Society's ChildS


Telephone

Rugged Individualism vs. Collectivism vs. Community: The Truth about 'The Right'

Stephen Soukup
American Greatness
Tue, 06 Jan 2026 20:27 UTC
mamdani swearing in nyc mayor
© Amir Hamja/APLetitia James, Zohran Mamdani, and his wife Rama Duwaji at his swearing in as Mayor of New York City, January 1, 2026
Mamdani's error isn't praising collectivism alone, but pretending its opposite is "rugged individualism," when the true antidote has always been community, family, and tradition.

Much has been made over the past several days about a jarring line uttered by New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani in his inaugural address last week. "We will," the city's first "Democratic Socialist" mayor promised/threatened, "replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism."

Understandably — and rightly — most of the criticism of this line (and its speaker) has centered on its mortifying and inarguable whitewashing of the term "collectivism." Collectivism — at least as it has been used for the last 150 years — refers specifically to the political manifestations of mass ideologies, mostly Marxist in origin, but including fascism and Nazism as well. Hence, its historical record is one of repeated failure and continual mass murder. In just six decades — from 1917 to 1977 — collectivism in its various forms produced the deaths of upwards of a quarter of a billion civilian men, women, and children, from Russia to Germany to Cambodia. Add in the casualties of various wars, and the total is even larger and more abominable.
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Arrow Down

Buh-bye: Defeated Tim Walz quits governor's race, ducks questions over multiple Minnesota fraud scandals

Tyler Durden
ZeroHedge
Tue, 06 Jan 2026 19:54 UTC
tim walz loser scandals minnesota
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz appeared defeated during a press conference around noon as he finally addressed the Somali-linked fraud scandal that has ended his re-election bid.

Walz's team has shifted from dismissing those who questioned or investigated the Somali-linked daycare and autism fraud as "racist" or "Islamophobic" to now acknowledging that serious corruption occurred under its leadership.

Walz still found time to attack Trump and Republicans, blaming them for "seeking to take advantage of a crisis. I don't want to mince words here. Donald Trump and his allies in Washington, in St. Paul, and online want to make our state a colder, meaner place."

Comment: Minnesota is not out of the political woods yet, as yet another Democrat clown has stepped up to take Walz's place:



Rumblings of a backroom deal:



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TV

Fake news demise: Corporation for Public Broadcasting votes to dissolve after funding cuts to NPR, PBS

Joseph A. Wulfsohn
Fox News
Mon, 05 Jan 2026 19:37 UTC
capitol building npr pbs broadscasters
© llison Robbert/Bloomberg via Getty Images; Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesCongress withdrew federal funding from NPR and PBS last summer following a decades-long effort by Republicans.
Trump, GOP lawmakers championed the defunding alleging the two outlets had liberal bias

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB) announced its board voted to dissolve itself after 58 years as an organization after Congress voted last year to pull federal funding allocated to NPR and PBS.

"For more than half a century, CPB existed to ensure that all Americans — regardless of geography, income, or background — had access to trusted news, educational programming, and local storytelling," CPB president and CEO Patricia Harrison said in a statement Monday. "When the Administration and Congress rescinded federal funding, our Board faced a profound responsibility: CPB's final act would be to protect the integrity of the public media system and the democratic values by dissolving, rather than allowing the organization to remain defunded and vulnerable to additional attacks."

Comment: They can't shift this chick out the door fast enough:



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Pistol

Texas businessman, Gov Abbott appointee shot dead in border city: police

Sarah Rumpf-Whitten
Fox News
Mon, 29 Dec 2025 17:32 UTC
Eddy Betancourt
© Texas Facilities Commission)Eddy Betancourt
A prominent businessman and appointee of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott was shot and killed at a business in McAllen, a border city in the Rio Grande Valley, over the weekend, authorities said.

McAllen police identified the victim as Eddy Betancourt, 61, of Mission, Texas.

Officers responded Saturday afternoon to the 800 block of North Ware Road after a 911 call reported a man on the floor who was possibly shot and not breathing. Betancourt was found unresponsive, with no pulse, and appeared to have suffered a gunshot wound, police said.

His death is being investigated as a homicide, police said. Police on Sunday identified Reynaldo Mata-Rios, 60, as a suspect in the shooting.
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Arrow Up

Push for censorship on campus hit record levels in 2025

Sean Stevens
RealClear Politics
Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00 UTC
Harvard U
© UnknownHarvard University
This year, the fight over free expression in American higher education reached a troubling milestone. According to data from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, efforts to censor speech on college campuses hit record highs and across multiple fronts - and most succeeded.

Let's start with the raw numbers. In 2025, FIRE's Scholars Under Fire, Students Under Fire, and Campus Deplatforming databases collectively tracked:
  • 525 attempts to sanction scholars for their speech, more than one a day, with 460 of them resulting in punishment.
  • 273 attempts to punish students for expression, more than five a week, with 176 of these attempts succeeding.
  • 160 attempts to deplatform speakers, about three each week, with 99 of them succeeding.
That's 958 censorship attempts in total, nearly three per day on campuses across the country. For comparison, FIRE's next highest total was 477 two years ago.

Comment: Israeli billionaire's call to limit free speech sparks conservative fury:
Israeli cybersecurity billionaire Shlomo Kramer's push to limit free speech has sparked outrage among conservatives online. During an interview New Year's Day on CNBC, Kramer said "it's time to limit the First Amendment. We need to control all the social platforms ... and take control of what they are saying."

Why It Matters: The First Amendment — which protects core American values including freedoms of speech, the press, exercise of religion and peaceable assembly — is a cornerstone of democracy. Any effort to impose limits on those rights often faces significant backlash in the U.S.

What To Know: "I know it's difficult to hear, but it's time to limit the First Amendment in order to protect it," Kramer said during the CNBC interview. He was discussing content moderation and misinformation on tech platforms but alarmed many viewers with the framing of limiting the First Amendment, a core safeguard against government censorship.

The conservative backlash arrived swiftly, with former Republican U.S. Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida writing on X: "No. We aren't going to do this."

Mehdi Hasan, British-American journalist and editor-in-chief/CEO of new media company Zeteo, responded with concerns over the dangers around foreign involvement in U.S. free speech.
"A foreign tech billionaire, who works in cyber security, and used to work for a foreign defense intelligence unit, is openly calling for the limiting of the First Amendment on American television. And we're all supposed to think this is normal."
Another account, @WallStreetMav, wrote on the platform:
"Foreigners have zero business telling us anything."
Alex Jones, far-right radio host and conspiracy theorist, said on X:
"Israel has publicly declared war on the American people's right to free speech. Israel's leadership has now joined forces with the tyrannical European Union, UK and others to overturn the first amendment effectively establishing a AI digital dictatorship."
U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Georgia Republican who announced she's resigning on January 5, wrote in response to the original video:
"An Israeli cybersecurity billionaire demanding to take away Americans guaranteed First Amendment Free Speech and President Trump threatening war and sending in troops to Iran is everything we voted against in '24.

"Trump voters spent the week threatening a tax revolt because they are so furious about the never ending waste, fraud, and abuse of their hard earned money going to foreigners and foreign wars. The focus should be on tax dollars here at home and defending our God given freedoms and rights."
Kramer, who has an estimated net worth of $2.2 billion, is known in the cybersecurity world for cofounding Check Point Software Technologies and Imperva.

What People Are Saying

Glenn Greenwald, journalist who hosts System Update, on X:
"Genuine thanks to Israeli billionaire Shlomo Kramer for stating so explicitly and unflinchingly what so many other top Israelis and their US loyalists are saying, albeit a bit more subtly: Americans must learn to accept limits on our First Amendment rights."
Chris Menahan, publisher of independent news site InformationLiberation.com, on X:
"Israeli billionaire Shlomo Kramer's New Year's resolution is to eliminate America's First Amendment."
Jayda Fransen, founder of The Christian Nationalist Party, also on X:
"This is the result of supporting Israel, even when they commit genocide. They feel emboldened to say & do anything."
What Happens Next

The First Amendment protects citizens' rights to freedom of speech. However, private tech companies like Meta and Twitter can have their own rules around content moderation and misinformation.
How does one protect a 'right' that is forbidden to be used...by using it.

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Stop

Woke politics forced the US media to ignore a $9bn scam

Robert Bridge
RT
Sat, 03 Jan 2026 14:33 UTC
Camera recording
© B4LLS/Getty Images/File
The Minnesota childcare fraud went unreported in legacy outlets for days because it was too 'racist' a story.

How is it possible that a young man with a video camera has done more to expose exorbitant fraud and corruption in one American state than all the giant billion-dollar legacy media combined?

For days after a 42-minute viral video by independent journalist Nick Shirley exposed widespread fraud in Minnesota, where empty childcare centers and healthcare offices reportedly received millions in taxpayer money, the mainstream media remained silent on the issue. That's very strange, given that it may be the largest fraud scandal in US history.

Shirley, posing as a father looking to enroll his child in Somali-owned daycare facilities at various locations, including one with the misspelled name "Quality Learing Center," was shocked at what he would find, or rather did not find. Instead of encountering rooms of playing children and welcoming staff, he was greeted with slammed doors and hostile threats by the few people he found on the premises. At the multiple sites visited, he failed to spot a single child. Thus, in just one day, Shirley blew the lid on a massive childcare and healthcare fraud case. Yet his shocking findings have done nothing to make the establishment sit up and take notice.
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Red Flag

Woke Oregon city hires convicted murderer who shot teen girl to police review board: 'Brings a perspective that most of us don't have'

Anthony Blair
New York Post
Tue, 30 Dec 2025 15:45 UTC
Convicted murderer Kyle Hedquist
© Kevin Neri/Statesman Journal / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn ImagesConvicted murderer Kyle Hedquist has been reappointed to a police review board in a woke Oregon city.
A convicted murderer who executed a teenage girl has been voted onto the police review board of a woke Oregon city — because of the unique "perspective" he brings.

Kyle Hedquist, 47, was reappointed by the City Council in Salem, Ore., to serve on the board that reviews police complaints by a five-to-four vote, despite serving 27 years in prison for murder, the Statesman Journal reported.

The Oregon native was sentenced to life behind bars without parole in 1994 for the killing of 19-year-old Nikki Thrasher, after he led the victim down a remote road and shot her in the back of the head to prevent her from telling people about a recent burglary spree.

Comment: Kyle Hedquist maybe trying to turn his life around but to do so in a public capacity and receiving special privileges seems irresponsible.

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Propaganda

CBS News anchor admits network is establishment propaganda

Nicole Silverio
Daily Caller
Fri, 02 Jan 2026 15:06 UTC
CBS News Tony Dokoupil
© Screenshot/CBS News
CBS News anchor Tony Dokoupil admitted on Thursday that legacy media has ignored the perspective of average Americans and put "too much weight" into the views of the elites.

Dokoupil became the new host of "CBS Evening News" in January during CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss' efforts to balance the network's coverage and boost ratings. During a message to viewers, Dokoupil promised to put the viewer first over politicians and corporate interests in order to regain the public's trust.

"The point is on too many stories, the press has missed the story because we've taken into account the perspective of advocates and not the average American," Dokoupil said. "Or we put too much weight in the analysis of academics or elites and not enough on you. And I know this because at certain points, I have been you. I have felt this way too. I felt like what I was seeing and hearing on the news didn't reflect what I was seeing and hearing in my own life."
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Roses

'Dilbert' cartoonist Scott Adams gives dire health update in wake of prostate cancer

Alexandra Bellusci
NY Post
Fri, 02 Jan 2026 14:56 UTC
Scott Adams Chicago Tribune
© TNSScott Adams tours the Chicago Tribune newsroom and its cubicles in 2002.
Cartoonist Scott Adams is sharing a harrowing health update.

The 68-year-old, who created the comic strip "Dilbert," revealed that his prostate cancer prognosis is not a positive one.

"I talked to my radiologist yesterday and it's all bad news — the odds of me recovering are essentially zero," he said during his podcast "Real Coffee with Scott Adams" on Thursday. "I'll give you any updates if that changes, but it won't."
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Monkey Wrench

A warning from Germany's family businesses: Taxes, energy costs, and bureaucracy are killing competitiveness

Thomas Kolbe
ZeroHedge
Sat, 03 Jan 2026 21:16 UTC
family business
At the turn of the year, the Foundation for Family Businesses, together with the ifo Institute, presented a corporate survey on tax policy and location attractiveness. The result is unequivocal: Germany is too expensive and no longer competitive as a business location.

There is nothing new under the sun. In their year-end Annual Monitor, the Foundation for Family Businesses and the ifo Institute once again went straight to the heart of the matter. A total of 1,705 companies across all sectors and size categories were surveyed on their assessment of current tax policy and Germany's attractiveness as a business location. The evaluation of this corporate panel — 1,358 of which were traditional family-owned businesses — turned out to be devastating, as expected.

Overburdened Labor Factor

More than 80 percent of companies perceive the overall tax and contribution burden — particularly in the area of personnel costs, i.e., wage taxes and social security contributions — as far too high. The heavy burden on the employee side is especially criticized by smaller family-owned businesses. It has become increasingly difficult to grant wage increases when the fiscal authorities take the lion's share and key performers are bled ever more heavily with each pay raise due to the continuous increase in social security contribution ceilings.

Comment: Unfortunately 'Blackrock' Merz is lost in his illusions of restoring Germany's military might, and taking on Russia for a third (!) time. Not much space there for the average German citizen except as a resource to be taxed and conscripted. Merz answers to others.

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