Well, we were going to talk about Big Tech's reckoning, but as usual, philosophical inquiry is an animal that cannot be tamed, and so instead we ended up discussing with the people in the live chat (check us out on Twitch and YouTube, twitch.tv/SocraticCitizen) where our rights come from (hint: they don't come from government), and how to protect them when they are threatened. And we take some time to talk about Julian Assange, and how the French can't seem to remember what country they're living in.

Today's legacy media operates in many ways like a mafia racket. This episode explains how it all works (after we read the comments from yesterday and talk about the New Adventures of Super-Cuomo, of course!).

Left and right populists need to realize that they have more in common with each other than with establishment elites of either party. Democrats and Republicans in Congress want what's best for their donors, not for you and me. At least the populists can agree to do what's best for the people--though they may disagree in the details of what that should look like. But the elites want us fighting, want us thinking that half the country simply cannot be reasoned with--when that a) simply isn't true, and b) conveniently serves the elite's interests.

Nobody remembers the long paragraph from which "power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely" comes, but perhaps they should: Lord Acton argues that the powerful must be held to a higher standard for the rest, for those who are attracted to power are rarely the best among us. And so I look askance at TIME magazine making Biden/Harris its "Person of the Year," at Andrew Cuomo's Emmy, at the idea that requiring cops to have bachelor's degrees is really going to change anything. Power to the people--that's what we really need.

Attorneys General across the United States go after Facebook for its monopolistic practices, and the prognosis is good for the future of free speech; Minneapolis wants to wrest control of the streets away from the police (but they haven't thought things through); the government wants to control where you can go and who you can see re: COVID and the lockdowns, and We the People want control of all of it back where it belongs--with US.

But what will the world look like without Trump at the helm? We take a look at Israeli generals claiming aliens got Trump out of office, politically correct Santa Clauses using the mall as their personal political platforms, Elon Musk leaving California, and a minor debate ensues in the chat over lockdowns--with a promise of a more-informed debate tomorrow!

As parents grapple with their hefty student loans, and with the fact that school can no longer be relied on to take care of the kids for six or seven hours a day, some parents are brought, many against their will, to consider full-on homeschooling as an option. And as it turns out, this is fantastic news! Homeschooling produces better results, more tolerant kids, and better overall outcomes than schools can even hope to compete with.

We read comments on AOC and her hoodie sales, consider whether Rudy Giuliani has COVID because he has angered the gods, and look at last night's Senate runoff debate between Kelly Loeffler and Jon Ossoff. Walter E. Williams died last week, and we take some time to honor his memory, by looking at the in memoriam penned by his best friend, Thomas Sowell, and by looking at Williams' final column.

People love to blame capitalism for rising wealth inequality, for the United States containing both billionaires and people on the edge of poverty. Government needs to redistribute wealth to make up for the unfairness inherent in capitalism. But capitalism isn't the problem, any more than dragon attacks or alien invasions are the problem--because neither dragon attacks nor alien invasions nor free markets actually exist in the United States. And THAT, for those who are paying attention, is the real problem.

The federal government is funding activists to go around telling teachers they need to be teaching that race is the most important sociopolitical factor. Goldman Sachs and Nasdaq are telling companies unless they have at least two "diverse" board members (read: board members who aren't white men), they can't be on Nasdaq or get a Goldman IPO. Trump's erstwhile lawyers tell Georgians to boycott elections. And David Brooks muses on the death of the "nuclear family." This is America, and these are its culture wars.