Merry Christmas, America! As we gather with families and enjoy this holiday season, let us pause to consider: things could be much, much worse. Some perspective is in order.

The Christmas holiday this year delivers a welcome and much-needed time out. Our country is anxious on many fronts. Our nation’s leaders in Congress appear unable and unwilling to lead, and financial markets have turned volatile and fearful, giving up the gains of the past year as traders prepare for a slowdown.

Meanwhile, Democrats – especially their media propagandists and those planning to run for president in 2020 -- are desperate to topple President Trump.

So, where’s the good news?  How about this? Notwithstanding the gloom factory that is the liberal media, the country remains upbeat.  They know it’s a MAGA Merry Christmas.  Our troops in Iraq sure know it.

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Against what or whom is the contemporary Western public pushing back?

The French non-Parisians against new green taxes on already unaffordable gasoline?

Broke southern European Union nations against the financial demands of German bankers?

The Eastern Europeans against French and German open-border mandates?

The British masses against both the EU and their own government that either cannot or will not follow the will of the people and implement Brexit?

The American populists against outsourcing, offshoring, and illegal immigration?

The common target of all these populist pushbacks is an administrative and cultural elite that shares a set of transnational and globalist values and harbors mostly contempt for the majority of their own Neanderthal citizens who are deemed hopelessly unwoken to environmental, racial, gender, and cultural inevitabilities.

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[Note by JW: Here is more proof that so much of the unique value of To The Point lies in the brilliance of TTPer contributions to the Forum. Duane Purvin’s comments on Victor Davis Hanson’s The Evil of the Global Elite (12/18) are an example, while Mike Ryan’s are simply breathtaking.  Again, the best Christmas Present you can give a friend or loved one is a Gift Subscription to TTP!]

Duane Purvin said:

“Even the Constitution is being re interpreted, the New Testament, Gender, conversion of concepts of individual liberty/freedom into identity politics and Reality as recognized by an educated, sentient man as now created and fed to humankind in the trough of social media, propaganda, omission and lies.”

The problem is a product of the humanities departments at the elite universities as Hanson pointed out. The sciences and applied science departments are much less of a problem.

Why? The intersection of Rationalism and Empirical science is known as thermodynamics.

Nothing like it exists within the programs favored by the Left. Show me a conservative university department, and I will bet a box of donuts that thermo is part of the curriculum in one form or another. Either to be taught as physical laws or as spiritual or philosophical virtues.

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It’s time for all of us to admit that Alphabet, Inc. is the 21st century equivalent of Ma Bell: it is an almost all-controlling monopoly that restricts consumer choice in order to maximize profit for the company.

We all know what Ronald Reagan did to AT&T. He broke up that monopoly so Americans could have real choices and the free market could actually work.

So it’s time for the Trump Administration to break up the Alphabet, Inc. monopoly. But unlike the Ma Bell monopoly, Alphabet, Inc.’s monopoly—which includes the search-engine behemoth Google—isn’t just about greater competition and more choices for the American people.

It’s about so much more: free political discourse and our privacy rights as citizens.

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All of Washington is focused on the political peril President Trump faces from Robert Mueller's investigation. But the Mueller probe could very well turn out to be a disaster, not for Trump, but for the Democrats.

The special counsel was appointed to investigate whether Trump engaged in a criminal conspiracy with Russia to win the 2016 presidential election. If Mueller finds incontrovertible evidence of a criminal conspiracy between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, then the president will be -- and should be -- removed from office.

But it is very likely that Mueller will not find evidence that Trump conspired with Russia – resulting in Mueller or federal prosecutors in New York's Southern District finding evidence for some other charge unrelated to a conspiracy with Russia -- such as Trump's hush-money payments to alleged former mistresses or crimes related to Trump's family business.

That would be a nightmare scenario for Democrats, for three reasons.

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It's bad enough that Russia’s only aircraft carrier was damaged in a mishap involving the country’s largest floating repair dock -- the only one big enough to maintain the flagship of the Russian Navy.

What's worse is that the decades-old dock is now sitting on the bottom of Kola Bay, not far from the major Arctic Circle city of Murmansk.

But even that may not be the extent of the bad news.

The dock, even if it is raised to the surface, may be beyond repair, meaning Russia’s only aircraft carrier, several of its largest naval ships, and at least one ballistic-missile submarine may not be able to be serviced for months, if not years.

That’s a not-insignificant setback for Kremlin efforts to upgrade the country’s fleet, experts say, an effort that parallels a larger ongoing modernization of Russia's armed forces.  Indeed, Putin’s plans for Russia’s Navy are sinking.

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Moscow’s dispatch of strategic bombers and heavy transport planes to Venezuela last week (12/10), and its subsequent obliging Washington to remove them only four days later (12/14), highlights both what has and has not changed in the in the “new cold war” between Russia and the United States.

Indeed, as Moscow-based military expert Aleksandr Golts argues, the appearance of two Russian Tu-160s in Latin America this week highlighted that the present-day hostility between Russia and the US could far more easily go “hot” than was the case in the “old” Cold War (Otkrytyye Media, 12/12).

That’s because, given the weakness of the Russian Federation today compared to the strength of the Soviet Union in the past, Russia’s nuclear stockpile remains the only resource Putin has that allows him to claim any kind of superpower status for his country.

This results in a foreign policy of “Putin Realpolitik” –  not the sophisticated kind reflected in the works of Henry Kissinger, where the major powers balance economic, political and security interests, but a primitive kind that’s dangerously delusional..

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