CMR is the leading provider of funding and management support for small to medium-sized businesses and entrepreneurs 

Authored by John & Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“He sees you when you’re sleeping.
He knows when you’re awake.
He knows if you’ve been bad or good,
So be good for goodness’ sake.”
   — “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town”

For generations, “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” has been treated as a playful reminder to children to be good because someone, somewhere, is watching.

Today, it reads less like a joke and more like a warning.

The Surveillance State is making a naughty list, and we’re all on it.

Long before Santa’s elves start loading his sleigh with toys for good girls and boys, the government’s surveillance apparatus is already at work—logging your movements, monitoring your messages, tracking your purchases, scanning your face, recording your license plate, and feeding it all into algorithmic systems designed to determine whether you belong on a government watchlist.

Unlike Santa’s naughty list, however, the consequences of landing on the government’s “naughty list” are far more severe than a stocking full of coal. They can include heightened surveillance, loss of privacy, travel restrictions, financial scrutiny, police encounters, or being flagged as a potential threat—often without notice, explanation, or recourse.

This is not fiction. This is not paranoia.

This is the modern surveillance state operating exactly as designed.

Santa Claus has long been the benign symbol of omniscient surveillance, a figure who watches, judges, and rewards. His oversight is fleeting, imaginary, and ultimately harmless.

The government’s surveillance is none of those things—and never was.

What was once dismissed as a joke—“Santa is watching”—has morphed into a chilling reality. Instead of elves, the watchers are data brokers, intelligence agencies, predictive algorithms, and fusion centers. Instead of a naughty-or-nice list, Americans are sorted into databases, risk profiles, and threat assessments—lists that never disappear.

The shift is subtle but profound.

Innocence is no longer presumed.

Everyone is watched. Everyone is scored. Everyone is a potential suspect.

This is the surveillance state in action.

Today’s surveillance state doesn’t require suspicion, a warrant, or probable cause. It is omnipresent, omniscient, and inescapable.

Your smartphone tracks your location. Your car records your movements. License plate readers log when and where you drive. Retail purchases create detailed consumer profiles. Smart speakers listen to everything you say. Home security cameras observe not just your property, but your neighbors, delivery drivers, and anyone who passes by.

The government’s appetite for data is insatiable.

In a dramatic expansion of surveillance reach, the Transportation Security Administration now shares airline passenger lists with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, enabling ICE to identify and arrest travelers at airports based on immigration status.

In one incident, ICE arrested and immediately deported a college student with no criminal record who was flying home to spend Thanksgiving with her family.

What was once routine aviation security data has been transformed into an enforcement tool—merging civilian travel records with the machinery of deportation and demonstrating how ordinary movements can be weaponized by the state.

Even the most personal acts—like Christmas shopping—are now tracked in real time. Every item you buy, where you buy it, how you pay, and who you buy it for becomes part of a permanent digital record. That data does not stay confined to retailers. It is shared, sold, aggregated, and folded into sprawling surveillance ecosystems that blur the line between corporate data collection and government intelligence.

Companies like Palantir specialize in fusing these data streams into comprehensive behavioral profiles, linking financial activity, social media behavior, geolocation data, and government records into a single, searchable identity map.

The result is not merely a government that watches what you’ve done but one that claims the power to predict what you will do next.

It is a short step from surveillance to pre-crime.

While predictive policing and AI-driven risk assessments are marketed as tools of efficiency and public safety, in reality, they represent a dangerous shift from punishing criminal acts to policing potential behavior.

Algorithms—trained on historical data already shaped by over-policing, bias, and inequality—are now used to predict who might commit a crime, who might protest, or who might pose a “risk.” Even the way you drive—where you came from, where you were going and which route you took—is being analyzed by predictive intelligence programs for suspicious patterns that could get you flagged and pulled over.

Once flagged by an algorithm, individuals often have no meaningful way to challenge the designation. The criteria are secret. The data sources opaque. The decisions automated.

Accountability disappears.

This isn’t law enforcement as envisioned by the Founders. This is pre-crime enforcement—punishing people not for what they’ve done, but for what an AI machine predicts they might do.

At the same time, President Trump has openly threatened states that attempt to regulate artificial intelligence in order to protect citizens from its discriminatory and intrusive uses—seeking to clear the way for unchecked, nationwide deployment of these systems.

No government initiative has done more to normalize, expand, and entrench mass surveillance than the Trump administration’s war on immigration.

The Trump administration’s war on immigration has become the laboratory for the modern surveillance state.

Under the guise of border security, vast stretches of the country have been transformed into Constitution-free zones—places where the Fourth Amendment is treated as optional and entire communities are subjected to constant monitoring.

The federal government has transformed immigration policy into a proving ground for authoritarian surveillance tactics—testing tools, technologies, and legal shortcuts could be deployed with minimal public resistance and quietly repurposed for use against the broader population. As journalist Todd Miller warned, these areas have been transformed into “a ripe place to experiment with tearing apart the Constitution, a place where not just undocumented border-crossers, but millions of borderland residents have become the targets of continual surveillance.”

Through ICE and DHS, the government fused immigration enforcement with corporate surveillance technologies—facial recognition, license-plate readers, cellphone tracking, and massive data-sharing agreements—creating a sprawling digital dragnet that now extends far beyond immigrants.

What began as a policy aimed at undocumented immigrants has now become a model for nationwide surveillance policing.

“What’s new,” reports the Brennan Center for Justice, “is that the federal government now openly says it will use its supercharged spy capabilities to target people who oppose ICE’s actions. Labeled as ‘domestic terrorists’ by the administration, these targets include anti-ICE protesters and anyone who allegedly funds them—all of them part of a supposed left-wing conspiracy to violently oppose the president’s agenda.”

The critical point is this: the surveillance infrastructure developed to track immigrants is now used to monitor everyone. Immigration enforcement served as the justification, the infrastructure, and the legal gray zone needed to create a permanent surveillance apparatus that treats all Americans as potential suspects.

All of this adds up to an algorithmic naughty list.

Government watchlists have exploded in size and scope.

Terrorist watchlists, no-fly lists, gang databases, protester tracking systems, and “suspicious activity” registries operate with little oversight and even less transparency.

People can be added to these lists without notification and can remain there indefinitely. Errors are common. Corrections are rare.

Social media posts are mined. Associations are mapped. Speech is scrutinized. Peaceful dissent is increasingly treated as a precursor to extremism.

The government’s watchlists aren’t just opaque databases hidden from public view. They are becoming public-facing instruments of political classification. Internal Justice Department memoranda now direct the FBI to compile lists of groups and networks it categorizes as possible domestic extremists, broadening counter-terror tools to sweep in ideological opponents and organizations without clear statutory definitions.

At the same time, the White House has launched an official “Offender Hall of Shame”—a public naughty list of journalists and media outlets it accuses of bias—even briefly circulating a video styled like Santa putting together a naughty list of offenders before deleting it amid backlash.

In this system, being “good” no longer means obeying the law. It means staying under the radar, avoiding attention, and never questioning authority.

The chilling effect is the point.

Once upon a time, privacy was recognized as a fundamental liberty—an essential buffer between the individual and the state. Today, it’s a conditional privilege, granted temporarily and revoked when it suits the police state’s purposes.

Under the banner of national security, public health, and law and order, surveillance powers continue to expand. Biometric identification—facial recognition, gait analysis, voice prints—are normalized.

What was once unthinkable has become routine.

Americans are being conditioned to accept constant monitoring as the price of safety. That resistance is suspicious. That anonymity is dangerous.

Yet history teaches us the opposite: societies that normalize surveillance do not become safer—they become more authoritarian.

A government that sees everything, everywhere, all the time, will eventually control everything.

The Founders understood this. That is why they enshrined protections against unreasonable searches and unchecked power. They knew liberty couldn’t survive under constant surveillance.

When the government knows where you go, what you buy, what you say, who you associate with, and what you believe, freedom becomes conditional.

This Christmas, we might joke about Santa watching from the North Pole, but we should be far more concerned about the watchers much closer to home.

The surveillance state doesn’t take a holiday. It doesn’t sleep. It doesn’t forget. And it doesn’t forgive easily.

So you see, the question is not whether we are being watched. We are.

The question, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, is whether we will continue to accept a system that treats every citizen as a suspect—and whether we will reclaim the constitutional limits that once stood between liberty and the all-seeing state.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

Authored by Cara Michelle Miller via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

“Like a human hockey puck”—that’s how Nikki Schultek describes a year spent ricocheting between specialists in Connecticut, each focused on one piece of her deteriorating health—bladder pain, neurological symptoms, joint pain—while missing the whole picture.

“I really don’t fault the clinicians,” she told The Epoch Times. “The training hones them to be experts in a domain.”

After her odyssey of misdiagnoses, Schultek finally received a correct diagnosis of Lyme disease. However, her experience navigating a fragmented health care system brought her to Washington on Dec. 15, where Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. convened a rare federal roundtable addressing what he called long-standing failures in how the disease is diagnosed, studied, and treated.

“Lyme disease is an example of a chronic disease that has long been dismissed, with patients receiving inadequate care,” Kennedy said at the event. “I want to announce that the gaslighting of Lyme patients is over.”

The Medical Divide

Schultek’s story echoes those of many patients whose months—or years—of fatigue, pain, neurological symptoms, and cognitive problems, after undergoing a battery of tests, are eventually traced back to that one tick bite that infected them with Lyme disease.

Persistent symptoms from Lyme disease are both difficult to diagnose and treat, in part because health agencies, mainstream medicine, researchers, and patients disagree about what is causing the debilitating constellation of symptoms.

The roundtable brought together patients, clinicians, researchers, and advocates to discuss what many describe as long-standing failures in how Lyme disease is diagnosed, studied, and treated. At stake is not just terminology, but access to care.

Lyme disease is caused by the bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi and is spread through deer tick bites, most commonly in the Northeast, mid-Atlantic, and upper Midwest. Early symptoms can include fever, headache, and a characteristic rash, and around 90 percent of cases are successfully treated with a few weeks of antibiotics.

However, for about 10 percent of patients, like Schultek, symptoms such as fatigue, joint and muscle pain, and cognitive difficulties persist after antibiotic therapy.

“The cause of this is poorly understood,” Durland Fish, a professor emeritus of epidemiology at Yale School of Public Health who attended the roundtable, told The Epoch Times in an email. “But similar phenomena occur with other conditions, such as long COVID and chronic fatigue syndrome.”

The medical divide occurs here: Mainstream medicine, including federal health agencies, refers to persistent symptoms after treatment as post-treatment Lyme disease syndrome, or PTLDS, believing the symptoms are caused by lasting damage or an immune reaction to the initial infection.

For this reason, these institutions discourage the use of the term “chronic Lyme disease,” which implies that Borrelia bugdorferi bacteria remain in the body. They also discourage long-term antibiotic treatment for these patients, citing the risk of serious side effects.

“Chronic Lyme disease usually presumes that infection persists after therapy,” Fish said.

However, patients with persistent symptoms often prefer the term “chronic Lyme,” as they believe it better captures the ongoing nature of their illness. Many also developed symptoms without ever being treated for acute Lyme infection, making the PTLDS label less applicable to their experience.

Some are also open to the possibility of a persistent Lyme infection, noting that their symptoms improve temporarily with antibiotics.

“The central misunderstanding is the false assumption that persistent symptoms reflect a single, uniform condition with a single explanation,” said Dr. Amy Offutt, a physician who treats patients with complex Lyme disease and serves on the board of the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society, in an email to The Epoch Times.

Complexity on the Front Lines

Disagreement over whether persistent symptoms are caused by chronic Lyme disease or PTLDS makes it difficult for patients to get the treatment they need.

While the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, and the American Academy of Neurology discourage antibiotic treatment beyond 28 days after initial infection, the International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society, which specializes in treating Lyme disease, encourages a more flexible approach depending on patient needs.

“Chronic Lyme disease and related conditions require highly individualized, patient-centered care due to their variable, multisystem nature,” Offutt said.

Complicating matters further, Lyme disease is notoriously difficult to diagnose. Many patients spend years seeking answers and are sometimes referred for psychiatric evaluation when laboratory tests appear normal.

Standard tests do not directly detect Lyme bacteria. Instead, they measure whether the patient has developed antibodies to the infection. This approach can miss early cases, and some patients initially test negative only to receive a positive result years later.

Better Diagnosis

As scientific debate continues over the causes and treatment of persistent Lyme symptoms, roundtable participants found common ground on one point.

“The most meaningful outcome of the roundtable was a strong consensus on the importance of diagnosis,” Fish said.

Schultek, now a Board Member with the ILADEF (ILADS Education Foundation), was at one point evaluated for multiple sclerosis—an experience that underscored how difficult Lyme-related illness can be to diagnose when symptoms span multiple body systems.

Better diagnostic tools, researchers said, could prevent patients from falling into prolonged medical gray zones and may help clarify why symptoms persist in some cases but not others.

For Schultek and other patients who attended the roundtable, the meeting carried emotional weight beyond policy debates.

Hearing persistent Lyme symptoms discussed seriously by researchers and clinicians—and knowing that rigorous studies are underway to measure cognitive, neurological, and other multisystem effects—offered a rare sense of recognition.

“Hearing those words, I had goosebumps,” said Schultek, who founded the Intracell Research Group to explore how infections contribute to complex chronic conditions such as Lyme disease. “It felt unbelievably validating. I feel more hope than I have in a decade.”

Offutt said that hope matters—even without immediate changes to treatment guidelines.

“Federal engagement signals a willingness to acknowledge uncertainty and complexity,” she said. “That’s an essential first step toward improving outcomes.”

The roundtable did not resolve the science. However, for patients long caught between disputed definitions and unanswered questions, it marked something that has often been missing: recognition that uncertainty itself can be harmful—and that listening may be the beginning of better care.

Authored by Dave DeCamp via AntiWar.com,

US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee said on Monday that Iran "didn’t get the full message" following the US airstrikes that targeted Iranian nuclear facilities in June, comments that came as Israel is pushing for the US to support another attack on the country.

"Iran, I don’t know if they ever took [President Trump] seriously until the night that the B-2 bombers went to Fordow," Huckabee said in an interview with Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies, referring to one of the underground Iranian nuclear facilities bombed by the US.

"I hope they got the message, but apparently they didn’t get the full message because … they appear to be trying to reconstitute and find a new way to dig the hole deeper, secure it more," Huckabee added, referring to reports that say there’s been activity at the bombed nuclear sites.

Huckabee made the comments when asked if the US would support another attack on Iran if Israel determined "further military action was necessary" based on Iran’s work on its civilian nuclear program and ballistic missile program.

According to a report from NBC News, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will ask President Trump to back another attack on Iran over Israeli concerns about Iran's ballistic missiles, which were effective at striking Israeli territory during the 12-Day War.

"It’s hard for me to tell you what the US would do because that’s a policy decision that’ll be made at the White House," Huckabee said. "All I can do is point to you what the president has said repeatedly, and he consistently has said Iran is never going to enrich uranium."

Since the ceasefire that ended the US-Israeli war on Iran, President Trump has repeatedly threatened to bomb Iran again if it resumes enriching uranium. Earlier this month, he also suggested that he could "obliterate" Iran’s ballistic missiles. "We can knock out their missiles very quickly. We have great power," Trump said.

For its part, Iran has said its uranium enrichment has been halted by the US bombing campaign, but it has vowed to restart the program, framing it as a matter of national pride, while maintaining its policy that it will never pursue a nuclear weapon.

Iran has also rejected the idea of entering a deal with the US that requires limits on its ballistic missile program since its missiles are its only way to deter Israel and the US.

Authored by Ryan Morgan via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The U.S. military is set to expand its artificial intelligence (AI) toolset in a new partnership with Elon Musk’s xAI service.

Musk’s xAI service owns the Grok family of generative AI chatbots, which are available on the X social media platform. Those Grok-based models are now set to join the military’s GenAI.mil platform of artificial intelligence tools, which the Pentagon launched earlier this month.

The xAI models will integrate with GenAI.mil in early 2026, according to a Dec. 22 Pentagon press statement.

The Pentagon said xAI’s models will allow both uniformed and civilian personnel within the Department of War to securely handle so-called controlled unclassified information in their daily workflows. The term “controlled unclassified information” describes materials that are not considered classified, but which are not marked for public release.

“Users will also gain access to real-time global insights from the X platform, providing War Department personnel with a decisive information advantage,” the Pentagon said in a statement.

On Dec. 9, the Pentagon announced the launch of GenAI.mil as the central platform for onboarding different artificial intelligence models and capabilities into the military’s various workflows. This artificial intelligence platform launched with Google’s Gemini for Government AI service, but the Pentagon said from the start that it planned for “several frontier AI capabilities to be housed on GenAI.mil.”

At launch, GenAI.mil was made available for desktops used at the Pentagon and across military installations around the world.

“The War Department will continue scaling an AI ecosystem built for speed, security, and decision superiority,” the Pentagon said Monday.

Artificial intelligence was one of six critical technologies identified by the Pentagon last month, alongside quantum computing, biomanufacturing, directed energy weapons, hypersonic weapons, and innovations for conducting logistical operations in contested spaces.

“We are pushing all of our chips in on artificial intelligence as a fighting force. The Department is tapping into America’s commercial genius, and we’re embedding generative AI into our daily battle rhythm,” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth said earlier this month.

In a company statement on Monday, xAI described its venture with the Pentagon as a long-term partnership.

“In addition to Enterprise use cases, xAI is bringing the power of Frontier AI and real-time insights directly to the warfighter,” the company said. “Through an ongoing, long-term partnership with the DoW and other mission partners, xAI will make available a family of government-optimized foundation models to support classified operational workloads.”

This summer, the Pentagon awarded contracts to xAI, Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI to develop artificial intelligence capabilities for the military. Those contracts each came with a $200 million ceiling.