Americans, the Associated Press reports, spent a record $11.8 billion online on “Black Friday” (the day after Thanksgiving) this year … and another record, $6.4 billion on Thanksgiving itself. Physical in-store traffic for Black Friday also ticked up versus the previous week, although shopping for deals has strongly moved online in recent years.

What caught my eye about the story, though, was the headline, which suggests the record sales occurred “despite wider economic uncertainty.”

“Despite?” More likely, in my opinion, “because.”

With inflation still running at about 3% annually, prices subject to Donald Trump’s seemingly random tariff policies, the job situation looking more uncertain and unpredictable than it has since the COVID-19 panic, etc., what have American consumers been up to?

I can tell you what they’ve been up to, because I’ve been up to it myself.

What we’ve all been up to is “waiting for the best deal if the purchase isn’t an emergency.”

I started waiting in early October, right after Amazon’s “Big Prime Deal Days” sale.

Not on groceries and stuff like that, obviously. But on electronics, household goods, and other non-perishables, I kept a running list in my head of things I needed or wanted and held off on buying until I started seeing “early Black Friday deals.”

Unless you’re wealthy, you probably did the same thing.

The big sales bumps for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, etc., aren’t a sign that the economy’s great. They’re a sign that we’re watching our money even more than usual, waiting for the sale price instead of paying MSRP.

Fortunately, our own uncertainty is mirrored by the uncertainty of retailers. As you may have noticed, we see a lot more “big sales” these last few years. Retailers love to sell lots of stuff year-round, but when no one can know what prices — and incomes — will look like next week, it feels like the best time to get those items out the door and the money in the bank is “ASAP.”

That probably explains the ever-expanding nature of “Black Friday.” Even a few years ago, that fell on, um, Friday. Then we started seeing “Cyber Monday,” then “early Black Friday deals” and, I noticed this year, “Black Friday Week.” A few years from now, the big pre-holiday sales event may be called “November.”

We’re keeping an eye out for especially good deals for two reasons.

First, we don’t know what tomorrow will look like.

Second, we strongly suspect it won’t look as good as today.

We’ve lived in more optimistic, less uncertain times, but this isn’t one of those times.

It’s not just a Trump thing. His second presidency may — hopefully does — represent the pinnacle of massive government debt coupled with cockamamie tax and trade policy, but he didn’t invent those problems. He just inherited them and put them on steroids.

Here’s hoping you found what you were looking for on, or around, Black Friday. And that you won’t feel like you have to watch your bank balance quite so closely next year. Happy holidays.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“Some of those who believe tech lost its way are finding explanations in a book published a quarter century ago,” according to David Streitfeld’s full-page profile of Cyberselfish author Paulina Borsook in The New York Times (“A Book That Criticized Silicon Valley Gets Dusted Off,” November 30). To those who recall the turn-of-the-millennium Internet, Borsook’s is the exemplar of what Star Wars sage Obi-Wan Kenobi called “a name I’ve not heard in a long time.”

The 2000 tome warned readers for whom “it’s easy to sit at your computer and imagine yourself the Han Solo captain of your destiny” that “the era of the solo programmer making an impact is mostly long over” (the year that one created the formative video game Counter-Strike, as noted in a Times retrospective on  December 1).  Earthbound free spirits would have to settle for something sounding more like a real-life version of a Family Ties rerun, the spirit of the Sixties generation confined to “more comfort with a broader range of psychoactive substance use” alongside Eighties enthusiasms entrenched: “Deregulate this! Phooey on government!”

For all their reliance on corporate welfare, according to Borsook, “technolibertarians typically can’t be bothered to engage in conventional political maneuvers.”  The 2001 paperback edition envisioned such an ideology dominating the computer industry “long after high tech has retreated to being just one industrial sector among many.”

If the year 2025’s nationalist, protectionist industrial policy differs markedly from the road ahead suggested in Cyberselfish, perhaps it wasn’t all that perceptive about the twentieth century. Crediting heavy state funding with virtually all economic progress and social stability, and conflating the government with social cooperation, it’s hundreds of pages with all the depth of the bumper sticker proclaiming “IF YOU HATE SOCIALISM GET OFF MY PUBLIC ROAD.” (Although Borsook insists that she’d never “know how to tell other people how to live their lives,” let alone run them off the road of public life.) Murray Rothbard rates a mention in Cyberselfish as exemplifying libertarianism at its most uncompromising, but he looked to the history of the American economy not as a model for a “cruelly meritocratic world-to-come” but for evidence that its productive potential had been persistently prevented.

It wasn’t even the first published book to highlight the underbelly of the dot-com boom (Streitfeld mentions Clifford Stoll’s Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway, which as that its subtitle suggests, saw the Net more as a road to nowhere than to dystopia). Bill Lessard and Steve Baldwin’s NetSlaves: True Tales of Working the Web was dubbed “the ultimate corrective to Internet IPO mania” by Entertainment Weekly the same year that Douglas Rushkoff rued in Coercion: Why We Listen to What “They” Say that he could have ever “really believed the Internet could put an end to coercion”: 1999.

It may seem impossible to put an end to coercion on the Internet in 2026 and beyond, let alone use it to free the offline world.  Disentangling the World Wide Web from political logrolling is a good place to start.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “OPINION: No virtue in ‘Cyberselfish’-ness” by Joel Schlosberg, The Richmond Observer [Rockingham, North Carolina], December 2, 2025
2. “No Virtue in ‘Cyberselfish’-ness” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, December 4, 2025
3. “CONTRIBUTOR’S VIEW – Thomas Knapp [sic]: No Virtue in ‘Cyberselfish’-ness” by Thomas Knapp [sic], Valley, Alabama Times-News, December 5, 2025

“You can refuse illegal orders … you MUST refuse illegal orders.”

That’s the message from a recent video featuring six Democratic members of Congress, all former members of the US armed forces and/or intelligence services, and directed at current members of those organizations.

Seems non-controversial, but someone else would like a word. Er, several words:

“Their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP??? … SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”

As you’ve probably guessed, that someone else is US president Donald Trump.

And he’s not just talking. He’s had US secretary of defense Pete Hegseth threaten to recall one of the politicians in question, US Senator Mark Kelly, to active duty in the   Navy for a potential court-martial. He’s having the Federal Bureau of Investigation request “interviews” with with all six politicians.

Yes, really.

But, like I said, the whole thing seems uncontroversial. This is, to use a turn of phrase Trump seems to like, a “witch hunt.”

It’s been 40 years since I spent the summer in San Diego becoming a US Marine. I’m sure things have changed since then, but I doubt they’ve changed so much that anyone graduates any armed forces boot camp without receiving instruction in the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

A summary, from memory, on the section  (Article 92) concerning orders:

You must obey lawful orders.

You must not obey unlawful orders.

As I recall it, the case my platoon’s instructor used as an example was Lt. William Calley’s conduct in Vietnam during an event later known as the “My Lai Massacre.”

Here’s what the US Court of Military Appeals had to say about Calley’s defense that he was “just following orders”:

“An order requiring the performance of a military duty may be inferred to be legal. An act performed manifestly beyond the scope of authority, or pursuant to an order that a man of ordinary sense and understanding would know to be illegal, or in a wanton manner in the discharge of a lawful duty, is not excusable.”

Calley served three years (of a life sentence) for the murders at My Lai.

Why? Because you must refuse illegal orders.

If it’s “treason” or “sedition” to state that fact, then every instructor in every basic training class on military law is a traitor who’s been teaching treason and preaching sedition to every recruit since 1950, when the UCMJ was adopted … and probably long before that.

Would these particular politicians  have made this particular video if it was a Democrat  issuing illegal orders from the White House?

Probably not, but they’re right anyway.

Note to military and intelligence personnel:

You must refuse illegal orders.

If this be treason, make the most of it.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY