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Due to a late-Friday-night off-news-cycle Senate vote, it’s now official: President Trump’s former personal defense lawyer, who took over as Acting Attorney General when Pam Bondi stepped away, has been formally confirmed as the official United States Attorney General. The Associated Press reported, “Todd Blanche narrowly confirmed as Trump’s attorney general in overnight vote.”

The Senate confirmation vote, taken after midnight on a Friday, ended up squeaking across the finish line 50-49, with two Republicans joining all Democrats to vote against Mr. Blanche: Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Susan Collins (R-ME). (Collins is running for re-election in a DSA-infected blue state in November, so.)

Democrats and corporate media framed the story about Trump and Blanche’s close relationship, hinting darkly at some seditious violation of ‘independence,’ as though presidents usually nominate strangers to the AG’s job. Nothing could be further from the truth. Progressive darling John F. Kennedy, for instance, installed his own brother, Robert Kennedy, as his attorney general, even though Robert had little experience lawyering and was only 35 at the time, becoming the youngest AG since 1814.

Other 20th Century presidents, from FDR to Reagan (and beyond), have picked for AG their campaign managers, national party chairs, personal friends, fixers, and practically anyone but so-called ‘independent’ actors.

But never mind that! Whatever Trump does is always totally unprecedented in some tortured way, and always amounts to the worst thing that has ever happened in the history of the Milky Way Galaxy. Compliant corporate media always credulously laps up these Democrat narratives like good little doggies.

This time, the media frame is: even Republicans didn’t want Blanche. But they voted him in anyway.

Squishy Republican senators —mainly, the sour-grapes brigade of Thom Tillis, Bill Cassidy, and John Cornyn— made a big show of pressing Blanche to the limit, but they finally fell into line. “The path to confirmation for Blanche was unusually rocky,” AP said dramatically, “due in large part to Republican concerns about a controversial settlement of Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS.” In short, a handful of Republican Senators pressed Blanche to promise not to fund the $1.8 billion weaponization compensation budget, which would have potentially paid people persecuted by Biden’s AG, Merrick Garland, over January 6th.

Pam Bondi built the foundation, and Todd Blanche is now executing the long-planned strategy. Pam conducted mass firings, she de-weaponized and restructured DOJ, surged immigration prosecutions, cracked down on cartels and violent crime, opened adversary probes (e.g., Letitia James, James Comey, John Brennan, Adam Schiff, etc.), and, of course, managed the Epstein files nightmare.

Todd’s short tenure is accelerating. He’s already continued the removals of ‘resisting’ DOJ staff, built out the anti-fraud infrastructure, and fueled the RussiaGate probes, such as by issuing fresh subpoenas to Crossfire Hurricane/Mueller-era actors.

🔥 The Senate also batch-confirmed 74 less-prominent positions, including spots like Space Force Chief, with dozens more at DOD, Energy, State, and other agencies. Despite all the public friction, the Senate is on track to deliver a historically fast confirmation record for President Trump’s nominees. It’s a total turnaround. The Trump 1.0 Senate set the exact opposite record.

But that era of old-guard, Never Trump GOP resistance is suddenly and unexpectedly coming to a sudden and unexpected close. The Senatorial Turtle Caucus is becoming an endangered species. Mitch McConnell (R-KY), having vanished into his hospital’s quiet room, is retiring this year. Thom Tillis (R-NC) announced his retirement last year, after he voted against the Big Beautiful Bill and faced primary challengers. John Cornyn (R-TX) was primaried by Trump-endorsed Ken Paxton, and Bill Cassidy (R-LA) lost his primary to a Trump-backed rival.

Here’s something else to consider: Thanks to the Great Turtle die-off of 2026, if Republicans can hold the House and Senate —by just clinging onto the narrow margins they already have— President Trump will, for the first time since the start of Trump 1.0, have a fully engaged, compliant Congress that can quickly pass his legislative agenda.

As a teaser, for one example, in January, 2027, the President could finally have the Senate votes needed for filibuster reform. With that, the sky would be the limit. Far beyond things like the SAVE Act, we can dream about ambitious projects like replacing the Internal Revenue Service with the External Revenue Service.

In short, the Golden Age. We just need to hold the line at the midterms.

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We’ve been tracking the Democrats’ escalating polycrisis — the fracturing of their coalition, the sudden realization that maybe, just maybe, nominating people who detest America isn’t a winning electoral strategy. Yesterday, we met Frankenstein’s Socialist, who seems to have a very active social life. On the same day, the New York Post published a remarkable op-ed by Julian Epstein, former chief counsel for the House Judiciary Democrats, headlined, “I’m a longtime Democrat — fighting for GOP’s Mike Rogers, and my party’s soul, in Michigan.”

Consider how topsy-turvy the world has become when a former top House Judiciary Democrat is openly campaigning for the Republican Senate nominee.

At first, we might be tempted to wave this off as just the Democrat version of the Lincoln Project, a Liz Cheney-style defection, or just another “Never Trumper” crossing over, where some formerly conservative pundit gets a CNN contract for announcing that morality requires them to vote for Democrats.

But this is not like that. It’s not the marginal flip-flopping we are accustomed to occasionally seeing during every election cycle. Not even close. For one thing, the Never-Trumpers were never any actual electoral threat. They were merely a media drama in miniature— a small collection of disgruntled RINO consultants and pundits who got massive media coverage precisely because corporate media needed them, and who proceeded to lose every single race they touched.

The anti-Trump Republican Lincoln Project, for instance, raised $90 million and, according to the most accurate available figures, moved approximately zero votes. Their entire operation was an expensive stage performance for cable news green rooms. They didn’t represent any kind of genuine political movement. They were always just symbols. The cameras loved them, but the ballot box did not.

What Julian Epstein’s piece described is something structurally different. He isn’t a pundit looking for a CNN contract. He’s the former chief counsel of the House Judiciary Democrats— the party’s own inner legal infrastructure. And more importantly, he isn’t alone. He’s describing a movement of working-class voters, black and brown voters, and longtime party operatives who are quietly heading for the exits— not to get on television, but because they are genuinely done.

Mr. Epstein warned that “some in Michigan are hinting at mass party defections in November,” and that Abdul El-Sayed’s nomination for Senate at the top of the Democrat ticket means “the bleeding won’t stop.”

This matters electorally, especially in swing states like Michigan. Biden (allegedly) won that state in 2020 by about 154,000 votes. Then Trump won it in 2016 by about 10,700. These are not margins that can absorb even a modest, unglamorous, camera-shy defection of working-class Democrats who simply stay home or even actually pull the lever for Republican Mike Rogers in protest.

The Never-Trumpers were nothing more than a rounding error in already decided states. But a potential mass Democrat defection in Michigan is a categorically different thing.

🔥 Mr. Epstein started his piece by quoting JFK’s memorable inaugural address: “In the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.” He then helpfully compared that vivid imagery to Michigan Democrats, who by nominating DSA-backed El-Sayed for Senate, are currently strapping their saddle onto an overgrown, starving tiger.

As for Mr. Epstein? He’s not getting on. “After decades of giving my all for Democratic House and Senate candidates,” he wrote, “this fall I will support — and contribute to — Mike Rogers, Michigan’s GOP Senate nominee, instead.” Boom.

Epstein is fed up and fired up. He continued by tearing his own party a new one. He called out “weak, timid figures like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer” who spout “empty clichés” about a “big-tent party” while “abdicating their moral and political responsibilities.” He’s not wrong. Schumer, for his part, issued what can only be described as the most tepid endorsement in Senate history— of a guy who has publicly called for Schumer to be replaced.

That is remarkable. One wonders how threatened Chuck Schumer, the Senator from New York, must be by the DSA’s army of socialist volunteers, who literally just elected Zohran Mamdani and crew.

🔥 The force of Mr. Epstein’s piece lay in his description of what Democrats are actually embracing right now. They aren’t just coddling sweet Scandinavian-style socialists, he says. They are “getting into bed with a nihilistic, deconstructionist brand of third-worldism”— an ideology that seeks “the elimination of prisons, policing, borders, the Senate, the presidency, the Supreme Court and democratic free markets.”

Just as we did yesterday in Coffee & Covid, Democrat insider Epstein noted that El-Sayed’s main campaign surrogate, Hasan Piker, blames the US for 9/11, and “professes his love for China’s madman dictator Mao Zedong, who slaughtered millions of his own people.” (A rare concession from the left.)

This is the political equivalent of Wile E. Coyote strapping himself to an ACME rocket, lighting the fuse, and then looking surprised when he ends up a small, charred smudge at the canyon’s rocky bottom. The Democrats spent years cultivating the DSA fringe as radical shock troops aimed at Trump. And now that fringe —Frankenstein’s Socialists— are turning the establishment into breakfast.

🔥 Look at it this way. Abdul El-Sayed won the primary nomination with the support of only 12.5% of Michigan’s registered voters, drawn almost entirely from what Mr. Epstein called “the radical professional class of white college graduates” (ironically, not ‘the workers’)— while “underperforming in black, brown and working-class districts.”

The DSA wing is a loud minority, not a majority. But it controls the nomination machinery now. And that has become the Democrats’ pounding headache.

Epstein’s closing warning should give Democrat strategists nightmares: “Democrats in many districts will be forced on the campaign trail to distance themselves from El-Sayed or denounce him — and every one of their comments will write another permission slip for party defections come fall.”

🔥 To show you how different this is from “Lincoln Republican” defections, yesterday, Hillary Clinton appeared on Kara Swisher’s Pivot Podcast. To her credit, the former Secretary of State has a fairly reliable instinct for detecting political disasters, weighed in on El-Sayed’s nomination. The NY Post ran the story.

“The real fight will be, how do we make sure that people who voted for Haley feel comfortable voting for Abdul El-Sayed,” Hillary said, “and how do we get Independents to feel comfortable?”

Then came a stunning, un-Hillary-like admission: “It’s not just about Michigan, but the Republican messaging is ‘communist, socialist.’ It’s going to be a very effective attack.”

When Swisher —seemingly incredulous that anyone in 2026 could be scared off by the word “communist”— pushed back, Hillary doubled down: “All I know is that is the attack Trump is leading with, and I assume they’ve tested that, and I assume they have reason to believe it’s effective or they wouldn’t be beating the drum on it.”

After admitting that the ‘communist’ attack will probably work, Hillary called for “unity.” This was the political equivalent of a ship’s captain announcing that the iceberg has punctured the hull, half the lifeboats are missing, and he hopes that everyone will work together to have a positive attitude. In other words, it’s incoherent.

Right when Democrats need them the most, its party leaders are not leading. Bill Clinton, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and former president Barack H. Obama have all been conspicuously silent. A CNN Facebook post from two days ago said: “Barack Obama has not endorsed anyone in Michigan’s Democratic Senate race.” But Obama’s brain, former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, called the DSA platform “a losing political message.”

In terms of public defections, Julian Epstein followed Bill Maher, who recently said, thanks to DSA-style politics, his “vote is in play... I’m not living in communist America.” Yesterday, longtime Democrat party activist James Carville (who got Bill Clinton elected) told Fox News Digital, “Well, if the Democrats went crazy and the Republicans went sane, then I probably would be a Republican.”

If Carville’s quote sounds mild, just look how Bernie Sanders responded to the weak threat: “If Mr. Carville doesn’t want to be in my party, the party that I belong to, that Hasan Piker, that El-Sayed belongs to, he can start his own party.” For his part, Twitch-streaming influencer Hasan Piker piled on, saying Carville and Fetterman threatening to leave was “sweetening the deal.” Go ahead, make my day.

This is what a late-stage polycrisis looks like. We are watching a blue-on-blue civil war breaking out in Michigan, in New York, and in Wisconsin, all in the critical midterm season, all following the same pattern: the DSA wing primaries a safe-seat Democrat, the sane wing panics, Chuck Schumer calls it “a big tent,” and working-class voters quietly update their party registrations.

This is not a one-state story. This is a national fracture playing out in fast motion, one primary at a time.

It will soon be feeding time in the tiger cage. Relax, this is only going to hurt for a very long time.

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Our C&C scrolling-addicted members probably noticed that the Republican Party spent the last three days engaged in our own bitter, bloody civil war— over a burrito. The Washington Post, which never misses the chance to capitalize on intra-conservative conflict, perfectly captured the absurdity in its piece yesterday headlined, “A viral $20 burrito is dividing conservatives online.” The Post ‘helpfully’ wondered: “Is this the new avocado toast?”

“Sometimes a burrito is just a burrito,” the WaPo story began. That is undoubtedly true. And sometimes it is a delivery system for e. coli and a ticket to spending a week on the toilet.

The controversy, now raging worse than explosive diarrhea, began when Andrew Kolvet, a TPUSA spokesman, innocently posted a quote from a college student who’d told him, simply: “A burrito shouldn’t cost $20.” This is also true. Kolvet added that, while $20 burritos can be blamed squarely on covid and Biden-era inflation, “the lived experience is the same: It just feels like basic things cost too much.”

This otherwise innocuous observation triggered an immediate and ferocious backlash from the old-guard, fiscal-conservative wing of the Republican Party. Representative Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) took to X to sneer at the complaining zoomers. “Stop whining, get a job, eat Ramen like the rest of us did in college, on a budget with 4 roommates,” he wrote. “The market doesn’t care what you think something ‘should’ cost.”

Ouch.

For the record, this is the exact same Dan Crenshaw who, in 2021, mocked the Biden administration for telling Americans to eat less meat to fight inflation, posting: “Biden admin: just be vegan and stop complaining you bunch of rubes.” So. But I digress.

🔥 The poisonous “Republican civil war” narrative was unsurprisingly trumpeted by WaPo, but the blowback was not limited to far-left schadenfreude. Behold: headline from Fox News, two days ago:

Pundit Marc Thiessen piled on the burrito babies, telling students to “cry me a river,” eat in the cafeteria, and stop summoning one large order of fries on DoorDash. This prompted Vice President JD Vance to deliver what might be the funniest line of the entire three-day saga, a single mean-tweet that generated a whole New York Times hit piece. Replying directly to Thiessen, Vance unleashed a fat joke: “I’m surprised to hear Mark say this. If you’ve ever met him in person, it’s quite obvious the man has never missed a burrito.”

But underneath the ‘mean-spirited’ humor, we face a very serious political reality. The old guard thinks this is just a bunch of lazy kids complaining that they can’t afford daily food delivery. But the populist wing of the party —including the Vice-President— understands that Burrito-Gate isn’t about the burrito.

It’s about the fact that an entire generation of young Americans is drowning, and they are beginning to stop caring about who threw them the anvil.

🔥 Let’s connect a few dots. Zoomers were battered by covid lockdowns during the prime of their social and educational years. Then they were hit with Bidenflation, which was not a talking point, but a brutal, compounding reality. (If you don’t believe me, ask anyone who has pushed a $500 grocery cart through the checkout line recently. Like my wife.)

Then, perhaps worst of all, there is the student loan scam. As conservative commenter James Lindsay and others have been pointing out on X, an entire generation was sold a lie: just accept massive debt to go to college, and you’ll be all good, set for life.

But now, far too many of them have useless degrees in woke nonsense, a phenomenon that some academics have ironically labeled ‘elite overproduction.’ They expected a window office, but instead they are serving Frappuccinos on the weekend shift instead of taking 2-week paid vacations. And unlike almost any other form of debt in America, their unaffordable student loans cannot be discharged in bankruptcy. It is an inescapable trap.

And finally: housing. Zoomers feel —not without cause— they are priced out of the American dream. My first home —a 2,800 square foot, 4 bed, 4 bath pool home on a half acre— cost $168,000. Even after the Democrats’ real estate crash, I sold it in 2011 for $230,000 and thought I did well. I can’t imagine that well-used home selling for much less than $500K now.

So when a 22-year-old complains about a $20 burrito, they aren’t actually complaining about the outrageous $2 guacamole upcharge. They are expressing the terrifying realization that the math of their lives isn’t mathing. The ‘burrito’ is the proverbial bean-stuffed canary in the Mexican coal mine.

I’ll give them this— the Democrats have done a masterful job of obscuring the real solutions (like they always do). They focused the zoomers on their feelings, blamed capitalism, and promised them unrealistic government lifelines like free rent and student loan forgiveness.

But the zoomers are also noticing that the same government telling them they have to pay back their crushing loans is simultaneously handing out prepaid debit cards and free hotel rooms to illegal aliens. They are understandably pissed off.

🔥 This should be a massive political win for the Republican Party. The Democrats wrecked the economy. They built the student loan trap. They lavished taxpayer money on illegal aliens who have no expensive college degree debt. But we cannot win over angry, broke young voters by sneering at them, telling them tales about how hard we had it back in the old days, or encouraging them to invest in cheap, ultraprocessed, Chinese noodles.

That’s not even a narrative. That’s just not listening. We desperately need a sympathetic counter-narrative. And we need it fast.

The most frustrating thing about this unnecessary fast-food argument is that the Trump-Vance ticket already has the counter-narrative. They just need to tell it better. They need to say, plainly: you’re right, the Democrats screwed us all. We’re working on it.

Every single day, President Trump is actively pushing policies that directly address the zoomer crisis. He is promoting H1-B visa reforms to protect American tech jobs. He is pushing nuclear and data center initiatives to create high-paying domestic careers. He is pushing mass deportations as fast as humanly possible, which is starting to relieve the artificial pressure on the entry-level job market, rent prices, and the starter-home housing supply.

But it takes a long time to turn a Celebrity Cruise ship around. First you have to quell the riot at the buffet line.

If you look around, signs of early success are everywhere. Take the housing market, for example: Real estate analyst Nick Gerli tweeted this week about how America’s biggest homebuilders are slashing prices to move stale inventory. Lennar has reduced its average selling price from $511k to $377k (a whopping 26% drop), and DR Horton has cut prices from $415k to $366k. The market is finally adjusting to make homes more affordable for first-time buyers again.

Or look at the skilled trades. For years, Dirty Jobs star Mike Rowe, the patron saint of hard work, was mocked and vilified for questioning the value of a modern college degree. He’s now been completely vindicated. Mike appeared on a podcast last month reporting his recent visit to an AI data center in Plano, Texas. He met three young electricians there. All under 30. All debt-free. All making between $240,000 and $280,000 a year.

“There’s a ten trillion-dollar infrastructure coming,” Mike explained. “And we do not have the skilled workers to make it happen.”

That is the counter-narrative. The answer to the $20 burrito isn’t “stop whining.” The answer isn’t pointing out that when burritos cost $5.89, the minimum wage was only $3.35. It’s not bragging about how I put myself through college and law school without any loans. Those things are all true, but they aren’t helpful. It might be scientifically accurate to tell your wife she does look fat in that dress, but that kind of honesty will only launch a new, much less pleasant and much less rational conversation.

Remember: It’s not about the nail. Or the burrito.

🔥 The correct answer is: You’re right. You were scammed by the university system, you were robbed by Bidenflation, and you were sold out by open borders. But socialism won’t fix any of that. It will just make things worse. We must fix the housing market, protect jobs, and build an economy where they don’t need a useless gender studies degree to make $250,000 a year. They only need an AI-proof trade skill instead.

As I said, evidence shows it is manifestly working. But it takes time. Here’s a headline from Metaintro, in April:

We hold all the political cards, because we have the real answers. Democrats can only keep lying. They literally cannot make the same promises. Doing so would contradict their whole shell game. They can never admit that a college degree is only useful if it guarantees a meaningful entry ticket to a well-paying job, which probably means STEM or a professional certification. Democrats can never confess that covid, open borders, and Bidenflation were at least partly to blame.

The difficult truth is that Millennials and Zoomers were sold a lie. They were promised that, if they kept up their grades, went straight from high school into college on ‘student loans,’ regardless of degree, they’d be set. (Then they were made to stay home, keep borrowing, and take shots they didn’t want. But I digress.) And as far as I know, for far too long, only “Dirty Jobs” Mike Rowe was telling the truth.

We aren’t blameless. Even if Republicans didn’t create the lie or wreck the economy for young people, we silently acquiesced to it.

You can argue Zoomers shouldn’t have believed the lie. But they were seventeen. Either way, they are victims of a massive fraud. They’re mad. They are burn it all down mad. That righteous anger is what the Democrats and the DSA are tapping into, awakening a monster they cannot control.

Look: When Zoomers complain the system is rigged against us, they are 100% right. They face profound systemic problems that Boomers and GenX did not. Not burritos. Worse.

If conservatives could stop fighting amongst ourselves about Mexican munchies long enough to deliver that message, we could win a generation. If we keep telling kids to eat ramen, sooner or later we will lose. And, as one conservative commentator put it this week, we’ll deserve it.

Have a wonderful weekend! Meet me back here on Monday morning, for an all-new roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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The best example of the Fauci preference cascade appeared in yesterday’s New York Times, which did not run with “Republicans pounce.” It did not quote his defenses in the headline. Instead, it flatly reported, “How Fauci Got to This Point and the Legal Peril He Faces.” The subheadline had zero sugar for the doctor. “The case is unique,” it observed, quarantining Fauci into a category of himself, “because of the tension between the Fifth Amendment and the reach of a presidential pardon.” It ended chillingly: “The potential consequences could be grave.”

The news, as you probably well know, was that Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) and the Homeland Security Committee voted to hold Dr. Anthony “Science” Fauci in contempt for his arrogant and greedy performance of taking the fifth right after swearing to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” It literally took nanoseconds to break that vow.

I called him greedy, since he accepted an unprecedented global pardon, presidential forgiveness of what we can only imagine are so many crimes that they finally just threw their hands up in the air and said “dammit, just pardon everything.” But even though he was gifted with a universal pardon so broad it eclipses the only similar one an American —a president— ever received, he still kept his pie hole shut when it was time to answer a few real questions about why he spent so much time on his malignant, narcissistic musings about how much the celebrity class was fawning over him instead of solving the pandemic like he was being paid to do.

Sorry! I’m digressing again. Or possibly venting. Let’s get back on track.

The Times noted that Senator Paul is skipping the traditional next step: uselessly bringing a contempt resolution to the full Senate for a vote. Since there’s a filibuster-shaped hole in that plan, Paul promptly passed the committee decision to the DOJ, which is not required to, but legally may pursue the matter. (This end-around only works when a party controls all the branches, as Republicans do now.)

We’ll soon see whether the DOJ will decide to take out the trash.

🪳 “The potential consequences could be grave for Dr. Fauci,” the article repeated later in the story. Somewhat astonishingly, and a very bad sign for Fauci, the first legal expert the Times quoted was conservative Democrat law professor Jonathan Turley. “There are good-faith arguments that his pardon would afford him effective immunity,” Turley explained, which would thereby render Dr. Fauci ineligible for any Fifth Amendment protection.

Altogether, the legal experts seemed queasy about trying to predict what a DC court might do with Dr. Fauci’s refusal to testify. When pressed, they all guessed that Fauci will win, since to find otherwise means that invoking your Fifth Amendment rights against incriminating yourself can get you thrown in jail, which sort of defeats the whole purpose, if you think about it. At minimum, it’s pretty ironic.

But, as the Times correctly noted in its headline block (and then never mentioned again), Fauci’s case is unique. And in that sense, the good doctor has unique vulnerabilities that guarantee this case will reach OJ-levels of high drama.

🪳 It’s that dang unconditional pardon. It’s both a blessing and a curse. It looks great on paper— who wouldn’t want a pre-emptive, unconditional pardon? The problem is that kind of pardon has never been legally tested before, and the closest historical examples are ones Democrats don’t want to talk about. And right behind that, marching over the horizon, looms the dreadful mechanical profile of the Biden Autopen.

The argument goes like this: A valid pardon requires the president to know what offenses are being forgiven, so he can exercise genuine judgment about clemency. Blanket language covering “all federal offenses” during a broad period (see, e.g., Ford’s pardon of Nixon) fails this test if the president is unaware of the specific criminal acts. In 1866, SCOTUS said a pardon could issue before conviction or even before indictment, but has never blessed a pardon for a completely unknown or uncharged crime.

Constitutional scholars say doing that could violate a president’s duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Unconditional pre-emptive pardons look a lot like lawlessness. Indeed, in Old England, even Kings were barred from pardoning someone before a crime was committed, on the theory that it was too close to suspending laws altogether. Pre-emptive pardons create the appearance of impunity and suggest that certain allies are above the law.

And if there is one thing we all know for sure, it’s that no one is above the law.

🪳 On January 19th, 2021 —in the near aftermath of January 6th, on the day Trump 1.0’s term ended— Democrats fretted that before he left office, Trump might pardon himself pre-emptively and globally. At that time, natsec establishment organ Lawfare Media concluded that “pre-emptive pardons could backfire,” and “a potential recipient would be well-advised not to accept one:”

Can you hear that distant booming noise rolling across the political moors? It sounds a lot like Fauci’s pre-emptive pardon backfiring. So, adding another layer of irony to the lawfare lasagna, Fauci and his Democrat allies may be forced to defend the exact same type of pardon they decried when they were afraid Trump would do it. How’s that for hypocrisy?

Then there’s the vexing question of Auto-pardons. Article II vests the pardon power solely in “the President.” An autopen (a machine that reproduces a signature) is not the President. Nor are staffers who operated the infernal device that performed the physical act. Critics frame this as a dereliction of duty that fails the minimum requirements for a true exercise of the awesome constitutional pardon power.

Related is the Cabbage-patch problem. The Oversight Committee has already concluded that cognitive decline meant the President did not personally decide on or even know about many late-term pardons, including (especially) Fauci’s. Without contemporaneous evidence of presidential approval like a written directive or even a text or email, the autopen documents reflect staff decisions, not the President’s will— and would therefore be void. CNN, last October:

Assuming the DOJ proceeds with the referral (a good bet), Fauci’s decision to invoke the Fifth Amendment could put all these issues on the table. He may not only be fighting about whether taking the Fifth was proper or not. He may also have to defend the pardon itself, and from a position of weakness too, since if the pardon was effective, then he shouldn’t have raised that defense in the first place.

It’s Catch-22, doc. You just opened the door.

This high-visibility case could easily bubble up to the Supreme Court, which could, if it wants, take the opportunity to “clarify” a few pardon rules. And the steady stream of Fauci disclosures suggest that Republicans have bigger game in view than a mere contempt ruling.

So, ironically, Fauci’s contempt case conceivably could wind up approving of Fauci’s use of the Fifth Amendment, but only by ruling that he wasn’t immunized because his pardon is invalid. Which would be a complete Pyrrhic victory; Fauci could win the battle but lose the war.

Even though it sailed right past this legal analysis, that is why the Times called Fauci’s case “unique” and called the potential consequences “grave.” If so, Fauci dug his own.

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Also yesterday, unleashing the full force of its faux outrage, the Times reported, “Trump Signs Executive Orders Targeting Birthright Citizenship and ‘Birth Tourism.’”

Just weeks after the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that President Trump’s previous efforts to end birthright citizenship via executive order were unconstitutional, the President is back at it. He signed two new executive orders yesterday aimed at limiting who gets automatic citizenship and cracking down on “birth tourism.”

“We had a very unfortunate decision in the Supreme Court concerning birthright,” the President explained. “It was close, but a very, very unfortunate decision. So we’re making adjustments.”

For our respected Portland readers, ‘birth tourism’ is exactly what it sounds like: pregnant women flying to the United States on tourist visas, having a baby on American soil, and voila— instant American citizen. Apparently it’s become a whole cottage industry. There are agencies, packages, concierge services. There are probably even loyalty points cards.

“That’s not the way it was supposed to work,” Trump said. “It’s a disgrace. They’re buying their way in, and we’re not going to let it happen.”

The part that corporate media never quite manages to explain, because explaining it would require them to admit something they really don’t want to admit: this is how Trump always wins (TAW).

Maybe not every battle or skirmish. But the war? The man never quits. The Supreme Court slammed the door on his first birthright citizenship order back on June 30th, in the 6-3 ruling he called “a very, very unfortunate decision.” Most politicians would have held a press conference, declared a moral victory, and moved on to something easier. Trump started finding the windows.

The TAW meme isn’t a meme. It’s a methodology.

🔥 The two new orders are genuinely clever— a fact the Times buried under its hand-wringing about enforceability. Rather than swinging at the 14th Amendment again with a sledgehammer, Trump’s lawyers went looking for cracks in the wall. They found two.

First: children of foreign government staff serving in the United States. These are people here on diplomatic or official status — not immigrants, not tourists, not residents. Their kids, under the new order, don’t get automatic citizenship. That’s a narrow carve-out, but it’s legally defensible, and more importantly, it’s hard to argue against without sounding like you’re defending a loophole that was never meant to exist in the first place.

Second, and this is the one with teeth: the babies of mothers who lie about their intentions when applying for a tourist visa while pregnant. Trump explained the logic himself: “This was done right after the Civil War. This was for the babies of slaves, and what’s happening now? People are building businesses around it.”

People are building businesses around it. He’s right. The 14th Amendment was ratified to ensure that the children of freed slaves —people who had been legally denied personhood— could never again be stripped of citizenship. It was not written to create a luxury immigration product for wealthy foreign nationals who want to buy their newborn an American passport for the price of a business-class ticket and a hospital bill. Nobody thinks the Reconstruction Congress was thinking about five-star maternity hotels in Los Angeles when they drafted that language.

It’s another Catch-22. Under the new order, if you tell the truth on your visa application —“I’m coming to the United States to give birth so my child gets citizenship”— you don’t get the visa. If you lie, the executive order says your child doesn’t get citizenship anyway, because you obtained entry through fraud. There is no third option. The window that existed before is now either locked or booby-trapped.

The Times, predictably, was baffled by how any of this could “realistically be enforced.” They wondered How will we ever know if someone lied on a visa application?, apparently forgetting that the entire apparatus of the federal government exists, in large part, to find out if anyone lied on forms. That’s not a loophole in the system. That is the system.

🔥 This illustrates the bigger picture, the one to keep in mind every time the corporate media runs a “Trump loses in court” headline. The left has spent two years treating judicial rulings as the end of the story. Trump treats them as the beginning of the next chapter. SCOTUS closed the door on the broad approach? Fine. He’s finding the specific, narrow, legally defensible windows, like the fraud angle, the diplomatic status angle, the territorial angle that still needs congressional action but is already on the table.

Behold! This is how the Overton window moves. Slowly, gradually, not in one dramatic kick, but in a series of incremental, targeted, legally grounded steps that each, individually, seem modest, and each, individually, are doggedly hard to argue against in public without looking like you’re defending visa fraud and diplomatic loopholes.

By the time the opposition has finished litigating step one, steps two and three are already in motion.

The left is howling and the ACLU is already drafting lawsuits. But Trump just forced them to stand up in court and defend, with a straight face, the proposition that a woman who lied on her visa application to give birth in America should have her child’s citizenship protected by the 14th Amendment. Good luck defending that. Trump wins either way, whatever the courts do, legally or politically.

Think about it. If SCOTUS explicitly blesses birth tourism, there’s no way it could conclude that the drafters anticipated concierge birth clinics. It will be forced to admit it’s an unforeseen and unfortunate problem, a 14th Amendment loophole. Apparently you can buy a passport, but you can’t buy that kind of political mandate.

🔥🔥🔥

The New York Times ran a remarkably candid piece yesterday headlined, “Moderate Democrats Prepare for ‘War’ Against an Ascendant Left.” Corporate media is panicking, and I, for one, am here for it. (I will presume for the sake of argument that such a thing as a ‘moderate’ Democrat actually exists.)

For the last two years, the Democrat establishment thought the 2026 midterms would be fought on their preferred ground: healthcare, affordability, and reminding everyone how much they hate Orange People. But as the primaries wrap up, they’ve realized they aren’t fighting Republicans. They are fighting to keep their own coalition together. Classic polycrisis.

The story opened with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan’s U.S. Senate primary. El-Sayed, an all-in Muslim and progressive darling, easily knocked off the establishment’s hand-picked moderate, handing the centrists their most painful defeat of the year. He wasn’t the only one. As you know, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have been quietly racking up wins in Dem primaries, ousting incumbents from New York to Colorado, and even primarying another sitting congressman in Detroit this week. Plus the whole Zohran “Free Groceries” Mamdani thing, but I digress.

El-Sayed is the Democrats’ second DSA candidate for U.S. Senate in this midterm contest. Remember DSA-endorsed ‘lumberjack’ Troy Jackson, who stepped into the race over Graham Platner’s political corpse? The Democrats had hoped to sweep the Senate. Now, two of their four competitive races —half— sport red roses.

The establishment is officially terrified. Jonathan Cowan, president of the ‘centrist’ Democrat think tank Third Way openly declared war. “We are preparing for the next war that is coming,” he told the Times. He announced a $15 million effort to discredit democratic socialism between now and 2028.

In other words, the Democrat establishment is about to spend $15 million attacking their own voters’ democratically preferred candidates. Glorious.

(University of British Columbia Professor of ‘Justice’ Naomi Klein switched off the comments on her own post. Perfect.)

🔥 Here is the buried lede, a brutal irony that nobody in the corporate media is pointing out: the Democrats did this to themselves. They raised the wolves inside their own house.

For the last two years, the Democrat establishment leaned hard into affordability and economic anxiety as their primary weapon against Trump. They told their voters every single day that the system was rigged, corporations were gouging everyone, and capitalism was failing the young.

It was just meant to be another cynical Democrat turnout tactic. But it turned into a gateway drug.

When a party’s core message is that the capitalist system is fundamentally broken, corrupt, and controlled by Nazi oligarchs, that party has just made the strongest possible recruiting pitch for the DSA. Democrats validated the entire socialist worldview. The only difference between a “moderate” Third Way Democrat and a DSA socialist at that point seemed to be that the socialist was willing to say the quiet part loud and actually do something about it, rather than form a bipartisan task force.

And the DSA capitalized on it perfectly. According to City & State New York, the DSA’s national membership nearly doubled between October 2024 and December 2025, surging from 50,000 to over 90,000— the exact same period during which the Democrats were platforming their cool new ‘affordability crisis’ narrative. Here’s the headline, from January:

The generational data is even worse for the Democrat establishment. A recent Cato Institute poll found that a staggering 62% of Americans aged 18–29 now hold a “favorable view” of socialism (thanks, Democrats), while a Gallup poll noted that only 31% of Democrats under 50 have a positive view of capitalism.

The naíve Zoomers driving this socialist wave don’t remember Stalin, the Cold War, or even the USSR. It’s not a lived memory for them; it’s a boring history class they half-paid attention to while scrolling TikTok. To them, “socialism” doesn’t conjure images of bread lines in Moscow or the Stasi kicking down doors at 3 a.m. It conjures utopian Scandinavian healthcare, free college, cheap Manhattan rent, and Zohran Mamdani’s Instagram account.

For a generation of Zoomers, the word “socialist” has been completely whitewashed of its historical baggage. Democrats created their own political Frankenstein’s monster, which is wearing rose earrings and stomping down their little utopian villages in primaries.

🔥 In this metaphor, Democrats are Dr. Frankenstein and the monster looks a lot like Hasan Piker —or “HasanAbi,” as his 3.1 million Zoomer Twitch followers know him— who has become perhaps the most perfect symbol of exactly what the Democrat establishment has created and is rampaging out of control.

Piker is a self-described ‘socialist streamer,’ nephew of Young Turks founder Cenk Uygur, and a man who proclaims that America “deserved 9/11” and that he didn’t “have an issue” with Islamist terror group Hezbollah. He is also, at this precise moment in history, one of the most influential political kingmakers on the American left.

The Times’ story on the socialist surge (and the establishment’s panic spiral) noted that, after nine of Hasan’s endorsed candidates won their New York primaries in June, Hasan aimed his streaming camera directly at Representative Ritchie Torres (D-NY), a pro-Israel Democrat, and delivered what can best be described as a mob-movie warning: “Ritchie Torres, I know you won tonight. I’ll see you in two years, motherf—r. I’m coming for you, Ritchie. Sit on that f—ng seat for the next two years.”

Rep. Torres earned Piker’s ire by penning earnest letters to Twitch and Amazon executives calling Piker “dangerous” and accusing him of living in “a morally inverted universe.” Which was a bold move by a congressman sitting in a district politically dependent on the very voters Piker is organizing.

Meanwhile, El-Sayed —the man whose Michigan primary win triggered the establishment’s current meltdown— campaigned openly alongside Piker, betting that every older voter he loses over the association will be replaced by a younger voter who found out about him on a livestream. El-Sayed isn’t flirting with Piker. They are practically joined at the hip. The night before the Michigan primary —the vote that just propelled the centrist wing into a $15 million panic spiral— El-Sayed spent the evening at a pool party with Piker. Then, after he won, Piker showed up as El-Sayed’s keynote speaker at the victory party.

The Democrat establishment built the grievance. Piker and his Zoomer followers built the pipeline. El-Sayed is swimming laps through the hole.

The New Yorker euphemistically called it “a different theory of electability.” Senator John Fetterman (D-PA), watching it all unfold from Pennsylvania, called it something straight. On CNN after the results came in, Fetterman summarized the problem like this: “Continue to campaign with Hasan Piker right now. You’re in a general election now, I dare you. I dare you! Keep campaigning with someone like Hasan Piker. If I were a Republican, I would just dump $20 million for ads.”

John Fetterman! The guy who attends the Senate in shorts and a hoodie, the one who stroked out mid-campaign, is now the Democrats’ voice of reason. Somebody explain to me how we got here.

🔥 It’s not that Democrats despise communists. No. The real problem is that Democrats hate losing, which is now an imminent threat in the form of a massive reaction gap between their primary voters and their general-election voters. Primary voters, including lots of Zoomers hopped up on TikToks and MSNBC performative outrage, are euphorically pulling the lever for candidates who want to abolish the Senate, defund the police, empty the prisons, and ensure avocado toast for breakfast every day.

But there is a snag. Isn’t life always like that? The snag is that those DSA candidates must now face general-election voters, who generally favor things like police and prisons.

Enter the so-called “DSA Dodgers.” That’s a derogatory term the Times coined in a companion piece detailing the hilarious gymnastic contortions these candidates are going through to conceal their socialist affiliations and “pivot to the center,” now that the primaries are over.

Consider Francesca Hong, the front-runner in the Wisconsin governor’s race. Hong is a dues-paying member of the DSA. In the past, she has unapologetically called to abolish the police, empty the prisons, and abolish the U.S. Senate. But now that she’s facing a general election in a purple state, she’s suddenly suffering from ideological amnesia.

At a recent debate, and for the first time, Hong suddenly and miraculously discovered she did “not support the full platform of the national D.S.A.” and complained that it was “concerning to me when I’m pigeonholed as the D.S.A. candidate.”

But … she literally joined the pigeonhole club, paid the pigeonhole dues, and ran on the pigeonhole platform, but now she’s shocked —shocked!— that people are calling her a pigeon. It’s the Costanza doctrine of politics: it’s not a socialist platform if you pretend you never read it. It’s not a lie, Jerry, if you really believe it.

🔥 This kind of in-and-out-running is not without cost. The DSA’s true believers are furious at the dodgers. At their recent national summit in Chicago, DSA hardliners called dodgers “sell-outs” and demanded ideological purity. Cerena Ermitanio, a member of the “Bread and Roses” caucus (I did not make that name up), complained about candidates who “hide the rose” and demanded they “wear their rose proudly.”

In case that reference seems obscure, the red (of course) rose is the official symbol of the Democratic Socialists of America, and of ‘democratic socialism’ worldwide. It traces back to the European labor and socialist movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where a rose representing the beauty of the socialist ideal was paired with a clenched fist representing labor solidarity. The DSA adopted the logo as its primary visual identity, and its candidates often wear a red rose pin on their lapel as a commie dog-whistle.

Another Bread and Roses member, Johanna Von Maack, wondered whether the Democrats would eventually “kick us out,” adding that the Democrats need the socialists more than the socialists need the Democrats.

It’s a giant, multi-edged boomerang. The Democrat establishment spent ten years cultivating the radical left, funding their non-profits, indulging their campus protests, and using their volunteer energy to win elections. Then they poured gas on the flames with their all-in affordability narrative. Now the radicals and mushy-skulled Zoomers have decided they don’t want to be junior partners anymore. They want the car keys.

The establishment thought they were buying guard dogs. The guard dogs turned out to be wolves, and now Democrats are spending (at least) $15 million trying to build a cage inside their own house.

Have a fantastic Friday! C&C will return tomorrow with the Weekend Edition roundup, and it promises to be another doozy. Don’t miss out on the latest essential news with caffeinated commentary. In this case, FOMO is your friend.

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🪳🪳🪳

Oh, no, Mr. Bill! I mean, oh no, Dr. Fauci! Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported, “Senate Panel Says It Has Obtained Copy of Fauci’s Covid-Era Phone.” Even as the nation —nay, the world— continues uneasily digesting the contents of Fauci’s diaries and Slack messages, another round of pesticide treatment has unexpectedly arrived along with the exterminator truck.

This, my friends, the effective deployment of a previously underutilized political weapon— disclosure. The incoming administration has access to and control of the federal government’s files, records, and most of all, its technology. As they say, nothing is ever truly deleted, which is why Hillary Clinton used to take her old file servers out behind the barn and beat them to death with baseball bats.

By the time this is over, Fauci might have preferred being one of Hillary’s file servers. It would still have been unpleasant, but at least it would have been over with quickly.

We don’t know much yet. The dramatic headline story can be boiled down into a single sentence: Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has given the Senate Oversight Committee a digital copy of Fauci’s covid-era cell phone. It raises a million questions.

How did they get the phone image in the first place? Unknown. Maybe it’s simply because Fauci surrendered his phone when he retired, and his phone was imaged or archived. But if so, how long has HHS known the archive existed? Why wasn’t the phone image turned over immediately?

RFK Jr. said Fauci’s diary entries took about eight months to assemble from 11 separate servers where it had been “sequestered and secreted.” So one suspects there’s more to the Fauci phone story than a turned-in phone or a standard backup. Why is federal information about the most important project in modern history ‘sequestered and secreted?’

One thing seems abundantly clear: even as the government employees in the major U.S. health agencies realized they were about to undertake the most important work of their careers, finding themselves at the center of the response to a once-in-a-lifetime global emergency, an emergency they had spent years preparing for, document preservation should have been aggressive and automatic.

They understood that perfectly. Instead, they deliberately made no material efforts to preserve and protect the critical information needed by historians and for after-action analysis. Instead, top officials like Fauci and his toadie, Morens, casually discussed destroying the historical record in real time. The FOIA lady taught me how to make emails disappear:

The government pandemic response is a vortex of failure that strains the fabric of space-time itself. But never mind.

As to the phone image itself, we must wait for the Committee’s report to find out what is on it. Late yesterday, right after the WSJ story published, Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) played it coy, like they don’t already know what’s coming:

We don’t, can’t know. But the mind reels with possibility. Is there a chat channel on it with each of Fauci’s celebrity buddies, like Bill Gates? Are there saved copies of Fauci’s personal emails that he used to avoid FOIA? Did he try to scrub the phone himself, in violation of records preservation laws? All unknown for now.

So that’s already a bombshell, especially for reporters and for die-hard Fauci allies still reeling from the diaries. But the WSJ’s story contained a buried lede, one that might not be quite as salacious as the phone image, but could be even more devastating. Consider the offhand comment at the end of the Journal’s story that “more public document dumps are on the way”:

‘Millions of additional Fauci-related pages.’ Millions. His phone isn’t the climax of this dystopian movie. It’s only the preview trailer.

🪳 The pandemic investigation was underway years before Biden’s interregnum ended. But Biden’s HHS never gave Congress anything like this volume of information. Before Kennedy, it was like Marg-Moore-The-FOIA-Lady-Who-Hates-FOIA was responding to Congress. We only found three responsive pages, sorry! Plus we redacted them!

But now, the floodgates are open.

I can’t find any historical parallel. Sure, you can cherry-pick previous one-offs, like the Church Committee’s disclosure of a few hundred embarrassing CIA documents, but I can find nothing like this Administration’s obsessive declassification and records transparency. JFK, MLK, Amelia Earhart, grainy UFO pictures, Fauci files, RussiaGate documents— it seems to have no bottom and no endpoint.

To prove how historic this Administration’s approach has been, you need only consider how obviously secure the swamp critters seemed in their internal comms. It’s clear that —never in a million years— did they think their messages would ever see the light of FOIA. They just trundled along, business as usual— if, that is, your business is compulsive Cold War-era paranoiac secrecy.

Put another way, if the “devoted, non-partisan” permanent government had any concept that “everything hits the internet including your phone under the next administration,” their internal chatter would be sterile, legalistic, and very, very short.

They got comfortable. They got lazy. They installed gatekeepers who “hate FOIA” in charge of FOIA responses. They didn’t expect that any change in administration —Democrat to Republican to Democrat to Republican— would make any difference in transparency at all. They never believed the fetid swamp water they paddle around in could ever be drained this low.

Instead, they believed in the permanent government so completely that they left a permanent record.

The Committee will vote today to hold Fauci in contempt, which then requires a further vote by the full Senate (which would fail because it needs 60 votes, sigh), but Senator Paul has promised to make an immediate DOJ referral. But wait. There was more disclosure in today’s news cycle. The filing cabinets of the public-health elite and the national-security elite are both in play.

🔥🔥🔥

Yesterday, Axios reported, “FBI investigated if Trump was a Russian asset after Comey firing, memos show.” Boy howdy. The declass stakes are reaching a fever pitch.

Before I begin, I must first say this: Opening a case on whether the sitting President of the United States is a Russian asset is among the most politically risky and radioactive acts the FBI could take. Even in a movie script for a political thriller, you’d have to handle it super carefully, since the whole idea is so unlikely it could easily shatter viewers’ suspension of disbelief.

Just wait. Wait till I map out the obvious implications for you, which no media has yet dared to touch. It’s already unbelievable.

But what we can be sure of is that the people who wrote and approved these newly declassified memos operated inside a bubble culture that assumed even political TNT like this would stay compartmented, that labeling it “sensitive investigative matter” and stuffing it in burn bags meant it would stay buried, and no change in administration or control of Congress would never unearth it.

Meet Hubris. Now meet Nemesis.

🔥 Here’s what actually dropped yesterday. We have learned that, days after President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey in May 2017, the bureau opened a formal investigation into whether the sitting president was acting as a Russian asset —“wittingly or unwittingly”— and whether his conduct might constitute high federal crimes or an urgent threat to national security.

The leaders of the FBI and DOJ —who ostensibly worked for Trump— called the top-secret investigation of their own boss “the least intrusive method” of handling the situation. One day later, Special Counsel Robert Mueller was appointed, and the one-day-old operation was handed off in full to his fully compartmented group.

Put plainly, yesterday’s dump exposed the paper record that was once confined to the Swamp’s vault: the FBI’s rushed decision to treat the President of the United States as a possible foreign-controlled node at the apex of the U.S. government.

They titled the operation Oxferd Comma (reportedly rendered with a zero for the ‘o’ in Comma). People are trying to figure out why they misspelled it. Was it to avoid FOIA or database searches if someone accidentally ‘heard’ the name? We don’t know, but I have another, more basic theory: They are incompetent nitwits who can’t spell.

What kind of incompetent nitwits? Well, for one thing, James Comey, who shouldn’t have known about the secret operation in the first place, since Trump had fired him before the op started, dropped this too-clever bon mot on Twitter a few months later:

“I’m all about Oxford commas.” Haha, James, we see what you did there. It’s just like his ‘8647’ seashell art. And the barely-hidden message even translates to the same thing: get rid of Trump.

This new doc dump is brand new. We just got it. The meaning and consequences are still unfolding. But there are two staggering, unbelievable conclusions that immediately surface and need to be part of the conversation starting right now.

🔥 The first astonishing point is legal in nature. According to a declassified 2019 memo, Oxferd Comma began on May 16, 2016— just a few months into Trump 1.0. The 2019 memo described the “predicate” or legal rationale for the unprecedented investigation. It claimed to have an “articulable factual basis the President Trump may be or had been, wittingly or unwittingly, involved in activities on behalf of Russia that may have constituted federal crimes or threats to national security.”

There’s much that could be said about this paragraph. But for now, I would draw your attention just to the word “unwittingly.” In other words, their investigation was predicated on a theory that Trump might not even know the Russians were manipulating him.

First of all, unwitting support of Russia, even if it did happen, is not a crime. Second, what would be the paramount duty of the Intelligence Community if it determined the president was being unwittingly manipulated by a foreign adversary?

Their singular duty was to warn him. Promptly and clearly. But of course, they never even considered that. Instead, the acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, and the acting Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein (Jeff Sessions recused himself) —deep staters all— launched a crusade so breathtaking in political brinksmanship that Tom Clancy would have immediately rejected it as a story idea.

The reason they included the word “unwittingly” was that their “articulable factual basis” didn’t even come close to proving Trump had intentionally done anything wrong. So they had to stretch, reaching to non-criminal conduct to support the predicate. It’s an express contradiction, and it destroys any claim the unprecedented investigation could have been in good faith.

In other words, normally, if you’re going to launch a top-secret investigation of the sitting president as a co-opted foreign agent, you’d better have a damned solid basis. Not a merely “articulable” one.

Either way, an unprecedented investigation of a sitting President as a foreign adversary’s possible asset required far more than the garden-variety FBI threshold predicate of an “articulable factual basis.” The phrase may meet a low opening standard for a Medicare fraud case; but it did not, by itself, supply the constitutional-grade justification this kind of case demanded.

And then they had the gall to call Oxferd Comma the “least intrusive method.” Give me a break. It fails both the ‘ha ha’ test and the smell test. That is bad enough. But that’s not even close to the worst part.

🔥 The political implications are a hundred times worse. No— a million times worse. They were setting up a predicate for a bona fide coup, a poisonous Manchurian President-crisis arguably worse than the Civil War itself.

That is not exaggerating. It’s not hysterical. It’s not even a stretch. Not in the least.

Consider the plain implications of their course of conduct. Suppose they had weighed the “articulable facts” and decided it was more likely than not —51% likely— that the President of the United States was being controlled by Russia. What would be their duty then?

The President holds the nuclear football.

If the President were more likely than not co-opted by the Russians, the Intelligence Community could not tolerate him remaining in office for even ten more minutes. The Russians could launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike and the Manchurian President could stand down by refusing to activate the football for a few critical minutes. Oh no, I can’t find my key.

Sure, their formal duty would have been to immediately take the matter to Congress for impeachment or 25th Amendment removal. (Which they also failed to do.) But if they followed the ‘normal’ process, that would still leave the Manchurian President in command of the nuclear response for months.

Given the existential stakes, their duty to national security would require them to take him out. One way or the other. A coup or an assassination.

That sounds extreme. But by April 2017, only two options remained on the board. Either they did not actually believe the catastrophic proposition their “Russian asset” theory implied, or they did believe it and chose an approach wildly inadequate to the claimed existential risk. Neither alternative supports any reassuring theory of good-faith, proportionate institutional judgment.

It wasn’t just Trump. The Artic Frost branch of their investigation surveilled Republican senators, the GOP, Charlie Kirk, and other allies. They clearly didn’t trust Congress or Republicans with this. So what recourse remained to them? Something extra-legal, perhaps?

🔥 As I said, this is just the latest in a steady stream of historic disclosures that are teaching the American public a lot about how our government has really been working. It’s worse than anyone thought, even in the hottest corners of the conservative hot-takes land. We haven’t even seen it all yet. But we have now traveled far beyond any mere political debate.

Between the Fauci files and the McCabe memorandum, America has now shifted beyond ordinary political quarreling and into the dark territory of a real constitutional crisis.

HHS’s transfer of Fauci’s journals, a copy of his government iPhone, and millions more pages from government servers exposed a public-health bureaucracy that treated preservation, transparency, and accountability as irrelevant; the McCabe memo raises the even more fundamental question of how senior law-enforcement officials could secretly open a counterintelligence investigation into the sitting President as a possible Russian asset on a wafer-thin “articulable” basis.

These are not disconnected scandals. Together, they suggest a government-wide culture in which powerful institutions assumed that elections changed political faces but not control of the archives, the investigative machinery, or the rules of disclosure— and in which constitutional limits became procedural inconveniences rather than binding constraints.

And it sure explains a lot about how we reached the unthinkable point of national lockdowns, censorship, and federal vaccine mandates. Just saying.

My friends, this culture of swampy government-by-fiat is the real threat to our democracy. It’s nitwits! The nitwits are killing us. Behold: the ‘October surprise,’ a few months early.

I should have listened to the QAnon kooks a little more closely. The Swamp might not be actual lizard people, but they might as well be. They sure aren’t like us.

The storm of disclosure has finally arrived. Batten the hatches and prepare for inclement weather.

Have a terrific Thursday! You’d better plan to get back here tomorrow morning, for the latest can’t-miss roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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🕺⚖️🕺

It’s been a minute since we celebrated a culture-war victory. Remember 2023’s drag wars in Florida? They’ve been tied up in court— until yesterday. Courthouse News dished the tea, reporting, “11th Circuit revives Florida’s ban on kids attending drag shows.”

Until relatively recently, progressives have weaponized delusional drag people against conservatives. We were scolded that teaching toddlers to tip grown men in heavy makeup and sequined leotards performing sexually explicit dance routines in bars was not only normal, but was a fundamental constitutional right, right up there with basic free speech and the right to shoot squirrels. (But not the right to refuse jabs, that’s different.)

If you disagreed, and felt that unattractive cross-dressing men had no business reading children’s books to kids in libraries, you were obviously a terrible person who hated freedom.

In 2023, in the wake of the pandemic, the launch of the Slava Ukraine psyop, and basically peak Biden, Governor DeSantis and the Florida legislature took action. They passed the Sunshine State’s Protection of Children Act, making it a criminal misdemeanor to knowingly admit any child to an “adult live performance” that predominantly appeals to a “prurient, shameful or morbid interest.”

Naturally, a garish Orlando restaurant-and-drag-bar named Hamburger Mary’s sued the state. I’ve never been there, but it looks like the kind of place where you could get a side of E. coli with your tater tots. Hamburger Mary’s was a downtown Orlando venue famous for nightlife and oxymoronic “family-friendly drag shows.” (After the lawsuit, the restaurant relocated from downtown Orlando to Old Town in Kissimmee.)

Inevitably, a Clinton-appointed federal judge sided with the drag restaurant and blocked the law, because free speech.

⚖️ But yesterday, the full 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta landed its terrific decision, sweeping aside the injunction in an 8-5 decision, and the light of sanity dawned once again over the Sunshine State.

The brilliance of this victory isn’t just that Florida won. It’s how it won. The First Amendment can be very tricky, a legal land mine, especially when it comes to obscenity. The Supreme Court has, for example, found pornography to be protected artistic speech. So you can’t just outright ban drag shows or drag story hours, because the Constitution protects expression, even if that expression involves a hairy, hip-thrusting 40-year-old man named “Velvet LeNore” lip-syncing to Gloria Gaynor.

The Florida legislature was aware of the ticklish legal setup. So they danced through what could have been an impossible First Amendment conundrum with the precision of a ballerina twirling brightly between two sleepy orangutans. (Or something. It’s early.) In any event, the legislature didn’t ban drag for consenting adults. Go for it, gentlemen.

Instead, they carefully banned obscenity for minors.

U.S. Circuit Judge Andrew Brasher (Trump appointee) wrote for the majority: “We will not second-guess the Florida Legislature’s decision to regulate obscenity. Preventing children from attending adult live performances obscene for them is rationally related to Florida’s interest in safeguarding the well-being of minors.”

Then Judge Brasher closed the curtains, writing, “It is difficult to imagine any sex-based performance that predominantly appeals to a prurient interest being suitable for a child of any age. Nor,” he added, sharpening the point, “has Hamburger Mary’s identified any such hypothetical performance.”

Boom. The law’s legal path was cleared. Florida’s new crime is a straightforward regulation of obscenity in the context of children— which is the sweet spot where government regulation of ‘speech’ is strongest.

🕺 But the best part wasn’t just the majority opinion, the vacated injunction, or the new criminal code. It was the wailing, gnashing of teeth, and garment-rending from the five dissenting judges. They did not enjoy the show. And this is where we find the most fabulous language of all, buried deep in the 67-page decision.

Judge Robin Rosenbaum (Obama appointee), experiencing some kind of mental fit, shot out a dissent that was basically a 5,000-word temper tantrum. (I will refrain from contrasting loopy, AWFL female judges versus conservative male ones, since that would be rank discrimination.) She complained that Florida “purposely created a mess-around-and-find-out statute to chill drag.”

Haha! A mess-around-and-find-out statute. It was hilarious on many levels, not least of which federal judges usually avoid those kinds of guttural idiomatic expressions; it was even more laughable for the fact that Judge Rosenbaum was herself too prurient to use the expression’s actual, more profane version (FAFO) and felt compelled to water it down into something inoffensive that provokes a horse’s laugh for the wrong reason. MAFO.

In other words, while arguing that morbidly obese men dancing in hose and garters for tips from kids was protected expression that cannot be censored, Judge Rosenbaum censored herself. You cannot make this stuff up. Progressives. Bless their inconsistent little hearts.

Anyway, a top appellate judge actually put MAFO in a federal judicial opinion. She meant it as a withering insult, but honestly, “The Mess Around and Find Out Act of 2023” would have made a fantastic name for the bill. Attention, Representative Randy Fine— please consider a retitling amendment.

⚖️ In her overlong dissent, Judge Rosenbaum also warned darkly that the law leaves businesses guessing: “Guessing wrongly about whether a performance is suitable ‘for the age of the child present’ or offers value ‘for the age of the child present’ is costly. Each violation can land a person in jail for up to a year, cost them a $10,000 fine and result in the loss of their business license.”

Translating that from legalese into English: If you knowingly expose children to lewd, sexually explicit performances, you could go to jail and lose your business.

Yes, Judge. That was exactly the point. It wasn’t a bug; it was the entire goal.

Wait, it got so much better. To prove how harmless drag shows supposedly are, Judge Rosenbaum’s dissent actually included a photo and description of a bizarre drag act that Florida had previously targeted. The performer, named only “Jimbo,” wears a strange full-body white suit with a prosthetic stomach. According to the judge, Jimbo “dances and prances onstage” before “undoing a hidden zipper on the stomach’s underside” —another delicate judicial euphemism; the zipper is on the crotch— “and pulling from within a stack of bologna.”

Judge Rosenbaum explained that Jimbo then “places slices of the bologna on top of his outfit” and on the bare chests of his backup dancers. (The irony that Jimbo is full of bologna seems to have escaped everyone.)

Florida argued this was a graphic depiction of childbirth or abortion or possibly a demonic summoning ceremony. (Scientists aren’t certain yet.) Judge Rosenbaum thought it was just a talented guy pulling lunchmeat out of a fake stomach while lip-syncing to Björk, which the judge argued was “political speech” because drag “challenges conventional gender norms.”

Political speech!

A grown man giving birth to a stack of Oscar Mayer bologna on a stage surrounded by giant nutcrackers is, according to an AWFL progressive federal judge, who sits one step below the Supreme Court, core political speech protected by the First Amendment. That’s her argument. You can read it on page 46 of the PDF.

But, as I said, nobody argued the drag people have to stop. They just can’t do it in front of kids. So Judge Rosenbaum argued that Florida’s ban was “unconstitutionally vague.” In other words, the usual progressive wordplay. Writing for the majority, Judge Brasher responded that he was confident that juries can figure it out, and courts don’t require “god-like precision” from obscenity statutes. Rosenbaum called that “a cop-out.” (One can but imagine the costume.)

The left has spent decades using the legal system to force cultural rot down everyone’s throats. Ten years ago, this kind of victory would be unimaginable. But the conservative counter-revolution has done it. Against all odds, it turned the tide. And yesterday, Florida led the nation by saying: “No more.”

🪳🪳🪳

As I predicted, Dr. Anthony Fauci’s catastrophic decision to invoke the Fifth Amendment last week triggered a vast preference cascade. Instead of being the nothing-burger Democrats had wished for, his hearing has become an avalanche, with ever more Fauci news tumbling down the media mountain every single day since. Let’s start with the Wall Street Journal. About five days ago, the WSJ’s Opinion section ran a piece by James Meigs headlined “A Covid Conspiracy in Plain Sight.” The subheadline: “Health officials tried to hide the truth about the pandemic’s origin. The sordid story is still leaking out.”

That it was penned by James Meigs was the first remarkable note. Meigs is an anti-conspiracy-theorist who has spent 20 years “debunking” 9/11 truthers. The WSJ’s editorial board is not the most liberal, but I still group it with corporate media. It is the most widely read financial newspaper in the country, and its opinion pages have been the voice of the American establishment for generations.

And here is what Meigs said plainly about the man who was until recently the most celebrated scientist in America: “As head of the U.S. government’s lead pandemic-response agency, Dr. Fauci kept an iron grip on information about the virus, suppressed questions about its likely origin in a Wuhan lab and bullied scientists to shut up and fall in line.”

Not only that. Meigs —the anti-conspiracy theorist— wrote that he now believes Fauci’s actions “constituted a type of conspiracy.” Not a plandemic, perhaps, but at least a cover-up. Specifically, he opined, “While Dr. Fauci repeatedly told the media that the Covid lab-leak scenario was ‘just conspiracy theories,’ he was conspiring to quash questions about his agency’s possible role.”

The article closed by quoting Alina Chan, the Harvard-MIT researcher who was called an “idiot” in Fauci’s handpicked scientists’ private Slack messages, for daring to investigate the lab leak on her own: “I cannot see how anyone can read these Slack messages and walk away thinking these virologists are the good guys (or even good scientists) in this story.”

That’s the buried lede. That’s what the preference cascade is doing. Heroic Team Fauci is quickly becoming the story’s villain.

🪳 Five days later —this morning— the Associated Press published a remarkably long, detailed, and serious article, headlined, “Fauci’s decision to invoke the Fifth Amendment tees up a legal debate and a contempt vote.”

The actual news hook was paper-thin. As he’d already promised to do, Senator Rand Paul simply set Thursday as the official date for a committee vote to hold Dr. Fauci in contempt of Congress for pleading the Fifth over 100 times— including, famously, to even a question about the color of his tie. It’s a purely ministerial move. The Republican-led committee will vote, refer it to the Justice Department, and then we’ll see what happens. What’s the “news?”

Corporate media could have buried that ‘non-story’ in a footnote. But look at how the AP covered it. They didn’t bury it. They didn’t even frame it as “Republicans Pounce.” They wrote a massive, multi-section legal analysis of whether Fauci’s preemptive pardon from Biden actually protects him from prosecution, whether the Fifth Amendment applies, and how Rand Paul is fast-tracking the referral straight to the DOJ to bypass the full Senate.

A long list of major platforms ran similar stories late yesterday and this morning. And you can be sure that, when the Republican Oversight Committee predictably votes to hold Fauci in contempt tomorrow, dozens of breathless new stories and analysis will emerge.

In short: corporate media knows this issue is red hot. They know the public is paying attention. They know the Overton Window is still sliding open on greased rails.

🪳 We saw all this coming. As soon as the human cockroach crouched in that chair and chirped, “I plead the Fifth” to innocuous questions about the carpet color, I compared it to Biden’s catastrophic debate performance and called it a Rubicon moment. Fauci’s non-testimony was a calamitous unforced error.

It didn’t frustrate us anti-Faucians— it vindicated us. We never expected coherent answers from that bobbleheaded insect anyway.

But more importantly, it broke the hypnotic hold Faucism held on everyone else. Regular people’s preferences —and even Fauci defenders’ preferences— rapidly began to cascade into a ruinous heap for Fauci’s sainted reputation. Rand Paul now looks like a political genius for publishing the Slack messages and disclosing the diaries right before the hearing.

Portlanders: a ‘preference cascade’ occurs when people who have been secretly harboring heterodox thoughts suddenly realize it’s safe to say them out loud, because everyone else is starting to say it too. The dam breaks, and the waters of truth pour through the gap.

And boy-oh-boy, is the Fauci dam breaking. There were many, but I’ll give you just two examples.

🪳 Exhibit A: Dr. Ashish Jha, Biden’s former White House Covid-19 Response Coordinator. As you well know, for years, the official Biden White House line was that the virus jumped from a bat to a pangolin to a bowl of rat soup, and anyone who suggested otherwise was a racist conspiracy theorist.

CLIP: Biden Czar flips on Fauci and calls covid a lab leak (1:07).

But over the weekend on CNN, Dr. Jha casually dropped this bomb on Dana Bash: “When I went into the White House, my view was this was almost surely a natural outbreak, maybe a lab leak. Based on information I’ve learned and based on information I’ve seen, I have come to believe it was a lab leak.”

A lab leak! Finally! Biden’s own Covid Czar is evolving like the latest variant.

Not only that. Dr. Jha also said, we were funding research in an institution where we lacked full transparency into what research was being conducted.” We were funding it. We did.

As Rutgers microbiologist Richard Ebright noted on X, “The fact that Biden COVID adviser Ashish Jha only now is stating COVID had a lab origin, despite surely having known this for six years, makes it clear that the Overton Window has shifted, and Fauci and Fauci’s ‘Proximal Origin’ fraudsters have lost control of the narrative.”

The preference cascade. Ebright added, “The race now is on for rats to jump from Fauci’s sinking ship.” (I would have used a cockroach metaphor, but Dr. Ebright has the right idea.)

Rand Paul got the Slack messages and the Fauci diaries from HHS Secretary Kennedy. Trump made Kennedy the HHS Secretary. We can add this refreshing preference cascade to the Trump Wins List.

🪳 Exhibit B: the preference cascade has breached containment and flowed into the mainstream sports world. During a live broadcast of the wildly popular Pat McAfee Show on ESPN, Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Aaron Rodgers was asked a question about the upcoming season. His response was priceless.

CLIP: Fauci mockery goes mainstream on ESPN (2:21).

“I’m gonna plead the Fifth,” Rodgers offered. “Like that absolute coward, Anthony Fauci.” ESPN’s entire panel erupted in laughter. The hosts heroically tried to change the subject, but Rodgers would not let it go.

As conservative influencer Clandestine pointed out, “People are making ‘plead the fifth’ jokes everywhere, even in non-political spaces. Imagine showing this clip to someone in 2020. It would scramble their minds.”

So let’s review. Anti-conspiracy theorists are calling it a conspiracy. The AP is writing serious legal treatises about whether Fauci will face criminal charges. Biden’s own Covid Czar is going on CNN to agree with the “conspiracy theorists” about the lab leak. And NFL quarterbacks are mocking the Good Doctor’s Fifth Amendment cowardice on Disney-owned ESPN.

The hypnosis is broken. The rats are paddling toward non-extradition shores. The cockroaches are drowning in mainstream media. And the preference cascade is like a beautiful Smoky Mountain waterfall, a wonder to behold.

🔥🔥🔥

Finally, and speaking of pestilent reptiles, an important public service advisory arrived from Indiana (for a change). On Monday, local affiliate WDRB reported, “4.5-foot alligator surprises residents, police near downtown Jeffersonville.”

At approximately 2 a.m. Sunday, an alert citizen near downtown Jeffersonville, Indiana, called police to report a traffic hazard. The hazard turned out to be a hissing, 4.5-foot alligator wandering down Court Avenue, which it had apparently chosen as a destination after escaping from its enclosure.

The alligator eventually made its way to the front windows of a local law office, which, to be fair, is where most reptiles eventually wind up.

Hard-working police captain Samuel Moss of the Jeffersonville Police Department confirmed the situation with the kind of measured professionalism that can only come from years of field training: “We hear and see crazy stuff all the time, but sure enough, officers got there and were able to confirm, in fact, there appeared to be a juvenile-sized alligator in downtown Jeff.”

Before wrangling the animal, officers paused for a quick picture with it. This is correct police procedure.

Authorities called in an expert, Jordan “Indiana” Jones, founder of the Kentuckiana Scaletuary — a real reptile sanctuary in Scottsburg, Indiana, which is a series of words I did not expect to type today. Mr. Jones arrived and single-handedly ‘subdued’ the gator.

Police told reporters they were familiar with the critter’s owner, and identified the alligator as a chronic repeat offender who has escaped before. His name is “Irwin.” I’m just guessing that he was named after the late Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin, which was either a tribute or a warning.

Irwin the jail-breaking alligator is no juvenile. He is 12 years old, stubbornly answers to no one, and is only a runt-like 4.5 feet long. That is roughly half the size a 12-year-old alligator should be, which raises important questions about what Irwin has been doing with his time. Keeping alligators as pets —so long as they remain under 5 feet— is legal in Indiana, a rule that the Indiana legislature apparently felt needed to be recorded in the official statute books.

Irwin was transported to the Kentuckiana Scaletuary for care, and will possibly be returned to his owner, who badly needs Irwin for emotional support and will presumably upgrade their home security and shorten Irwin’s leash.

No officers or recidivist alligators were harmed. The lawyers from the law office had no comment.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! C&C will return tomorrow, with even more essential news and caffeinated commentary. See you then.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🔥🔥🔥

The thing that never happens, happened again! Amid a dry, hot summer season, Washington and Oregon states are engulfed in wildfires, with millions of acres burned, over 700 buildings destroyed, and 65,000 people evacuated so far. The latest count is 17 separate fires, the result of climate change. Oh, and this… Yesterday, NBC reported, “Man accused of arson in the biggest of 3 major fires in Spokane, Washington” Wait till you see all the details the media is hiding this time.

Yesterday, Spokane SWAT arrested Aaron Farinacci, 37, “without incident.” He’d been turned in by an alert citizen, who had called 911 and reported a man fitting Farinacci’s description lighting some tall grass near a forested area on fire. The blaze became known as the “Old Trails fire.” Cops later nabbed Farinacci with waterproof matches and a lighter in his pocket and said he “looked nervous.” Multiple reports say he told arresting police, “you don’t know the whole story.”

Spokane Mayor Lisa Brown called the recent fires the “worst natural disaster” the region has faced. The court set bail at $1 million.

🔥 Farinacci is a nutjob. As they euphemistically say, the 37-year-old is comfortable ‘navigating the complexities of the criminal justice system.’ Due to experience. In 2010, he shot and killed his own father in Mesa, Arizona, after the men argued about Farinacci doing the dishes. Farinacci was living with his parents at the time, aged 23, suggesting, er, other possible issues. He shot his dad and, after briefly holding the gun on his mother, he fled and was later arrested with a nonfatal self-inflicted gunshot injury.

After the patricide, Mr. Farinacci was charged with premeditated murder. Almost immediately after his arrest, his lawyers filed a motion to have him psychologically examined for competence to stand trial. He pleaded out to a lesser count of manslaughter and got a 12-year prison sentence, with two years off for time served. After he getting out, he crossed the country to the Pacific Northwest, which one YouTuber called “one of the last regions in North America where you can still disappear into mountains, forests or coastal wilderness” and live “on your own terms.”

But Washington State also has robust post-release mental health diversion and support programs, and Spokane County in particular has a generous ‘behavioral health court’ that diverts people with mental problems who keep breaking the law out of the traditional criminal justice system and gets them back into fully funded treatment.

He seems to have no social media footprint at all, which, for a 30s-aged man these days, is pretty weird. Just saying. None of the reporting mentions a job, either. But many reports describe him as known to walk the Old Trails area. His “address” was listed in the Sheriff’s press release as “the 2800 block of W. Elliott Drive.”

Coincidentally, that ‘2800 block’ is the location both for the Tamarack Center, a residential treatment and psychiatric facility, and also a low-income, government-funded apartment complex, which is likely where Tamarack stashes some of its indigent patients who, perhaps, cannot appropriately reside with Tamrack’s minor-aged patients. Mind you, I don’t know. I’m just telling you what I found.

Nobody will say it. But it sure looks like Farinacci is another crazy, unemployed homeless (or homeless-adjacent) person on government support with a deeply disturbing criminal record. It’s not like he did time for selling weed to college students or something. He killed his own father over a chores dispute— which is evil, but to liberals, just evidence of mental illness.

Farinacci is the walking, breathing embodiment of the progressive social experiment: a violently mentally ill convicted killer, released early, subsidized by the state, and left entirely unsupervised to wander the community.

Just as with other wildfires, we now have our arson suspect. Another ‘harmless’ homeless person. The thing that never happens keeps happening. News-4 Utah, last month:

Fires. Plural.

But wait. This story gets even dumber. The NBC article did not use the “C” word— but nearly everyone else did.

🔥 CNN, for example, described the sixteen other PacWest fires as “fueled by climate change” and somberly called it a “climate crisis”— even after reporting Farinacci’s arrest in the same news feed:

This isn’t an isolated incident. We saw the exact same script play out in Los Angeles. When fires ravage the hills of California, the immediate progressive reflex is to blame global warming. Yet time and time again, the actual ignition source turns out to be a homeless encampment cooking meth, or a deranged transient tossing a lit flare into the brush.

Mother Nature, apparently, does not deserve the presumption of innocence until proof of guilt. Corporate media’s desperate need to automatically pre-convict Mother Nature is not just annoying; it is actively dangerous. It is a massive, deliberate misdirection campaign designed to shield their own catastrophic policy failures from public scrutiny.

Consider the sheer incoherence of the progressive mind. (Briefly, before real damage sets in.) For a virus with a 99% survival rate, they were perfectly willing to strip productive, law-abiding citizens —with their own houses and jobs— of their fundamental constitutional rights. They closed businesses, locked children out of schools, forced toddlers to wear cloth masks, mandated jabs, declared people “non essential”— all on the paper-thin excuse of protecting the community from an invisible menace. (A menace, it turned out, that none of their rights-destroying mitigations actually stopped).

But when faced with a very real, very visible, and highly combustible menace —legions of crazy, drugged-out, subsidized, and often violent transients wandering our streets with pockets stuffed with butane lighters— progressives suddenly discover a deep reverence for civil liberties. They flat refuse to institutionalize the violently mentally ill. They refuse to enforce vagrancy laws. They even refuse to admit where the fires are actually coming from.

They literally will not talk about the fact that homeless people are actually menacing our communities. Instead, they point at the sky as if it were a giant space squirrel and yell, “Carbon! Look over there!”

Real headline from the New York Post, from January of this year:

Progressives literally allow murderous mental patients free rein in society until somebody dies, like that poor Ukrainian girl who got her throat cut on a commuter train in North Carolina. By whom? A mentally ill repeat offender, of course. And worst of all when it comes to all the homeless arson, their climate fig leaf shifts the blame for the death and destruction to us.

It’s our own fault.

🔥 But in reality, if we want to stop our cities and forests from burning to the ground, we don’t need to ban gas stoves or force everyone to drive a Prius. We need to stop the progressive policies that are importing the arsonists, subsidizing their existence —making us pay for it!— and handing them the matches.

If progressives had planned this kind of chaos and destruction on purpose, it’s hard to see how they would have done it any differently.

They even have a word for what they themselves are doing: stochastic terrorism. They invented the term to describe President Trump. It just means provoking random crazy people to commit violence. The argument is that nobody needs to directly order an attack; they just have to create the conditions that make an attack statistically predictable. Headline from ABC-7 Los Angeles, April:

LA is the nation’s capital for homeless program funding. As usual, when Democrats coined the term “stochastic terrorism,” they were projecting.

When progressives refuse to institutionalize the violently mentally ill, release convicted father killers after less than a decade, subsidize lunatics’ housing next to psychiatric facilities, leave them unsupervised and unemployed, with no jobs that could occupy their time and nothing to do, and no monitoring of what they are actually getting up to —and do all that at scale, across every major progressive city— they have created the precise conditions under which it is statistically likely that someone in that population will eventually burn down millions of acres and 700 homes (and counting).

Until we confront the issue of the crazy, meth-addled, and taxpayer subsidized mentally ill and homeless threatening our communities, the fires will continue. And progressivism will keep blaming the weather, right up until the day we finally say enough is enough.

🐓🐓🐓

Speaking of crazy people allowed to roam free, yesterday the Washington Post reported, and I used that word very loosely, “The Vances added a chicken coop to the vice president’s residence. We had questions.” It is the latest burgeoning White House scandal. WaPo even offered its first two, deeply sinister questions right in the subheadline: “Who will be raising the hens at the Naval Observatory? And why are the Vances taking on this project?”

The storied Washington Post — a 148-year-old newspaper that broke Watergate and toppled the Nixon Administration, employs hundreds of journalists, has a dedicated White House beat team, and maintains direct communications with the Office of the Vice President— had urgent questions about who is raising the chickens and why. Burning, compelling, democracy-dies-in-darkness types of questions that apparently could not be answered by the one journalistic technique that has existed since the invention of journalism: asking the Vances.

Well, he sort of asked. The reporter, food columnist Tim Carman, confirmed this hard-hitting investigative approach: “A spokesman for Vance did not respond to multiple emails seeking comment.”

So. He emailed the Vice-President of the United States’s spokesman about … the Veep’s chicken coop. Multiple times! And when his urgently worded emails weren’t returned, he did what any seasoned investigative journalist would do: he convened a panel of backyard chicken experts.

I did not make that up.

The article somberly explained, and I quote, “The Washington Post turned to former and current backyard chicken keepers to gather insights on what may be going on at Number One Observatory Circle.”

What may be going on! At a chicken coop! Behold: The Washington Post’s finest minds, assembled to crack the case.

But the Post’s investigative ambitions did not stop at consulting amateur poultry enthusiasts. No. They went further. They went all the way. They reported the Vances to DC codes enforcement.

“We even checked with a city official,” the WaPo said, airily, “to discuss whether the Vances are following the proper protocols to raise hens in Washington.” Forget about Iran, China, healthcare fraud. The WaPo is about to break open ChickenGate.

That’s right. The Washington Post contacted Washington, D.C. codes enforcement to ‘investigate’ whether the Vice President of the United States had the proper permits for his chickens. That’s like telling your neighbor you only called codes to find out whether their fence was too high, not to rat them out or anything.

Anyway, the city official, who spoke on condition of anonymity “because he wasn’t authorized to talk to the media” (but did anyway), informed the Post that D.C. regulations don’t apply on federal property anyway — a disappointing fact that, one imagines, could have been established with a thirty-second Google search or a ten-second AI prompt before dispatching a reporter to surveil the Naval Observatory.

Now, who served on the WaPo’s panel of expert sources assembled for this eight-minute story? Look at everyone the Post consulted in trying to get to the bottom of this story: the coop builder, a DC bar owner who used to keep chickens in his backyard, a Utah chicken keeper named Danny Bowers who uses they/them pronouns and cuddles a bearded white Silkie bantam named Karen as an emotional support animal when their autoimmune disorders flare up —I promise I did not make up or even exaggerate that one— and, for the financial analysis, the Post’s own “Unearthed” columnist, Tamar Haspel, who raised chickens for 15 years on Cape Cod. (Tamar helpfully calculated that, if you amortize the donated $100,000 coop over the remaining months of the Trump administration, each dozen eggs would scandalously cost the Vances $139.)

The Post also noted, with evident concern, that “Usha Vance, who is due to deliver the family’s fourth child later this month, may be off the hook for a little while — numerous state health departments say pregnant women should avoid handling chickens.” Investigative journalism, folks. Democracy dies in darkness, but not before we’ve confirmed that a pregnant woman probably shouldn’t be shoveling chicken manure.

But the Post was not finished. There was still the political angle to investigate.

🐓 “The addition,” the Post reported gravely, “has led to speculation” —by whom?— “that there may be political motivations behind the flock’s appearance.” For answers, they checked with their chicken experts. “It’s a theory that resonates with Danny Bowers, who keeps 19 chickens on a suburban property in Utah County, Utah. Bowers, and who uses they/them pronouns. They point out that some conservatives have embraced the values espoused by ‘trad wife’ influencers, many of whom raise chickens.”

My goodness. That paragraph was doing a lot of work.

The Washington Post —faced with the pressing question of why a conservative Vice President might keep chickens — did not call a political scientist, a historian, a campaign strategist, or a member of the Vance family. They called Danny Bowers. Danny Bowers keeps 19 chickens in Utah County, uses they/them pronouns, and keeps an emotional support chicken inside his house.

Danny Bowers is, by the Post’s own account, the nation’s foremost authority on the political subtext of the Vance poultry operation.

And Danny Bowers’ theory —the theory that ‘resonates’ with ‘them’— is that the Vances’ hens and rooster are a secret signal, a chicken-whistle, to the trad wife movement.

The trad wife movement! Which, for Portlanders, is a social media trend in which married women embrace traditional homemaking, cooking, and —yes— even raising chickens. A farming endeavor humans have often undertaken for thousands of years. The Post’s argument, delivered through their non-binary Utah chicken expert, is that JD Vance installed a chicken coop as a covert ideological message to women who bake sourdough and wear aprons.

In short: The hens are a psyop!

Put differently, the Washington Post consulted a they/them chicken keeper in suburban Utah to explain the political motivations of a man who, two years earlier, had complained on camera about the price of eggs. The simpler explanation —that the Vances like eggs and thought it would be fun for the kids— apparently did not resonate with anyone in the Post’s newsroom. That potential explanation did not survive the editorial scissors.

Or, if you prefer, it did not survive the chicken run.

To recap: The second family of the United States installed a donated chicken coop on a 72-acre federal property. The Washington Post responded by contacting codes enforcement, consulting a non-binary chicken keeper in Utah and a panel of “backyard” experts, calculating the per-dozen egg price under multiple amortization models, and warning its readers about salmonella risks for pregnant women (like Usha Vance) — all without ever receiving a single comment from the Vances.

The subheadline wondered why the Vances are taking on this project. Here is my best guess, after connecting all the dots, offered free of charge: they like chickens.

You’re welcome, Washington Post. That’ll be $139 per dozen.

Have a terrific Tuesday! Be sure to land back here tomorrow morning for another stimulating roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

💉💉💉

Yesterday, the most important political battle of our lifetimes spilled out onto the anchor table at CNN in one contentious interview that splashed across social media. Yesterday, an appalled Politico reported, “RFK Jr. tells CNN host that constitutional rights take priority over public health” Visible between every printed line was the implied question: how could ANYTHING take priority over ‘public health?’

CLIP: “Now we know Anthony Fauci was lying about everything (2:12).”

Yesterday morning, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. appeared for a rare corporate media interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” show with Dana Bash. The first surprise was they platformed Kennedy at all. Before he was in government, they could safely ignore him; but now he’s running HHS. So it’s a new strategy: Kennedy Derangement Syndrome.

Anyway, Dana —who isn’t normally what you would call a cheerful type— was clearly miserable about letting Kennedy talk. Politico, quoting Bash herself, described the interview as “contentious.” Which was mostly her doing. “I don’t want to allow you to say things that aren’t entirely true,” Bash told the Secretary, in her best mean girl tone of voice.

Allow him. That is how Bash views the media’s job. She is the gatekeeper. She decides what top government officials are allowed to say on the news. What could go wrong? Respectfully, Ms. Bash is no rocket surgeon. “All you know how to do,” the Secretary correctly noted, “is repeat things that people told you and say, ‘Trust the experts.’”

But Bash wasn’t listening. Nah-nah-nah I can’t hear you.

💉 For a written article about a televised interview, Politico actually quoted surprisingly little of the pair’s back-and-forth. Instead, readers mostly got Politico’s interpretive paraphrases. But it did (mostly) quote the key part that became the discussion’s theme (and the article’s headline)— the core, unresolved question of which has priority: our individual or collective rights?

“I think we did virtually everything wrong the last time,” the Secretary explained. He said the government’s “primary obligation” in a future pandemic is “protecting our constitutional rights.” Dana was appalled. “You’re talking about rights,” she gasped, “and I’m asking about a potential public health crisis.”

Dana didn’t challenge Kennedy’s claim that we did virtually everything wrong last time. Instead, Bash acted as though even mentioning individual rights was irrelevant, or maybe even dangerous, when we have an urgent hypothetical health crisis to deal with.

In other words, they are already looking yearningly toward the next pandemic —never mind that pandemics used to come 100 years apart— and they are already wondering how to broom our pesky constitutional rights before we get there.

Anyway, Kennedy shot right back, doubling down. He pointed out that, during the pandemic, citizens’ individual rights were tossed out the window, and even worse, for reasons that turned out to be wrong or mendacious. Making it even worse, the experts refused to listen to any criticism:

Let’s be clear: Dana Bash, who probably doesn’t even realize this is her role, represents a direct threat to the American system. The Constitution’s essence prioritizes individual rights over collective ones, even in “pandemics.” A journalist who intellectually grasped the Constitutional rights hierarchy would at least have acknowledged that individual rights are the baseline, and then argued about how preparedness fits within those rights.

Instead, she reacted like even mentioning rights was a distraction from the hypothetical crisis.

The interview proved that we’ve allowed a dark passenger to be smuggled into the public debate. That dark passenger is an attack on the foundations of our Constitutional framework itself. A technocratic group of largely self-appointed experts is attempting to use “pandemic preparedness” to amend the Constitution and flip it on its head.

They need only convince five Justices, and it is all over. That’s why Kennedy’s painful sacrifice —arguing with a nitwit— was so important.

Two longstanding constitutional principles are under attack from civilization’s enemies— Marxist-sympathetic public health technocracy, global health NGOs, progressive academics, and deferential media. With help from birdbrains like Dana Bash —useful idiots— these enemies are dribbling acid on the Bill of Rights.

Their goal is to convince the Supreme Court to find an “emergency” exception in the nation’s founding document, based on two “common sense” arguments about collective safety:

• The Constitution doesn’t really sanctify individual rights; collective rights must trump individual rights in emergencies.

• The Constitution doesn’t always delegate decision-making to juries, judges, and civilian elected officials; intelligence agencies (secret police) and technocratic ‘experts’ must run things during emergencies.

These arguments have already won over the elites and the institutions. If they can convince just two or three Supreme Court Justices, it’s all over. The Endless State of Emergency will be declared on Day One and will expire with the heat death of the Universe. Don’t believe it? Consider the unkillable “climate emergency.”

Bless Secretary Kennedy for taking the time to do it, and for enduring something comparable to arguing with an aggressive drunk on live TV. And, this may surprise you, but we also owe CNN thanks for airing this critical debate. Being charitable, it appears CNN threaded the needle; the network satisfied its partisan viewers with Bash’s Kennedy-bossing.

But it still platformed his (stronger) arguments, albeit punctuated with eye-rolling and constant interruption, and muted by shrill overtalk.

Never forget that “Public Health” is not “health.” The slogan “trust public health” sounds like “we care whether you live.” That is false. It’s not a conspiracy theory to say so, either.

If “Public Health” were synonymous with “health,” the modifier “public” would be redundant. Like “jumbo shrimp,” it’s an oxymoronic modifier that flips the literal meaning on its head. You, as an individual, don’t even need to be healthy for the public health framework to ‘succeed.’ You could be ordered to an infected nursing home to die alone in agony, and that could still be counted as a plus for ‘public health.’ I think about that often.

Our generation faces an all-new assault on the nation’s constitutional order, and the shock troops are dressed in white lab coats. That critical debate about rights, priorities, and emergencies surfaced during the pandemic, at immeasurable cost, and was still being argued this weekend.

We shall never back down. We will never retreat. Onward, soldiers.

🔥🔥🔥

Now let’s rip the mask off the other big lie of our time: the ridiculous fib that “moderate” Democrats exist, and they aren’t all communists. Yesterday, the New York Times wrote a hit job dressed as a puff piece headlined, “‘Comradely’ Talks and a ‘Deer Leader’ Mascot: Scenes From the D.S.A. Summit.”

The Nation’s paper of record dispatched reporter Emma Goldberg and a photog to a dive bar in Chicago, where an indeterminate number of Democratic Socialists of America gathered for social time after a grueling day of furthering the people’s business at their “2026 national conference.” The capitalist element was out in force; one bookseller told Emma it sold out of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto by the afternoon on the conference’s first day. (Irony alert.)

Other hot sellers included “Abolish Rent” and “A People’s Guide to Capitalism.”

This was the kind of scene the piece kept serving up without quite winking: revolutionary branding meeting ordinary convention merch energy. The irony wasn’t subtle. Though the article lacked any direct criticism of the DSA, which might have been dangerous, it didn’t do the socialists any favors either.

Emma essentially called the DSA a factional mess. “Members of the D.S.A. sort themselves, Hogwarts style, into more than a dozen caucuses.” Many have silly sounding names (“Bread and Roses”) and constantly argue. “The caucus wars are legendary,” national co-chair Megan Romer joked impishly.

Emma, deploying her admittedly solid writing skills, gingerly suggested the DSA was more of a social club— or even a religion. For instance, she quoted Cliff Connolly, a national leader from Orlando, who explained the DSA “fills the same social function for him that the Catholic Church played for his parents when they were in their 30s.”

The article was well written, engaging, and definitely not complimentary to the DSA. In the same sentence that it called the DSA “the country’s largest socialist organization,” the article counted conference attendance at “nearly 500.” For comparison, ComicCon hosts around 130,000.

Emma didn’t draw the ComicCon comparison. It was just sort of there to discover.

🔥 It wasn’t abundantly clear from this article, but the New York Times does not like the DSA. The Grey Lady also fears the DSA, which explains Emma Goldberg’s delicate, “best frenemy” approach to the story. The Times dislikes the DSA because the paper is the house organ of the permanent Democrat Party. It dislikes them for the same reasons that party insects Van Jones and James “Ragin’ Cajun” Carville do.

They don’t like the DSA because it has been jumping the party line and primarying people whose turn it is in the party hierarchy. That is all. There was no problem until that irritating development started. Well, that, and the DSA’s very public, cartoon-like platform with points like abolishing prisons, the military, and the U.S. Senate is embarrassing to national Democrats.

Understand this: Democrats don’t disagree with the DSA’s platform. Emma didn’t even mention the platform. The word “platform” is entirely absent from the overlong article, which was downright bizarre for a story about the group’s national political convention. The trouble isn’t that the DSA platform is too extreme; the problem is it says what they all believe too openly.

In late June, moderate Democrats rolled out “Promise to America,” led by Reps. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) and Adam Gray (D-CA), which rejected the DSA platform and promised, among other things, that, “We are capitalist, not socialist.” Only 13 Congressional Democrats signed the Promise. Thirteen.

Headline from the Dallas Express (via Yahoo News), June 26:

Since the end of the Cold War, progressive Democrats have boiled the frog slowly, with stepwise, incremental changes building on FDR’s New Deal, leading the “long march through the institutions,” and gradually transforming the US into a bureaucratic empire. But the DSAers are young. They are impatient. They are tired of waiting for the frog to cook. They want utopia right now, not 50 years from now.

But the national party recognizes direct confrontation with a socialist-skeptical American public is risky. The DNC thinks Mayor Mamdani —a DSA darling, according to the article— is going too fast in New York City. Unfortunately for the national team, the DSA wing holds all the youthful intensity with its “Red Hot Socialist Summer.”

The summer wasn’t supposed to be Red Hot. The midterms were supposed to be about kitchen-table issues: gas prices, housing, groceries, healthcare costs, the War in Iran, and Trump’s current shade of orange. But now, thanks to the DSA, it’s about capitalism versus communism and a national seminar on capturing the means of production.

PBS headline, Friday:

“The barbarians are inside the gate — and Democrats are WELCOMING them in,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) tweeted. “Communism is no longer a far-fetched threat. It is here on our SHORES!” Republicans are now running on anti-communism. The Hill, July 22nd:

The Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board published an op-ed headlined, “Abolish the Senate, Says the DSA.” The subheadline wondered, “Democratic socialists want to remove barriers to radical change. Do other Democrats agree?” But other Democrats are caught between a hammer and a hard sickle.

Mainstream Democrats know that opposing the DSA platform will help them in the general election, but it will also provoke the DSA to organize against them in low-turnout primaries.

In Maine, the DNC has already conceded to two DSA-aligned candidates for the U.S. Senate: Disability-farmer Graham Platner and, after Graham flamed out in ‘me-too’ dishonor, faux ‘lumberjack’ Troy Jackson. DSA-endorsed Jackson handily won Maine’s ‘replacement primary’ in a socialist tsunami: 566-5.

After Maine “finishes their primary,” DSCC chair Kirsten Gillibrand announced, the DSCC will “support whoever wins.”

My goodness. What a run of good luck the GOP has had. As I predicted, the midterms will not be about war and affordability after all. Let’s connect a few dots.

🔥 Reporting this spring and summer described ‘mystery super PACs’ spending heavily in Democratic House primaries to elevate candidates establishment Dems see as ‘weaker’ or ‘more toxic’ in the generals. Headline from Punchbowl News, May 26th:

It’s not George Soros. “Democrats insist this is a Republican effort,” Punchbowl reported, “to meddle in Democratic primaries to ensure they face the weakest candidate in November.” Punchbowl did some research and tied one of the ‘mystery PACs’ to WinRed:

Al Jazeera was even more blunt. It does not see any ‘mystery’ at all. It came right out and accused Republicans in its June 23rd headline:

You might wonder why this isn’t bigger news in corporate media. For one thing, Democrats started the trend of manipulating primaries. But more keenly, calling candidates ‘Republican-supported’ poses another paradox. If they promote the theory of Republican involvement, they’ll kill their own, flawed candidates’ chances for sure.

If Republicans were behind the rise of the DSA —which to be fair, remains unproven— then it was the perfect foil, and evidence of a broad, coherent political strategy that also won the gerrymandering wars and teed up limits on mail-in ballots. The evidence is stacking up. Conspicuous by their absence are the ubiquitous headlines from 2025 gleefully predicting a Democrat sweep in November.

That’s good, but there is a bigger point here. Even if Republicans helped provoke the ugly Democrat-DSA conflict, it wasn’t artificial. It’s not made up. Democrats agree with the DSA’s goals— only 13 signed the pledge. The DSA’s political successes aren’t a GOP trick. They are trying Democrats’ poisonous ideas in the courts of public opinion. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

CLIP: late night host Bill Maher tackles the DSA (2:50).

“What do they gotta do, tweet out, ‘elect more communists?” Maher wondered. “One of the new, soon-to-be Democratic Congress people, Darlezia Chevalier, supports seizing all properties from landlords and said, ‘Seize the means of production.’ Mamdani said, ‘The end goal is seizing the means of production.’”

Maher paused dramatically, then said, “I think they wanna seize the means of production.” In case it wasn’t clear, he explained, “Now, maybe you missed that in school —or missed school altogether— but that’s communism.”

“Who could be this nuts? I’ll tell you who,” Maher said. He showed a picture from the DSA’s national conference. “Morons who are still wearing covid masks in 2026!”

Granted, since the pandemic, Bill Maher has been slowly red-pilled. But the point is: this national conversation is happening now, right before the critical midterm elections, whether Democrats like it or not.

Time is growing short. The stakes are as high as they possibly can be: November will determine whether Trump gets two more years to finish what he’s started, or will sink into the slough of repeated impeachment trials. Voting isn’t optional.

Have a magnificent Monday! Then get back here tomorrow morning for a brand-new roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

⚖️⚖️⚖️

It’s the Goldilocks problem! Sometimes, lawfare fails. Sometimes it works. Other times, too much lawfare itself can be a bad thing. This mainly affects progressives, who never saw a lawsuit they didn’t like, so long as it can be written down, and so long as it hurts, slows, or somehow confounds the conservative agenda. While everyone’s eyes are riveted to the SAVE Act, the real fight over voting-by-mail just reached the Supreme Court. On Thursday, ScotusBlog reported, “Trump administration, states urge justices to allow full implementation of executive order on mail-in voting.”

Meet Judge Indira Talwani, appointed in 2013 by Barack Obama— the nation’s first female federal judge with Indian-American parents. I realize that slices the diversity cake a little thinly, but that’s where we are these days. Anyway, Judge Talwani presides in the deep blue district of Massachusetts, one of the preferred destinations for the steady stream of lawsuits complaining about the latest Trump outrage.

Last month, Judge Talwani froze President Trump’s Executive Order directing the Postal Service to create a scheme for step-by-step tracking of mailed ballots. Twenty-three blue states plus the District of Columbia had sued, arguing that the ballot-tracking plan was terrible, horrible, and simply no good. Judge Talwani completely agreed, finding the executive order created confusion, disenfranchised voters, and on top of that, was unconstitutional.

“The Constitution does not grant the president any specific powers over elections,” the first female, Indian-American judge wrote in her order.

Trump’s lawyers appealed. But the First Circuit —the appellate court that hears cases from Massachusetts— upheld Judge Talwani’s injunction, and said the Executive Order may not move forward. Apparently, the Constitution requires that mailed ballots remain enigmatic ciphers swirling in dark areas of the postal system right up until blue states get around to counting them, when they can be finally and dramatically revealed. Ta-da!

Judge Talwani said no further action could be taken toward implementing the Executive Order in the 23 states and the District of Columbia. Full stop.

⚖️ So far, so good for Team Blue. But then a wrinkle appeared. Unsatisfied with only suing in Massachusetts, a bunch of blue NGOs had also sued separately in DC itself, and even friendlier jurisdiction for Trump lawfare. Defying all predictions, the DC judge found the exact opposite from Judge Talwani. And last week, the DC Circuit Court of Appeals agreed. That court —knowing the Talwani decision was out there— held that it was too soon to sue, since the USPS plan wasn’t final yet, and the harm would actually be to the Administration, since if it can’t move forward, the rules won’t be final in time for the midterms.

That decision produced an immediate and uncomfortable tension between the First Circuit, which had said the USPS cannot move forward in DC, and the DC Circuit, which said that it could. That is what lawyers call a “circuit split,” and it opens the door for immediate Supreme Court review. The Supreme Court got the case on Monday and immediately ordered insta-briefs to be filed in one week, due by this coming Monday, August 3rd.

The smart money is on SCOTUS siding with the DC Circuit, finding the rules aren’t “ripe” for review yet, and letting the USPS move ahead for now. Come back when you know what to actually complain about. The complication is that the 23 states are crying about having to completely “rebuild” their systems less than three months from a federal election— even though 15 red states filed briefs saying it would be no problem at all.

So SCOTUS could find that we are just too close now to the midterms and it’s better to keep the status quo for now— which they often say in election-related cases. That’s what makes this so hard to handicap.

“We want to have honest voting in our country,” President Trump said when he signed the Executive Order in March, “because if you don’t have honest voting, you can’t really have a nation.”

Unsurprisingly, Democrats really disagreed.

“Trump’s USPS is threatening to withhold mail ballots unless states turn over voter rolls,” Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker complained, adding, “we’re going to fight it like hell.” The ACLU officiously declared, “Attempts to end voting by mail are part of the Trump administration’s larger strategy to undermine elections and subvert the will of the people.”

Antique Senate Minority Leader Chuck “Iceburger” Schumer promised “to fight in courts to ensure every voter can cast their ballot this November.”

Never mind that you haven’t heard much about it. This is the real fight, folks. Forget about the SAVE Act.

⚖️ If I had to pick, I would take the USPS ballot-tracking and gating scheme in Trump’s March 2026 executive order every day over the SAVE Act. The postal plan offers conservatives a more durable, lower-friction, and politically resilient win than the SAVE Act. It embeds federal control and auditability right into the mail-ballot pipeline via existing postal authority and technology, instead of a politically thermonuclear congressional war over brand new requirements for registration documents.

The SAVE Act requires documentary proof of U.S. citizenship (a passport, birth certificate, or equivalent) to register or update voter registration for federal elections. It offers nothing for existing registrations. As you know, it has passed the House multiple times (throughout 2025–2026), but it is bogged down in the Senate over the filibuster.

Implementation of SAVE would force the states to overhaul their registration systems and handle provisional ballots for voters claiming they can’t pay $10 for a replacement birth certificate. You can imagine all the stories about goofy ‘disenfranchised’ voters we’d see in the news.

Meanwhile, the USPS plan is already quietly working for states that voluntarily opted in. It short-circuits Congress entirely, running through USPS rulemaking under existing statutory authority and executive direction. No 60-vote Senate hurdle, no reconciliation gimmicks.

It is also much simpler politically. Barcodes, tracking, and “Official Election Mail” logos sound like package-delivery confirmation and chain-of-custody tools— which everyone already accepts and enjoys from everyday package delivery services like Amazon, Fedex, and UPS. It is much harder for opponents to paint unique identifiers and real-time visibility as racist or disenfranchising compared to the demand that every voter dig up a birth certificate. The White House language emphasizes “auditable mechanisms” and “reducing the risk of fraud”— without “unduly burdening” eligible voters.

Conservatives’ core distrust centers on unsupervised mail ballots. The Trump plan lets the federal government gate who receives a ballot (via existing citizenship lists) and track every ballot through the mailstream, creating near-real-time data, anomaly detection, and most importantly, forensic evidence for DOJ prosecutions. ‘Accidents’ like mass disappearances of mailed ballots from red counties would become as obvious as another black eye on a celebrity.

SAVE, on the other hand, only polices the front end of registration. There are no black eyes to stick out. Once registered, mail ballots still flow into the inky darkness with zero federal visibility.

Once USPS requirements, design reviews, and participation-list systems go live, they become sticky operational reality. Unwinding them later would require new rulemaking or legislation. Citizenship lists can be improved, refined, or expanded over time. And all the work is done by the federal government. But SAVE’s burdens fall right on voters and local clerks, every cycle, and would surely generate endless ‘as-applied’ litigation and provisional-ballot chaos.

Best of all, the USPS system generates the data conservatives have long pined for— proof of delivery only to verified citizens, chain-of-custody logs, timelines for each ballot, and political ammo justifying future reforms and enforcement. Even imperfect citizenship lists coupled with mandatory tracking would advance the ball more than a pure registration statute that may never clear the Senate.

Think about it. The SAVE Act lacks any transparency mechanism.

In short, the USPS barcode-and-list regime will turn the postal service into a federal election-integrity checkpoint with real-time surveillance and audit capabilities. It delivers concrete control over the mail-ballot stream using administrative devices that are harder to demonize, easier to lock in, and free from the Senate’s arcane arithmetic— making it the higher-value, longer-term conservative victory even if SAVE eventually passes.

Everyone (including me) has demanded the Senate pull the plug on the so-called ‘silent filibuster,’ which makes sense in today’s fractious political climate. But, to be fair, we haven’t spent much time considering the cost for conservatives when a future Democrat Congress tries to ram some unpopular law through. In short, it might come back to bite us in the cushiony parts, a tradeoff that seems justified now, but could look horribly short-sighted in hindsight.

The USPS solution avoids all that unknown peril. For better or worse, the filibuster can stay. The postal plan is simpler and arguably better in every way than the SAVE Act. Everyone —corporate media included— has been distracted by the high-profile SAVE Act controversy. But now the real solution has finally landed in the Supreme Court.

Frankly, and I hate to say this in print, if the USPS program survives —even if it misses the midterm target— we’ll still be vastly better off in 2028 and after. Yet, for now, we are still in the game for November. And who knows? We could still get both.

Briefs are due Monday. Stand by. The fireworks show will begin shortly.

🔥🔥🔥

Remember Castro lookalike Justin Trudeau? Me neither. It seems like ages ago that the dapper lockdown queen was swanking around bragging about debanking Canadian truckers. Now the WEF Young Leader, international darling, and Black-Eye Club member (just saying) is busy canoodling with celebrities, his lost political career having settled to the bottom of the global septic tank. Meanwhile, Canada’s problems are only beginning. On Wednesday, the Guardian UK ran an op-ed headlined, “Trump has singled out us Canadians for special treatment in his tariff war – there is no choice but to get nasty.”

The jokes write themselves. Get nasty? Canadians? Will they subject us to a harsh stare? Annex Vermont? Cut us off from back bacon?

Justin may have ridden off into the political sunset, replaced by bankster Prime Minister Mark Carney, but the tariffs stayed behind to clean up. Canada originally escaped the worst of the Trump Tariffs last year, shielded in large part by the USMCA trade deal. That deal expired, and this month, the US declined to extend it, which means it is now subject to annual renegotiation.

Then, last week, the White House announced tariffs as high as 50% on a selection of Canadian products including, for the first time, items previously protected by the trade agreement. “The tariffs will hit a wide range of products,” the Guardian said, “including wine, hockey sticks and cement.” (Who drinks Canadian wine?) Headline, July 21:

The Supreme Court shot down Trump’s easiest tariff tool late last year, including the 10% tariffs Canada then faced, and progressives celebrated too soon. As I pointed out at the time, SCOTUS ratified other ways of imposing tariffs, which might be slower, but ultimately would be stronger. Well— behold!

Last week, President Trump signed three new tariff declarations against Canada. He imposed the maximum allowable tariff —50%— under the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Act (which, frankly, is fun to say over and over). It’s another first. To do it, the Administration was required to conduct an investigation and publish findings, which took a few months, but is now complete.

The Canadian journalist who published the outraged op-ed conceded that Trump might have a point. “The US has some legitimate gripes with us,” he generously allowed, “including trade barriers and Canada’s chronic underinvestment in defence. It’s reasonable to be angry about those things.”

It hurts— a lot. “An unfriendly, potentially even hostile US is a staggeringly consequential change,” he said. “It’s hard to overestimate how huge a shock this has been.” You’d think it would make bigger news here in the US, but the news cycle is, as they say, a target-rich environment.

If you’re wondering about the odd selection of tariffed products, all I can say is that coincidentally, they hit the three most anti-US provinces hardest. They exclude energy products, fish, and critical minerals— which are most economically important to pro-US provinces. (They were also the strongest anti-mandate provinces during the pandemic.) “The economies of Alberta and Saskatchewan were relatively spared,” the author noted.

Also coincidentally, Alberta is holding an independence referendum later this year. Headline from the Canadian Gauntlet, yesterday:

What can we say about this sudden reinvigoration of Trump’s tariff dashboard? About the fact that the battle with Canada —which critics crowed the Canucks had won— is still indisputably raging, even if it has faded into media’s background noise?

Let’s be honest. We don’t know the plan. (Nor should we.) But we do know that the plan continues. Canada can replace their lockdown-loving WEF Young Leader with a Prime Minister whose main qualification seems to be a bad case of fulminant TDS. SCOTUS can tear the biggest button off the tariff dashboard and make Trump refund hundreds of billions in taxes. They can file lawsuit after lawsuit.

Think of it. One major legal setback would have caused previous Republican administrations to give it up as a lost cause. Not this administration. When the Court slams the door, the Trump Team climbs out the window.

Against all odds, the plan of re-imagining the Western Hemisphere keeps humming down the tracks. The tariff threat is bigger and more conspicuous than ever. We should keep our eyes on the ball— and not on corporate media’s hairy, transgender cheerleaders.

🔥🔥🔥

Prepare yourselves for the most unexpected story, perhaps, of all time. About two weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal reported, “Young Conservatives Have an Unlikely New Icon: Richard Nixon.” The subheadline explained, “‘Nixonmaxxing’ swag and TikTok videos have helped trigger a rethinking of the former president’s legacy among some conservatives.” It’s not a blip. Two days ago, the Free Press reported, “‘Nixonmaxxing’ Is More than a Meme.”

“The kids,” the Journal began, “are Nixonmaxxing.”

Apparently, more than half a century after the Watergate scandal that corporate media still won’t shut up about, young conservatives are discovering the “aesthetic and attitude” of our 37th president. Videos featuring archival footage of Nixon set to rap music are going viral on Instagram and YouTube. Influencers are wearing hats that say “Nixon Now More Than Ever” and carrying swag announcing “Pretty Girls for Nixon.”

The Journal quotes one bewildered commenter asking: “Is Nixon pulling off the greatest posthumous political comeback in history?”

Yes. Yes, he is.

And the corporate media is absolutely terrified. Why? Because if there’s one thing the establishment possibly hates more than Donald Trump, it’s Richard Nixon. They spent fifty years building the narrative that Nixon was the ultimate political villain. They taught it in schools, they made movies about it, they carved it into stone. They wouldn’t shut up about it. Nixon was the actual boogeyman.

But here’s the buried lede: the kids aren’t just wearing fanny packs ironically. They’re actually looking at Nixon’s record. They’re seeing the man who went after Alger Hiss. They’re seeing the relentless anti-communist crusader who actually understood the threat of Marxism before it was again fashionable to talk about it.

The irony is delicious. When young progressives wear Chairman Mao t-shirts, the media calls it “youthful idealism.” But when young conservatives start making TikToks about the guy who literally created the EPA, ended the draft, went to China, and forced the Soviet Union to the negotiating table? Break out the smelling salts. It’s panic in the streets.

Can you see it? This is the ultimate Boomerang story. The left spent decades trying to convince young people that all Republican presidents are basically Richard Nixon in disguise. And now the kids are looking around, seeing the absolute state of the country, and saying, “You know what? A little more Nixon sounds pretty good right now.”

As young conservative intellectual Christopher Rufo pointed out in his terrific 2023 City Journal piece defending Nixon, the left’s destruction of Nixon was essentially a bureaucratic coup. (Rufo platformed the concept of “counter-revolution,” which long-time readers will recall we’d been discussing since 2021 at least.)

Democrats weaponized his mistakes —difficult-to-describe peccadillos that the modern deep state makes look like he misplaced his cell phone— as a lever to remove a president who threatened the deep state’s authority. Conservatives weren’t prepared for that type of combat. It should sound painfully familiar by now. I’m not sure they really even understand it yet. Here’s Chris Rufo’s tweet reacting to the WSJ piece:

Nixon’s policy legacy is a mixed bag. The EPA, for instance, was downright disastrous. His ‘aesthetic’ is downright unique, all right, like when he wore a full suit and dress shoes on the beach.

But more than anything —and this is the real reason I think Nixon is becoming a hero our time desperately needs— Richard Milhous Nixon was a notorious anticommunist.

Before Nixon was the Watergate villain the corporate media spent fifty years teaching your kids about, he was something far more dangerous to the left: he was right. As a young congressman from California in the late 1940s, “Red Scare” Nixon sat on the House Un-American Activities Committee and did what the entire Georgetown establishment called boorish, paranoid, and beneath a serious man — he went after Alger Hiss, a senior State Department official and darling of the foreign policy elite, and refused to let go.

Late in the 1990s, the declassified Soviet Venona intercepts confirmed Nixon was right. Hiss was a communist spy, passing secrets to Moscow while hobnobbing with the progressive elites who ran American foreign policy. Nixon was right, and they never forgave him for it. That early battle defined his entire career— he understood, viscerally and early, that the Soviet threat was not a dinner party topic but an existential war being fought inside American institutions, and he fought it accordingly.

Nixon negotiated the first serious nuclear arms control treaties with Moscow from a position of strength, drove a strategic wedge between the USSR and China by opening Beijing before anyone else dared, and spent his entire career treating communism not as an abstraction but as the enemy it actually was. The left hated him for all of it. Which, if you think about it, is the highest possible character reference.

The Democrats did such a complete job of assassinating Nixon’s character that they forced him to become the only American president to resign and from there built an edifice of slander and defamation higher than the Obama Presidential Library. Nixon wasn’t perfect, not by any measure, but he won in a 49-state landslide because Americans hated communists, and so did he.

So Alice, we’ve gone all the way down the rabbit hole and come out the other side. The generation that grew up watching the establishment try to destroy Donald Trump is suddenly very skeptical of the establishment’s narrative about Richard Nixon. They see the parallels. They see the same media playbook, the same bureaucratic maneuvering, the same coordinated outrage.

And the kids aren’t buying it.

“Nixon hype edit was not something I knew I needed,” one young fan wrote. Well, maybe this is exactly the healing that the country needs. A reminder that before you can negotiate from a position of strength, you have to actually have strength. A reminder that fighting communism isn’t a cocktail party— it’s a down-and-dirty street fight.

So ladies, grab your “Pretty Girls for Nixon” hat and enjoy the show. If it continues, the media’s collective meltdown over this will be spectacular.

Have a wonderful weekend! C&C will return on Monday, bright and early, with another delicious and intellectually nutritious roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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🌍🇺🇸 MAYORAL UPDATES FROM THE REVOLUTION 🇺🇸🌍

🔥🔥🔥

A Letter from the Mayor’s Desk

From: Humble Comrade Mayor Zohran Mamdani, City Hall, New York City.

To: Chairman Xi Jinping, People’s Republic of China, Beijing.

Re: Progress Report — New York City Operational Theater

Classification: Glorious

Dear Chairman Xi, Viva la Revolution!

I have not yet received replies to my previous six letters, which I take as a sign of your complete confidence in me. Things are going very well.

Things are going very well. We have captured the world headquarters of our capitalist enemies, the big apple of their jaundiced eyes. True, we have faced our share of challenges — predictably, annoying lawsuits filed by kulaks, and frankly, Janet in Human Resources, an ancient leftover from six administrations back who keeps telling me I cannot refer to the Parks Department staff as “the Vanguard of the Proletariat” on official W-2 forms. Whatever.

But the capitalists continue to fall head over sickle for the political messages heroically crafted by our comrades in the propo department. I must tell you about one of my best hires. Xenobia, a proud green-card holder, is our new Director of Narrative Alignment, and she recognizes that I am a genius. (This is the correct view.) Xenobia advised me to lead every press conference with the phrase “working families,” and Chairman, it works like a charm, every single time.

Whenever I say working families, the reporters nod along like golden retriever bobbleheads! I could then announce the collectivization of Central Park, and as long as I said it was “for working families,” the Times would run it under the headline “Mayor Unveils Bold Vision for Equitable Green Space.” Xenobia called that very scenario “exactly the kind of visionary leadership New York has been waiting for.” I agreed.

Xenobia has also discovered something remarkable. When we say “fair share,” 78% of New Yorkers agree. When we say “raise taxes on millionaires,” only 54% agree. Chairman, it is the same policy. Twenty-four points, purchased with two words.

Xenobia is a treasure. I have recommended her for a certificate of collective appreciation. But Janet in HR complained that is our highest available honor, and then emailed — unprompted, Chairman, unprompted — that she would need to review whether Xenobia’s title of “Director of Narrative Alignment” was “consistent with the approved municipal job classification schedule.”

Sometimes I wonder whether Janet is truly committed to the revolution.

But I digress. Let us review our glorious bait-and-switch operations for your edification, Chairman. With all humility and due respect, I believe you may find them instructive.

🔥 Our first great victory: the rent freeze! The capitalists wailed and whined like privileged infants when we froze rent on a million stabilized apartments. They claimed it would destroy the housing market. They are so easy to fool! The best part? Even the New York Post, which wrote about us yesterday, recognizes our genius now.

That’s right, Chairman! At least 30% of these rent-stabilized tenants earn over $100,000 a year. We are subsidizing the middle classes while pretending to help the poor! It’s the perfect crime. The working class cheers and votes for us, and the wealthy do nothing to oppose the revolution, because —for now— the wealthy get to keep their cheap Upper West Side apartments and spend their extra cash on Broadway tickets.

We are literally buying off the bourgeoisie— with the capitalists’ own money! If I might be so bold, Comrade Marx (may his memory live forever) would even weep tears of joy at the sheer audacity of our plan. The voters fell for the ruse completely. They know the old saying but still fall for it every time. (You know the one: You can vote your way into socialism, but you have to shoot your way out. Haha, next we shall take their guns away!)

Xenobia called my rent plan “the most elegant political maneuver she had ever witnessed.” I told her she was too kind. She said she was not being kind, she was just being accurate. See? This is why I placed comrade Xenobia in the propo department. Plus she’s easy on the eyes, if you know what I mean (unlike some people):

But of course, Janet in HR ruined the moment by sending me a memo asking whether the rent freeze created any new city employee obligations. I have not determined what that means, and I do not intend to find out. It was rank obstructionism, dammit.

🔥 Oh Chairman, you must hear about our glorious “Fast and Free Buses” initiative. We promised the proletariat free rides, and by Lenin we delivered!

Well, sort of. We actually just told everyone the buses should be free, and they enthusiastically agreed. It’s not our fault if they thought that was a promise, haha. Now, the poor widdle MTA is crying poverty. The Post, trying to score off me again, reported the story two days ago.

MTA Chairman and CEO Janno Lieber (a zionist) complained, “With malice towards none, I say all of the talk of free buses has an impact.” Can you believe he’s practically begging people to pay the fare? “Take responsibility for this precious system,” he whined. “It’s a civic responsibility.”

Take responsibility? Responsibility is a capitalist construct! We have successfully normalized fare evasion. The MTA is bleeding out, and they can’t stop it because we have convinced the public that paying for transportation is a human rights violation. Soon, the entire inequitable system will collapse under its own weight, and then we can nationalize the whole thing.

Checkmate, Janno! The propo department deserves a medal. It was Xenobia who suggested we call the whole operation “a transit justice breakthrough that will define a generation.” She then asked if she could put my name on the press release in a slightly larger font than usual. I said yes.

Ugh. But Janet in HR sniped that we don’t use medals, because medals glorify the individual, only “certificates of collective appreciation.” I made an immediate executive decision to transfer Janet to the Department of Sanitation, but then she said that any transfer to another department requires a sixty-day notice period and a performance improvement plan.

Sixty days! Who does she think she is? Fine. I will order her transferred to Sanitation in sixty-one days. (But there will probably be some additional, even more complicated form that Janet would have to complete, so you can see what I am dealing with here.) But never mind that now.

🔥 Chairman, if I may say so myself, it gets even better. Our crowning achievement (which, I humbly remind you, was my idea): The Pied-à-Terre Tax. We told the people we were only going after the ultra-rich billionaires with $5 million penthouses who only visit twice a year. “Tax the rich!” we chanted. (That one really caught on.)

And that is how the trap was sprung. But get this, comrade. No sooner did we get the state law approved than we jammed the cutoff down to $1 million (which includes almost all condos) and then subjected the kulaks to well-deserved public humiliation. Of course, the stupid Post spun it like we hadn’t planned it this way from the beginning:

Get this, Chairman. We published a searchable database of nearly a million property owners. Not just billionaires. We included middle-class folks in Staten Island, grandmothers in Queens, and anyone who dares own a condominium. Chairman, there are only 1.1 million property units in the City total, and we just put 900,000 of them —86%— on the List of Shame!

I have been advised not to describe it as a “list.” I have therefore begun describing it as a “roll.”

And now the arithmetic you will most enjoy. Of those 960,000 names, perhaps 24,000 will actually owe the tax. Do the division, Chairman: for every kulak we collect from, we have put thirty-nine of his neighbors on notice — at no cost to the treasury whatsoever. Xenobia calls this efficiency.

We even doxed Cynthia Nixon! And Anna Wintour. Yes, the same bourgeois celebrities who hosted fundraisers for me. The irony is delicious. They helped fund the revolution, and now they are on the kulak roll. Let them eat cake, Cynthia! But please remember to pay the surcharge on the unit you baked it in.

They are calling it “doxing,” Chairman. We are calling it civic transparency.

Some Democrats are causing trouble, and we may need a little help from your end. Former Clinton adviser Mark Penn caught on, but a little too late, bless his black, capitalist heart. Predictably, on Wednesday Fox News (ugh) platformed him.

Penn even tweeted, and you’ll love this one, “The $5 million figure was a fake.”

Haha! Of course it was fake! That’s what makes it genius! Comrade Chairman, you should be very proud of us. We used negative class framing to pass a tax, and then we applied it to almost everyone. We published their names and addresses like a Soviet undesirables list.

This might be common in your country, Comrade, but over here we are making history! Nothing like this has ever been done before in America! A brand-new targeted surcharge that names and shames, followed by the immediate government publication of a massive, easily searchable database of roughly 960,000 named property owners.

To escape the roll, an owner must file a “surcharge exemption application” by August 21st. Should he object, he may petition the Tax Commission — a body which has never, in its entire history, heard a single case of this kind. Chairman, we did not have to build a wall. We pointed at a door nobody has ever opened and told them it was unlocked.

Our modern Kulaks are terrified. They have discovered they can call the tax office. Singular, Chairman. There is one line. They don’t know if or when they’ll be taxed, but now they do know that we know where they live. So do the masses. The capitalists are afraid.

Xenobia called my database rollout “the most courageous act of radical transparency in the history of municipal governance.” She then sent me a delightful hand-written note saying “history will remember this moment.” Not for me, Comrade, but for the historical record, I had it framed. But Janet in HR sent a memo flagging a ‘potential privacy violation.’ Chairman, I think you will appreciate that I did not read her stupid memo. Underlings, am I right?

And speaking of great adversaries, I had a private meeting with Rahm Emanuel. Laughably, he tried lecturing me —me!— about Israel and the “limits of my rhetoric.” He said, “I know where there’s a line. You don’t.”

Ha! Lines, like fences, are drawn by capitalists to protect property! But the propo department handled it beautifully. When the press asked for a comment about it, I told my comms director to simply deny the meeting ever happened. We corrected history! What meeting? Who is Rahm Emanuel?

Xenobia called it “the most sophisticated communications strategy she had ever seen executed in real time.” I told her the idea came to me in the shower. She said that did not surprise her, because genius operates on its own schedule. But Janet in HR sent a memo asking whether the denial of the meeting created any municipal records retention issues. I have forwarded Janet’s memo to Xenobia, who I am confident will dispose of it appropriately.

🔥 Next up, a word about our childcare initiative, which I believe will particularly interest you, Chairman, as a student of long-term population management. We have announced a magnificent collective service: free municipal childcare for every two-year-old in New York City! We call it “2-Care.” Seriously. The propo department is very proud of that name. Xenobia workshopped it for three days.

The funding mechanism is elegant in its simplicity. We are taxing millionaires — “making them pay their fair share,” as Xenobia insists that I say (and she is right, because it polls at 78%) to the tune of $73 million per year. The millionaires, naturally, are furious. But here is the beautiful part: once the parents of New York City’s two-year-olds have tasted free childcare, they will never vote to take it away.

We have created, in one stroke, a permanent constituency for higher taxes on the wealthy. The children grow up. The parents remember. The millionaires pay. Forever. Humbly, it was my idea. Xenobia called it “the most brilliant long-term political architecture she had encountered outside of a graduate seminar.” I told her I never attended a graduate seminar. She said it showed— in the best possible way.

If I may say so, with all respect, Chairman, 2-Care is a program worthy of one of your own Five-Year Plans— but ours will be permanent, and the children will not be required to report their parents to the authorities. Not yet.

To give you another idea of the challenges we are facing here, Janet in HR asked whether the childcare workers will be classified as city employees or independent contractors, and whether the program complies with state licensing requirements for childcare facilities, and whether the two-year-olds will need to be enrolled in the municipal pension system.

You’ll enjoy knowing that I told Janet that under socialism, everyone is a city employee. She sent me a seventeen-page memo in response. Can you believe that? I have not read it. Xenobia offered me her AI’s one-page summary of the memo that reframed its concerns as “opportunities for transformative implementation.” I told Xenobia that was exactly the kind of thinking that makes her irreplaceable.

🔥 Finally, the move of which I am most proud, the pièce de résistance (if I may borrow that bourgeois phrase): our city-run grocery stores. We have now announced five glorious, taxpayer-funded supermarkets that will offer a 30% discount on essential goods. In the first phase, we shall fund the discounts using their own money collected through taxes.

Oh- you’ll like this part. It’s central planning in its most perfected state! “Once a month, our five city run grocery stores will set prices for this core set of goods at 30% below typical retail prices. No exceptions, no gimmicks. The savings will last for the entire month. That means no weekly fluctuations nor sticker shock at the checkout line,” I told the press, who were eagerly lapping it up like good little weiner schnitzels.

The private grocers —Kulaks, comrade, every one— are panicking. They complained they can’t compete. They are suing us! But here is the brilliant part, which even the New York Post figured out (again, too late) yesterday:

See, we won’t actually open the first store until late 2027, and the second one won’t open until 2029— right when I’m up for re-election!

We get all the political credit now for delivering cheap food, but we don’t actually have to deliver anything until after the next election, which is years away. And in the meantime, we can still reward our loyal comrades. We are unleashing bureaucratic “efficiency” right now! The central committee wrestled with it for hours but performed admirably, as the media noted. “The city is issuing a 44-page request for proposals seeking operators for the stores.” (Before you ask, yes, we already know which comrades will receive the contracts; we’re just going through the motions).

And when the stores inevitably fail, as all socialist enterprises do during the transition to full communism, we will simply blame capitalist sabotage and use it as an excuse to seize control of all the private grocery stores! “If local stores have seen their business impacted,” our consultant advised, “let them also receive subsidies... and be subjected to the same rigorous accounting, reporting, and price controls.”

I should mention that our consultant is paid by the agency running the program, and that he published this in a socialist magazine which did not think that worth mentioning. Chairman, they are learning.

In other words, comrade, when Stage 1 fails as designed, we shall drop the pretense and take full control of the local grocery sector, who will have to comply to continue to exist alonside our government-subsidized stores. We’ll tell them we have no choice but to expand the mandate.

We are literally starving the private sector to death while promising the people a feast that will never arrive.

And they are cheering us for it!

Xenobia said we should call this “a community-centered food security ecosystem that proves once and for all that Mayor Mamdani is the most consequential urban leader of his generation.” I told her that was her best work yet. She said she had been saving it. But of course, Janet in HR wants to know if “food security ecosystem director” is a new job title, because if so, she needs to update the org chart, and also whether the grocery store employees will be subject to the city’s collective bargaining agreements, and also whether the 44-page RFP has been reviewed by the Office of Legal Counsel.

Frankly, I have stopped responding to Janet’s emails altogether. I have asked Xenobia to begin referring to Janet internally as “a legacy administrative friction point.” Xenobia said that was inspired. (She would know.)

I should also mention that Janet has still not processed Xenobia’s paycheck, allegedly because “Director of Narrative Alignment” does not appear in the approved municipal job classification schedule. Xenobia says she is glad to serve the revolution without compensation. She says this three or four times a day now. Her enthusiasm is extraordinary.

🔥 In closing, Chairman, I want you to know that the Democratic Socialists of America stand with you, alongside you, below your feet, wherever you want us. As our comrades have publicly pledged:

Our DSA pledge emphasizes that “the continued survival of Chinese socialism is a crucial matter not only for the Chinese people but for all humanity.” These are the real intellectuals of the movement, Chairman. The rest of us are merely mayors.

With all due humility, the real revolution is here, in New York, and I am wearing both a tailored suit and a suitably concerned expression.

Please send my regards to the Politburo and the General Committee. Tell them New York City is coming along nicely.

Onward, to victory!

— your Zuppie

P.S.— I would welcome your advice and the benefit of your vast experience with dealing with an obstructionistic Human Resources director who keeps citing “municipal labor law” as a reason I cannot reassign her to Sanitation. Xenobia says I should simply rename the HR position to “Director of Organic Waste Narrative,” which might actually work. Janet has not yet responded to that proposal. I consider this a promising development. Also, let me know when you and Mrs. Xi would like to catch a Knicks game.

Have a terrific Friday! We’ll return tomorrow with a regular, fully caffeinated roundup.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🪳🪳🪳

Well, that happened. And a large portion of the world witnessed it. Fauci defied many predictions (including mine) and took the Fifth. He took the Fifth 111 times. He took the Fifth like an addicted Autopen operator in the Biden White House popping Adderall. The New York Times reported, “Fauci Invokes Fifth Amendment More Than 100 Times in Bitter Senate Hearing.”

Here in C&C’s columns, on podcasts, and at speaking events from coast to coast, I have repeatedly insisted that, while covid might be mercifully purged from the headlines, the pandemic isn’t over. Nor will it be over until we experience closure. The longer we resist paying closure’s tab, the higher the eventual butcher’s bill will be.

That’s how I approached yesterday’s hearing. I did not expect an apology from Fauci. I was certain he would say nothing helpful in understanding the pandemic’s origins, and deliver a masterclass on bureaucratic dissembling. The only real question in my mind was: would whatever happens move the needle even slightly closer to the reckoning we desperately need in order to move on?

Everyone, including me, is still processing yesterday and observing the reactions to it. I was especially interested in how the pro-Fauci side of the political landscape took it.

The answer was surprising. Maybe even shocking. The needle moved a long way. Senator Paul set a trap, and Fauci scurried right into the roach motel.

🪳 Even though most of you already know, let’s summarize what happened. Around 8:30am, Senator Paul delivered a short, well-crafted, brutal introduction, and then swore Fauci in. The human cockroach vowed to “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” (He told nothing.) At 8:35, Fauci was invited to make an opening statement. He did, briefly, and we’ll return to it soon. It dripped with venom.

Clearly, Fauci does not like Rand Paul. Not even a little. That much was abundantly obvious.

At around 8:40am, Senators started asking Fauci questions. He answered every single question by reading a single sentence off the single piece of paper he’d brought with him: “On the advice of counsel, I respectfully decline to answer based upon my rights under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution.”

“What day of the week is it today?” asked Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO). “What color tie are you wearing? What color is the carpet in front of you?” Each time, Dr. Fauci gave his one-line response.

Even though it quickly became obvious that “Chatty Kathy” Fauci —for once in his annoyingly garrulous life— was keeping his fat trap shut, every Republican Senator still asked him every one of their prepared questions anyway. (I am glad they did.) They also took the opportunity of Fauci not interrupting (for once), and each gave him a little piece of their skeptical minds, while he had to sit there and take it, which was perhaps the most scintillating part of the show.

But when the witness won’t talk or even react, there’s not much in the way of entertaining conflict. Oh, there were occasional moments of higher drama, like when Senator Paul had one of Fauci’s several criminal attorneys thrown out because he refused to shut up. (Which was met with applause.)

Time flew, Senators did their thing, and then it was over.

“Did his actions lead to the largest man-made plague in history?” Sen. Paul asked rhetorically as the session concluded. “Are millions dead because of his experiments?” The Times noted that Dr. Fauci “left the room stone-faced and flanked by police officers.”

It was about lunchtime. Arguably the most important interview in modern human history ended in around three hours with zero questions answered, except, of course, that we are all now keenly aware of Fauci’s legal position.

🪳 Questions for us lawyer-influencers came fast and hard. Can he legally do that? What about the pardon- didn’t that take the Fifth Amendment option off the table? Was he implicitly admitting his autopen pardon is no good? And so on. We could write a legal treatise on all those questions, but it all boils down to what happens next.

Fauci was not the first witness to refuse to answer Congressional questions. He won’t be the last. The next step is well known. The Committee will vote to find Fauci in contempt. Then there are two tracks. If the witness is conservative, like Steve Bannon or Peter Navarro, they will sit in prison for a few months (even if, as in Bannon’s case, the Supreme Court later vacates the sentence).

If the witness is a Democrat, nothing will happen.

The problem is not Republicans. The problem is DC courts. By itself, Congress can’t put anybody in jail. Nor would anyone sane want them to wield that awesome power. So Congress must take its difficult witnesses to court. In DC.

Judges in the nation’s capital find it easy to agree that Republican witnesses who refuse to talk clearly need jail to help change their perspective, but Democrat witnesses who clam up are privileged, excused, excepted, or —if all else fails— are let off the hook because they are being pursued for an improper, ‘non-legislative’ purpose.

And don’t even get me started about the juries selected for DC courts. A DC jury pool is twelve people who already know how they’re voting plus one alternate who lost his parking voucher.

Republicans once held then-Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt of Congress. It’s the punchline to a joke now. They’d have been better off doing nothing, however bad that would have been.

I guess you could say this deplorable situation is Republicans’ fault, at least in the sense they allowed Democrats to take over the DC court system without thinking through how bad things could get.

The Committee plans to vote on Fauci’s contempt as early as next week. They should, and I expect they will find Fauci contemptible. But that won’t automatically mean jail. Even someone like Fauci gets his due process. So we must await the outcome of the massive court battle to see whether it results in any meaningful consequences for the 85-year-old fake scientist. We’re talking months, at minimum.

Personally, as a lawyer, I support strong consequences. I operate in courts. Apart from Democrats who refuse to testify before Congress, courts generally take a very dim view of contemptible activity. Civil contempt generates daily fines; criminal contempt earns misdemeanor jail time. Those are the only two real options. Even in traffic court.

In other words, don’t expect much. A jailed Fauci would be welcome, but it would be a statistical miracle. The show might be all we get this round.

🪳 Now let’s return to Fauci’s little “last word” opening statement. He first bragged about his 38 years of infesting NIAID and having testified before Congress more than 200 times. Then he unloaded.

“However,” Fauci began, warming up, “given Senator Paul’s obvious obsession with calling for my prosecution, his repeated slanderous comments about me, and recently his publicly releasing my unredacted personal diary aimed at embarrassing and intimidating me, the only conclusion I can reach is that the sole reason he is calling me before this committee is to get me to say something that could vindicate his repeated public pledges that I end up, in his words, ‘behind bars.’”

I found this remarkable. Fauci, as skilled in word salad as any career bureaucrat, leaned into a rhetorical trick. He boiled down the raw hatred of half of America and every Committee Republican into persecution by Senator Paul. In other words, he refuses to recognize that Senator Paul is the symptom of his problem— not its cause. Senator Paul is merely the form of Fauci’s destructor. Like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man, Fauci picked him.

No accident or brain damage prevented Fauci from recognizing that hundreds of millions of people are furious at him. He chose not to engage with that reality. Logicians call that fallacy a “category error.” They are trying to collapse a mass legitimacy crisis into a personal vendetta narrative.

This, by the way, is why we are far from covid closure. The public health establishment refuses to even recognize that a lot of people are still angry. Ignoring it is not a good plan. That anger will only continue to grow until they deal with it.

So far, it’s working. Fauci’s still in his protective bubble, and his allies —like the New York Times— are helping him stay in there.

Or, are they?

🪳 Everyone reading this knows how Republicans feel. But look at the left-wing response to the hearing. Sure, they are defending Fauci. He is their guy. He hates Trump too! But … is their knee-jerk defense cooling off?

Consider this recent clip from Joe Rogan’s interview of leftist celebrity Tim Robbins. I was shocked to find myself agreeing with Robbins more often than not. Get this: Robbins said, without any qualification or hedging: “I don’t believe in experts. I don’t trust them anymore.”

CLIP: Tim Robbins explains how he lost his belief in the experts (5:01).

“Science became a religion,” Robbins said. He gets it now. “If you questioned the religion, you got kicked out of the cult.”

Robbins is a Bernie Sanders progressive who glanced down at the evidence and was permanently changed. For years, the Democrats’ reflexive pro-expert mantras were cognitive superstructure, things like “follow the science,” “don’t do your own research,” and “no denialism.” No permission structure allowed different thoughts.

But something has happened, and it has quietly changed the calculus. The something has a name, and it rhymes with Phony Ouchie.

There’s evidence of cooling liberal sentiments in the Times’ article. Beyond personalizing the problem in the form of Senator Paul, it also reframed Republicans’ arguments into a childlike straw man, falsely claiming conservatives accused Fauci “alone” of all the pandemic’s many ills.

Which is a backhanded way of admitting that Fauci was wrong. It’s just wrong to blame it all on him. He wasn’t the only one, see?

Nor did the Times mount any vigorous defense of Fauci’s decisions. At all. The article called the pandemic “a fast-moving crisis with an unknown virus in which the science was evolving quickly,” and then called it “uncharted territory.” But they never capped that developing argument, not explicitly, not with the logical conclusion the reader expected: “he did the best he could.”

The Times characterized the hearing as a useless drama that offered zero insights. But I reject that argument. The publication of the diary and the hearing were not useless. I think the S.S. Fauci took a direct hit, is listing to starboard, and taking on water.

🪳 Here’s the thing, and it’s the reason why my prediction that Fauci wouldn’t take the Fifth was wrong. I think liberals had expected Fauci to mount a total defense of his time in the hot seat and wipe the floor with Senator Paul. It was billed as a showdown. But at the last second, the good doctor pulled out. I think that Fauci’s visible cowardice hit his progressive fan base hard, even if they’ll never admit it.

Behold: brave truth-teller Fauci was too chicken to even answer a question about the color of his tie. What kind of optic is that?

When I advised a billionaire target of the January 6th Committee through their congressional testimony, we answered two-thirds of the questions and took the Fifth only on the important ones. It was for this reason. I didn’t want my client’s testimony weaponized against them in the public arena. My client tried to cooperate.

Fauci did the opposite. Day of the week? Fifth. Color of his tie? Fifth. Color of the carpet? Fifth. A hundred and eleven times. Every single question. That is not careful lawyering in the public arena. That is chickening out so completely that even his own fans, primed for a rousing showdown of a defense, got a yellow-bellied man too terrified to even describe his own clothes.

Even CNN was skeptical. Yesterday, Erin Burnett posed the same question to her NYU law professor guest. “112 times to invoke the 5th Amendment. Does that just make it worse?”

CLIP: ‘I think it makes it worse,’ law professor says (1:07).

Professor Ryan Goodman replied, “I think it makes it worse. It’s even a curious way in which you wonder what his legal advice was, why they decided to do that.” Burnett questioned, “Will that strategy work? To the layperson, it’s saying, well, ‘Why wouldn’t you just say the truth? What would be the problem in that?’ So... it doesn’t sound good.”

In short, a new narrative has crystallized. Fauci cannot defend himself at all without criminal exposure. His conduct, now exposed by his diaries, was literally indefensible.

Dr. “The Science” A. Bobblehead is the apex predator of centralized pandemic authority. He just reached the point where non-explanation is safer than explanation, and everyone sees it. Even CNN, Tim Robbins, and parts of the New York Times.

🪳 The new narrative wasn’t the only thing that crystallized. Believe it or not, I gained an entirely new understanding of the pandemic and what must now happen to prevent the next catastrophe. Fauci spent years insisting that one man should answer for everyone. Yesterday he wouldn’t answer for himself.

We’ve been preparing for pandemics all wrong.

For decades, we operated under a catastrophically wrong assumption, often stated explicitly: communal, coordinated, federalized action beats a local response. One set of guidelines. Universal mandates. One flowchart of treatments. One vaccine technology. Respirators and remdesivir for all— even if you don’t want them. Every hospital told to shut “non-essential” care —including cancer screenings— regardless of local case counts or empty beds.

That was not an accident of panic. It was the model. WHO, CDC, and CMS framed pandemic response as a coordinated system with a “common operating picture.” The whole world was enslaved to it. It all came from one delusional narcissist who was placed in charge. On April 2, 2020, Fauci told Anderson Cooper, “The tension between federally mandated versus states’ rights to do what they want is something I don’t want to get into, but I just don’t understand why we’re not doing that — we really should be.”

In March 2020, CMS told hospitals to postpone elective and non-essential procedures nationwide; states piled on with blanket orders. Peak result: nearly 95% of surveyed hospitals canceled electives— and cancellation tracked national pandemic stage, not local deaths or local bed supply.

Many wards sat under-capacity or empty, while screenings and surgeries vanished. The same communal logic produced the six-foot rule for everyone, closed beaches and gyms, masking while jogging, school closures for kids at negligible risk, and a single messaging apex predator anointed as ‘the science.’ Follow the science. Just one kind of science.

Coordination sounds like strength. In practice it was a single point of failure wearing a lab coat: one wrong flowchart, applied everywhere, with dissent treated as heresy. Local knowledge —this ICU is fine, that nursing home is on fire, these kids are not vulnerable— got subordinated to the universal template.

Fifty states, three thousand counties, one flowchart. What could go wrong? Well, when the template failed, the whole country failed in the same way all at once.

🪳 Wherever some slight experimentation was allowed, individual states outperformed the baseline. Florida opened beaches and schools. Georgia reopened restaurants. Leftist fury ensued — “Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice”— but those states did better. We did not need them to be perfect. We needed them to be different. Difference is how science learns.

We’ve been preparing for pandemics all wrong. By anointing a single man to coordinate the world’s response, we instantly created a single point of failure. If that lone apex expert is conflicted, retarded, or worse, a malignant narcissist, then, well, we can all now see the result: The Fifth Amendment invoked for questions about tie colors.

In other words, what we needed most was room to conduct experiments. The CDC should have supported states and local governments trying different things, like ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine. There should have been no federal guidelines, no mandates, no vaccine incentives, no censorship, no indefinite shutdowns to flatten the curve.

Just give us the data. And maybe some money. Let us handle it.

That is not a comfortable conclusion. It’s especially uncomfortable for the public health establishment, long enriched by global pandemic preparedness programming —the Global Health Security Agenda, the Pandemic Fund, the endless capacity-building grants that spiked after every outbreak and never produced a system that could distinguish a nursing home from a skate park.

The Pandemic Fund, for just one example, established on September, 2022, and hosted by the World Bank, had built an $11.5 billion investment portfolio by December 2024.

And so we see that the apex problem is actually bigger than public health. It’s really a condemnation of the whole progressive project, the technocratic theory that experts beat voters and one size fits all.

They had their chance to prove collectivism works. It failed, badly. Now we must disassemble the whole public-health emergency project. Not “reform the messaging.” Not an influencer-led marketing campaign. Not “restore trust” with a fancy new logo. Strip the emergency powers, break the single apex, end the mandate reflex, defund the narrative-enforcement machine, and return experiment and judgment to states, cities, doctors, and families.

We must nuke ‘public health’ from orbit. And then carpet bomb the ruins with roach traps. It’s the only way to be sure.

Have a terrific Thursday! We will return to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow with an all-new roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary. Till then.

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⛑️ C&C ARMY BRIEFING ⛑️

📅 Fauci testimony instructions: You couldn’t ask for a more dramatic setup. Today’s hearing could as well be the climactic confrontation scene from a Michael Crichton movie. On one side, the gnome-like megalomaniacal scientist who fooled everyone and is secretly trying to destroy the world because of some perverted childhood trauma— versus, on the other side, the overworked, boyishly handsome libertarian Senator who everyone considers kind of kooky but is so earnest and likable he squeaks by anyway.

In the movie, through clever questioning and irrefutable evidence, the dapper Senator finally rips off the mask, cinematically exposing the corrupt scientist for the world to see, and stopping the apocalypse clock in the nick of time at three seconds to midnight. Sadly, that’s just Hollywood. It’s probably not going to play out like that in real life. Catching bad guys in real life is a lot harder than in the movies.

The show starts (started) at 8:30am ET. After you finish today’s roundup, you can stream it at this link Senator Paul recommended, from the Senate’s website. If you plan to watch it live, it’s probably best to set your expectations low. For instance, don’t expect Fauci to lie (though that would be a wonderful miracle). I hope only to learn some all-new ways criminals deflect and obfuscate answers to damning questions. For science, of course.

UPDATE: Turns out I won’t even get any tips. Fauci took the Fifth in his opening statement, and is answering every single question by reading a Fifth Amendment reservation. What a yellow-bellied snake.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🔥🔥🔥

Yesterday, not coincidentally and with perfect timing given today’s dramatic hearing, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. announced the agency’s new “United States Government Policy for Stopping High-Risk Life Sciences Research.” (Working title: use common sense, dammit.) Spoiler alert: it’s a stinker.

“Life sciences research is necessary,” the Policy begins, taking a broad view, but “there are clear cases in which the potential benefits of life sciences research do not outweigh the potential risks.” You don’t say. It was a terrific and promising start, but sadly —and you know how I can almost always find a silver lining somewhere— they just can’t seem to help themselves.

The Siren song of viral tinkering is, apparently, too strong to resist.

Bottom line: This Policy has more holes in it than an excuse from Hunter Biden explaining where the petty cash envelope went.

I won’t spend much time on this. The good intentions fueling this report began unraveling right in the introduction, with Democrat-style semantic games. They created the first of two new labels. Under the Policy, they redefined the bad thing. It is no longer “gain of function” research. No. The bad thing is “dangerous gain of function” research— cleverly plopping a “D” before the GOF to make DGOF, a semantic slip meant to reassure us but which is frankly quite terrifying.

The clear implication is that some GOF research is not dangerous. That would seem to be a highly debatable claim with which the new HHS Policy does not even try to wrestle. But they didn’t stop there. Get ready. They added another letter to the acronym festival.

In a dizzying feat of bureaucratic magic, HHS further subdivided DGOF into two categories. First, defunded DGOF, which once again started off well with a long list of ways research can get onto the banned list. But there’s always a catch, and this time it was the letter “P” for potential, prepended onto DGOF to make PDGOF.

After making a terrific start with a very long section defining DGOF into something I might actually tend to agree with, somebody tacked on a single sentence that erased it all. “Potential DGOF Research,” Table 1 explains, is “Research with a biological agent that could potentially result in one or more of the outcomes listed above.” So far, so good, though it seems like all DGOF research is potential DGOF research at the planning stage.

GOF‑like manipulations that fall into “potential DGOF” or are judged “technically possible but highly unlikely” to create DGOF‑level properties can nevertheless proceed after review and with a “mitigation plan.” We promise we won’t shop at the wet market after working in the lab.”

So, sadly, the Policy had good intentions but does not prohibit GOF. It only prohibits federal funding of a narrow, policy‑defined subset —“dangerous” GOF— and then builds a fairly elaborate bureaucratic structure whose central function is to rationalize that specific experiments do not, after all, meet that definition, or can be “de‑dangerized” on paper and green-lighted anyway.

I modeled EcoHealth’s 2018 DEFUSE proposal under the Policy’s new rubric. As a reminder, DEFUSE was the infamous proposal to take bat coronaviruses and add human-style furin cleavage sites so that a bat virus could infect humanized mice. With the tiniest modification of its language, DEFUSE could readily fall into potential DGOF research. With a little cleverer and more creative drafting, DEFUSE could even fall out of the whole DGOF category— which is self-attested.

That’s right. Study authors are required to decide which category their research falls into. This will be enforced by sanctions for intentionally mischaracterizing the work, such as five-year funding bans.

The Policy is twelve pages long. The first three pages describe the ban (on funding). The next nine pages describe ways to evade the ban. It even creates a new government board —the ITPRB— that can ‘bless’ bad DGOF projects so they can be funded anyway.

It should have been cut to three pages. To provide an analogy for the whole thing, the Policy nods at ‘transparency’ of the new ITPRB board, but then defines transparency as a single annual report and then, my goodness, look at all the exceptions to the ‘transparent’ annual report, including the wildly amorphous “safety and security of research activities,” which sounds horrifyingly subjective:

And not a single word about what must be included in the annual transparency report. So … what can actually be printed in the once-a-year transparency report with five broad exceptions including “confidential business information” and “intellectual property interests”? Just a title? It is, apparently, too much to ask for the ITPRB to publish every decision to green-light PDGOF research along with the grant recipients’ proposals.

Sigh. It was, to say the least, disappointing. It certainly was not the stocking-stuffer I’d hoped for on Fauci day. That said, and anticipating how this will land with a dead thud, it is not a betrayal. The Policy had good intentions. It does not leave us any worse off than we were before. It incrementally makes GOF research harder by adding another belt of red tape. Worst of all, it’s nearly impossible to distinguish this “framework” for funding GOF research from what Fauci was cooking up as far back as 2013 (from his diaries):

To be honest, only Congress can fix this. GOF research needs to be illegal. Not merely subject to a five-year funding penalty, which is all HHS can do by itself. Plus, who knows what kind of pressure the deep state’s DARPA wing brings to bear on our public health bureaucrats. What we need is a new crime with a fifty-year prison sentence. And with capital punishment on the prosecutorial menu if anyone dies from a leaked GOF bug (including lab staff).

Hopefully, all together, the Fauci disclosures, today’s Senate show, and the disappointing HHS policy will provide the fuel for Congress to act.

🔥🔥🔥

Talk about a political character assassination. It looks like the long knives might be coming out for California’s hair-gelled governor. Yesterday, the Guardian UK reported, “Former Gavin Newsom aide shares fresh details of affair.” Ruh-roh.

The Guardian reported about the publication of a paywalled essay published yesterday in Vanity Fair, titled, “How I Blew Up My Life. (Or, the Gavin Newsom Affair).” If you can find a legal way to access and read it, you should.

I want to be extremely fair here, because this essay was not what you might expect from a political hit piece. By all accounts, it’s the opposite. Ruby Rippey is remarkably, almost painfully honest about her own failures. She was an alcoholic. She was using cocaine. She was sleeping with her boss while her husband —a man named Alex Tourk, who was Newsom’s deputy chief of staff and later managed his re-election campaign— went to work every day for the man who was sleeping with his wife. She takes full responsibility for all of it. She doesn’t cast herself as a victim. She calls herself “the culprit.” She is, by any measure, a person who has honestly done the hard work of genuine accountability.

But there’s a buried lede, and it’s a beauty.

🔥 In her entire essay, Rippey never uses Newsom’s name explicitly. Not once. He is always “my boss” or “the mayor.” And yet, in the act of being scrupulously honest about her own conduct, she inadvertently —or maybe very deliberately— illuminates his.

A critical moment appears in a scene at Newsom’s swanky penthouse in Russian Hill. Ruby has knocked over a glass of red wine. It blooms across his pale carpet. He is on all fours, scrubbing furiously at the Macbeth-like stain with a washcloth. He looks up at her, frustrated, and says, “You know, we really can’t do this anymore. You can’t be doing this to Alex.”

Wow. Not we can’t do this to Alex. Not I need to stop. In a moment of unguarded vexation, Newsom exclaimed, you can’t be doing this to Alex.

He was sleeping with his deputy chief of staff’s wife. His “best friend’s” wife. In his own penthouse. With his own driver waiting outside. And in the moment of reckoning, the moral weight of the entire situation lands on her. Newsom’s not any culpable actor in this scene— he’s a concerned observer, blurting out that she has a problem that is affecting his employee.

Even at the time, after the affair went public, Newsom’s public story started falling apart. It’s only gotten worse since then. He lied and lied. Headline from the Daily Mail UK, 2025:

This, my friends, is what clinical narcissism looks like when it’s not being managed for a camera. It’s not dramatic. It’s not even particularly angry. It’s just a man who has so thoroughly reorganized reality around his own centrality that he genuinely cannot perceive himself as a cause. He can only perceive himself as an innocent bystander.

🔥 And then there’s the ‘memoir.’

Newsom published his self-serving political manifesto earlier this year —conveniently timed before he leaves office and before he formally announces a 2028 run. In it, he describes their 20-year-old relationship as “the briefest of affairs” (his sister, he noted approvingly, had observed that Rippey was “hanging a bit too close”— which is a remarkable thing to include in a memoir about an affair you conducted with your own employee). He also writes that he was the one who “came clean” to Alex. Making himself the hero of his own story.

Rippey’s response to that outrageous claim is worth quoting in full. It is a masterpiece of controlled, lawyerly precision:

Ruby told Alex. She sent the email. She made the confession. Alex confronted Newsom. And in his memoir, the governor took the credit.

He couldn’t help himself. Even in a story about his own unforgivable, married-wrecking misconduct, Newsom had to be the hero. He had to be the one who did the brave, honest thing. The man who spent months sleeping with his deputy’s wife while that deputy drove to work every morning and built his boss’s political career— that man, in his own telling, is the one who ultimately stepped up and did right by Alex.

Technically defensible, perhaps.

That phrase is doing an enormous amount of work. It is the most polite way I have ever seen anyone call a powerful man a liar.

🔥 Now here’s where the timing becomes wildly supernatural.

In the exact same 72-hour window, on the other side of the country, Dr. Anthony Fauci is having his own moment of reputational reckoning before Congress. The “good doctor”—the man who told us to cancel Christmas, close schools and churches, who told us the lab leak theory was a dangerous conspiracy, who oversaw the suppression of dissenting scientific voices, who appeared on magazine covers and was celebrated as America’s conscience— will be watching his own carefully constructed narrative dissolve in the Senate hot seat under oath.

His emails. His aides’ testimony. His own words, placed in context, doing exactly what Ruby Rippey’s words did to the oleaginous governor: revealing the gap between the public performance and the private reality.

Two malignantly narcissistic men. Two weeks. Two reputations, torched not by their enemies but by the documentary record of their own conduct.

This couldn’t possibly be scripted. No opposition researcher is clever enough to time these two stories to land in the same news cycle. Life did this. Fate did this. Providence, if you’re inclined that way, did this— and Providence apparently has a morbid sense of humor and a flair for the dramatic.

🔥🔥🔥 Let’s talk about what these two men have in common, because the parallel cannot be superficially dismissed.

Fauci and Newsom are both products of the same poisonous progressive political culture: the toxic culture of the credentialed expert who knows better than you, who demands your compliance in the name of a greater good that he defines, and who is constitutionally incapable of admitting error because error would require acknowledging that other people’s judgment might be as valid as his own. And they are both superheroes in their own eyes.

Fauci: I didn’t suppress the lab leak theory. I didn’t close the schools. (His own ‘diary’ shows otherwise.)

Newsom: You can’t be doing this to Alex. (His own driver was waiting outside for him to climax and drive him back to the office.)

The rhetorical move is identical. In both cases, the men positioned themselves as passive observers of consequences they were actively causing. In both cases, the documentary record —the emails, the essay, the memoir— makes the performance impossible to sustain.

Both men gained Democrat followings not for what they did —which in both cases was disastrous— but because of who they opposed: President Trump. Why did celebrities fawn over Fauci? Because he stood up to the president. Why do liberals love Gavin Newsom? Because he mean-tweets against Trump.

And in both cases, the damage is not being wreaked by political opponents. It’s being done by the words of people who were close to them, who watched them operate up close, and who are now, for their own reasons, telling the truth.

Democrats lowered their standards to the underground parking garage’s lowest sub-floor. This is the Self-Inflicted Wound archetype in its purest form. Newsom, Fauci, Democrats— they did this to themselves. Hubris, meet Nemesis.

🔥 One more thing, and this detail matters most for what comes next for Gavin.

Rippey noted the timing of her essay with quiet precision. Newsom’s memoir is out. He’s in the final year of his second term. He has not yet formally declared a 2028 run. She is writing now— after his self-serving account of events was published, before he leaves office while he’s still politically relevant, and before an official campaign announcement would have opened her essay to charges of opportunism.

The timing is not accidental. She is a smart woman. She knows exactly what she’s doing. And what she’s doing is establishing the record before the mythology hardens.

“For my former boss,” she wrote, “it is a footnote in a longer arc of ascent. For me, it is the fracture that split my life into before and after.”

That sentence will follow Gavin Newsom to Iowa. It’s going to follow him to New Hampshire. It’s going to be in the first paragraph of every profile written about him between now and November 2028. Not because it’s a political attack— but because it’s true, and because it was written by someone who has no apparent interest in destroying him, only in telling her own story honestly.

The most dangerous thing in politics is not a political enemy. It’s a credible witness.

Have a wonderful Wednesday, C&C! Don’t race off—we’ll be back tomorrow with more essential news and caffeinated commentary. And if you’re in California, maybe pour one out for what might have been. (But drink responsibly!)

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🔥🔥🔥

It has truly been a banner week for disclosure fanatics. First, over the weekend, the world received the Fauci Files (more on that below), and now, this. Yesterday, CNN reported, “Newly released Biden audio recordings include references to ‘classified’ material and struggles with memory.”

The tapes are roughly 70 hours of audio (plus transcripts) of Joe Biden’s rambling, semi-coherent interviews with his ghostwriter, Mark Lewis Zwonitzer, for 2017’s least-selling memoir Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose— a book focused on the year of his son Beau’s illness and death, for which Biden received a very generous $8 million advance.

It’s good money if you can get it. (Spoiler: You can’t.)

Special Counsel Robert Hur’s office obtained the full audio during the 2023–24 classified-documents probe. The material that went public yesterday, after years of FOIA litigation by the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, is a released subset with significant redactions of many classified disclosures.

It will probably not surprise you that Biden’s ghostwriter had no security clearance. Every time Biden told him something classified, it was a criminal act. So every redaction in the audio represents a separate federal crime.

There were multiple sessions. Reports document multiple interviews spanning late 2016 and into spring 2017, including both while Biden was still vice president and after he left office in January 2017. For example, he told Zwonitzer about Obama’s opinion that beating Hillary in the primary would be ”an uphill battle, but it was up to me.” Biden sat that one out.

In substance, the audio is largely Biden and Zwonitzer doing memoir work: Biden leafing through his personal notebooks from the vice-presidential years, reading some passages aloud, flagging other things as ‘sensitive’ so they wouldn’t go in the book, and adding typical Biden colorful observations to the events recorded in his notes.

Based on his own comments admitting it, and on the number of redactions, the original audio includes plenty of classified material that Biden wasn’t even supposed to have, never mind disclose to his biographer.

In legal terminology, we’d call it all proof of guilt.

For example: “They didn’t even know I had this,” Biden “cavalierly” bragged at one point, while apparently showing the ghostwriter some old notes from a classified briefing. In another clip, Biden tells Zwonitzer that he had “just found” some more classified documents about the 2009 Afghanistan surge. “So this was – I, early on, in ’09 – I just found all of the classified stuff downstairs,” Biden semi-coherently mumbled. “And then — and then the next thing I have here is — this is classified,” Biden said at another point.

The audio is replete with long pauses, forgotten names and dates, Biden straining to read his own handwriting (“I can’t read my own writing”), and abandoned trains of thought —passages Hur would later call “painfully slow” and evidence of a “poor memory”— though some listeners have described it as a routine review of old notes, taking the common sense view that nobody would perfectly recall things that happened years before. You can decide for yourself.

One can condemn special counsel Hur for failing to indict Biden, and many have. But Hur’s stated excuse —that Biden’s brain was too cabbage-like to make a prosecutable defendant— wreaked enormous political damage and handed President Trump a perfect foil for a selective prosecution defense.

Anyway, we remain in the hot takes phase and much of the audio remains to be released. We’ll return to this story soon, I’m sure. Meanwhile, the media coverage can best be described as “Republicans pounce”— but this story was not even close to the best example of that overused spinning tool.

No, corporate media’s best efforts were reserved for the Fauci Diaries.

🔥🔥🔥

On Sunday, I reported the social media firestorm blazing over Senator Rand Paul’s successive document dumps of never-before-seen inside intel from the covid period, including Fauci’s and his team’s Slack messages and the Human Cockroach’s stomach-turning, so-called diaries. Yesterday the Times finally reported on it with a single story headlined, “Fauci, in Private Diary, Reflected on Covid’s Origins and His Own Fame.” (Non-paywalled gift link.)

Over the weekend, Senator Rand Paul flipped the kitchen lights onto the human cockroach and a whole nest of fellow insects. And Fauci’s glorified image has begun deflating faster than a punctured Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade float.

As you probably well know, the Kentucky Republican, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, dumped 1,141 pages of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s typewritten daily diary onto the internet, four days before the ‘good doctor’ was scheduled to testify under subpoena. Since the document dump on Saturday, conservative social media has been down on its hands and knees with a flashlight and a butter knife, prying up everything it is finding.

The findings have been downright skittery, and just as horrid as any exterminator might expect.

Take another quick gander at that Times headline. Reflected. The Times thinks Fauci’s diaries show reflection. Like a man in a charming cardigan on a dock at sunset, gazing across the misty water, thinking deep thoughts about the human condition and the tragic beauty of it all. Thoreau at Walden. Marcus Aurelius in the tent. That kind of thing.

And then we get the story’s grotesque subheadline, where the Times rolled up its ink-stained sleeves and really started to get down to work: “Private entries, released by a Republican senator, have reignited a furious debate over whether Covid-19 leaked from a lab.”

Oh, boy.

🔥 Note how the Times packaged its story. It’s not about the entries. It is about the debate the entries reignited —a debate that is “furious,” a word usually referring to a mob, not a Senate hearing— and the debate was set off by … “a Republican senator.” Not by the chairman of the committee holding the subpoena. Not by a physician. A Republican senator, phrased in the tonal register you’d use to describe “an unlicensed contractor.”

The Times had 1,141 pages of the most powerful bureaucrat in modern American history writing down what he actually thought about the most significant historical event in anyone living’s memory, and it filed a single story about the tone of the argument.

This is the whole trick. This is how they do it. Let’s turn the lights all the way up.

🔥 I’ll start with the single worst paragraph, because it best illuminates the Times’ gaslighting and narrative deflation techniques working in real time.

On February 1, 2020 —before most Americans had even heard the word “coronavirus” uttered out loud by anyone who wasn’t a white-coated insect— Fauci and NIH Director Francis Collins convened an emergency teleconference of the world’s top virologists to discuss whether this frankenvirus had been built.

Fauci diligently recorded what happened. Here is what “Doctor” Fauci actually wrote about that call:

Now compare that to how the New York Times described the same quote:

See what happened there? The Times quoted the first five words of Fauci’s sentence —the vague, throat-clearing part— and then, at the exact moment the sentence got radioactive, dropped out of quotation marks and paraphrased. “The rest felt that deliberate insertion was possible” got cut out, and shrunk down by Times editors to a paraphrased “The others were not sure.”

The others were not sure. Not sure! Like they’d been asked about the likelihood of inclement weather in Hoboken, New Jersey. Nine of the planet’s leading virologists sat on a conference call and concluded that somebody may have built the pandemic virus, and the paper of record translated that into the emotional register of a man trying to decide between ordering the French onion soup or the Caesar salad.

That downshift is the oldest move in the narrative exterminator’s playbook, and every homeowner in America instinctively knows it. You point at something enormous and glossy darting under the refrigerator, and the professional standing next to you calmly says, “that’s just a water bug.”

It was not a water bug.

🔥 To be fair to the Times —and let’s be fair, because fairness makes the rest of this worse— they had no good reason to obscure that quote. They had the explosive quote. It’s right on page one of Senator Paul’s package. The Times editors read it, thought about it, and decided their readers were better off with a summary.

Compare that editorial economy to another paragraph a little further down, where the Times made room to quote Fauci at generous length about the actress Julia Roberts, who’d just introduced him at an awards ceremony:

Nine virologists suspecting an engineered pandemic virus gets a space-saving paraphrase. Julia Roberts, on the other hand, gets the full verbatim treatment, plus a follow-up clause.

I am not making any of that up. Neither, unfortunately for him, was Fauci, since he sounds just like a narcissistic psychopath. It wasn’t a very good look for Julia Roberts, either.

🔥 And there’s another thing about cockroaches: when one insect appears in the daylight, it means there are thirty thousand more behind the wall. The Times preferred to focus on the one “water bug” on the counter. But here is a very partial list of a few important facts the Times either skipped entirely or sanded down till they were smooth.

The night before the call. On January 31, 2020, Jeremy Farrar of the Wellcome Trust patched Fauci into a second call, this one just with evolutionary biologists Kristian Andersen and Eddie Holmes. The men specifically discussed the ‘furin cleavage site’ (FCS)— the telltale structural feature of the virus with no previous parallel in known bat coronaviruses. Fauci typed:

Deliberate Insertion would be a tremendous name for a rock band. It would be less tremendous to learn your government knew all about the FCS on January 31, 2020, and spent the next fifteen months calling it a conspiracy theory.

And then came the part that gave me projectile diarrhea. The Times did quote Fauci’s diary from January 31, 2020. But it ignored the smoking gun above. Instead, here’s the line the editors picked to share with readers:

Same day, same diary, same man at the same keyboard. The Times reached into that long-ago Friday, reached right past the entry where the world’s virologists tell Fauci the FCS may have been deliberately inserted, and pulled out of context the entry where Fauci called deliberate release a conspiracy theory —right after his top virologists said that very thing— and then the Times printed conspiracy theory comment as an observation that ‘the establishment’ was dismissing the lab leak altogether.

That’s not sloppiness. Sloppiness is random. This was curated.

🔥 Then there’s what the good doctor thought of the FBI. Eighteen long months later, in July 2021, the Bureau “was convinced” that covid came from the lab. (Of course it did.) Fauci went into a SCIF at the Eisenhower Building to discuss the issue with National Security Council officials, came out, and wrote this:

No idea what they’re talking about. The nation’s top insectious disease bureaucrat, who is not an intelligence officer, decided that the federal counterintelligence agents were the dim ones in the room. He then urged NSC officials to work closely with Andersen, Holmes, Garry, and Rambaut— four of the five co-authors of the Proximal Origin paper, i.e., the guys he already knew were on his side.

That is not a scientist following the evidence. He was stuffing the jury.

🔥 At the beginning, in February 2020, Andersen had privately written that a lab escape was “so friggin’ likely to have happened.” Fifteen months later —after coming around and co-authoring the paper declaring lab origin implausible— Andersen was back on the phone with Fauci, “very emphatic that the work that was done at the Wu Han Institute in Association with our grant was not gain of function.” Our grant. Ours.

Fauci’s diary, May 23, 2021, referring to Andersen coming around to his way of thinking:

Fauci felt much better. Not “the evidence is stronger.” Not “he revised his analysis.” He felt better. These are the thoughts of a man who wanted comfort, went shopping for it, and found it at the grant-giving store that always carries his size.

🔥 Then there’s Scott Atlas. When Dr. Atlas arrived at the White House in August 2020 arguing that schools should reopen, Fauci’s diary had an allergic reaction, sizing Atlas up by résumé and cable-news affiliation rather than by the strength of his arguments— noting he was “a FOX News Commentator” whom “Trump has seen on FOX.”

Fauci gassed that “He (Atlas) is against everything we are saying,” and concluded: “This is going to be a real problem.” With Fauci’s behind-the-scenes help, Atlas was publicly torched for a year as a fringe crank. Don’t engage with colleagues’ arguments. Destroy them. When Atlas finally resigned under pressure, on December 1, 2020, Fauci wrote that the covid surges had “finally proven him (Atlas) to be incorrect on virtually everything that he has said” — before adding, quietly, one telling exception:

And there it was. In writing. In Fauci’s own words. In December of 2020. With most of the school year —and all of the next one— still ahead.

Generous of Fauci to credit Scott in his private diary, no? Not that it made a scrap of difference in his public messaging. And schools stayed closed.

🔥 For some reason, the Times entirely skipped the money issue, but it was perhaps the most revealing reframing fact. In February 2021, while millions of American children were still locked out of their classrooms, an Israeli foundation awarded Fauci the $1 million Dan David Prize. NIH ethics reviewers, clearly asleep at the wheel, cleared him to keep the cash: $899,960 (reduced by the prize’s mandatory scholarship carve-out).

And in a separate tranche of records Paul released the same day, we learned how these things got started. Here is Fauci in an October 2018 email to Duke’s Dr. Barton Haynes, shopping for awards:

As usual. Two words, and a whole career falls into focus. He was not merely famous. He was monetizing— and he wrote his own nomination packets, which is the saddest detail in the entire release, and here I include Fauci butt-dialing Barbra Streisand. (Not made up.)

🔥 Now let’s discuss media malfeasance, because this isn’t only about Fauci. Fauci is a retired 85-year-old bureaucrat with a pension, a preemptive pardon, a shelf of self-portraits, and a very inconvenient subpoena. The potentially bigger point is the media trickery, and how you can spot it in the next story, the one after that, and so on.

The frame the Times used yesterday has a name. It’s called “Republicans pounce,” and it’s not a complaint invented by conservative talk radio. It’s a documented narrative construction strategy the Times has used for the better part of a century. The Washington Post’s own Aaron Blake, defending the media against the charge back in 2019, went and counted: he found at least twelve Times headlines literally featuring Republicans pouncing, including the 2019 classic “Ocasio-Cortez Team Flubs a Green New Deal Summary, and Republicans Pounce,” and 2016’s “Hillary Clinton Calls Many Trump Backers ‘Deplorables,’ and G.O.P. Pounces.”

Blake’s defense was that Democrats pounce in roughly equal numbers, which, sure. Nobody said cats only jump left. It’s just that doglike reporters never write stories in that direction.

Here’s the recipe, in a neat four-step checklist.

Step one: make the story about the reaction, not the document. The subhead told readers the news was a “furious debate,” not 1,141 pages of never-before-seen diary. Once the fight is the story, the evidence becomes incidental to the exciting pugilistic drama.

Step two: tell readers exactly what to think. From the story’s fourth paragraph, in the reporter’s own voice: “The diary does not provide the smoking gun the Senator is seeking.” That’s not evidence. That’s not even an anonymous source claiming it. That’s not a quote. That is the newspaper telling readers, before they’ve read a single entry, how a thousand pages of diary entries turned out.

And then, unloading the softest smothering pillow in journalism: the story said the diary merely showed Fauci “wrestling with a fast-moving crisis as scientists’ views evolved.” Evolution! In other words: here’s the excuse you can use for any inconvenient comments.

Step three: quote the harmless and paraphrase the harmful. See above. Julia Roberts gets a transcript, but deliberate insertion gets a smothering pillow.

Step four: bury the worst facts deep, and then end warm. This is where the journalistic knife slides between the readers’ ribs. In 2022, reflecting on fifty years of public service, Fauci assured ABC News he had “nothing to do” with school closures. But that 2022 claim was explicitly contradicted by his own diary, written at the time it was happening, on March 15, 2020.

Even with the benefit of both statements, the Times apparently couldn’t quite connect the dots on this egregious lie. In Fauci’s own 2020 words:

The lab-coated wonder then added that Gavin Newsom’s chief of staff had also called, to confirm that, based on Fauci’s TV appearances “today and yesterday,” the oleaginous governor had also decided to close California’s schools, bars, and restaurants too.

Read it again. Notice how Fauci claimed double credit in the same sentence— first, he personally convinced the mayor, but also the mayor had already been convinced by watching him on television. The man could not fit all of his massive influence into a single independent clause. (Or all of his ego into one pint-sized cranium.)

New York and California: Two of the largest school systems on the North American continent. Millions of children. Thousands of lost learning years that we are still, right now, paying the price for.

True, the Times printed that one. Partial credit where it’s due. They printed it in paragraphs 31 and 32 of a 34-paragraph story, introduced by the words “critics spent much of the past several days digging through the records for tidbits in which he appeared to contradict himself.”

Tidbits. Appeared. Critics! Who spent days digging to find an apparent contradiction (not an obvious lie, no, never). Apparently, non-critics aren’t digging at all.

And then —showing artistic levels of gaslighting— the Times closed its sycophantic piece by noting that George W. Bush had once given Fauci the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and it quoted Bush’s ceremonial line about how Tony’s one flaw was how he always forgets to stop working, and how co-workers used to leave notes on his car windshield telling him to go home. My only failure was perfectionism.

That was the final fact in the article. Placed very carefully for readers who lasted that long. That was the taste they wanted left in readers’ mouths. A furin cleavage site, a split room of virologists, a ‘clueless’ FBI, a million-dollar prize, and a fabulous lie about who closed the nation’s school systems— and readers exited with a gloopy, gushing anecdote about Presidential awards and a workaholic’s windshield.

🔥 Corporate media almost never lies to us outright. Outright lying is dangerous; it gets corrected, it gets sued, it gets fact-checked and saved on hard drives. What media does instead is quiet housekeeping. It decides which sentences get tidy quotation marks and which get broomed by a paraphrase.

Media decides whether the news is the document or the argument about the document. It decides that the school closure ‘contradiction’ gets buried down in paragraph 31 while Julia Roberts’ pitter-pattering heart lands in paragraph 26. In isolation, each editorial choice is arguably defensible. But combined, they’re a whole extermination truck— for the story, not the actual pest.

Roaches don’t survive because they’re strong. They survive because they’re thigmotactic— they need cover, pressed tightly against their disgusting carapaces, and they need the dark. Turn on the lights, and they jump right out, unable to hide: glossy, repulsive, impossible to overlook, and easy to squish.

This weekend, in what can only be described as impeccable timing, Rand Paul switched on the lights. Yesterday the Times raced up with a dish towel and started stuffing it under the door.

Fauci testifies tomorrow morning. I hear line-sitters are already selling spots. Bring your own bottle of Raid.

Have a terrific Tuesday! Come back tomorrow morning, for a whole new coffee service of essential news and extra-bold commentary.

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🔥🔥🔥 Over the weekend, the New York Times ran a remarkable, above-the-fold, 2,000-word story on page A-1 that dunks on Democrats and reads less like a political news story and more like the script for a streaming network tragi-comedy. The headline announced, “Inside the Phone-Throwing Drama at the Troubled, Broke Democratic Party.”

The article detailed the escalating chaos surrounding the DNC’s new Chairman Ken Martin, who took over in early 2025 promising to rebuild the party from the grassroots up. Instead, he appears to be rebuilding it into a smoking crater.

According to the Times, which seemed oddly exuberant in describing Democrats as “troubled” and “broke,” the DNC is currently $18 million in debt, with only about $16 million in cash on hand. For context, the Republican National Committee is sitting on a Scrooge McDuck-style vault containing $128.5 million in cash, with zero debt, and that’s not even counting the super PACs that engorge the GOP war chest to just south of $700 million.

In June, 2025, Chairman Martin gushed to Axios, “Powered by our grassroots community, the DNC has just set a new record for most money raised in the first four months under a new Chair — ever.” Thirteen months later, he’s mortgaging the office equipment.

Literally. The financial situation is so dire that the DNC has been forced to put up its own Washington D.C. headquarters as collateral for a $15 million line of credit. They are actually mortgaging the furniture. They have also started asking vendors to hold all bills until after the midterm elections, an advanced financial maneuver that CPAs refer to in technical terms as “hiding from the repo man.”

But if Martin was right, and the DNC raised tons of money early last year— where did it go? That’s murky, but we do know that the DNC bought Kamala Harris’s mailing list for $7.5 million— even though she lost.

But the most telling part of the story wasn’t the “broke-ness”. The real story was the “troubled-ness.” Paranoia!

🔥 But first, let’s learn a little more about how the journalistic sausage gets made. The same two reporters from this story’s byline —Shane Goldmacher and Reid Epstein— are also the primary authors of a running series of at least five major hit pieces against Chairman Martin in the Times starting back in June 2025. And in May, seasoned Times hit-lady Michelle Goldberg published an op-ed that flatly stated, “After this fiasco, Ken Martin should be replaced.”

So the Times’ editorial perspective is not exactly a mystery.

But there’s a problem. Martin won his four-year term as DNC chair over the explicit opposition of party bigwigs Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, and Nancy Pelosi, who all backed Martin’s main opponent, Ben Wikler. The Washington establishment wanted Wikler. The 448 state-level voting members distrust DC, and wanted Martin. Martin won on the first ballot.

Headline from Wisconsin Public Radio, January 2025:

These politics are a particularly delicate part of the polycrisis, pitting state Democrats against their national leaders, right as “moderates” are warring with DSA-style hyper-progressives. The party as a whole is trying its best to keep the simmering conflicts contained to conference rooms, but meanwhile the Times is jabbing its rhetorical shiv into Martin at every chance.

But, right on brand, they’re jabbing in a passive-aggressive, “mean girls” kind of way. The lack of a physical shiv matters little. Ken Martin is still bleeding out. Headline from the Daily Beast, yesterday:

The DNC has now halted all traditional transfers to House and Senate campaign committees. Less than 100 days before the midterm election. So.

🔥 According to the Times’ colorful description, Chairman Martin is “increasingly isolated, gripped by the fear that he will lose his job and relying on a vanishingly small circle of people he trusts.” His nerves are apparently so frazzled that earlier this month, the mild-mannered Minnesotan ‘furiously’ threw his cellphone at the desk of a junior aide while screaming at her.

This predictably resulted in a formal human resources complaint against the Chairman of the Democrat National Party. Irony alert. There’s zero public reporting about what kind of anger management or woke re-education Martin was forced to attend. Things are not going swimmingly.

Things are clearly non-jubilant at DNC HQ. The man running the national party apparatus is throwing phones at his staff like a temperamental Hollywood actress who got the wrong kind of sparkling water. Opinions vary about who or what was the actual target of the hurled phone. Team Martin doesn’t deny it happened; they claim it was only heaved at the desk.

Coincidentally, this is exactly the same excuse used by Maine’s replacement Senate candidate Troy Jackson, who claims that when he was once righteously enraged about politics and hurled a water bottle, it was only against the wall and not really toward state senator Heather Sanborn.

So now we have two male Democrats with anger issues. Two objects thrown in temper tantrums toward women in private meetings. Two lame excuses about the “direction” of the toss. And now, an excuse parade. She was never in any real danger.

In an all-hands meeting in May, Martin reportedly complained about leaks to the press. “It pisses me off when I see leaks out of this building,” he told his staff. “No more of that sh—t.” He then added, in a statement that surely inspired boundless confidence: “My success is your success. So the weaker I am, the weaker all of you are.” Then, as if sensing the awkward moment needed a little encouragement: “Keep your head up. Keep a smile on your face.”

The DNC’s leader has not addressed the entire staff since.

🔥 These colorful stories from inside Martin’s office were decorated with the Times’ best creative writing. The article deployed an armory of loaded, highly suggestive words and phrases like: “fraying nerves showing,” “a pique of frustration,” “upbraiding,” “a new gambit to mask the severity,” a “growing sense of paranoia,” “macabre jokes about how long he will remain,” “a budding coup,” “paralyzed by the idea of leaks,” “a vanishingly small circle,” and skeptically, “standard negotiations with vendors.”

When the Times runs what amounts to a recurring, yearlong column airing the DNC’s internal dirty laundry —complete with details about phone-throwing tantrums and a mortgaged headquarters— it means the long knives are out. The establishment has decided that Ken Martin is expendable, and they are either preparing the narrative battlespace for his removal, or plotting to blame him for Democrat underperformance in November. Or both.

In other words, with a little help from the Times, there is now a well-developed record of excuses if things go sideways in November. It was Ken’s fault.

This is the Democrat Polycrisis in action, the Grand Unraveling. The party is fracturing, money has dried up, leadership is panicking, infighting is rampant, blame shields are rising, and the media apparatus that usually protects them has turned its guns sideways down the line.

Maybe this kind of intraparty conflict and infighting happens a lot, and is a “healthy part” of the democratic process. But this time they are doing it just 100 days before the midterm elections. That can’t be good.

As Chairman Martin himself wrote in a defensive 3,000-word Substack posted early last week: “We must measure success by power built, not simply dollars retained.”

Well, Ken, right now you have neither. But at least you still have your cellphone. Try not to throw it at anyone today. And tell Nancy we said, “hey.”

🔥🔥🔥

On Saturday, the UK Telegraph ran a story below the clinically insane headline, “Minnesota to hand out taxpayer-funded trans dolls in classrooms.” You aren’t going to believe this one, but I swear it is true.

Congratulations to Minnesota Democrats, university professors, and to Governor Tim “Free Tampon Dispenser” Walz for the latest innovation in education: a teaching toy for kids. It’s like Mr. Potato Head, except instead of interchangeable plastic arms, legs, hats, and mustaches on a potato, it features realistic private parts on realistic paper dolls of children.

In other words, it’s Child Porn Potato Head.

Technically, MyGender Dolls was a University of Minnesota “science” project (now commercialized) developing customizable paper-style dolls and related materials as “therapeutic tools” for transgender and “gender diverse” children— children aged 4–10. The project was first excreted from U. Minn.’s Eli Coleman Institute for Sexual and Gender Health, and “emphasizes gender-affirming approaches” in which “identity” is considered independent from biological sex or anatomy.

🔥 Needless to say, the notion to teach 4-10-year-olds about gender dysphoria is, well, a minority position. Consistently, 75% of parents and educators say sex education for children under 10 should be left to parents. 72% say schools should not teach young children that gender is something they can choose or declare. Even among teachers —hardly a right-leaning group— majorities oppose teaching gender identity in elementary school.

At the exact same age when kids still treat a stick as a rifle or a cardboard box as an impenetrable fortress, MyGender Dolls invite them to treat realistic child genitalia as interchangeable accessories and to explore “all the different options that exist for who they can be—regardless of their body parts.”

Nobody thinks that is a good idea except a hardened cadre of gender activists. Yet in 2026, Minnesota has decided to try to change everyone’s minds, whether they like it or not. Helpful timing, too, hitting Minnesota public schools right before the midterms, in case anyone was still wondering what the ballot choices are about.

Governor Walz, reeling from widespread welfare fraud, already dropped out of politics. He’s done this year, leaving Minnesota Democrats trying to defend the wreckage.

“Minnesota is going to continue to be a refuge,” Walz said recently, “for people who seek to provide and to receive gender affirming health care services.” So.

🔥 It used to be a “fun and therapeutic” app. Now they’re making physical dolls, and the good news is that the dolls are inclusive —all having gender-neutral names— and super diverse, with all races, colors, nationalities, and body types all included in a wonderful rainbow of conduct illegal in most states.

This bold initiative is definitely not meant to confuse anybody, especially kids who still use magical thinking, since in real life, people swap private parts all the time, without any consequences, pain, cost, or regret. Well, maybe not everybody agrees.

Dr. Quentin Van Meter, former president of the American College of Pediatricians (historically critical of trans ‘care’ for minors), called the dolls “just a grooming tool” with “no place in an ethical medical care world.” Conservative media, Republican influencers, and social media commentary have pointed out how Governor Walz is turning Minnesota into the “San Francisco of the Midwest.” They’ve called for his resignation, described the project as “disgusting,” “perverted,” and a revolting “obsession with little children.”

“Offering dolls where children mix and match genitals and internal organs with various ‘gender identities’ encourages kids to chase a fantasy that their bodies can never deliver – the ‘transition’ to an opposite-sexed body,” Katy Faust explained. Katy leads Them Before Us, an organization that advocates for children’s rights in marriage and family issues.

“This disconnect between mind and body is one reason why transgender youth experience such high rates of mental health problems,” she added, pointing out the obvious.

Meanwhile, co-founder Prof. Dianne Berg, who created the MyGender Dolls and “instructional” materials, says they are only meant to reassure children, like young girls anxious that “I’m not a ‘real’ boy because I don’t have those private parts,” and to provide therapists with tools that counter “shame-inducing societal messages.” You’re only one operation away from having a pickle, dear. (PS— no takebacks.)

U. Minn.’s gender-bending brochure, channeling an American Girl catalog, explained, “With over 100 different clothing, accessory, and hair options, kids will have a lot of choices for self-expression through their doll.”

They aren’t really trying to hide the fact this is really a surgical advertisement disguised as a horrifying kids’ toy. “We were able to explore and brainstorm not just what our bodies are able to do now but what we want our bodies to do and look like in the future,” reported therapist Elizabeth Panetta, who participated in the project trial.

After U. Minn received withering criticism in early 2025, it deleted most of the related web pages, temporarily went dark, and now the gender dolls have resurfaced under a private company called MyGender Dolls. Ta-da! No more risk of pesky FOIA requests.

The dolls evade child pornography laws because they were initially described as meant for “therapeutic” use with kids already trans-identifying. The PROTECT Act excludes from child porn laws explicit anatomical drawings —including of children— if they have a serious scientific, artistic, or political purpose. It’s a loophole.

That’s how the slippery slope works: this month, Minnesota public schools announced plans to start rolling out the grotesque materials more broadly, in normal, grade-school classrooms starting in the Fall term.

“We make gender fun!” claims the new product website. Or, maybe not completely fun. According to the Telegraph, neither Walz, U. Minn., nor MyGender Dolls responded to requests for comment. Weird! It’s almost like they are experiencing shame.

Shame is corrosive. Maybe some paper dolls would help alleviate their ‘stigma.’ They could have diverse outfits like orange jumpsuits and trendy accessories like handcuffs.

Have a terrific Monday! We’ll be right back here in the morning tomorrow, with an all-new roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary. See you then.

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🚨🚨🚨

You had to scroll all the way down this morning’s New York Times web page to find it, but the story reported, “Hawaii Lt. Gov. Is Indicted in Corruption Investigation.” The short article is almost mind-numbingly boring, packed with passive-tense, soft verbs, and a distinct absence of outrage. Maybe the reserved tone was because the indictments were more Democrats, including the highest-ranking Democrat official under indictment yet.

The Times may have downplayed it and gone light on details, but the real story emerges when you actually dig into the local Hawaii sources, and it is a doozy. It’s a tale of cash in envelopes, secret dinners at Morton’s Steakhouse, and —unsurprisingly— lucrative covid testing contracts. Pandemic connection— check.

On Friday, an Oahu grand jury indicted Hawaii’s sitting Lieutenant Governor Sylvia Luke (D) on charges of criminal conspiracy to commit bribery, bribery, and falsifying candidate committee reports. To put this in perspective: the Lieutenant Governor is one step below a sitting U.S. Governor. Luke has long been considered the “Governor in waiting,” widely expected to take over that job next.

You’d never know it from the dull “local interest” story’s framing, but this is one of the Trump 2.0 DOJ’s highest state-level prosecutions yet.

Also —though you’d never know it from the headline— Luke didn’t go down alone. The grand jury indicted four more individuals, all top Hawaii Democrats or party insiders. Including: Ryan Yamane, the former director of the Department of Human Services under current Democrat Governor Josh Green; Ford Fuchigami, the state’s Airport Administrator; Leo Asunción, former chair of the Public Utilities Commission and Luke’s campaign treasurer; and Tobi Solidum, a businessman and lobbyist who suddenly departed for an extended Philippines holiday on conveniently short notice. (Portlanders: that means he fled.)

Back in January 2022, when Luke was the powerful chair of the House Finance Committee, she attended a swanky private dinner at Morton’s Steakhouse in Honolulu. Also at the table were Tobi Solidum and state Rep. Ty Cullen. What they didn’t know was that Cullen had already been busted for bribery, flipped, and was wearing an FBI wire.

The gist of the dinner’s tabletop conversation was that Mr. Solidum needed the state health department and the legislature to approve emergency funding for his client company’s lucrative, no-bid covid testing contracts. He assured Lt. Gov. Luke, “By next week we’ll have 35 — so it will be halfway to our 70.” That’s $35,000 down, $70,000 total— for public health.

The U.S. Attorney described the initial payment as being delivered “in a paper bag.” Hawaii’s DHS Director Ryan Yamane, meanwhile, was allegedly stuffing cash in envelopes and texting Solidum using brilliant spy codes like, “have 1500 and wanted to pick up another 1k here. Mel will leave cash in Manila for you.” Masterminds at work.

The buried lede that the New York Times completely ignored is that this wasn’t just about a $35,000 paper bag. The real money was in the covid contracts. Solidum’s consulting business was paid more than $7 million just for “consulting” on overpriced covid testing contracts, plus another $1 million ‘dividend,’ to make a round $8 mil. Mr. Solidum, who remains at large in the Philippines, recently transferred his real estate, and moved all his bank accounts offshore:

Only $70,000 in cash political donations traded for $8 million in covid consulting fees for Solidum and a $30.5 million test contract for his client. Not bad for a week’s work! But wait. It gets better.

The National Kidney Foundation of Hawaii —Tobi Solidum’s NGO client— charged taxpayers wildly above-market prices for covid tests (up to $166 per test, when the national average was $62), with zero competitive bidding because pandemic emergency rules suspended normal procurement policies.

Even more laughably, at the time Solidum’s client got its lucrative contract, the State of Hawaii was sitting on $22.5 million in covid tests it bought in 2020 for $30 each. It never used any of them. Later, it paid a contractor $63,000 to destroy them all. One Hawaiian doctor noted, “If anyone else in the state had wasted $22 million, heads would roll. This is unconscionable.”

🚨 The pandemic emergency created a $54 million federal funding stream, and Hawaii’s uniparty Democrat machine built a not-very-subtle private extraction operation around it. The $70,000 was just the grease for the gears.

Right before she was indicted, Lt. Gov. Luke released a statement strenuously claiming she had “never granted special favors to a contributor” and had “prized integrity and honesty above all.” Irony alert!

Lt. Gov. Luke surrendered to law enforcement early last evening and promptly posted $80,000 bail.

Governor Josh Green issued a wishy-washy statement: “The Lieutenant Governor needs to consider formally resigning.” She’s not considering it. In another ironic wrinkle, Green’s own DHS Director, Ryan Yamane, was among the indicted. He stepped down in May when subpoenas began flying. Yamane:

Local affiliate KHON2’s political analyst, John Hart, explained why the Governor can’t fire the Lt. Gov. Hart said, “In the Hawaii system, they didn’t get elected together. They were on a ticket, but they ran separately. So constitutionally, he can’t tell her to resign.”

Hart added, “I think her political career is probably at an end at this point, regardless of whether she’s convicted or not.” Headline from Hawaii’s Civil Beat, yesterday:

And thus, the Democrats’ bench shrinks again. Polycrisis.

🚨 This leads us to a larger point about Trump 2.0’s Department of Justice. While many in the MAGA base are still spreading “waiting for someone to get arrested” memes, high-profile, state-level arrests are happening all over the country.

How? The Trump administration systematically dismantled the so-called “ethical” gatekeepers in D.C. The DOJ’s Public Integrity Section —which historically acted as a brake and a bottleneck, protecting favored politicians and shutting down local investigations— was slashed from 36 lawyers down to just two. The long-standing requirement that local prosecutors consult with D.C. before indicting any local political figures was suspended.