🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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Sometimes a headline is so delicious and satisfying that I simply must screen-grab it for you, and this morning’s New York Times version was one of the best yet:

Imagine the excruciating pain experienced by the NYT headline editor forced to greenlight a headline including “Huge Blow to Democrats” and a “major victory for Republicans.” Anyway, that’s how badly Democrats are taking the final inglorious end of their most hopeful gerrymander law, which would have swapped Virginia’s current 6D-5R maps for 10D-1R.

The gerrymandering law was so flawed that not even Virginia’s liberal Supreme Court could rescue it. They’d approved the gerrymandering bill after 40% of voters had already cast ballots without it. The court, not unreasonably, was skeptical of changing the ballot in mid-election.

It was a setback, and for a reaction, the Times reported on progressives’ emotions. “Democrats seemed despondent over the decision,” the Times wrote. “They had invested eight months and nearly $70 million to pass the referendum.” That’s a lot, even in 2026 dollars. Will anybody be fired?

Now, as the Times said, it’s all “wiped away.” They just lost $70 million of donor money that can no longer be spent on the midterm races. Money shredder go brrrrrrr.

It’s not like we didn’t warn them. Mike Young, Virginians for Fair Maps, said: “On the first day Democrats tried to enact this scheme, we said it was illegal and unconstitutional.” Kamala “Chuckles” Harris, who herself was installed without a single primary vote, laughably complained that Virginia’s Supreme Court “ignored the will of the people.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem “Praise be to Allah” Jeffries (D-NY) whined bitterly, “the decision to overturn an entire election is an unprecedented and undemocratic action that cannot stand.” Don Scott, Virginia House Speaker and the named plaintiff in the case, said “voices of the people matter” even as he pushed the referendum through with 40% of ballots already cast.

The most ironic grousing was excreted by Gavin “Hairdo” Newsom, who spat, “MAGA has rigged the system.”

Alert readers will recall that it was the Virginia gerrymander that made all this Democrat despondency politically possible. Remember that, before Virginia’s Dems rushed the last-minute measure onto the in-progress ballot, Indiana Republicans had high-mindedly declined to “unfairly” redistrict that red state (and then paid the price).

But, after Virginia’s blatantly illegal trickery and all-costs maximalism, Republicans all around the country became highly motivated.

So now, between this Virginia ruling, SCOTUS’s Voting Rights Act decision (Callais), and state-level redistricting in TX (+5), FL (+4), MO (+1), NC (+1), TN (+1), LA (+1), SC (+1), and AL (+1), the Cook Report projects Republicans will net +8 House seats from redistricting alone. Democrats went from only needing to flip +3 seats to needing +11— a nearly insurmountable margin.

They literally redistricted themselves into a worse position than where they’d started. “While Democrats have themselves grown more ruthless about gerrymandering,” the article admitted, “they are broadly struggling to keep up.” That’s one way of putting it.

🔥 Yesterday, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche tweeted about the decision. He finally said what I’ve been telling you since last fall (and on which I recently doubled down on in my polycrisis article). As far as I know, this is the first time a top Trump Administration official has made this prediction. Behold, the last two paragraphs of Todd’s tweet, which I’d argue describes the polycrisis without naming it:

Meanwhile, overnight, Virginia’s Democrats launched a long-shot petition asking the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene. I would explain how wildly unlikely that is, but the Times grudgingly made the case for me, right in its own story:

I give their SCOTUS appeal zero chances. They almost certainly know it, too. It’s probably just a play for time. For what? Who knows.

In one amusing clip, Bill Maher was gobsmacked. “It seemed only a few weeks ago, maybe months ago, that it would be impossible for the Democrats to lose this election- no way,” he began. “Well, headline today: way.”

CLIP: Bill Maher explains how “Republicans are winning the gerrymander war (1:28).”

We expected corporate media’s unmitigated gaslighting that Trump’s redistricting battle plan would backfire. But too many Republicans who should have known better also boarded the doom bus. For example, Representative Jay Obernolte (R-CA) said, “It was a mistake to go down this road.” Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) called GOP gerrymandering “bad for our country” and said “nobody should ever go down this route.”

But now, the President has been fully vindicated— even by the Grey Lady herself. Doubters are now welcome to apologize.

Like I keep saying: Let the man work.

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I apologize for all the “I told you so’s” lately, but what can I say? We’ve been awash with opportunities lately. Next up: I’ve told you the covid wars weren’t even close to over. Yesterday, War Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a Department of War COVID-19 Reinstatement and Reconciliation Task Force. They are making everything new again.

CLIP: War Secretary Hegseth announces back pay and restitution for all discharged soldiers who refused jabs, even if they don’t return to service (2:22).

Between August, 2021 and January 2023, about 8,700 courageous servicemembers were involuntarily discharged or separated by the Biden Administration for declining the military’s mandatory experimental covid shots. Around 4,000 were not even honorably discharged, but got ‘general’ discharge terms along with a reprimand, which penalized their re-enlistment options and reduced their benefits.

“Under the leadership of President Trump,” Hegseth said, “the War Department is committed to doing everything we can to make it right. We want warriors of conscience — warriors who made a principled stand for truth.” (The phrase ‘warriors of conscience’ would have gotten a 2022 Pentagon staffer fired. Same words. Same office. Different planet.)

Any servicemember discharged for refusing the covid jab, who wishes to re-enlist, will be reinstated at their original rank with full back pay and benefits. “You were mistreated by the Biden Pentagon, and we are fixing that injustice.”

Second, “even if you do not intend to return to service,” the Secretary continued, “the War Department will provide a path for resolution of unearned bonuses, upgrades to discharge characterizations that will unlock your well-deserved benefits, and removal of adverse documents from your service files.”

Finally, he addressed the future: “I have directed a review of policies and decision-making to ensure that we do not go down this path again.”

This is terrific news for our servicemembers. Both those who bravely resisted Biden’s tyrannical jab mandates, and even those who gave in— who’ll now never face mandates like them again. (Last month, Hegseth even canceled long-standing flu shot requirements, making that seasonal jab optional for the first time.)

It’s easy to connect these dots: flu shots made optional last month; covid-mandate discharges undone this week; a directed policy review behind both. The Biden-era mandate culture isn’t just being repealed— it’s being nuked from orbit.

But more significantly, this proves the backlash against covid mandates continues. It shows people are still as quietly furious now as they were back when Biden was stiff-legging it across the lawn and the Autopen was scribbling like a runaway robot. Covid still remains a powerful political tool, so powerful that corporate media completely ignored Hegseth’s announcement. They remain terrified of it. And they should be terrified.

This still isn’t over, not by a long shot.

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The President quietly made more history yesterday, this time in the all-but-forgotten Proxy War. Reuters reported, “Trump says Russia and Ukraine have agreed to his request for a 3-day ceasefire and a prisoner swap.”

To frame this the proper way: Just imagine the political possibilities if Trump wraps both the Iran War and the Ukraine war before the midterm elections. Suggestively, Democrats have been doing their level best to memory-hole their brave little green-sweatsuited comedian. What Proxy War?? Last week, James Woods noticed the deafening silence:

Three years ago, Zelensky was Churchill in a green hoodie. Now he can’t even get a Ukraine-flag-in-bio.

Since the Proxy War started in February 2022, Ukraine and Russia have made several attempts at short cease-fires, usually on major holidays (Christmas, Easter, the usual ones). All prior ceasefires held like duct tape in a tornado. All were quickly violated by one side or the other within hours.

The new, historic, three-day ceasefire deal came after “substantive talks” between US and Ukrainian officials in Miami yesterday, with US envoys scheduled to visit Kiev “in coming months.” Trump’s ceasefire is the longest of the war so far, and was the first brokered by the Americans. It is best viewed as a trust-building exercise— get both sides to honor three days, and then push for an extension.

The POW exchange —1,000 per side, meaning 2,000 families will be reunited— gives both leaders a quick optics win to help sell the ceasefire domestically. It’s a textbook Art-of-the-Deal incremental close— and the first one Putin’s picked up the phone for.

The Proxy War is back on the midterm menu.

👽👽👽

Here we go again! Yesterday, the New York Times ran a story headlined, “U.F.O. Files Released by U.S. Shed Light on What the Government Knows.” The Department of War released the first set of 162 documents out of “millions of records, including some that exist only on paper”— which are all apparently being reviewed for declassification by someone who must be consuming near-fatal amounts of caffeine.

According to the official announcement, the government was providing “maximum transparency” by dumping over 160 files dating back 80 years. This first set included FBI case files, intelligence reports, and videos from military platforms worldwide.

Naturally, the internet went wild. People were expecting high-definition, 4K footage of little green men shaking hands with the President. They were expecting blueprints for hyperdrive engines. They were expecting, at the very least, a clear photograph of an alien spacecraft.

But we got what more of what we always get: grainy, flickering, jumpy shots of blurry dots flapping around like gnats on the camera lens.

It is difficult to explain this consistent blurriness. We live in an era where a teenager on TikTok can accidentally film a crystal-clear, slow-motion, high-definition video of themselves falling off a hoverboard. We have satellites that can read the expiration date on a discarded Yoplait container from low Earth orbit. We have Ring cams with better resolution than the Hubble Space Telescope.

Yet, somehow, whenever a multi-million-dollar, state-of-the-art military aircraft encounters a highly advanced extraterrestrial vessel, the resulting video looks like it was filmed through a jar of Vaseline by a person suffering from severe hiccups.

One of the newly released videos, for example, purports to show an “eight-pointed star” streaking across the sky in 2013. The footage, shot using an infrared sensor, shows a blob that looks less like an interstellar cruiser and more like a lint ball stuck to a microscope. The official description notes that it has “arms of alternating length,” which is exactly how I would describe a squished Daddy Longlegs.

Another file includes a “composite sketch” with an “FBI Lab rendered graphic overlay” depicting a metallic object hovering over a field. Translated from bureaucratese: “We had a guy draw a picture of what somebody said they saw, and then we put a fancy border on it.”

There is also a transcript from the Apollo 17 astronauts describing “very bright particles or fragments” tumbling past their window, which they said looked like the Fourth of July. The official caption noted that a preliminary analysis suggests it could be a “physical object.” Thank goodness for the experts. Without their ‘preliminary analysis,’ we might have assumed the astronauts were just hallucinating space confetti.

The pro-alien and no-alien camps were having a pretty crazy day. Sean Kirkpatrick, a physicist who used to lead the Pentagon’s anomaly resolution office, tried to burst the bubble. He stated that there is no bombshell evidence of aliens in these files. He explained that many of these viral videos of speedy, pill-shaped objects are actually just “the thermal bloom of jet engines” captured by infrared cameras.

In other words, the military is chasing its own exhaust fumes. Which is fine so far as it goes. They have to chase something. But then why collect the fume videos into classified files? It’s a rare federal program that concludes “we didn’t actually need to investigate this.”

True believers insisted that the government is still covering up the real evidence. They pointed out that, if aliens can master faster-than-light travel and anti-gravity propulsion, they can certainly invent a cloaking device that makes them look exactly like a blurry dot on a Navy pilot’s targeting screen.

Personally, I am starting to think that the aliens are doing this on purpose. They’re gaslighting us. If you were a highly advanced inter-dimensional being visiting a planet where the dominant species spends its time arguing about “kings” on the internet and eating deep-fried Oreos at state fairs, would you want to be seen clearly? Of course not. You would keep your distance, fly erratically, and make sure you always look like a smudge.

While we may not yet have the definitive proof we were hoping for, we do have 162 new files to analyze, debate, and turn into profitable YouTube discussion videos. And who knows? Maybe the next batch of declassified files will finally contain the smoking gun. There’s still ‘millions’ of pages to go.

Until then, the only aliens we can see clearly are the ones in front of the cameras, screaming “MAGA rigged the system” while losing 26-7 in Alabama. Maybe Fox Mulder was right — the truth is out there. He just had the wrong ‘there.’

Have a wonderful weekend! And Happy Mother’s Day to all our C&C moms. We shall return on Monday morning with more essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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Barely two weeks ago, corporate media was running articles crowing about Democrats’ wonderful midterm prospects to win back a majority in the House of Representatives and then launch Trump Impeachment 3.0. But one Supreme Court decision later— and it’s pure pandemonium. Local WSMV-4 reported, “Chaos erupts at Tennessee Capitol as redistricting maps move forward.”

CLIP: ‘Chaos’ takes the podium as Republicans gerrymander away all Democrat House seats (2:24).

The final vote in the Tennessee State House sounded less like a legislative proceeding and more like a middle school band practice gone horribly wrong. Demonstrators yowled, bullhorns blared, Democrats pounded their desks and walked out, troopers removed obstreperous gallery members, and one Democrat Senator climbed on a table and refused to come down. Despite the cacophony, the Republicans calmly approved the map, presumably using sign language and smoke signals to communicate their “yea” votes through the racket.

In one viral clip, during a tussle with a state trooper, Democrat state Representative Justin Pearson screamed “BOY!” in the officer’s face before calling him a “stupid motherf*cker.” It was pure bedlam.

It’s weird, since Democrats threw a fiesta after the same thing happened in Virginia, except going in Democrats’ favor. And, even though their redistricting was so illegal that a court threw it out one day later, no Virginia Republicans climbed on tables, shouted through bullhorns, or screamed obscenities in the faces of state troopers.

Anyway, Tennessee Republicans got the vote done. Governor Bill Lee has already signed the redistricting bill, which will surely generate equal numbers of lawsuits and New York Times articles announcing the death of democracy or something.

🔥 Mayhem equally ensued in Alabama. In a real-life Shakespearean weather metaphor, Republican lawmakers completed the redistricting vote during a storm evacuation. All the while, Democrat officials screamed gibberish like King Lear, refused to leave the lectern, and pulled fire alarms that blared the whole time. Meanwhile, mandatory evacuation notices lit up everyone’s phones, water began floating lawmakers’ cars away, and floodwaters seeped into the state house’s ground floor, making the hallways look a lot like the flume ride at Walt Disney World.

Ironically, the violent thunderstorm had the positive effect of ending a Democrat filibuster which —while the fire alarm continued to blare— allowed Republicans to call the vote. The lawmakers cast their votes even as they were evacuating the chamber. State Senator Greg Albritton (R-Atmore), stood at the chamber doors, making sure each member voted before they left.

The redistricting bill passed 26-7. Down here in Florida, we call that margin, “not even close enough to kill a gator with a hand grenade.”

The video scenes from the two legislatures were so troubling and bizarre they almost defy description. It was a horrible optics for Democrats. It confirmed everything I described yesterday in the Polycrisis roundup. They acted like panicked, unreasoning zoo animals released into a gang turf war that spilled over into an out-of-control Delta Tau Chi house party.

Democrats displayed no dignity. No professionalism. No soaring rhetoric. No cunning procedural strategy. Just … flinging feces.

This is not the behavior of an organized, effective political party. It smacked of desperation. It was pure mob mania; petulant, childish emotional blackmail— nothing more sophisticated than do what we want or we’ll throw a tantrum right here in the cereal aisle.

By contrast, Alabama and Tennessee Republicans shone. They remained calm and dignified. They were professional. They stayed off the tables. Through the chaotic noise and confusion, they bravely followed —as best they could given the circumstances— Robert’s Rules of Order. And they won— as they should have, since Republicans hold supermajorities in both states. (Though it hasn’t stopped them from caving under the weight of Democrats’ performative emotional extortions in the past.)

These twin cacophonous conflicts are a metaphor for, or perhaps, a preview of the midterm elections. The volume of the noisy chaos will increase over the next few months, as the Democrat party continues devolving into dissolute anarchy. If the Polycrisis theory is correct, we are witnessing the feverish death throes of a major political party —with all its beneficiaries and hangers-on— sinking beneath the waves for the last time.

Hopefully!

🔥🔥🔥

I told you progressives were going crazy. Almost as if the corporate media wanted to reinforce yesterday’s Polycrisis story, the Times ran a major guest essay yesterday headlined, “Why So Few Babies? We Might Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All.” The article takes 20 graphs to get there, but the “biggest reason” was: progressive anxiety. And it even included the P-word as the reason for all the anxiety.

“A growing body of evidence,” the story explained, “suggests that the anxiety of bringing a child into such an uncertain world may increasingly outweigh the appeal of motherhood.” (For liberals.) The article briefly noted that the world has faced uncertain prospects before, so it asked: what’s different now? Behold, the loud echo from yesterday’s roundup:

Never doubt me.

Anyway, to fix the particular crisis of plummeting birth rates (which are flat terrible among Democrats), the Times quoted Sarah Hayford, a population expert at Ohio State. Sarah explained that some “policies” —i.e., the government— must make “systems more conducive to living a happy and secure and healthy life as a person.” Among the options Sarah mentioned were bribing women with tax incentives and offering them free child care, because offloading kids to government workers makes motherhood so much more fulfilling.

Sarah did not mention any policy changes that might incentivize women to leave the workforce, though. That would be a progressive bridge too far.

🔥 Perhaps the best evidence for my thesis was unintentionally illustrated by the story’s personal interest anecdote: a young-ish couple who said they wanted kids, but sadly, there are just too many problems. Not fertility problems. Not even their problems. Other people’s problems.

Just look at this inventory of worry, which includes climate change, racial profiling, lack of government subsidies, and even hypothetical unvaccinated classmates for their as-yet unconceived children:

That paragraph is doing so much accidental work.

The Times’ anecdote literally described a woman with an advanced degree, a stable job, and a supportive marriage who is so saturated in elite risk discourse that she’s pre‑worrying about hypothetical unvaccinated classmates for hypothetical children she hasn’t even conceived yet. That’s not “uncertainty.” It’s a cultivated neurosis — progressive anxiety‑as‑virtue, where a “good person” is always scanning the horizon for the next danger and next moral failure to worry about.

The implications for low reproduction —especially among progressives— is existentially profound. As if to make my point, this section appeared at the top of this morning’s New York Times web page:

The “Biggest Reason” article unintentionally exposed the truth, which must be read between its lines. The problem isn’t “uncertainty,” as the article claims. It is a culture of permissive pessimism that roots progressives’ mental-health polycrisis.

Modern Democrats define ‘being happy’ as inherently evil, or at least, as non-virtuous. No one who is “awoke” to all the world’s various injustices can morally be happy or content until all the problems are resolved. Not worrying either means you don’t care or you aren’t paying enough attention. And holding off on having children —and telling everyone about it— is how liberals prove to each other how “woke” they are.

To the extent that having kids is inherently an expression of optimism, it is thus also a moral failure. For liberals, any good person questions the morality of reproduction itself in light of every global injustice on the menu. Don’t forget how climate change affects the New Guinea striped salamander!

Let me explain it another way. What the essay’s author called “uncertainty” —its soft, non-judgy euphemism for anxiety— is really a very specific moral culture of pessimism and guilt, reinforced by nonstop progressive rhetoric. “Decent” people are supposed to feel bad, scared, and ashamed— almost all the time. If you’re not anxious about climate, fascism, racism, sexism, transphobia, pandemics, inequality, AI, and “our democracy,” that proves you’re either ignorant or evil.

In progressives’ worldview, happiness is equivalent to complicity. Given that inherent contradiction —being fulfilled by being unhappy— the real surprise is how many of them don’t report mental health problems.

🔥 Then, 3,000 words in, the article finally, tentatively, touched a finger to the true answer, before snatching it away. “There is,” the author explained, “one low-cost fertility policy that actually seems to work: faith.” After noting that religious families have far more children than agnostic or atheistic couples, it quickly moved on from that uncomfortable truth, and never mentioned the liberal/conservative divide at all.

The irony was that the Times admitted that the “one low‑cost fertility policy that actually seems to work is faith,” but then retreated into ever finer gradations of “uncertainty” and increasingly more expensive government interventions. But, having admitted the efficacy of faith, the piece never asked, “how might we recover faith, or build something else like it?”

Instead, it pivoted right back to policy, paid leave, and large‑scale political transformation.

In a March, 2023 blockbuster article, the American Affairs Journal ran a story headlined, “How to Understand the Well-Being Gap between Liberals and Conservatives.” It is the most complete analysis of this tragic happiness gap that I’ve found in any single reference. (Read it.) It cited scads of studies showing that, irrespective of religion, “Conservatives do not just report higher levels of happiness, they also report higher levels of meaning in their lives.” Thus, “independent of religious attendance, liberals are roughly twice as likely to report mental illness as conservatives.”

This effect seems to hold almost universally, even worldwide: “Liberals were happier than conservatives in only 5 out of 92 countries,” one international study showed, “and never in the United States.”

That said, the religious happiness boost is real, measurable, and widely reported. Weekly conservative church attendees reported the lowest levels of anxiety of any group. Even liberals benefit from attending church. I can personally testify to the dramatic benefits from my own experience. For most of my life, I was chronically anxious, a professional worrywart, until the day I had an unexpected religious encounter in 2013. My lifelong anxiety disappeared immediately and has never returned.

Yet, despite this well-documented faith-happiness connection (which, just saying, the Bible itself promises), therapists rarely suggest going to church, prioritizing instead risky chemical interventions like SSRIs and circular naval-gazing. Indeed, the secular expert class would rather redesign the entire economy —or your neurotransmitters— than seriously entertain the possibility that the most powerful “uncertainty reduction strategy” is a church down the street and a God who commands “do not be anxious.”

So in the same story, side by side, we find secular, highly educated progressives tying themselves into pretzel-like knots over potential future problems like unvaccinated classmates and structural, inescapable doom; compared with conservative and religious Americans who cut through all of that with simple, confidence‑building narratives around faith, redemption, and patriotism— and then they actually have babies.

Aren’t you glad you’re not liberal? You don’t have to constantly fret about being canceled by your friends for not fretting enough. We should be sympathetic to our suffering progressive pals, family members, and neighbors, who are literally torturing themselves with a doom spiral of performative anxiety.

Never worry. Be proactive and optimistic. Take the long view.

🔥🔥🔥

The polycrisis may not be limited to our own Democrats. It might be spreading. Great Britain held its version of the U.S. midterms yesterday, and a political earthquake shook its longtime liberal party to the roots. The New York Times reported, “Early UK Local Election Results Point to Big Losses for Starmer’s Party.” If anything, that was an understatement.

The UK Labour Party is the equivalent to our Democrat party. It’s their “mainstream” progressive party, and has been in control of the government since shortly after the pandemic started. It supported Ukraine, refused to help in Iran, kept the borders open, locked up Facebook commenters, refused to investigate grooming gangs, and appointed one of Epstein’s besties as the Ambassador to the United States.

Yesterday, Labour finally got its political clock cleaned.

The clock cleaner was UK’s Reform Party, led by “far right” gadfly Nigel Farage. It is a brand-new third party, and Farage is a Ross Perot-like figure who in 2016 led the UK’s movement to leave the European Union. So far, Reform has won +400 seats (all new seats for the new party), and Labor has lost nearly -300. About 5,000 seats are in play.

Farage said, “We are way exceeding anything that I thought.”

Stuffed-frog Keir Starmer, the current prime minister and the Labour Party’s leader, has the lowest approval ratings for that office in UK history. Despite the loss of mandate, he brushed off loud calls for his resignation and vowed to soldier on. “I was elected to meet these challenges, and I’m not going to walk away from them and plunge the country into chaos,” Starmer said.

A GB News anchor expressed amazement. “I’ve never heard anything like this in my life,” he said, obviously shocked. “83% of Labour’s incumbent seats— smashed like matchwood.”

It’s a bigger story than the Indiana RINOs who were erased in this week’s primary.

In his sad “we got shellacked” post-mortem speech to party supporters, Starmer did exactly what I described yesterday. He laid out an “agenda” for “change” that was 100% mealy-mouthed buzzwords, with not a single measurable suggestion. He said, “In coming days, I will set out the steps we will take to deliver the change voters want and deserve. So that every child can go as far as their talent and ability can take them, not held back by poverty. So that every community can have what it needs, a secure safe place for everybody to live. So households and families do not feel constantly held back by a cost-of-living crisis. A Britain where everybody can feel proud of where they live and where they work.”

You can’t find a single actionable policy anywhere in Starmer’s overlong string of liberal value signals. He can’t afford to take any firm position on anything, because the Labour Party —like our Democrats— is a “big-tent coalition” party that is trapped in a progressive purity spiral. It includes moderate Blairites and trade unionists alongside neo-communist “democratic socialists” and trans activists. Thus, Starmer’s stuck. Offering anything but vibes risks alienating one group or another.

CLIP: GB News anchor shocked by Labour’s 83% loss (2:33).

Now consider this. In 2016, the UK’s successful Brexit movement predicted Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton by about five months. We are about six months out from the midterm elections. Could it be happening again? Could Labour’s shocking, catastrophic collapse yesterday predict something similar for U.S. Democrats in November, mirroring 2016’s dynamics?

It makes you think. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Have a fantastic Friday! Coffee & Covid will return tomorrow morning, for the Weekend Edition roundup of your essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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Don’t race off! We cannot do it alone. Consider joining up with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds. I could sure use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠

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🌍🇺🇸 C&C SPECIAL EDITION 🇺🇸🌍

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If you listen closely to the wind blowing through Washington, D.C., you might hear a faint, high-pitched whining sound. That is not the sound of cicadas fluttering through the cherry blossoms. That is the sound of the Democrat Party realizing that the check has finally arrived, and their credit card was declined. Last month, the Washington Post broke a story that perfectly captures the Democrat Party’s woebegone state:

Ruh-roh.

For the last few years, despite occasional bouts of truth bursting through the costume’s seams, corporate media has generally assured everyone that the Democratic Party is in fine fettle. Sharp as a tack. It is, they say, like a double-decker bus packed with a coalition of highly educated coastal elites, powerful unions, a motivated gang of highly diverse grievance groups, plus legions of narcissistic white boomers who somehow still believe that NPR is the best way to learn what’s going on in the world.

But underneath the hood, the engine was smoking, the transmission was held together by duct tape, and the bus driver was staring blankly at the dashboard trying to remember what to do when it makes that weird noise. The passengers argued about whether the bus should be renamed to something more trans-inclusive, whether to start with a land acknowledgment, and whether that weird noise was actually a microaggression.

Now, the bus has completely stalled out, parked on the side of the highway, and the passengers are sitting inside waiting for someone else to come fix it.

🔥 Corporate media is desperately trying to conceal what historians and political scientists call a “polycrisis.” As defined by historian Adam Tooze (and the World Economic Forum, which considered it an opportunity instead of a problem), a polycrisis happens “where disparate crises interact such that the overall impact far exceeds the sum of each part.” It describes where the political ground is destabilized from so many different directions at once that policymakers ultimately become paralyzed, usually while forming another gold-star committee to consider funding a new study on the destabilization.

Tooze explained, “In the polycrisis, the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts.”

Throughout history, apparently successful political parties have been sidelined or even destroyed in what appears to be an instant. The UK Labour Party spent nearly two decades in the political wilderness after 1979, for instance. The Republicans were nearly destroyed twice in the 20th Century— one 20-year ‘wilderness’ stretch after the Great Depression, and another after Watergate (Time Magazine ran a cover story wondering whether the party could survive).

In both GOP cases, Republicans eventually recovered —once by nominating a war hero (Eisenhower), and then by finding a unifying leader with fresh, genuine, ideological clarity (Reagan). The Democrats currently have neither option available.

And as we’ll soon see, history’s better example might be the Whig Party, which precipitously collapsed in 1850, leaving not a rack behind.

But amid all those examples, the modern Democratic polycrisis stands out as uniquely spectacular. It’s experiencing the political equivalent of getting audited by the IRS on the same day your Pekinese chews through your internet cable and then your roof caves in right after you opened the insurance cancellation notice.

🔥 All the insiders know it. Trad-media is doing its level best to distract and obfuscate, but some recent headlines are flashing red: On April 9th, Bloomberg warned that “Michigan Shows Democrats’ Identity Crisis Up Close.” On March 15th, Axios reported that “Democrats face a post-Trump identity crisis for 2028.” On March 30th, the NDSMC Observer simply called it “The Democratic party’s identity crisis.”

“The Democratic Party has an aura of ineffectiveness,” NDSMC wrote. “This is an existential threat.” The main problem, according to the author, is that the party is now only about opposing Trump— which manifestly is not working. So, the author argued, “with that opposition, there needs to be an alternative message. Something that voters can get behind. An idea. A value. Not the lack of values. Not just anti-MAGA.”

Jim Messina, Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, agreed. “You can’t win a presidential election on opposition alone,” he told Axios. Democrats (not MAGA) are fractured. “Democrats are deeply divided over what they’d do if they returned to power,” Axios said. They intend to run against Trump in the 2026 midterms, but realize that won’t work in 2028, when Trump is terming out.

Democrats must “build a message predicated on values rather than reactions,” the NDSMC author fretted, “lest they doom themselves to a future of perpetual minority status, forever living in the shadow of the MAGA right.” But what screamed from the pages was that the author had no suggestions for a message. Not one.

The reason he didn’t is the same reason the Democrats cannot fix this problem. It’s a structural problem broken beyond repair.

Identity crises are the worst. A person or group questioning their very identity is a sinkhole of potential disaster. It’s like the Democrat Party is bored with being a stay-at-home dad named Benjamin, and yearns to move to Las Vegas, change its name to Mercedes, get that special surgery, and become a stripper.

It would be bad enough if identity were the only crisis Democrats were facing. Let’s dissect the anatomy of this rapidly approaching fast-motion disaster.

🔥🔥🔥

A polycrisis isn’t just a regular old run of bad luck. It is a structural failure. In any normal political cycle, a party could lose an election, suffer a fundraising dip, or deal with pushback against an unpopular leader. Or even all three. Those problems are manageable. You just replace the leader, change the messaging, and pretend you never actually supported the things you supported yesterday.

But in a polycrisis, the mechanisms for fixing the problems also break. The disease and the cure become indistinguishable. That’s what Democrats face. They are currently trapped in a perfect storm of intersecting, overlapping, cannibalistic calamities, each feeding and feeding off the others.

Democrats core problem is that their party has become an “odd coalition” of wildly divergent interest groups united by only one thing: opposition to Donald Trump. The so-called “No Kings” movement is the problem’s purest expression. No Kings is a hot mess of a tire fire, a janky collection of unrelated grievance groups, united only by deliberately vague policy positions— because articulating any specific proposal would immediately expose that half the coalition actively despises the other half.

When a political party has no articulable platform besides “we are not the other guy,” a polycrisis is not just possible. It becomes mandatory.

Part II: The Crises Unfold - Coalition Defections and the Single-Issue Trap

Traditionally, the Democrat Party has billed itself as the champion of the working man and minorities. Today, it is increasingly the party of the wealthy, credentialed, and highly educated. This is a big image problem when your main message is “eat the rich.” Their hypocrisy is being noticed— inside the tent.

For example, on April 6th, far-left Jacobin Magazine ran a story headlined, “Democrats Are Facing a Moment of Reckoning.” It explained:

Uh-oh! Fracture!

The 2024 election exposed the fracture for all to see. Kamala Harris won 80% of the Black vote— solid, but a massive 10-point drop from Joe Biden’s 90% in 2020. President Trump secured 20% of the Black vote, the highest level of support from that demographic since George W. Bush in 2000. The shift was even more extreme among Hispanic voters, where Trump narrowed the gap to a mere 3 points, as compared to Biden’s 25-point margin four years earlier.

The shift among young men is particularly stark. Men under 50 split evenly (49% to 48%) between Trump and Harris, erasing a 10-point Democrat advantage from 2020.

Instead of addressing these defecting voters’ concerns, factions within the Democrat party are doubling down on purity tests, which I’ve previously labeled as the “purity spiral.” In Michigan, for instance, progressive Democrats punished the Harris campaign over the administration’s handling of Gaza, proving that for some factions, “wallowing in the illusion of purity” was more important than building a winning coalition. (That’s from last month’s Detroit News.)

The Detroit News wrung its bony hands over the fruits of the state’s recent Democrat primary nomination results, which produced far-left candidates whose views “raise serious questions about their electability.”

Recent polling by the Manhattan Institute confirmed the disconnect. The Democrat party is essentially three blocs: Moderates (47%), Progressive Liberals (37%), and a “Woke Fringe” (11%). The median Democrat actually wants border security and safe streets, but the party is held hostage by the 11% who think math is racist, there’s an infinite number of genders, and Karl Marx was on the right track but just didn’t try hard enough.

The Gerontocracy

While the Democrat base is fracturing, while fresh, bold ideas are needed to hold it together, the leadership is calcifying. The halls of Congress increasingly resemble a retirement home with excellent benefits combined with a surprising amount of insider trading that is best characterized as estate planning. As of early 2026, 24 members of Congress are 80 or older, over half are running for re-election, and the vast majority are Democrats. In the Senate, the median age of Democrats is 66, significantly older than their Republican counterparts.

When a reporter asked Representative Maxine “Auntie” Waters, 88, why she continues to serve, she replied, “My work is not finished, and I don’t know if it will ever be finished.” This creates a darkly comedic juxtaposition: a party ostensibly championing the future, yet visibly clinging to the past, with internal demands for “generational change” met with the political equivalent of “not yet, dearie.”

Maxine Waters has now served in Congress longer than most of her constituents have been alive. At some point, “public servant” becomes “geological feature.”

An Increasingly Anxious Base

Perhaps the most under-appreciated aspect of the polycrisis is the perplexing psychological condition of the Democrat base. Studies consistently show that liberals report significantly lower levels of happiness and psychological well-being compared to conservatives. Maybe building an identity out of imminent global climate destruction and looming, ever-present fascism was a bad idea.

Progressivism is literally driving them insane.

According to the 2022 Cooperative Election Study, conservatives outnumber liberals 51% to 20% among those reporting “excellent” mental health, while liberals outnumber conservatives 45% to 19% among those reporting “poor” mental health. Read that again— nearly half of liberals self-report having poor mental health. Shocker.

On a 100-point happiness scale, even childless conservatives scored a 63; while childless liberals scored a dismaying 48. So weird.

In their noble quest to bear the weight of the world’s injustices, modern progressives have stumbled into a perpetual state of existential angst. While a conservative is happily eating a hot dog and thinking about tonight’s MMA matchup, the liberal is meticulously fact-checking the organic status of their kale, worrying about whether their lawnmower’s carbon footprint is perpetuating the patriarchy, and wondering if they are using this week’s proper pronouns.

A political base running on a steady diet of SSRIs and catastrophic thinking is highly susceptible to burnout. It becomes increasingly difficult to knock on doors for candidates when you are simultaneously convinced that the planet has only six months to live and your neighbor’s F-250 is a hate crime.

The Laundromat is Closed

Running a modern political campaign requires astronomical amounts of money. For years, Democrats relied on two massive funding streams: small-dollar digital donations via ActBlue, and a sprawling network of government-funded NGOs. Both are now collapsing.

Last month, the Washington Post reported that the Democratic National Committee is facing a massive cash crunch as “top donors have been slow to open their wallets.” The DNC had assured party officials that their resounding 15-point victory in the Virginia governor’s race would open the floodgates. “But big checks did not flood back,” leaving DNC Chairman Ken Martin presiding over a financial and leadership crisis.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has taken a sledgehammer to the NGO complex. DOGE first targeted USAID, leading to the elimination of over 5,000 programs. These programs were rife with fraud and political grift, with taxpayer money flowing through dizzying arrays of cut-out corporations to Democrat coffers. Musk bluntly explained, “This is one of the biggest sources of fraud in the world— government-funded NGOs.”

The broader recent crackdowns on Medicare fraud, autism services, and daycare funding are systematically cutting off the federal spigot that has long nourished progressive advocacy groups and political operatives. The “blue laundromat” is being condemned, and the DNC is suddenly discovering that running a political party requires actual money and real fundraising, which tends to be harder than making backroom deals with Somalian cartels.

Lawfare Blowback: The Raid on Senator Lucas

For years, Democrats cheered more enthusiastically than a high-school squad at tryouts while prosecutors launched unprecedented legal attacks against Donald J. Trump. Now, the bill for all that norm-destruction is coming due. Yesterday, for example, CNN reported, “FBI searches business, other locations associated with Democratic Virginia state senator.”

Let’s back up for a second. Last year, Democrats shook their fists after Pam Bondi fired most of the DOJ’s Washington D.C.-based ethics “oversight group.” Democrats claimed it dismantled “ethics,” but what it really did was unshackle local U.S. attorneys to pursue political investigations in their districts without the D.C. office shutting them down.

What is being called “a shocking escalation” unfolded yesterday, when the FBI raided the Portsmouth office of Virginia State Senate President Pro Tempore L. Louise Lucas. Lucas, 82, another geriatric Democrat ‘serving’ for 34 years, was targeted in a “major corruption investigation.” Agents also raided a cannabis dispensary she co-owns. 🙄

What makes this extraordinary —and to Democrats, sinister— is that Lucas was the lead architect of Virginia’s Democrat-backed redistricting push— the map that Democrats were counting on to win up to four additional congressional seats. The person who drew the maps to save the House is now under federal investigation. (This also exemplifies Democrats’ gerontocracy problem: at 82, after 34 years in office, Lucas had apparently accumulated enough power, real estate, and cannabis dispensaries to attract the FBI’s attention. This is what a ‘long and distinguished career in public service’ looks like in the modern Democrat Party.)

The weaponization of the justice system has turned out to be a double-edged sword, and currently, Democrats are holding that sword by the blade end.

As I reported yesterday, in Georgia, the DOJ has issued a sweeping grand jury subpoena demanding the personal information of 3,000 Fulton County election workers from 2020. Yesterday, a federal judge just shut down Fulton’s request to get its ballots back in a blockbuster 68-page order. NBC reported, “Judge says Justice Department can keep the 2020 election ballots the FBI seized from Fulton County.”

🔥 In November, several of Gavin Newsom’s political allies were indicted for corruption. Capitol Weekly, November 12th:

Also indicted were Greg Campbell, an influential Democrat ‘consultant’ (fixer), Sean McCluskie, former Chief of Staff to Xavier Becerra, and McCluskie’s spouse. Alexis Podesta, a former secretary at the California Housing Agency who currently runs her own consulting firm was included in the indictment, but unnamed, as an unindicted co-conspirator. Her attorney said she was not charged and is cooperating with investigators.

Campbell and McCluskie pleaded guilty and are awaiting sentencing. Williamson, who refused to take a plea, has a criminal case and parallel ethics probe that remain pending. The available reporting strongly suggests this is bigger than just the named defendants, and is radiating outward through Newsom‑world and the broader Sacramento ecosystem.

The Collapse of Trad-Media

An entirely separate problem for Democrats is the collapse of the legacy media infrastructure that has for decades carried water for the progressive platform. Trust in mass media has hit a record low of 28 percent. Viewers are migrating to alternative media, mostly conservative or conservative-adjacent podcasts like The Joe Rogan Experience.

Corporate media is shifting rightwards. Within the last six months or so, conservative billionaires Larry and David Ellison acquired Warner Brothers (which owns CNN), independent commentator Bari Weiss was installed as editor-in-chief at CBS News, Jeff Bezos’ new head of the Washington Post fired 13 “climate reporters,” and the list goes on. Furthermore, as you well know, X (formerly Twitter) under Musk’s ownership allows uncensored conservative content.

The Guardian, yesterday:

The Democratic Party’s traditional megaphone is on the fritz. The batteries are running out. Which means they can no longer just scream “racist!” at their political problems and expect them to go away. They can no longer rely on corporate media to promote their narratives and psyops.

They are going to have to work harder to earn audience attention— but their problems are multiplied since they can’t enunciate clear policy positions anyway. They must feel like an aggressive drunk who dominated the barroom conversation through brute force until new management made him take it outside. Now nobody listens, and everybody feels better. And it’s much quieter inside.

Part III: The Whig Party’s Warning from 1850

To understand where this polycrisis is heading, we can look back to the 1850s and the collapse of the American Whig Party. The parallels to today’s Democratic Party are almost uncomfortably precise. It’s kind of astonishing.

The Whigs were founded in the 1830s as a coalition united primarily by one thing: opposition to Andrew Jackson. Ironically, they sneeringly called him —wait for it— “King Andrew.” You can’t make this kind of thing up. In the first historical parallel with today’s Democrats, the Whigs were a party defined entirely by what and who they were against.

Like modern Democrats, the Whigs were a coalition party. Because their fragile coalition included Northern industrialists and Southern planters, the Whigs needed to avoid naming specific policy platforms, which would expose their internal contradictions and anger one side or the other. In 1852, desperate to keep the coalition together, they nominated General Winfield Scott. Scott was 66 (ancient for the era), famously pompous, and nicknamed “Old Fuss and Feathers.”

Scott was also so physically enormous —weighing in at over 300 pounds— that he could not mount a horse without a stepladder and significant, um, assistance. Today, that would be like being unable to fit into a normal-sized car without a giant shoehorn.

The parallel to Joe Biden —an aging, physically declining figure nominated purely because the coalition couldn’t agree on anyone else— is spectacular. Scott’s inability to get on a horse is the 19th-century equivalent of Biden’s inability to walk a straight line across a stage without wandering off to shake hands with a potted plant or falling over a sandbag.

The Whigs’ fatal flaw was that they were a national party in an era when the central question of American politics —slavery— was inherently sectional. As long as slavery could be kept off the agenda, the Whigs’ coalition held. The moment it couldn’t, the party fractured and died. And a brand-new political party flowered into life (the Republicans).

Like the Whigs, today’s Democrat Party faces a similar irreconcilable fracture line. Not just one. Several of them. Immigration, police funding, and trans “rights” are all solid examples. All of them are potentially slavery questions for the loose Democrat coalition. If the DNC takes a strong position on any of those issues, it will forever fracture the coalition. That’s why they can’t commit.

Take immigration, for example. The progressive wing views open borders and amnesty as a moral imperative rooted in anti-racism. But Democrats’ working-class wing —especially unions, black, and hispanic voters, who are currently all defecting to the GOP— views unrestricted immigration as direct economic competition that drives down wages and overwhelms local resources.

The immigration question cleaves the coalition along lines that cannot be papered over with vague language about “comprehensive reform.” Every time the party tries to stake out a middle position, it simultaneously enrages multiple factions.

Progressives accuse leadership of fascism; the working class accuses leadership of abandonment.

The Whigs were destroyed not by a single catastrophic defeat, but by a slow accumulation of contradictions that ultimately made the coalition mathematically impossible to maintain. Then, snap. That is precisely the dynamic of a polycrisis, and it is precisely what the Democrats are facing now.

Part IV: Tipping Points and the Hegelian Synthesis

In complex systems theory, a polycrisis does not resolve itself gradually. It builds pressure until it reaches a tipping point— a threshold where a final small change —the proverbial camel’s straw— triggers an abrupt, potentially irreversible transformation or collapse.

For the Democratic Party, the 2026 midterms represent that tipping point. They face a brutal structural map, needing four seats to retake the Senate. Midcycle redistricting, wildly exacerbated by the Supreme Court’s recent Louisiana v. Callais decision striking down minority-majority districts, has scrambled the House battlefield more thoroughly than eggs on a Waffle House grill.

But the most profound implication of where the polycrisis is going, and what it will make politically possible, can best be understood through the Hegelian dialectic: thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

The thesis is the current, chaotic, decentralized election system with late counting, mail-in ballots, harvesting, permissive voter rolls, and weak ID requirements. Democrats’ viability depends on that system, and they will fight to the political death to preserve it.

The Hegelian antithesis is the current crisis— the ongoing federal investigations in Georgia, Arizona, and elsewhere, combined with aggressive crackdowns on non-citizen voting and the stalled SAVE America Act, which would mandate ID, citizenship, and strict voter purges.

If the DOJ’s investigations produce credible convictions of election workers or political figures, it will shatter whatever remaining trust exists in the system. The synthesis is the solution that comes next, having been made politically possible by the thesis/antithesis dynamic. In this case, it will probably take the shape of a comprehensive federal elections bill. Maybe the SAVE Act. Maybe something bigger.

For decades, Republicans have called for uniform federal elections standards— mandatory voter ID, paper ballot backups, strict chain-of-custody rules, and aggressive enforcement against non-citizen voting. Democrats have blocked these measures, usually by claiming that requiring an ID to vote is racist, a post-millennial form of Jim Crow— even though everyone needs an ID to buy Sudafed at CVS, cash a check, or go to a concert.

But if elections officials are convicted of election crimes, the political cost of obstructing reform will become prohibitive, and long-deadlocked change will suddenly become politically possible. The Democrats wouldn’t need to believe the convictions were legitimate. They would simply have to recognize that the perception of crisis was existential to their electoral viability. It would be like finally agreeing to wear a seatbelt because the airbag broke.

Supporting a federal elections bill becomes their only way to say, “We fixed the problem,” as opposed to defending the obviously broken status quo. As Democrats scramble to plug the holes in the hull, they may soon find that the only way to save the ship is to agree to a new set of rules written by the people they spent the last decade trying to destroy.

If a strong elections bill is passed —whether the SAVE Act or something else— Democrats may save themselves, but will enter their own 20-year wilderness period while they remake themselves into a party that can maintain a coherent message. Or it may be too late, and the longest-surviving political party in American history may be buried next to the Whigs.

I’ve only named some of the crises facing Democrats. There are more, like the 2030 Census, which most analysts predict will shift control of Congress and the electoral college back toward the GOP.

The Democratic polycrisis is not just a run of bad luck. It is the systemic collapse of a political coalition, a fundraising apparatus, an ideological project, and an institutional support network, all happening at the exact same time. The GOP could still lose its advantage by somehow snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, as it has a bad habit of doing, but the game is now theirs to lose.

The Democrats aren’t just losing the game; they are losing the whole stadium.

Have a terrific Thursday! Sprint back here tomorrow morning, for your regular-style roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🔥🔥🔥

BOOM. Last year, Indiana’s Republican supermajority filed a bill to redistrict the state into sane, non-racist districts that would have given the GOP +2 seats in the House of Representatives. It sailed through Indiana’s house, but sank in the senate after 21 Republicans voted with 10 Democrats to stop it. Seven of the defectors were up for re-election this year. Yesterday, NBC reported on Indiana’s primary: “Trump exacts revenge in Indiana over redistricting vote, with five GOP legislators defeated.” Revenge!

They weren’t just “taken out”— they were atomized. In five of seven contested primaries, Trump-endorsed challengers defeated sitting senators by margins that would make Kim Jong Il’s election commission blush: 75-24, 65-35, 61-39, and a pair of 18-point routs.

Trump-aligned groups spent over $12 million on the effort, which is a lot of money for state senate races, but a steal for the satisfaction of watching five rogue RINOs all simultaneously discover that Mike Pence’s endorsement has the political impact of falling off a cheap Home Depot ladder.

The Senate defectors claimed their voters preferred “fairness,” and they were called by their higher duty to their own constituents to vote down the pro-GOP map. Incumbent Greg Walker gave a passionate floor speech in December, calling it “the most consequential vote of my Senate career.” That was true.

They just learned the hard way that their voters have a different view, and had a chance to express their preferences. The New York Times’ take:

“Trump’s loyal and energized supporters turned out to punish the incumbents,” Politico reported, “showing that his endorsement remains the gold standard of GOP politics.” David McIntosh, president of the Club for Growth (which put more than $2 million in the race) said, “It’s a sign that the party’s ready to follow the president on this and get younger, newer leaders in the state Senate.”

80-year-old Jim Buck survived the travails of Indiana politics since 1994. He made it through the Tea Party wave, through Obama, and through Trump 1.0. Then he voted against the redistricting map, and —even worse, if that’s possible— Mike Pence called him “a man of integrity and one of Indiana’s most conservative state legislators.” Yesterday, he got beaten like a drum (by 30 points) by a relatively unknown Tipton County commissioner endorsed by President Trump.

Incumbent senator Greg Walker was planning to retire. He held on specifically for the redistricting fight, cried like a little girl on the Senate floor about the future of the party, and was primaried by 18 points. Meanwhile, challenger Blake Fiechter quit the race in February, convinced he was toast. But after a White House visit in March, Blake un-quit. (Whatever Trump said to him was either the best motivational speech in history or the scariest.)

Five of seven defectors went down in flames. And one of the two survivors, Spencer Deery, now faces a recount, having ‘won’ by only three votes (his challenger said she is confident she’ll win after provisional ballots are counted). The only clear survivor got help from a spoiler who split the protest vote. The five ousted incumbents were veteran lawmakers all, having served a combined 70 years in the Indiana Senate. Indiana Governor Mike Braun:

They had deep connections, established fundraising networks, and the personal endorsement of a former Vice President who remains a religious relic for never-Trumpers. They also had, as it turns out, the political instincts of a GPS that keeps driving you through the bad part of the hood.

They fooled around and found out. They never should have believed corporate media reports of Trump’s alleged unpopularity. Like Mark Twain, reports of the President’s political death have been slightly exaggerated.

Republican legislators in other states will now think very carefully before crossing the leader of the GOP (Porlanders: the President) on redistricting or anything else. Of the sixteen anti-redistricting senators who survived last night, zero have publicly defended their December vote. Trump just rewrote the chamber’s incentive math for the price of five primaries. Their silence in 2026 says more than a thousand outraged X posts.

🔥 Related: yesterday, former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy swept Ohio’s gubernatorial primary. BBC: “Vivek Ramaswamy wins Republican nomination for Ohio governor.”

In the general election, Vivek will face Dr. Amy Acton, Ohio’s former Director of Public Health during the pandemic. In spite of trad-media claims of a “neck and neck” contest, the deck is stacked against her for at least five reasons.

First, Ohio is a red state (R+7, Trump crushed it in 2024). Second, Vivek has a massive financial edge, having primed his campaign with $25 million of his own money. Third, Ohio hasn’t elected a Democrat governor since Ted Strickland in 2006. Fourth, Amy has never even run for any elected office, not even for animal control. So.

But fifth, and most significantly, her baggage. Ohio conservatives remember Dr. Acton as “Dr. Lockdown” and as “Ohio’s Female Fauci.” She’s going to spur some strong feelings.

Were Democrats confident, they’d have run a stronger candidate. Amy is a disposable throwaway serving the useful purpose of forcing Republicans to invest in the race. Meanwhile, Vivek is charismatic, money, prior electoral experience for president (albeit unsuccessfully), and has a national name-brand without Acton’s pandemic negatives.

Media’s political analysts are calling it a “razor-thin race,” and projecting it will be one of the most closely watched campaigns in the midterm cycle. Frankly, I don’t see it. If nothing else, angry Ohioans who remember school closures will turn out in force, finally having a chance to get a lick in against their local covid dictator.

Whatever you think of him, I predict it’s Vivek’s race to lose. All he needs to do is avoid unforced errors.

💉💉💉

Yesterday, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNBC, and Reuters all broke the same story within a few hours of each other— with the same narrative. Someone made phone calls. The synchronized headline: the FDA “blocked publication” of studies finding covid and shingles vaccines were “safe.” Four outlets. Same language. Same day. Probably born as a press release. The New York Times claimed, “F.D.A. Blocked Publication of Research Finding Covid and Shingles Vaccines Were Safe.”

The Times is, apparently, a mind-reader. “The withdrawal of the studies is the latest step by the administration to try to limit access to vaccines,” it reported as a fact, rather than what it was: an inference about the administration’s intent. It then listed a parade of horribles: slashing research funding for mRNA vaccines, publishing “unvetted information casting doubt on vaccines,” and “blocking information about their safety.”

Ironically, Secretary Kennedy gets more credit for his anti-vaccine work in the Times than from most MAHA commenters on X.

What the Times didn’t say was that the four safety studies —two on covid jabs and the other two on shingles shots— were conducted and written by FDA insects during the Biden era (2022-2024). Nor was this “news.” In February, when career FDA staffers sought approval to submit the Shingrix studies for a conference, “agency officials did not sign off in time.” The Times claimed the FDA’s top brass ordered the authors to withdraw two covid ‘safety’ papers that had already been accepted for journal publication.

Pro-jab ‘experts’ quoted by the Times called the alleged withdrawal orders “censorship,” “sabotage,” and “data suppression,” and claimed that, at any previous time, this would have triggered hearings and resignations. Ha. Censorship? Don’t make me laugh. Resignations? We know this isn’t true because outright liars, sycophants, and bunglers at CDC and FDA were not fired during the pandemic.

💉 The irony was so thick you could cut it with a cardboard knife. These so-called ‘experts’ never criticized the FDA under Biden when it approved these vaccines at warp speed, assured us they were “safe and effective” before the clinical trials even ended, and greenlighted boosters based on studies of eight mice.

They can take their “follow the science” hysteria and shove it where the needles don’t probe.

Buried in every single one of these coordinated stories was one little sentence from HHS spokesman Andrew Nixon, who explained that the studies were withdrawn because “the authors drew broad conclusions that were not supported by the underlying data.” None of the stories grappled with the details of this explanation, except to reject it out of hand.

For me, any paper concluding the covid vaccines are ‘safe’ is immediately suspect. There’s just too much anecdotal data at this point, including thousands of published case studies on injuries. But these studies went much further, attributing magical, snake oil-like health powers to the jabs. One of the Biden-era FDA studies statistically compared a 21‑day post‑shot window to the next 20 days. That’s it. That was the whole basis to conclude the shots were totally safe.

Smells like cherry-picking time ranges to find the result you want, to me.

When studies critical of the covid shots or that showed data inconvenient to the narrative were sidelined between 2020–24, the same professional classes largely shrugged, rationalized, or actively helped police the boundaries of acceptable speech.

The Times piece never asked its quoted experts how many skeptical or cautionary analyses they saw quietly buried during the pandemic, or what they did about those. (That, of course, is a rhetorical question; the answer is they did nothing.)

Altogether —the timing of simultaneous publication, the staleness of the ‘news’ from February (at the latest), the absence of any supportive quotes, the self-flattering double standards and selective outrage, the intellectual indolence to investigate the reasons the Trump FDA doesn’t like the studies— make this an obvious midterm political maneuver, not any kind of legitimate scientific criticism.

The good news is that covid shots and questions about their safety remain frontpage news. It isn’t going away. The covid‑vaccine file is still open— and swampy officials are still nervous enough about the public reaction to become hysterical when their ‘safety studies’ get round-filed.

Through all this hysteria, what they are really mad about is that they’re losing control of what they always assumed was their unimpeded property: the monopoly on gatekeeping of academic literature. TRUTH. IS. WINNING.

Nice try, corporate media. Forgive me for laughing and moving on to the next story.

🗳️🗳️🗳️

Speaking of things that are definitely not over. On Monday, the New York Times reported the terrific news, “Trump Administration Demands Names of 2020 Election Workers in Georgia.” The sub-headline complained, “The Justice Department again appears to be using the investigative power of the federal government to rehash debunked claims that Democrats stole the 2020 election.”

For the past five years, we have been repeatedly assured by corporate media, the Democratic Party, and various highly credentialed experts that the 2020 election was the most spotless, pristine, mathematically flawless democratic exercise in the history of human civilization, and possibly in the whole Milky Way Galaxy.

We have been told that counting the ballots in Fulton County, Georgia, was an operation so pure and incorruptible that it made the Vatican look like Tony Soprano’s strip club. If you so much as raised an eyebrow at a sudden 3:00 a.m. ballot dump, or wondered why a burst pipe required everyone to stop counting except for a few highly dedicated volunteers pulling suitcases out from under tables, you were immediately branded a threat to Democracy Itself.™

But all is not well within this immaculate monument to civic perfection. Snags have appeared.

🗳️ Within the last few days, the Department of Justice —now under Todd Blanche’s management— issued a grand jury subpoena to the Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections. The DOJ is asking for something fairly straightforward: the names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses of the roughly 3,000 election workers and volunteers who touched the ballots in 2020.

Short of an arrest warrant, a grand jury subpoena is about as serious as it gets. A standard civil subpoena —the kind you see in lawsuits and Congressional inquiries— can be challenged, negotiated, and routinely delayed for months or years while lawyers argue about scope and relevance. Courts apply a balancing test and often narrow the scope of what must be produced. The recipient has considerable leverage.

But a grand jury subpoena is a different animal entirely. For one thing, it confirms that someone is in the crosshairs of a federal criminal case— and not just an FBI fishing expedition. It also carries the full weight of federal criminal law. Compliance is presumed mandatory.

The standard for quashing a grand jury subpoena is extremely high— courts almost never do it, because grand juries are supposed to be able to investigate broadly. Refusing to comply without a judge’s order can result in contempt of court, which can lead to jail. There is no “we need a little more time” option.

🗳️ Now, if you had just overseen the most secure and magnificent election in American history, you might assume you’d be proud of your work. You might expect these Fulton folks to step forward, take a bow, and perhaps ask for a commemorative plaque or at least a lapel ribbon. “Yes, I was there! I scanned the ballots! I defended Democracy!”

Instead, Fulton County is reacting to this request with the kind of panicked, multi-lawyer defensive maneuvering usually reserved for people who have just been asked to explain some accounting irregularities at Enron, or cockroaches who just realized they can check in, but they can’t check out.

Instead of celebrating their chance to prove how wonderfully pure their work had been, Fulton County officials immediately ran to a federal judge with a 27-page motion begging the court to quash the subpoena. They claimed the DOJ is trying to “target, harass, and punish” them. “Let me be clear,” said Robb Pitts, the totally-not-DEI chairman of the Fulton County Board of Commissioners, “we will not be intimidated” by this “outrageous federal overreach.”

Whew. Good thing he made that clear.

This is a fascinating response. If the 2020 election in Fulton County was entirely above board —if every signature was matched, every machine functioned perfectly, and every ballot was handled with the utmost integrity— why is the prospect of the Justice Department simply knowing who worked there considered an existential threat?

🗳️ To prove its innocence, the county has hired the notorious Abbe Lowell —one of the most expensive and prominent defense attorneys in Washington, D.C.— to fight the subpoena. For context, Lowell has recently represented prominent ne’er-do-wells like Hunter Biden and Bob Menendez, among others. It’s almost like somebody said we can’t afford to lose this fight.

As their legal basis, the county’s lawyers argue that the statute of limitations for election crimes in 2020 has expired. This is the legal equivalent of saying, “We definitely didn’t steal the cookies, but even if we did, you still can’t punish us because it happened more than five years ago, so please stop looking in the Oreo bag.”

That defense is not exactly a ringing endorsement of the County’s unblemished innocence.

🗳️ To be fair, Fulton County is having a pretty rough year. Back in January, the FBI raided their election hub and hauled off roughly 700 boxes of 2020 election documents. Fulton County is currently suing —in a separate lawsuit— to get those boxes back, presumably because they need them for a very important municipal papier-mâché project.

The left-wing advocacy groups are, of course, having a collective meltdown. The Brennan Center for Justice called the subpoena a “fishing expedition” (even though it came from a grand jury). Democracy Docket, a website dedicated to ensuring that Democrats never lose an election, called it a “major escalation” by the Trump Administration.

Step back. Consider the bigger picture. We are constantly being told that transparency is the bedrock of our democracy. We are told that our election systems are robust and fully open. Yet the moment the federal government asks for a list of the people who actually ran the election in a county famous for its, shall we say, creative vote-counting techniques, the immediate response is to lawyer up, cite the statute of limitations, and wildly accuse the DOJ of harassment.

I think Manuel Noriega used the same playbook.

Gosh. It just makes you wonder. If the 2020 election in Fulton County were truly the most secure in history, why are they guarding the employee roster like it’s the nuclear launch codes?

Who knows. Maybe they are just very, very modest. Or perhaps, when you spend five years insisting that there is absolutely nothing to see here, the last thing you need is someone switching on the lights.

🗳️ Nobody outside the grand jury room knows where this is going. But the scale and persistence of the effort —the warehouse raid, a civil lawsuit, and now a subpoena for 3,000 names— suggests that whoever is driving the bus believes there is something real to find. Here’s my lawyer’s take.

The most obvious reason to demand the names, addresses, phone numbers, and emails of every single person who worked the 2020 election in Fulton County is to build a comprehensive witness list. Obviously, before you can interview people, you first need to know who they are. The county has never voluntarily produced a full roster, so the grand jury is forcing the issue. This is standard investigative groundwork: get the list, start making calls, and see who is willing to talk and who lawyers up.

But worse for Fulton County, there’s another common play that could also easily explain the subpoena: looking for a cooperating witness.

With nearly 3,000 names on that list, the odds favor that at least some of those workers saw something irregular, were pressured to do something they were uncomfortable with, or just want to tell their story. Prosecutors in complex criminal cases almost always build from the bottom up— find the low-level participant who is nervous, offer them immunity or leniency, and work your way up the chain. The sheer breadth of the request (everyone, not just supervisors) suggests they are casting a wide net, precisely to find that person who can crack the case like a piñata.

The worst case for the County is that one or two cooperating witnesses provide testimony that implicates supervisors or officials— and those supervisors, facing their own legal exposure, flip upward. Federal prosecutors call this “building the pyramid.” Start at the base and work upwards toward whoever was giving the orders. The subpoena for worker names is the foundation of that pyramid.

If the physical evidence about which we’ve heard so much —the ballots, machine logs, and tabulator tapes— show discrepancies, then a cooperating witness who can explain how those discrepancies occurred transforms a forensic anomaly into a criminal conspiracy. That is the difference between “the numbers don’t add up” and “here is the person who told me to run those ballots through again.” The former is a political argument; the latter is an indictment.

🗳️ The county’s statute of limitations argument is a dead loser.

Fulton County’s lawyers are making a lot of hay of the fact that the statute of limitations for 2020 election crimes has expired. That’s true for most standalone offenses. But it is not true for conspiracy charges, which have a longer clock and reset every time a conspirator takes an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy.

The SOL argument also fails if the investigation considers conduct that continued beyond 2020— for example, if records were altered, destroyed, or concealed after the election. The FBI’s January raid focused partly on record retention violations, which would be a separate and more recent offense. So the SOL argument, while real, is not even close to the slam dunk Fulton County claims it is.

🗳️ But there’s an even more alarming possibility— alarming for Fulton County, that is.

The theory that should make Fulton County most nervous is that the grand jury may just be using 2020 as a predicate —establishing a pattern of conduct— while the real target is what happened in subsequent elections, such as 2024. If the same workers, supervisors, or systems were involved in later elections, and if there is evidence of ongoing misconduct, the 2020 data becomes the foundation of a much larger case rather than 2020 alone.

This would completely explain why the DOJ is still actively pursuing this years after the fact, and why they raided the warehouse in January rather than simply closing the file.

The county’s claims about political persecution arise mostly because the subpoena was signed by Dan Bishop, the Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of North Carolina, who Pam Bondi appointed as national coordinator for election-related crimes. For context, back when he was a Republican Representative in the House, Dan voted against certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral victory on January 6, 2021— in other words, a true believer.

And don’t forget: Dominion —Fulton County’s e-voting provider in 2020 and 2024— has been bought out and rebranded out of existence (it’s now “Liberty Vote” under new Republican management). Liberty Vote has Dominion’s records and could easily be voluntarily cooperating with the DOJ, and nobody would know. (Smartmatic is fighting for its corporate life in federal court on foreign bribery charges.)

The pincers are closing from multiple directions.

The Fulton County situation is a microcosm of a broader Democrat polycrisis. Democrats spent four years using the legal system as a political weapon against Trump —two impeachments, four criminal indictments, civil fraud cases, state prosecutions— and now the instrument is in other hands. The norm against weaponizing federal law enforcement has been thoroughly shredded— by Democrats. It is now intellectually impossible for them to argue that investigating a political opponent’s election conduct is inherently illegitimate, when they just spent four years doing exactly that.

Should I explain the Democrats’ polycrisis tomorrow? Let me know in the comments.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! Navigate humpday, then circle round in the morning, for more essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

💉💉💉

Yesterday, Reuters ran an ‘exclusive’ story headlined, “Warned off vaccine actions, Kennedy seeks quick health wins ahead of midterms.” Reuters knows full well that the threat to the midterms actually comes from a fractured base, not from independents anxious about Kennedy canceling some jab mandate. So Reuters stood up, dusted off its hands, and said, this base isn’t going to fracture itself! Let’s see what they’ve actually got here.

Reuters’ story claimed that the Trump Administration ordered HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to shut up about vaccines right now and focus instead on “quick wins on new health initiatives to help Republicans in November’s midterm elections,” like “research into psychedelics” and “a slate of food initiatives.” The story argued the White House told him no more steps against vaccines this year.

It’s a brave claim. The article even praised itself, bragging, “Many of the details about Kennedy’s strategy … are reported here for the first time.” In other words, Reuters is the only one saying this.

“The stakes are high for Trump’s Republican party,” the wire service stressed, “which risks losing control of both chambers of Congress.” (Not the Republican Party; Trump’s Republican Party. It was a sly but obvious rhetorical trick to transform the midterms into a presidential referendum.) The gist was, Reuters believes President Trump thinks the best way to win the midterms is by making MAHA see red.

“Kennedy’s past moves, such as removing vaccines from the recommended U.S. childhood immunization schedule,” Reuters argued plaintively, “are among the policies that could hurt the party’s candidates.”

But like woke scientists always say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. So … what evidence did Reuters offer for this extraordinary, MAHA-destructive claim?

💉 Just apply the lessons I’ve taught you. First, check the sources. For this story, every single operative detail behind its extraordinary narrative was a quote. No documents. No memos. No emails. Just who said what to Kennedy, what the White House has “insisted,” which moves are now off‑limits– and all of those quotes were sourced from unnamed “senior administration officials,” “people familiar with the matter,” and “current and former officials.”

Reuters never said how it got clued in to its exclusive story in the first place. In other words, it’s all anonymous hearsay from nowhere, which down here in Florida we call gossip.

Having identified that Reuters’ claim was based on 100% anonymous sources, we moved to the next step: speculating on who the anonymous sources might be. Do you think they’re die-hard Kennedy fans trying to boost his image by betraying MAHA? Do you believe Reuters’ hardworking reporter got “a hunch” and cold-called the entire federal government until she struck a vein of journalistic gold with “a dozen senior officials and outside advisors”?

Or is it more likely that a cabal of anti-RFK malcontents prepackaged the whole thing and reached out to a friendly media outlet?

🔥 To conceal the weakness in its sourcing, the story quoted a handful of named pro-vaccine Republicans— all people with no inside knowledge about the alleged strategy. For instance, it quoted pollster Tony Fabrizio, who wrote an unrelated article in December claiming that “vaccine skepticism is bad politics.” (Reuters didn’t even try to reconcile Fabrizio’s dumb claim with the basic fact that in 2024, Trump openly aligned with the most famous “anti‑vaccine” figure in the country, survived months of unhinged coverage about it, and then won decisively. But never mind.)

Reuters’ narrative treated Fabrizio’s pro-jab memo as if it were some timeless law of politics, rather than, at best, a momentary snapshot that’ll be modified by turnout, intensity, and the difference between generic “public sentiment” and the highly motivated voters who actually turn out in swing states and midterm election cycles.

I could easily continue. The reason I spent the time to debunk this witless narrative —this unverified gossip obviously intended to enrage MAHA— is that other corporate media platforms will soon pick it up by citing Reuters. (“According to a recent Reuters exclusive…”) And then the doombloggers will start carping like a murder of black crows.

At least now you know where the latest “Kennedy betrays MAHA” narrative came from: thin air.

Finally, and by the way, the reason corporate media is so obsessed about “fracturing” MAHA is that the health-freedom movement includes so many ‘reclaimable’ former and disaffected Democrats who, they assume, still agree with the rest of the donkey platform. And also because trad-media thinks MAHA voters are gullible, single-issue types with gnat-like attention spans who can be easily peeled off with the right wedge.

Don’t be a gnat with a wedgie. And— make journalism great again.

✈️ ✈️ ✈️

Saturday morning, after 34 years, Spirit Airlines —the bright yellow budget carrier that taught America you could fly for less than a large pepperoni pizza (if you didn’t mind holding your luggage on your lap)— suddenly and unexpectedly shuttered its operations. Its second bankruptcy in two years proved fatal after a proposed $500 million government bailout collapsed. CBS reported, “Spirit Airlines shutting down after failed effort at government rescue deal.” Transportation experts were baffled.

Traveling on Spirit Airlines was much like any other airline. It involved checking your baggage, finding your seat assignment, wedging your carry-on into an overhead bin space half the size required, and then enjoying a peaceful, relaxing flight experience comparable to being shoved into an MMA-style cage match with the doors locked behind you.

There might be a clue to Spirit’s multiple bankruptcies. I would direct baffled experts to behold this sampling of recent and not-so-recent headlines. Note: I did not make any of these up. They are not Babylon Bee headlines, either (although they could be). They are a drop of goo in the bankrupt airplane’s toilet-overflow bucket.

Live and Let’s Fly, February 2025:

LALF again, November 2024:

Metro, May 2024:

CNN, August 2022:

Fox-2 Detroit, July 2021:

NBC News, March 10th (my birthday!), way back in 2016:

Personally, I am a Delta Airlines fan. I’ll admit that Delta isn’t perfect— but which affordable common carrier is? During a typical year, I mostly fly Delta, but also United, American, and JetBlue. I have flown Bahamas Air. I even took a couple of flights on Indian state-owned airlines —not ‘Indian’ as in on the reservation; in Southeast Asia— during a difficult-to-explain vacation there.

For all those airlines’ imperfections, I will say this: Never once, not in 40 years of air travel, have I ever been required to put up my dukes, eat a knuckle sandwich, or wrestle to reach the lavatory. Oh, I’ve gotten my share of nasty looks when I reclined my seat. I’ve been scolded by countless stewardesses over the years for leaving my tray table down too long, twice for leaving my foot partly extended into the aisle, and once for having my mask below my nose.

But I’ve never even seen a fistfight on an airplane. Not one time. I’ve certainly never seen a mid-flight catfight between two women or, Moses help us, between the gate agents.

Let’s be honest: Spirit Airlines had a reputation. I can confidently assume that my assistant would never even offer me a Spirit flight option, not even if it were half the price, not even if it got me home a day early. She wouldn’t even check the Spirit web page. That kind of reputation is not too good for business.

Bizarrely, most of yesterday’s media coverage focused on the tragedy of losing an airline and quibbled about whose ‘fault’ it was— dandy Pete Buttigieg or the Trump Administration. But capitalism demands that some poorly run businesses must fail. It’s like clearing the underbrush out of the forest to prevent forest fires.

I feel sorry for anyone displaced by Spirit’s bankruptcy. But I am sure that all Spirit employees —those without criminal records— will soon be gainfully employed with other airlines.

🔥🔥🔥

Chalk up more murders to left-wing violence. Yesterday, the New York Times reported, “Man Accused of Starting Palisades Fire Admired Luigi Mangione, Prosecutors Say.” The subheadline added, “The Los Angeles suspect was lonely and angry and felt ‘enslaved’ by rich people, prosecutors say.” So, logically, he torched the Los Angeles hills.

Let’s not forget too quickly that, after the fire, the Times credited climate change for starting the massively destructive blazes. But it turned out that “climate change,” apparently, is 30 years old, idolizes murderous terrorist Luigi Mangioni, and likes playing with matches. (Probably a bedwetter.)

LA resident Jonathan Rinderknecht, 30, single, was arrested last week for arson, which killed 12 people, burned down thousands of private homes, and torched billions in personal property. Federal prosecutors recently filed a trial memorandum that described Rinderknecht as “a lonely and erratic man who was angry at the world, particularly the rich.”

So weird! I wonder where Rinderknecht got that hyper-violent idea? Barron’s, 2019:

Reddit, posted last year, but appears at the top of today’s search (who is “we?”):

Democrat meme search:

Anyway. According to prosecutors’ trial memo, Rinderknecht googled Mangione-related news using the search terms “free Luigi Mangione,” “lets take down all the billionaires” and “reddit lets kill all the billionaires.” Investigators asked him why someone might burn the Palisades. Rinderknecht answered that it would be out of resentment of the rich, and he compared the fire to Luigi Mangione’s assassination of a random insurance executive.

“We’re basically being enslaved by them,” he told the investigators. (It wasn’t clear that Rinderknecht knows what “enslaved” means.) Rinderknecht denies the charges.

He was obsessed with fire, prosecutors said. A few months before the Palisades fire, he asked ChatGPT to generate images of people fleeing from a burning forest. On December 5th —just weeks before the Palisades fire— he googled images of a wildfire in Southern California caused by arson. On December 29th —the day before— he filmed fire engines leaving a Hollywood station and said out loud, presumably to himself, “They’re coming for you, bro.” He then, according to the court filing, warned himself to “get his mind in order” and “not be liking this craziness.”

In 2011, mathematician Gordon Woo coined the term “stochastic terrorism,” which refers to “the public demonization of a person or group resulting in the incitement of a violent act, which is statistically probable but whose specifics cannot be predicted.” Democrats, who see hate speech and “dangerous disinformation” everywhere else they look, can’t recognize it in the mirror.

🔥🔥🔥

A good news mini-roundup! First, this weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Administration is not just pruning food stamps but fundamentally restructuring the whole system:

Under the revised rules, non-disabled adults between 18 and 64 without children under 14 must work, volunteer or participate in approved job-training programs for at least 80 hours a month. (The previous age limit for work requirements was 54, and allowed exemptions for adults with children under 18.) The new rules also ended eligibility for illegal aliens.

Enrollment is plummeting. “These large state drops in SNAP caseloads represent a fundamental restructuring of the food-assistance safety net,” said Colleen Heflin, a welfare studies professor at Syracuse University. It is “beyond anything we’ve ever seen,” she added.

They’re just getting started.

🔥 Next, Fox News reported more progress at structurally reforming the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It will never be the same:

Don’t forget that Kash Patel is also closing the monolithic Hoover Building. And he announced the bureau is ‘embracing’ artificial intelligence tools to speed its investigations. Between treasonous Russiagate conspirators, welfare fraudsters, and election thieves, they have a lot of important stuff to investigate.

🔥 Last week, the Hill reported, “Trump says US government’s Intel stock made the country $30B in last 90 days.” Last year, President Trump made a national security investment in Intel Corporation —one of the last remaining fully domestic chipmakers— and that investment has now made up to $45 billion dollars. Compare that to prior Administrations, which always spend money on their programs. Trump is the first president I can remember whose programs keep making money and securing massive new investments.

It’s so much more than the Intel investment. It’s not even just a trend. It is an America-first dealmaking philosophy. For another example, at the end of January, the Hill reported, “Argentina pays its debt: The US-Latin America strategy becomes clearer.”

Last October, the Trump Administration agreed to ‘loan’ Argentina $2.5 billion in a transaction called a “currency swap.” (Put simply, we buy some of the other country’s currency, hold it for a while, then sell it back. In the interim, that country has US dollars it can use.)

At the time of the swap, Senator Elizabeth “Face-Like-Mule” Warren (D-Mass.) blasted the president for “putting himself and his billionaire buddies first and sticking Americans with the bill,” and tried (and failed) to pass a law blocking the credit line altogether. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) —who never misses a chance these days— piled on that the package was “probably one of the grossest things” that the administration had ever done.

Corporate media experts warned darkly that American taxpayers would never see a dime — because Argentina’s long history of defaults made repayment a fantasy.

Welp. In January, Argentina repaid the entire $2.5 billion with interest and ahead of schedule. The swap line worked exactly as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent intended: as a short-term bridge to support a key Latin American ally during acute market stress. It was never a bailout. And it made money— a windfall estimated at tens of millions.

All this money-making by Trump programs made me wonder: When did we relax our expectations so far? Why shouldn’t the government be expected to often turn a profit? Especially when that profit is coupled with our strategic national interests, like protecting domestic AI chipmaking or supporting key, lithium-rich, strategic South American allies?

Why shouldn’t foreign aid, bank bailouts, development loans, and ‘green energy programs’ be required to be profitable? When did we start assuming the federal government can be nothing more than a parasitic money-sucking charity? It’s the hard bigotry of low expectations.

The Trump Doctrine is being revealed as the opposite of the New Deal and Great Society philosophies. Those eras framed federal action as insurance and redistribution: you “pay in” via taxes, and government “pays out” in services, safety nets, and public goods— but never cash returns. Admittedly, there are lots of potential pitfalls to avoid, such as the federal government distorting domestic markets, picking winners and losers, prioritizing lucrative conflicts over less profitable peace, and creating ethical hazards.

But we obviously need better expectations.

This lesson is an unexpected Trump 2.0 bonus— the Administration is proving the concept of profitable governance. Draw that line far enough, and you can see a point on the map where income tax becomes no longer necessary. What would you say if Trump ended the income tax for good?

Because we are headed in that direction.

Have a terrific Tuesday! Coffee & Covid is the antidote to corporate media’s mockingbird mantras of doom and gloom. Be sure to get your friends and relatives out of the doom spiral by turning them on to C&C. And meet back here tomorrow, for another roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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🚀⛑️ C&C ARMY BRIEFING — IRAN WAR UPDATE ⛑️ 🚀

On Friday, on the eve of the War Powers Resolution’s 60-day deadline, President Trump declared that Operation Epic Fury’s “hostilities” were “terminated.” Yesterday, he announced a new, totally different operation: Project Freedom. The New York Times reported, “Trump Says U.S. Will Help Stranded Ships Leave Strait of Hormuz.” It already started early this morning.

In a long Truth Social post yesterday, President Trump described the new operation as a humanitarian mission. “Many of these Ships are running low on food,” the Presidential tweet explained, “and everything else necessary for largescale crews to stay on board in a healthy and sanitary manner.” Thus, the US Navy will “guide their Ships safely out of these restricted Waterways, so that they can freely and ably get on with their business.”

Then, just before signing off, President Trump explained the new humanitarian mission might get kinetic. “If, in any way, this Humanitarian process is interfered with,” he warned, “that interference will, unfortunately, have to be dealt with forcefully.”

In the same post, President Trump said negotiations with the Iranians were still ongoing and “could lead to something very positive for all.” Over the weekend, the Iranians suddenly became much more flexible, and even offered a 14-point terms package including (for the first time) surrendering some of their enriched uranium and diluting the rest. They offered those terms publicly.

On Saturday, President Trump tweeted that he was reviewing the new proposal but would probably reject it because “they have not paid a big enough price.”

Meanwhile, CENTCOM tweeted more specific details: “U.S. military support to Project Freedom will include guided-missile destroyers, over 100 land and sea-based aircraft, multi-domain unmanned platforms, and 15,000 service members.” It is like AAA roadside assistance at sea, but with Tomahawks. It is definitely not a war.

It’s a legal loophole. If Iran fires on the escorted ships or our fleet, that would be Iran starting a new conflict. Our military can then respond defensively. Technically, it would not be attacking. So no new War Powers clock would start, because the USA did not start hostilities— Iran did. The President is clearly allowed to take whatever defensive actions he feels appropriate.

It’s all about leverage. President Trump keeps ratcheting up the pressure on Iran. Somewhere between his first and second terms, Trump realized that hard power works much faster and more effectively than soft power. Previous presidents couldn’t use hard power like this, because they were captives to coalition-building with feckless European ‘allies,’ and were ensnared by a craven need for prior UN approval.

There hasn’t really been a previous president who used hard power so often and so quickly. If you consider Trump’s tariff regime as economic hard power (which is perfectly fair), he’s already deployed hard power against the entire world. The speed and magnitude of President Trump’s hard power flex is completely unprecedented.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🔥🔥🔥

These days, to be a right-thinking Democrat, you must be an outright communist. Buoyed, apparently, by the ‘success’ of barely concealed communist candidates in places like New York City, they’ve decided to chum the waters with red bait. This will backfire, probably spectacularly. As I have often said: Communism is the only ideology that must pretend to be something else in order to survive.

(Note how the California Democratic Party picked ‘red’ as its theme color, even though red’s for the GOP on electoral maps)

Friday was “May Day,” the high holy day for people who use the word “comrade” unironically and believe that the best way to help the working class is to stop them from getting to work. According to Fox News’s investigation, an estimated 600 groups formed a sprawling “red-blue” alliance to organize roughly 3,000 protests across the country.

And when I say “red-blue,” I don’t mean Republicans and Democrats working together to fix potholes. I mean “red” as in the Communist Party of the USA, and “blue” as in mainstream Democratic organizations who apparently looked at the communists and said, “You know what? These guys make some excellent points about dismantling the system. And they have cool hats.”

This is not a ragtag bunch of Bryn Mawr sophomores who just read Karl Marx for the first time and are furious at their bourgeois parents. This is a massive, professionally funded protest-industrial complex. Fox’s investigation found these groups have a combined annual revenue of about $2 billion. For perspective, $2 billion is roughly the GDP of Botswana, or the price of a medium-sized popcorn at a Regal theater.

Somewhat ironically, it turns out that smashing capitalism requires a lot of capital. But first, lest you think I’m exaggerating, let’s review the historic roots of May Day.

🔥 Here in the US, the year 1884 was noteworthy for several reasons. They finished building the Washington Monument, the Canadians claimed to have captured Bigfoot in British Columbia, and Grover Cleveland, who also had very big feet, became the first Democrat to win the White House since before the Civil War. (The conspiracy theory that Cleveland was Bigfoot is probably just a coincidence. Probably.)

Anyway, two years into the Cleveland Administration, during the hot, humid 1886 Chicago summer, starting around May 3rd, “labor organizers” staged a series of “mostly peaceful” protests in Illinois and Ohio, which included a bunch of “labor organizations” that staged walkouts and strikes. On May 4th, during an “almost totally peaceful” protest rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square, a busy produce and food market centered on Randolph and Desplaines Streets.

At some point, a mysterious someone —unknown to this day— threw a mostly peaceful dynamite bomb at police. Socialists celebrate it as the first dynamite bomb ever used in peacetime history of the United States. According to lore, the police panicked and shot several of their own in the confusion. Four cops died, and it triggered martial law across the entire US.

All things considered, it was a pretty wild summer, even though Bigfoot never showed up.

In July 1889, socialist and Marxist groups met in Paris at what would become known as the founding congress of the ‘Second International’, which is also often called the “Marxist” International Socialist Congress. That congress passed a resolution —introduced by French socialist Raymond Lavigne along with the American delegation— calling for an international demonstration on May 1st, 1890 to mark the new worker’s holiday and demand ‘working‑class reforms.’

By the early 20th century, May 1st was firmly established as May Day, the socialist and labor holiday. It’s also known as International Workers’ Day, where collectivist-minded workers celebrate labor by striking, peacefully burning buildings down, and driving the nation so crazy it considers declaring martial law.

In 2026, May Day has become the official day of the California Democrat Party, which ‘adopted’ the day by joining socialist and communist protest groups and coloring its pamphlets red.

🔥 Corporate media loves to crow about how polls show younger Americans growing approval of ‘socialism.’ But that’s only because they have skulls full of mush and conflate ‘socialism’ with wild descriptions of Scandinavian-style welfare states. But if you drill down, and ask any American about the socialist/communist actual agenda, approval rates plop into the sewer (single digits).

Here are the three planks of the modern collectivist movement:

• Abolition of private ownership of the means of production (land, factories, major capital) replaced by ‘collective’ or state ownership. This is often explicitly presented as the “single sentence” summary of modern communist theory.

• Dictatorship of the proletariat: U.S. communist groups openly say that their goal is to destroy the existing “bourgeois” state and replace it with a new state that is explicitly a class dictatorship run ‘in the name of’ the working class.

• Democratic centralism: internally, communists promote a civic organizational model where government decisions are made through “democratic” procedures, but once those are decided, strict top‑down discipline (often using force) and subordination of minority views to the majority line are mandatory.

Taken together, it’s not just “more welfare” or “more worker’s rights.” It’s one‑party class rule, centralized control of the commanding heights of the economy, and a tightly disciplined vanguard party.

But that’s not what they advertise. Instead, modern socialists and communists promote a murky, utopian fairy tale of ‘equality,’ ‘liberty,’ and the settling of scores between various identity groups and the ever-present enemy: oligarchial billionaires. Except billionaires like George Soros, who funded a bunch of May Day protest groups this year, or CCP-aligned Neville Roy Singham.

Neville Roy Singham is an American-born tech tycoon who currently lives in Shanghai. According to Fox, Singham has pumped around $278 million into a constellation of far-left groups, including the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the People’s Forum, and Code Pink. Singham is also very enthusiastic about the Chinese Communist Party, which is ironic, because if there’s one place where workers definitely do not have the right to skip work and protest the government, it’s China. But let’s not get bogged down in details.

Then there is Indivisible, one of the largest Democratic Party-aligned grassroots networks, which has received millions from billionaire George Soros’s philanthropy network. Indivisible has at least 200 chapters nationwide supporting these May Day events.

So, to summarize: We have a massive coalition of 600 groups, funded by actual billionaires, organizing a nationwide protest movement under the official banner of “Workers Over Billionaires.” You cannot make this up. It is like having a “Vegetarians Against Vegetables” rally sponsored by Oscar Mayer.

This is why social communism implodes when it gets too much attention. It’s one thing to hold signs calling for confiscating Elon Musk’s companies. It’s quite another to volunteer to give your own house to the party.

CLIP: Protestors confused when asked about billionaires funding their protest (3:12).

🔥 How Democrats think this increasingly obvious collusion with red communists will help them is anybody’s guess. It’s mystifying. Fox quoted frustrated Democrat strategist Melissa DeRosa, who said, “The increasing willingness of mainstream Democrats to align with extremist socialist groups is a major factor in why the Democratic Party is losing the center more and more, and why so many lifelong Democrats find themselves feeling politically homeless.”

“That is not how you build a majority,” DeRosa continued. “That is how you turn a governing party into a protest movement — and a losing one.”

The official demands of the red-blue coalition are exactly what you would expect if you asked a Magic 8-Ball to generate left-wing talking points. They want to “Tax the rich,” “Expand Democracy,” and implement “No ICE. No War.” No mention of private property or who’ll be in charge after the glorious revolution. They are also keenly upset about an “authoritarian billionaire takeover of government,” which, again, is pretty rich for a movement taken over by billionaires.

Yesterday, progressive gay-rights champion and former congressman Barney Frank, who is sadly dying in hospice, told CNN’s Jake Tapper about progressive policy that, “some of which the public isn’t ready for. I think they make a mistake by taking the most controversial parts of the agenda and turning them into a litmus test.” In other words, they’re boiling the frog too fast.

CLIP: ‘Progressive icon’ Barney Frank tells CNN the Democrat party has “gone too far” (2:21).

Ask yourself— why would CNN reach all the way back to a dying Democrat to snag this message about slowing the communitarian roll? Could it be that the donkey party is splitting in twain? ‘Moderates’ versus ‘progressives?’ Mamdanians versus mainstreamers? Or is the Democrats’ May Day bromance a last gasp from hospice?

We are witnessing the beautiful, absurd spectacle of the American political left eating itself while simultaneously trying to overthrow a system that gave them $2 billion to play with. Unless I am missing a huge factor we can’t see yet, the red-blue spectacle we witnessed on Friday will not help Democrats’ midterm prospects.

They can find all the Nazi-tattooed, bearded white guys they want, but if socialism is the main selling point, it’s going to be a difficult sale.

🔥🔥🔥

I keep a suspicious eye on the Times’s op-ed pages, so I can forecast progressive cultural weather. After all, the Grey Lady is the schoolmarm of leftist thought, minding everything they are allowed to think. Every once in a while, a remarkable piece slips past the Editors’ steely gaze and signals a deeper shift. It happened this weekend, in an essay headlined, “In a Minneapolis Public School, a Cure for Toxic Politics.”

It was breaking news from the front lines of American journalism: the Times’s editorial department has suddenly discovered that, wait for it, children who sit quietly, wear uniforms, and read the classics might actually turn out more decent human beings than what our failed public school experiment does.

I know. I was shocked too. I had to read the article twice to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating from consuming too many seed oils.

The article was written by an education researcher who described himself as a “child of the 1960s who went to progressive schools where our chief extracurricular activity was protesting the Vietnam War.” It was an eyewitness report from Eagle Ridge Academy, a classical charter school in the Minneapolis suburbs.

The author, James Traub, ‘embedded himself’ (I’m not sure what that means, exactly) in a ninth-grade class and was absolutely flabbergasted by what he witnessed. The students were discussing Virgil’s Aeneid. They were sitting in a circle. They were taking turns speaking. Nobody was throwing spitballs, TikToking, or demanding to be graded on their “lived experience” rather than their knowledge of Roman literature.

“Almost everyone in Mr. Lemon’s class wanted to talk, but no one interrupted,” Traub wrote, clearly shaken by this display of basic human decency. “There was no showboating.”

He even witnessed a kindergarten teacher praising her students for a perfect bathroom break, asking them to “raise your hand if you’re ready to commit to that again.” The children, unburdened by the crushing weight of progressive pedagogical theory, enthusiastically agreed to use the potty in an orderly fashion.

For the modern liberal, this is terrifying stuff. As Traub admits, the idea of teaching “virtue” in public schools “raises many hackles” because conservatives sometimes use virtues to —brace yourself— “enforce compliance with social codes.”

Social codes. Like, “don’t interrupt,” “stand when you speak,” and “maybe don’t act like rabid badgers during third period.”

The piece offered Times readers a fascinating —albeit grudging— forgotten-history lesson. It turns out that America’s founders actually believed that a republic requires virtuous citizens. They thought schools should teach things like wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance. But then, about a century ago, progressive thinkers led by John Dewey decided that shaping children’s character was too heavy-handed. So we got “lowest-common-denominator relativism.”

“Virtue language,” Traub noted, “gave way to talk of ‘values,’ which is to say, personal preferences. In our modern therapeutic vocabulary, ‘temperance’ and ‘justice’ gave way to ‘self-esteem.’”

And just how has that progressive experiment in ditching virtue worked out for us? Well, if you look at the average public school, you will find legions of students with incredibly high self-esteem regarding their ability to fail basic math while simultaneously diagnosing their teachers with toxic microaggressions.

Eagle Ridge, on the other hand, operates on a moral code based on Citizenship, Integrity, Perseverance, Honor, Excellence, and Respect. And the results are stunning. Traub reported that two girls with opposing political views had a fierce argument about Donald Trump— and then stood up and held hands.

If this happened on a college campus today, the administration would immediately call in a SWAT team of grief counselors and hate-speech enforcers under a state of emergency. But at Eagle Ridge, it’s just called “civil discourse.”

The most amusing part of the article was the author’s clumsily hidden attempt to reassure Times readers that it’s okay to like this school. He pointed out that only 8% of the students come from the prosperous, progressive Minnetonka district. The rest are largely nonwhite immigrants who —surprise!— actually want their kids to get a rigorous education and learn good manners.

Traub also noted, with obvious relief, that the school has posters about “sustainability” on the walls. Phew! For a minute there, we thought they were raising a generation of polite, well-read conservatives. But don’t worry, they still care about the plight of polar bears.

The education researcher even suggested a branding strategy, to make classical education more palatable to the left, quoting a scholar who described it as “the modern version of the liberal education considered suitable to an Italian courtier.” In other words, “We aren’t teaching conservative values; we are training your children to serve the Medici family.”

Haha, just kidding. He was suggesting a return to classic liberalism— implicitly rejecting progressivism.

In the end, Traub posed a profound rhetorical question: “Would you feel better, or worse, if you knew that every future American citizen would receive an education like the one they get at Eagle Ridge?”

For most of us, the answer is an enthusiastic “Yes, please, where can we sign up?” But for the New York Times, this is a complex moral dilemma. Because if we admit that teaching kids to be virtuous— being polite, reading great books, and respecting one another— actually works, we might have to admit that the progressives have been wrong for the last hundred years.

And that is a tragedy worthy of the Aeneid’s Virgil himself. Or at least some guy from Minneapolis named Virgil.

🔥🔥🔥

There are certain unwritten rules of fast-food etiquette. For example, if you order a chalupa at 2:00 a.m., you should not expect it to look anything like the picture on the menu. Also, if you ask for a “water cup,” you are entering into a sacred, legally binding covenant that you will fill it only with water, and maybe with a single lemon wedge if you are feeling brave enough to fish one out of the metal bucket. At least, that’s the rule in Florida. Last week, local NBC-6 West Palm reported, “Florida Taco Bell worker accused of shooting at customers who put soda in water cup.”

Tragically, we live in a fallen world. Some people believe that a clear plastic cup is merely a suggestion, a vessel meant to be filled with whatever sugary, carbonated nectar flows from the fountain. In most places, this minor transgression might earn you a dirty look from the shift manager. But not in Florida. A Florida man takes the unwritten rules that hold society together very seriously. In Florida, unauthorized soda acquisition can be a capital offense.

According to police in West Palm Beach, a 20-year-old Taco Bell employee named D’Mari Jy’Quan Patterson (if that’s his real name) recently took responsibility for enforcing the fast-food chain’s water-cup rule extremely strictly. And by “extremely strictly,” I mean “at gunpoint.”

The incident began, like most great American tragedies do, with a group of friends walking into a Taco Bell. Two women approached the counter and asked for a cup of water. Patterson obliged, handing over the cup, likely expecting them to head straight for the little nozzle that dispenses lukewarm tap water.

Instead, one of the women went rogue. She walked over to the soda machine and began filling her water cup with Mountain Dew.

Now, let us pause here to consider the economics of fountain soda. The actual liquid inside that cup costs the Taco Bell corporation approximately one-tenth of a cent. If a customer steals a cup of soda every day for a year, Taco Bell might eventually have to raise the price of a Cheesy Gordita Crunch by a fraction of a penny to cover the loss. It is not exactly the heist of the century. It’s not like she was trying to walk out with the nacho cheese vat.

But Patterson —who, to his credit, is a stickler for the rules— would have none of it. According to the probable cause affidavit, he began ‘remonstrating with’ (yelling at) the women. A bitter argument ensued, drawing in a third friend who had just walked into the restaurant to find an unfolding fracas.

At this point, you might expect the situation to de-escalate. Perhaps Patterson could have simply charged them for the soda. Or perhaps he could have realized that he works at Taco Bell, not the Texas Gold Depository, and let it go. Instead, Patterson allegedly yelled, “Do Something! Do Something!”— a phrase that has preceded roughly 90 percent of all fistfights in American history. Another employee tried to intervene, but then came the unmistakable sound of a firearm being racked.

You can’t imagine the high drama and chaos that then ensued. According to the affidavit, Patterson pistol-whipped one of the women, accidentally discharging his firearm. One woman’s eyebrow was grazed. She ran out of the store. Patterson went after her. He cornered the third friend and fired again. He missed the woman, but he did manage to shoot a window, shattering it completely. The woman, understandably terrified, broke through the damaged window to escape.

Mr. Patterson was charged with various crimes you can easily imagine, but he raised self-defense, claiming he thought the women were armed. Hey, at least he was gainfully employed. And you can’t argue with his sense of corporate loyalty. Living la vida taco: work más, shoot más.

This unfortunate misunderstanding starkly reminds us of the escalating tensions in our modern society. We are a nation divided, a people on edge. And nowhere is this more apparent than at the local Taco Bell, where the line between a refreshing beverage and a felony charge has grown thinner than a corn tortilla.

Please consider this story to be a travel advisory. The next time you find yourself at a fast-food establishment in the Sunshine State, please remember the rules. If you ask for a water cup, fill it with water. Do not attempt to sneak a little Sprite. Do not try to mix all the flavors together to create what the kids call a “suicide.”

Just drink the water. It’s good for your hydration, and more importantly, it significantly reduces your chances of being shot by a guy making minimum wage folding burritos.

Have a magnificent Monday! Swing back here tomorrow morning, for Tuesday’s fresh installment of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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⛑️ C&C ARMY BRIEFING ⛑️

I recovered from an anger management breakdown this week, after I received more political text messages in a single morning than words in an above-average C&C roundup. So in frustration, I finally searched high and low for a solution. (I googled it.) Until this week, I’d been investing increasing amounts of rage-inducing time each day into ‘stopping’ and deleting them, one by one, like an obsessive-compulsive maniac.

Anyway, having located an answer, and having tested it all week, I’m now sharing the solution with everyone else who, like me, may have missed the memo. (This is iPhone only. I’ve never touched an Android phone.)

Go into Settings. In the Search box, enter ‘Messages.’ When you find and tap it, scroll down to “Unknown Senders.” Set “Screen Unknown Senders” to on. Then make sure “Filter Spam” is on.

It works great. The only downside is that from time to time, you’ll need to glance in your “Unknown Senders” folder to make sure nothing real got swept in there, like a question from the DoorDash driver who’s trying to deliver your extra spicy Taco Bell chalupas.

Finally, some spam texts may still slip through. There’s a nuclear option for those. The App Store offers a selection of apps that aggressively police your text inbox. I’m currently trying ‘Sifter,’ which, although it seems aimed at computer science majors, only costs a couple of bucks and adds aggressive filtering and blocking. You can see in my Messages settings, above, that the “Text Filter” is set to “Sifter.” That’s why.

You might not even need Sifter or apps like it. Turning on Screen Unknown Senders may be enough to get the job done. Please share additional tips in the comments. We need to work together to prevent this high-tech epidemic from spreading. 15 days to flatten the text tsunami curve.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🚀🚀🚀

Yesterday, in a letter to congressional leaders that can only be described as a masterclass in creative legal writing, President Trump informed Congress that the Iran war has been, and I quote, “terminated.” CBS News reported, “Trump tells Congress ‘hostilities’ with Iran have ‘terminated’ as conflict hits 60-day deadline.” Well, how terminated depends on the meaning of that word, “terminated.” Maybe more like, mostly terminated— like a mostly peaceful protest.

The letter arrived with the split-second precision of a lawyer filing at 11:59 PM right before the deadline. (I might be familiar with the maneuver.) Under the 1973 War Powers Resolution, the President has exactly 60 days to continue military operations before Congress weighs in. That countdown reached zero yesterday, on May 1st. So Trump did what every president since Richard Nixon has done when the timer runs out— he sent the American language into battle.

“The hostilities that began on February 28, 2026 have terminated,” Trump wrote in a letter to Republican leaders in the House and Senate. This will surprise the 50,000 American troops currently maintaining a naval blockade of Iran’s ports, who might be forgiven for thinking that surrounding a country with warships is, at minimum, hostility-adjacent.

Defense Secretary Hegseth helpfully clarified we could resume bombing “at the push of a button,” which I guess you’d call un-terminating hostilities or something. (Either way, it is either a War Powers Resolution button-hole or the button on Skynet’s user interface, depending on who you ask.)

Under the War Powers Resolution —a statute passed by Congress— a president can start military action without ‘prior authorization,’ but he must notify Congress within 48 hours, and then he must ‘terminate hostilities’ within 60 days unless Congress grants an extension. Today would have been 61 days from the start of the war.

A week ago, the New York Times was practically crowing about the War Powers Resolution, euphorically hoping it would cut Trump off at the knees:

Sorry, Times. “As the situation develops,” Trump’s letter concluded, “I will continue to update the Congress on noteworthy changes.” In other words: I’ll be back.

Since it originally passed, Congress has successfully used the War Powers Resolution to end a military campaign exactly zero times. Not even once in nearly 53 years. This makes the Resolution’s 60-day “deadline” essentially a polite suggestion with no enforcement teeth and practically invites lawyerly wordplay. Obama did it with Libya (he argued “operations” didn’t constitute “hostilities”). Clinton did it with Kosovo (he argued congressional funding was implicit authorization). Clinton also did it with Somalia (not “sustained”). Biden claimed we weren’t engaged in “hostilities” against Russia at all (Ukraine was).

Many SCOTUS-watchers note an unrelated but relevant 1983 Supreme Court decision captioned INS v. Chadha, which disapproved of Congress taking any action without legislative process and ‘presentment’— which means getting the presidential John Hancock. So it’s likely that, to stop a president’s war, Congress would need a signature from the same president it was trying to stop.

Indeed, in 2019, Trump vetoed a Yemen resolution, and Congress lacked the votes to override him. Thus, the War Powers Resolution appears to be the legislative equivalent of a strongly-worded letter, like a notice from the HOA explaining that your 12-by-18 American flag exceeds the 6-by-9 maximum in subsection 4.7(b), and please remit the $10 fine within 30 days.

The President has repeatedly told reporters he thinks the War Powers Resolution is unconstitutional— a sentiment shared by many constitutional scholars. His letter never mentioned the Resolution directly one way or the other; the only reason we know the two were connected was the timing and the use of the words “hostilities” and “terminated,” which track the statute.

But the letter did mention “my constitutional authority to conduct United States foreign relations and as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive.” That’s a direct slap at the Resolution’s main constitutional weakness, which is that the Constitution puts the President in charge of both military and foreign policy, meaning Congress can’t start setting war deadlines and making military rules.

Since hostilities have now officially been “terminated,” if we resume them, does that mean the 60-day clock starts over? Nobody knows. The War Powers Resolution has never been tested in the Supreme Court, and given the Resolution’s constitutional problems, I doubt Congress will ever push it there.

🔥🔥🔥

Like Dr. Frankenstein throwing the switch and sending lightning surging through the Monster’s veins, the New York Times electrifyingly resurrected the stale Epstein suicide conspiracy this week, in a story headlined, “Jeffrey Epstein’s Possible Suicide Note Hidden From Public View.” If you thought you already knew all the weird, inexplicable facts about Epstein’s death, just wait. You ain’t seen nothing yet.

The Times story is typically useless. Worried, perhaps, about legal liability, it tiptoed around some of the most astonishing revelations since we learned the cameras were turned off and the guards were sleeping.

First of all, the story reported that three weeks before he was killed, Epstein was found unconscious in his cell with “a strip of cloth around his neck.” When he came to, Epstein told jailers that his cellmate, Nicholas Tartaglione (remember his name), had tried to kill him and he was definitely not suicidal.

Tartaglione denied it. A week later, Epstein recanted his allegations against Tartaglione and “said he felt safe being housed with him.” Two weeks later, as you know, Epstein was found dead in his cell, strangled with a cloth sheet (again).

The second time, also as you know, Epstein didn’t wake up. (Allegedly.)

That quick timeline was the story’s first explosive reveal. I bet most of you never even knew about Epstein’s prior “suicide attempt.” (I didn’t.) But wait. It gets much crazier.

🔥 The Times described Tartaglione as “a former police officer charged with a quadruple homicide,” which drastically understates the case. He’s serving four life sentences, which means he’s one of those special prisoners with nothing to lose. What’s one more life sentence? We’ll return to the ex-cop in a moment, but before we continue, I mean, get a load of this musclebound killer:

After Epstein was moved to a new cell and put on suicide watch, Tartaglione claimed to have “found” a suicide note “tucked into a graphic novel.” Tartaglione told jail officials, “I opened the book to read and there it was”— scrawled on a piece of yellow paper ripped from a legal pad.

(Annoyingly, the Times never mentions which graphic novel, which is the only thing I really wanted to know. What does an ex-cop quadruple murderer with four consecutive life sentences read for fun? Watchmen? Manga? Maybe one of those Punisher arcs where the corrupt cop is really the hero?)

Tartaglione described the mysterious bookbound note as saying: “What do you want me to do, bust out crying? Time to say goodbye.” (Connoisseurs of late-90s adult contemporary/Italian fare will immediately recognize the dramatic closer —“Time to say goodbye”— as the chorus of the popular Sarah Brightman-Andrea Bocelli duet.)

Then —unbelievably— the alleged suicide note, a critical piece of evidence, went on walkabout. The Times described a bizarre, complicated timeline of Tartaglione trying to give the note to one of his attorneys “in case Epstein claimed he’d tried to hurt him,” failing to effect a handoff, giving it to another lawyer (and succeeding), the note failing authentication, but then later being (allegedly) authenticated by unnamed “handwriting experts,” and then Tartaglione’s judge demanding the note be surrendered and secured by the clerk of court.

The clerk’s dusty, Indiana Jones-style archive is right where the note remains today, and nobody else has ever seen it.

The DOJ said it has never seen it. Us either! It wasn’t included in the Epstein files. Though the facts weren’t state secrets —his lawyers argued constantly about the note in the felon’s appeal— the media has never mentioned it in relation to the Epstein suicide story. (Remind me what the media’s job is again?)

You’d think an alleged suicide note would’ve been a salacious wrinkle with which to engage media’s readers. But … crickets. That’s massive reveal number two.

🔥 All of that is strange enough. And, at least, the Times finally surfaced those incredible facts. But it stopped far short of mentioning the most astonishing and explosive facts of all. Tartaglione. All the story said about Epstein’s cellmate was his quadruple murder conviction and that he “maintains his innocence,” as if there might even be something to it.

That description is risibly inadequate.

Here’s the buried lede, which can be easily found online with 10 seconds of effort in the DOJ’s sentencing announcement. Nobody denies that Tartaglione was a crooked New York cop straight out of Central Casting. He was in a drug deal with a bunch of cartel crooks, and when the deal went sideways, Tartaglione tortured Martin Santos-Luna for information about where $250,000 in Tartaglione’s share of the money went. (As well he might.)

When Luna refused to talk, officer Tartaglione killed him. Then he executed three witnesses to the killing, back-of-the-head-style, and buried all four bodies in shallow graves in his Otisville home’s backyard. Pretty gruesome. But that’s not the important thing.

Guess how Tartaglione killed Martin Santos-Luna, the first victim who wouldn’t talk? He strangled him. Officer Tartaglione strangled Luna using a ziptie. In short: Tartaglione —a violent, roid-raged, muscular murderer with police connections who was housed with Jeffrey Epstein— was a strangler.

By himself or someone else, Epstein was also strangled. A pretty strange coincidence! You agree? A strange coincidence worth a media mention or ten?

You really cannot make this stuff up. Nor can you explain how these facts —long available in court records and DOJ press releases— were somehow never reported during all the years of hoopla over Epstein’s bizarre suicide.

🔥 All this raises the difficult question that nobody at the Times —or even at DOJ— seems eager to ask out loud: why in the first place was Jeffrey Epstein ever housed in the same tiny cell with this particular inmate? Federal jails are supposed to classify inmates for risk, and keep high‑value pedophilic prisoners like Epstein away from obvious predators. It’s not supposed to bunk them with a disgraced ex‑cop and convicted strangler with four bodies in his backyard and nothing left to lose.

If you were trying to maximize the chances that Epstein would have “an incident,” while preserving maximum deniability for everyone else, Hollywood couldn’t script a better roommate, not even with a team of experienced Game of Thrones show-writers.

In classic motive‑means‑opportunity terms, Tartaglione is almost too perfect as a cut‑out. He had the means: a proven willingness to torture and kill, including by ligature strangulation, and the physical access from sharing a locked cell with Epstein. He had the opportunity: weeks of intimate, unsupervised access inside one of the least‑monitored corners of a poorly supervised federal jail, complete with mysteriously missing camera footage and very sleepy guards.

And, thanks to four consecutive life sentences and a long history in the morally ambiguous gray zone between cops and crooks, Tartaglione supplied the perfect motive: a man with nothing to lose, every reason to curry favor with whoever still has power over his conditions, a delusional hero fantasy of dispensing personal justice to criminals, and a ready‑made story in his back pocket about how his famous cellmate “killed himself” and even left behind an exculpatory farewell ‘note.’

Remember, the bodies may have been, but none of the information was concealed in a shallow grave. Tartaglione’s zip‑tie strangulation, the execution‑style shootings, the graves on his own land, even Epstein’s first neck incident and his accusations against his cellmate have been sitting in public records for years. Yet through round after round of “Epstein killed himself” coverage, nearly every major outlet treated those details as … what? —irrelevant? Too impolite to mention?

Goodness gracious. I know it’s awful, but come on. What is the corporate media even for? Apparently, nowadays, its purpose is just to communicate the official narrative and bury inconvenient information bodies behind the Times’ offices. Good little doggies.

Trad-media evidently preferred to repeat DOJ’s “exhaustive” suicide mantra rather than investigate what it could mean that the world’s most dangerous witness was locked in a cell with a convicted strangler who had a proven ability to deal with inconvenient witnesses who knew too much.

This doesn’t tell us much about who among Epstein’s many high-profile enemies with government connections might’ve arranged his death (such as ones connected to other convenient suicides), but it does give us a lot more insight into the how.

🔥 RELATED: The Epstein files have not, in fact, gone away. They are still dropping rotten fruit nuggets all over academics and leftists. Here are just three recent examples:

• April 20th: New York Times, “Epstein Craved Harvard Connections. Many There Were Eager to Help.” It’s a long, detailed piece incriminating dozens of Harvard professors. You’re shocked, I know.

• April 21st: NYT, “Gates Foundation Is Conducting an External Review of Its Epstein Ties.” They didn’t say who is conducting the outside review. But this is exactly how Klaus Schwab’s downfall began. Wouldn’t it be deliciously ironic if Gates gets kicked off his own foundation?

• Yesterday: NYT, “Bard College’s President, Leon Botstein, Will Retire After Epstein Revelations.” Botstein had run Bard for 50 years. In 2013, he told Epstein, “miss you.” (In 2021, Soros pledged $500 million to Bard.) Now, Botstein is an ex-college president. Sad!

🔥🔥🔥

Yesterday, CNBC reported, “Trump’s new executive order, with help from Congress, could increase U.S. retirement wealth up to 77%, researchers find.” Congress had better help. It has a giant insider-trading problem. The President expressed optimism.

CLIP: President Trump explains TrumpIRA.gov (1:43).

President Trump signed an executive order this week creating another new, Trump-branded government website: TrumpIRA.gov, starting early next year. “You’ll be able to access the same type of retirement accounts that federal employees enjoy through the Thrift Savings Plans, which are incredible, as part of the federal Saver’s Match program,” President Trump told reporters at the White House press conference. “Low-income Americans will be eligible to receive up to $1,000 per year in matching funds deposited directly into their accounts.”

President Trump explained it is “so everyone can benefit from the rising stock market.” CNBC said, “researchers found that cumulative American retirement wealth could rise by as much as 77%, adding up to $1.35 trillion in projected retirement wealth over 10 years.”

In other words, while Congress has spent decades using non-public information to outperform the S&P by margins that would make a hedge fund blush, the rest of us are finally being invited to the index fund. Pelosi can keep her 70% annual returns. Working folks will settle for the matching dollars and a Vanguard log-in.

Once active, the TrumpIRA website will let workers without employer-provided plans research, compare, and enroll in low-cost private-sector IRAs. It will also tell them whether they’re eligible for matching funds. This will be most meaningful for young, working-age folks and blue-collar workers. All our kids (and grandkids) will probably want to consider signing up when they’re eligible.

A 25-year-old enrolling next year will be looking at the word “Trump” on her quarterly statement until roughly 2065. Voters rejected the Bidenomics brand after about eighteen seconds. TrumpIRAs are a brand that compounds tax-deferred for forty years. There’s a strategy in there somewhere.

President Trump is reaching all generations. He is teaching working-age Americans who is really looking out for their best interests. (Don’t forget no taxes on tips.) Yesterday, he reminded an enthusiastic rally audience in Florida at The Villages about his cuts to Social Security taxes. And he’s even getting kids! In the same press conference, President Trump said that over 5 million children have already signed up for Trump Accounts. They’ll be tracking those accounts as they turn 18 and start voting.

Our kids will be the first generation whose starting political memory will be a deposit notification.

It is 5-D chess. Democrats can’t oppose Trump IRA’s without also opposing low-income retirement matches. They have no good choices. Their only two options are (a) attack a populist program that most helps poor workers (political suicide) or (b) silently vote for it and let Trump take the win (just as bad).

Can you see yet how things are taking shape for the midterms? Remember— If Democrats win the House or Senate, they’ll take all this great stuff away, but they will keep making insider trades for themselves. The script writes itself.

🔥🔥🔥

This week, Bloomberg Law reported, “Trump DOJ Pursuing Separate Comey Probe for Classified Leaks.” The DOJ indicted the former FBI Director in North Carolina this week, for making threats against the President. Now Bloomberg is reporting that a separate investigation is underway against Comey for leaking classified information to Columbia University professor Daniel Richman, who then leaked to corporate media.

They don’t know much, including where a second indictment could be brought. Bloomberg mentioned both New York and Virginia (DC area) as possibilities. They aren’t done with Comey yet. Maybe not by a long shot.

Interim Attorney General Todd Blanche is crushing it.

🔥🔥🔥

Maine’s handsome, gravel-voiced governor Janet Mills —who is terming out— has now officially ended her Senate election race challenging incumbent Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine). Yesterday, the Washington Post reported, “Trump said he would end her political career, but Democrats did her in.” Also sad!

This week, nearly six months after she opened her campaign, Mills dropped out of the Democrat primary, following a frosty response from voters and “difficulty raising money.” The WaPo called it a “stunning political collapse of a sitting governor” that has “ left Mills’s allies reeling and raised questions about whether Democratic voters want to reward politicians for standing up to Trump.”

Mills dropped out because ‘she’ was getting shellacked by former Marine Graham Platner —a white, male, “blue-collar oyster fisherman” (though he’s from a wealthy family)— who for 18 years proudly sported a Third Reich “Totenkopf” Special Forces tattoo on his chest. He recently claimed he got the tattoo while he was drunk on shore leave in Croatia in 2007. Could happen to anyone. (He’s since had it re-inked into something that looks like it crawled out of the movie The Thing.)

Here’s the original version:

To perhaps understand Democrat primary voters’ love affair with him, Platner also has been exposed in now-deleted Reddit posts calling himself a “communist,” which apparently elevates him with Democrats —fascist Nazi tattoos notwithstanding— above a sitting governor popular with Democrat partisans for “standing up to Trump.”

For a taste of Democrats’ fascist flexibility, here’s a fun mashup of Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy (D) first complaining about Elon Musk’s “Hitler salute” and then defending Platner’s actual Nazi tattoo (“sure, he’s made some mistakes…”).

CLIP: Senator Murphy (D-Conn.) excoriates Musk but defends Platner and says he looks forward to sitting down with him (1:02).

(Notice how the male Democrat senators are simultaneously rolling out the five-o’clock shadow and the unbuttoned collar? Call it Operation Beard. The party that spent five years explaining masculinity was toxic has apparently issued the senator-grade follicle policy. Fetterman was the prototype. Murphy is still in beta.)

Frankly, I think the real reason they prefer him is probably just because Platner looks normal. I’m not saying ‘Janet’ Mills is a hot mess in this era of collapsing trans narratives, but come on. Whatever you think about Democrats’ inability to recognize actual fascist symbols while easily finding them in cloud formations over Trump rallies, Platner appears more normal than Janet Mills ever did.

Whether Graham “Third Reich” Platner has a Maine snowball’s chance against Susan Collins remains to be seen. Seems like a gamble. But it will be as much fun to watch as the next Terminator sequel.

Have a wonderful weekend! Then come back on Monday morning for another terrific edition of essential news and commentary.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🔥🔥🔥

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court didn’t just tweak Louisiana’s map; it quietly detonated the Voting Rights Act’s entire race‑engineering regime, and now that shrapnel is ripping through Congress, blue‑state fortresses, and the forgotten local boards, commissions, and councils that for forty years have co-opted our democratic institutions via identity politics pods. This morning, the New York Times reported, “Supreme Court Voting Rights Ruling Could Fuel New Era of Redistricting Wars.” This could wind up being the most liberating Supreme Court decision in our lifetimes.

For fifty years, the Voting Rights Act’s Section 2 regime worked a bit like Invasion of the Body Snatchers: the pods arrived as “civil‑rights remedies,” quietly took over local institutions, and before long the whole political neighborhood had been replaced by something that looked familiar but behaved very differently. Callais represents the Earth People’s victory; SCOTUS finally breached the alien mothership and blew up all the plant people.

It’s Independence Day.

“Some fear,” the Times wrote (schizophrenically describing its own worries in the third person), “that the court’s decision will reverberate beyond the halls of Congress.” Quoting a random “Louisiana resident” (who conveniently articulated the Times’ editorial opinion in one succinct sentence), the Times said, “Judges, school board members, councilmen — doesn’t matter, it will affect them all.”

That off‑hand quote about judges and school boards was the closest the Times came to admitting how deep the body-snatching invasion got into our institutions. Just wait until you understand the full scope of what’s really at stake here— the downstream effects they’ve spent decades burying like a golden retriever hiding chew toys all over the backyard.

🔥 It feels utterly insufficient to call this an update to yesterday’s story about one of the most politically explosive Supreme Court decisions ever issued. What the Court did in Louisiana v. Callais was not just about one badly drawn Louisiana map, or even about potential GOP pickups in the 2026 midterms. This story is so much bigger than that. SCOTUS quietly unwound four decades of political pod politics that corrupted our body politic top-to-bottom.

In plain English, the ruling is already triggering at least four massive downstream shocks— three of which nobody has bothered pointing out to us, even though they are probably the biggest stories of all:

1. A red‑state rush to redraw maps before the midterms, now unshackled from court‑mandated “majority‑minority” districts and old Section 2 racial targets.

2. A blue‑state brick wall, which ambitious Democratic gerrymanders and constitutional amendments are suddenly slamming into because their legal doorway just evaporated into thin air.

3. A federal lawfare Uno-reverse, with Trump’s DOJ already promising to apply its civil‑rights powers to attack the race‑driven maps it used to defend, and to enforce Callais in “every state that has such a district.”

4. An earthquake rumbling under local government, where decades‑old Section 2–era “remedies” — single‑member districts, special minority seats, and other race‑tuned structures in cities, counties, and school boards — are now open to attack as potentially unconstitutional racial engineering. (Racers, take your marks.)

Only the first one —the red‑state map rush— was widely predicted. The other three, especially the local effects, are what make this political earthquake a magnitude‑8 event with aftershocks for two generations. As of yesterday afternoon, we started getting real‑world confirmation on all four fronts. Let me show it to you.

🔥 As we expected, more red states jumped into the redistricting pool yesterday, eager to enjoy their new map-drawing freedom, unshackled from racist requirements for court-mandated majority-minority districts. For instance, AL.com reported, “Alabama wants to redraw its Congressional maps, asks Supreme Court for quick review.”

(Portlanders: a “majority-minority district” is an oxymoronic congressional district drawn specifically so that one racial minority group forms the majority, which until Wednesday was legally required to prevent ‘racial discrimination,’ which was how courts explained that the best cure for treating people differently based on race is to treat people differently based on race. Progressive legal scholars call this kind of logic “nuanced.” The rest of us call it “a migraine.”)

Even in Georgia, where early primary voting has already begun, legislators have started brainstorming how to implement the new Supreme Court rules. Fox 5 Atlanta, yesterday:

Nearly everyone predicted the rush of red states to speed-run map changes before midterms. That was already priced in. But an even bigger implication surfaced yesterday. A Tri-Cities NBC affiliate reported, “‘Uncharted’: US court ruling shakes up battle for Congress.”

The story quoted two Cook Political Report analysts, Amy Walter and Matthew Klein, who admitted the consequences are so potentially vast that it is difficult to imagine all the implications. “We are swimming in uncharted waters,” they wrote.

Political strategist Caroline Welles said, “Voting rights litigation has been the main tool since 2013. If it gets blunted, Democrats are looking at structural disadvantages that feel insurmountable.” Like Wile E. Coyote, they looked down, saw only empty space, and are now at the stage of holding up a small sign that says ‘uh-oh.’

Widener law professor Michael R. Dimino noted, “The decision is very significant for the future -- it will remove an unfair advantage for Democrats.”

In other words, while everyone saw the red-state rush to redraw districts, nobody outside political skunkworks operations predicted the effects in blue states. Illinois, for example, was literally moments away from approving an amendment to its state constitution —gavel raised— that would allow Democrats to gerrymander a favorable new map, but the SCOTUS decision erected a brick wall. Chicago Tribune, yesterday:

They had their amendment gift-wrapped, bowed, and sitting in the driveway ready to ship. Then the SCOTUS UPS truck pulled in and ran right over it. Democrats are picking themselves up and beginning to grapple with the terrifying scope of Wednesday’s decision.

🔥 The third huge shock appeared, of course, in a tweet on X. John Solomon’s Just the News reported, “Justice Dept says it will enforce SCOTUS ruling in every state with racially gerrymandered districts.” Every. Single. State. It began with a letter from Senator Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) to the DOJ, helpfully “reminding” DOJ that it has federal authority to enforce the new rules on all fifty states.

Of course, Eric also tweeted out his letter, and Assistant Attorney General (and covid superlawyer) Harmeet Dhillon promptly replied, “We are ON IT!”

The implications are nothing less than astonishing. In practical terms, the DOJ can (and likely will) systematically review existing maps across blue states to identify districts where race was an explicit or predominant factor in line‑drawing, especially where the old Voting Rights Act framework was used as an excuse to draw pretzel-like majority‑minority districts. (Illinois’s 4th Congressional District, for instance, looks like two oddly shaped neighborhoods connected by a highway median, which is technically two pretzels, with extra salt, but whatever.)

For decades, conservatives have watched the DOJ deploy its full legal firepower against Republican-drawn maps with the grim, unstoppable efficiency of a toxic glacier. Now, a senator sends a letter, and the Assistant Attorney General of the United States responds on social media within what appears to be the time it takes to heat up a microwave burrito. “We are ON IT!” is not the language of a typical federal bureaucracy. It is the language of a guy (or gal) who has been waiting a very long time to say exactly that.

This is the today we celebrate our Independence Day moment, especially for everyone who has been on the receiving end of VRA lawfare since the 1980s. I, for one, am here for it.

By the most recent count, there are about 45 redistricting disputes —“a sprawling web of litigation”— still pending in more than 30 states in various federal and state courts. Harmeet’s announcement suggests the DOJ plans to dive into that briar patch like Br’er Rabbit, but this time attacking the race‑aware maps— rather than defending them as it has always done before.

So it’s not just that Louisiana v. Callais is spurring red-state redistricting, closing off some blue-state initiatives, and ending decades of ugly lawfare against Republican states. In normal times, that kind of win would be good enough. Conservatives, experts in unilateral disarmament, usually settle for ‘good enough.’

But this time, they’re finally flipping the script. The shiny, black cannons of lawfare have been captured, and are now being swiveled around to face Democrats. Suddenly —and unexpectedly— Democrats now find themselves sitting in the crosshairs, the defendants in what could be decades of civil rights litigation. It’s coming fast and hard.

🔥 Fourth —and possibly most significant of all— even though Louisiana v. Callais explicitly applies to congressional districts and the VRA’s Section 2, its logic could ripple throughout all other state and local offices, too. Section 2 doesn’t only apply to Congress. Anyplace where blue states have rigged the game using race as an excuse —city councilmen, county clerks, library board members, mosquito control board— will now be fair game for local lawfare challenging any racial scale-tipping.

Historically, many Section 2 cases forced local governments to account for race, by abandoning at‑large elections in favor of single‑member districts, and ‘improving minority representation.’ Following the 1982 VRA amendments, Section 2 was used most heavily not on congressional maps— but on cities, counties, school boards, utility boards, and similar local bodies, especially in the South. Indeed, roughly half of all Section 2 cases since 1982 have involved local governments (city councils, school boards, county commissions, etc.)— not statewide or congressional plans.

For example, this is abundantly true in my own uniparty blue county. Alachua County is obsessed with racial politics. Red-state Attorneys General (paging James Uthmeier) can now focus directly on troublesome blue counties like mine and can bring the pain. Turnabout, after all, is fair play.

Callais gives conservative groups and individual litigants, State Attorneys General, and the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, a brand new way to argue that all these ‘remedial,’ racially motivated restructurings themselves crossed the line into unconstitutional race‑based engineering, especially wherever local records show race was the primary driver.

If a legislature or city council carved out a special “minority opportunity” seat on a board of elections, a school board, a county clerk’s office, et cetera, and the design was openly about racial representation, as many of them explicitly were (virtue-signalers can’t help advertising their virtuous motives), all those just became lucrative targets for legal challenges.

It is a little baffling why the pod-press media didn’t prepare people for all these potential downstream effects while Callais was percolating, or why it now seems so shy about discussing them at all. I suspect they don’t want us to recognize how pernicious and widespread the VRA regime has infected our entire democratic superstructure.

The VRA didn’t just infect the superstructure; it created careers, installed institutions, and built brands. Entire organizations, pod networks, civil rights “expert” classes, and academic political identities were colonized by the idea that the Section 2 regime was both necessary, virtuous, and superior to their MAGA neighbors.

For the first time since the 1970s, we are not just hiding from the pods. We can now start ripping them up by their evil roots. Assuming the courts and DOJ follow through, we are looking at a true sequel to Invasion of the Body Snatchers with an Independence Day-style happy ending — where the humans actually take their institutions back and crush the alien pods into dust.

The hissing era of identitarianism is over. The pod-people mothership is burning and crashing into the Nevada desert. A new golden age of colorblindness has begun. Happy May Day, comrades! (The parade has been canceled.)

Welcome to Earth.

Have a fantastic Friday! …

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⛑️ C&C ARMY BRIEFING — IRAN WAR UPDATE ⛑️

I’ve waited days for top corporate media to pick up this story, but they’ve gone all Mr. Magoo again. Late last week, Reuters thinly reported, “US sanctions wallets tied to Iran, freezing $344 million in cryptocurrency, Bessent says.” The story was so thin it was just one sentence. (Crypto News provided a little more detail.)

CLIP: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent explains next-level economic warfare (1:56).

So far as I can tell—and the facts remain as murky as the water at the Kharg Island dock— the State of Iran owned the seized cryptocurrency. Since crypto’s main purpose is to preserve anonymity (like cash), it was likely used for smuggling, evading international sanctions, funding terror proxies, cybercrimes and ransomware, and other nefarious purposes.

Anyway, Scott Bessent is vacuuming it all up now. He reported yesterday that the total seized is now up to $500 million.

Yesterday, Secretary Bessent told Fox Business that the Treasury Department is ramping up “Operation Economic Fury” and is now “sprinting for the finish line.”

Specifically, the US Treasury has found and frozen secret bank accounts owned by IRGC officials, preserving the money “for the Iranian people.” Hilariously, Bessent also announced we are now seizing IRGC officers’ “villas in the South of France and all over the world,” including, unsurprisingly, London. (Because nothing screams ‘Death to the Great Satan!’ quite like yelling it from the balcony of your six-bedroom chateau in Cannes while sipping mimosas and checking your crypto wallet.)

In his bland, straightforward way, Bessent said, “We will track them down,” sounding more like he was announcing a scheduled expansion of Treasury restroom facilities instead of burning up IRGC officials’ bugout bags amidst a war.

This is the key. We’ve learned that the Iranian Republican Guard Corps (IRGC) is a parasitic mega-corporation that has co-opted the elected government of Iran, and uses the apparatus of state to suck blood and treasure out of the Iranian people, all to enrich a secretive class of demented hypocrites who cosplay as religious maniacs but are really violent mobsters with missiles and an army.

You couldn’t possibly imagine a less democratic system of government. It’s not a theocracy. It’s a heavily armed kleptocracy.

Not that any of that troubles our corporate media types. We shouldn’t judge other cultures. But let’s do a thought experiment. Suppose we discovered that all our top Pentagon officials had secret overseas bank accounts stuffed with millions, villas in the South of France, and so on. How would the U.S. media report that? But when it comes to Iran— crickets.

So Operation Economic Fury may not simply be a curious sideshow to the greater war. That, combined with the Trump Blockade, might be the main action. The United States Military has defanged the IRGC’s military capabilities. For proof, just ask yourself— when was the last time Iran lobbed a missile at anyone?

Its oil wells are full and will soon begin losing permanent capacity. Its ports are closed to any kind of foreign trade, especially oil sales. It’s under a naval blockade. Now comes the real leverage— taking the IRGC mobsters’ toys and Swiss bank accounts away. It’s what you might call a “rubber meets road” moment. The IRGC’s ‘mullahs’ constantly brag about how they’ll happily become martyrs if needed.

But … are the anonymous leaders of Iran’s private army willing to become paupers for the cause? That’s the real question.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🔥🔥🔥

Ruh-roh! Even as the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is trying to reverse its indictment in court, more bad news is coming down the pike, and the group’s problems are multiplying like rabbits overdosing on Viagra. It’s all starting to fall apart. In the first of two “bad news” stories, yesterday the New York Times reported, “Fidelity, Vanguard Won’t Let Donor-Advised Fund Holders Donate to Southern Poverty Law Center.”

Fidelity Charitable and Vanguard Charitable are large “donor-advised funds,” which let people maximize tax benefits under special “donor fund” laws. Investors receive immediate tax benefits in the tax year they contribute to the fund, even though the actual donation occurs later, sometimes much later. Meanwhile, the money is invested in mutual funds, stocks, bonds, or similar equities, which continue growing tax-free, potentially increasing the ultimate donation.

Even better (or worse, depending on your viewpoint), the funds are not required to disclose which donor-investors gave to what charity. So these types of funds also provide a way for donors to remain anonymous and avoid anyone finding out where their money went. You can imagine why this would be popular for certain individuals. (Like politicians, say.)

The main thing, the thing that keeps it all running smoothly, is that investors can specify which charitable organization will get their money. The funds aren’t legally required to follow these designations, but they almost always do, unless it raises a legal or regulatory compliance issue.

Yesterday, both Vanguard and Fidelity announced to hundreds of thousands of their customers that they will no longer allow donations to the SPLC. Fidelity said, “the organization is not an eligible grant recipient during the ongoing investigation.” Vanguard told its investors, “The organization has had allegations and/or charges brought against them for activities that may call into question their ability to carry out their tax-exempt charitable purpose.”

Ironically, in 2023, the SPLC noisily criticized these exact types of funds —specifically naming Fidelity and Vanguard— for acting as a “consistent and significant source of income for groups peddling a variety of hateful and extremist beliefs.” Now the worm has turned. So it will have a hard time complaining about getting cut off in 2026.

But that’s okay! The SPLC has media allies. The Times was outraged on its behalf. Outraged! “It is noteworthy,” the Times argued, “that the Fidelity and Vanguard funds acted before any legal or judicial process had played out.” It a “Boston College law school professor” who asked, “If you or I can still make an outright donation on our own, why can’t the funds do so on our behalf?”

The professor answered her own question. (I guess it was rhetorical.) “My answer is, if we can, then they can,” she said. Of course, the Times didn’t quote any law professors explaining why it would make sense for Fidelity and Vanguard to defer donations to the SPLC. But it did finally get around to the gist, or nub, which was that this development is likely going to sting:

The Times called other donor-advised funds, like Daffy and Charles Schwab, who are currently still letting investors designate the SPLC as a charitable recipient. So there’s room to grow.

🔥 But that was just the first domino to fall. Remember the old saying? It goes something like: lie down with dogs, get up with criminal indictments. The second story did not appear in any corporate media report I could find, but appeared in the SPLC’s own court filings. Specifically, the SPLC admitted that one of its “paid informants” has flipped and is now cooperating with the DOJ against it. Their current story is that “informant F-9” is intensely biased against the SPLC:

According to the DOJ’s indictment, the SPLC laundered $1 million to informant F-9 —a leader of a neo-nazi group. There’s clearly pretty good money in hate. That, and autism, hospice, childcare, food stamps, trans puppet shows, PPP loans, minority-owned SBA loans, and political payment processing.

It’s just that nobody told us how the grift works.

Anyway, the SPLC is attacking the indictment just as I’d predicted when I first reported this story to you: it is quibbling about whether its informants were legitimate sources versus the DOJ narrative it was “funding hate groups.” In its filed motions, the SPLC presented various examples where it has previously provided the DOJ with tips and warnings, which it claims came from its informant network.

I warned you this line of argument would get murky.

Personally, I don’t believe it was well-intended. Why pay a hate group leader a million dollars for “tips?” Any reasonable rationale beggars the imagination. But their careful provision of some tips over the years opens the door to their defensive argument. And I’m sure that was their insurance plan, if they ever got called out. But it doesn’t matter. The legitimacy of their informant network is not the real issue.

Which is why their current strategy seems to be focused on quashing the indictment. They need to stop it right here before things get out of hand.

🔥 Nowhere in SPLC’s motions and letters did it explain, justify, or even mention their fake-entity bank accounts (such as “Fox Photography,” “Rare Books Warehouse,” “Center Investigative Agency,” etc.). The DOJ’s indictment said those accounts were created using false information submitted to federally insured banks. So far, the SPLC has not denied it. They also have not addressed the concealment money-laundering conspiracy count head-on.

(Apparently, the only thing stored in the ‘Rare Books Warehouse’ was a pristine first edition of Money Laundering for Dummies.)

Convictions for bank fraud and false statements to banks require proof of a scheme or artifice intended to deceive a financial institution. The DOJ’s indictment alleged the SPLC knowingly opened accounts under fake names and submitted false documents precisely to hide the fact that donor money was flowing to insiders in the very hate groups they publicly condemned.

“We did it to protect sources,” “we only lied a little,” or “we meant well” are not recognized defenses to these statutes. Federal courts have repeatedly held that operational necessity or a “greater good” does not excuse lying to banks.

The SPLC has yet to provide any compelling factual explanation for why an organization run by lawyers felt it was appropriate to set up multiple sham entities to deceive financial institutions. That silence is notable nine days after the indictment (and going).

The SPLC’s public posture is “the program was necessary and helpful to law enforcement, and the charges are politically motivated.” That may play well with their donor base (some of whom have already said publicly they “knew” or expected informant payments), but it is not a strong legal shield against the specific bank-fraud and laundering counts, which turn on the mechanics of deception, not the moral worthiness of the underlying intelligence work.

It’s not illegal to pay for information. But —and this is a huge but— most people don’t cosplay as intelligence agencies and pay criminals through fake bank accounts. There’s a good reason why not. As SPLC’s lawyers must surely have understood, lying to banks is completely illegal under very serious federal laws. Full stop. Maybe even worse, if you pay an informant for information, and that informant commits crimes, then you can also be criminally liable for the same crimes, as an aider and abettor.

It’s an understatement to say what the SPLC was doing was a titanic risk. There was also titanic money to be made. I guess we’ll find out how much risk, as the Middle District of Alabama makes its decisions. Good luck.

⚖️⚖️⚖️

An all-day fireworks show erupted on social media yesterday, as one of the year’s most-anticipated and longest-delayed Supreme Court decisions finally rolled off the clerk’s presses. The New York Times reported, “Supreme Court Strikes Down Louisiana Map, Another Blow to Voting Rights Act.” The Act is a Civil Rights-era law that has been interpreted by courts to require ridiculous electoral district drawing, such as Louisiana’s gerrymandered ‘snake’ map, which stretches nearly the entire length of the state and looks less like a voting district and more like the outline of your lower intestine after a bad batch of Circle-K sushi:

That is Louisiana’s current map, which the Supreme Court just struck down as unconstitutionally racially motivated. The decision flipped the previous interpretation of Section Two of the Voting Rights Act on its head. Mind you, the Act itself says nothing about mandating minority districts (which would be unconstitutional). But previous Supreme Court decisions, relying on Section Two, allowed states to use race to “ensure minority participation.”

Here is a link to the terrific decision, which in a single stroke changed the entire calculus about Democrats’ prospects for the midterms. For decades, the Donkey Party lazily relied on lawfare lawsuits demanding racially-drawn districts, especially in the otherwise red South, to support its Congressional advantage. It was one leg of the Democrats’ stool, which got sawn off yesterday.

Courts’ racially biased interpretation of the Act brought us some of the most intellectual heavyweights in Congress, like Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), who chaired the House January 6th Committee. Now all those districts are in jeopardy.

All it will take is those states redistricting to ensure compliance with SCOTUS’s new race-neutral requirement, and these clowns will go away for good. Reuters reported that Governor Jeff Landry (R-La.) immediately suspended the May primaries, to allow time to reprint ballots reflecting a new map before the November midterm elections:

The effects are so wide-ranging that it’s hard for anyone to count them all. For instance, Governor DeSantis pointed out yesterday that the new decision changes the game in unexpected ways, as in Florida, where SCOTUS’s decision just voided part of Florida’s state constitution.

He wasn’t just randomly musing. In a legislative lightning round this week, right after SCOTUS issued its opinion, Florida’s House and Senate speed-passed a new redistricting bill that is now sitting on Governor DeSantis’s desk, and which would have been susceptible to Democrat legal challenges absent the new SCOTUS decision. Now it’s fine. Here’s the new map, which shifts +4 in the GOP’s direction:

In the wake of the decision, Alabama Republicans are also racing to redraw their state’s congressional district maps before the midterms. Alabama news (AL.com), this morning:

It seems likely more states will follow. There is —barely— still time.

The entire midterm calculus for the House of Representatives just shifted in the GOP’s favor.

🗳️ Needless to say, Democrats are extremely upset by this race-neutral interpretation. They are practically hyperventilating. They claim the decision is “destroying democracy” and is “racist.” This is based on two misunderstandings. Both flawed concepts were exposed in Barack Obama’s awful take. He complained about (1) equal participation in “democracy,” (2) and the “rights of minority groups.”

You would think a former two-term president would know better. First of all, our system is not a “democracy” —under which the majority rules— but is a representative republic. So his first complaint is aimed at a different country.

Second, and much more pernicious, is the claim about “protecting the rights of minority groups.” Obama’s not the only one. That phrase decorates judicial decisions over the years. But it is even dumber than the “democracy” argument.

Minority groups don’t have rights. That should not be controversial. The reason minority groups don’t have rights is because groups don’t have rights. In the American constitutional system, individuals —not groups— hold the rights. There is literally no such thing as “rights of minority groups.”

And, lest you conclude Obama was just speaking rhetorically or something, think again. In the neo-communist formulation, where racial and sexual identity groups replaced classic economic ones, groups are everything. Obama exposed what Democrats wish were true, that the Constitution would privilege the “rights” of discrete identity groups over the rights of individuals. (And, of course, they would be in charge of defining the groups, which is nothing more than identitarian gerrymandering.)

🔥 Some political analysts estimate that, in total, this single change could permanently cost Democrats up to 40 seats in the House. (The current margin is only +3 GOP.) Here’s one “plausible” map of just the Southeast, where VRA districts are most commonly found:

They are downplaying it now, though. Yesterday, NPR estimated “at least 15 House districts at risk of being eliminated.” Axios reported the ruling “might enhance the Republican majority in the House by an estimated +19 seats compared to the electoral maps for 2024.”

But —before the decision— Politico cited an analysis by Democrat‑aligned voting‑rights groups, which warned that if Section 2 were effectively gutted (as it has been), up to 30% of the Congressional Black Caucus and 11% of the Hispanic Caucus —around 24 members— could be drawn right out of their seats.

In other words, this is a generational shift. Absent a sea change toward the Democrats, which seems unlikely, since all the momentum is going the other way, the Democrats are facing being the congressional wilderness for a long time, like Republicans were for forty years until the Reagan revolution.

I told you not to worry about corporate media forecasts about the midterms. And listen—the plan doesn’t rely solely on this decision. There’s much more yet to come.

Have a terrific Thursday! Come back tomorrow for another great installment of Coffee & Covid’s essential news and commentary.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

I told you so! Never doubt me! Behold: The Trump Administration has fully unleashed its Annus Operum— 2026, the Year of Action. It’s happening. There was so much goodness in this week’s news cycle that I had to toss my usual deep-dive into 3-5 stories overboard, and give you a quick-hits roundup instead. You won’t want to miss any of it. It’s the C&C Week in Review, as of just Wednesday.

⚖️ ⚖️ ⚖️ The Justice Department Gets Busy

⚖️ If you’ve ever tried to hide an embarrassing email confirming the purchase of a “male enhancement product” from your spouse, you are a rank amateur compared to Dr. David Morens. Morens, one of human cockroach Dr. Anthony Fauci’s former senior advisors, was indicted yesterday. Which means he’ll be arrested and processed. The New York Times reported, “Former Fauci Adviser Indicted on Covid-Related Charges.”

CLIP: Fox News report on Morens indictment (1:57).

A federal grand jury has indicted Morens, 78, for conspiring with others to conceal public records related to covid research grants. According to the Department of Justice, Morens used his personal Gmail account to dodge Freedom of Information Act requests and suppress the lab-leak theory. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche stated that Morens and his pals “deliberately concealed information and falsified records in an effort to suppress alternative theories regarding the origins of COVID-19.”

Not-yet indicted Co-Conspirator Number One is almost certainly British zoologist Peter Daszak and his shady NGO, EcoHealth Alliance. This paragraph in the DOJ’s press release basically screamed the names to high heaven:

The press release described Co-Conspirator Number Two as “a physician, scientist and professor who worked for an academic institute that received federal grants.” Guess who that sounds like? UNC’s Ralph Baric.

It’s possible Daszak and Baric are cooperating, or have already pleaded to something. If not, they’re desperately calling defense lawyers right now. It’s also worth noting that it’s very unusual for the DOJ to provide identifying details about unindicted co-conspirators in a press release like this.

It’s happening! The federal government is finally holding the “covid experts” criminally accountable for defrauding the American public during a major public health emergency. For years, we were told to Trust The Science™, which apparently involved conducting official government business on a Gmail account so nobody could see what The Science™ was actually up to. Not to mention defrauding the government by finding dishonest ways to award multimillion-dollar grants to shady NGOs that had already been debarred so they could study illegal gain-of-function coronavirus bioweapons research.

The indictment says Dr. Morens allegedly received pathetic kickbacks for his “efforts,” like bottles of wine delivered to his house and promises of meals at Michelin-starred restaurants. This is how Washington works: You suppress a global pandemic theory, illegally re-route huge grants to illegal recipients, and they buy you a nice Pinot Noir.

Now he’s facing spending the rest of his life in federal prison in exchange for a below-average wine bottle.

I’m sure everybody is also wondering about Fauci. Well, you already know his situation is complicated, since President Autopen gave him a blanket pardon. That’s an analysis for a different post, but at minimum, it proves they knew these prosecutions were coming. Tick, tock!

⚖️ In more terrific legal news, yesterday the DOJ also indicted former FBI Director James Comey. Again! It’s round two. And the second time is the charm, apparently. As with Morens, this means Comey will now finally be charged, arrested, and prosecuted. Last time, the DC grand jury refused to indict the former FBI Director for lying to Congress. This time, the grand jury did indict Comey for threatening the President. The New York Times reported, “DOJ Secures New James Comey Indictment Over Alleged Threat Against Trump.”

CLIP: James Comey responds to new indictment; “this won’t be the end of it” (0:38).

At a time when left-wing social media was routinely calling for Trump’s assassination using the same 4-character code, Comey posted a picture of seashells on social media arranged to spell “86 47”— delete Trump. The DOJ correctly argued this was a threat against the 47th President. Comey insists he meant something more … intellectual, like invoking the 25th Amendment or something. He isn’t sure what he meant, actually. Could have been anything.

Democrats are carping that the DOJ will have to prove Comey’s intent beyond a reasonable doubt to get a conviction, and laughing about how hard it will be. But maybe it won’t be that hard after all. At this time he made his little shell art project, Comey was touring to promote his novel FDR Drive. Guess what it was about?

FDR Drive is a boring, narcissistic ‘thriller’ about ‘stochastic terrorism’ involving a right-wing public figure using coded messaging to incite his followers to commit acts of violence against political enemies. Comey enthusiastically told an NPR interviewer that the book’s central themes were free speech and “what happens when someone’s words incite violence.” The protagonist, federal prosecutor Nora Carleton, investigates whether the podcaster can be held criminally accountable for violence committed by his followers. I am not making that up.

The jury will find it very interesting how RussiaGate co-conspirator Comey was gassing away on national radio about how coded incitement operates, while simultaneously insisting he was just unable to recognize the coded incitement in his own Instagram feed. The fact that he quickly deleted the image after it started getting criticism speaks volumes.

Why delete it at all, if it was perfectly innocent?

Comey is a human weasel. Threatening the President is the least serious crime he’s probably guilty of. Comey is the one who should be 86’d— after a fair trial, of course. By 86’d, I only mean locked up in a Salvadoran Supermax prison for the rest of his life, of course. Or something like that.

Meanwhile, early reports suggest that the FCC has launched a ‘review’ of Disney-owned ABC’s broadcast licenses, after Jimmy Kimmel cracked a joke about Melania Trump having the “glow of an expectant widow.” He said that on broadcast TV three days before the latest assassination attempt. I wonder what Comey’s fictitious prosecutor, Nora Carleton, would think about that.

According to NPR, the FCC has now required Disney to file early license renewal applications that weren’t due until between 2028 to 2031 (depending on the station). Message delivered.

The gloves are off. Pam Bondi’s era —which paved the way by restructuring the DOJ and navigating the Epstein disclosures— is over. We’re in the Blanche era now. The Administration is not playing games. If you use coastal mollusks to send coded messages, or if you use late-night television to make morbid jokes about the First Family, stuff is going to happen.

Finally, I am a lawyer, not a cephalopod, but I still feel like we have reached a regretful point in American history where we must set aside a little freedom and begin regulating seashells. Maybe we should require a background check before anyone is allowed to collect conchs. As for Kimmel, he should probably stick to safer comedic territory. Maybe he should try mocking Muslims or doing funny Mohammed impersonations.

Or maybe try some seashell jokes.

⚖️ Whew. It’s been a very busy week. Next, Federal agents surprise-raided twenty-two locations in Minneapolis this week, targeting many individuals with “ties to the Somali community.” Including, shockingly, the Quality Learing Center of Game Theory Excellence. The Washington Post reported, “Federal officers raid 22 businesses, many Somali-linked, in Minneapolis.”

Federal officials searched autism centers, day cares, small businesses, and some residences, according to WaPo’s story. They had fistfuls of search warrants. “Today the FBI, with federal, state and local law enforcement, is involved in court-authorized law enforcement activity as part of an ongoing fraud investigation,” a spokesman for the Justice Department said in a statement.

Minnesota’s last Feeding Our Future fraud probe produced $250M+ in charges. This wave looks even bigger.

For years, Minneapolis has been handing out taxpayer money faster than a landscaper with a leaf blower in a bank vault. The DOJ is finally tracking down the people who treated federal relief funds like their own personal lottery winnings.

⚖️ The all-of-government fraud crackdown is not moving at the speed of government. It’s not even moving at the speed of business. This is something different. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins dropped a bombshell this week, revealing that in one single red state, fourteen thousand people on food stamps were also driving cars like Maseratis and Porsches that most ordinary taxpayers cannot afford. The Washington Times reported, “Thousands on food stamps drive luxury vehicles, Agriculture Secretary Rollins says.”

CLIP: Ag Secretary Brooke Rollins connects car registrations to food stamp lists and voilá (0:41).

In a single data maneuver, Secretary Rollins just exposed a massive loophole in the welfare system. It was so simple. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) created software linking car registration data to welfare rolls to automatically flag these kinds of unimaginable ‘discrepancies.’ Why hasn’t anyone done this before?

The story reported that “a Lamborghini costs more than $680,000, and a Ferrari can top $600,000. Bentleys are priced at $250,000 to $414,000. Maseratis start at $65,000 but can cost more than $200,000. The price tag for a Porsche ranges from $65,000 to more than $280,000.”

It became possible, unsurprisingly, thanks to an Obama/Clinton “loophole” in SNAP eligibility. It’s not clear yet whether the Obama loophole will allow fraudsters to escape legal liability. In any case, the Trump Administration is now moving to tighten eligibility requirements.

“This is just in one state. We need to defend our nutrition programs for those most in need, not for scammers gaming the system,” Secretary Rollins said. So far, 29 states, nearly all red, have turned over their SNAP registration data. The rest, all blue states, including California and New York, have filed lawsuits to block the USDA from accessing the data, citing “privacy concerns.”

Privacy concerns? Where were all those delicate concerns when the blue states were trying to build a national vaccine registry? Et cetera.

I don’t know about you, but when I go to the grocery store to buy my generic-brand macaroni and cheese, I do not drive a Maserati. If you can afford a car that costs more than my house, you can probably afford to buy your own groceries. I’m not being unsympathetic. I’m just saying.

Thank you, Secretary Rollins for cracking down on food stamp fraud. One hopes the 14,000 will be criminally prosecuted, though this creates a logistical problem that won’t be easily solved.

📈 📈 📈 The Economy is Roaring

📈 Despite the ongoing war with Iran and ‘soaring gas prices,’ the U.S. dollar is surging, and consumer confidence is up. The so-called experts, who spend their lives looking at charts and predicting doom, are once again baffled. The AP reported, “US consumer confidence inches higher in April despite Iran war, soaring gasoline prices.”

CLIP: CNBC breaking news report— consumer confidence goes the wrong way for democrats— up (0:55).

Analysts predicted a confidence rating under 90, but it came in at 92.8— the highest this year.

The American economy is remarkably resilient. It turns out that when you cut regulations and unleash the free market, people actually feel pretty good about things, even when the geopolitical situation in the Middle East is a mess.

It is starting to seem like the model-loving experts are always wrong.

📈 The U.S. Geological Survey announced a massive discovery of one of the most valuable minerals in the modern era —lithium— in the southern Appalachians. They’ve found an estimated 2.3 million metric tons of the stuff, enough to power 130 million electric vehicles and replace 328 years of U.S. imports. Bloomberg reported, “Appalachian Lithium Cache Enough to Power 130 Million EVs, USGS Says.”

This is a historic game-changer for American energy independence. We need no longer rely on foreign countries for the critical minerals needed to build rechargeable batteries. We can just dig it out of our own backyard. (Right now, we buy most of our lithium from China, Australia, and Chile— billions streaming from the US to those countries.)

This will completely restructure the global lithium market and shift it in our favor. Lithium prices will fall, just based on the announcement itself— long before a single gram emerges from the ground.

Let’s connect some dots: Last week, President Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to address a national energy emergency. Yesterday, Seeking Alpha reported, “Trump signs law lifting Minnesota mining ban” (a 20-year Biden moratorium). Now this. The timing between all these events is very suggestive. Massive moves are afoot, and the myopic corporate media can’t see any of it.

This isn’t boring lithium news; it’s a mineral sovereignty offensive.

This is also terrific news for Appalachia, which has experienced tough economic sledding for generations. Now they are sitting on a gold mine, or rather, a lithium mine. Look forward to a reality television show called “Lithium Rush,” featuring Duck Dynasty-style bearded men in flannel and hard hats yelling at each other while operating heavy machinery. I will definitely watch it.

This announcement alone will produce generational changes on a global level. And it wasn’t even close to all the big developments in this category.

📈 In a massive geopolitical earthquake, the United Arab Emirates announced it is leaving the OPEC oil cartel. Coincidentally, this happened just days after the UAE negotiated currency swap lines with the U.S. Treasury. In other words, Trump did a deal. The New York Times reported, “UAE Says It Will Leave OPEC as Iran War Strains Oil Markets.” Here’s the building housing the UAE’s state-owned oil company:

Get this: according to the Times, “the U.A.E. gave less than a week’s notice, saying it would leave on Friday.” The speed of Trump. Buh-bye, suckers.

It is hard to oversell this story. For our entire lives, we’ve lived at the mercy of OPEC’s price-setting and heard about the “petrodollar” until we wanted to start gushing our guts out. UAE is one of OPEC’s biggest producers. It is hard to imagine how the monopolistic Middle East oil cartel can continue without UAE (or rather, in competition with it).

So this news marks the beginning of the end of the petrodollar era and a death blow to OPEC’s control over global oil supply. It also proves that the Trump administration’s strategy of forging strong bilateral alliances in the Middle East is paying off, effectively breaking the cartel’s generations-long stranglehold on energy markets.

Since 1960, the OPEC oligopoly has treated the rest of the world like a captive audience, turning the oil spigot on and off whenever they felt like it and setting prices like an airport snack kiosk. The UAE’s departure is like the bass player quitting a really annoying band. Without them, the whole operation starts to fall apart.

Let’s hope this leads to cheaper gas, so I can afford to fill up my new Maserati, and go spend some food stamps. But either way, we’re suddenly —with less than a week’s notice— in a whole new geopolitical world now.

Now ask yourself: how long was this in the can? I bet Michelle’s Tahoe it didn’t happen in a week.

🗳️ 🗳️ 🗳️ The Shifting Political Landscape

🗳️ Google co-founder Sergey Brin, a man with more money than some small countries, has reportedly shifted rightwards, unexpectedly praising President Trump and donating to Republicans. He even dramatically confronted oleaginous California Governor Gavin Newsom over the state’s proposed ‘billionaire tax.’ While online sleuths remain skeptical about his sincerity, check out how the appalled New York Times reported it: “Sergey Brin Moves to the Right, With a ‘MAGA Girlfriend’ by His Side.”

Brin reportedly scolded Newsom that the billionaire tax was “a tax on success that will drive every founder out of California.”

The tech elite are clearly getting tired of progressive politics that punish success. When the guys who invented the wokest search engine start voting Republican, you can sense a major political realignment underway. Mr. Brin —whose family fled communism to the US when he was a child— has been reliably liberal:

It is not just Sergey. The Times explained, “like so many other leaders in the traditionally liberal bastion of Silicon Valley, Mr. Brin has shifted to the right.” So many others.

Try to imagine how loudly the Democrats will howl if Google stops delivering woke search results.

I have always suspected that billionaires are just like us regular folks, except they have private jets, football teams, and never worry about overdraft fees. But nobody likes paying wealth taxes, not even Sergey Brin. Welcome him to the sane side. He can start by fixing my wifi.

Behold, the conservative counter-revolution, now in full flower. Somehow, the Trump ascendancy demolished the progressive permission structure that trapped all these entrepreneurs in a gilded woke cage. By all historical markers, these folks should be conservative. Now they are out in the wild.

🗳️ Speaking of the conservative counter-revolution, and just as the good news of an Appalachian economic renaissance arrived, we got this. Thousands of voters in West Virginia and the surrounding Appalachian region are switching their voter registrations en masse from Democrat to Republican. This movement, dubbed by locals as “VEXIT,” is rapidly narrowing the area’s historic Democrat registration lead. Fox News reported, “Thousands of Appalachian voters flip from Democrat to Republican, narrowing registration lead.”

This connects directly to the lithium discovery story. Voters in Appalachia can see that the GOP’s focus on domestic energy production and economic growth directly benefits their communities, while the Democrats’ environmental policies threaten their livelihoods.

It is fascinating to watch a political realignment speed-running in real-time. The Democrats used to own Appalachia, treating it as another welfare state while slowly strangling the state’s biggest industry, coal mining, while lecturing the people who worked it. But now the voters are waking up and packing up their lunch pails, and heading for the exits.

🗳️ As we begin to enter the ‘real’ midterm season, and primaries start to pop off around the fifty states, the latest Harvard CAPS/Harris poll shows the GOP in a dead heat for Congress with the Democrats. Given that its polls historically undercount Republican support by about 5 points, this means the GOP could suddenly and ‘unexpectedly’ be in a very strong position. Newsmax reported, “Harvard-Harris Poll: Dems, GOP Tied at 50% Ahead of Midterms.”

The Trump administration’s aggressive “Year of Action” agenda is beginning to resonate with voters. Despite the media’s constant hand-wringing, the American people seem to like what they are seeing. They are starting to understand that Trump’s Iran War isn’t a reckless misadventure, but a carefully planned geopolitical realignment designed to put America First.

Indeed, it’s been weeks since a trad-media headline had the word “reckless” in it. That narrative died on the operating table. Even corporate media has chucked in the towel.

The same poll shows independents breaking +2 for Republicans, and Republican enthusiasm edging over the Democrats. Even if the GOP is tied in the Harvard poll, that means they are probably winning by a landslide.

Index to Today’s Terrific Stories

Here’s the whole roundup in a list form, in case you want to send it to someone to prove how much good news is coming down the pipeline and how fast it’s gushing.

⚖️ Acting AG Todd Blanche — Indictment of Key Fauci Crony for Covid Crimes

• U.S. Department of Justice comment on Morens

• FOX Report on Morens

⚖️ DOJ Re-indicts Comey over ‘86 47’; FCC going after Disney, Kimmel

⚖️ DOJ Mass-Raids Minneapolis fraudsters including the Q. Learing Ctr. of Excellence

⚖️ Federal charges for Big Balls attackers

⚖️ Secretary Brooke Rollins says THOUSANDS of food stamp folks driving cars taxpayers can’t afford in single RED STATE; tick-tock

📈 Dollar defies experts, gas prices, BRICS, doomscrollers, and Iran War and surges

📈 Consumer confidence defies experts, gas prices, and Iran War and goes up

📈 Appalachian lithium cache found, enough to power 130 million EVs, 328 years, USGS says

📈 HISTORY — UAE breaks up with OPEC, end of petrodollar era

• Commenter reaction

🗳️ Billionaire Google Co-founder Sergey Brin switches to GOP (like Musk did)

🗳️ ‘VEXIT’— Thousands of Appalachian voters flip from Democrat to Republican, narrowing registration lead (connects to lithium story; W.Va. prospects looking up and voters happy)

🗳️ GOP recovers, dead heat with Dems in latest polling (which really means GOP +5 given prior poll performance)

Have a wonderful Wednesday! Hopefully things will settle down (or maybe it would be better if they didn’t—I can’t decide), and tomorrow will bring a regular C&C-style roundup of essential news and commentary.

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🚀⛑️ C&C ARMY BRIEFING — IRAN WAR UPDATE ⛑️ 🚀

Defying all expert predictions, the President’s Iran War plan appears to be working, and the Second Great Depression has not landed. Plus, yesterday’s breaking war news exposed most of last week’s trad-media war reporting as outright lies. The Wall Street Journal reported, “Iran Is Flooded With So Much Unsold Oil That It’s Stashing It in Derelict Tanks.” The sub-headline added, “Tehran is trying to buy time as the war turns into a race to see whether its oil fields or global consumers can take more pain.” They’re playing chicken. BUCK-BUCK-BACAAAW!

You might think that having too much oil is one of those good problems that no one sympathizes with, like having so much bitcoin the taxes are eating me alive, or the quarterback who complains to the nerds in the IT class that he can’t decide which cheerleader to take to prom. But it turns out that, under certain rare and exotic circumstances, having too much oil is more like having too many black mambas slither out of your Manhattan apartment toilet.

Whoever is in charge right now in Iran —probably some anonymous, morally flexible, Arabian business gentlemen who are totally off the grid and who enjoy multiple Swiss bank accounts and a private army— finds themselves tightly pickled in one of those rare and exotic “black mamba” situations. Iran is burning up its own oil in desperation.

🚀 Why? For one reason and two reasons. The one reason is President Trump. More broadly, the two reasons are, first, Iran is running out of places to stash the pumped oil, but it cannot stop pumping. Second, President Trump’s Uno-reverse-card blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has stuffed a cork in Iran’s lower drainage aperture and it can’t ship the oil anywhere else.

It’s that simple.

It gets worse. You see, Iran pumps a lot of oil. A lot. It has to, to meet expenses. Supersized private armies and secret nuclear programs are among the most costly of the modern world’s luxuries. And recently, due to various ‘sanctions’ that the ‘International Community’ strongly worded and then promptly forgot to enforce, Iran has been pumping it out of the ground at record rates. They’ve been pumping it, and pumping it, and pumping it. (Note to self: That would make a good refrain for a pop rock song, Pump It Good!)

At this point, you, being a logical person, are probably wondering: Well, why can’t they just switch off the pumps for a while?

This is because you, like me, do not understand how an aging Middle Eastern oil well works. An oil well is not like a garden hose. If you turn off a garden hose, the water stops, and the only negative consequence is that your azaleas die, which they were going to do anyway because you bought them at a home improvement store where they were primarily watered with leftover Diet Mountain Dew.

But if you turn off an Iranian oil well, the entire apparatus seizes up. The subterranean pressure collapses, the machinery breaks down, and the well can never be restarted. (Note to self: Wait! “Subterranean Pressure” would be an even better song name. Someone call Spotify.)

Hence, they cannot stop pumping. The oil must flow. It is like that hilarious scene in I Love Lucy where the chocolates keep coming down the conveyor belt, except instead of chocolates, it is millions of barrels of highly combustible unrefined crude, and instead of Lucy and Ethel, it is a group of panicked clerics frantically searching around for empty containers.

They are filling up derelict oil tankers. They are filling up spare barrels. They are probably filling up Tupperware containers, empty swimming pools, and those little plastic cups you get at the dentist. Any day now, the Supreme Leader is going to wake up, go to the kitchen to get some milk for his Cap’n Crunch, and find that his refrigerator is completely full of light sweet crude.

It is the geopolitical equivalent of a defective soft-serve ice cream machine you ordered from Temu that won’t stop dispensing vanilla. You start out holding a cone, then you grab a bowl, then a bucket, and eventually you are just standing there in your pajamas, screaming at your spouse to bring the kiddie pool into the kitchen.

This awkward conundrum is Iran’s own fault. After President Trump asked Iran to give up its enriched uranium, Iran said, “No, we need it for personal purposes,” yelled something incoherent about Great Satans, and told the Orange Man to stuff it. They deployed six motorboats with black-masked men holding machine guns to shut down the Strait.

Trump shrugged and said, “no, you’re not shutting down the Strait. I am.” Iran’s mullahs had forgotten one very important fact— they need the Strait, too, to get rid of all the pumping oil. But Trump played his Uno reverse card and the clock started ticking on Iran’s ability to find spare gas cans and pickle barrels to hold the black stuff. Iran reached for the cork; Trump used it on them.

And thus began one of the most mendacious media campaigns in history. Iran can be forgiven for lying; it’s in a war. War involves propaganda. But the media isn’t supposed to report our enemies’ propaganda as straight news.

🚀 While President Trump and CENTCOM were calling the US blockade a “tremendous success,” corporate media sneered until its reporters’ faces required extra Botox, and reported official Iranian State announcements as news facts. For example, consider this Financial Times headline from just three days ago:

“At least 34 tankers with links to Iran have passed through the US blockade to exit the Gulf,” the Times gushed, whereas “US forces have so far detained one container ship in the Gulf of Oman and boarded a sanctioned tanker in the Indo-Pacific.” In other words: Trump’s blockade is a joke. But one week ago, before the FT article, the trade press was reporting the opposite. From Kpler (a commodities industry financial rag), dated April 23rd:

So, if the Financial Times’s story was true, it seems super weird that the Wall Street Journal is now reporting that Iran is running out of pots and pans to hold its “black gold.”

According to the Journal, Iran is down to maybe days before things start getting really slippery. Sad! The WSJ’s “race” is a game of chicken. Iran, which cannot win on the battlefield, is trying to win a political pressure war, to force Trump to unblockade its oil so that futures prices fall. Meanwhile, Trump is waiting for the Iranian oil fields to collapse.

So far, Iran —erroneously believing Democrats’ TACO nonsense— has bet that Trump wouldn’t actually let the oil fields collapse, because then its global output will begin being permanently reduced. JPMorgan estimated Iran is already down roughly 750,000 barrels per day from pre‑war levels, even before full shut‑ins, and that a prolonged shut‑in cycle could lock in a permanent loss of several hundred thousand barrels per day relative to pre‑war capacity.

In other words, Iran is betting that the President will back down and chicken out, well before its oil fields begin imploding, since, as time marches on, the damage will permanently reduce its ability to contribute to global oil supplies. That increasingly seems like a bad bet. Trump is showing no sign of relenting.

Think about what this reveals about the bigger plan. The structure of Trump’s blockade strikes the heart of the one thing — the aging oil fields— that really supports Iran’s nuclear ambitions, its gigantic private army, and its terror proxy budgets. By driving export flows down roughly 70% and pushing Iran’s mature reservoirs toward forced shut‑ins, Trump’s policy is not just squeezing this year’s cash flow; it’s sailing straight toward permanently shrinking the entire resource base that funds Iran’s private armies and secretive underground programs.

If that happens, Iran will disappear from the global-problems stage for a generation. What first looked like a reckless blockade is starting to look like Iran’s structural retirement. Tick, tock.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

💉💉💉

Oh, frabjous day! The vorpal sword of DOGE’s ghost just went snicker-snack again. Saturday, the New York Times reported, “Trump Fires Board Members of Group That Oversees U.S. Science Funding.” Not just some members. He fired all 25 members of the National Science Foundation’s board, which ‘oversees’ 90% of all federally funded science projects like measuring the male-female diversity in Panamanian hummingbirds and improving gender reassignment outcomes for gerbils.

For 76 years, the country’s scientific direction has been overseen by the National Science Board, a super-diverse group of 25 highly distinguished people whose primary job, as far as I can tell, was to sit around a massive mahogany table and say things like, “Yes, absolutely, we should give a million dollars to study dance-making in physics. Let’s do the Macarena of Thermodynamics.”

Until Friday. Friday was another historic day in Washington, and a historic day for truth, accountability, and real science. On Friday, the Trump administration, acting with the swift, terrifying efficiency of a man who has just discovered a wasp in his underpants, fired the whole “independent” National Science Board. All 25 gone. Terminated via a curt email that said only, “On behalf of President Donald J. Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as a member of the National Science Board is terminated, effective immediately.”

Naturally, the Times reacted to this the way the media always reacts to anything Donald Trump does, which is to say, by immediately declaring the end of the world. The Grey Lady’s headline could just as well have said, “Trump Fires Science; Gravity Suspended Pending Further Notice.”

The board’s next scheduled meeting was a week from now —May 5th— but unfortunately, right now there are no members to attend. It’s going to be a very short meeting.

Representative Zoe Lofgren of California called it “the latest stupid move made by a president who continues to harm science and American innovation.” And she has a point. How will America innovate without federally funded women’s grievance circles, seal-microaggression studies, and new pronouns for hamsters?

Before DOGE showed up, the NSF was dishing out grants —mostly to progressive ‘scientists’— for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion faster than a hyperactive toddler hands out Halloween candy.

They funded studies on the extinction of pollinators in Hawaii. They funded studies on aquatic insects. They funded a project to develop a web extension that would flag “misinformation” online, which as you know, is government-coded vibe-speak for “opinions we don’t like.” They funded —and I am not making this up— a project to study “decolonizing space.”

Space! Where no one can hear a trans climate scientist scream.

🔥 The main problem is that, nowadays, when you put 25 unelected activist academics in a conference room with a $9 billion spending valve, for some reason, they don’t say, “Let’s cure cancer and invent a flying car.” No, they say, “Let’s study the intersectional trauma of rural Arctic students engaging with polar science.”

DOGE tried to defund the NSF. Congress gave the NSF its budget back. So Trump pulled his classic Apprentice maneuver. Just... boom. You’re fired. It’s a move that has left the scientific community reeling, mostly because they now have to figure out how to pay for their hummingbird diversity studies without using our wallets.

The ousted board members were, predictably, as ever, outraged. Keivan Stassun, an astrophysicist at Vanderbilt University and former board member, complained that the White House is defying the board’s authority. He noted that the Office of Management and Budget recently had the unmitigated audacity to direct the NSF to build a new Antarctic research icebreaker without asking the board’s permission.

Think about that. The Trump administration wants to build an actual ship. A ship made of steel, to do actual research in actual Antarctica, and the academics are mad because nobody asked them to form a study committee to discuss the icebreaker’s commitment to equity and inclusion.

“We would ask them, ‘Are you following board governance directives?’” Stassun said of his conversations with NSF officials. “And their answer would be, in effect, ‘We don’t listen to you anymore.’”

I don’t know about you, but “We don’t listen to you anymore” might be the most beautiful sentence ever uttered to a woke bureaucrat.

🔥🔥🔥

Every once in a while, a story emerges from the local media that tops anything in the corporate media news cycle. Yesterday, a massively underreported Ohio story broke into the UPI, headlined, “Bill introduced to name ‘Loveland Frogman’ as Ohio’s official cryptid.”

As you know, every state has official symbols. These are selected by state legislatures, which consist of people who spend their days trying to figure out how to spend our money, and when they get tired of that, they pass laws declaring that the official state dirt is now “loam.”

Ohio is no exception. Ohio already has a state bird (the cardinal), a state tree (the buckeye), and a state amphibian (the spotted salamander). But apparently, the spotted salamander is not getting the job done. The spotted salamander is slacking.

Which is why two forward-thinking Ohio lawmakers, State Representatives Tristan Rader and Jean Schmidt, have introduced House Bill 821. This is a truly bipartisan piece of legislation, meaning that both Republicans and Democrats have joined hands across the aisle to agree on one fundamental truth: Ohio needs an official state cryptid.

And not just any old cryptid. They want the Loveland Frogman.

🔥 Now, you may be fairly asking: What is a cryptid? A cryptid is a well-known creature whose existence is entirely unproven by ‘science,’ like Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, the goat-sucking chupacabra, or a balanced federal budget. And what, you would be forgiven for asking, is the Loveland Frogman?

According to local lore, the Loveland Frogman is a four-foot-tall, bipedal frog that wanders around the Little Miami River near Loveland, Ohio. It was first spotted back in 1955 by an alert local businessman —who may or may not have just returned from an Ayahuasca retreat— who claimed he saw three frog-like figures standing on their hind legs by the side of the road. One version of the story says one of the frogs was holding a wand that fired a spray of sparks. I am not making this up. If you are going to hallucinate a giant frog, you might as well give it a magic wand.

But the legend really launched with force in 1972, when a Loveland police officer named Ray Shockey was driving near a boot factory at 1:00 a.m. and saw an animal scurry across the road. He described it as a 50-pound creature with leathery skin that was “crouched like a frog” before it stood up, climbed over the guardrail, and headed for the river.

Two weeks later, a second officer on night patrol, Mark Matthews, saw something similar crouching in Loveland’s gloomy darkness. Being a trained law enforcement professional, Officer Matthews calmly handled the situation like any skilled professional would: by shooting it. He then stashed the body in his trunk and showed it to Officer Shockey.

And here is the best part of the story, the part that truly qualifies the Loveland Frogman to be an official state symbol: It wasn’t a proper frogman. It was just a very large iguana that had lost its tail. Officer Matthews confirmed this in 2016, noting that it was probably somebody’s pet that got too big and was released into the wild.

Now, the State of Ohio is poised on the riverside of officially recognizing a legendary four-foot-tall, wand-equipped, magical bipedal frog that, by all actual evidence, was just a very unlucky, oversized tailless iguana.

This is perfect. This is exactly the kind of critical bipartisan issue our government should be focusing on. “This bill is about showcasing our communities,” Representative Rader said in a press release. “The Loveland Frog is uniquely Ohio.”

He is absolutely right. What could be more uniquely Ohioan than taking a misunderstood reptile, shooting it, stuffing it, and then turning it into a beloved local mascot? The city of Loveland has fully embraced the Frogman. They have a Frogman Festival. They have T-shirts and frogman puppets. In 2023, the city even debuted a life-sized Frogman mascot dressed as a “frog prince.”

I fully support House Bill 821. I think every state should have an official cryptid. Florida’s should be the Skunk Ape. New Jersey’s could be a guy named “Tony” who claims he can get you a deal on some surround-sound speakers that “fell off a truck.” California’s would be a learning center with live students in it.

In the meantime, we should all applaud Ohio for taking its bold stand on the cryptid issue. If you happen to be driving near the Little Miami River late at night, keep your eyes peeled. And if you see a four-foot frog waving a spark-shooting wand, for Heaven’s sake, don’t shoot it. It’s probably just a short Ohioan supporting the newest state mascot.

Have a terrific Tuesday! Get back here tomorrow morning, for more delicious and entertaining essential news and insightful, if at times weird, commentary.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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By now, if your scrolling addiction is even moderate to low, you’ve already seen news of would-be assassin Cole Allen’s ‘manifesto’ —a generous label, considering his supposed intellectual credentials. Frankly, and disappointingly, Allen set the bar pretty low, considering all his degrees from top universities and “Teacher of the Year” status. Anyway, so far as I can tell, only the conservative New York Post printed the complete version, in a story headlined, “Exclusive: Read White House Correspondents’ Dinner gunman Cole Allen’s full anti-Trump manifesto.

If you want to know what’s really wrong with America today, look no further than our manifesto writers. There was a time when a proper manifesto had some heft to it. It was typed on a manual typewriter in a cabin with no electricity, walls lined with aluminum foil, and it usually involved a very detailed and complex (if mathematically questionable) explanation of why the industrial revolution was a bad idea.

But today? Today we get Cole Allen, 31, formerly a Los Angeles resident, but now permanently rehoused with the Bureau of Federal Prisons.

Right before he launched his failed attack, Cole, who uses the online nickname “coldForce” (which sounds less like an assassin and more like a brand of men’s body wash available at gas stations), released a 1,052-word document outlining his deeply held grievances. He signed it: Cole “coldForce” “Friendly Federal Assassin” Allen. (Quote marks in original. And yes, he gave himself two nicknames.)

To be clear, I did not make that up. He actually called himself the “Friendly Federal Assassin.” (For the record, that is also a good name for a Casper the Friendly Ghost reboot in which Casper gets very online and very angry about government policy. Or a good name for a punk rock band: The Friendly Federal Assassins. Either way.) It was the kind of title you give yourself when you are trying your best to murder high-ranking government officials— but you also want to make sure you get a good Yelp review. Four stars. He shot at the podium, but he was very polite and asked for consent first.

🔥 Cole’s manifesto reads less like a chilling declaration of ideological warfare and more like a passive-aggressive, virtue-signaling email dispatched to a homeowners’ association.

He starts off by apologizing. A lot.

“Let me start off by apologizing to everyone whose trust I abused,” he wrote. He apologized to his parents for lying about having an interview. He apologized to his colleagues for saying he had a personal emergency. He apologized to the people he sat next to on the train from LA (for not wearing deodorant? Cole didn’t say. It sounded embarrassing). He apologized to the people who moved his luggage.

Wading through this pointless litany of polite regret, I expected him to next apologize to the hotel front desk clerk, for not signing up for the Hilton Honors rewards program. I know I missed out on double points, and for that, I am truly sorry.

This is the problem with modern extremism: it’s entirely too concerned with fake etiquette. It’s downright unmanly, dammit. You can’t launch an armed assault on the highest levels of the federal government and then worry about whether you inconvenienced the bellhop. Pick a lane, Cole. Are you a fearless instrument of divine justice, or are you the guy who leaves a note on a parked car after lightly tapping the bumper?

As annoying as that was, Cole’s virtue-signaling nonsense quickly became even more exasperating. Cole, our Friendly Federal Assassin, then laid out his “Rules of Engagement.” The CalTech engineer and NASA intern actually typed the words: “(probably in a terrible format, but I’m not military so too bad.)” (Add to the long list of other mysteries that a man who presumably once calculated orbital insertion trajectories for spacecraft could not figure out how to format a bulleted list.)

This is like a bank robber handing the teller a note that says, Please give me all the money (sorry about the handwriting, I’m a Pisces).

His ‘rules of engagement’ were basically an overlong list of people he was not going to target. Hotel employees? Not targets. Guests? Not targets. Secret Service? Only if necessary. He even specified that he hoped the Secret Service was wearing body armor (they were), because he was using buckshot instead of slugs, “in order to minimize casualties.” Um.

For some reason that no one can yet explain, Cole specifically said FBI Director Kash Patel was not a target. Corporate media is having a field day with that one.

🔥 Cole Thomas Allen is, without a doubt, the most virtue-signaling domestic terrorist in American history. He’s like a compassionate vegan considerately telling everyone about the health benefits of organic carrot dogs at a church cookout— he wants to make the point, but he also doesn’t want to be blamed for ruining anyone’s afternoon.

Next came his overly defensive “Rebuttals to Objections” section, which was my personal favorite. Cole actually anticipated how people might complain about his ‘selfless’ actions, and pre-argued with himself in his ‘manifesto.’

For just one example: “Objection 2: This is not a convenient time for you to do this.”

Who does he think would make this objection? Who looks at a heavily armed man storming a hotel ballroom with murderous intent and says, “You know, Cole, this is a really inconvenient time for me. I have a Zoom call at 3:00, and I haven’t even had my coffee yet. Could we reschedule the assassination for Thursday?”

And Cole’s self-centered, ungrammatical, pre-rebuttal? “I need whoever thinks this way to take a couple minutes and realize that the world isn’t about them.” My plan is more important than YOUR silly problems.

That’s right. The guy who decided to take it upon himself to violently alter the course of American history is accusing other people of being self-centered. Cole “needs” people to consider his priorities.

Cole wrapped up his masterpiece as if he were a great artist accepting an award: with a boring but emotional thank-you speech. He thanked his family. He thanked his friends. He thanked his colleagues for their “positivity and professionalism.” He thanked his students for their “enthusiasm and love of learning.” He even thanked, and I quote, “the many acquaintances I’ve met, in person and online, for short interactions and long-term relationships.” Thank you, Circle-K clerk, for selling me those nicotine pouches.

It was an Orwellian Oscar speech from a man who, in his own deluded mind, had just won something important. As best I can tell, the award he envisioned was for Lifetime Achievements in Grievance. He’d like to thank the Academy. He’d like to thank his parents. He could not have done this without all of you. Please hold your applause.

What exactly was he thanking them for? Their love? Their companionship? Their perspectives and inspiration? Cole never said. But the implication was clear: somewhere along the way, his third-grade teacher’s encouragement, his college roommate’s friendship, and a stranger’s kind word on Reddit all combined to produce this.

You’re welcome, America.

When you read Cole’s thank-you section carefully, you notice something very unsettling beneath the ridiculous Oscar-speech format. Cole isn’t just saying goodbye to people he loves. He’s performing for an audience he expects to approve. The whole letter was written as if there was, somewhere out there, a community of folks who will read it and think: finally, someone was brave enough to do it. We’ll return to that thought in a moment.

This was without a doubt the most troubling part of the ‘manifesto.’ Is there a community of folks who are clapping right now, since, as Cole wrote, “I don’t see anyone else picking up the slack”? And if so, what should we do about that, if anything?

A coherent nation cannot long allow that malevolent spirit of violence and discontent to continue.

🔥 Then, at long, painful last, Cole finally signed off. But, just as the reader breathed a sigh of relief, Cole compulsively added a long postscript complaining about hotel security. (Unsurprisingly, a last-word freak.) Below his signature, Cole tacked on, again without demonstrating a shred of evidence of his postgraduate education: “PS: Ok now that all the sappy stuff is done, what the hell is the Secret Service doing? Sorry, gonna rant a bit here and drop the formal tone.”

What formal tone?

The “informal postscript” was, ironically, a scathing one-star review of the event’s security measures. “I expected security cameras at every bend, bugged hotel rooms, armed agents every 10 feet… What I got (who knows, maybe they’re pranking me!) is nothing.”

Well, Cole, it was not absolutely “nothing.” After all, you did end up shirtless, face down, hogtied on the carpet, having murdered nobody. Say what you like about the many inexcusable security failures (as I did yesterday), but the last person who should be bragging about that is Cole Allen. He made it about 75 feet —only because he was sprinting— and never even set foot on the staircase.

Either way, you could almost hear the disappointment in his voice. He went to all this trouble to become the Friendly Federal Assassin, and nobody even checked his bag. It must have felt like studying for weeks for his doctoral dissertation, only to find out the professor was grading on participation. I brought multiple weapons! he essentially complained. Notice me!

He ended, at last, for real this time, with a heartfelt message aimed at the youth of America: “Oh and if anyone is curious is how doing something like feels: it’s awful. I want to throw up… Can’t really recommend it! Stay in school, kids.”

Thank you, Cole. We’ll be sure to add that to the curriculum, right after the side effects of vaping.

We surely live in the most bizarre possible timeline. We now have virtue-signaling assassins who apologize to luggage handlers, write FAQs for their own crimes, and complain about the lack of security like a disappointed tourist at Islands of Adventure.

If this is the future of political extremism, we might not even need the Secret Service. We just need a really good customer service department to handle all the complaints. Oh well.

Casper the Virtue-Signaling Assassin can continue submitting his complaints from SuperMaxx, since his “manifesto” also counts as a confession.

🔥 Hopefully, now that we have rightfully mocked Cole’s moronic manifesto, you’ll allow me a few more serious comments. Cole Thomas Allen is not our biggest problem.

BlueSky isn’t 4chan, Discord, or a darkweb channel. BlueSky is where progressive journalists, academics, Democratic political operatives, and mainstream left-leaning professionals went after rage-quitting Twitter. It is, by design, a curated, credentialed, “respectable” space for progressive intellectual discourse. BlueSky is also where Cole Allen lived. Per the Washington Free Beacon, Cole signal-boosted posts on BlueSky calling for Trump to be ‘immediately removed from office and tried for high crimes’ — a fact corporate media has declined to dwell on or even mention.

So I dipped a tentative toe into BlueSky, hoping to find at least one good quote. What I found was a seething volcano of approval, defense, and justification for Allen’s assassination attempt.

BlueSky provides evidence of the real problem, a visible strain of cowardly but obvious approval. They aren’t even trying to hide it. It ranges from the carefully worded —“we condemn the violence but understand the frustration” to the openly celebratory in progressive social media. From BlueSky, this morning:

This is but one example of countless posts arguing that the assassination attempt was Trump’s fault. Another strain finds the political violence a perfectly natural and expected response from smart people like themselves:

Chillingly, the general and enthusiastic consensus from so-called “progressive elites” is that more political violence is coming:

Equally unsettling, the progressive left is starting to manufacture a pantheon of resistance ‘folk heroes,’ comparing Cole Allen favorably to the healthcare CEO assassin Luigi Mangione, for whom they’ve made t-shirts, mugs, memes, and filled Etsy to the brim. The obvious message: kill people who disagree with us.

In a CNN interview yesterday, Democrat strategist Van Jones saw what’s happening, too. “I’m starting to worry about something,” Jones said. “Which is that the shooter survived, which means on Monday he’s going to court, which means there is a danger that people try to make him some sort of hero.” He added, “You watch what happened with Luigi, who shot a CEO to death, and somehow became a hero.”

🔥 Even among the left’s more cautious political and media types, the word “but” has been doing enormous work over the last two days. “It’s deplorable but it represents a large group of unhappy Americans.” This is the rhetorical equivalent of, “I’m not saying he should have done it — I’m just saying I understand why someone would.” That’s not actually condemnation. That’s a permission structure dressed up in plausible deniability.

For instance, yesterday, while generally decrying political violence, former president Barack Hussein Obama mused, “We don’t yet have the details about the motives behind last night’s shooting at the White House Correspondents Dinner.” Meaning, let’s not judge him too hastily.

These few examples aren’t BlueSky outliers. They were the majority. What I found myself looking at in shocked horror was not random outrage. It was a complete rhetorical ecosystem — every possible angle of justification, minimization, and encouragement, all present in a single thread, all collecting likes. Someone normalizes him. Someone predicts more. Someone invokes Luigi to make it feel heroic. Someone denies it was even serious. Someone says the system started it.

Collectively, BlueSky doesn’t just approve of Cole Allen. They’re constructing a complete permission structure for the next attempt. They are answering every single objection in advance, exactly the way Cole’s own manifesto did— except they’re doing it for a world audience.

The unavoidable conclusion is that the radicalization pipeline is now fully normalized on the mainstream left. When BlueSky resoundingly celebrates Cole Allen within hours of the event, with no pushback of any kind —not despite their respectability but through it, using the language of trauma and systemic injustice and folk heroism— it means the permission structure for political violence has migrated out of the fringe and into the mainstream left’s social infrastructure.

The “more to come” posts are not predictions— they are invitations. When Dawn Humphrey said that more Cole Allens would emerge, she was not warning anyone. It’s not something that troubles her. She was describing an outcome she considers logical and, implicitly, deserved. When oakidoaki replied “More to come!” in enthusiastic agreement, that post was visible to everyone in the network.

It invites copycats. It reassures anyone else who might be on the fence that their community will applaud them as well. That is radicalization infrastructure, operating in the open, on a platform packed full of corporate media journalists who will never ever report on it because they all quietly agree.

🔥 BlueSky isn’t the canary. It’s the coal mine.

Actually, the coal mine is the broader left-wing media and cultural ecosystem, which spent years building the rhetorical conditions for this: the “by any means necessary” framing, the “this is literally fascism” escalation, the Luigi celebration, the normalization of “punching Nazis” as an ill-defined category that can expand to fit anyone the speaker dislikes. BlueSky is just where we can see the temperature most clearly, because the users there are less guarded than they would be on a platform with a mixed audience.

Here’s the problem. The next escalation in this logic is not a more competent Cole Allen targeting the same level. It’s some deranged leftist who reads the same permission structure and concludes: why aim so high when you can aim locally and actually succeed? Think of a Republican Congressman from a rural district who might tip the House scales were he gone. A conservative county commissioner. A school board member who voted the wrong way on segregating bathrooms. A judge who upheld parents’ rights.

These kinds of targets have essentially zero security. They are accessible. They live in neighborhoods. They have routines. The ideological framework being assembled on BlueSky —the system is violent, normal people have had enough, there’s more to come— does not specify a target level.

It just specifies the category: people who support the wrong side.

This progressive revenge fantasy is as delusional as it is wicked. The left’s pro-violence permission structure is being built entirely inside a fantasy of perpetual opposition— as if Republicans are a sleepy occupying force that can simply be disrupted into submission. What progressives fail to model is the response. They are not asking: if we succeed, then what? The answer is not the fall of the Trump regime.

It is the consolidation of it.

In America, political violence against a movement’s opponents has almost never weakened that movement. In the 1960s, leftist violence from groups like the Weather Underground, Black Panthers, and the SLA handed Nixon his mandate. McKinley’s assassination birthed Theodore Roosevelt. The attempted assassination of Reagan in 1981 generated a gigantic wave of public sympathy that helped cement his political dominance. Butler, Pennsylvania, almost certainly shifted votes, if not cemented Trump’s election.

But beyond that, Republicans currently grasp every lever of federal power. They have a Supreme Court majority that includes a justice who just survived a leftist assassination attempt and whose colleagues watched it happen. They have a president who has already survived three attempts (that we know of) and whose political identity is now substantially built around that survival. They have a base that is, by any measure, better armed than the opposition.

And they have —this is the part the left is not thinking about— the legitimate legal and constitutional machinery to respond to a pattern of political violence against local and federal government officials with overwhelming institutional force. Think Insurrection Act. Think martial law.

The people celebrating on BlueSky never ask themselves what happens if they succeed? Or, more to the point, what happens if enough people who read their posts try and fail. They are not the side holding the federal apparatus, the Supreme Court, the Insurrection Act, and three more years on the clock. They are lighting matches in a room they do not control, can’t clearly see, and they seem to think the room will burn in the direction they choose.

Is there anyone left in the Democrat party to recognize the danger and stop this runaway train? Because the old saw is true: something that can’t go on forever won’t. And this —whatever progressives believe they are doing— cannot go on for much longer. And runaway trains never stop gently.

The optimistic take is that, whatever happens, it will produce a long-overdue catharsis, a purge of hatred and violent impulses, ultimately delivering a new birth of harmony, civil engagement, and communal respect. But we might hit a few speed bumps first. So hang on to the armrest.

Have a magnificent Monday! Come back tomorrow morning, for a regular roundup of essential news and commentary.

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Given the nature of the story and the need for accurate information, and to counter the dumb corporate media narratives, I’ve opened today’s supporter-only bonus post to everyone (except that the comments are restricted to paid subscribers).

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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Well— it happened again. Thank heavens, they failed again. As you almost certainly know by now, nearly every news platform in the world covered last night’s latest assassination attempt. After midnight, the Hill reported, “Trump’s WHCA dinner with the press turns into night of tears and terror.” President Trump is fine. The shooter is in custody. The attendees are traumatized.

The White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) dinner is a black‑tie banquet in Washington, DC. Once a year, the President, political officials, and journalists gather for speeches, awards, and light‑hearted roast‑style humor. Organized by the WHCA, a group representing reporters assigned to the White House, the annual event is held at the Washington Hilton, which has hosted the dinner for decades. It mixes serious elements, like journalism scholarships and awards, with entertainment, jokes from the president, and a featured comedian.

Coincidentally, the Washington Hilton is also where John Hinckley shot Reagan in 1981. Having now been the scene of two attacks on a sitting or former U.S. president in 45 years, the Washington Hilton is rapidly accumulating the kind of reputation hotels usually only earn through radioactive bedbug infestations or hosting snuff films.

Nevertheless, Trump kept a positive attitude. “I was all set to really rip it,” the President said afterward. “I said to my people, this would be the most inappropriate speech if I said it now; I’ll probably be very nice, very boring next time.”

The dinner event is usually widely covered by U.S. media, since they love talking about themselves, and as a symbol of the close-but-sometimes-awkward relationship between the press and the presidency. President Trump boycotted the dinner during all of Trump 1.0 and last year. So last night’s WHCA dinner would have been his very first as Commander in Chief.

Now this.

🔥 It went down around 8:30 pm, right after everyone had been seated and the dinner service had begun. Blurry hotel security footage on the floor just above the conference room showed a heavily armed black man racing past the Secret Service security checkpoint in a full sprint, heading for the staircase leading to the ballroom. As he sprinted past security officials at a dead run, he fired at the closest agent and hit him in the center of mass (the agent’s vest caught the bullet).

CLIP: President Trump posts security footage showing assassin sprinting past security (0:24).

Three or four more shots were fired. It’s not yet clear who fired them— Allen or security. Alert agents tackled the would-be assassin about 50 feet later, near the grand staircase down to the ballroom, where he would have had a clear shot to the stage— where the President, Vice-President, their wives, and other officials were innocently dining.

Meanwhile, downstairs in the ballroom, Secret Service and other security personnel heard five shots in quick succession and sprang into action, rushing the Vice President and then the President offstage. The ballroom exploded in chaos and panic. A local DC reporter said, “You heard the pops, then a beat of silence, and suddenly everyone in tuxedos and gowns was under the tables.” Wolf Blitzer reported that an officer “threw him to the ground.”

The room was locked down while terrified attendees cautiously emerged from under their tables, and staff began clearing broken glasses and dishes destroyed in the race to the floors. Around 9 pm, a WHCA official said the program would resume; at 9:20 pm they changed their mind and told everyone to go home.

By 10:30 pm, the shooter had been identified, and President Trump held a press conference at the White House. “Some of these people are genius-level IQ, but they’re nuts,” Trump said plainly. And some of these people have unaccountable weapons skills and security knowledge.

🔥 Early this morning, the Wall Street Journal reported, “Caltech Grad, ‘Teacher of the Month’ Named as Washington Shooting Suspect.” The subheadline said, “‘I’m in shock,’ says former classmate of Cole Allen, who is in custody after attack outside White House correspondents’ dinner.”

Cole Thomas (alt. ‘Tomas’) Allen, 31, of Torrance, California, was quickly publicly identified. Allen graduated from Caltech in 2017 (the same campus where they filmed exterior shots for The Big Bang Theory) with a degree in mechanical engineering, interned at NASA’s JPL, and in 2025, he got a master’s degree in computer science from California State University. In other words, he was of the credentialed elite class.

When caught, the Teacher of the Month was found armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and an unspecified number of knives. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said, “It does appear that he, he did, in fact, set out to target folks that work in the administration, likely including the President.” CBS reported that he “told law enforcement he wanted to shoot Trump administration officials.” He aimed for total mayhem.

For convenience, Allen also booked a room at the Washington Hilton where the dinner was held, so he wouldn’t have to run too far. We don’t know yet whether he used the baggage cart to get all the weapons to his room. (And presumably, he collected his Honors points and his free chocolate-chip cookie.)

The Journal reported that Allen was registered with no party preference, according to voting records. But in 2024, he donated $25 to ActBlue with the memo “Earmarked for Harris for President,” according to FEC filings. I wonder what his politics are. According to a recent LinkedIn post, he worked at C2 Education, a private tutoring and test-prep company, which had just awarded him ‘Teacher of the Month’ only four months ago in December, 2024.

Somewhere right now, an HR Director at C2 Education is prying a laminated certificate from a lobby wall.

Allen’s younger sister, Avriana Allen, is a far-left journalist who lives in DC. She graduated in 2021 from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Until just recently, she worked for progressive platform CalMatters as a ‘voter-guide developer.’ Since September, she has appeared to work for the PEW Research Center, with an office within walking distance of the Hilton. So far, no evidence has been reported suggesting Avriana helped Cole, such as by providing him details about the WHCA dinner or the layout of the DC Hilton, both of which she was almost certainly familiar with.

US Attorney for DC Jeanine Pirro announced Allen will be arraigned on charges including using a firearm during a crime of violence and assaulting a federal officer with a dangerous weapon. For starters. Pirro promised, “There will be many more charges based upon the information that we are learning in this very fluid situation.”

The WHCA and President Trump both said the dinner will be rescheduled within the next 30 days.

🔥 Corporate media is already downplaying the story. Though headlining it with multiple stories, Outlets like PBS and the awful New York Times are calling it “an incident” instead of an “assassination attempt.” They are one euphemism away from calling it a “spirited disagreement.” As of going to press, the Times refused to name the shooter, babbled about how the president was never in danger, and basically called it a mostly peaceful shooting. PBS:

Overseas, the coverage was closer to what we would expect. One European outlet dryly noted that the Washington Hilton attack “brings the number of attacks suffered by the current president to three in just two years.”

Social media hot takes are also exploding, as you would rightly expect. Independent researchers are hard at work, digging into the internet, scouring public records, and harvesting historic social media posts. They are uncovering dots and speculating wildly.

One of the most eerily mysterious items they’ve found was an anonymous X account, created in 2023, that has posted exactly one thing in its entire existence —the two words ‘Cole Allen’— and then went dark. This is the social-media activity of either a retired intelligence officer, a deeply committed haiku poet, or someone who mistook X for Venmo.

Independent investigators have already located a “Henry Martinez” who worked at NASA at the same time Cole Allen interned there. I would not be surprised if it turns out the men were romantically involved. If that is the same guy, why would he post Allen’s name on X— as his only social media activity? It’s hard to guess.

🔥 Some curious patterns are emerging from the three shooters. All three episodes share a common shape: a lone, heavily armed man, apparently motivated at least in part by politics, probing the edges of Trump’s protective bubble and exploiting a specific vulnerability in the environment. When does a ‘lone wolf’ become a pack?

In Butler, Pennsylvania, shooter Thomas Matthew Crooks climbed onto an unsecured rooftop just outside the rally perimeter; in Florida, Ryan Wesley Routh built a sniper’s hide along the fence line of Trump’s golf course; and at the Correspondents’ Dinner, Cole Thomas Allen tried to blast through the Secret Service checkpoint just outside the ballroom.

Each time, the attack emerged from just beyond what security planners assumed was “good enough” standoff distance— high ground outside the venue fence, a concealment point just beyond the fairway boundary, or a magnetometer line that turned out to be just spread-out enough for a rapid charge from around the corner.

I’m not saying all three attacks suggest deep, intimate knowledge of presidential security strengths and weaknesses. I’m just saying.

Taken together, the three attempts highlight a paradox: the protective apparatus keeps evolving— and so do the shooters’ tactics. It’s almost like each successive shooter knows how the Secret Service’s protocols have changed.

In the most recent two, the attacker was successfully neutralized before Trump was physically harmed, and in the latest, the suspect never made it to the final stairway. Yet, in spite of increasingly paranoid and enhanced security, each incident exposed a brand‑new seam — an unguarded rooftop, a gap in a golf‑course fence, a “layered security” perimeter that still allowed an armed man to sprint the last 50 yards.

This, agencies assure us, is fine. What can you do?

Politically, that narrative pattern feeds two competing stories: one, of a president repeatedly targeted and miraculously spared, which can be framed in almost providential terms; the other, of a security system that keeps being surprised by shooters who seem to know exactly where the gaps are, keeping Trump’s public appearances in a permanent state of high‑alert brinkmanship.

Three different venues, three different attackers, three different sets of local circumstances— yet in each case the gunman materialized precisely where the security architecture was thinnest, as if he’d been handed a highlight reel of the weak spots. An unsecured rooftop in Butler, a scrubby fence line along a golf course, and now a magnetometer choke point close enough to allow a 50‑yard sprint at a black‑tie dinner where the president, vice president, Cabinet, and much of Washington’s press corps were all in the same room.

You needn’t believe in a grand conspiracy to notice that the “random loner” keeps showing up exactly where the professionals left the door cracked open.

At a minimum, the now-clear pattern poses uncomfortable institutional questions. Who, exactly, signed off on a rally site that left a clear shot from a low commercial rooftop directly into the candidate’s stage and moved the rooftop agents into the building because it was “too steep?”

Who decided that a former president under active threat should play golf on a course where a man with a rifle could dig into the foliage just beyond the fence line and wait for hours— and fail to screen the perimeter?

And **who approved the WHCA security plan that routed the top political and media elite of the United States through a screening funnel that still allowed a heavily armed shooter to get within sprinting distance of the ballroom doors?

Those aren’t “acts of God.” They’re choices, made by specific people, inside specific agencies, under specific pressures.

Once you start asking these kinds of questions, the official narrative —lone wolves, no broader plot, nothing to see here, just move along— begins to sound less like a conclusion and more like a reflex. Investigators insist that Crooks, Routh, and Allen were all acting alone, with no evidence (so far) of any coordinating hand.

Maybe that’s true. But even if you take them at their word, you’re still left with a different kind of coordination problem: a security culture that keeps treating each near‑miss as an isolated fluke instead of a connected stress test of the system. The result is a protection posture that hardens yesterday’s failure point while leaving tomorrow’s gap wide open.

Trump’s critics mostly yammer about rhetoric, polarization, and staged attacks, not about how three successive attackers all managed to find the one tiny pixel in the security perimeter that would give them a shot. Meanwhile, the agencies in charge issue boilerplate statements about reviewing procedures, enhancing coordination, and moving forward— language that has, so far as I can tell, was cut and pasted directly from the agency’s response to the previous two attempts.

As if “more of the same” is any kind of adequate answer to a pattern that keeps repeating, with increasingly higher stakes each time. What do they think will happen if one of these attempts finally succeeds?

🔥 At some point, a serious country would stop treating these as three separate news cycles and start treating them as a single, very troubling data set. Even the New York Times is starting to notice a pattern. Headline this morning:

I don’t want to beat a dead horse here. But this is important. If this were just three different shooters exploiting three different weak spots, that would be bad enough. But when you look more closely at the details, the pattern gets even harder to wave away as “bad luck.”

First, Butler wasn’t just an overlooked rooftop; agents were assigned to that roof and then pulled off it, with the Secret Service cycling through goofy explanations it could not defend in public. Then-Director of the U.S. Secret Service, Kimberly Cheatle, told lawmakers, “That building in particular has a sloped roof, so, you know, there’s a safety factor that would be considered there that we wouldn’t want to put somebody up on a sloped roof.”

The initial claim that the roof was too steep to stand on was quickly walked back after we all saw photos of the FBI standing easily on the nearly flat rooftop, yet all we have been offered to replace Cheatle’s moronic initial excuse is the tailpipe of an industrial-grade fog machine.

It wasn’t just the failure to anticipate a vulnerability. It was the conscious decision to vacate the exact piece of high ground that turned out to be decisive— and then to stonewall when asked why. Isn’t that the most important question?

Florida shows a different but related flavor of failure. Routh did not teleport into position. He moved weapons and gear onto the course and sat in the brush along the fence line for hours, in brutal Florida sunshine, within sightlines that normal perimeter doctrines are supposed to check and re‑check before the protectee shows up.

If the Secret Service’s own “layered security” model means anything, it should mean that a guy with a rifle can’t lie motionless for half a day inside the outer ring of the bubble and still be there when the president walks into his field of fire. The fact that agents only engaged Routh once they happened to visually pick him up with a weapon, rather than because a sweep flushed him out long beforehand, is its own quiet indictment of how seriously those outer layers are being enforced (or not being enforced).

Again, the failure isn’t just that there was a blind spot; it’s that the part of the system designed specifically to catch that particular blind spot was never switched on.

Now we get to number three: Cole Allen at the Correspondents’ Dinner. It’s still early, of course, but the odds picture gets even weirder. Watch the security video that Trump released. You’ll see what looks like a secure choke point: multiple officers at the magnetometers, a tight cluster of bodies forming a bottleneck between the public space and the ballroom.

Yet somehow, Allen is able to accelerate from out of view, around the corner, roughly 50 yards away, sprint straight past that knot of security, and close the distance without colliding with a single person— as if the lane in front of him had been cleared just in time for his dash. That’s some pretty good luck right there. At that speed, just one agent shifting his stance, one officer stepping back half a step, one official walking to talk to another, should have been sufficient to produce a messy collision and a dogpile.

Instead, all six or so visible officials happen to be positioned just far enough off the through‑line to give Allen a clean shot at the stairwell. How did he know when to start running? There may be a good answer. But if so, we haven’t heard it yet.

🔥 Combine those three stories, and our N=3 dataset starts to look a lot less like three independent miracles of bad fortune and a lot more like a system that keeps failing in eerily specific ways.

One rooftop that was covered and then mysteriously uncovered. One would‑be sniper who spends hours inside the outer perimeter without any sweep pushing him out. One gunman who manages to pick the exact right moment when a half‑dozen security professionals aren’t physically in his way at a choke point designed precisely so that someone should always be in the way.

We can dismiss those questions as coincidence —as lottery-level luck— for three separate, consecutive “lone wolves.” If so, well, the crack where “incredible luck” lives is getting microscopically skinny. Or we can admit that, at a minimum, we’re looking at a protection culture that somehow keeps moving the wrong people off the wrong roofs, skipping the wrong sweeps, and leaving the wrong lanes open at the wrong time. And that the three shooters all somehow sensed right where the lapses would occur.

Did these shooters get help —active or passive— from people inside who know how the system really works? Remember the Ian Fleming chestnut: once is coincidence. Twice is happenstance. Three times is enemy action.

In the case of Trump assassination attempts, we’ve now reached three— three gunmen, three “lone wolves,” three times the system somehow accidentally left the exact wrong piece of ground uncovered. One hopes that the Administration knows its James Bond lore.

🔥 Finally, what’s equally troubling is the surge of recent left‑wing violence. You see partisan and ideological motives aimed up the food chain: at CEOs, presidents, political leaders, Tesla dealerships, ICE facilities, party headquarters, Supreme Court judges, and popular conservative activists. We have would‑be assassins like Ryan Routh, a man clearly helping the deep state with the proxy war, allegedly lying in wait on a golf course fairway because he decided Trump’s foreign policy justified a bullet.

You see a swelling catalog of plots and attacks that, taken together, suggest not random outbursts but an emerging permission structure: a belief that “stopping fascism” or “saving democracy” might require a rifle, a Molotov cocktail, or worse. Last September, in the difficult says following Charlie Kirk’s assassination, YouGov asked Americans whether political violence can sometimes be justified. Among self-described ‘very liberal’ respondents, one in four said yes. Among 18-to-44-year-old liberals, that number rose further to 26%, against just 7% of conservatives the same age.

The smallest group of agreers was the “very conservative.”

At some point, you would think a serious country would stop pretending this is just a law‑enforcement problem and start treating it as a political toxicity problem. The party supposedly opposed to “hate speech” is never accountable for its political and media elites who keep pouring gasoline on deranged minds and then acting surprised when it ignites.

In October, 2024, then-VP Kamala Harris said Trump fits the definition of “fascist.” In May, 2024, Biden responded to a Trump speech by mumbling, “That’s Hitler’s language. That’s not the language of America.” There are many more examples.

Until accountability happens, we shouldn’t be asking whether or not there will be a fourth attempt. We should be asking why, given the incentives we’ve created, there wouldn’t be one.

🔥 President Trump, the security officers, and the attendees were shaken. But everyone is fine.

In a remarkably dignified way, President Trump called for conciliation. “As you know, this is not the first time in the past couple of years that our republic has been attacked by a would-be assassin who sought to kill,” he said. “In light of this evening’s events, I ask that all Americans recommit with their hearts in resolving our differences peacefully.”

“Quite an evening in D.C. Secret Service and Law Enforcement did a fantastic job,” President Trump continued, praising his security team. “They acted quickly and bravely. The shooter has been apprehended, and I have recommended that we ‘LET THE SHOW GO ON’, but will entirely be guided by law enforcement.”

Trump’s response was gracious and presidential. But a nation cries out for accountability. Three strikes is supposed to mean you’re out. We have got to start asking who’s pitching.

Have a blessed Sunday! Then check back in tomorrow morning to kick off another terrific week of C&C-style essential news and commentary.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🔥🔥🔥

Politics meets the munchies. Yesterday, the AP reported, “Trump reclassifies state-licensed medical marijuana as a less-dangerous drug in a historic shift.” Get out your dispensary cards, there’s more to this historic story than meets the eye.

For our entire lives, the federal government has treated marijuana with the exact same level of regulatory concern as weapons-grade plutonium. Under the law, cannabis has been classified as a Schedule I substance, meaning it has “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.” It sat right there on the list next to heroin and LSD, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the Uber Eats driver to deliver a 24-pack of Taco Bell chalupas.

But Thursday, the Justice Department, on orders from President Trump, decided it was time to harsh the government’s mellow. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed an order to officially reclassify state-licensed medical marijuana as a Schedule III drug.

For perspective, Schedule III is the regulatory equivalent of the shallow end of the pharma pool. It’s where they keep Tylenol with codeine. It means the federal government is finally conceding that maybe, just maybe, the stuff your kooky aunt grows in a flowerpot on the backside of her porch won’t cause the collapse of Western civilization.

To be clear, and to illustrate the broader point, I have wandered a long way into the medical freedom camp, but I still personally oppose legalization. I understand the libertarian argument, but I also don’t want to see coin-operated gummy dispensers in Walmart. I don’t want to have to pre-lick my kids’ Halloween candy to see whether I get a contact high. I have concerns about some people’s susceptibility to serious side effects and their obvious inability to drive faster than 15 mph.

But this move was a classic Trumpian third way.

It did not make marijuana federally legal. But it did massively improve the tax situation for state-licensed cannabis businesses, which can finally deduct their business expenses. Until now, the IRS has treated these companies like they were running a smuggling operation out of a Miami basement. Now that growers can pay taxes like other regular businesses, retail prices will, presumably, plummet. So break out the tie-dye and the Spicoli quotes.

Personally, I would support an outright ban on pot products and sales. I have a harder time with laws about what people can grow at home, which is where my libertarian thread flares up like an angry leg rash. So you can chalk this up as another example where I disagree with the President, but I’m not rage-quitting over it.

🔥 There’s a much bigger story here. And I couldn’t possibly improve on the political Ted Talk that late-night comedian Bill Maher gave during his show this week. Bill Maher — a man who has spent decades donating to the Democratic Party while simultaneously looking like he just woke up from a nap in a tour bus— explained how ‘TAW’ works better than anyone in the media has so far.

CLIP: Bill Maher on Trump’s issue-picking superpower (7:13).

The real story here isn’t the tax code or marijuana classifications. The real story is politics. Maher delivered a monologue that started by telling Democrats, “I told you so.” Bill argued that elections aren’t won with lofty, abstract speeches about “saving the soul of America” or “muh democracy.” Elections are won by fixing the things that actually annoy regular people on a daily basis. You might call them 80/20 issues within smaller, discrete voting blocs.

Maher mused that Trump has mastered this technique. He called it a “coalition of little things that hit people personally.” For instance, Trump ran on “no tax on tips,” and every waitress in Las Vegas immediately understood what that meant for her wallet. (Nevada flipped for Trump.) He ran on jettisoning the TSA’s stupid shoe-removal ritual. (Moses, praise the roses.) He ran on fixing low-flow toilets, lackluster LED lights, and stingy showerheads. He ran on saving TikTok (even after targeting it during Trump 1.0), which spiked the youth vote.

As Maher put it with brutal accuracy: “Kamala ran on ‘democracy,’ which is the most important issue, but without the political skill to sell it, it added up to nothing. Meanwhile, Trump was running on, ‘I’ll make the poop go down.’”

It’s one micro-TAW after another.

🔥 Trump just did it again, this time with marijuana. For decades, Democrats dangled the carrot of marijuana reform before independent-minded voters. They yammered about it, they convened gold-star committees over it, they promised to promptly look into it— right after they finished making girls’ sports safe for boys and thereby “saving the soul of America.”

This story’s timing, landing within striking distance of the midterms, was not accidental. Trump came along, studied the Democrats’ evergreen marijuana promises, and said, “Let’s just reschedule it.” Boom. Done. Issue captured.

In one move, he scooped up another passionate, highly motivated voting bloc (well, highly motivated when they aren’t napping). As Maher explained, marijuana was the last tangible, personal issue that Democrats still owned. And Trump just walked over and grabbed it off their plate, the same way he grabbed the crypto bros in Silicon Valley and grabbed RFK Jr.’s MAHA voters who prefer their cereal be made out of actual grain instead of glowing petrochemical byproducts.

It turns out that a billionaire real-estate developer from Manhattan, a guy who has probably never unclogged his own toilet or ever had to take off his shoes and walk barefoot across the TSA’s germ mats, is still somehow better at listening to the daily grievances of the real American voter than the entire Democratic strategist class.

The Democrats keep losing to a guy who promised to make the commode work on the first flush.

Trump understands that, while voters do care about the big picture, they also really care about their shower pressure, their tips, and their right to buy state-licensed cannabis without the DEA kicking down the door. They care about those things much more than the current state of the Strait of Hormuz.

And those small-but-important issues all translate directly to smaller government, which has been the Republicans’ main theme ever since the Reagan revolution.

Trump is teaching many Democrats and independents how unexpectedly valuable shrinking government and reducing regulations are. Meantime he keeps peeling off one historically democrat voter group after another. The midterm pitch is already scripted: vote for Republicans— or the Democrats will take away what you just got.

The Democrats have noticed. They are quietly attempting a Clintonesque triangulation, and are tacking right, running straight white guys all over the country. Headline from Axios, a month ago:

But at the same time, they can’t help following their instincts. They continue leaping right into a progressive purity spiral at the same time. It’s weird how clueless they seem, considering all the intellectual heavyweights leading that party, by which I mean perfect nitwits like Ilhan Omar, Jasmine Crockett, and blue-haired Rosa DeLauro.

As I said, I have mixed feelings and some reservations about the change. But for our libertarian friends and MAHA freedom extremists, the good news is that the federal government now says your medical marijuana is only as dangerous as cough syrup with codeine.

Aloha, Mr. Hand.

🔥🔥🔥

Yesterday, Fox News —and only Fox— reported a massive development that sent tentacles of terror through the Democrat donor class. The headline: “Vance task force reveals Biden admin ‘protected’ 562K pandemic loans in $22.2B suspected fraud scheme.” The Biden Administration didn’t cover up pandemic loan fraud because it was committed by conservatives. Think about that for a second.

As a taxpayer during the pandemic, you will surely remember the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and the Economic Injury Disaster Loans (EIDL). These programs were created by the federal government with the noble goal of keeping small businesses afloat while simultaneously shutting them down. The applications were easier to fill out than a below-average waiver to enter a children’s trampoline gym.

In other words, the government achieved this noble goal of saving Main Street by taking an enormous firehose, hooking it up to the U.S. Treasury, and blasting trillions of dollars out the window while screaming, “TAKE IT! TAKE THE MONEY! NO QUESTIONS ASKED!”

But down on the bottom of each and every form, in barely visible six-point type, was a stern warning about lying, a right for the government to claw back inappropriate payments, accompanied by a nearly incomprehensible string of tiny numbers and letters identifying various federal statutes that provided years and years of potential prison time. Nobody paid any attention to this paragraph. (Except for my clients, since I highlighted it in bright yellow ink for them.)

As it turns out —this will not even surprise Portland readers— when you offer people free money with zero oversight, you create what economists call a “moral hazard.” They are tempted to bend the rules and take the free money, or to grab more than they should. Some of these people were actual small business owners. But many, many others were enterprising individuals who suddenly discovered they owned, for example, highly lucrative ‘ballet studios’ in the weathered plastic Home Depot sheds in their backyards.

According to the Vice President’s fraud task force, we’ve learned that at least $200 billion of this emergency-aid money was stolen by fraudsters. That is a staggering amount. It is enough money to buy every single person in America a very nice riding lawnmower. Instead, it went to creative people who concocted fake basketball leagues, imaginary farms, and phantom employees.

Usually, when someone steals billions of dollars from the federal government, the government gets cranky and sends people with windbreakers and badges to collect it. But according to yesterday’s announcement from the Small Business Administration (SBA), the Biden administration took a different approach. They quietly determined that chasing down covid fraudsters was just too much hassle.

“After extensive review, and with the strong support of the White House Anti-Fraud Task Force, we are taking our most decisive action yet to end a Biden-era scheme that protected over 560,000 borrowers tied to more than $22 billion in suspected pandemic-era fraud,” SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler explained.

In other words, SBA has finally referred a half a million (562,000) already identified fraudulent loans to the Treasury Department— for collection. They total $22.2 billion.

Fox reported that the Biden administration had flagged these 562,000 loans as highly suspicious, and then did absolutely nothing about them. They didn’t send them to collections. They didn’t refer them to the Justice Department. They just slid them into a bottom drawer, presumably labeled “DO NOT OPEN UNTIL WE HAVE A BASE ON MARS.”

The SBA press release called President Cabbage’s non-prosecution a “de facto amnesty scheme.” In layman’s terms, this means the government knew that a guy named “John Doe” who claimed to have 100 employees at a business called “John’s Totally Real And Not Fake Exotic Animal Farm” had stolen $2 million, and the Biden Administration’s official response was, “Well, animals are important, too. Even fake ones.”

But … why not? Biden went after every single J6 tourist and scads of abortion clinic prayer warriors. Why not round up all the covid fraudsters? Who are they?

To understand how absurd this really is, look at the kind of fraud we are talking about. This wasn’t sophisticated, Ocean’s Eleven-style cybercrime. It wasn’t even Learing Center level fraud. This was people using deceased relatives’ Social Security numbers to apply for loans. This was people claiming to run multi-million-dollar agricultural empires out of a one-bedroom apartment in Queens. In one terrific example, an online lender approved hundreds of pandemic loans to “farms” with names like “Devious” and “Beefy King.”

If you or I tried to deduct a $53 business lunch on our taxes, the IRS would audit us so hard our grandchildren would feel it. But if you told the Biden-era SBA that you needed a million dollars to cover payroll for your amateur basketball league —an actual case where a man just pleaded guilty— the government apparently handed you the cash and then deliberately looked the other way while you never paid it back.

Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland prosecuted around 1,000 covid fraud cases. There is no clear partisan pattern; Republican donors and Democrats appeared in the list. As early as November 2020, the Project on Government Oversight reported on large political donations following equally large PPP loans. (Curiously, POGO’s article briefly mentioned Marjorie Taylor Greene as having a potential covid loan problem related to her construction business, which makes you think.)

Administrator Loeffler stated that the Trump SBA is now “working to claw back stolen taxpayer dollars and hold fraudsters accountable.” The agency announced it has already suspended over 110,000 borrowers in California alone, tied to $8.6 billion in suspected fraud.

🔥 Which brings us to the obvious question: Why? Why would the Biden administration deliberately shield half a million suspected fraudsters from the consequences of their own actions?

If you look closely at where this fraud was concentrated, a very interesting pattern emerges. The Trump SBA has already suspended over 110,000 borrowers in California, representing $8.6 billion in suspected fraud. That is a massive chunk of the total— over a third. And where do you suppose the rest of it is hiding? If you guessed “deep blue urban centers where Democrat political machines rely on a constant flow of federal cash to keep their constituents happy,” you won the prize.

But now, the bill is coming due. And this could have massive implications for the 2026 midterms.

You can run the numbers without a degree in political science. The Biden administration looked at a list of 562,000 people who had essentially looted the Treasury, realized that a statistically significant portion of those people lived in key Democrat strongholds, and decided that prosecuting them might be bad for morale. Nothing ruins a get-out-the-vote rally quite like the FBI showing up to arrest the precinct captain for inventing a fake poultry farm.

This ‘de facto amnesty’ was, essentially, a $22 billion taxpayer-funded stimulus package for the Democrat base. It was the ultimate political patronage system: We gave you the money, we know you shouldn’t have it, but we’re going to let you keep it. Remember that in November. Or else.

The Treasury Department now must track down 562,000 people who have spent the last few years believing they had successfully pulled off the greatest heist in American history. It’s like trying to squeeze $22 billion worth of toothpaste back into the tube. But the Treasury has lots of tools and techniques; for instance, it can grab any federal payment to that person and apply it to the outstanding debt (like social security payments, grants, tax refunds, and so on). It can also transfer collections to private agencies, file lawsuits itself, and threaten to make criminal referrals to DOJ.

More importantly, it means that hundreds of thousands of people in blue states are about to receive a very nasty letter from the federal government demanding our money back.

Naturally, this will make a lot of morally flexible people intensely angry. And angry people tend to vote (unless they have felony convictions; just saying). But who will they be angry at? The Trump administration, for finally enforcing the law? Or the Democratic politicians who promised the gravy train would never stop flowing?

And now what happens to blue donations? A half-million Democrats are suddenly going to need as much cash as they can lay hands on, for lawyers and settlement payments.

If we don’t try to get this money back, then we are sending a very clear message to the American people: working hard and paying taxes is for suckers. The real money is in autism centers, hospice, childcare, and fake orange groves.

So, to the 562,000 people who are about to get a letter from the U.S. Treasury: I hope you enjoyed the free money. And if you bought a riding lawnmower with it, you might want to put it on Craigslist. You’re going to need the cash.

🔥🔥🔥

Yesterday, at my son Luke’s Spring Recital, the band director spent a sober moment reflecting on the importance of beauty. He’s not the only one. Yesterday, CBS reported, “Trump says he’ll resurface the bottom of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, turning it blue.” The project, originally projected to take three years, has already started and will be done in a few weeks, well in time for the nation’s 250th anniversary celebrations.

The Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was originally built in the 1920’s. It stretches between the Lincoln Memorial and the World War II Memorial/Washington Monument along the National Mall. Its basin totals over 300,000 square feet and is over 2,000 feet long— the length of around twelve Olympic-sized swimming pools stacked end-to-end.

The Reflecting Pool has prompted a great deal of reflection. In 2012, Obama spent $34 million to “renovate” the pool, and the before-after distinction was so stark it required scientific instruments to detect. Visitors often describe the water as green, sludgy, and filled with algae. One August 2024 Yelp review noted the pool had “very little water,” and what water it did have was “green, brackish, and emanates a not exactly edifying smell,” with ducks walking rather than swimming. Another 2024 review mentioned being “surprised to see how dirty it was; cigarette butts, food wrappers, algae, etc.”

President Trump decided to fix it and described his plan during this week’s Oval Office event about TrumpRx, in a classic Trump topical diversion. “It’s filthy, dirty—the water looks disgusting,” the President said, adding that, “it leaks like a sieve.” In short: “It doesn’t represent our nation.” He described asking a government contractor for a quote to properly repair the pool. They quoted $300 million and three years of construction.

The President smelled an overpriced rat. So he called some of the pool guys he used back in the day when he was building hotels and asked for a “fair price.” He told them to treat it like it was a very big swimming pool. The result: a $1-2 million quote, a 40 to 50-year lifespan, and a forecast of one week. They asked for his surface color preference, suggesting “American flag blue,” and Trump immediately accepted. “It will look more beautiful than when they built it in 1922, much more beautiful,” he said.

In November, President Trump posted a “before” video on his Truth Social feed captioned “Make the Capitol Beautiful Again,” and told us to “bookmark it.” Well, here it is, in time for both the Washington, DC, anniversary celebration and the midterm elections. But that wasn’t nearly all the beautifying.

Earlier this month, BusinessWeek ran a story that reported “President Donald Trump is reshaping Washington, DC, from the White House to federal buildings.” A few examples include the Reflecting Pool, the new East Wing ballroom, building renaming, proposed new monuments, the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, and the most recent example, the Lafayette Park fountain, which is nearly complete.

CLIP: Nearly refurbished Lafayette Park Fountain (0:11).

The twin Lafayette Park fountains are ornamental, circular basins set in the lawn panels east and west of Andrew Jackson’s statue in Lafayette Park, directly north of the White House across Pennsylvania Avenue. They had fallen into disrepair and stood bone-dry for several years (2021–2024) before the Trump Administration prioritized getting them operational again.

The fountains flank one of the strangest visual juxtapositions in Washington: a flamboyant equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson on a horse balancing only on its hind legs —the first of its kind in the world— surrounded by calm lawns and modest fountains. (Historical note: the statue’s 1853 artist, Clark Mills, had never seen an equestrian statue before. He worked with horse cadavers and his own stallion —named Olympus— to figure out the balance. At the dedication, he threw his own body against the front legs to prove it wouldn’t fall.)

Earlier this year, the National Park Service started a major Lafayette Park rehabilitation that includes repairing the historic fountains, installing new pumping systems and underground vaults, and upgrading irrigation, turf, benches, and hardscape. This week, the fountains were turned back on —for the first time since the Cabbage infested the White House— with water running even as the surrounding construction continues. It is a liquid metaphor for how history continues drowning the Biden Era and how the waters of freedom are flowing again.

🔥 Beauty in a national capital is not a luxury. It is one of the ways a people tells the truth about itself without words. Monuments, fountains, gardens, and even the everyday facades of bureaucratic buildings all form a kind of civic mirror, reflecting back what a nation believes is worthy of honor and what future it imagines.

When visitors walk onto the Mall or look across Lafayette Park at the White House, they aren’t just seeing stone and water; they are seeing a visual argument about order, permanence, and aspiration. Capitals that neglect beauty tend to feel provisional and brittle, as if their institutions expect not to be loved or remembered. Capitals that cultivate it, by contrast, invite citizens into an emotional relationship with their own country.

Trump’s second-term “beautification” drive in Washington is a visible demarcation line between eras. It doesn’t just tweak décor; it is aggressively rewriting the capital’s aesthetic script. Previous presidents largely operated within a shared vocabulary of incremental restoration: tune up a garden, repair a façade, maybe add a sculpture here or there— but always as careful custodians of inherited symbolism.

Trump the Builder, by contrast, has treated Washington as a personal construction project: a $400 million White House ballroom, a paved and rebranded “Rose Garden Club,” towering banners on federal facades, a triumphal arch proposal, and a campaign to repaint, relight, or recolor everything from fountains to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. It is a shift from stewardship to authorship.

That is why the current wave of projects, like turning dead fountains back on in Lafayette Park and across the District, functions as a bright line in time, a cultural demarcation point. On one side is the Capital’s long post-Cold-War decline, a gradual relaxation into the aesthetics of battered homeless citizens, garbage mountains, broken infrastructure, security fences, police tape, ugly stained building facades, and piles of goose droppings.

It was a long, disappointing story of pessimism and a slow surrender to the forces of entropy.

But now, we are on the other side. We are building a newly energized, humanized, personalized capital, where beauty is mobilized as a uniquely American brand: giant arches, flag‑colored pools, and ballroom-scaled entertaining spaces that tie the look of the city more tightly to a positive, optimistic identity, a new birth of freedom, growth, development, and adventure.

I wonder how future historians will evaluate all the Democrats’ lawsuits to stop this in its tracks. Not well, I hope. Why any American would want to keep our capital in perpetual decline is a question that invites a very serious and troubling answer.

Kudos to President Trump and all his beautification projects. America is grateful.

🔥 Finally, notice the thread that runs through all three of today’s stories. It’s about Democrats’ broken promises and their perpetual failure to deliver. Democrats promised marijuana reform and never delivered. Democrats flagged $22 billion in fraud and decided not to collect. Democrats spent $34 million on the Reflecting Pool and the ducks walk on dirty concrete. President Trump is finishing everything the Democrats started‚ and making it beautiful again.

Have a wonderful weekend! We shall return on Monday morning, with another delicious and intellectually nutritious roundup of essential news and commentary.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🔥🔥🔥

The SPLC story is expanding like a clown’s oversized birthday balloon. Unsurprisingly, the conservative New York Post is on it, and yesterday ran a delightful followup story headlined, “SPLC’s high-profile donors like Clooney, Soros stay mum after nonprofit indicted over alleged $3M hate group informant scheme.” They’re turning corporate media’s playbook against them.

“The DOJ claims the organization misled both donors and law enforcement,” the Post reported, “by paying undercover ‘F’ agents ostensibly tasked with gathering intelligence and conducting espionage within groups including the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, and the Nationalist Socialist Party of American Nazis.” (Using illegal bank accounts.)

The Southern Poverty “Law Center” was so good at finding hate that it amassed a donor-fueled endowment of roughly $800 million. This is because when you tell wealthy, virtue-signaling people that hate is lurking right under the bed, they will write very large checks to make it go away. The Post compiled an SPLC donor file, which reads like the guest list for a completely awful Hollywood dinner party: George Clooney’s foundation, George Soros, Apple CEO Tim Cook, JPMorgan, and, inexplicably, Chick-fil-A, who apparently just wanted everyone to eat more chicken in peace.

Hilariously, the Post’s reporters “reached out” to all these celebrities, bigwigs, and poseurs, and asked them to comment on their large SPLC donations. Only Chick-fil-A answered, to clarify they donated $2,500 one time and that’s it. It was basically saying, “Please leave us out of this, we just make sandwiches.”

But Clooney ($1M), Soros ($75K), Cook ($1M), and JPMorgan Chase ($500K) all remained strategically silent. They did not defend their donations, which tells us a lot. They can smell which way the smoke over Charlottesville is blowing.

Yesterday, intrepid independent investigators traced over $27 million in federal taxpayer money laundered to the SPLC through USAID and an NGO called the Tides Foundation.

The SPLC spent years making enemies. Now there’s blood in the water. For decades, the SPLC has been the undisputed heavyweight champion of pointing fingers at conservatives, right-leaning law firms, and legitimate whistleblowers —like Turning Point USA and Moms for Liberty— for upholding traditional marriage or opposing open borders. The SPLC righteously declared, “All those guys are haters.” Far-left media like the New York Times accepted their judgments as delivered wisdom. AI chatbots were trained to take the SPLC’s defamatory pronouncements at scientific face-value.

Now, the Reckoning has arrived like a school of media tiger sharks. And they are very hungry.

🔥 The Post article’s cover picture was a Fox News video about the SPLC fraud, making it two articles in one. This is a wonderful example of turning around another traditional corporate media smear technique: the feedback loop.

We’ve seen the left do this over and over. One platform launches a story, however thinly sourced, like a seagull snatching a french fry from a toddler’s tiny fingers. Then the other platforms rush to report on the first story, and before you know what’s happening, a whole flock of beach birds is squawking in a cacophonous feeding frenzy, frantically tearing a single fry into microscopic threads, and dropping a virtual cloud of pasty white seagull poop on the innocent beachgoers.

The intended result is for regular folks —who are just trying to get through the day without being replaced by an AI body-snatcher— to get the sense that the story is everywhere. That’s how the left has done it for at least the last 25 years, from around the time they started calling George W. Bush “Hitler.”

But now, the right is doing it back to them, except with better-sourced stories. Since Trump appeared on the scene, sane people have captured just enough of trad-media so that the feedback loop works.

For example, yesterday CBS —formerly squarely in the Corporate Media camp, but now under the new leadership of Bari Weiss— reported the SPLC story straight (though again, informant-based) and even went further, reported previous years of investigations alleging that the SPLC was wasting donor money and enriching itself. Hate is a profitable business.

CLIP: CBS reports SPLC story even-handedly (1:52).

Making the social media rounds on X —formerly part of the left-wing echo chamber till Elon Musk bought it— was a 2018 John Stossel report about the SPLC, which, among other things, reported how the group openly reported on its financial disclosures that it was salting money away in sketchy money-laundering locations like the Caymans, BVI, and Bermuda. Like cartel kingpins do.

CLIP: John Stossel 2018 exposé on the SPLC (2:43).

Were these early moves a coincidence? Or could this long-overdue move against SPLC have been planned since Trump 1.0? We’ll never know. But either way, it’s a happy result.

🔥 Whose opinion is all this feedbacking intended to influence? Not partisan Democrats, surely, who will stop up their ears and refuse to believe the allegations, no matter what anybody says. They don’t even care if they are true. (They have 800 million reasons not to care, sitting in the Caymans, BVI, and Bermuda.) Not conservatives, who were already delighted. All the interlinking coverage just makes the news cycle more delicious and rewarding for them.

On the other hand, it does build helpful momentum leading into the November midterms.

But the real audience is the middle. The loud, coordinated, mutually referential coverage about the allegations in the SPLC’s indictment is meant to teach low-information voters why progressivism is so fake and gay. Everything points to this story having legs that will last until November.

🔥🔥🔥

In another update story, yesterday KOMO News reported, “2-year-old joins Trump at White House as president spotlights ‘miracle cure’ for deaf boy.” The tear-jerker story confirmed our special edition a couple weeks ago, where we mentioned the same cure. Now it’s standing in the Oval Office.

CLIP: President Trump announces free miracle cure for deaf kids (0:25).

Yesterday, President Trump held an Oval Office presser with feisty 2-year-old Travis Smith and his mother, Sierra. The President explained that the child was born deaf, but his life changed after he started a revolutionary treatment developed by Regeneron Technologies.

Sierra explained, Regeneron works miracles.” Travis “didn’t know his own name. He couldn’t hear me tell him how much I love him — and now, with Regeneron, and this amazing surgery, he can listen to music!” She continued, “And he loves it. He loves to dance. He loves instruments and yeah, now he can hear. He has a bright future ahead of him and I’m so thankful to everybody on the Regeneron team.”

Regeneron’s president made an equally dramatic announcement.

“We have decided to provide this first-of-its-kind gene therapy for hearing loss free for children in the United States,” said George Yancopoulos, President of Regeneron. “Why? To highlight the power of disruptive biotech innovation, and all the good we can bring to all of our lives and our health.”

If Regeneron’s name sounds familiar, it might be because the biotechnology firm developed one of the nearly miraculous monoclonal antibody treatments during the pandemic —the same one President Trump got— which the Biden Administration abruptly and unaccountably canceled.

But that wasn’t all. In the same presser, President Trump announced that 17 of the country’s biggest pharma companies (and Regeneron) have now joined his TrumpRX drug plan, advertising the lowest drug prices in the world to U.S. Medicare and direct-pay patients. Stat News reported, “Trump celebrates closing first round of drug pricing deals, promises more ahead.”

The announcement confounded corporate media, which have been harping on TrumpRx for hosting too few providers, or for the discounts not being big enough (even though the retail prices are below most people’s co-pays). So media has been reduced to making insane arguments like this one, linked in yesterday’s Stat story:

So … their criticism is that deaf people are just fine the way they are. They are specially abled. And they don’t even want a cure. So the President and Regeneron should be ashamed of themselves. How dare they. When Travis Smith grows up, he’ll probably resent that his deafness was cured when he was two.

Chris Klomp, the HHS official tasked with putting together the TrumpRx portfolio, promised much more. He said the administration now plans to work out agreements with the “many hundreds” of other pharma and biotech companies with drugs in the U.S. Klomp said, “We’re not done.”

🚀🚀🚀

Yesterday, Axios reported, “U.S. special forces soldier arrested over Polymarket bets on Maduro raid.” Allegedly, one of the special forces members who snatched Venezuelan President Maduro placed a bet online ahead of the mission. When a reporter asked him about it, President Trump shot back, “did he bet for or against his mission?”

CLIP: President Trump responds to reporters’ questions about betting soldier (0:47).

In the storied annals of military history, there are many great tactical maneuvers. Hannibal crossing the Alps. Washington crossing the Delaware. And now, we add the newest maneuver: a U.S. Army Special Forces soldier logging onto a prediction market website to bet $33,000 that he was about to successfully kidnap the president of Venezuela.

In December, Gannon Van Dyke was brought in to help plan and execute “Operation Absolute Resolve,” which is the important-sounding kind of name you arrive at after you’ve rejected “Operation Big Trouble in Little Venezuela” and “Operation We Are Definitely Going to Caracas.” The goal of the mission was to ‘apprehend’ Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, a man who has spent years turning his country’s economy into a cartel laundromat and generally being the kind of dictator who dons athleisurewear for formal events.

As part of his job, Van Dyke was given a “Classified Information Security Briefing” and signed a non-disclosure agreement. This is a standard military document that essentially says, “Do not tell anyone what we are about to do, and definitely do not use this information to win money on the internet.” (Apparently, Van Dyke skimmed that second part.)

In the predawn hours of January 3rd, the U.S. military successfully apprehended Maduro and his wife. A few hours later, President Trump announced the raid to the world. And over on Polymarket, Gannon Ken Van Dyke’s account lit up like a pinball machine. His $33,000 bet turned into a healthy profit of $409,881.

You might think a special forces soldier enjoys special internet skills. Apparently not. Shortly after the raid, people on social media noticed that someone had made a suspiciously large, perfectly timed bet on Maduro’s capture. Van Dyke allegedly panicked. He asked Polymarket to delete his account, claiming he lost access to his email. He transferred the money to a foreign cryptocurrency vault. He changed his email addresses. It was a masterclass in looking exactly like a guy who just committed a federal crime.

When asked about the situation, President Trump offered a uniquely Trumpian perspective.

“That’s like Pete Rose betting on his own team,” Trump said. “Now, if he bet against his team, that would be no good.”

This was an excellent point. In 1989, legendary MLB player Pete Rose (4,256 career hits) was permanently banned for life for betting on his own team, the Cincinnati Reds, to win. It sparked a longstanding controversy about sports betting and whether it should be illegal to bet on yourself.

On one hand, you could argue that Van Dyke’s bets could have tipped off the enemy. If the Venezuelan intelligence service had been monitoring Polymarket —which, given the pitiable state of their economy, is entirely possible— they might have noticed the sudden spike in bets and thought, “Hey, maybe we should double the guard around the presidential tracksuit closet.”

On the other hand, President Trump had already spent weeks publicly informing President Maduro that he was in deep doodoo. Thank you for your attention to this matter. It wasn’t exactly a state secret that the U.S. was extremely displeased with him. “Come and get me,” Maduro dared just days before we did exactly that.

Furthermore, Van Dyke was betting for the mission to succeed. If you are going to kick down the door of a heavily armed dictator in his own fortified castle, you probably want the guy next to you to be highly motivated. And there is nothing more motivating than knowing you have $400,000 riding on the outcome.

So, what should happen to Gannon Ken Van Dyke? According to Axios, he currently faces up to 60 years in prison for commodities fraud, wire fraud, and unlawful monetary transactions.

Should he go to jail for six decades? Should he just get a stern reprimand and a mandatory class on the dangers of crypto-gambling? Or should the military start offering a commission on successful raids, to keep everyone properly focused?

Let me know what you think in the comments. But whatever you do, please don’t bet on the outcome. The Justice Department is watching.

🔥🔥🔥

Yesterday’s New York Times brought one of April’s most unintentionally hilarious stories, headlined, “A Year After U.S.A.I.D.’s Death, Fired Workers Find Few Jobs and Much Loss.” Not just federal workers in general, mind you. USAID workers. For some reason, they in particular are struggling to find productive private-sector employment. Sad!

“Former U.S.A.I.D. workers,” the Times began, “estimate that less than half have found full-time work.” Being fired once has apparently left them permanently scarred. A full year later, the Times explained, “many said they were still dealing with mental trauma and a loss of confidence in their professional abilities.” Welcome to the world, morons.

They felt privileged. The Times explained that “U.S.A.I.D. workers thought of themselves as ambassadors for American ‘soft power’” —meaning leftist regime change— and “are still burning from President Trump’s characterization of them as ‘radical-left lunatics.’” Burn, baby, burn.

In the Times’ view, the real victim was not the taxpayer, but the United States Agency for International Development, infamously known as USAID. For years, USAID was in charge of distributing roughly $35 billion a year. You might assume this money went to things like food, medicine, and teaching people how to build wells. And some of it probably did! But as the Times quietly admitted in paragraph 47 of its story, “much” of that $35 billion actually went to Washington insiders.

Apart from that, the story was packed with unintentionally hysterical personal-interest anecdotes. When the music stopped and the agency was dismantled, roughly 16,000 federal employees and a staggering 280,000 contractors worldwide suddenly found themselves facing their most terrifying assignment yet: the private sector.

For instance, Amy Uccello earned a generous salary of $175,000 a year at USAID. The Times didn’t offer her title or job description. She just did … it. Whatever it was. Now she can’t find work doing it. Catherine Baker, 36, made $127,000 a year as a USAID contractor who “helped start up USAID projects,” whatever that means. Now she works nine hours a week as an adult babysitter.

Adrian Mathura, 55, who described himself as “a queer, brown immigrant,” was ‘involuntarily retired’ from his job as a senior USAID adviser in global health. (“A Queer Brown Immigrant” would be a good name for a punk rock band. But never mind that now.) The Times offered no context as to what a “senior advisor in global health” actually does at work. Whom did he advise? The Globe? Does the Globe listen?

It is truly shocking that the government would stop paying someone to advise the globe.

Anyway, Adrian now spends his days trying to get paid for being retired. The queer, brown immigrant has never faced something nearly every American without a government sinecure has endured: being fired. Adrian called it betrayal of the darkest character. “I never even once imagined I would be so betrayed by my government,” he whined.

🔥 Sheryl Cowan, 57, made $272,000 a year as a ‘senior vice president’ at a USAID.-funded nonprofit —not even USAID itself— when she got fired at the end of March 2025. Last month, the Times reported, Sheryl endured an online interview for a $19-an-hour job managing a Penzeys Spices store near her home in Falls Church, Virginia.

She’s hoping they’ll make her the senior vice president of sriracha. But her prosects aren’t great. Apparently, the skill of “being a senior vice president of a thing funded by a different thing” does not translate well to retail management.

Sheryl has “applied for 60 jobs.” That should keep the unemployment monitors off her back for a while.

Alysha Beyer, 53, ran reproductive health programs in Africa as a USAID contractor. She’s now unemployed and on welfare, which she described as “humbling.” Courtney Blake, 47, worked in Geneva, Switzerland in USAID’s ‘bureau of humanitarian assistance.’ Now she lives with her sister in New Paltz, New York. She said she has (unsuccessfully) applied for more than 40 jobs, which she would say, if she’s collecting unemployment.

Don Niss, 56, made $195,000 as a “USAID Development Advisor” at the Pentagon. Again, the Times didn’t bother translating the bureaucratese. Don has “depleted his savings” and is now invading his 401k. The story didn’t say whether Don has applied for any jobs, but we can assume the market for “development advisors” is soft.

🔥 The Times’ trail of USAID tears continued, paragraph after tragic paragraph. “I sat down by the river, and I cried a bit,” one former NGO contractor, Samuel Port, 32, manfully admitted.

It was hard not to feel a tiny twinge of sympathy as the miniature violins played. But the overarching lesson here was a brutal tutorial in economics. These exquisitely credentialed, highly paid specialists are discovering that their jobs only existed because the federal government mandated that they exist.

There is no organic, real-world demand for someone who monitors the paperwork of the person who is implementing the guidelines of the project starter.

The entire USAID ecosystem was a self-licking ice cream cone. The government gave money to the agency, the agency gave money to the nonprofits, the nonprofits hired senior vice presidents for $272,000, and the senior vice presidents hired project starters for $127,000. It was a beautiful, taxpayer-funded terrarium.

Now the terrarium’s glass has been shattered. The inhabitants are getting out, wandering around the real world, blinking in the harsh sunlight, wondering why nobody wants to pay them six figures to advise the globe. It is a tragedy, really. Some kind of tragedy. Maybe not Shakespearean. Hallmark-level, perhaps.

But if somebody needs someone skilled in helping start up a project to find an NGO to manage a budget, I know a few people who are available.

Have a fantastic Friday! Coffee & Covid shall return, tomorrow morning, fresh and bright, with another caraffe of essential news and commentary.

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⚖️⚖️⚖️

Yesterday, Law Commentary ran a terrific story headlined, “Judge Strikes Down Virginia Redistricting Amendment, Voids Special Election Results.” The New York Times completely ignored this development, instead running a front-page story headlined, “How ‘Yes’ Won a Narrow Victory in Virginia’s Redistricting Battle.” It did not mention the judicial loss at all. Don’t begrudge them; they wanted to stretch out their narrative a little longer before grappling with reality.

It happened fast. Really fast. Tazewell County Circuit Judge Jack Hurley’s order was issued within a business day of the election, and within hours after the vote was final. He ordered the Commissioner of Elections not to certify the results of the state’s widely reported redistricting race— a race that would have handed Democrats over 90% of Virginia’s congressional seats even though nearly 40% of the state’s residents are registered with the GOP.

The proposed new map has been both praised and mocked for its marvelous “creativity.” Despite all that creative line-drawing, it barely “won” by only three points. In other words, they stopped counting after they got the win.

Tuesday’s ballot referendum asked voters to approve the redistricting bill —a constitutional amendment— while describing its legal effect as “restoring fairness.” I did not make that up. It could have more accurately said “to eliminate all but one Republican congressional district,” but Democrats went with the equivalent of “free Ozempic.” This violated a Virginia constitutional requirement that proposed amendments “accurately describe” their effect, which was just one of the seven things Judge Hurley found illegal.

Judge Hurley also found that the law placing the amendment on the ballot violated various clear rules in the Virginia Constitution, so he struck it down and blocked the election results from having any effect. He called the bill’s “restoring fairness” description “flagrantly misleading.” He said the bill was rushed, violating a constitutional requirement of at least 90 days between passing a bill and holding an election on it. It also broke a rule requiring amendments to wait for the next House general election— which won’t happen in Virginia until 2027. It also broke a rule requiring amendments to be limited to a single issue.

The vote itself was characteristically hinky, although no trad-media was brave enough to mention it. Independent analysts reported that the redistricting surged into first place during late-night mail-in ballot counting, featuring yet another statistical anomoly in which 73% of ballots oddly went “yes”— even though the in-person electorate only ran around 45% yes.

More oddly, there were three distinct “f-shaped” surges throughout the night’s counting in a single county, which rescued the failing bill and then barely nudged redistricting approval over the top— what the Times blandly called “a narrow victory”:

Is it just me, or do these late-night f-shaped surges always go the same direction?

President Trump noticed it, too, and called the election “RIGGED”:

Like the Times, most of corporate media ignored Judge Hurley’s order striking down the election. Maybe it will just go away if we ignore it hard enough. The last thing they need is any headlines like “Judge Immediately Strikes Redistricting Vote Down as Illegal.” Wherever trad-media did report the story, every single headline focused on the pending appeal, which hasn’t been filed or even drafted yet. For example, here’s the Hill’s version:

Not one of the stories I reviewed, including the Hill’s article, cited any actual reason for the appeal, such as whatever Judge Hurley supposedly got wrong.

Judge Hurley’s 5-page order is tight, well-written, clear, and provides very little for the appellate courts to work with. I won’t predict anything —you know how it’s going in the courts these days— but he made the order as difficult to overturn as a circuit judge could possibly do. I can’t wait to see what state AG Jason Miyares comes up with in his appellate brief.

Meantime, the Virginia referendum has failed. Its legal shortcomings are now exposed in a judicial finding —in plain language— and were so obvious that the judge got the order out the same day the vote finished counting. Calling it a mere narrative setback is far too kind.

🔥🔥🔥

Speaking of things the corporate media largely ignored, yesterday, as part of a week-long Bible-reading project, President Trump read 2 Chronicles 7:11-22 (nearly 3 minutes long). The AP covered it as straight news, headlined, “‘If my people’: Here’s why the Bible passage Trump read aloud is so potent and polarizing.” The passage calls for national repentance, is often read at rallies and prayer breakfasts, and is downright frightening to progressive journalists.

CLIP: President Trump reads from the Bible in the Oval Office (2:39).

The 2 Chronicles passage the President read includes these well-known words: “If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”

During the week-long reading event, timed to celebrate the 250th anniversary of US independence, hundreds of lay people, prominent conservative figures, politicians, and members of the administration are also reading passages, including War Secretary Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. It will continue until they’ve read the whole Bible, front to back.

The AP was largely alarmed by this. It invoked the terrifying specter of Christian nationalism, whatever that is, while glancing around nervously for signs of imminent lightning strikes. So far as I can tell, there is no agreed-upon definition of “Christian nationalism,” and in Corporate Media it usually just means “whenever Christians talk about the Bible outside of church.”

So, in that sense, I suppose the AP was right. Make of this historic development what you will. But consider it in light of the next story.

🔥🔥🔥

In another under-reported story, also about “Christian Nationalism” (if I understand the terminology), on Tuesday PBS reported, “Appeals court rules Texas can require public schools to display Ten Commandments in class.” The ACLU said it was “extremely disappointed” in the Fifth Circuit’s 9-7 decision overruling two lower court decisions, which means it was great news for everybody else.

Under a new 2025 law, on September 1st, Texas’s public schools would have been required to hang up Ten Commandments posters. But in two separate cases, federal judges promptly enjoined the requirement, of course, both in Texas and in Louisiana (under a similar new law). It left schools split. Some schools went ahead anyway using private funds. Others breathed sighs of relief, because the last thing they need is the words “Thou Shall Not Commit Adultery” staring down their necks every minute of the day and constantly judging them.

I’m not exaggerating. Here’s how one NBC story reported a teacher’s response to the Ten Commandments. She said the Decalogue means “zero” to her students, who apparently prefer more relatable commandments like “just be kind” and “don’t steal our art supplies”:

We obviously have a long way to go. Encouraging kids to “Be a good person” is not especially helpful without instructions as to what a “good person” does. Which is exactly what the Ten Commandments provide. Educate the educators.

Texas’s law does not punish or sanction teachers who refuse to comply. Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan wrote for the majority and explained that hanging Ten Commandment posters does not establish any religion. “The Texas law does not tell churches or synagogues or mosques what to believe or how to worship or whom to employ as priests, rabbis, or imams,” Judge Duncan wrote. “It punishes no one who rejects the Ten Commandments, no matter the reason.”

Nevertheless, the ACLU vowed to appeal to the United States Supreme Court— where it will likely lose. In 2022, this same Supreme Court in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District overturned a 50-year-old “Lemon” test (Lemon is the name of a previous ruling, not the Thirty Rock character) and said courts should instead interpret the Establishment Clause “by reference to historical practices and understandings.”

Under the new Kennedy rule, lower courts are told to ask whether a particular practice fits within the nation’s historical traditions, and whether it involves actual coercion. Not just whether some hypothetical “reasonable observer” might be ‘offended,’ or might see it as endorsement. In other words, mere exposure or offense is no longer enough to show an Establishment Clause violation under the Kennedy framework.

Commentators interpret Kennedy as a “final nail in the coffin,” not only for Lemon, but also for “offended observer” standing. This means people who just feel excluded by a religious display can no longer get into federal court at all. Plaintiffs must now show a particular injury beyond their emotional reaction or their feelings of exclusion. If a particular practice —like hanging the Ten Commandments in schools— has been part of America’s historic traditions, then it is now fair play.

America is rapidly returning to its historic Judeo-Christian heritage after a fifty-year dalliance with secular humanism. Sorry, humanists.

💉💉💉

It’s really very funny how things work out sometimes. Just when you think all is lost, and you’re staring at Life’s Pink Slip, Providence turns around and hands you a bonus instead. So it was with this week’s Reuters story, headlined, “COVID shots, newer vaccines in limbo after US court halts Kennedy’s advisory panel.” Reuters didn’t mean the good kind of limbo, where you take coconut rum shots and try to dance under a pole.

Regular readers will recall last month’s bad news for MAHA, after Judge Brian Murphy decided that the members of the CDC’s vaccine advisory committee (ACIP) weren’t qualified, and he ordered them to stop meeting altogether. Next, the CDC published a proposed rule change to its ACIP standards to explicitly require the committee to include members across a broad range of fields —including vaccine injuries— and not just vaccine manufacturing. But that will take months of public comment before they can put the committee back together.

Blackpillers lost all hope. They focused on this one “loss,” a tiny blip among an ocean of wins. But I encouraged everybody to hang on, and wait to see what happens. Let them work. Voilá— behold the first surprising and encouraging turnaround.

Judge Murphy —to clever by half— accidentally created a Big Problem for Big Pharma. “The ruling leaves the CDC without a functioning advisory body to recommend new vaccines or updated uses of existing ones,” Reuters explained. It quoted —who else?— the CDC’s former Satanist Demetre Daskalakis, who complained, “It’s just uncharted territory.”

Ten minutes before that, Daskalakis was still high-fiving his corporate sponsors over Judge Murphy’s order pulling the ACIP’s plug. Whoops. (Don’t worry about Demetre. As of February, he is gainfully employed as ‘Chief Medical Officer’ at Callen-Lorde Community Health Center, an LGBTQ-focused health center in New York City, and is quoted by trad-media in every single story about MAHA, Kennedy, the CDC or HHS.)

Here comes the twist, the “uncharted territory.”

Flu/Covid season is rushing toward us like an out-of-control cash train. Very soon now, all annual vaccine updates will need CDC approval and guidance for doctors and insurers. For instance, every year, both covid and flu vaccines have ‘updated’ annual formulations that must be green-lighted by the CDC, which in turn relies on recommendations from the ACIP.

Without the committee’s recommendations, the CDC can’t approve the updated jabs. Nor, without a functioning ACIP, can it approve any other new vaccines. Checkmate.

This is the most bureaucratic kind of chaos, which makes it even more entertaining than it sounds. Judge Murphy’s vaccine-panel war has left the CDC without a functioning advisory body. Unless something changes quickly, the fall vaccination season could arrive without approvals for annual flu and covid boosters, leaving those jabs and any new vaccines in limbo, with insurance coverage questions sliding around like loose scalpels in the back of a speeding ambulance.

This is exactly what happens when judges try to micromanage health agencies. Your move, Judge Murphy. What will you do now? Start reviewing vaccines in court?

💉 That wasn’t all this week’s great jab news. In a related story, the New York Times reported, “Pentagon to Stop Requiring Members of Military to Get Flu Vaccines.” Not covid. Influenza. One of the longest-standing vaccine mandates in history. War Secretary Hegseth just struck it down.

Any servicemember who wants a flu shot can still get one, for free. But Hegseth called the mandate “absurd and overreaching.” The War Secretary explained, “We will not force you, because your body, your faith, and your convictions are not negotiable.”

The Times, perhaps sensing it is losing the medical freedom war, decided to only quote Republicans. Republicans who like mandates. It reported that Hegseth’s anti-mandate move caught Senator Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, “off guard.” Probably not thinking too carefully, Senator Wicker blurted, “You know, you do give up certain rights when you take the oath; it’s just part of it.”

But to me, this looks like part of the military’s broader mission to remake its fundamental character. Try to imagine which type of people might refuse to join our volunteer army, or might rage-quit, because it doesn’t mandate flu vaccines. Am I wrong? Let me know in the comments.

And let’s not rush past the tiny report that the rule change caught Senator Wicker off guard. The Trump Team is doing things without telegraphing them in advance, depriving the rabid media of its normal opportunity to undermine and create chaos. For our entire lives, the usual political playbook has been: (1) float a deniable trial balloon, (2) see if it survives the media gauntlet and public opinion, and (3) if it survives, then do it; and if it doesn’t look good, just say you never meant to do it in the first place and quietly sneak off for a round of golf.

President Trump has ripped that classic playbook to shreds. His strategy is simpler: just do it without telling anyone first and let the media play catch-up. It is masterful. Nobody knew you could do it this way. He’s rewriting the American political process in real time.

This would be an even bigger story if the military had banned all mandates. Measles, mumps, and polio all remain on the list (assuming a servicemember didn’t get those vaccines in childhood). Anthrax remains possibly required, depending on deployment. Since most countries require certain basic vaccines for legal entry, it’s not completely outrageous to have service members prepared for quick travel in national security emergencies.

But … who knows what might be on the chopping block next? Stand by for updates.

I know everyone wanted all vaccine mandates of any kind banned immediately in a single executive order on Day One. That would have been enormously gratifying. Instead, MAHA has been waiting impatiently for mandates to die on the operating table. But obviously, the Administration has concluded it’s better to kill vaccines with a thousand tiny scalpel cuts.

It’s slower than we’d like, but it’s happening. Stay optimistic.

Have a terrific Thursday! Slide back here tomorrow morning, for your terrific Friday roundup of essential C&C news and commentary.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🔥🔥🔥

Conservative social media lit up like a container-load of Roman candles yesterday afternoon and continued well into the wee hours. The New York Times ran one of the most useless articles it has ever written, weakly headlined, “Justice Dept. Charges Prominent Civil Rights Group With Financial Crimes.” First of all, when the Times edits the defendant’s name out of the headline, you know the indictment is serious. Second, it wasn’t the Justice Department who charged them— it was an Alabama Grand Jury.

The SPLC is squatting on a Leprechaun’s hoard of around $800 million dollars, plus or minus, squirreled away for electing progressive candidates aligned with the organization’s left-wing values. Carefully note that morbidly obese bank balance —$800 million— as it will become extremely important later.

Yesterday, brand-new interim Attorney General Todd Blanche —whose name means “white” in French, and who’d have a snowball’s chance in Tehran of ever being confirmed by the Senate— unleashed what will soon become the most controversial and historic indictment of the entire Trump era. To give you an idea of how momentous this is, when I asked Michelle what she thought about it, she said, “I now forgive every awkward tweet Trump ever posted. Whenever people complain about something he says, I’ll just say: ‘SPLC.’”

If ActBlue is the left wing’s corpulent, malevolent body, the SPLC is its nerve center. By criminally indicting the SPLC, the Department of Justice shot an arrow straight into the progressive establishment’s throbbing, black brain. Its squidlike body is about to thrash all over the deck. Get ready.

“The SPLC allegedly engaged in a massive fraud operation to deceive their donors, enrich themselves, and hide their deceptive operations from the public,” FBI Director Kash Patel soberly said on X. “They lied to their donors, vowing to dismantle violent extremist groups, and actually turned around and paid the leaders of these very extremist groups - even utilizing the funds to have these groups facilitate the commission of state and federal crimes.”

Calling it politically explosive is a sore understatement. “Explosive” is a versatile word that could be applied to bad diarrhea. But this unexpected political development requires more vivid descriptors, maybe like thermonuclear or supernova. Unsurprisingly, the hot takes and psyops are off the charts— including misinformation and disinformation flowing like a Potomac sewage spill from both sides of the political spectrum. Let’s roll up our sleeves, dig in, and try to find a pony.

🔥 Here’s a link to the indictment, which was issued by a grand jury located in the Middle District of Alabama, right where the SPLC located its headquarters, in as deep-red a federal district as the SPLC’s critics could ever dream of, in their wildest fantasies of long-overdue comeuppances. The SPLC located its HQ in Alabama to poke locals in the eye and called Montgomery the Capital of Racism for decades.

Now it must rely on fairness from an Alabama jury.

Put simply, the grand jury’s indictment alleges that, over a long period of time, the SPLC and its legions of LARPing lawyers cosplayed as a law enforcement agency. It generously funded “informants” in a variety of racist hate groups —actual ones— like the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, and the National Alliance. In one recent example, the SPLC paid $270,000 to a notorious racist who helped plan and organize the infamous 2017 Charlottesville rally in Virginia, around which corporate media would later concoct a ridiculous “fine people” fiction to smear President Trump during his first term, and Democrats would fundraise on that lie for years.

The Times reminded readers that Charlottesville’s neo-nazi rally “included torch-wielding marchers chanting antisemitic slogans, and violent clashes that culminated with one participant ramming his car into a group of counterprotesters, killing a woman and leaving at least 19 others injured.” In other words, a typical “mostly peaceful protest” on the left— otherwise known as Thursday. Funded by the SPLC.

That’s sketchy enough, but the indictment really begins to grip when it describes the scores of fake bank accounts the SPLC created and used to launder money to its “informants” in the hate groups. It would go like this: the SPLC would dream up a preposterous-sounding business that didn’t actually exist. A few examples include: “Fox Photography,” the “Tech Writers Group,” the “Rare Books Warehouse,” and —I am not making this up— the “Center Investigative Agency (CIA).”

Those names! Rare Books Warehouse? Really? Was “Totally Legit Business, LLC” already taken? And … CIA? Are you kidding me? Did all the SPLC’s lawyers have a great laugh over that one? I bet they aren’t laughing now.

Anyway. Next, after brainstorming retarded names for their fake businesses, the SPLC would open a fake account at a bank, fund it, and use the money to pay “informants” and hate groups millions of dollars. We might call that a “left-wing laundromat.” The indictment calls it both “money laundering” and a “conspiracy to commit money laundering.”

Mind you, none of these businesses ever existed. No customers. No vendors. No products or services. To convince the banks to open accounts for their invisible businesses, the SPLC lied on the account applications. In writing. The DOJ now has it dead to rights.

Then —critically for the indictment— in 2021, one of the banks investigated SPLC’s accounts, discovered they were made up, closed them, and got the SPLC to agree in a letter confirming they were all fake and actually owned by the SPLC.

The DOJ has the letter.

The SPLC has lawyers. Lots of lawyers. Its lawyers, it turns out, did not bother to read the Bank Secrecy Act. The SPLC’s lawyers now need lawyers of their own.

🔥 You or I might have a protective internal instinct that occasionally chirps helpful warnings like “you better pay for that Altoids tin at self-checkout,” or “you should just tell her because your wife will find out about the new Cybertruck the moment you pull it into the driveway, dummy.” Conservatives would call that instinct our ‘conscience.’ And our conscience would probably warn us not to lie to banks in writing about fake companies that don’t actually exist, which breaks about a billion state and federal laws, and I am being conservative here.

The SPLC and its legions of lawyers obviously have no conscience. That kind of moral flexibility is helpful, at first, but eventually leads to problemas grandes, as our friends South of the Border might say.

On top of the banking crimes, the DOJ also alleged that the SPLC defrauded its donors by failing to tell them that at least part of their money would fund the very same hate crimes that the anti-hate group highlighted in its fundraising emails. Garden-variety fraud.

Finally, since you can’t lock up a non-profit, the DOJ’s indictment sought the remedy of criminal forfeiture. Remember that fact, along with the SPLC’s treasure trove of $800 million, because both facts will become super important very soon.

It all looks very bad. “The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” Acting AG Blanche said in the DOJ’s official statement. And the propaganda wars launched faster than a food fight on a Celebrity Cruise.

🔥 Disinformation is erupting on both sides. Over on BlueSky, the literati are pooh-pooing the indictment, downplaying (or leaving out) the financial crimes and highlighting the “informant” angle, arguing that the SPLC was just helping root out racism and ‘hatred’ —by funding it— to get intel. Disinformation on the conservative side is also confusing people, downplaying too much the “informant” angle, escalating wild claims about how much the SPLC paid the hate groups, and also overlooking the much more damning financial crimes.

This confusion —over whether the informants were actually informants or not— is giving the SPLC oxygen and breathing room. “The indictment,” the Times smugly reported, “offered little to support the notion that the group’s payments to informants were meant to aid the extremist groups they had infiltrated.” The Times (and most of BlueSky) pointed out the SPLC “helped the Justice Department” during the Biden era. They meant well.

Their intent is completely irrelevant and beside the point.

First of all, it’s 100% legal (though unsavory) for law enforcement agencies to fund criminal informants. Law enforcement trades cash for tips all the time. In theory, when it does happen, it includes records, receipts, is regulated by internal rules and policies, and is under LEO supervision.

But it is not legal for a private citizen or company to fund criminals. Not even as informants. You can’t cosplay as a cop and start making citizen’s arrests when somebody cuts you off in traffic. And you definitely can’t pay neo-nazis to organize violent rallies. Even if you mean well.

Second, their “good intent” is far from clear. One thing is conspicuously missing from the conversation over the SPLC’s “meant-well defense”: any evidence of prosecutions and convictions. If, over decades, the SPLC did use their informants to help shut down hate groups, then where is their track record, their belt of scalps? You would think the SPLC would have already posted that list on its website by now. You would think they’d be feeding allied reporters all the examples of all the bad guys they helped put behind bars using their informant network.

But … there’s nothing. No examples. No bad guys. No scalps. Under the law, when a reasonable person would speak in their own defense, but don’t— it can be inferred as an admission by acquiescence. It doesn’t look good. It looks like the SPLC’s hate-money never helped catch anybody.

So when you see someone claim without evidence that the SPLC was “only” infiltrating hate groups to turn the information over to the FBI or something, just ask: WHO??? Who was arrested? Who was prosecuted? Who was convicted by the SPLC’s heroic efforts?

🔥 But even setting aside the SPLC’s highly questionable intentions for the money it funneled into the very same hate groups it was fundraising over, and even dismissing the question of whether it defrauded its gullible donors or not, there still remains the 800-lb gorilla in the briefing room— the financial crimes.

Maybe the CIA can get away with using fake corporations to create bank accounts and launder money. For better or (probably) worse, the Central Intelligence Agency is allowed to do that for national security.

But I can’t do that. You can’t do it, either. Not without getting locked up in chokey.

And the Southern Poverty Law Center definitely can’t launder money through fake corporations and fraudulent bank accounts, not legally. Even though it made up a dumb fake company with the initials “CIA,” and probably wishes it were, the SPLC is not the CIA. Every single payment it made from a fake bank account is wire fraud. It might even be a conspiracy to commit crimes, like the Charlottesville murder, if an Alabama jury concludes the death was reasonably foreseeable.

All that to say: this indictment is very serious. If I had to bet Michelle’s Tahoe, I would bet the SPLC does not survive this case as an organization. It would probably be easier for progressives to just start over from scratch than to scrape the SPLC out of this jam.

But there’s 800 million reasons they will fight to save the SPLC.

🔥 $800 million. Sitting in a bank account owned by the SPLC, waiting to be deployed during the midterm elections. That’s $800 million presumably flowing from progressive donors who didn’t know about all the SPLC’s sketchy funny-business, like paying Charlottesville neo-nazis a cool quarter-million —in normal-sized, pre-pandemic dollars— to hold a hateful riot that got people killed.

A criminal indictment from a grand jury directed at persons allows the government to hold them in custody until trial, unless the judge sets bail. But they can’t lock up a non-profit corporation. It just won’t work. The building is too big. It won’t even fit in an above-average prison cell.

But what federal law does allow under a criminal indictment is freezing fraudulently obtained assets pending forfeiture. In other words, the DOJ can now freeze some or all of the SPLC’s $800 million political war chest. Six months out from the midterm elections.

Let’s say you were advising President Trump. He asks you, “when do you think would be the best time, politically, to unleash all this judicial wrath?” He means all the arrests and prosecutions. ActBlue, SPLC, RussiaGate conspirators, 2020 election fraudsters, and possibly even more incredible indictments. What would your answer be? If you think about it, there are only two reasonable choices for maximum political effect: (1) right before the midterms or (2) before the 2028 presidential election.

Think: October surprises.

Between the two options, the midterms seem to loom larger. If the midterms go pear-shaped, then 2028 might be a lost cause anyway. It must be the midterms. It might even be both. Either way, if I’m right, things will soon get even more exciting than this.

And, in that lens, the fact of Todd Blanche —President Trump’s personal lawyer— replacing Pam Bondi looks a lot different. This doesn’t look like any unforced error, as the trad-media narrative suggests. It looks more like raising up a wartime consigliere on the eve of battle.

You’ll know our theory is on the right track if the DOJ soon also indicts ActBlue, and freezes its assets. What happens to the Democrats’ already-depleted midterm war chest then? With the SPLC sidelined and ActBlue on ice, it would be catastrophic. Depending on who else is involved, it could even be existential.

All the activity on social media over this indictment shows you just how politically thermonuclear it is. Not only is the SPLC institutionally at risk —the Democrat party’s political lawfare hub since 1971— but its $800 million is potentially in the wind as well. Even if DOJ ultimately loses the forfeiture counts, the money could remain tied up, off the table, till after the elections.

That’s all fun to think about, but at least we know now why the Atlantic just launched a badly sourced, zero-evidence hit job alleging FBI Director Kash Patel was a drunk. The timing strongly suggests they were trying to get ahead of the SPLC story.

They saw it coming. They had 800 million reasons to do … something. They just didn’t see it coming fast enough.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! We’ll be back tomorrow morning, with a LOT MORE essential news and commentary, since it is mounting up. Don’t miss it.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🔥🔥🔥

Like a frozen meat-lover’s pizza pulled out for Wednesday dinner —right on the C&C midterm schedule, I might add— last summer’s ActBlue “smurfing” scandal has emerged from the deep freeze and is quickly thawing out in preparation to be served. April’s third week has delivered a slew of stories, all bad news for the Democrats’ fund-raising engine. First, yesterday’s Texas Tribune reported, “Ken Paxton sues Democratic donor platform ActBlue.”

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued ActBlue yesterday under the state’s Deceptive Trade Practices Act. He roped them in like a herd of diseased cattle. Officials from ActBlue testified late last year that, in response to viral videos exposing donation fraud, the organization had “stopped” accepting gift cards and burner credit cards. They pinkie-swore that the fundraiser now uses “robust safeguards” to block illegal and foreign donations.

So Paxton’s team tried it out. They waited a couple of months. Then they tried making donations using prepaid credit cards and gift cards. I’ll give you one guess what happened.

Despite all the new “robust safeguards,” Texas investigators were still able to make donations using fake names, gift cards, and prepaid cards, including to the DNC itself and various Texas candidates. Weird! The lawsuit also alleged the platform “allows improper donations from people outside the United States and those who have already hit the mandated donor limit,” in part because prepaid gift cards and similar loopholes bypass identity checks.

Amusingly, the petition argued that ActBlue is deceiving its donors, by falsely advertising that it runs a lawful system compliant with election laws. In other words, and ironically, Paxton is suing to protect Democrat donors. His petition asks the court to fine ActBlue $10,000 per violation —which could add up to a lot— ban it from accepting anonymous payment methods, and lock ActBlue’s lying officials in the Alamo’s stockade for a week of public shaming.

Okay, I added that last one. They haven’t brought back the stocks, and aren’t letting citizens toss vegetables at fraudsters and scofflaws. (They should, though.) But here’s the actual ActBlue timeline, a disturbing tale of creeping doom, which you will enjoy:

• In October 2023, the Republican Congress launched its first investigation into ActBlue’s foreign and “straw” donations

• In December 2023, Paxton launched his own investigation.

• In August, 2024, James O’Keefe published viral “smurfing” videos, in which he went door-to-door while elderly Democrat donors denied they gave large amounts (like $839,000) in sometimes thousands of small donations.

• In late 2024, Paxton passed the problems he found to Biden’s Federal Election Commission, requesting rule changes. (It had the same effect as the proverbial tree falling in the forest when no one’s around.)

• In 2025, President Trump ordered the DOJ to investigate ActBlue, which is ongoing.

• Around the same time, every single member of ActBlue’s legal and compliance team quit, was fired, or went on extended leave.

• Early this month, the New York Times (!) threw ActBlue under the bus, in a long-form exclusive, headlined, “ActBlue May Have Misled Congress on Vetting Foreign Donations, Its Lawyers Warned.”

• One week ago, Politico reported, “House GOP ramps up pressure on ActBlue.” The House Oversight Committee sent new document demands to the fundraiser— based on the Times’ story.

Now, in the same month as the Times’s ActBlue article, Paxton launched his new lawsuit. Get this: Paxton’s lawsuit’s allegations also cited the Times article, which is turning out to be as helpfully influential as I wrote at the time.

Paxton’s suit was just the first thrust in what Democrats probably perceive to be a coordinated attack. In public, Democrats deflected and ducked behind whataboutism. “If Attorney General Paxton and his Republican allies actually cared about donor fraud, they would work to strengthen security standards across the board, including within their own operations, rather than targeting ActBlue,” ActBlue spokeslady De’Andra Roberts-LaBoo said. (I did not make that name up.)

Behind the scenes, Democrats are freaking out. In a parallel story this morning about Paxton’s lawsuit, the far-left Washington Post observed, “The closure or restrictions on ActBlue would be devastating for the Democratic Party and its candidates as they try to regain control of Congress this year and win the White House in 2028.”

Imagine that.

🔥 Yesterday, the New York Post reported, “ActBlue employees took the Fifth in House depositions 146 times in probe on alleged donor fraud.” Not just 146 times. Every time. Five former ActBlue officials took the Fifth on every single question that Representatives asked them. (Ironically, in a recent statement, ActBlue insisted it has “always been forthcoming with Congress.”)

The House Oversight Committee subpoenaed five former ActBlue officials —including members of the legal team who had abruptly quit (or were fired) early last year— to testify under oath. Yesterday, every single one invoked the Fifth Amendment—the constitutional prohibition against being forced to testify against yourself, commonly called “self-incrimination.”

Under criminal law, a defendant’s invocation of the Fifth Amendment cannot be used as evidence against them. But under civil law —like Paxton’s Deceptive Trade Practices suit— a Fifth Amendment invocation can establish a presumption of consciousness of guilt, and witnesses can be ordered to testify anyway, unless they can specify which crime they are worried about.

In criminal cases, Fifth Amendment invocation is common, and depending on which side people are on, it is either perfectly harmless and totally natural— or damning. It avoids the question, but it doesn’t do anything to help.

Looking at the timeline, one cannot avoid a sense of dreadful momentum, a mounting signal of pending mayhem. ActBlue obviously played the rules fast and loose, for a long time. Now it’s being attacked from multiple directions— including from inside the progressive house. It probably feels like it got shoved into a dark utility closet with a family of annoyed badgers.

Tick, tock, ActBlue. The prepaid gift card is expiring.

🔥🔥🔥

It’s not like Democrats aren’t trying to fight back. But it’s blowing up in their faces. Last night, NBC reported, “Kash Patel sues The Atlantic over report alleging excessive drinking and absences.” He’s suing them for $250 million dollars. Wait till you hear this story. And hold in your mind the fact that the FBI will be the one making any arrests based on pending Grand Jury indictments or ActBlue investigations. That might be a motive.

Four days ago, the Atlantic ran an exclusive “exposé” originally headlined, “Kash Patel’s Erratic Behavior Could Cost Him His Job.” The Atlantic stealth-edited the headline yesterday, after Kash sued them. It now reads, “The FBI Director Is MIA,” which is even dumber than the original, because he’s obviously not MIA. He’s right there, suing the pants off you morons.

Anyway. By “Erratic Behavior” that “Could Cost Him His Job,” the story claimed Kash Patel is a notorious drunk. Its author, Sarah Fitzpatrick, further claimed, both directly and through insinuation, that the FBI Director often goes on benders and then fails to show up for work, presumably drying out someplace. Fitzpatrick repeatedly connected this alleged conduct to a “national security crisis.”

What might happen, Fitzpatrick wondered, if there was a terrifying domestic attack and Kash was off lying face down in a gutter somewhere?

Fitzpatrick’s “logic,” if you can call it that, is hard to follow. Was she saying it would be better if a notorious drunk were in the office, and available to lead the response to a terrorist attack? Or would it be better if he was absent and sleeping it off? She never picked a lane.

But far beyond the article’s logical problems were its sourcing problems. C&C readers would have caught this immediately. Fully one hundred percent of at least seventy people claiming Kash Patel is a notorious drunk were anonymous. Over and over, the article cited sources like, “nine people familiar with his outreach,” “two people familiar with the matter,” “multiple current officials,” “two people close to the White House,” and so on, and so forth. No names.

None of 70+ people were willing to go on record. Not one.

🔥 For a bumbling guy who’s supposed to be intoxicated most of the time, Kash Patel sure tweets a lot. Problem is, his tweets don’t show any drunkenness. In fact, he tweeted pretty quickly and rationally about the Atlantic’s dumb hit piece. The same day, in fact. I guess he wasn’t drunk then:

The FBI Director also appears in countless interviews and video clips— far more often than Chris Wray ever did. And reporters follow him around everywhere, hoping for a slip. But I can’t recall a single example of Kash slurring his words or even seeming tipsy on video. Can you?

Given how ubiquitous cameras are in D.C., Las Vegas clubs, and on government trips —and how many enemies and disgruntled subordinates the article itself admits he’s made— the absence of even one leaked clip of him slurring or stumbling is a notable, well, “gap.” Here are the three things you should notice about this “exposé:”

• No hard evidence. The Atlantic article offered zero documents, zero photos, zero videos, and zero logs that could let readers independently verify the allegations of “conspicuous inebriation,” missed meetings, or security emergencies; everything rested on people “familiar” with things. (Apparently, it’s so “conspicuous” that it’s never been captured on a cell phone video.)

• No dates and times. Aside from a few vague references (“early in his tenure,” “on multiple occasions in the past year,” “while on official travel to Italy in February”), the article never connected any of its key allegations to specific dates, times, or locations where an outside observer could cross‑check or rebut them.

• No named complainants. As noted, every single damaging claim about Patel’s drinking, absences, mismanagement, and supposed “national‑security vulnerability” came from anonymous officials, former officials, staff, hospitality workers, or political operatives; not one person was willing to attach their name and job to the accusations.

Compare this story to the New York Times’s exposé on ActBlue, which referenced specific memos, named involved officials, provided dates, and listed the many people (at least by title) that it interviewed. This story is garbage. It is a classic, maximalist, anonymous-oppo narrative dressed up as an investigative feature. It relies only on sweeping character assassination built almost entirely from unattributed anecdotes, asserted patterns, and authority‑signaling phrases rather than a single concrete, verifiable fact.

🔥 An anonymously based story like this is egregious journalistic malpractice. Any FBI Director accumulates countless enemies. It’s part of the job (assuming a director is doing the job). So there’s simply no way to weigh the value of anonymous gripers. It could just be a bunch of gloomy malcontents. Anonymous whispering is cheap.

And for a major news platform, making this kind of career-destroying accusation against a top, sitting official should never be founded on a whispering campaign.

Ironically, as one of the only three quotes defending Patel, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told Fitzpatrick, “Anonymously sourced hit pieces do not constitute journalism.” He was 100% correct.

Democrats have used this narrative script before. In the 1860s, they mounted a campaign to smear Ulysses S. Grant as a useless drunk. Yet this supposedly “perpetually intoxicated” general crushed the Confederacy, forced Lee’s surrender, and saved the Union. As a “drunk,” Grant then won the presidency— twice. As an allegedly inebriated president, he helped stabilize Reconstruction, fought the early Ku Klux Klan, and presided over the peaceful reunification of a country that had just torn itself apart in civil war, which is even harder than it sounds.

When Democrats and disaffected Republicans once confronted President Lincoln about General Grant’s drinking habits, Lincoln is said to have answered, “Please find out where General Grant gets it, and I will send a barrel of this wonderful whiskey to every general in the army.”

Somehow, through the alcohol-induced fog, Kash managed to get a whole lawsuit together and filed in two days— a lawsuit that has muscular legs. If the Atlantic can’t produce any of its anonymous witnesses or cough up more specific evidence that it left out of its own story, it will have serious legal problems. The Atlantic can hide behind journalistic privilege all its wants, and refuse to name its sources. But it must pay for that privilege, and the cost is losing the lawsuit.

Somebody find out what Kash Patel drinks, and send cases of it to the rest of the DOJ. Don’t pay for it with prepaid gift cards, either. And quit acting up.

Have a terrific Tuesday! Return tomorrow morning for another caffeine injection and even more essential news and commentary.

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🚀⛑️ C&C ARMY BRIEFING — IRAN WAR UPDATE ⛑️ 🚀

Over the weekend, an Iranian cargo ship tried to run the U.S. blockade at the Strait of Hormuz and found out. BBC reported, “US attacks and seizes Iranian cargo ship, as Iran says ‘no decision’ yet on joining peace talks.” In dramatic audio released by the US military, a radio operator warned the ship’s crew to “vacate the engine room, we are preparing to subject you to disabling fire.”

CLIP: U.S. Central Command stops the Touska (0:35).

“Guided-missile destroyer USS Spruance intercepted M/V Touska as it transited the north Arabian Sea at 17 knots enroute to Bandar Abbas, Iran,“ CentCom clinically reported. “American forces issued multiple warnings and informed the Iranian-flagged vessel it was in violation of the U.S. blockade.”

The Touska —a container ship 965 feet long and heavy as an aircraft carrier— ignored the warnings and steamed ahead, radio silent. You have to hand it to the captain; that guy has some stones. With a massive destroyer tracking him for six long hours, he thought, nah. I bet they won’t do it. They’ll TACO. The Spruance then “disabled the Touska’s propulsion by firing several rounds from the destroyer’s 5-inch MK 45 Gun into Touska’s engine room.” Oh. I guess they WILL do it.

Ropelined Marines then boarded the drifting vessel and “took the Touska into custody,” using a maritime term that sounds like they shoved it into the back of a police car or something. Either way, it has been seized. All your cargoes now belong to us. President Trump tweeted, “We have full custody of the ship, and are seeing what’s on board!” The manifest and other paperwork might be particularly interesting.

IRGC officials blasted the United States, accusing us of “black-hearted piracy on the high seas,” or words to that effect. And then they warned darkly that we’d be sorry. And then they closed the Strait. Again. Somebody should probably spray WD-40 on the Strait’s hinges since it’s opening and shutting every ten minutes. (Coming from a regime that has seized 18+ foreign tankers in the Gulf since 2019, calling us pirates was pretty rich.)

It wasn’t piracy. We’re sailing in safe legal seas. The Touska is what you might call a “repeat offender.” The ship has a record and priors thicker than the barnacles on Iran’s sunken fleet. According to Financial Express, the Touska has already been sanctioned by multiple countries and is currently blacklisted from international finance and global ports. (It’s the diplomatic equivalent of being banned from every Starbucks on planet Earth.)

There are good reasons. Firstly, Touska is operated by the Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines, which is not a recreational cruise provider. It’s a fake IRGC cut-out disguised as a company, considered by Western agencies to be the primary transport arm for the IRGC’s ballistic missile and nuclear proliferation programs. And Touska is believed to have previously sneaked in dangerous explosive materials like sodium perchlorate (a key precursor for solid rocket fuel) from ports in China.

It’s always gotten away with it before, neatly navigating around financial sanctions and blacklists. Nobody’s ever been willing to kinetically stop the Touska, presumably over fears of causing so-called “diplomatic incidents.” Those lax days are over.

Following through on its dramatic threats, the IRGC bragged to its state media that it had launched “several drones” at unnamed U.S. military vessels in the Gulf of Oman, which is east of the Strait of Hormuz near Somalia, where Iran’s Houthi allies are based. Un-dramatically, no damage was reported, not even in IRGC-controlled media. (An interesting side note: the Spruance is a veteran of last year’s Houthi conflict and has tangled with those rabid rebels before. Which reminds me: What else do you have when you have a room full of Somali pirates? A full set of teeth.)

So now we clearly see the matchup. Iran’s ‘Navy,’ such as it is, can deploy ineffective Somali “drones” —presumably, tiny, remote-controlled ACME motorboats laden with three dynamite sticks, or possibly small model planes with grenades in the nose— which accomplish nothing against defended targets unless the Iranians get extremely lucky.

Meanwhile, the US Navy can shoot with pinpoint accuracy into Iran’s massive military cargo ships and then confiscate them whenever it wants, completely unopposed. But sure, Iran is winning. Okay.

On the economic front, oil prices ticked up slightly this morning, recovering some of their losses from Friday’s historic close, but remained well below the $100/barrel rate. Brent crude futures rose by +4.74% to $94.66 a barrel, while West Texas Intermediate (WTI) was +5.6% higher at $88.55. The oil markets appear to be doing what Iran cannot: calming down.

The current cease-fire expires on Wednesday. Today, American negotiators plan to attend peace talks in Islamabad, Pakistan. But they might be lonely; the Iranian side cannot confirm its own attendance. The Iranians are drowning in internal struggles between the secular, elected government and the murky, militarized IRGC corporation. Nobody knows whether Iran’s team will show up or, if they do, who’ll wear the captain’s hat.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🔥🔥🔥

This was potentially huge news, the first rumblings of a massive political earthquake. Late last week, Fox News reported, “ODNI sends criminal referrals to DOJ for ex-IG, whistleblower tied to Trump impeachment.” In a rare example of a “somebody said something” story that was actually newsworthy, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard issued a remarkable —if not historic— official DNI press release that declassified more new documents related to Impeachment I. Here’s the staggering title, right from the website:

She didn’t just declassify some documents. Tulsi simultaneously made criminal referrals to the DOJ against several key actors involved in the 2020 Impeachment. It was a poisoned dagger shivved into the heart of the conspiracy to defeat President Trump using politicized lawfare: “they manufactured and manipulated the whistleblower process to create the pretext for an impeachment of the sitting President.”

It’s dense— replete with murky names, a calendar’s worth of dates, and documents bearing bureaucratic titles as long as small novels. Let’s walk through it without getting in the weeds.

This round’s starring character was former Intelligence Community Inspector General (IC/IG) Michael Atkinson, who served during the middle years of Trump 1.0 until the President fired him. The IC/IG is supposed to be a neutral, internal watchdog for the entire intelligence community, and definitely not a policy or political actor. One of those “nonpartisan” career professionals we keep hearing about but never seem to find.

Atkinson is the key federal official who formally launched the RussiaGate impeachment hoax. Under the banner of his “nonpartisan” office, he made a “referral of urgent concern” to Congress in 2019, alleging there was “credible evidence” that President Trump blackmailed Kiev’s clownlike president Zelensky. Atkinson claimed that Trump intimidated Zelensky to investigate the Biden Crime Family’s nefarious activities in Ukraine, which Atkinson claimed was intended to influence the upcoming election, presumably by exposing Biden’s illegal hijinks to the public.

In other words, Atkinson’s narrative was that Trump leveraged his office and the tools of U.S. foreign policy, including by pausing aid (the stick) and dangling a White House visit (the carrot), to induce Ukraine to investigate the Bidens. The dual charge: abuse of power combined with election interference. The worst.

That is old, well-worn news. Now’s where it gets really interesting based on the new document disclosures— which itself was a historic declassification unlike anything that has ever before emerged from the DNI’s secretive offices. For the very first time in ODNI’s 21-year history, a sitting DNI has made criminal referrals against her own office’s former leadership.

🔥 Tulsi declassified Atkinson’s investigative file. What she found —and what the file shows— is that the “nonpartisan” inspector general was anything but nonpartisan. He twisted the rules into a mall pretzel shape to fit the “crimes.” He ignored the actual transcript of Trump’s call with Zelensky, and instead relied on four unnamed “whistleblowers”— none of whom heard the call and all of whom were easily impeachable for obvious political bias.

The whistleblowers were all partisan Democrats with a history of Trump opposition, none of whom were on the call. Atkinson knitted that into a “referral of urgent concern” that spurred the President’s impeachment and sidelined his agenda.

And he bent the rules like Uri Geller bending a drawer full of spoons. First, and maybe most egregiously, the IG’s office had a long-standing rule for whistleblowers: no hearsay. That means whistleblowers could only report things they actually knew about— and nothing that they “heard” from someone else. That rule was actually printed right on the form.

But none of his whistleblowers had personal knowledge of the call. One whistleblower actually wrote, “I do not have direct knowledge of private comments or communications by the President.” The second whistleblower claimed to have read the transcript, and wrote they “would not have been able to get from ‘point A to Z’ the way the (first) Whistleblower did.” A third whistleblower —also going from the transcript— wrote that they had to “read between the lines,” and that his/her perception of a quid pro quo only “became clear in hindsight.” Just guessing.

This kind of second-hand testimony was prohibited right on the face of the form. So Atkinson just … changed the form. He simply deleted the prohibition against hearsay. Kind of like changing the definition of “vaccine” on the CDC website.

And, even though all the ‘witnesses’ all based their conclusions on readings of the call transcript— Atkinson never read the transcript himself. He hid behind the sofa. He avoided the transcript like it was a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses ringing his front doorbell.

Despite all that, Atkinson quickly made a criminal referral to the DOJ. DOJ looked at it and found “no urgent concern,” and kicked it back. Atkinson shrugged, re-packaged it for Congress —no actual investigation needed— and the impeachment game was afoot.

🚀 Now let’s look at Atkinson’s “whistleblowers”— who were just people who’d read the transcript of the Trump-Zelensky call. The “call” included a crowd of officials and employees approximately the size of a high-school football team. On the Ukrainian side, Zelensky had an unspecified number of aides and advisors. The US side included Trump, White House notetakers, NSC staff, and other senior aides. Trump later declassified and released the transcript.

Nobody who was actually on the call ever objected, became a whistleblower, or testified against Trump. None of them were even interviewed by Atkinson before he made his impeachment referral. House and Senate Democrats took the deeply flawed report and ran with it.

Instead, the first and main witness told Atkinson: (1) he was a registered Democrat. (2) He “worked closely with Vice President Biden” and was involved in Biden’s Ukraine businesses. (3) He said he was “the target of right-wing bloggers … and conspiracy theorists.” (4) He coordinated with Adam Schiff’s House Intelligence Committee staff before filing the complaint.

Despite all those clues, Atkinson later testified that “I never considered the whistleblower to be politically biased.” During the 2020 impeachment trial, Democrats refused to let Trump’s lawyers ask about the Whistleblower’s bias and motives.

The second ‘whistleblower’ was just as flawed. (1) They admitted in a witness interview to being a “co-author of the 2017 ICA”— the discredited source of the RussiaGate allegations. (2) They admitted to working ‘alongside’ now-disgraced FBI agent Peter Strzok (of the “insurance policy” fame). (3) They advised interviewers of being “disappointed everyday by policy decisions”— meaning the President’s policy decisions.

Basically, Atkinson rounded up some of the most virulently partisan Democrats in the deep state —who weren’t on the call— and used them to manufacture out of thin air a criminal allegation against the sitting President of the United States. That’s apparently all it took to launch the coup.

🔥 In the long, secretive, buttoned‑down history of the U.S. intelligence bureaucracy, Tulsi Gabbard’s press release landed like a meteor crashing into a mobile home. This isn’t just another dry “we take these concerns seriously” memo. It’s the sitting DNI accusing her own predecessors and official watchdogs of running a years‑long coup and then stapling criminal referrals to the front for good measure.

It’s a big deal. I’m not sure there’s anything remotely historically comparable. On behalf of the entire ODNI, Tulsi is not just admitting past wrongdoing. The Office is explicitly alleging that senior IC players and an Inspector General deliberately “manufactured and manipulated” intelligence and whistleblower processes to overturn the democratic result of a national election, and did it in an official press release labeled as advancing “transparency and accountability.”

In a single stroke, the ODNI dragged the secret world’s dirty laundry into the DMV’s fluorescent lights, naming names, declassifying transcripts that Congressional Democrats literally kept in a safe, and inviting Todd Blanche’s DOJ to go hunting for crimes in the same skunkworks that helped impeach the President.

For an institution that normally communicates in passive voice and footnotes, this is the bureaucratic equivalent of flipping the lights on at 3 a.m. in the deep state’s nightclub and handing the bouncers over to the cops. Future historians will circle April 13, 2026, in red ink— as the day the intelligence community publicly turned its detective flashlight back on itself.

If the Atkinson file confirms what conservative reporters have been saying for six years —that Schiff’s staff was coordinating with the Whistleblower (Eric Ciaramella, pictured above) before the referral was filed— then Schiff’s 2028 hopes will die, too.

One cannot help but notice the timing. Seven months remain before the midterms. The Florida grand jury is continuing its work. Historically, the DOJ has avoided bringing politically-sensitive indictments within two months of an election. But Biden’s DOJ trashed that ‘unwritten rule’ in the Trump cases.

When South Florida Judge Cannon pressed Special Prosecutor Jack Smith’s team on the 60‑day rule, his lead prosecutor flatly said putting Trump on trial in the run‑up to the election was consistent with the Justice Manual and that the “60‑day rule” doesn’t appear anywhere in the DOJ’s formal rules. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

💉💉💉

Some MAHA folks were up in arms this weekend after Trump nominated a new CDC director who was involved in enforcing military mandates for the covid jabs. CNN reported, “‘We just need someone who’s not crazy’: Inside the White House decision to nominate Erica Schwartz as CDC director.”

Erica Schwartz, MD, JD, MPH, is smart, attractive, highly credentialed, well-spoken, and experienced in all the areas that MAHA people are concerned about. It’s just the wrong side of the experience lane.

This weekend, anti-vaccine superlawyer Aaron Siri called Dr. Schwartz “the Queen of Mandating Vaccines,” and called her nomination “incredibly ironic.” Indeed, she authorized the Coast Guard’s first policies on Anthrax, Smallpox, and Influenza vaccination. Earlier in her career, she served as Chief of the Immunization and Preventive Medicine Department, which oversaw the Guard’s 42 clinics and sickbays, where vaccines were given to servicemembers.

Later, as Deputy Surgeon General (2019-2021), Dr. Schwartz was involved in the pandemic-era response, including through the initial vaccine deployments, but not including the federal mandates period. Specifically, she left the office in April 2021— months before the first federal mandates began in September, and right after the vaccines were initially deployed (she tendered her resignation in January, 2021).

The CDC has seen a revolving door of anti-vaxx and anti-establishment characters. They oversaw massive staff layoffs and a ban on the CDC’s public communications. You might consider them to be change agents. Critically, one pro-vaccine candidate —Susan Monarez— was fired after refusing to take orders from Secretary Kennedy. (She famously dragged few other top hardliners into rage-quitting with her, including the kinky, leather-loving, pentagram-tattooed ‘monkeypox czar.’)

One alert reader challenged me on ‘X’ this weekend over Schwartz’s nomination:

You would think that Trump nominated that human cockroach, Fauci, or something.

To be clear: even if Erica were awful, nominating an enthusiastically pro-vaccine CDC head would be frustrating but not even close to making me consider ditching Trump and embracing Democrats. Just put that silly notion right out of your head. We’ve made more progress against Big Pharma and vaccines in the last 14 months than in the 25 years before that. I’m rational, not suicidal.

Notwithstanding that, it is far too soon to panic. (Wait until I give the signal.) There is no evidence that Dr. Schwartz is a pharma sellout. She enforced long-standing military policy, which only means she follows orders. She was incompatible with the Biden Administration, which is yet another good sign. She was not involved in the civilian covid mandates.

Why don’t we wait and see what she does? Maybe Erica’s the stable force intended to follow all the chaos and change that was necessary to reset a CDC that had become distorted and distracted? I’d be just as happy as the next sane person for the CDC to be permanently closed. Frankly, I prefer our chances without one. But short of that, the proof will be in the pudding.

Personally, I’m never going to hysterically issue threats or rage-quit over what some nominee might do. You’ve got the wrong coffee blogger if that is what you’re looking for. I will call out bad policies if and when I see them. I might even file lawsuits; who knows. In the meantime, I’ll assume the President knows what he is doing and I’ll let the man work.

So, yes. President Trump is still “my man.” Keep on working.

Have a marvelous Monday! Race back here tomorrow morning for another educational and informative roundup of essential news and commentary.

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