🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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Last Friday, President Trump banned CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House. On Monday, the three outlets sued him in D.C. federal court— a 27-page complaint, fronted by First Amendment heavyweight Ted Boutrous of Gibson Dunn, naming Trump, Communications Director Steven Cheung, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and the Secret Service director, on the apparent legal theory of “sue everybody and let the Kaiser sort it out.” The Hill wrote an entire streaming series about the conflict, beginning with: “Outlets Trump banned from White House sue administration on First Amendment grounds.”

A lawsuit was inevitable, which is a shame, because the parties were having so much fun manufacturing evidence against themselves. Let’s start with the evidence locker President Trump is filling against himself.

Trump didn’t just ban the three outlets. He explained himself. At great length. In writing. In all caps. He said they write “FICTION and LIES.” He said they have “an obligation to be fair.” He called the whole thing, in his own words, “an assault on the FAKE NEWS, something that has grown like Cancer in our beloved United States of America.” He threatened that “other Fake News Media Outlets” would follow.

Anything you post can and will be used against you in a court of law.

When a reporter asked him whether there was a particular story behind the ban, he said no. “It’s really just cumulative stories over the last few years,” coverage he considers “one-sided” and “never good” because “they want to try and diminish the Republicans.” Asked if he was trying to intimidate the press, he replied: “No, no, no, no; I dislike dishonest press like you. I think you’re terrible.”

Now, the President wasn’t wrong about any of those points. But, it might’ve been better had he kept off social media. Legally speaking, Trump probably could have gotten away with it if he’d just kept his thumbs quiet. There is no constitutional right to a White House press pass. A federal appeals court said so last summer, ruling he could exclude AP reporters from the Oval Office and Air Force One —his ‘private workspaces’— over the whole “Gulf of America” standoff.

But once the government opens its doors to the press generally, it can’t slam them on certain viewpoints. That’s the ruling of Sherrill v. Knight, a 1977 D.C. Circuit case holding that press credentials are a liberty interest: reporters get notice, an appeal process, and their credentials can’t get revoked just because the president thinks their coverage stinks. (Even if it does stink.) In the AP case, a Trump-appointed judge put it plainly: “if the Government opens its doors to some journalists... it cannot then shut those doors to other journalists because of their viewpoints.”

So now Trump’s lawyers get to walk into federal court and argue, with straight faces, that when the President of the United States says “I’m banning these outlets because of their coverage,” he doesn’t actually mean he’s banning them because of their coverage. We lawyers call this the “He Was Just Kidding” defense. It has a mixed track record.

And the scope doesn’t help: Last year’s Associated Press fight was just about the Oval Office and Air Force One. This ban covers the entire White House grounds— and not just one reporter, but three whole news organizations, in a wholesale lot. It’s the difference between disinviting someone from your dinner party and bricking up the front door.

He’s been through all this before. More than once. He knows the rules. It’s almost like Trump picked this fight, wanting maximum publicity, and on purpose. And then he got the worst possible judge.

🔥 The case drew D.C. Judge Timothy J. Kelly for Wednesday’s emergency hearing— a Trump appointee and, in a twist the networks’ lawyers must have savored like a $400 California cabernet billed to CNN, it was the same judge who ordered the Trump 1.0 White House to give Jim Acosta’s press pass back. Trump, who on Friday mused that the ban’s survival “depends on the judge you get, to be honest with you,” got this judge.

Kelly is one of Trump’s worst judicial picks ever. For instance, Judge Kelly sentenced Proud Boys’ Enrique Tarrio —who wasn’t even at the Capitol— to twenty-two years in federal prison. It was the record longest J6 sentence. No other judge got close. (Trump undid Tarrio’s twenty-two years with a pen on his first afternoon back. The judge, unfortunately, is still there.)

Meanwhile, the entire corporate media has gone to war. Even Fox. But passive-aggressively, of course.

🔥 Yesterday, Trump inaugurated his new White House lawn helipad —a parking space for helicopters— and corporate media treated its own stubborn refusal to cover the event like it had won the Cold War. It reported this like breaking international news, which is pretty rich, because on any normal day a helipad ribbon-cutting would get less airtime than a weatherman’s birthday.

The Hill —which isn’t even part of the conflict— ran a whole separate story on media’s courageous Helipad Snub. To make sure everyone got the point, media ran the ribbon-cutting film, but absent any presidential audio:

The media’s non-coverage of the helicopter parking spot became media’s big story, because the people who decided not to cover it covered their decision not to cover it.

With no pool crew on hand to supply a microphone, the White House’s own feed had no audio: a silent movie of a man inaudibly cutting a ribbon beside a noiseless helicopter pad. It was the first soundless inauguration since Calvin Coolidge, without anchors describing their takes on how dictatorially Trump held the giant golden scissors. (To me, this was an improvement.)

🔥 Beyond the lawsuit, ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox also cut their pool coverage in solidarity. CNN had been scheduled to run the pool camera for Trump’s U.N. trip —the one crew whose footage feeds everybody— and when CNN was barred, the others refused to step in. “The public has a vital interest in receiving accurate, independent information,” they declared jointly, moments before guaranteeing the public would receive none.

The Hill managed a third story about there being no story, this time about the non-existence of the pool coverage.

The Washington Post, unwilling to be outdone in the bravery department, announced it would delay publishing any pictures until last night. The Administration is said to be reeling. (Sources confirm it is not.)

As if that weren’t enough, Trump used the media circus to launch his own network Monday afternoon: “Trump TV,” a 24/7 YouTube livestream called The Essentials Station, broadcasting what it calls the administration’s “greatest hits, unfiltered.” The launch montage featured clips from The Office, Seinfeld, Family Guy, Friends, and SpongeBob SquarePants, set to the Buggles’ 1979 hit “Video Killed the Radio Star.”

What a timeline. A government launching a television channel to a 47-year-old song about new media devouring old media is either the most self-aware thing this administration has ever done or the craziest. Either way, it’s predictably giving Democrats endless fodder for new complaints.

For instance, oleaginous California governor Gavin Newsom, whose hairdo has its own gravitational field, declared it “quite literally state-run TV” and “truly autocratic behavior from a failed President.” Well. To be fair, dark warnings about autocracy from the man who banned Californians from the beach and closed schools for two years while fine-dining at the French Laundry don’t quite hit the same.

All these media and progressive knee-jerk reactions, and his utter lack of care for the legal niceties, make me suspect Trump created the whole thing on purpose for his own reasons. It’s not clear why he co-opted the news cycle. Maybe to launch Trump TV. But there was an even bigger story, behind the story. Some dots we need to connect.

🔥 In all their many breathless stories about Trump’s 2026 War on Media, there’s one thing nobody’s mentioning— all three of the banned outlets showed up to this First Amendment fight already bloodied by earlier rounds.

First, MS NOW is the network formerly known as MSNBC, spun off by Comcast last November and rebranded with a name that sounds like a teenage influencer with a Shein try-on channel or a hub for Multiple Sclerosis news. It is suing the President of the United States as a “legacy institution” under a name that did not exist a year ago. Irony. The complaint even had to include an explanatory paragraph about the name change, which is what happens when your own lawyers aren’t sure the judge knows who you are.

Second is Politico, which arrived at the legal Octagon fresh off losing its biggest subscriber. In February, 2025, DOGE canceled $8 million in annual federal Politico Pro subscriptions ($80 million every ten years), and according to sources, when it clicked ‘cancel,’ even declined Politico’s retention discount. (The $8 million figure itself turned out to include every agency’s subscriptions plus $26 million from Biden, including from USAID —a fact the complaint called, in Trump’s version, “a categorically false and debunked claim”— but the cancellation was real, and so was the giant revenue hole.)

Third is CNN. The network, which now has fewer regular viewers than reruns of “Law and Order SVU,” has just been snapped up by Paramount Skydance. The $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns CNN, cleared its final legal hurdle on Monday, the same day as the lawsuit, when twelve blue-state attorneys general led by California settled their antitrust case. The suit had held off the merger since February, but last week, Paramount threatened to pull out of California. The blue states caved.

Get this: the settlement includes a “News Editorial Independence Board” for CNN and CBS News: five journalists, serving three-year terms, appointed by Paramount’s board of directors, empowered to resolve newsroom disputes over “reporting bias” and “fairness standards” — and to monitor editorial independence, quote, “from ownership and shareholders.” Paramount is owned by conservatives Larry and David Ellison.

In other words, the board guaranteeing CNN’s independence from its owners will be appointed by its owners. A CBS staffer called the plan “utter garbage.” The Freedom of the Press Foundation called Ellison “a compromised oligarch with a history of throwing journalists under the bus.” Connecticut’s attorney general, who had originally demanded Paramount sell CNN outright, said he was “deeply disappointed we could not do more.”

Progressive wails are deafening.

You can’t make this stuff up. CNN is suing the President to defend “independent journalism free from government interference”— on the same day it settled for being monitored for “fairness” by a board appointed by its new conservative billionaire owner. MS NOW is defending the free press under a name its interns invented last fall. And Politico is defending its White House access after losing the entire federal government as a customer.

Ouch.

Even supposing they win, which, given the judge and Trump’s tweets, they probably will— what have they actually won? A court order gets the press passes back. It doesn’t get them called on; no judge can order the press secretary to take their questions. It doesn’t get them the good rooms— the AP already learned that the Oval Office and Air Force One can be carved right back out. It doesn’t get them the pool rotation, which, since early last year, the White House now controls outright. And it doesn’t get them subscriptions, liberal owners, or non-moronic names.

A Pyrrhic victory. They may get their passes back. The White House they get back into won’t be the same one they left. TAW.

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This could be the craziest gerrymandering case in U.S. history. Yesterday, WRAL News reported, “Appeals court favors Trump-backed Missouri congressional map, but Supreme Court will have final say.”

Yesterday, the U.S. Eighth Circuit weighed in, 2–1, in an unsigned opinion —nobody wanted their name on this thing— ordering Missouri to use the Trump-backed 2025 map for November’s election. Then, in the same breath, the court stayed its own order for seven days so the U.S. Supreme Court can take yet another look. Which means: the map is alive, but only on life support, pending a decision due by September 28th at 5 p.m. Central.

Ironically, September 28th is the one-year anniversary from when Governor Kehoe signed the new map into law.

🍿 The saga’s timeline must be seen to be believed. It reads like a legal thriller written by someone with a head injury:

September 2025. It started when the Missouri legislature, in an extraordinary session, passed a new 7–1 Republican congressional map. Before the ink dried on the governor’s signature —the Eighth Circuit’s words, not mine— a Soros-funded group called People Not Politicians filed a referendum petition to kill it. The map’s most controversial feature: it dismantled Democratic Representative Emanuel Cleaver’s Kansas City-based Fifth District by stretching it into rural Missouri like taffy.

Fall 2025 – summer 2026. People Not Politicians sued, and sued, and sued, and sued. (Literally. Four lawsuits.) Missouri courts rejected every challenge: the special session was fine, redistricting twice in a decade was fine, the map’s shapes were fine, the referendum doesn’t automatically suspend anything. As the Eighth put it, “Until September 3, 2026, the 2025 map withstood every legal challenge against it.”

August 4, 2026. Missouri held its primary using the new 2025 map. Over 1.2 million people voted. Candidates spent $6.5 million on ads. Rick Brattin won the GOP primary in the new Fifth District, earning the right to challenge Cleaver. The same day, Secretary of State Denny Hoskins certified that PNP’s referendum petition was insufficient, on the grounds that you can’t hold a referendum on a federal congressional map at all.

One hour later, PNP’s Executive Director Richard von Glahn sued in state court. (One hour. Somewhere there’s a well-paid lawyer who had the complaint pre-drafted, and finished a little prematurely.)

August 19. The trial court sided with chrome-domed Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins, correctly noting that switching maps “would move hundreds of thousands of voters into different districts.” Moving the map moves the voters.

September 3. The Missouri Supreme Court reversed —one day after oral argument— ordering Secretary of State Hoskins to put the referendum on the November ballot, enjoining him from using the 2025 map, issuing its mandate immediately (no stay for any appeal), and prohibiting any post-judgment motions. Translation: “We’ve already decided. No take-backs. Get lost.”

September 4. Hoskins asked for a stay. Denied, in what the Eighth Circuit delicately called “an unreasoned order.” That’s judge-speak for “they didn’t even bother making up an excuse.”

September 8. Hoskins took it up to the U.S. Supreme Court. Justice Kavanaugh said no. But a few hours later, federal Judge Stephen Clark granted a temporary restraining order requiring the 2025 map anyway, on the grounds that switching maps would “wreak havoc.” So by sundown, Missouri had one federal judge’s order and one Supreme Court justice’s denial pointing in opposite directions, like a weathervane in a tornado.

September 9. The Eighth Circuit declined to stay Judge Clark’s order.

September 10. But the Supreme Court —which had just said ‘no’ to Hoskins— said yes to People Not Politicians and stayed Judge Clark’s order. Forty-eight hours, two opposite answers. This is fine. Everything is fine.

Mid-September. Here’s the best part. The inevitable Catch-22. Secretary of State Hoskins, wedged between a federal order saying “use the 2025 map” and a state supremes order saying “use the 2022 map,” did what any sensible official would do: he obeyed the federal court, then obeyed the U.S. Supreme Court’s stay, then got hauled into expedited contempt proceedings by the Missouri Supreme Court— which held him in contempt, then immediately found he “purged the contempt” by doing what it told him. He was held in contempt for obeying a federal judge and un-contempted for obeying the state judges.

Meanwhile, Boone County’s clerk was being simultaneously ordered by different courts to use two different maps. Just a normal month in election administration. Nothing to see here. Please vote!

September 21. Yesterday, the Eighth Circuit ruled on the merits. They held that switching maps between the primary and the general violated Article I, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution, which requires —here they boldly applied common sense— “continuity in the constituency throughout all stages of a single election.” In other words: you can’t hold the first half of the game in Kansas City and the second half in Springfield and call it one football match.

The court did the math. 1.4 million Missourians live in different districts under the two maps; 284,000 voted in one district in August and would vote in another in November; 57% of the Fifth District’s residents would be relocated— not because they moved, but because the district moved out from under them, like a rug in a slapstick routine. As the court put it in a footnote for the ages: “The protected right of participation in the choice of representatives cannot be satisfied by giving voters two halves of two different procedures.”

Remember— this whole thing is a battle over a single congressional seat. That’s where we are right now. That’s how valuable a single seat is.

🍿 The 8th’s unsigned opinion runs 40 pages, and for those of you who enjoy the legal insider takes, it’s got some terrific stuff.

The order took pains to note that, at oral argument, counsel for People Not Politicians conceded that a Supreme Court case, Lance v. Dennis (2006), was “a problem” for their legal analysis. Imagine paying a lawyer who stands up in federal court and admits the other side’s legal precedent is “a problem.” That’s like a one-star Yelp review written by your own attorney.

The court also noted, with all the warmth of a tax audit, that PNP counsel claimed Mr. von Glahn lived in a different district under the new map— then drily observed: “The Court has not found the factual support for this representation in the affidavit that von Glahn filed or elsewhere in the record.” Translation: nice story, counselor, where’s the evidence? Did you make that up? Because it sure reads like you made that up.

Then there was the ‘three-judge-court’ argument. PNP insisted it had “requested a three-judge panel.” The court’s response: “but it never did.” Four words. A complete legal argument gutted by four words. Somewhere a law professor is framing that sentence.

🍿 And the amicus briefs! The county clerks’ association filed a “friend of the court” brief warning about the horribly time-intensive burden of implementing a new map— only for the court to quote one of the brief’s own signatories as having previously assured the Missouri Supreme Court that “the Court need not consider that concern in this case.”

The court caught the clerks contradicting their own clerks. It was like watching someone argue with their reflection. (This is what happens, by the way, when the legal system tries to go fast.)

Then came the Campaign Legal Center, which is backing People Not Politicians here, but last month had argued in a Texas case that switching maps between primary and general violates the Equal Protection Clause— an opposite position it somehow forgot to mention in its brief to the Eighth Circuit. But the court noticed. Oh, the court noticed. “Without evidence” and “but it never did” are this opinion’s love language.

My favorite maneuver, though, was the Purcell judo. People Not Politicians argued the Purcell principle —to avoid chaos, there should be no late changes to election rules— barred the federal courts from intervening. The Eighth Circuit agreed Purcell applies, then pointed out that the status quo had been the newer 2025 map, which Missouri had used for a year; it was the Missouri Supreme Court that “upset it”; and “it is our duty, consistent with Purcell, to at least preserve the possibility of restoring it.”

The Eighth Circuit judges took PNP’s own principle, turned it around, and smashed them with it. “Refusing to correct an erroneous, ‘late-breaking’ state court decision based on the Purcell principle would ‘turn Purcell on its head,’” the court wrote, quoting Justice Kavanaugh. It’s the legal equivalent of grabbing someone’s sword by the blade and then bashing them with the handle. Don’t bring a principle to a principle fight unless you’re sure which side it’s on.

Oh, and the closing line offered to the Missouri Supreme Court, after describing the whole contempt saga: “The Court trusts that the Missouri Supreme Court will respect this Court’s decision under the Supremacy Clause.” That’s not trust. That’s a threat in a black robe. (Footnote: the court also added that it trusted counsel “will not instruct local election authorities to violate the Constitution,” citing civil-rights liability statutes, 42 U.S.C. §§ 1983 and 1985(3), in case the hint wasn’t clear enough. It was less of a footnote and more of a loaded gun in a gift box.)

The dissent, by Trump appointee Judge Stras, was the most interesting part: he agreed the map-switch was probably unconstitutional, but said People Not Politicians lacks standing to appeal— which is a dissent the way a bouncer is a greeter.

So now we wait for September 28th, when the Supreme Court gets its third bite at this particular apple. Note the Eighth Circuit closed the run-out-the-clock loophole: without an expedited deadline, PNP could have waited until December 21st to seek cert, mooting the whole thing since the election would be over. Somebody on the 8th Circuit panel has seen this movie before.

One footnote for the road: the opinion observes, almost in passing, that nine states have now redrawn their congressional maps mid-decade with an eye on these midterms — California, Florida, Louisiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, Utah — with three more warming up in the bullpen: Marylan, Mississippi, and New York. And it quotes, with what I choose to read as a straight face, that “partisan advantage is a constitutionally permissible criterion that States may rely on as desired.”

The gerrymander wars are no longer a Texas story or a Missouri story. They’re the whole map. And Missouri’s Republican-friendly map —slain in the state supreme court, revived by a federal judge, stayed by SCOTUS, dragged through contempt proceedings, revived again yesterday— has more lives than that Warner Bros. cartoon cat that was always chasing the tweety bird around.

I tawt I taw a dead putty tat. We’ll see whether the latest feline incarnation survives the 28th and gets nine lives. No predictions.

Have a terrific Tuesday! Sail back tomorrow morning, for the latest installment of C&C’s essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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🔥 We begin with the necons at the Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board, which yesterday evaluated the publicly disclosed parts of the new Greenland Deal and concluded that, unlike the New York Times, they like it. They just didn’t appreciate all the mean tweets.

I wasn’t kidding about the mean tweets thing. In their very first paragraph, the Editors condescendingly noted that, “it’s fair to ask whether this deal could have been reached without the collateral damage to U.S. alliances from Mr. Trump’s bullying threats.” It’s also fair to ask whether the Editors are incontinent nincompoops, but I digress.

The gist was, they appreciated the historic accomplishment and all that, but they wish the President could word his social media posts differently. Nicer. Less judgmental. I will never get that. The most important thing is not winning but making sure everyone had a good time.

Their ‘gentle scolding’ might have been more persuasive had the Board’s geopolitical geniuses suggested how they would have run the Greenland negotiations if they’d been in charge. Maybe they could quit talking and show the President how it’s done. Go negotiate a different deal yourselves where the US gets everything it needs and pays zero by asking nicely.

On Friday, President Trump called it the “Infinite Life Agreement.” He added, and I quote: “there is no end!” (The Infinite Life Agreement sounds like something you’d buy at a gas station next to the beef jerky, promising eternal vitality and 300 milligrams of caffeine. But the branding is perfect: who could oppose infinite life? The Democrats are going to have to run against infinity.)

It’s the most comprehensive sentence ever written about an island most Americans could not find on a map, including —and I say this with all due affection— a small crowd of Congressmen.

The Journal announced that the deal will be signed this week on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly, though it still needs ratification by the Danish and Greenlandic parliaments, because even infinite life requires bureaucracy.

🔥 In light of the Greenland deal (which I covered more extensively and with less brain fog yesterday), I’ll share this chart I’ve been saving up for the right story. My pharmacologically-addled brain thinks now is a good time. Behold the results of less than 18 months of transformative ‘diplomacy.’

As of September, 2026, the United States (or NATO) has effective control of seven of the world’s most important naval checkpoints— all long known as strategic jewels. Now stop. Guess how many of the seven were in the inventory of US control as of January, 2025 (as the Cabbage rolled out)? Two.

In January, 2025, there were only two on the list: the Turkish and Danish straits, both of which are NATO-run. So from a purely American point of view, excluding the NATO ones, you could also say we controlled zero before Trump 2.0, and now we have five. We went from 2 to 7— a nearly 300% increase in number, and an immeasurable increase in influence.

Excepting only Hormuz, Trump acquired them all by dealmaking. Two of the deals —Malacca and Gibraltar— appeared as fait accomplí with no prior warning. Which makes you wonder if there might be any more surprises percolating out there.

🔥 The next story also comes from this morning’s Journal— it was the firing of a starting gun for which everyone was been waiting. Republicans, the WSJ reported, are turning on the money spigots.

The 2026 midterms are seven weeks away, and the Wall Street Journal brings us the delightful news that Republicans are “unleashing their fundraising advantage” against the Democrats. Unleashing. Great verb choice. You don’t “spend” money in politics anymore; you unleash it, like the kraken, or Walmart cologne. Somewhere in a windowless office in Virginia, a consultant is poised over a giant red button labeled “FUNDRAISING ADVANTAGE” while dramatic music plays. Call it forth!

The numbers behind the kraken are genuinely staggering: the Republican National Committee sits on roughly $128 million with no debt, while the Democratic National Committee has about $16 million in the bank and $18.5 million in debt — and, in a detail that is indescribably wonderful for bloggers everywhere, the DNC was forced over the summer to put its own Washington headquarters up as collateral for a $15 million loan.

The Trump-aligned super PAC MAGA Inc. alone is sitting on roughly $400 million. Add the congressional super PACs —Senate Leadership Fund with $238 million on hand versus $126 million for its Democratic counterpart, Congressional Leadership Fund with $142 million versus $115 million— and Republicans are working with something in the neighborhood of $850 million. That’s not a war chest; that’s a war dresser. With matching nightstands.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, never one to let a nine-figure sum go un-sneered-at, dismissed the Republican advantage without a second thought: “The hole that Donald Trump has dug for the Republicans and continues to dig every day is not something that can be made up with a few $100 million worth of feel-good ads.” Pause on the phrase “a few $100 million,” delivered as it was with the breezy casualness of a woman asking for a few extra napkins.

A few hundred million! In Washington, $100 million has now apparently become a rounding error. Warren then argued voters are ‘angry’ about the economy, the Iran war, and corruption— and her theory is that no amount of streaming-TV ads can fill the hole. It’s a bold theory, and we’ll find out in seven weeks whether holes or krakens win elections.

Everybody’s been waiting for the kraken to surface. Now it’s finally here, and beginning to wave its giant tentacles around. The midterms are on.

🔥 There are two things going on here. First, the GOP and closely associated PACs have a war chest that is multiples of Democrats. But so far, all that powder has been kept dry. Don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes. Now, it’s on.

The second is the polls, which corporate media keeps assuring us strongly favor Democrats in the midterms. Republicans are “unleashing one of their biggest advantages over Democrats,” the Journal reported, “as they seek to overcome electoral headwinds in the final weeks before midterm elections.”

Putting it nicely, polls are unreliable. The polls have been wrong three times out of three when it comes to Trump elections. At this same point in 2024, Quinnipiac showed Harris up by large margins across the swing states. For instance, it had Pennsylvania 51–45 for Harris, and Michigan 50–45. An Emerson College/Hill poll forecast a Harris win by margins ranging from 50–48 in Nevada to 53–46 in North Carolina.

The polls were not just a little wrong. They were wildly off. And all three times, they were off in the same direction. Always showing an illusory Democrat advantage. The polls either don’t work or they are sold out. They mean nothing.

What then can help us navigate the complex political map, if not polls? Common sense. Contrary to the Journal’s lazy framing, this election is not about Trump’s approval rating, “economic malaise,” or “climbing fuel prices.” It is a midterm, and midterms are largely turnout contests: the out-party always arrives more motivated. It’s human nature. So Democrats will likely benefit from their anti-Trump intensity— nothing more than the conventional midterm advantage always enjoyed by the annoyed, out-of-power party.

The real question is whether Republicans can match or beat that enthusiasm gap: whether our voters, who are less reliably drawn to low-turnout elections and are being enervated by blackpiller nonsense, will show up in sufficient numbers to offset Democrats’ TDS bump. I cannot say I am completely comfortable in my mind. I’m not sure Republicans have quite got the formula.

One reason I wonder is that the Journal dutifully reported that Senate Republicans, clearly aware that “we have more money than you” is not a complete governing philosophy, held a luncheon last week to discuss the best way to pitch the sale. Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) urged colleagues to sell voters on economic advantages “beyond tax cuts, including permitting reform for affordable housing and energy projects.”

Permitting reform! Nothing gets a crowd on its feet like permitting reform. Picture the rally: ten thousand people chanting “STREAMLINE THE NEPA REVIEW PROCESS!” I will say this for the GOP Establishment: it takes real courage to look at $850 million and decide what the people truly hunger for is a white paper on low-income housing permits.

But you know what I always say: We can’t just sit around waiting for somebody to save the bacon.

What can you, individually, do to help? The first thing you can do is open your calendar, right now, and block off time on Tuesday, November 3rd for voting. (Or whichever date, if you have early voting. You know what I mean. Stop quibbling.) If you’re a list person, put it on your list, or lists. Put it on all of them.

Remind your conservative friends and family to mark their calendars too. Let’s start a calendaring movement.

Don’t get me wrong. Dollars are good, because they can amplify a message. (Assuming it’s better than ‘faster windmill permits.’) But dollars cannot substitute for voters taking the time to cast ballots. That will be up to us. Let’s get working on it now.

That’s all I have in the tank this morning. Thank y’all for your patience. Have a marvelous Monday! We’ll dive right back in with a normal C&C roundup tomorrow. See you then.

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Chalk up another Trump win; possibly one of the most historically significant of his two terms. Yesterday, deploying its arsenal of adjectives, the New York Times sneeringly reported, “U.S. and Denmark Reach Security Deal on Greenland, Trump Says.” Got that? Trump says.

Though Times readers will never learn this, Greenland is not just an oxymoronically named ice floe at the bottom of every travel agent’s recommended list. Only the hardiest adventurer travelers who relish a fresh case of frostbite find a trip there at all tempting. But the world’s largest “island” has been the subject of constant anxiety among geopolitical security analysts ever since World War II, when its strategic importance in controlling northern access into the Atlantic Ocean became clear. (During WWII, we had to go up there and kick some Nazi rear-ends out of their heavily armed “weather stations.”)

Then the ICBM was invented. Suddenly, Greenland was not merely a frozen North Atlantic maritime outpost; it was a giant, ice-encrusted early-warning station sitting directly beneath the most efficient flight paths from Soviet launch sites to North American cities.

Shortly after the Second World War, as the Cold War settled in, in 1951 Denmark and the United States signed the Greenland defense agreement, and America built what became Thule Air Base —wokely renamed by the Cabbage as Pituffik Space Base— where its radar ceaselessly scans the skies for intercontinental and submarine-launched ballistic missiles and tracks objects in space. (Denmark was in the chat because Greenland —with a tightly clustered population of only about 56,000— is, for now, a Danish territory.)

From time to time, the Greenlanders, trapped indoors in the dark for months at a time, rattled U.S. military planners by getting bored, drinking heavily, and ginning up independence movements, occasionally canoodling with Russian and Chinese emissaries who offered the frigid islanders free power plants, airports, and hot spas. What most scared U.S. generals was that, if Greenland became independent, the 1951 treaty with Denmark might be ripped to shreds.

Or, more likely, renegotiated by people suddenly holding one of the world’s most valuable strategic choke points and a large pile of Chinese business cards.

And, needless to say, the 1951 treaty was not completely up to date with 2026 realities. It was written when Soviet bombers and missiles were the principal worry, China was an impoverished communist backwater, and nobody imagined Beijing might someday be waving gift cards at Nuuk for airports, mines, telecommunications, ports, nuclear reactors, highways, and lifetime Hot Hands subscriptions.

As the Times was forced to concede, the archaic 1951 treaty “did not explicitly restrict the presence of ‘adversary’ nations.” (The Times never explained why it bracketed doubtful quotation marks around the word ‘adversary.’)

Regardless, those are real, documented risks. For decades, military and naval journals have churned out reams of alarming white papers about Russian Arctic rearmament, Chinese infrastructure diplomacy, the GIUK Gap (“Greenland-Iceland-UK”), missile-warning vulnerabilities, and the strategic consequences of an independent Greenland bursting with Chinese yuan.

So it was an outright lie when the New York Times sniffed at the issue and effectively portrayed a well-known, looming crisis as something that just had popped into President Trump’s feverish imagination.

🔥 Since his first week back, as alert readers probably recall, President Trump made a noisy bid for “buying Greenland,” which twisted NATO allies’ knickers and, in the Times’ alarmed description, “worsened the relationship.” But Trump’s loud demands also created a crisis that has now resulted in a new, improved, historic 2026 agreement.

“President Trump said on Friday that his administration had reached a deal with Denmark and Greenland,” the Times reported, giving “the United States … ‘permanent control over security, and all other needs’ in Greenland.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio tweeted, “this historic agreement permanently guarantees U.S. security interests in the Arctic at zero cost to the U.S. taxpayer.”

“Greenland,” Secretary Rubio explained, “will forever be part of the strategic defense area of North America and exclude any adversary from it and the surrounding area.” Trump’s Truth Social post was less diplomatic: “This is an ‘Infinite Life’ Agreement, there is no end!”

Behold: The Art of the Deal. No money. Just mean tweets.

In one stroke, the agreement solves the U.S.’s two biggest Greenland problems: the deal stands even if Greenland ever becomes independent, and it reportedly gives U.S. veto power over Chinese or Russian involvement in the island’s affairs. To the Times, this is a dismal failure: “the agreement fell well short of Mr. Trump’s longstanding demand of total control over Greenland.”

He got the bases, the ban, the veto, and forever, and the Times marked him down for not also getting the gift shop or inheriting Greenland’s welfare state.

But in the very same story, the Times also reported that the announced terms include: a larger U.S. military presence and a build permit; a ban on non-NATO bases or military presence; full flyover rights; continued effect after a future Greenlandic independence; and a U.S. approval right over sensitive Russian or Chinese investments.

As I have explained before at painful length, Trump’s public demands to buy Greenland were a negotiating anchor. Under the announced deal, Denmark “wins” by keeping sovereignty while simultaneously giving the U.S. everything we need. Without having to “buy” anything. It was a masterstroke of negotiation.

Reading between the lines, the Times was really fretting about the creaky NATO relationship. It has a good reason. The Greenland deal was bigger than it looks.

🔥 Here’s what nobody is reporting. America’s continuing membership in NATO was another self-destruct trigger in the old 1951 deal. It was a NATO-era agreement between the United States and Denmark, built on the two countries’ mutual obligations to defend the North Atlantic treaty area. Article XIV of the 1951 agreement said, “This Agreement, being in implementation of the North Atlantic Treaty, shall remain in effect for the duration of the North Atlantic Treaty.”

In other words, if America ever quit NATO —as Trump has often threatened to do— the old treaty would at best become highly questionable, and at worst a piece of Cold War parchment ready for Nuuk’s shredder. We could lose all Greenland rights.

So, in that sense, Greenland was the biggest barrier to U.S. withdrawal from the cross-Atlantic alliance. We couldn’t afford to quit.

Back in March, on Hannity, Secretary Rubio directly raised the NATO question. He pointed at European refusals to allow U.S. planes to use their bases in the Iran War. “If now we’ve reached a point where the NATO alliance means that we can’t use those bases, that in fact, that we can no longer use those bases to defend America’s interests, then NATO is a one-way street.”

CLIP: Sec. Rubio questions the value of U.S. staying in NATO (1:26).

“Unfortunately, we’re going to have to reexamine the value of NATO and that alliance for our country,” he said. In March, that was a bluff— and Europe knew it. After Friday, it isn’t.

Rubio’s anti-NATO sentiments were not new. What’s new is that the threat is now credible. With the Greenland problem now apparently solved, U.S. threats to leave NATO land with thunderbolt force. The largest practical impediment —the danger of losing reliable Arctic access, missile-warning coverage, and a northern defense foothold— has been removed. For years, allies held Washington over a barrel while dithering over financial and military contributions. Now they are in a far weaker bargaining position.

The cards in President Trump’s hand just got terrifically better. He didn’t just solve the ever-present Greenland problem. He laid the foundation for solving the NATO problem, too.

Years from now, history may view the Greenland deal as one of the most enduring and consequential achievements of both Trump administrations.

🔥🔥🔥

How about another terrific update? Yesterday, the Trump Administration published a new order limiting H-1B visas for foreign workers. But first, let’s check in on how well things were already going before that. On Tuesday, IEEE Spectrum reported, “Tech Giants Silently Reroute Jobs as H‑1B Costs Skyrocket.”

Regular readers will recall that last November, a “MAGA civil war” broke out after online conservative influencers falsely claimed that the Administration had not only failed to curb H-1B visa abuse, but also was secretly enabling more H-1Bs. Rage and fury ensued. (For instance, on November 12th, Evan Kilgore tweeted, “Donald Trump has betrayed the American people over some H-1B Indians.”)

But it was all a psyop, and we helped squash the bizarre claim. On Tuesday, IEEE helpfully rounded up how well it was actually working.

Last year, the Administration unveiled a bold new innovation: the Visa Purchase Decision Enhancement System, also referred to as “What if this application form cost $100,000?” Critics of H-1Bs have long argued that employers —especially tech companies— hired foreign workers over Americans because the foreign workers were cheaper and easier to control. Employers claimed it was because they couldn’t find any American workers no matter where they looked, which was mainly inside a locked, sub-basement cabinet.

Thus, the $100K fee dared employers to put their checkbooks where their HR department was. If critics were right, you’d expect overseas hires to fall. Well, guess what?

The article said most employers who might have hired H-1B candidates chose not to apply at all. (IEEE complained about lost fee revenues. I’m not kidding.) Meanwhile, DHS recorded an 87 percent year-over-year decline in applications subject to the fee. That is a lot. In fact, only 85 application fees total were collected between September and February.

Not only that, but the administration has started targeting foreign students. In July, it set a fixed 4-year time limit on student visas. Previously, those visas lasted as long as the student’s course of study— ten years, twenty years, no problem. The federal government is currently studying a proposal to charge foreign students between $70,000 and $100,000 to stay for 1 to 3 years after graduation— something they can currently do for free. “If there is a $100,000 fee for that, it’s going to cut the talent pipeline,” one of the experts, Julia Gelatt of the Migration Policy Institute, said.

Yesterday, the State Department announced that, starting October 1, all student visas will undergo mandatory “online presence” checks. Meaning, their social media. Presumably, tweeting “Death to America” will start counting against them.

The crackdown is working. “As of March,” the article reported, “U.S. universities were reporting 20% fewer international enrollments in bachelor’s programs than the year before.” Master’s degree students fell even more (24%). The reason is not a mystery: “84 percent of the participating universities listed government policy as a significant obstacle to enrollment.”

In fairness, government policy is usually an obstacle. That’s the whole point.

The reporter said he contacted 25 companies for a comment, including the top 20 historic H-1B users. None —zero— would provide a statement. Not even to complain. “Companies,” the article concluded, “do not appear eager to provoke the federal authorities on whom they depend for visas.”

They have good reason to appear uneager. Yesterday President Trump signed a brand-new H-1B executive order— and the stakes got even higher.

🔥 In a barely reported story, yesterday afternoon President Trump signed the latest in his long series of H-1B orders. This one might have escaped notice on account of its bureaucratic title, “Enhancing Program Integrity and Interagency Coordination in the Administration of the H-1B Nonimmigrant Visa Program.” But it was the bureaucratic equivalent of a sharp punch in Microsoft’s face.

Before Friday, the downside for tech giants who flooded their offices with cheap foreign labor was mostly just bad P.R. (That’s one reason why they decline to give comments to reporters about H-1B hiring practices.) The fee was forward-looking and mired in court orders. But as the IEEE article helpfully explained, it has still helped curb applications a lot. Yesterday, Trump gave the rules some razor-sharp teeth.

It began by officially applying a rhetorical baseball bat to the H-1B franchise just as it was reeling from the $100K application fee. (It’s currently blocked, but don’t worry, a new, higher fee is waiting out the clock in public comment.)

🔥 First, in the “Purpose” section, the order bluntly accused tech companies of using foreign workers to avoid paying Americans— which breaks the law. “H-1B visa holders earn far less than comparable United States-born workers, despite the statutory mandate that H-1B workers be paid equally to their domestic peers,” it said.

It said one company warned shareholders that the new limits on H-1Bs meant the company might be forced to use higher-wage “local workers.” That’s us. We’re the locals.

Next, it escalated the H-1B problem to the level of a national security threat. It found that H-1B recruiting shops that match foreign candidates with U.S. employers are rife with “systematic and organized abuse,” basically describing them as a type of placement mafia, with rampant “visa fraud, money laundering, and other illicit activities.” It further argued that H-1B abuses discourage Americans from getting STEM degrees— undermining our historic leadership.

The order then reported that government investigations uncovered “widespread fraud and noncompliance” and “pervasive violations” of H-1B rules among employers. These included things like: preferring foreign workers to Americans, misrepresenting job descriptions so only foreign workers could qualify, and my favorite, “submitting questionable foreign degrees from diploma mills” to prove specialized skills.

So the President ordered a remedy, which bore a remarkable resemblance to a legal wood chipper.

🔥 Section 3 delivered the punch. First, it directed the Secretaries of State, Labor, and Homeland Security to evaluate all H-1B applications —including at the border— by looking at their employers’ record: did they lay off American workers within the last year? Or have plans to do so? If yes, and those layoffs hurt U.S. workers, the petition can be denied, regardless of whether the fee is paid.

Then the scalpel cut deeper. Within 30 days, the order requires the dreaded Wage and Hour Division to start investigating past layoffs and applications, and if abuses are found, to take appropriate action. It all falls under existing laws, cited in the order. Congress is not necessary.

They are building an enforcement database. “The Secretary of Commerce, the Secretary of Education, and the Administrator of the Small Business Administration shall provide any relevant wage, employment, academic, industrial, or other economic information,” the order modestly added.

The dreadful significance is that companies who gamed the H-1B as a checkbox form just learned that the archives are open. Not “be good going forward.” We are reading the old ones. The companies that under-described the jobs to lower the wage level, mislabeled a commodity coding job as a rare specialty, or ran the displace-and-replace shuffle while swearing on the record that U.S. workers were doing fine— those filings are now an evidence locker for an agency under a 30-day starting gun.

It’s a pincer movement. The first part makes future petitions dangerous if you’ve laid off any Americans. The second part makes past petitions dangerous if you already did. The net effect is that companies won’t just have to stomach the additional cost of the new H-1B fees (assuming they survive the legal gauntlet), but they’ll also have to start digesting accurate job descriptions, and stop forcing Americans to train their foreign replacements.

🔥 Altogether, we can see how unfair the November criticisms were. No previous Administration before Trump has risked getting sideways with the Chamber of Commerce by curbing H-1B abuse. Not even close. No prior president has dared offend academia by crushing foreign student enrollment.

This is why I keep telling you to ignore the blackpillers. When I refer to blackpillers, I’m not talking about Democrats. We expect Democrats to lie and be impossible to please. I’m talking about folks who claim to be conservatives but always seem to find something to criticize— and they are always wrong.

It’s not that blackpillers always overreact (though that is also true). It’s not that they are being unfair or stingy by failing to give Trump credit when he’s earned it. It’s that they are consistently dead wrong, and wrong so badly that it completely inverts the truth. Assuming good faith —granted, a stretch— they are their own worst enemies.

Think of it this way. Assume blackpillers’ red line is the H-1B issue (any issue works, but stick with this one). Their ‘solution’ to get what they claim they want —eliminating H-1B abuse— is to fracture MAGA and force a midterm loss, so as to “teach Republicans a lesson.” But in reality, they are sabotaging the one administration in U.S. history that actually invested the political capital to do the exact thing they claim to want.

I’m not leveling accusations. But I am questioning good faith. Nobody who predicted the Great H-1B Betrayal has issued a correction. They’ve just moved on to the next betrayal. There’s always a next one.

Cough up the black pill. Whenever you read some social media polemic about the latest Trump betrayal (or Kennedy, or Bessent, or whoever), presume it is a well-packaged distortion, or an outright lie, until we get a chance to put their claims under the microscope.

Finally, I’m not saying that I am ready to plan a holiday in Greenland. I have thin Florida blood, after all. But I’m pretty chuffed. That’s two massive wins in a single Friday afternoon, and the people who told us to give up missed them both.

Have a wonderful weekend! Enjoy the cooler weather, and then return here on Monday morning for more all-new essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🔥🔥🔥

We begin with Fox, since none of the prestige platforms would touch the story with a ten-foot pole. Yesterday, Fox News reported, “Democrats reluctantly hand Trump major victory on key program targeting Tim Walz.” The sub-headline explained the surprising House vote: “The bill passed 352 to 72, with Hakeem Jeffries among Democrats backing Trump’s National Fraud Enforcement Division.”

There were plenty of reasons for corporate media to cover this story. Democrats are known for members’ voting discipline and rarely split their vote this way. As my grandma Coon used to say, you could wear out a rocking chair waiting for another vote like this to come along. That alone was news. But the split vote also showed that the bill’s subject matter was important enough even to many Democrats that the representatives were forced to bail out of the party bus on this one.

According to reports, House Democratic Whip Katherine Clark’s floor guidance advised blue representatives that the party’s committees “strongly opposed” H.R. 9576. Yet late Wednesday, over 140 House Democrats voted with all Republicans to make the DOJ’s National Fraud Enforcement Division permanent.

Before Wednesday, the Times, WaPo, and the WSJ all heavily reported —you might even call it endless carping— about the Fraud Division. The nonstop series of stories mostly focused on claims that: Trump is weaponizing fraud enforcement to persecute his enemies, like Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, he is acting extra-constitutionally (kingly), and he keeps personally terrifying Times reporters by sneaking into their bedrooms at 2 a.m. and sticking live marmots up their pajamas. (Or something like that.)

Anyway, the point is, since it was first created, reporters basically couldn’t shut up about the Fraud Division. So it is remarkable in about six dimensions that the House just voted to make permanent the dreaded Fraud Division that corporate media obsesses over so much. Where are the howls of outrage? More, it passed with help from a majority of Democrat representatives, including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who has personally complained so much about the Division that it seemed like he could get a lottery prize from them and would just criticize how the check was folded.

“This is hardly some kind of great breakthrough in law enforcement or criminal justice,” Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said on the House floor, “but it is perhaps the least offensive piece of legislative flotsam and jetsam that has washed ashore in the last 48 hours of Republican chaos and retreat here in the House of Representatives. I’m joining his bill.” (Ilhan Omar voted nay.)

One suspects the Fraud Division is so incredibly popular with the American people that a majority of House Democrats were trembling at the horrifying prospect of voting against it and then being savaged on social media.

And the corporate media knows it, too. That’s why they suddenly have nothing to complain about.

🔥 It seems like a long time, but the DOJ only started up the Fraud Division in April. If passed by the Senate, the bill will cement the new crime-fighting division into federal statute, making it much harder for a future administration to simply abolish or restructure through an executive order. The division’s charter is to chase federal fraud cases that affect public funds and federally funded programs. Remember that italicized part. It’s the key.

Contrary to the disappointment we’ve become accustomed to in that fickle chamber, the bill’s prospects in the Senate appear strong. The Democrats’ House support is a good sign that Democrat senators will be pulled along, too. (But don’t start counting chickens; the Senate could still smother it in committee. Here is where some public encouragement of Senators could be helpful.)

One of the first things a commercial litigator learns is that the definition of “fraud” is as vast and uncountable as the dizzying constellation of human malfeasance. There are all kinds of commonplace fraud. Nigerian scammer fraud, Bernie Madoff-type investor fraud, Everglades building projects, and senior citizen ripoffs involving astrologers and fortune tellers, just to name a few. Fraud is, unfortunately, common as dirt. Over half my business cases involve at least one allegation of fraud and a surprising number where the parties swap fraud allegations against each other like they were Pokémon cards.

But the Fraud Division is only focused on one type of fraud: Fraud against the government. Meaning, welfare fraud. Medicare scams. Autism centers. Covid loans. Private healthcare providers. Somali SNAP bodegas. Quality Learing Centers.

To put it mildly, this is not the type of fraud enforcement that Democrats normally embrace. It exposes uncomfortable failures in the sprawling public-benefit and public-subsidy programs Democrats designed, fund, and defend. It undermines fundraising, vote buying, and unevenly targets protected progressive communities. It threatens to cut off lucrative side hustles for Democrat officials.

In short, a permanent DOJ office with the full-time charter of pursuing public benefits fraud is a blue nightmare. The fact they’ve been forced to support it, however tepidly, shows the incredible success of the Trump Administration’s yearlong campaign working with influencers like Nick Shirley to teach the public how invasive the problem has become.

Come on, Senate. Let’s get it passed.

📈📈📈

Election propaganda is reaching deafening levels and will only get worse as the midterms approach. We have lots of work to do to protect our brains. Let’s begin with the Wall Street Journal’s latest alarming submission, placed at the tippy-top of its web page this morning, headlined, “Weeks Before the Midterms, Almost Everything Is Getting More Expensive.” Time to panic!

Presumably, since the article planned to cover “almost everything” (almost—weasel word alert), a whopping three Journal reporters collaborated on their joint economic story— an economic story that mentioned the midterms before the prices. Before examining your grocery receipt, the Journal would like to establish which election it should affect.

The article did mention some difficult news. Unfortunately for its headline, a lot of that news is good. And the things they left out are even better. Everything isn’t perfect yet. But depend on the Journal. If a cup is one-eighth full, it will fully explore the bottom of the glass. With graphs.

The Journal began, as it must, by grudgingly acknowledging a “robust economy driven in part by President Trump’s tax cuts, reduced regulations and historic AI spending.” Unemployment is a low 4.1%— now flirting with the 3s. Household net worth has reached $186 trillion, up $26 trillion since the fourth quarter of 2024. Consumer spending remains strong. These facts were allowed to skate quickly through the article, accompanied by security, before being escorted away from the headline.

Please do not interact with the good news. It has somewhere else to be.

The reporters even anticipated the possibility that some readers might be doing okay. But that is bad. “Even those workers whose wages are keeping up with inflation might be feeling irked,” they warned. An economist explained that getting a raise can require negotiating, changing jobs, or leaving co-workers. The horror.

So if you didn’t get a raise, that’s bad. If you did get a raise, that is probably also bad, because now you don’t get to see Wanda from Human Resources. The Journal is leaving no American behind. If you are currently experiencing prosperity, a trained economist will be with you shortly to explain why it hurts.

Now, to be fair, the piece reports a handful of real pressures: wages recently lagging inflation, expensive fuel, and painful borrowing costs. It attributed some inflation to tariffs and the data-center build-out, and the energy shock to the Iran war. But the question is not whether expensive things exist. The question is how the Journal packaged them into a pre-election weather system called Trump.

Consider the history. Well down the story, the Journal acknowledges that inflation reached 9.1% in June 2022, during Cabbage Biden’s asterisked presidency. (The current figure is 3.4%.) That is unsurprising. Biden printed $6 trillion in two years, which guaranteed inflation for years to come.

Lower inflation does not mean prices have settled back down to their old levels. It just means they are now rising more slowly. Nor does an earlier peak excuse every current policy. But the accumulated damage has a history, and the Journal itself dates its cumulative 27% price increase from January 2021, when Biden took office— not from Trump’s inauguration.

Somehow, Biden-era inflation has nevertheless acquired the narrative qualities of an abandoned mattress. Nobody remembers buying it. Nobody knows who put it by the curb. The tags are cut off. But it is now suddenly in Trump’s apartment, and the Journal demands to know why he hasn’t gotten rid of it yet.

Most of the story’s dramatic machinery runs on fuel prices and interest rates. Gasoline appears, then diesel, then heating oil. These are different expenses with real consequences, but they are also close relatives. It’s a disappointing family turnout for a headline promising “almost everything.”

Then came the interest-rate maneuver. The Journal explained, correctly, that “The Fed raised rates to cool inflation.” It also explained, correctly, that the effect takes time. Higher rates can make borrowing more expensive now while restraining inflation later. That is a trade-off, not an economic contradiction.

But my goodness! The editorial possibilities! Inflation hurts. The treatment for inflation also hurts. This gave the newsroom both the disease and the treatment to work with. It’s like covering a hospital exclusively through headlines like Wife Tortures Feverish Husband With Cold Washcloth.

By Thursday, three reporters are consulting economic experts on whether the patient enjoyed the washcloth.

The article even explained that people sometimes mistake interest rate increases for a cause of inflation because the two occur together. This useful clarification arrived after the article marched rates and prices down the street in the same terrifying parade of horribles. Thank you for the distinction.

Eventually, it reached the Journal’s main point, the electoral evidence. The story supplied economic data and a Republican strategist’s warning, but the three reporters only found one on-the-ground member of the voting public: Stacy Hislop, a 64-year-old Michigan retiree who plans to vote for Democrat Abdul El-Sayed. It did not say that she switched from Trump, changed her vote because of the latest rate increase, or represents any quantifiable electoral swing.

Stacy’s financial concerns deserve to be taken seriously. Anyone living on a fixed income while fuel prices spike is bound to feel somewhat oppressed. What deserves the joke is the journalistic promotion: she described her household budget and emerged as a one-woman bellwether for control of Congress.

Still, you have to admire the Journal’s economy of scale. Three reporters. One Michigan voter. “Almost everything.”

Now let’s see what the Journal left out. You won’t believe this.

📈📈📈

The week has been practically bursting with great economic news. As we just saw, it took three Wall Street Journal reporters —David Uberti, Justin Lahart, and Aaron Zitner— to discover, weeks before the midterms, that gas, mortgages, and dinner out (“almost everything”) still cost money. What the trio of reporters somehow could not find room for, in a newspaper that sheds charts the way other people shed carbon dioxide, was the rest of the dashboard. Our first omitted example appeared in Wednesday’s Investing Live, which reported, “Atlanta Fed GDPNow estimate for Q3 growth jumps to 5.1% from 4.4%.”

5.1% growth is a lot. On Laura Ingraham’s show, Larry Kudlow called it an economic boom. Retail sales are running around 6%, business investment in machinery, equipment, and data centers is up over 20%, productivity is up about 3% a year for almost two years running. It’s the kind of revolutionary clip America has not seen since the boom of the Reagan ’80s, which was itself historic, and which rewrote economic textbooks about what was considered possible to achieve through government policy.

Then came the Census Bureau, announcing even more shattered records. On Tuesday, the agency announced that real median household income hit $87,460— up +2.6%, reaching the highest on record since 1967. Not only that, but the official poverty rate fell half a point to 10.2%. Reuters, not exactly a Trump Super PAC, headlined it as the lowest poverty rate on record.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent did not make it up. Looking pleased as punch (as well he might), he read the specific numbers out loud to congressmen: poverty down -50 basis points, real median income up +$2,250, black incomes were up +4.8% —the highest of any group— and whites were also up +2.9%. Child poverty has hit its lowest figures in history. Hispanic poverty also hit a historic low.

The Journal’s contribution to this record-breaking financial data dump was a vibe check on the price of fast-food hamburgers and a single Michigan retiree rage-voting for a socialist.

So yes, gas is expensive, because we are finally stopping Iran from getting nukes and oil markets have opinions. Interest rates bumped up— in order to slow inflation. Dinner costs what dinner costs. None of that needed a three-byline special. What did require three bylines was the narrative decision to frame a booming, high-income, falling-poverty economy as a midterm horror story about the price of avocado toast— while burying the Atlanta Fed, the Census Bureau, and the highest real median household income in American history under the mattress with the spare adjectives.

Maybe it was a staffing problem. Maybe, if they had assigned a fourth reporter, they could have found the big story.

🗳️🗳️🗳️

Let’s enjoy some dueling headlines. First, yesterday’s headline from KCCI-Des Moines:

KCCI’s experts found comfort in the lack of voter fraud convictions. “It shows to me, again, coming from – looking at internationally and comparatively – it shows to me how strong our system is,” elections ‘expert’ Michael McNulty said. Lack of convictions is a weird way to measure strength.

I keep trying to explain to them that “proven voter fraud cases” is not any kind of valid measurement of how much voter fraud is going on. Prosecutions rely on diligence and focus by local officials, whose attention spans compare unfavorably with below-average kindergarten art students. Measuring overall voter fraud by convictions is like measuring the iceberg by the part that hit the boat. They seem able to model viruses from now till the next hundred-year pandemic, but they can’t seem to make any models for voter fraud.

But never mind.

🔥 Next, Tuesday’s headline from Fox-4 Fort Worth:

The thing that never happens keeps happening.

Five of the seven were arrested on September 14th. One was arrested on September 11th. Another surrendered to federal authorities on Tuesday. Get this: “All seven of the suspects,” the story said, “are non-citizens from Nigeria, Mexico, India, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.” (Six were “lawful residents,” meaning Biden-asylum or something, and one was an illegal.)

Two more suspects were charged but haven’t yet been pinched. They remain at large. For now.

Reporters asked Ryan Raybould, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas, whether the arrests were politically motivated. I did not make that up. “We don’t care who that person voted for,” Raybould patiently replied. “Just like we prosecute every violent crime vigorously, we’re going to prosecute every instance of voting fraud very seriously.”

🔥 Next, we find this revolting news nugget in Tuesday’s Salt Lake Tribune:

No signs! State legislative auditors, the story explained, investigated Utah’s voting systems and found no evidence of “significant” fraud. This is like asking the fox how the hens are doing. The fox reports no “significant” poultry losses.

The “insignificant problems” included: hundreds of active dead voters, missing drop-box security seals, a ballot-processing room without camera coverage, a skipped 1% signature audit, a county clerk auditing an election that he was also on the ballot for, and at least one guy who voted twice in the recent primary elections.

They found enough insignificant problems that Deputy Elections Director Shelly Jackson asked lawmakers to “work with election officials to reach a consensus on how to address issues rather than introduce new legislation.” Why? Jackson explained, “We have concerns that overly prescriptive legislation will have the undesired effect of removing otherwise eligible voters, leading to disenfranchisement.”

Uh huh.

🔥 Finally, we’ll close with a trio of stuff that never happens. First, yesterday’s submission from Tampa Bay WTSP-10 News:

“According to the Department of Justice,” WTSP reported, “Shushlebin hired another man, Sanjar Jamilov, and others in 2023 to submit 132 fraudulent voter applications to the Pinellas County Supervisor of Elections.” This insignificant problem appeared in Florida. Imagine how bad Utah must be.

For this and credit card fraud, Shushlebin, 45, of Miami Beach, was sentenced to six years in federal prison, followed by three years of supervised release. Special Agent in Charge Rodney Crawford of the FBI’s Tampa Division said, “The FBI is committed to supporting our election security partners, ensuring fraudulent schemes never have a chance to succeed.”

Shushlebin is not a citizen. He is Russian.

🔥 Also from Florida’s WTSP this morning, we found a second example of insignificant voting fraud problems.

According to the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office, Corey James Lamberson, 27, was squatting in a vacant Tampa Bay area home. He was stealing the entire neighborhood’s completed election ballots from their mailboxes. (Also their credit cards.) Lamberson was charged with stealing or unlawfully possessing an election ballot and unlawful possession of five or more pieces of personal identification information.

Non-experts like us might get the misleading idea there’s a tidal wave of election fraud, and the cases they’re nabbing are the tip of an iceberg of fraud.

🔥 Oh, what the heck. There are so many just from this week that I can’t just do one more. I will quickly leave you with a final series. These are not all the ones I found. From the DOJ’s website, Wednesday (Boston):

CPR News, yesterday (Grand Junction, Colorado):

The Louisiana Illuminator, Monday (candidate Bridget Johnson, 53, was helping illegal aliens vote):

The related press release from the DOJ, also Monday (charging five more with milking “Skid Row” homeless for votes in LA):

But remember— there is no evidence of widespread voter fraud. There are so few arrests and convictions, experts tell us, it is insignificant. I feel like making a website like enterprising resisters did during covid called “Here Is The Evidence!”

There is an unreported tidal wave of election fraud prosecutions sweeping across the country right now. It is at a historic scale. Be encouraged. The DOJ is crushing it, delivering beyond what was promised and more than we’d hoped.

And the useless corporate media won’t be able to keep a lid on this forever. Hang in there.

Have a fantastic Friday! Coffee & Covid will return tomorrow morning, with even more shareable essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

💉💉💉

Dear readers: all things considered, we have been extremely patient. It’s finally paying off. Today’s whale of a story confirms more legacy ‘conspiracy theories,’ and further puts the lie to what is beginning to look like the most deceitful political organization in human history. (Which is saying a lot.) We begin at the storied British Medical Journal, the gatekeeping “gold standard” of science, which occasionally stirs itself to actual journalism. Yesterday, it quietly published the result of its own investigation, written by a Pulitzer-winning health reporter, based on new disclosures, titled, “US officials knew covid vaccine safety system was flawed—but turned aside the FDA doctor who alerted them.”

In short, the BMJ just exposed the latest statistical shell game the Biden “public health” agencies played, fooling all of us rubes into thinking they gave millions of shots and saw no unusual safety signals in their data. For instance, in April, 2021, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky said, “We have not seen a signal (for myocarditis), and we’ve actually looked intentionally for the signal in the over 200 million doses we’ve given.”

“That was false,” the article stated simply. They weren’t looking intentionally. They were looking with the lights off.

“US officials embraced an algorithm for detecting signals of harm from mRNA covid-19 vaccines,” the BMJ reported, “that they knew was broken and suppressed efforts to fix it.”

Allow me a quick moment to explain how they did it. It wasn’t particularly complicated.

💉 For ages, the FDA’s signal-detection system compared VAERS reports from any new vaccine to the other VAERS reports from different vaccines. It was a closed loop. But the Covid mRNA jabs produced so many reports it completely swamped the database of all previous vaccine adverse events. Over 90% of 1.1 million adverse event reports in the first year were reports from the covid shots. (You might call that a signal of its own. The FDA didn’t.)

So when they used their only statistical sampling method, it was basically just comparing Pfizer to Moderna and vice-versa. Thus, like the dosimeter in HBO’s Chernobyl that maxed out at 3.6 roentgen— no signals. In April, 2021, the CDC’s VAERS safety page reassured jab-takers that, “VAERS has not detected patterns in cause of death that would indicate a safety problem.”

Think of it like this. Let’s say Camel and Marlboro came out with a new type of cigarette using artificial, self-replicating tobacco. Before the launch, the FDA had a few hundred adverse reports over the years from natural cigarettes. But then the new fake cigarettes produced hundreds of thousands of reports. When you compare Camel against “everything else,” it is really just comparing it to Marlboro.

That’s bad enough. But the BMJ, reviewing newly disclosed internal FDA and CDC emails, found that they knew all about the data-flooding problem. “We were aware of this data mining limitation before and during the pandemic,” the FDA’s safety chief Narayan Nair wrote in a 2023 email to colleagues that the BMJ reviewed. They knew about the problem before the pandemic!

The FDA scientist who built the original data-mining system tried to alert everyone, and even developed an accurate way to sample the massive VAERS data to detect safety signals more accurately than simply comparing the two jabs. They shut her down.

On September 15, 2021, then-FDA vaccine chief Peter Marks wrote to his counterpart in the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER), complaining, “One of the CDER statisticians, Ana Szarfman, has decided on her own to do vaccine analyses using VAERS as part of her work at FDA. She is, however, not doing this in collaboration with our statisticians, and quite to the contrary, has been asked to cease and desist, because the strategy that she is using could create erroneous conflicts that feed in to anti-vaccination rhetoric. This is creating an issue . . . This issue came up previously during the pandemic and it seemed to go away, but it is now back. Can we catch up about this sometime?”

(Peter Marks, the BMJ drily reported, did not return requests for comment. Nor did any of the other official ‘stars’ of this story. Ana Szarfman sat for an interview. Ironically, Marks’ noisy resignation letter last year accused Secretary Kennedy of “not desiring truth and transparency.”)

Now, haha, you might think that hardworking career scientists in the federal health agencies given the awesome responsibility of ensuring the nation’s safety during the massive rollout of a brand-new vaccine technology would pick a different way to detect safety signals than one they already knew didn’t work. You would be wrong.

In his 2023 email, Narayan Nair explained the FDA’s early decision not to use any other data mining method to detect signals. “We thought it would be problematic,” he said, “to use a brand new, possibly unvalidated tool in the context of an EUA.”

Then, and this is really the most darkly hilarious excuse of all, Narayan threw up his hands. Creating any different kind of analysis than the one they already knew didn’t work “would be beyond our capabilities at FDA.” Um. Ana Salzman, who built the data mining program, had been emailing them for two years.

(And note the subject line: “FDA co-author for tinnitus paper.” They were writing papers with a tool that couldn’t see tinnitus.)

He described the only fix they could come up with: “As new non-COVID vaccine reports are added we think this limitation will be mitigated to some degree.” In other words, the FDA’s plan was to wait for other vaccines to hurt enough people to dilute the covid ones.

That was behind the scenes. But for the cameras, they kept assuring the public the jabs were the most studied and safest vaccines in history. Marks, less than three weeks after the September 15th email, assured a Zoom group of neurologically injured patients that FDA would query for “a neurologic signal”— then reported three months later, “we have not found a rate… that is higher than would be expected.”

He was ‘searching’ with a flashlight he’d been told had no batteries. Tarring and feathering officials is underrated.

💉 Here’s how the BMJ’s investigator summed up this sordid story:

Thank goodness for the CDC! Thank heavens for the FDA! Praise Beelzebub for the diligent career public health experts who just follow the science! They found a signal all right— Ana Szarfman’s signal of vaccine hesitancy.

They chased that signal enthusiastically.

You, a dumb non-scientist, might wonder why they didn’t just compare the rates of reported injuries in mRNA vaccines to rates in non-mRNA vaccines. They did! In 2022, the CDC finally got around to running a different statistical query against the old-style vaccines —trying to confirm FDA’s figures— and guess what? It lit up. They found scads of alarming safety signals! So of course they threw it out, since it didn’t match the broken test. In a weaselly letter to Congress, Walensky called her results “generally consistent” with FDA’s, and said they revealed “no unexpected safety signals.” Generally.

Get that? They didn’t just find myocarditis. In summer 2021, they’d already found signals for myocarditis, pericarditis, Bell’s palsy, tinnitus, and other ‘reported disorders’— a load-bearing catchall phrase that was doing a heroic amount of work. (Here in C&C, at the time, I documented so many reported disorders it would take a full post just to list them all.)

Just how many “other reported disorders” did the CDC find signals for when it ran the alternative safety analysis? Hundreds.

Hundreds! It was “a flaw,” the BMJ blandly reported, in prime British understatement, “that senior officials declined to rectify.”

A flaw! A flaw our senior public health officials declined to rectify. Declined! You’ve got to love the British wit.

💉 The classic feline, as they say, is clawing its way out of the bag. The BMJ reached back to a 2022 safety study the CDC and FDA published in the Lancet. BMJ located a quiet acknowledgment of the data-flooding problem in the study’s limitations section. An anonymous reviewer who actually read the preprint’s fine print had expressed astonishment. “The great majority of (total VAERS) reports was for the vaccines of interest,” he wrote. “If this proportion is over 90%, the possibility of identifying a signal was likely close to zero. So, why perform such an analysis?”

Why, indeed. (To their credit, the Lancet editors asked the FDA to justify the analysis or remove it before formal publication. They withdrew their names from the study and cut their paragraphs. In an email, the FDA scientists admitted “there is a considerable bias toward the null when using our data mining efforts.”)

The introduction of this unforgivable error ran all the way down the septic pipe: public health agencies → media → politicians. First, the experts announced the smoke detector was clear. Then the newspapers announced the experts had announced it. Then the politicians announced that doubting the newspapers made you a threat to grandma.

When an incredulous public pointed at 1.1 million VAERS reports, the official religion had a ready sermon: it was our own fault. Knowing their system was broken, they called our entries incomplete. They were unverifiable. (Phones not having been invented.) They were an anti-vax conspiracy. AP explained how activists “targeted” the tracking system. PolitiFact called VAERS a “breeding ground.” Headline from NPR, June, 2021:

The problem, we were told, was the users. We were the problem, not the agencies. Unlike us deplorables, the public health agencies were following the science. Meanwhile, according to the BMJ, they were sitting on safety signals of hundreds of types of injuries and sending ‘cease and desist’ emails to their own researchers who noticed.

The problem with VAERS was not the users. We were the only part that worked.

The FDA careerist Ana Szarfman, who tried to alert her superiors, was in many ways heroic. To her credit, she tried. For a while. She defied multiple orders to desist. She loudly insisted she’d found a signal for death and sudden death. But in the end, the top bureaucrats got to her. She ultimately ceased and desisted, as ordered.

And now she’s giving the BMJ interviews. She looks like Wonder Woman compared to the rest of the FDA and CDC.

💉 This betrayal of public trust is nearly indescribable. They intentionally chose a statistical system incapable of detecting any problems and used the lack of signal as the asserted evidence that no problem existed. Safe and effective.

Assuming the BMJ’s documentary account is accurate, and nobody is saying it isn’t, this was not merely bureaucratic incompetence— it was a complete inversion of the public-health duty: known surveillance blindness was promoted as science, warnings were discarded in the name of —this is what they told Ana Szarfman— avoiding “confusion” and preserving “vaccine confidence,” and the resulting non-alerts were presented as reassurance.

No, that’s inaccurate. It wasn’t just presented as reassurance. The unfounded claims became the backbone of an industrial censorship regime enforcing deliberate obfuscation. Politicians, newspapers, social media companies— they all got squarely behind the non-evidence of safety that the agencies privately admitted was useless.

Let’s shift gears. These lying cowards are the same bunch who locked us down during the pandemic and now want us to trust them to lock down artificial intelligence.

🤖 The big push is on. Today’s alarming cover stories on the New York Times’ web page were not about this astonishing investigation in the “gold standard” of medical excellence. Never mind covid. They were about the latest international emergency —the existential threat of AI!— and how only the government can save us from this latest dire threat to human flourishing. Here are all the stories on the Gray Lady’s front page this morning:

• “OpenAI Discloses Six New Incidents of ‘Concerning’ A.I. Behavior”

• “The Awesome and Alarming A.I. Visions of Anthropic’s C.E.O.”

• “King Charles Meets With A.I. Executives About Safety Risks”

The same New York Times that couldn’t find the BMJ story found room for the King of England’s thoughts on robots. (What happened to No Kings?)

Undoubtedly, AI is a disruptive technology with all the risks disruptive technologies always carry. But how in the world of sanity is this government the solution? Why shouldn’t all rational persons conclude that government control of AI would merely make the problems infinitely worse?

For example, we need AI to help process tens of thousands of CDC emails and FDA documents the Senate keeps disclosing about covid, Russiagate, and Butler. Set aside the pressing question of whether AI can be regulated at all. Does anyone believe that government would not, if it gains control of AI, quickly and brutally close off citizens’ ability to ask their AI to help discover damning evidence about government malfeasance?

But Jeff, I can hear the critics complain, that is a false dichotomy. The only options, they will insist, are not no regulation versus bad regulation. They sneer that I have neglected a third possibility— good regulation.

No. No, I didn’t.

I am not neglecting the third possibility of ‘good AI regulation.’ I am foreclosing it.

Given what the BMJ is now parsimoniously and tardily admitting about how the government lied and censored away the existence of hundreds of safety signals while bludgeoning us with “safe and effective,” please explain why we should trust those same officials with the means of total global thought control, when I wouldn’t let them regulate a cellphone repair kiosk.

No. Thank. You.

In one sense, today’s BMJ investigative report is nothing new. It merely once again confirms that our conspiracy theories were conspiracy facts. The covid horse is out of the barn and almost nobody is getting boosters, thank heavens. To paraphrase Hillary Clinton: what difference, at this point, does it make?

Today’s quiet, uncelebrated BMJ admission makes all the difference. It is finally evidence from inside the citadel that the elites cannot deny. When Paul Offit tweets about how many lives were saved by the covid shots, everyone should just send him a link to that BMJ report. They can’t say the shots were proven safe when they didn’t look for injuries. They must now be forced to account for how the rollout was handled, and cannot be allowed to blame it all on officials who’ve already resigned.

If it proves nothing else, the BMJ story proves the wisdom of the founders. The Constitution tried to limit the federal government to a few narrow enumerated powers like controlling the border, levying international tariffs, the military, and running the post office (badly). When it dabbles in things like public health and charity, what happens? Lies. Massive fraud. Cover-ups.

When it “helps” us with mandatory retirement schemes, what happens? A broke Social Security system. When it “serves” us with regulated healthcare plans, what then? American life expectancy that trails Costa Rica. When it “protects” us from environmental poisoning, what do we get? Regulated backyard puddles. When it “assists us” with evening the playing field, what happens? Diversity, equity, and inclusion. When it “advances” us by funding science, what result? Gain-of-function research in Chinese labs and a global pandemic.

In what extra-constitutional realm has the federal government ever unequivocally succeeded? Color me skeptical. I welcome the debate.

So, while I still have plenty of reservations about where AI is taking us and whether our collective IQ will shed even more points when we let the machines take over thinking, the last thing I want is for the same government that ran the pandemic to run AI. The real false dichotomy is certain doom versus government-managed artificial intelligence.

CLIP: This is what AI should be used for. Keep off the grass (1:27).

The BMJ —ground zero for scientific ‘consensus’— just, admirably, began to reckon with the institutional failures. It is fresh momentum behind the Reckoning™ we’ve been waiting for. One thing we can be sure of is that corporate media will not advertise their own failures as enthusiastically as they trumpeted the “safe and effective” lie.

The Reckoning landed in the penthouse. Getting it down to the lobby— that, my friends, is up to us.

Have a terrific Thursday! This special edition required me to leave tons of absolutely wonderful news on the cutting-room floor. Get back here tomorrow, and I will fill you in on all the encouraging essential news with traditional caffeinated commentary.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🚀🚀🚀

We begin with a rare confession: I was wrong. (Sort of). On Monday, I wrote about China’s mysteriously disintegrating spy satellite and the U.S. allegations linking Chinese-supplied imagery to an Iranian strike that killed three American soldiers. I suggested the satellite’s unfortunate career change might have been related to the strike. My closing thought: “… I suspect that it is past time to welcome everyone to the space wars. Because nobody will ever declare them.”

Welp. I was wrong— the same day, Space Force declared the space wars. Well, more or less. Air & Space Forces Magazine reported, “Meink Reveals Space Force Has ‘On-Orbit Space Control Weapons’.” (I was right about everything else, of course.)

Occasionally, when I indulge in connecting dots, random critics show up in the comments demanding sources. This time, the Secretary of the Air Force delivered them for me. Speaking on Monday at the Air, Space and Cyber Conference, Secretary Troy Meink announced: “The Space Force now has on-orbit space control weapons capable of defending the joint force against hostile adversary action.”

Since we are keeping up the list of Trump 2.0 Accomplishments— notice the tense. Not will have. Not has commissioned a bipartisan feasibility study whose executive summary needs three banker’s boxes. He said, “now has.” Whatever “space control” is, it’s in orbit. The interesting hardware has already been uploaded.

Reporters asked, what sort of space control hardware? Meink politely declined to identify it, discuss its testing history, or explain whether it shoots bullets, lasers, or possibly extremely mean tweets. “We’re not going to talk about the specifics of what we’re doing, whether we’ve tested, not tested, or anything else,” he said, and that was that.

Get it? Meink’s announcement was the final part of The Message. (The message to China we discussed Monday.) The Pentagon confirmed the existence of orbital weapons, then carefully declined to provide any more information that might allow enemies to find them. Meink even said that the announcement was intentional —meaning the timing— and the wording was “very well thought out.” He explained that revealing the weapons’ existence could help deter adversaries (i.e., like China), but “talking about the details of what we’re doing would actually not benefit that deterrence.”

This fits the pattern we discussed Monday: the attributed intelligence disclosures about Chinese imagery, the sudden lifestyle change of Yaogan-50, and now a public acknowledgment of American orbital space control weapons, accompanied by an equally deliberate refusal to dish the details. In plain language: those are nice spy satellites you have there. It would be a shame if they gave the Iranians any film.

Space is no longer just a decorative ceiling above the real war. Military operations and the civilian economy depend on it. Last year, then-Chief of Space Operations General Chance Saltzman warned that fighting an adversary with unrestricted access to space that we lacked would be “a recipe for death and destruction.” Losing the advantage in the heavens can become a very earthly problem for the Americans underneath it.

🚀 Secretary Meink next moved to Golden Dome, Trump’s missile-defense initiative, and the story became even more interesting.

In his first week in office, President Trump signed an executive order launching the “Iron Dome,” which in February he renamed to “Golden Dome,” probably because the Israelis sent us a nasty trademark infringement letter, or possibly because Trump just wanted to beat them. Gold is obviously better than iron. So there.

Golden Dome is a Space-Based Interceptor program (“SBI”), which is intended to help shoot down incoming missiles from space. It is basically the literal realization of Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” defense system, which was more aspirational than effective. The project only began last January.

But on Monday, Secretary Meink reported that SBI has gone from “initial contract to flight-ready hardware”— in less than a year. By “flight-ready,” he didn’t mean it is fully operational. Still, testable hardware is a refreshing change for Washington, where a military build program usually spends its first year deciding whether the working group should be called a ‘task force’ and picking a logo.

One reason why it is moving so fast is that they structured the interceptor program as a competition with multiple players. This is also quite different for Washington. Space Systems Command reported 20 agreements with 12 companies, carrying a potential combined award value of up to $3.2 billion, with an initial ‘integrated capability demonstration’ targeted for 2028.

The intended constellation of SBI satellites would put interceptors in low Earth orbit, to engage missiles wherever they are. Meink described four “gates,” which anyone else might call milestones, and announced that the competitors had all passed through the first gate, which requires a finished design and the commencement of component testing.

General Michael Guetlein, Golden Dome’s director, said he wants proof that the capabilities work and, “more importantly, that they’re scalable and affordable.” When he said “affordable,” several reporters fainted. Last month, General Guetlein reported that Golden Dome had its first operational ground station up and running at Fort Story, Virginia, and had finished two successful tests, including one at White Sands Missile Range.

“We are digging dirt around the homeland,” he said, presumably referring to activity more interesting than what the armadillos do every night in my front lawn. I took his meaning as physical construction— which, again, is happening at a dizzying bureaucratic velocity unprecedented for a project of this scale.

At the same time they are building on the ground, they are also building in the sky. The service awarded SpaceX —Elon’s outfit— a $4.2 billion contract in May to begin launching another constellation of satellites to track anything in the air, like planes, missiles, and AOL on her broomstick. Meink said its first satellites would launch this month— September. (He did not say how many, but SpaceX launches tons of its own satellites. They can scale.)

As of Monday, the United States is publicly acknowledging existing weapons in orbit, holding a competition to develop space-based missile interceptors, breaking ground on new domestic operational facilities, and adding a brand-new satellite constellation to track airborne threats. I’m not sure there’s ever been a comparably significant peacetime mobilization, and you wouldn’t know about any of it from corporate media.

This is starting to look like the kind of military transformation historians will name as the beginning of an era. I’m not the only one who noticed. Though we had to travel all the way to India Today to find this morning’s story:

On Monday, I mistakenly wrote that the space wars era had arrived unannounced. I think they just announced it. Same day. You read it here first.

🔥🔥🔥

India Today has been doing a lot of current-events reporting that our own corporate media seems unable to cover. Yesterday, its headline asked the astonishing question, “Who paid to cremate Trump shooter Thomas Crooks? New FBI files reveal a mystery donor.” The subheadline explained, “Fresh federal records say an anonymous donor paid for Thomas Matthew Crooks’ cremation after the Butler rally shooting.” Nothing says transparency like unquestioned anonymous donors helping destroy evidence.

For more than two years following Butler, conservatives have not been arguing over a settled story. We’ve been staring at a hole in the ground where a story should have been. Nobody has produced a motive that stuck. Nobody has explained how a twenty-year-old with a rangefinder and a rifle walked onto an unsecured roof in plain sight of a presidential rally while the world’s most expensive protective detail surrounded him.

The shooter’s politics stayed foggy, his online life stayed half-told, and the Bureau’s public account kept landing on “lone wolf”— without the paperwork that would let a normal person sleep with any peace. The body was released and cremated before a House investigator could look at it. Key physical evidence —a ladder, a bag, a phone that agents still seem to be hunting— drifted in and out of official language without any clean inventory for the public. Layers of the file stayed sealed or blacked out for reasons nobody would name.

By the time Trump took office again, the conservative complaint was not “we refuse to believe he acted alone.” It was simpler and meaner: if this was an open-and-shut case, why does it still feel like it’s stuffed in burn bags tucked away in a hidden FBI safe room?

This week, we finally got some new information. Spoiler: it only raised more questions.

🔥 Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley has been running his own Butler inquiry. The FBI finally turned over a trove of interview summaries and related records, and only the New York Post and Fox reported the disturbing new facts. In part: Crooks used a bizarre pseudonym, “Bob Dole,” to order weapons parts online, the father gave a useless account of not knowing anything was up, and of course, the anonymous cremation reveal. Around the same time, an Eighth Circuit FOIA dump in the prolonged Crooks litigation spilled another hundred-plus pages of FBI Pittsburgh 302s, evidence logs, and internal traffic— all heavily redacted, with nearly a hundred pages withheld outright.

Attorney General Todd Blanche praised FBI Director Kash Patel for his “herculean” scrub of what the Biden crowd had left behind, and said the fresh material on the shooter’s background had been turned over to the Senate. “I think we looked at some 27 devices,” Blanche announced yesterday, “exfiltrated all the data off of them, looked for connections to individuals in America and overseas, and we found no evidence that that individual was literally even speaking to any other human being other than his parents, who he resided with.”

Why did he need to email his parents, who he lived with? Never mind. Blanche said the disclosures include information “we recently discovered” and that “was not provided to us.” He is clearly blaming Biden’s FBI. Why would they play games with the Crooks files?

Then Trump unleashed a rhetorical space laser in the form of a Truth Social post that directly accused Democrats of involvement in the plot:

The New York Times did not, apparently, find Trump’s astonishing accusation sufficiently newsworthy to print. ABC covered it, but added the classic “no evidence” gag right to the headline, as though a Truth Social post is a motion for summary judgment.

No evidence? Was the President supposed to attach affidavits, Bates-stamped email logs, and a sealed appendix before clicking post? Accusing Democrats of trying to assassinate him is kind of a big deal. This is the kind of “somebody says something” event that is actually news, but corporate media decided to frame it as a mean tweet.

🔥 It’s not just that none of the facts add up. The part that really keeps the controversy moving is the FBI’s apparent lack of concern about the parts that don’t add up. Crooks’ family has consistently been described as financially strapped. They couldn’t even afford to cremate their son. A sympathetic anonymous donor had to do it. How did the donor find out about the need?

And now we’ve learned that Crooks, an unambitious live-at-home with a part-time, minimum wage job, whose father was unemployed and whose mother was on medical leave, had up to 27 devices, ordered enough weapons parts using a fake name to equip a below-average arms dealer, printed ghost Glocks on what must have been a very well-equipped 3D printer, and possibly paid for subscriptions to multiple secure comms channels. Never mind his many weapons and the cost of his “training” at the shooting range.

A household that can’t even pay a funeral home doesn’t usually look like a small armory with a server closet and a secure comms channel. Where is the official curiosity? Why are the Senate and Judicial Watch’s lawyers required to drag all this information out of the Bureau over a period of years?

Are we seriously going to say we’re respecting the privacy wishes of an anonymous donor who just happened to appear ten days after the shooting offering to pay to destroy the body? Look, I don’t know who needs to hear this, but you don’t get HIPAA for paying to destroy the remains of the man who just shot a president.

It’s not only that they could dispel the rumors by saying the donor was confirmed to be a friend of the family and leave it there. They don’t know. The family’s lawyer told them it was anonymous and that was that. Biden’s FBI just accepted “anonymous donor” at face value, diligently wrote it down on the interview form, and then diligently moved on. Just what kind of investigation was it? Well, the kind of investigation that dropped the body into an oven before a House investigator could take a look at it.

Was the FBI the anonymous donor? Just asking.

🔥 To his credit, Fox’s Bret Baier raised an obvious point. “The new documents say Crooks had 27 devices,” he exclaimed. “Twenty-seven they combed through? I have four, maybe!” Columnist Marc Thiessen suggested it was no big deal: “On the other hand, we are still debating the motivations of Lee Harvey Oswald... so it’s not unprecedented.”

CLIP: Fox discusses Kash Patel’s conclusion Crooks only emailed his parents (1:50).

I categorically reject the Kennedy comparison. The tech we have in 2026 is not comparable to the primitive evidence collection of 1963. Kennedy gave us one grainy home movie. Kash Patel “scrubbed” twenty-seven devices. Whose devices? Why devices? Does that include spare USB drives in the kitchen junk drawer? Xboxes?

Look, I’m just a lawyer. I’m not a senior FBI investigator with access to an international database. But did it occur to Kash Patel that the only reason he found emails to Crooks’ parents on 27 devices might be because all the other traffic had been removed? Or is that what Kash is quietly trying to tell us? Is he letting the patent unbelievability of the lack of electronic evidence speak for itself?

There is a lot more.

🔥 The FBI traced comms from Crooks’ phone using at least four encrypted Mailfence email accounts. Mailfence is Belgian. On July 15, the FBI sent urgent foreign-dissemination requests to two governments (names redacted) for “any and all records” from the foreign accounts. There is no record of any reply. During previous Congressional testimony, FBI officials disclosed more than 35 digital accounts accessed by Crooks.

The new disclosures reveal the FBI was dumpster-diving for a cell phone near a shopping center forty miles away where an alert citizen found the ladder. That makes three cell phones that Crooks used that we know of. The FBI never found the third one. It’s still missing. It’s probably traveling overseas with the FBI’s curiosity.

But wait. The FBI records stated they got the aforementioned ladder from the aforementioned alert citizen who found it in a “wooded area” near a remote shopping center near Crooks home, along with Crooks’ gun bag, including two empty ammo boxes and his range ID. What? How did that stuff travel from the scene to a shopping center forty miles away? Did it fly? Use the Star Trek teleporter? Was it a wrinkle in time?

A week after the report dated the FBI taking possession of the ladder, then-FBI Director Chris Wray told Congress the FBI still didn’t have the ladder. (Technically, Wray the weasel told Congress, “we did not find the ladder at the scene.”)

The FBI report did not speculate on how Crooks’ kit got there. He obviously didn’t drive it there after the shooting. He was dead. So either he ditched the gear for some reason —why?— and Butler was climbed another way (the ridiculous AC unit story), or someone living moved a dead assassin’s ladder and bag halfway across Allegheny County while the biggest manhunt in Pennsylvania was on. The Bureau collected the props, noted the citizen, and treated the teleportation as an unexplained logistics footnote. Where is the curiosity?

The FBI report noted that it collected the ladder and bag from the citizen in the parking lot of a Crowne Plaza. He drove it there in his pickup. During the handoff, the report says “a slim piece of black plastic, with potentially a button on one side” fell out of his tailgate. The citizen said it wasn’t his. Agents bagged it. The file never says what it was.

The new disclosures also reported that video footage from the range on the day before the shooting shows Crooks practicing and speaking with an unknown club member who was the only other person on the range. What? How could that member possibly still be unidentified? Every gun range I’ve ever been on requires signing in and paying. What on Earth?

According to the file, agents pulled stills of the man and his car off a club official’s phone, then ran DMV against every name on the sign-in sheet. The last human conversation on the public timeline before Butler is on video on a rifle range with a man the Bureau can’t name. Whatever that ‘investigation’ produced was not in the FOIA release. What did they talk about— yardage, optics, politics, a ride, snacks— nothing? Was the guy a regular? Did he know Crooks well? Did Crooks seem off? Is the guy still unidentified?

Either the FBI never interviewed this critical witness, or it didn’t turn the interview over to anyone. Neither is good. But wait. It gets worse.

🔥 According to a tip from the Keystone Armory gun shop in Edinboro (about a two-hour drive), on May 25, 2024, a ‘person resembling Crooks’ spent about an hour with two men— a mid-30s white male and an older white male with a gray beard. He bought 20 rounds of 7.62×54R on a MasterCard— yet apparently, still, two years later, they cannot confirm it was Crooks. I mean, come on! Whose name was on the card slip??

The FOIA writeups stated the ‘person resembling Crooks’ used his MasterCard at precisely 12:41 p.m. to buy the 20 rounds of 7.62 ammo. The FOIA did not state the cardholder name, the last four digits, or the bank return. So either the Bureau never pulled the slip (malpractice), pulled it and left it out of the dump (omission), or pulled it and redacted the only line that would end the baffling mystery over a “person resembling Crooks.”

Oh. And the FBI investigators didn’t find this. The store called it in and turned over the video.

Guess what? The FBI disclosed neither the IDs of the two men nor any witness interviews with them. Remember: The FBI accepted his father’s statement that Crooks “had no friends.” Um.

🔥 I don’t know about you, but this lawyer is beginning to detect a pattern.

An unidentified witness at the gun range the day before the shooting who remains unidentified. Two men Crooks spoke with for over an hour seven weeks before the shooting who also remain unidentified (and laughably, Crooks himself remains unidentified). An unidentified good Samaritan who found the ladder and kit bag 40 miles from the scene, with no identified reason for the evidence to be there. (Did they check Flock cameras?) Another unidentified ‘anonymous donor’ who paid for Crooks’ warp-speed cremation. Foreign governments that apparently have not responded to FBI’s urgent asks for email traffic.

No interview reports from any of them.

As for interviews, apparently all the Senate got was Crooks’ clueless father who, like Sgt. Schulz from Hogan’s Heroes, knew nothing useful. (Though he first learned of the shooting from CNN. Reporters found him before Secret Service, the FBI, or local police. Maybe the reporters should take charge.)

There could be good reasons for these iceberg-sized gaps in the information. But if there are good reasons, the FBI isn’t telling them. We —and the victim, President Trump— are left to fill in the blanks ourselves. That’s not okay.

Everything about this ‘investigation’ stinks. From what we can see, it could be the worst FBI investigation ever performed. It could be a cover-up. It could be selective disclosure. It could be incompetence. (It could be all three.) None of those possibilities are reassuring. Nothing about this evidences the kind of transparency the assassination attempt demands or even a good-faith desire to extinguish conspiracy theories.

I’m climbing out on a tiny limb here, but it is safe to assume President Trump —the DOJ’s boss— knows more than the general public. He just called it a Democrat plot. We don’t have enough information to decide, just inexplicable gaps, but we can safely assume that if Trump had information proving it wasn’t a Democrat plot he would have hedged. And if Trump doesn’t know— then who does?

This is far from over. You might even say it is finally getting started.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! Come on back tomorrow, for another intellectually nutritious serving of essential news and caffeinated commentary that the corporate media will never dish up.

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⚖️⚖️⚖️

It looks like the last-minute legal show may now be over, and it wasn’t the buddy comedy ending we were hoping for. It’s ending more on the kind of upbeat note of its two stars holding hands and going over a cliff in a convertible. Late yesterday afternoon, the New York Times triumphantly reported, “Supreme Court Blocks Trump Administration Plan to Screen Mail-In Ballots.” Not great. But there’s a silver lining in the Times’s pony pile somewhere. Let’s start digging.

“The battle over the Trump administration’s plan to change mail-in voting has played out over the past few weeks in a dizzying series of legal developments,” the Times reported, “even as states began sending out ballots.” Yesterday —lamentably— the Supreme Court declined to stay Judge Talwani’s injunction blocking the Postal Service from activating the new ballot envelope standard.

The Times, sprinkling adjectives into its ‘straight news’ like beads off a Mardi Gras float, called it a “major loss” for the President and a “resounding win” for Democrats, who, it said, “had argued that the plan was unconstitutional and an existential threat to the democratic process.”

Which is what Democrats always say about everything they don’t like, including reflecting pools, but never mind. The Times unquestioningly reported the existential threat to democracy. This article was one of the best examples (meaning worst) of the Times’s increasingly obvious abandonment of even a pretense of journalistic integrity. They’re basically phoning it in now.

The Times described the “major loss”/“resounding win” as the Supreme Court “blocking” the USPS plan, as if it had body-checked the new rule. But the truth is, all the Court did was deny the Administration’s emergency request and leave Judge Talwani’s injunction in place while the litigation continues. The rest of the story was just as misleading. I won’t bother quoting Governor Newsom’s celebratory comments, except to note that he heroically worked the word “democracy” into a single sentence three times.

The unsigned order did not indicate any count or discuss the reasoning. It said little more than that the government “was not likely to succeed on the merits,” without explaining why. The Court did not say no. It said not yet, in writing, with a page cite.

But fortunately, Justices Alito and Kavanaugh wrote separately.

⚖️ Before we start aiming the rage machine at anyone, consider that Judge Talwani enjoyed one huge advantage: seven red states filed amicus briefs from their election officials swearing it would be impossible to comply in time for the midterms. It was a layup. The Supremes could impartially accept unrebutted arguments from the home team.

Justice Kavanaugh accepted that. He wrote a separate, also one-paragraph concurrence (the judicial equivalent of, “and another thing”). He explained that, while the rule was probably legal, it was just too late this time:

So mark the first sliver of silver in the lining. Kavanaugh is not prejudging —he only said it has a “fair prospect”— but he looks like one vote in favor of upholding the new standards whenever the case returns on the merits.

Next, Justice Alito, joined by Justice Thomas, filed a seven-page dissent saying he’d have allowed the rule to proceed even for the midterms. He went further than Kavanaugh. He helpfully explained why he thought the complaining states should lose. Get this: citing SCOTUS’s own precedent, he called their case a “Hail Mary pass”:

Not only that, he all but called it a lawfare operation. An NGO, he wrote, should not be able to “spend its way into standing simply by expending money to gather information and advocate against the defendant’s actions.” He was blunt: “Such cryptic filings cannot be used to show standing.” Lol, cryptic filings.

Justice Alito wasn’t buying the timing argument. He blamed the plaintiffs and the courts for the delay. “ The plaintiff States and the courts bear a substantial share of the blame for the rule’s timing,” he wrote bluntly.

So we can add two more Justices —Alito and Thomas— to the list supporting the rule. Granted, they are the most conservative robes on the high bench, but with Kavanaugh that makes three total, and we only need five.

⚖️ It’s misleading to call that a “major loss” for sanity and a “resounding win” for Democrats. Let’s count the silver. First, the drama of the lawfare and all the coverage has shoved the mail-in ballot issue front and center. The Times conceded this. “The weekslong legal tussle over the issue may have sown its own kind of confusion,” the article admitted, “a victory of sorts for Mr. Trump as he seeks to cast doubt on the integrity of the vote in an election his party might lose.”

Next, as I pointed out, the three Justices to say anything substantive all appeared to bless the rule, and Alito even offered the government helpful suggestions for how to win the larger lawsuit. The government’s lawyers can now cite the “Hail Mary” comment — and Judge Talwani can’t just wave it away.

We saw this same dynamic when Justice Thomas wrote an unsolicited opinion about how Special Counsel Jack Smith was unconstitutionally appointed, and South Florida Judge Aileen Cannon immediately adopted his reasoning and dismissed the case against President Trump.

There is a strong chance that the new rules will be settled law in time for the 2028 presidential election. So we must win the midterms the same way we won the 2024 elections in a red wave. The Democrats still face their polycrisis and a DSA civil war. Onwards, to plan E.

🔥🔥🔥

Speaking of self-created crises, twin choreographed immigration lawsuits landed in the Manhattan courts yesterday, filed more or less simultaneously. Twenty-two deep-blue states filed the first one, led by New York (Letitia James). The second was filed by six blue cities and counties, and one NGO, led by socialist champion and New York Mayor Mamdani, who announced it while characteristically grinning like a high chimpanzee. Reuters reported, “States, cities sue to block Trump immigration rule on public benefits.” You’re going to like this one.

The two groups filed together, four days before the new immigration rule is scheduled to take effect (Friday), which allows using welfare status as an immigration test. The Democrats could have filed two months ago, back when the final rule was published on July 20th, but they waited till yesterday to create the conditions for an “emergency” injunction.

It’s the old saw about murdering your parents and then seeking sympathy for being an orphan. In other words, legally speaking, this is about as cynical as it gets, and a judge should shut it down, but, well, you know.

Wait till you hear the irreparable harm they’re claiming.

🔥 The new lawsuits seek to stop an ancient immigration law long on the books. It was originally passed by Congress in 1882, back before progressives got hold of the English language. Here’s the original 1882 “public charge” law, in all its plain-spoken glory:

For no particular reason, I would like to point out that “convict, lunatic, idiot, or person unable to take care of himself or herself” accurately describes a disturbing number of members of a major U.S. political party, which shall remain nameless since this is a family blog, but I’m just saying.

That crystal-clear 1882 language offended snowflakes, so over time, they sanded it down. The law’s wording —but not its intended effect— was ‘updated’ over the years till its most modern form in 1996, which, for a variety of bad reasons, went largely unenforced until Trump 1.0. When Trump tried to bring it back into effective service in 2019, Democrat lawsuits blocked him, SCOTUS finally lifted the injunctions, and it ran for a short period. Then, in 2022, President Autopen issued a replacement rule basically ordering immigration officers to ignore it again. (Don’t tell the “No Kings” crowd, it will only confuse them.)

One of the greatest differences between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0 is that, during the first term, the President got almost no help from Republicans or the public, who were distracted by RussiaGate, serial impeachments, and mean tweets shaped like squirrels.

The current statute itself is simple, straightforward, and plainly written enough for a purple-haired transgender education major to understand. The law has two parts. Here is part “a”, which, despite all the diligent rhetorical sanding, is still about as blunt as you could ask for.

In short: “any alien who is likely at any time to become a public charge is inadmissible.” Period. The statute delegates that decision to the immigration officer, and part ‘b’ provides a little more guidance and a whole lot of discretion:

Summarized: “At a minimum, the immigration official shall consider age, health, family status, assets, resources, financial status, education, and skills.” So the official can consider more than these things, but must at least consider these things.

The weakness was that this statute never defined exactly what a “public charge” is. That allowed progressives —starting ages ago— to play their word games and narrowly define “public charge” as only people “primarily dependent on the government.” So immigrants could get in line for SNAP, WIC, Medicaid, free luxury hotel rooms, and other taxpayer gifts, and as long as the immigration officer could opine they wouldn’t be primarily dependent on the government, then they were fine. Here’s your green card and your food stamp application.

🔥 In 1996, Congress tried to strengthen the statute but wound up sanding it down some more. It allowed immigrants to overcome even primary dependence if they had an affidavit from a sponsor who ‘promised’ to be financially responsible for them. These affidavits are now on sale at most bodegas, and, of course, are never enforced. But helpfully, the statute only says the immigration official “may” consider the affidavit— not must.

Trump’s new rule strips progressives’ narrow definition of “public charge.” It just tells immigration officials to apply the plain language of the statute. But the new rule comes with guidance, and the guidance suggests that any receipt of means-tested benefits is “almost always…highly relevant” to the public charge decision. It offers helpful examples like housing, food stamps, healthcare, and college aid.

That’s driving Democrats crazy. They can’t stand the idea of not giving aliens visas, green cards, and citizenship— and signing them up for welfare on day one. New York City Mayor Zohran “The Magnificent” Mamdani complained that the murderous rule “seeks to push immigrant families away from the programs that have kept people fed and healthy for decades.” He warned darkly, without exaggerating, “people could die.”

Hardly. The new guidance says the official may not, in considering “family status,” consider the benefits received by other family members unless the alien’s own children would get benefits. Here’s where progressives stretch the truth like homemade taffy. Democrats insist that immigrants aren’t very smart. They get confused. They think any family benefits could prevent their overseas relatives from getting in too.

So, and this is the most terrifying part to Democrats, family members might voluntarily stop taking welfare. They focused on DHS’s own projection that a ‘chilling effect’ could result in about $13 billion a year in voluntarily reduced transfer payments. As if that were a bad thing.

“This rule preys on that fear and counts on families forfeiting the ​food assistance, healthcare coverage, and ​other public benefits to which ⁠they are legally entitled,” New York Attorney General Letitia James crowed.

Thus we see the “emergency” that the states and cities are using for standing. It’s not that the rule will actually strip benefits from resident aliens. They also worry that reductions in food stamps will hurt businesses that rely on them.

And, worst of all, it might discourage aliens with no jobs, no money, and no prospects from even applying for a visa. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) put it simply:

So Democrats want the court to throw out the new rule and guidance and return to Biden’s meaningless 2022 version. They want a judge to give them an emergency injunction to stop the new rule from taking effect. An emergency they created, by waiting till the last minute to file their lawsuit.

At this late date, I won’t even try handicapping what the Manhattan court might do. But the Trump Administration followed the rules to the letter. The original rule and request for comment were published last November. There is no emergency.

📉📉📉

Yesterday, Newsweek watered one of corporate media’s hardiest perennial stories, headlined, “Donald Trump’s Approval Rating Shifts With America’s Most Educated.” Ah, yes. The evergreen Trump Is Losing Smart People story. It flowers every few weeks, requires almost no sunlight, and can survive for years without producing any actual fruit.

The exciting news was that Trump’s approval among college graduates fell from 34% in late August to 31% a week later, and then to 30% in early September. Newsweek described this four-point meander as having “fallen sharply,” which is the polling equivalent of describing a Roomba bumping into a sleeping Doberman as an exploding train derailment.

The first survey included a whopping 504 college graduates. The second expanded to 563. Newsweek reported that the polls’ overall margins of error were about 3.4 to 3.5 points. Then, several paragraphs after announcing the intellectual stampede, the story quietly admitted that the week-to-week movement “may fall within normal polling variation.” Um.

In plain English, that means Trump’s approval among college graduates may not have moved at all. But never mind.

Newsweek quickly recovered from this dangerous outbreak of statistical sobriety. The three readings, it said, “could be an ominous signal” for Republicans in November. So the same data may be meaningless noise, but it may also be the distant rumble of electoral doom. This is why professional journalism requires years of specialized education. An untrained person might recklessly conclude that nobody knows yet.

The story even conceded that polls have historically underestimated Trump’s popularity in three presidential campaigns. I am not making that up (like they did). The instrument has misread the same patient three times, but when it twitches four points inside an unreported subgroup’s margin of error, well, everybody should strap on surgical masks and start buying toilet paper.

To be fair, college graduates are now an important Democratic constituency. They told pollsters they were highly motivated to vote, and that their congressional preference strongly favored Democrats. But that is not a new “shift.” It is the same coalitional alignment we have been watching for years, now repackaged as breaking news because the numbers went 34, 31, 30 — the political-science version of a microwave countdown.

Also, despite Newsweek’s arrogant framing, “college-educated” is not a synonym for “smart.” It means “has a diploma,” which can describe a neurosurgeon, a structural engineer, or somebody with $180,000 in student debt and a master’s thesis on gender expression in nineteenth-century Belgian puppetry. Meanwhile, the man repairing the transmission in your pickup may lack a four-year degree but somehow knows that a machine cannot run forever after you remove all the oil.

But the funniest part is the comparison corporate media never makes.

📉 In July, YouGov’s own European tracker found French President Emmanuel Macron at 20% favorable and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz at 16% favorable. Not just among the overeducated. Overall! Macron has since dropped to 16% popularity in a September Ipsos poll. And this week, Reuters reported that an eye-watering 78% of Germans do not think Merz should be chancellor — including a majority of voters (58%) from his own party.

Yet both men remain in office, attending swanky summits, issuing gibberish in statements, bravely defending democracy, and being photographed striding gravely across expensive Kiev carpets as though 84% of the population had not just asked the government support chatbot whether there was a return policy.

Granted, favorability and job approval are not identical measurements. But they are close enough to expose the absurdity. When Trump draws 30% approval inside a microscopic subgroup already heavily aligned with Democrats, it is an “ominous signal” threatening control of Congress. When a European leader draws 16% support from his entire country, he is introduced as a respected statesman who will now explain to us how democracy is supposed to work.

Apparently European democracy operates under different software. In America, a president must maintain approval among every demographic category, including adjunct professors, artisanal pickle consultants, and people who describe NPR as “too centrist.” In Europe, a leader needs the support of roughly one citizen, two cabinet ministers, and a colorless granite building in Brussels.

This is the buried lede. The article is not really measuring Trump’s political durability. It is reassuring credentialed Democrats that the credentialed class still dislikes Trump— news roughly as surprising as a survey finding that golden retrievers remain broadly favorable toward tennis balls.

And the evergreen story never flowers because elections keep rudely interrupting the narrative. Trump loses the smart people. Then he wins more votes. The polls miss him. Then the next poll arrives, wearing a fresh lab coat and asking us to admire its precision.

So relax. The Trump Is Losing Educated Voters plant will keep growing back until Greenland becomes a state. It cannot die, because it does not depend on facts. It feeds entirely on wishful thinking, prestige anxiety, and a steady compost of people who are highly educated but apparently never learned to recognize the same story no matter how many times they shovel it out.

🔥🔥🔥

On Monday, Newsweek ran a very encouraging story headlined, “Map Shows Where 870,000 Borrowers Were Banned Over Alleged Pandemic Fraud.” The map is useful in case you were wondering which states contain people willing to invent a business to obtain free federal money. The answer is: yes.

The SBA announced it has now suspended 870,000 borrowers connected to $39 billion in suspected fraudulent PPP and Covid emergency-loan shenanigans. That’s a lot. Added to earlier actions, the agency has now suspended more than a million borrowers nationwide tied to roughly $49 billion in suspected fraud. It is the largest enforcement action in American history, and it is still only one slice of the Inspector General’s estimated $200 billion pandemic-loan fraud banquet.

Behold, the honeypot.

Back in 2020, I warned clients to approach those loan applications like a sleeping alligator wearing a free-money sign. The programs were rolled out at warp speed during government lockdowns, the forms relied completely on self-certification, and applicants were being asked to make factual representations to the federal government under statutes carrying criminal penalties. That combination — easy money, an honor system, and signatures under penalty of perjury — was a moral hazard wrapped in DocuSign.

The government’s implicit sales pitch was, “Here is a nice big pile of cash. Now please tell us whether you qualify.” A surprising number of Americans responded, “Absolutely,” despite having no employees, no payroll, no operating business, and in certain ambitious cases, no discernible relationship with the Milky Way galaxy.

It looked easy because it was easy. The phrase “too good to be true” has often come to mind. Never in human history has getting hundreds of thousands of free dollars from the federal government been so convenient. The official PPP application itself estimated that completing it would only take eight minutes.

Those may have been the most legally consequential eight minutes since someone handed Richard Nixon a tape recorder.

Before Vice President Vance fired up the Task Force, SBA’s policy was to only prosecute fraud if it was more than $1.5 million. Now, there is no floor.

🔥 The original Treasury application required applicants to certify that their businesses were operating on February 15, 2020; that economic uncertainty made the loan necessary; that the money would be used for authorized purposes; and that every material statement and supporting document was “true and accurate.” The form then explained —right above the signature line— that false statements could mean five years in prison and a $250,000 fine, or, when made to a federally insured institution, up to 30 years and a $1 million fine.

In other words, it was not in the fine print. It was in the medium-sized print, saying, Please do not fabricate a landscaping company unless you are comfortable discussing it later with federal prosecutors.

The same form also authorized lenders to share tax information with the SBA and its Inspector General, warned that financial records could be accessed, and explained that suspected violations could be referred to law enforcement. Thus, every dishonest applicant thoughtfully supplied the government with his name, Social Security or tax-identification number, bank, electronic signature, invented payroll, false certifications, and a convenient list of federal statutes under which he might someday be charged.

That was not merely an application. That was a fill-in-the-blanks prosecution memo.

🔥 These 870,000 borrowers have been flagged as suspected fraud risks and cut off from future SBA loans and programs; they have not all been criminally charged, not yet, much less found guilty. Some legitimate borrowers may be ensnared in errors, bad data, or lost records, and they deserve due process. But that must be a very small group. The loan form wasn’t exactly complicated.

For the applicants who created phantom employees, counterfeit tax forms, and businesses that existed only in the hopeful province between their laptop and the federal Treasury, the daily trip to the mailbox is becoming, well, exciting.

Under its exquisitely named Operation No Doze, the SBA is beginning with about 8,000 final 30-day demand letters in Kansas and Missouri. Recipients must resolve or repay the flagged debt or face possible Justice Department referral, Treasury collection, liability of up to double the government’s damages, added collection costs of up to 28%, and offsets against tax refunds, federal salaries, contractor payments, Social Security, and other benefits. Whew.

You can picture the envelope. Heavy cream-colored government stationery. An eagle. A return address containing the words “United States.” The kind of letter that makes the family dog Bubbles stop barking and slink out of the room. NOTICE OF DEBT.

There is no word in the English language more terrifying than Notice. A political campaign sends you a brightly colored postcard. A federal agency sends you a Notice, which is a letter that has attended law school, carries handcuffs in its briefcase, is armed, and knows all your bank account numbers.

Vice President JD Vance summarized the new policy with the kind of plain-spoken simplicity common back in 1882: “If you screwed the American taxpayer, the federal government is now going to say you’re cut off, no more.” Meanwhile, the Justice Department’s summer surge produced enforcement actions involving more than 160 defendants and about $245 million in intended losses. Congress extended the limitations period for PPP and EIDL fraud to ten years, so the government can keep mailing its cream-colored thunderbolts through 2030 and 2031. (Absent further extension, that is.)

One featured defendant, Jamie Gray of Missouri, allegedly claimed to own dozens of pre-pandemic businesses. He was a veritable fraud factory, filing hundreds of loan applications. Prosecutors say nearly all were fictitious, while the one that actually existed — and I am not making this up — was a pet store called Fur Lives Matter, a Texas company that allegedly had no idea who he was.

Another defendant, Evie Zou of Texas, claimed 50 fake employees, used her daughter’s identity without permission, and spent the emergency loan proceeds on Austin real estate and brokerage investments. The government says those investments appreciated, so it now expects to recover more than she took. The stock market has joined the prosecution’s team. World wide:

The institutional failures were spectacular. The SBA Inspector General found that officials weakened or removed normal controls in a “pay and chase” system, which also describes a certain type of gentleman’s normal evening out. The government sent out $1.2 trillion before performing the sort of basic checks that banks traditionally conduct prior to handing perfect strangers sacks of money.

At least 17% of all loans may have gone to potentially fraudulent actors. The government created the temptation, advertised the honor system, and postponed verification until after everybody had bought matching Maseratis. I’m not saying we shouldn’t trust Americans, but given the loose definition these days of “Americans,” maybe at least basic verification isn’t too much to ask.

One also imagines that, if one were in a certain demographic, say Republicans, one might have received the notice much, much earlier. I’m not completely speculating. President Autopen’s administration was able to find Republican lawmakers who fudged their covid loans. Remember former Florida State Rep. Joe Harding, who famously authored Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law and was hated and reviled by the left? Headline from Conde Nast’s Them, an LGBT rag, dated October 2023:

So. Payback, as they say, is something that rhymes with “witch.” Or maybe, fool around and so forth.

It’s been six years, which is long enough for fraudsters to start to breathe a little easier. But the delayed reckoning does not erase their signatures. That is the great 2026 reveal. What looked like a giveaway was also a database. What felt anonymous was indexed by Social Security number. What seemed forgiven was merely waiting for enough investigators, computing power, and prosecutorial attention.

The moral hazard has matured into a moral demand letter.

For six years, nearly a million Americans with flexible ethics may have believed they beat the system. Now the largest SBA fraud roundup in history is warming up, Todd Blanche says 500 federal prosecutors are now focused just on fraud, and Operation No Doze has five more years to work through all the names.

The free money was fast. The Notice took longer. And it knows where you live.

Have a terrific Tuesday! Coffee & Covid will be right back in the saddle tomorrow morning, with its saddlebags stuffed with more delicious essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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💉💉💉

Like many Americans, you have probably been waiting impatiently, if not obsessively, to find out which types of vaccines will be marketed —sorry, I mean recommended— for your shoulder this year. Good news. Tired of waiting for the CDC to get around to it, a group of progressive medical groups bravely banded together to evaluate shot safety themselves. For public health. You will never believe what they concluded. The New York Times reported it two weeks ago: “Medical Groups Issue Guidance on Covid, Flu and R.S.V. Shots”

The vaccine-industrial complex faces a problem of its own making. It now sells three different annual shots to gullible seniors, medical fetishists, and human pincusions: influenza (including Moderna’s brand-new mRNA version mFLUSIVA), Covid, and RSV. Pharma usually relies on the government (via CDC) to just tell customers to consume product.

That guidance used to come from a “safety and efficacy” review committee with the acronym ACIP, which ran the annual safety review. It was kind of like a six-armed rubber-stamping machine, and most resembled a carnival puppet show everyone had already seen twice that morning.

But after Secretary Kennedy’s HHS appointed certain people to the ACIP committee who were not members of the Great Big Vaccine Club —people who might ask awkward questions like why did all the rats die?— the establishment went a little overboard with their lawsuits. They were a little too successful.

They got a judge to bar the ACIP from meeting at all. Federal judge Brian Murphy found Kennedy’s scientists lacked the judge’s preferred credentials. He said no more meetings until the CDC’s committee was repopulated with Vaccine Club Members, as it should be. (You see, the CDC committee must be independent from the President and the rest of the executive branch, but not independent from the judicial branch. But I digress.)

Oh, how pharma and Democrats laughed and laughed. They won one! On vaccines! Kennedy, they crowed, was stymied. He would have no choice but to cave and install new pharma-approved memb… oh. Secretary Kennedy did not cave. He did not install new, pharma-approved ACIP members. He simply did… nothing.

He just waited, till annual vaccine time came and went.

In other words, the Democrats shot right past a judicial victory and crashed into a prickly briar patch. They thought Kennedy would be crying himself to sleep since the ACIP couldn’t meet. But Kennedy slept like a baby. Thanks to Democrats, they —not Republicans— became responsible for no vaccine recommendations going out this year. (Technically, CDC airily said just go with last year’s flu shot, which of course, is neither updated for this year’s “strain” nor the new mRNA tech. CDC did not issue any Covid or RSV guidance.)

The lab coats tried to punch Kennedy, whiffed, and pulled back a fist holding a political hand grenade with a pulled pin. No mRNA-flu-shot recommendation. Ruh roh.

💉 Well, you didn’t think they’d give up that easily, did you? Lacking an official one, Big Vaccine formed its own ACIP. It has lots of Vaccine Club members, I guess, like the AMA, AAP, and other three-lettered progressive medical groups. (It’s funded by a Walmart fortune heiress.) Laughably, they named their amorphous group the “Vaccine Integrity Project,” and are running it out of —where else?— the University of Minnesota, a state that is now the punchline to every joke about Somali welfare fraud.

This is going to shock you. The Integrity Project carefully reviewed all the scientific literature, deliberated for several minutes, and approved every single vaccine for almost every age and demographic. Whee! Traditional flu vaccine? Check. mRNA version? Check again. RSV and Covid? Absolutely. 6-month-old infants? Check. Pregnant women? Check and double-check. Team Integrity even approved a new RSV monoclonal antibody for newborns under 6 months. Everybody gets one!

There were only two limits. The brand-new mRNA flu vaccine is recommended only for people 50 and up, and Covid mRNA shots for kids over two with “underlying conditions.”

💉 The Times failed to point out the main problem with this creative workaround: insurers aren’t required to cover shots approved by a brand-new group with a murky membership roster, even if it does have the word “Integrity” right in its title. Obamacare, for example, ties reimbursements to shots approved by the ACIP, not by the Quality Learing Center of Utmost Integrity.

Behold the very first comment from the article’s comments section, from an 81-year-old retired doctor who actually wants the mRNA flu shot. But he can’t get it anywhere he looks. Sad!

This is encouraging. If true, it sounds like the big chains aren’t even going to bother with Moderna’s new flu shot. Even better, only three people ‘liked’ his post. Another commenter said they did find the mRNA jab, but their pharmacy wanted $270 for it, which was too much to pay for safety.

The ACIP might be judicially enjoined, but I’m giving Kennedy the win on this one. Message: be careful what you ask a progressive judge for.

🚀🚀🚀

That’s a nice spy satellite you have there. It would be a shame if anything happened to it. On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported, “Exclusive - U.S. Links Chinese Satellite Imagery to Iranian Strike That Killed Three Troops”

According to ‘U.S. officials’ cited by the Wall Street Journal’s exclusive report, Iran acquired high-resolution images from unnamed Chinese entities before Iran’s July 17th missile strike on Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan. The missiles hit housing where American troops were sleeping, wounding four soldiers and killing 1st Lt. Tyler Feehan, Pvt. Isabella Gonzales, and Sgt. Angel Rampersad.

Within three days, Iran giddily published remarkably detailed pictures of the damage. This was thoughtful of them, since otherwise American officials might have been forced to wonder whether the twenty-plus damaged buildings had always looked that way.

The unnamed U.S. officials did not identify the allegedly involved Chinese entities, did not accuse Beijing of direct participation, and did not publicly release their evidence. China’s embassy responded by demanding proof and accusing critics of “maliciously linking and smearing other countries.” In diplomatic language, this means: How dare you accuse us of the thing you have not yet proved we did.

Washington had already sanctioned three Chinese satellite companies in May for allegedly making imagery available to Iran. After the deadly July attack, senior American officials raised the new imagery findings directly with Chinese counterparts, although the reporting does not say exactly when that conversation occurred. Secretary of State Marco Rubio met Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi only days after the strike. When asked afterward whether China had supplied targeting intelligence, Rubio carefully said only that “nothing China did altered in any way the course of the conflict.”

Please notice that this was not the same as saying China did nothing. It was the diplomatic equivalent of your teenager saying the mysterious dent in the Tahoe did not materially alter its highway performance.

So far, this is a grim and tragic espionage story. But then space entered the chat. Let’s connect some dots.

🚀 Just under a week ago, on September 8th, Gizmodo dramatically reported, “Chinese Satellite Breaks Apart in Rare Orbit That Could Hold Debris for Centuries.” China’s six-month-old Yaogan-50 ‘reconnaissance’ satellite had experienced what aerospace professionals call an “anomalous event,” which is a technical phrase meaning the expensive spacecraft is now a large collection of much smaller and less expensive objects.

The U.S. Space Force cataloged at least 43 pieces of the former satellite on September 4th. But that was when the debris was cataloged, not necessarily when Yaogan-50 came down with its acute case of spontaneous disassembly. An independent spacecraft monitoring website, Gunter’s Space Page, placed the Yaogan-50’s breakup around late July and counted at least 47 detected fragments.

Get that? Late July. Coincidentally, on July 20th, President Trump tweeted, “Every time Iran kills an American Soldier they will pay for that killing many times over!”

Let’s consult the official international-diplomacy calendar. On July 17th, an Iranian missile attack —allegedly assisted by Chinese-sourced imagery— killed three Americans. Within three days, Iran published detailed post-strike satellite photographs. Days after the attack, Rubio met Wang and was publicly asked about Chinese targeting help. Senior U.S. officials confronted Chinese counterparts at some point. On July 20, Trump promised revenge. And around late July —days following the base strike— a Chinese military spy satellite in an exotic retrograde orbit abruptly became 47 commemorative diplomatic paperweights traveling several miles per second.

To be fair, there is no proof that the United States transformed Yaogan-50 into Yaogan-1-through-47. Nor would there be. That’s the whole point.

🚀 This is not a slip-and-fall-in-Walmart lawsuit. Spooks don’t send preservation letters. Nobody produces the orbital equivalent of Ring-camera footage. In this kind of diplomacy, both governments need room to deny everything —China so it does not have to retaliate, America so China does not have to retaliate, and everybody else so the United Nations can hold a sternly worded meeting about responsible management of space debris without mentioning any particular space behavior.

The message only works when the recipient understands it perfectly and the public cannot prove it. The diplomatic translation is: You made your point. Remember all those midwestern chicken farms and oil refineries that kept mysteriously catching fire during the Biden Administration while we were helping Ukraine target Russia’s oil refineries? It’s like that.

But in this story, we have more dots to connect than we did during the Autopen years, which were mostly a matter of timing. This time, we have a July 17th Iranian strike that killed three Americans using Chinese-sourced imagery, a formal protest, and a mysteriously fragmented spy satellite in “late July,” which could be the hours or days after the Iranians hit our base.

And then —this is the part festooned with red flags— around six weeks later, we have unnamed American officials handing the Wall Street Journal an exclusive about the Chinese imagery.

That was not a random leak from Oscar in Accounting. It was an official leak about highly sensitive intelligence, delivered to America’s premier financial and diplomatic newspaper shortly before Trump was expected to meet Xi. The officials supplied enough detail to establish a causal chain —Chinese imagery, Iranian targeting, dead American soldiers— but withheld the companies’ names, the underlying evidence, and any accusation against Beijing itself.

In other words, they gave the Journal exactly enough information for everyone to connect the dots, while carefully refusing to connect them on official stationery. But why leak it? That kind of leak is not a story: it’s a message. They let the “anomalous event” do the talking.

Maybe the leak and the anomaly were unrelated. Maybe the dates mean nothing. But the officials were sophisticated enough to know online open-source-intelligence influencers can read a calendar. They did not need to draw a red circle around “late July” and add a little arrow saying, LOOK HERE, YOU IDIOTS. They dropped one set of dots. The independent orbital trackers supplied the other set.

If the United States were using Space Force to help send a more efficient form of diplomatic cable, the exchange might have gone something like this:

Old-fashioned diplomacy required embossed stationery, a ceremonial room, twelve deputy ministers, and a communiqué declaring that both sides had enjoyed a “frank and open exchange,” meaning everyone left furious. Modern diplomacy may be more … concise. One country demands evidence. The other country just points upward.

NASA says debris around 800 kilometers up can remain in orbit for centuries, while fragments above 1,000 kilometers may circle Earth for a thousand years or more. Thus, whatever happened, Yaogan-50’s remains will keep delivering the possible message to China’s future governments long after today’s diplomats, generals, and cable-news experts have become archaeological layers.

We’ll never know. The plausible deniability in this story has its own plausible deniability. But I suspect that it is past time to welcome everyone to the space wars. Because nobody will ever declare them.

🚀🚀🚀

It’s also time to check in on the Proxy War, where we find the deep state under fire. Literally. Yesterday, the New York Times reported, “Close Call for Ex-C.I.A. Head as Russia Strikes Ukraine Near Polish Border.” Corporate media is outraged.

This may surprise you —it surprised me— but things in Kiev are so bad now that top European ministers, globalists, and U.S. deep staters recently attended a swanky, billionaire-funded ‘conference’ in the war-torn capital. America’s contribution seems to be disgraced former CIA chief, classified intel leaker, and adulterer David Petraeus, who, in case you were worried, seems to be doing quite well for himself peddling influence around the globe.

But David recently had a difficult travel experience, and it is President Putin’s fault. “This is the act of a truly barbaric leader trying to terrorize Ukrainian civilians,” Petraeus indignantly informed the Times, referring to his now-ruined working vacation to Ukraine. “This was terrifying,” he added, straining to make the point.

If you’re traveling to Kiev these days, you must do it by train, from Poland. Trying to fly in could leave you looking like a disassembled Chinese spy satellite. Fortunately, the Ukrainians are famous for their luxurious railroad hospitality, and by all accounts, Western politicians enjoy a very dignified travel experience on the level of Animal House on wheels. (Petraeus, it should be noted, has historically done his best work on sleepers.) It’s something to look forward to, and a one-way trip takes about fourteen hours from Warsaw to Kiev, after which you may need some downtime.

Over the weekend, the Ukrainians held an annual security conference called YES (the Yalta European Strategy forum), which hosted some 700 current and former EU ministers, journalists, and notables like Petraeus, former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, and former Finnish PM (and party girl) Sanna Marin. Ukrainian billionaire oligarch Victor Pinchuk funds the conference and, presumably, the gift bags.

The foreigners mingle with Ukrainian politicians and make connections, a polite euphemism for a mutually enriching experience. While the agenda includes high-minded, unachievable items like “Peace Through Strength NOW!”, it is really an influence conference, where “networking” is high on the list, and is meant to prepare the foreigners to return to their home countries and advocate better for Ukraine’s interests: “YES connects Ukraine with international partners … and mobilizes international support.”

One could fairly wonder why, given there’s a war on, the Ukrainians don’t go to Poland, rather than the Westerners rolling to and from the capital city, which has been under 24x7 attack for months now. The answer is symbolism. The visitors are bravely doing their part, enduring the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and putting their lives on the line to prove their support for their Ukrainian brothers-in-arms.

Plus, how could the Ukrainians carry all those gift bags to Poland? It has to be in Kiev.

What happened next was another diplomatic message couched in a fireball. As the last luxury train prepared to cross the border from Ukraine into Poland, carrying the worn-out ministers and former CIA chiefs back home for some well-deserved R&R, a Russian drone struck and destroyed a spare locomotive sitting on the tracks right next to David Petraeus’s train. He literally heard it happen.

Predictably, the usual suspects began crying about Russia “targeting” western “dignitaries” (a bit of a stretch in Petraeus’s case), even though none of the delicate politicos were harmed. Still, it’s an easy connection to draw. The trains were in the far Western part of Ukraine, as far from the frontlines as it gets. The strike was perfectly timed and perfectly placed to send a bloodless but clear message.

Moscow said only that it hit rail infrastructure “used to transport military cargoes from European countries.” (I.e., Boris Johnson.)

The Russians knew what they were doing. Not only did it send a message to the attendees —we can get you anytime we want— but it spurred predictable outrage that drew the world’s attention to this absurd, quid-pro-quo influence operation funded by oligarchs.

Everything about the conference is ridiculous, especially the feigned outrage. The Times expects readers to believe that the former CIA director was shocked —shocked!— that a drone hit a nearby train. In a war zone. With a well-known rail campaign underway, and railroad advisories about changing bravery schedules to avoid the constant attacks. Indeed, Russia has destroyed over 200 locomotives since the start of the year.

But somehow, Petraeus —a former general— failed to imagine the possibility. Okay.

The Times is trying to convert the Russians’ explosive message —cut this crap out— into another wearisome Ukraine-victimhood narrative. But I think Moscow gets the points this round. A destroyed locomotive on the next track over from the globalist party train is just as effective as a mysterious satellite implosion.

The ‘dignitaries’ came to Kiev to defy Russian drones. Except, apparently, actual ones. That’s not the right kind of symbolism. That’s different. That’s not the right kind of virtue-signaling symbolism. The Russians were supposed to play along. They didn’t this time.

Message delivered. I think the party train might have reached its final destination. How about you? Let me know what you think in the comments.

Have a magnificent Monday! Come back tomorrow, for another round of insightful and delicious essential news and caffeine-commentary.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🔥🔥🔥

Thanks to Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, and a cheap Chinese knockoff that probably begins every answer with Dear Respected User and/or Provincial Security Official, the practice of law is changing. A lot. I decided to take advantage of the slow news cycle and share some amusing, provocative insights from the trenches. We begin with yesterday’s story from news aggregator Reuters, which reported, “Lawyer cites fake witnesses in murder case and blames ChatGPT.” The legal profession devoted eight centuries to replacing plain English with Latin. Artificial intelligence only needed about eighteen months to replace the Latin with imaginary police officers.

The tale began about two years ago. Oscar Renee Sandoval, 57, of Chaparral, New Mexico, was convicted back in January 2025 of first-degree murder and aggravated assault for the April 1, 2024 killing of his wife, Shiereen Al-Jibury, the mother of his children. It wasn’t hard for the jury. He chased his wife/partner Shiereen Al-Jibury across a busy highway. Shiereen desperately tried to flag someone down, but Oscar caught up and shot her four times in front of passing motorists. Some stopped to administer CPR. Making his situation worse, and ensuring they’d remember him in the lineup, Oscar threatened the witnesses before running off.

Oscar is not the crunchiest taco in the street cart. In his haste, he abandoned his SUV, which had been parked nearby. It had a bullet hole, a 9mm casing on the passenger-side floor mat, an unspent round in a cup holder, and his wallet— which held his driver’s license and credit cards. Cracking the case did not require New Mexico’s dream team. It only needed a warrant, a flashlight, and the specialized forensic technique of reading the name on the driver’s license.

After employing the clever distraction of leaving his wallet in the murder vehicle, Oscar fled to Mexico, was picked up in Ciudad Juárez eight days later, extradited, tried, and got life plus 4.5 years. (Just to make sure.)

Local news later reported that Oscar had an “unexpected” reaction to hearing the verdict. After listening to the jury’s decision, he grinned, danced in the courtroom, and exclaimed, “¡Viva Mexico!” (Literally, “I am a maniac.”) I did not make that up. None of the reports I saw stated his immigration status. I’d only be guessing. But they did say he doesn’t speak any English.

All we know for sure is that Carlso is a deeply unsympathetic character who loves Mexico.

🔥 After his sentence, presumably now dissatisfied with his free public defender’s performance of getting him life plus a few more, Oscar hired a private lawyer to handle the appeal. Enter our (non) hero, Santa Fe solo criminal defense attorney Stephen Aarons, who took the case. Aarons has been practicing law in New Mexico since 1985. His fee wasn’t in the record, but a murder appeal generally runs $20,000-$40,000, and up.

To earn that fee, attorney Aarons asked ChatGPT to review the trial transcript and write the brief. The brief was excellent. The brief clearly explained why Oscar had been falsely convicted when there was clear evidence that a different shooter wearing dark pants and a white shirt was spotted by the other drivers. The brief quoted key witnesses in Oscar’s favor, including Officer Michelle Amarillo, Officer Sanchez (no first name given), Manal Al-Jibury, and Teresa Marquez.

There was only one problem. The brief was fictional.

Nobody at the trial had actually mentioned a differently dressed shooter. The police department didn’t employ any Michelle Amarillo or an “Officer Sanchez.” Nobody knows who ‘Manal’ or ‘Teresa’ are. They were more of a mythical theater troupe than real people. The brief also fabricated testimony, described a completely different episode, and included facts that didn’t exist.

Not too good, Chat. Anyway, Aarons didn’t notice his own appellate brief was more like fan fiction. But the prosecutors did. They noticed immediately.

🔥 After he was hauled before New Mexico’s Supreme Court to account for filing a fake brief in a murder appeal, attorney Aarons threw himself on the mercy of the court using the worst of all possible defenses. I’m not guilty; I’m just retarded. “It’s of little comfort to know that my stupidity is what brings us together this afternoon,” he began. Laughably —and I bet the justices did laugh— attorney Aarons claimed he did not know AI could hallucinate stuff. This is not a strong defense.

Every lawyer involved knows what really happened. Aarons took his client’s fee and let ChatGPT do all the work. He probably even used the free version.

Remember this part for later: Supreme Court Justice Michael Vigil did not criticize Aaron for using AI. He compared it to using an intern. “There’s nothing wrong with using a law student to help you write a brief,” he admonished. “But when you put your name on that brief, and you file it, you’re attesting that you have checked that brief and it is accurate.”

That is true. Bar rules make lawyers responsible for whatever is in what we file. That’s why we must sign everything that goes in the record. It’s not because we want to.

Justice C. Shannon Bacon asked the questions now destined for every law-school ethics PowerPoint until the sun becomes a blackened cinder: “Counsel, do you watch the news? Do you listen to the radio? Do you read anything about what’s going on in the world?” She added, “Because the problem with lawyers relying on AI hallucinations is an above-the-fold story every single day.”

But then, and this is the main point, Justice Vigil added, “The issue is not AI per se. The remedy is not with AI; the remedy is with a lawyer.”

In one sense, Justice Vigil was perfectly correct. Humans have fretted about technology since before Christ. Socrates, for one famous example, warned about over-reliance on writing. The written word would make students lazy, the great philosopher cautioned, since they won’t have to memorize things. They can just write it down.

It’s a good thing Socrates never saw Twitter.

Anyway, the state high court found Aarons in contempt, referred him to the bar for discipline, barred him from appearing before the New Mexico Supreme Court while that process is pending, fined him $5,000, gave Oscar back to the public defender, and struck all Aarons’s briefing in the appeal.

Oscar will probably want his money back. It’s not a good look for Aarons’ law practice, either. It’s the digital version of being tarred and feathered.

🔥 I had lunch with a lawyer friend yesterday. Only slightly ironically, he mentioned using ChatGPT to help him draft an appellate brief. I didn’t tell him about the Aarons case. (It wasn’t the right time to bring it up.) But I wasn’t particularly surprised. At this point, using AI is not optional in litigation. Your adversaries are using it. So must you.

As of this month, September 2026, every legal database service that law offices and courts rely on —Westlaw, LexisNexis, and all their smaller competitors— offers their own built-in AI bots that find cases and draft briefs.

The attorneys at my office use AI every single day. My paralegals are required to double-check every case and statute cited in their briefs before filing. My attorneys are not allowed to file things themselves. Not because I don’t trust them. But because I don’t trust human nature. Not only was attorney Aarons lazy, he was cheap. He didn’t pay a paralegal to double-check his brief. He didn’t even use a specialized legal AI to draft it.

He did save time and money, though. But now attorney Aarons is learning an expensive and time-consuming lesson.

In my experience, when used properly, AI does not save time. Sometimes it even takes longer than the same job without AI. But when used properly, AI improves the quality of the work product. It can surface deeply buried facts. It can serve as a brainstorming partner. It can do tedious work attorneys often skip, gloss over, or pretend to do while sipping a suspicious-looking beverage poured over a whiskey rock.

It can do all those things (except sipping). And also AI can make stuff up.

So, working well with AI requires double-checking it— the same way you’d check the work of a young associate. And that usually means involving more than one human, like a lawyer and a paralegal. Proper AI use means prompting it for higher quality and precision. Smart lawyers should buy more than one service, use specialized tools, and have one AI double-check another.

But here’s the thing: month by month, AI keeps improving. It’s already better and more reliable than any second-year associate. It hallucinates far less than it did this time last year. The specialized versions almost never hallucinate. Soon, manufacturers will solve that particular problem for good.

Soon, AI will draft better and more reliably than the average experienced lawyer, and then what?

🔥 Don’t mistake me. I am not personally worried about job security. Not anytime soon. Lawyers pretty much run everything. We help write the rules. We won’t go down without a fight. More seriously, above-average lawyers will rise with AI, tame it, and use it to help their clients get better results than they can get without legal help.

In September, 2026, what I wonder about most is: what happens when all the briefs on both sides of a case are argued by AI? Then it will just be ChatGPT vs. ChatGPT. Who wins that one? As we pass some point of AI intelligence, a point we are soon approaching, there won’t be much visible difference between one AI and another. When they are all “smarter” than people, extra smarts probably doesn’t add much to a brief that maybe no human will ever read.

Which brings us to judges.

🔥 The New Mexico Supreme Court justices gave attorney Aarons a pretty hard time. They mocked him for “not knowing” that AI could hallucinate. And rightly so. Of course he knew. He just lied about being lazy, apparently hoping everyone would believe he’s mentally defective rather than slothful. The truth is worse. Even judges are doing it now. Meet Federal District Judge Henry T. Wingate of the Southern District of Mississippi.

Eleven days ago, the ABA Journal ran a story headlined, “Judge’s release of order with AI errors is ‘pretty serious matter,’ 5th Circuit says.” Ironically, the case involved a challenge to a Mississippi law barring DEI programs. Keep that in mind.

Last summer, Judge Wingate issued a TRO blocking Mississippi’s anti-DEI law. That was not surprising. The problem was that his TRO “referenced allegations and parties not in the lawsuit, nonexistent declarations by four people, and language not found in the state law being challenged,” the ABA said.

After being called out, Judge Wingate stepped up and took responsibility like a man by blaming it all on his law clerk. He said it had been filed by accident. He said it was only “an early draft that had not gone through the standard review process, which involves several layers of review.” He withdrew the TRO and issued an amended one.

Then, making the story a thousand times better, Judge Wingate’s amended TRO cited a non-existent case. I am not making that up. At his conduct hearing, one of Judge Wingate’s judicial bosses, Fifth Circuit Judge Jerry Smith, asked him, “Don’t you think that’s a pretty serious matter? If after all that had happened with getting rid of the initial order, that there still would be an AI hallucination in what was finally issued?”

Deputy Mississippi Solicitor General Anthony M. Shults is now asking the Fifth Circuit to reassign the case to a different judge. “The court didn’t disclaim the TRO, and actually embraced it, and relied on the legal reasoning in the flawed TRO, which we think is very concerning,” Shults said. He’s right. That is concerning.

Don’t miss that. AG Shults accused Judge Wingate of relying on ChatGPT’s reasoning— rather than the other way around. In other words, he’s hinting that Judge Wingate didn’t do the judging. He didn’t tell ChatGPT how to draft the order. He just told ChatGPT who should win, and then let ChatGPT explain why.

It looks like classic outcome-driven judging with a judge who wasn’t even trying, or else he would have caught the AI errors.

Soon AI won’t make errors that give lawyers and judges away. And then we won’t be able to tell when DEI rulings are 100% silicon and 0% grey matter. Here’s the thing: I will bet a GM SUV that judges are using AI just as much as lawyers are at this point. It’s human nature. Like lawyers, judges should also have to disclose when they use AI. But we can pretty much assume they all are.

🔥 Let’s see what you think. Pretend you are a busy judge. Lawyers continue filing briefs in your cases with swelling page counts. The briefs are getting smarter and more complex. They look increasingly identical in quality. And it is getting harder and harder to tell which brief should win— because AI is helping write all the briefs the lawyers keep filing in your docket.

Now. Knowing that the lawyers are using their AIs to generate all these long briefs, do you block out most of your day to sit down with a tall stack of similar-looking briefs, start reading, pull the cases, and try to reach a measured judicial decision? Or do you just feed the AI-generated briefs to your own AI, and ask ChatGPT to decide who won? (Then ChatGPT will say, “would you like me to draft the order?”)

I think you know the answer. Surely, not all judges are there yet. Especially not the good ones. But, like with the lawyers, I’d be shocked if most below-average judges weren’t already doing this. Remember Judge Wingate?

The most troubling thing is that I’m not sure whether this is a bad development or not. If the judges are actually letting ChatGPT decide, then an AI decision might be an improvement over what a below-average judge could come up with on his or her own. My concern is rather judges who tell their AI who should win based on their personal preferences, then ask the AI to help disguise that as a reasoned decision.

The problems in dealing with these issues are phenomenal. By the time you can get an AI standards committee together for its first meeting, the technology target has moved miles further away. It’s like we’re on the roller coaster ride at Islands of Adventure, but we need to talk about safety standards for roller coasters.

We must wait until the ride is over to hold the meeting. But the ride is still going, and another loop-de-loop is coming up.

Have a super Saturday! C&C will return Monday morning with an all-new roundup of essential news and commentary.

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⛑️ SPECIAL SEPTEMBER 11TH REMEMBRANCE MONOLOGUE ⛑️

This morning, the New York Times ran what it probably considers a poignant memorial essay at the top of its website, headlined “Sept. 11 and the Persistence of Memory.” The Times marveled at how 25 years later, though life goes on, Americans remain stuck in passion and grief over the attacks. But the Grey Lady should not be surprised. September 11th never really ended.

September 11th isn’t an officially federally recognized day when courts and banks close, but it should be. It is the day we unofficially recognize not just the slain but also America’s deepest psychic injury, a tragedy we’ve never fully reconciled, a wound that has partly scabbed over but has never fully healed. It is not only the day 3,000 Americans were killed by terroristic attacks. It is the day when trust in our institutions began to fracture, and civil rights we long took for granted began to fray.

On September 11, we unknowingly traded confident “party like it’s 1999” normality for the perpetual surreality of boundless security theater. For almost 25 years, until we re-elected President Trump, a widening gyre of irrational safetyism gobbled up more and more everydayness, as though the crazy geniuses at CERN accidentally launched an artificial black hole into the Earth’s core, and every year since 2001 a little more pre-9/11 reality has been sucked into its event horizon.

Worst of all, the post-attack injuries were self-inflicted. We canceled an American tradition we grew up with —seeing your loved ones off at the gate— and replaced it with a useless barefoot humiliation ritual for everyone, forever, only because one ridiculous “shoe bomber” supposedly tried to ignite his Air Jordans. (It could have been worse. Thank goodness he wasn’t an underpants bomber. Please remove your briefs and panties before entering the scanner.)

Then came the long parade of post-9/11 ‘emergency’ politics. Congress raced to pass the Patriot Act in the weeks after the attacks, vastly expanding surveillance and investigative powers. It passed the PREP Act in 2005, tucked into a massive defense authorization bill amid fears of bioterrorism; in 2020, that liability-shield architecture became one of the most destructive legal foundations of the covid emergency.

The national-security mentality metastasized into constant surveillance, censorship, public health mandates, travel restrictions, law enforcement, speech, and even private life.

Thus, the emergency never really ended. Actually, though the dust settled and the buildings were rebuilt, the state of emergency kept getting bigger.

🔥 After the attacks, and not coincidentally, strange anti-government conspiracy theories bloomed like springtime poppies in Afghanistan. Lizard people. 9/11 Truthers. Flat Earthers. Moon landing deniers. Satan’s Little Season theologists. Mudflooders. Tartarians. People who denied cloth masks worked. None of those conspiracy theories were wrong, per se. Many things that arrogant elites sneeringly called “conspiracy theories” were promptly proven correct. Others, like the ‘lizard people’ theory, can be viewed as valid folk allegories describing true underlying realities.

Spanning all that time, for nearly a quarter century, culture, art, science, literature, music, fashion, architecture, everything— it all stalled or devolved. Violent crime surged as states dropped bail requirements and stopped prosecuting “lifestyle crimes.” The center was not holding.

In short, September 11th shattered the old timeline. It somehow spun us off into a bizarre Twilight Zone dimension where progress froze and everything just kept getting worse and worse and worse. It was all self-inflicted; the nation became an emo teenager with a cutting fetish. We stopped advancing, and for the first time in American history, we started going backwards.

We made dishwashers stop washing so they could “save the water.” We made our cars —which used to last 300,000 miles or more— break down the day after the warranty expired, to “save the planet.”

We replaced beauty with compliance, durability with energy efficiency, journalism with a giant, heavy-handed op-ed wearing lipstick, and the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition with catalogs for body positivity. In one of the strangest paradoxes imaginable, after poorly vetted non-citizens succeeded in the September 11th attacks, instead of fixing the alien vetting process, we shoved natural citizens into a high-security annex.

Then Biden tossed vetting out the window altogether and threw the borders open.

🔥 With unidentified aliens streaming into the country by the thousands and millions, the people who were born here, or who’d legally immigrated, we still had to take our shoes off, submit to facial recognition, and endure escalating rituals of official suspicion. Citizens were presumed to be terrorists until they displayed their nude feet, turned their devices on, and proved their identities to skeptical TSA agents— evidence not required from unidentified aliens who used Biden’s convenient CBP One app to self-identify.

In short, the government that kept asking citizens to trust it gave every sign it didn’t trust the citizens. We discarded mutual trust for one-way trust with an exemption for illegal aliens.

Those weren’t things that happened to us. We were not victims or passive bystanders. Those were choices. We punished ourselves. We let it happen. The reasons why are complex, inscrutable, and too depressing to contemplate. Regardless of reason, the point is the September 11th attacks did not end in 2001. They continued— until November 2024.

To be clear: President Trump is not Superman. He is not an anointed savior; there has been, and will only be, one Savior. He is better seen as the apotheosis of a civilizational immune response, ordinary citizens finally rising up against globalist elites and Epstein-class “lizard people.” If you prefer, he is Nemesis to elite Hubris.

But still. Against all odds and predictions, we managed to elect a crude, mean-tweeting real-estate showman, a political outsider who’d never held any public office. We did that. Meanwhile, the corrupt globalists did everything they could to stop it. Twice.

🔥 Now for the best news. In 2026, for the first time in 25 years, we can see clear signs that the nation is beginning to heal from its deep September 11th injury. We no longer must take our shoes off and walk 25 feet on a dirty concrete floor to board an airplane. Cars are starting to drive themselves. Rap is vanishing from the Top 40. We are building new monuments in DC. The border is shut. The truth about Patriot Act abuses is trickling out.

One vexing obstacle is that only half the country wants to heal. Democrats are mired in the slough of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Polls show they dislike America. They prefer to keep the communal self-punishment going and continue the slow descent into wrecking everything, this time by openly embracing communism. For a reason I will never understand, they continue to defend their globalist elite overlords.

It’s tempting to be depressed about that, but that is glass-half-full thinking. The reality is that last November, right over half the country —enough to elect a president by popular vote— showed it was finally ready to move on.

As I assured regular readers many times during the pandemic, political change happens when even small minorities become highly motivated and organized. The excesses of the pandemic spurred a conservative counter-revolution strong enough to turn the ship of state around. And it is turning the culture around, too. Twenty-five years after Muslim terrorists killed 3,000 Americans, the wokest newsmag of them all, the Economist, ran this headline yesterday:

Even though the Economist is British, and even though it included the obligatory nod to non-violent Muslims, I doubt that the timing of that tardy admission —one day before 9/11— was coincidental. By its own rules, the Economist just outed itself as an Islamophobe. But never mind. (It changed the rules while you weren’t looking.)

Here’s why I highlighted that particular example. That concession by the left, the admission that Islamism is a threat, was necessary for us to move forward from September 11 and stop arguing about whether America was really to blame. We didn’t need an apology from them. We just needed them to admit there was an Islamist problem and stop reflexively calling everyone phobic. It took 25 years.

For the first time in a quarter century, we can start recalling September 11th not as an ongoing trauma that is slowly becoming more acute, but as a healing injury showing that our range of motion is finally coming back.

This September 11th, as we remember our murdered fellow Americans, we should also remember that we have a lot for which to be thankful.

🔥🔥🔥

Twenty-five years ago this morning, most of us can tell you exactly where we were standing. Janette Reynolds turned that question into a book — twice. She first published Where Were You On 9/11? in 2002, and this week, at a Washington, D.C. launch, she released the 25-Year Anniversary Edition — Stories That Inspire and Endure.

Part memoir, part reporting, the book follows nine people whose lives bent around that horrible day, including Gary Sinise (Lieutenant Dan, and the man who has done more for wounded veterans than most federal agencies), Pastor Carter Conlon of Times Square Church, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s niece Alveda King, and three people who walked out of the Twin Towers— two from above the South Tower’s impact zone, and a blind man led down 78 floors of the North Tower by his guide dog.

Fifteen years before he would become president, Donald Trump wrote the foreword to the original edition (also included in the new one).

In the interest of full disclosure, and because you will find out anyway, one of the nine profiles is me. The back cover is a row of pencil-sketched faces — Sinise, King, Conlon, a President — and then, down in the corner, a Florida lawyer who writes a blog before sunrise. I am identified as a “legal commentator and popular blogger,” which is the kindest thing anyone has called me in print and which Michelle has agreed not to comment on. I did not write my chapter, so for once I cannot be blamed for it.

The rest of the book is sobering but also uplifting. Janette describes her own unexpected encounter at Ground Zero a few weeks after the attacks, and how it re-routed her life; the nine interviews are threaded with that same theme: God tends to work quietly behind the scenes right up until the moment He doesn’t. It runs 370 pages and carries a strong, unapologetic Christian message.

The release’s timing was a meaningful way to mark today’s somber anniversary of 25 years and counting. If it interests you, Where Were You on 9/11? can be ordered here.

I hope you have a thoughtful and ultimately optimistic Friday. Return tomorrow morning with fresh eyes, when we’ll round up a stimulating batch of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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🔥🔥🔥

Last weekend, President Trump posted an AI picture of himself wearing Hulk Hogan’s body. The New York Times responded by assembling a 2,000-word-plus front-page psychiatric evaluation.

Which only proved that the meme worked as intended.

Yesterday, the Times ran an extraordinary “breaking news” exclusive, “60 Posts in 10 Hours: How Trump’s Social Media Reflects His Version of Reality.” It appeared near the top of the website and landed on Page A1 in this morning’s print edition, because apparently the Nation could not commence business operations until America’s Newspaper of Record informed readers that Donald Trump had posted something boastful on the Internet.

Before we begin, this was not clearly labeled opinion. It appeared under the gauzy heading “Washington Memo,” the corporate-media equivalent of choosing a fake-mustache-and-sombrero filter before pressing record on your TikTok video. The article’s deadly serious subheadline advised readers that Trump’s posts were, “critics say, a barometer of his mental state.” Then, for nearly 2,200 words, the story energetically auditioned for a top spot as one of those critics.

By my count, the Times’s purported news analysis packed in roughly two dozen express or implied insults aimed squarely at the President of the United States. It emptied out the thesaurus. Trump “unleashed” a “barrage.” He put the “bully” in the bully pulpit. His world was a “unique reality” anchored “not in fact” but in “ego.” His posts were “ever wilder,” “ever more outrageous,” “bizarre,” “abnormal,” “frenetic,” “grandiose,” “belligerent,” “delusional,” “authoritarian,” “imperialist,” and evidence that he may have “lost his mind.”

From tweets.

The story’s opening paragraphs warmed to its overheated theme by describing President Trump as a bully, fantasist, egomaniac, warrior-in-his-own-mind, failed conqueror, would-be historical giant, deteriorating old man, and an ‘enemy of presidential dignity.’ That was all before the article reached its first quoted source. In other words, that was the factual background. (Apparently anonymous adjectives now count as corroboration.)

But the Times’ problem was bigger than bias or even the embarrassing TDS flare-up. The story was hilarious— unintentionally.

Trump’s ‘terrible’ mental-health symptoms included: posting an image of himself intimidating Canada’s prime minister with a hockey stick; wearing Hulk Hogan’s muscles; pounding Iran with an enormous hammer; declaring “The Moon Is Ours”; leading an extraterrestrial in shackles; reshaping Iran into his hair profile; and draping the American flag over most of the Western Hemisphere in a cartoon map.

In other words, the President posted memes— a radical new development the Times has apparently never heard of.

Think about it. It wasn’t like he posted the nuclear inventory. They weren’t satellite photos of President Xi’s master bathroom. He didn’t upload Chuck Schumer’s hooker rolodex. It was just… Memes. Deliberately and obviously preposterous visual jokes—the digital equivalent of political cartoons, except the cartoonist is the President and the Newspaper of Record doesn’t get to choose the caption.

The Times repeatedly admitted that the pictures were AI-generated and “cartoonish,” but still analyzed them as though Trump had accidentally uploaded his latest Rorschach test. If any other influencer posts himself as Superman, sane people understand that he is not actually claiming to fly like a plane or date a myopic woman named Lois.

But at the Times, when a new cartoon meme appears, the terrified Editors frantically call the Cabinet for an emergency wellness check.

The Times looked at the “rat-a-tat of ever wilder, ever more outrageous posts” and saw “a barometer of his mental state.” Whereas, I would call this article a barometer of the New York Times’ mental state.

🔥 The Grey Lady’s investigative reporting has reached heroic levels. The reporter carefully determined that Trump began posting at 11:54 a.m., posted six more messages at 1:47 p.m., circulated twenty-seven more from 2:40 p.m. to 3:43 p.m., and finally stopped at 10:35 p.m. Somebody at the Times logged a second-by-second tweet timestamp like it was a newly discovered edit of the Zapruder film.

The story repeatedly complained about constant posting but never considered whether Trump could have uploaded a batch of posts at once and just scheduled them to publish at different times, or that aides could have done it, who, the Times conceded, ‘craft’ some of his posts. But never mind.

After all that investigative effort, the Times finally cracked the case: when the President has fewer scheduled events, he spends more time online. Pulitzer committee, clear some shelf space.

The quotes from ‘sources’ were no less deranged. The article quoted Representative Chellie Pingree (D-Maine), who you could be forgiven for never having heard of. She called Trump “truly unhinged,” “dangerous,” and potentially unfit for office, while demanding that Congress, the Cabinet, and “everyone around him” make it stop. Chellie wasn’t talking about stopping the Iran War. She meant stopping Trump from making Canada lose a pretend hockey game.

It quoted Trump’s former deputy press secretary Sarah Matthews, who insisted the meme-tweets prove Trump is going insane. “It feels like we’re genuinely watching his brain rot in real time,” she sneered, without any hyperbole whatsoever.

🔥 But one short sentence tucked away under a photo’s caption gave the whole game away: “Trump sometimes uses social media to bypass traditional media.” It explained everything. The article’s fury was actually the white-hot passion of a spurned lover.

The Times is not actually afraid that readers will believe he literally annexed the Moon. It fears that Trump no longer needs the Times, to tell readers what he said, what he meant, whether it was important, and how all virtuous people should feel about it.

That information monopoly used to matter. A president made a statement; credentialed interpreters translated it into approved English; editorial priests separated acceptable meaning from dangerous heresy; and citizens received the polished product with a side of narrative twenty-four hours later, published right beside an advertisement for 20-foot-long phone extension cords.

You see, the Times is most hurt by Trump’s rejection, which is why they cannot summon any sense of humor. This article and its endless catalog of sneers sound exactly like the torrent of superheated invective a feminist divorcee might unleash after her former husband starts dating a 19-year-old hot yoga instructor.

But, behind its back, everyone is either feeling sorry for or laughing at the Times. It is suffering Cluster B personality disorder.

The joke is not merely Trump as Hulk Hogan. The joke is watching the people who appointed themselves democracy’s guardians solemnly convene emergency seminars about Trump as Hulk Hogan. The Times even quoted Trump’s own explanation: “We do a little trolling.” Yet somehow, after ten years, the country’s most celebrated journalists still respond to every troll like a village council hearing its first report of a large creature under the bridge demanding payment to cross.

With missiles flying in hot wars, markets moving in record sweeps, and governments wobbling across the European continent, the Times devoted prime homepage real estate and Page A1 to report that Donald Trump still thinks Donald Trump is terrific. Not exactly breaking news.

Well, two can play at this game. Allow me to deploy a few diagnostic words to describe the Times’ unstable mental state: obsessive, humorless, depressed, self-centered, heartsick, cast aside, plagued with low self-esteem, and hopelessly addicted to the same man it has spent a decade ordering everyone else to ignore ever since the divorce.

🍿🍿🍿

Keeping you posted on the astonishing legal battle in Missouri over a Republican +1 map. Late yesterday, SCOTUSblog reported, “Missouri congressional redistricting dispute returns to the Supreme Court.” Round two.

Yesterday I told the tale of two orders: Federal Chief Judge Stephen Clark had just opposed the Missouri Supreme Court, by issuing a TRO ordering the Secretary of State to do the exact opposite thing and use Republicans’ 2025 map— the same one voters just relied on in the primary.

Well, yesterday the other side appealed to the Eighth Circuit. It immediately lost, so it climbed the judicial ladder back to the Supreme Court, asking it to stay Judge Clark’s order, which would restore the 2022 map and give Democrats +1 House seat.

SCOTUS moved fast. “Kavanaugh has instructed Onder and Hoskins,” the article reported, “to respond by 10 a.m. EDT on Thursday.” Meaning, this morning. Justice Kavanaugh literally ordered overnight briefing. You cannot make this stuff up.

If Democrats really think the midterms are in the bag, as all the polling news keeps claiming, they sure are fighting hard for one single seat in Missouri. The stakes in the 2026 midterms are getting astronomically high.

🔥 Republicans are fighting just as hard. Yesterday, the GOP began its unprecedented midterm ‘convention’ in Dallas. The Wall Street Journal reported, “Five Takeaways From Day One of the Republican Convention.” President Trump spoke for nearly two hours. Try to imagine Biden speaking for two hours about anything without devolving into a long, incoherent story featuring cannibals, Corn Pop, and oil cancer. On second thought, don’t try that.

Trump’s speech was the classic inventory of his favorite subjects. He recognized Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated one year ago. He triggered corporate media by claiming to have won the 2020 election, and by suggesting that, if Republicans keep control of Congress, every adult American could get a “Trump dividend” of $5,000 each. Even though the amount is implausible (totaling well over $1 trillion), reporters raced to the wires to accuse the President of “buying votes.”

It was like reporters don’t think Democrats always promising more entitlements and higher minimum wages is vote-buying. But never mind.

Corporate media also fumed about Senator John Fetterman (D-PA), who appeared at the Republican convention (by video), to say, “I’m always going to reject the extremes in socialism and that anti-American way of life.” Ouch. The Journal devoted two full paragraphs to insulting Fetterman, mostly by calling him lazy, and then reported, “His video appearance only further angered Democrats and fueled speculation that he may switch parties.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent spoke, warning that “The radical left is relentless in their pursuit to remake America in the image of every socialist hellscape of the last century.” I thought it was a neat turn of phrase. He pointed out, “Democrats brought this country to the brink of ruin” under Biden.

Keeping Congress is, admittedly, a tall order. The House almost always flips after a president’s first two years. Despite corporate media’s fake news propaganda, the regularity of the phenomenon proves it is not a referendum on a particular president. It happens to everybody, regardless of party or approval rating.

The truth is that midterm-Congress-flipping is more about turnout than anything else. Independents largely vanish from midterms, since they typically only vote in presidential elections. So it’s a battle between partisans, and the out-of-power party is usually more fired up. It’s that simple. It is literally all about turnout.

Republicans have a plan. “The midterms are not supposed to be won by the sitting president, but we’re going to change that,” President Trump promised. He pledged to campaign in 35 competitive House and Senate races all around the country. So we know that much. But vexingly, they haven’t told us the plan. (Nor should they.)

The convention is scheduled for two days, yesterday and today. President Trump will conclude the agenda tonight, along with Vice President JD Vance.

What corporate media either missed or intentionally ignored is that this convention isn’t about publishing a platform or confirming the party’s nominees, like normal conventions. This one is the launch party for the Republicans’ midterm strategy. So far, they’ve been sitting back and keeping their campaign powder dry. But now the GOP’s war chest is finally opening.

Ready or not, here it comes.

🦆🦆🦆

Alert! Law enforcement officials need our help. Police in Chatham County, Georgia, are searching for a man who allegedly broke into somebody else’s backyard, swam in the pool, relaxed in the hot tub, became “obsessed” with a rubber duck, stole $1,200 worth of pool towels, and escaped on a bicycle. WTOC reported the developing crisis yesterday under the headline, “Police search for suspect seen on video using pool, hot tub and ‘intensely interacting’ with rubber duck in Chatham County.” Security photos ruled out Goldilocks.

The headline alone contained enough plot material to fuel Season One of a new Netflix series. It has breaking and entering, luxury recreation, forbidden passion, grand larceny, and a low-speed getaway. All it needs is Helen Mirren as the police chief and a troubled detective who drinks alone because years ago he trusted the wrong bath toy.

According to alert Chatham County police officers, surveillance cameras recorded the unidentified man frolicking on the Whitefield Avenue property for over three hours in the middle of the night between 2:15 a.m. and 5:30 a.m. The suspect didn’t just trespass; he enjoyed the full package. “It’s obviously not the biggest crime we’ve dealt with this month,” a CCPD statement said, “but it has a lot of ick-factor.” 😳

The short article provided a surprising amount of helpful detail. First, the unidentified intruder took a refreshing moonlight swim. Then he moved to the hot tub. Presumably he would have ordered room service, but the concierge was asleep and also did not know the home had become a luxury hotel.

At some point, police say, the man noticed a rubber duckie— and quickly became “infatuated” with it. Security video shows him spending more than ten minutes —and I am not making this up— “intensely interacting” with the duck. That is the official police description. Intensely.

“Intensely interacting” is the kind of official euphemism authorities deploy when everybody knows what happened but nobody at the press conference wants to be the first person to make eye contact. It safely covers a broad range of conduct, from a stern maritime interrogation to a torrid relationship that will require the duck to enter the Witness Protection Program.

The department added that it wants to find the mysterious intruder “so he doesn’t do this to someone else.” This is prudent police thinking. We can all agree the police should do everything in their power to safeguard the community from this kind of demonic transgression. But it does raise a few difficult jurisdictional grey areas: does “someone else” include other rubber ducks? And if so, have authorities alerted manufacturers? Which statute, precisely, prohibits such intense, rubberized interactions? The unauthorized romantic use of a bath toy?

If there isn’t a law, should there be?

🦆 Until the suspect is apprehended, Chatham residents are advised to bring all rubber ducks indoors after dark. Ducks should avoid isolated hot tubs. If approached by a stranger, they should remain calm, float toward a well-lit area, and squeak three times. Under no circumstances should they attempt to confront the suspect, especially since their feet are decorative and their wings have no practical range of motion.

I’m already running long, but one more detail is worth pausing over. $1,200 in pool towels? Towels he carried away on bicycle? Were they made of Apple stock certificates? For $1,200, a towel should dry you, apply sunscreen, validate parking, and contact your dermatologist about that thing on your shoulder. It should remember your birthday. It should whisper, “You were right about your sister,” while tenderly enveloping you in Egyptian cotton.

And I really hate to bring this up, but… Was the towel caper an inside job? I am not accusing the duck of anything. I am only asking. But it is curious that, after more than ten minutes of ‘intense interaction,’ the suspect suddenly knew exactly where to find twelve hundred dollars in towels. Follow the feathers.

The American Council for Rubber Duck Relations did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

WTOC assured readers that, and I quote, “The Chatham County Police Department is the lead investigative agency in this case.” This is important because until then it was unclear whether jurisdiction belonged to the FBI, the Coast Guard, Fish and Wildlife, or the NTSB’s Hot Tub Division. Interpol is monitoring the duck.

The police —again, I am not making this up— have asked anyone who recognizes the lovestruck intruder to call the police department right away. “Tipsters can also call Crime Stoppers at 912-234-2020,” the article encouraged, “where tips are anonymous and may qualify for a cash reward.”

A cash reward! Diligent Chatham police are leaving no towel unturned. Or unfolded. You get the idea.

Have a terrific Thursday! Ride back here tomorrow morning, for even more essential news (okay, maybe not always entirely essential) and extra-caffeinated commentary.

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🍿🍿🍿

Yesterday I told you to get the popcorn ready. I was right, but under-equipped: Missouri’s election officials now need the popcorn, a hard hat, and a laminated card explaining which court order they are supposed to risk violating first. Yesterday, the New York Times dramatically reported, “Dueling Court Rulings Leave Missouri’s Congressional Races in Chaos.”

“Conflicting court orders issued on the same day threw the congressional elections in Missouri into chaos on Tuesday,” the Times said, “two months before an election in which a handful of races could decide control of the House.” Wait till you hear this.

Last September, Missouri Republicans passed a new congressional map —House Bill 1 (HB1)— as part of the mid-decade redraw President Trump wanted before the 2026 midterms. The point was one more House seat: Missouri sends six Republicans and two Democrats, and the new map carved up 81-year-old Emanuel Cleaver’s Kansas City district to make it seven-and-one.

Democrats, who for obvious reasons preferred the old map, complained about “tyranny.”

As I mentioned yesterday, Democrats attacked the HB1 map using a citizen referendum process, and on Thursday the Missouri Supreme Court pulled the plug by ordering the HB1 map to be frozen, and to revert to the 2022 map for the midterm elections. The twist was that 1.2 million Missourians voted in the August primary on the new map lines, so it was chaos, though not the chaos the NYT focused on.

So, over the weekend, Republicans filed and briefed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court— which has had to implement a pager system to handle all the emergency requests. Yesterday I said the high court could rule any moment, and later in the day it did— in a curt, one-sentence order signed by Justice Kavanaugh rejecting the emergency stay application and denying consideration of the matter altogether.

But before Democrats could begin celebrating came a surprise: plot twist. “But soon after Justice Kavanaugh acted,” the Times reported, “word spread that Stephen R. Clark, the chief federal judge in St. Louis, had separately ordered the state to use the map that Missouri Republicans drew last year.” Boom.

It seems one of the candidates affected by the flip-flopping maps, Bob Onder (R-MO-3), had also raced into court, but into the local federal court, and asked District Chief Judge Clark (Trump appointee) for an emergency 14-day stay, which he granted as a hard-to-appeal TRO. Judge Clark suggested the Missouri Supreme Court violated the U.S. Constitution by restoring the 2022 map. He said his order was meant to prevent “havoc.”

Judge Clark’s order then ordered Missouri’s Secretary of State Denny Hoskins to use the 2025 HB1 map for the upcoming midterm elections.

Uh-oh! On one side, Missouri’s Supreme Court had ordered Hoskins, a Republican, to use the 2022 map. But now Judge Clark has told him he must use the 2025 HB1 map. “I believe that the federal court does trump the Missouri Supreme Court,” Mr. Hoskins announced, and emailed Judge Clark’s order to all local election supervisors in the state. That quip caused the Missouri Supreme Court to order Hoskins to appear before them in person tomorrow and show cause why he should not be held in contempt of court.

The Missouri Supreme Court told Hoskins to be ready to answer three tough questions. The Missouri Independent quoted the order’s pointed inquiry:

🍿 Behold, chaos! Local officials are starting to pick sides and Democrat ones are claiming they don’t know which map is correct. “I think they’re probably not sure what map they should use, and they need to talk to their lawyers about that,” the lawyer for the group opposing the newer HB1 map, Chuck Hatfield, said. Missouri’s election is now a Choose Your Own Adventure. Both choices end in contempt.

Boone County Clerk Brianna Lennon explained, “We have diametrically opposed issues because we’ve got the Supreme Court of Missouri saying that we have to use the 2022 map; otherwise we’ll be in violation of their order. And then we have the federal court saying that we can’t use them; otherwise, we’ll be in violation of the federal court.” Catch-22!

A House seat hangs in the balance. It is a tale of three courts. Missouri’s highest court ruled 7-0 that the state constitution requires all laws —including election maps— to be frozen if a valid citizen referendum gets enough signatures. Nobody’s arguing against that. SCOTUS —court number two, the highest US court— then declined to stay Missouri’s supremes, without giving a reason. Then the Missouri District Court —third, and the lowest court in the bunch— ruled that going back to the 2022 map after the primaries disenfranchises voters in a federal election, and called his ruling Purcell in reverse.

What happens now? Who knows! Judge Clark’s decision is surely headed back to the U.S. Supreme Court, which just sniffed at the appeal from the state supreme court. It could take a pass again, like it did the first time, or it might accept the case on its second try, since it’s now a federal issue with different parties, and it’s not just a matter of interpreting a state constitution.

The most significant fact that none of the stories reported is that Justice Kavanaugh could have passed on the case because he knew the TRO was pending in Judge Clark’s courtroom. Kavanaugh entered his short order at 4:30pm that day, and Judge Clark entered his TRO twenty-eight minutes later at 4:58pm.

Catherine Hanaway, Missouri’s Republican attorney general, noted, “Never before in American history has a court overturned a congressional map after a primary and before a general.” She’s mostly right. There’s a lot happening these days that has never happened in American history before. Keep on popping.

🔥🔥🔥

One of 2026’s wildest stories appeared in a magazine-style feature in the New Yorker, which reported, “A Political Operative on the Verge of Self-Deportation.” The subheader explained, “Daysi González, who works to elect Democrats, is gearing up to leave the U.S. as soon as this month. She wants her own party to pay attention.”

The article, penned by Jesús Rodríguez, explained that Daysi, 31, is not a U.S. citizen. She cannot vote. She can’t legally contribute money to campaigns. She is Salvadoran and is living in the U.S. under Temporary Protected Status. The Trump administration appears to have ended Salvadoran TPS, effective today. The New Yorker called the date a brick wall of a deadline. “That’s when I sell my house, I sell my car, I buy a ticket, I pack everything I own, I get rid of everything I can’t take with me,” Daysi told the news mag.

“Temporary” protected status for Salvadorans began in 2001 following double earthquakes. Apparently it took twenty-five years for the earthquake to finish its paperwork. Trump tried to cancel Salvadoran TPS during his first term, but a court blocked it. Then, during his last week in office, Biden extended the ‘temporary’ program again, through September 9, 2026 (today)— and the Administration now seems to have declined to further extend it. Presumably DHS feels the earthquake situation has improved.

“Temporary Protected Status is exactly that – temporary,” a DHS spokesperson recently told CBS News. “For too long, TPS has been allowed to function as a de facto amnesty program despite Congress not intending it to be permanent.” Several outlets reported that DHS has not officially announced it will let Salvadoran TPS expire, but it doesn’t sound like it’s happening. LA Times, this morning:

To date, the Trump 2.0 Administration has ended or declined to extend TPS for: Afghanistan, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Haiti, Honduras, Myanmar (Burma), Nepal, Nicaragua, South Sudan, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen. Things aren’t looking too good for anxious Salvadorans. Bad odds.

🔥 According to the story, the Salvadoran femme exile is super interested in US politics. She loves it! As a political consultant who helps 1st- and 2nd-generation Americans get elected, Daysi “has a job that puts her in rooms with powerful people.” She “tries to help Democrats win some of the most consequential races in the country, including James Talarico’s campaign for Senate, but also smaller names in red districts trying to flip the House.”

I’m not an immigration law expert, but 11 C.F.R. §110.20(i) bars any foreign national (including TPS holders) from “directly or indirectly participating in the decision-making process” of any person’s election-related activities, “such as decisions concerning the making of contributions, donations, expenditures, or disbursements.” She can’t even be in the room. DHS, take note.

Over the years, when she could spare the time, Daysi sometimes tried to get a green card. One lawyer suggested she marry her boyfriend, but she didn’t want to. Now that it is down to the wire, her boss at the political consulting firm, Chuck Rocha, is trying to help. He “has many friends in Washington.” But Chuck pulled his strings to no avail. “You mean I can’t call a senator? I can’t call the chairman of the Hispanic Caucus and just fix this sh-t?” he said, raising his arms incredulously. “No matter how many important people you know, no matter how much money you think you have, that you’ve made at this little firm—none of that matters.”

Thank goodness. Chuck is furious because those calls used to work.

Incidentally, Chuck Rocha, who’s buddies with so “many important people” and runs a top Democrat political consulting firm, was convicted of embezzlement in 2013 and served 24 months of federal probation. In other words: On-brand.

🔥 President Trump has scrambled traditional politics so much that Democrats aren’t even talking about immigration, which frustrated Daysi the most. “House Minority Leader, Hakeem Jeffries,” the article complained, “didn’t even mention immigration in a recent press conference announcing an agenda of Democratic priorities should they retake the majority.” Daysi also complained about her politician clients, who say they can’t help her. In an italicized sentence dripping with sarcasm, she mocked, “And that’s why I want to win and fight for immigrants.”

The New Yorker interviewed Andrea Flores, who worked in the Obama Administration and was a Biden border official. Flores explained the problem: the public is against them. “There may not be an immediate electoral gain in prioritizing immigration,” she told the reporter, or in “allowing the Republican Party to continue to weaponize that dysfunctional system against Democrats.”

Translation: Republicans’ “weapon” is a broken system packed with criminals and fraudsters that voters can see with their own eyes, which is getting awkwardly hard to neutralize using the old tricks, like making bizarre emotional appeals to rescue well-paid political activists by favor-trading in Washington.

Rafael Collazo, who runs a ‘Latino civil-rights’ activist group, groused that “the people that claim to be more progressive on immigration issues—the Democratic Party, Democrats in Congress—they haven’t done enough. None of them have done enough.” TAW.

As well she might, when commenting in an article destined for national publication, Daysi told The New Yorker she is considering self-deporting. She explained she’ll return briefly to El Salvador, then emigrate to Spain, where it is easy for Latin Americans to apply for citizenship. “It’s like a sort of reparations program,” she laughed.

Her boss, the well-connected Chuck Rocha, offered to let her keep working remotely, but Daysi isn’t sure that will work for her. She’s made no firm plans.

🔥 One question the article did not answer is why a non-citizen is so interested in U.S. politics at all. Especially considering that she cannot vote, register, or donate to campaigns. Yet she affiliated with a major political party and built a career advising Democrats on how to win U.S. elections. “There is always a fix that no one else has thought of, a loophole to be discovered,” the story explained, referring to Daysi’s political problem-solving skills.

Apparently she couldn’t find the loophole this time. Imagine: Democrats without loopholes. That’s like toddlers without the word, “why?”

One obvious reason Daysi is so fascinated with American politics on the blue side of the aisle is self-interest. After all, Democrats kept extending her TPS status; Republicans wanted to end it. So helping more pro-immigration Democrats win is a natural move for a resident non-citizen. (Cough, like illegally voting.) But that doesn’t explain everything. According to the story, Daysi is so politically minded that she left the Mormon church, where she’d been raised, because too many Mormons are MAGA.

She traded one religion for another.

She’s also probably feeling glum about going back home to El Salvador, which is currently led by one of the most energetic conservative leaders in South America. Remember Nayib Bukele? He set up that CECOT hypermax prison. You’d think Daysi would enjoy the record-low crime rates and the wide-open opportunity to advocate for Salvadoran socialists. (But no. Too much MAGA. Hence, her potential plans for Spain.)

Daysi’s active Instagram account does not disclose a firm departure date. But she is all over corporate media. She’s quoted in a CBS story from six days ago, where she called her options “self-deport or risk everything that I’ve built here”— suggesting she might risk it. Meanwhile, she has been busy giving heart-rending interviews to all the alphabet networks, which mainly described her as a “Virginia homeowner.”

There’s so much wonderful material here. Immigration reporting has become so tone-deaf it just jumped the shark. Self-deportation is going mainstream. Democrat political activists are going bye-bye. The political influence of non-citizens is draining away . TPS is finally ending for one country after another. (Sorry, blackpillers.) Let’s pause and wonder about this: how many other Daysi Gonzalezes are out there? Whatever the number, it is too many.

Calling this “progress” hardly does it justice. Mega progress.

🔥🔥🔥

The laughs kept coming yesterday. The New York Times ran a breathless story about the latest Trump-trolling diplomatic crisis headlined, “Iceland Summons U.S. Ambassador Over Provocative Trump Map” Oh, boy. Get this: the article prudishly omitted the “provocative Trump map” advertised in its own headline, presumably to avoid triggering and further offending progressive readers. But I will! Here it is:

Apparently Iceland was hardest hit. Prickly Prime Minister Kristrun Frostadottir (say that three times fast) of Iceland was not amused. She snapped, “There is nothing funny or normal about making fun of the sovereignty of states.” Well. Some people thought it was funny.

Nor was the Times amused. Its reporters took the graphic deadly seriously. Reporters even refused to look directly at the image, since a single glance could detach their retinas. They had to use mirrors, or look at it out of the sides of their eyes. But they raced to the phones. “The American Embassy in Reykjavik declined to comment on Mr. Trump’s post or Iceland’s response,” the article somberly said, “and the White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.” Imagine that. The Oval Office didn’t immediately respond to a question about a joke tweet.

Iceland’s foreign minister Thorgerdur Katrin Gunnarsdottir (gosh), summoned U.S. Ambassador Billy Long to ‘express’ what her ministry called a “clear message that the image was wholly inappropriate.” No joking around. “This is not a joke in my opinion,” she unnecessarily explained. “And if this is supposed to be a joke,” she added, “it’s a bad joke.” Speak for yourself.

The world waits anxiously to discover whether Iceland, stung by the mortal insult, will declare World War III and mobilize its entire icebreaker fleet (of one), the country’s terrifying (unarmed) ship Frosty McIceFace.

The Times did not report that Mexico, Greenland, Cuba, or even ultra-polite Canada had summoned their ambassadors to lodge official diplomatic complaints. Presumably, through repeated exposure therapy, over time, those countries have become immune to being triggered by Trump’s random Truth Social posts.

Short of summoning ambassadors, Iceland could have struck back, by tweeting an image of North America covered by Iceland’s flag. That would show us! Or it could have gotten a sense of humor, assuming woke progressives are allowed to have those now.

Trump plays the media and the Euroweenies like they are an electronic drum set. And I, for one, am here for it. Keep drumming.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! Coffee & Covid will be back tomorrow, with even more snarky news and caffeine-fueled commentary.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🍿🍿🍿

We are closely watching two 2026 emergency election cases pending at the U.S. Supreme Court this week. The Justices have been working overtime.

🍿 First, as you may recall, our old friend Judge Indira Talwani enjoined President Trump’s new USPS ballot-envelope standard, blocking it for the midterms. But the rule is clinging to life support, even as North Carolina early ballots continue streaming out. By some kind of election miracle, last week North Carolina abruptly announced it would use the new USPS standards voluntarily, so it didn’t give Democrats an automatic win.

Today, an emergency appeal —the third SCOTUS appeal in the case— is ripe at the Supreme Court. The government filed its brief on Saturday. Justice Jackson fast-tracked the briefing schedule, with California’s response due by tomorrow (Wednesday) at 4pm. We shall see.

This case is off the map. At this point, nobody is even pretending to predict what happens next.

🍿 Last week, Missouri Democrats dreamed up a citizen referendum petition that would scrap this year’s newly gerrymandered maps —maps favoring Republicans— even after the primaries had been run using the new maps. At first, it didn’t work. Cole County judge Daniel Green properly rejected their request to suspend the new maps until “voters decide” the referendum. Democrats then filed an emergency appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court, which reversed the trial judge 7-0 and ordered the old maps to be restored and used instead in the general election. Cue chaos.

Supported by the national GOP and the State of Florida, Missouri’s Secretary of State Denny Hoskins filed an emergency appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The SCOTUS case was fully briefed yesterday and now awaits the Court’s decision.

It’s hard to imagine SCOTUS endorsing Missouri swapping its maps after the primary election. It’s like Ruth’s Chris changing menus after everyone has ordered and finished eating their appetizers. Under their long-standing Purcell Rule, the Supreme Court has cautioned courts against causing chaos, though the rule generally applies to federal courts. Well?

🍿 In good election news, late last week, the Supreme Court rescued Republicans’ campaign ad budget. The Associated Press reported, “Supreme Court grants Republican emergency appeal on TV ad rates before midterms.” Four Democrat candidates, Sherrod Brown, Jon Ossoff, Roy Cooper, and Kristen McDonald Rivet, had gone to the Fourth Circuit and won a ruling that the mandatory candidate discount belongs only to candidates. That would not have stopped the GOP from advertising. But it would have made the party committees pay full freight for the same spots, and stations were already canceling the cheap rates.

The DNC is broke and in debt. The RNC, NRSC, and NRCC have hundreds of millions teed up. The Fourth Circuit’s decision would have drastically limited the Republican committees by making them spend much more on ads for the same airtime.

On Friday, the Supreme Court stayed the Fourth Circuit, restoring the status quo ante for the midterm elections. Roy Cooper’s campaign complained the Court gave “a massive TV ad discount to billionaires.” Um. Billionaires are the only people who don’t get the discount, since only party committees qualify, not super PACs. The discount goes to the party, which is to say, to small donors. But never mind.

🍿 How unusual is this blizzard of last-minute elections litigation at the Supreme Court? Very. Emergency election applications aren’t strange anymore; they’re practically a legal sub-specialty. What is 2026-bizarre is the order of operations. Missouri voters have already nominated candidates in districts the state supreme court just erased. Absentee envelopes are already in the mail under a postal rule a federal judge has blocked, and the administration is racing to restore it before Wednesday afternoon.

This is as close to a high-stakes, Hollywood-style legal drama as you get in the world of injunction litigation. Somewhere, a deputy solicitor general is living off caffeine and Ritalin.

We used to litigate elections after they happened. In 2026, we are now litigating them between the primary and the general, with the ballots already in the stream. November 3rd is starting to look less like a finish line and more like a filing deadline the lower courts keep missing.

With less than eight weeks to go, the only thing I can forecast is that things will probably get even stranger before then. Race to the stores. We need to stock up on popcorn.

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🔥🔥🔥

There’s much more happening than election litigation. On Friday, Fox News reported, “Trump administration proposes stripping tax-exempt status from schools using race-based programs.” It’s big. The subheadline explained, “Proposed Treasury rules could impact 18,000 schools and 750,000 students who may qualify for race-based scholarships.”

“Schools rebranding race-based preferences as equitable, inclusive, or diversity-enhancing does not change their discriminatory nature,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said.

In other words, Secretary Bessent explained that calling a race preference “equitable” does not make it nondiscriminatory, just as calling a raccoon “an outdoor cat” does not make it safe near the trash cans.

The new Treasury rules would revoke the tax-exempt status of private schools and colleges if they use race at all in admissions, athletics, scholarships, loans, or whatever the DEI office renames it before the lunch break. Treasury stressed that its proposal would not stop schools from using religious criteria or helping disadvantaged students using race-neutral criteria, like income, geography, first-generation status, or preference for Asian cuisine in the school commissary.

The American Association of University Professors is furious. The professors want to keep racist preferences. They are “considering” a lawsuit. “This is not neutral enforcement ‌of ⁠civil-rights law. It is an affirmative attempt to turn civil-rights law against the very people it was enacted to protect,” AAUP President Todd Wolfson said. “For half a century, federal policy recognized that measures intended to dismantle entrenched racial exclusion are not equivalent to policies designed to preserve it.”

Naturally, civil-rights laws become dangerous the moment they protect the wrong person.

The proposal turns the entire debate into one childishly simple question: may a school treat an individual differently because of race and still call itself racially nondiscriminatory? Academics support equality so strongly that they have developed several hundred pages of guidance explaining when it must not be used.

Back in 1983, the IRS pulled Bob Jones University’s tax exemption over racial rules, and the Supreme Court approved it as fundamental public policy. Treasury is now running Bob Jones in the other direction, and the same people who cheered back then are now’ considering’ a lawsuit. Consider away.

To be fair, the old rule was also easy to understand: racial discrimination was not discrimination whenever the discriminators had good intentions and virtue-signaling lanyards. Treasury’s proposal threatens the great administrative innovation of our age: accomplishing exclusion through the vocabulary of including people.

Some pigs are more equal than others. The proposal is now open for public comment. Ironically, it closes on November 3rd— election day.

🔥🔥🔥

We have learned the foxes were hired to administer the immigration henhouse. Yesterday, Newsweek reported, “Senior USCIS official arrested in green card crackdown issues denial”

Meet Lukman Owolabi Ganiyu (fake name alert), a former Senior Immigration Services Officer with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). USCIS handles most immigration-benefit decisions inside the United States, including adjustment to lawful permanent residence (“green cards”), removal of conditional-residence status, and naturalization. The word “Services” in USCIS can, apparently, have a flexible definition.

Ganiyu is a dual US-Nigerian citizen. Last week, the DOJ said Ganiyu oversaw a six-year pay-to-play immigration bribery scam stretching from December 2019 through March 2026, and was promoted to Senior Officer in 2024— four years into the fraud. (His closing rate was terrific.) The DOJ’s complaint assigned about $671,438 in payments to Ganiyu through Zelle, Cash App, and similar channels, plus about $287,830 in cash deposits that investigators alleged were intended to conceal the source— roughly $959,268 combined.

I probably don’t need to say this, but $959,268 —just the ones they’ve confirmed— is not just a side gig; it’s a parallel economy. (The FBI’s internal estimate is north of $1.7 million.)

According to the DOJ affidavit, Ganiyu also earned about $407,838 in federal salary between 2020 and 2025. That’s a lot, but his side-hustle was better. The investigation began promptly in May, 2025, out of the FBI’s Dallas field office, based on an “internal tip,” presumably from a person who felt that finally someone would listen. He “resigned for personal reasons” in March of this year.

The DOJ connected many of the payments directly to specific immigration approvals, many of which were plainly ineligible. It said Ganiyu repeatedly bypassed interviews, supervisory reviews, jurisdictional limits, criminal background checks(!), and other normal processing protocols like the antiquated notion of eligibility. Some applicants were approved on the same day as the bribes.

From his apparently unsupervised position at USCIS, Ganiyu ran private immigration premium lane. For the right price, he offered same-day service. (At least it shows government can move fast when it has an incentive. Legal immigration applicants wait years.)

Investigators also discovered extensive communications between Ganiyu and many applicants whose immigration cases he handled, totaling thousands of messages and hundreds of calls. The communications weren’t through the government portal or his official phone line. They came through encrypted WhatsApp texts and calls.

Thousands of messages. At some point, it stops being clandestine communication and becomes a customer-service department. Additional red flags floating over his desk included the startling fact that from his Dallas office, Ganiyu routinely assigned cases from distant offices to himself, including Houston, Charlotte, and Minneapolis, which is about 1,000 miles away.

This demonstrates the USCIS’s rigid internal security controls, provided that nobody clicked the “Assign to Me” button.

🔥 DOJ arrested him last Wednesday. (The judge approved his bail bond but, in a rare triumph for judicial wisdom, took both his passports away and ordered an ankle bracelet.)

The complaint said Ganiyu, a co-defendant, and immigration applicants repeatedly exchanged money in a confusing flurry of transactions— reflecting their attempts to route, reconcile, and obscure the payments. If convicted, he and his co-defendant, ‘associate’ Adeniyi Akeem Somoye, the bagman, face up to five years in federal prison and a possible $250,000 fine for conspiracy to receive illegal gratuities by a public official. (In simpler words, bribes.)

Cunning, perhaps, but not particularly smart. Investigators reportedly found personal bank statements showing payments in Ganiyu’s government email account. This is the public-corruption equivalent of leaving a signed confession in the folder marked “Inspector General—Start Here.” He must have felt pretty comfortable that no one was watching.

“Selling immigration benefits for cash is a blatant abuse of public trust,” said U.S. Attorney Ryan Raybould. “When a federal official puts a price tag on lawful status, we will intervene immediately. Public corruption will never be tolerated in the Northern District of Texas.” Immediately in this case means sixteen months. But we’ll take it. Wheels of justice and so forth.

Now, all the immigrants who bribed Ganiyu could be prosecuted criminally and/or denaturalized. One hopes. America is still a land of opportunity, although we assume selling lawful status to people who can’t pass a criminal background check was not originally meant to be a franchise opportunity.

🔥 Six years. And nobody clocked him. As interesting as this case may be for a variety of reasons, it summons the specter of a much more profound problem. What happened to oversight? In other words, how could he get away with it for six years— including the entire Autopen Administration? This is shocking evidence of an institutional blind spot roughly the size of that hexagon on Saturn.

Green cards are not like fishing licenses. Immigration vetting is a core national-security function. But USCIS’s software apparently allowed one officer to assign himself a customer’s application and approve it the same afternoon. That is less an ‘internal control’ and more like a self-checkout lane with the camera turned off.

While you are noodling on that one, ask yourself this: how did the applicants know where to find him? And how did they learn they could get same-day turnaround on WhatsApp without getting in trouble? Presumably he didn’t advertise on TikTok or put up a website. Was it just word-of-mouth? Yelp reviews? Was his ‘associate’ Samoye out beating the bushes for business? And all that time, nobody noticed?

How many preparers, activists, or immigration lawyers knew about the ‘easy way’ to get a difficult case approved through CashApp and the Dallas office? Somebody was sending him customers. The complaint names applicants from Minneapolis; it does not yet name who told them to call Dallas.

We can only speculate why previous Administrations were so lax that someone like Ganiyu felt comfortable enough to check his bribe receipts using his official email account. He must have believed that nobody cared.

Part of the problem is that these kinds of prosecutions are politically embarrassing. It is, apparently, easier to look the other way than to look closely at what senior immigration officers are doing.

Well, the Trump 2.0 Administration doesn’t seem too worried about the optics. Or else the permission structure has changed enough that it is now politically possible to do the one basic job everyone assumes the federal government is always doing: stopping Nigerian scammers from being installed in key agency positions and selling our national security to the highest bidder.

I’m adding this story to the TAW list.

Have a terrific Tuesday! Come on back tomorrow, for more delicious essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

📈📈📈

Last week, the Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board —after first apologizing for presenting good news— published an encouraging op-ed headlined, “The Food Stamp Reform Is Working.” The piece began, “Sorry to be the bearer of good news in these ill-tempered times, but fewer Americans are using food stamps.”

According to new USDA data, food-stamp enrollment crashed from 42.3 million to 36.6 million in the 12 months between May 2025 and May 2026. Nearly half of states saw enrollment declines of more than 10%, including Florida (-22%) and Arizona (-54%). “Republicans,” the Editors snarkily noted, “have ended the literal free lunch for able-bodied beneficiaries and states.”

Catching SNAP scammers one by one is important. It provides helpful deterrence and adds a much-needed “FO” to the educational acronyms of food-stamp fraudsters. For instance, earlier this year the Massachusetts DOJ office reported snagging an entrepreneurial swindler who billed SNAP up to $500,000 a month from his supermarket empire in Boston. How altruistic.

Showing levels of diligence ordinarily seen in month-old white bread, our alert public servants failed to notice that the ‘empire of fraud’ operated from a single 150-square-foot store named “Jesula Variety Store.” Apparently, the ‘variety’ was his keen marketing techniques that netted a cool half million in food stamp redemptions monthly, whereas full-service mega-supermarkets only scraped up around $82,000 a month on average.

Just saying, but the Jesula Variety Store was slightly short of being a full-service supermarket. 150 square feet is about the size of a below-average room in an Eastern European hostel with no closet and where the ironing board drops out of the wall over the bed.

Not only that! But the auditors also missed the small but critical fact that the empire-building owner, Antonio Bonheur, was himself on food stamps. That is heartwarming. Americans are a loving people who want every immigrant to experience the same opportunity for self-improvement and free liquor that we all enjoy. “Bonheur maintained numerous secondary bank accounts through which SNAP proceeds were transferred,” the DOJ’s statement explained, “withdrawn as cash and redeposited to create the appearance of legitimate business activity while obscuring the true source of funds.”

He pleaded guilty in late March— carving another notch into the DOJ’s convictions belt. But let’s be honest. While always entertaining, pinching fraudsters individually after, like Mr. Bonheur, they have milked taxpayers for over $7 million, is a painfully slow way to fix the broken welfare system. Fortunately, Republicans in Congress took action last year.

🔥 The Journal explained that the GOP’s 2025 budget did two pivotal things. First, it increased SNAP’s monthly work requirements and closed a “work requirement waiver” loophole. Second, it started charging states a higher share if their “error rates” were above the pre-pandemic average. Nothing shrinks a state bureaucracy’s enthusiasm for “equity” and careless generosity like learning that, starting soon, “federal money” will include some of its money.

As a result, food-stamp enrollment has fallen by -5.7 million in one year —20% below forecast— proving that government programs can shrink without first being struck by a giant asteroid. The Trump 2.0 reforms worked before Democrats had finished explaining why they could not possibly work.

For decades, Washington’s anti-fraud strategy has consisted of sternly announcing that fraud would not be tolerated and then tolerating it at scale. It’s all about a radical conservative concept largely unknown to progressive economists called incentives.

The DOJ’s Fraud Task Force is reducing fraudsters’ incentives for doing the fraud. The much maligned GOP Congress is reducing the states’ incentives for tolerating the fraud. Win-win.

🚗🚗🚗

This year, we’ve invested a substantial amount of thought and discussion into artificial intelligence, but there is another radical technology story quietly reaching a boiling point. Let’s begin with a Babylon Bee-style headline, also from the Journal, announcing carmakers’ brilliant new innovation in electric cars: putting the gas engines back. Yesterday, the WSJ reported, “Carmakers Have a New Idea to Boost EV Range: Add a Gas Engine.”

Somehow, Tesla —a company with no revenue and no market share— was able to build a nationwide network of charging stations that solved drivers’ thorniest EV problem: range anxiety. But the traditional carmakers who already owned the auto market relied on a $7.5 billion Biden grant to build out their networks— hoping to use ‘free’ taxpayer money.

Shockingly, even with Tesla’s example to follow, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg couldn’t pull it off and built only about 68 chargers in total, at around $110 million per charger. That was a problem. Automakers experienced what the Journal euphemistically called a “painful retrenchment,” leaving “billions of dollars in stranded investments as customers failed to make the switch at levels once projected.”

Worse, the new Administration stopped pushing everyone toward electric cars. “EV sales remain depressed,” the article explained, “since the Trump administration removed a $7,500 incentive last year and rolled back regulations driving a more electric market.”

So, desperate automakers, lacking a necessary way to power customers’ batteries, had a flash of inspiration —eureka! What if they put the charging station right in the car? They are calling them Extended Range Electric Vehicles (EREV). EREVs are not hybrids (which everyone hates). Hybrids combine two propulsion systems in the same vehicle, doubling the number of things that will probably break as soon as the warranty expires.

EREVs will still be all-electric vehicles, but with a gas generator —not a motor— added to charge the battery when it runs low. Do not call it a hybrid. It is an electric vehicle with a battery, a gas tank, an exhaust system, and a 250hp V6 gasoline engine. Please try to keep up. Admittedly, the distinction is not completely obvious. The point is, carmakers have solved the electric-vehicle range problem with a daring new technology called fossil fuel.

“Now we’re throwing in another layer of complexity and oddity,” grumbled Ivan Drury, director of insights at the car-shopping website Edmunds. He wasn’t wrong.

In short, the brilliant new plan involves making all-electric cars where the drivers still have to stop for gas and don’t save any polar bears. What could go wrong? And they have to start over with another brand-new design.

There are many morals to this story. First, whenever you see a distortion in the market —like electric cars without a charging network— look for the withered, interfering hand of government. Second, relying on the government to support your business is probably on the reckless side. So.

After ten years of announcing the death of the gasoline engine, carmakers have invited it back to rescue their electric vehicles. Irony.

But wait. There’s a flip side to this story. The carmakers are chasing a design that is already obsolete. Get ready to have your mind blown.

🚗 The technological revolution began without ceremony or notice. On Friday, Axios reported, “Tesla’s Cybercab triggers regulatory game of chicken.” This story is so much bigger. Hint: Tesla’s newest production vehicle doesn’t have a gas engine. Or steering wheel. Or a brake pedal. Or mirrors. And it is now picking up passengers in Austin.

One of the most astonishing signs of the times is the lack of excitement about this civilization-changing development. Ho hum. We’re so used to magical technological breakthroughs at this point that a completely new kind of vehicle barely moves the needle. Each gold-colored cab has only two passenger seats, a big screen, butterfly doors, and a trunk roomy enough for two carry-ons or one panicked ACLU lawyer.

But corporate media remained skeptical.

Despite just making history, Tesla stock dropped -6% after the first all-computer cars hit the roads in Austin last week. Future Fund co-founder Gary Black sneered, “The Cybercab event was largely a bust.” Barclays analyst Dan Levy complained, and I am not making this up, that Tesla did not livestream the event or supply new financial projections.

Imagine standing beside the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk and saying, “Sure, it flew, but management offered no updated guidance on seat-mile revenue.” Or watching Alexander Graham Bell make the first telephone call— and downgrading the stock because the device lacked three-way calling and the first call in history wasn’t live-streamed.

The Cybercab does not merely use self-driving software. It has been physically built around the assumption that no human will ever drive it. Tesla AI chief Ashok Elluswamy put it simply: “Cybercab is here. It’s actually here. You can go outside and take rides.”

Axios and the rest of corporate media focused on an NHTSA “Audit Query” —not a defect investigation— looking into whether Tesla’s new driverless Cybercabs comply with industrial-age regulations. Tesla, apparently, decided it was better to ask forgiveness than permission, and launched without full pre-approval.

But just how do analysts expect the regulations to change quickly? Proactive government bureaucrats? Do analysts count boldness and confidence against Tesla? Are they properly pricing in Tesla’s federal government connections?

It’s not possible that driverless cabs will be banned. The only question is how long it takes for full approval. Corporate media pretends that Tesla hasn’t considered regulatory hurdles. But Tesla clearly did not overlook the regulatory hurdles. Axios admitted Tesla planned around them, coordinated with NHTSA, and launched while testing whether the old rulebook can accommodate the technology that everyone —including NHTSA— is already preparing to legalize at scale anyway.

🚗 People understandably distrust cars that drive themselves. The machine feels strangely alien. A lot of people have trust issues. They correctly predict that, sooner or later, the government will probably start remote-controlling the damned things, never mind hackers. Not unfairly, they suspect cars will tattle on them, and a few more freedoms and privacies will be sacrificed on the altar of safety.

But powerful forces push back in the other direction. Robot-driven cars never check out who’s in the car one lane over and accidentally run over a mailbox. They do not get road rage while cursing at the idiot driving slowly in the left lane and leaving his blinker on. They have never said, “hold my beer and watch this.”

The revolution is here. It’s inevitable. Don’t doubt me. The experiment has been running long enough to create compelling data.

Through March, autonomous cab company Waymo (which retained the steering wheel) logged 220.6 million miles with no human drivers in control. Compared with human-driven benchmarks in the same cities, its vehicles were involved in 94% fewer crashes causing serious or fatal injuries, 82% fewer airbag-deployment crashes, and 82% fewer injury crashes. The serious-injury-or-worse rate was 0.01 per million miles for Waymo versus 0.23 for humans—a difference of more than twentyfold.

An independent Insurance Institute for Highway Safety study reached a more conservative but still striking result: Waymo’s driverless cars had 68% fewer police-reportable crashes, 85% fewer single-vehicle crashes, and 81% fewer injury crashes per mile than human drivers.

Robotaxis don’t text, drink, nod off, shave, apply eyeliner, or cross four lanes because Waze said “turn right” just as the vehicle entered the intersection. It has never reversed down an I-95 exit ramp, merged while eating a Taco Bell chalupa, or evacuated a hurricane at 84 miles per hour with a queen-sized mattress secured to the roof mostly by the driver’s left arm.

Here on Florida’s I-95, motorists treat the turn signal as a dangerous disclosure of strategic intent. Sunshine State “defensive driving” means assuming every nearby vehicle contains a pet iguana, a lit bottle rocket, and a heavily armed man with a face tattoo named Duane who has just received upsetting news from his stockbroker.

Admittedly, robots do make mistakes. They will make more. There will be grotesquely overcovered accidents, software failures, sensor blind spots, confused emergency responders, burning batteries, cybersecurity scares, and cars that freeze in intersections for reasons explainable only by an astrophysicist with a minor in theology.

But machines have an advantage human drivers lack: SkyNet learns collectively. When one autonomous car encounters a novel hazard, the lesson can eventually propagate throughout the fleet. But when Florida Man encounters a novel hazard, he posts the video to TikTok and tries it again, this time with a boat instead of a jet ski.

As it becomes increasingly obvious that the robot-powered cars are safer by an order of magnitude, people will demand them. I know you still prefer a stick-shift and controlling your own destiny, as do I, but the good old days have numbers on them.

🚗 Only 45 gold Cybercabs are registered in Texas so far, operating alongside several hundred traditional Model Y robotaxis. So the launch is small. But the buried lede is that it is the first widescale commercial deployment of all-robot cars in history. And Tesla has already built manufacturing capacity to produce 125,000 Cybercabs a year, and Elon’s stated ambition is for millions.

That is the real story. Not the fleet size. Not the gold plastic bumpers. Not even the NHTSA audit. Tesla just proved the concept. At this point, the timetable no longer matters. For better or worse, it’s all over but for the fine details.

That’s all well and good, but now I’m asking you to think bigger. Remove the driver, and suddenly the car is no longer a machine that we operate. It becomes a room that moves.

Tesla software chief Silvio Brugada said the company thinks of Cybercab as “a second living room.” Today that living room is a small two-seat pod with mood lighting, a large screen, and enough room to watch Netflix while a neural network negotiates scooters on Sixth Street. But the missing steering wheel opens a much larger design space.

Use your imagination. Think big. Seats no longer need to face forward. A family pod can use face-to-face seating around a table. A commuter pod can become a private office with a desk, display, video wall, and soundproofing— finally enabling Americans to attend meetings while trapped in traffic without pretending they are paying attention to traffic. Vehicles won’t need a front or back. They can become rolling clinics, fitting rooms, barber chairs, conference rooms, restaurants, classrooms, and hotel rooms.

I’m not arguing for or against driverless cars. That isn’t the point. The point is, while clunky traditional automakers are putting gas engines back in electric cars, tech companies like Tesla are literally transforming the basic design. For our entire lives, progress in personal transportation has consisted mostly of additional cupholders, fewer body styles, and shorter drivetrain warranties.

Mark my words: we’re about to experience a transformation so radical that it will change our concept of what a car even is. It might not quite be the Jetsons —the cars aren’t flying yet— but it will soon be the next closest thing. And I’ll bet the robot dog is sitting right around the corner.

🔥🔥🔥

We’ve been enjoying the fruits of the conservative counter-revolution here at home so much we’ve neglected our cousins in Europe. Probably thanks to our shutting down USAID, they are drafting right behind us, and are now this close to turning the corner and leaving the globalists behind. Yesterday, NPR reported, “Germany’s far-right achieves an electoral breakthrough in key state election.” Germany’s Alternative for Germany party (known as AfD) won a stunning victory in Sunday’s election in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt. By “stunning,” I mean terrifying for progressives.

Turnout was an astonishing 77.8%, the state’s highest since German reunification. AfD took 43.8% of the vote. The next largest vote-winning party, the governing center-right Christian Democrats (CDU), staggered across the finish line with only 17.2%. AfD more than doubled its previous share, won 39 of 83 seats, and finished only three seats short of full control.

In short, a record number of Germans participated in the electoral process. They peacefully cast lawful ballots in a free and fair election. They did their civic duties.

This, of course, frightened democracy half to death.

NPR reached the first “far-right” label in its headline. It repeated it in the article’s first sentence. By paragraph three, NPR had already arrived at Nazi Germany. The article reported that the result put AfD “within reach of power for the first time since the time of Nazi Germany.”

According to NPR, 44% of the entire state of Saxony-Anhalt are skinheads. Skinheads who vote. Even though it was just one German state (about the size of Nebraska), it sent shockwaves through the battered globalist community throughout Europe.

French Finance Minister Roland Lescure called AfD’s victory part of a worldwide “populist wave” and announced, “We must resist.” France’s Europe Minister Benjamin Haddad called it “a very grave moment for Europe.” Chancellor Merz said the result shook his governing CDU party “to its very foundations.”

🔥 For some reason, it was even big news here in the US. Nearly every corporate media outlet covered it. They shared stylebooks. BBC: “German far right AfD hails ‘historic’ election victory in east.” AP: “Far-right Alternative for Germany party wins big.” CNN: “Germany’s far-right AfD win historic victory.” CNBC: “Far-right AfD wins historic victory.” Euronews: “German far-right AfD wins by a landslide.” Al Jazeera: “German far-right AfD wins Saxony-Anhalt election.” Deutsche Welle called the democratic result “unsettling” and then applied “far-right” for good measure.

(Every one of them pointed out the win ‘falls short of a majority,’ as though that were some kind of a consolation prize.)

At this point, you might be wondering what sorts of far-right proposals this tsunami of AfD insurgents threatens to put in place. First, and most terrifying of all, they want to close their borders to illegal migrants and start mass deportations. AfD also drew support around immigration, crime, high prices, energy policy, deindustrialization, Ukraine funding, Russia sanctions, and distrust of public broadcasting. Sound familiar? AP reported that the election pulled in many people who had never voted.

German leftists tried to ban AfD. The national intelligence services labeled AfD “confirmed right-wing extremists.” All the other parties —the “moderate” conservatives through the wacky greens and communists— have banded together and promised each other they will never form a government with AfD. They call that remarkable agreement the “firewall.” (The irony completely escapes them: moderate conservatives making coalition deals with communists, deals that voters never signed up for, and calling that “democracy.”) They did everything they could to keep people from voting AfD.

In spite of all those handicaps, AfD still won more than any other party in yesterday’s election.

Buried beneath the ideological warning labels was a far more instructive number: almost all (87%) of Saxony-Anhalt voters disapprove of Germany’s current federal government. The globalists know this. But they still won’t change anything. Their only solution to catastrophic low approval rates is to call 44% of their voters “Nazis.”

The most sensible comment in NPR’s article came from a CDU candidate who lost. Sven Schulze, the state’s governor, took the stage, graciously conceded, congratulated AfD on its win, and said, “Some say this is a dark day for Saxony-Anhalt. I say this is democracy.”

But I say this is a bright day for civilization. Now that we’re winning the conservative counter-revolution and excising globalists in the Western Hemisphere, hope is blooming in the least expected place: Europe.

Have a magnificent Monday and a peaceful and rewarding Labor Day! Roll back in here tomorrow morning, for even more essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

📈📈📈

Yesterday we enjoyed a good-news roundup about immigration (and learned important safety information). Today, let’s put on our helmets and tackle the economy. First up: jobs. Yesterday, CNN reported, “The US economy added 162,000 jobs in August, more than double expectations.” It already sounds good, but the news was even better. CNN tried to shrink it. “More than double” here means 2.5 times, or 150% more. As usual, experts were baffled.

The experts had only predicted +65,000 jobs. “This jobs report did blow expectations out of the water,” said Daniel Zhao, chief analyst at Glassdoor. Economists, wearing their orange-tinted glasses, had overly focused on feared “headwinds” including: an aging population, rapid adoption of AI, higher oil prices, the war with Iran, and an unseemly lust for news that could possibly damage Republicans right before the midterm elections.

But there was no way to sour-coat this news.

“The employment gains in August were some of the broadest seen since President Donald Trump took office,” CNN reported glumly. But fortunately they found a leaden lining. The sudden and unexpected surge of terrific economic activity allowed CNN to deploy sneering words like “whiplash,” “choppiness,” “a whipsaw effect,” “volatile,” and “unstable momentum”— as if it were describing a rogue wave hitting a Celebrity Cruise ship right as the buffet opened.

Although it clearly pained CNN, and even though the platform shrank these two additional admissions into two single-sentence paragraphs each, it grudgingly coughed up more good news. “August also marked the first increase in the labor force participation rate in eight months,” it allowed. “And the number of people working part-time for economic reasons fell to its lowest level in nearly two years.”

That was good, and fine so far as it goes. But the story left out a couple important statistics. First, the AI jobs catastrophe, which has been hysterically predicted by “AI experts” for years now, remains poised just beyond the horizon, always just out of reach. Headline from yesterday’s Economist:

That’s not all. My personal favorite was that the number of federal government jobs as a proportion of the overall market has now plunged to historic lows, chalking up yet another Trump 2.0 record and creating what psychologists call cognitive dissonance among professional economists, referred to in the diagnostic manual as “Eeyore Syndrome.” Behold:

In other words, between the surging jobs market and all the firings of federal employees, the burden of unproductive jobs funded by taxpayers is bottoming out. The Administration is setting all-time records. More promises kept.

🦠🦠🦠

But don’t worry! The New York Times is on the case, shaking out the nation’s couch cushions to find some appalling new threat to eclipse all the great economic news. After all, you can’t spend it if you’re dead. Yesterday, the Grey Lady excreted an especially malignant bit of misinformation deceptively headlined, “Six-Week-Old Infant Died From Measles, Lancaster Coroner Says.” Ironically, the subheadline accused Secretary Kennedy of lying: “The ruling casts doubt on statements from the federal health secretary, who speculated that measles deaths reported by the state may have been ‘fabricated.’” And it selected a gigantic cover image to trigger America’s germaphobes:

“The Lancaster County coroner has determined,” the Times’ story began, with a completely straight face, “that a six-week-old child in Pennsylvania died from measles.” Not “with.” From.

Alert readers will recall Josh Shapiro’s dramatic press conference eleven days ago, in which the Pennsylvania Governor (D) theatrically announced two unidentified but “completely preventable” measles deaths, both “unvaccinated,” which he flatly blamed on the Trump Administration in general, and Sec. Kennedy specifically, as if the HHS Secretary were sneaking around daycare centers injecting toddlers with measles virus.

Governor Shapiro then delicately refrained from providing any further information about the deaths, such as evidence for his claims, citing “privacy.” He didn’t even identify them. He just let everybody guess, like the “public health emergency” was some kind of morbid after-dinner round of Measles Clue.

Thanks to some real reporting, we quickly learned that Governor Shapiro’s first tragic example was a newborn infant who died from a “lacerated spleen,” which can be caused by a number of unfortunate reasons— but not respiratory viruses, unless they’ve learned how to use scalpels.

For an as-yet-unknown purpose, the newborn was PCR-tested for measles virus post-mortem and found to be positive. “At the time of the autopsy, we did obtain some tissue from the newborn and sent it for PCR testing that did confirm the presence of measles,” the coroner admitted to reporters. Mind you, no measles symptoms had been reported. The kid was just born. (They are searching as hard as they can to find themselves a measles poster child. Just saying.)

The Times, quoting unnamed Pennsylvania “State health officials,” still called the death “measles associated” since “the spleen can become enlarged in response to a measles infection, making it more vulnerable to injury and rupture.” Okay… But over a week ago, a local affiliate reported, “Dr. Diamantoni said the forensic pathologist did not feel the spleen was enlarged or inflamed, or showed any evidence of infection from measles.” The Times, which employs a whole ‘health desk,’ apparently missed that one.