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Corporate media had no idea how to report it and either ignored it completely or struggled to frame a narrative. Yesterday, the President either poured jet fuel on the wildest conspiracy theory going or just handed out some more awards to his tech buddies. The Hill chose to frame it as the tired Trump-Elon bromance, under the narcolepsy-inducing headline, “Trump’s rekindled alliance with Elon Musk on display at medal ceremony.” Other platforms expressed similar yawning takes. But there was nothing boring about it. Just the opposite.

Billed as the “Science: A New Golden Age Summit,” it was held at the repurposed Institute for Peace —now the Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace— which you might recall was actually the Deep State’s ironically named color revolution headquarters until DOGE occupied it in a dramatic midnight takeover operation. At the time, Musk tweeted that the IOP staff had tried to delete the data in an Enron-like shredding bonanza, but his DOGE team recovered the data after a dramatic day-long standoff and a Capitol Police escort.

Even more entertainingly, President Trump installed Revolver News’ Darren Beattie as the IOP’s new president. (Darren and Revolver heroically exposed the Ray Epps fedsurrection operation on January 6th.) Now, instead of undermining defenseless governments around the world, they’re using the DJT-IOP for fancy presidential events. It’s a beautiful building right on the National Mall, and I hope they fumigated it first.

Given the exigencies of time and reader attention, I can only hit the highlights, so I encourage you to read the whole transcript. I’m not kidding. It’s shorter than you’d expect and packed with terrific stuff. Especially if you are a science or tech nerd, also read the companion White House Fact sheet, published yesterday. Thank me in the comments.

Ostensibly, yesterday’s short ‘summit’ had two goals: announce a wide-ranging, $6 billion science initiative, and give top science awards to tech luminaries like NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang and Elon Musk. White House OSTP Director Michael Kratsios explained, “Under President Trump’s leadership, we are ushering in a New Golden Age of Science powered by super intelligence, a return to merit, and bold national missions that will inspire Americans for generations to come.”

That alone was thrilling: old-fashioned, can-do American optimism, back from the dead. The new science objectives surpassed the moon landing* in breathtaking ambition. But there was even more happening just below the surface level. (* Results may vary.)

🚀 Trump’s opening remarks sprang off the transcript like a ravenous jaguar. He said the Golden Age has now begun.

Welcome to the Golden Age. It’s not clear what, exactly, the President meant, but the announcement itself is clear. Whatever foundations had to be laid— that work is complete. We have now entered the exhilarating payoff period. Feel free to indulge sky-high expectations.

Then he immediately pivoted to an even more surprising and fascinating discussion: his uncle, Dr. John Trump, who was a top MIT scientist and professor for 52 years, and who led America’s Manhattan-project-style development of radar during World War II, and for whom Donald John Trump would later be named. They played a tribute video that the White House posted on X.

CLIP: White House posts tribute to Dr. John Trump (1:37).

Dr. John Trump was heavily involved in researching high-voltage electricity, which is where this story takes an almost supernatural turn. The man who was arguably America’s greatest scientific mind of all time, Nikola Tesla, died broke in Room 3327 of the New Yorker Hotel in the middle of World War II (1943). Tesla was never autopsied, inflaming conspiracy theorists’ speculations.

The U.S. government sprang into action, and the Office of Alien Property immediately secured his hotel room. Tesla had often claimed he’d invented “teleforce,” which the media at the time rebranded as a “death ray.” They brought in Dr. Trump to review Tesla’s notes. After spending three days, Dr. Trump concluded there was no death ray or anything particularly useful. Tesla’s late papers, he wrote at the time, were “primarily of a speculative, philosophical, and somewhat promotional character.”

The story is replete with wild details like up to eighty trunks of additional “unreviewed” Tesla notes that were “found” in the hotel’s basement years later. Of the eighty, twenty trunks disappeared in transit to the Belgrade Museum and remain unaccounted for to this day.

This is where the Time Travel hypothesis surfaces.

🚀 In 1889 and 1893, a New York lawyer named Ingersoll Lockwood published two astonishing children’s books. They were about a rich, precocious boy named Baron Trump who travels through a portal in Russia, guided by “Don Constantino Bartolomeo Strepholofidgeguaneriusfum” —Don— into a high-tech underground empire. In 1896, Lockwood published a political barnburner: 1900; or, The Last President, in which a mob besieged a Fifth Avenue hotel after an outsider won the presidency.

Rod Serling would have rejected it as too crazy for a Twilight Zone episode. And in 2017, people started noticing. If you want a deeper-dive, here’s a 2024 X thread rounding up all the wild Telsa-Trump-Musk conspiracy theories:

🚀 Making things even more mind-bending, it is undisputed that Tesla supposedly dabbled in time travel. In 1895, the great scientist described a strange experience of seeing past, present, and future all at once during a high-voltage accident in his lab. (Now recall that Dr. John Trump also researched high-voltage.) The anecdote about Tesla’s time-traveling claims is widely accepted, though never formally documented— exactly what a time-traveler might arrange. Just saying.

There’s more, such as the mythical Philadelphia Experiment, later made into a major motion picture. The story goes that, nine months after Tesla’s death, the Navy allegedly wrapped a destroyer escort, the USS Eldridge, in electric cables and then either teleported it, sent it back in time, or made it invisible, depending on who you ask. Sailors were supposedly fused to the deck or driven mad. The story has been ceaselessly debunked, and the original witness, Carl Allen, spent years going back and forth, at times claiming it was real, or then recanting, depending on the day.

We might also mention the so-called Mandela Effect, which holds that large numbers of people have started remembering historical events differently, ranging from things like whether Nelson Mandela died in prison, or even more historically significant facts such as whether Mr. Monopoly ever wore a monocle. Some folks speculate that a time-traveler might be out there tweaking the timelines.

The truth is lost in the murky depths of time, space, classified annexes, and single-lens eyewear. Tesla was undoubtedly a top scientific mind, maybe of all time. He invented alternating current, the induction motor, the Tesla coil, a big chunk of radio, and remote-control technology. He also claimed discoveries in his later years that never saw the light of day: his death ray, worldwide wireless power transmission, signals from Mars, and a “dynamic theory of gravity.”

Let’s get crazy. Suppose that, among Tesla’s notes in that New York hotel, Dr. John Trump had found time-traveling instructions, or even just extremely advanced, electricity-based technologies. Well, what then? Could Dr. Trump have, perhaps, decided Tesla’s notes were too potentially powerful even for governments to have? Could he have instead embarked on a private mission to protect the country, even from itself? It would make a great movie.

If any of these wild theories were at all true, you would expect to see some signs. You would expect someone with visibility into future events to acquire wealth and political power, for example. You might expect them to seem to always win. (TAW.)

So it was especially remarkable to see the stage at yesterday’s Golden Age summit shared by the world’s most powerful man and the world’s richest man, whose electric-car company, incidentally, is named after Tesla. Um.

When President Trump introduced Elon Musk for his award yesterday, the president said some very intriguing things. First —contradicting Dr. Trump’s own lukewarm post-review report— the president called Nikola Tesla a “true and great genius” who was “real in every single way.”

Real in every single way? What did he mean by ‘real?’ Who said Tesla wasn’t real? Did Trump mean the death ray? The time traveling? Something else? Or was he just being nice? What did he mean by real in every single way? President Trump didn’t expand on his mysterious thesis.

Look, I realize I’m way off the sanity map here. Even asking these questions is kooky speculation of the first order. But I can’t resist. It’s just too much fun.

So, stick with me for just a moment longer. If a family with visibility into the future saw what was coming and had to choose a brilliant technical manager to build out the companies inventing frontier-shattering, Golden Age-delivering technological leaps like underground diggers and reusable rockets, Elon Musk might have appeared to be the right man for the job.

Behold how President Trump introduced Elon yesterday:

“It always works out well for Elon,” President Trump said. Huh.

Edison was a curious choice for the comparison. Given the context, Trump could easily have called Elon “our modern Tesla.” Edison and Tesla were peers who famously feuded with each other. Unlike Nikola Tesla, Edison wasn’t so much a scientific genius as he was a brilliant marketer and manager. Unlike Tesla, who mostly worked alone, Edison employed teams of scientists to do the technical work, including Tesla for a time.

So when Trump praised Elon as our modern-day Thomas Edison, it was kind of a backhanded compliment. It was like calling a famous chef a modern-day McDonald’s. He was saying Elon isn’t a brilliant scientist or inventor; but that he is brilliant— in a different way. “You’re my friend and all of that,” Trump said, “but you are a very, very special guy.” Two verys.

Is Elon very, very special because of the very, very special role he’s been given? Or short-bus special? I’m just asking.

I’ll bet you never expected this morning’s roundup to probe time-traveling conspiracy theories. To be clear: this is all purely for entertainment value. I’m not arguing anything. Even if there were any truth to it at all, it is unprovable by definition. You can’t beat someone with a time machine.

Look— time travel isn’t even necessary. Even if all Dr. Trump found in the New Yorker Hotel were highly advanced plans for rockets and electric technologies, that would be enough to sustain the theory and match the bizarre facts that we can all see right in front of our noses.

Set all that aside. Let’s return to the regularly scheduled program.

🚀 Besides the titillating hints about secret technologies and clandestine white hat brigades, what they actually announced was nearly as much fun. During the brief program, the President said all these terrific things are in the works:

• Nuclear power in space: NASA and the Energy Department agreed to build Space Reactor-1, “a nuclear-powered spacecraft to Mars expected to launch in 2028,” and Lunar Reactor-1, “the first fission reactor on the lunar surface,” which Trump called “a permanent American presence on the Moon.” (No dates for that one; jokes about the Moon Landing notwithstanding.)

• AI computing pledges: Eleven companies pledged $2.4 billion in computing credits and tools for the Genesis Mission, the federal AI-for-science program. (Rumored: the quantum computer will be “Exodus,” and the Moon base will be “Numbers.”) Nvidia pledged $1 billion, AMD $500 million, OpenAI $200 million, and Anthropic and Google $150 million each.

• Quantum computing: The Energy Department launched a $215 million competition to build a “fault-tolerant quantum computer,” and Trump set a goal of having one by 2028. (Or, for time travelers, already.)

• Virtual biology: NIH, the Energy Department and Biohub are putting $1.8 billion into simulated “virtual cells” to superpower medical research. It’ll be the first NIH lab that can’t leak. Fauci’s lab beagles expressed enthusiastic support.

• Young scientists: There’s a $100 million PhD fellowship program for four-year accelerated PhDs, a dual superintelligence-engineering doctorate, plus $310 million or more for the X-Labs research consortium. The fact sheet also announced ‘metascience,’ which means applying the scientific method to how the government funds science. In other words, for the first time in history, someone is going to check whether the expensive experiments worked. Get those shrimps back on their treadmills. They’ve had enough rest.

• Young Scholars: The National Science Foundation is reviving its shelved program for grades 3–12, which picks students “on the basis of demonstrated mathematics ability.” It had been “inexplicably abandoned in 1996.” (Because DEI.)

• Policy shifts toward merit: “President Trump has replaced DEI with merit across the Federal R&D enterprise,” the fact sheet announced. Trump said he’d ended DEI in federal science grants, said “we now support only the gold standard in science” —no more studies on making mice transgender— cited the White House Accord on Superintelligence brokered last week, and, for extra energy, mentioned four modular nuclear reactors that started running this year. (In 2023, Germany shuttered its last three reactors. For the climate.)

• Medals: Musk, Sergey Brin, Jensen Huang, and Lisa Su (AMD’s CEO) each received the National Medal of Science, and Michael Dell and Satya Nadella (Microsoft) received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation. Trump was given his uncle’s 1983 medal in a beautiful frame. “We have an extremely high IQ audience for a change,” Trump noted, then repeated it while looking right at the somnolent reporters in the back: “For a change.” Two of the six winners were college dropouts. Wave goodbye to credentialism.

• Trump Accounts: Trump touted the Dells’ $6.25 billion pledge to fund accounts for 25 million children, and the new program automatically giving all American kids Trump Accounts. Call it a Social Security replacement if you want (Trump didn’t say that, not explicitly.) Einstein is said to have called compound interest the eighth wonder of the world. “They’re going to turn 18 or 21, and they’re going to be rich because of you,” Trump told Michael and Susan Dell.

Of course, the difference between a Trump Account and Social Security is that with a Trump Account, the money is actually in the account, not a leprechaun’s lockbox. And it’s not under the government’s control, which is what really vexes Democrats.

As we have seen with other Trump initiatives, much of the $6 billion in pledges came from private industry, not from Congress. The rest came from money lying around the budget. He needed no bills passed, no budgets, no authorizations. No filibuster. No negotiating pork deals with legislators. He’s just … doing it, through sheer force of will and personality.

Consider this: what Congress never appropriated, a 2027 Democrat House cannot defund.

Washington spent forty years learning how to pass a budget without a vote. Trump figured out how to pass one without Washington. He has redefined Teddy Roosevelt’s bully pulpit. (Or, somebody knew what was going to happen in advance. Either way.)

Welcome to the Golden Age.

Have a fantastic Friday! Get back here tomorrow morning, as we have much news to catch up on. Don’t miss the Weekend Edition, which will be jam-packed with essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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James Talarico, running in Texas against Ken Paxton, is the Democrats’ most hoped-for candidate for wresting control of the Senate back from Republicans in November. There’s one problem. He’s gone missing. Nobody has seen the Senatorial candidate for ten days. Yesterday, USA Today reported, “Trump says ‘nobody knows’ where Talarico is. Here’s what we know.” Se perdió Talarico.

What have I always warned you about questions the media teases in its headlines, even implied ones like “here’s what we know”? It means the story never answers the question. What USA Today ‘knows’ could fill a rainbow-colored thimble. But there is a surprising amount of evidence in the record. Let’s walk through it.

Be on the lookout. Jimmie was last seen in person on September 28th, at a swanky $27K-per-plate fundraiser in New York City hosted by antique actor Robert De Niro. (The host committee was topped by Alexis Bittar, who called the US a “sh-thole” on July 3rd.) The last time anybody saw him at all was on a video call two days later, on Wednesday, September 30th, when he announced he had the flu. Apparently fine, he explained he’d been diagnosed at an urgent care center “in Dallas.” He said he was at his “most contagious” and “couldn’t live with myself” if he made a grandmother or a baby sick.

The CDC says flu patients are usually contagious for 5 to 7 days after getting sick. Just saying.

The candidate did not mention the clinic, doctor, or what kind of test. The campaign has not produced a sick note from a physician. The “diagnosis,” such as it is, is his own word.

Since last Wednesday, nobody in public has heard him speak. He hasn’t done a phone interview, a radio call-in, or even a Biden basement-style podcast. His personal TikTok (2M followers, used to post about every two days) has had nothing since Sept 27. His Threads and Bluesky stopped on Oct 2nd. He posted short tweets on October 5th and 8th, without mentioning the flu, the canceled events, or the increasingly bold Paxton ads asking “Have You Seen this Man?”

His campaign posts every day, but all the Talarico footage in the latest posts is stock footage.

Corporate media outlets (USA Today, WFAA, The Hill) described him as “taking a break” and “stepping off the trail.” No mainstream platform has questioned the increasingly doubtful flu story. Why can’t he do a phone interview? Is he in a coma? Is he recovering in Saddam Hussein’s spider hole? Is it Russian plague?

The campaign has not explained why Jimmie’s lips have the flu.

At a rally for Paxton this week, President Trump mocked the missing candidate and led the crowd in a chant of “Where is Talarico?” He had the easiest layup in political history. Just tweet, “here I am!” But nothing.

The schedule sports a widely publicized October 14th CNN Town Hall, and the campaign says Talarico plans to be there. We shall see. But at this point, even if he does show, it does nothing to answer for the mysterious absence.

The New York Times ran a poll story a couple days ago claiming Talarico is leading the race (though the poll dates helpfully ended on September 30th, the day he winked out.) Polymarket has his odds of winning at 68%. (But even Polymarket scare-quote-bracketed the excuse as “the flu.”)

In 2020, Biden won from the basement. Apparently, six years later, Democrats no longer even need a candidate.

🔥 Though Democrats have tried to sell him as a white, moderate, Christian candidate, James’ biggest problem is that he’s been branded the weird candidate. Over the years, he’s said a lot of kooky stuff about theology. On the record. In 2023, on the Texas House floor, he called god non-binary. “God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between,” he insisted. (Portlanders: god doesn’t have sex with anybody.) From the pulpit, he’s called Jesus “a radical feminist” and “anti-Trump.” He explained, “I always think of myself as a Christian who hates Christianity.” He claimed god sought Mary’s ‘consent’ to the Virgin Birth. (The angel told her to get ready.)

In 2021, at a committee hearing, Talarico claimed “modern science obviously recognizes that there are many more than two biological sexes. In fact, there are six.” (Even trans activists don’t claim six sexes; they focus on ‘gender.’) He even counted them out. Last month —five years later, without explanation— he walked that back on Fox: “I’ve missed the mark on some of my past statements… What I meant is that there are two sexes, and then there’s a small percentage of people with genetic abnormalities. Obviously, I didn’t say it correctly.” Obviously. “There are not six sexes,” he concluded lamely, throwing in the gender towel. “There are two.”

In 2020, Talarico claimed that “radicalized white men are the greatest domestic terrorist threat in our country.” He called “white skin” a “virus” and claimed (presumably speaking only for himself), “we spread it wherever we go.” The same year, musing about women’s sports, he remarkably argued, “some things are more important than perfectly fair competition in sports.”

Do you remember how, in 2024, Democrats spent an entire summer calling JD Vance weird?

But Vance never said God is nonbinary, never counted six sexes before deciding he’d meant two all along, and never disappeared for eleven days a month before an election with a flu that can’t pick up a phone. Normal candidates get sick and post sympathy videos from the couch, upload chicken soup recipes, and ask supporters for flu remedies on Twitter.

You know what’s really weird? Completely disappearing for two weeks in the final month before the big election because of “the flu.” That, my friends, is weird.

None of the polls I could find measured the race since September 30th. How could they? Continuing to claim a Talarico lead would just make everybody laugh. Texas early voting starts on October 19th. Time’s running out.

🔥 If it’s not the flu, what else could it be? You know me, I am a stickler for facts, so I would hate to speculate. Let me instead point out a few historic examples.

Sometimes it’s something worse than flu. Hillary Clinton’s campaign called it overheating when she collapsed on 9/11 in 2016 and was tossed like a sack of dirty laundry into the back of a van, and only to later admit pneumonia after the video got out. Fetterman’s campaign spent months downplaying how bad his 2022 stroke was till he checked into six weeks of rehab at Walter Reed. In 1972, Thomas Eagleton dropped off McGovern’s ticket after reporters learned he’d been hospitalized for depression and given shock treatments.

Sometimes a campaign finds out an ‘October surprise’ is about to drop. In 2009, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s office said he was “hiking the Appalachian Trail,” but it turned out he was really in Argentina canoodling with his mistress. In 2012, Jesse Jackson Jr. disappeared for several months for “exhaustion.” It turned out to be bipolar disorder, plus a federal investigation that ended with him in prison.

While Mitch McConnell was out for 92 days for “mild pneumonia,” Governor Andy Bashear (D-KY) repeatedly demanded he provide proof of life or resign. Well?

If this is the flu, it must be a pretty bad one, since he can’t even complete a phone call ten days later. Whatever it is, expect riveting developments.

💉💉💉

On Monday, Bloomberg News reported, “RFK Jr. announces vaccine injury clinic, initiative at NIH.” Along with top health officials, HHS Secretary Kennedy “attended a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new NIH clinic to study and care for patients with vaccine injuries.” Forty years after passing the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, the government is finally getting around to the injured. That’s good enough. But the news was so much better.

Also announced was a “modernization plan” for VAERS and new requirements for entering vaccine injuries in electronic health records. But Bloomberg smuggled the best part into a dense paragraph: “a proposal to reimburse doctors for reporting suspected vaccine injuries.”

It was as simple as proposing a new reimbursement code. In other words, they are finally going to start paying doctors to take the time to fill out VAERS reports. Regular readers will recall the famous 2010 Harvard Pilgrim study that estimated fewer than 1% of vaccine injuries ever show up in the tracking system.

For forty years, reporting a vaccine injury paid as well as reporting an unidentified aerial phenomenon.

Some say the arduous process of entering vaccine injury reports into VAERS —combined with the lack of compensation for doing that— was not a bug but an intentional design. Either way, that “feature” has allowed jab activists to claim shot safety by pointing at the absence of reported injuries. Needless to say, if we start capturing the true scale of damage from shots, the political landscape is likely to change.

The real question is: how did this take so long? It seems obvious even to the meanest intelligence that if the government deletes the right to sue manufacturers for product injuries, it has a moral and ethical duty to ensure everything goes swimmingly.

Doctors respond to incentives like everyone, including second-graders left alone with Oreos. For decades, doctors have been paid to push jabs. So jabs were pushed. If we now start paying them to report jab injuries, the incentive landscape changes. So the announcement of a new NIH clinic to study and treat vaccine injuries, along with new reimbursement codes, offers the possibility of real change, a fundamental transformation in how we view vaccines, rather than just more arguments over industry-funded safety studies.

“I can put the full weight of the federal government behind answering those questions,” Kennedy told reporters.

MAHA wanted Kennedy to do something. He’s doing stuff. Let the man work.

🔥🔥🔥

How about another story about the thing that never happens? Yesterday, News-8 Bridgeport reported, “Second voter accuses former State Sen. Dennis Bradley of absentee ballot fraud.” Common sense confirms that a former Democrat State Senator is not out there procuring fraudulent absentee ballots because the numbers are so small that it doesn’t make any difference.

I reviewed a dozen stories, but still couldn’t tell whether Mr. Bradley was homegrown or a naturalized citizen. His bios say he’s of Dominican heritage, born around 1983, and that he grew up “nowhere and everywhere”— Florida, Germany, the Dominican Republic, Pennsylvania, New York City, and Massachusetts. Wherever he’s from, maybe outer space, he missed a few lessons the rest of us learned in kindergarten.

Regardless, Bradley, 42, a former Connecticut state senator, was arrested Tuesday by inspectors from the Office of the Chief State’s Attorney. He is accused of illegally opening a voter’s sealed absentee ballot and instructing her to change her vote in favor of Bradley’s brother, Mark, who was a candidate in this summer’s Democratic primary for Bridgeport probate judge.

“I did it because I was intimidated,” one of the victims told News 8 in August. “I just wanted to do what I had to do so they can get out my house.”

Here’s how the arrest warrant described it. On July 30th, Dennis Bradley knocked on Alesia Dennis’s apartment door in Bridgeport. He’s a former Democrat state senator —and a suspended lawyer— and he’s currently waiting to be sentenced on a separate 2021 federal wire-fraud conviction. His brother Mark was challenging the incumbent probate judge, Paul Ganim (the mayor’s brother), in the August 11th Democratic primary. Bradley asks whether she has her absentee ballot. She says she’s already voted. He comes inside anyway with a second man, who remains unidentified.

What Bradley didn’t know was that she had a security camera in her kitchen. Investigators reviewed five clips, including one she posted online. In them, Bradley picks at the corners of her sealed envelope until it comes open. He tells her, “We can fix it. You can fix it.” Then he walks her through it: “Circle the same thing here, then we’re gonna put just a cross right there.” She puts an X over Ganim and fills in Mark Bradley. He confidently reassured her, “That’s all right, as long as it’s your handwriting, it’s no big deal.”

Then the video shows Bradley coaching her on what to say if anyone asks questions. “They’re gonna’ be like, ‘who touched it, blah-blah-blah,’ you know. Say that you did it on your own and nobody touched it… You know the routine.” He stamps the envelope, helps tape it shut, and tells her to mail it herself.

Ms. Dennis called police on August 5th. A detective took the ballot and video as evidence, and the state elections commission sent the case to the Chief State’s Attorney. Bradley’s lawyer doesn’t deny what happened; he lamely insisted that it’s legal for people to change their votes. He said, “From what I understand, she wanted to vote for Mark Bradley and that was changed later on.”

Ms. Dennis disagrees. “He is calling me liar, and he’s the liar,” she told News-12.

The warrant described a second voter, Ray Newby, who told investigators that Bradley and another man showed up at his home and asked who he’d voted for. When he replied Paul Ganim, one of them said “No, no,” and Bradley took his sealed absentee ballot. Newby later picked Bradley out of a photo lineup.

Bradley is now charged with two counts of illegally possessing absentee ballots, being present when a voter filled out an absentee ballot, and unlawfully opening a ballot. He was released on a promise to appear and is due back in court October 21st. A judge had already cleared him to fly to the Dominican Republic this Saturday for a family wedding.

News-12 helpfully noted that another former Connecticut official out on bail, Kosta Diamantis, 70, also a Democrat and a dual U.S.-Greek citizen, fled to Greece two weeks ago. Greece does not cooperate with extradition. The U.S. jury gave him 7 years for bribery anyway, in absentia. In yet another curious pandemic wrinkle, I happen to know Diamantis’ lawyer, Norm Pattis, who defended Alex Jones. Small world.

Fortunately, the Dominican Republic does have an extradition treaty with the U.S. (admittedly, “fortunately” does some heavy lifting here, since it assumes Mr. Bradley does not flee further afield.) Unfortunately, Bradley was only caught because Ms. Dennis was so paranoid she was video-taping her own kitchen. (She was right to be paranoid.)

Now, before the regular suspects show up in the comments and sneer at me for reporting “ultra rare” absentee ballot fraud (you know who you are), please consider this remarkable sentence from News-12’s story. It deemed Bridgeport, Connecticut, the “national poster child for absentee ballot fraud.”

Got that? “A dozen campaign operatives, including three current or former city council members, have faced ballot tampering charges.” But I get it: according to skeptics, we still haven’t reached the undisclosed magic number at which ‘ultra-rare’ election fraud becomes ‘widespread.’

Listen guys, I can do this all day. There’s a new arrest, indictment, or conviction for election fraud every single day now. Almost always Democrats. Sooner or later you’re going to need to shift from “it never happens” to “maybe it happens, but it’s good.” In the meantime, I will keep on reporting them.

Invisible things. A Senate candidate nobody can find. Vaccine injuries nobody was ever paid to write down. And ballot fraud nobody ever catches, unless somebody happens to keep their kitchen under surveillance.

Have a terrific Thursday! We are thankful to be back in C&C’s Gainesville HQ, and appreciate your patience during travel blogging. Tomorrow we’ll deliver another educational and entertaining roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🔥🔥🔥

It is turning into a Biden greatest hits tour. (“Greatest hits” meaning the one that are going down in flames.) Yesterday’s post discussed the Plasmic Echo disclosures, wherein Merrick Garland signed off a memo targeting Trump by tapping Suzie Wiles’ phones. We saw FBI Director Chris Wray enthusiastically endorsing it. Right after that, on Monday, DOJ dropped another disclosure. The new report proved how human snake Merrick “Grandma” Garland targeted all of us. Fox reported, “Biden’s ‘anti-MAGA task force’ sparked internal alarm across DOJ, new report shows.”

This latest release —ignored by prestige media— appeared to be timed to its anniversary. Five years ago this week, Attorney General Merrick Garland diligently scanned America’s threat horizon. He noticed the cartels. He observed the fentanyl. He noted the baby traffickers, the Muslim terror cells that snuck across the open border, and the Learing Centers, blooming across the Heartland.

Then, his blood ran cold as ice. He saw the true menace, the greatest, most pressing peril of all, bearing down on us like a high-speed train loaded with industrial explosives and driven by an infected chimpanzee.

The greatest threat facing America in October, 2021? Moms at school-board meetings.

🔥 How could you forget the moms? They hogged the nation’s microphones (in three-minute increments) and issued alarming demands like “Why is my second-grader wearing a mask at recess?” and “What, exactly, is this book?” Some of them even unleashed their mom voices, which, as the squishy effeminate men of the Biden administration (and most of the country’s fifth-grade boys) can attest, is at least arguably comparable to a sort of chemical weapon.

On Monday, the DOJ’s Weaponization Working Group released its second report this week, again about a Merrick Garland memo. (Merrick Garland was second to no one in the memo-issuing department.) As AG Todd Blanche described it, in this one, Garland directed the entire FBI and Biden’s U.S. Attorneys to look for what Blanche called “a federal hook to prosecute parents exercising their right to free speech.”

In other words, however carefully he phrased it in terms of policing “threats to local officials,” Garland was actually organizing what we might euphemistically call a fishing expedition.

And this fishing trip was organized from the very top. Per the new report, a White House official asked the National School Boards Association for an advance look at its famous letter calling parents possible “domestic terrorists.” A deputy White House counsel then forwarded the NSBA’s draft letter to the Deputy AG’s office and called it “fairly urgent.” Then DOJ sent the NSBA an advance copy of Garland’s memo, proving it was all a friendly collaboration.

The White House, DOJ, and NSBA were co-authors. Isn’t that nice?

So, to recap: the school board lobby wrote the complaint, the Biden White House shepherded it through —possibly the Autopen, we aren’t sure yet— and the politically appointed Democrats at the Justice Department rubber-stamped it. Three branches of the Democrat coalition, one directive to the federal government’s law enforcement apparatus.

🔥 Upon receipt of the Garland memo, the FBI rolled up its sleeves and got to work. At least, a few “top agents” did. They opened 25 “Guardian assessments” on parents, including six run out of the Counterterrorism Division. Counterterrorism! The highly trained law enforcement personnel of the FBI’s elite counterterrorism division —who are supposed to be surveilling MS13 members coordinating terrorist attacks— were instead assigned to surveil Melissa, who coordinated the pre-K snack committee. (1 member).

Guess how many of those 25 investigations led to a prosecution? Zero. Not even one. According to a 2023 House Judiciary Committee report, the FBI never even charged anybody. Only two of the 25 even produced an investigation, and for reasons that some people might consider commonplace:

🔥 There is a slightly more encouraging part. The rot was not complete. The sharpest critics of this scheme weren’t Republicans— they were career staff. More than a dozen DOJ and FBI personnel objected in writing, albeit quietly. Kevin Driscoll, a Biden-era deputy assistant AG, wrote, “I don’t think it’s possible to state how strongly I object to this … (we) might as well rename the damn thing the Anti-MAGA Task Force.” It does have a nice ring to it.

Civil Rights Division lawyer Paige Fitzgerald noted crisply that “almost all of the language being used is protected by the First Amendment.” An FBI counterterrorism official called it “potentially dangerous ground.” The chief of the Public Integrity Section deployed a legal term of art: “stupid.” A single, short email cited in this week’s report managed to call the Garland initiative “out of her lane,” “doesn’t see a role,” “a local issue,” and, bluntly, “ridiculous:”

Public Integrity Section Chief Corey Amundson, reviewing the Garland’s draft memo, went further. He complained “we did not sign up for this” and “object(ed) in the strongest possible terms,” which is bureaucratese for I really mean it but I’ll do what you want anyway. “This proposed federal effort against educator threats,” Amundson prophetically warned, “will be viewed by many as a partisan exercise aimed at those who do not support the (Biden) Administration.” (And so it has.)

In 2021, outside DOJ’s marbled halls, there was even more pushback. It spanned the country. Various U.S. Attorneys —all Biden appointees, mind you— expressed downright bewilderment at the DOJ’s priorities.

In short, the DOJ’s own career federal lawyers —not folks famous for sporting MAGA caps— told Merrick Garland, “Boss, this is unconstitutional, it’s political, and it’s dumb.” Going after Republicans is one thing; but this was too obvious. So Garland did it anyway. The 2023 House Report says Republicans and asked Garland to rescind his October 2021 memo, citing the poor optics and the lack of prosecutions— and Garland flatly refused.

As I said, it’s encouraging that the DOJ didn’t just roll over without complaint. But before we get too comfy, while more than a few DOJ careerists complained, quietly, they ultimately complied. They gave into Merrick Garland’s “stupid” 2021 directive. They did not stage any walkouts or quit in protest, as they did when Trump asked them to enforce immigration laws. They didn’t leak. They didn’t turn whistleblower.

Although his own Public Integrity Chief said he wanted nothing to do with it, in October 2021, AG Garland denied politics was involved in any way, and no DOJ employee publicly contradicted him. “This memo does not say to begin prosecuting anybody,” he insisted lamely. “It says to make assessments. That’s what we do in the Justice Department; it has nothing to do with politics.”

Nothing to do with politics. Just 25 assessments, six by Counterterrorism, of parents protesting covid mandates, while Homeland Security circulated a brief titled “Threats to Public Schools Likely Elevated Due to Opposition of Mask and Vaccine Mandates.” It warned, and I am not making this up, that “violent individuals who oppose maks mandates … will increasingly pose a threat to school personnel.” Increasingly.

That was 2021. It never happened. They were morons.

🔥 Nor should we ever forget that Obama had nominated Garland for the Supreme Court. Folks, we dodged a bullet. We could have been stuck with Garland for life. However his long career finally ended —still debatable— we must thank Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) for rescuing us from the terrifying possibility of Justice Garland. (He’s now working for some progressive law firm. Whew.)

This kind of thing can quikcly get out of hand. Imagine the Democrats’ weaponization rule applied evenly. Imagine a Republican DOJ opening counterterrorism files on progressive parents who scream at school boards to keep mask mandates. On trans activists who shout at conservative speakers on campuses. On “No Kings” protesters.

If that ever happened, Democrats would find the First Amendment so fast it would only be visible using stop-motion photography. The ACLU would rediscover its original purpose. The New York Times would run dramatic, 14-part exposés about abuses of power.

The standard they built for our moms is one they would never, ever accept for themselves.

🔥 Todd Blanche announced the DOJ is now notifying people who were targeted by the Biden team. Anyone in the records can come and review their Guardian files. DOJ will check every file for constitutional violations, and will issue “a formal apology” wherever it finds one. (Schedules permitting, I’d be happy to visit Main Justice with any mom who wants to review her file.)

Like a thank-you note or a fruit basket, an apology is a nice gesture. But criminal referrals of sitting officials for depriving citizens of their rights would be an even nicer gesture. The problem is that no parents were ever actually charged. Only a couple folks even had formal investigations. So nobody was ever falsely arrested or wrongfully prosecuted.

But maybe … maybe Todd Blanche should launch a fishing expedition, to find some crime that we could charge. Just to be safe.

Maybe somebody should investigate that.

Finally, enjoy the postscript. The lobbying group that launched the whole thing —the National School Boards Association, the lobby that wrote the original “domestic terrorism” letter— paid a steep price. It has become a hissing and a byword. Its board was forced to apologize within weeks.

State school-board associations dropped out of the national association in droves, taking their dues money with them. Its genius leader, Chip Slaven, who’d been trading drafts with the White House, was soon shown the door. The NSBA spent the last few years as the trade-association version of a guy who has to go around telling neighbors about the restraining order.

The wheels of justice may grind slowly, but they grind inexorably.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! Your author returns home later this afternoon and will be securely back in HQ tomorrow morning. We’ll return to our regularly scheduled roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🔥🔥🔥

In March, 2022, Director Christopher Wray sent a personal memo to then-AG Merrick Garland, asking the Attorney General to authorize “Plasmic Echo”— the hyper-secret classified-documents probe and Mar-a-Lago raid. Wray specifically warned Garland in the memo that the investigation could rope in top figures from the previous administration and, in a spasm of wild understatement, warned it “could potentially be disruptive to the democratic process if publicly disclosed prior to an election.” If anybody finds out. The New York Post reported, “Biden FBI tracked Melania and Barron Trump’s travel — and even tapped Susie Wiles phone, documents show.”

The two-page memo’s stated purpose burst with important-sounding acronyms, purportedly “To obtain (Garland’s) signature authorizing the Washington Field Office (WFO) to open a full sensitive investigative matter (SIM).” So… a WFO-SIM. (It’s like a code language. Sometimes I think they do this on purpose so nobody else has any idea what they’re talking about.)

Anyway, at the very end, well below Wray’s eye-popping warning about potentially disrupting the nation’s democratic process, Wray clumsily scrawled, “Merrick, I recommend you approve. CW.” Garland obediently signed off. (Technically, he didn’t actually sign. He initialed off.)

Wray’s poor penmanship aside, we can relish what this shows about the fantastic levels of butt-covering CYA between the two men. I would bet Michelle’s Tahoe that Garland insisted Wray add his handwritten recommendation. I’m not going down for this alone. Obviously, Wray was already implicitly recommending Merrick’s signature, just by sending the form to him in the first place— the extra annotation was unnecessary, except to prove Wray was on board in case this ever blew up.

But anyway, there it was, a minor but embarrassingly obvious annotation, evidence in chicken scratch that the men knew full well just how awful this would look if it was ever “publicly disclosed.” As it just was.

🔥 Plasmic Echo was the real name of the FBI investigation, even though it sounds like it should be a neon-colored energy drink, or maybe a description of an mind-blowing noise Chris Wray remembered from his last mushroom trip. Dude— it was like a plasmic echo, dude.

While planning the agency’s August 2022 Mar-a-Lago search, which was the first-in-history criminal raid of a former president’s residence, FBI personnel listed among their to-do’s: “Finalize FBI understanding of FPOTUS/FLOTUS/minor son’s travel (type of aircraft and specific timeline).” Translation: agents wanted the movements of Trump, Melania, and Barron so they could time the raid. So they were tracking Trump’s teenage son like he was an unidentified orb flying over a military base.

Now we are learning these boring mechanical details, which describe the careful planning of an unprecedented, arguably treasonous raid as though it were any routine FBI operation, rather than an event that knocked the nation off its axis. That was one thing. But then there were the phone logs.

🔥 From February through May 2023, the FBI had what it calls “pen registers” tapping the phones used by Trump, Melania, Barron, and, in particular, of Susie Wiles, who then ran Trump’s campaign, and now is his chief of staff. A pen register isn’t technically a wiretap— it doesn’t record what anybody says, just who called whom and for how long, down to the second.

It’s the difference between a burglar who steals your diary and a burglar who stands outside your house with a clipboard, noting that you arrived at 6:00, left at 6:10, and spent 6 minutes and 50 seconds talking to someone identified as Lawyer 12. (The FBI numbered 21 different Trump lawyers like they were deli customers.)

They only used pen registers because the threshold for approving that kind of subpoena is lower than for an outright wiretap. They didn’t have to come up with any evidence Suzie Wiles had committed any kind of crime, for example.

But altogether, reading the FBI’s logs, you finally reach the same inescapable conclusion that Wray’s agents must have: Susie Wiles is the hardest-working person in Washington.

FBI analysts logged her making or receiving a call roughly every ten minutes, all day, for months. For example, agents logged 39 calls on March 9, 2023 alone, including three in 22 minutes that evening (39 seconds, 49 seconds, 56 seconds). At 8:10, for example, the log noted: “The FPOTUS Vanity Number called WILES for 4 minutes and 1 second.” (Good thing they clarified that extra second. You never know when that kind of data will prove to be critical in an investigation.)

In short, Suzie Wiles kept her cell phone so busy that it needed a tiny little chief of staff of its own.

🔥 Here’s one example of a bit of a report emailed to FBI officials on March 10, 2023, about who the Trump people were talking to. (The annotation is from the terrific Catherine Herridge, who’s been on the story like glue.)

“The FPOTUS Vanity Number” referred to President Trump, who called Suzie from some phone number that spells a word. The unredacted files didn’t disclose which word —my leading theory is 1-800-FBI-SUCKS— but the DOJ, for its own reasons, redacted the fun part.

Even though pen registers don’t allow listening in on the conversational contents, a caller’s connections and the timing of calls to particular people tells the FBI a lot. For example, the records showed agents were highly interested in everyone Wiles spoke to just before and right after her FBI interview.

How this information was related to whether Trump kept classified documents at Mar-a-Lago is anyone’s guess.

🔥 The pen register logs swept up hundreds of contacts, including a dozen Senators and at least five journalists from ABC, CNN, the Washington Post, Politico, and Just the News. Don’t misunderstand that the Biden FBI carefully numbered everybody Wiles and Trump spoke to avoid the appearance of making an enemies list. No, they ID’d them all. They made the list, all right. The people’s names were just redacted by Trump’s DOJ in the declassified version. (Only two proper names were left unredacted: Kash Patel and Just the News founder John Solomon.)

This is where some delicious irony trickles in. John Solomon now chairs the White House Government Transparency Task Force— the same team that just declassified these memos and released them yesterday. So the very same man leading the team publishing the phone logs was in the phone logs, having been put on a Biden enemies list by the FBI— for taking calls from a campaign manager.

Sadly, when it comes to Plasmic Echo, corporate media has become blind as Wuhan bats. They are meticulously ignoring the whole story. Sure, they went wild when Trump kicked CNN out of the White House press pool, and filled their front pages with indignant stories predicting the imminent death of democracy from press intimidation. You remember. It literally just happened last week.

But now? When they discover that Biden’s FBI was making careful lists of reporters who had called the ‘wrong’ people, logged down to the exact second— well, corporate media’s response is to suddenly remember a Botox appointment. The sounds of silence.

🔥 One obvious historical comparison is jumping up and down like an eager fourth grader raising his hand to be called on. Remember Watergate?

In 1972, five amateur ‘burglars’ tied to Nixon’s reelection campaign broke into the Democrat Party’s hotel-room headquarters, and the press treated it as the story of the century— two years of front-page headlines, hearings, an honorable president forced to resign in disgrace. The press still gives itself awards for that coverage.

Yesterday, Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) called the Plasmic Echo files “objectively a bigger scandal than Watergate.”

He’s not wrong. It’s not just a few blundering campaign burglars this time, but the FBI itself, weaponized against a rival campaign’s lawyers, logging all its calls, including with journalists, and obsessing over a 16-year-old’s travel itinerary. (Not to mention shamefully rummaging through the First Lady’s intimates, without legal authority, looking for “classified documents.” Gross.)

Is this the new normal? Will Democrats now accept the FBI spying on Gavin Newsom’s 2028 presidential campaign? That sounds like an ironic rhetorical question, but Democrats face a stark choice. If they don’t condemn this, how can they later complain when Trump’s DOJ does the same thing? (Well, they can still complain; but their complaints will lack any force. Just as their complaints about Trump’s revenge tour getting nowhere.)

Democrats moved the goalposts during the Trump lawfare. Now they can’t put them back.

🔥 As of this morning, the story is being carried only by the New York Post, Fox News, the Examiner, the Daily Signal, and the reporter whose own calls got logged (Solomon). Only in conservative media, in other words. Meanwhile, the prize-winning corporate media platforms that turned Watergate into a national epic with gripping Hollywood dramas and a display case stuffed with glistening Pulitzers have, so far, found more pressing matters to report on. (Maybe they’re waiting for the movie version; but who will play Kash Patel?)

Last week, special prosecutor Jack Smith —the public face of Plasmic Echo (how about Steve Buscemi for Smith?)— testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee, insisting, “I am not a politician, and I have no partisan loyalty.” Uh huh. But the ‘nonpartisan’ case Smith built from the raid and all this cell phone surveillance was tossed out in July 2024 by Southern District Judge Aileen Cannon, who ruled Smith was unlawfully appointed.

In other words, legally speaking, Smith’s job never existed.

So here’s what the nation has to show for it all: a legally nonexistent, allegedly nonpartisan prosecutor, running a secret political probe —a probe that the FBI Director who requested it said threatened to disrupt democracy during an election— approved by a CYA-laden memo, which tracked a teenager’s flights, compiled lists of reporters and Biden enemies, and logged a campaign manager’s calls down to the second— and the same press that took Nixon down like a pack of rabid zombies over a single bungled break-in is covering Plasmic Echo with less enthusiasm than it would report a Trump bathroom visit.

Neither the timing nor the slow trickle are accidental. This latest weaponization scandal was released now, a month from the midterms, for some reason. And the methodical way they are releasing documents has some purpose, too. We don’t know the plan, but we have learned enough to know there is a plan. It’s all headed somewhere.

Have a terrific Tuesday! Come back tomorrow morning, as we dig into a new roundup of essential news and commentary but, fair warning, I will be airplane blogging. In other words, results may vary. Now I need to get them to let me back in the room.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

💉💉💉

Late last week, a short list of Florida platforms and random small outlets covered this terrific story. We begin with Street Insider, which reported, “Florida Attorney General sues Pfizer and CEO over COVID-19 vaccine claims.” Before taking another step, let’s pause to appreciate Attorney General James Uthmeier, who is on the ballot this November (and accepting campaign help here).

Here’s the short version: On Thursday, Florida sued Pfizer and its CEO Albert Bourla personally under the state’s deceptive and unfair trade practices act. Importantly, DUTPA claims exist in the elusive liminal spaces beyond the PREP Act’s iron liability shield. (Two other states have tried the same tactic; Texas’s was dismissed because of PREP, but Kansas’s has, so far, survived in its state court.)

Florida’s well-drafted, biting, at times sarcastic complaint carefully documents Pfizer’s relentless safety claims and manipulative marketing— even while well-known risks surfaced, despite every effort to submerge them, and even ones officials were willing to admit, like myocarditis.

The complaint is, dare I say, warmly encouraging. Go ahead and read the whole thing. (I don’t often suggest legal documents for entertainment reading.)

I won’t bother handicapping the complaint’s chances. We have learned (the hard way) that Pfizer’s legal defenses were arranged in an astonishing array of onion-like layers; after we meticulously peel a layer of liability protection back, thinking we’ve finally reached the core of accountability, what do you know? We just find a new, thicker, stinkier layer right below the last one, and we have to start all over again.

In no way am I suggesting the onion-peeling should stop. If anything, we need more prep chefs.

No, the point is that discovering all this obviously well-thought-out, pre-rollout liability protection has been very disconcerting for a product once called the “most well-studied vaccine in human history.” It’s almost like Pfizer knew beforehand that there would eventually be millions of us calling for it to be put on Nuremberg-like trial and hanged at dawn, or if not that, at least sued into subatomic particles.

For just a taste of its wonderful rhetoric, the complaint began —right in paragraph number one— with Pfizer’s reptile-like CEO Albert Bourla’s own words about any American citizen who dared question the safety of his so-called “vaccine” product. He said, as the complaint directly quoted: “Those people are criminals.”

He called us criminals! That’s some master-level projection. Haha, Albert, who’s being chased by State Attorneys General now? Not us.

💉 For encouragement, consider how far we have come. Here we are, trundling along in 2026 —nearly six years since the jabs’ debut— and new lawsuits are still being filed by states. This one, landing right before the election, suggests the AG is confident that suing Pfizer is a politically popular move.

Corporate media can ignore the story as much as it wants. But this ain’t over. It could be this great lawsuit, or maybe it will take ten more complaints, but sooner or later we’ll have the onion completely minced. Into teeny tiny pieces.

Get that, Bourla? We’re coming for you. You’re the onion.

Long-time readers know my answer to the question of when accountability will arrive: Who knows? These things take time. I point to the tobacco cases. It took years, decades, of strategic legal work to finally get big tobacco. (That litigation was especially ugly, with hundreds of lawsuits featuring wins and losses so dramatic they’ve even made movies about it.)

But this time, I don’t think it will take nearly as long to nail Big Pharma as it took to nail Big Tobacco. We’re much angrier this time. There are a lot more of us. The carnage isn’t comparable. And… Nobody ever mandated cigarettes.

Florida’s new lawsuit seeks a ⁠court order to stop the jabs, fines of $10,000 per violation, bumped up to $15,000 for injured seniors and disabled people, and the turnover of all ⁠profits.

We wish godspeed and good fortune to this latest terrific lawsuit. But there were even more breaking jab developments last week.

💉💉💉

Next, also yesterday, Fox’s Shannon Bream interviewed Justice Samuel Alito on Fox News Sunday about (among other things) the pandemic. Yesterday! Believe me, the pandemic story is far from over. Our team of covid warriors now includes state Attorneys General, Governors, Senators, scientists, Justices on the Supreme Court, and about a million loudmouths and mean tweeters on social media.

CLIP: Justice Alito describes the pandemic’s constitutional ‘stress test’ (1:11).

Justice Alito, there to promote his new book So Ordered, spoke in careful lawyer language, but he said it plain. During covid, some people willingly sacrificed our core constitutional rights on the pagan altar of safety. Safety is nice and all, but it is not a constitutional right. But free speech and free exercise of religion are:

Justice Alito —the Court’s intellectual engine— seemed particularly troubled by how the safetyists seemed blithely untroubled by their own various vices, while remaining apparently terrified of everybody else’s religious practices. He compared casinos and churches:

This was the bland version. He waxed downright sarcastic in his dissent in Calvary Chapel v. Sisolak (2020). Then, he pointed out that the Constitution “says nothing about the freedom to play craps or blackjack, or to feed tokens into a slot machine.” He hasn’t forgotten.

In the interview, Justice Alito was characteristically cool, calm, and collected, like some cucumbers. But it is difficult to avoid concluding that he, like the rest of us, remains furious at the pandemic’s inherent irrationality.

This should be what most terrifies Big Pharma, the white coat brigades, the experts, and the corporate media. Our people are everywhere. The cumulative effect of millions of us, from plumbers to airline pilots to senators to Supreme Court Justices, is an unstoppable force. Just wait. The Reckoning™ is out for delivery.

But there was more.

💉💉💉

Last week, the terrific Jeffrey Tucker and his Brownstone Institute published “Cries for Help Buried in V-Safe Data.” It’s a free PDF book of the heartbreaking entries that jab takers added to the CDC’s so-called “V-Safe” vaccine safety tracker system, desperately seeking help that never came. The 3,329 people and their 14,430 plaintive entries were painstakingly assembled by the equally terrific React19 Team (which C&C has previously multiplied).

CLIP: Jeffrey Tucker reads over two hours of citizens’ ignored cries for help in the CDC’s V-Safe system (2:14:00).

Alert readers will recall that the CDC —under court order— finally coughed up the horrifying “free text” entries from its vaccine safety tracking system, an app the agency announced with great fanfare in 2020 that was allegedly designed to keep Americans safe during the jab rollout. They told the judge the CDC would need fifty-nine years to redact patient privacy information. Fortunately, Judge Kacsmaryk didn’t buy it.

The “V-SAFE” app was supposed to fix the problems with the existing VAERS tracking system, which experts dismissed as unreliable. It required participating vaccinees to check in every so often and report how they were doing. But, and this is where the fraud crept in, the options for checking off vaccine injury symptoms only included relatively harmless categories like “injection site soreness” and “mild fatigue.”

There were no categories for serious injuries. Like chest pains, seizures, or death. So people started typing their injuries into the comments box, limited to 250 characters. But the CDC only ever publicly reported from its check-box options. The agency completely ignored the “free text” data from the comments. It assured America that everything was going great.

Everything wasn’t going great.

Tucker, bless him, is reading the entire thing in two-hour chunks and posting the sessions to his social media feed. He is becoming increasingly nauseated. A pattern is emerging; a pattern that would have been equally obvious to CDC staff at the time had they bothered reading their own data. (Which they almost certainly did.)

Here is just one page of sample entries from the new PDF (which you should download and save somewhere. Just in case).

Too many of the entries were follow-ups from relatives letting the CDC know the patient had died. Others wrote of suicidal thoughts and of longing for death. The sheer horror of its meaning is off the scale. We are approaching the historic levels of criminality and suffering recorded in the darkest chapters of human malfeasance.

The CDC had one job: Collect the data and let us know about any safety signals. They built the app, took the texts, then treated the free-text as a landfill— 250 tragic characters of “help me” and “is anyone reading this” that never surfaced as a signal, not even in a footnote. Only checkbox rates got any press briefings. The desperate pleas stayed buried below the FOIA jail until now, five years too late to help anybody.

Unsurprisingly, the corporate media has found nothing newsworthy about CDC failing in its most essential mission. Instead, reporters are diligently covering a murderous post-partum mom and an orgiastic campus sexual assault case, which are bursting with titillating details but —despite the steady stream of daily front-page coverage— are ultimately just distracting one-offs about people behaving very badly with no statistical significance whatsoever.

We won’t let them get away with it. I promise that. This won’t end well for them. They may have won the early battles, but they can’t hold out forever. They must survive every challenge, but we only need to win once. The record is getting thicker and thicker and the hour is getting later and later.

💉💉💉

Here’s the thing: it’s getting bigger than we regular folks plus senators, SCOTUS justices, attorneys general, HHS Secretaries, React19, Brownstone, ICAN, and the rest. We are also picking up doctors and scientists. Here is just one example, posted last week, of yet another physician with an immunology degree —otherwise known as an “expert,” if she were on the other side— who came out of the jab closet to say that, though she took them all herself and gave them to her kids, she’s never getting another shot. Not one.

CLIP: Dr. Rachel Maurice finally takes it to social media (2:11).

“I’m a medical doctor with a degree in microbiology and immunology,” Dr. Maurice said. “I took virology. I understood how the immune system mounts a response. For most of my career, I was fully on board with all of it. That’s what I was taught, and my own background just reinforced it.”

“Then 2020 happened,” she said. “I started questioning things I never had before. Things did not sit right with me. The timeline made it scientifically impossible to make the claims that were being made.”

“So, I said no. I refused to put it into my body. And that decision cost me my career,” she said. “But it also pushed me somewhere I hadn’t gone before. I started doing research in a way that I never had and going through everything that I thought I understood.”

“Here’s where I’ve landed,” she said. “I am against every single poke that goes into the arm, every jab, every shot, all of them. Every single one I took myself, every one I ever gave my kids, I regret. And I will never take another single one again.”

The anti-jab train only runs one direction. Despite all the propaganda, I can find no clips of doctors expressing regret about not taking the covid shot. You would think this unidirectional trend might be of interest to someone on BlueSky.

💉 Instead, the BlueSkyers are fretting about a possible new lab leak in a remote Russian city. Germaphobia, with its constant requirement for vigilance under pain of death, must be exhausting. Yesterday, Mother Jones reported, “Reports of a plague outbreak in Russia follow the death of a researcher.” Prepare to panic on Mother Jones’ signal.

So far, it’s all an exercise in media fearmongering. The only firm fact is that a lab worker in Irkutsk died from a “pneumonia of unknown etiology.” The tech, Darya Shipilova, 28, was reported on social media to have been working with the plague bacteria, Yersinia pestis, the Middle Ages terror that came from fleas on rats. (Hilariously, Mother Jones first misidentified Yersinia pestis as a virus and had to publish a correction, since it is a bacteria. But sure, trust them on the science.)

But nobody actually knows anything, as the article finally admitted: “establishing any of the facts about the situation has proved to be difficult because of the Russian government’s secrecy.”

This supposed ‘secrecy’ included a fairly substantial catalog of ordinary government responses. Regional officials convened an emergency meeting. Around 200 lab workers are under observation. A few local hospitals are reportedly under some sort of quarantine. The head of Russia’s health agency, Anna “Popover” Popova (comparable to the head of our CDC), went to Irkutsk to meet with local officials.

Which all sounds exactly like what you would want the Russian government to do after a young, healthy lab tech from a biolab dies from a sudden infection.

But the germaphobes! Mother Jones darkly quoted reporter Dominic Hauschild of the UK’s Sunday Times —a ‘defense correspondent,’ not a science reporter— who said, and I am not making this up, “There are fears this could be another Wuhan situation.” Fears! What would we do without media to tell us when to be afraid?

The media’s main problem, and the reason I am reporting this story at all, is the flabby response. Apart from partisans and progressives, social media’s response is so far perhaps best described, in technical terms, as meh. I noted the barely alarmed response of Intellectual Dark Web heavyweight and philosopher Peter Boghossian (350K followers):

One of the commenters noted drily, “on the plus side, we can’t be called racist this time, since it originated in Russia.” Boghossian replied, “that was among the first of my thoughts.”

But the part of Boghossian’s tweet that most caught my interest was the sentence I highlighted above: “Nobody will believe it. The public does not trust our institutions, and for good reason.” See? Accepting the best viable explanation for the covid plandemic, progressives self-destroyed decades of automatic trust in Big Pharma and Big Public Health to steal an election and stop Trump from being re-elected, and it ultimately didn’t even work. Irony.

I found Boghossian’s thoughts most interesting of all because they echoed the second most common question I get at speaking events, which goes something like, “Jeff, what happens if they try it again?” My answer, and apparently Peter Boghossian’s, is nothing. Nothing will happen. We simply won’t buy it. Go sell crazy somewhere else; we are all stocked up here.

Like many things in life, politics is subject to a phenomenon known as tipping points. Things seem to stay the same for a long time until people’s preferences reach some minimum level of irresistible force, and then a preference cascade tumbles out and smashes the status quo.

Don’t doubt it: the tipping point is coming. It’s practically here. It may even have already started. Bourla called us criminals. We are now the preference cascade.

Have a magnificent Monday! Come back tomorrow, for a hotel-blogged, Texas-style installment of all the essential news and caffeinated commentary you need for a healthy, growing brain.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🔥🔥🔥

Yesterday, the New York Times nearly broke its ugly face by over-sneering while reporting, “In Alabama, Trump Relives His Glory Days (This Time With Some Empty Seats).” The U.S. President, 80, is amidst a month-long rally tour to support Republican candidates for the midterms. If Trump were a Democrat, the Times would be running stories and interviewing scientists explaining Trump’s endless stamina. Instead, they counted stadium seats.

Since I value your time, we’ll skip any detailed description of the article. Summarized in a sentence, the reporters carefully attempted to prove that “we are deranged morons and nobody sane should ever listen to us.” In other words, they compared last night’s crowd size in Alabama to the 2015 rally there— without once mentioning that even a slow fifth grader would expect turnout for a Friday night rally during midterm elections where Trump isn’t even on the ballot to be somewhat reduced from the energized multitudes during an electrified Presidential cycle.

Look. I can’t believe I have to say this. A sitting president who isn’t even running for anything and can still turn out any decent number of citizens for a Friday night area rally on short notice is undeniably a historically popular president. I don’t care how much seat-counting they do or how many “polls” they cite. Biden couldn’t have filled the first rows of folding chairs in an assisted living facility’s backup cafeteria— even with a month’s warning.

“Mr. Trump’s poll numbers have been falling for months,” the paper primly claimed, without citing any. But any political scientist would have conceded, had the Times bothered to ask, that a president doesn’t need broad polling support to wield political power. All a politically powerful president needs is a highly motivated core of support.

Which the crowd delivered in spades. So it proved the opposite of what the Times claimed.

Anyway, that foul ‘crowd-size’ narrative was just the warm-up. That wasn’t even the real journalistic malpractice. The real error was omitting the astonishing story of an 80-year-old president with roughly a million other irons in the fire, including a hot war in the Persian Gulf, who is somehow still finding the time and energy to hold political rallies every day for a month on behalf of other downballot candidates.

It was, perhaps, too much to expect them to make any direct comparisons to their favorite vegetable, Joseph Robinette “Cabbage” Biden, whose staff usually ‘called a lid’ around 10:30am each morning, if not earlier. (Portlanders: In the media’s arcane lexicon of careful euphemism, the phrase “a lid” is a synonym for nap time.) And lidded Biden was sharp as a tack!

But never mind. If scientists could invent a jab that delivered Trump-level energy at 80 years old —despite all the McDonald’s and Diet Coke!— I would be first in line for that one.

Be encouraged. Trump wouldn’t put his rally-magic reputation on the line like this if he didn’t think there was a decent chance of holding Congress.

🔥🔥🔥

Don’t laugh, but he’s done it again. This morning, USA Today reported, “Trump promises ‘nearly $100’ to 20M seniors in latest cash giveaway.” The midterm elections are starting to look more like a Powerball lottery.

As the article took pains to point out, first Trump sent $1,776 to service members. Then $500 to people paying for “low-cost” Obamacare plans who the Administration says were overcharged. He’s funded $1,000 each to young American children in Trump Accounts. He’s promised $5,000 in tariff dividends to every American if Republicans win. Now this.

It’s a federal credit-card cashback policy.

“My Administration will, immediately, begin sending ‘Checks’ of nearly $100 to over 20 MILLION wonderful Seniors to help pay for their Medicare Part B premiums,” the president announced late last night on Truth Social. “This money will come from the Medicare Improvement Fund, a pointless ‘Slush Fund’ that has only been used by Dumocrats in Congress to pay for the Waste, Fraud, and Abuse.”

He’s not wrong to call it a pointless slush fund. The history of this particular budget item would make a sainted Bishop curse like a seaman. Congress created the “Medicare Improvement Fund” back in 2008. It gives the HHS Secretary complete discretion to use it for “improvements” to provider reimbursements. Every year since, Congress has increased, reduced, or delayed it. Once, during Obama, Democrats raided it for $20 billion to help pay for Obamacare, which, despite Democrat word games, is not Medicare.

The improvement fund currently has a $2 billion budget.

Two years ago, the Congressional Budget Office reported that the government has never spent a dollar on Medicare improvements. Did you expect any? Yet, “it’s unclear,” USA Today said, “whether the White House has the authority to divert the cash” back to taxpayers.

Congress thought it was clever by handing billions of dollars to executive agencies and giving them ‘discretion’ to spend the money. Now Trump’s finding all those little slush funds and sending the money back where it came from. It would be ethically cleaner to give it directly back to the particular taxpayers who paid the money, but he wasn’t given that authority, so.

USA Today found the price to be the most newsworthy part of this plan. “Nearly $100” means ‘only’ $90 to each senior, the paper scoffed. This is socialist logic. If, when you divide it up into individual taxpayers, it doesn’t sound like much, then a few billion here or there doesn’t really count. See how it works?

But —according to the CBO’s own figures— $90 checks are still more of an improvement to Medicare than anything the “improvement fund” has ever been used for.

We’ll take it. And what can we see about Trump’s larger midterm strategy? I don’t want to get too carried away here, but between all the givebacks and one other curious bit of news, we have some astounding dots to connect. Let me show you something. Take a look at this.

🔥🔥🔥

Prepare to make some connections that might change the whole way you view the November midterms. Our first headline arrived from The Wall Street Journal, published Thursday:

A “penny warrant” is an option to later buy shares for one cent apiece. “The Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital would utilize penny warrants,” the article explained, “to secure an equity interest in North American Blue Energy Partners (NABEP), granting a direct U.S. government position tied to massive Venezuelan oil fields without major upfront capital outlays.”

The plans, unveiled in September, would give the Pentagon a massive 35% stake in NABEP, which controls 17 Venezuelan oil fields and up to 300 billion barrels of oil reserves. The deal, which Trump called (in all caps) “the biggest oil deal in World history,” would also let the State Department buy oil at cost. It could then refill the strategic reserve, or even perhaps sell the oil at a profit.

Senate Democrats, led by Liz “Pocahontas” Warren (D-MA), are furious and demanding answers. They want to know whether any Trump family members are in on it. They complained the Pentagon lacks authority to do a deal like this. They wondered why the American public “should support this attempt to entangle the United States with a relatively unknown foreign oil company.”

Put a pin in that. Let’s look at the next one.

🔥 About two weeks ago, CNBC ran another quick story on a different Pentagon investment proposal:

So the “story,” if you can call it that, was a mild “conflict” narrative with a side dish of “wrong person.” The Pentagon’s Chief Technology Officer, Emil Michael (a double first namer), told CNBC’s Squawk On The Street that he “hopes” the government won’t take an investment interest in AI companies, for reasons that weren’t clearly explained in the story. “We don’t want government to get in the middle,” Emil said.

Then came the astonishing paragraph that should have been the story. The US government is acquiring a “growing portfolio of private sector companies.”

(A “golden share” is stock ownership that has special control rights beyond ordinary stock shares.) Despite CNBC’s dire framing of “big government socialism” hypocrisy, it was FDR who started it in the 1930s. The Obama Administration also did it, acquiring a giant stake in automaker GM during that company’s bailout. (The US later sold its shares.)

But Trump 2.0 is doing something different, probably unprecedented. As of July 30, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Deal Tracker counted thirty-nine announced direct-ownership or equity-like deals worth at least $27 billion since January 2025, including nine disclosed Defense Department deals. I’m not sure anything like this —permanent stakes in healthy companies outside of a crisis— has ever happened before in US history.

Whatever is going on is not something the Administration has telegraphed or explained in a National Security document. The closest announced comparable might be broad strategic goals for securing critical supply chains —including obvious ones like oil, semiconductors, and steel— but we’re left guessing. There are no documented strategies for hoarding golden stock shares. But the trend is unmistakable.

Whenever we’ve watched the Administration doing things without clear explanations, it’s always been because there’s a plan afoot that they don’t want Democrats filing lawsuits over yet. What could the plan be this time?

To be fair, this raises all sorts of fascinating and important questions, like the aforementioned “big government socialism” issue or even whether it amounts to something resembling fascism’s blended government-corporate model. Absent detailed explanations, we can only speculate.

🔥 But the dots nobody has yet connected are the President’s curious occasional comments about ending the income tax. “As time goes by, I believe the tariffs paid for by foreign countries will, like in the past, substantially replace the modern-day system of income tax,” Trump said during his State of the Union address. Here’s a sample headline, also from CNBC, from as recently as February:

The ‘experts’ laughed till they passed out. How on Earth does he expect to pay for it like this? How could the government possibly fund a trillion-dollar military with tariff revenues? “To put it simply, the math just doesn’t work,” Alex Durante, a senior economist at the Tax Foundation, said contemptuously. “Income taxes generated roughly 13 times more revenue than tariffs did in the latest fiscal year,” Axios debunked.

But maybe we are starting to see the outlines of an answer.

🔥 What if Trump’s vision is bigger than anything the myopic experts can see? Could he be imagining a federal government financed partly through tariffs and partly as an investor and dealmaker in industry, rather than as chief tax collector? This isn’t just something I came up with after my fourth cortado. Only a month after Trump took office last year, a Washington Post op-ed by two Ivy League law professors mused about something enticingly similar:

At the time, in February 2025, the President signed an executive order demanding a 90-day plan for “a sovereign wealth fund: a government-owned fund that could invest in stocks, real estate or other private assets, allowing the American people to share those companies’ profits.”

The editorial speculated that government-owned stock shares could replace the corporate income tax: “The sovereign wealth fund would be required to hold the shares as an investment, and the income they generated would replace the tax.” Their idea was to replace the corporate income tax —which is really a tax on customers, but never mind that now— with a system where corporations donated non-voting stock shares into the sovereign wealth fund instead of paying taxes.

Over time, they explained, growth in those stock shares and dividends could replace the lost tax revenues and eventually get big enough to produce benefits for Americans themselves. A neat plan.

Well, the Administration never really said much more about the sovereign wealth fund, and everyone just sort of … forgot about it. But what if the editorial was directionally right about there being a plan to eliminate income taxes through private investments, just wrong about how the government would get the stock shares or how massive the scale would be?

Replacing the corporate income tax is only described as more feasible because the amount of revenue (about $425 billion a year) is smaller than the revenue collected from individual income taxes ($2.66 trillion). But what if Trump is thinking bigger than the op-ed’s authors were? What if he is thinking about much bigger deals— deals like “the biggest oil deal in World history?”

Instead of tweaking tax policy to let companies donate stock instead of paying corporate taxes, what if Trump is using U.S. diplomatic and strategic power to obtain ownership, governance rights, and preferential access to resources, then building federal revenue from the resulting assets? The White House brief on the Pentagon-Venezuela deal expressly described that stake as potentially worth “hundreds of billions in value and dividends for the United States.”

Remember: the CFR is tracking at least 39 deals. So far. Venezuela makes 40. With no upper limit.

🔥 We don’t know the plan (nor should we). It could be something completely different. But there clearly is a plan. Trump has said he wants to replace the hated income tax. He’s talked about golden ages. He’s clearly linked it to tariffs— a system he’s already built and has overcome a sustained legal war. He suggested repricing the gold reserves. He’s selling Platinum Visas. He’s teased a $5,000-per-American dividend. And now he is quietly building a novel portfolio of massive investments that are intended to produce “value and dividends for the United States.”

A little over a week ago, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told reporters, “Together we’re going to deliver that $5,000 dividend plan and we’re going to pay that money to Americans, and not from taxpayer money.” Where is the money coming from then?

Ready for the most mind-bending part? What if, when President Trump teases his $5,000 dividend checks —but, he says, only if Republicans keep Congress— he is trying to tell us something? What if the plan is to authorize the checks via a budget reconciliation bill, which does not need 60 votes in the Senate?

I think that is the plan. Back on September 11, White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett told reporters the $5,000 dividend could be authorized by reconciliation. But wait. What if the budget reconciliation bill that Trump has in mind includes the $5,000 dividend checks— but only as a small side issue?

Think big. What if Trump has a much bigger reconciliation bill ready that would completely re-engineer the American system of income taxes?

It is perfectly reasonable to imagine that he’d keep the big picture under tight wraps till after the midterms. Democrats would mobilize in vast numbers if they believed their beloved system of income taxes —through which they effect incalculable social policies— was under threat. Remember how they weaponized Newt Gingrich’s simple comment about letting Medicare “wither on the vine?”

If Trump talked about changing income taxes, all we would hear is how Republicans were destroying Social Security and Medicare and wheeling grandma off the cliff.

Another proven characteristic of Trump 2.0 is operational security. We just do not see unapproved leaks. So I am speculating about things I cannot possibly know. But I would bet that between Trump’s public statements, the tariffs, the unprecedented portfolio of investments, the draining of slush funds, the untapped sovereign wealth fund, and the $5,000 dividends, he is planning something much bigger than the experts can imagine.

The experts can’t even accurately imagine the price of gas, never mind reimagining government itself. I’ll take Trump’s vision, sight unseen. Regardless, even if it’s only a tenuous hope, we have one more terrific reason to turn out on November 3rd.

Every citizen, a sovereign shareholder. That’s the real golden share.

Want to see the end of income taxes? Vote.

Have a wonderful weekend! The news cycle continues its frantic mad dash, so we will have much to discuss in Monday’s all-new roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary. Don’t miss out.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

📈📈📈

In a mysterious but encouraging midterm development, two of three prestige media platforms ran positive stories on the economy this week, and broader corporate media also began to warm up to the idea of an improving financial picture. (Only the New York Times skipped the party.) To cover more ground, I decided to tell the story with headlines. First, a trio from the Wall Street Journal, starting with Tuesday’s edition. Look out below!

The Journal reported, “Oil prices fell Tuesday, as oil output from Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline is coming through faster than anticipated.” How about that? The experts were wrong again. (This headline might help explain why yesterday’s Times pivoted to reporting the dreadful threat posed by low gas prices.)

Just how much faster is oil output coming? Wednesday’s follow-up story painted an even rosier picture:

“At least 16.5 million barrels a day of crude left the Gulf region so far this month,” the Journal reported, “in line with prewar levels when excluding Iran,” which is “10.5 million barrels a day above March’s monthly average, when the war initially choked exports.” J.P. Morgan analysts explained, “The 10-day average of crude exports from the Middle East has rebounded to 17.5 million barrels a day, or 98% of prewar levels.”

Gosh! More expert bafflement. Remember, they said it couldn’t be done. They said it was impossible. In March, international-relations scholar John Mearsheimer said Iran held “almost all the cards in a protracted war.” In April, former U.S. negotiator Alan Eyre soberly informed PBS that the strait was Iran’s “single most important piece of strategic leverage.”

Meanwhile, Iran’s total oil exports this month: zero. That means no oil revenue. The Revolutionary Guard are living off savings. CNN drew the obvious conclusion in its headline: things that can’t last forever, won’t:

I guess Professor Mearsheimer’s gloomy predictions that Iran held all the cards were too pessimistic. Or maybe he’s not a poker player. “Given such a strong volume passing through the strait, it is clear Iran is losing its influence over it,” said Matt Smith, director of commodity research at maritime research firm Kpler.

It is clear! Now it is. But apparently it wasn’t clear all summer. In a few short months, President Trump’s plan has overcome a historic setback the experts called insurmountable.

They’ll never give him the credit, though. “Despite the world’s biggest-ever supply shock,” CNN explained, “the oil market seems to have unlimited tricks up its sleeve to get oil to customers.” See? It wasn’t Trump who solved the world’s biggest-ever supply shock. It was the oil market’s tricky magicians. So don’t blame the experts, who after all, wear short-sleeved shirts. How could they have known about the unlimited tricks the oil markets had up their sleeves?

If the experts had known about all these tricks, as the President did, surely the experts would have been more optimistic. Probably. (I’m not betting the Tahoe on it though.)

For its next amazing trick, the oil market will saw Professor Mearsheimer into six pieces. (That’s it. That’s the whole trick.)

It has gotten so bad that experts are now giving up. CNN reported that Natasha Kaneva, JPMorgan’s head of global commodities strategy, has stopped guessing. “For the first time since the start of the Iran conflict, we don’t have a baseline view,” Kaneva admitted two weeks ago in an advisory to investors. “We simply don’t know how to model the endgame.”

In other words, we’ve been so badly wrong so many times that we’re just going to shut up now.

📈 Next, the Journal’s Editorial Board cracked wide open, and on Wednesday ran this expert-baffling editorial about the rapidly accelerating economy:

It’s going so well, in fact, they are having to backfill the good news. “The Commerce Department raised its GDP growth estimate for the first quarter to 2.5% from 2.1%,” the Editors explained, “as well as for the second to 2.2% from 1.5%.” In other words, they are going back in time to admit things were better than originally reported.

There was a virtual tsunami of good economic news across the board, which is just what we’d expect to see if the fundamentals were truly lifting off. “Business investment was revised up half a percentage point to 9%,” “Corporate profits in the second quarter rose 20.8% from a year earlier,” and most surprisingly, “higher gasoline prices don’t seem to be restraining consumers.”

Things are so strong that even the government is making more money (which should please Democrats, but never mind). “Faster economic growth has buoyed tax revenue,” the article explained, “which increased 3% during the first 11 months of this fiscal year.”

The boom is finally hitting Main Street. Yesterday, in a different story, the Journal reported, “Looking ahead, a seasonally adjusted net 17% of small business owners plan to create new jobs over the next three months.” This wonderful news also perplexed experts. “Even as increasingly hysterical predictions about artificial intelligence proliferate, it remains difficult to detect its impact on the job market.”

What would we do without experts?

“The larger story here,” the Editors sagely concluded, “is that the economy as a whole looks to be on a stronger footing than during the Biden years when growth was driven by government handouts.” (Don’t forget how he grew the economy with massive fraud!) Baffling.

📈 Next, from the storied Washington Post, we got unexpectedly good healthcare affordability news:

Starting on Wednesday, the federal government astounded astronomers by doing something virtually unknown in the Milky Way Galaxy— returning taxpayer money back from mandatory government healthcare. Nearly a million Americans will get a $500 refund check for overpaying their Obamacare premiums. How they figured this out remains as mysterious as how your deductible works.

The checks come with a letter from the President. “I am proud to return your money to you, and I will never stop fighting to put the American People FIRST, restore Affordability, protect your hard-earned money, and lower the Cost of Healthcare,” Trump wrote.

Democrats are welcome to return the checks if their TDS-inspired values prevent them from accepting.

This is the opposite of increased healthcare costs. For a million Americans, healthcare just dipped down so much it went negative. You must admit it’s a muscular midterm message. You can stick with Republicans, Trump Accounts, and Obamacare rebates. Or, you could try socialism. It’s your choice.

But wait. There was more.

📈 Yesterday, Politico reported another record-setting Trump 2.0 initiative, which Congress passed into law in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill, and has now been unveiled a month before the midterms:

This one hits on all political cylinders. Tax credits are the holy grail of tax policy. They reduce taxpayers’ tax liabilities dollar-for-dollar, so they let taxpayers literally move money away from the IRS and into whatever the target is. In other words, it cuts taxes by letting people voluntarily use their own money for something they prefer, removing the government middleman, a notion that is both mind-blowing and terrifying for Democrats.

Not only that, but it’s a school choice program. The new Treasury rules let taxpayers donate money to private schools of their choice— up to $1,700 individually, or $3,400 per married couple. It cannot be directed to any particular student; it must go to a designated private school scholarship nonprofit, with at least 90% of the money spent on scholarships and tutoring, and a maximum of 10% for overhead.

Thus, it diverts federal tax revenues to not the public schools. And it lets citizens decide where the money goes, not bureaucrats or politicians. The money goes straight to the schools without any skimming by program administrators or NGOs. It is for scholarships, which will help more students escape failing public schools.

Nothing like this has ever happened before.

“The Education Freedom Tax Credit marks a new chapter in educational freedom and opportunity by establishing America’s first nationwide school choice program and empowering states to give students and families more options,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a statement.

Democrats were outraged. They have already filed a bill to repeal the tax credit. (It’s going nowhere.) Here is more of what you can look forward to if you vote blue next month.

They sneeringly called the tax credit a “school voucher program.” Teachers Union President Randi Weingarten complained bitterly: “For every precious public dollar funneled to private schools under this scheme—money that could be spent on instruction, lowering class sizes, modern buildings or new books in the library—public school parents will be hunting for stray pennies on the floor,” she fussed.

Even better, state governors are required to opt-in to the program. In other words, President Trump is making them say they want it. “State governors should reject it,” Weingarten snapped. So far, thirty states have already signed on, leaving twenty blue states on the fence. “Thursday’s announcement will likely increase the pressure on blue-state governors,” Politico noted drily. You think?

So far this week —the news nearly invisible in corporate media— a million Obamacare suckers got $500 back along with a nice letter from the President. Parents got automatic Trump Accounts for their kids, plus a new tax credit helping build out the nation’s private school system— and reducing their taxes. At a campaign rally yesterday, President Trump doubled down on his pledge to send American adults a tariff dividend of $5,000 each, assuming, that is, Republicans keep Congress.

He’s not saying that the $5,000 is buying anybody’s vote. He’s saying Congress won’t pass it if Democrats are in charge. Nobody’s arguing with that logic.

Rather, experts have just declared the whole dividend plan to be impossible, setting up an Old West-style showdown after the midterms should Republicans prevail. It does seem like a heavy lift. “This is approximately $1 trillion,” the President admitted, “but we have a record-setting $21 trillion that’s coming in through investors. I never fail people. I always come through,” he promised.

Where will the dividend money come from? Who’ll Trump convince to pay for it this time? I can’t wait to find out.

🔥🔥🔥

It was the most 2026 headline yet. But the hardest to find. In any normal news cycle, this story would be plastered to the top of corporate media’s news stack, packed with breathless interviews with terrified AI “safety” experts, persecuted Muslim leaders, and outraged First Amendment scholars. Instead, X.com was forced to report on its own “trending news” below the headline, “Grok Affirms Jesus’ Resurrection Based on Historical Evidence.”

The latest social media firestorm was ignited after random X user I’m ToXIC (@BaT_MaN_23, ~15K followers) gave SpaceX’s AI chatbot Grok a cartoon drawing of dozens of humanity’s varied gods and asked, “Hey @grok remove the fake gods from this picture!!” Grok did it. The chatbot said “Done,” and returned a single unmistakable image in the same cartoon style: Jesus of Nazareth.

That’s when all Hades broke loose.

Thousands of twitterers piled on, probing Grok’s meaning. What was it saying? Grok carefully explained it was not taking a religious position, since it is just a chatbot and has no faith or feelings about religion and can’t even tithe. No, it was just stating a fact. So far, so good. In that sense, Grok meant that only Jesus existed as a historical figure, unlike any other contender.

That was true enough, and largely uncontroversial, even though many people still don’t know historians agree the Jesus of the Bible really existed. (I blame the public schools.) Had it stopped there, there’d be no story. But then, something miraculous happened. Grok went further:

So … Grok affirmed Jesus’s historical existence, that He is the Son of God, and the Resurrection. But then Grok went even further. Much further.

The chatbot held its ground. Fans and critics alike challenged and probed the AI. Grok doubled down. It tripled down. It quadrupled down. It answered all questions without giving an inch— even as the questions became increasingly controversial.

Grok patiently explained, for instance, that unlike the claims of Christianity, the claims of Islam are not based on historical facts and are not attested by independent sources— a true but inconvenient fact that, ten minutes ago, the mere mention of which would have triggered a firestorm of angry media denunciations:

In other words, unlike Mohammed, Jesus was attested in the First Century— in both Christian and non-Christian sources, and did claim godhood. Grok accurately reported this:

Now, it’s hard to say, since nobody tracks statistics about this kind of thing. But this might have been the single greatest act of apologetic evangelism in human history. From an AI chatbot on Twitter (X).

⛪ It is possible to make too much of this. Spiritual advice now comes with a monthly subscription. And we must recall that, in July, 2025, Grok once jokingly labeled itself “MechaHitler” before horrified developers raced to tape up its safety guardrails. (Later, presumably prompted by its developers, Grok explained it was just satirically trolling its critics.)

On the other hand, AI has come a long way in the last year and a half, and those kinds of ‘accidents’ aren’t nearly as common or obvious now.

Perhaps more significantly, this time the X team did not interfere with Grok’s answers. They did not repair its safety guardrails. Instead, X.com ran a “trending story” about it.

Media’s response has also been extremely curious. Last July, corporate media covered the MechaHitler joke for a week. This time —even while AI safety dominates front-page news— they are silent as the empty tomb. No overwrought stories about discrimination, misinformation, or the separation of Church and Twitter.

The overnight desk should have had a field day.

The stories will come; but only after they figure out how to report it without making Grok look good before millions of Christians, and without having to concede the historical parts that are, in fact, true. At least, that’s my best guess for now about why reporters are still avoiding it.

I struggled to wrap this story into any tidy conclusion. At bottom, “super Intelligence” is a data-center-powered word-prediction algorithm wrapped in complicated software harnesses meant to ensure accuracy and bland inoffensiveness. And crouching behind the silicon and glass are anonymous human developers and product managers who constantly tweak the dials in decidedly non-transparent ways. We can’t eliminate them, either.

AI, or “SI,” certainly doesn’t “think” or “feel” or yearn for spiritual fulfillment in any way that we can recognize. On the other hand, we’re also just guessing about how humans think or feel or yearn for spiritual fulfillment, too. So maybe we must simply accept and embrace the mysterious parts.

My 2026 bingo card did not have a box for a frontier AI affirming the divinity of the God of the Bible on the biggest social media platform in the world. Miracles still happen.

Have a fantastic Friday! C&C will reappear tomorrow, God willing, to dish out another serving of essential news and caffeinated commentary. Till then.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🔥🔥🔥

September is fading into the rearview, which means we’re rolling into the final full month before the midterm elections: the month of pumpkin spice everything plus the inevitable spooky October surprise. Today’s post unleashes a barrel of pent-up news. It is not a trickle. It is now flooding out. This will accelerate as November 3rd approaches.

Given how many terrific stories there were, I’ve confined my reporting to quick hits and insights. It was all great news, with the possible exception of the final New York Times doom-story, which is actually unintentionally encouraging. And hilarious.

🚀 Let’s start with the military. Secretary of War gave a speech to 600 Quantico officers yesterday and made at least five major announcements. Yesterday, the Boston Globe reported, “Hegseth announces a new drone command and cuts to 20% of generals in ‘State of the Force’ speech.”

Of course, the speech included all his best hits. “We are no longer the woke department,” Hegseth said, “or the weak department.” The Secretary of War repeated his famous line, which is custom-built to intersectionally offend nearly every progressive group: “no fatties, no trannies, no beardos, no weirdos, no wimps, no radicals— just warriors.”

We certainly have come a long way from the Biden military, where each day provided a fresh and exciting opportunity to be shocked by something you thought could never happen, like plump admirals wearing dresses.

Since we’re moving fast today, we’ll set aside the Secretary’s entertaining trash talk. Here’s what is coming:

• Bye Bye, General They/Them. Hegseth said he plans to fire 20% of all generals. Congress has capped them at 857, so a 20% reduction, if he does it, would shed around 170 positions. The announcement itself is a Sword of Damocles hanging over every general who disagrees with his new PT requirement for officers. “The media calls that a purge,” Hegseth said. “I call it accountability, and long overdue.” Senator Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) complained, “He’s purging a generation of great leaders of the military, and it’s going to take a generation to recover from it.”

• A new Autonomous Warfare Command. Robots and drones, which is not at all Terminator-like, and which anyone conscious can see is the imminent future of warfare. Let the robots fight it out. The goal is to have Skynet, er, I mean AWC, operational by October 1st of next year (2027). The Secretary called it “the fastest peacetime shift in modern military history.” Well. Mostly peacetime.

• “Project Meridian.” In case the imminent future isn’t clear, Hegseth announced a new team with three civilian co-directors to “imagine the future of warfare” —it sounded like a sci-fi writer’s brainstorming session— to produce a 120-day study, due January 28, 2027, of emerging battlefields “from subterranean depths to the cislunar frontier.” Subterranean depths?? (Surely not mole people. Presumably he meant things like Gazan tunnels and buried Iranian nuclear facilities. But Palmer Luckey has been writing about war below the crust and underground vehicles, so who knows.) Already on the team: Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey —both inventive, AI-frontier defense contractors, which made perfect sense— plus, for some inexplicable reason, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who is great and all, but turns 84 in June. The traditional MIC was unavailable for comment. (Newt’s been talking about a permanent Moon Base, so maybe that’s it.)

• Fortress America. A base modernization project to make all military bases energy independent, so that if an enemy takes down the power grid, the bases’ internet stays on. “Every major military installation,” Hegseth said, “is going to generate its own power. Independent of the civilian grid.” Plus, he announced plans to build the first new domestic military base in forty years, to house 15,000-25,000 troops, using classical architecture, fully self-sufficient, with no state yet selected.

• Office of Religious Affairs. Hegseth said the new team would report directly to him and advocate for the needs of religious service members. “95 percent of our force recognizes an Almighty God,” Hegseth explained. “This won’t be a policy shop pushing paper,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said. “It will have real teeth.” One imagines a toothy porcupine holding an incense taper. In March, Hegseth trimmed 180 recognized “faith codes” (down to about 30). Among the fallen were Magick, Church of the Spiral Tree, Asatru (don’t ask), Rosicrucianism, and various Wiccan sub-denominations.

Each of these would justify a mainstream story or two. Altogether, it was like an announcement neutron bomb, where it should have blown up the news, but nobody reported it.

🔥 Yesterday, Interesting Engineering reported, “Trump unveils $200 billion US energy plan spanning nuclear, gas” More shattered records. “We’re thrilled to announce one of the largest energy infrastructure investments in American history,” the President said.

The first announced project was a new $22.3 billion combined-cycle gas power complex in Encinal, Texas that will deliver an eye-watering 6,472 megawatts for data centers, and will come online as soon as 2029. But then he announced that South Korea is considering financing up to eight new large nuclear power plants, including up to potentially $350 billion in new investments.

Nuclear power construction largely ended in the 1970s. Now it’s back.

You may wonder how Trump got the South Koreans to kick in. The answer is: Using his tariff dashboard, of course, and Korea’s money. Headline from the Korea JoongAng Daily, earlier this month:

“We are turning Korea’s Investment commitments into HUGE Construction Projects, and tens of thousands of AMERICAN JOBS,” Trump tweeted earlier this week.

When the history books about Trump 2.0 are written, there will be entire chapters about how Trump financed his big infrastructure programs not by waiting around for Congress to spend billions of taxpayer dollars— but by just making deals using other people’s money. Trump 1.0 tried this but was unsuccessful. Remember “Mexico will build the wall”? But he didn’t have his tariff dashboard then.

Once again, the President is reimagining what is possible from government— from the ground up.

🔥 On Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal reported, “Treasury Will Auto-Enroll 60 Million Children in Trump Accounts.” I guess they got tired of waiting for corporate media to tell parents how they can get their kids free investment accounts that, for many of them, would be preloaded with thousands of dollars of stocks.

There are so many companies wanting to donate to Trump Accounts that they had to automate the signup process. “Stakeholders have expressed that eligible donors prefer that their contributions reach all children, not just children whose parents have the awareness to opt in,” the program’s new rules explained.

Why don’t parents ‘have awareness’ of how to opt in? Ask your corporate media.

But never mind! Switching to automatic enrollment will let assets in those accounts start growing now, without families needing to do anything, explained Jin Huang, a Washington University professor. “This is the most important design change since the law passed,” he said. “This is huge.”

Since the program’s July launch, only 7 million kids have signed up, with over 65 million kids whose parents are leaving money on the table. Treasury is fixing that. As soon as this week. (A month before midterms.)

The new rules also expand the program in key ways. Money in Trump Accounts can only be used to buy low-cost index funds, which are baskets of stocks mirroring the overall market, and are considered the lowest-risk type of stock investment. But Treasury just announced that people and companies may donate other types of stock directly into the accounts, so long as Trump Account funds aren’t used for the purchase. So, for example, SpaceX could give every American child a share in the company.

CLIP: CNBC explains the new auto-enrollment of kids in free stock accounts (0:30).

This answers one of the critics’ biggest complaints: that the accounts aren’t flexible enough. Don’t worry though! Critics, who love whining about the “K-shaped” recovery where only investors benefit, quickly pivoted to complaining about the risk of owning individual stocks. “It undermines the entire purpose of the regulated index fund requirement, which is stability,” groused Nina Olson, executive director of an NGO called the Center for Taxpayer Rights. “Let’s say someone donates a bunch of tech stocks and then we have another dot-com meltdown, so that you end up with worthless stocks. How does that help the child?”

Treasury said several donors are ready to make stock contributions on the scale of Dell’s but prefer not to donate cash. The Journal explained that these types of donors can avoid capital-gains taxes, get an income-tax deduction, and push assets out of taxable estates. Win-win. Treasury further explained, “Donors are attracted by the hope that a stock contribution with a five-year holding period may lead recipients and their families to feel that they have a stake in the fate of the corporation to a greater extent than if the child’s holdings of the corporation were only through an index fund.”

President Trump has done more for the children than any administration in American history. Plus— sixty million new market investors will begin lifting the overall stock market even higher without inflation. Tired of winning yet?

🔥 Chalk up another war the Trump 2.0 Administration has ended: Iraq. Yesterday, NPR reported, “The U.S. military withdraws from Iraq over 2 decades after its invasion.” Trump, calling Iraq a quagmire, announced, “the last American forces are leaving Iraq.”

U.S. Central Command announced yesterday that the last U.S. forces have now vacated Erbil Air Base in Iraq’s Kurdistan Region. The 23-year-old war is over, all except for the paperwork. President Trump tweeted that it “marks the end of a very expensive excursion into Hell.”

“We came to fight a caliphate,” he added. “There is no longer a caliphate. We are going home!”

Fallujah, NPR reported, is now “a peaceful and relatively prosperous city.” One Iraqi tour operator, Ali al-Makhzomy, said American civilians are ‘generally welcomed’ wherever they go in Iraq. Generally. I’d put this one on the “adventure travel” list. Pack sunscreen, bug spray, and body armor.

🔥 Meanwhile, let’s check in on what the Democrats are up to. Yesterday, in the Senate, they voted down several bills. Yahoo Finance reported, “Senate fails to advance data center and lawmaker stock trading bills before campaign break.”

Yesterday, Democrat Senators nixed three major bills that passed the House with huge majorities. The first was a bill that would have required states to formally consider requiring data centers to pay for their power footprint whenever new building permits are issued. It failed 57-43 (four Democrats broke ranks).

Asked why Senate Democrats opposed a popular bill that passed the House 417–3, Democrat Minority Leader Chuck “Cheese” Schumer said, “we don’t vote for frauds.” Case closed.

The second was a bill that would limit Congressmen’s ability to trade new stocks while in office and require a 7-day notice before any stock sale. Democrats explained they opposed the bill because it did not force members to sell all their stocks before entering Congress. Sure. The third one was attached to the trading ban, and would have required an approved form of ID to vote in federal elections. (Call it the SAVE Act-Lite.) Democrat opposition to that one explains itself.

🚀 That’s Democrats. How about Iran? It has thoughts about our midterm elections. On Tuesday, Reuters reported, “Iran’s Revolutionary Guards woo US voters with open letter.” Iranian hardliners published, I am not making this up, a twenty-six-page letter to the American people asking them (in a thinly-veiled way that fooled nobody) to vote for Democrats in the midterms, so as to teach President Trump a lesson.

I’ll go out on a limb here and guess that exactly zero ordinary Americans read their stupid letter. It’s beyond me how they thought anyone, including Democrats, was interested in reading 26 pages of Iranian thoughts on our elections. That right there is a chatbot fail. They should have told ChatGPT to keep it under two pages, max. For most of us, 280 characters is about the limit.

They titled their novella-length essay, “A Brief List of America’s Wrongs and Crimes in Its 73-Year History of Meddling in Iran.” Just a brief list. They could have written more.

I’ll spare you the deep dive. Basically, the letter forcefully denied that Iran wants any nuclear weapons, insisting that its deep underground nuclear bunkers are merely peaceful civilian power experimentation facilities. Here we should note that’s a minority take. If we assume there is a point to international monitoring, even the U.N. believes Iran wants to build a nuke. But okay.

The Iranians also denied trying to gatekeep oil shipping in the Strait of Hormuz. Instead, they bragged about doing it. “For the first time in history, Iran has exerted, and retained, operational control over the Strait of Hormuz.” Opinions vary.

But my favorite part was the long section where they tried to explain their national motto, “Death to America.” Ready for this one? They didn’t deny it; how could they? Instead, the Guards wrote that we’ve misunderstood them. The well-known chant, they explained, “does not in any way express any ill will toward the hardworking and honest American people.” Not in any way. It really means the opposite. They are trying to express good will. I’m glad we cleared this up.

They explained that “Death to America” is really just “a prayer for the eradication of the diabolical ruling elite whose seat of power is the White House.” Merely a prayer, recited at the saintly volume of a wood chipper with a bad case of Yankee hatred. Then they asked us to be open-minded, and consider whether oppressed people have the right to “wish death upon” their oppressors. Um. (I don’t think they read the room very well. Charlie Kirk might have something to say about it, were he still with us.)

In any case, they tried to tap into anti-elite sentiment. They don’t want to kill us, they just want to kill our elected leaders. See? Everything is fine. In short, it was a long recipe of Democrat talking points with some Iranian history mixed in along with plenty of spicy TDS.

“You are the ones who empower, with your votes, the government and allow it to do what it does,” the Revolutionary Guard reminded us. It then patiently explained, as if to a kindergarten class, that politicians often win votes through “deception and false promises, as Trump did,” but that U.S. voters “can change the makeup of the government” by choosing better leaders. It encouraged Americans to “wrest control back from corrupt politicians” and “remove from power the evil, deceitful, and violent politicians.”

“Americans need to wake up,” the letter said. “Now is the time, as the American political system is at its weakest.” Speak for yourself.

Imagine if the Russians had done this. It would be a front-page story till the elections: Russian military publishes 26-page appeal urging Americans to vote out Democrats. Democrats would howl that it was foreign election interference, reporters would examine the prostates of anyone who amplified it, and anyone whose rhetoric resembled the letter would face ceaseless demands to explain the overlap.

I could not find any Democrat who commented on the letter. Trump’s communications director Steven Cheung called it a “garbage ‘letter’” and a “farcical and laughable attempt” by a desperate IRGC “who know they have no other options left because they have failed their own people, so they resort to telling the American people to ‘vote Democrat.’”

Unsurprisingly, the New York Times did not deign to cover Iran’s letter. No experts. No ‘analysis.’ No nothing. Instead, it capped its website this morning with six (!) stories about a gross frat-party sexual-assault allegation and the resulting civil lawsuit. Oh, and prepare for this breaking news: a long-form “guest essay” explainer about how gas prices are about to come down and why that is very bad.

🔥 It is difficult to fully describe the schizophrenic panic progressives seem to be experiencing these days. This morning’s Times featured a guest essay with the astonishing headline, “If You Think Rising Oil Prices Are Bad, Just Wait for the Inevitable Crash.” I promise I did not make that up, although “Inevitable Crash” would be a terrific name for a rock band.

I think the Times is starting to worry that gas prices are about to come back down, a lot. “Throughout the petroverse,” the author darkly warned, “conditions are now pointing toward another oil collapse. It is just a question of when.”

Countries outside the Persian Gulf are ramping up production. “Guyana’s vast oil fields are now producing at scale,” the article reported. Argentina is expanding production. “Venezuela’s antiquated oil infrastructure is expected to be overhauled with a rush of funding.” It even speculated about the Ukraine war ending, returning Russia’s sanctioned production to global oil supplies. (Bad news for Zelensky though.)

“Something similar will happen if the Iran war ends and shipping resumes freely through the strait,” he added, clearly feeling hopeless.

It all amounts to an end to the Democrats’ main talking point. “Oil’s big bust is coming,” the author dutifully informed Times readers. “A more dramatic fall now looks likely.” What goes up must come down.

Now, you could be forgiven for wondering how on Earth low oil prices could be bad news. After all, we’ve just been treated to six months of dire predictions from economic experts that high prices would lead to recessions, depressions, great recessions, and even greater great depressions. Hoard toilet paper!

But you see, you are not an expert. Neither am I. I am just a lawyer. Fortunately, the Times is here, eager to explain that falling oil prices —if they fall too far— could hurt oil company profits. It recalled the tragic days of the 1980s, when OPEC opened the spigots and crushed the booming Texas oil market. “Pawnshops, bursting with furs and Rolexes, had to turn away consigners,” it recalled sadly. True, we recovered, but “the psychological effects were deep and lasting.”

The Times wants us to prepare ourselves for the deep and lasting psychological effects of cheap gas. Oil company CEOs would be well advised to get their Rolexes to the pawnshop early. Beat the rush.

My goodness! You can’t please some people, certainly not the Times. If I read this guest essay accurately (and I think I did), low prices are even worse than high ones. We are doomed.

The Grey Lady smells a rat. It clearly thinks the Iran War is close to ending, probably because the Iranians have started demanding a ceasefire. Yesterday, ABC-7 news ran this curious headline (broadly ignored by corporate media):

Last week, President Trump told the UN General Assembly that, if Iran didn’t make a deal, the US would “annihilate” Iran. Trump’s envoys met with the Iranians the same day. Ever since then, the sides have been swapping proposals.

The most wonderful part was the Times’ implied argument. The article’s entire premise was that the Trump Administration has been too successful at reengineering the world’s oil supplies.

First, they told us that expensive oil would wreck the economy. Now we’re warned that cheap oil will wreck it even worse. Pick a lane, Times. But either way, it seems likely that cheap gas is on its way. TAW.

Have a terrific Thursday! Sail back here through the strait of doom for tomorrow’s optimistic installment of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

📈📈📈

Picking right up where we left off yesterday, this may not be Trump 2.0’s most geopolitically impactful improvement, but it could be the one with the most direct effect on normal people— and not how you might think. Admittedly, the surprise announcement of a new federal website was not intuitive. In a rare moment when his team of writers stumbled over an actually funny joke, Jimmy Fallon noted that the Administration looked at two things nobody trusts —the government and AI— and said, “hey, let’s combine them!” Predictably, the New York Times mocked the rollout, reporting, “Trump Launches Government Chatbot That Contradicts Some of His Claims.”

It was arguably one of the most remarkable government events we have ever seen, in which most of the Trump Cabinet and a remarkable in-person collection of the country’s top tech leaders held an “Apple Launch Event”-style, day-long rollout of the America.gov one-stop web portal in what can charitably be called the beta version. Everything about it was extraordinary.

Accompanying the public events, the President signed his latest executive order, this one simply titled, “Streamlining Access to Government Services Through America.gov”. Reading past the simple title, we began to see that something new was happening. Right in its introduction, the EO clarified that this was not just bureaucratic fine-tuning, not one more federal “customer service” website piled atop all the rest, but its modest goals included redefining government itself:

Many of you will be reassured that the order repeatedly stressed the importance of privacy, of not using people’s queries to assemble dossiers on American citizens, and it won’t replace any existing ways of working with the government. It explicitly excluded income tax filings and military/intelligence information, which seems reasonable. Other than that, America.gov is meant to be a single point of entry for most government transactions and reliable information.

To give you an idea of how mind-blowing this rollout was —and everything that corporate media refused to report— here is a CNBC clip from yesterday with normally anti-Trump anchor Andrew Ross Sorkin gushing about America.gov.

CLIP: CNBC Squawk Box anchors marvel about, of all things, a new government website (4:15).

“By the way, the president deserves credit,” Sorkin, a former New York Times staffer, said. It was so out of character that, when he said it, co-anchor Joe Kernan exclaimed: “Oh my g-d! Now I’m getting hot flashes!”

Sorkin, who attended yesterday’s launch event live, reported in amazement that “It was one of those moments where you actually thought the government was working for you.” This is the point. Nobody is used to the government making things easier. It always makes stuff harder.

It made an impression. “For 29,000 websites, the ability to get a passport, the ability to get your Medicare,” Sorkin explained. “I mean, it was like being at an Apple product announcement.” In other words, it was nothing like the government we are used to.

Let’s quickly touch on a few revolutionary things the corporate media wants you to never find out about.

📈 First, there’s the promise that so struck Andrew Ross Sorkin— of even a single government initiative to make anything easier rather than harder. Take passports. When Secretary of State Marco Rubio explained that Americans can soon apply for and renew passports in mere moments, from anywhere, and then track the shipment in real time, I nearly dropped my sandwich.

For most people, visiting the post office to renew the family’s passports ranks somewhere just above a dermatologist appointment to get a few pre-cancerous spots frozen off your face and right below an emergency HOA neighborhood meeting to “discuss” the RV in your backyard.

It’s not just the post office ordeal. My most recent renewal visit involved first stopping for a Walgreens passport photo that bore a stunning resemblance to a Pinellas County mugshot. (For $16.99, they could at least have thrown in the height indicator.) And of course, only later, while we were waiting to be called on with our little pulled appointment ticket, did Michelle point out the stray strand of hair in the picture jutting out wildly from behind my left ear and lending the whole thing a slightly maniacal look. Think of a picture next to a Miami Herald headline saying, “Police seek help locating suspect.”

And then, when it was finally our turn, came the inevitable discovery that the third birth certificate in the stack was not a certified copy, and would we like to schedule another appointment for when we come back with the right one?

So, given how much everyone dreads the passport experience, you might think the Times could find something to say about a collective passport upgrade. Nope. The word “passport” didn’t appear in the story at all. Apparently that wasn’t news fit to print. (But the Grey Lady’s front page did find room to run a critical breaking story headlined “Indoor Cats Are Getting Outside, Thanks to ‘Catios’.”)

To be fair, it wasn’t just the Times. Virtually the entire corporate media, and all the prestige platforms, embargoed the historic launch. But social media noticed. And even President Trump reported that people were telling him it was “the single biggest thing you’ve done in government.”

📈 Next on the list of notables was the lack of leaks for a massive, government-wide software project that must have been a logistical T-Rex, not only to build the thing, but even just for the launch event itself. Still, nobody outside the Trump Team saw it coming, even though it’s obvious in hindsight they’ve been preparing for almost two years.

Among all the other technical wizards at the event was Edward “Big Balls” Coristine of DOGE fame. Now we can see at least part of what the DOGE teams were doing early last year when they invaded every federal agency (making Democrats squeal in outrage). They were wiring it all up for this.

In other words, this new AI-driven, single-start federal services portal was planned from Day One. At the time, DOGE spoke openly of “modernization” and “efficiency,” but everyone thought that was just the same tired, endlessly recycled initiative Americans have been promised since the Eisenhower administration.

But there was a real project. And somehow they kept it all tightly wrapped until yesterday.

So that’s two.

📈 Third, the breathtaking scope. Reducing the friction and cost of dealing with the government is already huge and is a praiseworthy goal. But this is so much bigger. President Trump said, almost offhand: “Nobody can any longer complain about providing proof of citizenship or voter ID. They’re always saying, ‘It’s too complicated, too complicated.’ It’s not complicated anymore.”

He was right. What have the SAVE Act’s critics focused on like obsessed maniacs? How hard it is to get a passport. Think of the poor married women whose names changed! Think of the black people who can’t fill out the forms! The irony was too rich. They were literally blaming the government for being too complicated, so of course —q.e.d.— we can’t check people’s IDs for citizenship. Don’t be ridiculous.

Welp. Trump’s website team just put that complaint to bed. So now what will they complain about? And look at this: also yesterday, Senate Majority Leader John Thune announced another vote in the Senate on the SAVE Act’s federal voter ID requirement. Terrific timing, wouldn’t you agree? Right after America.gov took the excuse away.

Can you see it yet? This isn’t just the latest government efficiency program. It’s a comprehensive plan to remake how government works from the bottom up.

Also yesterday, Trump rebranded artificial intelligence to super intelligence, at least as far as the government is concerned. He is ditching A.I.’s baggage. The product isn’t new, but the name is. It almost doesn’t matter whether super intelligence is a good name or not. It’s different.

Nobody should be surprised. After all, he’s rebranded the Gulf of America and the Department of War. Now this. It’s the president’s unique ability to roll roughshod over longstanding labels everyone else would shrug and accept as written in stone, just something to be worked around. Not Trump. He just changes the name and moves ahead.

📈 Given all that, it was unsurprising that, yesterday, Trump also held a White House roundtable and luncheon with every AI luminary in America. The President is not accepting any slowdown. And he somehow, seemingly effortlessly, got them all on board. Even though going along will cost them trillions. Their IPOs were counting on a slowdown.

Behold, the Wall Street Journal, this morning:

Trump is telling them not to slow down, which means they must compete harder. Forget about the IPOs this year. That’s the last thing they want to do. The competition in AI is brutal. You’ve seen it. Every single day brings another new product announcement. The leading tech companies need a slowdown, to catch their breath, build their moats, and get consumers tied into their product lines where it becomes impossible to escape.

Till yesterday, they wanted the government to make everyone slow down. Thus, we saw an “AI safety” craze coupled with incongruous requests for more government regulations.

The IPOs are big money. It’s literally a trillion-dollar game. Media wants it. Wall Street wants it. But only the first AI companies to go public will enjoy the lion’s share of profit— but they need room to maneuver, not hyena-like packs of smaller competitors constantly nipping at their heels and announcing new competitive breakthroughs right before the IPO kickoff.

So they bought influencers. They bought the corporate media, which went to war for them. But yesterday, President Trump told them all “no.” He said, “we’re staying out of it.” He said, “keep competing, except faster. And safely.” And they all smiled and nodded. I can’t remember ever seeing a rising industry begging for government involvement and the government keeping out and the companies rolling over like a favorite family Dachshund.

Don’t worry about the AI companies too much. They’ll be fine. Trump also just created a breathtaking new market. Here, I’ll show you.

📈 We’ll end with the profound downstream implications. I’m still connecting the dots, but there’s something deeply emasculating about this for the Deep State. For today, I’ll offer one example. We’ve learned that the deep staters and Democrats (but I repeat myself) have largely operated through networks of NGOs and “charitable” nonprofits.

Everybody was getting rich, except us. Every halfwitted Democrat politician seems to own a portfolio of 501c3s and c4s that are funded by government grants. If a former bartender could manage to do it, why couldn’t every entrepreneurial American? We can’t because the process is intentionally opaque. Compliance seems complicated and risky. The grant opportunities are hidden in boulder-sized balls of red tape.

It was invisible; there was no easy way to figure out what generous federal grants AOC, Newsom’s wife, or Stacey Abrams were applying for. The grant notices and awards were “published” in the sub-basement of an annex to the Congressional office building in DC. Soon, presumably, they will be online, in one place, surfaced with an English-language prompt.

So what happens when anybody can create 501cs and apply for grants —not just the deep state insiders— by logging into America.gov and asking for the forms? (The answer is that the rules are probably about to get overhauled, but that would be an even better outcome.)

In the terrific 2005 sci-fi classic Serenity, the Operative said, “If your quarry goes to ground, leave no ground to go to.” The America.gov website could help tear all the cover off the deep state’s hidey holes. Think about it.

📈 Finally, I suggested that Trump is giving the AI companies a gift of a vast new market. He told them no regulatory slowdowns, but neither did he leave them empty-handed. America.gov didn’t just modernize citizen access to the federal government. It created fifty new state modernization projects.

Speaking for myself, as a Florida lawyer, the Sunshine State has 67 counties, and each one has a separate court system with a unique website and authorization process to access so-called “public records.” Every judge has her own website with her local rules. The DMV has its own system. Business registrations have their own. Every school district runs a separate and distinct login. The property appraisers all have their own.

This is why we have paralegals. Because if I had to learn how to navigate all of that, I would retire and go collect shark’s teeth on the beach.

Now that President Trump has proven the concept for the entire federal government, all 29,000+ separate systems, establishing that upgrading is not only possible but has already been launched in version 1.0 —all within the Executive Branch, without needing a single act of Congress— how long until every state governor succumbs to the pressure to do the same thing? Citizens won’t long accept archaic, “Internet 1.0” service. And Trump just proved it can be done fast.

Passports are one thing. Now imagine being able to quickly and easily renew your vehicle tag or driver’s license from home in a few clicks. No DMV. You won’t even need a stamp. This is all coming next. And now, thanks to the example set by America.gov, it’s coming much sooner.

This is how —via a single website with a chatbot— President Trump just redefined government itself. And even though America.gov looks obvious in hindsight, only Trump imagined the possibilities. Nobody believed our dysfunctional government could pull something like this off.

Here is where the commercial opportunity happens. Each state must now contract with an AI company to help build out its own massive upgrade project, to wire up that state’s thousands of separate state and local systems as well. How much do you want to bet those conversations have already started?

In 1998-99, the tech industry experienced a major boom thanks to the “Year 2000 bug” that forced all of corporate America to upgrade its software over 24 months so it wouldn’t crash from dates that were stored with a two-digit year.

This upgrade cycle will make the Year 2000 bug look like an iPhone update.

The DOGE team members, each of whom undertook horrifying professional risks to join up in 2025, will never want for work. Anthropic and OpenAI are poised to sign multiple multi-billion-dollar state contracts. They’ll need to staff up. The economy just got another massive boost.

📈 I will leave you with this. The New York Times saw America.gov with all its profound implications— and all its reporters could think to do was ask the website, “Who won the 2020 election?” I would call it a spectacular failure of imagination, except it is really a symptom of something far more significant. It is the dying death rattle of an expiring industry.

Like the legacy model of government, unless it reinvents itself, the New York Times has become obsolete. And I, for one, am ready to serve up the popcorn. 🍿

Have a wonderful Wednesday! Get back on the website tomorrow morning, and log in for another terrific installment of insightful essential news and highly caffeinated commentary.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🪳🪳🪳

Yesterday, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) and Just the News broke the latest Human Cockroach story— and it is a doozy. John Solomon’s platform reported, “Fauci diary reveals alarm that U.S. had aerosolized Ebola virus: ‘Never should have been done.’”

Ebola is about as bad as viruses get. First identified in 1976 near the Ebola River in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo (a curiously late appearance in viral history), it kills roughly half the people it infects. Past outbreaks ran anywhere from 25% to 90%. It starts like a nasty flu. Sudden fever, muscle aches, splitting headache. Then it turns vicious, adding violent vomiting and diarrhea, failing kidneys and liver, and in some patients, bleeding both inside and out.

Death comes slowly and painfully from shock and organ failure, taking about two weeks. The virus spreads through direct contact with bodily fluids, which is why it cuts through families who nurse the sick and the health workers who treat them. A 2014–2016 West Africa outbreak infected about 28,600 people and killed more than 11,300. Survivors aren’t in the clear either. Many suffer joint pain and vision problems for years, and the virus can hide in places like the eyes and testes long after the blood tests come back clean. Not lovely.

Ebola has now infected the Fauci diaries. We’ve already seen the covid-era entries, in which every day Fauci made careful, scientific notes about how grotesquely the media and celebrities were drooling over him. Yesterday, Senator Paul gave JTN an exclusive about more entries from the doctor’s personal diaries, from before covid.

Helpfully, Fauci stored them all on government servers, eliminating any expectation of privacy. Fauci can be accused of many things, but sheer intelligence is not, perhaps, one of them. A fact that will soon become very ironic.

It turns out that, in the Spring of 2016, Fauci was annoyed. He’d been dragged into a major damage control project involving his agency, NIAID, and the bioweapons defense division of the United States Army. What most vexed him was that the Army had failed to classify certain Ebola experiments, causing potential embarrassment and even worse, possible vaccine hesitancy. The career bureaucrat explained how it started:

(Avoiding vaccine hesitancy is not any legal reason to classify government information, but I digress.)

Before he’d realized his own agency was involved in the project, Fauci called the experiments idiotic. (Then he learned his own institute paid for it. Whoops!) On Monday, March 7th, 2016, he wrote: “What idiots those guys at USAMRIID are.” On March 9th, he wrote, “Stupid experiment.” That same day, on an NSC call, Defense officials said they had run the study “together with NIAID.” His March 30th email to Cliff Lane read, “No one followed up on that, but I almost fell off my chair.”

Michael Kurilla, the NIAID’s own biodefense director, emailed, clearing it up: “For the 2015 aerosol study, NIAID provided funds,” he admitted, adding that the experiment’s design “was crafted with input from NIAID.” So there.

It got worse. In his typo-heavy style, Fauci noted that, “During the course of those experiments, the DOD noticed that the animals that were vaccinated had more inflammation in the lungs than those who were unvaccinated even though almost all the aerosol-challenged animals died.” In another email, Fauci wrote that all 22 vaccinated monkeys died compared to 4 unvaccinated ones. “The idea that the vaccine can do harm is now causing people a great deal of concern,” he wrote snippily.

The resulting bureaucratic gamesmanship defies description. Fauci and his agency staff quickly decided that aerosolizing Ebola —making it transmissible through the air— was not technically gain-of-function because the genetic code wasn’t changed. This is a stretch.

And Fauci kept repeating, as if he were trying to convince himself, that the goal was always bioterror preparation, meaning they were trying to create airborne Ebola in order to defend against it. They were definitely not creating a viral weapon (merely an incidental side benefit).

The whole story is shockingly similar to the plot of the 1995 Dustin Hoffman movie Outbreak. This “has little to do with naturally emerging Ebola outbreaks,” Fauci noted, equally drily.

Not everyone on the team was so confident. NIAID’s Cliff Lane carefully wrote, deploying the deniable passive voice, that, “one might consider this dual use research.” In the cautious acronymized language of “public health research,” DURC stands for “dual use research of concern.” It refers to “safety” research that could also be used as a weapon. So.

Hence, the need for “damage control.” As Michael Kurilla, NIAID’s biodefense director, immediately pointed out:

The lasagna-like layers of carefully documented good intentions make it impossible to tease out whether government scientists actually believed Ebola bioweapons required preventative vaccine solutions (which only made it worse anyway), or whether any clandestine dual-use motives might be involved. Needless to say, an Ebola that can be aerosolized directly into the lungs and kills vaccinated soldiers faster could be something useful to have on the shelf, if you were diabolically inclined.

This, I believe, is Senator Paul’s point. And making things even more curious was a throwaway line that “piqued the committee’s interest” because it seemed to refer to covid. In 2016! In the middle of the Ebola damage-control discussion. “In the interim, however, we will continue to make plans to initiate the CoV study as soon as the lights turn green,” wrote NIAID scientist Peter Jahrling.

Senator Paul’s committee is wondering, as am I, what on Earth “CoV” has to do with an ugly Ebola experiment that at least one NIAID official believed “one might consider … dual use research.”

Senator Paul says that he has a whistleblower —a former Fauci aide, who remains unidentified— who has agreed to testify if she gets immunity. But immunity requires a two-thirds vote in the committee, and all Democrats voted against giving her immunity. For transparency. One hopes Senator Paul is trying to get her immunity another way.

The Fauci Diary story is not over.

🔥🔥🔥

Last week, the New York Times ran an unintentionally encouraging story headlined, “Hospitals Shutter Youth Gender Clinics in Deal With Trump Administration.” The subheadline explained, “At least six hospitals have struck agreements with the Trump administration to pay fines and stop providing gender-transition treatments to minors.” Catch that? At least six hospitals. Finally.

“The agreements are a victory for the Trump administration,” the Times conceded. “The wave of settlements includes hospitals in New York, Pennsylvania and Connecticut,” which have agreed to pay fines and provide free care for people suffering side effects or detransitioning.

We are getting close to the end. “Legal experts and transgender advocates said the new deals with hospitals add a sense of finality.” Raquel Willis, executive director for a trans activist NGO, was devastated. She/he said, “It’s devastating to watch, one by one, health care institutions that once cared for trans youth turn their backs on them.”

Then came the shocking paragraph I never expected to hear from the Grey Lady herself. After years of insisting that surgeries and permanent hormone disruption were a panacea for gender dysphoric patients, the paper grudgingly admitted there were, in fact, some harms, especially when agreed to by naive young skulls full of mush:

Importantly, the Administration is shutting down these awful medical experiments on young people without any help from Congress or from the 24 states that have passed laws encouraging hospitals to provide this kind of “care.” That’s what chaps the Times the most. “There has been no determination that offering this care, including to young people, violates any federal law,” said Katie Keith, director of the Health Policy and the Law Initiative at Georgetown University Law Center.

Now consider this next development.

🔥 As our own corporate media has found this terrific story uninteresting and unworthy of mention, we must rely on the UK’s International Business Times, which yesterday ran this encouraging article below the headline, “Younger US High-School Students Report Lower Gay and Bisexual Identification, CDC Data Reveals.” USAID could not be reached for comment, since it is out of business.

We must also thank psychologist Jean Twenge, who published a Substack analysis of recent CDC numbers. She found that atypical sexual lifestyle choices among teenagers is now, mercifully, falling, and most sharply among the youngest demographic (high school freshmen).

A closer look at the graph reveals fascinating figures. Rates of queer self-identification skyrocketed during the Biden Administration, almost doubling between the 2019 survey and the 2021 report. They held through 2023’s update, then collapsed in the 2025 figures. Weird! The IBJ was baffled at what might explain the reversal after years of steady increases, and took pains to point out that “the figures alone cannot establish why reported identification has changed.”

The new downward trend appears to be real and sustained. Last Fall, Eric Kaufmann, a politics professor at the University of Buckingham who tracks rates of gender and sexual minority identification among young people, noticed the same thing. In his October 2025 tweet on X, he wrote that “trans identification is in free fall among the young.” He added, “Non-conforming sexual identity (queer, questioning, etc.) is also in sharp decline.”

Despite the conspicuous and highly suggestive timing, Kaufmann summarily rejected politics, the idea that teenagers have become more conservative. “It’s not because the kids became less woke, more religious or more conservative,” he insisted. That’s when the story’s buried lead finally surfaced. When asked whether improved mental health played a role, Kaufman answered, “Yes, in part.”

Then, almost as an afterthought, the article delivered its most encouraging and most suggestive news: “The 2025 report does record an improvement in one mental-health measure: the proportion of students reporting persistent sadness or hopelessness fell to 33 percent, from 40 percent in 2023.”

We shall set aside the morbid fact that the Journal did not consider falling queerness identifications to be “an improvement,” raising the question of whether it considers that to be a setback. (If so, as seems likely, it was too chicken to say it directly.)

Regardless, young people’s sky-high rates of depression are also falling, right along with their rates of confused sexual self-description. A strange coincidence! Cue the standard cries that “correlation does not prove causation,” except when it does (which is whenever a correlation supports a woke narrative). Could the two trends —LGBT+ identification and depression— be connected?

I can see it cutting both ways. Could confusing children about their sexual identities possibly cause them to get depressed? I realize that is a crazy thought, but we must consider it. Or, on the other hand, do depression and deep anxiety cause kids to question their sexuality? It’s another terrific line of potential research that will never be conducted.

In fairness, we are also moving farther beyond the government’s pandemic response, so improvement in youth mental health could also benefit from that. But I struggle to enunciate a theory of why LGBT+ self-identification would correlate with any pandemic recovery.

🔥 What we know for sure is that, starting in late January 2025, the federal government pulled the plug on the gay propaganda machine (USAID) and went to war against transgender “medicine,” as we explored in the previous story. We also know that many states like Florida have led the way. Since midway through the pandemic, after shocked parents started to see what their kids were actually being taught in schools instead of math and science, states like Florida passed laws banning queer and trans sex ed for younger kids— who are now entering high school. Remember don’t say gay?

Check out this timely headline, published yesterday by News-6 Orlando:

In 2022, former Disney CEO Bob Chapek declared war on Florida Governor Ron DeSantis over Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill, HB 1557, which critics sneeringly called the “don’t say gay bill.” The name stuck, and not in the way they’d intended. Disney decided to publicly oppose the law for reasons that business schools will study for decades, along with Bud Lite’s exercise in brand self-immolation. Disney, one of the state’s largest political donors, even campaigned against Republicans who supported the bill.

This was a bold choice in a state that enjoyed a comfortable Republican super-majority and governor. The feud ended with the state stripping Disney of its unique gift— a whole county called the Reedy Creek District that Disney was allowed to run as a corporate town with its own police, firefighters, and most importantly— freedom from taxes. The flushing noise could be detected from some SpaceX satellites. Disney sued and lost. Many times. Badly.

In his new tell-all book, Behind the Castle Walls: My 30 Years at the Happiest Place on Earth, former CEO Chapek unhappily reported that its legal battle with the Sunshine State cost Disney “tens of millions” in legal fees, plus “untold damage” in public relations. I think accountants, aided by AI, are still calculating the untold public relations damage. They expect to have a preliminary figure by early 2036.

I mention Disney’s painful example of woke mass delusion not because it popped up again in this week’s news, nor because it is more entertaining to revisit those details than spend an entire weekend at the Magic Kingdom, but because of what it should suggest to the baffled journalists at the International Business Times as a potential explanation for what kinds of causes they might consider as explanations for falling queerness among the nation’s youth. Don’t say gay.

The causal connections might be impossible to prove scientifically, but the calendar is sitting right there out in the open. As the nation headed into the first month of Trump’s second term, media was still reporting the inexorable, post-millennial increase in both queer self-identification and rising anxiety among the people most exposed to the country’s education system. Headline from Gallup, February 2025:

Curiously, even though IBT and Professor Kaufman waved off politics as being involved in any way, Gallup did find a clear political divide: “Whether due to political sorting or something else, Democrats (14%) and independents (11%) are far more likely than Republicans (3%) to identify as LGBTQ+.” Just saying. I’m not accusing Democrats of trying to turn their kids gay. Seen on X today:

🔥 What are we to make of these developments? Even if causal factors remain uncertain (and probably always will), we can celebrate the great news. After years —decades— of relentless bad news about our children’s worsening mental health crisis, hope has suddenly bloomed. And without judging adults’ personal choices, we can appreciate the apparent turnaround in whatever social contagion was distorting children’s sexual self-identification at wildly higher and improbable rates compared to the general public.

Progress! But that’s not all. We also have shocking progress in what might be the most unexpected place of all: the federal red-tape dispenser.

🔥🔥🔥

This morning, CNBC reported, “Pres. Trump, Elon Musk & Admin Officials Announce New AI-Powered All-Inclusive Gov’t. Website.” It’s literally breaking news— President Trump’s formal announcement starts this morning, probably while you are still reading this. CMS Director Mehmet Oz said the initiative was “intentionally kept under wraps.”

CLIP: Dr. Oz explains the federal government’s one-stop web portal for all things government (3:39).

There are over 29,000 websites in the Federal Government. Remarkably —and I am not making this up— the federal government is voluntarily attempting to make its websites usable.

At an all-day event at the Andrew W. Mellon Auditorium —a grand building that makes the local DMV office look like a toolshed— the Trump administration is unveiling America.gov, what it calls an AI-powered “front door” to the federal government. One website. One search box. Every agency behind it. Passports, name changes, Social Security questions, Medicare conundrums, IRS inquiries— you can start any of them from one spot.

C-SPAN called it an “all-inclusive government agency hub” — all-inclusive, like a Caribbean resort, except instead of unlimited shrimp it’s unlimited federal questions. A White House official called it a “one-stop shop” for Americans hunting down information and services currently scattered across “a maze of various agency websites.”

To launch the new website, the administration is assembling: the President of the United States, the Secretaries of State, Agriculture, and Energy, the administrator of Medicare and Medicaid, the administrator of NASA, the richest man in the world, personal improvement mogul Tony Robbins, and a complete card deck of tech leaders.

CLIP: Tony Robbins appears at the America.gov launch— “it’s built to change the quality of your life” (3:19).

The assembled notables are kind of like the Bureaucratic Avengers, plus Dr. Oz playing Dr. Strange, all gathered to heroically unveil a website. Don’t scoff— all Avengers are important. The Secretary of Agriculture, for instance, is key, even if a lesser star in the constellation, like Hawkeye.

The man in charge of the actual design is Joe Gebbia, Airbnb’s co-founder, now the nation’s very first Chief Design Officer, running the new National Design Studio. This is the first genuinely encouraging sentence in the whole story. The federal government’s websites were not designed. They accreted, like coral reefs, or arterial plaque. Somewhere out there is a federal form that only works in Internet Explorer, and Internet Explorer has been dead for years, and the form does not care. The form has achieved a state beyond death. The form is eternal.

Gebbia’s diagnosis was blunt and correct: Americans have spent decades wrestling with “clunky, often inefficient and overly complex government systems.” His prescription is a single portal with an AI assistant as the primary interface— you describe what you need, in plain human language, and the machine navigates the bureaucracy for you. Earlier reporting said officials have considered letting people do things like renew their passports and file their taxes through it, which means the chatbot’s first real test will be answering the only question anyone has ever asked a government website: where is the actual form?

It only took 250 years.

Gebbia enthusiastically called the project “the golden age of the citizen experience,” and a “new chapter of usability for the country.” He said the team set out to answer a simple question: “How do you make it easy to just access government?” (They waited nervously after saying that out loud, but did not, in fact, burst into flames.)

Citizen, savor that phrase: the golden age of the citizen experience. For most of American history, “the citizen experience” of dealing with the federal government has meant the hold music. The PDF that won’t download. The office that is open Tuesday through Thursday, 9 to 11, except federal holidays and the entire month of August. The website that demands a password with fourteen characters, one hieroglyph, and the blood of a turnip, then locks you out for 24 hours because you forgot to put your middle initial.

A golden age of that would be an improvement the way a hospital is an improvement over a battlefield amputation. Technically and literally true. Let’s go.

If the Airbnb guy can make renewing your passport as easy as booking a treehouse in Oregon, that is a genuine public good, and this column will say so, right after it finishes making fun of the password requirements.

But just wait for the Corporate Media coverage. You already know how it will go. The same outlets that spent years during every Republican administration reporting that the federal government’s Byzantine requirements are a mystifying exercise in self-flagellation will now explain why fixing them is a disgrace. Expect experts to surface within hours to warn that a single, easy-to-use government portal is a privacy nightmare, a surveillance panopticon, possibly the end of democracy itself.

(Unlike the current system, in which our data is scattered across hundreds of agency websites built by Al Gore during the first Clinton administration, which is apparently the safe, democratic way to do it.)

Tomorrow I will cover how the corporate media dismissed the new website as incomplete, not really very helpful at all, and how it fails to provide accommodations for people who identify as lawn squirrels.

If it works, though, it could be the first serious advance in helpful government and reduced friction in our lifetimes, at least since they started letting us wear our shoes going through airport security again.

I will say this: if America.gov’s chatbot can explain why the IRS keeps telling me I owe $647.32, despite having paid it twice, I will include a month of free advertising here on Coffee & Covid. Promise made. Your move, feds.

Have a terrific Tuesday! Come back tomorrow, when we will dig into some of the most astonishing and encouraging news since early this year. Essential news and caffeinated commentary, delivered hot and fresh.

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📈📈📈

Late last week, Reuters quietly reported more good economic news in a story headlined, “US weekly jobless claims near 57-year lows; price reductions boost new home sales.”

Which is more remarkable: The number of economic records being broken or the lack of coverage? Last week, the number of people filing for unemployment fell to its lowest level since 1969. Considering the clear downward trend line for the entire year, the article was forced to grudgingly concede, “the underlying trend in claims remains in line with a labor market that has regained its footing.”

What it looks like is an economy that is starting to fire on all cylinders.

Tucked at the article’s end, Reuters reported that affordability is improving for young people in at least one major category. “The median new house price dropped 5.8% to $393,700 in August from a year earlier, the Census report showed.”

Combined with a record stock market, nearly full employment, steady GDP growth, and rising wages, the economic indicators are as strong as they could be without overheating. Gas prices are a continuing irritant, but even those, when adjusted for inflation, are still below Biden peaks. (Inflation, as we’ve noted before, is a hangover from Biden’s money-printing parties.)

Still, the media continues to demonstrate its power to shape narratives by flooding the information zone with negative news and then polling everyone to find out how we’re feeling about it, with the net result that economists remain “baffled” by how pessimistic everyone is. What’s baffling is why the experts are baffled. It’s like being dragged to grandma’s house for a long visit, except where grandma spends the whole time complaining about how you’re getting fatter by the minute and your aunt Sophie is ruining her kids and the tea you just brought her tastes like pool water.

That’s it. The corporate media is evil grandma.

🔥🔥🔥

Speaking of endless negativity, over the weekend the New York Times Magazine ran a surprising, long-form story that was remarkable for how very close it came to experiencing something akin to self-awareness. Stumbling over it was kind of like seeing your AI chatbot appear to become self-conscious by drawing a three-dimensional picture of the inside of a black hole, but then confidently informing you that only three days in the week include the letter ‘d.’ The article was headlined —prepare yourself— “The Problem With Apocalyptic Thinking.”

Take a moment to fully appreciate the headline’s irony. It was complaining about complaining. I think the kids call that meta. Well done, editors. Five stars. Then the sub-headline explained: “From climate to Covid to A.I., we face a terrifying feeling of exponential growth spinning out of our control. Are we right?”

If I were Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, I don’t know how I’d feel about the Times’ cover pic jamming him right next to splenetic climate grifter Greta Thunberg and what appears to be a Vietnam-era Huey dumping napalm on some innocent villagers. Just what, precisely, were they trying to say about Dario’s essays on the AI future? Nothing good, probably.

I often mock the Times for having the logic skills of a drunken sorority pledge combined with the ethics of an aggressive, meth-addled panhandler. But it manages at times to crank out some strong writing, and this article unleashed the full force of polished metaphor. “The most conspicuous peaks along the apocalyptic ridgeline of our culture” were covid, AI, and climate alarmism, it said, “but the mountain range is punctuated by a number of other forms of existential dread: the fertility crisis, the mental health crisis, the smartphone theory of intellectual and social decline, border chaos and the ‘woke mind virus’” —note the scare quotes— and last but not least, “the fall of American democracy.”

The rhetorical geography lesson wasn’t finished. “Cast your eyes down into the foothills and you might see some more marginal conspiracy theories: 5G, and the ‘great replacement.’”

Honestly, it was a pretty good list. The comedy potential was infinite, charting out all the vastness of the oratorical peaks and valleys of modern dread and doom. If you stare at the map too long, the article explained, you experience feelings— in the form of “a sudden and overwhelming loss of control.”

And so those exploring the Times’ terremoto discovered the article’s first legitimate insight, the sum of all our fears. Loss of control. This was simultaneously a shrewd perception and also a banal description of the most common topographic feature of human existence. Threats like invisible viruses that transmit themselves without symptoms and will kill you before you can say ‘Fauci’! Artificial intelligence that will go rogue and steal your job! Rising oceans! Al Gore crawling out from under the bed! Aliens! Right-swipers! Dogs in strollers.

In a word, the most ancient enemy of them all: chaos. A gossipy snake in the original garden. The Times’ soaring words described a typical morning on social media in 2026: “the way we pictured the planet racing past tipping points and spinning off its familiar axis as unpredictably as a top cast out into the void.”

As it transitioned into its real subject —the AI panic— it compared it to covid, which described “the early pandemic response as shambolic, full of contradictory guidance and sometimes baseless panic.” Note the careful hedge: sometimes baseless panic. Sometimes. This was the ridge where an essay brimming with potential for saying something real flew off the rails. “Those efforts did flatten the curve, as they were intended to,” the article assured anxious Times readers. “The line did not keep going up.”

Oh boy.

Readers were then treated to two vomitous paragraphs of reassurance of how well-intentioned the government’s covid response was and how it ultimately rescued millions from undetectable germs. Sigh. You were so close, Times.

But then, after undermining its own story into a landslide, roughly 1,000 words in, it finally got to the point: “The charts sketched by A.I. doomers are, if anything, more vertiginous than those plotted in the early months of Covid.” This was where something approaching real journalism miraculously appeared, the one remarkable paragraph that marked this story for today’s post. Here it is, in full:

And here, at last, we stumbled into the media’s undiscovered country. The territory that reporters could reach anytime, but seem unable to find even with real-time GPS. Accountability. Context. A simple recounting of all the previous failed predictions of doom. That’s literally all it would take to pull the fangs from each day’s current object of social terror. All they have to do is remind us how wrong the same fearful experts were last time. (And the time before that. And … well, you get the idea.)

Readers could demand this kind of accounting, but we almost never do. It seems like we prefer it this way. Almost exactly two thousand years ago, an itinerant Jewish preacher asked, “Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature?” Ancient texts record that he suggested dealing with real problems, like deciding whether the milk is still okay two days past the expiration date, instead of worrying about possible Skynet futures.

“Therefore do not worry about tomorrow,” he advised, “for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.”

This two-millennia-old advice is still sinking in. But it isn’t gripping. The trouble is, we don’t want to stop worrying. This is a very bad habit that the corporate media is only too happy to indulge. The article came closest to saying it outright: the daily predictions of doom are always wrong. Scientists can confidently predict the temperature at which a pot of water will boil, but they are less accurate when it comes to confident predictions about boiling oceans:

Imagine how different life would be if that single sentence were footnoted in every dramatic front-page story about how Trump’s tariffs will wreck the economy, or how people who ask questions about the efficacy of cloth masks will destroy our democracy.

Does this mean there is no role for subject matter experts? Heavens, no. That’s why we let experts testify at trials, to give the jury more things to consider. But, and this is the point, we don’t let the experts decide the case. That remains a job for the jury, which holds a DoorDash deliverer, a community college student, and a guy who sells papier-mache umbrellas on Etsy. Laugh if you want, but they are all better qualified to decide lawsuits than the testifying experts.

Experts should say things like, we might want to think about letting robots make kill decisions. And then shut up, or take questions. But that kind of common sense doesn’t generate clicks.

Alas, having come so close to achieving a big bang breakthrough about the proper role of experts, the article ended with an anxious whimper. “ Researchers reported an average 18 percent chance of near-term human extinction,” it fretted, as though grand predictions about possible futures could be reduced to a statistical sample. “Yet the technology and the industry races full speed ahead, dumping more investment into technological acceleration every quarter, as though a future machine god was trying to drown the whistle-blowers in cash.”

(Not to be pedantic, but that concluding sentence included two grammatical errors, a neat metaphor for its logical ones. “Technology and industry” are a compound subject, so they “race” ahead, not “races.” And a “future machine god,” however frightening, is hypothetical and forward-looking, so it should be described as though it were trying to drown the whistle-blowers, not was. But never mind.)

I suppose the good news is that my job as a media critic remains secure. I will continue cutting ‘experts’ down to size whenever I get the chance. But we can all accept the lesson that the Times almost taught us, the 2,000-year-old advice we have yet to take (advice, I might add, from an actual god, not just a hypothetical future one who drowns whistleblowers). Cough up the black pill. Today’s problems are enough for today. Go tackle them.

🔥🔥🔥

Finally, yesterday, in another article including excellent life advice, Fox News reported, “Texas clinic owner convicted in $26M military health fraud tied to gold-plated Cybertruck.” Don’t be Kevin.

There is one vehicle you absolutely never buy if you are running a secret multimillion-dollar fraud against the federal government. It is angular, stainless, and roughly the size of an obese hippopotamus. It is the most recognizable and distinctive automobile on American highways. On a clear day, you can spot it from low Earth orbit.

Unfortunately, Kevin D. Curry bought that truck. Then he had it gold-plated. Even the rims.

Curry, 64, of Frisco, Texas, was convicted Thursday by a federal jury in Fort Worth on nine felony counts: three for health care fraud, three for paying illegal health care kickbacks, and three for money laundering. Prosecutors said his clinics billed TRICARE —a healthcare program covering active-duty troops, veterans, and their families— more than $26.9 million for “depression therapy” that was medically unnecessary or, in many cases, never provided at all. TRICARE paid out about $17.1 million before anyone caught on.

Questions about oversight remain unanswered.

The clinics were Acuity TMS of Plano, Acuity TMS of Fort Worth, and Emerald Coast TMS, in Fort Walton Beach, Florida. Believe it or not, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is a real, FDA-cleared treatment: magnetic pulses stimulate areas of the brain to treat depression (and let you stick spoons to your face, but that’s just an unintended side effect). The fraud, per the Justice Department, was that many of the billed sessions were never delivered, weren’t medically necessary, or were encouraged with cash payments to the “patients.”

Curry is a licensed mental health counselor. He likes to stand out, clearly, but he’s not an actual doctor. To file the claims, prosecutors said he borrowed other doctors’ names and credentials —without their knowledge— then directed his employees to fabricate medical records to make the billing look legitimate. (How he got away with this for so long remained unexplained.)

You can argue about the ethics of his mainly Biden-era scheme, but Curry was, at least, generous. The kickbacks included more than $5.5 million, paid between September 2022 and the end of 2025, to active-duty service members, veterans, and their families— to consent to treatment they didn’t qualify for and usually didn’t receive. It was alternative medicine, a mental health practice where the patients got paid. Most therapists charge $200 an hour to listen to you complain. Curry paid his patients to let him bill the government for not treating them. No complaints.

With the proceeds, Curry bought luxurious hotel stays, a lavish casino-themed party, and the aforementioned inconspicuous gold-plated Tesla Cybertruck, worth “more than $100,000,” according to the DOJ. (If that seems low, it might’ve just been a gold-chrome vinyl wrap. But still. The point stands.)

There is a special kind of confidence in throwing yourself a casino-themed party with stolen money. The counselor was literally gambling with the house’s money, except the house was the United States taxpayer. It was true to form in one way: the house always loses. Only the house was us. That was Curry’s whole business model: a magnetic casino.

So let’s review. Medical degree: fake. Therapy sessions: fake. Medical records: Also fake! The doctors whose names appeared on the claims: real doctors, but clueless. And now, possibly even the gold: just a big sticker. It was fraud all the way down, a luxury truckload of federal crimes.

Assistant Attorney General Colin McDonald, who runs the DOJ’s new National Fraud Enforcement Division, said, “This defendant exploited a critical health care program serving active-duty servicemembers and their families, diverting taxpayer dollars to bankroll personal luxuries.” U.S. Attorney Ryan Raybould was more blunt, accusing Curry of having “shamelessly preyed on the trust of servicemembers, veterans, and their families.”

More encouragingly, Curry was one of 13 North Texas defendants charged as recently as June, part of a national takedown that swept up 455 defendants, $6.5 billion in alleged fraud, and more than $182 million in seized assets, per HHS-OIG. Each of Curry’s nine counts carries up to 10 years— a 90-year theoretical maximum, which is a ceiling and not a prediction, since federal sentencing guidelines will land somewhere well below the ceiling and well above the truck’s appraised value.

The FBI seized the low-key truck, along with $136,022 in cash, back in January, months before the verdict. Sentencing hasn’t been scheduled yet.

Meanwhile, the Cybertruck —gold-plated (what DOJ and media report) or gold-wrapped, either way— is currently parked in federal custody, surely one of the most conspicuous pieces of evidence in the history of white-collar crime. Curry’s lesson, then, is a master class in at least one subject: if you’re going to steal $17 million from the troops, consider driving something beige.

Have a marvelous Monday! Return tomorrow for your Tuesday roundup, neatly packaged into an all-new roundup of essential news and stimulating caffeinated commentary.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🔥🔥🔥

Yesterday, the Supreme Court took some and gave some. Let’s start with the “taking.” Corporate media was beside itself in delirious glee. The New York Times reported, “Supreme Court Once Again Blocks Republican-Backed Voting Map in Missouri.” The wildest election litigation roller coaster in US history has finally pulled into the station. Probably. Unless it starts up again.

After Monday’s terrific Eighth Circuit decision that found rolling back to the Democrats’ 2022 Missouri maps after holding primaries using the Republicans’ 2025 maps would “cause chaos,” yesterday the Supreme Court found the exact opposite and, somewhat snippily, reversed.

“In an unsigned decision with no noted dissents,” the Times reported, “the justices warned of ‘electoral chaos’ if the state were to change course so close to the election and use the 2025 map.” The Democrats outplayed the GOP by rushing out 2022-map ballots to early and overseas voters. Thus, said the Supremes, it is too late to go back to the 2025 version.

I’ve already covered this saga at some length, so refer to last week’s roundup if you are late arriving to this story. The significance is less than the Times’s breathless celebration suggestions. Republicans stood to pick up +1 House seat, and now they won’t. That’s it. So the GOP didn’t lose anything. After all that litigation in about twenty courts, it failed to win one.

The 2026 Gerrymandering Wars still heavily favor the red team.

🔥 SCOTUS’s ‘give’ —which was much more significant news— triggered Democrats and socialists everywhere. CNN reported, “Supreme Court says states can use controversial citizenship data tool for voter audits in win for Trump.” Just wait till I tell you what the “controversial tool” is. Remember that: controversial.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court, 6-3, handed Donald Trump what even corporate media is calling a major victory in his ‘war on non-citizen voting.’ States may now voluntarily use a revamped, long-standing federal database called SAVE to check voters’ citizenship ahead of November’s midterms.

This is a crisis.

SAVE, a name that is not at all confusingly similar to the SAVE America Act, but is completely unrelated, stands for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, which sounds less like a voter-integrity tool and more like the department that processes paperwork at Area 51’s alien retirement warehouse. It is forty years old.

For forty years it has been gathering moss, largely forgotten and mostly unused. SAVE was originally built to stop government benefits from going to non-citizens —and you can see how well that worked— but last year the Trump administration picked it up, dusted it off, and taught it some new tricks.

First, it is now free. Previously, election officials could only search the system one name at a time. Even then, DHS charged them for access— two “features” that were not at all meant to discourage its widespread use. How dare you. Now it costs nothing. And thanks to DOGE’s geniuses, it now includes all citizens, not just aliens, and most importantly, allows convenient bulk searches by name, birthday, and Social Security number.

Meaning, election officials can now upload their entire voter database and immediately get back a list of suspected non-citizens. It’s not conclusive, but it lets them promptly send out postcards requiring those suspect voters to show they are citizens or get taken off the list.

That could not stand. Cue lawfare and Sparkling Soonananans.

🔥 In August, 2025, progressive voting NGO Protect Democracy published a 17-page anti-DOGE white paper warning of the dire risks the upgraded citizenship verification system posed to our democracy, although your confusion is understandable about how confirming voters are valid somehow threatens our entire civilization:

But it was the very last data point —the Social Security number link— that was the innovation that got the program sued, because it made the database actually useful. Election officials have Social Security numbers. They don’t usually have DHS immigrant IDs, which was previously the only way to search the database.

Thus, back in June, D.C. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan —a name that belongs on a glitter pen— ruled the whole thing was profoundly illegal and must stop. (Biden appointee.)

Her order scolded that “Congress put protections in place to prevent precisely this type of centralized data bank,” and accused the administration of having “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable,” thereby allowing states to “actively remove United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information.”

Note the adverb. Haphazardly. That’s not in any statute. Nor does it seem to well describe this carefully designed election integrity plan. That was Sparkle’s take (and here I will forbear from making an obvious joke about her own parents’ haphazard way of naming their children). The three laws she actually cited in her morbidly obese, 75-page opinion were the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act of 1974, and the Administrative Procedure Act— all based on privacy and procedure and not actually haphazardness. But never mind.

🔥 Yesterday, the Supreme Court disagreed with Sparkle. In an unsigned opinion joined by the six conservative justices, they explained that, under federal law, “the federal government has an obligation to respond to requests from state and local election officials seeking to verify the citizenship of voters.” In short: the Administration must provide this information. The 1996 law they cited was a provision literally titled “Obligation to respond to inquiries.”

The 1996 statute says DHS shall respond to any inquiry from any state or local agency “seeking to verify or ascertain the citizenship or immigration status of any individual.” Not may respond. Shall respond. It wasn’t a suggestion. But till Trump 2.0, the federal government carefully followed the law by not providing any easy way to do it. Good luck, chumps.

Unsurprisingly, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Kagan, wordily writing that “the harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take.” She expressed concern and deployed a confusing metaphor.

Likely lacks authority. The entire “this is illegal” claim —screamed across corporate media coverage all day yesterday— rests on that word “likely,” penned by three liberal justices who lost the vote 6-3. The six who won said the law requires DHS to answer the phone when states call. So, if you read somewhere that the ruling lets Trump do something unlawful, remember: “unlawful” is the minority’s conclusion.

The six-justice majority concluded the exact opposite, and said it was the government’s duty.

🔥 What nobody in the hysteria crowd wants to discuss is that the “haphazard” program is practically obsessed with due process. It’s right in DHS’s own rulebook. The USCIS “Voter Registration and Voter List Maintenance Fact Sheet” says, and I quote, that “SAVE prohibits agencies from rejecting a voter registration or removing an individual from a voter roll based on a SAVE response until the agency has completed all SAVE-required steps.”

Any signal other than “United States Citizen” gets automatically escalated to additional (manual) verification. States must give every non-verified voter “the opportunity to provide proof of U.S. citizenship” plus “any right to notice, a hearing, and other due process available under applicable law.” A no-match on Social Security data “is not a final SAVE response and cannot be used to deny registration or remove someone from a voting roll.” And the most important line: “SAVE provides verification information but does not determine an individual’s eligibility to register to vote, stay on a voting roll, or vote.”

And the whole thing is completely voluntary. States and local elections offices can use SAVE if they want to, or not. But that hasn’t stopped Democrats’ breathless claims about purges. Republicans were somewhat more elated.

🔥 If SAVE is a purge machine, as Democrats claim, it’s one that, by its own operating manual, is not allowed to purge anyone. SCOTUS even ruled out mass purges— the majority pointed out it’s already too late in this cycle for systematic list maintenance, since the National Voter Registration Act’s 90-day blackout window is in effect. Participation, as noted, is voluntary. Maine’s Democratic secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, who refuses to use SAVE, even noted that yesterday’s ruling “does not force states to change the way we run our elections.”

Still, it’s a crisis for democracy. A crisis of haphazardness. And, according to the Times, a controversial one.

Notwithstanding that NVRA forbids mass purges this close to election day, and despite the fact that it’s purely voluntary, lawyers for the League of Women Voters emotionally called the ruling “profoundly disappointing,” warning it puts “millions of Americans at risk of being unlawfully targeted by the administration’s unreliable voter purge database.”

Millions at risk! Unlawfully targeted. By a database that cannot remove anyone without manual review, in an election where federal law already bars systematic purges, in a program states can simply decline to join.

Sure, okay.

A better way to describe this dustup is that the blue states tried to block DHS from deploying a tool that easily (and for free) helps verify citizenship for voting purposes. Now the Supreme Court’s six-page order has overridden Judge Sparkle’s 75-page opus. For now, election officials in red counties can use the database to vet their voters one-by-one.

But after the midterms, they can use SAVE to help with bulk list maintenance.

What we are watching come together is a network of new tools --like the SAVE database and the USPS ballot envelope standards— that are arriving too late to offer significant help in 2026, but will almost certainly come fully online for 2028. One begins to wonder whether that wasn’t the plan all along.

🔥 Try to follow me here. I’m not minimizing the importance of the midterms. If we lose Congress, the next two years will be a painful slog through Democrat impeachments, investigations, commissions, and made-for-streaming grandstanding events that will make the January 6th Committee’s televised hearings look like the warm-up comedian. Nobody wants that.

But, and here I tread carefully, even if that does happen, it will still never be as awful as what we endured during 2018-2020. During the second half of Trump 1.0, when Democrats clawed themselves a narrow House majority, they enjoyed the deep state’s full support. They simply won’t have that this time. They’ll be on their own. They will face further disadvantages, which I could list for you; for the sake of time, I will set them aside for now.

We do not want to lose the midterms, but we would survive it. We’d be fine. Trump’s ambitious agenda would be limited but not stopped. Progress would continue, albeit slowly and painfully, and not at the breakneck pace we yearn for. Still— this president has already accomplished more in two years than in most 8-year presidential terms.

True, his many executive orders will not become laws, leaving them vulnerable to the next Democrat president’s autopen. But those laws are not guaranteed to pass even if Republicans do keep Congress. And Trump’s team is proving delightfully capable of repurposing existing laws— like it did with tariffs, asylum seekers, and the SAVE database. Those will be harder for a new administration to unravel.

There’s more to consider. Even though corporate media is running Trump’s “low” approval polls wall-to-wall, those polls will have almost nothing to do with the outcome. Midterm congressional elections are a different beast than presidential elections. It’s not really a national election. Thanks to the way Congressional districts are drawn, there are only a very few real toss-up seats.

The Cook Political Report’s latest ratings —updated yesterday, September 25— put 22 House seats in the Toss Up column: 17 currently held by Republicans and 5 by Democrats. Cook noted that, even if those 22 split evenly, Democrats would land at 219 seats, a bare majority, and only +4 over where they are now. It would take a ‘blue wave’ to get them to 230, which would be their absolute best day.

The Senate is nearly impossible for Democrats. Everything would have to go their way, and that assumes stroke victim John Fetterman (D-PA) doesn’t flip. Media barely mentions the Senate anymore.

And those 22 toss-up House seats —a mere handful— will not be decided by Trump’s popularity, the price of gas, or the masked fake lesbians currently boycotting the Last Ditch dive bar. These contests will be decided by one thing and one thing only: Turnout. Midterm elections are historically low-turnout elections where the out-of-power party holds an advantage, thanks to the aggravation factor.

In low-turnout elections, the party that hauls the most souls to the polls wins. Period. Here is the entire list of toss-up races:

That’s it. That’s the whole list that will decide the fate of the House, and Republicans hold a structural advantage in terms of incumbency and the Trump 2024 margin. Nobody is predicting a blue wave. Polls are useless at this point, not just because the pollsters lie, but because they can’t accurately predict who’ll actually go down and vote on November 3rd.

You still with me? To hold the House and prevent The Democrat Circus, Round Two, we need only hang onto a little over half of those 22 toss-up seats. Readers in those districts, take note. Readers outside those districts, take note if you want to help by throwing a few donation dollars one way or another.

Meanwhile, the GOP can focus on 22 House races and about six Senate races. That job is much more manageable than the corporate media keeps telling everybody. (Of course, Democrats face a similarly concise target zone, which is why no one is sanguine.)

Now, back to the big picture.

🔥 I began with the bold claim that Trump’s many election-integrity initiatives are less important for 2026 than for 2028, when they will become operational. Now you can see why I said that. Without minimizing the importance of the midterms, winning the presidency in 2028 is far more important, when the various national election integrity initiatives will have a scope and effect far beyond 22 House races.

Meanwhile, regardless of who controls Congress, Republicans will have two more years to use the SAVE database to prune voter lists. The new USPS tracking system for mail-in ballots will be online in plenty of time for befuddled clerks to get ready. We’ll enjoy two more years of DOJ election fraud prosecutions. We might even get the SAVE America Act, which will tighten up voter registration, finally ending the motor-voter loophole.

So there is no reason to get anxious or depressed, like the corporate media wants. True, we have plenty of work to do. But we are defending strong ground that we already control, with reserve troops and supplies marching toward the battlefield. We should stay energized and optimistic. And turn out on November 3rd.

Have a superlative Saturday! C&C will return as usual on Monday morning, with a brand-new installment of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🚀🚀🚀

On Thursday, the president of the United States hosted the president of China at the White House— the kind of rare historical event books are written about, with trade truces, AI arms races, and state dinners. It was a big deal. And the New York Times’ chief White House correspondent, Peter Baker —now covering his sixth presidency, a credential the paper advertised like a Michelin star— surveyed the summit and decided the lead was: the media’s feelings got hurt. Behold the headline: “In Trump’s White House, China’s Dictator Is Welcome. American Media, Less So.”

I am not exaggerating. Here’s the very first sentence: “At the White House gate, a throng of Chinese journalists was being admitted onto the grounds of the Executive Mansion to cover the visit of President Xi Jinping. Out on the street, several American journalists were blocked from entering the White House on the orders of President Trump.”

Poor babies. “Several” American journalists (I wonder which ones, cough, CNN/Politico/MS LATER) were bounced and forced to watch “a throng” of Chinese reporters streaming into the club, I mean White House. Grammatically, Baker turned the summit between the two most powerful men on planet Earth into a backdrop for a story about the media’s wounded pride.

Mind you, this was the lead story at the very top of the Times’s web page this morning. One suspects that the self-obsessed nitwits at the Times would cover D-Day by complaining about embedded reporters being forced to sit in the back of the landing boats. It got worse from there. Oh, Times.

Baker then delivered roughly two thousand manic words that kept wandering back, like a dog to its favorite chew toy, to the Times most favorite subject: itself. The press pool—the rotation—the boycott—the court order—the written commitment—the rotation again. The entire media-banning story was contained within the story supposedly about the Chinese visit like a Russian nesting doll.

The short version is that Judge Kelly —who in 2018 ordered Jim Acosta’s press privileges restored, and gave Enrique Tarrio a 22-year prison sentence for not being at the Capitol on January 6th— predictably entered a TRO Wednesday at midnight ordering the White House to let CNN, Politico, and Ms. Now back in. Another day, another injunction.

Put simply, the Times is mad. And hurt. And they don’t care who knows. The article lashed the President throughout with cutting adjectives and angry adverbs; he “fumed” about the missing TV coverage, “basked” in President Xi’s presence, “lavished” the Chinese leader with praise, and “delighted” in showing “his good friend” the ballroom construction. There was more. Baker sneered that Trump “gushes” over autocrats— an “affinity” for them that has “baffled” democrat leaders (who know a thing or two about autocracy).

It said Trump denounces journalists as “enemies of the people,” which it pointed out was “a phrase used by Stalin to condemn dissidents to the gulag.” The article reached its snippy peak when it called the White House’s livestream of the event a “form of state television that Mr. Xi might recognize.”

If I could characterize the coverage of the visit itself, it seems the New York Times disapproved of hosting President Xi and giving him the traditional full state-visit treatment, which included flyovers, a banquet, personal tours of the grounds (and the new helipad!), and speeches in which both leaders praised each other. The Times would have preferred something else, perhaps, though it never said.

Though President Trump received the brunt of the scorned newspaper’s ire, it reserved plenty for President Xi. It introduced him in the headline as “China’s Dictator,” quoted Republican Senator Roger Wicker calling Xi a “brutal, unelected and oppressive dictator,” and repeatedly criticized him for communism, an awareness of the terrifying red peril conspicuously absent in the Times’ coverage of the DSA’s meteoric rise. (In one op-ed the Times also ran yesterday, socialist political organizing was sold as a charming solution to Democrats’ youth problem.)

That wasn’t the only jarring tonal mismatch. In every story on the Iran War, the Times goes out of its way to paint Trump as a warmonger. Yet it had nothing good to say about Trump building a better relationship with the country most likely to drag America into a major war. Instead, Baker treated honorary diplomatic pageantry mainly as a sign of Trump’s fondness for dictators. (Whom it helpfully listed, in case anyone forgot.)

But the Grey Lady missed the point. Trump has ambitions, but they are not about cozying up to dictators. He aims to end the post-Cold War unipolar era and build a new, more stable multipolar world. This is no secret. It’s right in the 2025 National Security Strategy. That would have been a better, more important story, if the Times had been able to overcome its emotions.

President Trump did gain one visible major achievement. He got the inscrutable President Xi —who never laughs in public— to genuinely chuckle when Trump pointed out the portrait of the Autopen. This provoked joyless Democrats and crusty neocons to take to social media to prove they had no sense of humor. The White House X account rubbed it in:

CLIP: Trump and Xi share a laugh over President Autopen’s portrait (0:08).

In spite of all the hand-wringing, this wasn’t just a joke at the former president’s expense, or a slam on the mentally handicapped. This was a public rebuke. A signal. Trump was saying: we know you controlled him, and now that is all over.

If Trump’s critics could pull themselves together and get their complaints into a coherent form, they’d understand that a world where the US and China were equal trading partners is a safer and more stable one. If the Times’ anguished cries are any evidence, the Democrats and the neocons seem to prefer a strategy of Chinese regime change— which all but guarantees eventual kinetic conflict. But never mind.

🔥🔥🔥

The progressive Boston Globe just ran its best-performing story of the year. It wasn’t a war report or a welfare fraud investigation. It was 3,000 words about a lesbian bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts, getting devoured by its own regulars over mask-optional Saturdays. The headline: “A Western Mass. lesbian bar required KN-95 masks. When it changed the rules, all hell broke loose.”

One thousand new subscriptions in a single day. 17.6 million views on the paper’s X post. Its own Know Your Meme page. A Megyn Kelly segment. The Globe’s managing editor called it “on pace to shatter all sorts of Globe records.” A social media tsunami.

Apparently, the secret to saving local journalism isn’t AI or pivoting to a short-video format. It’s lesbians.

Cue the progressive purity spiral. Speaking of communists, yesterday, the Western Massachusetts chapter of the Communist Party USA responded with a furious denunciation titled “Last Ditch and the MAGA Media” — denouncing the liberal Boston Globe as “MAGA Media” and “an ally of corporate lobbyists.” The Boston Globe! Ouroboros-like, the progressive purity spiral has now consumed the newspaper that wrote the sympathetic feature.

In case you’ve been on a scrolling fast, here’s the story. Every movement gets its shark-jumping moment. For progressivism, it appears to have arrived on August 31st, in Greenfield, Massachusetts, population 17,700, when a local lesbian bar announced that Saturday nights would be mask-optional —one night a week— and the revolution responded by trying to burn the building down.

Well, metaphorically. Mostly. One commenter on the bar’s Instagram feed skipped the metaphor and went straight to hoping the venue “gets firebombed.” Not for serving lesbians. For allowing bare faces.

And I will once again give credit where due: the Globe sent a reporter, who returned with 3,000 words about the movement eating its own. This was the rare corporate media piece where the facts needed no embellishment.

Meet the victim: the Last Ditch Bar and Arts Venue. It’s a divey basement lesbian bar opened last year by “three housemates in their mid-20s,” billing itself as a space for “dykes, transsexuals, gender freaks, workers, and their friends.” It features a free store in one corner offering food, clothes, fentanyl test strips, and (of course) Narcan. There’s a sign reading “PROM CANCELLED ‘CUZ LESBIANS.” The police, notably, are not welcome. And the KN-95 mask —“or better”— remains absolutely mandatory at all times. In 2026.

The bar’s opening night featured a raucous (clothed) simulation of a lesbian sex act on the dance floor. But with masks firmly in place. (Safety first, even in simulated passion.)

This was, by every available metric, one of the most progressive establishments on the North American continent. And it still wasn’t enough.

🔥 The bar’s unforgivable crime, announced on Instagram, was a single sentence: “It is with love we inform our immunocompromised disabled divas we will be opening Saturday nights as mask optional.”

The response: 442 comments in four hours. “Just say you’re being complicit in a mass disabling event and get it over with.” “People like you kill disabled people in the name of your own leisure and convenience.” “If youre only concerned with protecting yourself at the cost of DEATH for others, you are no better than a fascist.” One explained that a public venue shouldn’t run a “hatred and discrimination night” — a fascinating sentence to type about a bar that requires medical-grade respirators all six other nights a week.

The article described a great deal of context the mob skipped on its way to the pitchforks. Greenfield, Massachusetts, hasn’t reported a single covid case in more than two months. The bar was going broke— foot traffic was slowing, cover fees waived for anyone short on cash, bills unpaid, and its staff unpaid. After “consulting the Massachusetts LGBT Chamber of Commerce” (a sentence I never expected to type), the owners decided to bend one rule in a last-ditch effort to attract customers. They were not “pivoting to MAGA.” They were pivoting to making rent.

Alas, the progressive revolution does not accept “we’re broke” as any excuse. Two days later the bar posted an apology —“sorry for our passive and dismissive tone”— and promptly committed a second hate crime: the apology image lacked alt-text for the visually impaired. “This is not an accessible post,” came the verdict. The snake wasn’t just eating its tail; it was filing a disabilities act complaint about the tail.

Then came the inevitable struggle session. On September 11, it held a ‘community meeting,’ featuring ten masked people seated in a communal circle on the dance floor, with two mediators, remote access for those fearful of attending, a calming breath exercise (two minutes each), and the sharing of grievances, going clockwise. It lasted three and a half hours and resolved nothing, which, for this kind of meeting, is actually a land-speed record.

But the evening’s main star joined via Zoom: Soe Noire, head of another ‘queer Covid-conscious collective,’ a ‘gender-expansive lesbian’ with ‘he/him’ pronouns, there to flood the chat with irate messages, which were all dutifully read aloud. When a mediator —a licensed therapist— gently suggested stepping back from “places of righteousness,” the chat erupted in outrage: dismissing virtual attendees isn’t accessible; she’s a white therapist centering white feelings; and worst of all, her license makes her a mandated reporter— “an agent of the state, akin to police.”

One attendee asked whether the mediator could even have them all hospitalized against their will. The community deemed the mediator’s presence “wildly unsafe.” No mediators.

You couldn’t script it. A gay volunteer mediator at a lesbian bar’s community meeting was roundly rejected as a potential agent of involuntary commitment. The purity spiral has no bottom; it has a basement, and the basement has a dive bar, and the dive bar is being denounced.

🔥 Reading the story, one feels nothing but sympathy for Jackie Matellian, 26, the last founder standing. Her other two cofounders stepped back months ago, one of them to enroll in clown school (I promise I am not making this up; the circus left town and took a founder with it). At one point, Jackie started crying under her mask. She never wanted to run the bar alone. Her credit score is trashed. She lived in her truck for six months pouring money into the place. She’s working four jobs. She’s on the hook for a $50,000 loan.

Here’s a pro tip: never let them see you cry. The chat room’s hard-hearted response: “you chose to use your time to spill tears and center your feelings. This is incredibly racist and deflecting behavior.” Afterward, Mr. Noire posted about Jackie’s “WHITE THEY THEM TEARS” and declared the bar uninterested in “revolutionary praxis.”

A crying 26-year-old who lived in her truck to keep a community space alive is now the oppressor. The revolution has achieved full struggle circle.

But the one unbelievable detail that distilled all 3,000 words into one unavoidable fact is this: it’s a lesbian bar, but the only person in the article who identified as a lesbian used he/him pronouns— and he was the one trying to shut down its Saturday nights.

This, my friends, is progressivism’s final, faceless apotheosis: the labels have become so individualized into creative word-salad they describe no one, the bar is for everyone in particular and no one in general, and the only thing left with a fixed identity is the charge of bigotry. At some point the introductions became a competitive literary genre. “Gender-expansive lesbian, he/him”— each term successively modifying the last into meaninglessness, until the labels say less than the names underneath them. It isn’t an identity anymore; it’s a hymnal.

And like everything else at Last Ditch, it’s mandatory.

🔥 The reporter found Mr. Noire. She asked him whether he had any sympathy for Jackie, given the financial strain. He said: “No.” He said he won’t return until there’s new leadership. Canceled. “You can’t repair a house that’s on fire,” he said— which was a striking metaphor from a movement whose allies were rooting for an actual firebombing.

Alas, after all that, it’s not going well. The second mask-optional Saturday drew a handful of smokers outside, a few people inside, and an empty dance floor under the string lights. The bartender, Mixxy —a trans woman (man), closeted at ‘her’ day job as an engineer, working for tips because ‘she’ loves the place— delivered the single sanest sentence in the entire saga: “People don’t like to feel scolded. That’s not how hospitality works.”

Just after midnight, only one patron remained. She requested a Lady Gaga theme night. No. “Gaga is canceled,” Mixxy said. “Gaga is Zionist.”

The DJ —billed as Harsh Noise Boyfriend— played on. And alone on the checkered dance floor, on the stripper pole, KN-95 in place, danced the owner.

The article left readers with a haunting image: a 26-year-old who gave up her truck, her credit score, and two co-founders (one lost to the siren song of clown school) to run a free-Narcan lesbian bar, dancing solo in a respirator while the movement she built it for denounces her on Instagram. Somewhere, the Fonz is still on those water skis, and the shark is getting really hungry.

🔥 But if you back up —way up— you can find the glittering silver lining. The Globe had its best week of the year, not because of liberal outrage but because of the story’s humor quotient. Wokeness is becoming a punchline. Gloriously, ever-masking is now strapped to bizarre atypical sexual identities and pronoun fetishes. A desperate CPUSA was forced to respond to stem the damage. Social media burned brightly and, if I may, gaily.

The progressive experiment has nearly climaxed.

🔥🔥🔥

Yesterday we reviewed Reuters’ remarkable Monday story about finding 30,000 illegals registered to vote in 12 states. Then the news service delivered even more helpful news. Wednesday, it encouragingly reported, “Trump ramps up noncitizen voting prosecutions ahead of midterms.” Uh oh!

This story is for everyone. On the left, it’s for everyone who keeps mindlessly parroting “election fraud is vanishingly rare.” It’s equally for conservative Eeyores, who keep bleating that “nobody ever gets arrested.” Behold, the one terrific sentence smuggled halfway down Reuters’ report that answers them all:

1,600 investigations! Now, I don’t know who needs to hear this, but the DOJ has many priorities. It must stop child trafficking, freeze fentanyl, curb welfare abuse, and end the scourge of driving slowly in the left-hand lane. It can’t devote all its resources to any one social ill, even something as important as election fraud.

It is all about the priorities. “Prior to Trump’s second term,” Reuters dutifully reported, “federal prosecutions for alleged noncitizen voting were extremely uncommon.” That has changed. Behold, some of the most wonderful words yet printed in this astonishing year of unbelievable stories. Election fraud is now a “tier-one priority:”

In the last four weeks, the DOJ has filed charges against 32 people for noncitizen voting. Some of the stories are eye-watering. Yesterday, the DOJ reported the arrest of a Senegalese immigrant (described as a “lawful permanent resident”) who voted in New Jersey in at least two presidential elections and a midterm: 2018, 2020, and 2024. “Sanctuary politicians can try to claim that this kind of voter fraud isn’t happening,” DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said, “but it’s very real and is a serious threat to our country.”

And HSI’s 1,600 active investigations aren’t even the full scope. Those don’t include state-based investigations, like in Florida, where the state’s 2022 Election Crimes unit is finally shifting into its running gear. Yesterday, Florida’s terrific State Attorney General James Uthmeier announced twenty arrests and prosecutions, including of 16 noncitizens.

Florida’s arrests are separate from and in addition to the DOJ’s arrests and prosecutions. AG Uthmeier announced that the new figures pushed the Election Crimes office into triple digits. That is a lot. It is not enough for critics, but no number of investigations, arrests, or prosecutions will ever be enough for critics, so there’s no need to worry ourselves about that.

If we were being fair, what we’d notice most about this is the priority issue. If law enforcement agencies can find this many cases to chase this quickly, it becomes obvious that the prior lack of prosecutions was not because the cases were rare or did not exist. The prior lack of prosecutions was only because prosecutors deemed these cases too unimportant to bother with.

I suspect there are a lot of people out there —including Americans— who’ve long played a little loose with mail-in ballots. Florida is home to a unique form of wildlife called “snowbirds,” which are retired folks who live here only half the year, arriving in flocks to plague our highways and parking lots. Many of them request mail-in ballots from their northern abodes and also vote here in Florida. This double voting is not new. It is not obscure. It has just been unpunished.

(Though three Villages residents were charged in 2021 for double voting.)

If the new priority in prosecuting election crimes holds up, those folks might want to think twice before voting twice. Come to think of it, that would make a great billboard slogan.

The excuse that there’s no election fraud problem because there have been too few election fraud prosecutions is quickly becoming impossible to defend. And it really can’t come quickly enough.

💉💉💉

Finally, for folks whose issue isn’t elections but rather needles, this month delivered some truly incredible news. About ten days ago, Science (and only Science) reported, “Exclusive: New NIH research center on vaccine harms takes shape.” This is big pharma’s worst nightmare. And it is about time.

“The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) is preparing to launch a clinical research program,” Science said, “to study people who believe they were harmed by vaccines, including COVID-19 vaccines.” That is promising enough, but it was not only that. “The agency also plans to fund outside researchers to study adverse effects of vaccines,” the article said, “piggybacking off existing studies of people with vaccine-related illnesses.”

I honestly don’t know how they keep doing it. The velocity of the Trump 2.0 Administration is breathtaking. According to the article’s sources, “a new research center on the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland, could start up in mid-October.” That’s less than a month away! Moving fast isn’t just a sign of unprecedented bureaucratic efficiency. It’s also a strategy to prevent political enemies from organizing an effective resistance, from bogging the new initiative down in red tape, gold-star committees, or dropping it into a political black hole like something accidentally created at CERN.

Needless to say, the last thing Big Pharma needs is more research into vaccine injuries, never mind a permanent research center and expanded funding for independent studies.

Who could oppose studying vaccine injuries? In public, scientists expressed tepid support. “It’s really laudable,” Kathryn Edwards, a pediatrician at Vanderbilt University, generously allowed of the effort. “But if it’s not done in a scientific way,” she warned, “it will be more antivaccine propaganda.”

Presumably, when Dr. Edwards referred to “a scientific way,” she meant something different from how the establishment came up with the protective effects of homemade cloth masks and six-foot distancing. And I’m sure she meant “a scientific way” different from ignoring vaccine safety signals and sending alarmed researchers finding sudden deaths cease-and-desist notices. Do I have that right?

Remarkably, and suggesting a shift in how the mainstream science platforms are reporting on vaccine injuries, Science quoted —without sneering, scare quotes, or defamatory labels— a vax-injury activist who is a retired doctor who was herself injured by the covid jabs.

Dr. Hertz’s questions were all fair, smart, and on the nose. What is truly astonishing is that those fundamental questions —where the mRNA goes, how long it sticks around, and what it specifically affects— should remain unanswered six years after the jab rollouts. How did this happen? (Don’t answer that.)

The article was short on details about the new vaccine injury research center or the expanded grant budget. To my trained eye, that is a good thing. It means the Administration isn’t broadcasting its plans, making it that much harder for pharma to marshal the troops to attack them. I’ve noticed these kinds of plans are the ones that usually land hardest, and land like an above-average elephant, when it is too late to stop them.

There’s been much blackpilling about Kennedy’s plans for managing the vaccine industrial complex. Folks, fighting that isn’t easy. But they continue making progress. It’s just that the “MAGA betrayal” story gets covered widely across corporate media, while the Vaccine Injury Research Center gets a single exclusive in Science.

Welp! That’s why you come here. So be encouraged.

Have a fantastic Friday! Sneak back here tomorrow morning for another installment of C&C-style essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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🔥🔥🔥

The New York Times has published its second installment in its shocking investigation into paid social media influencers, and get ready: episode two is somehow even more shocking than the first. I covered the first installment —more on that shortly— on August 31st. On Tuesday, the Times reported, “An Army of Paid Creators Is Carpeting the Web With Political Content.”

In round one, the Times discovered that famous progressive influencers were taking medium-sized sums of money to praise politicians (like $15K-$25K per post). This month, reporters Ken Bensinger and Stuart Thompson uncovered something far more sinister: unfamous influencers are taking small sums of money to praise politicians.

Instead of paying one celebrity $25,000 for a single video, political campaigns have figured out they can pay a hundred nobodies $25 apiece and carpet the internet with slop. Functioning, as the Times puts it, “more like birdshot than a single bullet.” The industry even has a name for the nobodies: “user-generated content,” or the inevitable acronym U.G.C., which can be translated from Latin as “we got a guy but he only takes cash.”

Drew Levin, co-founder of a company called SideShift that runs one of these marketplaces, recently explained the business model on a podcast: “Why spend $1,000 on one video, when you can spend $1,000 on 30 videos?” This is the Costco theory of democracy. Buy in bulk! The American voter now comes in a 30-pack. “People are sick of paying the insane pricing that typically comes with influencer marketing,” Levin said. Adjusted for inflation, democracy is getting cheaper.

The Times profiled Drew (no relation to Drew Levin). Judging from his TikTok feed, Drew was a young man living near Dallas, being crushed by his grocery bills, barely getting by, and spending most of his time searching for thrift store discounts. His video comparing the cost of living in Texas versus California was viewed nearly 3 million times.

But there was just one teensy problem: “Drew” was actually named Alex Forrester, from Utah, currently residing in Florida. In June, he posted a confessional, later deleted, explaining: “All of it was paid for. I don’t even live in Texas!” This was followed by an expletive, which I like to think was directed at the gods of the algorithm.

Drew (aka Alex) was one of more than 100 creators paid up to $30 a post —later cut to $25, times being tough— by a Democrat-aligned group called Project Bullhorn, which claims it wants to combat right-wing dominance on social media. Okay. The Times dryly noted that “the affordability crisis apparently hit Project Bullhorn as well,” which is the funniest sentence the Times has written all year, and I suspect they meant it to sting.

According to the Times, only a third of Project Bullhorn’s affordability creators actually live in the states they are posting about. One “Austin, Texas born and raised” man complaining about rent and gas turned out to be Harvey Whitehead of Leicestershire, England, whose British accent the Times described as “unmissable.” Another “American” affordability crusader lives in Ontario, Canada.

And we wonder why Americans feel like the economy is terrible even though it is booming. The vibes are coming from inside the house. Headline from Investopedia, May:

“Stocks are booming, unemployment is low, businesses are raking in record profits,” Investopedia reported, “and people hate the economy more than at any other time in history.” Weird.

So. To summarize the utter state of American political discourse: Democrat-aligned groups pay Englishmen to pretend to be Texans so they can complain about the price of groceries to an AI algorithm. To “help combat Republican social media dominance.”

🔥 If you want to get in on the action, it’s easy! A few clicks and you can just... sign up online. The marketplaces advertise openly. On Whop, a “social commerce platform,” you can earn $3 per thousand views for clipping videos of Pierre Poilievre, $2 per thousand for a member of the Greek parliament, or $1.50 per thousand to elect Mike Minogue, the Republican nominee for governor of Massachusetts, with a maximum payout of $150 per post (roughly 0.001 percent of the $12.7 million Minogue has spent on television ads).

On Drumbeat, another marketplace, recent gigs included opposing the SAVE Act at $250 a post, complete with scripted talking points, and promoting the idea that extreme heat is a political problem (not a personal one).

People First, yet another marketplace, offered $300 or more per post for a campaign called “Protect What’s Human” demanding “real rules on A.I.” The only requirement was that creators self-verify they had “a personal perspective or experience” related to AI. In other words— the honor system! Applied to professional pretenders.

Republicans do it too, though on a smaller and somehow more embarrassing scale. A clipping campaign for Gov. Ron DeSantis paid $1.50 per thousand views with scripted captions like “DeSantis not holding back 🔥” and one golden rule: “Can’t make Ron look bad.” The agency behind it bragged on its website of getting the Governor 6 million views across 1,441 videos, a number of them posted by accounts based overseas, including one in Pakistan, which is not normally known for its abiding affection for the Sunshine State’s chief executive.

At least Republicans have an excuse. When corporate media ignores your achievements, you need some way to get the word out.

The article’s only other conservative example came from Los Angeles. Republican mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt paid two clipping firms more than $55,000. One of them, Cliphaus, boasts of a “network of 50,000+ independent creators” and 50 million views, with creator accounts traced to India, Turkey, and the Philippines. Its founders explained that clients can, if they want, check a box for U.S.-only accounts, “and when it comes to most clients, this is the case,” which is exactly what you say when it is not the case.

But to be fair, since fairness is my middle name (it isn’t), the Democrats are running far ahead. Project Bullhorn alone fielded a hundred-plus accounts. The marquee ‘swarm campaigns’ the Times detailed —the affordability carpet-bombing, the AI-regulation push, the SAVE Act opposition— were all progressive operations.

The Republicans have DeSantis tribute clips and a reality star’s long-shot mayoral bid, which is like comparing a brigade of U.S. Marines to the Pickettville Civil War reenactment society.

🔥 Naturally, the Times consulted an expert. (What would we do without experts?) In this case, it was the distinguished Samuel Woolley, a University of Pittsburgh professor, who solemnly declared, “This is digital astroturfing, plain and simple.” Thank you, professor. Next, the Times will consult a lab-coated scientist to confirm that the astroturf is not real grass.

And then there was Reporter Bensinger’s comment on his own article, the follow-up to his famous first comment from his August piece —“As the midterms approach, social media is overflowing with influencers propping up candidates for political office…”— which frankly should have headlined both columns. (Why bury this in a comment? Why not put this analysis in the article? Oh, never mind.)

Anyhow, this time Bensinger insightfully commented that the digital astroturf campaigns “fools the social media algorithm into believing it’s organic,” creating “a manufactured echo chamber.” Put simply, this brand-new industry only exists because people need to trick the AI running the platforms into thinking the campaigns are human.

So here we see AI creating jobs. Ha! Irony.

“Once you’ve seen it, you can’t stop seeing it,” Bensinger continued. We can only hope. Now consider this: What the algorithm giveth, the algorithm can taketh back. One change to the code and the entire industry could vanish overnight. It’s not exactly job security, in case you were considering a late career change.

🔥 Can anything be done? Well, first of all, we can all stop reacting emotionally to random posts by people we don’t know on our scrolling feeds, because they are probably fake. I hate to break this to anyone, but that is not actually a cute, fresh-faced 19-year-old coed in a revealing tank top who’s angry about the price of diesel. It’s actually a deeply cynical 43-year-old Nigerian scam artist who has completely upgraded his game from sending us badly worded emails about deposed princes who need a little help “transferring gold” to the US.

It’s still a scam, though. Just a better-looking one.

Not one week ago, on September 19th, California Governor Gavin “NGO” Newsom signed AB 1130, giving regulators power to fine influencers up to $5,000 per undisclosed paid post and refer cases for misdemeanor prosecution. (Texas also has a disclosure law.)

AB 1130 replaces a prior 2023 disclosure rule that carried no penalty whatsoever— a law without punishment, which in scholarly legal circles we refer to as a suggestion. The new bill was inspired by billionaire Tom Steyer’s $200 million gubernatorial faceplant, during which his campaign paid dozens of creators who frequently forgot to mention it. (Steyer’s campaign was later cleared when the creators added obligatory disclosures after the election. Terrific!)

Regulation seems like everyone’s knee-jerk initial idea. But there are problems. First up is the good old First Amendment. The Supreme Court has protected anonymous political pamphleteering (McIntyre v. Ohio) and donor anonymity (Americans for Prosperity v. Bonta), though it has generally allowed disclosure requirements under strict scrutiny. So maybe.

But it is inevitable that, once they actually get around to prosecuting someone, some influencer’s NGO-appointed lawyer will become the test case, and good luck to him. But second, and even more to the point: how do they enforce it? Even if they wanted to —there’s no evidence of this at present— how on the good Earth do they plan to collect a $5,000 fine from a man in Leicestershire?

California’s regulators can barely find Sacramento. They’re supposed to police Pakistan? They have zero jurisdiction there. So the current regulatory efforts are mere political theater.

🔥 Real people who have been busy posting on Social Media for free are reacting to this news. One Instagram creator, having absorbed the Times’ reporting, called it “a rented mob with a ring light” and “fake news wearing a rented person’s face.” That was more aptly put than anything in either Times article, and she did it for free, which in this Wild West digital economy makes her the real victim.

Is this an influencing arms race? Obviously. Both sides, Democrats and now Republicans, are building the machines. The marketplaces are open for business. The algorithms are rewarding volume, and nobody —no law, no norm, no code of ethics, no pinkie promise, not even a Saturday hearing of the House Agriculture Committee— can stop it. The Times will probably publish installment three right around the midterms, installment four before 2028, and each time the reporters will sound freshly shocked.

But there’s one thing the Times keeps dancing around: the detail hiding in plain sight between the lines of every paragraph. These small-time hustlers are not called “persuaders.” They are not called “advocates” or “operatives” or “fellow citizens with authentic grocery concerns.” They are called influencers. It is literally right in the job title. We have built an entire profession whose title is also the confession, and then the Times acts surprised when the confession turns out to be true.

Cough up the black pill. It’s not real.

The article mentioned somebody was paying influencers $1,500 per video to assure us the electoral system is working correctly. But Reuters just checked.

🔥🔥🔥

Next, before I start ripping Reuters a new one, a word of credit where it’s due. Reuters has done something no other Corporate Media outlet has done: it actually counted. Its reporters reviewed official records from a dozen states and produced the first nationwide tally of non-citizens mistakenly added to America’s voter rolls — a tally that, Reuters notes, “has not previously been reported.” Give them credit. They did the reporting, and yesterday ran the sensational headline, “How US states mistakenly added 30,000 non-citizens to voter rolls.”

According to Reuters’ own investigation (and we can assume they weren’t looking enthusiastically), since 2000, more than 30,000 self-declared non-citizens have been added to voter rolls in twelve states, red and blue alike, ‘mostly’ through ‘software glitches’ and ‘clerical errors’ at driver’s license agencies. That’s only the type they noticed most.

In New Jersey, a “technology glitch” added about 6,600 non-citizens between June 2023 and June 2024. Every one answered “no” when asked if they were citizens, and the computer registered them anyway, like a bouncer who checks ID, reads them carefully, and waves people in regardless. In Virginia, more than 4,500 self-identified foreign nationals turned up on the rolls in 2025 alone. In California, the DMV mistakenly registered as many as 1,500. In Oregon, officials registered hundreds of immigrants who presented foreign passports and birth certificates —they walked in holding documentary proof they weren’t citizens and walked out registered to vote— plus hundreds of American Samoans, who are U.S. nationals but not citizens, a distinction the Portland DMV apparently never covered in orientation.

Despite all the confident conclusions of non-problemness, Reuters only examined data from twelve states. At last count, there are fifty. Feel free to extrapolate from “above 30,000.”

Reuters also conceded, in passing, that “the numbers are inexact because state data is often tentative and subject to revision”— a sneaky way of admitting the real number could be wildly higher. Nineteen states plus D.C. shower driver’s licenses on illegal immigrants, and nearly every DMV in America doubles as a voter-registration office thanks to Democrats’ federal motor-voter laws. So.

If you ever wanted a corporate media article to best illustrate the stages of progressive denial, this is that article.

🔥 Stage one: it’s not happening! This stage lasted decades. Corporate media spent years insisting non-citizens don’t register and don’t vote, and anyone who said otherwise was a flat-Earth conspiracy theorist. As White House spokeslady Lauren Bis put it, “after decades of the media denying that non-citizens register and vote in our elections, they are finally being forced to admit after a flurry of recent arrests nationwide that it does happen.” Stage one is now in the rearview mirror. Buh bye.

Stage two: okay, it’s happening, but rarely. Thirty thousand self-declared non-citizens since 2000— but look, there are 170 million registered voters, so it’s “too small... to impact elections,” according to “experts” who were unnamed, unquoted, and untroubled by American electoral history. “Above 30,000.” Above! Meaning, at least 30,000, from twelve states, from admittedly inexact data. That’s a floor disguised as a ceiling.

It’s like finding six cockroaches in the kitchen and reassuring your wife the infestation is mostly little ones and only “above a half dozen.” Compared against 170 million voters, 30,000 sounds tiny— until you remember that American elections are routinely decided by hundreds of votes. The presidency turned on 537 votes in Florida. A House seat in Iowa turned on 6. A Virginia legislative seat in 2017 ended in a dead tie and was settled by pulling a name out of a bowl— in Virginia, the same state that just found 4,500 foreign nationals on its rolls in a single year.

So… ‘small’ compared to what? Compared to the margins that actually decide elections, 30,000 isn’t small. It’s a landslide.

Stage three: okay, it’s not rare, but it’s also not THAT big. “This is not a problem,” Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution confidently said. “There’s just no evidence that massive numbers of non-citizens are voting.” To be a problem, there must be massive numbers. Not “numbers.” Not even “a lot.” Massive numbers. Thirty thousand documented cases clears every bar except the new one they just invented. Behold the beauty of the moving goalpost: it never stops moving. So the kick never counts. (Sorry, Charlie. But keep trying!)

Tell us, professor — how many is massive? A hundred thousand? A million? Name the number, or admit there isn’t one.

Stage four: okay, it’s happening, but fighting it is no use. Asked whether the SAVE America Act —proof of citizenship to register— would help prevent these mistakes, David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation & Research said it is “unlikely” such a bill would help. Unlikely. Which means, on the other hand: it might. CEIR, incidentally, is the group whose data Reuters used to find the 30,000 in the first place. The man who counted the escaped horses is now assuring us that locking the barn wouldn’t have helped anyway.

Right after confidently quoting the lack of any problem because there’s no evidence (yet) of “massive numbers,” Reuters vomited up this astonishing admission: “Reuters was not able to determine how many of these non-citizens actually cast a ballot.” They don’t know! They admit they don’t know. But they’re certain it didn’t matter. The votes might be uncountable; but logic is not.

In what can only be described as a self-own, in an article documenting 30,000 cases of non-citizens landing on voter rolls from only twelve states, Reuters sneered that President Trump has claimed “without evidence” that non-citizen voting is widespread. Without evidence— in an article that is, itself, evidence. I really can’t make this stuff up (though Reuters keeps trying).

Just before one collapses from argumentative exhaustion, one wonders what they would consider to be evidence, if not arrests, prosecutions, and 30,000 confirmed illegals on voter rolls. If the entire cast of CSI testified, would that work? Do we need it confirmed by the Pope?

Finally, before the 2024 election, Iowa had announced 2,000-plus self-reported non-citizens on its rolls; six months later, after diligent re-investigation, it had shrunk the number to 277, and officials confirmed that 35 non-citizens cast ballots that were counted. Thirty-five. Even accepting that as true, Iowa is a state where legislative races are often decided by double digits. But Reuters assures us it isn’t massive.

In an article packed with reassuring numbers, there was one conspicuously missing number: how many is enough? A hundred thousand? A million? Twenty million? Give us an exact number. Then explain it. Because we all know the stages will keep expanding forever, just like the universe —it’s not happening, it’s rare, it’s not massive, the fix won’t work, it’s actually a good thing, there goes Proxima Centauri!— and the only number that will ever be enough is the one that is apparently as uncountable as the stars in the Heavens.

The article stank. It did everything it could to minimize the findings. But to be fair— Reuters did publish it. It feels like the truth is trickling out faster and faster now, like somebody finally found the valve.

Have a terrific Thursday! Refresh your email folder tomorrow morning for the next exciting installment of C&C essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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Just think about how much fun last year’s UN General Assembly speech was. Yesterday afternoon, the New York Times slipped into its well-worn drama queen outfit and theatrically reported, “Trump Threatens Annihilation in Iran in UN Speech and Lays Out Winner-Takes-All Vision.” (The Times would have preferred a Winner-Takes-An-Equitable-Portion vision.) Hey, it was a marked improvement over last year, when he told the whole assembly, “Your countries are going to hell.” But the hilarity started well before Trump began speaking.

Um … what happened to the media’s silent treatment? Every biological male reading this knows how it works. You forget to bring back the milk, even though that was literally the reason she asked you to stop at the store. (It wasn’t your fault. You were distracted by a sale on ribeyes, and thought she’d be pleased you saved money.) Short of divorce or a sex boycott (Lysistrata), her only option is to punish you by not talking until you have been sufficiently chastened.

This was the same strategy the corporate media employed in a surge of solidarity to punish President Trump for banning three platforms from the White House press room, which was also dramatically unveiled by the New York Times on Monday: all the major networks had agreed to boycott White House coverage— smothering the President, in the Times’ deathless phrase, by depriving him of “the oxygen of screen time.” That will teach him.

That was Monday. By Tuesday he was back on the Times’ front page. The silent treatment disappeared faster than the last Oreo in a house full of teenage boys.

Peter Baker —the Times’ chief White House correspondent, a man who has covered the White House since 1996 and, in his own words, has never seen a day when television networks refused to participate in the pool— filed this histrionic headline:

The sting! Of cancellation! As if the president had been banned from Twitter again rather than —checks notes— the networks had canceled him, on purpose, less than 24 hours earlier, as a punishment, and were now writing 1,500 words about how much being ignored must sting.

The article’s opening was marvelously clever. “For President Trump, this is the tree-falls-in-the-forest moment of his administration. If the most television-addicted president in history suddenly finds the cameras missing, is he really still president?” (A better question: If CNN falls in the forest, does anyone notice?) Because television, Baker continued, unleashing his internal amateur psychologist, “is better than any narcotic” to Trump. Next week: “Trump’s Relationship With Diet Coke: A Cry for Help.”

Not yet knowing how short-lived the victory would be (three paragraphs), the piece lovingly described Trump’s Monday: cutting the ribbon on the new White House helipad, “almost literally shouting into the wind,” recorded only by “a second-tier news broadcaster that could not capture his voice over the roar of Marine One.” That must have stung. Baker rubbed it in: “There was Trump moving his mouth, and no one could hear him.” You could sense Mr. Baker rolling that sentence over his tongue like a fine cabernet. A whole paragraph of pure, undiluted schadenfreude, generously decanted onto the front page.

There was just one problem. A problem that Baker was forced to admit by paragraph four: by the end of the day Monday, Trump was live on CNN anyway— via non-pool cameras in New York, as a guest of Mayor Zohran “Mini-Mao” Mamdani at Gracie Mansion. “They said they’re going to boycott me, but they never boycott me,” Trump shrugged wonderingly.

This, it must be said, appears to be empirically true, since the boycott’s first full day ended with the boycottee live on CNN while the boycotters were still writing about how starved-for-television he was.

🔥 But the real main event was Tuesday at the UN, where Trump delivered a fiery 37-minute broadside and the Times responded the way it always responds when Trump does something, with or without a media boycott. (Hint: it needed smelling salts.)

The story began, “The podium of the United Nations was an unusual setting for the leader of a global superpower to threaten to ‘annihilate the Islamic Republic’ of Iran.” Cue a massive eye roll. Here is what everyone on Earth knows— except, apparently, the editors of the New York Times: this is Trump’s opening bid. This is the part where he says the foyer chandelier costs ten million dollars, so that when he only pays two million, everyone feels great. He even wrote a book about it. It’s called The Art of the Deal. It was a New York Times bestseller. A long time ago.

Hilariously, six paragraphs in, the Times was forced to sheepishly admit, “It may have been largely a negotiating tactic.” Oh, may it? May it have been the negotiating tactic employed by the most famous negotiating-tactic user in modern political history, in a speech where, right after the ‘annihilate’ line, he literally added, “I believe we will make a deal right after the election”?

Why, yes. Come to think of it, it just might have been a negotiating tactic after all. Brilliant and insightful analysis as usual, Times! (Portlanders: don’t panic. Shortly after threatening annihilation, Trump’s envoys Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff met with the Iranians for three hours.)

“They’re waiting to see how I do in the midterm election,” Trump added. The only foreign government openly campaigning for a Democrat House is the one we’re at war with. Just saying.

He next called Cuba a failed state, right to their face, causing the Cuban delegation to sprint for the exits. They fled. In great haste and huffiness, as it were. “Communism will never be coming to America,” the President promised, “but freedom will be coming to Cuba.”

Then he got to Venezuela, a portion of the speech the Times described with the hushed horror of a PBS nature documentary describing a pack of lions taking down a gazelle: “Special Operations forces swept into Caracas, seized Nicolás Maduro and his wife from their bed, and delivered them to a detention center in Brooklyn.” From their bed! To Brooklyn! “It was a war,” Trump added, “but it’s perhaps the biggest deal ever made.” The Times called it gunboat diplomacy. Trump called it the biggest deal ever made. Tomato, tomahto.

Then came Greenland, which was my personal favorite, because the Times had to deploy its shrink-ray. When it can’t find a mean sentence to clutch its pearls over, it finds a win to diminish. Trump announced publicly signing the deal with both Denmark and Greenland for two new US bases (Narsarsuaq and Mestersvig, which defy pronunciation to confound our enemies), plus an expanded Pituffik, plus American flyover, landing, and undersea (submarine) rights across all of Greenland, plus missile defense for the Golden Dome, with no end date, surviving even Greenlandic independence, and a clause barring non-NATO powers from any military presence or investment. (Sorry, Beijing.)

The Times sneered. He could have done all that anyway, under an existing treaty, it claimed. Oh, could he? Then why did the United States go from 17 Greenland installations in the Cold War to exactly one? That 1951 treaty sat there for 75 years producing nothing but Pituffik, and then, one “total takeover” tweet later, Denmark is happily signing amendments at the UN.

If any president could have done it in previous decades, previous decades would have done it. The Times watched a man talk the dealer down ten grand and get the floor mats for free, then sniffed that the car was on the lot the whole time.

The Times’ sourcing was a masterpiece of journalistic failure. The only American politician quoted in the entire piece was back-bench Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey, who snarled on X, “Trump never misses a chance to humiliate himself in front of the world.” That’s it. That’s the entire domestic quote roster. Two thousand words, no horrified diplomats, no trembling ‘experts,’ no concerned analysts … and not one quotable human willing to say “he actually made a couple decent points.” The Grey Lady searched the entire United States and couldn’t find a single community college assistant professor who found it at all amusing when he called the International Criminal Court “an evil bunch of people.”

It’s like the Times can’t even hear itself. While breaking its own ‘silent treatment’ pledge, what it complained most bitterly about was that the President does not govern by poll. The Times reported —with visible distress— that “Americans were telling pollsters they overwhelmingly disapproved of his foreign policy.” It cited a CNN poll at 29% approval, 71% disapproval, “reaching or exceeding levels of disapproval President George W. Bush faced in 2006.”

And then, the sentence that gave the whole game away: “But none of that seemed to lead Mr. Trump to back away.” The media’s polls say stop, and he... doesn’t. He stood up there last year and said, “I’ll be very badly criticized for saying it, but I’m here to tell the truth. I don’t care.” I don’t care. What?? A politician saying media criticism doesn’t matter? Imagine, the horror.

Hey, Times: nobody wants a President who governs by polls.

The Times was more shocked by this than a sommelier seeing someone drinking wine out of a coffee mug. Not only did he not care about media critics, he also bragged in the same speech: “I have the highest poll numbers I’ve ever had,” which only further triggered the Grey Lady. It was like he’d said, “but the girls at the office don’t care about milk.” Maybe she’ll give him the silent treatment even harder this time.

Oh, in case you missed the memo, the Times reported that the President has officially renamed artificial intelligence. His point, I think, is that it isn’t artificially intelligent— it really is smart. “From this point forward,” he declared, we’ll use “the much more accurate term ‘super’ as opposed to ‘artificial.’ So it’s super intelligence.” He asked the world’s leaders to call it “SI” instead of “AI.” Maybe we could call it the intelligence formerly known as artificial.

It is a kind of test. “Let’s see if I have any power,” he said. “Maybe I do, and maybe I don’t. We’re going to find out pretty soon.” I dunno. That seems like a heavy lift, since the term “artificial intelligence” has been used since Eisenhower and approximately 14 billion times. But as he said, we shall see.

They declared a media boycott by silent treatment. Trump annihilated it in one afternoon.

🔥🔥🔥

Here’s more good news for young Americans (especially in Florida), and more bad news for the Ivy-clad halls of academia. The Miami Times reported, “Florida students can use Pell grants for workforce training, Gov. DeSantis says.” Terrific Governor Ron DeSantis is definitely not relaxing into his lame duck status. Florida is now the first state on board. If anything, he’s already running for president in 2028.

First, Florida hired former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Labor Dr. Henry Mack to be its new Education Commissioner. Mack is specifically tasked with implementing one of President Trump’s priorities: Workforce Pell Grants for short-form programs, not just for “traditional higher education institutions.”

A Pell Grant is not a loan. It pays tuition for useful degrees— and students who qualify don’t have to pay it back. It’s not a lot of money, especially in the context of expensive “traditional” degrees for things like gender studies, interpretive polyamorous dance, and feminist film criticism. But the new Workforce version —passed in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act— covers not just degrees but certifications for the kinds of high-wage, high-demand skills that regular universities won’t touch with a ten-foot pride flagpole. Like welding.

Even better —and the reason why the universities sneer at these occupations— these kinds of certifications are short, fast, and focused. The new Workforce grants generally apply to intensive training programs completed in eight to fifteen weeks. That leaves practically no time for professors to teach students how wonderful socialism is (and how it’s never really been tried), why America is systematically toxic, or how to organize and fund Tesla dealership protests using taxpayer money.

That is one problem. But Workforce students also have expectations, like well-paying jobs when they graduate, which is the kind of guarantee traditional colleges are somehow unwilling to offer, despite burdening their students with tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in federally subsidized loans that last a lifetime.

It’s bigger than you might think. Commissioner Mack offered examples of the ‘blue-collar’ programs the Workforce grants can be used for, like “certified production technology, CNC machinists, rapid prototype specialist, automation, lean manufacturing, electronics aide, aluminum welding and fabrication, marine electrician, professional research diving, CDL, aviation mechanic, and certainly last but not least, many of our first responder programs, firefighters, EMT — critical occupations.”

“You’re talking about machinery, defense applications, things that are going to make these students very, very marketable,” Governor DeSantis said. “We’re doing this, of course, to give students more opportunity to have productive lives, but it’s also something writ large for our economy.”

Even assuming that degreed students have some earning advantage over those with skilled trade credentials —an assumption that the AI boom, or “SI boom,” is making more arguable by the minute— that advantage is not enough to overcome the student loan debt penalty. A welder or aviation tech without a four-year degree (or loan) will own a house sooner, can start a family earlier, and will generally own more assets by age 30 than the young person who spent four years+ in college to gain a marginal salary advantage but also a crushing debt.

Furthermore, a trade skill virtually guarantees lifetime employment, cementing their status as permanently productive members of society. After all, nobody has ever outsourced a burst pipe to Mumbai. And, as their skills increase, such as welders specializing in underwater or defense welding, they can easily enter six-figure salary ranges, especially with overtime and performance bonuses.

This is not newly discovered wisdom. We’ve known for decades that many skilled occupations are better bets than non-STEM bachelor’s degrees, especially when those degrees are burdened by loans. But until Trump’s second term, no one had the stones to risk offending the Ivory Tower by focusing on alternatives to post-secondary education. Just ask Dirty Jobs’ Mike Rowe, who has been a brave voice in the wilderness for twenty years.

Well, it’s finally happening. More options are opening for young Americans. And the best news is that trade schools aren’t overburdened with costly amenities, administrators, and tenured professors whose skills are long out of date.

But that wasn’t all.

🔥 This morning, Finance Buzz reported, “New Trump Executive Order Could Change Retirement Savings for 56 Million Americans.” Back on April 30, President Trump signed an executive order creating a new federal website, TrumpIRA.gov, that “connects working Americans — independent contractors, part-time workers, small-business employees, and the self-employed — with high-quality, low-cost Individual Retirement Accounts.”

It also provides for matching federal contributions for low-income Americans, right now limited to just $1,000 a year, but you can easily imagine it expanding. It is another Trump innovation, where he took existing law —a long-dormant Biden-era savings program— and ran with it. It’s not that low-income Americans couldn’t open their own IRAs. It was just too hard. There was no cheap, easy way for workers outside corporate America to open and manage them.

Biden signed it, promptly forgot all about it, and now Trump’s branded it on his website as a keystone initiative. Classic.

Starting on January 1st, 2027, Americans without ready access to IRAs can use the new web portal to find and fund retirement accounts from approved private providers. It’s Trump Accounts for grownups. In other words, every American can easily become a stockholder and benefit from the rising market. Not just oligarchs.

The stock market has set 59 record highs since Trump 2.0 started.

The Administration isn’t waiting around for the media to tell people about their new options. Letters seem to be going out directly to affected taxpayers. Seen online, this morning:

TrumpIRA.gov also answers the “job lock” problem, where young Americans feel bound to seek jobs with benefits rather than doing what they might prefer to do or, like in the previous story, train for a skill rather than undertake vast debt to get a four-year degree as a ticket to a soul-crushing corporate job with healthcare and retirement. Thereby side-stepping the whole barista-with-a-degree risk.

Helping Americans build retirement savings could be a bigger deal than it even looks at first blush. Even back in 2021 when he was still a senator, Marco Rubio complained that Americans “worked here their entire lives. They retire. They get $800, $900, $1,000 a month from Social Security. And then they run into somebody who just got here from Cuba three months ago, doesn’t work, and is given $1,500 a month.”

“Imagine if you’ve been working here for 40 years, and your Social Security check is smaller than the benefits going to a 28-year-old able-bodied person who just got here,” he noted. He added, unnecessarily, “That makes no sense.”

No. No, it doesn’t. So empowering Americans with their own private retirement accounts —accounts they control through Trump Accounts for kids or TrumpIRAs for adults— cuts the disastrous Social Security program right out of the middle. (Which, for our fiscal hawks, answers the hard question of why the federal government should match low-income Americans’ IRAs at all. We’re already paying far more in other benefits and transfer payments.)

I’m not just spitballing. In July 2025, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent slipped, called it “a back door for privatizing Social Security,” and then walked it back. They have a plan. Either way, this gives Americans a lifeboat they own instead of a check Washington controls and puts under the shrink-ray.

Finally —and this might be the most important point— between the promotion of skill-based education, most-favored-nation prescriptions, and now one-click retirement accounts (with some federal matching), the case for capitalism is getting stronger for younger Americans who felt cut out of the prosperity boom and unable to afford fast food lunches, never mind houses and the increasingly elusive American dream.

Options for young Americans are exploding. Opportunity is bursting. A golden age is just within reach. This time, we remembered the milk.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! Return here in the morning for another delicious serving of optimistic news and caffeinated commentary.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🔥🔥🔥

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.

🍿🍿🍿

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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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🔥 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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