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Democrat polycrisis news! Yesterday, Axios reported, ““Huge defeat”: Democrats left reeling after socialist “earthquake” in New York.”

As you know, New York City —the Big Apple, the home of Wall Street, and America’s financial capital— has been experiencing a warm, fuzzy, collective moment. It’s ‘warm and fuzzy’ in the same sense as passing out behind an idling trash truck with a stray dog lying across your face. In other words, it’s only comfortable while you’re unconscious, and you might not wake up.

The ‘earthquake’ in Axios’ headline was that every one of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s comrades —three of three Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) candidates he endorsed— won their primary elections yesterday, booting Democrat incumbents. Two of them essentially won federal congressional seats formerly earmarked for Congressional Hispanic Caucus members. (Yesterday’s election was just a primary, but in these safe, deep blue districts, the primaries are the ‘real’ contest.)

Worse for Dems, Mamdani’s candidates were all inexperienced political newbies with tons of baggage. One of them, a self-proclaimed communist, once tweeted that she used the American flag to wipe her hands. Another called 9/11 America’s fault because of our “islamophobia.” Another called white women “ugly colonizers” and demanded defunding the police and prisons. Of course, their names cannot be pronounced correctly in English.

CLIP: New York’s newest Palestinian-American state senator (and first-time political candidate) Aber Kawas, 34, explains America’s ‘long trajectory’ of racism and Islamophobia (1:00).

“It was a tough night,” complained Representative Greg Meeks (D-N.Y.), a close ally of leadership and chair of the Queens County Democratic Party. Incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman lost to a first-timer in a 30-point landslide. “The progressives beat the establishment in the heart of NYC,” crowed progressive Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.). “The energy of our party is clearly with the left.” (I bet you never realized the far-left Democrat party had its own left. It can always get worse.)

By the end of last night, as the returns came in and the outcome became painfully clear, one lawmaker told Axios there was “lots of silence” in the stunned Congressional Hispanic Caucus chatroom. Crickets.

Believe it or not, this is terrible news for Democrats. Axios asked a ‘senior House Democrat’ whether their colleagues were worried about the results: “Yes, they are,” was the answer. “Calling it a headache is an understatement,” the lawmaker said. “Holy sh*t,” said a second senior House Democrat. “Buckle up.” They called it a “huge defeat” for Democrat leadership.

A house divided cannot stand.

This story is about more than “progressives beating moderates” (or even about commies beating Democrats). It was a head‑to‑head organizational test. And last night, the DSA‑aligned, mayor‑backed network outperformed the official DNC party establishment. Establishment Democrats now recognize there are enough DSA members to create persistent intraparty turbulence.

🔥 In December, nonpartisan think tank Baron published a risk analysis of Democrat problems. Consider its conclusion:

Arguably since 2016, the factions of the Left have been in a stalemate. No clear leader with the ability to unite these blocs has yet emerged, and no faction enjoys a strong enough position to achieve control and lead the Left against the Populist Right. This relegates the Left, at least temporarily, to a reactive posture. Although a providential transformational leader or civilization-shaking crisis could upend the competitive landscape, the American Left has not confronted such challenges in decades.

That was written long before yesterday’s “earthquake” in Manhattan, making the Baron article’s third potential scenario, “Party Collapse,” seem even more likely. In this third scenario, “Through broad and sustained party primary victories and the power of deep blue cities, the Progressive bloc compels the Democratic Party to adhere to increasingly radical positions, eroding its electoral competitiveness in growing swaths of the country and putting an Electoral College majority out of reach.”

In its “Collapse” plotline, Baron explained, “The most extreme elements of the Left react with a frustration that increasingly turns into violence, discrediting the entire left-of-center cause and producing long-term dominance by the Right.” That chilling observation nicely tees up tomorrow’s Antifa segment. Mentally bookmark it.

🔥 Behold the quiet narrative or meme that won’t go away: the Democrats’ “Civil War.” Consider this string of illustrative headlines from just this month. First, the Wall Street Journal, five days ago:

Vox, six days ago:

The New Yorker, unsurprisingly, predicted last night’s outcome six days ago:

Reaching a little further back, to late May, here’s Axios:

And, at the tail end of April, this from the far-left Lever:

“Our blockbuster report,” the article began, “exposes a billionaire-funded political machine designed to co-opt — or de-fang — a rising tide of economic and anti-corruption populism boiling up in the Democratic party.” In other words: open civil war. Except this time, it’s like the South versus the South. Cage match.

🔥 I traced the ubiquitous “civil war” narrative flag back to an op-ed that Democrat strategist James Carville published in the New York Times a year ago. Headline from July, 2025:

“The Democratic Party,” Carville wrote, “is steamrolling toward a civilized civil war.” War is inevitable. “It’s necessary to have it,” the Ragin’ Cajun allowed, but “it’s even more necessary to delay it.” War cannot be stopped. “The only thing that can save us now is an actual savior,” Carville admitted unironically. (He meant a strong presidential candidate, who can only be identified after the 2026 midterms.)

Democrats have no idea how to solve it. Oh, Carville offered plenty of ideas. After all, excreting advice is how he earns his weekly direct deposit. But look at the advice: his main theme was to run on a unified message blanketing all media from Summer 2025 to November 2026, calling for the repeal of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. “That single word is our core message,” he said. “We’ve never had a simpler, more unifying oppositional message,” he opined.

I am not making that up. But who’s talking about the OBBBA these days? That’s ancient history. Events have overtaken them.

They call it “civil war.” We’ve called it the Democrats’ polycrisis. The details of the disputes might be fascinating to political insiders, but are hard to differentiate if you’ve never been a liberal. Basically, the DNC Establishment (which they call the “moderate wing”) is trying to steer the party toward the center —pro-market, pro-Israel— assisted by its donor-consultant class and the blue oligarchs, aiming for practical high-tax policies and proving-by-doing that progressive ideas can actually work, notwithstanding the evidence.

Meanwhile, the DSA and aligned groups are eat-the-rich, defund-the-police, pro-Palestine, trans-everything populist progressives of the Zohran Mamdani stripe. The two sides are incompatible.

🔥 I’m far from the only one who sees the looming threat to the donkey party. For instance, Senior Claremont Institute Fellow and former Assistant Secretary of the Interior Jeremy Carl tweeted yesterday about the Mamdani-quake and, among other things, predicted, “it isn’t going to play well for the Dems in 2026 and 2028. The future of the Democrat party is radical and post-American.”

Until quite recently, we’ve only ever had one out-and-out socialist in Congress. Adding the two new ones from yesterday’s primaries, next year Congress will now host four total— a 400% spike in far-left radicalism in the House of Representatives.

Four is not a large enough bloc to threaten Republicans. It’s just a few more Squad creatures, plus or minus. Nor are any seats being stripped from the GOP. The seats are being taken from Democrats— in their safest deep-blue districts, where patronage reigned, and the DNC was never before required to spend any real money to defend.

Saying this new challenge from the left comes at a bad financial moment for the DNC is a hilarious understatement.

In his tweet, Jeremy Carl and Axios agreed— this is an incipient migraine of epic proportions. “The radicalism of these soon-to-be Congressmen,” Carl said, “is going to be a headache for Democrat leadership in the House and a gift to the GOP.”

Every precious dollar that Hakeem Jeffries, AIPAC, Majority Democrats, or union allies spend trying, increasingly unsuccessfully, to save incumbents like the Hispanic Caucus members in New York, is a lost dollar not spent defining Trump, protecting actual swing seats, or building any case for a 2028 reset.

🔥 Obviously, outright socialists infesting Congress and occupying New York City’s offices and boards remains an appalling development demanding immediate attention. Communists in any form —including so-called “democratic socialists”— must be squashed like the horrifying insects that they are, before they spread and start breeding under the kitchen refrigerator.

But here’s the bright side, the quiet paradox: the 2026 commie eruption might overall be more positive than alarming. Every crisis produces an opportunity.

First of all, it proves Democrats are starting to crumble under the swelling burden of their polycrisis. Socialism has often been compared to a morbidly obese clown riding a capitalist unicycle and eating deep-fried Oreos. As the clown gets fatter and fatter, eventually the spokes snap, and the whole thing crashes down in a floppy avalanche of adipose tissue.

Now the humongous clown is riding an increasingly wobbly Democrat party.

Taking a brief excursion, pro-Mamdani analysts love crowing about surveys that show increasing numbers of ‘younger voters’ saying they prefer socialism. But the problem with younger voters is their incorrigible habit of growing up.

Science supports this. Headline from the Chicago Booth Review, April 2020:

“Research suggests that there is a neglected dimension of polarization, one driven by age,” the article explained. “Younger people” —whose skulls are full of mush— “are disproportionately liberal, and then drift steadily to the right, becoming just as disproportionately conservative by retirement age.” So enjoy it while it lasts, comrades.

By large majorities, Americans detest socialists. And we really hate communists.

🔥 Which brings us to the second point: Communism is the only ideology that must pretend to be something else in order to politically survive. Exposed communism is vulnerable communism. While it is alarming that so many young Americans could support open communism, it is much easier to fight in the open than behind the scenes.

Look at it this way: It’s hard to convince uninformed citizens that a particular president (whose name might or might not rhyme with “your mama”) is actually a secret communist. People don’t want to believe it. The person himself denies it, and swears support for “fair capitalism.” The media dismisses you as a conspiracy theorist. Etc.

The truth is, if regular Democrats thought they could win elections by embracing communism, they would all be living in communes, wearing red berets, and sporting Che Guevara t-shirts. Oh, they are happy to LARP as secret commies, but the last thing they want is for anybody to call them one.

Implicitly or explicitly, Democrat base voters and donors are being asked to pick sides. And the act of making them choose their tribe-within-a-tribe is itself one more concrete block tied to the legs of the Democratic polycrisis. In other words, forcing rank-and-file Democrats to declare “I’m with the Mamdani-DSA wing” or “I’m with the donor‑backed moderates” doesn’t resolve the crisis, it piles another layer of strain onto a coalition that’s already cracking like a boiled egg.

For most blue-base voters, both sides are imperfect. They dislike corporate donors and oligarchs, but they also worry that open socialists and communists are unelectable or too extreme on crime/Israel/culture. Being pushed to pick a side heightens their cognitive dissonance instead of relieving it. That’s the migraine.

Finally, let’s connect the dots. As the Baron analysis and the Chicago Booth Review article show, the civil war started in 2016 under Trump 1.0 and was boiling by early 2020. It only grew more acute through four years of Bidenomics and lawfare. In other words, Trump ‘got lucky’ again. (TAW.)

It has become increasingly plausible to ask whether Democrats can survive as a national force at all, or if the party is destined to enter a doom loop leading to a degraded, generational wilderness exile. It’s far too soon to declare victory; polls and competitive races rest on a knife-edge. But the polycrisis and the Democrats’ civil war are growing worse, not better.

They are counting on the midterms. It will be catastrophic if they lose. Still, as the old saying goes, it’s not over till the morbidly obese clown in the Che Guevara t-shirt sings. And he is backstage, warming up.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! Tune back in tomorrow morning for a special law-and-order roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary. You won’t want to miss it.

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Well, well, well. Mere days after former DNI Tulsi Gabbard declassified 1,600 pages of secret intelligence community emails and work product from the first months after the pandemic, Dr. Anthony Fauci has had a sudden, but sincere, change of heart. Yesterday, SFG Media reported, “Anthony Fauci Refuses to Testify Voluntarily Before Congress on COVID-19.” It’s ironic. Having run the world’s premier allergy agency, Fauci has suddenly become allergic to testifying.

Once upon a time, Fauci was everywhere. From 2020–2024, Fauci was arguably the single most ubiquitous public‑health figure in American media. For years, he did daily White House briefings. He had endless cable hits. He got a glossy PBS “American Masters”–style documentary. He testified before Congress countless times. He wrote a book, went on Urban Hip-Hop podcasts, and had a line of bobblehead dolls.

He was universally marketed by corporate media, not to mention by himself, as the trusted narrator of the pandemic story, the sober ‘doctor’ who’d never treated a patient but who would “just follow the science” on everything from masks to six-foot distancing to school closures.

Frankly, until late last week, Fauci practically refused to shut up. Why should he? Folded in his pocket is the broadest, least specific pardon in American history. (The Autopen nearly caught fire the day it signed that one.) To remind you how grotesque the coverage was, ‘enjoy’ this supercut of media lionizing Fauci to his ratlike face:

CLIP: obsequious corporate media boosting its pandemic narrative hero (2:12).

But that was before Tulsi Gabbard declassified a five-inch binder’s worth of emails and reports showing Fauci personally misled the country over covid’s origins— right when knowing where it came from could have helped end the pandemic before it ever got started. The documents are so damning that corporate media has completely embargoed them, not even bothering to fact-check the claims— a remarkable journalistic omission that’s like the 911 call center calmly listening to phones ring without picking them up.

Amusingly, corporate media’s stubborn refusal to cover the story gave Fox News a hilarious chance to report on their non-reporting:

This is a telling reminder that “media omnipresence” is not the same as transparency. Someone can saturate corporate media while serving the narrative, but can disappear without an iota of follow-up when the inconvenient rubber finally hits the road of truth.

In case you wondered whether Fauci even noticed Tulsi’s disclosures, here is your answer. Before the document drop, he’d voluntarily agreed to testify before Rand Paul’s committee. But right afterwards, he withdrew his agreement and said he wasn’t coming (prompting Senator Paul to subpoena the former bureaucrat’s attendance).

Obviously, we can’t know what’s in Fauci’s head (nor do we want to know; yecch.) But the timing is suggestive. I can think of at least two good reasons Fauci would want to avoid testifying now that Tulsi’s evidentiary blow has landed.

First, social media is buzzing over the prospect of catching him in a new lie under oath, a delightful scenario that could result in prison, notwithstanding the Autopen pardon. So the stakes in testifying just got much higher. Second, there are now 1,600 brand-new documents that he could be questioned about, and these documents are not only inherently problematic, but they also tend to contradict the lies that Fauci’s foul face-hole has previously excreted. So the questions will be much more difficult.

Thanks to Tulsi Gabbard, who never forgot about him, Fauci is now dangling on the hook— and he knows it. But do you know what’s even more interesting than it looks on the surface? Corporate media’s utter silence.

💉 Status Labs, a brand-management consulting firm, recently published an article titled, “Why Silence Is No Longer Golden in Digital Crises.” Modern crisis‑communications theory is clear: not responding is a response. Studies of “strategic silence” show that audiences now interpret quiet as avoidance, guilt, or indifference rather than prudence. In an always-on, AI‑summarized, social‑media ecosystem, every single hour without a statement lets other actors congeal their own narratives in the public mind harder than a cheese casserole left sitting outside overnight.

Some social media consultants concede that, in rare cases, silence can still be strategically useful, such as when a story is fringe, based on weak rumors, or likely to burn out on its own if not amplified. But the consultants stress that it’s more about timing and triage, not actual neutrality. Once serious documents or whistleblower claims surface, “ignore it and it will go away” becomes a terrible strategy, because it concedes the narrative frame to adversaries.

Whenever there is actual smoke, the “silence” strategy is like trying to put out a kitchen fire by leaving the room and hoping for the best. Other consultants have concluded silence is never a valid choice, not least because it’s very hard to tell up front which stories will ultimately grow legs and become stinging centipedes of bad publicity. Article from MyJoyOnline.com, April:

If you look at it through the lens of crisis communications, the near‑blackout of the ODNI/Tulsi Fauci files (and the Rand Paul subpoena, for that matter) on major corporate media platforms isn’t just an oversight. It is actually a form of narrative framing— framing by omission.

Media‑criticism pieces point out that the lack of coverage of conflicts or scandals has long served to shape perception just as much as saturation coverage does— deciding what to leave out is also part of constructing reality for audiences.

Corporate outlets have chosen strategic silence over the detailed allegations and hard evidence that Fauci manipulated covid intelligence assessments and misled Congress. That allows social media, the podcastverse, and conservative outlets from Fox to JustTheNews to concretize a narrative.

It maps almost perfectly onto the crisis‑comms pattern where institutions stay quiet, when speaking up would either implicate them or rope them to a sinking narrative. In other words, by refusing to defend Fauci, corporate media is laying down arms and walking away. They are surrendering the narrative ground to Fauci’s enemies, allowing the anti-establishment narrative to carry the day unopposed.

Why, through their inaction, are they throwing their favorite bioweapons engineer under the bus? It could be that the Tusli disclosure documents are so incriminating that the media just cannot credibly defend them. I’m not sure, though. After all, they manage to sell all kinds of other goofy ideas to progressives, like convincing them that cow flatulence is literally destroying Planet Earth, biological sex is a social construct, and the most important thing about selecting a surgeon is whether they use the right pronouns.

No, I suspect the real reason for their reluctance is that the disclosure documents are so incriminating that corporate media can see that Fauci is going down, and it doesn’t want to go down with him. When the outlets that canonized St. Fauci in 2020 refuse to speak up in his defense now, they’re not protecting Fauci— they’re protecting themselves.

And there’s one more fascinating possibility. Corporate media’s failure to defend him also suggests that Fauci has lost his deep state plot armor. If he still had it, we’d expect to see the usual trio of tricky media moves meant to prevent a needed figure from falling:

(1) the instant fact-checking (“nothing to see here”),

(2) the nonstop ad hominem attacks framing critics as cranks, cultists, or conspiracy theorists, and,

(3) the saturation of feel‑good narratives about the protected figure.

If Fauci still retained a working set of plot armor, we would expect to see the deep‑state/media complex spend political capital to preserve the legend. The fact that they are now mostly avoiding his name suggests he’s no longer mission‑critical; perhaps he has even become expendable.

Let’s expend him.

🔥🔥🔥

Now that Tulsi Gabbard has formally stepped down, Trump’s interim appointee Bill Pulte has assumed command at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. He isn’t wasting a single minute. Yesterday, NBC reported, “Top intelligence agency begins mass firings under new Trump appointee, source says.”

When she declassified those 1,600 pages last week, what Tulsi really disclosed was not so much Fauci’s foulness (a fact largely taken for granted), but it was the catastrophic incompetence of an 18-agency intelligence community that could allow itself to be co-opted by a single conflicted public health bureaucrat in the most important project on which its living members had ever worked.

Putting it another way: the entire apparatus of American national intelligence, with its satellites, analysts, black budgets, and approximately 97,000 people with security clearances, got played by a 5’4” guy with a bobblehead doll.

So it was unsurprising that Bill Pulte had some restructuring in mind. Pulte, you’ll recall, is the terrific Fannie/Freddie director who referred several Democrats for mortgage fraud prosecution— already quite productive. Now he is also serving as Acting DNI, replacing Tulsi Gabbard until a permanent replacement can be confirmed by the Senate. As NBC’s headline reported, Pulte didn’t waste any time.

Yesterday was his first official day, and NBC says the mass firings have already started. The horror!

For some reason, Democrats are panicking at the very thought of any intelligence agency cuts or more disclosures. Headline from Sunday night’s New York Times, practically vibrating with anxiety:

According to the Times, Representative Jim Himes (D-Conn.) and Senator Mark Warner (D-Va.) sent a nastygram letter to Pulte ‘welcoming’ him on his first day at work with roughly the same warmth as a cease-and-desist notice. The letter “warned him against making substantial cuts to his office or declassifying information.”

The Warner-Himes letter scolded Pulte. It didn’t even try to cushion the blow, bluntly pointing out that he lacks credentials. “Given your lack of experience within the Intelligence Community,” the Democrats wrote, “it is difficult to imagine that in such a short amount of time you have already developed fully informed views as to how to shrink ODNI without incurring risks to national security.”

This was a fascinating argument from the party that insists the intelligence community functioned perfectly during the pandemic, despite 1,600 pages of documents suggesting otherwise.

Warner-Himes also demanded that Pulte promise not to cut any spooks without Congress’s approval, since he is “just” an Acting Director. “Our expectation is that you will not take actions while temporarily serving as the Acting Director of National Intelligence that are more appropriately left to a Senate-confirmed Director.”

In other words: sit down, shut up, and sit still till we install someone we can manage.

The Democrats also warned Pulte, more than once, to preserve all his records, “including, but not limited to, any actions regarding declassification, publication, or release of classified materials, as well as any personnel actions.” It was an unsubtle threat. Keep your records, because later we are going to give you a microscopic proctological exam. (With footnotes.)

But what are they afraid he might declassify? That is no secret. Unnamed “officials” —presumably Democrats— fear he will declassify classified documents related to the 2020 election or the 2018 Russiagate scandal. “Given the extremely sensitive nature of intelligence,” Warner-Himes wrote, “we expect that you will not declassify properly classified information that would compromise intelligence sources and methods, or weaponize the declassification process for partisan political purposes.”

The word ‘weaponize,’ it should be noted, is doing a heroic amount of work in that sentence.

Ironies aside, if you’ll allow me a momentary digression, declassification is one thing that might actually benefit from weaponization. If each administration expected the next administration would declassify its secret documents, there might be a lot more transparency to start with. I say let’s try mutually assured declassification. At bare minimum it would quickly produce classification reforms, which we sorely need. But never mind.

Tulsi has already cut 40% of ODNI’s staff, reducing headcount to 1,300. But the office was so bloated that the Times admitted, “there is bipartisan support in Congress for shrinking the office further.” So … what’s the problem? The problem is that, “there is also concern about how Mr. Pulte would make those cuts.”

In DC-speak, that means, “we’re fine with cuts in theory, as long as none of our people get cut.”

In an article published late yesterday afternoon, CNN quoted a source saying, “The deep state firings have begun.” The anonymous source “declined to give details on how many jobs had been cut.” Two other unnamed sources said Pulte asked “all offices to provide a list ranking their personnel by Monday.” It wasn’t completely clear whether “all offices” meant departments within the ODNI or something else.

For whatever reason, Bill Pulte is driving Democrats bonkers unlike any of Trump’s other cabinet staff pick, even including misfires like Matt Gaetz, the fiesty Florida Congressman whose nomination for Attorney General had the shelf life of below-average gas station sushi.

Pulte wants to gather no moss, hit the ground running, or however you say it. He’s moving. He is moving fast, against the deep state’s crown jewels, its final castle, its home turf.

Bill Pulte is picking the final boss fight. It is, after all, Trump’s Year of Action. Onward and upward.

Have a terrific Tuesday! Race back tomorrow morning for more essential news and caffeinated commentary. You won’t want to miss it.

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Yesterday, the New York Times reported, “U.K.: Starmer Announces Resignation as Prime Minister.” Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer, who looks remarkably like a runner-up in the first-semester project contest at the school of taxidermy, sort of announced his retirement early this morning (on U.S. time). It surprised no one. If anything, it was a year overdue.

CLIP: Sir Keir Starmer’s resignation statement (0:40).

Corporate media gaslighting is off the charts. Read all the UK’s corporate media articles you want, and you will come away stupider than you started. They avoid naming Starmer’s two essential failures by expelling a vast fog of mind-numbing detail; each article offering the most granular post-mortem of any political career in history, with encyclopedic timelines and Shakespearean casts of staff characters and cabinet ministers— each of whom, according to UK media, deserves more blame for Starmer’s disastrous term than the ‘luckless’ Prime Minister.

The Times never even tried to diagnose his fall. It just admitted Starmer was “one of the least popular prime ministers in modern British history.” It conceded he “had a popularity among voters in record lows.” But the same paper that runs Trump’s approval rating on a scrolling Chyron never mentioned Starmer’s actual approval rating. It was around 11%. (One may fairly ask how EU politicians with approval ratings in the low teens manage to keep getting re-elected and finally must be forced to resign. You won’t get a satisfying answer, but you can ask all you want.)

Mind you, Starmer’s replacement will mark Britain’s seventh prime minister in ten years. That’s like America rotating presidents every 18 months. (Coincidentally, that period of destabilized UK governance is also the same post-2016 decade following Trump’s first election in the U.S. Just saying.)

The truth is that Starmer’s inglorious reign was cut short by the DOJ, which released certain emails from Jeffrey Epstein. That injury was made infinitely worse by Starmer’s incurable personality shortcomings. Let’s start with those.

Behold how the man answers simple questions— even rhetorical questions. “The question my party is asking now is whether I am best placed to lead us into the next general election,” Starmer said in his resignation statement, his ‘voice breaking with emotion at times.’ (The loss of his man card didn’t help either. Crybaby.) Starmer answered himself: “I have heard the answer of my parliamentary party to that question, and I accept that answer with good grace,” he said. “That is why I will resign.”

Catch that? He said, “I have heard the answer, blah blah,” but never said what the answer was. The answer to the question that he asked himself was obviously ‘no.’ One two-letter word. A single syllable. Just say it, you pretentious gasbag.

Many articles conceded that Starmer lacks any ‘special gifts of oratory.’ The problem is that his verbal disability left him unprepared to handle his Epstein flare-up, and everybody knew it. Headline from the UK Independent, February:

Answer: No. (See how easy it is? It’s just one short declarative word. Keir should try it sometime.)

🔥 In February of last year, Trump had been in office only a few weeks, and Starmer and the UK team were in the White House meeting with President Trump about Ukraine. Media had glowingly forecast the meeting as Starmer getting tough with Trump and applying the full weight of EU influence, presumably in the form of leverage from other EU leaders.

Starmer, you will recall, has been one of Ukraine’s most important EU allies. Starmer literally embraced the alliance. This fact will be important later.

That same day of Trump’s first face-to-face with Starmer, Pam Bondi called an unscheduled meeting for some conservative influencers who were in DC for a different event, and theatrically handed them “Epstein Phase One” binders that turned out to be a random sheaf of boring Epstein documents that might’ve been scraped off the top of Pam’s desk.

At the time, I speculated this seeming self-inflicted injury could actually be a pressure point— the Trump team sent the UK team a message: we know where your Epstein skeletons are buried.

It seemed to work. In the meeting, Starmer appeared rattled and never “dropped the EU hammer” like media predicted. At the time, I had no idea what the Epstein skeleton was. I was just guessing there was one. But in December, we finally learned that the skeleton’s name was “Peter Mandelson,” the appointed UK Ambassador to the US, and his nickname in Great Britain was “the Prince of Darkness.” I promise I’m not making that up. (It’s too on the nose to invent anyway.)

From the US side, everything we could see said Bondi’s binder stunt was a net negative domestically: media mocked the binders as “binders full of nothing,” and senior Trump aides later said she “completely whiffed” on the Epstein files and blindsided the White House. But Trump’s team still achieved something valuable— leverage over a rising British leader who had just installed an Epstein‑linked fixer as his ambassador, (then) spoke for the whole EU coalition, and who also happened to know there was probably some stuff in the Epstein file that could destroy his Prime Ministership.

Well, it did destroy his position. In December, the DOJ —following the instructions of bleating Democrats in Congress— published a vast tranche of Epstein emails that, among other things, documented the more-than-cozy relationship between the Prince of Darkness (Mandelson) and the Devil’s Apprentice himself, Jeffrey Epstein.

As the scandal unfolded in the UK, it came to light that Starmer had been briefed on Mandelson’s Epstein stickiness before Starmer picked him for US Ambassador.

We now see that our timeline fits perfectly. At the time Starmer was sitting in the White House, hearing from frantic aides that Trump’s new attorney general was making a dramatic Epstein disclosure, Starmer knew for a fact that he had an Epstein problem. He’d just been briefed about it. Headline from the New York Times, March:

And, sitting there in front of the President, Starmer must have been thinking, Trump knows.

From that point, Starmer’s Epstein problem, already in Stage 4, metastasized like turbo cancer. His political enemies in the UK seized hold of it. His Labour party started losing local elections in large numbers. And his pompous ramblings did nothing to defuse the problem; just the opposite: The more word salad Sir Keir Starmer dished out trying to deny it, the more he sounded just like an arrogant Epstein-class élite, straight from Central Casting.

Six long, painful months later, Starmer’s career abruptly crashed and burned, punctuated only by his typically supercilious resignation.

🔥 In short: Starmer didn’t stumble into bad luck. He didn’t hire the wrong people (even Mandelson). Starmer was taken off the geopolitical chessboard— on purpose. Why now? I don’t know, and don’t want to know, but it does occur to me that Starmer was helping keep the Ukraine Proxy War afloat. If a single person is crying today over Starmer’s resignation, that tearful idiot would be the Green Goblin of Kyiv, Volodymyr Zelenskyy (two y’s).

But as always, we look for the timeline as our best evidence for the parts we can’t see. So … why now?

My newsreading spider senses are tingling about the Proxy War. Do you suppose Trump plans to end that war before the midterms, to join it to the long list of other wars he’s ended, and to check off his original campaign promise to end that war?

I went looking for more circumstantial evidence and immediately found this NPR headline from February:

June. That’s this month. Makes you think, what? Sorry, Starmer. Stiff upper lip, old boy. Keep calm and soldier on. Bob’s your uncle. And so forth.

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I thought I’d update you on some news from my little hometown, which contains the state’s not-so-little University of Florida. Actually, it’s the Sunshine State’s biggest educational institution, and we love to brag about it, right alongside “Florida has the most lightning strikes per capita” and “our governor once wrestled an alligator, probably” (everybody has, at one point or another). UF has lacked a president since the tragic resignation of Ben Sasse, who was perfectly healthy until he announced his wife’s profound illness. Seventeen months later, Ben himself got a surprise diagnosis of Stage 4 turbo cancer. Since then, Ben has been fighting for his own life (and he’s on our prayer list). Anyway, bloodthirsty politics have dogged repeated, failed efforts to replace him. Last month, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported, “U. of Florida Plays Punching Bag — Again”

“As an anti-DEI campaign tries to sink another presidential search,” the subheadline explained, “faculty see a beleaguered university that has lost its sheen.” A war has broken out between the State Board of Governors, which oversees all public universities, and UF’s Board of Trustees, which makes certain decisions for the school— a governance structure that, in terms of clarity and efficiency, closely resembles two rival HOA boards fighting over the color of a shared community mailbox.

Last year, the Trustees tried to install Santa J. “Oh, No!” Ono as UF’s next president. The Canadian-Japanese candidate was best known for his tenure at the University of Michigan, where he’d bragged about making it the top DEI school in the country. This was not a good look, especially not in Florida, where it went down about as well as a vegan influencer boasting about the virtues of all-plant diets during the keynote of a convention of big-game hunters. After much political infighting, Dr. Ono got the boot.

This year, the Trustees are back. This time, they are pushing Stuart Bell, who implemented the University of Alabama’s DEI program, though perhaps not quite as enthusiastically as Santa J. Ono at U. Mich. The far-left Chronicle explained the current climate with unexpected clarity:

In a telling sign of the times, the global reputation of a top-ranked public research university appears to hinge on whether a longtime administrator of limited national notoriety can convince the state’s political establishment that he is sufficiently hostile toward DEI and satisfactorily contrite about his past support of diversity programs.

I admit it all. Guilty as charged. That is all true. We conservatives in Florida do want academics to convince us they are “sufficiently hostile toward DEI.” And, if they did stupidly support DEI in their previous job, we do want them to be “satisfactorily contrite” about it.

The only thing remarkable about this is the left’s mystifying lack of self-awareness. These are, after all, the same people who invented loyalty codes, mandatory land acknowledgments, and the squishy concept of “lived experience” as a substitute for actual evidence that a fifth-grader could recognize.

Mr. Bell’s problem is that, while serving at Alabama, he was mentioned in unearthed post-meeting notes as reassuring faculty that, though he re-named that school’s DEI department to comply with that state’s new anti-DEI law, not to worry! because the renamed department would continue its same mission. Ruh-roh. This is the administrative equivalent of investigating yourself for ten seconds and then producing a three-volume exculpatory report.

Compounding Bell’s general sneakiness and willingness to defy at least the spirit of Alabama’s law in the name of woke, Bell then lied about it to Florida’s search committee. His opponents thus characterize Dr. Bell as a crook and a liar. His supporters insist his DEI beliefs have ‘evolved,’ like a new covid variant, or possibly a powerful new X-Men villain with the ability to change people’s pronouns at will.

CLIP: Dr. Bell denies ‘rebranding’ DEI at his school, but meeting notes say it was ‘in name only’ (0:23).

So the State Board of Governors responded by pulling Dr. Bell’s approval vote off the agenda, attempting to castrate his candidacy using Robert’s Rules of Order. But the local Board of Trustees counter-moved, and plans to hold an emergency vote this afternoon to approve immediately hiring Dr. Bell as UF’s “interim” president— something within the Trustees’ power. They may not hire any permanent president, but they can hire ‘interim’ ones— a loophole that exists because the people who wrote these rules apparently never anticipated that anyone would actually use it this way.

More amusingly (or inflammatory), to hire Dr. Bell, they must release the current interim president before his contract expires in two months, incurring a $2 million severance bonus. That’s how badly the Trustees want a DEI-friendly president— badly enough to light two million taxpayer dollars on fire as a down payment. (In fairness, some may just want to end the DEI wars because they think any presidential candidate with recent experience will inevitably have some DEI baggage, which is a reasonable point, and also the most depressing sentence I have written this week.)

I heard from an insider contact who described the massive civil war brewing between and among Florida Republicans over UF’s presidency. It involves top lawmakers, think tankers, Governor DeSantis’s office, top (state) GOP donors, and, of course, various members of the dueling Boards of Governors and Trustees, all of them locked in mortal combat over a mid-tier administrator from Alabama.

It’s not enough anymore to fight with Democrats. There just aren’t enough of them. Absent any effective Florida Democrats, I suppose we must now battle each other, which at least keeps everyone’s knife-fighting skills sharpened. Oh well.

I don’t know Dr. Bell. He may be a terrific guy. And truthfully, I opposed Ben Sasse at first, since he was one of the Republicans in Congress who voted for Trump’s impeachment. He got primaried for that, then he came to UF. But Sasse turned out to be great while he was here, and his anti-Trump bona fides lent just enough credibility with the far-left faculty for him to be effective. Maybe Bell would be the same. Maybe a state that idolizes Florida Man can’t afford to be too choosy.

It is true that you can’t let the activists drive everything, because they are nearly impossible to please, and sometimes, compromises become necessary, even inside one party. That’s politics for you. The Democrats are shattering right now thanks to their inability to compromise with each other. Don’t become Democrats.

At bottom, though, my sense is that installing a woke president at Florida’s flagship university despite credible red flags could be a self-inflicted political injury for the GOP that could really sting for a long time, like squatting on a fire ant mound while trying to make a nuanced point about institutional governance. Why poke yourself in a tender spot? Can’t we just find someone who stood up to DEI? Is there anyone?

Anyway, setting all that confusing intra-party conflict aside, there’s a more important silver lining. It might even be a gold lining. And that gold lining is the fact that, at least in the red states, DEI background is becoming professionally toxic. The Great DEI Purge will force aspiring top academics to stake out public positions for or against diversity, equity, and inclusion, making it cost-prohibitive to play both sides of the woke fence.

Which means, for the first time in a very long time, the people running our universities may actually have to clearly state what they believe —without any word salad— a common sense concept so revolutionary it could end up changing everything.

🔥 Late last week, we received even more encouraging anti-DEI news, assuming you consider it “news” when a court finally points out the glaringly obvious. On Thursday, Wisconsin Public Radio reported, “Wisconsin Supreme Court rules college minority grant program unconstitutional.” This latest terrific decision arrived thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling in Students for Fair Admissions, which in legal terminology held y’all progressives stop being so racist.

The 40-page opinion was clear: Wisconsin’s “minority retention grants” program was racially and ethnically biased and therefore unconstitutional. In progressive parlance, it was racist. “At the heart of the Equal Protection Clause,” the majority wrote, “is the principle that race‑, national origin‑, ancestry‑, or alienage-based discrimination is unconstitutional except in the most extraordinary instances where such a remedy is required.”

In other words, you can’t just throw out taxpayer money based on a color chart, a concept that is apparently baffling to modern university administrators like Dr. Bell, who spend their days trying to figure out how to divide students into ever-smaller categories of victimhood, grievance, and lactose intolerance.

“Under the Equal Protection Clause,” it continued, “the government must treat each citizen as an individual— not as one member of a class, … and not on the basis of race.” Thank goodness somebody finally said it. “Because racial classifications are ‘odious’ to the Constitution,” they explained, “statutes concerning one’s race are inherently invidious, regardless of how benign or laudable the law may appear.”

This was a polite, judicial way of saying, “Stop doing this, you absolute lunatics.”

The court’s unambiguous conclusion struck down the racist retention grants and cut off any future attempt to come up with a replacement that uses taxpayer money, which was Very Bad News for the flourishing industry of Diversity Consultants, whose primary job is to write reports justifying bureaucrats in giving our money to favored Democrat voting blocs. “No State has any authority under the equal-protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to use race as a factor in affording educational opportunities among its citizens.”

To be perfectly clear: private charities remain free to award scholarships to anyone they want, and they can use race as a criteria. After all, private charities aren’t bound by the Constitution— so long as they have no ties to government money or Title VII institutions. If the charity is an NGO that receives taxpayer money, it will be bound by this ruling— at least, in Wisconsin. So if you want to start a scholarship fund exclusively for disabled, pansexual persons of color, go right ahead, provided you use your own money.

One suspects that, with taxpayer funds off the table, the gusher of free money might soon dry up.

This carefully written Wisconsin opinion is likely to influence decisions in other states, too, especially since it was a straightforward application of the 2023 SCOTUS decision. This is more than progress. This is winning.

Have a marvelous Monday! Coffee & Covid will return tomorrow with more essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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🔥🔥🔥

Yesterday, social media again showed corporate media’s imbecilic drive to achieve its own obsolescence. The New York Post covered the story, a story that didn’t and never will see daylight in the corporate press. The Post’s original headline: “Fauci gave millions in taxpayer dollars to fund Wuhan lab research that sparked COVID: DNI Gabbard.” It was later punched up to: “Spy agency quashed complaint against Fauci for lying to Congress about ‘gain of function’ research, new documents show.”

YOUTUBE: “I’m Exposing Dr. Fauci” (5:21).

Many of you have already seen this story in your social media feeds. For everyone else: yesterday, on her very last day in office, outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard delivered her most important public work product: the declassification of over 1,600 pages of internal intelligence community chatter and work product from the first months of the pandemic. Setting aside the human cockroach for the moment, this dump will one day become a gold mine for pandemic historians (whenever they decide it’s professionally safe to start working on it).

Sitting next to a five-inch binder that she repeatedly patted like a favorite pussycat, Gabbard said things about former NIAID Director Anthony Fauci (the human cockroach himself) that, in a rational universe, would result in his being driven out of polite society and forever locked in a special leaded-glass cage built to hold Marvel super-villains or something.

“He blatantly lied to Congress under oath during his 2024 testimony,” she said. Then she added, “Dr. Fauci funded dangerous gain-of-function coronavirus research linked to Big Pharma and their pursuit of universal vaccines, worth trillions of dollars.” Later: “Dr. Fauci became the nation’s pandemic pundit, and he publicly pushed lies, disinformation, and censorship using every platform available.” (A neat bit of alliteration.)

You are probably wondering why the little cockroach hasn’t already been squashed. You already know the reason, but let’s set that unpleasant business aside for a minute.

🔥 To give you a tiny taste of the documents themselves, Emmy-award-winning independent journalist Catherine Herridge couldn’t even get past the very first document in the stack:

Catherine’s tweet quoted the very first document’s astonishing conclusion— which was that “We assess all the necessary conditions” to trigger the pandemic were at the Wuhan lab. That was the first, bold-faced paragraph in the first document: a classified report prepared by the Lawrence Livermore National Labs (LLNL) in May, 2020. (In other words, mere weeks after covid’s launch.)

But the paper’s second paragraph was even more damning. LLNL explained the common-sense criteria for its conclusion:

Think about that for a second. All the conditions, including known precursor viruses, were there at the Wuhan lab. But the Fauci Fans still want us to believe in a ‘natural origins’ coincidence— that the same virus artificially made in the lab somehow also naturally evolved in the wet market a mile away.

That ‘coincidence’ is more unlikely than winning the lottery and being struck by lightning right after buying the ticket— three times in a row.

LLNL’s report tells us nothing we didn’t already know. A child could connect these dots. What are we even arguing about here? As far back as June, 2021, late-night funnyman Jon Stewart even mocked the natural origins idea. “Oh my gosh! There’s a novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China! What do we do?? Oh, wait, you know who we could ask? The Wuhan novel respiratory coronavirus lab. The disease is the same name as the lab!”

Stewart wasn’t done. “Oh my gosh, there’s been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania. What do you think happened?” He answered himself: “It’s the f***ing chocolate factory.” (Stewart was almost canceled over that little joke. He’s called the blowback “swift, immediate, and quite loud.”)

🔥 Since you probably lack time and enthusiasm needed to peruse all 1600+ pages of documents, however fascinating and revealing they are both individually and in the aggregate, here are the broad takeaways of what they prove:

• The good news was that it showed the intelligence community (IC) is not, after all, composed of all witless morons. Many immediately recognized that the Wuhan lab was the most obvious source of covid’s chocolately badness.

• Somehow, Dr. Fauci wielded insane levels of influence inside the IC. “The intelligence community almost always incorporated Fauci’s recommendations,” Tulsi said. He used that outsized influence to conceal at least two big things.

• First, Fauci didn’t want anybody connecting dots between the pandemic and certain NIH grants he personally approved for coronavirus research at the Wuhan lab.

• Second, he especially didn’t want people talking about those grants because they were for research that, if one were feeling uncharitable, could easily be described as “gain of function,” which raised serious potential criminal implications. “Fauci provided millions in US taxpayer dollars to fund dangerous gain‑of‑function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” Tulsi said.

• So Fauci became a very busy cockroach indeed, hustling like he’d never hustled before, not even when he mangled the whole AIDS thing. This time, he personally went down the CIA and other agencies, to grab hold of the origins narrative tightly, before it could veer out of control. Later, he’d falsely swear to Congress that he’d never gotten involved in any of the IC discussion on origins.

• “ Dr. Fauci’s close relationships with the intelligence community,” Tulsi explained, “enabled him to assume three key roles that shielded him from scrutiny.”

It wasn’t just the 1,600 pages, either. The second bit of good news was that some IC members actually have a working conscience and have volunteered to be whistleblowers despite brutal suppression. “We also received testimony from multiple intelligence community whistleblowers who reported retaliation for challenging the intelligence community’s manipulation of intelligence on the virus’s origins,” Tulsi said, “once again revealing a clear pattern of suppressing dissent, silencing critics, and burying the truth.”

Here’s the buried lede: The IC completely failed, right when we needed it the most, and for the most pedestrian and indefensible reason possible: to protect the flabby buttocks of one lame, overpaid bureaucrat. Then the IC allowed the proximate origin of the pandemic —Fauci himself— to control the investigation across all 18 intelligence agencies.

How could this happen? It happened because Fauci was their main virus expert. But he was also a suspect.

The expert won. The suspect disappeared. “I am the science,” Fauci smugly declared. He was right about that. He was the science, so far as the IC was concerned.

🔥 You might call it a significant weakness in our intelligence architecture that one of the pandemic’s main suspects somehow became the controlling expert in an IC-wide investigation. I am just spitballing here, but shouldn’t there be an IC-wide rule that, if your agency funded the subject matter of the investigation, you can’t also be the main expert on the case? Do I really need to say that? (Apparently, I do.)

Fauci was the highest-paid employee in the United States Government. He earned more than the President. That was not because of his terrific work on studying allergies. But it probably did have something to do with the reason an NIH allergy-center director had such a “close relationship with the intelligence community.” I’ve called him a bioweapons engineer, and I will stick with that. The only debate about that claim is semantics.

To date, Fauci, 85 (but remarkably spry and unwrinkled), has been stripped of his job, credentials, salary, perks, government-funded security detail, his security clearance, and his insider status. Tulsi’s latest disclosure stabbed the pardon-protected cockroach right in the ventricular thorax.

Despite all the chatter over the statute of limitations running on potential claims against “The Science,” the DOJ is not necessarily calling it quits. New York Post, last month.

Just yesterday, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) called, once again, for Fauci’s prosecution despite his pardon:

Fauci is well protected from prosecution from multiple directions. So, we’ll see. But … how important is prosecuting him, really? Locking up an 85-year-old is largely symbolic. And how much older will he be after all the court proceedings and appeals and whatnot are finished? 95? More?

Still, I get that even the symbolism is important to many people for closure. And I concede that an aggressive prosecution would serve as an important deterrent to other government employees. So, of course, I say full steam ahead. Hang him higher than Haman. (After a fair trial, of course.)

In her video, Tulsi said the documents proved Fauci lied to Congress under oath in 2024 about his contacts with the IC about covid. True, it was before the pardon. But the statute of limitations for perjury is five years. Just saying.

🔥 It is unsurprising that the current big story about Tulsi’s disclosure is Fauci, Fauci, Fauci! But focusing only on Fauci is a distraction. The disclosure’s real payload was a much bigger gift: the exposure of how the IC completely botched the single most consequential intelligence question of our lifetimes.

For instance, one wonders what Tulsi’s “testimony from multiple intelligence community whistleblowers” will be used for. It’s not in the binder. It must be for something else. I’ll tell you what it strongly hints at. It hints at criminal charges against careers and political appointees in the IC who helped cover up the lab-leak assessments and who retaliated against dissenters. That’s what it suggests to my lawyer’s ear, anyway. At a minimum, the evidence and whistleblower testimony could support even deeper firings of corrupt IC staff, including its most senior staff. (Bill Pulte, please report to your office.)

Consider another example: Just imagine the treasure trove of ideas this dump opens up for future FOIA requesters, Congressional oversight committees, or even sullen late-night talk show hosts.

Tulsi’s dump —regardless of how diligently corporate media tries to ignore it— is much bigger than Fauci. It is more like a wrecking ball colliding with the IC’s main headquarters. It has proved that, when the interests of a powerful insider collided with the need for honest intelligence, the whole IC system folded around the insider. Any conceivable reform, however extensive or intrusive, could now be justified by Tulsi’s disclosure.

In other words, Tulsi has now proven that the IC is profoundly and dangerously broken. It’s like opening the monkey cage and discovering the chimps playing with a crate of hand grenades. What, after all, was more important in 2020 than for our intelligence agencies to quickly figure out where the pandemic really came from? We all know the rule by heart. Every Outbreak-style horror movie uses the same clichéd trope— find patient zero. Not hide patient zero.

You could say that the sitting Director of National Intelligence just built a documentary record that, in its own terms, the intelligence community is unprepared for the next pandemic. And I’ve been led to believe there is nothing worse or less urgent than being unprepared for pandemics.

💉 Finally, it’s worth noting how much coverage the story is getting on social and conservative media, even as it remains completely invisible on traditional corporate media platforms. They’ve locked this story in narrative quarantine. They aren’t even fact-checking it. Think of how scared of it they must be not even to run debunking stories.

Or, maybe their terror of touching it should be unsurprising, given that corporate media were co-conspirators in helping Fauci cover up the lab-leak theory. Anyway, yesterday, the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, with 240 million followers, boosted the story on X:

While Musk may have been the biggest, he wasn’t even close to being the only one. Tulsi’s final drop of her intelligence career is splashing all over conservative media.

Corporate media’s stunned silence is a mistake; it is letting the narrative grow unchecked.

Their convenient silence is self-inflicted obsolescence. It teaches everyone that, if you want to know what the government actually just did or released, you cannot rely on corporate media to even flag it for you. Their choice not to engage doesn’t squash the narrative; it just proves they’re no longer the platforms that serious people go to first for high‑stakes information.

💉 So, where does all this leave us? For one thing, thank you for your service, Tulsi Gabbard. Second, it is better to consider this disclosure as a first step rather than the last. It really does open a Pandora’s Box for the deep state. It further implicated Fauci, sure, but he was already cooked. More importantly, Tulsi’s Disclosure Day also implicates a raft of co-conspiring IC employees and even the IC’s homogeneous culture itself— “tactics straight from the deep state playbook,” as Tulsi described it.

The disclosures will naturally lead to demands for more declassification, more testimony, and more transparency. And, as we’ve seen, it will justify major structural reforms, if that’s what President Trump wants. Tulsi’s replacement, Acting DNI Bill Pulte, will now enjoy what you might call a “target-rich environment.” Pulte’s not just getting another covid scandal side-dish to nibble on. He’s getting a whole menu of options.

We’ll watch with great interest how this plays out, and whatever Pulte does next (and how much we are allowed to know). Popcorn, popped.

Have a wonderful weekend! Roll back here on Monday morning, for more nutritious and satisfying essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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A first, tender reed of new growth has sprouted from the apocalyptic post-pandemic Congressional wasteland. Left media heralded it first. Last week, the Verge excitedly reported, “The bill that would let Jimmy Kimmel sue Brendan Carr is here.” Two days ago, the libertarian Reason Magazine reported, “Two senators offer a bipartisan solution to censorship by proxy.” It’s garnering surprisingly strong coverage across Tier Two media (whereas corporate media is currently giving it the Mr. Magoo treatment). Both the far-left ACLU and the conservative group FIRE endorsed the bill— a moment of consensus rarer than a clear UFO picture, and one that hasn’t happened since before Congress last balanced a budget.

Today’s question is: How do you make the politically impossible possible?

Last week, Senators Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Ron Wyden (D-OR) jointly introduced a free speech bill. It’s named the JAWBONE Act (“Justice Against Weaponized Bureaucratic Overreach to Networked Expression”). We’ve been waiting for something like this for years.

Basically, the bill would forbid the government from censoring people by pressuring their media platforms. If it does happen, JAWBONE provides for injunctions, discovery, attorneys’ fees, damages, and basically a giant gavel with which to club bossy bureaucrats. It also requires the government to publish all its communications with media platforms transparently. No secrets.

Let’s rewind to see how we got here.

In his January 2025 Joe Rogan interview, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg confessed that Biden-era officials, including White House staff, would “yell” and curse out Meta’s moderators, pushing “super hard” for them to take down vaccine-related posts, including vaccine content that Zuck called “humor and satire” and materials that were factually true. “I believe the government pressure was wrong,” he regretfully told the House Judiciary Committee in a letter, “and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it.” I state my regret.

Zuckerberg also told the House Oversight Committee that the FBI came to Meta before the 2020 election and “warned” the platform about Russian “disinformation” related to the Hunter Biden laptop story. So, like good little doggies, Facebook throttled, shadow-banned, and buried all laptop posts deeper than Jimmy Hoffa, including those from major media platforms like the New York Post— which Zuckerberg now admits was “inappropriate.”

One appreciates the moral courage it takes for a billionaire CEO to express such profound introspection— years after the fact, under congressional subpoena, and with a team of lawyers present. But never mind.

As always, the technocratic platform billionaire was careful to blame himself, not the Biden team. Zuck said he should have been more resistant and outspoken, which is like saying it was your own fault the cops stole your bicycle because you forgot to lock it when you left it outside the police station.

Fast forward to Trump 2.0. Last year, unfunny “comedian” Jimmy Kimmel, who apologized in 2020 for years of blackface sketches and racial slurs, and who now serves as liberalism’s designated conscience, made nasty comments in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. So FCC chair Brendan Carr publicly ‘suggested’ that ABC and its affiliates could face withering FCC scrutiny or license trouble under “news distortion” or related rules if they continued airing the humorless jokester.

Shortly thereafter, ABC temporarily suspended Kimmel’s late‑night show (though just for a few tumultuous days).

Back when everyone found out about all the Biden-era censorship, liberals did not object. No, they loved it. They gushed about “responsible content moderation,” mitigating “dangerous misinformation,” and “effective public health communication in a digital age.”

But boy-oh-boy, when it was Trump’s turn, progressives devoted the three days of Kimmel’s suspension to screaming so loudly about censorship and “retaliation” that their complaints could be detected in low Earth orbit.

Behold! With the unlikely assistance of one of the least amusing late-night hosts in human history, and for the first time in a very long time, liberals have rediscovered that dusty old parchment, the U.S. Constitution— a document they have spent the better part of our lifetimes describing as a ‘living’ text in need of significant revision, and which they now find, in its original form, to be surprisingly useful.

And guess what? In the Constitution, they found these cool things called “amendments.” They started looking hard at the very first one.

🔥 So, defying all rational prediction, and within 24 months from progressives championing pandemic censorship, the ACLU, the fever swamps of lefty media, and NPR listeners still wearing double masks in their cars are all now championing a free-speech bill that outlaws exactly the sort of grey-area government censorship-by-proxy that they recently labeled as responsible moderation. In other words, progressives are now suddenly supporting a stronger version of what Murthy v. Missouri could have been if it had gone the best possible way.

How fully have progressives turned the corner on censorship? Get this: yesterday, the Daily KOS even renamed the Cruz-Wyden JAWBONE Act as, and I am not making this up, the “bipartisan Jimmy Kimmel Act.” To which I say, fine! Sounds great! Let’s use that! The bill is much better than Jimmy Kimmel’s blackface act, anyway.

But how did this happen? What dark alchemy is necessary to flip half the country from celebrating censorship as a “critical public health tool” to now claiming it’s even worse than Hitler, same-sex sports rules, or putting peanut butter back on school lunch menus?

Once again, we get a glimpse at the outlines of the astonishing Trump 2.0 master plan, this time to cut the deep state’s knees out from under it and curb Biden’s authoritarian excesses using durable laws rather than transient executive orders. Remember, Biden’s style of surreptitious censorship-by-proxy was devilishly hard to pin down. Since it was done in secret, you aren’t even aware it was happening until it was too late. And legally speaking, it was always in a grey zone, because the government never directly censored anybody.

In its view, Biden’s administration didn’t censor anybody at all. It only “encouraged” its friends in the media platforms to censor citizens. Since Facebook is a private company, not subject to constitutional constraints, there’s no legal problem. At least, that’s their argument. But government should not be allowed to do indirectly what it may not do directly.

So rather than trying to start by nailing legislative jello to the First Amendment’s wall, Trump just did the same thing that Biden did —pressured a media company, ABC, to control its content. Except instead of pressuring ABC secretly, Trump’s officials did it right out in the open on Twitter. It was vivid and concrete, with a Trump appointee as the villain, a far-left-beloved late-night comedian as the plucky hero, and democracy tied to the railroad tracks.

Jimmy Kimmel was the perfect counter-narrative. For progressives, that single, bold, in-their-face, Trump-related ‘censorship’ incident became an instant crisis, a moral panic, and an ActBlue fundraising email subject line— even though thousands or millions of sneaky, off-radar, pandemic-era Biden censorship incidents never troubled liberals at all.

You might conclude that the Kimmel showdown, which created these new political opportunities, was purely accidental. President Trump was only being Trump, a bull in a china shop. Or, it was mindless revenge! But once again, Trump just got lucky in how it lined the stars up to create perfect conditions for further swamp draining. (I’m sure you remember what I always say about lucky presidents.)

We’ve often discussed these sorts of political permission slips. When they happen, intellectuals call it a Hegelian dialectic— the triplet of thesis—antithesis—synthesis. It’s a fancy German phrase that just means “convenient crisis.”

Either way, these transformative events are defined as any convenient crisis that quickly changes voters’ minds about an otherwise politically impossible issue. Never let a good crisis go to waste. Like how the 9/11 attacks made the Patriot Act possible. We all just meekly agreed to half undress, to let barely qualified government agents publicly fondle our women without punching them in the face, and to voluntarily stroll across yards of bacteria and fungus cultures in bare feet to board airplanes. For safety.

In Murthy v. Missouri, the Supreme Court could have collapsed Biden-style censorship-by-proxy and rescued poor little Jimmy. But SCOTUS looked at the massive pile of documented evidence of government censorship and decided the real issue was standing,, and the case settled with a whimper.

But now it’s back, in the least likely but best spot of all: up on the Hill.

🔥 I don’t usually report on bills, especially newly filed ones. My warp speed political education has taught me that bills are common, but laws are rare. Bills die the death of a thousand cuts. They can be ignored till they go away. They can die in committee. They can be watered down by amendment into legislative oblivion. They can be passed by committee but never set for a vote. It’s like how grouper lay 10,000 eggs but only two survive to adult fishhood.

This bill is different, though. Different in some extraordinary ways that demand our attention even at this early stage.

First, behold all the attention. A long list of unlikely bedfellows, including FIRE and the ACLU, have already endorsed it. The brand-new bill is enjoying substantial coverage in tech and Tier Two media. So one of two things must be true, and either one is good for freedom.

It could be that someone made a heroic effort behind the scenes to coordinate all that support before the bill was filed, to make it appear to have fierce momentum coming out of the gate. If so, it implies there is much broader and stronger support than just two well-known Senators. Or, the bill is actually resonating in a bipartisan way, which means real momentum.

Second, the bill revealed that the censorship-by-proxy problem is not new. It’s just more obvious now. But it’s been happening since Lyndon Johnson, when the term “jawboning” was originally coined. The term describes government pressure to compel private companies to do things they don’t want to do. That’s a nice social media company you have there, it would be a shame if Section 232 destroyed it.

Do you recall ever hearing about ‘jawboning’ during the Biden era, when HHS and CISA were cursing out social media companies over ‘vaccine misinformation,’ or the FBI was ‘visiting’ social media companies, warning them to throttle their Hunter Biden coverage during election season? Me neither.

Since the Johnson era, “Jawboning” has always been there. Libertarians complained about it for decades. We just never heard that word used by politicians or in any “informative” corporate media articles during the Biden era. Now, thanks to Jimmy Kimmel, the term has come roaring back into the public discourse. NPR, last September:

So, if the JAWBONE Act ultimately passes, it will knock down another deep state soft-power tool that’s been sitting on the toolbench since the Cold War era and twisting American media into a Ramen noodle.

🔥 Third, and finally, the biggest story of all might be all the attention the fledgling bill is getting. Even if the bill doesn’t pass —which the stats suggest is more likely— the issue has now surged to the forefront, engaging both Democrats and Republicans.

In other words (so long as it never looks like Trump wants it), jawboning has become the latest 80/20 issue.

The Overton Window has shifted. We’ve gone from “jawboning is responsible pressure to fight misinformation” to “jawboning is an obvious constitutional problem with a named fix— the Jimmy Kimmel Act.”

All of that is terrific news, which fully justifies today’s departure from normal C&C protocol. The Supreme Court may have failed to stop jawboning, but Trump 2.0 had a Plan B. Thank you, Jimmy.

Have a fantastic Friday! C&C will return in the morning with the Weekend Edition roundup, packed with more terrific essential news and caffeinated commentary. We have a lot to catch up on.

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After months of demanding that President Trump end the Iran War right now —including filing bill after bill in the House and Senate demanding withdrawal of U.S. forces— his critics have pirouetted in place and now insist (implicitly, at least) that he should have kept fighting. This morning’s New York Times reported, “Average U.S. Gasoline Price Falls Below $4 for First Time in Months.”

Whoops! Sorry! That was the wrong headline. But thank goodness the price of gas might be headed back to pre-war levels —80 cents a gallon cheaper— thereby narrowly averting the Second Great Depression. I don’t know how we make it through summer travel season. Some kind of economic miracle, perhaps.

Allow me to begin again. We’ll break tradition and go with Fox News’s take. This morning’s headline: “Trump personally signs Iran deal at Versailles in major diplomatic breakthrough.” The Iranians also signed the “memorandum of understanding,” a 14-point framework outlining a final deal. Think of it as a binding letter of intent. Once again, Trump surprised the media by signing at the G7 conference in France. Yesterday, media reported the signing would happen in Sweden on Friday (tomorrow).

So far as I can tell (and I looked hard), no official copy of the executed MOU was released. But several platforms claim to have “the full deal.” If you’re curious, here is the “full text as seen by Bloomberg.” But you can already tell from the headlines and the carping from critics: there’s not much in the 14-point deal to criticize.

Critical comments are all focusing on what isn’t in the 14 points. One solid example of critics on the right was Mike Pence’s frenemy tweet, which damned the deal with faint praise and made both points (i.e., that it’s not ‘good enough’ and we should just keep fighting):

As we’ll see in a moment, Mike Pence knows better. It is far too early to complain about this deal. Anyway, here’s how the UK Guardian pitched it:

Ask yourself this question: when was the last time you remember corporate media investing this much effort in analyzing the universe of possible wish-list terms that weren’t in some peace or international trade deal? Seriously. It’s quiz time. What were all the omitted terms from the Doha Peace Accords that “ended” the Afghanistan war? Go!

Wait! Actually, now that I think about it, I do remember corporate media complaining nonstop for days about what was missing from Obama’s JCPOA deal with Iran.

Haha! Just kidding!

The obvious reason that nobody usually complains that deals weren’t good enough is that dealmaking is hard. If you lean over and tell a negotiator, make sure they have to personally deliver it in cash only, that person is likely to look at you like you have ‘UFO DISCLOSURE’ tattooed on your forehead and say something like, if you think it’s so easy, why don’t you take over.

As a lawyer who’s negotiated in more mediations than I can remember, deal points that seem easy or minor to one side are often red lines for the other side. For instance, insisting on getting an apology is a great way to ensure you’re going back to court rather than settling a case. In peace deals, there’s an extra layer of constraints: what’s politically possible.

Either way, large parts of the MOU are placeholders, terms that are not yet final. Some pretty big blanks remain to be filled in. Two of the noteworthy outstanding points are Iran’s nuclear concessions versus a $300 billion foreign-investment package “contingent on performance” for rebuilding Iran’s destroyed infrastructure. JD Vance’s team will start negotiating those points in Sweden tomorrow.

That round of haggling was given two months, which can be “extended by mutual consent.” In the meantime, the Strait of Hormuz is open, a cease-fire is in effect, and countries can start refilling their depleted oil reserves with cheap gas. In fact, there’s about to be too much oil on the market, since Iran, now finally able to sell again, will rush to empty its overfull storage systems.

Meanwhile, I see little point in lighting up the cost/benefit-analysis hot takes until the deal is actually final, which could be months away. Until then, the hot takes will be inevitable but pointless (except that they let partisans score points off each other). If you want a more detailed conservative hot-take, this tweeter did a decent job summarizing the current status.

And … while the deal remains fluid, what stops the Trump Administration from running out the midterm clock with dickering and busywork, and then firing back up the whole Bomb Iran campaign? The Iranians are well aware of this possibility.

Literally, the IRGC’s only leverage was political pressure from the midterms. Past the midterms— what do they have left?

We are especially tantalized by some of the less-discussed details. For instance, will the IRGC now open Schrödinger's box and let Mojtaba Khamenei out? After all, with a ceasefire in place, Mojtaba has no reason to remain in hiding. Right? So will the mystery soon be resolved over whether Iran’s replacement ruler remains upright or has just been a cardboard Ayatollah?

The bottom line is that anyone encouraging President Trump to keep fighting till we get a better deal (cough, Mike Pence) is probably actually trying to ensure Republicans lose the Congress in November. Just saying.

🔥 Yesterday, the Hill reported, “Trump on arrival at G7 meeting: ‘I’m the boss.’” You may have already seen this widely-shared clip, but in case you missed it, enjoy this amusing video of President Trump walking into the G7 at Versailles late and, stone-faced, announcing, “I’m the boss.” Media framed it as a joke. Decide for yourself.

CLIP: President Trump pulling Ultra-Chad alpha move at the G7 (0:42).

Thing is, jokes are funny because they contain an element of truth, or at least that’s what humorless experts always say, unless the jokes are about racial, gender, or national stereotypes, like saying Mexican people like siestas. Then there’s no truth in jokes at all. But I digress.

Most social media pundits enthusiastically compared Trump’s dramatic G& entrance to the clip of Joe Biden’s cabbage moment at his final G7, when, stiff-legged, he wandered away from the other leaders to look at a parachute, and Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni gently steered him back to the photo line.

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The pajama party is over! Yesterday, the New York Times featured an op-ed headlined, “We Liked Remote Work. Then We Looked at the Data.” Now they tell us. “Despite its advantages,” the economist authors wrote, “remote work has significantly deepened Americans’ isolation and distress.” Gosh. Who could have predicted this?

The piece was based on a study published this month in Science, titled “Home alone: Remote work, isolation, and mental health.” The findings were pretty awful, even if obvious. “Remote workers living alone spent entire days without human contact,” the summary stated, “and their mental distress, use of mental healthcare, and antidepressants increased acutely.”

In case you needed reminding that “public health” and the media are not our friends, consider how the experts and reporters pushed remote work like it was going out of style. Headline from the New York Times, 2020:

Some people are empowered by work-from-home (WFH). Many people handle it just fine. The point isn’t to dunk on WFH. The point is that, once again, we see something public health experts pushed on us that turned out to have risks of serious, undisclosed adverse effects. This seems to be something of a pattern for public health. (The list is long: school closures, opioids, etc.)

While the public health experts are busy protecting us from the virus-of-the-week, who will protect us from the public health experts?

If I were in charge, I’d suggest two reforms:

• Every major public‑health policy should come with (1) a public, written impact statement with signatures, and (2) ongoing evaluations and reports on whether the projected benefits and harms ever materialized, with actual consequences for agencies when they miss badly.

• I would reframe “trust the science” as “constrain the experts.” The goal isn’t to completely ignore epidemiology or pharmacology, but to make it explicit in statute that experts are often wrong. So they must always be subordinate to citizens’ elected representatives.

In other words, I’d commit specific experts to their recommendations and make politicians responsible for the experts’ decisions, by requiring all major public health policies concocted by the CDC to be first ratified by Congress and then renewed every 60 days, but only if the reports were finished.

One of the smartest things the Trump Administration did last year was require federal workers to return to the office. Many of them rage-quit in protest. The media hated it. But as the editorial and the study make clear, he was only trying to help them. The decision to bring federal workers back to the office was, apparently, one of the most pro‑worker mental‑health interventions Washington has seen in years. TAW.

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Is there any government charity program that isn’t a fraudulent mess? Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported, “State Unemployment Programs Targeted in Federal Antifraud Campaign.” The subheadline explained, “The Trump administration sends warning to all 50 states about complying with measures to stop alleged fraud.”

CLIP: Acting Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling explains post-covid fraud in unemployment insurance (1:37).

“It’s one of the largest taxpayer-funded thefts in history,” Labor Secretary Sonderling said. “How did this happen? A lack of oversight and control. Paying prisoners. Paying children. States turning a blind eye.”

I’m not sure I see the problem. After all, prisoners are unemployed. Prisoners are fraudsters, rapists, murderers, and people who sell their SNAP benefit cards to Venezuelan drug dealers. Crime is literally their job. A job they can’t do right now, due to unfortunate circumstances beyond their control, such as being arrested by police officers. Where is the empathy from this heartless administration?

“We’re taking some extraordinary measures,” Sonderling explained, “to make sure that never happens again. If states allow fraud, they will suffer the consequences.” Beyond lax oversight, there are structural problems. Sonderling explained that under the current disjointed system, a single Social Security number can get unemployment from multiple states.

The DOL’s announcement used three states as bad examples. You could probably guess which ones. I’ll just tell you: California, Illinois, and New York. (Not exactly a plot twist.) The Government Accountability Office estimated that fraud accounted for up to 15% of the total paid out through unemployment insurance programs from April 2020 through May 2023. Meaning billions.

You won’t be surprised to learn that the federal government lavishes hundreds of billions on the states to distribute through state programs to nonworkers. You could call it a wealth transfer from the better-employed states to the poorly managed ones. Anyway, the Trump Team is now threatening to suspend or cancel transfers to states that can’t or won’t get their unemployment fraud under control.

The real question is: why did this take so long?

🔥🔥🔥

In news of the weird and unexpected, yesterday Al Jazeera reported, “‘Send them back’ chants in EU Parliament after anti-migrant bill passes.” The ministers were literally hugging each other.

Well, maybe it isn’t that surprising. But first, the new Europe-wide law established “return hubs” in third countries, expanded detention powers (including home raids without judicial warrants), and fueled a general “hard rightward turn” in EU migration enforcement. PBS framed it as the strictest EU migration law in decades, explicitly modeled on U.S. ICE‑style tactics: extended detention periods, aggressive home searches, tougher entry bans, and offshored facilities where EU process protections are weakest.

“The new regulation will speed up the return process and increase returns of persons who have no legal right to stay in the EU,” said Nicholas Ioannides, deputy migration minister for Cyprus, which holds the rotating presidency of the 27-nation bloc. “Critics compared the regulation to the immigration policies of the Trump administration,” NPR said, without naming the critics (it was NPR and NGO activists).

“These new rules will ensure swifter, simpler, and more effective procedures across the European Union for returning non-EU nationals who have no right to stay, in full respect of international law and fundamental rights,” said Henna Virkkunen, EU commissioner for technology.

“This deal will give governments much broader powers to detain and deport people,” complained Marta Welander, a middle-aged white female activist employed by a migration NGO. “It looks set to normalize immigration raids, and expand the use of detention in prison-like facilities outside EU territory that are essentially legal black holes.”

Legal black holes is also a neat way to describe migration NGOs themselves. They are basically money vortexes disguised as charities that suck up our taxes and pay lawyers to sink the ship of state.

🔥 In my view, three things made these surprising “historic” reforms possible.

First, “far-right” (moderate conservative) parties have been ascendant in Europe, a trend that accelerated after President Trump’s re-election last year. Conservative and “reform” parties now make up about a third of all elected EU members.

Second, center-left parties —also about a third— joined the conservatives to pass the new anti-migration policies. Only the far-left parties (Greens and socialists) opposed the new package and shouted “shame!” at their colleagues after the vote passed. (Although you could hardly hear them over all the joyful celebrating.) Thanks to the center-left’s flip, it passed by an unbeatable two-thirds majority.

Third, the center-left’s course correction from pro-migrant virtue-signaling to pro-sanity common sense followed continuous pressure from the U.S. over the last 18 months, which ceaselessly argued that Europe was destroying itself with its open-borders migration policies, and often linked them to America’s pullback from NATO. According to this headline from EU News, last week, a majority of EU voters now want ICE-like migration policies:

You might fairly ask why I linked this political tipping point in Europe to Trump’s re-election. After all, as the experts always remind us, correlation doesn’t prove causation. Maybe Trump’s election and the rise of sanity in Europe were both caused by some other third factor. To answer, I would point to one specific policy decision, the closure of USAID, and to one person, President Trump, over whom the EU leaders fawned at yesterday’s G7 Summit.

🔥 First, follow the money! Think-tank analysts estimate that up to $2.3 billion annually in U.S. aid ($23 billion every 10 years) was tied to Europe’s “migration management” work. USAID’s closure effectively zeroed this out, leaving a sudden, large gap in financing for development and protection projects in the countries of origin and transit.

In other words, USAID paid the countries where migrants came from, and it paid the countries through which they traveled on their way to Europe. No longer.

The USAID money spigot is closed. Now the EU is reversing those incentives— by paying origin countries to “host” their own migrants. And, whether it was through tariffs, NATO drawdowns, or energy markets, President Trump has beaten European politics in arm-wrestling. This astonishing turnaround was far from certain. EU leaders actively opposed him during Trump 1.0. Remember this iconic 2018 picture, coincidentally also taken at a G7 Summit?

Or this nearly-as-famous shot of the German delegation at the UN General Assembly in September 2018, showing the German Foreign Minister and Ambassador smirking and laughing as Trump warned about Germany’s over-reliance on Russian oil.

Trump opposes open borders and unregulated immigration, especially in the U.S., but also in Europe. Headline from EuroNews, last September:

In July, he spoke with rhetoric resembling blunt-force trauma. “You’d better get your act together, or you’re not going to have a Europe anymore,” the President warned angrily, like he was leading an intervention. “You’ve got to stop this horrible invasion that’s happening to Europe.”

Now, in complete contrast to their smirking defiance during Trump 1.0, European leaders hang on his every word. They laugh in delight rather than derision when he strolls in late and tells them he is “the boss.” The leaders who used to resist him now want to curry his favor, because he’s got all the leverage. (TAW.)

It is difficult to overestimate how encouraging this week’s anti-migration vote is for the world’s prospects. With Europe’s electric migration issue handled by a broad coalition majority, what else could this newly empowered bloc accomplish, now that it has finally found its political legs? Free speech? Grooming gangs? Reversing decades of social degeneracy?

Could the West’s inevitable decline have just become a little less inevitable?

If, one year ago, I’d told you this was possible, you’d have laughed me right off of Substack. Yet here we are. As I assured our European cousins early last year: hang tight. After we save ourselves, we’re coming to save you, too.

Have a terrific Thursday! Don’t miss tomorrow morning’s edition, when we’ll round up even more essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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The Empire of Fraud is collapsing. The man who locked Californians in their homes, shuttered their businesses, and kept their kids out of school —while dining maskless at the French Laundry— is now claiming he’s the victim. Yesterday, the LA Times ran a story consuming more media oxygen this week than even the fanciful imaginings over the Iran deal’s terms, headlined, “Newsom seeks political advantage in probe he says Trump ordered.” I wonder whether the innuendo was accidental. Trump ordered Newsom’s probe. Alrighty then. Bend over and cough.

CLIP: Governor Newsom’s poorly lit, rambling confession of a federal investigation that nobody else has publicly alleged (4:42).

Dressed like the keynote speaker at a morticians’ conference about to deliver an off-color joke about embalming fluid, in a (selfie?) video apparently filmed in a dark basement, California Governor Gavin Newsom —one of the few surviving pandemic Lockdown Queens— “proudly” announced on Monday that he is under investigation by the Department of Justice and the Internal Revenue Service.

“Today, my wife and I joined Donald Trump’s hit list,” Newsom admits in the clip. “He has directed his Department of Justice to investigate us.” He said he found out because investigators have been questioning, probing, and even arresting his friends and neighbors. For at least a year. So … why pick now to come out of the closet?

Regular readers will remember that we covered last year the swirl of investigations and criminal prosecutions of staff, activists, and officials surrounding Newsom. Gossip and speculation about whether the governor himself is a target has been a regular feature of Sacramento politics for at least that long. The DOJ has never said.

🔥 The LA Times scared up an expert, a professor of political science at UC San Diego who narrated Newsom’s unlikely brilliance at turning a federal criminal investigation into a branding opportunity. “He seems to be wearing this as a badge of honor because his brand is being the strongest opponent of Donald Trump,” explained professor Thad Kousser.

Maybe it will work with the partisan Democrat base. All that the base cares about is standing up to Trump, so if Newsom says he’s being investigated —normally a pretty awful selling point— then donors like him that much better. Call it the Graham Platner effect.

Maybe the most remarkable feature of Newsom’s aimless five-minute rant —which was nearly unquotable due to its fuzzy insubstantiality— was a conspicuous omission. Newsom never actually said what he or his wife Jennifer were being investigated for. In a similar startling development, yesterday, Axios covered the story and linked a leaked talking-points memo that Newsom apparently sent in private to national Democrats.

Look at this! The very first entry in Newsom’s leaked memo’s Q&A section:

The very first Q&A question was a good start: “What exactly is the DOJ investigating?” But the answer was: no answer. “That’s a question Trump’s Department of Justice needs to answer.” But why? Does he really want the DOJ answering that?

Anyway. Newsom clearly knew that the very first thing anyone —even his allies— would wonder after watching his badly produced video is: what exactly has he been accused of? He deflected to the DOJ. But DOJ has never admitted there’s an investigation in the first place, as Newsom obviously knows, so he’s chucking the question right into a narrative black hole.

One can understand his reluctance. One doesn’t want to start giving prosecutors ideas they might not come up with on their own. But it backfired, at least to the extent that it has forced even friendly corporate media to fill in the blanks by suggesting possibilities.

🔥 Gavin’s wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, has apparently been involved in some sketchy NGO shenanigans that washed money into the couple’s personal finances more efficiently than the senior wait staff at the French Laundry could. Some of that money came from donors who later benefited from Newsom’s decisions. Which is not just potential bribery but also tax fraud—precisely what they nabbed Al Capone for.

Here, for just one example, is how CNN veered into speculation about Newsom’s Empire of Fraud, and even, dare I say it, did some investigative journalism:

Newsom could have offered a strawman explanation, however silly, and kept control of the narrative. They claim I’m a warlock, but I never went to Hogwarts or owned a wand. But this … gossamer nothingness?

Inviting even friendly media sources to figure out for themselves what the investigation is all about seems like an unforced error.

“This is something that could lead to other elements that blow up, so there’s a risk,” David McCuan, a Sonoma State political science professor, told the LA Times. “It’s a long-running game,” McCuan added. “It’s just the Newsom first couple has perfected it and moved it forward.”

My best guess as to why Newsom refused to say what he’s being investigated for is that his lawyers told him not to talk about it. And so the media is filling in the holes.

🔥 Over the previous few months, the Sacramento Bee and others have reported over $3.7 million flowing from one of Jennifer’s several non-profits into Jennifer’s for-profit company (she hired herself) from the NGO ecosystem, while large donors like PG&E, AT&T, Kaiser, Blue Shield, and others got large contracts, regulatory forbearance, or other preferential treatment from the state.

Other platforms reported that Gavin personally solicited donations to his wife’s companies. In one case, he ultimately routed another $4 million into Jennifer’s charitable film company, which promotes feminism. In another looming scandal, a tribe donated $1.8 million to Jennifer’s charities, at the exact same time that Gavin conveniently took the tribe’s side against a different tribe in a casino dispute.

Don’t cancel me, I’m not alleging anything. This is all the stuff corporate media keeps surfacing. Media, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Since neither Newsom nor the DOJ is saying what Newsom might be under investigation for, the media is being forced to do something that, back in the old days, it used to do naturally: investigate.

My analysis is that Newsom is not playing 4-D chess badly. It seems much more likely that something forced his hand. Something like finding out a key witness is cooperating, somebody turned state’s evidence, or that he stupidly left the political murder weapon on top of the dryer at the grift laundromat. Here’s the summary of my evidence:

1. Public knowledge that the DOJ investigation was ongoing is not new (at least, in California politics) or even stretches back to the Biden era. (C&C covered it last year.)

2. Gavin’s video was poorly produced, suggesting it was rushed rather than carefully planned. (Newsom’s leaked “talking points memo” also has a rushed look about it; I’d say that it was AI-generated except that AI could have done a better job.)

3. The ‘campaign’ left a gaping narrative vacuum for media to fill.

4. Events seem to be overtaking the oleaginous governor. Yesterday, the Sacramento Bee reported Newsom was fined for violations related to many of the alleged ‘donations’: “Newsom fined by campaign finance watchdog just prior to DOJ probe announcement.”

5. The governor’s inner circle is compromised and may be cooperating. Last month, Newsom’s former chief of staff, Dana Williamson, pleaded guilty to bank fraud and wire conspiracy.

6. In his selfie video, Newsom said FBI and IRS agents were knocking on doors of “family friends and former employees” last week, demanding records.

7. If this were a narrative strategy he’d been working on for months, he’d have a clear origin story, trial balloons, surveys, and media consensus lined up before he went public.

And one more thing— there is zero evidence that Newsom’s narrative is working, even with Democrats. During 2021–2023, whenever Biden’s prosecutors moved against Trump, we saw wall‑to‑wall coverage all over social media from real voters: rally‑goers on camera, man‑on‑the‑street interviews in diners, memes, MAGA folks protesting outside courthouses and vowing, “this makes me support Trump even more,” “they’re only going after him because he is in the way,” “this is bulls—t,” et cetera.

At the time, polls showed over 75% of Republicans believed that the federal charges against Trump were fake and politically motivated. His primary numbers improved after the indictments. So … where are Gavin’s polls? At the same moment his “experts” are insisting this scandal is rocket fuel for his presidential campaign, the one thing conspicuously absent from the record is any actual measurement of whether voters actually buy his effeminiate martyrdom story.

In other words, Newsom and his elite allies are trying to steal Trump’s 2021-2023 formula, as if it were just a secret recipe of talking points that can bake corruption slime into consensus cookies— but it isn’t working. The cookies are burning into toxic sludge. Meanwhile, Democrats who cheered weaponization against Trump for four years are failing to convince anyone of a new “tyranny” narrative.

The only people claiming Californians “relish” the governor’s attacks on Trump are his own allies, college professors, and the same parrot-like political analysts who always plug his policies. Ordinary Newsom fans —voters— don’t appear in these stories at all.

So here are our two choices: either (1) believe the governor’s simplistic “I’m the real victim here” explanation —Trump forced me to defend myself in public— or (2) consider instead that Trump forced Newsom to attempt a humiliating limited hangout without actually hanging anything out except the lame excuse that “Trump fears me.”

I think it’s the second one. I highly doubt Trump fears Newsom. Trump isn’t even on the 2028 ballot. What’s he supposed to be afraid of?

In other words, Newsom, feeling the probe drive in a little further than he expected, flinched and tried to turn a wince into a war cry.

Have a terrific Wednesday! As we will see tomorrow, DOJ/FBI breathing down Gavin’s neck isn’t even close to the flood of prosecutions and investigations coming down the pike. Don’t miss another delightful roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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⛑️ C&C ARMY POST—MAILBAG ⛑️

But first, two themes ran like vines through yesterday’s comments. First, some readers, apparently unaware where my “lucky presidents” reference came from, pushed back (gently). Less gently, other readers said they already feel gypped by the “bad” Iran deal— even before the terms are public. Let’s tackle both, especially the second one, because gypped is exactly how corporate media wants you to feel. I tried to squash that narrative yesterday, but it’s taken root like mutant crabgrass. Let’s pluck it out.

⛑️ If you ever manage to get a liberal to debate you about Trump without them resorting to name-calling, storming off, or spontaneously combusting, you will eventually reach a point where they are confronted with undeniable evidence that Trump did something right. Usually, they have a pre-packaged answer, fresh from the New York Times’ talking-points lab. Sure, the stock market is up a little, but it only helps rich people. What about gas prices? K-shaped recovery!

Occasionally, though, you might point out something for which they don’t have a handy, pre-packaged media dismissal. When that happens, they fall back to their default setting, which is something along the lines of, “Well, even a blind squirrel can occasionally find an acorn.” (They really shouldn’t be bringing up Peanut the squirrel, but whatever. We’ll roll with it.) In other words, if they can’t minimize an accomplishment or claim that Joe Biden actually did it while sleepwalking, they’ll just call Trump the unwitting beneficiary of good fortune. He just got lucky.

My response to that is simple: even if that were true —even if Trump’s successes are purely the result of him stumbling backward into a pot of gold— I will take a lucky president any day of the week. “Lucky” is infinitely better than “smart.” Smart presidents can have bad luck, and where does that leave us? Usually, it leaves us broke, entangled in a foreign war, and paying fourteen dollars for a dozen eggs. Checkmate.

In other words, I’ve co-opted the progressives’ silly argument, and the weekend’s fortuitous meteorological events (after the Democrats celebrated the bad weather way too early) gave me the perfect opportunity to rub it in a little harder. To be clear, I don’t actually believe in luck. I’m with Einstein on this one: God does not play lotto with the universe. (Or words to that effect. Einstein was probably too busy inventing gravity to buy scratch-offs.)

⛑️ More significantly, a not inconsiderable number of folks shared feelings verging on downright pessimistic about the Iran War. It was too expensive, took too long, killed too many soldiers, raised gas prices, and now look: it didn’t even destroy the IRGC and all we’re getting is a crappy tourist t-shirt with the word “Strait” misspelled in “I 💗 the Straight of Hormuz!”

Let me tell you what’s going to happen. The minute corporate media gets its sweaty, panic-mongering hands on the details of this deal, all we are going to hear is how horrible and gyppy it is. That’s the narrative they’ve already written. And that’s exactly why I am pre-debunking it right now. I am boldly taking the position that I do not care what the terms of the deal are. As I said yesterday, the terms don’t even matter, because when you compare it to literally every other Middle East conflict we’ve ever stumbled into, the Iran operation was shorter by an order of magnitude and billions of times better for America.

Just count up the benefits we already know about. The Iran operation ended OPEC— within two months! It got all the fractious countries over there on the same page, made a joke out of the Useless Nations, starved China of oil, put America on top of global energy for the first time in history, pressured the Europeans, et cetera. None of our previous Middle Eastern adventures did anything helpful at all; they just made everything worse.

So, here is my warning. If anyone dares me to defend the terms of some Trump-Iran deal that corporate media and Team Candace call horrible, here is what I will do. Remember, I warned them. I will say that’s fine, please compare it to all the other Middle East peace deals that other presidents have negotiated.

After all, if we want to be intellectually honest —a concept the media abandoned sometime around 1994— we can’t just criticize the Iran deal in a vacuum. We need benchmarks. We need context. How can we possibly tell how truly stinky the Iran deal is without recalling all the super-terrific, totally-not-disastrous deals that past Middle Eastern wars have produced?

So let’s go ahead and pull the records on Bush’s Iraq, Obama’s JCPOA, and 20 years of Afghanistan. Let’s compare those deals to the Iran deal, and see which one ended best. Let’s contrast what we got from each previous war-slash-deal to what we get from Iran. Let’s compare the total cost of the 20-year Afghanistan war and the 8-year Iraq war with the cost of Trump’s three-month Iran war.

I bet we will discover some nifty statistics.

And to be perfectly fair, I will let the critics who are unhappy with the deal (which, again, they haven’t seen yet) do all those calculations for themselves and then report back. There really isn’t anything to talk about until those comparisons have been made.

Or, better yet, we could just refuse to step into the media’s narrative trap of criticizing the Iran deal without historical context.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🔥🔥🔥

On Saturday, we saw Tulsi Gabbard dish out deep state pain over Ukraine biolabs, and the Pentagon cut NATO to the quick by declaring real drawdowns of our force deployment in Europe. To those two encouraging reckoning stories from Saturday, let’s add two more, both related to intelligence agencies. On Saturday, the Hill ran a totally not-hysterical story about how a long-detested spying law finally collapsed in Congressional flame: “FISA 702 lapse plunges US into unknown territory.”

On Thursday, both the House and Senate voted down bills extending Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) “amid outrage from Democrats about Bill Pulte being tapped to lead the intelligence community.” Opponents ironically included nineteen Trump-aligned Republicans who swung the vote. Seven Democrats voted for FISA’s renewal. (Portlanders: FISA is the law that lets the feds electronically spy on foreigners and any Americans corresponding with them— without pesky warrants.)

As you see, the Hill’s headline dramatically declared that America has been plunged into unknown territory! This kind of headline is how you know for sure the corporate media is the deep state’s willing slave. Literally nobody outside Washington likes FISA. Republicans hate it. Democrats and libertarians hate it. It’s not even an 80/20 issue; it’s more like 90/10. One March poll concluded that barely 12% of surveyed registered voters thought Congress should reauthorize warrantless surveillance without major reforms.

So … which audience was the Hill aiming at with its article whining about FISA lapsing? It’s not the only one. Corporate media headlines are almost universally supportive of FISA and critical of its lapse. Look how the New York Times framed it:

Not “excitement grows.” Hopes dim.

FISA’s support has only ever come from politicians, who, like clockwork, emerge from their SCIFs, blinking like groundhogs in the harsh, unfamiliar sunlight, and solemnly declare, “the world’s dangerous, so we need three more years of warrantless spy powers.”

And then we all say “fine” and, dang it, the world never seems to get any safer. No matter how much spying power we give them. Weird! In fact, it seems to work the opposite way. The more liberty we trade for security, and the more spy powers we give the government, the more dangerous the world becomes. The Hill, two days ago:

Every time we go along with them, it only provokes the next round of powers and compromises they demand, and the spooks on the wheel keep spinning, around and around and around, never stopping, never resting, never taking a break.

Well, it just stopped for once.

🔥 The roster of alarmed folks the Hill quoted about the lapse consisted mainly of former spooks and members of Congressional intelligence committees. The Hill didn’t quote any member of the public. (Who cares what we think? Members of the public are only needed for anti-trans bills.) The Hill ignored civil libertarian groups. And it somehow forgot all about the many rank‑and‑file Senators and Representatives like Rand Paul, or the other Republicans who voted against FISA, who’ve collectively spent decades calling Section 702 an unconstitutional backdoor for domestic surveillance.

Over the years, starting in Trump 1.0, the President himself repeatedly encouraged Congress to “KILL FISA!” His righteous anger was unsurprising, since FISA was how the Russiagate actors “legally” spied on Trump-world. They surrounded the Trump team members with helpful foreign cutouts, informants, and honeytraps, then treated any contact with those same over-friendly assets as the predicate for first surveilling Carter Page— and kept widening that crack to haul in others in Trump’s orbit.

🔥 FISA’s lapse might seem technical and wonky, but really, it was Another conservative dream come true. Spy powers are easy to give, but notoriously hard to take back. Its lapse is a black swan event that conservatives and libertarians have been assured for 20 years was impossible. Bung it onto the growing list of political miracles.

Best of all, Trump wrangled the Democrats into doing it, which prevented any deadly false flagging by the deep state (say, some ‘preventable’ tragedy that punishes wayward politicians and proves how badly FISA is needed after all). Like what? Oh, I don’t know, maybe something like:

Here’s the thing, though— the deep state won’t embarrass its preferred party. Since Democrats killed the bill, the deep state can’t strike back. It won’t.

We needn’t believe in false flags. It’s enough to observe incentives.

Intelligence officials and their media allies are already working overtime to frame the lapse as an unfortunate and totally understandable byproduct of partisan protest over Bill Pulte, rather than as any fundamental repudiation of 702 itself. They hope to revive it. The intelligence community is not, as Senator Schumer’s wife’s boyfriend once told him, “finding six ways from Sunday at getting back” at anyone.

In other words, the deep staters need Democrats to return to the table once the Pulte personnel fight is resolved, and they know a spectacular, conveniently timed “lesson” in what happens without warrantless powers would be read by half the country as an own‑goal against the very party that just burned political capital to protest Trump’s interim DNI choice.

In technical terms, political science types would call that a “no-no.”

So Trump’s 4-D chess move didn’t just knock out 702’s statutory legs for the moment; it simultaneously made it impossible for the deep state to teach the public a bloody civics lesson about why those legs were supposedly irreplaceable.

🔥 The second, seemingly unrelated story that unfolded right as FISA expired, was barely reported anywhere. On Friday, without any fanfare, the White House issued a dense, technical directive —it’s like an Executive Order– that was blandly titled, “National Security Presidential Memorandum NSPM-12.”

NPSM-12, known only by its acronym, could potentially be one of the most significant intelligence reorganizations in modern history. We don’t know much, since there was no press conference or signing ceremony for this one. They just slipped it in. The corporate media looked the other way. Trade media was less sanguine:

Remember how DOGE worked on a technical level? DOGE agents invaded every major federal agency and office. They linked all the important databases. They synchronized all the critical records. They mapped the payments, contracts, recipients, approvers, and contractors. They forced the big agencies to standardize on a single email platform. Throughout 2025, they fought and won lawsuits to link Social Security, Treasury, Medicaid, and ICE, so checks won’t go out to dead people, and illegals can’t get welfare or tax refunds.

In other words, DOGE tied federal agency databases together, providing the White House with a level of real-time visibility that had never existed before. In particular, DOGE made it possible to follow the money. Over about twelve months, years of deeply buried activity became a searchable evidence trail. Now, DOGE systems empower Trump’s Fraud Task Force. That’s why Democrats fought DOGE so hard.

🔥 NSPM-12 just launched the same transparency process, but this time for the intelligence agencies. The memo “is different than what we usually see,” NextGov advised. Instead of “wiggle room, vague timelines, and the ‘consistent with applicable law’ language that gives everyone room to slow walk implementation, there are named officials. Hard deadlines. A governance body with actual authority to issue binding directives.”

In other words, a control architecture.

Writ large, NPSM-12 places all national security systems under the authority of a single agency, the NSA, for cybersecurity purposes. This makes superficial sense in an age when AI chatbots are racing toward a quantum singularity that could crack any existing encryption.

But some of the NSPM’s related powers could also challenge the standard operating procedures of all clandestine work. One wonky analysis of the order said, “Agencies will be required to maintain annual inventories of all National Security Systems under their control.” And, the NSA “will be able to issue emergency directives requiring agencies to take immediate action, to protect sensitive networks.”

The first example that sprang to mind was the FBI’s alleged “Prohibited Access” files— the Bureau’s second set of books-off-the-books that Kash Patel’s team uncovered. NSPM-12 would have disclosed its existence. The parts of that dark-file system that were electronically stored, searched, transmitted, encrypted, cross-loaded, or hidden within FBI infrastructure— they now fall under the NSA’s brand-new role as National Manager.

That means the FBI’s so-secret-the-secret-is-secret prohibited access system must be inventoried, logged, audited, secured, and surfaced. Assuming the other agencies are pursuing the same “prohibited access” angle (why wouldn’t they?), it will be devastating for generations of deep state skunkworks.

Here’s how NextGov explained it to the agencies:

Needless to say, for any off-books file system, visibility —a “clean picture of a full agency footprint”— is apocalyptic. And if Trump 2.0 has taught career bureaucrats anything, it is that resisters get pink slips.

And now we circle back to Bill Pulte, the dreaded man who just terrified Democrats into protesting so hard that they lapsed their favorite spy program, “plunging” the nation into “unknown territory.” Not coincidentally, Pulte is closely tied to DOGE. His critics constantly complain about how, under Pulte’s leadership, the DOGE model was extended into housing finance and related domains.

Add to that Bill’s pre‑government “Twitter philanthropy” branding, where he explicitly discussed using technology and social media to expose corruption in welfare infrastructures, and later, in mortgage fraud, and you see a consistent character: Bill Pulte leans into a public identity as a tech‑driven, anti‑corruption crusader.

Now, suddenly, Bill Pulte is the acting Director of National Intelligence. And within days of getting that job, without announcement or fanfare, he was handed NSPM-12. Consider that a coincidence if you like. But Bill now sits at the political apex of the IC while a strictly worded memo forces agencies to hand over detailed maps of their most sensitive systems.

Just like that, Bill became entitled to receive a list of everything the agencies are quietly squirreling away in “prohibited access” type programs. Not an inventory down to the file level, but a broad list of all programs housing intelligence files, along with information about where and how the data is stored. In other words, it is an AI-powered roadmap for what to ask for next.

All this falls under the indisputable logic of cybersecurity in an age of artificial-intelligence singularities. It is an irresistible demolition crane. And DOGE-superstar Bill Pulte just got the keys.

Have a terrific Tuesday! Tomorrow we’ll dig into the most tantalizing story of the week— drama queen and oleaginous governor Gavin Newsom just confessed to being under federal investigation in a melodramatic “I’m the real victim” selfie video. That, and much more, in the Wednesday roundup.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🔥🔥🔥

Regular readers know that I have something of a dot-connection impulse, or possibly an obsession. (We don’t know yet.) This one I can’t prove. I mean that proving it is impossible. Proving the existence of a lucky president falls into the hazy Twilight Zone beyond the boundaries of conventional science. But the dots are right there. We’ll prime the dot-connection lab table with this uncharacteristically chipper headline from PBS: “Trump celebrates 80th birthday with Iran deal ahead of UFC fights on White House South Lawn.”

CLIP: One of many moving, patriotic video shorts prepared for the UFC event (1:26).

The White House UFC show was part scheduled for President Trump’s 80th birthday and part of the national celebration of our 250th anniversary. It was staged as a made-for-TV spectacle: a 4,300-plus-seat arena built under a glowing steel arch on the South Lawn, with another massed crowd of 85,000+ in a nearby fan zone, and a global streaming push likely driving a live audience of millions worldwide, with even more on delay.

On Sunday night, the manicured South Lawn was transformed into a temporary fight stadium, dominated by “The Claw,” a 92‑foot‑tall metal superstructure loaded with patriotic lights, sound rigs, and giant video screens looming over the UFC Octagon. Spectators piled into tightly packed temporary grandstands wrapped around the cage, while tens of thousands more watched from big screens on the nearby Ellipse, turning the whole White House grounds into something like a Las Vegas fight-night superspectacular.

President Trump made a dramatic, slow-mo televised walk from the mansion to the arena beside UFC CEO Dana White, while fighter jets roared overhead in a flyover, framing the evening explicitly as both presidential pageant and combat-sports event. Inside the cage, pairs of fighters cycled through seven-plus bouts, trading elbows, kicks, and takedowns in quick succession under the bright white lights, the crowd surging to its feet for knockdowns and finishes while cameras panned repeatedly to the presidential seating area a few feet from the chain link.

At regular intervals, the crowd broke into full‑throated “Happy Birthday” songs for the president, and medal‑of‑honor recipients and first responders escorted fighters to the Octagon, blending patriotic ceremony with blood sport in a way that felt intentionally on‑the‑nose even by modern political‑entertainment standards. The Claw itself —already compared by Trump to a kind of Washington Eiffel Tower— hung in most wide shots, a glowing industrial crown over the cage that visually fused the White House façade, the crowd, and the Octagon into a single, continuous arena.

Let’s start with the event itself.

🔥 Thing was, it should have been rained out. Weather forecasts threatened the show all weekend, not just by predicting rain, but fierce thunderstorms, the news of which electrified liberals on BlueSky. They spent all day Saturday and Sunday posting BlueBird droppings, gushing in eager anticipation about Trump’s birthday being ruined by bad weather. Indeed, the event’s start was delayed by an hour due to rain, high winds, and lightning. But late yesterday, Front Office Sports reported, “UFC Freedom 250 Goes Off Despite Political and Weather Drama” Some called it a weather miracle.

Next: the result. It was never supposed to happen, either. The headlined fight was a matchup between long-shot American fighter Justin Gaethje and the reigning, undisputed world champion, Spain’s Ilia Topuria. Yahoo Sports reported the shocking upset: “Justin Gaethje shocks Ilia Topuria, pulls off ultimate U.S. upset on White House lawn”

Justin Gaethje, 37, from Tucson, “was widely believed to be past his peak.” Despite being cast as a more than 6-to-1 underdog, and “despite being roundly dismissed as a lamb led to slaughter on the biggest stage in UFC history,” Gaethje did the unthinkable, Yahoo Sports narrated, “brutally stopping” Topuria to capture the lightweight title. Gaethje’s feat, the article explained, “is among the biggest upsets in UFC history” and “one of the greatest results for an American fighter in MMA history.”

“Hey, I’m from America. Two hundred and fifty years ago, we were way bigger than 6-to-1 dogs, and look at us thriving now,” an elated Gaethje shouted in victory. Other winners on the night’s ticket thanked God, made Gospel statements, said they were blessed to compete on the White House lawn and were grateful for the opportunity. It gave the broadcast a noticeably faith-positive vibe layered onto the patriotic staging.

So far, for President Trump’s birthday weekend, we have a weather near-miracle saving fight night literally at the last moment (or 60 moments past), despite witches hexing the event or whatever they do these days, and a dramatic come-from-way-behind story about the American winning at the nation’s 250th anniversary-branded fight event.

It was the weekend’s theme. America is roaring back.

🔥 The rest of the world might not emphasize mixed martial arts to the same extent, but the rest of the world does love soccer. To put it kindly, America is not a soccer heavyweight. The last time our team experienced a conclusive victory was decades ago in 2002, and so it gets less coverage than the 5th-grade team at Susan B. Anthony Middle School in Poughkeepsie. But on Saturday, the U.S. Men’s Team pulled off a “dominating 4-1 win” over Paraguay in their first game of the 2026 World Cup, and their first three‑goal victory margin at a World Cup since 1930.

CNN reported the patriotic story with laudable enthusiasm, below the headline, “A perfectly American start to the USA’s 2026 World Cup.” Fans clogged the streets outside of SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles, “turned out in every which way one could fashion the stars and stripes— it felt like a country’s worth of Fourth of July parades combined into one.” Independence Day remains weeks away, but the crowd was clearly feeling it:

Hopes for the American team ran high. As players arrived at the stadium, the speakers blared David Bowie and Queen singing, “Under Pressure.” After the U.S. team scored its first goal early in the game —a Paraguayan defender tipped the ball into his own net— the crowd went wild. “To explain the stadium eruption that followed,” CNN reported, “is to imagine a Super Bowl where nearly everyone was rooting for one team.”

It’s only FIFA’s first weekend, and the games continue through July 19th across Canada, Mexico, and the United States. I’m not predicting our team’s continued success. I’m noting a remarkable underdog launch from the starting line and the curious coincidence of timing— another extraordinary achievement arriving on President Trump’s high-profile birthday weekend.

🔥 Ready for another long-shot sporting upset in the same weekend? Fox News reported, “A longtime Knicks fan, Trump became the first sitting president to attend an NBA Finals game when he sat alongside team owner James Dolan at Game 3 of the series, as New York finished off the San Antonio Spurs in five games to clinch the championship.” NBC-4 New York’s simply reported, “Knicks beat Spurs in Game 5, win first NBA championship since 1973.”

“I have no words,” Jalen Brunson, the NBA Finals MVP, said during an on-court celebration after the game. “It’s everything I ever dreamed of.”

It’s a big deal for the Big Apple; it’s the city’s first NBA championship victory since the Cold War era. ABC-7 New York reported, “New York Knicks ticker-tape parade preparations underway ahead of Thursday celebration.”

We could make too much of this. It’s ‘just sports.’ It was just New York (Trump’s hometown) versus San Antonio. Upsets happen all the time— that’s what keeps sports interesting. But there were three in one weekend.

So let’s move beyond sports. Remember what the media has minted into the President’s biggest domestic political problem?

🔥 Yesterday, the BBC observed that “the announcement of an Iran deal has provided Donald Trump with a very welcome birthday present.” The New York Times reported, “Oil Tumbles and Stocks Surge After Trump Announces Deal With Iran.” Oil prices tumbling and stocks surging to record highs were also very welcome birthday presents— which suggests the markets believe the war has been good for us.

One reason for soaring market confidence might be that President Trump even called the New York Times to announce the deal in a voluntary 28-minute interview that he initiated. Trump seemed to understand that something more was needed than another signal of a potential deal.

“Speaking on his 80th birthday,” the Times reported, “as his family could be heard gathering in the background for a celebratory dinner,” the President told reporters that face-to-face meetings to finalize the agreement are expected to start on Friday in Switzerland. He thanked Presidents Xi (China) and Putin (Russia) for being “gentlemen” and not interfering with the American operation, and called out Israel’s President Netanyahu as “a very difficult guy.”

Trump also suggested that, if Iran fails to follow through, America would consider permanently policing the Middle East— in exchange for 20% of its total oil revenue. Whether he was serious or just trolling the Times is open for debate. (He admitted no Middle Eastern country had discussed it yet.)

The Times next said that the President reported the two countries are “still negotiating over whether Iran would suspend its enrichment for 20 years.” Trump hinted that “he might settle for a 15-year suspension, but did not want to negotiate via the press”— right after negotiating via the press.

At this point, nobody is foolhardy enough to predict that anything is actually over, since the nebulous ghosts of old unconsummated peace deals ebb and flow with the Persian Gulf tides. But most importantly, President Trump declared the Strait of Hormuz is now open for normal maritime traffic— a first since the “war” began.

Remember— the kinetic phase of the entire Iran “war” was compressed into the 60-day limit of the War Powers Act. It’s the opposite of an endless war. I’ll bet Michelle’s Tahoe that, sometime soon, corporate media experts will start complaining that it was never a “real” war to begin with. Sigh.

Apart from President Trump’s vague description, we don’t yet know any specific terms of “the Deal.” Democrats and the media, which so far have tried to characterize one of the shortest wars in human history as a “forever war,” are preparing to pivot to complaining that “Trump’s peace deal isn’t good enough.”

🔥 You could make a very strong argument that the deal’s terms are irrelevant. They are just the candles on America’s birthday cake. After only two months of fighting from the air, and with fewer casualties than Joe Biden racked up just in his catastrophic scramble to flee Afghanistan or in one drone assault against a Syrian base, Iran has been disciplined, its neighbors stand with America against it, and both its economy and its war aims have been set back 20 years, at least.

Meanwhile, the world’s global energy flows have been permanently restructured in America’s favor. OPEC’s monopoly —a thorn in our collective sides for our entire lives— has been broken and become a spent force. And now, this. Headline from Seeking Alpha, four days ago:

In other words, the world’s former embargo victim is now the swing export superpower— a structural reversal relative to the entire post-1973 energy system, and since long before the Iranian revolution in 1979.

In fact, even before 1973, the U.S. had never held the title of largest exporter. Ever.

One average index fund of U.S.-based global oil companies is up +67% in the last 12 months— with almost the entire increase accruing after the Iran “war” began:

No previous Middle Eastern war shock has ever directly catapulted U.S. producers into the position of top global exporter and sustained profit center. Not the eight-year Iraq war. Not the 20-year war in Afghanistan (the longest war in U.S. history). None produced sustained benefits for America.

And the Iranian conflict was the shortest major action of them all.

No matter how good (or bad) the peace deal’s terms are, the president’s critics will find a way to hate the result. But, and much more significantly, even without knowing a single agreed point, the markets are loving it— and they are the ones that matter, more than the talking-head experts and critics, for sure.

🔥 Let’s number the seven gifts of good fortune that President Trump received on his lucky birthday weekend:

1. The country threw him a spectacular birthday party on the White House lawn. Biden got a “private family brunch.”

2. Tumultuous weather drove off mostly peaceful protestors, but then broke at the last possible minute so the show could go on.

3. In the headline fight, the scrappy 6-to-1 American underdog won, despite being eight years older than the ranking UFC champion.

4. America’s soccer team crushed its first World Cup game before a wildly patriotic crowd after a losing streak going back to 2002, and captured its first 3-point margin since the Great Depression.

5. Trump’s hometown NBA team, the Knicks, broke a 53-year losing streak to win the championship, triggering ticker-tape parades and celebrations.

6. A peace deal with Iran came together— if not ending the conflict, at least bringing it closer to an end than anytime since it began.

7. The markets surged to new all-time highs, oil prices plunged, and America became the world’s top oil exporter for the first time in history.

Here at C&C, we have often observed that a lucky president is better than a smart president. A president that is both lucky and smart is a generational anomaly, a once-in-a-lifetime blessing that is remarkable both for its rare nature and its ability to shift the board in America’s favor for decades to follow.

🔥 Look back at those seven gifts and squint. A scrappy 37-year-old from Tucson, written off as past his peak, walks in as a 6-to-1 underdog and walks out a champion. An American team that hadn’t won like this since Herbert Hoover was in the White House hangs a four-spot on the favorites. A franchise that spent fifty-three years losing finally wins it all. Strip the names off the box scores and you’re not reading the sports page — you’re reading the autobiography of the country.

Because America has always been the underdog nobody booked to win. Two hundred and fifty years ago, a handful of farmers and printers and small-town lawyers sized up the most powerful empire on earth and decided the odds — far longer than 6-to-1 — were insulting. The smart money said the colonies were a lamb led to slaughter on the biggest stage in history. Justin Gaethje would’ve recognized the pregame coverage.

And here we are. Not past our peak. Thriving. OPEC spent. The energy map redrawn in our favor. The markets at record highs, the Strait open, the country the whole world had quietly filed under “former superpower” suddenly headlining its own birthday weekend like it had something to prove. Which, it turns out, it did.

Can I prove the President’s luck and the country’s fortunes are the same luck? No— I admitted that up top. It lives somewhere out past the fence line of conventional science, in the Twilight Zone where Providence keeps its appointment book.

But a lucky-and-smart president landing on the exact hinge of the nation’s 250th year, on his 80th birthday, the same weekend the underdog won three times, the war turned toward peace, and America became the world’s top energy exporter for the first time ever — the dots are right there. You don’t have to connect them. You just have to count them.

So happy birthday, Mr. President. And happy almost-birthday, America. Two old underdogs, both confidently written off with odds way worse than 6-to-1 — and both, against every last expert prediction, are just getting started.

Have a terrific Monday! Do not miss tomorrow’s terrific roundup, where I promise we’ll pick back up Saturday’s terrific threads and flesh out the profound Reckoning afflicting our wayward intelligence community. Don’t miss it.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

💉💉💉

The grand canyon between social media and corporate media is widening. Today’s roundup begins with a trip overseas to Radio Free Europe, which yesterday reported otherwise invisible news, “US Releases Information On Biolabs In Over 30 Countries, Including Ukraine.” You could call it Tulsi’s revenge.

Tulsi Gabbard resigned last month as Director of National Intelligence to care for her ill husband, but continues serving her through her notice period at the end of the month. Since the announcement, Tulsi has been on something of a disclosure tear, tying up all her loose plot points before packing up the office. (This has generated some not inconsiderable excitement about her possibly delivering the crown jewels —2020 elections disclosures— but it’s just buzz for now.)

It’s like a long narrative arc finally completed. As a civilian in 2022, Tulsi warned that the US built biolabs housing dangerous pathogens in Ukraine. This was during peak Russiagate, about two weeks after Russia’s February 22, 2022 invasion— and just days after Biden’s toadlike undersecretary Victoria Nuland admitted under duress during Congressional testimony that the U.S. was indeed “working with” Ukrainian biological research labs and was concerned Russia might try to seize them.

Within days of Tulsi’s relatively mild warning about US biolabs in Kiev, then-Senator Mitt Romney took the dog cage down off the roof of his car long enough to accuse Tulsi of a slew of crimes, including treason, Russian collusion, and probably using unlicensed surf wax.

Right after that, magically, for a reason that Biden’s Homeland Security team has never fully explained, Tulsi Gabbard was placed on the dreaded “Quad-S” travel watchlist, which made flying anywhere a nearly intolerable ordeal and required a security patdown that would make a gynecologist blush.

At this point, it’s worth recalling a then-unknown online sleuth with the handle @WarClandestine. He noticed, and wrote about, a curious fact— the very first Russian air strikes across Ukraine were all in cities where U.S.-linked biolabs existed.

In a long post dated February 24, 2022, Clandestine provided an over/under map, showing where the initial Russian strikes hit and where U.S. biolabs were located, sourced from publicly available information. The juxtaposition was striking:

For his trouble, the usual suspects gave him the old “swift and devastating takedown” treatment. Twitter suspended Clandestine’s account the next day, on February 25, 2022. Homeland Security’s Newswire doxxed him by name (Jacob Creech), sneered that he was a “wine bar manager” (not a Foggy Bottomed elite like them), and labeled him a “fringe QAnon figure.”

The Anti-Defamation League (perfectly consistently) defamed him as an “extremist.” The entire left-wing media’s defamation establishment piled on to this random low-follower account’s claim. E.g., Vice, April 2022:

To anyone paying attention, all that live fire from deep state allies and fake news media virtually guaranteed that Jacob Creech’s claims would eventually be proven to be materially correct. And so they have.

🚀 Creech wasn’t alone. The Russians have never hidden their belief in the labs. On March 11, 2022 —two weeks after the war started— Russia took its complaint to an emergency UN Security Council meeting, where it alleged that its forces had already found evidence of “US‑funded military biological programs” in Ukraine, including work on “biological weapons components.”

In the weeks that followed, the Russians showed the Security Council evidence like a Ukrainian email asking a Turkish drone manufacturer whether its products could “carry 20 liters of aerosolized payload to a range of 300 kilometers – putting them in range of a dozen major Russian cities.” They also provided a June 2019 guidance from Ukraine’s Public Health Ministry that insisted on secrecy —not exactly what you insist on when everything is on the up-and-up— and that required “serious” adverse incidents “including the death of the subjects” to be reported to US authorities within 24 hours.

Nothing says ‘routine public health’ like a 24-hour deadline to report when your subjects die. Either way, whatever secret biological development was happening in Ukraine was closely supervised by the U.S. and was also potentially fatal.

The Russians also claimed that Hunter Biden was deeply involved, through his investment firm Rosemont Seneca and his partnership with bio-research firm Metabiota. Hunter was, apparently, a master of time-management and multi-tasking, able to stay atop Burisma’s energy board management and a sprawling investment in Ukrainian biolabs, all while juggling various of- and under-aged hookers and crack. And misplacing laptops and coke baggies, but I digress. Nobody can do it all.

Moscow also accused the CDC, military contractor Black & Veatch, USAID, various Soros-affiliated NGOs, Biden’s Pentagon, and the U.S. Democrat party, which it said received “financial support for election campaigns,” and whose congressional members had an unusual addiction to taking recurring group junkets to scenic Kiev, Ukraine, a mysterious practice that continued through two years of war up until the re-election of President Trump.

I would also characterize those Democrat junkets as lucrative, but you get the idea.

The U.S., UK, and others dismissed Russian biolab complaints to the Security Council as disinformation and gaslighting. Biden’s State Department accused Moscow of “increasing the volume and intensity of its disinformation about biological weapons in an unsuccessful attempt to deflect attention from its invasion of Ukraine, to diminish international support for Ukraine, and to justify its unjustifiable war.”

After the un-Security Council ultimately said “meh” and dismissed Russian complaints, the Russians published their claims online. Two years later, in December 2024, Ukrainian special forces assassinated Russian General Igor Kirillov with a scooter bomb. (Don’t call it terrorism; that upsets peace-loving liberals.) Kirillov, who headed Russia’s nuclear and biological defenses, was coincidentally the same Russian officer who compiled and then publicly released all the claims about the biolabs, Hunter, and the Democrats. Now he’s dead.

Which brings us to current events.

💉 Yesterday, Tulsi Gabbard cemented Clandestine’s legacy as a key player in exposing the deep state’s worldwide, illegal bioweapons program. Clandestine became famous just by reading a couple of maps and connecting the dots. Yesterday, Tulsi released new declassified documents proving a whole sordid stack of bad actors were liars, from the bottom (Mitt Romney) to the top-heavy pinnacle (Vicky Nuland). And proving that Clandestine was right all along.

CLIP: Outgoing DNI Tulsi Gabbard announces gain-of-function labs in Ukraine (3:06).

For fairness, let’s briefly consider the pathetic excuses offered by the Deep State’s defenders. Remember, they originally denied the biolabs even existed. That argument has become untenable. So they now admit there were labs, but it was a good thing. Their new arguments fall into two categories:

1. The biolabs and their research were perfectly ordinary ones used to safeguard public health.

2. US funding only helped make the foreign facilities more secure.

Both arguments are easily disproven. For one thing, perfectly ordinary public health facilities don’t require secrecy or produce fatal adverse events in “subjects.” But there’s a lot more.

🚀 Welcome to the euphemistic-rich continent of bioweapons development. As you know, Democrats routinely do violence to vocabulary. We’ll never forget what they did with the word “vaccine,” and what they tried to do with “gain of function.” Wait till you see what they did to “bioweapons.”

In her clip, Tulsi explained that, after she was installed at ODNI, she turned agency resources toward collecting information about the biolabs— the same ones that Mitt Romney called “Russian Disinformation” and that got Tulsi put on the Quad-S travel blacklist.

“After months of searching through intelligence community holdings and files,” she said, “today I’m releasing new evidence of long-standing US government funding of more than 120 biolabs in over 30 countries.” Before you ask— yes, all 30 countries have lax regulations, legacies of official corruption, and long histories of dependency on USAID.

It’s not just routine bio-research. “Many of these U.S. government-funded biolabs are currently or have previously engaged in research using hazardous and highly contagious pathogens, in some cases to include dangerous Gain-of-Function research, with very little visibility or oversight.”

“Politicians and so-called health professionals like Dr. Fauci” —I love how she modified health professionals with so-called— “and entities within the Biden administration’s national security team lied to the American people about the existence of U.S.-funded and supported biolabs, and threatened those who attempted to expose the truth.”

Lies and threats. That’s the sitting ODNI accusing top government officials of malfeasance. It made history. The only comparable incident I could find was Tulsi’s own July 2025 release that accused Obama’s national security team of manufacturing the Russia-collusion intelligence narrative.

Tulsi is systematically dismantling the 2016-2024 intelligence establishment narrative. Which is probably why the corporate media quietly nudged the whole story behind the break room fridge with its Birkenstocked foot.

The documents Tulsi published yesterday list the types of pathogens found stored in the Ukrainian labs. I’ll leave it to you to say whether these are “ordinary” veterinary research subjects: “Anthrax, tularemia, tuberculosis, Swine Fever, Newcastle Disease, hantavirus, MERS, SARS, Marburg, Ebola, Lassa, the Plague, Rickettsia, etc.”

That Devil’s inventory of the worst diseases in human history makes the sufferings that flew out of Pandora’s Box look like a warm-up act. You can understand the Russians’ concern about Ukrainian interest in drones that can carry 20 liters of “aerosolized material” for 300 km, or Kiev’s 2019 guidance calling for “secrecy” and the immediate reporting of fatal adverse events among “subjects.”

Calling that terrifying, Sum-of-All-Fears pathogen list “ordinary veterinary research” is like calling a nuclear missile silo “a tool shed.” Any geopolitical thriller writer can connect those dots with a single cup of coffee. Where is Tom Clancy when we need him?

Finally, let’s shred the stupidest shell game of them all: biopreparedness. To skirt US laws and international restrictions on bioweapons development, the DoD and its allies kept on doing gain-of-function research but, re-labeled it as threat reduction, vaccine development, and pandemic avoidance.

The game is to genetically engineer some horrible disease like Marburg so it can infect humans more easily. Then they make a vaccine for their own genetically engineered virus and call it pandemic research. Then, using rhetorical gymnastics that would make Orwell leap out of his grave shouting I told you so!, they redefined their whole foul project as “public health.”

The underlying trick was always the same: make the bug more dangerous, then insist you were only trying to protect everyone from the dangerous bug you just made. It’s that episode in The Office where Dwight locks all the doors and starts a fire to help prepare his co-workers for a “real” fire.

Tulsi never had to say bioweapon. That was the point. The word hovered over her whole statement, buzzing like a drone with a 20-liter payload, a sprayer attachment, and a USAID grant application.

🚀 If you watch Tulsi’s announcement clip, you’ll hear how carefully she used her words. She didn’t call anything criminal. She didn’t announce any DOJ referrals. She just … put it out there. So— now what?

Well, first of all, the ODNI’s investigation continues. “DNI Gabbard issued new guidance to the Intelligence Community directing increased collection on these laboratories and facilities overseas,” the official press release said.

But second— consider what Tulsi’s disclosure means for the Russians.

It hands Russia a diplomatic blowtorch. Moscow can now say: We told the UN. You called it propaganda. Now even the U.S. intelligence chief admits U.S.-funded labs existed, stored dangerous pathogens, had secrecy rules, and raised legitimate national-security concerns.

It retroactively validated Moscow’s long-dismissed concerns. Not necessarily every Russian claim. But it makes them all much more plausible. It nearly justifies the invasion. Who wouldn’t strongly react to, “there are U.S.-supported dangerous-pathogen labs all over our border.” Imagine similar Chinese labs ‘closely studying’ Ebola in northern Mexico along the Rio Grande. Along with spraying drones. For purely veterinary purposes.

Of course, corporate media would have called anyone who complained about those hypothetical Chinese labs a racist conspiracy theorist. But sane people would have insisted the government do something about them.

And so, Tulsi’s disclosures also make the corporate media look even more corrupt, if that’s possible. Once again, corporate media is shown to have called truth disinformation and slandered innocent people like Clandestine, who’ve finally been proven to have been right. We really don’t hate the fake news media nearly enough.

Whatever else it might be, Tulsi’s disclosure is an olive branch to Moscow. Now nobody can call the invasion completely “unprovoked aggression.” There was provocation. That’s a significant shift in Russia’s direction. Where it’s all going remains to be seen.

But I would draw your attention to the next story.

🚀🚀🚀

Speaking of moves in Russia’s direction, yesterday the New York Times reported this nearly miraculous story, one so all-around encouraging that I’ll reprint the headline in full:

For conservatives who’ve pined for the US to get out of NATO, this was real progress. Iit’s also progress for Russia. Moscow, which was rejected for NATO membership after the Soviet Union fell, has come to view NATO as its primary regional problem.

The Times sourced the story on a private memo from early this month addressed to NATO leaders, “parts of which were reviewed by The New York Times.” It’s not just fighter jets. “Stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe,” War Secretary Hegseth told NATO bosses in February.

True, the newly disclosed memo calls for American F-15s staged in Europe to be drawn down from 150 to 100. It also cuts maritime reconnaissance aircraft from 26 to 15 and deletes all eight in-flight refueling tankers. It removes a missile sub and an aircraft carrier, along with its escort fleet. And it “reallocates two bomber groups previously assigned for Europe’s defense.”

CLIP: Fox News reports on NATO drawdown plans (1:49).

That’s a whole lot more than mean tweets. That’s a significant force reduction, and it comes right as the Europeans are losing their minds, hyperventilating in one emergency meeting after another over their dark fantasies of Russian ground invasions marching down the Champs-Élysées.

“These details,” the Times helpfully explained, “provide the clearest picture yet of the extent to which the Trump administration intends to reduce its commitment to NATO.” Nothing in the article suggested this potential drawdown is an endpoint, either. And it’s coming fast: “American officials indicated it will take effect very soon — far earlier than European counterparts had been preparing for.”

The Europeans are losing their minds. Headline from yesterday’s UK Independent:

The funniest part is that this is the same Russia that corporate media has spent four years describing as militarily exhausted, economically shattered, sanctioned, technologically backward, diplomatically isolated, and barely able to conquer eastern Ukraine. But now, somehow, the same shriveled-up bear is supposedly ready to march on NATO in 36 months.

Pick a lane, dummies! Either Russia is a collapsing gas station with nukes, or it is Sauron with a side quest. It cannot be both, at least not outside of corporate media doublethink.

Combined, this morning’s first two stories look less like a coincidence and more like a strategic inflection point. Tulsi’s disclosure handed Moscow a near-apology: your biolab concerns were not crazy after all. The NATO pullback sends Moscow a concrete security signal: Washington is de-escalating.

Neither move says “peace deal” in print. But both move together, in the same direction— away from the Proxy War and toward some kind of de facto resolution between the US and Russia. And it might even be moving toward a much bigger global realignment.

But that wasn’t the last of this week’s connectable dots. Sadly, I’m out of time, even though I’ve first-drafted the next two dots to connect. Where’s Tom Clancy when we need him? The trouble is, he’s a fiction writer and wouldn’t have had to make any of this up. The rest of the dots connect Monday.

Have a wonderful weekend! Get back here on Monday morning for Part 2 and for more essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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I told you this was a bigger story than they realized at first. Yesterday, the New York Times reported, “Postal Service Issues Proposal to Block Mail Ballots in States That Don’t Turn Over Data.” The story referred to a new rule proposed last week by the U.S. Postal Service (but only covered now, since Democrats have realized the risk) that would require states to provide lists of eligible voters, along with unique barcodes, so that mail-in ballots can be processed and delivered. To the Democrats, this is a completely crazy idea that will literally destroy democracy itself. And it’s fascist.

Specifically, Democrats and voting-rights NGOs claim the proposed rules are “clear evidence that the Trump administration is trying to unconstitutionally intrude on state-run elections.” Wait till you see how much sheer, unadulterated panic this created. Plus, it would be too hard —“expensive, cumbersome and chaotic to comply”— with only 150 days until the midterms.

For years, we have been told over and over that mail-in voting is the most secure, flawless, and utterly perfect system ever devised by mankind. It is so secure, in fact, that even questioning it makes you a dangerous conspiracy theorist, a threat to democracy, and probably someone who enjoys fish pizza. But the moment the federal government says, “Okay, great, let’s just add a little barcode and a checkoff list to make sure these highly secure ballots are going to actual, living, eligible voters,” the Democrats react as if someone just suggested replacing the Statue of Liberty with a giant gold-plated statue of Donald J. Trump.

Behold! A Democrat ticker-tape parade of doom: Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read thundered, “This would deny eligible people the right to vote. Full stop.” Maine’s Secretary of State Shenna Bellows bellowed that, if courts side with Trump, you will see a virtual elimination of mail-in voting.” (We can but dream.) California’s Deputy AG Michael Cohen told a federal court that “it’s just difficult to overstate the disruption that this will cause to election administration.” Senator Alex Padilla of California —who as a former secretary of state called questioning mail-in ballots “unconscionable”— warned that “tens of millions of eligible voters could be prevented from voting by mail.” And the National Association of Letter Carriers union president Brian Renfroe prophesied that Trump’s Postal Service will “completely refuse to deliver mail ballots or other election mail.”

Virtual elimination! Tens of millions disenfranchised! Total refusal! Dogs and cats, living together! I did not make any of this up. These are actual quotes from one hysterical article. There were more.

But the truly hilarious part was that the Times acknowledged the elephant in the room. The story claimed without citing evidence that “Republicans have been convinced by Mr. Trump’s unfounded claims that mail balloting is not reliable and invites fraud.” In other words, half of the country distrusts the mail-in ballot system and believes Democrat postmen might throw their untracked ballots away.

You would think that a political party claiming to care deeply about “our democracy” would be thrilled to implement a simple, technology-based tracking system that would provide a reassuring pressure valve for half of the country.

Amazon can tell you which front porch your salted peanut clusters were delivered to (along with a picture!), but a barcode on a ballot? Never.

If nothing else, better tracking would resolve the massive, festering trust problem within our democratic institutions. But no. The prospect of actually verifying who gets a ballot has induced a level of unbridled hysteria on the left that is usually reserved for when a conservative tries to speak on an Ivy League campus.

The Times quoted a totally unbiased and neutral “former USPS Board of Governors Vice Chair” —the Times’s description— named Anton Hajjar, who told CNN, “If proper postage is paid on a mail piece, the USPS should deliver it. It’s that simple. The proposed rule says it’s not regulating elections— but that’s what, in effect, it’s doing.”

Anton Hajjar. “Former USPS official.” Sounds super authoritative and totally neutral, right? Just another concerned, non-partisan postal bureaucrat who merely wants to ensure that your notice of proposed property tax increase doesn’t arrive until weeks after the vote.

But, in typical Times fashion, that wasn’t exactly the whole truth.

A quick look at his actual background reveals that Hajjar (who, it turns out, spent his entire career as a far-left labor lawyer) is the former head counsel for the American Postal Workers Union— an AFL-CIO affiliate widely considered the most left-leaning of all postal unions. He was nominated to the USPS Board by Joe Biden (or the Autopen, we aren’t sure) specifically to be a pro-union, anti-conservative voice.

So, when the Times fronted Anton Hajjar, they weren’t quoting any old neutral “former official.” They were quoting a partisan, far-left-wing, TDS-afflicted labor lawyer. It’s exactly the same as quoting any other Democrat. But the Times didn’t mention that. They just presented him as a nonpartisan expert— classic corporate media sleight of hand.

🔥 But there was an inconvenient buried lede the Times tried to wave away. The article mentioned, practically in passing, that the USPS’s proposed new barcode and tracking system was considered “best practices for mail voting” by Tammy Patrick, the chief programs officer at Election Center, a non-profit that serves election officials across the country.

Tammy noted that some large counties in Arizona and Colorado are already using ballot envelopes with barcodes, designed exactly the same way as the USPS is now proposing. In other words, the “unprecedented, catastrophic, democracy-ending” technology the Democrats are screaming about is something that responsible election jurisdictions have been quietly using for years. The only thing unprecedented here is the Democrats’ reaction to being asked to do what good election administrators are already doing without, apparently, wrecking democracy.

Here’s the summary: The USPS just wants to use simple barcodes to track ballots against approved lists— which is already considered the best practice. Half of America distrusts the current system, and better tracking would go a long way toward fixing that. The Democrats, who insist the current system is perfectly secure and Must Not Be Interfered With,™ are screaming that tracking ballots will literally destroy democracy. And corporate media is platforming union lawyers disguised as “former officials” to tell you why you shouldn’t be allowed to know who is getting a ballot in the mail.

I can’t see the Supreme Court upholding a judicial injunction that would prevent this commonsense upgrade. So. I predict it will take effect, despite Democrat hysteria. And maybe even before the midterms.

Next, I bet you won’t believe the same news cycle linked mail-in voting to homeless NGO fraud. Well, get ready.

🔥🔥🔥

Yesterday, the New York Times reported, “Trump Suspends Funding for Los Angeles Homeless Agency.” The subheadline dramatically declared, “Mayor Karen Bass warned that people will lose their lives.” Contradicting its own headline, the cover photo’s caption explained, “Scott Turner, the housing secretary, said his agency would not fund what he called the ‘corrupt failure’ of Los Angeles’s homelessness efforts.” In other words, it was Secretary Turner, not Trump. But never mind. Why be accurate when there’s a good narrative handy?

The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA) has received an eye-watering $1 billion in federal money over the past five years. The article reported that Los Angeles has gotten more federal homelessness funding than any other jurisdiction in the country, while it has “misspent millions of dollars and failed to properly account for its spending.”

The Reckoning™ has arrived and wants a word.

“There has been widespread criticism of LAHSA’s spending,” the Times admitted, “even from those who believe in its philosophical approach.” LA County officials, the article reported, have themselves pulled $300 million from LAHSA, and built their own department, because the agency had become “unwieldy” and “mired in various layers of bureaucracy.”

This story included one final, but wonderful, example of its low journalistic standards. Even after acknowledging that LAHSA is poorly run, has misspent millions, been reviled in probe after probe, failed audits, and that even liberal LA County has pulled its funding, the Times still quoted exactly zero people agreeing that pulling its federal funding was necessary or even just logical. It was just another Trump temper tantrum. Times readers are the least informed people on the planet.

CLIP: Fox News report on defunding LAHSA (1:58).

It’s almost like there’s some reason progressives want to keep the money spigot on despite all the waste, fraud, and abuse.

🔥 Well, the silver lining is that LA’s homeless population apparently has a strong sense of civic participation. Unlike nearly anywhere else on earth, LA’s underpass dwellers vote in surprisingly large numbers.

Even more interesting, LAHSA maintains a dedicated “Vote” page that teaches its grant-funded service providers how to ‘register unhoused clients”— unhoused meaning, drug-addled or outright crazy. Even while experiencing homelessness, you can still vote!, the official homeless services website explains. I did not make that up.

They can still vote— and not just in person. They can be homeless and still conveniently vote by mail. Your government at work!

LAHSA’s website explains that homeless folks can just use cross streets as a residence, and shelters or even agency offices as mailing addresses. It encourages same‑day registration at vote centers. Activist groups publish primers for their workers on how to get drug-addled homeless people signed up. And lest you laugh too hard at Los Angeles, the federal government is also peddling homeless voting at Vote.gov, which is just as ridiculous:

You don’t need a home to vote. Apparently, you don’t need an apartment, car, tent, or even a shopping cart with a broken wheel to vote, either.

“If you do not have a fixed home address to get mail,” the federal Vote.gov page advises, “you can use a different address as your mailing address. You can use a description of the place where you live or sleep as your home address, such as a park or the intersections of street corners.” You can just say, “here,” or “Frank’s backyard.” Just put any old thing.

What is conspicuously missing from these websites is any rationale for why people who can’t hold a job, get a credit card or open a bank account, or keep themselves off the streets, should still have the legal capacity to vote. I’m sure there is a good rationale, but I just can’t think of it. Nor can I think of a reason for putting up thoroughly detailed, step-by-step websites teaching homeless people how to vote more easily by mail.

Like me, you are probably wondering: how are the homeless even getting onto these websites to read this advice?!?! There’s a simple answer. Through NGOs. Here is another, different federal government website, the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness, dated from the Biden era, which also teaches NGOs how to register the homeless and help them vote. Helpfully, the guide can even be viewed in Arabic and Tagalog!

Isn’t that nice? The multi-language feature is for selfless, giving people who just got here but want to start helping out even before their citizenship issues are sorted out. I help you, you help me.

I don’t know how many of these taxpayer-funded, homeless-NGO-advising websites there are in total, but I think it’s a lot.

🔥 It is a vast, interconnected, byzantine bureaucracy purportedly reflecting empathy, but which never seems able to actually reduce homelessness. But the one thing it is good at is registering people who can’t think straight to vote. LAHSA can’t find the money, the receipts, or the homeless. But it has never once lost a voter registration form.

Here is a handy-dandy guide to just the parts we can see:

Now, I can tell what you’re probably thinking. You’re probably thinking this whole thing is really a giant, fantastically expensive vote-buying, ballot-harvesting operation. You’re probably thinking, when stacks of mail-in ballots arrive at local outreach centers (which the homeless have used at their mailing address), there is no conceivable way that the highly motivated office staff are heading out to highway overpasses and beggars’ corners to personally deliver ballots.

You are probably also skeptical that the highly motivated homeless people somehow become telepathically aware the instant the ballots arrive, and head right down to the services center to make sure their votes get filled out and returned in time.

Obviously, the homeless and only the homeless are filling out those ballots. How dare you insinuate that center staff are too lazy to go looking for homeless and just fill out the ballots themselves. And look here— the federal website for providers even teaches providers to “educate” the homeless about who to vote for. Wait! Sorry! I meant, provide them with non-partisan information about both sides of the complex issues surrounding the funding of public charities, of course:

So, just the part we can see shows federal taxpayer funds —billions— are used to “educate, encourage, and help homeless vote.” If that’s not a taxpayer-funded ballot harvesting operation for progressives, then I live under an overpass with a pack of wild dogs.

Local and off-year elections are determined by very small margins. After the polls closed, late entrant Nithya Raman was losing so badly she gave supporters what everyone thought was a concession speech. But in the week following the election, around 3,000 more ballots for Raman than Pratt came in. Just three thousand. LA’s homeless population is estimated over 72,000. In other words, you’d only need around 4% of the homeless to put Ms. Raman Noodle over the top.

They’re obviously not helping get homeless off the streets. The homeless population gets bigger every year. But they are helping the homeless vote. It’s right on the United States’ own website. It’s the one metric of success. More homeless are registering and voting than ever.

But here’s the thing. When the USPS barcode rule kicks in, we’ll be able to see that homeless ballots aren’t coming from Frank’s backyard, but from a single homeless center, all on the same day. And any ballot that does come from a cross-street will be returned to sender.

I wonder whether the Trump Administration is aware of these homeless-voting websites on federal servers. Somebody should make sure.

Have a fantastic Friday! Return tomorrow morning, for our Weekend Edition roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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If there was a single issue that most rankled and annoyed ordinary Americans, even more than open borders or forever wars, it was the incomparably irksome D.E.I., the first in a series of progressive slogans so onerously periphrastic they require acronyms. “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” fooled no one; it was just more leftist wordplay, a sneaky shibboleth that actually meant its mirror opposite: uniformity, unfairness, and rejection.

Specifically, in reality, DEI means uniformity of thought and speech, patent unfairness that a below-average fourth grader could spot from across the cafeteria, and the rejection of everyone who actually worked hard and earned their position. Most annoying of all, perhaps, was the smug conceit of the so-called “DEI Experts,” a moblike class of overpaid mids who hectored us to the brink of insanity with unintelligible progressive buzzwords and meaningless slogans like “allyship.”

They infested our jobs with the most offensive and absurd “DEI training” materials beyond anything George Orwell could possibly have imagined. And they otherwise basked their grotesque, body-positive selves in broad daylight for the last several decades.

Before we start, to keep things straight, here is a handy guide to DEI buzzwords that I have compiled:

• Allyship — complying without complaining

• Doing the work — agreeing faster

• Holding space — sitting quietly while being scolded

• Lived experience — an unlikely and unverifiable personal anecdote, but load-bearing

• Other ways of knowing — confidently not knowing

• Calling in (vs. calling out) — calling someone out while smiling

• Safe space — a separated space excluding you (who are the danger)

• Centering marginalized voices — the meeting has a new chairman

• Unpacking — what academics do instead of getting back to work

• Problematize — to discover a problem though none was reported

• Equity lens — special glasses that can find racial disparities in a takeout menu

• Positionality statement — virtue-signaling before the land acknowledgment

• Land acknowledgment — admitting the theft while keeping the land

• Cultural humility — humility, but billed hourly at confiscatory rates

• Restorative practices — like detention, but more boring and with a confession circle

As its cachet has boiled off —slowly at first, and then all at once— DEI tried to change its outfit, a sort of political looksmaxxing, by adding letters. DEI tested DEIB (belonging), and some institutions even went with JEDI (justice, equity, diversity, inclusion), until objections were raised that the term was problematic because Jedi —i.e., made-up sci-fi characters— are “inappropriately religious,” and anyway, too many Star Wars characters are white. That objection appeared in Scientific American. It even complained about phallic lightsabers. You can’t make this stuff up.

🔥 Well, my friends, during last year (the Year of Preparation), we were gratified to see the Trump Administration eject DEI from the federal government and pick fights with a small batch of wealthy, high-profile Ivy League universities (like Harvard) over their affirmative-action admissions policies. But 2026 is the Year of Action. So it’s time for a DEI update. Much has happened recently, and almost none of it has been reported anywhere near the level it deserves, especially given that until ten minutes ago, DEI was the basic operating system for the worst of our two major political parties.

Seriously, it is farcical how coldly corporate media is ignoring the biggest revolution in race and gender relations since the Civil Rights era. You’ll see that I had to source most of this story from legal journals and HR advisory newsletters.

Anyway, keep this in mind: The Administration’s most brilliant strategy was redefining DEI as itself discriminatory and reviving the concept of “merit-based” hiring as the solution— a blueprint first outlined in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. Prepare to receive bushels of delicious fruit that are now maturing from the original crop.

🔥 Two days ago, CBS became the first and only corporate media platform to report the terrific news, “DOJ finds EEOC violated civil rights laws with guidelines that pressured employers to make race-based decisions.” This game-changing development was the direct result of Executive Order 14281, issued by President Trump over a year ago in April 2025, which directed federal agencies to eliminate the use of disparate impact liability “to the maximum degree possible.”

In other words, terminate it with prejudice.

Did you ever wonder where the bizarre idea came from that, if a school disciplines black students at higher rates than white students, the fix is to stop punishing black students? It sprang from a mind-numbing lefty buzzword called “disparate impact.” This is the same illogic that allows fire chiefs to be sued when female applicants are required to carry as much equipment as male applicants, and that holds if fewer black people have good credit scores, mortgage companies must stop using credit scores to decide whether to give loans (or, just give more loans to black folks and avoid the question in the first place). Hello, 2008 mortgage crisis!

In other words, “disparate impact analysis” flipped the traditional civil rights goal from preventing intentional bigotry to ensuring a statistically equivalent outcome. It was installed throughout America without Congress passing any law, or even a president issuing an executive order. It was first smuggled in through a terrible 1971 Supreme Court decision, which metastasized into dozens or hundreds of rules from various administrative agencies. Around 1990, in an effort to address the damage caused by the disastrous policy, Congress codified a version of disparate impact in Title VII and other statutes.

By the time President Trump took office for his second term, “disparate impact” was not just a goal or suggestion, but a mandate frozen in carbonite. Businesses were required to avoid statistical outcomes that produced different results for different races or genders, or face government Stormtroopers weilding devastating lawsuits.

Outside of schools, the litigation threat posed by disparate impact cases to everyday American companies came from the so-called “Equal Employment Opportunity Commission” (EEOC). I refer to it as so-called because it has traded “equality” for “fairness,” and replaced “equal opportunity” with “equal outcome.” (At least the acronym still works.)

Yesterday, Trump’s DOJ (now under the leadership of Acting AG Todd Blanche) pulled the carpet out from under the entire edifice, from the original SCOTUS decision to the forest of follow-on rules to the laws actually passed by Congress. It did this in a single document.

🔥 CBS’s story began: “The Justice Department on Tuesday accused the EEOC of violating federal civil rights laws by issuing guidelines that effectively pressured employers to make race-based considerations in hiring and promotions.” The “disparate impact rules,” DOJ said, “are unconstitutional.”

“The fundamental problem,” the DOJ’s opinion letter explained, “is that disparate-impact liability tends to incent — and even coerce — employers to make race-based decisions, to avoid liability or the threat of liability.” It got specific: “Employers can now use tools such as aptitude tests, criminal background checks and other metrics without fear that they could face discrimination claims based solely on the impact those tools may have.”

“Despite trying to promote equality, EEOC’s disparate impact liability interpretation under Title VII actually fosters the very discrimination its guidelines seek to address,” explained Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. “This opinion will now allow businesses to hire based on performance, restoring equal opportunities in the American workplace,” he added.

The DOJ’s newest opinion attacked the plethora of agency rules—including EEOC’s—using recent Supreme Court law on non-delegation and the major questions doctrine. It attacked the 1990s-era changes to Title VII and other statutes as either facially unconstitutional or vague. It basically rejected wholesale an ocean of prior law, practice, and an X-wing fighter fleet of long-standing corporate HR policies.

In terms of its structural impact on American civil‑rights enforcement, this is potentially enormous— a wrecking ball on the order of the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions, which struck down race-based college admissions, but this time for employment law. It rolls civil rights liability rules back to pre-1971 standards— a time where disparate impact statistics were merely a potential basis for evidence, rather than de-facto proof of illegal discriminatory intent.

Better, the entire federal government just lost its ability to “nudge” employers toward DEI. This restores real equal opportunity, for everyone, and lets employers once again hire based on performance, not skin color. Nobody knows how big the economic benefit to the nation’s productivity might be for letting companies fill positions with the best-qualified people.

Best of all, this flips the script. Companies that continue to use disparate impact analysis in their hiring and promotion policies are now the ones at risk from EEOC lawsuits. And as we’ll see, the DOJ can use the same disparate impact logic against DEI holdouts as evidence they aren’t following the rules.

Now is the time to remind you that this progress is great, necessary, and welcome, but it can be rolled right back by the next Democrat president. That’s why the next few election cycles are critical, and we can’t afford to fall asleep at the switch.

🔥 The fact that corporate media largely ignored the disparate impact story instead of squealing like prodded pigs is, perhaps, the best news of all. They are squashing the story because they realize that a majority of Americans are sick of the whole DEI grift, along with its clone armies of race-hustling advocates.

But there’s so much more. An unreported War On DEI is underway. The front line is already large and continues to expand. The Trump Administration is ripping DEI out of American life, root and branch. Here are a few example stories from the last month or so that you probably never heard of. A clear pattern is emerging. It’s just happening outside the corporate media bubble.

Our first example popped up last week in HR Grapevine, headlined “Employers warned as DOJ offers incentives to DEI whistleblowers.” In his first week in office last year, President Trump signed a series of executive orders purging DEI from federal offices, and —here’s the big one— requiring anyone who contracts with the federal government to certify “anti-discriminatory hiring practices.”

Last year, the DEI Industrial Complex became terrified after the Justice Department established a new task force to investigate federal contractors for alleged violations of the False Claims Act— meaning, falsely claiming to have complied with their anti-discrimination duties.

Well, the task force has stopped studying and has begun acting. “We’re already seeing the wheels in motion,” three employment lawyers reported at a recent Harvard Law conference. “The DOJ is trawling actively for complainants and whistleblowers.” David Glasgow, Executive Director of NYU Law’s DEI center said, “We’ll see more whistleblower actions given that the DOJ is strongly encouraging them.”

Strongly encouraging is one way of putting it. Under the False Claims Act, the DOJ can and has offered to pay whistleblowers up to 25% of any recovery for bringing cases. “Knowing that any employee in their business could take it upon themselves to sue means that organizational leaders have an incentive to be cautious,” Glasgow said, stating the obvious.

Twenty-five percent could be a lot. In late April, legal mag JD Supra reported, “$17 Million False Claims Act Settlement is Cautionary Tale for Federal Contractors with Diversity Initiatives.” In April, the DOJ brought its first lawsuit against a company for DEI violations under the False Claims Act. Twenty-five percent of $17 million would be (checks math) $4.25 million.

The DOJ’s target was high-profile: International Business Machines (IBM). The result: IBM coughed up $17 million almost immediately after the DOJ filed the lawsuit. The DOJ had alleged that, since 2019, IBM gave management bonuses for meeting race, sex, and gender hiring targets. In other words, quotas, driven by disparate impact analysis.

It almost seems unfair. For 25 years, companies were threatened by progressives if they didn’t discriminate in favor of preferred progressive voting blocs. Now it’s been flipped back around, and they’re being threatened if they did discriminate like Democrats wanted them to. Heads, we win. Tails, you lose.

“DEI programs,” the article blandly stated, “are particularly susceptible to False Claims Act scrutiny.” Then it added, “more high-profile settlements seem likely.”

Likely? How about certain.

🔥 There are so many similar stories working their way through the trade media. Here are a few sample headlines to make the point. First up, headline from Axios, just over a week ago:

In a press release, DOJ officials said secret videos taken by a conservative activist group showed that “Arizona State University denied equal treatment to students based on race, color, or national origin—while attempting to hide its discriminatory practices from federal scrutiny.” In one of the videos, an ASU DEI coordinator told a student the school had to strip words like “diversity” from the names of centers and programs, but don’t worry, “it isn’t changing the work.”

🔥 In our next example, three days ago, the New York Post reported that the DOJ is moving far beyond the Ivy League, drilling down to the level of public school districts:

In this story, DOJ announced a “new front,” investigating four California public school districts, for teaching students about sexual orientation and gender ideology under the disguise of “LGBTQ history and social studies” while failing to notify parents.

“Further, each of these school districts appears to have implemented policies that mean students may unknowingly share sex-segregated bathrooms and locker rooms with the opposite sex, and biological males are allowed to compete on girls’ sports teams,” the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division chief Harmeet Dhillon explained.

Do not overlook the message this sends to every other goofy school district transing their girls’ sports and private areas.

🔥 Next, in April, the Missouri Independent published this encouraging headline above a story about DOJ suing a High School Sports Association— over denying a board position to white applicants:

The lawsuit focuses on a 2004 policy that reserved two seats on the association’s 10-member board of directors for “candidates representing the under-represented gender of the current board or an under-represented ethnicity.”

According to the organization’s lawyer, it created the 2004 policy after noticing a “striking pattern” that the board, with one exception, had never had “a minority or female board member.” In other words, disparate impact.

Last year, a white high-school district supervisor tried to run for one of the two reserved board seats and was summarily rejected. Cue the lawsuit. “Racial and sexual quotas are offensive, demeaning — and most importantly, illegal,” Civil Rights AG Dhillon, who seems to be everywhere these days, explained. “They are especially harmful when they exclude qualified candidates such as Superintendent Dr. Merlyn Johnson from public service.”

🔥 The feds are not finished with the Ivy League. Things are just getting more granular. About two weeks ago, Stat News reported that the DOJ was pursuing another “disparate impact” case, this time at Yale’s and UCLA’s medical schools:

In 2023, SCOTUS decided Students for Fair Admissions, which prohibited so-called “affirmative action” in college admission decisions. The DOJ is now accusing Yale and UCLA of stealthily taking their affirmative action programs underground. As evidence, the DOJ cited statistics showing lower average MCAT scores for black admissions than for white or asian admission.

In delicious irony, Stat reported that, “In targeting diversity initiatives, the Trump administration has embraced ‘disparate impact theory.’” Haha! Now they’re using scare quotes around ‘disparate impact theory.’

Yale and UCLA are baffled. After all, America doesn’t need the smartest medical students. What America needs most is DEI doctors. Cue eye roll.

🔥 Trust me, there are many more. But we’ll conclude today’s roundup with this story from last month, which was reported in Payments Dive, a trade mag for electronic payments processors:

Payment processing giant PayPal fell into the DOJ’s crosshairs over a 2020 “diversity investment fund,” which earmarked $530 million for “investments in Black and minority businesses.” Under the new settlement, PayPal will waive transaction fees for a billion dollars of transactions processed for small businesses in the manufacturing, technology, veteran-owned, and farming industries. (The net cost to PayPal is calculated at around $30 million.)

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said in the DOJ’s press release announcing the settlement that, “American corporations are on notice: you will face our aggressive enforcement if you use race or national origin to discriminate against qualified Americans.”

🔥 I hope you can begin to see the contours of DOJ’s broad anti-DEI strategy. All last year, beginning with Trump’s first week in office, the DOJ prepared the foundation for a vast anti-DEI crackdown, which is now underway and going full steam ahead. Best of all, corporate media is uncharacteristically quiet about the whole thing. They know it’s a losing issue.

Actually, the preparations for this massive effort started even before Trump’s first week in office. Over the last few years, the Supreme Court has issued a series of decisions reining in administrative agency powers and, in 2023, declared “affirmative action” to be unconstitutional in college admissions.

Consider that Heritage’s Project 2025 carefully built this strategy during the Biden years. Now it is in play, and the DOJ, in a flurry of furious activity, is actively ripping the DEI thumb from the scales, everywhere: the federal government, state governments, colleges, high schools, public schools, and now private businesses.

All Democrats —who are distracted by dozens of polycrisis problems— seem able to do is hunker down, try to wait it out, and avoid further inflaming an already aggravated public. Our job —yours and mine— is to make sure Republicans cement these changes into permanent law.

Who’s with me?

🔥🔥🔥

Even though I reported this week’s happy news that election reform is still moving forward under Plan B (and through postal service reforms over mail-in ballot handling), the SAVE America Act is not necessarily a dead letter. And the frustrated media doesn’t know whether it’s Plan A, Z, or even a plan at all. Within one 24-hour news cycle, Fox reported, “Trump’s SAVE America Act shows signs of life in the Senate despite Republican revolt.” And then Newsweek reported, “Trump’s SAVE Act plan for midterms is slipping away.”

“It will pass,” Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) said on the Senate floor recently. But, “Everybody knows it’s not gonna pass,” Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) responded to reporters.

Yesterday, President Trump submitted a new $350 billion military funding package that includes the SAVE America Act —it’s baaaack!— which requires proof of citizenship to register and a legitimate photo ID to vote in federal elections. He tweeted that he wants Republicans to pass it, for real this time:

Unless the Senate parliamentarian rules it out of order, a budget reconciliation bill like this can pass with 50 votes instead of 60— entirely bypassing the silent filibuster. It’s up to one unelected parliamentarian and three wayward Republicans.

The Senators must be feeling a sense of deja vu. Just a few days ago, the SAVE America Act failed to pass in a similar budget reconciliation bill, which was aimed at funding ICE and Border Patrol through 2027. Four Republicans defected and joined Democrats in stripping out the SAVE Act. (Though mercifully, the ICE-funding part passed.) Antique Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) complained, “Nothing is more important than defeating this dagger to the heart of our democracy. It’s one of the most despicable pieces of legislation I’ve come across.” Cry harder, Chuck.

But despite the SAVE Act failing on Monday, Trump is already ready to try again. Twice in one week. You might call him relentless.

But why? What’s changed? For one thing, the LA mayoral race controversy has platformed one of the most obvious cases of rampant voter fraud, since (allegedly) LA’s homeless, drug-addled Skid Row population voted in greater rates than its productive citizens. Though Spencer Pratt has been robbed of his chance to run against incumbent Karen “Globetrotter” Bass —which nobody denies would at best be a long shot in LA— a furious national conversation is underway, and brand-new political permission structures now suddenly exist that didn’t four days ago,

And so, two days later, the White House is back. The President is seated at the SAVE America table again. The corporate media keeps quoting frantic Democrats who claim the ID requirement is intended to “disenfranchise minority voters”— voters who somehow navigate modern life without driver’s licenses, passports, birth certificates, or other forms of official ID.

Meanwhile, voter ID is another 80/20 issue, with the vast majority of Americans approving.

I don’t know what will happen with the SAVE Act. Nobody does. There is no consensus over whether it’s even possible. Predictions are more harmful than useful. The Newsweek story suggested that, even if it doesn’t pass, since it’s an 80/20 issue, the repeated and highly publicized efforts to push it through can only help Republicans’ midterm strategies.

Which is exactly the kind of strategic ambiguity this White House seems to prefer. Stay tuned.

Have a terrific Thursday! Coffee & Covid shall return tomorrow, with more need-to-know news and caffeinated commentary.

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⛑️ C&C ARMY BRIEFING ⛑️

At best, vindication is a second-class citizen in the pantheon of blessings. It’s the clearing of your besmirched name, or public proof you’d been right after everyone wrote you off as wrong. That’s all fine and dandy. But unfortunately, in order to be unsmirched, you must have been smirched in the first place. It’s not an outcome anyone particularly hopes for. Who’d like a business-class upgrade? You only have to let us punch you in the face first. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published its short (37 minutes) documentary about the real heroes of the pandemic, titled “The Lockdown Dissidents.”

“The Lockdown Dissidents tells the story,” the description explains, “of researchers like Jay Bhattacharya, Scott Atlas, and Robert Redfield—voices who say they were sidelined and censored when they questioned the public health consensus.” The main story is the development of and fallout after the explosive Great Barrington Declaration, but the short video is packed with pandemic gold.

Not only does it recognize the heroic scientists who risked their careers, but it also includes cameo appearances from the most absurd elements of the pandemic. “It’s a false confidence,” Fauci says in one clip, “to take comfort in a lower rate of death.” Governor DeSantis is there, along with his early re-opening efforts —opposed by teachers’ unions, the Biden Administration, and germaphobic Democrats.

It mocks the insane public health officials who green-lit the George Floyd protests while locking down restaurants, in which you had to wear your mask from the hostess stand to the table. After a clip of the paddle-boarder arrested by boat police for breaking the beach curfew, Bhattacharya wonders in a voice over, “how many lives were saved by that?”

“The expert class failed,” Scott Atlas tells an interviewer at one point. “I got a lot of death threats and had to have 24x7 security,” he reminded viewers.

The fact that, six years on, documentaries like this confirm what we believed, and what the Great Barrington Declaration declared, tells the whole story. Think of it. We are not seeing documentaries praising or even defending public health’s pandemic efforts. The handful of unwatched puff pieces (funded by billionaires you would immediately recognize) do not engage seriously with excess‑mortality, learning‑loss, mental‑health, and economic data. They just assume “yes, the tradeoff was worth it.”

The video is a nearly nostalgic reminder, and it also fills in a baker’s dozen of fascinating gaps in various well-known pandemic stories, and as I said, it’s mercifully short. It is well-produced (including a musical score), fast-paced, entertaining, and informative, and I recommend it. But even if you don’t watch, or if you plan to watch later, click on over to the page real quick and give it a ‘like,’ to help the video trend on YouTube. Do it right now while you’re thinking about it.

I often criticize the Wall Street Journal, so it’s that much more important that I praise it when it works well. This well-produced documentary delivers long-overdue vindication. And, while vindication is never anyone’s first choice, we’ll take as much of it as we can get.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🔥🔥🔥

As pandemic hero stock rises, as evidenced by the Wall Street Journal’s new Great Barrington documentary, the villains continue to slip into dishonor and disgrace. Last week, the same Wall Street Journal reported, “Bill Gates Spent Years Crafting His Image. Now It’s Cracking.” The Journal published this story mere days before Gates’s closed-door testimony before the House Oversight Committee, which is today. If you want to believe the timing was coincidental, fine. Not me.

Gates’ carefully stage-managed agreement to testify voluntarily (without cameras) focuses on his connections with everyone’s favorite International Mystery Man, the late Jeffrey Epstein. Gates is taking it seriously. He hired attorney Jake Greenberg, the Oversight Committee’s former chief investigations counsel, to advise him.

Among other things, DOJ’s documents and Epstein’s calendar entries show numerous meetings with Gates starting in 2011, which is three years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor. Why was Gates repeatedly meeting with a convicted sex offender, starting three years post-conviction?

The WSJ article tells us, in so many words, that Bill Gates is a big fat phony. And they exposed him right before he was set to testify.

🔥 The first remarkable, if unsurprising, fact dished by the WSJ was that Bill Gates employs a small army of PR professionals to carefully manicure his public image. He spends more on public relations than most big corporations do. He’s practically addicted to it.

“Bill Gates’s employees,” the article began, “have spent years carefully cultivating his image—down to keeping a custom-size mannequin to test his outfits for different days of the week.” They used their life-sized test doll, not trying to achieve an image of competence or masculinity (both long shots for Gates). They are shooting for harmlessness.

If that doesn’t scream action movie super-villain, I don’t know what does.

Their goal was, and I am not making this up, to make Gates look and sound like Mr. Rogers. From that old kids’ show. “Calm and approachable,” the Journal explained. Maintaining the charade involves entire departments. It begins with the “styling group,” which chooses dressing options from “neutral tone crew and V-neck sweaters, button-down shirts, slacks and extra pairs of the Silver Lining Opticians ‘Carbon’ glasses.”

The styling group then sends 3-4 outfit options to “senior staff” who choose the ultimate apparel for Gates to wear to any public event. Two sets of polling teams then monitor whether it’s working. Their ultimate objective is to bathe Gates, 70, in “the soft-knit glow of a global philanthropist.”

Until very recently, and for decades, Bill Gates has been getting his public relations money’s worth. “Gates ranked at the very top of a 2019 survey of public figures that people look up to—ahead of the Dalai Lama and Pope Francis,” the article noted.

But, “his carefully crafted image has been shattered as more details of Gates’s association with the late Jeffrey Epstein have spilled into public view.” The DOJ disclosures have revealed what the article called “a more complex picture.” Epstein introduced Gates to the head of the Nobel Peace Prize committee; “Epstein was involved in negotiations between Gates’s employees and Gates himself; and Gates posed for photos with Epstein and the women around him before or after some of their meetings.”

After everything, it may be his libido that finally takes him off the board. Bill Gates, 70, has a problem keeping his pickle jarred, just like bowtied gnome Peter Hotez. (We aren’t certain yet of the extent of Gates’ Cialis consumption.) Indeed, the Journal reminded readers, “In a February town hall with foundation employees, Gates owned up to two affairs with Russian women referenced in Epstein’s emails.”

Haha! One wonders what princely sums the billionaire paid for his “affairs,” which were presumably even less romantic than gas-station sushi. The story piled on: “Some people familiar with the matter said they heard about his admission to foundation staff with disbelief: In his divorce proceedings, allegations related to more than 20 affairs had come up.”

In other words, among the rest of its controlled demolition of Gates’ carefully crafted image, the WSJ just ripped the mask off Gates’ limited hangout.

Maybe worst of all, the Journal explained that DOJ documents showed Bill Gates allegedly asking Epstein about how to surreptitiously slip antibiotics to his wife after he caught an STD. Meanwhile, Epstein was actively blackmailing Gates over a Russian bridge player — all while Gates’ nuclear power company quietly hired another of his Russian mistresses, and his glowing Netflix documentary was secretly produced by his own PR staff.

All his horny goat adventures and his Epstein buddy-buddying are taking a toll. “Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, was recently snubbed from the company’s annual CEO summit and from the annual meeting of Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, which he has attended for years.” He also abruptly pulled out of an Indian high-tech conference late last year, even though he was its keynote speaker.

And now, the pace of events is forcing him to “voluntarily” testify before hostile Republican committee members. Nobody really “volunteers” for that kind of painful ordeal. It’s like volunteering for an unnecessary BOGO root canal.

🔥 The Epstein revelations, and the Journal’s hit piece, show that his once-successful PR teams have failed catastrophically. They no longer have the power or ability to suppress unflattering stories like this one. Think about what that means. As we saw with Peter Hotez, Bill Gates’ deep state plot armor is falling apart.

Consider everything Bill Gates managed to survive over the last 25 years: An antitrust ruling against Microsoft and a horrible performance in a video deposition; a reputation as a predatory monopolist who betrayed his co-founder; funding of gain-of-function research; the covid vaccine push; a high-profile divorce with 20+ affairs; the initial disclosure of his Epstein connections in 2021; and the atrocious “Inside Bill’s Brain” Netflix hagiography that ran the same month Epstein died in prison. There’s more.

Every one of those should have been career-ending for any normal billionaire. But none of them stuck to Bill Gates. That, my friends, is plot armor.

At minimum, this article represents a single dandelion of press freedom growing through a crack in the oligarchical pavement. At maximum, it shows the white hats have occupied some parts of corporate media and have driven out the deep state.

In short succession, Trump 2.0’s DOJ released the Epstein files, the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee subpoenaed Gates, and the MAHA-aligned HHS has been dismantling the global gain-of-function and vaccine apparatus he helped fund. Federal grants to his NGO partners “dried up.” Even the Indian government —which Gates spent twenty years cultivating with foundation money— has read the room and tossed him like a soiled mousepad.

Every institutional pillar of Bill’s deep state plot armor is being yanked out simultaneously. Polycrisis!

Can Gates survive the catastrophic implosion of his carefully cultivated “Mr. Rogers” brand (if, that is, Mr. Rogers was a serial adulterer who financed global bioweapons development)? Remember, as we observed with Peter Hotez: men with uncontrolled libidos are easy to manage. My hypothesis is that Gates was a deep state “soft power” tool. But the swamp has been drained. It’s bankrupt, and the swamp creatures are being repossessed.

Bill Gates is no longer useful to the architecture that has always protected him, because that architecture itself is being dismantled. You don’t need a custom-built Mr. Rogers persona for a “good billionaire philanthropist” when the entire NGO-foundation-public-health-WHO-GAVI complex is being rapidly defunded. The vehicle itself is being scrapped, so the spokesman/driver is being decommissioned.

Gates will probably survive financially. He has $124 billion. But his days as a public moral authority? Over. As a political policy influencer? Done. As a public health luminary? Kaput. As a free man? That remains an open question. The WSJ article hinted at multiple avenues of potential prosecution. Slipping antibiotics to his wife— a crime. Hiring a Russian at his TerraPower nuclear company— a crime if undisclosed. His financial connections to Epstein— a crime if they facilitated trafficking.

It is unquestionably true that, in normal times, men with Gates’ money and political connections are devilishly hard to convict. But, as we have seen, these are not normal times. And Bill’s political support network is winking out like stars on a cloudy night as the thunderstorm moves in.

Finally, as a brief coda, consider all the other libidinous billionaires, high-profile political types, and swamp co-critters who are currently squirming in the same broad net as Gates. Reid Hoffman, Larry Summers, Leon Black, Eric Schmidt, and the whole Pritzker network, just to name a few. It is so easy to forget how much karma is suddenly and relentlessly flowing upstream toward the funders and facilitators of vast human misery during the pandemic.

And all of it has happened recently, since the Epstein disclosures. Not just progress this time. It’s much progress.

🔥🔥🔥

Well, President Trump, the builder, has done it again. Against all odds (and Democrat lawfare), he repaired the Lincoln Monument Reflecting Pool in weeks at a fraction of the cost of the most recent repairs during Obama ($34 million in 2012 dollars), which took two years and didn’t even work. So, it’s now time for the media to pivot away from what they originally sneered at as doomed, and now deploy a whole new narrative to minimize it. Yesterday, PBS reported, “Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool refills with water after Trump paint job.”

Ha! Now PBS says it was just a paint job. But only one month ago, PBS incestuously platformed the New York Times’s David Fahrenhold, who soberly said, “Remember, this is not a swimming pool. This is a pool that’s about 2,000 feet long. It’s been around since the 1920s. It has a lot of complicated problems that come from both its age and its size.”

David then predicted that the project wouldn’t even make a visual difference. “From folks we have talked to, it will probably not make the pool look any different in terms of reflectivity,” he said.

Much of corporate media, including the Washington Post, is running breathless, top-of-page stories about cost overruns. President Trump, WaPo claimed, “bragged” that the project would only take about $2 million, but “actually” $14 million in contracts were awarded related to the pool. Trump derangement.

For contrast, Boston’s “Big Dig” highway and tunnel megaproject was originally estimated around $2–5 billion, but its final cost was over $22 billion. Media yawned. California’s high‑speed rail project was sold to voters back in 2008 as roughly a $33 billion system from San Francisco to Los Angeles by 2020. Recent estimates run north of $120 billion for a scaled‑back version, with some reports now citing numbers in the $200+ billion range. Media is still looking the other way.

But this! This reflecting pool! This is an outrageous waste of public treasure!

I’m not saying the cost differential is meaningless. I’m saying corporate media’s moral panic over a relatively tiny delta between $2 million and $14 million for a project that was successfully completed on a 24x7 rush schedule to meet the 250th anniversary celebration schedule is pure Trump Derangement Syndrome on display.

In fact, that very point was made by none less than Democrat Senator John Fetterman, who amusingly tweeted that Democrats should “stop henpecking:”

You should see the comments from Democrats against their own Senator. Fetterman is driving them insane.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick posted a much nicer photo than the WaPo’s, taken from ground level, which appears to show that, shattering PBS’s pessimistic predictions, the Reflecting Pool is, in fact, reflecting, and does, in fact, look different. Different and better:

Here’s what I suggest, and I don’t think this is any stretch. Let’s look at the Reflecting Pool —and all the other beautification and restoration projects around our Nation’s capital— as a metaphor. As the capital is being restored and made more beautiful, so is the country writ large. The Reflecting Pool is itself a reflection, a mirror image of an even greater achievement.

President Trump —the reality TV huckster and rough-spoken real estate developer— is reminding America that decay is not inevitable. It is a choice.

Behold the New American Renaissance— against all odds, against all enemies both foreign and domestic, and against every reasonable prediction. We are almost there.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! C&C will be back tomorrow morning with an all-new roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary. Preview: it’s even MORE good news.

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Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! Your roundup includes: my community’s tragic loss of a heroic small-firm covid lawyer and a deep-dive on the LA mayoral race— what we know, don’t know and why it may not matter so much in the big picture, since the Administration’s careful planning last year is paying off anyway, not just in spite of Spencer Pratt’s mail-in ballot problems but also because of them.

⛑️ C&C ARMY POST ⛑️

Warner Mendhall, 66, the heroic small-firm lawyer, selfless pandemic legal champion, and my friend, from Akron, Ohio, passed away this weekend from what we would call turbo cancer. Late last year, he was surprised by an initial diagnosis at stage 4C. Not seven days ago, he was still tweeting. I’d even heard he was doing better. But I was profoundly shocked by the news of his passing. Maybe it wasn’t sudden, but it feels sudden. I’d allowed myself to feel hopeful.

CLIP: Warner explains the difficulty of getting experts for covid lawsuits and then protecting them from career destruction (1:45).

I first conferred with Warner early in the pandemic, before any of us were known for our covid work. I’d originally tracked him down because I’d heard he was having some success suing hospitals that refused ivermectin to their severe covid patients and wouldn’t even discharge them. (I was just starting to accept a flood of the same types of cases, which, around the office, we referred to as “hospital kidnapping.”) Much later, Warner would be involved in ultra-high-profile cases like Brooke Jackson and Grace Shaara.

Over the years, Warner and I occasionally traded calls for professional advice on one issue or another, and we often bumped into each other on the speaking circuit. I distinctly remember sharing conference stages with him in Atlanta and in Las Vegas. There were probably more.

Warner was an all-in Christian. He was humble, patient, and kind— soft-spoken on the outside but with an unyielding iron core; he never backed down from a fight. He took so many pro bono (no charge) cases that I figured he was either independently wealthy or had rewritten the economic rules for small law firms. The truth was, he was selfless and sacrificed his income for five years for others.

I spoke to Warner after news of his cancer diagnosis became public. I’m sure he won’t mind me sharing that he never took a jab. (And you’ll never convince me his cancer was unrelated to spike protein, either from the virus or second-hand from a shot.) Since Warner was connected to all the heterodox doctors in MAHA, he was trying the alternative treatments you’re probably wondering about. Sadly, there are no absolute cures for this cancer pandemic.

Warner, my brother, we are deeply grateful for you. Now, your Earthly labors and sufferings have been perfected. You have gone to Glory, and for that, I envy you. We who remain here in the temporal realm will miss you, a lot, but we shall continue the fight until we also join you in paradise, at which time we can pick up that conversation we never finished about tips for dealing with difficult judges. Till then.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

📈📈📈

Yesterday, the New York Times, with barely restrained glee, reported, “Democrat Secures Second L.A. Mayor Spot and Ends Spencer Pratt’s Run.” Social media wildfires are burning over the totally believable once-in-a-lifetime statistical miracle in mail-in balloting —another one!— that has launched far-left socialist candidate Nithya “Noodle” Raman from so far in last place she’d already given her concession speech to second place overall. Happily for Democrats, this last-minute magical-ballot turnaround has vaporized scrappy Spencer Pratt, the only Republican in the race.

Officially, it’s still too soon to start analyzing the results, since the election isn’t over. Haha, you probably thought it must be over since it happened a week ago, but that is because you are using non-California logic. In the Golden State, elections occur in the quantum realm, where time is an artificial construct. In LA, the ballots are not just still being counted, they are still coming in.

Paul Mitchell, a Democrat ‘political data expert’ quoted by the Times, explained that Spencer Pratt was “undone by the voters who were holding their ballots, waiting for the last shoe to drop.” This is perfectly normal. It happens all the time. In fact, most voters hold their ballots and wait. For shoes. I mean, for strategy. It’s science.

Here’s a chart some X commenter prepared showing post-election ballot receipts and how they affected the race— after the race:

President Trump called California a “3rd World Nation” with “Rigged Elections!” Last night, Vice President Vance told Fox’s Jesse Waters that the election was “sketchy.” Social media is swimming in hot takes and outraged theories.

On the other hand, and for balance, Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton appeared on CNN yesterday and said that his campaign has been watching, with lawyers standing by, but has “seen nothing” suggesting any serious problems with ballot handling.

CLIP: Republican Steve Hilton says he hasn’t seen anything actionable yet (3:54).

Some claim that large numbers of Republican ballots were rejected for so-called “signature mismatches.” Others surmise that Democrats held back large numbers of fake homeless ballots till they saw the election-day results. Still others point out that California lets people who claim they are homeless to use empty lots as official addresses, and lets people register to vote using a gym membership card as ID.

Obviously, nobody knows anything for sure except that dark horse candidate Nithya Raman Noodle —who entered the race at the last minute, had an abysmal performance in a single debate, has no visible bloc of support, no yard signs or bumper stickers, no rallies, and did virtually no campaigning— experienced a thrilling come-from-behind turnaround that not only defies political gravity and basic arithmetic, but surprised even Raman, and which will guarantee incumbent mayor Karen Bass’s re-election.

Democrats and corporate media outlets like the Times insist this kind of thing happens all the time, since mail-in ballots “always skew Democrat.” Why? Who knows! It doesn’t matter! Being a Democrat just means you are better organized than Republicans, or something. It is just “a thing” and we must all accept it without question, right up there with “two weeks to flatten the curve” and “inflation is transitory.”

When you dig deeper, you discover experts who argue mail-in ballots “skew” Democrat because of pandemic policy, since liberal authorities encouraged voters to use remote options, whereas Trump called mail-in balloting ripe for fraud. Since more Democrats are now germaphobes, the theory goes, mail-in ballots track that ratio. And in the LA mayoral election, it was allegedly progressive Democrats in particular who favored mail-in ballots to avoid germs.

But that is at best a partial story. It does almost no work to explain why the decisive tranche is not just mail, but late mail. The “Democrats are more germaphobic, so they vote by mail” trope can plausibly explain type differences (mail vs in-person) in 2020 and maybe some persistence after. But it cannot, by itself, explain why so many Democratic-heavy ballots are returned in the last couple of days and processed in a way that they show up days after the in-person tallies.

In other words, a sincerely germaphobic Raman voter could just as well mail their ballot the first day it arrives; nothing about the pandemic-preference narrative implies a conscious strategy of “I will wait until the last possible moment so my ballot is among the final ones counted.”

📉 I’ll return to the fraud problem in a minute, but the truth is, Spencer Pratt was always a long shot. He is a political novice who’s never won an office and running as a Republican. The last time a Republican won the LA mayor’s office was Richard Riordan in 1993— and decades of bad immigration policy have flowed through LA’s septic system since then.

And not only is the race in California, the mail-in balloting capital of the world, but it is in LA, which is the nation’s autism and Medicare fraud capital. Many people think LA is also the capital of voting fraud, and probably every other kind, including but not limited to stealing lollipops from toddlers.

This will sound deeply unfair, but cynically speaking, the deck was always stacked against him. Spencer never really had a chance— even though he absolutely ran a terrific, maybe perfect campaign. He probably deserves to win. He got a bunch of Democrats to cross over and vote for him with his common-sense pitch. His losing would feel profoundly unfair.

But to say we expected him to win until it was stolen from us is a stretch.

Put differently, the outrage over Spencer’s stolen election is not about loss. Meaning, we haven’t lost something that we ever thought we had. We are just seeing another, glaringly obvious example of a problem we already knew we had. Paradoxically, that’s also the best thing about it.

Spencer Pratt should keep fighting. The voting hasn’t finished. There are weeks to go! And he should sue them whenever it has. That’s all well and good.

But all the social media outrage over the statistically impossible rise of Nithya Raman is accomplishing something even more important than deciding who will be LA’s next mayor. It is creating a permission structure for mail-in balloting reform. That permission structure is about to become very important.

📉 We’ve all been frustrated by the defections of a handful of squishy Republican senators and the languishing SAVE America Act, which, if passed, would require legitimate ID to vote in federal elections (though not in purely state or local races, such as a town’s mayor).

But the Trump Team never relies on one plan. That’s one way TAW works. It always seems to have plans A, then B, C, and D. And maybe even E. I’ll give you two great examples.

The Save Act is only one plan. Another is that the Supreme Court is expected to announce a decision any day in Watson v. Republican National Committee, a Mississippi case about whether the Constitution permits ballots received after election day to be counted, regardless of when they were postmarked. If SCOTUS issues its opinion late this month as expected, it will land just in time to affect the midterm elections.

A ruling for the RNC would effectively outlaw the whole “late-arriving ballot tranche” in federal elections in 14 states and D.C. This would effectively end the possibility of cheating by waiting for election day to see how many votes you need to win, and then magically producing them after the in-person voting has finished.

But that’s not all. There’s also Trump’s postal plan.

In late March, President Trump signed an executive order directing USPS to create rules that, among other things, require states to mail ballots only in barcoded “Official Election Mail” envelopes and to give the Postal Service voter-by-voter lists for anyone who will vote by mail in federal elections. In other words, it will modernize the free-for-all ballot process and give voters a way to track their ballots online, just like they can track their DoorDash delivery of a McDonald’s Blueberry Cake Freeze to their front door.

It’s about transparency. For the first time in history, Trump’s postal plan means Republican voters can see exactly which dumpster their ballots were thrown into. We can see where all the brand-new Democrat ballots came from. It will be possible to do kinds of statistical analysis that have always been impossible. It will put mailed ballots under an AI-powered microscope.

Of course, activist groups and Democrats sued. They argued this commonsense upgrade would be unconstitutional under the Elections Clause and various federal statutes, and asked courts for preliminary injunctions to freeze the order while litigation proceeds.

About two weeks ago, on May 28th, a federal judge in DC denied the activists’ request for an injunction, meaning the plan could move forward while the case was fully litigated. As I have explained before, when a judge denies an injunction, he must find that it is unlikely to prevail on the merits in the bigger case.

The day after that ruling, USPS published proposed rules that would, among other things, require states to give the Postal Service voter lists that states have so far resisted handing over, require associated mail-ballot barcodes, and would give the federal government unprecedented new abilities to track and even potentially halt ballot mail flows.

DHS is already exploring using the new USPS data to “monitor mail-in and absentee ballot flows, identify anomalies that may suggest voter fraud or misuse, and generate authorized investigative leads.”

And so we see the two toothy prongs of a red-hot pincer. On one side, SCOTUS appears poised to end the counting of late-arriving mail-in ballots. Democrats can still use mail-in ballots, but they’ll have to send them in early, or at least on time. But I’ll bet you a taco truck that all the “shoe dropping” fun will have drained out.

The second claw is the new USPS rules. Once ballots can be tracked and analyzed, and once the feds get hold of and audit absentee voter lists, a wide variety of clever possibilities will evaporate like the morning dew off the mail truck. Between the two prongs, even if there was no fraud to start with (don’t make me laugh), voters can enjoy a new level of confidence in elections.

Even if it accomplishes nothing else, Spencer Pratt’s hard work and lopsided result does this: his vivid example prepares the narrative battlefield for Plans B (SCOTUS) and C (USPS) to more easily survive challenges and take effect soon.

I am not saying that Plan A (requiring ID) has become irrelevant. But Plan A is much less urgent once Plans B and C come online. After all, SAVE America-style ID requirements mainly affect in-person voting, not post-election absentee fraud, which is clearly the bigger problem.

In other words, once SCOTUS slams the door on late federal ballots and USPS forensically logs who gets which ballot and when, ID shifts from an existential fight to an important but secondary electoral hygiene. And with all those germs out there, we need to be hygienic.

The glass-half-full view of Spencer Pratt’s sacrifice in Los Angeles is that he just created the best possible example for why both SCOTUS’s decision and USPS’s plans are fair, reasonable, and necessary. TAW.

Have a terrific Tuesday! Catch the mail truck back here tomorrow morning, for another installment of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

💉💉💉

You wanted accountability? I bet you never saw this coming— the latest comeuppance-slash-morality tale with the most unlikely cast of characters, some of the most astonishing plot twists imaginable, and a villain who looks like a poorly groomed garden gnome. On Saturday, the New York Post —and only the New York Post— reported, “Vaccine expert lusted after Northwell Health scientist — then got her canned, she claimed.” Oh, it’s so much more.

I’m just going to say what we are all thinking. Don’t cancel me. Possibly the last person we would ever imagine to be a concupiscent sex pest, taken down by his randy hormonal misadventures, would be one Peter “Captain Bowtie” Hotez, 68, who is much better known as a first-order pandemic villain. I mean, just look at him. (Briefly.)

How could this happen? Sure, they say “there is someone for everyone,” but… ugh! Usually, that saying implies the other person has some ability to see and isn’t being blackmailed by a federal grant approval. The mind recoils in horror at the thought of a gross, adulterous slob like Hotez using his grifted taxpayer money, his undeniable non-charm, and his trademark bowtie to pull lady scientist victims into his web of professional favors, like some kind of bloated arachnid.

The unlikely protagonist of our story is Annette Lee, 64, a Dean at Northwell Health’s Elmezzi Graduate School of Molecular Medicine. After 23 years of spotless service, Northwell abruptly fired her in 2024. The reason: Lee was a “safety concern.” Two years later, on June 1st, Lee sued Northwell.

Just wait till you hear what Ms. Lee claims really happened. To say that the story is hard to believe would be a massive understatement. Words fail me.

But first, let me remind you who we are dealing with.

💉 You might remember the Bowtied Wonder from the pandemic. For that reason, you’ll be forgiven if you recoil at the sight of his ugly face the same way a sleepy cowboy might react upon awakening and discovering a rattlesnake in his left boot.

Hotez was one of the most overexposed public “faces” of the covid-19 vaccination coercion campaign. Without a hint of irony, Hotez explicitly called opposition to the shots a form of “organized anti‑science aggression” while simultaneously refusing Joe Rogan’s offer to debate his critics.

Hotez even published a book in 2023 titled, and I am not making this up, “The Deadly Rise of Anti-Science: A Scientist’s Warning.” It’s a miracle Hotez’s spine remains even close to straight after all the self-congratulatory back-patting in his rotten book. “As a scientist who has endured antagonism from anti-vaxxers and been at the forefront of both essential scientific discovery and advocacy,” Hotez claimed in his book description, referring to himself in the third person, “Hotez is uniquely qualified to tell this story.”

“Doctor” Hotez was at the forefront of “essential scientific discovery,” all right. The very forefront. Think ten years before the pandemic. Before Fauci, patron saint of the Blessed Face Mask. Even before Ralph Baric, whose “essential discovery” was teaching bat viruses how to infect human cells. That kind of forefront.

💉 Hotez is —for now— co‑director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and a professor at Baylor College of Tropical Medicine. Over the last fifteen to twenty years, he led worldwide research teams and mined lucrative NIH grants developing …wait for it… coronavirus vaccine platforms, including for SARS and MERS— years before Covid-19.

The disheveled scientist’s public biographies from Baylor and related institutions stress his “10 years of research into spike proteins” and coronaviruses, tying his lab’s earlier SARS/MERS vaccine research to rapid development of Covid-19 vaccines. According to reporting and the underlying grant documents, Hotez held an NIH grant from 2012–2017 to develop a SARS vaccine whose stated aims included, get this, responding both to zoonotic spillover and to “accidental release from a laboratory.”

Yep. The irony.

Years later, Hotez would turn on a dime and sneer at the possibility that a lab leak could have sparked the 2020 pandemic, calling the very idea an “outlandish conspiracy.” But wait. It gets better.

Hotez’s NIH grant was so bloated that he had to subcontract parts of it out to other labs. He published a paper in 2017 describing a gain-of-function experiment that combined two different SARS-CoV variants into a brand-new coronavirus. Hotez used an offshore subcontractor for the lab work. Guess who? Zhengli Shi of the Wuhan Institute of Virology— the infamous WIV “Bat Lady.”

But wait, it gets even better. The Bat Lady was double-dipping, paid by two grants for the same research: Hotez’s grant and EcoHealth Alliance’s NIH grant. Check! Another connection from Hotez to two of the pandemic’s other foundational bad actors confirmed.

In later congressional hearings, NIH officials ultimately acknowledged under duress that Hotez’s Wuhan coronavirus research was “out of compliance” with its own gain‑of‑function oversight rules. Rutgers molecular biologist Richard Ebright and others testified it was “unequivocally” gain‑of‑function research.

To sum it up: Hotez isn’t just a blob-shaped, nerdy bureaucrat who got famous during the pandemic for “defending science.” He’s submerged in the sketchiest parts of the pandemic up to his fat little neck. He was one of the day manager of the NIH’s gain-of-function laundromat, which washed federal dollars to the same Chinese communist lab that a half dozen intelligence agencies have now grudgingly admitted probably launched the global pandemic. The Cialis Connoisseur’s pandemic work of “defending science,” including his ridiculous book, was really about defending Peter— which, ironically, was the one organism nobody else wanted to save.

Peter is not, in my opinion, a good person. He is a very bad person. Which brings us right back to the unsightly stage presence of Peter’s chemically engorged little scientist.

💉 Apparently, and this is simultaneously both easy and hard to believe, Dr. Annette Lee alleged that (married) Dr. Hotez often bragged to her about being a serial adulterer. “He told me about his repeated marital affairs and joked about how much Cialis he had purchased.” (You have to admire his commitment to transparency. Most men hide their affairs and erectile dysfunction medication; Hotez used them as pickup lines to woo a 62-year-old microbiologist.)

“I was disturbed by all the women he described and told him that being the high-profile person that he is, he should be more discreet and stay out of the backseat of cars,” she alleged in her complaint. “Dr. Hotez told me he would give up all these other women for me,” she added, “but I declined and said I did not want to be more than friends and said that I did not want a sexual relationship.” Smart cookie.

Baylor, Northwell, and Hotez deny all Lee’s allegations. But it looks to me like the lawsuit has legs, unlike Peter’s chances of a successful romantic Cialis deployment (without, that is, any federal subsidies).

After acquiring a certain amount of litigation experience, sometimes a lawyer can just tell. A complaint that will go the distance usually includes falsifiable allegations that, if they can’t be documented, would get the lawsuit thrown out. But if they are true, it would be very uncomfortable for the defendant.

I think Dr. Lee’s complaint is strong. To give you a sample, here are a few of the specific allegations against Hotez:

• On June 13, 2024, Hotez texted Lee, “Miss you, let’s talk again when I’m back in similar time zones, you keep me calm,” and that he would like to bring Lee along to one of his scientific conferences.

• On June 19, 2024, Hotez texted Lee that he “totally lost it” that day, that he just “sat there and wept like a crazy person.” He went on to say that “he didn’t even give a sh-t and now he was so embarrassed.”

• On September 17, 2024, late at night, Hotez texted Lee: “Seriously I really miss you, I think about you, and in a nice way. I don’t have a lot of brilliant friends who just get it and understand things. Maybe it’s our Boston origins. I love you truly,” and, “You should call and text me more often and I will do the same. You are an important person in my life.”

There’s a lot more. Hotez likes to text. And he apparently has a malfunctioning filter. But here’s the thing: all those alleged text messages either exist or they don’t. The fact that Lee’s lawyers provided exact dates for them and used quote marks tells me they have the texts and are ready to plunk them into evidence.

Assuming I am right, the texts prove that Hotez was obsessed with Dr. Lee and confessed to a lot of unflattering and unprofessional behavior, such as weeping uncontrollably, cheating on his wife, begging for Lee’s attention, and gobbling Cialis like they were Altoids, a mental picture which, frankly, I would prefer not to think about.

💉 Lest anyone feel tempted to sympathize with the married but romantically hyperactive Peter, who never expected that his private texts would see the light of day— he started it. The complaint explained that, after a particularly grueling day at work, Lee had texted Hotez a frustrated joke— that she was heading to a workout “and leaving the rifle at home.”

She says Peter knew it was a joke, not a threat to anyone. But later, after Lee had repeatedly spurned his romantic advances and turned down his offers of mutual business travel to Hotez’s many swanky science conferences, he struck back. Hotez forwarded Lee’s “rifle” text to her boss, presumably with more than a hint of official Hotez disapproval. Several hours later, Lee got a text from her boss requesting a same-day meeting.

The meeting included HR and a security officer. This is a bad sign. The HR official started asking Lee about her views on “gun violence” and eventually brought up the Hotez text. The short version is they put her on administrative leave, conducted a “review,” and then fired her over Zoom. After 23 years of stellar performance reviews. For workplace safety.

So one way of looking at this case is that Peter Hotez first shared a private text with Lee’s boss to get her fired. Now Lee is publishing all of Peter’s much more compromising communications— on a public federal docket.

💉 The difficult truth is that Peter Hotez wears deep state plot armor. First of all, as a private-sector employee, he can’t be fired by Secretary Kennedy or NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya. Like a cockroach after a nuclear war, Hotez has already survived Congressional disclosures of his gain-of-function and pandemic connections.

What I mean by “plot armor” is that he’s a kind of essential character that the deep state script writers can’t afford to kill off. For decades, until Trump’s DOJ arrested him in 2019, Jeffrey Epstein also wore deep state plot armor. Even his 2009 ‘non-prosecution’ deal, with his year of “house arrest,” failed to remove Epstein from the global chessboard. Only his arrest and sudden actual death in prison could do that.

Epstein is what deep state plot armor looks like on full blast: repeat exposure, minimal consequences, and continued utility to powerful networks— until something breaks hard enough that makes it impossible to keep him.

Similarly, Hotez stars in the global vaccine industrial complex and is a main character in the shady world of international gain-of-function research that Hotez himself has described as “national security” adjacent. And that’s just the part we know. We are now seeing that, like Epstein, Hotez apparently also has an out-of-control libido, despite not being an “international man of mystery” who corporate media reporters swoon over.

Out-of-control libidos make men easier to control. Just saying.

Big pharma, or the deep state, or whoever dwells in the twilight regions where shady, “soft power” geopolitical investments are made, helped build Hotez up over decades and has protected him from fallout not just from his own high-risk serial affairs and Cialis consumption, but also his profound and as-yet unexplained connections to the root causes of the global pandemic.

💉 But now, thanks to Annette Lee’s timely lawsuit, we begin to see chinks developing in Peter Hotez’s deep-state plot armor. The New York Post article describes a married 68‑year‑old professor boasting about repeated affairs and Cialis use, making unwanted advances on a longtime colleague, then reporting her “keep me away from a firearm” text right before she’s fired.

Think of it this way. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that there are “white hats” at work quietly dismantling the deep state’s global biosecurity apparatus. Nursing home butcher and “Luv Guv” Andrew Cuomo was taken out not because of his various pandemic scandals —from which he was institutionally well-defended— but because of his libidinous misconduct that his own party had long treated as background noise.

Either way, whether it was heroic white hats toiling away below deck, or just the “Wuhan curse” catching up with his Achilles’ groin, the cost of preserving Peter Hotez just ratcheted up in a substantial way. Whether it will be enough to purge him from the circular make-a-virus-make-a-vaccine loop remains to be seen.

Remember, I’ve told you the Reckoning™ was coming. It only keeps surprising us because it is hard to predict what form Nemesis will take. In whatever form, it keeps creeping forward. And it’s just getting started.

Have a magnificent Monday! There’s a whole lot of breaking news we need to catch up on, so do not miss tomorrow’s roundup of essential developments served with caffeinated commentary.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

💊💊💊

Yesterday, Fox News reported, “Trump expands TrumpRx prescription drug discount program to more than 800 medications.” The President announced the latest expansion of his new direct-to-consumer drug website on Truth Social, saying “TrumpRx.gov is adding another 160 Prescription Drugs, at highly discounted prices, for a new total of over 800 of the most commonly-used Prescription Drugs.” This announcement was received by the corporate media in the manner of a tree falling in a forest where no reporters were assigned to listen.

Obviously, the prescription drug revolution will not be televised.

While the media occupied itself diligently covering the Iranian World Cup soccer team’s unfortunate visa problems: TrumpRx.gov added 160 new drugs, such that the online marketplace can now fill four out of five of all prescriptions. Not specialty drugs for obscure conditions. Not narrow experimental treatments. Eighty percent of everything. So far, the website has saved patients over $400 million, proving that a lot of folks are already using it. It channels the radical concept that Americans shouldn’t pay more for the same drug than people in Paris, Tokyo, Dubai, or outer space, for that matter.

The site offers eye-watering discounts on prescription drugs of 400%, 500%, and even 600% percent on some drugs, and the program is still expanding. This threatens Democrats and corporate media for several reasons. First, while TrumpRx is currently only marginally better than other cash-pay drug-coupon options, if it continues to grow, it could radically transform the traditional insurance industry, especially the so-called “Obamacare model.”

Second, the optics are horrible for Democrats. It counters their dumb “affordability” narrative. And seniors, who consume the most drugs, are a powerful voting group. The last thing Democrats need —especially right before the midterms— is for older Americans to feel like Trump’s branded drug website is actually working for them. So Dems’ best strategy is to ignore it.

The few Democrats who do engage sneer that the nascent TrumpRx site is little better than other existing drug coupon options like GoodRx, and that some people —mostly union members— who enjoy “diamond-tier” Obamacare plans without annual deductibles, often see negligible co-pays for almost all drugs, especially when generics are available. So, Democrats argue, TrumpRx offers them nothing.

But TrumpRx is finally starting to lap even the top Obamacare plans as it rounds the corner. Its inventory increasingly includes popular drugs that either lack generic options or simply aren’t covered under Obamacare-style insurance, like fertility drugs or Ozempic-style GLP-1s taken for weight loss instead of diabetes management. Assuming things continue on this trajectory —and there is no reason to think they won’t— at some point, doctors will start advising their patients to first check TrumpRx.

If this works, it could slay an Obamacare-created class of drug middlemen called “Pharmacy Benefit Managers” (PBMs), which have wildly distorted American healthcare markets, led to sky-high insurance and drug costs, and earned 1000% profits for big insurance— all thanks to a law passed without a single Republican vote, and ironically called the “Affordable Care Act.”

Embrace affordability.

🔥🔥🔥

Somalians now face unexpected competition for the top spot as national champions in Medicare fraud. Yesterday, local Ohio affiliate ABC-6 reported, “Bhutanese community responds to claims of Medicaid fraud in Ohio” I’ll bet you didn’t even know there was a “Bhutanese community” in Ohio.

The Bhutanese who settled in Ohio are largely ethnic Nepalis, a people called the Lhotshampa —say that three times fast— who were driven out of southern Bhutan in the early 1990s and spent years enduring refugee camps in eastern Nepal. Starting around 2008, the United States agreed to resettle scores of them, and agencies initially scattered Bhutanese families into many different cities.

Over time, they remigrated and condensed. They followed their relatives and friends to Ohio, since the insular ‘Bhutan community’ did not integrate well into American society. That second migration helped coalesce a series of smaller clusters into one of the country’s largest Bhutanese communities, with shops, temples, and grocery stores transforming Ohio’s (and especially Columbus’) traditional American landscape into something closer to a third-world hellhole.

Needless to say, under Biden’s porous border period, waves of additional Bhutanese joined their countrymen in flyover country.

On Wednesday, the House Task Force on Medicare Fraud issued a press release linking Somalians in Minnesota to the Bhutanese in Ohio. “It’s the same people,” Luke Rosiak, a Daily Wire reporter, testified. “They all have relatives in both places, and they move back and forth.”

“There’s thousands of people involved,” Rosiak continued. “I would say the majority of Bhutanese people are either on Medicaid and home healthcare, or are providing Medicaid home healthcare services.” It’s not just in Ohio; it’s wherever Bhutanese have resettled. “I think Bhutanese people are systematically using Medicaid, not only in Ohio, but also in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, New York, and in other states where they perceive that they will pay the family member and pay for non-nursing services. And those are the two big vulnerabilities.”

To be sure, we lack evidence that every Somalian or Bhutanese refugee is a fraudster. But avoiding unfair over-generalizing does not require abandoning useful generalizations. There is an easy explanation for why certain ethnic groups are more prone to fraud.

Some of these groups fled perfectly awful places in the world where, literally in order to survive, they had to do things every single day that first-worlders would consider deeply immoral. That is the state of life in these primitive, conflict-torn regions. Skills in gaming government systems, like International aid programs, can be the difference between a family’s living or dying. Lying, especially to the government, is seen as a moral good when the majority government is controlled by an ethnic enemy.

For all we know, these folks may have strong interpersonal values of honesty. But they grew up swimming in cultures where institutional fraud is a primary survival characteristic. That kind of modus vivendi isn’t easy to shake. It’s a way of thinking, of being. We can understand it, but we can also seek to contain it, or flat keep it out of our naive communities, which are unprepared to deal with waves of groups that become predatory as soon as they’re plopped into gullible high-trust societies like Columbus, Ohio.

To be fair, refugees from low-trust origin states aren’t the only offenders. Plenty of native Americans have been convicted and jailed for Medicare fraud. And there’s an even bigger problem. That bigger problem is that local officials (usually Democrats) and the local ethnic “community” appear to tolerate, if not encourage, the fraud.

In other words, our public charity layer is actually a low‑oversight, high‑moral‑hazard environment. It invites exactly this sort of gamesmanship, and that invitation is being enthusiastically extended to anyone who can learn to read the rules or hire someone to read the rules for them. Like NGO activists, liberal white women, and entrepreneurial conmen. But I repeat myself.

🔥 I fear that criminalization and even more technocratic tweaking at the margins, however helpful and gratifying, can never actually address the root causes. Not so long ago, the government was not the primary provider of American charity. That duty belonged to local churches and mutual aid societies.

The desire to root out the church in the name of secular “separation of church and state” did not solve the dependency problem. It led to swelling ranks of shiftless indolents dependent on taxpayer largesse. Every few years, after some ‘welfare queen’ scandal or other, it gets pruned by reform efforts, only to be re-engineered and continue to grow.

Look, government charity is inherently inefficient. Programs like SNAP and Medicaid waivers redistribute hundreds of millions of tax dollars through complex rules, multiple intermediaries, and distant agencies; every layer adds more people with their hands in the till, from administrators to NGO contractors to shell providers.

Oversight is mostly paper and algorithms —claims reviews, occasional audits, electronic visits and verifications— rather than human beings who actually know the family, the patient, and the neighborhood. That’s a fundamentally different model from that of a pastor or deacon who lives in the community and has personally witnessed a particular situation for years.

In today’s environment, fraud isn’t an anomaly. It’s an emergent property: whenever incentives are strong and detection is weak, opportunistic actors —both native and foreign— fill the cracks in the system to overflowing. This week’s House Oversight hearing was one more confirmation that this is now baked into the system.

Traditional church‑based or mutual‑aid charity relied on high levels of information and close social proximity. The people dispensing help usually knew the recipients’ personal histories, families, and habits; if they started showing up with suspicious stories, givers noticed quickly.

Proximity also created informal discipline. If people abused the system, they risked not just losing aid but losing standing in their social world. Fraud carried a reputational cost that today’s anonymous, card‑swipe welfare programs lack.

But now, thanks to grasping politicians manipulating our charitable impulses, America has baked a rotten social lasagna. Layers of interlocking statutes, regulations, and judicial decisions “protect” welfare recipients’ “entitlements” to “benefits.” And increasingly, cheesy politicians facilitate the fraud by intentionally loosening oversight, turning a blind eye in exchange for votes from blocs of “communities” who reward elected patrons.

Every time we try to tighten rules to control abuse, all it takes to justify re-expanding access and reducing accountability is one or two sob stories about how deserving applicants found the rules too burdensome, vindictive, or complicated to navigate. It’s a vicious pendulum swinging between the extremes of welfare reform and inevitable enlargement.

And so we get Ohio. A Medicaid waiver architecture so complex that even basic oversight (like noticing 94 companies billing $66 million out of one half‑abandoned building) took decades, viral social media influence, and a House Oversight task force to surface.

The Trump Administration is admirably trying to reheat the spoiled lasagna by doing the things it can control: increasing the cost of fraud and shining a spotlight on the abuses, which creates the political potential for the latest round of reform. I hope it works.

But, paradoxically, the one thing we don’t need is more rules and regulations. Granted, sufficiently significant reform might provide short-term relief for a few years or even a generation. But eventually, bad actors will learn new techniques for gaming the system, while honest folks will find it much harder to qualify for help, and the whole spoiled lasagna will become bigger and even more poisonous and expensive.

It might be too late to get the government out of the charity business. But I would argue that we need reinvention rather than reform. What do you think might work? Let me know in the comments.

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Speaking of fraud stories, yesterday, the Washington Post reported an astonishing update to the CIA gold bars story, in an article headlined, “CIA officer accused of stealing gold allegedly created fake ‘black box’ spy program.” The unanswered questions remain unsettled, but now we have even more outrageous and inexplicable detail. Which is just as remarkable a story as the underlying fraud. Just wait till you see how three big dots connect with each other.

I already reported about (former) senior CIA official David J. Rush, who was arrested last month after FBI agents raided his house and found 303 gold bars worth roughly $40 million, $2 million in cash, and, as a bonus peculiar detail, 35 luxury watches. But the new details are incredible. According to the Post, agent Rush allegedly created a fake, ultra-classified intelligence program — a so-called “special access program,” or SAP — and then used it as a conduit to funnel millions of dollars for his personal purposes.

He didn’t just requisition the gold. He invented an entire fake spy program.

Here’s how the scheme allegedly worked: an SAP is the intelligence world’s version of a black op— so secret that even officials with the highest security clearances can’t access it without specific authorization. Rush allegedly “read in” two colleagues to his fictional program, effectively making them unwitting accomplices and preventing them from comparing notes with anyone else. He then persuaded one of them to transfer millions of dollars to the fake program through a fraudulent government contract. As one person familiar with the investigation told the Post, with laudable brevity: “He made up a contract.”

The fake operation, it turns out, was designated as “continuity of government” operations — hyper-top-secret plans to keep the federal government running after a nuclear war, cometary impact, or similar planetary-scale catastrophe. Rush apparently used this outrageous cover story to persuade an unnamed defense contractor to buy large amounts of gold. For the government. For continuity purposes. Which Rush then kept in his basement. Good times.

The prosecutor called Rush a “master manipulator” —weird for a spook, no?— who “lied to colleagues” about basic facts of his background and “lied to neighbors” about working as a Navy pilot. An FBI investigation found no record of Rush ever attending Clemson University or Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the two schools he claimed on his original CIA job application. There is no evidence he was ever a Navy pilot. At best, he was a mechanic.

Former CIA operations officer Marc Polymeropoulos described the agency’s usual hiring process as “a full-on colonoscopy”— and yet Rush somehow sailed right through it, raising even more unanswered questions, like what on Earth??

The judge ordered Rush to remain in jail pending trial, finding he had the skills, “means, and motive” to flee.

🔥 But here is the most remarkable fact in the entire story: we are hearing about it at all. Normally, a corrupt spook stealing $40 million in gold bars through a fake classified program would be quietly resolved internally. The secretive Intelligence Community abhors embarrassing headlines. They like things buried under national security classifications, in classified basements, handled only by people with clearances, and resolved in sealed proceedings.

Yet this time, it’s front-page news in the Washington Post.

The FBI and CIA have had a famously hostile relationship since the CIA’s founding in 1947 — a rivalry rooted in turf, loyalty, and fundamentally different cultures (cops vs. spooks). J. Edgar Hoover actively opposed the creation of the CIA, and the two agencies spent decades withholding information from each other. One book on the subject is literally titled Wedge: The Secret War Between the FBI and CIA (1994).

The institutional default has always been for the CIA to handle its own internal problems quietly, and for the FBI to stay in its own lane.

That said, the FBI has, occasionally, gone after CIA officers— but almost exclusively in two narrow categories: espionage (selling secrets to China or Russia) and unauthorized disclosures (unauthorized leaks to reporters). A financial fraud prosecution on this public scale is essentially unprecedented. It’s a historical first.

The Aldrich Ames case (1994) is perhaps the most instructive parallel. The CIA knew something was wrong for years —assets were being burned, people were dying— but resisted letting the FBI investigate one of their own. When the FBI finally got in, it was because the evidence became impossible to ignore. The institutional lesson from Ames was supposed to be: the CIA cannot police itself. That lesson apparently did not fully take.

The fact that the Rush case is now described and publicly prosecuted rather than being quietly buried is the most remarkable detail of all.

🔥 The WaPo’s several articles breaking this appalling story rely entirely on anonymous sources, described only as “people familiar with the criminal investigation” and “former U.S. officials.” There has been zero explanation of how the story came to WaPo, no mention of a whistleblower, no reference to a congressional referral, and no indication that the CIA or DOJ proactively disclosed anything.

Yesterday’s article was bylined by three national security reporters (Warren Strobel, Ellen Nakashima, and Katie Mettler), which suggests a significant source effort, but the mechanics of how it surfaced have never been revealed. Which speaks volumes.

The other telling detail was that the article noted that NBC News first reported that the CIA had put several officials on administrative leave— meaning NBC had its own separate pipeline on this story, even before WaPo added the “fake SAP” layer. Two major outlets, each with independent sourcing on the same internal CIA scandal, neither of which was given the story officially, suggest a concerted effort inside the government to make this information public.

Obviously, this is an “official” leak.

So: Is this intentional disclosure meant to create political permission for massive intelligence reforms? A Hegelian dialectic, to manufacture the crisis, then offer the solution? Or is the IC simply so out of control that the white hats struck a blow at the deep state, by leaking a perfectly absurd example of institutional corruption?

Obviously, we are having a rare encounter with the spooky world of shadows and disinformation. So we don’t know.

The Post noted that “several of the people familiar with the case said the very government secrecy designed to protect valuable intelligence can be used to hide misconduct.” Duh. One “former top intelligence official” put it even more starkly: agencies use “financial tradecraft” to move around large amounts of money (and gold, apparently) without attracting adversary attention— and the problem, he said, is that “neither do we” know where the money goes.

Obviously, that is a remarkable admission to hand to a reporter. Someone wanted it all over social media.

🔥 Whatever the reason, the timing is impeccable, because the Senate is currently having a conniption fit over the Intelligence Community. The Hill reported early yesterday morning: “Senate Democrats block extension of spy powers to protest Trump’s choice of Pulte for DNI.” They really don’t want Bill Pulte at ODNI.

In a stunning move, every single Senate Democrat (except John Fetterman) plus seven Republican senators voted against advancing the extension of the nation’s enhanced surveillance authorities under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The powers expire on June 12— next Friday. The stated excuse? They are protesting President Trump’s appointment of Bill Pulte as acting Director of National Intelligence.

Senator Mark Warner (D-Va.) said Democrats couldn’t simply stand by and vote to authorize enhanced surveillance powers when Pulte “doesn’t even meet the basic qualifications of the law to be director of national intelligence” and has “a history of taking and weaponizing confidential information.”

Senator Adam Schiff (D-Ca.) said Pulte “has demonstrated in his current position (at Fannie/Freddie) a willingness to weaponize whatever information he can get access to.” Just consider the irony for a moment— Adam Schiff, the man who spent four years selectively leaking classified intelligence committee proceedings about Russiagate to any camera he could find, now lecturing gullible reporters about weaponizing confidential information.

If it weren’t for double standards … well, you know.

🔥 But let’s take the Democrats’ argument seriously for a moment. They claim Pulte is dangerously unqualified for intelligence. If that’s true, he should be haplessly ineffective — a mere plaything for the career intelligence professionals who have “six ways from Sunday” at getting back at anyone who crosses them, as Chuck Schumer once helpfully explained.

An incompetent outsider in the DNI chair should be a gift to the IC, not a threat to it. So why the panic?

Here is the 4D chess angle: would it actually be bad if FISA 702 were suspended? Trump has every reason in the world to hate FISA— it was the legal vehicle used to surveil his 2016 campaign. If FISA goes dark, it will have gone dark because Democrats killed it to protest his DNI pick.

As for President Trump, he has repeatedly called for ending FISA, then always retreated after pushback. In 2018, Trump tweeted, “This is the act that may have been used, with the help of the discredited and phony Dossier, to so badly surveil and abuse the Trump Campaign by the previous administration and others?”— and called for Congress to “KILL FISA.”

The White House later walked that back, insisting Trump supported reauthorization. That cycle repeated in 2024, with Trump calling to “KILL FISA” and House Republicans revolting— followed by Trump reversing himself and calling for a clean reauthorization.

Curiously, so far this week, Trump has not posted anything about Democrats killing FISA this time. Oddly quiet, no?

Ending FISA like this —making Democrats do it— is not a bad outcome for Trump. He gets the benefit (revenge!) and none of the blame. The Democrats appear to have walked across the rake. Again.

🔥 Now— the third dot. Ask yourself: why are Senators really so worried? What exactly is Trump bringing the “inexperienced” Pulte in to do? Politico answered that question yesterday afternoon: “Trump says he asked Pulte to gut intelligence agency.” And now we begin to see the big picture.

According to Politico, Trump told the Wall Street Journal that he wants Pulte to oversee massive staffing cuts at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. “I’d like to see it smaller. I think there are a lot of people in there that shouldn’t be there,” Trump said.

Now, Trump also has reason to dislike the ODNI. Alert readers will recall that Tulsi Gabbard’s Russiagate disclosures showed that ODNI was the command-and-control hub for the operation that politically castrated —and almost took down— Trump 1.0.

The ODNI ran Russiagate. After Trump was elected, but before he assumed office, following a December 9, 2016, National Security Council Principals meeting —attended by Clapper, Brennan, Comey, Susan Rice, Loretta Lynch, Andrew McCabe, and Avril Haines— DNI Clapper’s assistant emailed ODNI leaders. The email’s subject was, “POTUS Tasking on Russia Election Meddling.” It assigned them to create “an assessment per the President’s (Obama’s) request.”

A totally made-up assessment.

ODNI led the effort, with CIA, FBI, NSA, and DHS in supporting roles. With help from the Europeans, the CIA manufactured the underlying intelligence; the ODNI coordinated, suppressed contradictory findings, silenced internal dissenters, and published the false assessment. Then, the ODNI’s own Inspector General weaponized the whistleblower process to trigger Trump’s impeachment.

Yesterday, the Journal reported Trump ‘suggested’ that Bill Pulte prioritize firing staff who served during the Biden and Obama administrations. Trump also noted that having Pulte serve on an acting basis “gives you more power” to enact sweeping changes— no confirmation hearings, no Senate leverage, no slow-walking.

“Frankly, it might be good for him to shake it up before people come,” Trump casually explained. “Because, if he reduced the size, in conjunction with me, he can do a lot of the hard work, and we wouldn’t have to saddle somebody that goes in.” It’s just common sense.

It was more than common sense. President Trump described a change-agent wrecking ball. It is a strategic maneuver similar to what we have already seen this year, like with Trump’s recent appointment of Todd Blanche as acting Attorney General.

🔥 But there was also a buried lede. It was tucked away, at the very end of the Politico piece: Trump also said he wants Pulte to focus on releasing information related to the 2020 presidential election. “You may find out some things about the rigged elections,” Trump told reporters. When asked by the Journal what information he hopes Pulte will release, Trump replied, “I would say everything — he should look at everything and make a determination.”

Now let’s draw a line connecting these dots. We have the helpfully timed disclosure of an unsupervised CIA officer with fake credentials who ran a fake ultra-classified program for years, stole $40 million in gold, and lied about his entire background— and somehow passed every internal CIA security check.

That story is now —against all odds, thanks to multiple anonymous informants— headline news, not quietly buried inside the Orwellian IC apparatus. It opens the CIA up for major reform.

Senate Democrats were so panicked by Trump’s new acting DNI Bill Pulte, despite his inexperience, that they are willing to blow up their own beloved FISA spy powers, just to protest the pick— which, if it works, hands Trump the FISA expiration he probably wanted anyway. And Trump is suddenly on record saying Pulte’s job is to gut the agency, fire the Obama and Biden holdovers, and release everything about 2020’s stolen election.

The CIA is in institutional disgrace. The ODNI is on the chopping block. The IC is being dismantled from the outside, embarrassed from the inside, and accidentally defunded by the very Democrats who love it most. Whether this happy confluence of events was Trump’s genius or just dumb luck is irrelevant. Geniuses can often be unlucky. But lucky leaders change the course of history.

Either way: Alice, my dear, we’re all the way down the rabbit hole. Kudos to the Q crowd. I told you 2026 would be the Year of Action.

Have a wonderful weekend! Scramble back here on Monday morning, bright and early, for even more delicious, delightful, and spicy essential news and caffeine commentary.

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🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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Yesterday, ABC National News Desk reported, “Exclusive: Sen. Ron Johnson discusses alleged COVID cover-up, suppression of research.” Sometimes, “exclusive” means you broke the story before everybody else. Other times, like now, it means you were the only one who covered it while the rest of the corporate media ran Pfizer drug ads instead. Good for ABC.

Wednesday’s hearing, chaired by Senator Johnson (R-Wi.), was titled ‘Plausible Mechanisms of COVID-19 Injections Causing Cancer and Attacks on Scientific Publications and Research.’ Several compelling witnesses testified, many of whom are well known to anyone following the covid jab issues. For instance, the morning session featured well-known University of London oncology professor Dr. Angus Dalgleish, who informed lawmakers that all six of his melanoma patients, who had been serenely cruising in remission for years, were dragged back into the oncology wood-chipper shortly after getting jabbed.

To set your expectations, this won’t result in any arrests. Senator Johnson is playing a long game. That alone is a refreshing novelty in a capital where most politicians’ long-term planning extends only as far as their next libation with a pharmaceutical lobbyist.

The senator properly framed Wednesday’s hearing as part of a multi‑year transparency project, to slowly and steadily expose what he correctly called “the biggest government scandal of my lifetime:” public health agencies that knew about serious vaccine safety signals, cherry-picked statistical tricks to bury those signals, and diagnosed dissenting researchers with a sudden, acute case of career termination.

A grateful nation can thank Senator Johnson, who has dogged this issue since the pandemic. He’s using his Senatorial platform to hammer as much evidence of covid malfeasance into the permanent Congressional record as he can. “I can’t prosecute, I can’t convict, but I can expose,” Senator Johnson said. “That’s the first line of accountability. I’m trying to do this because America deserves a COVID reckoning,” he added.

Bring it, Senator Johnson.

💉 At the hearing, staff circulated an interim report issued within the last two weeks, titled, “Failure to Warn: How Federal Health Agencies Downplayed the Risk of Myocarditis and Other Adverse Events Following COVID-19 Vaccination.” The report carefully details how CDC/FDA officials knew about the myocarditis signal in young men as early as February, 2021 —a month into the public launch— but did not make Pfizer and Moderna disclose it until June.

June. Long after hundreds of thousands of young people had gotten the shots to comply with their high school sports and college enrollment requirements.

The investigative committee subpoenaed thousands of pages of records from the agencies, drugmakers, and the White House. That effort uncovered an abusive pattern of minimizing the myocarditis signal while also leaning into ways to explain it away, like suddenly deciding that the adverse event tracking system they designed, VAERS, was unreliable. All of these monkeyshines were muddled in discussions about avoiding “vaccine hesitancy” and in polished talking points about how safe and effective the shots were.

Here’s one example of the games the committee uncovered. In May, 2021, some honest CDC officials prepared a “HAN” (“Health Alert Network”) advisory that would have delicately warned doctors and cautioned young people about the myocarditis signal and would have urged restrictions on “rigorous athletic activity” for at least 3 months for myocarditis cases. Restrictions intended to save their lives. It wasn’t a guess. Confidential internal CDC notes from May 24, 2021, explicitly answered one researcher’s question, “Is VAERS signaling for myopericarditis now?” with “For the age groups 16–17 years and 18–24 years, yes.”

By May 23, 2021, then CDC Director Rochelle Walensky had signed off on the substance of the HAN, writing, “I’m fine with how this reads … grateful.” Absent a major surprise, it should have been published.

Surprise! Even that artfully hedged, tenatively phrased, barely committed HAN was too much. We must avoid hesitation! Triple-masking FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock gave the HAN a fatal injection. She directly emailed CDC Director Walensky, insisting that “FDA does not concur with the issuance of the myocarditis HAN as written.” So CDC ultimately published no HAN, quietly transforming the draft into a short, low‑visibility “clinical considerations” web page posted on May 28, 2021, which did not mention the recommended athletic restrictions, and which was not reported in the corporate media.

In other words, CDC staff had a fully baked alert ready to go, with an internal written acknowledgment of a real VAERS signal in the 16-24 age group, but a conscious political choice in the form of pushback from the FDA’s politically appointed director downgraded that lifesaving alert to a nearly invisible website note. We’ll never know how many kids and young adults could have been saved from lifelong injuries or even died as a result.

This is the same FDA which, I feel compelled to add, gets at least 65% of its human drug regulatory budget directly from pharma ‘user fees’— i.e., from the same companies it’s supposed to be policing. But never mind.

All while this sordid timeline of deceit was unfolding, other CDC officials “provided up‑to‑date information on the status of the HAN to Pfizer and Moderna representatives,” even as doctors and the public got no real‑time warning. In other words, while some CDC employees were doing their job and preparing a belated but critically important HAN, other employees were tattling on them to Pfizer and Moderna.

One has little difficulty imagining Pfizer and Moderna, having gotten the heads-up, complaining about the HAN to Janet Woodcock or even Biden (assuming he was awake).

Soon, and suddenly, political appointee and chronic germaphobe Woodcock shut it all down.

💉 There’s lots more. Read the whole report for more detail than you ever wanted about how things really work inside the public health agencies. Back at the hearing, and far beyond the myocarditis signal, Johnson’s witnesses explained into the Congressional record a dizzying number of ways that the covid shots could conceivably cause cancer.

In particular, Dr. Wafik El-Diery, MD, PhD, FACP testified about how the covid jabs interfere with the body’s normal tumor-suppression defenses against cancer. He also described how his carefully worded papers about how spike protein might reduce the body’s ability to suppress cancer were savaged, both publicly and sneakily behind the scenes.

CLIP: Dr. El-Diery testifies about credible oncological mechanisms arising from mRNA spike protein (7:49).

Dr. El-Diery testified that he’d reviewed over 70 peer-reviewed papers from 27 countries reporting over 300 cancer cases arising shortly after someone got the shots— many of which appeared near the injection site. In several cases, spike protein —which should be absent from tumor tissue— was found in biopsied tumor samples.

None of this, of course, says anything about later cancers that might develop one to three years after the shots, at a time when the delay makes it devilishly hard to claim any link, and when nobody’s testing tumors for spike.

Mass arrests and prosecutions are still far away, barely visible specks on the distant horizon. But we have seen many firings. And some involved scientists are being arrested, albeit for current misconduct. (We’ll take it, of course.) The market for covid jabs and for mRNA drugs in general has undergone a rapid, unscheduled disassembly. Moderna, whose stock ticker is literally “MRNA,” has acquired a terminal financial infection.

Meanwhile, Senator Johnson continues to beat the war drums and build a record. I wish they could give these courageous witnesses Congressional Medals of Honor. And Ron Johnson has earned our undying gratitude. Please keep it going, Senator.

🔥🔥🔥

Yesterday broke even more encouraging Reckoning™ news. CBS reported, “Former Trump adviser John Bolton to plead guilty to retaining national security information” Boom.

John Bolton, a notorious neocon and one of the key architects of the Russiagate hoax that derailed Trump 1.0 —which led to two impeachments followed by four years of furious lawfare against the President— has agreed to plead guilty to basic DOJ charges that he illegally kept classified materials from his time in office.

After what President Trump went through, the irony of nailing Bolton on a classified documents conviction is so thick you could cut it into slices and serve it with Joe Biden’s favorite mint chocolate-chip ice cream.

It is also worth noting that, ever since Mr. Bolton was charged last year and his homes and office were raided, he has steadfastly insisted he was innocent, and the whole thing was weaponized selective prosecution. I guess he lied. From the Washington Post’s Editorial Board op-ed, in October:

Whoopsies! I guess he’s rethought all that. He no longer wants his day in court. And he’s no longer insisting on his innocence. Under the proposed plea agreement, Bolton, 77, will plead guilty —to one of 18 counts from the indictment— pay a $2.25 million fine, become a convicted felon who can never again hold security credentials, and will allow the judge to sentence him up to five years in prison.

If, like me, you would have preferred that Bolton be tried fairly by a jury of his peers and then launched into the Sun, you might be feeling less than fully excited about the proposed deal. But it is logical from the DOJ’s perspective.

In exchange for giving up a chance at a life sentence, the DOJ gets security. It has not, to date, had much luck with DC juries and judges. This way, it gets a conviction and takes Bolton off the political chessboard forever. Bolton gets a chance at having a few good years left as a free man.

The deal still must be approved by the Judge at a June 26th hearing.

And it leaves open the possibility of future charges related, say, to the ongoing Russiagate investigation. So there’s still hope for sending Bolton on his one-way mission to the star.

🔥🔥🔥

It just became a little harder to blame Senate Majority Leader John Thune for failing to pass the SAVE America Act. Yesterday, Fox News reported, “Four Senate Republicans again unite with Dems to block Trump’s SAVE America Act.”

Yesterday, the Senate actually voted on an amendment to add the SAVE America Act to a pending budget reconciliation bill. Alert readers will recall that the proposed Act would require all voters to present ID and proof of citizenship in federal elections.

It only needed 50 votes. It failed 48—50. Four Republicans defected and joined Democrats opposing the amendment, including Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), 84, Thom Tillis (R-NC), 65, Susan Collins (R-ME), 73, and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), 69.

The failed vote suggests that Majority Leader Thune may have had good reasons for delaying it— in that he probably knew it couldn’t pass. Of course, this doesn’t completely clear him. He could apply pressure and party discipline, such as by stripping the disloyal senators of their committee positions, as Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-La.) encouraged yesterday.

More conspiracy-minded commenters darkly suspect that Thune only let it come up for a vote because he knew it wouldn’t pass. I have no opinion on that one; it is a matter of mind-reading and imputed motives. I prefer to see the glass half-full— that there are now 48 Republican Senators on record as supporting the Act.

Maybe the Act will enjoy improved odds in January with a new Senate. Till then, there are other opportune irons heating up in the electoral fire. Be sure to tune in tomorrow for more on that.

🔥🔥🔥

Speaking of Susan Collins: behold the latest exciting polycrisis chapter, set in Maine. Yesterday, the New York Times ran a long-format article masquerading as a hit job against the Democrats’ nominee against Senator Collins— the Nazi-tattooed oyster hustler and true colorful character Graham Platner. In reality, the Times’ story was more of a limited hangout. It raised new allegations of sexual abuse, but made them sound like hysterical whining from Republican ex-girlfriends. The Times reported, “Several Women Who Dated Graham Platner Recall ‘Unsettling’ Behavior.”

Unsettling behavior! Imagine the choice of vocabulary they’d have selected instead, if Platner were a Republican endorsed by President Trump.

The funniest thing about this whole story is that Platner is a walking, talking, cartoon caricature of what Democrats think knuckle-dragging conservatives are like. Despite that, and despite the fact he attended the Hotchkiss School, one of the most exclusive and expensive private boarding schools in the country, he’s still somehow the Democrats’ great white hope.

Adding the parts we already know to the new allegations in this story, here’s what the balance sheet shows so far:

• Platner is a bearded, flannel-wearing stereotype of high-testosterone, “blue-collar,” salt-of-the-earth toxic masculinity that Democrats both fear and romanticize.

• He never shuts up about his Marine service, saying he “signed up for the U.S. Marines to kill.” (Now he says he’s “incredibly non-violent.” It’s incredible, all right.)

• Democrat supporters brag about how he could “beat up anyone in Congress.”

• His Reddit posts stress his “passion for firearms” and “steadfast support for the Second Amendment.”

• In his archived social media posts, he constantly uses “gay” and “retard” as slurs, uses rude nicknames for black people and women (“slits”), and calls rural whites “racist and stupid.” (He now says he was in a “dark place” when he wrote those things.)

• His now infamous Nazi death-camp guard tattoo, which he called “my Totenkopf” (he now claims that for nearly 20 years he thought it was just a non-binary, friendly-pirate emoji).

• He has a recurring populist line steeped in contempt for the institutions: he calls U.S. wars “a lie” and says the system is rigged by oligarchs. His populism is almost MAGA-adjacent.

• He told one of his girlfriends that if he ever caught an intruder in his house, he would rape them— “not in a gay way,” but in a dominance way. (The campaign did not deny it.) This was a very sophisticated, progressive, hands-on theory of home defense, which I’m certain will be warmly received by Maine’s suburban women voters.

• He admits sending sexy chats to women, not his wife, within a year of getting married.

• He and his wife are in current treatment with at least four mental health professionals and probably an exorcist.

• He has PTSD. Nobody is saying he could snap and shoot up the Senate.

• Three ex-girlfriends described him as a volatile, sometimes physically intimidating partner, with excessive drinking, flagrant infidelity, and the kind of sneering contempt toward women that usually gets you featured on a true-crime podcast.

His “transformation” into a liberal happened very recently in 2021, right around the time he realized that Maine’s progressive donor community has much deeper pockets than an oyster bed. Instead of having any kind of communiarian epiphany or even a thoughtful progressive platform, Platner manufactured his progressive bona fides by claiming to have voted for Bernie twice and being a “vegetable‑growing, psychedelics‑taking socialist,” which Jacobin and NBC repeat as a kind of charming, anti‑establishment tagline rather than an instant disqualifier for public office.

Naturally, we are expected to believe Platner’s transition from bloodthirsty rifleman to peaceful, vegetable-growing, LSD-imbibing, tie-dyed socialist is completely genuine, and not at all a calculated rebranding designed by a focus group. Perish the thought.

And … well … I’m no expert, but I feel compelled to add that I would not be shocked if a reckless, PTSD-afflicted barfly with this train of wreckage already in his biography actually still had a whole conga line of skeletons poised to shimmy out of the closet any minute.

🔥 Back in 2018, NBC published what would become one of the most widely cited polls in recent political history. The article was headlined, “Poll: 56 percent of Republicans would consider voting for a candidate accused of harassment.” For contrast, the subheadline added, “Poll finds 81 percent of Democrats would definitely not support a candidate accused of sexual harassment by multiple people.”

That poll was dragged up again and again during me too episodes like Trump’s Stormy Daniels case and Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, as proof that Democrats are more principled than Republicans, and would never ever support a candidate with sex pest strings attached. Believe all women!

So you would think it would be more explosive that the Times’ new Platner exposé included troubling allegations far sketchier than those leveled against former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, which forced that unlucky politician to step down. But no. You’ve got to see how the liberal Times readers reacted in the comments. Behold, three examples of hyper-flexible mental gymnastics that could headline an old-time circus sideshow.

🔥 Democrats are taking a much broader view of Platner’s flaws than NBC’s poll might suggest. First (2,600 likes):

And (1,500 likes):

And (1,300 likes):

There you have it. In a single election cycle, Democrats went from “81% say they would definitely not support a candidate accused of sexual harassment by multiple people” to “who cares; we just want healthcare and a higher minimum wage.”

(I also find it profoundly weird that Little Joe thinks his party “fights for the working class” when they just forced the working class to take experimental drugs or get fired, which by my calculations results in a minimum wage of zero. Maybe I’m missing the nuances. Never mind.)

🔥 The woman most heavily quoted in the Times’ new story was Platner’s ex-girlfriend Lyndsey Fifield, who this morning posted her response to the article. Lyndsey admitted that she was the one who first quietly unmasked the Totenkopf-tattoo story (trying to stay under the radar because she was afraid of Platner). Unsurprisingly, Lyndsey said the Times did not report the full extent of her history with Platner, did not use any of her text messages or screenshots, and spent six paragraphs proving she is a Republican, even though she readily admits as much.

X POST: Lyndsey Fifield’s tragic story of how the Times convinced her to go public then threw her under the bus.

My reaction to this developing story is mostly one of bemusement. For some reason, Democrats see Graham Platner as their best chance to pick up a Senate seat. But even without all this baggage, Platner was always a long shot against “moderate” Republican Susan Collins, who has never lost. Even though Times readers are willing to live with Platner’s knuckle-dragging, neanderthal temperament because he claims to drop acid and grow kale, the steady stream of misogyny can’t possibly help.

But for the sake of argument, let’s say Platner somehow wins. The last time the Democrats rolled the dice on a tattooed bro-candidate with psychological turbulence, they got John Fetterman. And Fetterman has been a spectacular success for progressives, assuming their primary goal was to elect a senator who spends his time trolling his own base, voting with Republicans, and bleeding staff like a punctured IV bag.

I’m not sure Democrats have fully thought this Platner thing through. I say: let them run him. If the Democrats want to replace Susan Collins with a man who threatened to rape home intruders and has to consult four mental health professionals to decide what to have for breakfast, we shall not stand in their way.

Have a fantastic Friday! C&C will return tomorrow morning with an all-new roundup of essential news, caffeinated commentary, and oyster shucking. (Rhetorically.)

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