Good morning C&C Army! I have a great roundup for you today including: Mad Maxine tests positive; Operation Multiplier updates; a new op; odd congressional covid stats; Elon gently pushes back; thoughts on student loan forgiveness; New York’s high court strikes Dem maps; Fauci says its over but its not over; great news from OK; and a grand jury forms in Loudon County.

🗞 THE C&C ARMY POST 🗞

🪖 OPERATION MULTIPLIER Update: I had a delightful call yesterday morning with Leslie Manookian, the founder of the Health Freedom Defense Fund. She was incredibly grateful for our multiplier, moved to tears at one point during the call. Like our previous ally Joe Harding, HFDF’s office has been BURIED in hate mail, their email system is under cyberattack, and criminals are flooding them disgusting porn.

All this hate, just for freeing Americans from an unlawful mask order, using the legal, lawful process of taking it to court, which took most of a year to accomplish. Who ARE these nutjobs?

Anyway, Leslie doesn’t have final numbers for us yet but she’s working on it. She did write a delightful thank-you letter to us though. Here’s a snippet:

“I and the entire Health Freedom Defense Fund (HFDF) team would like to extend our deepest gratitude to Jeff Childers of Coffee and Covid (C&C) and all his wonderfully generous followers! … Operation Multiplier [] has yielded an incredible result. … Thank you to each and every one of you that answered the call[!] … We are fighting a leviathan and we simply cannot do this without the support of all of you. … We also have several other major lawsuits in the works so now more than ever we are grateful for your support and encouragement as we continue our work to defend our health freedoms.”

Our encouraging Operation landed JUST when they needed the support most. I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: none of us could have done this alone, no matter how grateful we felt about their mask lawsuit. But working together we moved a mountain. Imagine if we could encourage 100 more HFDF’s to stand up.

Multipliers work because we ALL chip in, just a small amount that individually we won’t even notice, regardless of our economic circumstances. And now, because of how impactful our HFDF multiplier was, you can feel great all day today! We did a marvelous, amazing thing. And, I’ll update you once she gets the figures together.

If you somehow missed the Operation Multiplier post and want to get in on the win, you can still contribute any amount ending in a ‘2’ here: https://secure.anedot.com/health-freedom-defense-fund-hfdf/donate.

(FYI, I know about RON JOHNSON. He’s on the list. Stand by for orders.)

🪖 New Operation: We have a brand new operation for all C&C Army soldiers. We have an opportunity created by the Twitter-Musk controversy, which appears to have caused the social media companies to turn the censorship dials way down for the moment, giving us a chance to message without being throttled as much. The new assignment is OPERATION BALLOON. I’m asking every C&C follower to take two or three minutes to blast out the www.coffeeandcovid.com link (or the Facebook page) to as many folks in your list as possible, taking advantage of this incredible chance to expand the army.

I reckon that between Facebook and Substack we currently have about 100,000 readers. Imagine what our multipliers could do if we can get to 1,000,000 readers. Let’s blow it out. To help, I’ll commit to doing my very best snarky optimistic work. We can do this!

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On to the roundup.

🗞COVID NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🗞

🔥 Masked, shielded, and quadruple-vaxxed democrat congresswoman “Mad Maxine” Waters tested positive for covid yesterday.

Don’t worry, she said the words though! In a press release about her positive test, the silly lawmaker recited that “I am grateful to be fully vaccinated and to have received two booster shots. Thankfully, I am feeling fine and recommend everyone to get vaccinated if you have not done so already.”

📈 A fascinating bit of numbers coincidence: In April and May 2022, 94% of covid cases in Congress were among Democrats:

— March: 1 R, 17 D

— April: 1 R, 16 D

Odd, no? I could make a variety of guesses. Dems might be more likely to take the test. Maybe it’s some kind of political strategy. Maybe Omicron likes dems better. Or, maybe they are more likely to have been boosted than Republicans; some data suggests boosting may increase the risk of a covid infection.

🐦 Twitter has continued to evolve this week, even though Musk has not yet completed his purchase. Conservative accounts appear freed from some kind of gulag, with follower numbers increasing faster than probably any time before the 2020 elections. Lefty pushback is ramping up, with dour articles in the New York Times and other heavyweights predicting the acquisition will turn the U.S. into Nazi Germany overnight, or something.

Then yesterday the Biden Administration announced it would take steps to combat misinformation on social media by forming a new department called the “Ministry of Truth,” sorry, I mean the “Disinformation Governance Board.” It’s going to govern misinformation or something.

This is where it really gets interesting and shows why Elon Musk is perhaps the most successful entrepreneur in history. He tweeted “For Twitter to deserve public trust, it must be politically neutral, which effectively means upsetting the far right and the far left equally.”

Boom. One million lefty heads exploded in terrified awe.

What Musk’s saying is fine, if he has to censor people, he’s going to censor BOTH SIDES. Leftists were like, what? Can he DO that? But of course, that’s ONLY FAIR. And the leftists minds were blown, just like that. They see it now, for a brief moment, why it’s a bad idea to let unknown, untransparent, recently-graduated fact-checkers decide what gets online and what doesn’t.

I don’t know if it’s checkmate but it should sure slow down all the blah blah blah.

For the record, I’m not advocating for Elon Musk to be in charge of anything he doesn’t own. I’m just as skeptical of the whole brain interface stuff as anybody else. But you have to admit he’s moving the needle in lots of interesting ways. Plus he makes a great car.

🔥 There’s been a lot of talk about Biden forgiving student loans somehow, to score points with young people for the midterms. It’s a political stunt, but there’s ALREADY a very simple existing potential solution for folks mired in un-payable student debt: bankruptcy.

The only current challenge is that bankruptcy courts came up with a hardship standard called the Brunner ‘certainty of hopelessness standard’ that makes it incredibly difficult to discharge student loans in bankruptcy. I have litigated this issue. In one case where we tried to convince a bankruptcy court to provide a discharge for an un-payable student loan, I wrote this in my conclusion:

It is not any exaggeration to observe that nondischargeable student loans are literally destroying lives. Destroying them, in thousands and tens of thousands. Entire generations of productivity are being lost, wasted. There is not a single shred of evidence that the made-up ‘certainty of hopelessness’ standard has done anything but backfire, badly. There is no legitimate moral defense for this crippling, inhumane system. It is terrifying to imagine the harvest if the Courts do not repair what they have broken. [The borrower] begs this Court to help turn the tide only by applying basic rules of linguistic interpretation to Brunner and discarding layers of ‘retributive dicta.’ It has to start somewhere. Let it start here.

In that 2020 case, the court unfortunately ruled by avoiding the hardship issue, denying the request to discharge the borrower’s student loans, and saying that the borrower must first complete five years of attempted repayment under a Chapter 13 bankruptcy case, and only then could he come back and ask for a hardship discharge.

We don’t need a new statute or act or an executive order to solve the student loan problem. All we need is for the courts to announce they’re relaxing the hardship standard. That’s it. It would solve all the most difficult student loan problems instantly. If Biden issues some kind of blanket forgiveness, it will punish the people who saved and sacrificed and skimped and worked hard to pay off their loans.

Even more important, relaxing the bankruptcy standard would help all students going forward, because lenders would have to rein in the wild-west market for student credit, because they’d know that students with bad loans could get bankruptcy discharges if they get underwater. Loans should be tailored to the degree earned. There’s no reason for a kid getting a marketing degree to borrow $100K. They’ll never earn enough to pay it back.

🔥 Fox News ran a surprising article yesterday headlined, “New York’s Highest Court Strikes Down Dems’ ‘Partisan’ Redistricting In ‘Big Time’ Defeat.” The decision affirmed a lower court that had found the same thing, that the dem’s proposed redistricting map was unconstitutional because the district boundaries had been unconstitutionally gerrymandered and the Legislature hadn’t followed proper procedure in passing the maps.

The GOP’s lawsuit against the new district lines was supported by computer simulations from an alert elections analyst who’d discovered the maps were gerrymandered. Great work.

🪳 Welp, it’s official now, I guess. Or maybe not. According to NPR, yesterday the public health team’s top insect Anthony Fauci spoke from one bodily orifice saying the country is now OUT of the pandemic phase, but on the SAME DAY he also emitted the exact opposite opinion. I know you can’t believe it, since Fauci’s been an icon of consistency so far. Anyway, the little weasel said it’s OVER on PBS NewsHour yesterday:

“We are certainly right now in this country out of the pandemic phase,” Fauci said in an interview with PBS NewsHour. “Namely, we don’t have 900,000 new infections a day and tens and tens and tens of thousands of hospitalizations and thousands of deaths. We are at a low level right now. So if you’re saying, ‘Are we out of the pandemic phase in this country?’ — we are,” he said.

Fauci actually gassed on about how over the pandemic is for almost a full minute, in fact.

PBS NewsHour @NewsHour

JUST IN: Dr. Anthony Fauci tells our @JudyWoodruff the U.S. is "out of the pandemic phase." to.pbs.org/3MzB3rB

But then — on the SAME DAY — Fauci told an Associated Press reporter the EXACT OPPOSITE:

“We are in a different moment of the pandemic,” he said. After a brutal winter surge, Fauci added, “we’ve now decelerated and transitioned into more of a controlled phase. By no means does that mean the pandemic is over.”

So which is it? That right there is a mighty fine example of same-day narrative shifting. But what most amazes me is that a lot of people in this country will accept both Fauci’s statements, that “we are … out of the pandemic phase in this country” and also that “by no means does this mean the pandemic is over.” Somehow, some people can hold both thoughts in their minds simultaneously and be perfectly satisfied with that.

It seems like George Orwell had some ideas about this mystical double-brain power, but I can’t remember it right now.

🔥 The Oklahoma legislature just passed a bill to ban abortions immediately if Roe v. Wade is overturned. So you can add one more.

🔥 A special grand jury has been convened in Loudon County, Virginia, to consider criminal charges related to that school board’s mishandling and cover-ups of sexual assault cases in its schools. On January 15, newly-elected Governor Younkin issued an executive order authorizing the state’s Attorney General to investigate certain incidents at Stone Bridge and Broad Run High Schools.

As a reminder, the story originally broke because a father angrily and tearfully confronted the school board about covering for a boy who’d raped his daughter, a predator who the school had authorized to freely enter girl’s bathrooms whenever he wanted. The school board handled the understandably upset father by promptly having him arrested and thrown out of the meeting. How dare he.

The school board members who authorized the rapist and then covered up the assault, along with a SECOND rape, still sit smugly in office. They might be a little less smug now though, since Younkin entered another order approving a special election in November for the whole board, which would be super helpful if they are all in jail by then, since they can’t attend school board meetings from prison. Maybe Younkin’s thinking ahead?

Now, I know it’s not the grand jury you all REALLY want to see, but it’s a start!

My prediction: they’ll all resign soon, they’ll quit yapping like dogs — on advice of counsel — and, they WON’T sue over the special election in November like they have been threatening to do.

So.

Have a terrific Thursday, and I’ll be back tomorrow morning with more delicious Coffee & Covid!

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☕️ Coffee & Covid 2022 🦠

☕️ Coffee & Covid ☙ Thursday, April 28, 2022…