Good morning and Happy Tuesday, C&C! It’s a Good News roundup today: good news on the WHO treaty; Netflix tries to unwind its woke programming; State Farm learns a lesson about the culture wars; great news for balding people; good news for first time Florida homebuyers; and the WHO, the CDC, and the media start to come clean about monkeypox.

🗞 *THE C&C ARMY POST* 🗞

🪖 Thanks for all the wonderful comments yesterday encouraging and discouraging me from probing Elon Musk’s open job offer. I should have made this clear yesterday: OF COURSE it never even occurred to me that I might have to stop writing Coffee & Covid. How perfectly absurd. What would I do to vent all this pent-up sarcasm?

🪖 I’m mulling over options for our June multiplier. There are lots of good possibilities, but I haven’t made any decisions yet. Candidates include: Rand Paul, for standing up to the WHO, Rebel News, or Feds for Medical Freedom. If I left out any other good ones, let me know in the comments.

Incidentally, I’ve been getting lots of requests for multipliers from people running in local races against established democrat opponents. These situations don’t really fit the multiplier model, which is designed to bless folks and outfits who’ve ALREADY accomplished something important and shown courage in the face of cancellation. By multiplying them we are sending a message to encourage others, too, and show our opponents that we’ll support our heroes. Plus, accomplishment is the very best evidence that folks are for-real, non-RINO, valuable assets for the cause.

Having said that, I’d like to figure SOME way we might be able to help support local candidates and local issues, even if not financially. Suggestions are welcome.

🗞*COVID NEWS AND COMMENTARY* 🗞

🔥 Looks like all the attention on the WHO’s pandemic treaty amendments has borne some nice fruit. Yesterday, several Substacks reported that “12 of the 13 proposed [WHO] amendments had been removed from consideration because the working group [for Pandemic Response] was ‘unable to reach a consensus.’” We’ll see how it plays out this week, but this is a great sign. Keep the pressure on.

🔥 You aren’t used to hearing this, but sane people scored two more big wins in the runaway culture wars yesterday. The first story has been developing for a few weeks, but yesterday RedState ran a story headlined, “The New Ricky Gervais Special Might Be the Reason Netflix Sent out Its Memo Suggesting Woke Employees Quit.”

I recently reported how the streaming company sent a memo to its employees saying that if they don’t like working on shows that offend their political sensibilities, then don’t let the door hit them on the way out. The memo didn’t mince words, using phrases like “Netflix may not be the best place to work for you” and suggesting employees “might want to consider working somewhere else.”

Seems pretty clear.

The first sign of the new direction was that Netflix cancelled its big-budget show “Cowboy Bebop,” a live action remake of a popular animé, that had been widely criticized for turning one main character transgender and morphing another popular series character into a feminist lesbian action heroine.

Next, Variety reported Netflix pulled the plug on several other woke animated projects aimed at kids, including “Wings of Fire,” from executive producer Ava DuVernay; “Antiracist Baby,” a series aimed at PRESCHOOLERS; “With Kind Regards From Kindergarten,” a film targeting youngsters; and a yet-unnamed feminist animated series concocted by royal grifter Meghan Markle. Netflix also scrapped the banal documentary “Stamped: Racism, Antiracism and You.”

Finally, Netflix has announced the release of a comedy special by acerbic British funnyman Ricky Gervais. Red State says the streaming company had the Gervais special in cold storage for some time, but hasn’t released fearing leftwing backlash. Reviewers say it has more transgender jokes than Dave Chapelle’s recent special. “One-hundred percent, the Netflix employees are going to get mad again,” said SiriusXM host Sam Roberts, who’d gotten an early peek at Gervais’ show.

Get un-woke, go un-broke?

🔥 You’re going to love this next story. It took less than a workday to turn the trans cruise ship around. It started when about mid-day yesterday I began to get reports about a leaked State Farm memo sent to its insurance agents in Florida, asking six “volunteer” insurance agents to deliver packages of gender-bending books to KINDERGARTEN classrooms. In other words, we saw yet another big woke corporation sneakily assisting groomers by stealthily flanking parents with gross sex stuff. Because what do parents know about raising kids anyways? It was also clearly trying to help kooky allied teachers break the new Florida law clearly prohibiting giving this exact kind of material to young kids.

Why involve parents anyway? Those bigots, they don’t realize that you have to break a few young eggs to make a rainbow omelet.

State Farm, which itself offers zero products for children, was supporting a program by a lunatic grifting outfit calling itself GenderCool, which “promotes education around LGBTQ issues,” and which designed the outrageous strategy for ‘distribution of books in schools,’ including one awful offering for the littlest children titled “A kid’s book about being non-binary.”

“The project’s goal is to increase representation of LGBTQ+ books and support our communities in having challenging, important and empowering conversations with children age 5+,” the leaked email said.

Why on Earth do they think 5-year-old kids need to have “challenging, important and empowering conversations?”

The email continued, “Nationwide, approximately 550 State Farm agents and employees will have the opportunity to donate this three book bundle to their local teacher, community center, or library of their choice.”

In other words, if the STATE won’t give kids five years and up the disturbing sex manuals, then GenderCool will, and it will use your State Farm insurance premiums to do it with, too. So, take that.

Personally, I find it impossible to scrape together any sympathy for deviants who want to teach kindergartners about their options for having a more fulfilling sex life. Personally, I think these kinds of people should be criminally prosecuted.

So I was all set to give the insurance giant a wicked scolding in today’s post and encourage some ‘positive communications” with local agents when, early yesterday evening, the Washington Examiner ran a story headlined, “Backlash Prompts State Farm to End Program Donating Trans Books to Schools.” Well, well, well.

It turns out the pushback began almost immediately yesterday, with awesome meme campaigns “Like a Creepy Neighbor” and “Like a Good Groomer” making the rounds of Twitter by mid-afternoon. Moms for Liberty’s twitter feed was red hot, as you can imagine.

Although State Farm initially defended the program, by late afternoon it was sprinting backwards. “State Farm’s support of a philanthropic program, GenderCool, has been the subject of news and customer inquiries,” the company said in a statement to the Examiner. Then it conceded, “Conversations about gender and identity should happen at home with parents.” You don’t say. It continued, “We don’t support required curriculum in schools on this topic. We support organizations providing resources for parents to have these conversations.”

And finally, “We no longer support the program allowing for distribution of books in schools,” the statement promised, but warned “we will continue to explore how we can support organizations that provide tools and resources that align with our commitment to diversity and inclusion.” Hmm. My thought is that, if you’re spending time dabbling in kindergarten sexual education, maybe you aren’t focusing enough on the INSURANCE BUSINESS.

Just saying.

Anyway, well done, parents! Whatever you did yesterday worked. State Farm wisely decided not to join Disney in the culture wars this round, and will be coughing up crow feathers all day today.

💉 In a series of about six hundred excited tweets, the Boston Globe reported yesterday on its very own article, headlined “Experimental Pill Prompts Some to Regrow a Nearly Full Head of Hair.” How about that? It’s too bad this story didn’t break a couple months ago, we might’ve avoided all that unfortunate unpleasantness with Will Smith.

The Globe reported that Concert Pharma’s CEO Roger Tung announced that between several hundred thousand and 1.5 million people in the US currently have the heartbreaking non-hair condition. For some reason, this is a HUGE new market opportunity, because nobody ever heard of baldness before. I wonder what could’ve changed. Weird.

And, it turns out that the small Lexington pharma company is only one of SEVERAL companies with hair-loss drugs in the late stages of clinical trials for the disease, where a person’s immune system attacks their own hair follicles, resulting in patchy or total hair loss. Eli Lilly, Incyte, and, wait for it, PFIZER are also developing new treatments for the condition. Soon balding people will have tons of options for regrowing their shedding curls. So that’s good.

According to the article, Concert tested its TWICE-DAILY pill in a study of about 700 people with moderate or severe alopecia. By the end of the study, the company said almost half — 41.5% percent — of people who got the highest dose also got hairier.

“I think there are enough patients in the US who are going to need treatment for alopecia areata that there will be multiple successful drugs,” CEO Tung told the Globe. It seems like there are more alopecia patients all the time, and there will be plenty of market to go around.

For some reason.

🔥 Yesterday, Governor DeSantis announced a program to give certain citizens $100 million dollars for “down payments and closing costs.” It’s for “more than 50 professions when buying their first home,” including police, nurses, and teachers. This is covid surplus money. On one hand, it’s great that the Governor is plowing the dollars back into Florida’s economy rather than wasting it on some crony-fied boondoggle. It also helps him politically, because his opponents Nikki Fried and Charlie Crist have been constantly attacking him based on the cost of housing in Florida.

On the other hand, from an economic standpoint, the program violates core conservative principles by picking winners and losers, and will inevitably cause more real estate price appreciation, although it’s not clear to what extent. On balance, I’ll call it good news.

🔥 Progress! Yesterday, CNBC ran a story headlined, “Monkeypox Outbreak Is Primarily Spreading Through Sex, WHO Officials Say.” The sub-headline notes that “The most recent surge in cases appears to have been spread among men who have sex with other men.”

I told you the euphemism machine would be at its highest setting. Why can’t they just say “gay men?” Why do we need this tortuous language “men who have sex with other men?” Don’t tell me, I don’t need to know. It was a rhetorical question.

But they haven’t given up the fear, I mean public health campaign. The story explained that “WHO officials … emphasiz[ed] that ANYONE can contract monkeypox.” The gist is that they think the transmission is from close physical contact with open body sores rather than something particular to the kinds of sexual contact between gay men. So if hetero people also join up in “sexual networking” — whatever that is — and have sex with random people that have open monkeypox sores, the hetero people could catch it, too.

The fear porn continued as the article gloomily predicted, “monkeypox can kill as many as 1 in 10 people who contract the disease.” Well. We haven’t seen that yet, or anything like that kind of fatality rate. They’re just guessing, or hoping, or something. The old African figures they are referring to involve the very worst cases in third-world people who waited a long time to seek treatment.

But at least they’re acknowledging how the disease is really spreading. That is good news. Late last night, CNBC ran another article headlined “CDC Officials Sound Alarm for Gay and Bisexual Men as Monkeypox Spreads in Community.” That’s even closer to reality than the first article. The evening article includes the same silly warnings as the earlier article, but the headline says what it needed to say.

Pfizer board member Scott Gottlieb apparently said, “there is a possibility now this has gotten into the community [and] if in fact it’s more pervasive than what we’re measuring right now, that becomes hard to snuff out.” Hard to snuff out?

I’m just a lawyer, not a public health expert, and I don’t know all the ins-and-outs of sexual networking, but here is a suggestion. Maybe — just stick with me for a minute — maybe if people stop having sex with other people they don’t know and aren’t married to for a while? Could that help? Take a year if they have to. Maybe THAT could “snuff it out?”

Remember all the stuff about “do it for the community,” and “if it saves just one life,” and “don’t kill grandma?” How about a tiny abstential sacrifice for grandma and the community, gay people? Will we hear those kinds of suggestions this time, do you think?

Somehow I doubt it. Somehow I think this is going to come down to them telling us ALL to take smallpox vaccines. Or, maybe I’m just being paranoid. It’s so hard to tell the difference these days.

Have a terrific Tuesday and I’ll see ya’ll back in the morning for more.

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