☕️ACCORDING TO PLAN ☙ Monday, April 13, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS🦠

Schrodinger's Ayatollah morphed into Schrodinger's Strait; fake meat collapses in infamy; leading Democrat candidate for CA governor collapses in disgrace; Pharma buying spree; bad Trump post; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! Your roundup includes: how Trump blockaded the very strait Iran refused to open; the spectacular collapse of a $14 billion fake-meat empire to penny stock status, which should have been obvious from Artemis II would happen; Swalwell’s governor campaign flames out in disgrace, four accusers deep, just as Democrats had planned; big pharma’s biotech buying spree confirms our revolutionary theory; and a rare disagreement with the President’s edgiest ever Truth Social post.

⛑️🚀 C&C ARMY BRIEFING — IRAN WAR UPDATE 🚀⛑️

Yesterday, President Trump surprised media again, doing the exact same thing he just complained that Iran was doing. PBS reported, “Trump says U.S. Navy will blockade Strait of Hormuz after ceasefire talks end without agreement.” Chaos! Incoherent rage! Corporate media is completely baffled. Meanwhile, more conservative commenters are confidently starting to see the bigger picture.

CLIP: Benny Johnson explains Trump’s Iranian master plan (14:05).

It’s darkly hilarious. If we didn’t know that Trump wants the Strait closed, it wouldn’t make any sense. The entire premise for the cease-fire was that Iran would “open” the Strait. (Which is a dumb media frame anyway. Iran’s navy is sunk. They can’t actually “close” the Strait; they can only issue threats about lost mines and drone attacks. But never mind.) After weekend peace talks shattered after battered Iran wouldn’t agree to cough up its enriched uranium, Trump said fine, then I will close the Strait myself.

“I have instructed our Navy to seek and interdict every vessel in International Waters that has paid a toll to Iran,” Trump tweeted, adding “the Blockade will begin shortly.” Later, CENTCOM clarified that this means no Iranian oil will pass the Strait of Hormuz, toll or otherwise.

So, in 24 hours, we went from Iran conceding that it would reopen the Strait to President Trump saying we would close it. It’s like complaining that a dirt road is unusable because of a giant pothole, and then, when the city finally agrees to fix it, parking an old aircraft carrier over the pothole, blocking the road. Or maybe it’s like changing the locks on a skyscraper when the seller refuses to give. Either way.

Naturally, the Democrats were very upset by this. Senator Mark Warner went on CNN to express his confusion. “I don’t understand how blockading the strait is somehow going to push the Iranians into opening it,” he said, not unjustly.

On Fox News yesterday, business reporter Maria Bartiromo cited the fact that the United States is now producing more oil than Saudi Arabia and Russia combined. That makes us the largest oil producer in the world, bar none. With the Strait closed, the world must now buy American. “We are seeing a complete diversion,” Maria reported. “Major super tankers are changing direction and going to the Gulf of America for oil and gas.”

Why rush to reopen the Strait when the entire world is changing its practices to buy American oil instead of Iranian oil?

This is a very recent development. We first became the world’s top crude oil producer during Trump 1.0 in 2018, thanks to the shale revolution, the Permian Basin, and new fracking techniques. Since then, notwithstanding the Biden dip, we’ve added natural gas supremacy as well. Our lead over the rest of the world has continued apace, and, as Maria reported, recently shot past the milestone of Saudi Arabia and Russia’s combined output.

In short, the US is the only major power well-positioned to profit from the rerouted energy trade, thanks to our production dominance. And that’s just one win amidst a multi-factorial smorgasbord. (Rhetorical ammunition against NATO is another.)

Ever since Thomas Jefferson sank the Barbary Pirates, we don’t pay tolls to Iranians or anybody else. We send in the Marines. It is all going according to plan.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

A tragic story is unfolding in the world of high finance and low-grade soy products. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported, “How Beyond Meat sank from a $14 billion plant-based protein powerhouse to a penny stock.” Weird! I guess people didn’t like picking celery fibers out of their teeth after eating their super-food burgers. Remember, ‘super’ is one of those progressive modifiers that comes with an invisible negative (social justice, affirming care, honest politics. If the adjective doesn’t work, they just change the definition on the website. See, e.g., vaccine).

Behold, the wretched story of Beyond Meat, a pie-eyed company that set out to save the planet by convincing Americans to eat something that looks like a hamburger, cooks like a hamburger, and tastes exactly like a moist, heavily salted kitchen sponge. “The company went public on May 2, 2019, after the initial public offering priced at $25 to value the company at that time at $1.46 billion,” the Journal reported. “The mania continued for a couple of months, as the stock rose to its record close of $234.90 on July 26, 2019.”

“Mania” is the root word for maniac. Six years later, the stock closed on Friday at 60 cents. Womp.

In other words, you could have taken your life savings, invested it in Beyond Meat, and you would currently have less money than if you had simply left it in the pocket of a pair of jeans you accidentally donated to Goodwill.

‘Super food’ really means super profits. That’s how a plantburger company reaches a $14B valuation in the first place— expectations of profits beyond dreams of avarice. Super foods are a scam. They take whatever farmers throw away and call it ‘healthy,’ because fiber. Fiber is also in cardboard, t-shirts, and the mysterious puffy substance that emerges from the dryer along with your clothes. ‘Fiber’ is, by definition, indigestible matter. You can wear it like a hat, but you can’t digest it.

But fibrous ‘meat’ was backed by visionaries like Bill Gates and Leonardo DiCaprio, two men who famously spend a lot of time hanging out at regular American backyard barbecues. Corporate media assured everybody that the era of actual meat was over. Soon, we would all be happily grilling up hyper-processed, laboratory-extruded plant proteins, while the cows took up golfing, or more to the point, “retired,” in the sense of going extinct.

Admittedly, I’m just a lawyer, not a nutritionist. I’m about to annoy fiber lovers, but this is true. The entire premise of “fiber” was initially conceived by Dr. Kellogg, who constructed an undying cereal empire from shredded corn husks and enough sugar to give an entire nation diabetes. The theory goes that our intestines love getting the wire-scrubber treatment. Medical science, which adheres to excess profits like a greedy remora clinging to a zombie shark, enthusiastically joined the party.

So it was unsurprising who received the pointy end of the finger of blame on last week’s earnings call. Beyond Meat’s CEO Ethan Brown blamed —prepare yourself— not a bad business model, mismanagement, or a product only slightly more attractive than raspberry-flavored cricket powder. No. He blamed you and me. In less polite terms, Brown explained we are just too stupid to see how wonderful his company’s product is.

Mr. Brown —who confidently increased his salary from $5M to $30M last year, a healthy 600% raise— explained that the real problem is Americans who have fallen under the spell of “pseudoscientific jargon” and are experiencing a “resurgence of red meat.” He noted that the government’s dietary guidelines still stubbornly refuse to reclassify ribeye steaks as toxic hazards, and he expressed “sadness” for the people who are being misled into eating actual beef instead of his heavily processed pea-protein pucks.

Worse, just now —six years into the great plantburger experiment— analysts have discovered that the market for veggie burgers is pretty dang small. “If you can’t also capture pescetarians or just regular old omnivores, that limits the total addressable market,” Zak Stambor, retail analyst, said. “It just isn’t as large as investors had initially thought.” He mentioned a 2023 Gallup poll, which found that only 4% of Americans identify as vegetarian, while a tiny sliver, 1%, identify as vegan.

The Journal failed basic journalism. Curiously absent from its story about the precipitous decline of Beyond Meat’s fortunes was any mention of MAHA or the pushback against industrialized factory foods. It was rank malpractice, since that data is not hard to find. It’s not just Beyond Meat that is sinking toward the bottom of the Persian Gulf. It’s the entire fake meat sector. December:

How could the Journal have missed the main problem? For example, an October, 2025, VegNews story reported that Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health recently noted that the stagnation in plant-based meat sales was probably because “they are ultra-processed—a category of foods that have come under greater scrutiny for links to poorer health.”

‘Greater scrutiny’ is one way of putting it. Rejected is a simpler and more accurate concept.

Behold: in a single year, the terrifying World Economic Forum and its maniacal motto, “zey will eat ze bugz,” has become a spent force. DEI has added a +1 and become a four-letter word. Transmania is under attack in six dimensions. Bug factories are closing. And Wall Street darling Beyond Meat is about to be delisted. Whenever you grow weary of the doomscrolling, remind yourself how far we have come so fast.

💉💉💉

Here’s a little more evidence for our health wars theory. This morning, the Journal ran another story headlined, “Big Pharma Is Thinking Small on Deals. That’s a Boon for Biotech.” They keep using that word “boon,” but I don’t think they understand what it means.

Big pharma is buying up medical startups at a historic pace. “The number of deals already rivals many full years,” the Journal reported, “and puts 2026 on pace for an annualized record of 72 such deals, more than double last year.” And, “total dollar volume is on pace to make this the second-most-active year for biopharma M&A in history, trailing only 2019.”

Big pharma isn’t buying biotech because they want to cure you. They’re buying it so nobody else can.

This is the gauntlet. Big pharma is fighting back. We are poised on the brink of a technological revolution in medicine based on cures rather than chronic treatments. But, to get there, we’ll first have to survive pharma’s buying spree. Flush with covid cash, big pharma aims to invest in new startups, acquire their revolutionary technologies, and then bury them under a shuttered bug factory in northern Greenland.

They’re getting battered on both sides. The biotech revolution is nearly as bad news for them as the bottom falling out of the fake meat industry, which creates the chronic conditions that Big Pharma endlessly maintains.

I remain optimistic. I think the revolution in health innovations is just getting started and will be too big to buy. Let’s win this thing.

🔥🔥🔥

That was fast. When Democrats throw you under the bus, you know it. Speaking of things going according to plan, yesterday the New York Times reported, “Eric Swalwell Suspends Campaign for California Governor After Sexual Assault Allegations.” The poorly shaven, front-running Democrat has dropped out in disgrace. Democrats hope Swalwell supporters will shore up one of the seven remaining blue candidates. Republicans hope this seals the deal.

He was smothered by a blue avalanche. Sad! “Several Democratic officials — and more than 50 of his former staff members — had called for him to step aside,” the Times reported. In short, they all pulled out. The seven-term California Congressman and Chinese spy aficionado made his disconsolate announcement —where else?— on X:

After sober introspection lasting at least several hours, and after videos appeared of him doing weird stuff with hookers —which may or may not be AI deepfakes— Eric circumspectly decided he prefers to keep his safe House seat after all, which he previously vowed to sacrifice to run for governor. Representative Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) said she would file a motion to expel Swalwell from the House. (After Republican firebrand Matt Gaetz was nominated for Attorney General, he was shown the Congressional door, on much weaker claims than those alleged against Mr. Swalwell. Just saying.)

His spilled-tea problems aren’t limited to politics or international relations with young Chinese interns. Mr. Swalwell now also has a domestic problem. “About three months after Ms. Sammarco’s text exchanges with Mr. Swalwell began, his wife gave birth to their third child,” the Times gushed. “While he was posting photos of the baby on public social media platforms, he was allegedly writing to Ms. Sammarco in private.”

Swalwell is in denial. Which means he is currently pursuing a deny everything approach. But he apologized to his wife —again, where else?— on social media. “I have certainly made mistakes in judgment in my past, but those mistakes are between me and my wife, and to her, I apologize deeply for putting her in this position.” What mistakes in judgment? Which position? Missionary?

Hey, everybody should give him a break. He’s probably a sex addict. He just needs to go dry out somewhere. “For nearly 20 years,” Swalwell repeatedly said in campaign commercials, “I have served the public — as a prosecutor and a congressman and have always protected women.” (He meant that he lay on top of them. For their protection.)

Finally, the Times got to the political consequences. Democrats must push one of the lower-polling candidates into the top two, or it will be an upset that will rock Sacramento like “the big one.”

Somehow, I suspect all the Democrats demanding Swalwell drop out of the Governor’s race will pivot to supporting his congressional re-election campaign. Who wants to bet?

🔥🔥🔥

Finally, and on a more serious note, this one is for all my critics who claim I never criticize President Trump. Here it comes: I have no choice but to reject one of his edgiest posts. Late last night, he re-posted a satirical image of himself as Jesus, healing a sick man, framed by a flag, a praying woman, soldiers, and angelic figures flying in the background. Corporate media pounced. The UK Independent reported, “Trump slams Pope Leo as ‘weak’ and posts picture of himself as Jesus healing the sick.”

I won’t reproduce the image here. You can find it at the link if you want.

The context was that he’s been trading barbs with the Pope, who has been saying very silly and inconsistent things about the Iran war. What apparently triggered Trump yesterday was when Pope Leo exclaimed, “Enough with the idolatry of self and money! Enough with the display of force! Enough with war!”

Trump was like, Idolatry? Hold my beer. I presume by reposting the AI-drawn cartoon, Trump intended a pictorial escalation of the men’s rhetorical boxing match. Look— no one accepts the President’s pugilistic verbal sparring more than I do. I get it. It’s his brand.

But alas, this one was too much, even for me.

Christians, especially those in the Protestant denominations, take the first four Commandments very seriously. This image is textbook blasphemy, the digital version of a graven image. We properly labeled it when liberals put Jesus’ image in a vial of urine and called it ‘art.’ While not as (directly) insulting as Democrats’ ‘art project,’ last night’s post was nevertheless undeniably offensive. And it verges uncomfortably close to unpleasant End Times scriptural comparisons the President should probably seek to avoid, like “declaring himself to be G-d.”

It’s rare, but he has deleted posts before. In one recent example, he took down a video clip of the Obamas that had a couple seconds of amusing monkey antics added at the end. My preference would be for him to delete this one, too. Whether he wants to say anything about it is up to him. It’s not his style to apologize, nor my place to demand an apology.

This disagreement won’t stop me from supporting the President. I give him grace. He is human. And if he is often theologically confused, who among us isn’t? Just ask any mixed group of protestants about infant baptism and stand back. Far back.

But I do want to be absolutely clear: there is only one Savior, and that is the Lord Jesus Christ, who died for the sins of mankind and rose again, breaking the chains of death once and for all. There is no better way to live than by the faith and hope of everlasting life, which is offered by our Creator as a free gift to anyone who chooses to accept it. Choose life.

While I sense that Trump only meant to score some cheap points off Pope Leo —because the president never leaves any criticism unanswered— and even if he had no sacrilegious intent, which seems likely, this also strikes me as an unforced political error. Protestants are one of Trump’s most reliable supporter blocs. Why make us feel so uncomfortable over a marginal grudge tweet? Why invite pricklier protestants to stay home on voting day? Why hand his media enemies a potential wedge?

I’ve said my piece. Having expressed my criticism, presented my position, and proven that I will publicly disagree with the president when it matters, I will leave it there.

Have a marvelous Monday! We’ll be back with another engaging and informative update tomorrow morning, with all your essential news and commentary.

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