☕️ ALPHA WOLF ☙ Thursday, September 18, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

UK rolls out every royal trick to flatter Trump as he takes alpha spot among world leaders; ABC axes Kimmel sparking faux First Amendment panic; Trump's Antifa post draws flak from all sides.

Good morning, C&C family, it’s Thursday! Your slightly tardy roundup today includes: the Royal Family rolls out the red carpet and everything else in the princely bag of tricks trying to bury the political hatchet with President Trump; Trump assumes takes Alpha position among world leaders; ABC cancels Jimmy Kimmel, provoking widespread but unnecessary anguish over First Amendment concerns; and Trump post targeting the terrorist Antifa group draws silly criticism from both sides of the aisle.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Yesterday, Great Britain unveiled the unreserved might of its royal pomp and pageantry in wooing the US President. The UK Daily Mail ran one of many stories with the wordy headline, “Princess Kate and Prince William beam at King and Queen's state banquet for the Trumps: Charles salutes the nations' 'remarkable bond' in speech to 160 guests at Windsor - and reveals he almost married a Presidential daughter.”

Trump got the Royal Treatment. There were horse-drawn carriage rides through leaf-dusted streets lined with thousands of colorfully dressed royal guards, noisy jet flyovers with red, white, and blue chemtrails, and endless encounters with titled personages personally appearing like lines of Disney princesses (along with all Britain’s untitled ‘who’s who’). There were silken red carpets, military marching bands cheerily tootling “YMCA” and the Star Spangled Banner, somber troop inspections, Royal Banquets featuring the good silver, palace and castle visits, musical performances, hours of face time with the King himself —you name it— there was no conceivable honor left unshowered on the President of the United States, Donald. J. Trump.

The entire world noticed. Which was probably the point.

Many awed commenters, like the Daily Mail and British pundit Piers Morgan, correctly deemed Trump’s treatment “unprecedented.” For one thing, every previous U.S. president has been limited to a single serving of Royal fawning. Trump just blasted through a whole new standard. And his second visit made the first one look like a rural high school prom party in comparison.

The article called the astonishing spectacle “one of the biggest shows of royal power in decades.”

In other words, the embarrassingly over-the-top flattery was a love spell, designed to capture the heart of a President. One of CNN’s stories was headlined, “How kings and queens and Churchill’s ghost are working their magic on Trump.” The article concluded that, at long last, Trump is outmatched. “The British monarchy,” CNN explained, “has practiced the art of the deal since long before Trump was born.” Not only that— but “there’s never been a US president so susceptible to royal buttering up.”

One might ask, what does the UK want in return for all this majestic buttering up? “His Majesty’s government wants shielding from Trump’s most mercurial instincts, a better tariff rate, investment for its slow-growth economy and cash to build a new artificial intelligence powerhouse,” the article noted. And most of all, “it hopes to persuade Trump not to abandon Ukraine.”

In other words, the UK wants to be America’s girlfriend again. It wants America to go fight Russia for them. Let’s you and him fight. And it desperately seeks forgiveness for its unfaithfulness, when it arranged a RussiaGate behind our backs, and sent over all those pro-Kamala activists during the election. And it also wants gifts (business deals), like in the old days, when we used to love it.

🔥 But there was a fly in the magical ointment. Discordantly, the CNN story occasionally flirted with real journalism, like when it noted how the whole obsequious spectacle was majestic, sure, but it was also, well, kind of unflattering:

“Diplomacy,” CNN admitted, “is often distasteful.” It ruefully concluded —and this was the most unexpectedly fascinating point— that Trump’s second serving of royal flattery “was the latest reminder that much of the world has decided that the only way to tame his bullying ways is to appeal to his vanity.”

In other words, they’ve decided to try being nice to him.

How else can you describe Trump’s turnabout, except historic? From the day he came down the Trump Tower escalator, they nattered he was a “fascist,” barked he was a convicted felon, darkly hinted at his appalling resemblance to a certain mustachioed dictator from the 1930’s, and did everything they could think of to prevent his election and save bureaucracy. Twice.

Now, they are fawning all over him.

If CNN is right, and the new strategy of conciliation is their reaction to “bullying,” then the Royal Family just taught Trump that bullying works. I doubt, however, that it is any result of “bullying” —whatever bullying means in geopolitical terms— but either way, we have rapidly reached a point where no major world leader is willing to directly confront or even criticize President Trump.

The truth is, they are afraid of him. Oh, they don’t want to admit it. With help from the good doggies in corporate media, they mask their cowardice with the more flattering fiction of “appealing to his vanity.” But it’s fear. They are scared. “Appealing to his vanity” means placating him.

🔥 How did Trump ascend to the world’s Alpha position so fast? I won’t say it was easy. He took fabulous risks that would be inconceivable to ordinary politicians. But here’s what we can see:

1. Trump Smashed All the Unwritten Rules. The President ignores “norms” and “customs.” He quickly and easily insults allies, threatens tariffs, and praises rivals — things previous presidents wouldn’t have dared to try.

2. Trump Ignored the Entrenched Interests. He brought to heel the permanent class of diplomats, media luminaries, generals, and meddling bureaucrats who usually shape U.S. foreign policy. He edged out all the middlemen. Foreign leaders are shocked to discover that they’re suddenly not negotiating with “the system” anymore but with Trump personally.

3. Trump Led With America First. Previous Presidents annoyingly draped their policies in the gelatinous language of “shared values” and “global responsibilities.” But Trump frames everything bluntly, asking only what does America get out of it? That bluntness provides clarity, which slashes through dense geological layers of ancient red tape.

4. Trump Stayed Unpredictable. He’s proven he’ll quickly retaliate against contrary allies and embrace cooperating enemies— essential for believable threats and promises. He can turn on a dime. Allies and adversaries now believe he might actually walk away from NATO, rip up deals, or hike tariffs on his lunch break. He wields uncertainty itself as a weapon.

5. Trump Piled Up Successes. From NATO spending pledges, investment promises, and tariff deals, leaders watched him extract concessions from one leader after another. Trump is teaching them all that resistance is more expensive than deference.

If those five factors seem obvious, consider how they are all asymmetric advantages for President Trump. He’s battling foreign leaders crippled by their impulses to adhere to “rules-based orders,” enslaved to their entrenched interests, bound by their virtue-signaling politics, and who are terrified of appearing unpredictable.

Whatever Trump’s formula is, it is working. And the British are proving it in gilded spades.

And finally— before you ask, President Trump did not bow to King Charles. He just shook his hand.

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Yesterday, the New York Times ran a delightful story headlined, “ABC Pulls Jimmy Kimmel Off Air for Charlie Kirk Comments After F.C.C. Pressure.” Reactions on our own side were often fiery, ranging all the way from what took so long? to we mustn’t embrace cancel culture.

In case you never heard of him, Jimmy Kimmel is a skinny “Late Night” show host who, for some reason, is always described as a “comedian” —like President Zelensky!— but who’s never published a single comedy album. The truth is, he’s not that funny. He’s just another raving, left-wing lunatic with a late-night show. The green sweatshirt guy is funnier than Kimmel.

And Jimmy definitely wasn’t funny when, in Monday night’s monologue, he claimed Charlie Kirk’s homosexual assassin was a far-right MAGA conservative. “We hit some new lows over the weekend,” Jimmy unironically said while hitting a new low, “with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”

As you can imagine, given the tenderness of the present moment, wild backlash ensued. Trump’s new FCC Commissioner, Brendan Carr, lashed forwards. He said (on a podcast) that, “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the F.C.C. ahead.” He never said what the F.C.C.’s additional work would be.

Later yesterday, two large ABC affiliates, Nexstar and Sinclair, announced they’d be pre-empting Jimmy Kimmel Live “for the foreseeable future.” Sinclair defiantly said its 24 stations would run a Charlie Kirk memorial instead. Nexstar (32 stations) issued an appalled announcement that said nothing about the F.C.C.:

Sinclair —another actual broadcaster whose free speech would be abridged if the FCC did something impetuous— not only didn’t object to Carr’s comment, but later called for stronger action by the FCC:

The story reached its crescendo last night, when Disney’s CEO Bob Iger (Disney owns ABC) announced the network would indefinitely suspend Jimmy Kimmel Live, pending further notice. Which no one expects will be forthcoming.

Cue complete hysteria. Democrat Senate Minority Leader Chuck “Chuckie” Schumer called it “outrageous.” Nitwitted Governor Gavin Newsom complained it was “a coordinated effort to control the media.” The Daily Beast called it “truly sick.” Our libertarian friends warned that this is what fascism REALLY looks like. BlueSkyers called for an immediate Disney/Marvel/ABC boycott.

But I thought it was wonderful and appropriate. President Trump —posting from Windsor Castle— called it “Great News for America.” Brendan Carr tellingly tweeted, “This is an important turning point.”

🔥 The falderol among conservatives and rational libertarians (forget the liberals) is a dispute about whether the government indirectly coerced ABC using veiled threats into canceling Jimmy’s show and thereby may have violated ABC’s First Amendment rights.

That is a false debate, and I suspect it was ginned up by left-wingers trying to “help” conservative conversations. The problem is the evidence does not at all show Carr’s threats led to Kimmel’s cancellation.

Let me explain it like I would to someone who voluntarily lives in Portland. First of all, Brendan Carr never threatened to take any specific government action. He just said it would create “more work” for the F.C.C. You can easily find an implied threat there, but he never explicitly threatened to take any particular enforcement action.

CLIP: Brendan Carr explains how Kimmel’s cancellation resulted from affiliate action (0:29).

Not like, say, when Biden called the “Disinformation Dozen” (who I currently represent in their lawsuit) an imminent threat to the public. None of these new free-speech now defenders popping up online offered a word of sympathy to the D12. And don’t even get me started about the Twitter Files, or the time C&C was canceled off every media platform in one day. Let’s not ask Charlie Kirk about being cancelled for speech. But I digress.

Second, ABC profits from government largesse. Unlike cable channels, podcasts, streamers, bloggers, or random online disinformers, ABC and its affiliates enjoy the use of the public broadcast spectrum, which is regulated by the F.C.C. Any networks enjoying public spectrum use are legally required to broadcast “in the public interest.” Over the years, the F.C.C. has regulated the “public interest” in various ways that courts have found non-objectionable.

So that’s the deal. The networks know they are regulated entities. That’s the business model.

Finally, Kimmel’s cancellation cannot be pinned solely on Carr. CEO Bob Iger was mainly looking at vast public ire aimed at an unfunny ‘comedian’ whose show’s ratings lagged Bob the Builder reruns. Meanwhile, ABC’s two biggest affiliates were furious, having already yeeted Jimmy off the schedule, and demanding more. What was Iger supposed to do? Regardless of the F.C.C., had Iger elected to defend the unapologetic Kimmel, he would be declaring war against ABC’s own two biggest affiliates— spurring a new political headache that Disney needs like another pedo outbreak at the Bippety-Boppety Salon.

The bottom line is: there is no constitutional crisis here. Even had Mr. Carr taken some tangible action against ABC in the “public interest,” which he didn’t, the network could have sued to enforce its rights. That’s what courts and constitutions are for. So don’t buy into the whole “free speech” thing.

This isn’t a free speech case. Don’t accept the premise.

Even if it were a free speech case (which it isn’t), I’d prefer to first discuss the Disinformation Dozen before getting exercised about a washed-up lunatic on late-night TV. I’m not saying Jimmy Kimmel is not important (he isn’t), but we have a backlog of more important speech issues to tackle first.

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In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, President Trump created more controversy with an encouraging Truth Social post to which everyone on the left and some on the right overreacted. This morning, Reuters ran a propaganda-laced story headlined, “Trump targets antifa movement as 'terrorist organization.’” If you are wondering who besides the usual suspects is now defending terrorists, just wait.

This isn’t the first time. In May, 2020, during the Summer of Protest, President Trump signed a proclamation calling Antifa a terrorist organization. Yesterday, he did it again in a Truth Social post. You would think that he signed a law or issued an executive order or at least did something new.

The law is clear. The Constitution forbids the government from banning domestic organizations, even truly awful ones, because of the dual First Amendment rights to free speech and free assembly. Nothing Trump posted on Truth Social even purported to change that.

Antifa is a violent, radical, and well-organized movement that rejects all mainstream conservative politics and even most centrist positions to the left. In other words, to Antifans, the word “fascist” means any political ideology except the far-left.

It is an unapologetically ‘far-left’ group sometimes referred to by law enforcement as a “terrorist organization” or, at minimum, as an ideological network engaged in coordinated violence and criminality.

Like other clandestine terrorist groups, Antifa deliberately uses a loose, secretive structure organized into autonomous “cells,” designed to make it hard to capture or counter. Although media and progressive critics claim it is completely unorganized, independent research has shown networks, local branches, shared symbols and anthems (such as “Bella Ciao”), and overlapping ideological and operational tactics.

Antifa is often involved in broader left-wing militancy —not just ‘fascist’ or economic themes— such as in the Tacoma ICE facility attack, where Antifa symbolism and martyrdom narratives played a central role in a protest against immigration policy.

🔥 Andy Ngo is a courageous independent journalist who’s covered Antifa since before the pandemic, and who was once beaten and left for dead by militants. In 2021, he published “Unmasked: Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy.” Yesterday, Andy leaked an Antifa memo from Corvallis, Oregon, warning chapters to stand down in the wake of Charlie’s killing, at least publicly, because of bad optics:

That might seem like good news, since even Antifa is having to show restraint after Charlie’s assassination. But they aren’t giving up or anything. Instead, this particular Antifa chapter advised false flags, by “driving wedges between” conservatives. Note carefully:

Needless to say, don’t get tricked by crazy conspiracy theories circulating about Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Antifa has social media accounts disguised as conservative that it uses to create wedge issues. To be clear, I’m not discounting any theory. Let’s explore (and question) everything. But we must also hang together and not let the terrorists divide and hang us separately.

🔥 Those sympathetic to Antifa, like Reuters, deny it exists. In 2020, the Washington Post claimed that Antifa is “not an organization. Rather, it is a politics of revolutionary opposition to the far right.”

Oh, okay. It’s just politics.

Note Reuter’s use of the lower-case “a” in “antifa” in its headline. They don’t use the uppercase “A” because, in their view, Antifa is just a loose, undefined coalition of individuals and small groups who all happen to “oppose fascism.” It’s just a little antifa. To draw this conclusion, they must deny obvious facts, such as trails of Soros funding for Antifa cells, clearly intricate preparation for many Antifa protest events, and documented evidence from various local prosecutions.

Critics’ thinking is, as always, muddled. If Antifa doesn’t exist, then why should anybody worry about Trump declaring the non-existent group as “terrorists?” That’s what passes for liberal logic.

Trump’s Truth Social post said he would be (future tense) “designating Antifa as a major terrorist organization.” In other words, at least so far, it’s just a “somebody said something” story. But it still provoked hysteria, even among some conservatives, about Constitutional issues that are all purely hypothetical and do not (yet) amount to anything.

Knee-jerk reactions to stuff people say (Trump, Carr) are blackpill tactics. We must wait and see whether Trump’s team can find creative legal ways to increase the pressure and attention on Antifa before we conclude that it can only be a brown-shirted takeover of government.

Meanwhile, Antifa is like your wife nagging about the slow-flushing toilets that need septic tank attention, but you keep putting it off until the day an extremely unpleasant and stinky accident emerges and you can no longer ignore it.

So it is great news that President Trump is (again) focusing on this particular septic problem. If they’re terrorists, let’s call them terrorists.

Have a terrific Thursday! Come on back tomorrow, for even more delicious and stimulating essential news and commentary.

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