☕️ APPOMATTOX ☙ Monday, December 30, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

MAGA civil war ends with surprising concession; Carter dies producing another 2024 'coincidence'; DEI death rate accelerating; Republicans unplug main federal censorship shop; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! Not just any Monday. It’s the last Monday of 2024, a year ending in two days, bringing the most historic year in our lifetimes, which began in dishonor, but ultimately arrived at a glorious, triumphant end. Today’s roundup includes: MAGA H1-B civil war ends with Musk’s generous concession and a surprising narrative reframe; President Carter dies at 100 and a surprising allegory emerges; DEI’s death accelerates as it leaks out of official places and tries to hide underground; and Republicans gut federal government’s main pandemic censorship office.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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The MAGA civil war is over, the rebel general has surrendered. This morning, NDTV ran the story headlined, “Elon Musk Says H-1B Visa System "Broken", Days After "Will Go To War" Promise.”

You are already familiar, I’m sure, with last week’s fiery dispute over H1-B temporary work visas for skilled immigrants. Taking all comers, Elon and Vivek Ramaswamy rhetorically grappled with a horde of furious conservatives for whom the H1-B is a trigger issue. In particular, conservatives complained of that visa’s misuse in replacing American workers with lower-paid foreigners.

Late Saturday, Elon quietly surrendered.

Specifically, Elon tweeted his agreement with two big changes —a salary cap and a pay-to-play fee— and called the H1-B system “broken” and needing major reform:

He did not surrender, exactly, so much as prove his bona fides by cutting the heart out of all the good-faith complaints. After days of argument, the anti-visa grievances boiled down to two issues: H1-B overuse, by hiring unskilled H1-B workers like cashiers and dishwashers, and unfairly underpaying aliens, thereby displacing qualified Americans with cheaper foreign talent.

Elon’s proposals would neatly fix both problems. Setting a minimum salary would ensure foreign workers were never hired for lower-skilled jobs like dishwashers and cashiers. Imposing an annual fee on employers would increase costs of H1-B visas, without paying foreign workers more and attracting even more of them.

Elon’s agreement that the program is “broken” was a major concession miles from where he started, and it effectively ended the argument.

As a happy side-effect of the widely-publicized “MAGA civil war,” disappointed corporate media is no longer yammering about “President Elon.” Since Elon and Vivek fought their brief but intense war with Trump insiders like Laura Loomer, the fake media narrative of Elon Musk getting whatever he wants has been shattered.

I’m not saying this unnecessary, overheated “civil war” was deliberately staged to change the narrative in that exact way, but it is fun to muse about.

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Proving 2024 was not quite done yet, yesterday President Carter, 100, died peacefully in hospice. By an astonishing coincidence, the Democrats’ previous one-term failed president passed away within the same 30-day period that the Democrats’ current one-term failed presidency is dying. The Washington Post covered the story under the headline, “Jimmy Carter, 39th president and Nobel Peace Prize winner, dies at 100.”

Carter, a gentle, small-town Georgia peanut farmer who once claimed to be attacked by an angry, swimming swamp rabbit, had a tumultuous term featuring failed gas price controls, “stagflation,” a mangled Middle East rescue mission, and humiliating helplessness against Iranian Islamists who took hundreds of U.S. citizens hostage for over a year.

Carter’s cause of death was not disclosed. The articles in corporate media, hagiographic and halcyon histories that don’t quite fit the facts, are perhaps appropriate as paid respects to any member of the small group of the nation’s leaders.

President Trump posted a respectful and kind note:

Like Biden, Carter was a deeply unpopular president, roundly rejected by voters after just one term. Ronald Reagan beat Carter in a punishing 50-state landslide, remarkably similar to how soundly Trump beat Biden’s surrogate and Vice President. (Remember, Kamala endorsed all Biden policies and said she’d continue them.)

Another astonishing parallel to the Biden term was reflected in a New York Times headline yesterday: “After Jimmy Carter Won the Presidency, Democrats Lost the South.” The article explained that, before Carter’s disastrous term in office, Democrats controlled the southern states. But Carter demolished the Democrats, turning the South red for the first time since Reconstruction, and ensuring three consecutive Republican terms.

Although historians disagree, to this day Democrats still praise Carter, who couldn’t manage a food truck but who had the political superpower of virtue-signaling in an era long before woke. For his part, Biden hired more overweight, unattractive cross-dressers than all previous Democrat presidents combined. Biden practically hired an entire “loud and proud” Drag Show’s worth, forcing historians to squeeze a whole new statistical category into the already-tight presidential rankings.

The similarities are breathtaking. Carter had stagflation. Biden had inflation. Carter lost Iran and flubbed the hostage rescue mission. Biden lost Afghanistan and fumbled the U.S. troop withdrawal mission. Carter crashed the delicate New Deal coalition; Biden bungled the coalition of progressive identity groups. Both men were cognitively impaired in 2021 when Biden infested the White House, although Carter probably spent more days working in the office over the last four years.

But most significantly of all, one-term Carter lost the South forever and led the Democrats into the political wilderness where they wandered for years. One-term Biden has lost Hispanics, young people, Gen-X, Asians, blacks, and women, and has led the Donkey Party into a toxic-brand wilderness with no clear path in sight. Just cactuses and used Acme blasting caps.

In that sense, it was fitting for Mr. Carter, after his long life, to expire right as the Biden term is also set to expire, his death a signpost or signal, a narrative inflection point perhaps highlighting the next decade of Democrat ennui. Just this morning, the New Yorker asked not whether, but “How Much Do Democrats Need to Change?”

President Carter reminds us of how Biden destroyed the Democrat party just as it seemed poised to become a permanent uni-party. But instead of banishing Republicans into the political hinterlands, the Democrats find themselves mired in political stagflation and beset by swamp rabbits on all sides.

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That hissing sound is the air leaking out of the DEI balloon. NBC ran a terrific story yesterday headlined, “DEI programs weathered a myriad of attacks this year, with more to come in 2025.” For instance, on Friday, local KCRG-Cedar Rapids ran a very encouraging video report headlined, “University of Iowa pushes to close departments of American Studies and Gender, Women’s and Sexuality.” (Sexuality studies? What career does that prepare you for?)

As part of a broader DEI diminishment effort, the University of Iowa’s board of governors announced last week a plan to close —for good— the three silliest, least productive departments in the state’s public universities, plus cancel two other majors in ‘American Studies’ and Social Justice.

Earlier this month, the University of Michigan ended a requirement for ‘DEI statements’ in faculty hiring, promotion, and tenure. And the University of Austin, a private liberal arts university, also replaced its DEI framework with merit-based initiatives this year. “One by one, diversity, equity and inclusion programs at some of the country’s biggest companies fell apart in 2024,” NBC reported, “with signs that efforts to reverse DEI initiatives will only ramp up in 2025.”

Even companies hanging on to DEI face lawsuits and shareholder initiatives. CostCo is in the news this week as its woke board tries to fend off a well-organized shareholder proposal to delete DEI. Other companies are trying to keep the grift going by rebranding and relabeling their DEI departments and going underground, a short-term solution not likely to remain viable in the long term, with the DOJ passing under skeptical conservative control.

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CyberScoop ran a very welcome story last week headlined, “State Department’s disinformation office to close after funding nixed in NDAA.” One of the great side stories of this month’s budget battles was the permanent closure of the State Department’s Orwellian “disinformation” office, resulting in an astounding $61 million in annual savings as the House Weaponization Committee claimed a major scalp.

The “Global Engagement Center,” or GEC, was run by the U.S. State Department, and stopped operating for good on Christmas Eve since it ran out of money. Despite its massive budget, the office included only 120 staff, with the money primarily going out in grants to various leftwing think tanks and foreign media companies, including one that labeled both NewsMax and the New York Post as “Russian disinformation.”

GEC’s supporters claim the office tirelessly protects America from foreign disinformation from Iran, Russia, and China. But nobody believes them, since the GEC actually operates more like a taxpayer-funded Democrat political action committee.

GEC is most well-known for its pandemic censorship operation, when it coordinated the major social media companies in a vast cancelation effort aimed at American users who questioned vaccines or wondered whether the virus came from a lab in China. During last week’s funding debates, Senator Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) correctly called the GEC “an entity that is funded to censor conservatives.”

The news was most encouraging because it showed the House Weaponization Committee finally having a real-world impact, and it was the most significant strike yet against the progressive censorship complex. In fact, the Washington Post’s version of the story was headlined, “State Dept. disinfo unit faces shutdown amid GOP’s war on censorship.”

It’s like they think a “war on censorship” is a bad thing. The progressives have raced so far down the road to totalitarianism that they lost the plot and think all the other drivers agree with them. Well done, Republicans, it was a nice surprise stuffed into the Christmas budget stocking.

Twenty-one days.

Have a magnificent Monday! I’ll be back tomorrow with a gala New Year’s Eve roundup and a few thoughts about the 2024 year in review.

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