☕️ AUTO PENMANSHIP ☙ Thursday, June 5, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Trump’s travel ban baits progressives; DHS strikes Harvard; Columbia faces new heat; Texas passes historic conservative agenda; Biden autopen scandal now an official DOJ probe; and more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! In today’s stellar roundup: Trump 2.0 travel ban baits progressives into more unpopular hot takes; the Administration’s War With Harvard took another dire turn yesterday as DHS nixed the school’s international student rights; the War with the Ivy League progresses as compliant Columbia faces new challenges; Texas legislators pass historic conservative revolution in bill packed with terrific developments; and the Biden autopen story became the subject of an official DOJ investigation with politically incalculable implications.

🪖 C&C ARMY POST 🪖

🪖 All-in C&C fans might enjoy my recent Code Red podcast appearance, wherein I was interviewed by outstanding Pastor Zach Terry. Here’s the link (1:29:17)..

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Yesterday, the cowardly New York Times ran a bit of drive-by journalism headlined, “‘We Don’t Want Them’: Trump Signs Travel Ban On Citizens From 12 Countries.” It was peak outrage and vintage Trump. The President seized the news cycle with his latest executive order, reviving —and upgrading— his Trump 1.0 travel ban package.

The ban takes effect on Monday. Subject to a baker’s dozen of common-sense exceptions, it bars non-resident entry from a dozen scenic places that are definitely not on your vacation bucket list: Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. Plus, it places limits on citizens of Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela, who won’t be getting tourist or student visas or green cards anytime soon.

Why? “The latest travel ban,” the Times reported, speaking once again in third-person passive voice, “cites issues with security vetting in certain countries and says immigrants from those countries frequently overstay their visas.” And that was it. The Times promptly dropped the rationale like a hot rock, never returning to those reasons, not for context or even to dispute them. It just moved on. It doesn’t matter if it’s true! It’s still racist!

As you could easily guess, the Times’ outraged take was that it was the most racist, sexist, and homophobic thing ever in the history of Spiral Arm 26 of the Milky Way Galaxy, at least since the Trump 1.0 travel ban, which Biden reversed on his first day in office calling it a “stain on our national conscience,” a badly aging take that the Times had reminded readers of by the second paragraph. (It was a stain on something, but more likely that was Biden’s Depends.)

The Trump 1.0 travel bans were actually much more popular with the American public than media narratives ever admitted, especially when poll questions were neutrally worded. Support hovered between 48–60% depending on the question. One 2017 Politico poll reached 60% approval, settling the ban squarely among the President’s most popular policies.

And that was before Biden flung the borders open in the middle of the night looking for a bathroom. Once again, Trump has maneuvered corporate media into forcefully taking the minority position, which is bent over.

The story wrapped with a quote from Becca Heller, head of a refugee NGO that sued Travel Ban 1.0 in 2017: “This is another example of the president making a mockery out of immigration and national security laws in order to punish races, religions and ideas he doesn’t like.” Readers were left to wonder why Becca’s lawsuit didn’t work. It’s because the Supreme Court finally green-lit the bans in 2018.

“We will not let what happened in Europe happen to America,” the President promised. The Times, which included that quote in its story, can’t remember what happened in Europe, so don’t bother going to the article to find out.

🔥 In related news yesterday, Reuters ran a story headlined, “Trump suspends entry of international students studying at Harvard.” Not only that, but according to a leaked cable “seen by Reuters,” the State Department ordered all its consular missions to enforce additional vetting of visa applicants looking to travel to Harvard for any reason.

The President’s two-page order explained that Harvard had “demonstrated a history of concerning foreign ties and radicalism” and had “extensive entanglements with foreign adversaries,” including the Chinese Communist Party. You might expect Reuters to at least challenge that assertion, but no, it was the usual inglorious journalistic failure. The article didn’t dispute the core facts at all— which suggests something about how radioactive Harvard’s reputation has become.

Harvard, frantically trying to climb out of the PR crater in which it now finds itself, bravely called the ruling “yet another illegal retaliatory step taken by the Administration in violation of Harvard’s First Amendment rights.”

The suspension is only for six months —one admitting cycle— but can be extended for another six months. So. Your move, Harvard.

Trump’s latest chess move echoed the 1950s crackdown on institutions accused of harboring communist sympathies. Now, 75 years later, Harvard —once a Cold War stalwart— finds itself on the receiving end— accused of seditious foreign entanglements, not Soviet this time, but Sino-Communist. This is McCarthyism in reverse: not blacklisting professors, but putting elite institutions themselves on the no-fly list.

During World War II, FDR restricted the entry of German nationals amidst concerns about subversion and sabotage. Harvard, with its “radical foreign entanglements,” is now being treated as a national security vulnerability on par with enemy nations. In other words, Harvard is a non-state actor with state-sized influence, finally recognized as such.

Rogue judges will do what they do, but Harvard will almost certainly lose this cage match. Immigration and visa policy fall squarely under the executive branch’s Article II powers, especially when framed as a national security measure. Plus, this time, the Trump Administration holds the 2018 Supreme Court decision like a battlefield map.

Harvard can cry all it wants about the First Amendment and retaliation, but foreign nationals have no constitutional right to enter the U.S., and institutions like Harvard have no constitutional right to demand visas be granted to their applicants. Courts have explicitly ruled this. Not only that, but Harvard is deep underwater right now in the public’s jaded eye: antisemitism scandals, imploding diversity deans, corpse controversies, plagiarism problems, lying ethics professors, remedial math classes, Chinese cash pipelines, and widespread mockery over grade inflation and ideological monoculture.

But wait, there was more.

🔥 Accreditation dies in darkness. Yesterday, the Washington Post ran an encouraging story headlined, “Education Department says Columbia doesn’t meet accreditation standards.” In other words, Trump is turning progressive torture tools back against the very institutions that manufactured them.

Yesterday, the Department of Education formally notified Columbia University’s accrediting agency that the university may be out of compliance with federal antidiscrimination law —specifically, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act— due to its mishandling of antisemitic harassment on campus. The escalation followed a joint investigation by the Department of Education and HHS, which found Columbia had acted with “deliberate indifference” to antisemitic incidents, thereby denying Jewish students equal access to education.

In one example of many, a Jewish student group invited a Holocaust survivor to speak on campus. Protesters showed up, shouted her down, and accused her of genocide. University security did nothing, despite repeated desperate requests. The next day, Columbia’s administrators issued a statement expressing concern about the protestors’ “right to be heard.”

In another example, a Jewish student found a sign taped to her door saying “Free Palestine. No Zionists allowed here.” When she reported it to Columbia’s “bias response team,” mistakenly thinking that was what the “bias response team” was for, she was told not to “escalate tensions” by making any public comments about the incident, and was referred to campus counseling.

If Columbia loses its accreditation, it will no longer be eligible for federal student aid, including loans and Pell Grants. This piles on previous punishments for the Ivy League school, such as a $400 million cut in federal funding in March.

Unlike Harvard, Columbia isn’t escalating. After getting the stinky DOE letter, Columbia agreed to cooperate. “Columbia is deeply committed to combating antisemitism on our campus,” the school’s spokesperson said. “We take this issue seriously and are continuing to work with the federal government to address it.”

For decades, the Left used civil rights law, accreditation leverage, and bureaucratic choke points to punish dissenters, deplatform opposition, and reshape institutions. Now, for the first time, that machinery is being reversed— not dismantled, but weaponized in the opposite direction.

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Don’t mess with Texas! After a slow start, the Lone Star State has pulled ahead of Florida in the competition to be the nation’s conservative leader. The Washington Post ran the story this week headlined, “Texas GOP scores legislative wins, shifting immigration, education costs.” Just wait till you take a gander at this dreamlike conservative wish list.

In its last biennial term two years ago, the Texas legislature dissolved into combative infighting that looked more like the last stand at the Alamo than lawmaking. Not this year. “This is a win for Republicans going into an election year,” said James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at UT Austin.

Let us sample from the conservative counter-revolution’s delicious buffet. First up: a new law requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in every public school classroom. Texas was not the first (hat tip to Louisiana), but is now the biggest state to roll back the 1960s disastrous secularization policies. Other states will surely follow Texas’s lead.

Next, a new law created private school vouchers and funded them with a billion-dollar budget. Beginning next year, parents will now get $10,000 per student to transfer kids from public to private schools. Teacher’s unions were hit hardest.

All Texas sheriffs must now cooperate with federal immigration officials to help deport illegal aliens. In a highly amusing innovation, the state will help offset some additional costs, but not completely, especially in blue counties, which are forced to pay for more of it themselves. The irony!

In a move that would have been very helpful in Florida during the recent Santa Ono dustup, Texas rearranged how faculty senates —long captured by leftists— are organized. Now, half of faculty senate members at Texas universities will be appointed rather than elected by professors. It also shrank faculty senate sizes. The law created a new state ombudsman empowered to investigate and defund ‘noncompliant’ schools. Best of all, faculty senate members can be removed by the Governor for “political advocacy.”

You may recall that, in the Santa Ono story, UF’s “board of trustees” unanimously approved the Canadian-Japanese DEI darling’s candidacy. The board of trustees is appointed by UF’s loony leftist faculty senate. We could use Texas’s reforms here in the Sunshine State.

The final example (limited only by space, there were more) was property tax relief in the form of a +40% increase to the standard homestead exemption and a nearly +300% increase in exemptions for seniors (65+) and disabled folks. Nearly 25% of the entire budget was allocated to plug the funding hole— but only as long as the state enjoys a surplus, after which local counties must figure it out on their own.

Voters must approve the property tax reforms in the next election cycle.

The session concluded without any of last cycle’s drama, with Republicans keeping smooth control of both chambers and passing over 1,200 bills. Governor Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick called the session the “most conservative and successful legislative session” in Texas history.

Kudos to Texas readers!

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It’s now official: the history of the decline and fall of the Biden empire will be written. It might take even more than Gibbon’s six volumes about the Roman Empire. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran a long-awaited story headlined, “Trump Orders Investigation Into Biden’s Actions as President.” In particular, they’ll be looking into Biden’s “use” —if you can call it that— of the infamous Presidential Autopen.

Do you suppose they’d let you sign your mortgage loan with an autopen? Let’s say you’re at the closing table, and decide to run out for a quad-shot mochachino. I’ll be right back, guys; the Autopen will take care of this stack of papers, don’t worry.

I’m thinking: no.

Yesterday, President Trump formally ordered the White House Counsel and Attorney General Bondi to investigate whether Joe Biden’s presidential authority was “unlawfully exercised” by presidential staffers using an autopen, especially while Biden was having his bad days. In other words, Biden’s cognitive fitness is now the subject of an official DOJ investigation.

🔥 There are two separate areas of incalculably vast implication. The first is that Trump has shattered another “norm and custom.” The “old way” was that successive presidents covered for each other— regardless of political party.

Trump isn’t just shattering a norm, he’s dynamiting the entire gentleman’s agreement that presidents don’t investigate each other once out of office, no matter how sloppy, senile, or shady things got. That informal truce —call it The Uniparty’s Mutual Immunity Pact— was never any kind of law, just a closely held and vastly frustrating gentleman’s agreement. But bull-in-the-china-shop Trump, as always, is gleefully smashing the crockery.

Biden’s legal capacity to govern is now squarely in the court of public opinion. If the investigation leads to a report (almost a sure bet), and the facts about how the presidential sausage was pressed prove ugly, the Democrats have even more problems on their hands heading into the 2026 midterms.

Trump is retroactively forcing Democrats to defend Biden’s fitness, turning what should’ve been a quiet, graceful fadeout into a humiliating postmortem. It’s Mueller 2.0, but reversed. This time, rather than Trump, it’s Democrats who are the ones spinning, lawyering up, and sweating subpoenas.

🔥 The effect on the upcoming midterms could be tectonic. Democrats will likely be forced to take sides in the debate, without knowing what evidence will trickle out next. It’s a political minefield scattered all over the 2026 campaign trail. Dems who defend Biden risk looking complicit if damning memos or testimony later emerge. But those who try to distance themselves will fracture the party’s unity and invite civil war within the base.

Tellingly, the Wall Street Journal article did not cite any defenders of President Biden’s use of the autopen besides the old man himself.

Unsolvable, party-shattering issues for Democrats are mounting up. Just off the top of my head: Biden’s capacity, men in girl’s sports, the Israel-Palestine conflict, and DEI policies. Every one of those confounding problems is fraught with political peril. I’ll give you two recent examples.

First up: Governor Newsom recently tried to tack toward a Clintonesque third way when, on his podcast debut, the oleaginous governor quite reasonably agreed with Charlie Kirk that men playing in girls’ sports was ‘unfair.’ The immediate blowback from the left was reminiscent of standing in front of a 747’s jet engine. Somehow the Governor’s hair was unmoved, but the message was sent: don’t even try moving toward the center.

Second, just yesterday delivered news of Biden’s former Press Secretary’s defection from the Democrat party. Super-diverse Karine Jean-Pierre, or whatever her name is, is publishing a tell-all book about a “broken” White House, and simultaneously announced she is now an independent because she can’t stand Democrats anymore. The left was not happy. Axios: “Bidenworld goes scorched earth on Karine Jean-Pierre.”

The other stratospheric angle, which may be less important, includes the legal possibilities. If the investigation turns up even one internal “smoking gun” memo proving aides acted without Biden’s full buy-in, which also seems likely, and then Trump declares some Biden order or pardon invalid, it’s headed back to the Supreme Court. The Court will be forced to weigh in on the legality of Autopen scribbles, probably defining a narrow set of rules that must be adhered to for valid use.

And if the Supreme Court does set down Autopen rules, as it did with Presidential Immunity, it could give Trump a clear roadmap for going after other Biden orders and pardons. Trump would say, “I’m just following the rules they gave us. This is how we restore integrity.” Meanwhile, complaining Democrats will be left defending illegal procedures, fraudulent governance, or both.

Democrats are soon approaching a moment of Reckoning.™ Up to now, they’ve mostly succeeded in papering over Biden’s cognitive decline—with controlled appearances, friendly media, claims of cheap-faking, and an aggressive “how dare you” reaction to critics. But, like Biden’s mental fitness, that strategy also has an expiration date, and Trump may have just punched the clock.

Have a terrific Thursday! Coffee & Covid shall return, tomorrow morning, with another fresh cup of essential news and commentary.

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