☕️ AWKWARDNESS ☙ Saturday, January 31, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Lemon arrested over church invasion; Trump-style dealmaking squeezes bankrupt UN; SpaceX seeks million-satellite AI datacenters; Epstein files flood out as DOJ hints darker finds; Fla breaks bad; more

Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! Enjoy January while it lasts. And spare a moment to pray for your Florida brothers and sisters, as our temperatures dip below freezing and even some snow is possible. I realize that might seem ironic to some of you, but Florida Man can’t take it. We’ll trade an extra hurricane over snow any day of the week. Think of our poor iguanas. That said, it’s time for the Weekend Edition roundup: Don Lemon finally arrested and processed for his outrageous church invasion; the Art of the Deal collides with the United Nations, as the storied international peacekeeping organization verges on bankruptcy; history of cash crunches; historic withdrawals; dot connecting; UN polycrisis; dealmaking; SpaceX applies for million-satellite permit to build orbiting AI datacenters; tech revolutions come fast; Epstein files avalanche lands with millions of new documents; Assistant AG hints at much darker materials now under investigation; Dem super-donors Bill Gates and Reid Hoffman face the music; and Florida tweaks its driver’s license test which media reports like a tree falling in the forest.

🌍 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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By now, most of you have heard the good news. Yesterday, NPR reported “Feds arrest Don Lemon, Minnesota journalist and 2 others over church protest.” Haha, “protest,” good one, NPR. Now let’s see if we can find a bigger picture.

Late Thursday, FBI agents nabbed four more people involved in the St. Paul church raid, including sour podcaster Don Lemon. The four were arraigned and released yesterday (no bond). The arrests followed a brief struggle between the DOJ and local Minneapolis judges who refused to sign Lemon’s arrest warrant. So instead, the DOJ convened a federal grand jury and indicted them— a second and more serious path.

Lemon later complained, “the DOJ sent a team of federal agents to arrest me in the middle of the night for covering the news.” Wake up, Don! Former CNN correspondent Jim Acosta called Lemon’s arrest “outrageous” and cried, “This cannot stand. The First Amendment is under attack in America.” Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen, said, “Don Lemon’s arrest is an egregious violation of the First Amendment.”

The best development in all this is the Left’s new appreciation for the Constitution, even though just a few years back, they were complaining the founding document needed to be scrapped.

But the Constitution might not actually be involved. Lemon helpfully posted selfie videos confirming his involvement in the church raid, often referring to the group as “we,” and calling the invasion “our operation.” To date, the DOJ has charged nine activists —and I included Lemon here— with federal crimes for interfering with others’ constitutional rights.

Two years ago, Democrats cackled gleefully when peaceful abortion center protesters were convicted of FACE Act violations. How they laughed! Good times. But for some reason, they aren’t nearly as enthusiastic this time. It is a surreal mirror image— but with less sympathetic actors. Just substitute a mosque for the church, and some angry “Christian Nationalists” for the unhinged Minnesota activists, and it should be obvious how outraged liberals would be.

Anyway, and despite that, Democrats are outraged at Lemon’s arrest in particular, because, they howled, he is a journalist. Journalists enjoy special First Amendment protections. But that does not extend to crimes, and they know it, since progressives always clap like Energizer Bunnies whenever conservative influencers are charged. Just ask James O’Keefe.

Why the different treatment now? Why is solo podcaster Lemon delicately draped in institutional protections, and his arrest is outrageous, but liberals consider a hidden-camera reporter with a multi-million dollar media company to be fair game?

There’s a simple answer. It’s the two-tiered double-standard of justice. Lemon, despite being cast down from the cushy clouds of corporate media, is still considered elite class.

Thus, the debate —if you can call it that— over Lemon’s charges and arrest is really about his elite status, his membership in the protected class. It isn’t supposed to work this way.

Finally, and most interesting of all, was the near-complete absence of any discussion in corporate media this time about whether podcasters are “real journalists.” For years, Democrats have refused to recognize lowly independent podcasters as “real journalists” deserving the same First Amendment armor as New York Times reporters.

But yesterday’s battalions of sneering stories simply assumed that Lemon is a journalist, without any quibbling at all. This might be the very best news, since conservatives dominate the podcast world. Congratulations, Joe Rogan! Congratulations, Matt Walsh! You’ve finally made it into the halcyon ranks of approved journalism.

Still, I wouldn’t bet your bitcoin they’ll leap to defend conservative podcasters next time.

After Lemon’s midnight arrest in LA (he was there for the Grammys), his processing, brief detention, and arraignment, Lemon remained defiant: “I look forward to my day in court.” Us too! All the media’s arguments about Lemon’s First Amendment rights are irrelevant; his lawyers will raise those arguments, and a court —or more likely, an appellate court— will decide.

Best of luck to you, Don, even though you wanted me banned from hospitals and grocery stores during the pandemic. No hard feelings.

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There was more good news—it’s the Art of the Deal: Global Edition. The United Nations, long despised by conservatives, announced yesterday that it faces financial extinction. Yesterday, ABC News reported, “United Nations faces ‘imminent financial collapse’ without urgent action, UN chief says.” I have an idea of something they could do to raise money:

In hindsight, looking back with cooler heads, maybe the UN shouldn’t have shut down the escalator right when Trump stepped aboard. Maybe the UN shouldn’t have unplugged his Teleprompter right as his speech started. Just saying. FAFO, and so forth.

Yesterday, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres dispatched an urgent letter to all member nations begging for cash. It began, “Dear valuable member, I would hate to have to revoke your gold-star membership, but we need URGENT ACTION ON A 10X MATCH within the next 48 hours!” Or words to that effect. Anyway, Guterres told member nations that the international war-making body will scrape the bottom around July, when difficult decisions must be made, unless overdue members cough up their arrearages.

By overdue members, Guterres was almost certainly referring to the UN’s sugar daddy, the United States. Apparently, we have gotten somewhat behind in paying nearly $2.2 billion in annual dues, plus another $1.8 billion owed for the UN’s laughable “peacekeeping missions.” It amounts to four billion total, which includes last year’s entire annual US membership fee. Nor have we paid anything so far this year, in 2026. (Venezuela, ironically, is the second-worst-paying member, owing around $38 million, which is a rounding error compared to the US’s red-inked ledger.)

The UN’s annual budget is $3.5 billion, or about one-third of Minnesota’s Learing fraud, which to be fair, has been teaching invisible kids for around ten years. Maybe the UN should ask member nation Somalia for the extra support.

🔥 Needless to say, the US pitches in more than any other country in the world. Dues are pegged to each country’s relative wealth; it’s sort of like a wealth tax. Republican Congresses have been stingy before. Cyclical cash squeezes, anchored in U.S. arrears, are a well-known phenomenon that began in the 80’s. It last hit critical levels during Trump 1.0. Headline from CNBC, October 2019:

Notwithstanding that, the crisis is worse this time. This time, the UN faces a polycrisis of record‑high arrears, a completely omitted year of dues from the UN’s single largest payer, and a public spat with Donald J. Trump, who is busily setting up his Board of Peace and pulling out of UN NGOs, so Guterres’s public complaint makes this episode sharper and more system‑exposing than the traditional periodic funding drama.

🔥 When it comes to UN funding, Congress allocates the budget, and the President cuts the checks. Last year, Congress initially funded $1.5 billion for UN dues plus $1.23 billion for peacekeeping. But in July, Congress passed a “rescissions” package that clawed back around a billion total across all UN obligations. Whoops! Never mind! I’d call it “Indian giving,” but I’m not sure we’re allowed to say that anymore.

After the Congressional recessions, about $700 million remained. But Trump paid zero. Not one dime, all last year. Not only that, but in news that must have sent chills running down the spines of UN bureaucrats swanking in their fancy New York offices, earlier this month, Trump summarily canceled America’s participation in thirty-one UN organizations and 35 UN-adjacent ones, along with a terrifying nastygram officially notifying the UN that “additional reviews are in progress.”

Needless to say, there are no historical precedents for a single, large-scale U.S.-UN withdrawal of this scale. It is unprecedented. Certainly, nothing like this has ever happened in one announcement or policy action. We’ve never withdrawn on this scale over a whole year. Not even all together. You have to go back to the moribund League of Nations era to find anything even close.

Let’s connect some dots!

🔥 Remember how we recently discussed Trump’s new “Board of Peace,” and the overwrought claims that he meant to completely replace the United Nations with it, since their charters are so similar? Ironically, yesterday the Associated Press ran a story reporting that Trump’s “wide ambitions” for the Board backfired and sparked “new support” for the UN:

The story reported that last week, for example, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who did not respond to Trump’s Board of Peace invitation, met with UN Secretary Guterres in London and glowingly broadcast “the UK’s enduring support for the UN and the international rules-based system.” On Monday, China’s U.N. ambassador, Fu Cong,* said, “We shall not cherry-pick our commitments to the organization, nor shall we bypass the U.N. and create alternative mechanisms.” (* I did not make that name up.)

But it went off the rails immediately. On the same day the AP ran that bit of narrative apple-polishing, UN Secretary Guterres posted his public dunning letter. Curious timing. The UN is apparently fighting back, trying to publicly shame the US into coughing up the money it needs to continue existing.

Nobody is thinking about the Art of the Deal. Think about leverage.

They should write more books about this man’s negotiating skills. Trump has the UN quivering between the prongs of a multi-headed vice. One prong is his amorphous, ambiguous Board of Peace, which they obviously see as a threat to somehow replace the United Nations. The second prong is the money, a crisis now reaching existential levels. A third prong was extracting the US from all the silly, wasteful UN programs, like a kind of geopolitical root canal, and hinting at more.

The UN will soon have no choice but to make a deal.

We don’t know the plan (nor should we). But when the UN inevitably comes begging, ready to compromise, what will President Trump want? We know he wants the UN to shut up about climate change, DEI, transgender stuff, population controls, open-borders, censorship, ‘soft-power’ regime change, and so on. We know he thinks our dues are too high. We know he wants the UN to get out of our hair, quit complaining about Venezuela and Greenland, get on board with Gaza reconstruction, and get the heck out of the Western Hemisphere. (We remain pretty sure the UN worked with Biden on blowing America’s borders open and even funding the invasion, for example.)

If this story follows the classic pattern, expect demands for “talks” soon. The UN isn’t going to die; but it will soon look a lot different. Nobody ever thought change could happen this fast.

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I am doing my level best to keep you abreast of the real tech developments, ones that could conceivably affect us all. This is harder than it looks. A lot of tech news turns out to be hype, or at least exaggerated. So I don’t cover every breathless story that comes along. This morning’s entry comes courtesy of PC Magazine, which yesterday reported, “SpaceX Eyes 1 Million Satellites For Orbital Data Center Push.” That’s not a typo: the space giant seeks official permission to launch one million satellites.

Late yesterday, the company asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to authorize a constellation of one million new satellites into near-Earth orbit, in order to build an “orbital data center.” To give you an idea of the scale, SpaceX currently has more satellites than any other company or government, totaling around 9,600. It would even be remarkable if they doubled it.

But a million of them? For what?

The filing explained that the proposed massive satellite array is intended to support artificial intelligence. Here is the formal description from the application:

SpaceX is designing its satellite system to accommodate the explosive growth of data demands driven by AI, machine learning, and edge computing, where processing needs are already beginning to outpace terrestrial capabilities. To deliver the compute capacity required for large-scale AI inference and data center applications serving billions of users globally, SpaceX aims to deploy a system of up to one million satellites to operate within narrow orbital shells spanning up to 50 km each (leaving sufficient room to deconflict against other systems with comparable ambitions). This system will operate between 500 km and 2,000 km altitude and 30 degrees and sun-synchronous orbit inclinations. SpaceX plans to design and operate different versions of satellite hardware to optimize operations across orbital shells.

SpaceX might even be aiming at something beyond an orbiting AI datacenter. Consider this remarkable paragraph, which must have instantly earned the record for stunning ambition in any FCC filing:

Launching a constellation of a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers is a first step towards becoming a Kardashev II-level civilization—one that can harness the Sun’s full power—while supporting Al-driven applications for billions of people today and ensuring humanity’s multi-planetary future amongst the stars.

Before you scoff about orbiting datacenters, we’ve been headed toward them for months, at least. Consider this remarkable headline from Forbes, last October:

Is a million satellites realistic, or is it just a negotiating strategy? Earlier this month, SpaceX asked for 28,000 more satellites, but the FCC only gave them 7,500. Maybe the million-sat request is just a Trumpian anchor-setting move. If SpaceX requests a million, maybe they’ll get 100,000. Who knows.

As big as it sounds, it still wouldn’t crowd the night sky. Space is big. Think about a million leftwing activists wandering around in Texas. They could spread out so far they couldn’t see each other, until coyotes ate them. Texas is tiny compared to the orbital plane, which is much bigger than the Earth itself. (Portlanders: consider how much more surface area an overinflated balloon has compared to one with much less air in it. On the other hand, never mind. Just trust me.)

This single filing, and the dramatic near-future that it suggests, reminds me of the transportation revolution at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1900, horses still clogged American city streets (along with their stinky but unavoidable byproducts), the Wright Brothers were still just bicycle mechanics tinkering in their Dayton shop, and the fastest way to cross the country was a four-day train ride—assuming nothing broke down or blew up.

By 1920 —just twenty years later— Model T’s had replaced horses, commercial aviation had been born, and wealthy thrill-seekers were hopping across the Atlantic Ocean like it was a backyard puddle. Someone born in 1890 watched their entire world transform before they even hit middle age. They went from shoveling horse manure, to cranking temperamental automobile engines, to watching barnstormers loop overhead— three completely different transportation realities crammed into a single lifetime. They never got a vote; they just had to hang on and try to keep up.

We’re living through a revolution like that right now, except that the changes are coming faster and the destination is even harder to imagine. One day we’re debating whether ChatGPT has gone sentient, the next we’re casually discussing orbital superclusters. The most remarkable fact is that we can discuss these kinds of things without having to sit down first. Oh, a million satellites? Wow. What’s happening in Minnesota?

The bottom line is: we’re in a different world now, Alice.

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Here we go! It’s the Epstein-avalanche everyone was waiting for. It’s finally here. The BBC’s incredible headline read, “Epstein files live updates: Photos appearing to show Andrew on all fours over female included in new release.” Meaning, former Prince Andrew. Um. Awkward.

Maybe he’s just demonstrating CPR?

As a lawyer, I have some trouble understanding why accomplished men who seem to have it all would make horrible decisions and allow themselves to get into compromising positions chasing skirts. But it happens. He was probably thinking with the little prince. What’s much harder to square is why these men would let themselves be photographed doing it.

I call this manufacturing evidence.

It’s a mystery whose tendrils extend back to King David, who horned in on his friend’s wife Bathsheba. They may not have had cell phone cameras back then, but it still came out. (God saw.)

Yesterday marked the end of the beginning. The DOJ released three million more pages of Epstein materials, including all-new photos and videos. Believe it or not, Democrats are already criticizing the document dump. Within two hours after the release, the ‘victims group’ held a press conference claiming the DOJ was still withholding things. How they reviewed three million documents in two hours is up for debate. Speed reading or something.

🔥 The DOJ said that all documents in its custody have now been released, with certain exceptions. Here is Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, explaining what is (and isn’t) in the final document dump:

CLIP: Todd Blanche explains the final, massive Epstein files release (2:31).

Blanche began by admitting that “there’s a hunger or a thirst for information that I do not think will be satisfied by the review of these documents.” Here are the main points from Blanche’s comments:

• No records were withheld or redacted for national security purposes.

• Redactions were made to protect victims, for attorney/client and work product privileges, and to protect the FBI’s “deliberative process.”

• In photos, all women’s faces were redacted (except Ghislaine); no men’s faces were redacted.

• Child sexual abuse videos and violence (snuff films? holy moly) were withheld.

• Criminal investigations may be ongoing (he neither confirmed nor denied).

• Blanche said the list of ‘public officials’ exposed in the document —required by the discharge petition— is forthcoming soon. (He didn’t commit to when.)

• Blanche invited Congressmen to review any redacted or withheld document, photo, or video.

Presumably supercharged by AI, the rush to mine all the embarrassing gold in the files is on.

🔥 Two immediate American targets included billionaires Bill Gates and Reid Hoffman, who together donated hundreds of millions to elect Joe Biden. Many folks have recalled Elon Musk’s comments to Tucker Carlson from a couple years back, when Elon speculated that part of the reason people fought so hard to stop Trump’s re-election was fear of Epstein files exposure.

One new email making the rounds is a literally unbelievable draft argument, where Epstein saved a response to Bill Gates’s effort to decouple from their relationship— apparently after Epstein “accidentally confessed to Melinda” (what he confessed wasn’t clear). In it, Epstein reminded Gates that the software billionaire got an awkward STD from some Russian hookers, and had to ask Epstein for antibiotics that he could slip to his wife Melinda without her noticing.

It’s hard to imagine how Gates, slippery cockroach though he is, can survive this one. (The divorce already cost Gates half his empire.) Read the whole email.

Portly tech billionaire and Democrat super-donor Reid Hoffman was also a popular figure in the new releases. His relationship with Epstein obviously went far beyond the occasional meetup. Hoffman’s name appears more than 2,600 times in the DOJ’s Epstein files, revealing hundreds of emails, Zoom calls, dinners, and meetings between Epstein and Hoffman from 2013–2018— long after Epstein’s first conviction.

Meanwhile, in another Epstein email, the international man of mystery complains about Trump and admits he “never got a massage.” Nothing in the new releases so far contradicts President Trump’s stories.

There are a handful of emails with Elon Musk, some verging on PG-level spiciness, but nothing that refutes Musk’s claim he never went to pedo Island or flew on the Lolita Express.

Not coincidentally, yesterday the House Oversight Committee published an amusing mashup about holding the Clintons in contempt for refusing to testify about their relationship with Epstein. Tick, tock.

It’s a developing story, so I won’t try connecting any dots yet or speculating about the fallout. I would like to see the Epstein bank statements, which is what this lawyer is looking for to show that everything has really been released. As they say, follow the money.

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Yesterday, CBS News ran an encouraging story headlined, “Florida mandates driver’s license tests must be taken in English, eliminates other languages.” That was fast.

Starting February 6th, all driver’s license tests in the Sunshine State will only be administered in English, including commercial and non-commercial types. Coincidentally, my 16-year-old recently took his driver’s license test (in English). Afterward, he reported that it wasn’t hard.

But it’s probably somewhat harder if you don’t read English. Lo siento mucho! But this is a safety issue. If people can’t even read the test, how can they read the traffic signs?

This story is a great example of the overwhelming effect of the successful conservative counter-revolution. Just a few years ago, you can imagine how it would have made international news, drawing furious condemnations from activist groups, the United Nations, and people with unpronounceable names. Articles about Florida’s exam change would have been thick as ticks with claims of racism, xenophobia, and would have been packed to the gills with tragic interviews with the victims.

But with the frantic pace of events, there is no bandwidth to get outraged over a de facto language requirement to drive. And Florida made the change lightning-fast, without a long lead-up of public debate and hand-wringing.

The result was that CBS just reported it straight, more like a public service advisory than anything else. We’ve come a long way.

Have a wonderful weekend! Stay warm, and return on Monday morning for more delightful and educational essential news and commentary.

Don’t race off! We cannot do it alone. Consider joining up with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds. I could sure use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠

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