☕️ BELIEF MODELS ☙ Saturday, October 26, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Historic Rogan-Trump interview shatters records; WaPo betrays liberal readers; House report savages gov't covid psyops; RFK plain-talking campaign ad raises stakes; best legal news all year; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! Only eleven days left. Make plans to vote, and early. Now let’s get to your Weekend Edition Roundup: Rogan interviews Trump and more records are set; the Washington Post commits the greatest act of betrayal since Benedict Arnold; House Oversight drops report detailing how the government lied their way into a fake pandemic; RFK raises the stakes to ‘ultimate’ in latest campaign ad for Trump; terrific news from the Fifth Circuit that might just be an election integrity game changer.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

📈📈 Last night, right after the record-breaking interview dropped, the New York Times ran a lightning damage-control article headlined, “6 Takeaways From Donald Trump’s 3-Hour Podcast With Joe Rogan.”  The face-off between the former Fear Factor and Apprentice hosts forged political history yesterday and dealt the selected candidate a crippling blow from which she may never recover.

SPOTIFY: Joe Rogan Episode #2219 - Donald Trump (2:58).

I could not find a previous historical example of a President (or candidate) taking such a long, open-ended interview with a major media platform. I don’t believe it has ever happened.

Joe Rogan commands the world’s largest media venue, period, full stop. Nothing else even comes close, except possibly a handful of one-off events like the Superbowl. The Times reported Rogan has 14.5 million subscribers on Spotify and 17.6 million on YouTube. Rogan’s shows consistently top the charts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Rogan signed a renewal contract with Spotify earlier this year, estimated by trade press to be worth nearly $250 million, making him the highest paid journalist in history.

Though corporate media does its best to ignore Joe Rogan, the former MMA fighter remains the lone champion of a dominant media class of his own.

The race to score the Rogan interview began twelve days ago. It was Harris’ idea. Reuters ran the story headlined, “Harris could join Joe Rogan podcast in hunt for male votes, sources say.” The Harris campaign is desperate for male voters. A YouGov poll last year found most (81%) of Rogan listeners are male, and just over half (56%) are under 35, so she badly needed the exposure.

Trump has never enjoyed a smooth relationship with Joe Rogan. Two years ago, Rogan refused to let Trump come on the show, and called Trump a “threat to democracy.” Yesterday on the show, Rogan told Trump the assassination attempt changed his mind: “Once they shot you, I was like, ‘He’s got to come in here,’” Rogan explained. “It’s all about timing.”

On Monday, the news broke of Kamala’s talks with Rogan, and it looks like the Trump campaign sprang into action and scooped the interview. Trump had at least one advantage: he could handle three hours of unscripted interview without negotiating a bunch of rules, and Kamala probably could not. So it looks like there is a behind-the-scenes story of how Trump snaked the Rogan interview out from under Kamala’s nose.

Even before the interview began, Trump had already won, by denying Kamala access to Rogan’s show. Rogan says he’d still have her on. But there’s no way she’ll take that interview now, fearing inevitable and predictably brutal comparisons between her’s and Trump’s performance. And that is the point: Trump doesn’t need independents to listen to the interview.

He just needs them to know Trump took the three-hour unscripted interview, and Kamala didn’t or couldn’t. And that may be a sufficiently compelling reason to vote for President Trump, since it really does evidence a basic presidential capability.

In the first nine hours since the podcast went live on YouTube, it has already been viewed 8.3 million times. And there are already 196,000 comments. These figures don’t even count additional listeners on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

As for the content, little will be new to existing Trump supporters. The former President confirmed his plan to end the income tax, albeit without elaborating, which is probably smart. And Trump confessed to Rogan that his biggest mistake during his first term was picking “bad, disloyal people,” showing he’s learned a lot from his first try.

But it was surprising to see how much of the world is with us. The YouTube comments section —which developed overnight— was incredibly encouraging. Foreign Trump fans from all over Planet Earth chimed in, wishing America blessings for the election. Here are just three examples in a row of very many:

The list of supportive countries continued beyond your author’s ability to scroll. While trying to imagine a scenario where any Kamala interview would draw this kind of worldwide response, ask next whether anything the Cackler has done could create this sort of wild energy:

But the Rogan interview wasn’t even close to all of yesterday’s positive portents.

📈📈 Betrayed! Stabbed in the back! Benedict Arnold-ed! Libs were triggered again yesterday, very badly this time. Sensitive seismic devices on the Moon clearly detected the howls of outrage from far-left social media back on Earth.  The New York Times reported the wild brouhaha in a simply headlined story: “Washington Post Says It Won’t Endorse a Presidential Candidate.” The sub-headline primly explained, “The chief executive said the paper was ‘returning to our roots’ of not making endorsements for the office.”

The news came fast on the already unsettling heels of the woke LA Times’s intentional failure to endorse Kamala Harris. West Coast elites had been automatically counting on that endorsement, taking it for granted, not even thinking about it, just expecting an LA Times endorsement to come around again like Christmas, Guy Fawkes Day, or the Haitian Solstice.

But yesterday, the East Coast collapsed into disgrace after the woke Washington Post also announced that it too would be not endorsing Kamala Harris. It was the political equivalent of a comet crashing right into the steel and concrete containment dome over the still-glowing remains of the Soviet nuclear power facility in Chernobyl. Double disaster.

The Washington Post is the biggest leftist paper in the country, not least because it demolished Republican President Richard Nixon and his reputation in history down to the studs. To East Coast elites, the WaPo is the wellspring from which the liberal permission matrix flows, just as the LA Times is for West Coast elites.

This development was colossally catastrophic, undermining the foundations of Democrat world view. The two papers were the safest sources Democrats rely on to tell them what it’s okay to think, and what they can safely say. And those foundations of safety just slid sideways.

As with anyone whose core identity is unexpectedly challeged, the WaPo’s refusal to endorse Democrats’ selected candidate produced incandescent fury and incoherent rage. For example, the increasingly deranged, far-left podcaster Keith Olbermann, who yesterday non-ironically demanded Biden immediately arrest Elon Musk and nationalize Musk’s companies, also rage-quit the Washington Post to protest the paper’s non-endorsement:

The unhinged fever swamps of far-left ‘media’ have suddenly, but far too late, discovered that corporate media has its own agenda. For example, yesterday’s headline from looney-left The Bulwark:

They just can’t understand it. The current theory on far-left Twitter alternative BlueSky is that the two billionaires who each own the LA Times and the WaPo expect Trump to win, and they fear his retribution. So they are currying favor by refusing to endorse Kamala.

The New York Times explicitly described this Trump-deranged trend as having zero evidence. But they still explained the theory:

In other words, they think Bezos is scared that he’ll get the Elon Musk treatment. Even though fear of deep state retribution was the first explanation they ran to, Democrats still can’t see that the real problem is a weaponized federal government. (Democrats cannot imagine a world where the papers’ owners have good faith, bona fide reasons for not endorsing Harris.)

Jeff Bezos and the LA Times owner, billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, should be more worried about being punished by Democrats for their sudden betrayal. It’s more curious that they aren’t.

💉💉 This week, the House Oversight Committee released its long-awaited report on the government’s misuse of psychological manipulation during the pandemic. It’s ugly. The House report was titled, “We Can Do This: An Assessment of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Covid-19 Public Campaign.”

The report weighs in at a very-readable 70 pages. I recommend the whole thing. If you’re time-limited, skim the table of contents on the third page and just read the sections of most interest.  For a quick overview of the whole thing, read this Twitter thread summarizing the report written by Stanford Professor and real public health expert Dr. Jay Bhattacharya.

In fall 2020, the bureaucratic behemoth that is HHS was well along in swinging its monstrous apparatus of government over the heads of every citizen in the country. Instead of doing its own work, the government’s vast army of overpaid health bureaucrats outsourced critical public health communications to a “full-service behavior-change research” firm.

Not a science firm. Not a health firm. A “behavior-change research” firm. The firm’s name, which should become as much a hissing and a byword as the names “Mengele” or “Benedict Arnold,” is the Fors Marsh Group. (We will figure out the names of the involved individuals at FMG. I bet there is a lot more to this story.)

As the report’s introduction explains, for its “behavior change” services, HHS ultimately paid FMG over nine hundred million dollars. Stop and think about that for a second. The U.S. government paid nearly a billion dollars to one company to manipulate citizens into becoming more compliant to the government.

But … but … it was all meant for good, right? I mean, sure, we can quibble about the ethics of psychological manipulation and “nudging” and stuff, but those decisions were made during a pandemic, amidst a public health emergency, when lives were at stake. But the important thing is their hearts were in the right place. Right?

Maybe not. Maybe it was much simpler than it looks. What advanced techniques did FMG use to make the American public more compliant? What cutting-edge science did FORS bring to the HHS table, to earn their billion-dollar fee? Was it a blend of innovative AI and pioneering psychology?

Nope. They just lied. They lied, and they exaggerated stuff, to terrify people. Their lies were so bloody awful and so preposterous that nobody would have ever listened to them — except that they put the full weight and credit of the United States government behind their lies and fearmongering to make the whole grotesque scheme work.  In doing so, they consumed every drop of historic trust earned by previous generations of hard-working public servants.

But … did they really lie? Yes. They lied. They lied like rugs, or dogs, or Joe Biden reminiscing about his Uncle Bosey. They lied tons of times. Lies like promising that vaccination would stop transmission of the virus dead in its tracks. That particular lie came from the CDC itself (i.e., the pits of hell) and sailed straight into the FMG’s advertising scripts:

FMG’s plan wasn’t innovative. It wasn’t cutting edge. A child could have done it. They’re morons. They just lied, and they leaned on Americans’ trust in government to sell their simplistic lies. And the bureaucrats running the health agencies and the country’s liberal health professionals all compliantly went right along with it all, facilitating the lies at every step.

Lies are unethical and Liars are bad people. Even, or especially, public health liars. FMG’s whole stupid program was unethical to the core.

It was also overhyped nonsense. For example, FMG’s initial proposal to HHS was founded on a single “theory” they called the “Health Belief Model.” Here’s how they dressed their so-called Health Belief Model up in fancy, academic-sounding language:

That’s not innovative, creative, cutting-edge, or even smart. All that Model says is, if you scare people by saying they’ll die, and don’t give them time to think, they’re likely to do whatever you say, especially if they already trust the person telling them what to do:

Of course, afterwards, once they figure out they’ve been had, people won’t trust the “influencers, celebrities, and sports figures” anymore, but who cares? FMG will already be rich by then.

In other words, the plan was to coerce or bribe top government officials, doctors, pastors, priests, social media stars, bloggers, vloggers, Hollywood celebrities, singers, football players, and tennis stars into lying for them. The House report included the scripts FMG prepared for actors who pretended to be covid victims.

It was all completely fake and completely outrageous.

Worse, it’s not just the billion dollars FMG got. The real cost includes Americans’ lost trust in government. And the lost trust in public health. The lost trust in vaccines (well, that one might actually be a positive). The lost trust in experts. The spiked anxiety rates from the fear campaigns. The broken brains of germaphobes and medical fetishists. The cost to the children in lost educational attainment, depression, and who knows what kinds of future psychosis.

(We could continue, adding vaccine injuries, jobs lost to mandates, closed businesses, destroyed economies, inflation, and so on.)

But the important thing is FMG’s owners got paid. And they were paid well. Very well. They are now set to retire on generational wealth earned from our tax dollars, all wielded as psychological weapons against us.

This House report was a great start toward accountability. Having documents like this is important, because they can be cited as official findings. For example, a court is much more likely to seriously consider something from a House Oversight Report than something some lawyer says. We’re getting there.

🔥🔥 RFK released a new campaign ad that, just a year ago, would have been considered an unreasonable, over-the-top exaggeration. But now it seems totally reasonable. If anything, it understates the facts. In his latest ad, Kennedy soberly intoned, “A vote for Kamala Harris is a vote for nuclear war.” It’s had almost 7 million views in 48 hours.

CLIP: new Kennedy ad—vote for Trump to avoid nuclear war (5:25).

And Kennedy’s not wrong.

Consider that, for our entire lives, this kind of direct argument that named names would have been buried, concealed, and suppressed. Nobody would have ever seen an ad like this. Back before social media matured to the point it’s reached now, where nearly everyone uses it, it was the days of radio and television dominance. No mainstream radio or TV platform would have run Kennedy’s ad. Or at least, it would have been prohibitively expensive.

And until Elon Musk bought Twitter and freed its little blue bird, the security state dominated social media, preventing this kind of politically pointed argument.

This may be the first election in U.S. history where candidates and influencers can talk directly to other citizens, without an intermediary, unfiltered, and without interference. This is also why the Democrats are freaking out about free speech lately. They aren’t used to a political campaign without information gatekeepers.

🔥 Finally, get ready for what might be the best election integrity news we’ve yet received. At minimum, it’s a game changer. The Washington Post ran the story yesterday headlined, “Court rules ballots that arrive late shouldn’t be counted despite postmarks.” The sub-headline ominously warned, “The 5th Circuit’s ruling in a Mississippi case could have implications for other states with similar laws.”

In January, the Republican National Committee sued the State of Mississippi over its policy of counting late-received but timely postmarked ballots. In other words, even if the USPS is slow, oh well, that happens sometimes. And so long as a voter puts the ballot in the mail on November 5th, well, we should be able to count that one whenever it finally arrives.

And if Democrat vote-counters ever need a few more votes, they can just hold open the ballot window a little bit longer, and slam it shut at just the right moment.

In its lawsuit, the RNC argued that, since Congress set a specific deadline, November 5th, that should be the final ballot cutoff, regardless of what the postmark says. But the federal district court ruled against the RNC. And so —fortunately— the RNC appealed to the terrific Fifth Circuit.

Yesterday, a unanimous three-judge Fifth Circuit panel ruled conclusively: the date of receipt is all that matters. The postmark is irrelevant. The date of mailing is irrelevant. If a ballot hasn’t been received by November 5th, it’s too late. “Federal law requires voters to take timely steps to vote by Election Day,” Judge Oldham wrote. “And federal law does not permit the State of Mississippi to extend the period for voting by one day, five days, or 100 days.”

While the decision explicitly applies to Mississippi, it is binding law for the whole Fifth Circuit, which also includes Texas and Louisiana. Outside the Fifth, the case will be considered persuasive law, but not a binding law. So it will influence lawsuits filed in the other jurisdictions. If another circuit goes a different way, it will conflict with this ruling, and that conflict will go straight to the Supreme Court.

If the Supreme Court upholds the Fifth, it will become law in all fifty states.

The judges left the problem of how to handle the current election up to the District Court. But it will be under a lot of pressure to comply with the law. More importantly, this brand-new Fifth Circuit law is now available for post-election challenges in any state where late-arrived mail-in ballot determine the results.

It’s difficult to overestimate the significance of this ruling. While it only applies to one avenue of cheating, that avenue has been completely closed off. And while it only applies in one federal circuit, it ripples across the rest of the country.

Have a wonderful weekend! Stay optimistic, VOTE, and get back here first thing Monday morning to kick off the week the C&C way as we head into October’s final week.

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 🦠

How to Donate to Coffee & Covid

Twitter: jchilders98.
Truth Social: jchilders98.
MeWe: mewe.com/i/coffee_and_covid.
Telegram: t.me/coffeecovidnews
C&C Swag! www.shopcoffeeandcovid.com