☕️ BILLIONAIRE BOOMERANG ☙ Tuesday, April 8, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Markets settle as trade wars heat up; EU signals surrender, Israel caves, China blunders; Trump shrugs. Experts flail, Florida strikes pedo ring, Idaho makes medical freedom history; and more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! Your roundup today includes: markets settling down as trade wars are heating up; two standards for stock markets from same experts; signs of life in the secondary headlines defy experts’ gloomy economic forecasts; European Union quickly signaling signs of surrender but aren’t even close to a good Trump deal yet; Israel completely caves but Trump turns up his nose; China picks the fight, but could be playing right into the President’s hands; global pedophile roundup might be in the works as Florida delivers an international knockout blow to kiddie porn vendors; and Idaho makes history by passing a truly terrific bill that you are going to absolutely love.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Predictions of a 1930s-style market collapse were disappointed yesterday, but you needed an electron microscope to find the good news. The New York Times ran the story headlined, “Some Calm Returns to Markets Even as Trade Tensions Escalate.”

“After three days of global market turmoil not seen since the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic,” the Journal wrote, “stocks regained a measure of calm on Tuesday.” So, that was good. Crisis averted! But it got me thinking. And remember the Journal’s pandemic reference— we’ll return to it shortly.

Yesterday, I drove a seven-hour round trip to attend a high-stakes, in-person, 15-minute court hearing in Southwest Florida. (Well, it ran about an hour. But it was set for 15-minutes.) The whole trip was down and back one infamous road: I-75, the Sunshine State’s main north-south corridor. Driving down the teeming highway yesterday felt like being a lone ant pushed along in a swarm of stirred-up ants— driving cars.

I doubt I’ve ever seen such large swarms of semis and tractor-trailers. I also spotted full car carriers, oil tankers, trucks hauling brand-new boats sealed in shiny shrink wrap, just-manufactured military trucks on flatbeds, and about a million citizens going about their daily business.

In other words, it did not look like an ailing economy. It looked like a booming economy. I’m just saying.

You might object. “Jeff,” you say, “you’re just a lawyer, not an economic expert! You wouldn’t know a good economy from a kale sandwich.” Hang on, though. Not so fast. Au contraire, mon amí. I do have some special expertise. Allow me to explain.

During the darkest days of peak lockdown during March and April 2020, Michelle and I peacefully protested by hauling the kids all over the state, defying the lockdown orders. We took an in-person survey, if you will, of various places around Florida, to see how they were responding to pandemic orders. (Looking back, I think we were subconsciously searching for somewhere sane to escape to.)

Either way, we spent a lot of time driving on I-75 during the lockdown lunacy. And —listen to me carefully— I never want to experience anything like that again in my entire life. It was haunting and dystopian. For a period of about three weeks, you could drive down the road for half an hour without seeing any other car in either direction— on one of the busiest highways in the state.

It was hideous and surreal and awful. I felt like I was trapped in a Twilight Zone episode about a post-nuclear apocalypse after the neutron bombs fell and vaporized the people but left all the furniture. All the stuff was still there, but all the people were gone.

Yesterday, somebody sardonically observed they were old enough to remember how, back when the stock market plunged by -20% during the pandemic, the government experts simply re-defined “recession,” ta-da!, and then tripped over each other in a rush to reassure everybody how the market adjustment was really a good thing.

Haha! Remember those good old days? I do.

Those were the days with bare highways and fractured supply chains, cargo ships quarantined in anchored stacks, but the experts were just so sunny and so uncharacteristically hopeful about the market correction. It is but a flesh wound! Now, with packed highways, and despite there being no intractable, worsening problems (like a pandemic), the experts have grown dark and bitter and chant forebodingly like Macbeth’s twisted witches. They prophesy not just recession, but depression and stagflation and more inflation and every other “-tion” in their kettles of economic gloom.

Or maybe it’s all just politics, and the foul-weather experts are lying again. You decide.

Anyway, the markets stabilized yesterday afternoon, and Trump’s team kept haggling like vendors at a liquidation sale in a Turkish rug market.

💰 WE really don’t hate the so-called experts nearly enough. Consider this unrecognized economic signal from Tom’s Guide, published yesterday:

It’s hard to square a ‘historic economic downturn’ with parents elbowing each other at Target for a $400 Switch 2. If there’s a better example of a discretionary purchase than Game Boys, I don’t know what it could possibly be. Actually, I take that back. What about organic butter?

The truth is, consumer sentiment appears largely driven by political affiliation, a proxy for which news people consume. In other words, sour sentiment is being ginned up by the media. Consider this unintentionally informative MarketWatch headline, published yesterday:

The experts can’t find any of these data points, though. Somehow they keep managing to ignore the crowds at Best Buy and the $12 grass-fed butter flying off the shelves.

💰 THE European Union is starting to sweat. Yesterday, Politico ran a story headlined, “EU offers Trump removal of all industrial tariffs.” EU President Ursula Von der Leyen said the EU “stands ready to negotiate” and “has offered zero-for-zero tariffs” on all industrial goods, including cars, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, rubber and plastic machinery:

CLIP: Europeans race to negotiate a trade deal (0:22).

It’s a start, but it’s not the kind of offer Trump is likely to find appealing. First, it omits consumer and agricultural goods. Second, the EU is one of those places where they play games with non-tariff trade barriers like VAT taxes and “safety standards.” And third, Trump already rejected a similar offer in his first term.

In a White House presser yesterday, the President explained the EU’s sneaky non-tariff barriers. "It's tariffs where they make it impossible for you to sell a car ... they make it so difficult, the standards and the tests," Trump said. "They come up with rules and regulations that are just designed for one reason: that you can't sell your product in those countries. And we're not gonna let that happen. Those are called non-monetary barriers."

Trump did respond to Ursula’s offer though. He said not even close. This morning, Politico ran a story headlined, “Trump says EU must buy $350B of US energy to get tariff relief.” The sub-headline added, “Brussels’ zero-for-zero tariff offer not enough, U.S. president says, but indicates he’s open to a deal if the bloc commits to closing the trade deficit in goods.”

Remember? Trump said the Europeans would have to pay restitution.

Israel might be making the most aggressive offers so far. Yesterday, Reuters ran the story headlined, “In nod to Trump, Netanyahu pledges to eliminate Israel's trade surplus with US.” According the Prime Minister’s public comments, the Middle Eastern country offered not just to equalize tariffs, but to completely eliminate the trade surplus, meaning Israel will buy from America just as much as it sells to America.

“And we're going to also eliminate trade barriers,” the Prime Minister promised, sitting next to Trump in the Oval Office.

But Trump didn’t take the deal. Not good enough. He was noncommittal, essentially saying he’ll think about it.

💰 The only country so far showing an urge to really fight is China, and Trump seems just as eager to fight with them. The AP ran the story headlined, “China says it will 'fight to the end' after Trump threatens to impose still more tariffs.” The President had strong words for the Chinese on Truth Social. “If China does not withdraw its 34% increase above their already long-term trading abuses by tomorrow, April 8th, 2025, the United States will impose ADDITIONAL Tariffs on China of 50%, effective April 9th,” Trump tweeted.

He warned, “Additionally, all talks with China concerning their requested meetings with us will be terminated!” I think Trump is the first President in history to set trade policy through social media mean tweets.

To be clear, I don’t know any more about Trump’s real plans than anyone else does. But it seems to me that Trump wants to stymie trade with China. Call it the Russia model. Before the Proxy War, Russia’s economy was over-reliant on foreign investment. Biden’s sanctions made foreign investment impossible, and the unexpected result was a renaissance in Russia’s economy, as Russian billionaires —cut off from their London townhouses and Swiss banks— were forced to invest at home.

Cut off from the West, Russia didn’t wither. It de-globalized and re-nationalized— and it worked. In just two years, Russia rocketed from mid-level doldrums to the top of the world’s wealthiest countries list. Once an ailing, foreign-dependent economy, Russia is now independent, politically stable, economically self-sufficient, and —despite all expert predictions— stronger than ever.

For the last 40 years since the mid-1980s, until my eardrums begged for mercy, I’ve listened to the broken record about how our manufacturing sector had been hollowed out by cheap Chinese labor and how that meant the Chinese would eventually “own us.” America doesn’t know how to make anything anymore! And my favorite, You better learn to speak Mandarin!

You could call this Trump’s Reverse Sanctions Doctrine. I think Trump’s goal might be to intentionally strangle trade with China— not so much to punish them, but to force American manufacturing to grow up and move back home, creating an unexpected Russia-style resurgence and domestic prosperity. Just as Russia’s oligarchs must have done at first, our billionaires are starting to complain bitterly, too.

Headline from this morning’s Business Insider:

In other words, maybe Trump’s not wrecking international trade. Maybe he’s just preparing the construction site. Maybe the tariff boomerangs are starting to strike our oligarchs’ perfect little tender spots.

The mockingbird media’s experts are clueless about what’s happening. Let the dickering and hard bargaining continue.

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The tide may be turning. Yesterday, Tampa Bay-10 ran a troubling but also encouraging story headlined, “'Faces of evil': Florida authorities announce arrests in global child abuse ring bust.” Florida’s new Attorney General James Uthmeier announced the international indictments in a deeply disturbing press conference.

The CSAM ring, organized out of Turkey, involved seven Floridians and spanned multiple countries. “The level and brutality of these images is sickening,” Uthmeier said, shaking his head. Authorities seized millions of horrific videos—including those showing “real, identifiable children in the United States” listed in the National Missing and Exploited Children registry.

Many victims were babies.

Some of the unidentified children were thought to be illegal immigrants, trafficked across the border under Biden’s open-door policy for “families with children.”

"There is not a word in the English dictionary that can describe the gross content that was on the videos,” Uthmeier reported. I’ll spare you any specifics —this is a family blog— but one officer described the videos as "some of the most egregious, disgusting content" state officials had ever seen.

Ringleader Mehmet Berk Bozuyuk remains in Turkey, but Florida law enforcement officials are working with Homeland Security to extradite him. “Mr. Mehmet was very deliberate in hiding his identity," FDLE Special Agent in Charge Mark Brutnell said. "He really, really believed that he could outsmart us. But, at the end of the day, he didn’t.” They found Mehmet after nabbing Krunalkumar Nereshbhai Modi in New Jersey.

The arrested co-conspirators face forty to sixty years in prison. Or, the wood chipper. Either way, but I lean toward chipping.

Authorities continue investigating the international connections— linking the ring to Canada, Ireland, and other foreign countries. TikTok was apparently the gateway platform, providing users who paid just $100 access to a dark web portal where the massive library of “dangerous material” was hosted.

While corporate media obsesses over stock charts and tariffs, real evil is being exposed, even though you can only find it in local reports. This isn’t just a crime story— it’s a moment of moral clarity. It is a glimpse into the kind of depravity that flourished and spread while the Biden Administration was busy policing speech and enforcing mask mandates.

The articles were silent about this part, but … what about all the people who paid the $100? Law enforcement almost certainly has the data— logins, IP addresses, credit card transaction trails.

You can see why officials didn’t mention it. No warnings. They don’t want these people bleach-bitting their hard drives like Hillary or fleeing to Ukraine. I would bet that those names have already been referred to agencies and jurisdictions all over the country. Maybe even all over the world.

Maybe right now, CSAM users all over the world are gobbling Xanax and soiling their jockey shorts, flinching like neurotic terriers whenever Fedex taps the doorbell. We’ve been disappointed so many times that I’m not counting on anything. But it is possible that this announcement from Florida could lead to the largest pedophile roundup in history.

The wheels of justice turn slowly. But they also turn inexorably.

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It’s happening. Local Idaho Fox affiliate 8-ABC ran a story yesterday succinctly headlined, “Gov. Little signs new "medical freedom" bill.”

Idaho Governor Brad Little just signed the first law of its kind in the nation— a historic medical freedom bill guaranteeing bodily autonomy for Idahoans.

State Senator Daniel D. Foreman (R) laid it out plainly. “Unless required by federal law, no state, county, or local government entity or official in Idaho shall require any person to receive or use a medical intervention,” he said, adding that “the receipt of government benefits and services may not be predicated on the mandatory receipt or use of a medical intervention.”

Even better, the new law bans businesses from discriminating on medical status: “A business entity doing business in the state of Idaho shall not refuse to provide any service, product, admission to a venue, or transportation to a person because that person has or has not received or used a medical intervention."

Naturally, Idaho Democrats (!) were outraged. State House Democrat leader Illana Rubel (D-Boise) complained, “[This bill] says they can’t make you bandage oozing wounds, that they can’t make you get lice treatments, that they can’t make you cover your mouth if you have ebola and you’re coughing on people.”

What nonsense. I don’t want the government to force us to bandage our wounds, get lice treatments, or cover our mouths when we cough. I want the government to stay out of my bloodstream. State Representative Lucas Cayler (R-Caldwell) agreed with me. “It’s a part of life. It’s always been a part of life. It’s what makes us human,” Cayler said. “We have immune systems, and those immune systems, by and large, regulate.”

Absent the Democrats’ pandemic overreach, this never would have happened. Their reckless covid tyranny midwifed the first true medical freedom law in America. Defying all pre-pandemic odds, Republicans have become the party of medical freedom. And Idaho has blazed the trail.

The best part is: MAHA is only just getting started.

Have a terrific Tuesday! Wagon back here on the Idaho trail tomorrow, for even more fantastic essential news and commentary.

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