☕️ BLIND JUSTICE ☙ Wednesday, May 21, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Miraculous PREP Act win in court; media spins Biden’s “undiagnosed” terminal cancer, skeptics persist; 5th Circuit judge roasts SCOTUS; Trump exits Proxy War—neocons howl; 2025 absurdities; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! In today’s jam-packed roundup: a recap of our miraculous hearing in district court defending our PREP Act lawsuit against dismissal; media desperately tries covering for Biden’s ‘undiagnosed’ terminal prostate cancer but some remain skeptical; Fifth Circuit Appellate Judge slams Supreme Court in order packed with hilarious one-liners; neocons decry Trump’s quiet, unstoppable pulling out of the Proxy War; and more 2025 headlines of the absurd for your amusement and edification.

🪖 C&C ARMY POST 🪖

I argued one of the biggest and most important cases in my career yesterday afternoon.

Regular readers know that, late last year, my firm filed a lawsuit against the 2005 PREP Act, which is the federal law that immunizes from legal liability vaccine manufacturers (along with doctors, hospitals, and a vast army of other miscreants), for injuries caused by “safe and effective” (but also defective) vaccines and other pandemic treatments. The short statute replaces injured Americans’ common-law legal claims with a black box process called the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP) that, in archaic legal terms, is called “a bad joke.”

Our lawsuit seeks to declare the PREP Act unconstitutional under six main theories.

Here’s what a litigator’s life is like. I spent the last five days straight preparing to argue against the federal government’s mega-motion to dismiss our lawsuit. Apart from church on Sunday, I worked right through the weekend. Just one case chart —a list of precedential cases cited in the briefs— included ninety-two separate decisions, constituting thousands of pages of dense case law. I did my best to read and familiarize myself with all of them. I probably wrote and re-wrote two dozen versions of my argument.

I never used any of it. Yesterday afternoon, as the hearing started, the judge offered each side 15 minutes of argument. That’s a warm-up.

But that wasn’t the only surprise. After calling our case fascinating, he broke protocol, saying he wanted to hear from our side first (usually the ‘moving side’ goes first, and here, the DOJ had moved to dismiss our lawsuit). So instead of responding to the government’s arguments, I had to quickly invent a whole new affirmative case. He told me to proceed with my argument.

I was halfway through my first amazing, legally triumphant opening sentence when the judge interrupted. He said, “let me ask you a couple quick questions first.”

In the litigation business, that is what we call a “hot bench.” It is similar in concept to a hot mess, but mostly just for the lawyers.

What followed was a respectful and smart but machine-gun-style series of questions aimed at every difficult issue in the case. I thought I handled the questions well, but things were going downhill. Judge Young (a Reagan appointee) said, with all due respect, it seemed to him that our case was a string of very good arguments in search of a legal claim. He wondered whether we should have just sued Pfizer in state court and tested our theories there. (I disagreed, of course.)

Imagine a professor who starts the lesson by picking you out of the class and firing off questions, staccato-style, interrupting and shifting to the next question as soon as he gets the idea of where your answer is headed. “I understand your argument, counsel. What about this?”

While my cerebral cortext continued playing verbal tennis, some other remote, disengaged part of my brain was already beginning to organize an appeal. But then a miracle appeared out of thin air. The rhetorical assault ended, and the judge shifted his attention to the government’s lawyer. He gave the government the same treatment, respectful but demanding, and just as dismissive of any reasoning he disagreed with.

Then came the hand grenade.

“Of all the plaintiffs’ counts, I think their substantive due process argument could survive,” the judge told the DOJ lawyer, as though it was a stray random thought. It changed everything.

🪖 “Substantive due process” (SDP) is an amorphous, jello-like, hard-to-pin-down concept that some rights are so fundamental —like the right to raise your children, make personal medical decisions, or marry the person you choose— that the government can’t take them away, even if it follows all the right procedures, and even if those rights aren’t expressly addressed in the Constitution.

SDP is not just about how the government acts, but what it tries to do. If the law crosses a certain line —by being deeply unfair or violating a fundamental liberty— the Constitution says that’s not allowed, no matter how neatly the government checked the boxes.

SDP claims are among the hardest to win. Courts give the government wide latitude to regulate, especially in areas like public health, safety, and morals. To succeed, a claimant must prove that the government’s action is not just mistaken or harsh, but so extreme and so unjustified that it “shocks the conscience” —a legal standard so high it takes special NASA telescopes to find it on dark nights.

Unless a law unconstitutionally targets a fundamental right —and courts stingily recognize very few of them— judges will almost always defer to the government’s reasoning, so long as it clings to even a scrap of rationality, and even if it’s flimsy or paternalistic. But when the court allows a fundamental right is implicated, the government finds itself on brittle ice.

Well-known SDP cases include Roe v. Wade, Lawrence v. Texas (a 2003 decision that struck down the Lone Star State’s anti-sodomy laws), and Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage.

🪖 Judge Young pointed out to the government that we’d cited a couple of cases where the Supreme Court had mused that there might be an outer limit to the same thing the government did in the PREP Act. These musings mostly came from the Swine Flu cases — where in the 1980’s the government had also immunized pharma for shots during an ‘emergency.’ Back then, the government didn’t extinguish claims against jabmakers, like the PREP Act does, but that was beside the point.

One older Supreme Court case, in a concurrence, remarked offhand that it remains unsettled law whether the government can abolish common-law lawsuits without providing a meaningful alternative. Judge Young told the government’s lawyer that offhand comment seems to be a narrow crack that our substantive due process might, if proven, shine through.

It hit the courtroom like a sledgehammer. But the judge wasn’t finished. “I’m not saying this is true,” he explained, “but the plaintiffs have alleged that the PREP Act’s replacement process, the CICP is, well, absurd.” I think he might have even laughed aloud when he said absurd. He could have left it there. But then, as though driven by personal curiosity, he asked a biting follow-up question: “does the government think the CICP process is sufficient?”

The DOJ lawyer did his best to change the subject, trying to re-route the question back to safer ground about standing, the government’s cherished abolisher of claims. But the point held.

🪖 Not even thirty minutes into the hearing, Judge Young started wrapping it up, saying, well, “I think I have a duty, if I believe a cause of action has merit, to try the case.” Noting that it would take “some time” to write up his decision, whatever it ultimately was, the judge turned back to me.

In the closest thing to a judicial thunderclap, black-robed lightning cast down from Mount Olympus, he asked, “Well, Mr. Childers, if that is my decision, when would you like to go to trial?”

What followed was a verbal track and field event between me and the Department of Justice to win (or squash) this unexpected momentum. Finally, the judge was persuaded that the parties. before we could start discovery and so on, needed some direction over what his final decision would be. Judge Young admitted that he hadn’t completely decided yet, and “sometimes a decision just won’t write.”

He then suggested he might enter a short order sooner, with a longer memorandum explaining his reasoning to follow. If so, he would also issue deadlines for us to start working on trial preparation.

To date, no PREP Act challenge has ever survived dismissal. If it holds, ours would be the first. It is not exaggerating much to call it a miracle.

Thanks to everyone for all the prayers and support. We continue to soldier on.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

🔥🔥🔥

In the wake of his most recent oil cancer announcement, the Biden coverup narrative has been muted but not silenced. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran an obsequious and journalistically deplorable story headlined, “Biden’s Office Says He Was Last Screened for Prostate Cancer in 2014.” They didn’t even use the skeptical word, “claims”

Back in 2018, the media treated Trump’s medical report with a level of skepticism typically reserved for banana republic dictators, Russian elections, and chemtrail theories. The White House physician at the time, Dr. Ronny Jackson, had declared Trump in “excellent health,” noting his good genes, cognitive sharpness, and “great” cardiac results. That prompted nerve-stretching eye rolls and pushback from most mainstream media outlets, who questioned the report’s data and even its tone.

Coverage at that time often read like a forensic TV serial: like NCIS analysts inspecting a strand of hair recovered from a crime scene. Reporters meticulously dissected Trump’s BMI, cholesterol levels, and diet habits, never failing to mention his love of fast food and ‘sedentary lifestyle.’ Some outlets even ran side-by-side photo comparisons of Trump and other presidents to challenge the “excellent health” claim.

When Jackson described Trump’s health as “incredible,” critics suggested it was more PR than professional assessment, and speculation about undue pressure on the doctor abounded. The story quickly became less about the president’s health and more about the integrity of the report itself, with the press implying it was part of a broader pattern of image manipulation from the Trump White House.

But there was no such “Fourth Estate” skepticism yesterday of Biden’s literally unbelievable claim that he hadn’t had a single PSA level test (retail $20) since 2014. They asked no questions. The closest they came to any sort of pushback was noting, then immediately dropping the thread, that Biden’s “physician, Dr. Kevin O’Connor, hasn’t responded to requests for comment.”

I’ll bet he hasn’t.

Nor did the Journal quote a single skeptical doctor, a Republican, or in any way question the literally unbelievable claim. It just reported it as a fact. “It remains unclear,” the Journal’s credulous reporter stated, “whether Biden, as president, decided to forgo the screening or if his medical team made that decision without consulting him.”

The only reason the Journal’s comical question “remains unclear” is because the reporter didn’t even bother to ask Biden.

🔥 Meanwhile, CBS and most other networks trotted out a TV doctor to say it’s normal to stop testing after age 75. But CNN, at least, found that claim … surprising.

CLIP: CNN panelists find it “very surprising” that Biden wasn’t tested for prostate cancer (1:48).

Al Jazeera, doing the job sold-out U.S. corporate media refuses or is unable to do, invoked the phrase “cover-up” right in the headline:

Hat tip to Matt Walsh, who recalled that, in 2019, Biden was diagnosed with an enlarged prostate, a condition called BPH, which at the time was severe enough for treatment. Needless to say, it strains credulity to the snapping point that a BPH patient with known prostate pathology would not receive regular PSA tests regardless of age. Never mind someone running for President of the United States and then infesting the office for four years.

In his podcast, Matt noted, “If they lied about this, which they almost certainly did, that really would be the scandal of the century.” He added, “Imagine if it turned out that Joe Biden was senile in part because they were treating him for terminal cancer that they did not disclose.”

After offering the appropriate sympathies and well-wishes, President Trump said it just wasn’t adding up:

Frankly, it’s insulting they’re making us debunk this moronic claim. Corporate media is worse than useless.

⚖️⚖️⚖️

At least one federal judge is pushing back, in a darkly amusing fashion, on the Supreme Court’s decision to stay Trump’s gang member deportation plan. Yesterday, Rolling Stone ran the story headlined, “Trump Judge Slams Supreme Court, Says Courts Are 'Not a Denny’s’.” Displaying extraordinary judicial annoyance, Fifth Circuit Appellate Judge James Ho wrote a humdinger of an order castigating the Supreme Court’s decision.

There were too many good parts to include them all in today’s post. Read the whole thing for a laugh.

Judge Ho was the lead judge in a unanimous three-judge panel who entered the original decision denying a deportation stay that the Supreme Court reversed. Ho wasn’t so much upset about their stay (but not enthusiastic, either), as much as he was annoyed that the Supreme Court criticized him and his fellow judges for waiting 14 hours to rule on the ACLU’s emergency injunction motion.

Judge Ho, warming to his theme, began by criticizing the Supreme Court for its disrespect to the lower district judge, and not least of all to President Trump:

Next, including a snappy line destined for a thousand echoing quotations, he wrote that it wasn’t his job, or any other court’s job, to keep the Executive Branch under control:

But it was the short deadline that bothered Ho the most. The Supreme Court waved aside the fact that the District Court had told the ACLU it would give the government one day (24 hours) to respond to the ACLU’s emergency motion, that it had filed just after midnight at 12:34 am. But around noon the next day, the ACLU gave the busy District judge an ultimatum—respond within 42 minutes or it would appeal to the Supreme Court.

The judge didn’t, couldn’t, meet the 42-minute deadline. So as promised, the ACLU appealed. The Supreme Court’s majority unnecessarily blamed its rare intervention on the District Court’s sloth, complaining that in 14 hours —counting from the midnight filing— it didn’t rule on the ACLU’s emergency motion. After reminding the Supremes how long they take to respond to emergency injunction motions (weeks and months), Judge Ho’s response to the 14-hour nonsense was not subtle:

Not a Denny’s! That’s gold. Judge Ho wondered whether the Supreme Court was creating a demanding new 14-hour response deadline for district courts. But if not, he wondered what it says about justice:

Ouch! And there was a lot more. Read it for edification and amusement.

It is often said that judges like Judge Ho on the Circuit Courts of Appeal are actually the most powerful judges in America, since the Supreme Court can only process a handful of appeals every year. So Judge Ho wasn’t just shouting into the whirlwind.

The Supreme Court deserved every bit of that withering criticism. It unfairly threw the district judge under the bus, just to create for itself an easy pretext to interfere in the case. Having said that, I should stress again that SCOTUS did not decide the merits. A new three-judge panel on the Fifth Circuit now has a chance to focus on the case, and if Judge Ho’s sentiments are any guide, the ACLU will be trying to dig itself out of a giant legal hole in the ground. It’s going to need a bigger shovel.

🔥🔥🔥

It happens. Not very often, but still. I missed my chance last week to point out another historic Trump win. But yesterday, the Times unintentionally helped me out. The Gray Lady ran a pointless outrage story headlined, “Trump’s New Position on the War in Ukraine: Not My Problem.”

The sub-headline snarkily added, “In a reversal, President Trump appears to have backed off joining a European push for new sanctions on Russia, seemingly eager to move on to doing business deals with it.” Haha, a reversal. Trump never said he’d join the sanctions.

“After a phone call on Monday between Mr. Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia,” deep-state diva and Times reporter David Sanger wrote, “Trump appears to simply be walking away from the frustrating negotiations for a cease-fire between Russia and Ukraine.”

The article reported that, right after Trump spoke to President Putin, he dialed Zelensky and “other European leaders,” who were undoubtedly waiting anxiously by the phone for news. Trump told them, “Russia and Ukraine would have to find a solution to the war themselves.” He also said that the U.S. would not join the new financial sanctions that the Europeans have been cooking up.

Instead, in a post on Truth Social following the calls, Trump said, “Russia wants to do large-scale TRADE with the United States when this catastrophic ‘bloodbath’ is over, and I agree.”

“The subtext of Mr. Trump’s call with Mr. Zelensky and the Europeans,” Sanger continued in the story, “is that the era of American expenditures of diplomatic energy, new arms for Ukraine, and economic sanctions against Russia is rapidly coming to an end.” Finally.

What the Times didn’t say, and what I’d missed, was that when Trump brokered historical peace talks between Moscow and Kiev last week, he accomplished more than just forcing the two sides to start negotiating together for the first time. Maybe even more significant was the fact that, also for the first time, Trump got the U.S. out of the middle.

Ever since he won the election, even before he took office, Democrats have been gloating that Trump “inherited” Biden’s Proxy War. They think that, if Ukraine falls, it will be Trump’s fault. Since then, neocons have watched his every Proxy War move like cocaine-fueld hawks, constantly chirping about how they could have done it better.

But Trump seems to have accomplished the impossible, and pulled a Br’er Rabbit, somehow oiling his way out of a Proxy War tar baby.

Last, but not least, the media feigns cluelessness, but of course Trump doesn’t want to pile more sanctions on Russia. All the ordinary sanctions are already maxed out. Which is why the Europeans’ new sanctions package doesn’t sanction Russia— it sanctions other countries that do business with Russia.

But Trump is right in the middle of trying to negotiate new tariff deals with all those other countries. So, why on Earth would he want to add a whole new layer of hopelessly complicated sanctions on half the nations he’s negotiating good trade deals with?

A child could understand that, but Mr. Sanger and his co-reporters completely missed the nuance. Oh well, that’s why we have Substack.

🔥🔥🔥

Finally, I leave you with two “only in 2025” headlines from this morning’s Wall Street Journal.

First, we told you dabbling in Bitcoin would get you clipped someday. Pulp Fiction is now real life:

In short, crooks are literally torturing people, medieval style, to force them to turn over their Bitcoin wallet passwords. Ominously, Coinbase, one of the world’s largest online digital wallet providers, just admitted that someone stole their customer database, so the criminals know exactly where to go looking:

Govern yourselves accordingly.

Next, in the you-can’t-make-this-stuff-up category, behold this unpredictable gem:

In other words, don’t count on your submersible scooter to protect you from the diligent bloodhounds at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Or, scoot faster. Either way.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! C&C shall return once again tomorrow morning, with even more mentally-nutritious 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 🦠

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