☕️ BURNING MAN ETHOS ☙ Friday, August 29, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

CDC reels as Kennedy reshapes it; CVS halts jab appointments after EUA pulled; Trump readies bold midterm push; Dems backtrack on crime; FT warns left’s baby bust tilts politics rightward; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s finally Friday! Whew, what a week. Your final weekday roundup for August, 2025 includes: CDC experiences spiritual depression as Secretary Kennedy’s reorganization of the agency inexorably marches on; CVS reels back covid vaccine appointments after EUA revoked; Trump teases aggressive midterm strategy and historic pre-election convention; Democrats announce crime surges of their own, right after braying like donkeys at the hilarity there was a crime problem at all; and Financial Times article lends a whole new political dimension to the falling birth rates problem.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Guess which story hogged the headlines at the top of the Times’ website this morning? The Centers for Disease Control. For the second day running! Times readers probably think the Atlanta-based agency is the only agency being downsized. Out of three top CDC stories, I selected the one headlined, “Inside the C.D.C., a Growing Sense of Despair.”

The bizarre yard sign above, which topped the Times’ story, perfectly captures progressives’ relationship with government, especially the most intrusive and personally involved parts. They just love it. They can’t get enough. They’re terrified it might shrink some.

They are in love with governance in ways that are difficult for conservatives to understand.

On an aside, the words “stay strong” also reveal much. Those two syllables represent resistance, explaining how CDC represents not just a public health agency but a political pushback, an anti-conservative movement. Rationally speaking, resistance fully explains why the rogue agency needs reorganization. But there is nothing rational about liberals’ love for this particular agency— when hundreds of others are also getting just as much Trumpian HR attention.

Nor are CDC employees reacting rationally, like normal staff facing downsizing. “We’re scared for ourselves and for the country,” a terrified staffer told the Times. At a small group meeting yesterday morning, two people broke down into sobbing. A “senior leader” who has “always stayed calm” under pressure was “visibly shaking.” Several groups of employees discussed possibly striking (however, strikes by federal workers are felonies punishable by a permanent ban from federal service).

I hate to seem unsympathetic, but most Americans outside federal agencies have often faced the unpleasant task of polishing up their resumes and applying for new jobs. It’s not much fun, but it’s not the end of the world, either. You’d think these “scientists” and “health experts” would do just fine. There’s a whole big pharma industry just waiting to warmly embrace them.

Plus, there’s always podcasting. Just saying.

💉 CDC staff are experiencing over-the-top conniptions and emotional breakdowns because it’s not just about the job. It’s about the politics. That, and a bottomless well of self-importance and savior complexes. Yesterday afternoon, hundreds of CDC employees gathered outside the agency, cheering and clapping for the three officials who rage-quit yesterday following Director Susan Monarez’s abrupt termination.

💉 My first thought when I glanced at the ironic headline trumpeting the “growing sense of despair” at the CDC was how well it paralleled Americans’ growing sense of despair during the pandemic, a sense of despair that deepened every single time the CDC issued its next politically motivated health decree or mandate.

In a rare flash of self-awareness, another one of yesterday’s trio of articles concluded by unintentionally summarizing the CDC’s problem with politics:

Following that eye-popping paragraph, the Times wrapped the article by quoting Catholic University law professor Joel Alicea, who explained, “By making executive officials removable at will by the president, the Constitution ensures political accountability for them to the American people.”

See? They know what’s really causing all this. Accountability. But they don’t want to engage with those real arguments, preferring instead to battle slogans and strawmen with buzzwords like “authoritarianism” and “no kings.” And ironically, everything the Times reported in its three articles about Democrats’ and CDC employees’ response merely reinforced how politicized the massive health bureaucracy has become, even while Americans’ health has steadily worsened.

“There’s a lot of trouble at C.D.C.,” Secretary Kennedy said, “and it’s going to require getting rid of some people over the long term in order for us to change the institutional culture.” Hopefully. And he echoed the same point: “Anybody who lived through Covid saw all these bizarre recommendations that were not science-based, all the misinformation.”

Late yesterday, Kennedy appointed his deputy, Jim O’Neill, a former biotechnology executive, as the C.D.C.’s acting director.

I’ll leave it to you to speculate over why progressives are so deeply devoted to this failing “public health” agency.

💉 In related news, after Secretary Kennedy ended the jabs’ EUAs yesterday, CVS canceled covid vaccine appointments in 16 states (including Florida, New York, and DC). Those are states where pharmacies may not legally give unscheduled vaccines without a prescription.

So, for readers who measure progress in purging covid shots, see? It’s happening. Patience. Let the man work.

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I told you President Trump was working on an unprecedented midterm strategy. The Washington Post ran the story this morning, headlined, “Trump floats unusual Republican National Convention before midterms.” Yesterday, President Trump posted this:

“YES, Mr. President!” Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) enthused on X. “Let’s go!!!!”

The New York Times’ coverage —which was just another “somebody said something” story— was capped with an even more interesting roundup of Democrat party woes:

As we press into September, the midterm races begin to loom large. Any day now, we should see the Democrats’ turnaround strategy. What will it be? Epstein? Citizenship for illegals? Women’s sports? Cashless bail? A new logo?

So far, whatever it is, they’re still hiding it beneath their political bushel baskets.

… Or are they? We may be seeing the first glimpses of Clinton-style triangulation.

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Yesterday, the Hill ran an astonishing story headlined, “Newsom deploys new crime-fighting teams across California amid Trump crackdown.” But! Just ten minutes ago, they were swearing crime rates were down, and complaining that crime-fighting surges were authoritarian excess and more policing just resulted in more crime. Not today, though. What’s changed?

CLIP: Oleaginous Governor announces California anti-crime surge (0:39).

The Hill’s story concluded with this painfully obvious point: “This move by Newsom, who is expected to make a presidential bid in 2028, could be an attempt to improve the public image of Democrats towards fighting violent crime.”

Could it be? You think?

The Hill said the Golden State will soon surge California Highway Patrol “Crime Suppression Teams” across the state. California’s Canola Governor explained, “We need to continue to do more to support our efforts… the community wants to see more. We are trying to be responsive to the people we serve.”

Believe it or not, the new CHP Teams will focus on drugs, shoplifting, car thefts, and border control. All things that, until today, were Democrats’ sacred bovines.

For years, the progressive party line held that shoplifting was a “poverty crime” that shouldn’t be prosecuted. Enforcing retail theft laws was “criminalizing survival”— and racist. Big chains closing their crime-plagued stores was capitalism’s fault, not Democrat policy preferences. Now, magically, the same people who preached those sermons are cosplaying as superheroes and sending Highway Patrol into Target parking lots.

The contradiction is so blatant that it’s comical: one week, prosecuting shoplifting is racist oppression; the next, it’s “responding to the community.” The crime statistics didn’t change. The political statistics changed. Trump successfully seized the crime issue, and Democrats can’t afford to leave him holding it alone.

🔥 It’s not just Governor Newsom, either. Earlier this week, AM New York ran a story headlined, “Hochul defends bail laws, says judges need to ‘step up’ amid Trump’s threats of funding cuts in executive order.” Responding to President Trump’s new Executive Order cutting off federal aid to states with “no-bail” release policies, New York Governor Kathy Hochul lamely insisted her state already solved the bail problem, but judges weren’t cooperating.

“The President’s wrong. He’s flat out wrong. We don’t have cashless bail in the state of New York,” Hochul said. “I’ve been surprised at the number of judges who don’t seem to know the law has changed,” she said, adding that they need to “step up.”

New York axed cash bail in 2019. Year after year, it steadily increased the list of crimes for which judges were not allowed to order bail for releasing accused criminals. But under political pressure, starting around 2021, New York also quietly added back some crimes as “bail eligible” (but still not required).

So Hochul is blaming judges (not Democrats) for not using their backfilled discretion to order bail in cases where bail remains optional. And today, in 2025, many other crimes, like misdemeanor shoplifting, remain bail-free under the law. New York’s judges still may not order bail for thefts under $1,000, for instance.

Further fact-checking Governor Hochul, just a week ago, AM New York quoted New York Mayor Eric Adams and the Big Apple’s police commissioner Jessica Tisch— wh0 complained about the state’s no-bail laws. “This is the definition, I believe, of insanity, arresting the same people over and over again and expecting different results,” Mayor Adams grumbled. Commissioner Tisch snapped, “It is unconscionable that a violent, predicate felon who pled guilty to two more robberies was out on the streets to commit his crimes today. That is criminal justice reform for you.”

Will this work? Can Democrats recapture the crime issue? Will people forget who caused the crime, and fall for Democrats’ Cracker Barrel-style re-rebranding? The political results remain to be seen, but clearly, Newsom’s new crime-fighting cape would never have appeared on his shoulders absent Trump donning one first, in DC.

So … Californians grateful for the new law enforcement surge can thank President Trump.

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You will be unsurprised to learn that plummeting birthrates have a political dimension. The Financial Times ran the story yesterday, headlined, “Why progressives should care about falling birth rates.” The reason they should care wasn’t because humanity itself is at risk, or from fears of catastrophic economic collapse. No. The subheadline drolly cautioned, “Falling fertility levels are making the world more conservative.”

The Financial Times’ chart was a little confusing. The short version is it shows that, in the U.S., birthrates among self-identified progressives fell a full point from 2.8 kids per mother in the 1970’s to only 1.8 by 2024— below replacement levels. Meanwhile, for conservatives, the decline was much smaller, dropping only 0.1 to 2.7 kids per mother. The same appears true for the rest of the world, too.

In other words, conservatives are maintaining relatively stable fertility levels, while progressives’ rates have, like a cartoon coyote holding an anvil, plummeted off a cliff. Just since the 1970’s. “From the US to Europe and beyond,” the story said, “people who identify as conservative are having almost as many children as they were decades ago. The decline is overwhelmingly among those on the progressive left.”

The trendline is stark. The more progressive, the worse the birthrate. It seems so clear, in fact, that births have nearly become a proxy for anti-human political ideology.

The article’s progressive author, John Burn-Murdoch, tiresomely fretted that conservatives will eventually “win” the political war since liberals aren’t replacing themselves. Believe it or not, Burn-Murdoch sees this as a conservative conspiracy. “The greatest trick the right ever pulled,” he warned, “was convincing the left that talking about families and children is conservative-coded.”

His political analysis was as boring as it was insubstantial, and we won’t bother with it any further, except to note the fascinating development that Burn-Murdoch tentatively pushed back on the longstanding liberal claim that kids will eventually suffocate Mother Earth. “The environmentalist argument that falling birth rates are good for the planet may appear obviously true, but the reality is less clear,” he cautioned.

So, some progress.

🔥 I call progressives’ awful, anti-natalist ideology the Burning Man Ethos. Burning Man is an annual drug-fueled orgy in the Nevada desert, where organizers construct a temporary city in the sand (“Black Rock City”), which is itself consumed by the week-long excess of radical self-expression and personal autonomy (and rampant STDs, but I digress). By the event’s climactic end, only trash and sand remain— gone with the desert wind.

And so it is with this progressive generation.

Burning Man Ethos parallels the progressive fertility collapse: life as a self-indulgent art project, not a lineage. You enjoy it, you express yourself, and then it dissolves into smoke— no children to carry it on. By contrast, conservative ethos is more like farming: repeat, cultivate, make small incremental improvements, and pass it down.

Now consider the current progressive moment through the lens of Burn-Murdoch’s last name. Hyphenated surnames have long been proxies for progressive politics, announcing “liberation” of women from the patriarchal custom of taking their husband’s name in marriage. But it was always dumb and short-sighted, more useless virtue signaling than revolutionary, because it completely breaks down by the third generation.

When Ms. Burn meets Mr. Murdoch at Burning Man and they marry, they become Burn-Murdoch. Their son marries Ms. Taylor-Brown … and now what? Burn-Murdoch-Taylor-Brown? That’s a law firm, not a last name. Good luck fitting it on a driver’s license. Great idea, morons.

The truth is, by the third generation, the surname reverts to something simple— and usually patriarchal.

That’s why sociologists call hyphenation a transitional convention. It’s a temporary desert city, not a sustainable change in political power. Hyphenation makes a political or egalitarian statement in one generation, but it’s mathematically unstable across time. By the third round, it breaks down under its own weight like an RV that’s seen one too many wild parties in the Nevada desert.

In the same way, like hyphenated last names, modern progressives have also become a transitional convention. Democrats’ problems are more profound than their positions on illegal immigration or men in women’s sports. As I type this, too many liberals are force-feeding their kids heaping handfuls of sterilizing drugs.

Even from a political standpoint, a broad progressive population collapse is not a desirable outcome, as it will inevitably lead to economic and social collapse if it continues. However ham-handedly, that was also Burn-Murdoch’s point. But the problem isn’t liberal attitudes, per se. The problem is progressivism, writ large. It’s a death cult.

Save humanity. Defeat progressivism.

Have a fantastic Friday! Plow your way back here in the morning, as we wrap up August with a terrific weekend edition roundup of essential news and commentary.

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