☕️ CHAMPIONS ☙ Thursday, February 5, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Trump rescues NBC anchor who trashed him; WaPo bloodletting spooks progressives; trans medicine hits wall as guidance evaporates; AI feature nukes tech stocks; Epstein fallout claims Dem bigwig; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! Your roundup today includes: President Trump rides to the rescue of NBC anchor who has savaged him for years; Washington Post bloodletting terrifies progressives, who think they smell a brewing rightwing takeover of “their” media; morbidly obese climate reporting department; duo of developments pretty much seals the deal for the ’transgender revolution’; trans doctors face difficult decisions without cover of permissive professional guidance; blue states on notice; tech markets crash on news of a single new software feature on a popular AI chatbot; skills replace prompt engineering; this changes everything, again, and Wall Street is catching on; and more Epstein fallout news as another Democrat heavyweight falls from grace.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran a heartbreaking story headlined, “Savannah Guthrie Posts Plea for Mother’s Return.” And President Trump is coming to the rescue.

CLIP: NBC’s Savannah Guthrie thanks public for prayers and makes heart-rending appeal to possible kidnappers (3:58).

In case you aren’t familiar, Savannah Guthrie, 53, is the co-anchor of NBC’s Today show, a former White House correspondent, and a licensed attorney. She grew up in Tucson, where her 84-year-old mother Nancy still lives. Savannah suffers from TDS. She once scolded the President on live TV at an October, 2020 Town Hall, saying, “You’re the president. You’re not like someone’s crazy uncle who can just retweet whatever.”

Later in the same Town Hall, she asked, “This theory that Democrats are a satanic pedophile ring and that you are the savior of that. Now, can you just, once and for all, state that that is completely not true and disavow QAnon in its entirety?” At a rally a few days later, Trump called her a “crazed lunatic.” Good times.

This week hasn’t been too good for Savannah— or her family. She needs the President’s help, and he’s giving it. Apparently, her elderly mother, Nancy, has been missing since Sunday, and police suspect that she was kidnapped. Details are murky. There are rumors of a ransom note and signs of a struggle.

In a bizarre and tragic intersection with the AI revolution, Savannah asked for proof of life beyond audio and video, since “we are ready to talk. However, we live in a world where voices and images are easily manipulated. We need to know without a doubt that she is alive and that you have her. Please reach out to us.” Indeed, we live in a time of great deception, well beyond AI-generated media.

🔥 In a development that must be giving NBC executives whiplash, President Trump — the man their network has called everything from “Hitler,” a “threat to democracy,” to “Orange Julius” — just personally called their morning show host to offer all federal resources to find her kidnapped mother. This is like the neighbor you’ve been complaining to the HOA about for years showing up first with a ladder when your cat’s stuck in a tree. Trump sent Kash Patel to personally supervise the operation. The same Kash Patel that CNN assured us would destroy democracy is now running point on finding a lost grandmother in Tucson.

Notice how quickly Trump drops the political theater when an actual person is in actual danger? While Democrats are busily drafting letters demanding ICE agents wear nametags, the president is mobilizing the FBI director for a kidnapping in Arizona. NBC has spent years calling Trump a monster. His response? “Let me help your family.” That’s either political genius or genuine decency —or both— and the left simply cannot understand it.

This isn’t an isolated incident. President Trump has a long, quiet history of helping people in crisis— even people who hate him.

At the end of the day, we are all Americans, and this is what we do. We pray God will sustain Nancy’s fragile health and bring her home soon.

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Yesterday, in an unusually widely covered media story, the Atlantic ran an article dramatically headlined, “The Murder of The Washington Post.” Normally, corporate media primly and collegially overlooks reporting on competitors’ financial struggles. Not this time.

Yesterday, the Washington Post told its entire staff to stay home and await an 8am announcement, which is like your boss telling you there’s no need to come in to the office on Monday, just call HR for further instructions. It laid off roughly one-third of its employees, including the entire sports section —right before the Super Bowl and Olympics!— and, if you can believe it, fired all thirteen “climate reporters.”

Thirteen! Just for the climate! Despite making masterful staffing and management decisions like that, according to reports, the Bezos-owned progressive paper has been successfully hemorrhaging around $100 million per year, which can add up and, before you know it, amount to real money. (Historical note: progressives celebrated when Bezos bought the WaPo. Whoops! Plot twist. Billionaires prefer to make money.)

The Post’s motto is “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Turns out democracy is doing fine — it’s the Post that’s dying, in broad daylight, down about 600 employees. To put the 13 climate reporters in perspective, the entire Miami Herald has fewer reporters total, who cover everything— including hurricanes, which are actually climate. The good news for the newly unemployed reporters is that they have highly marketable skills like “writing stuff nobody reads” and “being outraged about everything.” The bad news is that Substack already has plenty of that.

I’d advise them to learn to code, which is what most of them advised coal miners when Biden closed down the mines in droves, but it might be too late for that. Maybe they should learn to vibe code. Or they could start a YouTube podcast. It’s working out super well for Don Lemon.

Yesterday’s layoffs were the exclamation mark at the end of a run-on sentence. For the last few years, WaPo has been cutting staff, replacing editors, and —gasp!— pledging to shore up its lagging journalistic integrity. Progressives thought they smelled a right-wing rat, and yesterday’s massacre confirmed it for them. “Maybe, as many of us who deeply love the Post fear, the decimation is the plan,” the author (a former WaPo reporter who quit last year) wrote.

The Atlantic piece is an overlong, 4,000-word eulogy that accidentally betrayed some of the very reasons a CEO might want to make some cuts. “The newsroom was a merry band of misfits,” the author admitted, adding that “my beloved editor Dan Eggen once joked my corner of the building’s biggest problem was: ‘Too much giggling.’” She also praised the paper’s “pulsing humanity” —a phrase that beggars the imagination— and its “zippy teamwork.” So there’s that for the résumé.

Anyway, she got a job as a staff writer at the Atlantic, where giggling and pulsing are still allowed, so there you go. Win-win.

As you may recall, CBS News is already undergoing a major makeover, with free-speech advocate Bari Weiss taking the reins. Now the Washington Post looks to be going the same way. Somewhere, a coal miner is smiling.

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A duo of developments this week confirmed what we’ve suspected: the transgender revolution is dying on the operating table. Two days ago, the Washington Post ran a story headlined, “First major medical group opposes gender transition surgeries for youth.” Medical group meaning the American Society for Plastic Surgeons (ASPS). Before I could blog about it, another one landed. Yesterday, the New York Times reported, “Doctors’ Group Endorses Restrictions on Gender-Related Surgery for Minors.” Haha, “doctors’ group!” It was the American Medical Association (AMA).

It’s historic. “For the first time,” the Times admitted, “two major medical groups have backed limitations on gender-related surgical treatments for minors in the United States.” In technical terms, no more chopadictofmies or addadictomies.

In a remarkable about-face, the American Medical Association has suddenly and unexpectedly endorsed restrictions on gender surgeries for minors, saying these procedures should “generally be deferred to adulthood.” The AMA’s announcement came one day after the American Society of Plastic Surgeons issued similar guidance recommending doctors wait until patients turn 19.

In its statement yesterday, the AMA explained, “In the absence of clear evidence” —you’ve got to be kidding me, now they tell us— “the A.M.A. agrees with A.S.P.S. that surgical interventions in minors should be generally deferred to adulthood.” This was a little sleight of hand; the ASPS had actually gone further, recommending against hormone treatments, too.

Absence of clear evidence?? Isn’t it funny how “the science” works? For years, anyone who questioned whether we should be performing mastectomies on confused teenagers was labeled a bigot and a transphobe. Red states that passed bans were hysterically accused of “denying life-saving care.” But— tada! Yesterday, the nation’s largest doctors’ organization finally admitted the evidence was never there.

The rapid pivot is even more darkly amusing than it looks. What changed? Well, one conspicuous development happened last Friday, when a New York jury awarded $2 million to Fox Varian, whose doctors pressured her into a double mastectomy at age 16, and who is now mangled and breastless. It was the first trans malpractice verdict of its kind. Within days, this week, the two biggest medical associations in the country legged it for the exits.

It is so amazing how quickly the “settled science” gets unsettled when the lawsuits start rolling in.

CLIP: Whistleblower doc Ethan Haim explains how Kennedy’s HHS paved the way for “nuclear “bomb-level paradigm shift” (2:20).

🔥 You know who just got hit hardest? Doctors in blue states. The change in guidance isn’t merely performative. Do you realize what this means for doctors on the ground, regardless of which state they practice in? Everything.

Professional medical guidelines aren’t just suggestions— they’re the backbone of malpractice law. When a patient sues a doctor, the central question is usually whether the doctor followed the “standard of care” established by their professional organizations. Until this week, surgeons performing mastectomies on 16-year-olds could point to permissive guidelines from groups like WPATH and say, “I was following the accepted standard.”

That shield just evaporated.

Now, any surgeon who operates on a minor’s healthy tissue is doing so against the guidance of both the nation’s largest doctors’ organization and the plastic surgeons’ own professional society. That’s not just bad optics. It’s a plaintiff’s attorney’s dream. Insurance companies will take notice, too; expect carriers to start excluding coverage for procedures performed contrary to AMA guidance, or to demand extensive documentation and liability waivers.

Hospital administrators, already nervous after watching Stanford and Kaiser shutter their youth gender programs, now have official cover to say “no.”

The dominoes are falling fast. For practitioners who quietly harbored doubts but felt professionally pressured to comply, the AMA just handed them permission to follow their conscience. For those who keep performing these surgeries despite the mounting evidence, the legal exposure just got a lot more personal.

Blue state legislatures can pass all the shield laws they want, but can’t rewrite the AMA’s guidelines or immunize a surgeon from malpractice. Now, when a detransitioner sues their doctors, the question won’t be whether California law permitted the surgery— it will be whether the doctor met the standard of care. And as of this week, the standard of care says: wait until adulthood. Blue states built a legal sanctuary for procedures their own medical establishment now says shouldn’t happen. Their fortresses just became very expensive, outdated monuments to mental illness.

The revolution isn’t just dying on the operating table. It’s being wheeled to the morgue by its own doctors.

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I told you that we’re riding a supersonic AI inflection point. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal ran a market-crushing story headlined, “Trillion-Dollar Tech Wipeout Ensnares All Stocks in AI’s Path.” It was one of the biggest tech selloffs in history. Once again, the media is missing the gist. So once again, I’ll try to explain what’s happening in English.

See the one at the bottom of the losers list? That’s Thompson-Reuters, a billion-dollar company that provides legal databases like Westlaw, which my law firm relies on— just like most of Big Law, small law, judges, interns, clerks, law students, law professors, and the legal media. In a single day, because of a single quiet software release, the market lopped -20% off Thompson’s value. That’s almost as bad a crash as Moderna.

Yesterday, Anthropic —the AI company behind Claude, preferred for the Moltbot I blogged about a few days ago— released without fanfare a new feature called “Cowork,” with a new sub-feature called plugins. The AI world is calling the plugins skills (and I will, too).

If you’ve been following the AI revolution at all, you know the drill. You type a little prompt, the AI responds, rinse and repeat. That was Phase One. We’ve been in Phase One for three years. Well, Phase Two just arrived, and it landed like a flaming meteor crushing a velociraptor buffet.

Skills are pre-packaged bundles of highly-engineered prompts that turn a general-purpose AI into a domain specialist. It’s like the difference between asking a teenager to ‘clean your room’ versus handing them a laminated checklist their tiger-mom prepared.

To use Anthropic’s new legal skill as an example —the one that crushed Thompson’s stock price— instead of asking AI to help you review a contract one prompt at a time, you call the legal skill —a whole bunch of pre-written prompts— by just telling it: “Review this contract for a guy to pressure-wash my driveway so the HOA gets off my back.”

The problem with writing your own prompts is that you must have some kind of idea what to ask for.

The word “review” triggers the skill, and AI follows a prepackaged litany of expertly designed prompts. In other words, you don’t have to be good at AI prompting anymore. So much for all the YouTubes and “prompt engineering” classes and so on. A novice user will get out of AI nearly as much as a good lawyer would.

We’re past chatbots. That one “legal” skill plugin is a lot like a paralegal. Or a second-year associate. Or, depending on the complexity, maybe even a mid-level attorney. In other words, the twenty-something associate billing $400/hour to review your lease renewal? The AI just learned his job. Maybe better.

The market understood this instantly. In a single trading session, $285 billion evaporated from software, legal tech, and financial services stocks. Wall Street called it the “SaaSpocalypse.” Thomson’s plunge of -18% was a record one-day drop. RELX, which owns LexisNexis, cratered -14%. LegalZoom zoomed downwards by -20%. DocuSign, Salesforce, Adobe, ServiceNow — all got hammered — after being hammered last week by Moltbot* news. (* Moltbot has been renamed again, now it’s called OpenClaw. Something to do with the witness protection program. Just FYI for those keeping track.)

The threat to lawyers from AI has surged past accidental cat avatars in court hearings

🔥 At the risk of redundancy, let me explain it a little more, for folks who aren’t fluent in nerdspeak. For the last three years, “prompt engineering” was the hot AI skill to bung onto the resumé. Companies hired people whose entire job was crafting the perfect prompt to coax useful output from AI. It was like hiring someone whose job is to phrase the perfect Google search. Useful, but limited.

Skills eliminate the middleman. A skill isn’t a single prompt— it’s a whole methodology. It includes prompts, yes, but also sub-tasks, decision trees, connections to your data, and instructions for handling edge cases. The legal plugin, for example, includes specific frameworks for analyzing contracts, including limitation-of-liability clauses, indemnification provisions, IP assignments, and data protection terms. It knows to check whether a liability cap applies per-claim or in the aggregate. It knows to flag asymmetric carveouts that favor a contract’s drafter.

Headline from the UK Guardian, yesterday:

The good news is that skills are written in plain English. They are just instructions to the AI, like anything else. So users can edit, customize, and improve them.

The legal profession should be paying close attention. Not because AI is coming for our jobs (though that’s part of it). The legal skill Anthropic released this week handles contract review, NDA triage, compliance workflows, legal briefings— basically everything my paralegals spent the last decade mastering. That’s a meaningful chunk of what junior attorneys and paras spend their days on.

🤖 Skills were the headline news, but that wasn’t all. Anthropic’s AI can also now control your computer for you (if you let it). So you can say, “organize my downloads folder” and it will roll up its sleeves and get to work. I wish I could tell it to organize my closet, but let’s leave that unpleasant subject alone. You can also tell it to create a new piece of ready-to-install software for you— and it will. Soup to nuts.

Here’s the thought experiment many market makers are noodling over. If you can get ad-hoc, purpose-built software on demand from your AI, why would you pay $20 a month for something that was last updated during the Obama administration?

If you’re retired, you can take all this or leave it alone. If you’re still working at a white-collar job, like me, you need to get your arms around it. AI isn’t going to take jobs. It’s going to separate people into two groups: those with AI skills, and those without AI skills. It’s that simple. The good news is you don’t have to learn Python or C++.

Blue-collar folks— you guys are sitting pretty. At least until the robots get here.

Finally, this revolution will change everything— but it won’t happen overnight. These things take time. People are used to doing things a certain way, and resist change. But remember back when people swore they would never even use voice mail, much less smartphones? Now even grandmas text memes. AI adoption will follow the same curve, just caffeinated.

Related: if you want more mind-blowing tech news, check out this Wall Street Journal podcast titled, “Vibe Coding Could Change Everything.” (It is transcribed if you prefer reading.) We are all coders now.

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How about an Epstein fallout update? Yesterday, the New York Times ran another deplorable story headlined, “Brad Karp Resigns as Paul Weiss Chairman Amid Epstein Fallout.” The DOJ disclosures just nabbed another elite Epstein-snuggler.

Brad Karp, Democrat super-bundler and longtime chairman of Paul Weiss, one of the country’s “top corporate law firms, suddenly resigned on Wednesday evening after a series of embarrassing emails between him and Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier, became public in recent days,” the Times reported.

By “one of the top corporate law firms,” the Times meant that the Paul Weiss firm bills $2.6 billion in annual revenue. That’s a lot of hours.

Karp is often obsequiously described by corporate media as a “champion of social justice causes.” He “rallied lawyers for Kamala Harris” in 2024. And he is a huge Democrat Party fundraiser, or “bundler.” He was in the news last year after Trump targeted the firm in an executive order stripping its federal contracts and security clearances (Karp coughed up $40 million in free legal work to make it go away).

Now Mr. Karp is Paul Weiss’s former chairman. (He’s staying at the firm, though. For now.)

In one particularly telling email with Epstein, Karp, the champion of social justice, begged Epstein to get his son a job with … wait for it … Woody Allen. That’s like asking Harvey Weinstein to recommend a babysitter.

Apparently, social justice championing has a carveout for lavish dinner parties with notorious pedophiles.

Karp’s resignation statement insisted he “regrets” his Epstein interactions. I bet he does. On Tuesday, he claimed his Epstein ties were limited to “two group dinners” and “a small number of social interactions by email.” The very next day, he resigned. Funny how “regret” works.

The dominoes are falling fast and hard. I wonder if the Democrats realize yet that demanding the Epstein files was a boo-boo?

Have a terrific Thursday! Coffee & Covid will return tomorrow, with another lively roundup of essential news and commentary. See you then.

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