🎄 CHRISTMAS IS BACK ☙ Tuesday, December 24, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🎄

Europe cancels Christmas while America restores it; Houthis vs F-18 fighter jet; media malfeasance on display; Trump game-changing pollster lawsuit; election interference; ABC settlement; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Christmas Eve! I told you it was coming quickly. In today’s pre-holiday roundup: Europe cancels Christmas, while America sprints the other way, and Forbes discovers the Christmas Trump Effect; friendly fire story complicated by Houthi claim to have shot down our F-18; a deep dive into media malfeasance; Trump’s game-changing election interference lawsuit against rogue pollster; and Washington Post story discloses more details about ABC settlement.

🪖 C&C MORNING MONOLOGUE 🪖

Two days ago, Tablet Magazine ran a horrible story headlined, “Europe Is Canceling Christmas.” The sub-headline explained, “Moves in France, Spain, the United Kingdom, and Germany are a worrying sign of the West’s renunciation of its Judeo-Christian identity.” You might call it a great falling away. But if anything, here in America, the opposite is occurring.

Tablet explained that, ostensibly, Europe is canceling Christianity to avoid offending its growing Muslim population. But the explanation fails to satisfy, because most Muslims don’t seem as keen on purging Christianity as Europe’s increasingly childless leaders do.

In one viral TikTok video mentioned in the article, a French Muslim expressed shock that the manager and other Christmas decorations had been purged from the local town hall in the name of secular separation of Church and State. But the Muslim man was outraged. “Our friends the Christians, our brothers, they are in a Christian country,” he said. “Yes, laïcité, fine. But, no. They have the right to decorate their town hall for their holiday. Mangers don’t bother me … Politicians, you are going to kill France, you are going to kill Christians! It’s crazy!”

Crazy is a great way of describing it. Europe has lost its damned mind, and its enthusiastic self-destruction is hardly limited to deleting its own Christian heritage. While it is always tempting to blame a secret cabal of evil billionaires, we must always remember that, villainous billionaires or no, none of it could happen without half the population’s full support.

While my heart breaks for our European cousins, my heart soars for America. In America, Christmas is back. Behold this fantastic headline from Forbes, two days ago:

It is the Trump Christmas effect. Forbes extended its lukewarm observation about the return of “Merry Christmas” into a broader effect caused (or permitted) by the bare fact of Trump’s election: the death of DEI. It isn’t completely dead yet but it’s acting like a just-sprayed cockroach nest:

We’ll look more closely at this 180-degree swing and this seismic shift in a few days, when we consider C&C’s 2024 Year in Review. For now, we can be grateful for America, for Christmas and for its source and reason, and for the rapid return of rationality here in the States.

As the saying goes, if America catches a cold, the rest of the world gets pneumonia. Maybe this time, as has occasionally happened before, America’s recovery will heal Europe. That is one of my Christmas wishes.

Beyond that, I wish the best for you, dear C&C readers, and your families on this most astonishing Christmas, in a season of joy in which we’ve received tremendous blessings beyond anything we’d dared to hope for since before the pandemic. Sam said it best in Tolkein’s The Two Towers:

It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered, full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end, because how could the end be happy? … But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines, it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you… Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn't. They kept going, because they were holding on to something. … That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo… and it’s worth fighting for.

This Christmas, the sun is finally starting to shine. Can you feel its warmth yet? Keep going. Keep holding on. There is plenty of good in this world, dear reader, and it is worth fighting for. Merry, merry Christmas!

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Yesterday, we covered the U.S. Navy’s bizarre claim to have shot down its own F/A-18 Super Hornet fighter jet in a non-combat scenario in a bafflingly incompetent manner that credulous corporate media euphemistically whitewashed as a “friendly fire incident.” The proposed narrative was strange because the explanation raised about a million unanswered and unasked questions. On Turkish media, I found an alternative narrative with more explanatory power. Turkiye AA ran the story Monday headlined, “Yemen’s Houthis claim to down US fighter jet over Red Sea.”

The Houthis are a Muslim jihadi militia group that currently controls Yemen. Although they occupy the capital city and run the government, the Houthis are embroiled in a decade-long civil war against a Western coalition claiming to be the legitimate government in exile. (The moniker ‘Houthi’ is a scornful corporate media nickname meant to camouflage its religious identity; the group calls itself Ansar Allah.)

Yemen is a peculiarly bleak desert country located on Saudi Arabia’s southern border. Some portions of the country’s landscape are so inhospitable that travel guides describe them as ‘alien.’ It is also an ancient Middle Eastern country with deep historical roots. In antiquity, for example, Yemen was known throughout the civilized world for producing frankincense and myrrh, such as was gifted to the baby Jesus.

(Christmas Eve side note: according to the Book of Matthew, the wise men’s three gifts were gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Gold symbolized kingship. Frankincense, used in Hebrew worship and medicine, symbolized Jesus’s role as High Priest. Finally, myrrh was widely used for embalming rituals, and thus symbolized death and resurrection.)

Despite being disorganized, underfunded, and comparatively primitive, the Houthis hold one solid geopolitical card. As is often true in war, they have a major advantage solely based on the good fortune of Yemen’s geography. Specifically, Yemen’s southwestern border abuts a narrow oceanic corner where the Red Sea makes a sharp righthand turn into the Gulf of Aden. Through this tight passage flows some of the world’s most valuable commercial traffic: oil. The only alternative route is around the dangerous Cape of Good Hope.

Without exaggeration, the Houthis enjoy enormous strategic leverage because of that critical shipping chokepoint. Up to ten percent of all worldwide commercial traffic and a substantial amount of military traffic passes right under the Houthi’s angry noses. The disruption of even a fraction of the traffic through the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait —the “Gate of Tears” in Arabic— has global consequences, especially for the West.

Starting in late 2023, the Houthis suddenly and unexpectedly scrambled onto the global stage, launching missile attacks against Israel to the north and drone attacks against shipping traffic in the Bab-el-Mandeb. The rebels make good use of cheap water drones built out of remote-controlled motorboats filled with TNT. But in the last couple years, they have become much better funded and armed, such as with modern ballistic missiles, leading to speculation of Russian support.

The Russians have long warned that, if the U.S. continued to arm Ukraine, it would be fair for Russia to help the U.S.’s regional enemies with targeting data and so forth. Tit for tat.

In response to the Houthis’ attacks on Israel and its disruption of shipping, in 2023 the U.S. sent a naval carrier group —the Harry S. Truman strike group— and commenced a mission called “Prosperity Guardian,” intended to defend regional oil shipments and Israel.

That is the reason why the U.S. Navy was in the theater scrapping with seafaring Houthis this week.

With that background in mind, let’s return to the article. The story reported that Houthi military spokesman Yahya Saree said rebel forces responded to a U.S. attack, and their response “was carried out using eight cruise missiles and 17 drones, resulting in the downing of an F-18 fighter jet while the destroyers attempted to intercept the Yemeni drones and missiles.”

In other words, the Houthis claimed credit for downing the F/A-18.

Useless corporate media has omitted most of those details, leaving us with seemingly contradictory claims: the military’s story about friendly fire versus the Houthis claim of its attack. But the two stories can be elegantly resolved. The Houthis didn’t claim to have shot the Super Hornet down directly; the spokesman said their attack “resulted in the downing” of the U.S. fighter. Resulted. Thus, it seems possible that during the chaos of the battle group’s response to the Houthi attack, the F/A-18 probably flew right into the path of an air defense missile just launched from the Gettysburg.

So, technically the Super Hornet was downed by friendly fire. But corporate media is still lying through omission; the jet wouldn’t have been destroyed except for the Houthi attack, which corporate media either fails to mention at all or downplays in its stories. In other words, it is media mis- or dis-information; information that may be true, but is missing context, so it is misleading.

In the wake of either the “friendly fire” incident or the successful Houthi attack, whichever, the Wall Street Journal ran this headline yesterday:

We’re not winning. Fortunately, the two pilots safely ejected. But, it seems fair to chalk up the loss of the F/A-18 Super Hornet (retail $100 million) as additional cost to help fight the Ukrainian Proxy War. Hopefully, that importune misadventure will soon end.

🔥🔥🔥

Last week, the New York Times ran what may be one of the most accidentally encouraging stories of the month, hand-wringingly headlined “A Famed Iowa Pollster’s Career Ends With a ‘Spectacular Miss’ and a Trump Lawsuit.” The sub-headline added, “Known for her ‘gold standard’ polls of Iowans, J. Ann Selzer is facing retribution from Donald Trump after her final 2024 survey showed a surprising, and ultimately wrong, winner.” Accidentally.

Two days before the election, the uncannily accurate, “gold standard” Iowa pollster Ann Selzer published the poll that pulled the plug on her long and storied polling career. Her election-eve poll shockingly showed Trump clearly losing Iowa —which even in 2020 he’d easily won by +8 points. Literally within minutes of publication of Selzer’s poll, all the corporate media outlets laser focused on this one poll, and the talking heads chattered nonstop till the election about how Selzer’s poll proved Trump had already lost the election.

Specifically, mockingbird media’s talking heads instantaneously analyzed Selzer’s data and gushed that it evidenced a last-minute avalanche of support from America’s angry women that would inexorably clinch the election for cackling VP Kamala Harris.

Conservatives immediately smelled a rat. Selzer’s poll was an outlier. A big outlier. Like the other polls were in sitting in a Des Moines Starbucks and Selzer’s poll was trying to dock with the International Space Station. Corporate media’s instantaneous and homogenous narrative smacked of coordination. And get this: Selzer retired right after the election — a professional move she now calls “long-planned” but one which she’d never publicly mentioned even a single time.

As it turned out, Selzer’s poll was wrong. Not just a little wrong. She was way off, by double digits. Two weeks ago, she published a humiliating op-ed sort of apologizing for her ‘mistake.’ But not really apologizing. More like shrugging. These things happen sometimes. That’s science.

Selzer’s explanation answered nothing. If anything, it was insulting and infuriated her critics. Then last week, President Trump sued Selzer in Iowa. The suit also named Selzer’s employer, the far-left Des Moines Register, and the Register’s owner, Gannett News. Trump’s legal claims include consumer fraud and election interference, which the Democrats have taught us is literally a million times worse than whatever Benedict Arnold did.

🔥 In the 2016 and 2020 electoral cycles, Democrats enthusiastically demanded criminal investigations into largely-imagined Russian bot farms, silly Facebook memes by college students, and housewives’ tweets of election denialism. “Election interference” became a progressive rallying cry from the View ladies to lawmakers on Capitol Hill. A sort of manic, progressive Big Bang inflated the concept of “election interference” from a dusty, rarely-used label reserved for shadowy foreign agents, bribery rings, gun thugs guarding ballot boxes, and ballot box tampering, to include nearly everything Democrats didn’t like right down to a single retweeted meme.

But especially misinformation.

Last year, far-left progressives giddily celebrated Douglass Mackey’s conviction. In 2021, Biden’s DOJ raided, arrested, and prosecuted the young man, who in 2016 had posted a sarcastic meme encouraging Hillary supporters to vote by text. His case is currently on appeal, but Mackey could be sentenced to up to ten years in federal prison for election interference via disinformation under a statute called “conspiracy against rights” (18 U.S.C. § 241).

Significantly, DOJ lawyers successfully argued that the effect of Mackey’s tweet didn’t matter. In other words, it was irrelevant whether anyone was actually stupid enough to try voting by text message. Mackey’s intent to ‘trick’ at least some voters was enough.

At the time, conservatives warned that Mackey’s conviction was a slippery slope to ever more “creative” claims of election interference, such as claims directed at campaign strategists, political activists, media outlets (like Gannett), and even pollsters (like Selzer).

In other words, Democrats laid down the election interference Slip-n-Slide and then poured vegetable oil all over it. Now they’re whining about being all greasy.

Before 2016, “election interference” only involved direct or physical vote manipulation. But thanks to Democrat linguistic terrorism, the term now lacks any solid definition. Trying to define election interference is like jello wrestling. Now, anybody can freely claim that election interference includes altogether new or “soft” forms of influence; if you can describe it, it can be interference.

Trump’s lawsuit leverages the Democrats’ spongy non-definition, where “election interference” can be anything that misleads or manipulates voters, including intentionally fraudulent polls. Trump’s lawyers have alleged that Selzer’s poll fraudulently influenced the election by creating a false narrative of inevitability for Kamala Harris.

In other words, Selzer’s fake poll was just as bad as, if not worse than, Mackey’s meme.

To be clear, the main legal thrust of Trump’s lawsuit is his claim under Iowa’s consumer protection law. But the definition of the alleged ‘fraud’ that occurred arises directly from the rhetorical Wild West of “election interference.”

Sooner or later, Democrats and their sold-out corporate media allies may learn to regret having re-defined “election interference.”

🔥 They know that, and they aren’t waiting around to see what will happen. A fiery propaganda war is already underway to try to shield the media from liability for interfering with elections. This week, corporate media began scrambling to protect its power and defend its allies by hysterically wailing about Trump “intimidating the media.” For example, consider this headline from the Washington Post, two days ago:

Mostly the WaPo is unhappy about ABC’s $15 million dollar settlement with Trump and his new lawsuit against pollster Selzer. Despite media criticism, Trump isn’t backing down. On Friday, Trump told reporters he intends to keep on suing the media. “It costs a lot of money to do it, but we have to straighten out the press,” the President said at a news conference in Mar-a-Lago.

Tellingly, Trump’s spokesman Steven Cheung told reporters the President plans to focus on “blatantly false and dishonest reporting, which serves no public interest and only seeks to interfere in our elections on behalf of political partisans.”

See? It’s another Trump boomerang. He’s turned “election interference” around on them. Now, in hindsight, it seems obvious that the corporate media was always the most exposed to expansive claims of election interference. If poor Douglass Mackey committed a serious crime by reposting a meme, which the media roundly agreed, what should we make of a whole news organization that intentionally skews its coverage to support one candidate over the other?

🔥 Remember, winning these lawsuits isn’t even the most important goal. Now that Democrats and their mockingbird media allies have transformed nebulous “election interference” into a viable legal claim, discovery of the media is on the table. Discovery is a much more powerful threat than money. As the most recent example, the WaPo gave readers a little more information about why ABC settled its defamation case with Trump last week. Look:

In other words, Disney paid $15 million dollars to avoid giving Trump’s legal team ABC’s internal communications. Media companies have long enjoyed a generous freedom from discovery, since judges, following strict standards, routinely dismissed suits against media companies before the parties could take any discovery.

But it’s a new game now, and discovery is back on the menu.

Remember, sunlight is the best disinfectant. (Even better than injected bleach!) The threat posed to Ann Selzer and Gannett News is not the threat of money damages. It’s the terrifying possibility they may be forced to turn over their secret communications with the Harris campaign.

Only one political ideology is always defeated by transparency. Do you know? Tell me which ideology it is in the comments.

Happy Christmas Eve, C&C! Enjoy this special day of preparation and have a very Joyful Christmas tomorrow. I’ll see you on the other side, as we begin the final countdown toward the end of this most remarkable year.

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 🦠

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