☕️ CLUSTERED ☙ Friday, April 18, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Secretary Rubio nukes Ukraine’s PR war; Kiev signs Trump’s minerals MOU; FDA revolution begins; Trump tags Harvard’s tax breaks; IRS pick triggers libs; media mutes cancer cluster crisis.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! Your Good Friday round includes: Secretary Rubio drops a rhetorical bomb on Ukraine and the green-sweatshirted thespian moves with surprising alacrity; Kiev signs Trump’s Memorandum of Understanding preparatory to signing a full minerals deal; new FDA Commissioner rolls out long list of long overdue reforms that together constituted a revolution; Trump versus Harvard matchup gets more interesting as President raises the stakes— tax exemptions and student visas now in the ring; IRS gets unlikely interim director that triggers progressives; media ignores same-family cancer cluster, of course, along with a long series of recent cancer cluster stories; media response deafeningly silent; and what it means for the potential causative agents.

🪖 C&C MORNING MONOLOGUE 🪖

Happy Good Friday, C&C Family! Holy Week continues apace, and we are headed for a spectacular Resurrection Sunday (Easter). The White House’s week of celebratory events may have been under-reported, but they are underway.

It is both a dramatic turnaround from just a year ago, as well as a fitting commemoration of Christians’ holiest holiday. Despite its under-reporting, a palpable, renewed Spirit of Faith is replacing the Spirit of Fear that has blanketed the Nation for nearly five years now.

I will now exercise editorial privilege and share with you my favorite Good Friday media:

CLIP: Pastor Rufus contemplates Good Friday— but Sunday is coming (3:39).

I won’t wear out my secular readers with a Good Friday essay, but I wish everyone —regardless of your beliefs— an equisitely hopeful Good Friday and a joyful and rewarding Easter. Religious or secular, either way, it’s undisputed this is the greatest story ever told. Knowing it will bless you. Trust me.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

🚀🚀🚀

Media has more intentional blindness over a historic shift in the Proxy War peace talks. Yesterday, Reuters ran a deceptively bland story headlined, “US will abandon Ukraine peace efforts if no progress made soon, Rubio says.” How soon? Days. Rubio just delivered the Administration’s first threat ever to “walk away” from the proxy war.

Yesterday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio occupied Paris, to meet with European and Ukrainian “leaders.” The “leaders” were mostly French PM Emmanuel Macron and the former comedian, accompanied by staff. Regardless, afterward Rubio told reporters the clock was ticking. “We're not going to continue with this endeavour for weeks and months on end.”

And there it was, the inglorious conclusion of Biden’s goofy promise to stick with them until the last Ukrainian. It’s the first time the Administration has formally threatened to pull Kiev’s plug. Rubio concluded by warning, “So we need to determine very quickly now —and I'm talking about a matter of days— whether or not this is doable in the next few weeks.”

It isn’t an empty threat.

We told them so. The Ukraine-flag-in-bio, Slava Ukraini! types could have spared their upcoming crushing disappointment by learning about the United States’ history in previous proxy wars with Russia. The pattern is clear and never changes: an extended period of undying support followed by a snap disconnect. For instance, we ended the Vietnam proxy war by bypassing that country’s mulish, maximalist president.

When President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu refused to play ball, Nixon and Kissinger sliced him right out of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords. No signature needed.

Consider this timeline of U.S. presidential enthusiasm for the Vietnam war, right up until the day the enthusiasm withered like a glyphosate-sprayed dandelion:

• Eisenhower (1954): “The loss of Indochina would be the loss of Southeast Asia. The United States must help.”

• Kennedy (1961): “We are not going to withdraw… This is a most important struggle.”

• Johnson (1965): “We will not be defeated. We will stand in Vietnam.”

• Nixon (1969): “Let me make one principle of American policy absolutely clear: the United States will not permit the independent existence of South Vietnam to be destroyed by force.”

In other words, we will stand with Vietnam until the polls look bad. Nor can we tell you what day that will be. Call it American Roulette. (Don’t even get me started about Afghanistan.) Ukraine’s defenders have no excuse. It was always just common sense. Proxy wars demand political theater. To make them work, you have to publicly pledge eternal loyalty to the proxy government. But privately, you plan your exit for whenever the war catches political monkeypox.

In 1973, when Vietnam’s time was finally up, Nixon blamed the Vietnamese. He essentially said, “We gave them every chance. They just wouldn’t fight for themselves” (paraphrased from political word salad.) You can see the hapless Ukrainians lining up under the blame balloon. They can’t even see it, hanging right above them.

🚀 Still, there might be a flicker of intelligence in there somewhere. Somehow, Rubio’s message penetrated and a whole new Ukrainian vista opened like a blooming rose. The New York Times ran a story yesterday headlined, “Ukraine and U.S. Sign Agreement in Lead-Up to Full Minerals Deal.” Late yesterday —following Rubio’s comments— “Ukraine and the United States signed a memorandum of understanding” with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Suddenly, the minerals deal is back on the table.

The one-page MOU is light on details but what was left out spoke volumes. There was no mention of weapons, mutual defense, or security guarantees. It focused on reinvestment, reconstruction, and economic “partnership.” Most conspicuously absent was the green sweatshirted thespian— the MOU was signed by Deputy Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko and referenced Ukraine’s Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal as the main signatory— two top Kiev officials that, thanks to our useless media, we never heard of before.

Zelensky’s name was nowhere to be seen. Now, four years later, we learn there are other members of Ukraine’s government.

With days left on the clock, what options did they have? “Ukraine,” the Times grumbled, “had little choice but to sign some version of the deal.” Bessent said he expected to ink a full deal next week. So.

💉💉💉

Yesterday, pharma rag Stat News ran a terrific story headlined, “Makary says FDA will remove pharma representatives from advisory panels.” In a wide-ranging interview with Megyn Kelly, the nation’s new FDA Commissioner laid out a revolutionary plan to remake America’s health landscape.

CLIP: FDA Commissioner Makary explains removing big pharma from FDA drug advisory boards (2:48).

Johns Hopkins surgeon and public health researcher Marty Makary, newly confirmed as FDA Commissioner, was a key dissenting voice during the pandemic. He argued forcefully for natural immunity, against lockdowns and mandates, and even before the pandemic was a prominent voice on healthcare transparency and reform. Now he’s in the command room, and Dr. Makary is learning it is even worse than he thought.

“I was shocked,” Dr. Makary told Megyn, “when I learned that employees of Big Pharma companies sit on FDA advisory committees.”

In our more innocent, Halcyon days of blissful ignorance, you probably thought that having pharmaceutical reps sitting on the FDA’s drug approval advisory board would be an irresolvable conflict of interest, a fox-in-the-henhouse sort of thing. That shows how little you really understand science, dummy. Science runs on money.

But yesterday, amidst a shower of proposed reforms, Dr. Makary said that as soon as legally possible, the FDA will remove all pharma reps from advisory boards and replace them with patients and family caregivers. He didn’t completely ice them out; after all, pharma is a critical component of the nation’s healthcare system. “We’ll be inviting pharma companies to send representatives to the advisory committees, but they can sit with the rest of the public and watch and pose questions,” Dr. Makary explained.

Another way of looking at it is, their greedy pandemic excesses cost them their seats at the FDA’s table.

⚕️In the same interview, Dr. Makary shed more light on how the Swamp works. He said that, as soon as he’d been nominated, he got swamped by pharma lobbyists offering to “help” him get confirmed, such as by writing letters to Senators on his behalf (0:51). One wonders why we never heard that before. Presumably, it happens every time.

Makary also explained that the FDA’s priorities would undergo a profound shift (0:38). “My predecessor in this role stated his number one goal was fighting misinformation,” Makary said. But, “our number one goal is delivering cures and meaningful treatments and healthier foods for Americans.” Imagine that.

He also said the FDA’s food pyramid was soon coming down (1:08). Which is great news, since the current offering has all the nutritional value of gas station sushi. “That dogma” —the ubiquitous idea that all calories are equal— “had no scientific basis,” Makary explained. “When you ignore a thousand chemicals, some of them petrochemicals, you can’t call that healthy just because it’s low in saturated fats. That’s all dogma.”

Everyone knows the current food pyramid (now, the food “plate”) is bad science, but nobody can do anything about it. The FDA didn’t just freeze a discredited, anti-scientific philosophy— it taxidermied it and mounted it above the cafeteria line. Scientists can’t get grants unless they climb the food pyramid, and kids must eat pyramid-friendly ultra-processed foods at school. Meanwhile, Big Food can label snackwells as “FDA approved.”

Delighting animal lovers, Dr. Makary also called for a moratorium on animal testing (2:29). “God did not make these animals on planet Earth for us to do cruel things to them and subjugate them,” he explained. He thinks computational models and lab-grown organs can handle most of the heavy lifting. “Those models should be replacing animal testing.”

⚕️Finally, in a follow-up to yesterday’s autism announcement, Dr. Makary offered his own personal thoughts about the possible cause. “If I had to make a hypothesis as a scientist, not as a regulator,” Makary said, “I think it is the cumulative burden of all of these exposures, environmental and dietary, that alter the microbiome.” In other words, processed foods, antiobiotics, and plasticizers. He asked, “When you carpet bomb the microbiome with all of these ingredients that don’t appear in nature … what are we doing?”

In other words, it’s not just bad genetics and bad luck.

Makary’s “multi-hit” hypothesis isn’t bad. It fits the data like a glove. Starting in the late 80’s, ultra-processed food exploded, heavily relying on high-fructose corn syrup, preservatives, and emulsifiers. C-section births and early antibiotic use became popular, both of which deplete microbiome seeding in infants. And new types of food manufacturing chemicals became commonplace, such as titanium dioxide, artificial sweeteners, and seed oils.

A raft of emerging studies increasingly link gut microbiota, immune function, and brain development, especially in early childhood. Autism seems to involve neuroinflammation and immune dysfunction— and both types of dysfunction are influenced by gut health.

⚕️ Dr. Makary wisely avoided the third rail of health politics, but I won’t. Guess what also exploded in the late 80’s? Jabs. In 1986, Congress passed the National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act, which instead of preventing jab injuries, opened the needle-tipped floodgates. It created a whole new market of mega-profitable, liability-free “vaccines.” In 1989, the CDC started adding new ones to the Childhood Vaccine Schedule and never looked back.

That, my friends, is why no one wants to discuss the EPA’s 1989 inflection point. But when Makary talks about “environmental exposures,” you can be sure that jabs are on the table, too.

If we had an honest science-media complex, the EPA’s 1989 inflection point would be on the cover of The Atlantic and Nature every six months. Instead, it’s buried in policy annexes and whispered by heterodox doctors who get called “conspiracy theorists” and “anti-vaxxers” for even noticing.

The FDA is on the verge of finally fulfilling its original promise to improve the nation’s health. Not a second too soon, either.

🔥🔥🔥

Yesterday, the AP ran a classic story with a question in the headline, “Can the IRS revoke Harvard's tax-exempt status?” As always, they never actually answered the question. It began with a Trump tweet, wherein the President speculated that maybe, who knows, Harvard should lose its tax exempt status as a ‘public charity:’

The AP sneered until its face muscles ached, but it finally got around to the most important —and for Harvard, the most troubling— fact:

The loss of tax-exempt status means a university must pay federal income taxes, and donors may no longer claim tax deductions for their contributions. About 17 years later, in 2000, Bob Jones finally gave in and dropped its ban on interracial dating. It got its tax-exempt status back seven years after that in 2017.

CBS reported yesterday that the IRS is considering Harvard’s tax-exempt status. Here’s Brett Baier’s report about it from Fox News (0:33).

🔥 Also yesterday, the Harvard Crimson ran a related story headlined, “DHS Threatens To Revoke Harvard’s Eligibility To Host International Students Unless It Turns Over Disciplinary Records.” DHS Director Kristi Noem said Harvard’s certification to host student-visa holders will be automatically revoked if the school fails to turn over the requested records.

The Crimson reported that, if Harvard’s SEVP status is revoked, current international students will face three difficult choices: transfer to a different school, try to change their immigration status, or depart.

Would Trump’s IRS actually revoke Harvard’s tax exemption over the school’s racially discriminatory DEI policies? It seems like that would be only fair, given how Bob Jones was treated, and given how the 1983 Supreme Court found that treatment constitutional. Whether Trump could do it was the headline question that AP never answered, though all its cherry-picked ‘experts’ thought it impossible.

Harvard plans to fight the Administration to the last Iranian graduate student.

🔥🔥🔥

Not only didn’t the IRS get 85,000 new auditors, it’s now been slashed by up to 20% and counting. Out of the bureaucratic chaos emerged more wonderfully ironic Trump 2.0 news. CBS ran the story under the headline, “Hunter Biden whistleblower named acting IRS commissioner.”

It was another thumb jabbed in Democrats’ eyes. Gary Shapley is the senior IRS investigator who blew the whistle on the Services’ slow-walking of the Hunter Biden investigation. In retaliation, the Service savaged Shapley and sidelined him, but was forced to commence its wrist-slapping prosecution of President Autopen’s crack-addled son. (Biden later autosigned a breathtaking pardon of every conceivable Hunter crime over a full decade, a pardon that ironically politically enabled Trump’s full pardon of all the J6ers.)

This week, while Trump’s real IRS nominee, Billy Long, remains mired in Senate committees, the President appointed Gary Shapley as acting commissioner. Trump’s telling Senators, take as long as you want. Even before receiving this high honor, Shapley and fellow whistleblower Joseph Ziegler were assigned to Treasury Secretary Bessent's office as senior advisers for IRS reform, and Shapley was appointed deputy director of criminal investigations at IRS.

This is a terrific example of Trump’s “shock and awe” strategy. During normal news cycles, the Democrats would have written a song about this interim appointment and would have tried to use it to topple Trump. Now, it’s just Friday. They have to take it on the chin.

Don’t feel too sorry for them. During the Autopen era, conservatives were forced to swallow a long, revolting series of tattooed men in dresses and luggage thieves who received prominent federal appointments. At least Shapley is sane.

💉💉💉

I’ll give you one guess at what trumpeting elephant in the newsroom media ignored this time. Last week, the UK Press and Journal delivered this remarkable cancer-cluster headline:

Peter has incurable esophageal cancer, which is, fortunately, responding to treatment. While he was in chemo, his wife and daughter both turned up with breast cancer. “It’s still hard to believe,” Peter said. “Three of us. Me, my wife and my daughter — all going through cancer at the same time. You couldn’t make it up.”

No, you couldn’t.

Media never even got close to speculating over the odds of three family members getting cancer at the same time. Reporters just pretended it was bad luck, and focused instead on how the plucky family is transforming bad luck into good works for other cancer sufferers.

Jarringly, the Jones story wasn’t even the first mysterious cancer-cluster story this month. Here’s the UK Daily Mail, two days ago, reporting on a Massachusetts hospital brain tumor cluster:

So let’s do this. Behold this terrifying roundup of other cancer cluster stories from just this month, April 2025.

In no particular order, three days ago, Illinois’ IPM News reported a brain cancer cluster in Piatt County:

In 2022, after her father rapidly died from the disease, Caitlin McClain began to investigate the rest of her community. At that time, she found 26 other cases of rapid-onset glioblastoma in Piatt County. Currently, her data contains around 30 cases, 14 of which have died in the last five years.

When she recently addressed the city council, McClain told them she’d contacted federal and state officials, the Illinois Health Department, and the Illinois EPA, but their response were not “timely or appropriate. “ I bet. She also said she really didn’t receive any substantial response until student investigative reporters reported the story last month, in March.

Students! They haven’t been co-opted yet.

⚕️ Four days ago, Iowa’s KCRG ran this eye-popping story:

The story reported that the Iowa Cancer Registry first ran an investigation in 2022, after 12 teachers got breast cancer diagnoses. The investigation found “no evidence of a breast cancer cluster” among school staff in Hudson, mostly because they did not all have the same cancer subtype. A local citizen and retired school teacher, Diane Anderson, noticed more breast cancer cases among women cropping up in the town and recently asked the University of Iowa to reopen the investigation.

You know what school teachers were subject to. It starts with M- and rhymes with band-aid.

⚕️ On April 8th, Click 2 Houston ran this headline:

The residents suspect five local Superfund sites called the “waste pits.” At an April public meeting with Texas health officials in Harris County, Lynchburg resident Gene Hennigan unloaded. “My son died of two kinds of lung cancer two years ago,” Hennigan said. “My wife’s had breast cancer. Fortunately, she’s in remission now. My youngest son’s father-in-law, who lives next door to me, died two months ago from liver cancer. The neighbor across the street’s got brain cancer right now. Our whole neighborhood’s full of it.”

The EPA and the Texas Department of Health Services cut off their investigatory dataset in… 2021. Officials remain unperturbed.

⚕️ A couple months ago In February, Patch.com ran this troubling story:

In 2022, Al Lupiano, who grew up in Woodbridge and went on to become an environmental scientist, started investigating what he calls an unusually high number of brain cancers and brain tumors in Colonia High School graduates and workers.

Lupiano and his wife are both now fighting rare brain tumors.

In total, six current or former cafeteria workers at Colonia High School have been diagnosed with cancer or brain tumors. One Colonia High School junior is currently battling a brain tumor, and a local who graduated from Colonia High several years ago died from brain cancer on February 7th.

I could continue. There were many more, and that’s just with a simple Google search. Apparently, they haven’t blocked the search term “cancer cluster” yet.

💉 What should we make of all this? It’s hard to say. The term “cancer cluster” was not uncommon in pre-pandemic headlines. In May 2019, for example, the Guardian ran a high-profile, multimedia style exposé about a Louisiana cluster headlined, “'Almost every household has someone that has died from cancer.’”

But in my amateur news investigation, I can draw a couple rough conclusions. First, based on the stories, before the pandemic, public health officials used to be more forthcoming and more willing to diagnose and identify the clusters than today. “The EPA not only confirmed the existence of a profoundly higher risk of cancer throughout the region,” the Guardian reported in 2019, “but it pinpointed Reserve, a working-class town of about 10,000, at the bullseye.”

That initial observation leads directly to a second. Pre-pandemic, cancers seemed to cluster around industrial waste or other readily identifiable causes, and the types of cancers caused were similar subtypes within the same cluster areas. But we began today’s post with a story about a cluster of different cancers within a single family—one esophageal cancer and two breast cancers.

That’s an entirely different type of exposure. The Jones’ family’s experience suggests exposure to something with a general cancer-promoting effect, rather than something that causes certain types of cancer.

Finally, we can easily observe a sea change in the radically different way these stories have been reported pre- and post-pandemic. Before the pandemic, cancer cluster stories were routinely and enthusiastically covered by corporate media giants like the Guardian. And those stories were usually skeptical of official denials. But now, you must dig into local stories and into student journalist articles to find them.

Is corporate media’s obvious avoidance based on trying to defuse “vaccine hesitancy,” or is it something more sinister? Because what we see is a possible systemic, multi-site, post-2021 carcinogenic exposure event that doesn’t follow the historical “cluster” playbook.

⚕️ Pre-pandemic, cancer clusters existed, yes— but they were usually tied to localized, persistent industrial contamination. Generally, offenders were stand-alone corporate malfeasants, not entire industries. And the investigations typically followed a predictable arc:

• Public health agencies confirm elevated incidence.

• Media outlets investigate and pressure the government.

• EPA or state agencies eventually respond (or stall until public outcry mounts).

• The 2019 Guardian story is a textbook example—complete with emotionally compelling quotes, on-the-ground reporting, and plain skepticism of official inaction.

But after 2021, stories of cancer clusters still appear— but now:

• Cancers are varied (esophageal, brain, breast, liver) within the same families or communities.

• Affected populations are more diffuse (teachers, nurses, young people, not just industrial towns).

• Responses from authorities are slower, vaguer, and less confident.

• Mainstream coverage is MIA.

It’s like we’ve crossed into a new era of unacknowledged causality, where even the suggestion of a systemic agent triggers bureaucratic shutdown. The difference between media’s full-bore pre-pandemic charge against cancer clusters and its current delicate distancing, I believe, lies in who the potential polluter might be. This time, it’s not likely to be just a single leaky industrial plant or a big chemical manufacturer nobody ever heard of. Look at these greedy polluters harming the innocent townsfolk!

This time, it’s much bigger and more dangerous to the establishment. This time, the likely big polluter is the establishment.

💉 This time, it isn’t vinyl chloride or benzene in the water. These new clusters don’t seem to produce a predictable cancer subtype. Instead, they seem to:

• Accelerate the already present but latent cancer risk,

• Activate different rare cancers in genetically related individuals, and

• Afflict healthy people in non-industrial environments.

I’m just a lawyer, not an oncologist, but this profile more suggests a broad-spectrum mutagen or an immune dysregulator. Something like:

• A systemic modifier of DNA repair.

• A disruptor of oncogene suppression mechanisms.

• A long-term, pro-inflammatory agent that weakens tumor resistance.

Before 2021, reporters leaned into cluster stories. They smelled blood in bureaucratic denial. But now they run for the hills, as though fearing censorship, deplatforming, and advertiser blowback. And we’ve learned the media’s biggest advertiser and buyer of expensive news subscriptions is the United States federal government.

Even hinting at systemic causes must now feel like professional suicide.

💉 The problem is that, post-pandemic, the potential “polluter” isn’t some marginal chemical company. It’s a federally coordinated pharmaceutical rollout backed by near-universal media support, unconstitutionally mandated by governments, shielded from civil and criminal liability, and glorified by editorials, white-coated pretenders, and blue-checked Twitter threads.

This time, the gun of media exposure is aimed backwards. If the current causal chain runs through post-2021 mass exposure, then the implication is that regulators didn’t just miss it— they caused it. And the media didn’t just fail to report it— they helped sell it. That, my friends, is a politically toxic, unprintable story.

In other words, the media’s deafening silence doesn’t mean the clusters aren’t real or aren’t significant. It means the clusters are too dangerous to explain, because this time, the trail leads right back to the newsroom itself, where the government, pharma, media, and public health agencies all stood together and smiled for the cameras.

The media’s problem is that the evidence is swelling and will eventually become undeniable— yet they are institutionally disabled from investigating or reporting on it. When the truth finally emerges, they will surely try to shift blame, point fingers, retcon, and obfuscate. But a reckoning is on the way —some might argue it’s already in progress— and either way, it can’t be avoided.

We only need the new media to mature a little bit more, while continuing to salivate over the chance to rake the old media over the cancer-causing coals.

On this Good Friday, be comforted with the realization that it is probably too late for legacy media. Their culpability in the pandemic will be their unraveling. We will get a new, replacement media that shoves the old media aside— and it will be their own fault, on account of what they did. Their pandemic performance wasn’t just a bad chapter— it was their irreversible narrative collapse. They will never regain what they lost. And the press that replaces them will rise not despite their failure, but because of it.

The question now is: how long can they keep faking credibility, while the truth is slowly leaking out of its rusting barrels and permeating the media’s ecosystem? Let me know what you think.

Have a joyful and rewarding Good Friday and Easter. C&C will return on Monday morning to kick off the new week of essential news and commentary as we roll into April’s second half.

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