☕️ CRUEL AND UNUSUAL☙ Thursday, August 24, 2023 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Multiplier; thoughts about the debates/interview; goodbye Prighozin, or is it?; BRICS balloons; media rescues Big Pharma, again; Hawaii killed people with roadblocks; SBF suffers; Big Law woes; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! Almost there. What a roundup I have for you today. First, new multiplier orders (finally)! Then: thoughts about the Republican debates and interviews; hello Yvegeny, goodbye Prighozin; BRICS balloons into a legitimate threat to the West but Establishment Media doesn’t notice;  the Establishment Media’s covid alarmism saves the day, again, for Big Pharma; AP reports that Hawaiian government killed people with roadblocks; Bankman-Fried suffers cruel and unusual punishment in jail after witness tampering; and counter-revolutionary activist group takes on Big Law.

🗞 THE C&C ARMY POST 🗞

🪖 MULTIPLIER ORDERS: C&C Army! To arms! President Trump will submit for processing and mugshots at the Fulton County jail today. Most of President Trump’s co-defendants in the new Georgia case are prominent, nationally-known lawyers like Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis. But a few, like my friend Ray Smith, are not well known, at all, but they are all tumbling into the same political-judicial sausage grinder that was constructed to make mincemeat out of the President.

If you already know what to do, here’s the link: https://www.givesendgo.com/RaySmith

As I recall, I first met Ray in early 2021 because of his work on the Trump election cases in Georgia. At the time, I was helping lawyers and parents all across the country put together lawsuits to fight mask mandates. We needed a good lawyer in Georgia but were struggling to find one who’d take such a politically-charged case. Remember, at that time, even asking whether masks worked was exactly the same as ‘literally’ killing grandma.

Most lawyers wanted nothing to do with mask cases.

So I started asking around for lawyers who handled the Trump elections lawsuits, figuring anyone brave enough to do that would at least consider taking a mask case. I quickly found Ray. He said yes after only a little persuading. And then Ray continued to litigate his mask case through an extended, difficult appeal, long after the fundraised money ran out.

Now it’s Ray’s turn. Now Ray needs our help. Make no mistake, the Trump prosecution’s secondary goal is to ensure no good lawyer ever takes an election case for a conservative candidate. So let’s send them a message, the message that these kinds of tactics will not work. Loud and clear.

If you’re new to multipliers, we need everyone to give any affordable amount, so long as it ends in a ‘2’, like $12, $22, $32, and so forth. If you’re a new C&C’er, this is what we do, the thing we do together, that makes C&C different from any old news blog. Here at C&C, you’re part of a movement, a movement that gives us the reach and power of a multimillionaire conservative donor, even though none of us individually ever has to give any amount that we’d notice missing.

Unfortunately, GiveSendGo does not allow $2 donations, or those would be fine if it’s all you can easily afford. So if you can’t afford $12, sit this one out, and we’ll carry you. When you give, don’t worry about the extra amount for GiveSendGo, it won’t display on Ray’s feed, it is totally optional, it can be under $5, and it even allows cents (like $2.22).

And do it right now! Giving only takes a few seconds. Then continue reading today’s terrific roundup.

Here it is again: https://www.givesendgo.com/RaySmith

I promise that, after you pitch in, and see the results, you’ll feel great! You’ll realize that you can make a difference, even though you’re only one voice. Together we are roaring like a packed football stadium.

There are a bunch of defendants. I’ll keep an eye on them. We might have some more of these types of multipliers to do over the next few weeks.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥 Believe it or not, last night’s double-platformed battle of the Republican giants was not the biggest news yesterday, not even close. But we’ll start with it anyway. President Trump’s interview with Tucker posted at the same time as the other Republican nominees debate, which included Governor DeSantis, aired on Fox. As of this morning, Tucker’s Trump interview shows over 156 million views on Twitter — about half the U.S. population in number of ‘views,’ whatever that’s worth — which says something pretty incredible about the rise of disintermediated media and might actually have been the real story last night.

I have promised to stay neutral for the primary, and in fact I have — somehow — still been able to avoid making my decision. I think my lawyer skills at being able to argue either side of an argument helps. Also helpful is that, as you know, I don’t believe in the “Superman” theory of politics anyway. So, I will continue to refrain from critiquing either leading candidate, instead renewing my hopeful call for conservative cooperation, unity and grace.

Rather than give you comments on the various debate wins and losses, which are more than adequately covered just about everywhere else, I’ll present the two sides’ legitimate opposing points of view in a nutshell, as best I can see it, in the possibly vain hope that it might help us understand each other.

https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1694513603251241143

Trump supporters feel like we are facing an existential crisis, that a wrecking ball needs to smash into our government in order to save America from certain doom, and President Trump is that wrecking ball. They don’t particularly like Trump’s involvement in the jab rollout and lockdowns, but are convinced that the issue of saving the Republic eclipses that concern. A sizable minority of Trump supporters even think the stolen election and Biden’s disastrous Sundowner presidency could be part of a master plan.  They believe that Trump and only Trump can save the country, and they — wisely — trust no one connected to the DC establishment.

Trump supporters also have a perfectly valid grievance about the stolen 2020 election, when their candidate should have been elected. They want to right that wrong. They point to Trump’s enduring popularity in spite of four criminal prosecutions, which have only made him more attractive. They want to make America great again.

https://twitter.com/FLVoiceNews/status/1694520122260557857

Governor DeSantis’s supporters also believe we face an existential crisis. They are terrified that the Establishment Media has successfully poisoned the Trump well and too many voters have now become never-Trumpers. They noticed that, whereas Trump lost in 2020, Governor DeSantis won re-election in a landslide. Their top concern is bodily freedom, without which nothing else matters, and they believe — correctly — that DeSantis has the best record in the country on that issue. Plus, DeSantis once called Fauci a ‘little elf’ and said someone should toss him across the Potomac. So.

DeSantis supporters are confident the internationally-acclaimed Governor is a proven capable executive who could deliver as President. They aren’t thrilled with his establishment support, but can overlook that, given his electability. They want to make America Florida.

To me, both positions are thoughtful, reasonable, correct, and also incomplete in their own ways. There is no perfect candidate, no “Superman.” We can agree to disagree over who’s better, but can also still work together to save the country.

Fox ended its debate by asking the candidates whether they’d back Trump if he wins the election, but is also criminally convicted in one of the democrats’ politically-motivated prosecutions. All the serious candidates eventually raised their hands in a show of support. It seems to me that’s the way forward, whether Trump or DeSantis wins the primary.

Let’s save the country!

(Feel free to add your perspective in the comments, but please offer grace to each other. Keep it positive!)

🔥 My goodness. No sooner had the Russian-affiliated Wagner mercenary group’s leader, Yvgeny Prigozhin, raised his bald head in Africa, than his plane plummeted out of the sky faster than a Marxist wearing a lead straightjacket thrown out of a helicopter. This morning, the Washington Post ran the story headlined, “Kremlin, Wagner Group silent on Prigozhin’s fate after deadly plane crash.”

https://twitter.com/UsmanZia921/status/1694592948464415186

Although Prigozhin was listed on the plane’s flight manifest, there seems to be some confusion over whether or not he was actually on the plane. As the Post bluntly noted, “It is unclear whether Prigozhin actually boarded the plane.” Ominously, despite making public comments after the BRICS meeting yesterday, Russian President Putin — well known for assassinating his political enemies — said nothing whatsoever about the crash.

Putin was as silent as the grave, as they say, about the popular Wagner chief’s dramatic news.

After emerging from a Jazzercise class, allegedly, and despite knowing no more than anyone else, Biden hinted darkly that the old vampire Putin must have been behind the accident. The Mumbler-in-Chief told reporters yesterday that, “I don’t know for a fact what happened, but I’m not surprised. There’s not much that happens in Russia that Putin’s not behind.” He continued, “But I don’t know enough to know the answer.”

The main alternative take among all of the abundant hot-takes is that it could just be another Russian rope-a-dope, just like last time, and Prighozin is sneaking around alive and well somewhere. Let’s wait a few days and see what shakes out.

As for me, I’m wondering: where was Hilary Clinton yesterday?

🔥 Putin continued winning yesterday, in what was probably the day’s actual most important developing story. Not that you’d notice from reading Establishment Media. The Washington Post ran a related story this morning, with the muted, understated headline “BRICS group of nations announces expansion plan with six new members.” But it wasn’t just the announcement of an expansion plan. This is the first expansion in the coalition of non-Western nations since it was originally formed back in 2009.

Six mostly oil-rich countries — Argentina, Egypt, Iran, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — were invited to join next year’s summit as members, and their memberships are expected to start as soon as January.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, stressing the group’s goal of “countering Western global dominance,” congratulated the new members in a video address, saying they would all be “working in a full-scale format next year.”

Congratulations, Joe Biden, for uniting our enemies.

The Washington Post couldn’t be bothered to inform its readers, but with the addition of the top Middle-Eastern oil producing countries, BRICS now controls about 80% of the world’s oil reserves. Oil talks and Bidenomics walks. Goodbye petrodollar, we hardly knew ye.

Senior U.N. advisor, professor of economics, and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University’s Jeffrey Sachs reacted, pointing out the obvious significance of the news, which is that the BRICS expansion is perhaps the most significant political shift in our lifetimes.

https://twitter.com/GUnderground_TV/status/1694631196255203688

Here’s the Wall Street Journal’s otherwise banal headline this morning, but which included a telling admission in its subheadline:

How about that? A victory for Russia and China. As I said yesterday, Biden’s disastrous Proxy War policies are rapidly sinking the West under Russian and Chinese world leadership. Or maybe that was the plan.

💉 What did I tell you? The Establishment Media’s covid variant alarmism has once again saved the day!

According to CNBC, after a week of wall-to-wall scariant coverage, sacrifices to the pagan god Eris, two minor mask mandate announcements, and anonymous officials whispering about plans for new Fall lockdowns and airline mandates, shares of Novavax shot up +13%, Moderna’s stock closed up +9%, BioNTech was up +6%, and even Pfizer’s stock ended around +1% higher.

Here is the logic behind the increases, as reported by CNBC. See if it makes any sense to you:

So far, there is no evidence that BA.2.86 spreads faster or causes more serious infections than previous versions. But the emergence of BA.2.86 could potentially increase demand for vaccines and treatments that will likely provide some degree of protection against the highly mutated variant.

Um. There no evidence of increased risk, but they expect demand to jump anyway. I’ll take a stab at explaining this apparent contradiction: Fear sells vaccines.

And yesterday, of course, from the CDC (via the Epoch Times):

They can’t leave out the most important customer group: repeat jabbers.

🔥 More bad news for Maui’s fire response emerged yesterday in the form of a Hill story headlined, “Maui residents who disobeyed barricade survived fires: AP.”

The Hill reported on an AP story, which had reported that the smart people who disobeyed the barricaded road closures during the Maui fires survived, while many, if not most, of those who followed orders and turned around wound up dying horribly in their cars and homes, with no way out.

As of the time of publication yesterday, the official Maui death count is least 114 people killed. But the Hill added that the FBI is estimating that up to 1,100 more people remain “unaccounted for.”

Wait. What is the FBI doing there? Investigating crimes? What crimes? The Hill didn’t say.

Moving on, the AP interviewed residents who disobeyed the barricades, and who provided these harrowing accounts of lifesaving civil disobedience:

Nate Baird and Courtney Stapleton recounted their experience to the outlet, saying they loaded the car up with their two sons, Baird’s mother and one dog to escape the flames. When they turned south to escape Lahaina, they were met with cones and were told to turn back around to Lahaina, which was already burning.

But instead of turning around, they swerved past the cones and escaped to a neighboring town.

Kim Cuevas-Reyes said she survived with her two sons by ignoring orders to turn right onto Front Street, which has now been devastated by the fires. Instead, she turned left and drove in the wrong lane to escape the town.

“The gridlock would have left us there when the firestorm came,” Cuevas-Reyes, 38, told the AP. “I would have had to tell my children to jump into the ocean as well and be boiled alive by the flames or we would have just died from smoke inhalation and roasted in the car.”

As Reagan said, government is not the solution to the problem. Government is the problem.

🔥 Speaking of problems, after violating his gentle pre-trial release conditions and then being ordered back to jail, plump tech bro Sam Bankman-Fried can’t seem to catch a break. Now his problem is cruel and unusual punishment. The AP ran the story Tuesday, headlined “Jailed Sam Bankman-Fried can’t prepare for trial without vegan diet and adequate meds, lawyers say.”

Judge Kaplan had revoked Sam’s pre-trial release and ordered the prosperous tech bro jailed after concluding there was probable cause to believe Sam was busily tampering with witnesses.

According to his lawyers’ complaints to the judge on Monday, the failed crypto-giant and FTX founder is hungry and distracted. Apparently the young tech ‘entrepreneur’ can’t adequately prepare for trial in six weeks, because he is languishing in jail without proper access to computers, video games, non-prescription Adderall to help him focus, and a better diet than bread, water and peanut butter.

Okay, I added video games. But we all know it’s true.

The reason Sam is only eating bread, water, and peanut butter is because the delicate genius eschews meat. He’s a vegan or something. Flesh makes him vomit. Allegedly.

You’d think a real vegan would be a little slimmer and better focused. Weird.

Bankman-Fried, 31, is accused of stealing billions of dollars in FTX customer deposits, spending tens of millions on his businesses, speculative venture investments, sketchy charitable donations, and making illegal campaign contributions aimed at influencing cryptocurrency regulation in Washington and electing democrats.

As I’ve noted before, Sam never created anything before launching his failed multi-billion-dollar crypto company. The whole thing stinks. It has a very Jeffrey Epstein-esque stench to it. Not the human trafficking part, the propped-up-by-intelligence-agencies part.

Anyway, the judge denied Sam access to computers, but said she would order necessary medications and allow a diet closer to his vegan preferences.

So don’t feel too sorry for Sam. He’s doing fine. He’ll choke down whatever veggies they give him, don’t worry. He’s tough. Sort of. Well, not really.

“If you can’t do the time, don’t do the …” something. I can’t remember.

🔥 The Wall Street Journal ran another uplifting, counter-revolutionary lawfare story Tuesday, headlined “Activist Behind Supreme Court Affirmative Action Cases Is Now Suing Law Firms.”  The sub-headline explained, “Ed Blum’s organization accuses firms offering fellowships for diverse candidates of racial discrimination against straight, white men.”

Ed Blum started the American Alliance for Equal Rights two years ago, advocating to end “affirmative-action.”  Separately this summer, in a case involving Harvard College and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Supreme Court overturned nearly 50 years of race-conscious affirmative action at colleges and universities.

Fueled by that ruling, earlier this month the Alliance sued an Atlanta-based venture-capital firm fund that only supports Black small businesswomen. The lawsuit accused the VC firm of unlawful racial discrimination. On Tuesday, the Alliance filed two more lawsuits, this time against two prominent democrat-connected law firms, Perkins Coie and Morrison & Foerster, that only give fellowships to diversity candidates.

According to the story, the law firms’ fellowship positions are open only to applicants who are ‘students of color,’ ‘students who identify as LGBTQ+,’ or ‘students with disabilities,’ and other similar wacky categories that have nothing whatsoever to do with legal skill, and which include five-figure starting bonuses and salaries right out of law school starting at $200,000 and up.

Straight white men need not apply, regardless of law school grades, accomplishments, or capabilities. So.

Blum’s newest lawsuits accuse the two Big Law firms of violating Section 1981 of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which bars racial bias in private contracts.

You might wonder why a giant law firm would disregard the best candidates, and instead hire people based on skin color or atypical sexual preferences, who barely passed law school. Don’t the clients object? Don’t clients want the best lawyers working on their cases?

Not when your biggest customer is the government. When your biggest customer is the government, you hire the lawyers that the government wants. If the government doesn’t want smart lawyers, but only lawyers of a certain color or who have sex a certain way or with certain types of people, then you hire those lawyers.

Nobel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman once famously said, “whenever you see a distortion in the market, look for the withered hand of government.”

Well. There it is. Right there.

Best wishes to Ed Blum for his terrific counter-revolutionary work, and we hope to see him (or his lawyers) arguing at the Supreme Court soon.

Okay, all you people who just couldn’t wait to get to the roundup. I know I’ve spoiled you by always inserting it again the end. Here’s that link: https://www.givesendgo.com/RaySmith. Do it now! You’re going to feel terrific. Let’s win this thing.

See you tomorrow for the Friday roundup!

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