☕️ CUNNING LINGUISTS ☙ Tuesday, December 16, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Like fascism, recession is always threatening the United States, but seems to land on Europe. The Tariff Connection. Wars, drugs, and definitions. And lots more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! The Childers family is dealing with a houseful of sick children who all have the flu and are coughing so hard that one of them briefly traveled back in time. So it’s all hands on deck here in the household, resulting in today’s roundup being solid, but brief. We’ll catch up on the rest of the important news tomorrow.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Yesterday, the New York Times ran a quietly morose story headlined, “Volkswagen to End Production at German Plant, a First in Company History.” While it is interesting that Volkswagen has never shuttered a car factory at home before, the real story was about Germany’s economy, which is flatlining faster than Governor Cuomo’s nursing home patients. The article was also another shining example of the NYT’s journalistic ethics, which compares favorably with turnpike bathroom toilet bacteria.

But let’s start with the ostensibly subject: Volkswagen. “From an economic perspective, the plant’s closure was absolutely necessary,” VW’s CEO Thomas Schäfer explained. But why was it so absolutely necessary? Poor sales? Ukrainian war profiteers preferring Lamborghinis instead of VW bugs? A misfire with a woke social media campaign? Nope.

“The company has been hit hard by President Trump’s tariffs,” the Times said, “and the company said it expected tariff-related costs to amount to more than $5 billion this year.”

And there was the first buried lede: Tariffs. According to the Times, Trump’s tariffs are punishing European carmakers. But they don’t seem to be troubling American carmakers as much, which aren’t shuttering plants. Instead, they are enjoying record post-pandemic sales.

In their most recent financial reports, Ford and GM are each up +8% year-over-year. Stellantis is up +6%, with some of its brands, like Chrysler, up an eye-watering +43%. You can’t find that great news in the Times, though. Headline from industry rag Mopar Insiders, October:

How about “tariffs?”

Naturally, one might expect the Times, after reporting that Trump’s tariffs are driving VW’s first domestic plant closure, to mention that Trump’s tariffs are also driving American manufacturers down a highway of solid profits. Indeed, other NYT stories complain about tariffs’ impact on US carmakers— but omit the record sales and strong profits.

📉 To give you a sense of how troubling this news was for Europe, Volkswagen is no random carmaker. It is Germany’s largest manufacturing company and one of the world’s largest automakers, with annual sales exceeding $374 billion. “No industry is more important to the German economy than automobiles,” the Grey Lady reported back in October, 2024, “And no carmaker is more important than Volkswagen.”

None of that critical context was included in yesterday’s story.

As Volkswagen goes, so goes Germany, or the other way around, or something like that. “The fact that Volkswagen is seeing plant closures and compulsory redundancies shows how deep German industry is now in crisis,” said Carsten Brzeski, chief economist at mega-bank ING Germany.

Don’t mention “the war”

Germany —the EU’s economic heart— is doing even worse than VW. On Monday, the German government reported its economy had contracted -0.2% in 2024, which was “corrected” (revised down) from an earlier, too-optimistic projection of +0.3% growth. “Dragging output down,” the story said, “is the industrial sector, which has failed to recover from the shocks of the coronavirus pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.”

It’s covid’s fault! Plus the Proxy War. Germany’s economy has now shrunk for two consecutive years —2023 and 2024— and a “recession” is usually defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth. But they stubbornly refuse to use the “R” word. So.

Take a moment to imagine how hysterically the Times would report those kinds of numbers if the U.S. were experiencing them under President Trump’s economic policies. It wouldn’t be shy of using the word “recession,” that’s for sure. They would probably be calling it a depression.

📉 Anyway, on to more Times malpractice. You know who else felt the dual shocks of covid and the Proxy War? America. So this story might have noted how, under President Trump, the US has recovered, but Germany —the EU’s top industrial nation— has not. While Germany’s economy is shrinking, ours is bursting. CNBC headline, last week:

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Western Europe, Britain, France, and Italy each saw sluggish growth of only 0.4%, 1.1%, and 0.75%, respectively, in 2024. At least those countries didn’t contract, although one wonders about the reliability of the data, given how often it is subject to after-the-fact “correction.”

Outside Europe, the Times also might have mentioned the other members of Trump’s notional “C5” group of nations. Russia is enjoying sunny growth rates of +4.1%, even though Moscow is literally in the Proxy War, not to mention suffering from historic levels of sanctions. India and China are performing well at +6.5% and +5%, respectively.

The Times can’t shut up about Trump’s tariffs. But even when it runs a story about the tariffs undermining EU economies it cannot bring itself to recognize that tariffs are having the opposite effect here at home. And while mentioning Germany’s troubles because of “the pandemic and the Russian aggression,” it could have, but didn’t, mention that only Europe is scraping the bottom, while the rest of the developed world is going gangbusters.

The European elites blame Russia for their bad economy. I am not making that up.

Maybe it’s just a coincidence. But Trump’s preferred nations group is surging ahead and leaving Old Europe in the dust. Which —also coincidentally— is also consistent with Trump’s new National Security Strategy. We love our courageous and long-suffering cousins in Europe and wish to preserve their traditions and national identities, but the EU must go.

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Somewhere in hell, Saddam Hussein must be laughing ruefully. Yesterday, NPR ran an angry story headlined, “Trump designates street fentanyl as WMD, escalating militarization of drug war.”

Okay, I must pause right here to get something off my chest. And it’s not an alien face-hugger. Instead, I am getting very cranky about corporate media hypocritically calling it a drug war for 55 long years, but now suddenly complaining about “militarization” of the “war.”

What do these nincompoops think a war is? Who “militarized” it by calling it a “war” in the first place?

Seriously. It was reporters. The term was coined by the Chicago Tribune, after President Nixon in 1971 called drug abuse “public enemy number one” and promised an “all-out offensive.” (Nixon should have been looking for different enemies number one, but that’s another story.) Media manufactured the “war on drugs” label, repeated it approximately six trillion times over five decades, and now they want to whine about Trump militarizing drug policy?

Maybe reporters should try looking in the mirror. (Nor, by the way, did they complain overmuch when Clinton’s Attorney General Janet Reno wrangled a very militarized tank barbecue of the hapless Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, but I digress.)

Definitely not “militarized”

Yesterday, during an Oval Office press event to honor servicemembers who helped secure the border, President Trump announced, “Today I’m taking one more step to protect Americans from the scourge of deadly fentanyl flooding into our country with this historic executive order.” He added, “No bomb does what this is doing.”

But— is it WMD? Undoubtedly, fentanyl can cause mass destruction. It has been aerosolized and used in mass-casualty attacks before (outside the US). The hangup seems to be over whether an illegal drug can be considered a weapon or not. It seems odd to me that the same people quibbling over this definition happily expanded the word “vaccine” to include experimental mRNA gene treatments that don’t prevent infections, but whatever.

Fentanyl is fifty times stronger than heroin. Two milligrams of the drug —an almost undetectable trace amount “equivalent to 10 to 15 grains of table salt”— is a lethal dose. As little as 2.6 pounds contains fifty thousand lethal doses. The biggest Mexican cartels are all involved in massive, well-organized networks to produce, smuggle in, and distribute the drug. Up to 300,000 people —including 100,000 young people— die each year from it.

It’s not clear what legal effect Trump’s order even has, since “weapons of mass destruction” are already defined by statute, which can’t be amended by executive order. Fentanyl does not fit neatly into any of the existing categories. But the President signed the order with US generals dramatically posed standing behind him, which did make the point.

Trump’s EO clearly, specifically, and very precisely requires the Secretaries of the Treasury and War to “pursue appropriate actions.” In other words, Trump’s team has some kind of a plan. But they’re not warning the cartels what it is yet. The media will never forgive how unfair President Trump is being by not advertising his next moves to cartel chiefs.

The war on fentanyl has been underway for years, marching along a winding road of state and federal laws, slowly ratcheting up the escalating pressure. This summer, for instance, Congress passed the HALT Fentanyl Act, which reclassified the drug as a “Schedule I narcotic.” In 2023, Virginia passed a law designating fentanyl as a “weapon of terrorism.”

Right out of the gate, in February 2025, Trump renewed the battle from his first term, by announcing sweeping tariffs on Canada, China, and Mexico, citing the three countries’ roles in illegal drug flows. And, of course, as I write this, the Navy is currently using fentanyl smugglers in the Caribbean for target practice, as part of something media calls a “war” but demands not be treated like one.

I’m a lawyer, not a politician, but I’ll just say it: it would be helpful for a concerned member of Congress to file a bill turning Trump’s WMD definition into law, which might avoid twelve Democrat lawsuits, three injunctions, two trips to the Supreme Court, and a spree of late-night comedians making Iraq jokes. Congress could take a brief break from monotonously debating whether killing narco-terrorists twice instead of giving them a free ride on a battleship is a war crime or not, and whether Mexican avocado labels should be 3 millimeters smaller than Florida ones. Or however they’re spending their time this winter.

Have a terrific Tuesday! Thanks for your patience with the abbreviated roundup. Hopefully, we’ll catch things up tomorrow morning, with a fresh roundup of the week’s already fascinating essential news and the commentary you love.

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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