☕️ DUCK DUCK GOOSE ☙ Wednesday, September 4, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Another alleged Chinese spy busted working for top Dems; remarkable new study warns forever maskers and their brains; Trump teases possible Epstein list dump; encouraging Hollywood news; and more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! Your daily roundup of essential news includes: DOJ busts another Chinese spy and you’ll never guess which political party she infiltrated; another new mask study highlights the dangers of forever-masking, especially when we consider other apparently unrelated news; Trump teases potential Epstein list reveal; and a very encouraging report about Hollywood’s grudging new focus.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥🔥 The New York Times reported on a breaking story yesterday under the headline, “N.Y. Official Charged With Taking Money, Travel and Poultry to Aid China.” Yes, it’s another Chinese spy, and yes, she was working for another democrat politician. And yes, it involved unsavory fowl.

Linda Sun held influential positions in Governor Andrew Cuomo and then Governor Kathy Hochul’s administrations, following a series of other state government jobs. Sun was even Hochul’s deputy chief of staff at one point. Unsurprisingly, Ms. Sun specialized in Asian American affairs and diversity, equity and inclusion.

But the whole time, for decades, Linda really worked for the People’s Republic of China.

Ms. Sun’s goose was cooked yesterday by a 65-page federal indictment featuring ten criminal counts such as visa fraud, FARA violations, money laundering, and keeping salted ducks without a license. Just kidding about the ducks, but she was fired by the State of New York back in March, 2023 — and was reported to police — but was only charged now, during a recent flock of DOJ crackdowns on Chinese agents.

The Times tried to build a birdcage around the facts, presumably downplaying the catastrophe to help minimize the political damage. Its article focused on silly and distracting details like Peking duck deliveries, on Ms. Sun’s efforts to thwart Taiwan’s contacts with the State of New York, and her obtaining official state plaques and certificates for Chinese officials, which the Times assured us had no real value, but which were used to secure visas and arrange contacts with other U.S. officials.

But at the end of the all-you-can-eat Asian espionage buffet of decades of influence and manipulation, the Times admitted it honks like a duck and waddles like a duck, and thus appears to be yet another colossal intelligence failure, especially after the sordid spy stories involving Erik Swalwell (D-Ca.) and Diane Feinstein (D-Ca.).

This will probably shock you, but it looks like the Chinese communists have been basically running New York State since well before the pandemic:

This revelation sheds a whole new light on New York’s heavy-handed, zero-Covid, Chinese-style approach to lockdowns and mandates, not to mention the state’s unparalleled covid death rates. The Wall Street Journal’s article about Sun’s arrest included this interesting tidbit:

I’m not saying DEI is a Chinese Communist plot to destroy America,* but here’s communist agent Linda Sun pushing more DEI in New York State’s government, especially more equity:

CLIP: Linda Sun advocating for more diversity, equity, and inclusion in New York (0:44).

(* I’m not not saying that, either.)

A couple observations. First, Democrats may have sold out New Yorkers, but at least they accomplished the much more important goal of diversity. As far as I can tell, Ms. Sun was born in China and naturalized as an adult. A background check would probably have been racist, so.

Second, the Chinese were paying the Suns through her husband’s businesses, which got millions for shipping fake seafood to Chinese companies who paid the bills. To confound the trail of evidence, the pair used a dizzying array of shell companies and over eighty bank accounts.

What high-ranking Cabbage and his family business does that overly complicated bribery strategy remind you of?

And, why is it always democrats with spy problems?

😷😷 Drip, drip! A new study published in the Journal Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety this week, titled “Wearing face masks as a potential source for inhalation and oral uptake of inanimate toxins – A scoping review.” Hint: It’s not too good for mask maniacs.

The study was a “scoping review” that examined the potential toxic effects of face masks on human health by rounding up other studies. Researchers analyzed twenty-four relevant studies, focusing on the content and release into people’s bodies of known toxic substances from face masks.

Especially extended mask wearing.

The scientists found evidence of concerning levels of several toxic substances in face masks, including:

• Microplastics and nanoplastics

• Volatile organic compounds (VOCs)

• Phthalates and phthalate esters

• Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS)

• Heavy metals (lead, cadmium, cobalt, copper, antimony)

• Titanium dioxide particles

Coincidentally, I’m sure, microplastics were in the headlines this week thanks to a different study by completely different researchers:

These researchers found that a half a percent of autopsied brain matter from “normal individuals” aged 45-50 were made out of plastic. That is double the amount of brain plastic from autopsies conducted in 2016. Nobody has connected the dots to masking.

Call it mask brain. In passing, the toxic mask study mentioned chronic “mask-induced exhaustion syndrome” (MIES), which looks increasingly suspicious after combining the two studies.

Anyway, the mask study concluded that, while masks can helpfully filter large particles, they may less helpfully introduce toxic substances into folks’ airways and gastrointestinal tracts:

Even more remarkable than a negative mask study being published at all, the researchers didn’t even have to say the magic words! Just the opposite: “On top of that,” the researchers noted, “there was and still is no empirical evidence for the effectiveness of the masks in limiting the spread of viruses in the general populace.”

Ouch!

Four years later, the embargo against real science related to face masking is finally over. Somebody tell the holdouts.

🔥🔥 India’s Economic Times ran an exciting story yesterday headlined, “Epstein client list: Donald Trump teases release of infamous list if re-elected, says 'fortunately I was not one of them’.”

CLIP: Trump discusses releasing the Epstein client list (0:45).

President Trump electrified the internet yesterday when he appeared on “The Lex Fridman Podcast” and agreed that, if elected, he would be inclined to release the Epstein client list. “Yeah, I’d be inclined to do the Epstein (list), I’d have no problem with that,” Trump said.

Oddly, the Epstein list suggests a strange parallel to Senator Joe McCarthy (R-Wi.), who famously claimed in the 1950s to have an unpublished list of 200 communist spies in the State Department. Democrats destroyed McCarthy to stop those names from coming out. To this day, we still don’t know who was on McCarthy’s notorious list, and we never will.

For those of you late to the party, McCarthy was posthumously vindicated as being 100% correct. Here’s what Grok says, after I pressed it nearly to a short-circuit:

As for the Epstein List, who knows. I’m not getting my hopes up.

But Trump is going to lose votes if he keeps talking this way. It’s a good bet that, if Bill Gates hears about this, he won’t vote for Donald Trump in November. And don’t forget Magistrate Bruce Reinhart, who made history by signing off on the FBI’s warrant to raid Mar-a-Lago, the first police raid of a presidential home ever. Here’s the good magistrate:

Before becoming a federal magistrate, Reinhart quit the US Attorney’s office in South Florida to defend Epstein, who was being prosecuted by the US Attorney’s office in South Florida. Epstein got a sweetheart deal. I’m not accusing Magistrate Reinhart of anything. I’m just saying.

Could you imagine what would happen if that Epstein list got out? The people on that list can surely imagine it. It would be even bigger than McCarthyism. Call it Epsteinism.

🔥🔥 Finally, yesterday the Wall Street Journal ran a most encouraging story headlined, “Religious Movies Are Sweeping Hollywood. Rich Investors Are Pouring in Millions.” I bet you never saw that headline coming.

The long-form, magazine-style story began by describing scenes from the shooting of Amazon’s upcoming series, The House of David, about the life of Biblical King David. The series, a partnership with Christian studio The Wonder Project, is being filmed on location in dusty sets near Athens, Greece.

The Journal then mentioned hit series The Chosen (one of the most popular series in the world, regardless of genre), the movie Jesus Revolution, which grossed $54 million, and the movie Sound of Freedom, which grossed $250 million on a $15 million budget.

Hollywood was shocked by these hits that “seemed to materialize out of nowhere.” Even more surprising, The Chosen and the Sound of Freedom were both financed by fans, who raised money for those productions using crowdsourcing techniques. The article called them “a vast but underserved audience turned off by the dystopian dramas and grim antiheroes that loom large in pop culture.”

Dystopian dramas and grim antiheroes. See? They know.

Vernon Sanders, head of television at Amazon MGM Studios, explained  Prime Video aims to be a “credible source” for “a catalog of faith-plus content” (including from non-Christian creators). For its part, Netflix is investing in faith-focused films from producers like Tyler Perry and DeVon Franklin, who are making the new movie R&B, a contemporary take on the biblical love story of Ruth and Boaz, set in the modern-day South.

It’s not just purely religious material, either. Angel Studios, which produced The Chosen, is currently filming Young Washington, an adventure movie about the youthful hijinks of America’s first president. The article referred to positive, good-beats-evil content as “faith-adjacent,” whatever that means.

There’s much that could be said about this inspirational development, like how artistically bankrupt Hollywood has become, with its endless production line of joyless woke remakes, humorless, ultraprocessed sequels, and formulaic progressive pabulum.

But I’m most interested in what this might suggest about the conservative counter-revolution. Recall the famous quip that politics is downstream from culture. If that observation holds in these baffling and bizarre times, then a growing cultural trend toward more optimistic and more faith-based (or even faith-adjacent) media could be a very good sign for upcoming political developments.

Keep the faith! We are getting there.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! C&C shall return tomorrow morning, in a non-woke sequel of essential news and commentary.

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