☕️ EXCESSIVE FINES ☙ Friday, August 22, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

New York court buries Trump “check stubs” case but hands him victory; Times fumes over orders; Alligator Alcatraz scrapped?; media cashes in on AI; sci-fi stuck in time loop; raids now begin; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! Before complaining about the late delivery, have some sympathy for your devoted author: I had to skim 300+ pages of the historic new Trump decision and then catch up on breaking news of FBI raids. In today’s roundup: New York Appeals Court tries to bury Trump in the “check stubs” case, but winds up handing him a total victory; Times whines about Trump emergency orders without a scrap of self-awareness; Obama Judge orders Florida’s immigration staging area, Alligator Alcatraz, to be torn down for scrap, and wait till you hear the reason; media changes its tune over AI as it hears cash registers chiming; people start noticing that science fiction, like the rest of the culture, is stuck in a time vortex; and in breaking news this morning, the deep state raids begin.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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By now, you’ve probably already heard yesterday’s biggest news. About two days after I noted that Trump’s historic half-billion-dollar New York fine remained stayed, the New York Court of Appeals issued an equally historic blockbuster opinion that completely wiped it out. Big platforms like the New York Times airbrushed the article right out of their front page lineups. But NBC ran the remarkable story under the headline, “New York appeals court throws out Trump's more than $500 million fraud judgment.”

Boom.

It hardly seems necessary to remind C&C readers that this is one of the most politically-charged cases in history. It’s the only one that offered Democrats any hope of ‘real’ consequences for Trump being Trump. They even built little mantelpiece shrines to corpse-like Judge Arthur Engoran, fondly arranged right next to their Fauci bobbleheads.

Before I sarcastically slice up the massively unnecessary 126-page majority opinion, let’s pause just a moment and recall that judges are human beings who must live and work in the BlueAnon swamp. Despite everything I’m about to say, the majority decision was reasoned, thoughtful, and very carefully written. They were wrong, and were called out on it, but still. Bless their liberal hearts, they did their damndest to convict Trump in the court of public opinion before wiping out the largest individual civil judgment in history.

⚖️ The most telling fact was that, out of the novel-sized order (a scale-crushing 323 pages including concurrences and dissent), the majority only invested two and a half pages on the only issue that mattered: whether the half-billion-dollar penalty violated the Eighth Amendment. They parsimoniously penned that critical section in the driest, most technical register, without a hint of reproach for the trial court that conjured the oversized award in the first place.

And then, like tucking an embarrassing relative in the attic, they jammed it at the very end or their order. By the time any weary reader arrived there, after slogging through 120+ pages of Engoron-defense and Trump-scolding, the ruling felt like a woodshed beating, even though the actual outcome was a constitutional reversal.

To give you another sense of how shortly shrifted was the majority’s Eighth Amendment analysis, for comparison, they spent almost twelve full pages painstakingly defending Engoron’s absurd $18–27 million valuation of Mar-a-Lago — a figure nobody in Palm Beach takes seriously, and one that wasn’t even necessary to uphold liability.

Yet when it came to the only part of the case that actually mattered —the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution— they summarily dispatched it in just two and a half pages, written in dry, clinical monotone, neatly tucked into the order’s nether end.

⚖️ Let’s take just that one example, Mar-a-Lago, to expose the majority’s sleight of hand. Judge Engoron tossed Trump’s valuations of $347–739 million, and instead embraced the Palm Beach tax assessor’s $18–27 million number — a figure below the price of many Palm Beach teardowns. Trump’s lawyers countered with unrebutted evidence: the property was unique, unlike anything else in Palm Beach, and their expert, a broker with 50 years in the luxury market, pegged its real market value at $1.2 billion.

The majority opinion didn’t embrace Engoron’s absurdly low number; it did something slipperier. It salvaged his result by systematically discrediting every piece of contrary evidence. They discounted Trump’s uniqueness argument. They dismissed his broker’s testimony as “conclusory.” They waved off the billion-dollar valuation. Then, after bulldozing all the defensive evidence, they shrugged and said: well, the tax assessor’s number was all Engoron had, so what else could he do?

And from that tortured result, they raced back to the Trump fraud angle, as though Trump’s accountants should also have rejected all their professionals’ conclusions and used the tax appraiser’s value, just like Judge Engoran. Dissenting Justice Friedman called the majority’s twisted thinking out: their labeling the broker’s $1.2 billion valuation “conclusory” while accepting the assessor’s $27 million valuation without testimony or analysis was, in his words, “remarkable.”

⚖️ That’s not even the most ridiculous part. When the majority admitted the property was unique, the analysis should have stopped right there. How can anyone value a unique property? Almost by definition, the seller of a unique property sets the terms. But after conceding there wasn’t any other reliable evidence, Judge Engoran and the majority just waved away Trump’s own opinion of value. Under the law, a seller’s evaluation of value is normally considered extremely probative evidence, since sellers know better than anyone what their own properties are worth.

To call it a “stretch” to find fraud from that tortured valuation reasoning is generous; it’s like saying Judge Engoron could fly to the moon if he had wispier hair. It’s nonsense. Worse, fraud normally requires misrepresentation, reliance, and harm. Yet even after showering Trump’s valuations with shrugs, the majority then conceded AG Letitia James failed to prove harm or reliance.

No bank lost a dime, no lender testified they were duped, and every loan was repaid on time with interest. Instead of admitting those missing elements sank the case, the court waved them away, and invested even more pages in a new doctrine of convenience: in this case, they said, the AG doesn’t need to prove harm and reliance.

⚖️ At the end of the very long judicial day, even after 120+ pages of Engoron-repair and Trump-bashing, the Justices had no choice but to finally face the Constitution. Citing controlling Supreme Court precedent, they ultimately (and tersely) admitted the disgorgement award was excessively punitive, and struck it down under the Eighth Amendment’s ban on excessive fines. That part they got right — and it’s exactly what SCOTUS will do if the case finally crawls its way up there.

But the craziest part? The reason the Times and other top papers ignored the ruling is because three judges found the entire case should be thrown out. Three judges (Friedman, Higgitt, Rosado) all agreed the AG hadn’t proven liability. Only through an unusual procedural trick where two of the dissenting judges “joined the decretal” could the 3-2 decision in Trump’s complete favor be swapped to 4-1 against, to keep the fraud finding (and some injunctions) even while nixing the award.

The headline should have been: “Appellate Majority Says AG Failed to Prove Fraud.” Judge Friedman called it out with a sports zinger: “it’s as if a team is awarded a touchdown without crossing the goal line.”

So Trump was essentially right when, on Truth Social yesterday, he declared it a “total victory.” TAW.

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File this under the “it’s your own fault” category. This morning, the Times ran a breathless, dual-reporter article headlined, “How Trump Leans on Emergency Declarations to Bypass Congress and Skirt Regulations.” Cry us a river.

The whiny article complained about Trump’s declarations of emergency and darkly hinted about rising authoritarianism in America. “In his seven months back in office,” the reporters warned, “President Trump has declared nine national emergencies, plus a ‘crime emergency’ in Washington.” (Scare quotes around “crime emergency” in original.)

But for most conservatives, these orders are a feature, not a bug. Our libertarian friends may disagree, but to me, nine emergencies seems like a pretty good start, given all the crises Joe Biden left for us. Sniffy Joe Biden was himself a crisis. We should declare an emergency to find Biden’s missing grey matter.

Frankly, after the excesses of the pandemic emergency, including its cozy no-bid contracts, anti-constitutional mandates and quarantine camps, and how they’ve created a permanent underclass of mentally fatigued forever-maskers, it’s pretty rich for Democrats to now be complaining about emergency powers abuse.

Oh, I agree with them in principle: let’s strip all emergency powers from government. Compared to the alternative, we’ll take our chances.

But only after we fix what the Democrats broke.

Where oh where was all this hang-wringing about emergency powers abuse during the Biden interregnum, when it might have been helpful?

Sit down and shut up, New York Times.

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What would we do without judges? Yesterday, the New York Times ran a completely predictable story below the headline, “Judge Orders ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ Detention Center in Florida to Shut Down for Now.” Actually, she ordered it to be disassembled and stripped down to concrete, but who cares about the pesky details? Not the Times, obviously.

Those tents are an environmental hazard of some kind

Want to know why the judge ordered Florida’s new wildlife-patrolled immigration facility to be torn down? You can’t make this stuff up. She ruled that federal officials failed to first conduct a multi-year environmental review before building the temporary housing facility on the abandoned airport in the middle of nowhere.

After all, baby alligators nesting in the dusty, broken-down luggage conveyor might be displaced.

One gets the sense that President Trump and Governor DeSantis must now have special waiting areas outside their bedrooms where the process servers can queue up each morning. It feels like every single thing they do is immediately contested in court. Sign an order? Court. Hold a press conference? Court. Get a haircut? Court.

Of course, starting right after the election, Democrats vowed to do it. So I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised. Welcome to the new lawfare normal.

The case’s legal argument is over a federal law that requires any federal construction project to first undertake extensive environmental reviews. But, Florida officials argued, Alligator Alcatraz is a state project not subject to the federal requirements. The judge cleverly used a wildlife metaphor to rebut this commonsense argument: “if it quacks like a duck,” she observed, then it must be a protected avian species with webbed feet. Or words to that effect.

Anyway, Governor DeSantis predicted this would happen, since he’s tangled with Judge Kathleen M. Williams (Obama appointee) before. For example, she recently ordered Florida’s Attorney General to be held in contempt (he’s appealed). In other words, the Governor was already planning to appeal this ruling.

In other words, a swamp judge orders the swamp project closed to protect swampy reptiles. It’s perfect.

Onwards.

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The great rhetorical de-risking of AI continues apace. Rounding out this morning’s Times trifecta, the Grey Lady promoted a bland, reassuring op-ed headlined, A.I. May Be Just Kind of Ordinary. Now they tell us.

Ah, the good old days. I guess it makes me an old-timer, since I can remember when we were weeks or months away from an AI going superintelligent and instantly wiping humanity off Planet Earth.

But now, they’re running boring, meh headlines like this.

The schizophrenia wasn’t lost on the author. “In 2023,” he admitted, “one-third to one-half of top A.I. researchers thought there was at least a 10 percent chance the technology could lead to human extinction.” But now, “a couple of years later, the vibes are pretty different.” Vibes.

The nominal inflection point would appear to be OpenAI’s recent disappointing release of its overhyped ChatGPT version 5. Unaccountably successful CEO Sam Altman promised the firm’s excited early adopters that its new version would be the “death star” of AI, the closest thing to superintelligence the world had yet seen.

But when it came out a couple weeks ago, most users couldn’t tell any difference. The market concluded: mid.

The technical rationale for the retreat from imminent human extinction is that AI is rapidly approaching a point of diminishing returns. It now requires massive amounts of additional resources to achieve even incremental improvements. The new thinking seems to be that we’ll run out of power and water long before we get close to superintelligence. (Conspiracy theorists: unless they whip out zero-point energy, of course.)

Or, maybe all this newly discovered calmness has more to do with everybody discovering which side of the computer chip toast has the strawberry cryptocurrency on it. Network World headline from February:

Money talks! So now, it’s ixnay on all the apocalypse-way chatter. Nothing to worry about, after all. Relax, everybody! There’s no need to overreact with crazy government guardrails or, perish the thought, AI regulations. There’s gold in them thar data centers.

I’ve long pooh-poohed end-times prophecies about AI. My rationale, which is worrisome in a different way, is that they still don’t really understand how it works. How can you radically improve something that defies explanation? AI is one of those happy lab accidents like penicillin, rubber, or the Post-it note. Except with AI, they don’t understand what makes the paper with the passwords written on it stick to the computer monitor.

Anyway, enjoy the amusing whiplash as the media, having hyped AI’s deadly dangers to one of Saturn’s smaller moons, now bends over backwards to make the disruptive technology seem like it’s just a minor improvement in the accounting department.

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In related news: Finally, someone said it out loud. Science fiction is broken, stuck in a time loop. The Ringer ran a story this week headlined, “Sci-Fi Is Stuck in the ’70s.” The sub-headline explained, “‘Alien: Earth’ is the latest sci-fi spinoff to channel the aesthetics of the ’70s. Will the fictional future always look like the past?”

In the distant future, humanity invents clicky keyboards and giant knobs

Why are sci-fi shows set in 2129 forecasting people are still typing— on 1980’s style, clicky keyboards with giant dials and knobs? Oh, you could make an allowance for this particular franchise, since the original Alien was filmed in 1979, when IBM keyboards were high-tech. So you could surmise they just want to keep the canonical look and feel.

But Alien Earth —the latest serial entry in the franchise— is not the only offender. Knobs, dials, and keyboards still clutter up most science fiction, and AI is consigned to portraying artificial girlfriends who look just like regular girlfriends except they turn murderous faster.

What happened to imagining the future? Have science fiction authors been so traumatized by the pandemic, AI, Anime girlfriends, talking Japanese pleasure robots, autonomous drones, and self-driving taxicabs, that they have utterly lost the ability to imagine what even more radical scenarios the future holds?

I mean, for real people, nobody grabs a steering wheel in a robotaxi, much less a keyboard. Why should spaceships have them?

Or is this imagination desert another toxic DEI byproduct, where traditional screenwriters are passed over for unimaginative (but highly diverse) interns? Or (as I believe), is this another symptom of the Great Cultural Freeze that started just after the turn of the Millennium?

Though we don’t know the cause, we do know that sci-fi —like fashion styles, music, art, and most cinema— remains mired in a pre-millennial progressive aesthetic. Hollywood still focuses more on diversity, LGBT themes, anti-patriarchy, over-the-top CGI explosions, and “subversion of the male gaze”— rather than on entertainment value or even the art itself.

The good news is that, like the rest of our frozen culture, science fiction is poised on the cusp of a breakthrough more dramatic than a baby alien bursting through an expendable actor’s chest cavity. This silly “stuck in the 70’s” example illustrates the potential for unleashing a new “golden age” that Trump has spoken about so many times.

Most of all, this random article shows progress. As confounding as the Great Cultural Freeze has been, the voluntary omertá —that nobody talked about it— was even more frustrating. You can’t solve a problem that you won’t admit you have.

Finally, don’t take this larger gripe as any complaint about the show. By all accounts, Alien Earth is a decent show with solid entertainment value, even if perhaps ultimately unmemorable. By ‘forgettable’, for example, I mean that most people probably couldn’t name three characters from the ‘blockbuster’ sci-fi movie Avatar.

Who even are these people?

But, after all these decades, most folks could probably still name three characters from the original Alien.

The Great Cultural Thaw can’t come quickly enough.

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As I worked to diligently (and quickly) prepare this morning’s post, a critical story broke, on which I could not fail to make comment. Perennially cynical readers, get ready to cough up your black pills faster than a Great Dane upchucking his worm pills when his owner turns around. CNBC ran the story around 8am headlined, “FBI raids home of John Bolton, former Trump national security advisor.” And so, it begins.

What does this scene remind you of?

This morning, the FBI raided the Maryland home of John Bolton, Trump’s former national security advisor turned TDS-crazed critic. According to NBC, agents were searching for classified documents tied to leaks to the media— an investigation that started under Trump 1.0’s DOJ, but languished in FBI purgatory under Biden, until new FBI Director Kash Patel greenlit the probe.

The optics are astonishing. Bolton, who cashed in with The Room Where It Happened—a self-indulgent memoir DOJ lawyers once described as “a flagrant breach” of his classified secrets obligations— now finds himself on the receiving end of the very classified-docs dragnet he once cheered against Trump. Attorney General Pam Bondi piled on, tweeting, “America’s safety isn’t negotiable.” Deputy Director Dan Bongino twisted the knife further: “Public corruption will not be tolerated.”

Kash tossed the Democrats’ own words right into their shocked faces in his tweet this morning:

Haha, CNBC’s reporter apparently clicked the ‘like’ button and commented.

Still, some people will never be satisfied. The black-pilled in Kash’s comments raged, “wake me up when you start arresting people.” What? And skip all the delicious early-morning FBI raids, leaked photos of staged documents, and the slow-death trials in the media? What fun is that?

Here’s Fox News’s breaking coverage:

CLIP: Fox News covers raid on John Bolton’s house (0:47).

Take a moment to fully appreciate what’s happening. John Bolton isn’t some minor staffer— he’s a former National Security Advisor and UN Ambassador. The FBI has never before raided the home of a former national security chief on suspicion of mishandling classified material. That’s a first. And, deliciously ironically, Bolton openly endorsed investigations into Trump’s retention of classified records. Now, Bolton is in the exact same crosshairs.

And —don’t miss this— Bolton is both a Republican and former Trump official. So Democrats can’t effectively whine about political persecution or revenge. The FBI’s first raid was on the same side of the aisle. Can you see how brilliant that is?

In short: along with the raid on Mar-a-Lago, this is one of the most significant FBI raids in modern American political history. It combines high office, political irony, and a signal that nobody is safe under the new DOJ playbook. One can imagine a lot of panicked calls to already-retained lawyers in the DC area.

Since it’s a breaking story, there isn’t much more to say about it now— other than enjoying a few more laps around the ironic victory circle. Go ahead and get your steps in.

Have a fantastic Friday! Jog back here tomorrow morning, for breaking updates and even more essential news and commentary.

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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