☕️ FISH WEDGES ☙ Tuesday, July 15, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Multiplier update; SCOTUS hands Trump another prime legal win; Bondi purges more DOJ lawyers; Dems demand Epstein docs; NYC floods; and even the Times admits the tranny issue broke their coalition.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! The great summer adventures are underway. Your humble author is hotel-blogging from our State’s capital, preparatory to delivering oral arguments in an elections-related appeal. (It’s a wonky local issue. Local, local, local!) Today’s roundup includes: multiplier update shows another successful C&C Army operation; SCOTUS serves President Trump another delicious and well-cooked slice of U.S. prime legal beef; Bondi continues purging DOJ of unethical ethics department lawyers, causing media indigestion; Epstein case plot twist as Democrats begin demanding the DOJ release every scrap of Epstein paper; weird weather strikes Northeast as New York City subways flood suddenly and unexpectedly; and the Times unexpectedly admits the tranny issue has fractured the Democrat coalition.

🪖 C&C ARMY POST 🪖

🪖 The C&C Army did it! We overwhelmed the enemy with another successful multiplier operation. When we began yesterday, Dr. Moore’s GiveSendGo stood around $145,000. This morning, it had skyrocketed to $436,321, and the donation history is a beautiful scrolling list of amounts ending in a ‘2.’

It required only the tiniest effort from each of us. That’s the power of the C&C Army. I’m very proud of you.

And if you’re just tuning in, there’s still time to join in the glory if you missed the first wave. Here’s the link!

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Yesterday, ABC ran a terrific story headlined, “Supreme Court allows Trump to continue effort to gut Education Department.” As if it even needed to be said, the sub-headline added, “The court's three liberal justices dissented.”

Yesterday, SCOTUS lifted a lower-court injunction against the Trump administration's efforts to “gut” the Department of Education. He’s gutting it like a fish.

For now, the Court said, the Trump Administration may continue with the mass firings that, starting in March, already slashed nearly half of the agency's workforce, plus other great stuff like reassigning the federal student loan portfolio to the SBA and ending billions in state subsidies.

The majority didn't explain their two-paragraph decision. All three liberal justices opposed it, but this time, Justice Sotomayor penned the hangry dissent. She thinks it is the End of the World. “Lifting the District Court's injunction,” Justice Sotomayor darkly predicted, “will unleash untold harm, denying educational opportunities and leaving students to suffer from discrimination, sexual assault, and other civil rights violations.”

For extra rhetorical oomph with a spicy soupçon of name-calling, she said the majority was “either wilfully blind or naive.”

National Parents Union President Keri Rodrigues (2022 salary: $320,000) called the decision “an outrageous and unlawful power grab by President Trump.” Rachel Gittleman, a former Federal Student Aid office official (now between jobs), told ABC she’s feeling a lot of “heartbreak,” “rage,” and “sadness.” Lots of feelings!

Maybe she should try going fishing.

TAW. “The Supreme Court's decision,” ABC noted drily, “is another win for Trump's efforts to overhaul the federal government.”

Since the majority didn’t opine, there’s nothing to analyze. But, combining this new decision with last week’s decision to allow President Trump to proceed with other mass layoffs in other federal agencies (“another victory for Trump at the Supreme Court”), we can see a clear pattern emerging. SCOTUS, not yet having said so explicitly, seems aligned with Trump’s Unitary Executive Theory, which posits that the Constitution gives the Chief Executive sole authority over the Executive Branch, even if Congress tries to set up guardrails, rules, or limits.

For analysis of the media coverage, all you need to know is that ABC quoted about a dozen people opposing Trump, and only Linda McMahon saying anything positive about the decision. So much for balance. ABC gutted journalism like a farm-raised Mahi-Mahi.

Related: New York Times, yesterday, “24 States Sue Trump Over $6.8 Billion Withheld From Education.”

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Yesterday, Bloomberg ran an encouraging story about our embattled Attorney General headlined, “Bondi Fires Her Personal Ethics Chief as DOJ Purge Continues.” It’s a classic binge of purges.

Joseph Tirrell, a 20-year DOJ careerist, got the bad news Friday in the form of a short, pink-slipped letter saying curtly, “your employment with the Department of Justice is hereby terminated, and you are removed from federal service effective immediately.”

Speculation swirls, but longtime DOJ watchers pointed out that Mr. Tirrell had ethically supervised ‘special prosecutor’ Jack Smith while that unpleasant individual was relentlessly persecuting President Trump. (A federal judge later found Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional. In other words, not very ethical.)

Tirrell’s letter looked just like the ones sent to at least 20 other DOJ officials tied to the Trump prosecutions. So.

Tirrell leaped on LinkedIn to post an overlong and quite unmanly complaint. “Until Friday evening,” he huffed, “I was the senior ethics attorney at the DOJ responsible for advising the AG on federal employee ethics.” I realize this is a pretty big deal for Mr. Tirrell, but he obviously thinks this is some kind of historic scandal. His LinkedIn post announcing his firing, for example, quoted Martin Luther King and Edmund Burke.

At least he didn’t wear a dress to work. Again, maybe fishing could help him relax. Just don’t think about the gutting.

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Plot twist! Yesterday, Axios —which broke the Epstein-DOJ story— ran a followup article headlined, “House Republicans block Democratic maneuver to force release of Epstein files.” Of course they did.

Yesterday, House Democrats filed a proposed amendment to a cryptocurrency bill that would have forced the DOJ to release the Epstein files. How about that? "The question with Epstein is: Whose side are you on?" Representative Ro Khanna (D-Ca.), the author of the Epstein measure, asked Axios ahead of the vote.

House Republicans, predictably, shot down the proposal. That, Axios said, “was the outcome Democrats anticipated, and one they plan to gleefully cite as President Trump continues to grapple with the MAGA fallout over the DOJ's handling of the documents.”

They demand transparency. “I want to know what the hell is in these files,” demanded Representative Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), the top Democrat on the Rules Committee. Khanna asked rhetorically, “Are you on the side of the rich and powerful, or are you on the side of the people?" Then he promised to re-introduce his amendment “again and again and again.”

Finally! It’s the wedge issue they’ve been waiting for.

Remember: The deep state doesn’t need tanks or tribunals. Its chief soft-power weapon has always been the wedge issue— deployed not to persuade, but to divide, demoralize, and atomize the population into manageable identity fragments. It doesn’t matter what the wedge is: race, gender, climate panic, flag etiquette, vaccines, eastern European wars, or gas stoves. The point isn’t resolution; it’s friction. Pick a pressure point, drive in a rhetorical crowbar, and crack the body politic open like a boiled clam. Then serve the chaos cold with a side of astroturfed protest.

This is the technique. The agencies and their NGO handmaidens have mastered the art of weaponized empathy— deploying just enough moral outrage to make compromise impossible, then stepping back to watch the public eat itself alive over whatever shiny wedge they’ve chosen this round. Whenever a particular wedge starts to dull, they just sharpen up a new one. They always have another clam in the pot.

Trump has handed them a pot full of pedo clams, on a silver salver. Now the Democrats will gleefully and repeatedly force Republicans to pick sides, while marching into town halls in the Congressmen’s districts to vent their faux, scripted outrage, waving the banners of newly discovered love of transparency in government.

I wonder whether Democrat elites can get their own base on board for this. Maybe. But it’ll take some spectacular mental gymnastics. These are the same folks who just two years ago called Epstein speculation a QAnon dogwhistle and dismissed the entire subject as right-wing paranoia. Now they’re polishing their halos and demanding Pam Bondi release the files in the name of democracy.

It’s either his greatest unforced error since Trump rode down the escalator, or he’s working the world’s biggest rope-a-dope and creating a controversy to secure the media’s laser focus. I sure hope it’s the latter.

Either way, I’ll bet your 2025 bingo card didn’t have Democrats demanding the Epstein Files on it.

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More weird weather! The New York Times ran a story yesterday headlined, “Flash Flooding from Storm Swamps N.Y.C. Subways and Delays Flights.” Oh, what’s the big deal, it happens all the time.

Expect delays

Yesterday, large parts of the Northeast were drenched in over seven inches in under five hours— more than a month’s worth of rain dumped in a single evening. Flash flood warnings stretched from Virginia to Staten Island, triggering evacuations, water rescues, and total transit shutdowns across multiple states.

New Yorkers compared it unfavorably to Hurricane Sandy.

Back in 2021, during Hurricane Ida, New York City only received its first-ever “Flash Flood Emergency” alert. Now it’s happening again, just four years later, but in an unforecast non-hurricane storm. “It was a disaster,” sighed Juan Luis Landaeta, a 12-year city resident, who said he’d never seen flooding like this.

Subway stations became geysers, manhole covers blew off, transit stations were submerged, and the MTA offered the weak excuse —again— that its infrastructure wasn’t built for this “new climate reality.” But this wasn’t a hurricane. It was just Monday. In July. And it overwhelmed the city’s services.

New Yorkers didn’t get much in the way of notice. As water began filling an occupied train, one conductor told passengers, “Oh my G-d, it’s only Monday.” He thought about it for a second and added, “I don’t get paid enough for this.”

The National Weather Service issued useless but urgent flash flood warnings starting late yesterday afternoon and evening, even as the water was already rising. By contrast, as Floridians well know, hurricane forecasts come with detailed five-day tracks, press conferences, and evacuation prep.

Fortunately, New Yorkers are tough. Musician Jessica Dye said, “The real New Yorkers were just on their phones, not caring, not paying attention” to the rising floodwaters in the subway cars. They’re getting used to it.

Whether the cause is manmade carbon dioxide (unlikely), weather manipulation, solar forcing, magnetic pole shifts, or something more mysterious, the narrative gatekeepers are starting to admit that something different is happening. We’re wandering off the meteorological map, and the compass is spinning wildly.

The Times quoted Erin Coughlan de Perez, a disaster risk researcher at Tufts, who dutifully genuflected to the usual climate script: “Of course, with climate change, flash floods are also getting stronger and more common,” she explained. But then she let slip the mask, a bit. The models meteorologists have trusted for centuries are getting stale. “We’re driving forward while looking in the rearview mirror,” she warned.

Close readers noticed that the Times’ article wasn’t just a local story. Buried beneath the soggy subway footage and grumbling conductors, it quietly corralled a whole herd of recent global flash flooding disasters: New York, Texas, Japan, Spain, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Uganda. It was as if they were trying —perhaps unconsciously— to tell us something more.

The quietly embedded global roundup pointed to the real story: not just New York’s flooded commute, but a planetary breakdown of predictive systems, institutional credibility, and risk communication— all unfolding in a world left unprepared by its captured experts for the arrival of a radically shifting climate.

🔥 What lies ahead literally defies prediction. Wherever ‘here’ is in history, we’ve never been here before. The Atlantic current stirs uneasily. The geomagnetic field spasms over the South Atlantic like a dying leviathan. And above it all, non-Euclidean aurorae bloom in the skies. This isn’t any “new normal.” It’s a slow encroachment of the abnormal— the kind of shift that once made ancient sailors turn back and priests fast in terrified silence.

As always, the experts are useless. There’s no grant money in challenging the Approved Narrative.™ But sooner or later —probably sooner— the mask must slip even further, and they will finally be forced to reckon with the ancient forces stirring beneath the waves. And that will be progress.

It’s good for the fish, though. If, that is, they can avoid being gutted like the Department of Education.

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Speaking of wedge issues, if you wanted a clearer sign than this that the culture is shifting, I don’t know what it could be. Yesterday, the New York Times ran a remarkable story headlined, “Democrats Lost Voters on Transgender Rights. Winning Them Back Won’t Be Easy.” This is the same Grey Lady that used to publish hysterical headlines about Republicans erasing trans people.

Democrats’ problem with transgender politics isn’t just about policy. It’s about perception, ideological purity, and fear of their own coalition. The issue didn’t register in polling as any top concern for voters in 2024, but party strategists now admit the “relentless Republican attacks” worked. “We try so hard to represent everybody,” conceded former Biden campaign manager Greg Schultz, “we alienate everybody.”

In other words, the trannies need to go back in the closet.

Caught between activist orthodoxy and rising public skepticism, centrist Democrats still cannot safely articulate any moderate position on girls’ sports that isn’t instantly vaporized by righteous political hellfire. Even Mara Keisling, founder of the National Center for Transgender Equality, now concedes: “We haven’t been pragmatic for the last 10 or so years. And that’s killing us.”

“Pragmatic” means sneaking up on us instead of rubbing gender doublespeak in our faces in a very unsanitary fashion. But, at this point, “pragmatic” also signals retreat.

It’s not like they were rubbing it in our faces

The Times generously described the problem as Democrats “getting ahead of voters,” as though the uneducated electorate simply hasn’t caught up to their more enlightened moral arc. But the truth is less heroic: the party got sucked into a purity spiral, elevating ever-narrower litmus tests enforced by activists with more Twitter followers than constituents. Instead of persuading voters, they performatively virtue-signaled to each other until the applause fell silent after Trump’s landslide victory and, looking up from their phones at last, they realized the room was empty.

“Getting ahead” implies vision. This was just downhill velocity.

Trump didn’t need to make the trans issue the centerpiece of his campaign; he just needed it to function as a wedge. And it did—spectacularly. With a few well-placed jabs, he fractured the Democrats’ brittle coalition along its weakest fault line: the widening gap between activist absolutism and normal parental protective instincts.

How could they have lost the middle with subtle sports messaging like this?

His campaign’s “they/them” ad wasn’t really about transgender people. It was about us, the forgotten voters, watching Democrats champion yet another niche cause while our eggs and gas spiked, our kids floundered, and the country drifted deeper into purple-hued, immigrant-overrun chaos.

“Democratic strategists believe that these attacks did have an impact,” the Times finally admitted.

This wasn’t just a Democrat messaging failure. It was a clarifying moment for the whole country. The trans sports issue didn’t move millions of votes on its own; it revealed just how fragile the Democrats’ cultural consensus had become. A party built on carefully curated identities and queer intersectional slogans at last proved unable to defend basic concepts like fairness, childhood, or biological reality.

That collapse didn’t push voters rightwards. It reminded them they’d already drifted there, quietly, and that only one party seemed willing to say what everyone else was thinking. This story, a complete reversal for the Times, is perhaps best viewed as a new permission structure intended to give centrist Democrats a chance to oppose boys playing in girls’ sports.

The trans reckoning is no longer coming. It’s here.

Have a terrific Tuesday! Come back tomorrow for another roundup of essential news and commentary, C&C style.

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