☕️ FOLLOWING SCIENCE ☙ Tuesday, November 11, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

BBC admits errors; Trump threatens lawsuit; UK reels from bad month; Trump hijacks affordability debate; we unpack prices, wages, and policy; DOJ whacks Big Meat; trans sanity surfaces; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Veteran’s Day! We have a quick holiday roundup: after BBC admits mistakes, President Trump threatens to sue; a no-good, very bad month for Great Britain; indignant Times claims Trump trying to steal affordability narrative; we dig into the affordability details; grocery prices versus wages; Democrats’ non-plan; Trump policies bringing prices down; short-term versus long-term fixes; DOJ targets big meat; dems fret over Dominion voting machines; and the Transgender Revolution may not be spinning for much longer.

⛑️ C&C MORNING MONOLOGUE ⛑️

Veterans Day is when America pauses to remember that her freedom has always come at a price paid in human blood and broken bodies. It’s not a holiday of celebration so much as one of reverence— a living memorial stitched together by stories of courage, loss, and duty.

At 11:00 a.m. on the 11th day of the 11th month —the precise moment the guns of World War I fell silent— the country honors all who wore the uniform, from the muddy trenches of France to the deserts of Iraq. The air seems to hold its breath; flags ripple in slow motion; and for a fleeting instant, even the noise of modern life softens.

Each veteran is a walking fragment of history. The old man with the weathered ball cap at the diner once jumped from a burning bomber over Europe. The quiet nurse in the VA line once fought a different war— against infection, exhaustion, and fear. The young amputee who learned to walk again carries not only his own scars but the unseen weight of comrades who didn’t return, who sacrificed their last full measure of devotion to the nation that had birthed them.

Veterans Day matters because it reminds us that citizenship is not a spectator sport. It’s a covenant, a sacred promise— one guaranteed by those willing to risk everything for people they’ve never met. In honoring them, the nation measures itself: not by its wealth or its politics, but by its gratitude.

Thank you, veterans!

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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That escalated quickly. Yesterday, the New York Times ran an anguished story headlined, “Trump Threatens to Sue the BBC for $1 Billion After Jan. 6 Documentary.” The resignation in disgrace of two top BBC officials established clear evidence of defamation, and the President wasted no time. After yesterday’s resignations, it was just more bad news for the Beeb.

Trump’s lawyers demanded a retraction, a full apology rather than a weasely, passive-aggressive admission that ‘mistakes were made,’ and payments that “appropriately compensate President Trump for the harm caused.”

If not, warned the lawyers’ letter, President Trump will sue the election-interfering, government-sponsored news network for one billion dollars. “The BBC is on notice,” the letter concluded, and to dig the knife in, added an all-caps postscript: “GOVERN YOURSELF ACCORDINGLY.” Not only that. UK Telegraph headline, yesterday:

“The White House may consider restricting the BBC’s access to open press events due to their admission of falsely doctoring President Trump’s words,” a senior White House official told The Telegraph. (Earlier this year, the AP challenged a similar ban and lost.)

The BBC has until Friday afternoon to respond to Trump’s demand letter. Or else.

To remind Portland readers: in January, the BBC was caught doctoring Trump’s January 6th video, splicing clips together from different parts of the speech to make it look and sound like the President called for a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol. In other words, classic fake news. After holding out for most of the year, and after Press Secretary Leavitt launched a rhetorical fusillade, the BBC caved in a most cowardly fashion and its two top officials resigned in disgrace.

I won’t waste time on the Times’ awful article. They could have just reported the news of Trump’s new demand and quit there. But the paper —which is also being sued by President Trump for $15 billion— excreted three more pages wringing its chocolate-stained hands over press freedom.

The First Amendment of the Constitution is a masterwork of democratic elegance, a stroke of genius that secures our precious freedoms from tyranny, and Times readers think it means fake foreign news can lie all they want without consequence.

But First Amendment free speech has never extended to defamation, much less defamation by British election interferers.

The Beeb was in a box. By conceding that “mistakes were made,” they tempered the political pushback. But they also handed Trump’s lawyers an admission that the original story was a stinker. Their white-wigged lawyers surely knew it, too, which tells you how much pressure they must have felt.

🔥 The British government has had a rough month. It was forced to fire its US Ambassador —one of the most powerful permanent bureaucrats in the UK— after new Epstein disclosures. Prince Andrew was stripped of his royal titles and banned from palace properties. Now the government’s prized news organ faces an ‘existential crisis’ along with a nasty Trump lawsuit.

The long-suffering British people aren’t too happy with their government or their hapless prime minister, either. “Where did it all go wrong?”, CNN innocently wondered in a headline last month.

I’ll tell you where it went wrong. It went wrong in 2016, when Britain’s version of the CIA (MI6) collaborated with Obama and friends to overthrow the U.S. government.

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Bwahahaha! I told you so! Yesterday, the New York Times ran an indignant story headlined, “Trump Tries to Seize ‘Affordability’ Message.” The subheadline sneeringly clarified, “The issue has buoyed Democrats and is resonating with an American electorate that is souring on the president’s economic agenda.” Since everyone is fighting over it, it’s time to gid into affordability.

Trump started the tug-of-war over the “affordability issue.” In 2024, the President himself ran on affordability. He ran against Bidenflation generally, and the price of eggs and gas in particular. If anything, Democrats’ current efforts to steal the issue from Trump suggests they’ve concluded that’s why they lost. (“It’s the economy, stupid.”)

The affordability crisis is real. Many everyday items are, in fact, painfully expensive. It’s not just Democrats complaining. Last week, Republican firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) told a CNN interviewer, “Grocery prices remain high. Energy prices are high. My electricity bills are higher here in Washington, D.C., at my apartment, and they’re also higher at my house in Rome, Georgia — higher than they were a year ago.”

Yesterday on Newsnation, Bill O’Reilly called for a “cost of living czar,” because “the problem is that some staples of life are far too expensive. Food, insurance for your car, for your house, for your health… It is way out of line now. WAY out of line.”

They’re not wrong. As the head of a household of five, I can testify that a modest restaurant meal has become nearly unaffordable; I now expect the dinner tab to be over $150 at a counter service place, and that’s without booze. They bring the check out along with a financing form.

In an October PEW poll, respondents’ top economic concern was groceries. A solid majority of 65% said they were very concerned about the price of food and consumer goods. It is not their imagination. (The other day, I told Michelle that I now avert my eyes whenever I see “Publix” pop up on the bank statement to avoid strokes.) Granted, this example is from Whole Foods, but still:

Of course, expensive organic produce is not Trump’s fault. It’s not tariffs. It’s the rotten fruit of Bidenflation, combined (in the case of energy) with the power demands of AI data centers. In contrast to the Big Cabbage, in less than a year, Trump’s policies are already bringing prices down.

🔥 The “affordability crisis” no longer about rising prices. Wells Fargo’s annual Thanksgiving Price Index actually fell this year by a modest -2.5%. Wells Fargo says you can prepare a ten-person Turkey Day feast for $80:

The problem is that Wells Fargo’s modest savings were calculated against Biden’s already sky-high prices. Down a little, but still too expensive.

Beyond groceries, even the Times admitted that lots of stuff is cheaper under President Trump’s policies compared to Biden’s levels:

• Gas prices are down

• Interest and mortgage rates are down

• Eggs have plunged back to sane levels

• Prescription prices are falling

• The stock market is soaring

• Unemployment is low

The Grey Lady also reluctantly conceded that yet more good stuff is coming down the pipeline, like:

• a possible $2,000 dividend to every American from tariff revenue;

• a TrumpRx website to sell lowest-price drugs direct to consumers;

• Obamacare subsidies paid into individual health savings accounts; and

• a 50-year mortgage option (I’ll have a lot to say about this one if it happens).

In short, Trump’s policies are working. And he is doing a lot to address the “affordability crisis.” So why are conservatives like MTG and O’Reilly whinging about Democrat talking points? The answer is because Biden and the Autopen printed so much money that it tripled the amount of circulating currency.

Something like that is going to smart. There’s no avoiding it.

Inflation is inconvenient; nobody likes having to carry cash around in buckets. But it is painful only because of a three-word economic law: “Wages are sticky.” It means that, in a time of hyperinflation, people’s salaries increase much slower than consumer goods prices. Wages get stuck. Prices are the hare, and wages are the tortoise. There are many reasons why wages are so sticky. Some reasons are obvious, some are less intuitive, and some are drenched in syrup.

But it matters little why. It just is.

Whenever wages finally do increase, groceries and electricity and insurance don’t get cheaper. They just get more affordable.

The most difficult news is that prices will never return to pre-Biden levels. There’s too much cash sloshing around. A president can indeed ease the pain, in the short term. For instance, this week, the Administration went after big beef. New York Times, Saturday:

And, just how much meat can a meatpacker pack if a meatpacker could … sorry. I got carried away.

As another example, SNAP reform may be less about the budget than we think. It may be more about targeting short-term grocery prices. For example:

In other words, a goofy government policy of subsidizing 42 million people’s grocery purchases with free money will inevitably push up prices. If the subsidy is reduced, prices will fall. For Trump, that’s low-hanging fruit (* not covered by SNAP).

🔥 Anyone not legally blind can easily see the all-of-government effort to keep a lid on grocery prices and prune them wherever possible. But the only real long-term fix to the “affordability crisis” is to raise wages. That takes time. And Democrats are convinced Trump can’t possibly do it fast enough for politics. That’s why, having just been spanked silly with it, Dems are trying to turn the affordability argument back against the President.

It’s a conundrum. Trump can juice the economy with loads of new jobs, but if the economy warms up too fast, it can overheat and burn to a crisp. In other words: more inflation. Most economists think it is outright impossible for government policy to raise wages (the price of labor) without also raising the price of everything else, too, which ultimately pegs the problem at an even higher price point.

We need higher wages without inflation. Which means it must be solved without government subsidies or interventions. For example, they can order fast-food minimum wages to be increased, but that just increases the price of hamburgers, too. You can cap rents, but that causes a shortage of apartments.

A real solution requires boosting jobs the hard way. Not with easy policy sugar, but with structural protein. Trump needs to boost productivity and employment while simultaneously getting government out of the way.

I don’t know the plan. But, at the risk of oversimplifying an insanely complicated economic Rubik’s Cube, the carefully designed tariffs —coupled with smart H1B visa reforms to stop foreign workers from taking all the new jobs— appear to be the key. It’s all about getting the jobs back.

This may explain why Trump has been so obsessively coercing companies and countries into building new U.S.-based facilities. The government can also encourage whole new markets — such as AI, robotics, cryptocurrency, and self-driving cars — which generate more demand for workers, without requiring subsidies or interventions like green energy boondoggles. Similarly, bringing blue-collar manufacturing (i.e. jobs) back to U.S. shores also creates demand for workers, which necessarily increases wages as employers compete for labor.

Trump’s plan is vast, complex, and smart. And it is evidently working, even if not fast enough for some people. But, needless to say, Democrats have no affordability plan, nor are they capable of devising one. Who is going to do it, Jasmine Crockett?

Don’t count on corporate media to explain ‘affordability’ to anyone. The solution is healing America’s economic engine, not slapping more expensive Band-Aids on top of festering financial sores.

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We might not be out of the transgender woods of insanity yet, but we can hear the highway. The London Times ran a highly ironic story yesterday, headlined, “Transgender women to be banned from all female Olympic events.” Best of all: they did it using science.

“The International Olympic Committee is set to announce a ban on transgender women in female competition early next year,” the Times non-ironically began, “after a science-based review of evidence about permanent physical advantages of being born male.”

This will shock you, so prepare yourselves. The IOC appointed a team of brilliant scientists to study one of the most confounding scientific puzzles in history: are average men stronger than average women?

The astonishing conclusion was, and I quote: “the scientific evidence showed there were physical advantages to being born male that remained with athletes, including those who had taken treatment to reduce testosterone levels.”

Eureka! They cracked it! They’ll probably get a Nobel Prize in biology.

The result, with appropriate apologies to frustrated cross-dressers, is that trans athletes must now compete in the Olympic category determined by their biological sex rather than today’s selected gender costume.

But that wasn’t all. Apparently, IOC members didn’t just accept the IOC scientists’ conclusions. They did it enthusiastically. According to the Times, using double passive-tense, “an IOC insider said there had been hugely positive feedback from IOC members about the presentation.”

The article was an egregious bit of journalistic malpractice, but in a very optimistic way. Omitted from the story were any quotes from trans activists or NGOs about erasing trans people. There were no comments by affected athletes sobbing how they prepared for this moment their whole trans lives only to have it all torn away by trans phobia. Indeed, there was no criticism of the decision at all. It was just a scientific breakthrough.

Yay! Bravo for scientists. So honest! So brave! So willing to follow the science wherever the evidence of a paycheck led them.

What morons. This so-called “scientific advance” was just a cowardly retreat back to the status quo ante. Until very recently, Olympic athletes were always required to compete in their correct biological category. These chickens are just hiding behind “science.” You have to sympathize with trans people, who trusted that science was on their side. They are about to encounter the two-by-four hidden in science’s fluffy couch cushion.

More than anything, the IOC’s enthusiastic erasure of trans athletes —without a scintilla of protest— suggests that the transgender revolution may finally be spinning to a stop.

And not a moment too soon.

Have an awesome Veteran’s Day! Thank a veteran, then meet me back here tomorrow morning, for an all-new roundup of essential news and sarcastic 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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