☕️ FORKED, REDUX ☙ Wednesday, April 16, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Lying media muffles the sky story, but chemtrail cover gets torched; EPA strikes, Ladapo roars, Trump woos war and wages peace while steamrolling the swamp with speed and access.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! In today’s astonishing roundup: despite lying media’s best efforts to cover for it, for some reason, weather modification shenanigans are finally getting their pants pulled down; EPA chief strikes at the heart of chemtrail denialism; Florida surgeon general piles on with diatribe about sneaky weather modifiers; federal workers get a second chance to take Trump’s deal and this time they are taking it; United Kingdom’s highest court issues the most surprising ruling that none of us ever expected and Matt Walsh smiled; Trump team makes progress on Ukraine war negotiations; Trump deploys key ally as special envoy; and Trump’s two-pronged strategy to defang the deep state through access and velocity.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Spank my pillows and call me Nancy. Remember that “conspiracy theory” the media mocked you about — where scientists sneered through their Warby Parkers and insisted those smeary sky streaks were just “harmless” water vapor? Just a natural byproduct of your freedom to fly? Welp… the EPA just kicked down the front door. Behold the website MakeSunsets.com — a startup straight from the fever dream of a Bond villain combined with an Etsy store. Polished, preening, and proudly selling “cooling credits” — one buck per dose of sulfur dioxide lobbed into the upper atmosphere. It’s like carbon offsets meets industrial sabotage.

From the site: a wide-smiling, environmentally conscious gay couple —looking like they just biked from Burning Man to a TED Talk— claim to fight climate change by launching SO₂ balloons into the stratosphere. SO₂, sulphur dioxide, is the same chemical that produces acid rain, respiratory disease, and Chernobyl sunsets.

The prices are suspiciously low. One “cooling credit” can be purchased for as little as $1, which allegedly cools the Earth as much as if one ton of CO₂ were removed for a whole year. Two years ago, Time ran a feature article about the company headlined, “Exclusive: Inside a Controversial Startup's Risky Attempt to Control Our Climate.” These days, I wonder whether the 2023 article was planted as a distraction to make the company’s work seem small-scale and thus a low-priority problem.

Enter the new sheriff. Trump’s EPA Commissioner, Lee Zeldin, also seems interested in Make Sunsets’s operation. Yesterday, he fired off a demand letter to the shady outfit (and tweeted it). The Sunset team, whoever they are, has 30 days to float back a list of documents or face criminal penalties.

The website crows that the SO₂ they claim to release is naturally occurring, since it sometimes burps out of volcanoes. But, first of all, according to the Time story, they get their SO₂ by burning a sulphur-based fungicide. So there’s that. Second, volcano emissions may be natural, but they are not healthy. They’re considered catastrophic. Finally, SO₂ makes acid rain, a phenomenon that I am old enough to remember was something environmentalists used to want to get rid of.

A quick ChatGPT query disclosed long-term risks like soil acidification, respiratory illness, heart problems, infrastructure corrosion, and even social unrest. Perhaps the most horrifying fact comes right from the company’s frequently asked questions:

Six months to three years! Right now, you are probably wondering something that pops up a few questions down the list: is this legal???? The goofy, totally non-threatening, Birkenstock-wearing gay scientists are way ahead of you:

Haha, my goodness there they are cropping up again, like a treatment-resistant venereal disease. The CIA and FBI, front-loaded on the list of government agencies Andrew and Luke are in contact with. It’s not creepy at all! It’s totally natural that those two spooky agencies should be involved in Make Sunset’s compliance with the Weather Modification Act of 1976 (WMA).

Andrew and Luke (or whoever it really is) say they’re using balloons, which is clever, since nobody can see them up oozing chemicals that float in the stratosphere for years. But planes could easily spread SO2 as well.

Technically, the WMA does not legalize weather modification. It just requires anyone doing it to file a NOAA report. And, get this, that NOAA link includes a quasi-searchable report database— with the friendliness and usability of a Soviet-era DMV portal. You can’t search by anything useful, like company name, but you can poke around the horrifying reports, and there are lots of them. Hundreds. Thousands.

If you are a chemtrails truther, all the evidence you need to prove it’s happening is right there, if you have the time and patience of Methuselah, that is. Have a gander for yourself.

But the good news is, Lee Zeldin now wields the Clean Air Act. And yesterday he went straight to the source, bypassing lying media and their cohort of mendacious experts who deny anybody is injecting chemicals into the skies. And Zeldin broke the story on Twitter (although media, of course, ignored it).

Chemtrail denialism is dead.

🔥 Yesterday, Florida’s Surgeon General Joe Ladapo asked “who in Heaven’s name thinks they are entitled, have a right, to medicate you? That’s insane.” He started off with fluoride (and also mentioned jabs) but quickly reached weather modification:

CLIP: Dr. Ladapo rails against the global scientific effort to save us from ourselves by ‘insane’ forced medicalization (4:26).

Many states are considering laws to make weather modification illegal. The problem, as I’ve repeatedly told you, is that the Clean Air Act stands in the way, which trumps state law. But now, thank Heavens, a sane EPA is calling the shots.

Did you ever think you’d live long enough to see this? Media can suck it.

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They’re forked again! Yesterday, Bloomberg ran an encouraging story headlined, “Federal Workers Jump at Buyout Offers They Once Shunned.” DOGE sent a second buyout offer to federal employees, coloquially called “Fork in the Road Part 2,” and this time they seem to be listening. They should take the deal or quit complaining.

This time, Fork 2 is being stabbed from each agency, rather than as a centralized offer like Fork 1. Bloomberg reported that about 20,000 IRS employees —about 20% of the agency’s staff— accepted the forking offer. By comparison, only 3,700 of them took the first stab. The paper also reported that 3,700 prodded DOE workers took the new deal (double the 1,300 who jumped the first time), and 4,000 DOT workers have so far signed on (about 7% of the agency’s total).

It seems to be everywhere. Politico said the Pentagon’s entire “Digital Design Services” team is taking the deal (all 14 of them, but still).

Politico’s story reported that a “former senior Pentagon official” complained that DOGE’s delving into the Defense Department was damaging and unproductive. “They’re not really using AI, they’re not really driving efficiency. What they’re really doing is smashing everything,” the former official said.

Smashing everything sounds productive and helpful to me, but I wasn’t there.

The Fork 2 emails informed workers they were getting a second chance due to various ‘problems’ with the first offer. It reminded them that the agencies are working on reduction-in-force plans. Any employees who get “RIF’d” will get only one week of severance per year of service, plus their health care will end immediately. But if they take the buyout, they keep their full paychecks and their medical coverage through the end of September.

Following Trump’s first-week executive orders, agencies are now due to submit their reorganization plans, which are expected to include more yet waves of job cuts, new offers to work on Indian reservations, and, according to Politico, other “proposals that could make government jobs less attractive.”

What kind of other proposals? Yesterday, DOGE announced it was expanding its credit card audit, since there are still twice as many government-issued cards as employees.

No more credit cards to feed their soy latte habits. The clock is ticking. Take the fork.

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Yesterday, reporting a rare bit of good news from Europe, the Wall Street Journal ran a story headlined, “U.K. Supreme Court Rules Trans Women Can’t Be Defined as Women.”

Yesterday, the UK’s Supreme Court issued a “landmark ruling” that transgender women —i.e., cross-dressing men— can’t be considered women under the country’s equality laws. “The unanimous decision of this court is that the terms ‘woman’ and ‘sex’ in the Equality Act 2010 refer to biological women and biological sex,” said the court’s deputy president, Lord Hodge, keeping a stiff upper lip.

The kerfluffle arose over a 2018 Scottish law allowing men with bizarre “gender recognition certificates” to access women’s legal rights, including loitering in their sports leagues and wandering to and fro in their bathroom spaces. Pro-women activists sued, resulting in yesterday’s decision seven years later.

It’s a drop in the woke Europe bucket, but still. It’s a start. Welcome to a scrap of sanity, European readers.

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While media obsesses about an MS-13 terrorist “accidentally” deported to El Salvador’s super-max CECOT prison, President Trump’s global negotiations roll inexorably forward. The Hill ran one of the stories yesterday, headlined “Witkoff says US ‘finally’ got answer on Putin’s demands for peace.”

A few months ago, this development would have been all the news cared about. Now, corporate media largely ignored the historic meeting. Trump’s emissary just spent five hours negotiating peace in St. Petersburg directly with media villain President Putin.

Longtime Trump ally Steven Witkoff is the United States’ “special envoy,” and he is everywhere these days. This week’s headlines informed us he is heading for France with Secretary Rubioto talk about trade and Ukraine, and is leading the talks with Iran to shut down its nuclear program and make Middle East peace. Last month, Witkoff negotiated a peace deal between Israel and Hamas.

And so we begin to see two more prongs of Trump’s anti-deep state plan emerge from the fog of political war: access and velocity.

🚀 President Trump has completely sidelined the State Department. Steve Witkoff first ran with Trump back in the day, over 30 years ago. They’ve been friends ever since. He started as a New York real estate lawyer, and later began his own successful real estate investment firm. He has zero diplomatic experience, but Trump once called him “one of the toughest negotiators I ever knew.”

Steve is an insider’s insider. He’s long been a prominent Republican Party supporter and was a close Trump ally during both elections. He’s poured millions into Trump’s campaigns and took the stage at the 2024 Republican National Convention, where he praised Trump as a “dear friend” and described how the former president stood by him after his adult son died of an opioid overdose.

Witkoff’s appointment—and his universal reach—make one thing clear: Trump isn’t playing nice with the federal bureaucracy this time. He’s completely scraped them out. So much for Ivy League credentialism, “institutional knowledge,” and interagency consensus. Trump has good reasons to ice them out. The bureaucracy leaks like a spaghetti strainer, and even when it’s not actively sabotaging the mission, the striped-pants crowd takes months to finish a memo.

So this time, Trump’s not waiting around for entrenched federals to stop World War III. He’s sent in a haggler. He’s locked the bureaucrats out of the command room— denying them access, and along with it, their primary weapon: the strategic leak.

Last time, twenty people were on the Zelensky call. They crushed him with leaks—fueling double impeachments and bogging his agenda down in the storied, army-ending rasputitsa of Ukraine’s mud season.

This time, he’s sending Witkoff alone. No leaks.

🚀 It has been impossible to keep up with the daily executive orders, multiplicity of overseas missions, shifting tariff levels, streaming DOGE reveals, declassified disclosures, and the rest of Trump 2.0’s various moving parts.

I am beginning to understand that is the point.

The Democrats are replaying the same tired 2016 playbook. They are laying in the tall grass, waiting for Trump to make an unforced error. Then they will strike. Along with their compliant corporate media allies, they’ll metastasize the hoped-for mistake into a narrative of doom they can use to cripple or destroy his presidency. If they can make Trump even a little politically toxic, they can peel off enough Republicans to slow or stop his agenda now, and will be poised to recapture the House of Representatives in next year’s midterms.

That’s their theory, anyway. The headlines show you where they keep nipping at the president’s heels. This week’s Harvard story and the MS-13 “father of the year” narrative are two terrific examples.

But somewhere along the way, Trump recognized their strategic weakness: shaping effective narratives requires time and space. Agenda-ending narratives need news-cycle time to grow and fully flower into life, and they need rhetorical space for media to fan the flames of public discontent. But if the news keeps coming, too fast, then narratives wither on the vine before they can take root. And if the public’s attention keeps being distracted by developments, the narratives get crowded out, lacking room to spread.

In other words, poison narratives need room to breathe, but Trump is suffocating them with speed. They need time to grow, but he’s burying them under breaking news. They need daylight to fully flower, but he’s filling social media’s skies with smoke. He’s not letting the poison pool long enough to become deadly.

The antidote to the Democrats’ venomous narrative strategy is velocity— pedaling too fast for their fake news stories to catch hold or catch up. It’s a bureaucratic blitzkrieg, overwhelming the deep state apparatus with moving targets and multiple fronts.

So far, it’s working.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! We shall return, tomorrow morning in fact, with more essential news and compelling commentary.

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