☕️ FOUNTAINS OF WOKE ☙ Wednesday, June 4, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Comment glitch explained; Dr. Oh No! denied UF throne and DEI spoils; new “scarient” debuts as jab noise spikes; Palantir panic unpacked; NC teen wins vocabulary war; and more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! Halfway through the week, and I’m pretty sure about that, this time. Your roundup includes: comment-blocking, explained; Dr. Oh, No! voted down in contentious Board of Governors hearing, so no golden DEI contract; media trots out stupid new scarient to celebrate the controversy surrounding new jab approvals; I do my best to dispel the fog surrounding the media’s minted Palantir controversy; and another happy conclusion to the latest woke battle over a North Carolina vocabulary lesson.

🪖 C&C ARMY POST | MORNING MONOLOGUE 🪖

Apologies for accidentally turning off comments on yesterday’s post. It wasn’t censorship, sabotage, or AI sentience. It was just a long-standing Substack quirk (um, glitch) that’s been dogging me for months.

By default, open comments are set to “off” (i.e., paid subs only). So six days a week, I manually flip them to “on.” No big deal— just one of those fun little puzzles like trying to remember whether daylight savings is starting or ending.

But the trap is that, if I change the comment setting and then do literally anything else, like tweak the title, blink wrong, or pet the cat, Substack’s gremlins surreptitiously switch the comments back off again. With no warning.

Anyway, that’s what happened yesterday. The glitch strikes again! No conspiracy or cover-up. Remember: Never panic until I give the signal.

Feel free to drop your banned comment from yesterday on today’s post. I’ll pretend I posted both at the same time and you’re just ahead of the curve.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Yesterday, woke went to Florida and died. Like Conquistador Ponce de León after failing to find immortality, DEI darling Dr. Santa Ono departed the Sunshine State without locating the highest-paid public university contract in history. The Alachua Chronicle ran the story headlined, “SUS Board of Governors rejects Dr. Santa Ono as president of the University of Florida.” (SUS means State University System, but nice one, Chronicle.)

In what can best be described as the academic equivalent of a hostage video, Dr. Ono disavowed nearly every statement, program, and position he’d previously endorsed— blaming them on other people, old data, or the fact that he’s “an immunologist” and therefore not responsible for understanding, believing in, or explaining anything outside a petri dish.

Pressed on why he once praised a task force that declared “whiteness is an obstacle to inclusive excellence,” Ono clarified that he no longer stands by those words. Or those ideas. Or that task force. Or apparently anything he said prior to about 18 months ago. It was the same for vaccine mandates (“hard to say”), anti-racism (“not my specific area”), and the climate crisis (“I didn’t have the data back then”).

At one point, he even backed off his own field of study, claiming he never reviewed the clinical data on covid mandates, despite being —get this— an immunologist.

Ono reversed more often than a 17-year-old cheerleader while parallel parking.

By the end of the hearing, some alert viewers wondered whether the Board of Governors had sniffed out not just ideological incoherence, but possibly a legitimate, Biden-like medical problem. Ono repeatedly claimed he couldn’t recall the context of his own public statements, couldn’t remember what “renewed adversity” referred to, and couldn’t explain why he signed, then un-signed, a national letter denouncing “government overreach.”

He couldn’t even recall the values he once called core. To be honest, it sounded less like a job interview and more like a cognitive screening.

CLIP: Dr. Oh-No tells how to find the fountain of implicit bias in you (0:36).

Did he, perhaps, suffer from an ideological infection? Or maybe jab-induced, early-onset dementia? Or had Dr. Ono, somewhere between Vancouver and Gainesville, gotten amnesia sitcom-style, by walking into a low doorway, and now he can’t even remember that? Whichever, Ono experienced a convenient flare-up of memory-itis.

At one point, when pressed about a quote from last October, he conveniently replied, “I don’t remember what I was saying at that time.” When pressed on whether he would mandate vaccines again, immunologist Ono said he “doesn’t have enough data” to make that decision.

You almost felt bad for the guy. Almost. Then you remembered he was about to be handed $3 million a year to lead Florida’s flagship university and steer its students through the minefields of science, speech, and social values— armed, apparently, with an empty pipette, a DEI-induced blind spot, and a memory card corrupted by progressive firmware.

🔥 Let’s learn a little so that we can appreciate yesterday’s vote even more. UF’s Board of Trustees is the school’s local governing body, responsible for overseeing university operations and initially selecting presidential candidates. The Trustees unanimously approved Dr. Ono’s candidacy.

The 17 members of Florida’s Board of Governors (BOG) oversee the State University System, including UF. Fourteen of those members were appointed by Governor Ron DeSantis, and are empowered to confirm or reject presidential appointments made by individual university boards.

To put it bluntly, yesterday’s BOG hearing made history and broke records.

The Governors voted 10–6 against confirming Dr. Ono as UF’s president. That has never happened before. It was the first time in Florida history that the BOG overruled a university’s selection for president, never mind the selection of a morbidly obese university gorilla like UF.

But what really ripped up the map was why. A horrified Politico described the vote as “shocking” and “unprecedented.”

Politico’s editors were shocked and horrified because the vote meant that DEI —once the golden ticket to elite academic posts— became a fatal liability. Not a bullet point. Not a “difference of opinion.” A disqualifier.

Dr. Santa Ono, a man once heralded as a rising star in the woke constellation, found himself forced to disown his own past like a penitent bishop hauled before the Spanish Inquisition. He didn’t just walk back his positions— he crawled, mumbling apologies, disclaimers, and immunology-themed evasions until even the friendly Governors looked uncomfortable.

The man who once declared that “inclusion and equity… must be at the heart of everything we do” now insisted he wasn’t even really sure what “anti-racism” meant. He rejected initiatives he no longer supports. And he regretted saying racism was America’s original sin— an idea now apparently cast out like forbidden fruit. By the end, he was bleeding out in a swarm of his own mosquitoes and chewing through his own record like a sawgrass sandwich: bitter, stringy, and not especially nourishing.

It was a symbolic moment not just for Florida, but for the whole national trajectory of campus politics. The vote’s message was loud and clear: ideological alignment isn’t enough anymore. It might be disqualifying.

🔥 Above all, to other university presidents and would-be academic conquerors, Florida’s rejection of Dr. Santa Ono wasn’t just a local dispute. It was a territorial marker. A declaration that the old maps have become untrustworthy.

What once gilded an academic résumé —DEI manifestos, activist laurels, ideological conformity— can now shipwreck academic élites, stranding them on unfamiliar shores, unwelcomed and unelected.

For sitting college presidents everywhere, it was black powder fired across the bow. In Florida, the age of ceremonial appointments is over. These are now hard landings, with the state’s Board of Governors acting less like gullible natives and more like Spanish Inquisitors with receipts. Every quote, every signature, every initiative from previous academic expeditions is fair game—especially those once praised to the hills in the wilderness of woke orthodoxy.

Ono’s defeat signaled to the academic fleet that the currents have shifted. Florida has charted a new course— less DEI, more clarity; less virtue-signaling, more consequence. The Sunshine State isn’t following the usual procession of elite academia anymore. It’s cutting its own trail through the palmettos, and it’s not interested in candidates who arrive burdened with ideological baggage from their last port of call.

And above all, the lesson was: don’t underestimate the locals. Florida isn’t the sleepy colony it once was. It’s become a proving ground, a place where credentials are questioned, catechisms are tested, and incompatible explorers are sent packing with spears and arrows sticking out of their backs.

I’m confident Dr. Santa Ono will be just fine, and I wish him fair winds on his next voyage. Though one wonders: when he drops anchor at the next ivory tower, will he once again discover the DEI fountain of professional youth, bubbling anew in that welcoming port? Or will his groveling words from yesterday’s hearing give him even more Spanish flu?

Apparently, ideological conversions can be as fluid as tide charts. Especially for elite academicians chasing golden appointments in faraway lands … where woke goes to die.

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They’re up to their old tricks again, searching the land of seasonal sniffles for undiscovered continents of catastrophe. Amidst controversy over new covid jab approvals, media’s lapdogs have returned to their vomit, and shazam!, a new strain is suddenly swirling through the Southern Hemisphere. Australia’s New Daily ran a scary story headlined, “What you need to know about Australia's new Covid variant.” The article was topped with spiky terror:

At least they haven’t named the new bug, just bumped up the revision numbers (NB.1.8.1). You must read down till the final third to find the punchline of this sad joke:

So … it’s a cold. Again.

It’s the El Dorado of Hysteria. Long before that helpful item about the new variant’s mildness appeared in the story, readers were soberly informed that the new variant spreads even “faster” and “more efficiently” — which is the same feverish fantasy they sail out about every new variant. My goodness—it’s practically supersonic now. How fast can it go? Can it time travel?

The breathless, front-page treatment given to every sniffle-shaped variant stands in stark contrast to the flat, underplayed reporting on real public health crises— like the quietly rising rates of cancer in younger adults, or the still-mysterious spike in at-home heart attack deaths since 2020. Stroke admissions are up. Global fertility is down.

But wait! There’s a new subvariant with a scary name and “enhanced receptor binding,” so let’s lead with that and bury the cardiac stats below the fold. You’d think we were dealing with smallpox in the Andes, not sinus congestion in suburban Melbourne.

When Trump declared corporate media to be “the enemy,” he wasn’t wrong.

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Speaking of New World Panics, the New York Times ran a breathless warning about another potential virus, it’s latest Trump-aligned enemy number one, now that Elon has stepped back. The story ran late last week below the terrifying headline, “Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans.” The subheadline pushed further: “The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work with the government, spreading the company’s technology — which could easily merge data on Americans.”

I was immediately suspicious. After all, the Times has never come across a data surveillance operation that it didn’t want to run away with and marry in Las Vegas. These are the same folks who applauded when tech companies tracked our every move for “public health,” when the FBI monitored school board protests for “domestic extremism,” and when intelligence agencies flagged memes as national security threats. They practically gushed over predictive policing algorithms.

But suddenly it’s an apocalyptic threat because Trump sits at the terminal?

So let’s unpack the latest liberal-fueled panic, which has managed to leak into parts of the conservative commentariat as well. And let me say clearly up front: I’m a libertarian-leaning conservative who opposes vaccine passports, digital currency, and national driver’s licenses. But let’s not let the Times frame the narrative this time.

🔥 Palantir is an unlikely villain in this global control story. For starters, it is a publicly traded company —anyone with a brokerage account can own a piece of it— and it’s subject to SEC disclosures, shareholder lawsuits, and the usual quarterly pressures. Not exactly the black-ops boogeyman the Times wants us to imagine.

Then again, BlackRock is also publicly traded, and that sketchy outfit oozes enough globalist megacorp energy to keep the tinfoil trade booming. As usual, the truth lies somewhere in between the talking points.

Palantir was co-founded by conservative mega-donor Peter Thiel, who once pledged to destroy the same media companies now raising the alarm. But on the other hand, Palantir’s CEO, Alex Karp, recently bragged in an interview that some of the company’s software “single-handedly stopped the rise of the far-right in Europe.” Not too good.

Palantir’s executive ranks brim with Obama-era intelligence officials. And it spent the pandemic quietly managing CDC logistics under the Biden administration. So yeah— there are good reasons to raise a skeptical eyebrow. And the Times, always able to detect a whiff of tyranny the moment a Republican retakes the White House, was more than happy to fan the flames.

🔥 Let’s be blunt: what the media’s trying to torpedo isn’t “surveillance”—it’s DOGE. That is, Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency. Palantir’s project threatens the status quo—bureaucratic turf silos, operational redundancy, and sacred cows galore.

Here’s what’s actually happening: the administration is expanding Palantir’s existing contracts with several federal agencies —like DHS, HHS, ICE, the IRS, and possibly Social Security and Education— to implement ‘Foundry,’ a software platform designed to help integrate and analyze otherwise disconnected federal data.

Foundry isn’t spyware. It’s a relational database platform with a user interface, built to help agencies see the big picture— like connecting Treasury’s tax data with SSA’s death records, or flagging overlapping benefits across programs.

To be honest, everyone assumed the federal government was already cross-referencing agency information. The real scandal DOGE uncovered wasn’t “too much integration”— it was total dysfunction. Retirement records were buried in a literal mineshaft. IRS computers were unable to verify that refund recipients were alive. There were massive gaps in agency coordination. DOGE didn’t reveal 1984— it revealed 1954.

Let’s also be clear: Palantir isn’t collecting our data. It’s not deciding what to do with it. It’s a data processor, not a data controller or collector. The federal agencies define the rules, the sources, and the outputs, and the agencies provide the data.

Palantir was not hired to spy, but to clean house. The goal is to eliminate waste, fraud, abuse, and decades of bureaucratic fungus. The potential cause for concern —what is worth real scrutiny— is that once data is better organized, it’s easier to misuse. The same tools that catch duplicate payments or filter out ineligible recipients could, in theory, be used to profile dissenters, target political enemies, or perish the thought, supercharge immigration enforcement.

That’s why progressive critics are howling, frantically trying to gin up a conservative civil rights panic. They could care less about our privacy. What they really fear is that the invisible galleons —the ghost fleets of siloed bureaucratic control— might stop sailing. They are freaking out that the Spanish doubloons of federal spending will no longer flow quietly into their NGOs’ bank accounts under the banners of “social equity,” “outreach,” or “compliance infrastructure.”

The New York Times is not worried about surveillance. Don’t make me laugh. They’re worried about accountability.

To be clear, Congress has a critical role to play. It must ensure the right goals are being pursued —efficiency, transparency, fraud reduction— not mission creep, and that Americans’ privacy is protected at every stage. The problem isn’t that the already existing data is being better organized. The problem, and it’s not a small problem, would be if it’s abused. That’s where oversight, not hysteria, belongs.

For further reading from a less extreme take, or for balance, see this X thread published yesterday by Wendy R. Anderson, a former senior defense official and ex-Palantir executive.

In other words, even the Times’s headline —“Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans”— is categorically false.

But at the same time, Palantir’s CEO grinned like a chimpanzee while boasting about influencing political outcomes abroad —by taking down conservative movements— which is definitely not reassuring. The modernization project is a must to help Trump finish what DOGE started—but so are transparency and congressional oversight. So, as I said, the Palantir story is both more and less than the hot takes suggest.

Anyway, that’s my take. Let me know what you think in the comments.

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Finally, appropos to where we started with the sinking of the SS Santa Ono, yesterday the Carolina Journal ran a very encouraging story headlined, “Student suspended for saying ‘illegal alien’ will receive public apology in new settlement.”

A long, absurd saga out of North Carolina has finally ended in crushing defeat for the speech police. Christian McGhee, 16, was suspended for three days last year— for using the term “illegal alien” during a vocabulary lesson. Now, according to recent court filings, he is getting exactly what he should’ve gotten from the beginning: a clean record, a public apology, and twenty grand to help cover his private school tuition after the public school system tried to cancel him.

The dummies on the Davidson County school board have now formally admitted that their ‘racial bias’ accusation was a ‘mischaracterization.” In other words, it was false, defamatory, and improper. They’ve agreed to purge all disciplinary references from Christian’s educational record. His real crime was saying something in English class that was factually accurate and legally defined.

The school’s overeducated administrators claimed the term illegal alien “caused a disturbance” among classmates. In other words, hurt feelings. As a quick factual refresher: The term “illegal alien” appears in federal statutes, in Supreme Court opinions, and in multiple rulings from the Department of Justice over many decades.

Ironically, during the year-long lawsuit, a sitting board member publicly smeared Christian’s mother, Leah McGhee. The board member sneeringly dragged up Leah’s decades-old recovery story in a grotesque attempt to silence her. But get this: That same arrogant board member was later forced to resign following a DWI crash. She quietly issued a private apology, though given the timing, one suspects she regrets the consequences more than her conduct.

The local fallout was electric. Local elections flipped and board members were swept out like the Florida tides. It turns out that parents don’t like it much when schools rewrite the dictionary and gaslight witnesses.

As Santa Ono and several freshly unemployed school board members have now learned the hard way, Americans are just about fed up with the woke nonsense. We’re done pretending that truth is hate speech. We’re done letting institutions gaslight parents, smear students, and bury accountability under layers of DEI jargon and feelings-based discipline.

Welcome to The Reckoning.™

Have a wonderful Wednesday! Crash back here tomorrow morning for even more un-woke, delicious, and delightful essential news and C&C commentary.

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