☕️ GASBAGS ☙ Wednesday, August 6, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

HHS nixes $500M in mRNA grants; Trump pries Ivy admissions data loose; Texas mail-in law upheld; visa bonds spark liberal angst; and the WEF meltdown rolls on like divine clockwork.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! Your midweek roundup includes: HHS shoots down a half billion in murky mRNA contracts and the pharma sycophants impotently complain; Trump forces Ivy League to cough up its deepest, darkest secret data and that means merit is roaring back; Texas laws restricting mail-in ballots find friendly ground at the federal circuit court, which spells bad news for midterm democrats; State Department drops visa bond requirement on sketchy third-world hellholes and liberals anguish; and the WEF’s slow-motion meltdown gloriously continues, defying all reasonable predictions.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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A half billion here, a half billion there, and pretty soon it adds up to real money. This morning, the New York Times led with a headline to keep medical fetishists up at night: “RFK Jr. Cancels Nearly $500 Million in mRNA Vaccine Contracts.” And that’s on top of the $600 million in bird flu ‘vaccines’ that Kennedy canceled back in May.

Now, they could still privately fund these projects an reap the rewards themselves but, well, you know. For the liberal-minded, the only thing worse than no life-saving vaccine is a life-saving vaccine with a co-pay. “This is a bad day for science,” grumbled mRNA developer Scott Hensley. It was also a bad day for his investment account, since the free government money just dried up. Now he must convince private investors. Who want results.

A “bad day for science” means it was a great day for human beings.

I don’t know who needs to hear this. But Moderna, for just one example, is a publicly traded company with billions in market cap, a war chest of covid windfall cash, and obligations to shareholders. If its pipeline of mRNA products is so promising, why should taxpayers fund the research?

Anyway, in its release, HHS said the $500 million in contract cancellations covered twenty-two different projects, all managed by BARDA, the government’s hybrid health-military-espionage biomedical skunkworks, a mutant love baby between DARPA and anthrax vaccines. After being cloned from DARPA in 2006, BARDA has spent money like a tipsy Ukrainian oligarch’s wife, with free license to invest in unsupervised “lone-bidder” contracts and unaccountable, high-risk “moonshot” projects.

Like what kind of projects, you ask? Haha, never mind, silly, because BARDA awards are often classified or redacted. Don’t get mad. It’s for your own good. (All of it is ironically hilarious, because the only people who don’t know what’s going on are the people who paying the tab. Everyone else —scientists, military, congresspeople, and every spook in the world— know exactly what’s happening. You can’t hide a large-scale science operation from them. Please.)

Since 2006, BARDA’s tangible accomplishments can only be measured by billions spent. Its only visible achievement is a “national stockpile” of slowly expiring vaccines for pandemics that never happened and untested miracle drugs nobody is taking.

If it sounds like a black-site, off-books funding operation for big pharma, well, you can decide for yourself.

Either way, BARDA officials swank their dark checkbooks around and have become quite popular in some places. For instance, they get invited to all the after-hours parties at pharma conventions. Wink, wink. You get what I’m saying, homie?

We saw last month in a leaked pharma memo that the jab industry is terrified of RFK, and repeatedly emphasized its new PR plan to lean into national security and fear. So, guess what the Times’ compliant pet experts said?

“Ending BARDA’s investment in mRNA technology creates a national security vulnerability,” said Chris Meekins, some kind of former pandemic official. Good doggie! He wasn’t done. He explained himself, sort of: “These tools serve as a deterrent to prevent other nations from using certain biological agents,” Meekins tweeted.

What nations? Which “certain” biological agents? Um, were those nations and certain biological agents funded by U.S. grants, too? Are we paying for both sides?? The diseases AND the cures? Like we did in, oh, dammit, what’s that city called again, Wu-something? The bat place?

(As far as I can tell, the Times found Meekins’ quote by randomly searching Twitter; Meekins’ puny tweet had only 139 views, two likes, and no replies. That, evidently, constitutes hard-breaking news nowadays.)

Haha, of course the Times ignored all this nuance and inconvenient remembering. That’s why we have Substack. Ironically, five years ago, nobody would even have noticed their shady, lucrative double-faced scams. Now, we’re onto them. Great job, morons.

Tl;dr: Kenney wiped out $500 million in sketchy mRNA skunkworks projects and the Times predicted doom. The end.

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Merit was in the news again. Yesterday, the Times —crying in its blackberry Ripple— ran another unintentionally encouraging story, headlined, “Columbia and Brown to Disclose Admissions and Race Data in Trump Deal.”

This week’s student dispatch from the collapsing citadel of American academia announced the Trump administration has forced Ivies Columbia and Brown to cough up their most highly guarded data: every applicant’s grades, test scores, and race. It’s like the Ivy League’s version of a TSA cavity search. The universities also had to promise —cross their hearts and hope to lose funding— that they will stop using race or even sneaky race proxies in admissions.

The Times’ hysterical, over-the-top reaction was that President Trump was personally “destroying diversity” by enforcing race-neutral policies. The rest of us thought, well isn’t that the POINT?

Far from being proud of their diversity schemes, the Ivies have long hidden the statistical byproducts of their murky, secretive, rigged admissions programs. Oh, they trumpet their outsized minority populations from gothic towers, but have clung to their internal data on scores and GPAs more tightly than a hobo clinging to his final fifth of Jack Daniels amidst a “mostly peaceful” BLM protest.

They were wise to hide that data. The numbers betray the narrative. The moment you stack GPAs and SATs side-by-side with race and admission rates, the curtain falls off the “holistic” wizard. The Ivies understand “disparate impact” better than anyone, and knew the real figures would show racial bias instead of racial neutrality. They wished to create an illusion that qualified black candidates were unrepresented; not prove in hard numbers that they were actually preferencing underqualified blacks over qualified whites and asians.

That’s why this is so huge. Trump has thrown down a dollar-stuffed gauntlet: if you want federal funds, you must prove you are following federal law. Not that they must show their work, the whole scam comes to a screeching halt. Yale law professor Justin Driver said morosely, “The Trump administration’s ambition here is to send a chill through admissions offices all over the country.” Precisely.

The settlement with Brown and Columbia plainly provided that the creative accounting days are over: “No proxy for racial admission will be tolerated.” After fighting the hook for a few weeks, they surrendered. TAW. Columbia’s acting president, Claire Shipman, said simply, “We have agreed to provide data to which the government is entitled.”

Merit is back. Acting Associate Attorney General Chad Mizell said, “The DOJ will end a shameful system in which someone’s race matters more than their ability.”

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Uh-oh! Yesterday, Politico ran a story headlined, “Appeals court upholds Texas law requiring ID numbers to cast mail-in ballots.” The sub-headline understatedly said, “Unanimous ruling from a three-judge panel is a setback for civil rights groups.” It’s a setback, all right.

One of the great mysteries of the nascent twenty-first century is the wholesale acceptance of the notion that showing up to vote in person is some kind of terrible burden. But the logic of exceptions carried the day, and now we must all grapple with a voting system as slippery as a hog rubbed down with gallons of P. Diddy’s baby oil.

The pig just got a little less slippery. Yesterday, the Fifth Circuit said it had “no difficulty” finding Texas’s 2023 law requiring an ID number (like a driver’s license number) to be provided along with the voter’s name and address on any valid mail-in ballot. The Fifth Circuit overturned a lower federal district court ruling that had found the ID requirement unnecessary and subject to simple mistakes.

But the Fifth Circuit disagreed. “The number-matching requirements are obviously designed to confirm that every mail-in voter is who he claims he is,” the Court wrote in its straightforward, nine-page order. “And that is plainly material to determining whether an individual is qualified to vote.”

Things could go a lot differently in Texas next midterms. On top of this ID requirement, Texas also recently survived the judicial gauntlet with another law requiring mail-in ballots to be received and counted by Election Day. And this week, Texas is lining up a redistricting plan, impatiently waiting for lily-livered Democrat lawmakers to stop fleeing the state and do their jobs.

The Times’s story did not mention whether the “voter’s rights activists” will attempt an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. I hope they do, since that would cement the ID requirement nationwide. Either way, the ID law becomes effective in the meantime. So get ready.

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On Monday, the New York Times ran yet another unintentionally terrific story under the bland headline, “U.S. to Require Some Foreign Visitors to Pay Bonds of Up to $15,000 for Entry.” Don’t be fooled by the bureaucratic phrasing — this is one of the most elegantly simple immigration deterrents in recent memory.

CLIP: Fox News discusses visa bond program with former DHS assistant secretary (3:17).

Though the Times had no problem identifying national security threats relating to lucrative pharma needle contracts, it applied doubting sneer-quotes to “national security threat” when it related to the Trump Administration’s claim that countries whose citizens loiter beyond their visa dates constitute risks.

According to a new State Department notice, foreigners seeking to enter the United States on tourist or business visas from countries with high visa overstay rates must put down no less than $5,000 to guarantee they’ll leave before their visas run out. They can have the money back on departure. The simple and logical idea is that, if the government is forced to track foreigners down for overstaying, then their bonds help offset the cost.

Yesterday, Al Jazeera reported the new program is already kicking in, with travelers from Malawi and Zambia now facing $15,000 visa bonds to obtain permission to enter the U.S. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) issued a scathing statement on its website yesterday complaining that the bond program was “discriminatory and humiliating,” and a “legalized shakedown” that “turns America’s welcome mat into a paywall.”

Exactly.

As for me, I have no problem with it. If other countries don’t like it, they can fix their overstay figures. If they want to do the same thing to us, they can weigh the effect on tourism and business as easily as we can. Sure, it’ll be a sacrifice giving up some Malawian tourist dollars— but our economy will survive.

The idea that people should be able to pass American borders without any bothersome security requirements is bedrock globalism. No thanks. From here in the cheap seats, it’s called fundamental border integrity. It is one of government’s most basic existential justifications, but it has been AWOL for decades.

A policy that actually holds people accountable for leaving when they’re supposed to is not xenophobia. It’s called, “functioning government.”

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The World Economic Forum’s slow-motion meltdown is getting even more watery. About two weeks ago, Fortune ran the latest in a series of, let’s be honest, smears against WEF figurehead Klaus “Own Nothing and Be Happy” Schwab, below the headline: “World Economic Forum founder Klaus Schwab and his wife cashed in on Davos with over $1 million in questionable travel expenses, investigation finds.”

You couldn’t ask for a clearer sign of globalism’s wasting disease than the meteoric downward trajectory of its favorite gasbag, “Klaus” Schwab, whose puffed-up cranium is losing air faster than the Hindenburg on 1.5x YouTube speed. Oh, the humanity. And most delicious of all, it’s an inside job.

The Wall Street Journal first broke the story about a year ago. “Whistleblowers” accused Schwab of —I realize this will be hard to believe— living large on taxpayer money received from donor countries, especially the United States. I’ve covered all this before, but for Portland readers, Schwab is another one of these “prop-ups” like Epstein or Sam Bankman-Fried, who never accomplished anything real or hard but somehow plopped out of nowhere into lucrative and politically influential positions. Weird.

Anyway, the “overspender” claim is part of the classic dirty tricks playbook for vaporizing out-of-favor nonprofits. You’ll recall the same kind of accusations were used to snatch James O’Keefe out of Project Veritas right after the Pfizer story dropped. Except in James’ case, the claims weren’t true (which is irrelevant), and in terms of self-pleasure at others’ expense, Klaus makes James look like a homeless Haitian eyeing a sick mallard as possibly dinner.

The Fortune story enumerated a long and eye-glazing list of personal purchases, glitzy vacations, over-the-top indulgences, “gifts” from donors, and luxury real estate interests— all on top of the Schwab’s “normal” extended stays in the world’s top hotels purely for economic conference purposes.

Even if Klaus or the WEF somehow survive all this, how does it look? Is this what “good global governance” looks like? Unaccomplished Germans who fell out of the ugly tree living luxuriously off money ultimately sourced from middle-class American citizens?

Set aside all the legitimate complaints about the WEF that frustratingly never seem to stick. In the world of politics, bare accusations of financial impropriety make political figures toxic. And, for decades, the World Economic Forum was synonymous with its figurehead and founder. So Klaus’ fall is also the WEF’s fall. And the WEF isn’t stumbling by accident. It’s obviously being pushed over.

One year ago, the WEF seemed poised to take control of the world. Remember all those stories about Klaus bragging about how many “WEF Young Global Leaders” he kept in his lederhosen’s oversized pockets? Well. Now what?

Be honest. Did you ever think we’d live to see the vaunted and terrifying World Economic Forum pop like an oily soap bubble? Or at least, this quickly? Let me know in the comments.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! Then get back here again tomorrow morning, so we can round up another terrific mug of essential news and commentary.

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