☕️ GET RFK ☙ Wednesday, July 2, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

New TAW wins: media caves, pays Trump; Senate passes Big Beautiful Bill—House showdown next; U. Penn strips Lia Thomas, apologizes; new pharma whistleblower drops mockery gold; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! Your roundup includes: more TAW goodness as another major corporate media outlet caves and pays Trump for election meddling; Senate passes Big Beautiful Bill, putting it in line for a landing in the House this week, when we will find out what’s in it; woke U. Penn officials forced to strip cross-dressing swimmer Lia Thomas of his awards for beating girls and apologize; and a new whistleblower exposé of big pharma plotting provides lots of food for relentless mockery.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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This morning, CNN ran the latest terrific TAW story, headlined, “Paramount settles Trump’s dubious ‘60 Minutes’ lawsuit with $16 million payout and no apology.” It might’ve been cheaper had they said they were sorry. Oh well.

Just like December’s ABC/Disney capitulation, Paramount will wire its $16 million “totally unrelated” hush money —not to Trump personally— but to his looming presidential library, which will probably be built out of gold-plated server racks and feature AI-powered holograms narrating Trumpian greatness in surround sound. It will be YUGE. Possibly intergalactic.

CNN’s pathetic sneering started in the very first sentence, in which —in a supposedly straight news story, mind you— it sandwiched the scornful descriptor “legally dubious” between the words “settle a” and “lawsuit.” So much for objective reporting.

Despite CNN’s twitchy insistence that the lawsuit was “legally dubious,” the merits were anything but. Trump accused CBS of creatively editing Kamala Harris’s interview with Lester Holt to conjure a digitally improved description of Biden’s Gaza policy —during the heat of an election cycle— airing different clips on different shows, then refusing to release the full transcript. It wasn’t routine editing; it was message management.

A media that delights in spotting everyone else’s “cheap fakes” saw no problem at all with what amounted to an AI-grade rewrite of Kamala’s signature word salad. CBS’s video editors transformed a meandering diplomatic mush into something that almost sounded like coherent policy. The same outlets that cried foul over TikTok deepfakes couldn’t be bothered when 60 Minutes edited the Cackler like a Marvel trailer, snipping out the painful dead air and scads of “ums” until the final cut sparkled with keen insight.

But hey, as long as the manipulation flatters the right candidate, it’s not “disinformation”—it’s just editing for time.

When CBS finally coughed up the raw footage under FCC pressure, the evidence confirmed that, yes, key context was missing. Whoops. CNN’s witless morons called the claim “legally dubious,” but a Texas judge denied CBS’s motion to dismiss— meaning the court found the claim had merit. Period, full stop, as Justice Jackson would say. That didn’t stop CNN’s unidentified “legal experts,” who allegedly “maintained that Trump’s suit was frivolous and that CBS was on solid ground to fight and win the case in court.”

“Everyone knows the case is not worth $20 million, or even 20 cents, in terms of legal merit,” the Freedom of the Press Foundation said last week. “It’s beyond frivolous — and that’s saying something given the myriad frivolous lawsuits Trump has filed.”

But, if the lawsuit survived a motion to dismiss, by definition it isn’t frivolous. “Frivolous” is a legal term of art, not just a spicy insult tossed around on cable news. A frivolous case is one so lacking in legal merit that it cannot reasonably be argued under any existing law. Courts can sanction parties and even lawyers for filing them. Yet Trump’s lawsuit cleared the plausibility bar at the dismissal stage, went to court-ordered mediation, and ended with a $16 million check. That’s not frivolous; it’s expensive.

The “legal experts” are lying. Or they don’t even understand basic legal concepts. Or both.

🔥 Here’s the bottom line: if, as CNN not-so-subtly suggested, CBS/Paramount paid Trump off because of political pressure, it never would have litigated its motion to dismiss. Losing that motion cost CBS a lot of money and a huge reputational hit. If CBS were just kissing Trump’s royal behind, it would have whipped out the corporate checkbook before calling the case frivolous and litigating dismissal.

But even worse, and proving why the media is, in fact, the enemy of the people, the 60 Minutes edits were exactly the kind of selective curation that, if reversed, would’ve had the media shrieking about “election interference” louder than a CNN chyron during a Trump presser on the Gulf of America. They would have pounded the anchor room conference tables and demanded criminal sanctions. But election interference is only seditious when you can accuse your political enemies of doing it. Apparently.

Haha. Let us count the cumulative TAW earnings.

Back in December, ABC/Disney quietly shelled out $15  million (plus $1  million in legal fees) to Trump’s future presidential library after libelously claiming he was “found liable for rape” in the E.  Jean Carroll case— a defamation lawsuit that ABC resolved with cash and a “statement of regret.” In January, Meta coughed up a cool $25  million ($22 million to the library) for suspending Trump’s Facebook account on January  6th, with Mark Zuckerberg personally negotiating the deal during a Mar‑a‑Lago sit-down. Today’s settlement with Paramount (CBS/60  Minutes) added $16  million more, rounding out a trifecta of $56 million so far recovered from corporate media morons.

Trump has more pending lawsuits in the pipeline, including one against the Des Moines Register and another against various pollsters and survey reporters for pushing fake polls right before the election.

We are rapidly approaching the point where one wonders whether Trump might ultimately claw back all the fines, judgments, and penalties extracted by progressive lawfare during the wilderness years of judicial persecution. As they say, two can play Cards Against Humanity, or the worm always makes a squiggly U-Turn, or words to that effect. I can’t remember.

T.A.W.

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Speaking of sneering media, the New York Times ran a scornful story this morning headlined, “Senate G.O.P. Gambles Its Legacy and Political Fate on Bill.” The so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” has survived Senate wrangling —after several all-nighters and working through the weekend— and now returned to the House of Representatives for a final vote today or tomorrow.

I have held off commenting on the BBB thus far because, as Nancy Pelosi infamously quipped, we’ll have to wait for it to pass to find out what’s in it. Its provisions are changing faster than a Walmart dressing room. And there’s so much spinning going on by everyone that it is impossible to tell yet which parts are really important and which parts are political playthings.

Assuming it passes the House this week (and I suspect it will), and Trump signs it (with a real pen), then we’ll dig in and try to figure out what it all means and which parts of the Agenda it connects. Onwards.

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Unexpectedly! The Associated Press ran a story yesterday headlined, “US job openings in May hit 7.8 million in a continuing display of labor market resilience.” It was right there in the first sentence: “U.S. job openings rose unexpectedly in May.” Who could’ve seen this coming?

Well, Trump, for one. He predicted it. In any case, the surprised AP dutifully informed its readers that “Economists had expected a slight decrease.” So … whom should we believe on the next one? The guy who’s been uncannily right about energy, trade, inflation, immigration, and most importantly, labor trends? Or the overly credentialed experts who forever forecast imminent financial collapse right before each unexpected improvement? One of these groups is accidentally correct about twice a year. The other is Donald Trump.

The AP coughed up the unexpected facts, reporting that U.S. job openings surged to 7.8 million in May, but quickly tried to minimize the good news by noting it was still slightly below Biden’s final pre-election month in office in November, when openings hit 8 million. What the AP didn’t mention is that Biden’s November figure was part of the now-infamous juiced-up pre-election jobs streak— numbers that got immediately shrink-rayed in February when the Labor Department quietly revised them downward by hundreds of thousands.

So yes, Trump’s May number technically trails Biden’s peak, the same way the female swimmers trail Lia Thomas’s two pool-length lead.

Haha, not every sector enjoyed bursting new job demand. “Vacancies at the federal government,” the AP reported gloomily, “fell to the lowest level since May 2020.”

Anyway, more TAW.

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Speaking of cheating swimmers, yesterday Axios ran a long-overdue story headlined, “Trans swimmer Lia Thomas' records revoked in UPenn deal with Trump admin.” It’s much better than that.

I just love that girl in the middle. A body language master. I’d like to buy her a new swimming cap or something.

As part of a newly inked deal with the Department of Education to comply with federal bans on transgender athletes in women's sports, U. Penn agreed to retroactively strip “Lia” Thomas of his swimming records and titles in ladies’ swimming. School officials also agreed that henceforth, no perverts will be allowed in women’s “intimate facilities” (locker rooms and bathrooms). Penn will also adopt definitions for “male” and “female” consistent with biological sex, and will restore the stolen records and titles to female athletes.

Best of all, Penn must issue personal apologies to each impacted female swimmer.

🔥 Something is happening. Former democrat Christina Buttons (87K followers), who rage-quit the Daily Wire after disagreeing with conservative co-hosts about being “mean” to trans people, such as by refusing to use ungrammatical pronouns, yesterday executed a flawless flip turn:

Christina’s tweet is the kind of rhetorical tectonic shift signaling a broader cultural realignment. Christina, who previously clung to a moderate or even sympathetic position in gender discourse, is now explicitly siding with groups historically dismissed as “extreme” like TERFs, gender-critical feminists, and conservatives. (She’s been working up to it lately, running a series on her Substack about detransitioner experiences. She currently works with Chris Rufo at the Manhattan Institute.)

Not only did she admit her error, she endorsed conservatives’ hardcore strategy of zero compromise, a wild departure from the incrementalist, live-and-let-live middle ground.

That kind of public mea culpa —delivered on Twitter to 700k+ viewers— is a neon-lit bellwether. When former fence-sitters start echoing the language of hardliners, and aren’t afraid to publicly say so, it means the cultural clouds are clearing. Momentum is shifting. And the Overton window is flying open with a loud thump. In the very recent past, voicing sympathy for TERFs or gender-critical conservatives was career kryptonite. Now, it’s a badge of credibility; maybe even applause-worthy, if the comments to her post were any measure.

The cancel-culture fear police are losing their jurisdiction. The conversational chilling effect is thawing. When formerly cautious voices start saying the quiet part out loud, it means the cultural current hasn’t merely shifted. It’s reversing in full gear.

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Today’s final and most important story comes courtesy of Jeffrey Tucker and the Brownstone Institute, which broke a story yesterday headlined, “The Plot to Get RFK.” Someone, bless them, leaked a pharma-industry meeting memo, which you can find reprinted in full here. It’s a stinker.

Before digging into it, I must first state that Brownstone did not confirm the memo’s authenticity beyond the representations of its undisclosed whistleblower. The memo looks perfectly real, and so far nobody’s denied it, but that disclaimer stands.

Having said that, the memo summarized a recent meeting of BIO, the Biotechnology Innovation Organization, which is the largest biotech lobby in the world. Think of it as Big Pharma’s embassy in Washington, D.C., but with a slicker brand and a bigger umbrella. While it’s often mistaken as a science nonprofit or a research consortium, at its core, BIO is a trade association, representing over 1,000 pharmaceutical, biotech, and academic institutions— including giants like Pfizer, Moderna, and Gilead. Its newly elected co-chairs are Silvia Taylor from Novavax and Art Hirt from Merck.

Unsurprisingly, while BIO markets itself as promoting innovation for the public good, it rarely (never) addresses product safety, transparency, vaccine injury reporting, conflicts of interest with regulators, or member misbehavior like pharma profiteering during public health crises. Cough.

If any of you are still wondering about Secretary Kennedy’s bona fides, this memo should bury those doubts in their shallow graves. In the four-page memo’s very first bullet point, BIO’s members identified Kennedy as “a direct threat.”

As you can readily see, the third bullet point revealed how juicily the members salivated over the “potential” for creating a political “breakdown” between Kennedy and President Trump. Like dogs with new Pets-R-Us chew toys, the BIO memo repeatedly homed in on ideas for attacking the new HHS Secretary. That was the admittedly troubling news Brownstone focused on. But there was so much more.

The specific kind of “direct threat” the pharma execs had in mind was unveiled midway down the first page: profits. Of course, they didn’t say that outright, instead using buzzwords and euphemisms like “capital access,” “unpredictability,” and “viable capital-raising opportunities:”

Between the memo’s lines, the close reader sniffed the acrid odor of an all-hands-on-deck dumpster-fire emergency. The rest of the memo focused on what to do about that pesky RFK and all this anti-vaxxer nonsense. I’m sorry to tell you this, but once the suggestions started, their very first idea was “engaging conservative influencers” like the American Enterprise Institute, an influential conservative think-tank:

They BIO executives are morons. Cluess, witless, whatever you want to call it. The memo exposed their hubristic downfall: the complete failure to engage with their industry’s singular point of weakness— safety and efficacy. And Hubris is inevitably followed by Nemesis. They incorrectly identified RFK as Nemesis, and failed to read the national room. RFK is a symptom of their disease, not its cause.

BIO’s memo revealed not just strategic failure, but a kind of institutional narcissism. They’re not thinking clearly because they still believe the problem is you, me, RFK, and “misinformation”— not the mountain of corpses beneath their collapsing slogan: “safe and effective.”

By the way, the phrase “safe and effective” —or anything like it— appeared nowhere in the memo. I interpreted that as a quiet, maybe even subconscious, recognition that the slogan has now become a sarcastic punchline.

But wait till you see what they intend to replace “safe and effective” with. It’s so deranged and clueless that it is almost parodic. It would be truly hilarious if they weren’t so damnably dangerous. Are you ready? The BIO’s executive brain trust recommended focusing their new public vaccine messaging on: national security.

🔥 You really can’t make this stuff up. We literally just emerged from a pandemic where the phrase “national security” in the context of public health became synonymous with gaslighting, censorship, secrecy, cover-ups, coercion, and buffonish denials in the face of plain facts. Here it is, in their own words, again from the first page, and without a single reference to their Achilles’ heel, safety:

Those words, “national security,” ripple through the rest of the memo like a talking doll script. It’s like they dug through the smoking wreckage of their credibility, held up the one remaining piece of debris still smoldering, and said: “This. This will be our new flag.”

Here’s another mentally disturbed example. Still on the first page, BIO identified “threats and opportunities,” circling back once again like sketchy housecats gobbling up unmentionable items from the litter box, to their jingositic incantation: “national security:”

Good grief. I’m just a lawyer, not a branding consultant, but even I can come up with something better than repositioning vaccines as national security assets. Why not drive full bore into the mouth of the enemy, and announce plans to prove once and for all just how safe and effective their products are? They could trumpet voluntary new vaccine surveillance systems, loosen their death’s grip on study data, pledge to protect children at all costs, promise better cooperation with the new ACIP, agree to stop marketing antidepressants to kindergartners— anything. Something!

But no. It’s the worst rebranding since New Coke, or since Budweiser slapped that effeminate cross-dresser on its bottles. They’re not just tone-deaf. They’re trying to re-militarize medicine, to invert the doctor-patient relationship into a compliance-state dynamic. It won’t work. It can’t work. We all now know exactly what “national security” means. It means “do what you’re told and don’t ask questions.”

In place of ‘safe and effective,’ we now offer you ‘top secret and compulsory.’ You’re welcome.

It is literally the definition of bio-fascism. Framing personal health choices as state-security imperatives. And what’s most guffaw-inducing is that BIO did it in a memo ostensibly about “promoting trust.”

💉 You might wonder why BIO’s wildly overpaid board members landed on national security as their new brand identity rather than as the punchline to an off-color joke. The reason is, they found a single silver lining amidst their crashing stock prices and the new regulatory hostility. That silver lining appeared in the form of an April government report titled, “Charting the

Future of Biotechnology.” Here’s its ‘reassuring’ cover image:

Biomedicine in a sniper’s scope. The report implicitly presumes that all our bodies are nodes (defensive weapons) in the national security infrastructure. There are good nodes and dangerous, noncompliant nodes.

I won’t bother quoting the report, which is an elegy to high-tech biomedicine crossed with an AR-15. All I need to say is that it frequently and often favorably quoted Chinese President Xi —the world premier communist dictator— whose views on personal medical freedom are, shall we say, somewhat anemic. The report’s authors seemed to believe quoting Xi Jinping gave their recommendations gravitas, rather than revealing their ideological drift.

Or maybe it was even written by the CCP. It would be hard to tell if it weren’t. You could slap a red star on the cover, translate it into Mandarin, and pass it out at the next National People’s Congress, and the apparatchiks would devour it with spicy Szechuan relish.

In fairness, the report doesn’t exactly praise Xi Jinping— but it quotes him like Moses delivering the ten biological commandments from Mount Synthetic Biology. Ostensibly, the CCP leader’s words were framed as warnings, the kind designed to provoke flung-open checkbooks at a Senate hearing. But in every substantive respect, the report adopts Xi’s logic point for point: biotechnology as statecraft, innovation as national security, and dissent as destabilization. It pretends to scowl while busily duplicating China’s model in the back copy room.

So here’s the funniest part: BIO actually believes this report —this technocratic fever dream quoting Xi Jinping like a policy oracle— will somehow win over conservative skeptics and MAHA fence-sitters. It’s laughable. The very voters BIO hopes to “inspire” watched their jobs, their churches, and their kids’ lungs suffocated under policies born from this exact mentality. To somehow think that wrapping the same ideology in a national security flag and citing the world’s premier communist dictator will rebuild trust in vaccines and torpedo RFK is not just out of touch— it’s magical thinking bordering on a parody of Alice in Wonderland.

Please.

The takeaway for those of us way up here in the cheap seats is: BIO is big pharma’s wounded rhinoceros, which they are unleashing to prod red-on-red conflict, pitting Trump against RFK and tradcons against MAHA. Keep your eyes open, ignore the clickbait, and avoid the hot takes. Hold the line.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! Swing around again tomorrow morning, for the latest installment of essential news and commentary, as we play through 2025’s back nine.

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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