☕️ GIFTS AND GRIFTS ☙ Monday, June 30, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Inside joke for Portland pals; Canada folds in Trump’s trade war; NYT says no right to bank account as Texas hurls gold into the vault; ACIP shock; China-linked Dem aide exposes pandemic grift; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! It’s the final day of June; tomorrow I can safely say we’re halfway through the year. In today’s roundup: a brief explainer of an inside C&C joke for our Portland friends; Canada folds faster than a cheap Mexican suit after Trump draws a fresh line in the trade war debate; Times informs readers they have no right to a bank account, but Texas lobs a gold hand grenade into the bankers’ bunker; major MAHA influencer agrees with me about the new ACIP’s historic first committee meeting and I have thoughts; more charges against Democrat China operative rip the mask off pandemic grift, giving us a chance to examine the ugly underside of what really happened to us— and how.

🪖 C&C ARMY POST 🪖

For the benefit of new readers and skimmers, I will now explain the running inside C&C joke. (Regular and close readers may safely skip down to the roundup.) Proceeding… Lately, in the comments, I have observed a surprising degree of confusion over my occasional reference to the acronym ‘TAW.’ It stands for “That Angry Wench.” Haha, just kidding.

Exactly one month ago, C&C was titled: “Always Winning.” In a story about a brief but certifiably insane judicial order temporarily disconnecting Trump’s tariff dashboard (the court of appeals overruled it on the same day), I quoted this part of a New York Times story. And a new acronym was born:

The left loves its new acronym ‘TACO’ (Trump Always Chickens Out). But we have ‘TAW.’ (I tried to come up with something spicier than TACO, but BURRITO was a bust and ENCHILADA was too extended.)

Anyway, if TAW sounds a little hubristic, it’s not meant that way. It’s not a brag. It’s a brand. Around the same time that I quoted Kevin Hassett, I’d also quoted Van Jones, who sincerely called Trump a genius and the most powerful man in the world.

CLIP: Van Jones tells it like it is (1:04) (Jones begins around 0:36).

Van’s co-host triggered him by asking, “How the h-ll did Donald Trump figure out where the culture was headed?” Jones reacted forcefully, stabbing his fingers at the screen and firing off his words like invisible spears.

“This dude is a phenomenon,” Jones impatiently explained, referring to the President. “He is the most powerful human on earth and in our lifetime. We look like idiots.”

Van Jones is a Yale-educated attorney, Emmy-winning media producer, and veteran civil rights activist who served as Obama’s “Green Jobs Czar” and is one of the most recognizable progressive voices on CNN. He’s founded multiple high-impact nonprofits that funneled hundreds of millions into street-level progressive activism and policy entrepreneurship.

What makes Jones stand out isn’t just his resume; it’s his ability to navigate both grassroots movements and elite institutions. Fluent in revolutionary rhetoric as well as bipartisan blather, he is arguably the smartest (and therefore most dangerous) political consultant on the left.

In the clip, the former Obama political consultant broke it down. “Donald Trump is smarter than me, you, and all his critics. You know how I know? He has the White House, the Senate, the House, the Supreme Court, the popular vote, a massive media ecosystem bigger than the mainstream, a religious fervor of a movement, his best buddy is the richest person in the history of the world, and the most relevant Kennedy is with him. And yet we’re still saying, ‘how is this guy…’ We look like idiots.”

Van might have added that Trump beat back about a thousand criminal charges, a score of lawsuits, and he survived at least two impeachment attempts. But that’s just quibbling. Van made his point.

Van’s rant was not just satisfying to hear because it came from a smart progressive. It proved that they know. Oh, they might call him “Orange Man” and “clownfish” and send each other hilarious memes on BlueSky, but they know they are dealing with someone smarter than they are and more politically skilled.

And, as Van persuasively pointed out, the way they know —the only language they understand— is because Trump Always Wins.

TAW. The new taco. Jalapeños optional.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

🔥🔥🔥

Appropos of my painful explanation of that inside joke, behold the latest evidence of TAW. This morning, the New York Times ran a terrific story headlined, “Canada to Scrap Tax That Led Trump to Suspend Trade Talks.” It only took two days before Canada crumbled.

After the abrupt resignation of Fidel Castro-lookalike Justin Trudeau, who Trump hated, his progressive party executed a remarkably adept political jiu-jitsu maneuver and replaced the disgraced Prime Minister with an even more globalist leader, Mark Carney. (Pictured above, following Trump.)

Early last year, long before Trump took office, Canada passed a ‘digital service tax’ on international streaming and financial services doing business there. Everyone understood it was aimed at the big U.S. providers like Netflix, Stripe, and so on. It wasn’t scheduled to take effect until today, Monday, June 30, but it was also retroactive to last year when it started.

Meaning, had it gone forward, U.S. companies would’ve had to stroke checks to Canada amounting to $2.7 billion dollars, according to the Times’ calculations.

Most folks thought that, with the Trump tariffs in play and Canada desperate to conclude a new trade deal, the Canucks would have voluntarily scrapped the tax, or at least put it on Canadian ice. But no. Prime Minister Carney stubbornly clung on, like a greedy octopus, repeatedly vowing to teach America a lesson that it couldn’t just push Canada around (or deprive it of all that sweet unearned cash).

On Friday, with the Monday deadline looming, Trump said that’s it. He announced that the United States was putting Canada in the penalty box, by terminating all trade discussions “effective immediately.” He called the tax a “blatant attack” on U.S. tech companies. He promised to let the Canadians know soon exactly how much “they will be paying to do business with the United States of America.”

“We have all the cards. We have every single one,” President Trump said in the Oval Office, adding that, “economically we have such power over Canada.”

In other words: TAW. What followed Friday’s announcement was a scrum of political positioning. On Saturday, Carney remained defiant but typically polite, casting the contretemps as a minor speed bump in the negotiating road but insisting that Canada was entitled to tax Amazon’s streaming music if it wanted to.

But one day later, yesterday, all opposition to President Trump tumbled over like a limp rasher of back bacon. Late yesterday afternoon, Canada quietly announced it would in fact shelve the tax, refraining from collecting anything until its parliament can rescind the absurd fees for good.

“The Canadian government said on Sunday night that it would cancel its tax on American technology companies,” the Times’ subheadline mourned, “handing a victory to the Trump administration.” Another victory.

TAW.

🔥🔥🔥

Last month, the Times ran a controversial story headlined, “No, You Don’t Actually Have a Right to a Bank Account.” The sub-headline explained that, if you were debanked for a Facebook meme about Biden’s last brain cell, tough noogies.

The Times didn’t try very hard to deny that banks have been cutting off customers because of politically motivated discrimination. Crypto companies, frackers, Canadian truckers, conservative commenters, and elderly Facebook memers have all gotten the polite letters saying their business was no longer welcome at major U.S. banks.

“Lawmakers,” the Times admitted, “say there have been thousands of debanking complaints over the past few years.”

But the Times isn’t sure. And, apparently, there’s no way to check. “The debanking hysteria is all smoke, no fire,” said its cherry-picked expert, Adam J. Levitin, a Georgetown law professor. “It’s a lot of self-serving and unverifiable allegations from risky businesses and customers.”

Professor Levitin lied. There’s plenty of fiery evidence. Most of the debanked promptly uploaded their cancellation letters in justified outrage. I know many of these folks myself, since I often get calls asking for post-debanking legal advice.

The Times continued its horrid story as though debanking were just a weird cultural phenomenon or kind of mass hysteria, like all the new state laws banning chemtrails.

But then a related story caught my eye.

🔥 Yesterday, AInvest News ran a story headlined, “Texas Authorizes Gold, Silver as Legal Tender for Daily Transactions.” Texas’s comptroller announced that Governor Greg Abbott signed a new law making gold and silver legal tender in that state:

The Lone Star State joined Florida, Utah, and Arkansas in the move, which to be clear, is a frontal assault on traditional banking. Banks, after all, are just middlemen. They hold our money for us, and send it off to people we buy things from.

The new state laws like Texas’s are setting up systems where state depositories, not banks, will hold the gold, and citizens can still use debit cards to buy and sell stuff. But in this case, they’ll be using an asset-backed currency that isn’t subject to inflationary taxes like fiat currency (such as the dollar).

The ‘trick’ —the politically difficult part— is exempting precious metals from state sales taxes. When traded metals are taxed, they remain a product rather than a currency. Strip off the taxes, and folks can swap gold and silver (even digitally) for other products or services without paying for the privilege.

Lots of questions remain. For instance, can citizens use state-based, digital gold to buy things across state lines? The Constitution suggests yes, but it’s never been tested. States must recognize each others’ court judgments, but not, for example, driver’s licenses. That’s voluntary. The federal Congress holds the power of the purse.

The bottom line is, we don’t know yet.

The Tenth Amendment provides that powers not delegated to the federal government are reserved to the states or the people. The Constitution prohibits states from coining money, but explicitly allows them to use gold and silver coin as legal tender (Art. I, Sec. 10). Texas can also enter into mutual currency agreements with other states, just as they do with mutual driver’s license recognition.

This is a fascinating and slowly forming test case for constitutional federalism in finance. If Texas and the other states play it right—with enough gold, a functional app, and strategic alliances —and maybe a little help from Congress— it won’t topple the dollar, but it could give the banks their first competition since the Federal Reserve was founded.

So… keep on debanking people, dummies. The banks are making their own demise politically possible.

💉💉💉

Following my glowing report last week on the brand-new ACIP Committee’s first, historic meeting, the sour grapes began piling into the winepress of dissatisfaction. Why didn’t they just cancel flu shots altogether, the unsatisfiable mob demanded. Well, if you won’t accept it from me, maybe you’ll listen to Dr. Sherri Tenpenny:

CLIP: Health Freedom Pioneer Sherry Tenpenney congratulates the ACIP Committee (2:12).

Sherri J. Tenpenny, D.O., is an Ohio-trained osteopathic physician, former emergency department director, and founder of the Tenpenny Integrative Medical Center, where she champions holistic and alternative treatments while warning against conventional vaccines. Over the past decade, Dr. Tenpenny has authored multiple books like Saying No to Vaccines, and runs a “Mastering Vaccine Info Boot Camp” to teach persuasion tactics aimed at undermining mainstream public health ‘guidance.’

She was a fierce warrior for freedom during the pandemic, which is where I first met her.

Dr. Tenpenny has always claimed vaccines cause autism, and is deeply skeptical of 5G and many other MAHA concerns. She holds significant sway in the health-freedom community— helping shape its narrative, influencing policy discussions (like Ohio’s anti-mandate hearings), and was even counted among Biden’s “Disinformation Dozen” of misinformation superspreaders— making her arguably one of the most influential players in the MAHA movement.

In the clip, Dr. Tenpenny obviously recognized that the new ACIP committee did everything politically possible to reverse decades of slavish vaccine adherence by our public health agencies. But there’s still a blackpilled vein of dissatisfaction running through MAHA, which snipes relentlessly at brave health freedom pioneers from the bushes.

Had the committee voted to altogether remove flu vaccines from the recommended schedule in its very first meeting, the blackpilled would still complain that it hadn’t removed all vaccines. Even had the committee removed all vaccines from the recommended schedule, the blackpill brigade would still have sneered and wondered why they didn’t make the shots illegal.

This is a mistake. The correct response to incremental victories is to celebrate them. Then double down on the next increment, using encouragement. But the blackpillers have already concluded that the new ACIP members are ‘fake’ sellouts to Big Pharma, and are demanding they all immediately resign.

I hope that it’s obvious to everybody that whoever is fueling the blackpilled response probably works for Big Pharma, and their job is to ensure MAHA blows up on the SpaceX launch pad. Please don’t take the bait. Any incremental win, however small, is a victory that builds momentum. If you want more of that, you should celebrate it, and encourage people to keep risking their professional careers to keep moving the jab needle in the right direction (toward the landfill).

For the rest of us, the best thing we can do is gracefully push back against blackpilling wherever it crops up on social media.

That’s just my $0.02. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

😷😷😷

If all you crazy conspiracy theorists thought the progressives who engineered the pandemic were secretly getting rich from covid graft, consider this story. Last week, the AP ran an article headlined, “Accused of acting as a Chinese agent, NY governors' ex-aide now faces pandemic fraud charge, too.” How could this happen, & etc.

Democrat luminary Linda Sun served in two consecutive New York gubernatorial administrations. She was Deputy Chief Diversity Officer, serving under “Love Guv” Andrew Cuomo (2018–2020), then was Deputy Chief of Staff for lockdown queen Governor Kathy Hochul (2021–2023). Over five years of influencing the top of New York’s Democrat political machine.

Born in Nanjing, China, Linda was naturalized in the U.S. after attending Barnard College and Columbia University. She rapidly rose through state government ranks before her awful tenure in two Democrat Governors’ offices.

During the spring of 2020, when New York was allegedly ‘struggling’ to source masks and other PPE, Linda oversaw the state’s PPE procurement team. She used her Chinese connections to broker procurement deals. She also steered $45 million in PPE contracts to two companies tied to her husband and her cousin— by forging official documents to make the men appear as if they had been vouchsafed by top Chinese government officials.

For their trouble, Linda and her husband are alleged to have received millions in kickbacks, including $2.3 million washed through her cousin, with the total illicit windfall reaching as high as $8  million. Linda was charged in September for being a secret paid Chinese agent. Last week, the DOJ added yet more charges, for her covid bribery and fraud.

They lived large during the pandemic. Prosecutors say the illicit kickbacks funded the couple’s purchases of several multimillion-dollar properties and loads of luxury cars.

Governor Kathy Hochul fired Linda in 2023 after allegations of misconduct began to surface.

😷 When you scratch off the surface of pandemic-era rhetoric about “safety” and “public health,” what you often find instead are enormous piles of unaccounted-for money, hastily written no-bid contracts, and crony enrichment pipelines. In Linda Sun’s case, it allegedly involved tens of millions funneled to family-linked companies through covid procurement schemes— plus side allegations of foreign influence by Chinese communists.

Linda’s story is not just about a lone bad actor. Her story illustrates how the entire emergency powers structure —fast-tracked approvals, relaxed oversight, direct-award contracting— created a feeding frenzy for opportunists inside and outside government.

Once such a system is in place, who really wants it to stop? The masks and lockdowns may have been theater; the real show was backstage, in the spreadsheets and cash envelopes.

And the longer the “emergency” lasted, the longer the grift went on.

😷 It wasn’t even close to just Linda Sun. New York City spent roughly $7  billion on pandemic supplies via emergency no-bid contracts. That included paying up to $7.50 per cloth mask. But when NYC auctioned off $225  million in surplus PPE, it only got $500,000— a massive loss for taxpayers.

New Jersey’s comptroller recently issued a report titled, “Investigation Uncovers Waste, Abuse in Essex County’s $40 Million COVID-19 Vaccination Program.” Among many other examples, the report said, “One worker was paid $130,000 over 11 months, yet the County didn’t know who that person was or what the person did.”

Another example (of many) appeared in February’s New York Post:

Julio Medina, 51, a local “nonprofit boss” (i.e., community organizer and NGO scammer), was funneled $150 million for putting up inmates in New York hotels during the covid era. He scraped off a bunch for himself. Here’s Medina taking an envelope of cash from a major Eric Adams donor (Chinese, of course):

Another 2023 report cited over three thousand DOJ criminal cases, two thousand convictions, 524 individuals charged, and about $188  million in confirmed losses. The same report said the GAO had already flagged over 3.7  million potentially fraudulent federal covid loans. That’s almost four million loans that look sketchy. It probably amounts to billions.

There are many more examples.

😷 All that is a disgusting, corrupt layer of icing on top of all the official scientific grants, hospital enhancements, forgivable loans, media buys, and influencer payments that we already know about. The pandemic was an institutional buffet for profiteers at every level. The crisis infrastructure empowered schemes from federal loan fraud to no‑bid city-level deals and county vaccination contract abuses.

The incentives created by pandemic profiteering —both official and under-the-table— help explain why so many nonsensical, contradictory, or unnecessary policies were not just implemented, but defended to the death.

Emergency declarations loosened procurement laws, disabled competitive bidding, and unlocked vast sums of state and federal money. Every time the emergency was renewed, the money-printing spigot stayed on. That gave agencies, contractors, lobbyists, and connected middlemen a direct financial incentive to keep the virus crisis going— which meant keeping the “emergency” alive.

The longer the pandemic panic lasted, the more masks, tests, tracing apps, vaccines, cleaning contracts, covid loans, hotel rates, and compliance consultants got funded.

The pandemic didn’t just reward obedience. It financially punished dissent and financially rewarded compliance, creating a self-reinforcing system where going along meant getting paid, and pushing back meant getting sidelined, censored, or unemployed.

Doctors, nurses, school administrators, tech companies, hospital managers, even pastors who went along with mask mandates, school closures, vaccine pushes, and social distancing were financially propped up, either through direct funding, liability waivers, and opportunities for new revenue streams (virtual learning, telehealth, emergency contracts, etc).

Those who dissented faced license investigations, firings, board complaints, and media ridicule. Not to mention total exclusion from decision-making tables.

We who opposed unconstitutional pandemic policies received nothing but ridicule and contempt. We failed to “follow the science,” and the science led right to an envelope packed with hundred-dollar bills.

The pandemic created a coercion economy. Pandemic participation was incredibly profitable. No wonder they wanted it to last forever.

But the grift has ground to a halt. The DOJ now faces a target-rich environment. If you think about it, in one sense, the grift was a gift. Thousands of politically-connected “activist” crooks and kleptocrats have been outed and identified, with more incoming. Linda Sun —deputy chief of staff for one of the most politically significant states in the Union— is only the most recent and most prominent example.

We are in the pandemic hangover. The Reckoning is underway and gaining momentum.

Have a terrific Monday! Skate back here tomorrow morning for a fresh new mug of essential news and double-caffeinated 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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