☕️ GIFTS AND SURPRISES ☙ Friday, May 2, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

YT gifts Trump rare praise; the Gray Lady admits history is happening; NPR & PBS lose their allowance; Florida flushes fluoride; and Trump torches the UN’s 2030 globalist fantasy.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! We have a jam-packed roundup to enjoy: New York Times runs unintentionally complimentary Trump Support story; Gray Lady’s pages begin to fill with stories admitting how historic Trump’s second term is; Trump cuts NPR and PBS off at their federally funded kneecaps; Florida poised to de-poison the state’s water supply and experts are anguished; and US slashes the United Nation’s capstone globalist project, Agenda 2030.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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In a development that happens less often than a San Francisco street camper takes a shower, the New York Times held its nose yesterday and —using its tiniest headline font— ran a story actually reporting voter enthusiasm for Trump’s first 100 days headlined, “For Trump Supporters, an ‘Exciting’ First 100 Days.”

Don’t get me wrong— this was no Times turnaround. The article worked overtime to make MAGA voters sound like bedazzled yokels. It scrupulously avoided listing any actual Administration accomplishments (like closing the border), instead spotlighting folks like 68-year-old Maria Libecki, who attended Trump’s Michigan rally and gushed, “The people he chose for his administration, they’re like the Avengers… Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, Marco Rubio, they are just awesome, every single one of them.”

Had they asked —or cared— Ms. Libecki almost certainly could’ve rattled off a dozen concrete wins, or explained why she likes Trump’s Cabinet picks so much— but that wasn’t the point. The point was to reinforce the paper’s house narrative: that Trump supporters are credulous rubes from flyover towns.

People, this is why you should never talk to corporate media, no matter how friendly and sympathetic the reporters seem.

To reinforce the “mindless herd” trope, the Times next quoted Bodie Catlin from Highlands, North Carolina (a lovely mountaintop town), who said: “Everyone I know thinks this way, that Trump has done more in his 100 days than Biden did in four years.” The implied criticism was subtle as a sledgehammer. But despite the reporter’s obvious angle —Trump’s support is cult-like and irrational— the article accidentally doused this week’s “plummeting polls” narrative with cold Appalachian spring water.

I’ve ignored this week’s “falling support” story because it’s a see-through fiction, and the piece itself accidentally admitted as much. It reported that a recent NYT/Siena poll showed 42% of folks not only approved of Trump’s job performance, but they even described it as “exciting.” And Trump has held nearly all the 48% of voters who backed him last November.

The reporter, gritting his teeth and clutching his emotional support latte, eventually conceded through pursed lips: “The numbers underscore that the durability of his appeal for his base cannot be ignored any more than Mr. Trump himself.”

Despite the Times’ best efforts to paint Trump voters as gullible yokels in red hats with sequined slogans who view politicians as Marvel superheroes, the real story bled through the bias: the base isn’t just holding — it’s fired up. The more corporate media sneers, the stronger the signal gets.

If the first 100 days taught us anything, it’s that Trump’s support doesn’t depend on arrogant elite approval — it thrives in spite of it. And if Ms. Libecki’s Avengers analogy holds, the Times might want to brace itself for the sequel.

🔥 The Times is starting to get the idea. Almost a week late, it ran several stories yeaterday acknowledging the unprecedented times we’re living in. One story was headlined, “In 2nd Term, Trump Pushes Bounds of Presidential Power, Testing Rule of Law.” Another said, “Are Trump’s Actions Truly Unprecedented? We Asked 35 Historians.” I’ll save you the trouble of reading it: The historians’ answer was yes, over and over, in various ways.

The Times framed Trump’s historic first 100 days darkly, as a warning or a sinister omen, but was finally forced to admit that either way, the nation has never witnessed any presidency like this. For instance, one sub-headline blared, “The United States has never seen an effort to expand presidential authority at the scale of Donald J. Trump’s second term.”

“They are trying to do a moonshot on executive power,” explained Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith. Jack doesn’t share Trump voters’ excitement. He feels threatened: “this situation is a much more dangerous threat to the rule of law than the last time.” I’ll just point out that, over the last four years, Jack never thought Biden’s lockdowns, mandatory drugs, or vaccine passports for accessing air travel were threats to the rule of law.

Not to be outdone, Yale Law School professor Akhil Reed Amar (if that is his real name) observed even less meaningfully, “Trump is the most powerful person in the world; he does not seem to be very good at restraining himself and he’s not getting any younger.” Professor Amar always thought Joe Biden was a spring chicken that was sharp as a tack.

Meanwhile, over at Stanford, law professor Michael W. McConnell was most impressed by the rush of events. “It’s just the volume — an incredible spate of activity on all kinds of different fronts, and at some point volume begins to have a qualitative feel to it,” he said. In English, he meant that the raw speed and the uncountable number of things the Administration is doing is creating something new, in and of itself.

In that, we agree. Stanford wins.

The bottom line is, they know it’s a historic presidency. They just don’t want to admit it. They want to focus on controversy, but historic presidencies are always even more controversial than boring ones. They refuse to admit Trump is making history, day after day. They especially don’t want to concede that fact until they have wrangled up a rhetorical wrapper to make it sound bad.

So they must have been especially mad when they heard the next bit of news.

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Womp, womp. CNN ran a terrific story yesterday, headlined “Trump orders Corporation for Public Broadcasting to end federal funding for NPR and PBS.” This barrage of riches is getting downright embarrassing. Who ever thought we’d see not only the end of the Department of Education, but also the defunding of NPR and PBS in the same presidential term?

Be honest. If you try to claim you saw this coming, I’m going to write ten paragraphs about AOC’s bartending career faster than you can say “Dick Durbin” (or the other way around).

To offer a single example picked from a target-rich environment, in 2021 NPR ran a national editorial in print and on its Weekend Edition radio show titled, “Opinion: Animals Deserve Gender Pronouns, Too.” Behold, the sage advice provided to the nation from NPR’s editorial board:

It’s okay to inject rats with viruses, but don’t you dare refer to them as “it.” You have to say “he, she, or they” when you talk about rats.

Whatever will we do without this kind of keen social analysis?

Trump’s new executive order was titled “Ending Taxpayer Subsidization Of Biased Media,” and it landed like a political Oreshnik missile, with NPR/PBS hiding in an underground Ukrainian bunker packed with Swedish “military advisors.” The order requires all direct federal funding to be halted to both National Public Radio and the Public Broadcast System. It also ordered their managing entity, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), to root out and cancel any indirect sources of federal funding as well.

Earlier this week, the CPB sued the Trump administration, because three of its five board members —all Biden appointees— were fired by email. In other words, the Trump Team was already preparing for yesterday’s defunding order.

So far, all of the ‘reinstatement’ lawsuits filed by terminated board members of various other “independent” agencies like the CPB have either failed or remain pending in appeals.

Finally —just to make sure— Trump’s order directed HHS to investigate NPR and PBS for discriminatory hiring practices. What kind of discriminatory hiring practices? Oh, I don’t know. You tell me. Here’s NPR’s top management:

I bet NPR’s AWFLs —its affluent, white, female liberals (*plus token)— aren’t smiling this morning.

The article whined about “independent stations” being forced to close, especially ones that serve “rural areas,” which the article claimed through its tears are mostly Republican anyway. Fine. Show me a Republican who depends on NPR for news and I’ll show you a Democrat who only watches Alex Jones every day. Let’s do this.

That’s the real lede: NPR and PBS are the progressive movement’s version of Alex Jones, except with a green, reusable tote bag. We won’t miss them.

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Yesterday, the New York Times’ entire editorial board published an anti-Trump fatwa that enraged the liberals on BlueSky— because it was too easy on Trump. The op-ed was teasingly titled, “Fight Like Our Democracy Depends on It. Liberals thought the headline was false advertising. In short, once the headline roped them in, the editorial scolded liberals to quit being so danged Trump-deranged. Liberals instantly hated it.

Near the beginning of the piece, the editors tried to be nice, but they went ahead and ripped off the band-aid: “The patriotic response to today’s threat is to oppose Mr. Trump. But soberly and strategically, not reflexively or performatively.”

Uh oh. “Not reflexively or performatively” meant, stop calling him Hitler.

From that awkward low point, it only got worse for progressives. The editors counseled Democrats to work with fair-minded conservatives. Even more shocking to liberal sensibilities, the editors sternly advised that the building of such a coalition of resistance “should start with acknowledging that Mr. Trump is the legitimate president and many of his actions are legal.”

Whew. It went on: some of those actions, the editors lectured fellow liberals, “may even prove effective.”

Break out the smelling salts! What came next was wild and astounding, an astonishing paragraph just as unforeseeable as the rest of Trump’s first 100 days:

Lest I be accused of misquoting the Gray Lady, the piece also spent much of its time decrying various Trump tropes, like his alleged defiance of judges, his unproven steamrolling of due process, and his DOJ’s ‘totally unjustified’ investigation of ActBlue. But it kept describing common ground with conservatives, like when it admitted that, “Other attempts to assert power over previously independent parts of the executive branch seem more defensible. The executive branch reports to the president, after all, and parts of it have suffered from too little accountability in recent decades.”

I had to read that twice and double-check that I was on the right website.

The “solution,” the editors soberly advised, is to keep on relentlessly criticizing Trump until the Republican-led Congress can’t stand it anymore and balks. Meanwhile, it told Times readers to shut up with all the azi-nay talk. “We understand the urge to speak out in maximalist ways about almost everything he does,” the editors sympathized. “It can feel emotionally satisfying, and simply like the right thing to do, during dark times. But the stakes are too high to prioritize emotion over effectiveness.”

But the editors were talking to people who don’t like to be told to calm down.

The editors patiently mansplained, “liberals who conflate conservative policies with unconstitutional policies risk sending conservatives back into Mr. Trump’s camp.” In other words, you guys are making us all look like morons and running off our allies.

The editors’ introspective strategy isn’t new. It reminded us of this 2018 Bloomberg editorial:

Either way, novel or not, a strategy that took progressives two years of Trump 1.0 to reach is already on the chessboard at Trump 2.0’s 100-day mark.

The current mainstream narrative describes Democrat ‘disarray’ and their ‘inexplicable’ inability to enunciate any viable opposing plan. That narrative is a psyop. With the midterms still 18 months away, Democrats have no reason to advance their competing agenda. Revealing it now would only give conservatives time to challenge and criticize. So they are holding their cards close and waiting till the right time to play them.

Meanwhile, they are struggling to keep the radical base from going completely loco.

That said, the last thing I expected to see this week was the New York Times editorial board admitting Trump is a “legitimate president” and that “some of his policies are legal, popular, and might work.” Surprises, as they say, never cease.

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On Wednesday, the Hill ran another remarkable, totally unexpected story headlined, “Florida set to become second state to outlaw fluoride from water supply. The new anti-flouride bill passed both the state’s senate and its house and is now headed for Governor DeSantis’ desk, where it will almost certainly be signed.

Corporate media is completely opposed to canceling the chemical. Yet, nearly all European countries either do not add fluoride to drinking water or have banned it outright. For some reason, that simple fact is absent from the argument here in the U.S. If more people knew that Europe is doing fine without forcibly medicating its citizens, the narrative toothpaste would be out of the tube.

Media, as we know all too well, is utterly useless.

One short year ago, the anti-fluoride argument was a wacky conspiracy theory. Twelve months later, the fluoride banning bill passed both Florida houses by wide margins. I have no idea what the booking odds were, but last summer nobody would have bet that at this point we would be watching Big Fluoride circling the drain.

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This week at the UN General Assembly, the US Counselor denounced the UN’s so-called 2030 Agenda Sustainable Development Goals, a globalist wish-list of mandatory climate and DEI nonsense. Without US support, the 2030 SDG’s are a dead duck. Quack, quack, gleerrrrrb.

CLIP: US denounces United Nations’ so-called Sustainable Development Goals (2:25).

Good luck finding it reported anywhere in corporate media.

The United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals —or SDGs— are a sweeping set of 17 interlocking objectives adopted in 2015 under the banner of Agenda 2030. On paper, they promise a utopian checklist: end poverty, combat climate change, ensure “equity,” restructure education, overhaul energy systems, and manage global land use.

In practice, they are a soft-power blueprint for top-down, bureaucratic control over national policies— often sidestepping democratic processes in favor of unelected “stakeholders,” NGOs, and supranational enforcement. It’s like a global Homeowner’s Association, but for everything from farming to finance, with no opt-out clause, and no one you can vote against.

In a bland sentence that rang musically in the ears of Americans worried about the UN’s incremental globalist takeover of the United States, US diplomat Edward Hearney flatly told the delegates, “Agenda 2030 and the SDGs advance a program of soft global governance that is inconsistent with US sovereignty and adverse to the rights and interests of Americans.”

Finally!

Hearney summarized the US’s new position: voters said no. “Put simply, globalist endeavors like Agenda 2030 and the SDGs lost at the ballot box. Therefore, the US rejects and denounces the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the Sustainable Development Goals, and it will no longer reaffirm them as a matter of course.”

“President Trump also made it clear we need an overdue course correction on gender and climate ideology, which pervades the SDGs,” he added.

For decades, global technocrats advanced schemes like Agenda 2030 the same way empires used to plant flags — quietly, confidently, and assuming no one would resist. But this week, from the same General Assembly floor where Khrushchev once banged his shoe and Gaddafi ranted for an hour and a half, the U.S. finally fired back. With language echoing Washington’s farewell warning against “entangling alliances” and Reagan’s stand against creeping collectivism, Counselor Hearney drove a stake into the vampiric heart of soft global governance. For now, the SDGs rest uncomfortably alongside the League of Nations on the ash heap of unrealized utopias — grand in design, but rejected by free people who still prefer sovereignty over slogans.

I’m not naive. If we don’t end the globalist experiment for good, Agenda 2030 will soon be back, repackaged as Agenda 2040 or an even more delightfully named program like “This Time We’re Getting 15-Minute Cities Whether You Like It or Not.” We must stop them for good.

But this week’s declaration was nothing less than a populist revolution. Agenda 2030 was the globalists’ crowning achievement. America just threw the SDG tea into the harbor.

Have a fabulous Friday! Sneak back here for tomorrow’s nootropic roundup of essential news and commentary that will not only nourish you but will actually make you smarter.

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