☕️ GREAT EXPECTATIONS ☙ Tuesday, December 31, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Enjoy C&C's 2024 monologue and year in review, and Happy New Year!

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday, New Year’s Eve! It’s not just any year that is ending, but the most remarkable, record-setting, history-making year that anyone reading today’s post has ever lived through. Enjoy this C&C monologue and year in review.

🪖 C&C NEW YEAR’S MONOLOGUE AND YEAR IN REVIEW 🪖

Defying all critics, common sense, and basic math, we have somehow reached Coffee & Covid’s fifth New Year’s Eve editorial. The infant Facebook blog that started pushing back against lockdowns and mandatory masking has grown into a toddler. Whether you’re a masochistic originalist, a long-suffering long-time reader, or a brand-new victim, thanks for being here to celebrate the New Year with us.

There’s simply no comparing the ebullient mood capping off this year to the doldrums we were feeling last December 31st, 2023. Last year’s frightful final post was a bleak roundup of news of massive solar flares, freak waves battering California’s coastline, turbo hurricanes leveling Acapulco, and Zuckerberg burrowing into an underground bunker in Maui — real end-of-the-world stuff.

Days before that, Colorado had just disqualified President Trump from the primary ballot for insurrection, and other blue states were clamoring to do the same. The various presidential prosecutions were steaming full speed ahead. A colossal conflict was building up between President Trump’s supporters and the supporters of the Nation’s Governor, Ron DeSantis. It was all headed for a bloody internecine battle tanking the GOP’s chances, leaving us to face four more disastrous years of watching a decaying Cabbage rotting in place.

Twelve months ago, a nervous nation was still experiencing pandemic PTSD and Fauci flashbacks. Sufferers report that Fauci flashbacks often occur unexpectedly, such as after seeing a holdout double-masker driving alone with the windows up, which produces an electrifying sensation similar to one’s cerebellum pressing against a live wire.

Even worse, in December, 2023 we were all trying to prepare ourselves for what looked to be a very difficult election season — assuming, we told ourselves darkly, there even was an election. Novel pandemics and lockdowns, more midnight cheating and more water-main excuses, days of drawn-out counting and recounting, a winter of protest riots; we were steeling ourselves for anything.

But none of that happened. It was, in fact, the reverse opposite.

For the first time since the pandemic, since I began blogging, this year there is no need to scrape up the reassuring nouns and verbs. This is the first year-end post where hope is already soaring, off the charts. I’ll try not to ruin it.

Real life will surely return at some point, but let’s ride this terrific feeling as far as we can.

🚀🚀🚀

2024 was so off-the-charts that, when SpaceX accomplished the greatest engineering feat in human history by literally catching in the air the heaviest rocket ship ever launched, leaving it theoretically ready for refueling and re-launch, the world yawned and flipped to a different streaming service. Meanwhile, the malfunctioning Federal Aviation Administration said yes, nice landing and everything, but what about the gopher tortoises?

And nobody even blinked that the world’s richest man, top presidential whisperer, and owner of the most influential social media platform made fire come down from heaven unto the earth in the sight of men. Ho hum.

This year, Big Pharma began enjoying the fruition of its own engineering triumph, the long-sought Shangri-La of pill poppers, as the FDA relaxed restrictions on prescription guidelines, and compounding pharmacies jumped on board for GLP-1s. Name branded Ozempic, it’s a 2017 diabetes drug that claims to make folks sexy, svelte and fit back into their skinny jeans.

They don’t know how Ozempic or its relatives work, of course. Why would they? And never mind the list of horrible side effects. Pharma’s post-covid slide was arrested in the nick of time with its exciting new line of weight-loss products. Turbo cancer? Who cares! Wheeeee

As a happier side-effect of widely available diet drugs, Big Food may finally be forced to re-formulate its products and figure out what changed in the 1970’s to start making everybody morbidly obese. Who knows whether it will ever amount to anything, but it’s a promising start.

Speaking of pharma, anti-vaxxing became trendy, or at least slightly less toxic, with Trump’s nomination of Robert Kennedy, Jr., for HHS Secretary. Despite Kennedy’s politically savvy pivot to food health, which also saw a renaissance this year, everybody knows we’re all still really talking about the jabs.

🔥 All of that was eclipsed by a bonkers presidential campaign defying all official predictions and making a large number of Americans question their sanity. In late January, facing anemic primary performance, withering boot criticism, and having much warmer prospects back home in the Sunshine State where he was appreciated, Governor DeSantis graciously dropped out of the race, cementing President Trump’s inevitable primary victory in March. (Haley’s comet crashed violently into the Sun and burned to a crisp.)

They’ll be writing books for years about everything that happened next.

On July 13th, President Trump got shot but still narrowly avoided being assassinated at a rally in Butler, PA, where the Secret Service failed to do anything right, and the FBI helped cremate the assassin’s body ten days into a continuing investigation that has yet to answer a single important question.

The assassin, Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old who still lived at home, somehow evaded multiple layers of professional event security with a long gun, a backpack, and a range finder, despite the fact that you can’t get a small bottle of mouthwash onto an airplane.

Crooks was stopped when local police, not the Secret Service sniper, shot him first, disabling the would-be assassin. Only then did the Secret Service sniper fire several rounds that finished off the wounded Crooks, ensuring the young man would never have to answer any questions.

Shortly thereafter, after bizarrely telling Congress that Secret Service snipers avoided the mostly flat roof on account of a risky gentle slope, the female director of the Secret Service abruptly resigned. She was totally not a DEI hire.

And that was only the first assassination attempt. In the second attempt, a deranged Ukraine fixer with no apparent source of income named “Wile E. Coyote” laid in wait for the President at his South Florida golf course, and somehow survived the fusillade from a Secret Service agent who emptied his entire clip at the lucky shooter from about five feet away.

Wiley, I mean Ryan Wesley Routh, failed at everything in his life except avoiding arrest, but somehow managed to nearly pull off an amazing assassination caper with nobody noticing. He would have gotten away with it, too, were it not for a Secret Service agent with very bad aim and a couple alert Floridians who saw the colorful character racing off and got after it.

Ryan E. Coyote was then captured, not by the FBI, but by local law enforcement. Only then did the FBI snatch him up and declare Routh’s eighteen password-protected cell phones and his trove of electronic surveillance gear was nothing interesting.

Soon Kash Patel can look into the Routh case. I wonder whether Routh will live that long.

In the third and weirdest assassination attempt, the FBI arrested some Iranian guy who Homeland Security greenlit into the U.S. The Iranian allegedly posted an ad on City Journal looking for a discount hitman to kill “US officials” for $5,000. Corporate media headlines claimed the miserly hitman-shopper was targeting President Trump.

None of the three assassination attempts has ever made any sense at all. But as always, assassinations are never ever traced to any well-funded, well-organized group having an actual legitimate reason to kill a president. As ever, this time, it was just two lone gunmen plus an entire Middle Eastern country the neocons wanted to invade anyway, with no connecting thread between any of them of any kind whatsoever.

Mind you, all this happened just during the last six months of the year. But the triple assassination attempts ended with perhaps the most remarkable development of all: the explicit and obvious joining of forces, not sneakily, not George Soros-like behind the scenes, but right in your face, of the world’s richest man with the world’s most disruptive politician. Not only that, but it all happened back at the original site of the very first assassination attempt.

It was documented in this headline from the New York Times, October 7th:

The Times’ headline editors were being cute. Elon did leap, literally. He was jumping around the Butler, PA stage like an overcaffeinated spring lamb:

Just saying:

Maybe you can remember a time when a top world billionaire joined forces with a presidential candidate in such a public way, but I can’t.

🔥 Even all that indescribable history, with its multiple assassination attempts, bizarre cast of characters, and record-setting alliances, pales in comparison to the suffering the democrats were enduring. Their pain started mere days before Matthew Crooks took his best shot at Trump in Butler, and it is still smarting.

As summer began, facing relentlessly lagging polls, Joe Biden unaccountably agreed to an early debate with Trump, which almost certainly will be the opening sentence in some future political history book.

The next morning on June 27th, NBC desperately ran this headline: “'Babbling' and 'hoarse': Biden's debate performance sends Democrats into a panic.” There was a brief moment where they thought maybe they could blame Biden’s disastrous debate on covid. But Biden’s babbling blew the Democrats up, and started up an internecine schism that began growing like a political turbo cancer. Democrat leaders Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and Barack Obama joined up to lead a not-so-secret movement to purge Joe from the party.

It only took about three weeks of behind-the-scenes skullduggery and character assassination. On July 21st, a sudden and unexpected tweet appeared on Joe Biden’s X account, along with a very strange letter, announcing Biden’s withdrawal as the Democrats’ presidential candidate, a nomination he won fair and square in a 50-state primary.

Within minutes following his weird withdrawal, Joe endorsed his impeachment insurance policy, jovial Kamala Harris, leaving the plotters in a political pickle of their own making.

Something similar may have happened in Rwanda or Romania, who knows, but nothing like this had ever happened in American politics before.

Instead of holding an emergency primary, in their enthusiasm to ‘save democracy,’ the Democrats just scratched out Joe’s name on the forms and penciled in Kamala without anybody having to vote.

A short summer of progressive joy ensued. Fueled by a $2.5 billion dollar war chest, the shortest presidential campaign in history redistributed massive amounts of Democrat donor wealth to party insiders and cronies, but resulted in a shocking modern landslide for President Trump.

Six months later, the party’s panic, which began right after the disastrous June debate, now stinks even worse than it did back then.

The summer of joy froze into a toxic winter of Democrat discontent.

Even now, corporate media frantically struggles to find a savior for their former political patrons, and sourly labels the Democrat “brand” as toxic. Democrats Bud Lited themselves. Last weekend, MSBNC ran an op-edthat morosely muttered, “It doesn’t seem like Democrats have really digested, yet, exactly how badly their brand has been tarnished.”

Other articles describe Democrats fleeing the party to run as independents. MSNBC’s article ended with this dour prescription for Democrats:

If, as QAnon theorists suspect, this whole time Joe Biden was really an actor wearing a rubber mask and controlled by White Hats, they couldn’t possibly have engineered the destruction of the Democrat party any better than this.

The political implication for the Democrats starting 2025 in shambles is that it will cost time. Before they can run against Republicans, they must overcome their toxic brand before mounting a mid-term campaign.

Remember — this toxic brand implosion was completely invisible until after November 5th. Before the election, Democrats always appeared on to be ascendant, with fake polls consistently showing the contest leaning toward Kamala.

Then, suddenly, in one day, the party’s rotten, termite-infested heart was exposed, and now all the walls must be torn out.

🔥 And all of this candidate history-making occurred over the quilted backdrop of not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, but six criminal cases filed against President Trump, plus a handful of civil lawsuits thrown in, all designed by Democrats to thwart the GOP’s political chances. (It never occurred to anyone that the dozen or so legal proceedings were all brought by radical progressives and not a single one filed by a Republican.)

But over the second half of the year, every single criminal case against Trump imploded, was dismissed, or was indefinitely stayed. It is all over. As for the civil cases, they are either resolved or on appeal. But no longer do they pose any serious threat; all are now relegated to nuisance status. Meanwhile, after all that, late in the year, Trump began winning his own cases. Just this month ABC forked over $15 million for defamation.

Given how thin and how creative the cases against Trump were, many of us were optimistic. But nobody would have predicted this kind of radical and complete turnaround in Trump’s legal fortunes, all in one year, and all resolving before the elections.

🔥🔥🔥

I’ve barely scratched the surreal surface of this astonishing year. It would take a book to round it all up. There were many other unexpected incremental developments. For instance, this summer, the New York Times published a long-form, magazine-style article on uncompensated vaccine injuries featuring anecdotes from injured healthcare professionals. Meanwhile, despite an HHS extension of the pandemic emergency to 2029, Moderna’s stock slide picked up steam, and Pfizer’s covid revenues kept withering away.

Historic Hurricane Helene wiped Western North Carolina off the map. A different kind of hurricane wiped the floor with antique party leaders Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell.

Nor have we discussed the remarkable developments outside the U.S., such as in the Proxy War in Ukraine and the Middle East. For example, Russia successfully tested on the battlefield a real game-changing wonder weapon, the never-seen-before Orechnik “Hazelnut,” an intermediate-range, hypersonic ballistic missile, which instantly revolutionized modern warfare by obsoleting all current air defense systems.

On the other hand, the U.S. Army’s 7th Transportation Brigade (Expeditionary) set multiple records, mostly bad ones, after publicly humiliating the military, again, by failing to build the world’s most expensive humanitarian pier in Gaza, despite a $300 million dollar budget, no military opposition, and a cooperative corporate media.

Despite all those candidates, the year will ultimately be known for the drama of the political turnaround story of all time. As it should be. Trump’s shock victory, especially because it was so definitive, dragged the world’s hopes out of the gutter and teed up exciting possibilities for 2025 that are the exact opposite of what the world was expecting.

I doubt we will ever see another year like this one, and I can’t wait for us all to find out how next year will play out. Enjoy a wonderful New Year’s Eve.

What have I forgotten? Add your favorite 2024 moment in the comments. C&C will be off tomorrow for the holiday (so I can stay up late), but will return on Thursday to start the year off right, the Coffee & Covid way. Happy New Year!

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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