☕️ HONOR AMONG THIEVES ☙ Friday, January 9, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Tenant Tsarina cries over capitalist sins; prog media shields ICE shooting to bury fraud tale; Hilton beats MSM on viral DHS video; VP names White House fraud czar; Trump teases housing relief; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! Your Roundup roundup today includes: Mamdani’s commie Tenant Tsarina dissolves in tears when confronted by her capitalist tendencies; bourgeois privilege rears its ugly head in the Mayor’s office; progressive media races to the defense; media pushes ICE shooting narrative to smother fraud story; shooting victim identified as anti-ICE activist; Hilton responds faster than corporate media to viral video controversy over ejected DHS agents in Minneapolis hotel; Vice President announces brand-new, White House based fraud czar to tackle national response, which was very bad news for Democrat governors; Trump teases more housing affordablity moves in form of mortgage bond buybacks; and the covid jab controversy folds into a major new wrinkle as the maker of Roundup enters the ring.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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On Wednesday, the UK Daily Mail ran a silly followup story about Socialist Mayor Zohran “the Magnificent” Mamdani’s new anti-white Tenant Advocate Director, headlined, “Anti-white NYC mayoral aide SOBS when asked about mom’s home.” Online-insurgent-turned-bureaucrat Cea Weaver was confronted outside her townhouse by Daily Mail journos earlier this week, who merely wished to clarify her anti-white, anti-capitalist views. Weaver, a Bryn Mawr graduate, demonstrated the cool aplomb of a hardened French revolutionary with her fingers on the guillotine handle by dissolving in tears and fleeing down the street.

In 2018, Weaver tweeted, “There is no such thing as ‘good gentrifier,’ only people who are actively working on projects to dismantle white supremacy and capitalism and people who aren’t.” But diligent Daily Mail researchers, doing proper journalism, dug up the fact that Weaver’s own parents (Vanderbilt professors, of course), own a $1.4 million home in a chic neighborhood in Nashville— a former black neighborhood that is now too expensive for lower and middle class folks. In other words— Weaver’s parents are textbook gentrifiers.

Weaver herself said there was no such thing as a good gentrifier. Weaver’s townhouse in Crown Heights is also in a gentrifying New York neighborhood. You can imagine the questions the Daily Mail reporters had hoped to ask, were it not for Weaver’s bourgeois tears, deployed the same way an octopus squirts out a cloud of ink before it jets away.

🔥 But isn’t Weaver’s privileged upbringing always the way? Isn’t it basically communist branding?

Young Vladimir Lenin’s father, Ilya Ulyanov, was the well-heeled Director of Primary Schools in Simbirsk Province. Lenin learned to hate his own bourgeois class while studying Latin and Greek at his private school, and later studied law without ever working a day among the proletariat or missing a meal. But even without himself working, through a stroke of collectivist genius (or possibly a brain tumor, we still don’t know for sure), he understood workers’ deep class resentments well, better than they themselves did. At least in theory. Not to mention that, thanks to his Ivy League education (Russian edition), he could describe their theoretical class complaints in credentialed, scientific vocabulary.

Ms. Weaver is perhaps not nearly as eloquent as Lenin, but earns marks for trying hard. “America,” the Ivy Leaguer once tweeted, “built wealth for white people through genocide, slavery, stolen land and labor.” The little red activist that could was also Mamdani’s senior policy advisor on the campaign. “Homeownership is racist,” she often chirped, parrot-like, reflexively sticking up for working-class people who didn’t attend Ivy League schools and thus don’t know any better.

Apparently, despite the dustup, Weaver will remain in post. Early this morning, New York Magazine leaped to Weaver’s defense, generously allowing that, while her ridiculous tweeting “recalls the nauseating apogee of the woke era,” nevertheless, “none of the posts are recent.” Nobody —including New York Magazine— is denying she’s a communist of the Marxist-Leninist stripe, either.

“If Mamdani sticks by Weaver,” New York Magazine soberly advised, “he can survive this news cycle. Eventually, the media will lose interest, especially since there is, by definition, nothing new here.” If only the progressive media were half so forgiving whenever they unearth some prehistoric Reddit post Pete Hegseth typed when he was eleven. But I digress.

I actually agree that there’s nothing new, in the sense that it is perfectly on brand for Mamdani to appoint and “stick by” his racist, openly communist Tenant Tsarina. If Mamdani does ‘stick by’ Weaver, as seems likely, she’ll continue to be a pox upon the houses of New York landlords. But for the rest of us, she will remain a delightful source of continuing amusement and entertainment throughout the Mamdani era.

Good luck, Zohran!

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I won’t spend much time on this developing ICE shooting story, except to say that the real story is the coverage of the story. Here’s this morning’s New York Times home page, with wall-to-wall coverage of the Minneapolis ICE-related tragedy.

Notice what’s missing:

• no discussion of why the stop occurred,

• no analysis of agent threat perception, and

• no comparisons with hundreds of similar police shootings, including at least two other recent fatalities involving ICE firing into SUVs.

Just to be clear, the tragic death of the 37-year-old activist is a political story, not a law enforcement story. The coverage and the astroturfed protests are obviously intended to interrupt the growing momentum of the welfare fraud news cycle. The ICE-shooting narrative recenters Minnesota as the victim of oppression, rather than as the capital of graft and grotesque mismanagement.

We remain in the hot-takes moment, but the emerging facts hint at complications for the narrative. Yesterday, the New York Post ran a story headlined, “Renee Nicole Good was Minneapolis ‘ICE Watch’ ‘warrior’ who trained to resist feds before shooting.” She and her lesbian wife recently moved back to Minneapolis from Canada, where they’d briefly relocated in protest of Trump’s 2024 re-election. According to the Post, Good —a mother of three— was a card-carrying, trained ICE-resistance activist.

Good’s wife, Rebecca, was busy confronting ICE agents (outside the SUV) at the time of the shooting. The Post reported she was filmed sobbing, “it’s my fault,” after the shots rang out and she realized Renee had been struck. “I made her come down here, it’s my fault,” she can be heard saying in a video filmed by a local resident.

According to the Post’s story, both women were members of “ICE Watch,” a group that tracks the movements of ICE agents and coordinates ways to interfere with them. For instance, ICE Watch recently shared an Instagram post that encouraged members to bring items to help barricade the streets around where the shooting took place, including suggesting bringing dried-up Christmas trees to burn.

So, they’re not super smart. But still.

The story also noted that, according to DHS statistics, ICE agents have faced an unprecedented spike in car attacks, surging by +3,200% over the last year. The agent who shot Ms. Good was himself recently injured in a different car attack last June, in Minneapolis, under similar circumstances. According to a New York Times report, the agent was dragged 100 yards after trying to disable the driver with a stun gun, and required medical treatment.

Notwithstanding the growing evidence that Ms. Good and her wife deliberately intended to get in harm’s way, this media psy-op will probably work to shift the national focus from fraud to ICE enforcement, at least in the short term. Attention, after all, is limited. It’s a zero-sum market. It’s neither good nor bad; it is just how the psy-wars go.

The salacious hare of “police brutality” sprints ahead, while the tortoise of truth lumbers along behind.

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Earlier this week, Hilton Hotels International narrowly avoided being Bud-Lited. The Wall Street Journal ran the story below the headline, “Hilton, ICE and the New Playbook for Handling an Online Crisis.” The subheadline explained, “The hotel company severed ties with a Hampton Inn less than 24 hours after allegations that it canceled rooms for immigration agents.”

The fight began quietly, with a few blunt emails and a hotel clerk who figured no one would ever see them, and ended with a crane literally ripping the “Hampton Inn by Hilton” sign off a Minnesota hotel as the entire country watched.

Several federal immigration and DHS officers arrived in Minneapolis, already under siege from the Biden-era border crisis that has spilled deep into the country’s interior, suddenly found their government-booked rooms were canceled, and were rudely informed in writing that the property was “not allowing any ICE or immigration agents to stay at our property.”

DHS blasted the move in a searing tweet titled, “NO ROOM AT THE INN!” The agency accused the entire Hilton chain of a coordinated effort to blacklist federal law enforcement and effectively side with the very criminal networks those agents were there to confront.

When Nick Sortor tweeted a viral independent video showing a front-desk worker still turning agents away —even after corporate assured the public and DHS that the problem had been resolved— the online backlash from outraged Americans was instant and ferocious, forcing Hilton to act again within hours.

CLIP: independent journalist Nick Sortor shreds Minneapolis Hampton Inn (4:47).

“So they lied,” Nick says at the end of the video. “They lied. I guess they want to get Bud-Lited,” he supposed. But Hilton did not want to join the watered-down, malted beverage in marketing Hades. In other words, Hilton’s management is much smarter than Budweiser’s.

In a rare and very public rebuke of one of its own franchisees for failing the basic test of equal treatment and public accomodation, Hilton cut the Lakeville property completely out of its system, declared that Hilton-flagged hotels must be open to everyone, and immedately ordered workers to haul down the trademarked flag (the Hilton sign)— a steel-and-neon warning to every other woke-minded business thinking about discriminating against the men and women who enforce the nation’s immigration laws.

Hampton Inn hotels are independently owned franchises and are subject to a dizzying array of contractual requirements. Apparently, refusing service to federal employees and then lying about it breached Hilton’s franchise agreement, probably in multiple paragraphs. I’ve represented hotel franchisees. Believe me that this de-flagging process usually takes months, with franchise locations usually getting multiple warnings and chances to fix problems. Big brand owners like Hilton try to avoid lawsuits from their franchisees, so they are usually slow and cautious.

Not this time. Hilton International obviously had no intention of waiting around for the country to sort out the distinction between the corporate brand and a local franchise. The whole thing was over in less than 24 hours. Buh bye.

There is another story here about the awe-inspiring power of social media, free speech, and lone independent journalists— and the death by a thousand cuts of legacy media. I probably don’t need to tell you this, but corporate media didn’t catch up to this story until the pale horse of brand destruction was long out of the social media barn. Social media and even the corporations are now faster than the legacy media.

Corporate response expert Jim Fielding told the Journal, “These companies are learning.” That’s because they have incentive to learn, unlike corporate media journalists.

Hilton said it was contacting all franchisees to “reiterate and reinforce its standards across its system to ensure this doesn’t happen again.” So.

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Despite this week’s well-timed ICE distraction, the fraud issue isn’t going away. Yesterday, Politico gushed a sneering story headlined, “Vance rolls out new assistant attorney general to root out ‘fraud’ nationwide.” Don’t overlook Politico’s scare quotes around ‘fraud,’ and then roll your eyes several times before proceeding.

CLIP: VP Vance announces all-new attorney general position focused on fraud in Minnesota and beyond (1:47).

Yesterday, Vice President JD Vance announced the creation of a new DOJ position to investigate welfare fraud across America. Vance said the new assistant attorney general —selected but not yet named— will initially focus on the rampant fraud in Minnesota, but that it will ultimately be a “nationwide effort, because unfortunately, the American people have been defrauded in a very nationwide way.”

Vance also said Minnesota Governor Tim Walz “has enabled fraud, and maybe, in fact, has participated in fraud,” and explicitly called for his resignation. I’m not predicting anything, but if they charge a sitting governor with something, that would probably grab the news cycle right back. Just saying.

The new Assistant Attorney General will be announced “hopefully in the next few days.” The role is unique; it will be based in the White House, not the Department of Justice, and will report directly to the President and VP Vance. Senate leadership has promised a “swift confirmation.”

Democrats predictably decried the new AG position, renaming it the “Chief of Xenophobia and Racism,” or something like that.

It might be bigger than just welfare fraud. The new role will oversee a “major interagency task force,” including DHS agents already surged to Minnesota, and with DOJ sending extra prosecutors, creating a centralized, White House‑run fraud apparatus with “national jurisdiction.” But VP Vance also linked the job to pursuing people who “are defrauding the United States by inciting violence against our law enforcement officers,” suggesting the role’s scope goes well beyond benefit fraud— including potentially NGOs funding protests and public‑order-slash-insurrection terrain.

On Tuesday, the Trump administration froze over $10 billion in federal child care, family assistance, and social services funds for five blue states —California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York— amid concerns over widespread fraud and misuse. The governors of those states called the moves “politically motivated” and meant to harm vulnerable, well-meaning, low-income families who are just trying to get rich the Somalian way.

This story isn’t going away, no matter how hard they try to distract everyone.

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Meanwhile, in the political arena, January’s surge continued yesterday. The AP dished a story headlined, “Trump says he wants government to buy $200B in mortgage bonds in a push to bring down mortgage rates.” The Democrats asked for the affordability fight; here it comes.

The housing affordability crisis didn’t appear because of bad vibes. It started during the pandemic, when builders were forced to sit on their hands, realtors treated open houses like biohazard zones, and half the country was “working” from bed in yoga pants. Then Biden-era green mandates piled on like extra kale nobody ordered, inflation turned every home price into a ransom note, and those magic 3% rates locked in owners tighter than grandma clutching her last Werther’s Original.

Yesterday, President Trump issued a post declaring that he will instruct Fannie and Freddie to use an existing war chest of about $200 billion in reserves (a rainy-day fund he wisely refused to burn off during Trump 1.0) to buy up mortgage bonds, a complicated financial move that experts say will help lower residential mortgage rates. The extent of the potential reduction is hotly debated. One Redfin economist quoted for the story estimated the move could shave 0.25 to 0.5 points off 30-year mortgage rates. Every little bit helps, one supposes.

Current average 30-year rates have already fallen to around 6.15%, with rates for 15-year mortgages down to 5.45%. If the 30-year rate drops into the 5’s, it will cross a psychological threshold and probably spur new buying activity. Builders are already commonly buying down customers’ mortgage rates as incentives, and so between the mortgage bond buyback and builder incentives, buyer rates could conceivably drop to the low 5’s. One more push and rates in the 4’s become possible, encouraging rate-locked owners to buy.

This news piles on yesterday’s announcement of a ban on hedge-fund vampires buying up residential properties. When enforced, it will increase the supply of homes, especially starter homes, which will lower prices. Starter homes might actually become available for, gasp, starters instead of being turned into rental portfolios for guys named Chadwell Gerard Bostley IV who summer in the Hamptons.

In other words, over two days, Trump announced plans to pressure both mortgage rates and housing prices.

This all feels suspiciously like the payoff from that mysterious post-Christmas Mar-a-Lago housing powwow that briefly flickered across the news cycle before vanishing like a bad Tinder date. No leaks, no warnings or photos, just a steady series of announcements. It’s classic Trump: untelegraphed action. Surprise!

The bottom line is that the Administration is throwing haymakers at the housing crisis faster than a heavyweight trying to beat the bell. Will all these housing tweaks work? Who knows; we are paddling along in uncharted waters at midnight. But —for the first time in years— it finally feels like someone’s actually trying to fix the boat instead of complaining that it’s leaking.

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Just when you thought the covid jab story could not get any more twisted and bizarre, the poop-show around covid “vaccines” (scare quotes intended) just exploded in a whole new direction. Late last week, Reuters ran a legal story headlined, “Bayer sues COVID vaccine makers over mRNA technology.” Just wait. If you thought Pfizer’s and Moderna’s problems were already bad, they just got substantially worse.

Ignore the misleading headline— it’s not actually Bayer proper storming the courthouse steps. No, it’s Bayer’s subsidiary Monsanto, the same one that turned “Roundup” into a household name and “glyphosate” into a four-letter curse word for half the planet. Monsanto filed suit in Delaware federal court against Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna, with a side dish against Johnson & Johnson in New Jersey. The allegation is that these companies allegedly cribbed Monsanto’s 1980s breakthrough in stabilizing messenger RNA so crops could produce more durable, pest-resistant proteins —patented as US No. 7,741,118 (granted in 2010, expiring June 2027)— and repurposed it to “stablize” the fragile mRNA in their covid jabs— and don’t ask questions about mRNA persistence in human bodies.

Consider the irony for a moment: the same corporate alchemy that gave us glyphosate-tolerant soybeans engineered to laugh in the face of herbicides has now allegedly been reverse-engineered (or straight-up copied) to make human cells churn out spike proteins like a Jolt Cola-fueled 3D printer. Back when shoulder pads were still a thing, Monsanto’s scientists figured out how to tweak coding sequences to boost mRNA longevity and protein yield in plants. Fast-forward four decades, and suddenly that same patented codon-optimization trick is the secret sauce behind Comirnaty and Spikevax. Coincidence? Monsanto says no.

The covid shots include the same technology used to stabilize plant mRNA, which Monsanto used to genetically engineer designer seeds resistant to its weedkiller product. That tech is now in us. But leave that aside for now, as well as the plain fact that everything about the jabs screams “genetic treatment” and not “vaccine.”

The potential damages math if Monsanto is right is deliciously medieval. Pfizer and Moderna raked in over $100 billion in global revenue from the shots during the pandemic peak. Patent infringement remedies start with a “reasonable royalty” —typically 6-10% in biotech disputes— plus interest, costs, fees, and the looming threat of treble damages for willful infringement. We’re talking potential core liability in the $6–10 billion range, give or take a few yachts. And that’s before discovery turns into the legal equivalent of an archaeological dig through decades of incriminating lab notebooks, awkward emails, and “confidential” PowerPoint decks.

Patent litigation, as the saying goes, is the sport of kings— regular kings, not the kind who tweet at 3 a.m. The process is so brutal that most cases settle before trial, often for undisclosed sums that sound like lottery winnings. But the real schadenfreude here is the timing. Moderna’s pipeline is thinner than a supermodel’s lunch; it’s basically a one-trick pony with no other blockbuster in sight. Pfizer, meanwhile, is getting the full Trump treatment—public whacks, policy headwinds, and now this. The profit pie is shrinking faster than ice caps in Greta Thunberg’s feverish imagination, and now there’s a gigantic, well-funded, hyper-litigious claimant at the table demanding its slice.

So here we are. Monsanto, the agricultural biotech behemoth that once terrorized farmers with seed-saving lawsuits, is now turning the tables on the pharma darlings who transformed mRNA into a pandemic windfall. It’s like watching the villain from one dystopian novel sue the heroes of another. Will it end in a quiet nine-figure settlement? A years-long slog through the courts? Or —dare we dream— actual discovery into how exactly the leap from Roundup Ready corn to human spike-protein factories occurred?

One thing seems certain: the mRNA revolution, once sold to the world as humanity’s triumphant leap into synthetic biology, now looks more like a house of cards built on borrowed patents and hubris. The very same molecular tricks that Monsanto pioneered to keep plant mRNA from degrading in the rain —tricks that helped birth glyphosate-tolerant super-crops— are now the fragile backbone of the same covid shots injected into about 73% of Americans. And glory be, the thieves are turning on each other as the nooses tighten.

Monsanto, struggling under an avalanche of lawsuits against its mRNA product, Roundup-resistant seeds, wants its cut of the covid windfall. For obvious reasons. Headline from the New York Times, four days ago:

Monsanto needs a safe haven. Pfizer and Moderna want to keep what’s left of their billions. There’s no honor among patent pirates, apparently —just the cold arithmetic of royalties, treble damages, and discovery that could expose exactly how the jump from Roundup Ready soybeans to human spike-protein factories was made.

The entire mRNA ecosystem —agricultural, pharmaceutical, therapeutic— is staggering against the ropes, caught in a web of lies, interlocking legal claims, vaccine skepticism, HHS hostility, mounting injuries, expiring monopolies, and public backlash that stubbornly refuses to go away.

The popcorn may be GMO, but the drama is all-natural, seed oil-free schadenfreude. When the dust settles, the only thing left standing might be the legal bills. And the mRNA revolution will turn out to be just another fool’s gold biotech dream that always looked better on paper than it ever performed in real life.

And wait till you see the latest peer-reviewed mRNA-cancer study that is so explosive that its website has been buried in denial-of-service attacks for weeks now. But that engaging episode will have to wait till tomorrow’s Weekend Edition.

Have a fabulous Friday! Scoot back here tomorrow morning, for the latest terrific roundup of essential news and C&C commentary.

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