☕️ I TOLD YOU SO ☙ Monday, February 23, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

El Mencho's done; HuffPost needs therapy for your patriotism; USA's historic Olympic wins; the NYT panics over Epstein; and Harvard says optimism is a longevity drug. I told you so.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! Get ready to have your week kicked into high gear. Your terrific roundup includes: Trump takes out the second drug kingpin south of the border — it’s Venezuela Round II, Cartel Edition, and the timeline of Mexican capitulation provides dots to connect; HuffPost deploys a licensed therapist named Ranger to diagnose why you feel yucky rooting for Team USA — on the same day Jack Hughes spat his teeth onto Olympic ice and scored the golden goal; the New York Times assigns James Comey’s personal leaker to argue the Epstein files should never have been released — four days after Prince Andrew’s arrest; and Harvard proves that optimism literally adds years to your life — making C&C a longevity program with a clinical trial you didn’t know existed.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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While everyone was waiting for war to break out in Iran, it actually broke out in Mexico. It was Venezuela Round II— Cartel Edition, and the media missed all the real connections. This morning’s New York Times reported, “Mayhem Rocks Mexico After Most-Wanted Cartel Boss Is Killed.” I told you: Trump has a plan.

On Sunday, Mexican special forces —supported by a brand-new U.S. military-led intelligence task force— took out Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, better known as “El Mencho,” the head of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) and who, in the demonic competition for worst, was arguably Mexico’s most powerful and vicious drug lord. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed U.S. intelligence support and added that the Trump administration “commends and thanks the Mexican military for their cooperation and successful execution of this operation.”

El Mencho, which roughly translates to “tough guy,” was Mexico’s Walter White. He was a 60-year-old former police officer turned fentanyl kingpin. Mencho was shot during the weekend raid and died in custody. His body arrived in Mexico City on Sunday afternoon in a heavily guarded National Guard convoy.

El Mencho was a ghost. Only a handful of old photos of him exist. He kept such a low profile that reporters sometimes questioned whether he was even still alive. The only audio was from a leaked 2016 call where a furious Mencho phoned a police commander and ordered him to pull his officers: “Tell your sons of bitches to fall back because all of you happily accept my money.”

The officer just said yes sir, boss. That audio resurfaced on social media yesterday after his death. (The whole call is really something.)

🔥 Over the weekend, the now-leaderless cartel expressed its grief in traditional Latin American fashion, by setting fire to Costco, torching businesses across six states, triggering an airport shutdown at otherwise scenic Puerto Vallarta, and stranding tourists from United, American, Air Canada, and Aeromexico. In other words, a slightly below-average Mexican vacation.

Shellshocked tourists described the beach resort as a “war zone” with columns of black smoke rising over the bay. First timers. If you holiday in Mexico, you assume a certain amount of risk. I thought everybody already knew that. Anyway, the human interest angles are blooming in media stories faster than bullet holes in a whistleblower’s car.

🔥 It’s unreal how awful our media is. The first and most obvious connection, which media completely missed, is that President Trump has now removed the second drug-linked leader south of the border. Venezuelan Maduro was last month ($50 million DOJ bounty), and this month’s edition was the Tough Guy ($15 million).

Maybe media was too confused to draw the comparison, since El Mencho wasn’t an elected leader, but if you say that around Venezuelans, they’ll laugh so hard they’ll choke on a chalupa. The point is, El Mencho was a major cartel jefe, like Maduro, and was on the DEA’s most-wanted list, also like Maduro.

Now, like Maduro, the Tough Guy has been taken off the American hemisphere chessboard. He wasn’t a ghost after all. He’s no longer invisible. He’s not even in jail, like former President Maduro. El Mencho is in a box.

However “tough” El Mencho was, President Trump is tougher. He’s running a rollup play. Consider the timeline:

• November 2025 — Sheinbaum vows that she’ll never ever cooperate with the U.S. military on drug enforcement, tariffs be damned.

• January 3rd — Venezuelan President Maduro ‘relocated’ by special forces from Caracas to N.Y. federal penitentiary.

• January 21 — less than three weeks later, President Sheinbaum ships 37 cartel figures to the U.S. for prosecution.

• February 22 — President Sheinbaum’s military cooperates with the US military to take out the country’s top cartel boss.

President Sheinbaum spent all of 2025 insisting that Mexico would never allow U.S. military involvement in cartel operations. She said this firmly, repeatedly, and with great conviction— right up until Maduro’s plane landed in New York. Then she suddenly discovered a deep and previously unmentioned enthusiasm for bilateral security cooperation.

🔥 The implied but unwritten story was that our intelligence agencies knew exactly where the ‘invisible’ hombre was, but couldn’t get the Mexicans to grab him— until now. Democrats waged a “war on drugs” for decades but failed on every metric.

Comparatively, in one year, Trump has crushed the drug epidemic. Overdose deaths are down almost 20% across-the-board, and fentanyl deaths are down over 30%. Only 4.5 tons of fentanyl were seized at the border last year —down over 50% from 2024— which means less is being shipped. Mexico has turned over more than 90 cartel defendants since Trump took office— 37 in one day, right after Maduro’s capture.

My legal advice is: if you’re a Central/South American bigwig on the DEA’s most wanted list, the best time to consider retirement is right now. Any future time is what we call suboptimal. Don’t be loco— March is right around the corner. Who’ll be next?

I told you this would happen. It’s the Donroe Doctrine, which is embarrassingly simple: be the guy nobody thinks is bluffing.

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It takes a very particular kind of talent to turn Team USA winning Olympic gold into a mental health emergency. But HuffPost has never been one to leave a perfectly good victory party unspoiled. Yesterday— the exact same day the U.S. Men’s Hockey team beat Canada in overtime to bring home the gold at the Milan-Cortina Olympics for the first time in 46 years— HuffPost ran a mental-health story headlined, “There’s A Reason You Feel Yucky Watching The Olympics Right Now.” The outlet promoted it on social media with the helpful caption: “If waving the American flag or chanting ‘USA!’ turns you off right now, you’re not alone.”

At one point in the amazing match between arch-rivals Canada and the US, Jack Hughes, the 24-year-old New Jersey Devils phenom, took a vicious stick to the face (“accidentally”). Blood gushed and at least three teeth snapped clean out. He spat them onto the ice, grinned through the gap like he’d just been dared to try it again, and kept playing. No quitting, no excuses.

Following the dramatic, if not historic victory, with his voice hoarse from shouting and emotion, lisping ever so slightly from gap where his front teeth used to be, but still radiating unquenchable patriotism, Hughes delivered words that surged across social media with electric abandon.

“This is all about our country right now,” Hughes told reporters. “I love the USA. I love my teammates. It’s unbelievable. The USA hockey brotherhood—it’s so strong. We had so much support from ex-players... and I’m so proud to be American today.”

CLIP: Jack Hughes tells reporters how it is (0:59).

He paused for a beat, eyes shining, knowing exactly what he was saying and to whom. Hughes doubled down with pure, unfiltered joy: “That’s a great Canadian team, but we’re USA. We’re so proud to be Americans. Tonight was all for the country.” (He added enthusiastically, “we got great dentists back home!”)

Earlier in the games, the USA’s women’s hockey team also beat Canada to take the gold— also in a dramatic overtime showdown. I am not making this up: even though losing to the US, Canada still won the silver medals— still, Vancouver reportedly lowered its official state flags to half-staff, as if Justin Trudeau had fallen off his yacht and drowned while choking on a chunk of backbacon.

I can’t verify this, but yesterday afternoon, Canadian social media was glumly re-posting an image of a bald eagle that apparently landed on the half-lowered flag at the Canookian Capitol:

Canadians, supposedly prized for their cultural politeness, grumbled. For a country whose children play up growing ice hockey from fetal stage, it must have stung very badly to be beaten by a nation whose hockey is mostly played indoors as a seasonal pastime.

Meanwhile, Alysa Liu, whose father fled the Tiananmen Square massacre and who refused to skate for the CCP (the FBI shielded her from CCP spies), won the gold in figure skating for America and was unabashedly patriotic, creating viral videos that also flooded social media.

Posts called Liu’s flag-wrapped celebration and dramatic rendition of the Star Spangled Banner “pure American pride,” “the most heartfelt podium moment of the Games,” and “a reminder of what representing the USA truly means.” Comment sections flooded with variations of “She makes me proud to be American” and “This is the patriotism we needed.”

Even Olympic skeptics admitted it hit different and better— raw, genuine, and dare I say, unifying in a divided time.

Well, maybe not completely unifying.

🔥 In its queasy, nausea-inducing story, HuffPo helpfully cited two licensed therapists to diagnose its mental instability, which is apparently induced by watching American athletes win and praise the USA, while simultaneously feeling bad about immigration enforcement.

One therapist’s name —and I am not making this up— was Ranger. Ranger the therapist. Ranger is an ‘expert’ who has apparently treated dozens of progressives who accidentally cheered during the hockey game and then immediately felt guilty about it.

“Why do I want them to win when I’m angry about what the country is doing?” Ranger the therapist asked, rhetorically. “You might even need to turn the game off right after a big moment because it suddenly feels all too complicated to keep rooting,” Ranger added. (Turn the game off? Jack Hughes just spit three teeth on the ice and kept playing. Who turns that off?)

“If waving the American flag or chanting, ‘USA!’ makes us feel grossed out or ashamed, we can cheer for individual athletes,” another moronic therapist suggested.

🇺🇸 This so-called ‘condition,’ according to HuffPost, is a kind of “cognitive dissonance,” which is a legitimate psychological concept that has now been officially stretched to cover rooting for the United States at the Olympics.

HuffPo’s social media post linking to its article was violently ratioed. Back in the land of reality, about 200 million Americans were chanting USA without feeling yucky, crying at hockey highlights, and instead were swapping bald eagle memes. Representative Randy Fine (R-Fla.) replied directly to HuffPo, suggesting a succinct policy response: “Get the hell out of my country.”

Senator Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) added: “If you can’t be excited about winning gold at the Olympics— including in OT vs Canada, you don’t have a pulse.” The social media ratio was, fittingly, less of a fact-check and more of a national intervention. No therapists needed.

Get bent, Huffington Post, and anybody who agrees with them.

🇺🇸 Altogether, Team USA shattered its previous Winter Games records with 12 gold medals —the most ever in U.S. Olympic winter history— alongside 12 silver and 9 bronze for a powerhouse total of 33 medals, placing second overall behind only Norway. (You’re next, Norway.) It was the nation’s strongest traveling Winter performance in decades, a surge of breakthroughs, comebacks, heart-tugs, and clutch moments that lit up the nation from coast to coast.

One can understand Canadian angst:

It’s harder to understand why progressives need therapy to deal with historic wins by US athletes at the Winter Olympics. They might want to carefully consider today’s final story.

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I told you it wouldn’t take long. Wait till you grasp these connected dots. The New York Times platformed an opinion piece this morning arguing —for the first time!— that the Epstein files should never have been released, headlined, succinctly, “The Epstein Files Should Never Have Been Released.” Hahahaha! The author was none less than Daniel Richman, Columbia Law professor and former federal prosecutor.

You probably don’t remember Professor Richman from his previous work on sensitive government documents. He’s the man former FBI Director James “86-47” Comey personally selected to leak classified FBI memos about Trump to the press in 2017.

In short, the guy who helped leak FBI documents to trigger a special counsel investigation and two impeachments now thinks the government’s Epstein files should have stayed locked up after all. Apparently, leaking is fine when it targets a Republican president. But transparency is dangerous when it targets pedophiles and their élite snugglers.

The bipartisan Epstein Transparency Act isn’t working out as well as progressives had hoped.

🔥 In his remarkable op-ed, Richman pensively whined that, “if our justice system were working properly, the public would never have such access.” Correct. If the justice system were working properly, Jeffrey Epstein would not have received a sweetheart deal from Alex Acosta. He would not have been allowed to “commit suicide” in a federal facility under conditions that would embarrass Fulton County’s drunk tank.

And 3.5 million pages of evidence about powerful pedophiles would not have required an act of Congress to see daylight. The system’s failure is the reason for the release, not an argument against it.

The NYT’s choice of narrative rewinder was characteristically exquisite. They needed someone willing to argue that the government should keep its secrets, and not turn over to the public what Richman sneeringly called, “untold layers of hearsay, unverified accusations and vague circumstantial connections.” (Haha!)

So of course the Times picked the government’s most notorious leaker. It’s like asking the guy who left the barn door open to write an op-ed about the importance of barn doors.

Too late now! Still, Richman wrung his skeletal hands and argued with a straight face that any more Epstein files “ought not be released for the public to pick over.” Too much hearsay (about Democrats)! Too many unverified accusations (against progressives)! Too many vague, circumstantial connections (linking liberal college professors)!

I predicted this day would soon come. Though to be fair, I never thought it would happen this soon. The timeline suggests they were badly shaken by former Prince Andrew’s arrest— a breaking development conspicuously absent from Richman’s article.

🔥 The Epstein files are producing actual consequences across Europe— arrests, investigations, firings, and resignations. Meanwhile, the New York Times is running op-eds arguing the files should never have been released. Ironic! For most of last year, the Times ran wall-to-wall coverage for months, demanding ever more transparency, criticizing every redaction, and amplifying every call for full release.

Behold, the very same New York Times, December 19th:

As recently as February 9th (the week before Andrew’s historic arrest), the Times’s Epstein Live Blog amplified Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie, who were demanding the DOJ stop redacting names from a single “mug shot” photo list of 20 people.

The New York Times even spent most of December helping people un-redact the files. They literally ran a story explaining how to recover insufficiently redacted information.

But here’s what happened between “release the files” and “the files should never have been released”: the files worked. They did exactly what transparency is supposed to do. They produced accountability. And Andrew’s arrest —the first royal to be arrested since the 1640s— proves anybody could be next.

Ten months of “release the files now!” One royal arrest. Four days of silence. Then, “actually, you shouldn’t have these.”

🔥 The Times isn’t just crying about spilled Little St. James coconut milk. The DOJ is still sitting on an estimated 2.5 million more pages. It looks to me like the Times is reeling in Richman to plug the gap, and stop any more releases. If the first 3.5 million pages are this bad— how much worse are the pages the DOJ might still be sitting on?

The New York Times has now completed the most revealing editorial arc of the decade: two months of demanding Epstein file transparency, followed by a panicked reversal four days after the files produced their first major arrest. The principle was never about transparency.

The principle was: transparency for thee, but not for the people who summer in the same places as our editorial board.

When Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor abruptly crossed the red line from “person of interest” to “person in handcuffs,” somewhere between Windsor Castle and the Times’s opinion desk, someone decided the public had learned enough. So they assigned the op-ed to James Comey’s personal leaker, who wrote it from the unique moral authority of a man who has both leaked classified documents and also had his own emails seized by federal investigators.

The New York Times: all the news that’s fit to print, unless it leads to an elite arrest.

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Today’s final “I told you so” moment appeared courtesy of science. According to a new, major, peer-reviewed Harvard scientific study: reading C&C might literally add years to your life. Here’s the tweet from Sahil Bloom summarizing the findings, and here’s the study, titled “Optimism is associated with exceptional longevity in 2 epidemiologic cohorts of men and women.”

A massive study out of Harvard and Boston University, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, followed over 70,000 people for up to 30 years and found that the most optimistic people live 11% to 15% longer than pessimists. They also have 50% to 70% greater odds of living to 85.

These astonishingly strong results held even after controlling for diet, exercise, smoking, alcohol use, chronic diseases, depression, and socioeconomic status. In other words, it’s not just that optimists happen to eat better or exercise more. All by itself, the expectation that good things will happen independently extends your life.

If a drug produced a 50-70% improvement in your odds of reaching 85, Pfizer would charge forty thousand dollars a dose and the FDA would fast-track it. And people would pay for it. But C&C is 85% free! And even a C&C supporter subscription is nothing compared to what people would pay for that remedy. Just saying.

Back when I started this blog in 2020, I made a big bet. The bet was that everything would be okay. Not because I had inside information. Not because I was ignoring the data. But because the data, if you read it honestly, kept pointing in the same direction: toward optimism. And now I want to take just a moment —not to gloat (much), but to remember— because we optimists turned out to be right about everything.

We were right that covid wouldn’t kill 2% of the population. We were right that lockdowns wouldn’t stop the virus and would devastate everything else. We were right that school closures would damage a generation of children for a disease that barely affected them.

We were right that natural immunity was real, durable, and at least as good as vaccine-induced immunity — a position that got you banned from social media in 2021 and published in The Lancet by 2023. We were right that the vaccines didn’t stop transmission — something Pfizer eventually admitted it had never even tested for.

We were right that masking children was pointless and cruel. We were right that “two weeks to flatten the curve” was a lie. We were right that the virus almost certainly came from a lab — another “conspiracy theory” that eventually became the U.S. government’s official assessment. We were right that VAERS signals were worth investigating, not dismissing. We were right that the “pandemic of the unvaccinated” was a political slogan, not an epidemiological fact. We were right that the “experts” who demanded our obedience were often wrong, conflicted, or both.

And we were right about the most important thing of all: that the American people would finally figure it out. That the truth would surface. That the institutions demanding blind trust would eventually have to answer for what they did. It took longer than any of us wanted. But it happened. It is happening.

So when Harvard publishes a study showing that optimism adds 11 to 15 percent to your lifespan, I don’t take that as news. I take it as confirmation. This blog has been a longevity program since day one. We just didn’t know there was a 30-year-long clinical trial underway to back it up.

So— you’re welcome! It has been my great pleasure to serve you. Now let’s keep the project going— optimistically, relentlessly, and now with peer-reviewed actuarial prospects.

Have a magnificent Monday! Tomorrow morning, Michelle and I awaken at 3:30am, California time, to head for the airport. So I have no idea what tomorrow’s post will look like or when it will arrive. But I’ll get something out as soon as I can. Be optimistic.

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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