Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! Your roundup includes: the New York Times watches the presidents of the two most powerful nations on Earth meet at the White House and files two thousand words about the press pool; the Boston Globe's biggest story of the year, in which a KN-95-mandatory lesbian bar in Western Massachusetts tries one mask-optional night to make rent and gets denounced by its own regulars, a Zoom mob, and the Communist Party; 1,600 federal investigations, 32 federal charges in four weeks, and twenty more arrests in Florida as noncitizen voting finally becomes a "tier-one priority"; and the NIH's new vaccine-injury research center, which could open by mid-October and which you probably heard about only here.
🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍
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On Thursday, the president of the United States hosted the president of China at the White House— the kind of rare historical event books are written about, with trade truces, AI arms races, and state dinners. It was a big deal. And the New York Times’ chief White House correspondent, Peter Baker —now covering his sixth presidency, a credential the paper advertised like a Michelin star— surveyed the summit and decided the lead was: the media’s feelings got hurt. Behold the headline: “In Trump’s White House, China’s Dictator Is Welcome. American Media, Less So.”
I am not exaggerating. Here’s the very first sentence: “At the White House gate, a throng of Chinese journalists was being admitted onto the grounds of the Executive Mansion to cover the visit of President Xi Jinping. Out on the street, several American journalists were blocked from entering the White House on the orders of President Trump.”
Poor babies. “Several” American journalists (I wonder which ones, cough, CNN/Politico/MS LATER) were bounced and forced to watch “a throng” of Chinese reporters streaming into the club, I mean White House. Grammatically, Baker turned the summit between the two most powerful men on planet Earth into a backdrop for a story about the media’s wounded pride.
Mind you, this was the lead story at the very top of the Times’s web page this morning. One suspects that the self-obsessed nitwits at the Times would cover D-Day by complaining about embedded reporters being forced to sit in the back of the landing boats. It got worse from there. Oh, Times.
Baker then delivered roughly two thousand manic words that kept wandering back, like a dog to its favorite chew toy, to the Times most favorite subject: itself. The press pool—the rotation—the boycott—the court order—the written commitment—the rotation again. The entire media-banning story was contained within the story supposedly about the Chinese visit like a Russian nesting doll.
The short version is that Judge Kelly —who in 2018 ordered Jim Acosta’s press privileges restored, and gave Enrique Tarrio a 22-year prison sentence for not being at the Capitol on January 6th— predictably entered a TRO Wednesday at midnight ordering the White House to let CNN, Politico, and Ms. Now back in. Another day, another injunction.
Put simply, the Times is mad. And hurt. And they don’t care who knows. The article lashed the President throughout with cutting adjectives and angry adverbs; he “fumed” about the missing TV coverage, “basked” in President Xi’s presence, “lavished” the Chinese leader with praise, and “delighted” in showing “his good friend” the ballroom construction. There was more. Baker sneered that Trump “gushes” over autocrats— an “affinity” for them that has “baffled” democrat leaders (who know a thing or two about autocracy).
It said Trump denounces journalists as “enemies of the people,” which it pointed out was “a phrase used by Stalin to condemn dissidents to the gulag.” The article reached its snippy peak when it called the White House’s livestream of the event a “form of state television that Mr. Xi might recognize.”
If I could characterize the coverage of the visit itself, it seems the New York Times disapproved of hosting President Xi and giving him the traditional full state-visit treatment, which included flyovers, a banquet, personal tours of the grounds (and the new helipad!), and speeches in which both leaders praised each other. The Times would have preferred something else, perhaps, though it never said.
Though President Trump received the brunt of the scorned newspaper’s ire, it reserved plenty for President Xi. It introduced him in the headline as “China’s Dictator,” quoted Republican Senator Roger Wicker calling Xi a “brutal, unelected and oppressive dictator,” and repeatedly criticized him for communism, an awareness of the terrifying red peril conspicuously absent in the Times’ coverage of the DSA’s meteoric rise. (In one op-ed the Times also ran yesterday, socialist political organizing was sold as a charming solution to Democrats’ youth problem.)
That wasn’t the only jarring tonal mismatch. In every story on the Iran War, the Times goes out of its way to paint Trump as a warmonger. Yet it had nothing good to say about Trump building a better relationship with the country most likely to drag America into a major war. Instead, Baker treated honorary diplomatic pageantry mainly as a sign of Trump’s fondness for dictators. (Whom it helpfully listed, in case anyone forgot.)
But the Grey Lady missed the point. Trump has ambitions, but they are not about cozying up to dictators. He aims to end the post-Cold War unipolar era and build a new, more stable multipolar world. This is no secret. It’s right in the 2025 National Security Strategy. That would have been a better, more important story, if the Times had been able to overcome its emotions.
President Trump did gain one visible major achievement. He got the inscrutable President Xi —who never laughs in public— to genuinely chuckle when Trump pointed out the portrait of the Autopen. This provoked joyless Democrats and crusty neocons to take to social media to prove they had no sense of humor. The White House X account rubbed it in:
CLIP: Trump and Xi share a laugh over President Autopen’s portrait (0:08).
In spite of all the hand-wringing, this wasn’t just a joke at the former president’s expense, or a slam on the mentally handicapped. This was a public rebuke. A signal. Trump was saying: we know you controlled him, and now that is all over.
If Trump’s critics could pull themselves together and get their complaints into a coherent form, they’d understand that a world where the US and China were equal trading partners is a safer and more stable one. If the Times’ anguished cries are any evidence, the Democrats and the neocons seem to prefer a strategy of Chinese regime change— which all but guarantees eventual kinetic conflict. But never mind.
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The progressive Boston Globe just ran its best-performing story of the year. It wasn’t a war report or a welfare fraud investigation. It was 3,000 words about a lesbian bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts, getting devoured by its own regulars over mask-optional Saturdays. The headline: “A Western Mass. lesbian bar required KN-95 masks. When it changed the rules, all hell broke loose.”
One thousand new subscriptions in a single day. 17.6 million views on the paper’s X post. Its own Know Your Meme page. A Megyn Kelly segment. The Globe’s managing editor called it “on pace to shatter all sorts of Globe records.” A social media tsunami.
Apparently, the secret to saving local journalism isn’t AI or pivoting to a short-video format. It’s lesbians.
Cue the progressive purity spiral. Speaking of communists, yesterday, the Western Massachusetts chapter of the Communist Party USA responded with a furious denunciation titled “Last Ditch and the MAGA Media” — denouncing the liberal Boston Globe as “MAGA Media” and “an ally of corporate lobbyists.” The Boston Globe! Ouroboros-like, the progressive purity spiral has now consumed the newspaper that wrote the sympathetic feature.
In case you’ve been on a scrolling fast, here’s the story. Every movement gets its shark-jumping moment. For progressivism, it appears to have arrived on August 31st, in Greenfield, Massachusetts, population 17,700, when a local lesbian bar announced that Saturday nights would be mask-optional —one night a week— and the revolution responded by trying to burn the building down.
Well, metaphorically. Mostly. One commenter on the bar’s Instagram feed skipped the metaphor and went straight to hoping the venue “gets firebombed.” Not for serving lesbians. For allowing bare faces.
And I will once again give credit where due: the Globe sent a reporter, who returned with 3,000 words about the movement eating its own. This was the rare corporate media piece where the facts needed no embellishment.
Meet the victim: the Last Ditch Bar and Arts Venue. It’s a divey basement lesbian bar opened last year by “three housemates in their mid-20s,” billing itself as a space for “dykes, transsexuals, gender freaks, workers, and their friends.” It features a free store in one corner offering food, clothes, fentanyl test strips, and (of course) Narcan. There’s a sign reading “PROM CANCELLED ‘CUZ LESBIANS.” The police, notably, are not welcome. And the KN-95 mask —“or better”— remains absolutely mandatory at all times. In 2026.
The bar’s opening night featured a raucous (clothed) simulation of a lesbian sex act on the dance floor. But with masks firmly in place. (Safety first, even in simulated passion.)
This was, by every available metric, one of the most progressive establishments on the North American continent. And it still wasn’t enough.
🔥 The bar’s unforgivable crime, announced on Instagram, was a single sentence: “It is with love we inform our immunocompromised disabled divas we will be opening Saturday nights as mask optional.”
The response: 442 comments in four hours. “Just say you’re being complicit in a mass disabling event and get it over with.” “People like you kill disabled people in the name of your own leisure and convenience.” “If youre only concerned with protecting yourself at the cost of DEATH for others, you are no better than a fascist.” One explained that a public venue shouldn’t run a “hatred and discrimination night” — a fascinating sentence to type about a bar that requires medical-grade respirators all six other nights a week.
The article described a great deal of context the mob skipped on its way to the pitchforks. Greenfield, Massachusetts, hasn’t reported a single covid case in more than two months. The bar was going broke— foot traffic was slowing, cover fees waived for anyone short on cash, bills unpaid, and its staff unpaid. After “consulting the Massachusetts LGBT Chamber of Commerce” (a sentence I never expected to type), the owners decided to bend one rule in a last-ditch effort to attract customers. They were not “pivoting to MAGA.” They were pivoting to making rent.
Alas, the progressive revolution does not accept “we’re broke” as any excuse. Two days later the bar posted an apology —“sorry for our passive and dismissive tone”— and promptly committed a second hate crime: the apology image lacked alt-text for the visually impaired. “This is not an accessible post,” came the verdict. The snake wasn’t just eating its tail; it was filing a disabilities act complaint about the tail.
Then came the inevitable struggle session. On September 11, it held a ‘community meeting,’ featuring ten masked people seated in a communal circle on the dance floor, with two mediators, remote access for those fearful of attending, a calming breath exercise (two minutes each), and the sharing of grievances, going clockwise. It lasted three and a half hours and resolved nothing, which, for this kind of meeting, is actually a land-speed record.
But the evening’s main star joined via Zoom: Soe Noire, head of another ‘queer Covid-conscious collective,’ a ‘gender-expansive lesbian’ with ‘he/him’ pronouns, there to flood the chat with irate messages, which were all dutifully read aloud. When a mediator —a licensed therapist— gently suggested stepping back from “places of righteousness,” the chat erupted in outrage: dismissing virtual attendees isn’t accessible; she’s a white therapist centering white feelings; and worst of all, her license makes her a mandated reporter— “an agent of the state, akin to police.”
One attendee asked whether the mediator could even have them all hospitalized against their will. The community deemed the mediator’s presence “wildly unsafe.” No mediators.
You couldn’t script it. A gay volunteer mediator at a lesbian bar’s community meeting was roundly rejected as a potential agent of involuntary commitment. The purity spiral has no bottom; it has a basement, and the basement has a dive bar, and the dive bar is being denounced.
🔥 Reading the story, one feels nothing but sympathy for Jackie Matellian, 26, the last founder standing. Her other two cofounders stepped back months ago, one of them to enroll in clown school (I promise I am not making this up; the circus left town and took a founder with it). At one point, Jackie started crying under her mask. She never wanted to run the bar alone. Her credit score is trashed. She lived in her truck for six months pouring money into the place. She’s working four jobs. She’s on the hook for a $50,000 loan.
Here’s a pro tip: never let them see you cry. The chat room’s hard-hearted response: “you chose to use your time to spill tears and center your feelings. This is incredibly racist and deflecting behavior.” Afterward, Mr. Noire posted about Jackie’s “WHITE THEY THEM TEARS” and declared the bar uninterested in “revolutionary praxis.”
A crying 26-year-old who lived in her truck to keep a community space alive is now the oppressor. The revolution has achieved full struggle circle.
But the one unbelievable detail that distilled all 3,000 words into one unavoidable fact is this: it’s a lesbian bar, but the only person in the article who identified as a lesbian used he/him pronouns— and he was the one trying to shut down its Saturday nights.
This, my friends, is progressivism’s final, faceless apotheosis: the labels have become so individualized into creative word-salad they describe no one, the bar is for everyone in particular and no one in general, and the only thing left with a fixed identity is the charge of bigotry. At some point the introductions became a competitive literary genre. “Gender-expansive lesbian, he/him”— each term successively modifying the last into meaninglessness, until the labels say less than the names underneath them. It isn’t an identity anymore; it’s a hymnal.
And like everything else at Last Ditch, it’s mandatory.
🔥 The reporter found Mr. Noire. She asked him whether he had any sympathy for Jackie, given the financial strain. He said: “No.” He said he won’t return until there’s new leadership. Canceled. “You can’t repair a house that’s on fire,” he said— which was a striking metaphor from a movement whose allies were rooting for an actual firebombing.
Alas, after all that, it’s not going well. The second mask-optional Saturday drew a handful of smokers outside, a few people inside, and an empty dance floor under the string lights. The bartender, Mixxy —a trans woman (man), closeted at ‘her’ day job as an engineer, working for tips because ‘she’ loves the place— delivered the single sanest sentence in the entire saga: “People don’t like to feel scolded. That’s not how hospitality works.”
Just after midnight, only one patron remained. She requested a Lady Gaga theme night. No. “Gaga is canceled,” Mixxy said. “Gaga is Zionist.”
The DJ —billed as Harsh Noise Boyfriend— played on. And alone on the checkered dance floor, on the stripper pole, KN-95 in place, danced the owner.
The article left readers with a haunting image: a 26-year-old who gave up her truck, her credit score, and two co-founders (one lost to the siren song of clown school) to run a free-Narcan lesbian bar, dancing solo in a respirator while the movement she built it for denounces her on Instagram. Somewhere, the Fonz is still on those water skis, and the shark is getting really hungry.
🔥 But if you back up —way up— you can find the glittering silver lining. The Globe had its best week of the year, not because of liberal outrage but because of the story’s humor quotient. Wokeness is becoming a punchline. Gloriously, ever-masking is now strapped to bizarre atypical sexual identities and pronoun fetishes. A desperate CPUSA was forced to respond to stem the damage. Social media burned brightly and, if I may, gaily.
The progressive experiment has nearly climaxed.
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Yesterday we reviewed Reuters’ remarkable Monday story about finding 30,000 illegals registered to vote in 12 states. Then the news service delivered even more helpful news. Wednesday, it encouragingly reported, “Trump ramps up noncitizen voting prosecutions ahead of midterms.” Uh oh!
This story is for everyone. On the left, it’s for everyone who keeps mindlessly parroting “election fraud is vanishingly rare.” It’s equally for conservative Eeyores, who keep bleating that “nobody ever gets arrested.” Behold, the one terrific sentence smuggled halfway down Reuters’ report that answers them all:
1,600 investigations! Now, I don’t know who needs to hear this, but the DOJ has many priorities. It must stop child trafficking, freeze fentanyl, curb welfare abuse, and end the scourge of driving slowly in the left-hand lane. It can’t devote all its resources to any one social ill, even something as important as election fraud.
It is all about the priorities. “Prior to Trump’s second term,” Reuters dutifully reported, “federal prosecutions for alleged noncitizen voting were extremely uncommon.” That has changed. Behold, some of the most wonderful words yet printed in this astonishing year of unbelievable stories. Election fraud is now a “tier-one priority:”
In the last four weeks, the DOJ has filed charges against 32 people for noncitizen voting. Some of the stories are eye-watering. Yesterday, the DOJ reported the arrest of a Senegalese immigrant (described as a “lawful permanent resident”) who voted in New Jersey in at least two presidential elections and a midterm: 2018, 2020, and 2024. “Sanctuary politicians can try to claim that this kind of voter fraud isn’t happening,” DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin said, “but it’s very real and is a serious threat to our country.”
And HSI’s 1,600 active investigations aren’t even the full scope. Those don’t include state-based investigations, like in Florida, where the state’s 2022 Election Crimes unit is finally shifting into its running gear. Yesterday, Florida’s terrific State Attorney General James Uthmeier announced twenty arrests and prosecutions, including of 16 noncitizens.
Florida’s arrests are separate from and in addition to the DOJ’s arrests and prosecutions. AG Uthmeier announced that the new figures pushed the Election Crimes office into triple digits. That is a lot. It is not enough for critics, but no number of investigations, arrests, or prosecutions will ever be enough for critics, so there’s no need to worry ourselves about that.
If we were being fair, what we’d notice most about this is the priority issue. If law enforcement agencies can find this many cases to chase this quickly, it becomes obvious that the prior lack of prosecutions was not because the cases were rare or did not exist. The prior lack of prosecutions was only because prosecutors deemed these cases too unimportant to bother with.
I suspect there are a lot of people out there —including Americans— who’ve long played a little loose with mail-in ballots. Florida is home to a unique form of wildlife called “snowbirds,” which are retired folks who live here only half the year, arriving in flocks to plague our highways and parking lots. Many of them request mail-in ballots from their northern abodes and also vote here in Florida. This double voting is not new. It is not obscure. It has just been unpunished.
(Though three Villages residents were charged in 2021 for double voting.)
If the new priority in prosecuting election crimes holds up, those folks might want to think twice before voting twice. Come to think of it, that would make a great billboard slogan.
The excuse that there’s no election fraud problem because there have been too few election fraud prosecutions is quickly becoming impossible to defend. And it really can’t come quickly enough.
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Finally, for folks whose issue isn’t elections but rather needles, this month delivered some truly incredible news. About ten days ago, Science (and only Science) reported, “Exclusive: New NIH research center on vaccine harms takes shape.” This is big pharma’s worst nightmare. And it is about time.
“The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) is preparing to launch a clinical research program,” Science said, “to study people who believe they were harmed by vaccines, including COVID-19 vaccines.” That is promising enough, but it was not only that. “The agency also plans to fund outside researchers to study adverse effects of vaccines,” the article said, “piggybacking off existing studies of people with vaccine-related illnesses.”
I honestly don’t know how they keep doing it. The velocity of the Trump 2.0 Administration is breathtaking. According to the article’s sources, “a new research center on the NIH campus in Bethesda, Maryland, could start up in mid-October.” That’s less than a month away! Moving fast isn’t just a sign of unprecedented bureaucratic efficiency. It’s also a strategy to prevent political enemies from organizing an effective resistance, from bogging the new initiative down in red tape, gold-star committees, or dropping it into a political black hole like something accidentally created at CERN.
Needless to say, the last thing Big Pharma needs is more research into vaccine injuries, never mind a permanent research center and expanded funding for independent studies.
Who could oppose studying vaccine injuries? In public, scientists expressed tepid support. “It’s really laudable,” Kathryn Edwards, a pediatrician at Vanderbilt University, generously allowed of the effort. “But if it’s not done in a scientific way,” she warned, “it will be more antivaccine propaganda.”
Presumably, when Dr. Edwards referred to “a scientific way,” she meant something different from how the establishment came up with the protective effects of homemade cloth masks and six-foot distancing. And I’m sure she meant “a scientific way” different from ignoring vaccine safety signals and sending alarmed researchers finding sudden deaths cease-and-desist notices. Do I have that right?
Remarkably, and suggesting a shift in how the mainstream science platforms are reporting on vaccine injuries, Science quoted —without sneering, scare quotes, or defamatory labels— a vax-injury activist who is a retired doctor who was herself injured by the covid jabs.
Dr. Hertz’s questions were all fair, smart, and on the nose. What is truly astonishing is that those fundamental questions —where the mRNA goes, how long it sticks around, and what it specifically affects— should remain unanswered six years after the jab rollouts. How did this happen? (Don’t answer that.)
The article was short on details about the new vaccine injury research center or the expanded grant budget. To my trained eye, that is a good thing. It means the Administration isn’t broadcasting its plans, making it that much harder for pharma to marshal the troops to attack them. I’ve noticed these kinds of plans are the ones that usually land hardest, and land like an above-average elephant, when it is too late to stop them.
There’s been much blackpilling about Kennedy’s plans for managing the vaccine industrial complex. Folks, fighting that isn’t easy. But they continue making progress. It’s just that the “MAGA betrayal” story gets covered widely across corporate media, while the Vaccine Injury Research Center gets a single exclusive in Science.
Welp! That’s why you come here. So be encouraged.
Have a fantastic Friday! Sneak back here tomorrow morning for another installment of C&C-style essential news and caffeinated commentary.
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ERRATA:
— Various minor fixes.
The scene showing Xi the Autopen is a classic. You are a keeper Mr. President!