☕️ LIBERATED ☙ Wednesday, April 2, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Unpacking key takeaways from Wisconsin & Florida elections, Trump’s historic health agency purge, fresh cancer concerns, tariff turmoil on “Liberation Day,” and Congress revisiting JFK files.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! It’s also President Trump’s “Liberation Day,” though we won’t find out until near suppertime what that means. I hope it doesn’t mean ‘liberated from dinner.’ So it remains a day bursting with optimistic possibilities. Meanwhile, your roundup includes: we dissect the outcomes, fallout, and significant implications of yesterday’s special elections in Wisconsin and Florida; massive same-day layoffs at all the big health bureaucracies terrify and infuriate liberals and medical fetishists; more bad cancer news for young people; liberation day arrives with predictable media meltdowns and market jitters, but what does it mean?; and the JFK declassification journey continues apace, with the new task force holding its first blockbuster hearing.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Maybe it’s just me. But it sure seems like the corporate media universe glitched early this morning, when the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post ran eerily nearly identical headlines about the disappointing Wisconsin election results:

Surely, the matchy-matchy headlines were just a coincidence. And they offensively omitted to mention the two Florida wins, even though the articles grudgingly discussed them at length. But the media’s glitch mirrored a shocking truth: Yesterday’s Wisconsin and Florida special elections were not about 2025. They were a coordinated, high-stakes field test.

🔥 First, Wisconsin. To give you an idea of the stakes, WaPo called it “the most expensive judicial contest in U.S. history.” Specifically, “the contest cost more than $100 million, nearly doubling the past record and putting it in line with top Senate races.”

It wasn’t really even close. Far-left Susan Crawford beat Brad Schimel by more than ten points, preserving an existing 4-3 liberal majority and virtually ensuring the future loss of two GOP congressional seats.

It was a wake-up call for Republicans: the Democrats are only playing dead. They are not, in fact, leaderless.

The silver lining was that it exposed the Dems’ real leaders and that Democrats have only been playing dead. This was no grassroots election. It was a polished, professional campaign owned and operated by oligarchs. According to WaPo —pay attention— among others, Ms. Crawford got $1.5 million from Illinois Governor JB Pritzker (D), $1 million from George Soros, $250,000 from LinkedIn co-founder and lefty lunatic Reid Hoffman, and millions more from shady dark-money PACs.

Democrats and their media allies are doing their best to describe the Wisconsin loss as a triumphant rallying cry for the left. Both the Journal and WaPo described the loss as “destabilizing” to Republicans generally, and as a “rebuke” to Musk specifically, since he campaigned for Schimel in Wisconsin. Meanwhile, Democrats are crowing about how this proves voters hate Trump, how they’re back in business, and everything else they can think of, probably even that JFK’s assassin acted alone.

Here’s how Politico covered the story— just one of a half dozen articles it ran on the same story:

Setting that over-enthused take aside, this wasn’t really a state election. It was an oligarch stress test. They didn’t spend $100 million on a mid-cycle judicial race for fun. They’re war-gaming 2026 and 2028.

Here’s the weirdest glitch: On the same night, Wisconsin voters overwhelmingly passed a state constitutional amendment requiring voter ID— a key conservative priority. You’d think the same voters who elected a Soros judge would also reject voter ID. They didn’t. Some suspect foul play; who knows. But cheating will be much harder next time with the new ID requirement.

Thus, Musk’s investment in Wisconsin may not have paid immediate dividends — but it planted a landmine for the next round.

🔥 Wisconsin may have dropped the cheese yesterday, but Florida delivered sunshine, although corporate media is predictably carping about the margins. In the FL-6 race (to fill former Representative Mike Waltz’s seat), unpopular Republican state Senator Randy Fine beat Democrat Josh Weil, a teacher and “progressive activist,” by +14%. If you ask me, +14% was a miracle.

Over in Florida’s First Congressional District (Pensacola area), in a battle over Matt Gaetz’s old seat, Republican Jimmy Patronis, the state’s popular chief financial officer, handily dispatched Gay Valimont, a Democratic “gun-control activist.” Patronis won by +15%, around the same as Fine’s margin.

In the last general election, Republicans won both districts by +30%. It’s not clear how well the numbers compare to a low-turnout special election.

But clearly— Democrats went all out to win both Florida seats with far-left activist candidates. They lavished money on the two races, outspending the GOP by over four-to-one. Josh Weil, the public school teacher, reportedly raised around $10 million, dwarfing the $1 million raised by Randy Fine. Gay Valimont raised around $6.5 million compared to Jimmy Patronis’s paltry $2.1 million.

The DNC stayed laser-focused on both races. Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin and Senator Bernie Sanders campaigned for the two liberals, and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries financially supported them. They led a GOTV effort bigger than the presidential election, spending more per voter trying to elect the two activists than they did to elect Kamala in 2024.

The good news was they still got vaporized. It helps that Florida spent four years tightening its election security. Even though Dems managed to scrape up 20% of their base in early voting, surging past Republicans, they couldn’t crack Florida’s firewall, and the GOP blew them out on election day.

The media’s tepid coverage of those two Republican blowouts —and their telling omissions from the headlines— proves they don’t want to talk about how, even when Dems poured millions into “activist” candidates with full DNC firepower, they still got vaporized by double digits under tightened election rules.

🔥 Here’s the real takeaway: All the headlines about leaderless Democrats being in disarray and so forth? I’m so mad at myself I could cough up a mid-sized Tesla. I can’t believe I credulously bought their admittedly entertaining “disarray” narrative.

I apologize; I should have known better. I was swept away by the excitement of the moment.

Of course the Democrats aren’t led by the bumbling dummies out front, who can hardly scrape a coherent sentence together. They are led by Soros and Pritzger and the rest of their leftwing oligarchs. The left isn’t floundering. They’re testing, probing, and learning.

Wisconsin and Florida proved the Democrats’ secret leadership is not in any kind of disarray. They aren’t broke. They aren’t confused. They just mounted a massive, off-year special election machine spending record amounts of money—and still stayed off the radar. And —albeit at terrific cost— they held onto their Wisconsin Supreme Court seat.

While Republicans were relaxing because “Democrats are in disarray,” progressives were flexing and quietly lining up their next shots. Soros and Pritzger were testing their 2026 playbook. It was a field test, probing Republican defenses and weaknesses.

We must stop swallowing the lie the Democrats are leaderless, dispirited, or distracted. That is a psyop. If we relax like last time, you know what will happen. We’ve watched that show before.

I will do better.

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In much more encouraging news, Reuters ran an alarmist headline yesterday that probably gave every career bureaucrat heartburn: “Trump begins mass layoffs at FDA, CDC, other US health agencies.” The agency’s former commissioner, Robert Califf, cried “the FDA as we've known it is finished.” Thank goodness. They should have taken the deal.

It might’ve been the biggest single-day purge of the federal government in U.S. history — and it was certainly the largest decapitation of the byzantine health bureaucracies. Newly minted HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. posted on X: “Our hearts go out to those who have lost their jobs. But the reality is clear: what we've been doing isn't working.”

Kennedy had already promised to reduce headcount from 82,000 to 62,000, and to trim the number of health agencies from 28 to 15. So it shouldn’t have been a surprise.

According to Reuters, the layoff blitz was so fast and so brutal that some employees were notified by security guards when they tried to badge into the HHS offices in DC. Those who’d been axed were handed a ticket and sent home. Reuters complained that workers waited in line for hours, not knowing what would happen when they got to the front.

It wasn’t just line workers. Even Fauci’s heir NIAID Director Jeanne Marrazzo was canned — though she reportedly was offered a “transition job” in the less glamorous Indian Health Service. Reuters didn’t say whether she accepted. Maybe she’ll send up a smoke signal from the reservation to let us know.

No one reported exactly how many federal health employees got the boot. But it was a lot. The unhinged language in the media coverage was apocalyptic: “bloodbath,” “massacre,” “devastation.” You can easily imagine the hysterical quotes; I don’t need to list them here.

🔥 Even some conservatives, who clearly haven’t been paying attention, expressed concern over the purges. They fretted that “good” employees got swept up in the purge — that scientists who weren’t involved in the covid catastrophe are being unfairly punished.

That may be true, but they are missing the point. The problem isn’t just the crooks at the top; it’s the culture of cowardice beneath them.

All these “good” CDC and NIH employees kept their mouths shut during covid. They could have spoken up and mitigated the harm. But the “good ones” stayed silent, kept their heads down, to save their jobs. Now, they’ve lost their jobs anyway, since the public has learned the hard way that the bloated health bureaucracies are an imminent danger and must be pruned to protect us all.

Silence in the face of institutional corruption is complicity.

Despite all the pearl-clutching predictions of civilizational collapse, I have yet to see a single example of a clear win for public health. Trump’s critics complain only about things that might happen. The CDC prevents pandemics, they cry. But it didn’t prevent covid, did it? We cannot measure things that didn’t happen. But clearly, the massive investment in public health hasn’t stopped cancer, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, autism, the opioid crisis, or a raft of other burgeoning diseases afflicting our country— things that aren’t happening in other countries.

They even helped enforce a false narrative about Alzheimer’s that stalled progress for twenty-five years.

So … what do we need them for? All they’ve done is balloon into a multi-billion-dollar apparatus of failure and finger-pointing. The pandemic proved the federal health agencies are more dangerous to the public than the diseases they claim to fight.

Finally, as we see Trump fulfilling his campaign promises, we should note his brilliance. Trump broke the rules. The reason no administration ever tried this before wasn’t because they couldn’t — it’s because they wouldn’t. Political appointees always feared the inevitable media meltdown and career-ending backlash.

But Trump appointed people who’ve already been through the media’s mangling machine. What can the media now say about Kennedy they haven’t already dished out in heaping measure? Or Bhattacharya, Makary, or the rest? These folks have already been through the cancellation wringer. They don’t care.

I’m sympathetic that some good scientists will experience a temporary period of underemployment. But they should be back to work soon, snapped up by the private sector for their awesome skills.

This is a long-overdue reckoning. I’d even call it karma.

🔥 Related: behold, yesterday’s headline from Spectrum News:

Last year, the American Cancer Society revised the recommended screening age for colorectal cancer, lowering it from age 50 to 45. The NIH reports that colon cancer rates are quickly swelling by +1-2% annually in people under 55— a previously unthinkable development.

Not only haven’t the health agencies stopped this horrific trend, they haven’t even diagnosed it. Again— what exactly do we need them for?

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The Wall Street Journal celebrated this morning’s economic holiday by running a story headlined, “Trump Tariffs Live: 'Liberation Day' Arrives; Dow Futures Fall as World Awaits Retaliatory Levies.”

President Trump officially declared April 2nd as “Liberation Day” for U.S. trade policy, and the globe’s elites are holding their breath like it’s the Cuban Missile Crisis, parts of which can still be seen off Key West today.

Trump has promised to announce the contours of “a sweeping tariff plan” in a Rose Garden address scheduled for 4pm today. Frustratingly, I have a meeting that lasts till 5. Maybe I can get out of it. You think the covid-test excuse still works?

Even in this space — where I usually let the headlines cool off a little before weighing in — I’ve now covered this so-far-non-story for two straight days. That’s the brilliance of Trump’s marketing genius. By keeping his tariffs a secret, assuming he doesn’t push them back again, he’s captured the global headlines. The whole planet is losing its mind in terrified anticipation.

By keeping his tariff specifics a secret, Trump has basically kidnapped the global news cycle. For free.

PoliticoEU ran an overwrought story this morning, headlined, “Europe thought it had a way past Trump’s tariffs. He didn’t care.” President Trump is so mean and uncaring. Most entertaining, the article reported that EU diplomats desperately tried to reach the President to negotiate about the tariffs —whatever they are— but, get this, they wound up “hitting a wall of bureaucracy and disinterest in Washington.”

Super LOLs. The snooty, disinterested European bureaucrats hit a wall of themselves.

As we discussed yesterday, there’s no structural market problem. The market will stabilize once the tariffs are announced and the speculation bubble bursts. Tomorrow, we’ll be awash in the hot takes about how civilization is about to end— or even worse, democracy. Whatever they turn out to be, you can bet the corporate media won’t like it.

But anyway: Happy Liberation Day!

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A fascinating article appeared in NBC yesterday headlined, “'JFK' director Oliver Stone to testify to Congress about the newly released assassination files.” First of all, the review of the newly declassified JFK files continues at high speed. Second, Oliver Stone is saying there should be a new JFK commission.

Yesterday, the first hearing of the House Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets is began. And Stone —who in 1991 produced a major Oscar-winning documentary about the Kennedy assassination— testified. He told the Task Force, “I ask the committee to reopen what the Warren Commission failed miserably to complete. I ask you, in good faith, outside all political considerations, to reinvestigate the assassination of this President Kennedy, from the scene of the crime to the courtroom.”

Stone aimed at the CIA. "Let us reinvestigate the fingerprints of intelligence all over Lee Harvey Oswald from 1959 to 1960 his violent death in 1963 and most importantly this CIA, whose muddy footprints are all over," he said.

ABC said Democrats on the subcommittee, for whatever reason, sought to discourage colleagues and witnesses from “drifting into conspiracy theories” and criticized the declassification of documents.

ABC sneered at the documents’ value for resolving the decades-old mystery, but admitted they “did shed light on details of mid-20th century espionage that the CIA had fiercely fought to keep secret and that are treasure trove for historians and scholars.”

The last formal congressional investigation into Kennedy’s assassination ended in 1978, when a House committee issued a report concluding that Kennedy “probably was assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.”

What do you think? Should we have another JFK Commission?

Task Force Chair Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fl.)

My take is they should reopen the JFK investigation — but not because we expect to find a “smoking gun.” But because the American public deserves to know just how badly we were lied to. The Kennedy assassination is one of the original sins of modern American secrecy and institutional dishonesty. It is the template for every information psyop, every “trust us” narrative, every “nothing to see here” dismissal that followed. Vietnam, Watergate, Iraq, even covid—all of it traces back to the CIA’s dusty fingerprints in Dallas.

Frankly, I trust Oliver Stone more than the CIA at this point. Stone is about as far from a traditional conservative as you can get. He’s an old-school, anti-establishment leftist — anti-war, anti-corporate, distrustful of U.S. foreign policy, and famously critical of American empire-building. He backed Bernie Sanders in 2016 and has always leaned hard left on social and economic issues.

I say, let’s freaking go. Let Liberation Day also liberate us from all the lies.

Have a wonderful Wednesday and a triumphant Liberation Day. Hopefully. Then charge back here tomorrow morning for another delicious serving of C&C.

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