☕️ MAN PROBLEMS ☙ Thursday, June 12, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

HHS Secretary RFK Jr. boots ACIP’s vax flunkies and installs fresh minds; LA riots spread, sort of; Dems nuke their best 2026 hope by rigging a redo to oust the only guy young men still trusted; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! In today’s whirlwind roundup: HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. deploys a stable of terrific replacements for the CDC vaccine committee mere days after ashcanning the entire cabinet of ACIP sock-puppets; LA riots spread to other big cities while governors prepare to shut them back down; an unsurprising poli-sci study throws shade on Donkey Party’s 2026 midterm chances and shows how bad things could really get for progressives; and the Democrats color in the study’s conclusions by undemocratically reversing their leadership elections to purge the one guy who might have rescued them from the demographic trap of their own making.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Frustrated by potential threats of defamation lawsuits, yesterday the New York Times tried to disguise its sneering criticism in a story neutrally headlined, “RFK Jr. Announces Eight New Members of CDC Vaccine Advisory Panel.” But that journalistic restraint immediately evaporated in the sub-headline: “The health secretary promised not to pick ‘anti-vaxxers.’ But some public health leaders accused him of breaking his word.”

Let’s start with the actual news. After summarily firing all 17 members of the CDC’s ACIP vaccine guidance committee earlier this week, yesterday, HHS Secretary Kennedy announced the first eight replacements. Each knows they are walking into the media’s pharma-fueled, character-assassinating buzzsaw. The victims, er, volunteers, include: Martin Kulldorff, MD, PhD (Harvard); Robert W. Malone, MD; Cody Meissner, MD (Dartmouth); Retsef Levi, PhD (MIT); Joseph R. Hibbeln, MD (former NIH); James Pagano, MD (UCLA); Vicky Pebsworth, OP, PhD, RN (Nat. Assoc. of Catholic Nurses); and Michael A. Ross, MD (GWU).

The short version is: this is terrific news. The best evidence of that from the story was the reaction from the deep-state’s grandfatherly seeming tool, Dr. Paul Offit, who was so outraged he is already thinking of taking his medieval torture toys home and making his own ACIP committee just to show them. “What Kennedy just did was, he lost the trust of the medical community,” Dr. Offit snarled, “so much so that people are thinking, ‘Should we try and create our own A.C.I.P., our own vaccine advisory committee?’ Because you can’t trust this one.”

Oh, no. RFK lost the trust of the medical community? You mean, Kennedy had that trust before? I say, go for it, Paul, you big talker, make your own committee and let’s see.

In a very cowardly fashion, without naming which ones, and carefully attributing the quote not to itself but to GWU Law School professor Richard Hughes, the Times claimed, “three of the new members are ‘legitimate physicians’ who have ‘no discernible expertise’ in immunology or vaccines. But he characterized the remaining four as ‘Covid-19 deniers, skeptics and outright anti-vaccine individuals.’”

Not one single favorable quote appeared anywhere in the Times ‘fair and balanced’ article. Rubbish.

🔥 “By far the most contentious pick, and the one with the highest profile,” the Times soberly informed readers, signaling the smear to come, “is Dr. Robert Malone.”

I know Robert and consider him a friend. Not the kind of friend that I watch football games with or take joint family vacations, but a battlefield comrade, with affections forged in the fiery crucible of pandemic cancellation, back when it was especially risky to oppose government policy at all.

Malone, who holds some of the earliest mRNA patents and has never been contradicted over his claim to have invented the technology, was an early and vocal critic of the covid vaccines. Owing to his credentials and his incomparable knowledge of the mRNA platform, Dr. Malone’s voice was one of the most challenging and difficult for the establishment to rebut. They hated him, in other words (and still do, quite fiercely, in fact).

Not only that, but Dr. Malone is a deep reservoir of institutional knowledge, gained through his own professional experience in vaccine development, arcane government skunkworks operations, and the defense industry’s inexplicable involvement in the biomedical sector. He took the first two shots and promptly got a serious vaccine injury, which he barely survived.

Within the MAHA movement, there is a deep thread of dour skepticism about Dr. Malone, owing in part to a highly public personal conflict with some well-loved MAHA authors. It is also (I think) because he clings to a position that some kind of mRNA could still be useful (if properly and carefully designed), and because he used to dwell in the back acres of the deep state’s alligator farm. Not that my opinion matters, but —though I understand the concerns— I do not share these concerns. (Nor does Michelle, who is a super suspicious and reliable human fraud detector.)

🔥 My ‘endorsement,’ such as it is, is built mostly on the foundation of Dr. Malone’s early and enthusiastic opposition to the jabs. We first met when we were all touring the country speaking out against the vaccines and the mandates everywhere that would have us, at a time when to do so invited instant professional destruction. Basking in 2025’s wonderful gifts, it is easy now to forget how outmatched we were in political power and media access at that time.

It took a lot of faith and courage to step out and take the podium in 2021 and 2022. Believe me. So much so that it has become my new intelligence test: what was the person’s position during the mandates?

Beyond Robert Malone, Kennedy’s other picks —obviously pre-planned— were also a gift bag of MAHA goodness. Martin Kulldorf, for example, was one of the three co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which caused all three scientists to be immediately placed on the U.S. federal government’s personal destruction list. He was eventually fired from all his jobs, but before that, he helped Governor DeSantis unwind pandemic mania in Florida.

Retsef Levi, the MIT professor, conducted some of the earliest studies on covid vaccine safety signals. In 2023, he called for the shots to be withdrawn:

CLIP: Professor Levi explains safety signals found in EMS calls and damns the shots (6:28).

The others were equally strong. Here’s a little roundup of their pandemic bona fides.

🔥 These appointments are a worst-case scenario for Big Pharma. Not just because these picks are MAHA-friendly, but for two additional reasons. First, they were all savvy enough during the pandemic to avoid saying disqualifying things —things we all know, and many of us wished they would say out loud— but they were wiser than we were, and they played the institutional long game. So they all possess sharp political skills.

Second, they are all veteran survivors of cancel culture. They have proven beyond doubt, under duress, that they believe in speaking the truth regardless of the cost, and they don’t care what the media says about them.

It’s also a worst-case scenario for the media. With the possible exception of Dr. Malone, none of Kennedy’s picks are “public figures,” which means corporate media must be incredibly careful to avoid defaming them. One of the classic grounds for a solid defamation claim is saying anything that casts doubt on “a person’s suitability for their chosen profession.”

Truth is a defense to defamation. But you’d better be able to prove it, which makes opinion-based defamation extremely dangerous. It’s impossible to prove a label or an opinion. For example, carelessly calling someone a “racist” is super risky. Can you prove that? Can you show evidence they were … what? A member of the KKK? A published black supremacist? The evidence better be solid, not just someone reposting a meme calling Kamala a “hoe.”

So the Times couldn’t publish the eight-way hit piece it wanted. It was all tied up by its legal department’s concerns. It wanted so badly to trash each and every one of Kennedy’s new committee members, but that would have practically guaranteed several visits from the process server.

So far as I know, the ACIP does not need 17 members. So Kennedy might stop at eight. This could be it. The Committee’s next meeting is later this month, and you better believe the livestream will be well attended.

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The flaming-car fun is spreading. Yesterday, Bloomberg ran a story headlined, “Anti-ICE Protests Spread to NYC, Chicago After LA Imposes Curfew.” But so far, the only proper riots have been in LA, where arrests by local cops have reached 380, and clueless Mayor ‘Karen’ Bass declared a downtown curfew.

Deployments of the National Guard and U.S. Marines to LA have to date been limited to protecting federal buildings— safely within normal legal rights. In other words, President Trump has federal resources standing by, but is still giving the locals their chance. The Bloomberg story turned out to be more of an update about the LA Riots and less about violence spreading across the country. Protest marches, sure, but riots— not yet.

This morning, USA Today reported on the weekend’s planned nationwide “protest” event in a story headlined, “'No Kings' protest organizers expect massive crowds in response to LA militarization.” They are hoping for a big turnout. “I think we will see the largest peaceful single day protests that this country has seen certainly since the first Trump term," said Indivisible cofounder Ezra Levin, one of the organizers.

We’ll see.

The states are bracing for impact. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has already deployed his state’s National Guard to the protest zones. Yesterday, Governor DeSantis practically invited Floridians to drive over protestors blocking roads in the Sunshine State.

CLIP: Florida drivers aren’t sitting ducks; “you have a right to defend yourself in Florida” (0:27).

Bonus points for running over masked marauders. I’m thinking that, this weekend, the Sunshine State will be very peaceful.

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A new political science study made the social media rounds yesterday, and its predictable conclusions provided more evidence of something we’ve long known. The researchers found significantly more diversity of thought on the political Right than on the political Left. On the left, diversity is limited to one flavor. Maybe this study got so much attention was its helpful graphic, which showed progressives’ brains hammered into a dense blue dot of conformity:

The authors used a ‘network-modeling method’ to map how 396 participants (plus a validation group of 8,280 more) related to 40 different political attitude nodes across eight polarizing political topics (e.g., abortion, gun control, immigration, etc.). The Democrat cluster was tight, uniform, and extreme— centered around strong disagreement with conservative items. The Republican cluster was looser, more spread out, and included a wider range of opinions (from mild to strong agreement).

In other words, Democrats tended to cluster tightly around extreme, uniform beliefs, while Republicans showed a broader spread of agreement, even encompassing some moderate or neutral stances.

The Democrats’ violently enforced ideological rigidity offers short-term benefits: an illusion of unity, clean, consistent messaging, and temporary cohesion. But it comes at a cost. Enforced purity crushes internal debate, stifles innovation, and reduces resilience. Lacking any ability to dissent, an ideologically rigid political group eventually becomes brittle, like glass under pressure.

This always leads to what we can already see happening on the left. Members eat each other in ideological cannibalism. Allies become traitors overnight. Leaders purge party loyalists who were slightly too slow on the latest narrative pivot. Smart, independent-minded people either leave or go silent. Ultimately, the only survivors are ideological enforcers, the passionate, loyal midwits who lack any creativity.

According to social scientists, when reality finally and impolitely intrudes (usually during a crisis), an ossified party either reforms itself, which is very rare, or more likely begins a downward purity spiral, hardening into a coercive apparatus in a desperate bid to retain whatever power remains. That spiral is what usually happens. For instance, see this 2020 headline from Phys.org:

During the French Revolution, as Robespierre and the far-left Jacobins enforced doctrinal purity, they began guillotining their own allies. The Ouroboros-like revolution consumed itself, culminating in a backlash that ushered in Napoleon, a Trump-like, right-wing authoritarian who wrapped himself in revolutionary language.

It’s happened here before, like in the 1960s. The so-called New Left fractured over Vietnam, civil rights, and identity politics. Activists alienated working-class whites who once backed FDR’s coalition. As a result, Nixon’s “Silent Majority” cleaned up electorally. Reagan mopped the floor with them in the ’80s.

In sum, culture-war maximalism on the Left always eventually drives centrists and apolitical types into the arms of whomever promises calm, competence, or revenge.

For Democrats, their increasing ideological rigidity is a bad sign for the 2026 midterms. It’s more like a giant blinking warning siren. The study showed the Democrat cluster is anchored around strong agreement to extreme positions, which means the slightest deviation —like moderate views on immigration, vaccines, or sports policy— makes newcomers feel unwelcome. It’s painfully hard to build a coalition or recruit independents that way.

In 2025, the list of ideological demands for “being progressive” has become mind-numbingly long: transgender orthodoxy; race essentialism and DEI dogma; climate apocalypicism; vaccine maximalism; un-nuanced abortion maximalism; “borders are racist” immigration absolutism; mandatory solidarity with Palestine; censorship advocacy; criminal justice radicalism; and privacy-free techno-utopian regulation.

The problem isn’t (only) with any one of those issues; it’s that, to be a democrat in good standing, members must enthusiastically endorse them all. Any disagreement is disqualification. You can’t even be neutral; “silence is complicity.” Nor can you even quietly agree— public affirmation is a mandatory sacred sacrament. (See, e.g., anti-racism.)

A rigid message works for ideological purification but fails for persuasion. If Democrats can’t tolerate nuance or heterodoxy in their own ranks, they certainly can’t court skeptical swing voters without imploding. Seeming decades remain on the political clock till next year’s elections. It is too soon to predict anything with clarity.

But, rather than democrat reform, the odds favor increased infighting and maniacal ousters of moderates in the primaries. In other words: here comes the purity spiral.

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Exhibit double-Z appeared in yesterday’s The Hill below the headline, “DNC votes to redo vice chair elections of Hogg, Kenyatta.” Not pure enough.

The DNC deleted the results of its most recent leadership election, ostensibly because a sore-losing candidate alleged that the process unfairly advantaged men. David Hogg, once the progressive movement’s darling, declined to re-run amid backlash for… wait for it… criticizing Democrats and supporting primary challenges.

The post-election “disadvantage” complaint wasn’t even about fraud or misconduct. It was about gender optics. The mere allegation that women weren’t sufficiently advantaged was enough to cancel the will of the voters. Hogg’s actual sin wasn’t really procedural— it was ideological deviation. He failed the purity test. Supporting non-conformist candidates violated the unwritten rule: You may not challenge the Church.

Repeating elections based on identity claims and punishing internal dissenters is not participatory democracy. It’s just narrative control. It’s the exact kind of story that turns off independents, suburban moderates, and normal liberals. It makes the party look chaotic, ideologically rigid, and obsessed with identity politics over governance or even results. And it was a loud and clear message to young men.

Like Soviet interrogators, they even made David recant. ABC’s story reported that “Hogg says he is stepping down to fully focus on his group's mission to endorse and support aligned candidates in Democratic primaries.” Aligned ones. Not the insurgents he promised to support during his brief whirlwind term.

Sticking the knife in even deeper, after he agreed not to run again, DNC officials pivoted to praise Hogg’s ten-second tenure. "I commend David for his years of activism, organizing, and fighting for his generation, and while I continue to believe he is a powerful voice for this party, I respect his decision to step back from his post as Vice Chair," DNC Chair Ken Martin gushed.

Ken Martin is a phony poser. In a hot-mic mistake, just before throwing David overboard, Martin was overheard angrily telling Hogg, “You basically destroyed any chance I have to lead.”

Ironically, when David was first elected, the media waxed euphoric about how having a young white man in DNC leadership would help rebuild support with his demographic, whom the Democrats have been losing faster than they are shedding their hair. Headline from three days ago, in the far-left The Week:

The Week’s article described the Democrats’ $20 million consulting contract to study young men, as if they were a novel typhoid variant. The over-funded study’s entire, unsurprising premise is that young men crave strength, direction, and respect. Duh.

Up till yesterday, David was a left-wing symbol of all three of those values.

A Parkland shooting survivor, David came equipped with all the trappings of progressive moral authority. He was a millennial mascot for youth mobilization— the “future of the party!” As a white male progressive, he was a rare species in the DNC’s top ranks, a signal to other young men of flowering re-birth, optimism, and opportunities for advancement in the party.

But David didn’t advance. He tried to lead but reached too far, just outside that hard knot of Democrat ideological conformity, and like 18th-century Jacobins, they chopped his head off for pushing a toe outside the lines of their tiny blue circle of trust.

Pigs get fed, but Hoggs get slaughtered.

Have a terrific Thursday! There’s more news flooding the lists this week than you can shake the ugly stick at. We’ll catch up on it all tomorrow morning, with another fabulous installment of essential news and commentary.

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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