☕️ MARS ATTACKS ☙ Monday, July 21, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

A massive Epstein narrative shift; major MAHA wins; unbelievable media concessions about Trump’s first 6 months; the wild and wacky world of unexpected interstellar visitors; much more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! It’s a traveling vacation roundup and I’m out of time to draft the usual full summary. The quick roundup recap: A massive Epstein narrative shift, major MAHA wins, unbelievable media concessions about Trump’s first six months; and the wild and wacky world of unexpected interstellar visitors.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Yesterday, I covered the narrative-crushing New York Times interview with Epstein investigative reporter Julie K. Brown, which pushed the stuffing back in most of the Epstein conspiracy theories and ended observing Epstein could not have done his crimes without help (it also basically exonerated Trump). This morning the Times ran another bizarre story, at the top of the website, headlined, “What to Know About the Epstein Files, a Perfect Recipe for Conspiracy Theories.”

Smile for the camera! It’s probably inside the light fixture.

The article begins, unsurprisingly enough, by highlighting the “loud, public crack in the president’s support system” that has —according to the Times— widened into “a chasm.” A narrative chasm that threatens to cause the Times’ liberal readers to expire from unrestrained joy. At first, the story seemed to be the traditional Democrat take, but then things started to get … weird.

First, tell me what you think of how the Times described Epstein’s death in prison:

The authorities say he hanged himself. Was the Times injecting a hint of skepticism about the official story?

The article picked itself up and continued merrily along with the usual corporate media take, invoking QAnon, Pizzagate, the X-Files, and other cue phrases designed to make self-anointed intellectual progressives titter like stoned hyenas. But then came another sly dash of cold water:

FBI files contain strange rumors and absurd speculation? Am I imagining things, or did the Times just throw cold water on demands for the “full file?” And right when liberals are demanding full transparency and Congressional Democrats are injecting “full file release” amendments into dam-repair bills?

Regular readers will recall our speculation last week that the FBI files are packed with poison pills deliberately making the “full file” useless and politically explosive at the same time. Now the Times seems to be tracking the same direction, pre-bunking the unreleased material. It even expressly debunked Musk’s claim that “Trump is in the Epstein files:”

Not uncorroborated leads. They said, bad tips. Meaning, false ones. There were many other ways the Times could have written that sentence while leaving room for dark suspicion, but instead, more icy water from the break-room cooler. Don’t worry about what’s in the file. It was probably wrong. Trust us.

The Times dismissed the videos with a single sentence: “The video recordings were not, as some have suggested, videos that Mr. Epstein recorded of crimes by himself or his friends, but material he downloaded, Ms. Bondi said.” This, to me, is the most absurd claim of all. Are we to believe that Epstein wired his planes and properties with secret recording gear just because he was an AV fanatic? Trying to deter shoplifting? He never turned them on? Please.

The Times’ reporting is all over the map. Last week, they joined Democrats calling for full transparency. Over the weekend, they ran the eye-opening Julie K. Brown interview that re-raised all the Epstein questions. Today, they’re running a story debunking Elon Musk’s claim (!), defending Trump, and pre-bunking the FBI files as ‘absurd rumors” and “bad tips.” The Grey Lady is intoxicated, lurching between exposé and exculpation.

They’ve lost narrative control. Usually, the Times’ editorial machine runs smoothly, with sharply honed angles, a unified voice, and consistent framing. But this is narrative turbulence.

We don’t —can’t— know what’s really happening behind the scenes; and that’s okay with me. Keep the plan under wraps. But we can watch how Trump’s enemies react. Right now they’re reacting like incoherent drunks who just got punched in the nose. It sure is fun to watch.

🔥 Maybe this has something to do with it. Of the several Epstein stories featured at the top of the Times’ website this morning, behold the one at the very top: “How Trump Deflected MAGA’s Wrath Over Epstein, at Least for Now.” In other words, it isn’t working. They couldn’t break us.

“By tapping into other grievances,” the sub-headline explained, “President Trump managed to turn one of the most fractious moments for his base into a unifying one.”

Guess what the Times decided the turning point was? The ridiculous Birthday Scrapbook letter, the bizarre, juvenile cartoon allegedly sent to Epstein, now the subject of a $10 billion defamation suit against the Wall Street Journal. That’s the “other grievance” that shifted the narrative back.

In other words, the attack backfired. “The Murdochs’ bizarre assault on the president galvanized his base because of both content and process,” Steve Bannon said, in what might be the first time the Times has ever quoted him as a credible source. “Now we are united as Trump goes on offense — against the Murdochs, the courts and the deep state.”

True, the WSJ’s exposé was laughably incomplete. “Where is this letter?” Vice President Vance demanded. “Would you be shocked to learn they never showed it to us before publishing it? Does anyone honestly believe this sounds like Donald Trump?”

Exactly. Where is the supposed letter? No scans, no excerpts; just a vague description. The Journal isn’t saying; it’s gone dark, and shut up, refraining from running any follow-ups, whether defensive or not. If they had the letter, they’d be waving it around like a stained dress. They don’t have the letter.

The Epstein file fracas was supposed to be the kill shot. It was supposed to be put Trump in an impossible Hobson’s choice: either release the doctored files filled with “absurd rumors” and “bad tips” … or fracture the base. It was meant to be the one thing Trump couldn’t wriggle out of.

But instead of fracturing the base, they galvanized it. The classic narrative machine is broken. They pulled the last card in the deck—and it crumpled. The media threw their best punch but MAGA didn’t flinch. (Much.) Now, the narrative is in tatters and corporate media is incoherently scrambling to find purchase, racing off the edge of the cliff like Wile E. Coyote after he just found out the hard way the tunnel was only painted on the mountain.

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Let’s call this the “Post-Epstein phase” since, if the Times’ drunken positioning is any guide, they no longer think they can stick the landing. Here’s the third piece rounding out our trifecta of progressive madness, an op-ed published in this morning’s edition, optimistically titled “James Carville: This Is How Democrats Win the Midterms.”

Long-time Democrat advisor and pundit James Carville is feeling a little backed up. He should try prunes, better hydration, or bran muffins. Regardless, the clogged donkey party is in a shamble:

“The only thing that can save us now is an actual savior,” Carville said, not meaning an actual Savior, but another Barack Hussein Obama. He doesn’t see one, but hopefully guessed that “our new leader won’t arrive until the day after the midterms in November 2026.”

Here’s the tell. Early in the piece, consistent with the Times’ cutting edge, Monday-morning spin, Carville shockingly advised Democrat readers to give away their newest toy and forget about Epstein. “Let President Trump Rope-A-Dope with MAGA on the Jeffrey Epstein case, and don’t get in the way,” he advised, before moving on to an equally incoherent ramble of inconsistent policy prescriptions and even conscripted MAGA soundbites.

His main suggestion was for Democrats to run in the midterms by calling to repeal the OBBBA. Not any proactive policy; just more resistance. The irony is that is what they’ve been doing all along, and Trump’s polling remains solid. Carville is obviously calling back to Republicans’ push to repeal Obamacare in 2010, but the OBBBA isn’t a single-themed bill. It’s an omnibus. So calling to repeal the whole thing is deranged. What about no tax on tips?

In other words, Carville wants Democrats to say: “No. Repeal that. Waitresses should be taxed more.” Good luck.

The point of these three stories is: the Democrats are suddenly fleeing the Epstein story like rats evacuating the S.S. Titanic. Is it as simple as they’re giving up because it isn’t working to fracture the MAGA base? Or do they know something? Have they realized they stumbled into a Trump trap? Abort, abort, abort!

Wile E. Coyote might finally feel like he has a sympathetic friend.

🔥 Related! New York Times, last week: “Democrats Are Workshopping New Tactics After Losses of 2024.” The unintentionally hilarious sub-headline: “Among the ideas: knocking on every single door in a House district and awarding cash prizes for the most effective new ways to reach voters.” In other words, how can we deliver the same message better?

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Last week, the Hill reported a stunning development that delighted MAHA, in an unintentionally encouraging article headlined, “US rejects amendments to WHO international health regulations.”

CLIP: Secretary Kennedy pans WHO’s lockdown-loving and power-grabbing IHR regulations (4:49).

Last week, The Hill reported that the U.S. officially rejected proposed amendments to the World Health Organization’s International Health Regulations (IHRs)— a sweeping package of globalized rules for pandemic response, surveillance, and information control that was to be voted into place this week.

Among many other awful things, the IHRs would have:

• Expanded the WHO’s authority to unilaterally declare health emergencies.

• Empowered it to enforce global narratives and squash so-called misinformation.

• Created frameworks for cross-border biomedical surveillance, digital vaccine passports, and border control coordination— without national approval.

“The proposed amendments to the International Health Regulations open the door to the kind of narrative management, propaganda, and censorship that we saw during the COVID pandemic,” Secretary Kennedy said in the clip. “The United States can cooperate with other nations without jeopardizing our civil liberties, without undermining our Constitution, and without ceding away America’s treasured sovereignty.”

“It lays the groundwork for global health surveillance of every human being,” Kennedy warned. “We must strengthen local authorities and keep global organizations in check.”

The IHRs are a basket of Orwellian “guidances” that the WHO has been trying to pass since the resistance to pandemic overreach began in earnest in 2021. They almost made it. Last year, with Biden championing the process, and Democrats flooding Twitter with technocratic memes, only a single courageous country —Slovakia— vetoed and held off effective one-world biomedical governance.

The Trump Administration just delivered a crushing blow to the head of the pandemic globalist snake. By rejecting the WHO’s Orwellian IHR amendments, Secretary Kennedy didn’t just protect American sovereignty; he rebuked the entire covid-era blueprint for censorship, surveillance, and globalist control. It’s a massive win for MAHA, but only the Hill reported the story.

The IHR amendments were the WHO’s crown jewel— a bureaucratic end-run around national sovereignty, marketed as “health cooperation,” but designed to create a new supranational global government using “soft power” and wrapped in a prescription pad. If this were the only thing Kennedy's HHS tenure accomplished, his term would be a win.

The IHRs have no chance with the US opposing them. The plan’s legitimacy is shattered. Kennedy just pulled the plug on the globalist scheme’s death throes.

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You read it here first, months ago. Tally this one along with all the other things you never thought you’d see. Friday, Newsweek ran this unexpected headline: “Donald Trump "is most successful president after six months" since FDR.” They were too chicken to say it themselves; they used AI.

According to an analysis conducted by Newsweek using AI, the first six months of Donald Trump's second term have been the “most successful” of any American president since Franklin D. Roosevelt.

I know this annoys some readers, and I’m sorry, but still: I told you so. Never doubt me.

Newsweek’s attempt to avoid blame for the conclusion by outsourcing it to AI unintentionally added heft. It wasn’t subjective. The AI calculated its conclusion using hard data. It evaluated legislative accomplishments relative to congressional support. And President Trump ranked first since FDR— above Reagan, Obama, and even Biden’s first-term, pandemic-fueled stimulus spending spree.

The stark conclusion was supported by historic accomplishments like Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBBA). It wasn’t just big— it passed both chambers and changed the entire budgetary framework for the next decade. And the Laken Riley Act (deportation plus no bond for violent illegal immigrants), passed within 9 days of introduction. Plus, Trump’s Project 2025 reorganization is now well underway; centralizing power, eliminating bureaucratic choke points, and gutting legacy regulatory structures.

Newsweek rounded up some experts that didn’t disagree but whined that Trump enjoys partisan control of the government. Laughably, that didn’t happen by accident. Trump’s partisan control of Congress was the result of his presidential policies, not their cause or enabler. In other words, voters knew what he would do and handed him the keys.

Not only that, but plenty of presidents have enjoyed majorities but still flopped. The Peanut Farmer (Carter) comes to mind. But Obama also enjoyed a filibuster-proof majority and only passed Obamacare. He failed on cap-and-trade. Biden also had full control for his first two years. All Democrats got was a bloated and falsely named Inflation Reduction Act.

Remember— it’s only the first six months. What, pray tell, could be coming down the pike next?

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Something very weird —cosmically weird— is going on. Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb just co-authored a scientific paper hypothetically suggesting that the newly discovered interstellar object 3I/ATLAS might not be a rock at all. It might be… alien technology. He drafted a formal paper, pre-published on his Substack, and titled “Is the Interstellar Object 3I/ATLAS Alien Technology?” Secure your grey alien Halloween mask, fasten your tinfoil hat, and prepare for turbulence.

Before you roll your eyes: Avi Loeb isn’t some wild-eyed crank on late-night AM radio. He’s the former chair of Harvard’s astronomy department, former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and lead scientist of the Galileo Project. He’s a credentialed establishment figure—who just called for humanity to seriously consider that this object may evidence intent.

To be fair, Avi also recently published a lay-targeting but science-heavy book speculating about alien origins of our very first interstellar visitor, Oumuamua. Here’s the link to Avi’s slightly more lay-friendly Substack summary of his new paper.

The terrifying punchline is that Avi thinks evidence suggests there is a tiny but greater-than-zero possibility that 3i/Atlas is a weapon meant to destroy the Earth. Seriously. Using science. And he cited Pascal’s Wager to justify going public with his concerns. It’s better to be wrong and discredited than wrong and dead.

🛸 Avi found at least seven bizarre features of the new intergalactic visitor that he finds improbable if it were just an accidental bit of space flotsam or jetsam. First, it came from the direction of the Galactic Core, which sounds unremarkable until you put on suspicious 3-D eyeglasses. Since it flew in from that particular star-dense section of space, we couldn’t see it until it was too late to mount an interception probe.

That’s … odd, but it doesn’t prove anything. But it gets a lot odder.

Next, Atlas’s “random” trajectory defies probability. If it were just a random bit of space debris, it could have entered the Solar System from any angle and any direction. So … why is it making a close fly-by of three planets (Jupiter, Mars, and Venus) and the Sun? It seems to be surveying half the system. Avi calculated the odds of this happening by chance at under 0.005%.

Avi wonders whether it could be probing those three planets. It’s passing each of them well within reach of one of our ICBMs.

It is massive. The best guesses put it around 20 kilometers wide, which is the size of a small city. It’s 200 times bigger than 2017’s first interstellar visitor, Oumuamua. The significance of its size is that if these types of interstellar objects are common —regardless of size— we should have seen millions by now. Before 2017, we never even saw one. The astronomical history books are being rewritten in real time.

This next point is wonkier. Atlas is traveling in a retrograde plane, meaning the opposite direction from everything else in the Solar System. If it is orbiting the Sun on some kind of vast orbit, it is hard to explain this retrograde motion without special pleading.

It is fast. It is going three times faster than our fastest rocket. We now have no hope of catching up to it.

Finally, and most troubling for Mr. Loeb, Atlas is aimed to pass very close to the Sun, just like Oumuamua. The chances defy description. And most suggestively, it will pass the Sun on the exact opposite side from Earth— the only place we can’t see it. And Avi has a theory.

🛸 There’s a classic move in orbital mechanics called an Oberth maneuver, named after Hermann Oberth, a foundational figure in rocket science. Most people are familiar with the standard version: the slingshot. You dive toward a massive object —like the Sun or a planet— and fire your engines at the fastest point to get even more speed, using gravity like a turbo boost to escape the system or redirect your path.

But there’s a lesser-known cousin: the reverse Oberth.

In this move, the ship doesn’t try to go faster—it fires its engines to slow down. It uses the Sun’s gravitational pull as a brake. The closer and faster you get, the more efficient the slowdown becomes. A well-timed reverse Oberth can turn a hyper-speed flyby into a stable orbit, or even a course correction to a specific target.

Like, say, a nearby habitable planet.

It’s not a sci-fi concept. It’s real physics— and is exactly the kind of maneuver you’d expect an interstellar probe to use if it wanted to stop, stay, or quietly redirect. Here’s where things get really spooky.

🛸 Just for fun, since this is what our Harvard astrophysicist is doing, let’s stack the “ifs”:

• If 3I/ATLAS is a probe that was sent, not a wandering rock;

• if it deliberately flew in from the crowded backdrop of the galactic core, where early detection is almost impossible;

• if it timed its arrival to thread a corridor past Venus, Mars, and Jupiter;

• if it passed perihelion precisely behind the Sun, right where no telescope on Earth can track it; and

• if it used that moment to execute a reverse Oberth maneuver, bleeding velocity to shift into a new trajectory…

… then we have a very different situation on our hands. We’re not dealing with a space rock.

Here comes the kick-in-the-delicates: what if, as it braked passing the Sun, it swung around the star and headed right for Earth? It would be invisible. We wouldn’t see it until it was almost here. The Sun is so bright, so overwhelming, that any small, dark object coming straight at us from the solar direction would remain hidden until it was practically pulling up at the White House.

If that’s the case, the most significant close encounter in human history could already be underway— and we wouldn’t know until the mother ship makes its big announcement.

Loeb easily conceded the possibility of an attack on Earth is vanishingly small, and admitted there’s probably not much we could do to stop it anyway, but given the stakes, he wants governments to start preparing now. It’s Pascal again. It would be better to waste a few billion on nothing than be caught flat-footed if it’s something and wished we’d taken the signs more seriously.

Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe 3I/ATLAS is just a weird, oversized rock doing weird, oversized rock things. But if it’s not? If it’s something else —something watching, waiting, maybe braking— then we’re living at the end of Planet Earth Act I. And when the lights come up, it won’t be flying saucers over the Washington Monument or Martians with ray guns yelling “Ack ack!” It’ll be silent, surgical, and by surprise. The real War of the Worlds won’t begin with a broadcast. It’ll begin with a shadow sliding out from behind the Sun.

Remember Revelation 8:8? I just mentioned it last week, dismissing the comet theory. But now? “And the second angel sounded, and as it were a great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea…” Now it sounds plausible again. And technically speaking, 3i/Atlas isn’t a comet.

Having indulged once again in that most human of pastimes —electrifying speculation about imminent doom— we should now reattach ourselves, however reluctantly (or gratefully), to reality: the least likely outcome is that 3I/ATLAS is any kind of actual threat. Odds are, it’s just a rock. A weird, spookily-aimed, Sun-skimming rock with the narrative timing of a Bond villain, sure. But still just a rock.

And yet. Yet, here we are, calmly discussing, in scientific literature, the orbital maneuverability of a possible alien probe. That, in itself, is bonkers. The real story might not be what Atlas is. It’s that we’re now rationally asking the question.

Ack ack!

Have a marvelous Monday! Hurtle back here and reverse gears for Tuesday’s roundup of essential news and commentary.

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