☕️ MEN ARE MEN ☙ Friday, December 19, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Dems dump 20202 postmortem; DOJ preps to dump Epstein files; HHS dumps trans-industrial complex; jurors dump ICE-evading judge; and New York Times dumps limited hangouts, hand over fist. More.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! You didn’t forget, did you? Happy Epstein Day. We’ll finally learn whether all that noise and drama amounted to anything. Weekend reading, I guess. For a variety of reasons, none of them particularly good, C&C is running late today, so rather than type up the normal recap, I’m choosing to publish faster. It’s a packed roundup: Democrats choose coverups over transparency in surprise about-face; HHS deploys vast assault on trans-industrial complex, joins Congress; new rules; ICE-evading Wisconsin judge criminally convicted by jury of her peers; the Epstein disclosure wave provokes rushed hangouts from media as it empties its Epstein files before the documents dump.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Believe me— I am not making this story up. We do indeed live in the most entertaining timeline. The New York Times ran a delicious ironic story yesterday below the incredible headline —I promise this is real— “The D.N.C. Is Scrapping Its Report on What Went Wrong in 2024.”

When lanky, mild-mannered white guy Ken Martin was elected to head the Democrat National Party early this year, it was in the wake of the worst-case scenario for the donkey party: a national Trump landslide. After screwing up initial candidate selection so badly that Biden flamed out in the first Trump debate, the anti-democratic Democrat elites performed a quick coup, and with a David Copperfield-like wave of their ruling sticks —SHAZAM!— and a puff of sulphuric smoke, in ran Kamala the Cackler. She appeared without any time-wasting public debate, and saved all the risky controversy that might have been caused by Democrat primary voters.

Having anointed a new candidate, and like a Dyson super-vac set on ’11,’ party elites hoovered up a Solomonic warchest from donors— $2.5 billion spent over just six weeks. And still they lost every swing state. Every single one. Not just that, but despite all that money and effort, they lost both chambers of Congress, handing Trump a gold-embossed mandate and perfecting voters’ utter rejection of their “not Trump” agenda.

Enter Ken Martin. Ken won February’s contentious DNC election on a platform of transparency. His prime promise —which got him elected— was vowing to produce a 2020 Autopsy (he prefers: “after action report”), with no holds barred, no stone unturned, which he said was absolutely needed to rebuild the trust of the party’s disgruntled base, which was wondering (rightly) where all that money went.

🔥 Back in January, during the election, Martin ironically and loudly complained about a previous after-election report in 2016 that the DNC had buried before publication. “There was a post-election review done many years ago, right after the ‘16 election,” Martin recalled. “And that was never released. The DNC spent a lot of time and money on it, and it wasn’t even released to the DNC members. So what happened with that?”

Famous last words #212.

As soon as Martin was elected, true to his promise, he got down to business. The DNC commissioned the “no stone unturned” review, conducted over 300 interviews across all 50 states, and then briefed some early findings to big donors in October. Throughout, Martin endured withering criticism and accusations that he was “slow walking” the report, but kept saying it was more important to get it right than to rush it out.

But yesterday, in his mild, Midwestern manner, Ken said never mind. “Mr. Martin will instead keep the findings under seal,” the Times reported. “Looking back so publicly and painfully at the past would prove counterproductive for the party as it tries next year to take back power in Congress,” it explained.

In the most astonishing quote of all, the Mr. Rogers lookalike finally said the quiet part out loud: all the Democrats care about is winning. “Here’s our North Star: Does this help us win?” Mr. Martin said in a widely reported statement. “If the answer is no, it’s a distraction from the core mission.”

And there you have it.

🔥 It was pretty rich. This win-at-all-costs mindset is the same kind of anti-democratic nonsense that got the Democrats into this mess in the first place. Shut up and let the party elites decide what you need to know. Had they run a competitive mini-primary in the summer of 2024, instead of just selecting Kamala, they might have found a stronger candidate.

Now they are doing the same thing, all over again, raising the question of who really runs the party? The party’s members? Clearly not. Shady, behind-the-scenes billionaires? Nancy Pelosi? An artificial intelligence in orbit? Emperor Palpatine?

I’m not the only one who noticed. The natives are down in the village busily rubbing their farm implements on sharpening stones and gathering firewood. For instance, here’s a carefully considered tweet from former Obama speechwriter and Pod Save America darling Jon Favreau:

Others called the decision to seal up the report “cowardice,” “a hilarious self-own,” and “mind-bogglingly stupid.” Other folks described it in blunter terms, in ways that cannot be reprinted in this family blog.

But don’t judge too quickly. It’s not like they’re attacking democracy or anything. Coronating selected candidates without voting and burying inconvenient reports to protect the rich and powerful is definitely not ‘threatening democracy.’ Spending $2.5 billion in a blitz, losing every swing state and both chambers, then sealing the official report explaining how it all went wrong —especially the parts that might embarrass big donors and consultants— is just smart politics.

When Martin said winning trumps everything, that included voting, transparency, honest self-criticism, equal rights, rebuilding trust with the base, campaign promises, and control of the thermostat. And, apparently, winning even trumps democracy itself.

Do you suppose the elites who decided the bury the autopsy report carefully weighed the bad optics and potential backlash, and found the report so damaging that the tradeoff was worth it? Or did they just react to the report’s conclusions like vampires seeing garlic, and didn’t bother gaming out their decision? Either way, it’s not a good sign.

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Since the House unexpectedly passed MTG’s anti-mutilation bill, the world began collapsing for the transgender-industrial complex. It began yesterday with the most remarkable HHS press conference anyone has ever seen. First, Secretary Kennedy and Dr. Oz announced the most sweeping and revolutionary package of anti-transgender policies since Democrats (falsely) accused FBI Director Hoover of cross-dressing. It was savage. For instance, nobody’s ever seen a more frank and honest opener than Deputy Secretary Jim O’Neill’s:

CLIP: Deputy Secretary O’Neill delivered the stunning home truths (0:40).

“Men are men,” O’Neill began, almost sorrowfully, to stunned silence. “And they can never become women.” The room was so quiet you could hear a drag queen cough a mile away. “Women are women,” he continued sadly, “and they can never become men.” The room broke out in nervous but unrestrained applause. “Children are innocent, and they need our protection.” Boom.

If, during the early Biden Administration, any of us had posted those otherwise unremarkable statements on Twitter, we’d have immediately received a cheerful notification that “Sorry! Your post has violated Community Guidelines for Safety and Violence, so we have deleted your account. Have a nice day!”

But times have changed.

O’Neill’s remarks were even more controversial than that, if you can believe it. Here are the Deputy Secretary’s opening comments, in fuller context (the whole transcript is here). Let me know if you ever thought you’d see the day:

Men are men. Men can never become women. Women are women. Women can never become men. Children are innocent and they need our protection. It takes organized effort to deny these fundamental truths. Sadly, we’ve seen such efforts succeed from time to time. The denial of fundamental truths can destroy nations from within. At the root of the evils we face, such as the blurring of the lines between sexes and radical social agendas is a hatred for nature as God designed it and for life as it was meant to be lived. This ideology does not just deny biology, it declares war against it.

As part of the Biden administration’s war on nature, this department perverted the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. They pretended that gender dysphoria was a disability to force healthcare providers and programs to mutilate minors. Without the reforms Secretary Kennedy made today, more children would be coerced into life-altering interventions that many will deeply regret.

Thankfully, President Trump and Secretary Kennedy are stopping this madness and stopping the war.

💉 Given the stakes, the press coverage was amazingly muted. NBC ran the story below the headline, “HHS moves to slash funding and access to care for transgender minors.” To illustrate why corporate media is trying to bury this story like it was a 2020 election post-mortem, Politico’s headline sneered, “Republicans are trying to change the subject on health care affordability — to transgender care.”

Transgender “care” is intensely profitable for hospitals because it is subsidized by the federal government. When parents of ‘trans’ three-year-olds are forced to pay for their own castration drugs, the problems will resolve themselves.

Following Wednesday’s wonderful news from the House, that it had passed MTG’s bill to criminalize trans “healthcare,” the House did it again on Thursday, passing a second bill that would strip all medicare funding for trans procedures and gender drugs for kids. As we’ve discussed, those bills are wonderful in sentiment, but thanks to the silent filibuster, are probably dead on arrival in the Senate.

Fortunately, therefore, that wasn’t all. President Trump isn’t waiting around for Congress.

💉 “Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his advisers,” Politico said, “announced a slew of rules that would effectively end gender-affirming care at hospitals.” That was just the warmup. The entire press conference was amazing, here’s the full video (~1 hr) if you prefer to watch or listen.

“These procedures will fall into the deepest abyss of the darkest periods of American history, like lobotomies,” said CMS Director Dr. Mehmet Oz. (Hilariously, Politico described him as a “former TV doctor,” an epithet it couldn’t locate during covid to describe all its own “experts.”) Then he announced new CMS rules cutting off all funding to hospitals offering gender-rejecting care to kids.

Next, the FDA issued a warning to manufacturers of so-called ‘breast binders,’ which are upper-body corsets given to girls who want to be boys, to squash their chests. Enforcement actions against binder makers, Kennedy said, could include product seizures. Next, HHS will stop classifying gender dysphoria as a disability (at least, without a physical deformity). And HHS plans a new public health advisory to parents, stating that transgender hormones are not safe and effective treatments.

“The Biden era amendments that designated gender dysphoria as a disability served the commercial interest of a predatory multi-billion dollar industry that betrayed the original intention of those laws,” Kennedy said, “engendering widespread public resentments against those laws among the American people, and discrediting the statutes in the public mind.”

“There is divine worth in every person, and it shines most brightly in our children,” Kennedy said, invoking the Creator and practically daring Democrats to wail about theocratic conspiracy theories. “Hospitals rake in millions of dollars,” Kennedy continued, “by convincing boys and girls that a lifetime of off-label prescriptions for estrogen and testosterone blockers, chest reconstruction surgeries, and more are the only way to achieve true happiness and belonging in life.”

“It’s wrong,” the Secretary flatly declared. “The Trump administration will not stand by while ideology, misinformation, and propaganda push vulnerable young people into decisions they cannot fully understand and that they can never reverse.”

When he took the podium, Dr. Oz asked what sounded like a joke, “You know what you get when you mix politics and medicine?” He answered promptly: “you get politics. There is no medicine left.”

All these proposed rule changes have been released for public comment under the standard procedures for major rule changes. None of the articles suggested a possibility that HHS might change its mind, especially given how strongly worded its press conference was.

💉 It’s astonishing how quickly the transgender revolution is imploding. Half of the reason is that the Trump Administration is pulling no punches, and just attacking it all-out. The Trump team is obviously unafraid of how the media will react. They sense that corporate media has lost its confidence. That’s the other half of the equation— the media has been neutralized, terrified to strongly criticize the anti-trans agenda, because it might help Trump.

I would bet a greased microwrestler that, once federal funding disappears, so will a whole lot of gender dysphoria cases.

Media, unsure of its footing, is leaning into an incoherent attack: Republicans are only promoting this hugely popular policy to distract from the healthcare crisis that Democrats created. Even taking their irrational argument seriously, it still doesn’t make sense. Wouldn’t halting funding for the trans revolution necessarily also reduce costs? I’m just asking.

How times have changed. And how quickly.

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Remember the Wisconsin judge who tried to help sneak a criminal illegal alien out of the courthouse? Welp, she’s been convicted by a jury. Yesterday, the New York Times ran the story headlined, “Judge Convicted of Obstructing Agents as They Sought Undocumented Immigrant.”

I wouldn’t even try handicapping Judge Hannah Dugin’s appellate chances, given how unusual this case is. But, barring an appellate miracle, she now faces sentencing of up to six years in prison. Even if she never serves hard time, the felony conviction will end her judicial career and will probably ensure she never even works as a lawyer.

At trial, Dugin’s lawyers brought in a powerhouse character witness— a popular former mayor. He testified to rapt jurors that he’d known Dugin since she was 11 or 12, that she was “very honest,” and that he was “sure she’ll tell you what really happened.” Then Dugin declined to testify, rendering the mayor’s efforts immediately impotent.

Judicial prosecutions are vanishingly rare. I wouldn’t say it doesn’t exist anywhere, but I could not find another modern example. For a judge to be prosecuted at all, their case has to run a treacherous gauntlet of collegial protection, institutional deference, immunity doctrines, and raw politics that effectively foreclose all but the most egregious cases of judicial misconduct.

Consider, for example, this Reuters Special Report from 2020:

So once again, the Trump Administration has shattered “norms and customs” and modern records, by successfully prosecuting this unicorn-like case through to conviction— even though Judge Dugin’s misconduct, while unacceptably lawless, arguably does not even rise to the “most egregious” levels of judicial misconduct.

I’m not surprised that judges do whatever they can to avoid going to court. Juries will hold them to a very high standard.

Fool around and find out. TAW.

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It’s finally here! Right in time for Christmas. Yesterday, ABC ran a story headlined, “After years of speculation, DOJ faces Friday deadline to release remaining Epstein files.” Today —December 19th— is the statutory deadline for the DOJ to release the remaining Epstein files under the so-called Epstein Accountability Act.

The media coverage is schizophrenic. The same corporate media that ran novella-length articles on a daily basis before Trump signed the Epstein Accountability law now seems unable to decide what to say. Now, the articles are terse and, if anything, appear designed to lower expectations.

Expect the DOJ to start releasing documents today. I would expect the full rollout to happen over weeks, if not months.

Most stories, including ABC’s, focus on all the loopholes. The DOJ need not release files related to ongoing investigations. It may redact victims’ identifying information. And it may withhold documents that could compromise national security.

What the articles don’t mention, for some reason, is that whenever the DOJ redacts or withholds something, it must list the withheld evidence on an unclassified log along with an explanation. So it’s not exactly a free pass, either. There’s no point speculating about how it will all shake out, since we’ll know for sure very soon now.

But there was one remarkable development. All through the week, the New York Times rushed out a series of Epstein exclusives, one after another, including all sorts of never-before-published details. The Grey Lady claimed it was just “investigating” the case, but it seems unlikely these massive stories could have been both researched and written in under a month.

It feels like another limited hangout. The truth is, the Times helped cover for Epstein more than anybody. It knew all this stuff the whole time. It just wants to get ahead of the document dump.

🔥 The first, and biggest Times exclusive story allegedly answered one of the most persistent and vexing mysteries of the Jeffrey Epstein saga— where his money came from. On Tuesday, the Times purported to provide an answer:

It’s a long, detailed, fascinating read, and I will not try to summarize it here. Epstein watchers will be engrossed. But if I could boil it down to the essence, the article described a classic high-end con man.

It doesn’t answer everything, but it is feasible.

Purely coincidentally, I happen to have some experience in this area. When I started my law career at an Orlando litigation firm, I worked in a smaller department with a half-dozen lawyers representing banks in Ponzi-scheme cases in Central Florida. In one high-profile case, my firm represented Bank of America against Lou Pearlman, the scoundrel who repped the Back Street Boys, built Church Street in Downtown Orlando, and had a fake international airline. In another case, I represented a regional bank that’d loaned money to a real estate schemer who defrauded hundreds of notable locals, including most of the Orlando elite establishment. (He shot himself before trial.)

There were others.

Through that experience, I learned a few things about con men. They are enigmatic and mysterious, almost a separate species. They enjoy a kind of rare manipulative genius, combined with chameleon-like powers of camouflage, a nearly irresistible personal magnetism, and complete moral flexibility. They aren’t smart, not in the way you would normally consider intelligence, and that’s obvious, since all their business ventures consistently fail and their plans almost always inevitably collapse into a heap of disgrace.

No, they are not smart (although they can act smarter than everyone). They are intensely cunning. They have an almost genetic ability to sense exactly what people, especially wealthy or powerful people, need to hear— coupled with an Oscar-level ability to deliver. As far as I know, they are also all male. And tall. Tall men.

Psychologists might call them permissive narcissists.

Anyway, that’s the kind of person the New York Times described, in almost overwhelming detail, to a “T.” From the time he graduated high school. Epstein was tall, attractive, smart-sounding, well spoken, and incredibly persuasive.

Although the article studiously avoided mentioning the well-known occasions when Epstein obviously interacted with and enjoyed the protection of U.S., British, and Israeli intelligence services, the details it did provide were the most compelling portrait yet of the so-called “International Man of Mystery.”

Who knows whether this small novel on Epstein’s rise to power, along with the Times’ other Epstein disclosures, will move the needle. But I find the timing incredibly suspect, and very suggestive that the Times is worried the DOJ might dump a lot more than anybody is expecting. We shall await further developments with great interest.

Have a fantastic Friday! Meet back here in the morning, for the Weekend Edition’s roundup of essential news and commentary.

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