☕️ MOMENTUM ☙ Tuesday, April 29, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

A roundup of one day's Trump Administration news to give you an idea of the breathtaking pace of events; plus comments on yesterday's European Mini-Dark Age.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! We’re one day into what the White House is calling the ‘100-day Week.’ After yesterday’s comment that the deep state is being killed by a thousand cuts, I decided to give you a rapid roundup of a whole slew of events from just one day. But first, we’ll investigate yesterday’s bizarre and mysterious power outage in Europe.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Experts, baffled again! I mean, seriously, what are they good for? Yesterday, the New York Times ran a mysterious story teasingly headlined, “What We Know About the Power Outages in Spain and Portugal.” In brief, Spain, Portugal, and parts of France lost power for most of yesterday and they still don’t know why.

¡Ay, caramba! Across two and a half European countries, at exactly 12:35pm local time, all the electric trains and subways stopped. Elevators froze. Computers died. ATM’s seized up. Planes couldn’t land. Traffic lights winked out. City streets became coagulated arteries. In short, it was general chaos served with a cold side of uncooked yucca fries.

Don’t miss this: Yesterday marked the largest peacetime blackout in European history. Rebooting the power grid took about 18 hours, giving millions unscheduled vacations from screen time.

“The cause,” the Times unenergetically reported, “is still under investigation.”

At a late Monday evening press conference, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez saltily told reporters, “This has never happened before.” ¡Que lastima! Experts, always useless when it counts, remain confounded. “What caused it is something that the experts have not yet established — but they will," Sánchez promised, adding “no hypothesis has been rejected, and every possible cause is being investigated.”

Don’t hold your breath. I’ll bet you 1,000 pesos it remains a forever mystery, stored in the same file with 2020-2021’s mysterious missing flu seasons.

The first widely reported (and rightfully mocked) excuse the government offered yesterday, right out of the manually operated gate, was that the grid crashed due to a complicated rare atmospheric phenomenon described by power officials in obscure technical language so dense and impenetrable that Christopher Columbus could have walked across it to America.

But they’ve already given that one up. The article reported, “REN, the Portuguese electricity and gas supplier, denied reports that an unspecified ‘atmospheric phenomenon’ was to blame.”

Oh. So nevermind.

Nowhere in the article did the Times reveal where the original “reports” came from— which was government officials. Their first impulse was to lie and make up a complicated, unprovable fairy tale. And they complain that we don’t trust them. But I digress.

The Times next said there was no evidence of any cyberattack. Spain’s state grid operator, Red Electrica, said a “very strong oscillation in the electrical network” caused the disconnect, but that just pushed the question back one step to what caused the oscillation? They aren’t even speculating.

Online, many folks observed that two weeks ago, Spain (where the blackouts began) celebrated switching to “100% green power.” April 22nd headline from PV Magazine:

The timing suggests that could be some sort of clue. But Politico EU reported that EU officials have ruled it out. They said there’s no possible way that renewable production could be to blame, since they have rules to prevent that sort of thing from happening. So just forget about it. Take your science denialism and conspiracy theories and go sell them someplace else (*that has power).

My favorite independent weather catastrophist, SpaceWeatherNews, claims to have identified evidence (Youtube; 49:01) that the Earth’s weakening magnetic field essentially failed, collapsing for a brief second, and giving the affected region a blast of solar energy comparable to a massive flare, even though the Sun was mostly quiet. At least he has a theory.

Is it reassuring to you that, unlike SpaceWeatherman, the EU government’s highly-paid experts don’t even have a theory about the largest, multi-country, peacetime blackouts in Europe? Is this a power crisis or a crisis in expertise? The answer is: probably both. And no, all the official confusion is not reassuring. Not at all.

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Remember how yesterday, we speculated that Trump’s bureaucratic blitzkrieg is not a single offensive but looks much more like a building momentum? And how the deep state is about to experience something like a death by a thousand paper cuts?

So much happened yesterday in Trump Administration news that I’m using a lightning-round style to report it all. Get ready:

🔥 Harvard is talking big in public but kissing bottoms in private. Media got hold of a very informative internal Harvard email yesterday. Even more telling, it was sent just a few hours after Trump’s lawyers met with Harvard’s lawyers in the University’s new lawsuit over nearly $3 billion in suspended federal grants. The email described how Harvard is officially renaming its “Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” to “the Office of Community and Campus Life.” Harvard is quietly caving.

In the email, Dr. Sherri Ann Charleston, the school’s now-former chief diversity officer, generously said the university should bring people together based on their backgrounds and perspectives and “not on the broad demographic groups to which they belong.” Hahahahaha!

Also yesterday, the Administration announced a brand new investigation into Harvard’s prestigious Law Review, for violations of civil rights and racial discrimination. Craig Trainor, the Department of Education’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights, announced the journal “appears to pick winners and losers on the basis of race, employing a spoils system in which the race of the legal scholar is as, if not more, important than the merit of the submission.” I know, how could this happen, and so forth. Behold my shocked face.

Harvard knows it cannot win this fight.

🔥 In related news, media reported yesterday that hundreds of veteran lawyers and other staff members are rage-quitting the Justice Department’s Civil Rights division, driven out by their prudish distaste over Trump administration policies to “aggressively pursue cases against Ivy League schools and liberal cities.”

“Over 100 attorneys decided that they’d rather not do what their job requires them to do, and I think that’s fine,” new division head Harmeet K. Dhillon told conservative commentator Glenn Beck in a weekend interview. “The job here is to enforce the federal civil rights laws, not woke ideology,” Dhillon added.

Based on unofficial estimates of the number of people planning to resign by Monday’s deadline, the division would soon be reduced from 380 down to about 140 attorneys, or even fewer, depending how things shake out. Think of it— woke, deep state civil rights lawyers embedded in the civil service are self-deporting.

In the interview, Dhillon said that she plans to rapidly hire new lawyers to get after things like illegal DEI, cities violating Second Amendment rights, and to protect women’s sports. So.

🔥 Like Harvard, Mexico is also talking big in public but kissing bottoms in private, too. Yesterday, media reported that, under tariff threats, Mexico announced its agreement to give Texas farmers more water from shared rivers (the Rio Grande, the Colorado and the Tijuana), amounting to about 420 billion gallons, which it had agreed to do in a 1944 treaty but has flouted for decades, daring the U.S. muchachos to do anything about it.

During the Biden administration, Mexican water contributions drained to new lows, less than a third of treaty commitments. None of the articles I reviewed found anyone quotable who opposed the restored arrangement.

Remember what I told you— Trump’s using tariffs to get everything he wants from every country on Earth, not just equalizing tariffs. No previous president has ever even tried anything like this.

🔥 House Republicans are working on a “big beautiful bill” to support Trump’s agenda. In one example emerging from the noise, yesterday the House Judiciary Committee approved a provision, for example, that would charge fees to immigrants seeking political asylum: $1,000 per person or $3,500 for a family with kids, plus a $100 annual maintenance fee for as long as the case continues.

Asylum-seekers would also have to pay other fees, like $350 to apply for a temporary work permit.

The fees would be used to fund increases in immigration budgets, like +$45 billion for immigrant detention centers, +$8 billion for more Immigration and Customs Enforcement staff, and +$1.25 billion for Justice Department immigration judges. In other words, the immigrants must fund the infrastructure.

It’s a wild reversal from giving them free cell phones, debit cards, and plane tickets.

🔥 DOGE has arrived at the Peace Corps. According to reports, 960 full-time Peace Corps staff oversee 3,000 volunteers. In other words, it currently takes one full-time salary to “oversee” every three volunteers. Nobody knows yet what layoffs are coming, but honestly, how many people does it take? If these volunteers are so needy, maybe they should get more qualified volunteers.

I’m thinking that about three people should be able to handle it.

🔥 Yesterday, the Administration pulled the plug on a 1990 G.W. Bush initiative called the National Climate Assessment, a five-year repeating project that OMB Director Russ Vought has correctly called “a source of climate alarmism.” More plainly, it is a grift factory. Until shortly before noon yesterday, over four hundred expert “climate contributors” were diligently working on the Sixth Assessment. But the gravy train has reached its final destination.

“We are now releasing all current assessment participants from their roles,” the Administration’s bulk email succinctly said. Sad! But hey, you never know. “As plans develop for the assessment, there may be future opportunities to contribute or engage,” it continued, ending politely by saying, “Thank you for your service.”

🔥 The Department of Education announced a new discrimination investigation yesterday, this time into the University of Pennsylvania for allowing a transgender woman (i.e., a man) to participate in female sports. Specifically, the infamous ‘Lia’ Thomas.

The Education Department announced it will require Penn to strip Mr. Thomas’s athletic records, send an apology letter to all affected female athletes, and restore their own individual records.

Penn declined to comment.

🔥 Yesterday, IBM announced a new initiative to invest $150 billion in domestic manufacturing, which the New York Times said came “as the Trump administration pressures firms to expand their U.S. manufacturing.”

🔥 President Trump signed three new executive orders on immigration yesterday. Somewhere in there, he shot past President Autopen’s four-year total of executive orders, which had itself set a new presidential record. One of the new orders directed DOJ to crack down on so-called “sanctuary cities.” The second provided money for wrongly accused police officers, partially re-funding defunded police departments.

CLIP: Trump launches a war against sanctuary cities (0:49).

The third order directed the Department of Transportation to enforce an English-language proficiency requirement for all domestic U.S. truckers. For some reason, they feel that truckers need to be able to read the road signs, or something silly like that.

Meanwhile, over the weekend, the White House trolled corporate media by erecting 100 signs showing illegal aliens arrested for violent crimes.

CLIP: MSNBC anchors whine about illegal alien criminal posters (0:42).

The posters now decorate the White House lawn all along the West Wing driveway, right where corporate media reporters usually do their video reports. “No matter what network you’re on—that includes MSNBC—if you’re doing a hit from the White House, those pictures will be behind you.”

In other words, the Trump Team is inviting media to keep on reporting that the epidemic of illegal alien crime is overblown— while standing right in front of the evidence. Genius.

🔥 This list of news is all from one day. Dear readers, this short list is not even everything I could have reported. The Administration is calling this its “100-day Week.” Nobody can keep up with this kind of pace. Corporate media reporters must be experiencing the ideological equivalent of an extra-painful monkeypox infection.

Yesterday, I found a single article that came closest to capturing the first 100-days’ historic nature. Domestic news stubbornly refused to recognize what’s happening. This lonely story ran in the BBC. Here’s the headline:

And here is the money graph:

In terms of preserving Trump’s radical remaking of our nation, much still depends on Congress. But unlike impatient commenters and hot-takes addicts, I am fine with a slower pace. Trump is still rolling things out. I’m not even sure we’ve seen the whole plan yet. So it may be premature for Congress to strike now; and, practically speaking, they have until next year’s midterms to do it.

Get ready for a wild week.

Have a terrific Tuesday! A brand new roundup awaits you tomorrow morning, first thing, featuring all the essential news and commentary you need for your healthy news diet, fortified with Vitamin-C (caffeine).

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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