☕️ NO MORE MONARCHS ☙ Wednesday, October 15, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Charlie Kirk posthumous Medal of Freedom; media tie themselves in knots; NYT flounders; Dem states push assisted suicide for anorexia; China proves labor isn’t its edge; “No Kings II” nonsense; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! In today’s roundup: President Trump awards Charlie Kirk posthumous Medal of Freedom, and media tangles its tongue trying to avoid stepping on political landmines again; debunking the media’s ‘conservative political violence’ trope; blue states devolve further into assisted suicide, now prescribing it for ‘terminal anorexia’; Telegraph article proves our point about China’s manufacturing advantage—it’s not cheap workers; and so-called ’No Kings II’ weekend of protest draws universal agreement, at least from me. No kings. Perfect.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Yesterday, CNN, wriggling under the fierce weight of political compulsion, coughed up a clean story, free from any Kirk criticism —veiled or otherwise— below the headline, “Trump awards posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom to Charlie Kirk.”

Yesterday, as Fall’s first chill fingers twirled through the late afternoon sunlight sparkling across the newly redecorated Rose Garden, President Trump soberly awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Charlie Kirk’s widow. Yesterday would have been Charlie’s 32nd birthday.

The Medal of Freedom is the highest awardable civilian honor in America. It was established in its current form by President John F. Kennedy, expanding an earlier version that President Truman created to recognize folks who helped during World War II. Charlie’s bespoke version carried a custom inscription including a Christian cross etched on the back.

President Trump gave a short, touching speech, often funny, occasionally angry. Erika made hopeful remarks, and the packed ceremony on a perfect day closed with a patriotic military band playing a spirited rendition of “Amazing Grace.”

As I mentioned, CNN’s article bit its acid tongue, holding back veins of dark criticism of Charlie Kirk, reserving its churlish comments for the President instead. In fact, CNN didn’t really say anything about Charlie, which is clearly how the passive-aggressive reporter complied with what must have been an editorial directive not to speak ill of the dead. They learned their lesson last time. Just avoid saying anything.

CNN avoided saying anything substantial about Charlie Kirk by heavily quoting President Trump, chopping his jokes and quips up like finely minced onions so that they lost all flavor. It then quoted Erika for a couple of paragraphs at the end, and that’s it. Here’s an example. Rather than describing Charlie’s killing, they let the President do it:

Which is not to say that CNN fully resisted its urges. A reflexive snipe, for instance, appeared right after reporting that Trump said, “In the wake of Charlie’s assassination, our country must have absolutely no tolerance for this radical left violence, extremism, and terror.” The story then immediately complained that Trump “made no mention of political violence against Democrats.”

Why would he mention that? For Heaven’s sake, the President was speaking at Charlie Kirk’s posthumous award ceremony. Kirk was killed by a left-wing, trans-addled lunatic, after which Democrats across the country clapped like trained seals and barked in approval. But CNN continued, taking this little opportunity —though Trump never compared violence between the two parties— to link to its own argumentative article from just after Kirk’s assassination:

CNN’s argument encapsulates the same claim that corporate media has parroted for weeks since Charlie’s killing: that far-right political violence exceeds far-left violence. For example:

Note carefully that far-left MSNBC commenter Ari Melber said “over the past three decades.” That cherry-picked timespan will be important in a minute.

Well, it was one more damned thing to do, but I finally ran their silly claim of majority far-right violence to ground. As you probably suspected, their carefully collated claims are a carefully collated shell game, featuring all the left’s usual statistical manipulation, cherry-picking, and obfuscation. Let’s see whether we can slay this false narrative.

🔥 Corporate media usually cites two sources for their claim: the DOJ and a Cato Institute Study. The DOJ claim is easy to deal with. Former Director Chris Wray’s DOJ reported that the majority of its domestic terror investigations have been of “varieties of white supremacism.” Never mind the way the left unfairly plastered right-wingers with “white supremacists,” even though the Republican Party literally sprouted out of abolition, and the KKK was a Democrat invention. Set that quibble aside.

The DOJ “investigations” only prove the DOJ’s focus. Investigations are quite different from convictions or even crimes. Biden’s diligent FBI, eager to root out home-grown extremism, employed a laser-like focus on old ladies who treasonously attended the Capitol on January 6th, seditiously took communion at latin Catholic masses, or insurrectionally prayed outside abortion centers.

Not to mention those ten devious Republican U.S. Senators. Anyway, to illustrate the point, behold this headline from National Review, in June:

That’s what the FBI counts as right-wing extremism in its “investigatory statistics.” So.

🔥 CNN’s argument next leaned on a libertarian Cato Institute report and a National Institute of Justice Report. Both used heavily criticized methods of deciding whether a particular attacker was “right wing” or “left wing.” Even CNN admitted, “There is always some subjectivity in such studies. It can be difficult to place a killer’s ideology on the left-right political continuum.”

So there’s one problem. But the biggest trick was the cutoff date. Cato calculated its analysis from 1975, and the so-called Justice Institute from 1990. That’s like saying Bill Clinton is the most scandal-free president in history, because since 2020 there hasn’t been a single bimbo eruption involving the affectionate old Arkansan.

The 1960’s and early 1970’s were a bloody mess of leftwing advocacy “for change.” Here is just a partial list of groups active in the U.S. that were mostly peacefully protesting for better living conditions by: bombing cars, killing people, robbing banks, taking hostages, hijacking airplanes, and assassinating cops.

Ready? Here you go: the Weather Underground; Students for a Democratic Society (SDS); the Black Panthers; the Symbionese Liberation Army (which notably kidnapped Patty Hearst in 1974—the year before Cato’s cutoff); the Black Liberation Army; the United Freedom Front; FALN (a Puerto Rican Marxist group); the Yippies; the American Indian Movement (AIM); the Red Guard; and many more.

The far-left Symbionese Liberation Army, advocating for gun control.

The 60’s were a tsunami of far-left violence, and by the mid-70s the nation was pretty much fed up and had enough. We cracked down, and most of the worst troublemakers were thrown into prison, leading to several decades of mercifully low left-wing domestic terrorism, since the bad actors were enjoying free federal vacations or had decided to take extended overseas vacations.

So if you try really hard, squint, ignore the brutal 60’s and early 70’s, remain flexible with your political definitions, and only look at the calm period of aftermath, then you can find a stretch of higher “right wing” violence. In other words, the period since 1975 represents an artificial low in leftwing violence, since their misbehavior got them soundly grounded.

The truth is that leftwing violence has always been higher. It reached a terrifying peak after World War II, and we beat it back. Now the left is using that against us, claiming a false mantle of peace that was actually produced by most of the left’s leaders being locked up. The real lesson is: the left remains most peaceful when it is in prison.

Bottom line: the lie of more rightwing political violence only works if you start counting after most of the left was thrown in jail before 1975.

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Blue Utopia is going about as well as everyone predicted. This story adds a whole new dimension to telling kids to eat their broccoli. Last week, the Denver Post ran an op-ed headlined, “Assisted suicide was offered to my friend Jane Allen. She had an eating disorder.” If you won’t eat food, how about THIS?

In what will someday make a gripping Lifetime movie, Jane Allen was rescued by her father from a diabolical anorexia treatment center in Denver, hours or moments before she planned to take the poison provided by her doctors for her to kill herself. A judge finally awarded Jane’s dad a legal guardianship and he raced against the clock to the treatment facility, arriving just in the nick of time.

That was right before the pandemic in 2018. Jane recovered, was happy, and lived seven more years, but tragically died this year due to complications from her anorexia— which her family believes can be traced back to the period at the Denver “treatment center” where her medical conditions went untreated and she was offered suicide instead.

In June of this year, a group of Colorado patients, advocacy groups, and families filed suit against the state. The suit focused on the “alarming consequences of the law’s implementation, including its application to individuals with non-terminal conditions like anorexia, spinal cord injuries, and other disabilities that may bias health care providers.”

Welcome to the Hotel Colorado. You can check in, but you can’t always check out.

In simpler language: the lawsuit alleges Denver doctors are browbeating patients suffering with non-terminal conditions into suicide, under the grotesque euphemism of “Terminal Care.” There’s another one! What have I always told you about leftists adding modifiers to words? Killing patients is not care. Dead patients don’t need care. And the patients described in the lawsuit weren’t terminal. The whole thing is another leftist lie.

Blue states have raced so far past the Hippocratic Oath that they can’t even see it in the rear-view mirror. The Oath explicitly provides that physicians “will not give a deadly drug to anyone if asked, nor suggest such advice.” For thousands of years, the Hippocratic Oath’s prohibition on delivering deadly drugs was well-known, and doctors who violated it could be condemned for breaching professional standards.

This issue sits squarely on the uneasy crossroads between medical freedom and bioethics. On the one hand, patients should be free to make decisions regarding their bodily autonomy. On the other hand, the West was established in the foundational concept of the limitless, immeasurable value of human life. Doctors’ universal agreement to avoid using their skills to cause harm, even if patients beg for it, is an essential part of the Western canon.

In other words, the left has transformed the millennia-old prohibition on doctors using their craft to commit what in every other sphere would be a crime —intentionally causing harm— into “care.” Care = crime = care. Of course, Blue States aren’t as far down the path to Hades as Canada, where one in 20 deaths are now the result of medical “suicide.” In Quebec, over 7% of deaths are by euthanasia.

“Canada Is Killing Itself,” blared the Atlantic’s succinct headline two months ago in August. Two years from now, assisted suicide will become available in Canada to those suffering only from mental illness. The Canadian Parliament has also recommended access for minors— without parental consent. “As Canada contends with ever-evolving claims on the right to die,” the Atlantic reported, “the demand for euthanasia has begun to outstrip the capacity of clinicians to provide it.”

Some Canadian doctors have euthanized hundreds of patients. “I have two or three ‘provisions’ every week now, and it’s going up every year,” Claude Rivard, a family doctor in suburban Montreal, told the reporter. Dr. Rivard has transitioned over 600 patients.

There’s even an app ($10.99) called Be Ceremonial that helps plan your doctor-driven suicide, with suggestions like story altars, collecting witness tears, and “forgiveness ceremonies.”

The “debate” —if you can call it that— has become so convoluted and unnecessarily complicated that I cannot hope to do it justice here. In the old days, all you needed was a decent rope and a chair. Now, according to progressives, we need a vast, expensive bureaucracy aimed at “compassionate dying,” which you’ll notice is yet another lefty rhetorical shell game.

None of this, mind you, is intended to minimize the suffering of people —say, vaccine-injured folks— who can’t bear to draw another breath. The cultural experiment underway in the Blue States and in Canada is: what happens to societies when doctors become experienced killers?

Well, I don’t think it’s helping restore trust in the medical establishment, to be honest.

Remember when, back during the pandemic, the government categorized us all as either “essential” or “non-essential?” Don’t think about that too hard. And try to avoid the hospital, especially if you live in Colorado.

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Remember when I recently wrote about how badly the left has lied for decades about how China took over manufacturing? How liberals swore it was just because China has cheaper labor, all those rice farmers willing to work for slave wages? Well … see, I told you so. Yesterday, the UK Telegraph ran an illuminating story headlined, “Western executives who visit China are coming back terrified.” If you guessed that what terrified Western executives were legions of cheap Chinese workers, think again:

In my prior post about the Sharpie factory, I suggested that the only real advantage China ever had was just that its factories were newer than ours. The Chinese invested in state-of-the-art, and we didn’t. Instead of paying for 21st-century retooling, I argued, our manufacturers just let the Chinese take over building stuff in their fresher factories.

Well, this Telegraph article should seal the deal.

“It’s the most humbling thing I’ve ever seen,” Ford’s CEO Jim Farley said after his recent trip touring Chinese manufacturing plants. It wasn’t the slave-labor conditions. It was the robots. “You’re walking alongside this conveyor, and after about 800, 900 meters, a truck drives out. There are no people – everything is robotic,” said Australian billionaire Andrew Forrest, who took a similar tour.

Other executives described vast “dark factories,” where robots do so much of the work that they don’t even leave the lights on for humans. The Telegraph reported that just in the last year China installed 295,000 new industrial robots, compared to only 27,000 in Germany, 34,000 in the US, and a pitiful 2,500 in the UK. (These aren’t necessarily humanoid-style robots, but rather computer-powered assembly machines of various kinds.)

Those numbers pretty much tell you everything you need to know to understand the global manufacturing problem. Who’s investing more? Obviously China.

Worse, the robots are making better and cheaper cars than humans. “Their cost and the quality of their vehicles is far superior to what I see in the West,” Farley warned.

Now, I’m not accusing Democrats of working for China by covering up China’s massive investment in manufacturing technology by lying about the causes. I’ll let you decide that one for yourself. But that lie —the lie of cheap labor— was so strong that our CEOs didn’t even go over there to find out for themselves until now. What changed?

Tariffs. Trump’s tariffs changed the calculus, spurring a generation of executives to try to figure out how to build stuff cheaper here. Tariffs are now the only answer, since China is ten or twenty years ahead in factory buildouts. Had someone stood up twenty years ago and said, “the reason production is moving to Asia is only because they have newer, more efficient factories,” then all this might have been avoided.

We have a lot of catching up to do. But that’s also what we’re good at, once we know the goal. And some companies are doing it: Tesla, for example, claims up to 95% of its production is automated (its welding workshop is 100% robotic). Ford and GM are catching up, but they have a long way to go. Tesla’s line can reportedly produce a new Model Y every thirty seconds— which is literally impossible to imagine.

Now we just need to do that for our other manufacturing industries.

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Yesterday, USA Today ran a story headlined, “‘No Kings’ protests could draw historic turnout in pushback against Trump.” Prepare yourself for another “No Kings” weekend, as organizers aim for a Saturday debut. But … for what? What do they want?

They want to protest, that’s for sure. “They are actively trying to take away your constitutional right to peaceful protest, and that is how authoritarian regimes work,” explained Indivisible cofounder Ezra Levin, one of the organizers. He means mostly peaceful protests like the anti-ICE protests in LA earlier this year:

Only kings stop people from torching cop cars

Truly, who among us hasn’t lit a cop car on fire to protest an unwanted policy or two? Let him without matches throw the first Molotov cocktail. Or words to that effect.

Altogether, 2,500 events are scheduled for this weekend— about 700 more than June’s silly get-togethers for elderly liberals who love mandates, passports, and lockdowns, but hate deportations. Of course, you’d expect a better turnout in October’s cooler weather. Just saying.

Notably, they aren’t even calling for an end to deportations. Maybe just … nicer ones. “They are taking our people and terrifying our people and that feels so much more personal,” Colorado organizer Jacqueline Denny, 57, said. “The need to protest feels very real and crucial right now,” Denny said.

Altogether, it was impossible from the USA Today story to tell what the protestors want. Do they want ICE to be canceled like the DOE? Do they want fewer deportations? No deportations? Free vaccinations? Free college? Free bail? Free love? Free tacos? Government-sponsored P-hats? A Middle East ceasefire? (No, wait. Hold that last one.)

Who knows?

Search for “No Kings” on BlueSky and you’ll be even less informed, and possibly lose several IQ points. “No kings means NO KINGS,” one lefty poster helpfully suggested.

I think we can all get behind that sentiment. Nobody wants kings. Check. They’ve persuaded and unified us all. So what’s left?

Don’t ask the protestors. Some of them are just there for the paycheck. Other will wave their preprinted signs and tell you what they don’t want, like “kings,” plus a long laundry list of random Trump policies. But they’re not advocating for any policies of their own, just a generalized morass of bizarre, hard-to-define complaints. They are the nattering nabobs of negativity, to quote Spiro Agnew.

This weekend, be sure to drive by your local “No Kings II” parade and honk in agreement with “no kings.” Honk nicely. Don’t terrify them.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! Parade back here tomorrow morning, for more delicious Coffee & Covid, and another roundup of essential news and commentary.

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