☕️ PARTLY DISABLED ☙ Thursday, October 16, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

SCOTUS clips rattle Dem hopes; NYT anti-woke review backfires; Trump sics CIA on Venezuela; gain-of-function bombshell drops; and revival sparks in America’s most powerful Christian nation; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! In today’s terrific roundup: more viral clips from yesterday’s SCOTUS oral arguments hint at deep problems for Democrats’ Congressional hopes; Times’s predictably awful movie review of first major anti-woke film remarkably backfires among progressive readers; Trump unleashes CIA on stubborn Venezuelan while Nobel prize boomerangs back to him; new peer-reviewed study shows how badly the National Institutes of Health’s gain-of-function experiments have screwed the entire world; and another hopeful, encouraging, and optimistic sign of Christian revival in history’s most powerful Christian nation.

⛑️ C&C ARMY POST ⛑️

Several alert users reported problems reaching their C&C roundups yesterday. After some not insignificant effort, we determined that we were back on Comcast’s naughty list and labeled unchaste. I mean, unsafe. It was probably the latest cancellation attempt by someone (or ones) unable to debate on the merits.

The issue should be resolved, and your daily roundups should once again be sailing into your inbox under fairer winds.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Remember oleaginous Newsom and the brewing national gerrymandering battle? It’s about to go on steroids. Early yesterday, the New York Times ran a story headlined, “The Supreme Court Case That Could Hand the House to Republicans.” Based on yesterday’s oral arguments, court watchers expect SCOTUS to hand Republicans up to +19 safe Democrat Congressional seats, potentially turning the entire Southeast a delightful shade of crimson:

“Despite all the gerrymandering by both political parties in recent years,” the Times sadly began, “neither has been able to obtain a significant structural advantage in the House so far this decade.” But yesterday, the Justices heard oral argument in Louisiana v. Callais, a case proving Abraham Lincoln’s favorite expression about how you can please all of the people some of the time, and some of the people … wait, I forgot my place.

Anyway, his point was, no matter what you do, somebody always complains. Right after that, he invaded Maryland.

In 2022, Louisiana’s legislature carefully drew a new Congressional map for an art contest or perhaps something more important. Either way, the state’s newly gerrymandered districts eliminated an oddly shaped district that looked like the love child of a mutant duck and a salted eel, a district on which black people had already called “dibs.” Thus, furious black voters screamed racism! and called Louisiana white supremacists! and sued for racial discrimination under Section 2 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, a civil rights darling that has been interpreted by the courts to essentially require a minimum number of ‘guaranteed’ black districts.

The federal court sternly ordered Louisiana to go back to your desk and draw a new, better, less racist map— or else it could go straight to time out. So, two years later, this time using colored markers and a ruler instead of freehand crayons, the state submitted a new, improved map, this time adding an artistically drawn district shaped like a furry caterpillar eating a rotini noodle— but which, dutifully, only included black neighborhoods.

Whew! Crisis averted.

Or not! Alas, the delicious new caterpillar district also ate the old new district, the one from the 2022 map, now missing in action, which had already been called by non-black-people, transforming Louisiana into both an anti-white, anti-Asian, anti-Indian, anti-Pacific Islander racist butterfly and an Indian giving centipede.

So this time, in 2024, the group of non-black-people sued, also for racial discrimination, but under the Constitution —take that!— and this time, a new, different federal court agreed with them, and ordered Indian-giving Louisiana to go back to its room and not to come out till it had drawn another, better, proper new map coughing back up the non-black-people’s district.

So Louisiana —whose fingers were very tired and ink-stained by this point— threw an embarrassing temper tantrum in front of everybody and in a fit of frustration threw its colored markers into the courthouse toilet and stormed out, requiring the Supreme Court to get involved.

Which brings us to yesterday’s oral arguments.

⚖️ Cutting to the chase, based on the tone and tenor of the Justice’s questions, and one time Kavanaugh scratched his nose in a very revealing way, it seems likely that the Supreme Court will find that the VRA’s demands of drawing, re-drawing, and re-re-drawing districts to guarantee black candidates can easily beat every other color of person is racist, pointless, and dumb, and violates the Equal Protection guarantee of the 14th Amendment.

If it does, SCOTUS will hand Republicans up to +19 seats and generational control of the House, a nearly unbeatable margin. Right in time for the midterms.

CLIP: CNN freakout over GOP redistricting advantage combined with SCOTUS possibly overturning the VRA (1:26).

The first thing I’d like to point out is that Democrats created this problem. Without the VRA’s artificial Democrat districts shaped like random garden tools, the donkey party should actually be -19 seats in the hole (at least). They got lazy. Oh, they’ll cry about this being the crafty Republicans’ fault, but they made their own gerrymandered bed.

A second point is why the case went viral yesterday. It was not so much because of the astronomically high stakes, but because of Justice Jackson, who is becoming more and more the butt of salty jokes about dull-wittedness. During oral argument the black justice actually compared other black people to the disabled:

My kind of, paradig-dig-matic example of this is something like the ADA. Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act against the backdrop of a world generally not accessible to people with disabilities, a world that was discriminatory in effect… I don’t understand why that’s not what’s happening here?! Blacks don’t have equal access to the voting system. They’re disabled.

“It’s not about whether it relates to race,” Lawyer Edward Greim patiently responded, carefully avoiding Justice Jackson’s faux pas. “It’s whether the remedy that relates to race involves stereotyping voters and making assumptions about their politics, their views, and their thoughts based on their race. That’s the problem. It doesn’t exist in those other statutes.”

Paradoxically, the heart of the argument boiled down to whether states can draw districts for partisan political advantage —which is legal— versus for racial reasons, which should be unconstitutional. The liberals tried to argue that if the reasons were blended —racism and politics— that would be okay. But the conservative majority and lawyers argued that any racism was intolerable.

Tellingly, though, everyone, liberals and conservatives, all seemed to agree that racially motivated district-drawing is wrong. And that is why it looks like the VRA is living on borrowed time.

If the Court makes racially-drawn districts illegal, and does it sooner rather than later, the Democrats have no hope of regaining the House. None. It’s all over. And as we’ve seen, this isn’t their only problem.

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This week, the New York Times ran a remarkable, anxiety-dripping op-ed/film review by its diarrheac opinion-excreter Michelle Goldberg, headlined, “The New Julia Roberts Movie Seethes With Anti-Woke Resentment.” To my astonishment, this film is the first mainstream American movie depicting the true horrors of out-of-control campus liberalism. And it’s driving libs crazy.

The movie “After the Hunt,” released to theaters last Friday, is a tense psychological drama. It was produced by Amazon-MGM Studios, internationally distributed by Sony Pictures, and directed by lauded Italian filmmaker Luca Guadagnino.

In the film, Julia Roberts plays Alma, a tenure-track, Ivy League philosophy professor for whom life is at first going swimmingly. But soon, a fateful cocktail party at her home upends her life. After a night of drinking, her star student Maggie (above left) accuses Alma’s close colleague Hank of sexual assault. Maggie never provides details —was it a kiss? An embrace? Something more? Hank denies it, and claims Maggie is making up the assault because he’d accused her of plagiarism.

Sound familiar?

The fallout is predictable: despite a lack of evidence or even details, Hank is fired, Alma —who tries unsuccessfully to walk a neutral line between her friends— loses tenure, and darker secrets emerge in the story’s foreground, while in the background the woke university inexorably grinds everyone except the diverse Maggie into a grisly professional paste.

That a major studio made this movie with an A-list actress and top-tier director is, frankly, the most astonishing sign of the counter-revolution we’ve seen to date.

🔥 But far-left TDS-sufferer and op-ed writer Michelle Goldberg hated it. She deployed the sharpest assassin’s knives in her rhetorical arsenal, her carefully crafted words dripping with reviewer’s poison:

In other words, we get one mainstream movie about false rape accusations in the Ivy League and Maggie Haberman is already tired of them. I could drip some sarcastic poison of my own on Haberman’s knee-jerk institutional immune response, but there is more to unpack here.

Golberg is trying to swap victim status like a New York street hustler shuffling shells. During her so-called “me-too micro-era,” the left was victimized by racists and patriarchs. Having pushed that too far, as Goldberg seems to acknowledge (e.g., citing “self-righteous progressivism”), she finds a new starring villain for her victimhood: the “repressive” (patriarchal) Trump Administration.

In other words, rather than relinquishing the progressive mantle of embattled me-too virtue, she simply slipped it under a different shell. The progressive left’s status as perpetual victim is thus preserved, regardless of cultural reversals or changing power dynamics; the villain is swapped out as needed, with the narrative logic of injury and resistance remaining intact.

Ironically, misused power of progressive victimhood was the point of the movie. Now Goldberg is using the same victimhood power, except trying to cancel a movie instead of a Yale professor. Rather than honestly engaging the film’s provocative questions about truth, justice, and mob power, she works to delegitimize the film itself by framing it as morally suspect or, at best, boringly passé.

In other words, Haberman’s poisonous review is a perfect mirror image of the movie’s central theme.

But Ms. Goldberg might have accidentally stepped on a rake. If the review’s comments were any sign, her attempt to cancel the movie backfired badly. Which was an even more astonishing sign of the current cultural reversal.

🔥 The comments! Unsurprisingly, of the over 1,000 commenters, 80% were liberal. But shockingly, most (80%?) of the liberal commenters agreed with the movie and pushed back on the reviewer. Here’s one example (of many):

Great googly moogly. Will wonders never cease? Woke is dying, and fast. Another liberal reviewer, EHR from Baltimore, said, “if you want to prevent another Trump, we should learn from our past incidents, and avoid them in future, instead of sweeping them under the rug.” Several liberal teachers chimed in, vouching for progressive repression on campus and supporting the movie’s honesty.

My friends, great things are afoot. Had this movie debuted a year ago, the comments would be packed with sneering condescension and outright mockery of its premise. In eight short months, President Trump may have pulled sane democrats back from the virtue-signaling brink.

They aren’t ready to vote Republican or don MAGA hats, but it sounds like the party politic is preparing to jettison wokeness. Sanity is retaking her throne.

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Things are getting spicier than pickled jalapeños down in South America. The Wall Street Journal ran a story yesterday headlined, “Trump Authorizes CIA Covert Operations in Venezuela.” Questioned by reporters, President Trump said, “I think Venezuela is feeling the heat.”

“Every boat is saving 25,000 lives,” Trump explained, commenting on the fifth and latest blown-up Venezuelan drug boat. Yesterday, the President signed an order authorizing the CIA to “conduct covert operations in Venezuela”— which obviously nobody knows what they will look like.

A reporter pressed Trump on whether he’d authorized the CIA to remove Venezuelan president and cartel ally Nicolas Maduro. “That’s not a ridiculous question,” Trump responded, “but wouldn’t it be ridiculous for me to answer?”

On top of Maduro’s drug war against us, and besides their awful custom of roasting cute, helpless little capybara as snacks, a simple Google news search shows that Venezuela —the closest South American country to American shores— has long been working with Russia and China to build up its military. For one example, a headline from the Warsaw Institute, 2019:

That’s why Democrats —who claim to hate Putin— think President Trump is really aimed at regime change. They aren’t completely wrong, but Trump has consistently accused Maduro of fronting for the cartels and flooding the U.S. with gang members during Biden’s open-borders period.

President Trump hinted that inland strikes could soon take place against suspected drug smugglers on Venezuelan soil. “We are certainly looking at land now because we’ve got the sea very well under control,” he told reporters.

This week, the Norwegian Nobel Committee rushed out its Peace Prize award, hastily trying to beat calls for Trump to get the prize for his brokering of the cease-fire and hostage return in Gaza. They gave it instead to Venezuelan Trump ally María Corina Machado, who opposes Maduro and is his likely replacement if regime change happens. (Amusingly, Machado turned around and dedicated the prize to Trump and the Venezuelan people.)

In response, Venezuela rage-quit Norway by closing its embassy there, and Madura saucily called Machado a “demonic witch.” Overall, between the facts that Trump loves Macado, Machado opposes Maduro, and the fiery Latina dedicated the prize to him, it was another Trump TAW moment.

The irony of Trump ramping up clandestine and kinetic military action against Venezuela while also receiving a dedicated Nobel Peace Prize from a Venezuelan completely escaped corporate media journalists’ notice.

As we expected and predicted, the pressure on Venezuela is getting irresistible. The question is: will Maduro —who is also subject to a $50 million U.S. bounty for his arrest— step down, or be taken out? Or will he eat another helpless, roasted capybara? Time will tell.

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Covid is literally making us crazy. This week, Science Alert ran an anxious story with the understated headline, “COVID’s Surprising Effect on Sperm May Impact Future Generations.” They never mentioned the v-word, but a close reader could find it squirted in between the lines.

According to a new peer-reviewed study published in Nature Communications, researchers at the Florey Institute infected male mice with covid and found their offspring were crazier than those from uninfected fathers. The study discovered “significant changes” in gene activity in the hippocampus —the emotion-regulating part of the brain— especially in female offspring, linked to mutations in sperm RNA from infected fathers.

“We found that the resulting offspring showed more anxious behaviors compared to offspring from uninfected fathers,” study author Elizabeth Kleeman said. “These findings suggest that the COVID-19 pandemic could have long-lasting effects on future generations,” lead researcher Anthony Hannan reported. “If our findings translate to humans, this could impact millions of children worldwide, and their families, with major implications for public health,” he added.

Oh.

This is the first study finding genetic effects from covid infection. One understandably wonders about the mRNA version and how the jabs might affect genes. But it is not the first study showing covid worsening mental health problems.

But never mind. Since this is “just” a mouse study, and since human studies would take years or decades to complete —if they are performed at all— it may be a cold day in Caracas before we find out whether the NIH’s gain-of-function experiments may have damaged the human genome worldwide.

This seems like a good opportunity to remind everyone that, despite investing more taxpayer money in “public health” and “pandemic preparedness” than the rest of the world combined, the U.S. had the highest covid mortality of any other country:

It is really time we had a difficult conversation about the future of “public health.” I don’t think that phrase means what they think it means. Let’s just end it for good.

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Finally, and in much more encouraging news, the New York Times ran an unintentionally uplifting story this week headlined, “Why So Many Gen Z-ers Are Drawn to Conservative Christianity.”

I’ve covered this remarkable and reassuring revival trend in C&C several times over the last year. This article is no outlier. The trend is real.

“Gen Z is clouded by despair,” the author observed. Thanks, scientists. Thus, “In the aftermath of Covid,” the op-ed reported, “a sizable minority of Gen Z-ers have found their answer in conservative Christianity, fueling both a religious and a political revival among these young Americans.” It added, “They bring a new attitude to the combination of faith and politics, and many see politics as a matter of spiritual warfare against demonic forces.”

The Times’ editor, of course, found this spiritual revival among young Americans to be a troubling sign of the dark rise of fascism. “Americans who think that Generation Z might offer hope for a less divisive, less polarized political future should think again.” Worse, “many of these young Christians have turned to conservative politics — a near-seamless mix of Christian faith and the MAGA message.”

That stupid sentence did unintentionally disclose one thing. The movement Trump started, the Make America Great Again movement, is somehow related to or involved with a massive, sudden, and unexpected Christian revival. The pandemic is also part of it.

But what sounded like good developments to us terrified the author. It’s the worst thing ever. This growing revival “has led at least some younger conservative Christians to question liberal democracy and religious pluralism altogether and to entertain the idea of a postliberal framework.”

How soon can we start building the postliberal framework? I’m ready to get started. How about you?

As we’ve seen in other similar reports, the article reported that it’s the young men. “Young male churchgoers now outpace young female churchgoers in weekly attendance.” (Fear not, the girls will follow.) It reflects a return to a more muscular, masculine Christianity, pushing aside the effeminized hippy-dippy version that infected churches following the 60’s and 70’s.

And that is exactly what troubled the Times the most, causing it to drop its Lababu comfort doll from nerveless fingers and hallucinate that it was living in The Handmaid’s Tale again. But it is terrific news for the rest of us.

Have a terrific Thursday! Get back here tomorrow morning for even more informative and entertaining essential news and commentary.

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