☕️ POACHERS AND GAMEKEEPERS ☙ Monday, June 3, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

AP's new anti-Trump narrative blows up on the launch pad; record Trump fundraising continues; NIH scientists exposed as pharma shills; muted corporate celebrations; what happened in 2012?; and more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s another Monday! A fresh start to a new week and a new month of this historically kooky year. Your kickoff roundup includes this essential news: anti-democratic Associated Press tries inflating a new Trump Verdict narrative and we let all the air out; citizens vote with their dollars as Trump rakes in historic levels of campaign fundraising; NIH scientists exposed raking in three quarters of a billion on covid jabs for the ‘public good’; so-called pride month gets muted corporate support; and a testy influencer asks a loaded question about voting preferences.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥🔥 They’re trying to stuff a new “Trump is destroying democracy” narrative, so let’s rip it apart. Yesterday the Associated Press recovered from a terrifying fainting episode and darkly warned Americans about disappearing democracy in a horrid story headlined, “Trump's attacks on US justice system after his conviction could be used by autocrats, say experts.” It’s an emergency! Try to keep up with their logic.

In a one hundred percent one-sided article citing several so-called ‘experts’ who were definitely not at all cherry-picked by AP reporter Emma Burrows, but definitely were randomly selected in a totally fair blind lottery by drawing names of experts out of a crocheted hat.

Or, they were cherry picked. Either way, the experts all agreed with each other and, not coincidentally, with Emma: Trump is bad. Very bad.

According to Millennial reporter Emma, the person benefiting the most from Trump’s post-Verdict criticism of the US justice system was Vladimir Putin! And right behind him, China. Emma didn’t quote Putin for this story — why should she? — she quoted Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, who correctly observed the Trump Verdict was “simply the elimination of political rivals by all possible means, legal and illegal.” Emma also took great umbrage that China’s Global Times noted the Verdict adds to the “farcical nature” of this election season.

How dare they.

Emma’s Millennial logic went like this: Trump says something about the Verdict, and then Russia and China say stuff about the Verdict. So … <bzzzt!> Whoops, Emma’s logic shorted out.

Don’t be angry, Emma is a progressive public school graduate. Emma can’t remember Russia or China ever criticizing the U.S. before Trump came along. This is a common logical fallacy called “recency bias,” where Emma myopically focused on the last four days while ignoring the last four decades of constant criticism from our geopolitical rivals.

The truth is, Emma is fretting because the Trump Verdict gives Russia and China their best arguments yet. In other words, if the U.S. justice system really were fair, transparent, and robust, it could easily withstand criticism from both domestic and foreign complainers, who’d have no power to undermine its legitimacy with a couple buzzwords and throwaway lines.

It’s actually an “Emporer has no clothes” moment. The AP is secretly worried that the US justice system is so brittle and so fragile that one single Kremlin spokesperson making a single critical remark about our two-tiered justice system can literally destroy democracy.

But the AP did, inadvertently, describe a real threat to democracy. The real threat to democracy was the AP’s autocratic assumption that words can destroy our democracy, and therefore, people like Trump need to be shut up, because their dangerous ideas could spread to even more dangerous people like a Kremlin spokesperson or a different reporter at the AP’s competitor, the Global Times.

According to the Associated Press — who you’d think would be keenly aware of the necessity for the First Amendment — the dangerous freedom inherent in Trump’s complaints, his speech about the Verdict, must be suppressed to protect democracy.

But Trump isn’t the threat to democracy. He’s just complaining about a bad jury verdict, and even though Emma couldn’t find them, lots of legal experts agree with the former President.  In his place, any of us would do the same. The real threat to democracy is the elitist Associated Press, which advocates for firing up a dystopian boiler room of censorship and thought control for citizens’ own good.

Sometimes I suspect the AP isn’t actually a democratic media institution at all. Sometimes I wonder whether the AP is as committed to democratic ideals as it claims. I wonder if it might be willing to burn some core freedoms on the altar of sacrifice, hoping for the blessing of a hallucination of stability and control. Sometimes I wonder if the AP is not really a media platform at all, but instead is just a captured instrument of some three-letter agency nesting deep inside the bureaucratic state.

Who do you think is the biggest threat to democracy? Trump or the AP?

🔥🔥 Meanwhile, the people seem to have a much different take on current events than did future cat lady Emma Burrows and her alleged media employer. From yesterday’s UK Daily Mail:

Eric Trump, who is married to the GOP chair, said 30% of all the recent small-dollar donations were from first-time donors—not just first-time to Trump, first-time donating to anyone. Eric pointed out that murderous mobster Al Capone was indicted on only one count, whereas President Trump was slammed with 34 counts from the same Quickbooks dropdown check stub notation.

CLIP: Maria Bartiromo interviews Eric Trump about post-Verdict fundraising (1:25).

The record-shattering Trump fundraising put the lie even more clearly to the Associated Press’s moronic, anti-democratic argument that Trump is destroying democracy by criticizing the justice system. In a healthy democracy, citizens’ voices would be more important than the voice of government-aligned media’s narrative steerers. The real locus of autocratic threat is not Beijing or Moscow, but newsrooms, boardrooms, and bureaus in corporate America.

The autocrats are inside the house.

💉💉 Remember, they did it all for your benefit. Yesterday, the New York Post ran a startling but ultimately unsurprising jab story headlined, “NIH scientists made $710M in royalties from drug makers — a fact they tried to hide.” The so-called scientists allegedly slaving away for taxpayers’ public health were actually enriching themselves helping big pharma hawk its novel injections.

It’s taken multiple FOIA lawsuits, but new newly disclosed NIH data shows the agency and its scientists collected an eye-watering $710 million in royalties, just during the pandemic, between late 2021 and the end of 2023. Up till now, the NIH refused to say how much in royalties its taxpayer-compensated scientists have earned, insisting there’s no law requiring them to disclose that, and citing public servants’ privacy (even though you had to disclose your jab status to buy a cheeseburger).

So, the very same people pushing jabs, lauding their safety and efficacy, and helping justify vaccine mandates, passports, and databases were raking it in the whole time, laughing all the way to the bank, earning multiples of their government-approved salaries in covid shot royalties.

Science!

In this case, we are not required to assume good faith on the part of greedy NIH scientists. It’s their job to avoid even the appearance of an ethical conflict. Having failed to do that, especially because they weren’t transparent about it, they appropriately deserve society’s sanction and harsh criticism.

No wonder they tried to bury it. The burden of proof has now shifted. The NIH must now convincingly demonstrate that it was not acting improperly, and did not let its financial incentives influence its scientific judgments and public health policies.

If NIH can’t prove that, it deserves the harshest possible sanction, especially given the life-and-death stakes.

But the scandal also raises essential questions about whether NIH scientists should receive royalties in the first place. I mean, what are we paying these people to do? If a scientist worked for a private boss, guess who gets the royalties for whatever the employee scientist invents? The boss does. That’s why he hired the scientist in the first place. Duh.

So why are NIH scientists entitled to royalties?  Why aren’t NIH royalties paid back to the public treasury, since the taxpayers are the boss in this scenario?

Or, if not that, why are the inventions created using public funds not flowing into the public domain? Why should inventions be licensed to private pharma companies, with benefits flowing to government scientists? Why should the public pay on both ends - first to support the research and then again in the form of high prices and limited access for new drugs?

The NIH and its poachers-turned-game-wardens have a few good little earners there. Remind me again of the difference between big government and big pharma.

The disclosure of nearly a billion dollars in jab royalties shared by a couple hundred well-connected NIH government scientists exposes an unholy symbiosis between a captured agency and the industry it regulates, a shadow system tirelessly working behind a public façade, extracting wealth and freedom from duped citizens. The pandemic response, with its dire combination of corporate profiteering, administrative overreach, and the suppression of dissent, has exposed the workings of this infernal machine in stark detail.

Bless him, Senator Rand Paul is trying to fix the problem. His recently sponsored Royalty Transparency Act unanimously sailed through a bipartisan committee and will hopefully receive a prompt and favorable floor vote. In a burst of common sense, it would require government employees to disclose any royalties they receive.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

But even more than new laws and stricter ethics rules, what we need most is a renewal of the ethic of public service — the idea that government employment is a sacred trust, not a self-dealing hunting license. We need uncorrupted public officials who would never dream of trading on their offices for private enrichment, who understand the basic, timeworn notion that even the appearance of impropriety is a stain on their personal honor and on the integrity of the public institutions they steward.

Still, the disclosure of these rotten regulators and Senator Paul’s transparency bill are progress, even if long-overdue, and even if only in fits and starts.

🔥🔥 Last year, Microsoft’s Xbox updated its profile logo to ‘celebrate’ pride month, only to revert less than a week later after facing scathing public criticism. This year, Xbox didn’t even try:

Instead, the gaming giant quietly forked over $200,000 in protection money to LGBTQIA2S++ activists. Still, it’s progress.

📈 Finally, for your entertainment, and to pour some gas of controversy into the comments section today, what happened to women in 2012?

CLIP: Arynne Wexler on Instagram: "Where is the lie?” (1:07).

Indeed. Arynne’s main argument, while compelling, omits lots of sane, rational, women like the moms who courageously stormed school boards during the pandemic over masks, jabs, and library p*rn. But … is there a conversation in there somewhere that needs to be had?

I’m looking at you, Emma Burrows, and the other unmarried women under 40.

What do you think? What happened to women in 2012?

Have a magnificent Monday! And skate back here tomorrow morning for more essential news and commentary in tomorrow’s delightful and delicious Coffee & Covid.

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