☕️ POST CHEVRON ☙ Friday, July 5, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Media's controlled demolition of Joe Biden rages; Missouri sues N.Y. over Trump case for election interference; British conservative party meltdown shows promise; first post-Chevron decision; more.

Good morning, C&C family, it’s Friday! And for many Americans, a two-fer patriotic holiday since Independence Day fell on a Thursday, and what’s the point of going back to work for just one day? Who knows what the colonists could have achieved with an extra day of tea-dumping. On to the extended holiday roundup: Joe Biden pileon continues as corporate media competes in dreaming up new ways to tell us about how Joe Biden has lost his marbles; Missouri sues New York for, wait for it, election interference; Great Britain electoral earthquake prompts corporate media celebrations, but it actually proved the new political rules; and the first post-Chevron decision dropped illustrating the brave new world in which we now live, a happier, more optimistic, more free one.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥🔥 While normal folks celebrated the most optimistic and relaxed Fourth of July in half a decade, corporate media continued its Hegelian plan, creating a sudden and unexpected crisis over Joe Biden’s diminished leadership. In a perfect summary of the coordinated pile-on, behold The Economist’s latest Biden cover. It was downright mean:

In the remarkable cover article, the Economist’s editors pressed the point, even invoking the nuclear codes, and upended the Democrats’ motto, accusing them of destroying democracy:

You’ll recall that two weeks ago, corporate media assured America that any criticism of Biden’s presidential bona fides was a “cheap fake.” Now, suddenly, you would be hard-pressed to find a dissenting media voice. The New York Times, for instance, closely followed the playbook, running a raft of sly, top-of-fold headlines like this one, defining the contours of the Democrats’ divided house:

Since they say money is the mother’s milk of politics, losing donors is an unforgivable mortal sin. The Times, covering its bases, also addressed voters. In a separate article, the Times suggested the formation of a new “Anybody But Biden” coalition:

Defecting Democrat voters don’t worry about Biden’s ability to perform the office of the Presidency. They lose no sleep wondering whether the ailing octegenarian can keep the country out of World War III. They unconcerned Biden can fix the economy, or even preserve the dollar as the world’s default currency. Nope. The reason they are mad and want Plan B is only because  Biden might not be able to beat Donald J. Trump:

Beating Trump is literally the only thing they care about. Country be damned.

🔥 Governor DeSantis agrees with us. Biden’s crime was not pretending he was long past his expiration date or, science help us, having no idea what on Earth is going on. For disgruntled Democrat donors, Biden’s only crime is not being able to beat Trump.

CLIP: DeSantis Flays Media Over Biden's Mental Fitness After 'Painful' Debate Performance (3:07).

Governor DeSantis explained it’s only about politics and not about what is best for the country:

Understand: they're only saying that, not because they have any problem with having a president who has cognitive limitations and is in cognitive decline. They are perfectly willing to let the executive branch be run by a bunch of these left-wing staffers —who none of us elected— and they're totally fine to have a ‘Weekend at Bernie’s’ presidency Part Two. They are totally fine with that.

The reason why they’re calling for a change is not because they think it's important that a president can actually discharge the functions. No. They’re calling for change because that debate scene was so jarring that they understand he's going to lose.

So they want to be able to get someone else in there who will carry out their agenda. But they really don't care. If that debate had gone a different way, and somehow people thought that Biden could win, they would not say a word. Because ultimately, it's all just about retaining power and having power consistent with their ideological agenda.

📉 Tonight, Biden will be interviewed in a totally fair and not at all stage-managed interview with Washington termite George Stephanopoulos. The Wall Street Journal reported it this morning in its story aptly headlined, “Biden Sits for Interview to Try to Bounce Back From Debate Debacle.” The Journal gave Biden’s upcoming interview a single paragraph. The rest of the story consisted of Biden slams, like this one that reported how yesterday, Biden claimed to be the first black Vice-President:

Two weeks ago, the Journal would have buried that line or written it off as just Joe’s main points collapsing into the black hole of a well-meaning but incomprehensible stutter. But now, the “first black vice-president” remark anchored a full paragraph in a story about Joe’s comeback interview.

The Stephanopoulos interview airs tonight at 8pm EST. But it will be pre-recorded. So. I won’t even try to predict whether they will interview A.I. Joe or the real one.

📉 Perhaps the day’s best Biden meltdown story, if you wanted just one, was the well-written (but no less deceptive) article run in elite New York Magazine’s Intelligencer, headlined, “The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden.” The story began with a long, brutally honest, detailed description of Biden’s odd decision to speak to a few top Democrat donors at an elite Hollywood home fundraiser for ten minutes using a teleprompter.

Then the reporter dropped the bomb: MAGA/QAnon people and elite Democrats who all recognize Joe’s mental problems finally agree on something. They now agree with each other that the deep state is running the government:

The reporter said she knows the Bidens well, and has regularly covered Joe since back in the Barack days. Her story ended by describing running into the first black Vice-President at the reception line. He didn’t remember her, and not in a snobby elite way, but in an uncomfortable, grandma-thinks-the-nurse-is-stealing-her-underwear-again way:

My heart stopped as I extended my hand to greet the president. His face had a waxy quality. He smiled. It was a sweet smile. It made me sad in a way I can’t fully convey. I said “hello.” His sweet smile stayed frozen. He spoke very slowly and in a very soft voice. “And what’s your name?” he asked.

Like corporate media’s pandemic coverage, the Biden stories are all alike, varying only by degree. Read one, and you've read them all. Conspicuous by their a. were any stories yesterday defending Joe. The closest headline I could find to any sort of defense was this backhanded AP beauty:

In other words, we watch in real time a sitting president’s historic, synchronized demolition, just before an historic election.  Joseph R. Biden, or Robert L. Peters, or whatever his name is, appears to be battling the entire deep-state media complex.

🔥 On Wednesday, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey filed a lawsuit at the Supreme Court against the State of New York over its “check stub” conviction of President Trump. AG Bailey’s press release was titled, “Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey Files Suit Against New York for Election Interference.”

AG Bailey invoked a rare process allowing the Supreme Court to take original jurisdiction of certain types of cases purely between states, bypassing the need to first litigate through the lower courts. Specifically, Missouri seeks a Supreme Court injunction against New York that would do two things: lift Judge Merchan’s gag order and delay Trump’s sentencing until after the election.

Missouri’s main argument is that New York is improperly interfering with its citizens’ ability to participate fully in the presidential election, by prosecuting a major presidential candidate. In other words, it is election interference. Insurrection! A crime which, as you well know, is literally one million times worse than pickled cabbage, which scientists have determined is a superfood, a category including all plants that, though barely edible, show strong commercial prospects.

Here’s a link to Missouri’s election interference motion. The good news is it’s legible to non-lawyers, so feel free to dive in if you’re interested in more. The motion includes maybe the best current summary yet of all the foibles and problems attached to insurrectionist Alvin Bragg’s misguided prosecution.

It’s 2024, and anything could happen. I won’t speculate about whether the Supreme Court will take the case or what it might do after that. If Judge Merchan were smart, he’d drop the gag order and stay Trump’s sentencing pending the appeals. But, if he were smart, he’d never have taken the case to begin with. So.

🔥 Britain’s conservative party, which first (reluctantly) engineered Brexit, and more recently oversaw that country’s Orwellian pandemic response, completely collapsed yesterday. Politico’s story was headlined,  “UK general election: Labour hammers Tories with historic election win.” Britain’s “farthest right” conservative and political gadfly Nigel Farage, who was perhaps most individually responsible for Brexit, the movement that telegraphed Trump’s 2020 election, had a very big night last night, as you might be able to detect from close scrutiny of this picture he uploaded yesterday:

Britain’s snap elections, called in May by now former conservative-party Prime Minister Rishi Sunak,* wreaked havoc on the historic party of Margaret Thatcher and rocketed the liberal socialist labour party into equally historic control of the entire British Government by a massive margin. Corporate media is trumpeting the result as a failure of conservatism in England, and a narrative opposing the recent ascendency of the ‘far right’  in the rest of Europe. But contrary to that narrative, Labour’s winning campaign slogan was “Make Brexit Work.”

Perhaps even more tellingly, now-dominant Labour was the only major British party to oppose vaccine mandates and most of the vaccine passport rules during the pandemic.  So.

The aforementioned Nigel Farage quickly spun up his new Reform Party (f/k/a the Brexit Party) after the snap elections were called, and despite that short runway, still handily won several parliamentary seats, even though he’s tried and failed to be elected to the British Parliament seven times before. Eight times was the charm, for Nigel.

One possible explanation for his new success is that, like Labour, Nigel Farage also strongly opposed vaccine mandates.

While corporate media myopically pretends to celebrate the election of a left-wing government in Britain, they have (probably intentionally) missed the gist. In yesterday’s election, voters overwhelmingly rewarded parties that had opposed jab mandates. Britain’s RINO conservative party undermined Brexit, which was bad enough, but even worse it deployed severe jab mandates and passport rules. And Boris Johnson, the pandemic Prime Minister and conservative leader, infamously partied while locking down the rest of Great Britain.

Think about that. The pandemic fallout not only continues but appears to be gathering steam.

(* that has to be a fake name.)

CLARIFICATION/ERRATA (1:00pm):

A number of British C&Cers have chimed in over their dismay at the Labour election, for which I do not blame them. Many have pushed back on today's post arguing that Labour opposed mandates. A couple clarifications are in order:

1) Labour's electoral landslide is almost certainly bad news for Britain, from a conservative perspective at least. It'd be like a Democrat party takeover here.

2) Labor party members —identified as such— did oppose NHS mandates in Britain, although it is a generalization to say the party opposed mandates. That was not its official platform. E.G.: “Labour Rebels Fear Compulsory Vaccines For NHS Staff Will Hammer The Workforce.”

3) The best comparison to U.S. politics might be to claim the Republicans opposed vaccine mandates. That is true; but the GOP was on board with mandates at the start, and most opposition was never a formal part of the party platform, but came most strongly from Freedom Caucus "rebels."

I suspect a lot of folks would be irritated if I ever wrote that "the Republican party opposed mandates." So I don't blame our British cousins. I should have been more nuanced.

4) My point, however, stands. It might be more accurate to say the election was less about rewarding Labour than punishing the Conservatives, who were indisputably responsible for Britain's over-reaction. In fact, it makes me (partly) happy the Republicans were in the wilderness during Biden's first two years.

🔥🔥 And so, it begins! Welcome to the post-Chevron world. Two days ago on Wednesday, a Mississippi federal court entered an order shutting down Biden’s new trans-friendly Title IX rules —nationwide— by citing the new Chevron decision. Absent the injunction, Biden’s rules (published by HHS), would have taken effect today. Among many other things, the new rules would have forced hospitals and insurance companies to provide genital mutilation surgeries and dangerous hormone treatments, even if such treatments were forbidden by state law.

Here’s the key paragraph from its order where the Court opened the Chevron door and strolled through:

“Recently”! It hasn’t even been two weeks, and Loper Bright is already bearing fruit. With Chevron reversed, the Mississippi judge interpreted the statute for himself, ignoring HHS’s insane interpretation. Instead, he logically found that when Title IX passed in 1972, “sex” was meant to be (and is) binary. Two sexes determined by biology — not one million billion flexible feelings determined by angry teenaged TikTok influencers.

Post-Chevron is a whole new and better world. In her peevish dissent, Justice Sotomayor darkly predicted that courts would be overwhelmed by litigation, to which I said, “Good.” But Justice Sotomayor once again missed the bigger picture. The bigger picture is that federal agencies will now need to be much more careful, and much less creative, when drafting their rules. They will have to stay inside the lines of the statutes passed by Congress.

I know we’ve already said this in many different ways, but the effect of Chevron’s reversal is so big and so far-reaching that it is difficult to fully grasp the outer boundaries of its salutary effects. Prepare yourselves for even more great legal news as courts begin reining in the administrative state.

Have a fantastic (sort-of) holiday Friday! C&C will return on schedule tomorrow morning with your Weekend Edition of essential news and commentary, plus skepticism about at least one politician’s fake name.

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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