☕️ PREMATURELY ☙ Friday, June 13, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

News cycle crushed: Israel stuns with decapitation strike; Trump axes climate grift; Kennedy hints at healthcare overhaul; Newsom jumps the gun; BlueSky purity spiral imploding on cue; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday the Thirteenth! Fortunately, we are not superstitious. Much. Today’s electrifying roundup includes: news cycle smashed again with dramatic Israeli decapitation strike on Iran that defied all comprehension and historic possibility; Trump Administration quietly pulls the plug on federally funded climate propaganda machine and might just take up the reins; Kennedy teases more goodness from the Big Beautiful Bill that might actually revolutionize America’s stagnant hospital-dominated healthcare system; Gavin Newsom prematurely gushes over short-lived judicial win and Trump retains control of California’s National Guard; and news from BlueSky provides a triumphant and illustrative sequel to yesterday’s description of Democrats’ self-destructive purity spirals.

🪖 C&C ARMY POST 🪖

🪖 An alert reader reminded me yesterday to clarify that Florida’s anti-protest law does not actually make it legal to flatten annoying protestors. Technically speaking, the 2022 law modified Florida’s self-defense statute, providing that people trapped in cars in protests who have a reasonable fear of being harmed can use reasonably necessary force (and no more) to escape the danger. So it’s not Grand Theft Auto, and playing Frogger with activists is generally frowned upon.

Be careful out there during this weekend’s Summer of Love parades. No bumper bowling. Unless you really need to.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Welp, the Western world woke this morning to news of yet another shocking Israeli military strike that wildly expanded the boundaries of what anybody thought was possible. The New York Times’ live-update thread was headlined, “Israel Strikes Iran's Nuclear Program, Killing Top Military Officials.” As far as anyone can tell, Israel erased Iran’s entire military chain of command, and made it look easy.

Not only that, but Israel attacked military bases and nuclear sites all across Iran, in multiple waves. In other words, 200 Israeli aircraft struck over 100 targets across a nation the size of Alaska, supposedly defended by one of the largest and most layered air defense systems in the Middle East.

Inexplicably, Iran’s air defenses stayed silent. Not a single Israeli fighter jet was damaged. In response, Iran only managed to launch around 100 drones —a lazy half hour’s action in Ukraine— to no apparent effect. These drones, all downed long before they neared Israel, could easily have been an automatic response, suggesting a total lack of any meaningful military response by Iran.

The only explanation that makes sense for Israel to enjoy clear skies over the entire country is that someone inside Iran somehow pulled the plug on all the country’s air defenses right before the attack. If so, it was another catastrophic security failure by Israel’s enemies.

This story is like a strategic lasagna. Peel off each layer of the strike to reveal another astonishing fact. For example, to get to Iran, the Israelis must have been aided by the Jordanians and allowed to use Saudi Arabian airspace. There’s no way Israel’s 200 jets crossed half of the Middle East without at least tacit approval from its neighbors. That means a whole lot of folks were involved— but Iran obviously had no idea it was coming.

Jordan probably even helped Israel by shooting down Iranian drones. A short, blurry statement from the Jordanians said “it had intercepted a number of missiles and drones that … were likely to fall in Jordanian territory, including populated areas … but did not specify where the drones and missiles came from.” Uh-huh. Obviously, they came from Iran.

But wait, there’s more. For the last 48 hours, social media buzzed with warning signs. The US closed its embassy in Iraq and withdrew personnel, as did other Middle Eastern countries. The air spaces were closed. Telegram hummed with predictions of an imminent Israeli attack. Yet many of Iran’s generals and nuclear scientists were killed by targeted strikes while sleeping in their apartments— in their bedrooms and not in their bunkers.

What on Earth? Even if Iran’s leaders thought all the red flags were probably just a psyop to pressure upcoming nuclear talks (scheduled for Sunday), why would it just stand down? That’s beyond reckless. The reason you have a military is to prepare for attacks just like this one. The Iranian military’s negligence beggars belief.

🚀 The Trump Administration said it was aware of the attacks, but the U.S. did not participate. Early this morning, the President posted on Truth Social, begging the Iranians to return to the negotiating table, reminding that he’d tried to warn them, and warning even more was coming:

What Trump meant by “next already planned attacks” was unclear, but this decapitation strike could easily be the preparatory phase of a much larger operation to permanently disable Iran’s nuclear capability. Israel probably will not get another chance to operate like this without Iran’s air defenses. The pressure not to waste the opportunity will be enormous.

Al Jazeera reported this morning that Israeli civilians and Iranians are engaged in panic buying, snatching up supplies to prepare for a longer conflict. Meanwhile, a federal judge in San Francisco issued a temporary injunction late last night ordering Israel not to attack anybody else. (Just kidding.)

We peer dimly through the fog of war, unable to ascertain what comes next, and we pray that cooler heads will prevail.

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The Guardian ran a terrifically encouraging story yesterday headlined, “Major US climate website likely to be shut down after almost all staff fired.” In short, NOAA’s ‘official’ Climate.gov propaganda website just got flattened.

“The entire content production staff at climate.gov (including me) were let go from our government contract on 31 May,” reported a former government contractor, who remained anonymous from ‘fear of retaliation.’ “We were told that our positions within the contract were being eliminated.”

The Climate.gov website was run by NOAA’s communication, education, and engagement division. It is called “the largest team in the federal government dedicated to climate communication, education, and engagement.” In other words, climate change psyops.

The site’s former director (now fired) smells a rat. She suspects a “sinister possibility” that the Administration may co-opt climate.gov, to publish its own anti-science content. Rebecca Lindsey said the administration could now “provide its own content team, leveraging our audience, our brand, our millions of people that we reach on social media every month. That’s the worst-case scenario.”

Or it’s the best-case scenario, Rebecca. It depends on how you look at it. I found it particularly amusing that Rebecca claimed it as “our” brand, “our” audience, and “our” readers. Who is “us”?

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Yesterday, more goodness came trickling out of the Big Beautiful Bill and tickled MAHA to its core. HHS Secretary Kennedy announced the latest plan on Fox yesterday, and it’s a whopper.

CLIP: Kennedy describes new provisions for healthcare options in the BBB (1:21).

Kennedy said the BBB aims to “revolutionize healthcare” in the U.S. by introducing a $75 per month healthcare program, including access to a 24/7 concierge doctor, without needing any insurance claims. Kennedy explained: “It’s going to be like old-style healthcare.” He added the new law would also expand Health Savings Accounts, to let people fully pay for pro-health things like gym memberships with pre-tax dollars.

If it passes, it will make your gym membership a lot cheaper, since you can use untaxed money to pay for it. Imagine a world where we incentivize pumping iron instead of pill popping.

He added that the new program would also encourage employers to establish on-site medical centers where workers can receive free healthcare treatment if they want. I’m not sure how that would work, but it sounds pretty convenient for people in big companies.

But the best signal was the focus on concierge care, which is hands down the best routine healthcare available. After the pandemic, the Childers family transitioned from traditional insurance to concierge coverage. For a low monthly fee, we can text with our doctors, avoiding most appointments, and we often get immediate answers. Most in-office visits can be arranged same-day or next-day, and they take a fraction of the time required by ‘traditional’ doctor visits. I would never go back. I won’t. You can’t make me.

Predictably, I couldn’t find a single corporate media story mentioning the proposal, which would be wildly popular when people find out about it. Share your own concierge experience in the comments.

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It was a bad case of premature enthusiasm. Late yesterday, the New York Times crowed about the latest Trump judicial reversal in its story headlined, “Trump’s Use of National Guard in Limbo After Court Rulings.” The sub-headline explained, “Judge Charles Breyer ordered the administration to return control of the National Guard to the California governor.” Of course he did. Gavin wasted no time celebrating:

The 36-page order was just as ugly as you might imagine, finding that the Nation’s Commander in Chief lacks authority to quell a riotous insurrection. “The President’s actions were illegal—both exceeding the scope of his statutory authority and violating the Tenth Amendment,” Judge Breyer wrote, and continued, “He must therefore return control of the California National Guard to the Governor of the State of California forthwith.” For good measure, and to make his bias crystal clear, the judge unnecessarily sneered, “That’s the difference between a constitutional government and King George.”

Governor Hairdo spurted happy talk all over the microphone. “Clearly there’s no invasion. There’s no rebellion. It’s absurd,” the oily Governor gushed. “And so we’re gratified. Today is a big day for the Constitution.”

But not so fast, Gavin. Before the sun set on the Golden State, the Ninth Circuit had already stayed Judge Breyer’s order. The New York Post was the only paper (so far) to report the stay:

The Court of Appeals set a hearing for next Tuesday to consider California’s emergency motion— but the 3-judge panel includes two Trump-appointed judges (the third is a Biden appointee). So I wouldn’t bet on Gavin getting any relief from his flaccid condition.

The Appellate order was just a simple paragraph temporarily staying Judge Breyer’s order, and they (properly) did not weigh in on the merits. But Trump’s lawyers stiffly argued in their brief that, “Courts did not interfere when President Eisenhower deployed the military to protect school desegregation. Courts did not interfere when President Nixon deployed the military to deliver the mail in the midst of a postal strike. And courts should not interfere here either.” Touché.

Courts didn’t interfere in a lot of things before this year. But it’s a new judicial day, and the 2025 ride through the courts is wilder than the corkscrew coaster at Islands of Adventure. Gavin needs to do some Kegel exercises or something.

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In a delightful sequel to yesterday’s notes on the Democrats’ purity spiral, Fortune Magazine delivered this absolute gem of a headline:

Whoops! Who could have seen this coming? According to Fortune, BlueSky “became somewhat of a safe haven for liberal users who wanted to drown out the noise of President Trump’s reelection.” Between November, 2024, and this May, Bluesky ballooned from about 10 million to 30 million users.

They prematurely celebrated.

Far-left tech billionaire Mark Cuban, a fast-talker who owns the Dallas Mavericks and used to be on Shark Tank, was one of the most prominent BlueSky refugees, landing there with great fanfare earlier this year. Cuban’s tumescent initial post crowed, “Hello Less Hateful World.”

But this week, not even six months later, the lead has dribbled out of Cuban’s pencil. He described the exact purity spiral dynamic I broke down yesterday. “Engagement went from great convos on many topics, to agree with me or you are a nazi fascist,” Cuban wrote. “We are forcing posts to X.”

The progressives can’t even stand each other. Cuban added that he thinks Bluesky users have “grown ruder and more hateful.”

It was the very phenomenon yesterday’s post described. Cuban complained, “Even if you agree with 95% of what a person is saying on a topic, if there is one point that you might call out as being more of a gray area, they will call you a fascist etc.”

He’s not alone. The progressive billionaire cited a grim WaPo editorial from last Sunday headlined, “The Bluesky bubble hurts liberals and their causes.” The author’s outlook appeared hopeless. In the sub-header, she bleakly noted that, “The new social media network was doomed to fail as users tried to re-create Twitter.”

Editorial author Megan McArdle, in turn, cited a recent PEW survey that described an increasingly limp platform. “A recent Pew Research Center analysis found that many news influencers have Bluesky accounts (I’m one of them) but that, like me, two-thirds post irregularly. By contrast, more than 80 percent still post to X on most days.”

It’s getting worse. “Engagement on Bluesky appears to have peaked in mid-November,” McArdle reported. “It’s now down about 50 percent, and the decline shows no sign of leveling out.”

One of McArdle’s most accidentally insightful points was that, until Musk bought Twitter, liberals enjoyed free rein there, but mostly thanks to thought policing. “Progressives had the sympathy of Twitter’s professional-class employees,” she explained, “who proved increasingly susceptible to liberals’ demands for tighter moderation policies on things such as using male pronouns to refer to a transgender woman.”

Ah, the bad old days. Remember them? Back when you could get your Twitter account canceled for using wrong pronouns? Beyond the moderator madness, can you remember cancel culture?

“Progressive Twitter mobs also policed the discourse themselves,” Megan added, “securing high-profile firings that made many people afraid to cross them.” As we discussed yesterday, old Twitter’s enforced groupthink “created the illusion that progressive ideas were more popular than they actually were.” And that was really the whole point of the senseless exercise, wasn’t it? Faux consensus.

BlueSky, lacking local conservatives to target, is tearing itself apart, more viciously than an illegal dog-fighting ring. “The result,” McArdle pointed out, “is something of an echo chamber where it’s hard to get positive engagement unless you’re saying things progressives want to hear — and where the negative engagement on things they don’t want to hear can be intense.” How intense? Check out this bon mot: “The nasty fringe has become even nastier: left-wing trolls keep urging people who disagree with them to commit suicide.”

Yikes. We thought Twitter trolls were tough. At least self-cancelation isn’t a regular suggestion on X.

McArdle concluded by musing that what BlueSky liberals really need is more conservatives. “Without the leavening influence of their opponents,” she charitably speculated, “Bluesky discourse appears even more censorious and doctrinaire than what progressives were saying on old Twitter.”

Or, like trained fighting dogs, it’s just that progressives are always in attack mode. If they can’t find a conservative to pick on, they’ll happily battle each other. You decide. Either way.

As former DNC vice-chair David Hogg can attest, we’re watching a cage match of late-stage progressivism, where leftists commit ritualistic cannibalism, each round of revolutionary beheadings fueling the next, even bigger bloodletting. I encourage them to stay on BlueSky since, as more deranged nonsense gets posted over there, Twitter gets healthier.

Think of far-left BlueSky as a toxic intellectual landfill. My idea is to slap a concrete containment dome over it before it spreads back to X. Your own suggestions are welcome in the comments.

Have a terrific Friday! Then make your way back here tomorrow morning, for a Weekend Edition roundup of essential news and commentary.

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