☕️ RAKE IN THE GRASS ☙ Saturday, February 8, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

It's pretty amazing how all the parts of Trump's strategy are coming together: from DOGE's giant testicles to the Proxy War and resorts in Gaza, it is all connected. I'll show it to you.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! Which means it’s time for the C&C Weekend Edition. And, what a week it has been! Today’s packed roundup includes: most delicious media self-own in recorded history as attempt to cancel teenaged DOGE expert backfires stupendously; another media assassination fails as DOGE rehires media-smeared expert; DOGE consultants begin revealing how deep the federal rot goes; Trump follows Biden’s lead and revokes the former president’s security clearance in hilarious Truth Social post; media slips and admits Musk narrative is a sham; NATO allies debate sending troops to Greenland and Trump runs narrative rings around the Proxy War.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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One odd apect of human nature is the perverse hilarity reflexively enjoying while watching another human step on a rake and get bashed in the face. Entire cable channels are composed of “hilarious sports fails,” usually involving numberless clips of unfortunate skiers missing the ramp and soaring into dense thickets or planting their faces in the snow. Ouch.

Yesterday, I felt that same kind of uncontrollable laughter welling up as I watched the corporate media stepping on a rake that I am quite sure was carefully laid for them by the DOGE team.

Corporate media spent its Friday joyously doxxing more DOGE members, trying its best to cancel them before they can uncover more government misconduct. Early yesterday, Wired broke the biggest story, hysterically headlined “DOGE Teen Owns ‘Tesla.Sexy LLC’ and Worked at Startup That Has Hired Convicted Hackers.”

The horror.

Unironically, Wired accused Edward Coristine, 19, of creating his LLC, Tesla.Sexy, three years ago, when he was sixteen. I’ll say it again — Edward created his own successful tech LLC when he was sixteen years old. In its bloodthirsty excitement to cancel a top DOGE team member, Wired completely missed the gist.

For example, Wired’s article also smeared Edward with a prior job he’d held at IT security firm Path Networks, “known for hiring reformed blackhat hackers.”

In other words, Wired accidentally explained Edward is a real-life computer genius. But wait, there’s more. Edward’s next job was working for Elon Musk at the Neuralink company. And now Edward works in a top agency of the federal government.

All by the time he was 19 years old.

Michael Dell, you may have heard of him, also started a tech company when he was 19. So we’re talking about a potential Michael Dell-level of talent.

Wired, fueled no doubt by Deep State dirty tricks, did everything it could think of to smear young Edward, using the poor kid’s own resume. For example, he briefly owned a website selling an AI tool for a gaming website (Discord) — with Russian and Chinese versions. It proves he must be a Russian-triple-agent-Chinese spy!!!! Just like Trump!!!!

It was a Wired self-own. Or at minimum, the Wired article is a Rorschach test. If you are a woke lunatic, and you squint at the blobby dots hard enough, you see a comic-book supervillain. Sort of.

But everybody else sees a clear picture of DOGE hiring our country’s best and brightest.

Edward is the élite’s worst nightmare. His highest educational attainment was high school. No Ivy League. Not even college. But, enjoy this, an indignant Wired resentfully reported Edwards title at DOGE is simply, “Expert.”

That’s it, that’s his whole title: “Expert.”

Hahahaha! Edward’s title is an inside joke, an obvious mockery of progressives’ most treasured possession: expert status. DOGE is killing the wokescolds with humor. Everyone gets it now: progressive expertise is the cheapest kind of expertise, a knock-off, a Canal Street counterfeit; it’s expertise the easy way, not requiring actually accomplishing anything except being good at butt kissing.

Hence, for five years, they rubbed our faces in bulbous buffoons like Peter Hotez and dimlights like Leana Wen. The truth is, not everybody who graduated medical school in Haiti and is willing to lie on TV is an expert. Almost none of them are, actually. But I digress.

But the worst, most disqualifying misstep Wired discovered was that Edward once used a particularly colorful online gamer nickname. By this time, most everyone reading this has probably already heard it.

Edward might have big … basketballs, but his nickname was big news, especially among a certain far-left media category, represented best by a bevy of breathless, pearl-clutching, post-menopause-aged anchorwomen on CNN who were absolutely furious. “We looked into his background,” Karen scolded —by ‘looked into’ meaning she skimmed the same widely-circulating Wired story everybody else did— and, get this, she discovered “he has used the unfortunate nickname Big Ballz online.”

CLIP: In case you missed it, AWFLs Katie and Karen discuss big, um, you-know-what (1:21).

Hilariously, DOGE made them say it. Over and over and over.

Edward’s braggadocious gaming handle was, indeed unfortunate. But maybe not for the reason CNN thought. Among most young people, the “unfortunate” moniker is no slur, it is an unhumble brag. The left completely missed the target by repeating the rough compliment a thousand times, elevating Edward into the colored inserts in America’s testosterone-fueled history books of masculine achievement.

🔥 Not only that, but everyone could see CNN’s obvious hypocrisy. The AWFL CNN wokescolds offended by the coarse humor were the same man-hating divorceés that always, while you’re waiting in Target for your 9-year-old daughter to get out of the bathroom, they creep up behind you and hold the door to the ladies’ room open for a six-foot-six, 320-pound bearded man in a sack dress, smirking at you the whole time.

The AWFLs don’t care at all about the bearded lady’s actual b… er, equipment, not even when he hauls them out in the stall right next to your nine-year-old and starts offering her unsolicited makeup tips under the laminated partition. But, for a nickname, break out the smelling salts, Betty! How dare he use that misogynistic gaming handle!!!!

Inevitably, the merciless mocking continued all day yesterday. To wit:

The story took social media by storm, swamping the news, and utterly backfiring on the left in every possible way, humiliating the left’s captive corporate media, and most especially damagingly, wrapping Wired around its axle. Social media sleuths focused on tracing and exposing Wired’s many contacts to government and, unsurprisingly, even to USAID.

🔥 The fruitless DOGE doxxing campaign continued apace, with one young DOGE tech, Marko Elez, 25, forced to resign yesterday over two “intolerant” social media posts he made years ago. But then —the same day— Musk announced Elez would be rehired. The BBC ran the story under the headline, “Musk to rehire Doge aide who resigned over racist posts.”

While you weigh whether a single rude social media remark should forever disqualify an exceptional young person from government employment, also remember the long decades when the opposition happily drooled over former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizards and worse. They’ve even erected statutes for literal criminals. So get out of here with that low-T nonsense.

They walked right into it. Media, meet rake. A rake with big, well, balloons.

🔥 Antonio Gracias is a seasoned billionaire investor with a long history in private venture capital. He runs Valor Equity Partners, and used to work for Elon at Tesla. Antonio has been helping with the DOGE effort as a consultant. In a recent All-In podcast, he explained that based on what DOGE has uncovered, the federal procurement process is totally broken, and some of you will be unsurprised to discover it broke in 1971, right after Nixon took the U.S. off the gold standard.

CLIP: Venture capitalist Antonio Gracias describes the genesis of government fraud and abuse (3:13).

🔥 From the same podcast, here is multimillionaire tech investor David Sachs, another tech venture capitalist and former Paypal C.O.O, explaining how USAID showers money on “nearly every left-wing group in the world.”

CLIP: David Sachs talks USAID and Congress’s chronic failure to rein in spending (2:22).

“We knew that the US Government runs a $2 trillion dollar deficit every year,” Sachs explained, and “we're in debt almost $40 trillion, and every time someone tries to cut something in Washington, the whole city screams bloody murder. The question is why? Now we know -- everyone was getting paid!”

Indeed. Some of us, long labeled conspiracy theorists, have long argued that the Swamp was enriching itself at our expense. Now, thanks to DOGE, it is conspiracy fact.

🔥 Yesterday, Trump posted one of his most electrifying missives yet, which the New York Times querulously headlined, “In revoking Biden’s security clearance, Trump makes clear his motivation is payback.” The article was written by our old friend David Sanger, the Times’ sneering, Deep-State mouthpiece.

Late in the article, it finally, grudgingly admitted that Joe Biden originally broke the long-standing DC tradition of extending security courtesy to former presidents. The Cabbage made political history by revoking Trump’s security clearance, allegedly over January 6th and a basic need-to-know argument. “What value is giving him an intelligence briefing?” Mr. Biden rhetorically asked CBS’s Norah O’Donnell in 2021, who came up just as empty-handed as Biden.

Here is Trump’s glorious truth, perfectly capturing the spirit of The Apprentice, reprinted here in its entirety for your enjoyment:

Sanger’s article seethed with barely concealed resentment. Revenge! The truth is that it was Biden who left the rake out in the yard in 2021, when Biden did it first, making Trump’s cancelation of Biden’s security clearance practically routine.

Biden and Sanger, meet rake.

🔥 DOGE is unloading a tractor-trailer of rakes into the Swamp’s front yard. On Thursday, far-left Vox ran a ‘story’ headlined, “All the ways Elon Musk is breaking the law, explained by a law professor.” (By the way, this is their favorite way to publish opinion as ‘news,’ by quoting a cherry-picked expert saying what Vox editors want to say.) Anyway, behold this fascinating paragraph of admission by Vox’s legal “expert”:

Despite thousands of headlines decrying that “nobody voted for Elon Musk,” and wailing about his access to “private” information in government databases, they have no idea whether Musk is really doing anything official except tweeting a lot about DOGE.

If you carefully read Musk’s tweets, he never says that he, personally, has done anything at all in DOGE. He sometimes says “we” learned something, or “we” did something, but it is clear that he is speaking in the royal “we,” meaning somebody else did it.

For instance, in the tweet I copied above about re-hiring Markos, Elon did not say, “I” am re-hiring Markos at DOGE. Look carefully and read critically. Musk said, “He will be brought back.” Musk implied having agency in the decision, but his careful use of passive voice provided plausible deniability for later that the space billionaire had nothing to do with it. He was just saying.

I am beginning to suspect Musk is another media decoy, like a wooden mallard bobbing around the corporate media headlines. In other words, Elon Musk —the billionaire they love to hate— might only be another giant rake that the media keeps stepping on.

🔥 In lack time to dig into it, but for the Times’ latest sorrowful take on the Democrats’ continuing disarray and ineffectiveness, published on Thursday, see its editorial roundup headlined, “‘The Damage to the Party Is Profound’: Three Opinion Writers on What Happened to the Democrats.” It is worth a read, if only for the Schadenfreude.

🔥 More rakes. This may be the biggest rake of all. Yesterday, the UK Telegraph ran a truly remarkable story headlined, “Nato allies discussed sending troops to Greenland after Trump threats.” The sub-headline warned, “European countries held informal talks on options if US president moves to seize Danish island.”

What on Earth do the Europeans think they are talking about now? The US is not just a NATO member, it is the glue that holds NATO together. A house divided against itself cannot stand.

The article named only Germany “among dozens of European allies” who participated in the not-so “clandestine” talks. This prompted horse laughs from one unnamed NATO official, who derisively noted, “Berlin doesn’t want to send troops to Ukraine because the situation is ‘too ambiguous’— but is openly flying kites about sending Nato troops to Greenland.”

That is funny and ironic, but pause to make a mental note of that link to Ukraine. We’ll return to it momentarily. It is the center of everything.

🔥 Since assuming control of the most militarily powerful country in the world, if not the history of the planet, President Trump has tossed out several colorful, colonizing concepts: forcefully repurposing the Panama Canal, grabbing Greenland, converting Canada into the 51st state, and this week, the President casually tossed out his shocking plan to just take a “long-term ownership interest” in Gaza, to build a giant, U.S.-owned, Trump-themed Mediterranean seaside resort. Headline from Thursday’s New York Times:

So far, though, US troops have yet to descend on Panama, Canada, Greenland, or Gaza. But in the feverish imaginations of Trump’s triggered, hysterical adversaries, full-scale military invasions are already underway.

In other words, Trump has created a climate where everyone is eager to talk to us, to negotiate, to halt these hypothetical, earth-shaking moves that would totally upset the existing world order. Without deploying a single soldier, Trump has already succeeded at preparing the bargaining battlespace in his adversaries minds.

With me so far? Now consider how profoundly these theoretical acts of American aggression impact the discussion over Ukraine.

🚀 “Russian aggression,” a vomitous mantra endlessly repeated ad nauseam until we can all hear it in our sleep, has been the primary narrative fuel for NATO and the Biden Administration. Here’s just one of millions of examples, this one from the Biden Administration’s Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s website:

Here’s the puzzle: how can NATO or the U.S. complain of Russian territorial aggression against Ukraine when Trump is going around laying claim to every hotspot on the planet? Trump has skillfully re-framed the entire debate, returning the argument to where it always should have been: a debate over the validity of security interests.

In other words, Trump is upending the Deep State’s narrative. He’s scrambling the virtue-signaling moral framework that has long underpinned Western opposition to Russia’s actions in Ukraine.

President Trump has already accomplished two key strategies: First, he’s forced NATO and the EU into an uncomfortable contradiction, explaining their delusional discussions of sending troops to Greenland. But if they argue that territorial integrity is sacred, how can they justify even discussing taking invasive measures to defend against Trump’s hypothetical Greenland grab?

But on the other hand, if they acquiesce and admit that great powers sometimes act in their own security interests, then Russia’s Ukraine strategy suddenly becomes an arguably legitimate act of state security rather than a one-sided moral transgression.

Second, Trump has reset the negotiating table in his favor. Whether or not he actually intends to follow through with any of these controversial ideas, the mere discussion forces his opponents to negotiate on his terms. Europe, whiplashed, is now occupied with talking about how to respond to the U.S., rather than how to dictate terms to Russia, China, or Iran. And Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to protect its own security interests is fading away in the fog of hysteria over Trump’s hypothetical invasions of Panama, Canada, Greenland, and Gaza.

NATO’s delirious debate over Greenland shows how Trump is successfully shaping reality through sheer force of narrative. NATO is walking right into Trump’s trap, a giant, Gulf of America-sized rake carefully laid in the grass just outside Brussels.

I respectfully suggest that Trump’s “crazy” ideas about U.S. territorial expansion were always intended to lubricate the conclusions to the Proxy War and the Middle East conflicts. It is 5-D narrative chess.

🔥 Finally, it’s worth noting that Trump’s strategy is the exact opposite of how Biden and previous U.S. administrations handled foreign policy. Instead of launching drone strikes, deploying massive (and ineffective) sanctions, and dumping billions into unwinnable proxy wars, Trump is using cheap rhetorical and inexpensive symbolic dominance—which are less costly, less risky, and —so far— much more effective.

Today’s roundup described only part of the terrific news this week. It was rake after rake after rake. You’d think the Swamp’s bloody nose would start getting its attention at some point. Onwards.

Have a wonderful weekend! Don’t miss Monday morning’s roundup, as it will surely be a stellar recap of essential news and commentary. See you then.

Don’t race off! 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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