☕️ REAL COFFEE ☙ Wednesday, January 14, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Scott Adams passes from this mortal realm, and an era is over; SCOTUS castrates transgender arguments; sanity returns; Clintons defy Congressional subpoenas; Trump announces funding freeze; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! Yesterday, Scott Adams passed away in hospice. Although we’ve expected this for a long time, it still hurts. Today’s roundup begins with the closest thing I could produce to a proper obituary, since corporate media could barely conceal its glee. Then: electrifying Supreme Court oral arguments and surprising Washington Post editorial board op-ed signal sanity returning from the top down; Clintons defy Congressional testimony, invite contempt prosecutions, and we see how far the Trump prosecutions moved the political needle; self-inflicted political injuries; and President Trump announces freeze of sanctuary jurisdiction funding and teases arrests of public officials.

⛑️ C&C MORNING MONOLOGUE ⛑️

Beloved cartoonist-turned-commentator Scott Adams has died. His passing followed a nine-month battle with turbo prostate cancer. For some of us, our relationship with Scott began over 35 years ago, when his cheeky cartoon sendup of corporate America, Dilbert, first entered syndication in 1989. Yesterday, corporate media felt compelled to invoke politics in Scott’s obituaries. Reuters ran one of the least offensive headlines: “Scott Adams, ‘Dilbert’ comic strip creator and Trump fan, dead at 68.” They were all rubbish. Let’s see if we can improve on corporate media’s miserly efforts.

Long before I ever saw Scott’s face, he’d already brightened my life with his daily humor. I couldn’t begin to guess how many hilarious Dilbert collections we’ve purchased over the years, both for personal consumption and as gifts. Plenty. In 1996, Scott became a bestselling author with The Dilbert Principle, his first business how-to book. In 2013, he published his first self-help book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.

By the time of his death, including cartoon compendiums, Scott had published a vast body of work: 64 books in total. But the decision that finally introduced us all to Scott the person demonstrated his most enduring values.

In 2015, Scott Adams did something almost no one else who enjoyed his privileges was brave enough to do. He sacrificed his lucrative career as one of the most successful cartoonists in history by choosing to support Donald J. Trump for President. At that time, everyone in Hollywood or big media was too cowardly to put their politics where their mouths were. But Scott wasn’t. And it cost him. Supporting Trump effectively ended his traditional career in old media.

But life is weird that way. Scott’s loss of ‘traditional’ caché unexpectedly blossomed into a new-media career— as a daily conservative podcast influencer with an intellectual bent. He gathered his basket of “good-not-great” skills —which he called his talent stack— and made a runaway hit out of them. He clearly loved it, and seemed joyfully fulfilled through his podcast, Real Coffee with Scott Adams. It’s hard to say who enjoyed his show more— his followers or Scott himself.

As Trump’s first term ended and the nation transitioned into the pandemic in 2023 —and as America’s censorship era reached high noon— two thousand newspapers canceled Dilbert’s syndication on a single day, allegedly over a “racist* rant” Scott made during a podcast. (* not racist at all.) They had just been waiting for a contractual excuse. Just a few months earlier, on January 21, 2023, Scott renounced his pro-vaccine position, admitting that “the anti‑vaxxers clearly are the winners at this point” and that they “came out the best.”

Either way, freed from his decades-old cartooning responsibilities, Scott continued publishing his daily podcast, which had clearly become his passion.

In May, 2025, he informed his followers he’d been diagnosed with stage-4 metastatic prostate cancer— and the prognosis was grimmer than corporate meeting purgatory. From then until yesterday, the media master kept the world updated throughout a dramatic health battle that included experimental cancer treatments and emergency presidential interventions.

As his health deteriorated, his increasing frailty and obvious pain never prevented his podcasting. Scott soldiered on.

🪖 Two weeks ago, Scott penned a letter addressed to all of us, intended for posthumous release; yesterday, his first ex-wife read it aloud in a viral tweet. In it, Scott made his peace with his life and death and thanked his listeners, who, he said, had given him much more than he’d given them. He hoped he’d been useful. And he typed out his acceptance of Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior— a concession he’d long and stubbornly refused— until the last possible moment. God works in mysterious ways; His wonders to behold.

Illustrating Scott’s reach and influence, none less than the President of the United States mourned the cartoonist’s death yesterday:

Between his cartoons, his many books, and his daily podcast —whose clips were widely shared across social media— it is undeniable that Scott Adams’ relentless productivity improved the lives of millions. He was incredibly useful. Scott’s life and legacy are marked by his wicked sense of humor, his fierce intellect and common sense, the courage of his convictions, his unstinting labors to help others, his broad and enduring influence, the exemplary grace of his highly public cancer battle, and his ultimate transition from this earthly realm into a new Heavenly cubicle.

He is survived by two ex-wives (he was married for just ten years in total). Scott never had any biological children.

We will miss you, Scott, bigly. But we will simultaneously sip again soon, in the next life.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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In News of the Surreal, the New York Times ran a story yesterday headlined, “Supreme Court Highlights: Justices Seem Inclined to Allow States to Bar Transgender Athletes.” Seem inclined? It was an intellectual bloodbath. I suppose, at least, we must credit the ACLU for trying to defend one of the least defensible and dumbest legal arguments in American history.

CLIP: Justice Samuel Alito sets a logic trap and the ACLU falls right into it (2:02).

There may be no better illustration of the insanity of the Millennium’s first quarter-century than the fact that the highest court in the world’s most powerful country was forced yesterday to debate whether mentally-confused boys are constitutionally entitled to play women’s table tennis.

The case involves an Idaho law requiring schools to enforce biological sex as the test for sports participation. Since Idaho Governor Brad Little signed it into law in 2020, lower federal courts have prevented the law from taking effect. That may be about to change.

Throughout yesterday, clips from the oral arguments were social media catnip. The most-quoted exchange from yesterday’s oral arguments might also be the most remarkable words ever uttered in the sanctified chamber where SCOTUS holds its oral arguments. Justice Alito asked the ACLU lawyer, “For equal protection purposes, what does it mean to be a boy or a girl, or a man or a woman?”

After some dissembling to buy time, the leftist lawyer stammered, “We do not have a definition for the Court.” They learned nothing from Matt Walsh’s hit documentary, What is a Woman?

🔥 It wasn’t quite the slam that social media thinks it is. The ACLU lawyer was inartfully trying to explain that she would, for the sake of argument, accept the challenged Idaho law’s definition of “sex,” and so didn’t need to offer any definition of her own.

But still. The fact that she couldn’t simply enunciate a straightforward answer, but had to hedge, distract, and dissemble, said everything needing to be said.

With that admission in hand, Justice Alito then drew his intellectual Katana and logically eviscerated transgenderism— SNICKETY-SNACK. In other words, he followed up by asking the ACLU whether a boy who truly believes he is a girl, but who never took any testosterone blockers, should be allowed to play against girls. This is where the whole sordid trans enterprise sputtered out. The ACLU lawyer properly answered no, as she must, to avoid taking the politically impossible position that it’s fair to let fully testosterone-fueled boys with stubbly beards and mustaches dominate girls’ basketball.

“Then,” Justice Alito correctly observed, “you ARE discriminating on the basis of sex.” He was emphasizing that even the ACLU agrees it is legally okay to stop biological boys from playing against girls— unless they take estrogen pills. In which case, the dispute is only about medication levels, not actually sex. And therefore, moronic.

Again, the ACLU lawyers aren’t completely brain-dead, they’re mostly deceitful. Without saying it out loud, their entire argument was that a tiny class of hormally-disabled boys who are medically similar to girls (in testosterone levels) are being discriminated against. Not even all transgenders. Just the medically castrated ones.

For reasons that should be obvious, they can’t say that out loud, because no one in their right mind would go along with it. But it didn’t matter; if the law could be struck down for that tiny group of people, it would also be struck down for everyone. Hence, it was more tricky and deceitful than ignorant.

But Justice Alito called her out on the SCOTUS carpet.

🔥 How did we get here? The “logic” of transgenerism crumples like a cheap Walmart suit when it faces even the most cursory intellectual challenge. How we got so far down this path of insanity to Supreme Court involvement was because progressives performed pretzel-like intellectual gymnastics to invent a whole new emotion-based vocabulary, allowing boys to be girls, girls to be boys, night to be day, up to be down, and wrong to be right.

In short, progressives took a common synonym for “sex” —gender— and split it off to accommodate transsexuals not just dressing like the opposite sex but —SHAZAM!— magically becoming the opposite sex through feelings.

For all human history until very recently, “sex” described the dimorphic distinction between male and female, regardless of species, from ferns to crabs to mammals, including humans. The term derives from the Latin root sexus (meaning “section” or “division,” but usually linked to division into male/female categories), and was ubiquitously used in biology, medicine, and natural history without any distinction from what we must now laboriously call “biological sex.”

“Gender,” by contrast, was a grammatical distinction. Gendered words, in some languages, are aligned with sex, like “rojo” versus “roja” in Spanish. Gender was also used as a polite synonym for “sex,” but referring only to the dimorphic sexual status of human beings. Cocker spaniels may be male or female, but they don’t have genders. Only gentlemen and ladies have gender differences.

In the 1950’s, progressive sex pests and second-wave feminists began using “gender” as a modifier —e.g. “gender roles”— ultimately leading to progressive re-definition of the word to mean psychological or behavioral sex in contrast to biological sex. In the 1980s, academics embraced the notion of “gender” as something distinct from —rather than synonymous with— biological sex.

Hence, trans-sexual evolved into trans-gender. Voilá.

Only by embracing this neo-Marxist wordplay can the fluidic concept of “trans-gender” survive. When you abandon the faux veneer of objective vocabulary, the internal logic vanishes into subjective, anti-scientific vapor, and you are left fumbling with totally subjective and unverifiable “lived experiences” and “harm reduction.”

It is more subversive than it might appear. At essence, transgenderism survives on the premise that “I feel I am a woman” is an expression of truth. But that is circular logic; it is a ‘truth’ only because the person subjectively feels it is true, reducing truth itself from a statement about objective reality to an expression of subjective emotion. So adopting “transgenderism” requires relegating truth to an unfalsifiable expression of intention— the opposite of what has been historically considered the scientific method.

Now the debate is at the Supreme Court, and the Times thinks the End is Near.

But the best prediction of how things are likely to shake out appeared on Sunday, when the Editorial Board of the Washington Post ran an op-ed headlined, “Trans athletes head to the Supreme Court.” The sub-headline crushed progressive hopes, saying, “Neither science, nor the American public, is on their side.”

Behold the op-ed’s astonishing opening paragraph, which referred to transgenderism as “one of the worst excesses of America’s cultural revolution:”

The phrase “cultural revolution” invoked Chairman Mao’s catastrophic Cultural Revolution in China following the communist takeover. If the Democrats at the Washington Post are distancing themselves from trans sports like that, you know it is well and truly over.

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On related lines, yesterday the New York Times ran a story headlined, “Facing Contempt Threat, Bill and Hillary Clinton Refuse to Testify in Epstein Inquiry.” Surprise! Or maybe not— the online betting odds Bill would show up and testify languished in the single digits.

“President Trump has answered thousands of questions about Epstein, but Bill Clinton hasn’t answered any,” House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) explained to reporters yesterday. “But Jeffrey Epstein visited the White House 17 times while Bill Clinton was president.” The Committee had subpoenaed Clinton’s testimony and, after much backroom wrangling, former president Bill Clinton flat refused to appear and testify yesterday.

Chairman Comer has vowed to pursue contempt charges.

Hillary’s testimony is scheduled for today. One does not wish to make predictions, but the smart money is on “no show.” After all, Hillary might have a conflict, like a Harvard commencement speech or a spa treatment involving an infant blood bath, which, as you can imagine, is often hard to reschedule.

In the traditional playbook, the next step is to threaten the witness with contempt (check), followed by more backroom wrangling between the lawyers to negotiate a compromise, such as an unsworn or closed-session Zoom interview rather than an in-person deposition. Whether the Committee will stand on principle remains to be seen. Contempt would require a Committee vote, followed by a full House vote, and then referral to the DOJ for prosecution.

The useless Times article devoted most of its column inches to credulously quoting the Clintons’ self-serving 8-page letter, which they sent instead of appearing to testify. This would have been a great opportunity for the Times to round up Clinton’s Epstein connections —the photos alone are priceless for media engagement— but nope. Hope you weren’t holding your breath.

The hearing was a nonstarter, but the politics are hard to adequately describe. For one thing, compelling a former president to testify in a congressional committee hearing —in a case with potential criminal consequences— is pretty much unheard of. The handful of historical examples all fizzled out before they went anywhere, and not since 1953 has Congress even tried. The fact that none of the media reports focused on this transgression of “norms and customs” shows you how profoundly the Trump prosecutions have moved the needle and created a “new normal.”

Remember: No one is above the law. Former presidents are on the menu.

Second, neither would this be politically possible without the Democrats’ full-court press to transform the Epstein saga into the next Watergate. So the fact that the Clintons are currently dealing with serious legal issues —instead of rubbing elbows with fawning celebrities and giving overpriced speeches to progressive groups— is another self-inflicted injury.

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Yesterday, Politico ran a story headlined, “White House to end funding to sanctuary cities and states on Feb. 1.” We can hope.

“Starting February 1st, we are not making any payments to sanctuary cities or states having sanctuary cities because they protect criminals at the expense of American citizens,” Trump said yesterday at the Detroit Economic Club, as well as in his post on Truth Social.

It sounds like President Trump intends to halt all federal funding to sanctuary states, but the strategically ambiguous scope isn’t entirely clear. Nor was it clear whether the frozen funding would be tied to specific sanctuary cities or defund the states as a whole. The DOJ has identified 11 states as sanctuary jurisdictions, including California, Illinois, Minnesota, Colorado, Washington, and New York.

In an interview with Laura Ingraham late yesterday, White House advisor Stephen Miller said, “We are not going to, as a country, subsidize mass immigration, mass criminal activity, and mass theft of American taxpayer resources by people who have no right to be here.”

Later, President Trump added, “we intend to imprison any fraudster, politician, or public official involved in these sick plots to pillage and loot our country.” In the next sentence, coincidentally, he mentioned Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.).

CLIP: President Trump puts ‘public officials’ on the table for welfare prosecutions (0:46).

Aside from the hints at Ms. Omar, it was equally ambiguous who Trump could have been referring to. Tim Walz? Minnesota’s state attorney general? Other officials? Obama? Now they all have to wonder. Was he being serious?

Yesterday’s news cycle momentarily slowed and took a gratifying breather. With Scott Adams passing away, we needed a brief break. But I can already feel the pace resuming. Don’t miss tomorrow’s roundup.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! Get back here tomorrow, so as not to miss any essential news and commentary during the January surge.

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