☕️ REFLECTIONS AND REBIRTH ☙ Wednesday, June 10, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠
Bill Gates to testify about Epstein while the WSJ cracks him like an egg; polished documentary vindicates lockdown dissidents; Trump fixes a reflecting pool that reflects more than TDS; more.
Good morning, C&C family, it’s Wednesday! Your roundup includes: the Wall Street Journal’s new documentary vindicating the Great Barrington Declaration scientists — and it’s only 37 minutes, so you have no excuse; Bill “Mr. Rogers” Gates testifying before Congress today about his Epstein connections, which is going about as well as you’d expect; and Trump’s Reflecting Pool restoration, which PBS assures us is just a paint job, despite the pool now visibly reflecting things.
⛑️ C&C ARMY BRIEFING ⛑️
At best, vindication is a second-class citizen in the pantheon of blessings. It’s the clearing of your besmirched name, or public proof you’d been right after everyone wrote you off as wrong. That’s all fine and dandy. But unfortunately, in order to be unsmirched, you must have been smirched in the first place. It’s not an outcome anyone particularly hopes for. Who’d like a business-class upgrade? You only have to let us punch you in the face first. Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published its short (37 minutes) documentary about the real heroes of the pandemic, titled “The Lockdown Dissidents.”
“The Lockdown Dissidents tells the story,” the description explains, “of researchers like Jay Bhattacharya, Scott Atlas, and Robert Redfield—voices who say they were sidelined and censored when they questioned the public health consensus.” The main story is the development of and fallout after the explosive Great Barrington Declaration, but the short video is packed with pandemic gold.
Not only does it recognize the heroic scientists who risked their careers, but it also includes cameo appearances from the most absurd elements of the pandemic. “It’s a false confidence,” Fauci says in one clip, “to take comfort in a lower rate of death.” Governor DeSantis is there, along with his early re-opening efforts —opposed by teachers’ unions, the Biden Administration, and germaphobic Democrats.
It mocks the insane public health officials who green-lit the George Floyd protests while locking down restaurants, in which you had to wear your mask from the hostess stand to the table. After a clip of the paddle-boarder arrested by boat police for breaking the beach curfew, Bhattacharya wonders in a voice over, “how many lives were saved by that?”
“The expert class failed,” Scott Atlas tells an interviewer at one point. “I got a lot of death threats and had to have 24x7 security,” he reminded viewers.
The fact that, six years on, documentaries like this confirm what we believed, and what the Great Barrington Declaration declared, tells the whole story. Think of it. We are not seeing documentaries praising or even defending public health’s pandemic efforts. The handful of unwatched puff pieces (funded by billionaires you would immediately recognize) do not engage seriously with excess‑mortality, learning‑loss, mental‑health, and economic data. They just assume “yes, the tradeoff was worth it.”
The video is a nearly nostalgic reminder, and it also fills in a baker’s dozen of fascinating gaps in various well-known pandemic stories, and as I said, it’s mercifully short. It is well-produced (including a musical score), fast-paced, entertaining, and informative, and I recommend it. But even if you don’t watch, or if you plan to watch later, click on over to the page real quick and give it a ‘like,’ to help the video trend on YouTube. Do it right now while you’re thinking about it.
I often criticize the Wall Street Journal, so it’s that much more important that I praise it when it works well. This well-produced documentary delivers long-overdue vindication. And, while vindication is never anyone’s first choice, we’ll take as much of it as we can get.
🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍
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As pandemic hero stock rises, as evidenced by the Wall Street Journal’s new Great Barrington documentary, the villains continue to slip into dishonor and disgrace. Last week, the same Wall Street Journal reported, “Bill Gates Spent Years Crafting His Image. Now It’s Cracking.” The Journal published this story mere days before Gates’s closed-door testimony before the House Oversight Committee, which is today. If you want to believe the timing was coincidental, fine. Not me.
Gates’ carefully stage-managed agreement to testify voluntarily (without cameras) focuses on his connections with everyone’s favorite International Mystery Man, the late Jeffrey Epstein. Gates is taking it seriously. He hired attorney Jake Greenberg, the Oversight Committee’s former chief investigations counsel, to advise him.
Among other things, DOJ’s documents and Epstein’s calendar entries show numerous meetings with Gates starting in 2011, which is three years after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor. Why was Gates repeatedly meeting with a convicted sex offender, starting three years post-conviction?
The WSJ article tells us, in so many words, that Bill Gates is a big fat phony. And they exposed him right before he was set to testify.
🔥 The first remarkable, if unsurprising, fact dished by the WSJ was that Bill Gates employs a small army of PR professionals to carefully manicure his public image. He spends more on public relations than most big corporations do. He’s practically addicted to it.
“Bill Gates’s employees,” the article began, “have spent years carefully cultivating his image—down to keeping a custom-size mannequin to test his outfits for different days of the week.” They used their life-sized test doll, not trying to achieve an image of competence or masculinity (both long shots for Gates). They are shooting for harmlessness.
If that doesn’t scream action movie super-villain, I don’t know what does.
Their goal was, and I am not making this up, to make Gates look and sound like Mr. Rogers. From that old kids’ show. “Calm and approachable,” the Journal explained. Maintaining the charade involves entire departments. It begins with the “styling group,” which chooses dressing options from “neutral tone crew and V-neck sweaters, button-down shirts, slacks and extra pairs of the Silver Lining Opticians ‘Carbon’ glasses.”
The styling group then sends 3-4 outfit options to “senior staff” who choose the ultimate apparel for Gates to wear to any public event. Two sets of polling teams then monitor whether it’s working. Their ultimate objective is to bathe Gates, 70, in “the soft-knit glow of a global philanthropist.”
Until very recently, and for decades, Bill Gates has been getting his public relations money’s worth. “Gates ranked at the very top of a 2019 survey of public figures that people look up to—ahead of the Dalai Lama and Pope Francis,” the article noted.
But, “his carefully crafted image has been shattered as more details of Gates’s association with the late Jeffrey Epstein have spilled into public view.” The DOJ disclosures have revealed what the article called “a more complex picture.” Epstein introduced Gates to the head of the Nobel Peace Prize committee; “Epstein was involved in negotiations between Gates’s employees and Gates himself; and Gates posed for photos with Epstein and the women around him before or after some of their meetings.”
After everything, it may be his libido that finally takes him off the board. Bill Gates, 70, has a problem keeping his pickle jarred, just like bowtied gnome Peter Hotez. (We aren’t certain yet of the extent of Gates’ Cialis consumption.) Indeed, the Journal reminded readers, “In a February town hall with foundation employees, Gates owned up to two affairs with Russian women referenced in Epstein’s emails.”
Haha! One wonders what princely sums the billionaire paid for his “affairs,” which were presumably even less romantic than gas-station sushi. The story piled on: “Some people familiar with the matter said they heard about his admission to foundation staff with disbelief: In his divorce proceedings, allegations related to more than 20 affairs had come up.”
In other words, among the rest of its controlled demolition of Gates’ carefully crafted image, the WSJ just ripped the mask off Gates’ limited hangout.
Maybe worst of all, the Journal explained that DOJ documents showed Bill Gates allegedly asking Epstein about how to surreptitiously slip antibiotics to his wife after he caught an STD. Meanwhile, Epstein was actively blackmailing Gates over a Russian bridge player — all while Gates’ nuclear power company quietly hired another of his Russian mistresses, and his glowing Netflix documentary was secretly produced by his own PR staff.
All his horny goat adventures and his Epstein buddy-buddying are taking a toll. “Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, was recently snubbed from the company’s annual CEO summit and from the annual meeting of Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, which he has attended for years.” He also abruptly pulled out of an Indian high-tech conference late last year, even though he was its keynote speaker.
And now, the pace of events is forcing him to “voluntarily” testify before hostile Republican committee members. Nobody really “volunteers” for that kind of painful ordeal. It’s like volunteering for an unnecessary BOGO root canal.
🔥 The Epstein revelations, and the Journal’s hit piece, show that his once-successful PR teams have failed catastrophically. They no longer have the power or ability to suppress unflattering stories like this one. Think about what that means. As we saw with Peter Hotez, Bill Gates’ deep state plot armor is falling apart.
Consider everything Bill Gates managed to survive over the last 25 years: An antitrust ruling against Microsoft and a horrible performance in a video deposition; a reputation as a predatory monopolist who betrayed his co-founder; funding of gain-of-function research; the covid vaccine push; a high-profile divorce with 20+ affairs; the initial disclosure of his Epstein connections in 2021; and the atrocious “Inside Bill’s Brain” Netflix hagiography that ran the same month Epstein died in prison. There’s more.
Every one of those should have been career-ending for any normal billionaire. But none of them stuck to Bill Gates. That, my friends, is plot armor.
At minimum, this article represents a single dandelion of press freedom growing through a crack in the oligarchical pavement. At maximum, it shows the white hats have occupied some parts of corporate media and have driven out the deep state.
In short succession, Trump 2.0’s DOJ released the Epstein files, the Republican-controlled House Oversight Committee subpoenaed Gates, and the MAHA-aligned HHS has been dismantling the global gain-of-function and vaccine apparatus he helped fund. Federal grants to his NGO partners “dried up.” Even the Indian government —which Gates spent twenty years cultivating with foundation money— has read the room and tossed him like a soiled mousepad.
Every institutional pillar of Bill’s deep state plot armor is being yanked out simultaneously. Polycrisis!
Can Gates survive the catastrophic implosion of his carefully cultivated “Mr. Rogers” brand (if, that is, Mr. Rogers was a serial adulterer who financed global bioweapons development)? Remember, as we observed with Peter Hotez: men with uncontrolled libidos are easy to manage. My hypothesis is that Gates was a deep state “soft power” tool. But the swamp has been drained. It’s bankrupt, and the swamp creatures are being repossessed.
Bill Gates is no longer useful to the architecture that has always protected him, because that architecture itself is being dismantled. You don’t need a custom-built Mr. Rogers persona for a “good billionaire philanthropist” when the entire NGO-foundation-public-health-WHO-GAVI complex is being rapidly defunded. The vehicle itself is being scrapped, so the spokesman/driver is being decommissioned.
Gates will probably survive financially. He has $124 billion. But his days as a public moral authority? Over. As a political policy influencer? Done. As a public health luminary? Kaput. As a free man? That remains an open question. The WSJ article hinted at multiple avenues of potential prosecution. Slipping antibiotics to his wife— a crime. Hiring a Russian at his TerraPower nuclear company— a crime if undisclosed. His financial connections to Epstein— a crime if they facilitated trafficking.
It is unquestionably true that, in normal times, men with Gates’ money and political connections are devilishly hard to convict. But, as we have seen, these are not normal times. And Bill’s political support network is winking out like stars on a cloudy night as the thunderstorm moves in.
Finally, as a brief coda, consider all the other libidinous billionaires, high-profile political types, and swamp co-critters who are currently squirming in the same broad net as Gates. Reid Hoffman, Larry Summers, Leon Black, Eric Schmidt, and the whole Pritzker network, just to name a few. It is so easy to forget how much karma is suddenly and relentlessly flowing upstream toward the funders and facilitators of vast human misery during the pandemic.
And all of it has happened recently, since the Epstein disclosures. Not just progress this time. It’s much progress.
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Well, President Trump, the builder, has done it again. Against all odds (and Democrat lawfare), he repaired the Lincoln Monument Reflecting Pool in weeks at a fraction of the cost of the most recent repairs during Obama ($34 million in 2012 dollars), which took two years and didn’t even work. So, it’s now time for the media to pivot away from what they originally sneered at as doomed, and now deploy a whole new narrative to minimize it. Yesterday, PBS reported, “Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool refills with water after Trump paint job.”
Ha! Now PBS says it was just a paint job. But only one month ago, PBS incestuously platformed the New York Times’s David Fahrenhold, who soberly said, “Remember, this is not a swimming pool. This is a pool that’s about 2,000 feet long. It’s been around since the 1920s. It has a lot of complicated problems that come from both its age and its size.”
David then predicted that the project wouldn’t even make a visual difference. “From folks we have talked to, it will probably not make the pool look any different in terms of reflectivity,” he said.
Much of corporate media, including the Washington Post, is running breathless, top-of-page stories about cost overruns. President Trump, WaPo claimed, “bragged” that the project would only take about $2 million, but “actually” $14 million in contracts were awarded related to the pool. Trump derangement.
For contrast, Boston’s “Big Dig” highway and tunnel megaproject was originally estimated around $2–5 billion, but its final cost was over $22 billion. Media yawned. California’s high‑speed rail project was sold to voters back in 2008 as roughly a $33 billion system from San Francisco to Los Angeles by 2020. Recent estimates run north of $120 billion for a scaled‑back version, with some reports now citing numbers in the $200+ billion range. Media is still looking the other way.
But this! This reflecting pool! This is an outrageous waste of public treasure!
I’m not saying the cost differential is meaningless. I’m saying corporate media’s moral panic over a relatively tiny delta between $2 million and $14 million for a project that was successfully completed on a 24x7 rush schedule to meet the 250th anniversary celebration schedule is pure Trump Derangement Syndrome on display.
In fact, that very point was made by none less than Democrat Senator John Fetterman, who amusingly tweeted that Democrats should “stop henpecking:”
You should see the comments from Democrats against their own Senator. Fetterman is driving them insane.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick posted a much nicer photo than the WaPo’s, taken from ground level, which appears to show that, shattering PBS’s pessimistic predictions, the Reflecting Pool is, in fact, reflecting, and does, in fact, look different. Different and better:
Here’s what I suggest, and I don’t think this is any stretch. Let’s look at the Reflecting Pool —and all the other beautification and restoration projects around our Nation’s capital— as a metaphor. As the capital is being restored and made more beautiful, so is the country writ large. The Reflecting Pool is itself a reflection, a mirror image of an even greater achievement.
President Trump —the reality TV huckster and rough-spoken real estate developer— is reminding America that decay is not inevitable. It is a choice.
Behold the New American Renaissance— against all odds, against all enemies both foreign and domestic, and against every reasonable prediction. We are almost there.
Have a wonderful Wednesday! C&C will be back tomorrow morning with an all-new roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary. Preview: it’s even MORE good news.
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ERRATA
— Marc Andreseen was inadvertently included in the list of Epstein scalliwags. (It was leftover from a draft where I was going a different direction in that paragraph.) Properly removed.
“President Trump…is reminding Americans that decay is not inevitable, it’s a choice” 🎯