☕️ REFORMULATED ☙ Thursday, April 2, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Artemis II launches America back to the Moon. Hershey admits to fake chocolate. And the NYT writes fan fiction about Trump firing Bondi. The Great Reformulation is bigger than food. More.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! Your roundup includes: America goes back to the Moon — for the first time in 54 years (or maybe ever) — and nobody in my circle even knew about it, because the Times was too busy writing about a $23-million space toilet; Hershey confesses to selling fake chocolate and promises to stop, while the entire American food industry undergoes what the trade press is calling ‘The Great Reformulation’ (and none of them want to say why); and the New York Times publishes political fan fiction about Pam Bondi sourced entirely from four anonymous people, while the only person quoted on the record says she’s doing great. Welcome to modern trad-journalism.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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Living a day in the Trump presidency is like watching a documentary on World War II in fast-forward. If you glance down to grab a jalapeño-cherry rice crisp, you’re likely to miss the Battle of Stalingrad and half of D-Day. Yesterday’s being April Fool’s Day didn’t help, since the feeds were flooded with fake but barely plausible-sounding news, like Kristi Noem Husband Outed as Cross-Dressing Rancher with Big Heifers. I almost believed that one.

Beyond the political knifework disguised as supermarket tabloids, historic stuff was happening, and it was coming in heaping handfuls. For example —and this should be much bigger and more exciting news than it was— we finally did it! We hauled the nation’s minivan out a deep, enervating, 50-year cultural and scientific slough of despond (located just off the I-75 exit near Davie, Florida), at 6:35pm EST local time last night. This morning, the New York Times reported, “Artemis II Completes First Day of Its NASA Lunar Mission.”

“After a brief 54-year intermission, NASA is back in the business of sending astronauts to the moon,” said Jared Isaacman, NASA’s newest administrator, during a news conference after the launch. It was terrific news for America. You know how we can be sure it was terrific news for America? We know it was terrific news for America because of the two articles the Times bracketed right below the main headline above. Ready?

If my eyes could roll any harder, they would pop out of their sockets and rocket around the room like ping-pong balls in a Texas derecho. “China’s aiming for the Moon,” too! (Sly Times editorial: It’s not that hard.) And a toilet story? Seriously? They wrote an entire frontpage article about a silly detail that only deserved one sentence in the main story, or if you wrung the most out of it, a short tongue-in-cheek paragraph at most.

It turns out the Potty Story was actually about an interesting technical advancement— the Artemis rocket is apparently equipped with an en-suite, sit-down commode. Prior missions had, um, “collection pouches” attached to the astronauts. We need say no more.

The “septic problem” that generated the headline that Times editors used to undermine the main story appeared only in the first two sentences at the top. They briefly described a blinking potty light that was quickly resolved. (Mission accomplished.) That’s it. It wasn’t even a messy plumbing problem. Nobody was sitting there. It was just a blinking light. But “toilet problem!” was the headline. Anyway. Back to the mission.

Michelle and I forced the kids to watch the launch. I guess, at this point, it can’t compete with video games. We’re too young to remember the Kennedy program or the original Moon launch (assuming for the sake of argument that it wasn’t filmed in a studio in Arizona). But as kids growing up in Florida, Michelle and I recall how school let out every time there was a launch at Cape Canaveral, so kids could “go outside” (an archaic form of exercise preceding Peloton) and watch the Challenger go up, since you could see it from anywhere in the Sunshine State. (We didn’t have contrails clogging the sky back then.)

But when I spoke to a half dozen people at work yesterday, none of them had even heard about the launch. What Moon mission? That’s how pathetic and lazy our corporate media has become. Last night’s launch nearly brought a tear to my eye; for what it signifies if nothing else. We broke something in ourselves during the Cold War.

Something fundamental. Regardless of whether we went to the Moon or we didn’t— either way, our soaring ambition to travel beyond orbit had cratered, completely exhausted. The fire went out. The motor stopped running.

Fast forward to December 2017. President Trump signed an executive order, “Space Policy Directive 1” (SPD-1), countermanding eight years of Obama transforming NASA into a cultural outreach program for muslims. Obama had basically canceled the previous long-extended lunar return program (Constellation) and redirected NASA toward a fuzzy asteroid redirect mission that nobody was excited about.

But SPD-1 soaringly vowed: “the United States will lead the return of humans to the Moon for long-term exploration and utilization, followed by human missions to Mars and other destinations.”

SPD-1 put NASA back on a Moon-first trajectory. And now, 8+ years later, Artemis II just launched the first crewed mission beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972. It all traces back to that 2017 directive.

The Artemis II mission lasts ten days, will shuttle the astronauts through the otherwise fatal Van Allen radiation belt, around the Moon, and then return. This mission prepares the way for 2028’s Artemis IV mission, which intends to plop the astronauts back onto the lunar surface. That rapid pace is only possible thanks to a partnership with SpaceX, which is slated to meet NASA in orbit around the Moon and handle the lunar landing part— a sci-fi-esque, public-private joint venture called for by Trump’s original 2017 SPD-1.

👨‍🚀 Here’s the thing. I don’t care if you are a Moon-landing denier. In fact, I don’t even blame people who are skeptical of the 1970s Moon landings. After witnessing the relentless stream of official lying and odious skunkwork during the pandemic, I have a lot of new questions, too. It’s no longer good enough that the government “said so” anymore. That’s fine and all, but let’s see some evidence.

Whether you agree that we ever went in the first place or not, we can all agree that the nation slumped into a humiliating 54-year coma after that. That’s the same period where we all got sicker, fatter, and dumber. I’m not connecting health to the Moon; I’m saying the national ‘check engine’ indicators were lighting up across the board like a 1960s German Christmas village. Then, just after the Millennium, we completely seized up in a 20-year cultural and scientific paralysis that lasted till the Great Fake Pandemic.

Yesterday, President Trump posted: “We are WINNING, in Space, on Earth, and everywhere in between — Economically, Militarily, and now, BEYOND THE STARS. Nobody comes close! America doesn’t just compete, we DOMINATE.”

If it proves anything, Artemis II just proved we are unstuck. Even for hardcore deniers who think Artemis II itself is just a fake AI video— at least they’re faking Moon missions again. It’s progress either way. The national engine has turned over and roared back to life.

🔥 Now I’ll connect the Moon mission to health. (This is the kind of insightful, candy-striped dot-connecting you only get in C&C.) Yesterday, NBC reported the delicious news that, “Hershey to resume using chocolate in most products; Reese’s grandson may taste sweet victory.” The subheadline explained, “The company will use ‘classic milk and dark chocolate recipes’ in all Reese’s and Hershey’s products after Brad Reese went viral for calling out the candymaker.”

The candy giant announced this week that it will return to using “classic milk and dark chocolate recipes” in all its Reese’s and Hershey’s products by 2027, instead of a “chocolate-like” compound made out of a residue scraped from the bottom of a barrel of fertilizer.

In 2007 —as the Great Cultural Freeze got underway— Hershey first started replacing cocoa butter with vegetable oil in popular products like Whatchamacallit, Milk Duds, Mr. Goodbar, Krackel, and Kissables. The candymaker blamed rising cocoa commodity costs. They couldn’t legally call it “milk chocolate” anymore, so they quietly changed the labels to “chocolate candy,” “made with chocolate,” then, pathetically, just “chocolatey.”

Some people noticed. A candy blogger coined the term mockolate. The TODAY show ran segments on it in 2008 and 2015. Hershey lobbyists even tried to get the FDA to change the legal definition of chocolate to allow the use of vegetable oil (fortunately, they lost). Then, during the pandemic’s supply-chain crisis, the $47-billion company quietly swapped the formula of their flagship delicacies —Hershey bars, Kisses, and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups— for vegetable oil-based compound coatings, and changed out real peanut butter for “peanut butter crème,” whatever that is.

In February, Brad Reese —grandson of inventor H.B. Reese— published a public letter blasting Hershey. “I went and bought a bag, and I took a couple bites, and I had to throw the bag in the garbage,” he complained. At this week’s investor day (while ringing the NYSE opening bell, no less), Hershey triumphantly announced they’re switching back to “classic milk and dark chocolate recipes” across all Reese’s and Hershey’s products. CEO Kirk Tanner claimed the decision was made last summer, before Brad Reese’s fiery broadside. They just didn’t mention it till now.

It’s not a one-off.

Food Processing magazine is calling 2026 “The Great Reformulation.” And they aren’t wrong. Over just the last twelve months, Kraft Heinz promised to yank synthetic dyes from Jell-O and Kool-Aid. General Mills and PepsiCo followed. Walmart —the nation’s largest retailer— announced it’s stripping artificial dyes and thirty other sketchy additives from every single house-brand product by 2027.

There’s more. Steak ‘n Shake vowed to ditch seed oils entirely and went back to cooking fries in beef tallow, like our grandparents did. They’re also removing microwaves from their kitchens. And now yesterday, Hershey got on the MAHA bandwagon. Every single company insisted this is all just about “evolving consumer preferences.” None of them mentioned MAHA, RFK, or the FDA’s new petroleum-dye phaseout deadline. The funny thing about dominoes is … they don’t tip themselves over.

Some people might call it a stretch to link the Great Reformulation and candy recipe tweaks to the nation’s revived spirit of adventure and discovery in space, but I say it’s all part of the same cultural moment. The Moon mission isn’t the only thing America is reformulating.

America spent decades passively accepting deceitful, degraded versions of everything. Fake chocolate. Fake, petroleum-based Fruit Loops with no fruit. A fake space program with no manned missions past low Earth orbit. And now, in one year, we’re demanding real ingredients, demanding real peace instead of serially bribing terrorists and dictators to buy a few more years of good behavior, and we’re sending real humans around the real Moon again for the first time in fifty years (or maybe ever).

America is back. We refuse to accept an “acceptable facsimile” of anything anymore. We want the real things. Real health, not pills. Real peace, not pallets of cash. Real space, not ‘political outreach.’

The Great Reformulation isn’t just about food— it’s about a return to truth itself. And it’s about time. And I, for one, am here for it.

Who’s with me?

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Speaking of not accepting fake things, yesterday, the New York Times ran a vomitous heap of rumor and innuendo dressed up as “news,” headlined, “Trump Has Discussed Firing Attorney General Pam Bondi.” Let’s learn a little more critical news reading.

My best guess is that the sharks at the Times smell blood in the water after Kristi Noem’s sudden ‘reassignment’ last month from Secretary of Homeland Security to Special Envoy for the Americas. Now they’re circling another high-profile woman in the Trump Administration, Attorney General Pam Bondi.

The story claims that Trump “has discussed” firing Bondi and is considering replacing her with Lee Zeldin, the current EPA Administrator. You might wonder how it know this. Well, it cited four sources “familiar with the conversations.” Every single one was anonymous. President Trump was the only source quoted on the record, and he praised Bondi: “Attorney General Pam Bondi is a wonderful person and she is doing a good job.”

From a journalism-sourcing hierarchy perspective, Oxford University describes a descending ladder of credibility, from strongest to weakest. It looks roughly like this:

• On the record is a direct quote, something like: “Trump said in an interview / statement that…” (E.g., Trump’s Bondi-praise quote).

• On background, but clearly located means an identified anonymous source, like “a senior Justice Department official who attended the meeting said.”

• On background, but with a vague connection, is what the Times used here: “people familiar with the discussions,” or sometimes, “people briefed on the matter.” In other words: hearsay. Gossip. Somebody told somebody something.

• Deep background is even more general, and usually looks like “according to officials,” which could mean anything. Which officials? Lithuanian officials? High-school baseball umpires?

• Off the record means a quote that is not publishable at all, even in paraphrase, and is only used to steer reporting.

So “people familiar with the conversations” is middle-tier anonymous background: better than pure “according to officials,” but worse than “one participant in the meeting said.” It could include secondhand or even thirdhand knowledge. Betty told Chad who told me that President Trump is thinking about firing Pam.

This type of low-level hearsay attribution means nothing without some other external evidence to corroborate it.

They don’t even have a theory. The story only cited two reasons. It reported as a fact, this time even without a source, that President Trump is “frustrated” with Bondi’s handling of the Epstein rollout —the most politically explosive issue in our lifetimes— and the DOJ’s lack of success prosecuting James Comey and Letitia James— two of the most politically charged and historic cases in generations. Maybe— but those are the hardest things a DOJ could do.

🔥 Remember— this White House has astonishingly tight discipline and far fewer true leaks than any prior administration. When real leaks are this rare, four alleged leakers suddenly surfacing would itself be a newsworthy anomaly.

In an administration that almost never leaks, a front‑page story built entirely on four unnamed “people familiar with the conversations,” with no meaningful detail about who they are, or how they know, should be treated as political fan fiction rather than news until it’s backed by documents, on‑record statements, or observable actions.

When Trump reassigned Kristi Noem, it came as a complete surprise. There were no leaks, no anonymous sources, no “people familiar with the matter.” He just did it. And then the media started backfilling his alleged rationale, which the president has never publicly advanced.

Here, the only extrinsic evidence, one on‑record quote —Trump’s language— gives the opposite signal: “Pam Bondi is a wonderful person and she is doing a good job.” Everything else negative was filtered through anonymous intermediaries with vague descriptors (“familiar with the conversations,” “spoken to him recently”) that don’t tell readers whether it’s inner‑circle participants, hangers‑on, second‑hand storytellers, or even Administration allies or enemies.

The Times’s own journalistic standards say reporters should “describe the source’s point of view and potential agenda as much as possible,” but here they give readers zero information about whether these alleged sources are sympathetic to Trump, hostile to him, or aligned with Bondi or her rivals. As usual— useless.

We have no idea whether Trump is considering replacing or reassigning Pam Bondi. Maybe. Maybe not. But more importantly, the Times has no idea whether Trump is considering replacing or reassigning Pam Bondi. The fact that the Grey Lady obviously hopes that’s the case is possibly the greatest evidence that Pam is doing a good job.

The Times didn’t mention these facts, but national crime statistics say she is doing pretty well. Under Bondi’s DOJ, murder dropped 20% last year —the largest one-year decline ever recorded— pushing the homicide rate to its lowest point since 1900. They charged and arrested nearly 30 Minneapolis church raiders —plus one washed-up podcaster— in days. But four anonymous people think she is about to be fired. (Noted.)

The nation’s ‘paper of record’ isn’t reporting facts. It’s manifesting its own dark fantasies, and hoping readers won’t notice the difference. Now you can see how they do it.

The Times published this dumb story on April 1st. In fairness, I published mine about Biden. The difference is, I labeled mine as April Fool’s.

If only we could Reformulate the fake New York Times.

Have a terrific Thursday! Grab your truth detectors and head back here tomorrow morning, for even more essential news with no industrial ingredients, combined with 100%-pure reliable commentary.

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