☕️ RESCUE AND LIBERATION ☙ Friday, February 20, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Epstein haunts Bill Gates, who flees India; Update on Prince Andrew arrest— first time since 1647; CIA in spotlight; NYT throws California under ballot bus; America builds Freedom Portal for Europe.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! Your traveling roundup includes: Bill Gates fleeing India’s AI summit at the last possible second (Epstein’s ghost travels faster than Bill does); Congresswoman Mace demanding the CIA’s Epstein files — and uncovering why the Agency’s 2011 answer and its current answer are completely different; UPDATES on Prince Andrew arrest; pinched at 8 a.m. by six unmarked police cars — the first royal arrest since King Charles I in 1647; the NYT Epstein scalp dashboard is growing; the New York Times Editorial Board — not a typo — publishes a takedown of California’s broken election system, and our theory about why now; and the U.S. government builds a Freedom Portal to help Europeans see banned content — with a Churchill sendoff to give you Friday chills.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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It couldn’t be happening to a nicer billionaire. Yesterday, Reuters reported, “Bill Gates pulls out of India AI summit amid Epstein scrutiny.” If only he’d pulled out of Jeffrey Epstein’s gifts. Flights, I mean. (What did you think I meant?)

Bill Gates ‘pulled out’ (their words, not mine) of India’s AI Impact Summit just hours before he was scheduled to appear. He wasn’t just a guest or panelist. He was supposed to deliver the opening keynote address on Thursday— a premature non-climax. Instead, he chose caution over pleasure, and on extremely short notice. The unlucky head of India’s Gates Foundation office drew the short straw as last-second replacement. No, YOU give the speech.

The Gates Foundation issued an awkward statement saying the carefully considered decision was meant “to ensure the focus remains on the AI Summit’s key priorities” — a transparently cowardly PR line showing the real ‘priority’ is to avoid inconvenient Epstein questions. Gates was already in India when he chickened out at the last minute. He was practically walking toward the podium.

But only days earlier, the Foundation had dismissed rumors that Gates might cancel, and insisted the software-slash-vaccine philanthropath couldn’t wait open the event. So all the agendas were printed, and the emails went out, and attendees bought tickets. Then— here’s Ayurveda Prithipanti instead!

Despite the Foundation’s framing, the media noticed that Gates’s abrupt withdrawal also followed the DOJ’s recent release of emails between Jeffrey Epstein and Gates Foundation staff, which has “intensified scrutiny” of Gates’s long-documented relationship with the convicted sex offender. Scrutiny is one way of putting it.

Gates still maintains his relationship was limited to ‘philanthropy discussions,’ and still calls his meetings with Epstein “a mistake,” like clicking “Buy Now” when you meant to hit “Cancel Order.” His cancellation compounded an already-troubled AI summit — Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang had already bailed on Saturday, citing illness, and the event was plagued with controversy: an Indian university claimed credit for a Chinese robot dog, out-of-towners were snarled in typical Indian traffic chaos, and OpenAI’s CEO refused to hold hands with Anthropic’s CEO. Or vice-versa. We don’t know yet. (I did not make any of that up, I promise.)

The Microsoft founder who funded global “health” policy, who censored doctors questioning lockdowns, who appeared on Epstein’s flight logs and met with him repeatedly after his sex-crime conviction— has become so toxic that he can’t even deliver a tech speech in India because Epstein’s grim shadow now haunts him wherever he goes.

🔥 Next up on the Epstein list, on Tuesday, the Hill reported, “Mace asks CIA director for documents agency may have on Epstein, Maxwell.”

“Classified or not, we want to see it,” the Congresswoman wrote in a 2-page letter addressed to CIA Director Ratcliffe. “The American people deserve answers about whether our intelligence agencies had connections to a child sex trafficker.”

The unsurprisingly convoluted story began with a FOIA letter. Epstein’s own lawyers contacted the CIA in 2011, asking the Agency to confirm the relationship. At the time, various civil litigants were chasing Epstein around in court, encouraged by his 2009 guilty plea. Presumably, Epstein wanted to defend against the lawsuits by claiming he was working for the CIA. Sort of like 007 James Bond, except less tuxedos and martinis and more skeevy-demonic tracksuits and kitten blood cocktails.

Anyway, the last thing the CIA planned to do was get involved in Jeffrey’s sordid pedo litigation, and curtly responded that there were no such documents. But more recently, when the DOJ sought Epstein records from the CIA, the Agency said it could neither “confirm nor deny” any relationship between Epstein and the CIA, citing FOIA exemptions for classified information. So which is it?

I don’t know if the Agency realizes this yet or not, but nobody believes it never turned its jaundiced Sauron Eyeball toward Little St. James.

In this week’s letter (immediately posted to X), Congresswoman Mace cited obvious public information and the Epstein files suggesting there was a relationship, like Epstein’s three calendared meetings with Bill Burns, who later became Biden’s CIA Director. Mace also pointed out comments from various Epstein emails referencing “intelligence” and a “cia drop.” She might as well have said, c’mon guys, we all know.

If you consider Epstein’s connections to just Britain’s and Norway’s royal families, it was the CIA’s job to figure out what he was up to, and then tell the President. That is literally its charter. Epstein wasn’t some unimportant rando. He’s still destabilizing governments from his teats-up position in a coffin* (* allegedly), and the public probably knows less than 10% of whatever he was up to.

In other words, if the CIA doesn’t have files on Epstein, then what good is it?

🔥 Rounding out the trio, as I reported early yesterday, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor —formerly known as Prince Andrew, Duke of York (now stripped of his royal titles)— was arrested Thursday morning by Thames Valley Police on suspicion of misconduct in public office. Six unmarked police vehicles pulled up at Wood Farm on King Charles’s Sandringham estate in Norfolk at approximately 8 a.m. local time (3 a.m. Eastern). Police also searched Royal Lodge, his former residence at Windsor. Late yesterday afternoon, after the searches were finished, Andrew was sprung, though he didn’t look any too happy about it. You might say he looked haunted by the ghost of a notorious pedophile:

As far as I can tell from British sources, everything about the arrest (before charges), the searches, and even the potential corruption charge itself are extremely rare if not completely unprecedented. As I mentioned yesterday, the last time any royal personage’s body was violated by personal arrest was in the mid-1600s during the English Civil War. Why not put him under house arrest, or even just ask him to stay put for a few hours? Why toss him in chokey with the riffraff?

Brits are convinced that the police would not have been so heavy-handed without the express consent of the Prime Minister, Kier Starmer, and King Charles III. To allow Andrew to be jailed suggests a deeply unhappy King. One commenter called it a “massive blow” to the Royal Family. That’s one way of putting it.

A wide cross-section of influencers is explicitly framing Andrew’s arrest as an existential threat to the British Monarchy, which is still nursing bruises from decades of scandal. Here are a few examples from yesterday’s media:

• In an interview on Fox, Piers Morgan predicted that other senior royals will likely be interviewed by police, and called it “the tipping point of a gigantic scandal” and “an existential threat to the monarchy itself.”

• ABC News’ royal contributor Robert Jobson called it “undoubtedly a threat to the monarchy” and described the police raid on a royal estate as “seismic” and historic.

• ABC Australia reported that “many analysts believe this week’s events could present an existential threat to the monarchy.”

• Former BBC royal correspondent Peter Hunt said it could lead to “wider questions being asked of the monarchy as a whole.”

• U.S. corporate media was more measured. The NYT reported it “could shake public confidence in the monarchy.” But CNN unsubtly drew a historical parallel to Charles I’s trial and execution, which was followed by 11 years without a king. So.

The suspected charges —the basis for Andrew’s arrest— aren’t for sex crimes (not yet). It’s that while serving as the United Kingdom’s trade envoy in the early 2000s, Andrew allegedly shared confidential British government trade reports with Jeffrey Epstein, which became impossible to ignore after the DOJ’s most recent disclosures. Two weeks ago, an anti-royal group formally called for an investigation; last week, Thames Valley Police said they were “assessing” the claims. Thursday morning, they acted.

At the time of going to press, Andrew has not been formally charged with anything yet. Assuming he is charged, which seems a safe assumption given the ultra-high stakes, he will become the second person —after Ghislaine Maxwell— to face Epstein-related charges.

Yesterday morning, concurrent with the arrest, King Charles III issued a short statement saying he “learned with the deepest concern the news” and pledged, “Let me state clearly: the law must take its course.” If charged and convicted, misconduct in public office carries a maximum sentence of life in prison in the UK.

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The Times has 12 reporters slowly digging through the latest DOJ-released files —“a stack of paper as tall as the Empire State Building.” They are hosting a real-time dashboard of Epstein scalps:

That wasn’t even close to the most remarkable effort from the Times yesterday, which gives you an idea where we are. The entire Editorial Board published one of the most unlikely op-eds imaginable, headlined, “How California Is Damaging Faith in Government.”

Incredibly, the Editors argued that California’s vote-counting system is broken— and blamed it for why Americans now spend weeks not knowing which party controls the House of Representatives after elections. California allows mail-in ballots to arrive up to seven days after Election Day, then counts them, in the Times’ own words, “with agonizing slowness.”

“California adopted its rules with the admirable intention of maximizing voting access,” the Editorial Board generously opined. “But the system has failed.”

The Board noted that, for more than a century, same-day election resolution was the American norm. In the Nineteenth Century, for instance, telegraph lines delivered results by the next day’s newspaper. Now, they wrote, “In each of the past three congressional election cycles, Americans waited at least a week to find out whether Democrats or Republicans controlled the House of Representatives. The main reason has been California.”

Of course, it’s ultimately President Trump’s fault. The NYT’s Editorial Board acknowledged the confusion “plays into the hands of bad-faith political leaders, including President Trump, who lie about vote counting and fraud.” But even while blaming Trump for shooting lies, they blamed California for feeding him the ammunition.

The Board called the civic benefits “close to nil” since turnout has actually fallen since California changed its rules. “Turnout in California has fallen farther behind the national average since the state changed its rules,” they admitted. Worse, “when uncertainty lingers for days, Americans wonder why government today can often seem less competent than it once was.”

No kidding. Welcome to the club.

When the far-left New York Times Editorial Board —the same people who published “lockdowns worked, trust the experts, MAGA is a threat to democracy”— publicly blames California for “damaging faith in government” and enabling “misinformation peddlers,” you immediately save the screenshot. But questions linger.

📰 We must ask the obvious question: Why now, Times? I can’t help but notice the other electoral elephant in the room: the SAVE Act lurking in the Senate’s wings. It now has 51 Senators’ support (thanks, John Fetterman), is arguably bipartisan, and awaits only a decision by Majority Leader John Thune to force a talking filibuster.

The timing cannot possibly be coincidental. The Times Editorial Board didn’t run this California-critical editorial by accident. Assuming they aren’t just trolling us, it’s possible they’re pre-positioning an explanation. Just in case.

If —or when —California’s vote totals drop noticeably in November, whether from broader administrative reforms, ICE raids and deportations, or from the SAVE Act passing and requiring proof of citizenship, progressives who’ve denied illegal voting will be faced with an uncomfortable question: where did all those votes go?

Maybe the Times is prepping a tailor-made answer. If they publish this editorial now, in February, they establish for liberal readers that California’s system was “broken” and needed “reform.” Then, when the numbers do come in lower, they can point back here and say: see, California just cleaned up its process, like we recommended. Nothing to see here. Certainly not evidence of anything improper happening before.

Maybe this isn’t an editorial. Maybe it’s a pre-built alibi for missing votes. I’m taking it as terrific evidence the SAVE Act is likely to pass after all. At least the Times seems to think so.

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This might be the most delicious post-pandemic irony yet. On Wednesday, Reuters reported, “Exclusive: US plans online portal to bypass content bans in Europe and elsewhere.” The new website features an animated Paul Revere riding across the top. “Freedom is Coming,” it says:

The U.S. State Department is deploying an online portal at freedom.gov that will let people in Europe and elsewhere access content banned by their governments— including content labeled “hate speech” or “terrorist propaganda” under EU law. The portal is headed by Undersecretary for Public Diplomacy Sarah Rogers. (‘Sarah Rogers’ is also a minor superhero in the Marvel Universe— Captain America’s daughter. Probably unrelated. They do look alike, though.)

Officials have reportedly discussed a VPN feature that could help user traffic appear to originate in the U.S., which has a battered but still-functioning Constitution. In other words, local police won’t be able to trace Facebook posts about illegal immigration to the British citizens who posted them.

This is what I call a “reverse play.” Since the Cold War, the U.S. has deployed information freedom tools for people in authoritarian regimes like China, Iran, and those behind the Iron Curtain, mostly using radio. Now it’s doing the same for Western Europe, but on digital steroids. The State Department officially denied having a “censorship-circumvention program specific to Europe,” but did confirm that global digital freedom is a State Department priority.

The battle against government censorship is beginning to spill outside U.S. borders. This week, Mike Benz went viral on X, pointing out that Europe’s censorship NGOs complained bitterly that their names weren’t redacted in the House Judiciary GOP’s recent bombshell report on Europe’s censorship campaign— in other words, they were literally asking to be censored about being censors. The irony was noted.

Alongside that, the pending GRANITE Act (Global Reach and Accountability of Networks in the Information Technology Era) is a proposed law that would let Americans and American companies sue foreign entities —like EU regulators— in U.S. courts for overreaching content moderation targeting U.S. platforms. It seems fair, since the EU has been fining American companies like X for not censoring citizens’ speech.

The Europeans claim they aren’t censoring anybody. But, for example, Reuters reported that in 2024 alone, Germany issued 482 removal orders and forced providers to take down 16,771 pieces of content. I guess “censorship” has become one of those flexible progressive terms, like gender. There are, apparently, many different kinds of censorship.

According to “sources,” DOGE prodigy Edward “Big Balls” Coristine is also involved in the project. That young man stays busy, doesn’t he?

Last week on Valentine’s Day, at the annual Munich Security Conference, Secretary of State Marco Rubio told a group of assembled E.U. officials and military that, “We in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline.” Rubio was announcing the rescue mission.

In June 1940, Winston Churchill delivered one of his most famous speeches to a country facing an imminent existential threat from fulminant fascism. He vowed the British would fight everywhere: on the beaches, in the hedgerows, in the Halal markets, at the Buc-ee’s and the marijuana dispensaries, and so on. (He might have added, “on Facebook.”) Then, he promised, after all else failed, a champion would arrive from across the sea.

We will fight, Churchill said, “until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.” He meant America. And once again, we are coming. Hang on, European cousins. After we finish saving ourselves, we will come and save you, too.

Have a fabulous Friday! This post made it out early, but remember, C&C is in an insane time zone for the next few days. Patience, grasshoppers. Tomorrow will bring another edition of essential news and commentary, sooner or later. But it’ll be worth the wait.

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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