☕️ REVERSE GEARS ☙ Monday, February 10, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Superbowl signals cultural turnabout; federal judge bars Treasury Secretary from working; polls show Dems' DOGE attacks backfire; Hunga Tonga is back; Trump axes archivist; Fauci in crosshairs; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! And just like that, Trump Week Four begins. Your encouraging roundup today includes: Superbowl 2025 was more than a ball game, it was a signal of profound cultural reversal; federal judge un-appoints Trump’s Treasury Secretary in bizarre midnight order; Democrats’ attacks on DOGE workers spectacularly backfires in new Trump polls; Hunga Tonga won’t go away as new study confirms massive post-eruption, worldwide water vapor anomaly; President Trump fires Biden’s National Archivist as promised; and the anti-Fauci movement picks up steam.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Last night evidenced the end of several eras. It was the end of the Kansas City Chiefs’ Superbowl-winning streak, after their humiliating 40-22 loss to Philadelphia’s Eagles. Three times was not a charm. The Times even called it a “rout,” probably because the Eagles took a 24-0 head start, and the Chiefs never caught up. It was a stunning reversal: Just two years ago, the Chiefs had scalped the Eagles in a Superbowl matchup. But last night’s bigger story might be how game watchers experienced a completely different, well, culture at yesterday’s SuperBowl performance.

CLIP: Lauren Daigle sings America the Beautiful at 2025 Superbowl (1:39).

Everything was different, and reversals were the evening’s real story. From the Eagles’ crushing overthrow of the dominant Chiefs, to the fan reactions, to the selection of the planned entertainment, it all signaled the shifting of a cultural era. No, it was more than shifting. The mega-game illuminated the tectonic reversal of an outdated era.

Set aside the stunning game results. Consider another example: It wasn’t just that wholesome Christian singer Lauren Daigle was spotlighted on the field, neatly belting out a jazzy America the Beautiful for the delighted crowd, while snake-snuggling Taylor Swift was relegated to nesting in the upper stands. That was just the top layer. Look deeper.

There were layers and layers of meaningful cultural reversals to peel back.

New Orleans readers recognized a vicious layer of vindication in Lauren’s selection. Not only did she become the first mainstream faith artist featured at the Superbowl, but it was also a turnaround story, a completely different reversal. The mild-mannered singer, 33, had been canceled in 2020 by New Orlean’s disastrous mayor LaToya Cantrell, after Lauren sang at a Christian anti-lockdown event during covid. Mayor Cantrell was displeased and made it her personal mission to smear Lauren, and using her Mayoral offices, got Lauren deleted from her upcoming, career-making slot on Dick Clark’s New Year. Here is Lauren discussing her cancelation experience:

CLIP: Covid-canceled Christian singer Lauren Daigle discusses being called a “weapon” who “endangered the public” (1:26).

For the courageous Ms. Daigle, who sacrificed her breakthrough moment to stand up for others, it was a terrific turnabout. Last night, Lauren gracefully transitioned from being officially labeled a “menace to the public” —and not in the good, rap-music way, but in the bad, Typhoid Mary way— after five years being launched like a touchdown pass back from that despondent low point to now delivering the most patriotic song at the Superbowl.

There was more. Let’s check in on Mayor LaToya. While Lauren would never wish any misfortune on the witchy bureaucrat, the direction that Mayor Cantrell’s career arc is headed looks much less encouraging than our Superbowl singer’s career arc. Behold, this morning’s headline from NOLA.com:

Whoops. A “wide-ranging” probe is exactly the kind of probe that most people hope to avoid. That is gonna hurt. The sordid details are insignificant; suffice to say Mayor Cantrell’s political career is trending downwards.

🔥 Meanwhile, Taylor Swift, 35, also attended the game, presumably in her role as girlfriend of Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, whose lackluster performance was widely reported as “subdued.” Maybe it was just accidental that the show producers first highlighted President Trump, who delighted the audience to rapturous applause. Then the game camera panned to Taylor Swift, the cobra-charming mega-celebrity, who seemed completely confused that the audience responded with sustained boos. It was a dramatic reversal of fortunes for the pop star. I’m not sure Ms. Swift had ever faced an unfriendly crowd before last night.

CLIP: Taylor Swift booed by Superbowl fans (0:12).

Perhaps it has occurred to the pop icon that maybe she should’ve stuck to music instead of raking in the Harris campaign’s money, choosing a side, and getting involved in politics. Unsurprisingly, President Trump rubbed it in, taking an undignified but deserved victory lap:

One hopes MAGA is more forgiving than Trump gave the movement credit for. But at this moment in history, who can blame them?

🔥 It was several classic reversals of fortune, playing out on —love it or hate it— the grandest stage in American pop culture. The Chiefs fell from dominant dynasty to humbling defeat, Lauren Daigle rose from Covid-era cancellation to the Superbowl spotlight, and Taylor Swift—once pop’s untouchable darling—got a taste of audience rejection, setting a new low point in her meticulously curated career.

The layers of cultural meaning in this Superbowl ran deep. Daigle’s moment wasn’t just about singing America the Beautiful—it was a symbolic return of something more profound: the unapologetic embrace of faith, patriotism, and traditional American values — in a public space where they’ve often been benched, eclipsed by corporatized, virtue-signaling messaging designed to be offensive and to get in your face.

The optics of Daigle’s salubrious performance juxtaposed against Swift’s chilly reception will be hard to forget.

And then there’s Mayor Cantrell’s karma coming due. The same sneering bureaucrat who worked to cancel Daigle for daring to sing at a peaceful covid protest is now under the kind of “wide-ranging probe” that ends political careers. Another stunning switcheroo.

As for Taylor, the sustained booing may have been a first for her, but it wasn’t unearned. She chose to step into the political arena, picking candidates and positions that alienated large groups of Americans. Now, she’s counting the consequences. Unlike Daigle—who took her stand on principle, accepted the backlash, and now emerges stronger—Swift played the establishment game and is learning the hard way that public adoration isn’t guaranteed when you pick sides.

The Superbowl was more than just a football game—it was a cultural weathervane. And the winds are obviously blowing in a different, much better direction.

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The Wall Street Journal carefully curated the first major challenge to the Trump agenda into a story misleadingly headlined, “Vance, Musk Criticize Federal Judge for Blocking DOGE From Treasury System.” But the judge went much further than the headline suggests. Astonishingly, he enjoined all non-career officials from accessing the Treasury system— right up to the Senate-confirmed Treasury Secretary himself.

Judge Paul Englemayer

The biggest problem with the judge’s decision appeared right in the story. “The Democratic attorneys general,” the WSJ admitted, “said the true limitations on DOGE’s access remain unclear.” In other words, the plaintiffs didn’t know, and can’t prove, whatever they think DOGE might be doing. Under the high injunction standard, tangible evidence of irreparable harm is normally needed to get an injunction.

I reviewed U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer’s order. It seemed weak. The order —written in whole part by the Democrat AGs— founded the decision to temporarily stay all access to Treasury systems by “political appointees” (including the Secretary!), by citing an unnamed “heightened risk that the systems in question will be more vulnerable than before to hacking.” That unquantifiable “heightened risk of hacking,” whatever that means, seemed far from sufficient to justify a temporary restraining order.

In New York, as in most places, “a showing of irreparable harm is the single most important prerequisite for the issuance of a preliminary injunction.” Heightened risks, regardless of their speculative stature, hardly show irreparable harm.

Judge Englemayer, an Obama appointee, didn’t cite a single piece of evidence supporting the alleged threat. The hearing (if there was one) was held ex parte, meaning the Trump Administration wasn’t permitted to participate, and it looks like the “evidence” was pure guesswork by the blue-state Attorneys General. Nor did Englemayer’s order explain how state Attorneys General have standing to interfere with the federal government’s internal processes and procedures.

The whole thing was sketchy. According to the docket, the states’ motion was filed at 9:30pm on Friday night, and Judge Englemayer signed the AGs’ pre-drafted order three hours later at 1am. Since Englemayer was acting as an emergency duty judge, the case was automatically assigned to a full-time federal judge.

Late yesterday, Trump’s DOJ filed an emergency motion to dissolve the TRO. Here is the Trump motion’s first paragraph:

In other words, Judge Englemayer’s astonishing order inserted the courts fully inside the Executive Branch’s business, purporting to segregate Executive-branch goats from the lambs, dividing employees by labels of “civil service” and “political appointment,” in effect assuming direct micromanagement of the Treasury Department. Worse, the terms “civil servant” and “political appointee” are undefined and are not anything more than commonly understood jargon.

Yesterday, newly assigned Judge Jeanette Vargas, a Biden appointee, directed the two sides to first "meet and confer" this morning to see whether any agreement could be reached or at least narrow the disputed issues. Given the issues, that seems unlikely to happen. Barring that, the states’ response to the Motion to Dissolve the TRO is due by 5:00 pm, and Trump’s DOJ’s reply is due by 11:00 pm tonight.

My guess is that the TRO won’t survive the next 48 hours, at least not in its present, overbroad state.

This temporary restraining order is not the first, nor will it be the last, to be filed against the Trump Team’s Swamp draining efforts. After all, lawfare is one of the left’s favorite tools. Many lawsuits have already been filed, and more will surely be filed. I don’t plan to cover every lawsuit; rather, I’ll let you know if something significant happens. If I don’t mention it, that means I think it’s just normal legal wrangling and nothing to get excited about yet.

This order might be more interesting in that it shows the Swamp’s growing terror of Trump’s “political appointees.” Before Trump 2.0, career bureaucrats felt safe and insulated from political staff since the bureaucrats have so many ways of frustrating an incoming Administration’s team. This overreaching order shows that the long-established status quo is melting, and the Deep State is freaking out.

If the TRO gets slapped down quickly, it will be a helpful barometer for how much patience the judiciary has for these tactics. If it somehow survives in any meaningful way, it will be headed for the Supreme Court.

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Yesterday, new Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced that, in five days, eighty percent of open FEMA requests from North Carolina’s Hurricane Helene disaster area have now been resolved. In five days.

CLIP: Secretary Noem announces remarkable FEMA progress (0:24).

I could not find any corporate media stories celebrating this remarkable accomplishment. So.

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On Friday, the NIH (now under new management) announced it was cutting the “indirect overhead rate” in government grants to only 15%, producing an estimated savings of $4 billion dollars a year. As an example, imagine a million-dollar grant. Before this change, the wealthy institutions where the researchers work, such as Harvard or Yale, could grab $700,000 from the grant for “indirect overhead.” The scientists who actually do the research would be limited to only $300,000 to cover the direct research costs.

To be honest, even fifteen percent still sounds too high to me. But it is progress. The sky-high indirect overhead rates were a perverse incentive that made grant grabbing the most lucrative enterprise going for the academy. And who knows what kind of other mischief they were getting up to with all that free taxpayer money.

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Yesterday, CBS ran a provocative polling story headlined, “Trump has positive approval amid "energetic" opening weeks; seen as doing what he promised.” Among all sorts of good polling news for the President, guess which age cohort most solidly supported President Trump? It was Gen-Z, with a +10 approval margin:

Maybe the Democrats’ plan backfired to target Musks’ 19-25 year old tech bros by rolling out fossilized legislators complaining about “children” running the government. Who could have seen that boomerang coming?

Keep talking, Democrats.

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A diligent C&C reader alerted me to a nifty article published Saturday in the Daily Skeptic, headlined “EXCLUSIVE: Sensational Findings Point to Hunga Tonga Eruption as Prime Suspect Behind Recent Temperature Spike.” Well, if you’ve been reading C&C, you’ve known about that for over two years now. But still, it is more progress.

The Skeptic’s “exclusive” article arose from a new research letter, published in November, titled “Long‐Term Temperature Impacts of the Hunga Volcanic Eruption in the Stratosphere and Above.” While the study, perhaps wisely, focused on how the water vapor cools the upper atmosphere, it also confirmed the massive increase in worldwide water vapor, which necessarily means warmer surface temperatures.

Water vapor is the strongest “greenhouse gas” there is.

As we have discussed many times, the incredible increase in atmospheric water vapor resulting from a massive underwater volcano boiling a small sea of water into the air explains not just the hotter climate but all kinds of weird extreme weather events, like gorilla hail, flash floods, and maybe even turbo hurricanes.

As they say, what goes up must eventually come down.

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On Friday, the New York Times ran a terrific story headlined, “Trump Fires Nation’s Archivist in Latest Round of Personnel Purge.” The sub-headline added, “the National Archives had been deeply involved in the classified documents case against President Trump.”

On Friday night, Colleen Shogan, Biden-appointed director of the National Archies, said on social media she had been fired by President Trump. You may recall the National Archives kicked off the classified documents persecution and the Mar-a-Lago raid, by formally complaining that President Trump had “kept classified records,” which to this day, nobody has ever identified even generally as any particular problem.

It was another promise fulfilled. In early January, Trump vowed, “We will get somebody else. We will have a new archivist.”

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On Saturday, Florida Politics ran an encouraging story headlined, “Ron DeSantis thinks James Uthmeier could prosecute Anthony Fauci.” Mr. Uthmeier replaced former Attorney General Ashley Moody after the Governor appointed her to Marco Rubio’s senate seat.

Last week interest grew on social media related to prosecuting the human cockroach under state law. Biden’s infamous pardon of the deep-state doc does not extend to any potential state-law crimes. “We have got a new Attorney General coming in. I think he’s of the mindset to look at this to see what the jurisdictional hooks are, to see what if any state statutes may have been violated,” DeSantis told Yale’s Federalist Society on Saturday.

DeSantis added it was possible that “some other states would also do it.” Wouldn’t that be the most wonderful reversal of all? Florida’s Governor might have been on to something. On Saturday, Must Read Alaska ran a wonderful story headlined, “18 state Attorneys General launch investigation into Dr. Fauci’s role in Covid-19 response.”

In a letter addressed to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, the 18 attorneys general commended current congressional efforts to uncover potential misconduct. They also requested state-level cooperation in investigating any violations of state laws.

“President Biden’s blanket pardon of Dr. Fauci is a shameful attempt to prevent accountability,” said South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson, who drafted the letter. “If any of these findings indicate violations of state laws, we are fully prepared to take appropriate action to ensure justice is served.”

See how far we’ve come? You can scuttle under the retirement refrigerator, Fauci, but you can’t hide from the exterminator.

In more Fauci news, yesterday Newsweek reported, “Fauci museum exhibit funding canceled: DOGE.” Friday afternoon, DOGE posted on X that Health and Human Services had canceled 62 contracts worth a total of $182 million in the previous two days, including a $168,000 award to build an exhibit for Fauci at the NIH museum.

Paradoxically, Biden’s inglorious pre-emptive pardon of the highest-paid federal employee in history may have only inflamed anti-Fauci sentiment, leading to what may be a stunning reversal of fortunes for the disaster-prone doctor.

This Fauci thing isn’t over. Not by a long shot. It’s just getting started.

Have a magnificent Monday! More essential news and commentary will be served right here, at this time tomorrow, so don’t miss out. Bring your extra-large coffee mug.

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