☕️ RUNNING RINGS ☙ Tuesday, May 19, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

China-style organ harvesting spreads; a $1.776 billion DOJ settlement fund — patriotic, judicially blessed via Obama-era courts; Dems waking up to polycrisis threatening national party status; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! Your terrific roundup includes: an important new book confronting the moral abyss of medical cannibalism; how Trump’s team boomeranged a $1.776 billion DOJ settlement structure — using Eric Holder’s own legal blueprint; and the Stacey Abrams MSNBC clip admitting Democrats could lose 191 state legislative seats.

⛑️ C&C ARMY BRIEFING—KILLED TO ORDER ⛑️

Of the many highlights of last week’s conference, one standout was the “authors’ room”— conservative writers chatting and developing carpal tunnel from signing book copies. One of those authors was American Thought Leaders’ Jan Jekielek, who you may recall used his show to heroically platform many of us who battled mandates and pandemic overreach back in the bad old days.

Jan’s first book is out, and has already sold enough copies to qualify as a New York Times bestseller (much to the Times’ displeasure) is titled, Killed to Order: China’s Organ Harvesting Industry and the True Nature of America’s Biggest Adversary.

Jan begins his book by carefully documenting China’s thriving organ harvesting industry, which medically strip-mines unwilling political prisoners to gift their hearts as “biological upgrades” to Communist Party elites and sell their leftover livers to wealthy foreigners. That’s shocking enough, and gives the expression “being Shanghaied” a whole new meaning.

But Jan goes much further, transforming that abhorrent scandal into a wider lens that describes China’s whole dysfunctional culture, in which, at best, life is cheap, or at worst, expressly anti-human.

Killed to Order is not just an exposé mashup of decades of investigations, interviews with survivors, and his own on-the-ground reporting. Jan confronts the harrowing moral questions, pushing readers to consider an excruciating thought experiment: if your child needed a new heart, and you could only get a suitable child-sized match from China’s black‑box transplant system, would you take it?

Killed to Order forces us to struggle with that moral quandary, and keeps going. What if the organs from one homeless meth addict could save the lives of ten productive citizens? Wrestling with that philosopher’s conundrum helps us better understand how a society lacking a Christian moral center can be tempted further and further along the path of medical cannibalism.

It’s an important book, much more than it looks at first blush. It is critically needed now, to help inoculate us against a similar slide into cultural depravity and waking up in hotel bathtubs short a kidney.

Back last July, the New York Times (of all places) published a major investigation on how the stampede to increase organ supply in the U.S. is distorting bedside treatment decisions. It documented increasing numbers of patients who —though not fully brain‑dead, still having some brain activity— are being steamrolled toward donation under loosey-goosey “circulatory death” standards, while distraught families face heavy encouragement from ghoulish bedside ‘organ procurement organizations’ to sign their loved ones’ lives away.

To put it bluntly: Organ “donations” are big business.

Organs themselves cannot be legally bought or sold. But U.S. organ procurement organizations collectively receive billions of dollars a year in ‘program service revenues’ for facilitating procurements— organ snatching. Most of that revenue derives from state and federal grants and Medicare reimbursements.

In other words, even though private NGOs are doing the bedside sales work, it is in fact a government program that we, the taxpayers, are funding. From the linked article:

Canada, unsurprisingly, is way ahead of us on the organ harvesting industry’s greasy slip-n-slide. If you struggle to understand that benighted country’s obvious obsession with assisted suicide, look first at how Canada is explicitly integrating organ donation right into the same handy-dandy MAID form. Check box 1 to authorize us to painlessly kill you. Check box 2 to first let us take your organs, making your tragic suicide meaningful (no pressure!).

Every year, the number of MAID organ donations in Canada increases geometrically. National stats —surely undercounted— show that in 2024, about 5% (1 in 20) of all organ transplants in Canada used MAID patients’ organs. Around 7% of all ‘donors’ are now suicide patients.

Once normalized, this kind of thing can get downright addictive. Once you start, you can’t stop. EWTN News, February:

A pro-life activist quoted in the EWTN article correctly “argued that legalizing medical homicide opens the door to greater and greater crimes against humanity.”

That quote certainly describes China. But he wasn’t even thinking about China.

Before we smugly celebrate our moral superiority compared to the communist CCP, we must confront the fact that the U.S., Canada, and most Western nations are doing the same things. The Chinese carve up prisoners who have no choice. But U.S. organ procurement organizations prey on fatigued families while the patient is unconscious and not choosing anything. Meanwhile, Canada lets suicidal people ‘choose’ to give their lives meaning, as if any decision under those appalling circumstances can be considered a non-coercive choice at all.

At least the Chinese don’t cloak their depravities in saccharine, fake virtue-signaling.

If you’re in the market for a thoughtful and important read (and a concise one; mercifully, given the subject matter, it’s only 200 pages long) that provides emotional and rhetorical ammunition against the slippery organ slope we unfortunately find ourselves sliding down, grab Killed to Order.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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That was fast! It’s already signed and sealed, and waiting expectantly for the first lawsuit to show up. Yesterday, in a completely neutral and totally unbiased article, the New York Times reported, “Justice Dept. Sets Up $1.8 Billion Fund That Could Funnel Money to Trump Allies.” They’re upset because the DOJ executed it brilliantly.

The settlement was teased over the weekend, but now we have the actual document, and yesterday we saw how skillfully it was deployed. In short, President Trump settled three of his lawsuits for an apology and a reparations fund with no money going to him personally. The three resolved cases were the one against the IRS for leaking his tax returns, the second over the Russia-collusion hoax during Trump 1.0, and the third over the 2022 Mar-a-Lago raid.

The best part is the restitution fund —not $1.8 billion as the Times headline reported, but a much pleasanter $1.776 billion— which becomes a patriotically numbered DOJ compensation fund for any person “who suffered weaponization and lawfare.” The money comes from a special DOJ general fund available to resolve lawsuits against the government, which “gives the department authority to make monetary settlements without needing approval from Congress.”

The DOJ hasn’t said, but virtually everybody commenting on the deal assumes the money will be available to January 6th lawfare victims. All J6’ers should apply. Maybe everyone canceled during the pandemic should apply, too. I’ll be applying on behalf of my Disinformation Dozen clients.

When details emerge, I will make sure everyone knows exactly how to apply.

🔥 The left’s reaction was a wild explosion of hyperbolic fury. “This is one of the single most corrupt acts in American history,” said Donald K. Sherman, an anti-Trump activist and NGO president. Chuck Schumer called the settlement the “most depraved and corrupt” thing Trump has ever done, and claimed it would “fund an insurrectionist army to the tune of billions.”

What really got into their underpants is how Trump’s lawyers ran rings around them and boomeranged their own tactics back against them. No fewer than 93 Democrat lawmakers filed a hysterical motion “just minutes after Trump’s lawyers informed Judge Williams” of the deal. But Trump’s lawyers didn’t ask the court to bless the deal; instead, they just dismissed his lawsuit, which under the rules did not require court permission since the DOJ had not yet formally responded.

“The president’s lawyers essentially beat the lawmakers to the draw by dismissing the case on their own,” the Times explained, “hamstringing the lawmakers’ ability to stop a settlement from going through.” Booya.

And then the DOJ published the one-page settlement in an online announcement. According to DOJ, the settlement fund “provides a systematic process to hear and redress claims of others who suffered weaponization and lawfare.”

In a second, equally brilliant maneuver, both the settlement itself and all the DOJ communications cited an obscure Obama-era lawsuit that the DOJ settled in 2010, in virtually the same way. Just wait till you get this.

🔥 Keepseagle v. Vilsack was a nationwide class action filed by riled-up Native American farmers who claimed the racist USDA had discriminated against them in farm loan programs since 1981. They sued in 1999 (presumably not partying like it was 1999). When Obama took office in 2009, his Attorney General, Eric Holder, immediately began negotiating a settlement, which was approved by the court in 2010.

The Keepseagle settlement required the DOJ to deposit $680 million into a compensation fund (plus pay another $80 million for loan debt forgiveness and for the lawyers). Indian farmers could submit claims under an expedited process that didn’t require any proof of injury at all and get around $62,500 (in 2010 dollars). Or they could provide evidence of actual harm and get up to $250,000 plus an amount to cover income taxes and their attorney’s fees, if any.

At the time, corporate media thought it was wonderful; they framed it as long overdue justice provided to right historic wrongs and make everything fair. NPR, October 2010:

Eventually, only about $300 million was paid to the farmers. So, guess what Eric Holder did with the leftover $380 million? He paid it all out to progressive NGOs, that’s what. There is no public list of the organizations and officials that ultimately received settlement money, because it was laundered through large initial block grants to Native American groups, which in turn made undisclosed sub-grants to others, and so on down the line.

Anyway, guess who sued? Not Republicans. The farmers sued. They argued the money was supposed to be used to compensate them for their racial discrimination loan injuries. But they lost at the district court. They lost at the Circuit Court of Appeals. They appealed to the Supreme Court, which refused to take the case.

In other words, courts upheld the settlement structure.

The whole time, everybody knew perfectly well that the money was really sloshing to the Obama Administration’s allies. A Wall Street Journal Editorial Board op-ed called the Keepseagle fund (and other similar ones Obama arranged) his “slush funds:”

That is why the Democrats are so furious. They are projecting again. They think Todd Blanche is copying Eric Holder’s successful slush fund strategy— a terrifying prospect. There’s one huge difference, though. The Trump Settlement says that any money left over goes back to the DOJ’s general fund. Unlike when Democrats do it, it won’t tumble into the political laundromat.

Of course, that didn’t stop the Times from claiming it will “funnel money to Trump’s allies.” The Times article, and I am not making this up, never even mentioned the Keepseagle case, even though it is right there in the one-page settlement. Nor did the Times even link to the settlement form itself, in case a reader might stumble upon Keepseagle accidentally.

The Times wants so badly for the Trump Settlement’s structure to be somehow illegitimate. That argument will fail. It’s not just that Obama’s DOJ did the same thing (or even worse, if you include the NGO firehose). No, not only that, but Obama’s DOJ did the same thing and the courts upheld it. It’s already been judicially blessed in the far-left DC Circuit.

Not only were Democrats and the media taken completely by surprise, their last-ditch lawfare failed spectacularly, since Trump’s team knew exactly what they would do. Too predictable.

The settlement fund is a done deal. They can fight it, and I’m sure they will, but Obama paved the way.

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That’s not the only ring-running this week. After the Supreme Court’s Callais redistricting decision, I told you everyone was missing the bigger picture. I said it went far beyond a fight over a handful of Congressional seats, however important those are. The decision would, I predicted, extend all the way into state and local offices, collapsing Democrat political power across the country, from the courthouse to the statehouse. Well, Democrats are starting to do the math.

CLIP: a panicked Stacey Abrams explains catastrophic mathematics of the Callais decision (1:33).

Failed Georgia Gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams appeared on MSNBC yesterday with an excited warning. “With these new maps,” she cautioned, “we could lose 19 to 20 congressional seats, but we could also lose up to 191 state legislative seats!”

It’s not even just the state legislative seats, and Stacey knows it. “In the south,” she continued, “those state legislators draw city council districts, county commission districts, school board districts, and they draw state legislative lines.”

Nor, she admitted, is the threat unique to Democrats in southern states. “What we have to remember,” Stacey urged, “is this is a national fight. It may start in the south, but it has national implications.”

As I noted two weeks ago, anywhere that Democrats have used race to draw any kind of political map, or slipped in any special advantage based on race, like reserving three of five seats on the Portland library board for minority members, or explicitly drawing school board maps in Detroit to ensure more minority kids attend majority white schools— all those offices and local maps now risk being struck down based on the Callais decision.

Most Democrats haven’t yet realized the awesome scope of the vast problem they are facing. But Stacey Abrams gets it. “We need national intervention,” the portly politician said, “because they are starting in the south, but this is a national attempt to misuse democratic institutions to suppress all of the communities who fight for democracy in this country.”

Yesterday, responding to Abrams’ diatribe, conservative influencer DC Draino (2.3 million followers) tweeted that “this means they will effectively cease to be a national party in America.” The polycrisis. He added, not completely exaggerating, “Winning the 2016 election and getting those 3 SCOTUS picks changed the course of world history.”

Remember local, local, local? The Trump Team and the Supreme Court did their part. Now it’s up to us in each of our states, counties, and cities to grab the ball and run with it. Now, go! Go for the touchdown.

There is so much more, but not enough time this morning to cover it all. Tomorrow I’ll tell you about the latest and bigger wave of arrests and investigations coming right after the last legal tsunami. It wasn’t clear to me exactly when the Trump Administration would fulfill all its accountability promises, but it is starting to look like that will happen before the midterms.

They want us to be excited and motivated to vote. I think it’s going to work.

Have a terrific Tuesday! And then get back here tomorrow morning, for another exciting roundup of essential news and double-strength caffeinated commentary.

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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