☕️ RUSSIAN DOLLS ☙ Thursday, February 26, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Gates apologizes (again) for Epstein ties, admits affairs with Russian women; Democrats throw rubber marital appliances at alt-SOTU; Florida and the Senate advance toward voter ID; Thursday fire; more

Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! Your roundup includes: Bill Gates finally apologized to his Foundation employees for the Epstein ‘thing’ —for the fourth time while admitting to affairs with two Russian women that a convicted sex trafficker used as blackmail leverage (nothing illicit though, trust me!). The Democrats’ official SOTU counterprogramming: the ‘State of the Swamp,’ featuring grown adults in frog costumes throwing rubber appendages at a TV screen while Robert De Niro compared loving America to spousal abuse ($99 tickets, $1,000 for the frog suit upgrade). Finally, voter ID is coming — Florida just passed proof-of-citizenship requirements 83-31, the SAVE Act is headed for a Senate showdown, and Democrats are warning that married women might not survive the paperwork.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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For years, Microsoft founder, woke-values preacher, and psychopathic philanthropist Bill Gates terrified young freedom lovers worldwide. He pushed vaccines globally, invested in Moderna starting in 2016, bought into BioNTech in 2019, and otherwise credibly impersonated Mr. Burns from the Simpson’s. Yesterday, CBS reported, “Bill Gates apologizes to Gates Foundation staff over Epstein ties, admits to having affairs.” Now that the Epstein files have fertilized the soil of disclosure, regret is once again blooming.

He’s sorry. “It was a huge mistake to spend time with Epstein,” Gates reportedly told Foundation employees Tuesday in a town hall-style crisis management meeting intended to rally the troops and staunch the organization’s bleeding-out morale. “I apologize to other people who are drawn into this because of the mistake that I made.” It was only a huge mistake, like turning the wrong way on the GPS. “I did nothing illicit,” Gates insisted.

I think he must have meant illegal, not illicit. He admitted to adultery, which isn’t illegal in most states. ‘Illicit’ is broader, and means “forbidden by law, rules, or custom.” Rules and customs over adultery are mentioned in passing in several obscure and hard-to-find sources like the Holy Bible. I think it makes a cameo appearance late in the Ten Commandments, too, if I am not mistaken. So even just the parts he’s admitting to were textbook ‘illicit.’

And calling three years of canoodling and visits a “mistake” is like calling a three-year gym membership an accident. Somebody needs to help him with his vocabulary.

🔥 Anyway. He wasn’t finished. “I saw nothing illicit,” he also protested, weakly, convincing no one. Sergeant Schultz would like a word.

Gates apologized specifically for cozying up to the notorious pedophile and for having two affairs with young Russian women. Mark that. The untimely apology arrived roughly seven years after Epstein’s death, five years after Gates’s divorce, three years after the WSJ exposed the extortion attempt, and less than a month after the DOJ released files proving everything the vaccine billionaire had previously denied.

Explaining his long relationship with Epstein after Epstein’s first arrest and guilty plea, Gates told Foundation staff he was dimly aware of “some 18-month thing” that had limited Epstein’s travel, but insisted he’d failed to “thoroughly vet his background.” Hey, these 18-month travel restrictions happen to all of us from time to time. Best not to ask questions. The “18-month thing” was no big deal. Just a prison sentence for procuring a child for prostitution. He called that “a thing.”

In other words, Gates, who wrote the world’s most common computer operating system, and pretends to be a tech superstar, expects people to believe he couldn’t work a search engine. It’s so complicated. Where do you put the words in? Or maybe it’s that, under the Gates Non-Illicit Standard, you don’t need to Google the convicted sex offender you keep having dinner with, so long as the philanthropy conversation is interesting.

🔥 He generously gave credit to his ex-wife Melinda (she cleaned up in the divorce), “who was always kind of skeptical” of Epstein. “Skeptical” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Most wives are “skeptical” when their husband keeps visiting a convicted sex offender. The word she probably used instead was shorter and inappropriate for a family blog.

“Knowing what I know now,” Gates told them, “makes it, you know, a hundred times worse in terms of not only his crimes in the past, but now it’s clear there was ongoing bad behavior.” Now. Now it’s clear. Now that the files are out. Now that everybody knows what Bill knows. Now that the party is over. Now that it’s time for elite panic.

This was Gates’s fourth Epstein apology since 2019. At some point, the word ‘sorry’ just means ‘you found more documents.’ His apology tour has a firmer release schedule than a Netflix series. Sadly, the truth is he’s not confessing. He just keeps adjusting his story to the available evidence.

Hope springs eternal. Divorced, publicly shamed, canceling AI conference keynotes, and groveling before his employees, Gates added, “the more that comes out, the more clear it’ll be that it had nothing to do with that kind of behavior.” Very hopeful framing. Most innocent people don’t need to wait for evidence to gradually exonerate them. Trust me, bro!

🔥 Now for the Russian dolls. At Tuesday’s town hall, Gates admitted —and why not, everybody knows now— that he “did have affairs, one with a Russian bridge player who met me at bridge events, and one with a Russian nuclear physicist who I met through business activities.” I loved her for her brilliant mind, and we connected over our shared interest in science; she in atoms, me in sterilizing African babies. But it sounds less like two affairs and more like the cast from a John Le Carré screenplay.

Democrats spent 2016-2020 screaming about Russian connections. Mueller! Impeachment! Impeachment again! Bugged soccer balls! “Russia Russia Russia!” President Trump was supposedly compromised by wily Russian actors. And here comes Bill Gates —the Democratic donor class’s favorite philanthropist— admitting to affairs with two attractive young Russian women that a convicted sex trafficker discovered and used as blackmail leverage.

That’s not two ‘affairs.’ That’s a textbook kompromat scenario.

Imagine if Donald Trump held a staff meeting and admitted to two affairs with Russian women that a convicted sex trafficker later used to try to extort him. We wouldn’t be on impeachment three— we’d be on impeachment seven. CNN would have a countdown clock. Don Lemon would still be on the air. But when it’s Bill Gates, corporate media calls it ‘speaking candidly.’

Gates isn’t just any old billionaire. He meets with world leaders, influences billions in global spending, and advises the UN, the WHO, and innumerable governments on health policy. His massively expensive divorce followed dalliances with only Russian women. Why aren’t Democrats asking whether Bill Gates is Putin’s plaything? It’s almost like they don’t care.

Were Mila Antonova (the bridge player) and the nuclear physicist ever cleared for intelligence connections? Did Bill vet them with the same intensity that he vetted his convicted sex offender buddy, Jeffrey? Our elite class is compromised in every sense of that word.

Bill Gates debugged DOS from a garage. He built an empire on finding and fixing errors. But somehow, the illicit error he can’t seem to find is the one staring back at him from the Epstein flight logs. Maybe he needs to update his moral operating system.

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Yesterday, while President Trump was awarding the Medal of Honor to a 100-year-old Navy combat pilot inside the Capitol, boycotting Democrats were across town at the National Press Club— at an event they called, and I am not making this up, how could I, the “State of the Swamp.” The Atlantic ran an absolutely perfect piece headlined, “The Democrats Who Got Weird During the State of the Union.” It was packed with swamp creatures.

The National Press Club event —organized by Defiance.org and something called the “Portland Frog Brigade”— featured adult humans dressed in inflatable frog costumes, a man in a giraffe suit twerking onstage, and, according to the Atlantic, a crowd that spent the evening throwing rubber marital aids at a television screen showing the President’s SOTU speech.

The message was unclear. If it’s some kind of sex joke, I don’t get it. I’m not sure I want to know.

Washed-up actor Robert De Niro was there. Former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams was there. Hulk actor Mark Ruffalo and CNN Anchor Jim Acosta were there. Sitting United States senators were there. The giraffe man —a “performance artist” stage-named Robby Roadmaster who boasted of being arrested by ICE three times— twerked, sang a little anti-ICE folk ditty into his harmonica, and bragged about doing time. Not enough time, obviously.

Combined with the “People’s State of the Union” that I mentioned yesterday (held outside in the freezing cold on the National Mall), this spectacle was the donkey party’s official counterprogramming. While Republicans were giving standing ovations for a veteran who single-handedly fought seven Soviet MiG-15 fighter jets over North Korea in 1952, Democrats were giving standing ovations at an event named for the “Swamp” in “joyful, radical, peaceful resistance” with a guy in a frog costume who calls himself “a proud Antifa terrorist.”

It’s not entirely clear what, exactly, the event was meant to accomplish. “According to organizers,” the Atlantic said, “the gathering was an effort to give Democrats a new, albeit bizarre and often crass, way to push back.” But how? The Atlantic compared the State of the Swamp to TPUSA’s alternative Super Bowl halftime show, as if national politics were just another kind of sporting event. A crude one. “The crude and confrontational approach was a central part of the message and has become a dominant aspect of the broader anti-Trump effort,” the article explained.

Toward the end of the event, an aging De Niro, 82, exhorted the crowd that “in the current climate, declaring love for our country is like an abused spouse professing love for their abuser!” He repeatedly asked the attendees if they could love a country that had adopted so many of Trump’s policies. “No!” the audience yelled back.

“Tickets for the event, which organizers said sold out, started at $99,” the Atlantic explained. “VIP tickets started at $1,000, received a full frog suit, and had access to a VIP meet and greet where they could mingle with Resistance figures.” The article didn’t say, but other sources reported that about 600 folks attended the gala Swamp event. Does that seem like a lot to you? My research suggests 600 is a ‘meh’ turnout for a National Press Club event.

Maybe the era of grown men wearing children’s Halloween costumes in February and tossing silicone schlongs is finally losing its rubbery luster. We can hope.

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The SAVE Act is poised for a possible vote in the Senate next week (more on that in a moment). Meanwhile, yesterday, Democracy Docket ran an unintentionally terrific story headlined, “With SAVE America Act stalled, Florida House passes its own version.” The reporter sneered at Florida’s effort as “a voter-suppression bill,” and included several hysterical (and delicious) quotes.

“The Florida House of Representatives voted 83-31 Wednesday,” Democracy Docket reported, “to move forward with a sweeping voter suppression bill that could disenfranchise tens of thousands of Floridians, at least, by creating new requirements for citizenship checks.”

Under the bill, residents cannot register to vote unless the state DMV database verifies their citizenship or they provide proof of citizenship. The bill would also require the state to verify the citizenship status of all existing voters and eliminate some forms of I.D. that voters can currently use to verify their identity at the polls (if you can believe this). Floridians, for instance, could no longer use debit or credit cards, student IDs, or retirement center, neighborhood association, or public assistance identification.

Oh, no! It is literally the worst, most racist and sexist thing ever.

State Representative RaShon Young (D-Orange) warned darkly about serious consequences. “This is fearmongering and disenfranchisement and voter suppression dressed up as security,” he bleated loquaciously. “This is modern-day gatekeeping and bureaucratic obstruction, administrative overreach, and poll tax by paperwork.”

Florida isn’t alone. Other red states have enacted similar state-level proof-of-citizenship laws, including Arizona, New Hampshire, Louisiana, Wyoming, Indiana, and Ohio. Other states are currently considering similar legislation, including Utah, South Dakota, and Missouri. (Texas tried and failed to pass a citizenship bill last June. Maybe Texans should try again.)

The Florida House’s version of the bill would become effective in January 2027. But the companion bill pending in the Florida Senate would take effect this July, before the November midterm elections.

Ladies, guess who’ll be hardest hit? “Married women who have changed their last names could be among the most impacted by the legislation,” the Docket warned breathlessly. Whatever will they do? The problem is just too difficult for girls to solve. It’s hopeless.

🔥 Late last night, the New York Times ran a silly story headlined, “Trump Leans on Congress to Address His False Claims of Voter Fraud.” No bias there! The subheadline explained, “The president used his State of the Union speech to call for action on election security legislation, pressuring the G.O.P. to push it through over Democratic opposition.”

Like Florida’s bill, but on a national level, the SAVE America Act would require Americans to show proof of citizenship when registering to vote, require voters to show real photo ID to cast ballots in federal elections, and grant DHS access to states’ voter rolls for compliance checks.

Trump also pressed Congress to end the use of mail-in ballots “except for illness, disability, military, or travel.” The House passed its version of the bill two weeks ago, including the ID and citizenship requirements, but without new restrictions on mail-in ballots.

“They want to cheat,” President Trump said during the State of the Union, looking straight at the Democrats. “They have cheated. And their policy is so bad that the only way they can get elected is to cheat.” One wonders what policy the President was referring to; do the Democrats have a policy?

The Times repeated Democracy Docket’s talking point about women who can’t manage to get proper ID. “Many Democrats,” the Times patiently explained, “have pointed in particular to women whose birth certificates or passports do not reflect their married names, arguing that the paperwork required for them to vote would be overly burdensome.” In other words: It’s too hard!

“Trump’s lies are a desperate attempt to rig the midterm elections and cling to power,” Representative Joseph D. Morelle (D-NY) added, without evidence.

The rubber is about to meet the road. Irresistible pressure is building on the Senate to act. What nobody knows is whether Senate Majority Leader John Thune will require a ‘talking filibuster,’ which is the only realistic way that the SAVE Act could pass. It has a constitutional majority of 51 Senators, but a relatively recent Senate rule allows any Democrat to permanently stall any bill with fewer than 60 votes.

The vote is not yet scheduled. If Thune does require a talking filibuster —something he probably and wisely won’t announce until that precise moment— all Hades will break loose. Everyone seems to think the midterms depend on this vote. Either way, the temperature is about to get incandescent, and I, for one, am here for it, with microwave popcorn ready at hand.

Have a terrific Thursday! Return here tomorrow, same time and place, for more classic C&C-style essential news and commentary.

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