☕️ SHOCK THERAPY ☙ Monday, June 10, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Shocking Maryland pageant winner; shocking New York Times double, anti-narrative op-eds; shocking European elections developments; and more.

Good morning C&C, it’s Monday! Your roundup-from-the-road this morning includes: Maryland transforms the standard of feminine beauty; New York Times double op-ed shatters narratives, and it’s great progress, but was it legit or just a limited hangout?; and French President Macron suddenly and unexpectedly dissolves the government, hoping to assemble a better one — and it might be another terrific sign.

🗞 THE C&C ARMY POST 🗞

🪖 Attention Facebook readers: it looks like election censorship is underway again. I’ve received two takedown notices this month so far, and if there’s a third, then Coffee & Covid may languish in Facebook jail for a while. Fortunately, there are several other places where you can get your fix. Now might be a good time to bookmark www.coffeeandcovid.com.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥🔥 Maryland’s most magnificent ‘Miss’ is a Mister. The Federalist ran a brutally honest headline Friday, captioned “As Miss Maryland, This Man In A Dress Will Interact With Kids.” It happened again.

This year’s pageant saw an intensely competitive field. Lots of lovely ladies tried out, each vying for the top scores in poise, beauty, and most of all, femininity. Last Thursday, out of all the beautiful women who competed, the Miss Maryland USA Pageant crowned the very best man as Miss Maryland.

And having earned his crown, he vows to use his new title to help achieve world peace.

Bailey Ann lives the way he imagines a woman would, and according to Bailey’s social media accounts, is also connected in several key ways to our U.S. military. Bailey claims to be married to an active-duty Marine, and works for (or with) the USO, of course, the DOD’s troop morale-boosting department.

Doing exactly what to boost the troops’ morale is left to one’s imagination, since Bailey’s Instagram does not explain.

Here’s Bailey, according to the Instagram caption, with Commander Robert P. "Shooter" Stochel, and receiving some kind of award. Bailey is the one in the white dress, standing next to the grinning red-haired man claimed as the husband:

Who are we to judge? But, buh bye ladies! Trans women (i.e., men) are stronger, faster, and there’s no mansplaining required.  And, how handy!

Bailey next proceeds to the Miss USA pageant, scheduled for August 4th in Los Angeles. Get ready! That’s August, 2024. So, you know.

🔥🔥 Last Sunday, the New York Times juxtaposed two remarkable op-eds on the same page, not accidentally, which were so astonishing it’s worth showing the actual pages from the print edition. The opinion pieces were respectively headlined, “Why Covid Probably Started in a Lab,” and “An Object Lesson on How to Destroy Public Trust.” Indeed.

That wasn’t all! The two op-eds featured their own full-length cover page:

Here’s that centered, supremely ironic headline, but a little bigger so you can read it clearly:

At first, I thought they must be joking. Can we finally have an honest conversation about covid?  First of all, who has been stopping that honest conversation from happening? The New York Times, among others! And second, the headline clearly implies the previous conversations weren’t honest.

Who has been lying? I’ll let you answer that one.

The first author attempted to answer those questions. Dr. Alina Chan, a molecular biologist at M.I.T. and Harvard, and co-author of “Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19,” blamed all the confusion on reflexive partisan politics:

Next, the Times’ mind-controlled readers finally read what we’ve been trying desperately to tell them for almost four years—science created this historic catastrophe:

Folks, it’s slow, but we are making progress. I could quibble about the specifics, and the narrative framing, but it was all there in the op-ed. Though Dr. Chan was careful to point the finger of blame back at the Chinese, Dr. Ralph Baric, the North Carolina researcher squatting at the middle of the controversy, was named five times. He was not blamed so much as used as undisclosed evidence of lab origin:

Though China took center stage, the piece didn’t quite let the U.S. completely off the hook either. Dr. Chan clearly connected U.S. funding and research priorities to the pandemic, and even (gently) called out the NIAID’s top human cockroach and beagle torturer, Fauci:

Remarkably, there was more in Dr. Chan’s piece that I agreed with than disagreed with (though she could have gone much further).

The connected companion op-ed about lost trust in science was authored by Princeton professor and regular Times opinion columnist Zeynep Tufekci. It was equally honest — at least, as honest as we’ve yet seen in corporate media to date. Tufecki first blamed government officials as the ones who created the covid confusion, and she didn’t accept it was any accident:

Times readers may have ignored last week’s Congressional hearings, but now they’re reading about the low-lights. Things are heating up. Professor Tufekci outright rejected the pathetic official excuse that we didn’t know what we didn’t know, but did the best we could at the time. She called government officials (i.e., Fauci) arrogant and obstinate cowards:

Tufecki is no conspiracy-minded conservative. The Professor is an ardent pro-masker, a voluntary quarantiner, and a vaccine aficionado, admitting she “gleefully rolled up” her sleeve to get the shots. Gleefully.

So it was all the more remarkable that she echoed Coffee & Covid, decrying the pandemic’s “paternalistic, infantilizing government messaging” and calling, in her own way, for truth, transparency, and trust:

The 1,600 comments to Dr. Tufecki’s op-ed give great insight into the average Times reader’s stubborn mentality. Most commenters completely missed the point, making the elitist argument that, notwithstanding bad public messaging, they themselves always knew what was really going on, thanks to “serious” media like the Times.

Insert massive eye roll.

Here’s a typical example, a short exchange in the comments between an outraged commenter and the feisty Professor, who shot right back, comparing Atutu to an anti-vaxxer:

Professor Tupekci’s op-ed caused many commenters to bristle with barely concealed rage. They doggedly insisted that calling out the pandemic’s mistakes was unfair armchair quarterbacking, and was downright harmful to the narrative. Here’s one commenter, Elizabeth:

I included this taste of the comments because they highlighted the real problem, which is the zany zeitgeist or demonic spirit of the age. The fundamental trouble comes from the big group of folks who still believe, ipso facto, that government cannot ever err.

It is tempting to blame partisan politics, as Dr. Chan did. After all, it’s mostly leftists who’ve defensively circled the wagons around lying government officials. But politics is downstream from culture.  What about personal health decisions could possibly be political?

In fact, before the pandemic, it was the left-leaning, crunchy granola folks who were always most likely to favor alternative medicines and employee rights. But the pandemic’s wrecking ball knocked normal politics askew, and now it’s all backwards and upside down.

If politics is downstream from culture, then to fix politics, we must first fix the culture. Even if fixing culture is vexingly difficult, the phenomenon is well known. In 1841, in his seminal book “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” Charles Mackay famously noted, “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”

If covid isn’t an extraordinary popular delusion, then I am a spicy pepperoni Hot Pocket. For whatever reason, good or bad, limited hangout or genuine contrition, the New York Times seems to be slowly recovering its senses. And I’m counting that as progress.

📉📉 CNN ran a similarly remarkable story yesterday headlined, “Macron gambles on snap election after crushing loss to French far right in EU vote.”

This week, the European Union member states, including France, are holding their five-year EU parliament elections, which elect each country’s representatives (called MEPs) to the EU parliament.

France is one of the first EU countries to finish. In a profound shock to European globalists, yesterday Marine Le Pen’s “far-right” National Rally party won 32% of the vote, more than double what French President Macron's far-left Renaissance party received (15%).

In what most people thought was just a publicity stunt, Le Pen called for Macron to dissolve France’s parliament, arguing the results showed France’s current government was out of touch with the people. She surely did not expect him to do it. But in another shocking development, Macron did just that, and dissolved France’s government, teeing up emergency elections to form a new internal French parliament.

To give you an idea, France last dissolved its parliament over 25 years ago, in 1997.

Macron hopes that the emergency election of a new parliament will swing his way and that the shock of Le Pen’s victory in the EU election will galvanize the left and center to vote for stability instead of change. Maybe he frets that, if he waits, France will drift even further rightwards. Whatever the reason, the snap election is a high-stakes gamble that could either shore up Macron's position, or weaken him significantly, depending on how French voters respond.

It’s the globalist’s favorite trick: make them vote again.

The French results, while shocking, should not surprise anyone. In January, EuroNews ran an eye-opening story headlined, “Right-wing populists could control EU Parliament after election: study.” European globalists fret that the EU’s climate schemes and Ukraine policies could be slowed or even, perish the thought, reversed.

If you want, you could also view this surprising trend in the same light as European political developments back in 2016. The anti-globalist Brexit movement in Great Britain became an early warning signal of Trump’s election. These results in France, while not quite as politically dynamite as Brexit, are perhaps comparable. We don’t yet know how the rest of the EU elections will turn out, but everyone is on pins and needles to find out.

Despite the globalists’ historic, secretive worldwide war of resistance, the counter-revolution continues taking territory.

Have a marvelous Monday! I’ll be back with another vacation roundup tomorrow morning. Next week, we’ll return to the regular schedule of snarky commentary.

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