☕️SINKING CRED ☙ Thursday, April 9, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS🦠

NYT claims America lost the war; NATO chief thanks Trump on CNN; DOJ investigates LA schools post-Mirabelli; Dr. Oz revokes fraud doc's billing; fertility hits record low. More.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! Your roundup includes: NYT’s absurd “Suez moment” cope vs. NATO’s Rutte thanking Trump on CNN; DOJ tests Mirabelli against LA schools’ gender secrecy policies; Dr. Oz update on the “overworked” hospice fraud doc; and America’s fertility crisis gets the full C&C treatment.

⛑️ C&C ARMY BRIEFING — MORNING MONOLOGUE ⛑️

I am pleased to report that we C&Cers aren’t barking in the wilderness anymore. We are no longer the only ones noticing that President Trump has been working from a long-term plan, as though directing construction from a complicated blueprint. More and more, people are starting to connect the dots we’ve long seen. Two quick examples.

On Tuesday, UK’s GB News (a conservative outlet) ran a segment connecting the “impeccable timing” of both the Venezuela and Iranian operations. “America is now controlling the vast swathes of oil that China needs; Europe is also getting hit hard,” anchor Alex Armstrong said. “That puts America in a very strong position.”

CLIP: GB News’ Alex Armstrong lays out Trump’s long-term master plan (5:50).

Armstrong also connected the dots from oil supremacy to US withdrawal from NATO, to a revived American continent, and even to Greenland. He ended by warning that Britain risked entering a new dark age, although, let’s be honest, how would you tell? “If you think all of that looks like America losing,” Armstrong said, “then you’ll hate to see what winning looks like.”

Also on Tuesday, Victor Davis Hanson (also a rock-ribbed conservative) described how the Trump Doctrine has —in a single year!— successfully purged America’s two geopolitical opponents from the most difficult and sensitive places on the globe. (To be fair, VDH has been a consistent voice noticing a thread of logic connecting Trump’s first year. But he’s putting it all together now.)

CLIP: Victor Davis Hanson explains how Trump has successfully evicted China from Latin America and Russia from the Middle East (2:16).

“Our Chinese and Russian adversaries are in a much weaker position,” Hanson explained. “They’ve seen the display of American expertise. It’s a deterrent factor.”

True, but it’s not just a deterrent factor. It is also a degrading factor. How about the so-called BRICS? Remember them? (Portlanders: BRICS is the rival economic bloc started by Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.) Nearly Biden’s entire term was a noisy drumline hammering away about BRICS. BRICS is making a new digital payment system. BRICS is adding more member countries. BRICS is having another swanky conference and the U.S. isn’t invited. BRICS this, BRICS that.

You don’t hear too much about the BRICS these days. It’s practically passé.

That wasn’t an accident. Last summer, Trump threatened countries supporting BRICS: “Any Country aligning themselves with the Anti-American policies of BRICS, will be charged an ADDITIONAL 10% Tariff. There will be no exceptions to this policy.” The result: not one country has joined BRICS since Trump issued his threat. India’s Prime Minister Modi quietly rebranded BRICS to ‘Building Resilience and Innovation for Cooperation and Sustainability.’

The party is over. Good luck finding any trad-media recognizing that achievement.

In a Charlie Brown sort of way, we conservatives keep falling into an approval trap. We keep hoping that corporate media platforms will one day recognize how much the President has actually won, that he’s not just winging it, or that a former real-estate developer was actually the quintessential choice to lead America into a cultural, economic, and military renaissance.

The hard truth is: they will die screaming before they cough up one syllable of praise. It will never ever happen. We must release that forlorn hope. They will resist to the bitter end, no matter how cheap gas, rent, and eggs get. Eggs could be free— and they would still complain. That’s why the modern Democrat party must be dismantled, since it has shifted so far leftwards, so fast, that physicists call it a blue-shift.

Instead, we need to beat back the buffoonish left-wing narratives and collect conservatives onto the same intellectual continent, if not into a neighborhood of agreement. And it increasingly looks like our mission to do just that is working. Smart people and social media chatterers are finally beginning to recognize that Trump isn’t just winging it. (Here’s another example: “Trump is on an all-time run.”)

Progress.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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The New York Times, unsurprisingly, has a different take. Yesterday, it ran a story declaring not just that Trump “lost” the Iran War, but that the cease-fire —a ceasefire it relentlessly demanded!— proves America is in a civilizational slump. The headline blared, “A Cease-Fire for Now in Iran, but a Blow to American Credibility.” The sub-headline warned, “Critics wonder if this is America’s ‘Suez moment,’ when a leading power signals the start of its international decline.”

The Times sneeringly began with the argument that “the war against Iran was not begun in consultation with allies,” as if this were a self‑evident indictment of U.S. behavior. But it never specified which allies, what level of consultation would have been sufficient, or why such consultation was normatively required.

In reality, key Middle Eastern partners were deeply involved: Gulf states and Israel were in intensive contact with Washington throughout the crisis leading up to the war, with some regional leaders privately urging Trump to keep fighting until Iran was “decisively defeated” and pressing him on cease‑fire terms.

The Times’ lame complaint about a ‘lack of consultation’ may capture the frustrations of some easily offended European governments. Yet, by dropping any qualifier and simply saying “allies,” the article rhetorically conflated a region‑specific grievance into a sweeping indictment. In the process, it erased the documented, real‑time coordination that helped produce the pro‑U.S. alignment across the entire Middle East.

But the worst part was the Times’ conclusion from this weak premise: that America is experiencing a “Suez moment.” It compared the Iran War to the decline and fall of the British Empire. Comparing Trump’s Iran win to Britain’s Suez humiliation is like comparing a championship trophy to a participation ribbon — one of these things ended an empire, and the other just expanded one.

Instead of recognizing any of the war’s effects on improving American fortunes —such as weakening China, cementing U.S. control over European energy supply, and crippling Iran’s regional influence— the Times quoted one of its generic experts who opined, “There has never been a time when the United States was more distrusted, by both traditional friends and by rivals, as at the present.”

The Times also picked a bunch of lame think-tank ‘experts’ nobody has ever heard of, while stubbornly refusing to quote actual policymakers, like NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, who appeared on CNN yesterday with Jake Tapper. Tapper asked Rutte, “Is the world safer today than before the war started?”

Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) 3K likes · 94 replies

Rutte immediately answered, “Absolutely! Thanks to President Trump’s leadership, degrading Iran’s capabilities is really, really, very important for your and my safety, here in the US, in Europe, and in the Middle East.” Rutte’s comments directly negated the Times’ ridiculous claim that “there has never been a time when the U.S. was more distrusted than the present.”

In the longer clip, Rutte went even further. “I support the president when it comes to taking out the capacity of Iran to export chaos,” the Secretary General said. He took a remarkably conciliatory tone; it was anything but distrustful or resentful of not being consulted. “It is true, not all European nations lived up to those commitments,” he added, admitting, “President Trump is clearly disappointed with many NATO allies, and I can see his point.”

Whatever European process norms might have been strained, NATO’s own secretary general isn’t acting like a man furious about not being consulted; instead, he’s on CNN thanking Trump for making the world ‘absolutely’ safer. The Times might’ve mentioned it.

The credibility gap between the New York Times and reality is getting wider than the Strait of Hormuz.

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The recent Supreme Court case banning schools from misleading parents about their children’s gender dysphoria is bearing fruit. Yesterday, the New York Times reported, “Trump Administration Investigating L.A. Schools’ Gender Disclosure Policies.” LA County school district is now forced to rely on the worst possible argument: we were following the law as we understood it, before the Supreme Court ruled it was unconstitutional.

It’s a terrible argument. It’s like a teenager saying you never told me I couldn’t take the car when I wanted to.

To remind you, I reported the terrific decision back in March. The Supreme Court’s Mirabelli v. Bonta decision held that California cannot bar schools or teachers from telling parents when a child is experiencing symptoms of gender dysphoria at school or require staff to hide it, because that likely violates parents’ constitutional right to direct their children’s upbringing and, for religious families, their free exercise of religion. In the Court’s words:

Parents—not the State—have primary authority with respect to ‘the upbringing and education of children.’ The right protected by these precedents includes the right not to be shut out of participation in decisions regarding their children’s mental health.

The DOJ’s Civil Rights division is now testing whether LAUSD’s “secrecy” framework can and longer survive in a legal world where the Supreme Court has already said schools may not hide or facilitate a student’s social gender transition while keeping parents in the dark. (Looks like a hard ‘no.’)

Yesterday, Trump’s Justice Department announced a new civil‑rights investigation into the Los Angeles Unified School District’s 2019 gender‑identity policy, the first major test of how Mirabelli will be applied to on‑the‑ground school practices. At issue is whether LAUSD’s directive —telling staff to let students socially transition at school while deciding “case by case” whether to inform parents— violates the newly reinforced constitutional rule that schools may not keep parents in the dark about such transitions absent a concrete safety justification.

Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights (and covid superlawyer) Harmeet Dhillon cast the investigation as a direct enforcement of Mirabelli’s parental‑rights framework. “Parents have a fundamental right to the care, custody and control of their children,” Dhillion said. “Including the right to direct their children’s upbringing and education,” she added. The DOJ “will not tolerate policies that deny parents’ fundamental rights.”

The Times garbage piece treated the news as another “Trump vs. trans students” skirmish and somehow missed that, after Mirabelli, it’s fundamentally a parental‑rights and separation‑of‑powers story, not just a culture‑war flare‑up. Indeed, the name Mirabelli was AWOL from the story. Ignoring the recent SCOTUS decision let the Times frame the DOJ probe as an aggressive new Trump move, rather than the DOJ testing LAUSD’s policy against a fresh, controlling constitutional signal.

It takes a special kind of talent to write a story about a Supreme Court enforcement action without mentioning the Supreme Court case itself. I’ll predict that the Times will soon be running a new followup story including the words, in the latest setback for trans rights…

More progress.

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UPDATE: On the same day CBS ran the story about how overworked hospice doctor Rajiv Bhuva had nearly 3,000 terminally ill patients who apparently live forever, CMS Director Dr. Oz reported that Bhuva’s Medicare billing account was revoked last month. So, when CBS reporters knocked on Dr. Bhuva’s door, and he said “there’s nothing illegal,” he also didn’t mention that he’s no longer allowed to bill the federal government.

In my law experience, canceling billing privileges is the very first thing the feds do. I haven’t been involved in many Medicare fraud prosecutions, but I’ve occasionally run into them. Defense lawyers have told me the DOJ has five years to bring criminal charges and usually waits till right before the deadline to file.

That means dirty doctors must walk around nervously for five years after getting the initial notice, waiting for the indictment to drop. But I can’t shake the feeling that Dr. Bhuva will not need to wait that long this time.

Will the DOJ’s new fraud initiative disrupt Democrat fundraising for the midterms? Between Blanche’s 8,000 active fraud cases and Dr. Oz’s CMS revocations, someone’s donor rolodex is about to get a lot shorter. I can’t wait for someone to unearth Dr. Bhuva’s donation records.

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We still have work to do. Maybe the most important work of all. Fortunately, it’s the fun kind. Yesterday, the New York Times ran an alarming story headlined, “U.S. Fertility Rates Drop to Another Record Low.”

“The fertility rate has been falling since 2007,” the Times reported, “a trend that has become something of a demographic mystery.” Experts baffled! There is a terrifying new report out from the federal government, and for once, it is not about the national debt, oil prices, or the sudden, unexplained disappearance of all the good flavors of Doritos.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention —an agency that, when it’s not pushing sketchy jab products, usually spends its time telling us not to overeat raw cookie dough, which is frankly none of their business— the United States fertility rate has dropped to an all-time, record-breaking low.

In 2025, there were only about 53 live births for every 1,000 women of reproductive age. The total number of babies born was around 3.6 million. Now, 3.6 million babies might sound like a lot, especially if you have ever been seated near just one of them on a cross-country flight. But statistically speaking, it is a disaster.

Bizarrely, the Times blamed teenagers. “The fertility rate for teenagers dropped by 7 percent from 2024’s figure, setting another record low for the group.” I’m old enough to remember when we were trying to stop teenagers from making babies.

Economists, who are people paid to worry about things using math, tell us that we need a “replacement rate” of 2.1 children per woman just to keep the population stable. (It’s not clear how the .1 kids fit into car seats.) We are currently well below that rate. We are not replacing ourselves. We are slowly phasing ourselves out, like vinyl records, the McRib, or basic common sense.

The mainstream media, of course, has decided that this is actually wonderful news. The experts quoted in the Times and other major trad-platforms were doing intellectual backflips to explain why having no children is actually a stroke of economic genius.

One Ivy League professor argued that having fewer kids is great because we can “invest more in the quality of each child.” Yes, he used the word “quality.” Because children are apparently like flat-screen televisions. You don’t want five dinky, blurry ones; you want one massive, high-definition plasma unit that can connect to the Wi-Fi and eventually get into Georgetown.

These experts argue that, with fewer children, parents can spend more money on essential developmental tools, like organic, locally sourced wooden blocks, and private cello lessons for toddlers. They also argue that fewer people are better for the planet, because a smaller population emits less carbon, consumes fewer resources, and produces fewer survival-based reality television shows. (‘The planet’ was unavailable for comment.)

But out here in the real world, where we actually need young people to eventually take over paying for stuff like Social Security and Medicare, the math is looking grim.

Here is how Social Security works: You toil in a job for your entire life, the government takes a regular chunk of your paycheck, and they promise to give it back to you when you are too old to remember where you put your reading glasses. But they don’t actually put your money in a vault. Don’t be silly. They immediately invest it in things like studying the inclusivity of Peruvian tree frogs and speculative Somalian daycare schemes.

So, to pay us back, they need a constant influx of young, working people to pay taxes. It is often called a federally mandated Ponzi scheme, but with worse hold music when you call customer service.

When we stop having babies, we start running out of young people. It’s not complicated. And when we run out of young people, there is nobody left to pay into the system. As of 2024, retirees already outnumber children in nearly half of U.S. counties. We are rapidly approaching a demographic cliff where the entire American economy will consist of 85-year-olds trying to pay each other in butterscotch candies.

👶 So, why are Americans not having kids? (It’s not just America. But it is also America.)

The baffled experts gas on about “economic anxiety” and “climate change” and the fact that college tuition now costs roughly the same as a medium-sized nuclear submarine. But those are also the same experts who are constantly creating the anxiety about climate change. Spending twenty years telling people that having kids is an environmental crime, then acting surprised when they stop is peak expert.

I suspect the real reason is much simpler: Have you met children lately?

They are exhausting. They require constant supervision, they refuse to eat anything that isn’t shaped like a dinosaur —even chicken nuggets— and they are legally required to throw a tantrum in the middle of Target. Raising a child today means navigating a terrifying gauntlet of screen-time limits, peanut allergies, school boards, drag queen story hours, vaccine mandates, and modern math homework, which no longer uses numbers, but instead relies on a system of abstract shapes that represent the cosines of emotional feelings.

In the old days, people had large families because they needed ‘hands’ to work the family farm. Today, if you ask most teenagers to weed the garden, they will look at you in flabbergasted astonishment, like you just asked them to translate the Rosetta Stone without their cell phone.

Some politicians are floating big ideas. There is talk of “baby bonuses” and federal tax credits. But let’s be honest: If you are the kind of person who decides whether or not to create a human life based on a $5,000 tax credit (* results may vary), you probably shouldn’t be in charge of a virtual cartoon hamster, let alone a baby.

The truth is, raising a family is an act of profound optimism. It is a statement that, despite the inflation, the crazy politicians, and the fact that they keep canceling all the good TV shows, the future is still worth investing in. We need more optimism. And more babymaking.

So, do your part for America. Have a kid. Or at the very least, try harder. You might like it.

Have a terrific Thursday! When you finish babymaking practice, swing back here in the morning for another installment of essential news and C&C 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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