☕️ SMITH AND LESSON ☙ Friday, September 5, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Kennedy spanks Senate, mandates sink, FDA opens denial letters, Eleventh Circuit frees Alligator Alcatraz, Delta tilts sane, blue states bolt CDC, DOJ teases trans gun bans—don’t bite; more.

Good morning, C&C family, it’s Friday! Your roundup today includes: Kennedy hearings backfire on Democrats and the HHS Secretary emerges unscathed, more popular than ever, and in fighting form; mandates less popular than ever; FDA continues transparency push and opens drug denial letters to public review; Eleventh Circuit squashes federal judge injunction and Alligator Alcatraz is re-opened for business; Delta —the U.S.’s best airline— tilts back toward sanity; more blue states secede from the CDC union; and the DOJ sparks a firestorm of Second Amendment fury after teasing transgender gun bans— conservatives shouldn’t take the bait. It’s for someone else.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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As Charlie Brown would say, Good grief. The New York Times reported yesterday’s Senate hearing below the halfhearted headline, “RFK Jr. Faces Senate Grilling After Vaccine Changes and C.D.C. Shake-Up.” Let’s just say that American government was not in peak form yesterday. Even the Times called it a “free-for-all.”

CLIP: “We are the sickest country in the world. That’s why we have to fire people at the CDC. They did not do their job.” (0:15) (Warning: the young lady’s facial expressions will make you crush on her.)

In yesterday’s hours-long, live-streamed hearing, Democrat Senators screamed shrilly, called Kennedy names, heaved invective like angry orangutans flinging feces at tourists, petulantly demanded he quit, and delivered fiery, rambling, and illogical speeches disguised as questions. It was like watching a bare-faced guy in a MAGA cap who was going the wrong way down the grocery aisle accidentally encounter six middle-aged women buying supplies for a pro-masking protest.

The fur flew.

But Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has spent twenty years dodging pharma’s slings and arrows as an antivaxx pariah. He punched back. In one exemplitive exchange, Senator Ron Wyden (D-Portland), who looks and sounds like a hairless cat, clenched his withered fist and tried to castigate Secretary Kennedy for sacrificing children. Kennedy put him in the litter box:

WYDEN: "I hope that you will tell the American people how many preventable child deaths are an acceptable sacrifice for your agenda that is fundamentally cruel and defies common sense.”

RFK: “Senator, you've sat in that chair for 20, 25 years while the chronic disease in our children went up to 76%— and you said nothing!”

The Senatorial scrum was nothing more or less than an ugly sideshow. Nothing significant happened, neither scientifically, practically, nor politically. They meant to shred Kennedy or at least take him down a notch, but all the notches were lost by the United States Senate, which mostly resembled an Adult Swim cartoon of a chaotic bar fight on midget wrestling night.

The Kennedy hit job was coordinated, of course, with the progressive influencer mob, who en masse started tweeting “gotcha” moments and celebrating every moronic moment in real time as soon as the hearing began. But Vice President Vance tweeted perhaps the best summary, even if it was a little coarse (albeit appropriate for the moment):

Democrats never stood a chance. Kennedy is orders of magnitude more popular than any of their Senators. I don’t know which Democrat conceived the idea of staging this political assassination effort, but whoever it was, I would like to shake his/her/their/its hand. Kennedy was already so popular that he was able to gather over a million signatures to get on the ballots in every single state during the presidential campaign. He remained a viable third-party presidential candidate until he stepped down and endorsed Trump.

The screaming and screeching didn’t even dent Kennedy’s immense popularity. If anything, the corporate media’s milquetoast headlines proved the hearing backfired. Some even verged on giving Kennedy the tie-break. For example, Barron’s:

The notion that ancient Bernie Sanders, Liz “Dancing Snake” Warren, and odd-feline Ron Wyden could somehow injure Kennedy’s popularity ratings by yelling at him is simply hilarious. Seriously, what were they thinking? They are getting desperate.

💊 Progressives are trying to keep a brave face, but they know the hearing fell flat. Afterwards, jab-pushing fake doctor Eric Fingle-Dingleberry was downright depressed:

The CNN segment pictured above reported astonishing, unreported figures from a 2024 Gallup Poll, which was published on the pollster’s website below the caption, “Far Fewer in U.S. Regard Childhood Vaccinations as Important.”

As the screengrab correctly reflected, Gallup found that Americans’ support for vaccine mandates plunged from a solid 81% majority in 1991 to barely half (51%) last year. The downward trendline is steepening. (Curiously, mandate skepticism is mostly a Republican phenomenon: “Democrats’ views on the matter have shown no meaningful change -- 69% support mandates now, and 72% did so in 2019.”)

But maybe the most startling and underreported statistic from the 2024 Gallup Poll was its findings on people’s beliefs about the connection between vaccines and autism. A clear majority of U.S. adults (64%) either believe in a connection or aren’t sure:

Even a stunning 40% of Democrats either believe in a connection (4%) or are unsure (36%). Remarkably, the vaccine-autism issue has, for all practical purposes, become an “80/20” issue, where Kennedy holds the high ground in the debate. His position mirrors the clear majority: he isn’t sure vaccines cause autism, but he is sure that we need to find out.

And one suspects that, as data continues to tumble out of the CDC’s burn bags of suppressed studies, and the connections become clearer, Kennedy’s political stock will continue to rise. Which brings us to the next quiet story.

💊 Kennedy’s superweapon is transparency. All he needs to do is open the books. Two days ago, MedCity News ran a story (ignored by most corporate media) headlined, “Embracing Transparency, FDA Will Make All Future Drug Rejection Letters Public.” FDA Commissioner Marty Makary announced yesterday that the FDA will now publish drug-rejection decision letters “in real time:”

In other words, the FDA is now making public previously confidential decisions whenever the FDA informs drugmakers why it declined to approve a particular drug. The agency will now promptly redact trade secrets and personal information, and publish the latter. The public can now see why FDA made any particular drug decision.

Keeping them secret was a handshake deal between FDA and drugmakers, who really don’t want the public to learn of any problems with their drugs or approval studies. But Dr. Makary gave two reasons for making them public. First, so the public stops blaming the FDA for rejecting ‘lifesaving’ drugs for no apparent reason.

Second, Dr. Makary pointed out that other drugmakers can learn from previous rejections. For example, if the FDA dislikes a certain style of drug trial, other less experienced manufacturers can avoid that type of trial going forward.

It’s win-win-win. Incentives only improve when FDA regulators know their denial letters will become public documents. They’ll want their decisions to withstand public scrutiny, so they’ll be that much more careful and fair.

More like this, please!

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Yesterday, the New York Times ran a tear-soaked story headlined, “Appeals Court Says ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ Detention Center Can Stay Open.” TAW.

Two weeks ago, deliriously happy Democrats took premature victory laps around the swamp after a federal judge in the Southern District ordered Florida to tear down its newest immigrant detention center within 90 days. But yesterday, the 11th Circuit not only stayed that injunction, but it stayed the entire case pending resolution of the appeal.

It doesn’t look good for the lower court judge. The appellate judges noted that the lower judge had found the activist plaintiffs had standing to challenge the facility on the paper-thin premise that “light pollution affects members' ability to observe the night skies” and “noise pollution impacts members' ability to observe and interact with wildlife.”

Interact with wildlife? Wait— were they trying to mate with the alligators? Or was it with the boa constrictors? Never mind— I don’t want to know. Some kind of reptile, at least.

Either way, the 11th Circuit pointed out that the site has been a “working airport with close to 28,000 landings and takeoffs in the prior six months,” with “bright lights kept on 24/7,” and a lack of any noise complaints by activists at any time before the site’s “conversion to a detention center.” (I did not know the airport was operational. News reports have always described the airport as abandoned. Now we know why.)

The happy result is that Alligator Alcatraz remains open for business. Restart the airboats! Florida’s Attorney General James Uthmeier was pleased:

On an aside, Uthmeier’s tweet reflects a much bigger story about how President Trump has transformed the way public officials communicate with constituents. The public need no longer rely on corporate media to ‘summarize’ what they said. Officials now routinely go to X or other social media platforms and tell us themselves.

Maybe it would’ve happened anyway. But at a minimum, Trump accelerated the process. He even set up his own competing social media site when Twitter kicked him off. It’s a remarkable change in governance and the ripple effects are incalculable.

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This morning, the New York Post ran a story headlined, “Trump announces Delta Air Lines will officially use ‘Gulf of America’: ‘Finally embracing MAGA.’”

Delta Airlines made two global changes in its most recent Airway Manual update. First, the carrier will properly refer to the ocean on Florida’s west coast as the “Gulf of America.” Second, they are restoring the term “Airmen,” which virtue signalers had airbrushed to “Air Mission.”

Personally, I’ve always felt that Delta was the best-run airline in America. Granted, the bar is low, but still.

Anyway, President Trump posted about it, and declared that Delta was “finally embracing MAGA!” That might be a slight exaggeration. Delta’s spokesman said, “Those changes were mandated by the FAA.” But they did it!

So it might also be time to buy some Delta stock for your 401K.* (* Not financial advice, just saying. Don’t sue me.)

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Another rebel state has seceded from the CDC union! NBC Boston ran the story yesterday, headlined, “Mass. requiring vaccines be covered by insurance, regardless of CDC recommendations.”

“We will not let Donald Trump or Robert Kennedy interfere with our peculiar institutions,” Governor Maura Healey said, or words to that effect.

Massachusetts liberals now have a new doctor. “What Governor Maura Healey has done is essentially write a prescription for anyone over the age of five,” NBC-10 Boston explained. Who needs doctors anyway, when we have bureaucrats?

In other words, Massachusetts has now joined the Confederacy of States declaring their independence from the dictatorial federal government. Their new “Spirit of 1850” would be more convincing if all this medical libertarianism had reared its rebellious head during the Biden Administration’s excesses. But never mind.

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Wonders never cease. Yesterday, the Washington Post ran a story in which it only quoted conservatives, headlined, “DOJ discusses a potential ban on transgender people owning firearms.” But the story is much craftier and more explosive than the hot takes suggest.

According to anonymous leakers, “Senior DOJ officials” are considering “banning transgender people from owning firearms.” The news ignited the Internet’s Second Amendment corner.

I suspect the arsonists were not actually Second Amendment fans, but progressives, who are terrified of stepping on another Trump rake they can see lying in the political tall grass right in front of them. The 2A people are the ones currently taking the bait.

Federal law already precludes gun ownership by certifiably crazy people. The mandatory federal background check form has long included a box asking, “Have you ever been adjudicated as a mental defective OR have you ever been committed to a mental institution?” Granted, that’s a tall bar.

So, and this is the delicious part, the leakers said DOJ authorities discussed working with ATF to expand the definition of a disqualifying mental health status to include people who are transgender. Adjudicated metal defective, committed to an asylum, or transgender?

In other words, they are ‘considering’ making transgenderism a federally recognized and dangerous mental illness (which it always used to be until activists successfully lobbied for a change, but whatever).

That idea isn’t as crazy as people who believe they can swap genders. For some reason, some parts of the public are starting to think that the transgender movement has an unhealthy relationship with firearms.

To be clear: there’s been no official policy proposal; there’s no proposed rule or legal change. The only “news” was “a discussion” reported by anonymous leakers without naming a single person involved in the discussion. But that’s all it took, and now progressives face the impossible task of deciding whether to get behind “gun control” or come out for Second Amendment rights.

Some conservatives got it. I understand concerns about “red flag” laws and stuff, but we should sit this one out. For example:

And it appears that the liberals get it, too. Consider this astonishing report of delicious chaos and purity attacks from the left:

Whatever else this “anonymous discussion” does, or amounts to, or doesn’t amount to, this “somebody said something” news just completely defused the Democrats’ latest kooky gun-control push following the trans-fueled tragedy at Annunciation Catholic School.

In other words, keep pushing the politics, and we’ll officially declare trans people crazier than rabid bedbugs. Which would only be naming an inconvenient truth, but I digress.

I swear, Trump makes manipulating these purity-spiraling virtue-signalers look so easy.

Have a fabulous Friday! We’ll be back tomorrow morning, with a savory Weekend Edition roundup of your essential news and commentary.

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