☕️ SMURF-BLUE ☙ Friday, April 25, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Atlantic blows the lid off mass injury claims—just not how you’d expect; and ActBlue’s probe gets presidential heat, making progressives madder than Papa Smurf when someone paints the mushroom red.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! Due to the press of events and demands of schedule, we have a quick roundup today: astonishing Atlantic article blows the lid off millions of injured Americans— but not like you think; and ActBlue gets Presidential attention and the investigation turns out be more like the serious kind of investigation and not just the talking about it kind of investigation.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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During the pandemic, there was no more enthusiastic and loyal covid policy cheerleader than The Atlantic. Ironically published on April 1st, the Atlantic ran a literally insane story with a simple, two-word headline. The editors made up the second word, which needed no explanation. It read: “The Evermaskers.” The sub-headline sorrowfully said, “The people who may never stop masking.”

The government’s mask policy was always more psychological science than physical or biological science. We now know the shrinks told the bureaucrats that forcing masks on citizens would “nudge” us all toward other more effective germ-reducing behavior. They couldn’t tell us they were doing it though, since nudging only works when we aren’t aware it’s happening.

In other words, people tend to get muley when they suspect they’re being manipulated.

So, of course, they lied and they fearmongered. They lied like dogs, or rugs, or paid Amazon reviewers. They lied about all of it, but mostly about masks, and about how dangerous —but avoidable!— the virus was. For most of us, it was not dangerous; for all of us, it could not be avoided, not through masks, distances, lockdowns, or jabs.

And behold: the rotten fruit of a ruined generation of broken Americans whose scrambled, germaphobic brains are stuck on 11. Oh well! Collateral damage. Eggs and omelets!

The article reported that according to a recent PEW poll, around four percent (4%) of Americans still regularly mask up. If my calculations are correct, that comes to about 14 million people. In other words, more than the population of eleven U.S. states put together.

If you ignored the germ problem and stacked them on top of each other (they would have to be unconscious or wearing hazmat suits), the evermaskers would form a pile three times as high as geosynchronous orbit.

💉 The article predictably began with a tragic human-interest anecdote. Meet Dennis Rosloniac. Dennis, 44, is fit, healthy, and active. The Green Bay media tech enjoys mountain biking in his spare time, and he has no chronic health problems. But the idea of covid, Dennis said, “breaks my brain sometimes.”

Dennis’s cerebral cortex is infected with a singular, unshakable fear. Or maybe it’s more of a fearful notion, an unrelenting conviction that compels him to continue strapping on the mask, even though he feels constant social anxiety about wearing it around other people. “You feel pressure from the world,” Dennis admitted. He experiences an expanding sensation of inevitable doom, an unending awareness of a terrifying covid clock counting down, which Dennis is compelled to try to hold back: “Each time he’s infected,” the Atlantic explained, “the chances that something really bad will happen to his body ratchet up a little higher.”

Tick … tick … tick.

It’s a lonely life in the real world. But Dennis finds solace in seeking fellow evermaskers on online forums, “a kind of shadow world where the fears and obligations felt by everyone in early 2020 never really went away, and lockdowns still persist in private.”

The Atlantic’s reporter never used the term, but I will. A few years ago, these bizarre rituals and beliefs would have been called obsessive-compulsive disorders. In their “online communities,” evermaskers perfect N95 mask-fitting tips. They swap hacks for creative germ mitigations, like taping waterproof filters to snorkel spouts for safe swimming in indoor pools (always in moderation). They congregate on Sundays (by Zoom) for covid church. They exchange lists of evermasker-friendly doctors who won’t ever suggest they might need a different type of treatment.

They don’t need shrinks. They already know who the crazy ones really are: Us. The no-maskers. We are the crazy ones. Dennis explained that the evermaskers never abandoned science. Science abandoned them.

Most troublingly, and I feel a gloomy sense of impotent despair just typing this next sentence, the article reported that evermaskers advise each other about covid-conscious parenting. In other words, they are raising a new generation of radical germaphobes who’ll never experience fresh air.

💉 Evermasking isn’t easy— or cheap. It gets more expensive all the time. Last month, HHS rudely announced it would “no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago,” and just like that, free test kits and paxlovid pills disappeared like virus particles sucked through a HEPA filter.

Tess, 35, is a public health worker. She declined to use her last name citing another fear: fear of retaliation. She told the Atlantic that she —and others like her— worry less about dying from acute covid than being disabled by long covid. But oddly, the article also reported Tess said she already has long covid, with unrelenting brain fog and loss of lung capacity. (Now I think about it, brain fog might explain a lot.)

Apparently Tess —just like Dennis— believes each new case of covid makes her crippling condition even worse. It’s just a long, inescapable spiral into total medical dependency. All she can do is try to hold it off as long as she can.

Evermasking requires making hard choices. Last year, Tess separated from her husband, because he took off his mask at work without telling her, got infected, and then passed along the illness. “Somebody who I’m supposed to trust lied to me, took away my agency, and got me sick,” Tess explained helplessly. What else should she have done?

💉 Nancy, 69, runs twice-weekly Zoom sessions helping evermaskers fellowship together. Like Dennis and Tess, Nancy also fears repeated exposure. “If you keep catching it over and over and over again,” Nancy explained, “your chances of developing long COVID increase, and it gradually weakens your immune system.”

Following a shower of statistics and studies that mostly showed long covid rates declining, rather than increasing, the article finally got around to another common element the evermaskers shared, a highly suggestive joint quality that probably should have started the article: “In the U.S., at least, people’s sense of risk from COVID, in particular, also has a strong connection to their politics— many COVID-conscious people are progressives.”

Can you see the dreadful implication? The horrifying significance from the fact that progressive people are most likely to become evermaskers? You understand what this means?

It means the virus hates democrats.

Haha, just kidding. It’s quite easy to mock these evermaskers —trivial, in fact, mere child’s play— but the fact is that fourteen million American evermaskers represent another giant group of victims— not victims of the virus, but of the government’s deceptive response to the virus. They are stuck in a perpetual state of fear, anxiety, and obsessive compulsion.

It’s ruining their lives, their relationships, and what remains of their mental health.

And so we begin to see the inevitable result of weaponizing fear to motivate people using their trusted authority figures. A result everyone but experts could see coming. Thanks, experts.

Spare a moment’s sympathy for the legions of people who followed the science— and now they can’t find their way home.

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Can you hear the distant squawks of chickens flapping toward their roosts? Yesterday, CNN ran a story dripping with dire portent, headlined “Trump targets Democratic fundraising powerhouse ActBlue with DOJ probe.”

This could be the single most important development for the 2026 midterms. We’ve discussed a potential ActBlue investigation before, but now the problem is getting presidential attention.

CNN even admitted that when President Trump signed an order yesterday targeting ActBlue, which is the Democrat Party’s main fundraising platform, he was “taking aim at one of the key pillars of the financial infrastructure for Democratic candidates.” The investigation, CNN said, “has raised concerns it could impair the Democratic Party’s fundraising efforts ahead of next year’s high-stakes midterm elections, given its central role in processing donations.”

Yesterday afternoon, the White House posted a “fact sheet” about Trump’s order. The order —a “Presidential Memorandum”— directed Attorney General Bondi to investigate and “take appropriate action” about ActBlue’s involvement with squads of straw donors, sometimes called “smurfs,” as well as large numbers of small-dollar foreign donations.

You may recall the story was originally broken by James O’Keefe, and later confirmed via a House investigation.

The House’s investigation was featured in the fact sheet. “A recent House of Representatives investigation,” the fact sheet explained, “found that ActBlue detected at least 22 significant fraud campaigns in recent years—nearly half of which had a foreign nexus.” And it said that “numerous state attorneys general have opened investigations into ActBlue over suspicious donations made through obscured identities and untraceable means.”

The smurfing phenomenon was prominently positioned in the memo:

Papa Smurf was unavailable for comment.

I doubt it’s possible to overestimate the Gargamel-sized threat this poses to the Democrat money machine. And money, as they say, is the mother’s milk that makes the political school bus go around and around. Or words to that effect. You get the idea. The best part is that the Democrats have gotten away with it for so long that they got addicted to it, and as Fury Road’s Immortan Joe warned his serfs about getting addicted to water, the danger is that, when the money is not around, “you will resent its absence.”

I’m just a lawyer, neither a political consultant or an elections crimes prosecutor, but it seems to me the most politically damaging way forward is for DOJ to be very deliberate and take its time, making sure it is on all fours before arresting someone, and pushing the clock as close to the 2026 primaries as possible before pulling the plug. As I often say, this is only going to hurt for a very long time.

Have a fabulous Friday! Smurf back here for tomorrow morning’s weekend edition, when we’ll catch up on a grab bag of fascinating essential news and commentary to tickle your funny bone.

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