☕️ STRATEGIC ☙ Monday, October 7, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Elon Musk puts more of his money where his America-saving mouth is; FEMA comms director goes into digital hiding; Florida braces for second historic, unusual storm; Ukraine updates; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! Your roundup today includes: Elon Musk’s America PAC fires up the engines of finance to register new conservative voters in tossup states; FEMA’s comms director buries her head in the social media sand, highlighting the agency’s deplorable failures; another record-setting hurricane heads toward Florida’s soggy conservative counties; the strategically deficient West floats Ukraine baby-splitting peace plan; Ukraine’s radical attrition plan is no victory strategy; and Am I Racist crushes the documentary box office.

🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞

🔥🔥 Welcome to the latest October surprise, and it could be a game-changer. Yesterday, I reported that Elon Musk was putting his mouth where his money was, or his money where his mouth is, or some effective combination of both.

This morning, SportsSkeeda reported a lucrative story headlined, “"Election interference?" — Netizens react to Elon Musk giving $47 to every person who refers a swing state voter.” The gist was the far-left exploded in rage after Elon’s America PAC website published two huge offers and took a massive legal risk. It’s almost like a giant troll of the left; Elon was practically provoking them:

First, the offers. Under “Join Our Team,” America PAC is offering to hire voter registration and turnout workers in the tossup states—including storm-torn North Carolina— at an astonishing $30 an hour plus bonuses.

The PAC’s biggest problem will be holding all the moles and infiltrators at bay.

Second, AmericaPAC promises to pay $47 for each new or existing registered voter in any of the seven tossup states who signs the online petition.  I tried to sign it, selfishly using ‘jchilders@coffeeandcovid.com’ as referrer, but Floridians don’t qualify. If you’re qualified and up for it, sign Elon’s petition here.

This could be massive if enough folks hear about it soon enough. Each turnout worker gets $30/hr plus bonuses for registering new voters of any political persuasion. But on top of that, for each newly registered voter, the turnout worker gets another $47 if the new voter also e-signs the petition—making conservative voters much more lucrative.

I’ll do the math for Portland readers. If the turnout worker registers and e-petitions only four people an hour —say, standing outside their local grocery store— that amounts to $30 in wages plus $188 in petition referral fees, or a whopping $218 an hour — almost $9,000 for a 40-hour work week. That beats most white-collar jobs and even “one weird trick for making money online.”

If you know someone who needs work, or is retired and has some free time, let them know today. It might be worth heading for one of the tossup states right now, before the short remaining period to register new voters closes. It might even be worth taking some saved-up vacation. Even for lawyers.

Partisan Democrats are so furious they are spitting chai seeds. To them, these two deals, when placed side-by-side, smell a whole lot like paid voter registration, a federal felony. But the PAC is probably in the clear. None of the PAC’s money is paid to newly-registered voters. And Democrats have helpfully already litigated over both the deal’s parts: paying turnout helpers is fine, and paying petition workers is also legal. Turnabout is fair play.

The fact that Elon’s offers are legal explains why I couldn’t cite any corporate media source. Legacy media is studiously silent about this story. So spread it around!

🌪️🌪️ It’s come to this: FEMA’s Director of Public Affairs Jaclyn Rothenberg has locked down her Twitter account. She does not want to hear any more cranky feedback from any more upset citizens.

As stated in her FEMA profile, “Jaclyn is a public affairs, media relations, and crisis communications strategist.” She might be a crisis communications strategist, but she’s no constitutional scholar. Abundant caselaw finds it a First Amendment violation for public officials to block citizens’ speech on social media. Maybe Jaclyn thinks that, since this is her personal twitter account, it somehow doesn’t count. But her use of FEMA’s logo on her Twitter bio page is probably sufficient to show she’s using it in her official capacity.

When danger reared its ugly head, Brave Sir Jaclyn bravely ran away…

I suspect she’ll soon reverse her hasty decision. Apart from the legal issues, the irony is deliciously thick; Jaclyn is the FEMA official in charge of crisis communications, who just refused to communicate directly with citizens during a crisis. Nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, I can’t hear you!

Maybe Jaclyn’s crisis communications strategy of stony silence seems like a small story, but it’s representative of one of FEMA’s chief failures in Hurricane Helene’s aftermath. The fog of natural war hangs thick over the Western Carolinas, and apart from the agency’s inexcusably slow response, it’s vexedly difficult to evaluate FEMA’s overall performance given all the varying reports.

But we can see one abject FEMA failure very clearly. Unlike previous large disasters, such as 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, this time FEMA is not providing any scheduled daily press briefings where reporters might have a chance to ask uncomfortable questions. Thin FEMA reports are dribbling out in 164-character Twitter posts, a handful a day.

Jaclyn’s silence is synonymous with FEMA’s inexcusable silence. If I were in Congress, I’d be demanding FEMA’s communications director come out of her hidey-hole. Just a suggestion.

🌪️🌪️ Axios ran a story suggestively yesterday headlined, “Milton could be the hurricane Tampa Bay has been dreading for decades.” It’s looking like more broken records and more bizarre storm behavior.

“This one,” Axios began, “could be historic.” It’s true they always overhype storms, but Hurricane Milton —already Category 2 and predicted to be a major Category 3 storm when it rams into Florida in two days— is heading for Tampa, a part of Florida’s coast without a direct hurricane strike in over 100 years.

Storms don’t usually form in that part of the Gulf, or travel in that direction.

Pinellas County officials said they'll likely order mandatory evacuations from all zones, A, B and C. For comparison, during Helene only Zone A was ordered to evacuate. Of course, Helene only struck Pinellas a glancing blow; this time, Milton looks to be a head-on collision. Over the weekend, Governor DeSantis issued a state of emergency for fifty-one of 67 counties and recalled Florida’s national guardsmen deployed to other states.

Back-to-back hurricanes in Florida create two special problems. First, all the Helene debris neatly piled on the ground waiting for pickup could get blown around again. This causes a giant mess and produces windswept volleys of flying projectiles. Second, trees, the grips of their roots already loosened by Helene’s soaking, will more easily let loose when re-drenched. Assuming Milton hits where projected, it’s likely many more trees will topple this time.

Tree roots don’t reach nearly as deep as you’d think, making soggy soil conditions especially perilous for our barked friends.

Florida’s west coast contains the state’s most conservative counties. The big blue counties all sit low on the eastern seaboard. This compressed, historic hurricane season is a kind of October surprise all of its own.

🚀🚀 As the world braces for today’s anniversary of the barbaric October 7th attacks on Israel and as the war in the Middle East heats up, the influential Financial Times floated a very suggestive proposal yesterday headlined, “Ukraine, Nato membership and the West Germany model.” The sub-headline added, “Security guarantees will have to underpin any peace deal where Russia retains control of Ukrainian land.” So much for “not one inch.”

“Although it remains committed to recovering the lands seized by Russia over the past decade,” the Financial Times regretfully explained, Ukraine “regrettably lacks the manpower, weaponry and western support to do it.” Later, it somberly conceded, “the west patently lacks a strategy for Ukraine to prevail.”

Now they tell us! And here, we all thought they had a strategy of some kind. (Just wait for the next story to see what the current strategy is.) But apparently not. So now they want to split the Ukraine baby.

Now they tell us, Part Deux: “The West German model for Ukraine has been discussed in foreign policy circles for more than 18 months.” Surprise! What they mean by the “West German model” is splitting Ukraine into two parts, like West and East Germany after the Second World War. In that historic scenario, West Germany was allowed to join NATO even though half the country remained under Soviet control.

This overly optimistic scheme suffers from two obvious problems, as the article eventually got around to admitting. First, in Germany, the occupied borders were well-defined, allowing the famous Berlin Wall to be erected right down the line. But in Ukraine, the war marches on, and the ever-changing borders remain fluid.

Second, after the war, the Soviets agreed to the Germany-splitting compromise. Today, Russia will never agree to let West Ukraine join NATO as part of any peace plan. It will never ever happen.

Biden’s neocons, Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, must now divide their attention between the old, difficult, plan-less Ukraine war, and the shiny new war emerging in the Middle East, which is ripe with potential and enthusiasm for a fresh conflict and all its glorious potential.

Meanwhile, things are only getting worse in Eastern Europe’s strategy-free theater of war. Any day now, Ukraine will head into winter and its rasputitsa mud season, further freezing and bogging down prospects for Ukraine’s ‘victory.’

🚀 Perhaps it isn’t completely fair to say there’s no strategy. On Saturday, the New York Times ran an eye-watering story headlined, “Ukraine’s Donbas Strategy: Retreat Slowly and Maximize Russia’s Losses.” The agonized sub-headline added, “It’s far from clear if the Ukrainian strategy will succeed.” So, there is a strategy after all.

Talk about trying to put a good spin on failure. The gist was that the Ukrainians are losing, are in retreat all along the front lines, but Kiev has ordered its troops to hold their untenable positions at all costs, in the hope that the Russians will eventually get tired of winning and go home.

That’s it. That’s the whole strategy.

To be clear, Ukraine has an alternative: pulling its troops from vast numbers of unholdable towns and villages, and mustering them together in more defensible positions, such as behind the giant Dnieper river, which divides the country in half. The main advantage of this defensive strategy would be saving tens or hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives.

Instead, Ukrainian martial law coordinator and former comedian Zelensky figures that, despite the astonishingly high cost in lives and free NATO materiel, by holding on till beyond the last minute in every little hamlet and township, the Russians might, sooner or later, get exhausted by all the fighting and give up.

Given that one of Russia’s stated objectives at the outset was to demilitarize Ukraine, it seems unlikely that Russia will get tired anytime soon of killing Ukrainian soldiers by the battalion.

Combined, these two stories, the Financial Times’ and the New York Times’ articles, together revealed the war’s hideous truth. Western war planners don’t care about Ukraine. They don’t care about its courageous soldiers willing to fight Russia to their inglorious deaths. As I reported yesterday, all the West cares about is the Wolfowitz Doctrine: establishing a NATO foothold in Ukraine to keep a lid on Russia and prevent it from becoming a rival world superpower.

In other words, the Ukrainian people and their land are disposable NATO resources. But there isn’t any strategy. Doing the same thing over and over and hoping for a different result isn’t a strategy, it’s insanity.

But the fact the corporate media conversation and “foreign policy circles” have evolved from a goal of crushing Russia any day now to a strategy of trading land for peace is a great sign. Perhaps the end lies in sight.

🔥🔥 According to Box Office Mojo, Matt Walsh’s new movie Am I Racist? has now grossed around $12 million on a $3 million budget. making it a breakaway hit. Plus, according to Matt’s tweet yesterday, the internal figures may be even higher, shooting past Super Size Me’s much-discussed $22 million:

Yesterday, the Childers family (Dad included) enjoyed the film at a matinee showing. It’s packed with laughs, obvious and subtle, highbrow and slapstick. Having seen it, I can’t imagine what any sane person, no matter their political persuasion, could possibly object to. Wokescolds will be upset that the film exists at all, but all Walsh did was give race hustlers room to beclown themselves.

The movie’s Rotten Tomatoes audience score remains stratospheric. More surprisingly, critics have given the film a solid 77% rating:

If you haven’t seen it yet, Am I Racist? earns a C&C 100% fresh, “must see” rating. Beyond mere entertainment, this movie might have single-handedly put DEI on life-support.  If DEI somehow survives Walsh’s well-earned roasting, it still will have suffered a mortal injury and will probably expire sooner or later.

It is difficult to overemphasize how encouraging the critical and financial success of this important movie and social commentary is. Humor is the way!

Have a magnificent Monday! Hang tight, we’re one-quarter of the way through October and all its surprises. Barring turbo hurricanes, I’ll be back tomorrow morning with more delicious and nutritious Coffee & Covid.

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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