☕️ TERMS OF ART ☙ Friday, October 3, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Gallup shows media trust hits historic lows; markets soar as shutdown drags; Trump quietly declares war on cartels; Dems’ “law enforcement” spin falters; Kavanaugh’s trans-ID’d assailant faces music.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! Your roundup today includes: a longstanding Gallup poll shows citizens’ trust in corporate media cratering to historic lows (shocking, but true); third day of shutdown brings stock market euphoria while Democrats watch their stupid narrative crumble; Trump Administration quietly declares war on cartels through a notice to Congress, just after the assembly of generals; historical parallels undermine Dems’ law enforcement arguments; and as Kavanaugh’s attempted assassin faces sentencing today, court filings reveal —what else?— his ‘transgender identity.’

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Look out below! Yesterday, Axios ran a story headlined, Media trust hits new low across the political spectrum. Somebody needs to do a welfare check on reporters. They’re acting suicidal.

Axios led with this remarkable statistic: According to the most recent Gallup poll, only a paltry 28% of Americans say they have a great deal or a fair amount of trust in the mass media, which is down from a solid 68% in 1972. That figure has never in history fallen below 30%.

And as you can see from the chart, it’s gotten much worse since the pandemic, with conservatives’ trust in media plummeting from 50% to only 8%. The percentage of Republicans who have “no trust at all” has also risen sharply over the past few years, from below 30% in 2015 to a supermajority of 62% in 2025.

Even among Democrats, over the past three years, trust in mass media has fallen by a whopping -19%.

It’s like they can’t help themselves. Axios —part of the media that everyone’s losing trust in— did not bother itself to offer any speculation about the cause of the media’s tragic downfall. It quoted no experts. It offered no personal interest anecdotes. It just reported the figures and stopped right there.

In Gallup’s report, the pollster drily noted (somehow without laughing), “With confidence fractured along partisan and generational lines, the challenge for news organizations is not only to deliver fair and accurate reporting but also to regain credibility across an increasingly polarized and skeptical public.”

Maybe —I’m just spitballing here— maybe it has something to do with the media’s instant fact-checking of pieces published whenever somebody calls New York Mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani a “communist,” especially when they print the fact-check right next to a half dozen articles credulously quoting Democrats calling Trump a “nazi” and directly comparing him to Hitler.

But they won’t quit. Not even for self-preservation. They can’t, since there is no vaccine to cure their Trump Derangement Syndrome. Axios’ headline should have been: “TDS Tanks Trust in Traditional Media.”

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Early this morning, the Wall Street Journal ran a story headlined, “Stock Market Today: Dow Futures Rise as Shutdown Enters Day Three.” Maybe we should shut down the government more often.

The market broke new records yesterday, as the DOW and stock futures ticked off more record highs. You could argue this suggests people aren’t just shrugging about the shutdown but are actually enthusiastic about it. Still, the Journal diligently cast about for an explanation that didn’t give the Trump Administration any credit and lamely concluded it was “AI enthusiasm.” Okay.

The absence of evidence of any “shutdown” effect on the economy suggests that only hyper-partisans and corporate media types truly care. So … even if corporate media did convince people the shutdown was “Republicans’ fault,” then what difference would it make?

What is clear, however, is that investors, at least, aren’t troubled by the government ‘shutdown’ (whatever that means). When they ‘shut down’ the federal government, it is like asking your hard-partying upstairs neighbors for the second time to please turn down the music. “We did turn it down! Can’t you tell?”

Thump, thump, thump. The federal government’s bass line keeps rattling the rafters, even while supposedly turned off. Maybe people will worry more when the walls stop shaking. Anyway, the “blame game” isn’t going well for Democrats. This remarkable headline appeared in the New York Times yesterday which, unless I’m reading it wrong, blamed the donkey party for its eye-popping demands, and conceded the GOP is playing it straight:

The narrative has shifted, or slid, into an increasingly tiny crack. Now, the “blame game” line is that “Republicans have refused to negotiate,” which even a smidgen of introspection translates to: “Republicans have refused to purchase Democrats’ participation in governing.”

Trump took their demand for $1 trillion in new health spending and forced Democrats to take an indefensible position. He argued they are trying to give illegal border jumpers free healthcare, which caused them to deny they want to use Americans’ tax money to give freebies to non-citizens that citizens must pay for. The problem is, the record is packed full of Democrats insisting that illegals get healthcare. CNN, 2019:

Trump’s genius is not even that it makes Democrats look like liars —which it does, and they are— or that it ably scores GOP goals in this shutdown season’s blame game. The genius is that it is taking another 80%/20% issue and plastering it all over the headlines and talk shows. Though the backdrop is the shutdown, everybody’s talking about an issue that is a clear winner for Republicans, and which Democrats have long been on the wrong side of.

If you think this happened by accident, I have some prime Florida waterfront property for you to consider.

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“War” might never change, but it seems to be a very slippery concept. Yesterday, the New York Times ran a breathless story headlined, “Trump ‘Determined’ the U.S. Is Now in a War With Drug Cartels, Congress Is Told.” The sub-headline added, “A notice calls the people the U.S. military recently killed on suspicion of drug smuggling in the Caribbean Sea ‘unlawful combatants.’” Right on schedule, as predicted. Prepare for a game of American Battleship.

Through the years, Democrats (and Republicans) have been perhaps over-generous in their slap-happy use of the term, “war.” War on Drugs, War on Crime, War on Obesity, War on Terror, you name it, right now there’s an endless war raging against whatever social evil you can think of; albeit all of them are more accurately described as wars on our pocketbooks, rather than on the elusive enemies themselves.

President Trump appears to be taking that concept more literally.

On September 15th, U.S. Special Operations Forces sank a small boat in the Caribbean, killing all three people aboard and blowing up a shipment of strange white powder. Fortunately, it was later confirmed that Hunter Biden was not aboard. He was at a different crack party. But I digress.

This week, the military celebrated ‘Sinko de Mayo’ by retiring another crack cruiser and its 11 sailors. (h/t Jimmy Failla.) Right after, the Trump administration delivered a formal notice of hostile action to Congress, which is legally required whenever US forces are engaged in armed conflict.

Trump’s notice called the cartels’ sunken sailors “unlawful combatants” —a War on Terror term— who were “affiliated with a designated terrorist organization engaged in trafficking illicit drugs.”

The article did not reproduce a copy of the notice, so we cannot read it in context and have to take the Times’ word for it all (cue laugh track). Presumably, some Congressional Democrat leaked the notice to the Times, which starchily reported it was “controlled but unclassified.” The article explained the notice “says that Mr. Trump has ‘determined that cartels engaged in smuggling drugs are ‘nonstate armed groups’ whose actions ‘constitute an armed attack against the United States.’”

What snagged everyone’s attention were the two phrases nonstate armed group and armed attack. Those are both terms of art from international law. “Nonstate armed group” refers to a “war with a nonstate actor.” War. And, under federal law as well as the Constitution, the President may lawfully respond to any “armed attack against the United States”— without further Congressional approval.

🚀 In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006), SCOTUS found that the “war on terror” against Al Qaeda was a “real war” for constitutional purposes. That ruling allowed treating Al Qaeda terrorists as enemy combatants who were not entitled to court hearings or traditional due process, and could be tried by military tribunals under the Geneva Convention. Hence Guantanimo.

Yesterday, Senator Jack Reed (D-R.I.) complained bitterly. “Drug cartels are despicable and must be dealt with by law enforcement,” Reed generously allowed, trying to avoid appearing like a spongy, soft-on-crime biscuit. But he then argued that President Trump “offered no credible legal justification, evidence, or intelligence” for the strikes.

But technically, under the War Powers Resolution, Trump is only required to provide the notice. He’s not required to provide “legal justification” or evidence.

The first legal expert quoted by the Times, a former State Department lawyer, complained “that it is far from clear that whoever they are targeting is an organized armed group such that the U.S. could be in an armed conflict with it.” I.e., “far from clear” to him. Presumably, it was clearer to the Navy sailors who sank the cocaine express.

Another expert —a former Army JAG lawyer— complained that drugs are products, not hostile acts, because users voluntarily buy and consume drugs. “This is not stretching the envelope,” he wailed. “This is shredding it. This is tearing the envelope apart.” An Administration spokeslady pointed out that 100,000 Americans kick the bucket every year from fatal drug overdoses.

Democrats want to argue about whether drugs can be considered an “armed attack,” since drugs aren’t weapons, and since nobody at the scene has attacked any addicts.

🚀 That moronic argument will likely fail. The Opium Wars were a pair of brutal clashes in the mid-19th century where Britain, hungry for Chinese tea and silk but too stingy to pay in silver, forced its way into China’s markets by flooding the empire with opium (heroin) grown in British India. When the Qing dynasty tried to stop the trade by seizing and burning the opium in Canton, British gunboats answered with iron and fire.

The First Opium War (1839–1842) saw Britain’s modern navy batter ancient Chinese forts, culminating in the ignominious Treaty of Nanking, which pried open China’s previously protected ports and snatched up Hong Kong.

The Second Opium War (1856–1860) was even more punishing, as foreign troops stormed Beijing, looting and torching the imperial Summer Palace. Together, these two drug-fueled wars carved deep scars into China’s sovereignty, ushering in the Chinese “Century of Humiliation,” where Western powers dictated terms from the business end of a cannon, and China’s old world order collapsed under the acrid smoke of forced addiction and foreign guns.

They haven’t forgotten. You can understand why China might consider a fentanyl war against the American Empire to be fair play. What’s good for the goose, and so on. A certain historical irony. The point is, modern scholars —both Western and Chinese— overwhelmingly characterize the Opium Wars as unjust wars of aggression that undermined China’s sovereignty.

🚀 The Administration’s unspoken argument, formed from its various acts and notices, executive orders, and hearings held by various Congressional committees, is that China is waging a plausibly deniable Opium Proxy War against the United States, by and through the Maduro regime in Venezuela and the cartels in Mexico. I’m not the only one who’s made the historical comparison. A scholarly article from NDU/PRISM, 2019:

So when corporate media’s ‘legal experts’ argue that drugs are only a law enforcement issue, and not a military matter, they are intentionally ignoring well-established and uncontroversial war history. Drugs can absolutely be weapons of war. Pretending otherwise is either historically illiterate or intentionally evasive.

Modern international law of war is dense and complicated, and it is definitely not my normal wheelhouse. But it appears Democrats’ complaints are, once again, based on alleged violations of norms and traditions, and on arguments that Trump is bending the law or using technicalities. They have not (yet) argued that Trump has broken any law. At least —so far— no lawsuits have been filed.

As I said yesterday, the drugs issue is only part of the Venezuelan problem. It’s a real part, a modern Opium War, but the other part is the Proxy: Maduro’s cozying up to the Chinese— plumb spang in America’s backyard. One way or another, that kind of thing has to stop before it gets out of hand. Before you know it, China will have a giant military base looming over Corpus Christi like a giant Spongebob bent on revenge, and a brand-new naval port squatting on the Gulf of America.

President Trump has evidently decided to pull the plug on both China’s Opium Proxy War and any Chinese military bases in the American hemisphere. You’ll recall that in April (which now seems a lifetime ago), Pete Hegseth pushed China out of the Panama Canal. Trump also first tried to tackle the problem through tariffs —remember the early trade talks about fentanyl with Canada, Mexico, and China?— but he couldn’t pin Beijing down, and the crackheaded whack-a-mole shifted to Venezuela.

Behold, the next step.

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Two weeks ago, Newsweek ran a tragically predictable story headlined, “Kavanaugh’s attempted assassin identifies as transgender.” The assassin, Nicolas “Sophie” Roske, is due to be sentenced in court today (Oct. 3rd.)

On June 8th, 2022, the night in Chevy Chase was heavy with the muffled stillness of suburbia. The lawns were still glistening, slick from sprinklers, when Nicholas Roske slipped from a cab and began walking toward Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s house. In his backpack nestled the instruments of premeditated murder —a Glok 17, a knife, zipties, burglary tools— comprising an assassin’s arsenal small enough to carry but broad enough to alter the fate of a Nation.

Roske had flown across the country believing himself an agent of history, ready to strike down a sitting justice in his own home. His murderous list included three conservative Supreme Court Justices in all.

But when Roske reached the quiet street, he was startled by two deputy U.S. marshals, silhouettes against the porchlight glow, posted as sentinels on the threshold. Their unexpected presence rattled him. The assassin’s confidence cracked, and his conviction curdled into cold feet. His hand went not to the gun but to his phone; dialing 911, he confessed his purpose to a stranger on the line.

Within minutes, patrol cars circled into the cul-de-sac, and Roske surrendered himself into custody— his mission collapsing not with gunfire but with the simple, immovable fact of two deputies who stood at their posts.

But the roots of that June night went back years earlier, into an even more personal struggle. Recent court filings reveal that in 2020, Roske confronted a different crisis—the young man’s evolving realization of ‘herself’ as ‘Sophie.’ Roske sought medical ‘care’ as Sophie, and he confided his secret identity to a tight circle of his teachers, a trusted sister, and certain close friends.

He hid his “gender identity” from his parents, who, Roske feared, would never understand.

Yet even as his inner life twisted between concealment and confession, his outward gaze hardened on the marble pillars of the Court. Prosecutors now describe a man —or, a would-be woman— who imagined ‘herself’ as an agent of destiny, studying three sitting Supreme Court justices as potential quarry. If the Justices were no longer there, he reckoned, the leaked Dobbs decision might die along with them.

Roske’s ambition metastasized into delusion: he would, with a gun, single-handedly bend the arc of the Republic. The government’s September filing stripped away any patina of private anguish, reducing the story to its terrible core: a hormone-addled citizen who sought to “alter the Constitutional order for ideological ends.”

In other words, in Roske’s fevered, chemically-altered, propagandized imagination, he was a woman who might get pregnant and be denied an abortion. In that sense, he acted as if the Dobbs decision was aimed at him, or “her,” personally— even though, physiologically, it could not possibly be. Roske internalized Dobbs as though it were an existential threat to his own identity.

This, by the way, is a common pattern in radicalization; an abstract cause fused with a personal grievance.

We don’t know who radicalized Mr. Roske. (It was not his parents, who presumably still love their badly confused son.) Regardless, Roske’s story is a double tragedy. Roske is one of the victims. The real attempted assassins remain at large. For now.

We will find out today at his sentencing whether the Court considers Roske’s transgender identity as any mitigating factor in trying to kill an abortion decision by killing a judge. The prosecution wants 30 years. The defense attorneys asked the court for only 8 years followed by 25 years of supervision, given that: he didn’t go through with it, he surrendered peacefully, and he shouldn’t be jailed with men. I bet they wanted to, but his lawyers stopped short of arguing Roske was mentally ill, which would have been an even more interesting development.

Sooner or later, the nation needs to have a serious conversation about transgender violence— and about the ruthless doctors who are poisoning these children with cross-sex hormones.

The good news is that conversation is underway, although some people are still trying to avoid it. Maybe this story suggests that judges should start paying closer attention.

Have a fantastic Friday! Circle back tomorrow for another steamy installment of essential news and spicy commentary.

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