☕️ THE BOURNE COINCYDINK ☙ Monday, June 23, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

War unfolds as expected; woke Pixar bombed; NYT accidentally redpills women; Trump ends Africa’s bloodiest war—media shrugs; Minnesota Murders get weirder. Clues pile up—straight to Walz’s door; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! Summer continues apace. In today’s jam-packed roundup: the daily war update, so far playing out just how we thought it might; culture wars savage latest woke Pixar offering, right in line with our running theme; New York Times exposé on young liberal women switching to the GOP accidentally proves the point; President Trump ends the most devastating war in the 21st century and the corporate media doesn’t notice; just when you thought the Minnesota Murders story couldn’t get any more bizarre, the facts that don’t fit mounted up to completely cover Tim Walz’s gubernatorial mansion. A deep dive.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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We begin with the war update, since Saturday’s strikes hijacked the headlines and now occupy every major outlet’s front page. It’s the conflict narrative they want us laser-locked on. Fine. This morning’s Wall Street Journal’s top war story was headlined, “A Cornered Iran Gives Few Clues on Response to Bombings.”

All day yesterday, the usual panic engines were enriched to nuclear levels: social media, cable chatterboxes, end-times podcasts, Indian smoke signals, and prophetic chemtrails—everyone gloomily fixating on worst-case scenarios. Iran’s closing the Strait of Hormuz! Russia’s handing over nukes! The Ayatollah just declared himself a non-binary camel! Rinse, repeat, apocalypse.

Fanning the flames, President Trump rolled out one trolling tweet after another, musing about regime change, more strikes, and essentially wondering what sort of royal robe he should wear to the State of the Union address next January.

Meanwhile, Iran continued carefully contemplating its options. ”Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei,” the Journal reported, “in what appeared to be his first comments since the U.S. attack, didn’t mention the U.S. and instead focused on Israel in a post on X.”

On X! Ha! Even Iran’s 106-year-old Supreme Leader is tweeting his foreign policy now. Somewhere, Trump is smirking, “You’re welcome.”

🚀 If my updates seem suspiciously light on “10 buildings flattened” or “F-35s scrambled from Cyprus,” that’s because we’re floating in a fogbank of war propaganda. Very little of what we’re told survives the 48-hour news cycle. Almost everything is subject to change without notice or apology. It’s not worth reporting the details, and nobody should pay much attention to them, at least until they survive a few days of stress testing.

That said, events are unfolding more or less as we expected. Iran’s nuclear ambitions weren’t totally obliterated. As the Journal casually noted, “Vice President JD Vance signaled Iran’s stockpile of enriched uranium is still intact and in Iranian control.”

So… what was the point?

Here’s the thing: the enriched uranium apparently wasn’t at the three bombed sites. “The stockpile was believed to have been mainly at Isfahan,” the Journal reported. “But it could have been moved.” Iran moved it beforehand —confirming advance notice— but leaving something to negotiate over.

Which brings us to this curious line from VP Vance on ABC’s This Week: “We are going to work in the coming weeks to ensure that we do something with that fuel, and that’s one of the things we’re going to have conversations with the Iranians about.”

Vance pointed out that, following the strikes, Iran no longer has the ability to rapidly weaponize the fuel. “And that was really the goal here,” he said. Critics cried he was moving the goalposts! But … was he? What if he’s telling the truth? What if this is all going according to a backroom agreement?

Let’s try a little thought experiment. Picture the tense U.S.-Iran talks before Saturday’s strikes. Suppose Iran agreed to permanently shut down the three enrichment sites. “Okay,” the U.S. negotiators say, “but we need to bomb them.” Then, “fine,” say the mullahs, “just give us a couple days to rent some U-Hauls and pack up the centrifuges.”

Even temporary rubble over those labs buys everyone breathing room and cools the radioactive fever. Now the big question is: what happens to the uranium? Funny you should ask. Yesterday, Iran’s foreign minister arrived in Moscow to meet with Vladimir Putin. The meeting’s agenda is “consultations on how to proceed,” the Journal said, without explaining further.

Proceed… with what, exactly? It’s possible they are discussing terms for Russian custody of Iran’s enriched uranium— a job the Russians have previously volunteered for. Obviously, I don’t know. I’m just a lawyer. We’ll know soon enough whether my theory holds plutonium.

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The UK Daily Mail served up more Hollywood hot garbage yesterday, running a story headlined, “Pixar suffers worst box office opening ever as $150M movie Elio bombs.” A cultural decoupling is in overnight delivery.

In case you never heard of it, Pixar’s hoped-for blockbuster, a sci-fi take on the much better How to Train Your Dragon, features a racially ambiguous, emotionally fragile boy whose friendship with a space squid affirms his tender identity and teaches him that being different is okay. The female lead, Elio’s aunt Olga, is a hard-charging marine who aspires to be an astronaut.

You could swap Elio for a girl, and the plot wouldn’t miss a beat.

No mythic trials by fire, no earned strength, no mastery of chaos, no growth through adversity. Elio doesn’t learn to stop crying and fight back. He learns it’s okay to cry. That’s the arc. No sword, dragons, or scars— just feelings. It’s therapeutic cinema masquerading as myth.

Who, pray tell, was this movie for?

Not boys, obviously. Not little girls, either. Aunt Olga, the story’s warrior, is unmarried. The message is clear: a strong woman doesn’t need a man— just a government job and an adopted child to emotionally co-regulate. It’s not that Aunt Olga was let down by a weak man; she never needed one to start with. The sub-message is: boys don’t need fathers. Militarized mother figures are fine. Boys just need to talk more, about their feelings. And they need hugs.

Unsurprisingly, the vastly expensive, emotional-passivity fairy tale with tentacled spacecraft is crashing harder than a malfunctioning squidship. Though it just debuted, it was the weekend’s worst performer. And the film earned only $14 million in overseas markets, for an abysmal worldwide total of only $35 million. Revenues always drop sharply after the first weekend. With a $150 million budget, barring some kind of box office miracle, it seems unlikely the movie could turn a profit.

One is tempted to speculate about how much USAID NGO money used to prop up this kind of malarkey. If you sniff the screenwriting air long enough, you catch the faintest aroma of government grant-writing language: “Promoting emotional literacy and inclusivity through intergalactic allegory targeting underserved youth.”

It’s the kind of narrative that wouldn’t look out of place in a USAID funding report, right between anti-extremism puppet theater and climate resilience TikTok influencers in Micronesia.

Oh well. They’ll have to pay for their own DEI consultants now. Too bad. But … is it time yet to bring back the Boy Scouts and unleash RoboCop?

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I think we might be onto something: the women will follow the men. Over the weekend, the New York Times accidentally wrote a love letter to the conservative counterrevolution. Headlined “‘Less Prozac, More Protein’: How Conservatives Are Winning Young Women,” the article meant to sound an alarm but instead read like a recruitment brochure.

The piece covered the 2025 Young Women’s Leadership Summit in Dallas, Texas, hosted by Turning Point USA, where roughly 3,000 sundress-clad twenty-somethings packed into a ballroom to fiercly chant “less feminism, more femininity” and ask pointed questions like “How do I find a husband?” and “What’s the best Bible-based birth control method?” And no, this isn’t satire.

This was the largest conservative women’s event in the country — and according to the Times, it’s doubling in size every year.

By the Grey Lady’s description, the event had the energy of a sorority slumber party crossed with a megachurch marriage seminar with a whiff of multi-level-marketing wellness zealotry. Saturday night was literally called “Girls Night In.” Influencer and podcaster Alex Clark electrified the crowd with her red-pilled remix of women’s empowerment: “We’re done pretending that a cubicle is more empowering than a countertop.”

And it’s working. According to the Times, these women aren’t being dragged rightward by their boyfriends or pastors. They’re empowered, and are leading the charge themselves. They’re cutting birth control, cutting processed foods, and cutting ties with feminism. They’re trading antidepressants for raw milk, and TED Talks for Titus 2. They’re not opting out of modernity. They’re diagnosing it.

Critics sneered at the irony of a “leadership summit” built around telling women to get out of the workforce. But the women didn’t seem confused. They seemed grateful. One college student told the Times she was “so relieved” to finally hear someone say what she’d long felt but couldn’t say out loud: that careerism and hookup culture weren’t fulfilling, and maybe — just maybe — she wanted something older, slower, and saner.

The piece highlighted one Rhaelynn Zito, a 25-year-old nurse —a healthcare professional, in other words— who lives in Raleigh. In 2023, she hit bottom. She went through an ugly breakup, lost a family member, and yearned for purpose outside work. Rhaelynn started listening to Alex Clark, whose show is found among the top ten health podcasts on Spotify.

After listening to Mrs. Clark, Rhaelynn said, she no longer identifies as a feminist. It changed her life. She started a Bible study group, cut down on drinking, and stopped dating casually. Instead, she is focused on finding a husband. She stopped using birth control, and has become dubious about abortions and vaccines.

Here’s the key part: “What dipped my toe into all of this,” Rhaelynn explained, “was the MAHA movement.” Now, she said, “I find myself leaning more conservative than I ever have before.”

The article’s timing was perfect. One day after Coffee & Covid forecasted that disaffected young women would follow their red-pilled brothers out of the feminist desert, the New York Times dropped this paragraph like a confirmation telegram:

Alex Clark, one of the conference’s organizers, agreed that MAHA was key to this cultural revitalization moment. “Based on MAHA, they’re getting redpilled and now they’re showing up at the largest conservative women’s event in the country,” she said.

“In more than two dozen interviews with attendees,” the Times reported, “young women said it was a relief to hear a message that they had privately embraced but felt uncomfortable sharing widely: that it was feminism and career ambition making them unhappy, not the broader stress of puzzle-piecing together the responsibilities of modern life.”

Callie Shaw, 26, an accountant from South Carolina, told the Times, “I’m the product of the generation that said ‘Oh, the future is female, go after your career, family can wait.’” She continued, “Women like me are realizing climbing this corporate ladder doesn’t fulfill you. They realize ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve been taking birth control, now I want to start a family, but I’ve put it off.’”

🔥 The Times soft-pedaled the spiritual undercurrent like it was trying not to spill its soy latte. The article tiptoed around the R-word (revival), but the evidence was everywhere between the lines: Bible studies forming, scriptures quoted, drinking habits dropping, casual sex ending, and a growing hunger for meaning over materialism.

Of course, the piece treated the movement like a quirky diet fad —part Goop, part GOP. But what’s really happening here mirrors the same movement among young men returning to faith: disillusionment with nihilism, a longing for order, beauty, tradition, and even —dare I say it— God. Only in this case, it’s wearing sundresses and quoting Proverbs.

Finally, the Times mentioned, but also underplayed, covid’s role:

It was my theme from my Heritage talk. A moment of rupture? What was ruptured? Questioning pre-existing beliefs? Which beliefs? The pandemic shattered our conception of culture, of democracy and freedom, of checks-and-balances. It ruptured everything we’d thought we knew about the world we lived in. The Times can see it, as though through a glass darkly, but still avoids the profound implications.

Here comes The Reckoning.™ And we’re just getting started.

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Not that he’ll get any credit— a point the President himself made. But, two days ago, Business Insider Africa ran a story headlined, “Trump declares end to Rwanda–DRC conflict with historic peace agreement.”

Imagine a jungle cathedral the size of Western Europe, teeming with orchids, militias, gorillas, mercenaries, and minerals. That’s the Congo (DRC)— a land so rich in resources it practically bleeds lithium and cobalt, but so cursed by history it’s never known peace longer than a single political campaign. To its east lies Rwanda, a lush mountain republic forever etched in the world’s conscience for its 1994 genocide, but now punchy, proud, and regionally ambitious.

For the last twenty years, these neighbors have traded bullets across a demon-possessed border where ideology and ethnicity dissolve into economics and resource extraction. Rwanda has long been accused of backing rebel proxies to destabilize mineral-rich eastern Congo and carve out a shadow empire of influence and control. The Congo, for its part, is a state in name but a witches’ cauldron in practice— half-government, half-warlord, with villages constantly caught between machetes and megaphones. The war is not clean, not conventional, and not short.

The DRC-Rwanda conflict has been called “Africa’s World War” for a good reason: the ethnic tensions, rebel groups, and international proxy meddling have made peace efforts nearly impossible. This endless war was responsible for millions of deaths, legions of child soldiers, and half a dozen failed U.N. missions.

It was the kind of conflict that chews up U.N. resolutions and spits out refugees. And now —suddenly, improbably— Trump announced it’s over.

It was a diplomatic double-play — part humanitarian win, part geopolitical masterstroke.

According to Business Insider, Trump brokered the historic peace treaty between the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda. The deal included troop withdrawals, disarmament of militias like M23, repatriation of refugees, and —here’s the real kicker— a minerals-for-security framework giving the U.S. access to strategic resources like cobalt and lithium.

In other words: peace plus rare earths.

Directed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Trump’s Africa adviser Massad Boulos spent the spring running shuttle diplomacy like Henry Kissinger with a passport packed with Kinshasa stamps. Late last week, Trump triumphantly declared, “We are ending violent bloodshed and death, more so even than most other wars.”

He was right. Still, corporate media largely ignored the massive story. It doesn’t fit the narrative, especially not this week, with the Pentagon dropping missiles into Iranian ventilation shafts like a rogue Jedi attacking the Death Star. But this historic African peace treaty was signed in Washington and facilitated by Trump’s State Department.

Buried in the story is the birth of something altogether new: a post-globalist foreign policy that trades endless conflict management for strategic resolution — and always with a keen eye on critical resources and a good deal for the U.S.

This scorched hulk of a peacekeeping vehicle, pictured above, with its wheels sunk in volcanic mud, smoke curling from a tire, useless turret turned skyward like it’s defying the Almighty, perfectly captures the United Nations’ useless 20-year record in Congo: burn fuel, hold meetings, and hope the rebels feel guilty.

The MONUSCO mission, once the largest and most expensive peacekeeping operation on earth, achieved precisely nothing except giving warlords convenient targets and diplomats a reason to expense bottled water in Goma and fund numberless NGOs. And now, a real peace is finally brokered — not by blue helmets, but by the man the Western media calls a warmonger.

History has a keen sense of humor.

The Rwanda–DRC war killed more people than any conflict since WWII. But now, instead of celebrating, it’s crickets among Trump’s critics. If ending that kind of war doesn’t merit a Peace Prize, what does? It’s almost like they don’t really care about peace.

“I won’t get a Nobel Peace Prize no matter what I do,” Trump correctly observed this weekend on Truth Social, practically daring Oslo to prove him wrong. But he added, almost wistfully: “The people know, and that’s all that matters to me.”

Some people do. The Pakistani government’s X account posted Friday, “The Government of Pakistan has decided to formally recommend President Donald J. Trump for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize, in recognition of his decisive diplomatic intervention and pivotal leadership during the recent India-Pakistan crisis.”

It’ll go nowhere, of course, but I suppose it’s a start.

For twenty years, the Congo conflict was a bottomless money pit for Western guilt and USAID grants — a bureaucratic bonanza where NGOs multiplied like river amoebas, consultants got rich, and the UN racked up frequent flyer miles to swanky conferences while rebels racked up body counts. Peacekeeping became a business model. Stability was bad for funding.

But now, Trump walks in, cuts a deal, and wrecks the racket. No wonder nobody wants to talk about it. He ended the war — and worse, he ended the grift.

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Just when you thought the Minnesota Murders story couldn’t get any weirder, guess what happened? First, over the weekend, the Star Tribune ran a dramatic story headlined, “Letter to FBI from shooting suspect made wild claims about Klobuchar and Walz, sources say.” Second, the FBI unsealed its arrest affidavit.

Vance Boelter, the curiously wealthy but unemployed Congolese preacher and master of disguise, who’s charged with shooting two politicians and their spouses, claimed in a letter addressed to the FBI —to Kash Patel— that Governor Tim Walz (D-MN) asked him to assassinate Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN). The one-page-and-a-half letter was described as rambling and “difficult to read,” but Boelter claimed he had been secretly trained by the U.S. Military and was asked to perform the killing so that Walz could run for Klobuchar’s Senate seat.

Police say they found the handwritten letter in Boelter’s truck.

Naturally, Walz called the allegations “deeply disturbing” — but only in the “this is very sad” kind of way, not in the “I definitely didn’t do this” kind of way. Prosecutors said they’ve seen no evidence backing Boelter’s story, and that’s fair, since as far as we know, it only described a private conversation that just two people would’ve known about.

Despite Boelter’s explicit, written allegation that Governor Tim Walz ordered a political hit on a sitting U.S. Senator, the media coverage has been painfully incurious. No mainstream outlet appears to be investigating any contacts or overlap between Walz and Boelter; tracing campaign donations, email records, or social media interactions; asking whether Boelter ever worked for or contracted with any state agency; checking whether Boelter’s “military training” claim has any verifiable kernel; or demanding to see the actual letter to the FBI, or whether it was logged, scanned, or buried.

Did the letter include any other details that might not have been leaked? Who knows. It’s hard to read.

The phrase “difficult to read” does a lot of quiet work here. It implies that the document is disorganized, emotional, and probably delusional. In other words, why even bother verifying anything in it? And those three words also preemptively dismiss any inconvenient leads the letter might contain, like timelines, names, patterns, payments, location details, or operational notes.

🔥 Add this to the growing mountain of weird: weekend reports revealed that, just hours after killing two lawmakers, Boelter bought a Buick and an e-bike off a stranger — a man he “had never met,” according to prosecutors — in a cash transaction at a bus stop.

So … Boelter met a mystery man at a Minneapolis bus stop around 7 a.m. in the morning, and paid him $900 in cash for a getaway vehicle and an electric bike. This, whilst being the most wanted man in the state, with helicopters buzzing overhead and a 70-target political kill list in his pocket.

Let me ask you this: If you were being pursued by the entire state government and every available fed, could you find a car to buy for $900 on the run?

Please. Let’s be real. You can’t buy a reliable car for $900 on Craigslist without getting ghosted, much less in person while evading an intensive manhunt. You don’t just stumble upon a guy with an e-bike and a sedan at a bus stop ready to part with both for less than a week’s rent.

As the corporate news kept leaking out, Belter seemed crazier than a bedbug. But I’ll ask again: where did the money come from? This high-functioning ‘lone lunatic’ somehow bought a million-dollar estate, his wife was caught flush with $10,000 in cash, he had multiple vehicles, dodged capture for days, used high-end silicone disguises, rapidly replaced his unmarked transportation, and had access to weapons, intel, and logistics well beyond what an unmedicated fantasist should possess.

Crazy? Or crazy like a fox? There’s a lot more to this story.

🔥 Next, the FBI’s unsealed affidavit (here it is) raised profound questions that corporate media is studiously avoiding. You can’t make this stuff up.

First, Jennifer Boelter, who was briefly nabbed and then released, was found with cash, a safe (?), guns, a bug-out bag, and the couple’s four kids. She told the FBI that she and Boelter were preppers, and he’d told her to “prepare for war.”

Second, the affidavit stated, “Boelter’s wife further identified that Boelter has a business partner from Worthington, MN who resides in Washington state and is partners with Boelter in Red Lion, a security company and fishing outfit in Congo, Africa.”

Wait, what? First of all: what business partner? Who is this mysterious person? The affidavit doesn’t say. Next, what a weird coincidence— the Congo, an unaccountable endless war zone. And that curious little phrase — security and fishing outfit — deserves more attention.

Red Lion smells less like a legit business and more like a front. It’s the kind of off-the-books stuff that thrives in lawless mining zones and conflict-adjacent states. As mentioned above, Eastern Congo, rich in cobalt and chaos, has been a mercenary playground for decades.

And “fishing” is exactly the kind of innocent cover that makes customs paperwork easier.

But the third one was the bombshell. The affidavit said that, after the shootings, Boelter went to the bank and emptied his accounts. Then— "A third party identified as REDACTED then drove Boelter from the bank in an automobile."

It wasn’t some random Uber driver. It was someone Boelter knew —someone Boelter trusted right after two homicides— who helped him vanish during the largest manhunt in Minnesota history. There could be several reasons why the FBI redacted the driver’s name. They might be trying to flip him. He might be an asset they don’t want to burn. Or he might be a politically inconvenient link.

Whichever way— this is already a much bigger story than lone gunman strikes again. He’s far from alone. Just from the FBI affidavit, we have a wife with guns and cash walking free. We have a security partner with African ties who’s apparently vanished. And we have an unidentified driver helping a fugitive escape the scene of a domestic political assassination — and nobody in media is asking who the hell it was.

You’d think a masked man gunning down elected officials in their homes would be the biggest political violence story in a decade. You’d think the wife caught with guns, passports, and a bug-out bag full of cash would raise some flags. You’d think an unnamed driver helping a fugitive vanish from a bank would get, at minimum, a press inquiry or two.

🔥 On Saturday, even with access to the affidavit, the New York Times ran a full-length profile of Vance Boelter. They treated the whole thing like a human interest story with a tragic twist. They printed multiple photos, catalogued his time removing corpses from nursing homes, quoted sermons he gave in the Congo, and even described his gas station résumé — but somehow managed to bury every explosive thread under a soft blanket of quirky loner with a troubled past.

The Times’ story mentioned Red Lion only in passing, citing LinkedIn and not the affidavit (though it briefly mentioned the affidavit elsewhere, so we know they saw it). There was no mention of “security operations,” despite the affidavit identifying Red Lion as a security and fishing outfit. The article also completely omitted mention of Boelter’s business partner and the getaway driver.

The press isn’t investigating this story — it’s embalming it. From the moment Boelter was caught, corporate media slipped into damage control mode. The New York Times ran its sprawling profile that read more like a eulogy than a crime report: lots of gas station jobs, Bible school trivia, and vague “mental health struggles” — but no follow-up on the $10,000 in cash, no curiosity about the wife with weapons and passports, no mention of the vanished business partner, and no questions about the REDACTED driver who helped Boelter escape during the largest manhunt in state history.

The Times name-dropped Red Lion — Boelter’s sketchy “security and fishing” firm in the Congo — right into the memory hole. They quoted the FBI affidavit — but only the soft parts, leaving out the actual operational evidence and damning implications. The result was a neatly packaged “lone nut” story, ready for the assassin’s archive.

Let’s be honest: this whole thing feels less like a lone madman spree and more like a script rewrite from The Bourne Identity. A masked assassin dressed as a cop slips through a locked-down neighborhood, ditches his tactical SUV, vanishes into the city, buys a used Buick and e-bike from a random guy at a bus stop, pays in cash, hits the bank to drain his accounts, and disappears again.

Paging Jason Bourne.

At every turn, there’s a new mystery character the media forgot about: the getaway driver whose name is redacted, the wife with a mobile armory, the security partner in Congo, and now the used car guy who’s never named and apparently not questioned.

You can’t find this whole unfolding story in any corporate media report. Blech. Our media is worse than useless. I sure hope Kash Patel is paying attention.

Have a terrific Monday! We’ll return tomorrow with even more essential news and skeptical commentary. See you then.

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