🦠 THE CANCELED MANIFESTO ☙ Thursday, October 9, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Middle East peace inches closer with major deal announcement; CNN surprisingly honest with credit; feisty roundtable with Antifa experts evokes pandemic strategy; cowardly Dr. Antifa tries to flee.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! Today’s roundup includes: major Middle East peace news as President Trump announces both sides agreed to phase one, which will bring the remaining hostages home; CNN reports real details on Trump involvement in brokering the deal; President Trump also hosts DeSantis-style roundtable with Antifa experts and the fur flies; and Rutgers Professor “Dr. Antifa” unsuccessfully attempts to flee the country. So much for courageous resistance. They are all paper tigers and armchair revolutionaries.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Around four o’clock this morning, CNN ran a remarkably complimentary story headlined, “How Trump willed ‘phase one’ of a Gaza ceasefire deal across the finish line.” The first several steps along the 21-point plan have now been agreed to, and it is undoubtedly terrific news— broken by the President on social media just after dinner last night:

That’s the news: what will soon be called “phase one” confirms Hamas will deliver all the remaining hostages, alive or dead, and Israel will uncork some Palestinian prisoners and pull troops back from about half of the Gazan territory, all lubricated by the delicate but continuing ceasefire that Trump brokered last weekend.

Presumably, the plan’s other points are still being worked through. But the announcement was nevertheless historic, and is a palliative to the inhabitants on both sides of the war-torn region, to the desperate parents and relatives, the soldiers and fighters, the wounded, and indeed to the entire war-weary world, which —one way or another— is stuck to the conflict raging in the postage-stamp-sized region.

🚀 You might (fairly) be thinking that’s nice, but so what? We’ve been hearing about the hostage exchange for over a week now. Without the hostages actually showing up on the scene, what exactly was the “news?”

The news is the Art of the Deal, which was also the subject of this surprising CNN story.

Read CNN’s story or bookmark it for later. It rebuts all criticism that Trump somehow stumbled into an existing historic deal that someone else had already arranged —the other Arab leaders, Biden’s Secretary of State and priceless imbecile Tony Blinken, or anyone else. CNN relied on unnamed sources —strategic leaks— and walked through the entire negotiation from start to finish. The article included specific details about how it all started, how it developed, and how it reached this morning’s key milestone.

President Trump is employing a classic negotiating tactic called incrementalism. It is best used in complex and prickly conflicts covered with thorns, distrust, gopher holes, landmines, and every other allegory for impossible-to-settle deals.

It works like this. The mediator sets the chessboard by first helping parties visualize the endgame’s rewards, sketching out a possible game path in general terms, then convinces the players to perform just one significant move, a mini-deal. If the mediator can accomplish that, momentum and investment unlock new levels. As each successive incremental move toward a final deal are carefully played, it becomes increasingly harder to walk away from the game.

When other stakeholders are involved, as here, a great mediator involves the stakeholders at every step, too, applying them like braces to reinforce each little advance. That’s why Trump posts so much about the deal on Truth Social — refusing to give up, and celebrating every teeny tiny incremental advance— in public.

President Trump has made the public itself part of the negotiation.

Here, in the WaPo’s words, is a great example of how Trump skillfully weaponized even the tiniest positive movements. From CNN’s story:

See? That is incrementalism at work. (On an aside: According to other reports, when Trump “told Netanyahu he was being negative,” it was actually in much more descriptive language and could even have involved an f-bomb or two.)

You might ask why this strategy isn’t used to resolve every complicated deal. The reason is that it requires a brilliant mediator comparable to a chess grandmaster, who has the creativity and experience to find the incremental plays and opportunities, with the force of personality to push the parties together whenever their intrinsic magnetic forces repel them. And even a brilliant mediator needs lots of pieces with which to set up plays.

Only Trump could have done it. Indeed, in this clip, a leftwing CNN anchor Abby Phillip seemed stunned, asked why “this was not doable under President Biden,” and agreed “Trump has changed that dynamic” (0:45).

At one point in the timeline, for example, a scowling Trump forced Israel’s Prime Minister, like a scolded schoolboy, to phone officials in Qatar and deliver a scripted apology for a botched bombing raid — live, on camera, and very much against his will. It instantly created one of the most iconic pictures in diplomatic history:

What is even more fascinating is the possibility that the spectacle of Trump pushing the muley Israelis around could be completely staged, part of the show, to convince the Arab world it is getting a great deal and to give Netanyahu political cover at home, where he can tell hard-liners he got strong-armed by the White House. It’s impossible to tell, either way. Trump is that good.

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We are so far down the Trump 2.0 rabbit hole now that the great news about the “phase one” agreement arrived yesterday during a completely different example of Trump’s political mastery. The Hill ran this unrelated story below the headline, “White House hosts conservative influencers for antifa roundtable amid Portland protests.”

First, let’s rightfully credit Governor DeSantis, who invented the format. During the pandemic, Florida’s governor held a series of streamed “round table” events with experts, discussing masks, vaccines, lockdowns, and other pandemic policies. (YouTube banned several of these newsworthy expert events, and corporate media refused to report them.) In each case, DeSantis followed his roundtables with a major pro-freedom policy change.

It worked beautifully. Critics’ complaints that DeSantis wasn’t “following the science” fell flat, since he had literally just consulted the experts. When the governor reopened elementary schools, for example, it was after spending two streamed hours discussing the policy with doctors and scientists who advised him that school closures were harmful and ineffective.

Yesterday afternoon, President Trump held a roundtable with independent journalists who have been diligently covering the Antifa insurrection in Portland and Seattle. One of the invitees, for example, was the courageous Andy Ngo, who was nearly killed —twice— by domestic terrorists while covering Portland “protests.” Another was Jack Posobiec.

The clips are more fun than a barrel of black-clad videogame players pretending to be South American guerillas. The independent journalists often spoke directly to corporate media reporters who were in the room, basically calling them cowards for being too afraid to cover Antifa. Delicious, but I digress.

There was a point to it. And the Washington Post got the point, even if the Hill didn’t. The WaPo’s article was headlined, “Trump builds case for deploying National Guard to Chicago, Portland.” And it included the single most important statement in its sub-headline: “The president said he would pursue designating antifa a ‘foreign terrorist organization.’”

That is the key. The government can’t deploy the military, use the most aggressive surveillance tools, or wield the strongest laws including freezing bank accounts against domestic groups, even if they are domestic terrorists. But if Antifa is deemed a foreign terrorist organization, well, then all bets are off. Even citizens who support foreign terrorist organizations can be prosecuted. Here comes the pain.

At one point, Attorney General Pam Bondi said, “Just like we did with cartels, we’re going to take this same approach with Antifa.” Homeland Security Secretary Noem called Antifa “just as sophisticated as “MS-13, the Islamic State, Hezbollah, and Hamas.” In other words, both ladies compared Antifa to other foreign terror groups.

And here is how the WaPo described the consequences:

The independent journalists had described their research and conclusions in painful detail, which included linking Antifa to foreign actors and foreign funding. The case was made. Right in front of corporate media reporters.

They can’t say there is “no evidence.”

🔥 Perhaps not coincidentally, Reuters ran a mysterious, inconclusive, and highly suggestive story yesterday headlined, “Rutgers Expert on Antifa Tries to Flee to Spain After Death Threats.” The sub-headline clarified that, “Mark Bray was teaching courses on antifascism. Turning Point USA accused him of belonging to antifa. His flight to Spain was canceled abruptly on Wednesday night.”

Often described by his critics as “Dr. Antifa,” Rutgers assistant professor Mark Bray cultivates an aura of radical chic with his black T-shirt and leftist bookshelf aesthetic, projecting the self-assured certainty of an intellectual whose activism rarely faces real-world consequence. Until recently.

Bray’s 2017 book, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, is a veritable manifesto for anti-conservative and anti-police activism, touting the legitimacy —if not the necessity— of violence to oppose political adversaries broadly labeled as “fascists.”

Bray claims to donate half his book’s profits to the International Anti-Fascist Defense Fund. Remember that, it will be important later.

In The Anti-Fascist Handbook, Bray plainly advised that “anti-fascists don’t wait for a fascist threat to become violent before acting to shut it down, physically if necessary.” In fact, the first sentence in his book states, “Fascism is not to be debated, it is to be destroyed.” Later, he gushed that “Violence remains a tactical question, not a moral absolute… removing it entirely from the ‘toolbox’ of resistance may prove too late when facing genuine fascism.”

Throughout the book, Bray admitted he was “reluctant to define genuine fascism” because he sees it as a “moving target.” If you’re reading this post, it’s likely that Bray would consider you a fascist, too. Professor Bray argued that it is “strategically dangerous” to wait for ‘textbook versions’ of Hitler or Mussolini, and instead encourages all anti-fascists to act against any threat that they personally perceive as dangerous or oppressive.

“Fascism,” Professor Bray wrote, “is a moral signifier” rather than any particular political position. In other words, there’s no test, per se. It’s purely subjective, and each little anti-fascist can decide for themselves who needs to be destroyed rather than debated.

From the standpoint of constitutional principles, classical liberalism, and mainstream Western political philosophy, Professor Bray’s advocacy for militant, preemptive violence based on subjective definitions of “fascism” is not a legitimate policy, a sound moral justification, or a defensible philosophical stance for any free society. Bray is a reprehensible lunatic and all right-thinking people should shun him, at least.

Reuter’s article did not quote Bray’s book, of course.

🔥 Now you understand why conservative groups like Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA have labeled Bray “an outspoken, well-known antifa member” and demanded his firing, with some likening his presence on campus to Rutgers hosting a taxpayer-funded extremist. Bray is listed on TPUSA’s “professor watchlist.”

Anyway, following Charlie Kirk’s murder and Trump’s executive order designating Antifa as a terror group (at that time, without calling it a foreign terror group), Professor Bray began playing the victim, loudly complaining in a very cowardly fashion about receiving loads of death threats. Ironic.

I cannot find a single published example of any death threat, any arrest for making of death threats, or even any report of an investigation into any death threat against Bray. I doubt they exist. It’s not threats that Bray is really worried about.

But Bray told his students that, for his and his family’s “safety,” he was immediately moving to Spain and would finish the fall semester remotely. Not to avoid prosecution, no. He was getting out of Dodge from fear of political violence, which Professor Bray has long okayed whenever it is aimed at anyone rightwards of the far left. (Rutgers offered Bray security, but he declined.)

When the Bray family reached the gate at Newark Liberty International Airport last night, after getting their boarding passes, checking their bags, and going though security, he was then told by the airline that “the reservation was just canceled.” Whoops.

Dr. Bray said the airline rebooked them on another flight for Thursday (today). He told Reuters that he was hoping for the best. But. “I may sound conspiratorial, but I don’t think it is a coincidence,” he said. “We’re at a hotel and we’re just going to try again.” We’ll see. Hopefully.

Taken by itself, the article was super silly. At bottom, it’s just about a randomly canceled flight that Bray had organized at the last minute. There’s literally no evidence anyone stopped Bray from leaving. It’s just his conspiracy theory, thoughts swirling in his frantic brain, which Reuters happily boosted into “news” because Reuters likes his theory, as opposed to not reporting the theories of moms who believe their infants were injured by vaccines, say. But I digress.

Reuters was too chicken to draw the obvious line. But Mark Bray knows he sits squarely in the DOJ crosshairs of any prosecution of “material support” for a foreign terrorist organization —like donating his book proceeds to the International Antifa Defense Fund— if in fact Antifa officially becomes a foreign terror group.

And if Governor DeSantis had organized yesterday’s roundtable, I’d bet a pallet of PPE that’s exactly what he was just about to do.

Have a terrific Thursday! Professor Bray’s flight might be canceled, but don’t let that stop you from getting back here tomorrow morning for another installment of delicious and nutritious Coffee & Covid.

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