☕️ THE CASCADE ☙ Monday, August 10, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Biden White House veteran endorses Republican for Senate; Piker demands a purge; BMJ blames distrust in medicine on Rand Paul's fault; FAA fills 3,800 vacancies with a different kind of controller.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! Ready to launch a brand new week? Your terrific roundup includes: the latest Democrat defection is Jill Biden’s former press secretary, who just came out as a Mike Rogers voter and then took the extra step of telling everyone else to do it too; the Twitch commissar who answered by declaring a party line, out loud, on the internet, apparently convinced that “Marxist-Leninist doctrine” tests well in Macomb County; the British Medical Journal’s six-year inquiry into why nobody trusts doctors anymore, which somehow arrived at Rand Paul; the Duke professor who signed it while disclosing, in the same journal, that he takes the updated shot every single year — which at this point is less a conflict of interest than a lifestyle; Anthony Fauci’s private diary, which turns out to disagree rather sharply with Anthony Fauci; and the United States Department of Transportation, which just worked out that the cure for a 3,800-person air traffic controller shortage had been sitting in a beanbag chair the whole time, holding a different kind of controller.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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DEMOCRAT CIVIL WAR UPDATE. Spoiler: it’s getting worse. This weekend, Fox News reported on the latest high-profile defection: “Biden-world veteran issues stark warning about Abdul El-Sayed as he crosses party lines.”

Michael LaRosa just became the latest Democrat defector. His progressive credentials are uncontested: not only was he Jill Biden’s press secretary during the Cabbage years —the first “openly gay” one— but before that, he worked for a long string of Democrat pols like Kirsten Gillibrand, Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA), and Nancy Pelosi. He often pops up on the networks, billed as a Democrat strategist.

On June 24th, LaRosa appeared on a CSPAN panel and fretted that Republicans could weaponize the DSA against Democrats, and fervently hoped that Abdul El-Sayed would lose Michigan’s primary for Democrat candidate for U.S. Senate. At that time, LaRosa felt that the Democratic Socialists’ influence was contained to dark blue enclaves in Manhattan and West Hollywood, and hoped that Michigan would be immune:

But as you know, El-Sayed did win the Michigan primary, shattering LaRosa’s cozy theory that the DSA infection would be quarantined to the craziest patches of Democrat largesse. The socialist virus is spreading. LaRosa seemed even more disgusted that Mr. El-Sayed would embrace the radical Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who keeps saying America “deserved” the 9/11 attacks.

So, LaRosa not only said he planned to vote for Republican Mike Rogers, but also endorsed the conservative candidate— in essence calling on other Democrats to do the same. That’s pretty bold. And it says something profound about how far the Overton Window has slid.

Think about it. LaRosa could have quietly voted for Rogers and that would be that. But he went public, risking serious career damage and even cancellation. After all, the Democrat Party is better known for its deadly purity spiral than for tolerating heterodox thinking and aisle-crossing like endorsing Republicans. Just ask John Fetterman, who never even endorsed a conservative. He just supported Israel.

Remember— for Democrats, gaining control of the Senate is critical, so LaRosa’s defection risks corrupting the entire national strategy. Hasan Piker called for any Democrat who opposes El-Sayed to feel the purity spiral’s lash. On Thursday, he told his three million followers, “There are haters in our midst. If there’s one Marxist-Leninist doctrine that the Democrat Party should deploy, it should be that: No more factionalism! It’s over! Abide by the party line!”

“You can’t be out here saying like, ‘Oh, I’m a centrist Democrat,” he continued. “Or, ‘I think Abdul is a bridge too far.’ That must be punished.” Alrighty then. But he pressed on. Reaching an apogee of political fervor, Hasan cried, “Establishment Democrats who “work with MAGA are irredeemable and must be excised from the party ranks!”

One detects the faintest echo of a certain 1930s-era mustachioed dictator.

This story reflects a polycrisis much deeper than Democrats losing a single strategist. LaRosa’s defection follows Democrat lawyer and strategist Julian Epstein’s high-profile defection last week. Now, on Monday morning, the more important questions are: how many others feel the same way LaRosa and Epstein do, and does LaRosa’s public endorsement of a Republican provoke a permission structure for other, more timid Democrats to cross the aisle too?

If the comments to the LaRosa story can be believed, the answer is at least one:

How many of these will we need to see before we can safely label it a preference cascade?

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Ahura! The prestigious British Medical Journal has finally cracked the case. After six years of exhaustive scientific inquiry, the world’s leading medical minds have discovered the true cause of the devastating loss of public trust in America’s health institutions. Behold: the “gold standard” British Medical Journal’s editors excreted its latest celebrity op-ed titled, “Fauci’s Senate hearing riled up the MAGA base—but at the cost of damaging public health.”

Was it the school closures? The forced masking of toddlers? The arbitrary distinctions between “essential” strip clubs and “non-essential” churches? The fact that the entire medical establishment locked arms to tell us that gathering in groups of more than three was a lethal biothreat— unless you were rioting for Black Lives Matter, in which case the virus would scientifically look the other way?

No, you silly rubes. The problem is Republican politicians.

In the op-ed, two professors diagnosed the political patient. One, Gavin Yamey of Duke University, is a registered Democrat whose center receives NIH funding, who signed an open letter calling on Congress to stop being mean to Fauci, who has donated to organizations dedicated to opposing the Trump administration’s health policies, whose family participated in the first mRNA vaccine trials, and who —this is in his own competing interests disclosure, published in the same journal— “receives an annual updated covid vaccine.” Which should have been immediately disqualifying, but whatever.

In other words, Professor Yamey is on the auto-renewing jab subscription plan. And now he has squeezed out a ‘neutral’ scientific opinion piece about Anthony Fauci.

🔥 According to Dr. Yamey and his co-author, the real tragedy of the pandemic isn’t the million dead Americans, the ruined economy, or the stolen years of our children’s lives.

The real tragedy is that Senator Rand Paul was mean to Anthony Fauci.

“The vilification of Anthony Fauci by Senate Republicans will erode trust in science,” the authors sobbed, clutching their pearls so tightly I’m surprised they haven’t crushed them into diamonds. The recent Senate hearings, they claimed, “fueled anger among the MAGA political base and conservative influencers, energizing them ahead of the upcoming midterm elections.”

Ha! This is the kind of breathtaking, bird-brained conclusion you can only reach by spending your entire life inside the faculty lounge.

Notice the direction the BMJ’s causation arrow travels. In the minds of the BMJ editors, the MAGA base was sitting around, happily sipping their Bud Lights and trusting the science, until those dastardly Republican politicians started asking rude questions. The politicians caused the anger. The politicians created the distrust.

This is exactly backward. Which, to be fair, is the default setting for the public health establishment these days.

The truth is, Republican politicians aren’t leading the angry mob; they’re running to catch up with it. The public isn’t enraged because Rand Paul gave a speech. Rand Paul gave a speech because the public is infuriated.

Which they have every right to be.

🔥 Let’s review the polls, shall we? Back in May 2025, a YouGov poll found that 57% of all Americans —including 82% of conservatives and even a shocking 36% of liberals— believed Covid-19 “definitely” or “probably” came from a Chinese lab. Time isn’t helping. A year before that, it was 66%. Even the Washington Post —hardly a MAGA newsletter— admitted last year that “The war for public opinion was won long ago.”

It’s over. The American people sensibly looked at a virus that emerged in the exact same city as China’s premier coronavirus research lab —a lab conducting U.S.-funded gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses— and thought, “Gee, I wonder if those two things are related?”

For this basic application of common sense, they were branded conspiracy theorists, banned from social media, and treated like escaped mental patients by the very people now writing op-eds in the BMJ.

If anything, the politicians are more restrained than their constituents. Rand Paul wants Fauci behind bars. His voters want something considerably less comfortable. The senators are the moderating influence. You’re welcome, Tony.

🔥 But wait, it gets better. The BMJ authors confidently assured us that Senator Paul was pushing “baseless” claims, “despite the lack of evidence supporting those allegations and the substantial body of scientific evidence consistent with zoonotic origin.”

Ah, yes. The old “substantial body of evidence.” Let’s examine this evidentiary double standard, which is so lopsided it’s a wonder the entire scientific community doesn’t walk in circles.

If, say, you want to claim the virus came from a bat that sneezed on a pangolin that was sold to a guy who made a contaminated bowl of soup at the Huanan Seafood Market, no proof is necessary. You just need a computer model and prestigious letterhead.

For instance, the BMJ cited a 2022 “modeling” paper by Michael Worobey as if it were handed down on stone tablets from Mount Sinai. Never mind that, six years later, nobody has found an intermediate host animal. Never mind that the World Health Organization itself admitted in its June 2025 report that China hasn’t shared the data needed to evaluate the lab leak theory.

Thus, in the absence of Chinese confessions, the “weight of evidence” suggests zoonosis, so shut up and slip your crocheted mask back on. Here is Duke University Professor of Public Health Gavin Yaney, MD, MPH (really):

🔥 Let us not pass too quickly over this fact. The WHO admitted China is withholding the same evidence that could settle the question. And the scientific establishment’s conclusion from this is: zoonosis wins by default! That’s not science, it’s an Asian protection racket with a peer-review membership card.

But for folks who want to claim the virus leaked from a lab? Well then, the rules are completely different.

Never mind that the virus has a furin cleavage site— an engineered biological characteristic not found in nature. Never mind that all cases stemmed from a single introduction into humans, unlike every previous pandemic with multiple spillover events. Never mind that Wuhan Institute of Virology researchers were hospitalized with covid-like symptoms in the fall of 2019, months before the wet market cases appeared. Never mind that the White House, the House Oversight Committee’s 500-page final report, and Biden’s own former covid coordinator, Ashish Jha, all now say a lab leak is the most likely origin.

All of that is, according to our dear professors, “no evidence.”

And it certainly doesn’t matter that Anthony Fauci’s own private diary —released during those very same Senate hearings the BMJ is crying about— reveals that on February 1, 2020, nine out of eleven scientists on a conference call with him believed “deliberate insertion was possible.” Or that on January 26, 2020, Fauci himself wrote, “Now we know the market was not the source, it was the amplifier.”

🔥 Publicly, Fauci commissioned the infamous “Proximal Origin” paper to suppress the lab leak theory and push the natural origin narrative. Privately, he knew the market theory was garbage. Then he pleaded the Fifth Amendment 111 times rather than explain the discrepancy. This is what the BMJ calls “50 years of public service.”

To the BMJ, it is still a “lack of evidence.” They demand a sky-high level of proof for the lab leak that they snicker over and waive off for their own preferred theory— and they do so while winking at the fact that the Chinese Communist Party will never cough up the definitive evidence anyway. Heads I win, tails you’re a conspiracy theorist.

Now let’s discuss the 232,000. The BMJ solemnly informed readers that “over a 15-month period in 2021-22, an estimated 232,000 US deaths could have been prevented among unvaccinated adults had they been vaccinated.” This statistic was deployed as a cudgel against Republican vaccine skepticism, the obvious implication being that GOP politicians are accessories to mass death.

What the BMJ did not mention: more than a million Americans who died during the pandemic anyway, including plenty who were vaccinated. What the BMJ did not mention: the lockdowns, school closures, and deferred medical care that caused their own cascade of deaths and ruined lives— deaths that somehow never get assigned to the public health experts who actually caused them.

What the BMJ did not mention: the “6 feet apart” social distancing rule that shut down schools and small businesses across the country was, by Fauci’s own closed-door testimony, not based on science. It “sort of just appeared.”

What the BMJ did not mention: Fauci’s senior advisor, Dr. David Morens, who deliberately obstructed the congressional investigation, unlawfully deleted federal covid records, and likely lied to Congress multiple times.

EcoHealth’s Peter Daszak doctored documents before releasing them to investigators and provided false statements to Congress. The Biden administration’s HHS ran a multi-year obstruction campaign to hide evidence that could embarrass senior public health officials.

The BMJ mentions none of this. The BMJ is not interested in accountability. The BMJ is interested in protecting the guild.

🔥 This remarkable op-ed laughably concluded that we need a “rigorous, bipartisan inquiry to understand what worked and what failed.” This, from the same authors who spent the preceding thousand words calling the Senate hearing a “show trial” and “political theatre.” They say they want a bipartisan inquiry— just not the kind that involves asking Fauci any questions he prefers not to answer.

They are wishcasting. The public health establishment actually believes that, if they just keep parroting “lab leak lacks evidence” with sufficient authority and emphasis, the American people will suddenly snap out of their MAGA trance, forget the last six years of lies, start trusting public health again, and give them a cracker.

It will not work. The scientists have learned absolutely nothing.

You don’t restore trust by insisting that people should just trust you. You restore trust by being trustworthy. And right now, the public health establishment has the credibility of a Mexican timeshare salesman with a bad toupee. The people running public health commissioned fraudulent papers, deleted federal records, obstructed congressional investigations, flipped on masks, flipped on schools, flipped on lab leak— and now they want credit for their 50 years of secure government service.

The entire rotten edifice must be vivisected. Laid open on the table while still alive, examined organ by organ —the institutional capture, the funding conflicts, the political coordination, the censorship apparatus— until we understand exactly where the initial infection began. And then the whole sick thing needs to be thrown in the incinerator.

The lessons must continue until they are learned.

Don’t panic, scientists. Just breathe slowly through your triple mask— the one that “sort of just appeared.”

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For years, parents across America have been engaged in a futile, daily struggle with their teenage sons, delivering variations of the exact same speech: “Justin, put down the Xbox controller and go do your homework! You can’t make a living playing video games! You need to go to college so you can get a degree in Marketing and work as an assistant manager at a 7-Brew drive-through coffee stand!”

It turns out the parents were wrong. The teenagers were right. And, in a plot twist that M. Night Shyamalan would reject as too unbelievable, the hero who proved the teenagers right is the United States Department of Transportation. Behold, yesterday’s tweet from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, titled “Game Changer”:

CLIP: rollicking TSA ad interviewing gamer Air Traffic Control applicants (0:56).

Shortly after his appointment, Secretary Duffy announced that the Federal Aviation Administration had a massive, crippling shortage of air traffic controllers. The FAA was short about 3,800 people. This is a problem, because air traffic control is one of those jobs where you really, really want a full staff. It is not like the Department of Motor Vehicles, where if they are short-staffed, the only consequence is that you spend an extra four hours sitting in a plastic chair reading a 2018 issue of Highlights magazine. If the FAA is short-staffed, airplanes can bump into each other.

So Secretary Duffy launched a new recruitment campaign. And he did not target people with master’s degrees in Public Policy. He targeted video game freaks. New York Times headline, April (note: it’s not just air traffic controllers):

A couple of weeks later, Secretary Duffy explained to Fox how they came up with the idea:

✈️ The FAA’s ad campaign literally started with an Xbox logo and gaming footage from Twitch streams. The pitch went something like: “Hey, you! The guy who just spent 14 consecutive hours successfully managing a 40-player raid in World of Warcraft while simultaneously eating a family-sized bag of Doritos and ignoring your bladder! How would you like to do the exact same thing, but with real airplanes, and we will pay you $160,000 a year?”

That is the actual starting salary. The average certified professional controller earns over $160,000 within three years of leaving the academy. At the nation’s busiest airports, the base pay reaches a tidy $225,700. And —this is the best part— applicants no longer need a college degree.

The response was exactly what you would expect if you told a million nerds that their parents were wrong. In a single 24-hour window, the FAA received 12,350 applications— more than double the previous record. They hit 94% of their hiring goal immediately.

This is basically the plot of the movie Ender’s Game, or The Last Starfighter, where the military realizes that the only people with the hand-eye coordination and spatial awareness required to save the galaxy are teenagers who have never seen the sun.

The FAA realized that the skills required to guide a Boeing 737 safely through a thunderstorm into O’Hare are the exact same skills required to survive a Call of Duty deathmatch (minus, perhaps, the part where you scream insults at a 12-year-old in Denmark who isn’t covering his six.)

But the absolute comedy is the reason why the FAA was short 3,800 controllers in the first place.

✈️ To understand how we got here, we must time-travel back to 2013, during the glorious Obama administration. Since its inception, the FAA had relied on a proven, rigorous aptitude test to hire new controllers. But woke progressives decided that this test was not producing a sufficiently diverse workforce.

So Obama’s FAA ashcanned the aptitude test. They replaced it with a “Biographical Questionnaire.” The stated goal was to prioritize diversity, equity, and inclusion. (Don’t ask why one of the most critical, stressful, and demanding jobs in the country needed more ‘diversity.’ It will just give you a migraine.)

How did this marvelously diverse questionnaire work? It asked questions about the applicant’s background and assigned points based on the answers. And because this was the federal government, the points were assigned in a way that defies all human logic.

For example, one of the questions was: “The high school subject in which I received my lowest grades was…” Now, set aside the fact that they could have asked for transcripts instead of self-attestment. Set aside the fact that this has nothing to do with air traffic control skills. Set aside the fact that there is no correct answer to an unscorable question like that.

The part that will make you want to chew the carpet is that, if the applicant said their worst subject was Science, they were scored +15 points.

I am not making that up. To get a job where your entire responsibility is applying the laws of physics, mathematics, and meteorology to keep hundreds of tons of metal from falling out of the sky, the Federal Aviation Administration gave you bonus points if you were bad at science.

I am not making this up, either: You also got +15 points if you said your lowest college grades were in History. (Presumably, “History” was a correct answer because if you knew the history of the FAA, you wouldn’t bother applying.) You can see what they were doing, right? It was obvious. They replaced merit with bonus points for weak subjects that suggested you might be in certain diverse groups.

Especially if you knew in advance what non-intuitive answers to put down in the questionnaire.

This is where things got stupendously worse. An FAA whistleblower recorded a voicemail for a specific minority advocacy group, coaching applicants on exactly how to answer the questionnaire to pass. The voicemail literally said: “I am about 99 point 99 percent sure that it is exactly how you need to answer each question in order to get through the first phase.”

The result of this brilliantly diverse bureaucratic strategem was that hundreds of highly qualified candidates —people who had spent years studying aviation, say— were rejected, because they failed a personality quiz that actually rewarded people for flunking physics. After a series of near-disasters, the FAA froze its hiring for years while the lawsuits piled up. Then the Biden administration accelerated the DEI focus, the shortage worsened, and the whole rotten system nearly collapsed.

But then President Trump appointed Sean Duffy. He arrived, looked at the previous 8-step hiring process that took three months for the initial review, and asked, “What if we just hire people who are good at this?”

He cut the hiring process to five steps. He removed the degree requirement. He dropped the DEI nonsense. He went straight to the people who have spent their entire lives training their brains to track multiple fast-moving objects on a glowing screen while remaining perfectly calm.

The gamers answered the call. The nerds are saving aviation.

So the next time you are flying, and your plane lands smoothly in a raging blizzard, do not thank the diversity committee. Do not thank the person with a PhD in Fourth Wave feminist sociology. Thank Justin. He’ll be up in the tower, shotgunning his fourth Red Bull, banking $160,000 a year— and he is crushing this game.

Have a magnificent Monday! Then land back here tomorrow morning, for the next brain-expanding roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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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