Good morning, C&C, it’s Thursday! My flu has exited the nose-running-like-a-water-main-on-election-night phase and entered the 100% congestion phase, which requires sleeping bolt upright. Yay. Onwards— your Thursday roundup includes: the Wall Street Journal’s leaked Ilhan Omar scoop and the Democrats’ sudden discovery of the word “weaponization”; Jack Smith’s 639,000-name spreadsheet of garden-variety Republicans; a Florida Democrat on CNN, cheerfully demanding her opponent be “locked up”; Elon Musk’s $276 million reminder of a single 2020 tweet; Taiwan signs up to buy from a historic Alaskan gas pipeline and agrees to help build it; and a Danish think tank that worries about “international norms” while Greenland’s oil gets ready for American customers.
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Weaponization is fun! At first. It’s almost a kind of game, tossing it at your political enemies and making them scatter for cover. But at some point it swoops back around and clobbers you. Two stories ably illustrate that point. The first appeared in the Wall Street Journal, which exclusively reported, “Ilhan Omar Investigation Aims to Build Case for Stripping Her Citizenship.”
Today marks our third Ilhan Omar day, so I will be brief. The Journal added several new claims (anonymously sourced from U.S. officials). First, it claimed that an official confirmed that the Administration is building a case to strip Ilhan’s citizenship through denaturalization. Note that the Administration has recently put fresh batteries in a special deportation court —the Alien Terrorist Removal Court (ATRC)— that Congress created in 1996 and which, in 30 years, had never been used a single time. If you sold it on eBay, you’d describe the ATRC as still in the original packaging.
Anyway, the process remains speculative, but the WSJ claims that deporting Omar is the goal. In other words, the Administration is shooting the works.
“Authorities have issued more than a dozen subpoenas, including to some of Omar’s relatives,” the Journal reported, fixing a tantalizing figure on the broad scope of the investigation. It reported that agents who raided Ilhan’s home got “her cellphone, notebooks, personal computers, and her passport.” She won’t be visiting Mogadishu anytime soon.
Finally, she was there for the raid: “Only the congresswoman and her husband were home at the time of the search.”
🔥 This new, helpfully leaked information just as helpfully extinguished several hot takes and rumors, from one persistent thread claiming Ilhan must have been tipped off since a neighbor allegedly saw her fleeing the scene 30 minutes before agents arrived at the dawn raid, to an even more outrageous one claiming she’d fled the country to Monaco, as if she were a Bond villain or something.
This seems to be the new Democrat strategy. Whenever bad news appears for one of their own, social media quickly gets flooded with what used to be called ‘disinformation’ (during covid, Biden officials twisted that term into an unrecognizable pretzel shape). Classic disinformation is as simple as fake rumors that confuse everything so badly people throw up their hands trying to make any sense of things at all.
Classic-style disinformation is especially effective these days, where so-called influencers can just post the word “BREAKING,” add a Weekly World News-style headline, and then a certain number of naive folks start forwarding it to everyone they know. Things like:
BREAKING: Talarico surges in Texas polls, signaling disaster for Republicans!
BREAKING: Trump calls undocumented migrants “befuddled bean pickers”!
BREAKING: UFO aliens invade Chuck Schumer’s underpants!
So my guess is someone at DOJ tossed some facts to the Journal, in order to corral yesterday’s kookiest Ilhan Omar claims, which are probably a disinformation psyop of their own. To avoid falling for it, just keep following our 3-day rule on hot takes.
🔥 With the disinformation psyop failing, Democrats are leaning into the “weaponization” narrative. For instance, Democrat Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said the raid raised “serious questions about the continued corrupt weaponization of the federal government against Donald Trump’s adversaries.” (Of course, back in June, 2023, when discussing Smith’s indictment of President Trump, Jeffries said, “No one is above the law – including Donald Trump… This indictment must now play out through the legal process, without any outside political or ideological interference.”)
It was a perfect setup. This is where the boomerang knocked them silly.
Though the Omar story is enjoying wall-to-wall coverage, only conservative media covered our next story. Yesterday, Fox reported, “Massive trove of Republican voter and donor info breached in Biden DOJ probe: Senate chairman.”
A newly leaked memo proved that Biden Special Counsel Jack Smith —who handled the Trump Mar-a-Lago documents case and the ‘insurrection’ prosecution— was not just looking at the president, forty-four Republican congressmen, and eight GOP senators. Smith was also building a vast and highly detailed database on 640,000 garden-variety Republican voters, donors, and supporters.
But why?? Smith, who looks just like a Don Knotts clone from Star Trek’s evil dimension (the so-called “Mirror Universe”) was asked that question at Senate Judiciary Committee hearing a couple weeks ago. He started by pledging that he would answer why, right before not answering why.
It was “to conduct a criminal investigation of one of the most serious crimes that’s ever happened in our nation’s history,” Smith supposedly ‘explained,’ without any exaggeration. He was referring to his ‘insurrection’ theory, that Trump tried to ‘overthrow’ the 2020 election. Was Smith saying that everyone who ever donated $7 to a Trump fundraiser was part of a ‘criminal insurrection investigation?’ That’s the logical conclusion. (“I had a duty to collect facts,” Smith insisted. 640,000 of them.)
Even if that ridiculous claim were somehow defensible —which it isn’t— the memo that Committee Chair Chuck Grassley published yesterday shows even that outrageous argument to be a lie. Smith’s special counsel office and the DOJ “obtained spreadsheets containing Republican campaign donors, supporters, and detailed personal voter information in various formats, totaling over 639,000 individuals, at minimum,” Grassley said in the memo.
Most significantly, some of the records Smith collected dated back to 2005— long before Trump even thought about riding down the Trump Tower escalator. That’s a pretty durable conspiracy. According to Smith, all those GOP donors somehow knew Biden would steal the 2020 election fifteen years before it happened.
“The data gathered on the voters and donors,” Fox reported, “included names, dates of birth, physical addresses, emails, whether the person was a registered Republican, their occupation and place of employment — samples on the list included retirees, pool technicians, drivers, loggers, etc. — credit card information, donor analysis data and donation amount, among other details.”
Remember— these are the same Democrats filing lawsuits to stop the federal government from getting voter registration information on illegal immigrants in their states because privacy. Just saying.
To anyone with half a functional brain —here I rule out all corporate media reporters— Smith was obviously building an enemies list so ambitiously vast it would have made President Nixon leap into a Crying Games style shower.
Can you spot the beautiful irony? Grassley’s memo landed just as the ‘weaponization’ complaints over Ilhan Omar’s raid reached maximum volume. Chairman Grassley took their Ilhan Omar bid and raised them, pushing in a giant pile of 640,000 chips. So you want to talk about weaponization?
Democrats’ best argument —that DOJ should stay all the way out of politics— has been overthrown, not by Republicans but by their own shenanigans. They so absurdly weaponized the criminal justice system during the Autopen Era that their complaints cannot be taken seriously. At this point, Trump could investigate any Democrat politician and Republicans would cheer.
During Trump 1.0, the “lock her up” chant was popular in MAGA circles but never left the political tarmac. Obviously, Democrats labeled “lock her up” as incipient fascism and reckless Trump talk. But too many Republicans were also uncomfortable with the idea of arresting Hillary, about starting something that could snowball in unpredictable ways.
My friends, those days are over. Since Democrats enthusiastically endorsed Jack Smith building a secret database of GOP donors, there is no longer any ‘red line’ to cross. It’s been smudged out. Whenever Todd Blanche is challenged by a corporate media reporter about weaponization, all he need do is shoot back, “what about 640,000 everyday citizens in Jack Smith’s criminal database?” Case closed.
One can fairly wonder where all this ends. This week, the Democrats’ DSA candidate for U.S. Senate in Florida, Angie Nixon, told CNN that she wanted her opponent, incumbent Ashley Moody, put in prison. “I want her locked up and punished in jail for what she’s done,” Nixon said, without naming what crimes, exactly, Moody is supposed to have committed. Illegal use of pronouns, maybe?
CLIP: Democrat Senatorial Candidate Angie Nixon vows to lock up Republican opponent (0:22).
CNN’s anchor Kasie Hunt, incredulous, asked Nixon to repeat it, saying, “What she has done?” Nixon quadrupled down: “Yeah, basically, yes. Because of what she did, yes. I absolutely would want that to happen, yes.” Four yeses.
It didn’t help that Ms. Nixon’s arguments were at a roughly third-grade reading level. (The Democrat bench is getting very thin.) But the point is, it is difficult for Democrats to rationally complain about “weaponization” against Ilhan Omar while their Senate candidates go on CNN to request, for unspecified crimes, that Republican candidates be jailed.
The Democrats and their senile leader Biden put us on this greased slip-n-slide, and we are all sliding downhill, faster and faster. Where will it end? One imagines that hard lessons will be learned by the time we hit bottom going around 90 mph. I assume the Senate Leadership fund, flush with Musk’s millions, will run the Nixon clip all over Florida, which is a gift in itself.
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That’s not the only lesson Democrats are learning the hard way. Maybe they shouldn’t have burned down so many Tesla dealerships. On Monday, CNBC reported, “Elon Musk gives $276 million to Republican groups, becomes biggest known 2026 midterm donor.”
Based on the latest financial disclosure forms, since July, the world’s richest man has given $158 million to the Senate Leadership Fund. That’s just part of it. He gave over $76 million to America PAC, “bringing his known federal political giving this cycle to roughly $366 million,” per Reuters.
The Senate Leadership donation alone might be the biggest individual political donation in a single election cycle in history (not counting George Soros’ squidlike operations, which are uncountable by design).
It would be deeply gratifying to credit this political activity to Musk’s intrinsic genius and the undeniable wisdom of conservatism writ large. But that would be wrong. For this, we must thank Democrats.
I’ve written about this dozens of times, but it bears constant reminder. Until 2020’s pandemic excesses, Elon Musk was a lifelong Democrat. He said he had never voted for a single Republican in his entire life. Alert readers will recall the now-historic, badly aging tweet of State Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego), as reported by 10-News on May 10, 2020, when everything changed:
The billionaire only wanted to get his electric car factory reopened at 30% staffing capacity. There were about one billion better ways the all-blue county government could have handled it. Instead, they chose violence. Here is the original Musk tweet that provoked Lorena’s unhinged response:
In 2020, Musk complained about abusive unelected Democrat officials in California. By 2025, and because of that complaint, he’d become the most significant ‘unelected official’ in American history. Irony.
And on that critical Saturday night, which has become the definitive greatest error in political history, bar none, Gonzalez tweeted “F*ck Elon Musk.” On Sunday, having slept on it, Musk posted a terse, two-word reply: “Message received.” And the rest, as they say, was history. At the time, DOGE was still just a crypto meme coin, four years from becoming a revolutionary government initiative. Now it is an efficiency brand.
This week, Senator Bernie Sanders expressed outrage over Musk’s newly disclosed political contributions.
Irony. “Elon Musk spent $290 million to elect Trump. It paid off,” Bernie raged. But why, Bernie? Why?
Without Lorena Gonzalez to thank, there’d be no free Twitter, no Starbase in Texas, no Tesla HQ in Austin, no DOGE, and no historic 2026 campaign contribution. Thanks, Lorena! From the bottom of our hearts. And thanks covid, for another pandemic miracle.
To this day, Democrats have never denounced or even apologized for Gonzalez’s ill-tempered tweet. In January, 2022, just before Gonzalez termed out of her assembly seat, she resigned to be promoted to president of the California Labor Federation, where she still squats today. They never lear.
This is only the latest example of why I haven’t yet changed the name of this blog and why I keep saying the pandemic isn’t over by a long shot. The insanity Democrats invested during the late great unpleasantness continues to deliver healthy dividend checks. This time amounting to around $366 million.
I often think about how the whole FAFO meme was really about the Democrats’ germaphobic response to the pandemic, when they shredded the rules and torched the Constitution, provoking a profound response that shows no sign of winding down. Am I crediting that too much? Let me know what you think in the comments.
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More deals! On Tuesday, the Hill reported, “Trump says Taiwan agreed to buy 30 percent of gas from Alaska pipeline.” The President called it “one of the biggest deals ever made.”
Speaking at a campaign rally in Alaska on Tuesday night, Trump announced a 20-year deal for Taiwan to buy 30% of all gas from a new 807-mile pipeline. For comparison, if you drove 807 miles out of Pensacola, Florida, you would end up 12 hours later in the desert 90 miles west of San Antonio. (Or you could go to Key West, which might be more entertaining, depending on your personal preferences.)
“It’s one of the biggest commitments in history for anything,” Trump remarked. “It’s one of the biggest deals ever made.”
Not only that! He’s convinced other countries to pay for the pipeline. Trump said Taiwan will invest up to $4.4 billion on top of $50 billion already committed by South Korea to the Alaska project, which was just part of a potential $200 billion overall commitment from Seoul. (It also funds a natural gas plant in Texas and eight new nuclear power plants across the U.S.)
That wasn’t the only chapter added to the Art of the Deal.
🔥 Yesterday, CBS reported, “Trump says “massive” oil, gas and mineral exploration in Greenland is “getting ready to begin.”” It’s only been three weeks since President Trump dramatically signed a historic permanent-access military agreement at the UN with leaders from Denmark and Greenland. Well, surprise! It included a vast moneymaking opportunity, too.
In yesterday’s Truth Social post, President Trump announced the deal, explaining that, “Experts are saying that the amount of easily available Oil is far greater than that of almost any land, anywhere in the World.”
The deal isn’t completely clear from the public documents, except that the military access agreement provides US oversight to any non-NATO foreign investment. Reading between the lines, that suggests both that US firms will be preferred (since China and Russia are presumably nonstarters, and European firms lack the juice), and that the deal contemplates development, which would presumably be welcomed by both Greenland and Denmark.
It’s the Monroe Doctrine on a four-dimensional chessboard. America has already inked development deals with Venezuela to the far south, and American companies are already pumping oil. Now the President has locked up the far north, creating a Pax Americana founded on long-term business interests, top to bottom in the Western Hemisphere. Or at least, he’s creating the architecture for a commercially anchored American sphere of influence, stretching from the Arctic into South America.
In January, the Danish Institute for International Studies published a better explainer than anything our corporate media has excreted, simply headlined, “Greenland’s place in the new US security strategy.” It’s not long or overly complicated, and it is worth a read. Here, straight from the people who’ve been collecting Greenland’s rent since 1721, is what it said about Trump’s 21st Century Monroe Doctrine:
Note the final comment, “it is also a complete abandonment of international law and norms,” which could be read in two different ways. The Institute meant it as a criticism. Notably, it did not name any violated international laws, meaning Trump is breaking more customs and traditions like the proverbial bull in the geopolitical china shop. This frames the second way of looking at it: only President Trump could have come up with this plan.
Whatever you want to call it, the ‘Donroe Doctrine’ is extremely well thought out and designed to be durable long after the Trump era. Security access protects investments; investments create stakeholders in the relationship; and then those vested stakeholders make the security alignments harder to reverse.
President Teddy Roosevelt spoke softly and carried a big stick. Trump speaks loudly and carries a big pipeline. Taiwan’s first gas will arrive in 2032. The contract runs for twenty more years after that. Whoever is president in 2052 will inherit a hemisphere wired together with pipelines and permanent leases, which is the whole point. Doctrines get repealed. Pipelines don’t.
Have a terrific Thursday! I’ll be back tomorrow, but with a twist: I’ll be flying to LA, AND recovering from flu, so not only won’t I still be visible but who knows when the post will land. Probably at the same time as the plane. Thank you in advance for your patience! See you tomorrow.
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“Behold, My Servant, whom I uphold;
My chosen one in whom My soul is well-pleased.
I have put My Spirit upon Him;
He will bring forth justice to the nations.
He will not cry out or raise His voice,
Nor make His voice heard in the street.
A crushed reed He will not break
And a faintly burning wick He will not extinguish;
He will bring forth justice in truth.
He will not be faint or crushed
Until He has established justice in the earth;
And the coastlands will wait expectantly for His law.”
— Isaiah 42:1-4 LSB
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