☕️ THE OCCUPATION ☙ Saturday, February 1, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

A jam-packed Weekend Edition, trying to catch up with the flood of news. Broadly, Trump launched the next phase in the war against the deep state and Dems are freaking out. And tons more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! My goodness. Yesterday, amidst much other news, the Trump Administration piled on with a series of sackings that hysterical progressives are calling a ‘coup.’ I did my best to catch up. In today’s roundup: BlueSky lefties think the sky is falling; we begin to learn what DOGE has been up to through bureaucrat leaks, and it’s good; Musk captures the Office of Personnel and Management; DOGE battles with Treasury; Trump fulfills tariff promise; bloodletting at FBI management spurs howls of far-left outrage; Trump considers completely pulling the plug on USAID; Pentagon kicks corporate media out of DOD HQ and invites conservative media; another mysterious plane crash; Trump signs Laken Riley Act; Secretary of State Marco Rubio declares new US foreign policy and the end of globalism; and thoughts about the three controversial cabinet hearings this week and what the optics say about a declining Democrat future.

🪖 C&C ARMY POST | MORNING MONOLOGUE 🪖

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The Democrats are freaking out. In a series of slightly-less-unhinged posts yesterday, Gizmodo reporter Matt Novak succinctly summarized how far-left progressives on BlueSky are feeling right now, which is leaderless and hopeless:

Whose fault is it the Democrats are leaderless? They could have offered an unbeatable ticket —Robert Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard— but the ancient buzzards gatekeeping party purity refused to allow any new ideas to penetrate the DNC’s apparatus.

Now, merely two weeks into a Trump Administration that can be fairly described as manic, there is so much change coming down the pike that we are on the verge the waterfall, if not already over, tumbling in mid-air, having reached the over-saturation tipping point where non-partisan Americans just tune out and go back to living their normal lives.

Put simply, the 24x7 politics and the permanent outrage machine are simply too much emotional stimulation. We already lived through a year of apocalyptic predictions about the death of democracy. Nobody wants to go through that all over again. People can’t stay outraged about everything all the time.

As evidence I’m right, Matt expressed frustration that the evening news isn’t covering Trump’s latest outrages closely enough:

Increasingly, the tsunami of Trump actions appear to be a feature rather than a bug. He’s fighting a war, and is overwhelming the enemy. Six ways from Sunday.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Thanks to leaks, we are getting a pinch more visibility into Elon Musk’s Efficiency operations under DOGE. Yesterday, Reuters ran a story headlined, “Exclusive: Musk aides lock government workers out of computer systems at US agency, sources say.”

Sources say? Leakers. Reuters sourced its story to “two officials who spoke to Reuters on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.”

It is true thought that DOGE has not discussed its plan in public. Thus, the details from the story were thrilling.

On January 20th, the day Trump took office, a DOGE team including current and former Musk employees assumed command of the critical Office of Personnel and Management (OPM). DOGE delivered pull-out sofa beds to the fifth floor of OPM headquarters. The fifth floor is OPM’s top-management floor.

The sofa beds were installed so the DOGE team could work around the clock.

Meanwhile, OPM’s staff managers, like its CMO Katie Malague, were quickly and neatly moved out of their offices down to new offices on lower floors. It was a physical and psychological demotion, even if not any change in title or salary.

"It feels like a hostile takeover," one of the leakers complained to Reuters.

Next, OPM employees were unceremoniously cut off from all administrative access to the systems. They can still log in and do their work, but they cannot access any management functions or data. All this change is making their jobs much more exciting than usual.

OPM staff were “surprised,” for example, by the “Fork in the Road” memo last week, since the first time they saw it was at the same time it was sent out to all federal employees.

Amusingly, the article was sourced from leakers, but failed to connect the obvious dot: the DOGE team cut the OPM staff out of the loop because they clearly think the career people will leak like rusty sieves.

I’d hoped DOGE would do some good stuff, but I had no idea it would be like this.

🔥 We learned even more about Musk’s work from three other leakers and an internal Treasury memo. The Washington Post broke the story yesterday headlined, “Senior U.S. official exits after rift with Musk allies over payment system.”

The Treasury Department issues all payments on behalf of the United States. In that sense, every social security payment, every grant, tax refund, stimulus payment, Obamacare reimbursement, foreign aid, Fauci’s security detail’s strip club reimbursement, the whole works— if paid by the US, the check comes from Treasury. It issues more than 1.3 billion individual checks totaling over $6 trillion yearly.

In other words, Musk’s database engineers have been dying to dig into that Treasury data, to determine exactly what the US has been buying and who we’ve been paying. For example, does their name end with “-ensky?”

This database is the mother lode leading to the deep state.

But for two hectic, fast-paced weeks, the Treasury Department has stubbornly refused to give DOGE any access to the payments database. The rift leading to the resignation referenced in the headline happened when newly confirmed Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent ordered the highest-ranking career bureaucrat at Treasury to turn over the passwords.

Instead of doing, that he resigned. (It could be more accurate to say he was offered a chance to resign. We don’t know. After all, he can still take that 8-month deal.) The bottom line is, he refused to turn over the passwords.

Late in the article, the WaPo got around to admitting that DOGE’s request for access was completely legal. Trump ordered Treasury to do it back on January 20th when the President created DOGE. So if anyone is breaking the law, it’s career Treasury officials:

Treasury officials’ resistance looks more like bureaucratic defiance than lawful objection. Bureaucrats cannot just ignore a President’s lawful order. If officials disagreed on the legality, they should have sought a court injunction—rather than deploying rogue bureaucratic resistance.

Trump’s executive order mandated transparency and reform. DOGE’s charter is to expose entrenched waste, inefficiency, or even corruption within the government, including the Treasury payments system. There is no reasonable objection to allowing DOGE its access.

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NBC ran a story yesterday headlined, “Trump to impose tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China on Saturday, White House says.” He said he would do it, he is doing it, and yet the media is still freaking out. Clearly, the idea of a president who actually does the things he promised during the campaign is completely disruptive. We didn’t think he’d actually do it!

Yesterday, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that, starting today (Feb. 1), as promised the U.S. will impose a 25% tariff on all goods entering the U.S. from Canada and Mexico and a 10% tariff on goods from China. The President stressed that he wants to encourage the three countries to do more to stop illegal immigrants and fentanyl from entering the United States.

Even more broadly, President Trump has also promised additional tariffs on oil and gas imports, computer chips, and steel and aluminum, which he confirmed were coming soon, but didn't offer any details. He also promised to build a "tariff wall" around pharmaceuticals designed to bring the whole industry back into the U.S., for obvious reasons.

President Trump also ominously said he planned “substantial” tariffs on the European Union. More substantial than 25%?

The media has no idea how any of this will play out. Nobody does. Trump is making big moves, disrupting the old order, and it is probably impossible to predict exactly how things will go down. Assuming Trump doesn’t pull some kind of surprise rabbit out of his hat, like new trade deals with the three big trading partners, then there will be a period of economic adjustment.

Get ready for daily articles whining about how the tariffs increased the price of this product or that product.

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Yesterday, Newsweek ran a story headlined, “Trump administration's "purge" of FBI agents sparks backlash—"Retaliation.”” It’s not quite a purge, not yet, but yesterday’s moves totally freaked out the already anxious Democrats.

CLIP: MSNBC anchor Jen Psaki hysterically cries about “FBI Purge” (2:32).

Yesterday, without warning, acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove —formerly one of Trump’s personal attorneys— fired “25 to 30” DOJ prosecutors who worked on the Trump cases. They had always been temps, but Biden made them full-time employees right before the Inauguration.

Those sackings were unsurprising, but Democrats still complained worse than wet chickens.

According to MSNBC, the firings also included top FBI career leaders and “more than 20” directors of various FBI field offices across the country, including Miami, Las Vegas, and the DC Field Office. David Sundberg, who championed the J6 investigations, was the DC Field Officer Director, and was fired.

But what really got Democrats stirred up was Bove’s request for a list of all rank-and-file FBI agents and personnel who worked on the January 6th cases—a list that could include thousands.

That’s when the fur truly started flying. It was an all-hands-on-deck moment for Democrats. Cory Booker, Adam Schiff, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, AOC, Jamie Raskin, you name it, they all issued hyperbolic, outraged statements from their offices and on social media.

It backfired horribly. It was incredibly bad optics. These politicians’ support doesn’t help the FBI at all. The fact that all the Democrats’ most partisan members were screeching like barn owls only proved the point. You’d think that if the FBI Agents were apolitical and totally unbiased and neutral and so forth, at least some Republicans would be sticking up for them (likewise, if they were really even-handed, some Democrats would be irritated with the FBI).

Has the FBI no friends left among the Republican Party? If not, it speaks volumes.

🔥 Perhaps sensing the political moment better than Hakeem, Schumer, and Schiff, the FBI Agents Association shot for a more conciliatory approach. It invoked political self-interest, by suggesting how firing so many FBI agents at one time could backfire on the Administration: “Dismissing potentially hundreds of agents would severely weaken the Bureau's ability to protect the country from national security and criminal threats, and will ultimately risk setting up the Bureau and its new leadership for failure.”

But there’s a big problem with that argument. The argument is that firing these FBI Agents will weaken investigations into domestic terrorism and crime by understaffing the agency. But if these agents were so non-essential they could be assigned to January 6th cases for three years, it’s very hard to imagine we can’t somehow limp along without their particularly ignoble crime-fighting efforts.

In CNN’s story, one anonymous FBI employee said the January 6th case was the largest investigation ever worked by the FBI. “Everyone touched this case,” the employee explained helplessly.

In other words, imagine how much more efficient the FBI will run, once the “largest investigation ever,” which distracted everyone, is finally over. Speaking of efficiency, on Thursday, media began reporting that a DOGE team was now embedded on the Director’s floor at FBI headquarters. The 4-man DOGE team reportedly includes two former FBI agents, a former aide to Representative Jim Jordan (R-Oh.), and an as-yet unidentified SpaceX employee.

Combine the OPM couch story, the Treasury takeover, and the SpaceX employee telling the FBI what to do, and you can understand why the BlueSky-ers are so aggravated they are tossing around inflammatory words like “coup” and “oligarchy takeover.”

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Yesterday, the Hill ran another outrageous story headlined, “Democrats slam Trump over reports he’ll merge USAID with State Department.” Uh-oh. It’s about to get real.

Yesterday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, 74, launched the rumor that Trump was trying to figure out how to shut down USAID altogether:

As Schumer correctly noted, USAID was created by John F. Kennedy through an executive order and later established by Congress. It’s meant to be an “independent” agency overseen by the State Department to handle disbursing billions of dollars of “humanitarian relief and economic development.” Those terms are squishy enough that Democrats and every sketchy deep state agency have coopted it as a money spigot. USAID is a tool to quickly splash cash around the world wherever it may be needed, like funding color revolutions and regime change operations, or Democrats’ congressional campaigns.

USAID’s “independence” frustrates oversight and shuts down scrutiny. But the agency’s “independence” is constitutionally dubious, entrenched only through statutory loopholes and bureaucratic inertia. The Constitution vests all power over foreign relations in the Executive Branch (Article II, Section 2). Foreign aid logically falls under his constitutional authority over foreign relations.

Over the years, lawmakers have created statutory authorities purporting to allow USAID to function semi-autonomously. This effectively gave unelected bureaucrats wide latitude to execute U.S. foreign assistance policy— even if it contradicted the sitting President’s policies. But Reagan’s unitary executive theory suggests that the President may fire USAID officials and override their decisions without congressional micromanagement.

It sure looks like President Trump is toying with a showdown with Congressional Democrats over his control of Executive Branch agencies and their employees. This is another developing front in the war with the deep state. If Trump can cut off the money, the deep state will wither away.

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Trying to catch up here. Let’s do a few quick hits:

🔥 What’s not to like about our new Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth? Yesterday, Mediaite covered the story under the headline, “Pentagon Boots NBC, NPR, NYT, and Politico from Offices – To Be Replaced by Breitbart and One America News.” In what the DOD called a “rotation,” suggesting it’s no longer their turn, the military evicted corporate media from its permanent offices inside the Pentagon, inviting newer conservative media outlets to move in instead.

Corporate media’s eviction was more than just symbolic. Access gave corporate media a competitive news reporting advantage, which DOD just handed to conservative media. The irony is that if corporate media reported the news at all fairly, the DOD would be hurting itself by kicking them out. But since they knew corporate media would misreport everything, it was a win-win-win moment.

✈️ Just days after the Reagan National Airport tragedy, we had to deal with another plane crash. The BBC reported the story headlined, “All six passengers killed in Philadelphia medical plane crash, mayor's office says.” The private medical Learjet took off from Philly airport en route to Tijuana, Mexico, but crashed one minute into the flight. Obviously, there is no reliable information yet.

I can think of lots of good questions about this, but we are in the hot takes phase. We’ll wait for confirmed details. But it reminds me of the old saying:

“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.” — James Bond.

🔥 This week, something good emerged from a different horrific tragedy. On Wednesday, ABC ran a story headlined, “Trump signs Laken Riley Act, setting up next phase of immigration crackdown.” You’ll recall this is the new law that requires illegal immigrants to be deported upon their first brush with the law, before things escalate.

That much is already good enough. But what was arguably even better, the new law authorizes states to sue whenever the federal government fails to enforce immigration laws, which will prevent another Bidenic Border Catastrophe.

🔥 The Kyiv Independent reported one of the most important developments since the Inauguration, quietly headlined, “'Dishonest' to suggest Ukraine could have fully defeated Russia, retake Crimea, Rubio says.” Among other things, Rubio called the Proxy War “dishonest,” explaining that “the dishonesty was that we somehow led people to believe that Ukraine would be able, not just to defeat Russia, but destroy Putin, push him all the way back to what the world looked like in 2012 or 2014 before the Russians took Crimea.”

YouTube: Secretary Marco Rubio on Buying Greenland, His Trip to Panama, and How to End the Russia-Ukraine War (1:04:52).

Watch the whole thing. The Rubio upgrade installed in the State Department is a massive improvement. The new Secretary of State said that the U.S. has been "funding a stalemate" in a war that has "set Ukraine back 100 years.” Both of those critical, long-overdue admissions suggest the Trump Administration is taking a practical, honest approach to the Proxy War.

That is terrific news.

But Rubio went much further. He also explained a whole new policy approach upending fifty years of settled neocon theory. “It’s not normal for the world to have a single unipolar power; that was an anomaly of the Cold War,” Rubio explained. I wish I had more time to further explore the implications of this revolutionary declaration. Maybe tomorrow.

Either way, the Trump Administration just announced it will abandon the all-costs pursuit of American hegemony. The alternative is a practical, multi-polar world with at least three independent, cooperating superpowers (if not four).

In other words, the globalist era is over.

As a quick reminder, Rubio was the Senator who forced deep state diva Viktoria Nuland to admit that the U.S. built biolabs in Ukraine. So we can be confident Marco Rubio knows what time it is in Kiev.

🔥 NBC ran a story Thursday headlined, “Senate confirms Doug Burgum as interior secretary; Kash Patel, Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. testify at confirmation hearings.” Social media and political forums lit up with frustrated moderates and independents who watched this week’s triple confirmation hearings and concluded, correctly, that the Democrats have completely lost the plot.

The three hearings exposed the Democrats’ intolerance for independent thought, as former Democrats Kennedy and Gabbard and Republican Patel were hectored and pilloried —not for corruption, incompetence, or ethical failures— but for refusing to march in ideological lockstep with a 1990’s-era Democrat policy litmus test.

Over the past decade, the Democratic Party has systematically purged its own party of all new talent. It drove its freshest voices out of the tent— and into the arms of Republicans. Kennedy and Gabbard are only the highest-profile examples, but the trend is now undeniable.

Instead of embracing the massive energy of the MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement—truly a set of traditionally liberal policies that could have revitalized the party’s appeal— Democrats fumbled the healthcare ball, and Republicans happily snatched it up and are running it in for a 70-yard touchdown.

Like the Sleestacks in Land of the Lost, sputtering Senate Democrats appeared frozen in time. Or, like Titanic survivors bobbing in the freezing waters, they clung to the shreds of obsolete political strategies and past-dated policy positions that no longer move voters. Their furious —if not unhinged— rejections of Kennedy and Gabbard underscored the party’s stubborn refusal to evolve, prioritizing ideological purity over expanding its base.

We are nearing an unavoidable destination, a final stop that was perhaps always inevitable after Democrats fully embraced wokeness. Woke, after all, is a jealous political force tolerating no dissent and demanding unwavering allegiance through constant virtue-signaling.

It must be exhausting.

The Democratic Party’s strategy of strict ideological purges and preserved conformity may have floated the party’s boat for a time, but as the reaction to this week’s hearings suggests, the tide is turning. Americans are sick and tired of the theatrics and the faux outrage.

America wants leaders willing to speak to uncomfortable truths and tell us like it is, regardless of how unpopular telling the truth may be among Washington’s octogenarian class.

If the Democrats keep slamming the door on their brightest voices, they will keep finding that increasing numbers of voters are slamming the door on them.

A final point. Kennedy and Gabbard in particular used the Senate floor to slam open the Overton Window on a whole range of topics once considered untouchable conspiracy theories. For example, Kennedy dragged into common parlance the ugly fact that Americans pay more for our healthcare than any other nation— but experience the worst outcomes.

Nobody denied that now inarguable fact. Astonishingly, it became a mantra stolen by many of the Democrats, including socialist Bernie Sanders. (In one exciting exchange, Kennedy outed an apoplectic Sanders as a sold-out pharma shill.)

RFK also shone a spotlight on the autism epidemic, forcing a long-ignored but critically necessary conversation into the mainstream, in the process giving progressives permission to at least consider possible causes.

Gabbard, meanwhile, ripped the mask off the Iraq war. Whether intentional or negligent, the intelligence community’s failures in Iraq cost thousands of lives and countless billions— and there’s never been any accounting for that failure. Media this morning harped on Tulsi’s refusal to call Edward Snowden a ‘traitor’, like anybody cares about that.

And most significantly, all the Senators questioned the nominees about these previously off-limits issues, even if just to mock their ideas, but in the process proving the senators do know about the problems. It’s just that until now, they’ve pretended to be unaware of them.

Never mind me, corporate media can’t keep up with the epic deluge of Trump Administration news. Trump’s teams are working around the clock, while his adversaries remain on a 9-5 schedule. As the President’s people continue taking more and more control, and as each new nominee is confirmed, the pace will only increase.

What we are all experiencing is, as advertised, shock and awe.

Have a wonderful weekend! I’ll catch you back here on Monday morning, where I am sure we will have plenty to talk about, since the Trump Team never sleeps.

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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