Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! I hope you had a terrific weekend. School's back in session, the Gulf is warming up for its annual hurricane mischief, and America's institutions are hard at work deciding what you ought to be upset about. Your roundup includes: The Economist announces which covid scandal is the real one, in an article nobody would put their name on; three media psyop tactics, catalogued and named; Fauci's private diary versus Fauci's public denials; Education Secretary Linda McMahon tells CNN that one in ten children will be molested before they finish high school, and Dana Bash asks her where she heard such a thing; California, where a teacher's disciplinary record is better protected than a doctor's, a cop's, or a lawyer's; pass the trash; and Moderna's stock leaps 177% on a press release with no numbers in it.
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Like so many of our institutions, The Economist was once a respected British financial news magazine, but lurched leftwards, surpassing self-parody, and is now competing with Mad Magazine. Over the weekend, its editors trolled social media by publishing the latest over-the-top Fauci defense and scolding America (“it should be embarrassed”) for Fauci taking the Fifth. The headline, “The real covid-19 scandal is still unfolding.”
Set aside the unmitigated arrogance of the Economist deciding which covid scandal is the “real” one. The Economist was one of the worst and most unreliable sources of information during the pandemic. It, not America, should be embarrassed. But never mind that now.
The article started well. Its first sentence framed the “real” scandal as the single essential question —the one media usually avoids like it is an unusually persistent process server— as a question that would actually have been useful to explore. It asked, “Why did so many Americans die relative to the numbers who succumbed to the virus in other rich countries?”
Hip, hip, hooray, I thought, we’re finally getting somewhere. That was a terrific question, and its answer will one day send a lot of scientists to jail. But alas, not today. It was a head fake. The article promptly collapsed into a stew of media malfeasance and character assassination that made the New York Times look like Encyclopedia Britannica.
It will be both fun and instructive to expose the media tricks packed into this short, malicious, and anonymous “commentary.” (The Economist often withholds the names of reporters who write articles, because they are chicken and drink tea instead of coffee.) Let’s peek at a few.
🪳 Tactic One. Boldly lie. “Fauci was not responsible for the worst excesses of the covid response,” the author stated as a fact. Then, the lone example: “Those endless school shutdowns were the work of local officials and union leaders.”
Really? Fauci’s diaries, which briefly appear in the article, unquoted, put the lie to the author’s claim. On March 15, 2020, Fauci wrote that he had spoken with then–NYC Mayor Bill “Hamburglar” de Blasio and had “convinced him” to close New York City schools, adding that de Blasio had already decided to do so based on Fauci’s public appearances. In the same entry, Fauci bragged that California Governor Gavin Newsom’s chief of staff confirmed that Newsom had decided to close California schools (and bars and restaurants) based on Fauci’s TV appearances.
If you were a progressive Scrabble expert, you could thread the needle and defend the claim that “school shutdowns were the work of local officials and union leaders” by arguing Fauci was merely persuasive, but the ultimate legal decision rested with the lackwits on school boards. Technically true, but vastly misleading. Why did the school boards close down? Because Fauci said so.
I was ready to toss the Economist’s dumb article just for that silly lie, but nearly every paragraph provided a new and more wondrous example of a media psyop tactic.
🪳 Tactic Two. Impute motives asymmetrically. “Dr Fauci made mistakes,” the author generously conceded. “He could be arrogant. His private diary exposed his vanity.” But then the good doctor was immediately excused. “The diary also reveals a conscientious public servant trying to save as many lives as he could, struggling against the constraints that hobbled America relative to its peers.” Constraints meaning the Constitution, but let’s not be distracted.
How fair-minded! How charitable! How virtuously flexible, like a 16-year-old Romanian gymnast!
That charity was not available, it seems, for Fauci’s critics, who all have bad motives— including the entire Republican party. “Those vexing vaccines compelled Republicans to look away from the basic question about the pandemic, and to hound Dr Fauci instead,” it wrote, imputing a singular nefarious motive to half the country. “Attempting to square the greatness of Mr Trump with the supposed vileness of the vaccines has inspired his party to heroic feats of doublethink.”
According to the Economist’s cowardly anonymous reporter, all conservatives are ‘heroic’ double-thinkers who aren’t really interested in getting to the bottom of the “real” scandal, as defined by the Economist. Never mind covid origins! At this point, what possible difference does it make?
This dastardly technique is called motive imputation. It involves pretentiously prescribing what other people were really thinking. You just won’t come to counseling because I wouldn’t eat a hot dog. Imputing motives is poisonous in relationships and should be banned from op-eds, never mind from straight news and ‘commentary.’
🪳 Tactic Three. Change the subject. Unreasoning consistency, it is said, is the hobgoblin of little minds. Corporate media will never be accused of hobgoblin-ing then. Having framed the question —why did more Americans die— the article quickly dispensed the conclusive answer like it rolled out of a vending machine. “So many Americans died because so many failed to take the vaccines,” the author loftily declared, right after claiming the cause remains unidentified.
So… what, again, is the “real” question?
But his chief complaint was that the Republicans on the Covid Committee failed to ask for Dr. Fauci’s opinion about why so many Americans died. “America’s lethal underperformance once again went ignored when the Senate Homeland Security Committee recently questioned Dr Anthony Fauci,” he superciliously stated. “The hearing focused instead on the usual obsessions for which Dr Fauci has become the Republican scapegoat.”
But never mind that Fauci wasn’t talking. Never mind that Fauci, as the author of so much of the problem, was inherently conflicted. Never mind that the Committee has far more evidence from other sources than from interrogating a single defiant ex-bureaucrat. Never mind that nobody cares what kind of chopped word salad Fauci would have expelled from his cartoonish mouth hole, even if he did feel like answering, which he didn’t.
The Economist never even tried to explain why Anthony Fauci, the human cockroach, could possibly have answered the article’s main question (which it promptly answered for us anyway). Fauci’s authority was just supposed to be self-evident.
The Economist announced that it had identified the pandemic’s “real” scandal, but failed to identify the article’s author or offer any accounting for its own covid-era judgments. Its prescription for investigating American mortality was to solicit the hindsight opinion of a legally defensive, conflicted former bureaucrat who refuses to answer questions.
Meanwhile, the magazine airily dismissed alternative accountability inquiries as Republican “obsessions,” imputed ignoble motives to millions of conservatives, and treated all Fauci’s private foibles as exculpatory evidence. Before telling us what America should be embarrassed about, The Economist might begin by auditing its own bad advice, disproven narratives, and the gatekeeping certainties it pushed during the pandemic.
If this is the best defense progressives can mount, then I declare victory.
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Let’s check in on California, where things are going about as well as you would expect. Yesterday, the Hill reported, “McMahon: Education Department ‘cracking down’ on teachers harassing students.” Harassing students? The headline buried the disgraceful lede.
CLIP: Secretary of Education Linda McMahon calls out California (1:41).
Yesterday, Secretary of Education Linda McMahon told skeptical CNN anchor Dana Bash that, based on a department study of data provided by school districts, “statistics show one in 10 children will be sexually molested before they finish high school.” That seems like a lot.
Apparently, many or most of these teachers are not disciplined. Their records remain undisturbed. They just get reassigned to other school districts under a policy McMahon called passing the trash. “Instead of firing those teachers, those teachers just get sent to another school,” McMahon explained. “And it’s not part of their record or anything.”
🔥 That this scandal is erupting in blue states shouldn’t surprise anyone. I’m old enough to remember when Catholic churches and Baptists were accused of passing the trash with pedophile priests and youth ministers. Then, it was a progressive moral panic. Now? Crickets. Well, worse than crickets. Denial.
To its credit, CNN posted the unedited interview transcript. But what the transcript showed least was any sense of concern from interviewer Dana Bash. She repeatedly demanded proof, as if the official government findings were something McMahon had just made up for clicks and giggles.
Unsurprisingly, California is one of the worst offenders. “When we really looked at those stats coming out of California, we said, what is really going on here in these schools?” One suspects teachers’ unions might have something to do with it, given their proximity to ground zero, in the same way that Wuhan bioengineers might be related to the covid breakout. You never know.
McMahon announced a crackdown: opening formal investigations into school districts, threatening to withhold or cut federal funding under Title IX and other laws, and pressuring states and districts to actually fire molesters and child abusers and keep proper records.
That seems exactly like the kind of thing a federal Department of Education should be doing.
🔥 What was surprising, if not shocking, was Dana Bash’s resistance to the information, as if McMahon’s claims were completely unprecedented. But the problem has been long known, even if not well covered. How Dana Bash failed to do even the bare minimum of research is the ‘real’ scandal. Here’s a 20-year-old CBS headline:
Umm… yes.
In 2002, the Bush Administration’s Department of Education carried out a study of sexual abuse in the public school system. Hofstra University researcher Charol Shakeshaft conducted the study, and was shocked at how little attention the problem was getting compared to church-abuse scandals. “Think the Catholic Church has a problem?” she asked. “The physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.”
If church abuse is a national scandal, then what about 100x public-school abuse?
As recently as 2023, PubMed published a peer-reviewed study of K-12 teacher abuse.
“Overall,” the researchers concluded, “11.7% of the 6632 participants reported having experienced at least one form of educator sexual misconduct during Grades K-12, with 11% reporting sexual comments and less than 1% reporting other forms of sexual misconduct (e.g., receiving sexual photos/messages, being kissed, touched sexually, or engaging in sexual intercourse/oral sex).”
Most of those reporting misconduct were girls (72%).
🔥 It’s an epidemic. The 2023 study reported even more abuse than McMahon claimed. But CNN’s Dana Bash thought the very idea was the strangest thing she ever heard. “Where did that stat come from?”, Bash demanded, and then sneered, “Did you do a study at your department?” (McMahon said yes.)
The data is trivial to find. Even the data focusing on the Golden State. In May of this year, leftwing ProPublica ran an entire series called “Unfit to Teach: How California Hides Teacher Misconduct.” Finding specific examples with named teachers was a moment’s work:
Jason Agan —found “unfit to teach”— was the mildest example they could have chosen. After a lengthy union-defended process, he was allowed to resign from his original school district, and promptly started teaching in another. As of May, Agan was still teaching. ProPublica said it reviewed five years of records from 2019-2025 and found at least 67 similar examples of other unfit teachers who were not permanently disciplined, with at least 14 rehired by other districts. Pass the trash.
There are good reasons why California ranks among the worst states in the country for teacher abuse. “The agency’s disciplinary process is unique among licensing bodies in California in how much is kept secret,” ProPublica wrote. The licensing agencies for dozens of other professions in California —like doctors, nurses, police officers and lawyers— clearly disclose the reasons for disciplinary actions right on their websites. At least 12 states, including Oregon, Washington and Florida, do the same for teachers.
But not in the nation’s bluest big state, where Democrats squat in solid control of state government.
It’s not just male teachers, not by a long shot. In Florida, where teachers are arrested and publicly prosecuted for sexual misconduct, we have noticed, with an appropriate degree of horror, that a distressing number of abusers are women. Headline from Cocoa Beach affiliate CBS-12, April, 2026:
In June, Fox News reported six alleged victims of one female special education teacher in Douglas County:
🔥 Let’s not let Florida off the hook, even though the Sunshine State aggressively prosecutes offenders. Criminal prosecution is most effective in that it cuts teachers’ unions out of the loop. And we can recognize that McMahon’s crackdown is long overdue— why didn’t the Bush Administration, for example, crack down after conducting the original study?
But the core problem is that all after-the-fact remedies, whether firings or prosecutions, require a victim first.
Don’t get me wrong. Consequences are essential. Without them, confirmed problems continue. However, they arrive too late —after the harm has already happened— and too frequently prove incomplete.
What school districts really need are proactive policies designed to root out bad actors before they enter the system. But too often, Democrats kneecap efforts to screen undesirables from public schools. California law, for example, bans the state’s educational credentialing agency from publicly releasing teacher disciplinary records.
Again— this secrecy privilege is unique to teachers. “Professional privacy” is not shared by lawyers, doctors, nurses, or police officers.
Thanks to protective laws, school districts in California have limited access to sexual misconduct history. They can only get a summary of cases, only after the state agency has formally disciplined a teacher, and not after five years. Investigations take years, and the system is designed to keep the entire process confidential until a final decision. Short of rape, even the state agency lacks the power to revoke teaching credentials, and the state process has been described as “slow and opaque.”
That’s how pass the trash works. California state law makes it nearly impossible for a new school district to properly vet applicants. Teachers’ unions, especially the California Teachers Association (CTA), are among the state’s most powerful political players. Just saying.
The most encouraging part of Linda McMahon’s announcement was the threat of defunding schools whose policies fail to protect students. Maybe that will get their attention. But it must have teeth. More, please. Faster.
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It took less than three days. Last week, covid shotmaker Moderna’s stock rocketed out of the gutter, creating a frenzy of corporate media propaganda. In about 24 hours, the stock price soared 177% from $62 to a nose-bleed-inducing $174 a share. But yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported, “Hype for Moderna’s Cancer Vaccine Is Running Ahead of the Math.” (Results may vary.)
Moderna was always supposed to be a Wall Street unicorn— a pharma startup with no products, focusing only on a 20-year-old technology that has never delivered, but which fell into a windfall of being one of the two companies approved to sell the covid shots. (Never mind all the NIH scientists with undisclosed patent royalties flowing into their pockets. That is a different story.)
On December 18, 2020, the day the FDA authorized Moderna’s covid shot, CEO Stefan Bancel bragged, “This technology has basically no limits… we will make dozens and dozens and dozens of drugs.” But so far: bupkis. This week, Bancel called its newest drug “aspirational.” From “no limits” to “aspirational,” in six short years. Voíla.
Obviously, as mRNA skepticism grew and the pandemic waned, and as Kennedy’s HHS summarily canceled mRNA-based grants, Moderna’s sky-high stock price —approaching a market capitalization of $200 billion— cratered to around $12 billion. Which is still a lot. But it represented a -95% fall from pharma grace.
Last week, Moderna issued a corporate press release announcing the results —interim and not peer-reviewed— of its ongoing Phase Three trial of a “personalized” mRNA product aimed at treating late-stage melanoma patients. These are folks who’ve already been treated for skin cancer with other treatments like radiation and chemo. Moderna claimed that some undisclosed percentage of the patients enjoyed a reduced risk of recurrence or longer survival periods.
It’s not new, though you can’t tell that from the Journal’s article. Moderna pitched this exact cancer vaccine to CNBC in January of 2020. The ‘breakthrough’ is older than the pandemic that made the company famous.
💉 For obvious branding reasons, Moderna and the compliant media call the new product a “vaccine.” Even setting aside the mRNA aspect, this particular product is only given to people after they get sick, which is sort of the opposite of a “real vaccine,” which most sane people consider to be a product given to healthy people before they fall ill. The whole point of a “vaccine” is to inoculate you against a future disease. But whatever. More wordplay.
In this process, scientists analyze a patient’s tumor from a sample extracted by surgeons, sequence the tumor DNA, compare it to normal tissue samples, and identify mutations that are then used to manufacture a bespoke mRNA injection. The injection infects (“transfects”) healthy cells and forces them to start making proteins that prompt the immune system to attack the melanoma tumor. The mRNA injections are then given alongside Merck’s drug Keytruda, a monoclonal antibody ‘checkpoint inhibitor,’ which is a fancy way of saying it weakens the body’s natural mechanism for switching off killer T-cells. That’s enough science.
Barring delays, the Phase 3 study isn’t projected to finish until September of 2030. The public announcement provided no adverse-event dataset, detailed biodistribution figures, mRNA persistence measurements, or all-cause mortality numbers. “The trial data will be shared at a coming conference,” the Journal mentioned, as an aside.
But the stock still went crazy.
Obamacare architect and New York Times columnist Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel called the complete absence of data “a home run, maybe even a grand slam.” He gushed, “The results are pretty amazing.” Bank of America analyst Alec Stranahan called it “a watershed moment for Moderna, in our view.”
“The announcement marks a major leap in personalized oncology,” the Journal stated as a fact, presumably parroting language straight from Moderna’s press release. But there are problems in paradise beyond the lack of any hard data. Making a custom mRNA injection is time-consuming and expensive. “Like other personalized therapies,” the Journal noted, “it is a vastly more expensive way to manufacture a drug.” It could get very expensive. “Based on comparable therapies, the full treatment could cost somewhere in the ballpark of $300,000.”
And there are only so many late-stage melanoma patients, sharply limiting the market. Apparently melanoma is especially susceptible to immune-based treatment, whereas other tumor types are not. The Journal explained, “Some of the hardest tumors, such as pancreatic cancer, are notoriously resistant to immune-based treatments.”
Social media critics were particularly harsh, and you can’t blame them after what we just went through during the pandemic. For example:
Charlotte Kuperwasser, a cancer biologist from Tufts Medical School, tweeted, “Moderna and Merck announce their personalized mRNA cancer vaccine succeeded in a Phase 3 trial. No data presented, no paper published—but apparently the stock market has already completed peer review.” Cardiologist Dr. Joseph Marine observed, “These corporations have learned how to play the medical-scientific establishment like a Stradivarius.”
The criticism was earned and perfectly justified. But an mRNA-based melanoma treatment —call it a “vaccine” if you must— is categorically different from the covid shots. People terrified by potential recurrence might be less squeamish about the risk of developing a different cancer at some future time. There is a reasonable case that a voluntary treatment for a deadly condition is apples-and-kumquats different from a mandatory injection that healthy 19-year-olds are coerced to take to keep their dorm pass.
I’ll leave the conclusion up to you. Personally, I think mRNA is a dead end, because they have not solved the persistence and autoimmune issues. Oh, pharma tried to normalize mRNA with their horrid covid shots, but it boomeranged and knocked out the tech’s already limp reputation. The waning efficacy and pile of hard-to-spot side effects have made the public wary.
What most surprised me was how enthusiastic investors seem to be for an mRNA success story. That’s the ‘real’ scandal.
As the Journal reported, this overheated investor story isn’t any success story. Far from it. One suspects a bunch of pie-eyed investors are about to learn a hard lesson. Again.
Have a magnificent Monday! Shoot back here tomorrow morning, for even more essential news and caffeinated commentary.
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So many Americans died from Covid because the protocols for treating them were crap, and doctors hid behind them. In 2021 my dad had open heart surgery and when he asked for more vitamins or supplements, he was given whatever he asked for. When my mom was hospitalized with Covid pneumonia a few months later, she requested extra doses of vitamin D among other things and was denied because “it was not protocol.” 🙄
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In all this, they are surprised that you do not run with them into the same excesses of dissipation, maligning you, but they will give account to Him who is ready to judge the living and the dead.
— 1 Peter 4:4-5 LSB
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