☕️ THINKABLE ☙ Friday, August 1, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Trump launches unprecedented global trade war; media nitpicks tariffs while NYT frets over fit conservative women; shocking new RussiaGate leaks hint at what’s coming next; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Friday! July is now history. Wheeee! The year is blasting past us. Today’s blockbuster (vacation) roundup includes: Trump takes on the entire world in unprecedented global trade war and the media focuses on relative tariff rates and complaints from countries paying tariffs; NYT editors grumble about conservative women embracing fitness and reveal the left’s greatest weakness; and astonishing new RussiaGate disclosures provide even more amazing insights into where we’re headed.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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Despite everything else going on in this week’s nuclear news cycle, the New York Times interrupted its normal nauseating programming and packed its headlines this morning with Trump Tariff stories. Behold:

Honestly, I don’t blame them. It’s a big story. Oh, the Times missed the mark, as usual. But they have got hold of the right issue —Trump’s “Global Trade War”— but are trying to wrestle it down into an awkward groin-to-face hold. Rather than itemize all the different individual tariff tangles, let’s pull back and consider the astonishing historical implications.

Simply put, Trump sprinted into office with a singular goal: America first. What is now obvious is that he meant it, literally; since America is the world’s economic engine, America —i.e. Main Street— should collect the benefits. It’s not a secret or a joke. He’s said it over and over, but the experts just rolled their eyes and thought, more bluster.

But he’s not blustering. He’s actually doing it.

Do you get what’s really happening here? No U.S. president has ever taken on the entire world —at the same time— and demanded they agree to our terms. It’s never happened. Nothing else in U.S. history comes close.

The stakes are galactically high. Trump isn’t just killing a sacred cow or two. He’s not even culling the herd. He declared war on sacred cows and started blasting away before the ink was dry on the war’s declaration. The list of vested interests on which Trump is trampling is too long to possibly number. Think multinational corporations (Nike, Apple, Pfizer), billionaire donors (Soros, Gates, Buffett), federal politicians, state and local party bosses, and Wall Street— and that’s without delving into well-connected London banksters, influential oligarchs, foreign multinationals, and allied governments.

Trump is like an international railroad bandit— and he’s dynamiting all the bridges.

🔥 You can argue that, before the Soviet Union fell, no American government truly held the leverage to take on the entire world at once. And maybe that’s true— though even before World War I, America was already seen as a rising superpower. But set that aside.

We can agree on this: the rise of global communism (1916–1990) backed America into a strategic corner. The Cold War didn’t just demand military vigilance; it demanded restraint under a vast cloak of classified secrets. Quiet trade-offs, concealed compromises, closeted deals with devils, and arcane alliances that mainly served others’ interests.

But after global communism’s dusty collapse in the late ’80s —when the Cold War ended and America stood alone as the unchallenged superpower— the chessboard was reset. For the first time in history, the U.S. could have demanded favorable terms from every other country on Earth including, and especially, Russia and China.

But no post-Cold War president ever tackled it. They never even tried.

Why not? The reasons were complex, varied… and terrible. The Cold War had hardened a shadowy web of mutual interests, not between nations, but between powerful people. Bureaucrats, banksters, billionaires, and Beltway lifers. The military-industrial complex fused with the Fortune-50 trade lobby, which fused with the corporate media complex, which fused with the Ivory Tower. All stage-managed by a permanent overclass fluent in globalism and allergic to accountability.

Meanwhile, we regular Americans were handed a quaint bedtime story crafted by former Cold Warriors (e.g., CIA, NSA, DOD) and their captive Mockingbird Media: America, the noble policeman. Always overworked. Always overextended. Always sacrificing itself to uphold a “rules-based international order.”

Trust the process. It’s for national security.

Then, six months ago, Trump arrived. And everything changed.

🔥 Last night, Trump signed a new executive order that the Times described as “the latest move by the Trump administration to remake the global trading system.” This new order unveiled what might be the broadest, fastest, and most complex tariff regime ever attempted by any major economy. It sets new tariffs on over 60 countries, with threats extending to dozens more, and a default minumum 10% tariff on every country not mentioned. Rates range from 10% to 50%, with the first round taking effect at 12:01 a.m. on August 7th (next week).

Some unlucky countries, like Canada, got hit immediately. (Canada is being pummeled by a 35% tariff; reports say Prime Minister Mark Carney tried to call Trump at the last minute yesterday, but the President refused to take his call.)

You see what’s happening here? President Trump walked into the carefully maintained international parlor, looked around at the antique furnishings and marble fixtures, and started swinging a baseball bat. No postwar president has ever tried to break up the concretized global interests because doing so requires a kind of fearlessness verging on insanity.

He’s not worried about donors drying up. He’s not worried about savage media attacks. He’s not worried about reverse trade wars. He’s not worried about Congress going sideways. He’s not worried about a stock market collapse. He’s not worried about the military-industrial complex or the deep state. There are a million ways this could go terribly wrong for Trump, but he doesn’t care.

Why isn’t he worried? Maybe it’s because he’s already endured everything they could possibly throw at him. They impeached him twice. They indicted him 34 times. They raided his home, gagged him in court, canceled him, deplatformed him, demonized him, and declared him disqualified.

In other words, every institution that should’ve been able to stop him has already tried and failed. He’s still here— and stronger than ever.

Trump 1.0 tried to work inside the system. He renegotiated NAFTA, withdrew from the TPP, and floated the idea of auto tariffs. But he was sabotaged, undermined, and resisted at every step. So this time, he is bypassing the system. He’s pulling the system down on top of them.

In short, the President’s plan is to rapidly transform America from being the world’s ATM into its Amazon.com: the indispensable, centralized, pay-to-play hub of global commerce. And it’s working. And he’s doing it without the State Department, without teams of trade negotiators, think tanks, Davos, or donors, and without years of dickering and haggling.

The elites are angry because he’s not telling them what he’s doing. He’s just doing it.

Soon, people will start asking, if it was so easy, why didn’t anyone do this before? That’s when you’ll know we’ve crossed the Jordan.

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The Times’ Editorial Brigades are attempting a cultural counterattack, but its troops are disorganized, underfed, and rudderless. A telling example appeared in this week’s issue, under the exasperated headline, “Why the Right Is Obsessed With Thinness.”

The piece is a transcript of a podcast interview between two female Times op-ed editors, Meher Ahmad and Jessica Grose. It opens with a comically self-defeating premise: “Conservative Christian influencers are reshaping beauty standards and promoting diet culture — and their messages are resonating with women.”

Cue the alarm bells. These two editors were deeply concerned that women, in shocking numbers, appear to want to be less obese. This ancient, cross-cultural preference stunned them. They readily admitted the phenomenon predates capitalism, predates patriarchy, and spans cultures and civilizations—“the desire to be thin is ubiquitous, across time, across millennia and across the political spectrum.”

But they were still pretty sure it’s all the Right’s fault.

Despite starting from the premise that body ideals predate civilization itself, the two ladies delivered a tidy inventory of the usual contemporary scapegoats: Christianity (“overeating is sinful; It’s about martyrdom”), patriarchy (“It’s all traditional gender roles”), MAHA (“I want to be thin changed into I’m doing this to be healthy”), and racism (“thinness in the mainstream is also very white”).

To the Times editors, this is a major problem. A political problem, because women are getting the idea that the Left detests thinness. Instead, progressivism now seems to promote corporal inflation— Jessica reluctantly agreed that anti-thinness —for Democrats, “body positivity”— is now a leftwing value: “I think it is liberal-coded,” she conceded.

“By contrast,” Jessica opined, “liberals are TikTok activists with five shades of autism, panic attacks, and a ring light.” And she was including herself.

🔥 All of this political blame-shifting was unsurprising, if not redundant, predictable, and boring. But what did surprise us was a single, wistful, throwaway comment from Jessica that instantly reframed the whole conversation: “Sometimes I’m envious; I wish I believed in something that just told me how to live my life.”

And there it was: modern progressivism’s fatal flaw. After jettisoning every traditional value system in favor of total subjective flexibility, at last the left believes in nothing. Live your truth! (Whatever that means to you.) It has completely outsourced self-definition solely to the individual.

The problem with that flexible worldview is that most of us can’t even figure out how to get affordable insurance. It’s appallingly ridiculous to think we can dream up a unique sense of existential self-meaning and an internally consistent life philosophy that works— on the first try.

All progressives have left to offer is medication and a single commandment: do what thou wilt is the whole of the law.

And while that unbounded message is tempting whenever we want to do something we know we probably shouldn’t, it offers nothing for the bigger picture. Jessica described the traditional, conservative vision for a happy life: white picket fence, mom and dad, kids, church. Then she reluctantly admitted, “having a clear idea of that conservative vision is appealing. Because if the left feels like it doesn’t even know what that life vision looks like, it’s harder for people to grab on to.”

Indeed. You can’t grab tepid water. There’s no substance. Progressivism, in its current late-stage form, has become so deconstructed, so allergic to hierarchy, judgment, and constraint, that it no longer offers a coherent life script. It dismantled the old order— but neglected to replace it with anything real.

🔥 Let’s shift gears. There’s a much bigger picture here amongst the rhetorical wreckage of Jessica’s silly podcast. We know that fertility rates are plummeting across the developed world. We know that human biology is deeply hard-wired. Now: How do females of any species typically respond when population rates are under stress?

Across the animal kingdom, when population levels fall too low, mammalian females shift behavior in predictable, biologically embedded ways: they seek strong, protective mates; they band together in cohesive social units; and they reorient toward reproductive fitness and child-rearing.

It works the other way, too. When a population dips —whether due to environmental collapse, disease, migration failure, or falling birth rates— males across the Animal Kingdom undergo similar profound behavioral shifts designed to reclaim dominance, restore reproductive opportunity, and exit dying systems.

Males under population pressure demonstrate more visible male-male competition, aggressive mate-claiming, and territorial consolidation.

For the sake of argument, I will argue that we are watching those biological imperatives playing out in real time in the human species, whose population is under dire pressure. For young men, we see a reassertion of dominance: the rise of strong, hierarchical movements (rising church attendance, beards, prepping, rejection of wokeness, MAGA, redpill masculinity, tribalism). For young women, we see growing emphasis on mating strategies (fitness/health, Trad Wives, early marriage, anti-feminism, dresses over pantsuits, desire for kids and family).

In other words, the Left doomed itself by adopting a radical philosophy that is completely contrary to human biology. People can think themselves around biology, for a while, but eventually nature smacks them in the face with a two-by-four.

And on a bigger scale, Nature doesn’t negotiate. If we don’t self-correct, if we continue thinking we can outsmart biology, Nature will smash civilization itself and make us start over from the ruins. When a society stops reproducing (e.g., Ancient Rome), Nature doesn’t just send a memo. It pulls the plug.

Historically, pulling the plug on human societies looks like civil wars, foreign conquest, economic disaster, cultural amnesia, religious revivals, and mass migrations.

🔥 What was most telling about the Times’ op-ed wasn’t just its confusion. It was the complete absence of solutions or even suggestions. The two editors identified the “problem” (women wanting to be thin, structured, and disciplined), traced it across centuries of human history, and then… shrugged in despair. They offered no alternative vision, no coherent rebuttal—just a wistful sigh that conservatives seem to be winning the pro-health argument.

Jessica even admitted envying women who “believe in something that tells them how to live.” That’s not analysis; that’s reluctant surrender. It’s a quiet acknowledgment that conservative ideals are succeeding where progressive values have collapsed, not because of a poorly delivered message, but because conservative ideals align with something deeper: biology, instinct, and the eternal architecture of human flourishing.

So at last we can see Trump’s global trade war not as the cause of the cultural shift. It’s the effect. It’s the natural, primal expression of a resurgent masculine instinct reasserting itself after decades of suppression. His unapologetic dominance on the world stage —slapping tariffs, ignoring protocol, insulting leaders, rejecting compromise— isn’t just Trump being Trump. It’s millions of people, especially (but not only) men, unconsciously craving order, hierarchy, and strength—and channeling that instinct through the breakthrough figure bold enough to embody it.

Trump’s untrammeled male energy isn’t his handicap; it’s his superpower. In an age that pathologizes masculinity, apologizes for strength, and confuses dominance with cruelty, Trump embodies something raw and deeply familiar: assertive, unapologetic, territorial male drive. He doesn’t whisper, negotiate, or defer— he claims, commands, and compels.

That energy deeply offends the effete cultural class. But it profoundly resonates with something ancient in the public psyche— something that has been suppressed, mocked, and medicated, but never extinguished. Trump doesn’t just lead; he radiates potency, and in a collapsing world, biology dictates that potency sells.

The public support for Trump’s worldwide economic blitzkrieg isn’t ideological; it’s biological. In a world of softness, confusion, and collapse, Trump’s blunt-force assertion of national power feels right— not because it’s perfect or even rational policy, but because it feels like nature rebalancing itself. He isn’t negotiating; he’s claiming territory. And in a society adrift, that translates into active, masculine leadership filling the vacuum left by soft men— passive-aggressive poltroons in pajamas and credentialed eunuchs with sensitivity training.

President Trump, Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, Robert Kennedy, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, Argentina’s Javier Milei —and ladies like Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, and Tulsi Gabbard— aren’t the cause of the Left’s unraveling. They’re the effect. They are the immune response, the natural antibodies produced by a civilization infected with ideologies that have defied biology, hierarchy, and common sense for too long.

Progressive policies hollowed out family, erased gender, mocked tradition, and demanded that reality bend to feeling. But reality doesn’t bend. It snaps back. And these figures are what the snapback looks like. They didn’t create the reckoning. They are the reckoning.

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On to RussiaGate. I am still absorbing the latest declassified documents, which dropped on Wednesday afternoon like a piano falling from the top of Trump Tower. Social media is already packed with summaries and commentaries about them, so I’ll avoid being redundant here. Let’s tackle the short version and discuss what it all means. It means a lot.

Here is this week’s remarkable timeline:

• On Wednesday, the Times of London ran a story (broken by Fox) headlined, “Trump Russiagate papers found in ‘burn bags’ in secret room, FBI claims.”

• Yesterday, the New York Sun ran a story headlined, “Grassley, Bondi Revive Clinton Email Probe With New ‘Annex’ Allegedly Showing FBI ‘Cut Corners.’” It referred to a 306-page part of John Durham’s report that has never before been seen.

• Yesterday, DNI Tulsi Gabbard declassified a credible, 19-page whistleblower memo alleging both that the Obama team pressured the whistleblower to lie about Trump’s “Russia collusion,” and how the whistleblower tried unsuccessfully for years to report what he saw as systemic abuse of intelligence. Here’s the memo.

Altogether, it was a vast amount of new, incriminating evidence, even if there’s no “smoking gun” yet. Instead of giving us that endpoint, we have now been provided the genesis of the conspiracy. Deep state critic Mike Benz felt vindicated, to say the least:

The short version is that in July, 2016, it appears Hillary Clinton’s team secretly cooked up the Trump-RussiaGate idea as a distraction from her burgeoning email scandal. They also minted the idea of calling ‘election interference’ a threat to “critical infrastructure,” a legal loophole that authorized the intelligence agencies to surveil American citizens— to wit, Trump’s campaign.

A few months later, when Trump shocked the conspirators by actually winning the election —which was the last thing they expected— they took the now-underway RussiaGate distraction operation and turned it into an engine of resistance, to sideline Trump for four years, explode him out of office, and then prosecute him to deter future private citizens from getting similar ideas.

That’s the short version. You can find lots more detailed discussion on social media.

🔥 Now let’s look at what this latest disclosure tranche means.

First, the Trump Team is serious. We are now in the second week of a steady drip of increasingly detailed disclosure. The Fox “burn bags” article, which I’ll discuss more in a moment, shows coordination with the media. This is not an example of the Trump Administration finding a single inelegant email and running off half-cocked.

Durham’s 306-page annex was not redacted in one day. It must have taken weeks of wrangling with a half dozen agencies to agree on final redactions. So this is a slow burn. It is a controlled release. As we’ve previously suspected, this is yet more evidence that they are creating a public permission structure for arrests.

For a cogent example of similar thinking: Pundit Scott Adams recently opined that, to him, what was once unthinkable has now become necessary.

CLIP: Scott Adams explains how Trump is carefully persuading the country that arrests will happen (4:54).

I am more convinced than ever that arrests are now a certainty. Don’t worry about statutes of limitation.

But arrests are not even the most astonishing conclusion we can glean from the new declassifications.

🔥 One of the most salacious and intriguing facts appeared in the Fox story. It described how Kash Patel found loads of incriminating, top-secret RussiaGate documents stuffed into burn bags in an unrelated SCIF (a secured information storage area). In other words, the documents were supposed to have been destroyed— including Durham’s classified annex.

Tellingly, it did not say when Kash found the bags. That Fox story could have been pre-written weeks ago.

These kinds of facts light up my lawyer’s mental dashboard. The implications are astounding. And it is terrible news, both for Democrats and (obviously) the RussiaGate conspirators.

First, consider what it means that someone secured those bags and prevented their destruction. Only a very small number of people knew the documents existed— perhaps fewer than a dozen. Of those, even fewer could have known about the destruction plan.

In other words —better sit down for this— sometime after Durham issued his report, the conspirators decided to destroy the evidence, but one of the key players thwarted the plan and hid the bags for some reason. Maybe for self-preservation, maybe for blackmail, or maybe for another reason. I’ll get to it.

Second, Kash obviously knew where to find them. It defies logic that he could have conducted a top-to-bottom sweep of the vast Hoover building and randomly found some stray burn bags in a dusty SCIF on the 11th floor. No. Somebody must have told him where they were.

The most probable conclusion from these facts is that one of the key conspirators is cooperating. Which means they have everything.

If I can see this, it means the conspirators can surely see it, too. Which means they can’t talk to each other anymore; it’s not safe. They don’t know who’s talking, and they know the DOJ has enough evidence to get FISA warrants to monitor their comms. So the conspiracy has collapsed; the center could not hold.

It’s every man for himself now.

🔥 Between June, 1972 and July, 1973, Democrats slowly leaked Watergate materials against President Nixon, climaxing in the dramatic reveal of the Oval Office audiotapes. We now know they probably had those tapes from the beginning. But they waited, patiently, for twelve months, to drop the most incriminating evidence at the end. It was a slowly mounting campaign of political pressure culminating with a death blow.

The RussiaGate scandal is a thousand times worse than Watergate.

The Trump Administration appears to be following the Watergate playbook, except maybe on a faster timeline (at the speed of Trump). If I’m right, then we’re not watching documents being released in real time; we’re seeing an orchestrated sequence of increasingly damning information trickling out on a pre-planned schedule.

Remember— they don’t have to prove the case in public. The public disclosure campaign only needs to persuade 51% of the public that arrests aren’t irrational. Once that low threshold is met, arrests can begin, and then the DOJ must prove its cases in court.

As Scott Adams explained, arrests of top intelligence officials (and even the former president) long seemed unthinkable. But step-by-step, the disclosures of a cohesive, interlocking architecture of evidence is making the idea of arrests not only thinkable— but necessary.

Have a terrific Friday! C&C will return tomorrow morning with more essential news and commentary in the Weekend Edition.

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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