☕️ TWAS THE K-SHAPE BEFORE XMAS ☙ Wednesday, December 24, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Happy Christmas Eve! A quick pre-holiday good-news roundup to entertain and encourage as we all settle in for a long winter's nap, or rather a series of to-dos to get ready for the big day. And more!

Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday, Christmas Eve! Whether the view outside your window is sunny or snowy, whether you are racing to wrap gifts and cook holiday meals or heading into the office on a final workday (when nobody actually gets much work done), I wish you and your family the most joyful and rewarding of Christmases. Since I have various holiday duties, a Christmas Eve dinner, church, and a wrapping/stocking assignment, today’s roundup is a good-news quick-hitter. Enjoy it, and I’ll see you all again very soon.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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It was a Christmas miracle! This morning, the Wall Street Journal’s lead story was headlined, “The U.S. Economy Keeps Powering Ahead, Defying Dire Predictions.” Here is the Trump 2.0-era media narrative template: First, the media criticizes President Trump for his economic policies, his unprofessional communications style, and exhaling. The media diligently avoids even the appearance of bias by just quoting Scrooge-like ‘financial experts’ who predict that, as a direct result of President Trump’s policies, especially tariffs, ten thousand babies will die horrifically from measles, instead of being aborted first.

But then, disappointment. Babies stubbornly cling to life and Recessions fail to rear their ugly heads. Instead, the economy surges, unexpectedly, and the experts suddenly discover new and even more complicated economic theories proving that the surprisingly strong financial performance is mostly a mirage. “Bah, humbug,” the experts say.

Then, just go back to square one —criticize everything Trump does— and repeat. As Ross Perot used to say, It’s simple! Nothing to it.

📈 The truth is, despite experts’ anti-heroic efforts, we’re outperforming the entire European continent, including Germany, Britain, France, Lithuania, the Maldives, various Christmas markets, and the Rock of Gibraltar. “The U.S. economy continues to power through,” the Journal began, “defying widespread expectations of a slowdown or even a recession, and blowing past other developed countries.”

Whoosh! “What was zat, herr ubergrupenfloffer?” “Zat was America! It blew right past like a rocket-powered zeppelin!” Or something like that.

While ze Germans are burning their yard furniture for heat, Americans are shopping for Christmas gift deals and generally acting like the economy is robust. True, Americans might not like the hangover of Biden’s high prices, but we are powering through and paying them.

“Americans continue to spend,” the story explained simply. And not just a little. And it’s not just consumers. Businesses and investors spent, too. “The mood among the business community and investors is definitely bullish,” said Rebecca Patterson, an economist quoted in a story from yesterday’s New York Times , which was headlined:

Surged! Defied expectations! Powered through! And other verbs! But what happened to the experts’ predictions of imminent slowdowns and recessions? Well … “Almost everyone got Trump’s tariffs wrong,” the Journal admitted. “Instead of recession, the U.S. economy expanded in somewhat unexpected ways.”

And there it was, like clockwork: Unexpectedly. It’s not their fault! They didn’t expect Trump’s tariffs to work.

We may be tempted to feel sympathy for the now-humiliated financial experts, except we suddenly remember that they made the exact opposite predictions during four years of Bidenflation, at that time telling us all about funemployment and accusing us of imagining inflation.

But there’s one statistic to which the experts still cling, like the captain of the Pequod clutching the last wooden shreds of the sinking whale ship. “Pessimism persists,” the Journal purred. “The Conference Board reported that consumer confidence fell again in December, marking its fifth consecutive month of declines.” What would we do without surveys?

At least we know the media hasn’t given up. It is heroically downplaying all the good news, instead platforming feelings over financial performance. The relentless, dour news and widespread expectations are showing up in weak consumer confidence, because nobody believes the experts can be wrong all the time. The experts have a whole tool chest of ways to let the air out of any good news, and this time, they’re using one of their favorites.

📈 After conceding all the good news, the Journal pivoted to the current post-hoc rationalization, a class-warfare theory that media’s Marxist experts call “the dreaded K-shaped recovery.” According to their narrative, the recovery might look good on paper, but it’s a trick. There are two lines on the economy’s graph, not just one. An illusory good one and a really bad one.

The theory goes that, while rich folks are doing great (the K’s ascending top line), hardworking regular people are still scraping up change to buy gas two gallons at a time (the K’s descending bottom line). In other words, any perceived improvements are actually just a hallucination that most regular people, especially, should resent.

It’s a permission structure for pessimism. In other words, it gives Democrats a way to wave off any good economic news.

TRUMP: “Look! It’s a record stock market, surging GDP, and bursting employment!”

DEMOCRATS: “Meh. It’s just a K-shaped recovery. It’s actually terrible.”

But as usual, even in the same article, the data contradicted the K-shaped theory.

📈 “Mastercard found that consumer retail spending (excluding cars) increased +3.9% between Nov. 1 and Dec. 21 from the previous year as consumers shopped for holiday gifts,” the Journal was forced to admit. “It very much indicates that the U.S. economy is continuing to expand, it’s continuing to move forward, even in the face of heightened uncertainty,” said Mastercard’s chief economist Michelle Meyer.

I’m just a lawyer, and not a financial expert, but it seems like there are far too many Mastercard customers for it to be all rich folks. In other words, the credit card company’s data proves everyone (on average) is shopping more than last year. No “K-shape” to it at all.

Even though the European Union is scraping the bottom of the economic barrel, for some reason, media isn’t complaining about K-shaped recoveries in Europe. Yesterday, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick bragged on all the great news, including the fact that America is defying the West’s overall poor economic condition:

CLIP: Commerce Department announces US is crushing the competition (0:53).

The “K-shaped recovery” theory is dumb Marxist claptrap anyway. It posits there are two separate economies that don’t overlap or interact at all. First, a small group of wealthy Americans, call them “bourgeoisie” or “Kulaks,” who can somehow support the entire economy as long as they are happy. And then there are the rest of us, call us “the proletariat,” which suffers under the oppressive boots of the wealthy and must go bargain hunting instead of flitting about the Greek Isles where we deserve to be.

It’s all nonsense. It is totally unreasonable to pretend that a 40‑year arc of progressive wage stagnation, asset inflation, housing scarcity, and global capital flows can be unwound by any president in 11 months. Wielding that expectation as a political cudgel is narrative warfare, not economics. The fact that liberals just noticed the economy’s structural problems, which have been percolating since the 1980s, is evidence that they are malign actors, not neutral observers.

The media is doing nothing to help fix these structural problems. Nor is Congress. Nor are the ‘experts,’ whose expertise is obviously not in forecasting economic outcomes. Their expertise actually lies in provoking class envy.

President Trump and his team are the only ones doing anything helpful. And in a Christmas miracle, it’s already working. Just wait for next year. It will be even better.

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Yesterday, Al Jazeera ran a very encouraging story headlined, “US bars five Europeans over alleged efforts to ‘censor American viewpoints.’” Not just any Europeans. The State Department banned entry to the US by five top architects of the censorship-industrial complex, including the European Union’s top minister for criminalizing speech, sorry, I meant for “digital safety.” Who is French, by the way.

In yesterday’s statement, Secretary of State Marco Rubio correctly called the five individuals “radical activists” who had “advanced censorship crackdowns” against American speakers and American companies like Elon Musk and X. “The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship,” he added.

“For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose,” Rubio explained.

Ironically, the now-banned French minister, Thierry Breton, complained that he was being censored, and compared the travel ban to, wait for it, McCarthyism. (This is where I must defend “Tailgunner” Joe McCarthy, about whom everything you’ve been told is a liberal lie, and who was an American hero who liberals drove to an early grave and then salted the reputational earth. But I digress.) “To our American friends: Censorship isn’t where you think it is,” Mr. Thierry insisted.

Dainty French President Emmanuel Macron, whose handsome wife accompanies him everywhere, called it intimidation and coercion. “These measures amount to intimidation and coercion aimed at undermining European digital sovereignty,” Macron whined. “The rules governing the European Union’s digital space are not meant to be determined outside Europe.”

Nobody’s trying to determine your stupid European rules. We just don’t want speech terrorists in this country. We don’t hate them; we just feel better when they aren’t around. And yes, this is what we voted for.

Earlier this month, the EU fined Twitter/X an eye-watering $140 million for a bunch of made-up nonsense, which everyone knows was actually meant to punish the social media platform for helping European citizens speak more freely, and for Musk’s recent advocacy against British rape gangs. The fine was levied under the so-called “Digital Services Act,” or DSA, which was passed in 2022 during the pandemic.

Not coincidentally, the now-banned Thierry has been called the “mastermind” behind the DSA.

The Trump Administration is once again “shattering norms and customs,” by punishing the individual officials behind anti-American activities, rather than treating them as if they were diplomatically immune from blowback. And it is driving the Europeans nuts.

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Yesterday, the New York Post ran a terrific story headlined, “Federal judge slaps down California’s trans child secrecy law.” Last year, California’s oleaginous Governor Gavin Newsom signed a perfectly absurd law banning school district employees from informing parents whenever their kids show symptoms of gender dysphoria, such as asking to be called different names, weird pronouns, or asking to move in with their trans teachers. Yesterday, a federal judge struck down the new statute as unconstitutional.

As a practical matter, the judge ordered California schools to prominently include —in bold face type— the following disclaimer in all staff training materials related to sexual identity or gender expression:

“Parents and guardians have a federal constitutional right to be informed if their public school student child expresses gender incongruence. Teachers and school staff have a federal constitutional right to accurately inform the parent or guardian of their student when the student expresses gender incongruence. These federal constitutional rights are superior to any state or local laws, state or local regulations, or state or local policies to the contrary.”

Among other silliness, California had argued that even if the secrecy law was unconstitutional, it would simply be too hard to train teachers and staff in how to communicate with parents. It’s too complicated, the officials complained, especially since all our training materials have already been printed. The judge was having none of it. “When the State drops an elephant in the middle of its classrooms, it is not a defense to say that the elephants are too heavy to move,” he wrote in his order.

The ruling found it beyond dispute that parents —not teachers— hold the fundamental right to direct how their own kids are raised. “The history and culture of Western civilization reflect a strong tradition of parental concern for the nurture and upbringing of their children. This primary role of the parents in the upbringing of their children is now established beyond debate as an enduring American tradition,” the judge explained.

It’s not just any old fundamental right. The judge quoted the U.S. Supreme Court: “The liberty interest at issue in this case—the interest of parents in the care, custody, and control of their children—is perhaps the oldest of the fundamental liberty interests recognized by this Court.”

It was also shocking how hard California fought to preserve the right to keep secrets from parents. The judge only ordered that teachers may (but are not required to) tell parents about gender-related issues with their children, which was all the relief requested by the Christian parents who filed the lawsuit.

That was still too much for California officials, who have promised to appeal. We’ll see, but the appeal goes to the Ninth Circuit, which —thanks to Trump 1.0 appointments— was reliably pro-parent throughout the pandemic. We’ll see; but I like our odds. The tide is going out on trans insanity, even if Democrats are still clutching onto their cross-dressing dolls with both arms.

We have much to be grateful for. Spend a moment today considering how very far we have come in such a short time. It’s been all good news this week. Not only that, but the clerks at the stores aren’t wearing surgical masks this year. What a wonderful Christmas gift.

Have a tremendous Christmas Eve! I pray for your blessings, and that God may shine His face upon you. Good luck with the wrapping, the cooking, and the reindeer-counting—and for Heaven’s sake, go easy on the Christmas cheer. C&C is officially closed tomorrow, though who knows what the morning may bring—especially now that my teenagers are far too old to care about Christmas dawn, and instead require heavy industrial equipment to be extracted from bed shortly before after noon. In any event, we’ll return Friday morning with a brisk post-Christmas roundup to get you fully caught up and to clear away whatever obnoxious media narratives sprouted overnight like malignant mistletoe.

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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