☕️ UNCONDITIONAL ☙ Saturday, January 11, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Trump sentencing leaves libs in lurch; corporate media fail exposes anonymous source scam; President eviscerates Proxy War narrative; judge crushes FDA for hiding EUA docs; BlackRock takes blow; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! This Weekend Edition marks T-minus nine days till Inauguration. Today’s roundup includes: President Trump not sentenced at all, and corporate media lamely tries to take a victory lap—but nobody watches; Fortune accidentally gives away the corporate media game and things may never be the same; President Trump eviscerates the Proxy War narrative; FDA found hiding covid shot EUA documents and judge is not happy; and BlackRock takes a potentially mortal blow as a different judge finds ESG investing is illegal.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

🔥🔥🔥

Although it was completely predictable, the New York Times still ran perhaps its stupidest article in a long series of cognitively compromised columns, this one capped with the stunningly imbecilic headline, “As a Felon, Trump Upends How Americans View the Presidency.” A far more honest headline would have been, “Trump’s Sentencing Proves Liberal Lawfare Complete Waste of Time.”

Despite referring to “How Americans View the Presidency” right in the headline, the cowardly article never even tried defining how the Times claims Americans view the Presidency after four years of Joe Biden, or for that matter, after eight years of Bill Clinton. Whatever difficult to describe standard that was, we must trust the Times that now it has been upended.

Upended by yesterday’s sentencing. Not by the unprecedented prosecution, trial, or conviction. But I digress.

Judge Merchan, who has steadfastly refused to allow cameras or voice recorders into the courtroom for the entire, inconceivably expensive trial, reversed his long-standing policy yesterday, so that his completely undramatic sentencing of President Trump, who appeared remotely by Zoom from Florida, could be published.

After everything, after spending $80-million-plus (?) and who knows how much political capital to obtain the first criminal conviction of a U.S. president, Judge Merchan bravely sentenced Trump to nothing. No jail, no fine, no probation, not even community service.

Merchan’s unprecedented non-sentence left the Times with very little ammunition to work with, but it did it’s lying best. In the Times’ view, Trump has been punished: politically.

“TrUmP is tHe fIrSt FeLoN pReSiDeNt!!”

“While Mr. Trump was spared jail time or financial penalties,” the Times’s glum reporter noted with the slightest hint of finding a bright side, “he effectively had the word ‘felon’ tattooed on his record for all time unless a higher court overturns the conviction.”

Hahaha! Stop it! It’s too much! The best slam the Times could come up with was this is going on his permanent record. That is, effectively permanent. But not actually permanent! Because Trump’s appeal is still pending, and it’s pending under a whole new regime. So.

New York law allows judges to grant an ‘unconditional discharge’ when “no proper purpose would be served by imposing any condition upon the defendant’s release.” In his sentencing, Judge Merchan noted that the “citizenry of this nation” voted Trump back into the White House. For some reason. And so, an unconditional discharge was the only sentence that would not “encroach on the highest office of the land.”

They just can’t stop themselves. Although the Times desperately wished something significant had happened yesterday, Grey Lady realized that the “felon” label is a dead letter. “No one seemed shocked after Friday’s sentencing,” it reluctantly admitted, which “was already baked into the system.”

The reporter scared up an appropriate, if false, quotation from Barack Obama’s former lawyer who sadly said “You have somebody who is an adjudicated felon 34 times over, but you also have a nation that is either so numb or so in shock that it does not know how to react.”

Please. That is a progressive fantasy. Not only do we know exactly how to react, we did react. We re-elected the felon. Nor are we numb or in shock; we are furious. And we’re not going to let sold-out corporate media get away with it this time.

The Times’s article, framed as “news” but with a slimy “news analysis” legend at the top, failed journalism 101, because amidst a dozen anti-Trump quotes it included only a single paragraph cited to anyone even slightly favorable to President Trump, despite that he just won re-election in a modern landslide. That one paragraph is worth repeating here:

The article was a biased hit job, a badly written and poorly conceived op-ed decorated with a news wrapper, and nobody should bother reading it.

🔥 President Trump got a chance to speak at his sentencing hearing, and as you can easily imagine, he took it. Here’s the audio (6:17). President Trump was not remorseful. He was unbroken, unrepentant, unapologetic, and whatever is the exact opposite of remorseful. He told the court he was “totally innocent” and repeatedly insisted “I did nothing wrong.” The President denied the charges, called the whole thing an injustice, a political witch hunt, a disgrace to the system, an embarrassment to New York, and to make sure it was perfectly clear, said the case should never have been brought.

Trump told Judge Merchan, “it was done to damage my reputation so that I’d lose the election, and that obviously didn’t work. The people voted in a massive landslide and I got the largest number of votes by far of any Republican candidate in history, all seven swing states, and the popular vote.” The President flatly told the judge, “the people watched your trial and they voted.”

After all that, Merchan still gave him the unconditional discharge. Unsurprisingly, the useless New York Times reported none of Trump’s comments.

🔥 Afterward, President Trump responded to his sentence online by claiming complete vindication:

Trump has promised to appeal. Given how far the State of New York stretched the business records law used to convict the President, not to mention all Merchan’s bizarre trial rulings, there is a solid chance for reversal so long as the appellate court is even a little bit fair.

Liberals will simply be inconsolable if the conviction is reversed and they lose their “felon” label, which is all they have to show for all that effort.

🔥🔥🔥

On Thursday, Fortune published one of the most remarkable articles I can recall, which also remarkably replaced an overheated article published earlier in the day. The replacement article ran under a one-word, all-caps headline: “CORRECTION.” Here is the entire new article:

It sounds hilarious and it was. Fortune figured out that a single X user named “SpaceSudoer” had catfished the corporate media outlet into running a 100% fake story intended to mock Elon Musk. Yesterday, a new ‘Fortune Exposed’ account took credit (it seems SpaceSudoer created the Fortune Exposed account for this purpose):

In a series of posts, SpaceSudoer described how he’d answered a prompt seeking X whistleblowers at the bottom of one of reporter Kali Hays’ articles. So he pretended to be a disgruntled X employee and made up a story about being relocated. When Kali bit, he offered an outrageous tale of getting fired by Elon personally, after he pushed back on Elon’s dumb idea to “remove dates from X posts” and cancel the free account option.

Reporter Hays asked him for some supporting evidence, like an email or screenshot, which SpaceSudoer did not provide, ghosting her. He said he was then “surprised” to see Fortune run with the story, multiplying his fake, anonymous “whistleblowing” report into two anonymous sources:

Ruh roh. Not only did Fortune fall for being journalistically catfished —without evidence— but it also lied about its sourcing.

Lying corporate media is on life support. I keep telling you these articles quoting only anonymous sources are pure propaganda. If it fits the narrative, any bad actor can supply willing corporate media reporters who will neither try to confirm or deny the story, but will merely run with it so long as its politically helpful.

Kali could have emailed X and asked for a comment. I know it’s a lot of work, but still. I’m just saying. She didn’t check because she didn’t want to know.

If we had a functioning corporate media instead of a sold-out, deep-state propaganda operation, Fortune would not have deleted its article in panic. Instead, it would have published a much more introspective follow-up story explaining what went wrong, how it violated its own journalistic standards, and how it plans to fix it to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

Instead, all we got was a “CORRECTION” that blamed everything on the spoofer. As though Fortune has some right to expect anonymous tipsters to be scrupulous with the truth, so that it need not do any journalism work itself.

Remember — we were this close being forced to accept that the only credible sources of information were Fortune and the rest of corporate media.

Is it spreading misinformation when Fortune does it?

🔥🔥🔥

How long have we waited for this particular Emperor-has-no-clothes moment? During his epic, worlds-defining, Mar-a-Lago press conference earlier this week, another narrative that President Trump effortlessly sliced into ribbons was the Proxy War in Ukraine. Reuters ran the story earlier this week under the headline, “Trump says he sympathizes with Russia's opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine.”

CLIP: President Trump explains Russia’s opposition to NATO expansion in Ukraine (0:56).

One of the dumbest narratives we’ve been forced to tolerate for years, on pain of cancelation, until our brains bled, were the moronically oversimplified claims that Russia invaded Ukraine for no reason, Putin is a dictatorial madman, and my personal favorite, Russia hates democracy.

It’s simply marvelous how unquestioningly arrogant progressive elitists adopted these stupid slogans as if they were scientific truths. It tells you everything you need to know about progressivism. (Plus, I’m old enough to remember back when the left swooned over Russia and wanted to marry it. The irony.)

Even here on C&C, there are (were?) at least two (one?) reader accounts that loudly and regularly reinforced these oversimplified narratives in the comments. But on Tuesday, President Trump just shattered all the progressive permission structures and narrative is in a shambles.

Here’s what Trump told the seemingly unsurprised reporters:

For many, many years, long before Putin, Russia said you could never have NATO involved with Ukraine. That’s been, like, written in stone.

It was always understood. They had a deal, and then Biden broke it. Somewhere along the line, Biden said no. They should be able to join NATO. They had a deal that would have been a satisfactory deal to Ukraine and everybody else. But then Biden said no, you have to be able to join NATO.

Well, then Russia has somebody right on their doorstep. And I can understand their feelings about that.

In other words, Trump wadded up the insane narrative of “unprovoked Russian aggression” and tossed it into the shredder. It’s gone, never to return. Russia was provoked. And Russia’s reaction was understandable. None of the reporters challenged him. The geopolitical significance of this one tiny, official admission of truth cannot be overstated.

Trump knew exactly what he was doing. He was doing diplomacy.

Obviously, the folks listening most intently to Trump’s comments were the Russians and the Ukrainians. Until this week, the Russians never heard a scrap of sympathy from the United States government. Not from Biden, Blinken, Sullivan, Austin, Nuland — none of them excreted a single ounce of diplomacy, never allowing for even a hint of legitimacy in Russia’s concern about NATO’s eastward expansion.

Instead, Team Biden was all about blamesmanship, passive-aggressive sabotage (e.g., Nordstream bombing), and childlike escalation (i.e., “he’s making me touch him!”).

The worst part is that the Ukrainians never even wanted to join NATO. A well-accepted but officially unconfirmed story says Britain’s former Prime Minister Boris Johnson went to Kiev right before the Ukrainians signed a peace deal with Russia in 2022. Johnson talked the Ukrainians into breaking off negotiations, probably by promising them every weapon in the NATO arsenal. That’s the ‘deal’ Trump referred to.

President Trump also shattered another narrative construct, merely by acknowledging another obvious truth, which was that Biden’s brinksmanship could be catastrophic.

It turned out to be a very bad war. That war could escalate, and it could be much worse than it is right now.

This remark isn’t a throwaway line. Trump wasn’t just pointing out the obvious or scoring points off Biden. The President-Elect identified his mandate to make a deal. In other words, making peace isn’t only about ending Ukraine’s war, it’s also about keeping the world from burning.

Trump signaled to Russia and to Ukraine both that it is now time to put the weapons down because there’s no need to fight. NATO is back on the table. Despite the U.S. deep state’s heavy investment in Ukraine, both during and before the war, Trump just said that he understands Russia doesn’t want NATO there. Which was a half-step to agreeing it won’t happen, but more importantly a signal that NATO is negotiable.

And that one concession —the negotiability of NATO— gets the parties more than halfway to a deal.

💉💉💉

I have long counseled having superhuman patience in the critical effort to bring justice to the pandemic’s criminals, since accountability against resistance is always a slow and steady slog rather than any kind of race. But sometimes, the timeline surprisingly surges forward, like this week. We made major progress. Remember that famous case where the FDA straight-facedly argued it should get 75 years to produce the covid shot records? Yesterday, in that same case, heroic federal Judge Mark T. Pittman entered a new order — and it was a humdinger.

The judge gets it. “From the beginning of this case,” the judge wrote, the court “has been tasked with determining what the appropriate rate of production is for arguably the most important FOIA request in American history.” Pittman acknowledged how “Hundreds of millions of Americans were urged—and some coerced—into taking a vaccine that was developed and approved for emergency use.”

Although the FDA had already finished its initial production eight months ago, the plaintiffs and the court recently learned of another million pages that had never been turned over, ensconced in what the FDA called its “EUA file.” Once the judge ordered those newly discovered records turned over by February 25th, the FDA objected. The agency complained that the judge was “jumping the FOIA line” and butting ahead of other requests ahead of him in the pipe.

Pittman roundly rejected that tortured logic. It was no new request, he more than patiently explained, but the EUA File should have been included in the FDA’s original response to his first order from 2021. The frustrated judge damned the agency, explicitly noting that “the FDA attempted to hide the file’s existence.” He dramatically ended his order by quoting George Washington: “Truth will ultimately prevail where pains are taken to bring it to light.”

Whatever truth is in that million-page EUA file is apparently something the FDA had hoped would never ever see the light of FOIA. Things aren’t going well for the agency these days. If the FDA had thought it faced a friendly court system, it would have appealed Pittman long ago. And not only does it face this order on one flank, but on the other Robert Kennedy is poised to take control of HHS, and right on the front lines, Marty Makary is on the brink of running the FDA. Either Kennedy or Makary could order the FDA’s lawyers to stand down, and their FOIA department to turn over the records without substantial redaction.

In other words, the FDA is being surrounded. Pains are being taken to bring it to light, and truth will ultimately prevail.

📈📈📈

But the final, best news today was yesterday’s article in Reuters, headlined “American Airlines' focus on ESG in 401(k) plan is illegal, US judge rules.” The potential ramifications are so much bigger than the simple headline suggests.

Employers who manage their employees’ retirement accounts have a fiduciary duty to do their best to invest the money wisely. The law is very forgiving; fiduciaries can be stupid, they can make mistakes, and they can even buy bitcoin after the jump. Negligence isn’t normally enough. It usually takes an intentional act violating the fiduciary duty for a court to find liability.

And that is exactly what happened here. In what Reuters called a “first of its kind” ruling, yesterday a federal judge in Texas held American Airlines breached its fiduciary duty by making 401k investments based on environmental, social and other non-financial (“ESG”) considerations. In other words, “ESG” means DEI, climate change, transformers, and so on, and intentionally buying unprofitable ESG stocks is inconsistent with a fiduciary’s duties.

Specifically, and this might be the best part, ESG came into the picture because American Airlines invested a bunch of its employees’ money in Blackrock, whose entire raison d’etre is prioritizing woke ESG causes over maximizing investment returns.

District Judge Reed O'Connor blasted this type of “investing,” writing in his final order that “The evidence made clear that American’s incestuous relationship with BlackRock and its own corporate goals disloyally influenced administration of the Plan.”

Disloyally means that American prioritized BlackRock’s goals for making a “better world” over its employees’ goals of having some money to retire on. BlackRock may be panicking. Behold Reuters’ related headline from Thursday — the day before the judge’s final order published:

Ouch. A private BlackRock client letter explained the investment giant’s withdrawal from the NetZero collective—because of all the scrutiny and legal liability: “our memberships in some of these organizations have caused confusion regarding BlackRock’s practices and subjected us to legal inquiries from various public officials.”

Actually, that’s backwards. Nobody is confused about BlackRock’s practices. We understand it perfectly. In fact, over two years ago in 2022 Governor DeSantis took the lead, dumping BlackRock from the state’s investment plan:

Last year, in 2024, Texas followed suit:

Until this week, BlackRock was stubbornly hanging in there, rocking its woke credentials. But now that a federal judge has found that investing in BlackRock is de facto irrational because it fails to maximize returns, the ESG giant has a serious problem. This decision will freak out other companies, who will not want to avoid being on the receiving end of more lawsuits like the class action against American.

It might be a tad too early, but this is the very kind of thing that could be a death knell for wokeness. Wokeness writ large only came into its own when it was adopted by corporate America. This decision, along with the terrific work of activists like Robby Starbuck, and legal developments like the Supreme Court’s anti-discrimination decision, may finally make it financially impossible for blue states and corporate America to keep this up.

The American Airlines lawsuit started over two years ago. Remember, our wins against woke were all accomplished through a conservative counter-revolution that played out during the Biden Administration that was working against us at every corner. Just imagine what we can do after January 20th.

Have a wonderful and rewarding weekend! Then come back on Monday morning for more essential news and commentary.

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 🦠

How to Donate to Coffee & Covid

Twitter: jchilders98.
Truth Social: jchilders98.
MeWe: mewe.com/i/coffee_and_covid.
Telegram: t.me/coffeecovidnews
C&C Swag! www.shopcoffeeandcovid.com