☕️ UNCONDITIONALLY ☙ Wednesday, June 18, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Travel post: Heritage Panel feedback; war news updates; more arrests; democrat purity spirals; and the first tender buds of 2020 election problems bloom in DC.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! Remember that old saw about the best laid plans always being left on the top of the car? My wakeup alarm failed (that’s my story, and I am sticking to it). But then my flight got pushed back two hours. Hence the late delivery. In today’s roundup: Heritage Panel feedback; war news updates; more arrests; democrat purity spirals; and the first tender buds of 2020 election problems bloom in DC.

🪖 C&C MORNING MONOLOGUE 🪖

As regular readers know, I’ve been infesting the nation’s capital this week, speaking on topics near and dear to our hearts. For C&Cers who pine for an audio version—good news. This one’s a full two-hour-and-change field day, headlined by Senator Rand Paul, who masterfully helmed his legislative wheelhouse. If you’ve got the time, you’ll love every minute:

CLIP: Heritage Foundation panel — Shattered Trust and the Vaccine Reckoning (2:15:48).

The live audience at Heritage’s impressive Capitol Hill HQ included a former CDC director, top MAHA podcasters and movement leaders, policy officials, former FDA managers, pollsters, and (my personal favorite) an impressive showing of C&C fans.

To that august audience, I delivered a passionate portrayal of The Reckoning.™ (To cheat, and just hear my summary, start around 56:00.) During breaks, as ever, the top question folks asked me was evergreen: Jeff, do you really think we’ll ever see real accountability?

My answer: yes, a thousand times, yes. It is unavoidable. Inevitable. Inescapable.

The reckoning for the government’s pandemic overreach is bigger than any of us. All collective government rests on the foundational notion of consent of the governed. Consent, once given, is sticky. It’s not easily withdrawn. It took all the British Empire’s imperial arrogance to pry consent away from the colonists. (Remember tea taxes? That’s why this blog isn’t called Crumpets & Covid.)

But the pandemic’s authoritarian excess was worse than a thousand Tea Parties—and I mean in the original, Boston Harbor sense (not the plucky pre-MAGA movement). Someday, I’ll diagram British colonial oppression next to pandemic policy and show you how perfectly they overlay. Only this time, it wasn’t just taxation without representation—it was everything without representation. They trespassed us for speaking at school board meetings.

The pandemic pressure is not venting. It’s building. At worst, the public is crackling with revolutionary energy, primed for an explosive spark. At best, Americans feel like abused spouses— waiting, complying, quietly keeping score, and watching for the first open door.

This moment, like a bad case of PTSD, is politically unsustainable without closure. Hence: the reckoning. It’s in the slow mail —book rate from India, with stops in Karachi, Qatar, and Kalamazoo— but it is en route. The package is guaranteed. It’s out for delivery. The order cannot be cancelled.

With the swish of an executive pen, they deleted the quaint illusion that we live in a real democracy, with checks and balances, due process, and all the rest. We’d naively believed it couldn’t happen. We were wrong. Our freedoms were more fragile and our rights more alienable than the civics books promised.

To keep our consent, the government must repair the relationship. And like any abused spouse, we need to see evidence that the abuse can never happen again. At least abusive spouses apologize. We haven’t even gotten the first apology yet.

So yes, Martha, there will be a reckoning. What it looks like is up to the state. The real question is: When it lands, will the landing be soft— or hard? In other words, when it comes, the reckoning will be either voluntary or it will be involuntary. Those are the only options.

But it is coming.

Postscript— Tomorrow, I’ll give you some more flavor on Heritage’s private policy meeting following the public part. It was terrifically encouraging.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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The Middle Eastern war weather report is: more fog. It continues to be an endurance battle, measuring Iranian missile reserves against Israeli anti-missile batteries. But a few interesting nuggets emerged yesterday. The first story appeared in this morning’s New York Times, headlined, “Despite Close Ties With Iran, Russia Stands Aside as Israel Attacks Iran.”

The Times wistfully (and correctly) reported that ever since Israel began helping arm Ukraine, Moscow has cozied up to Tehran. First, Iran supplied the Kremlin with badly needed drones in the first year of its Ukraine invasion. It helped Moscow establish a critical factory to manufacture its own drones. And this year, the two countries signed a new strategic partnership treaty requiring closer security ties, including swapping defense technology.

But significantly (unmentioned in the article), the new Iran-Russia security pact does not include a mutual-defense provision. This gives the Russians a certain amount of flexibility, which they appear to be exercising. “Beyond phone calls and condemnatory statements,” the Times explained, “Russia is nowhere to be found.”

Why would Russia bail on its ally? The Times rounded up a long list of possibilities, such as Moscow’s obvious need to focus on its own war with Ukraine and avoid getting dragged into conflicts all over the world, unlike some people. But the story buried the real reason somewhere down the middle of the list: “Mr. Putin doesn’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons and also wants to keep improving relations with President Trump.”

Aha. In other words, Trump’s dealmaking with Russia is already delivering dividends.

🚀 Yesterday, making it look easy, Trump snatched back the media cycle with a two-word tweet. The Financial Times reported the story below the headline, “Donald Trump calls for Iran’s ‘unconditional surrender.’” Well, sort of. Here’s his post:

The media went berserk. The world raced to decode Trump’s ulterior meaning.

But my lawyer’s eye was more jaded. Trump’s “bellicose,” two-word, all-caps demand was only connected to Iran because his immediate previous two posts were also about that war-torn country. Fair enough. But technically, the President did not mention Iran at all. So, he could’ve been demanding unconditional surrender from CNN’s editorial board, Jack Smith, the WHO, Taylor Swift, or maybe the maître d’ at Mar-a-Lago who keeps serving his steak medium-well.

Trump’s genius is plausible deniability wrapped in maximum pressure. He doesn’t have to explain— he just aims, fires, and lets the media do all the work. It’s like quantum politics: the meaning only collapses when someone reacts. (And they always take the bait and react.)

Those two words were masterful narrative management; they carry vast historic echoes. President Ulysses S. Grant (my favorite historical president) earned the nickname “Unconditional Surrender Grant” during the earliest years of the Civil War, a moniker that propelled him to command of the Union Army followed by two terms in the White House.

Much later in 1943, in Casablanca, Churchill and FDR jointly declared a policy of accepting “nothing less than unconditional surrender” from the Axis powers. Both Germany and Japan ultimately surrendered without conditions. Yesterday’s hottest takes speculated that Trump was tearing a page from Harry S. Truman’s diary, and his all-caps tweet was really threatening to nuke Tehran.

Perhaps the best evidence of how Trump owns the media is the way the Financial Times ended its breathless “somebody said something” story. “UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer,” the FT concluded, “said ‘Trump said nothing that suggests he’s about to get involved in this conflict.’”

In other words, the politicians got that Trump’s post didn’t really say anything, but the entire media ran with it anyway.

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They are starting to notice all the arrests. Cue the faux outrage! Yesterday, the New York Times ran a story headlined, “Images of Handcuffed Democrats Are Piling Up in Trump’s Immigration Crackdown.” The sub-headline added, “Federal agents have arrested a growing number of the party’s elected officials, fueling liberal outrage and conservative accusations that Democrats are carrying out publicity stunts.”

The latest “victim” was Brad Lander, New York City’s comptroller and wannabe mayor (approximately half of Brooklyn is running). The Comptroller got himself arrested at an immigration courthouse in Lower Manhattan while theatrically escorting an illegal immigrant that ICE agents were trying to detain.

I’m just a lawyer, but it’s not perfectly clear to me what this sort of exercise has to do with comptrolling. But what do I know?

When agents moved in, Brad latched onto the hapless deportee like a desperate game of Red Rover. “I will let go when you show me the judicial warrant,” he heroically declared, as though invoking a Fourth Amendment fairy tale would somehow manifest a fanciful nonexistent law. The story’s next paragraph was priceless:

Womp, womp!

After a brief visit to the inside of an ICE facility, Lander emerged triumphant, shirt wrinkled, tie askew, hair mussed, and his candidatorial visage dripping with defiance. “I actually think I failed today, because my goal was really to get Edgardo out of the building,” he told a scrum of friendly microphones, confirming everything DOJ prosecutors will need for the charging memo. New York’s Comptroller is, obviously, on a first-name basis with the illegal alien, Edgardo.

It’s nice having friends in high places. Even comptrollers.

For weeks, Democrats have been railing against ICE “ambushes” at courthouses. They say it’s not fair. Illegals face what they call a Catch-22: if they skip hearings, they get automatic deportation. If they attend hearings, ICE knows where and when to find them.

But that’s not actually a Catch-22. That’s just two bad options. (A real Catch-22 would be, “you can only stay in the country if you don’t follow the law.”)

🔥 Progressives love to wrap their “sanctuary cities” with the muddled glow of moral righteousness. But if you peel off the press releases and look at the mechanics, they bear an uncomfortable resemblance to something Democrats would rather we forget: post-Civil War nullification of civil rights laws.

After the Union won the war, the Republican Congress passed the Reconstruction Amendments, including a tsunami of civil rights laws intended to protect newly freed black citizens. In response, Democrat-led Southern states didn’t openly reject federal authority—they just refused to cooperate. Sheriffs turned blind eyes. Judges ignored federal warrants. Local governments created legal quicksand to trap federal enforcers.

In effect, Southern Blue states said: “We don’t recognize the federal government’s authority to tell us who has rights or who gets to stay here.” If it all sounds familiar, that’s because it is.

Today’s blue ‘sanctuary’ jurisdictions do the same thing— only instead of defying civil rights laws to exclude citizens, they’re defying immigration laws to harbor aliens. The moral valence is twisted, but the legal sin is the same: deliberately sabotaging the equal application of federal law.

In both eras, the Democrats’ political message was the same: Our political ideology outranks your Constitution.

Back then, it was “states’ rights” used as a fig leaf for racial oppression. Now it’s “community values” used to justify aiding and abetting immigration fugitives. But the underlying doctrine —selective federal nullification by local Democrats— is Jim Crow in a different getup.

It didn’t work out well for them last time. If Democrats want to cosplay as civil rights martyrs while channeling the legal tactics of their Jim Crow ancestors, they might want to revisit how that story ended.

Spoiler alert: not great.

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Purity spiral! Yesterday, the Washington Post ran a story under the gloomy headline, “Democrats want to fight Trump, but they can’t stop fighting each other.” The sub-headline explained, “Internal divisions at the DNC and its direction under chair Ken Martin have been a source of tension in the party.”

The story wasn’t news, exactly. It was a mashup of developments we’ve already seen, focusing once again on David Hogg’s untimely ouster and the two high-profile DNC rage-quitting incidents featuring Teachers’ and AFSCME unions.

But the quotes from the story are priceless.

It’s The Purge, 2025 edition. WaPo said the DNC “has been rocked by clashes that reflect broader generational and ideological strains in the party.” Amidst those strains, rather than resolving or accommodating them, the Democrat Party is doubling down and “stifling input from dissenting voices and refusing to change in a way that is risky for future elections.”

“Many are simply fed up with all the rancor,” WaPo carped, but “the criticism is still flying.”

Purity is spiraling crazier and crazier. Yesterday, Representative Debbie Dingelberry (D-Mich.), who helps lead House Democrat messaging, said “There’s more division than unity.” Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wi.) opined, “You really have to work hard to step in the pile of s--- that they’re stepping in.” Howard Chou, a Colorado DNC member, said, “We dropped the baton, we tripped and we fell.” On a rake.

Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha added, “This is just fodder to show people that the poor Democratic Party can’t even govern itself.”

I think I made that same point myself, a couple days ago. Nice of Chuck to notice.

The story ended on a weak, discordant note of optimism from the DNC’s embattled vice-chair, Pennsylvania’s Malcolm Kenyatta. He suggested, “I think the party does have a message. Three freakin’ words … Make life better. Go repeat it.” Make life better? Is that the whole message? Remember— that’s from the DNC’s vice-chair.

I’m not sure Kenyatta’s slogan can compete with Make America Great Again, which supporters chant at rallies, gas stations, sporting events, and baptisms. Kenyatta’s slogan sounds more like a lame self-improvement mantra. I am good enough. Go repeat it.

Purity spirals twist in a descending corkscrew, relentlessly driving toward the subject’s heart. At this point, the DNC doesn’t look like a political organization. It looks like a late-stage Reddit forum in the final throes of collapse— mods fighting mods, bans flying, factions forming over whether to upvote a gif of Karl Marx wearing eyeliner. Nobody’s talking about Trump. They’re too busy chasing each other out of the shrinking tent with procedural torches.

As the DNC quarrels over whether female candidates were “sufficiently empowered” in the last leadership vote —and while big blocs exit the party in theatrical, hashtagged rage— Trump and the GOP are, love it or hate it, actually governing.

The purity spiral is bad enough, but wait— Democrat prospects just got worse. Much worse.

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Now they tell us. Now. Yesterday, Newsweek ran a story headlined, “FBI raises ‘alarming’ claims of Chinese interference in 2020 election.” On Monday, FBI Director Kash Patel declassified previously withheld FBI documents, and shared them with U.S. senators, explaining they detailed "alarming allegations" about real Chinese interference in the 2020 election.

In a statement only to conservative outlet Just The News, the FBI Director said, "Specifically, these include allegations of plans from the CCP to manufacture fake driver's licenses and ship them into the United States for the purpose of facilitating fraudulent mail-in ballots—allegations which, while substantiated, were abruptly recalled and never disclosed to the public.”

The Chinese scheme was intended to distribute the fake driver's licenses to Chinese sympathizers in the U.S. who would use them to cast mail-in votes for Biden.

Worse, according to FBI whistleblowers, in the lead-up to the election, then-FBI Director Chris Wray inexplicably issued a “destruction” order for all copies of documents related to the Chinese interference investigation. “An FBI spokesperson told the New York Post that federal authorities became aware of an alleged plot to impact the 2020 election around August of that year,” Newsweek reported, “though the intelligence reports were recalled for unknown reasons.”

Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) said Patel’s letter alleged “serious national security concerns that need to be fully investigated by the FBI.” Yesterday, Grassley shot back his own letter requesting that all related documents be turned over to the Committee.

In Washington, the trading of public letters between aligned officials can often signal a pre-coordinated dance between the agencies. My guess is that Director Patel already has a package ready for delivery to Senate Republicans.

🔥 In October, 2020, after testifying under oath that all the FBI saw were frustrated Russian efforts at election meddling, then-FBI Director Chris Wray gave a press briefing wherein he assured the public that, “When we see indications of foreign interference… we’re going to aggressively investigate and work with our partners.”

Meaning, the exact opposite. If he’d had even barely credible evidence of a Chinese fake-ID plot, Wray should have immediately notified all 50 state supervisors of elections so they could secure ballot-handling procedures, especially for mail-in ballots.

But Wray didn’t notify anyone. Not only that, but he issued a bizarre order recalling all documents related to the scheme, and for good measure, instructed the other intelligence agencies to destroy their copies.

Now, I’ve been reliably informed until my ear canals bled that election interference is a blasphemous and unforgivable crime that is one thousand times worse than ethnic cleansing. Worse than treason. Worse than genocide. Worse than misgendering someone.

For that contemptible crime, they prosecuted Trump in state and federal courts, sued legions of conservative lawyers, locked up grandma, filled the op-ed pages with faux outrage, cried rivers of crocodile tears, and generally turned election law into a hypersonic railgun aimed at every politically convenient target.

The bare threat of election interference is so awful, apparently, that just writing the wrong accounting code on your check stub is so corrosive and anti-democratic that it requires the full attention of the State of New York for four years.

But also, apparently, the very same people who hysterically screamed about SharpieGate and alternative electors simultaneously covered up credible reports of imminent, wide-scale cheating using fake IDs created in communist labor camps.

And then they had the gall to call it, “the most secure election in US history.”

Maybe what they really meant was that they “secured” the election, the same way mobsters secure witnesses— by making sure all the inconvenient evidence gets buried six floors beneath the Hoover Building next to Jimmy Hoffa and the Epstein security footage. Axios, September 2021:

He might not have seen the evidence since he kept his eyes closed while he was pushing it into the shredder.

This story has muscular legs. It touches all the big flash points: the stolen election, the two-tiered justice system, and all the fake hysteria over election integrity. This story doesn’t just destroy the narrative. It retroactively incinerates the moral authority they used to prosecute everybody else.

Democrats are already caught in their purity spiral of irresolvable political positions— open borders versus soccer mom safety, trans rights versus women’s sports, Hamas flags versus anti-Semitism. If the 2020 election starts to unravel —as Trump has always said it would— then Lucy will have some serious ‘splainin to do.

🔥 Since 2020, the dominant media-Democrat narrative has been “Trump lied about the election. He’s a danger to democracy. The election was secure. Questioning it is dangerous disinformation.” PBS headline from October, 2021:

If Trump turns out to have been right, even partially —that there was a meaningful threat of election interference, the suppression of intel, and FBI hijinx— it will be a narrative supernova. The Overton window will shift so fast it will give CNN whiplash.

The deep state is already mired in a slow-motion erosion of trust in the FBI, DOJ, media, Big Tech, public health, and even elections themselves. But if Trump turns out to be right, and those institutions suppressed evidence of foreign election interference —especially if they destroyed the evidence— that erosion will become a landslide.

Time for a reckoning.

Have a terrific Wednesday! Swing back around tomorrow morning for another informative and entertaining roundup of all the 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 🦠

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