☕️ UNSTOPPABLE ☙ Tuesday, November 26, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Russia changes everything with unstoppable missile system; Trump drops tariff hammer; Is Soros-linked Treasury Secretary any good?; So long, Jack, as Trump's federal cases die with a whimper; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! Two days left till Turkey day, although the Christmas season has well and truly begun. We just couldn’t wait, and who can blame us? Your roundup today includes: the Russians just ruined the Pentagon’s Proxy War by reinventing modern warfare, again, and this time it is going to stick; Trump drops tariff hammer on the border and on the fentanyl epidemic; Trump’s Soros-linked pick for Treasury invigorates the market and terrifies some conservatives; and the federal cases against Trump die with a whimper rather than Democrats’ hoped-for bang.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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As astounding and record-shattering as this year has been, 2024 is not done. Only close war watchers know that on Thursday, the Russians quietly obsoleted modern warfare and most of the West’s defensive arsenal. This changes everything.

Since shortly after the strike, corporate media’s strategy has been to downplay, shrink, and ignore the news, presumably until they can cobble together a workable narrative. It’s not going away. On Friday, French broadsheet Le Monde blandly reported the story under the unimaginative headline, “Russia fires medium-range ballistic missile at Ukraine in warning to West.”

Russia responded to Biden Administration escalations by making the final move, checkmate, escalating far beyond NATO’s reach. The Russians deployed a paradigm-shattering, epoch-defining, game-changing wonder weapon that turned every modern military strategy textbook into a historic footnote. It was not the sort of “game-changing weapon” that like robotic parrots corporate media has serially invoked since the Proxy War started, duplicitously announcing every new delivery of decades-old NATO military technology to Ukraine.

No. This was something genuinely new. And, by definition, revolutionary.

On Thursday, Russia blew up a large satellite manufacturing plant in Dnipro, Ukraine. That much was unremarkable. But an astonishing video of the attack quickly surfaced, and it confounded everyone, at least, everyone talking. The warbloggers began rolling out a series of excited guesses and urgent hypotheses for what looked like a cluster of missiles falling to Earth like avenging angels:

CLIP: Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev announces hypersonic missile attack (0:12).

The strike followed Biden intentionally crossing a red line set by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Putin warned the US not to help Ukraine fire ballistic missiles into Russian territory, which Biden promptly did anyway, with gusto. Following the Dnipro strike, as the warbloggers struggled to comprehend what they’d seen, President Putin delivered an address to the Russian people that provided a little more detail about the new weapon, which the Russians called “Orechnik,” and which translates in English as “Hazelnut.”

YOUTUBE: Putin Address LIVE: Putin Reveals Mach 10 Oreshnik Missile, Which 'Outpaces' All Western Defenses (long).

It was an intermediate-range hypersonic ballistic missile, which rings boring in civilian ears. But Hazelnut features some key groundbreaking specifications: first, the missile’s range is 5,500 kilometers (3,500 miles), which means it can strike anywhere in Europe, any time, within mere minutes from launch. Hazelnut flies at an eye-watering 8,000 mph— Mach 12, twelve times the speed of sound. Putin told the Russian people that no missile defense system on Earth can intercept the Hazelnut. It is immune to air defense.

Nobody is even close to developing a defense to this weapon. Least of all the United States, since our DEI-obsessed generals keep failing to develop any operative hypersonic technology at all. Plus, we’ve only just found out about this new threat; somehow the Russians kept it under wraps during years of development—another inexcusable failure by our intelligence services.

🚀 The Hazelnut is combines a traditional ICBM rocket, turbocharges it with hypersonic technology, delivers surgical precision targeting within a few feet, all capped by a conventional explosive warhead instead of a nuke. That sounds reassuring, but it is actually bad for us, because it means Russia can use the missile without violating nuclear weapons conventions or international rules against weapons of mass destruction.

Le Monde began its article with the understatement of the Twenty-First Century: “It's a first in the history of military nuclear power.” NATO and Ukraine plan an emergency meeting today, Tuesday, to discuss the implications of the record-shattering development.

As I mentioned, corporate media has mostly embargoed the story. Still, one can detect signs of pending panic reading between the headlines. For example, behold this alarming headline from yesterday’s UK Guardian:

The Guardian informed Germans they will soon “be encouraged to create protective shelters in their homes by converting basements and garages,” a spokesperson told the press at a rushed briefing. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal ran a long-form, magazine-style story — a story that only quoted other media and anonymous Ukraine and U.S. officials, the telltale fingerprints of intelligence agencies working in a hurry — pushing for peace:

The war isn’t going well, and the embargo on bad news has been completely lifted. Newsweek ran a story yesterday that said, without coming out and saying it, that Ukraine is on the verge of total collapse:

You get the idea. Right as Biden’s neocons were staring at inevitable defeat in Ukraine, and were considering ever-higher-risk options to somehow snatch victory from the iron jaws of defeat, on Thursday Russia calmly placed a brand-new, really game-changing weapons technology on the chessboard.

Our generals aren’t talking. But I suspect they must be reacting to this news like how the Zulu chieftans reacted after the first time the British used machine guns against them. Ominously, the Zulus didn’t recognize their peril and kept fighting, and dying. Our generals can’t be that dumb? Wait, don’t answer that.

Here’s why Hazelnut changes everything.

🚀 The implications can be sliced into two categories: immediate implications for Ukraine, and broader implications for the West:

• With its 3,500-mile range, Russia’s new missile can easily strike anywhere in Ukraine, including Zelensky’s Peloton, anywhere in Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa, for that matter.

• Western air defenses are now useless. Worse, Russia’s expensive hypersonics can first target Ukraine’s Patriot Missile Systems, then without effective defenses, the cheaper conventional missiles can handle the rest.

• There are other problems. To the extent aircraft carriers remained viable at all in light of short-range hypersonics, you can now pull the plug. Absent some revolutionary countermeasure, aircraft carriers are sitting ducks.

• In case it wasn’t obvious, we can assume China shares this technology, too. What if Russia gives these missiles to Iran? North Korea?

I see this as an arsenal half-full. Biden’s unsupervised neocons were busily deploying a series of incremental escalations designed to provoke Russia into doing something so egregious that Biden would have no choice but to respond.

Instead, Russia just quietly out-escalated them. The neocons, obsessed with narratives, need Russia to punch first. And it needs to be describable as a Russian over-reaction, so Biden probably can’t just leap six steps up the escalatory ladder, like by giving Zelensky a few nukes to play with.

Stein’s law holds that something that can’t go on forever, won’t. Ukraine cannot defend against Russia’s hypersonic technology. It is running out of men. There’s not one bit of material good news for Ukraine anywhere on the battlefield. All their strategies just went out the window, and Zelensky is a sitting Zulu duck. A realistic peace is the only remaining option.

Expect a lot of angry, bellicose talk as the Western powers come to terms with the new normal and as the Trump clock runs down on the Proxy War.

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In a very politely worded (for him) post on Truth Social yesterday, President Trump announced he’ll be ordering a +10% “fentanyl tax” on China, to be applied on all Chinese goods, until fentanyl stops flowing over our southern border. Let the Chinese figure out how to stop it with their Mexican buddies.

For anyone who thinks Trump’s +10% fentanyl tax on China isn’t fair, just wait. The President-Elect remembered our northern and southern neighbors as well. Mexico and Canada will have to pay a +25% fentanyl tax until the caravans of illegal invaders and the rivers of addictive, life-wrecking chemicals stop.

In other words, Trump is making Mexico and Canada pay to secure our borders. I am enthusiastically pro-tariff and will happily defend them anytime, assuming they are intelligently levied.

Most importantly, Trump can unilaterally impose these tariffs.

Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution vests power to lay and collect ‘duties’ (tariffs) in the Congress, not the Executive. But over the years, Congress has delegated some of its tariff powers to the President. For instance:

• Under the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, the President may impose tariffs whenever imports are deemed a threat to national security. If Democrats find a tweeted meme is a threat to national security, well, how about fentanyl?

• Under the Trade Act of 1974, the President may impose tariffs to address unfair trade practices or violations of trade agreements. Might dumping South America’s insane asylums and prisons into the U.S. be an unfair trade practice?

• The International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) is the law Biden used to sanction Russia for invading Ukraine. Under IEEPA, the President enjoys broad powers to regulate financial transactions in response to a national emergency, almost certainly including tariffs, although this hasn’t been tested.

Is the border invasion a credible national emergency? President Trump has repeatedly said he will immediately declare a national immigration emergency. I’m decidedly unenthusiastic about emergency powers. But maybe the best way to prod the courts into finally saying what is and is not an emergency will be for Democrats to lose their minds when a Republican President does it.

But here’s the question with which to entertain yourself today: might the Trump Effect kick in right now? Might these three countries believe Trump and start cleaning their acts up today, not waiting around to see if the President-Elect really means it?

Can you recall another President in our lifetimes wielding this much power even before taking the oath?

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The Wall Street Journal ran a very satisfying story yesterday headlined, “Walmart Rolls Back DEI Programs.” The sub-headline added, “Retail giant will wind down Center for Racial Equity and prevent sellers from listing some LGBTQ-themed items on its website.” It’s not just Walmart. Walmart swings massive momentum as the world’s largest retailer, dictating preferred terms to a vast root system of suppliers and manufacturers. Could the nation’s long DEI nightmare officially be over? Has the tide, at long last, finally turned?

A now-familiar name appeared in the Journal’s article: conservative filmmaker and anti-DEI activist Robby Starbuck. Robby tweeted about how the Walmart turnaround went down. He contacted Walmart management and told them he planned to run a story on their DEI programs. Walmart management asked for an emergency meeting with Robby, and when they met, Walmart reviewed a long list of planned DEI rollbacks.

The changes ran the gamut from simple to profound. The retailer promised to discontinue using the DEI acronym and its words. It will ashcan the cringe term “LatinX.” It will stop racial equity training for its employees. It will remove some super-gross, non-kid-friendly LGBT products from its web-based ‘marketplace.’ Most importantly, Walmart will end its preferred-suppliers program, which gave advantages to suppliers pushing DEI on their employees.

As the world’s largest retailer, Walmart enjoys vast powers to dictate terms to manufacturers, shippers, and supply-chain distributors. If Walmart says smaller businesses must DEI to do business, they’ll DEI. If Walmart creates DEI incentives, the incentives will be persuasive and pervasive.

But in similar fashion, if Walmart ends DEI incentives, then the calculus flips, and any suppliers bearing the additional burden of DEI will become less competitive for lucrative Walmart contracts.

Illustrating the power of a single committed conservative activist, Robby Starbuck has now been involved in deleting DEI from corporate policies at: Tractor Supply, John Deere, Harley Davidson, Polaris, Indian Motorcycle, Lowe’s, Ford, Coors, Stanley Black & Decker, Jack Daniels, DeWalt tools, Craftsman, Caterpillar, Boeing, Toyota and now WALMART.

Robby Starbuck is a one-man DEI wrecking ball.

Unofficial Mini-Multiplier: Support Robby Starbuck with any affordable amount ending in $2, to encourage him to keep turning the DEI tide. C&C Army: Take thirty seconds right now and reconnoiter Robby’s donation site, to boost his morale, deliver supplies, and signal for him to redouble his efforts and run DEI all the way to ground. You’ll feel great after, I promise.

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More Trump Effect. Yesterday, Reuters ran a story headlined, “Wall St closes higher; small-caps hit record high after Trump nominates Bessent.” As the market’s reaction to his nomination as Treasury Secretary showed, Scott Bessent is highly qualified. He’s smart, he is a heterodox thinker, and became a quiet Trump supporter since before it was safe to do so. The biggest problem is that Scott managed one of George Soros’s many investment companies between 2011-2015. Scott worked for Soros even longer than that, and enjoyed a warm personal relationship with the far-left billionaire.

As ever, the situation is not as simple as it looks. Claims circulated on social media that Elon Musk strongly opposed Bessent’s nomination. If so, Elon was more diplomatic in his only public comment:

The responses to Elon’s tweet were fascinating. Elon engaged with a lot of high-profile folks who weighed in, both pro and con. If you are interested in this pick, you might enjoy reading through all those comments. There was a surprising amount of support for Bessent from the right. For example:

Perhaps most helpful was Mollie Hemingway’s somewhat troubling deep-dive on Bessent published early this month, titled “The George Soros Partner Who Disrupted Right-Wing Publishing.”  Ultimately, Mollie concluded that Bessent’s red-pill experience could be bona fide:

Smith’s suit claimed that Bessent is a “progressive,” but there is nothing in his history, besides the Soros association, to suggest he is now a secret holder of left-wing beliefs. Instead it is possible, though by no means certain, that the quantitative easing policy championed by then-President Barack Obama pushed Bessent to the right. In 2017, Bessent shared his fear with author David Smick that cheap money and low interest rates had fed a disastrous glut of corporate debt. “The next downturn will be worse because corporate balance sheets are now a lot more fragile,” said Bessent. In a rare op-ed last year, Bessent blamed Biden’s policies for the severity and persistence of inflation in the U.S.

Bessent is an unusual case of someone who invests and donates like a conservative but maintains his status within more liberal spaces. He chairs the investment committee at Rockefeller University, the medical research institute in Manhattan, and sits on the Yale University Council.

Whatever his real views, and whatever the reasons behind them, Bessent has won the public loyalty of one major Trump world figure. “Scott’s a visionary who keeps his hands off the day to day,” Peter Navarro wrote by email, later adding: “If you are working up a hit piece on him, I’m not your guy.” (A few weeks later, Navarro was convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to testify before the January 6th Select Committee). Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has told at least one person he is in business with Bessent.

Citing a Wall Street Journal article, conservative journalist and author Miranda Devine (700K followers), called Bessent a “quiet disrupter” who quit working for Soros in 2015 when he could no longer avoid the politics, and said the two men have not spoken for years.

Over on far-left BlueSky, there’s not much you could call support for Bessent, they don’t seem to know quite what to make of him. Though there is much mirth and hilarity over the Scott—Soros connection and how conservatives are likely to react. Financial industry sources generally described Scott as a keen debt hawk, courageously pro-tariff and, relative to the other potential candidates, holding a more moderate, even-keeled economic philosophy.

I get the concerns; we’ve all heard this song before. And nobody distrusts George Soros more than me. I’m prepared to believe Soros is literally Satan wearing an Eastern European meat suit. But I think it would be a mistake, and would play right into our enemies’ hands, to unleash the hecklers’ veto against any of Trump’s nominees, including Bessent.  Not yet. Give the man time to work. GTMTTW. (Now, that’s just me; you do you. Also, it seems fair and just that nominees must live with things they’ve said and done.)

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Leftists wept bitterly yesterday as the New York Times ran a story headlined, “Jack Smith Moves to Dismiss Charges Against Trump in Election and Documents Cases.”

“After careful consideration,” Prosecutor Smith’s carefully drafted motions to dismiss carefully explained, “the Department has determined that (DOJ’s internal) opinions concerning the Constitution's prohibition on federal indictment and prosecution of a sitting President apply to this situation and that as a result this prosecution must be dismissed before the defendant is inaugurated.”

Ka-boom.

I’ll bet they “carefully considered” it, desperately but unsuccessfully searching for some kind of loophole. Either way, DC Judge Chutkan has already dismissed her case, leaving only the 11th Circuit in Atlanta to dismiss Smith’s appeal against Trump. I expect to see that dismissal today.

The Times article correctly noted that Trump had promised to fire Prosecutor Smith “within two seconds” of taking office, and has suggested, perhaps strongly, he’ll initiate investigations of the various federal prosecutions. For their sakes, I sure hope everything is squeaky clean.

Remember, if they didn’t do anything wrong, they don’t have anything to worry about! And also, no one is above the law!

Not even DOJ lawyers and federal law enforcement.

Smith passive-aggressively left the door open. He sought only dismissals “without prejudice,” which means the DOJ could potentially re-file the cases at some point in the future. (Unlikely.) Smith also pointedly did not seek dismissal of Trump’s various co-defendants. But Smith is quitting, or so he says, and the new DOJ will quickly clip away the last shreds and tatters of Smith’s inglorious work.

Liberals on social media were anguished at what must be characterized as unsurprising news, even though since Election Night everyone expected the two cases to be dismissed. I won’t round up the many examples, but apparently the rule of law in this country is now officially dead or something.

The truth is that the Democrats conducted a vast poli-sci experiment by crossing all kinds of invisible political red lines, such as prosecuting former presidents under flimsy legal theories, and they found out the hard way that kind of thing can boomerang on you.

We all just watched the largest jury trial in history. It was called “the election.” And the jurors found President Trump not guilty. Fin.

Have a terrific Tuesday! C&C will be back tomorrow morning with another entertaining and educational roundup of essential news and commentary.

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