☕️ Coffee & Covid 2025 🦠

GURPS

INGSOC
PREMO Member
It’s another Trump miracle! He got the Democrats to do exactly what he wanted. Let’s begin with the Jimmy Kimmel train, which kept frantically rolling yesterday as new leaked details tumbled out of the coal car. The Hollywood Reporter ran its story headlined, “How Jimmy Kimmel’s Suspension Went Down: Sponsor Panic, a Defiant Host and a Painful Call.” The sub-headline added, “Disney’s Bob Iger and Dana Walden wanted to know how Kimmel was going to address the situation. Sources say he planned to defend what he said rather than ‘kowtowing’ to the outrage. Disney thought that would fan the flames.”

image.png

Haha, now we know who really got Jimmy Kimmel fired: Jimmy Kimmel.

The story has swollen to the point we must dub it Joke-gate. Hollywood Reporter carefully plotted the timeline like it was JFK’s assassination or something. It began late on Monday night when Kimmel aired his injudicious ‘joke’ alleging Kirk’s assassin was MAGA, igniting a pungent “social media s—storm.”

The next day, FCC Chair Carr chimed in, suggesting the agency might get involved. But around that time, “multiple ABC station owners” were also already calling Disney to complain about Kimmel. Disney execs called the jokester to confer, but after “multiple conversations,” his bosses learned Jimmy remained defiant and even planned to double down on his very next show.

That’s about when “the advertiser calls began to roll in.” Then ABC’s two biggest affiliates, Nexstar and Sinclair, publicly announced plans to unplug Kimmel’s show. “By this point, 66 of the roughly 200 affiliate stations had said they would not carry the episode,” the story explained. About an hour before Wednesday’s 4pm taping (the show isn’t actually ‘live’), Bob Iger had to make a fast call, before Kimmel poured more gas on the flames.

As you know, Iger suspended the show, and he had solid reasons, lots of them, and apart from anything Carr said. That said, existing FCC regulations governing “false information concerning a crime or catastrophe” fully justified Carr’s warning:


image 9.png

But yesterday’s growing “free speech” delirium justifies a few more comments about the story.

🔥 First, the left is making Kimmel into a firewall, to stop the firings from spreading further. They hunkered down and endured the backlash for a couple of days, but now the wildfire is reaching their celebrity town center, so it’s time to draw the line. Which is why Obama skittered out of the woodwork yesterday to defend the unamusing funnyman.

Democrats’ normal playbook is to behave so obnoxiously that the next Disney will think twice about firing the next mouthy celebrity.

Second, the media’s narrative is the same tired, old chestnut: “the dark night of fascism is descending on Hollywood!” As Tom Wolfe quipped in 1987, fascism always seems to be descending here, but it always lands on Europe. Whatever Brendan Carr did on Tuesday is a tiny crumb compared to the wedding cake of censorship Democrats have been shoving down the media’s throat for generations.

Remember Biden sending FBI agents to Facebook to shut down the Hunter Biden laptop story?

Democrats have kept their tight, iron grip on media and Hollywood out of a credible threat of retaliation. For 20 years, corporate America has been taught to believe Democrats will always punish them if they don’t play progressive ball. What else, for example, are DEI requirements in federal contracting rules? It’s a plain threat: If you don’t adopt DEI, no more contracts.

But, until now, conservatives were not willing or able to play the same game.

We have soared past the point of think-tank debates. The stakes are for Western Civilization itself. The best way to get Democrats to agree to fix the problem they created is by making it into their problem. Yesterday, President Trump defiantly told reporters that one-sided broadcasters should lose their licenses. Game on.

Jimmy Kimmel is not a free speech crisis. Free speech has been under attack by Democrats in government for decades. But as boomers and Gen-Xers know, you can’t solve a bullying problem by making the kids shake hands. Somebody has to punch the bully in the nose.

And … Trump’s strategy is working. Already. Behold the next story.

🔥🔥🔥

Yesterday, the New York Times ran an astonishing story headlined, “Democrats Pitch Bill to Protect Speech Targeted by Trump.It only took one lame comedian. They’re not laughing anymore.

image 4.png

Without any exaggeration or hyperbole whatsoever, Representative Greg Casar (D-Tx.), chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said, “We are in the biggest free speech crisis this country has faced since the McCarthy era.” (I’d bet Michelle’s Tahoe that Greg Casar couldn’t name three “victims” of McCarthy, but I digress.)

The Times explained that yesterday, a group of Senate and House Democrats announced their sudden and unexpected plan to introduce a bill to “bolster legal protections for people targeted by President Trump.” That’s the Times’s framing; the bill, of course, would not be limited to President Trump. Behold, in the Times’s words:

image 3.png

That actually sounds terrific. Had Americans enjoyed access to a law like NOPE during the pandemic, everything would have been different. This is precisely what has been missing— a viable way for ordinary citizens to sue the government over speech suppression.

As the Democrats well know, the secret sauce is including the right to recover attorney’s fees. That way, public interest lawyers can take these difficult cases even if the client is broke. Clients shouldn’t have to fund these cases anyway.

If the stars in the sky were federal statutes, then only a few tiny, distant dots would represent laws allowing citizens to sue the government. The rest of the sky and the vast arrays of constellations are shielded from suit by a firmament called “sovereign immunity,” which is a blanket rule precluding citizens’ cases against the government absent an authorizing law.

Defying all prediction, somehow, Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension (he isn’t even fired!) has now prompted Democrats into proposing a real solution for one of conservatives’ biggest complaints: the egregious excesses of Twitter files censorship. Since we haven’t yet seen it, who knows whether the NOPE bill’s text will actually have teeth. But things are obviously moving in the right direction.

🔥 The turnaround was so astonishing that you could even call it miraculous. Democrats have not exactly championed free speech. After all, they are the party of microaggression, deplatforming, virtue-signaling, social media censorship, hate speech, and cancel culture. We could recite a long list of Democrat cancellation victims. But I’ll just offer this single example from Newsweek, 2022:

image 5.png

Where, indeed, was the outrage? Democrats’ current embrace of free speech rhetoric —amid a sea change in the balance of government power— stands in stark contrast to Democrats’ shrugs when censorship involved agencies controlled by their own party.

Back in 2022, Democrats did not introduce any NOPE bills while the dark night of fascism was descending on America. They could hardly remember Senator McCarthy in 2022, never mind invoke his ghost. In fact, in 2022, Democrat think-tanks were publishing Orwellian papers arguing that the First Amendment was obsolete and new laws regulating speech were needed to “protect democracy.”

But now they are clutching the Constitution’s sacred essence like there’s no tomorrow. “The Trump administration should not use the assassination of Mr. Kirk to rip up the First Amendment, Rep. Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.) said.”

In other words, Democrats love censorship, except when it’s directed at them, even a little. Their sudden self-interest is wholly contingent on being out of power.

But never mind all the hypocrisy. The point is, we are at the point where Democrats are proposing new laws protecting First Amendment rights and letting citizens sue federal officials who censor them. And, mark my words, rank-and-file Democrats will line up behind this free-speech effort since it’s aimed at Trump.

All it took was for them to believe that conservatives were willing to play the same games they’ve been playing. That, and one suspended late-night host (who is mid at best), plus a non-apologetic Trump threatening even more.

President Trump has done it again. He’s forced the Democrats to adopt his position. If Republicans play this right, we may get everything we ever hoped that the Weaponization Committee could produce.




 

GURPS

INGSOC
PREMO Member
Pundits called it “absolutely massive.” For certain, it was absolutely punishing. And the President did it right after all that hanging out with the tech bros and taking them to Windsor Castle to play Call of Duty with the King. But yesterday, Reuters ran a populist-pleasing story headlined, “Trump to impose $100,000 fee per year for H-1B visas, in blow to tech.

image.png

H-1B visas are like cheat codes for America’s tech and innovation sectors, supposedly granting very skilled foreign professionals like software engineers, scientists, and med/sci researchers —usually from India (71%) or China (12%)— an early logon to the high-stakes game of U.S. industry. The special skilled-worker visa was originally intended to fill talent gaps where American expertise is scarce, such as friendly baristas at Starbucks. Just kidding; it was for rocket scientists and quantum math majors and stuff.

But critics began to notice that tech employers (and others) used the special visas to fill lots of less demanding jobs that Americans could handle, even with our scrolling addictions. But see, the foreigners were cheaper. And the rules let companies fire American workers in vast piles of pink slips while simultaneously hiring Indians instead.

It was the money, but it wasn’t just the money. Workers on H-1B’s are job-locked, since it is nearly impossible to swap employers once they get here. Plus they come without distractions like families or social lives, so they can work 20 hours a day for the same low price. Best of all, if they get fired, they get deported, which is a surprisingly intense incentive to work hard.

Thus, employers enjoyed cheaper and more loyal workers, artificially lower turnover, and higher, uh, enthusiasm for demanding job conditions. It would be ridiculous and inflammatory to call H-1B workers ‘slaves.’ Here at C&C, we maintain higher standards (allegedly).


But indentured servant fits.

🔥 Surprisingly, this unfortunate state of affairs generated some friction. Studies suggest that the widespread use of H-1Bs in the tech sector somehow discourages young Americans from careers in science and technology, and pressures Americans who soldier on anyway into accepting lower salaries, since Narendji will take it if you won’t.

The result was a standoff between the biggest tech companies in the country (and largest Democrat donors) and everybody sane. But, because of the money involved, nobody did anything.

Until yesterday. President Trump signed an executive order that radically changed the game, using the simplest of economic incentives. He jacked up the application fee new H-1Bs from $1,000 to $100,000— a hundred-fold increase. (The order automatically expires in one year, but may be extended.) During the signing ceremony, Commerce Secretary Lutnick stressed that the new $100,000 rate is intended to be an annual fee.

Trump’s order also requires Secretary Lutnick to ‘revise’ a schedule of minimum H-1B salaries, presumably to ensure skilled foreign workers are more expensive than Americans. The era of cheap immigrant labor is officially over.

Reactions were, as you might expect, decidedly mixed.

🔥 U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick advised employers to “train Americans. Stop bringing in people to take our jobs.” Representative Brandon Gill (R-Tx) smartly tweeted, “America is a nation, not a jobs program for foreign workers.” Before he was unalived by Democrats, Charlie Kirk said, “these visas are used to disenfranchise our workers and prioritize foreigners." Governor DeSantis recently quipped, “these tech companies are laying off American workers and then importing H-1B visas. I think that's a total scam.” So.

image 4.png

On the other hand, the Tech Bros, for whom this development is a worst-case scenario, were unamused. Deedy Das (* fake name alert), a prominent tech venture capitalist, warned, “If the U.S. ceases to attract the best talent, it drastically reduces its ability to innovate and grow the economy.” Far-left activist Neera Tanden sneered in wild hyperbole, “I am an Indian American who was born here, and it's crystal clear that the Democratic Party sees me as American, and a large part of the base of the Republican Party does not. I hope Indian Americans remember this moment at the next election.”

It was a brilliant, elegant, simple move. When high-tech companies really do need rare, hard-to-find skills, like AI engineers, then paying the increased fee will be worth it. But it no longer makes sense to hire ordinary java programmers from overseas. In other words, Trump wrestled the out-of-whack incentives back to where they should be— something no other politician, Democrat or Republican, has been brave enough to do.

And how about the politics! Not only was the move perfectly aligned with “America First,” and not only did it defy doomscrollers who’ve long yapped about President Trump being sold out to his tech bro buddies (including Elon), but —if young people are paying attention— President Trump just secured the youth vote for Republicans forever.

image 5.png

Think of how far we have come, so quickly. Before Democrats’ polycule-marriage to pandemic-era vaccine-or-terminate policies, Democrats retained the narrative mantle as the defenders of unions and workers, successfully painting Republicans as the evil, pro-corporation party. But in just four short years, nobody credible considers Democrats to be pro-worker anymore.

Democrats are anti-worker and pro-immigrant (preferably illegal).

Now, the public correctly recognizes Republicans as the real champions of rank-and-file American workers, which elevates Americans over illegal immigrants. President Trump’s political courage to solve the H-1B problem cemented that position for the GOP in concrete.

That was only the first half of Trump’s immigration broadside.













 

GURPS

INGSOC
PREMO Member
We’d suspected that when Trump announced his goal at the UN was “world peace,” he had something big in mind. It was bigger than big. Of course, all the media could see is conflict, but what Trump promised was rescue. Yesterday, ABC ran its story headlined, “‘Your countries are going to hell': Trump bashes United Nations, world leaders in speech.


Admittedly, President Trump took the United Nations to the woodshed. He read them the riot act. He ripped them a new one. He skinned them alive.

Yesterday morning, President Trump took the podium as this year’s first main speaker addressing the United Nations General Assembly of 193 member states (plus observers Vatican City and Palestine). In a forum where fiery rhetoric is commonplace, it was perhaps the most remarkable and historic address ever delivered at the group’s New York headquarters. (Here’s the transcript if you prefer reading the whole thing to watching.)

I’ll round up the highlights, doing my best to edit them for brevity (such as by removing the President’s occasional colorful ramblings). There’s still quite a bit; push through and it will pay off, I promise.

🚀 Trump began with several segments we correctly predicted, which served as the rhetorical foundation for the rest of his speech. First he recited the undeniable fact that he’d settled seven “unendable” wars in seven months, which should have been the UN’s job, except that the UN is about as useful as a ninth covid booster for a heart transplant patient:

It's too bad that I had to do these things instead of the United Nations doing them. And sadly, in all cases, the United Nations did not even try to help in any of them. That being the case, what is the purpose of the United Nations?

The UN is such tremendous potential. I've always said it. But it's not even coming close to living up to that potential. Empty words don't solve war. The only thing that solves war and wars is action. Very sad to see whether the UN can manage to play a productive role.


Also as we’d expected, President Trump emphasized America’s military dominance. Don’t miss the significance of this. He wasn’t bragging. He was warning them why they should listen to reason:

There is no more serious danger to our planet today than the most powerful and destructive weapons ever devised by man— of which the United States, as you know, has many. And today, many of Iran's former military commanders are no longer with us, they're dead. Three months ago, seven American B-2 bombers dropped the fourteen 30,000 pound bombs on Iran's key nuclear facility— totally obliterating everything. And, let's put it this way. There aren't too many drug boats that are traveling on the seas by Venezuela.

No other country on earth could have done what we did. No other country has the equipment to do what we did. We have the greatest weapons on earth. Weapons that are so powerful that we just can't ever use them. If we ever did use them, the world literally might come to an end. There would be no United Nations to talk about. There would be no nothing.



image 10.png

With that dreadful promise hanging in the air, Trump did not directly advance any major proposal to restructure the United Nations. Not yesterday. But he sure did tease it:

I've come here today to offer the hand of American leadership and friendship to any nation in this assembly that is willing to join us in forging a safer, more prosperous world, a world that we'll be much happier with. A dramatically better future is within our reach, but to get there, we must reject the failed approaches of the past and work together to confront some of the greatest threats in history.


It might be more correct to say that Trump wasn’t talking to the world leaders. He was talking past them, to all the citizens of the world.

🚀 Trump next turned to the Ukraine war, and he began by calling our European and NATO allies out, right to their faces. He rubbed their noses in their impotent inabilities to do anything helpful by themselves.They can’t win the proxy war. They can’t stop it. They can’t even stop buying Russian oil, despite the profound irrationality of paying Russia to fight with them:

NATO countries have not cut off much Russian energy and Russian energy products, which as you know, I found out about two weeks ago. And I wasn't happy. Think of it, they're funding the war against themselves. Who the hell ever heard of that one?

The United States is fully prepared to impose a very strong round of powerful tariffs, which would stop the bloodshed, I believe very quickly. But for those tariffs to be effective, European nations, all of you are gathered here right now, would have to join us in adopting the exact same measures. I mean, you're much closer to it. We have an ocean in between! You're right there. Europe has to step it up. They're buying oil and gas from Russia while they're fighting Russia.



image 11.png

He continued:

It's embarrassing to them. And it was very embarrassing to them when I found out about it. But they must immediately cease all energy purchases from Russia. Otherwise, we're all wasting a lot of time. I'm ready to discuss this. We're going to discuss it today with the European nations all gathered here. I'm sure they're thrilled to hear me speak about it, but that's the way it is. I like to speak my mind and speak the truth.



The part of the truth Trump didn’t speak was that the Europeans neither can afford to stop buying Russian energy (directly or indirectly), nor can they afford to keep fighting the war on their own. And America is done with funding both sides of that unfortunate conflict.

In short, the proxy war is ending soon. One way or another.




 

GURPS

INGSOC
PREMO Member
Welcome to the media’s most covered story. This morning, the New York Times ran its thousandth entry under the headline, “Trump’s Power Faces Test in Court and at Ballot Box. In case it wasn’t perfectly clear what they were insinuating, to ensure even Portland readers would understand, the sub-headline helpfully added, “President Trump has a lot riding on the results of Tuesday’s elections.”

image.png

That is absurdly false, of course, a monstrous lie. There are no federal elections anywhere in the country tomorrow, not even special ones. Trump personally could not have less riding on the results of today’s elections, apart from media manipulation and Democrat fever dreams of kickstarting some kind of momentum.

The Democrats are first-order poseurs. The three races they picked to be ‘bellwethers’ to test the “nation’s mood” today are all Big Blue slam-dunks: two blue-state governorships (Virginia and New Jersey), and the New York City mayor’s race, of all things. For Pete’s sake, it’s been 24 years since NYC had a real Republican mayor (Rudi Giuliani, 1994-2001).

The truth is, these three races don’t measure the nation’s mood. They only measure the state of the Democrat party. These should be easy pickups for them. Personally, I can’t wait.

The Democrats’ gubernatorial candidate in Virginia has a name tailor-made for mockery (I am already sharpening my pencils of sarcasm): Abigail “Spammy” Spanberger. You almost feel sorry for the poor lady; she must have had an awful time in middle school hauling that moniker around. And … she’s a former CIA officer. (“You never really leave the Agency.”) You can’t make this stuff up.

image 3.png


Virginia Democrats also crammed in a last-minute ballot initiative that would let them gerrymander away one or two more Republican districts before next year’s midterms.


🔥 New Jersey’s gubernatorial race is already the most expensive in U.S. history ($200+ million). The takeaway is that chastened New Jersey Democrats ran a “blue collar” candidate, Mickie Sherrill, a former Navy pilot. She’s practically a squishy Republican, and even at that, the race against GOP candidate Jack Ciatarelli is still neck-and-neck.

Don’t even get me started on the Big Apple’s 34-year-old muslim socialist. Here’s how the BBC —in an article dripping with gooey praise— described the unlikely candidate:

image 2.png

It’s an all-out socialist giveaway party, since the always-grinning Mamdani has promised gullible progressive voters free everything: free child care, free public transportation, rent control, and even low-priced, government-run supermarkets. The problem is that as mayor, Zohran the Magnificent would lack the power to manifest the magical billionaire income taxes he claims can pay for it all, since that’s the New York legislature’s job.

Being so young and inexperienced, Mamdani also has no political connections, no political machine, and no political network. How will that likely play out in NYC’s hyper-political shark tank? Prepare for a feeding frenzy.

But … Democrats. I thought you’d enjoy seeing NYC’s goofy ballot, which has Mamdani conveniently located first and fourth, with Andrew Cuomo buried down second to last out of ten:

image 4.png

I guess alphabetical order was too complicated or something.

There are other races to watch: California voters will endorse (or reject) Newsom’s redistricting plan to hoover up five more of the handful of remaining Republican federal districts in the Golden State, and Pennsylvanians will vote to retain or reject three woke Supreme Court justices who made citizens’ lives miserable during the pandemic.











 

GURPS

INGSOC
PREMO Member

☕️ THE GENESIS SINGULARITY ☙ Wednesday, November 26, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠



Pilgrims and fowl forgiveness; Trump’s historic AI push and agent-run labs; China lags; Skynet vibes; a new golden era; Florida parents win age-check appeal; America First pops up in our parks.



🔥 Trump’s Executive Order quietly called for a closed-loop, “AI-directed experimentation and manufacturing” platform. In other words, they are planning for ‘AI agents’ to manage fully automated facilities to autonomously design experiments, test hypotheses, and automate entire research workflows— like operating instruments, collecting samples, analyzing data, and refining scientific methods. By itself.

Here is the exact language from Section 3(e) of the order:

“Within 240 days of the date of this order, the Secretary shall review capabilities across the DOE national laboratories and other participating Federal research facilities for robotic laboratories and production facilities with the ability to engage in AI-directed experimentation and manufacturing, including automated and AI-augmented workflows and the related technical and operational standards needed.”



I know. Hello, Skynet! Welcome, my friends, to the machine.


image 8.png

Pursuant to the order, the DOE must review and inventory all federal research facilities capable of hosting robotic laboratories and AI-directed workflows, and develop technical and operational standards for fully automated research environments controlled by AI.

What can we say about all this? The words “historic,” “revolutionary,” and even “Moon shot” seem quaint, clichéd, and inadequate to describe this kind of technological inflection point. Genesis doesn’t merely describe a single, focused scientific goal like Apollo or Manhattan, but rather the creation of a self-perpetuating, self-improving engine for sleepless progress across all scientific domains at once.

Assuming it works, the AI will be able to conduct its own experiments, like mixing different metals together to see if it makes a superconductor. The results are returned immediately, and the AI can tweak the formula and move on to the next combination. The AI’s automated experiments can run all day and night, never take smoke breaks, and won’t need months of woke-worded grant writing and murky approvals.



🔥 If successful, the Genesis inflection point could soar far beyond “just” technology. It could reshape economies, geopolitics, education, culture, arts, and even the essential meanings of human creativity, responsibility, and discovery. It is potentially the ultimate pivot from “human-driven advancement” to “machine-accelerated civilization.”

That may sound like typical tech hyperbole. And the results might fall short of these wild expectations. But they also might not. For the first time in human history, those wild expectations lie within sighting range.

image 9.png

In that sense, the Genesis announcement is less about dry technical breakthroughs and more of a singularity. If you hate change— well, I don’t quite know what to tell you. There’s no previous scale of change to even compare against what looks likely to soon arrive.

No other country has ever undertaken an initiative of this scale, scope, and imagination. No other country on Earth could likely pull it off. Let us count the ways.



🔥 First of all, the U.S. operates the world’s most advanced network of national laboratories (like the DOE labs), supercomputing centers, and scientific data repositories— resources built over generations requiring vast public investment.

America’s tech ecosystem —spanning leading tech companies (all currently onshoring), its top universities, and our startup culture— is unrivaled in its interconnections and innovation capacity. Who else can marshal public and private ingenuity on this level?

We might be the only country capable of integrating AI at this kind of massive, society-shaping scale.

It won’t be China. In some ways, China has already surpassed the US in automation and AI. But China’s culture operates under heavy state censorship that violently constrains unconventional and unapproved thought. Genesis’s unlimited scope poses an unparalleled threat; it could potentially upset every existing entrenched interest.

China’s authoritarian central planners would need to slowly approve every single disruptive development, one by one, thereby strangling any Genesis-like project in the crib.

They wouldn’t even try. The sheer possibility of unapproved, uncontrollable change would make such a project an existential risk for China’s central planners. It would be scrapped long before it could proceed on the scale envisioned by the President. This structural inflexibility is communism’s greatest weakness. Trump is leaning into it, intentionally or not.

Finally, the U.S. leads in both classical and quantum high-performance computing, and it is one of the few countries capable of integrating AI at a massive, society-shaping scale. The Genesis Mission is therefore a uniquely American endeavor, thanks to our existing infrastructure, scale, boldness of mandate, cultural advantages, and deep catalog of agency resources. Other nations —Who? Russia? UK? France? Canada?— might attempt similar programs, but in terms of “pulling it off” at this scale, the U.S. is, for now, peerless.

Genesis teases the potential for untapped technological, economic, and strategic leadership, potentially leapfrogging China and reinforcing the U.S.’s primacy at the outer frontiers of advancement. Trump is racing past everyone else— using stuff that is already laying around in the nation’s agencies’ sheds.

Once again, he recognized a latent, profitable asset where everyone else saw bureaucratic chaos.

Oh— one more thing. You must read between the order’s lines a little, but it seems clear from the Genesis EO that the U.S. government will retain a stake in any new products or technologies developed using its supercomputing cluster. More nontax income. Income that could pay off the debt and obsolete the income tax, say.
 

GURPS

INGSOC
PREMO Member

🦃 THE GREAT PILGRIM CONSPIRACY☙ Thursday, November 27, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦃





🍗 Part VIII: From National Repentance to National Freshman Five

This is the holiday’s historical arc:

1789: Washington Proclamation I — All God, no Pilgrims.

1863: Lincoln Proclamation II — Still all God, still zero Pilgrims.

1870–1910: New England elites — haul Pilgrims and Indians out of a dusty footnote and add them to God.

1910–1945: Industrial America — mass-produce the Pilgrim Myth; Natives and Early Americans expand, God shrinks.

1945–1970s: Progressives — All Pilgrims and Indians, no God, plus a new turkey pardon.

We started with 0% Pilgrims and 100% thanksgiving to the Divine Creator, and somehow wound up with a Thanksgiving that feels like a DEI refresher module with better food and a celebration of conspicuous consumption (plus an appointment with the treadmill).

Don’t get me wrong. I was raised on Pilgrims and Indians. I made construction paper headdresses in school. It’s a great story. Furthermore, the New England protestant elites who started the whole myth going had good intentions. But liberals effortlessly stripped off the Pilgrims’ religious motives and turned the whole thing into a way for “colonizers” to thank “original land owners” with roasted turkey and stuffing.

Like those who lived in 1789 and 1863, we are also veterans of a great war, a bioengineered war waged against us by co-opted parts of our own government. We are thankful to our Creator, for shepherding us through that terrifying ordeal and delivering us from our enemies. We repent from our national sins, that led inexorably to the very disaster from which we needed to be saved.

Let us now recommit to teaching our children the true story of Thanksgiving, and not the progressive myth. Enjoy your non-offensive Pilgrim memes and sickly-sweet Hallmark movies. But stick Washington, Lincoln, repentance, and God’s great Providence back on the dinner menu.

Thank God for America!
 

GURPS

INGSOC
PREMO Member

☕️ AMBUSHED ☙ Friday, November 28, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

A special edition roundup of news about the DC shootings, the hard-to-find reliable information, and the logical extrapolations. It's a very odd set of coincidences.





🔥🔥🔥

Yesterday, the New York Times ran an explosive story headlined, “For Shooting Suspect, a Long Path of Conflict From Afghanistan to America.” You don’t say. The sub-headline added, “Rahmanullah Lakanwal was among the Afghans who came to the US after the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan. Earlier, he served in a paramilitary unit that worked with U.S. forces.” I’ll give you one guess which three-letter agency directly supervised Lakanwal’s unit.

image.png

It’s one of social media’s hottest stories, and it is hogging the headlines, but it’s unaccountably hard to find the full story in one place. Here’s what happened.

Around 2:15 p.m. on Wednesday (the day before Thanksgiving), three West Virginia National Guard members were on foot patrol near the entrance to the Farragut West Metro station, just a few blocks from the White House, in the middle of a busy downtown pre-holiday afternoon. People moved in and out of the station, innocently doing their various business, traffic hummed along 17th Street, when a man suddenly sprang from around a corner holding a powerful .357‑caliber Smith & Wesson revolver and opened fire.

It was an ambush. A bold ambush; he attacked two trained soldiers carrying automatic rifles using a revolver. It was also a skilled ambush. Both successful shots were head shots. He attacked with a revolver that probably held only six rounds. (After he downed the first soldier and ran out of shots, Lakanwal coolly scooped up her sidearm and kept firing.)

Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, 20, was dropped where she stood; the gunman then leaned over her and fired again as she lay on the pavement. The second Guard member to fall, Staff Sergeant Andrew Wolfe, 24, tried to take cover behind a nearby bus stop shelter but was shot multiple times as the attacker kept firing.

image 10.png

Security video showed the two Guardsmen collapsing, with the shooter standing over his first victim before shifting fire to the second, while bystanders ducked and scattered.

image 6.png

The third Guard member in the patrol unit was not hit in the initial burst. While the attacker focused on the downed soldiers, the third Guardsman drew his weapon and returned fire. Then other nearby Guard troops rushed in, bringing the gunman down in a brief but violent exchange. Some platforms reported an unarmed National Guard Major raced to the scene from two blocks away and subdued the shooter using his pocketknife; but I couldn’t confirm that report in any major outlets.

Within moments, the suspect —29‑year‑old Afghan national Rahmanullah Lakanwal— was on the ground, wounded and disarmed, shot in the leg and butt, while Guardsmen and police moved to secure the scene and perform life‑saving care on Beckstrom and Wolfe.

image 2.png

On the sidewalk near Farragut Square, Guard members and first responders worked on the two critically injured soldiers as sirens converged on the block, with bystander phone videos capturing CPR and frantic medical care before both were rushed to the hospital. Lakanwal was hospitalized under guard.

Sarah died in the hospital last night. Andrew remains in critical condition.

image 5.png

🔥 Lakanwal first entered the U.S. in 2021 through Operation Allies Welcome, a hastily arranged and poorly considered Biden-era immigration program that resettled thousands of Afghans who had helped the U.S. during the war, and feared payback from Taliban forces following the Biden Scurry. More than seventy-six thousand Afghans were ‘rapidly resettled’ into the U.S. under the program.

Lakanwal was located in Bellingham, Washington, laundered through the tender mercies of a Lutheran NGO called “World Relief,” which, as far as I can tell, in recent years received the vast majority of its funding from the U.S. government, and recently complained it might have to close or “drastically scale back operations” after USAID was shuttered. The charity was founded in 1944; USAID has nearly killed it.

Until August, Lakanwal worked as an independent contractor for Amazon Flex, a gig job of delivering packages. According to reports, Lakwanwal lived in Bellingham with his wife and several children, all unnamed, whose whereabouts are, so far as we know, unknown.

When he was in Afghanistan, Lakanwal was trained by U.S. intelligence agencies and served in an elite “Zero Unit,” which was a blend of deep-black special ops and dirty work at the crossroads. He was stationed at “Firebase Gecko,” a military compound used by the CIA and Kandahar special forces. Zero Units were outside the military chain of command, and reported to the Afghan National Directorate of Security, or NDS, an intelligence agency propped up with CIA backing for Afghanistan’s U.S.-backed government.

image 12.png

In other words, he was a highly-trained, licensed-to-kill spook with extremely esoteric skills. A sort of third-world James Bond, if James Bond had been a Middle Eastern terrorist.

“He previously worked with the US government, including CIA, as a member of a partner force in Kandahar,” CIA Director John Ratcliffe confirmed in a statement yesterday. That admission was a teensy bit understated. He did more than “work with” the CIA.

A former senior Afghan general told CBS News yesterday that the Zero Units “were the most active and professional forces, trained and equipped by the CIA. All their operations were conducted under the CIA command.” The CBS story reported these “units were known in Afghanistan for their secrecy and alleged brutality, and members were implicated in numerous extrajudicial killings of civilians.” Human Rights Watch has accused the Zero Units of the most serious and brutal rights violations (the CIA denies this and claims it is Taliban propaganda).

In 2018, the New York Times ran a feature story about Zero Units’ war crimes and excesses:

image 11.png

So, Lakanwal was a spook, a brute squad boy, and an assassin. He probably made a lot of local enemies. You can understand why he’d be nervous about sticking around after the Taliban took over.

According to the Times, a ‘childhood friend’ identified only as Muhammad said that Lakanwal suffered from mental health issues because of the casualties his unit had caused. “He would tell me and our friends that their military operations were very tough, their job was very difficult, and they were under a lot of pressure,” Muhammad said.

I’ll just say this once. It was reckless to the point of insanity to allow a trained radical terrorist with known mental health problems to operate unsupervised in the continental United States. Assuming, of course, that he was unsupervised.

A long, dramatic 2022 Propublica article about the Zero Units cited its fighters saying they saw Americans as infidels, never trusted us, but worked with us as a lesser evil or a useful path to a “new Afghanistan.” A 2023 Washington Post storyabout relocated Zero Unit fighters described them as feeling angry and frustrated, feeling “abandoned” by the Biden Administration. “We are losing our minds,” one former unit commander told WaPo.

image 13.png

“There are times when I just think to myself, ‘Just drive your truck into a wall,’” another former Zero Unit fighter said. Other former fighters reported that their families were going hungry while overworked resettlement agency caseworkers didn’t return their phone calls.

Perfect. Just what we need! Angry and frustrated elite jihadi fighters trained by the CIA who never liked America to begin with. What could go wrong?

In a sane world, a dangerous radical with his elite training and trauma history would not just be airdropped into Bellingham with a caseworker and a benefits packet. He’d go through a years‑long, resourced process combining disarmament, psychological repair, close monitoring, and deliberate re‑anchoring into a nonviolent civilian identity. What do you want to bet none of those things happened?

Currently, nobody knows why Lakanwal drove 2,500 miles from Bellingham, Washington to Washington, DC to shoot National Guardsmen. If he was just feeling hopeless about his immigration status and life here among the infidels, it was a bloody strange way to show it. He’s currently awake but not cooperating.

The Times reported that Lakanwal’s neighbors said the FBI first sent a “drone and wheeled robot into the apartment,” which means they suspected he might’ve booby-trapped the place. Not surprising. After all, since we trained him, we should know what he’s capable of.

image 14.png

🔥 The assassinations ignited a powder keg of political fury. Yesterday, President Trump had a lot to say about it, both on- and offline, including that he will ‘permanently pause’ (not sure what that means) all migration from third-world countries. Here’s the first half of Trump’s Truth Social post (in the even spicier second half, he called Minnesota Governor Tim Walz “retarded” and mentioned Ilhan Omar’s brother):

image 3.png

“Frankly, the whole Afghanistan situation was a mess. It should have never happened. We would have got out with strength and decency and precision,” Trump said in a fiery presser (wherein he called the reporter a ‘stupid person’).

image 4.png

CLIP: Trump reacts angrily when reporter asks why Republicans are blaming Biden’s disgraceful scramble out of Kabul (1:15).

The unstated point was that the only reason we had to suddenly fly 70,000 unvetted Afghans into the U.S. without a meaningful deprogramming and integration system was because of how badly Biden handled our retreat from Afghanistan. It could have been done much better; it could hardly have been done any worse.

In response to the shooting, in addition to the “permanent immigration pause,” President Trump also called for a “full-scale, rigorous re-examination” of all green card and asylum cases from “countries of concern,” which includes Afghanistan. That all seems prudent.

As night follows day, Democrats blamed Republicans. To the extent I can follow their logic, they’re arguing that Republicans enraged Lakanwal —who lived in Washington State— by deploying armed National Guardsmen to Washington, DC (where he did not live). They cluck their tongues, deplore the violence, and regretfully conclude the DC law enforcement crackdown has just provoked more crime. In other words, what did you expect?

The hot takes are off the charts. Online, conservatives and progressives all distrust the official stories and muse about conspiracies. (For different reasons, of course.)
 

GURPS

INGSOC
PREMO Member

☕️ JUSTIFIED ☙ Monday, January 26, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Mostly peaceful protests swell nurse shot; Trump demands cooperation; Bondi serves Walz; shutdown threats loom; WHO tries reset; Texas crackdown at DMV; testimony rocks healthcare hearings; more.​




Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! Welcome to the last week of January, 2026. Your roundup includes: Minneapolis’ mostly peaceful rioting continues after weekend shooting of Nurse Pretti; ironies; blue state data proves resistance trends; did Metro Surge fraud investigations trigger protests?; Trump demands blue state cooperation; AG Bondi serves demand letter on wispy-haired Governor Walz; Democrats threaten new shutdowns following Minnesota shooting; WHO lamely and unpersuasively tries to retcon its guilt in lockdowns and vaccine mandates; Texas DMV cracks down on illegal alien auto registrations and some people don’t like it; and Big Insurance summoned to Capitol Hill for healthcare affordability hearings, and astonishing testimony ensues.




🔥🔥🔥

Unsurprisingly, the weekend’s loudest story splashed onto the front pages again this morning, about the peaceful Minneapolis nurse who was minding his own business and innocently playing with his bear horn and practicing his wrestling techniques when he was suddenly and unexpectedly murdered by ICE agents for no reason. The New York Times ran this morning’s top-of-page story under the headline, “How the Trump Administration Rushed to Judgment in Minneapolis Shooting.

image.png

To be clear, the Times’s story was not referring to the Athens, Georgia nursing student, Laken Riley, who was abducted by an illegal immigrant while she was jogging and then raped, murdered, and stuffed in the bushes. The Times isn’t concerned about that nurse, nor did it run days of multi-story coverage about her. Don’t be silly.

No, it was a completely different nurse who was, in an ironic twist on Laken’s story, shot while defending illegal alien criminals from federal agents. Even more ironically, Mr. Pretti used a very different standard for avoiding risks during covid:

image 2.png

Had he followed his own ‘safety-first’ covid advice, he might still be here today to help agonize over all the different video angles of the incident that the media has been obsessing over.

This is already a widely discussed story, so I won’t dwell on the details. Plus, I wasn’t there. I wasn’t there when Pretti was shot while federal agents were dealing with his “peaceful arrest-resisting.” It seems self-evident that going to violent, chaotic protests, shouting obscenities, blowing bear horns in agents’ faces, interfering when they tried to subdue another protester, carrying a semi-auto with extra magazines, and wrestling with officers in a high-adrenaline encounter carries known risks of an unfortunate misunderstanding and tragic outcome.

Nurse Pretti stayed home to avoid the risk of a mild viral infection, but he practically sprinted to a tumultuous street protest, armed, and grappled with law enforcement. Make it make sense.

🔥 The blame-game is off and running. The Times and Democrats claim the shooting was unjustified. But, if millions of people carefully flyspecking the incident frame-by-frame, from multiple angles and videos, can’t even agree whether Pretti touched his gun or tried to reach his holster, how on Earth are officers involved in the scrum expected to tell in the heat of the moment and in a split second?

The fact that this debate has raged for so long without any clarity is evidence of ambiguity, which must accrue in the officers’ favor. We can’t ask citizens to enforce laws and then hold them to impossible standards. If anyone is at fault, it is the Minnesota authorities, whose inept decisions created the high-risk conditions leading straight to the shooting.

Think about it. There have been no police shootings in jurisdictions like Florida that cooperate with federal authorities, instead of undermining them. This chart, which shows ICE arrests as a proportion of illegal immigrant population, tells the whole story:

image 3.png

The apparent outlier, the District of Columbia, is under federal control, so it should be considered a red state for the chart’s purposes. Put simply, the chart proves that blue states are resisting immigration enforcement. They refuse simple cooperation, such as handing over aliens from their jails, prisons, and hospitals. So ICE must go into those communities to find the aliens. Meanwhile, activists track ICE and organize insta-riots, which leads to more demonstrations and more chances for ugly encounters like the Pretti shooting.

I’m sorry Mr. Pretti lost his life due to his poor choices. But considering the risks these states and protesters are obviously creating for themselves and others, it’s a miracle there have only been two deaths so far.
 

GURPS

INGSOC
PREMO Member
Last week, Reuters ran an eye-opening article headlined, “US lawmakers press health insurance executives on affordability.” Representative Jason Smith (R-Mo.) published a clip from the Ways and Means Committee Hearing that is, perhaps, the best short explainer of everything wrong with Obamacare and our ‘healthcare’ system. It should be mandatory viewing for all Americans.

image 10.png

CLIP: Vice-chair Buchanan asks Big Insurance about vertical integration (1:16).

The January 22nd hearing on “Healthcare Affordability” was attended by a panel of stern-looking Big Health Insurance CEOs, like Stephen Hemsley (UnitedHealth), David Joyner (CVS), David Cordani (Cigna), and Gail Boudreaux (Elevance). If you have a spare day and an enormous appetite for healthcare policy talk, here’s a link to the whole fascinating hearing on CNBC (5 hours).

At one point during the hearing, Representative Smith, Chairman of Ways and Means, asked the assembled CEOs a series of pointed questions about their companies. Here’s a rough transcript:

SMITH: Which of your companies owns or controls a health insurance division? Raise your hand.
CEOs: All raise hands.
SMITH: Please keep your hand up if you also employ healthcare providers, or own clinics, specialty pharmacies, or any other kind of medical practice or pharmacy?
CEOs: All raise hands.
SMITH: Please keep your hand up if you also own or control a pharmacy benefit manager?
CEOs: All raise hands.
SMITH: Please keep your hand up if you lead a publicly traded company at which you have a legal responsibility to maximize shareholder value?
CEOs: All raise hands.

Chairman Smith wrapped up the electrifying segment like this: “We’ve established on the record that the largest health insurance companies are not just insurers. They’re also medical providers and pharmacies, diagnosing and deciding treatment for patients. They are also PBMs, another form of middlemen, managing drug benefits. They are increasingly controlling every aspect of our healthcare system.”

In other words, Obamacare created a three-tier system: hospitals, doctors, and pharmacies on the bottom; “pharmacy benefit managers” to negotiate drug prices in the middle; and insurance companies at the top. The big insurance companies responded to this perverse incentive by buying up the whole stack. Now they control the entire health process from stem to stern. No wonder their stock prices skyrocketed 10x since Obamacare was passed.


Meanwhile, patients’ health outcomes have plunged.

So it tracks that Representative Nathanial Moran (R-TX) asked them, “How many of you would agree with Leader Jeffries that we have a broken healthcare system?” Four of the five CEOs immediately raised their hands. The fifth —Boudreaux— saw the glass half full. She partially raised her hand and said, “I think we have an incredible opportunity to fix our system.” She’s an upbeat kind of lady.

In any case, the insurance CEOs all agreed. The system is broken.

Remember, the Democrats started this. “Affordability,” Reuters reported, “is seen as a key issue in this year’s elections that will decide control of Congress.” Democrats’ broken-record suggestion during the hearing was more giant subsidies to the insurance companies, which is what got us into this situation in the first place.

But Republicans have their eyes on much bigger reform. While everyone’s attention is glued to the freezing fracas in Minnesota, there is more happening on Capitol Hill than you might think. Stay tuned.




 

GURPS

INGSOC
PREMO Member
Yesterday, Barron’s breathlessly reported that, “Gold Surges Past $5,000 for First Time, Silver Soars Again. Why They Can Keep Rallying.” This historic milestone was terrific news, but you wouldn’t know it from the story. If your only source is useless corporate media, you are drowning in a bathtub of lukewarm misinformation.

image 4.png


Surging! Soaring! And other dynamic verbs! Gold and silver have smashed historic records, floating like Chinese weather balloons right past the psychological price points of $5,000 and $100 an ounce, respectively. With no sign of any upper limit, I might add, and defying all inflationary metrics.

According to hotly disputed official U.S. inflation figures, $1 in 2016 is now only worth around $0.73. Thanks, Joe Biden! That figure is almost certainly understated. Most economists agree that the real rate of inflation over the last 10 years is at least 40%. As eye-watering as that number is, it’s not even close to explaining the recent explosion in gold and silver.

It was welcome news for the precious metals crowd, who are celebrating like drunken longshoremen whose ship finally came in, and gloating about how all their predictions for the last 25 years are finally coming true. Meanwhile, corporate media is dishing up a cafeteria of silly, speculative explanations, with about as much nutritional value as a strip-mall Asian buffet. Their stories offer loony and unpersuasive reasons like the Venezuela raid, FOMO, market panic, interest rate cuts, AI, Greenland, body positivity, the nation’s appalled response to Star Trek Academy, and cat scratch fever.

The real reason may be much more straightforward and fantastically better than all media’s nonsense. The price charts provide the best evidence. It seems likely that the prices of gold and silver were artificially suppressed for a very long time, probably by carefully calibrated pricing by mole-like bureaucrats in the Fed’s basement. I mean, just look at it.

Here’s gold:

image.png


Here’s silver:


image 2.png


Does that look natural to you?

So that’s one dot on the board. Next, remember all the buzz right after Trump returned to office last year, when DOGE was still big news, about how he and Elon Musk wanted to “audit” Fort Knox? ABC, March 5th, 2025:

image 3.png


Congress even began rumbling about funding a gold audit. But shortly after that initial Fort Knox chatter, all discussion of auditing Fort Knox abruptly ended —poof! Headline from Tavex Bullion, summer 2025:

image 5.png


— and then the prices of gold and silver launched like SpaceX rockets.

💰 To be clear, there is no direct evidence that an actual DOGE‑run audit uncovered any missing gold stores. In public, Treasury and the Mint insist that “the gold is present and accounted for.” We’re just connecting dots from up in the cheap seats, but the simplest explanation is that Trump gained some leverage, and whatever covert government agency was suppressing prices on precious metals stopped doing it— allowing these commodities to finally seek their natural prices.

It’s not a chemtrail-level theory. We know they can do it. The government has admitted to manipulating gold and silver prices before. But why would Trump lift the price controls? The answer is obvious.

One huge problem when Trump arrived was that China and the BRICS were buying up and hoarding underpriced gold and silver faster than Tolkien’s greedy dwarves. That needed to stop. But even more importantly, Team Trump had plans for the gold. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent publicly teased that he wanted to revalue and monetize our Fort Knox gold stockpile. Trump and Howard Lutnick suggested the extra money could seed a sovereign wealth fund.

image 14.png


Not to scale.

In other words, gold has always been a core part of Trump’s economic plan. And if re-pricing gold is in the plan —which would be easy and logical— it also seems logical they would first want to allow the price of gold to float back to market before undertaking any revaluation, to get the best possible price. It’s the Art of the Deal. Buy low, sell high.

Believe it or not, gold is currently valued on the nation’s books at only $42.22 an ounce ($11 billion total). Marking our 262 million-ounce stockpile to market would instantly create around $1.3 trillion in value. It would also stymie the BRICS, give Trump a vast financial playground, and be more accurate and realistic. Shazam.

Still, in all its overheated gold reporting, useless corporate media never mentions any of this significant background. Instead, media prefers to vomit up wild fantasies about anxious investors fretting over Trump’s Greenland deal and buying up gold to prepare for some whimsical apocalypse.

But —before they caught on that it was helping Trump’s plan— they were able to speculate about my proposed scenario. The Economic Times, February 24, 2025— before the gold surge:

image 6.png

See? It’s right there in the headline. Fort Knox was the key to the next gold explosion. But now that Trump’s plan is unfolding, reporters, mimicking Mr. Magoo, can’t see it at all. Thanks, media.

The most likely scenario is that Trump is doing exactly what he said he would and putting America first. Every additional dollar in the price of gold (and trailing along with it, silver) makes America stronger, regardless of whether any of us have personally buried bullion in our backyards.

But if you do have buried bullion, it’s even better.




 

GURPS

INGSOC
PREMO Member
On Monday, an op-ed appeared in, of all places, Al Jazeera, that could not have graced any of the papers of record here in the United States. It was headlined, “The US-Israeli strategy against Iran is working. Here is why.

image.png

The tonal difference could not be more different. The New York Times’s front page ran a “MAGA Fracture” story headlined, “Rift Widens Among Republicans Over Israel and War in Iran.” The story’s gigantic cover photo platformed Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, both of whom have called the Iran Operation a mistake, an Israeli influence operation, and the worst thing since the EPA mandated energy-efficient dishwashers.

Let’s start with Al Jazeera. The op-ed’s author is a long-time, published intelligence analyst who specializes in the ways authoritarian regimes successfully project force. It was gratifying to see that people are starting to recognize two forces our myopic corporate media cannot detect: the dominant media narrative and the distinction between Trump’s tweets and his actions.

“Two weeks into Operation Epic Fury, the dominant narrative has settled into a comfortable groove: The United States and Israel stumbled into a war without a plan,” the story began. “Oil prices are surging, and the world is facing another Middle Eastern quagmire.” That’s it in a nutshell. The Hill, Monday, becoming a meme of itself:

image 5.png

“But this narrative is wrong,” the author explained. “The critics are measuring the wrong things. They are cataloguing the price of the campaign while ignoring the strategic ledger.” It’s the exact opposite of how corporate media handled the Ukraine Project. When it came to Kiev, they clapped like North Korean generals whenever incalculably expensive “aid” and weapons packages were approved, and their strategic analysis amounted to wildly shouting “Slava Ukraine” at each other and gleefully sharing foreign flag GIFs to load into their social media profile pics.

Remember? According to corporate media, it was unpatriotic to question whether sending hundreds of billions to the world’s capital of fraud, which incidentally happened to be engaged in a life-or-death battle with a nuclear superpower. Just never mind! What was Biden’s ‘plan’ for aiding Ukraine without triggering World War III? Who cares! Beat Putin, that’s the plan! Who needs plans anyway?

image 6.png

The Al Jazeera article admitted that Trump’s tweets are all over the map. One day the President calls for Iran’s “unconditional surrender.” The next day he hints that the Iranians are “ready to make a deal.” But while Trump’s sprawled posturing is catnip for corporate media, which thinks the tweets are the story, the op-editor correctly pointed out that tweets have nothing whatever to do with the strategic reality on the ground.

“When you look at what has actually happened,” he said, “the picture is not one of US failure. It is one of systematic, phased degradation of a threat that previous administrations allowed to grow for four decades.” The experienced analyst saw what our media cannot: two phases. “The campaign has moved through two distinct phases. The first suppressed Iran’s air defences, decapitated its command and control, and degraded its missile and drone launch infrastructure.”

“The second phase, now underway, targets Iran’s defence industrial base: missile production facilities, dual-use research centres and the underground complexes where remaining stockpiles are stored. This is not aimless bombing. It is a methodical campaign to ensure that what has been destroyed cannot be rebuilt.”

He says ignore what Trump says on Truth Social and focus on the strategic phases. “The endgame is visible in the operational phasing, even if the rhetoric obscures it. The objective is the permanent degradation of Iran’s ability to project power beyond its borders through missiles, nuclear latency and proxy networks.” He concluded, “Call it strategic disarmament,” likening it to the Allies’ post-World War II strategy of disarming Germany.

What about the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran’s death-grip on international oil prices? It’s just a matter of time, the author explained. “Closing the strait was always Iran’s most visible retaliatory card, and always a wasting asset. About 90 percent of Iran’s own oil exports pass through Kharg Island and then the strait.” It’s like a bank robber locking himself inside the vault.

image 7.png

“Every day the blockade continues,” the author continued, “Iran severs its own economic lifeline and alienates the one major power that has consistently shielded it at the United Nations. The closure does not just hurt the global economy; it accelerates Iran’s isolation.”

He boiled it down to this: “The absence of a public diplomatic blueprint does not mean the military campaign is failing. It means the campaign is ahead of the diplomacy, a sequencing problem, not a strategic one.” And the campaign is working. “War is never clean,” he concluded, “but the strategy – the actual strategy, measured in degraded capabilities rather than cable news cycles – is working.”

Straight from Al Jazeera: Trump’s strategy is working. The actual, on-the-ground strategy —not the Twitter strategy, not the cable news strategy— is working.

🚀 That’s Al Jazeera. What does the New York Times focus on? MAGA Fracture. Apparently Megyn Kelly and Mark Levin are having an undignified public spat over the war that is doing neither of them much good. Levin called Megyn Ozempic-faced, and Megyn called him “Micropenis Mark.” (Or diminutive words to that effect.) What either of those unfortunate observations have to do with the war is anybody’s guess.

image 2.png

The best you can say is that freedom of speech is spurting all over the place. Things are getting sticky. You could also say Mark and Megyn are not exactly providing helpful examples to the rest of us about how to hold a reasoned debate on the merits with someone who agrees with you on 90% of everything else. The Times called their reasonable debate a “rhetorical brawl,” and for once, not unfairly.

Assuming the best, assuming that both Mark and Megyn have good-faith arguments that should be addressed, there must be a less destructive way to work it out. MAGA Fractures only help the Democrats. And if the Democrats win the midterms, then we are all in big trouble. All of us. Remember what the Democrats did during the pandemic? That was a warmup lap compared to what they will do next, if they get a chance.

If that happens, both Megyn’s and Mark’s supporters will all be equally in the bouillabaisse. And presumably, as they are being prodded into President Walz’s FEMA camp, Megyn and Mark will still be arguing about who really started the war in Iran. It’s like Monty Python’s circular firing squad— the MAGEAN People’s Front fighting with the People’s Front of MAGA.

image 8.png

President Trump has been talking about Iran for at least thirty-eight years. In 1988, he told a Guardian reporter that, if he were president and the Iranians shot someone, gave us the stink eye, or dropped hummus on the tiles, he’d grab Kharg Island immediately (even though it has neither a golf course nor a concierge.) I’m paraphrasing, but you get the idea. During 2026, his Year of Action, he began by striking Venezuela and Cuba, two countries far from the Middle East and any cognizable interest of Israel.

It is totally fair to question anything. Even (or especially) Israel’s outsized influence on U.S. politics. But I have two complaints. First, given Trump’s history, it seems unfair and unreasonable to accuse the President of being anybody’s puppet. He has been perfectly consistent on Iran for most of his adult life, and Iran has been poking the US for most of our adult lives. That’s one thing.

Second, for the sake of everything holy, go ahead and debate these issues— but don’t give the Democrats the gift of the MAGA fracture they’ve been praying to their Wiccan gods for. Why can’t these influencers give each other the benefit of the doubt of good faith? If we are the party of reason, why not allow that other people can sometimes hold reasonable positions that are different from our own, and not because they are sell-outs or whatever?

It is undeniably true that tackling Iran advances Israel’s interests. But it is equally true that it would have been impossible for Trump to tackle Iran without Israel. So … who’s using who? Could the truth be something greyer than the black-and-white purity positions the influencers adopt? Are the US and Israel helping each other, even if for wildly different reasons?

One of C&C’s prime directives is: I don’t punch right. Why not? Because we’ll probably need each other later. That is not to say that I never criticize; I just prefer to give our allies the benefit of the doubt. The SAVE Act debate is a great example. I cautioned restraint while the influencers savaged Senate Majority Leader Thune, who was aggravating everybody by refusing to take a public stand against the silent filibuster. Let the man work, I said. Maybe he has a good reason for not taking a stand, I said. Now, Thune is engineering a Senate debate, which is very close to what we wanted. (And it’s been great so far.)

Never forget that our enemies’ preferred tactic is to sow division, turn populations against each other, and make us destroy ourselves. “Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting,” Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu advised. Democrats don’t need to break MAGA if MAGA does it for free. The Democrats are achieving supreme excellence by doing nothing while we do the fighting for them.

They’re exploiting our weakness, which should be a strength. Progressives avoid the trap by brutally enforcing homogenous ideological purity. Conservatives don’t work that way. We allow free speech, free thought, and free debate. That’s both our strength and our weakness, if we don’t do it right.

So we must debate better. Respectful debate is messy. It’s hard, and often frustrating. But it is worth it, which is why Western Civilization was built from it. We can do this.

image 9.png

Don’t be Daryl.


🔥 Al Jazeera’s analyst compared President Trump’s Iran strategy to the post-WWII Allied disarmament of Germany. U.S. corporate media compared it to a cable news ratings battle. In 2026, you have to read Al Jazeera to find out what America’s military is actually doing. The New York Times will tell you what Megyn Kelly tweeted about what Mark Levin said about it.

Thus, we have at long last come to this: Al Jazeera is now a more reliable source of useful information than the New York Times, which has transformed itself into a caricature of a supermarket tabloid. Frankly, I would rather read about how the Woman Who Had UFO Baby Becomes Top OnlyFans Earner than the pitiful detritus the Trump-deranged Times calls “journalism.”

(Mark and Kelly— please set a good example and make up, so we can focus on our real enemies. You’re giving Democrats free ammunition and making the rest of us watch two people we like embarrass themselves. Nobody wins a food fight except people who aren’t at the table.)




 

BOP

Well-Known Member
On Monday, an op-ed appeared in, of all places, Al Jazeera, that could not have graced any of the papers of record here in the United States. It was headlined, “The US-Israeli strategy against Iran is working. Here is why.

image.png
The tonal difference could not be more different. The New York Times’s front page ran a “MAGA Fracture” story headlined, “Rift Widens Among Republicans Over Israel and War in Iran.” The story’s gigantic cover photo platformed Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, both of whom have called the Iran Operation a mistake, an Israeli influence operation, and the worst thing since the EPA mandated energy-efficient dishwashers.

Let’s start with Al Jazeera. The op-ed’s author is a long-time, published intelligence analyst who specializes in the ways authoritarian regimes successfully project force. It was gratifying to see that people are starting to recognize two forces our myopic corporate media cannot detect: the dominant media narrative and the distinction between Trump’s tweets and his actions.

“Two weeks into Operation Epic Fury, the dominant narrative has settled into a comfortable groove: The United States and Israel stumbled into a war without a plan,” the story began. “Oil prices are surging, and the world is facing another Middle Eastern quagmire.” That’s it in a nutshell. The Hill, Monday, becoming a meme of itself:

image 5.png
“But this narrative is wrong,” the author explained. “The critics are measuring the wrong things. They are cataloguing the price of the campaign while ignoring the strategic ledger.” It’s the exact opposite of how corporate media handled the Ukraine Project. When it came to Kiev, they clapped like North Korean generals whenever incalculably expensive “aid” and weapons packages were approved, and their strategic analysis amounted to wildly shouting “Slava Ukraine” at each other and gleefully sharing foreign flag GIFs to load into their social media profile pics.

Remember? According to corporate media, it was unpatriotic to question whether sending hundreds of billions to the world’s capital of fraud, which incidentally happened to be engaged in a life-or-death battle with a nuclear superpower. Just never mind! What was Biden’s ‘plan’ for aiding Ukraine without triggering World War III? Who cares! Beat Putin, that’s the plan! Who needs plans anyway?

image 6.png
The Al Jazeera article admitted that Trump’s tweets are all over the map. One day the President calls for Iran’s “unconditional surrender.” The next day he hints that the Iranians are “ready to make a deal.” But while Trump’s sprawled posturing is catnip for corporate media, which thinks the tweets are the story, the op-editor correctly pointed out that tweets have nothing whatever to do with the strategic reality on the ground.

“When you look at what has actually happened,” he said, “the picture is not one of US failure. It is one of systematic, phased degradation of a threat that previous administrations allowed to grow for four decades.” The experienced analyst saw what our media cannot: two phases. “The campaign has moved through two distinct phases. The first suppressed Iran’s air defences, decapitated its command and control, and degraded its missile and drone launch infrastructure.”

“The second phase, now underway, targets Iran’s defence industrial base: missile production facilities, dual-use research centres and the underground complexes where remaining stockpiles are stored. This is not aimless bombing. It is a methodical campaign to ensure that what has been destroyed cannot be rebuilt.”

He says ignore what Trump says on Truth Social and focus on the strategic phases. “The endgame is visible in the operational phasing, even if the rhetoric obscures it. The objective is the permanent degradation of Iran’s ability to project power beyond its borders through missiles, nuclear latency and proxy networks.” He concluded, “Call it strategic disarmament,” likening it to the Allies’ post-World War II strategy of disarming Germany.

What about the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran’s death-grip on international oil prices? It’s just a matter of time, the author explained. “Closing the strait was always Iran’s most visible retaliatory card, and always a wasting asset. About 90 percent of Iran’s own oil exports pass through Kharg Island and then the strait.” It’s like a bank robber locking himself inside the vault.

image 7.png
“Every day the blockade continues,” the author continued, “Iran severs its own economic lifeline and alienates the one major power that has consistently shielded it at the United Nations. The closure does not just hurt the global economy; it accelerates Iran’s isolation.”

He boiled it down to this: “The absence of a public diplomatic blueprint does not mean the military campaign is failing. It means the campaign is ahead of the diplomacy, a sequencing problem, not a strategic one.” And the campaign is working. “War is never clean,” he concluded, “but the strategy – the actual strategy, measured in degraded capabilities rather than cable news cycles – is working.”

Straight from Al Jazeera: Trump’s strategy is working. The actual, on-the-ground strategy —not the Twitter strategy, not the cable news strategy— is working.

🚀 That’s Al Jazeera. What does the New York Times focus on? MAGA Fracture. Apparently Megyn Kelly and Mark Levin are having an undignified public spat over the war that is doing neither of them much good. Levin called Megyn Ozempic-faced, and Megyn called him “Micropenis Mark.” (Or diminutive words to that effect.) What either of those unfortunate observations have to do with the war is anybody’s guess.

image 2.png
The best you can say is that freedom of speech is spurting all over the place. Things are getting sticky. You could also say Mark and Megyn are not exactly providing helpful examples to the rest of us about how to hold a reasoned debate on the merits with someone who agrees with you on 90% of everything else. The Times called their reasonable debate a “rhetorical brawl,” and for once, not unfairly.

Assuming the best, assuming that both Mark and Megyn have good-faith arguments that should be addressed, there must be a less destructive way to work it out. MAGA Fractures only help the Democrats. And if the Democrats win the midterms, then we are all in big trouble. All of us. Remember what the Democrats did during the pandemic? That was a warmup lap compared to what they will do next, if they get a chance.

If that happens, both Megyn’s and Mark’s supporters will all be equally in the bouillabaisse. And presumably, as they are being prodded into President Walz’s FEMA camp, Megyn and Mark will still be arguing about who really started the war in Iran. It’s like Monty Python’s circular firing squad— the MAGEAN People’s Front fighting with the People’s Front of MAGA.

image 8.png
President Trump has been talking about Iran for at least thirty-eight years. In 1988, he told a Guardian reporter that, if he were president and the Iranians shot someone, gave us the stink eye, or dropped hummus on the tiles, he’d grab Kharg Island immediately (even though it has neither a golf course nor a concierge.) I’m paraphrasing, but you get the idea. During 2026, his Year of Action, he began by striking Venezuela and Cuba, two countries far from the Middle East and any cognizable interest of Israel.

It is totally fair to question anything. Even (or especially) Israel’s outsized influence on U.S. politics. But I have two complaints. First, given Trump’s history, it seems unfair and unreasonable to accuse the President of being anybody’s puppet. He has been perfectly consistent on Iran for most of his adult life, and Iran has been poking the US for most of our adult lives. That’s one thing.

Second, for the sake of everything holy, go ahead and debate these issues— but don’t give the Democrats the gift of the MAGA fracture they’ve been praying to their Wiccan gods for. Why can’t these influencers give each other the benefit of the doubt of good faith? If we are the party of reason, why not allow that other people can sometimes hold reasonable positions that are different from our own, and not because they are sell-outs or whatever?

It is undeniably true that tackling Iran advances Israel’s interests. But it is equally true that it would have been impossible for Trump to tackle Iran without Israel. So … who’s using who? Could the truth be something greyer than the black-and-white purity positions the influencers adopt? Are the US and Israel helping each other, even if for wildly different reasons?

One of C&C’s prime directives is: I don’t punch right. Why not? Because we’ll probably need each other later. That is not to say that I never criticize; I just prefer to give our allies the benefit of the doubt. The SAVE Act debate is a great example. I cautioned restraint while the influencers savaged Senate Majority Leader Thune, who was aggravating everybody by refusing to take a public stand against the silent filibuster. Let the man work, I said. Maybe he has a good reason for not taking a stand, I said. Now, Thune is engineering a Senate debate, which is very close to what we wanted. (And it’s been great so far.)

Never forget that our enemies’ preferred tactic is to sow division, turn populations against each other, and make us destroy ourselves. “Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting,” Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu advised. Democrats don’t need to break MAGA if MAGA does it for free. The Democrats are achieving supreme excellence by doing nothing while we do the fighting for them.

They’re exploiting our weakness, which should be a strength. Progressives avoid the trap by brutally enforcing homogenous ideological purity. Conservatives don’t work that way. We allow free speech, free thought, and free debate. That’s both our strength and our weakness, if we don’t do it right.

So we must debate better. Respectful debate is messy. It’s hard, and often frustrating. But it is worth it, which is why Western Civilization was built from it. We can do this.

image 9.png
Don’t be Daryl.


🔥 Al Jazeera’s analyst compared President Trump’s Iran strategy to the post-WWII Allied disarmament of Germany. U.S. corporate media compared it to a cable news ratings battle. In 2026, you have to read Al Jazeera to find out what America’s military is actually doing. The New York Times will tell you what Megyn Kelly tweeted about what Mark Levin said about it.

Thus, we have at long last come to this: Al Jazeera is now a more reliable source of useful information than the New York Times, which has transformed itself into a caricature of a supermarket tabloid. Frankly, I would rather read about how the Woman Who Had UFO Baby Becomes Top OnlyFans Earner than the pitiful detritus the Trump-deranged Times calls “journalism.”

(Mark and Kelly— please set a good example and make up, so we can focus on our real enemies. You’re giving Democrats free ammunition and making the rest of us watch two people we like embarrass themselves. Nobody wins a food fight except people who aren’t at the table.)




:dingding:
 

GURPS

INGSOC
PREMO Member

☕️ NOT-SO-EASY STREETS ☙ Wednesday, April 1, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠







Something remarkable broke loose yesterday, and the corporate media —preoccupied with its usual obsessions— completely missed it. Or maybe they didn’t miss it; maybe they just couldn’t figure out how to frame it without accidentally making Trump look like a genius. Let’s start with Ukraine —the linchpin of 2016-26 geopolitics— because that’s where this story really begins. Two days ago, Reuters reported, “Allies sent Ukraine ‘signals’ on reducing strikes on Russian oil, Zelenskiy says.

image 11.png

For the last two years, the collective West cheered every time Ukraine hit a Russian oil refinery. Zelensky was glowingly described as David slinging precision drones at Goliath’s wallet, cutting an estimated $150 million per day from Moscow’s war chest. He was a hero! He got standing ovations in Congress. He got magazine covers. The works.

Then Iran happened.

When the Strait of Hormuz closed in early March, twenty percent of the world’s oil supply vanished overnight. Brent crude (what the Europeans pay) rocketed to $116 a barrel —a 60% surge in a single month, the largest on record. European gas prices shot up 70%. Western Australia literally declared a state of fuel emergency this week.

And the first thing the West did —the very first thing— was ease sanctions on Russian oil. Because suddenly they needed it. It wasn’t optional. It wasn’t a “nice to have.” It’s existential.

The not-so-funny comedian watched his leverage vanish into the Ukrainian mud. The sanctions he’d spent two years fighting for were quietly rolled back, because (1) Europeans needed to heat their citizens’ homes and fill their tanks, and (2) everybody is getting sick of him anyway. So Zelensky did the only thing he knows how to do: he escalated. On March 26th, he told Reuters his strikes on Russian refineries were specifically because the West had eased sanctions — “By lifting sanctions on the aggressor, who makes money every day,” he explained.

Two days later, Ukrainian drones struck Russia’s Baltic export terminals at Primorsk and Ust-Luga— ports that pipe oil to Europe.

That’s when all the phone calls started. Reuters, Bloomberg, and the BBC all reported that unnamed “allies” sent Zelensky “signals” to knock it off. Scale back the strikes. You’re hurting us. Six months ago, Zelensky was Europe’s Churchill. This week, he became the guy standing between London and affordable petrol.

Zelensky nervously read the room. On March 30th, he publicly proposed a mutual “energy ceasefire”— Ukraine would stop hitting Russian refineries if Russia stopped hitting Ukrainian power plants. It was an optics move intended to make him look reasonable and shift the ball into Moscow’s court. But Russia, predictably, rejected it. They launched 339 drones overnight just to make the point.

🚀 What just became abundantly and astonishingly clear was: the Iran war is doing more to end the Ukraine war than two years of diplomacy ever did. Not necessarily by design— or maybe entirely by design. Because the cascade didn’t stop with Vladimir’s conundrum.

On March 31st, President Trump apparently had enough of his “allies.” Italy had just refused to let American bombers use Sigonella air base. France denied airspace for weapons transport. Spain blocked base access. Poland said no to Patriot deployments.

Trump’s response was vintage: he called them “cowards,” told them to “build up some delayed courage,” and delivered the line of the year: “Go get your own oil!

image 12.png

Within hours —not days, not weeks, hours— the dominoes started falling. The UK Home Office, which had spent years studiously ignoring the grooming gangs scandal, suddenly announced a full national inquiry to “explicitly examine the role of ethnicity, religion, and culture.” The same day —the same day— they announced they were scrapping Non-Crime Hate Incidents, ending the Orwellian practice of investigating ordinary, law-abiding British citizens for legal social media posts. That tweet got 30,000 likes. When a government announcement goes viral, you know something fundamental has shifted.

image 13.png

Then, puffy-faced UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer made an emergency address to the United Kingdom announcing that UK military planners would meet to discuss how to make the Strait of Hormuz “accessible and safe.” His exact words to the British people: “I do have to level with people on this. This will not be easy.”

image 14.png

CLIP: Starmer ‘levels’ with people, finally (2:28).

Twelve thousand miles away, Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, gave a nearly identical emergency speech. “The months ahead may not be easy. I want to be upfront about that.” Almost word for word. If those weren’t shared talking points from a Five Eyes briefing, I’ll eat my cordless keyboard.



🚀 Meanwhile, Germany’s Chancellor Merz suddenly found the courage to admit that “a considerable proportion of violence” in Germany comes “from immigrant groups” — a sentence that would have ended a German political career six months ago. Germany’s Economy Minister called their nuclear phase-out a “huge mistake.” (In related news, the captain of the Titanic was quoted as saying, ‘icebergs are underestimated.’)

image 15.png

Even France, which had just refused American bomber access, sent Macron scurrying to Tokyo for emergency energy talks with Japan — America’s closest Pacific ally. Macron is trying to build a coalition around the United States by lobbying America’s best friends, which tells you everything you need to know about how much leverage France actually has with Trump right now.

The pattern is unmistakable. Trump said go get your own oil, and within 24 hours:

  • The UK addressed the grooming gangs, restored free speech protections, and committed military assets;
  • Australia declared a fuel emergency and started rationing talk;
  • Germany admitted immigration is causing violence and its energy policy was wrong; and
  • Zelensky offered to stop hitting Russian oil and asked Trump to broker an Easter truce.
Some of these —like Australia’s fuel emergency— are genuinely driven by the energy crisis. But the grooming gangs? Non-Crime Hate Incidents? Those aren’t about oil prices. Those are political concessions that have nothing to do with the Strait of Hormuz and much more to do with staying in their own public’s good graces.

In other words, the energy crisis is forcing Europe to start embracing populism.

The energy crisis is doing what years of populist movements, Brexit, Yellow Vests, and AfD couldn’t— it’s forcing the establishment to adopt populist positions just to survive. Grooming gangs, free speech, immigration honesty, nuclear power— these were all “far right” talking points six months ago. Now suddenly, they’re government policy.

The irony! European elites spent a decade calling populism a threat to democracy. Now they’re adopting it to save their own skins. Somebody should look into how this happened.

Finally —and most significantly— President Trump has scheduled another emergency address about Iran at 9pm tonight (after the markets close). Many think he plans to announce the next phase in the Iran war —a phase that will be even less easy for the Europeans.

Useless corporate media will report all this separately, as a series of unrelated events. That’s not even close to the real story. What you’re watching is the post-American world order being renegotiated in real time, and the negotiator is a guy who builds hotels for a living.

This will not be easy. True, not for them. But President Trump is making it look pretty easy for him. The sooner the Europeans figure out what TAW stands for, the better it will go for them.

Europe is undergoing its own conversion therapy right now — converting from globalism to populism. I’m pretty sure the Supreme Court just ruled you can’t ban that.
 
Top