☕️☘️ THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT ☙ Monday, March 17, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS ☘️🦠

NYT hangs public health out to dry; Trump 2.0 targets 70 years of Cold War stagnation; Biden pardons under fire; FBI eyes climate hoaxers; left melts down over Trump’s deportation win; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday. Happy St. Patrick’s Day! In your roundup: Times limited hangout hangs the public health establishment out to dry; NYT op-ed confirms one of the most important prongs of the Trump 2.0 strategy; scientific stagnation is waking up from a 70-year cold war nap; Trump drops Truth Social bomb on Biden pardonees; FBI moves to criminally charge climate hoaxers; and legal dust-up as progressives prematurely celebrate Trump’s defiance of court order deporting dangerous gang cartel members.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

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This weekend, after the New York Times ran the most hypocritical and self-serving editorial in its highly questionable history, social media buzzed more angrily than a swarm of gypped bumblebees who were just told their permits for harvesting this wildflower patch expired that morning, and they would have to fly back downtown and apply for a new permit which would only take six to eight weeks. I hereby publish the Times’ sordid headline in all its original glory:

The “event” we were “misled about” referred to the “pandemic,” of course, that brief, ignoble patch of history squeezed betwixt the Time Before and the time of Everything After. It was so profoundly unpleasant that Hollywood has studiously avoided producing a single film or streaming series set in that dark time of lockdowns, beachgoing arrests, mask mandate confrontations, bureaucrats cowering behind ubiquitous plexiglass sneeze shields, streetside restaurant tables, and Orwellian uni-directional arrows taped onto grocery aisle floors. This way to disinfection, comrade.

Ms. Tufecki, who penned the Times’ late-arriving limited hangout, was a regular force on corporate media’s opinion pages during the pandemic. She is an AWFL Columbia University sociology professor — yes, that Columbia University — specializing in technological trends and digital misinformation and has been lauded as a “prominent voice during the pandemic.” Here’s a 2021 New Observer article glowingly praising her anti-disinformation efforts:

Lest you erroneously conclude that Zeynep (if that is her real name) was any kind of voice of reason during the pandemic, the “guidance” she challenged was the CDC’s early instructions that masks were not especially helpful. Here’s her 2020 New York Times op-ed arguing for more masking:

So it was especially ironic that Zeynep was selected to run this weekend’s reaction to the latest news confirming the covid virus originated not from pangolins, wet markets, or bat meat popsicles, but from the laboratory in Wuhan that we conspiracy theorists have been pointing at for over five years. The white-coated lambs of blame are finally being led to their scientific slaughter, and right in time for Easter.

“We have since learned,” Zeynep innocently observed, safely nestling herself amongst the royal we, “that to promote the appearance of consensus, some officials and scientists hid or understated crucial facts, misled at least one reporter, orchestrated campaigns of supposedly independent voices and even compared notes about how to hide their communications in order to keep the public from hearing the whole story.”

The way she described the unforgivable campaign by scientists and public health officials to hide the true origins of the virus — a critically important fact — makes it sound a whole lot like misinformation, which we have been repeatedly and violently instructed is the worst possible crime. Especially during a pandemic. So who really killed grandma?

Bypassing for the moment the flashes of righteous fury that appear like floating spots before the eyeballs when reading this quasi-confessional, we can also savor the comeuppance that public health and science are rightly experiencing as their handlers toss them under the supersonic bus of blame. “Perhaps,” Professor Zeynep darkly alleged, “we were misled on purpose.”

Zeynep told it straight. She described the criminal behavior of noted scientists and NIH officials who scrubbed emails, bought burner phones, held secret conferences, taught each other tricks about how to avoid public records exposure, and altogether conspired to manufacture a fake narrative of natural viral origin, even while warning each other that the damned thing must have leaked from the lab. Evolutionary biologist Kristian Andersen, for example, wrote in the conspirators’ secret Slack channel, “The lab escape version of this is so friggin’ likely to have happened because they were already doing this type of work and the molecular data is fully consistent with that scenario.”

Then David Morens, senior advisor to Fauci himself, wrote to EcoHealth president Peter Daszak saying, “We’re all smart enough to know to never have smoking guns, and if we did, we wouldn’t put them in emails, and if we found them, we’d delete them.”

The Professor also described, without equivocation, how NGO darling Daszak drafted and circulated a natural origins letter while strategizing about how to hide his tracks and assuring his recruited team of signing scientists that it “will not be identifiable as coming from any one organization or person.” Meaning, himself. The Lancet published Daszak’s fake letter and has never retracted it.

“What else,” Zeynep rightly wondered, “is still being kept from us about the pandemic that half a decade ago changed all of our lives?”

Alas, the thrust of Zeynep’s article, perhaps unavoidable, was ultimately aimed only at “restoring trust in science.” The Professor called on scientists to come clean. “Only an honest conversation,” she weakly encouraged, “will lead us forward.” She did not explain why these proven public health liars should even be leading a Las Vegas drive-through wedding band, much less the effort to restore trust in themselves.

Nor did she call for any accountability, which after all is the only real way for trust to be truly restored. Officials enthusiastically threw pastors in jail for holding church services, with scientists cheering them on. So what now for those same scientists, who bought burner phones and traded email-deleting tips to evade public records laws while conspiring to defraud the public about the pandemic?

As Hillary famously asked, What difference, at this point, does it make? At bottom, Zeynep shared her biggest worries in a response to one of the article’s top-rated comments. The Professor prefers to look to the future, complaining that “now, we are frozen about lessening the odds of a lab leak causing the next pandemic.”

But who, or what, dear professor, is freezing us? Are we not frozen by the absence of accountability that your article studiously avoided mentioning? Have the unpunished scientific fraudsters gotten away with it scot-free? As communist-defending Joe Welsh asked American hero Joe McCarthy in 1954, “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”

Well, Zeynep? Preventing future lab-leaked pandemics is an admirable goal, but what part does decency play in the orchestrated public health cover-up you so eloquently described? Or does accountability only apply to those of us in the tier below your élite club?

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Let us now turn to another remarkable “guest essay” in yesterday’s Times, this one headlined, “The End of the University as We Know It.” Superficially, the piece complained about how DOGE defunding massive science grants to big universities is destroying democracy, or something. But more interestingly, it evidenced the theme I introduced in yesterday’s bonus post: we are now shifting into the second phase of Trump’s Swamp-draining.

Looking at last week’s news of new cuts of deep-state agencies that you never heard of, or thought were just stale artifacts, like the Voice of America, I suggested that what Trump is really doing is finally ending the Cold War. Ex-spooks and neocon allies have kept it quietly going for the last fifty years, covertly pouring ever more taxpayer money and engaging in ever more skulduggery and lethal dirty tricks all around the world in the perverse name of “freedom.”

So it was no surprise that this “Universities are dying” article invoked the Cold War. We are finally getting down to the truth. “World War II and the Cold War,” the article earnestly argued, “fundamentally transformed universities into engines of state power, binding research to military and technological supremacy.”

The author argued that as though it were a good thing. “The Cold War effort had demonstrated the strategic value of academic research,” it stressed. “Universities became hubs of government-backed knowledge production. In 1957, funding from the National Science Foundation stood at $40 million; by 1968, it had climbed to nearly $500 million.”

“The modern research university,” it continued, “was of real value — even a great strength of America, as an instrument of soft power.” In other words, they see the University as an essential cog in the military-industrial complex’s endless war. What endless war? The Cold War. And Trump is taking it down. “If, during the Cold War,” the article continued, “the government funded universities as a way of strengthening America, Mr. Trump’s second administration treats them as a threat to be dismantled.”

Indeed. Many of us consider the universities as a threat. It’s not exactly a secret. But even among Republican presidents during the post-Cold War period, only President Trump has been brave enough to really tackle the problem instead of just nibbling around the margins. “Conservatives have been trying” — and failing — “to reshape the American university since the federal government began funding it in earnest in the mid-20th century. But now,” the author breathlessly argued, “the Trump administration appears prepared to destroy it. “

And how is Trump doing this? By taking away unlimited government largesse. “The university,” it admitted, “thrives on public funding. The result, if all goes through, will be nothing less than the permanent diminishment of research universities.”

Late in the piece, as if the author noticed one more sticky note pinned to his draft outline, it finally reminded readers of the other reason for our university system: educating students. But DOGE’s cuts have spared, for now, the horrible student loan problem, which is a separate problem. Withdrawing covert funding for a long-dead war disguised as ’scientific research’ will only help students.

🚀 A major strategic prong is emerging from the fog of bureaucratic war, obscured during the last 60 days in the waterfall of Trump’s executive orders, mass layoffs, and rapid-fire agency reorganizations. Trump’s unstated strategy is a war against the Cold War. Trump has always campaigned as a war-ender, and now he’s taking on the biggest war of them all, a war that traps us in perpetual conflict and holds us on the brink of nuclear war with Russia and China.

The Cold War ended everywhere but in America. Trump is finally shutting it down — for good.

🚀 If any more evidence were needed, consider this recent presentation by Intellectual Dark Web diva Eric Weinstein, a PhD, classic liberal, mathematical physicist, economist, public speaker, and former managing director of Thiel Capital. The YouTube, uploaded two days ago, was titled, “Why the West is waking up from a 70 year nap (17:22).”

“We are in a situation in which the post-World War II order has fallen,” Eric told the audience. The post-World War II era could also be called the Cold War era. “It’s a very long period of time I’ve called ’The Great Nap,’” he said.

Watch the whole thing. Eric gets around to the main thrust of his argument in the second half of the 17-minute talk (but the first-half buildup is worth it). He quoted a Biden Administration official who had a hot-mike moment last year. In a conversation about regulating the AI industry (to death), the unnamed official told AI venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, “During the Cold War, we classified entire areas of physics and mathematics.”

What? Why? The official explained. “It took these areas out of the research community, and entire branches of physics basically went dark and didn’t proceed. If we decide we need to,” he warned Andreessen, “we’re going to do the same thing to the science underneath AI.”

In other words, the United States government — for national security — classified not just particular projects, but entire fields of scientific thought and academic study deemed too potentially dangerous to pursue. It halted science and brought culture, art, and everything else to a dead standstill. Meanwhile, as we saw in the previous article, year by year it ballooned grants into ‘safe,’ officially sanctioned subjects, sternly steering scientists into safe but unproductive scientific cul-de-sacs.

Did you ever wonder why, as we just found out this year, the last 25 years of scientific research into the causes of Alzheimer’s were moored to a single wrong theory, with any competing ideas squelched, defunded, and canceled? Now you know why. National security. Decided by who? Unelected bureaucrats deeply buried like anonymous termites into the deep state’s Cold War apparatus.

“The US government,” Weinstein declared, “intentionally stagnates science, chooses designated winners, and classifies and destroys the competition.” Which is exactly what the Biden Administration was planning to do to the artificial intelligence industry. For safety.

Weinstein ‘steelmanned’ the government, meaning he attributed the best possible motives and still dismantled it. Even supposing the government has been acting in our best interest, even allowing they’ve successfully created the longest peacetime period in human history, it is still quietly and slowly killing us. As Eric correctly noted, the greatest advancements in human progress, health, and justice have all occurred during or just after periods of violent revolution.

Stagnation causes fertile fields to become swamps. Although it may have begun with the best of intentions, the Cold War has produced the deepest and most dangerous swamp in history. It nearly drowned us all.

Now, at long last, President Trump is draining the swamp.

In spite of the not-so-subtly implied risk, Weinstein remains brilliantly optimistic. Granted, it will be bumpy. Maybe even very bumpy. But — as I speculated in my nearly viral post about our stuck culture — when the government-imposed dam holding it all back finally breaks, it will unleash a tsunami of progress and prosperity unparalleled in modern history. What Weinstein described could fairly be called a “golden age.”

Maybe that’s not just a campaign slogan. Friends, we surely live in the most fascinating of times.

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Days after his declaration of war at the Department of Justice, President Trump yesterday dropped another MOAB on social media. Biden’s pardons, the President declared, are null and of no effect, since President Autopen didn’t know what he was signing. Newsweek ran the story last night, headlined “Donald Trump sends warning to enemies as he says Biden pardons void.” Here is the digital shot heard ‘round the world:

Jumping to the end, Trump lacks the authority to cancel Biden’s pardons unilaterally, as he admitted in statements to reporters a few hours later. Onboard Air Force One last night, Trump said "it's not my decision" whether Biden's pardons can be voided (1:28), and agreed that it would ultimately be up to the courts.

So what then is this all about? More Trump trolling? A joke? Or was something there?

There was a clever legal purpose behind the tweet (Truth Social, I know). The legal effect of Trump’s tweet was that it was a notice. The key phrase was buried in the middle, which is that Biden’s pardonees are “subject to investigation at the highest level.” Thus, the parties have been publicly notified of the Administration’s position, which is that the pardons were flawed and ineffective.

In other words, investigations are legally appropriate, since the Administration plans to make that legal argument — arguing Biden’s pardons lacked legal capacity — when it brings charges.

Trump’s tweet was nothing less than a declaration of legal war against the architects of the stolen 2020 election, the January 6th charade, and dare I say, the felons who coordinated the pandemic’s worst excesses. Welcome to Phase Two— gloves off. Game on.

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Phase two is undeniably starting. The New Republic ran a story last Wednesday headlined, “Trump’s FBI Moves to Criminally Charge Major Climate Groups.”

We only found out because “Climate United Fund” sued Citibank for freezing its climate grant funds. The NGO wanted the court to issue a TRO ordering Citi to immediately release its funds. But Citibank filed a fulsome response, arguing that it is obligated by many agreements to act as a fiduciary for the United States, and was only following lawful orders from the Department of Justice.

The filing revealed that the FBI alleges that Climate United and other similar groups are involved in “possible criminal violations,” including “conspiracy to defraud the United States.” Obviously, the Department of Justice doesn’t advertise, or even usually comment on, ongoing investigations.

Here we go. Buckle up.

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Finally, social media was buzzing this weekend about a judge who issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) ordering the Administration to turn around several planes already carrying hundreds of ganged-up Venezualan Tren de Aragua illegals down to El Salvador’s famous ultramax prison for processing. The planes didn’t turn around. And so progressives started partying, crying now we’ve got him! He defied a court order! He’s acting like a king! Haha! But their celebrations were short-lived. ABC ran the story under the headline, “Trump administration ignores judge's order to turn deportation planes around.”

Referencing the judge’s order last night, El Salvador’s president tweeted, “Oopsies! Too late!”

Then Trump’s lawyers, who’d already appealed the pop-up TRO, filed a “notice” with the judge, explaining the gangsters were deported anyway “pursuant to other authorities” besides the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 (later codified into federal law at 50 U.S.C. §§ 21-24). But the ACLU argued the “ancient” law could only be used in wartime or if we are under invasion, and the judge apparently agreed that a short-term TRO was appropriate.

It all happened fast. Trump’s lawyers weren’t present at the emergency TRO hearing, but the planes were already in the air by the time they found out about the order. Amusingly, in their notice, Trump’s lawyers did not explain exactly what “other authorities” were used instead of the Alien Enemies Act.

But the number of other possible authorities are, as they say, a target-rich environment.

Dare I say this is more Phase Two? Trump’s team has been carefully and quietly laying the foundations for this battle for weeks. On his first day in office, President Trump signed several executive orders. One declared an invasion and ordered the military to seal the border. The next declared a national state of emergency because the “southern border is overrun by cartels, criminal gangs, known terrorists, human traffickers, smugglers, unvetted military-age males from foreign adversaries, and illicit narcotics that harm Americans.”

A third EO ordered all agencies to cooperate in a whole-of-government effort to protect America from the invasion, invoking immigration law. A fourth proclaimed that the federal government would begin protecting the states from the invasion— fulfilling its Constitutional duty (which Biden ignored). A fifth order began the process of declaring the gangs and cartels to be ‘foreign terrorist organizations.’

Last week, that process finished, activating a slew of additional laws and powers, and only then, after all that, did Trump invoke the Alien Enemies Act. In other words, Trump already declared an invasion two months ago. That declaration has never been questioned. It has never been enjoined. And he has issued many more executive and military actions consistent with and relying on his original invasion declaration.

That original declaration of invasion was never challenged in court because it is subjective and relies on the Commander-in-Chief’s opinion. In other words, declaring an invasion is a political question, not a judicial question. The courts have no role in it.

The Democrats don’t have a legal leg to stand on. Trump’s team sewed it up twenty different ways months ago. Democrats never saw it coming. Not until now. Now, we are moving into the next phase, the action phase, when it starts becoming clear what all the preparations were leading up to.

It was also political genius. By starting with these hyper-violent cartel crooks, Trump is making Democrats defend some of the most violent and reprehensible criminals in the world. It’s not a good look, to say the least.

Pop your popcorn. Things are about to get even more interesting. If that is possible.

Have a magnificent Monday! Coffee & Covid shall return, tomorrow morning, with even more essential news and commentary you can’t live without.

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