Opinion
By Jeff Childers
2/24/25
Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! Welcome to a new week of fantasically chaotic Trumpian wrecking balls. In today’s roundup: new FBI Director Kash Patel hires explosive new second in command unlocking a new bureaucratic fear; great news for housecats races out of the Department of Homeland Security; Trudeau heads to Kiev to help save Ukraine from President Trump in the latest emergency EU counter-summit; new climate preprint detects surprising statistical correlation between NGO funding and climate study results; and Trump teases Amish health rates in Governors’ meeting.
🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍
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If we could climb into a functional hot tub time machine (might as well be comfortable), it would be fun to return to the top floor of the Hoover Building in Washington on January 7th, 2021— right before they carved our justice system in twain. When the agency’s top brass discussed launching the largest FBI operation in history against unarmed, first-time-offending Trump supporters, for trespassing, we could listen to see if anyone in the room warned them that, “you know, we could get some blowback over this.” Yesterday, four years later, the FBI did get some serious blowback, and blowback’s name is Dan Bongino. Behold, the New York Times headline that nobody, especially not the FBI, saw coming: “Right-Wing Commentator Named F.B.I. Deputy Director.”
The Baby Boomers have now been purged from control of the nation’s two-tiered justice system, and the Gen-Xers are firmly in charge.
In case you aren’t familiar with him, Dan Bongino, 50, is a former New York City police officer, a former Secret Service agent, and earned a Penn State MBA (“unqualified!”). He hosts a popular conservative podcast, was a Fox anchor during the difficult years, and has published at least seven books, including 2018’s Spygate: The Attempted Sabotage of Donald J. Trump.
Yesterday, President Trump announced that newly confirmed FBI Director Kash Patel hired Dan to be the agency’s Deputy Director — Patel’s number two — a job not requiring any Senate confirmation.
Around this point in the story, an exhausted Times summoned the strength to weakly protest: too much politics. The FBI, claimed the Times, is “an agency known for its tradition of independence.” Apolitical. Huh? Is that true? Is that really what the FBI is known for? “Independence?” What do you think?
Oh, well. Set aside the Times’ silly opinions.
Suffice it to say, the Times feels dissed and disgruntled. It might not have been illegal, but the Times whined that Bongino’s appointment was “radical,” an “abrupt departure” from normal bureaucratic norms and customs. (Ironically, that was precisely why we voted for a Trump Administration: to end ‘business as usual’ in Washington.) But that wasn’t all. The Grey Lady labeled Patel and Bongino misinformation superspreaders and sneered that they were the “least experienced leadership pair” in the FBI’s history.
But … doesn’t that evaluation depend on what kind of experience we’re talking about? Both Bongino and Patel, for example, have written entire books about FBI malfeasance. Does that count? Now, the profoundly skeptical pair run the agency. They aren’t likely to be co-opted by the permanent bureaucrats, either, since they both stuck to their guns during Trump’s wilderness years at great personal cost (Bongino, for example, was fired from Fox after platforming Trump in 2023).
FBI, meet blowback. Blowback is your new boss.
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The FBI wasn’t the only culprit involved in creating the two-tiered justice system that is now experiencing blowback. The Hill ran a deeply gratifying story yesterday headlined, “Angry Democratic donors turn off the flow of money.” The Democrats “have a major problem as they try to refashion their brand— the money isn’t there.” Weird. Where did all that money go?
“Donors,” explained the Hill, “are still angry about the election results.” Dem donors are feeling “uninspired by anything their side has put forward since then.” What? Are they saying crusty maven Maxine Waters and human barnacle Bernie Sanders have failed to inspire open pocketbooks?
Bluntly: “I’ll be blunt here: The Democratic Party is f‑‑‑ing terrible. Plain and simple,” said one major Democratic donor. “In fact, it doesn’t get much worse. This is worse than 2016,” the donor continued. “Our party is so weak and so diminished.” Practically flaccid.
The Hill said big donors were pulling back the cash pallets because they don’t see any plan. And small donors, explained the Hill, are snapping shut their change purses because they want to see more combat with Trump. The consistent theme among all levels of immigrant-loving Democrat donors is, apparently, no mas.
If I were just a little more conspiratorial, I’d suspect they are frantically trying to lower expectations for future Democrat fundraising, after Trump’s team canceled all that murky USAID funding for Nigerian trans operas. Haha! That would be crazy though!
The Democrats’ fundraising woes probably has nothing to do with the funding freezes. I mean, how could it? Do you agree?
🔥 Either way, something is wrong. First, they said it was just the usual post-election-loss voter fatigue. But now, it’s getting undeniable. On Friday, Straight Arrow News ran a story headlined, “Democrats in Congress receive lowest approval rating in Quinnipiac poll history.” In other words, they’re scraping the bottom of the polling barrel with a rusty Speaker’s mallet. It was so much worse than the headline suggested.
Related: (New York Post, yesterday) “House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries demurs when asked about Democrats’ terrible polls, listlessness.”
It was much worse because Republicans also reached a polling record— a record high, in the very same poll. Contrary to corporate media’s delirious hallucinations this weekend, as you surely can sense for yourself, registered Republicans were 79% approving of their lawmakers’ performance, compared to a stubborn 10% of confused conservatives who disapproved.
According to Quinnipiac’s poll of 1,039 registered voters, barely 21% approved of how Democrats in Congress were handling their jobs — the lowest approval rating in the poll’s history (it started in 2009). Meanwhile, a whopping, overwhelming 68% of voters disapproved of the Democrats.
The SS Donkey is listing to starboard, even among Democrats. Only four in ten registered Democrats approved of their lawmakers’ performance, while nearly half (49%) disapproved. Unsurprisingly, the natives of BlueSky are restless:
For a laugh, read the responses to Ali’s question.
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The housecats of America are enjoying some well-earned blowback. Time ran the story late last week, headlined “Trump to Remove Deportation Protections for Half Million Haitians.” Meow.
DHS dumped a container of catnip this weekend, when it cancelled a Biden Administration order to renew “Temporary Protected Status”—which gives people legal authority to be in the country without citizenship—for Haitians. (Last week, HHS revoked TPS status for Venezuelans.)
In the statement, Homeland Security reported that in 2011, 57,000 Haitians were eligible for TPS. But by July of last year, that number had clawed its way up to 520,694.
Time quoted nobody who spoke in favor of the move. It did, however, quote several outraged experts. Don’t they know how much crime and violence there is in Haiti?? Apparently, exporting Haitian chaos is the humane solution. Since there is so much crime in Haiti, they believe we should relocate Haiti’s criminals here, to small towns in America, to give the Haitian locals a breather.
But now it’s time to let the fur fly.
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Yesterday, the National Post ran an arresting story headlined, “Trudeau joining world leaders in Ukraine for summit on third anniversary of war.” It’s another emergency counter-summit! More talking! And, in Kiev. In the midst of the war. I guess this means they aren’t that worried about Putin, after all. One Oreshnik missile could take out Canada’s lame-duck Prime Minister and most pesky EU ministers.
The article advised that stubby former comedian and pintsized Martial Law Coordinator Volodymyr Zelenskyy summoned oleaginous Castro lookalike “Prime Minister Justin Trudeau … along with a dozen other world leaders” to Kiev today, to hold an “extraordinary” summit discussing Donald J. Trump.
In related news, on Saturday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said President Trump is “very confident” in forging a deal with Russia to end the Proxy War, and suggested it could come as early as this week. Expect fireworks.
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A new preprint study published last week on OSF titled, “Conflicts of Interest, Funding Support, and Author Affiliation in Peer-Reviewed Research on the Relationship between Climate Change and Geophysical Characteristics of Hurricanes.” You’ll never believe this one. Well, you probably will believe it, but still.
The researchers “analyzed 82 peer-reviewed articles on the relationship between climate change and the geophysical properties of hurricanes published between 1994 and 2023.” They were looking to see whether there was any statistical correlation between the climate studies’ conclusions and the authors’ disclosed conflicts of interest and affiliations or the studies’ funding sources.
They were partly stymied right out of the gate. They found “no associations between Conflict-of-Interest disclosures and study outcomes”— because “none (0) of the 331 authors disclosed COIs.” The researchers drily noted that, “we suspect that
some authors had COIs that they did not disclose.”
One wonders how these studies could have survived peer review lacking disclosures of conflicts of interests, but whatever.
What they did find was, and maybe you should sit down for this: “Non-governmental organization (NGO) funding was a significant predictor for an article to find a positive association between climate change and geophysical characteristics of hurricanes as a research outcome.”
USAID? The NIH? In other words, were the NGOs that funded the climate studies reaching the approved conclusions themselves funded by the United States taxpayer? I’d bet a lot. I’d even bet your money (after all, that’s what they’re using).
This study was just the latest icicle hanging from the expanding snowball of the great scientific deep freeze—where progress hibernates, and inconvenient truths are buried in snowdrifts of pre-approved conclusions. It is devilishly hard to have progress when the outcomes are predetermined and frozen in place, and where pseudoscience gets paid— leaving real scientists freezing in a ditch.
Remember— it’s much more damaging than just fake climate studies. It is an avalanche of psuedoscientific misinformation covering the entire landscape of academia. The NGO-purchased studies support claims of consensus, leading to ever more funding for more scripted studies, which in turn justify ever more laws eroding freedom.
This isn’t just academic fraud—it’s a feedback loop of manufactured consensus, feeding government control disguised as science. It is long past time to cut off the taxpayer tap—no more government-funded NGOs, no more pre-approved ‘truths.’ Stop following the science.
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The far-left New Republic published an unintentionally encouraging story this weekend headlined, “Trump’s Latest Health Care Claim Will Make Your Head Spin. It was the usual gibberish quibbling with the President’s quoted statistics (without refuting them). The important thing is, at last week’s National Governors’ Conference, President Trump riffed about the remarkable absence of autism among the Amish.
That reference should be encouraging news for people fretting that Trump is soft on vaccines. Nobody in their right mind who is pro-pharma would mention the Amish, not even to argue about the claims.
“The Pennsylvania Dutch, they don’t do anything, and they’re amazingly healthy,” Trump said, after talking about the explosion of pediatric autism in the United States.
The op-ed’s author slammed Trump for claiming that there was no autism fifteen years ago (Trump said, “like, no autism”), but confirmed he was right that the rates have dramatically increased to an astonishing and alarming 1 in 34. The author did his best to discredit the Amish finding by citing “studies,” but if you look up the one cited study, even that study allowed the Amish autism rate was only 1 in 271 (2010).
So … Trump was right. He was right even using their numbers, never mind the slew of favorable independent studies he could have cited. The simple fact is: there is a massive statistical difference between autism rates in Amish communities and the rest of America— even by the woke New Republic’s best counter-study. It’s a mystery dying to be solved. Maybe it’s the horses and buggies, the raw milk, or the super suspicious stable-raising parties?
Another mystery dying to be solved is the riddle of how, exactly, progressivism agreed to marry big medicine. Was it because they love technology and expertise that much? Maybe future historians can unravel how progressivism evolved from raging against Big Pharma to lovingly drip-feeding it billions in taxpayer-funded grants.
In any case, Trump’s offhand remark detonated like a rogue Oreshnik missile in a Pfizer factory. Right now, pharma boards are convening emergency meetings to frantically discuss the problem of Donald J. Trump. Probably in Kiev. Trump’s team is preparing to defrost the science of shot injuries. The kindling under the altar of vaccine orthodoxy is about to catch fire.
Blowback.
Have a magnificent Monday! Come on back here tomorrow morning for even more essential news and commentary, C&C style.
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The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida.
