Opinion
By Jeff Childers
1/22/25
Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! Your astounding roundup today includes: media goes mental over billionaire’s errant gesture faux paus and miss the main moment; Trump doubles down on deleting DEI in a second executive order and a shocking memorandum from the Office of Personnel and Management; Trump running rings around the Democrats with careful and strategic planning; John Bolton suffers a setback; and Trump snags tech titans and announces historic AI infrastructure project all at once.
🪖 C&C ARMY POST | MORNING MONOLOGUE 🪖
Holy frozen custard, Batman, it’s snowing in Destin. Destin, Florida. Snow, meet beach.
Pensacola received 7.5 inches of snow yesterday, a one-day historical record. We didn’t see snow here in Gainesville, but it did snow in Lake City, just 40 minutes north on I-75.
So much for global warming, or whatever they’re calling it now!
🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍
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Trump has repeatedly said America is entering a Golden Age. Maybe that is true. I certainly hope so. Or maybe, at some point, politics will encounter its normal reversion to the mean, and we’ll start to see some kind of effective resistance emerge. But just now, the Democrats are wrapping themselves around the axle of body language hysteria. Their complaint is some poorly-thought-through argument about Elon Musk being a secret crypto-Nazi, or something. It isn’t perfectly clear, but it’s all because he waved his arms the ‘wrong’ way during an excited rally moment on Monday.
Well, it’s his own fault. Elon neglected to submit his speech six weeks in advance for prior review by the Global Gesture Compliance Committee of the World Economic Forum in Brussels. Had he done so, the GGCC would have indicated that his proposed arm motion fell under the chapter ‘Faux Paus’ in the Committee’s Manual on Acceptable Waving (see page 1116).
The sad part is it could have been so easily avoided, had he just flashed the standard GGCC-approved princess wave, or even just flicked his wrist in a feminine downwards thrust at the finish. But with one careless arm-flail, Elon’s semaphore signal accidentally unlocked the Fourth Reich, a deplorable DLC module whose armies are assembling even now, and which, as you read this, are Goose Stepping their way through a fantastic zone of feverish progressive imagination.
Seriously though, the corporate media is so easy to troll. I’d bet decent money Elon created this controversy on purpose, taking a page from Trump’s own media-trollbook. Since progressives are so desperate for something to cling to, to reassure themselves as virtuous despite Trump’s landslide, they’ll even latch on to something as dumb as this.
This fracas over Elon’s wave is the adult equivalent of a child on a long car ride complaining that the other child keeps staring at them. He’s still looking at me!
They aren’t letting go of it either, no matter the cost. Behold, the Ouroboros of Outrage, the Left eating itself:
What’s most wonderful is that, while corporate media was busying itself with body language takedowns, finding secret pro-Hitler bias in errant gestures from over-excited billionaires, it was busily not reporting on gestures that actually matter, like the pen flourish at the end of the executive order President Trump signed yesterday, which drove an inky stake through the vampiric heart of D.E.I.
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They’re literally ignoring the biggest story of the decade, if not of our lifetimes. While the top headlines obsessed over Elon’s limb placement, I had to travel all the way to the India Tribune to find the full story. It was headlined, “Trump signs executive order ending diversity discrimination in federal government, private sector.” You’d think it would have been bigger news.
The Tribune’s sub-headline added, “The order revokes previous diversity and inclusion policies, calling for a merit-based approach to opportunities and ensuring compliance with federal civil rights laws.” Even that was a pitiful understatement.
The truth is, Trump just nuked DEI. From orbit.
It was like The Apprentice met The Presidency. Yesterday, Trump signed his second consecutive DEI order, Tuesday’s even more detailed and specific than Monday’s, and his Office of Personnel Management issued a tart memorandum. It informed all federal agencies that, by no later than 5pm tonight, they must close DEI all offices, delete all DEI websites, cancel all scheduled DEI “training,” terminate all DEI contractors, place all DEI staff on paid leave, and then prepare for staff reductions by the end of business on the last day of this month, January 31st.
Boom! You’re fired. Axed, laid off, made redundant, severed, separated, and terminated with prejudice.
Trump’s team isn’t just messing around, either. It’s not just performative. They can try to re-name DEI into something else, to try burying it in the bureaucratic depths, but it won’t work this time. Trump’s team is already onto that little game:
They’ve also required every federal agency to list their DEI employees as of November 5, 2024 —election day— just in case they were smuggled into other jobs after Trump’s win in a cryptic effort to save them from getting fired and keep the resistance going.
Behold the example email attached to the OPM’s Memo, for sending to all federal employees, whose week is already off to a rocky start, what with having to come in to the office today:
Note that, according to this email, any employee who knows about efforts to disguise DEI using “coded or imprecise language” and who doesn’t report it can face “adverse consequences.”
In other words, just give us a reason. We dare you.
But there was so much more. Yesterday’s order also rescinded a long list of “opportunity” orders stretching back all the way to 1965 (the “Equal Employment Opportunity” order signed by President Johnson). It ordered all federal procurement agencies to stop requiring federal contractors to comply with “diversity” or “affirmative action” policies, but rather to encourage those contractors to “advance the policy of individual initiative, excellence, and hard work.”
Agencies must now prioritize speed, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness in contracting, and discard any social goals. Imagine that.
The Department of Education was directed to send an anti-DEI memo to all educational institutions receiving federal subsidies.
President Trump also encouraged the private sector to follow the federal government’s lead and “end illegal D.E.I. discrimination and preferences and comply with all federal civil-rights laws.”
He also directed federal agencies to investigate corporations and foundations to ensure compliance with the law. Every agency was directed to single out nine potential lawsuits against major players—forming a vast compliance dragnet:
As a part of this plan, each agency shall identify up to nine potential civil compliance investigations of publicly traded corporations, large non-profit corporations or associations, foundations with assets of 500 million dollars or more, State and local bar and medical associations, and institutions of higher education with endowments over 1 billion dollars.
That single paragraph was a strategic masterstroke that will cause a mad scramble at the biggest and most influential institutions in the country to immediately revise their employment policies. It will immediately shut up and shut down all internal and external DEI messaging at these institutions, as they scramble to get out of the compliance crosshairs.
By decentralizing the huge job of identifying potential lawsuits down to the individual agencies, the Trump administration multiplied its enforcement powers. The order was literally an anti-DEI multiplier.
🔥 It seems so obvious now that we can see it. This kind of bold, fearless action was literally the only way to really root out the sunken tendrils of the racist DEI practices that had become irretrievably enmeshed into all our public and private institutions. Trump’s executive orders will trigger a kind of rapid immune response, the country’s projectile vomiting of long-standing, unfair, woke hiring practices.
What a time to be alive.
Trump’s orders weren’t gentle. They weren’t polite, compromising, or a mere shift in policy; they were a battering ram aimed directly at DEI’s institutional infrastructure. Trump isn’t doing the work—the system is being forced to purge itself, violently and suddenly, of deeply embedded practices that many people sadly concluded were untouchable.
The genius in Trump’s orders was in its bare-knuckled aggression. They didn’t nibble around the edges or cautiously test the waters; they are kicking down the DEI door and setting the woke house on fire. Institutions that leaned heavily on DEI to shield their mediocrity or dress up their faux ideological conformity are now scrambling to protect themselves, not out of principle, but out of sheer self-preservation.
The speed and scope of the reaction to the orders could achieve in mere months what it might have taken decades of lawsuits and debates to accomplish. The DEI regime is being forced to confront its own contradictions, and whether you view it as a restoration of fairness and merit, or as an overdue reckoning of justice, it’s undeniably bold.
While Trump just effortlessly unleashed a package of executive orders that were institutional dynamite and change everything, yesterday corporate media busied itself by refereeing Elon Musk’s alleged Nazi Wave Olympics.
DEI is so over. Put a fork in it; it’s done.
🔥 These DEI orders, memos, and draft emails weren’t created in the last two days during the Administration’s rush to move into DC offices. Trump’s Cabinet hasn’t even been approved yet. These swift management actions—like placing federal DEI staff immediately on leave and directing the agencies to promptly terminate diversity-related programs—demonstrate a meticulous, coordinated strategy that could not possibly have been formulated overnight.
In other words, they’ve been working on this for a long time. And somehow, they managed to keep it all under wraps. No leaks. Think about that.
Now compare what we’re seeing to Trump’s first term.
Actually, never mind Trump’s first term. This strategic master class is like nothing we have ever seen from a new presidential administration. Trump just invented a brand new benchmark, and has redefined what it means to hit the ground running. His political enemies are so far behind that they are vanishing from the rear-view mirror. It’s not just that Trump is already scoring touchdowns while the Democrats are still warming up; he’s landscaping the football field and installing more Trump-only touchdown zones.
He’s re-writing the rules in real time. Critics point to how easy executive orders are to undo, but they miss the point entirely. By outsourcing the work, Trump is reconfiguring society itself. And since it’s all based on the existing legal framework provided by the Constitution, the Supreme Court, and federal civil rights laws, it will be heinously difficult to oppose.
The speed —such as requiring things be done today— defeats lawfare. A lot of stuff will be moot long before it can get in front of a judge.
And remember, this is only one of Trump’s initiatives. The same strategic thinking is suffused throughout the rest of the many, many orders that are right now transforming the Executive Branch of the United States government.
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Yesterday, the Trump Administration canceled John Bolton’s Secret Service detail:
I’m sorry John felt disappointed about that. Oh well. Next do the human cockroach! Please!
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Yesterday, CNN ran a story headlined “Trump announces a $500 billion AI infrastructure investment in the US.” President Trump said the one project is expected to create 100,000 American jobs.
There’s a lot to say about this deal, which bears an insane name that will fuel countless conspiracies: “Stargate.” But first, let me make this obvious observation: Trump has tamed tech. Trump has somehow corralled all his former enemies into attending his Inauguration and furthering his economic agenda.
This might be my imagination, but over the last two days I could swear ChatGPT has ditched wokeness. Either way.
The three tech titans attending yesterday’s press briefing were Oracle’s Larry Ellison, SoftBank’s CEO Masayoshi Son, and OpenAI’s baby-faced CEO Sam Altman. During the presser, they collectively pledged $500 billion dollars over the next four years (i.e., Trump’s term), to build out what Trump called the “largest AI infrastructure project in history.”
Details were sparse, but apparently, Stargate will have multiple parts. The first part, a million-square-foot data center, is already underway in Texas. “I think this will be the most important project of this era,” Sam Altman said, adding, “We wouldn’t be able to do this without you, Mr. President.”
And there it was. All three men praised Trump to the roof. It was a development that made Democrats hate them and want them to fail even if that means the Chinese win the AI arms race. It’s often confusing to be a Democrat.
Apart from that, not many details were supplied about Stargate, except that Larry Ellison tried way too hard to sell AI as a medical miracle. Quite unfortunately, Larry picked mRNA cancer drugs to use as his example, bragging that AI could help speed up detecting cancer particles floating around in patients’ blood (particles=bad), and then “within 48 hours” could help make a personalized cancer “vaccine” that would force folk’s cells into making even more cancer particles that will float around in their blood (particles=good!).
The more I’ve learned about mRNA technology, the more it seems like the dumbest idea science has ever had, a wormhole of stupidity. The basic idea is to genetically engineer a shot forcing your cells to create some kind of protein, so that your natural immune system then mounts a response, killing all the transfected cells (which used to be healthy) as well as the targeted cancer itself.
That’s the idea anyhow.
But … if the goal is spurring the immune system with cancer proteins, why do we need the whole mRNA process in the first place? Why not just inject the protein that spurs the immune response, and leave the risky transfection process out of it? After all, that’s how traditional vaccines work. And in Ellison’s scenario, if detectable cancer proteins are already present in the blood, it’s not completely clear how forcing cells to produce more of the same proteins could solve the problem instead of making it worse.
Sadly, I think the answer to “why mRNA” has more to do with things like patents and profit potentials rather than the mRNA platform supporting any stargate to a health paradise. We’ll see. But unfortunately for the mRNA scientists, we are all onto them now. We know too much.
If we have anything to do with it, a whole parallel dimension of fierce mRNA criticism is preparing to flood through the Stargate.
Anyway, I don’t think Ellison was labeling the Stargate AI project as an mRNA project, as some of the hot takes have suggested. Ellison constantly says nerdy, dumb stuff about AI, like how it can help stop crime by constantly surveilling everyone. He’s not a great public speaker, and he’s certainly no politician.
This time, I think he just picked a horrible example of how this Stargate AI project might help people. He’d hoped to open a portal to a new dimension of AI hype based on his poor understanding of mRNA cancer vaccines, which he probably acquired by reading corporate media. The truth is, they’ve been trying to develop “personalized” mRNA cancer vaccines for 20+ years now without success.
Maybe AI can solve that puzzle, but I doubt it.
🔥 At bottom, the furious hot takes over Ellison’s mRNA-cancer-vaccines comments are a distraction resembling the controversy over Elon Musk’s arm flapping. The much more interesting and astonishing fact is that Trump has somehow managed to recruit to his cause all of Silicon Valley and its titans of technology, along with their billions.
It was a political coup of the highest order. Silicon Valley, once a fortress of progressive loyalty and a cornerstone of the Democratic donor machine, is now literally standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Trump, pouring their billions into his agenda.
Strike that. It wasn’t just a recruitment—it was a hostile takeover.
Trump’s genius lies in its double impact. By bringing the tech titans into his team, Trump didn’t just gain their resources and influence; he has also denied them to his political enemies. Every dollar, every innovation, and every headline coming out of Silicon Valley in support of Trump’s initiatives is one less resource reinforcing the Democrats’ narrative.
Plus, they’re doing the work. The tech titans are now pitching Trump’s AI strategy and Trump’s economic plans as their own efforts. Meanwhile, the Democrats are fumbling in disarray to explain how they let their most powerful allies slip away.
This is nothing less than a historic and unique political realignment of incalculable import. Trump’s gains don’t just advance his own agenda; they also leave his opponents scrambling for purchase in a game where the best players suddenly switched teams without notice. Trump didn’t just change the game; he’s flipped the board.
Have a wonderful Wednesday! Coffee & Covid will return tomorrow morning, with even more insightful commentary and snarky coverage of the most essential and historic news.
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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
