Opinion
By Jeff Childers
10-04-23
Good morning, C&Cers and all those who quietly fight for freedom, it’s Wednesday! Today’s action-packed roundup includes: Swiss reporter imprisoned for calling another Swiss reporter a fat lesbian; Fifth Circuit expands injunction against government censorship; House Speaker Kevin McCarthy rapidly and historically removed from his seat; Governor Pritzger begs Biden for border help; amazing but spicy citizen journalist video clip from New York City; Scotland moves to ban trans rapist prison switching; Florida law allowing death penalty for child rapists takes effect; Supreme Court refuses to help take Trump off the presidential ballot; and the EU failed to approve more funding to help protect Ukraine’s borders.
🗞 THE C&C ARMY POST 🗞
🪖 Thanks to the powerful C&C Army, for assembling for yesterday’s multiplier for courageous covid doc Ryan Cole. The numbers aren’t shown on the fundraising website but I will get us some feedback. In case you missed it, here’s the link. Remember to end your donation with a ‘2’ so the woke Washington Medical Board gets the message:
LINK: Click here to donate to Dr. Ryan Cole’s Fight for Freedom.
🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞
🔥 Straight to jail! NBC News ran an eye-popping headline yesterday: “Swiss LGBTQ groups praise jail sentence for commentator who called journalist a ‘fat lesbian’.” It was personal. The way I talk here on C&C, you better believe when I saw that headline, I immediately whipped out my pocket Constitution and gave that baby a kiss.
Say what you like about body positivity and the virtuousness of eschewing unflattering commentary on others’ physical appearance. Alain Soral did, and before he knew what was happening, on Monday he got sixty days in the slammer for the egregious crimes of “defamation, discrimination and incitement to hatred.”
The target of Alain’s curt, vituperative insult was another Swiss journalist, Catherine Macherel. To be specific, and I hope I don’t offend anyone, I’m just reporting the facts, in addition to calling her a fat lesbian, Alain also uncharitably called Catherine an “unhinged queer activist.” He did it two years ago. In a YouTube interview.
You know me, I had to check and see for myself. There aren’t many pictures of Catherine available online, but I finally found one:
So. I don’t think he should’ve got jail time, but Alain could have been a little more circumspect. He could’ve just said Catherine was an “obese” lesbian, a “plump” lesbian, or a “lesbian shaped like the Pillsbury Dough Boy.” Or even, “a whole lot of lesbian to love.”
Here in the U.S., thanks to the First Amendment, defamation is not a crime. Defamation is also not actionable if the insult is true. But if you do injure somebody with a false statement — injure them in terms of dollars and cents — you can then sue them in civil court for restitution. Hurt feelings don’t support a defamation claim. Generally speaking, you can’t get any money for your hurt feelings, and you sure can’t lock people up.
If it could talk, the Constitution might say, toughen up and insult them back. Remember “sticks and stones” from when you were a kid? Or that old chestnut, “I’m rubber and you’re glue?” There’re lots of ways.
And who knows what the crimes of “incitement to hatred” or “discrimination” might be. It all sounds pretty Orwellian. Thought crimes, and so forth.
Instead, Switzerland’s out-of-control LGBTQ++ crowd has pulled the levers of power in that unfortunate country so hard such that just insulting a gay person can get you thrown in prison. And that’s right where we’d be in this country, you’d better believe it, absent the First Amendment. Just look at what they’re doing to Trump. He didn’t even call a lesbian “fat.”
🔥 Meanwhile, here in the U.S., we have a little First Amendment ‘good news’ update. More progress! USA Today ran a story yesterday headlined, “Federal appeals court expands limits on Biden administration in First Amendment case.”
The procedural mechanics are a little complicated, a kind of legal loop, but the bottom line is yesterday the Fifth Circuit “reconsidered” an earlier decision, reversing itself, and adding Homeland Security’s so-called CISA agency back to the injunction. Now the government can again appeal to the Supreme Court and ask for the right to tell social media companies to censor Americans speech.
Missouri’s Attorney General Andrew Bailey, who is helping prosecute the case on behalf of ordinary Americans, tweeted, “CISA is the ‘nerve center’ of the vast censorship enterprise, the very entity that worked with the FBI to silence the Hunter Biden laptop story.” Now it will have to stop policing social media until the case has been decided.
🔥 Local KTLA reported late yesterday that “House makes history, removes Kevin McCarthy as Speaker.” For the first time in American history, the Speaker of the House was removed yesterday after House Democrats unaccountably and ironically joined House Freedom Caucus Republicans to effect the vote.
It was a twofer. In his first official act, interim Speaker Patrick McHenry (R-NC) ordered Nancy Pelosi (D-Ca.) to vacate the physical office of the Speaker immediately after McCarthy’s ouster. McCarthy had been too chicken to do it.
Presumably Pelosi’s former office will also get a deep cleaning.
I called the democrats’ participation “ironic” because one of the Freedom Caucus Republicans’ complaints about McCarthy was that he’d just used democrat support to get a budget deal passed over the weekend. Now the Freedom Caucus worked with democrats to remove the Speaker for working with democrats. What can I tell you? Politics makes strange bedfellows. Or, it was bipartisanship. You pick.
Of course, at bottom, McCarthy is now gone because he was clinging to sending more money to help Ukraine defend its borders.
Kevin McCarthy’s historic removal began after Matt Gaetz (R-Fl.) filed a motion this weekend to remove him, arguing cogently and forcefully that McCarthy broke several parts of the agreement they’d made when agreeing to help elect him in the first place. Part of that agreement allowed any Republican member to ask for a vote to remove McCarthy if he broke the deal, and that’s exactly what Matt Gaetz did.
Establishment Republicans called Gaetz a chaos agent. Newt Gingrich called Gaetz and the seven other Freedom Caucus Republicans who joined the vote “traitors.” But Gaetz rose to the occasion and honestly delivered some of the best speeches I’ve heard in Congress in a very long time. Gaetz is really developing into a serious, significant statesman.
In one impassioned clip yesterday, among other things, Gaetz eloquently explained he has reached his limit on the ballooning national debt:
I don’t feel pressure from conservatives or Democrats. I feel the judgment of history. I worry that when the history books are written about this country going down, that my name is going to be on the Board of Directors here.
And if this country is going down, and we’re losing the dollar, I am going down fighting. I don’t care if that means fighting Republicans, Democrats, the uniparty, House leadership, the PACs, or the lobbyists.
I’ve had it.
CLIP: Matt Gaetz, unleashed (1:51). **Warning: one f-bomb.
So, what’s next? To his credit, McCarthy gracefully bowed out of the running for replacement speaker:
As you can imagine, speculation over McCarthy’s replacement is burning even hotter than over DiFi’s. In a tweet, Gaetz has mentioned Jim Jordan. Many reports say Steve Scalise is “making phone calls.”
Get ready for lefty brains to start bursting. Representative Troy Nehls (R-Tex.) announced he will shortly file the paperwork nominating President Trump as the replacement Speaker of the House. Last night, Hannity said “he was aware” that Trump has been contacted to be the “interim speaker.” Jim Jordan told Hannity in the same segment that, while he wants Trump for President, he would be okay with Trump as interim speaker.
Wild times, people. Wild times. Who do you think should be the next Speaker of the House?
🔥 Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker (D) sent Joe Biden a strongly-worded letter yesterday, urgently requesting help with illegal migrants who are being bussed into Chicago. Hilariously, Pritzger’s letter suggested that Biden appoint “one person” in the White House to oversee border efforts:
But … Kamala Harris is already the ‘one person’ in the White House who is overseeing the border. Pritzger acted like she doesn’t even exist. Question asked, by the Hill:
Indeed. Apparently Kamala Harris is so inconsequential that Governor Pritzger didn’t even waste the words to suggest Biden needs someone else.
🔥 Speaking of illegal migrants and impassioned speeches, this one won’t be for everyone due to some extremely adult language that might offend the sensitive, but after weighing the pro’s and con’s, I decided to include it in today’s post. To set the table, Elon Musk has been encouraging “citizen journalists” to make their own reports on Twitter. Elon went to the border last week to show everyone how it’s done.
I have no idea whether this next super-spicy clip resulted from Elon’s encouragement or not, but it does show the growing frustration that regular folks have with traditional media.
In other words, if you stupid reporters won’t do your jobs, get out of the way and let us do it.
So the unidentified but totally based citizen who posted this video is today’s example. He saw something, filmed something, and it turned out to be a story. As the clip starts, a New York City resident approached a fancy hotel and asked what’s going on? Somebody said, it’s a migrant shelter. He started filming and, like a kicked-over rotten log, human cockroaches began boiling out of the lobby and trying to crawl all over him.
Watch this clip if you’re okay with the raw, but appropriate adult language.
For those who chose not to watch, what happened next is they all got into an argument over whether the guy “has the right” to film the hotel. They kept ordering him off, pushing around him, and he kept refusing to leave. More and more thugs came out of the lobby and tried to crowd him away. An NYPD officer stood by but refused to intervene. By the end of the clip, you can see at least eight people on the sidewalk representing the “shelter.”
None of them wore hotel uniforms.
We can learn a lot from this short video. We already know New York is paying luxury hotels hand over fist to house illegal immigrants. The clip evidences a conspiracy of silence between the media and the government to cover up the story. The Migrant Mafia members were too confident. They look like people who expect not ever to face any scrutiny.
A media that only covers gigantic problems when they are political problems for Republicans is a wholly worthless media.
Next, the clip showed us the uniform face of the vast migrant industrial complex. All those Migrant Mafia people are getting paid with taxpayer dollars, probably handsomely. And they all look and act like thugs. Who are these people, really? Who was the young black man in the Eastern European gangster-style track suit who spoke with authority and claimed to “own this building?”
New Yorkers, if you had an honest media, they would be all over figuring out where the money was going.
Finally, whoever they are, these Migrant Mafia people obviously do not understand basic laws of the United States of America. Otherwise they would know that the sidewalk is a publicly-owned area not subject to their jurisdiction, whatever they think that is. They seem to come from some third-world hellhole where might makes right and intimidation tactics are de rigueur.
What did we learn? The Establishment Media is a lost cause. We need a new media. New Yorkers: take up your cellphone cameras, and report!
🔥 We have some great news in the gender border wars. The UK Times ran a delightful counter-revolutionary story yesterday headlined, “‘’High-risk’ sex offenders to be denied gender switch in bill amendment.”
A proposed new law in Scotland provides that ‘sexual predators’ can be barred from legally changing their gender if they are deemed to be ‘high risk’ in a significant amendment to Scotland’s controversial transgender law. Even better, the proposed amendment was unanimously supported across all parties in a late-night vote yesterday, with a single abstention.
In layman’s terms, the law prevents rapists from changing their gender to get reassigned to women’s prison. Somehow that used to be a controversial notion. Progress.
🔥 It got even better. The UK Telegraph ran a story yesterday headlined, “Trans women to be banned from female hospital wards.”
In what the article called the UK Health Secretary’s plans to “restore common sense” to the NHS, a proposed rule change would require hospitals to separate patients by biological sex. In other words, regardless of how they dress or prance around, biological men would still not be allowed to be treated in female-only hospital wards.
Even better, hospitals would be required to use grammatically-correct, biological sex-specific language when treating women, and banned from using ridiculous, reprehensible, woke terminology like ‘birthing person’ or ‘people who menstruate.’
Steve Barclay, UK’s Health Secretary, told reporters “It is vital that women’s voices are heard in the NHS and the privacy, dignity and safety of all patients are protected.” Finally.
🔥 In more sex-offender news, Florida’s new law increasing penalties for child rapists went into effect yesterday, allowing for the death penalty in egregious cases and setting the minimum sentence at life in prison:
There are valid libertarian concerns about the new law, but it is the natural and predictable result of the crazed movement to legitimize pedophilia, as evidenced by new blue state laws like California’s, which recently largely de-criminalized “consensual” sex with minors, down to twelve years old.
California Representative Scott Weiner (D-San Fran.), who passed SB 145, and unidentified minor.
So.
🔥 The Epoch Times ran a promising story yesterday headlined, “US Supreme Court Rejects Challenge to Block Trump in 2024.”
The case got to the nation’s highest court after the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida dismissed John Anthony Castro’s lawsuit to bar President Trump from appearing on the presidential ballot for being an insurrectionist. Castro, a Texas lawyer, promptly appealed to the Supreme Court. But the highest court declined to hear the case, leaving the original dismissal undisturbed.
Game on!
🚀 Finally, in more bad news for the corrupt oligarchy of Ukraine and its flagging battle to protect its borders, which have been overrun by illegal Russian migrants, Russia Today ran a story yesterday headlined, “EU fails to unblock €5 billion aid to Ukraine.”
After Hungary vetoed the vote on the current aid package, E.U. ministers promised they will try again next year. Oh well. The Counteroffensive is almost over anyway.
Have a wonderful Wednesday! As the Terminator famously said, I’ll be back tomorrow morning with more delicious Coffee & Covid, so come on back, ya’ll.
We can’t do it without you. Consider joining with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds. I could use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠
Twitter: jchilders98.
Truth Social: jchilders98.
MeWe: mewe.com/i/coffee_and_covid.
Telegram: t.me/coffeecovidnews
C&C Swag! www.shopcoffeeandcovid.com
© 2022, Jeff Childers, all rights reserved
The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida.
