Opinion
By Jeff Childers
3/26/25
Good morning, C&C family, it’s Wednesday! And the week is off to another cracking start. In today’s wonderful-news roundup: in which I respond to blackpilled critics who claim I’m too soft on Trump and too dang optimistic all the time; updates fly in on the Signal leak story and, like fascism, reality bleakly descends on Europe; NYT crying about how big law firms are silent in the face of Trump’s democracy destroying whatever; NIH gets terrific new Director; FDA gets masterful new Director; vaccine study gets amazing new lead researcher and CDC stripped of control; and a questionable pick to run the Centers for Disease Control.
🪖 C&C MORNING MONOLOGUE 🪖
Last night, while scrolling comments to yesterday’s post, I trod on the cat’s tail, and the fur, as they say, flew. (She survived.) What had distracted me was a vein, or thread, of novel criticism from the right side of the political concourse. Paraphrasing their complaints, the three grumblers only accused me of being a crypto-communist and a child trafficker.
That’s nothing! The white-coated frauds used to call me a mass murderer. And that was just for asking a single question: if the fibers in a cotton mask are loosely weaved micrometers apart, how can they possibly trap nanoscale-sized vir… oh, never mind. You remember.
What I really believe these comments show is that the left is shifting tactics again. With their popularity wedged under a rainbow-colored coral at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, and with nobody sane listening to a word they say, they are doing what they always do: pretending to be conservatives so they can attack other conservatives.
Hello, Lincoln Project! Hello, NeverTrumpers!
They’ve been waiting impatiently, biding their time, barely resisting putting the polished leather gimp costume back on, eager for a chance. Yesterday’s Signal chat story brought them out in force.
🪖 But their sharpest faux complaint was related to civil liberties: Jeff is ignoring how Trump might be trampling on illegal aliens’ rights! Trump just deported a green card holder because they said something!! First Amendment! Jeff is bad!!
In response, I politely ask what, exactly, did you expect from mass deportation? That is exactly what we all voted for. There are between 12 and 20 million illegals in the country. Did you expect them to gently receive ACLU lawyers, drink tickets, and more free hotel housing while they each await their own jury trials before being deported? That would be impossible.
Again, someone please explain how on Earth any careful, granular approach to mass deportation can possibly work.
I get it; mistakes are bound to happen. Friendly fire is an unfortunate part of war. Mass deportation stresses the system and raises legitimate constitutional questions. But I have two questions for you: first, do you believe we are under an invasion, or not? If yes, then you should expect a constitutional stress test. Take heart, we’ve always survived them before.
If you don’t believe it’s an invasion, you’re a progressive pretending to read my column. (Keep reading, you might come around.)
My second question is: are you okay with deporting ICE-designated illegals and people who violate their green card contracts, like by posting violent, anti-American stuff on Facebook, but letting them file appeals from wherever they wind up? Remember, if they don’t want to risk being misidentified as Tren de Aragua gangsters, then illegals and green-card violators can voluntarily self-deport. They don’t have to wait for ICE to come around.
But Jeff! What stops Trump from snatching up American citizens like you and me and sending us to El Salvador? Like who? Let me know when Trump deports Rachel Maddow to that Antarctic Base with the madman running around, and I promise to criticize it. I’m not too worried, though, since at this rate, the black robes won’t even let Trump visit the Mar-a-Lago bathroom without a judicial pass.
Now, on to the news.
🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍
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A much bigger and much livelier discussion ensued in the comments yesterday over whether the Signal Fire was a moronic accident, an intentional leak, or a deep-state dirty trick. Of course, we don’t know, so everyone’s opinion is equally valid (and equally uninformed). But let’s consider yesterday’s exquisite PoliticoEU headline: “Europe fumes at Trump team’s insults in leaked Signal chat.”
Haha! Trump’s opponents are fuming! You know my opinion. As I explained yesterday, my money is on intentional leak. “British and European officials and diplomats,” Politico explained, “reacted with a mix of hurt and anger.” It woefully added, “in Europe, the tone among diplomats was more of grief and resignation.” Poor little diplomats. Somebody missed kindergarten that day. Sticks and stones, boys.
If they were real men, they’d shrug and say, who cares what those American morons think? Instead, they act like spoiled children. Somebody get them a juice box. But I digress.
The Europeans just got a dose of JD Vance. “An EU diplomat noted it underlined the impression that Vance was the driver of U.S. hostility towards Europe.” They are suddenly taking the Vice President a whole lot more seriously than anyone ever regarded our previous Chief Clock Philosopher. Time is like … time. It passes. It passes with time. Time, you see, is the passage of minutes, and time.
This next paragraph from the story seems to sum it up. In one harmless leak, the Europeans have been convinced that Trump is serious, in a profound way that no public statement could ever have achieved:
Politico reported that the anonymous diplomat conceded, “There is no alliance without trust. So I think that Europe has to do much more because it has no other choice.” Britain’s former Defense Secretary Grant Shapps posted on X that, “I agree Europe must do more on security.”
Politico didn’t cite any disagreement with that helpful sentiment.
In other words, the leak is convincing Europe to step up and pay for their own security. That’s a clear win for the President and his team. JD’s not just the junior Senator anymore—he’s living rent-free in the Brussels brain pan.
The Democrats can pound the table and sneer at Cabinet members and call them names and everything else, but it’s just noise. The practical effect of the leak is advancing Trump’s agenda. Even if you disagree the leak was deliberate, then it’s an example of the Trump Curse, wherein his missteps boomerang and bonk his enemies in the tender bits.
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Yesterday, the New York Times hosted a deliciously ironic guest essay headlined, “America’s Most Powerful Law Firms Won’t Stand Up to Trump.” They are finally experiencing how we felt during the pandemic, when America’s most powerful law firms wouldn’t stand up to Biden.
The piece was penned by Princeton Professor of Law and Public Policy Deborah Pearlstein. “Of all of the American legal institutions,” the Professor lamented, “none would seem better positioned to push back against Mr. Trump’s strongman tactics than this class of wealthy and politically connected firms, known collectively as Big Law.”
But they’re not doing jack. “Big Law has largely stayed silent or worse,” she complained, even though “they are engaged in every sector of the marketplace and central to ensuring that the United States and global economy continue to spin.” Yes, professor, but that is the problem.
I happen to agree with the Professor about her main thesis, which is that Big Law is too conflicted, and too reliant on lucrative government largesse, to effectively do its most important job in protecting the Constitution. That glorious social contract is, after all, what makes the lucrative largesse possible in the first place. But because Big Law has become dependent on government, they can’t afford to annoy their federal masters. So their position is simple: don’t snap at the hand that’s feeding you dessert.
Where the Professor and I part ways is in the prescription. My view is the federal government is too big and too powerful, so it distorts all our essential markets. Not just law, but health and industry and everything else. Shrink government, I say, and the problem resolves itself. Simple.
But Professor Noodlestein disagrees. Big government must persist. Her formula, and I am not making this up, is collectivism. Karl Marx meets Brooks Brothers. “These firms face a classic problem of collective action,” the professor sagely advised. “Every individual firm has an incentive to keep quiet, but if everyone stays silent, all will lose. The problem is solvable— firms must find the courage to act together.”
It’s simple! More communism! Or communitarianism, or some kind of -ism. No matter how many times -isms fail, they keep returning to the same vomitous trough.
I’m just happy they are finally getting a taste of their own medicine. They swooned over Big Law while it stood by and let Biden issue mandates for destruction and despair— over the flu. Now, the Big Law problem is smacking them about the face like an unhinged mask fanatic. Welcome to our world.
I celebrate this development not from schadenfreude, although I’m sure that’s some part of it, but from the blossoming hope that a common understanding of the problem might actually produce a solution this time. You ask why I’m relentlessly optimistic? It’s because of the regular stream of hysterical op-eds like swinish Professor Pearlstein’s.
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Yesterday, we got three more terrific confirmations and one disappointment. Let’s start with the good ones. The New York Times ran the story under the stingy headline, “Senate Confirms Bhattacharya and Makary to H.H.S. Posts.”
Yesterday, the Senate confirmed Stanford Professor Jay Bhattacharya as our new NIH Director, and Johns Hopkins Professor and surgeon Mary Makary as FDA Commissioner. You literally could not ask for two better appointments to those positions. Both courageous men took massive professional risks during covid to publicly oppose Biden’s pandemic policies (unlike cowardly Big Law).
I had the great honor of working with Dr. Bhattacharya. He helped me successfully stop the first government vaccine mandate in Florida. We instantly hit it off on both personal and professional levels. Jay is an all-in Christian, like me. He’s thoughtful, if not brilliant, and profoundly ethical. Ironically — deliciously ironically — Jay was individually targeted for destruction by Frances Collins and Tony Fauci— the leaders of the very same agency he was just appointed to run.
Jay holds a healthy distrust of the so-called public health agency. In other words, Jay walks into the NIH not just with a résumé—but with a long memory and unfinished business.
🔥 Dr. Makary is equally terrific. Like Jay, Dr. Makary helped Governor DeSantis dig Florida out of the pandemic pig-pile. As you know, Florida was instrumental in leading the country out of our nation’s darkest days.
Both men’s credentials are impeccable. Although the media did its best, it was impossible to write them off as “fringe epidemiologists.” Dr. Makary surgically slammed the FDA and the CDC for lack of transparency, bureaucratic bloat, and pseudo-scientific political interference in real science.
Now he’s running the same agency of which he has long been critical.
The confirmations are terrific. Over-enthusiasm is impossible. We have no right to have been blessed this abundantly. Dr. Bhattacharya and Dr. Makary left behind their professional sinecures to join the Trump Administration— to fix the broken system from the inside. It’s not revenge! — it’s Reconstruction.
🔥 Next, consider this wonderful Washington Post headline: “Vaccine skeptic hired to head federal study of immunizations and autism.” The sneering sub-headline chirped, “A long-discredited researcher and vaccine skeptic will conduct a government study on whether vaccines cause autism.”
Yesterday, HHS announced hiring David Geier, the controversial long-time vaccine researcher who initially linked thimerosal —a mercury-based preservative formerly used in vaccines— and autism spectrum disorders. HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy has cited Geier’s work in his books.
Having struggled for so long on the outside, in the scientific wilderness, Geier is now in the beast’s belly. He’s been hired to investigate the link between vaccines and autism, and he has access to the entire federal government research database and national patient health databases.
According to the article, in early March, HHS ordered the CDC to conduct the vaccine-autism study. But for an undisclosed reason —I could guess— this week, HHS officials ordered the CDC to turn over all its vaccine safety data to the NIH, so NIH could conduct the analysis instead. The NIH is now under Jay Bhattacharya.
The WaPo predictably decried Geier’s appointment as pseudo-science and literally the worst thing ever. Jessica Steier, a public health researcher who leads an NGO named the ‘Science Literacy Lab,’ told WaPo, “This is a worst-case scenario for public health.”
In other words, this is terrific news. If you want to restore faith in science, this is how you do it— by putting people in charge whose conclusions will be trusted by the very Americans who’ve lost all faith in the agencies. Let the mercury fall where it may.
🔥 Finally, one appointment displeased the MAHA movement. The Times wasn’t particularly happy either. The Times ran the story headlined, “Trump Nominates Susan Monarez to Lead C.D.C.”
The problems began when Trump’s original nominee, Dave Weldon, was sabotaged in the Senate after two squishy Republicans pulled their support. Meanwhile, back in January, President Trump had appointed Dr. Monarez, 50, as CDC’s temporary acting director. Now —following Weldon’s meltdown— Trump has endorsed her for permanent CDC Director.
Dr. Monarez is a PhD doctor, not a medical doctor, a fact that tortured the Times’ arrogant élite editors. “If confirmed by the Senate,” the article gloomily reported, “Dr. Monarez, an infectious-disease researcher, will be the first nonphysician to lead the agency in more than 50 years.” Boo hoo.
MAHA is deeply skeptical of Dr. Monarez. Before shifting to CDC, she worked at a new Biden agency, ARPA-H, a high-tech bioscience research group that was widely compared to DARPA. So she’s tarnished by her Biden connections. The thinking goes that, if Biden liked her, she must be pure evil. She was also quiet during the pandemic. She didn’t publicly oppose the jabs or Biden’s other kooky pandemic pseudo-science. But I haven’t seen any confirmed evidence that she ever endorsed the jabs, either.
I think MAHA’s biggest complaint is there were so many other good choices instead of this technocratic bioscience researcher. That is a fact.
But. Now, don’t get all crazy and start saying I just defend whatever Trump does and never criticize anybody. There are a few positives in the Monarez mix.
There’s the fact she was appointed by Trump’s team as interim director, and has kept the job since January. Clearly, there’s something Team Trump sees in her.
Next, as I said, the Times was sour on Dr. Monarez, which itself is a mark in her favor. “Dr. Monarez,” the Times whined, “has not attended the agency’s all-hands meetings or offered reassurance to employees unsettled by the tumult of the past weeks.” Worse, “she has been working with the cost-cutting initiative known as the Department of Government Efficiency to plan reductions to the agency.” Not that! She’s cooperating with DOGE!
Worst of all, “when the Trump administration ordered the C.D.C. to take down pages from its website containing phrases like L.G.B.T.Q. and transgender, Dr. Monarez did not resist nor attempt to preserve important data.” In other words, she’s been following orders. The Times also quoted unnamed CDC employees who groused about her.
Finally, RFK’s old outfit, seminal anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense, essentially endorsed her. It ran its endorsement yesterday under the headline, “RFK Jr. Defends Trump’s Pick to Lead CDC After Critics Lash Out on X.” According to the story, “Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he handpicked Monarez because she is a ‘longtime champion of MAHA values, and a caring, compassionate and brilliant microbiologist and a tech wizard who will reorient CDC toward public health and gold-standard science.’”
CHD’s article continued, adding more reassuring facts about Dr. Monarez. Read the whole thing if you’re worried about it.
The bottom line is that, it’s true, Dr. Monarez cannot be compared to stellar MAHA picks like Dr. Bhattacharya or Dr. Makary. Call it a missed opportunity if you want. That’s fair. But so far I see no reason to panic, and sufficient reason to be at least mildly optimistic. Remember, Kennedy also transferred the vaccine study to NIH. They are moving the pieces around the chessboard.
Let the man work.
Let’s not let a speck of disappointment detract from a mountain of goodness. And anyway, does it really matter? Any minute now, some judge will order Fauci re-termited into CDC with back pay and a massaging desk chair. So.
Have a wonderful Wednesday! I’ll be back tomorrow with lots more essential news and commentary. For instance, just to tease Thursday’s post, yesterday Trump re-declassified at least part of the Crossfire Hurricane files. Stand by for fireworks.
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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.
