Opinion
By Jeff Childers
09-17-24
Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! As another remarkable 2024 week chugs along, your daily essential news roundup includes: Day Two of the Second Trump Assassination information we know for sure; Governor DeSantis provides a wee bit more information on Florida’s independent investigation; Biden-appointed US Attorney heading Trump assassination inquiry has curious background; Ryan Routh appears in federal court and says stuff that raised big red flags; arresting Sheriff deploys legitimate conspiracy theories at press conference; Routh’s bizarre connections to democrat bigwigs; NIH’s Francis Collins scurries out of retirement to offer halfhearted apology and blame us for the pandemic; declining U.S. birth rates keep baffling experts like Francis Collins; Sweden trials bribing migrants to go back home; and North Carolina joins states defenestrating DEI.
🗞💬 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 💬🗞
🔥🔥 First, the Routh Report. Yesterday on Fox, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis expanded a little on Florida’s independent investigation:
Interviewed by Jesse Watters, the Nation’s best governor made the irrefutable point that the FBI and the DOJ have a built-in conflict of interest investigating the Trump assassination attempts, since those very same agencies are also currently trying to put Trump behind bars in several pending criminal cases.
So, it would obviously be better for Florida to lead the investigation.
DeSantis promised Florida will get to the bottom of how Routh snuck and managed to stay hidden in Trump International Golf Course’s decorative hedge for up to 12 hours, somehow avoiding Secret Service sweeps. The Governor told Jesse that he’ll soon have much more to say about Florida’s separate investigation, presumably at an upcoming press conference.
We can’t wait.
🔥 The Matrix must be shorting out. It’s the only thing that makes sense. Proving both DeSantis’s point about the feds’ conflict of interest and … something really weird, the Daily Beast ran a super strange story yesterday headlined, “U.S. Attorney Handling Would-Be Trump Assassin’s Case Is a Haitian Immigrant.” A Haitian immigrant? Come on. I mean, what are the odds? Seriously.
Markenzy Lapointe, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, who now leads the federal government’s Routh investigation, is a Haitian immigrant raised in Florida. Lapointe —the country’s very first Haitian-American U.S. Attorney— is a Biden nominee sworn in on January 9th, 2023.
Lapointe presumably supervises (or at least assists in) the prosecution of President Trump in the Southern District of Florida. We don’t know how Mr. Lapointe feels about the recent dismissal of special prosecutor Jack Smith’s case, due to Smith’s unconstitutional appointment. The Southern District is currently appealing that dismissal.
Nor do we know what Mr. Lapointe thinks about Trump’s recent criticism of Springfield’s Haitian invasion, or all the pet-munching memes. Nor do we know whether Mr. Lapointe believes that drinking cat blood at midnight brings good juju. It’s probably unfair to assume. We’ll just have to wait and see what his little Haitian Trump doll looks like.
🔥 Failed assassin Ryan Routh was in federal court yesterday, in a hearing quite logically called the “first appearance.” Fox covered the story under the headline, “Trump assassination attempt suspect laughs, smiles during first court appearance in Florida.” Routh was apparently cracking jokes with his public defender, which sounds annoying but could just be his way of managing anxiety.
Details were sparsely provided, but this most interesting paragraph leaped out:
Right away, we see some problems. For Portlanders, Routh claimed an annual income of $36,000 — far below the poverty level. Which means there is a lot of mysterious money floating around world-traveling Mr. Routh.
Here are only a few of the many possible questions: how did Routh afford international travel to and from Ukraine? Or to buy guns, body armor, and GoPro cameras? Who owns the Nissan truck he tried to escape in? Did he rent it? If so, with what money and what credit? How did Routh get to Florida? Where was he staying? How was he paying for stuff? Cash? Credit?
How did flat-broke Routh get in front of nearly every corporate media camera and reporter in 2022, from Newsweek to the New York Times?
Routh has an extensive low-level criminal record going back decades, including felony weapons violations. How did he buy the gun he brought to Trump’s golf course? According to the FBI’s criminal affidavit, it was a military SKS-style assault rifle made in former Soviet bloc countries, so it wasn’t from around here. The rifle’s serial number was “obliterated” and unreadable to the naked eye.
Why obliterate the serial number? Who is Routh trying to protect? Who gave him that gun?
🔥 We’re not the only ones asking questions. Martin County Sheriff Will Snyder, whose officers arrested Routh, gave a courageous —even reckless— press conference yesterday during which he said the quiet part out loud.
CLIP: Sheriff Snyder wonders about potential conspiracy to assassinate President Trump (1:38).
At yesterday’s Martin County press conference about the arrest, Sheriff Snyder wondered whether Routh could be part of a conspiracy:
“He was smart, he was just driving with the flow of traffic. He may have thought he got away with it. He couldn’t have known a witness took a picture.
He’s not from this area. Which raises the bigger question, how does a guy get all the way to Trump International, realize the former President is golfing, and is able to get a rifle into that vicinity?
Is this guy part of a conspiracy? Or a lone gunman? If he’s part of a conspiracy, then this whole thing takes on a really ominous tone.”
It’s a literal conspiracy theory! And Sheriff Snyder’s question was a good one. But, to expand on his theory: was Routh connected in any way to any U.S. security state agency or NGO? To any Ukrainian security or intelligence agency?
Where has that skinny hedge-hider been hanging out recently? And with whom?
🔥 So that’s what we know so far on Day Two. From the evolving media coverage, even on Fox, Routh is beginning to be painted like some kind of deranged lunatic. But that is a straw man. Do not buy that story. While there is plenty of evidence he was an amoral leftist, easily influenced, effortlessly manipulable, even criminally inclined, there is zero evidence Routh was clinically crazy.
In fact, it’s just the opposite. Routh appears to have seamlessly navigated complex and difficult life situations —like traveling to and from a war zone, and self-publishing his dumb book on Amazon— that would flummox most of us. He was also vetted by any number of media platforms that found him credible enough to feature in their pro-Ukraine propaganda stories.
In the photo above, failed assassin Routh is pictured with celebrity chef and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Jose Andres. The background of the picture is unclear. But Andres is well-known for leading a team of other celebrity chefs into Gaza to deliver canapes and snail puree to war-torn Palestinians. And he is also well-known for hanging out with Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Ukraine’s former comedian Zelensky.
For instance, consider this NBC headline, from April this year:
Or this headline, from ABC just last month:
What were Nobel-nominee Jose Andres and flat-broke Ryan Routh doing together before and after that widely circulated photo was taken in Kiev, Ukraine? Were they just fellow Proxy War proponents? Did they just attend a proxy war rally together?
Why in the photo was Andres pointing at Routh? Bonhomie? Overcome with camaraderie?
We don’t know. But we do know at least one thing: human hedgehog and media darling Routh enjoys just one thin degree of separation from Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Volodymyr Zelensky. Weird.
💉 On Sunday, the Atlantic ran a horrible op-ed (“Ideas”) penned by former NIH Director Francis Collins titled, “Why Didn’t Facing a Common Enemy Bring Us Together? By “common enemy”, Collins meant covid, not his own overfunded health agency, but you’ll be forgiven for not immediately recognizing that.
As the NIH Director during the pandemic, Collins was ostensibly Anthony Fauci’s boss, but Fauci earned more than twice as much as Collins and headed the White House covid team, not Collins. So.
In his awful op-ed, which was a weird blend of victim blaming combined with a halfhearted mea culpa, Collins decried pandemic misinformation and political partisanship, right before repeating the long-debunked “bleach injection” hoax about his own boss, President Trump.
Pot, meet kettle.
Collins also trumpeted his much-advertised evangelical Christian faith, right before dunking on his Christian brothers and sisters for being hysterical deplorables and knuckle-dragging science deniers who concluded the covid shots were the Mark of the Beast.
Which was just one more in a long series of straw man arguments from the so-called ‘man of science.’
At bottom, Collins deplored citizens’ lost trust in the biomedical security state and in its primary sacrament, the holy vaccine. Collins astonishingly claimed he believes that, eventually, the covid jabs will someday be recognized as man’s greatest achievement, which might be true when the only people left on the planet are deranged cannibalistic depopulationists and irradiated cockroaches.
Collins generously conceded that scientists like himself should’ve been less sure about everything and should have admitted that their recommendations were best guesses based on limited information — the exact opposite of everything he said at the time. Collins never grappled with his disgraceful campaign to cancel and smear other experts, like Stanford Professor Jay Bhattacharya, and other legitimate scientists for disagreeing with his “best guesses.”
The former director doubled-down on lockdowns, claiming they’d been effective to flatten the curve and to stop hospitals from being overwhelmed in the first covid wave, but he then blamed parents and teachers for letting school lockdowns last too long. Not the scientists who testified at every school board meeting citing CDC guidance, whom Collins did not mention.
You need not read the article, which was a waste of space even in the mostly-useless Atlantic. Francis Collins is a lifelong bureaucrat whose career was ended by his own great incompetence, not politics. His unrepentant Atlantic half-apology was too little, too late, and too clueless.
📉📉 Yesterday, the Berkshire Eagle published an example of how badly Collins and his science-following bureaucrats have failed to maintain the country’s vitality, in a distressing story headlined “Declining birth rate threatens future U.S. economic growth.”
Experts like Francis Collins expected the pandemic to produce a baby boom. Their hopelessly naive thinking was that, since Americans were forced to spend more time together during pandemic lockdowns, the spark of romance would kindle a massive wave of new births, reversing an ominous post-2000 trend.
Instead, the opposite occurred. The experts were wrong, again. Birth rates declined during lockdowns, accelerating an existing Millennial trend and, for the first time, falling below replacement rates.
What do the experts say now? Nothing. They have become hopelessly baffled, worthless human detritus of a failed political science experiment. Civilization is literally collapsing while our ineffectual expert class plays dance tunes on deck. There is really nothing bad that cannot be said about our current orthodox science establishment.
The silver lining though is how well the empire’s invisible clothing has been exposed to public scrutiny. They want to cry about lost trust? As Collins’ tone-deaf, non-apology proved, loss of trust is just the beginning.
🔥🔥 I’m not buying tickets yet, but maybe Sweden is onto something. The Deep Dive ran a story late last week headlined, “Sweden Introduces New ‘Remigration Check’ Policy, Raising Concerns Over Forced Migrant Exits.”
The Swedish government announced a new “financial incentive” to encourage migrants to return to their countries of origin. In other words, a bribe. Known as the “remigration check,” the new policy offers migrants up to $35,000 per person to voluntarily get lost, beat it back home, and make themselves scarce.
The article pointed out that a migrant family of four would get $140,000, enough to afford a home or land in most parts of Africa and the Middle East. To put down roots. Supporters pointed out it’s a good deal all around, since Sweden is already spending much more than that on inefficient welfare for the migrants.
You would think a policy like this would be a liberal’s wildest dream. It transfers more wealth from the first world to the third world. It sets up migrants to succeed in their own countries and helps them escape poverty. It’s a giant handout.
But no; Swedish leftists hate the idea. Because it’s mean.
Practical problems quickly suggest themselves. For a plan like this to work, a country must first close its borders, or else migrants will be encouraged to come, turn around, and claim their severance packages, a sort of money-grabbing lazy-Susan. But if handled right, if the borders were closed, it might work.
What do you think? Setting aside issues of fairness or affordability, is this a practical, ethical solution? Could it work here, in the U.S.?
🔥🔥 The great DEI drainout continues. Last week, North Carolina’s Daily Tar Heel ran a story headlined, “UNC System announces multi-million dollar cuts for DEI positions and programs.”
It was a DEI St. Valentine’s Day massacre. Last week, the state’s Board of Governors made sweeping cuts across the entire North Carolina public university system, slashing up to sixty positions and reallocating tens of millions of dollars in budgets for diversity and inclusion programs.
The Board equitably reassigned even more positions and, very diversely, dissolved entire DEI departments.
The move followed a new policy the Board approved back in May. UNC’s system approved a policy banning all DEI offices and titles, and required its universities to report on staff and funding reductions for these programs by September 1st.
Progress! As red state educational systems recapture money wasted on DEI departments, they will gain competitive advantages over blue state schools, since they can better fund other programs that add value, like STEM degrees. Blue state schools will, eventually, be forced to come around.
It’s slow, but it’s happening. Nobody’s setting up new DEI departments, and red states are, one by one, defenestrating them. As Charles MacKay famously wrote, “Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”
In a world that seems constantly crazy, we need to focus on what’s happening at ground level in boardrooms and conferences. The world is not going as crazy as the headlines suggest. Hang in there!
Have a terrific Tuesday! Come back tomorrow morning for another delicious and educational Coffee & Covid roundup, where not only do you get the essential news you need, but it makes you smarter.
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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
