Opinion
By Jeff Childers
4/5/2025
Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! And so it is time for the Weekend Edition. In today’s jam-packed roundup: Covid-19 files website opens for business; bellwether NC appellate decision prepares the way for viable election challenges; major NYT feature article panning pedophile hunters comes in for close scrutiny and we discover the paper’s most outrageous psyop narrative yet; an update on the tariffs and the economy; good news on jobs; good news on Trump’s tax package; implications for the Golden Age of America; debunking the economic experts; and massive health freedom Overton window shifts incoming at warp speed.
🪖 C&C ARMY POST | MORNING MONOLOGUE 🪖
I am extremely pleased to announce that, after years of hard work, our diligent C&C volunteers have opened the fully working version of their website, the Covid-19 files. The site provides a one-stop shop for searching covid-related documents of all kinds, including Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, legal court case filings, public database findings, and other materials. It’s a critical part of our long-term plan to achieve covid accountability.
Stop by and check it out! And leave them a tip while you’re there, to encourage them to keep going.
🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍
👨⚖️👨⚖️👨⚖️
A quiet state supreme court decision offers to upend election law for the better. The New York Times ran a story yesterday headlined, “Appeals Court Orders Thousands of Voters to Verify Information in Contested N.C. Election.” The sub-headline added, “The ruling was a win for the Republican who narrowly lost a State Supreme Court race in November. “
In last year’s election cycle, Judge Jefferson Griffin (R) ran for the North Carolina Supreme Court against Justice Allison Riggs, who is one of two Democrats sitting on the seven-member state Supreme Court. Griffin lost by about 700 votes. So he sued, arguing that about 65,000 people who voted in the election were ineligible, because they never provided proof of their identity when they registered — not even the last four digits of their Social Security number or a driver’s license number.
Although North Carolina is a red state, most of the 65,000 unverified voters are registered Democrats. Imagine that. Many of them are “overseas voters.” Many others are “never resident” voters, meaning they have never actually lived in North Carolina (but, for some reason, are intensely interested in voting there).
Needless to say, it’s illegal. North Carolina law requires proof of ID at registration. The Times reported, with great enthusiasm, that Justice Allison offered evidence showing at least some unverified voters did provide proof of ID, but “for several reasons” it “never appeared in the database.”
In a 2-1 decision split along on party lines, the appellate panel ruled for Judge Griffin. In stark contrast to 2020’s judicial logic, the majority held that even one unlawful vote essentially “disenfranchises lawful voters.” They ruled the questionable voters “should be allowed a period of 15 business days after notice to cure their defective registrations.”
Use it or lose it.
But after those 15 days, the court said the Election Board should “omit from the final count the votes of those voters who fail to timely cure their registration defects.” And they ruled that all the “never resident” votes should be thrown out, since the 2011 law allowing them to vote was forbidden by the state constitution.
The decision marked a sea change in post-election litigation. “Since 2020,” the Times wrote, “courts have almost universally held that legally cast votes cannot be invalidated under protections provided by the Constitution.” Benjamin Ginsberg, an experienced Republican election lawyer, told the Times, “Until this decision, courts facing challenges to ballots cast in compliance with past practice and election administrators’ instructions had uniformly sided with the voters.”
Meaning, this is one of the first times an appellate court has taken this kind of issue seriously.
From the Times’ point of view, it was the worst thing ever. Unnamed “election experts” and “activists” darkly warned that the decision, if it survives the inevitable appeals, could “undermine future elections and provide a blueprint for challenging close races.”
That blueprint is exactly what we’ve been looking for!
But the article gave away the game, by admitting that — as the Times reported in its subheadline — “the ruling was a win” for the Republican candidate. Election security should be a win for everyone. The Times carefully ignored the extraordinarily awkward fact that the 65,000 unverified voters skew heavily Democrat. That is the real story.
And this case suggests that, after all these years of controversy, judges are starting to warm to the idea of election challenges.
It is too early to declare victory, or any reversal of the standard operation procedure where judges just ignore election problems in terror of “disenfranchising” anyone. But it’s a terrific start.
🔥🔥🔥
The New York Times tried to pull a fast one yesterday, but we won’t let them get away with it this time. It began with a very strange and often revolting feature story headlined, “Online ‘Pedophile Hunters’ Are Growing More Violent — and Going Viral.” Unsurprisingly, the Times framed the story as almost sympathetic to the “victims” — meaning the men caught by independent sting groups for soliciting underage boys and girls for sex.
Vigilantism! Most bizarre, the story was in the Times’ long format, magazine-style, multimedia-dazzling articles. The Gray Lady invested a metric ton of column inches, technology effects, and rhetorical effort into portraying predator-catching groups as grifters, click-baiters, conmen, and violent criminals.
It spent no effort condemning the predators themselves. Instead, it thematically hinted —without saying so— that they, the predators, were the real victims here.
“In the past two years, a growing number of pedophile hunters have gone a step further and violently attacked the targets in their videos,” the Times complained. Some of “the footage shows hunters chasing their targets through retail stores, beating people bloody on public streets, and shaving the heads of their targets.” Citing only a single example, the paper generalized, “In the most extreme cases, people have been hospitalized with serious injuries.”
Awkwardly, no predator hunters have been convicted for assault or battery. This is partly because pedophiles usually eschew pressing charges, which the Times satanically characterized as a kind of legal disability that the sting operators exploit to take advantage.
But one particular sentence, pregnant with patent meaning far beyond its words, betrayed the awful reality of the situation and the Times’ co-conspiring culpability: “The Times reached out to more than two dozen people targeted by violent pedophile hunters,” the paper reported, “but none were willing to speak on the record.”
I bet not! Imagine the terror that a target outed by an amateur sting show must have felt getting an email from The New York Times asking for comments. The last thing they need now is having their name quoted in the Times as a potential pedo.
The Times stopped short of actively defending the accused, but instead focused —as ever— on public safety. “Law enforcement experts said those groups put bystanders in danger by attacking people in public places and jeopardize criminal cases.” Unnamed law enforcement experts. (I think they just made it up.) And, what is a “law enforcement expert” anyway? Is a cop a “law enforcement expert?” But set that aside.
Thanks for thinking of us, NYT, but I suspect we “bystanders” are okay with taking the risk.
🔥 Conspicuously absent from the Times’ alarmed article were any references to the growing numbers of public officials nabbed in stings. Especially law enforcement experts. In August last year, Shore News ran a salacious story headlined, “Bronx Prosecutor Resigns After Being Caught Soliciting Young Boy Online for Sex.”
In July 2024, the group Dads Against Predators confronted woke, progressive Assistant District Attorney William CC Kemp-Neal outside a Target store in Mount Vernon, after the unfortunate AG arranged to meet what he thought was a 13-year-old boy, for sex. Kemp-Neil tried to flee but was tackled by a bystander in the parking garage. He was later arrested, but never prosecuted (although he did resign as DA).
While at Fordham Law, Kemp-Neal wrote law review articles on “Environmental Racism.” So.
In other words, there was a woke fox in the law enforcement henhouse. A similar story from 2022 reinforced the point. Predators Poachers Massachusetts published a sting video exposing Stow, Massachusetts’ chief of police, Ralph “Rusty” Marino, who’d arranged to meet for sex with a person he thought was a 14-year-old boy. Marino resigned, was interviewed by state police, and charged.
Only 8% of Stow’s 7,000 residents are registered Republicans. Just saying.
At trial, although Chief Marino pleaded “no contest,” the Massachusetts judge withheld a guilty verdict, giving him probation with a three-year no-contact order. Prosecutors requested Marino be placed on the sex-offender list, but the judge refused. Marino’s case was quietly and summarily dismissed three years later without a conviction.
Court documents revealed Marino used the handle “Daddydearest” on Tinder, and had attempted to destroy evidence, including a plastic bag containing a sex toy and lubrication that he threw into the woods before his police interview. He also stupidly drove his department-issued Explorer to the sting.
It is almost impossible to find news reports about Marino’s story online.
But I found one. You won’t believe how they framed it. Check out the Miami Herald’s headline on the story, run last month —two years late— and which asked, “‘Predator’-catching group exposed town’s police chief. Are citizen-led stings helpful?” Two months before the Times’ more expansive article echoing the very same narrative, the Herald similarly reported that “some groups have gotten violent, creating concern among law enforcement.”
I can think of a few reasons why law enforcement would be concerned. Who watches the watchers?
Included in the Herald’s story, but AWOL from the Times’s, was balance. Dr. Thomas Holt, a Michigan State Criminal Justice professor, told McClatchy News that, when citizen groups collaborate with law enforcement, it is not “vigilante behavior.” Dr. Holt also said the groups were helpful, since law enforcement often gets overwhelmed with cases, and authorities “don’t necessarily have the resources to go out and investigate every single person.”
In another balanced quote, the Herald cited Parsons, Kansas Police Chief Robert Spinks, who praised the group Bikers Against Predators. “This group did everything right: they gathered evidence, involved law enforcement, and ensured the situation remained safe for everyone involved,” Chief Spinks said. “This wasn’t vigilantism — it was a thoughtful and thorough collaboration to protect our community,” he added.
Unlike the Times, the Herald also included quotes from the predator hunters themselves, who all disavowed violence and explained their motivations in their own words. Their rationale did not include grifting, click-baiting, or self-enrichment. “I feel like if I can stop these men from harming a fake child before they harm a real child, that’s what I’m going to do,” one explained.
As I read through the Herald article, it became clear the Times must have ‘borrowed’ its feature article from the Herald’s earlier work. Except, for whatever reason, the Times banished the Herald’s balance and redacted references to cases like Chief Marino’s or AG Kemp-Neal’s. Nor did the Times credit the Herald, which had already done all the heavy lifting, and had assembled a trove of balanced quotes that the Times left lying on the cutting room floor.
It’s a very strange day when I cite the Miami Herald as an example of better journalism, but here we are.
🔥 Also unmentioned in the article were broader trends in progressive thinking and how they may have contributed to the “vigilante” problem. Over the last four years, leftists have demonized cops as racists and mercilessly prosecuted them. They’ve fired cops for not getting shots. They’ve persecuted subway defenders. They’ve defunded the police. They’ve elected Soros prosecutors who let violent criminals (including pedophiles) off with no bail and sentences gentler than any nonviolent January 6th Capitol tourist.
Isn’t the rise of citizen law enforcement a reflection, to some degree at least, of the failure of progressive “reforms?” Isn’t vigilantism the entirely predictable byproduct of hamstrung police departments and corrupt Soros prosecutors? The Times’ article would have been much more interesting had it quoted a single “law enforcement expert” explaining why the videos are so popular, and why the market for grassroots justice is booming.
Tellingly, the Times curtly closed the article’s comments after only 122 submissions. I’m not surprised. The very first comment —from a Times reader in San Fransisco— began by making the obvious point that should have started the article: “Clearly, there is not enough law enforcement to handle the amount of pedophiles and predators on the internet,” MKH said.
Duh. Enter pedophile hunters, filling the void.
Another anonymous user, using a familiar liberal dog whistle about incels, said “I, for one, would much rather see hateful, vengeful men going after sexual predators than victimizing women who don’t want to date them.” DFJ881 opined that, “police stings do not seem to be enough to deter pedophiles from trying to lure kids into meeting them on social media, so adding the danger of getting beaten by a live streamer may be a useful deterrent.”
Michael Levy from Colorado asked, “How about we take a harder look at the penalties and enforcement of these sorts of heinous crimes of pedophilia (and or lack thereof)?” On the flip side, other, more broad-minded commenters who slurped up the Times’ “vigilante” narrative surged past the paper, openly speculating about the immoral entrapment of totally innocent people who just made a tiny mistake one time.
Those comments didn’t help the Times much, either.
🔥 So, what the Dickens is the Times up to this time? The Gray Lady’s latest exposé wasn’t journalism. It was a narrative psyop — a glossy, multimedia operation aimed not at predators, but at the citizens daring to expose them.
The word “violent” did a lot of heavy lifting in the article. The Times only cited one example of serious harm — the kind of thing that could’ve been addressed with a single police statement. But they used it to smear an entire emerging genre of grassroots justice as inherently dangerous.
And the NYT’s high-profile format — glossy visuals, embedded videos, multimedia effects — is normally reserved for war crimes exposés or rainforest depletion. The style is meant to manufacture credibility through gimmicks where it may otherwise be lacking. And this time, they deployed the style to paint pedophile hunters as villains.
The worst failing might be that the Times never confronted the essential moral calculus: these predators arranged to meet children for sex. Period. The article didn’t just downplay the predators’ unforgivable misconduct — it Photoshopped it out. Click, click, gone.
The papers’ revolting inversion of ordinary logic and garden-variety decency wasn’t even subtle.
My best guess is the growing proliferation of pedophile hunters threatens the progressive message, casts a pall on LGBTQ+ politics, and throws a broadening net that is scooping up leftwing officials. Surely not all the fingered pederasts are registered Democrats, but troublingly, too many of them are.
In other words, these sting ops keep yanking skeletons out of the closets of the wrong kind of people. If the sting targets were MAGA truckers, youth pastors, or Republican senatorial staff, the Times would be leading the outrage parade. But when it’s woke prosecutors and progressive police chiefs, the narrative whipsaws to “public safety,” “privacy,” and “law enforcement experts.”
This article wasn’t about protecting the public. It was about protecting the political class.
The actual threat isn’t vigilantism, clickbaiters, or a few rogue sting ops. The actual threat is the public’s loss of faith in the institutions supposed to protect children in the first place. These videos are ugly and sometimes reckless — but they’re popular for a reason: they fill a vacuum that the justice system has left gaping and festering.
When free people start to feel the absence of justice, they eventually make justice. The Times wants to shut that trend down — fast — before it spreads too far, gets too loud, and starts dragging more bloody skeletons out of woke closets that were never supposed to be opened.
💰💰💰
Let’s check in on the biggest financial event of our lifetimes: the Trump tariffs. First, Trump got some great news yesterday that the media assiduously underplayed. Reuters ran its story headlined, “US labor market healthy on the eve of Trump’s sweeping tariffs.” The real story was that employment surged in March, nearly doubling the experts’ most optimistic estimates, adding +228,000 jobs.
The headlined words, on the eve of Trump’s tariffs were meant to slyly remind readers that the great job numbers weren’t because of Trump’s tariff plan. But of course, everyone expected them— so the tariffs were part of the calculus. We can play word games all day, if they like.
Other headlines countered the good news by reporting that “unemployment rose.” Well, it “rose” from 4.1% to 4.2%. If Biden were president, they’d have reported it as, “employment stable.”
In other economic news, yesterday the stock market continued adjusting downwards, terrifying investors and elites alike. But what also fell was the price of oil, which plummeted -7%. So.
💰 Believe it or not, Republicans in the Senate worked till the wee hours this morning to pass a terrific budget. The Wall Street Journal ran the story, headlined “Republicans Advance Trump’s Tax Cuts After Late-Night Session.”
In a 51-48 vote early this morning, the Senate adopted a ‘fiscal framework’ for Trump’s tax targets along with new spending for border security and the military. (Rand Paul and Susan Collins voted against.) Republicans called the tax provisions —new tax cuts and extensions of expiring ones— as being essential to economic growth.
As we transition into what I have called “the end of the beginning,” we also begin to see the outlines of Trump’s vast economic program. For two months, he’s been lining up executive orders, presidential policies, and interagency plans — all aimed at deeply cutting consumer costs— and all before he pushed the plunger on tariffs. Gas and eggs are two standout examples. And lower taxes will leave more money in people’s pockets and simultaneously spur even more business investment.
For just one example, Businesses are already benefiting from slashed regulations, like irrational EPA requirements, which will cut even more costs for consumer goods.
Remarkably, as the Journal noted without comment, “Republicans have stayed mostly united so far.” Not just mostly. Completely. I’m not sure Republicans have been this effective and this unified since they were stranded in the wilderness of Cold War minority status for 40 years before Reagan.
And when was the last time you heard of Congressional Republicans repeatedly working through the night?
💰 Stingy corporate media will never give the President credit, but the tax cuts could fairly be called historic. They include a permanent extension of his 2017 plan, which lowers the top individual tax rate (from 39% to 37%), increases the ‘standard exemption,’ doubles the child care credit, and provides a 20% exemption for pass-through business income.
That last one —the 20% exemption for pass-through income— helps small businesses, freelancers, and gig workers like Uber drivers. Not big corporations.
And that’s just the start. New tax cuts will be wildly popular: no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security benefits, and a lower corporate income tax for American manufacturers (falling from 21% to 15%).
If passed by the House, the package would lock in a low-tax regime for a generation, a shift not seen since Reagan’s era. Even a pared-down version would rank among the biggest tax relief efforts ever, measured by dollar value.
💰 A few comments. Between this budget package, the stock market, and the global tariffs, progressive “economic experts” have been doomcrying about recession and malaise, and prophesying general economic collapse.
But they have no idea what they are talking about. Nobody has ever trieed this kind of radical fiscal surgery on the American economy before. Between the tax cuts, slashed regulations, pruned federal overhead, DOGE recoveries, stimulus provisions, and the whole-of-government effort, there is simply no way the experts can really predict the outcome.
We are on a whole new economic map. The 1981 Reagan cuts and deregulations came close in ambition, but lacked the global trade disruption; the New Deal was a spending surge, not a tax-slashing one. This is genuinely new. It’s a 5-D economic puzzle.
I would describe it as Trump giving himself multiple ways to win. The beauty of this, from Trump’s angle, is he doesn’t need every piece to fully succeed. Tax cuts spark a boom? Win. Tariffs bring factories back? Win. Deregulation unleashes a sector like energy? Win. DOGE cuts stabilize the budget? Win. Any combo that delivers jobs, growth, or a “strong America” vibe could claim victory, even if other parts lag— such as tariffs spiking prices or debt climbing.
It’s a bold, multi-front offensive. Success on any axis could cement his legacy. The President is not betting on one horse; he’s rigged the race with five. Whether the economy cooperates is the trillion-dollar question, but the setup virtually guarantees that something’s bound to stick.
💰 Let us also recall the historical nature of the new tax cuts: tips, Social Security, and overtime. Tips are already hard to police; many think it costs more to track them down than the government makes in recovered revenue. Social Security taxes offend seniors, a key voting constituency who will forever remember Trump’s tax relief. And de-taxing overtime will almost certainly spur a productivity surge, as companies relax rules and allow workers who want to work, to work more.
There’s another intriguing possibility. Stripping income taxes from these three massive populations could create a tax-free slip-N-slide, eventually canceling all income taxes. It’s not obviously fair that waitresses and seniors should live tax-free. Why not everybody? It’s a political Pandora’s box— once you sell “no tax on effort” (tips and overtime) and “no tax on earned benefits” (Social Security), the logic creeps inexorably toward “no tax on any work.”
These aren’t just tax tweaks. It’s a reimagining of who pays, and why. No U.S. package has ever so surgically freed up “earned” income streams while daring to sidestep enforcement headaches (tips) or political third rails (Social Security). It’s historic for its audacity. Past cuts broadened bases or lowered rates, but these cuts pick winners in a way that could wind up rewriting the tax debate.
Setting aside speculative future possibilities, the tax cuts will return hundreds of billions to workers and retirees— right as the tariffs hit their stride. None of the experts’ so-called “economic models” consider these side effects.
Yesterday, President Trump told reporters that “the operation went well … our country’s gonna boom. It’s gonna be unbelievable.”
CLIP: President Trump says “it’s going very very well … the stock market is gonna boom” (0:50).
🔥🔥🔥
First, they laughed. Then they banned it. Chemtrails are now officially mainstream. The Tallahassee Democrat ran a story Thursday headlined, “ ‘Chemtrails,’ cloud seeding would be banned under DeSantis-endorsed bill passed by Florida Senate. It wasn’t even close. The Senate approved the bill on party lines 28-9. So much for conspiracy theories.
Governor DeSantis endorsed the Senate version of the bill (and has opposed the House version). Senator Ileana Garcia’s version, if signed into law after House approval, would allow the state to charge a person with a third-degree felony if found participating in weather modification activities, punishable by up to five years and a $100,000 fine.
“This is about protecting Florida’s environment and public health,” Garcia said. “With no federal guidelines in place, Florida must take responsibility for its own airspace.” As I’ve reported before, the EPA has jurisdiction over planes and the common airspace. But it’s a new EPA. If the good bill passes, I doubt violators will feel comfortable that the EPA will spring to their defense this time.
Now, even the Tallahassee Democrat — not exactly a hotbed of heterodoxy — is printing the word “chemtrails” without flinching. In the headline! (Albeit with scare quotes.) The science hasn’t changed— only the politics. Which says a lot about the science.
🔥 In related news, you’ll recall that Utah became the first state last month to ban fluoride from drinking water. On Wednesday, ABC ran a terrific story headlined, “More cities, counties start to remove fluoride from public drinking water.” Not just small ones, either. Consider this Thursday headline from the Miami Herald:
Miami — Miami! — voted overwhelmingly (8-2) to remove the 70-year-old additive from its drinking water. That’s not some dusty rural county. That’s a core progressive stronghold throwing out one of the longest-running sacred cows in the public health pasture.
Miami’s mayor could veto. She has said she’s considering rejecting the move. But the Commission can override her veto with a two-thirds vote.
Tying it back to the weather story, last week Florida’s Senate also approved a bill that would ban fluoride statewide. There is a remarkable amount of anti-fluoride sentiment swelling in the nation’s waters lately. Our Surgeon General, Dr. Ladapo, opposes adding the chemical to our drinking water. So … it could happen.
The dam broke last month in Utah. On Wednesday, the Utah News Dispatch ran a story headlined “RFK Jr. coming to Utah on Monday to talk fluoride, ‘MAHA’ bills.” The article reported the new HHS Secretary will hold a press conference with new EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin about Utah’s fluoride liberation day.
Secretary Kennedy has got to be a very busy man these days. His trip to Utah strongly suggests upcoming federal guidance about removing the chemical. Maybe it will even be announced at Monday’s press conference.
In an interview last week, new NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya said he planned to refocus the agency on Americans’ top health problems instead of a dizzying array of lucrative distractions. He didn’t say bi-curious transgender mice, but they scurried around the fringes of his remarks. Jay is forcing the NIH scientists to examine Alzheimer’s, autism, heart disease, metabolic disorders, vaccine injuries, and plummeting fertility.
Finally.
This week’s news showed how rapidly the Overton window can shatter when truth is allowed out of its fact-checking box and political power shifts. The chemtrail bill and fluoride bans are canaries in the health freedom coal mine. And if this is the start, imagine what comes next: endocrine disruptors, seed oils, maybe even glyphosate.
Take a quiet moment to marinate on how far we’ve come, so dizzyingly fast. Chemtrails and fluoride —what we long dreamed that the government would one day officially recognize as problems— are now only the beginning. If America’s health starts roaring back, how much market uncertainty could we tolerate for a while?
Occasionally, I take a breath and ask myself whether this is all really happening? It is happening, and it’s glorious.
Have a wonderful weekend! Then float on back here bright and early Monday morning for even more tales of amazing essential news and commentary. I can’t wait.
Don’t race off! We cannot do it alone. Consider joining up with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds. I could sure 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
The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida.
