Opinion
By Jeff Childers
10/8/25
Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! Today’s banger roundup includes: Senate manufacturing line delivers 100+ new Trump appointees during government shutdown; late night comedian Jon Stewart, who is getting less funny by the minute, whines about unfairness; scrum in the Senate as Pam Bondi comes out swinging at Senators; blonde vaccine safety activist says the tide is turning; SCOTUS skeptical of laws banning counselors from trying to save gender-confused kids; and a quiet IU healthcare program suggests something much bigger may be afoot.
🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍
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Yesterday, Politico ran a delightful story headlined, “Senate confirms largest bloc yet of Trump nominees.”
Last night, Senate Republicans, whose calendars had helpfully been cleared by the Democrat Shutdown, confirmed over 100 Trump nominees in a single go. You’ll recall that last month, Republicans changed the rules to allow batch confirmations after “scrappy” Democrats were obsessively filibustering everything including requests for bathroom breaks and even once when Senator Kennedy sneezed.
Most of yesterday’s new appointees were US Attorneys and diplomats to critical countries like The Bahamas. Believe it or not, it still took almost eight months, but Trump’s backlog is finally clearing. It took years to reach this point under Trump 1.0. So.
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Jon Stewart does not look well. He’s also struggling with overwhelming emotions that should feel familiar to regular readers of this Substack: political helplessness. “Seventy-five million Americans voted for a Democrat in this last round of presidential elections,” he complained bitterly on his latest show, “and there has not been a moment of conciliation or concern about the issues and policies that drove those seventy-five million votes.”
CLIP: Jon Stewart whines about Republicans not paying attention to Democrat needs (1:58).
In other words, it isn’t fair. He failed to see the irony of the last four years, while Democrats practically stuck needles into our eyeballs, ransacked our CVS’s, and otherwise made our day-to-day lives as miserable as possible. All Republicans are doing is fulfilling Trump’s campaign promises, and too slowly for most conservatives, at that.
Stewart was wrong in another way, too. Democrats aren’t that helpless. After all, they shut down the federal government. At least, I think it’s still shut down— how can anyone tell?
Anyway, loyal progressive soldier that he is, Stewart was really just pushing the complicated progressive narrative that the shutdown, with the blame now firmly pinned on Democrats, is all about “preserving healthcare.” Ironically, while complaining that Republicans are ignoring the losing party’s medical care preferences, he was simultaneously advocating for an overpriced government healthcare plan that Democrats pushed through without a single Republican vote.
You can’t make this stuff up. I might be speaking out of turn here, but it seems to me that Republicans happily allow Democrats to keep Obamacare; just don’t force us into the useless program along with you.
Whatever else Stewart’s annoying emotional outburst was, it wasn’t funny. Bring back real comedy.
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Yesterday, the New York Times ran a feisty story headlined, “Pressed on Justice Dept. Politicization, Bondi Goes on Attack.” The sub-headline added, “At a Senate committee hearing, the attorney general avoided answering pointed queries by repeatedly laying into her questioners.” It was all wonderfully true.
CLIP: Attorney General Bondi tongue-lashes antique Democrat Senators (1:00).
It’s fair to say the days of Democrats hounding hapless Republican cabinet members for clicks are over. In yesterday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, DOJ Chief Pam Bondi, clearly not happy to be wasting her time answering Democrats’ rhetorical questions, slung zingers and launched one-liners like she was kicking down the doors of a Tren de Aragua crack house.
They were completely outgunned. It was practically elder abuse. The blonde AG manhandled a squadron of male lawmakers bent on embarassing her for soundbites.
“I wish you loved Chicago as much as you hate President Trump,” Bondi scolded Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), 81. The AG chastised Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), 70: “You sit here and slander President Trump left and right, when you’re the one who was taking money from one of Epstein’s closest confidants, Reid Hoffman — not only once but twice, in 2018 and 2024.”
To Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Ct.), 82, Bondi sniped, “I cannot believe that you would accuse me of impropriety when you lied about your military service,” referring to a long-standing donor-meeting video where Blumenthal lovingly described his harrowing Vietnam combat experience (he was never there). She savaged bloated mortgage fraudster Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Ca.), 65: “You know, if you worked for me, you would have been fired because you were censured by Congress for lying.”
The blackpill brigades grumbled that Bondi’s sharp tongue was just a distraction from the lack of arrests. But, as usual, they missed the point. Pam’s Senate appearance was mandatory. She had no choice but to show up and field stupid “oversight” gotcha questions.
But the scrappy Attorney General could choose not to be a human punching bag.
Instead, Democrats took the beating. In a post-hearing interview with CNN, Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), 62, said, “It felt more like being in a boxing ring.” Maybe they’ll think twice about demanding all these hearings.
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Spirited blondes are enjoying a moment this week. In a recent interview with Del Bigtree, former blonde bombshell actress and OG anti-vaxxer Jenny McCarthy Wahlberg said, “A hundred percent … the tide is turning.”
“It took this pandemic for people to kind of really see it,” McCarthy said. “I’m really blown away by the thousands of messages I get that say, ‘I’m a nurse and my adult son was injured by the covid vaccine.’”
Jenny McCarthy became involved in vaccine safety advocacy after her son, Evan, was diagnosed with autism when he was about two and a half years old, following a series of vaccinations. She became convinced that vaccines were responsible for his diagnosis, particularly the MMR vaccine.
McCarthy courageously began publicly sharing her views on the links between vaccines and autism, authoring books, giving interviews, and joining or leading autism-related organizations that pushed for vaccine safety. Her advocacy effectively ended her celebrity season. When she joined “The View” in 2013, for example, her vaccine views sparked astroturfed public campaigns by liberals urging ABC to kick her off the show because of “spreading misinformation.”
As we’ve observed many times before, the wheel of vaccine opinion has begun to slowly and ponderously turn. Good for Jenny.
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Yesterday, the Washington Post ran an encouraging story headlined, “Supreme Court sounds skeptical of Colorado ban on conversion therapy for minors.” In oral arguments, the judges seemed poised to make a big change, in the first of a series of hyper-controversial cases.
Kaley Chiles, a licensed therapist and evangelical Christian, argued that Colorado’s ban on counseling gay and trans-confused kids to stick with their biological norms violated her First Amendment rights to free speech and religion.
A decision in Kaley’s favor could be huge. Since 2010, thirty states have enacted similar laws banning so-called “conversion therapy.” Note that practicing counselors don’t call it that; the phrase is another example of Marxist language manipulation. Practitioners explain they are either treating gender dysphoria or just helping kids reduce unwanted sexual attractions.
I listened to most of yesterday’s oral argument in between Zoom meetings. The WaPo was right, the conservative justices seemed “deeply skeptical” that Colorado’s law was legal. Most of the questions were from two of the Court’s liberal ladies, who leaned into how “harmful” trans activists claim that talk therapy can be.
“Isn’t it just like shock therapy?” liberal justice Jackson asked at one point.
The irony of hysterical opposition to non-invasive talk therapy while defending irreversible pediatric genital mutilation went largely unnoticed during the arguments.
The legal issue revolves around the limits of freedom of speech in a highly regulated industry —medicine. Just last year, the Supreme Court found that some states’ bans on genital mutilation procedures were constitutional. So they must now distinguish why a law banning talk therapy isn’t similarly legal.
Fortunately, the easy answer, as the Justices’ questions seemed to confirm, is that speech is expressly protected by the Constitution.
In other words, talk therapy without any concomitant medical or surgical intervention is pure speech. Thus, while medical speech may still be regulated, the state must meet a tremendously difficult standard called strict scrutiny. In the case of gender dysphoria, the science is so awful and all-over-the-place that strict scrutiny would be hopeless.
So Colorado didn’t even try to argue it could meet strict scrutiny. It only argued the higher standard shouldn’t apply, because states are generally allowed to regulate the practice of medicine, adding that the big pediatric associations all insist that talk therapy for gender dysphoria is literally the most dangerous and worst thing ever.
“A health care provider cannot be free to violate the standard of care just because they are using words,” Colorado’s lawyer argued.
🔥 There was a time in this country when judges would have given great deference to the opinion of the American Pediatric Association’s standard of care. But —thanks to covid— that ship of deceit has sailed. Nobody gives doctors blind faith anymore. In yesterday’s oral arguments, for example, Justice Alito pressed Colorado’s lawyer about the inherent unreliability of consensus, “Once, was there a time when many medical professionals thought that certain people should not be permitted to procreate because they had low IQ?”
Justice Amy Coney Barrett mused about experts. “Let’s say that you have some medical experts that think gender-affirming care is dangerous to children, and others that say that this kind of conversion talk therapy is dangerous.” She asked, “Can a state pick a side?”
Even Justice Kagan, one of the court’s three liberals, seemed unconvinced. She posed a hypothetical in which two doctors meet a patient who identifies as gay. One doctor offers to help the patient accept their gay ‘identity,’ while the other doctor offers to help change the patient’s perspective.
“And Colorado is saying one of those doctors’ responses is permissible and the other is not,” Kagan noted. “That seems like viewpoint discrimination in the way we would normally understand viewpoint discrimination.”
If they’ve lost Kagan, it’s all over.
I can’t emphasize enough how bad this news is for the medical establishment. From the questions, it looks like six conservative justices and one of the liberals all dismissed the establishment’s “consensus opinion” as though it were irrelevant. Which, of course, it should be irrelevant, given the nature and history of science.
But it was great news for kids. If the Supreme Court does strike down Colorado’s law —and all the similar laws in 29 other states— parents of kids struggling with trans propaganda will finally have an alternative to irreversible and expensive surgical interventions like the infamous chopadicophomy. (Thanks to alert readers for correcting the spelling. And h/t to our late, beloved Rush Limbaugh.)
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Which finally brings us to a quietly revolutionary story that slipped past everyone’s notice back in January. The article appeared in NPR, of all places, below the headline, “Why some doctors have started asking patients about their spiritual lives.”
Timothy Moss was forced to retire from his teaching gig at age 59 after suffering from a raft of sudden and unexpected “health complications” (heart and kidney problems, neuropathy, and vision issues). After that, his brother died. Ahem. (💉 alert.)
Without a job, Mr. Moss —who is apparently single and childless— found himself utterly alone. His work had been his whole life. He had nothing left. “I loved my job. That was my hobby. It was all my friendships,” he told NPR.
Up to this point, it was the classic tragedy of liberalism. Absent a career, Moss had no purpose. His career was (probably) deleted by his trust in government and the experimental injections he believed were good for him. He faced nothing but misery from his health problems, loneliness, and despair.
There’s no drug for that.
But there was something for Moss’s condition. Under a unique Indiana University Health system program called the Congregational Care Network, hospital employees connected Mr. Moss with a faith-based group.
🔥 IU Health’s program starts with a doctor asking patients a series of “spiritual assessment” questions aimed to identify if they need something beyond their immediate physical care.
“All human beings have a need for meaning and purpose,” Jay Foster, the Vice President of Spiritual Care at IU Health, said. “When someone has an illness, that sense of meaning and purpose is impinged upon, and having a thoughtful conversation partner can help people cope with that illness.”
Foster pointed to a recent report from the McKinsey Health Institute which found that “spiritual meaning in one’s life” was associated with strong mental, physical, and social health. Who knew.
So far, the IU program remains a sample of one, but there are signs of an increasing recognition of spiritual needs in health care. At the most recent annual meeting of the American Medical Association, for instance, delegates passed a resolution promoting medical education on spiritual health and supporting patient access to spiritual care services.
None of this surprises Christian believers.
Secular readers may struggle to understand, but a rich spiritual life delivers meaning in a way that nothing else in the world can. For believers, you can strip away everything material —job, friends, family— and meaning persists.
According to Christian understanding, while imperfect, the church writ large is God’s gift to believers, for mutual support, encouragement, service, social fulfillment, and mutual growth in faith, love, and good deeds. It’s a place not only to receive support in times of need, but also to give support to other needful believers.
You can easily imagine the afterlife conversation between God and somebody like Mr. Moss. “But I had nothing,” the ghostly human complains, adding “nobody liked me. Even my cat ran away.” God rolls his eyes in frustration and says, “For Heaven’s sake, I gave you a free social club with a billion people in it; it had no dues and they were required to accept every applicant. It was literally right down the street. All you had to do was walk in the door. Seriously, must I do everything around here?”
Our collective pandemic experience continues changing us in ways nobody could predict. Doctors themselves are not immune to the empty, failed promises of their profession. Like the rest of us, they used to blindly trust the big institutions that seemed to offer everyone meaning, but which the pandemic exposed to be just as flawed and untrustworthy as any other human institution.
Now doctors are asking the big questions: is this all there is? If the IU program can be seen as a sign, some medical professionals are starting to realize that truth cannot come from a pill bottle, ‘consensus,’ or a professional organization. This story sits at the intersection of lost institutional trust, religious revival, our fundamental understanding of health care and what it means to be human, and a very positive sign of grasping for a way out of our cultural dead end.
Even five years ago, doctors were happy to ask patients about their sex lives and illegal drug use, but about religion? Too icky.
Maybe it’s nothing. Or maybe this is a fascinating and encouraging development.
Have a wonderful Wednesday! Get back here tomorrow morning, for even more mentally nutritious, optimistic, and trustworthy essential news and commentary.
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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
