Opinion
By Jeff Childers
11/24/25
Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! And we are on the short course approaching our national day of gratitude, Thanksgiving, an unparalleled American tradition generously supported by our plucky and selfless avian community. The first thing we’ll be thankful for is that no Obama-appointed federal judge has yet enjoined the popular holiday, but there are still two days left, so don’t start counting your turkeys.
Without further digression, your roundup today includes: more on Mamdani’s Oval Office meeting, which damaged the shortened socialist with cooperation; Ukraine peace deal races down the track; corruption noose tightens as Zelensky pretends to unsuccessfully resist; negotiating teams craft non-duress narrative; Rubio declares “great progress” and aims for a wrap this week; Trump hopeful; DOJ lands first Antifa terrorism convictions in history through voluntary plea deals; the story of the Alvarado ambush; amateur domestic terrorists confess to conspiracy crimes; convictions spreading; and the DOJ now weilds a new weapon against Antifa lunatics.
🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍
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“Mamdani still thinks Trump’s a fascist, but he’ll work with him.” Yesterday, I suggested that Trump generously refraining from repeatedly plunging Zohran Mamdani’s head into the Oval Office private toilet accomplished two things: it deprived the left of the public row they desperately wanted, to turn Mamdani into the second coming of Che Guevara, and it actually damaged the diminutive socialist. Exhibit A, straight from far-left Axios, yesterday:
The article —which knew exactly what it was doing— hilariously begins with this sentence: “New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani said in an interview aired Sunday he still believes President Trump is a fascist and a threat to democracy, even as he pledged to work with him to deliver for New Yorkers.”
Put plainly: “The dictator is real, the danger is existential, democracy is hanging by a thread— but I’ll be sending him my budget requests by close of business.”
It’s hard to overstate how catastrophically incoherent, impotent, and silly this makes Mamdani look. Trump didn’t need to body-slam him. Trump just shook his hand and smiled, and Mamdani instantly folded his moral absolutism into a neat little origami weasel.
The left wanted a martyr. Trump gave them a collaborator, a pocket-sized Quisling, politely asking the ‘fascist threat to democracy’ permission to add a few more bike lanes.
Astonishingly, some people think this stuff happens by accident, as if Zohran Mamdani just wandered into the Oval Office, slipped on the rug, and accidentally delivered the most humiliating collaborationist handshake since Quisling tried to guess which fork to use at Hitler’s official banquet. (LTMW.)
Mamdani’s disastrous Oval Office performance was not the only example of “accidental” political choreography this week. The supersonic Ukraine storyline makes Mamdani look like a bumbling community-theater understudy.
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“The deadline is that we want to get this done as soon as possible. We’d love it to be Thursday.” Yesterday, Al Jazeera ran a story —a drop in the Ukraine news ocean— headlined, “A corruption scandal may well end the war in Ukraine.” The sub-headline added, “ A weakened Ukrainian president can now easily be turned into a scapegoat for defeat.”
I’ve already written at length about this show, which is currently enjoying 85% user reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. Today, let’s focus on the astonishing velocity.
As recently as August, when peace talks last broke off, the former comedian humorlessly swore Kiev would never ever ever agree to any deal requiring Ukraine to give up its sovereign lands: “The answer to the Ukrainian territorial question is already in the Constitution of Ukraine. No one will retreat from this, and no one will be able to. Ukrainians will not gift their land to the occupier,” he said.
That was Ukraine’s red line.
Now, suddenly, as if by magic, everything is different. Yesterday, the Washington Post reported that “the leaked draft ignores many of Kyiv’s red lines: It would force Ukraine to shrink its army and give up land that Russia hasn’t managed to grab in nearly four years of war.”
Haha, the Trump peace plan is actually a real estate deal comparable to the Louisiana Purchase. According to various sources, Ukraine is being pressed to cough up territories as big as mid-sized U.S. states. These include: Crimea, Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, Kherson, and possibly demilitarized zones beyond that.
It’s around 33 million acres in total, or about seven times the size of New Jersey.
But to me, it looks just like the deal was already done. We’re just watching the necessary stage play — a Kabuki theatre production of “deliberation,” “negotiation,” and “agonizing compromise” — so the global public doesn’t realize their leaders were slipped a fait accompli between the NABU raid and the next round of subpoenas.
🔥 “Duress” is a legal concept that allows a contracting party to later avoid a contract by claiming they were illegally pressured to agree. Beyond the legalities, most people agree that deals made under duress aren’t fair and shouldn’t be enforceable.
It’s like when Princess Buttercup only agreed to marry Lord Humperdinck because Wesley was being tortured in the pit of despair. ‘I won’t be seeing you again. I’m killing myself once we reach the honeymoon suite.’ ‘Won’t that be nice.’
The point is, even if Trump sprang a corruption trap on Zelensky and his greedy co-conspirators, forcing them to finally end an endless war, the Americans couldn’t just pop out of the snare holding a fully executed peace agreement signed by the Green Sweatshirt himself. Ta-da! Not after he’d spent years loudly, theatrically, and repeatedly vowing never to do the very thing he’d just done.
In other words, even if the deal was a pre-arranged conclusion, they still needed a public cooling-off period— a strategic fog of “furious consultations,” “deeply expressed concerns,” and “serious diplomatic discussions” to make it all look like the Ukrainian side wasn’t marched at gunpoint straight from a NABU evidence locker into a diplomat’s notary’s office.
Over the weekend, Secretary Rubio announced that great progress had been made, and quipped, “The deadline is that we want to get this done as soon as possible. We’d love it to be Thursday.” Thursday is Thanksgiving. He also added, “It was probably the most productive day we have had on this issue, maybe in the entirety of our engagement, but certainly in a very long time.”
So much productivity! So much progress! So many aligned positions! So quickly. Trump, this morning:
Late last night, the White House released a statement saying: “The Ukrainian delegation affirmed that all of their principal concerns—security guarantees, long-term economic development, infrastructure protection, freedom of navigation, and political sovereignty—were thoroughly addressed during the meeting.”
How do you land a supposedly hard-fought peace agreement in a handful of days? Instead of the weeks, months, or years these things ordinarily take? Irresistible leverage, that’s how. It’s the only way.
Look, peace negotiations never go straight from ‘we will never give up an inch of our land’ to ‘meaningful progress toward aligning positions’ in 72 hours. Not unless the real work was already done offstage and the parties had zero wriggle room.
What we’re seeing now is the ceremonial choreography for public consumption.
It had to look like it wasn’t done under duress, and like Ukraine had at least some opportunity to negotiate. That’s Contracts 101. In other words, the deal can’t have been the product of personal extortion or blackmail of a country’s president. Instead, what we see proves that Ukraine has agency and was well represented in the dickering.
In other words, so long as the treaty appears to be the result of open deliberation —not high-handed pressure tactics, not sudden capitulation, not a corruption-based shakedown— then nobody can later say the magic words: We signed under duress.
And voilà: the fastest-cooked peace deal in modern history suddenly becomes palatable, and more importantly, believable.
I could be wrong. We will likely never know. But if the deal is done soon, it will look a lot like Ukraine lost because its rulers got too greedy. Hubris, meet Nemesis.
Now, if you want something even more fun to noodle about, consider which other European bigwigs might get scooped up in Ukraine’s widening net of corruption.
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Speaking of widening nets of corruption, late last week, the outstanding Andy Ngo ran a story in the Post Millennial headlined, “First Antifa terrorism convictions in US history.” Progress!
On the evening of July 4th, while patriotic Texans were busy with barbecues and backyard fireworks, under cover of deepening darkness, a group of masked attackers slipped up to the PrairieLand ICE Detention Center in Alvarado. They moved like a small tactical team — black clothing, balaclavas, and rifles braced on an SUV hood.
Without warning, they opened fire on ICE guard posts and administrative buildings, sending staff scrambling for cover. One officer was wounded in the neck. The attackers then launched a second wave, in the form of industrial-grade fireworks modified into explosive projectiles arcing over the fence, detonating in bursts of color and concussive smoke.
The entire assault lasted barely ninety seconds. It was loud, coordinated, and aimed to shock. Then the attackers sprinted back to their vehicle and vanished into the darkness. Investigators later said it bore all the hallmarks of a pre-planned paramilitary ambush, not a protest gone sideways.
🔥 If the ambush looked like a paramilitary operation, the arrests resembled the finale of a dramatic police procedural. Within days, federal agents fanned out across North Texas with sealed warrants, grabbing suspects in door-kicking predawn raids that left neighbors blinking through screen doors and asking why the FBI was in their driveway.
Agents recovered masks, clothing, shell casings, improvised explosive components, encrypted messaging devices, and — in one case — an entire drawer full of “revolutionary literature” more like a freshman-year anarchist starter kit.
The biggest break in the case came when one suspect’s burner phone turned up with an unexpected automatic iCloud backup. Whoops. Investigators pulled GPS pings placing him at the detention center minutes before the shooting, along with group chats coordinating the approach, the firing positions, and the getaway route. From there, the dominos toppled quickly. Each arrest added another link in the network, another target in the growing conspiracy.
Once the indictments dropped, the courtroom drama began. And it became clear very fast that this was not the kind of group you’d want to trust in a silent-running operation. The first defendant to crack did so spectacularly, flipping within hours of his initial detention, agreeing to cooperate so fast the ink was still wet when the prosecutors walked into court.
After that, five more plea deals raced through the small group of anarchists like food poisoning at a vegan farmer’s market. One co-conspirator agreed to testify about the weapons acquisition. Another admitted to scouting the facility. A third confessed to launching the explosive projectiles, explaining how they had modified commercial fireworks into impact grenades.
By the end, prosecutors didn’t only have a case. They had a conspiracy narrative: a self-declared Antifa cell, armed, masked, coordinated, launching an in-and-out, ninety-second ambush on a federal facility, leaving an officer shot in the neck and a detention center shaken.
Last week, the six cell members marched in single file into plea agreements confirming under oath that their attack was intentional, organized, and meant to do serious harm.
As Andy Ngo pointed out, this is not just a minor legal victory. It’s a historic pivot point.
🔥 These otherwise unmemorable ne’er-do-wells became the first Antifa terrorism convictions in U.S. history. It didn’t happen because a prosecutor got creative. The defendants copped to it. Their own plea deals cemented the terrorism narrative into the permanent judicial record.
And now the Justice Department is armed with admitted facts and a brand-new precedent, which will ultimately have more explosive power than any fireworks the cell lobbed over ICE’s fence. While there is no such thing as a standalone crime of “domestic terrorism,” federal statutes provide for enhanced punishments when other crimes are committed with ‘terroristic intent.’
These cosplaying radicals were facing decades of jail time, but pleaded to a maximum of fifteen years in exchange for confessing how their cell was organized and where their training came from. The movement blossomed during a permissive Biden era, where an attack like this would draw a slap on the wrist. No longer.
And the pleas and convictions are likely to spread.
So far, the DOJ has charged sixteen people in the Alvarado attack. The fact that five are cooperating is very bad news for the rest. And there may be more, even a lot more, as the ripples travel outwards. One of the plea agreements, for example, references “others known and unknown”. That’s DOJ’s classic signal that the current indictments are not the final roster.
Ominously (for Antifans), Reuters noted DOJ was investigating “associated actors in multiple jurisdictions.”
Most of these Antifa people aren’t ideologues. They’re cosplaying anarchists, with the commitment of a community college gender-studies student. This is the only insurgent movement in world history where half the cell has a Blue Bottle Coffee subscription and the other half DM’d their getaway driver using Signal— and then backed it up to iCloud.
These aren’t hardened radicals. They’re dime-store ninjas in black hoodies who go home and Google “how to launder tear gas out of stretch polyester.” No wonder five of them already took plea deals. Revolutionaries fight to the bitter end. This bunch folds like ethically sourced pour-over filters.
Unsurprisingly, there are no Antifa cells in prisons. Prison wardens track ‘Security Threat Groups’ (STGs), and none of their lists includes Antifa. Academic and law-enforcement studies say Antifa-style “affinity groups” cannot function inside prisons, thanks to the group’s lack of structure, internal ideological mismatches, inability to enforce discipline, and dominance of traditional gangs. And maybe because the grassroots are mostly astroturf.
Fool around and … well, you know.
Have a magnificent Monday! Come on back here tomorrow morning for more essential news and caffeinated 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
