Opinion
By Jeff Childers
11/17/25
Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! Today’s roundup includes: Trump ‘reversal’ on Epstein disclosures baffles media and soothes anxious House Republicans; CNN anchor Fareed Zakaria fractures the narrative by blaming Democrats for affordability crisis; progressive history of complaint about blue-state overregulation; only 10% of rebuilding permits issued by LA nine months after fires; comedian flees LA for Texas; buried story of real cause of LA fires; progressive confluence of bad policy; affordability backfires; and we dismantle the latest anti-Trump H1B visa complaints.
🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍
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Anyone surprised by yesterday’s top news hasn’t been paying attention. Late yesterday, the New York Times ran a surreal story headlined, “Trump Says House Republicans Should Vote to Release Epstein Files.” It is just another “Trump said something” story. But once again, Trump has captured an entire news cycle by just posting on Truth Social. To wit:
Dear reader, I wish I could spare you a coming crushing disappointment. (Not any disappointment with Trump.) You will soon be mortified to learn that millions of partisan Democrats don’t actually care about catching high-profile pedophiles, even though they turned Epstein into a cottage industry, minted memes like collectible coin series, obsessively loitered in Republican threads to post infinite variations of the same dumb question —where are the Epstein files???— held countless press conferences with Epstein victims demanding files be released —justice now!!!— and generally made pests of themselves in every conceivable way.
Mark my words. Very soon now, Democrats will be memory-holing Epstein, leaving the poor victims begging for bus fare home.
In his post yesterday, President Trump relieved a lot of sweaty, anxious, abused-feeling House Republicans (“members of the Republican party are being used”) by green-lighting their vote tomorrow in favor of the House Discharge Petition, instead of forcing them to decide which group of MAGA supporters to enrage.
🔥 The vaunted Discharge Petition seeks to compel the Department of Justice to release everything it has on the notorious pedophile— except ‘national security secrets’ —like what??— in which case the petition demands a declassified log of each withheld document with at least a generic description.
As I’ve explained, despite several tries, the House has never historically succeeded in ordering the DOJ to release investigatory materials. So Democrats know well that the petition will never produce a document dump. And Trump’s new post carefully preserved the DOJ’s independence with six words (“the House Oversight Committee can have whatever they are legally entitled to”).
The liberals’ mindless support of the Discharge Petition and their faux outrage was meant to force Republicans to go on record for or against Epstein disclosure. But Trump has snatched that extortive weapon away from Democrats and turned it around. Now, Republicans will vote en masse to release the files, but House Democrats will anguish over whether to agree or not— all over a silly photo op that they originally staged.
(Oddly, Representative Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who joined Democrat Ro Khanna to file the original Petition, has not yet offered any public comment about Trump’s post. We’re waiting with great interest.)
We shall soon see how the DOJ responds to the Petition. Obviously, since the feds just opened new criminal investigations into Bill Clinton, Reid Hoffman, Larry Summers, and “etc.,” some information must now be held back in light of pending investigations, which is law enforcement’s favorite all-time excuse. Democrats will complain bitterly that Trump is using the prosecutions to hide evidence, crouching behind procedural excuses, stealing candy from Palestinian babies, and being a dictator or king or uber-fascist and so forth.
But when Democrats complain about DOJ invoking investigatory privilege, they’ll fall into a trap. Their complaints will expose how little they actually care about prosecuting Epstein’s ‘clients,’ they only care about getting Trump. After all, releasing evidence about the targets will harm those prosecutions. So Democrats will be shielding allies like Clinton, Hoffman, and Summers while demanding Republicans be pursued.
In other words: they’re playing politics, not seeking justice.
🔥 Getting Trump seems increasingly unlikely. The emails in the most recent dump show Epstein assiduously undermining President Trump, the Trump-whisperer who told all Trump’s enemies that he could deliver the goods to take Trump down. But the serial trafficker never delivered any goods, not even to defend himself from the criminal convictions.
Epstein’s Trump emails can be divided into two tracks. The outside-facing track was Epstein offering Trump-dirt (or hints of dirt) to legions of industrious progressives, who’ve obviously been trying for years to solicit Epstein’s help to take Trump down, starting from when Trump announced his first presidential campaign in 2015. The inside track shows a paranoid Epstein convinced from 2005 onwards that Trump knew about his trafficking and was helping the police.
None of the emails ever show Trump talking to Epstein. Not one. It’s just Epstein talking about Trump. And, obviously, Epstein is an unreliable narrator.
Ironically, Epstein himself kept the Democrats’ hopes alive all these years. He relentlessly teased them with tantalizing hints and suggestions and fell over himself offering to help. The truth will be a bitter pill for progressives to swallow. They must admit they were fooled by a convicted pedophile and notorious fraudster who tickled their gullible ears and told them whatever they wanted to hear.
The Times marveled over Trump creating this crisis for himself. Politico said “Trump blinked on Epstein.” Obviously, the President could have ordered files released in June, instead of calling Epstein a “Democrat hoax” and creating the controversy. But corporate media never considered that the master showman could have deliberately engineered the public’s interest, even though he’s repeatedly done the same type of thing, over and over.
You couldn’t build a rollercoaster ride like this. Remain seated at all times, with your safety belts securely fastened. Here we go.
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Trump wasn’t the only pivoting yesterday. CNN’s leftwing but sometimes sane commentator Fareed Zakaria also unveiled a monologue excoriating the Democrat Party— for the nation’s affordability crisis.
CLIP: Zakaria says blue states and cities can’t govern themselves out of a paper bag (5:53).
“It’s hard to see how the government shutdown and reopening,” Zakaria began, “is anything other than a defeat for the Democrats.” Listen to the whole thing, but here is a shortened transcript. Zakaria cracked the brand-new affordability narrative like a raw oyster and, for good measure, called Democrats incompetent:
If America has an affordability crisis, it tends to be in places Democrats govern, like New York, Illinois, and California, all featuring high taxes, soaring housing costs, and stagnant outcomes. It is a paradox that defines much of blue-state America: government that promises more, costs more, but delivers less.
Democrats’ instinctive response to every problem remains the same: spend more. For decades, states and cities have traded short-term political harmony for long-term fiscal ruin. In too many Democratic strongholds, regulation has metastasized into paralysis. Housing is unaffordable because local zoning codes and environmental reviews, rent control and union carve-outs make construction painfully slow and expensive.
California has spent $24 billion on homelessness over five years, yet the problem has only worsened. More is spent per mile on subway construction in New York than any other city on earth. Each new initiative layers another bureaucracy atop the last.
Democrats must rediscover the lost art of simple competence—and they can prove it to the entire nation by governing well in places like big cities where they are in charge.
Despite appearances, Zakaria wasn’t doing a 180 for his liberal audience. He was extending a theme. Early this year, he endorsed the 2025 New York Times Bestseller Abundance, penned by leftwing darlings Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.
In the book, Klein and Thompson argued that progressive governance has lost its way, creating regulatory, legal, and bureaucratic rules and procedures that suffocate the very ambitions progressives claim to serve (like green energy and affordable housing).
It was an anti-bureaucracy, deregulatory book, but from the left. And it fractured progressives.
Elite centrist Democrats and technocratic liberals generally praised Abundance, calling it a clear diagnosis of supply-side stagnation and a manifesto for pragmatic reforms. But grassroots leftists and partisan progressives were strongly critical, arguing the book repackaged neoliberal tropes and leaned too heavily on deregulation without “ensuring justice or equity.”
Guess what the book’s central theme was? Affordability. The authors argued that housing, energy, and other essential goods and services have become dramatically less affordable over the last few decades. For example, the median home price in America has climbed from 2.2 times average annual income in 1950 to 6 times by 2020, squeezing ordinary workers out of cities, stifling mobility, and widening inequality.
Klein and Thompson contended that the main culprit isn’t lack of funding, but regulatory and procedural barriers— zoning restrictions, NIMBY opposition, environmental reviews, union carve-outs, permitting processes, and layers of government mandates that make it slow, costly, and often impossible to build enough housing or infrastructure in high-demand areas.
Housing projects that government tries to underwrite are often so loaded with requirements and bureaucracy (“everything-bagel boxes”) that costs per unaffordable unit can reach $400,000–$700,000, making them expensive window boxes for liberal virtue signaling rather than addressing anyone’s practical needs.
🔥 The duo’s book was published before the LA wildfires. Had Klein and Thompson knew, they’d surely have included the story as Exhibit A. Consider this headline from just last month, published on Realtor.com:
Nine months later, the number of rebuilding permits issued by LA —both the city and the county— amounts to fewer than 10% of the homes destroyed by the Palisades and Eaton fires. In nine months. If someone has insurance to rebuild, but can’t get a permit in their lifetime, that’s like unaffordable times infinity. Infinitely unaffordable.
This week, Hollywood headlines gushed over comedian Jeff Dye’s announcement that he’s leaving LA and moving to Texas. “Those fires were quite a wake-up call,” he said. “Even if, you know, whatever you believe about the fires, the way it was dealt with was pretty scary,” Dye told Joe Rogan on a recent podcast.
“Gavin Newsom,” Dye said, “scares the sh—t out of me.”
🔥 As a reminder of how progressive policies interact and combine together into bigger and even more monstrous forms, like mutant Transformers, consider this quiet CBS headline from March, which disappeared right down the memory hole:
The article reported that Palisades residents had complained for months before the fires about bums and vagrants burning stuff in the brush up on the hills, but were told by cops that “our hands our tied, there’s nothing we can do at this point and time. ‘Call us when there’s a fire.’”
In other words, if LA taxpayers burn branches in their backyard, they’ll be fined or arrested faster than you can say “social justice.” But if when homeless burn branches on public property, well, what can cops do? Their hands are tied. Californians, remember: You guys voted for this.
In 2024, close to 17,000 fires were attributed to homeless people through campfires, attempts to keep warm, or cooking. That’s not a typo. “Arson” is considered a “quality of life crime,” thus deprioritized by LA County’s district attorney, which helps explain why cops complain that their hands are tied. Progressives cuffed the cops.
Progressive governance is unaffordable. Over two dozen productive taxpayers were killed in January’s LA homeless fires. Legally immunized homeless fires burned up over fifty-one billion in taxpayers’ private property, so far. Projected total losses top $160 billion.
But sure, keep voting for these people. Frankly, I agree with Jeff Dye. These folks scare the bean burritos out of me.
Living in LA could cost you your life. But more than anything, the private costs of “social justice” laws make living in LA unaffordable.
🔥 Let’s return to Zakaria’s surprisingly critical monologue and Ezra Klein’s unexpected bestseller. Together, they prove affordability is a completely self-destructive issue for Democrats. They didn’t do their homework. They face a deep well of scholarship surrounding progressives’ responsibility for unaffordability, stretching back decades.
Zakaria complained about the insane levels of blue-states’ ineffective spending. New York State’s budget, he noted, is “twice Florida’s budget— even though Florida has several million more residents.” But New York delivers less than Florida by almost every measurement. And it’s just getting worse, fast.
Put simply, centrist progressives like Zakaria and Klein have long complained about unaffordable progressive policies. “A good rule is not one that simply sounds just; it is one that works,” Klein wrote in his book. “Our problem is not a lack of ideals, but a lack of outcomes.”
In other words, modern progressives may be well-meaning— but like Zakaria said, they’re incompetent. And that’s what progressives say.
Trump, who has only been in office for ten months, can hardly be blamed for Democrats’ corrupt and feckless lack of math skills. If anything, Trump is not the cause; he is the solution to progressives’ chronic affordability crisis. Ironically, only Trump has promised to deliver what the title of Ezra Klein’s book demanded: abundance.
This whole “affordability” argument is going to backfire badly on the Dems.
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Finally, let’s dismantle the strange new H1-B narrative. Over on BlueSky, progressives are celebrating Festivus early, making whoopee over MAGA fury about Trump’s H1B visa policies. (H1Bs allow US corporations to hire “temporary” workers, often allegedly cheaper than Americans.) For example:
It’s true; we can even find examples of upset Trump supporters here in the Coffee & Covid comments, including personal anecdotes of family members who can’t get STEM jobs because of foreign competition through the special visa program.
But, how did this become an issue now? And why is everyone mad at Trump? Did President Trump create the H1-B visa program?
Part of the reason everyone is mad at President Trump is that some prominent Republicans, like Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), are complaining bitterly and publicly about it. (In Marjorie’s case, her complaints have metastasized into a public row with Trump that made this morning’s New York Times.) Here’s an example of MAGA echoing the H1B talking point:
CLIP: MTG tells CNN that Trump’s H1B visas are not helping MAGA or Americans (0:52).
With all this rage directed toward Trump over the visas, you would naturally conclude they must have been Trump’s idea. Nope. Congress passed the H1B program ages ago, long before Trump. So it’s not his fault.
Okay, well, people aren’t crazy. Are they? What are they complaining about? Has Trump expanded H1B visas? Or made them somehow easier to get?
Nope again.
In September, President Trump signed an executive order directing the INS to require a $100,000 fee for H1Bs if they haven’t first tried to find Americans to work the jobs. The new policy is being ignored by the U.S. media, but it is not being slow-walked or anything. Late last week, the Times of India complained about over-enforcement of the new $100K fee:
“Requests for evidence are appearing in cases where the fee requirement is not applicable,” the Times of India complained. “This change predominantly affects Indians, who represent 70% of H-1B visa recipients,” it added.
Surely, critics welcomed the new fee, the new rules, and the aggressive enforcement? Apparently not. They hardly mention it. And his H1B critics apparently couldn’t care less about people trying to stop the new fee. BBC headline, last month:
The biggest and most dangerous lawsuit going was filed by the Chamber of Commerce, an ostensibly Republican organization, which argues President Trump lacks authority to add any fees or modify the H1B program in any way, since it’s Congress’ statute and constitutional area.
In its lawsuit, the Chamber of Commerce outright argued that Trump’s H1B “fee would inflict significant harm on American businesses,” forcing them to “either dramatically increase their labor costs or hire fewer highly skilled employees.”
So … where is all the rage equally directed at the Chamber of Commerce? I’ll wait. Let me know when you find it. I might take a nap, so just wake me up when you’re ready.
But maybe Trump’s critics are saying, fine, the fee was a good start (if it survives), but —and granted, we never complained about H1B’s under Biden— we want Trump to do more! More more more!
Okay, well, what about this? Is this more?
Two days ago, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer told Fox’s Maria Bartiromo that, “Almost 200 investigations now have been brought forward against companies who are abusing the H-1 visa program.” It is called Project Firewall, and is a full-throated crackdown on H1B abuses without historical precedent.
Two hundred pending investigations is a lot. That takes a lot of manpower, and it sends a broad message.
These are just two examples of Trump Administration’s war on H1Bs. There are more. But we can see a vast enforcement operation already underway— plus a crushing $100K H1B application fee for many positions. It hardly seems like Trump needs to “park Air Force One” and “focus on domestic priorities,” as Marjorie complained. He’s already doing it.
Let the man work!
What do critics want? Why are people ready to toss Trump for inaction on H1Bs? What do they expect him to do? End H1Bs completely? He cannot end H1Bs without Congress. Where are the critics complaining about Congress on H1Bs, or even calling for the end of the filibuster, which Trump has literally begged for till his typing fingers were sore.
Complaints about Trump over H1Bs are a deep-state psyop. Don’t fall for it. He’s crushing them harder than any president ever has. Be optimistic!
Have a magnificent Monday! We’ll be back tomorrow with a whole coffee bar of essential news and commentary—there is a lot to catch up on. The weekend’s new cycle was packed.
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 🦠
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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
