Better in their words…

The Four-Year Anniversary Edition! A ‘scandalous’ author interview; Trump wins again and libs lose their ever-lovin’ minds; the UK Daily Mail’s ‘cancer epidemic’ story follows the template; and more.

Source: FOUR YEARS ☙ Tuesday, March 26, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS

CELEBRATING FOUR YEARS OF C&C

Happy Anniversary, Coffee & Covid family! It’s been four short years.

To celebrate this gala occasion, I wrote several lengthy pages of deep reflection, introspection, and amusing anecdotes from C&C’s history. I extolled in great detail our accomplishments, our community, and our inside jokes. But then I looked at the whole thing and said to myself, hey dummy—they are here for a news roundup, not a novel about how one time you made a blog.

So I saved all that other stuff for the Ten Year Anniversary, assuming we make it that far. Today, I’ll be brief! To set the table, I’ve always felt gripped, impelled, driven maybe, by a much bigger mission far beyond me or my musings. You could call that undeniable pressure a God thing (I do). And my very first job when I started in 2020 was pushing back the spirit of fear that was creeping over the whole Earth, using humor, sarcasm mostly, and focusing on good news.

That’s C&C.

Then the missions started mounting up. As soon as we’d make progress on one mission, the next mission would pop up in the queue. After turning fear into scorn, we then fought back the lockdowns, then the mask mandates, then the jab mandates, and then we pushed legislators to prune local emergency powers.

We’ve won every single battle.

But, what now? What’s the next mission? Oh, it’s nothing too hard. Now we must get some justice, justice for the injured, justice against the criminals who caused it. After, we still need to Save America from the swarm of demented termites that resemble miniature, insectile incarnations of the demonic philosopher-prince Karl Marx.

In celebration of our Anniversary together, I decided to sit for an “author Q&A,” except that I will ask the questions around here, thank you. (And I’ll handle the answers, too.) Let’s go!

How do you have time to write Coffee & Covid and run a law firm?

Great question. The short answer is: I’m not sure. I just do it. I wake up at 4:45am, pray, exercise a little to get the blood moving through the old grey matter, snag a hot caffeinated beverage, and then get on the day’s post.

The more practical answer is, I traded some unproductive evening hours — by going to bed earlier and waking up earlier — and have scaled back my law work, thanks to supporters’ help. I will say it does take a special kind of discipline, or maybe obsessive-compulsion, to do this every single day.

How long does it take you every day?

It takes about three or four hours to go from a blank screen to hitting “publish.” That’s why you sometimes see typos, grammar errors, and fragments (extra words left over from editing). The short deadlines mean I don’t have a lot of time for proofreading. In the afternoons I do my research and collect a “stack of stuff” for the next day’s inspiration depending on how much free time I get from day to day.

How many people get Coffee & Covid every day?

More than 150,000 people are signed up for the newsletter. More than that actually see it, because some folks forward the post, or read it to their spouse, and so on. I’d guess that around 20% of the total read the entire roundup on any given day, but I’m just guessing.

More importantly, we have regular readers from all walks of life. Our fans range all the way from a nun who’ve took a vow of poverty (hello Sister!) to billionaires, from handymen to passenger-jet captains, from holistic nurse-assistants to cardiac surgeons, from school teachers to state senators, and about every other line of work you can think of.

Now that covid is over why not retire the blog?

I ask myself that question all the time. But … is covid over? You might say it’s not over till we get justice for everyone harmed by the defective jab products and the nefarious hospital schemes. Never leave a man behind. Or a woman either.

A more robust answer is Coffee & Covid isn’t just a blog. It’s practically a cliché to say that ‘we are a community,’ but I mean, just look at the comments. I don’t know how many other Substacks have 700 or more daily comments, but we must be in the top five percent. That’s all you guys.

But more important: Coffee and Covid is not just an echo chamber where a bunch of people agree with each other and ignore the world. We actually do stuff. We actually move the needle, in the real world. My job is to quietly persuade through engaging words, so that you can send C&C to someone, get them hooked, and redpill them. It’s happened over and over.

But also … the multipliers! I know why nobody else does it: fear. If they pick the wrong recipient, and that person turns out to be a goat or a shyster, they might get blamed. And in fact, over the years we’ve funded a couple duds (fortunately no shysters), but more often we’ve fueled superstars like Chris Rufo and Chaya Raichik (Libs of Tik Tok).

We don’t do fear at C&C. Maybe one day a multiplier will backfire, but we don’t multiply people because we’ve decided they’re saints. We don’t believe in the ‘Superman theory’ around here. We multiply people to send a message: don’t try to cancel conservatives.

What was the top multiplier of all time?

There are a couple we couldn’t get any feedback on, but I believe the top multiplier of all time was for Dr. Peter McCullough, which raised over $400,000 for his legal defense in three days.

Why does a Coffee & Covid subscription cost so much compared to other Substacks?

I respect the question but it makes me chuckle every time. While most Substacks charge a fraction of what C&C does for a paid membership, they also put out a fraction of the content. On a per-word basis, I think C&C is probably around the least expensive stack.

But that’s not why people sign up anyway. C&C gives away six out of seven posts every week! Why? Because the mission is to reach folks, destroy narratives, and change minds, not run a business. The best way to reach the largest number of folks is by giving away most of the content. So, paid subs help me spend more time writing C&C, and as a gift they get my day of rest in the form of a bonus post.

Folks should thank the paid subscribers, who literally make it all possible.

There’s also a practical reason for the price point. In early 2022, after publishing my most viral post ever, C&C got canceled, all on the same day, on every platform including Patreon, which handled the finances. Patreon had allowed many price points. But then I had to start over on a new platform, and we picked Substack.

Substack does not allow multiple levels of support. You have to pick one.

So, in a wild hurry to get everything back online fast, we chose the average level of support. It seemed right because it was about the same as what I charge for an hour of legal advice at the firm. So in effect, supporters each pledge to buy one hour of legal advice a year. It’s helped me justify the trade-off of spending less time on clients and more time on the C&C mission.

I wish I could help with the mission but I can’t afford $50 a month. Now what?

Well, just reading helps! Forwarding C&C to others helps, and cross-linking each day’s post in social media helps.

And I don’t mention it much, but there is a one-time donation option, which just got a major glow-up this year and is new and greatly improved. Here is the link: Donate now to Coffee & Covid. Note that you can make a recurring donation of any amount if you want.

Honestly though, I am just grateful and honored that you are here reading and helping me beat back the media’s silly narratives.

Do you use artificial intelligence to help write C&C?

Some might argue there’s no intelligence here at all. Haha, just kidding. I sometimes use a chatbot to answer a question, like who was the 23rd president or something, but I don’t really trust them much. I certainly don’t use chatbots to help write any content, as the frequent typos prove (sorry!).

And I will never let the AIs write any part of Coffee & Covid. I’m not even sure the chatbots are willing to mock tiny Tony Fauci, the human cockroach. And if they won’t even do that much, they’re out.

What’s the ‘spreadsheet’ that long-time readers sometimes refer to?

Over the first few months, my Facebook blog, not yet called Coffee & Covid, evolved a lot as I added more and more daily covid data, and I started including my own comments on the covid data and the day’s optimistic pandemic news. For instance, here’s the March 26, 2021 post, one year in, which shows my then-classic covid spreadsheet:

You can see how after a full year of daily blogging, we’d finally reached 123 ‘likes’ and 43 comments. If you want a tip to getting your blog going, maybe that shows consistency is key, as they say.

Can you explain the ‘So’ thing?

‘So’ was a censorship-avoidance technique. For the first several years of C&C, I would end a key thought with the word “So.” It was intended to make a point , a point that if I said it explicitly, I would get canceled or thrown in Facebook jail. For instance, it might go something like this:

Yesterday the New York Times quietly ran a story way down the webpage headlined, “Diamond Princess death numbers revised downwards.” In other words, the terrifying figures our panicked leaders used to lock down the country were, it seems, somehow, slightly over-estimated. So.

That ungrammatical shorthand became a kind of C&C trademark, an inside joke, a knowing wink at each other. While I was speaking at a covid conference once, I noticed some C&C fans wearing shirts they made with “So” on them. And because of relentless reader demand, and with lots of help from a passionate volunteer, we set up the C&C Shop, where you can buy C&C Swag, like “So” shirts and “So” mugs. I’ve heard they get lots of comments.

What can we do to help celebrate C&C?

To help celebrate our four-year anniversary, why don’t you write in the comments about what C&C meant to you during the pandemic, or if you’re a post-pandemic reader, how C&C improves your life. Or, tell your best C&C conversion story or anything else meaningful. Let’s collect everyone’s C&C stories in one place!

Now, at long last (and thank you for indulging me in a little Anniversary discussion), on to today’s roundup.