Better in their words…

Sunday Bonus: Trump wins again, this time against the Pulitzer elite; Pride Month launches limply; heart deaths spike at home; FBI gets polygraphed and paranoid.

Source: BEIGE-NESS ☙ Sunday, June 1, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS

WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY

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The tables have turned, the chickens are coming home to roost, and what goes around comes around— and usually with a fowl grudge. This week we witnessed a most delightful story, which only appeared in selected media. (It most certainly did not appear in the New York Times or the Washington Post.) The Hill’s version was headlined, “Trump hails ruling allowing case against Pulitzer Board to proceed.”

In 2022, Trump filed a state court lawsuit in South Florida, alleging the Pulitzer Board had defamed him via its 2018 award season, which lovingly bestowed top journalism awards on The New York Times and The Washington Post for their false “Russiagate” reporting.

The lawsuit’s defendants are all Pulitzer Board members, and constitute a chic “who’s who” list of élite institutional voices, including journalists, editors, university professors, and media execs like Elizabeth Alexander, Anne Applebaum, Nancy Barnes, Lee Bollinger, Nicole Carroll, Steve Coll, Gail Collins, Viet Thanh Nguyen, David Remnick, and more.

The last place those particularly prideful people want to be defending themselves is Florida state court. Trump had two ways to get them down here. First, one of the defendants lives in Florida (Poynter Institute president Neil Brown). Second, Florida defamation law extends in-state jurisdiction over citizens of other states, if they injure a Florida citizen. Between the two, they were caught in the Sunshine State’s judicial net.

Trump’s now three-year-old lawsuit claims that, when the Board awarded Pulitzers to the Post and the Times for their fake stories, the Board effectively republished and amplified the papers’ original defamatory content. Trump says the Board acted maliciously, intending to undermine his reputation and capacity to govern with lies rather than seek the truth.

The last time the media elite sneered at a defamation suit filed by a public figure, it didn’t end well for them. In 2016, Hulk Hogan sued Gawker Media over the unauthorized publication of a 90-second sex tape— and walked away with a jaw-dropping $140 million jury verdict. It effectively bankrupted the far-left company and sent a seismic shock wave through the journalism world.

The Gawker case, once dismissed as a circus sideshow, became a watershed moment in defamation law, proving that even celebrities (or presidents) can win when the media goes too far, and when juries are shown just how reckless the so-called “watchdogs of democracy” can be behind the scenes.

Trump’s case against the Pulitzer Board may not be about sex tapes, but it follows a familiar arc: a public figure long ridiculed by institutional media, coordinated character assassination framed as journalism, and now, a serious legal challenge that threatens to unwind a powerful narrative with cold hard facts— and possibly, a cold, hard, and unaffordaly huge check.

🔥 Last September, Florida Judge Robert Pegg denied the Board Defendants’ motion to dismiss. They appealed. They lost on appeal. Next, they filed a motion to stay the case, which Judge Pegg also denied. The defendants appealed again. This week’s story reported their secondembarrassing loss in Florida’s Fourth District Court of Appeals.

The Defendants’ lawyers’ argument to freeze the case was so dumb that it raises serious questions over whether they are being effectively represented.

I am not making this up. First, the Defendants argued that President Trump is too important to waste his time on a defamation lawsuit, since he should be running the country. Second, in a tack-on “and also”’ argument, they cried that President Trump had used the same argument when he was a defendant in his criminal cases, after he got elected in November.

Flatly rejecting those arguments, Judge Pegg and the Court of Appeals agreed: courts shouldn’t micromanage the President’s work schedule. If the President isn’t complaining about the “burden of litigation,” then it’s nobody else’s business. “Whether the pursuit of this litigation is in his best interests,” the appellate judges wrote, “or consistent with the responsibilities of his office, is exclusively within the President’s purview.”

If, as seems likely, this horrible argument was just a stunt to delay discovery, it failed that way, too, since the court of appeals ruled quickly. Very soon now, the Defendants will encounter the final reckoning that has long terrified them: discovery. I hope they videotape the depositions. After all, it is a matter of great public interest.

With discovery swinging toward them like a wrecking ball, the Board’s lawyers are almost certainly discussing the S-word: settlement. Trump doesn’t want money. He wants those 2018 prizes withdrawn. At least some of them, admittedly arrogant Board members, would prefer to back down, and not risk potentially embarrassing discovery or a bankrupting jury verdict like in Gawker.

A majority —ten of nineteen— could vote to rescind the 2018 awards. I can’t wait to find out what they do.

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Today is the first day of June, which means summer is fully and finally here. And also the made-up month celebrating sin, particularly the original sin of “pride.” They even named their special month for the transgression. Anyway, this year things are off to a sluggish start. The Idaho Dispatch ran our first story yesterday headlined, “Boise Pride Kickoff Cancelled Due to Low Interest.”

Womp, womp. The Idaho story was not a one-off. Also yesterday, the Associated Press zoomed out to the national scene, running its gloomy article below the headline, “Pride events face budget shortfalls as US corporations pull support ahead of summer festivities.”

Obviously, like you, my very first question after reading that headline was: I wonder what the experts think? The AP didn’t disappoint. “Experts,” the AP soberly informed readers, “note that a growing slice of the public has grown tired of companies taking a stance on social and political issues.”

As a member of the public, I agree. Tired is the least offensive possible way of putting it. What would we do without experts? 🤮 I wonder what kind of experts calculated that astonishing conclusion? (AP didn’t say.) Did they use models? AP didn’t say.

Anyway, across the country, Pride is shrinking like it just swam in freezing cold water. San Francisco Pride, which produces one of the country’s largest and most offensive LGBTQ+ celebrations, faces a $200,000 budget gap after corporate donors unceremoniously pulled out. In Kansas City, ‘Missouri Pride’ lost about the same amount, $200,000— roughly half its annual budget. ‘Heritage of Pride,’ the rainbow-colored umbrella organization for New York City’s prideful largesse, is desperately fundraising to narrow “a $750,000 budget gap” after sponsorships shriveled up.

Stung by losing most of its Bud Lite market share after its cross-dressing debacle, Budweiser pulled out of PrideFest in the company’s hometown of St. Louis, Missouri, after 30 years of sponsorship, leaving limp organizers stranded with a $150,000 budget shortfall. Axios reported, “Big corporate sponsors missing from Philadelphia Pride weekend.”

The New York Times was pounded the hardest. The Gray Lady swallowed her pride and ran an outraged article last week headlined, “Nervous Corporate Sponsors Retreat From New York Pride.” It blamed President Trump. The sub-headline blared, “25 percent of corporate donors to New York Pride have canceled or scaled back their support, citing economic uncertainty and fear of retribution from the Trump administration.”

Belying the sub-headline’s promise, there was not a single quote from a corporate sponsor that cited “retribution.” The article did report that one of the few remaining corporate sponsors, Target, chipped in anyway but asked not to be named as a sponsor. Back in the closet.

🔥 Target’s story in particular was even more amusing than it first looked. The gay-as-a-Hillary-pantsuit home goods firm found itself boiling in LGBT controversy— friendly fire. Among many saucy headlines, Gayety Magazine’s said it best: “If You Want To Look Like ‘An Underpaid Cabana Boy,’ Target’s Pride Collection is Perfect for You.”

Gayety’s sneering article first reported that, “Target has scaled back its DEI efforts, including reducing the number of stores carrying Pride-themed merchandise and moving displays to less prominent locations.” But Target’s latest original sin was even more unforgivable: its 2025 Pride collection palette is based on beige.

Beige! Sure, some items featured thin rainbow stripes, but the colorless collection washed away the so-called holiday’s in-your-face fun. Did they even ask any gay people for feedback? Judas-like Target didn’t fool anyone. “This retreat,” Gayety raged, “sparked criticism from both LGBTQ+ advocates and civil rights groups, who view it as a betrayal of the community’s trust.”

A very beige betrayal. But you can hardly blame the store. Target’s almonds are getting crushed in a nutcracker-like vice* (*now available in stores for $13.99). Forbes, from February:

Florida’s consumer-protection lawsuit accurately argues that Target failed to inform its investors of the risks of promoting Pride merchandise. The suit blasted Target’s 2024 Pride line as “exceptionally offensive” and “extreme,” citing items including tuck-friendly swimsuits for transgender kids and items carefully crafted by British brand Abprallen, which uses heavy Satanic imagery in its designs.

Elections have consequences. Maybe they should rename it to Shame Month.

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On Friday, the UK Daily Mail ran a profoundly ironic story that was so astonishing it required a screenshot:

They might be starting to get the idea. “Americans,” the Mail reported, “are dropping dead from heart attacks at home at alarming rates, doctors warn.”

At home. Regular readers will recall that key phrase from years of C&C reporting sudden celebrity deaths. “At home” sudden deaths are a massive red flag in epidemiology, because they break the expected pattern of how and where fatal cardiac events typically happen— and more importantly, who they happen to.

Most fatal cardiac events follow years of diagnosed cardiovascular history, highly advertised warning signs (chest pain, fatigue, arrhythmia), and well-known high-risk settings where help is widely available: during sports, at work, in transit, and during exertion— but not quietly on the couch.

When a large number of people, particularly younger adults with no history of heart disease, begin dying alone and unexpectedly at home, it defies baseline expectations. This makes “at-home” deaths not just a red flag, but a canary in the clinical coal mine— a symptom of institutional denial, diagnostic blindness, and mass gaslighting.

According to the Mail’s story, researchers at Mass General Brigham, a Harvard-affiliated hospital, found heart-related deaths have skyrocketed +17% since the pandemic. “While the exact number is unknown,” the story said, “in many of these cases heart attacks have been at home, despite deaths in hospitals decreasing.”

The story mused about covid, but it mostly pointed its bony finger of blame at, get this, marijuana gummies. You can read the whole thing, but guess which possible iatrogenic cause was nowhere to be found? A medical intervention already known to cause myocarditis and pericarditis? A “safe and effective” solution whose deployment calendar fits neatly atop the timeline spotted by Mass General’s “scientists?”

You know the answer, even if the scientists pretend not to. What’s especially insulting is that the mRNA vaccines’ link to cardiac inflammation —especially in young people— is no longer even controversial. It’s in the literature! It’s in the CDC’s own data, and it’s been acknowledged by European health authorities. It’s even on the FDA-required jab label. Yet in the story and in the underlying study, that well-known and widely discussed iatrogenic risk was airbrushed right out, while speculative ‘lifestyle factors’ were inflated into the narrative void.

In a very cowardly fashion, they set up the defenseless marijuana industry as a decoy. Somebody has to go under the bus.

Perhaps we should be grateful that the researchers published the study at all. After all, they did tiptoe into dangerous territory, by highlighting the most damning signal: the fact that at-home SADS is a novel red flag. But they still chickened out before even speculating over whether the blessed mRNA juice might be at all involved, even just to say it needs further study.

But there’s a glass-half-full reading, which is that Trump’s new HHS climate is perhaps inviting researchers to take more risks. Maybe we’ll begin to see more, well, intellectually inquisitive research.

There’s a faint whiff in the air —like ozone before a storm— that something has shifted. Trump’s re-election and RFK Jr.’s confirmation as HHS Secretary have blown a cold wind through the public health bureaucracy. Agencies and researchers who once echoed the narrative with cult-like precision may now be sensing that the old incentives are cracking, and a new climate that rewards honesty over orthodoxy is quietly forming.

We can hope! Anyway, the Mail’s story was incremental progress.

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Like a J6 tourist waiting to get the call, the FBI is feeling uneasy these days. Yesterday, the New York Times reported the story below the headline, “Unease at F.B.I. Intensifies as Patel Ousts Top Officials.” The sub-headline explained, “Senior executives are being pushed out and director Patel is more freely using polygraph tests to tamp down on news leaks.”

The story practically vibrated with bureaucratic panic. And it’s easy to see why: the FBI is getting gutted like a trout by someone who actually means it.

The irony, of course, is rich. For years, the FBI was weaponized against Trump and his allies, against soccer moms, pro-life protestors, and Catholic traditionalists. Now that it’s being forcibly un-politicized (by politicized means, granted), the same voices who cheered on crossfire hurricanes and early morning Roger Stone raids are crying about polygraphs.

To put a fine point on it, the most delicious irony is that polygraphs —a favored device once used by the FBI to squeeze confessions, weed out security risks, and intimidate suspects— are now being turned inward. The Bureau is finally on the business end of its own preferred tool of psychological leverage.

“The F.B.I.’s increasingly pervasive use of the polygraph,” the Times said, describing the Bureau’s standard protocol from 2001-2024, “has only intensified a culture of intimidation.” Get that? The FBI agents are intimidated.

You couldn’t ask for more delicious irony. FBI agents are feeling intimidated! These are the very same people who raided homes over Facebook posts, entrapped marginal political actors in “domestic terror” stings, classified traditional Catholics as potential extremists, hunted down grandmas who stepped onto the Capitol plaza, spied on journalists, and wiretapped a sitting president.

The FBI is starting to understand what it feels like to be on the FBI watchlist.

🔥 The article began by quoting Kash Patel’s book, Government Gangsters, wherein he opined that, “The F.B.I. has become so thoroughly compromised that it will remain a threat to the people unless drastic measures are taken.”

In other words, he warned them it was coming.

In effect, the story was really about casting shade on the FBI’s next round of investigations, which the story framed as “revived right-wing causes.” For example, the Times noted that “Mr. Patel has put officials on administrative leave with pay, including two men who dealt with issues related to Hunter Biden’s laptop.” And, “a succession of top agents, all women, were given an ultimatum: Take a different post or be asked to retire.”

For example, the Times reported that last month, an unnamed senior official was forced out. The Times reported, without saying how it knew, that his departure was related to his failure to disclose that his wife had taken a knee for BLM during the 2020 summer of protest. The story noted darkly that the ‘veteran agent’ had voluntarily retired — but after taking a polygraph.

Predictably, there was not a single quote —not even a token one— from anyone inside or outside the Bureau supporting the reforms. You would think the Times could have scrounged up at least one field agent who hated the D.C. rot, or a whistleblower, or a former official burned by the Bureau’s political games—who might have said something like, “It’s about time.”

The comments were turned off, or I’d have left something spicy.

🔥 This week, I noticed a trend of conservatives criticizing Kash Patel and Dan Bongino for moving too slowly. My opinion is that this is the worst kind of blackpilled internal infighting. My goodness: how fast do people really think purging and rebuilding the FBI should take? Based on the Times’s overwrought response, Patel and Bongino are traveling at breakneck speed.

The article even quoted Dan Bongino’s grasp of the immense job. “Part of you dies a little bit when you still see all this stuff from behind the scenes,” Boningo said this week on X. He was trying to tell us something. It’s a big job.

In this single story, which did its level best to obscure and minimize the progress, we learned that already: senior execs have been purged or reassigned, polygraphs weaponized against internal leakers, whole divisions disbanded, new leadership stacked across major field offices, the Hoover building closed, and counter-corruption squads gutted and replaced.

Anybody who says it is happening too slowly is either totally unrealistic or is not acting in good faith.

People, please. Let’s not eat our own just as we’ve begun to win.

Patel and Bongino inherited a federal agency more tangled than Hoover’s ghost and more politicized than Twitter’s content moderation team. They’re not moving slowly. They’re moving carefully— and still faster than anyone dared hope. Conservatives demanding faster scalps should pause and consider the mission: it’s not just to punish. Even more important, it’s to rebuild.

And you don’t rebuild a federal law enforcement empire between podcast episodes.

Have a blessed Sunday! Thank you, deeply, for your continuing loyal support of the mission. C&C will return tomorrow morning, right on schedule, with another dose of essential news and snarky commentary.

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