Better in their words…

It’s No Kings day; amorphous protests; Epstein fallout topples UK royalty; Russiagate links emerge; Bolton indicted; Smartmatic hit for bribery; Admin goes full Coffee & Covid, mocking wokescolds.

Source: YOUR MOMMA ☙ Saturday, October 18, 2025 ☙ C&C NEWS

WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY

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It’s finally here! They been waiting so long; it’s like Christmas for progressives. It’s Protest day. The BBC ran a story early this morning headlined, “No Kings protests across US cause states to activate National Guard.” Don’t say their protest message is incoherent. It means whatever you want it to mean.

According to my sources, other slogans considered included: No Cancer; No Radioactive Waste; No Artificial Yucca (submitted by Progressives for Puerto Rico); No Swearing (struck in the first round); No Ugly Cheerleaders (ditto); No Taxes (same); and No UN Overlords (struck before voting began).

So ‘No Kings’ it was.

The well-organized national “day of protest” even sports an interactive mapwhere you can easily locate areas of your own town to visit or avoid.

As I’ve said many times, I agree with their public theme: I don’t want kings. I prefer our existing form of constitutional republic, and oppose all tyranny and corruption. For example, I oppose Joe Biden’s medical mandates, school lockdowns, forced DEI policies, and tyrannically turning the White House lawn into a transgender drag show.

So I considered attending the local rally, but the AI patiently informed me it probably wasn’t a good idea, since the other protesters might view my No-King-Biden sign as a “distraction.” Seems intolerant, but never mind.

I do think they should be more specific. For one thing, surely not all kings are bad. If we depose the Burger King, who will stop the Hamburglar? Personally, I could live without Stephen King, but I also say “live and let live.” Good luck to him, I say. Let him babble about his loony liberal ideas and abuse adjectives all he wants. Don’t cancel him, for Pete Buttigieg’s sake.

Having invested more time than I care to admit studying this silly protest, investigating George Soros’s funding trail, wondering about foreign coordination, and so on, I’ve come to understand one thing. “No Kings” is not a normal protest. There’s no particular policy or position they oppose or want changed. It’s just a big tent for anyone who doesn’t like Trump to enjoy a day of raging against the Trump machine.

It’s the All-Protest! Come one, come all! Every progressive complaint welcome!

No Kings is less like a protest and more like an emotional clearinghouse for generalized Trump resentment. There’s no legislative demand, no policy plank, not even a unifying grievance beyond “Trump = bad.” It’s the political version of primal scream therapy — catharsis through ‘collective activism.’

In other words, it’s group therapy cosplaying as democracy. They should call it a mental health session. Instead of protest signs, they should hand out clipboards, mood surveys, and those folding paper crowns that Burger King gives out for kids’ fast-food birthday parties.

To be fair, it is “inclusive” in the sense that it invites anarchists, neoliberals, bored college kids, restless boomers, never-Trumpers, socialists, professional NGOs — everyone can show up, wave signs, shout slogans, and feel virtuous together. The “anti-monarch” language cleverly obscures its vagueness; since nobody supports monarchy, everyone can agree and get along, and then project their own personal frustration onto the “king.”

But don’t laugh at them. The progressives are taking this super seriously. For instance, consider this adorable sentiment, spotted yesterday on BlueSky:

I can hear it now, echoing through the generations: Grandpa once fought fascists by standing in front of Starbucks for two hours! Liberté, Égalité, Retweeté! I think this is perfectly precious. I hope they have commemorative photo booths set up down there.

And I wish them all the best in their epic struggle to defend our constitutional republic, defeat fascism, and find decent parking.

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Speaking of Kings, and of shedding them, the week delivered royal Epstein news from Great Britain. Yesterday, the BBC ran a curious story headlined, “After all those scandals, why did Prince Andrew quit his titles now?” Trump, that’s why!

Suddenly and unexpectedly, after all these years of clinging to them tighter than a cat on bath day, Prince Andrew voluntarily surrendered all further use of his royal titles and honors, including Duke of York, Knight of the Garter (ahem), Earl of Inverness, Baron Killyleagh, and Royal Panty Hound.

C’est la vie, or however they say it in the Queen’s English.

By voluntarily surrendering his official titles, he was allowed to keep the last one, “Prince,” suggesting it might not have been quite so voluntary as advertised. It sounds more like a take-it-or-leave-it deal. Whichever, until this week, Prince Andrew had successfully fended off Epstein fallout for nearly two decades, even after paying a generous settlement to quiet the late Virginia Giuffre.

What finally took him down were newly disclosed Epstein emails; specifically, the mysterious appearance of Epstein’s Yahoo email account that some unknown patriot zipped over to Bloomberg.

Andrew —along with a small army of other British notables— long insisted that he’d “cut all ties” to the International Man of Mystery after that first trafficking conviction in June 2008 for “procuring a child for prostitution.” But the new Yahoo emails exposed Andrew’s Pinocchio-like nose, along with an unsavory, continuing mutual admiration society between the two men.

And so it became painfully obvious that Prince Andrew was both a pederast and a liar. Back in the day, they’d have shipped him Down Under to supervise the Australian penal colony for the rest of his life, tidily solving the problem of having to answer any more embarrassing questions. But in 2025, Andrew was subjected to legal exile. By stripping his titles, the Palace achieved the same effect as shipping him off to govern Tasmania — without the travel cost. It created a comfortable layer of plausible deniability for the royal family; He’s not with us.

But Bloomberg’s bombshell emails did not implicate Donald Trump. If anything, they exonerated the President, showing Epstein’s frustration at Trump for spurning overtures and even suggested Epstein knew Trump was testifying against him. But the emails bashed like a wrecking ball aimed straight into the first floor of the British deep state.

To remind Portland readers: Last month, the new Epstein emails took out Lord Peter Mandelson, who got summarily sacked as British Ambassador to the United States, recently appointed to “repair the special relationship” with Trump. Mandelson was British deep-state nobility. The shadowy careerist’s satanic nickname among government insiders and journalists —I swear I am not making this up— was “the Prince of Darkness.”

Mandelson was a lifelong creature of Britain’s permanent political class —its deep state— the sort who never really leaves power, just swaps titles. When he wasn’t a cabinet minister, he was an EU Commissioner; when he wasn’t that, he was advising banks, media moguls, or quietly influencing leadership contests. Mandelson mastered the dark arts of spin, back-channel persuasion, and bureaucratic survival.

He was always impeccably polite, immaculately dressed, and perpetually several moves ahead — a political chess player who played in the shadows and preferred not to be seen moving the pieces.

His devilish nickname has aged poorly. When the Epstein emails surfaced, it suddenly read like foreshadowing — the Prince of Darkness found consorting with the wrong kind of royalty, spilling infernal effluence straight into the British deep state’s palace.

Now, in the wake of Andrew’s defenestration, let’s try to connect a few more fascinating dots, shall we?

🔥 There’s no public evidence that Peter Mandelson personally participated in the Steele-dossier operation or any formal U.S. intelligence efforts related to Russiagate. But the circumstantial ecosystem around him overlaps heavily.

First of all, Mandelson was a close personal and professional associate of Sir Richard Dearlove (a former MI6 spy chief) and other UK security grandees who have been credibly reported as key background sources for Christopher Steele’s fake Russiagate dossier. Dearlove and Steele both operated in the same post-MI6 private-intel circle that marketed lucrative opposition research to Western governments and political campaigns.

Mandelson also maintained long-standing ties with both the Clinton Foundation and the Obama-era diplomatic class, moving freely between London, Brussels, and Washington think tanks during the 2014-2016 period when the “Trump–Russia” narrative was incubating. His Rolodex included precisely the kind of consultants and former intelligence types who blurred the lines between diplomacy and information warfare.

As one of the architects of globalist “Third Way” centrism, Mandelson had every ideological reason to consider Trump’s populist nationalism (and Brexit) to be existential threats to his legacy. Even if he wasn’t a hands-onconspirator, his orbit would have been sympathetic terrain for those advancing the narrative.

But if you asked me to bet, given Mandelson’s Machiavellian perch in the shadowy nests of British intelligence, right at the crosswalk of Russiagate Street and Impeachment Avenue, I would wager that the now-disgraced Lord was up to his tea-stained neck in Obama’s “get Trump” operation. So Bloomberg’s Epstein email dump appears (to me) aimed right at the British deep state, and by another happy TAW coincidence, it is working.

🔥 What about Andrew? Again, there’s no public evidence linking Andrew’s oleaginous fingers to Russiagate. But Andrew and Mandelson knew each other well. Both men circulated through the same Mayfair–Soho dinner-party and ‘fundraising’ orbit that tied together the royals, Labour grandees, and billionaires during the 1990s–2010s. They attended overlapping charity events, foreign-trade functions, and private gatherings hosted by mutual friends such as the Rothschilds, Evgeny Lebedev (son of former KGB officer and British billionaire media mogul), and Jeffrey Epstein.

And they were both very good buddies with Jeffrey “my best pal!” Epstein, who often bragged about his MI6 connections. Ghislaine —through her mysteriously deceased father Robert Maxwell— was a potential conduit.

Trips on Epstein airplanes and visits to pedo island could have provided Mandelson and Andrew with ideal private opportunities to discuss the Russiagate operation. And Mandelson —skilled at navigating British politics from the shadows— would almost certainly have wanted Royal buy-in before doing anything that could damage the “special relationship.” So it would make sense for him to work with Prince Andrew.

Here’s another fun question to muse over: Did Trump’s DOJ arrest Epstein in 2019 —a reboot of the 2008 charges after a Miami Herald 2018 exposé— because they were cracking down on high-flying, deep-state pedophiles? Or did they arrest Epstein in 2019 because Trump had discovered Epstein was connected to Russiagate? Hmm.

Certainly, Epstein’s network included many of the same global elites who pushed the Russiagate narrative — finance, intelligence, and media power brokers. Certainly, arresting Epstein aided Trump’s counterstrike against the deep state by threatening a nexus of Russiagate actors with exposure. Intentional or not, the arrest shifted leverage dramatically. It suddenly put the same Anglo-American elite who pushed Russiagate on the defensive.

The British now seem to be trying to move past Russiagate. Last month, the Royal Palace convened a garish spectacle, a historic second state visit for President Trump with full honors. Could Andrew’s honorific exile be intended as a ritual bloodletting — a royal sacrifice offered to appease a resurgent emperor across the sea? The message seems unmistakable: the House of Windsor is prepared to purge its sinners and present a purified face to Trump’s court.

In geopolitics, as in myth, sometimes the only way to restore an alliance is with a little well-spattered crimson, for appeasement and for the forgiveness of sins.

In any event, for those paying attention: accountability is stalking Epstein’s connections, one by one, like a black-clad assassin moving stealthily through the political shadows in the corridors of power. As the evidence tumbles slowly into the daylight, President Trump looks more and more like the hero who took the deep-state’s pedo network down.

After savaging Britain’s deep-state royalty, the next obvious target is our own.

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As many of you have already heard, more deep-state nobility came under attack this week closer to home, right here in America. If Letitia James’ indictment was pushing over a pawn, this was more like capturing a corrupt rook or bishop. Yesterday, the Economist (of all places) ran a story headlined, “The criminal case against John Bolton looks serious.” On Thursday, Pam Bondi, obviously relishing the moment, quoted: “No one is above the law.”

Bolton, the mustachioed war priest of the old order, has met his match. After decades of sermonizing about regime change abroad, he’s now getting a little taste of it at home. The charges —mishandling and retention of classified material, the same ones that have felled lesser bureaucrats and tangled up a president— are deliciously symmetrical.

According to the indictment, Bolton hoarded “national defense information” in his personal files and transmitted it to unauthorized relatives, a habit he apparently picked up between coups.

Unlike the brief, “just-the-facts-ma’am” indictments of Comey and James, this one was 18 pages packed with salacious details about Bolton daily sending classified material over his unsecured AOL account and then stupidly getting hacked by Iran. The FBI also found lots of printed classified documents at his house. It didn’t help that, after the Mar-a-Lago raid, Bolton went on every news network and podcast bleating that Trump should be buried beneath the prison for keeping classified documents.

The legal pundits are unaccountably quiet this time. As the Economist said in its headline, the experts are mumbling that the case looks strong.

🔥 John Stuart Bolton, 76, cut his teeth as a Cold Warrior in Reagan’s DOJ. He’d graduated Yale, then Yale law, went straight to work for a top DC law firm, and like Peter Mendelson, transitioned gracefully into the permanent government. He’s a classic prototype of the Ivy-to-Beltway assembly line.

Over the years, Bolton bubbled up to the exclusive annex at the center of the nation’s corridors of power, serving in roles like Assistant Attorney General, U.N. Ambassador, and Under Secretary of State. Politically, Bolton is a neocon’s neocon, a hawkish globalist of the first order, a master spook swanning easily across blurred lines, undermined borders, military-industrial conferences, and oceans of dirty tricks, skullduggery, and secret rendezvous spots.

The mustachioed globalist’s North Star was the theory of pre-emption,bombing your enemies before they even realize they are no longer allies. To Bolton, diplomacy is the same as war, just a lot slower. And he likes to go fast. The human walrus was the military-industrial complex’s best friend in government, the unofficial head of the MIC liaison office.

After Trump naively hired him as National Security Director during Trump 1.0 in 2018, and the whole time he was gathering material for his never-Trump book, published two months after Trump fired him. Bolton undermined the President at every step, pushed both impeachments, and wore out his hairy lips muttering about how no one was above the law.

Yesterday, Bolton pleaded “not guilty” at his arraignment.

🔥 The charges in this storm of indictments aren’t especially salacious. Comey gets lying to Congress — a crime so common it should have its own seating chart. Letitia James gets mortgage fraud, the kind of thing you’d expect from a used-car financier, not a crusading state attorney general. Bolton’s accused of mishandling classified material was bureaucratically dull, if poetic.

None of them were charged with treason, insurrection, or puppy murder — all of which would seem to be more appropriate.

The methodical banality of the charges is on purpose. Trump’s prosecutors aren’t swinging for drama; they’re playing Capone-ball; catching big fish using a bunch of small hooks. Treason is complicated, controversial, and (thankfully) hard to prove. Boring charges are cleaner, faster, and less likely to crumble on appeal.

Why argue treason in front of a sympathetic D.C. jury when you can prove perjury or misuse of classified documents in one afternoon, and let the headlines do the rest? Each conviction chips away at the cocoon of untouchability that’s protected these people for decades.

In other words, it’s not about spectacle— it’s about attrition. You don’t need a guillotine when a thousand paper cuts will do the job.

🔥 If anything, the pace of indictments feels like it is spinning up. Rumors swirl about pending indictments due any moment from Florida Grand Juries, two of which were empaneled on September 26th (Fort Lauderdale and Fort Pierce). Other suggest Senator Adam Schiff (D-Ca.) could be next. We don’t know who (nor should we). But it seems unlikely this will stop with Bolton.

Here’s the thing about timing. Since prosecutions can take years, if Trump wants to see convictions while he remains in office, charges must be filed soon. It may become hard to keep up with them all.

Remember back when black-pillers were sending each other hilarious memes of skeletons waiting forever for arrests? How are you feeling now? But wait— it gets better.

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On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal ran a wonderfully encouraging story headlined, “Smartmatic Indicted Over Alleged Bribes.” The sub-headline added context: “Voting-machine company earlier brought defamation suits against Trump allies over claims it rigged the 2020 election.”

Voting-technology provider Smartmatic and three executives were charged under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act on Thursday, for conspiring to bribe foreign officials and money laundering in the Philippines— a much easier charge to prove than stealing the 2020 election.

Maximum penalties include up to 20 years in prison, plus the greater of $500,000 or twice the amount laundered and used for bribes.

Curiously, Smartmatic’s three charged executives are all linked to Venezuela. Two are Venezuelan citizens: Roger Alejandro “Piñata” Martinez and Elie Moreno. (Jorge Miguel Vasquez was the third). It’s too early to draw any pictures, but one begins to wonder whether dots are appearing between the 2020 election fiasco and the current military noose tightening around Venezuela’s dirty neck.

Last year, Smartmatic successfully sued Sidney Powell for defamation, after the courageous lawyer was unable to completely prove the company had thrown the 2020 elections for Biden. But her claims are worth briefly revisiting.

Powell specifically alleged that Smartmatic was directly involved with the Venezuelan government, and claimed its voting technology was designed under the direction of Hugo Chávez, the ideological predecessor of current president Nicolás Maduro (Maduro calls himself “son of Chávez”). Powell claimed that Smartmatic’s software was created in Venezuela to ensure Chávez (and Maduro) would never lose an election, and that Smartmatic’s technology was used to rig elections in Venezuela. The same technology, she said, was then used in the United States to manipulate votes in the 2020 election. Vox, 2017:

“How” indeed. The dictator who controls the electronic balloting controls the brink of collapse. The dots are practically begging us to connect them.

We know two things for sure. Two software companies were involved in the 2020 fiasco: Dominion and Smartmatic. This week, Dominion was suddenlysold to a former Republican election official who prefers paper ballots. Also this week, Smartmatic was indicted for bribing Philippine election officials, which should end its viability as an American provider.

Do you think the timing was coincidental?

Look at it this way. Even if there was no intentional, behind-the-scenes coordination, then some kind of growing animus toward these two electronic voting companies peaked this week. Their protected status is over. They may not face official consequences for whatever they did (or didn’t do) during the 2020 elections, but they are being corporately executed anyway.

Everywhere you look, the same hurricane is blowing. The monarchs, the mandarins, and now the machines — the same brutal winds are shearing off all the old guardians of unaccountable authority. It doesn’t matter whether you call it providence, probability, or payback; the pattern is unmistakable. The era of institutional untouchables is ending, not with a single explosion, but with a thousand simultaneous implosions. The Storm™ isn’t just cominganymore. It’s here, and it’s leveling the landscape.

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Perhaps the best development of all is the Administration’s growing embrace of the Coffee & Covid ethos, which we’ve all held to from the beginning of our long night of trouble: optimism, humor, and zero deference to institutional authority. For instance, consider this amusing headline from yesterday’s Huffington Post:

The Administration announced the next Proxy War meeting with Russian President Putin, which will be held in Budapest, Hungary (instead of Alaska like last time). A nasty HuffPo reporter tried to score points off White House Spokesbabe Karoline Leavitt, insinuating that President Trump was taking orders from Putin or something similarly deranged. This delightful exchange ensued:

HUFFPO: Who picked Budapest?

PRESS SECRETARY: Your mother.

On the way home, the scalded reporter thought up a comeback and texted it to the Press Secretary. It didn’t go well either.

HUFFPO: Do you think that was funny?

PRESS SECRETARY: It’s funny to me that you actually consider yourself a journalist. You are a far-left hack who nobody takes seriously, including your colleagues in the media, they just don’t tell you that to your face. Stop texting me your disingenuous, biased, and bullshit questions.

Priceless.

But that wasn’t all! Leavitt was just the warm-up act. Yesterday, every major federal agency invaded —not Venezuela— but the progressive sanctuary of BlueSky. Progressives’ official safe space is officially no longer safe. Commence triggering. It even made the Associated Press, in a story headlined, “White House joins Bluesky and immediately trolls Trump opponents.”

Nearly every post from every agency was some kind of a troll post. For example, Homeland Security’s first BlueSky post was a polite invitation to help:

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said hello and posted that he looked forward to sharing more content soon. The background music selection was exquisite:

CLIP: Innocuous but hilarious introduction from Howard (0:27).

If this next DHS post doesn’t make you laugh out loud, and if you don’t watch it over and over on loop, I’ll have to take a vacation to reconsider my editorial instincts:

CLIP: If you watch one thing today, make it this Homeland Security “Hello World” post on BlueSky (0:21).

They’re all great. I’d like to shake someone in the social media department’s hand. Go find the rest of them and enjoy.

Have a wonderful Weekend! Coffee & Covid will return promptly on Monday morning to greet the world with a terrific new roundup of essential news and commentary.

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