Better in their words…

The Left cannot decide if they hate or love the US Constitution. The Caracas raid is all contrast to Bay of Pigs; Carter’s Iran ‘rescue’; the Noriega capture; the Afghanistan withdrawal; etc. (I am fearful what “running the place” might turn into.)

Wow! CBS News just said the truth out loud (something that MSM hasn’t done in a decade?)  And Open Carry restrictions in California ruled unconstitutional. Never thought I would live to see that day! mrossol

Source: HIGH NOON ☙ Sunday, January 4, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS

WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY

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Venezuelan narco-dictator Nicolás Maduro is learing a hard lesson. Following President Trump’s address yesterday, the New York Times spewed a story headlined, “Maduro Arrives in N.Y.; Trump Says U.S. Will ‘Run’ Venezuela.” Meanwhile, finicky progressives complained about esoteric process issues and fastidiously debated picky points about the outer boundaries of constitutional executive power. Perhaps the most miraculous effect of Trump 2.0 is that censorship-minded liberals —who during the pandemic argued for shredding the national contract— have suddenly discovered an abiding devotion to the Constitution.

There were two bits of news. First, after publicly and repeatedly calling President Trump a “coward” and daring him to “come and get me, coward!” —a warmly collectivist maneuver that, in hindsight, may appear slightly reckless at the margins— President Maduro is now enjoying an all-inclusive, last-minute, involuntary vacation in Brooklyn, New York.

Second, President Trump described a flawless, lightning-fast military operation, unprecedented in American history for its speed and effectiveness. The Times reported that “the whole operation took two hours and 20 minutes.” Appreciate that the two-hour Operation Absolute Resolve involved 150+ aircraft, coordinated SEALs and Delta forces, air‑defense suppression, the compound assault, and Maduro’s exfiltration. General Caine said Delta forces even “built a replica house identical to the one where Maduro was staying” and repeatedly practiced breaching the fortress-like home’s steel doors and safe room.

Some commenters speculated yesterday that the speed and facility of the extraction means that the U.S. must have somehow co-opted Venezuela’s military and convinced it to stand down. But the Times reported that we had CIA assets inside the Venezuelan government tracking Maduro’s movements (even his pets), and reported that our aircraft destroyed at least three airbases and key air‑defense sites right before the raid began, allowing helicopters to reach Caracas “largely unopposed.”

My read is that it is much more likely that Venezuelan forces were unable to mount any coherent response in two early-morning hours after command-and-control sites were blinded and disrupted. They were probably still running around like decapitated yardbirds while Maduro was being zip-tied, mid‑level units were waiting for clear orders that never came, and top commanders were still asking their mistresses where their trousers were.

🚀 Unkind comparisons are already being made between Operation Delete Maduro and Biden’s shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan, or Carter’s catastrophic Iranian hostage rescue mission that collapsed with self-inflicted casualties at the staging area. Anyway, all ears perked up when President Trump announced, “we’ll be running Venezuela” until a safe transition can be arranged.

There were no further details about what Trump meant or how the U.S. plans to “run Venezuela.” They aren’t publishing the plan, thank goodness.

The Times described how Maduro practically begged to be deleted. “Maduro in late December rejected an ultimatum from President Trump to leave office and go into a gilded exile in Turkey,” the article said. Then, “Maduro’s regular public dancing and other displays of nonchalance helped persuade the Trump team that the Venezuelan president was mocking them and trying to call what he believed to be a bluff.”

Oh, Times. Obviously, Maduro was mocking President Trump. The videos are online. Why not just say it? Instead, they feel compelled to write a sentence as long as a paragraph moronically claiming Maduro was “helping persuade” people with “nonchalance” instead of just saying he was asking for it. But never mind. America gave the asterisked Venezuelan president plenty of chances, escalating from sinking cartel speedboats to embargoing oil tankers to his last involuntary vacation. Trump put a clock on it. Eventually, time ran out.

Meanwhile, Democrats were forced to begin debating the 1980s Panamanian precedent, when Bush I snatched Manuel Ortega in an operation taking weeks instead of two hours. Given the lack of “legal experts” quoted in Times stories this morning, the constitutional arguments are already bleeding out.

Coordinated, astroturfed protests with high-production-value signs suddenly popped up in 50-100 U.S. cities yesterday, including Washington, DC, New York City, and Chicago. Independent conservatives quickly traced the protests to progressive NGOs. Meanwhile, Venezuelans in the U.S. were largely celebrating. Newsweek:

“I am crying tears of joy for my country. Long overdue,” said Venezuelan-American Eduardo Darer. “I just want to thank you, America,” he added, overcome by emotion.

We can also admire Trump’s lightning-fast military maneuvers —Iran, Caracas— for more than their logistical triumph, skill, and performative excellence. Their unprecedented velocity also deprives his political enemies of time to scheme and oppose. By the point Democrats have started typing up emergency injunction petitions, the operations are over, and the troops are on the way home. Democrats can only complain about a completed op; their liberal judges can’t stop something that already happened.

Finally, Maduro’s capture provides some high-quality learing to other unfriendly regimes, like Cuba and Iran. And it sends a perfectly clear message to the increasingly useless United Nations: We aren’t asking for permission.

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The conservative counter-revolution has breached its first legacy media fortress, and corporate journalism is reacting the only way it knows how: silence. No coverage. No editorials. No thoughtful reckonings. Just a blackout. So we dive into Status.News, which ran the quietly explosive headline, “The Dokoupil Doctrine.” The subhead was more explicit: the incoming CBS Evening News anchor’s public rejection of “academics and elites” is the clearest sign yet of where CBS is headed under new leadership.

CLIP: CBS Evening News swears to earn back public trust (2:18).

CBS Evening News, the network’s flagship program, has a new anchor: Tony Doukopil. “Here’s my promise to you,” Tony said in his introductory broadcast. “You come first, not advertisers, not politicians, and not corporate interests, including the corporate owners of CBS.” He finally admitted the fact that should be the subject of every single news broadcast in America, every night: “people do not trust us like they used to,” Tony said, stating the obvious. “And it’s not just us—it’s all of legacy media.”

“On too many stories,” Tony explained, “the press has missed the storybecause we’ve taken the perspective of advocates and not the average American. Or, we’ve put too much weight on the analysis of academics and elites, and not enough on you.”

“The new CBS Evening News,” he said, “starts Monday at 6:30 p.m. ET on CBS.”

In another tweet, CBS said it had whittled its 38-page newsroom handbookdown into five core values. The kind of values you’d think would go without saying— except, of course, they don’t anymore. Here they are:

1. We work for you. You come first— not advertisers, politicians, or corporate interests (including the owners of CBS News).
2. We report on the world as it is. The show will be honest and direct, using no weasel words, reporting facts as they emerge, updating when new information arises, and admitting mistakes.
3. We respect you. The show believes Americans are smart and discerning, trusting viewers to make up their own minds and decisions for themselves, their families, and communities.
4. We love America. The show makes no apologies for this, highlighting America’s foundational values of liberty, equality, and the rule of law as making it the “last best hope on Earth,” while aiming to contribute to discussions about the country’s present and future.
5. We aim to earn your trust every night. What we can guarantee is that the tools will continue to change- but some things never will. One of those things is honest journalism.

In other words, America First. There you go.

Three months ago in October, Bari Weiss was named editor-in-chief of CBS News— the top editorial post at one of America’s oldest news institutions. Her appointment wasn’t the product of a traditional broadcast journalism career, but was the culmination of a trying and difficult path: after being hounded out of the New York Times in 2020 amid internal clashes over free speech and hyper-woke newsroom culture, Weiss founded her own media company, The Free Press, which became a subscription-based platform for critiques of what she saw as ideological conformity in elite media.

In October, to get Bari, CBS’s owner Paramount/Skydance acquired The Free Press in a multimillion-dollar deal, and installed Weiss at the helm of CBS News, placing her in charge of editorial direction and reporting priorities, even though her entire career was in print journalism, with no prior broadcast newsroom experience.

This breathtaking mea culpa and ideological realignment —in which CBS essentially admitted it has been dishonestly reporting the news— is almost certainly Bari’s work. Progressives should love Bari. She’s a classic liberal: secular, Jewish, culturally liberal, a democrat voter, anti-authoritarian, skeptical of corporate power, hostile to nationalism, and supports gay rights (she’s married to a woman). But she flunked the progressive purity test on one issue: free speech. Bari is reflexively opposed to all censorship, and has argued that conservative voices should get equal treatment as progressives, which painted a target right on her shoulders.

CBS is the first legacy platform to say the quiet part out loud. Trust in corporate media hasn’t merely declined—it has collapsed. In a recent Gallup survey, Republicans reported just 8% confidence in the media—an almost comically catastrophic number. In a sane industry, results this dire would trigger mass firings at the executive level, emergency board meetings, and the hiring of radical change agents to tear down whatever was left of the old model and start over.

Instead, most newsrooms have carried on as if nothing had happened, blaming misinformation, polarization, or us, the audience— anything but their own conduct. That CBS acknowledged the problem marks a genuine break from the whiteout of institutional denial that has long ruled corporate journalism.

Who knows whether it will last, or whether any of CBS’s competitors will be forced to follow. It’s far too early to tell. But the mere fact that one of the legacy networks at the core of national reporting is openly trying to rebuild trust with its audience signals something real has shifted. Institutions don’t confess failure until the old equilibrium is already broken. You can almost hear it now— the sudden whoosh of air as the pendulum, long stuck at one extreme, finally starts swinging back.

🔥 In related —and encouraging— news, on Friday CBS ran a mostly complete roundup on the Minnesota Fraud Scandal, headlined, “Everything we know about Minnesota’s massive fraud schemes.” It included Feeding Our Future (school meals), disability housing fraud, autism programs, whether charitable aid went to terrorists, and the latest daycare center scandals. Maybe CBS really is getting on board.

For your information, CBS published this story about framing the whole thing as “Republicans pounce,” or only quoting Tim Walz’s denials, or any of the other classic biased framing we’re used to getting from the alphabet networks. No, CBS played it straight. We pray it’s a trend.

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After years of regulatory land grabs, courts are finally riding back into town, recapturing constitutional territory that never belonged to the regulators in the first place. Yesterday, the New York Times fired off an unintentionally terrific story headlined, “Federal Appeals Court Says California Open-Carry Ban Is Unconstitutional.” Writing for the 2-1 majority, Ninth Circuit Judge Lawrence VanDyke explained, “The historical record makes unmistakably plain that open carry is part of this nation’s history and tradition.”

“It certainly is a very big, broad, bold ruling on the scope of the Second Amendment,” said constitutional law professor Adam Winkler. Meanwhile, California’s oleaginous Governor Gavin Newsom carefully criticized the decision, judiciously and without any exaggeration— naturally calling the two judges “Republican activists” bent on a “return to the days of the Wild West.”

You might think California would embrace its Wild West heritage, given the whole gold rush thing and all— plus the minor detail that it used to be the Wild West. Instead, the state first banned loaded visible firearms in 1967, in a knee-jerk response to a heavily armed protest by Marxist-Leninist Black Panthers (a violent revolutionary ideology that progressives now remember mostly for its breakfast programs).

More recently, in 2011, California’s Democrat-supermajority legislature banned all open carry— except in counties with fewer than 200,000 residents (only a handful of counties), and even there, subject to a required permitting process that the court found practically impossible to satisfy.

“California itself allowed citizens to carry handguns openly and holstered for self‑defense without penalty until 2012,” the court notes. The judges rejected California’s logic that open-carry was some kind of nefarious gambit employed by desperadoes and frontier highwaymen. “The general consensus at the time of the founding was that open carry was essential to protect the natural and common law right of self‑defense, while those who relied on concealed weapons could not possibly be interested in self‑defense, but instead must have an improper, aggressive motive,” they wrote.

In other words, the real bandits are the ones trying to hide their weapons, not the other way around. The panel even suggested —almost casually— that it may be more constitutionally permissible to regulate concealed carry than open carry, neatly flipping the entire progressive gun-control project on its head.

This freedom-loving ruling didn’t come out of nowhere. Trump’s Supreme Court started the pendulum swinging back. The majority in this California case applied a straight-line application of the Supreme Court’s 2022 Bruenframework, which scrapped the long-standing “interest-balancing” test, and instead instructed courts to ask a simpler, more dangerous question: is the restriction consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearms regulation? California’s law failed that test badly.

Once judges must look backward instead of polling evolving modern sensibilities, entire categories of gun control collapse on contact with the historical record. Bruen didn’t just change outcomes— it changed the rules of engagement, and states like California are now discovering how dusty the legal ground beneath them really is.

Interestingly, California’s attorney general said only he was “considering” an appeal. In light of Bruen, he may see trying to defend the open carry law as Fool’s Gold.

In many ways, open-carry bans have become the Alamo of modern gun-control philosophy—the final place where courts were still willing to pretend history didn’t matter. Once licensing schemes, magazine limits, and “may-issue” regimes started falling after Bruen, regulators retreated to the claim that visible arms are uniquely dangerous, provocative, or uncivil. But that argument flips the historical record on its head.

For most of American history, open carry was tolerated —or protected— precisely because it was transparent, accountable, and defensive, while concealed carry was treated with suspicion. As courts are now rediscovering, if the Constitution protects anything in this space, it protects what was ordinary, lawful, and openly practiced at the founding. When open-carry bans collapse, it won’t just invalidate another layer of gun control statute— it will mark the exhaustion of an entire regulatory theory that survived only by ignoring history for as long as judges hewed to the “living Constitution” theory.

The whirlwind of lawfare—with its high-profile wins and occasional setbacks in marquee cases—masks a quieter judicial revolution that SCOTUS began during President Trump’s first term, after he was blessed with a historically rare third appointment.

While the headlines fixate on personalities and political theater, the deeper story is doctrinal: courts are methodically restoring first principles, substituting history for vibes and text for policy preferences. The California open-carry case isn’t an outlier; it’s a datapoint on a dense graph ranging from gun control to religious liberty to the slow remaking of the administrative state. But the real accelerant isn’t the Supreme Court— it’s the lower federal courts.

Once SCOTUS resets the rules of decision, district and appellate judges become the outriders, carrying the new framework down the line, case by case, statute by statute, until entire regulatory regimes quietly collapse like overextended frontier claims under their own historical weight. Taken together, the high court’s rulings since 2021 suggest something far beyond a transitory ideological swing— something closer to a New Deal–scale generational reset. It’s less of a pendulum swing than a newly blazed branch of the constitutional trail, one that will continue reshaping American law long after Trump Derangement Syndrome has finally burned itself out.

And we are still just getting started, with the dust rising in thick clouds as the cavalry rides on.

Have a blessed Sunday! I am grateful for your loyalty and support of the C&C mission. We are making a difference and moving the needle. I’ll meet you back here tomorrow morning, to kick the week off right with an all-new C&C roundup of essential news and commentary.

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