Better in their words…

Sunday supporter bonus post! Sun Tzu means Project 2025, the latest example of a massive iatrogenic disaster afflicting the American public thanks to well-meaning progressives, and much more.

Source: FAT PHOBICS ☙ Sunday, January 11, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS

⛑️ C&C MORNING MONOLOGUE ⛑️

Michelle is out of town this weekend, so yesterday afternoon the boys and I went browsing at our new Books-A-Million location. It was surprisingly busy. My middle son fell in love at first sight with an annotated, leather-bound copy of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Although we already have well-worn lesser copies at home, I approved the purchase. Later, at dinner, we read from the book and discussed the remarkable facts that TAoW’s wisdom remains applicable today and how modern bookstores include tomes penned 2,500 years ago.

It prompted deeper thought. You could map Trump 2.0 directly onto Tzu’s battle strategy.

Sun Tzu begins with a simple declaration of the critical importance of planning: “The general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought.” That foundational objective reminded me of Project 2025. Two weeks ago, the far-left Atlantic called Project 2025 “the single most successful policy initiative of the entire Trump era.” Headline:

The author, David Graham, also wrote a whole book about Project 2025 (spoiler: he doesn’t like it). He observed that Project 2025 is much more than a policy paper. Graham described it as a three-part battle plan, “to create an agenda for the right-wing president to empower the executive branch, sideline Congress, and attack the civil service.”

That’s the line that really got me thinking.

The Art of War’s overriding principle is operational security. The ancient general sharpened his blade as follows: “All warfare is based on deception.” He meant that your enemies should never see it coming. Tzu thought it best to first undermine your enemies, soften them up, so the ultimate fight is quick and easy— or even better, you never have to battle them directly at all: “To subdue the enemy without fighting is the peak of skill.”

We have often observed Trump 2.0’s unprecedented operational security. The media keeps getting caught off guard. No leaks. A plan initially disguised as a joke —like the annexation of Greenland— is later revealed to be deadly serious. An attack —like the strike on Iran’s nuclear sites or Maduro’s capture— is fogged in distractions until it happens. All warfare is based on deception.

🪖 When the honed steel finally reaches razor sharpness, and a well-prepared battle plan is ready to go operational, Sun Tzu offers a three-tiered ladder of action. Here’s the paraphrased version:

1. Attack the enemy’s strategy. Undermine plans, narratives, legitimacy, morale, and decision-making. Destroy the enemy’s resources.
2. Break his alliances. Isolate him diplomatically, economically, and socially. Poison his alliances.
3. Attack his army. Only after extracting all the benefits of steps one and two, above, attack.

Let’s consider Trump’s 2025. For the purposes of this essay, the “enemy” will be identified as The Swamp, both domestically (the intelligence community and its NGO armies) and overseas (the European intelligence swamp, which helped Hillary deploy RussiaGate). In 2025, which we could call the “Year of Preparation,” just for a few examples:

1. President Trump DOGE’d the federal government, deleted USAID, and tariffed foreign countries —especially the EU— which cut off the stream of money funding the Swamp’s worldwide tendrils. He’s fired nearly 270,000 federal workers and locked down the Treasury. He forced the Europeans to fund the Proxy War and waste all their critical military assets by sending them to Kiev. Destroy the enemy’s resources.
2. He leveraged the Ukraine war and tariffs, and made other demands on NATO designed to pit the Europeans against each other. He’s leaned into 80/20 issues that have the Democrats mired in infighting over men in women’s sports, immigration, welfare fraud, and similar issues. The DNC was so confounded that it could not publish its 2024 post-mortem report. Undermine the enemy’s decision-making and poison his alliances.
3. Late in the year, he isolated Venezuela —the international swamp’s crack house— cutting off narcotics and oil revenues, terrorist training camps, and Russian/Chinese bases. There have been tons of ripple effects. For example, without Venezuelan resources, Cuba’s communist government is on life support. Poison his alliances.

I could continue at length, with countless further examples. I could map out the war on Big Pharma the same way, or the battle against Big Food. (More on that, later down.)

But the point is that, as Sun Tzu suggested, throughout 2025, our real enemies became increasingly weakened and isolated. CNN headline from last February:

I ask you: as we launch into 2026, where is any unified opposition to Trump? I can’t see one. His enemies are scattered, demoralized, leaderless, and their forces lie in disarray. He did it without any kinetic fighting. 2025 was all accomplished through tariffs, Treasury controls, withheld federal grants, and Truth Social posts.

🪖 Now let’s consider 2026’s first dramatic ten days. It’s like someone flipped a switch. Kinetics are back on the menu. If 2025 was the Year of Preparation, then 2026 is the Year of Offense. Or in Sun Tzu’s framework, having undermined the enemy’s strategy, cut off his economic support, isolated him diplomatically, and stripped his moral superiority, it’s time for phase 3: attack his army.

In simpler words, after softening them up for a year, Trump has taken the gloves off. In under two weeks, we’ve watched the world reel: Venezuela’s president Maduro captured and its oil confiscated, Syrian strikes, the Greenland annexation plan unveiled, the Minneapolis ICE surge, the war against the welfare state begun, and something that looks a whole lot like regime change happening in Iran.

The Democrats are howling, but they have no effective way to interfere. No effective “resistance” this time. Just tweets of outrage. As Trump threatens to acquire Greenland “the hard way,” where is the United Nations? Where is the condemnation from NATO allies, since Denmark is a member? Where are the lawsuits in the international court? Where are all the war crimes threats? Where are the EU denunciations? Nowhere, that’s where. The UN’s influence has been undermined and sidelined.

🪖 On January 21st —the day after the one-year anniversary of his Inauguration— Trump will personally address the assembled globalists at the World Economic Forum in Davos. For the first time, he’s coming in force— bringing Scott Bessent, Steve Witkoff, Dr. Oz, Howard Lutnick, and many more. Reuters ran the story on Thursday, under the headline “Bessent, Lutnick and Wright to join Trump at Davos, source says.”

This week, President Trump said his Davos speech will address affordabilityin general and housing affordability in particular. Earlier this week, he posted, “For a very long time, buying and owning a home was considered the pinnacle of the American Dream, but that American Dream is increasingly out of reach for far too many people. I will discuss this topic, including further housing and affordability proposals, and more, at my speech in Davos.”

In a separate exchange with reporters about his upcoming housing plan, President Trump said that, since homes are a large part of existing owners’ wealth, he does not want to see housing prices fall. But he also “aims to make it easier for young people and others to buy homes.” The President acknowledged that the two objectives were “somewhat contradictory,” but insisted that both would be addressed by his reforms and included in his upcoming Davos remarks. He’s also teased that banning large institutional investors from buying residential homes would be central to his plan.

Beyond those remarks —which were strategically ambiguous— the pundits have no clear idea of exactly what Trump has planned or what to expect. Expect fireworks. President Trump has a lot to talk about. The gloves are off. It’s the Year of Offense.

WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY

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Recalling Sun Tzu’s wisdom, consider last week’s LA Times headline, “U.S. will exit dozens of international organizations as it further retreats from global cooperation.” On Wednesday, President Trump signed a blockbuster executive order that en masse ordered federal agencies to withdraw the United States from participating in or funding sixty-six United Nations (or UN-adjacent) international groups, plus one climate treaty for good measure. We have been involved with some of them, like the “Colombo Plan,” for over seventy years.

The groups have bureaucratic, Orwellian names that you probably never heard of, and even if you did, you can’t remember anyway. They all lie in various progressive sweet spots: climate, environment, green energy transition, migration, population control, gender, “human rights/democracy,” and “peacebuilding.”

Some of the groups have obvious “purposes,” like the “International Renewable Energy Agency” or the “International Solar Alliance.” Others are titled in the murky, plausibly deniable language that George Orwell loved to mock. For instance, the “Regional Cooperation Council,” or the “Global Community Engagement and Resilience Fund.” Still others stood out like a blackened eyes: the “Science and Technology Center in Ukraine.”

If you track each one down, you’ll find they were a list of longstanding Cold War “soft power” laundromats plus a coterie of new-age climate scam groups. The aforementioned Colombo Plan was formed in the 1950s, to stop communism in Southeast Asia through “humanitarian” grants. As far as I can tell, in 75 years, its greatest accomplishments were spending money.Presumably for regime-change purposes.

Trump’s executive order was very suggestive. It began by referring to President Trump’s February 2025 order, which ordered the State Department to compile a list of “organizations, conventions, and treaties that are contrary to the interests of the United States.” Now, in the opening days of 2026’s Year of Offense, President Trump pulled the trigger. It was a weapon they held in reserve, waiting to be fired for nearly a year, and launched right as the Year of Offense began.

Isolate your enemy economically, and starve him of resources. Secretary Rubio is tracking down the feed troughs of the Global Swamp one by one and knocking them over.

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On Friday, Fox reported that, “Federal judge blocks Trump from cutting childcare funds to Democratic states over fraud concerns.” Of course he did. The judge, Arun Subramanian (a Biden appointee), ordered the federal government to keep sending childcare grants to five blue states to avoid “irreparable harm.” He keeps using that word, but I don’t think he knows what it means. It must be his quality learing.

I may be being somewhat unfair. Judge Subramanian’s order was only temporary, lasting just fourteen days, and he didn’t write much except that he wished to preserve the “status quo” until the preliminary injunction hearing. That’s when he either goes full cuckoo or not.

The moral of the story is: be careful what federal subsidies you offer, because a state might get addicted to them, and a court will find that taking them away would cause irreparable harm.

HHS, which suspended the childcare grants, vowed to appeal:

The five plaintiff states are led by New York’s trash-talking Attorney General Letitia “Primary Residence” James. Fox provided a neat infographic listing the amounts withheld from each of the five targeted states:

As you can see, California is a monster. “TANF” is temporary assistance for needy families, which, as the name implies, is intended to be “temporary.” I’ll just leave that there.

[Just think how much better off America would be if we took 1/2 of the $$ sent to California and spent it on ICE and law enforcement?  mrossol]

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Marking the apogee of the nation’s persistent testosterone crisis, this week delivered a standout story run by local affiliate ABC-7 with the tear-jerking headline, “Police chief cries, admits DHS was right about Tren de Aragua connection in CBP shooting.”

CLIP: Crybaby sheriff breaks down while reporting ICE-attacking gang affiliations (2:00).

Echoing the still-burning Minnesota story, last week in Portland (of course), two alleged Tren de Aragua gang members (now confirmed) were wounded by airborne lead fragments after trying to drive over ICE agents in their car. Initially, Portland’s sheriff disputed Homeland Security’s allegation of gang involvement as racist and xenophobic.

But later —whoopsies!— the gang links were confirmed, and Sheriff Bob Day was forced to correct his earlier statements. In a disgusting display of virtue signaling and obscene, unmanly emotion, Sheriff Day was briefly overcome while repeatedly apologizing to the “Latin American community.” He cried. He cried like a baby.

Sheriff Day was not upset about getting the story wrong in the first place.

He was upset because his job required him to make the announcement, even though —he thought— the news badly reflected on hispanics. The irony! Sheriff Day didn’t recognize that his reaction was profoundly racist, by assuming the gang-affiliation of these two miscreants would tar anyone whose ancestors came from South or Central America. It reinforces stereotypes! That’s right, Bob. Whose stereotypes?

As in Minnesota, protests in Portland are escalating as locals respond to the non-fatal shooting and arrest of the two gang members. Even after the gang affiliation was confirmed, as well as the pair’s criminal history in DUI, drug trafficking, and prostitution, Portland’s lisping Mayor Keith Wilson said he spoke with Minnesota’s Mayor Jacob Frey and demanded ICE leave the city.

President Trump isn’t backing down. DHS says it has no plans to reduce its operations in the Portland area. Where all this mayoral resistance will end remains an open question. But it might involve the word “insurrection.”

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On Thursday, the DOJ’s press release page added an item headlined, “Aliens Charged with Illegally Voting in a Federal Election and Making False Statements While Applying for U.S. Citizenship.”

The facts of the story were unremarkable (to anyone paying attention). Two illegal aliens residing in New Jersey, Muhammad Muzammal, 37, and Muhammad Shakeel, 62, were indicted of election fraud, since they both voted in the 2020 presidential election even though they weren’t citizens. (Later, they both also applied for citizenship, and confirmed under penalty of perjury they’d never voted in a US election. Another violation.) They each face up to 16 years in prison.

There were two remarkable things about the story, though. First, the DOJ is enforcing election laws and bringing cases. So, that’s good. But second, the fact that Muhammad-1 and Muhammad-2 each voted in New Jersey’s presidential election proves how porous the system is. I mean to say, if two guys with polysyllabic names like that can slide through, well, dammit, who can’t?

It’s like New Jersey isn’t even trying. Neither is PBS. Right before the 2024 elections, it mocked Republican concerns over double-Muhammad voters. Headline from PBS, September 2024:

PBS’s argument that “noncitizen voting is rare” relied mainly on the fact that arrests for noncitizen voting are rare, and because it had a hunch that felt strangely like a craving for a 7-11 danish. It also said “some experts” believe “tools to flag noncitizen voters are working.” I did not make that up.

In Florida, we have laws designed to discourage noncitizens from voting, because if we catch them, we feed them to alligators. Just kidding. We don’t usually do that. Instead, Florida requires an ID to vote, and cross-references voter records with driver’s license records (which contain immigration information). A bill filed last week, HB 985 (2026), would explicitly require supervisors of elections to verify applicants’ citizenship status. (Floridians— The bill currently has no co-sponsors and could use some support.)

Florida might not be perfect, but it’s a country mile past whatever New Jersey thinks it’s playing at. New Jersey is one of the states where no ID is required to vote, just good intentions. That’s why we need the SAVE Act that President Trump keeps yammering about. It has passed the House twice and is back in the Senate again. Among other things, including citizenship verification for federal elections, the SAVE Act would create personal criminal liability for any official who knowingly registers applicants lacking the required proof.

[I know people who still, still believe that 2020 and 2024 elections had absolutely NO FRAUD or election ‘irregularities’.  I doubt they will ever change their set-in-reinforced-concrete minds. -mrossol]

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Last week, new FDA Commissioner Dr. Marty Makary made some highly controversial allegations about the government that, in any sane world, would have been headline news. We survivors will long remember the federal government’s brutal, take-no-prisoners war on fat. Now, decades late, we finally have official confirmation from the head of the Food and Drug Administration that the government made the whole thing up. Just like six-foot distancing.

CLIP: FDA Commissioner Makary accuses federal government of deliberately lying about the ‘fat menace’ and it made us all sick (0:48).

How could we forget? All centered around the original food pyramid (and its equally fake successors) helped fuel the low-fat craze, encouraging newly fat-phobic people to swap margarine for butter, choose skim milk over whole, and load up on pasta, bread, and sugary “fat-free” snacks. As we know, the result was skyrocketing obesity, diabetes, and related chronic conditions — exactly what Dr. Atkins tried to warn us about.

But back then, we trusted the government. So wheeeee! we loaded up on pricey fat-free Snackwell cookies (30g sugar), choked down expensive cardboard-dry “boneless/skinless” chicken breast, and crunched upscale Olestra-based Pringles that guaranteed a minimum 20 minutes of post-chip lavatory business. Not only that but, and I am not making this up, many of us gobbled Alli supplements intentionally designed to interfere with fat digestion.The side effects included anal leakage, but who cares! It stops fat!

As far as we know, the entire fat mania was based on some witless bureaucrat’s simple logic that, if you eat fat, it makes you fat. The government ran with it, and the biggest beneficiary was Big Pharma. Big Pharma, aided by allies like the American Heartless Association, made bank by selling medicines to handle the inevitable fallout and even worse cardiac disease.

“Big Pharma suppressed the data for 16 years,” Dr. Makary said. “Two other large studies failed to show an association between fat and heart disease. Finally, the study trickled out in the medical literature. Nobody noticed it.” Then he dropped the hammer. The suppressed study showed that “Those in the low-fat group had higher rates of heart attacks.”

🔥 The study Dr. Makary was referencing is the Minnesota (!) Coronary Experiment — a massive randomized controlled trial from 1968–1973 involving over 9,000 people, mostly in mental hospitals and nursing homes. It tested replacing saturated fats (i.e., animal fats) with vegetable oils like corn or safflower oil, theoretically to lower cholesterol and prevent heart disease.

Replacing saturated fats with those polyunsaturated vegetable oils did lower serum cholesterol— but it did not reduce heart attacks, cardiovascular deaths, or overall mortality. In fact, the re-analysis showed that the more cholesterol dropped, the higher the risk of death in some groups — and overall, it showed no benefit to anyone, with hints of harm including higher mortality trends in the vegetable oil group.

Lead investigator Dr. Ivan Frantz reportedly withheld the study from publication because the results were “disappointing.” (He said something like, “We were just disappointed in the way it came out.”) It only saw the light of day decades later, after his son found the raw data in a basement box, leading to the shocking 2016 BMJ paper by Christopher Ramsden and his team. Headline from the New York Times, April 2016:

See how it works? The disappointing studies get the basement treatment. “Following the science” is for chumps. Fortunately for the drugmakers, at the time, everyone except kooks trusted the government experts, so the gravy boat sailed on. And we all got fatter and fatter, as our brainless, gaslighting doctors kept telling us it was our fault for having the worst willpower of any generation since they came up with their genius food pyramid.

It turned out that fat doesn’t make you fat. Fat-headed scientists make you fat. The whole thing is yet another iatrogenic disaster.

“We created a generation of children,” Makary stressed, “with low protein, high carbohydrates, sugar addiction, and burdened with ultra-processed foods, and what did we do as a medical field? Drugged them at scale.”

Dr. Makary promised, “Those days are over. We are telling people the truth about food.” Thank Heavens. And, we shall see if those days are over. They aren’t over if Democrats have anything to do with it. If Secretary Kennedy told them not to eat Tide pods, guess what would happen next?

Since Big Food never saw this coming —all warfare is based on deception— they didn’t have time to lobby Congress and spread the money around like usual. Sun Tzu would be pleased. And we can’t wait to see what the Year of Offense dishes up next.

Have a blessed Sunday! And a sincere ‘thank you’ for your continued loyal support. Get back here tomorrow morning, bright and early, for the latest roundup of essential news and commentary.

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