☕️ PESTILENT REPTILES ☙ Wednesday, August 5, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

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Five federal judges dissent in defense of lunchmeat; Aaron Rodgers pleads the Fifth on ESPN; the Journal drops the scare quotes; an alligator named Irwin, arrested by Indiana Jones; more.

JEFF CHILDERS

AUG 5READ IN APP

Good morning, C&C family, it’s Wednesday! Your mid-week roundup includes: how Florida just won the drag wars by refusing to ban drag, a maneuver that took three years, thirteen federal judges, and one extremely confused hamburger restaurant; how five dissenting judges attached their names, permanently and in a published volume, to a legal defense of processed meat; how the Wall Street Journal ran the phrase “Covid conspiracy” in a headline with no scare quotes and no hedging, written by a man whose entire career was built on telling people the buildings came down normally; why the Associated Press responded to a routine scheduling announcement with several thousand words of legal analysis, which is what corporate media does when it has quietly decided which way the wind is blowing; how Biden’s own Covid czar went on CNN and changed his mind about a virus he has had six years to think about; and finally, the escaped Indiana alligator named Irwin, apprehended by a man named Indiana Jones, in a state where owning a gator is perfectly legal right up until it hits five feet — which means somewhere out there is a Hoosier with a tape measure and a shrinking window of opportunity.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY🇺🇸🌍

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It’s been a minute since we celebrated a culture-war victory. Remember 2023’s drag wars in Florida? They’ve been tied up in court— until yesterday. Courthouse News dished the tea, reporting, “11th Circuit revives Florida’s ban on kids attending drag shows.”

Until relatively recently, progressives have weaponized delusional drag people against conservatives. We were scolded that teaching toddlers to tip grown men in heavy makeup and sequined leotards performing sexually explicit dance routines in bars was not only normal, but was a fundamental constitutional right, right up there with basic free speech and the right to shoot squirrels. (But not the right to refuse jabs, that’s different.)

If you disagreed, and felt that unattractive cross-dressing men had no business reading children’s books to kids in libraries, you were obviously a terrible person who hated freedom.

In 2023, in the wake of the pandemic, the launch of the Slava Ukraine psyop, and basically peak Biden, Governor DeSantis and the Florida legislature took action. They passed the Sunshine State’s Protection of Children Act, making it a criminal misdemeanor to knowingly admit any child to an “adult live performance” that predominantly appeals to a “prurient, shameful or morbid interest.”

Naturally, a garish Orlando restaurant-and-drag-bar named Hamburger Mary’s sued the state. I’ve never been there, but it looks like the kind of place where you could get a side of E. coli with your tater tots. Hamburger Mary’s was a downtown Orlando venue famous for nightlife and oxymoronic “family-friendly drag shows.” (After the lawsuit, the restaurant relocated from downtown Orlando to Old Town in Kissimmee.)

Inevitably, a Clinton-appointed federal judge sided with the drag restaurant and blocked the law, because free speech.

⚖️ But yesterday, the full 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta landed its terrific decision, sweeping aside the injunction in an 8-5 decision, and the light of sanity dawned once again over the Sunshine State.

The brilliance of this victory isn’t just that Florida won. It’s how it won. The First Amendment can be very tricky, a legal land mine, especially when it comes to obscenity. The Supreme Court has, for example, found pornography to be protected artistic speech. So you can’t just outright ban drag shows or drag story hours, because the Constitution protects expression, even if that expression involves a hairy, hip-thrusting 40-year-old man named “Velvet LeNore” lip-syncing to Gloria Gaynor.

The Florida legislature was aware of the ticklish legal setup. So they danced through what could have been an impossible First Amendment conundrum with the precision of a ballerina twirling brightly between two sleepy orangutans. (Or something. It’s early.) In any event, the legislature didn’t ban drag for consenting adults. Go for it, gentlemen.

Instead, they carefully banned obscenity for minors.

U.S. Circuit Judge Andrew Brasher (Trump appointee) wrote for the majority: “We will not second-guess the Florida Legislature’s decision to regulate obscenity. Preventing children from attending adult live performances obscene for them is rationally related to Florida’s interest in safeguarding the well-being of minors.”

Then Judge Brasher closed the curtains, writing, “It is difficult to imagine any sex-based performance that predominantly appeals to a prurient interest being suitable for a child of any age. Nor,” he added, sharpening the point, “has Hamburger Mary’s identified any such hypothetical performance.”

Boom. The law’s legal path was cleared. Florida’s new crime is a straightforward regulation of obscenity in the context of children— which is the sweet spot where government regulation of ‘speech’ is strongest.

🕺 But the best part wasn’t just the majority opinion, the vacated injunction, or the new criminal code. It was the wailing, gnashing of teeth, and garment-rending from the five dissenting judges. They did not enjoy the show. And this is where we find the most fabulous language of all, buried deep in the 67-page decision.

Judge Robin Rosenbaum (Obama appointee), experiencing some kind of mental fit, shot out a dissent that was basically a 5,000-word temper tantrum. (I will refrain from contrasting loopy, AWFL female judges versus conservative male ones, since that would be rank discrimination.) She complained that Florida “purposely created a mess-around-and-find-out statute to chill drag.”

Haha! A mess-around-and-find-out statute. It was hilarious on many levels, not least of which federal judges usually avoid those kinds of guttural idiomatic expressions; it was even more laughable for the fact that Judge Rosenbaum was herself too prurient to use the expression’s actual, more profane version (FAFO) and felt compelled to water it down into something inoffensive that provokes a horse’s laugh for the wrong reason. MAFO.

In other words, while arguing that morbidly obese men dancing in hose and garters for tips from kids was protected expression that cannot be censored, Judge Rosenbaum censored herself. You cannot make this stuff up. Progressives. Bless their inconsistent little hearts.

Anyway, a top appellate judge actually put MAFO in a federal judicial opinion. She meant it as a withering insult, but honestly, “The Mess Around and Find Out Act of 2023” would have made a fantastic name for the bill. Attention, Representative Randy Fine— please consider a retitling amendment.

⚖️ In her overlong dissent, Judge Rosenbaum also warned darkly that the law leaves businesses guessing: “Guessing wrongly about whether a performance is suitable ‘for the age of the child present’ or offers value ‘for the age of the child present’ is costly. Each violation can land a person in jail for up to a year, cost them a $10,000 fine and result in the loss of their business license.”

Translating that from legalese into English: If you knowingly expose children to lewd, sexually explicit performances, you could go to jail and lose your business.

Yes, Judge. That was exactly the point. It wasn’t a bug; it was the entire goal.

Wait, it got so much better. To prove how harmless drag shows supposedly are, Judge Rosenbaum’s dissent actually included a photo and description of a bizarre drag act that Florida had previously targeted. The performer, named only “Jimbo,” wears a strange full-body white suit with a prosthetic stomach. According to the judge, Jimbo “dances and prances onstage” before “undoing a hidden zipper on the stomach’s underside” —another delicate judicial euphemism; the zipper is on the crotch— “and pulling from within a stack of bologna.”

Judge Rosenbaum explained that Jimbo then “places slices of the bologna on top of his outfit” and on the bare chests of his backup dancers. (The irony that Jimbo is full of bologna seems to have escaped everyone.)

Florida argued this was a graphic depiction of childbirth or abortion or possibly a demonic summoning ceremony. (Scientists aren’t certain yet.) Judge Rosenbaum thought it was just a talented guy pulling lunchmeat out of a fake stomach while lip-syncing to Björk, which the judge argued was “political speech” because drag “challenges conventional gender norms.”

Political speech!

A grown man giving birth to a stack of Oscar Mayer bologna on a stage surrounded by giant nutcrackers is, according to an AWFL progressive federal judge, who sits one step below the Supreme Court, core political speech protected by the First Amendment. That’s her argument. You can read it on page 46 of the PDF.

But, as I said, nobody argued the drag people have to stop. They just can’t do it in front of kids. So Judge Rosenbaum argued that Florida’s ban was “unconstitutionally vague.” In other words, the usual progressive wordplay. Writing for the majority, Judge Brasher responded that he was confident that juries can figure it out, and courts don’t require “god-like precision” from obscenity statutes. Rosenbaum called that “a cop-out.” (One can but imagine the costume.)

The left has spent decades using the legal system to force cultural rot down everyone’s throats. Ten years ago, this kind of victory would be unimaginable. But the conservative counter-revolution has done it. Against all odds, it turned the tide. And yesterday, Florida led the nation by saying: “No more.”

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As I predicted, Dr. Anthony Fauci’s catastrophic decision to invoke the Fifth Amendment last week triggered a vast preference cascade. Instead of being the nothing-burger Democrats had wished for, his hearing has become an avalanche, with ever more Fauci news tumbling down the media mountain every single day since. Let’s start with the Wall Street Journal. About five days ago, the WSJ’s Opinion section ran a piece by James Meigs headlined “A Covid Conspiracy in Plain Sight.” The subheadline: “Health officials tried to hide the truth about the pandemic’s origin. The sordid story is still leaking out.”

That it was penned by James Meigs was the first remarkable note. Meigs is an anti-conspiracy-theorist who has spent 20 years “debunking” 9/11 truthers. The WSJ’s editorial board is not the most liberal, but I still group it with corporate media. It is the most widely read financial newspaper in the country, and its opinion pages have been the voice of the American establishment for generations.

And here is what Meigs said plainly about the man who was until recently the most celebrated scientist in America: “As head of the U.S. government’s lead pandemic-response agency, Dr. Fauci kept an iron grip on information about the virus, suppressed questions about its likely origin in a Wuhan lab and bullied scientists to shut up and fall in line.”

Not only that. Meigs —the anti-conspiracy theorist— wrote that he now believes Fauci’s actions “constituted a type of conspiracy.” Not a plandemic, perhaps, but at least a cover-up. Specifically, he opined, “While Dr. Fauci repeatedly told the media that the Covid lab-leak scenario was ‘just conspiracy theories,’ he was conspiring to quash questions about his agency’s possible role.”

The article closed by quoting Alina Chan, the Harvard-MIT researcher who was called an “idiot” in Fauci’s handpicked scientists’ private Slack messages, for daring to investigate the lab leak on her own: “I cannot see how anyone can read these Slack messages and walk away thinking these virologists are the good guys (or even good scientists) in this story.”

That’s the buried lede. That’s what the preference cascade is doing. Heroic Team Fauci is quickly becoming the story’s villain.

🪳 Five days later —this morning— the Associated Press published a remarkably long, detailed, and serious article, headlined, “Fauci’s decision to invoke the Fifth Amendment tees up a legal debate and a contempt vote.”

The actual news hook was paper-thin. As he’d already promised to do, Senator Rand Paul simply set Thursday as the official date for a committee vote to hold Dr. Fauci in contempt of Congress for pleading the Fifth over 100 times— including, famously, to even a question about the color of his tie. It’s a purely ministerial move. The Republican-led committee will vote, refer it to the Justice Department, and then we’ll see what happens. What’s the “news?”

Corporate media could have buried that ‘non-story’ in a footnote. But look at how the AP covered it. They didn’t bury it. They didn’t even frame it as “Republicans Pounce.” They wrote a massive, multi-section legal analysis of whether Fauci’s preemptive pardon from Biden actually protects him from prosecution, whether the Fifth Amendment applies, and how Rand Paul is fast-tracking the referral straight to the DOJ to bypass the full Senate.

A long list of major platforms ran similar stories late yesterday and this morning. And you can be sure that, when the Republican Oversight Committee predictably votes to hold Fauci in contempt tomorrow, dozens of breathless new stories and analysis will emerge.

In short: corporate media knows this issue is red hot. They know the public is paying attention. They know the Overton Window is still sliding open on greased rails.

🪳 We saw all this coming. As soon as the human cockroach crouched in that chair and chirped, “I plead the Fifth” to innocuous questions about the carpet color, I compared it to Biden’s catastrophic debate performance and called it a Rubicon moment. Fauci’s non-testimony was a calamitous unforced error.

It didn’t frustrate us anti-Faucians— it vindicated us. We never expected coherent answers from that bobbleheaded insect anyway.

But more importantly, it broke the hypnotic hold Faucism held on everyone else. Regular people’s preferences —and even Fauci defenders’ preferences— rapidly began to cascade into a ruinous heap for Fauci’s sainted reputation. Rand Paul now looks like a political genius for publishing the Slack messages and disclosing the diaries right before the hearing.

Portlanders: a ‘preference cascade’ occurs when people who have been secretly harboring heterodox thoughts suddenly realize it’s safe to say them out loud, because everyone else is starting to say it too. The dam breaks, and the waters of truth pour through the gap.

And boy-oh-boy, is the Fauci dam breaking. There were many, but I’ll give you just two examples.

🪳 Exhibit A: Dr. Ashish Jha, Biden’sformer White House Covid-19 Response Coordinator. As you well know, for years, the official Biden White House line was that the virus jumped from a bat to a pangolin to a bowl of rat soup, and anyone who suggested otherwise was a racist conspiracy theorist.

CLIP: Biden Czar flips on Fauci and calls covid a lab leak (1:07).

But over the weekend on CNN, Dr. Jha casually dropped this bomb on Dana Bash: “When I went into the White House, my view was this was almost surely a natural outbreak, maybe a lab leak. Based on information I’ve learned and based on information I’ve seen, I have come to believe it was a lab leak.”

A lab leak! Finally! Biden’s own Covid Czaris evolving like the latest variant.

Not only that. Dr. Jha also said, we were funding research in an institution where we lacked full transparency into what research was being conducted.” We were funding it. We did.

As Rutgers microbiologist Richard Ebright noted on X, “The fact that Biden COVID adviser Ashish Jha only now is stating COVID had a lab origin, despite surely having known this for six years, makes it clear that the Overton Window has shifted, and Fauci and Fauci’s ‘Proximal Origin’ fraudsters have lost control of the narrative.”

The preference cascade. Ebright added, “The race now is on for rats to jump from Fauci’s sinking ship.” (I would have used a cockroach metaphor, but Dr. Ebright has the right idea.)

Rand Paul got the Slack messages and the Fauci diaries from HHS Secretary Kennedy. Trump made Kennedy the HHS Secretary. We can add this refreshing preference cascade to the Trump Wins List.

🪳 Exhibit B: the preference cascade has breached containment and flowed into the mainstream sports world. During a live broadcast of the wildly popular Pat McAfee Show on ESPN, Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Aaron Rodgers was asked a question about the upcoming season. His response was priceless.

CLIP: Fauci mockery goes mainstream on ESPN (2:21).

“I’m gonna plead the Fifth,” Rodgers offered. “Like that absolute coward, Anthony Fauci.” ESPN’s entire panel erupted in laughter. The hosts heroically tried to change the subject, but Rodgers would not let it go.

As conservative influencer Clandestine pointed out, “People are making ‘plead the fifth’ jokes everywhere, even in non-political spaces. Imagine showing this clip to someone in 2020. It would scramble their minds.”

So let’s review. Anti-conspiracy theorists are calling it a conspiracy. The AP is writing serious legal treatises about whether Fauci will face criminal charges. Biden’s own Covid Czar is going on CNN to agree with the “conspiracy theorists” about the lab leak. And NFL quarterbacks are mocking the Good Doctor’s Fifth Amendment cowardice on Disney-owned ESPN.

The hypnosis is broken. The rats are paddling toward non-extradition shores. The cockroaches are drowning in mainstream media. And the preference cascade is like a beautiful Smoky Mountain waterfall, a wonder to behold.

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Finally, and speaking of pestilent reptiles, an important public service advisory arrived from Indiana (for a change). On Monday, local affiliate WDRB reported, “4.5-foot alligator surprises residents, police near downtown Jeffersonville.”

At approximately 2 a.m. Sunday, an alert citizen near downtown Jeffersonville, Indiana, called police to report a traffic hazard. The hazard turned out to be a hissing, 4.5-foot alligator wandering down Court Avenue, which it had apparently chosen as a destination after escaping from its enclosure.

The alligator eventually made its way to the front windows of a local law office, which, to be fair, is where most reptiles eventually wind up.

Hard-working police captain Samuel Moss of the Jeffersonville Police Department confirmed the situation with the kind of measured professionalism that can only come from years of field training: “We hear and see crazy stuff all the time, but sure enough, officers got there and were able to confirm, in fact, there appeared to be a juvenile-sized alligator in downtown Jeff.”

Before wrangling the animal, officers paused for a quick picture with it. This is correct police procedure.

Authorities called in an expert, Jordan “Indiana” Jones, founder of the Kentuckiana Scaletuary — a real reptile sanctuary in Scottsburg, Indiana, which is a series of words I did not expect to type today. Mr. Jones arrived and single-handedly ‘subdued’ the gator.

Police told reporters they were familiar with the critter’s owner, and identified the alligator as a chronic repeat offender who has escaped before. His name is “Irwin.” I’m just guessing that he was named after the late Crocodile Hunter Steve Irwin, which was either a tribute or a warning.

Irwin the jail-breaking alligator is no juvenile. He is 12 years old, stubbornly answers to no one, and is only a runt-like 4.5 feet long. That is roughly half the size a 12-year-old alligator should be, which raises important questions about what Irwin has been doing with his time. Keeping alligators as pets —so long as they remain under 5 feet— is legal in Indiana, a rule that the Indiana legislature apparently felt needed to be recorded in the official statute books.

Irwin was transported to the Kentuckiana Scaletuary for care, and will possibly be returned to his owner, who badly needs Irwin for emotional support and will presumably upgrade their home security and shorten Irwin’s leash.

No officers or recidivist alligators were harmed. The lawyers from the law office had no comment.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! C&C will return tomorrow, with even more essential news and caffeinated commentary. See you then.

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