Coffee and Covid

We are living in a Golden Age of long-form punditry. Of course, this started with the advent of the Internet and blogging, but it has just gotten better and better. Imagine back in the day when newspapers and magazines were the gatekeepers for matters of policy and opinion. An awful lot of very smart people were not heard, except maybe in the letters to the editor.

Among the shiniest nuggets of this Golden Age is a man named Jeff Childers who runs what appears to be a three-man law firm in Gainesville, Florida. Childers first came to prominence during Covid times, when he won the first ruling on the unconstitutional nature of mask mandates. He has also won cases on vaccine mandates and even defended J6ers.

He’ll remind you a great deal of Rush Limbaugh, who had this remarkable ability to take complicated issues and make them clear and, also, examine issues from new directions. This is Jeff Childers today. He may be the best political and social pundit working today. He writes a Substack called Coffee & Covid.

Were you worried about the Supreme Court’s decision on tariffs a few days ago? Don’t be. Have you heard the Left and the media celebrating this decision? Childers explains how the ruling was actually a gift to Trump. Follow the jujitsu. Trump used the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose tariffs on a wide range of countries. The Court said he could not invoke that measure to raise tariffs because the statute does not mention tariffs.

Trump squawked bigly. He even squawked about it this week in the State of the Union. The legacy media and the Democrats cheered. As Childers puts it,

Within hours of yesterday’s SCOTUS decision, the New York Times had jubilantly published no fewer than eight euphoric top-of-fold stories and was still going strong. Democrats were sprinting (or racing their wheelchairs) to podiums to issue slaphappy praises for Justices they’ve long been complaining were Trump’s stooges.

But, according to Childers, there’s a pony in that poo. He says the decision was “firewall, a machete, and two shields.”

It was a firewall because it prevents any future left-wing president from using the same statute to declare a climate emergency and impose the Green New Deal.

It was a shield for Trump because it was not unanimous, and the dissenting opinion was so strong as to make clear that his use of an emergency statute was not, as the Left claims, an illegal power grab. It was a split opinion and not the unanimous Supreme Court crying “fascism!”

It also shielded the court from being considered a shill for whatever Trump wants, something we have heard consistently from court critics.

The decision was a machete—and here is the deep dive—because it advances a legal rule called the Major Questions Doctrine. The MQD basically says the Deep State cannot just read between the lines or fill in the gaps of ambiguous statues. This is how the Deep States becomes a fourth branch of government. As Childers says, the “MQD is a revolutionary tool that could finally clear the ungovernable wilderness of the administrative state—a goal conservatives have longed for since the FDR days.”

On Epstein, well, on Epstein, Childers has been simply remarkable and downright Limbaughian. He points out that the roll up of bigwigs across the Atlantic—former Prince Andrew, former U.K. Ambassador to the U.S. Peter Mandelson, former Norwegian Prime Minister Thorbjørn Jagland (also former head of the Nobel Prize Committee, who just tried to kill himself)—portends great things on this side of the Atlantic.

Why? Because none of these men are in the dock over sex abuse but, rather, over peddling state secrets to Epstein for financial gain. And given our far, far stricter laws in these areas, you can count on many elite heads to roll, and none of it will have anything to do with sex or with Trump. And this is why the elite media are in something of a panic. They see what is coming. As long as it was about Trump and sex, they were cool. But now it’s about greasy influence peddling by their guys.

These elites are panicking over what Childers calls the “Epstein Cascade” and are now circling the wagons, calling the reaction to the release of all the Epstein files a “moral panic” like the long-ago daycare sex abuse scandals. He points to a dozen major media articles and columns that use such language. It appears the Epstein scandals will be about his own perverse peccadilloes but, even more, about the greasy relationship many elites had with him.

Finally, have you ever heard of an underwater volcano called Hunga Tonga? Me neither. It is one of the most dramatic ecological events in human history. It is ongoing and is causing higher global temperatures, and it’s probably behind those amazing sunsets we have seen over the past several years. I had never heard of this until Childers told me at Coffee & Covid.

If you are not following Jeff Childers, you are missing out on one of the greats.