Better in their words…

Coffee & Covid – JEFF CHILDERS JUN 27, 2026

Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! Your Weekend Update roundup includes: the Democrats’ civil war goes public; communism breaks out into the open; blue-on-blue scism widens; John Bolton finally pleads guilty; and the spies meet their new boss.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY🇺🇸🌍

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Republicans were not the only ones alarmed by the election of three open communists in New York City on Tuesday. Some kind of straw just broke the Democrat camel’s back. Social and second-tier media are swelling with what sure looks like the opening shots of an intra-party civil war.

Last summer, I crawled out on the authorial branch to make a risky prediction. Back then, corporate media was platforming packs of “political experts,” 24/7, who all promised a Big Blue Wave in the 2026 midterms— then 18 months away. I argued the exact opposite.

Months before the redistricting wars began, I argued Democrats could loseboth the House and the Senate, and maybe even lose big. I went further. I described how the Democrats might lose so badly that they could forfeit their major-party status and wind up wandering the political wilderness for a generation.

Behold, one year later: yesterday’s headline from Newser, “Carville: I Want No Part of This Democratic Party.”

CLIP: James Carville rant after three radical communists win elections in New York (2:47).

James Carville, the profane, trash-talkin’ Ragin’ Cajun from Louisiana, came to fame as the head strategist for Bill Clinton, cigar aficionado. Carville coined the slogan, “it’s the economy, stupid.” He regularly appears on the alphabet networks, runs the podcast circuit (e.g. with Bill Kristol), and publishes op-eds in lefty media like the New York Times. For instance, a couple weeks ago, Carville made the rounds robustly defending faux ‘oyster farmer’ and Nazi tattoo fan Graham Platner.

But it appears Carville has finally drawn the line. New York was a Bridge over the River Kwai too far. This week, he even called for an intra-party civil war, blue versus blue. Except Carville calls it a schism.

“Lady, I ain’t in the same party as you,” Carville said this week about one of the radical candidates who ran as a Democrat and won in recent New York Elections (Darializa Avila Chevalier). “I’m sorry. I’m just not. And I actually do think it’s time for Democrats to talk the ‘s’ word: schism. I really do. Everybody’s always said, ‘No, no. We’re a coalition. We’re a big tent. But there’s just some sh—t I can’t be in the same tent with.”

It’s not just Carville. Yesterday, another high-profile Democrat strategist, Van Jones, expressed similar concerns, albeit more politely. Jones was Barack Obama’s special advisor. He’s a Yale Law graduate, has authored multiple liberal bestsellers, and has appeared in TIME’s “100 Most Influential People” list. He’s a regular CNN commentator and has had his own primetime show. (And he has a podcast, of course.)

“Reasonable Democrats,” Jones tweeted yesterday, “are going to have to get off their couches, roll up their sleeves and start organizing real voters on the ground.” He didn’t call for schism like Carville, but he did describe a split-screen crisis. “We can no longer rely only on TV ads, digital spend, and endorsements,” Van wrote. “Just donating from afar and complaining about the Democratic Socialists of America won’t cut it. Their army grows every day.”

“Army” is the language of war.

“Look, I used to be on the left side of Pluto,” Van explained in a clip he attached to his tweet. “But to have somebody whose main qualification to be in our party is saying there should be no police, no prisons, Israel shouldn’t exist, is a red flashing light.” He warned that, if Democrat moderates don’t get organized fast, “you’re going to have people like this and worse taking over this party.”

The even more ‘moderate’ late-night comedian Bill Maher, who, let’s be honest, has been slowly red-pilling since the pandemic, in an interview with JD Vance, said his vote is in play. “It’s either going to be you or Marco,” Maher said. Tuesday’s election pushed him over the edge. “If this is where the Democratic party is going, with this Democratic Socialism that doesn’t believe in capitalism or prisons, then my vote is in play.”

CLIP: Bill Maher says he might vote for Vance or Rubio if the socialists define the DNC (0:36).

On Thursday, Fox News reported that thirteen ‘moderate’ Democrats have formed a new coalition to follow Van Jones’ advice and get organized. “We’re for capitalism, not socialism,” Tom Suozzi (D-NY) explained. “We’re for safety, not lawlessness. We’re proud of America, not ashamed of America— and we need to be promoting those things.”

CLIP: New York Representative announces ‘Promise to America’ coalition (0:31).

Don’t fall for it. ‘Moderate’ Democrats aren’t rallying around their sudden, rediscovered patriotism. They are organizing against a movement that is stealing safe Democrat seats. It’s self-defense. They know abolishing prisonsis not a winning issue.

The lid is off the blue crock pot, and the fondue is boiling over. The Democrats’ messy internal divisions are finally spilling onto the open battlefield: the civil war between ‘moderate’ Democrats and radical socialists.

Civil wars are characterized by one thing: an unsolvable wedge issue, an intractable issue over which neither side can compromise. In the U.S. Civil War, it was slavery. Inside the 2026 Democrat party, there are many wedges: capitalism, Israel, and the lunatic fringes of wokeness, to name a few. We’ve called this the Polycrisis.

🔥 The sides are becoming well defined. BlueSky was unified in sneering at Carville, Jones, and Maher. The BlueSkyers are universally mocking the three men, dismissing them, calling them losers, the washed-up “old guard,” and arguing they are just mad because they are “old rich men.” We know which side BlueSky is on.

Meanwhile, oleaginous California Governor Gavin Newsom, the human political weather vane, dropped his quiet opposition to a radical ‘billionaire wealth tax’ in the Golden State and publicly argued for the same radical wealth tax in all fifty states because “the system is fundamentally broken.” In other words, he went full confiscatory commie.

It’s not exactly well thought out. Newsom didn’t say what the tax money is needed for. He didn’t describe how he would spend it. He didn’t explain how more taxes can somehow fix ‘stagnated wages’ or ‘the cost of living.’

So Newsom isn’t saying the tax will make anything better. It’s just … fairness.Envy. Punishment. The communist manifesto.

How a wealth tax would even work remains unclear, since the Constitution’s Takings Clause forbids the government from taking people’s property without just compensation. The Income Tax Amendment only allows taxing income, not wealth.

But Newsom also recently said he was “open to” packing the Supreme Court, so I wouldn’t rule it out, either. The Constitution remains viable only while a majority of Justices defend it. If they pack the Court with Democratic Socialists, all bets are off.

To be clear, I didn’t start today’s post by mentioning my prediction from last summer to gloat (even though nobody else was predicting that). Nobody was predicting it because, up to that point, the Democrats had managed to keep their internal schism under wraps. The fact that it has now tumbled out into the open means they are no longer in control.

And a public civil war —Democrats denouncing Democrats— is the last thing they need heading into the midterms.

🔥 I’ve been an anti-communist since I was a fetus. My Twitter bio has long criticized only one group: comrades. I’ve studied communism since I was an 18-year-old Reagan fan. But after the Soviet Union fell, it got devilishly hard to convince anyone that communists remained any kind of legitimate threat. Haha, people would say, you mean those washed-up, beret-wearing fools in coffeeshops?

Actually, the U.S. communist network became even more dangerous after Reagan beat the Soviet Union. Their bosses were gone, but they remained a network of highly motivated, well-organized, angry communists. All they needed was a new boss, and the United States had become, in their view, the lone impediment to global utopia.

We should have purged them. Cleaned them out. Scraped them out of every city, town, college, village, hamlet, school district, and unincorporated rural collective. Sadly, we didn’t. On Thursday, President Trump tweeted (and yesterday re-tweeted) that the game is finally on:

He wasn’t finished. He had much more to say about it. Yesterday, he posted a longer diatribe against “these hardcore, godless, ruthless Communists”:

Everyone knows that the nation’s greatest anti-communist, Ronald Reagan, was an actor before he became California’s governor. But what most people don’t know is that Reagan was a B-roll actor with a declining career until he was hired by General Electric in 1954 to travel around the country delivering anti-communist speeches at GE plants, Lions Clubs, Rotaries, Garden Clubs, Chambers of Commerce, and other local civic venues.

Giving those little anti-communism talks, speech after speech, day after day, was how Reagan became the Great Communicator and one of the most popular presidents in U.S. history. This GE period helped transform him from a New Deal Democrat into a conservative icon and primed his political career.

Now, here we are, with a new president taking up the reins.

Never mind the Democrats’ civil war. This is the real battle— the fight by Republicans and moderate Democrats against a Democrat party infiltrated by well-organized, well-funded communist agents and their Islamo-fascist allies. The storm clouds of conflict have been gathering for decades ever since the Soviet Union’s collapse.

The New York Elections —where a first-time candidate and communist agitator beat a decades-long incumbent for a federal office— finally dragged the dirty laundry out of the shadows and awakened ‘moderate’ Democrats who’d been intentionally blind to what was happening inside their “big tent,” since it helped them win elections.

The war has begun. I’ll make another prediction: This will be the defining battle of our generation. Get ready.

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Earlier this month, I reported how Trump’s treasonous former National Security Advisor had agreed to plead guilty to one charge of mishandling classified documents. Yesterday he went to court and did it. The Washington Post reported, “Former Trump adviser John Bolton pleads guilty in classified files case.”

John “the Walrus” Bolton, 77, will not necessarily avoid jail time. His plea deal requires him to pay a $2.25 million fine, surrender his government pension, and agree he was guilty of a federal felony, precluding any future security status and making him unemployable as a darling of the anti-Trump lecture circuit.

But he has also agreed to let the judge sentence him to up to ten years in prison on October 28th. He and his lawyers are counting on leniency, since he ‘cooperated’ by pleading guilty. Prosecutors agreed to only seek five years. But the judge decides the sentence, and Bolton could still get the full ten years.

I’d hate to try to handicap it. Bolton benefits from cooperation, the hefty fine, his age, loss of pension, lack of priors, and his elite status, which usually protects high-profile defendants. But on the other hand, as a top national security official, he should be held to a high standard, and he illegally kept a lot of classified documents (1,000+ pages, that we know of). He also emailed the documents on unsecured networks (AOL, lol), exposing them to foreign intelligence gathering and Google employees.

But even more damning, Bolton has publicly called for the harshestpunishments in classified-document retention cases, at least when it came to President Trump. In June, 2023, Bolton said Trump “should be at trial as soon as possible” and “a really innocent man would insist on trial at the earliest possible date.”

Yesterday, he told the judge, “I am guilty, your honor, and I am sorry for it.” The irony!

Now his lawyers argue that, since Trump wasn’t jailed for keeping classified documents, Bolton shouldn’t be, either. But it’s a bad argument, since Trump didn’t plead guilty, wasn’t convicted, and presidents enjoy declassification powers that people like Bolton don’t.

Will the judge hold Bolton to his own standard? I’d think it would be tempting. All in all, ten years is on the books, but a sentence between 0-24 months, possibly with home confinement, is perhaps most likely. But either way, Bolton is forever removed from the political chessboard.

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Finally, let’s check in on Bill Pulte, who Trump tapped to replace outgoing Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard. I have two headlines for you. First, from CNN, earlier this week:

It wasn’t as big a cut as critics had feared, but Pulte is still making the kinds of fundamental organizational changes that a first-week interim official almost never does. CNN quoted an anonymous ODNI employee. “The staff is numb and unhappy,” the source said. “One person compared it to the trauma of the Covid pandemic.”

The source added, including Tulsi Gabbard’s cuts, “more than half of the offices are unoccupied and disheveled.” The intelligence community is finding out.

Our second Pulte headline arrived in yesterday’s New York Times:

Not just an “election operative.”

“Bill Pulte is bringing a former senior R.N.C. official who cavorted with election deniers and conspiracy theories into O.D.N.I. as his chief of staff,” Senator Mark Warner (D-VA) complained. “Americans have every reason to fear that this administration is once again eroding the wall between our intelligence agencies and domestic elections.”

On the other hand, Christina Norton, a Floridian and veteran campaign worker, is already serving as Pulte’s chief of staff at Fannie/Freddie. But it is also true that she was heavily involved in the RNC’s efforts to sue after the 2020 election, and is good friends with people like conservative commentator Jack Posobiec, who the Times described as a “Pizzagate conspiracy theorist.”

The intelligence community spent decades surveilling everyone else. Now itis the virus under the microscope. Wolverines, assemble for duty.

Have a wonderful weekend! I’ll see you on Monday to kick off another terrific week of C&C’s essential news and caffeinated commentary.