☕️ TAINTED ☙ Monday, May 11, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

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Virginia Democrats lost a court ruling, then plotted to retire every justice over 53; the NYT tells Dems to stop campaigning on climate; April jobs double the forecast; Kevin Warsh takes the Fed; more

JEFF CHILDERS

MAY 11READ IN APP

Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! Your roundup includes: Virginia Democrats float a plan to retire every Supreme Court justice over 53 because the bench had the audacity to read the rules; a Marxian academic in the New York Times tells Democrats it’s time to ixnay on the climate emergency; the April jobs report doubles the consensus forecast and an ‘upside surprise’ ripples through the markets; and Trump quietly grasps the last major lever of government influence as Kevin Warsh prepares to walk into the Federal Reserve.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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There’s so much in the news cycle these days, and I hate to beat a dead donkey, but this continuing story is just too good to let pass by. Yesterday, the New York Times reported, “A Private Call Reveals Democrats’ Desperation Over Tossing of Map.” The article explained that “desperation and fury have gripped the party after the state Supreme Court struck down a favorable map.” Just as I suspected, the Democrats’ useless Supreme Court petition was to buy time for this.

If there is one thing we can all agree on as Americans, it is that the most sacred, fundamental right we have —the very bedrock of our democracy— is the right of politicians to draw weirdly shaped blobs on a map so they never, ever lose an election.

As we all well know by now, this time-honored tradition is called “gerrymandering,” a word that sounds like a digestive problem you get from eating a bad street taco, but is actually a highly sophisticated legal process. Consider: Let’s say you are a politician. You look at a map of your district and realize, to your horror, that it contains Actual Voters Who Disagree With You. This is unacceptable. So you hire a team of experts armed with advanced computer software to redraw the district lines so that your new district looks exactly like a sexually aroused iguana, but magically contains only people who will vote for you until the end of recorded time.

Recently, Virginia Democrats went all in on this action. For months, the Democrats have been deeply, profoundly outraged by gerrymandering, by which I mean they were outraged when Republicans did it. Whenever Democrats do it, it is not gerrymandering. It is “Protecting the Will of the People.”

But this time, the Democrats were in a hurry. They had to save Democracy, and Democracy waits for no man (or, for that matter, no woman, bi-gender person, fluid spirit, or mollusk). So they held the first vote just days before November’s state election, while early voting was already well underway. Then, after the election, they voted on it again, and slapped it on an April special election ballot, where it narrowly passed.

“Behold!” the Democrats announced. “The Will of the People has spoken! Hand over the markers, we have some districts to draw!” Whew, they saved Democr… But wait. There was just one tiny, insignificant problem. A gnat in the vaseline. A speck, really. Something to quibble over.

That something was: They completely ignored the rules. (In the legal profession, we have a technical term for holding a vote during an election and claiming it happened before the election. That term is “cheating.”)

Republicans, who are also experts at drawing iguanas, immediately sued. As alert readers know, Democrats lost at the trial court and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court of Virginia, which tossed it out, 4-3. The court struck down the entire plan. The majority opinion stated that the legislature’s failure to follow the rules “incurably taints the resulting referendum vote and nullifies its legal efficacy.”

“Incurably taints” is a powerful term of art. It’s the kind of phrase you use when your wire terrier rolls in something shocking and unidentifiable in the yard, and you realize you have to throw away the dog and buy a new one. In other words, Democrats’ dream of winning the 2026 Gerrymander War blew up in their faces like an Acme cigar.

Naturally, the Democrats took this news with quiet dignity and grace.

Just kidding! They immediately declared that the Virginia Supreme Court was destroying Democracy. BlueSkyers and Hollywood celebrities called for civil war. Representative Suzan DelBene, chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, snarled, “four unelected judges decided to cast aside the will of the voters.” She warned rank-and-file Democrats that “the powerful and elite will do everything they can to silence you.” (Irony! The campaign chair of one of the two major political parties, warning people about the powerful and elite. 🙄)

Having lost the legal battle, the Democrats turned to what any mature, responsible political party would do: They started brainstorming ways to simply fire all the judges who ruled against them and start over with better ones.

🔥 The Times reported details of a “private” call between House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and top Virginia Democrats, citing as sources “three people who participated in the call and two who were briefed on it”— in other words, it leaked like a sieve (probably on purpose).

In the “private” conversation, Virginia Democrats floated a spectacular, cartoonishly goofy retaliation scheme. Since the state constitution allows the legislature to set the mandatory retirement age for judges, and since Democrats control the legislature, they proposed rapidly passing a new law to lower the retirement age to the magic number of 54.

Why 54, you ask? Is there some medical evidence that a human brain suddenly loses its ability to comprehend the law upon reaching its 54th birthday? No. The reason they picked 54 is because the youngest justice currently sitting on the Virginia Supreme Court happens to be 54.

In other words, their brilliant master plan is to legally declare that every single justice on the state’s highest court is suddenly too old and senile to do their jobs, force them all into immediate retirement, and then presumably replace them with a fresh batch of 23-year-old recent law school graduates who have solemnly sworn to always rule in favor of the Democratic Party. (The story said, they “could then fill vacancies on the court with sympathetic Democratic lawyers.”)

You know that I hate to mention this kind of awkward fact, but the Nazis also employed this same tactic in the early salad days of the Third Reich. In April 1933, within months of taking power, Hitler’s party passed the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, which instantly removed all judges deemed politically unreliable or racially undesirable from the bench. The goal was identical to what Virginia Democrats are floating — just replace any judges who might rule against you with ones who won’t. So simple!

🔥 A handful of still-sane Democrats have reservations. Former U.S. Representative James P. Moran (D-Va., 1991-2014) told the Times, “We do have to keep our credibility. We have to do things that pass the legitimacy test.” He appears to hold the minority view. Sitting Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (D-Loudon) stressed, “Everyone has got to have a strong stomach right now; this is a complete disaster waiting to happen if people are timid.”

So you never know. But the clock is ticking. “Any plans to enact a new congressional map for this year’s midterm elections would require action in the next few days,” the Times reported. The state Elections Commissioner warned that, “any changes to the maps after Tuesday, May 12, will significantly increase the risk of his agency being unable to properly prepare.”

You must hand it to them for innovation and creativity. All truly genius ideas originally sounded crazy. If this amazing tactic catches on, politicians will never have to lose a court case again. Your Honor, I object to your ruling on the grounds that we just passed a law stating that any judge with a mustache and a Hyundai Sonata is legally required to move to a condo in Florida.

I would offer a prediction that there was no way they’d attempt something this crazy. The backlash by the state’s judicial branch would be historic. The last thing they need is for their safe, cushy careers to become political footballs. So maybe the leak is the policy. The base needs to hear it more than the legislature needs to actually pass it.

But we are in a pandemic of TDS, so I’m not predicting anything. I’ll just say that, if they do it, it will be enough of a reward to watch the resulting Big Iguana Show.

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In our second Babylon Bee-style story to grace the Times’ website, two days ago the Grey Lady ran an op-ed headlined, “Democrats Don’t Have to Campaign on Climate Change Anymore.” If that headline sounds like the Times telling its readers what to think, just remember its primary purpose: to define liberal permission structures.

If you have ever scrolled an inch, you are well aware that humanity is constantly facing an Existential Threat. An Existential Threat is a scientific term meaning “a problem so massive and terrifying that you must immediately vote for the Democrat Party or else the Earth will explode like a Sam’s Club hot dog in a microwave.”

For the past couple of decades, the undisputed reigning champion of Existential Threats has been Climate Change. We were told, repeatedly and with great shouting and blocking of freeways, that Climate Change was not just an issue, it was the issue. If we did not immediately stop driving cars, eating hamburgers, and using electricity, the polar ice caps would melt, the oceans would boil, and Miami would become a colorful coral reef at the bottom of the Atlantic, which, to be fair, might improve the traffic on I-95.

If you disagreed, you were not just wrong; you were a murderous Science Denier who spitefully and on purpose wanted the baby seals, penguins, and polar bears to drown. In other words, you were a Bad Person.™

But it turns out that Existential Threats are a lot like ladies’ shoe fashions. One season, everybody simply must have the chunky platform heels, and if you wear flats, you are a social outcast. The next season, chunky heels are out, flats are in, and nobody mentions the heels ever again.

🔥 Behold: it’s a new season of Existential Threats. “The Democratic Party remains deeply unpopular,” the author wrote, setting the tone. Matthew T. Huber is a Marxian academic whose whole brand is arguing for a more class‑based, pro‑worker version of climate socialism rather than technocratic green liberalism. (As a greedy capitalist, you’ll be forgiven for not knowing the difference.) Professor Huber published the non-bestseller, Climate Change as Class War: Building Socialism on a Warming Planet, and regularly writes annoying articles for far-left outlets like Jacobin.

Professor Huber, whose communist bona fides are second to nobody, is giving Democrats permission to ixnay on all the windmills chatter.

“For the past several months,” Huber’s essay began, “Democratic elites have been debating how much to talk about climate change, if at all.” They have a new answer to two decades of frog-marching K-12 students through Inconvenient Truthassemblies, and hectoring them that the most urgent issue in human history was saving the planet from cow farts: never mind.

“It is a striking shift from a few years ago,” the article admitted, “when many Democratic politicians thought the promise of a Green New Deal would build a coalition based on green jobs and fighting inequality.” Oh, well.

🔥 Alert readers will recall that, in 2019, right after they captured the House of Representatives, day-drinking super-investor Nancy Pelosi called the “climate crisis” the “existential threat of our time” as House Democrats elevated it on their party platform. Politico, January, 2019:

Years before that, Barack Obama repeatedlyclaimed in his State of the Union Speech there was “no greater threat to future generations” and “no greater threat to our planet” than climate change. UNCC website article, January 2015:

In 2020, the top issue in the Democrat primaries was AOC’s “Green New Deal.” Just two years back, Joe “Oil Cancer” Biden called climate change “the existential threat to humanity,” “the number one issue facing humanity,” and “the only truly existential threat” in recent years.

But wait! It turns out the Existential Threat can be put on hold for now, because the polling numbers in battleground states are looking a little squishy.

Professor Huber patiently explained that the party line in 2026 has changed: “there is little reason for progressive politicians to focus on the climate issue anymore.” The author argued that credentialed progressive elites —which he called “the Brahmin Left”— are already convinced about climate and don’t need any more lectures. Blue-collar workers, who Democrats need to win back, don’t want to hear any more lectures about expensive green energy.

“When it comes to climate change, for now,” Huber argued, “it might be better to say nothing at all.”

He seemed to recognize this isn’t a temporary tactic for the upcoming midterms. “This shift among progressive Democrats on the campaign trail in many ways marks the end of an era,” the author wrote. Thank goodness for liberal hypocrisy and the politics of convenience. It’s just not polling well. “The Pew Research Center routinely asks Americans to rank their top concerns,” he explained, “and climate change is consistently near the bottom.”

It’s almost as if the Existential Threat was never actually about the weather at all. It’s almost as if it was just a convenient political tool to push a massive expansion of government power and spending, and the moment that tool stopped working, they tossed it into the back of the closet next to the chunky platform heels.

Either way, the apocalypse has apparently been postponed due to a lack of voter interest. I don’t know about you, but I, for one, will be much happier when they shut up about the climate.

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Right on schedule, the economy is crushing it. On Friday, Politico reported, “‘Upside surprise’: Job growth surges for Trump’s economy.” The Labor Department on Friday reported that despite the Iran War, higher gas prices, Trump’s immigration crackdown, “economic uncertainty,” and media’s best efforts to depress everybody, U.S. employers added 115,000 jobs in April— more than double the 55,000 projected by surveys of economic forecasters. Experts scattered like German cockroaches when the bathroom light was switched on.

“The data suggests the hostilities in the Middle East have had little visible impact on the U.S. job market,” said Eric Merlis, a managing director at Citizens Bank. This defied the corporate media experts, who assured us that the war would cause higher gas prices, inflation, a great recession, and children to turn bright orange. Whoops again. “The economy is so much better than what the doom crew has been saying,” Chris Zaccarelli, chief investment officer at Northlight Asset Management, wrote in a note to clients on Friday morning. Weird.

It was much more than just great employment figures. On Thursday, the New York Post reported, “The US economy is leaving most other big rich countries in the dust so far in 2026, data show.” In the first quarter of this year, our GDP expanded by +2%, almost double the G7 average of 1.1%, and over a hundred times the EU’s pathetic 0.1% growth. The EU is still growing, barely, the same way that toenails keep growing on a corpse.

It might have something to do with the Europeans now being completely dependent on us for oil and natural gas, their open borders problem, or the fact that UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who looks and sounds like an animatronic wax model, ‘enjoys’ an approval rating around 18%.

After employment and GDP, the U.S. stock markets continued probing historic highs last week, as corporate profits were reported strong across the board. “The S&P 500 just hit another all-time high, extending a rally that has added nearly 50% since the tariff-driven panic low in April 2025,” 247 Wall St. reported. I guess Trump’s tariffs didn’t destroy the economy after all.

Not only that, but in another expert-defying development, yesterday CNBC reported, “Dollar steady as Iran war uncertainty keeps markets on edge.” Experts dourly predicted that China was “dumping” its holdings of US currency. But this morning, Traders Union reported, “China continues to accumulate dollars and prioritize U.S. treasuries.” Could this mean that, unlike our ‘experts,’ Chinese economists think the U.S. is on the upswing?

There are more reasons to think we could be on the verge of another boom. One massive reason appeared in this morning’s Guardian, headlined, “US Senate expected to confirm Kevin Warsh as next Federal Reserve chair.” Current Federal Reserve Chair Jerome “Too Late” Powell, 73, who’s waged a bitter feud with Trump since his re-election, is terming out, only 19 years past Virginia Democrats’ mandatory retirement age. His replacement, Kevin Warsh, 56 —who national Democrats sneeringly call “Trump’s sock puppet”— is expected to be quickly and easily confirmed in the Senate this week along partisan lines.

Most commenters are expecting major reforms. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed last November, Warsh called the Fed’s leadership “broken” and called the bank “an institution whose reach has extended far beyond its grasp.” He keeps talking about “regime change” at the Fed.

The Administration —and Warsh himself— have been unusually light on details of what Warsh might have planned. To me, that itself is a giant indicator. They are keeping their enemies in the dark. All we know for sure is that Warsh is telegraphing major Fed changes. What he is not saying is the usual line: “we need to keep things stable to calm the markets during this time of war and uncertainty.”

Increasingly, it seems like President Trump and his new Fed Chair plan to do the exact opposite: something disruptive. Something big. And they know perfectly well that the midterms are less than six months away. Not only do all the gauges point toward a big move, but the Administration has a powerful incentive to use the Fed’s apparatus to boost the economy before the November elections.

Experts remain universally gloomy, but the markets are already anticipating something good, calling his nomination “Warsh Shock” and attributing the rising dollar to incoming fresh energy at the U.S.’s central bank.

The Guardian noted that, “The Fed’s influence over the economy spans from the job market to mortgage rates, and its every move is carefully scrutinized by investors on Wall Street.” By the end of this week, we’ll potentially know a lot more about what’s coming next as President Trump finally gains access to the last major lever of government whose influence has been cut off to him until now. I’m guessing there is a lot of pent-up demand.

Under Virginia’s proposed mandatory retirement age, Powell would have aged out during the Obama administration. Tomorrow, he ages out on schedule. This could get very exciting indeed.

Have a magnificent Monday! C&C shall return tomorrow morning with more exciting essential news and caffeinated commentary. Don’t miss it!

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