☕️ CLOWNS AND CIVIL WARS ☙ Wednesday, May 24, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

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A pack of inexperienced communists just stole a state senate seat and two House seats from Democrats in New York, and the media claims some kind of progressive victory. But it was a blue disaster.

JEFF CHILDERS

JUN 24READ IN APP

Good morning, C&C, it’s Wednesday! This morning’s lead stories all offered different takes on yesterday’s across-the-board socialist victories in New York City. It is now open civil war inside the Democrat tent; the lions are loose, the clowns are rioting, and the tamer is off on a bender. We have dots to connect and layers of narrative lasagna to peel away.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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Democrat polycrisis news! Yesterday, Axios reported, ““Huge defeat”: Democrats left reeling after socialist “earthquake” in New York.”

As you know, New York City —the Big Apple, the home of Wall Street, and America’s financial capital— has been experiencing a warm, fuzzy, collective moment. It’s ‘warm and fuzzy’ in the same sense as passing out behind an idling trash truck with a stray dog lying across your face. In other words, it’s only comfortable while you’re unconscious, and you might not wake up.

The ‘earthquake’ in Axios’ headline was that every one of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s comrades —three of three Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) candidates he endorsed— won their primary elections yesterday, booting Democrat incumbents. Two of them essentially won federal congressional seats formerly earmarked for Congressional Hispanic Caucus members. (Yesterday’s election was just a primary, but in these safe, deep blue districts, the primaries are the ‘real’ contest.)

Worse for Dems, Mamdani’s candidates were all inexperienced political newbies with tons of baggage. One of them, a self-proclaimed communist, once tweeted that she used the American flag to wipe her hands. Another called 9/11 America’s fault because of our “islamophobia.” Another called white women “ugly colonizers” and demanded defunding the police and prisons. Of course, their names cannot be pronounced correctly in English.

CLIP: New York’s newest Palestinian-American state senator (and first-time political candidate) Aber Kawas, 34, explains America’s ‘long trajectory’ of racism and Islamophobia (1:00).

“It was a tough night,” complained Representative Greg Meeks (D-N.Y.), a close ally of leadership and chair of the Queens County Democratic Party. Incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman lost to a first-timer in a 30-point landslide. “The progressives beat the establishment in the heart of NYC,” crowed progressive Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.). “The energy of our party is clearly with the left.” (I bet you never realized the far-left Democrat party had its own left. It can always get worse.)

By the end of last night, as the returns came in and the outcome became painfully clear, one lawmaker told Axios there was “lots of silence” in the stunned Congressional Hispanic Caucus chatroom. Crickets.

Believe it or not, this is terrible news for Democrats. Axios asked a ‘senior House Democrat’ whether their colleagues were worried about the results: “Yes, they are,” was the answer. “Calling it a headache is an understatement,” the lawmaker said. “Holy sh*t,” said a second senior House Democrat. “Buckle up.” They called it a “huge defeat” for Democrat leadership.

A house divided cannot stand.

This story is about more than “progressives beating moderates” (or even about commies beating Democrats). It was a head‑to‑head organizational test. And last night, the DSA‑aligned, mayor‑backed network outperformed the official DNC party establishment. Establishment Democrats now recognize there are enough DSA members to create persistent intraparty turbulence.

🔥 In December, nonpartisan think tank Baron published a risk analysis of Democrat problems. Consider its conclusion:

Arguably since 2016, the factions of the Left have been in a stalemate. No clear leader with the ability to unite these blocs has yet emerged, and no faction enjoys a strong enough position to achieve control and lead the Left against the Populist Right. This relegates the Left, at least temporarily, to a reactive posture. Although a providential transformational leader or civilization-shaking crisis could upend the competitive landscape, the American Left has not confronted such challenges in decades.

That was written long before yesterday’s “earthquake” in Manhattan, making the Baron article’s third potential scenario, “Party Collapse,” seem even more likely. In this third scenario, “Through broad and sustained party primary victories and the power of deep blue cities, the Progressive bloc compels the Democratic Party to adhere to increasingly radical positions, eroding its electoral competitiveness in growing swaths of the country and putting an Electoral College majority out of reach.”

In its “Collapse” plotline, Baron explained, “The most extreme elements of the Left react with a frustration that increasingly turns into violence, discrediting the entire left-of-center cause and producing long-term dominance by the Right.” That chilling observation nicely tees up tomorrow’s Antifa segment. Mentally bookmark it.

🔥 Behold the quiet narrative or meme that won’t go away: the Democrats’ “Civil War.” Consider this string of illustrative headlines from just this month. First, the Wall Street Journal, five days ago:

Vox, six days ago:

The New Yorker, unsurprisingly, predicted last night’s outcome six days ago:

Reaching a little further back, to late May, here’s Axios:

And, at the tail end of April, this from the far-left Lever:

“Our blockbuster report,” the article began, “exposes a billionaire-funded political machine designed to co-opt — or de-fang — a rising tide of economic and anti-corruption populism boiling up in the Democratic party.” In other words: open civil war. Except this time, it’s like the South versus the South. Cage match.

🔥 I traced the ubiquitous “civil war” narrative flag back to an op-ed that Democrat strategist James Carville published in the New York Times a year ago. Headline from July, 2025:

“The Democratic Party,” Carville wrote, “is steamrolling toward a civilized civil war.” War is inevitable. “It’s necessary to have it,” the Ragin’ Cajun allowed, but “it’s even more necessary to delay it.” War cannot be stopped. “The only thing that can save us now is an actual savior,” Carville admitted unironically. (He meant a strong presidential candidate, who can only be identified afterthe 2026 midterms.)

Democrats have no idea how to solve it. Oh, Carville offered plenty of ideas. After all, excreting advice is how he earns his weekly direct deposit. But look at the advice: his main theme was to run on a unified message blanketing all media from Summer 2025 to November 2026, calling for the repeal of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill. “That single word is our core message,” he said. “We’ve never had a simpler, more unifying oppositional message,” he opined.

I am not making that up. But who’s talking about the OBBBA these days? That’s ancient history. Events have overtaken them.

They call it “civil war.” We’ve called it the Democrats’ polycrisis. The details of the disputes might be fascinating to political insiders, but are hard to differentiate if you’ve never been a liberal. Basically, the DNC Establishment (which they call the “moderate wing”) is trying to steer the party toward the center —pro-market, pro-Israel— assisted by its donor-consultant class and the blue oligarchs, aiming for practical high-tax policies and proving-by-doing that progressive ideas can actually work, notwithstanding the evidence.

Meanwhile, the DSA and aligned groups are eat-the-rich, defund-the-police, pro-Palestine, trans-everything populist progressives of the Zohran Mamdani stripe. The two sides are incompatible.

🔥 I’m far from the only one who sees the looming threat to the donkey party. For instance, Senior Claremont Institute Fellow and former Assistant Secretary of the Interior Jeremy Carl tweeted yesterday about the Mamdani-quake and, among other things, predicted, “it isn’t going to play well for the Dems in 2026 and 2028. The future of the Democrat party is radical and post-American.”

Until quite recently, we’ve only ever had oneout-and-out socialist in Congress. Adding the two new ones from yesterday’s primaries, next year Congress will now host four total— a 400% spike in far-left radicalism in the House of Representatives.

Four is not a large enough bloc to threaten Republicans. It’s just a few more Squad creatures, plus or minus. Nor are any seats being stripped from the GOP. The seats are being taken from Democrats— in their safest deep-blue districts, where patronage reigned, and the DNC was never before required to spend any real money to defend.

Saying this new challenge from the left comes at a bad financial moment for the DNC is a hilarious understatement.

In his tweet, Jeremy Carl and Axios agreed— this is an incipient migraine of epic proportions. “The radicalism of these soon-to-be Congressmen,” Carl said, “is going to be a headache for Democrat leadership in the House and a gift to the GOP.”

Every precious dollar that Hakeem Jeffries, AIPAC, Majority Democrats, or union allies spend trying, increasingly unsuccessfully, to save incumbents like the Hispanic Caucus members in New York, is a lost dollar notspent defining Trump, protecting actual swing seats, or building any case for a 2028 reset.

🔥 Obviously, outright socialists infesting Congress and occupying New York City’s offices and boards remains an appalling development demanding immediate attention. Communists in any form —including so-called “democratic socialists”— must be squashed like the horrifying insects that they are, before they spread and start breeding under the kitchen refrigerator.

But here’s the bright side, the quiet paradox: the 2026 commie eruption might overall be more positive than alarming. Every crisis produces an opportunity.

First of all, it proves Democrats are starting to crumble under the swelling burden of their polycrisis. Socialism has often been compared to a morbidly obese clown riding a capitalist unicycle and eating deep-fried Oreos. As the clown gets fatter and fatter, eventually the spokes snap, and the whole thing crashes down in a floppy avalanche of adipose tissue.

Now the humongous clown is riding an increasingly wobbly Democrat party.

Taking a brief excursion, pro-Mamdani analysts love crowing about surveys that show increasing numbers of ‘younger voters’ saying they prefer socialism. But the problem with younger voters is their incorrigible habit of growing up.

Science supports this. Headline from the Chicago Booth Review, April 2020:

“Research suggests that there is a neglected dimension of polarization, one driven by age,” the article explained. “Younger people” —whose skulls are full of mush— “are disproportionately liberal, and then drift steadily to the right, becoming just as disproportionately conservative by retirement age.” So enjoy it while it lasts, comrades.

By large majorities, Americans detest socialists. And we really hate communists.

🔥 Which brings us to the second point: Communism is the only ideology that must pretend to be something else in order to politically survive. Exposed communism is vulnerable communism. While it is alarming that so many young Americans could support open communism, it is much easier to fight in the open than behind the scenes.

Look at it this way: It’s hard to convince uninformed citizens that a particular president (whose name might or might not rhyme with “your mama”) is actually a secret communist. People don’t want to believe it. The person himself denies it, and swears support for “fair capitalism.” The media dismisses you as a conspiracy theorist. Etc.

The truth is, if regular Democrats thought they could win elections by embracing communism, they would all be living in communes, wearing red berets, and sporting Che Guevara t-shirts. Oh, they are happy to LARP as secret commies, but the last thing they want is for anybody to call them one.

Implicitly or explicitly, Democrat base voters and donors are being asked to pick sides.And the act of making them choose their tribe-within-a-tribe is itself one more concrete block tied to the legs of the Democratic polycrisis. In other words, forcing rank-and-file Democrats to declare “I’m with the Mamdani-DSA wing” or “I’m with the donor‑backed moderates” doesn’t resolve the crisis, it piles another layer of strain onto a coalition that’s already cracking like a boiled egg.

For most blue-base voters, both sides are imperfect. They dislike corporate donors and oligarchs, but they also worry that open socialists and communists are unelectable or too extreme on crime/Israel/culture. Being pushed to pick a side heightens their cognitive dissonance instead of relieving it. That’s the migraine.

Finally, let’s connect the dots. As the Baron analysis and the Chicago Booth Review article show, the civil war started in 2016 under Trump 1.0 and was boiling by early 2020. It only grew more acute through four years of Bidenomics and lawfare. In other words, Trump ‘got lucky’ again. (TAW.)

It has become increasingly plausible to ask whether Democrats can survive as a national force at all, or if the party is destined to enter a doom loop leading to a degraded, generational wilderness exile. It’s far too soon to declare victory; polls and competitive races rest on a knife-edge. But the polycrisis and the Democrats’ civil war are growing worse, not better.

They are counting on the midterms. It will be catastrophic if they lose. Still, as the old saying goes, it’s not over till the morbidly obese clown in the Che Guevara t-shirt sings. And he is backstage, warming up.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! Tune back in tomorrow morning for a special law-and-order roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary. You won’t want to miss it.

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