☕️ BASHING ☙ Monday, August 3, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

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Viral contentious interview between Dana Bash and Secretary Kennedy surfaces a civilizational showdown; Dems’ 2026 midterm strategy collapses; DSA debate takes center stage; and more.

JEFF CHILDERS

AUG 3READ IN APP

Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! July is in the can, and we’ve tilted all the way into the back half of 2026. Your roundup today includes: dramatic weekend showdown interview between CNN’s Dana Bash and HHS Secretary Kennedy goes viral; the acidic attack on our constitutional rights was exposed; public health is anything but; corporate media platforms Democratic Socialists of America annual conference, but why?; how is the national Democrat platform different from the DSA’s bat-guano insane platform; progressives’ planned midterm message in tatters; signs of coherent GOP elections strategy; a replacement midterm debate; and a new national conversation about communism.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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Yesterday, the most important political battle of our lifetimes spilled out onto the anchor table at CNN in one contentious interview that splashed across social media. Yesterday, an appalled Politico reported, “RFK Jr. tells CNN host that constitutional rights take priority over public health” Visible between every printed line was the implied question: how could ANYTHING take priority over ‘public health?’

CLIP: “Now we know Anthony Fauci was lying about everything (2:12).”

Yesterday morning, HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. appeared for a rare corporate media interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” show with Dana Bash. The first surprise was they platformed Kennedy at all. Before he was in government, they could safely ignore him; but now he’s running HHS. So it’s a new strategy: Kennedy Derangement Syndrome.

Anyway, Dana —who isn’t normally what you would call a cheerful type— was clearly miserable about letting Kennedy talk. Politico, quoting Bash herself, described the interview as “contentious.” Which was mostly her doing. “I don’t want to allow youto say things that aren’t entirely true,” Bash told the Secretary, in her best mean girl tone of voice.

Allow him. That is how Bash views the media’s job. She is the gatekeeper. Shedecides what top government officials are allowed to say on the news. What could go wrong? Respectfully, Ms. Bash is no rocket surgeon. “All you know how to do,” the Secretary correctly noted, “is repeat things that people told you and say, ‘Trust the experts.’”

But Bash wasn’t listening. Nah-nah-nah I can’t hear you.

💉 For a written article about a televisedinterview, Politico actually quoted surprisingly little of the pair’s back-and-forth. Instead, readers mostly got Politico’s interpretive paraphrases. But it did (mostly) quote the key part that became the discussion’s theme (and the article’s headline)— the core, unresolved question of which has priority: our individual or collective rights?

“I think we did virtually everything wrong the last time,” the Secretary explained. He said the government’s “primary obligation” in a future pandemic is “protecting our constitutional rights.” Dana was appalled. “You’re talking about rights,” she gasped, “and I’m asking about a potential public health crisis.”

Dana didn’t challenge Kennedy’s claim that we did virtually everything wrong last time. Instead, Bash acted as though even mentioning individual rights was irrelevant, or maybe even dangerous, when we have an urgent hypothetical health crisis to deal with.

In other words, they are already looking yearningly toward the next pandemic —never mind that pandemics used to come 100 years apart— and they are already wondering how to broom our pesky constitutional rights before we get there.

Anyway, Kennedy shot right back, doubling down. He pointed out that, during the pandemic, citizens’ individual rights were tossed out the window, and even worse, for reasons that turned out to be wrong or mendacious. Making it even worse, the experts refused to listen to any criticism:

Let’s be clear: Dana Bash, who probably doesn’t even realize this is her role, represents a direct threat to the American system. The Constitution’s essenceprioritizes individual rights over collective ones, even in “pandemics.” A journalist who intellectually grasped the Constitutional rights hierarchy would at least have acknowledged that individual rights are the baseline, and then argued about how preparedness fits within those rights.

Instead, she reacted like even mentioningrights was a distraction from the hypothetical crisis.

The interview proved that we’ve allowed a dark passenger to be smuggled into the public debate. That dark passenger is an attack on the foundations of our Constitutional framework itself. A technocratic group of largely self-appointed experts is attempting to use “pandemic preparedness” to amend the Constitution and flip it on its head.

They need only convince five Justices, and it is all over. That’s why Kennedy’s painful sacrifice —arguing with a nitwit— was so important.

Two longstanding constitutional principles are under attack from civilization’s enemies— Marxist-sympathetic public health technocracy, global health NGOs, progressive academics, and deferential media. With help from birdbrains like Dana Bash —useful idiots— these enemies are dribbling acid on the Bill of Rights.

Their goal is to convince the Supreme Court to find an “emergency” exception in the nation’s founding document, based on two “common sense” arguments about collective safety:

• The Constitution doesn’t really sanctify individual rights; collective rights must trump individual rights in emergencies.
• The Constitution doesn’t alwaysdelegate decision-making to juries, judges, and civilian elected officials; intelligence agencies (secret police) and technocratic ‘experts’ must run things during emergencies.

These arguments have already won over the elites and the institutions. If they can convince just two or three Supreme Court Justices, it’s all over. The Endless State of Emergency will be declared on Day One and will expire with the heat death of the Universe. Don’t believe it? Consider the unkillable “climate emergency.”

Bless Secretary Kennedy for taking the time to do it, and for enduring something comparable to arguing with an aggressive drunk on live TV. And, this may surprise you, but we also owe CNN thanks for airing this critical debate. Being charitable, it appears CNN threaded the needle; the network satisfied its partisan viewers with Bash’s Kennedy-bossing.

But it still platformed his (stronger) arguments, albeit punctuated with eye-rolling and constant interruption, and muted by shrill overtalk.

Never forget that “Public Health” is not “health.” The slogan “trust public health” sounds like “we care whether you live.” That is false. It’s not a conspiracy theory to say so, either.

If “Public Health” were synonymous with “health,” the modifier “public” would be redundant. Like “jumbo shrimp,” it’s an oxymoronic modifier that flips the literal meaning on its head. You, as an individual, don’t even need to be healthy for the public health framework to ‘succeed.’ You could be ordered to an infected nursing home to die alone in agony, and that could still be counted as a plus for ‘public health.’ I think about that often.

Our generation faces an all-new assault on the nation’s constitutional order, and the shock troops are dressed in white lab coats. That critical debate about rights, priorities, and emergencies surfaced during the pandemic, at immeasurable cost, and was still being argued this weekend.

We shall never back down. We will never retreat. Onward, soldiers.

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Now let’s rip the mask off the other big lie of our time: the ridiculous fib that “moderate” Democrats exist, and they aren’t allcommunists. Yesterday, the New York Times wrote a hit job dressed as a puff piece headlined, “‘Comradely’ Talks and a ‘Deer Leader’ Mascot: Scenes From the D.S.A. Summit.”

The Nation’s paper of record dispatched reporter Emma Goldberg and a photog to a dive bar in Chicago, where an indeterminate number of Democratic Socialists of America gathered for social time after a grueling day of furthering the people’s business at their “2026 national conference.” The capitalist element was out in force; one bookseller told Emma it sold out of Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto by the afternoon on the conference’s first day. (Irony alert.)

Other hot sellers included “Abolish Rent” and “A People’s Guide to Capitalism.”

This was the kind of scene the piece kept serving up without quite winking: revolutionary branding meeting ordinary convention merch energy. The irony wasn’t subtle. Though the article lacked any direct criticism of the DSA, which might have been dangerous, it didn’t do the socialists any favors either.

Emma essentially called the DSA a factional mess. “Members of the D.S.A. sort themselves, Hogwarts style, into more than a dozen caucuses.” Many have silly sounding names (“Bread and Roses”) and constantly argue. “The caucus wars are legendary,” national co-chair Megan Romer joked impishly.

Emma, deploying her admittedly solid writing skills, gingerly suggested the DSA was more of a social club— or even a religion. For instance, she quoted Cliff Connolly, a national leader from Orlando, who explained the DSA “fills the same social function for him that the Catholic Church played for his parents when they were in their 30s.”

The article was well written, engaging, and definitely not complimentary to the DSA. In the same sentence that it called the DSA “the country’s largest socialist organization,” the article counted conference attendance at “nearly 500.” For comparison, ComicCon hosts around 130,000.

Emma didn’t draw the ComicCon comparison. It was just sort of there to discover.

🔥 It wasn’t abundantly clear from this article, but the New York Times does notlike the DSA. The Grey Lady also fears the DSA, which explains Emma Goldberg’s delicate, “best frenemy” approach to the story. The Times dislikes the DSA because the paper is the house organ of the permanent Democrat Party. It dislikes them for the same reasons that party insects Van Jones and James “Ragin’ Cajun” Carville do.

They don’t like the DSA because it has been jumping the party line and primarying people whose turn it is in the party hierarchy. That is all. There was no problem until that irritating development started. Well, that, and the DSA’s very public, cartoon-like platform with points like abolishing prisons, the military, and the U.S. Senate is embarrassing to national Democrats.

Understand this: Democrats don’t disagreewith the DSA’s platform. Emma didn’t even mention the platform. The word “platform” is entirely absent from the overlong article, which was downright bizarre for a story about the group’s national political convention. The trouble isn’t that the DSA platform is too extreme; the problem is it says what they all believe too openly.

In late June, moderate Democrats rolled out “Promise to America,” led by Reps. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) and Adam Gray (D-CA), which rejected the DSA platform and promised, among other things, that, “We are capitalist, not socialist.” Only 13 Congressional Democrats signed the Promise. Thirteen.

Headline from the Dallas Express (via Yahoo News), June 26:

Since the end of the Cold War, progressive Democrats have boiled the frog slowly, with stepwise, incremental changes building on FDR’s New Deal, leading the “long march through the institutions,” and graduallytransforming the US into a bureaucratic empire. But the DSAers are young. They are impatient. They are tired of waiting for the frog to cook. They want utopia right now, not 50 years from now.

But the national party recognizes direct confrontation with a socialist-skeptical American public is risky. The DNC thinks Mayor Mamdani —a DSA darling, according to the article— is going too fast in New York City. Unfortunately for the national team, the DSA wing holds all the youthful intensity with its “Red Hot Socialist Summer.”

The summer wasn’t supposed to be Red Hot. The midterms were supposed to beabout kitchen-table issues: gas prices, housing, groceries, healthcare costs, the War in Iran, and Trump’s current shade of orange. But now, thanks to the DSA, it’s about capitalism versus communism and a national seminar on capturing the means of production.

PBS headline, Friday:

“The barbarians are inside the gate — and Democrats are WELCOMING them in,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) tweeted. “Communism is no longer a far-fetched threat. It is here on our SHORES!” Republicans are now running on anti-communism. The Hill, July 22nd:

The Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board published an op-ed headlined, “Abolish the Senate, Says the DSA.” The subheadline wondered, “Democratic socialists want to remove barriers to radical change. Do other Democrats agree?” But other Democrats are caught between a hammer and a hard sickle.

Mainstream Democrats know that opposing the DSA platform will help them in the general election, but it will also provoke the DSA to organize against them in low-turnout primaries.

In Maine, the DNC has already conceded to two DSA-aligned candidates for the U.S. Senate: Disability-farmer Graham Platner and, after Graham flamed out in ‘me-too’ dishonor, faux ‘lumberjack’ Troy Jackson. DSA-endorsed Jackson handily won Maine’s ‘replacement primary’ in a socialist tsunami: 566-5.

After Maine “finishes their primary,” DSCC chair Kirsten Gillibrand announced, the DSCC will “support whoever wins.”

My goodness. What a run of good luck the GOP has had. As I predicted, the midterms will not be about war and affordability after all. Let’s connect a few dots.

🔥 Reporting this spring and summer described ‘mystery super PACs’ spending heavily in Democratic House primaries to elevate candidates establishment Dems see as ‘weaker’ or ‘more toxic’ in the generals. Headline from Punchbowl News, May 26th:

It’s not George Soros. “Democrats insist this is a Republican effort,” Punchbowl reported, “to meddle in Democratic primaries to ensure they face the weakest candidate in November.” Punchbowl did some research and tied one of the ‘mystery PACs’ to WinRed:

Al Jazeera was even more blunt. It does not see any ‘mystery’ at all. It came right out and accused Republicans in its June 23rd headline:

You might wonder why this isn’t bigger news in corporate media. For one thing, Democrats started the trend of manipulating primaries. But more keenly, calling candidates ‘Republican-supported’ poses another paradox. If they promote the theory of Republican involvement, they’ll kill their own, flawed candidates’ chances for sure.

If Republicans were behind the rise of the DSA —which to be fair, remains unproven— then it was the perfect foil, and evidence of a broad, coherent political strategy that also won the gerrymandering wars and teed up limits on mail-in ballots. The evidence is stacking up. Conspicuous by their absence are the ubiquitous headlines from 2025 gleefully predicting a Democrat sweep in November.

That’s good, but there is a bigger point here. Even if Republicans helped provoke the ugly Democrat-DSA conflict, it wasn’t artificial. It’s not made up. Democrats agreewith the DSA’s goals— only 13 signed the pledge. The DSA’s political successes aren’t a GOP trick. They are trying Democrats’ poisonous ideas in the courts of public opinion. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

CLIP: late night host Bill Maher tackles the DSA (2:50).

“What do they gotta do, tweet out, ‘elect more communists?” Maher wondered. “One of the new, soon-to-be Democratic Congress people, Darlezia Chevalier, supports seizing all properties from landlords and said, ‘Seize the means of production.’ Mamdani said, ‘The end goal is seizing the means of production.’”

Maher paused dramatically, then said, “I think they wanna seize the means of production.” In case it wasn’t clear, he explained, “Now, maybe you missed that in school —or missed school altogether— but that’s communism.”

“Who could be this nuts? I’ll tell you who,” Maher said. He showed a picture from the DSA’s national conference. “Morons who are still wearing covid masks in 2026!”

Granted, since the pandemic, Bill Maher has been slowly red-pilled. But the point is: this national conversation is happening now, right before the critical midterm elections, whether Democrats like it or not.

Time is growing short. The stakes are as high as they possibly can be: November will determine whether Trump gets two more years to finish what he’s started, or will sink into the slough of repeated impeachment trials. Voting isn’t optional.

Have a magnificent Monday! Then get back here tomorrow morning for a brand-new roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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