☕️ CAPITALS AND CHAOS ☙ Friday, May 8, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Tennessee Republicans calmly redraw maps while Democrats scream at troopers. The Times admits faith fixes birthrates, then forgets. UK Labour got shellacked. The polycrisis goes global. More.

Good morning, C&C family, it’s Friday! Your roundup includes: panicked state-capitol meltdowns in Tennessee and Alabama, where Democrats screamed at troopers, climbed on tables, and pulled fire alarms while Republicans calmly redrew the maps; the New York Times accidentally admitting that faith fixes plummeting birthrates, and then immediately walking it back; and across the Atlantic, UK Labour gets shellacked — by its own prime minister’s word — in what might be the worst British election rout in modern memory. Does it suggest anything for our midterm elections?

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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Barely two weeks ago, corporate media was running articles crowing about Democrats’ wonderful midterm prospects to win back a majority in the House of Representatives and then launch Trump Impeachment 3.0. But one Supreme Court decision later— and it’s pure pandemonium. Local WSMV-4 reported, “Chaos erupts at Tennessee Capitol as redistricting maps move forward.”

CLIP: ‘Chaos’ takes the podium as Republicans gerrymander away all Democrat House seats (2:24).

The final vote in the Tennessee State House sounded less like a legislative proceeding and more like a middle school band practice gone horribly wrong. Demonstrators yowled, bullhorns blared, Democrats pounded their desks and walked out, troopers removed obstreperous gallery members, and one Democrat Senator climbed on a table and refused to come down. Despite the cacophony, the Republicans calmly approved the map, presumably using sign language and smoke signals to communicate their “yea” votes through the racket.

In one viral clip, during a tussle with a state trooper, Democrat state Representative Justin Pearson screamed “BOY!” in the officer’s face before calling him a “stupid motherf*cker.” It was pure bedlam.

It’s weird, since Democrats threw a fiesta after the same thing happened in Virginia, except going in Democrats’ favor. And, even though their redistricting was so illegal that a court threw it out one day later, no Virginia Republicans climbed on tables, shouted through bullhorns, or screamed obscenities in the faces of state troopers.

Anyway, Tennessee Republicans got the vote done. Governor Bill Lee has already signed the redistricting bill, which will surely generate equal numbers of lawsuits and New York Times articles announcing the death of democracy or something.

🔥 Mayhem equally ensued in Alabama. In a real-life Shakespearean weather metaphor, Republican lawmakers completed the redistricting vote during a storm evacuation. All the while, Democrat officials screamed gibberish like King Lear, refused to leave the lectern, and pulled fire alarms that blared the whole time. Meanwhile, mandatory evacuation notices lit up everyone’s phones, water began floating lawmakers’ cars away, and floodwaters seeped into the state house’s ground floor, making the hallways look a lot like the flume ride at Walt Disney World.

Ironically, the violent thunderstorm had the positive effect of ending a Democrat filibuster which —while the fire alarm continued to blare— allowed Republicans to call the vote. The lawmakers cast their votes even as they were evacuating the chamber. State Senator Greg Albritton (R-Atmore), stood at the chamber doors, making sure each member voted before they left.

The redistricting bill passed 26-7. Down here in Florida, we call that margin, “not even close enough to kill a gator with a hand grenade.”

The video scenes from the two legislatures were so troubling and bizarre they almost defy description. It was a horrible optics for Democrats. It confirmed everything I described yesterday in the Polycrisis roundup. They acted like panicked, unreasoning zoo animals released into a gang turf war that spilled over into an out-of-control Delta Tau Chi house party.

Democrats displayed no dignity. No professionalism. No soaring rhetoric. No cunning procedural strategy. Just … flinging feces.

This is not the behavior of an organized, effective political party. It smacked of desperation. It was pure mob mania; petulant, childish emotional blackmail— nothing more sophisticated than do what we want or we’ll throw a tantrum right here in the cereal aisle.

By contrast, Alabama and Tennessee Republicans shone. They remained calm and dignified. They were professional. They stayed off the tables. Through the chaotic noise and confusion, they bravely followed —as best they could given the circumstances— Robert’s Rules of Order. And they won— as they should have, since Republicans hold supermajorities in both states. (Though it hasn’t stopped them from caving under the weight of Democrats’ performative emotional extortions in the past.)

These twin cacophonous conflicts are a metaphor for, or perhaps, a preview of the midterm elections. The volume of the noisy chaos will increase over the next few months, as the Democrat party continues devolving into dissolute anarchy. If the Polycrisis theory is correct, we are witnessing the feverish death throes of a major political party —with all its beneficiaries and hangers-on— sinking beneath the waves for the last time.

Hopefully!

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I told you progressives were going crazy. Almost as if the corporate media wanted to reinforce yesterday’s Polycrisis story, the Times ran a major guest essay yesterday headlined, “Why So Few Babies? We Might Have Overlooked the Biggest Reason of All.” The article takes 20 graphs to get there, but the “biggest reason” was: progressive anxiety. And it even included the P-word as the reason for all the anxiety.

“A growing body of evidence,” the story explained, “suggests that the anxiety of bringing a child into such an uncertain world may increasingly outweigh the appeal of motherhood.” (For liberals.) The article briefly noted that the world has faced uncertain prospects before, so it asked: what’s different now? Behold, the loud echo from yesterday’s roundup:

Never doubt me.

Anyway, to fix the particular crisis of plummeting birth rates (which are flat terrible among Democrats), the Times quoted Sarah Hayford, a population expert at Ohio State. Sarah explained that some “policies” —i.e., the government— must make “systems more conducive to living a happy and secure and healthy life as a person.” Among the options Sarah mentioned were bribing women with tax incentives and offering them free child care, because offloading kids to government workers makes motherhood so much more fulfilling.

Sarah did not mention any policy changes that might incentivize women to leave the workforce, though. That would be a progressive bridge too far.

🔥 Perhaps the best evidence for my thesis was unintentionally illustrated by the story’s personal interest anecdote: a young-ish couple who said they wanted kids, but sadly, there are just too many problems. Not fertility problems. Not even their problems. Other people’s problems.

Just look at this inventory of worry, which includes climate change, racial profiling, lack of government subsidies, and even hypothetical unvaccinated classmates for their as-yet unconceived children:

That paragraph is doing so much accidental work.

The Times’ anecdote literally described a woman with an advanced degree, a stable job, and a supportive marriage who is so saturated in elite risk discourse that she’s pre‑worrying about hypothetical unvaccinated classmates for hypothetical children she hasn’t even conceived yet. That’s not “uncertainty.” It’s a cultivated neurosis — progressive anxiety‑as‑virtue, where a “good person” is always scanning the horizon for the next danger and next moral failure to worry about.

The implications for low reproduction —especially among progressives— is existentially profound. As if to make my point, this section appeared at the top of this morning’s New York Times web page:

The “Biggest Reason” article unintentionally exposed the truth, which must be read between its lines. The problem isn’t “uncertainty,” as the article claims. It is a culture of permissive pessimism that roots progressives’ mental-health polycrisis.

Modern Democrats define ‘being happy’ as inherently evil, or at least, as non-virtuous. No one who is “awoke” to all the world’s various injustices can morally be happy or content until all the problems are resolved. Not worrying either means you don’t care or you aren’t paying enough attention. And holding off on having children —and telling everyone about it— is how liberals prove to each other how “woke” they are.

To the extent that having kids is inherently an expression of optimism, it is thus also a moral failure. For liberals, any good person questions the morality of reproduction itself in light of every global injustice on the menu. Don’t forget how climate change affects the New Guinea striped salamander!

Let me explain it another way. What the essay’s author called “uncertainty” —its soft, non-judgy euphemism for anxiety— is really a very specific moral culture of pessimism and guilt, reinforced by nonstop progressive rhetoric. “Decent” people are supposed to feel bad, scared, and ashamed— almost all the time. If you’re not anxious about climate, fascism, racism, sexism, transphobia, pandemics, inequality, AI, and “our democracy,” that proves you’re either ignorant or evil.

In progressives’ worldview, happiness is equivalent to complicity. Given that inherent contradiction —being fulfilled by being unhappy— the real surprise is how many of them don’t report mental health problems.

🔥 Then, 3,000 words in, the article finally, tentatively, touched a finger to the true answer, before snatching it away. “There is,” the author explained, “one low-cost fertility policy that actually seems to work: faith.” After noting that religious families have far more children than agnostic or atheistic couples, it quickly moved on from that uncomfortable truth, and never mentioned the liberal/conservative divide at all.

The irony was that the Times admitted that the “one low‑cost fertility policy that actually seems to work is faith,” but then retreated into ever finer gradations of “uncertainty” and increasingly more expensive government interventions. But, having admitted the efficacy of faith, the piece never asked, “how might we recover faith, or build something else like it?”

Instead, it pivoted right back to policy, paid leave, and large‑scale political transformation.

In a March, 2023 blockbuster article, the American Affairs Journal ran a story headlined, “How to Understand the Well-Being Gap between Liberals and Conservatives.” It is the most complete analysis of this tragic happiness gap that I’ve found in any single reference. (Read it.) It cited scads of studies showing that, irrespective of religion, “Conservatives do not just report higher levels of happiness, they also report higher levels of meaning in their lives.” Thus, “independent of religious attendance, liberals are roughly twice as likely to report mental illness as conservatives.”

This effect seems to hold almost universally, even worldwide: “Liberals were happier than conservatives in only 5 out of 92 countries,” one international study showed, “and never in the United States.”

That said, the religious happiness boost is real, measurable, and widely reported. Weekly conservative church attendees reported the lowest levels of anxiety of any group. Even liberals benefit from attending church. I can personally testify to the dramatic benefits from my own experience. For most of my life, I was chronically anxious, a professional worrywart, until the day I had an unexpected religious encounter in 2013. My lifelong anxiety disappeared immediately and has never returned.

Yet, despite this well-documented faith-happiness connection (which, just saying, the Bible itself promises), therapists rarely suggest going to church, prioritizing instead risky chemical interventions like SSRIs and circular naval-gazing. Indeed, the secular expert class would rather redesign the entire economy —or your neurotransmitters— than seriously entertain the possibility that the most powerful “uncertainty reduction strategy” is a church down the street and a God who commands “do not be anxious.”

So in the same story, side by side, we find secular, highly educated progressives tying themselves into pretzel-like knots over potential future problems like unvaccinated classmates and structural, inescapable doom; compared with conservative and religious Americans who cut through all of that with simple, confidence‑building narratives around faith, redemption, and patriotism— and then they actually have babies.

Aren’t you glad you’re not liberal? You don’t have to constantly fret about being canceled by your friends for not fretting enough. We should be sympathetic to our suffering progressive pals, family members, and neighbors, who are literally torturing themselves with a doom spiral of performative anxiety.

Never worry. Be proactive and optimistic. Take the long view.

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The polycrisis may not be limited to our own Democrats. It might be spreading. Great Britain held its version of the U.S. midterms yesterday, and a political earthquake shook its longtime liberal party to the roots. The New York Times reported, “Early UK Local Election Results Point to Big Losses for Starmer’s Party.” If anything, that was an understatement.

The UK Labour Party is the equivalent to our Democrat party. It’s their “mainstream” progressive party, and has been in control of the government since shortly after the pandemic started. It supported Ukraine, refused to help in Iran, kept the borders open, locked up Facebook commenters, refused to investigate grooming gangs, and appointed one of Epstein’s besties as the Ambassador to the United States.

Yesterday, Labour finally got its political clock cleaned.

The clock cleaner was UK’s Reform Party, led by “far right” gadfly Nigel Farage. It is a brand-new third party, and Farage is a Ross Perot-like figure who in 2016 led the UK’s movement to leave the European Union. So far, Reform has won +400 seats (all new seats for the new party), and Labor has lost nearly -300. About 5,000 seats are in play.

Farage said, “We are way exceeding anything that I thought.”

Stuffed-frog Keir Starmer, the current prime minister and the Labour Party’s leader, has the lowest approval ratings for that office in UK history. Despite the loss of mandate, he brushed off loud calls for his resignation and vowed to soldier on. “I was elected to meet these challenges, and I’m not going to walk away from them and plunge the country into chaos,” Starmer said.

A GB News anchor expressed amazement. “I’ve never heard anything like this in my life,” he said, obviously shocked. “83% of Labour’s incumbent seats— smashed like matchwood.”

It’s a bigger story than the Indiana RINOs who were erased in this week’s primary.

In his sad “we got shellacked” post-mortem speech to party supporters, Starmer did exactly what I described yesterday. He laid out an “agenda” for “change” that was 100% mealy-mouthed buzzwords, with not a single measurable suggestion. He said, “In coming days, I will set out the steps we will take to deliver the change voters want and deserve. So that every child can go as far as their talent and ability can take them, not held back by poverty. So that every community can have what it needs, a secure safe place for everybody to live. So households and families do not feel constantly held back by a cost-of-living crisis. A Britain where everybody can feel proud of where they live and where they work.”

You can’t find a single actionable policy anywhere in Starmer’s overlong string of liberal value signals. He can’t afford to take any firm position on anything, because the Labour Party —like our Democrats— is a “big-tent coalition” party that is trapped in a progressive purity spiral. It includes moderate Blairites and trade unionists alongside neo-communist “democratic socialists” and trans activists. Thus, Starmer’s stuck. Offering anything but vibes risks alienating one group or another.

CLIP: GB News anchor shocked by Labour’s 83% loss (2:33).

Now consider this. In 2016, the UK’s successful Brexit movement predicted Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton by about five months. We are about six months out from the midterm elections. Could it be happening again? Could Labour’s shocking, catastrophic collapse yesterday predict something similar for U.S. Democrats in November, mirroring 2016’s dynamics?

It makes you think. Let me know what you think in the comments.

Have a fantastic Friday! Coffee & Covid will return tomorrow morning, for the Weekend Edition roundup of your essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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