☕️ DOCTRINES AND FRACTURES☙ Monday, January 5, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

NYT cheers fresh MAGA fracture; psy-ops exposed; color-rev tactics; Donroe Doctrine; America First per NSS; don’t fall for it; Iran rial crash & Tehran unrest; Ukraine power shift; predictions; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! How do you like the way the month is going so far? It’s an important question, because the Times claims MAGA is fracturing again. In today’s thrilling roundup: New York Times jubilantly declares that MAGA is fracturing itself again; psy-ops revealed; color revolution strategy; the Donroe Doctrine; American First as set out in the National Security Strategy; don’t fall for it; Iranian currency crash; mostly peaceful protests in Tehran; a rial affordability crisis; Ukraine’s most powerful political position occupied by US-aligned surprise candidate; CIA ties; dots connect to Trump; global strategic synchronicity; responses to complaints about regime change and international interferences; and cautious 2026 predictions.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

🚀 🚀 🚀

Even if you thought Saturday’s dramatic snatch-and-grab of Venezuela’s de facto leader Nicolás Maduro went too far, would you instead prefer the Cabbage, the Cackler, or the Coach? Would you sit out November’s midterms in peevish pique? The New York Times sure hopes so. Like a dog returning to its vomit, the Times returned to the tiresome “MAGA Fractures” theme in yesterday’s cheery story headlined, “Trump’s Move for Regime Change in Venezuela Threatens a New MAGA Rift.” They’re at it again! It’s clever psychological warfare, and if we don’t spot the trick, we might fall for it. Fortunately, spotting tricks like this is exactly why C&C exists.

Let’s talk about color revolutions.

A key tactic, if not the very essence of color-revolution strategy, is to find a latent wedge issue, then climb down into the crowd and worry it like a loose tooth. Psy-operators don’t invent disagreement; they exacerbate it. They amplify a culture’s most emotionally fractious fault line —foreign wars, corruption, identity, legitimacy— then frame it as a betrayal by leadership and a moral test for followers. The goal isn’t persuasion. It’s fragmentation. Confusion. Conflict. Fatigue.

People don’t need to be persuaded to switch sides; they just have to be battered into staying home. This provides the psy-operators with the vacuum they can fille with their astroturfed protests— and rest of the now-familiar formula.

You can easily spot the initial moves. The messaging always sounds oddly intimate and disappointed, dripping with saccharine sympathy —“many supporters are uneasy,” “the base is divided,” “longtime allies express concern.” This isn’t reporting; it’s virtual crowd infiltration. The wedge is being quietly screwed in, so it can later be publicly hammered until distrust feels organic and disengagement feels virtuous.

Seen through that lens, the Democrats’ recurring “MAGA fracture” narrative isn’t commentary at all. It’s a poorly disguised destabilization technique— aimed inwards at us this time instead of at some hapless African country where Christians and Muslims are trying to live in peace. For us, with better fonts and a soothing, reptilian tone.

We have a terrific example.

In 2014, Ukrainians were politically divided: Western Ukrainians leaned toward Europe, and Eastern Ukrainians were economically, linguistically, and culturally tied to Russia. The CIA got involved. The dry political tinder was inflamed into a white-hot social media conflagration. There was perhaps no better symbol of our meddling than Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs, Viktoria Nuland, who was caught literally handing out cookies and bread —you can’t make this stuff up— to astroturfed protesters in Kyiv’s ‘Maidan’ (Independence Square) during the demonstrations.

Soon after Vikkie tossed her cookies, Ukraine’s democratically elected pro-Russian government was overthrown, and a decade+ of war began. In one infamous leaked call, Nuland can be heard selecting the overthrown president’s replacement. You’re welcome.

Is it any surprise that unemployed USAID workers, fired State Department weasels, and their NGO allies are now trying to turn MAGA against itself, in the exact same way that they got the Eastern and Western Ukrainians to fight each other and destabilize their democratically elected government?

We must be vigilant about this. The temptation to factionalism is strong, especially when real disagreements exist, and the psy-operators start tossing hot potatoes. Which is their job. And they do it well.

🚀 Having failed to split MAGA over H-1Bs and Chinese student visas, the Times is back at it again. “A handful of Republicans,” the Times helpfully reported, “are asking how Venezuela squares with Mr. Trump’s campaign-trail promises to not engage in nation-building or begin new foreign wars.” Grievance-merchant Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) regurgitated the Times’ point, just more bluntly: “This is not what we voted for,” he groused.

Feisty Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who’s resigning from Congress today, flipped the argument back toward Democrats’ favorite talking point— affordability: “the Trump administration campaigned on Make America Great Again, putting America first, so I want to see domestic priority that helps Americans afford life after four disastrous years of the Biden administration.”

Candace Owens went further. Venezuela, she warned her followers, proved the CIA had “staged another hostile takeover of a country” at the command of “globalist psychopaths,” comparing it to wars in Afghanistan (20 years long) and Iraq (16 years).

We didn’t invade Venezuela. We just made a midnight run for a quick dictator. I’m not saying Massie, Greene, and Owens are consciously helping psy-operators find and spike wedge issues. I’m just saying.

But— are they at all right? Even a little?

🚀 No. They are wrong. Dead wrong. Wrong in many different ways. First, the lightning strike to grab a known nefarious actor —an indicted criminal with a $50M U.S. bounty on his head, nobody denies that— is neither “nation building” nor “a new forever war.” We have not replaced Maduro with any “transitional government.” We haven’t occupied, landed in, or invaded Venezuela, like we did in Iraq or Afghanistan. So comparisons to those conflicts are just wrong.

Second, even if we were nation-building, we’d be doing it here at home. There is a qualitative difference between building nations far away in the Middle East, 10,000 miles from home, versus securing our own backyard. This isn’t “weapons of mass destruction” all over again. No one disputes that Venezuela directly affects American interests. No ocean separates our countries. Caracas undeniably stole billions in U.S. oil assets, floods our country with drugs, exports violent cartels into our cities and apartment buildings, and invites China and Russia to set up shop a few hundred miles off our coast.

Corporate media won’t touch this point, but MAGA folks are aware of the strong evidence —including witness testimony— that Venezuela was involved in stealing the 2020 U.S. election. In other words, Maduro almost certainly helped overthrow our government. Turnabout, as the Australians say, is fair dinkum.

Third, the Venezuelan operation is not, as the Times suggested, bizarre and random. The story quoted Jim Jordan (R-Oh.), who was caught flatfooted yesterday by a gotcha question from CNN’s Dana Bash. She asked him to define “America First.” His terrible answer, obviously unprepared, was, “We don’t know what that exactly means.”

Poppycock. Last month, the Trump administration published its National Security Strategy (NSS), a document that explicitly revived the Monroe Doctrine, promising that America would mind its own business, defined as our own hemisphere. This generated a flurry of furious news coverage, so reporters know. They even coined a stupid derivative, the so-called “Donroe Doctrine.”

The Monroe Doctrine contemplates precisely the kind of “gunboat diplomacy” that Mr. Maduro experienced first-hand on Saturday morning.

All Jim Jordan had to do was refer Dana Bash to the NSS. “Scroll down to the part about Monroe,” he should have said. President James Monroe is often called an “isolationist,” but he might better be described as a unilateralist with a sphere-of-influence defense strategy. He pledged to keep the U.S. out of European (i.e., eastern) affairs, but also promised to aggressively defend our Western Hemisphere from European adventurism.

The point is that the rationale for Maduro’s capture was described right in the NSS. It’s not a secret. It’s literally on the Internet. There’s no “surprise;” no “making it up as he goes along;” no “defining ‘America First’ on the fly.” In foreign policy terms, at least, there is a written blueprint that anyone can (and most have) read for themselves.

Maybe they gave Maduro a copy to read on the plane to Miami.

🚀 The “MAGA fracture” over Maduro’s capture is fake and gay. Don’t fall for it. Feel free to criticize the policy, or dive into the legal analysis, but please avoid crazy claims like “Trump is getting us in another forever war!!!” and eschew unhinged catastrophist language like “Trump is a CIA asset!!!” or “Trump has betrayed America First!!!” Go back and read the NSS again.

Nice try, New York Times. We aren’t falling for it.

🔥🔥🔥

Having inoculated ourselves against the Times’s mind virus, let’s move beyond Venezuela. As the New Year opens, all of Trump’s enemies seem to be caught on an out-of-control merry-go-round. Let’s start with Iran. Yesterday, FirstPost tossed out a story headlined, “Rial is the Word of the Week: How Iran’s currency has plunged the country into turmoil.”

The Iranian rial dates back to 1798 when it was first introduced as a silver coin during the Qajar dynasty. In 1932, the rial became Iran’s currency, and as you can imagine, it is a pretty important part of the lives of Iran’s 85 million citizens. A rial saved is a rial earned, they might say, or the rial stops here. You know the gag.

There’s a sudden and unexpected rial problem. It has set the theocratic country ablaze. Ironically, the Iranians are experiencing a sudden and unexpected affordability crisis.

In December alone, the rial lost -20% of its value. Since the same time last year, inflation has surged +42% nationwide, with food prices rocketing up +72%, and health and medical items up +50%.

Remember Clinton’s rule of thumb? It’s the economy, bro. (Or words to that effect.)

The understandable result, which bloomed just over the last week, is that Iranians are street protesting again, in large numbers, the extent of which is hotly debated. As always, the protests are mostly peaceful, which means cars are burning merrily and Iranians are shooting commercial-grade fireworks at each other. “Demonstrators are demanding regime change,” the article explained, “with some demonstrators even chanting slogans such as ‘death to the dictator.’” It’s not much of a slogan, but it makes the point.

Over the weekend, President Trump posted a Truth Social message promising to protect Iranian protestors from retaliation. “We are locked and loaded,” the President said, although nobody knows exactly what he meant.

It’s up for debate whether Democrats will compare America’s paltry +2.5% inflation rate with Iran’s impressive +50% inflation, to learn what an affordability crisis really looks like. In any case, the crisis comes at a very convenient time for President Trump, who is trying to sew up a Middle East peace deal that will allow the U.S. to finally edge out.

But wait. There’s more.

🚀 There are some equally impressive developments in the Proxy War. You may recall that Ukraine’s unfunny comedian-in-chief, Zelensky, has been increasingly isolated by a series of unfortunate and inconveniently timed corruption scandals. On Friday, CNN squirted out a story headlined, “Zelensky names spy chief to head presidential administration in big shake-up.” The ‘spy chief’ from the headline is Kyrilo Budanov, pictured below.

This assignment might have been the biggest, but it wasn’t the only appointment, not by a country mile. Zelensky is racing to refill an array of positions vacated by corruption allegations. But by shuffling around the people still in post, he keeps creating more empty spots that must be filled. It must be vexing.

But the highest-profile replacement was that of Zelensky’s Chief of Staff, a person nobody had ever heard of until last month, but who apparently actually ran the country the whole time: Andriy Yermak. He’s out now, saddled with corruption allegations and labeled with the crooked code-name “Ali Baba,” and it probably won’t be long till he flees the country.

On Friday, Zelensky named Yermak’s official replacement, Budanov.

🚀 Since before the Proxy War began, Budanov ran Ukraine’s “HUR,” which is kind of like a militarized version of the CIA. Hence the moniker, “spy chief.” Unsurprisingly, he’s tight with the US intelligence agencies. As it turns out, Budanov was not only trained by the CIA, but he has even been treated for injuries at Walter Reed hospital in Maryland.

It was more hard-boiled Ukrainian irony.

First, widespread rumors over the last two years suggest that Zelensky did everything he could to remove Budanov. It was so shocking that Zelensky would shove the hated Budanov into his administration’s top job that Ukrainian media is even speculating that the move must be 4-D chess, a sort of keep-your-friends-close-but-your-enemies-closer maneuver.

Of course, Zelensky struggles to play checkers, never mind chess, so this explanation remains unsatisfying.

But second, Budanov wasn’t just trained by the CIA, he has been considered an agency “key partner,” and he’s remained “unusually close” to the CIA throughout the war. Many commenters speculated that the reason Zelensky couldn’t purge Budanov, despite repeated attempts, was because the spy chief enjoyed CIA cover. What I’m driving at is that Budanov is almost certainly a CIA asset, or if he isn’t, he’s the next closest thing to one.

Put another way, given what we know of the publicly documented relationship, it is entirely reasonable to conclude that the CIA expects a high degree of cooperation from Budanov.

🚀 On Friday, Ukrainian outlet Liga thrust out a story connecting the obvious dot:

In other words, Budanov’s ascension was great news for President Trump, but more bad news for the Europeans. EU capitals fear that ‘key decisions’ could be ‘directly brokered’ through a covert CIA–Budanov channel— leaving Europe behind, like the kid who never gets picked for a team in gym class.

Don’t miss this. In just the first few days of the New Year, we see an impressive degree of strategic synchronicity:

• Venezuela: The Maduro standoff ended, with a historic, tightly targeted operation that sent an unmistakable message about U.S. reach, resolve, and capability— one heard well beyond the hemisphere.

• Iran: The regime’s mad mullahs are suddenly juggling a genuine polycrisis: an economy in freefall, mounting internal fractures, and streets once again boiling over with angry, defiant protesters, like a middle-schooler has kicked over a pile of furious red ants.

• Ukraine: The power node that actually matters —the peak, behind-the-scenes position that pulls Zelensky’s puppet strings— was unexpectedly swapped out for Washington’s preferred operator, without so much as a democratic croissant.

Apart from Russia and China, which are categorically different, every one of Trump’s major active geopolitical antagonists just experienced a meaningful strategic reversal —some overt, some internal, some psychological— within days of each other. Coincidence? What do you think?

🚀 Sidebar. Some will complain, not unjustly, that if America did dabble in Iran and Ukraine to coordinate a global New Year’s Surprise, it could arguably contradict my earlier points about the Monroe Doctrine, or Donroe Doctrine, or whatever you want to call the 2026 version that bungs Asia into Monroe’s original formula. My response would be that President Trump didn’t create the Iranian or Ukrainian crises. He inherited them— half-rotted, metastasized, and deliberately left unresolved by a managerial foreign policy that mistook endless process for virtue.

What he’s doing now isn’t expansion. It’s compression.

In Iran, the problem already exists: a radical regime, economic collapse, and internal unrest. The choice isn’t whether to intervene or not; it’s whether to allow slow-motion chaos or force an inflection point. Fast pressure is not contradiction— it’s cleanup. The NSS explicitly deprioritizes the Middle East unless its actions directly threaten US interests, and it even notes that the historic reason for US involvement —oil dependency— no longer exists.

In Ukraine, Joe Biden’s Proxy War was already raging, the stakes already set, the casualties already mounting. The question isn’t whether America is involved. It’s whether involvement remains open-ended and incoherent, or whether someone finally tries to bring the thing to heel. The NSS states that the US intends to “negotiate an expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine” while seeking “strategic stability with Russia.”

Velocity is the through-line. Not new theaters. Not endless conflicts. But rapid resolutions of existing hostilities. In other words, the Monroe Doctrine doesn’t mean “ignore the rest of the world.” It means don’t loiter there.

From what we can see —since Trump, wisely, isn’t telling— Trump’s foreign policy isn’t global adventurism. It’s strategic impatience: shortening timelines, setting clocks, collapsing ambiguities, and resolving inherited messes quickly, so attention can snap back home where it belongs. If critics want to argue that speed itself is dangerous, that’s a fair debate. But that’s a different argument than claiming any contradiction with America First.

Many have asked me to predict the 2026 timeline, to which I reply by laughing until my sides ache. No thanks! Like rugged, individualistic explorers —brave Cristopher Columbus, stout Cortéz, plucky Ponce de León, hardy Lewis and Clark (or Clark and Lewis)— we are adventuring into genuinely new territory.

If nothing else, the sudden shift in coordinated geopolitical momentum that appears to have kicked off, seemingly on schedule on January 1st, the New Year finds us plopped right into a whole new phase. I’ll make only this prediction: January will be lit. I bet it’ll be a game-changer.

Hang on, the rollercoaster is leaving the station.

Have a magnificent Monday! Then ride back here tomorrow morning for even more thrilling essential news and exciting commentary. Plus more psy-op slaying. Forewarned is forearmed, or words to that effect. See you then.

Don’t race off! We cannot do it alone. Consider joining up with C&C to help move the nation’s needle and change minds. I could sure use your help getting the truth out and spreading optimism and hope, if you can: ☕ Learn How to Get Involved 🦠

How to Donate to Coffee & Covid

Twitter: jchilders98.
Truth Social: jchilders98.
MeWe: mewe.com/i/coffee_and_covid.
Telegram: t.me/coffeecovidnews
C&C Swag! www.shopcoffeeandcovid.com