☕️ REVOLUTION AND RENEWAL ☙ Tuesday, May 12, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Democrat mayor pleads guilty to being Chinese agent; DOJ launch; the NYT contradicts itself on RFK Jr. in a single week; scientists confirm a third circulatory system; Democrats sue over a puddle.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! Your roundup includes: an Los Angeles area (Arcadia) mayor unmasked as a Chinese agent; the swelling prosecutorial floodwaters; the NYT awkwardly admits RFK Jr.’s vaccine probe is the biggest in 40 years or more; scientists confirm a third circulatory system that’s been hiding in plain sight; and loony Democrats sue to stop the National Mall’s Reflecting Pool from looking like … water.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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Under Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, the pace of resignations, indictments, and arrests is picking up speed. Yesterday, the UK Guardian covered the latest in a sneaky and deceptive story headlined, “Mayor of California city resigns over charges of being a foreign agent of China.” The Guardian’s story included all kinds of biographical information, but “forgot” to mention the mayor’s political affiliation. Can you guess what that means?

Arcadia is a Los Angeles suburb tucked against the rumpled green wall of the San Gabriel Mountains, about 13 miles from downtown. (Pop. 56,000.) Palm-lined boulevards slide past tidy ranch houses and understated mansions, shaded by an “urban forest” that the city calls its municipal tree canopy. On weekends, the air smells faintly of jasmine, dim sum, and fresh coffee as multigenerational families drift between Asian bakeries, old-school diners, and sleek bubble tea bars, reflecting a population that, over time, has become 59% Asian. The city’s name, Arcadia, is a Greek word meaning “idyllic rural paradise.”

Well, not all that idyllic. This week, Eileen Wang (D), 58, the mayor of Arcadia since 2022, pleaded guilty to a federal charge of acting as an agent of the Chinese Communist Party and abruptly resigned.

Wang was the council’s first female member from China and its first ‘Asian-American’ Democrat. (Thanks for nothing, Guardian.) She was elected on a platform of homelessness, “collaboration and unity,” and “championing small business.” Arcadia’s homeless population grew, and its small businesses shrank, but on the other hand, it got an exciting communist secret agent.

Admittedly, this is not super surprising in the modern Democrat party, in which you practically trip over Chinese spies on your way to the ribbon table. See, e.g., Eric Swalwell.

Prosecutors said Wang was in charge of spreading “pro-PRC propaganda” in the US. “By her own admission, Eileen Wang secretly served the interests of the Chinese government,” said Roman Rozhavsky, assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence and espionage division. In the plea agreement, which Wang signed, she admitted she “received and executed encrypted directives from PRC government officials to post pro-PRC content.” Well, who among us hasn’t received directives from PRC officials from time to time?

Wang faces fines and potentially ten years in federal prison. But more importantly, as a convicted felon, she can no longer hold office or vote.

I mention this “local interest story” because it is part of the larger pattern of resignations, arrests, and indictments that I covered in more detail in Sunday’s C&C post. Here’s the summary, in case you missed it. First, just in the last three weeks:

• April 14th — Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) resigns from Congress; he had been the Democrats’ leading candidate, it’s “great white hope” for California Governor.

• April 20th — the Southern Poverty Law Center was indicted by a federal grand jury for bank fraud and secretly financing hate groups.

• April 21st — Rep. Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-FL) resigns mid-campaign for her fourth term, with a pending Miami criminal case over $5 million in allegedly stolen covid disaster-relief funds (CNBC: “third House member to quit this month”).

• April 28th — Dr. David Morens, longtime Fauci adviser, indicted by DOJ on covid-related charges.

• May 4th — Michigan AG Dana Nessel files a 41-page criminal affidavit charging Fay Beydoun — a Gretchen Whitmer-appointed “nonprofit business leader” — with sixteen felonies for fraud and corruption around a $20 million state grant.

• May 8th — Poul Thorsen, former CDC scientist and lead author of the foundational 2003 NEJM paper used for two decades to “disprove” the MMR-autism link, was extradited from Germany and arraigned in Atlanta on two counts of wire fraud and nine counts of money laundering; he’s being held without bail as a flight risk.

• May 8th — Mass. State Rep. Christopher Flanagan (D-Dennis) was indicted on eight counts of wire fraud, one count of money laundering, one count of falsification of records, and three counts of filing false tax returns (~$40K, including a psychic).

• May 11th — James Comey indicted by a federal grand jury for his moronic “86 47” seashell art project. (Also, yesterday, USA Today: “Comey says Trump DOJ may seek third indictment.”)

• Last week — FBI raided Virginia State Sen. Louise Lucas (D) — “Virginia’s most powerful Democrat” and the “architect” of the failed $70M gerrymandering operation — along with her marijuana dispensary, as part of what Acting AG Todd Blanche confirms is an “ongoing criminal investigation.”

• Yesterday — Arcadia (Greater LA) Mayor Eileen Wang (D) resigned and pleaded guilty to being a Chinese spy.

That’s just three weeks! All of this wildly gratifying DOJ activity should also be considered in light of the FBI’s Fulton County raid (January 28th) and the FBI’s criminal subpoenas to Maricopa County officials (March), both related to the 2020 Election. This level of politically adjacent prosecution spanning the entire country and involving state and federal levels and deep state actors like the CDC scientists is historically unprecedented. If it weren’t happening right before our astonished eyes, you’d place a Polymarket bet that it could never happen.

🔥 Consider the knock-on effects. How might other potentially vulnerable Democrats be feeling right about now? Imagine what kinds of things staffers —people who helped paper various kinds of fraud but never got any of the money— might be thinking about. After Watergate, the entire Republican bench thinned for a decade, because potential candidates declined to run, donors got cautious, and political organizations got restructured.

Every Democrat in the country is paying very close attention to stories like Eileen Wang’s. They are panicking and getting hysterical, like a pink-haired gender studies major turning the corner and discovering Ben Shapiro giving a speech on campus. This helps us understand the unhinged things they’re saying, the increasing levels of violence, and the crazy ideas they are coming up with, like firing Virginia’s entire Supreme Court.

This is becoming much bigger even than Watergate, at least in its apparent scope. (There were 69 indictments and 48 convictions in the Watergate mess— but all related to each other and to the one alleged ‘crime.’)

Keep an eye on the indictments meter. Doomsters who hounded poor Pam Bondi last year with scathing “where are the arrests” memes owes her an apology. She was teeing all this up on the chopping block so that Todd Blanche could start dropping the axes as we approached the midterm elections.

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Speaking of doomsters owing people apologies, consider this next story. Yesterday the New York Times broke an exclusive story headlined, “RFK Jr. Is Driving a Vast Inquiry Into Vaccines, Despite His Public Silence.” Last week, the Times ran an exclusive report assuring readers that RFK Jr. had quietly abandoned his vaccine reform efforts under pressure from the White House. This week, it ran a new exclusive report, revealing that RFK Jr. is secretly running the most aggressive vaccine safety investigation in forty years. The Times has not explained how both of these things can be true simultaneously, but to be fair, they were probably very busy writing next week’s third exclusive about how he has definitely quit again.

The new “exclusive” began with a brief nod to last week’s report. “Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said little publicly about vaccines in recent months,” the Times repeated, “at the behest of a White House worried that his unpopular stance will hurt Republicans in November’s midterm elections.” But the Times missed an important wrinkle: “He has not abandoned his quest for evidence that they are unsafe.”

“Behind the scenes,” the Times explained, “Kennedy is spearheading an intense push to examine his long-held theory that vaccines are helping to fuel an epidemic of chronic disease.” And, “the wide-ranging inquiry is a top priority for Mr. Kennedy, who sees vaccines as a potential culprit.”

Well, well, well. Since its hit piece last week failed to fracture MAHA, the Times has flipped sides. Now it’s admitting that, in fact, vaccine reform has sped up, if anything. “The effort is being led by Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a critic of Covid restrictions and vaccine mandates.”

What most alarmed the Times is that the vaccine safety initiative spans the entire federal government. “Career scientists at the Food and Drug Administration and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are conducting the research alongside contractors who provide statistical expertise and access to millions of patient medical records.”

Worse, “Kennedy has tasked some government scientists,” the article grimly continued, “with studying the health status of vaccinated children compared with those who were not vaccinated.” You’d think the Times would be excited about a scientific study like that. If vaccines are so wonderful, the vaccinated group should crush the unvaccinated kids. I mean, at minimum they should be calling for the study to be well-designed, not trying to shut it down altogether.

The article reported that “vaccine scholars” were alarmed that Kennedy might use the results of the new study to “erode confidence in vaccines.” To be clear, the Times described the studies as straightforward comparisons of health outcomes between vaccinated and unvaccinated children, conducted by CDC scientists and Kaiser Permanente officials. The scholars are not worried the study will be rigged. They are worried it won’t be.

The article reeked with the stench of fear.

🔥 Whenever you hear critics complain about what Secretary Kennedy might or might not be doing on vaccines or MAHA issues, remember two things. First, Kennedy has been litigating against Big Pharma for decades; he did not arrive in Washington fresh-faced, imagining that vaccine reform would be easy. There’s no reason whatsoever to think he’ll quit just because the press or the bureaucracy push back.

Second, the Trump Administration almost never telegraphs its controversial plans. Its operational security is better than any administration in living memory— leaks are rare, thinly sourced, and usually arrive long after the fact. So the public absence of noise is not proof that nothing is happening; in fact, that is practically the thesis of the Times piece itself: nobody’s talking, which they first tried to weaponize against Kennedy by using the quiet to sow doubt into MAHA.

But MAHA didn’t take the bait. So now the Times is grudgingly admitting that something big is happening anyway— to alarm the Democrat base, which is terrified that everybody else might not be forced to take the same medicine that it laps up like a thirsty German Shepherd. (Note: no German Shepherds were harmed in the writing of this article. And, if you think about it, “The Thirsty Germans” would be a great name for a rock band.)

So there you go. Proof —in the New York Times— that last week’s Kennedy narrative was a lie. Vaccine reform is not being shelved as a political sacrifice for the midterms after all. In fact, reform efforts are not only alive and well, but are bigger and more pervasive than at any time since the 1986 vaccine act was passed.

Kennedy holds the keys to the kingdom. Not only does he now have full access to the entire federal database —access he’d have climbed over a mountain of discarded No Kings protest signs for back when he was a lawyer— but now he also has data analysis tools (like AI) that no previous Health Secretary has ever had access to. I might not bet Michelle’s Tahoe, but if I had to bet, it would be that we’re going to see something huge whenever it does arrive.

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In another fascinating medical story, the NYT published a bizarre article, if you can call it that, headlined “Inside the Interstitium, the Human Body’s Hidden Pathways.” I’ll file this story under the category of medical innovation of the kind we haven’t seen in the last 25 years. In short, suddenly and unexpectedly, scientists discovered a third circulatory system in the human body that they had never noticed before.

What’s most exciting, from a nerdy alt-health perspective, is that the discovery could explain most of the difference between Western and Eastern medicine. For centuries, Western medicine has recognized two major fluid-circulation systems: blood and lymphatic. Turns out they missed one. (In response, the American Medical Association issued a statement saying they are “cautiously optimistic” that the human body does not contain any more surprises, and that they are “reasonably confident” they have now found all the important parts.)

Researchers studying tattoo ink migration in the body found that fluid‑filled “interstitial spaces” throughout the body’s connective tissue were not just isolated pockets as they’d supposed, but were in fact one continuous network. They are calling it “the interstitium.”

There are pretty significant implications. The existence of this major fluid pathway could explain how cancer cells spread after they metastasize. It could explain how inflammation in one part of the body causes inflammation in another. It could explain how acupuncture works.

The story wasn’t exactly “breaking.” The lead researchers first published their findings in 2018. It has taken eight years for a major media outlet to cover the story, which is actually pretty fast by the standards of heterodox medical discoveries. By comparison, the medical establishment spent roughly forty years confidently telling patients that stomach ulcers were caused by stress before finally admitting they were actually caused by bacteria. The researcher who proved it, Barry Marshall, had to drink a beaker of the bacteria to get anyone to pay attention.

The good news is that scientists studying the interstitium have not yet been required to drink anything.

Still, one detects a lingering whiff of resentment. The Times chose to break this potentially civilization-altering medical discovery not as a written article, but as an interactive multimedia scroll that requires approximately 17 minutes of clicking to read what could have been three pages of text. This is the journalistic equivalent of announcing the discovery of fire by interpretive dance.

Anyway, the discovery of the interstitium is potentially another major challenge to orthodox medicine’s historical certainties. Welcome to 2026’s accelerating medical revolution.

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Does it ever seem to you that Democrats must have an unlimited lawfare budget? Who is paying for all this litigation? They’d sue President Trump for stepping off the Rose Garden’s sidewalks. Yesterday, Politico reported, “Lawsuit seeks halt to Trump’s reflecting pool makeover.”

Our nation’s capital is a city of monuments, memorials, and progressive elites who spend their days searching for things to be outraged about. Usually, they are outraged about tax cuts, redistricting maps, or the fact that some Cabinet member or other was seen eating a Jimmy John’s sub sandwich in public.

But this week, the most pressing issue facing Democracy™ —the crisis that has driven Democrats into their latest state of legal frenzy— is the color of a puddle.

I refer here to the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which is essentially a very long, very shallow bathtub situated on the National Mall. For decades, the bottom of this pool has been painted a murky, depressing shade of gray decorated with algae, pond scum, and goose droppings. According to liberal’s latest lawsuit, the dark gray color is wonderful because it “creates the illusion of greater depth and a more profound reflection.”

In reality, it creates the illusion that you are looking into a drainage ditch in a Soviet industrial park. Call it communist chíc. But in Washington, if something is sufficiently bleak and bureaucratic, it is considered “historic,” and you are not allowed to mess with it.

🔥 Enter Donald John Trump. President Trump, as you may have noticed, is not a big fan of bleak and bureaucratic. He prefers loud and gold-plated. But since he could not gold-plate the Reflecting Pool without causing a massive shortage of bullion reserves, he settled for the next best thing: He ordered the National Park Service to drain the pool, scrub it clean, and paint the bottom bright blue. Specifically, and appropriately, a color his pool supply company called “American flag blue.”

To normal non TDS-afflicted humans, this sounds like a perfectly reasonable idea. If you have a giant pool of water in front of your favorite national monuments, you probably want it to look like water, rather than a concrete culvert filled with lukewarm gravy. Trump even took his motorcade through the drained pool to inspect the work, a detail the new lawsuit seemed particularly aggravated by. It was described as though the President was shouting at workers, “Make it bluer! I want it so blue that astronauts can see it from space!”

But it is 2026. You cannot just go around painting historic gray things blue. That is practically a war crime. Hence, the latest liberal litigation over monument decoration.

An NGO (of course) called the Cultural Landscape Foundation found a retired architect who claims to have suffered, and I am not making this up, an “aesthetic injury.” So he wants an immediate halt to the painting. An “aesthetic injury” is a legal term of art meaning “I looked at something and I didn’t like it, so now I am going to sue the Trump Administration.” The damage enters through the eyeballs and penetrates the victim’s frontal lobe, where political grudges are housed.

This is a very serious medical condition, often requiring years of therapy and expensive lawyers funded by USAID grants.

🔥 The lawsuit claimed that painting the pool blue will “fundamentally alter the visual and experiential character” of the National Mall. It complained, bitterly, that the new color will make the Reflecting Pool look like —and I am quoting the actual language from the complaint here— “a large swimming pool.”

My goodness! Not that! A pool of water looking like … a pool of water! Next thing you know, they’ll be complaining the White House is white, or filing for an injunction against scattering the wrong kind of grass seeds on the lawn outside the Oval Office.

The “preservationists” found a 1999 National Park Service report that explained (probably as an excuse) that the dingy, dark-gray color was an intentional part of the contemplative mindset the pool was intended to cultivate. You see, as you stand before the Lincoln Memorial, you are supposed to look down at the water and feel a profound sense of gray, bureaucratic solemnity. If you look down and see a cheerful, patriotic blue, you might accidentally experience a moment of joy, which is strictly prohibited on federal property.

The NGO’s lawsuit demands that the pool’s historic character be restored immediately. This means they want the government to spend more taxpayer money to scrape off the bright, clean American flag blue paint and replace it with the traditional, historically accurate shade of Ditchwater Gray. Or (and this is probably what they’re really hoping for) they asked the court to order a halt to the project and to freeze it in an unsightly mid-renovation state for the next two years while the case drags on.

I’ve begun to experience a pang of sympathy for our legal system. Federal judges must now sit in their chambers, wearing their serious black robes, and carefully weigh the delicate constitutional implications of pool paint. The fate of a nation hangs in the balance. Will we be a renewed nation of bright blue optimism, or a moribund nation of dark gray contemplation?

Only the courts can decide. In the meantime, if you visit the National Mall do not look at the Reflecting Pool. You could suffer an aesthetic injury. It hurts. I should know. I just got one the other day looking at Hakeem Jeffries. My lawyers are reviewing the case.

Have a terrific Tuesday! Drive back ‘round tomorrow for another installment of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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