☕️ SOLIDARITY ☙ Tuesday, July 21, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Graham Platner's virtually identical replacement is selected; DC Circuit appellate panel actually green-lights Trump's USPS reforms of mail-in ballots; Rubio drops 100+ page anti-commie report; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! This morning’s coffee service is accompanied by these essential news condiments: before taking a single vote, Maine’s Democrat party has bravely selected Graham Platner’s replacement candidate for US Senate, and you won’t believe how diverse, inclusive, and equitable it was; astonishing decision from the far-left DC Circuit Court of Appeals upholds Trump’s USPS reforms for mail-in ballots, which spells bad news for Democrats in the midterms; and Rubio’s State Department publishes a shocking, surprise reporting disclosing the wellspring of US communism— and names names.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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You probably remember Graham Platner, the colorful Maine Democrat who was running for US Senate until a few weeks ago, when he abruptly dropped out after being accused of rape and physical intimidation. (He denied the allegations.) The Maine Democratic Party, reeling from this PR disaster, scrambled to appoint a replacement candidate to take on Republican Senator Susan Collins in November. They needed someone calm, collected, and completely devoid of any alarming behavioral history. Naturally, they chose Troy Jackson. Yesterday, CNN reported, “Maine Democratic Senate frontrunner faces scrutiny over alleged anger outbursts.”

According to the article, Jackson, a ‘former logger’ who served as state Senate president, is known in Augusta for pounding on desks, storming out of rooms, and swearing at colleagues. But his pièce de résistance occurred during a private meeting about five years ago, an event now nervously whispered about in Maine political circles as the “water bottle incident.”

During one clash with fellow Democrats, Jackson allegedly grew so enraged that he hurled a plastic water bottle. A full one. The female legislator in the targeting radius told colleagues she was deeply frightened and felt he was aiming for her. (It made her quit. She decided not to run for reelection, citing Jackson’s conduct as a factor.)

Jackson’s campaign, demonstrating the kind of deft rhetorical maneuvering we’ve come to expect from Democrats, admitted he threw the bottle but disputed the trajectory. “Over 22 years in public office, there have been moments when he let his frustration get the better of him,” the campaign admitted, but added that an eyewitness recalled, “the bottle was thrown away from everyone and struck no one.”

Ah, the old “I was merely aggressively hydrating the wall” defense. Classic.

This is where the story becomes truly magical. Let’s review the Democrats’ strategic pivot. They started with Graham Platner: a middle-aged white guy, prone to anger issues, cosplaying as a working-class redneck, and proudly holding a Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) membership card. After he imploded, they searched far and wide, consulted their top political strategists, and replaced him with... Troy Jackson: a middle-aged white guy, prone to anger issues, cosplaying as a working-class redneck, and proudly holding a DSA membership card. Bernie Sanders endorsed them both.

Yoo-hoo! Democrats! I think you misplaced your diversity. Maine Democrats, who of course have very firm convictions about diversity, equity, and inclusion, inclusively replaced their failed white candidate with one who is demographically identical in every measurable way —age, race, gender, flannel shirt size, and DSA membership status— and are calling the process a huge, diverse, equitable, democratic success.

Ta-da! Hope and change. Or, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

(You know, given the Dems’ conspicuous silence on all this blatant whitewashing and new love of testosterone, I’m starting to think that Democrats may actually be chucking DEI; from leadership right down to the base. They’re just … doing it. They’re just not saying it out loud. We’ll see, I suppose.)

The actual nomination won’t happen till this weekend, at a special Democrat convention where 600 party insiders will “vote.” But CNN reported that “Jackson is now widely expected to lock up the nomination at this weekend’s nominating convention.” It’s sewn up, in the bag. 480+ delegates have committed to him.

They took no chances. The next two most popular candidates —Shenna Bellows and Nirav Shah— both dropped out on Sunday and endorsed Jackson. (Shah beat Jackson in the gubernatorial primary.)

Behold: Democracy in action.

The buried lede in this story is that Jackson’s recent political track record isn’t terrific. He just lost in the Democrat primary for governor. He came in third. Now he’s been handed a Senate nomination —shazam!— with right after primary voters literally rejected him. The party saving Democracy strikes again! Between their hypocrisy on: (1) bullying of women, (2) pallid diversity, (3) toxic masculinity, and (4) a quote-unquote ‘democratic’ selection process, it’s hard to decide what to mock hardest.

🔥 Anyway, don’t worry, Maine’s Democrat party is completely fine with all of this. Democrats, not often accused of moral inflexibility, have suddenly discovered the virtuous side of inappropriate anger. Former state Representative Janice Cooper defended Mr. Jackson, describing his anger issues as a plus: “This moment calls for a rabble-rouser.”

Plus, raging at your colleagues works. (Just ask the lady who got the water-bottle treatment.) Another former colleague, Jennifer DeChant, argued that Jackson’s approach gets things done, noting, “He doesn’t run things like he’s coddling in kindergarten.” Sure, he might randomly launch projectiles during policy debates, but at least he’s our projectile-launcher. I think Jennifer just called other female legislators children, but never mind.

Even more amusing is the attempt to distinguish Jackson’s anger issues from Platner’s. Stacy Leafsong, a progressive organizer who publicly condemned Platner and describes herself as a “hardcore feminist,” told CNN she is “100%” behind Jackson. “There’s no comparison between him and Graham,” she said. (Well, come on. There’s some comparison.) “I think he’s a good guy,” Leafsong, the feminist, added, untroubled by Jackson’s attempted hydration assault. (Thank goodness we know what Ms. Leafsong thinks.)

“He’s the real deal,” she enthused, before enthusiastically exploding in a burst of sparkles and confetti.

An unnamed Maine Democrat who knows him made excuses for Jackson’s outbursts, explaining that he “doesn’t always understand that not every problem requires a chainsaw or an ax to get it out of the way.” His heart is in the right place, sweetie. He probably also apologizes after. Every time. She continued by describing Jackson as a “complex” person. “He sort of pushes his weight around,” she explained.

(I’ll pause here to reflect on the fact that CNN had no trouble rounding up legions of female Jackson defenders. Ladies? What’s going on? Helsinki syndrome?)

Democrats spent weeks in 2018 arguing that Brett Kavanaugh’s visible frustration and raised voice during a confirmation hearing where he was falsely accused of rape was itself disqualifying evidence of intemperate toxic masculinity. Um. Jackson has been throwing water bottles and screaming at female colleagues for twenty-two years, and the same people are calling that not toxic but passionate.

Just. Saying.

🔥 Glance into the Hypocrisy Mirror. Never mind the whitewashing, toxic masculinity, and the undemocratic selection process. Imagine, for a fleeting second, if a Republican candidate had a history of screaming at female colleagues and throwing objects at them in closed-door meetings and was nominated for the US Senate. The corporate media would be organizing daily vigils. MSNBC would have a permanent chyron counting down the end of democracy.

But because Jackson plays for the home team, his violent outbursts are described as “passion,” and his bottle hurling is just the rugged charm of a former logger. The whitewashing is practical politics. The selection process was open and transparent.

Well, if they want someone to “shake up Congress,” then Troy Jackson might do it. At least he’ll get them exercising more. (By dodging things.)

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We have a rare, massive win out of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. On Friday, a three-judge panel temporarily revived the Trump Administration’s executive order requiring strict new security and transparency standards for mail-in voting ahead of the 2026 midterms. The ruling allows the U.S. Postal Service to proceed with implementing the new rules, pausing a lower court’s injunction that had blocked them. Left-wing Democracy Docket, predictably, melted down into a goo of rage. They ran a breathless article titled, “Appeals court allows USPS to move forward with Trump’s anti-mail voting order, for now.”

“Anti-mail voting order” is DD’s euphemism for “basic security standards.” The USPS proposed rule does not outlaw “mail.” It merely requires all mail and absentee ballots to be placed in secure envelopes marked with the official Election Mail logo. More importantly, it requires Intelligent Mail Barcodes to track ballots throughout the entire mailing process, start to finish.

States must even provide a pre-mailing notice to USPS —a “Mail-In and Absentee Participation List”— detailing the voters who’ll be included and the unique barcode associated with each voter.

Why does this terrify Democrats? Because it closes two of the biggest, most obvious vectors for mail-in ballot fraud.

First, it eliminates the “last-minute manufactured ballot” problem. By requiring states to submit a list of expected mail-in voters before the ballots go out, and tying each ballot to a unique, trackable barcode, it becomes mathematically impossible for a sudden, unexplained pallet of ballots to mysteriously appear at a counting center at 3:00 a.m. If the barcode wasn’t on the pre-approved outbound list, the USPS system flags it.

And if a ballot is not in the USPS database at all— then it must have come from somewhere else.

Second, it stops any backdating of postmarks. One of the persistent concerns with mail-in voting has been the potential for corrupt postal workers to illegally backdate postmarks on ballots received after Election Day, allowing late ballots to be counted anyway.

The Intelligent Mail Barcode tracks the ballot’s physical progress all the way through the postal system in real-time. A manual, backdated ink stamp means nothing if the digital barcode scan shows the ballot didn’t enter the postal stream until two days after the election.

It is a simple, elegant, technological solution to a massive vulnerability. It’s not perfect. It just makes cheating a lot harder. And the left hates it.

The NAACP sued to stop the rule, and a liberal district judge (some of you may recognize the infamous judge, Emmet Sullivan) agreed, issuing an injunction— putting the whole project on hold. But the D.C. Circuit —not exactly a bastion of conservative jurisprudence— smacked down Sullivan’s order.

🔥 In their short, two-page order, the three-judge appellate court panel found that the Trump administration had “satisfied the stringent requirements” for overriding Sullivan’s injunction, and had also made a “strong showing that they will likely succeed” on the merits. If you’ve been following my tutorials on injunctions, that was the most important finding.

But the best quote from the order is about the urgency of implementing these rules now, before the midterms. The judges noted that, without a stay of Sullivan’s injunction, the USPS would be unable to issue a final rule before the November midterms, and said:

Precisely correct. There’s no way to un-ring the bell of a fraudulent election. Hence— the show must go on.

The timing of this victory is also deeply interesting. Just one week earlier, President Trump fired the three remaining commissioners of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC). The EAC is the federal agency that ostensibly helps states administer elections. The left panicked over that move, too, claiming Trump was trying to “exert control over elections.”

But look at the chessboard: Trump clears out the obstructionist leadership at the EAC, and a week later, his administration wins a crucial court battle to force the USPS to track and verify every single mail-in ballot. It sure looks a lot like a coordinated, multi-front offensive to secure the midterms before the predictable November chaos can begin. Just saying.

The rules aren’t perfect, and the legal battle isn’t over. But for the first time in a long time, the momentum on election integrity is moving in the right direction, and the D.C. Circuit of all places just gave it a massive push.

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Yesterday, out of nowhere, Secretary of State Marco Rubio dropped a 100-page tactical nuke on the American radical left. The State Department released a comprehensive report, breathtaking in its scope, titled “Cuba: The Capital of 21st Century Communism.“ The Guardian UK reported, “‘Front groups and fellow travelers’: state department attacks US left over Cuba.”

The report details how, for nearly seventy years, the communist regime in Cuba has operated as the main ideological engine and central nervous system for almost every destructive left-wing movement in the United States.

If you have ever wondered why American leftists —who supposedly care about things like “healthcare” and “the environment”— always seem to end up marching in the streets waving foreign flags, cheering for terrorists, and demanding the destruction of Western civilization, the State Department just gave you the answer: Because Cuba trained them to do that.

Cuba, already on political life-support, is a red, dead duck.

🔥 The report is a masterpiece of plain-spoken truth. It describes Cuba not as a quaint island of classic cars and cigars, but as the “spiritual capital of Third Worldist radicalism” and the “ideological capital of the modern radical left.” The regime’s entire raison d’être, the report explains, is a “war of attrition” to, and I’m not making this up, “erase the United States from the Earth.”

And based on the numerous examples from the report, Cuba has been shockingly successful at achieving its goals.

“There is overwhelming evidence that the machinery of the Cuban Government has been progressively organized around… a fundamental hatred of the United States,” the report stated. “Many of the most significant upheavals in recent American political history —from the George Floyd riots to the rise of Antifa to the explosion of pro-terrorist activism on American college campuses— can be linked, in some way, shape, or form to Cuban influence.”

The report doesn’t just hand-wave. It names names. It details how the Venceremos Brigade and other “revolutionary tourism” programs have funneled thousands of American activists to Havana for ideological (and sometimes literal) weapons training.

The Venceremos Brigade has brought 10,000 American activists to Cuba since 1969. This is because nothing says “I am fighting for the oppressed working class” quite like taking a state-sponsored Caribbean vacation where you are waited on by actual oppressed workers who aren’t legally allowed to complain about it.

It traced the lineage from 1960s leftist terrorists like the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers —whose fugitive murderers were welcomed in Havana as “honored guests”— straight through to today’s progressive darlings. It even described Barack Hussein Obama’s connections to Cuban communism— calling the former president out by name.

Like whom? Who in the news cycle is on the modern red list? The report singles out the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), noting that their “fierce, almost religious commitment to the cause of the Cuban regime” is now simply “the de facto policy orthodoxy on the American far left.”

The Democratic Socialists of America’s commitment to Cuba is described as “fierce” and “almost religious.” This makes sense. When your entire economic theory has failed everywhere it has ever been tried, you have to treat it as a religion, because treating it as a math problem is too depressing.

It also highlighted the “Nuestra America Convoy,” a March 2026 leftist junket to Havana coordinated by a convicted Cuban spy. The passenger manifest reads like a VIP list for a campus encampment: Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, Amazon Labor Union founder Christian Smalls, and Isra Hirsi (the suspended Columbia protestor who also happens to be Ilhan Omar’s daughter).

Hasan Piker, a social media capitalist who broadcasts his hatred of capitalism from a multi-million dollar mansion purchased entirely with capitalist dollars, naturally found his spiritual home in Havana. One assumes he was deeply moved by the authenticity of a country where nobody has a multi-million dollar mansion except the Castro family.

When the little band of nascent communists returned, they sounded like programmed assets. Isra Hirsi gushed that her trip “truly changed me” and that “the misinformation and lies spread by US propaganda are immediately dismissed when visiting Havana.” Hasan Piker, who now sports a Mao jacket and a scraggly revolutionary beard, even produced a propaganda documentary titled “The American War Against Cuba.”

🔥 But the most immediately alarming section of the report dealt with the National Network on Cuba (NNOC) and its “National Rapid Response Plan.” The Response Plan is a literal blueprint for domestic sabotage. The plan outlines coordinated, nationwide strikes against federal buildings, U.S. military bases, and ICE detention centers to be launched within 24 hours if the U.S. ever takes military action against Cuba.

The goal is explicitly to link “Cuba solidarity to anti-ICE/immigrant defense work happening nationwide.”

In other words, according to this official U.S. State Department report, the Cuban regime has successfully built a domestic fifth column inside the United States, utilizing American citizens who hate their own country so much they are willing to serve as a human shield for a collapsing tropical communist dictatorship.

As the report concludes: “Other hostile regimes have stolen American secrets, financed terrorism, armed proxies, spread propaganda, or sought to cultivate political influence inside the United States. Cuba did — and does — all these things and more.”

Rubio’s carefully researched, name-naming, damning report was not written overnight. It’s telling that the New York Times devoted zero column inches to it, even to label it McCarthyist or coin some amusing headline like “The New Red Scare.”

I think we know now what the GOP plans to run on for November. Against DSA candidates like rage-monster Troy Jackson. With newly secured mail-in ballots. Can you see it all coming together? (The pollsters haven’t.)

The report is a stunning document and a nightmare for the Democrats and their Cuban spymasters. Read the whole thing if you have time.

Have a terrific Tuesday! Be sure to get back here for tomorrow’s even more thrilling roundup of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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