☕️ VIRTUE SIGNALS ☙ Monday, May 4, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Trump ends the Iran war and launches a military operation in the same week; Democrats march with actual communists; the NYT discovers virtue; a Taco Bell 'hero' defends the soda line; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Monday! Your week-opening roundup includes: Trump’s latest Iran chess move — declaring the war “terminated” on the exact day the War Powers clock expired, then immediately launching a 15,000-troop “humanitarian” operation called “Project Freedom” to break Iran’s Strait blockade (with Tomahawks, just in case); the Fox News investigation that mapped the May Day protest machine and found 600 groups with $2 billion in revenue — including the Communist Party USA, the Maoist Communist Union, and the California Democratic Party all on the same organizer list, partially funded by an American billionaire who lives in Shanghai; the New York Times education writer who embedded himself in a classical charter school and was visibly shaken to discover that children who read Virgil and use the commodes in an orderly fashion might actually be onto something; and a spirited Florida Taco Bell employee who took the water-cup honor code very seriously indeed.

🚀⛑️ C&C ARMY BRIEFING — IRAN WAR UPDATE ⛑️ 🚀

On Friday, on the eve of the War Powers Resolution’s 60-day deadline, President Trump declared that Operation Epic Fury’s “hostilities” were “terminated.” Yesterday, he announced a new, totally different operation: Project Freedom. The New York Times reported, “Trump Says U.S. Will Help Stranded Ships Leave Strait of Hormuz.” It already started early this morning.

In a long Truth Social post yesterday, President Trump described the new operation as a humanitarian mission. “Many of these Ships are running low on food,” the Presidential tweet explained, “and everything else necessary for largescale crews to stay on board in a healthy and sanitary manner.” Thus, the US Navy will “guide their Ships safely out of these restricted Waterways, so that they can freely and ably get on with their business.”

Then, just before signing off, President Trump explained the new humanitarian mission might get kinetic. “If, in any way, this Humanitarian process is interfered with,” he warned, “that interference will, unfortunately, have to be dealt with forcefully.”

In the same post, President Trump said negotiations with the Iranians were still ongoing and “could lead to something very positive for all.” Over the weekend, the Iranians suddenly became much more flexible, and even offered a 14-point terms package including (for the first time) surrendering some of their enriched uranium and diluting the rest. They offered those terms publicly.

On Saturday, President Trump tweeted that he was reviewing the new proposal but would probably reject it because “they have not paid a big enough price.”

Meanwhile, CENTCOM tweeted more specific details: “U.S. military support to Project Freedom will include guided-missile destroyers, over 100 land and sea-based aircraft, multi-domain unmanned platforms, and 15,000 service members.” It is like AAA roadside assistance at sea, but with Tomahawks. It is definitely not a war.

It’s a legal loophole. If Iran fires on the escorted ships or our fleet, that would be Iran starting a new conflict. Our military can then respond defensively. Technically, it would not be attacking. So no new War Powers clock would start, because the USA did not start hostilities— Iran did. The President is clearly allowed to take whatever defensive actions he feels appropriate.

It’s all about leverage. President Trump keeps ratcheting up the pressure on Iran. Somewhere between his first and second terms, Trump realized that hard power works much faster and more effectively than soft power. Previous presidents couldn’t use hard power like this, because they were captives to coalition-building with feckless European ‘allies,’ and were ensnared by a craven need for prior UN approval.

There hasn’t really been a previous president who used hard power so often and so quickly. If you consider Trump’s tariff regime as economic hard power (which is perfectly fair), he’s already deployed hard power against the entire world. The speed and magnitude of President Trump’s hard power flex is completely unprecedented.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

🔥🔥🔥

These days, to be a right-thinking Democrat, you must be an outright communist. Buoyed, apparently, by the ‘success’ of barely concealed communist candidates in places like New York City, they’ve decided to chum the waters with red bait. This will backfire, probably spectacularly. As I have often said: Communism is the only ideology that must pretend to be something else in order to survive.

(Note how the California Democratic Party picked ‘red’ as its theme color, even though red’s for the GOP on electoral maps)

Friday was “May Day,” the high holy day for people who use the word “comrade” unironically and believe that the best way to help the working class is to stop them from getting to work. According to Fox News’s investigation, an estimated 600 groups formed a sprawling “red-blue” alliance to organize roughly 3,000 protests across the country.

And when I say “red-blue,” I don’t mean Republicans and Democrats working together to fix potholes. I mean “red” as in the Communist Party of the USA, and “blue” as in mainstream Democratic organizations who apparently looked at the communists and said, “You know what? These guys make some excellent points about dismantling the system. And they have cool hats.”

This is not a ragtag bunch of Bryn Mawr sophomores who just read Karl Marx for the first time and are furious at their bourgeois parents. This is a massive, professionally funded protest-industrial complex. Fox’s investigation found these groups have a combined annual revenue of about $2 billion. For perspective, $2 billion is roughly the GDP of Botswana, or the price of a medium-sized popcorn at a Regal theater.

Somewhat ironically, it turns out that smashing capitalism requires a lot of capital. But first, lest you think I’m exaggerating, let’s review the historic roots of May Day.

🔥 Here in the US, the year 1884 was noteworthy for several reasons. They finished building the Washington Monument, the Canadians claimed to have captured Bigfoot in British Columbia, and Grover Cleveland, who also had very big feet, became the first Democrat to win the White House since before the Civil War. (The conspiracy theory that Cleveland was Bigfoot is probably just a coincidence. Probably.)

Anyway, two years into the Cleveland Administration, during the hot, humid 1886 Chicago summer, starting around May 3rd, “labor organizers” staged a series of “mostly peaceful” protests in Illinois and Ohio, which included a bunch of “labor organizations” that staged walkouts and strikes. On May 4th, during an “almost totally peaceful” protest rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square, a busy produce and food market centered on Randolph and Desplaines Streets.

Mostly peaceful

At some point, a mysterious someone —unknown to this day— threw a mostly peaceful dynamite bomb at police. Socialists celebrate it as the first dynamite bomb ever used in peacetime history of the United States. According to lore, the police panicked and shot several of their own in the confusion. Four cops died, and it triggered martial law across the entire US.

All things considered, it was a pretty wild summer, even though Bigfoot never showed up.

In July 1889, socialist and Marxist groups met in Paris at what would become known as the founding congress of the ‘Second International’, which is also often called the “Marxist” International Socialist Congress. That congress passed a resolution —introduced by French socialist Raymond Lavigne along with the American delegation— calling for an international demonstration on May 1st, 1890 to mark the new worker’s holiday and demand ‘working‑class reforms.’

By the early 20th century, May 1st was firmly established as May Day, the socialist and labor holiday. It’s also known as International Workers’ Day, where collectivist-minded workers celebrate labor by striking, peacefully burning buildings down, and driving the nation so crazy it considers declaring martial law.

In 2026, May Day has become the official day of the California Democrat Party, which ‘adopted’ the day by joining socialist and communist protest groups and coloring its pamphlets red.

🔥 Corporate media loves to crow about how polls show younger Americans growing approval of ‘socialism.’ But that’s only because they have skulls full of mush and conflate ‘socialism’ with wild descriptions of Scandinavian-style welfare states. But if you drill down, and ask any American about the socialist/communist actual agenda, approval rates plop into the sewer (single digits).

Here are the three planks of the modern collectivist movement:

• Abolition of private ownership of the means of production (land, factories, major capital) replaced by ‘collective’ or state ownership. This is often explicitly presented as the “single sentence” summary of modern communist theory.

• Dictatorship of the proletariat: U.S. communist groups openly say that their goal is to destroy the existing “bourgeois” state and replace it with a new state that is explicitly a class dictatorship run ‘in the name of’ the working class.

• Democratic centralism: internally, communists promote a civic organizational model where government decisions are made through “democratic” procedures, but once those are decided, strict top‑down discipline (often using force) and subordination of minority views to the majority line are mandatory.

Taken together, it’s not just “more welfare” or “more worker’s rights.” It’s one‑party class rule, centralized control of the commanding heights of the economy, and a tightly disciplined vanguard party.

But that’s not what they advertise. Instead, modern socialists and communists promote a murky, utopian fairy tale of ‘equality,’ ‘liberty,’ and the settling of scores between various identity groups and the ever-present enemy: oligarchial billionaires. Except billionaires like George Soros, who funded a bunch of May Day protest groups this year, or CCP-aligned Neville Roy Singham.

Neville Roy Singham is an American-born tech tycoon who currently lives in Shanghai. According to Fox, Singham has pumped around $278 million into a constellation of far-left groups, including the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the People’s Forum, and Code Pink. Singham is also very enthusiastic about the Chinese Communist Party, which is ironic, because if there’s one place where workers definitely do not have the right to skip work and protest the government, it’s China. But let’s not get bogged down in details.

Then there is Indivisible, one of the largest Democratic Party-aligned grassroots networks, which has received millions from billionaire George Soros’s philanthropy network. Indivisible has at least 200 chapters nationwide supporting these May Day events.

So, to summarize: We have a massive coalition of 600 groups, funded by actual billionaires, organizing a nationwide protest movement under the official banner of “Workers Over Billionaires.” You cannot make this up. It is like having a “Vegetarians Against Vegetables” rally sponsored by Oscar Mayer.

This is why social communism implodes when it gets too much attention. It’s one thing to hold signs calling for confiscating Elon Musk’s companies. It’s quite another to volunteer to give your own house to the party.

CLIP: Protestors confused when asked about billionaires funding their protest (3:12).

🔥 How Democrats think this increasingly obvious collusion with red communists will help them is anybody’s guess. It’s mystifying. Fox quoted frustrated Democrat strategist Melissa DeRosa, who said, “The increasing willingness of mainstream Democrats to align with extremist socialist groups is a major factor in why the Democratic Party is losing the center more and more, and why so many lifelong Democrats find themselves feeling politically homeless.”

“That is not how you build a majority,” DeRosa continued. “That is how you turn a governing party into a protest movement — and a losing one.”

The official demands of the red-blue coalition are exactly what you would expect if you asked a Magic 8-Ball to generate left-wing talking points. They want to “Tax the rich,” “Expand Democracy,” and implement “No ICE. No War.” No mention of private property or who’ll be in charge after the glorious revolution. They are also keenly upset about an “authoritarian billionaire takeover of government,” which, again, is pretty rich for a movement taken over by billionaires.

Yesterday, progressive gay-rights champion and former congressman Barney Frank, who is sadly dying in hospice, told CNN’s Jake Tapper about progressive policy that, “some of which the public isn’t ready for. I think they make a mistake by taking the most controversial parts of the agenda and turning them into a litmus test.” In other words, they’re boiling the frog too fast.

CLIP: ‘Progressive icon’ Barney Frank tells CNN the Democrat party has “gone too far” (2:21).

Ask yourself— why would CNN reach all the way back to a dying Democrat to snag this message about slowing the communitarian roll? Could it be that the donkey party is splitting in twain? ‘Moderates’ versus ‘progressives?’ Mamdanians versus mainstreamers? Or is the Democrats’ May Day bromance a last gasp from hospice?

We are witnessing the beautiful, absurd spectacle of the American political left eating itself while simultaneously trying to overthrow a system that gave them $2 billion to play with. Unless I am missing a huge factor we can’t see yet, the red-blue spectacle we witnessed on Friday will not help Democrats’ midterm prospects.

They can find all the Nazi-tattooed, bearded white guys they want, but if socialism is the main selling point, it’s going to be a difficult sale.

🔥🔥🔥

I keep a suspicious eye on the Times’s op-ed pages, so I can forecast progressive cultural weather. After all, the Grey Lady is the schoolmarm of leftist thought, minding everything they are allowed to think. Every once in a while, a remarkable piece slips past the Editors’ steely gaze and signals a deeper shift. It happened this weekend, in an essay headlined, “In a Minneapolis Public School, a Cure for Toxic Politics.”

Do not ask me what this picture illustrating the op-ed was supposed to mean. I tried till I got a headache, but I came up with nothing.

It was breaking news from the front lines of American journalism: the Times’s editorial department has suddenly discovered that, wait for it, children who sit quietly, wear uniforms, and read the classics might actually turn out more decent human beings than what our failed public school experiment does.

I know. I was shocked too. I had to read the article twice to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating from consuming too many seed oils.

The article was written by an education researcher who described himself as a “child of the 1960s who went to progressive schools where our chief extracurricular activity was protesting the Vietnam War.” It was an eyewitness report from Eagle Ridge Academy, a classical charter school in the Minneapolis suburbs.

The author, James Traub, ‘embedded himself’ (I’m not sure what that means, exactly) in a ninth-grade class and was absolutely flabbergasted by what he witnessed. The students were discussing Virgil’s Aeneid. They were sitting in a circle. They were taking turns speaking. Nobody was throwing spitballs, TikToking, or demanding to be graded on their “lived experience” rather than their knowledge of Roman literature.

“Almost everyone in Mr. Lemon’s class wanted to talk, but no one interrupted,” Traub wrote, clearly shaken by this display of basic human decency. “There was no showboating.”

He even witnessed a kindergarten teacher praising her students for a perfect bathroom break, asking them to “raise your hand if you’re ready to commit to that again.” The children, unburdened by the crushing weight of progressive pedagogical theory, enthusiastically agreed to use the potty in an orderly fashion.

For the modern liberal, this is terrifying stuff. As Traub admits, the idea of teaching “virtue” in public schools “raises many hackles” because conservatives sometimes use virtues to —brace yourself— “enforce compliance with social codes.”

Social codes. Like, “don’t interrupt,” “stand when you speak,” and “maybe don’t act like rabid badgers during third period.”

The piece offered Times readers a fascinating —albeit grudging— forgotten-history lesson. It turns out that America’s founders actually believed that a republic requires virtuous citizens. They thought schools should teach things like wisdom, justice, courage, and temperance. But then, about a century ago, progressive thinkers led by John Dewey decided that shaping children’s character was too heavy-handed. So we got “lowest-common-denominator relativism.”

“Virtue language,” Traub noted, “gave way to talk of ‘values,’ which is to say, personal preferences. In our modern therapeutic vocabulary, ‘temperance’ and ‘justice’ gave way to ‘self-esteem.’”

And just how has that progressive experiment in ditching virtue worked out for us? Well, if you look at the average public school, you will find legions of students with incredibly high self-esteem regarding their ability to fail basic math while simultaneously diagnosing their teachers with toxic microaggressions.

Eagle Ridge, on the other hand, operates on a moral code based on Citizenship, Integrity, Perseverance, Honor, Excellence, and Respect. And the results are stunning. Traub reported that two girls with opposing political views had a fierce argument about Donald Trump— and then stood up and held hands.

If this happened on a college campus today, the administration would immediately call in a SWAT team of grief counselors and hate-speech enforcers under a state of emergency. But at Eagle Ridge, it’s just called “civil discourse.”

The most amusing part of the article was the author’s clumsily hidden attempt to reassure Times readers that it’s okay to like this school. He pointed out that only 8% of the students come from the prosperous, progressive Minnetonka district. The rest are largely nonwhite immigrants who —surprise!— actually want their kids to get a rigorous education and learn good manners.

Traub also noted, with obvious relief, that the school has posters about “sustainability” on the walls. Phew! For a minute there, we thought they were raising a generation of polite, well-read conservatives. But don’t worry, they still care about the plight of polar bears.

The education researcher even suggested a branding strategy, to make classical education more palatable to the left, quoting a scholar who described it as “the modern version of the liberal education considered suitable to an Italian courtier.” In other words, “We aren’t teaching conservative values; we are training your children to serve the Medici family.”

Haha, just kidding. He was suggesting a return to classic liberalism— implicitly rejecting progressivism.

In the end, Traub posed a profound rhetorical question: “Would you feel better, or worse, if you knew that every future American citizen would receive an education like the one they get at Eagle Ridge?”

For most of us, the answer is an enthusiastic “Yes, please, where can we sign up?” But for the New York Times, this is a complex moral dilemma. Because if we admit that teaching kids to be virtuous— being polite, reading great books, and respecting one another— actually works, we might have to admit that the progressives have been wrong for the last hundred years.

And that is a tragedy worthy of the Aeneid’s Virgil himself. Or at least some guy from Minneapolis named Virgil.

🔥🔥🔥

There are certain unwritten rules of fast-food etiquette. For example, if you order a chalupa at 2:00 a.m., you should not expect it to look anything like the picture on the menu. Also, if you ask for a “water cup,” you are entering into a sacred, legally binding covenant that you will fill it only with water, and maybe with a single lemon wedge if you are feeling brave enough to fish one out of the metal bucket. At least, that’s the rule in Florida. Last week, local NBC-6 West Palm reported, “Florida Taco Bell worker accused of shooting at customers who put soda in water cup.”

Tragically, we live in a fallen world. Some people believe that a clear plastic cup is merely a suggestion, a vessel meant to be filled with whatever sugary, carbonated nectar flows from the fountain. In most places, this minor transgression might earn you a dirty look from the shift manager. But not in Florida. A Florida man takes the unwritten rules that hold society together very seriously. In Florida, unauthorized soda acquisition can be a capital offense.

According to police in West Palm Beach, a 20-year-old Taco Bell employee named D’Mari Jy’Quan Patterson (if that’s his real name) recently took responsibility for enforcing the fast-food chain’s water-cup rule extremely strictly. And by “extremely strictly,” I mean “at gunpoint.”

The incident began, like most great American tragedies do, with a group of friends walking into a Taco Bell. Two women approached the counter and asked for a cup of water. Patterson obliged, handing over the cup, likely expecting them to head straight for the little nozzle that dispenses lukewarm tap water.

Instead, one of the women went rogue. She walked over to the soda machine and began filling her water cup with Mountain Dew.

Now, let us pause here to consider the economics of fountain soda. The actual liquid inside that cup costs the Taco Bell corporation approximately one-tenth of a cent. If a customer steals a cup of soda every day for a year, Taco Bell might eventually have to raise the price of a Cheesy Gordita Crunch by a fraction of a penny to cover the loss. It is not exactly the heist of the century. It’s not like she was trying to walk out with the nacho cheese vat.

But Patterson —who, to his credit, is a stickler for the rules— would have none of it. According to the probable cause affidavit, he began ‘remonstrating with’ (yelling at) the women. A bitter argument ensued, drawing in a third friend who had just walked into the restaurant to find an unfolding fracas.

Rules are important

At this point, you might expect the situation to de-escalate. Perhaps Patterson could have simply charged them for the soda. Or perhaps he could have realized that he works at Taco Bell, not the Texas Gold Depository, and let it go. Instead, Patterson allegedly yelled, “Do Something! Do Something!”— a phrase that has preceded roughly 90 percent of all fistfights in American history. Another employee tried to intervene, but then came the unmistakable sound of a firearm being racked.

You can’t imagine the high drama and chaos that then ensued. According to the affidavit, Patterson pistol-whipped one of the women, accidentally discharging his firearm. One woman’s eyebrow was grazed. She ran out of the store. Patterson went after her. He cornered the third friend and fired again. He missed the woman, but he did manage to shoot a window, shattering it completely. The woman, understandably terrified, broke through the damaged window to escape.

Mr. Patterson was charged with various crimes you can easily imagine, but he raised self-defense, claiming he thought the women were armed. Hey, at least he was gainfully employed. And you can’t argue with his sense of corporate loyalty. Living la vida taco: work más, shoot más.

This unfortunate misunderstanding starkly reminds us of the escalating tensions in our modern society. We are a nation divided, a people on edge. And nowhere is this more apparent than at the local Taco Bell, where the line between a refreshing beverage and a felony charge has grown thinner than a corn tortilla.

Please consider this story to be a travel advisory. The next time you find yourself at a fast-food establishment in the Sunshine State, please remember the rules. If you ask for a water cup, fill it with water. Do not attempt to sneak a little Sprite. Do not try to mix all the flavors together to create what the kids call a “suicide.”

Just drink the water. It’s good for your hydration, and more importantly, it significantly reduces your chances of being shot by a guy making minimum wage folding burritos.

Have a magnificent Monday! Swing back here tomorrow morning, for Tuesday’s fresh installment of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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