Some Democrats answer that question with a resounding yes, but it leads one to wonder what happens to a society when the most basic forms of morality are at stake.

In a recent episode of The New York Times podcast “The Opinions,” leftist streamer Hasan Piker and New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino joined Times opinion editor Nadja Spiegelman to discuss a new kind of public expression — “Why petty theft might be the new political protest.”

The conversation began with a quick exercise on their moral code, in which Spiegelman asked questions such as “Would you dine and dash from your local diner?” and “Would you steal a book from the library?”

To these, Piker and Tolentino both responded “No.”

When asked, “Would you steal from the Louvre?” Piker said he thinks it’s “cool,” and that “we’ve got to get back to cool crimes like that: bank robberies, stealing priceless artifacts, things of that nature.”

From there, the conversation pivoted to the kind of growing socialist rhetoric where actions that used to be widely considered wrong are now justifiable: “Because the rich don’t play by the rules, so why should I?”

When Spiegelman asked, “Would you steal from Whole Foods?” the duo was almost gleeful in declaring that they had no reservations about doing so.

Tolentino proudly said she would, and admitted she regularly had, “I think that stealing from a big-box store — I’ll just state my platform — it’s neither very significant as a moral wrong, … But I didn’t feel bad about it at all,” she added. This is the same Tolentino who owns a $2 million house in Brooklyn.

Piker agreed, declaring he is “pro stealing from big corporations, because they steal quite a bit more from their own workers.” His defense is that stores already inflate prices with inevitable robbery in mind and still “end up having increased profit margins.”

The anti-capitalist who praises Hamas and believes America deserved 9/11 is also a millionaire who owns a nearly $3 million house in Los Angeles.

Though Piker admitted he himself does not steal, he added, “if someone needs the food, they should absolutely steal it.”

But when pressed whether the same mindset would apply to a Zohran Mamdani-run, city-owned grocery store with lower prices, apparently, the sentiment is markedly different.

“No, I would not, because I feel like that’s taxpayer-funded, it’s union labor, and the prices are also adjusted regardless,” Piker admitted.

Spiegelman further questioned the root of the new protest — anger at the rich. “What I’m seeing on TikTok and social media is people saying that they’re stealing from Whole Foods not just for the thrill of it, but out of a feeling of anger and moral justification.”

“I feel part of what I’m seeing around me is that people feel like the laws are immoral. The rich don’t play by the rules. We live in a society where there are billionaires; where the top 1% holds 32% of the net worth and the bottom 50% holds 2.5%.”

“So, at some point, if the laws don’t feel moral, do you start to question your own sense of having to abide by them?” Spiegelman asked.

To which Tolentino responded, “Of course.”

The attack, which also killed his wife and son, has left the 56-year-old leader physically debilitated, largely isolated, and increasingly reliant on hardline military commanders to govern, according to the New York Times, citing senior Iranian officials.

Khamenei has been cut off from most officials as he recovers, surrounded primarily by medical staff amid concerns that revealing his location could make him a target, according to the report. Despite his condition, officials say he remains mentally alert and continues to weigh in on major decisions, though day-to-day authority has increasingly shifted toward hardline military commanders.

Questions about his health have intensified in recent weeks. Since being selected by Iran’s Assembly of Experts following his father’s death in March, Khamenei has not made a public appearance, with only written statements released in his name. 

The Times reported that his injuries include significant damage to one leg and one hand, requiring multiple surgeries, as well as severe facial burns that have limited his ability to speak and could likely necessitate reconstructive surgery.

Iranian regime officials have reportedly taken dramatic steps to conceal Khamenei’s location from the United States and Israel. The regime is relying on handwritten messages delivered through a network of trusted couriers traveling by car and motorcycle to avoid detection.

Born into Iran’s ruling elite, Khamenei followed a path that blended religious study with military involvement. As a teenager, he joined an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps brigade known as the Habib Battalion during the Iran-Iraq War. He later completed his education at a theological seminary, attaining the rank of ayatollah, and worked closely within his father’s inner circle, helping coordinate military and intelligence operations.

Despite his influence behind the scenes, he has never held elected office or served in a formal senior government role. He has also faced international scrutiny, including sanctions from the U.S. Treasury Department in 2019, and has been accused of involvement in the regime’s crackdown on the 2009 Green Movement protests.

The elder Khamenei was selected as supreme leader following the death of the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who overthrew Iran’s dynastic shah during the 1979 revolution. With his son now assuming the position, the transition has raised questions about whether the Islamic Republic is drifting toward another form of dynastic rule.

His rise to power followed the sudden killing of his father on the first day of the United States and Israel’s attack on the Iranian regime. But unlike his father — who maintained a tight grip over nearly all aspects of the government and the IRGC — Khamenei lacks the same religious authority and political stature and appears far more dependent on military leaders.

With Khamenei sidelined by his injuries, hardline generals have taken on a dominant role in decision-making, shaping Iran’s posture at a critical moment. Their growing influence is believed to have played a role in Tehran’s refusal to participate in a second round of talks with American officials in Pakistan this week.

Following the Times report, senior Iranian officials moved quickly to project unity, issuing closely aligned statements reaffirming loyalty to the regime — even as military leaders are reportedly taking on a larger role in decision-making. President Masoud Pezeshkian insisted there are no internal divisions, writing, “In Iran there are no ‘hardliners’ or ‘moderates’… only unity and obedience to the Supreme Leader,” while Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf and judiciary chief Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i echoed the same message.

On Tuesday, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced a federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama, the same city where the SPLC was founded, returned an 11-count indictment charging the organization with six counts of wire fraud, four counts of making false statements to a federally insured bank, and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering.

SPLC “secretly funneled more than $3 million in funds to white supremacist & extremist groups,” according to the indictment, including Aryan Nations, members of the Ku Klux Klan, and a member of Unite the Right, the group that infamously staged the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Virginia.

For Tina Descovich, CEO of Moms For Liberty, the charges were not a surprise. 

“I was shocked that people were shocked. The biggest target for the Southern Poverty Law Center over the last three years has been our organization,” Descovich said in an interview with The Daily Wire. “We make up over half of their hate map, and we have watched their unethical tactics over the last three years. We have watched them fabricate and manipulate.”

In 2023, SPLC designated Moms for Liberty, a grassroots group that fights for parental rights in schools across the country, as a pro-segregationist hate group.

“Immediately, the floodgates of hate were opened against us,” Descovich said. The intimidation tactics started immediately, as a result of them placing us on the hate map.”

Weeks after the designation, thousands of protesters descended on the Moms for Liberty’s national summit in Philadelphia, where vandalism the night before prompted a significant police response to secure the event. An anonymous international organization followed with a cyber attack that managed to take down their website.

The SPLC cost Moms for Liberty key vendor relationships, community engagement events, and new members, as some mothers feared the “hate group” label could carry professional consequences.

“The attacks for a small nonprofit, not well-funded organization of moms advocating for their children, were unconscionable,” Descovich said. “At our 23 Summit, one of our members’ daughters was outside of the hotel, and the protesters threw an egg at her, hit her in the face, and broke her retainer.”

 Following the indictment, Descovich said she’s in contact with attorneys and exploring legal options.

“When I think about all of the money that they brought in off of the backs of campaigning and lying and smearing conservative organizations like ours, not just ours, but others too, the real damage that they’ve brought to people’s lives. You know, I believe that there should be financial payments to organizations like mine to make up for what they have done to us,” she said.

Her organization is not alone.

SPLC classified The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which advocates for ending illegal immigration, as a hate group with “ties to white supremacist groups and eugenicists.”

“The SPLC creates imaginary bogeymen who they use to rake in millions of dollars from donors who were scammed by them,” FAIR said in a statement to The Daily Wire. “Too many mainstream groups have had their reputations tarnished, banking relationships canceled, and worse.”

“The media and political classes should finally treat the SPLC as the pariah organization it is,” FAIR added, a sentiment shared by Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), a think tank that supports restricting immigration.

“It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of creeps,” Krikorian said in an interview with The Daily Wire.

“The part, of course, that’s so hilarious is that, apparently, the supply of racism didn’t wasn’t meeting the demand, so they had to create more of it,” Krikorian said. He described the group as a “fundraising racket,” whose co-founder, Morris Deese, demonstrated “proficiency at raising money from, you know, old ladies on the Upper West Side.”

 Following Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory, the SPLC  labeled the CIS as a “hate group.”

 “And that was pretty clearly a strategic decision, because immigration was what he ran on. So they needed to try to delegitimize the outside groups that study immigration,” Krikorian said. “What they hoped was that it would be that the fear of violence would be so ever-present that people on the right would self-censor so that they didn’t get shot.”

The threat of violence was not a possibility, but a reality, for the Family Research Council (FRC), a Christian nonprofit group that promotes traditional family values. 

Over a decade ago, a gunman, who cited SPLC material, entered the Family Research Council building and shot a security guard. He intended “to kill as many people as possible” and was later sentenced to 25 years in prison, according to the Department of Justice. 

“That’s why this moment matters,” FRC President Tony Perkins said. “Accountability should not stop with individual convictions. If wrongdoing is proven, justice should include restitution to those harmed. With over $750 million in their endowment, which includes offshore accounts, the SPLC should be held responsible not only for what was done, but for the damage left behind.”

The Trump administration is weighing a $500 million bailout that could result in the federal government taking a significant ownership stake in the budget airline, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Several Republican lawmakers blasted the idea.

“If Spirit’s creditors or other potential investors don’t think they can run it profitably coming out of its second bankruptcy in under two years, I doubt the US Government can either. Not the best use of taxpayer dollars,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) posted to X on Wednesday.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) described the proposal on social media as “an absolutely TERRIBLE idea.”

“The TARP corporate bailouts were a huge mistake & the government doesn’t know a damn thing about running a failed budget airline (that the Biden admin killed),” he continued, referencing the 2008 recession-era Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Outside groups on the Right also weighed in. Advancing American Freedom, an organization aligned with former Vice President Mike Pence, released a memo slamming a possible deal.

“Why should taxpayers bail out one company that has been uniquely unprepared?” the memo asked. “American families shouldn’t be forced to bail out Spirit and the shareholders or pay the bill to see if the federal government can run an airline.”

Labor groups, however, expressed support for the potential federal assistance. The Air Line Pilots Association, International (ALPA), argued that federal intervention could protect jobs and stabilize the airline.

“Federal relief is not a handout,” said Capt. Ryan P. Muller, chair of the Spirit Airlines ALPA Master Executive Council (MEC). “It is a loan that will allow the airline to finish the work that is already well underway, and it is the right call for 14,000 workers, nearly 2,000 pilots, the families who depend on those paychecks, and the millions of passengers who rely on affordable air travel.”

On the Left, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) blamed the war with Iran for the airline’s demise.

“Donald Trump’s war with Iran caused the sky-high fuel prices that finally did Spirit Airlines in. What do the American people get out of this taxpayer bailout? Will the failed airline executives be held accountable?” Warren posted on X.

The White House has not confirmed whether a bailout is on the table, but pointed to a Biden-era lawsuit that led to the rejection of the Spirit-JetBlue merger.

“Spirit Airlines would be on a much firmer financial footing had the Biden administration not recklessly blocked the airline’s merger with JetBlue,” White House Spokesman Kush Desai said in a statement.

President Donald Trump told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” that he would prefer a private-sector solution, saying he would “love somebody to buy Spirit, it’s 14,000 jobs.”

Economist Peter St. Onge of The Heritage Foundation told The Daily Wire that the merger likely led to the airline’s decline.

“The main thing that drove them over the edge was blocking the JetBlue merger,” St. Onge said. “On the day that it was denied, their stock fell 47%. And the big picture here is that the low-cost carriers can’t pass anything on, right? They have razor-thin margins, like 2 or 3%. So they need scale in order to survive.”

Legally, it’s a bold claim, and courts will have to decide whether the allegations constitute federal crimes. But politically, the government has a powerful claim. As Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche put it: “The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence.”

The charitable group was founded in 1971. By the end of its second decade, its lawsuits assaulting Ku Klux Klan groups had successfully bankrupted that ugly movement. Its original mission accomplished, the SPLC didn’t declare victory and shut down. Instead, it became a fundraising factory that enriched its coffers by tarring mainstream conservative and religious groups by unfair association with extremists, lumping together neo-Nazi cadres with respectable conservative groups like the Family Research Council.

Compared to other nonprofits, SPLC is lavishly funded. In 2023, the group reported almost $170 million in total revenue — more than the revenues of the Special Olympics, the United Service Organizations (USO), and the National Park Foundation. SPLC’s vast wealth totals roughly three-quarters of a billion dollars in assets, tens of millions of which are held in offshore accounts, leading to jokes that its Alabama headquarters building is the “Poverty Palace” and that the group’s motto should be “The SPLC — making hate pay.”

Other than swelling the SPLC’s domestic and Caribbean bank balances, what did donors get for all this cash? The group’s institutional donor list — which contains such left-wing luminaries of Big Philanthropy as the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation (a conduit for Big Tech billionaire giving) — suggests the SPLC had strong ideological motives.

Before allegations that the SPLC was funding people at the top of radical white-supremacist groups, its most notorious product was its list of “hate groups.” In addition to counting what seemed like every racist knucklehead who could afford to register a URL as a “hate group,” it also tarred as hate groups such mainstream conservative organizations as the legal advocacy group Alliance Defending Freedom, the education advocacy groups Moms for Liberty and Defending Education, and immigration-restriction groups like the Center for Immigration Studies. It also branded the conservative political group Turning Point USA an “anti-government extremist group” just months before its founder, Charlie Kirk, was assassinated, apparently by a young man who told his roommate in a text, “I had enough of his hatred.”

Ominously, Kirk had warned that SPLC’s listing of his group could lead to violence, recalling that a shooter had attacked the Family Research Council after SPLC hate-listed it. That would-be mass-murdering extremist was stopped after shooting a security guard; he later said he chose his target based on the SPLC’s hate map and planned to also kill persons at three more conservative groups.

Thanks to ideologically sympathetic tech and major media companies, as well as law enforcement authorities like the FBI, the SPLC had its “designations” treated as if they were somehow official and neutral, rather than ideological weapons that often succeeded in harming targeted mainstream groups’ ability to raise money. In 2017, GuideStar, a widely used watchdog of charities, was persuaded not to apply SPLC “hate” labels to groups. By 2019, SPLC was partnering with the Amalgamated Charitable Foundation — a donor-advised fund provider closely tied to the bank that services the Democratic National Committee and is nearly majority-owned by affiliates of the Service Employees International Union — on a pressure campaign to ban contributions from donor-advised funds to so-called “hate groups.”

Still more scandals plagued SPLC, even as its wealth ballooned. Morris Dees, its founder and longtime litigation director, was canned in 2019 amid widespread allegations of misconduct, including sexist and racist discrimination and sexual harassment. A former employee wrote a long, devastating tell-all in the New Yorker, confessing that folks on the left had known for decades that Dees was “a ‘super-salesman and master fundraiser’ who viewed civil-rights work mainly as a marketing tool for bilking gullible Northern liberals.”

It remains to be seen if the Justice Department’s indictment of the SPLC will prevail, but should the shameless operation finally meet its downfall, that downfall would be well deserved. At a minimum, the latest revelations should knock down any last support for the group’s claim to moral authority.

Scott Walter is president of the Capital Research Center.

If approved, the proposed maps could add three to five seats that favor Republicans in the state, according to Politico, potentially shaping the balance of power in a narrowly divided U.S. House.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) has criticized the effort, warning Florida Republicans to “F around and find out.”

“If they go down the road of a DeSantis dummymander, the Florida Republicans are going to find themselves in the same situation as Texas Republicans who are on the run right now,” Jeffries said at a Wednesday press conference.

Jeffries also expressed confidence that Democrats will win tough seats in red states, adding, “Under no circumstances are Texas Republicans picking up five seats. They’ll be fortunate if they get two or three. While in California, we are going to get all five.”

“The Republicans are dummymandering their way into the minority before a single vote is cast because they started this war and we’re going to finish it,” he continued.

Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis laughed off Jeffries’ comments, suggesting that a national campaign by Democrats targeting the Sunshine State would only bolster the GOP.

“There’s nothing that could be better for Republicans in Florida to see Hakeem Jeffries everywhere around this state,” DeSantis said, according to Florida Politics. “Please, be my guest. I will pay for you to come down to Florida and campaign. I’ll put you up in the Florida Governor’s mansion. We’ll take you fishing.”

Mid-decade redistricting efforts have rocked numerous states. In California, recent changes are expected to favor Democrats in several districts, while Texas Republicans have approved new maps to strengthen their position.

In Virginia, a Tuesday special election approved changes that could create four more Democrat-leaning seats, though a state circuit court judge has temporarily blocked the results from taking effect pending further legal review, The Daily Wire reported.

When The Daily Wire reached out to DeSantis’ office for further comment, a spokesperson simply stated, “Stay tuned!”

At the state level, Democrats in Florida are also pushing back on the process. State Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith criticized the lack of publicly released maps ahead of the session.

“Just 6 days out from the Florida GOP dummymander and still NO MAPS!” Smith posted to X on Wednesday. “They want rigged Congressional maps that keep Trump’s Republican party in power despite majority opposition from Florida voters.”

Florida’s current congressional delegation includes eight Democrats and 20 Republicans. Nationally, Republicans hold a slim 218-212 majority in the House, with several vacancies and a number of competitive races expected to factor into the chamber’s balance of power. The Cook Political Report ranks 16 House races as “toss-ups,” with 14 contests considered “Lean Democrat” and two as “Lean Republican.”

These are the principles of the radical Left. And that radical Left is increasingly embraced by the mainstream Democratic Party. 

You may have heard of Hasan Piker. There have been a ton of New York Times profiles of him. He’s associated with most of the major left-wing Democrats. He’s a podcaster and a Twitch streamer. 

He is also monstrously evil. 

He publicly advocates for hatred of America. There’s not a terrorist group, an anti-American, anti-Israel terrorist group, that he doesn’t support. He has advocated for violence against those opposed to his views. 

And the mainstream Left loves him. I think that’s because they think that he is bro-coded, meaning that he works out a lot, and speaks the way that your friends from high school might after they read the Communist Manifesto and smoked some pot. 

He also zaps his dog, and is a socialist who is quite rich, but hypocrisy does not matter to these folks. Not one iota. 

When you speak of limousine liberals, this dude is a mansion Marxist. He’s worth millions and millions of dollars and owns a huge mansion in Los Angeles. 

He’s also willing to travel to Cuba — a communist hellhole where the average annual income is something like $150 — and party it up while rationalizing why he should have air conditioning in his nice five-star hotel. His outfits apparently cost roughly four times the annual income of a normal Cuban. He wore a Cartier ring that apparently costs $1,400, and Cartier sunglasses that cost roughly $1,300. 

But remember folks, he is a good Marxist, and he represents certain principles on the extreme Left: that America is evil, private property is inherently bad, and violence is often justified.

No principles of morality must be adhered to as long as you’re “fighting the system.” The ends of Marxist anarchism justify the means. They justify any behavior, so long as you are aligned with the ends, so you can have a really nice mansion, a $1,400 Cartier ring, and $1,300 Cartier sunglasses in Cuba. 

What we are watching right now on the Left is radical and dangerous leftist garbage.

The legacy media and the New York Times are trying to turn Piker into a mainstream figure. Inside the Democratic Party, they are succeeding. 

What we’re watching right now with the Democratic Party is beyond the intersectional wokeism that previously was the way of the future for Democrats. 

We are well beyond that now.

When people on the Right say “woke is dead,” woke may have died, but it’s been replaced by something else, and that is something older: third worldism. 

Third worldism is the philosophy that essentially every country on Earth that is poor is poor because of the West. The solution is to tear down the West from the inside. Global redistributionism, destruction of private property, and violence are all justified by the supposed evils of the Western system.

That’s not something new. That’s something quite old. 

In the 1970s, there was the Baader-Meinhof gang, also called the Red Army Faction. They were communists whose entire goal was to tear down the world of capitalism on behalf of Marxism.

They called for revolution. Ulrike Meinhof, the left-wing radical journalist who founded the group, famously said, “Protest is when I say this does not please me. Resistance is when I ensure that what does not please me occurs no more. Protest is when I say I don’t like this. Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like.”

That manifested itself in terrorism by the Baader-Meinhof gang. Meinhof actually wrote an essay defending the Munich massacre of Israeli Olympians by Palestinian terrorists.

That sounds a lot like the people defending Hamas’s massacre of Jews on October 7 while defending Hezbollah.

Which, of course, Piker has done.

Stefan Aust, who wrote a book on the Baader-Meinhof gang, pointed out that a poll at the time they were active showed that a quarter of West Germans under 40 felt sympathy for the gang. One-tenth said they would hide a gang member from the police, and prominent intellectuals spoke up for the gang’s righteousness. When the gang started robbing banks, newscasts compared its members to Bonnie and Clyde. 

This is nothing new. There’s an impulse in human beings that when they do not like the system, they believe it justifies violence, theft of property, evil, and terrorism.

Hasan Piker is one of these types. We’ve played clips of him on the show, routinely talking about violence against his political opponents. Now he’s done an interview with The New York Times in which he talked about stealing. He explained that he fully endorses crimes like robbing banks and stealing artifacts, saying, “I cheer on every news story of people that I see doing it.”

What a despicable human being. He also went on to suggest that you should steal from corporations. Of course, he also said he would not recommend stealing from taxpayer-funded grocery stores in New York City because the workers would be unionized. He also said you should be able to steal intellectual property.

The fact that this person is being mainstreamed by the Democratic Party shows you what the Democratic Party has become: a full-scale, destructive force in American life. 

This all culminates in Hassan Piker’s justification of murder. He’s not in favor of murder, you see. But he totally understands why United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was murdered, saying, “That was a fascinating story for me, because Americans are very draconian about crime and punishment. They’re very black and white on this issue. And yet, because of the pervasive pain that the private health care system had created for the average American, I saw so many people immediately understand why this death had taken place.”

Permission structures for murder. “Of course, I understand why people were so okay with a man being murdered, because of course, it’s just social violence.”

Everything Hasan Piker doesn’t like is social violence. And social violence justifies and excuses actual violence. He can pretend he’s not excusing it as much as he wants. 

He has made statements such as, “I don’t have any sort of patriotism in my heart for America,” and “Liberals,  you need to be showing your opponent’s guts on there, okay? You need to be gutting them. You need to be shanking these and letting their intestines just ride on stage.”

This is who the Left is mainstreaming.

Zohran Mamdani is ideologically the same as Hasan Piker. They are exactly the same. Nothing Hasan Piker says is radically different from anything Mamdani says. 

A couple of days ago, Barack Obama was hanging out with Mamdani. Hasan Piker and Bernie Sanders have campaigned together.

This is now pervasive throughout the Democratic Party.

Where does all this end?

Communist centralization of power. 

Operation Damocles was ultimately a successful program. It terrified Nazi scientists, and it certainly made the idea of working for Egypt much less appealing. It was also good practice for Mossad, which went on to conduct many more assassinations of foreign scientists — most recently in Iran. Just a few years ago, towards the end of Trump’s first term, the Mossad managed to kill Iran’s nuclear scientist using a remote-controlled, AI-enabled machine gun that was hidden in the back of a pickup truck that was parked on the side of the freeway.

Credit: Darron Mark/Corbis via Getty Images

Israeli spies programmed the AI to compensate for the machine gun’s movement in the back of the pickup truck, as well as the input delay from the remote operation of the weapon. So when the scientist drove by, all the Mossad agent had to do was press the button to shoot him. And at the time, Iran had no idea what happened. They assumed that snipers had been hiding near the freeway. Initial media reports suggested that a gun battle had taken place. And for their part, the Mossad contributed to this confusion by blowing up the pickup truck once the target was dead.

We sometimes hear about these kinds of operations when they’re conducted by our own intelligence services, or intelligence agencies that work with the CIA (like the Mossad). And that makes sense — it’s effective propaganda that sounds like you’re reading a spy thriller. And people “on our side” like to brag about successful operations. At the same time, it’s very rare to hear about similar operations that are conducted by foreign governments, within our borders. And there’s only two possible reasons for that: Either foreign governments aren’t conducting any assassination operations on U.S. soil, or they’re conducting those operations without being detected — or at least, without our government telling us about them.

Especially with the war in Iran underway, it’s not hard to wonder whether, indeed, American researchers are being targeted, without the government telling us. And in recent days, as you’ve probably heard, there’s a lot of concern about this possibility. It’s gone mainstream, and now the White House is involved. Watch:

Whenever there’s a confusing and alarming story like this, the worst thing you can do as a media organization is broadcast a superficial, drive-by report. And that’s exactly what NBC just did in that clip. If you’re going to suggest that shadowy assassins are taking out American scientists, or might be, then you can’t spend 60 seconds on the topic and then move on. It’s too important for that kind of treatment.

To be clear: this is obviously a story worth pursuing. But it’s also a story that’s extremely easy for media outlets to mess up. For the most part, they want the number of “dead or missing scientists” to keep increasing, because that creates more drama. And as a result, they’re not doing a deep dive into each one. Instead, they’re making you think that every single case is equally suspicious, which just isn’t true. There’s a lot of distraction going on here, for one reason or another, and it’s drawing attention away from the cases that deserve a second look.

So today we’re going to go, one-by-one, through all of the scientists who have allegedly been killed, or died under suspicious circumstances. We’ll talk about everyone who was just mentioned in that NBC report, and many others. We’ll start with Amy Eskridge, because on the surface, she’s the most disturbing case — although when you dig into it, there are a lot of issues with the narrative that’s going around.

Amy Eskridge died in Huntsville Alabama on June 11, 2022, at the age of 34. The cause of death was a gunshot to the head, which was determined to be a suicide. Shortly before her death, in 2020, Eskridge claimed that she was preparing to present major findings on “antigravity research” — which has relevance to UFOs and their propulsion systems — although she needed approval from NASA. To this end, Eskridge started a now-defunct website called “The Institute for Exotic Science,” which she said would provide a “public-facing persona to disclose anti-gravity technology.” Eskridge was also involved in her father’s company HoloChron Engineering, which was supposedly developing a “triangle antigravity craft” — although they didn’t get very far. Antigravity research, for the record, is not an established branch of science, and Eskridge has no published papers in any peer-reviewed publication. That’s not to say that “peer review” is the most important thing, but it does make it clear that she wasn’t an established, leading U.S. scientist or anything like that.

In any event, according to Eskridge, she was on the verge of a big breakthrough. And someone wanted to stop her. A month before her death, according to a UFO investigator named Franc Milburn, Eskridge reportedly sent a text message to a friend warning that her life was in danger.

The alleged text read, in part: “If you see any report that I killed myself, I most definitely did not. If you see any report that I overdosed myself, I most definitely did not … The dominos are being lined up all over again now.”

Obviously, that’s a very conspicuous thing for someone to write, shortly before they die of a gunshot wound to the head. On the one hand, it could indicate exactly what it says — that this person was being harassed by people who wanted her dead. On the other hand, you need context for a text message like this, because it’s also possible that this woman was simply paranoid and mentally unwell. To make that determination, you need context. David Wilcock, the “paranormal content creator,” also repeatedly said he wasn’t suicidal — and according to police, he just shot himself on April 20 when they responded to a residence where he was located.

So with that in mind, here’s a podcast interview featuring Eskridge, several years before her death, in which she talks about how a suspicious Lexus pulled up near her apartment complex. She describes the apartment complex as low-income, and says that a high-end, blacked-out Lexus is an unusual sight in the parking lot. And supposedly, this Lexus is part of the larger plan to harass her. Listen to this carefully, and assess her credibility. Watch:

NEW: Researcher working on anti-gravity technology, whose death was ruled a su*cide, sent a text just one month before her death saying she would never kill herself, according to the Daily Mail.

Amy Eskridge was found with a gunshot to the head in Huntsville, Alabama.

Eskridge… pic.twitter.com/kUj5vrBPot

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) April 22, 2026

The problem here is that, really, what she’s saying doesn’t make much sense. There’s no logical reason why someone would do any of this. If she’s a threat to someone because of her research, it doesn’t make much sense for them to send a Lexus and change its license plates in front of her, or moonlight as her Uber driver, or break into her house, or any of that.  She also doesn’t mention any police report, or any surveillance footage, or anything — she’s asking us to take her word for all of this.

You might say, well, the Lexus driver is trying to intimidate her so that she doesn’t publish her research. These people are supposedly sinister enough that they’re capable of murdering her, and yet they held off — for several years — hoping that they could scare her by changing some license plates around. But if that’s the case, you have to ask: Why didn’t she simply publish her groundbreaking research online? Why did she feel a need to wait for NASA or peer-review or anything like that? Why would these shadowy figures allow her to talk about their pressure campaign online, for years, before they took her out?

These are all important questions. And no major news outlets are remotely interested in answering them. One of the things you need to be careful about, as you read stories about these scientists, is that a lot of outlets are extremely sloppy with details. Many of them are probably using AI to generate their stories.

For example, as you can see here, The Daily Mail reported, “Journalist Michael Shellenberger testified before a public hearing on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena that Eskridge was ‘murdered by a private aerospace company in the US because she was involved in the UAP conversation.'”

Credit: The Daily Mail

When I read that quote, I did a double-take. Michael Shellenberger is a serious journalist. We cite his work on the show, all the time. If he did the research, and concluded that Eskridge had been murdered by a private aerospace company, then I’d be very inclined to, at least, take that story seriously.

But if you pull up the actual testimony, Shellenberger didn’t say anything like that. The attribution is completely wrong. He didn’t say anything about Eskridge, or how she was supposedly murdered. In reality, that claim came from a Retired U.K. intelligence officer named Franc Milburn, who got in touch with Eskridge before her death. And he told investigators that, in his view, Eskridge was indeed being harassed. In fact, he claimed that Eskridge had been targeted with a “directed-energy weapon.”

Credit: The Daily Mail

So who is Franc Millburn? He’s also the source for that alleged text message, where Eskridge said she’s not suicidal. As it turns out, he’s a British paratrooper veteran and intel officer who claimed that, in the late 1980s, the British special forces shot down a “non-human craft” in northern England. Milburn doesn’t have first-hand knowledge of this shootdown, but he claims that he spoke to an MI6 officer code-named “John” and the U.K.’s Royal Air Force crew that fired on the UFOs, which were supposedly traveling at hypersonic speeds.

Per The Daily Mail Milburn said, “John said they were tasked to secure and retrieve the craft in the north of England. They were flown in by helicopter. They established a cordon, a perimeter, and they approached the craft. ‘He didn’t describe the craft, he just said it was obvious it was non-human, and it was obvious that there were occupants who had fled the scene on foot – or whatever you call it. ‘He said then it became a task of tracking down these beings to try to bring them into custody. ‘Part of the unit was left protecting the craft. They would have left maybe six to eight blokes to cordon the craft, and the others would have been on foot, quad bikes, or 4x4s trying to track down these entities that escaped from it, with helicopters supporting. ‘He said after that it was totally passed over. He said, “scientists and technicians came in and it was completely out of our hands. We were flown away by helicopter, and we knew nothing more after that.”‘

So we don’t get a description of the UFO. We’re only told that the aliens ran away, and that there was a hot pursuit of some kind, involving quad bikes, like something out of a movie. And then, the whole thing was just dropped. The government didn’t kill John to keep him quiet, or anything like that. So he just told all his friends.

Put simply, Franc Milburn has a history of making unverifiable, outlandish claims. And now he’s making another one — he’s saying this woman was hit with a mysterious energy beam, harassed, and targeted for assassination. It’s simply not much to go on.

On the other hand, there are disappearances that are obviously worth a deeper investigation. Consider the case of 29-year-old Joshua Leblanc, a NASA scientist who worked on rockets and nuclear propulsion. Last summer, he died in a car accident. Here’s how local news reported on his death at the time. Watch:

A NASA nuclear scientist was found deceased in his Tesla after colliding with a guardrail, leaving his body so burned that he was completely unrecognizable, according to a new report from Fox News.

29-year-old Joshua LeBlanc, who worked on nuclear propulsion projects, died in a… https://t.co/C793en0aeU pic.twitter.com/8YIhgG7fE3

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) April 22, 2026

By itself, does any of this reporting prove — or even suggest — that Leblanc was targeted by an intelligence agency? No, it doesn’t. Nor does it make much sense for someone to use a Tesla to kill him, since Teslas have cameras that are constantly recording. And while the family has their concerns, it’s also possible that they’re mistaken. But given the circumstances, you’d think the authorities would have investigated and come up with some kind of explanation for what Leblanc was doing, and why he would’ve left his phone behind. Normally it’s not hard to figure out these kinds of basic details. But in this case, none of those details have been forthcoming. Maybe now that it’s getting more attention, that will change.

Then there’s another case NBC mentioned — the disappearance of 68-year-old US Air Force Major General. William Neil McCasland. And this is where the cases are worth paying a lot of attention to.

William Neil McCasland

Unlike Eskridge, McCasland had an established scientific career. According to the New York Post, he “served in senior Pentagon roles involving nuclear science, space research and defense initiatives. He also commanded the Air Force Research Laboratory at New Mexico’s Wright-Patterson Air Force Base — where wreckage from the 1947 Roswell crash was purportedly shipped.” (Although the Air Force has denied that.) During his career, McCasland also oversaw research at Los Alamos National Laboratory, in New Mexico, which was famous for its work developing the first atomic bomb.

Congressman Eric Burlison of Missouri says he had contacted McCasland concerning his research into UFOs. And according to the Post, “McCasland also appears in the Wikileaks dump of Hillary Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s emails. Former Blink-182 singer Tom DeLonge was in frequent contact with Podesta regarding UFOs and identified McCasland as his insider source on alien intel. Leaked calendar notifications showed a meeting scheduled between Podesta, DeLonge and McCasland on Jan. 24, 2016.”

On February 27 of this year, McCasland — an experienced hiker — left his home in Albuquerque without his phone or prescription glasses. All he took with him, apparently, was his wallet, hiking boots, and a .38-caliber revolver. Before leaving, at 10 a.m., he spoke to repairman at his home. His wife left for a doctor’s appointment at 11:10 a.m., and by the time she returned an hour later, he was missing. A couple hours later, his wife called 911. Listen:

So he has both mental and physical issues. He’s retired. He’s given indications that he might not want to continue on with his life, and his wife believes he doesn’t want to be found. And he left with a gun. The police dispatched a helicopter with an infrared scanner to try to find him, but they said it was too hot outside for the scanner to be useful.

“The mountain was just lit up like a candle,” a sheriff said. “We couldn’t differentiate from heat signatures and the heat from the rocks.”

So again, the simplest explanation is clear. You can easily make the case that, in all likelihood, this elderly man with mental health problems may have committed suicide, or become incapacitated while he was on a hike, or attacked by an animal, or any number of possibilities. There aren’t any indications that he was actively involved in any high-level research, or was on the verge of any kind of breakthrough.

What makes his case interesting is that, in a relatively short period of time, several other people with connections to national laboratories basically went missing the same way. Within around 10 months, they all disappeared without taking their cellphones with them. And some of them had weapons. So let’s go through those cases, starting with 78-year-old Anthony Chavez, a research and development engineer who also worked at Los Alamos. He spent most of his career working on a “Dual-Axis Radiographic Hydrodynamic Test” facility, which is involved in nuclear weapons research.

Anthony Chavez

Chavez had long retired. He hasn’t been working since 2017. And like McCasland, Chavez was last seen leaving his home on foot, with his car parked in the driveway — only, unlike McCasland, Chavez left behind his wallet. He was reported missing in May of 2025, and he still hasn’t been located, despite an extensive search.

Then, three months after Chavez disappeared, 48-year-old contractor Steven Garcia also went missing.

Steven Garcia

And he disappeared in pretty much the same way. He was last seen on August 28 leaving his home in Albuquerque at 9 a.m., carrying only his gun, and leaving his wallet and keys behind. Police said they had some reason to believe he may have been a danger to himself. Watch:

🚨10th missing person case in UFO mystery – Steven Garcia disappearance

Another government contractor with links to UFO information has become the latest person to go missing in the past year. Los Angeles Magazine contributor Lauren Conlin joins “Jesse Weber Live” to discuss the… pic.twitter.com/Scfmzh4yM9

— Skywatch Signal (@UAPWatchers) April 15, 2026

The Albuquerque facility of the “Kansas City National Security Campus” manufactures most of the non-nuclear components that are used in nuclear weapons. At the same time, a property custodian isn’t the most essential employee in that facility. So it’s not clear, to anyone, why he’d be a potential target for any reason. But, again, the similarity of these disappearances is striking.

And then there’s another disappearance to add to the list: the case of 53-year-old Melissa Casias, who also worked at Los Alamos.

Melissa Casias

Melissa Casias was not a UFO researcher or a nuclear weapons expert. She was an administrative assistant. There’s no indication, one way or the other, that she had access to sensitive information or research. She was last seen in June of 2025, entering her car in the afternoon after shopping downtown. She reportedly dropped lunch off for her daughter, before saying she was going to work from home.

Investigators have since recovered a pair of shoes that match the ones she was wearing. They’ve also discovered that her phone has been factory-reset.

Based on this information, if we’re being honest, there are about ten million explanations for why she might be missing. The most likely explanation, of course, is that she was attacked by a criminal who had no idea where she worked. And when that happens, contrary to what you might see on television, it’s not easy for police to figure out who did it. Think about the Nancy Guthrie case, which is still unsolved. If the FBI can’t find out what happened to Nancy Guthrie, then the odds are low that anyone’s going to be able to track down a random administrative assistant. People are much, much less safe than we might like to think. That’s one of the reasons we have the Second Amendment.

But the fact that we have so many people, all of them affiliated with national laboratories at one point or another, all disappearing, is obviously worth further investigation. That said, we do have to acknowledge that sometimes people die in strange ways. Sometimes they kill themselves. Sometimes they trip and fall while they’re hiking. And sometimes these people tend to live near each other, and work in the same kinds of places. Los Alamos alone employs well over 10,000 staffers. It’s not unreasonable to think that two or three of them, over the course of more than a year, might become suicidal, independent of one another. Recall that, after January 6, several Capitol police officers committed suicide. In fact, within months of January 6, four officers killed themselves. The media tried to link that to January 6 itself, claiming that these all counted towards that day’s death toll — a death toll that was actually just one, Ashley Babbitt. In that case, the attempt to draw a connection was absurd. Is this another example of that sort of thing? We don’t know yet.

But let’s keep going, because there are more names to get through. And again, some of them are worth a closer look. Fox reported that, “NASA materials engineer Monica Reza, who served as director of the Materials Processing Group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, also remains missing after disappearing during a hike in California in June 2025.”

Monica Reza

Reza is one of four cases that are linked to Los Angeles County, including Caltech’s Carl Grillmair and two other Jet Propulsion Lab experts, Frank Maiwald and Michael David Hicks. So let’s take these in turn, starting with Reza — who, incidentally or not, worked on projects that were overseen by McCasland at one point.

The local Fox affiliate reported that, “Reza disappeared while hiking with a friend near Mount Waterman in the Angeles National Forest. According to her companion, they were roughly 30 feet apart when they made eye contact; she smiled and waved to indicate she was fine. Moments later, when the friend turned around again, she had vanished.”

She disappeared in June of 2025, and her body still hasn’t been found, despite an extensive search and recovery effort. Right away, we should be able to point out the obvious, which is that it’s extremely unlikely that a CIA assassin snatched her during this hike. If you’re going to run an operation like that, it’s probably a good idea to do it when the target is alone, not right next to their friend. So again, the default assumption here should be that she fell off a ravine, or something like that.

But the other missing scientists from Los Angeles County are a little harder to explain away.

Carl Grillmair

Here’s Carl Grillmair, the Caltech scientist. He was 67-years-old, and he specialized in astrophysics at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center on campus. (That Center also partners with NASA). Grillmair was a renowned scientist who was famous for his work on “dark matter and galactic structures,” as well as for discovering the existence of water on a “distant exoplanet.” A few months ago, he was shot to death on his front porch in Antelope Valley. Watch:

The suspect who allegedly shot the scientist, before apparently carjacking someone, has been identified as 29-year-old Freddy Snyder. Good luck finding a picture of him — for some reason, the authorities haven’t released one. I certainly couldn’t find it, if they did. According to local reports, Snyder had been arrested several months earlier for “trespassing on Grillmair’s property while armed with a rifle.” There’s still no official motive.

But hearing these facts, it’s hard not to think of the murder of MIT professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro in front of his home in a Boston suburb.

Nuno Loureiro

As you probably remember, a gunman shot the professor after killing two students at Brown University. In that case, it was pretty clear that the killer was upset that his career was a failure, and he blamed Brown (while also harboring jealousy for the professor’s success). At the same time, the Brown shooter did kill himself, so we don’t have a definitive understanding of his motive, either.

Some of these lists mention Michael David Hicks, who died in July of 2023. I’ve seen his name come up at NewsNation, the New York Post, Newsweek, and other outlets. He was a veteran researcher at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for more than two decades. But there’s no indication of how he died, exactly, so there’s not much to go on. No cause of death has been released. For all we know, he might have been hit by a car, or died of a heart attack. But a lot of outlets are adding his name and picture to other lists of missing or dead scientists, which tells you something — a lot of them are trying to “pad” the statistics a bit. They’re trying to sell a narrative that may not be entirely true.

The magazine “Unheard” ran its own deep dive recently into several of these missing scientists. And while they’re more skeptical about the narrative than I am, they did include this paragraph on the origins of this story, which is pretty interesting. It’s always important to try to figure out, when everyone’s talking about a particular topic, where it began, exactly. Here’s what they came up with.

Where did this narrative even come from? The earliest article on this topic is dated March 22, and was published in the Daily Mail. It notes five missing scientists. … Two days later, a website called The Liberty Line added another name, expanding the list to six. According to its X account, the website specializes in ‘Philadelphia sports and whatever else comes to mind.’ Right-wing media and influencers kept adding names until we reached Eskridge, with old cases treated as breaking news. Finally, the story made its way to Fox News and the White House briefing room.

What’s frustrating about this is that, indeed, there are several disappearances and deaths that are worth further investigation. No reasonable person can deny that. We simply don’t have many details about deaths that are obviously suspicious, and that involve very high-level scientists (including retired scientists). But by the same token, no reasonable person can deny that the tabloids (and even some major media outlets) are mainly interested in turning this whole story into a circus. They’re adding names to the list that obviously don’t belong, just so they can create paranoia and drive clicks. And in the process, they’re distracting from some actual investigations that need to happen — particularly investigations into LeBlanc, McCasland, Chavez, Garcia, and Casias. And show us the picture of the man who killed the Caltech scientist. Otherwise, as usual, a legitimate story is at risk of being derailed — whether deliberately or not, it doesn’t matter.

Yesterday, we talked at some length about the “false flag” operation that took place in Charlottesville at the “Unite the Right” rally, during Trump’s first term. It was well-funded, well-organized, and highly effective. The whole thing was engineered to give Democrats a pretext to suspend civil liberties. We might choose to believe that these kinds of operations don’t take place on American soil, but they do — all the time. And by the same token, you’d have to be willfully blind to think that intelligence agencies — including potentially our own intelligence agencies — wouldn’t want to make certain people “disappear.” Or at the very least, they might lie about what happened to those people. Just the other day, for example, we were told that two CIA officers died in a tragic, and very strange, “car crash” in Mexico. Watch:

This is like the line from Mission Impossible, about how the U.S. government will “disavow all knowledge” if you’re caught or killed. Everyone knows these CIA agents didn’t die in a car crash. But that’s the cover story that the U.S. government is going with. Again, it happens all the time. And for that reason, we simply cannot be satisfied with the information we have so far, about these missing or dead scientists. We need an independent investigation — one that’s not conducted exclusively by the government — into each of those deaths I mentioned. Put all the facts out there, and let us debate the merits of every single case. Without transparency, the bodies are going to keep piling up. The theories will multiply. The tabloid articles will spiral completely out of control. Most of them will be way off-the-mark. And in that environment, when an intelligence agency *does* take out one of its targets, no one — even the most discerning observer — will have any way of knowing.

The congressman has not been around for roughly 50 roll votes beginning March 5, according to Politico.

Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ) told NJ Spotlight News, “Nobody’s covering up. We just haven’t heard a word,” and Rep. Chris Smith said, “We’ve both reached out. Don’t know.”

Van Drew further described to the outlet that it’s been “complete radio silence,” and he and Smith are “worried about him.”

“Congressman is addressing a personal health matter. He will be returning to a full regular schedule,” Dan Scharfenberger, the lawmaker’s chief of staff, told the outlet in a statement last week.

The Daily Wire reached out to Scharfenberger for further comment. It’s unknown what Kean’s health condition is.

“I know the congressman and his family appreciate all of the well wishes and support,” Harrison Neely, a consultant for the Republican, said to Politico. “Please know that he will be back on a regular full schedule very soon.”

Kean represents one of the most competitive House districts in the country, with the Cook Political Report ranking his race as a “toss-up.”

The Republican has been in Congress since 2023, and he previously served in the New Jersey Senate as the minority leader. He serves on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, as well as the Foreign Affairs Committee.

Kean’s absence comes at a chaotic time for the House of Representatives, as Reps. Eric Swalwell (D-CA), Tony Gonzales (R-TX), and Sheila Cherfilus-McCormick (D-FL) have all resigned in recent days due to major scandals.

In addition, Rep. David Scott (D-GA) died Tuesday, and there’s an expulsion push against Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL). The House holds a 218-212 Republican majority with five seats vacant as a result of the recent upheaval.

New pictures of the pair dropped on Thursday, showing the two kissing in New York six years before photos taken in March, which showed them canoodling in Arizona, ignited the current scandal.

Page Six published the bombshell photos showing Vrabel and Russini locking lips at a bar in New York City back in 2020 — just two weeks after the media outlet exposed Vrabel and Russini, both married, at an adults-only luxury resort in Arizona. The new photos add to the speculation that the two were romantically involved — and had been for some time.

Dianna Russini and married Mike Vrabel caught kissing at NYC bar in bombshell new photos — taken 6 years before scandal https://t.co/WIPOoGKAWF pic.twitter.com/4j1UpviNuy

— New York Post (@nypost) April 23, 2026

“They were kissing and they were all over each other,” an eyewitness told Page Six. “He had a ring on.”

Vrabel, who has been married to his college sweetheart since 1999, was wearing his wedding ring during the New York rendezvous when Russini could be seen “in between [Vrabel’s] legs,” according to Page Six.

“They were having a glorious time. They were giving each other pecks, a bunch of pecks constantly,” the source told the outlet. “There was nobody in there. Nobody knew who they were. I don’t even think the bartenders did.”

 

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In 2020, Vrabel was the head coach of the Tennessee Titans. Russini was with ESPN, covering the Titans closely.

Someone close to the situation told The Daily Wire it was well known that the two had an off-the-field relationship during this time.

Page Six reached out to Vrabel and Russini for comment on the photos Wednesday, and while the pair didn’t respond, ESPN reported late Wednesday that the Patriots coach would be skipping day three of the NFL Draft Saturday to go to counseling.

“As I said the other day, I promised my family, this organization and this team that I was going to give them the best version of me that I can possibly give them. In order to do so, I have committed to seeking counseling, starting this weekend,” Vrabel said. “This is something that I have given a lot of thought to and is something I would advise a player to do if I was counseling them.”

Vrabel told ESPN he plans to be with his wife, Jen, and their two sons outside of Massachusetts this weekend.

“I have always wanted to lead by example, and I believe this is what I have to do to be the best husband, father and coach that I possibly can be. This is not an easy thing for me to admit, but it is one that I know will make me a better person. I appreciate the support that everyone has given me and promise a stronger resolve as a result,” Vrabel said.

The 50-year-old vaguely addressed the Arizona incident with Russini on Tuesday, when he informed reporters that he’s had “difficult conversations” with his family, players, and staff.

“We believe in order to be successful on and off the field, you have to make good decisions. That includes me,” he said during the press conference. “That starts with me.”

RELATED: Married NFL Reporter Resigns After Poolside Photos With Coach Spark Scrutiny

Russini resigned from her senior position with The Athletic on April 14, stating in her resignation letter that she was leaving not because she “accept[s] the narrative,” but because she was refusing to give it “further oxygen.”

The 43-year-old has been married to her husband, Shake Shack executive Kevin Goldschmidt, since September 2020 — six months after the newly-released photos of Vrabel and Russini were taken.

The result? Virginia has arguably the fairest maps in the entire country.

On April 21, 2026, that reform was undone. A new referendum, jammed through with just 51.5% of the vote, handed the power to draw congressional districts back to the Democrat-controlled General Assembly. A reform that took years of bipartisan coalition-building to enact was reversed in a single special election by a razor-thin margin. What Democrats did to get here was not merely aggressive. It was egregious — a systematic dismantling of Virginia’s constitutional safeguards that exist precisely to prevent this kind of thing.

Start with the money. Total spending on the referendum exceeded $90 million — the most expensive ballot measure in Virginia history. The “yes” side spent roughly $65 to $70 million, much of it through dark-money nonprofits like House Majority Forward. The “no” side raised approximately $23 million — a ratio of roughly 3-to-1. But even that understates the imbalance. The “no” side’s money arrived late. For weeks, Virginia voters were saturated almost exclusively with “yes” messaging. By the time opposing voices reached comparable volume, hundreds of thousands of early votes had been cast. In the critical early phase, the spending disparity was more like 10-to-1.

But the money is only half the story. The deeper scandal is how Democrats manipulated the constitutional amendment process itself — and here, the details matter.

Virginia’s Constitution does not allow the General Assembly to amend the state’s Constitution on a whim. Article XII, Section 1, prescribes a deliberately slow, two-step process. First, both chambers must pass a proposed amendment. Then a new election of the House of Delegates must occur.  And only after that intervening election, and a second passage by the new legislature, may the amendment go to voters — and even then, not sooner than ninety days after final passage. These requirements exist to prevent a single legislative majority from bulldozing a constitutional change through before the public can react.

Democrats violated every one of these constitutional safeguards.

The first passage of the proposed amendment occurred during a resurrected special session called in May 2024 to address a budget dispute. Democrats argue that session was never formally adjourned, and thus they could use it to pass a redistricting amendment that had nothing to do with the budget. Under Virginia law, special sessions are governed by the scope of their call. The governing resolution, HJR 6001, was limited to budget matters. Expanding it to include a constitutional amendment would have required a two-thirds vote — a vote that never occurred. A Tazewell County judge found this violated Article IV, Section 6, and Article V, Section 5 of Virginia’s Constitution, and declared it “void, ab initio” — void from the beginning.

The intervening-election requirement was equally flouted. Because the first passage was engineered on October 31, 2025 – six weeks after voting had begun in Virginia’s 2025 election, rather than before a general election of House of Delegates members, there was no true intervening election between the first and second passages. The voters never had the chance that Article XII guarantees them: to pass judgment on the legislators who would cast the second, decisive vote. Democrats simply skipped that step.

Then there is the 90-day rule. Article XII, Section 1, states plainly that a proposed amendment may not be submitted to voters “sooner than ninety days after final passage by the General Assembly.” This is not ambiguous. It is a bright-line requirement written into the Constitution. On April 22, a Tazewell County Circuit Court judge ruled that this requirement was not met — that the timeline from second passage on January 19, 2026, to the commencement of early voting on March 6, 2026, fell far short of 90 days.

Finally, entirely apart from the procedural violations, the maps themselves are under challenge. Article II, Section 6, of the Virginia Constitution requires that “every electoral district shall be composed of contiguous and compact territory.” A hearing on the proposed maps’ compliance with this requirement was held Monday in Richmond Circuit Court, where a ruling is pending.

All four challenges now converge on the Supreme Court of Virginia, which will render the final judgment. This is not a federal question — the challenges are rooted entirely in the Virginia Constitution, and federal courts have no jurisdiction over how a state interprets its own Constitution.

The courts will determine whether what happened was illegal. But there is no serious question about whether it was wrong. Democrats resurrected a dead special session, bypassed the intervening-election requirement, ignored the 90-day waiting period, and flooded a low-turnout special election with tens of millions in dark money — all to undo a bipartisan reform that Virginians approved by 2-to-1 just six years ago. The Virginia Constitution was written to prevent exactly this. Whether its protections will hold is now in the hands of seven justices in Richmond.

***

Ken Cuccinelli is the former Virginia attorney general and former acting deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

***

Imagine a society where a man is murdered and the alleged killer receives love letters in prison, is treated like a folk hero, and even becomes the subject of a musical. That’s not fiction.

The valorization of Luigi Mangione, the man allegedly responsible for murdering a healthcare CEO in cold blood, says something disturbing about our culture. Even worse, the praise isn’t just coming from dark corners of the internet. It’s happening in the New York Times.

Far-left internet personality Hasan Piker drew deserved backlash for his recent claim that the slain CEO was responsible for “social murder.” But his comments offer an important glimpse into how parts of the Left now think — and how easily they rationalize the indefensible.

The case involving Mangione should be morally straightforward: a man is accused of murder. That used to end the conversation. Now it starts one, where the killing itself almost becomes secondary.

Listen to the logic: The system is broken. Insurance companies kill thousands of people every year. Healthcare is unjust. Fine. Debate all of it. But then comes the turn: If the system is harmful, the people inside it become morally implicated. And once that happens, violence against them starts to look like accountability. The rhetoric shifts from explanation to justification.

I saw this firsthand after a recent Fox interview where I criticized the growing tendency to glorify Mangione. My inbox is filled with angry, often threatening emails. What stood out was hostility and certainty. People repeatedly told me the murder was understandable because “insurance companies kill people.”

Think about that for a second: In the name of opposing harm, they were justifying it. In the name of moral clarity, they were abandoning it.

This, in many ways, is the outcome of grievance culture. For a certain segment of the Left, anger isn’t something to be examined or restrained. As long as it’s directed at the “right” source, it’s something to be nurtured or even celebrated, as we’re seeing with Mangione. They want villains. The rich, CEOs, corporations, politicians: If one target loses its emotional charge, another quickly replaces it.

I’ve written before about how Americans are increasingly drawn to the villain — not despite what he does, but because of the grievance he represents. That dynamic has hardened into something more extreme. People don’t just criticize systems anymore. They reduce them to individuals. They want to target a single face they can blame. And once that happens, that person stops being a person and becomes a symbol. And symbols are easier to hate.

The phrase “social murder” helps make all this sound serious.

“Friedrich Engels wrote about the concept of social murder,” Piker told the New York Times this week. “And Brian Thompson, as the UnitedHealthcare CEO, was engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder. The systematized forms of violence, the structural violence of poverty, the for-profit, paywalled system of health care in this country — and the consequences of that are tremendous amounts of pain, tremendous amounts of violence, tremendous amounts of deaths.”

This framing gives grievance an intellectual gloss. But in practice, it does something much simpler and much more dangerous. It shifts blame from systems to individuals and then suggests that those individuals deserve what happens to them.

From where I sit as a therapist, this isn’t really about policy. It’s about how people are being conditioned to deal with frustration and disappointment. Increasingly, they’re not being pushed to look inward or take responsibility for their own lives. Instead, they’re being encouraged to look outward, to find someone to blame. To them, the shift is comforting. It explains failure, justifies anger, and removes the burden of self-examination. But it also produces terrible thinking.

Step back for a second. What actually changed in the healthcare system after the killing? Nothing. Costs didn’t drop. Access didn’t improve. Care didn’t get better. The only noticeable change is that executives now have more security around them. That’s it. The only thing that’s been added is violence — and then a set of arguments to explain why it was somehow justified. That’s a very bad way of solving problems.

If your reaction to every problem is to find someone to blame, your solutions will reflect that. And if your solution to perceived harm is to inflict harm, you haven’t solved anything. You’ve simply mirrored the behavior you claim to oppose.

A culture built on validation without challenge creates people who feel perpetually wronged and increasingly entitled to act on that feeling. Over time, the line between understanding behavior and excusing it disappears entirely.

A functioning society depends on a basic distinction: Systems can be flawed, even deeply flawed, and individuals are still responsible for their actions. Lose that distinction, and everything becomes negotiable. The question is no longer, “Is this right?” but, “Who deserves it?”

And that’s a dangerous question.

***

Jonathan Alpert is a psychotherapist in New York City and Washington, D.C., and author of the forthcoming book “Therapy Nation.” Find him on X @JonathanAlpert.

On Tuesday, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche announced a sweeping federal indictment against the SPLC, accusing it of funding the very terror groups it claimed to be fighting.

A federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama, the same city where the SPLC was founded, returned an 11-count indictment charging the organization with six counts of wire fraud, four counts of making false statements to a federally insured bank, and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. It was not the Department of Justice, not a political appointee, not a press conference, but a grand jury of American citizens that sat in judgment.

According to the indictment, between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC paid at least $3 million to eight individuals affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, the National Socialist Movement, the United Klans of America, the Aryan-Nation-affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club, and other white supremacist organizations. These are the very same groups the SPLC was raising hundreds of millions of dollars to destroy. The money was allegedly funneled through shell companies with names like “Fox Photography” and “Rare Books Warehouse,” and loaded onto prepaid cards to conceal its source from the financial institutions the organization used.

One recipient, identified in the indictment only as F-37, was a member of the online leadership group that organized the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. On August 12 of that year, a white nationalist named James Alex Fields Jr. drove his car into a crowd of counterprotesters. Heather Heyer, 32 years old, was killed. Dozens more were injured. Fields is now serving life in prison. F-37 helped put that rally together. He made racist postings. He coordinated transportation for attendees. He did all of this, according to the indictment, at the direction of the Southern Poverty Law Center. And from 2015 to 2023, the SPLC paid him roughly $270,000, all while publicly condemning the very event he helped organize.

“The SPLC was not dismantling these groups,” Blanche said. “It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”

FBI Director Kash Patel put it simply: “The money never lies, and they got caught.”

Nothing has been proven yet. The SPLC will have its day in court. Its interim CEO has called the charges false and politically motivated. The organization says the payments were part of a confidential informant program designed to gather intelligence on violent groups, and that the program’s secrecy was necessary to protect those informants. Those are defenses a jury will evaluate.

But what strikes me most about this indictment is not the fraud itself. It is the why behind it. Why would an organization founded to fight racism need to pump up racism? Why manufacture the very evil you claim to oppose?

The answer is white guilt. And to understand it, you have to understand what white guilt actually is.

White guilt is not a feeling. Most people treat it as one, rejecting it with some variation of “I never owned slaves.” Both responses describe an emotion. Both miss the mechanism entirely. You cannot feel actual guilt for sins you did not commit.

White guilt is instead the cultural and institutional atmosphere that Americans live inside, whether they feel it or not. It is the language permitted in public life and the language that ends careers. It is the criteria by which institutions measure their own virtue rather than their actual outcomes. It is the moral authority that determines whether you are on the “right side of history” or stand condemned as a racist.

My father, Shelby Steele, has spent 40 years on this question. To paraphrase him, white guilt, at its core, is the vacuum of moral authority that was created when America finally confessed to four centuries of racial evils in the 1960s. That confession ended legal discrimination. But it also left whites accused of racism, whether they had personally discriminated or simply lived in a nation that had. Even though many whites had bravely confronted these racial evils, including members of my own family, the end result was a collective loss of moral authority. They were stripped of their innocence, the very innocence that would become the most coveted thing in American institutional life to this day.

This was not innocence in the legal sense, but moral innocence, the status of being on the right side of the nation’s deepest wound. As my father wrote in his 1988 Harper’s essay, “I’m Black, You’re White, Who’s Innocent?” — “Both races instinctively understand that to lose innocence is to lose power. Now to be innocent, someone else must be guilty, a natural law that leads the races to forge their innocence on each other’s backs.”

The driving force in American society became not true compassion for the oppressed, but the desperate need to prove that you are not the oppressor. Whoever can most credibly claim innocence of the nation’s racial sins, or claim to represent those who suffered, gains the moral authority that translates into institutional power, political influence, and cultural dominance. Innocence became the currency. The SPLC understood this better than almost anyone.

The SPLC did not begin as the institution now facing these charges. Founded in 1971 in Montgomery, Alabama, by Dees and Joe Levin, with civil rights legend Julian Bond as its first president, the SPLC took on genuine fights. Growing up, my parents told me stories over the dinner table about how the organization integrated state troopers, challenged unfair electoral districts, and sued the Klan after violent attacks. That early work, using the law to make the promises of equality real, especially in the heart of the Deep South, is why I was excited to meet Dees. It makes what followed all the more devastating.

Rather than meet the post-1960s reckoning through color-blind standards, genuine accountability, and the equal application of American principles, many whites chose the easier path: the performance of perpetual atonement. Instead of investing in the genuine development of black Americans, they became professional fighters against racism, the only remaining way to purchase the innocence that the vacuum of moral authority had taken from them.

From suing real Klan violence, the SPLC institutionalized white guilt. It built a vast donor base by mapping extremists and labeling an ever-growing list of dissenters as “hate” that must be fought. Conservatives like Charlie Kirk, who never committed violence, found themselves listed alongside actual white supremacists. Far from the days of fighting the Klan, the SPLC was now slaying windmills. The mission expanded not because the threat grew, but because the machine required an enemy. The emergency could not be allowed to end.

Perhaps we should have seen this corruption earlier in 2019 when Morris Dees himself was fired. The official reason was unspecified misconduct. Staff members sent letters to management describing “decades of racial discrimination, gender discrimination, and sexual harassment” inside the organization, founded to fight those exact things. One letter was signed before Dees’s firing was announced; a second, sent after the firing, accused leadership of being “complicit in” decades of such misconduct and demanded an investigation into an alleged cover-up. An outside review was commissioned, but its conclusions were never made public.

The grift formula, once you see it, is simple. You inflate the threat, sound the alarm, position yourself as the brave slayer of hate, and collect hundreds of millions from donors desperate to feel they are on the right side of history. The donor gets innocence. The corporation gets its ESG credential. The foundation gets its social justice bona fides. And the SPLC gets paid.

Real black communities bear the cost of this bargain. Real black families in real cities, especially those in the underclass, live with the consequences of institutions more interested in the performance of anti-racism than in the far more difficult and unglamorous work of developing individuals into productive members of society. The SPLC raised hundreds of millions in the name of protecting the vulnerable. The real product here was donor innocence.

If these charges hold, this is not merely fraud. It is white guilt at its most predatory.

The vacuum of moral authority that the civil rights reckoning created was supposed to produce genuine accountability, genuine repair, genuine progress. Many Americans truly sought that. They were eventually outmaneuvered by those who saw white guilt not as a wound to be healed but as a resource to be mined. And if the grand jury’s indictment is proven true, that industry did not just fail to reduce racism. It paid racists to keep racism alive, because alive racism was worth more to the machine than a color-blind society could ever be.

But this false innocence is not a simple lie. A lie knows itself to be false. False innocence is a moral credential claimed without moral action. It is innocence purchased through performance rather than earned through character. It is the DEI certificate that substitutes for actually caring about black lives. The hate list that substitutes for actually reducing hate.

This false innocence is more than a personal corruption or failing. It has become the air that we breathe. The man who says he feels no white guilt may be telling the truth about his feelings. But ask him if he would say, openly and without hesitation, everything he actually believes about race in America. In certain rooms, in certain institutions, around certain people, he already knows the answer. The cost is real. He is living inside the world of white guilt, whether he feels it or not. The machine does not require his confession. It requires only his silence.

This is what makes false innocence genuinely evil in the precise sense. It has corrupted the conditions under which honest people can speak honestly. It has made false virtue more valuable than the actual remedies. It has turned moral authority into a commodity that the loudest performers collect and the most honest people forfeit. And when an organization like the SPLC allegedly takes that logic to its endpoint by manufacturing the very hatred it claims to fight, because hatred is the raw material the innocence machine runs on, you are looking at the very heart of the white guilt machine.

I still think about Morris Dees and his gun at Claremont McKenna. If the indictment’s allegations are proven, the gun was the whole point. The prop that made the performance credible. The danger that made the donors open their wallets. The legend that kept the white guilt machine running. The windmills had to keep turning. So someone had to be paid to tilt at them.

The SPLC’s story is not an outlier. It is white guilt in America, followed to its logical conclusion.

***

Eli Steele is an award-winning American filmmaker. He writes at Man of Steele on Substack.

This article is part of Upstream, The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.

***

Americans were shocked to learn that two teens from Bucks County, a wealthy suburb of Philadelphia, were charged in the March ISIS-inspired terrorist attack in New York City. As a Bucks County native, I wasn’t surprised.

Over the past decade, I’ve watched the county change from a peaceful suburb to an ideological battleground where progressives and conservatives regularly clash over culture war issues that are dividing America.

Emir Balat and Ibrahim Kayumi, Bucks County teens charged in the March 7 attempted terror attack, are from desirable communities and were educated at sought-after suburban school districts. Kayumi reportedly resided in a multi-million-dollar house in Newtown, an affluent township located less than a 10-minute drive from where George Washington famously crossed the Delaware River.

Bucks County boasts lush farms, prestigious school districts, and quaint historic towns. It has more than 10,000 acres of public parks where you can get lost in the beauty of nature while being less than an hour’s drive from the center of Philadelphia and its renowned restaurants and museums.

It was an idyllic place to grow up. How did it become a breeding ground for terrorists who hate America?

My kids playing at Tyler Park, a 1,700-plus-acre escape in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, located just 33 miles away from Center City, Philadelphia. (Photo by Meg Brock)

The Philadelphia Suburbs Flip Blue

Philadelphia has been in decline for over half a century. Its population peaked in 1950 when it reached over 2 million residents, and over the next five decades, hundreds of thousands of residents fled. The city’s population bottomed out in 2006 with a low of less than 1.49 million. Since then, it has experienced a small yearly increase in population largely fueled by immigration, according to a Pew report. The analysis noted the population increases came from an influx of foreigners replacing U.S.-born citizens. “From 2000 to 2016,” the report stated, “the number of foreign-born residents rose by roughly 95,000 while the number of U.S.-born Philadelphians fell by 44,500.”

This trend hasn’t stopped. Local news outlet WHYY reported in a March 2025 article that the migration of “foreign-born residents outweighed domestic migration out of the city” and noted, “More than 21,300 individuals immigrated to Philadelphia between 2023 and 2024, compared to 15,300 U.S. born residents who left.”

Today, almost one in five working Philadelphia residents is foreign-born, and there are concerns over how President Donald Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration will affect the city’s population, according to recent reporting from The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Meanwhile, millennial parents swapped Philly for places like Bucks County to find safer communities and better schools in the suburbs. In the 2010s, 60,000 Philadelphia residents were leaving the city every year, and more than half of them were ages 18 to 34, according to Pew research.

I watched this happen in real time. My generation recognized the city was a fun place to live as a young adult, but its failing schools and rising crime made it an increasingly undesirable place to raise a family. Parents wanted to raise their kids in safety and didn’t want them attending schools where four out of five fourth graders aren’t proficient in reading, and who could blame them?

While parents may have voted against failed progressive policies with their feet, many took their voting habits to the suburbs.

For decades, the Philadelphia suburbs had been Republican strongholds. But in the 2010s, Philadelphia’s four surrounding counties — Bucks, Chester, Montgomery, and Delaware — shifted to Democratic control.

Montgomery County was the first county to flip when Democrat Josh Shapiro, now Pennsylvania’s governor, was elected county commissioner in 2011. Democrats completed their mission in 2019 with local wins that gave them control of Bucks, Chester, and Delaware counties.

To call the wins historic is an understatement. In Montgomery County, Democrats had won control of leadership for the first time in 140 years. In Delaware County, it was the first time they held power since the Civil War.

But there were more dynamics at play than just families fleeing Philadelphia. These wins weren’t only historic, but also strategic. Pennsylvania Democrats had long conquered Philadelphia and, fueled by their despondency over the election of President Trump, set their sights on conquering the suburbs.

Chapters of the radical progressive group Indivisible, an anti-Trump grassroots organization founded in 2016, popped up throughout the Philadelphia suburbs. Grassroots organizations worked alongside the Pennsylvania Democratic Party to channel their “anti-Trump furor” into winning local suburban elections.

Local Republican committees, filled with aging boomers and few under 40, were woefully unprepared for the fight. In 2019, Democrats Diane Marseglia and Bob Harvie defeated Republicans Gene DiGirolamo and Rob Loughery and claimed the leadership majority as county commissioners by the narrowest of margins — just 664 votes in an election with more than 450,000 registered voters. Democrats also won the four other countywide elections.

Harvie is currently running for Congress against a longtime Republican incumbent, Brian Fitzpatrick. DiGirolamo, the Republican elected as the minority commissioner, admitted to being totally shocked by the Republican losses, calling them “devastating” at a public meeting.

One of the biggest stories of the night was the 37% voter turnout — a historically high number for a local, off-year election. The average voter turnout for the previous eight off-year elections was only around 27%. Democrats had put the work in, and it paid off for their party.

Protestors support a Democrat running for a seat on the Central Bucks School District at a press conference before a contentious school board meeting in July 2021. (Photo by Meg Brock)

Culture Wars Escalate During The Pandemic

America’s brewing ideological divide accelerated to a boiling point in 2020, and Bucks County was no exception.

Democrats Harvie and Marseglia were sworn into office in January 2020 and, though they made personnel changes during their transition into power, they kept the county’s health director, Dr. David Damsker.

Bucks is one of only a handful of counties in Pennsylvania with its own health department. According to Pennsylvania law, the county health director has the authority to determine school mitigation efforts during a disease outbreak.

While Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Health Rachel Levine imposed some of the most extreme COVID-19 mitigation policies in the nation, Damsker took a moderate, data-driven approach to COVID mitigation. He controversially advocated that Bucks County lockdowns end in early May 2020, against the wishes of then-Governor Tom Wolf.

Damsker faced full-blown attacks in June 2020 after he issued reopening guidance for Bucks County schools that recommended a full return to in-person learning and made mask use optional. The guidance said “in-person instruction” was “essential to our children’s emotional well-being, as well as their educational growth and advancement.”

The school guidance caused a sharp division within Bucks County. Many parents were thrilled about a return to in-person learning, while others were horrified. Social media was abuzz with passionate, divisive opinions on Dr. Damsker, masks, and in-person learning.

The Mideastern region president of the Pennsylvania State Education Association published a scathing op-ed in the local newspaper questioning Damsker’s credibility and demanding he change his recommendations.

School board meetings were filled to capacity throughout the 2020-2021 school year as parents argued for and against in-person school, masks, and vaccines, while school board members were slandered and even received death threats over educational decisions.

A political breaking point came in the late summer of 2021 as tensions were again stoked by the emergence of the Delta variant of the coronavirus. That summer, I literally felt the tension when I was physically assaulted by a Democratic township supervisor who struck me from behind with a “Masks Save Lives” sign during a school board press conference. The supervisor was charged with harassment and was later reelected.

Grassroots progressive groups and leaders from the local Democratic Party pressured Harvie and Marseglia to fire Damsker, claiming his school guidance, which did not require students to wear masks, endangered the community.

The school guidance became overtly political when Pennsylvania’s Acting Secretary of Health Alison Beam reached out to Commissioner Marseglia, rather than Damsker, about Bucks County’s school guidance. By the end of the day, Bucks County had changed its school guidance to align with the state’s demands.

Many in the community saw this as an example of Democrats playing politics with children’s education and believed the politicians, rather than the health director, wrote the guidance for political clout — something the commissioners adamantly denied. Suspicions were increased when Damsker, who’d been in the public eye for over a year, suddenly disappeared from the public purview. Many thought he’d been silenced by the Democratic commissioners.

Seeking clarity on what had happened, I began submitting public record requests and asked for records showing who wrote the updated school guidance. Instead of providing clarity, the county weaponized itself against me. The commissioners wrongfully blocked my phone number from calling any county government office, made up a defamatory story about me and published it in the local newspaper, and denied me access to public records.

After months of me fighting for transparency with the Bucks County Law Department (which was led by Joe Khan, who is now Bucks County’s district attorney), the Pennsylvania Office of Open Records ordered the county to fulfill my record requests. Instead of giving me the public records, Khan and the Bucks County Law Department filed the first of five lawsuits against me in June 2022.

After a three-year legal battle, Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth Court upheld a lower court ruling that Bucks County lawyers had acted in bad faith and wrongfully withheld public records and ordered them to pay $3,000 in civil penalties.

Khan was named the 2022 Government Lawyer of the Year by the Pennsylvania Bar Association for his work overseeing the Bucks County Law Department.

Bucks County Democratic chairman state Senator Steve Santarsiero (right) speaks with Bucks County District Attorney Joe Khan (left) at a rally supporting The Rainbow Room in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. (Photo by Meg Brock)

The Suburban Battle For America’s Future

Citing sources familiar with the August 2025 trip, Gallego, a close friend of disgraced ex-Congressman Eric Swalwell (D-CA), was informed of a credible threat to his life while attending a dinner with U.S. Embassy officials, NOTUS reported. The outlet said the embassy employees advised him not to leave the embassy compound, but Gallego later went out to a club in Bogotá, where he remained until approximately 3:00 am.

The report also states that Gallego invited multiple U.S. Embassy personnel to join him at the nightclub. At least one female staffer was among those invited, according to NOTUS.

In a statement, a spokesman for Gallego disputed the report’s description of the evening, saying the senator “coordinated closely with embassy security throughout the trip, including on the evening in question, and followed all security guidance.” 

“While at dinner at the conclusion of a successful congressional delegation trip, the Senator and his Chief of Staff invited Embassy staff to join them, a common way to recognize the work of those who support these visits,” the spokesman said. “As one of the first Colombian-American Senators elected to Congress, Senator Gallego was proud of the work done in Colombia and looks forward to continuing efforts to strengthen U.S. ties in the Southern Hemisphere.”

Gallego’s trip focused on discussions with Colombian officials about “organized crime, the business climate, and China’s growing influence,” according to his office. 

The Arizona Democrat has come under increasing scrutiny due to his ties to Swalwell, who resigned from Congress after being accused of sexual assault and misconduct. Gallego, who once rode camels shirtless in Qatar with Swalwell, initially defended his friendship before accusing him of living a double life. 

“I’ve read the San Francisco Chronicle’s reporting and I take it seriously,” he said. “What is described is indefensible. Women who come forward with accounts like this deserve to be heard with respect, not questioned or dismissed.”

The Tazewell County Circuit Court ordered a pause on the election results from going into effect on Wednesday. The judge in the case also ruled against the vote multiple times prior to the election, arguing that it is unconstitutional, according to WJLA.

Former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli told The Daily Wire that he’s optimistic that the state Supreme Court will ultimately strike down the referendum.

“Hang in there. This isn’t over in Virginia, and that’s just the Virginia chapter. I think there’s a lot of regret across the country about the redistricting play in Virginia,” he said.

The former state attorney general, who’s the national chairman of the Election Transparency Initiative, added that the effort kicked the bipartisan redistricting commission to the curb, as the maps do not expire until after the 2030 census.

“We have pretty good maps. That system is better than the alternatives we’ve ever had. And to have that thrown away with a three-to-one spending deluge from outside the state as just part of some Hakeem Jeffries political hackery is pretty painful,” he said.

“But the Virginia Supreme Court doesn’t care about any of that. What they care about is the Virginia Constitution, and was the law followed. And as long as they keep just that focus, I am confident that this referendum is gonna be thrown out,” Cuccinelli continued.

Circuit Court Judge Jack Hurley’s order noted that the House Joint Resolution 6007, which was the bill to open the door for the mid-decade redistricting vote, is unconstitutional because “there has not been an ensuing general election of the House of Delegates, and such ensuing general election cannot occur until 2027.”

He also wrote that the “ballot language” on the proposed amendment gave “voters a flagrantly misleading question” and it “did not accurately describe” what the actual proposal would do, according to 8 News.

However, Democrats plan to keep up their fight in court for the gerrymandered map.

“My office will immediately file an appeal in the Court of Appeals. As I said last night, Virginia voters have spoken, and an activist judge should not have veto power over the People’s vote,” Attorney General Jay Jones said in a statement on the case.

“We look forward to defending the outcome of last night’s election in court,” Jones continued.

The mid-decade redistricting effort drew millions in spending from proponents, including the backing of Gov. Abigail Spanberger and former President Barack Obama. Republicans also hit the campaign trail, hoping that turnout from rural, redder counties would overcome the deep blue suburbs of Washington, D.C.

The meeting comes as tensions remain high, with Israeli officials accusing Hezbollah of repeatedly violating the ceasefire. A recent Israeli strike targeting what it said was a threat to troops reportedly resulted in journalist casualties.

The talks, hosted by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, will bring together senior U.S. and regional officials, including U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Michel Issa, Counselor Michael Needham, Israeli Ambassador Yechiel Leiter, and Lebanese Ambassador Nada Hamadeh Moawad.

Lebanon is reportedly seeking a one-month extension of the current ceasefire.

The current agreement was announced by President Donald Trump as a 10-day pause that took effect at 5 p.m. ET on April 16, following calls with Lebanese President Joseph Aoun and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It allows Israel to take self-defense measures while requiring Lebanon to prevent Hezbollah from “carrying out attacks, operations, or hostile activities against Israeli targets.”

While Lebanese authorities have long sought to disarm Hezbollah, the Iran-backed group remains one of the most powerful political and military forces in the country. At the same time, it has been significantly weakened since launching attacks on Israel in the aftermath of the October 7, 2023, assault. Israel’s response—an extensive air campaign and ground invasion—killed longtime leader Hassan Nasrallah and degraded much of the group’s operational capacity.

Trump has emphasized that the arrangement is separate from broader U.S. efforts involving Iran.

“This deal is in no way subject to Lebanon, either, but the USA will, separately, work with Lebanon, and deal with the Hezbollah situation in an appropriate manner,” Trump said last week. “Israel will not be bombing Lebanon any longer. They are PROHIBITED from doing so by the U.S.A. Enough is enough!!!”

Despite the diplomatic push, tensions on the ground remain high. Israel has accused Hezbollah of violating the ceasefire multiple times and recently conducted a strike against terrorists in vehicles it says approached Israeli troops “in a manner that posed an immediate threat to their safety.” In response, the Israeli air force struck one of the vehicles, and a structure the individuals fled into.

The strike reportedly also resulted in the death of journalist Amal Khalil, who worked for the pro-Hezbollah outlet Al Akhbar, according to Lebanon’s National News Agency. Another photojournalist was reportedly injured.

Lebanese Prime Minister Nawaf Salam condemned the incident, writing on X that “targeting journalists and obstructing the access of rescue teams to them, and then the renewed targeting of those teams after they’d arrived, constitute described war crimes.”

The Israeli military acknowledged that two journalists were injured in the strike, but denied deliberately targeting media personnel.

The first round of talks, held on April 14, was described by the State Department as “productive,” raising cautious optimism for continued diplomacy. U.S. officials have said a sustained agreement could unlock significant reconstruction assistance for Lebanon, help stabilize its economy, and expand regional investment opportunities.

Lebanese officials have stressed the importance of fully implementing the cessation of hostilities agreement, alongside addressing the country’s worsening humanitarian crisis. Israel has expressed a willingness “to engage in direct negotiations to resolve all outstanding issues and achieve a durable peace that will strengthen security, stability, and prosperity in the region.”

The negotiations mark the most significant high-level engagement between Israel and Lebanon since 1993 and are seen as a potential stepping stone toward formal diplomatic talks between the two countries.

On the ground, Israeli forces remain in southern Lebanon as part of efforts to push Hezbollah away from the border. Hezbollah, meanwhile, has refused to disarm unless Israel fully withdraws, though it has largely adhered to the ceasefire while publicly opposing the negotiations.

Controversy erupted in recent days after an Israeli soldier damaged a statue of Jesus in the southern Lebanese village of Debel, prompting swift condemnation and a formal response from the Israel Defense Forces.

In a statement on X, the IDF expressed “deep regret,” calling the act a “moral failure” that contradicts its core values. The soldier responsible, along with the individual who filmed the incident, has been removed from combat duty and sentenced to 30 days of military detention. Additional troops present have been called in for review, with the Chief of the General Staff stating the conduct “far exceeds any acceptable standard.”

The IDF replaced the statue in “full coordination” with the local Christian community.

Law enforcement told Page Six that they are “aware of these cyberbullying accusations and that is a part of the active investigation.”

Fans began circulating screenshots from a community Facebook group that Sheets was a member of, which detailed the alleged bullying. “My apologies to all people in Lake Havasu, my identity has been stolen and it is not me,” a post Sheets shared in January says. The reality star named two people who he claimed were “attacking me with hundreds of negative posts on people and their businesses.”

Sheets described the two individuals as “very sick people.”

“I banned him from being in my shop because of what him and [the other person] do to people,” he wrote, adding that he contacted the FBI about filing stalking, harassment, and stolen identity charges.

Another Facebook post shared in March made similar accusations about these same individuals.

“I’m extremely sorry and sick over this, these people have ruined me,” Sheets wrote. “People are showing up to my work and wanting to harm me, the police are aware of this.” He next said, “if something happens to me it was, it was [them].” 

Fans were heartbroken by the announcement that the 67-year-old star had died in an apparent suicide. 

According to a press release from the Lake Havasu City Police Department, Sheets was found around 2 a.m. local time on Wednesday, April 22, after officers responded to “a reported deceased individual.”

“Upon arrival, officers located a male subject who suffered from what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head,” the release said. “The male was pronounced deceased on scene, and the Lake Havasu City Police Department’s Criminal Investigations Unit was notified and responded to the scene to assume the investigation.”

“Storage Wars” premiered on A&E in 2010 and just debuted its 17th season in February. The reality show depicts real-life buyers who bid on the contents of abandoned storage units. 

During his time on the show, Sheets earned the nickname “The Gambler” for frequently bidding high on units that could be worth nothing. Sheets retired from “Storage Wars” in 2023 and opened an antique shop in Arizona called Havasu Show Me Your Junk.

A spokesperson for A&E says in a statement, “We are saddened by the passing of a beloved member of our Storage Wars family, Darrell ‘The Gambler’ Sheets. Our thoughts are with his family and loved ones during this difficult time.”

His longtime co-star Brandi Passante shared in an Instagram post full of photo memories that she’s “at a loss for words” following Sheets’ untimely death.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Brandi Passante (@brandipassante)

“I would like to say to everyone, if you are struggling, if you feel hopeless or like no one cares.  I assure you they do!! You are not alone.  Please reach out for help,” Passante added after offering condolences to his family. “The grief from suicide is endless.  There is always help,” the caption added.

Sheets is survived by his ex-wife Kimber Wuerfel, his two children, Brandon and Tiffany, and a granddaughter, Zoie. Brandon frequently appeared with his dad on “Storage Wars” and had the nickname “The Sidebet.”

If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.

The film is expected to garner plenty of other nominations at the next Academy Awards, including Best Actor for Ryan Gosling, Best Picture, and Best Director. There’s no telling if the Academy will select Ortiz as a nominee even though he is technically eligible.

Variety also noted that his work could be recognized in the Special Achievement Award category, which was last given to “Toy Story” (1995).

“Typically, we talk about puppetry as a technical achievement, and it is,” Ortiz told the outlet.

“It’s a spectacle,” he added. “For me as a performer, however, that’s never my entry point. I’m interested in the heart of the character — what they’re trying to communicate, what they’re feeling underneath all of it. When we can take a medium like puppetry, which is often seen as decorative, and bring to life a character with a beating heart in a way that genuinely affects people, then we’re doing something truly meaningful.”

Ortiz previously discussed how much expertise and planning went into bringing Rocky to life. Fans of the film praised its overall authenticity, which included using a real puppet rather than relying on CGI.

“Rocky is super intelligent and has a mind like a computer — you never have to say anything twice to him,” Ortiz said of the character. “He’s a brilliant engineer. But his soul, to me, always felt like that of a little brother. There’s a little bit of this anxious, 14-year-old boy who really wants to be invited to the party.”

“What I loved about the process was at no point did [directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller] or anybody on the team ever treat me like I was a technician, or like a plumber who was brought in to fix a specific thing,” the puppeteer added. “At every point they would ask, ‘what do you think, would Rocky do this or that?’ And I’d think about it and tell them exactly how Rocky would feel.”

“Project Hail Mary” dominated the box office last month with an $80.5 million domestic opening weekend, with a 95% critic score and a 96% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. By the second weekend, the film had crossed $300 million worldwide and became the second-biggest non-franchise opening over the past decade, second only to “Oppenheimer.”

Although China may soon feel pressure from reduced energy flows through the Strait of Hormuz, Beijing’s approach so far has been defined by restraint, risk management, and opportunism, according to experts interviewed by The Daily Wire.

“For Beijing, the primary objective is to mitigate the downside,” said Elizabeth Economy, a Hargrove Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution with expertise on Chinese domestic and foreign policy. “This includes navigating through the threat of a global economic recession, managing its disparate relations with countries in the Middle East, and ensuring that it maintains access to the energy it needs.”

Roughly 45% to 50% of China’s crude oil imports pass through the Strait of Hormuz. In 2025, more than half of its crude oil and nearly one-third of its liquefied natural gas came from the Middle East, according to Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

Official Chinese government data shows 42% of its crude (about 4.9 million barrels per day) comes from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and the United Arab Emirates. An estimated additional 12% comes from Iran, according to Kpler, even though Beijing has reported no Iranian imports since 2022. Oil from the Iranian-linked illicit “dark fleet” is often relabeled as from other countries, or transferred to different ships to disguise its origin because of U.S. sanctions.

Infographic with map showing how oil from Iran is transported to China circumventing sanctions with transfers to other vessels near Singapore (Graphic by AFP via Getty Images)

The U.S.-imposed blockade on vessels traveling to or from Iranian ports and its coastline has put increasing pressure on the regime and its primary buyer: China. 

“Beijing has reportedly been in contact with Tehran on shipping and de-escalation issues and has urged restraint,” Craig Singleton, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said.

One vessel that drew international attention this week was the Rich Starry. A sanctioned-tanker bound for China and carrying roughly 250,000 barrels of methanol loaded in the United Arab Emirates, it appeared to transit the Strait of Hormuz before turning back toward Iranian waters after encountering the blockade.

The United States expanded the blockade last week to target Iranian-linked sanctioned vessels worldwide. These ships, known as the “dark fleet,” have allowed Tehran to continue exporting oil despite sanctions by using tankers with obscured ownership, falsified tracking data, and other methods to conceal the origin of Iranian crude — much of which flows to China.

That expanded effort was enforced in the Indo-Pacific for the first time this week, marking a shift beyond the Middle East as U.S. forces intercepted and boarded the Iran-linked sanctioned M/T Tifani.

Even if the blockade continues, China has significant reserves to cushion the impact of the blockade or conflict in the short term.

Overnight, U.S. forces conducted a right-of-visit, maritime interdiction and boarding of the stateless sanctioned M/T Tifani without incident in the INDOPACOM area of responsibility.⁰⁰As we have made clear, we will pursue global maritime enforcement efforts to disrupt illicit… pic.twitter.com/EGwDe3dBI3

— Department of War 🇺🇸 (@DeptofWar) April 21, 2026

“The impact on China’s energy access appears relatively limited,” said Singleton. “China has spent years building up significant strategic reserves and investing in alternative energy sources, including nuclear and renewables, to buffer against supply shocks.”

According to geospatial analytics firm Kayrros, China had roughly 1.39 billion barrels of oil in storage — enough to cover about 120 days of net crude imports at 2025 levels. Additional oil is still in transit, awaiting customs clearance, or in floating storage in Asia.

Still, those buffers are not a long-term solution. Beijing may eventually turn to demand reduction measures, including curbing consumption or allowing state-owned energy firms to raise prices, according to the Columbia University-run center.

Smaller Chinese refineries, known as “teapot refineries,” could feel the pressure first. Many shifted from Venezuelan crude to cheap Iranian oil after the United States moved against Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro. Operating on thin margins, these refiners are particularly vulnerable to price spikes or prolonged disruption.

“In terms of price, China is facing the same problem the rest of the world is,” Michael Sobolik, a Senior Fellow at Hudson Institute focusing on U.S.-China relations said. “Their smaller refiners are struggling, for sure. But in terms of supply, Beijing will be fine, at least for now.”

“But the longer this conflict goes on, the tougher it’ll become,” he added.

China’s reliance on Iranian oil also creates broader diplomatic challenges.

After the United States and Israel launched attacks on Iran in Operation Epic Fury, the regime responded with rocket and drone attacks on its Arab neighbors, including Bahrain, Cyprus, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates — many of which China depends on for energy and trade.

That leaves Beijing trying to maintain ties with both Iran and its regional rivals at the same time.

Sobolik said China’s own role in supporting Iran’s missiles adds another layer of complexity.

“It supplied rocket fuel for Iranian missiles, and Tehran has fired those missiles at its Arab neighbors,” Sobolik said. “Beijing needs good relations with those countries for energy reasons, so Beijing may encounter some difficult diplomatic dynamics ahead.”

Though a continued conflict could force China to diversify or take sides, experts say a major shift is unlikely for now.

“Iran has historically been a discounted and politically useful supplier for Beijing,” said Singleton. “Over time, this could create stronger incentives for China to diversify supply, but a full realignment would likely require a more durable disruption or a fundamentally different regime in Tehran.”

Though China was rumored to play a role in pushing negotiations that led to the April 8 ceasefire, experts say Beijing’s role may have been more limited.

“It looks like China leaned on Iran to accept a round of negotiations in Pakistan,” said Sobolik. However, he cautioned that Beijing’s influence over Tehran has clear limits.

“China can’t guarantee Iran’s safety, nor can they compel the regime to give up its quest for nuclear weapons,” Sobolik said.

China also refrained from publicly taking a high-profile diplomatic role in negotiations, to have flexibility and avoid being blamed if talks failed. 

Economy said this approach “minimizes China’s political risk and enables Beijing to avoid blame or embarrassment if the negotiations stall or collapse.” It also helps China avoid being “called out for hypocrisy when it talks about protection of international law and respect for sovereignty, given its support for Russia’s war in Ukraine.”

The Iran conflict may be a topic in the upcoming U.S.-China summit scheduled for May 14–15, when President Donald Trump is set to meet Xi Jinping in China, but experts say the conflict has not significantly damaged relations between the two countries.

“It has introduced additional friction, particularly around energy flows and the blockade, but it does not appear to have fundamentally altered the broader trajectory of the relationship,” said Singleton. “Both sides still seem interested in managing tensions and preserving space for engagement where possible.”

Economy offered a similar assessment, saying the conflict has not derailed ties ahead of the summit, which remains a priority for both governments.

US President Donald Trump (L) and China’s President Xi Jinping shake hands as they arrive for talks at the Gimhae Air Base, located next to the Gimhae International Airport in Busan on October 30, 2025. (Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP) (Photo by ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images)

“I don’t think it has soured the relationship,” Economy said. “The summit remains a priority for both Trump and Xi, and the issues they will be discussing are largely bilateral in nature.”

She added that the meeting could still be postponed if the blockade or a more active conflict against Iran is ongoing. 

“The biggest focus for the summit — barring a new major international crisis — will be trade,” Economy said. “It is the one channel that both countries are most eager to stabilize.”

Sobolik noted that both Trump and China have “been careful to maintain positive rhetoric,” with one exception: reports that China was considering selling surface-to-air missiles to Iran.

“There were reports that China was about to sell surface-to-air missiles to Iran, which would’ve targeted U.S. helicopters and close air support planes flying over Iran,” he said, adding that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has also threatened secondary sanctions on Chinese banks with Iranian accounts.

China responded by denying the reports, calling them “purely fabricated” and threatening to take “countermeasures” if such tariff hikes were implemented.

China is not simply reacting to the ongoing conflict — it is also looking for openings to advance its broader geopolitical vision.

“Is there an opportunity to demonstrate the value of China’s alternative order,” Economy said, “for example by underscoring the value of mediation over military action and the weakness of the U.S.-led alliance system in managing the conflict?”

That balancing act of minimizing risk while probing for advantage has become the defining feature of China’s response to the war.

Maxwell appeared for a virtual deposition before the committee in February, but she pled the Fifth Amendment and said she would only testify on Epstein’s crimes if she was granted clemency. Maxwell’s demand has caused some debate in the Oversight Committee over a potential pardon, which would have to be granted by President Donald Trump.

“My committee’s split on that,” Comer told POLITICO. “I don’t speak for my committee.”

He did not name any of his colleagues who have voiced support for pardoning Maxwell, but he clarified that he is not on the side of lawmakers who want Trump to offer her the deal.

“I think it looks bad. Honestly, other than Epstein, the worst person in this whole investigation is Maxwell,” he said.

The lawmakers who support a pardon for the convicted sex trafficker appear to be on the Republican side of the aisle. Rep. Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, said that Democrats are united in their opposition to a pardon for Maxwell.

“That would be a huge step backwards, and, quite frankly, so disrespectful to the survivors. She is a known abuser. She is a known liar,” Garcia said. “If the DOJ or Oversight Republicans are out there trying to negotiate some sort of pardon that is … not only a huge slap in the face to this investigation, to anyone, to the American public, it’s a part of a massive cover up.”

Maxwell, who is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for helping Epstein acquire underage girls for sex, has been pushing for a pardon from Trump for nearly a year. The president was asked last October if he was considering a pardon for Maxwell and said he wasn’t aware that she had requested clemency. Trump added that he would “take a look at it” and “speak to the DOJ.”

After Maxwell refused to answer questions before the Oversight Committee in February, Trump was asked again if he would consider a pardon for her.

“It’s something I haven’t thought about,” he said again. “I’m allowed to do it, but it’s something I have not thought about.”

Last week, Maxwell’s lawyer, David Markus, told POLITICO that he remains optimistic that Maxwell will receive a pardon.

“I don’t know what the percentages are,” he said. “There’s a good chance and for good reason that she would get a pardon.”

Markus added that he has not yet spoken directly with the administration about Maxwell’s request.

“I don’t think now is the best time to do it, with everything going on,” he said, referring to the ongoing backlash to the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein investigation. “We’re not on a full court press right now.”

The Oversight Committee, which has been conducting its own probe of the Epstein case, has interviewed multiple high-profile people connected to the convicted pedophile. Last month, former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were grilled by the committee over their relationship with Epstein.

The Oversight Committee plans to interview Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates in the coming weeks.

“It makes my ears red,” a visibly incensed Mullin fired back following Schumer’s claim that Border Patrol and ICE are agencies “nobody respects.” Mullin continued his blistering counter-attack: “It takes a lot to get me upset. But Chuck Schumer, no one respects you. The definition of a lying scumbag politician, that is you; you would be the definition if you Googled you right now.”

Mullin’s righteous indignation comes after Schumer has suggested ICE could become a “rogue” force. The DHS Secretary was quick to point out the staggering hypocrisy of a man whom he said enjoys 24/7 taxpayer-funded security while simultaneously working to defund the men and women protecting the rest of the country. “How about he walks around these city streets without a detail? I wonder how safe he would feel,” Mullin challenged.

DHS Sec. Markwayne Mullin TEARS into Chuck Schumer after the Senate minority leader said NO ONE respects ICE and Border Patrol:

CHUCK SCHUMER: "Two groups… Border Patrol and ICE… that nobody respects in this country."

MARKWAYNE MULLIN: "Chuck Schumer, no one respects you.… pic.twitter.com/TyuXjqOrdx

— Fox News (@FoxNews) April 23, 2026

The verbal fireworks exploded just as the Senate GOP moved to bypass Democratic obstruction through budget reconciliation. Early Thursday, in a 50-48 vote, Republicans advanced a plan to dedicate roughly $70 billion to ICE and Border Patrol — a move necessitated by Schumer’s refusal to fund the agencies through traditional means. When California Democrat Senator Adam Schiff attacked “multi-million-dollar surge in spending and contracts to amass deadly weapons and ammunition since the start of the second Trump administration,” in February, the DHS press office responded, “A law enforcement agency purchasing law enforcement officers guns and non-lethal resources — really riveting reporting.”

For Mullin, the issue isn’t just about the budget resolution — it’s about the safety of American streets. He noted that Schumer had years during the Biden administration to address the border, but instead chose to let “criminals run amok.” Now, as the Trump administration moves to arm 12,000 new agents to restore order, the Democrats are resorting to name-calling and fear-mongering.

As the budget battle moves to the House, the lines are drawn. On one side stands Schumer, decrying “lawlessness” while opposing the very funding needed to end it; on the other stands Mullin and a GOP majority finally willing to give federal agents the tools they need to do their jobs. As Mullin made clear, if Schumer wants to find the source of the “chaos” he claims to despise, he doesn’t need an oversight report — he just needs a mirror.

Extreme far-Left organizations are embracing and influencing Democrat candidates across our ticket. U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed is attending rallies with Hasan Piker. Current secretary of state and gubernatorial candidate Jocelyn Benson is the star operative of a group indicted by the Department of Justice for funding extreme, neo-Nazi organizations.

I’m running for governor of Michigan because the state that has decided the last four presidential elections is about to face the most consequential gubernatorial race in the country.

Jocelyn Benson has already manipulated Michigan’s elections twice. At 19 years old, she interned for the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) Intelligence Project, supposedly learning how to infiltrate neo-Nazi organizations. Yesterday, that organization was indicted.

In 2020, Benson mailed absentee ballot applications to every registered voter in Michigan, not every active voter, but every registered voter, whether or not they still lived there. She instructed election clerks statewide to presume the validity of every mail-in ballot without verifying signatures. A nonprofit she founded received a $12 million Zuckerbucks grant on the eve of that election and funneled it to Democrat-aligned political operatives whose sole job was turning out Democrat voters. Her order instructing clerks to stop verifying signatures was found illegal in 2021. Rather than face consequences, she was rewarded with a Presidential Citizens Medal from President Joe Biden.

She issued the same order in 2024. Federal courts struck it down again. She then deliberately kept Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on the Michigan ballot after he had formally withdrawn and endorsed President Trump, a calculated attempt to split the conservative vote and hand Michigan to Kamala Harris. Judge David McKeague of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals did not mince words: “In defiance of the U.S. Constitution and state election law, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson manipulated the presidential ballot in Michigan.” A second Sixth Circuit judge agreed her actions had already cast doubt over the integrity of Michigan’s electoral process.

Millions of patriots in Michigan turned out to vote and made the 2026 too big to rig, and President Trump went on to carry Michigan. Now, Benson wants a promotion. And she is still serving as secretary of state, overseeing the very election in which she is running. That alone should disqualify her.

To understand Jocelyn Benson, you have to understand the organization that built her.

The SPLC is not a civil rights organization. It was a machine built to manufacture division, fundraise off fear, and deploy operatives to use racial chaos as a path to institutional power. Its co-founder admitted that the organization’s overriding purpose was making money. The DOJ just confirmed the method: manufacture the hatred, point at it publicly, collect the donations, and cut checks to the people doing the hating.

Benson started with SPLC at 19 and became a board member in 2014. She did not stumble into this organization; she was built by it. And she carried everything it taught her directly into Michigan’s secretary of state office.

Just this week, the DOJ indicted the SPLC on 11 federal counts for secretly paying at least $3 million to members of the Ku Klux Klan, the National Socialist Party of America, the United Klans of America, and the Aryan Nations — some payments which began the same year Benson joined their board. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche was direct: “The SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”

Not fighting it. Manufacturing it.

They labeled Moms for Liberty an extremist group. They put the Family Research Council, a mainstream Christian policy organization, on their hate map. They designated Turning Point USA alongside the KKK in their public database before Charlie Kirk was shot and killed.

That is the machine that built Jocelyn Benson.

The Trump DOJ has sued Benson for refusing to hand over voter registration records required by federal law, including those for over 17,000 registered voters age 100 or older. Michigan has registered 105 percent of its adult population to vote. She was held in contempt by the Michigan House for refusing to turn over basic election training manuals that would reveal how clerks were instructed to process ballots.

The state that decides presidential elections cannot have its ballots managed by someone federal judges have already called a manipulator. We cannot let her Spanberger our Michigan. We have too much at stake from the top to the bottom of the ticket

Jocelyn Benson is not an outlier. She is the next generation of Democrat operatives, trained to divide, manufacture threats, suppress opposition, and acquire power.

Michigan gave my family a shot at the American dream. By the grace of God, I am running for governor to make sure that promise is real again for every family in this state, not just the ones with the right political connections. My purpose has always been to use my blessings to be a blessing to others. That is what took me to Baghdad. That is what brought me home to build. That is what sent me to Congress. And that is what is calling me to Lansing.

Jocelyn Benson was built by a machine that profits from division. I was built by Michigan and called by God to serve it. My loyalty is to my Creator, my country, and the families of this great state. Not to a machine. Not to a party. To the people.

Michigan, America is watching.

***

John James is a West Point graduate, Ranger qualified Apache combat pilot, Iraq War veteran, Michigan job creator, and U.S. Congressman from Michigan’s 10th District. He is a candidate for governor of Michigan.

And yet that’s exactly the position influencer Harry Sisson found himself in at the University of Virginia, when he joined The Daily Wire host for the latest installment on CBS News and The Free Press’s “Things That Matter” debate series. Brown and Sisson sparred on culture, economics, and the direction of Gen Z politics, with Brown pressing an argument rooted in culture and faith and Sisson leaning on conventional liberal talking points.

Brown opened by framing the debate at a civilizational level, rejecting the idea that current political and economic frustrations can be pinned solely on former President Donald Trump.

“It may be flashy and easy to say it’s all Donald Trump’s fault,” she said, “but in reality where we have arrived at today is because of the systematic removal of God from our society.” She returned to that theme repeatedly, arguing, “We lack the common shared humanity that bound us all together — that is, God.”

.@harryjsisson and his leftist counterparts like to chase clicks by blaming all of Gen Z’s problems on President Trump.

But @theisabelb identifies the root of the crisis facing Gen Z: the systematic removal of God from our society. pic.twitter.com/LJBlDv1tlQ

— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) April 23, 2026

Sisson, by contrast, focused on attacking Trump’s rhetoric, claiming “Trump said Kamala Harris is going to import a million, gazillion people … and he said I’m focused on affordability … and none of that has happened.”

The debate sharpened when it turned to foreign policy. Sisson asked, “What war did Joe Biden get into?” Brown fired back: “Joe Biden directly propped up and funded foreign wars around the world … we sent money to the Iranian regime — we sent $200 billion to the war in Ukraine.”

While the exact figures are debated, it is well-documented that the U.S. committed over $180 billion in aid to Ukraine since 2022, according to a Defense Department inspector general report from 2024, alongside controversial financial transfers tied to Iran and the aftermath of the Afghanistan withdrawal — making Sisson’s implication of non-involvement difficult to sustain.

On domestic economics, Sisson claimed, “We now have less workers than jobs open right now,” echoing a common labor shortage argument. Brown immediately countered: “So why are 10 million Gen Zers unemployed?” As youth unemployment has remained persistently higher than the national average, and labor force participation among younger workers has lagged, complicating the simplistic “more jobs than workers” narrative.

“Immigrants in virtually every piece of economic data makes our country better, they make our culture better, they make us better as people,” Sisson claimed, drawing a sharp contrast with Brown’s argument that mass immigration can suppress wages in certain sectors, a concern supported in part by labor market research showing localized wage pressure in low-skill industries.

.@harryjsisson DENIES that mass migration hurts Gen Z @theisabelb: “It is a system that has been consistently selling out the opportunities of our generation for everyone else around the world.”

HS: “The idea that immigrants are coming in and stealing jobs is just NOT TRUE.” pic.twitter.com/HeXoo8Kvow

— Daily Wire (@realDailyWire) April 23, 2026

Brown then shifted the conversation to culture and social stability, noting that “Young people, especially young men are looking for unafraid, on offense conservatism,” she said, outlining a platform of limited government, reduced foreign intervention, and education reform against “woke slop.”

Throughout the exchange, Sisson often defaulted to dismissiveness, responding, “I don’t even know what woke slop means.” Brown tied her argument on education reform to a deeper argument about meaning and social cohesion, warning against what she described as a drift toward “radical Marxism.”

As The Daily Wire has frequently reported, the Biden administration spent millions promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in public schools, efforts the Trump administration has worked to roll back.

She also leaned on research from scholars like the Institute for Family Studies’ Brad Wilcox, noting that “married moms are three times happier than unmarried childless women,” and arguing that declining family formation correlates with rising mental health struggles among young people — a claim that aligns with broader data showing higher reported happiness and stability among married populations.

Sisson’s arguments, by contrast, reflect a more familiar institutional liberalism that often assumes its premises rather than defending them. Claims like immigration universally improving outcomes or dismissing concerns about foreign entanglements land differently with a generation that has grown up through economic instability, pandemic disruption, and now renewed geopolitical tension.

The Trump administration, while still dominant within Republican politics, is navigating a complicated stretch, particularly on foreign policy as tensions with Iran continue to hang over the national conversation. For younger voters, especially those wary of prolonged overseas entanglements, that creates an opening and a risk. There’s a clear demand for a version of conservatism that is assertive at home but restrained abroad, something Brown explicitly nods to with her emphasis on “no foreign intervention” and keeping “American tax dollars at home.”

Rick Jackson, a billionaire healthcare executive hoping to succeed Governor Brian Kemp, has pledged to ban DEI programs in state government and public education. The nonprofit he founded, goBeyondProfit, once encouraged companies to guarantee final interview slots to women and racial minorities, adopt “aspirational” DEI goals, and read anti-white activist Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist.” 

Jackson has positioned himself as a conservative outsider who will make Georgia the lead in the nation for criminal deportations, get wokeness out of schools, “ban DEI insanity and criminalize reverse discrimination,” and cut the state income tax in half. The Republican hopeful, who founded the Georgia-based Jackson Healthcare in 2000, has loaned his campaign $50 million. 

“Rick hires like the Georgia Bulldogs: Only the best players hit the field. Period,” Jackson’s campaign told The Daily Wire. The campaign added that many other conservative business leaders were connected to goBeyondProfit. 

“Many of Georgia’s most successful and conservative business leaders are program ambassadors or members including Bernie Marcus of Home Depot until his passing and Chick-Fil-A,” the campaign said. 

Rick Jackson for Governor.

In 2017 Jackson and his son started goBeyondProfit, an organization that encourages corporate generosity and social engagement. In January 2021, goBeyondProfit posted a video series entitled “Leading a Thriving Workplace with Race in Mind.” Jackson is still listed as an ambassador of the organization. 

The videos featured DEI consultant Darah Okeke and Matthew Harrison, the former vice president of human resources at Jackson’s healthcare company, discussing what actions corporate leaders should take to ensure that DEI is in the “fabric of the company.” 

In a video entitled “Action Steps to a Diverse Workplace,” Harrison said that it would be “cringeworthy” for corporate leaders to “do nothing” related to DEI. 

Okeke said that corporations needed to make room in their budget for outside DEI consultants to come in or to create DEI-focused internal departments. 

“I think a lot of people poo-poo DEI and don’t understand that it’s a true discipline, that there is a lot of research in this space,” she said. “It’s very difficult to be a D&I expert or an HR practitioner, and to be given these lofty goals of what you want to do to advance diversity within an organization, but no budget to really support you and back you up.”

Later in the video, Okeke said that companies should adopt a “diverse slate initiative” for interviewing prospective employees. 

“When you’re interviewing for a particular requisition, then you have, as a practice and a policy, that you will make sure that you interview at least one woman and at least one person of color, at that final stage of the interview process,” she said. “I’ve seen it done at multiple workplaces and seen it work extremely well in terms of increasing the diversity of those individuals that were hiring for certain roles.”

Harrison then jumped in and said he had adopted similar measures while working at Jackson Healthcare. 

“Here at Jackson Healthcare, I took over leading talent acquisition here in June of 2019 and put that in place, and within a year, we saw [an] increase in the number of people of color that we hired into new roles. It went from 9% to 25%,” he said. 

Jackson Healthcare did not respond to a request for comment from The Daily Wire, but previously said it does not hire based on DEI principles. 

Okeke then said that companies should specifically focus on recruiting from historically black universities, black fraternities and sororities, and minority-industry groups. She also said that companies should use their “black talent” and “women talent” to refer companies to prospective employees. 

Harrison said that interview panels should be racially diverse. 

“It’s important that the interview panel that that person is interviewing with is diverse,” Harrison said. “Someone who is of color, it may mean something to them to be able to see that there are other people similar to them that took part in the hiring process or will be a part of this organization that they’re joining.”

Harrison also said that Jackson Healthcare had “associate network groups” where white people were allowed to learn what it was like to be a racial minority and men were allowed to learn about the experiences of women. 

“It allows for people who are not a part of that group to be educated on what it’s potentially like to be another, whether it’s being a woman, being a person of color,” he said. 

Okeke said that she agreed with opponents of racially-focused groups who argued it was separating people by race, but said it was needed for them to feel safe. 

“There’s this kind of idea that, ‘Well, aren’t you separating even more, or self-segregating, by having these groups that are focused on the black employee resource group, or the women’s group?’” she said. “But my thought is that, ‘Well, yeah,’ I mean we are separating ourselves, but we’re also creating a safe space and an environment that can be very difficult for us.” 

At the end of the video Okeke said that she recommended reading Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist,” saying that “being an anti-racist is a proactive effort.”

Screenshot from goBeyondProfit video.

Other videos posted in the series included “Beyond Bias & Blind Spots,” which focused on the idea of implicit bias and the “Impact of Racial Inequity at Work.” 

The bias video talked about the idea of so-called “microaggressions” and suggested that business leaders take time to confess their own biases to co-workers while the other video claimed that the “vestiges of slavery” still impact the American workplace today. 

Okeke said that the idea that people can be colorblind, the idea that one should strive to treat all people the same regardless of race, was flawed.

“Unless you actually have the medical diagnosis of color blindness, you are not color blind. You see me. I am a beautiful black woman sitting in front of you,” she said. “You see my color, you see my locks, you see who I am.”

Jackson’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment from The Daily Wire.

Throughout 2021, goBeyondProfit posted a number of articles claiming that employees wanted their bosses to talk about race, embrace “inclusive leadership,” and gradually implement DEI programs. 

Other candidates vying for the Republican nomination include Lt. Governor Burt Jones, Attorney General Chris Carr, and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. The Republican primary is set for May 19, 2026.

The former kidnapping victim who became an advocate for child safety and an ABC News correspondent said she never expected this would happen.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Elizabeth Smart (@elizabeth_smart_official)

“When I posted the pictures in my story of me standing on stage in a bikini it probably shocked many of you, and I understand the shock because had you asked me if I would ever compete in a bodybuilding show a couple of years ago I would have said, ‘absolutely not! Never in 100 years!’” she wrote in the caption of an Instagram post shared Wednesday.

This message was accompanied by a photo of her competing at the Wasatch Warrior competition in Salt Lake City on Saturday. She took home first place in the Fit Model division, a category for entry-level female bodybuilders.

“This is actually the fourth competition I’ve done, but I was too afraid to post it before,” Smart revealed. “Worried that I would be judged, not taken seriously, somehow perceived as less than or now unworthy to continue work as an advocate for all survivors. Then this past weekend it struck me how eerily familiar these feelings and thoughts are for too many survivors.”

As for her reasons, Smart wrote that she didn’t want to “reach the end of my life and look back and feel regret for only living a half-life, not going after all the things I want to do and try.”

“This was a big change for me, it was hard, it pushed me, challenged me not to give up. I am so proud of myself for doing this. I am so proud of my body, and I want to celebrate it,” she wrote. “My body has carried me through every worst day, every hellish grueling experience, it’s created and nurtured three beautiful children, my body has risen to every single challenge life has presented it with, and carried me through so I refuse to be ashamed of it.”

Smart was taken from her Salt Lake home in 2002 when she was 14 years old. She was discovered by police 9 months later. Smart had been kidnapped from her bedroom at knifepoint by Brian David Mitchell and his wife, Wanda Barzee. Smart was raped daily by Mitchell as he hid her at campsites around Utah.

Mitchell was convicted and is serving a life sentence while Barzee was released in 2018. She was arrested again in 2025, however, after violating conditions of her sex offender status.

In the aftermath of the crime, Smart became an advocate for other victims of sexual assault by creating the Elizabeth Smart Foundation. She has been married since 2012 and has three children.

There is a Netflix documentary about her ordeal called, “Kidnapped: Elizabeth Smart.”

Texas Governor Greg Abbott (R) accused the city of violating the terms of the public safety grants after the passage of an ordinance that prevented local police from holding individuals with immigration arrest warrants for 30 minutes while ICE arrives at a scene.

Houston Democratic Mayor John Whitmire revised the ordinance with the help of Abbott’s office after voting in favor of it, according to KHOU. The new version states that Houston police will comply with federal laws and can temporarily hold someone for as long as reasonably necessary.

The Houston City Council passed it in a 13-4 vote, KHOU reported.

A spokesperson for Abbott told The Daily Wire it’s “a step in the right direction after Houston leaders put public safety at risk with reckless policies that undermined law enforcement.”

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) sued the city of Houston over the original ordinance, arguing that “no Texas city will be a safe harbor for illegals.”

Paxton said Wednesday that the legal pressure forced Houston to take “action to reverse its sanctuary policy.”

“My office will continue to review the updated ordinance and ensure that the City of Houston fully complies with SB 4 and does not restrict law enforcement’s ability to assist ICE and enforce immigration law,” Paxton wrote on X Wednesday.

Houston originally passed the ordinance barring local police from assisting ICE on April 8. That led Abbott to threaten to pull the $110 million, arguing the original version of the ordinance resulted in a breach of contract over the grants.

The state requires that recipients of the public safety grants must work with ICE. If they refuse to assist ICE, “they forfeit the money” and must “repay to the state every single dollar they have received,” Abbott told The Daily Wire in a recent interview.

“As President Trump sometimes says, they have no cards,” Abbott said. “We have all the cards in this, and they are going to lose, and they’re not going to be able to balance their budget.”

Last week, Whitmire said the city was facing a “crisis situation,” adding that “the potential loss of state funding poses real challenges” for local authorities and for security at the upcoming 2026 FIFA World Cup.

Those were the words of our former vegetable-in-chief, Joe Biden, who claimed the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was the moral catalyst for his entire presidential campaign.

A federal indictment now suggests that the catalyst was manufactured, and the people who built it were the same people weeping the loudest over it.

The Justice Department has indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) for purportedly funding the Unite the Right rally, assisting with its messaging and coordination, and secretly funneling over $3 million to the leaders and organizers of the very racist groups the SPLC claimed to be dismantling — among them the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nation, and the National Alliance. Their paid informants weren’t just monitoring extremist groups; they were actively promoting them, while the SPLC simultaneously denounced those same groups in its publications and solicited donor money to fight them.

Jaw. Drop.

Yes. An organization whose stated mission was to “dismantle white supremacy and confront hate across the country” funded white supremacy and hate across the country.

The audacity is seriously breathtaking.

Not only did the Left fabricate Donald Trump’s response to Charlottesville — he did not call neo-Nazis “Very Fine People”; he explicitly said they should be “condemned, totally” — but it now appears they had a hand in orchestrating the very spectacle they used to build that lie.

To appreciate the full scope of this, we need to examine the Southern Poverty Law Center and its omnipresence in our daily lives, constantly working overtime to paint Republicans as the bad guys.

Founded in 1971 in Montgomery, Alabama, the SPLC positioned itself as the preeminent watchdog of American hate, “combating white supremacy.” A noble mission, in theory. In practice, it became something far more useful: a political targeting operation. As genuine white supremacy became an increasingly marginal force in American life — because America is, by any honest measure, not a racist country, and hasn’t been in years — the SPLC pivoted. Rather than declare victory and close up shop, it expanded its definition of “extremism” to encompass mainstream conservatism. The mission was simple: label conservatives BAD, and use that label to cut them off from corporate America.

These weren’t fringe operations, either. The SPLC worked with Amazon, PayPal, Google, Facebook, Apple, and Mastercard, among others, telling them who not to do business with — and that list included perfectly peaceful, normal conservatives. Yet all the while they were warning companies away from “neo-Nazis,” they were funding neo-Nazis. This is Aesop’s “wolf in sheep’s clothing” for our modern political era.

The informants — referred to as “field sources” or simply “Fs” — were not heroic spies. They were key players in the movements that the SPLC claimed to oppose.

Take “F-37” — secretly paid by the SPLC, a member of the online leadership chat that planned the 2017 Unite the Right event, and an attendee who went at the direct instruction of the SPLC. F-37 made racist postings and coordinated transportation to the event. The SPLC paid him more than $270,000.

F-30 led the National Socialist Party of America, was the former director of a faction of the Aryan Nations, and was a former member of the Ku Klux Klan. The SPLC even featured F-30 in their “Extremist File” on their own website — while simultaneously cutting him checks totaling more than $70,000.

F-9 was affiliated with the neo-Nazi organization the National Alliance and actively fundraised for it. He served as a paid SPLC informant for more than 20 years and was secretly paid over $1,000,000.

These findings are egregious, plentiful, and absolutely unsurprising.

From its founding, the Democratic Party defended slavery, fought its abolition, and launched the Civil War to preserve the institution. The Republican Party was founded in 1854 as an explicitly anti-slavery counterforce. Abraham Lincoln — the first Republican president — was elected on the promise of containing slavery’s expansion. Democrats smeared him, seceded from the Union, waged war against his government, and ultimately assassinated him for the crime of wanting to free black Americans. The Ku Klux Klan was founded by Democrats in Tennessee in 1866. Today, Democrats continue to fund the very groups they now pretend they never supported.

The Left has spent decades constructing elaborate historical revisionism around a so-called “party switch” — the theory that the parties essentially traded ideological identities sometime in the mid-20th century, conveniently absolving Democrats of their entire history. It is, at best, a dramatic oversimplification.

The racist Dixiecrats did not defect en masse to the Republican Party. They largely stayed put. What changed was the branding. The plantation politics of control and dependency simply modernized, metastasizing into a federal welfare apparatus that keeps constituencies loyal and politicians powerful.

Republicans were never the party of slaves. Republicans were never the party of white supremacy. Republicans ended slavery, passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, and fought Democrats’ racism every single step of the way.

Why do Democrats do it? It must get exhausting, constantly rewriting history, tearing down the institutions they manipulated, and blaming every grievance in life on oppressors — when the true oppressor lies at the heart of the Donkey. 

The Left’s power is predicated on a specific narrative: that America is irredeemably racist, that Republicans are its standard-bearers, and that only Democratic governance stands between marginalized communities and existential threat. Strip away that narrative, and there is no justification for DEI mandates, race-based policy, or collectivist governance.

The reality is that America is an extraordinarily tolerant country — so they have to manufacture racism through organizations like the SPLC, to keep the fear alive, the donations flowing, and the power grab rolling.

Democrats have a lot of nerve pointing fingers from the plantation they built and never abandoned. But they can’t stop, and they won’t. They have to lie. They have to fabricate. Because it is all they have left.

Don’t fall for it. The blueprint of this particular lie is now visible in court documents. 

I wish we could all just move on and be normal Americans again. We can forgive past errors — history is messy, and both sides have stains. But I fear nothing will change until we stop letting them rewrite reality, gaslight the country, and play Big Brother with every label they slap on us.

America doesn’t have a white supremacy problem. It has a Democrats-funding-white-supremacy-groups problem, and now the receipts are in federal court.

Wolff’s central thesis is that the Athletics’ relocation—currently in a transitional phase in Sacramento before a planned move to Las Vegas in 2028—was caused by the Giants’ refusal to relinquish territorial rights to Santa Clara County. Wolff argues that the Giants’ iron grip on San Jose, the Bay Area’s most populous city, stripped the A’s of the leverage needed to secure a viable future in Northern California.

The roots of the animosity date back to 1990, when the A’s—then under the benevolent ownership of the Haas family—granted the Giants the rights to Santa Clara County to help them avoid a move out of state. Wolff contends these rights were conditional on the Giants actually moving to San Jose. When the Giants instead built Oracle Park in San Francisco, Wolff argues the territory should have reverted to shared status.

“The Giants’ position really, really messed us up in trying to even negotiate with Oakland,” Wolff told The Athletic. He described the subsequent MLB blue-ribbon panel, which spent years studying the issue without resolution, as a “cruel joke,” adding, “What I did not realize was that the amazing individuals comprising MLB … attract, employ or have around deceitful and dangerous sycophants. Not all, but some. And these sycophants assassinated the A’s!”

Giants chairman Greg Johnson has countered these claims, stating his responsibility is to protect his organization’s strength, noting that San Jose represents a massive portion of the Giants’ fan base and revenue.

The current acrimony is the latest chapter in the history of one of baseball’s most nomadic yet storied franchises. Founded in 1901 as a charter member of the American League in Philadelphia, the Athletics were the original AL dynasty. Under legendary manager Connie Mack, who led the team for 50 years, the “A’s” won five World Series titles and adopted the “White Elephant” as a defiant logo after Giants manager John McGraw dismissed them as a “useless possession.”

In 1955, the team moved to Kansas City, an era largely remembered for owner Charlie Finley’s eccentric innovations—such as Kelly Green uniforms and a mule mascot—and a frustrating reputation as a “farm team” for the New York Yankees.

The 1968 move to Oakland sparked a modern renaissance. The “Swingin’ A’s” of the 1970s won three consecutive World Series, followed by the “Bash Brothers” era of the late 80s and the “Moneyball” revolution of the early 2000s.

Yet despite winning nine World Series titles across three cities—trailing only the Yankees and Cardinals—the franchise has been plagued by stadium instability for decades.

Wolff’s memoir serves as a defense of his partner and current owner John Fisher, who has faced intense vilification from the Oakland faithful. While fans like Oakland 68’s president Jorge Leon blame ownership for “constant rebuilds” and a lack of investment, Wolff insists that “apathy” from local government and the Giants’ “nasty opposition” left the club with no choice but to leave.

As the A’s play out their temporary residency in Sacramento, the wounds in Oakland remain deep. For a franchise born in Philadelphia and forged in the East Bay, the move to the desert represents the end of a 57-year Northern California legacy—one that Wolff insists was sabotaged by the neighbors across the bridge.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed an order reclassifying FDA-approved products containing marijuana as a Schedule III drug, placing them alongside prescription medications. The administration also announced an “expedited” hearing on June 29 to consider the formal reclassification of cannabis.

“Today is another promise made, promise kept day… The Acting Attorney General this morning signed an order that moves into Schedule III medical marijuana products that are FDA approved or that are state licensed. This is a giant move forward to implement your promise.” pic.twitter.com/ewTDXJpEyX

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) April 23, 2026

“These actions will enable more targeted, rigorous research into marijuana’s safety and efficacy, expanding patients’ access to treatments and empowering doctors to make better-informed healthcare decisions,” Blanche said.

Under the decisive leadership of @POTUS, this Department of Justice is delivering on his promise to improve American healthcare. This includes:

• Immediately rescheduling FDA-approved marijuana and state-licensed marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule IIl

• Ordering a new,… pic.twitter.com/DUtqKQgavl

— Acting AG Todd Blanche (@DAGToddBlanche) April 23, 2026

Since 1970, marijuana has remained in Schedule I—the most restrictive category—alongside substances like heroin, LSD, and ecstasy.

Scheduling of a drug is “based upon the substance’s medical use, potential for abuse, and safety or dependence liability,” according to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

Under the Controlled Substances Act, Schedule III drugs are defined as substances with a “moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence.” The DEA considers Schedule I drugs to have “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.”

The Trump administration’s move does not legalize marijuana for medical or recreational use under federal law, but allows cannabis companies to deduct standard expenses like rent and payroll for the first time, CNBC reported.

“Today’s order is reflective of the Department of Justice’s continued dedication to common-sense policies and the prioritization of the safety and well-being of all Americans,” Blanche said.

In December 2025, Trump first signed an executive order directing federal agencies to increase medical marijuana and CBD research.

Over the weekend, Trump voiced frustration with the pace of the rescheduling process while signing another directive easing restrictions on psychedelics alongside podcast host Joe Rogan.

“You’re going to get the rescheduling done, right? Please? Will you get the rescheduling done, please?” Trump said to White House staff in the Oval Office. “Joe, they’re slow-walking me on rescheduling, okay? You’re going to get it done.”

Two dozen states, along with Washington, D.C., have legalized recreational marijuana use, according to the Associated Press. About 40 states have medical marijuana programs, and eight others permit low-THC cannabis or CBD oil for medical purposes. Only Idaho and Kansas maintain a full ban on marijuana.

In November 2024, voters in Nebraska approved a ballot initiative to legalize medical marijuana. Ballot measures to legalize recreational marijuana failed in Florida, North Dakota, and South Dakota.

***

I don’t care if “bon appétit” translates to “bomb app the teeth,” emotional saxophone is described as “obscure trumpet music,” or if [INTENSITY INTENSIFIES] and the lower portion of my screen suddenly spits out “%%%%%%%%%%%%%” over the one line of dialogue that ties the whole storyline together. I want subtitles.

If you can understand shows like “Peaky Blinders” without subtitles, you’re on a different playing field. “Who the f*ck is Tommy Shelby,” a villager asks in the trailer for “Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man.” “Vulopse sewinge ooleesplyin ooim yewiyam,” Shelby responds. According to the captions, he allegedly says, “Perhaps someone should explain to him who I am.” I rest my case. 

With 70% of adults queuing up captioning in 2026, we’ve fully entered our sound-maxxing era. Gen Z will say they invented “reading” movies and TV with subtitles, but [woman sighs aggressively] of course they didn’t. Shockingly, there were human people alive before 1997 who thought of putting words on screen to help tell a story.

Early adopters invented “intertitles” to spruce up turn-of-the-century blockbusters such as “Scrooge, Or Marley’s Ghost” in 1901, using text to describe silent scenes. The idea quickly caught on as “subtitle” overlays, and it eventually hit the small screen as “captioning” in the ’70s. While subtitles are designed to translate spoken dialogue into different languages, captions cover every last bit of audible sound. [Door creeks] “Oh. I didn’t know you were here.” [Coughs, clears throat] [Whimsical tuba music]. You can have it all with the second one.

I’m reading a really good series on Netflix right now 🤣🤣🤣 pic.twitter.com/jDANTvs2xY

— Lucy (@TheLucyShow1) April 20, 2026

I first dabbled in recreational subtitles watching “Amelie” in a theater that also served ice cream. Combining two of my greatest loves — romcoms and mint chocolate chip — I treated myself to le cinéma Français and the English subtitles I needed to understand it. Simultaneously reading and absorbing visuals was frustrating at first, especially for an arthouse film. But two hours later, I was sure I never needed subtitles again and was 100% fluent in French. “Fin.” 

Years went by before I reacquainted myself with the written screen. Early into dating my boyfriend, I discovered that he turned on captioning for literally everything. I assumed it was an English-as-a-second-language thing since he had grown up in Puerto Rico with Hollywood movies that were subtitled (not badly dubbed) in Spanish. But nope! He didn’t need to translate “Family Guy” or “Seinfeld” — he just liked the extra words. It didn’t take long for me to develop the borderline talent of picking up visual cues and listening to comedic timing while merrily “reading” TV. Now, I feel like I can’t “hear” without subtitles.

Captions help us get familiar with accents, stream while we scroll on another device, and keep the volume low. Another perk is the fact that you can still follow along while eating crunchy snacks or hanging out with chatty kids. But there’s another reason for this trend toward text on screen. And it’s not us; it’s the sound mix.

Theatrical sound design loses its luster when it’s played through teeny TV speakers (or, worse, phones and earbuds). Rather ill-equipped to handle soft whispers with the same finesse as Abercrombie-decibel-level car crashes, budget tech forces us to crank up the volume for quiet conversations, immediately forget we maxed it out, and then feel like we got shot in the heart by explosive sound effects. 

Ty Pendlebury from CNET described home audio as “playing a cello with a toothpick.” No wonder it’s hard to make out the hushed tones of Mumblecore. And bless your heart if you’re a non-native speaker of your show’s vernacular.

Even so, some resist normalizing subtitles. Defying the ubiquitous info hack, one person said, “I just read them and miss what’s on screen … Shout out to anyone else who doesn’t hear sounds when they’re too focused on reading.” Someone else pointed out, “Sometimes the subtitles are slightly different from what’s said by the actor/actress and that’s even more distracting.” Also challenging for everyone are those moments when nobody seems to know what’s happening. “At least one third of the time, the subtitler didn’t understand it either, and the subtitle reads ‘Unintelligible,’” a Redditor shared. 

At this point for me, watching a movie without subtitles feels at best like a hearing test and at worst like psychological torture. Yes, text blocks announcing [SWEEPING ORCHESTRAL SCORE] destroy the beauty of cinema. And, at home, they get in the way of competing built-in titles that pop up behind them. I will forever be wondering how interviewees on “20/20” relate to the crime, as their own dialogue obscures their identities. And I use my hand to block subtitles from spoiling a guilty verdict before “we the jury” blurts it out.

Somewhat akin to a projectionist threading actual film through metal sprockets for a live theater audience, clicking my remote to “Captions: OFF ALWAYS” feels weirdly terminal. What happens after I press play on my Prime rental? Will I understand the plot without a constant stream of backup copy? Will I miss half the story without realizing it’s already vanished? Should I just stop trying to be a hero and turn the subtitles back on? Looks like we’ll cross that “br√√∫∫∫∫ççç///” when we come to it.

If I never go back to plain-watching TV again, I’m okay with it. I don’t want to waste any more time wondering what so-and-so said. Please. I’m barely hanging on to my shredded attention span as it is. Subtitle culture isn’t strictly an age thing at the moment, but considering its grip on most of us, it will be someday. And for that, may they always make TVs larger than the font size we need to enjoy them.

The proposal passed the closely divided chamber 50-48, with Republicans backing the measure and Democrats voting in opposition. Republicans said that the measure, which now goes to the House, would help to secure the border. The passage means the resolution moves forward toward the reconciliation process, meaning Republicans can pass a funding bill without having to get past the filibuster.

“We have a multistep process ahead of us, but at the end, Republicans will have helped ensure that America’s borders are secure and prevented Democrats from defunding these important agencies,” said Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-ND).

Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) criticized Democrats for blocking funding for the Department of Homeland Security 16 times. The department has been defunded since February 14, 2026.

“Democrats are playing to the most radical members of their party. 
Through their actions, Democrats are putting the safety and security of our nation behind the safety and security of their own political careers,” he said from the Senate floor.

Democrats tried to add a number of amendments to the proposal that they claimed would address the cost of housing, childcare, and health care.

“Instead of pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into ICE and Border Patrol, Republicans should be working with Democrats to lower out-of-pocket costs,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said.

A number of Republican-backed amendments also fell short after Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) and Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) sided with Democrats. Those senators voted against a proposal from Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) to cut off funding for Planned Parenthood.

“One recent study found that in three years alone, Planned Parenthood got a billion and a half dollars from Medicaid and Medicare. 
Money to be used on these risky surgeries and [transgender] procedures for our children. This is wrong,” Hawley said. “This is a terrible misuse of federal funds, and we should put a stop to it today.”

Senators Thom Tillis (R-NC), Mitch McConnel (R-KY), Murkowski, and Collins and also voted with Democrats to block an effort from Senator John Kennedy (R-LA) to attach the SAVE Act, which would require photo ID to vote in federal elections, to the proposal.

The next phase will not be decided at the ballot box. It will be decided in courtrooms across the Commonwealth. The questions ahead are not minor. They go to the timing of implementation, the certification of the results, and ultimately, how the amendment will operate in practice. Those are issues that courts, not legislators or voters, will now have to resolve.

We are already seeing the contours of that fight take shape. A circuit court in Tazewell County has entered an injunction affecting certification of the election. The reaction was immediate. Critics on the Left labeled the ruling political. If the decision had gone the other way, the criticism would have come just as quickly from the Right.

That response tells you everything you need to know about what comes next. In cases with real political consequences, judicial decisions are almost always viewed through a political lens. That is not unique to this case. It is the environment in which judges are now being asked to operate.

Which brings us to a larger point about Virginia’s system of judicial selection.

Judges in Virginia, including the seven justices of the Supreme Court of Virginia, are elected by the General Assembly for fixed terms. Twelve years for the Supreme Court. Eight years for the Court of Appeals and circuit courts. Six years for district courts. Most judges who serve a full career will, at some point, have to return to the same legislative body for reappointment.

None of that means judges are unable to decide cases fairly or independently. Virginia’s judiciary has a long tradition of professionalism and integrity, and that should be acknowledged. But the structure still matters, particularly in cases like this one where the stakes are high and the political consequences are obvious. When continued service ultimately depends on reappointment by elected officials, it creates an environment where judicial independence is not just a matter of reality but also of public confidence.

Other systems approach this differently. The federal judiciary relies on life tenure under Article III of the United States Constitution. Many states use merit selection commissions combined with retention elections. Virginia has chosen a legislative appointment model, and that choice carries consequences. In high-stakes disputes like this redistricting fight, it ensures that judicial decisions will be scrutinized not only for their reasoning, but for what they mean politically.

That is where this case is headed next. The courts will be asked to resolve disputes over certification, implementation, and the legality of how this amendment is applied. Those rulings will shape not just this election cycle, but the political map of Virginia for years to come. They will also, inevitably, draw criticism from one side or the other.

Virginia law does allow for retired judges to be designated to sit in particular cases when needed, but the courts cannot create a separate commission to insulate themselves from political reaction. These cases will be decided within the existing judicial structure, by judges who are doing their jobs under the system we have in place.

The better question is not how to avoid criticism in this case. That is unavoidable. The better question is whether the structure we have chosen best protects public confidence in the judiciary when the stakes are this high. As this litigation moves forward, Virginians are going to see that question play out in real time.

***

Timothy V. Anderson is an attorney and a former member of the Virginia House of Delegates. Anderson graduated from the University of Tampa in 1996 with a Bachelor’s in Economics and received his law degree from the Regent University School of Law in 1999. Anderson is a member of the Virginia, North Carolina, District of Columbia, and Missouri bars and is admitted to the United States Supreme Court, the 4th, 9th and DC Circuit Courts of Appeals, and the District Courts bars in Virginia, the District of Columbia, Eastern North Carolina, Western Missouri, Colorado and the Southern District of Texas.

The spark for the confrontation was Tuesday’s referendum in Virginia. In a move that critics have slammed as a naked partisan power grab, Virginia voters narrowly approved—51.5% to 48.5%—a constitutional amendment allowing the Democratic-led General Assembly to bypass a bipartisan commission. The goal? Redrawing maps to transform a 6–5 Democratic edge into a crushing 10–1 advantage.

While Democrats celebrated the move as “defeating gerrymandering,” the victory was short-lived. A Virginia judge immediately threw a wrench in the works, ruling the referendum unconstitutional and blocking certification due to procedural failures.

That didn’t stop Hakeem Jeffries from “popping off,” as DeSantis put it. Flush with the Virginia news, Jeffries took to the microphones and social media to issue a warning to Florida Republicans. “Our message to Florida Republicans is F around and find out,” Jeffries barked, claiming Republicans are “dummymandering” their way into the minority and vowing to “crush” what he called the “DeSantis Dummymander.”

Rep. Jeffries "Our message to Florida Republicans is F around and find out. If they go down the road of a DeSantis 'dummymander', the Florida Republicans are going to find themselves in the same situation as Texas Republicans." pic.twitter.com/RlNH0OH4Kp

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) April 22, 2026

Democrats defeated Donald Trump’s gerrymandering scheme in Virginia tonight.

We will crush the DeSantis Dummymander in Florida next.

Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time. pic.twitter.com/zM1oXhZT8K

— Hakeem Jeffries (@hakeemjeffries) April 22, 2026

DeSantis, who has called a special session for late April to address Florida’s massive population-driven malapportionment, was more than happy to accept the challenge.

“This guy, Jeffries, popping off in Washington about Florida,” DeSantis told reporters with a grin. “He wants to be Speaker of the House, and he’s kind of like—more liberal than Pelosi and all this other stuff from New York City. I just want to know: ‘Ooh, Florida. We’re going to go after Florida.’ Please: be my guest.”

DeSantis then leaned into a devastatingly polite mockery, offering to pay for Jeffries’ travel and put him up in the Governor’s Mansion. “We’ll take you fishing,” DeSantis quipped. “We’ll do all this stuff. There’s nothing that could be better for Republicans in Florida than to see Hakeem Jeffries everywhere around this state. Voters will not like what they see.”

The governor then twisted the knife, pointing out that despite Jeffries’ attempts to move further left to appease his base, the radical wing of his own party remains unimpressed. “I kind of feel bad for the guy because he’s as Left as they come. He’s always going Left. And yet the far-Left hates him. You know, they call him a ‘dollar-store Obama.’ They call him ‘AIPAC Shakur,’ all these different derogatory names that they do. And so he’s tried to ingratiate himself with [them], but they’re just not drinking the Kool-Aid.”

🚨 HOLY CRAP! Gov. Ron DeSantis just BODIED Hakeem Jeffries threatening Florida if we re-draw our 2026 maps

"'Oh, we're gonna go after Florida.' PLEASE. BE MY GUEST. I will PAY you to come campaign! I'll put you up in the Florida governor's mansion! We'll take you fishing.… pic.twitter.com/uAN8gVXVHR

— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) April 22, 2026

While Jeffries relies on bravado, DeSantis has pointed to the cold reality of Florida’s growth. The governor has noted that Florida has seen ten years of population growth in just three, rendering current districts unfair. He has also hinted at an upcoming Supreme Court decision, likely penned by Justice Samuel Alito, that could further solidify the legal standing for mid-decade adjustments.

As the legal battles in Virginia prove that Democratic overreach often hits a judicial wall, DeSantis made one thing clear: if Hakeem Jeffries wants a war in Florida, the governor is happy to provide the battlefield—and the fishing rod.

During a hearing, Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) pressed Bessent on why the program was scrapped, calling it “free and easy to use.” Bessent pushed back, saying the service was only free to users, not taxpayers.

“It wasn’t free,” Bessent said. “It was $72 million for about 300,000 taxpayers.”

Roughly 60% of users did not complete their filings through the platform.

Sen. @ChrisCoons: “Why’d you shut down Direct File when it was free and easy to use?”
@SecScottBessent: “It wasn’t free and the—”

Coons: “Direct File was free to taxpayers.”

Bessent: “Not to the American people. It was … $72 million for about 300,00 taxpayers.” pic.twitter.com/fdku7e4vBh

— CSPAN (@cspan) April 22, 2026

Bessent argued that taxpayers could instead use private options such as FreeTaxUSA to file federal returns at no cost.

The IRS launched Direct File as a pilot program to allow taxpayers with relatively simple returns to file directly with the government, bypassing private tax preparation companies. It was rolled out in phases with limited eligibility.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), a supporter of the program, has proposed legislation to reinstate it.

“It doesn’t make any sense for [President Donald] Trump and [former Trump adviser Elon] Musk to get rid of Direct File—unless they want to do a big favor for giant tax prep companies by squeezing more Americans into paying for those products,” Warren said, pointing to Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) initiative.

Treasury officials have instead pointed toward expanding the existing Free File program, which relies on private tax software companies to provide free filing options for eligible taxpayers, rather than building a permanent government-run system. 

***

Feeling anxious while being a parent is no joke. We have real stressors that affect us. But there are a variety of things that we put on our plates that don’t belong there. Your child’s report card is not your report card; their cleanliness is not a reflection of your cleanliness. Your children are humans that are totally separate from you.

Parents have become so anxious about their children succeeding or not being lazy or clumsy or whatever other unfortunate adjective you can suggest. Some parents worry so much that they inadvertently make the thing they are concerned about happen because they don’t think with intention; they allow their emotions to dictate their decisions. 

The Pew Research Center reported in 2023 that as many as 45% of parents described themselves as overprotective. For this, you can thank the limbic system, which oversees behavioral and emotional responses as well as memory formation. The system includes the amygdala, the part of your brain that’s responsible for emotional processing and is key in fear and survival instincts.

A drastic number of parents, three out of four, are concerned that their children will develop anxiety or depression issues. Do you know what happens when we worry about that happening? Instead of looking at a situation where we notice our children show fear, anxiety, or sadness and allowing them to work through it, we may step in or try to distract them. We hop in to fix it. If we don’t want them to develop those mental health issues, that means keeping them away from those feelings, right? Wrong. As a clinical counselor, I will tell you right now that this is going to hurt them in the long run. 

When a child doesn’t face the things that bother him and has someone else step in for him, what he learns is that he is not capable of doing things on his own and that those feelings should be avoided. He wonders if there is something wrong with him for feeling those emotions, and he doesn’t believe in his own abilities.

Other parents worry about their children getting kidnapped, so they listen to their limbic systems and start tracking and monitoring where their children go all the time. They check in over and over. They don’t allow sleepovers. Would you like to know what kids learn from this? They assume that the whole world is totally dangerous and that they should fear it. They believe that they can’t trust their own abilities. They miss out on developing the skills of managing a healthy amount of risk. Then those kids may do one of two things: push back really hard on all the rules or internalize the belief that they are constantly in danger and are incapable of taking care of themselves.

When your amygdala jumps to the worst-case scenario, remember this: Most kidnappings are done by a biological parent, and the type of kidnapping people are most worried about has almost a one in a million chance of happening. If you were a sociopath who wanted your child to be abducted, he would have to be left outside on his own for 750,000 years before it even became a statistical likelihood. You’re welcome.

Here’s what parents can do instead. A lot of the work is going to be cognitive, meaning it will be based on what you tell yourself. This is a key component because when we have awareness of our thoughts, we can challenge them and not let the anxious thoughts dictate our choices. When you notice that initial uptick in anxiety (stomach hurting, heart rate increasing, something sitting on your chest feeling), acknowledge it. Don’t ignore it. Get curious. Use that glorious prefrontal cortex.

If the anxiety is rooted in your child struggling with a task, take time to observe how she is navigating it and see what she comes up with; talk with her about how things can be hard sometimes and that we can try again or continue to work at something because it doesn’t have to be perfect the first time. Remember that kids doing things differently doesn’t mean they are doing them wrong. Your kid can ask you for help if she needs it. What your child will learn is that she can figure out things on her own. She will also learn that her parent believes in her abilities! This leads to confidence in oneself.

If the anxiety is rooted in your child’s physical safety, take a beat to observe what is happening in front of you and determine if he is engaging in age-appropriate risky play or exploration. Let your prefrontal cortex know that the physical world is much safer than we think it is. (Violent crime has been decreasing since the ’90s, there is CCTV everywhere, and most of the predators are online now.) If he wants to go for a sleepover, get to know the parents and his friends. What your child will internalize is that he can conquer hard things, he can navigate social situations on his own, and the world is his oyster. He will be able to problem solve, use risk management skills, and know how to operate in the real world.

If the anxiety is rooted in the pain of experiencing “bad” emotions, please let me assure you that our emotions are there for us to feel. All emotions are okay (but not all behaviors). In order to support your child in developing healthy emotional regulation skills, name the emotion you see her experiencing, let her tell you about it, give her empathy and validation (this doesn’t mean you accept a poor choice she made; it just means you understand how she feels), work together to problem solve (don’t just give her the answer), and let her try out what she comes up with.

This can be a really hard balance. We hate to see our children struggle through emotions that feel heavy. But if we don’t let them navigate those emotions, they will have zero idea what to do when they are independent adults. By pushing through hard things, your child will realize that emotions are a normal part of life and that when there is a struggle, he can handle it. This will lead to increased frustration tolerance, emotional regulation skills, self-confidence, and competency.

What I want parents to know is that you don’t have to let your anxiety or worry or fear control how you make decisions. Be intentional. Work on wrangling your limbic system so that it can balance emotion and reason. And believe in your child’s abilities.

***

Gabrielle Frook is a licensed clinical professional counselor who has worked with children, adolescents, and adults, delivering evidence-based treatment for PTSD, depression, and anxiety. She writes her own Substack and has been published in Medium publications.

In a brief statement Wednesday, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said the department was “grateful to Secretary Phelan for his service,” adding that officials wished him well. No explanation was given for the abrupt departure.

STATEMENT:

Secretary of the Navy John C. Phelan is departing the administration, effective immediately.

On behalf of the Secretary of War and Deputy Secretary of War, we are grateful to Secretary Phelan for his service to the Department and the United States Navy.

We wish…

— Sean Parnell (@SeanParnellASW) April 22, 2026

The timing raises immediate questions. Phelan exits just as the U.S. Navy enforces a high-stakes blockade of Iranian ports near the Strait of Hormuz, a vital global oil chokepoint that has become central to the ongoing U.S.-Israeli conflict with Tehran. The blockade, combined with recent naval seizures and disruptions to shipping lanes, has kept the region on edge even as a temporary ceasefire holds.

Undersecretary Hung Cao will assume the role in an acting capacity. Cao, a 25-year Navy veteran with combat experience, previously ran as a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Virginia, backed by President Donald Trump.

Turnover is nothing new at the Pentagon, as War Secretary Pete Hegseth has dismissed several top military leaders in recent months, including senior generals and admirals.

Phelan himself was an unconventional pick for the role. A businessman and major Trump donor, he had no prior military service or senior civilian leadership experience within the Navy before his nomination in late 2024. His background was primarily in private investment, along with advisory work tied to national security nonprofits.

His sudden exit is particularly notable given that he publicly addressed a major Navy conference in Washington just one day earlier, laying out his agenda and engaging with reporters — with no visible indication that his tenure was about to end.

For now, the Pentagon has offered no further details, leaving open questions about whether the move was voluntary, strategic, or tied to internal disagreements. What is clear is that the leadership change comes at a sensitive operational moment, with U.S. naval forces playing a central role in both enforcing the blockade and deterring further escalation.

As negotiations with Iran remain uncertain, the Navy will now be navigating that environment under interim leadership — an added layer of uncertainty at a time when stability at the top would typically be expected.

In June 2022, the SPLC released a statement for World Refugee Day, stating that “U.S. Border Patrol agents on horseback infamously chased Black Haitian asylum-seekers with reins raised like a lash.” The false narrative emerged after horseback Border Patrol agents were seen using their reins to maneuver around a horde of Haitian migrants crossing illegally into Del Rio, Texas, in September 2021.

At the time, the agents were outnumbered by a crush of thousands of Haitians that had amassed along the bank of the Rio Grande in a matter of days.

An internal Customs and Border Protection (CBP) probe found that the agents never whipped migrants.

Before the investigative findings were released, several prominent Democratic politicians promoted the false narrative as photos and videos of the interaction went viral.

Then-President Joe Biden called the images “outrageous” and vowed that the agents “will pay.”

“It doesn’t matter if a Democrat or Republican is President, our immigration system is designed for cruelty towards and dehumanization of immigrants,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said at the time. “Immigration should not be a crime, and its criminalization is a relatively recent invention. This is a stain on our country.”

“This is so sick and @CBP will continue to commit human rights abuses if we don’t stop it now,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) said. “Cracking a f—ing whip on Haitians fleeing hardship shows you that this system simply can’t be reformed.”

“Use of whips on refugees? Disturbing and unacceptable,” Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) said. “This must end immediately.”

The Justice Department announced a grand jury indictment against the SPLC, alleging that the left-wing group secretly funneled millions of dollars to white supremacist groups.

The SPLC was charged with 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to conceal money laundering.

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said Tuesday that the group was “manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.”

Appearing before lawmakers on the Senate Finance committee on Wednesday, Kennedy made clear the issue is a priority for him, aligning himself with efforts led by Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) and a cross-party group of senators.

“I absolutely will work with you on the PREDICT Act,” Kennedy said. “It’s something that’s very personally important to me to have more wastewater surveillance. And we are also putting $325 million in this budget into a new bio threat radar system that will integrate with the microbial surveillance at wastewater treatment [plants] to detect pathogens as soon as they emerge in our country and elsewhere in the world.”

The PREDICT Act is a bipartisan proposal introduced by Scott and Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), alongside a coalition that includes Sens. Maggie Hassan (D-NH), Ted Budd (R-NC), Roger Wicker (R-MS), and Angus King (I-MA), who caucuses with the Democrats. The bill would expand the nation’s ability to monitor wastewater for traces of viruses and bacteria, a method that gained traction during the COVID-19 pandemic and has since been used to track diseases such as influenza, RSV, and measles.

Scott, in a statement provided exclusively to The Daily Wire, emphasized the urgency of strengthening those capabilities.

“Today’s hearing at the Senate Finance Committee underscored the importance of strong coordination in addressing public health challenges and staying ahead of emerging threats,” Scott said. “I was proud to highlight the PREDICT Act, which I introduced to expand wastewater surveillance so we can identify outbreaks earlier and respond faster to protect our communities.”

Wastewater surveillance allows officials to detect pathogens shed by infected individuals, often before symptoms appear or testing catches up. That early signal can provide critical lead time for local health systems to respond, potentially slowing or preventing wider outbreaks.

Supporters argue the system offers both public health and economic benefits. Early detection can reduce the scale of outbreaks, limiting strain on hospitals and avoiding the kinds of sweeping disruptions seen during the pandemic. Estimates from public health experts suggest that such systems could deliver significant per-person savings during a future health crisis.

Recent events have underscored that urgency. A measles outbreak in South Carolina has been cited by Scott and others as an example of why earlier detection tools matter, pointing to the need for faster, more proactive responses.

The PREDICT Act would direct the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to fund and coordinate a national network of wastewater monitoring programs, working with state and local health departments, universities, and private partners. It also calls for expanded lab capabilities to identify new pathogens and track multiple threats simultaneously, along with the creation of a national data dashboard to improve transparency and coordination.

Kennedy’s endorsement adds another layer to the effort, particularly as he signals broader ambitions to reshape how the federal government approaches prevention. In the same set of remarks, he indicated plans to reform the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, including bringing in new experts and increasing the frequency of its meetings.

“I know I have not done a good job of getting the meetings out there. We are going to change that,” Kennedy said, adding that existing standards for evaluating preventive care would remain intact.

The convergence of legislative and administrative efforts signals a push toward a more proactive model of public health, one focused on identifying threats before they escalate.

The PREDICT Act remains under consideration, but with bipartisan backing and support from figures like Kennedy and Scott, momentum is building toward a more coordinated, forward-looking approach to public health preparedness.

In a 2021 email obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request, a then-SPLC attorney asked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to “release” the detainee “as soon as possible” due to the transgender-identifying woman’s “hypertension and severe anxiety,” citing a COVID-era lawsuit that resulted in the release of some immigrants with certain comorbidities.

The SPLC attorney argued that the individual, a female who identifies as a male, “does not fall within the administration’s public safety enforcement priority” and must be released due to trauma she had experienced related to her transgender identity.

The immigrant, who held a Green Card, had previously served more than eight years behind bars for sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl. At the time, the transgender-identifying woman was 19-years-old. They had a two-year online relationship before the woman drove to meet the minor victim in 2011.

At the time, the Filipino national learned that the girl had lied about her age and revealed that she was just 14 years old. Still, the transgender-identifying woman proceeded with the meet-up where “they engaged in sexual conduct,” the email stated.

In 2021, DHS got an e-mail from the Southern Poverty Law Center, Mich Gonzalez (pronouns el/he/they), requesting an early release for this biological woman who engaged in statutory rape of a minor girl. pic.twitter.com/iGj3er47vn

— Oversight Project (@ItsYourGov) August 7, 2025

“Although conviction on its face appears grave and justly concerning,” the SPLC attorney wrote to Homeland Security officials, adding that there was a need to present “additional context” that included the detainee’s feeling of isolation as a child “with respect to his gender identity.”

In a July 6, 2021, email, a Homeland Security official responded that “career officials determined” that the detainee “should be released” with a tracking device.

The SPLC, which has long advocated against so-called hate groups, was the subject of a federal indictment announced Tuesday that accused the group of secretly giving millions of dollars to white supremacist groups.

A grand jury indicted the SPLC on multiple counts of fraud and conspiracy to commit money laundering over its informant practices, Justice Department officials announced late Tuesday.

The SPLC “secretly funneled more than $3 million in funds to white supremacist & extremist groups,” such as Aryan Nations, members of the Ku Klux Klan, and a member of the leadership group that planned the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, the indictment said.

“It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred,” Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said Tuesday.

The SPLC has labeled its political opponents as racists and maintains a “hate map” that places the conservative parental rights group Moms for Liberty alongside the Ku Klux Klan.

The “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was supposedly the defining moment of Donald Trump’s first term in office. That’s what we were told, relentlessly, for years on end, by both political parties, along with every mainstream media outlet in the country. It was a “mask-off moment,” in which neo-Nazis — emboldened by Donald Trump — violently rioted in the streets, killing an innocent woman in the process. And, we were told, Donald Trump endorsed these neo-Nazis, live on national television, calling them “very fine people.” That’s what Joe Biden said when he launched his campaign for president — and about ten million times after that. The rally was definitive proof that white supremacy was alive and well in the United States. 

Watch:

Source: Joe Biden/YouTube.com

All of corporate America lined up to push this message. Shortly after the “Unite the Right” rally, Apple announced a $2 million donation to so-called “anti-hate groups,” including SPLC. The CEO, Tim Cook, declared that “Hate is a cancer, and left unchecked it destroys everything in its path.” JPMorgan Chase and the Clooney Foundation did the same thing. In fact, JPMorgan’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, said that the company would match employee donations to the SPLC. He also disbanded an advisory panel to the president, for reasons that were never clear. But the SPLC got exactly what it wanted — they isolated the president, they demonized conservatives, and they received millions of donations. And they never stopped. They kept hammering the “Unite the Right” narrative, and they kept fundraising off it.

In fact, five days before Charlottesville, Cam Higby reports that SPLC received $375,000 from the state of Alabama. So this is an extremely well-funded group, with money coming in from everyone — including the taxpayers, apparently.

This continued for years. The Left was obsessed with Charlottesville, as you probably remember. It’s the hoax that simply never died. You can make the case that it lasted longer than Russiagate. Four years after Biden’s campaign video, in 2024, Kamala Harris again invoked Charlottesville on the debate stage. 

Watch:

Kamala Harris falsely accusing Trump of coddling the Charlottesville white supremacist rally exactly one month after she was endorsed by the SPLC—the group that planned, organized, & paid for the Charlottesville white supremacist rally. pic.twitter.com/Gw6jDaWe6y

— Tony Kinnett (@TheTonus) April 22, 2026

Source: @TheTonus/X.com

Every single aspect of this narrative, as told by every media outlet and by every prominent politician in Washington, was a lie. We’ve known that for some time. Trump didn’t endorse white supremacy; in fact, he explicitly did the opposite. And contrary to what CNN would have you believe, you don’t have to be a neo-Nazi to oppose the removal of Robert E. Lee’s statue. You simply have to be an American — someone who’s interested in preserving our shared history and venerating our national heroes, rather than defaming them. That describes most of the people who attended this rally. 

But there was one aspect of the rally that, to give left-wing activists some credit, was difficult for conservatives to explain away. There were indeed photographs of several men at the “Unite the Right” rally, some of them carrying Nazi flags. And a couple of them even yelled, “Jews will not replace us,” which was considered offensive to Leftists until about fifteen minutes ago. And it was difficult for some conservatives, in the face of that photographic and video evidence, to deny that — at some level — this rally was organized, or at least popular with, a group of neo-Nazis on the Right. 

Of course, the appropriate response from conservatives — even if that were true — would be to completely ignore the outrage. The presence of a small number of people waving Nazi flags is not a national crisis, even if they’re genuine Nazis. We’re a country of more than 340 million people. If we’re going to allow five guys with Nazi flags to derail our entire political discourse, then we’re never going to accomplish anything. We’re also going to create an enormous incentive for the Left to wave Nazi flags around, and blame them on the Right — which, it appears, is exactly what happened.

There’s now very good reason to believe that, at Charlottesville, what we saw was the product of a deliberate, engineered effort to destroy the image of Donald Trump and the Republican Party. Again, back in 2017, a claim like that would seem pretty far-fetched to most people. After all, what are the odds that a well-funded left-wing group, aligned with the Democrat Party, would actually pay people to act like Nazis at this small rally in Charlottesville, Virginia? What are the odds that, actually, the entire event was a psy-op engineered from the beginning, to give Democrats a pretext to wage war against “white supremacy,” which, of course, actually means “white people” and “conservatism” in general?

Well, the odds were pretty good, as it turns out. Last night, the DOJ released an indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center, or SPLC, saying it funded and supported an individual who was closely involved in coordinating the “Unite the Right” rally. And not only that — SPLC was funding (directly or indirectly) a lot of other supposedly “right-wing extremism,” including the KKK. Yes, according to the DOJ, the SPLC — the Left’s preferred “anti-hate group” — was apparently paying affiliates of the KKK. 

Watch:

Todd Blanche lays it out: The Southern Poverty Law Center “was doing the exact opposite of what it’s told its donors it was doing. Not dismantling extremism, but funding it.”

Between 2014–2023, SPLC paid at least $3 MILLION to people tied to the KKK, Nazis, and other extremist… pic.twitter.com/4RVjRNzwZV

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) April 22, 2026

Source: @SteveGuest/X.com

Before we go into the specifics of the indictment — If you’re not familiar with the SPLC, they’re one of the most dishonest and dangerous left-wing organizations in the entire country. They exist to provide a pretext for the censorship and harassment of conservatives, with the goal of destroying their lives. They also hate Americans, particularly white Americans.

Take a look at this video, featuring Mark Potok, who worked with the SPLC at the time. On the wall, you may notice a handwritten note documenting the decline of America’s “non-hispanic white population”. 

Watch:

Flashback to when the SPLC’s Mark Potok did an interview and on his wall was a handwritten note tracing the decline of America’s white population.

It isn’t an exaggeration to say that the SPLC and other left-wing organizations hate most Americans. pic.twitter.com/cFTzFNT4l6

— Patrick Casey (@restoreorderusa) April 22, 2026

Source: @restoreorderusa/X.com

They zoom in, really close, on the numbers there. White people accounted for 90% of the population in 1920, and only 62% in 2015. To the SPLC, this is a victory. They are one of the main engines of demographic replacement. Their goal is to demonize white people and claim that white supremacy is the greatest domestic threat, for the purpose of eliminating — or at least greatly diminishing — the white population.

To give just one example of how they operate, the SPLC put Turning Point USA on its “hate group” list shortly before Charlie Kirk was murdered. 

Here’s what Charlie wrote at the time, in May of last year.

The SPLC has added Turning Point to their ridiculous “hate group” list, right next to the KKK and neo-Nazis. … Even former staffers called their racket a “con.” Their game plan? Scare financial institutions into debanking us, pressure schools to cancel us, and demonize us so some unhinged lunatic feels justified targeting us. Remember the Family Research Council? An SPLC-inspired gunman went after them. They’d love nothing more than to see TPUSA in the crosshairs. … Maybe someone should take a hard look at where all that “nonprofit” money’s really going?

Now we’re finally discovering where the money went. Charlie also went on Fox to report that SPLC had targeted specific Turning Point chapters on college campuses.

Watch:

5/27/25 – Charlie Kirk on the SPLC targeting him and TPUSA:

“They are literally putting high school chapters of ours on a hate group next to the KKK and next to neo nazi groups.”

It’s 6 minutes but it’s worth every second 🔥 pic.twitter.com/Ll4F8FpStF

— Gina Milan (@ginamilan_) April 22, 2026

Source: @ginamilan_/X.com

In addition to the Family Research Council, which Charlie mentioned, the SPLC has also defamed the Federalist Society, PragerU, the Heritage Foundation, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Foundation to Abolish Abortion, and so on. They’ve targeted me as well, in their effort to de-monetize my channel and get me fired or killed.

You can take a look at my profile on their website here:

Screenshot: SPLC

As you can see, I’m listed under “GENERAL HATE” and “ANTI-LGBTQ.”

And at first, I admit I was a little offended. If you’re going to claim I’m a hateful person, then you should be able to point out, specifically, how I’m hateful. But if you say someone is just “generally hateful,” you’re painting a broad brush — one that I would argue is pretty unfair, under the circumstances. I mean, give me some credit here. My hatred is actually pretty specific. But then a few people pointed out that “General Hate” might actually be my rank. So if I’m “General Hate,” that would put me above Major Hate and Lieutenant Colonel Hate — in which case I rescind my complaint and gladly accept this prestigious title. In fact, I may need to add it to my bio next to “theocratic fascist” and “children’s author.” 

In any event, this is a direct quote from the DOJ’s indictment, concerning the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The indictment refers to a number of “F’s,” which is short for “field sources.”

Between at least 2014 and 2023, the SPLC paid their Fs in a clandestine manner. Doing so hid the fact that while the SPLC received donation money under the auspices that the funds would be used to “dismantle” violent extremist groups, this donation money was, instead, being used, in part, by the SPLC to pay leaders and others within these same violent extremist groups. That money was then used for the benefit of the individuals as well as the violent extremist groups. … Between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million in SPLC funds to Fs who were associated with various violent extremist groups. … Examples of Fs who were secretly paid by the SPLC include, but are not limited to the following: F-37 was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the 2017 ‘Unite the Right’ event in Charlottesville, Virginia and attended the event at the direction of the SPLC. F-37 made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees. Between 2015 and 2023, the SPLC secretly paid F-37 more than $270,000.00.

Yes, according to this indictment, the SPLC paid more than a quarter-million dollars to one person who coordinated the “Unite the Right rally,” and made racist posts under SPLC’s supervision. That’s a small fraction of the $3 million that the SPLC is accused of paying to fund various extremists in other groups. What this means is that, if the DOJ’s indictment is accurate, the SPLC is probably the single greatest funder of “white supremacy” in the entire country. No one else is paying this kind of money to fund white nationalist rallies, which is why the SPLC had to do it themselves.

What needs to be emphasized here is that, fundamentally, the SPLC is not some random one-off left-wing activist group. They are a wing of the Democrat Party in charge of engineering domestic Color Revolutions with fraudulent narratives that they invent out of thin air, for the purpose of overthrowing conservative administrations and replacing them with Leftists. Then, once the Leftists are in charge, SPLC starts writing memos that the FBI uses to justify violent crackdowns on conservatives.

For example, a couple of years ago, the FBI field office in Richmond declared that Catholics were a domestic terror threat.

Here’s what the FBI wrote.

FBI Richmond assesses the increasingly observed interest of racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists in radical-traditionalist Catholic (RTC) ideology almost certainly presents opportunities for threat mitigation through the exploration of new avenues for tripwire and source development. … As of 2021, the Southern Poverty Law Center identified nine RTC hate groups operating in the United States.

See how this works? It’s very similar to Russiagate.

The FBI’s allies in a left-wing group write some memo, and then the FBI will cite that memo as if it’s an independent justification to launch an investigation. Meanwhile, inside the FBI, agents were writing emails about how insane it was that the SPLC was dictating the FBI’s activities.

Here’s one of those emails, where FBI employees react to the designation of some Catholics as a hate group, at the behest of the SPLC.

One FBI employee writes:

Ummm, that is interesting, several thoughts, but mostly, who is the customer. Is anyone really asking for a product like this? Apparently we are at the behest of the SPLC.

And then an agent replies:

Yeah, our overreliance on the SPLC for hate designations is .. problematic.

But the rank-and-file agents don’t have any power. The people running the government — the Biden administration at the time — knew that the SPLC was manufacturing “hate groups.” That was the whole point. The more “hate groups” that the Left could manufacture, the easier it would be for Joe Biden to take the stage in front of a blood-red background, flanked by Marines, and declare that Republicans represented a threat to the Republic.

Watch:

Source: Bloomberg Television/YouTube.com

This speech laid the groundwork for the FBI’s attacks on religious liberty, including predawn SWAT team raids on peaceful pro-life demonstrators. It also laid the groundwork for the campaign of lawfare against Donald Trump, which had no precedent in American history.

People are more willing to accept an authoritarian takeover when you convince them that their opponents are really domestic terrorists. This is why Biden and Merrick Garland declared that “white supremacy” was the greatest domestic terror threat facing the country. All of their messaging was in sync with the SPLC.

That’s why, according to the DOJ, the SPLC’s efforts went far beyond the “Unite the Right” rally. This is also from the DOJ’s indictment, about another field source for the SPLC.

F-9 was affiliated with the neo-Nazi organization, the National Alliance and served as an F for the SPLC for more than 20 years. F-9’s activities included fundraising for the National Alliance. Between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly paid F-9 more than $1,000,000.00..

So if we’re following this allegation, the SPLC paid a million dollars to someone who was “affiliated with a neo-Nazi organization.” And then this informant, in turn, raised money for the neo-Nazi organization. So, according to this indictment, the SPLC was going out of its way to ensure that a neo-Nazi group remained in existence. At the same time, they were calling for the eradication of “right-wing hate,” they were doing everything in their power to fund neo-Nazis. And it was clear why they wanted to do that. 

Take a look at this screenshot from the SPLC’s website. 

SPLC

The caption reads, “The Department of Homeland Security posted this image with the caption “Which Way, American Man?” in August 2025. The caption appears to be a reference to a white nationalist book published by the National Alliance, a neo-Nazi hate group.”

See how this works? The SPLC wants groups like the National Alliance to exist, so that they can accuse the Trump administration of associating with them. Meanwhile, the SPLC doesn’t tell you that, in secret, they’re not simply associating with these groups — they’re funding them. 

And according to the indictment, this happened all the time. 

The SPLC [funnelled] more than $160,000.00 from a fictitious entity to F-11 who then sent funds to various violent extremist group leaders including the former Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.

It’s the kind of strategy that’s effective because, unless you’re extremely familiar with how depraved left-wing activists are, it would never occur to you that they’re doing any of this. But they feel a need to do it, because otherwise, there would be no right-wing “hate groups.” If the SPLC didn’t fund them, they wouldn’t exist. And then Democrats would lose power, and the SPLC would run out of money.

It’s the same reason your anti-virus software bugs you all the time. If your anti-virus software told you the truth — which is that you really don’t need to pay for anti-virus software anymore — then obviously no one would subscribe. So instead, they pester you with fake “threats” and scare tactics. It’s the same principle, except in the case of the SPLC, they were having a substantial effect on American politics.

The more you read this indictment, the more you realize how shameless it was. 

According to the DOJ, the SPLC was paying the same Klan members it was complaining about on its website.

F-unknown was the Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America. In an article published on November 22, 2013, the SPLC described the group as a “millennial reboot of what was once a serious domestic threat. … F-30 led the National Socialist Party of America, was the former director of a faction of the Aryan Nations, and a former member of the Ku Klux Klan. The SPLC website contained an “Extremist File” webpage for F-30 from which the SPLC solicited donations. Between 2014 and 2016, the SPLC secretly paid F30 more than $70,000.00. This overlapped the time period in which F-30 was featured on the SPLC’s “Extremist File” webpage.

This appears to be that webpage, from the SPLC:

SPLC

As you can see, they characterize the guy as a Neo-Nazi. And meanwhile, they’re paying him tens of thousands of dollars.

So now I’m starting to get a little frustrated, because again, I was also listed on their website as an “extremist.” They put my photo up there and everything. I was on their hate map, as someone who absolutely must be stopped. And yet, for all of this, I wasn’t paid a single cent at any point. I served as “General Hate” without any pay whatsoever. Meanwhile, the KKK wizards were raking it in.

If nothing else, this whole situation gives me new respect for Jussie Smollett. He bootstrapped his fake hate crime and paid for it himself, rather than having SPLC organize and fund it for him. He didn’t need SPLC money any more than I did. So there’s a lesson here: Support your local mom and pop hate crime hoax operations. Do it now, before they’re all put out of business by the big guys.

Of course, all kidding aside, SPLC wasn’t offering money to genuine conservatives who are effective at advancing conservatism. The idea was to fund and prop up the alleged “right wingers” who were useful to SPLC and the Left. And I suspect that soon, whether through this investigation or those to come, we’re going to find out that there are a fair number of faux conservative figures, the most embarrassing and ridiculous ones, who have been getting paid by the forces they pretend to oppose. There is a symbiotic relationship between left-wing activist groups and supposedly right-wing grifters. This relationship has always been obvious. Now we’re learning about its financial dimensions. 

Speaking of which, back to the KKK — what exactly were they doing to get all this SPLC money? Well, here’s one example. It turns out that, about a decade ago, there was a big controversy in Georgia over something called the “Adopt a Highway Program.” The idea is that, if you’re an organization, you can “adopt” a section of the state highway system if you agree to pick up garbage along the side of the road. In exchange for picking up the trash, you get to have your group’s name posted on signs alongside the stretch of highway that you’ve “adopted.”

There was a similar program in Missouri for a while, which led to the creation of this sign along the highway.

Tim Parker / Reuters

Eventually, the sign was taken down, apparently because the KKK didn’t pick up enough trash. But in any event, you can see why the KKK would want this kind of visibility. It’s basically free advertising from the government.

And apparently, the SPLC was a big fan of that advertising, as well. This is from the indictment.

F-43 was the reported National President of American Front and a convicted federal felon for his participation in a cross burning. Between 2016 and 2019, the SPLC secretly paid F-43 more than $19,000.00. F-unknown was a member of the Ku Klux Klan and married to an Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan. F-unknown and their spouse were involved in litigation whereby the Ku Klux Klan applied to take part in the Adopt-a-Highway program. During the course of the litigation, known payments were traced from the SPLC to F-unknown which exceeded $3,500.00.

It’s not exactly clear what that money bought, but it sounds like the SPLC was all in favor of the KKK getting a stretch of highway named after them. This is how pro-white supremacy the SPLC is. They’re all-in. They won’t stop until every stretch of highway is named after a KKK grand wizard. That’s the extent of their commitment to anti-racism. As Ibram X. Kendi (aka Henry Rogers) once said, the only way to combat racism is to be as racist as possible. And the SPLC, more than any other organization on the planet, has definitely taken that advice to heart.

The rest of the indictment outlines the ways in which the SPLC is accused of laundering money through shell companies to these various informants. The indictment says the SPLC set up fake companies like the “Center Investigative Agency” or CIA, as well as “Fox Photography,” “North West Technologies,” the “Tech Writers Group,” and a “Rare Books Warehouse.” The idea is that, for obvious reasons, the SPLC didn’t want to cut checks from its own account. So they may have broken the law by creating a bunch of fake companies to send the wire transfers. And in addition to that, the DOJ is claiming that donors were basically defrauded, because they were donating with the expectation that they were “fighting” right-wing extremism — not funding it.

This is obviously an ongoing case, and the SPLC is claiming that it was simply paying informants to undermine these groups. And already, Democrats, including Hakeem Jeffries, are claiming that the Trump administration is “weaponizing” the DOJ to go after its political opponents, which, of course, is something Democrats would never do. 

For their part, the Democrats’ allies in the media are mostly ignoring the story entirely. Newsbusters reports:

ABC, CBS, and NBC all bit their tongues rather than report on the downfall of the self-proclaimed “anti-hate” group. In fact, only PBS reported on the indictment. … [But] PBS’s report on the indictment was vague and unclear. The charges were recited but not explained. The SPLC’s CEO was allowed in for a friendly soundbite.

Imagine that. After years of talking nonstop about Charlottesville, none of the mainstream outlets are going to talk about SPLC’s role in helping organize the rally. After decades of citing the SPLC as a credible source of information on so-called “hate groups,” none of them are going to talk about the federal allegations that the company was funding those same groups. Apparently, they’re going with the argument from the Democrat Party, which is that SPLC was simply using “informants” for legitimate purposes. Meanwhile, something called the “Jewish Council for Public Affairs” just released a bizarre statement defending SPLC, saying they do invaluable work to “counter violent extremism” — never mind the fact that they fund it.

These arguments, of course, amount to complete BS. When you’re paying millions of dollars, you aren’t buying “informants” — you’re supporting the organizations themselves, and propping them up. It’s obvious what the game was. SPLC funded “right-wing extremist” groups so that it could turn around and fundraise off of them, and use them as a pretext to crack down on conservatives nationwide. That’s what was actually happening.

But even if these excuses were true, it would just serve to underscore the degree to which the Left has created quasi-government agencies despite having no legal authority to do so. The SPLC — according to their own defense — was acting like the FBI, hiring undercover agents to “disrupt terrorism” and so on. It’s hard to ignore the fact that, based on this indictment, we’ve been living under the tyranny not just of unelected judges and bureaucrats, but also of unelected activist organizations.

I’ve been beating this drum for a while now — about the need for the Trump administration to go to war with these fake non-profits and NGOs that, in reality, are criminal front-groups for the Democrat Party. And with this indictment, more than half a year after the murder of Charlie Kirk, the Trump administration is finally getting serious about doing that. And that’s genuinely worth applauding. I have plenty of criticisms about this administration, which I’ve voiced many times. But if they can dismantle these cancerous left-wing front groups — the same way they closed the border and shut down the fraudulent asylum claims — then unequivocally, this administration will have been a success. It certainly will have been a hell of a lot better than the alternative. And as tempting as it might be to engage in doomerism and complain nonstop, we need to celebrate wins when they happen. 

We need to recognize this indictment as a sign of major progress. 

And we also need to understand, at the same time, that SPLC is the tip of the iceberg. It appears the SPLC is a criminal organization. Every Leftist activist group is just as corrupt, dishonest, and sinister as this. They all want you dead. They all celebrated what happened to Charlie Kirk. They’re all willing to go to extraordinary lengths — lengths unfathomable to sane people — to defame, harass, and destroy their opponents. So it’s not crazy to wonder who, for instance, was behind January 6th. If they’re willing to spend millions of dollars on false flag operations, for the purpose of generating a narrative they can use to demonize and jail their political opponents for several years, then it’s not exactly a stretch to conclude that January 6th was just like Charlottesville—a well-funded psy-op.

It’s not exactly unheard of. Something similar to this incident happened back in 2001, in Germany. The federal government wanted to ban the “National Democratic Party of Germany,” saying they were run by Nazis. But the plan fell apart when it emerged that, in fact, “confidential informants of German intelligence agencies” were “active in the leadership of the party.”

Intelligence agencies and activist groups have never stopped running this playbook. During the Canadian trucker convoy, some mysterious Nazi flags appeared — and the people holding them eventually went back to a hotel that was being used by Canada’s federal police. These kinds of psy-ops are extremely common. But if you say any of this out loud, they’ll come after you, relentlessly. They bankrupted Alex Jones and stole his company, not because of anything he said about a school shooting, but because he made observations like this, about Charlottesville:

Here’s @RealAlexJones NAILING the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” false-flag years ago, shortly after it happened.

“Charlottesville was mainly a bunch of homosexual leftists dressing up like Nazis… the same leftist foundations are funding the white supremacists…”

PUT A… pic.twitter.com/cQeJOmg3qL

— Harrison H. Smith ✞ (@HarrisonHSmith) April 22, 2026

Source: @HarrisonHSmith/X.com

He saw right through it at the time. And they destroyed him for it. The press, the NGOs, and the nonprofits all denounced him and made sure he lost everything.

Now, lawfully and without any apologies whatsoever, we have no choice but to do the same to them.

On Tuesday, however, the Justice Department accused the SPLC of secretly using donor money to pay leaders within white supremacist groups. The SPLC, which labels organizations like the Alliance Defending Freedom as a hate group, was charged with multiple financial crimes, including money laundering and bank fraud. 

Prosecutors say the SPLC directed more than $3 million between 2014 and 2023 to such individuals while obscuring the transactions through accounts tied to “a series of fictitious entities.”

The charges come years after legacy media outlets have repeatedly cited the SPLC in reporting on conservative organizations and activists. 

The New York Times, for example, frequently refers to SPLC experts in articles on conservative figures and movements, including the late Charlie Kirk, whose Turning Point USA was labeled a “hate group.” In an article published on the day of Kirk’s assassination, the Times wrote that his “rhetoric was long cast as racist, xenophobic and extreme by groups that study hate speech, including the Southern Poverty Law Center.”

The paper’s obituary of conservative activist David Horowitz also quoted the SPLC, which labeled him “the godfather of the modern anti-Muslim movement.”

Other outlets have similarly relied on SPLC reports and designations. When the conservative grassroots group Moms for Liberty was added to the list in 2023, NPR reported that the SPLC compared the parental rights group to “pro-segregationist parent groups.” CBS News, in its coverage, pointed to the SPLC’s claims that the group had a history of “harassing community members, advancing anti-LGBTQ+ misinformation and fighting to scrub diverse and inclusive material from lesson plans.”

The SPLC’s designation of groups opposed to transgender ideology on kids or that hold to traditional Christian beliefs has received much coverage over the years.

One article from NBC cited the SPLC to identify groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom, the Family Research Council, and the American College of Pediatricians as the core of the “anti-gay movement.” Similarly, the Washington Post turned to the SPLC to label the group Gays Against Groomers as “an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group.”

Groups concerned about Sharia law have also faced criticism from the SPLC. An article from NBC pointed to the SPLC as a source in a report about momentum to ban Sharia law in the United States. It noted that one anti-Sharia group had been labeled a hate group by the SPLC. 

The Guardian framed the SPLC’s 2024 hate list as driven by people critical of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. 

Reporting in 2017 on the annual hate group list, CNN ran a headline titled “Here are all the active hate groups where you live,” providing a “hate map” that included groups that held traditional Christian beliefs. They later changed that headline to “The Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of hate groups” after complaints from conservatives.

Johnson, whose name has resurfaced in recent months over his false claims regarding Jeffrey Epstein, finds himself at the mercy of a court-appointed receiver who has been ordered by a federal judge to carry out a $71 million ruling against him. He was accused of lying about being an intelligence asset as part of an “extortion scheme,” in which he threatened investors with “sabotage” if they did not give him favorable investment terms.

Now, the fight over his assets appears to have extended to a criminal investigation, with the judge asking the receiver to report “any potential criminal conduct or wrongdoing” by Johnson. Johnson was thrown in jail late last year for contempt after he failed to disclose his assets to the court.

In an April 13 filing, the court says Johnson’s conduct “bears the hallmarks of conduct consistent with wire fraud … and money laundering,” adding that it “may constitute criminal perjury or false declarations.” The statements are, for now, based on a status report of the ongoing probe, and not a definitive conclusion of law.

Johnson, who was labeled a “sociopathic liar” in the initial case, has reemerged in the press due to years-old fantastical claims he made to the FBI about Jeffrey Epstein that were released in the Epstein files. Among the unsourced claims by Johnson were that President Trump was “compromised by Israel.” He also claimed that Jared Kushner, Trump’s Jewish son-in-law, was running the presidency in his first term.

The 2020 claims from Johnson were picked up by other anti-Semitic activists such as Dave Smith and Hasan Piker, who made no mention of the fact that Johnson had no basis for any of his claims.

FBI documents show Johnson was making similar unsourced claims about others in Trump’s orbit. One FBI report from May 2020 shows that Johnson claimed to the intelligence bureau that Sergio Gor, a top Trump official who is now his ambassador to India, was a “Russian spy.” He also said that Arthur Schwartz, another close ally of Trump, was a “spy.” Neither claim was paired with any evidence.

“Chuck Johnson is a complete loser who has failed at everything in life,” Schwartz told The Daily Wire. “Like many others in Washington, I look forward to the day that he’s sentenced to a lengthy and well-deserved term of incarceration.”

Johnson, who has referred to The Daily Wire as an “Israeli propaganda rag,” is open about his Jew hatred. He regularly associates with both Richard Spencer and Nick Fuentes, and is a Holocaust denier, saying that both “Auschwitz and the gas chambers” are not real.

“I love Nick Fuentes,” Johnson wrote in July 2024. “I avow him.”

Though Johnson is often represented as a far-right figure, he is now politically aligned with Democrats, and supported Kamala Harris over Trump in 2024. He liked Joe Biden, he said, but liked Harris even more because of her stance on Israel.

“I am a huge Joe Biden fan, and will remain such on domestic matters, but he has deferred to the Israelis way too much,” Johnson said during the 2024 campaign, “and I think to some extent, Kamala Harris is going to be a bit more aggressive towards them.”

Johnson’s handler at the FBI was reportedly Jonathan Buma, who became a favorite of liberal media for claims he made in 2023 that the bureau was biased in favor of Trump.

Buma was arrested in March 2025 for leaking confidential information to the press. It was actually disclosed by Johnson that he and Buma had both leaked information to the Wall Street Journal.

Buma has since been profiled for his claims that Trump and Elon Musk are entangled in a Russian conspiracy. Again, the claims came without evidence.

“Those efforts were intense and they were ongoing,” he said of Russian efforts. “I can’t go into too much more detail.”

Johnson did not respond to requests for comment.

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a left-wing agitprop organization that raises roughly $100 million every year, has been handing money to white supremacists.

Why in the world would they do that? What the hell is going on?

Let’s begin with this premise. The demand for white supremacy on the Left outstrips the supply.

What do I mean by this?

I mean that people on the Left think, broadly speaking, that Americans are horrible racists. Then they look around at the world, and it turns out that Americans are some of the least racist people in history.

Americans basically rank dead last in racism on the planet right now. If you go to any other country on planet Earth, you will notice significantly more racism than there is in the United States.

If you go to Japan, there’s a fair bit of racism, as in South Korea, as in India.

But when you come to the United States, the polls suggest that the vast majority of Americans are fine with living next to people of different races and fine with intermarrying with people of other races. We have very high rates of ethnic intermarriage in America. We are an extraordinarily tolerant and diverse people.

But for the Left to make its play for a communitarian, centralized government, they have to constantly suggest that the government must be there to ram decency and goodness down the throats of those evil racists.

And the only way that you can sell that proposition is to create a false supply of racism, which brings us to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is one of the most powerful left-wing groups in America. It’s a supposedly civil rights nonprofit originally founded in 1971, in Montgomery, Alabama. It built a reputation on using litigation and “research” — pretty shoddy “research” — to combat what they have called white supremacists and other domestic extremist groups while advocating for marginalized communities as their stated purpose. Over time, that turned into monitoring so-called extremist movements. They published a hate group list, a hate map, and they pushed programs on bias and intolerance.

This was used to mainline their intel into everything from media to education to law enforcement. The FBI, up until October 2025, was using inputs from the SPLC to determine the kinds of people to monitor.

Even in the private sector, SPLC data was being used. Amazon, under Jeff Bezos, said that it used SPLC data to decide whom to exclude from its Amazon Smile charity programs.

How prominent has the SPLC been? Since 2010, a search of The New York Times pulls up 711 instances where the SPLC is cited as an authority on hate or discrimination statistics.

They are the go-to. The New York Times sees a Jussie Smollett story, and they call up somebody from the SPLC to talk about it. There’s a Nick Fuentes story; they call the SPLC to talk about it. There’s a Charlie Kirk story, and they call the SPLC to talk about it. 

The New York Times repeatedly quoted the SPLC data in its coverage of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where the media routinely claimed that President Trump said there were “fine people on both sides,” which was not what he actually said. They lied about that, but the “Unite the Right” rally has been the calling card for entire swaths of the Left for a very, very long time. The New York Times even quoted the SPLC leadership to provide historical context for the rise of the alt-right.

In fact, a Google Gemini search of The New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today shows that 20 to 25% of all analytical pieces on the “Unite the Right” rally referenced data or quoted directly from the SPLC.

Why is this relevant? 

It turns out that the SPLC provided some of the funding for the “Unite the Right” rally. Yesterday, the acting attorney general, Todd Blanch, announced criminal charges for the Southern Poverty Law Center.

He said:

Today, a few minutes ago, in the Middle District of Alabama, a grand jury returned an 11 count indictment charging the Southern Poverty Law Center with six counts of wire fraud, four counts of bank fraud, and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. According to the charges in the indictment, the SPLC is a nonprofit entity that purports to fight white supremacy and racial hatred by reporting on extremist groups and conducting research to inform law enforcement groups with the goal of dismantling these groups. As the indictment describes, the SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.

The DOJ is saying that the Southern Poverty Law Center was basically paying all sorts of white supremacists and extremists to generate more white supremacy so that they could continue fundraising.

Here’s what’s true virtually everywhere in the nonprofit world — they exist, theoretically, to solve problems. You give money to a nonprofit to solve a problem. If the problem goes away, you no longer give to that nonprofit.

Let’s say that you are the leader of a nonprofit or your leadership class of a nonprofit, and it turns out the thing you’re trying to solve has been pretty much solved in the United States — such as the “racism of the American population.”

When you launched in 1971, racism was a very, very real and ever-present part of American life. But today, racism is not even a blip on most Americans’ radar.

But you’re the Southern Poverty Law Center, and you need to raise some money.

So what do you do? You create a fake supply of white supremacy so you can go back to your donors and say, “The problem is worse than ever.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center is accused of using donor money to pay actual white supremacists.

It’s totally insane.

According to the press release from the Justice Department, “Between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million and donated funds to individuals were associated with various violent extremist groups, including the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, National Socialist Party of America, the American Nazi Party, and Unite the Right.”

Unite the Right happens to be one that leaps off the page because the SPLC and the Left made bank off the “Unite the Right” rally for years and years and years. It was the key example they used over and over and over again to prove that the Right happened to be racist, even though the Right did not associate with the “Unite the Right” rally.

Blanche said on the Laura Ingraham Show on Tuesday that the Biden administration opened the investigation and then closed the investigation.

I wonder why.

“How did they get away with this for so long?” Ingraham asked.

“It’s a great question. I said today during the press conference that we know that this investigation was opened during the Biden administration and then mysteriously closed,” Blanche answered. “I really don’t have any information about why it was closed. And then we started again last year, the FBI did, working with the U.S. attorney in Alabama. And it’s extraordinarily egregious. You just talked about it. But imagine a donor to the SPLC, if they were told, ‘By the way, we’re going to give the money you’re giving us to the Ku Klux Klan … in some cases over $1 million.’ I mean, it’s incredible.”

We should remember the SPLC’s game was to label anyone remotely conservative an extremist.

This is the game. It does lend itself to the idea that much of what we consume in the media, on social media, and in politics is just not true. As for the “hatred” that a lot of Americans feel for other Americans, a lot of it is ginned up by groups like the SPLC.

The fakery here is quite real, and people make money off of it because the algorithm favors it. The algorithm favors amygdala-friendly responses.

The amygdala is the emotional center of your brain. It’s what responds to fear signals. The prefrontal cortex is the reasoning center of your brain, which says that the fear is not what you should be worried about. It’s not real.

The internet and virality are designed to appeal to your amygdala.

Thus, if you’re the SPLC, you say, “White supremacy is a threat to you and your family; it’s virulent, it’s violent, and it’s racist.” The whole pitch goes directly to the amygdala, because at no point does the prefrontal cortex kick in and say, “Wait, hold on, I know none of my neighbors are racist. They don’t like racism. They think it’s bad.”

But because the amygdala has kicked in, you now think worse of your neighbors, even though you have never really thought about the issue using the reasoning part of your brain.

The same is true in the algorithmic space online. There are a lot of accounts that go extremely viral because they use extraordinarily charged language, which tends to feature second-person pronouns. If I speak directly to you, the minute I say “you,” it’s probably firing up the centers in your brain that are more emotionally resonant. If I use words like “evil” or “wicked” or “soulless,” those are words that are much more likely to fire up the emotional centers of your brain than to appeal to your prefrontal cortex.

It’s a shortcut for politicians and influencers — and for groups like the SPLC. 

The more that you can use emotionally charged language that is second-person directed, the better you will do.

That’s why we all seem to be living in a world that is totally different from reality these days. The more time you spend online, the more you see this sort of stuff that is routinely retweeted and reposted, and is always deeply emotionally charged stuff.

That shtick is the entire game. And that’s why you feel alienated.

It’s why I’ve said a thousand times, and I will say it a thousand times more, that you ought to talk to your neighbors in person, because when you talk with your neighbors, your prefrontal cortex will kick in as opposed to your fear center in the amygdala.

And you might learn that the neighbor with whom you disagree about tax rates actually is not a racist.

Sources have claimed that “witch hunts” by human rights lawyers have led to men in D and G Squadrons SAS applying for premature voluntary release. Although the number has been withheld by journalists for security reasons, some SAS sources described the scale of losses as “a threat to national security.”

These resignations are a result of war crime investigations into recent SAS actions in Syria and Afghanistan, as well as historic actions in Northern Ireland. These are often viewed as a vexatious hounding through the courts, with one case described as “ludicrous” by the judge who heard it, but not before it cost the former soldier four years of legal battles.

Last month, a memo was shared with the Special Air Service and Special Reconnaissance Regiment associations, which showed that 242 special forces soldiers — including 120 who are still serving—are under investigation as part of human rights inquiries which are costing £1 million a month.

Former regimental sergeant major George Simm has said that troops are increasingly afraid of a “knock on the door” from human rights lawyers, and feel betrayed that the government isn’t standing up for them.

Several of those resigning are believed to be senior warrant officers, the backbone of the SAS. Usually, these are the men who stay with the Regiment, as it is sometimes called, for most of their career. They provide a crucial combination of combat experience and cultural continuity. Yet, just before Christmas, a number applied to leave. Morale, unsurprisingly, is said to be extremely bad among those who remain.

At a time when Britain’s armed forces are in a weakened state, losing experienced special forces is a serious issue. British special forces are also integrated with American special forces, having worked closely together for decades. Any diminishment in British capabilities, therefore, has knock-on effects on U.S. security.

This is a depressingly familiar pattern. Over a decade ago, the lawyer Phil Shiner alleged that British troops in Iraq had committed systematic war crimes, leading to the five-year, £24 million Al-Sweady Inquiry. It concluded that the allegations were “wholly without foundation and entirely the product of deliberate lies.” Shiner’s firm, Public Interest Lawyers, was struck off. But the underlying laws remain.

One major issue is the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Ratified in 1951, it was intended to prevent a repeat of the human rights atrocities which occurred in the Second World War, as well as to safeguard European democracies from the Stalinist totalitarianism which then threatened them.

Over the years, however, the ECHR has expanded its powers, especially under the “living instrument” doctrine, which holds that the European Court of Human Rights, which adjudicates cases under the ECHR, can reinterpret the original text in light of changing attitudes. The result has been the Court inventing radical new interpretations. In addition, in 1998, the Court’s rulings became mandatory, meaning that human rights judges could tell nations like Britain what to do without any democratic mandate or challenge.

Crucially, the doctrine of “extraterritoriality” expanded the ECHR’s authority to any territory where a signatory had control, including warzones. Suddenly, SAS operations overseas were at the mercy of human rights lawyers, requiring soldiers to think about how they could justify split-second combat decisions for decades afterward.

The current Labor government has done little to protect the SAS. Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, is a former human rights lawyer, as is his Attorney General, Richard Hermer. They are currently trying to pass a new law which will remove the immunity introduced by the last government for veterans who served in Northern Ireland, leading to nine former military chiefs claiming that soldiers’ trust in the legal system had collapsed.

While British soldiers face being chased through the courts for the rest of their lives, a former terrorist who tried to blow up a church is standing for office. Shahid Butt can’t be barred from running, as his offense was so long ago. The same human rights laws also protect terrorists, such as Shah Rahman, who tried to blow up the London Stock Exchange as part of an Al Qaeda plot. He cannot be deported back to Bangladesh because the ECHR protects him.

Although there are plausible allegations that some British special forces committed crimes and that there were attempts to cover this up, human rights law is being used to go far beyond that. Soldiers face persecution for doing their duty, while terrorists can use it for protection. No nation can demand that its soldiers defend it if it won’t defend its soldiers.

***

Guy Dampier is a senior researcher on Nationhood at the Prosperity Institute.

The federal government is considering providing the airline with a convertible financing facility that would allow it to convert debt into equity. According to Bloomberg, the arrangement could give the government the option to acquire a significant ownership stake in the airline, potentially as much as 90% of a restructured entity.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick are leading the talks and reportedly met with President Donald Trump on Tuesday night to discuss the proposal. 

Trump signaled support for potential federal assistance earlier this week, saying, “Maybe the federal government should help that one out,” while raising concerns about the possible loss of roughly 14,000 jobs.

Spirit Aviation Holdings Inc.’s shares jumped more than 500% following reports of the potential deal.  

Spirit’s financial troubles date back several years, and the airline has accumulated more than $7 billion in debt. A planned $3.8 billion acquisition by JetBlue in 2022 was ultimately blocked by the Biden administration’s Department of Justice and later upheld by a federal judge in 2024. Former Attorney General Merrick Garland described the acquisition’s termination as a “victory on behalf of the American consumer,” arguing the merger would lead to increased fares for customers.

More recently, rising fuel costs tied to the war in Iran have added pressure, with JPMorgan analysts estimating those expenses could increase by as much as $360 million.

If negotiations pan out, Spirit Airlines will join a growing list of private companies in which the United States has taken a financial stake in recent years, including Intel, MP Materials, Lithium Americas, Trilogy Metals, and a “golden share” in U.S. Steel, recently acquired by Japan’s Nippon Steel.

1. Identify a respected institution.
2. kill it.
3. gut it.
4. wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect. #lefties

This weekend, during White House Correspondents Dinner (WHCD) and festivities, Substack will be hosting its own third annual invite-only party at the Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C. Substack has sold this as a form of counter programming to traditional media, like network news and newspapers, and has always billed itself as a “New and Independent” media enterprise.

Except there is no longer anything new or independent about Substack, which over the last year has largely become a sanctuary catering to former corporate and legacy partisan journalists. For the first time, President Donald Trump will be in attendance, and several of the journalists he regularly spars with will be attending the Substack party instead.

Substack’s exclusive, invite-only party will feature a cadre of so-called independent media voices. Kara Swisher, Mehdi Hassan, Chuck Todd, Chris Cillizza, Jennifer Rubin, Jim Acosta, and more mainstream media cast-offs who now all lay a claim to Substack and who Substack is turning to for their audiences, and it goes without saying that they are the farthest thing from “independent” media.

There is also one more addition slated to appear — the looksmaxxing online influencer Clavicular, who has made waves of late in Florida and seen cavorting around with far-Right nationalist influencer Nick Fuentes. As someone who makes a great deal of his living from Substack and has for the past three years, the glaring shift in ideology and mission has been hard to ignore, as have the algorithmic changes that now favor those very same journalists — the ones who will be partying this weekend. What independent voices on Substack see is The David Burge Effect happening in real time.

It wasn’t even five years ago that mainstream media figures and outlets were publishing hit pieces against Substack, calling it a platform that hosts white supremacists, dangerous vaccine disinformation, transphobic, and lacking proper moderation, that these same journalists and media figures were successful at hollowing out platforms like Facebook and Twitter of voices they found problematic, until Elon Musk purchased Twitter. Several prominent media figures, like Kara Swisher, abandoned Twitter because they stated they could not participate on a platform owned by Elon Musk.

In actuality, what happened is they lost the power, through Twitter, to silence voices they disagreed with. Gone were media allies Vijaya Gadde and Yoel Roth, the heads of (former) Twitter’s so-called “Safety Team,” which was disbanded under Musk, and with the release of the Twitter Files, revealed how they worked closely with journalists to censor voices on the platform, oftentimes conservative or Right-leaning in nature.

After Donald Trump’s second election in 2024, several media institutions began recalculating their business models. Resistance porn was no longer effective, and their audiences were dwindling. Several prominent journalists and media personalities found themselves out of a job. CNN’s grandstanding partisan personality, Jim Acosta, refused to be moved to late-night. Chuck Todd was out at NBC’s Meet the Press, and social media punchline and Wrongest Human Being on Earth Chris Cillizza had also departed CNN.

That’s where Substack stepped up, not only offering its platform to voices and institutions that had disparaged it in the past, but also pursuing promotional partnerships. Earlier this year, Head of News and Politics Catherine Valentine partnered with Cillizza to offer a Substack “Masterclass” for journalists laid off at the Washington Post. Valentine also reached out on her public timeline for an anonymous CBS anchor unhappy with CBS News’s direction under new Editor-In-Chief Bari Weiss.

Cillizza, who once famously stated that “for the billionth time, journalists don’t root for a side,” had only recently joined Substack but was clearly being promoted by the platform as a new and important voice for content over less prominent long-time users of the platform.

Last year, Substack made a push into video and live video, and there are rumors of Substack wanting to become essentially a new online television network, with the development of a live TV app. Substack sent out a promotional email to users and subscribers (like my Substack, Versus Media). Who were they promoting with this new direction? Jim Acosta and Katie Couric — two well-established detractors in the media of the political and cultural Right.

Valentine’s X bio states that she is helping “to lead a new media revolution.” She’s a former CNN, Politico, and Washington Post journalist herself, which explains the urge to turn Substack into a newer version of those biased outlets; the same outlets that targeted Right-leaning and independent voices on social media over some of the biggest news stories of the last five years, including the origins of Covid and the resulting vaccines, Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, and the Hunter Biden laptop story, which journalists actively assisted Twitter at the time in stopping the sharing of the story on social media platforms.

To her credit, Valentine and other heads of Substack have been open to concerns about catering to legacy media partisans, but that doesn’t appear to be slowing this trend. It’s being lavishly celebrated and catered to, even with more of these promotional partnerships. Of the Top Ten Bestsellers on Substack, eight of the top 10 are progressive personalities or former corporate media journalists, and they will all likely be in attendance at Substack’s counter party to the WHCD.

Substack can no longer lay claim to being “New Media” when they have turned their platform over to the most prominent partisan voices of old media personalities from the Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC. If Substack wants to become the platform of the media it helped destroy in the first place, that’s certainly their choice.

After journalist/activist Don Lemon was arrested in Minneapolis earlier this year for his role in a church protest, during which congregants said Lemon blocked a doorway and would not let them exit, Substack released a statement defending Lemon, another former CNN personality, as an act of free speech and journalism.

It wasn’t.

While there was spirited debate among members of Substack’s leadership about religious freedom and the right to worship in peace, there was no mention of the First Amendment rights of the congregation that were being violated by Lemon and the protestors, with whom he was working.

What made Substack special in the beginning, and what made it thrive, was that it was a model that stood up to those very same institutions, which have largely been discredited by dwindling audiences and a lack of credibility. It didn’t cave to pressure and accusations of being a transphobic platform that also gladly hosted Neo Nazis. Now, Substack is throwing lavish invite-only parties for those very same people.

Substack is becoming South By Southwest and Coachella. What was once a fledgling, daring independent music festival featuring some of the boldest independent and undiscovered bands and musicians became a sell-out corporate media playground that hosted progressive politicians for TED Talks.

Coachella, once a bold four-day music festival featuring independent acts, is now simply a fashion orgy for the rich and the celebrity elite. The question we are all asking ourselves now is where we go from here, after Substack’s party for the media elites.

***

Stephen L. Miller is the host and producer of Versus Media Podcast on Substack. He has written for The Spectator magazine, National Review, the New York Post, and Fox News. He can be found on Twitter @redsteeze

“President Clinton is coming through the door,” Jones can be heard saying in a clip of the conference that’s circulating online. 

“Uh,” the Dallas Morning News reporter said as Jones told him he could still ask a question. The camera then focused on Clinton entering the press room. Jones didn’t fully answer the reporter before making his way over to Clinton, stumbling on his way to greet the former president. 

The #Cowboys just stopped their pre-draft press conference because former President Bill Clinton showed up.

What the heck 😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/RLpLrK0ayh

— Ari Meirov (@MySportsUpdate) April 22, 2026

“Look at this right here,” Jones says with a laugh. “Come in this house. Yes sir, Mr. President.”

“This guy was recently named the second most American to have started with very little and have accomplished a lot. Look at him, it’s important. There’s a great story about him,” the Cowboys owner added.

“He’s been a wonderful, not only President, but friend over the years, and I’m really happy to have you here today,” Jones said. He also told Clinton it was “unquestionably” the largest press conference in the NFL.

“Thank you, I’m glad to see you,” Clinton said. “Have a good draft day.”

The Cowboys visited Clinton at the White House after their three Super Bowl wins in the 1990s. The last time Dallas took home the Lombardi Trophy was in 1996.

Jones recalled one of the visits, saying Clinton recited the entire roster of the Arkansas Razorbacks at the time. Clinton replied by saying it’s now “a different world.” Jones mentioned how difficult it would be to take the field in today’s college games, prompting Clinton to joke that he’d be the “late Jerry Jones” if he did.

Dallas Cowboys executive vice president Stephen Jones confirmed on Wednesday that the team will not pursue a long-term contract extension with wide receiver George Pickens, but that he’ll play the upcoming season under the franchise tag. 

The 22-year-old med school student, identified in an interview with Wired by the pseudonym “Sam,” said he created a fictional character named “Emily Hart” to help pay for school. The sexy blonde AI-generated persona was active on Facebook, Instagram, and the OnlyFans competitor site Fanvue, which allows AI-generated content (OnlyFans does not).

Sam said he used Google’s Gemini chatbot to help identify a target audience, claiming it suggested the “MAGA/conservative niche” could be particularly lucrative because “the conservative audience (especially older men in the US) often has higher disposable income and is more loyal.”

He then tailored the account’s content accordingly. Photos depicted “Emily” as a nurse taking part in activities like “ice fishing, drinking Coors Light, and shooting off a few rounds at the rifle range,” Wired reported.

One caption on the account said, “If you want a reason to unfollow: Christ is king, abortion is murder, and all illegals must be deported,” while another said, “POV: You were assigned intelligent at birth, but you identify as liberal.”

Sam told Wired he didn’t expect much from the account, but it kept growing in popularity. “Every Reel I posted was getting 3 million views, 5 million views, 10 million views. The algorithm loved it,” he said. 

Sam also claimed that an “AI hot girl Nazi influencer” would “blow up” and “break all the records.” Meta commented in the article, saying Nazi content was flagged and removed from the platform. 

“I was basically doing nothing,“ the con artist said of Emily’s Fanvue account featuring nude photos generated with AI. “And it was just flooded with money.” 

Both the Facebook and Instagram accounts associated with “Emily Hart” have been taken down. Sam told Wired he has no regrets about what he did.

“I don’t feel like I was scamming people,” he said, adding that the fans probably would have followed along even if they knew Emily wasn’t real because they might “like the sentiment of it.”