We’re not grey people, we’re not dirty, we’re not mean, we love everybody, but we tab as we please …
NEW: During a floor debate on gerrymandering, Virginia State Senator Lamont Bagby (D) says he knows a little bit about rural America because he watched Dukes of Hazzard. pic.twitter.com/b3BtbLn4V1
— Nick Minock (@NickMinock) April 23, 2026
Ed: As I remarked in response on Twitter, my extensive viewing of shows like Good Times, What’s Happening, The Jeffersons, and Sanford & Son makes me qualified to run for president of my local NAACP chapter, too. I’m also qualified as a surgeon (St. Elsewhere), detective (many shows), and might be the best prepared to live on a deserted isle with a movie star and a farm girl. But don’t tell my wife that. Seriously, though … where do voters find these idiots?
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Axios: The death of Rep. David Scott (D-Ga.) has reignited a debate among Democratic lawmakers and activists about the party’s aging — and often ailing — leadership. …
- Scott’s health had been a subject of concern among colleagues for years, leading to his ouster as ranking member of the House Agriculture Committee in 2024.
- The Georgia Democrat had been running for reelection and faced a large field of younger, well-funded Democratic primary challengers looking to unseat him.
By the number: Scott is the eighth House member to die in office during the last two years, all but one of whom were Democrats who were 70 or older.
Ed: May Rep. Scott rest in peace, and please pray for his family and friends. Interestingly, the Protection Racket Media didn’t bring this up during the Biden Regency, when Joe Biden’s obvious senility and fragility produced nothing but denials and Sharp As a Tack™ narratives from news outlets. Remember how CNN and others ran with “cheap fakes”? Good times, good times (not in the Esther Rolle sense, of course). Only after Biden got humiliated during a re-election campaign that exposed the massive cover-up of Biden’s incompetence did this suddenly become a concern for the Left. And maybe Democrats should pay more attention to their idiot problem, as noted above.
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Kudos to the New York Post for being the only major outlet to get this right. The SPLC were paying the leaders. By definition, leaders cannot be informants. They run the operation. It is like paying the leader of Auschwitz to inform on who is carrying out the gassings instead of… https://t.co/qUrKyt6uyJ
— Hans Mahncke (@HansMahncke) April 23, 2026
… instead of paying him to stop the gassings. It is perhaps the most grotesque, cynical, and pernicious racket ever devised. Of course, plenty of groups extract money from taxpayers and well-meaning donors off problems they inflate, but this is far worse because it breeds real hatred and manufactures racial division to keep the grift alive.
Ed: This is exactly right. The DoJ may still have trouble prosecuting this as a crime, but it is a grotesque moral and ethical violation, and the SPLC deserves to be utterly destroyed for it. Or maybe the DoJ will have more success than we think. This may have been run as a protection racket of sorts as well …
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Jim Trageser at Lost in Cyberspace: The editorial board – publisher Tom Missett, managing editor Rusty Harris, and myself – were in favor of this development, and wrote a series of editorials in support of it. Then we went a step further, and in another editorial argued that political and activist organizations that keep files on American citizens should also have to disclose those files on request, and have a process whereby inaccurate information could be challenged.
We had in mind everyone from the National Rifle Association to the ACLU – the sorts of nonprofit advocacy groups that tend to monitor what their perceived opponents write and say in public.
But it was only the Southern Poverty Law Center we heard from. …
It would be unfortunate, the SPLC rep told Rusty, if the SPLC had to add a newspaper of all things to their hate watch list! That they would name our editorial board members as well, let the world know that we supported hate!
Ed: Read it all. It’s a great story, but a very disturbing look at the Mafia tactics of the SPLC long before anyone seriously challenged their practices (early 1990s).
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New Evidence Reveals Judas Received His 30 Pieces Of Silver From The SPLC https://t.co/TMbAhI3jp3 pic.twitter.com/a73SB3yXTh
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) April 23, 2026
Ed: Hmmm. Checks out.
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Jed Rubenfeld at The Free Press: Supporters of the SPLC will see the indictment as yet another vindictive Trump prosecution of a left-wing adversary. Haters will see it as overdue justice finally coming to a radical left nonprofit that worked with the Biden administration to target conservative parents and to call right-leaning Catholic organizations domestic terrorists.
But the question many will have is why—why on earth would the Southern Poverty Law Center, which all agree is sharply left-leaning, fund right-wing entities the SPLC itself calls hate groups?
The indictment offers no answer at all.
The SPLC has said it paid informants in these entities to obtain clandestine information about their activities—information it would share with law enforcement. The indictment does nothing to refute this claim. Instead, it simply recounts in detail numerous payments that were made and the fact that these payments were kept hidden.
That’s not going to be sufficient—either as a PR matter, or with a jury. Criminal fraud cases require a theory: Why was the fraudulent scheme undertaken, and who did it benefit? The government needs to explain that theory, yet the indictment doesn’t.
Ed: This is an interesting essay to read in full because Rubenfeld is a sharp and skeptical analyst, and this presents an argument for reasoned skepticism for prosecution. Rubenfeld agrees that the SPLC acted atrociously, but perhaps not criminally. My response would be to note that indictments do not present a full case but usually just enough to justify criminal charges. The theory here is pretty obvious: the SPLC defrauded its donors by sponsoring hate events to justify even bigger donations from defrauded sponsors. The DoJ has to prove that, of course.
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It really is wild that calling for the death of Jews and Republicans was not enough to get Democrats to distance themselves from Hasan Piker. It was his endorsement of shop lifting at Whole Foods.
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) April 23, 2026
Ed: That’s because Democrats and the woke media actually care about Whole Foods. And I’m only partly joking about that.
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Charles C.W. Cooke at NRO: It is entirely irrelevant whether we are discussing Citarella, Jimmy’s Roadside Grocery, or the Greater Manhattan Unionized Cooperative; stealing is verboten. Morality notwithstanding, this injunction provides us with the predictability that is necessary for our culture to flourish. Hasan Piker does not strike me as a particularly thoughtful person, so it is probable that, like so many affluent would-be revolutionaries, he has falsely assumed that the stability he enjoys every day is an intrinsic feature of the natural world. It is not. Each time he receives a payment, or swipes his credit card, or interacts with his accountant, he is mindlessly assuming that the rules about which he is so painfully glib will hold fast. If, as he insisted twice, it is acceptable to steal from Whole Foods, then there is no good reason that it is unacceptable to steal from Hasan Piker. Relative to most, both are rich, but, thankfully, that is not our standard. If it were, our society would become chaotic within a matter of weeks, and it would not be the privileged who paid the highest price for that.
The central conservative insight is that civilizations are fragile and that it takes constant effort to sustain them. Cretins such as Piker, Tolentino, and Spiegelman are free to emit their bilge without formal sanction, but they are not immune from the judgment of the sober. There are many words to describe figures whose worldview calls for the dismantling of the architecture that keeps us all secure, and, for my money, “enemy” is as good as any other. If heeded, Hasan Piker would walk us straight off the cliff. Yes. “Enemy” it is.
Ed: Worth noting, too: this discussion also included the rationalization of Luigi Mangione’s cowardly back-shooting assassination of a health insurance executive, whom Piker reasoned was guilty of “social murder.” Enemy is the proper term, and yet only the endorsement of stealing from Whole Foods made his Democrat pals embarrassed to associate with him. So what should we call those Democrats?
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Every communist atrocity in history was justified by said communists by inventing some scenario where they had no choice but to be monsters.
100% of the time.
“I didn’t wanna do this horrible thing. I just have no choice.” https://t.co/NdnnUbcGeX
— Jesse Kelly (@JesseKellyDC) April 23, 2026
Ed: This is why ‘The Road to Serfdom’ by F.A. Hayek should be required reading in high school. Hayek was an economist by trade, but this book is a very accessible and devastating analysis of how collectivist systems ALWAYS produce ever-more-brutal leaders and policies. Collectivism fails, and its true-believer cultists refuse to deal with that failure rationally. The attempts to force “success” in collectivist systems resulted in the deaths of over 100 million people in the 20th century, most of those after Hayek published that book. The Chavista arc in Venezuela provided yet another apt demonstration.
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You have to admit it’s at least *a little* funny that the hashtag resistance movement has gone from spearheading moral panics over white/Christian extremism and “hate” to embracing a pro-murder nepo-baby who says Jews are inbred pig-dogs.
— T. Becket Adams (@BecketAdams) April 23, 2026
Ed: Funny-peculiar, certainly.
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Adam Kredo at The Free Beacon: Iran’s “ghost fleet” of illicit tankers moved 60 million barrels of crude oil worth an estimated $5 billion between the beginning of Operation Epic Fury and the start of the U.S. blockade of the Persian Gulf, according to shipping data analyzed by the United Against a Nuclear Iran (UANI) advocacy group, which noted that the bulk of that oil went to China.
Twenty-six of the ships UANI has monitored originated from Kharg Island, Iran’s main energy hub and the site of multiple U.S. military attacks last month. The Islamic Republic’s wartime exports generated “an estimated revenue of over $5 billion” for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which according to UANI “continues to fund Iran’s active missile and drone programs central to the conflict.”
The monetary value of the oil that the ghost fleet moved out of Iran before the blockade came into effect emphasizes the consequences of U.S. action.
Ed: Trump didn’t impose the blockade at first because he wanted to keep the Strait of Hormuz open for everyone. Only when Iran reneged on the ceasefire agreement and started shooting at commercial shipping did he order the blockade. That’s going to do a lot more damage to Iran than anyone else, especially if the US Navy forces open the strait and provide an umbrella for shipping while locking Iran in its ports.
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Will anybody go to jail?
— John Ondrasik (@johnondrasik) April 23, 2026
Ed: It’s the question of the day.
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