Author Archive: Ed Driscoll

April 23, 2026

ACTIVIST BULLIES:

Rusty [Harris, editor of the 30,000 circulation Oceanside Blade-Citizen in San Diego County in the early 1990s] patiently explained that we’d already given this quite a bit of thought, and we stood by our position.

Then things turned ugly. 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!

Rusty had grown up with severe deafness as a child (and later came out as gay) in Kansas in the 1950s and ’60s, and he was not a man to be bullied. Nor did I ever see him intimidated.

He paused for half a minute or so, then quietly told the SPLC rep, “Well, why don’t you do that, then? That should be quite interesting.”

We never heard from them again, and so far as I know, neither Rusty nor I was added to the hate watch list.

But it sure left a sour taste in my mouth.

Read the whole thing.

(Via Jim Treacher, who writes, “And that was in the early ‘90s. So they’ve been doing this stuff for a long time. They amassed all that money and all that power, and they used it to threaten their political opponents. They might have even committed bank fraud to do it. Allegedly.)

UPDATE: “The Feds need to investigate the Southern Poverty Law Center’s finances,” Jim Tharpe, former managing editor of the Montgomery Advertiser wrote in the WaPo in 2019:

More than two decades ago, I was managing editor of the Montgomery Advertiser, which was located one block from the SPLC in downtown Montgomery, Ala. I proposed an investigation into the organization after ongoing complaints from former SPLC staffers, who came and went with regularity but always seemed to tell the same story. Only the names and faces changed. The SPLC, they said, was not what it appeared to be. Many urged the newspaper to take a look.

We were, at the time, anything but adversaries with the center. Like other media outlets, we generally parroted SPLC press releases. We also became friends with SPLC staffers, occasionally attending the center’s parties. Some of my reporters dated staffers at the center.

That relationship, however, suddenly soured when reporters Dan Morse and Greg Jaffe (both of whom now work for The Post) began making serious inquiries about the SPLC’s finances and the treatment of black employees.

SPLC leaders threatened legal action on several occasions, and at one point openly attacked the newspaper’s investigation in a mass mailing to Montgomery lawyers and judges. Then they slammed the door.

“Accommodating your charade of objectivity simply takes too much of our time,” center co-founder Joseph J. Levin Jr. wrote the Advertiser in 1993. “Our patience in this matter is exhausted, and we will not respond to further inquiries of any sort.”

In February 1994, after three years of research, the Advertiser published an eight-part series titled “Rising Fortunes: Morris Dees and the Southern Poverty Law Center” that found a litany of problems and questionable practices at the SPLC, including a deeply troubled history with its relatively few black employees, some of whom reported hearing the use of racial slurs by the organization’s staff and others who “likened the center to a plantation”; misleading donors with aggressive direct-mail tactics; exaggerating its accomplishments; spending most of its money not on programs but on raising more money; and paying its top staffers (including Dees and Cohen) lavish salaries.

Racial slurs? A plantation-like atmosphere? Those claims certainly hit different after Tuesday night: Corrupt Business Model: SPLC Funded the White Supremacists It Claimed to Despise.

Posted at 7:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 23rd, 2026

OLD AND BUSTED: Steal This Book. (And more recently, the NPR-approved In Defense of Looting.) 

The New Hotness? Thieves destroy nearly 75 Detroit fire hydrants to steal metal parts, putting lives at risk.

Thieves have destroyed nearly 75 fire hydrants on the west side of Detroit in the last 48 hours, stealing parts and putting lives at risk.

Crews with the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department are racing to repair the broken hydrants along Southfield Road and across the west side after thieves tore through dozens in about two days.

“We think the number is about 75 so far,” DWSD Deputy Director Sam Smalley said.

The thieves are targeting metal nozzles and stems on top of the hydrants, which are worth about $600.

Executive Fire Commissioner Chuck Simms said the vandalism is a serious and unacceptable situation that puts lives at risk.

“No matter how fast we get to a fire, if we don’t have an operable fire hydrant, it takes seconds, sometimes even minutes away from maybe us saving lives,” Simms said.

In 1967, the New York Review of Books published on its cover the instructions for making a Molotov Cocktail. Meanwhile, the theft of fire hydrants in 2026 Detroit sounds like it would be New York Times approved. Good luck putting that Molotov Cocktail out.

Exit quote:

UPDATE:

Tweet concludes, “Like they say about trans, petty theft has always been with us. OK, now go do it in a jurisdiction where they prosecute shoplifting, instead of one where they celebrate it. I mean, if you really want to be cool.”

Posted at 2:55 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 23rd, 2026

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Support A Needy Racist — Donate To The SPLC Today (Video).

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 23rd, 2026

COMING SOON: YOUNG JIMMY SAVILE, THE TOP OF THE POPS YEARS! The Michael Jackson biopic ignores half his life.

If you’re planning on making a biopic of a major musical figure, you would be advised not to miss out various rather vital aspects of their life. For instance, Bohemian Rhapsody dealt – if at times obliquely – with Freddie Mercury’s homosexuality and AIDS. The recent Bruce Springsteen film Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere attempted to tackle his mental health difficulties and near-breakdown.

Neither film was perfect, but they were at least made with reasonably good intentions. That is rather more than can be said for Antoine Fuqua’s Michael Jackson biopic Michael, which opens in US cinemas this week and has been greeted with disbelief.

The main objection is that the film refuses to acknowledge that Jackson was a deeply troubled man, who is widely believed to have engaged in acts of child molestation. While he was acquitted after a trial in 2003, the various financial settlements that Jackson paid out to accusers – all the while publicly denying any wrongdoing – suggests a man with a guilty conscience and deeply suspect behavior that he was desperate to hide.

Any halfway honest and representative biopic would have this as a vital part of the story, but Fuqua’s film simply ignores it altogether. According to advance reviews of the picture, Jackson – as played by his nephew Jaafar – was a near-Christlike figure. He suffered at the hands of his brutal father Joe, but went on to become the King of Pop. First alongside his brothers in the Jackson Five and then as the biggest solo star of his time.

More details here: Michael review — risible biopic turns Jacko into a 20th-century Jesus.

The film stops in 1988, which is handy as it avoids all that unfortunate child sex abuse material. Yet anyone who has seen Leaving Neverland will feel the tension between the allegations about abuse in the documentary (specifically relating to Peter Pan memorabilia) and the biopic’s creepy validation of Jackson’s “adorable” obsession with vulnerable lost boys and cute-for-ever kids.

The music scenes nonetheless are quite brilliant and thrilling — Jaafar is an accomplished impressionist. Jackson was a once-in-a-generation genius and his musical legacy is quite safe — his sales spiked by 10 per cent during the Leaving Neverland controversy. In the end he probably deserved more, for better and worse, than this.

So no cameos from Triumph the Comic Insult Dog, I take it:

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 23rd, 2026

WARNER BROS DISCOVERY VOTE TO APPROVE $110BN MERGER WITH PARAMOUNT SKYDANCE:

Shareholders of Warner Bros Discovery (WBD) voted “overwhelmingly” to approve the company’s $110bn merger with Paramount Skydance, the parent company of CBS News, on Thursday.

But shareholders voted against generous proposed compensation packages for WBD executives, including a $550m payout to the outgoing chief executive, David Zaslav.

The boards of both WBD and Paramount have already approved the merger, and shareholders were encouraged to approve it as well.

“Today’s stockholder approval is another key milestone toward completing this historic transaction that will deliver exceptional value to our stockholders,” Zaslav said in a statement. “We will continue to work with Paramount to complete the remaining steps in this process that will create a leading, next-generation media and entertainment company.”

A Paramount Skydance spokesperson said: “Shareholder approval marks another important milestone towards completing our acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery, building on our successful equity and debt syndications and progress across regulatory approvals.

“We look forward to closing the transaction in the coming months and realizing the creation of a next-generation media and entertainment company that better serves both the creative community and consumers.”

Jane Fonda hardest hit: Jane Fonda Committee Condemns WBD Merger Shareholder Approval: ‘This Fight Is Far From Over.’

“Today’s decision by Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders to advance a merger with Paramount is a serious setback — for our industry, for the workers who sustain it, for consumers, and for the fundamental democratic values that depend on a diverse and independent media landscape,” a statement read. “But this merger is not a done deal — and this fight is far from over.”

“We’ve seen time and again that sustained pressure works. Efforts to challenge consolidation, from the proposed Tegna-Nexstar Media Group deal to scrutiny of Live Nation Entertainment and Ticketmaster, have demonstrated that coordinated legal, political, and public advocacy can change outcomes, especially when state Attorneys General step in to protect the public interest,” it continued. “We will continue pressing forward on every front.”

“We will keep speaking out for the workers and artists at the heart of this industry, and for the public, which deserves more than an ever-shrinking circle of control over what they see, hear, and read,” the message concluded. “This fight continues. And we fully intend to win.”

“A handful of powerful decision-makers should not be allowed to quietly reshape [a nation’s] media, culture, and creative life without accountability.” Past performance really is no guarantee of future results:

Meanwhile, another famous communist is also curiously against the increasing collectivization of the cinema wing of the leftist propaganda industry:

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 23rd, 2026

TRAPPED IN THE COLOR REVOLUTION:

Staffers at crosstown rival magazine New York entertain similar thoughts: What Fresh Hell Is This? New York Mag Lionizes Shoplifter and Gives Tips on How to Steal.

Here’s the excerpt from a New York Magazine article headlined, “Paying the Price for Shoplifting From Whole Foods:”

At Whole Foods, you are apparently being monitored by a swarm of security officers, some of whom wander the aisles in plain clothes, and the company’s surveillance tech is improving. When security officers catch you, they will take you to Whole Foods Jail. Sometimes with glee.

The Union Square Whole Foods jail is a windowless storage closet near the entrance, says Astrid, a photographer. She mostly remembers the wallpaper: “Layers and layers of grainy faces,” she tells Nora Deligter. “All the thieves that had come before me.”

A sculptor we’ll call Gina found herself in the Bowery Whole Foods Jail. She was late to an Alex G concert at Bowery Ballroom and had decided to slip into Whole Foods for a quick spicy-tuna-roll walk-and-dine. She had a system: Approach the item with confidence, grab it, then head upstairs to the dining area and surreptitiously place it into her bag. But this time, she headed straight for the exit. “A rookie mistake,” Gina says.

Gina remembers keeping her head bowed and her eyes low as she was escorted back to Whole Foods Jail. The windowless office was almost too bland to recall, she says, except for a rudimentary banner, that read: ALL SHOPLIFTERS ARE BANNED FROM WHOLE FOODS FOR LIFE. A few weeks later, Gina says her parents received a $90 ticket in the mail from the company.

David Strom replies, “Is this the new socialism? Why wait for the revolution when you can just decriminalize stealing, or take your chances of getting caught and running to the media with your sob story?”

Still though, could be worse: Assassination Culture.

Much as Columbine captured the American imagination like a smash hit horror movie, which triggered a memetic wave of copycat school shooters we have still, to this day, not escaped, Luigi dragged us to hell in the form of a new archetype for the American assassin. There is some precedent for assassination culture in American history. In the 1960s and 1970s we were very much in the grip of a memetic death loop, as both political assassinations and the assassination of men deemed political, from Martin Luther King Jr. to John Lennon, were an almost regular occurrence. But today, on the internet, news of political killings for causes considered “just” are not only disseminated throughout the media, but celebrated on the internet. I do think this is categorically new, and worse.

Late last year, I touched on these themes, with a focus on left-wing violence in particular, in a piece for The Atlantic called “Abundant Delusion.” There, my thesis was simply the “Abundance Democrats,” if earnest in their stated goals of both civic and technologic progress, were doomed to fail. The problem, I argued, was they framed the movement as explicitly a Democratic project. Not only was this frustrating, given the most prominent ideas inherent to “abundance” — from megaprojects in energy and terraforming earth to reforming the regulatory environment crippling progress — were co-opted from libertarians and centrist tech thinkers, it was somehow totally ignorant of the left-wing base. These people did not want a bullet train. They did seem to want pretty much every guy capable of building bullet trains to die.

A large and growing segment of the left, I argued, had become deeply, openly violent. I did not just rely on anecdotal evidence, vibes, or even mainstream reporting, though I did cite all of these things. There was data supporting the notion.

Two days later, as the abundance libs just about concluded their mocking condemnation of my piece, Charlie Kirk was assassinated.

Upset, I wrote about — again — the reactions. Sharing grisly celebrations of Kirk’s gruesome murder was itself, I was told, dangerous. Frustrating as this was, I did attempt, in a follow-up, to thoughtfully parse this concern. Americans needed to reassert a very strong taboo against violence, I wrote. I hoped, at the time, if I could somehow convince the center-left to join me, there might be some way out of the cultural spiral. The center-left, including the massively influential ‘abundance lib’ Ezra Klein, has since taken to normalizingthe work of Hasan Piker, a socialist who has repeatedly called for the murder of his political enemies.

I no longer have any illusions we can significantly shift our country out of assassination culture. At this point, we can only try to be more aware — not only of assassination culture itself, but of the people either tacitly or explicitly encouraging it.

Just hours after what appears to have been a second attempt on Sam Altman’s life, the SF Standard, the Chronicle, and the Onion all shared photos of his home. The Chronicle reported its location. Incredibly, they did this not only as lunatics celebrated online, but as popular influencers made actual cases for further political violence (a lengthy thread here, from the Manhattan Institute’s Stu Smith).

Finally, at another niche Manhattan publication, it’s all the assassination prØn that’s fit to print:

UPDATE:

Posted at 10:55 am by Ed Driscoll on Apr 23rd, 2026

RIDE THE SOUTHERN POVERTY MOBIUS LOOP! Clueless Columnist Asks If It’s Now a Crime to Expose White Supremacist Groups.

I’m all for exposing white supremacist groups, and those who are bankrolling them:

From yesterday: How Your Tax-Deductible Donation Went to the Klan, Neo-Nazis, and the ‘Sadistic Souls.’

Now, call me crazy, but I think that if you’re a member of the “Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club,” you’re not a good person. I mean, it’s right there in the name. By the way, guess what the logo of the Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club is? If you guessed the same SS Totenkopf that was tattooed on the chest of Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner, you are correct! (“Are we the baddies?”)

I don’t know about you, but I would be extremely wary about ever putting any of my money or my organization’s money into the hands of anyone who was an active member of these groups.

As you may have noticed, these are not small sums of money. Whoever F-9 is, he allegedly made more than a million dollars from the SPLC over nine years! While the program reportedly began in the 1980s, the indictment lists wire transfers going up to April 25, 2023.

And speaking of the Southern Poverty Möbius Loop: SPLC paid to fuel Ku Klux Klan’s hate, then raised money to put it out.

UPDATE:

Posted at 10:37 am by Ed Driscoll on Apr 23rd, 2026

NEW CIVILITY WATCH:

Paul Krugman could not be reached for comment.

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Apr 23rd, 2026

April 22, 2026

ON “EARTH DAY:” Oysters With STDs, Witch Executions, and How More and Fewer Clouds Are Good and Bad News.

Still, these voices are trotted out as “experts,” and we are to heed their directives as they declare that “the science is settled,” all because “there is scientific consensus” about global warming. That is, um, climate change. Well, actually, it is a Climate Crisis now. But be assured, every scientist agrees — they just do not agree on what to call it.

Welllllll — in actuality, it is really more the consensus of the media covering the scientific community — but this is serious stuff! So long as you don’t analyze their claims, that is. This is because in the mad rush to report on anything and everything that can be connected to planetary calamity, the people who tell us to follow the science never manage to actually do the research.

Beginning from the very first Earth Day in 1970, there were issues. Much of the propaganda and sermonizing coming from that event concerned us freezing to death from the inevitable approaching ice age. Also, famine was due to wipe out billions by the end of the century, pollution would block the sun, citizens would need gas masks, acid rain would kill all plant life, and we were on the verge of running out of oil… uh, 30 years ago. So far, most of the starvation has been due to Venezuelan political policy.

There are problems with the creation of this day beyond being 180 degrees out of phase in predicting what today’s degrees would be. Now, some may want to highlight how the founder of the event, Ira Einhorn, murdered his girlfriend, but it is important to understand that he lived by example — he did compost her body. He followed his own sermons, as it were.

It’s also worth pointing out the environmental revolution that had taken place at the beginning of the 20th century that “Earth Day” ignored. As Jimmy Carr told Joe Rogan in 2023:

Carr: You know what the biggest industry in the world was in 1903?

Rogan: Beavers?

Carr: Very close. I’ll pass you—I’ll give you a C. Whaling was the biggest industry in the world in 1903. And it disappeared almost overnight. In about a year and a half, it was gone. Those towns were just emptied because whale oil wasn’t required anymore. Suddenly, we discovered petrochemicals.

Rogan: Electricity too.

Carr: Petrochemicals was really the thing. Yeah—whale oil, electricity, Edison, all of that, Tesla. It’s really interesting how that industry just fell away. It’s like the story of horse manure in New York City. You know this?

Rogan: No.

Carr: So, horse manure—do you know why brownstones have steps up to the front door? Ever wondered why the ground floor isn’t actually on the ground floor?

Rogan: Why?

Carr: Horseshit.

Rogan: Really?

Carr: There was horseshit everywhere. They’ve always got those metal scrapers by the side—

Rogan: Yeah, to get the horseshit off.

Carr: Exactly. You know how old movies always talk about smelling salts? There are loads of references to them. The smell was horrific. If a horse died in the street, you had to wait for it to decompose before cutting it up and taking it away. New York was chaos—cobbled streets, metal wheels on carts, horses everywhere. So they made laws:  “Right, we’ll tax horses.” Didn’t change anything.

Next year: “We’ll double the taxes.” Then more rules—if you have a horse, you have to do this, do that. They kept trying, over and over.

And what actually stopped it?

Henry Ford. Cars came along—[and then, horses in the streets] gone. Almost instantly. There are, what, five horses left in Central Park? That’s it. Whaling disappeared overnight. So did that whole system.

The first “Earth Day” in 1970 coincided with the beginning of a lengthy period of engineering stagnation, Glenn wrote a decade ago in USA Today:

Despite the rise of computers and the Internet, most of my lifetime has been spent in what has otherwise been a time of technological stagnation, compared to the “golden quarter century” between World War II and the Moon landings. During that era, things were getting better at breakneck pace: Jet planes! Spaceships! The Pill! Antibiotics! Nuclear Power! Computers! The future was coming at us fast, and there was a sense that things would keep improving.

Still on the hand, “Earth Day” was and is definitely “stuff white people like,” as Norman Podhoretz wrote in 1970:

Posted at 11:29 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 22nd, 2026

AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Alex Jones Worried People Will Start To Think Stories Reported By Infowars Are Fake.

Following an announcement that Infowars would soon be converted into a satirical news outlet, American media personality Alex Jones, known for his fringe conspiracy theories related to the Sandy Hook school shooting and homosexual frogs, expressed concern that people would start to think the stories reported by Infowars are fake.

According to Jones, Infowars had been at the forefront of every major story since its founding in 1999. Its writers, he said, were not afraid to report on news that other media companies won’t touch, like government-controlled weather weapons, juice boxes that turn kids gay, and Hillary Clinton eating babies. However, if the site is turned into a parody of itself, Jones feared readers won’t know what to believe.

“THOSE LITERAL VAMPIRE POTBELLY GOBLINS DON’T CARE ABOUT JOURNALISTIC INTEGRITY,” he said during a live broadcast of The Alex Jones Show. “THEY WANT TO TURN THE NEWS GAY.”

Although, to be fair:

In 2026, it’s Alex’s world:

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 22nd, 2026

HORSESHOE THEORY: Young Democrats Are Now More Hostile Toward Israel Than Iran or China.

[I]f you want to find a country that younger Democrats really feel negatively about . . . look to the world’s lone Jewish state.

Among younger Democrats, when asked about Israel, “negative” scored 45 percentage points net; only Russia scored worse among this demographic, and even that was only 15 percentage points worse. Remember on Iran, among young Democrats, “negative” scored 40 percentage points net.

Young Democrats feeling negatively about Israel has been well-reported. But young Democrats feeling more negatively about Israel than Iran or China has not. Remember, the Iranian regime and its loyalists still use “Death to America!” about as frequently as commas.

Younger Democrats’ intense hostility to Israel was a serious outlier compared to other demographics; among older Democrats, “negative” scored 19 percentage points net. Israel is now a partisan issue; among younger Republicans asked about Israel, “positive” scored 11 percentage points net, and among older Republicans, “positive” scored 65 percentage points net.

Related: Left Melts for Tucker: M-SNOW’s Alex Wagner Says His Trump Remorse ‘Feels Genuine.’

Ahh, the good times Tucker and Al Sharpton would have together on air. (Much like the good times Sharpton and Joe Scarborough share these days: Oops! Joe Scarborough’s Past Ideas About Al Sharpton, Racism, Come Back to Bite Him.)

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 22nd, 2026

TALKING POINTS ISSUED: The Democrat Lie About the SPLC Indictment Has Been Formed, and Now They’re Running With It.

You’d hope in the face of such disturbing allegations, including the possibility that the SPLC paid for criminal activity to take place, that Democrats would at least keep their mouths shut while this played out. But no, they’ve quickly, in conjunction with a compliant press, formulated a lie and are running with it. Instead of admitting what the indictment (which was returned by a grand jury) actually says, they are claiming the SPLC was just innocently paying “informants.”

I guess I’m going to have to explain this like I’m talking to a four-year-old, but the SPLC is not a law enforcement agency. The fact that the DOJ pays and uses informants to investigate crimes is not, in fact, relevant at all to what happened here. Yet, you’ve got Democrat Rep. Daniel Goldman (NY-10), ABC News, USA Today, the AP, and many others all running with this line that these were just payments to “informants.”

How exactly is allegedly paying someone who helped organize transportation to a neo-nazi rally just paying an “informant? What were they informing on? To who? About what? For what reason? That doesn’t even make any sense. The SPLC can’t indict anyone. They have no jurisdiction to investigate criminal activity, nor would they need “informants” to be able to say the Ku Klux Klan is bad.

Related: Jim Geraghty explores “How Your Tax-Deductible Donation Went to the Klan, Neo-Nazis, and the ‘Sadistic Souls:’”

Now, call me crazy, but I think that if you’re a member of the “Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club,” you’re not a good person. I mean, it’s right there in the name. By the way, guess what the logo of the Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club is? If you guessed the same SS Totenkopf that was tattooed on the chest of Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner, you are correct! (“Are we the baddies?”)

I don’t know about you, but I would be extremely wary about ever putting any of my money or my organization’s money into the hands of anyone who was an active member of these groups.

As you may have noticed, these are not small sums of money. Whoever F-9 is, he allegedly made more than a million dollars from the SPLC over nine years! While the program reportedly began in the 1980s, the indictment lists wire transfers going up to April 25, 2023.

The defense, put forth by the likes of MSNOW contributor and former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance, is that “the use of paid informants was essential to the intelligence the Center was gathering on the groups they were members of, including intelligence that was shared with the FBI.”

But how do we know that?  Yes, the bureau did say on its old website that “the FBI has forged partnerships nationally and locally with many civil rights organizations to establish rapport, share information, address concerns, and cooperate in solving problems,” and it listed the SPLC as one of those organizations. But based on all available evidence, FBI didn’t ask, or hire, the SPLC to go around recruiting informants. The FBI has its own undercover agents and its own funds for recruiting informants. The SPLC decided, on its own, that paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to these members of hate groups was worth it.

Exit questions:

Tweet concludes, “There’s no explanatory narrative that makes this stuff look good.”

Exactly. Which is why, beyond the modified limited hangout above, an omertà has been issued for the network news broadcasts: Omission: The Networks Fall Silent on the Indictment of the SPLC.

And as far as print media:

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 22nd, 2026

METAPHOR ALERT:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 22nd, 2026

SPLC FUNDED ‘UNITE THE RIGHT’ RALLY THAT SPAWNED ‘FINE PEOPLE’ HOAX:

We already knew that the “fine people” hoax was based on the lie that Trump called white supremacists “fine people,” instead of, as he did, condemning them. But until yesterday, we didn’t know that the white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville and whose protest led to the death of one person were bused there on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s dime, and were organized to be there by an SPLC “informer.”

The SPLC is one of the most powerful NGOs in the country. They have had the power to direct the federal government to go after groups and people. They had their grips on the censorship industry. They tell social media companies who should be silenced and who should be promoted. Local law enforcement listens to them. The media treats their “hate map” as gospel.

Yesterday’s news also likely clears up this mystery:

And it also dramatically shifts this detail as well: So, the Premise Behind Biden’s 2020 Run Was Built on a Lie Paid for By the SPLC?

As Roger Kimball wrote when Jussie Smollett’s story broke in 2019, “The less hate there is in the United States, the more hate crimes must be manufactured in order to keep the Fraternal Order of Victims afloat.”

UPDATE:

Heh, indeed.™

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 22nd, 2026

MILE MARKERS ON THE ROAD TO DETROIT: Downtown Frisco tower once worth $320 million went to auction. Nobody made an offer.

One of San Francisco’s notable office towers was up for auction last week, a 20-story, 360,000-square-foot Class A building on one of the most coveted corridors in the North Financial District. Nobody who showed up to the stretch of sidewalk in the shadow of City Hall where the sale was held Thursday was there to bid on the polished, quietly assertive building that was once valued at over $320 million.

It’s a bit of a reckoning for the property at 600 California St., which was tied to a distressed $240 million loan and pushed into receivership after its former anchor tenant WeWork stopped paying rent three years ago. With no contenders stepping forward to offer bids, Dallas-based Lone Star Funds became the official owner of the property, after the private equity group paid roughly $130 million to acquire the debt in January from Goldman Sachs, the original lender.

The quiet transaction felt closer to a casual curbside deal than a high-stakes transfer of a notable piece of the city’s skyline. Some market participants pointed out that 600 California’s anticlimactic sale underscores continued weakness in the office market, challenging claims of full recovery.

Also news out of Detroit by the Bay:

Unexpectedly!

Posted at 8:22 am by Ed Driscoll on Apr 22nd, 2026

RADICAL CHIC AND MAU-MAUING THE KLAN MEMBERS: They Call Us Extreme? Look Who Just Got Indicted for Funding Hate Groups.

On Tuesday, another news item dropped that will have conservatives (and probably a fair number of moderates) chuckling for the rest of the day. The Southern Poverty Law Center, or SPLC, is fond of screaming about racists and white supremacists; they are vocally part of the school of thought on the left that a white supremacist is lurking around every corner, when in reality, they are pretty thin on the ground.

Now, we learn that the SPLC has not only been encouraging real white supremacist and racist groups, but they have been funding them. And now, they have been indicted on 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Acting AG Blanche and FBI Director Patel made the announcement:

Given the DNC-MSM’s reliance on the SPLC for stories, as “Northern Barbarian” tweets in response to Rupar, “This is the point where they need guidance from higher on how to address this. The shitbag media, that is.”

Yesterday’s announcement potentially means:

As Zhou Enlai famously never said, “The French Revolution? It’s too early to say.” How much of the 2018-2020 color revolution was based on funds sloshing around the SPLC?

Tweet continues, “Everybody well-informed knew thing whole thing was astroturfed from day one. But maybe not to this extent.” In 2022, Glenn wrote, “Both the SDS and the KKK used to say in the 1960s that the guy in your group calling for illegal activity was the FBI mole.” Or more recently the SPLC mole.

Incidentally, yesterday’s announcement sure casts the Atlantic’s hit piece on Patel in a different light:

(Classical allusion in headline.)

Posted at 7:14 am by Ed Driscoll on Apr 22nd, 2026

April 21, 2026

CHANGE: The End of EPA’s Endangerment Finding Is a Bigger Deal Than the Iran War.

“We are like dwarfs on the shoulders of giants.” — Bernard of Chartres

Two things happened in February that will change the world. The first is the Iran War.

The second is an event so obscure most Americans don’t even know it happened — the Feb. 12 repeal of the 2009 Endangerment Finding by the Trump Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This decision puts a knife into the kidney of all the major U.S. climate rules made under the Obama and Biden administrations. It was the legal underpinning for the Green New Deal.

Of the two events, the end of the Endangerment Finding is of a greater consequence, yet 21st Century conventional wisdom — curated and gatekept by social media, the most unwise medium ever invented — makes it hard to fit one’s head around this argument. But here goes.

The Iran War is costing about $1-2 billion a day in direct costs, and several times that in indirect costs from higher energy prices across most of Europe and Asia, though less so in the United States, which is increasingly energy independent.

Meanwhile, the 2009 Endangerment is one of those “regulatory state” workarounds when Congress doesn’t pass a law or the Supreme Court passes on a tough decision. This administrative decision is the foundation of ALL modern climate regulation and global climate diplomacy. Its reversal has the Trump administration crowing about the $1.3 trillion in savings over the next decade to American citizens through cheaper automobiles, among other things.

This has made a lot of the right people unhappy.

Worst. Hitler. Ever. Read the whole thing.

Posted at 8:14 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 21st, 2026

GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: Misunderstanding Mr. Spock.

In the wake of the cancellation of yet another ridiculous “Star Trek” property, this time the hilariously cringe-inducing “Star Trek: Starfleet Academy,” sane audiences are once again asking the question “why can’t anyone get ‘Star Trek’ right?” The answer may be as simple as this… it’s because the studio’s leadership, as well as the creatives so far tasked with bringing new “Star Trek” stories to life, do not understand what “Star Trek” is, they only know what they wish it was.

These days, Hollywood creatives seem to want to write overtly about their own personal politics more than they want to tell great stories. In the Trump era many of Hollywood’s biggest writers, directors and actors believe deeply that the most important thing they can do with the positions in Hollywood to which they have ascended is to use their art to advocate for Progressive policies. It is the Great Cause which has finally brought meaning to their lives.

The problem is that this approach creates terrible drama every time it’s tried… a truth to which Hollywood has remained uniquely allergic over the last twenty years, in part because they believe “Star Trek” is an exception to this iron rule of story. To the modern Hollywood Progressive, the original “Star Trek” series was one which successfully combined exciting sci-fi adventure stories with constant Progressive political agitation. This is a tragic misunderstanding, but one in which Progressives believe so deeply, they have convinced themselves not only that “Star Trek” can continue to agitate for their preferred political outcomes while succeeding as a piece of popular entertainment, but that it must, because Progressive politics is built into the DNA of the “Star Trek” universe and you cannot have one without the other.

The original Star Trek was JFK’s muscular liberalism projected into space.  The young JFK became the young Captain James T. Kirk. Kennedy’s “New Frontier” became “The Final Frontier.” Trek was gunboat diplomacy, in space. Gene Roddenberry and Gene L. Coon, his best writer-producer both served in WWII; Roddenberry would go on to become a Los Angeles policeman. Coon created Star Trek’s “United Federation of Planets” as the intergalactic equivalent of the United States of America.

As James Lileks wrote in 2007 in a piece titled, “A Conservative Trek,” “You could say [Capt. Kirk] did his part for God and Country, but of course Trek believed in neither:”

Nevertheless, the best Trek was conservative: it was rooted in the unchanging nature of man, be they hooting hominids on the plains of Earth throwing rocks at prey, or civilized spacefarers Money, power, lust, war: These were the constants, and Star Trek knew they’d follow us to infinity and beyond. At best we could find enlightened, savvy ways to avoid the pointless fights. But some people only understand a photon torpedo up the dorsal vent port, and we’d best be prepared to deal with them. The Federation, after all, had something called General Order 24, which called for the total destruction of a planet’s surface if the civilization was considered a threat to the Federation. As Vader might have said: Impressive.

Kirk actually invoked General Order 24, in “A Taste of Armageddon.” He used it as a threat, and didn’t carry it out. You can imagine his relief; the paperwork alone would have been a nightmare. But he would have done it if he had to, and not just for the reputation you get back home at the Officer’s Club. Not for Kirk the niceties of diplomacy: If he had to violate a treaty, he’d do it. If he had to save a civilization from the lifeless machinations of an ancient operating system, he’d harangue its computer until it smoked and crashed. In “The Arena,” Kirk didn’t win the battle against a rubber-suit Gorn because they hammered out a six-point Roadmap to Peace. Granted, he got the thumbs-up from the League of Judgmental Effeminate Aliens because he didn’t cave in the Gorn’s head with a stone. But prior to that, he nailed him in the chest with an improvised cannon that shot diamonds. In a cannon-free zone, no less.

All of which is a reminder of how closer to the center did the Kennedy era hug before his assassination, Vietnam, Nixon, and eventually an obsession with identity politics drove Hollywood Democrats completely insane.

UPDATE:

Tweet continues, “Actor Robert Picardo reacted: ‘Not enough people had found us. He said, you know, that the reason you’ll hear is that we never cracked the top 10 shows in streaming. Maybe they wouldn’t have heard about it because there was really no advertising push behind our show.’ Are these Star Trek creators living in an echo chamber bubble?”

Having worked on the Rick Berman-era Voyager, Picardo has to know he’s gaslighting fans of that era Trek.

Posted at 4:45 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 21st, 2026

QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:

Exit quote: America “evolved in a very different direction, and upon separation, with some struggle, arrived at our own form of governance. With an emphasis on individual freedom our fellows in the greater Anglosphere lack. Once you notice all of that, a lot of it starts to make more sense.”

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 21st, 2026

THEODORE DALRYMPLE: We Shall Not Fight on the Beaches.

In 1973, Jean Raspail, who died aged 94 in 2020, published his dystopian novel The Camp of the Saints, for which he is now mostly remembered (certainly outside of France, though he was the author of many other well-considered novels and travelogues, and narrowly missed election to the Académie française). The Camp of the Saints is a book that refuses to lie down, so to speak, despite attempts to render it invisible or make it go away.

* * * * * * * *

Immigrants are not just immigrants. What they bring with them is as important as what they are offered by the host country. If what they bring with them is an evangelizing religion that claims, however fatuously, to be the answer to all of mankind’s little problems, a religion moreover that has a very strong hold over them and that is maintained by an effective system of social ostracism in the event of dissent, they will obviously have more difficulty integrating than if they have no such religion.

Raspail’s flawed novel is an illustration of an elementary political principle. For a liberal democracy to work, there must be a demos; for there to be a demos, there must be something more in common among them than living geographically cheek-by-jowl (without at the same time demanding an absolute uniformity). To import huge numbers of people who do not share, and indeed are resistant to sharing, the minimum that holds a demos together is inimical to liberal democracy.

In this most important sense Jean Raspail was visionary, even if he did not correctly identify the source of the greatest threat. Perhaps the most revealing thing in the book is his account, in the essay that precedes the novel, of how prominent political figures either ignored or repudiated The Camp of the Saints in public, but agreed with it in private. It proved to be a disastrous disjunction.

It’s the good Dr. Dalrymple, so read the whole thing.

UPDATE: Éric Zemmour’s The Suicide of France. The definitive account of France after de Gaulle is now available in English.

UPDATE (4/21/26): The same lefties who rail against banned books everywhere rejoiced yesterday when Amazon banned the paperback edition of Ethan Rundell’s 2025 translation of The Camp of the Saints. Amazon has since made the book available for purchase again: Amazon Didn’t Ban The Camp Of The Saints Because It’s ‘Offensive’ But Because It Resonates.

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Apr 21st, 2026
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