The Strange New Respect for Jew-Haters

By James Kirchick

Sunday, April 26, 2026

 

It’s springtime, and a spirit of reconciliation is in the air. It was President Donald Trump who ushered in our new bipartisan era when he welcomed the just-elected Zohran Mamdani to the White House last fall. “Wow, you’re even better-looking in person than you are on TV,” Trump marveled as the incoming New York City mayor entered the Oval Office, high praise considering that Trump makes cabinet appointments as if he were a casting director. “The better he does, the happier I am,” he told the press about a man whom he had repeatedly called a “nut job” and a “Communist lunatic.” Though Mamdani had responded in kind, labeling Trump a “fascist” and a “despot,” the two men were all smiles as they gripped hands and pledged to make New York City Great Again.

 

At a time when America is so polarized, such reaching across the partisan divide should be something to celebrate. Seeing a Republican and a Democrat (even a Democratic Socialist) make common cause understandably brightens our day. Which is why it’s so dispiriting that this season of rapprochement is occurring mainly among the absolute dregs of our political-media ecosystem.

 

Consider the case of former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. Over the course of her time in public life, MTG has been a propagator of the QAnon and “Pizzagate” conspiracy theories, speculated that the 9/11 attacks were a hoax, and advocated the execution of prominent Democrats from Hillary Clinton to Barack Obama. She has claimed that the Clintons killed John F. Kennedy Jr. to eliminate a potential threat to Hillary’s New York Senate campaign, compared Covid-19 safety measures to the suffering of Jews during the Holocaust, alleged that the 2018 California wildfires were caused by space lasers financed by the Rothschild family, and, my personal favorite, said that Bill Gates wants the government to force-feed Americans fake meat grown in a “peach tree dish.” (To be fair to MTG, she is from Georgia.) It should go without saying that she denies that Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election and supported his attempts to overturn it. What first comes to mind when surveying this curriculum vitae is a trenchant observation from the irrepressible Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana: “Life is hard, but it’s harder when you’re stupid.”

 

As you might expect, liberals once detested Greene (who resigned from Congress in January). The onetime owner of a CrossFit franchise, she was the target of constant derision and ridicule, an easily mockable personification of the die-hard MAGA voter. Five years ago, congressional Democrats voted to expel her for her previous expressions of support for political violence. In 2024, a routine hearing of the House Oversight Committee descended into farce when Greene alleged that Democratic Representative Jasmine Crockett, possibly the only member of Congress as obnoxious as Greene, was wearing “fake eyelashes.” Crockett responded by telling Greene that she had a “bleach-blonde, bad-built, butch body.”

 

Last summer, however, Greene’s reputation among liberals suddenly began to change. “There was once a great president that the American people loved,” she wrote on June 24, two days after the launch of Operation Midnight Hammer. “He opposed Israel’s nuclear program. And then he was assassinated. I am for peace. I oppose war, including wars Israel wages. Should I feel that my life is in danger now too?” Greene apparently wasn’t all that afraid of being the target of an Israeli assassination attempt, because a few months later she was insinuating that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad agent. Joining forces with Republican Representative Thomas Massie and Democratic Representative Ro Khanna, they became the three stooges of publicity-seeking dimwits demanding the release of the “Epstein files.” By November, she was instructing her followers, “If something happens to me, I ask you all to find out which foreign government or powerful people would take heinous actions to stop the information from coming out.”

 

For her heresy on the Epstein files and her sudden turn against Israel, Greene found a whole new fan base. Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin, the ranking member on the Judiciary Committee, said that his party must have a “huge, vast tent” large enough for Greene. “We visited Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene today to thank her for becoming such a strong anti-war voice in congress and tell her we will miss her,” said Medea Benjamin, the den mother of Code Pink, after Greene announced her retirement. On The View, which I sometimes think might be a deep-state psyop to repeal the 19th Amendment, Whoopi Goldberg praised Greene as “a very surprising voice of reason” for supporting an extension of Obamacare subsidies during the latest government shutdown. “She’s a rabid anti-Semitic lunatic,” the thinking on this part of the left seems to go, “but she’s our rabid anti-Semitic lunatic.”

 

By far the starkest example of the budding alliance between the far-right and the far-left is the strange new respect some progressives express toward Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens. Like Greene, it wasn’t so long ago that Carlson was a hate figure for progressives, and one of his biggest haters was a man named Cenk Uygur. Founder of a progressive media company called “The Young Turks,” Uygur denounced “fake” progressives who praised Carlson as late as 2022. “Tucker Carlson doesn’t agree with us at all,” Uygur declared. “He uses the fact that most of the country agrees with progressives as a tool to sheep-herd them into right wing talking points.” In 2019, Uygur attacked Carlson for displaying a graphic on his Fox News show depicting then–CNN head Jeff Zucker as a puppet master. “That is a deeply antisemitic trope, it goes back in history a long time, of the Jews being puppet masters,” he said.

 

Uygur felt similar disgust for Owens, the comically deranged podcaster who claims that Brigitte Macron is a man and who recently alleged that “satanic Zionists occupy the White House and Congress.” For spreading disinformation about Covid-19 in 2021, Uygur screamed, “I said it, Candace Owens, you’re the worst of the worst! You’re a sellout! You’re scum of the earth!” Uygur went on, “People like Candace Owens lead pathetic lives because they’re paid to sell their own identity out.” In 2024, Uygur accused Owens of deploying “over-the-top antisemitic tropes.”

 

Fast-forward a year, and Uygur has changed his mind. “No, I’m not going to denounce Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens!” he declares. “We don’t have to denounce her at all. Don’t come at me about denouncing Candace Owens until you denounce Jared Kushner.” Last year, accusing Israel of “proudly doing a genocide”¹ in Gaza, Uygur beseeched Carlson, Owens, and Greene to join forces with him and other progressives to “stop this.” He reached back in history to convey the gravity of the situation. “I would hope to god that if I was around in the 1930s and 1940s that I would have said, ‘Work with any right-wing populist and any left-wing populist or anyone period to stop that Holocaust,’ to save one more person,” he said, apparently unaware that it was the right-wing populists who were “doing” the Holocaust. In January, Uygur appeared on Carlson’s show, extending the hand of cooperation. “We’ve been taught by the media to hate each other and to have a tribal brain,” he said.

 

Carlson has also been gaining fans among Muslims, a proposition that would have shocked anyone who knew him personally or listened to his commentary over the past quarter century. “Democratic leadership has no idea how many people are being won over by Tucker Carlson and MTG right now over Israel,” the left-wing Substack writer Wajahat Ali tweeted, linking to a three-and-a-half-minute video in which the editor of the Economist tried unsuccessfully to get an answer out of Carlson on the question of whether Israel “has a right to exist.” Addressing speculation that Carlson might run for president, Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid wrote, “If it was [Pennsylvania Governor Josh] Shapiro vs. Tucker, I could imagine a significant number of progressives, young people, Arabs, and Muslims sitting it out or actually voting for Tucker.”

 

What we’re witnessing in this live-action demonstration of the horseshoe theory of politics is the convening power of anti-Semitism. It’s hard to think of another issue that could unite such an ideologically diverse set of characters. Progressives by and large seem to be the drivers of the emerging alliance, so excited at the prospect of a conservative crack-up over Israel that they’re willing to overlook many areas of disagreement to usher it along. The January cover story in Harper’s by Andrew Cockburn entitled “How Gaza Broke MAGA,” reveals this dynamic. Cockburn, son of the British Stalinist journalist Claud and brother of the deceased crackpot columnist Alexander, claims that, prior to his death, Charlie Kirk “had shown clear signs that he was changing sides” on the matter of the Israel–Palestine conflict, something that “made him dangerous” in the eyes of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Cockburn’s basis for this allegation is a report from the pro-Assad stooge Max Blumenthal about a meeting in the Hamptons where the investor Bill Ackman browbeat Kirk over his supposed heresy.

 

Everyone who actually attended the meeting and has spoken on the record about it disputes this claim. No matter. Cockburn writes that Blumenthal’s story was “buttressed by Candace Owens,” which is like saying P.T. Barnum corroborated something said by Pinocchio. Owens, whom Kirk cut off long before his assassination and who has since devoted her career to tormenting his widow, appears to have been Cockburn’s main source for his story. “Charlie’s feelings toward Israel were changing,” she told him “in a long phone call.” Cockburn credulously reports her assertion that Netanyahu offered Kirk “a ton of money,” and he repeats a widely debunked claim that Israel pays social media influencers $7,000 per post. And this is the supposedly reasonable Cockburn. 

 

Like the rest of his Stalinist comrades at the time, Claud Cockburn turned on a dime when the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany made peace in the fall of 1939. Overnight, they went from denouncing Hitler to lambasting Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. “Suddenly the scum of the earth and the blood-stained butcher of the workers (for so they had described one another) were marching arm in arm,” George Orwell wrote of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, whose supporters exhibited a level of cynicism and ruthlessness that repulsed decent people. The same can be said of their latter-day epigones.

 

¹ While constantly accusing Israel of “genocide,” Uygur named his media company after the Turkish political movement responsible for perpetrating (an actual) genocide (against Armenians), an irony that, like much else, appears lost on him.

The Full Story on Hasan Piker

By Jim Geraghty

Friday, April 24, 2026

 

Hasan Doğan Piker was born on July 25, 1991, in New Brunswick, N.J., to Turkish parents. Many online biographies say Piker “grew up in Istanbul,” but Piker described spending part of his childhood in the Turkish capital of Ankara. In 2018, Piker posted a picture of himself in his high school years, riding a show horse.

 

His father, Mehmet Behçet Piker, spent 24 years working at Sabancı Holding, rising to the board of directors and position of vice president. Sabancı Holding is one of Turkey’s largest business conglomerates, with a net asset value of $10.5 billion in 2024. Piker’s father was also a founding member of the Future Party in Turkey, formed in 2019.

 

Piker disputes the notion that he grew up wealthy and privileged; in November 2025, Piker claimed that his father “went broke by the time I got to college, and I was broke for the first decade after college.” Apparently it was the kind of “broke” that could afford a Equinox gym membership in 2013, which cost $133 to $142 a month with a separate $175 initiation fee; Piker likely means “broke” as a synonym for “not earning as much money as I would like.”

 

Hasan Piker’s uncle is Cenk Uygur, a leftist commentator and co-founder of The Young Turks, a progressive news organization. Hasan joined as an intern in 2013; in a later interview, Piker described himself as a “nepo baby,” a term for a beneficiary of nepotism. Within three years, he pitched his uncle’s organization on the idea of his hosting his own show, The Breakdown. For several years, Piker created videos discussing topics such as how Florida Democratic gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum “DESTROYED” his Republican opponent, Ron DeSantis. (You may have noticed that Governor DeSantis, reelected with almost 60 percent of the vote, was not destroyed.)

 

By 2018, Piker was posing with Playboy bunnies at a Playboy party thrown by Cooper Hefner, the heir to the magazine’s fortune, for the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. (Mind you, Piker boasts that he is a feminist; in 2021, he said during his program, “I’ve gone to a brothel, Artemis, in Berlin, and had sex with the workers there.”)

 

During Trump’s first term, Piker gained a wider audience from having clubby interviews with some of the most progressive elected officials in the Democratic Party. In October 2020, Piker held a virtual voting initiative with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar, where they played the video game Among Us. The following month, Piker was the subject of a glowing New York Times profile written by . . . Taylor Lorenz. (By November 2025, Lorenz would be quoted in profiles of Piker as “a friend of Piker’s.”)

 

A 2021 data breach of Twitch’s finances revealed that Piker had been paid a bit more than $2.8 million since 2019, or roughly $1 million per year.

 

That same year, Piker purchased a 3,800-square-foot home with five bedrooms and 5.5 bathrooms located in the Beverly Grove neighborhood of West Hollywood, Los Angeles, for $2.74 million. In 2022, Piker purchased a $200,000 2022 Porsche Taycan Turbo S.

 

(Piker graduated Rutgers in 2013 and described himself as “broke for the first decade after college.” That would be until 2023.)

 

Estimating an individual’s net worth is tricky; even the limited disclosure of Piker’s Twitch earnings and home price don’t give a full picture of his income, assets, liabilities, or debts. But for what it’s worth, some websites have calculated Piker’s net worth at $8 million; one site did back-of-the-envelope math of his known subscribers and estimated revenue per subscriber, and calculated he made about $217,000 per month. Other estimates put his monthly streaming earnings in a range from $127,000 to $173,000 per month.

 

He co-founded the athletic brand “Himbo Fitness.”

 

It’s Piker’s God-given right to make as much money as he likes in America’s free-market economy, but it does seem more than a little hypocritical for a self-described socialist who constantly denounces the greed of “the rich” to be enjoying such a wildly lucrative income and luxurious lifestyle.

 

In 2022, Piker accused Amazon of “trying to force Twitch to squeeze more revenue out of top content creators.” Amazon bought Twitch in 2014; Piker began streaming on Twitch in March 2018. Interestingly, for a man who regularly denounces the greed of billionaires, Piker rarely discusses Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos. (Bezos owns the Washington Post. I write a column for the Post, and I sell my books through Amazon, so technically both Piker and I are part of the terrible Bezos capitalist menace.)

 

The Harry Walker Agency, Piker’s speaker’s bureau, describes Piker as a “journalist” known for his “honesty.” In July 2024, Alex Mahadevan, who works to debunk misinformation as the director of MediaWise at the Poynter Institute, told the New York Times that Piker “shares as much misinformation as anyone on the right.”

 

In October 2024, New York Times published its second glowing profile about Piker, declaring that programs like Pikers are “an increasingly popular place for people to discuss current events, with some streamers turning into de facto pundits, offering their takes on the news for hours on end every day.”

 

By April of this year, Piker was the subject of his third overwhelmingly positive New York Times profile in six years. The headline was, “A Progressive Mind in a Body Made for the ‘Manosphere’” and gushed, “Hasan Piker pumps iron, likes weapons and wears pearls. His brand of masculinity has won him many fans online — and has been a useful vehicle for his politics.” (I have no doubt Piker thinks of himself as anti-establishment, and yet you can’t get much more “establishment” than the New York Times, and the Times clearly adores him.)

 

In that third profile, Times readers learned, “Piker, an avowed socialist, is just as at ease dressing in French maid drag as he is on a basketball court. . . . This fluency between culture and ideology has led many to brand Mr. Piker a Joe Rogan of the left — if Mr. Rogan had a mop top and painted his nails.”

 

(Mind you, Joe Rogan supported Bernie Sanders in 2020. Rogan endorsed Trump in 2024, but has grown increasingly critical in Trump’s second term over the Jeffrey Epstein files, saying that Trump’s deportation policies risked turning the country into “monsters,” and claiming Trump went to war against Iran “because of Israel, I guess.” While Rogan was always politically idiosyncratic, you can make a strong case that the “Joe Rogan of the left” is . . . Joe Rogan.)

 

Almost every profile of Piker feels the need to emphasize his appearance, on a level comparable to Gavin Newsom. The Times swooned, “He is, by conventional standards, a very handsome man. He is 6 feet 4 inches tall and built like a professional athlete, with a square jaw, a beard and a head of thick dark hair.” (In December, The Guardian gushed that Piker was “tall, muscular, fashionable and handsome — far too alpha to fit lefty stereotypes.”)

 

Throughout his career, Piker has stood out for saying the sorts of things that once were fodder for “cancel culture,” or at least negative consequences for a person in the public eye. Most infamously, Piker said on his program in 2019 — before his rise to fame and fortune, “America deserved 9/11, dude. F*** it, I’m saying it. . . . We f***ing totally brought this upon ourselves, dude. Holy s***. We did. We f***ing did.”

 

In October 2024, Democratic Representative Ritchie Torres, who represents the Bronx in Congress, wrote to Twitch’s management about Piker’s comments, among them:

 

Mr. Piker has all but exposed himself as an apologist for the sexual violence and savage rapes of October 7th. “It doesn’t matter if rape happened on October 7th. It doesn’t change the dynamic for me,” Mr. Piker declares before finally admitting that “Palestinian resistance” (his euphemism for terrorism) is not perfect.”

 

Mr. Piker has said he has “no issue” with Hezbollah, the world’s the most heavily armed terrorist organization in the world, and has given a platform to a suspected terrorist from the Houthis. The US government has declared Hezbollah a Foreign Terrorist Organization (in the case of the former) and the Houthis a Specially Designated Global Terrorist group. . . .

 

Outside the context of October 7th, Mr. Piker has even joked and mused about men date-raping women on a college campus and has posted an image of a handgun on top of a United States Senator in what appears to be open invitation to gun violence against a sitting elected official. Inviting one’s followers to shoot an elected official, whether it be done in earnest or in jest, is the kind of threat that warrants serious attention from federal law enforcement.

 

When he is not joking and musing about rape, Hasan Piker alternates between rape denial and rape apologia. He either denies the sexual violence of 10/7 or he denies that it matters. Mr. Piker once described the sexual violence of 10/7 as “rape fantasies” or “rape hallucinations.”

 

Remember, Piker describes himself as a feminist. Links to the video clips of Piker making these statements can be found in the notes to the Torres letter, here.

 

You might think that statements like, “It doesn’t matter if rape happened on October 7” or “Let the streets soak in their red-capitalist blood” might preclude Piker from appearing on high-profile programs or appearing with prominent Democratic officials. You would be wrong.

 

Earlier this month, Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed held campaign events with Piker on the campuses of Michigan State University and the University of Michigan. Asked about Piker’s “America deserved 9/11” comment, El-Sayed said that Piker’s comments had been taken “out of context.” (Take a moment to try to imagine the context where “America deserved 9/11” is not morally reprehensible.)

 

Piker proved to be a sufficiently controversial figure for the Board of Trustees of Michigan State University, and President Kevin Guskiewicz to offer a vague and extremely softly worded criticism of him.

 

“We recognize that recent comments attributed to a speaker coming to campus, who the university did not invite, have caused pain and concern, particularly among members of our Jewish community. Antisemitism and discrimination of any kind is unacceptable and inconsistent with our institutional values and has no place in a community grounded in respect, inclusion and dignity.” Take that!

 

About two weeks ago, Piker appeared on the Pod Save America podcast and was interviewed by Jon Favreau, former director of speechwriting for President Barack Obama, about his past comments about Hamas:

 

Favreau: I want to stay in the theme of violence just for a minute, because I think it connects to another comment of yours that’s been circulating. This is one from January. ‘Hamas is a thousand times better than the fascist settler colonial apartheid state of Israel.’

 

Piker: I stand by that.

 

Favreau: Well, so I will say this is the one that bothered me most when I first heard it, and I remember having a reaction to it when I first saw it in January. Because I think even if you believe what happened in Gaza is genocide, and what’s happening in the West Bank is apartheid, those are different claims from “Hamas is a thousand times better.” Because Hamas is an organization that has massacred, raped, kidnapped civilians on October 7th. They’ve also been catastrophic for Palestinians by almost every measure. Their governance, corruption, they made choices they knew would result in mass civilian death of their own people. So, my question is, when you say, “Hamas is a thousand times better,” do you actually mean that, or is that a rhetorical move or like a solidarity signal? Like, what—

 

Piker: What I mean, it’s all of the above. I do mean it. I think it’s a rhetorical move because it frustrates a lot of people. I’ve also said, I’m a harm reduction voter. I’m a lesser evil voter, and therefore I would vote for Hamas over Israel every single time.

 

Piker is not asserting moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel; he is asserting Hamas’ moral superiority to Israel.

 

During the interview, Piker also contended, “The biggest terrorist internationally is the Republican Party.” Besides all his other wrongdoing, Piker is really snubbing al-Qaeda, ISIS, Jamaat Nusrat Al-Islam, Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, Al-Shabaab . . . those are all terrorist groups that worked hard to compete for the world terrorism championship. The Republican Party didn’t even make the top rankings in most polls. Perhaps we need a playoff system.

 

Oh, and he uses a shock collar on his dog.

 

Piker doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but he articulates the raging id of the hard left, demonizes wealthy people while raking it in and driving his Porsche around West Hollywood, excuses away the world’s worst Islamist terrorists, including the al-Qaeda terrorists who committed 9/11 while insisting that Israeli victims of the Hamas attacks are describing their rape fantasies.

 

No doubt, many Democratic presidential candidates will court him for his endorsement between now and the 2028 primaries.

 

ADDENDUM: Our Kamden Mulder reports, “The Minnesota House Fraud Prevention and State Agency Oversight Policy Committee called Omar to testify at a hearing on Tuesday, but the committee’s chairwoman told National Review that Omar ‘completely ghosted’ state lawmakers.”

Let Me Explain What an Enemy Is

By John Podhoretz

Sunday, April 26, 2026

 

A good-looking young Muslim man who came to prominence playing video games while people watch him do so on a streaming service has chosen of late to speak about Jews.

 

He has called Jews and their supporters “blood-thirsty, violent pig-dog[s],” and has said that “it doesn’t matter if rape happened on October 7.” He called Orthodox Jews “inbred”—Orthodox Jews, mind you, who number more than 2 million worldwide and come from Yemen and Syria and Morocco and Vilnius and Belarus and Ethiopia and whose various skin colors mark them as among the most physically diverse people on the face of this planet. Given a chance to amend or apologize for his stated view that “Hamas is a thousand times better” than Israel, this young man replied that he stood by it—as well as his opinion that the United States deserved to be attacked on September 11.

 

The forum in which he affirmed his opinions was Pod Save America, the wildly popular effort by Obama staffers to influence the Democratic Party in a progressive direction and help the party succeed with voters while enriching themselves in the process. They brought him on to whitewash him, and, perhaps to his credit in some evil sense, this young man refused to be whitewashed.

 

Another successful Internet entrepreneur and Democratic Party booster, Ezra Klein, has taken his trade to the New York Times, where he tries to sound like a voice of sweet reason (following a raging early career on the web during which he suggested someone should “f—k” the late Tim Russert “with a spiky acid-tipped d—k” for not being liberal enough). Klein published a column in April about the controversies surrounding this young man called “Hasan Piker Is Not the Enemy.” (The column’s title was later altered, since whitewashing despicable opinions is the mandate not only of Pod Save America but the New York Times op-ed page, particularly as regards Israel and anti-Semitism.)

 

People like Piker are not without power in this world, especially when their views are amplified. As a voice in the most influential opinion precinct in the Western world, Klein is a gigantic megaphone. He represents what are now deemed acceptable views and, in so doing, advances those views from the acceptable to the respectable.

 

Ezra Klein is a Jew. Hasan Piker supports the mass murder of Jews. If Klein cannot recognize Piker as an enemy, then he has forever branded himself one or all of three things: 1) a moral idiot unaware of the fact that the statements of this supposed non-enemy pose a danger to him; 2) a disingenuous liar who wants to clear Piker’s name because he believes Piker to have influence that will help his chosen political party defeat the party he does not like, further consequences be damned; or 3) an implicit supporter of the idea that the Jewish people from whom he springs constitute an evil force on this earth worthy of erasure.

 

Klein might believe he has some sort of immunity from the evil that Hasan Piker wants to do because of some shared political views, but that’s not the way Jew-hatred works. Jews are hated not for being conservative Jews, or inbred Jews, or Israeli Jews. We are hated for being Jews at all. Hasan Piker is Ezra Klein’s enemy, because no matter what whitewashing Klein does and no matter Klein’s commitment to the cause of his party and ideology over his peoplehood, Piker would, all things being equal, be delighted to see him dead.

The Media’s Herculean Effort to Obscure the Details of the SPLC Indictment

By Becket Adams

Sunday, April 26, 2026

 

It is possible to hold these two seemingly opposing positions at the same time: that the Justice Department’s case against the Southern Poverty Law Center may be legally questionable, and that the underlying charges are eminently scandalous and newsworthy.

 

Yet, regarding the strength of the DOJ’s case, it does not speak well of the SPLC’s claimed innocence that news organizations have responded to Washington’s claims with the sort of full-court public relations effort that conspicuously ignores or mischaracterizes the most damning allegations.

 

It suggests a lack of confidence.

 

For context — because you’ll be hard-pressed to find it anywhere but in conservative media — the Justice Department last week announced an eleven-count indictment against the SPLC, charging the group with wire fraud, false statements to a bank, and conspiracy to commit money laundering.

 

More specifically, the SPLC stands accused of defrauding donors by secretly paying racists to keep on being racist while it claimed in fundraising drives that it needs yet more money to fight racists. Groups that benefited from this alleged arrangement included the Ku Klux Klan, the National Socialist Party of America, and a member of the group that helped organize the fatal 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., an event that former President Joe Biden would later claim inspired him to run for president.

 

It’s all deeply embarrassing for the SPLC, if not outright criminal.

 

Yet you’d hardly know this from following mainstream press coverage. You’d know mostly that a supposedly noble and esteemed anti-racist group is tied up somehow in Trump administration chicanery.

 

“The Southern Poverty Law Center was indicted for paying sources to infiltrate hate groups, a tactic federal agencies have used for decades,” reported USA Today.

 

Not even close.

 

“Justice Dept. Charges Prominent Civil Rights Group With Financial Crimes,” reported the New York Times, experimenting with the idea of a headline that says nothing at all.

 

“Financial crimes” is narrowly true, but one can’t help but wonder why the paper chose to omit the objectively newsworthy allegation that the anti-hate group bankrolled Klan members and the like.

 

“The Southern Poverty Law Center was formed in 1971 in Alabama and is best known for investigating groups like the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacy organizations,” the Times reported. “In recent years, Republicans have accused the group of unfairly targeting conservative and Christian organizations, labeling them as extremists.”

 

Wink, wink.

 

Then there’s this doozy from CBS News: “Justice Department charges Southern Poverty Law Center with fraud over investigations into extremist groups, Blanche says.”

 

“The SPLC is a nonprofit that tracks white supremacist and other hate groups across the U.S. and has been a frequent target of President Trump’s allies,” the report is careful to note. “It is best known for its work investigating the Ku Klux Klan.”

 

Oh, please.

 

At the very least, these people should admit the alleged SPLC scheme was ingeniously lucrative.

 

In 2016, the year before the Unite the Right rally, the SPLC’s total contributions and public support stood at about $50 million. By October 2017, after the rally, revenues soared to approximately $133 million.

 

Not a bad return on an investment in which the SPLC reportedly paid about $270,000 to a source who “was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned” the rally, “attended the event at the direction of the SPLC,” “made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC,” and “helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees.” It’s also worth noting that the SPLC allegedly continued to pay its Unite the Right source six years after the Charlottesville event.

 

In total, the federal indictment lists roughly $3 million in payouts, not just to the sources listed above, but also: a former “Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America,” a Klan member who was the spouse of “an Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan,” a person who “led the National Socialist Party of America” and “was the former director of a faction of the Aryan Nations,” and the “reported National President of American Front,” who was “a convicted federal felon for his participation in a cross burning.”

 

These aren’t low-level guys. They are in leadership roles, meaning the SPLC allegedly bankrolled high-ranking leaders in the hate groups it purports to oppose, keeping them financially afloat in the otherwise profitless profession of hating blacks, Jews, Catholics, and others.

 

The SPLC alleges it was merely paying “informants.” The group also said it has since discontinued the practice of using “informants,” which doesn’t exactly scream “there’s no there there.”

 

The DOJ’s case against the SPLC may or may not be too thin to survive (some of my colleagues certainly have doubts), and charges alone don’t prove guilt. You can indict a ham sandwich, after all.

 

Yet whether the charges are overblown or not, it shouldn’t prevent newsrooms from simply reporting the news, but it has been like pulling teeth trying to find the facts of this story. Readers must wade through a moat of throat-clearing, euphemisms, and outright misdirection in the coverage — particularly the ledes and headlines — to get to the “what” of “what has the SPLC been accused of?”

 

Then again, perhaps the hemming and hawing is understandable. For all the decades that these newsrooms have spent promoting the SPLC as the authority on racism and “hate,” they never meant it like that.

Model Immigrants No More: Sweden’s Elder Care Nightmare

By John Gustavsson

Sunday, April 26, 2026

 

Sweden’s experience with virtually unrestricted immigration has drastically changed the country’s image. Many in the West know that Sweden has struggled to assimilate millions of asylum seekers and that tensions from this failure have contributed to increased violent and sexual crime. Less well-known is how much of that sexual crime targets the elderly — and how often it is perpetrated by the very people hired by the public sector to care for them.

 

What is happening to the elderly in Sweden is yet another warning for the West about the consequences of unchecked migration.

 

In Sweden, looking after the elderly is the responsibility of the welfare state; only 1 percent of the elderly live with their children. Most of the Swedish welfare state is not managed by the state, however, but by the country’s 290 municipalities. This includes the provision of elder care.

 

But Sweden’s population is aging, and staffing is becoming a problem. To fill the gap, municipalities have turned to immigrants. While welfare is handled by municipalities, immigration policy is a matter for the state. When mass immigration to Sweden escalated in the 2010s, municipalities were forced to adapt to the new circumstances. Communities that had been promised an influx of doctors and engineers by politicians in Stockholm instead often found themselves saddled with young men without verifiable qualifications and with little knowledge of either Swedish or English.

 

The backbone of Sweden’s elder care is Hemtjänsten, the municipal home-care service that helps the elderly live at home longer by providing mainly nonmedical services — delivering meals, cleaning, and assisting with bathing and toileting. As with health care, the ability to choose a provider is limited, and care recipients have no legal right to refuse opposite-sex carers.

 

Faced with a surplus of unemployable migrants and a shortage of carers, many municipalities turned elder care into an unofficial jobs program, creating caregiving positions and hiring migrants — mostly men — who could not find work elsewhere.

 

The number of migrants working with the elderly quickly became a point of pride on the left. Migrants in care occupations were held up as model immigrants taking on jobs that Swedes wouldn’t do.

 

But now, an official investigation into rapes of the elderly has found that most nonmarital rapes since 2021 were committed by Hemtjänst carers or staff at municipal nursing homes. Most of the perpetrators are migrants, and some have even recorded or photographed their crimes on their phones.

 

Municipalities have in several instances been complicit in covering up cases or attempting to silence victims. In some cases, caregivers reported for rape have been reassigned but allowed to continue working with other patients.

 

Why is this? First, politicians may naturally fear political backlash when individuals held up as “model immigrants” are then implicated in serious crimes. Left-wing politicians in municipalities with large foreign populations also tend to rely on minority votes to stay in power, making them especially reluctant to confront migrant crime.

 

Second, the pragmatic reality is that carers are still needed. When Gothenburg introduced a requirement that foreign, non-Swedish-educated applicants for preschool teacher positions demonstrate proficiency in Swedish, not a single applicant passed the test.

 

Today, people with foreign backgrounds make up a majority of home-care staff in major cities like Uppsala, where one of the most serious cover-ups occurred. Some evidence suggests that the presence of unskilled migrants in elder care professions has made these jobs less attractive to Swedes as Swedish caregivers end up having to babysit their foreign co-workers, worsening the very staffing problem migrants were meant to solve.

 

Finally, there’s the motive.

 

Policymakers are understandably worried that voters may link these rapes to another new form of crime Swedes have dubbed “förnedringsrån” — “humiliation robbery” — where the aim is not merely theft but the humiliation of the victim. Migrant youth gangs will target ethnic Swedish teenagers, rob them of their possessions, and force them to perform degrading acts, often while recording. In one case, a 16-year-old Somali migrant forced an eight-year old boy to strip naked and do push-ups after seizing his bike. In police interviews, the 16-year-old claimed he did it because the child looked like he would vote for the national-conservative Sweden Democrats in the future. There are eerie similarities between these robberies targeting the young and the sexual assaults targeting the old.

 

Even though authorities still refuse to treat crimes against Swedes as hate crimes, these rapes and robberies are nevertheless viewed by many Swedes as a way for the perpetrators to send a message: This is not your country anymore.

 

For Swedish policymakers who have long clung to the belief that providing sufficient welfare, education, and job opportunities is all that it takes for any immigrant to assimilate, it’s hard to face the stark reality that some migrants actually carry a deep-seated, irrational hatred toward the country that let them in.

 

In 2022, Sweden elected a right-wing coalition government supported by the Sweden Democrats. Since then, great strides have been made in several areas: Asylum applications have dropped to a 40-year low, deportations have skyrocketed, and shootings were reduced by half last year while homicides fell to their lowest level in a decade.

 

Yet, the abuse of the elderly continues, enabled by a combination of underreporting and the continuing efforts of the left-wing Social Democratic Party — which governs half of Sweden’s municipalities and retains vast institutional power — to shield predators. The Social Democrats have even attempted to stop demonstrations on the issue from taking place in municipalities they control. Still, there are some signs of progress. New rules to improve language proficiency among carers will take effect on July 1, and the Sweden Democrats are pushing for a national inquiry into sexual crimes against the elderly by caregivers, along with lifetime sentences for the perpetrators.

 

While its achievements should be commended, Sweden’s right-wing government has, after almost four years in power, largely failed to confront and break the institutional power of the Social Democrats. Until the government does so, Sweden’s elderly will remain victims of the country’s failed multicultural experiment.

Dark Woke

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, April 24, 2026

 

Ethics in politics can seem confusing.

 

For instance, if you’re a special-ops soldier cashing in on your inside knowledge of the president’s war plans, you can expect to be prosecuted.

 

But if you’re a high-level crony cashing in on your inside knowledge of the president’s war plans, you can trust that neither Todd Blanche’s Justice Department nor the majority party in Congress will care.

 

Similarly, if you’re the influence-peddling son of a Democratic president leveraging your connections for cushy corporate positions, you’ll be appropriately vilified by right-wing media for corruption. But if you’re the influence-peddling son of a Republican president leveraging your connections for cushy corporate opportunities, the same right-wing media will help you promote your ventures.

 

It’s baffling—under traditional ethics, in which rules of proper conduct are supposed to apply universally. But under postliberal ethics, the apparent double standards melt away: The president’s friends, family, and allies are properly treated one way while everyone else is properly treated another.

 

People aren’t supposed to be treated equally under postliberalism. They’re supposed to be treated the way they “deserve.”

 

Or so it seems to me. To the average populist, all of this will sound like nonsense.

 

The whole reason postliberalism caught on in the first place, he or she would note, is because traditional ethics don’t actually apply universally in practice. Trump spoke candidly about that in 2016 when he declared America’s supposedly equitable liberal system of government “rigged.” Getting ahead in the proverbial swamp is all about who you know, he maintained, and he had the receipts to prove it. The elites monopolize power for themselves, exploit the average joe, and smugly pronounce the arrangement “fair” and “ethical.”

 

So there’s no such thing as “postliberal ethics,” our hypothetical populist would conclude. The president is practicing the same ethics as his predecessors. He and his toadies have merely dispensed with the lofty hypocrisy around such things, dropping the hollow pretenses of propriety.

 

The fact that Trump’s second term is already the most freakishly corrupt presidency in American history, in which tapped-in criminals are regularly set free while the commander in chief shakes down his own government for billions, is wholly coincidental, you see.

 

Which brings us, strangely, to Hasan Piker.

 

Radical chic.

 

Piker is a far-left agitator who streams commentary regularly on the platform Twitch. Until about three weeks ago, my exposure to him was limited to bon mots clipped from his stream by critics and posted on social media to illustrate what a chud he is. “I would vote for Hamas over Israel every single time” is a nice example.

 

You know his type. “Leftist provocateur shocks, titillates American cultural establishment” is a very old story, made more tedious in 2026 by the volume of right-wing provocateurs aspiring to do the same. I’ve never understood why someone who’s serious about politics would care what Hasan Piker thinks.

 

So imagine my surprise when the mainstream liberal commentariat collectively decided this month that it’s time to start caring what Hasan Piker thinks.

 

As best I can tell, Hasanmania was touched off by Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who held a campaign event with Piker on April 7. Five days later, influential New York Times columnist Ezra Klein made the case for engaging with Piker’s brand of radicalism rather than ostracizing it. (The Times has been doing that for a while, actually.) In short order, the Obama bros of the popular Pod Save America podcast hosted Piker for an hourlong chat.

 

On Wednesday, the Times nudged the Overton window further left again when it posted a lengthy conversation between Piker, the paper’s culture editor, and progressive New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino. It may as well have been titled épater la bourgeoisie. The topic: Is theft—or “microlooting,” as the editor memorably put it—ever justified?

 

Would it shock and/or titillate you to learn that the consensus among this radically chic trio was yes?

 

“I’m pro-piracy all the way, like, across the board,” Piker declared at one point. Not quite across the board, it turns out: He ruled out stealing books from a library or fleeing a restaurant without paying. But when the prospect of a heist at the Louvre was raised, he brightened up. “We’ve got to get back to cool crimes like that: bank robberies, stealing priceless artifacts, things of that nature,” he said.

 

He was more restrained than Tolentino was when asked to name something that isn’t socially permitted but should be. (Stealing intellectual property, Piker replied. “Maybe things like blowing up a pipeline,” she countered.) And both declined to endorse killing a health insurance executive, a position not everyone on the left shares—although Piker couldn’t let the subject pass without an ominous caveat about the crime of which Luigi Mangione is accused.

 

"Friedrich Engels wrote about the concept of social murder,” he said. “And Brian Thompson, as the United Healthcare CEO, was engaging in a tremendous amount of social murder."

 

The whole conversation is like that. Every crime condoned by the participants (and even ones technically not condoned, like the Mangione case) is rationalized as a form of retaliation against some greater injustice. “I’m pro-stealing from big corporations, because they steal quite a bit more from their own workers,” Piker frankly explains at one point.

 

Which sounds a lot like Trumpism’s approach to ethics to me.

 

Theft is bad.

 

It’s the same logic at heart. Per Piker, what Americans have long thought of as “traditional ethics” is actually a rigged system in which it’s fair for the powerful to exploit the average joe but improper for the average joe to respond in kind by, say, stealing. Unless and until that playing field is level—until the proverbial swamp is drained—the victims of our crooked system are morally entitled to play by its own twisted rules.

 

That nihilistic postliberal view, treating ethics as a sort of racket and one’s enemies as morally entitled only to what they “deserve,” created a permission structure that turned Washington into an unprecedented bazaar of open corruption almost instantly after Trump’s second presidency began. There’s no reason to think it wouldn’t have the same catastrophic effect on left-wing behavior if Pikerism became au courant.

 

It’s folly, for starters, to believe that all progressives would draw the same ethical lines that Piker and Tolentino did in their Times chat. The basic through line of their conversation is that crimes are fine against the powerful but not against the powerless, and that those crimes should be aimed at impersonal institutions like corporations rather than at individual people. But a consensus that immoral behavior is sometimes justified will not beget a consensus about which immoral behavior is justified. Opinions on that will vary (who is “powerful” and “powerless”?) and that variation leads nowhere good.

 

Look no further for an example than the president, who told reporters yesterday that he’s “not happy” about the apparent insider trading happening on his watch. Even if he means it, he’s still to blame: Having championed an ethical system in which almost anything goes, go figure that some of his deputies might define “almost anything” differently than he does.

 

Piker’s ethics, if widely adopted, would also hurt smaller businesses far more than large ones, ironically. Whole Foods can absorb losses caused by a rash of shoplifting, but the local mom-and-pop grocery store cannot. And while Piker might scrupulously distinguish between those two businesses when weighing whether it’s ethical to rob them, the sort of degenerate who’s keen for an excuse to steal will not. “Microlooting” will be indiscriminate, inevitably.

 

The Times editor who moderated the conversation between him and Tolentino unwittingly alluded to that at one point. “My friends and I have started calling this microlooting,” she said of shoplifting, “because it has a slight political valence to theft, as opposed to just the thrill of getting away with something.” The thrill of getting away with something will motivate 95 percent of the chuds who act on Piker’s encouragement; any “political valence” to their acts will transparently be nothing more than a way to backfill a moral justification.

 

And people looking for a thrill won’t care if they get it from Walmart or from the struggling bodega on the corner.

 

To make matters worse, mainstreaming petty theft would wreck the quality of life in working-class neighborhoods far more severely than in upper-class ones. You know what happens when minor crimes like broken windows are tolerated in a community: In a culture of impunity, some will feel emboldened to attempt more ambitious and dangerous crimes. Probably including a few of the unpunished window-breakers themselves.

 

The very progressive city of San Francisco just got a lesson in that. Officials there recently replaced waist-high turnstiles in the subway system with six-foot doors to make it harder for passengers to ride without paying. Turnstile-hopping is exactly the sort of petty offense I’d expect Piker and Tolentino to condone—high cost of living, travel should be free, yadda yadda—but the new policy is paying big quality-of-life dividends, per The Atlantic. Crime in the subway has dropped steeply, and workers are spending far less time cleaning up after unruly riders.

 

“Most fare beaters may be just trying to get a free ride, but most of the vandalism was apparently committed by fare beaters,” the magazine concluded. Punishing the minor crime averted the more serious stuff. There would be many broken windows in the Hasan Piker utopia by comparison, with everything that implies.

 

The kicker to all this is that left-wing cultural radicalism will empower Piker’s enemies on the authoritarian right. It already has: Without the open borders of the Biden years, the riot-rationalizing and “defund the police” hysteria after George Floyd’s murder, and the determined effort to mainstream transgenderism, Democrats might have held down Trump’s gains with working-class voters in 2024 and finished him off politically.

 

“If liberals insist that only fascists will enforce borders, then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals refuse to do,” David Frum warned in 2019—correctly, it would turn out. It’s no less true that voters will hire fascists if liberals insist that only fascists will punish theft. Which, to be sure, is an absurd result in the age of Trump, a man leading a de facto criminal syndicate who’s put child molesters back on the street. His commitment to “law and order” is a millimeter thin.

 

But a fraudulent millimeter-thin commitment beats no commitment at all.

 

Why now?

 

Center-left commentators understand all of this, I assume. So why have they chosen this moment to cram Hasan Piker down our collective piehole?

 

As it so often does in politics, I think the answer boils down to fear, anger, and jealousy.

 

Democrats are palpably jealous of the right’s success in new-media formats like podcasting that cater to a young constituency. Ezra Klein made no bones about it in his piece calling for dialogue with Piker, titling it “This Is Why There’s No Liberal Joe Rogan.” The left craves a loquacious bro of its own with a knack for connecting with 20-somethings, and a guy who prefers Hamas to Israel is currently the closest thing they’ve got.

 

By promoting Piker, they’re actively trying to put him on the radar of the sort of heterodox Joe Rogan listener who’s not averse to progressive takes so long as they come packaged with a little verve and a lot of contempt for the political establishment. If Hasan can convince people like that to start voting Democratic, liberals will tolerate him convincing the same people that Maoism is dope.

 

Democrats are also angry at the president and Republicans for, oh, lots of things, but generally for being lawless, cutthroat authoritarian scumbags. We got a taste of that anger Tuesday when Virginia liberals carried the party’s ruthless mid-decade redistricting scheme to victory in a statewide referendum. “Maximum warfare, everywhere, all the time,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries pledged afterward, still furious at the right in triumph.

 

The term “dark woke” has been used to describe the left-wing belief that defeating Trump 2.0 will require behaving in a manner no less cutthroat than the president and his minions. That’s what we saw in Virginia. At such a moment, is it any surprise that Piker’s unapologetic chuddery might break containment on the fringe and gain traction in the center? The logic is remorseless: To beat a sociopathic felon, it takes a sociopath who thinks theft is cool.

 

Fear probably explains Hasanmania better than anything, however.

 

Despite an unpopular war, a new burst of inflation, and sky’s-the-limit hikes in gas prices, Democrats are still viewed less favorably by Americans than the ruling party in Washington. The last presidential election established that they’re badly out of touch with the working class on cultural matters; the two years since have established that the party establishment is also badly out of touch with its progressive base on opposing Israel and confronting Trump aggressively.

 

The sudden interest in Piker is an obvious, if desperate, olive branch to the left from the center to signal we’re listening. Not all progressives would vote for Hamas over Israel (whatever that means), but certainly Piker’s sympathies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are closer to the average 20-something leftist’s than Chuck Schumer’s are. Piker’s cartoonish class-warfare agitation is also a better fit for the liberal (and national) mood as the affordability crisis deepens than the mushy technocracy of Washington Democrats. He might be a millionaire who wore a Ralph Lauren shirt during his Times chitchat with Tolentino, but he’s a proletarian peasant compared to, say, Nancy Pelosi.

 

And he’s young. In a party that’s grown notorious for geriatric leadership, up to and including demonstrating symptoms of senility in a national presidential debate, the simple fact that a guy in his mid-30s has built a minor cultural following preaching Marxism must seem miraculously hopeful to the broader left.

 

Maybe his newfound mainstream acceptability will temper his radicalism, as tends to happen in politics. Or maybe, in a media landscape of chud provocateurs as competitive as America’s, he’ll be forced to start calling for Israel to be nuked or whatever in order to retain market share. Either way, I don’t think the liberal fascination with avatars of nihilistic postliberalism is anywhere close to being over. Prepare your piehole accordingly.

Clarence Thomas Punches Left—And Right

By Jonah Goldberg

Friday, April 24, 2026

 

If you’re bored with hearing me bee-bop and scat on progressives, you can skip the first part and check in when I mildly criticize Clarence Thomas himself, or skip all the way to the end when I criticize the new right.

 

Last week Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas gave a speech at the University of Texas (which you can watch here) in which he denounced, in one way or another, the evils of slavery, Jim Crow, eugenics, Nazism, and communism. He lionized Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson and harshly criticized the court he sits on for upholding segregation. He declared forthrightly, and at times movingly, the idea that all people, regardless of the color of their skin or the circumstances of their birth, are endowed with dignity and are equal before God and government.

 

And a chorus of progressives was outraged. They mocked him. A writer for Slate said Thomas’ comments were “jaw-dropping” and “cause for alarm” not least because it was proof that Thomas suffers from “Fox News brain rot.” 

 

One reason Thomas’ comments infuriated these progressives is that fury at Thomas is their default mode. But the specific trigger was that Thomas singled out the progressivism of Woodrow Wilson and his contemporaries for criticism.

 

“Progressivism seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration of Independence, and hence our form of government,” Thomas said. “It holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God, but from the government. It requires of the people a subservience and weakness incompatible with a Constitution premised on the transcendent origin of our rights.” 

 

It will surprise no one that I largely agree with Thomas on this point. I also largely agree with Thomas on the historical facts. Wilson and many of his fellow traveling progressive intellectuals were openly and proudly contemptuous of natural rights, and Wilson rejected the idea of fixed and inalienable rights. “No doubt a great deal of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual,” he wrote in the book Constitutional Government in the United States, “and a great deal that was mere vague sentiment and pleasing speculation has been put forward as fundamental principle.”

 

For Wilson, individual rights were those granted by men in power through political negotiation. Referring to the line in the Massachusetts Bill of Rights, “to the end that this may be a government of laws and not of men,” Wilson retorts, “there never was such a government.” For Wilson, the purpose and function of the law is the “regulation of the national life.”

 

John Dewey, arguably the most influential philosopher of his era said, “Natural rights and natural liberties exist only in the kingdom of mythological social zoology.”

 

In fairness to Dewey—not something I’m known to say—he did not believe that rights and liberties did not exist. He simply believed that they were social constructs shaped and protected—i.e., granted—by government via what he called “social control.”

 

“In this effort toward a higher morality in our social relations,” progressive reformer  Jane Addams wrote in Democracy and Social Ethics, “we must demand that the individual shall be willing to lose the sense of personal achievement, and shall be content to realize his activity only in connection with the activity of the many.”

 

Charles Merriam, the great progressive political scientist, in A History of American Political Theories credits the German thinkers and American intellectuals influenced by them for crafting a new progressive theory of government that left, “The individualistic ideas of the ‘natural right’ school of political theory, endorsed in the [American] Revolution … discredited and repudiated.”

 

I can do this all day. But you get the point. The progressives of the Progressive Era were honestly and unambiguously contemptuous of the classically liberal conception of natural, or God-given, inalienable rights.

 

They were also highly skeptical of classically liberal notions of checks and balances and limited government. Wilson rejected the “mechanistic” design of the Constitution, believing that nation-states were Darwinian in nature. “Governments are living things and operate as organic wholes,” he wrote. “The makers of the Constitution constructed the federal government upon a theory of checks and balances which was meant to limit the operation of each part and allow to no single part or organ of it a dominating force; but no government can be successfully conducted upon so mechanical a theory.”

 

A great many of them were also fans of eugenics, as Thomas noted in his speech last week, to the outrage of many. I won’t rehash the evidence of this, but if you doubt it, just take a gander at Thomas Leonard’s work on the subject. But I will say, to buttress Thomas’ point, that eugenics was not some unrelated side interest to progressives. The assumptions of eugenics were seen as wholly complementary to the Darwin-infused idea that nations were akin to organisms.

 

This doesn’t mean the progressives were all bad people or cartoon villains. Many progressives were understandably outraged by poverty and the like. And many of them did extremely valuable and laudable things, from fighting corruption to fixing bad sanitation systems. And many of them, like Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., thought the smartest way of dealing with poverty was to sterilize poor people.

 

The contemporary progressives who are angry at Thomas for airing this dirty laundry are stuck in a bind. On the one hand, they want to claim that Thomas is attacking them when he attacks the self-described progressives of a century ago. On the other hand, contemporary progressives want to deny that they share the unsavory ideological commitments of those bygone progressives. I just don’t think this works.

 

First of all, Thomas didn’t say much, if anything, about contemporary progressives. The ones claiming Thomas attacked “progressive politics” are inferring that from his attack on Wilson & Co. Fine. If you subscribe to the views of Wilson, Dewey, et al., by all means take offense. He was indeed attacking you. But don’t then also take offense at the suggestion that you agree with those people about the embarrassing stuff.

 

Conservatives of my stripe figured out how to do this a long time ago. When some founders are attacked for their views on slavery, the mature conservative response is to say, “Yeah, they were wrong about that.” When people denounce Bill Buckley for some of his early writings on the segregated South, we say, “Yeah, that was bad. But he matured and changed his mind.” It’s really not hard.

 

A thoughtful progressive might listen to what Thomas was saying about the underlying philosophical assumptions of the early progressives and ponder whether their own philosophical assumptions require a rethink. Just because progressives tend to define progressivism as “good people doing the good things” doesn’t make that definition true. Woodrow Wilson is the guy who threw political prisoners in jail, censored critics, lamented the Confederacy’s defeat, and resegregated the federal government. He didn’t think he was betraying progressivism; he thought he was the living embodiment of it. If that’s a problem for you, it’s a you problem, not a me problem.

 

This stuff has been so inside my wheelhouse for so long, it’s very difficult to resist the urge to just go on autopilot. But I want to break new ground.

 

Two-and-a-half cheers for Clarence Thomas.

 

So first, I want to offer two criticisms of Thomas’ mostly excellent and utterly defensible speech.

 

The first has to do with his very, very Claremonty framing of things. Harry Jaffa was a brilliant, cantankerous guy and the founder of what has become known as the “West Coast Straussian” school of thought headquartered at the Claremont Institute. Jaffa believed—with good reason—that Abraham Lincoln was a moral philosopher who recognized that the “self-evident” idea that we are endowed with “inalienable rights” was the very heart of the American creed and our Constitution’s purpose and that slavery was antithetical to both.

 

Thomas’ understanding of the Declaration as the mission statement of government and the Constitution as the user manual in service to that mission is pure Jaffa-ism. And I’m here for it.

 

But the problem with Jaffa-ism in the real world is that Jaffa and many of his students were so smitten with Lincoln’s statesmanship in a time of crisis—and because Jaffa was obsessed with the power and centrality of ideas—they tended to think that conflicts over ideas were driving us to yet more crises. This yielded a kind of apocalypticism that some found hard to keep in check. A bit like a doomsday cult, every new light in the nighttime sky aroused an “Okay this is it!” response. This apocalyptic thinking is how we got “The Flight 93 Election” nonsense, fevered musings about the need for a “Red Caesar,” and John Eastman’s preposterous scheme to steal the 2020 election.

 

I hear rhymes and echoes of some of this in Thomas’ speech. I want to be very clear: I don’t think Thomas is calling for anything remotely like any of that stuff. If there’s one thing we know about Thomas, it’s that he’s a constitutionalist. But in his speech, Thomas correctly says, “The ideas of the Declaration were so powerful that our nation could not coexist with the contradiction created by the great evil of slavery.”

 

Later on, he says that progressivism “has coexisted uneasily with the principles of the Declaration. Because it is opposed to those principles, it is not possible for the two to coexist forever.” 

 

First of all, I don’t think the parallelism, intended or not, is helpful. Second, I just don’t think this is necessarily true. These conflicting visions have coexisted for more than 100 years. I agree that the principles of Wilsonian progressivism are theoretically incompatible with the Founders’ vision of natural rights. But in the real world, we’ve seen them in tension—sometimes in a very healthy tension!—not just for a century, but since the founding. John Adams had some really crappy ideas about the power of the state. Hamilton wasn’t exactly a laissez-faire classical liberal on economics. Andrew Jackson was a borderline Red Caesar. Wilson was an outright enemy of the founding in word and deed. But his tenure ended with Americans rejecting that stuff. They reembraced it under FDR, which really was the apotheosis of Wilsonian progressivism.

 

Since then, Congress and the courts have trimmed many—but not all—of the excesses of the Progressive Era. It’s been a long and zig-zaggy process. What it hasn’t been is fuel for a civil war. Progressivism as Thomas defines it may be very bad and very wrong, but it ain’t slavery. It doesn’t raise the same fundamental issues. Progressivism surely raises its share of moral dilemmas and conflicts—from abortion, to euthanasia, to trans issues and race. I don’t want to minimize these things, because they are serious and important disagreements. But they are still different and, so far, have been addressable through politics and law. And in recent years, progressives have lost on these fronts at least as often as they have won. Roe is gone. DEI is in retreat, as are racial quotas in higher education. Trans issues are now widely seen as a liability for Democrats.

 

The reason the court is visiting the issue of the independence of the Federal Reserve isn’t driven by anything as morally consequential as the existence of chattel slavery in a nation dedicated to human equality. It’s because a power-hungry narcissist thinks he should be able to control interest rates, and he’s using unitary executive theory to get it.

 

Maybe the conflict between progressivism and classical liberalism simply isn’t the binary choice that Jaffa-style intellectuals want to make it?

 

Take the word “progressivism” out of it and just call it “statism.” Thomas is absolutely right that Europe is far more comfortable with statism than America is. But Europe is full of decent, democratic nations where it is possible to live in freedom and dignity. They certainly have problems, and I don’t want their systems. But they aren’t unfree hell holes.

 

There’s a kind of intellectual who thinks a conflict of ideas must be mirrored in the real world. But the truth, for good or ill, is that Americans—like humans generally—routinely live in a world of conflicting ideas and contradictions of principles. America’s fondness or tolerance for statism waxes and wanes based on the facts in the real world, not just the theories on a page. The brilliance of the Constitution, as Thomas eloquently alluded to in his speech, is that it gives space for people to work out these conflicts through politics. And politics isn’t war. The point of politics is to avoid war, through compromise and argument. The point of the Revolutionary War was to create a new nation where politics, not muskets, settled most questions, within the guardrails of our Constitution. Politics and argument were insufficient to the task of resolving the crisis of slavery. But slavery wasn’t just a crisis of principles; it was a crisis of lived experience in ways that the problems of progressivism are not. That doesn’t mean they couldn’t be. But the slope we are on doesn’t look all that slippery to me.

 

Even the image of a slope is wrong. Progressivism—or statism—does not move inexorably forward monolithically, never mind inexorably. If it did, the New Deal would still be intact, as would all of the bad policies of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. The Supreme Court itself has not been sliding toward progressivism, but inching away from it. There has never been a court more protective of the First Amendment’s protection of speech and religion. Roe v. Wade was overturned. Gun rights are more secure than at any time in living memory. How did that happen? Decades of hard work by the conservative legal movement in law schools, journals, courts, and elections. In other words, politics. Progressivism is very strong in some places and in retreat in others. It was—and shall be—ever thus. The problem with the Flight 93 nonsense was that a bunch of people lost sight of this.

 

Look, I hate Woodrow Wilson, but the Fed established under Wilson was a quintessentially progressive idea: a body of technocratic experts trying to work outside of the political process. And it has worked remarkably well, coexisting with the constitutional order just fine—in the real world. The only place it doesn’t work is on paper. That’s not a trivial thing, but nor is it a crisis. That’s why the court is so reluctant to ditch it in service to Donald Trump’s selfish agenda.

 

Indeed, some of the speculation is that, in the words of a writer at Mother Jones, Thomas “thinks his fellow GOP-appointees are chickening out” when it comes to overturning Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, which limits the president’s power to fire certain officials. According to this theory, Thomas was playing the role of Henry V, delivering a St. Crispin’s Day speech to his colleagues to muster the courage to dismantle the administrative state. I doubt that was his primary motivation.

 

On the actual substance of the case—i.e. whether the court should fully repeal the Fed’s independence in fealty to unitary executive theory—I am quite torn. But whichever way you come down, I don’t think the rhetoric of revolutionaries committing to war should decide it.

 

And that rhetoric is my second quibble.

 

Thomas says:

 

When I encounter the Declaration of Independence anew today, I am most struck by the final sentence. It can be easy to forget, 250 years later, the courage it took for those 56 men to sign the Declaration. Arguably, these men committed treason against the King, risking death at the hands of an empire far mightier than the newborn United States. They thus concluded with the memorable final sentence: “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor.” I will say that again: “we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”

 

I am all in favor of fidelity to the Constitution and the principles of the Declaration, but there is just a huge categorical difference between the courage and sacrifice required to fight a revolutionary war against our colonial masters to create a new republic and the courage and sacrifice required for sustaining a democratic republic governed by the rule of law. The stakes in the fight over the independent status of federal agencies—or, for that matter, DEI, trans issues and the rest—do not require anyone to risk their lives or threaten the lives of anyone else. Again, I don’t think for a moment that Thomas is calling for that. But I think the rhetoric is inconsistent with the stakes (however Thomas sees them). America survived lots of bad Supreme Court rulings, including Plessy. America survived some progressive presidents empowered by horrible ideas and large majorities in Congress. Combatting progressivism is a good thing in my books (literally!), but it is simply not a fight for the nation’s survival the way Thomas seems to paint it at times.

 

I hope I have not seemed too critical of Thomas here. There’s so much in his speech I agree with, and so much in his character and career I admire.

 

Thomas from the top rope.

 

Which brings me to a final point. You know why I loved Thomas’ speech? Because whatever aid and comfort he is lending to the catastrophists of the Flight 93 school, intended or not, his larger argument is an utter refutation of the new right’s whole schtick.

 

It doesn’t surprise me that Thomas’ progressive critics took the bait and beclowned themselves attacking him. What is a little shocking, however, is how the various national conservatives, integralists, postliberals, heritage-American fetishists, neo-monarchists, neo-confederates, and Red Caesarists haven’t said a word in protest. For a decade now, the intellectual vanguard of these forces has rejected the idea that America is a creedal nation, and heaped scorn either on the claim that America is an idea or on that idea itself. And here comes Clarence Thomas laying hot fire on all of that.

 

Thomas all but shouts that America is the idea at the heart of the Declaration. He testifies:

 

We can argue over whether you believe in immutable, absolute natural rights or the Wilsonian idea of ever-progressing history. Indeed, your School of Civic Leadership was created to host such arguments. But let me ask you to consider the consequences. European thinkers have long criticized America for remaining trapped in a Lockean world, with its weak decentralized government and strong individual rights. They say our 18^th century Declaration has prevented us from progressing to higher forms of government. Why has America never had a socialist party, one German sociologist famously asked. But we were fortunate not to trade our Lockean bounds for the supposedly enlightened world of Hegel, Marx, and their followers.

 

Funny, for years, Yoram Hazony, Patrick Deneen, et al. have been mocking John Locke and lamenting our captivity in a “Lockean world.” When Viktor Orbán says, “Checks and balances is a U.S. invention that for some reason of intellectual mediocrity Europe decided to adopt,” his amen corner cheers. When Thomas says checks and balances are a near-sacred lynchpin of the American experiment, we hear only crickets from that corner. Thomas lays waste to Woodrow Wilson’s progressivism as antithetical to the American project, but Deneen says it was the inexorable outgrowth of the Founders’ ill-considered liberalism. Sohrab Ahmari and Christopher DeMuth celebrate Wilson’s taming of the market or his “ardent nationalism.” Thomas says that the Declaration’s principles, not Wilson’s progressive nationalism nor his socialist instincts, made America “the freest, wealthiest, and most powerful nation in the history of the world.”

 

And yet, we’ve heard no pushback from any of them.

 

In this context, I feel guilty offering even minor criticisms of Thomas’ speech. Because when it comes to the big picture, Thomas is picking fights with all the right people, even if some of them lack the political courage to fight back.