The Southern Poverty Law Center, which makes its money by exaggerating “hate” to scare donors and by comparing conservatives to the Ku Klux Klan, was itself funding Klan members—and now major Democrats are beclowning themselves by defending it. Like a dog returns to its vomit, so Democrats return to the ridiculous claim that the SPLC is some sort of noble civil rights group and that to attack it is to attack America’s soul. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., claimed that the Justice Department’s indictment against the SPLC is “turning what America’s all about inside out.” He noted that “in 1983, the Ku Klux Klan tried to burn down the Southern Poverty Law Center for daring to oppose its hatred.” “More than four decades later, the Trump administration is trying to do the same thing in the courtroom,” Schumer said. That’s a powerful line, but is it true? Schumer didn’t address the specific charges in the indictment—six counts of wire fraud, four counts of bank fraud, and one count of conspiracy to conceal money laundering. Nor did he address the allegations that the SPLC didn’t just pay $3 million to a set of “informants” in white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups, but actually directed racist social media posts and helped bring more people to the white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017, paying the very same extremists it highlighted on its website. READ ITToday, @DAGToddBlanche & @FBIDirectorKash announced an 11-count indictment against the SPLC.While SPLC raises money by claiming to oppose white supremacy, the indictment accuses the SPLC of paying the Ku Klux Klanhttps://t.co/Fl8GtFga9A1/12 pic.twitter.com/b567v12DAD— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) April 21, 2026 The Democrat merely dismissed the idea as laughable. “It has nothing to do with alleged wire fraud, with the Southern Poverty Law Center somehow working in coordination with the KKK,” Schumer said. “That’s ridiculous on its face! It doesn’t pass the laugh test.” If the good senator has any evidence the SPLC did not fund KKK members, I’d love to see it. The claim is extraordinary, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. The SPLC hasn’t denied it—the group has merely argued that it was funding “informants” in order to protect victims from potential violence. Doug Jones Doug Jones, a former senator from Alabama, also condemned the indictment as “pure political retribution,” casting the SPLC as a noble group “seeking justice on behalf of individuals and communities who cannot seek that justice themselves.” He noted one of the SPLC’s legal victories in the early 1980s and claimed, “It is absolutely ridiculous to think that they were raising money in a fraudulent way simply because they did not disclose publicly all of the tactics they were using in trying to … dismantle” white nationalist groups. As for “paying informants,” Jones noted that “those are the tactics used by law enforcement every day.” He added, “I know firsthand that the Southern Poverty Law Center in the years past have given this information, and shared this information with local law enforcement and the FBI.” Jones served as an assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Alabama from 1980 to 1984, and he returned to that district as U.S. attorney from 1997 to 2001. While it stands to reason that the SPLC’s paid informants program dates to the 1980s—when the center faced a violent attack from the Klan—Jones could not have known “firsthand” about the SPLC’s informant program from 2014 to 2023, the period in the indictment. Not Your Daddy’s SPLC That’s ultimately where so much of the Democrats’ defense of the SPLC falls apart. Sure, in the 1970s and 1980s, the SPLC did a great deal of noble work. The thing is, the SPLC’s fundraising strategy focused on fighting the KKK, and the center eventually ran out of grand dragons to slay. It repurposed its Klanwatch program to the broader “Hatewatch,” and started putting mainstream conservative and Christian groups on a “hate map” with largely defunct Klan chapters. The early SPLC represented poor people in the South—it even represented white people in a reverse racism case. But today’s SPLC routinely smears conservatives, and the “hate map” has inspired real violence. In 2012, a terrorist targeted the Family Research Council in Washington, D.C. He later told the FBI that he used the “hate map” to target FRC. Last year, the SPLC added Turning Point USA to the “hate map.” A few months later, Tyler Robinson allegedly murdered Charlie Kirk, saying he had had enough of Kirk’s “hate.” The SPLC has entered into information sharing with Antifa agitators through a mediator. One of its lawyers was arrested in 2023 at a Molotov cocktail riot. The group repeatedly covers for Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and Jane’s Revenge. It’s high time Democrats like Schumer and Jones wake up and smell the Molotov cocktail fumes. This isn’t their daddy’s SPLC. It’s a scandal-plagued left-wing smear factory that lost all credibility long ago and has now been publicly revealed for the farce it has been for decades. The list of SPLC scandals sounds like something out of Mad Libs: racial discrimination, sexual harassment, offshore accounts, inspiring terrorism, union-busting, transgender ideology, critical race theory, ties to Antifa, demonizing concerned parents, and anti-Christian bias. If you want a reason to distrust the SPLC, pick your poison. Anyone promoting SPLC as a noble civil rights group should reckon with its considerable baggage—and it’s only gotten worse since I wrote the book about it in 2020.

Wednesday’s California gubernatorial debate in San Francisco laid bare the results of 16 years of one-party Democratic rule: sky-high gas prices, tent cities, crumbling roads, and declining public safety, paired with little more than excuses and fantasies from the candidates. The four Democrats — Tom Steyer the self-styled “anti-billionaire” billionaire, Katie Porter the climate alarmist, Matt Mahan the eternal “San Jose success” salesman, and Xavier Becerra the “experience candidate” — offered the same tired script of blame, subsidies, and government expansion. Only Republicans Chad Bianco and Steve Hilton brought reality to the stage. Moderators opened with the question every California family feels in their wallet: Should we cut the gas tax? Steyer blamed the war in Iran and demanded new taxes on oil company profits — ironic from a man who built his initial fortune at Farallon Capital investing heavily in fossil fuels before pivoting to green activism. Porter delivered a climate sermon, claiming “we don’t breathe clean air,” and called for replacing the gas tax with a vague general-fund tax while pushing harder to eliminate fossil fuels. Mahan acknowledged the gas tax is regressive and said he would suspend it for relief to working families, but quickly pivoted to class warfare—making corporations and the wealthy pay more. Becerra fixated on potholes, blamed President Donald Trump (and mistakenly cited the war in Iraq), offered no actual solution, and fell back on his “experience.” Bianco and Hilton spoke plainly. Bianco noted that Democrat policies have crippled the oil and auto industries, and that despite California having the nation’s highest gas tax, the revenue fails to fix roads amid rampant waste, fraud, and abuse. California now has some of the worst roads in the country. Cut the waste first. Hilton was even more direct: highest gas tax, worst roads, yet the state imports oil instead of using its own. Both rejected new mileage taxes on electric vehicles. Hilton called for cutting spending and taxes across the board, while Bianco nailed the core issue: Sacramento doesn’t have a revenue shortage — it has a reckless spending addiction. The same divide appeared on homelessness. With roughly 187,000 people living on California’s streets, Democrats issued polite report cards on Gavin Newsom’s failures. Porter gave a B grade, proudly calling herself “a notoriously hard grader,” and insisted it’s just a “housing problem” solvable with more prevention and shelter. Mahan touted his San Jose model and pushed forcing people indoors. Becerra awarded an A for “effort,” floated zero-percent loans, and promised to keep people housed “no matter what.” Steyer pushed emergency housing that required neither cleanliness nor sobriety. Bianco and Hilton cut through the illusions. This isn’t primarily a housing shortage — it’s mental illness, drugs, and alcohol. End the endless NGO grift, redirect the money to real treatment, enforce the law, and require people to accept help. Hilton gave Newsom a straightforward F grade. Porter’s claim that the “majority of homeless are working” only revealed how detached some candidates remain from reality. On English proficiency for commercial truck drivers — an issue where California is the only state that refuses to ensure big-rig drivers can read road signs or communicate in English — Democrats reacted with outrage when shown a video of a California Highway Patrol officer administering a language proficiency test to a man who clearly couldn’t speak English. Becerra vowed to fight the Trump administration’s “reckless” and “discriminatory” policy. Porter and Steyer invoked systemic racism and racial profiling. Mahan hid behind San Jose statistics. Bianco demanded an end to issuing licenses to unqualified drivers and called out the “racist garbage” excuses. Hilton strongly supported full compliance, citing the real dangers posed by drivers who cannot understand road signs. Across other topics, including billionaires and AI, insurance costs, and utility rates, Democrats pivoted to attacks on Trump or corporate actors while pushing more regulation, subsidies, and taxes. Becerra’s repeated boasts about his “experience fighting crises” rang hollow given his record as attorney general targeting pro-life activists and pregnancy centers, and as HHS Secretary losing track of over 85,000 unaccompanied migrant children. Closing statements confirmed the split. Democrats recycled claims of San Jose success, accumulated experience, and anti-corporate purity. Bianco and Hilton stood apart as outsiders, warning that the Democratic platform is simply more of the same failed status quo. California still has extraordinary natural advantages and talented people. Yet 16 years of one-party rule have delivered persistently high gas prices, sprawling tent encampments, failing infrastructure, and eroding safety standards. Last night’s debate offered no real solutions from the Democratic candidates. Instead, it laid bare the real choice confronting California voters in the June top-two primary: double down on excuses, endless subsidies, and green virtue-signaling, or embrace spending discipline, regulatory restraint, and honest accountability to results. Only Chad Bianco and Steve Hilton were willing to name those trade-offs plainly. Californians, who live the consequences daily, must now decide whether fantasy or reality will guide the state’s next chapter. Think different. Vote different. The cycle of failure need not be permanent. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL—The Commerce Department has tapped a new director for the government’s safety-centered artificial intelligence organization, sources familiar with the matter tell The Daily Signal.  Collin Burns, a former researcher at Anthropic and OpenAI, will lead the Commerce Department’s Center for AI Standards and Innovation. Burns is the co-author of a paper titled “Aligning AI With Shared Human Values,” which argues that AI systems need to understand human moral judgments.  Burns’ hiring is significant because he most recently worked at Anthropic, an AI company currently at odds with the Trump administration.  Anthropic declined the Pentagon’s request for unrestricted use of its artificial technology. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth declared Anthropic a “supply chain risk to national security.” However, Axios reported that the National Security Agency is using Anthropic’s powerful new model, Mythos Preview. Anthropic has only allowed Mythos access to about 40 organizations due to its potentially dangerous cyber hacking capabilities.   The Commerce Department created the then-AI Safety Institute in November 2023 at the direction of President Joe Biden. Last June, the Trump administration renamed the agency to the Center for AI Standards and Innovation, marking the administration’s embrace of AI development.  “For far too long, censorship and regulations have been used under the guise of national security. Innovators will no longer be limited by these standards,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said at the time of the name change. “CAISI will evaluate and enhance U.S. innovation of these rapidly developing commercial AI systems while ensuring they remain secure to our national security standards.” Burns also once held the world record for solving a Rubik’s cube in 5.25 seconds. A former co-worker of his at OpenAI described him as “one of the very best researchers I’ve ever worked with.” “He’s super brilliant, extremely sensible, very balanced also in his sort of judgment,” the co-worker said. “I think it’ll be a real asset for recruiting technical talent in the government.” Another former co-worker said Burns is well known for his research on measuring AI systems. “Overall, I think he’s a great fit,” he said.

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal.   We’re about 60 days into the Iran war, and we’re getting a lot of mixed signals from the media, from the administration, from the Iranians, of course, who have no real government, there’s nothing more than a series of competing factions, of which we’re not sure who has the power in Tehran.  But we should review very quickly what the options are. So what are Iran’s options? Because people have made a fundamental logical error that survival is the same as victory or advantage. It’s not. Iran’s survival hinges on what the United States prefers to do, whether militarily, politically, morally, ethically. But just because a nation survives doesn’t mean that it’s winning. Nazi Germany was flattened, but it survived. Japan was flattened, but it survived. So just because Iran now is talking loudly and boastfully does not mean it has not been soundly defeated. The next question is, will the regime survive, at least? And they have three options. The first is the soft—the non-hard-liners or the soft-power people could come in. The parliamentary elected officials, such as they are in Iran, could capitulate. They wouldn’t capitulate and say, “We give up.”  They would say, we meet your demands, and those would be international inspections. There’s surrender of enriched uranium and inventories of their missile, rocket, and drone programs, and they’d have to give that up. Or number two, they could continue what they are just starting to do as I speak—that is, they could start sending out their PT boats, these small fast craft that have rockets and some light artillery, machine guns, torpedoes, and attack tankers. And then if we were to reply, they could hit the Gulf states, or they could hit tankers, or they could even shoot missiles at our fleet. Or I think their preferred option is delay, delay—the same 47 years that we’re all accustomed to through seven different presidents. Yes, we want to negotiate. Yes, we will give up our nuclear enrichment. No, we won’t today. Yesterday we said we will, but we thought it over. Yes, we will give up our missiles. But why don’t you make Hezbollah exempt from the deal. Again, like a rug merchant: barter, barter, delay, delay. And why are they doing this?  They feel that they’re only six months away from the midterm elections, and when they hear Democratic senators such as Chris Murphy say that it was awesome that Iran—when they lied and said 12 tankers had broken out of the blockade—it was a complete lie. But when Chris Murphy, a U.S. senator, voiced and amplified that lie, and not only did that but editorialized and said it was awesome, that gives them hope.  So does Tom Friedman, who said, Well, I’d like him to lose, but not if it empowers Trump. So does Tim Walz and Chris Murphy going over to a socialist conference in Madrid. So they feel that they can help build opposition, of course, in Europe and in the United States.  One of the ironies is that the Arab Middle East, at least the Gulf states, are more pro-American right now and for this war than is the American Left. But they think the American Left can put pressure on Donald Trump, get elected in the midterms, control the House and Senate, and then enact the War Powers Act and cut off funding. That’s not going to happen, but that’s one of their strategies.  What is our retaliatory strategy? We have a lot. Right now, we have a blockade, and we’re waging economic warfare. We’re trying to stop the importation of weapons and the selling of oil to starve the regime out. The problem we’re having with this, even though it’s reportedly costing them $420 million a day, is that there are avenues on the Caspian Sea where they can import Russian weapons.  They have a rail line through two different countries that goes into China. They can import; they have mechanisms other than airlifting weapons into Iran. And so we don’t really know—and we don’t really know to what degree. There are Iranian oil tankers all over the world in transit from before the blockade, so it might take longer than we think.  That’s a decision Donald Trump will have to make. And the pressures upon him will be the world economy, the price of gas in the Western world, the midterms coming up, his polls, and defections among his own MAGA supporters, et cetera, et cetera.  But otherwise, we can talk and talk, talk as they do. But the cards are in our hands because they are hemorrhaging money and we’re not. And we don’t need their oil. We don’t need their natural gas. We don’t need their petrochemicals. We only feel the pressure from others who are our friends that do need them.  The second thing we can do is if they start to try to break the blockade, as they had recently by attacking tankers. We don’t have to go back to war. We can just kind of shrug and say, “Well, I guess you don’t want this bridge.” And then just announce—today—we’re going to announce it in advance. We’re going to take out this bridge, and tomorrow we’ll take out one of the four or five nuclear—excuse me—electrical generation plants.  Not a full-scale war, but just tit for tat. But their hits will be very small, and our hits will be very great, and that will accelerate the economic strangulation. Or if they continue to do this, and we feel that the war has gone on too long, then we can hit where 90% of their oil comes from.  And I say that because Venezuela is very rapidly making up the difference in Iranian oil, which, by the way, was going mostly to China—80% of it anyway. But the United States is ramping up production; Venezuela’s ramping up production. The more that we can enforce this blockade, the more Middle East oil gets out.  So we could just say to Kharg Island, to the Iranians: We’re not going to hit your storage facilities. We’re not going to destroy the ability to pipe oil to Kharg Island and store it, but we are going to destroy the dockworks, the cranes, the ports, so that you can fill up the oil all you want, and for the regime that follows you—hopefully a democratic or transitional government—but you’re not going to be able to export oil, even if you get a ship in there.  And so we can say, well, if you have one of these Liberian tankers that’s masquerading as if it’s neutral but is actually controlled by China, it’s going in close to the Iranian coast, it’s going to park at Kharg, it won’t be able to get any oil because we can damage it from the air without invading.  The bottom line is we have a lot of alternatives, and Iran has very few. But remember another thing: defeating an enemy soundly and then demanding unconditional surrender and forcing that government to abdicate are two different things. They’re very different, and the latter requires a lot more time—probably boots on the ground.  It’s not on the agenda, but that does not mean that we can’t strangle this regime and make life go on as usual for the West and our partners. And I think you’ll see more of that in the upcoming days.  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

Republican leaders in Georgia told The Daily Signal that Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, who is campaigning for reelection, is presenting himself as a moderate by emphasizing broadly popular issues rather than embracing what they describe as a sharply partisan voting record. “He’s a great politician,” Rep. Rich McCormick, R‑Ga., said. “When he sees me at the airport, he comes up to me, knows my name, and asks how my kids are. He’s a good politician. He pretends that he’s not in a party that openly supports socialism.” Rep. Andrew Clyde, R‑Ga., told The Daily Signal that Ossoff attempts to rebrand himself during election years. “Once every six years, Jon Ossoff tries to distance himself from the radical Left Democrat agenda in order to convince Georgians he’s one of us,” Clyde told The Daily Signal. “But we aren’t fooled. His voting record shows support for policies that restrict Second Amendment rights, expand abortion access, increase taxes, and weaken voter ID laws.” Nick Puglia, the National Republican Senatorial Committee press secretary, said Ossoff campaigns differently at home than he governs in Washington. “Jon Ossoff says one thing in Georgia but does another in D.C.,” Puglia told The Daily Signal. “Ossoff is a fraud who fights for the radical left’s open‑borders and tax‑hiking agenda.” The Republicans’ remarks come as Ossoff has appeared to focus his campaign on bipartisan priorities such as veterans’ care, health care, and education, rather than on elements of his voting record that include opposing voter identification requirements while his campaign events require multiple forms of ID. Republicans also point to his support for green energy initiatives, positions on illegal immigration, and backing of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. “That doesn’t represent our values,” Clyde said. “We must fight to defeat him in November and return him to his deceptive career of fake journalism.” McCormick echoed Clyde’s criticism, arguing Ossoff opposed the SAVE America Act because of its potential political consequences. “He votes against it for the same reason New York City requires three forms of ID to shovel snow,” McCormick said. “They know exactly what they’re doing.” McCormick added that allowing roughly 10 million people to enter the country illegally could amount to the equivalent of 14 additional congressional seats. “They’ve been trying to skew the future of America,” he said. “Biden was the first to realize that the only way to keep the future of a party alive—a party with outrageous claims and beliefs—was to strike down the SAVE America Act.” McCormick also criticized Ossoff for failing to condemn Hassan Piker, a Democratic social media figure who has made antisemitic remarks and previously said the United States “deserved” the Sept. 11 attacks. Piker is actively promoting Ossoff. Adam Mockler asks Hasan Piker who he wants to run in the 2028 Democratic primary"The candidates I like are, obviously AOC, Ro Khanna, Chris Van Hollen. The dark horse is someone like John Stewart or a Shawn Fain. And then my sleeper pick, John Ossoff" pic.twitter.com/tQOqMkuutO— Popstonox (@Popstonox) February 20, 2026 “He’s working for him,” McCormick said. “He agrees with them.”