FIRST ON THE DAILY SIGNAL — With U.S. Sen. Jon Husted officially the Republican nominee against former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown, Americans for Prosperity Action is ramping up efforts for this special election in Ohio. After endorsing him in March, the group is doing an ad campaign for Husted. With the new $750,000 ad buy, AFPA has now spent $1.25 million in Ohio. The ads, which will run until May 31, will reach around 1.7 million Ohioans and play across connected TV, YouTube, and Meta. “With the economy at a crossroads, Ohio families are feeling the pressure,” the ad states. AFP says the ad aims to highlight Husted’s role in having “passed the largest tax cut in American history,” in addition to slashing regulations. It concludes with, “The Ohio way, not Washington’s, that’s Jon Husted.” During an exclusive interview with The Daily Signal last September, Husted claimed he is the “Ohio guy” and Brown is the “DC guy.” Another ad criticizes Brown and his record for having “repeatedly backed extreme progressive policies that drove up prices.” Policies cited include higher taxes and spending and job-killing regulations. Notably, the ad features an image of Brown with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. “Sherrod Brown puts his party’s extreme agenda over Ohio families, putting Washington politics first, and hurting Ohio. We just can’t afford Sherrod Brown,” it warns. According to Donovan O’Neil, AFPA senior advisor, the group wants to “hyper-target their message to voters,” chiefly on the issue of affordability. “[Husted] has a record of getting things done and being focused on the issues that Ohioans care about,” O’Neil told The Daily Signal. “He’s part of the solution to the decades of D.C. dysfunction that Sherrod Brown has been a part of his entire career.” He added he’s clear-eyed about the uphill battle candidates face with a Republican president in office. “The reality is, voters will want to know what individual candidates seeking their vote are going to do to address the affordability challenges that they’re facing, and I think we can win on that,” O’Neil said. Ohio has long been a bellwether state, which means voters can expect both parties to allocate resources there in mid-October ahead of the election. The latest ad campaign follows an April 30 memo from AFPA Senior Advisor Emily Seidel and Executive Director Nathan Nascimento, in which the pair stressed affordability and warned that Republicans could lose the Senate if they don’t focus on the right issues. “As it stands today, our view is that the Republican Senate majority is at risk. But there is still time. The window to act is now,” the memo stressed.

A two-month undercover Drug Enforcement Administration investigation exposed what federal authorities say is a Sinaloa Cartel–linked drug trafficking operation funneling fentanyl and methamphetamine into Los Angeles through MacArthur Park. On Wednesday, federal and local law enforcement officers raided the South Los Angeles park as part of “Operation Free MacArthur Park,” arresting 18 individuals, executing multiple search warrants, and seizing roughly 40 pounds of fentanyl with an estimated value of $8 million to $10 million. In contrast to the park’s description by the Los Angeles Conservancy as a “vibrant place of music, art, and community,” locals know Macarthur Park as a place filled with brazen drug use and homeless encampments. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli shared with Fox News his plan for the area.  “This park has been overtaken by gang members—by drug dealers, drug users. It’s zombieland, and we’re taking it back. So today we’re executing 25 arrest warrants, eight federal search warrants, and we’re hitting the businesses along Alvarado here that are used to stash the drugs.”  Footage shared by Fox News showed federal agents moving in on businesses Wednesday morning. NEW: 300 federal and local agents swarmed MacArthur Park after officials say MS-13 and 18th Street gang members helped fuel a fentanyl operation tied to $10 million in drug use.@MattFinnFNC breaks down the scene on the ground: people passed out in the park, 25 charged so far,… pic.twitter.com/8yppXFSVPU— Fox News (@FoxNews) May 7, 2026 In a press release, the department said they’re dedicated to ending these cartel-fueled crimes.  “This is a criminal organization operating in our country, and we are not going to stand for it anymore today. So, they have been put on notice. MacArthur Park belongs to the people of Los Angeles again,” said Anthony Chrysanthis, a special agent in charge with the Drug Enforcement Administration. The same day, while at the Los Angeles mayoral debate, incumbent Mayor Karen Bass was asked by moderators to comment on the raids. After years of doing nothing about the open air drug markets and fentanyl zombies in MacArthur Park, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass attempts to take credit for this afternoon’s federal raid. pic.twitter.com/zTKfneNU0X— Kevin Dalton (@TheKevinDalton) May 7, 2026 Republican Spencer Pratt, one of Bass’ two opponents in the race for mayor, criticized both Bass and City Councilmember Nithya Raman for the problems in the park. “Raman and Bass are so bad, MacArthur Park was raided by the Feds YESTERDAY and it’s already occupied again today,” Pratt shared on X. Raman and Bass are so bad, MacArthur Park was raided by the Feds YESTERDAY and it’s already occupied again today. Hey Nithya, what do you think will happen when one of your “street medical team” volunteers goes up to these upstanding citizens with a clipboard and asks them if… pic.twitter.com/jFIrhE50dy— Spencer Pratt (@spencerpratt) May 7, 2026

The Daily Signal’s Senior National Security and Legal Analyst Mehek Cooke warned after the May 5 primary vote that Ohio’s status as a Republican state is more fragile than many voters assume, saying that Democrats are organized and working to reclaim ground ahead of critical midterm elections. Appearing on “The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show,” Cooke said that complacency among Republican voters could open the door for a shift back toward swing‑state status. Ohio is “a red state” but “could easily shift back to purple,” Cooke said, pointing to recent voting patterns and Democratic enthusiasm. While Republican entrepreneur and gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy received support across the state in his primary victory, Cooke noted that Democrat Senate candidate Sherrod Brown ultimately secured more total votes, highlighting the importance of turnout in the midterms. Cooke said that when she was voting in Franklin County, Democratic turnout appeared strong. “Every single individual around me had Democrat ballots,” she said, warning that Ohioans are underestimating the momentum and energy behind the Democratic base. She also pointed to the substantial financial advantages Democrats have deployed in past races, noting that Brown raised more than $100 million in the 2024 Senate race against now‑Sen. Bernie Moreno. According to Cooke, upcoming races—particularly involving Republican Sen. Jon Husted—could see even more aggressive spending and mobilization efforts. “This is an election of a lifetime for us,” Cooke said. “Democrats are going to be pushing strong.” Beyond electoral politics, Cooke addressed national security concerns in the interview, emphasizing the need for a renewed “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran by the United States. She argued that the Iranian regime is unlikely to negotiate in good faith during peace talks and warned that ongoing delays of an agreement could allow Tehran to continue advancing its nuclear ambitions. “We will need a maximum pressure campaign,” Cooke said, adding that “Iran should understand the scoreboard—that President Trump holds all the cards.” The United States, Cooke argued, still holds significant leverage, including strategic influence over the Strait of Hormuz, a key global oil corridor. However, she called for stronger coordination with Gulf allies and major energy‑consuming nations such as India, Japan, and China. “This won’t end well for Iran. They won’t negotiate in good faith,” Cooke said, adding that President Trump must be prepared to use decisive leverage. On gas prices, Cooke noted that if the U.S. increases pressure on Iran, it must also expand domestic drilling and energy production—steps she said could help stabilize prices and strengthen U.S. economic resilience. Without decisive action abroad and vigilance at home, Cooke warned, both national security and electoral outcomes could face heightened risks.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s hypocrisy knows no bounds. Not only was the SPLC allegedly boosting members of the hate groups it says it exists to oppose while demonizing mainstream conservatives, but it also reportedly settled a racial discrimination lawsuit as recently as 2024. Michael Edison Hayden, who worked as a senior investigative reporter at the SPLC’s Intelligence Project, wrote a tell-all article on Substack last month. Hayden faulted the SPLC for not attacking conservatives enough; for harassing members of the SPLC’s union; for responding poorly to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel and its aftermath; and for engaging in racial discrimination against him. Insufficiently Anti-MAGA Hayden joined the Intelligence Project—the branch of the SPLC that puts out a “hate map” plotting mainstream conservative and Christian nonprofits alongside chapters of the Ku Klux Klan—in December 2018. Yet he said the SPLC had gone weak at the knees in opposing the Right since then. Hayden blamed then-CEO Margaret Huang—whose lavish salary earned her the monicker “Half-a-mil Mags.” SPLC leadership at the time “seemed to love spending donor money on retreats, and they seemed to hate publishing anything, especially pieces that might upset MAGA,” the Make America Great Again movement. During the 2022 midterms, “while the organization warned donors about threats to democracy, it sent our editorial team on a retreat to a pricey, wine-centric hotel with no clear agenda,” he wrote. He faulted the SPLC for delaying the release of the 2022 “hate map”—released on June 6, 2023—in order to help Senate Democrats confirm SPLC lawyer Nancy Abudu to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals. Union-Busting A few months after Hayden started, the SPLC fired its co-founder amid a racial discrimination and sexual harassment scandal. During the scandal, employees formed a labor union, and Hayden took a leadership position in the union in 2022. When he did so, management turned on him “overnight.” He said SPLC’s leadership called him into “Kafkaesque disciplinary meetings, issuing verbal warnings over incidents that never occurred.” He even accused leadership of writing down “quotes of mine that they had fabricated wholesale.” His criticism echoes the union’s 2024 accusations against Huang and SPLC leadership at the time. The SPLC Union voted to demand Huang resign, and she ultimately left in July 2025. Israel Hayden, who traces his descent to Egyptians who lived in what is now Israel, condemned the SPLC for doing “almost nothing publicly” after the Oct. 7 attacks. He helped draft the union statement condemning Israel for launching “the beginnings of a genocide” in Gaza. Apparently, the statement would have been even worse without Hayden, who says he insisted that the union at least mention antisemitism. Rabbi Yaakov Menken, managing director of the Coalition for Jewish Values, told The Daily Signal that the union’s statement was “laced through with antisemitic bigotry.” Even though the SPLC Union, not the center itself, had released the statement, Hayden recalled that “pro-Israel donors threatened to pull their funding.” This confirmed my suspicions about the Left’s generational divide over Israel. Hayden and his colleague, Hannah Gais, also signed an open letter demanding a ceasefire in Gaza and calling Israel an “apartheid” state. When The Washington Free Beacon reported on the letter, Hayden condemned it as a “racist attempt” to target him. The SPLC disciplined Hayden. “Maybe I had alienated a wealthy donor,” he speculated. “Whatever it was, the SPLC’s leadership still went through the motions, dressing up the discipline in different justifications because they couldn’t say outright what they were doing. They were a civil rights group, after all.” The SPLC punished him, an Arab American, but not Gais, a woman of Jewish heritage. The American Civil Liberties Union lawyers were “eager” to represent him and “go after the SPLC,” but ultimately backed down due to conflicts of interest. The SPLC fired Hayden amid a difficult struggle with mental illness, and he threatened to sue the SPLC for discrimination. “Rather than let the story become public, they settled in the spring of 2024,” he wrote. Yet the story is public now, and it does not reflect well on the SPLC. Not only did the SPLC allegedly not stand up for Jews in the aftermath of Oct. 7, but it also stood accused of applying a racial double standard in punishing staff who spoke out. The SPLC did not respond to my request for comment, and neither did the ACLU. When the SPLC settled with Hayden, someone in management reportedly told him that the SPLC leaders had given “buyouts” to the people who treated him harshly. The lawyers reportedly told him “the SPLC had become too wary of MAGA’s litigiousness and vengefulness to continue confronting the movement.” A Bone-Chilling Complaint I find Hayden’s major complaint against the SPLC rather curious. If anything, the SPLC proved more aggressive during Huang’s leadership. That 2022 “hate map” included Moms for Liberty and other parental rights groups alongside chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. The following year, the SPLC added groups of doctors who oppose transgender ideology to the map. Last year, it added PragerU, Focus on the Family, and Turning Point USA to the map. A few months later, Charlie Kirk got a bullet in the neck. Hayden’s story reveals yet more dysfunction and corruption at the SPLC, but his suggestion that the SPLC should grow even more aggressive in demonizing conservatives is bone-chilling. Let’s hope the new leadership doesn’t follow his advice.

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 talk about the Democratic Party as if it’s the Democratic Party of, say, the last century. We know what that Democratic Party was. It believed in an equality of result. It was not socialist or Marxist for the most part. It just believed in big government and good and generous entitlements, supportive of unions.  It had thrown off its racist pedigree for a century, and by the 1960s it was the forefront of civil rights for the most part by isolating the Democratic segregationists in the South. So, there was a positive role to play for the Democratic Party. But there is no more Democratic Party. There’s the name Democrat Party, or Democratic.  People on the Right tend to prefer the word Democrat Party, people on the left Democratic, because they feel it is, you know, truly a democratic operation. But it’s really a Jacobin party. Jacobin refers to a group of radicals that hijacked the French Revolution of 1789, and they met in a Dominican monastery that was called the Jacobin, and they took that name, and they thought that a constitutional monarchy with a parliament, as was transpiring in Britain earlier, was a sellout to the revolution.  So, they wanted to get rid of the kings, the monarchy, and they attacked organized religion. They executed people with a guillotine, well over 2,000. They were most infamous for the Reign of Terror, where they accused almost anybody of being a counterrevolutionary who was to the right of them, until finally the Robespierre brothers themselves suffered a counterrevolution brought by the Thermidors, and they were eliminated.  But they were a very radical, violent group, and they’re very similar to the Democratic Party. They thought the world was reinvented when they came on, just like the 1619 idea. They toppled statues. They went after organized religion. They destroyed property. They were at war with what they called the bourgeoisie and the rich, and they wanted a radical redistribution of property.  They believed in secularism. In other words, they were radical humanists that did not believe in a higher power. And if you look at what the Democratic Party has become, this new Jacobin organization doesn’t believe, for example, in borders at all.  Now, Alejandro Mayorkas may have said the border is secure, but what he really meant is, there is no border, because 10 to 12 million people, including 500,000 criminals, just marched across into the United States as part of a Jacobin idea of altering the demography. And we do have now 53 million people who weren’t born in the United States, of all legal status and illegal statuses.  And 16%, a new record, of the United States population was not born in the United States. They didn’t believe in fossil fuels, and had their agenda been actualized to its full extent, given what’s happened in the world today with the scarcity of oil, we would be broke. It’s only the efforts of conservatives and Donald Trump in particular that got us up to 14 million barrels.  But they didn’t believe that. They had an almost religious ideology, the Al Goreism, the John Kerryism, that said that the United States has to suppress, if not eliminate, fossil fuels, while China and India were building coal plants each month. They had this strange cultural agenda, like the Jacobins in France, that was a rejection of all prior norms and traditions.  The Democrats don’t believe that, as Bill Clinton said, that abortion should be rare and safe, but legal. They believe in abortion on demand up to the moment of birth. In fact, if you look at the Democratic Convention manifesto in 1992 and 1996 on immigration, on trying violent 17-year-olds as felons, on balancing the budget, today the Jacobins would call that Democratic Party of just three decades ago racist or fascist.  Another element of the Jacobins is that with this DEI, they have replaced class by race, and they’re fixated on race, antithetical to Martin Luther King’s dream that the content of our character, and not the color of our skin, would matter. They’re a violent party. when Donald Trump was almost killed three times, Democrats rushed to social media and either said that Donald Trump had staged those near-death experiences, or they lamented the fact that the three shooters had missed their target.  The ICE demonstrations are bizarre. You have grown adults, many of them in their 60s and 70s, and they are mocking law enforcement officers that are trying to enforce the law. They stick plastic phalluses in their face. They throw excrement at them. They throw bottled water at them. They try to stop the enforcement of federal immigration law.  Jacobin Democrats, governors, senators, they all have created 600 sanctuary cities in the spirit of the old Confederacy that says federal law does not apply to any of these places, that the state itself can pick and choose which federal laws it chooses to obey. Another thing, so they’re violent as well.  Besides the three attempts on Donald Trump, we had the execution, really the assassination, of Charlie Kirk by a lunatic that was praised by the Jacobins. And of course, we’ve had the House leadership, a few years ago, was playing baseball in Washington, D.C., and was almost taken out by James Hodgkinson, another former Bernie Sanders aide.  The final thing that’s weird about the Jacobins. The Robespierre brothers and their cohort were wealthy people, highly educated, products of the French aristocracy and the professional classes. So is the new Jacobin Democratic Party. If the Republicans have ostracized Nick Fuentes for his extremist and repugnant views, the Democrats have welcomed Hasan Piker.  He’s this influencer who poses as a socialist communist and a man of the people, but in fact, his parents are multimillionaires. He’s a multimillionaire. He drives a Porsche, and he acts as if he’s on the barricades, enacting a communist revolution. I say that because he said there’s going to have to be blood in the streets.  He has praised Luigi Mangione for killing Ryan Thompson, the head of UnitedHealth Corporation. He said that was a social murder, that socialists like himself can pick enemies of the people. No trial, no cross-examination, just name them as arbitrary enemies and then execute them with impunity.  Is anybody in the Jacobin Party objecting to that? No. He’s an iconic hero. He was at Stanford University lately. He was at Harvard. He’s touring all the major universities where he’s given a rousing welcome by the new Jacobins.  You look at Zohran Mamdani. He’s a Jacobin. He’s an open, you know, pro-Hamas mayor. He’s anti-Semitic in the way that he’s treated Jews. He’s a socialist or worse. He’s trying to tax the wealthy into making them leave New York.  Recently, at a research hospital that Ken Griffin, the billionaire, had generously endowed with $400 million, these Jacobin organizations protested why young kids were being treated for cancer inside the hospital as if they’d like to shut that down.  And Mamdani, of course, was born to millionaire parents in Uganda. His family are multimillionaires, with an endowed professor as a father, a subsidized filmmaker as a mother.  Then we get to Ilhan Omar. She can’t decide how much she’s worth. She says on one day she’s worth $30 million. Next day she says it was all a mistake when people point out her hypocrisies.  We have AOC and Bernie Sanders, the two socialists flying to rallies on private jets. That’s typical Jacobinism.  So let me just conclude. We talk about a Democratic Party as if it’s the party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Bill Clinton. It doesn’t exist. It’s gone. It’s gone forever.  What has replaced it is a radical agenda that wants to remake the United States into a social welfare state and to completely redirect the course of Western civilization. It doesn’t like the United States, the Jacobin Party. At least it says it likes the United States, but not the United States that was envisioned by the Founders and the following 250 years.  They feel, as Barack Obama had said, that they want to fundamentally transform America. And they just might.  Thank you very much. This is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal.  Thank you for tuning in to The Daily Signal. Please like, share, and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website at victorhanson.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.