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.

After the Supreme Court struck down congressional redistricting done solely on the basis of race last week, Republican officials in Mississippi are split over whether to redraw the state’s congressional map ahead of the midterm elections. “It’s time for Mississippi to redraw the lines and eliminate the racially gerrymandered district that exists solely to protect Bennie Thompson,” Mississippi State Auditor Shad White told The Daily Signal. “I’m not scared to say it: Bennie Thompson is the worst member of Congress, and we need to redraw his district so we can send President Trump more allies in Congress.” White is currently the only statewide Republican official publicly calling for redistricting before November. As of Friday, none of the Republican gubernatorial candidates or state lawmakers had called for the Legislature to take up congressional redistricting ahead of the midterms. Other Republican leaders, including Mississippi House Speaker Jason White, have expressed interest in redrawing the map but argued that the effort should wait until after the election. Unlike Tennessee and Florida, which each convened special legislative sessions within the past two weeks to enact new congressional maps, Mississippi officials have so far declined to pursue similar action. Lt. Gov. Delbert Hosemann has said he plans to call a special session in the near future, but it would focus exclusively on redrawing districts for the state Supreme Court—not Congress. “I’m disappointed that I’m the only statewide official in Mississippi calling for the state to redraw these lines,” White said. White accused his fellow Republicans—whom he described as “establishment politicians”—of avoiding the issue because they do not want to “make anyone mad” and are “terrified of being called a racist by Bennie Thompson.” White pointed to Indiana as a cautionary example for Mississippi Republicans. In Indiana, GOP lawmakers failed to approve a new congressional map during the previous legislative session that would have added two Republican-held House seats ahead of the midterms. That decision later drew the ire of President Donald Trump and his allies, including Sen. Jim Banks, R-Ind., who directed millions of dollars to the primary campaigns of challengers running against those lawmakers. As a result, Republican state Sens. Travis Holdman, James Buck, Greg Walker, Linda Rogers, Dan Dernulc, and Rick Niemeyer were defeated by candidates backed by Trump and Banks. White warned that Mississippi could face similar political consequences if it declines to redraw its congressional map before the midterms. “If Republicans lose control of the House by only a handful of seats, then the weak Republicans who refuse to do anything to fight against the Democrats will be partially responsible for the president’s agenda being halted,” White said. While redistricting efforts stalled in Indiana, Democrats moved forward with redrawing congressional maps in California on the basis of race, potentially adding as many as five House seats for the Democratic Party. House Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York has since called on the New York State Assembly to pursue similar redistricting efforts.

President Donald Trump plans to dismiss U.S. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary, the Wall Street Journal reported Friday.  Makary, whose firing was rumored by news organizations over the preceding week, has been a prominent public advocate of the administration’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda. A surgeon and researcher, he rose to public prominence as a critic of COVID-19 vaccine mandates under former President Joe Biden’s administration. The Senate later confirmed his nomination as commissioner in March 2025. However, Makary also has been at the center of highly controversial debates. For example, he received harsh criticism from pro-life groups and Republicans in Congress who alleged he was slow walking the safety review of mifepristone abortion pills. EXCLUSIVE: @DrMakaryFDA responded to a report saying he is delaying the review of the abortion pill.The FDA is currently in the “data acquisition phase” of the review," he told @DailySignal.“We do an ongoing review, but we’re also engaging in a robust study that can serve… pic.twitter.com/bhkTwXqvby— Elizabeth Troutman Mitchell (@TheElizMitchell) December 9, 2025 As commissioner, Makary played a major role in implementing Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s policy agenda, negotiating with corporations to remove petroleum-based food dyes from food and removing black box warnings from hormonal treatments for menopause.  The Food and Drug Administration also has overhauled the “food pyramid” dietary guidelines during his tenure. This week, the FDA authorized the sale of fruit- and menthol-flavored vaping products—a reversal of years of aggressive regulation. The Wall Street Journal had reported Makary’s reluctance to approve their sale was a cause of friction in the administration.

Under Secretary of Education Nicolas Kent slammed congressional Democrats for attempting to block a rule that would lower higher education costs for Americans. “Democrats are hypocrites,” Kent told The Daily Signal in an exclusive interview. “For years, they have purported to care about student debt, but now they’ve reaffirmed what we’ve all been saying, which is, it was never about helping students, but rather about buying votes.” On April 30, the Department of Education announced a rule taking effect July 1 to put new caps on student loan borrowing. The rule implements changes passed in President Donald Trump’s “One Big, Beautiful Bill Act.” On Thursday, a group of House and Senate Democrats introduced a Congressional Review Act resolution to repeal the rule. The Democrats argue that it will “force future nurses, social workers, teachers, firefighters, physical and occupational therapists, and many others to turn to often predatory, high-interest private lenders to complete their degrees.” “While working families struggle to buy groceries and put gas in their cars, the Trump Administration is sending a clear message to aspiring nurses, health care providers, social workers, teachers, and firefighters: If you can’t afford a high interest loan, then you can’t serve your community,” said Rep. Lauren Underwood, D-Ill.  But Kent says most graduate programs are not affected: 78% of graduate-level nursing programs, 94% of graduate-level teacher programs, and 100% of graduate-level fire service programs are not impacted by the loan caps. “Unlike Democrats, we’re trying to fix the problem without buying votes or settling other taxpayers with debt that they did not take on these Democrats and in are attempting to repeal our well-thought-out rule,” he said. “They’re hypocrites, and they’re using lies and scare tactics.” Democrats’ effort to repeal the rule would allow institutions to continue overpricing students, Kent said. He touted savings for students since the loan caps launched. The University of California, Irvine, cut tuition by more than 20%. The University of Kansas will offer new scholarship opportunities to law students following the administration’s announcement. The law school will also use their endowment to offer student loans at a lower interest rate than the government provides.  Santa Clara University Law School launched the “Pledge Scholarship,” a $16,000 tuition scholarship to every incoming first-year student joining its J.D. programs. “Some Democrats don’t actually care about helping students, and they certainly want to keep students in debt,” Kent said. “They want to keep colleges fat and happy and then cry wolf during election time that loan forgiveness is the only option to help borrowers.” A number of professional associations or advocacy organizations endorsed the Democrat effort, but Kent said it’s because they care about dues. “These associations are working together with institutions of higher education, and they actually don’t care about helping students,” he said. “They don’t care that these students are taking on unmanageable debt.” While Democrats want to forgive student loans, Kent said he wants to fix the root cause of the problem so debt forgiveness is not necessary. “The previous administration always wanted to solve the problem at the end of the story,” he said. “They wanted to saddle those individuals that never went to college with the debt of someone who did, and the American people overwhelmingly said that they did not accept that,” he said. Kent called it “unconscionable” that Democrats want to stop the rule from taking effect. “When you see really irresponsible members of Congress, like the ones who introduced this resolution,” he said, “what it signals to institutions is to pause the initiatives that they have in place to make those changes.” Some of the biggest higher education institutions have endowments over $950 billion. That money should be used to lower the cost of higher education for students, Kent said. “Institutions recognize that the gravy train is ending,” he said. “Students and families live within their needs. Institutions need to as well.”