I made the mistake of irrational optimism Thursday afternoon. My phone was an old Samsung S22, and I absolutely loved the thing. Maybe I don’t have elite expectations for a cell phone, or maybe I just got to the point where I’d managed to get really good at all of its apps. But all of these people I know were giving me the snob treatment about my phone, and I just shrugged at them. Until the battery on that phone began taking a turn. And on the way to lunch Thursday, the damn thing was actually hot in my pocket, which was… different. Considering it ran from a 100 percent charge to 14 percent between 7 AM and noon, it seemed like it was finally time to accept the inevitable. So after lunch, I went to the Verizon store and traded it in for a brand-new S26. Which appears to be the exact same phone, but bigger and with a slightly better keyboard interface. I guess I’m happy. Except that I spent the entirety of Thursday afternoon transferring apps, settings, data, and whatever else a phone needs from the old phone to the new, and then it was time to fight the password battle. Finally, Lori Mashburn — Editor Par Excellence at The American Spectator — sent me a text message. “Excuse me,” it said (I’m paraphrasing), “but are you sending in a column, or what?” I congratulated her on being the first sender of texts to my new phone and explained that I was about to begin work on the column, but what I thought would take one hour was now taking four, and counting. Lori was nice about it and sympathetic. Not exactly excited for me. So I resolved to put down the phone and write a Five Quick Things. And to write it quickly. So here’s what we’re going to do — I’m going to show you posts on X, and give fast reactions to them. That’s it. These will actually be quick things for the 5QT. I know I’ve promised this countless times and very seldom delivered. But I’m serious this time. Watch me. 1. Doug Jones Simps for the SPLC and Shows Us Why He Never Should Have Been in the Senate Remember Doug Jones? He was the leftist jackass who managed an upset victory over Roy Moore in the Alabama Senate special election after Jeff Sessions was named as President Trump’s first attorney general back in 2017. Jones caught a bolt of lightning that year, in that the country-club GOP types decided Moore gave them a case of the ick after he won the Republican primary, and Moore went down in a flaming heap. Jones did too, in the next election. He’ll never win anything in Alabama ever again. Folks in that state reacted to Jones as their senator like that guy in the first Alien movie did when that damned thing jumped on his face. But somehow he’s still around, and he had this to say after the Justice Department indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center for wire and bank fraud and a count of conspiracy to commit money laundering… Charging the Southern Poverty Law Center with a federal crime for paying informants to help dismantle hate groups is an outrageous weaponization of the Dept of Justice and the FBI. As someone who has been a prosecutor and has taken on the Klan I can tell you that use of paid… pic.twitter.com/MgZMCESbNa — Doug Jones (@DougJones) April 23, 2026 To call this a poor argument is pretty charitable, no? Doug Jones just told you that the Southern Poverty Law Center is the government. (RELATED: Eventually, the Grift Does Get Exposed) I don’t know about you, but I don’t consent to be governed by the defamatory communists at the Southern Poverty Law Center, who slandered Charlie Kirk as a white supremacist four months before he was assassinated. 2. How Much Sympathy Can You Summon For This Woman? I’m not even going to comment on this one. I’ll let you people have at it below. “Sheryl Cowan, 57, was making $272,000 a year as a senior VP at a U.S.A.I.D.-funded nonprofit when she was let go at the end of March 2025. Last month she had an online interview for a $19-an-hour job managing a Penzeys Spices store in Falls Church, Va.”https://t.co/OGDiHFV79u — Alec MacGillis (@AlecMacGillis) April 23, 2026 3. The Brits Would Call Him “Cheeky Bernie” for This Check out Bernie Sanders running his mouth about the Trump family and their “monetization” of the White House… The Trump family has made $4 billion off the presidency. Crypto: $3.02B Persian Gulf deals: $425.8M Qatari jet: $150M Legal fees/merch: $127.7M Mar-a-Lago: $125M Corporate deals: $91M Hanoi hotel: $40M Truth Social: $25M Don Jr: $19.6M Unprecedented kleptocracy. — Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) April 23, 2026 The nerve of this old commie sonofabitch is really something, isn’t it? First of all, the Qatari jet isn’t for the Trump family; it’s for the country. And second, is Bernie Sanders actually going to complain about anybody else raking off the filthy lucre from their political office? Everybody here knows Bernie’s scam, right? He “writes” a book, and then his campaign buys oodles of copies of said book and sends them out to the suckers who donate to it. Probably most of those books get thrown in the garbage rather than being distributed to anybody. Bernie doesn’t care. He’s billed his campaign something like $2.5 million for those books since 2011. This is pretty likely the same scam Ilhan Omar and her white-boy husband were running with that fake winery they owned, which went from being valued in the eight figures to being legally dissolved earlier this month. The con goes like this — because a bottle of wine doesn’t have an inherent price, you buy trash wine in bulk from actual vinyards, slap your own label on it and then sell it at a premium to “wine afficionados” who happen to be your campaign donors — or, let’s say, blood-soaked warlords from back home in Somalia, who’ve gotten rich on Medicaid fraud in Minnesota and have money to burn on trash wine with a fancy label with a name like “Blockchain” or “Clothesline.” You do that for a while, then after you’ve milked the gag dry, you move on to some other scam. (RELATED: The Spectacle Ep. 308: Ilhan Omar: Queen of Corruption) It isn’t necessarily illegal, but it’s still greasy as hell. And these people have a whole lot of nerve criticizing Trump over the Qataris giving him a jet to serve as Air Force One. 4. The Dems’ Hasan Piker Problem I’m not even going to launch into the full list of atrocious things that have come out of the pie-hole of this Turkish communist the Left has decided is their version of Rush Limbaugh. You probably already know about Hasan Piker, and if you don’t, I’m not going to disturb the bliss of your ignorance. Let’s just say Piker is becoming a big deal on the Left, and that’s awesome for the Right, because you can’t sell him to Normie America. Some in the Democrat Party have recognized that. For example, here’s old Obama flunky Jon Favreau, who had Piker on his podcast five minutes ago, now scoffing about his celebrity… Zero people have tried to make Hasan Piker “the spokesman for Democrats.” He showed up at one campaign event with one candidate in a primary and sat for some interviews. What’s embarrassing is the number of people on here treating him like he’s a 2028 contender or DNC Chair. https://t.co/g1zlfhwAGG — Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) April 23, 2026 This is worth watching. It’s a lot of fun. 5. “Don’t Fear the Dead. And Don’t Fear Me.” In Blockbusters, which you can and should go and buy on Amazon, I had as one of the plot points the presence of a breakthrough AI app which would let you recast a movie with actors of your choice, and then the app would stream it for you in an hour. So, for example, if you wanted to watch Casablanca starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, you could do it. That capability, by the end of the book, had led to all kinds of developments. If you’ve done any playing around with AI video apps, and I’ve done a lot, you know that in real life, we aren’t quite there yet. But we are not far away. All of the elements of the app in the book are with us. And we’re starting to get AI actors. Like Val Kilmer. He’s an AI actor now. Yes, he’s dead, but that’s no longer a problem. Kilmer is in a new movie coming out later this year called As Deep as the Grave, about a real female archaeologist who essentially found the Anasazi, who’d been lost to history. Here’s the trailer… Hollywood actor Val Kilmer resurrected after his death with AI to star in new movie ‘As Deep as the Grave.’ The actor passed away in April 2025 aged 65. pic.twitter.com/GfeUV7uevZ — Oli London (@OliLondonTV) April 16, 2026 He looks pretty good for a dead guy. And now there is nothing, assuming the heirs are OK with it and the royalties are paid, stopping filmmakers from casting Humphrey Bogart, John Wayne, Rita Hayworth, and Chuck Norris in feature films to come. READ MORE from Scott McKay: Eventually, the Grift Does Get Exposed Mitch Landrieu, Low-Functioning Political Vampire Five Quick Things: A Quite Cranky 5QT