Think More: Wednesday, May 6, 2026
Seven reads on the face the Democrats built, the apparatus pressing back, and the ingratitude of beautiful losers.
Hasan Piker Is the Face the Democrats Built
Spencer Klavan • The American Mind
Klavan opens with the gunman who breached the White House Correspondents’ Dinner perimeter and Van Jones’ plea for less violence, then follows the through-line: the New York Times hosted Hasan Piker for a podcast last week with Jia Tolentino, in which Piker equivocated on whether UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson deserved his murder, citing Friedrich Engels on “social murder.” Piker has previously fantasized on camera about killing landlords and told viewers that anyone who cared about Medicaid fraud “would kill” Sen. Rick Scott. Ezra Klein, who in November lamented his party’s leftward drift, by April was running interference for Piker. The Democrats did not stumble into this; they chose Peak Woke in 2020 and have refused to revisit the choice since.
The Times Reclassifies Theft as Virtue
City Journal • Manhattan Institute
City Journal’s Tuesday newsletter, anchored by Heather Mac Donald’s analysis, surveys the same Times video from a different angle: opinion editor Nadja Spiegelman moderating Piker and Tolentino as they discuss “microlooting” as compassion and Tolentino floats blowing up a pipeline as a defensible act. “Like self-righteous Western teenagers,” Mac Donald writes, “they simply assume that any successful business must be doing something immoral. Never mind that a firm can earn a profit only by meeting a demand or need.” The blue-collar laborer Tolentino claims to defend is the first person hurt by the industrial sabotage she calls admirable.
The Democrats’ Only Defensive Maneuver
Chris Bray • Tell Me How This Ends
Bray catalogues the California Democratic playbook from 2022 through this week: state Sen. Scott Wiener’s self-transcribed “death threat” voicemail; the abandonment of his minor-vaccine-without-parental-consent bill amid claims of being “murdered to death” by anti-vaxxers; and now Assemblywoman Mia Bonta’s AB 2624, the “Stop Nick Shirley Act,” which conflates illegal and legal immigrants while shielding NGO workers from public identification. Each policy disagreement converts to claims of mortal threat. As Republican candidates strengthen in the California governor and Los Angeles mayor races, expect the maneuver to scale: hateful angry Nazis attack, the only play the party knows how to run.
Counterterrorism Strategy Names the Domestic Threat
The White House this morning released the 2026 United States Counterterrorism Strategy, identifying three primary terror threats: narcoterrorists and transnational gangs, legacy Islamist terrorists, and “violent left-wing extremists, including anarchists and anti-fascists.” The third category is the substantive break with two decades of doctrine that defined domestic terrorism almost exclusively as right-wing. The strategy directs new foreign-terrorist-organization designations across cartels and gangs, sets goals of preemptive identification, financial interdiction, and group destruction, and faults the Intelligence Community for being “mired in old ways of looking at threats.”
Warren Preserved Competition by Eliminating an Airline
Spirit Airlines liquidated Saturday, taking 17,000 jobs and the country’s largest ultra-low-cost-carrier capacity with it, the first major U.S. airline liquidation in twenty-five years. Hinderaker traces the chain to its source: Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s September 2022 letter pressing Pete Buttigieg to block JetBlue’s $3.8 billion Spirit acquisition, the Biden DOJ’s successful 2024 challenge under Judge William Young, and Warren’s subsequent victory tweet calling the merger’s collapse “a Biden win for flyers.” On the day Spirit died, the senator pivoted to blame a Reagan-appointed judge and Trump’s war. Antitrust merger law has long recognized a failing-company defense for a reason.
China Owns Ninety Percent of Zimbabwe’s Mining
Select Committee on the CCP • U.S. House
Part one of the Select Committee’s three-part report China’s Minerals Mafia documents the Chinese capture of Zimbabwe’s lithium sector, where Chinese firms now control roughly 90 percent of mining operations. The investigation finds large-scale smuggling of undeclared lithium ore in defiance of Zimbabwe’s 2022 export ban; documented forced and child labor; and accounts of Chinese mine managers tying workers to heavy machinery and lifting them into the air as punishment. Committee staff were monitored by Zimbabwe’s state intelligence service during their visit and refused meetings with government officials. The recommendation is the obvious one: build sovereign and Western critical-mineral supply chains and sanction the corrupt actors.
Ingratitude Is Monstrous
Ted Richards • TomKlingenstein.com
Richards, a research associate at the Claremont Institute, takes up Elizabeth Corey’s Public Discourse essay celebrating what Sam Francis called “beautiful losers”: scholars who maintain moral and intellectual purity while losing every cultural and political battle. Corey’s named adversaries are Christopher Rufo and Kevin Roberts, both of them in the arena, both of them changing public policy directly. The asymmetry Richards diagnoses is structural: intellectual conservatives demand pluralism toward the Left and excommunication of anyone to their right. He closes with Coriolanus, whose tribunes drove him from the city he had defended single-handedly. The plebs understood what the tribunes refused to admit: ingratitude is monstrous.
