Think More: Monday, May 4, 2026
The SPLC's 11-count indictment reaches Sen. Ossoff, a Russiagate architect retreats, and the Declaration finds its first printer. Nine reads.
The SPLC Indictment Reaches a Sitting Senator
The Justice Department’s 11-count indictment alleges the Southern Poverty Law Center routed more than $3 million between 2014 and 2023 to informants embedded in the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations, and the National Alliance, opening accounts under fictitious entities to conceal the payments from donors and federally insured banks. FEC filings show the SPLC contributed roughly $700,000 to Sen. Jon Ossoff’s 2020 campaign. With the Georgia incumbent narrowly leading Reps. Buddy Carter and Mike Collins and businessman Derek Dooley in Emerson polling, his continued silence is its own answer.
The Russiagate Architect Who Now Calls It a “De-Conversion”
Jerry Dunleavy • Just the News
Gavin Wilde co-authored the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment on Russian interference, served as the unnamed “Witness 2” in the Trump-Ukraine impeachment, and worked on the 2020 election influence assessments. Now installed at the Carnegie Endowment and Defense Priorities, Wilde describes his own role as a “de-conversion story from that period of panic” and counsels democracies to “ignore” Russian propaganda rather than chase it. Accountability requires the named architects of a five-year political crisis to explain, on the record, what they got wrong.
Mamdani Builds the Permanent Campaign on the Public Dime
Jarrett Stepman • Daily Signal
The new Office of Mass Engagement under New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani has launched “Organize NYC,” a publicly funded program billed as bringing “mass public participation into the work of governing.” Its first deployment: paid canvassers urging tenants to testify at the June Rent Guidelines Board hearing, an outcome the mayor campaigned on. The Manhattan Institute’s John Ketcham and Christian Browne call this what it is: a taxpayer-financed political operation dressed up as civic virtue, and a model the Left intends to export.
Defund the Institutions Producing the Assassins
Evita Duffy-Alfonso • The Federalist
Duffy-Alfonso, daughter of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, traces a pattern hiding in plain sight: the alleged White House Correspondents’ Dinner shooter, like Charlie Kirk’s accused assassin and Brian Thompson’s killer before him, is young, college-educated, and formed inside an academy whose Frankfurt School inheritance treats society as fundamentally illegitimate. She quotes Burke on the French Revolution: “In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.” Her policy prescription follows directly: end the federal subsidy regime that finances ideological departments masquerading as scholarship.
Spirit Airlines Dies, and Sen. Warren Takes a Victory Lap
Spirit Airlines, a low-cost carrier employing 17,000 and serving primarily working-class fliers, ceased operations Saturday after a $500 million Trump bailout fell through. Soave, no conservative, lays the blame squarely on the Biden DOJ and Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s 2024 lobbying campaign that killed the JetBlue-Spirit merger; Warren herself called the deal’s collapse a “Biden win for flyers.” Rarely do the consumer-protection victory and the consumer’s funeral arrive in the same news cycle.
Oregon Classifies Federal Agents as Active Shooters
Beginning May 5, the University of Oregon will broadcast the presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers on the same emergency-alert system used for active shooters and fires, designating federal law enforcement as “an imminent threat to health and/or safety.” The policy implements House Bill 4079, signed by Gov. Tina Kotek on March 31, which requires every public school and university in the state to build an ICE alert system. A campus that cannot distinguish federal law enforcement from a gunman has answered the question of which authority it recognizes.
The Heresy of Voting With the Other Party
Rena Rowe • Washington Examiner
The Monroe County Democratic Party, which endorsed John Fetterman in 2022, now calls him a “TRAITOR to Democrats” and demands a primary in 2028. The proximate offense: Fetterman’s Sunday Fox News observation that voting for cabinet nominees of the opposite party “used to not be very controversial,” and his diagnosis that the Democratic Party has become “defined by TDS.” Quinnipiac shows the senator polling higher with Republicans than with the voters who sent him to Washington, which is the diagnosis his party is unwilling to read.
USCIS, Now Armed With Denaturalization, Goes on Offense
USCIS Director Joseph Edlow tells Just the News that the agency’s pending asylum caseload exploded from 400,000 in 2021 to 1.5 million by the end of the Biden years, and that USCIS has now built a corps of 1811-classified criminal investigators carrying arrest authority and the option of pursuing denaturalization. An early test, Operation Twin Shield in Minneapolis-St. Paul, flagged suspected fraud in 275 of the 1,000 cases reviewed. After a decade of treating legal immigration as a procedural ritual, the agency is being asked to behave like an enforcement institution again.
Bringing the Declaration to the People
Michael Auslin • The American Mind
An excerpt from Auslin’s National Treasure: How the Declaration of Independence Made America, published tomorrow by Simon & Schuster. Auslin reconstructs the Philadelphia print shop where John Dunlap, a 29-year-old Irish immigrant, set the Declaration in type through the night of July 4, 1776, and traces how the broadside traveled from Philadelphia to the Continental Army, the colonial assemblies, and the Mi’kmaq leadership of Nova Scotia. Burke understood the implications immediately: the Americans had not only thrust Britain into a new era, they had created a new country.
