Think More: Thursday, April 23, 2026
The SPLC indictment, the 2019 impeachment unwinding, and ten more essays on the day's civilizational stakes.
The Extractive-Performative Era
Chris Bray | Tell Me How This Ends
Bray reads the Southern Poverty Law Center indictment not as a discrete scandal but as the paradigm case of a modern institutional model: an organization that manufactures the phenomenon it claims to fight, monetizes the warning, and builds a durable constituency around the performance. The anti-poaching activist had the elephants on layaway; the anti-extremism nonprofit had the Klan on payroll.
Five Stories Democrats Told During Trump’s 2019 Ukraine Impeachment Have Fallen Apart
Solomon consolidates five of the primary Democratic narratives from the 2019 impeachment against the current evidentiary record, from the whistleblower’s supposed independence to the substance of the Ukraine call. The piece functions as a ledger of falsified claims in one of the most consequential episodes of the first Trump presidency.
Unmasked: Secret ‘Witness 2’ Was Anti-Trump Intel Officer Pushing Russiagate and Ukraine Impeachment
Jerry Dunleavy | Just the News
Dunleavy identifies the same intelligence officer who worked with Peter Strzok on Russiagate as the Ukraine impeachment’s Witness 2, with a contributing hand in the 2016 election-interference assessment and later on-the-record praise of Nina Jankowicz while serving at Trump’s Department of Defense. One actor, two operations, and a document trail that now names him at both points.
How the U.S. Can Restore Its Arsenal
Will Thibeau | The American Mind
Thibeau catalogs what Operation Epic Fury has cost the American arsenal: roughly a quarter of the national Tomahawk inventory in five weeks, 2,400 interceptors burned defending the Gulf, and by CSIS wargame estimates, eight days of Pacific high-intensity conflict before critical munitions run out. The problem is not money; the FY 2027 budget’s 150 percent munitions increase is the largest in a generation. It is production architecture, and the fix runs through shared-rights IP, a revived sub-tier manufacturing base, and allied co-production.
The SCAM Act Would Restore Integrity to U.S. Citizenship
Eric Schmitt | The American Mind
Senator Schmitt makes the case for the Stopping Citizenship Abuse and Manipulation Act as a statutory restoration of the meaning of American citizenship, closing naturalization-fraud loopholes that accumulated across three administrations. Citizenship cannot remain sentimental language if the state will not guard its own legal boundaries.
The Derangement of California
Christopher Rufo | christopherrufo.com
Rufo synthesizes Jonathan Choe’s on-camera reporting with his own analysis of a state now funding sex-change procedures for homeless illegal aliens through Medi-Cal, stacking sanctuary status, welfare capture, and gender ideology into a single civilizational picture. The reporting would sound fabricated if it were not on tape.
A Wartime Economy Would Be Different This Time
Allison Schrager | Manhattan Institute
Schrager argues that if drones do to 21st-century warfare what industrialization did to the First World War, the stimulus math of every past conflict collapses. Lengthy industrial mobilization financed by war bonds and priced as domestic stimulus was an industrial-age arrangement; a drone-age peer conflict will not produce the same macroeconomic ledger.
The Tradition and Limits of Campus Mental Health
Carolyn D. Gorman | Manhattan Institute
Gorman traces the campus mental-health apparatus from its Progressive-era origins through its postwar professionalization to its current diagnostic sprawl, arguing that it was never quite medicine and is now something closer to a moral-political instrument in clinical dress. The reform conversation will not progress until that history is admitted.
Big Beautiful Tax Returns Are Keeping Consumers Afloat
E.J. Antoni | Heritage Foundation
Antoni reads the One Big Beautiful Bill’s withholding-and-refund mechanics against current consumer-spending data and finds that the tax relief is doing quiet macroeconomic work while the press cycle chases Hormuz. The policy landed; the coverage has not.
56% See News Media With ‘Zero’ Credibility
A majority of likely voters now agree with Elon Musk’s assessment that the credibility of national news media is zero. Only 34 percent rate accuracy and fairness as good or excellent. When a once-provocative opinion becomes the majority view, the institution it describes has already lost the argument.
Presidential Determination on Large-Scale Energy Infrastructure Under the Defense Production Act
One of five coordinated Section 303 determinations issued April 20 activating Defense Production Act authority across the domestic energy build-out: grid infrastructure, large-scale energy development, natural gas and LNG capacity, coal supply chains, and petroleum production and refining. The administration is treating American energy as a problem of strategic capacity, not commodity price.
Unreasonable Expectations and Cults of Personality
eugyppius | A Plague Chronicle
Eugyppius, writing from Europe, offers the discipline of sober assessment American commentators struggle to produce about their own political class. The analysis is unsentimental about the current administration’s real accomplishments and unsparing about the cults of personality that threaten to undermine them.
