Iran talks called off for now

The New Neo Posted on by

Witcoff and Kushner can unpack their bags. Then again, maybe they always keep an Islamabad bag packed, just in case. But another round of talks with Iran seems like a waste of jet fuel at this point, so the cancellation appears wise.

The gist of what I’m been reading lately – whether it is correct or incorrect – says that the economic screws we’ve been tightening on Iran right now seem to be having the desired effect:

Iran is scrambling to get a massive crude carrier to Kharg Island, in a sign that President Trump’s blockade is bringing the regime’s oil-critical hub — which controls roughly 90% of Iranian crude oil exports — to the brink, according to a report.

Tehran has been forced to take a 30-year-old oil tanker, Nasha, out of retirement as Kharg Island nears its maximum onshore capacity, Gulf News reported Friday.

The vessel, which has been anchored empty for the past several years, is being revived as floating storage for Iran’s teeming crude supply, the outlet reported. …

The frantic move comes as Kharg Island’s remaining spare storage could fill up in just 12 to 13 days, with Iran’s net oil inflow running around 1 million barrels per day, analysts told Gulf News. …

Trump threatened to finish the war “militarily with the other 25% of the targets” if Iranian leaders “don’t want to make a deal,” he warned Thursday.

I doubt he’ll do more bombing if he thinks Iran really is on the brink of economic collapse in a way that threatens the regime. The oil reserves are a big big deal in this sense. The link I just gave is to a CNN article which I chose because it offers a relatively gloomy estimate for amount of time it will take; other source say it would be shorter, a matter of weeks. But the principle is the same:

If the country cannot shift the millions of barrels of oil it produces daily, it could be forced to cut production. Crude oil and petroleum product exports are Iran’s primary source of foreign currency.

Iran could probably sustain current oil production for another two to three months before storage issues become “a significant consideration,” Batmanghelidj said.

Iran also still has plenty of oil storage space remaining onshore, shipping analytics firm Kpler said, noting it has almost 30 million barrels of headroom, which means it’s still weeks away from its limit.

It could even push storage capacity longer if it finds other methods of offloading the stored oil.

One option Iran is exploring is using its retired crude tankers.

The CNN article omits this sort of thing about what “shutting down” might actually mean:

This is a well-known technical challenge in petroleum engineering. If Iran were to deliberately curtail or shut in production across its major fields, water infiltration (also called water influx or water encroachment) would be a serious and potentially irreversible problem. Here’s why:

The Core Mechanics
Most of Iran’s giant fields — Ahvaz, Gachsaran, Marun, Aghajari — are carbonate reservoirs under natural water drive. Aquifers underlying or flanking the reservoir rock are under pressure, and they push water upward into the pore space as oil is produced. When you stop producing oil, you remove the pressure sink that was keeping water at bay. The aquifer doesn’t stop — it keeps pushing.

Much more of the technical stuff can be found at the link to the tweet. Suffice to say it probably would be a major, perhaps permanent, problem.

Trump and Netanyahu have the task of balancing harm to the current regime against harm to the people of a future Iran. They want to maximize the former and minimize the latter, if possible.

SPLC: self-perpetuating propaganda machine

The New Neo Posted on by

Once upon a time, long long ago, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) actually did decent work in the field of civil rights. But for a long long time now it’s functioned as a partisan finger-pointer to effectively target many ordinary groups and people on the right, listing them as racist hate groups. The SPLC somehow came to be widely considered the authority on this – why or how I don’t know, but it was easy to see it had happened.

That’s why the recent DOJ indictment of the group is so potentially important and certainly eye-opening, although the left will almost undoubtedly continue to defend them and label the whole thing as merely paying “informants.” I already wrote about the indictment in this post, including a link to the indictment and to the press conference announcing it. So I won’t go over that ground again here, except to say that the charges are serious and go way beyond paying informants.

From Professor Jacobson of Legal Insurrection, who has been studying the SPLC and its methods since 2009:

Jacobson said he believes the indictment is extremely detailed, names names, and describes conduct that is far more specific and far more serious than the crisis management line SPLC has been feeding to sympathetic media, which is that they were simply paying informants the way any organization fighting hate would do. He said the indictment describes shell companies, fictitious accounts, suspicious money transfers that triggered bank fraud detection systems, and alleged lies told to banks when those systems flagged the transactions. That is not a description of routine informant payments. It is a description of a deliberate financial concealment structure, and the bank fraud charges reflect that distinction.

His first piece on SPLC appeared in 2009, and by 2010 he had already identified what he described as a pattern of fabricating or vastly inflating the existence of hate groups for fundraising purposes. He investigated a Ku Klux Klan group that SPLC had listed on its hate map in Rhode Island, where he is from, and found no evidence the group existed. He called the state police hate crimes unit, which also said it had no knowledge of any such group. The same thing happened in 2012 with a neo-Nazi group SPLC listed in Rhode Island. He said over the following fifteen years he wrote nearly fifty pieces documenting how SPLC’s hate map, which is its primary fundraising tool, was built on inflated and in some cases apparently invented groups. …

Jacobson said SPLC functioned essentially as a domestic political terrorist organization in the sense that landing on its list could be career-ending for individuals and company-ending for organizations, and that the terror the list created was amplified by the corporate partners who agreed to use SPLC designations as the basis for deplatforming decisions. He described being told by a client relationship management platform that it would expel his organization if it appeared on the SPLC list, calling that a vivid illustration of how the SPLC’s list functioned as a private extortion mechanism backed by the implicit threat of corporate enforcement. He said Amazon, PayPal, and other major companies participated in that enforcement network, and that the roughly eight hundred million dollars in total assets SPLC is believed to have accumulated could not have been built without significant support from corporate America alongside the celebrity and foundation donors who have received more attention.

He offered an analogy he said is not perfect but captures the essential fraud: it is like taking your car to a mechanic for a state inspection, being told something is broken and being charged to fix it, without being told the mechanic broke it himself. SPLC allegedly created or supported the very hate it was fundraising to combat, did not disclose that to donors, and pocketed the contributions. An arsonist collecting money to put out fires he set is another version of the same scheme …

More at the link.

Another way to look at it is this classic take from Iowahawk, written ten years ago. It’s not specifically about the SPLC, but it certainly applies to it:

It is likely that the SPLC is not alone in this sort of practice of fundraising off its own arson. It may be the most egregious, however, and possibly the most influential. The left will continue to make excuses and frame it as “Republicans pounce” and they may even work for Democrat voters. But these are nevertheless some fascinating developments, and the case will be tried in Alabama rather than DC or New York.

NOTE: Here’s an article about one instance of the SPLC’s threats. Also, I noticed in the video of the indictment announcement, that Blanche said this was not a new investigation, and that it had been opened quite a while earlier but stopped at some point during the Biden administration (I’ve cued up the brief segment):

Hmmm.

I also found this comment somewhere:

What always enraged me about the SPLC was how the organization intentionally used its misleading name and initials to fool imany donors who thought they were sending money to Martin Luther King’s SCLC, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Even today, many geriatric libs probably think both groups are the same.

The Virginia gerrymandering referendum and SCOTUS

The New Neo Posted on by

If you’ve been following the news on the recent Virginia redistricting referendum, you know that a lower court judge recently ruled it invalid and it will be appealed, so that it’s almost certain that the Supreme Court of Virginia will issue a ruling on the case. In fact, oral arguments are due to start this coming Monday.

Many people on the right are incensed because the gerrymandering would be so very skewed to favor Democrats, and feel there is an issue of fairness. But Judge Hurley’s ruling against the measure was based on the following:

The proposed ballot question asked: “Should the constitution of Virginia be amended to allow the General Assembly to temporarily adopt new congressional districts to restore fairness in the upcoming elections while ensuring Virginia’s standard redistricting process resumes for all future redistricting after the 2030 census?”

Hurley agreed with the Republicans that the question’s partisan language was misleading and fell short of what is acceptable to present to voters. The judge further sided with Republicans, ruling the referendum violates the state constitution’s timing requirements.

There are other, similar lawsuits, and they may all be joined. One in particular mentions the following issues with the referendum wording:

Republican U.S. Representatives John McGuire and Rob Wittman, who both stand to lose their seats due to the proposed redistricting, filed a similar challenge in Richmond. The congressmen in the Richmond lawsuit also attack the ballot language on multiple grounds, including that it does not fairly reflect the substance of the proposed amendment.

There’s also this tidbit:

The referendum comes six years after Virginia voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment banning partisan gerrymandering. The Supreme Court of Virginia drew the current map.

Only six years ago; what a difference. And it seems the recent referendum would end up invalidating the Virginia Supreme Court’s own map.

I don’t know how the Virginia Supreme Court will rule. But after it does, can the case be appealed to SCOTUS, and if so what is SCOTUS likely to decide?

If you think the results can be challenged in SCOTUS because the new districts are so unfairly partisan, not only does that not seem to have been one of the issues in the cases at hand, but the governing SCOTUS precedent on that would be Rucho, decided in 2019 [emphasis mine]:

Rucho v. Common Cause, No. 18-422, 588 U.S. 684 (2019) is a landmark case of the United States Supreme Court concerning partisan gerrymandering. The Court ruled that while partisan gerrymandering may be “incompatible with democratic principles”, the federal courts cannot review such allegations, as they present nonjusticiable political questions outside the jurisdiction of these courts.

The case was one of three heard in the 2018 term dealing with issues related to partisan gerrymandering used in the districting plans of states. It was combined with Rucho v. League of Women Voters of North Carolina, and its decision included the Court’s judgment on Lamone v. Benisek, a partisan gerrymandering case from Maryland. The 5–4 decision, divided along ideological lines, left in place North Carolina’s congressional districts, which favored the Republican Party, and Maryland’s congressional districts, which favored the Democratic Party.

The breakdown was that it was the conservative wing of the Court that said it could not do a thing about even nakedly partisan gerrymandering, and the liberal wing that wanted to rule against the practice:

The Court issued its decision in Rucho and Lamone on June 27, 2019. In the 5–4 majority opinion, the Court ruled that “partisan gerrymandering claims present political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts”, vacating and remanding the lower courts’ decisions with instructions to dismiss for lack of jurisdiction. Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the majority opinion, joined by Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh. Roberts made clear that partisan gerrymandering can be distasteful and unjust, but that states and Congress have the ability to enact laws to curb excessive partisan gerrymandering.

Justice Elena Kagan wrote the dissenting opinion, joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor. Kagan’s opinion was critical of the majority: “Of all times to abandon the Court’s duty to declare the law, this was not the one. The practices challenged in these cases imperil our system of government. Part of the Court’s role in that system is to defend its foundations. None is more important than free and fair elections. With respect but deep sadness, I dissent.”

On the other hand, gerrymandering for racial discrimination is something that SCOTUS can rule on. But as far as I can tell, no one has alleged that the Virginia districts are being redrawn for racially discriminatory reasons. Although race and politics can and often do overlap, there’s also an assumption that gerrymandering goals are political unless clearly racial. So if there is any new challenge to the Virginia redistricting on racial grounds it would probably fail, and if there’s any challenge that it’s politically partisan, Rucho would almost certainly control and SCOTUS would not act.

But the procedural challenges and the language challenges remain, and are the heart of the legal matter. Could or would SCOTUS decide either the procedural question or the wording question? I doubt it, although in a great deal of searching I haven’t yet found anything that directly answers the question. However, it generally appears that SCOTUS ordinarily defers to states on such matters. There always could be an exception, however.

In sum, I think whatever the Supreme Court of Virginia decides, it’s very likely to be the final word on the matter.

The latest leftist media fascination: Hasan Piker

The New Neo Posted on by

A great many young women are Democrats, and some of the leftist stars of the current day or recent past seem designed to appeal to that demographic. For example, there have been a couple of violent murderers of a supposedly dreamboat mien and terrorist or leftist disposition: Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Luigi Mangione. Then we have the smiley-face Communist mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani. And now the much-watched Communist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker.

It’s not an accident that three of the four are Muslims, either born or partly raised abroad, and thought to be good-looking. For the first two their violence is winked at by their admirers (or in the case of Mangione, admired), and for the second their utterly stupid and destructive ideas are considered smart or at least trendy.

Hasan Piker is the most recent; all of a sudden I see his name and photo in a lot of places. Apparently Democrats are having an argument about whether to engage and embrace him or denounce him. In some ways, the Piker dilemma on the left is a bit like the Tucker dilemma on the right.

Like Mamdani (for whom he campaigned), Piker is 34 years old. Mamdani was born of Indian parents in Uganda and raised Muslim, coming to this country at the age of seven and raised in a wealthy family. Piker was born in New Brunswick, NJ, but grew up in Istanbul. There is no information on why he was born here but grew up there, but his mother had relatives in New Brunswick and it’s certainly possible that they were visiting the relatives and that Hasan was a so-called “anchor baby.” Not only do the two men share having grown up in significant wealth and yet becoming Communists, but each has an academic father (in Piker’s case, also a businessman) and an artistic mother – Mamdani’s mother being a successful film director and Piker’s being a professor of art and architectural history. Piker’s maternal uncle is the leftist TV commentator Cenk Uygur, who gave him his start in the communications field.

Piker is featured here in a fawningly giggly interview with the NY Times (the women in the middle is from the Times; the other woman is apparently a writer for The New Yorker):

A couple of comments at the video:

Nepo baby from a rich, oligarch Turkish family wants poor people to steal, but not from him.

Remember to buy his $90 plain white T-shirts from his online store.

We need to get this man’s address out. I bet he’s got some cool shit.

Piker also spoke up when United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was murdered. This video is from even before Mangione was identified, but Piker presciently notes that the murderer (who is wearing a mask) is “hot” and is already being lauded and Thompson’s murder applauded. Piker himself walks a fine line, mentioning at the outset that the act is criminal, but then mocking and reviling Thompson and gleefully discussing how many people think Thompson deserved it (I’ve cued up about 10 minutes; it’s really quite a glimpse into the mind of today’s young leftists, as is the comment section):

I find this phenomenon very chilling – leftist chic. Nihilist chic.

And come to think of it, perhaps the first example – at least that I can recall – was Che Guevara, another good-looking rich kid playing with Communist fire (in his case not just with “mere words”) and sporting that oh-so-stylish black beret.

Law, law, and more law

The New Neo Posted on by

Today I was going to write yet another post on the SPLC case – I have a lot more to say. But I decided to postpone it, probably till tomorrow, because you know what? I got tired of writing about law, law, law. Two posts on law already today.

I was not fond of law school. Every now and then an issue would grab my interest, but a great deal of it was boring and nitpicky and so there’s a reason I never went into the law business afterward. If you had told me that lo these many years later I’d be writing about law on a near-daily basis, voluntarily, I would have laughed in your face.

And yet here we are.

Meanwhile, in Iran

The New Neo Posted on by

An announcement from Trump:

U.S. President Donald Trump has ordered the Navy to attack any Iranian boats mining the Strait of Hormuz. His decree, issued on Truth Social, also claims the U.S. is currently demining the strategic waterway. His announcement comes hours after the U.S. boarded another Iranian-linked vessel in the Indian Ocean and a day after the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC) fired on at least three ships and seized two of them in the Strait.

I’ve been curious about this “seized two ships” business. My question is: says who? Well, to start with, says Iran:

Nour News, affiliated with Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, said the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) opened fire on the first ship, which it called the Epaminodes, after it had “ignored the warnings of the Iranian armed forces”.

A second ship, named Euphoria, was then stopped after being “fired upon”, followed by the targeting of a third vessel, the MSC-Francesca, according to BBC Verify. …

IRGC Naval Command said both it and the Panama-flagged MSC-Francesca had been seized after endangering maritime security “by operating without the necessary permits and tampering with navigation systems”.

The two vessels will have their cargo and documents examined, it added in an announcement reported by Iranian state television. …

Four other vessels in the convoy have since crossed the strait, according to maritime data from Linerlytica. They appear to have turned off their transponders, which share a ship’s location, during the passage. …

Greece’s Foreign Minister Giorgos Gerapetritis later said he could not confirm that the Epaminondas had been detained.

He told CNN: “I can confirm that there was an attack against the Greek cargo ship, but I cannot confirm that this has been seized by the Iranians.”

Clear as mud.

And what of Iran’s Supreme Leader? This report might be credible, although it’s based on a NY Times story:

Mojtaba Khamenei remains seriously wounded, isolated and running the country under an unprecedented security umbrella.

Doctors at his side, senior officials at a distance
Access to the younger Khamenei is described as “extremely difficult and limited.” He is surrounded by a dedicated medical team that, unusually, also includes Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, a heart surgeon by training, and the health minister. Commanders in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and senior government officials are avoiding visiting him in person for fear that Israel could track their movements and eliminate the leader at his hiding place.

Khamenei’s physical condition is described as serious but stable. According to official Iranian sources who spoke to The New York Times, his leg has been operated on three times and he is awaiting a prosthesis. His hand was also operated on and is gradually regaining function. He is suffering from severe burns to his face and lips, making it difficult for him to speak. He is expected to undergo a series of plastic surgeries in the future. But despite the injuries, four senior Iranian officials said he is “mentally alert and involved in what is happening.”

Khamenei has refused to appear in video clips or audio recordings so as not to be seen by the public as “weak or vulnerable.” Communication with the leader is being conducted in an underground-style system: messages are passed only in handwritten form, signed and sealed in envelopes, through a chain of couriers traveling by car and motorcycle along side roads to the hideout. His instructions are returned the same way.

I think most of the other current leaders are laying pretty low, as well, after what happened to their predecessors.

California’s highest court has allowed the Eastman disbarment

The New Neo Posted on by

It should come as no surprise that the California high court showed attorney John Eastman no mercy:

The Golden State’s Supreme Court blessed this position when, on April 15, it denied the conservative lawyer’s petition for review of the state bar’s yearslong disciplinary jihad against him and ordered him stripped of his license to practice law.

What was the nefarious behavior that this former Supreme Court clerk, university law school dean, and public interest litigator allegedly engaged in? Effectively, in the eyes of the bar and California’s highest court, his thoughtcrime, punishable with professional destruction, was “lawyering for MAGA.”

The whole article is worth reading. Eastman has been disbarred for giving legal advice on the 2020 election with which the left disagrees, but which certainly was based on solid grounds. The left doesn’t think the right is entitled to legal representation, however – or at the very least wants to make it extremely costly and to thus deter lawyers from taking those cases. This would destroy the entire basis for the adversarial legal system, of course. I hope that SCOTUS ultimately rules against this form of lawfare, which reached its height (so far) in something called “The 65 Project.”

I’ve written about Eastman many times before; you can see a list of the post links here. The term “travesty of justice” applies. I’ve also written about The 65 Project, which was set up by leftist lawyers to disbar any lawyer on the right who worked on challenges to the 2020 election: see this post, in which I quote Alan Dershowitz thusly :

Our system of justice is based on the John Adams standard: he too was attacked for defending the British soldiers accused of the Boston Massacre, but his representation of these accused killers now serves as a symbol of the 6th Amendment right to counsel. That symbol has now been endangered by The 65 Project and others who are participating in its McCarthyite chilling of lawyers who have been asked to represent Trump and those associated with him.

In that post, I closed with this:

For decades, the left screeched about McCarthyism. They got a lot of mileage out of that, but in reality their main objection seems to have been that they were the targets rather than the ones behind the threats.

NOTE: Another post I wrote on The 65 Project can be found here.

The courts and the Virginia referendum: redux

The New Neo Posted on by

Why was the lower court in Virginia so quick to rule the referendum unconstitutional? This wasn’t the referendum’s first rodeo through the Virginia court system; it had been ruled unconstitutional in a lower court before. See this article from February 2026:

A Tazewell County Circuit Court judge on Thursday granted an emergency injunction blocking what Republicans call an unlawful April 21 redistricting referendum while the case is heard in court.

Chief Judge Jack Hurley issued a temporary restraining order barring state and local election officials from moving forward with the planned vote. The move handed the plaintiffs in the case — the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee and U.S. Reps. Ben Cline, R-Botetourt County, and Morgan Griffith, R-Salem, — a brief reprieve in a high-stakes fight that could reshape Virginia’s congressional map ahead of the midterms.

It was the Virginia Supreme Court that lifted Hurley’s order and let the vote proceed, without ruling on the merits at all, thereby postponing a decision on the merits. But that set up a probable bias to rule it constitutional if the voters went for “yes,” which they did. Constitutionality shouldn’t be affected by that, but it sometimes is.

Who was the judge who issued the stay yesterday? You guessed it: Judge Hurley once again. No wonder he was ready with his ruling; it probably echoed what he’d said back in February. The real question is what the Virginia Supreme Court will now say. Will they refuse to buck the “will of the people”?

Oh, and note in that article I just linked that Hurley is being excoriated as an “activist judge” by the left. Pretty funny, considering how they adore their own activist judges:

Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones said the ruling from an ‘activist judge’ will immediately be appealed by his office

You remember Jay Jones, don’t you? The guy who wanted the GOP Speaker of the Virginia House at the time shot and killed, and wanted the Speaker’s children shot and killed? Yes, that Jay Jones, who won his election and is now the august AG of Virginia.

SPLC indictment and coverage: point and counterpoint

The New Neo Posted on by

The DOJ indictment of the SPLC is a huge deal on many levels – including the way the press is already spinning it. First there was the preemptive strike: the Atlantic hit piece on Kash Patel that was basically anonymously-sourced gossip. Now there is the coordinated approach of the MSM, which is to say oh, the SPLC was only doing the perfectly normal thing of paying informants, just like the FBI!

But you know what? The SPLC is not a government investigative agency such as the FBI, which has such powers. It’s a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization that deceived its donors and deceived the banks. Nor were the people it paid mere fringe players reporting back on activities. The SPLC’s activities involved being major and organizing players in the “white supremacist” functions it purported to be fighting.

Help create the problem and magnify it, and then raise gobs and gobs of money off it, lying all the way by creating fake companies to hide what you’re doing. Not just business as usual, although the MSM would like its readers (and/or headline-readers) to believe that.

The story has made me go back to look up certain details of the infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, the one that was so very useful to the Democrats and that Biden (or his speechwriters) made the centerpiece of his 2020 campaign. I found some fascinating things like this, from the late Scott Adams in 2023:

The 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was “an American intel op against Trump.”

Not by the government, as far as we know. But at least to a significant degree by the SPLC.

There’s also this, which means more to me now than it did back in 2017 when the rally occurred [emphasis mine]:

Prominent far-right figures in attendance included [Richard] Spencer, entertainer and internet troll Baked Alaska, lawyer Augustus Invictus, former Ku Klux Klan Imperial Wizard David Duke, Identity Evropa leader Nathan Damigo, Traditionalist Workers Party leader Matthew Heimbach … Right Side Broadcasting Network host Nick Fuentes …

Fuentes, grifter extraordinaire; I’m convinced he’s never actually been on the right, either.

Of course, even without this indictment it’s been clear that the SPLC has long been a propaganda outfit that falsely lists some groups as being on the “far” right or being “hate” groups when they’re not.

Who was it that the SPLC paid? The indictment doesn’t say exactly – that is, it doesn’t name names but just describes positions. But the indictment is well worth reading; you can find it here. I can’t cut and paste from it, but here’s my summary.

It mentions that “unbeknownst” to donors, the SPLC funded “leaders and organizers” of these groups – which doesn’t sound like the usual informants. The organization called them “field informants” but they actively promoted racist groups. One of them, for example, was part of the leadership chat group that helped organize the Unite the Right rally . “The field source made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees.” One of the “informants” was the “imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America”. Quite a few other were higher-ups in these organizations, not just nonentities.

To pay these so-called informants, the SPLC created covert bank accounts under fictitious entities, and they made false statements about the accounts and the entities. The indictment lists at least eight fictitious entities such as “Fox Photography” – all with no employees. The creation of these fake companies makes it quite clear that this was not just paying informants but a coverup about paying these people and something that was never disclosed to donors, plus something the SPLC knew was wrong. Why else lie and commit bank fraud? And they defrauded donors by saying the money they raised – and there was plenty of it – would be used to dismantle such groups.