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.

It’s just a circuit court, and might be overruled, but the Virginia gerrymander vote has been declared unconstitutional

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s a start:

A circuit court in Virginia just ruled that the newly passed but incredibly biased gerrymandered congressional map is unconstitutional.

Former Virginia attorney general and Homeland Security official Ken Cuccinelli II posted on X Wednesday about the gerrymandered map, “UPDATE on referendum lawsuits: The Tazewell Circuit Court just ruled the referendum unconstitutional. The Judge entered an injunction blocking certification of the election & denied a motion to stay pending appeal. A final order will be entered once drafted, & it will be immediately appealed.”

It sure will. The Virginia Supreme Court refused to rule on the vote in advance, but now they will almost certainly need to do so. Of course, it will be more difficult to say it’s unconstitutional once “the people have spoken.” Difficult, but not impossible. It sounds to me like a timid court, though. Will the case ultimately be heard by SCOTUS?

I wonder who in Iran made this decision, and why

The New Neo Posted on by

An announcement from Trump:

President Trump on Wednesday said Iran will not executive eight Iranian women accused being involved in protests against the regime, as previously planned.

“Very good news! I have just been informed that the eight women protestors who were going to be executed tonight in Iran will no longer be killed,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post.

The president said four of the women will be immediately released and the four others will be sentenced to one month in prison, a day after he urged the Islamic Republic to halt their executions.

Perhaps the regime never intended to go through with it in the first place. Now they get to look so very magnanimous.

There is no reason to trust them on anything, period.

[ADDENDUM: Ace writes about some Iranian attacks on ships going through the Strait, as well as the sparing of the eight women. First, on the women:

Iran can take an infinite number of its own people hostage and then release them as a “concession.

Exactly; they are hostages, and Iran is completely in control of their apprehension and their release. What a fun game.

Plus, on the ships:

Iran is attacking shipping. This is not them saying “SOS.” This is Iran attacking shipping.

Yes, they are collapsing financially — but that will take a while. In the meantime, they’re attacking shipping, and for some reason, we’re not blowing up their attack boats.

Because of the “cease-fire” that only we are observing.

Why are we not attacking the fast attack boats? Why are we not dropping air-burst bombs over their harbors?

I think we will be. But I’m not sure, and I agree with Ace that at this point our forbearance seems ridiculous. However, there may be things going on behind the scenes of which I’m unaware: time for assets to get into place (either ours or Israel’s), or perhaps some machinations regarding the Gulf States.]

The significance of the Virginia redistricting vote

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I wrote a post on the results of the Virginia referendum, and I have more to say today.

But first I’ll quote commenter “JohnTyler” on the subject:

This Virginia redistricting is just a preliminary event and demonstrates, yet again, that demonkrats play hardball and they will do absolutely anything to gain and retain power.

When the Dems take Congress and the presidency they will pack the SCOTUS, bring in PR and DC as states, formally allow non-citizens to vote in any and all elections, open up the borders to allow in millions of illegals, get rid of the filibuster, arrest and indict Trump and any of his main supporters, totally nationalize health care, “informally” declare that Israel is a pariah state, re-establish US /Iranian relations as it was during the Obama era, etc. etc.

It will be a bloodless coup d’etat, because the constitution will be totally ignored as a result of the packing of the SCOTUS; imagine a bunch of Justice Jacksons on the court.

But hey, it’s up to the voters and it is the voters that will destroy our constitutional republic.

California, NYC and Chicago are just mini-examples of what will occur in the USA when the demonrats take power.

Except for the fact that I don’t use words like “demonrats,” I’m in agreement and have been saying it for many years. Leftists are True Believers and fanatics and one of the things in which they believe is that the ends justify the means. “The ends” equal permanent power for themselves.

Another True Believer – although in a different, strangely related, cause – is Erdogan of Turkey, who famously said:

Democracy is like a tram. You ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off.

That tram route can include fraudulent votes and misleading wording for a referendum such as the one in Virginia. And the stepping-off doesn’t have to be overt, because once the game is rigged, and then non-Democrats of the state are disenfranchised, you can stay on the tram indefinitely.

That’s been obvious about the Democrats for many many years, at least fifteen and probably many more. After the 2020 election, I thought it all would happen. But the Democrat majority in the Senate was small enough that Sinema and Manchin were able to thwart the plans. Now they’re gone and it’s the GOP with the tiny majority and people such as Murkowski to do the blocking. Plus, the GOP is not as fanatically devoted to bending the rules nor as united in aims.

What happened in Virginia? I see a lot of comments around the blogosphere from people on the right (or perhaps concern trolls) saying the Republicans did nothing to stop this. Well, they obviously didn’t do enough. But they didn’t do nothing. In my previous post on the subject, I wrote about the GOP lawsuit that failed when the Virginia Supreme Court refused to rule until the vote had occurred. In addition, there are allegations about fraudulent mail-in ballots in Fairfax County putting the Democrats over the top at the last minute; I have no idea if it’s true but I assume that even if it is it can’t be proven.

Plus:

Once the Democrats decided to set up this referendum to allow a bare majority of voters to permit the overturning of an amendment establishing a bipartisan redistricting body, and once the Virginia Supreme Court allowed the referendum vote to go forward despite a GOP challenge, what could the GOP do? I don’t think more money was the answer, although it wouldn’t have hurt. But at the moment, the reality is that Democrats hold the majority in Virginia – or effectively control the vote even if they don’t, because they control the populous counties and the voting process there.

Trump pauses the bombs but continues the blockade

The New Neo Posted on by

The responses to this message of Trump’s are brutal – lots of accusations of cowardice and the usual TACO stuff:

It may be that the economic approach will bear some fruit. Interesting observation here:

You might think that Iran would be happy after President Donald Trump announced that he would be continuing the ceasefire until their proposal is submitted and discussions are concluded.

But they actually seem very mad about the ceasefire being extended.

Why? Because the blockade continues. Just because they aren’t having bombs dropped on them doesn’t mean they aren’t still getting choked out by the blockade.

From Scott Bessent:

“In a matter of days, Kharg Island storage will be full and the fragile Iranian oil wells will be shut in. Constraining Iran’s maritime trade directly targets the regime’s primary revenue lifelines.

“The @USTreasury will continue to apply maximum pressure through Economic Fury to systematically degrade Tehran’s ability to generate, move, and repatriate funds. Any person or vessel facilitating these flows—through covert trade and finance—risks exposure to U.S. sanctions. We continue to freeze the funds stolen by the corrupt leadership on behalf of the people of Iran.”

I don’t pretend to be able to predict what will happen.

[NOTE: Tomorrow or the next day I hope to write some longer reflections on the dilemmas presented by this war.]

Virginia Democrats vote for the mother of all gerrymanders

The New Neo Posted on by

They tried it because they’re about grabbing power by hook or by crook, and they succeeded:

Virginia voters went to the polls Tuesday to vote on a referendum that would empower the Democrat-controlled state legislature to redraw the commonwealth’s congressional map.

The vote was in favor, and this means that according to the plan the number of Democrat to Republican districts in the state will change from 6-5 to 10-1. The 6:5 ratio pretty much reflected the actual proportions of Democrats to Republicans in the state, whereas 10:1 is ridiculously skewed. But only the courts could stop this now. The legal challenge:

The case centers on whether lawmakers violated the Virginia Constitution by keeping the special session open for nearly two years to pass the redistricting measure, a move critics say was an abuse of legislative authority. …

Democrats have argued to the Supreme Court that the General Assembly has broad constitutional authority to manage its own legislative sessions and procedures, including extending a special session, and that nothing in the Virginia Constitution explicitly prohibits how this particular session was handled.

The Honest Elections Project’s brief argues otherwise.

“If you look at what the law requires, it’s very clear that Governor Spanberger and her allies are steamrolling the process to try to launch a power grab,” Snead said.

The Democrats in Virginia are saying “the Republicans made us do it!” – arguing this is only a response to GOP efforts at redisticting.

More:

The [Virginia] Supreme Court decided in March to allow the referendum vote to move forward while it considers Republicans’ arguments challenging how the map amendment was passed by way of a special session.

“It is the process, not the outcome, of this effort that we may ultimately have to address,” the state’s highest court found. “Issuing an injunction to keep Virginians from the polls is not the proper way to make this decision.”

But an ounce of prevention would have been worth a lot of cure. Perhaps the Court hoped the populace would vote against it, and then the Court wouldn’t even have to rule. Now, of course, do they vote to undo the will of the people? I doubt it; here’s why:

Political and legal experts in Virginia agree the state Supreme Court is not overtly ideological, with many describing it as “small-c conservative,” leaning heavily on tradition and precedent rather than handing down ideologically right-wing rulings. And many observers say the court is wary of wading too heavily into political fights. But this time, it’s unavoidable.

“It’s kind of a state Supreme Court tradition to stay away from political matters whenever they can. They like to leave the legislating to the legislature. …

Virginia is one of only two states where the legislature elects Supreme Court justices. Because the state has had divided control for much of the past quarter century, the balance of the court’s justices were appointed by bipartisan compromise. The court’s current seven members include one justice who was elected when Democrats had sole control of the General Assembly, three when Republicans controlled both chambers and three when control of the legislature was split.

Some further background:

While state legislatures can redraw congressional maps in some states, Virginia voters in 2020 approved a constitutional amendment that created a bipartisan commission to draw their state’s map. Tuesday’s referendum set aside the current maps drawn up by the commission, replacing them with maps that were drawn by the Democratic-controlled General Assembly. The previous system will be put back in place after the 2030 census.

It’s so transparently unfair, basically disenfranchising nearly half the state. But it might be allowed to proceed. Would the case then end up in the US Supreme Court?

Iran pause

The New Neo Posted on by

I had in mind a longish post on Iran, but various obligations have intervened for a few hours in the real as opposed to virtual world. So this is a post for you to discuss Iran and related subjects.

I still do plan to write a post this evening, on this and perhaps one other topic. So please stay tuned.