I find this news deeply distressing. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has been indicted by a grand jury for money laundering, making false statements, and conspiracy:

A Grand Jury in Montgomery, Alabama, today returned an indictment charging the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) with 11 counts of wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering. The United States Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Alabama Northern Division filed two forfeiture actions to recover alleged proceeds of the organization’s fraud scheme. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigated this case with assistance from the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI).

“The SPLC is manufacturing racism to justify its existence,” said Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. “Using donor money to allegedly profit off Klansmen cannot go unchecked. This Department of Justice will hold the SPLC and every other fraudulent organization operating with the same deceptive playbook accountable. No entity is above the law.”

“The SPLC allegedly engaged in a massive fraud operation to deceive their donors, enrich themselves, and hide their deceptive operations from the public,” said FBI Director Kash Patel. “They lied to their donors, vowing to dismantle violent extremist groups, and actually turned around and paid the leaders of these very extremist groups – even utilizing the funds to have these groups facilitate the commission of state and federal crimes. That is illegal – and this is an ongoing investigation against all individuals involved.”

This is not a rumor or a partisan talking point; it is a formal indictment returned by a grand jury. That makes it serious. But it is still unproven—and that uncertainty is precisely what makes the situation so troubling. The reason I find it distressing is that no matter how it is interpreted there is very little good news here. As I see it there are three prospective explanations:

1. The SPLC’s—they were engaging in investigation and paying informants.

Even if this were an informant model, it raises difficult questions about moral hazard and indirect enablement. Money is fungible, and the line between infiltration and subsidization is not as clean as one might wish. Furthermore, citizens in a polity have an obligation to report crimes. That applies to journalists and NGOs as well. If they knew that crimes were to be committed and, worse, paid some of those doing the planning for those crimes, they were accomplices before the fact.

2. The DOJ’s explanation—the SPLC were committing crimes to have more to complain about.

According to the indictment starting in the 1980s, the SPLC began operating a covert network of individuals who were either associated with violent and extremist groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, or who had infiltrated violent extremist groups at the SPLC’s direction. Unbeknownst to donors, some of their donated money was being used to fund the leaders and organizers of racist groups at the same time that the SPLC was denouncing the same groups on its website.

“Donors gave their money believing they were supporting the fight against violent extremism,” said Acting United States Attorney Kevin Davidson. “As alleged, the SPLC instead diverted a portion of those funds to benefit individuals and groups they claimed to oppose. That kind of deception undermines public trust and social cohesion.”

Between 2014 and 2023, the SPLC secretly funneled more than $3 million in donated funds to individuals who were associated with various violent extremist groups…

Those groups included the Ku Klux Klan, the American NAZI Party, and Aryan Nation.

Long-lived organizations like the SPLC are subject to a temptation to drift from mission completion to mission maintenance. Has the SPLC fallen to that temptation?

3. The DOJ is engaging in a partisan hit job.

The SPLC, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and many others have made precisely that claim against the DOJ.

Every single one of those explanations would be horrid. Whichever explanation proves correct, something important has already been damaged.

That’s how David Ignatius describes the negotiations between the United States and Iran in his most recent Washington Post column. Mr. Ignatius seems vexed by what’s happening:

Given the stakes, you’d think that Trump would want de-escalation. But that’s not the way he operates. He likes disorder and destabilization — and seems ready to keep extending the state of uncertainty. He seems to think that creating and tolerating instability is his secret power. But with his extension he may have moved toward a more stable negotiation platform. The financial markets have been so convinced that Trump will make a deal in the end that they’ve been discounting the trash talk, reciprocal blockades and negotiating delays. Tuesday’s events make that look like a wise bet, but we’ll see.

As I see it there are several possible explanations for how things have progressed or, more accurately, failed to progress.

The first is the one that President Trump offered: he’s giving the Iranians time to agree among themselves. That reflects a reality that neither the Administration nor Mr. Ignatius have fully come to terms with: Iran does not speak with a single voice. Just as a start there are the mullahs, the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC), and the secular civilian authorities. The IRGC appears to benefit from sanctions and may even be gaining power as a consequence of the Israeli and American attacks against Iran. The clerical leadership prioritizes regime survival and ideological legitimacy. The civilian technocrats may want economic normalization.

With whom has the Administration been negotiating? Based on public reporting, the Administration appears to be negotiating primarily with civilian authorities. But there is little evidence those can bind the other power centers, and equally little evidence that those centers can reliably agree among themselves.

The second explanation is that this is another example of TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out).

The third, which Mr. Ignatius seems to lean into, is that this is simply the president’s way.

I suspect there are elements of truth in all of those explanations but, again, the simple reality is that even if you got all of Iran’s competing factions into a room, agreement, even if achieved, would be slow to form, fragile in substance, and uncertain in execution because it would rest on actors who cannot fully bind one another..

Ignatius gestures at an important point but doesn’t develop it: “bargaining” does not mean the same thing in Tehran as it does in Washington. Iranian negotiating practice places greater emphasis on patience, positional strength, and the avoidance of visible concession, and often proceeds through indirect signaling and extended back-and-forth rather than linear problem-solving. If you combine that with the fact that Iran does not speak with a single voice, the expectation of a single, clean, comprehensive deal begins to look less like a delayed outcome and more like a bad assumption.

My reaction to the editors’ of the Washington Post’s complaint about “Luigi Mangione copycats” was that, if a legal system were specifically designed not to deter would-be criminals, it could not achieve that objective much better than our present system.

To act as a deterrent a criminal justice system must be timely and sure not severe. Ours fails on all counts. In many jurisdictions, clearance rates for serious crimes remain low, and repeat arrests before adjudication are common. In practice many criminals are either never arrested or arrested and released dozens or even hundreds of times without ever being tried much less convicted. According to Pew Research only 2% of federal criminal defendants go to trial and most have been arrested before. Once arrested weeks, months, or even years may elapse before a trial and, even if a conviction results, the crime may have been pled down to something much more minor than the original charge.

There are modern systems, Japan’s for example, where the probability of apprehension and resolution is high, and that appears to have deterrent effects. The point isn’t to import their system wholesale but to note what they get right: certainty.

Luigi Mangione was arrested in December 2024. He should have been tried and, if the evidence against him supported it, convicted more than a year ago. The Sixth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees a right to a speedy trial. That should cut both ways. Neither prosecutors nor defense attorneys should be able to prolong the process indefinitely.

Judging by his most recent column in the Washington Post Fareed Zakaria has spent a week in Beijing and returned home having adopted key elements of Beijing’s framing. The column reads less like analysis than like a briefing from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Yes, China’s economy has grown enormously over the past 45 years. Yes, China is producing large numbers of solar panels, batteries, and electric vehicles. Much of that dominance has been produced by successively dumping products. Since its joining the World Trade Organization (WTO) China has had more dumping complaints than any other country. It has determinedly protected its large, internal market via import quotas and restrictions and encouraged its industries through export subsidies. To whatever extent being an unscrupulous, ruthless competitor is “taking the long view”, yes, China has taken the long view. While scale, labor costs, and supply chain integration explain part of China’s rise, its systematic use of protected domestic marketsm export subsidization, and dumping have been central.

For another view, consult China’s neighbors. They have a host of complaints from China’s encroachment on their territory to China’s poisoning reefs by dumping cyanide into the ocean. Making sweeping claims of its ownership of the South China Sea, it has occupied much of that sea, even building artificial islands to occupy.

I am not claiming that China is bad while we are good. My claim is that the Chinese authorities are focused unswervingly on China’s near-term benefit. The United States, on the other hand, only episodically pursues its own best interests. For decades we pursued the largely neoliberal “Washington Consensus” in terms of trade policy which was not in our near-term interest. Then President Trump’s tariffs whipsawed in the opposite direction which was also not in our near-term interest. Is the war against Iran in the U. S. best interest? The honest truth is we don’t know.

China’s advantage is not that it takes the ‘long view’ but that it takes a view and sticks to it. The United States alternates between frameworks, often abandoning one before its consequences are fully realized.

China has had no regime change. The party Xi leads is the same party that conducted the Cultural Revolution. An analysis of China’s “long game” that treats this history as irrelevant isn’t just incomplete it’s asking us to evaluate a player’s trustworthiness while ignoring everything we know about how they’ve played before.

Yesterday I saw a post with a title along the lines of “Gen Z mistrusts AI despite young generations’ acceptance of technology” and I wondered if that were actually true. Are “younger generations” actually more likely to adopt new technology?

Consider the graphic above. It illustrates the time from invention to adoption by 90% of the American population. Why 90%? Because I think it’s as good a metric as any to identify when a technology has been adopted.

The graphic shows something simpler and more important than generational behavior: the speed of adoption varies enormously across technologies and eras. The telephone took decades to reach saturation; the smartphone reached it in little more than a decade. That difference has more to do with infrastructure, cost, and network effects than with the attitudes of “younger generations”.

I think the notion that Gen Z’s skepticism about AI (assuming it’s true) is a good story but it doesn’t relate to what has actually happened over the last 50 years particularly well. Baby Boomers were, in effect, “optimistic from birth,” not because of anything innate, but because they were formed in an environment where optimism was the default posture. Gen Z, by contrast, has been formed in a period where pessimism is the ambient assumption. Younger generations are not inherently more likely to adopt technology; they reflect the broader cultural and economic environment in which they are formed.

I will suggest another story.

Starting around 1910 America went through a remarkable period of technological optimism. Yes, there were problems but any problem could be solved with the creative application of technology. Starting in the 1960s with authors like Rachel Carson and illustrated most graphically by the sharp decrease in aerospace spending in the 1970s.

That period of technological optimism was supplanted by one of technological pessimism, illustrated by authors like Paul R. Ehrlich. That didn’t occur all at once. At first we just had priorities more pressing than going to the moon. Over time that transmogrified into attitudes like NIMBY and even BANANA.

Maybe Artemis II’s circling the moon will spur a new wave of optimism. Fingers crossed. The future doesn’t just belong to the young. It belongs to people who identify problems and solve them with the clever application of technology.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Henry Sokolsky argues that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty does not give Iran an inalienable right to enrich uranium and that the U. S. can rally the world against Iran by arguing that it does not. Much as I might wish he were right, I do not believe he is. Here’s Article IV of the NPT:

**Article IV**

1. Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination and in conformity with Articles I and II of this Treaty.

2. All the Parties to the Treaty undertake to facilitate, and have the right to participate in, the fullest possible exchange of equipment, materials and scientific and technological information for the peaceful uses of nuclear energy. Parties to the Treaty in a position to do so shall also cooperate in contributing alone or together with other States or international organizations to the further development of the applications of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, especially in the territories of non-nuclear-weapon States Party to the Treaty, with due consideration for the needs of the developing areas of the world.

Here is the kernel of his argument:

But there’s another reason to push back on the “right” to enrich: There is no such right. The NPT makes no reference to uranium enrichment or plutonium recycling. These nuclear activities and the weapons materials they could produce can bring nations to the brink of building bombs.

Nuclear fuel-making entails processing liquids, gases and powders, molecules of weapons-usable uranium and plutonium that are nearly impossible to track. As for reliable, timely detection of military diversions, forget it. By the time inspectors might spot missing materials, a bomb might have already been built.

The NPT’s negotiators understood this. When Mexican delegates proposed an amendment to guarantee access to the “entire fuel cycle,” the convention rejected it. The British, Swedish and Burmese delegates explained why: Nuclear fuel-making was too close to bomb-making ever to be “peaceful.” They had a point. That’s why Mr. Trump is right to demand that Iran surrender all its enriched uranium and decommission its nuclear fuel-making plants.

The problem is the negotiating history cannot override the treaty’s text. At most, it can clarify ambiguity. Here, the text grants a broad right to peaceful nuclear activity without excluding enrichment. To read an exclusion into the treaty based on rejected proposals is to add a limitation the parties chose not to include.

As signatories the NPT gives them the right to pursue nuclear energy “for peaceful purposes”. Although the IAEA is skeptical of the Iranian regime’s motives it has not found evidence of an active nuclear weapons program in Iran and said it cannot fully verify the program’s peaceful nature. That leaves us with a treaty that grants a right conditioned on peaceful use, but no decisive mechanism for determining when that condition has been violated.

Where does the discussion go from there? If the United States wishes to rally international support, it must do so on the basis of clear evidence of non-compliance, not by reading prohibitions into the treaty that are not there. Absent that, the argument is unlikely to persuade those not already inclined to agree.

In his Washington Post column Marc Thiessen introduced something I found thought-provoking:

The blockade allows the president to twist Iran’s arm to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Moreover, because he is now blocking Iran’s energy exports to China, which gets 45 to 50 percent of its crude oil and 30 percent of its liquefied natural gas imports through the strait, Trump can give Beijing incentive to join him in that pressure campaign.

That evoked a two-part question.

First, should China offer to help the U. S. keep the Straits of Hormuz open? I think it would be in China’s interest to do so. Do the Chinese? There are risks as well as benefits in the move. It could preserve China’s access to Middle Eastern oil and confirm China’s position as a world power. But it would also be seen as abandoning Iran and there is always the risk of losing a ship which would be embarrassing to say the least. It would also implicitly accept blockade as a tool of statecraft. That would have implications for Taiwan. Perhaps China could secure the rewards without bearing the risks.

It also assumes Beijing would see the pressure as directed at Iran rather than itself.

The second is should the U. S. accept China’s help? I think it should but, as I have said before, I have difficulty in figuring out what President Trump will do. Whether the U.S. would accept such help depends on whether it prioritizes immediate leverage over long-term strategic position. There are risks and rewards here, too. It would drive a wedge between China and Iran but it would, as noted, confirm China’s position as a world power. It also would establish a precedent for shared spheres of influence.

Pope Leo XIV and President Trump have been engaging in a war of words. Like many political figures before him, President Trump is severely underestimating Leo. No, he does not command any divisions. But he does have the oldest existing “bully pulpit”.

I agree with Leo in this. The war against Iran is not a just war, as I have pointed out in detail. War is destruction and death. It should be a last resort, not just one more arrow in a foreign policy quiver.

That doesn’t imply that Trump is entirely wrong. Leo is in a long line of popes that have declined to condemn even the most murderous, reprehensible of regimes. It was true of Pius XII with respect to Hitler. It was true of John Paul II with respect to China. They have routinely prioritized diplomatic access over moral clarity. I try to refrain from psychoanalyzing anyone but I think popes see themselves as “playing a long game”. That’s true but I don’t believe that this particular game is in the Church’s favor. When the Church condemns some forms of state violence while remaining silent or muted on others, it inevitably appears to be taking sides. That erodes the very moral authority on which its influence depends.

The president is thinking in news cycles while the pope thinks in centuries. As in virtually all such exchanges in the last century or so, they are talking past one another.

The topic of the day seems to be the defeat of Viktor Orbán in Hungary. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal all have editorials, columns, and op-eds about it. Rather than commenting on specific opinion pieces, I’m going to comment on their existence.

Hungary has a population of fewer than 10 million people. These people speak a distinct language, unrelated to any of the languages of their neighbors. From the 16th to the 20th centuries it was ruled by a succession of empires, Ottoman, Hapsburg, etc. It should not be surprising if at least some Hungarians view the European Union in that same light.

Most of the opinion pieces I have seen are primarily equal and opposite reactions to President Trump’s verbal support for Orbán and attempting to draw lessons from that election for the United States. Most of their writers clearly know little about Hungarian politics or Hungary’s problems, treating the country primarily as a cautionary tale or a model for American politics. How can such a small country with a culture of its own continue to survive with a declining population? How can it accept mass immigration of immigrants who don’t speak their language or even have much interest in doing so? The election is over but those challenges remain.

Hungary is not being discussed on its own terms. It is being used. Migrants use it as a transit country on their way to Germany or Sweden. American commentators use it as a proxy for their own domestic arguments. In both cases Hungary is a means to an end rather than an object of understanding.

When I speak even a little Hungarian to my Hungarian-speaking neighbors, they are astonished and delighted. That reaction says more about the country’s linguistic isolation than any number of policy papers. It also helps explain why assimilation is not a trivial matter there.

I am American. I did not support Orbán. I do not support his successor. Hungary’s problems are its own and I’m content to let the Hungarians solve their own problems in their own ways. I wish more Americans would do the same.