Scott

FDR rolled out unconditional surrender at Casablanca in January 1943, announcing the Allies would accept "nothing less than the unconditional surrender of Germany, Japan, and Italy." He sprang it on the press almost casually, and the striking thing is how little hard analysis sat behind a decision that would shape the next two and a half years of killing. Churchill was blindsided by the public phrasing and uneasy about it. FDR's military planners weren't consulted in any serious way. For a slogan that locked in the terms of the bloodiest war in history, it was improvised to a degree that should give anyone pause. The stated rationale was avoiding another "stab in the back" myth like the one that poisoned Germany after 1918. Fine as far as it goes, but it treats a propaganda concern as worth an open-ended commitment to total war, and it assumes the only alternative to "unconditional" was a soft 1918-style armistice. That's a false choice. You can demand a hard, decisive peace without publicly slamming every door, which is roughly what good diplomacy is supposed to do. Instead FDR handed the enemy a gift. And the enemy used it. Goebbels could not have scripted a better line than "the Allies want to annihilate you, so there is no choice but to fight to the last man." Unconditional surrender let the Nazi regime tell ordinary Germans, accurately, that defeat meant total occupation and there was nothing to negotiate, so they might as well die in the rubble. The policy didn't cause German fanaticism, but it removed every incentive to stop, and the brutal winter of 1944 to 1945, the months that ran up the highest casualty counts of the entire European war, came after the outcome was no longer in doubt. People died by the hundreds of thousands in a war whose result was already settled, and the policy gave both sides a reason to keep grinding. The cruelest cost lands on the German resistance. The officers behind the July 20 plot to kill Hitler were trying to sell a coup on the promise that they could deliver a survivable peace. FDR's policy meant they had nothing to offer their own countrymen. Overthrow Hitler and the result is identical total surrender, so why hang for it. You can argue the plot was a long shot, but the people actually risking their necks to end the Third Reich from the inside said plainly that Washington's rigidity was strangling them, and FDR didn't care to adjust. The Pacific is where the critique gets genuinely damning, because it runs straight into the atomic bomb. Japan's one real condition was keeping the Emperor. The "unconditional" framing left Hirohito's fate ominously open, which gave the Japanese war faction exactly the argument it needed to fight on through the summer of 1945. Here's the part that should sit badly: after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the United States turned around and let Japan keep the Emperor anyway, in a ceremonial role. The very concession that might have ended the war was handed over after the cities burned rather than before. Defenders insist Japan wouldn't have quit over an earlier guarantee, and that's contestable, but the basic shape of it is hard to wave away. A rigid doctrine helped foreclose the diplomatic path right up to the moment the bombs made the question moot. The honest verdict is that the policy bought certainty, no revival myth, total defeat, full occupation, and it bought that certainty in blood. FDR chose the cleanest possible ending over the cheapest possible one, and a lot of that bill, in the ruins of Germany and over two Japanese cities, was paid by people who were never going to change the outcome either way. Calling that "brilliant" requires not counting the graves.

@GarysheffieldJr I watched 300 MLB games & went to 10 Yankee games per year. On 4/2/2021 they announced they were moving the All Star game from Atlanta. I turned off the Red Sox game & have not watched since. They lost people like me, but they still have the men who wear dresses demographic.

@Husky14Scott They aren’t apologizing for cowering to internet social justice warriors. They’re under the impression if they fail to oblige those fans will leave. They won’t. Just like they didn’t leave Starbucks.

My personal opinion on where baseball should go: 1. No salary cap (keeping tax thresholds perhaps with exponentially steeper penalties) 2. Contracts to a max of 6 years 3. Contracts can go 8 years if signed during first two years of career (early) 4. Max contract salary of $40M annually 5. Free agency hits after 4 seasons forgoing current arbitration system 6. Salary floor of $160M …any team that fails to accommodate can do so at the expense of their first round selection the following season (will be drawn to a random team that missed postseason) 7. Cannot receive contracts that surpass age-40 season unless signing what will be a max of 2-years signing after 40th birthday Conclusion: I like the idea of a competitive balance but think it’s overrated D-Backs-Rangers played in the 2023 WS and no one watched while folks say LA ruined the league with exploding postseason ratings Baseball and sports in general should be more so about entertainment than fairness

"FDR handled WW2 brilliantly" is the most unearned A grade in American history. he signed Executive Order 9066 and locked up 120,000 Japanese Americans, two thirds of them US citizens, in camps. a federal commission later ruled there was not one documented case of espionage among them. the official verdict was "a grave injustice" driven by "race prejudice and war hysteria." he turned away the SS St. Louis in 1939, sending 900 Jewish refugees back toward the Holocaust. his State Department sat on visa quotas while Europe burned. he didn't create the War Refugee Board until 1944, after years of pressure, and only after the bulk of the killing was already done. when the War Refugee Board asked to bomb the rail lines to Auschwitz, the administration said no, too much "diversion of resources." then at Yalta he sat across from Stalin, took his word on "free elections," and walked away having effectively signed off on Soviet control of Poland and half of Europe. those elections never happened. that's your Cold War, prepaid. winning a war the size of the planet with the GDP of the planet isn't genius. it's arithmetic. "brilliant" is doing a lot of lifting for a guy who got the biggest calls of the century wrong

FDR is the most overrated president in American history and it is not close. People treat him like a saint. The reality is he inherited a recession and turned it into the longest depression in the history of the developed world. Every other major economy on earth recovered faster than the United States did under FDR. Sit with that. We had the most resources, the most industry, the most capacity, and we recovered slower than countries that got bombed. Unemployment was still 19% in 1938. Six years into the New Deal. Six years of "bold experimentation" and one in five Americans still could not find work. Why? Because his policies were economically illiterate. The NIRA cartelized entire industries and made it illegal to lower prices during a deflationary collapse. He paid farmers to slaughter livestock and plow under crops while people stood in bread lines. He launched a war on business so aggressive that investment dried up because nobody knew what insane rule was coming next. Even his own Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, admitted in 1939 that they had spent enormous sums and "it does not work" and that unemployment was as high as when they started. Then in 1937 his policies triggered a second brutal crash so embarrassing the textbooks gave it its own polite little nickname, the "Roosevelt Recession," so they would not have to attach his name to the failure in the obvious way. A UCLA study in 2004 concluded the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression by roughly seven years. Seven years of extra suffering sold to you as heroism. So what actually saved the economy? Not the alphabet agencies. Not the fireside chats. A world war. Twelve million men shipped overseas and the entire planet's industrial competition reduced to rubble. That is the "recovery." That is the legacy. Strip away Pearl Harbor and FDR is a guy who took a bad recession and stretched it into a decade of misery with bad economics and a cult of personality. He is not ranked on results. He is ranked on the luck of being in the chair when Hitler invaded Poland. Greatest marketing job in the history of the presidency. Nothing more.

@MichaelARothman Just another empty threat from Mr. TACO!

𝐓𝐑𝐔𝐌𝐏 𝐓𝐎 𝐈𝐑𝐀𝐍’𝐒 𝐍𝐄𝐆𝐎𝐓𝐈𝐀𝐓𝐎𝐑𝐒: “𝐘𝐎𝐔 𝐂𝐋𝐎𝐒𝐄 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐒𝐓𝐑𝐀𝐈𝐓 𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐘𝐎𝐔 𝐖𝐎𝐍’𝐓 𝐇𝐀𝐕𝐄 𝐀 𝐂𝐎𝐔𝐍𝐓𝐑𝐘” While JD Vance, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner sat across the table from Iranian negotiators in Switzerland Saturday, President Trump was on the phone with Fox News delivering a message that no Iranian official would misread as diplomatic. Trump told Fox that he spoke with Iranian officials overnight and issued a direct personal warning. “𝘠𝘰𝘶 𝘤𝘭𝘰𝘴𝘦 𝘪𝘵 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘸𝘰𝘯’𝘵 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘢 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘺,” he told them. “𝘠𝘰𝘶 𝘸𝘰𝘯’𝘵 𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘯 𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘪𝘵 𝘣𝘢𝘤𝘬 𝘵𝘰 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘦𝘧𝘧𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘺.” That was before Iran’s President Massoud Pazeshkian made his own statement from the periphery, declaring that Iran would “𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘨𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘶𝘱 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘦𝘯𝘳𝘪𝘤𝘩𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵” and accusing Trump of making a “100-𝘥𝘦𝘨𝘳𝘦𝘦 𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘯” from his own position. Trump responded to Pazeshkian on Fox by name. “𝘏𝘦 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘸𝘢𝘵𝘤𝘩 𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘮𝘰𝘶𝘵𝘩. 𝘏𝘦 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘴𝘩𝘢𝘱𝘦 𝘶𝘱, 𝘰𝘳 𝘸𝘦’𝘭𝘭 𝘵𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘺.” Trump also put a specific mechanism on the table for after the 60-day window: if Iran doesn’t follow through, the United States becomes the 𝐠𝐮𝐚𝐫𝐝𝐢𝐚𝐧 𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐥 𝐨𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐒𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐭 𝐨𝐟 𝐇𝐨𝐫𝐦𝐮𝐳 — controlling ship traffic and collecting a 𝟐𝟎 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐜𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐭𝐨𝐥𝐥 𝐨𝐧 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐛𝐚𝐫𝐫𝐞𝐥 of oil that moves through it. That’s not a sanction or a tariff. It’s a takeover. Iran is at the negotiating table. Vance is in the room. And Trump is telling Fox News that if the Iranians close the strait, they won’t make it home. The warning is personal, the consequences are specified, and the 60-day clock is already running. 𝐓𝐫𝐮𝐦𝐩 𝐭𝐨𝐥𝐝 𝐈𝐫𝐚𝐧 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐡𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐞𝐧𝐬 𝐢𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐜𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐢𝐭: 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐲 𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐢𝐫 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐲.

@itsrosesm FDR

Be completely truthful: Who was the worst President the United States has ever had?

@joncoopertweets 2 of the 4 hate this country

Imagine Trump ever being invited to join a photo like this — not in a million years. Four presidents. Zero drama. Just smiles, respect, and a shared love of country. 🇺🇸

@CamRMacKenzie @factpostnews Which Roosevelt? As dumb as Trump is, he is still way smarter than FDR.

@factpostnews He absolutely would be the absolute last on the list. He is nowhere in the realm of Washington, Madison, Jefferson, Lincoln, Coolidge, Roosevelt, etc. This is the most ridiculous of all the sycophantic talking points all of MAGA has made.

Vance claims Donald Trump has the highest IQ of any president in history: If you give Donald Trump an IQ test with the other 45 presidents that the United States has had, he'd be either near the top or at the top

I’ll say it again: expecting behavioural change from this regime is like being attacked by a bunch of zombies and politely asking them if they’d consider a vegan diet.

How @TheDemocrats Steal Elections (in 5 Minutes) cc: @spencerpratt x.com/MKnowlesShow/s…

Millionaire here. Let me explain how Elon Musk became so rich. He is 10x smarter than me and I’m 10x smarter than you. That combined with one small piece of factual knowledge you haven’t learned yet: Marx and Mao were retarded.

@alx @springsteen Springsteen is (ironically) an America-hating idiot and billionaire hypocrite

@RedSox Big Papi. Legendary cheater.

Welcoming these 6 legends back to Fenway Park!

@JonahDispatch @KenGardner11 More importantly, no one can survive 4 years of working for Trump without eventually getting blamed for some Trump screw-up and having MAGA turn on them.

Preach! I’ve been pushing back on this presumptive nominee, heir apparent, air of inevitability crap for a year. Obviously he’s got a chance, but he also has obvious deficits and challenges that others don’t, starting with the fact that running on 4 more years as a sitting VP to a very unpopular president is an uphill struggle. It *might* not stop him from getting the nomination, but if looks like he’d be the worst placed candidate to win the general, a lot of normie Republicans will be like “why vote for someone I don’t like who can’t win in 28?”

There is absolutely no fact of reality, none whatsoever, that necessitates JD Vance being the GOP nominee or even that he will be the favorite to win the GOP nomination by early 2028.

@TodayinHistory This right here is why he will never be elected President. Over the last 5 election cycles the American people have shown that they prefer dumb people who say dumb things. Marco is way too smart to ever win a Presidential election.

This may be the most articulate response I’ve ever heard to this question.

Bill - I won’t speak for National Review, or for “all conservatives” annoyed at Bulwark. And I happen to agree with you that there are too many who started in righteous opposition who got moved by dollars or social pressure to fold. But, in all fairness, I have never seen a conservative - a National Review type - not one - express disappointment with people for “staying consistent in their opposition to Trump” … The issue people like me are so disillusioned over is why so many of those got up on one side of the horse only to fall off on the other. There simply has to be a way to have not let Trump move one’s self off of their belief system, in either direction. No rational person can listen to Tim Miller and say, “he’s just doing good, conservative opposition to Trump.” It’s just flat out left wing demagoguery. I believe there remains a principled remnant that will see a resurgence of political relevance when this entire embarrassing saga comes to an end. But that remnant must be filled by people of a true north - who didn’t abandon their views on decency, civility, moral clarity, or economic liberty in this decade - OR their views on life, family, foreign policy, or judicial restraint. I know where to go find that sort of Buckleyite rigor. And I know the future belongs to the truth tellers.

@JoshBaker261 @DonaldJTrumpJr In her defense, she was stupid long before she got old.

@DonaldJTrumpJr the only seat she needs to hold is the one in the nursing home...this is exactly why we need age and or term limits in government

FATALITY 🔥🔥🔥

@gothburz @Heminator That’s a very long post just to tell the world that you are incredibly stupid.

I have given the Southern Poverty Law Center $340 a year since 2014. That is $3,400. Ten years. Automatic withdrawal. I set it and forgot it, the way you forget a subscription to a meditation app you stopped using in February. I did not donate to fight hate. I donated to stop thinking about hate. Those are different products. The SPLC sold the second one. I found out last Monday. Eleven federal counts. Wire fraud. Bank fraud. Money laundering. The indictment is 47 pages. I read every one. I read them the way you read a biopsy result when the doctor's voice changes mid-sentence. Here is what my $340 a year bought: The SPLC paid informants inside the Ku Klux Klan. They paid informants inside the neo-Nazi National Alliance. They did this for forty years. They called them "the Fs." Field sources. Internal codename. It sounds like a file folder designation because it was a file folder designation. One informant received over one million dollars between 2014 and 2023. Let me say that differently. In the same calendar years I was setting up my automatic donation to fight white supremacy, the Southern Poverty Law Center was cutting checks to a man inside the National Alliance. He was being paid more per year than I make. He was inside a neo-Nazi organization. My money and his money came from the same account. I paid them to fight the people they were paying. Somewhere in Montgomery, a line item balanced perfectly. They sent me a thank-you card. It is still on my refrigerator. It has a stock photo of diverse children holding hands and it says "Because of you, hate has no safe harbor." It is next to my daughter's finger painting of a horse and a Thai takeout menu from a place that closed during COVID. The card cost eleven cents to print. The informant inside the National Alliance cost a hundred and eleven thousand dollars a year. Same fund. The shell accounts were named "Fox Photography" and "Rare Books Warehouse." I need you to sit with "Rare Books Warehouse." Someone at the SPLC — someone with a title and a parking space and a benefits package funded by people like me — sat in a conference room and said "What should we name the shell company we use to pay neo-Nazis?" and someone else said "Rare Books Warehouse" and everyone in the room nodded. There were blueberry muffins. There is always blueberry muffins. Somewhere in that conference room there was a whiteboard that said "Q3 FIELD SOURCE DISBURSEMENT" in blue dry-erase marker, and under it "Fox Photography" with a checkmark next to it. I know this because I know how conference rooms work. The muffins are always blueberry. Another informant was paid $270,000. He was in the Charlottesville "Unite the Right" planning chat. He was in the chat where they planned the rally where Heather Heyer was murdered. The SPLC knew he was in the chat. The SPLC was paying him to be in the chat. After Charlottesville, the SPLC sent me a fundraising email. The subject line said "This Is Why We Fight." I screenshotted it and posted it to Instagram with a black square. Seven people liked it. One of them was my therapist. I opened the email. It said the events in Charlottesville proved why the SPLC's work was more important than ever. It had a red donate button. I clicked the red donate button. I felt like I was doing something. I was doing something. I was replenishing the fund that paid the man who sat in the chat where they planned Charlottesville. The fundraising email did not mention the informant. The fundraising email did not mention "Fox Photography." The fundraising email did not mention that the SPLC had a man inside the planning and chose to use him as an intelligence asset rather than, say, calling the police. The fundraising email said "fighting hate requires resources." I provided resources. The resources fought hate by funding it. My donation subsidized both sides of the same transaction. I was the float. I put the bumper sticker on my car. The one that said HATE HAS NO HOME HERE. I put it on a 2016 Subaru Outback, Wilderness Green Metallic, which is the most SPLC-donor car in the history of motor vehicles. Hate had no home in my car. Hate had a condo in Montgomery, Alabama, a shell account called Fox Photography, and a direct deposit schedule. My partner asked me once — this was 2018 — "Do you actually know what they do with the money?" I said "They fight hate." She said "How?" I said "They track hate groups and take them to court." She said "Have they taken anyone to court recently?" I changed the subject. I changed the subject the way you change the subject when you realize the answer is no but the bumper sticker is already on the car and you used it as your profile picture on two platforms. My tax preparer asked about it. April 2019. She said "Oh, the SPLC, good for you." I got thirty-seven dollars back on my taxes. The informant inside the National Alliance got a hundred and eleven thousand. We both filed in April. Mine went to H&R Block. His went through Fox Photography. The IRS treated both of us like philanthropists. The SPLC's endowment is $732 million. I need you to hold that number. Seven hundred and thirty-two million dollars. In an endowment. For a nonprofit that fights hate. That is more money than the GDP of ten sovereign nations. Hate is, apparently, a growth industry. The SPLC found the arbitrage: you can monetize both the existence of hate and the appearance of fighting it simultaneously if your donors never check the ledger. I never checked the ledger. Morris Dees — the founder — was fired in 2019. Sexual harassment. Internal complaints going back decades. Two dozen employees signed a letter. The letter said the SPLC had a "systemic culture of racism and sexism." Inside the organization that defines racism and sexism for the rest of America. They hired a new president. She released a statement about "transformative accountability." The informant payments continued. They settled a defamation lawsuit with Maajid Nawaz for $3.375 million. They had labeled him an "anti-Muslim extremist." He is a Muslim. He is a Muslim who runs a counter-extremism think tank. The SPLC put him on the same list as the Klan. Then they sent me a fundraising email about the dangers of the Klan. The hate map. I should talk about the hate map. The SPLC publishes a hate map. It is the most cited source on extremism in America. It labeled the Ku Klux Klan a hate group. Correct. It labeled the National Alliance a hate group. Correct. It also labeled Moms for Liberty a hate group. It labeled Turning Point USA a hate group. It put parents who yell at school board meetings in the same taxonomic category as organizations that advocate for racial genocide. When you label everything hate, hate means nothing. When hate means nothing, the actual Nazis become noise. When the actual Nazis become noise, you need informants to find them. When you need informants, you pay them. When you pay them, you fund the thing you said you were fighting. When you fund the thing you said you were fighting, you send a fundraising email about it. Forty years of this. The org chart had a department for it. The FBI severed its relationship with the SPLC. Kash Patel called them a "partisan smear machine." I am not in the habit of agreeing with Kash Patel. But when the FBI says your informant program is too compromised for the FBI — the FBI, whose own informant programs are legendarily compromised — you have achieved a kind of operational distinction. I told my friends to donate. I told my mother to donate. For Christmas 2017, I gave my college roommate Mark a gift membership. Forty dollars. I told him it was the gift that fights back. Mark put it in his holiday letter. "Peter got me an SPLC gift membership!" Exclamation point. He was proud. I was proud. The neo-Nazi was solvent. It was the gift that fights back by sending forty dollars to an organization that was simultaneously paying a man inside a neo-Nazi cell and labeling PTA parents as equivalent threats. The donation was a personality. The personality you purchase when you want credit for caring without the inconvenience of doing anything. I put it in my Instagram bio for two years. "SPLC donor." Next to a sunflower emoji and a link to my Goodreads. I said it at dinner parties. I said it the way people say they drive a Prius. At Thanksgiving, my uncle — the one who watches Fox News and forwards emails about immigrants — saw my t-shirt. The one that said TEACHING TOLERANCE. He said "What's that about?" I gave him the full pitch. He laughed for forty-five seconds. He said "You're paying them to do WHAT?" He was closer to the truth than I was and he'd never read a single page of anything. The tolerance was a shell company called Fox Photography. The teaching was a filing cabinet in Montgomery with a folder labeled "F" containing pay stubs for a man who attended cross burnings on company time. I looked at my bank statement after I read the indictment. I have fourteen recurring donations. The SPLC is one. The ACLU gets $25 a month. I do not know the ACLU's endowment. I have never looked. I assume they fight for civil liberties the way I assumed the SPLC fought hate. I assume this the way you assume the pilot has a license. The Sierra Club gets $15 a month. I don't know what the Sierra Club does with $15 a month. I have a Sierra Club tote bag. I use it to carry groceries from a store that sells water in single-use plastic bottles. The tote bag has a tree on it. Doctors Without Borders. $20 a month. I set it up in 2016 after seeing a photograph of a child in Aleppo. I cried. I clicked a button. I have not thought about Aleppo since 2017. The $20 continued. That is the product. Not the doctoring. Not the borders. The not-thinking-about-it-after-2017. I have seven tote bags from organizations whose executive directors I cannot name. I have a closet that functions as a moral resume. Every bag is a receipt for a feeling I had once and never verified. The SPLC is the one that got caught. Fourteen recurring donations and the SPLC is the only one where I know what happened to the money, and what happened to the money is neo-Nazis. I don't know what happened to the other thirteen. I subscribe to being a good person the way I subscribe to streaming services. Monthly. Automatically. I audit neither. The difference is that when Netflix cancels a show, no one ends up in a planning chat for a rally where someone dies. I want to walk you through the accounting one more time. My automatic donation: $340 per year. Their informant payments: $3 million over the same period. Their endowment: $732 million. Their settlement to the man they falsely labeled an extremist: $3.375 million. Morris Dees's severance: undisclosed. The number of active hate groups they tracked in 2024: 595. The number of those groups that contained SPLC informants: classified, but the indictment says at least two. The number of hate groups that would have existed without SPLC funding: also classified, and I think about that every day. One thank-you card on the refrigerator. Thirteen other recurring donations I will not look into because looking into one was enough. The hat trick is that I can't stop donating. Not because I believe. I stopped believing when I read page 23 of the indictment, the paragraph about the shell accounts, the one that said "Rare Books Warehouse." I stopped believing in the middle of a sentence. But the automatic withdrawal is a metaphor and the metaphor is my entire political identity. If I cancel, I have to explain to myself what I was doing for ten years. If I keep paying, I don't. If I cancel all fourteen, I have to become a person who does things instead of a person who pays for things. I have never been that person. The SPLC knew I would never be that person. That is why the product worked. I tried to cancel. The website has a page called "Manage Your Giving." It has an "Increase Your Gift" button. It does not have a cancel button. There is a phone number. The phone number goes to a voicemail that says "We are experiencing higher than normal call volume due to recent media coverage." Eleven federal counts. "Recent media coverage." You understand. You understand because you have fourteen recurring donations too. Or seven. Or three. You understand because you have a tote bag from an organization you believe in the same way I believed in the SPLC — which is to say automatically, monthly, without verification, and with a bumper sticker. The right side is a product. The SPLC sold it for $732 million. I bought it for $340 a year. The spread between those two numbers is where the informants live. But the informants are not the point. The point is that I would have paid the $340 even if I'd known. Especially if I'd known. Because the $340 was never about the informants or the hate or the map or the court cases. The $340 was about the feeling. The feeling was the product. The SPLC just got caught selling it with neo-Nazis in the supply chain. I am the donor. I am the fundraising deck. I am the red button that says DONATE NOW. I am the Charlottesville email. I am the bumper sticker. I am the black square on Instagram. I am the tote bag. I am the closet full of moral resumes. I am every person who ever said "I gave to the SPLC" and felt the warm feeling and never once asked what the money actually did. I am every person who gives to anything and feels the warm feeling and never once asks. Here is what the money actually did. $340 a year. Ten years. One neo-Nazi. One million dollars. One shell company named after a camera store that does not exist. One thank-you card on the refrigerator next to a horse that my daughter painted in 2019. Thirteen other donations I will never audit. I am still on automatic withdrawal. The next charge is June 1st.

@siliconpug @paulswaney3 I worked for PE twice. Both times PE pumped in a lot of money to expand capacity and hire a lot more people.

@paulswaney3 If PE gets involved, stop using the product. If you work there, find another job. The business model is extraction. Don’t feed it.