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- [00:00]
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- [00:56]
Mike Pesca
It's Tuesday, April 28, 2026 from Peach Fish Productions, it's the gist Mike Pesca it is possible that Cole Allen, the Washington press corps assailant, the would be presidential assailant, never actually fired a shot. He'd still be a gunman, but not the trigger man. So the clues are that even though Jeanine Pirro confidently said this in a press availability after the shooting, I'm Jeanine Pirro.
- [01:23]
Ted Dintersmith
I'm the United States Attorney.
- [01:25]
Mike Pesca
Right now the defendant is being charged
- [01:27]
Ted Dintersmith
with two counts 924C, using a firearm during a crime, crime of violence, and a second crime under 111, which is assault on a federal officer using a dangerous weapon.
- [01:42]
Mike Pesca
Allen was not charged with that particular crime, and 111 charges get hung on pretty much anyone who impedes an ICE officer. So it's not a very high bar. Allen was charged with attempting to shoot or assassinate a president. That is based on his manifesto and it was charged with discharging a firearm during a crime of violence, which is confusing given what we're talking about. But he wasn't charged with shooting a police officer. Perhaps the officer was hit with friendly fire. Also, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanch was asked this exact question. Did he shoot anyone? And he gave this less than clarifying answer. Have you been able to determine whether the gunman fired shots? If so, how many shots he fired and who exactly whose bullet hit the agent?
- [02:31]
Todd Blanche
We're still we want to get that right. So we're still looking at that. It appears, and I don't want to overstate because we are still looking at this, that there were five. Five shots that law Enforcement fired. We are, we have all the evidence is being examined very carefully and expeditiously and we'll know more soon.
- [02:50]
Mike Pesca
Notice the shift in emphasis there. We know law enforcement fired five times. Yes, but was the shooter the guy we're calling the shooter? Actually a shooter is not so important, I guess. Guy with a gun and a manifesto indicating murderous intent rushes a secure area with officials and civil inside. All right, he's going to jail for a long time. He broke serious laws. But in this extreme environment of doubt and charges of staged events, I do think officials should do whatever they can to clarify and to be truthful. Here was Democrat Jasmine Crockett writing on social media of the attack back to the shooting. Has there ever been a president have this many close, quote, attempts on their life? Maybe it's lacks gun laws, maybe it's lack of mental health funding, or maybe it's fake, who knows? And the Manhattan Institute did some polling of the Democratic coalition and found that 46% of today's coalition believes, quote, the assassination attempt against Donald Trump in 2024 was orchestrated by his supporters to increase sympathy for him. So that's not good. Having that widespread belief out there is not good. I actually as a practical doubt that even consistent and accurate descriptions of events from the administration. In other words, if Blanch were totally transparent and if Pirro hadn't gotten that wrong or at least gotten ahead of what the charges would be, I don't think that any of that would placate Democrats who are suspicious of every single word that comes out of the administration's mouths. I would even say, I could even say that maybe some administration officials and those people who are affiliated with them preferred the destabilization of evidence and the denigration of truth wherever it comes from. In other words, even if they're the ones lying and they're the ones lying not in their interest, at least, lies get out there and the public begins to think nothing is true and anything is possible. Of course, I don't want to go too far down that road. They're lying on purpose. They're trying to get you to doubt yourselves. That's a bit of a conspiracy on my part. Of course, just because things are a conspiracy don't mean they're not true. But it's still best practices and not a particularly hard call. What to do in this case and another is like them, be accurate and don't play some sort of double bank shot manipulation game with the truth or the public on the show today, not this show. How to you know, we've all been angry, but this is a how to manage your anger. It's a really good one. Check it out. I guess what I'm trying to figure out is what is the end game? Like what is more important right now? Having her be self sufficient in a way that allows her to handle that problem or developing a positive relationship with her.
- [05:44]
Todd Blanche
That is a very fair set of
- [05:45]
Mike Pesca
questions on the show today. Onto the Southern Poverty Law Center. I try to get inside what the case is against that group. But first, let's do the math. TED Dinter Smith came by. He wants reform on how we teach math. I'm on board with changes, even big changes, but I don't want to throw the baby out with the math water, as it were. Stay until the end of this for a mathlete style brain teaser, which I launch on TED with little notice. And join me now as I talk to Ted Dintersmith, author of Aftermath the Life Changing Math that Schools Won't Teach you. Foreign. Smith is well now he's an evangelist. He's, he was a success in business. He used his quantitative skills to get acclaim and money and then he turned his attention as a second act in life. We'll find out to reforming American education, specifically math. He has made documentary films, he has done TED talks. His new book is called Aftermath the Life Changing Math that Schools Won't Teach you. TED welcome to the gist.
- [07:10]
Ted Dintersmith
Great to be here.
- [07:11]
Mike Pesca
So I did see your TED Talk, which is I guess TED squared or a little redundant in your case, but if you add one message because I did read the book and the book gets a little more in depth than some of the basics that you were talking about, what would it be? Is that we have to scrap the way we've taught math? Is it that we've had to fine tune it? Is it that we're failing our kids? Tell me what it is.
- [07:38]
Ted Dintersmith
Yeah, we teach the wrong math and we test it in the wrong way. And like a lot of things in life, it's there for a reason. You know, before computers, all the math that's covered in high school used to be important across a bunch of professions. But computers have made that wholly irrelevant today. And it'd be one thing if it were just a waste of time, but there's an enormous missed opportunity because our lives are ruled by powerful, fascinating math ideas that very few adults understand. And so I wrote the book to lay out these really interesting ideas to help people understand how they can deploy and apply them to in life, but also to make the point that those thousands of hours you spent on math at school were there basically because it fits with standardized tests, not because it's important in life.
- [08:23]
Mike Pesca
Well, but for tools, but for calculators. We could, you could make the argument that we would still need a lot of these skills. We would still need to know how to do these things, even if there is a calculator on standby to do them faster. I think that's true. We'd all argue that a calculator can do two digit multiplication, but you'd also want everyone to be able to do that and understand the concept on down through. Probably something to do with exponents, probably something to do with order of operations. But at what point do the powerful computer tools obviate what the individual should be learning and has to know?
- [09:06]
Ted Dintersmith
Well, the tools are really great at performing the mechanics. And so one of the points I question is whether learning the detailed mechanics actually helps you understand the overarching idea. For example, lots of studies will show presenting evidence based on correlation. For sure there is math involved in computing the correlations among two data streams. Nobody really needs to know that. You need to understand what correlation means, what ranges can be taken as affirming the study or being neutral to the study or actually disqualifying the assertion. And to me it's like in the world I want to live in, every kid coming from school is going to understand the ideas and understand how to leverage things that do the ugly math mechanics. But be able to ask the right questions and understand how the math that's all around them are influencing their lives. And we don't do that. Right. You know, most adults don't understand correlations. Most adults. You know, I have a chapter on the role of probability in the medical field and over 90% of medical experts don't understand conditional probability, which to a listener they may say like what the heck is conditional probability? But you get a very dark diagnosis from a medical test. You want to understand conditional probability?
- [10:30]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, I mean it came up, it was extremely important during COVID And what are the chances that someone actually has Covid? You'd have to use some conditional probability and Bayesian analysis. People were in their daily lives getting wrong the chances of walking outside because they didn't understand. And I guess maybe their public health experts didn't carefully understand and explain conditional probability.
- [10:55]
Ted Dintersmith
It is surprising that the experts often don't understand these ideas. And so the point I feel is important to make is we, it's not that nobody's taking Matt, we're All taking thousands of hours of math. But we're doing things like, how do you do the mechanics of factoring a polynomial? And when a kid asks a teacher, will I ever need to do this later in life? If the teacher's honest, they say, like, no. No adult in America. So it's worse than that, right? No adult in America performs closed form integrals by hand, the essence of high school calculus. Yet calculus is a must to get into a selective college. It's a blocker for career paths. It's held out as a pinnacle. And I've given all these talks to engineering and science teams. Nobody does closed form integrals by hand anymore.
- [11:44]
Mike Pesca
Okay, So I want to build up. Everyone needs to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. But you're also saying that they need to understand what multiplication means. I think mostly we can understand that. Yeah. Right. And I think it's taught, and not just taught by rote anymore. What else? What are the things that everyone needs to understand or pick a grade level that we're more or less getting it right. If maybe we could shift more towards making sure the kids understand how to perform these functions.
- [12:11]
Ted Dintersmith
Yeah. I have financial literacy and personal finance examples throughout the book, but do we owe it to every kid coming through, you know, 12, 13 years of elementary and secondary school to understand the basics of financial literacy? I think we absolutely do. Yet I give all these talks. Adults don't understand compound interest. They don't understand exponential growth. And, you know, if you look at what a $500 credit card charge does at 18% per year, you eventually figure it out, but you figured out in a very hard way. Or, you know, you look at the epidemic of gambling addiction, and to me, it's responsible and important to teach kids coming through school the principles of probability and how that can compound and how if you play against the house time and time and time and time again, the odds you can come out ahead are diminishingly tiny. You know, you are going to lose money and. And yet how many adults are going broke in, you know, online gambling today?
- [13:16]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, but to get there, to understand that, there have to be some building blocks, and some of the building blocks have to be taught. I don't know, maybe there's a different system other than rote or they can't. My sister teaches elementary school kids, and she's always emphasizing that they have to understand why these functions are functions. And I get that, and I understand that. But if the kids or if the adults have to understand financial literacy and it's incumbent upon us to understand compound interest. You're saying that some lessons in exponents must be given, right?
- [13:52]
Ted Dintersmith
You need to know what exponential growth is. You need to understand the, the feel in the sense, in the context of compound growth.
- [14:00]
Mike Pesca
But not calculating it yourself, that doesn't make you really understand that it's true. A calculator can calculate it, but if you do it on paper, don't you get more of the sense of how this really works?
- [14:11]
Ted Dintersmith
I'm doubtful actually, you know, because we spend a lot of time doing it by paper and then adults don't understand it. You know, I'll give you a different example, but I think it makes the point is that the cheerleader for wrote math data is the national center for Education Statistics. And so they are the ones that do the nation's report card and put front and center the math scores and we'll take a tiny drop and equate it to national catastrophe. Their own study says 82% of adults can't compute the cost of a carpet given length, width and cost per square yard. And so that's where we are today. It's all these hours of math and 82% can't compute the cost of a carpet. So to me, would I rather have kids understand, hey, there's a math way to compute the cost of something if you know its dimensions and cost per area. Because you can say into Siri. Siri is not the greatest engine, but you can dictate to ChatGPT or Claude. It's my favorite, you know, hey, I'm thinking about buying a carpet that's 3 yards long and 8 yards wide and the price is $27.77 per square yard. What's the cost? If you know the concepts, you know the question to ask, you can submit that to an AI engine. And then if you say, well, they make mistakes, you take the answer from one AI engine and put it in a second one and say, is the math right on this? Right. And as I said, we spent a lot of time on the low level rote. And if everybody was coming out of that process feeling good about themselves, feeling confident in their math skills, and 99% of adults could compute the cost of a carpet, I'd say, hey, ignore me, right? It's all going great. Except that's not what's happening, right? It blocks so many kids in life, it wails on self esteem for so many kids. There's far more punishment dished out by math in school than elevation and excitement and enlightenment. And so I just say, it's time to back up and say what's more important coming through this process, Understanding the ideas and seeing the beauty and power of the math or dwelling on, you know, what's the cube root of minus 27? Right?
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Mike Pesca
Yeah, it's negative three, isn't it? The. Do you think we should teach kids in social studies or history class what the three branches of government are?
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Ted Dintersmith
Yeah, absolutely.
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Mike Pesca
Okay. But only 40% of Americans could name them, so we're failing that too. We're probably failing every single basic fact that probably has something more to do with what our schools are doing, less to do with what our schools are doing and how our schools are doing it it than how it's received or what people are distracted by or who doesn't go to school or socioeconomics. I don't know that people not knowing how to do these things when they get to be adults is the best proxy for, therefore they shouldn't be taught. I mean, let's put it this way. Let's put it this way. If you asked me to calculate square carpet, I might not. I might not have my phone on me at the time, but I would be able to give you a rough estimate. And that's useful. That's not useful as a parlor trick. That's useful if I'm in the carpet game or the carpet buying game or, you know, whatever. And if I didn't learn that in school in perhaps an imperfect way, but in some way, I wouldn't be able to do that. And I don't know, maybe I'm in the 18%, but we should cultivate to some extent that 18% and not, say, use a calculator.
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Ted Dintersmith
Well, you know, can I come back to the three branches of government? And the overarching point is when kids see relevance in what they're studying, they learn it. And I see that over and over. I've been, I've made a practice of visiting a lot of schools. So I probably visited more schools in America in the last 10 years than maybe anybody, hundreds and so on. The three branches of government, if this is 15 minutes in a civics class where they cram it into short term memory for an exam and it never becomes real for them, it is gone. There's very little evidence that these facts that are crammed into memory, whether it is computing area based on dimensions and cost per square yard, or three branches of government, if it's a short term immersion in memorizing it for an exam, it doesn't stick. But when I visit schools, for instance, will stick on the three branches of government that invite kids to develop their own constitution for how their school should make rules, who should make the decisions, who should have blocking power, what should be the test for approval for a dress code. Or you know, those kids actually suddenly three branches of government at the federal level become very understandable and real because they've had to do it at their school level. And so if we make it real, if we. And that's what the book does. It shows you all these ways it applies to your daily life. And you could see, oh my gosh, that's interesting. And I think then the basic mechanics, you know, how to use them if you have your computer. Or you may get excited about it and decide you want to learn it on your own by rote. I'm happy with either outcome, but I'm definitely not happy with most kids coming through school not understanding the most important ideas that affect their lives. Mostly feeling like math did a number on their self esteem. Many not being able to graduate from high school because they can't factor a polynomial when we have so little to show for it.
- [19:41]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, no, you're right about so much of this. I do wonder about the complex factoring of the polynomials. The countries that do it better than us, Singapore. They branded it Singapore Math. We teach the kids Singapore math. Finland, some amazing educational system. Look at the list. Estonia is doing great. Do they do it more like your way or more like the way America has been doing it for 100 years?
- [20:05]
Ted Dintersmith
Yeah, Finland's a great example. You know, I've spent time there and in math class they will put up on the. They call them professors, right? I mean Finland respects their teachers, they pay their teachers really well. The training programs are really hard to get into. Finland has decided education actually matters for the future of their country instead of something to chop away at the budget on. But if you go to a math class in Finland, the professor will put a really interesting problem on the board and actually then turn to the class and say I'll be back tomorrow. Come up with as many different ways as you can to solve this and then let's talk about it tomorrow. I mean like these kids then are suddenly like totally engaged. It gets to the immense creativity behind math that we often just trample in our standardized test. One right answer, multiple choice world. So they are really focused on thought provoking challenges and it works. You look at how they do on the OECD PISA exams. They do consistently, incredibly well. And yet they have no standardized testing in Finland. 0. I'm good friends with Pasi Solberg, who architected all the changes people say isn't doing something different more expensive? The key to Finland's success, Posse explains, was a budget crisis. And they said we can't do everything well. We have to either put the money in training our teachers or money into data. They threw data overboard, standardized testing overboard, great teachers. And those kids are actually learning how to think through the process of school.
- [21:36]
Mike Pesca
What about Canada? That's an easier place to get to. Canada does better than Finland on the exams. I've had some exposure into the Canadian math system. It's not that different from the United States.
- [21:46]
Ted Dintersmith
It's not that different. I think one of the, one of the aspects here is the stakes and intensity. The UK probably would also fit this, but certainly the us we have this very stratified version of colleges. And so if you get into Tier one, fantastic, wonderful, amazing. Tier two. Oh, that's good. That's pretty good. Tier three. Oh, you know, like, you know, in Canada it's like you go to college, right. And, and so maybe it's not that different. I haven't visited that many math classes in Canada to have a really informed view about what they're doing, but I do think that they have a far more balanced approach where kids can lead happy childhoods in school. Whereas my book, the Very Last Chapter, talks about the math of testing. And these standardized tests are a bell curve. And it is really a prisoner's dilemma where you either spend endless hours of test prep so that you can make it into that top few percent, or if you take a more relaxed view and say, I'm only going to learn what I'm interested in, that I actually believe will be useful in life, you'll pay a penalty for that in the us, whereas in Canada, it's like they have, you know, there is some stratification, not much. You know, McGill's a great place, but it's like they're very large admissions classes and there's not the sort of uber competitive stakes for, for the college race in Canada as there is here.
- [23:07]
Mike Pesca
Yeah, this is an unrelated question to everything else you've been writing about, but I'm interested in it. What do you think is the most likely course to shake up the American college system? Do you think that it's government intervention? Do you think it's something like the end users just revolting? Or is it, I don't know, a Trump assisted denigration of the credibility of elite universities?
- [23:36]
Ted Dintersmith
Here's what I believe will happen is we're Already seeing this year fresh college grads struggling to get a job. It will get way worse next year and it will get almost impossible the year after that. Because the essence of US education, math and generally is 12, 14, 16 years of carrying out knowledge worker assignments. And if that's what you're trained to do and if that's what you're good at, an employer is going to say hey, $20 a month for done really well in 12 seconds or hire this kid. And so these kids need to have some other important advantage as they enter young adulthood. And I'm not all about career as the only goal of school, but I feel like if a kid has taken school seriously and worked hard, we owe it to them to have equipped them with the skills so they could pursue a career path that gives them some degree of purpose. So I think it will be as we see these 16 years of jumping through hoops and doing everything right, leading to unfortunate outcomes. I think there's going to be growing skepticism and you know, one of the
- [24:40]
Mike Pesca
important the polls are showing that now college has never been less popular. I mean it does break down along partisan lines. But I think the effect of this, which is true, it'll be harder and harder to get a job and I will take more of the knowledge worker jobs than ever before. It's just going to create this enormous, enormous bottleneck pressure at the elite schools such that even the 30th best school, whatever that means, means will be seen as inadequate. And you know people, if we thought people were killing themselves to get to into CIT, Stanford and MIT, it'll be 10 times that.
- [25:13]
Ted Dintersmith
Yeah, it'll be 10 times we and wanted. Back to exponential growth. You look at the hyper growth rates of the cost of college, right? And it's one of the more unfortunate things. There is a game theory dynamic working there, right? Is if you're a college and you don't build a plush campus with fancy fitness centers and campus centers and everything else, you're going to lose your best students to somebody who did. So we've had this arms race among colleges where nobody's been able to step back and say I don't think a 19 year old deserves cushy circumstances. I'm going to have a basic bare bones campus, put my money into great faculty, help these kids get work experiences as they make their way through college and have that college path be incredibly affordable. You know, I would be totally leaning in to having as many kids as possible to go to college under those circumstances. But I did this recent Calculation for I went to a state college in Virginia. Had they only increased tuition when I graduated, the tuition for the year was 750 bucks.
- [26:16]
Mike Pesca
William and Mary, this was.
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Ted Dintersmith
Yeah, yeah, William had they kept it growing at the same rate of inflation, the tuition for an in state student today would be 5,000 bucks.
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Mike Pesca
Right.
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Ted Dintersmith
You know, but it's like 35,000 bucks. You know, it's like 5,000 bucks is pretty darn affordable.
- [26:32]
Mike Pesca
Sure, you could work a part time job and pay for your college education. Now that's farcical.
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Ted Dintersmith
And then, you know, as you, as you were talking, you go down the strata and the kids that don't get into the top tier or the second tier, a lot of them are going to schools that will go out of business, that have poorly taught courses, that are struggling and budget wise. And they get there and after a year or two they say like, God, I'm not learning what's going on here. But they've already borrowed 30, 40, $50,000 and they're in this no man's land. Where do I keep going and go even deeper in debt when the people who are graduating aren't really getting those choice jobs? Or do I pull the plug now and they're trusting us when we have? And this has been a mantra largely in society, but particularly a mantra I have to say of the Democratic party is that of course you need a college degree to be a first class citizen in America. And I think that's been telling kids something that's not accurate. You know, I think there are going to be a lot of kids who choose non college paths going forward that do really well as there have in the past, you know, and I think we just need to be celebrating all of those on equal footing. I mean Finland, back to Finland. If a kid ends up leaves high school and wants to be an electrician, parents in Finland say good for you. If they want to go to college, it's 5,000 bucks a year and they'll say good for you. But there's not this like, oh, you didn't get into the top tier of colleges in Finland. Like, you know, like oh, you're a failure or heaven forbid you want to be an electrician. I can't stand. We just need to step back and look at what kids are good at, what makes them motivated and interested, what leads to interesting fulfilling jobs and start embracing all paths and equipping those kids in school with those skills.
- [28:21]
Mike Pesca
I want to thank you. Ted Dintersmith is the author of Aftermath the Life Changing Math that Schools Won't teach you. And we now end with the bonus question, which is this. On an analog clock, what is the angle when it's 3:15pm or AM?
- [28:41]
Ted Dintersmith
Oh, I like that. Hold on 1/4th of 1/12th. So I'm going to say 148 divided. So 360 degrees times 148. That's what I'm going to say.
- [28:54]
Mike Pesca
Times 148.
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Ted Dintersmith
Yeah.
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Mike Pesca
With the angle at 315, 3.
- [28:59]
Ted Dintersmith
360 degrees 1. A 48 of 360 degrees.
- [29:04]
Mike Pesca
I get it. I get that is brilliant because most people would immediately say, well, it's zero.
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Ted Dintersmith
Yeah.
- [29:11]
Mike Pesca
Because the big hand lies on the little hand. But of course, the little hand will also go a quarter of the way around.
- [29:19]
Ted Dintersmith
I'm hopeful that I'm right about that.
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Mike Pesca
So it is. It is in fact seven and a half degrees, which by your intuition, you got it right, sir. And the fastest I've ever heard. Get it? So therefore, this colors my entire interview. And now I have to admit you're right. Good job.
- [29:36]
Ted Dintersmith
My credibility is intact.
- [29:39]
Mike Pesca
Ted. Ted Dinter Smith, author of Aftermath. Thank you very much.
- [29:43]
Ted Dintersmith
It's been great. You convene the most interesting conversations. So thank you for your podcast and thanks for this discussion. It's been fantastic.
- [29:51]
Mike Pesca
And now the Spiel. Founded in 1971, the Southern Poverty Law center is best known for its work investigating and tracking violent extremist groups like the kkk. In recent years, however, it faced accusations from Republicans and allies of Donald Trump who say it is unfairly labeling conservative organizations and individuals as extremists. That is a quote from CNN's coverage of the SPLC. It was in fact a little less pro SPLC. Maybe you could call it both sides or a. I happen to think that saying but Donald Trump supports this group that went against the KKK is not that ringing an endorsement of the group? My problem was in the coverage of the Justice Department's indictment of the splc. I wasn't getting anything other than from conservative media. Yeah, the SPLC is Satan. And from almost all, if not all of the mainstream media. The people going against the SPLC have no case. And the SPLC is on the side of the angels. It turns out that the angelic and the devilish are not the best way to look at this indictment and this group. So as to the indictment, here is now by now just favorite Todd Blanche describing the charges against the SPLC.
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Todd Blanche
A grand jury returned an 11 count indictment charging the Southern Poverty Law center with six counts of wire fraud, four counts of bank fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. According to the charges in the indictment, the SPLC is a non profit entity that purports to fight white supremacy and racial hatred by reporting on extremist groups and conducting research to inform law enforcement groups with the goal of dismantling these groups. As the indictment describes. The SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.
- [31:58]
Mike Pesca
According to the indictment, the SPLC paid undercover informants hundreds of thousands of dollars each over the years to rat on their fellow white supremacists. But again, their fellow white supremacists. These were actual white supremacists who were the beneficiaries of SPLC largess. Well, I shouldn't say largess. It was tactical expenditures to try to dismantle the organizations as a whole, which is important. As to the theory of the indictment, there is also a theory which will be tested under the harsh scrutiny of a criminal trial if it gets there, that this all constitutes mal fraud because donors were never told, we're going to give some of this money to the Aryan nations affiliated Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club. That's true. But if they had told him that, it certainly would have blown the operation. Wouldn't have it. The critics of the indictment will say it's only political. And I have to say, of course it's political. Is it only political? I continue to entertain and will, by the end of this spiel, address the notion that it could have, in its motivation been entirely political. And yet an entirely political motivation could in fact wind up exposing illegalities. And let's also note that the SPLC has raised funds and attention not just about white nationalists, but white nationalists who are linked to members of this administration. Oh, not just linked. The SPLC issued a report during the first Trump administration placing Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson on a list of neo Nazis and white supremacists. Carson because he opposed same sex marriage. Rand Paul was also on this list for criticizing the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Now they eventually took Carson off the list, which got a lot of playing conservative media. But you would be excused if it didn't break through to you as a viewer of regular media, mainstream media as it's called. The SPLC has actually been on my radar for years and years and years. I knew they did great things in the 80s and 90s, but have been on kind of a grift since then. I remember reading an article in Harper's Magazine that opened my eyes. It was in the year 2000. It was all about how their founder, Morris Dees, was a very successful fundraiser, but had become something of a charlatan years before. In 1994, the local paper, which is right next door to the splc, the Montgomery Advertiser, ran a piece that was actually Pulitzer nominated, investigating the group's marketing and finances. So the SPLC was less than the greatest of philanthropies. The charity watchdog group Charity Watch routinely gives the SPLC poor grades an F grade for returns on donations and corporate governments. None of this means that the indictment is justified or was a chronicling of a bona fide breaking of the law. But. But I did yearn for the coverage to dig a little deeper. So I went on my own search to see who was covering this. Well, I wound up being, as you could probably imagine, unbelievably distraught. So a day after the indictment, I searched for the SPLC on Apple, the podcast app. And 20 out of 20 returns were right wing shows dancing on the SPL C's grave celebrating their comeuppance headline, Trump DOJ indicts liberals for Secretly Funding White Supremacists. The Charlie Kirk show, you know him, the guy who was claimed to be at the center of white wing extremism. Their headline was down with the SPLC and the Greatness of Justice. Alito Sub Stack had one SPLC defender high on the list of authors, Joyce Allen, who is a former federal prosecutor and appears on Ms. Now and then after Joyce, 50 substackers dancing on the Grave telling us how awful the SPLC is. I did find in the world of podcast, though I should say one voice, which was not inaccurate but was a 99% defense of the SPLC. The NPR Politics podcast did describe why the administration was being politically motivated to go after the splc. I do think they proved their point, but there was just no time spent describing any of the flaws of the splc, even if non indictable. Here's a sample sentence that stood out
- [36:23]
Ted Dintersmith
to me, that it is shifting its focus on extremism from the far right, which was really, I think we could say, the focus during the Biden years to what it characterizes as the far left and what it often refers to as antifa.
- [36:41]
Mike Pesca
So the right wing extremists. No qualifiers, they're just extremists and what they call the far left. The implication here is they're not really the far left, or there are more lefty groups than they. Or the part about what they call antifa. Maybe they're lying about these groups being antifa. I don't know. That's weird. In Texas, the trial concluded with multiple guilty verdicts on some self described antifa adherents who attacked an ice processing center. I don't know if one claim gets a qualifier and another doesn't. You have to think hard about why that is. And I know the knee jerk offenses because they really are white wing extremists and they're really not left wing extremists. But the case can also be made you just say that what the administration calls right wing extremists and what the administration calls left wing extremists. Or you could just say they have shifted their focus from going after the right to the left, which is also true. Here's what I would have liked from my coverage. So I had to craft it myself. 1. Some history of what the SPLC did to make it a true KKK wrecking machine. 2. A little of what the NPR podcast does. It lays out the administration's motives to go after the splc. I mean, they called their friend Charlie Kirk the nexus of right wing extremism. That definitely did offend Cash Patel, friend of Kirk But I want my coverage to also name Majeed Nawaz. Talk about the Charity Watch ratings. Talk about the 25 years of documented profligate spending when an SPLC fundraiser came to my door. This was a lovely kid. It was a summer job, but I said I can't donate. Have you heard of Majid Nawaz? And he said, no, I haven't. So I told him, oh, here was a guy who was an anti Muslim extremist crusader or someone raising consciousness in England. He got put on this list of anti Muslim extremists. 2016 Atlantic article by David Graham asks, how did Majid Nawaz end up on a list of anti Muslim extremists? And the answer seems to be that the SPLC doesn't do its job that assiduously. They talk about Nawaz, a self described former extremist who spent four years in an Egyptian prison. He has changed his approach and now argues for a pluralistic, peaceful vision of Islam. He stood for Parliament as a Liberal Democrat in 2015 and advised Prime Ministers Blair, Gordon Brown and Cameron. And he was on the list of Muslim extremists. Why? What put him on the list? Well, he did tweet a cartoon of Muhammad which most Shiites don't object to. But in any case, as the Atlantic asks, is simply committing a blasphemous act, anti Islam and he did visit a strip club. I don't see how that's important. So that's where Majid Nawaz maybe should have been mentioned. I also came across a politico article from 2017. Has a civil rights stalwart lost its way? A lot of questions in headlines about the splc. Here's the subhead. The Southern Poverty Law center, led by charismatic swashbuckling founder Morris Dees is making the most of the Trump era. But is it overstepping its bounds? Well, some of the things that they did is they labeled political scientist Charles Murray fixture on the list of extremists. And you might remember that in Middlebury students rioted at a Charles Murray speech, in part informed by the SPLC designation of him as an extremist. And they also note that in the 80s the SPLC, his entire legal staff quit to protest Morris D's obsession with remnants of the KKK, which still captured the imagination of the group's liberal donor base at the expense of lower profile but more relevant targets in its marketing. Again, this is Politico. The SPLC still tout seven figure judgments, I.e. one against Klan organizations even though the plaintiffs have been able to recoup only a tiny fraction from that group group. So they routinely put out flyers about the huge judgments against the Klan and then the mothers of kids killed by the Klan wind up taking home maybe $40,000. By the way, a couple years after that article ran Mars Dees was forced out. As head of the splc, I've always taken the pronouncements and lists of the SPLC with huge grains of of salt. I think they exaggerate a lot. When guests have been on the show SPLC affiliated trackers of hate groups, I push them, I express skepticism. Sometimes their information is valuable. But you do have to be very very skeptical of the sblc. I'm entirely skeptical of the idea that extremist groups have nearly as much power as the SPLC says they do. Not just the right wing extremists, but the so called or the actual left wing extremists or the actual Islamic extremists. I read these ADL reports that track hate groups. They're very much like the splc. They want to tell you how much hate crime and murder at the hands of extremist groups. Go on. The ADL's last full report, 2024 found that 13 people in the US were killed by domestic extremists. This continues a trend of fewer extremist related killings after a five year span were some somewhere in the 40s of murders were committed a year. This was the lowest year 2024 since 2000 in which 10 murders have been committed by extremist related deaths and 10 is too many. But if you go inside the numbers, you find out that most of the extremist murders are Aryan biker gangs killing each other mostly out of meth beefs. I hope none of them were funded in part by the splc. My conclusion as I said on the show, is this is not nothing, but it is not rampant. The extremist threat posed by the right posed by Islamicists. Keep a close eye on them. They can do harm. Of course, if you fundraise off the threat that there is an Islamic terror brewing in the United States, you're going to wind up on an SBLC hate list. So the indictment definitely politically motivated. However, the missteps or misdeeds of Morris D's and others don't reflect well on the organization. I'd have liked some reporting on that. But you know what? A politically motivated prosecutor might have charged the SPLC with crimes that they are guilty of. That is possible too. Did they break the law? I'd love to know. I'd love to know what the internal compliance people at the SPLC said from my analysis. And I trust places like Lawfare. This actually is a poor case. It hinges on if the SPLC really was ripping off donors for developing undercover sources. And since the sources do seem to have hurt white supremacist organizations, I don't know that donors would feel or would be in fact ripped off. But I did find all the coverage just lacking. What I had to do was I had to assemble through hours of my own research and also relying on prior knowledge, articles I read 20 and 30 years ago. I had to rely on this to get a fuller picture. And this is something that the average number news consumer or citizen can't possibly be expected to do on their own. So I guess you're welcome. You have the gist. And that's it for today's show. Cory Wara produces the gist. Kathleen Sykes runs our substack efforts. Mike peska.substack.com banisters our booking coordinator, Jeff Craig is out with a new addition edition of How To Today. It's a great one. It's all about anger. Michelle Pesca keeps hers under control as cool the cool head of Peach Fish Productions. And thanks for listening.