Calvin Duncan spent 28 years in prison for a murder he did not commit. During those years the Orleans Parish Clerk of Criminal Court office repeatedly denied him access to the records he needed to prove his innocence. He taught himself law inside the prison. He earned a paralegal bachelor’s degree after release. He graduated from Lewis & Clark Law School at age 60. In November 2025 he won 68 percent of the vote to become Clerk of Criminal Court in the same office that had helped keep him wrongfully imprisoned. He’s an American hero.

On April 23, 2026, the Louisiana House voted 63 to 28 to dissolve the office.

Senate Bill 256 shutters the entire criminal court clerk system in a week and folds it under the Clerk of Civil Court. No election will be held for the consolidated position. Nobody in New Orleans has ever voted for an Orleans Clerk of Court. Duncan was scheduled to take office May 4.

Governor Jeff Landry is expected to sign the bill before that date. Why?

• As Attorney General in 2018, opposed the voter referendum requiring unanimous juries for felony convictions. Louisiana’s non-unanimous jury rule came out of the 1898 constitution, designed to nullify Black juror votes.
• As Attorney General in 2023, opposed Calvin Duncan’s petition to be compensated by the state for 28 years of wrongful imprisonment.
• Fought the federal court order creating a second majority-Black congressional district under the Voting Rights Act. Signed SB 8 only after courts ran out the clock. His AG Liz Murrill is now in Louisiana v. Callais asking the Supreme Court to gut Section 2.
• Pushed legislation to release juvenile offender records, targeted to the three Louisiana parishes with the highest Black populations.
• Ran a sustained campaign against police reform in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, including moving to terminate the NOPD federal consent decree.
• His Department of Justice created a legal fellowship named for E.D. White, the Louisiana Supreme Court justice who wrote in favor of “separate but equal” in Plessy v. Ferguson.
• Won a federal lawsuit permanently blocking the EPA from considering race when regulating pollution in Louisiana, including in Cancer Alley. This goes right back to the Civil War continuing through 1873 Slaughterhouse pollution cases.
• In 2016 helped craft legislation to block sanctuary cities from state bond money after New Orleans police adopted a policy preventing officers from inquiring about immigration status.
• Called Black Lives Matter protesters “armed thugs.” Named an anti-racial-profiling policy “Hug-a-Thug.”
• Sat on the executive committee of the Rule of Law Defense Fund, which summoned Trump supporters to the Ellipse on January 6, 2021.
• April 2026: directed Senator Jay Morris to introduce SB 256, dissolving the Orleans Parish Clerk of Criminal Court office before Calvin Duncan could take it.

Senate author Jay Morris of West Monroe has acknowledged that Landry asked him to introduce the bill to remove the seat for Duncan. And I’ll say it again, Landry opposed Duncan’s petition for wrongful-conviction compensation when Landry was Attorney General in 2023. His successor Liz Murrill denied Duncan’s exoneration throughout the campaign, despite more than 160 legal professionals signing a public letter confirming it.

This is a long game of structural, systemic, racism.

You have to see Landry for the piece of racist shit that he is. Look at who is using state power to repeatedly attack an American Black man to hold him down based on his race alone.

Laundering in seersucker

Representative Dixon Wallace McMakin of Baton Rouge carried the bill on the House floor. He described dissolving a municipal court system as continuity through modernization. It isn’t, and that’s a specific phrase with a racist history. Typically “modernization” is the coded language for dismantling Black institutions and political power.

He cited the consolidation of the New Orleans tax assessors’ offices as precedent. It wasn’t. When Democratic Representative Delisha Boyd asked him how long that consolidation took, he said he did not know. Boyd told him the answer. Four years. This bill says it will bomb the office out in six business days, just so no Black man can have it.

Have you been to Baton Rouge?

Representative Denise Marcelle of Baton Rouge asked McMakin whether he would accept the governor eliminating Marcelle’s district before she could take office. He said he would be fine with it, presumably as it would keep whites in power and still block any Black from office.

McMakin acknowledged on the floor that there is no precedent for eliminating an elected office before the duly elected person can take their position. He then apologized. Not to Duncan, for being racist. To his fellow Republicans. For being called racist.

Hate holding longer than the state constitution

Louisiana is known for this.

In 1868 Oscar Dunn became Lieutenant Governor. In 1872 P.B.S. Pinchback served as acting governor. By 1898 the state had written a new constitution whose framers openly declared its purpose: eliminate Black political participation. The mechanism evolved across a century. Poll taxes. Literacy tests. Grandfather clauses. White primaries. The Voting Rights Act struck most of them down. The losing white supremacists taught their children to repeat the hate generationally.

Thus the current move is identical. A Black official wins an election by a 36-point margin. The state invents an administrative reason to eliminate the victory by declaring the seat erased. Sixty-three legislators vote for white supremacist power. The governor signs to keep hate alive.

McMakin called it modernization, because that’s a whistle to white supremacists. They are hiding records of their past crimes by committing new ones.

The archaeological detail

Duncan ran for this office because the office had wronged him. The records that would have proved his innocence sat inside the Clerk of Criminal Court’s files. He was denied access to them for years. When the Innocence Project of New Orleans finally pried the documents loose through litigation, the files showed police officers had lied in court. That is what a functioning records office is supposed to prevent and what a captured one enables.

Duncan’s victory threatened to put a man who understood the records system’s failures in charge of fixing them. The people holding racist power, who corrupted records and denied justice, preferred to dissolve the system before it could be fixed.

That is integrity breach as policy. Failure by design, like a ladder thrown down so others can’t climb the wall.

Office, what office?

The accountability mechanism was working. Voters elected a true American reformer by a landslide. The white supremacists responded by removing the mechanism rather than accepting the accountability. Because white supremacists by definition are people who can not accept accountability.

Representative Candace Newell of New Orleans said it plainly before the vote. The rights they eliminate today are a template for the rights they eliminate tomorrow. And that has a specific history in Louisiana, with a specific “modernization” term used to enact state-level white supremacist doctrine.

Polymarket CEO tells insiders to leak. So cool, he said five months ago. Do it, for the market.

…what’s cool about Polymarket is that it creates this financial incentive for people to go and divulge the information to the market and the market to change, and all of a sudden…

Insider leak is the entire product. Harvard researchers estimate more than $143 million in Polymarket profits may be linked to individuals with access to nonpublic information. I’m surprised it’s not 100%, given the CEO statement.

And now, as you might expect, Polymarket says insiders who leak will be selectively reported to law enforcement.

Proof? Arresting the CEO would be the only acceptable proof.

The insider-leak-harvesting system is sacrificing one publicly identifiable service member, without explaining how, to preserve the Polymarket platform as a pipeline of crime. The referral is compliance theatre that protects the CEO, who is in bed with the government and will victimize again.

Inducement to crime is the business model. Selective corrupted enforcement is the margin.

An insider named Van Dyke did exactly what Coplan advertised he made Polymarket for, and was held out as the “not cool” kind of leaker once the political cost of privacy exceeded the marketing value of generating leakers to sacrifice.

The resolution mechanism (who gets prosecuted) is cheaper to corrupt than the underlying event (controlling who leaks). Polymarket positions itself now as above the law, as it chooses which leakers to expose and which to hide for profit. That selection power is worth more than any individual trader’s profit, and it is apparently corrupted.

The “Eddie Murphy Rule” charge is novel and narrow. It punishes Van Dyke’s misuse of classified information. It does nothing to the platform that monetized his misuse, or to the CEO who described the misuse of classified information as a core feature of his business.

The FBI raided the Polymarket CEO’s apartment in November 2024 as part of an investigation into US users trading on the platform. Trump’s DOJ and CFTC abruptly dropped both investigations in July 2025. Then in September 2025 Polymarket bought a CFTC-registered exchange to go onshore. Talk about insiders. Coplan was on a call from Mar-a-Lago the same week as the raid. The acting Attorney General applauding “our men and women in uniform” on the Van Dyke arrest is Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal defense attorney. The FBI Director praising the indictment is Kash Patel.

The arrest is entirely political.

The system got the wrong guy, on purpose.

Critical OPSEC integrity failure, by design.

The Van Dyke arrest is the only visible prosecution against a backdrop of total federal withdrawal, on both sides of a rigged competition the First Family is paid to sit atop like President Andrew “genocide” Jackson would have wanted.

Donald Trump Jr. is a paid advisor to both Polymarket and Kalshi, the two largest prediction markets competing for the same regulatory carve-out. At an April House Agriculture Committee hearing, Representative Jim McGovern asked CFTC Chair Mike Selig whether the White House had pressured CFTC to drop its Polymarket probe. Selig refused to answer. Selig also runs a CFTC with one commissioner out of five, a quarter of its staff cut, and a public admission that AI is covering the enforcement gap. On April 2, that same CFTC joined DOJ in suing Arizona, Connecticut, and Illinois to block state enforcement against prediction markets. One of the DOJ attorneys on the case is Yaakov Roth, who represented Kalshi in the 2023 lawsuit that opened the door for these platforms in the first place. Blanche meanwhile issued his “cease cryptocurrency enforcement” memo while still holding between $159,000 and $485,000 in crypto, despite an ethics pledge not to act on matters affecting those holdings. He divested after.

In case you like historical parallels

Year	Case	Sacrificed	Protected
1720	South Sea Bubble	Company directors	Court and ministry (Walpole, “the Screen”)
1872	Crédit Mobilier	Two censured congressmen	Railroad directors, federal subsidy pipeline
1875	Whiskey Ring	Treasury clerks	Orville Babcock, Grant
1921–24	Teapot Dome	Albert Fall	Harry Daugherty, Harding cabinet
1986–87	Iran-Contra	Oliver North	Reagan, CIA chain of command
1995–96	Loans-for-shares	Russian public assets	Yeltsin family, seven bankers
2026	Polymarket	Gannon Van Dyke	Shayne Coplan, Trump family

Tucker Carlson apologized on his podcast. For what?

He says he was “misleading” his listeners about Trump.

• No specifics.
• No mention of Dominion.
• No mention of January 6 footage.
• No mention of Covid disinformation killing Americans.
• No mention of a decade of rhetoric about immigrants and Black Americans.
• No mention of antisemitism and platforming Nazis into the White House.

He just says he was “misleading.” The apology seems designed to collect absolution and avoid the judgment, especially without triggering restitution for all those harmed.

His former colleagues told Lyz Lenz in 2018 that Carlson never believed any of what he was selling the public. He was making money by doing a misleading bit.

Performing the demagogue because it paid.

That makes it worse. A true believer can plead conviction. A performer who knew the rhetoric was false and deployed it anyway because the ratings were good, knowing the harms it caused, is complicit.

The bet on not being held accountable paid for a decade. Maybe the Infowars case has spooked him. The Jones $1.5B judgment plus the Dominion $787.5M settlement where Carlson was named is real precedent.

All the Trump, MAGA, America First bets now have spoiled so badly, they apparently are beyond Carlson’s ability to spin harming others into his personal profit. So he wants out. Carlson would book all the harms as regret and keep the ill-gotten winnings. Victim money stays with him. His victims stay unnamed. The innocent and vulnerable people his show helped target get nothing for his role in profiting off their harm. The journalists that his adherents went after get nothing.

This apology therefore settles nothing, as much as he pleads he should get away free.

When [Tucker] Carlson parents sold the property, they sold the land off separately to housing developers, thus raping the woods where generations of kids had wandered and reaping the highest profits for themselves. Suffice to say that the signs — of extreme privilege, of decimating nature for profit, and of treating your own neighbors with disdain — were all there, in the parental nest, long before Tucker Carlson became America’s most pernicious super-spreader. What finally put an end to Father Coughlin’s stirring speeches promoting fascism in Europe and antisemitism in the United States was the Second World War. What might put an end to the mad and dangerous ravings of (the presumably celibate) Coughlin’s many honorary children?

Montgomery, Alabama. April 21, 2026. The district where Klansmen firebombed the SPLC office in 1983.

They’re back to attack the SPLC again.

The district where United Klans of America operated until SPLC civil litigation bankrupted it in 1987 after UKA Klansmen lynched Michael Donald. The district where federal prosecutors looked away from the Montgomery bus boycott, the Freedom Rides, the Selma march, and the murders that accompanied all three. The Justice Department has chosen the geography of historical failure to prosecute the organization that forced civil accountability where criminal prosecution refused to operate.

A federal grand jury in the Middle District of Alabama returned a heavily flawed eleven-count indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). This post is about Trump doing what everyone has long said Trump does for the KKK.

There’s a lot of acting going on in Alabama. The charging instrument is signed by Acting United States Attorney Kevin P. Davidson and his Assistant United States Attorney Russell T. Duraski. The press conference was staged by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel. Notably Patel announced last year he was campaigning to sever all FBI ties with the SPLC because it had been mapping hate related to domestic terrorism.

Patel said on Friday that the FBI would sever its relationship with the SPLC, asserting that the organization had been turned into a “partisan smear machine” and criticizing it for its use of a “hate map” that documents alleged anti-government and hate groups inside the United States. […] The FBI also cut ties with the Anti-Defamation League, a prominent Jewish advocacy organization that fights antisemitism. It faced criticism on the right for maintaining a “Glossary of Extremism.”

No map, no glossary, allowed anymore by the Trump FBI if it points at America First.

False DoJ Statements

The charge of wire fraud requires a materially false statement. Read the indictment for the false statement and there is none. It does not exist.

The government quotes SPLC donor-facing language at length: dismantle white supremacy, expose hate and injustice, confront hate, stand up to injustice.

Every quoted phrase is true.

Running paid sources inside the Ku Klux Klan is how you dismantle, expose, and confront the Ku Klux Klan. That is the operative definition of those verbs. The truth is context of organized racist violence. The indictment charges the sentences on one page and admits on the next page that SPLC penetrated National Alliance leadership, United Klans of America leadership, and the online planning chat for Unite the Right.

These facts are facts. The government points at no lie. None.

Instead it puts out a theological argument that they want the word dismantle to mean, to donors, something other than what this organization has very publicly been doing since 1971.

Morris Dees described the method in his books. Federal courts that tried the Donald, Person, and Macedonia Baptist civil cases knew where the evidence came from. Journalists reported on the Intelligence Project for decades. The method that the indictment falsely labels a secret is the method the organization is most famous for doing in the public eye.

The DoJ is the one on record making false statements.

Paragraph 11: Defense Opening Statement

Read paragraph 11(a) and the whole indictment crashes. F-37 was a member of the online leadership chat that planned Unite the Right. Attended Charlottesville under SPLC direction. Coordinated transportation for several attendees. The Justice Department has just placed in a grand jury indictment the fact that SPLC ran a source inside the planning apparatus of the rally that produced James Fields driving a car into Heather Heyer.

Any competent defense lawyer will read that paragraph to a jury and ask which part that SPLC donors should regret.

Paragraph 11(b) is even worse for the government. F-9 was a twenty-year National Alliance fundraiser. In 2014, F-9 delivered twenty-five boxes of internal National Alliance materials to an SPLC employee for copying. Twenty-five boxes. The largest documented counterintelligence haul against American neo-Nazism in a generation. The prosecution placed this sentence in the indictment as evidence of fraud against donors.

It is evidence of donors receiving what they wanted and far more than they paid for.

On the Document Theft

The government narrates F-9 entering National Alliance headquarters, removing materials, and the SPLC paying F-39 approximately $6,000 to falsely take responsibility. If the government had evidence of a chargeable theft conspiracy or obstruction of justice against SPLC employees, federal prosecutors had twelve years to bring it.

Twelve years.

They brought wire fraud over ACH batches instead. Either the underlying evidence fails to support the theft narrative the indictment insinuates, or the prosecutors prefer to make a rhetorical charge over a tiny one. Either reading erases any credibility of the filing. A prosecutor with a real burglary case charges the burglary. A political assignment apparently charges what the Trump assignment requires.

Indict the FBI

Gary Thomas Rowe was a paid FBI informant inside United Klans of America. He was in the car during the 1965 murder of Viola Liuzzo. The Bureau paid him with officially appropriated funds from Congress on representations about combating domestic terrorism. Under the legal theory Davidson and Duraski signed their names to, every FBI handler who ran a Klan source committed wire fraud against the American taxpayer. That’s batshit, Robin. Every DEA cartel penetration, every ATF firearms trafficking case, every federal organized crime prosecution built on informant testimony? GTFO. This DoJ theory cannot survive its own generalization that says domestic terrorism cannot be legally investigated.

No federal court will adopt a rule of law that retroactively criminalizes seventy years of federal counterintelligence practice. The indictment language is a KKK get out of jail free card.

Dates as Confessional

The §1014 bank false statement counts are dated December 20, 2016. Indicted on April 21, 2026. That’s nine years and four months into the ten-year window available under FIRREA. You can see the problem.

A prosecutor with fresh evidence files promptly. A prosecutor handed a political assignment files at the statutory edge because nothing new has emerged and the clock is running out. The wire fraud counts are dated April 25, 2023, within the extended ten-year window that applies when wire fraud affects a financial institution. The government will argue that extension to keep its charges alive. The filing dates, read together, describe an office reaching for every inch available to spin up a non-case the career prosecutors correctly ignored without action for most of a decade.

Forfeiture as Captured State Weapon

Forfeiture Allegation-2 invokes Title 18 §982(a)(1). This is the statute that allows pre-trial asset seizure on money laundering charges. Count Eleven exists to anchor the forfeiture.

The captured Justice Department is moving to seize the SPLC endowment, the archives, the operating capital, the real property traceable to donor funds.

Notably, the real property includes the Civil Rights Memorial Center on Washington Avenue and, across the street, Maya Lin’s Civil Rights Memorial: a black granite table inscribed with the names of forty people murdered during the civil rights movement between 1954 and 1968.

Trump wants history erased.

The Department of Justice, in 2026, has filed a forfeiture action that places Maya Lin’s memorial to civil rights martyrs within the universe of property the government is moving to seize from the civil rights organization that built it.

Say the sentence out loud. Read it twice. That is the actual basis of this entire charging instrument. Censorship.

Win or lose at trial is secondary to the outcome the filing produces. The substantive case will grind through motions and appeals for years. The asset seizure is meant to bomb America on day one. Strip operational capital and the organization ceases to function while the litigation is pending. That mechanism is the fire, ready, aim of Trump punishment.

The Charged Amount is Peanuts

The wire fraud counts? Just $13,905 in ACH transfers on a single day. Thirteen thousand nine hundred and five dollars. A prosecutor with proportionate judgment does not indict a civil rights organization over thirteen thousand dollars in batched bank transactions. The $3 million aggregate figure the press conference repeated is shameless DoJ exaggeration. It is politically generated hot rhetoric surrounding charges that do not contain it.

Read the counts.

The Indictment Exposes Sources

Remember all the ink spilled on the Trump-Epstein Files?

Every F in the document is identified by group affiliation, payment range, and date window. National Alliance. Aryan Nations. Sadistic Souls Motorcycle Club. American Front. Imperial Wizard of United Klans of America. National Socialist Party of America.

The indictment redacts the names while publishing a reverse-lookup manual.

The violent racist networks SPLC penetrated now have a federal roadmap for identifying their informants. The Justice Department, under grand jury seal, has just handed the National Alliance, the Aryan Nations, and the Unite the Right planning network the intelligence they have been trying to assemble for decades.

This service to the beneficiary class of domestic terrorists is difficult to describe as incidental to the DoJ intentions.

Wrong Side of History

Todd Blanche ran Donald Trump’s criminal defense before his appointment as Acting Attorney General.

Kash Patel published a list of sixty names titled Members of the Executive Branch Deep State in Appendix B of his 2023 book Government Gangsters before his appointment as FBI Director, and pledged on the Bannon podcast to go out and find the conspirators.

Kevin Davidson is a career prosecutor who signed a charging instrument whose legal theory would indict his own agency’s seventy-year history of domestic intelligence practice.

Russell Duraski is the line AUSA.

Judge Emily Marks sits as a 2018 Trump appointee.

The grand jury returned the bill that prosecutors asked it to return, as grand juries do. These names belong in the record of what this indictment is, for history to always reflect on them. The names remain attached to the filing.

American Lessons

The Alabama legal apparatus prosecuted Freedom Riders while protecting the men who beat them.

Federal tax investigations targeted the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Bar complaints targeted NAACP lawyers.

The machinery that protected the Klan in the 1950s and 1960s is operating again in 2026, from the same offices, using updated statutes. The method, vocabulary and function are nearly identical. Wire fraud and bank fraud and money laundering are the current language for what sedition, tax evasion, and criminal syndicalism were used for in the civil rights era.

The work the indictment charges is the work that broke United Klans of America in Beulah Mae Donald v. United Klans of America, 1987. The district where the indictment was filed is the district where Klansmen firebombed the SPLC office in 1983 in retaliation for that work.

The Justice Department has now formally sided, through the charging instrument, with the white sheets faction that lit the match and now carries the torches.

What the Record Requires

I’m no lawyer but I spend enough time around them that I expect the indictment will face motions to dismiss, motions to suppress the forfeiture, and constitutional challenges under the First Amendment and the Fifth Amendment selective prosecution doctrine.

The legal process will document, in a public record, the filing is to embolden white supremacist domestic terrorism. Every pleading creates an exhibit for what should follow: professional responsibility referrals against the signing prosecutors, Senate oversight inquiry into the leadership officials who staged the press conference, and the slow accumulation of judicial findings on a charging instrument whose legal theory is an embarrassment to federal precedent on informant operations.

The civil rights bar, the former United States Attorneys association, and every federal prosecutor who has ever signed a 302 on a paid Klan source are now on notice. The theory advanced in Montgomery on April 21, 2026 is the theory that would retroactively criminalize any career that fights AGAINST the KKK. Silence in the face of this filing is consent to the KKK violence that it endorses.

Civil accountability onto the United Klans of America was forced by the SPLC. Now the SPLC will force it onto the current Justice Department that is trying to restart the Klan’s 1983 firebombing by other means.