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.
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.
The 1981 lynching, two years before the Klansmen firebombed the SPLC office in 1983
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.
The Economist/The New Yorker weren’t wrong
Acting Attorney Kevin P. DavidsonThere’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.
Tracking America First campaigns (Mapping the Klan) is based on a variety of sources, mostly newspapers sponsored by or sympathetic to the Ku Klux Klan. These publications reported on the activities of local units, known officially as Klaverns. Source: Virginia Commonwealth University
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.
Woodrow Wilson adopted the 1850s nativist (racist hate) slogan “America First” in 1915 and soon after the infamous white robe costumes appeared, based on the film “Birth of a Nation” that he heavily promoted to white-first audiences.
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.
American automotive mythology launders European design, Nazi-era theft, and Henry Ford’s antisemitism into an all-American icon. I don’t often hear Americans give way to the fact that the original Ford Mustang was a European design, with a European engine. Give credit where credit is due?
The European open two-seater was well established by 1962, so the Ford copy was, well, basically a copy of European sports cars. Mustang I copied that idiom end to end: mid-engine, lightweight tubular spaceframe, V4 transaxle, two-seater, disc brakes, rack and pinion.
Let’s start with the V4 engine that debuted in the Taunus P4 (12M) in 1962. It was the 1962 Mustang I drivetrain. The Ford Köln plant building this V4 was the same Ford-Werke that built Hitler’s Wehrmacht trucks in WWII (one-third of the 350,000 trucks used by the motorized German Army as of 1942 were Ford-made).
Next, the Mustang I body was a bespoke Troutman-Barnes aluminum design, which looked like Italian concepts on top of the prior Taunus P3 design: raked windshield, smooth uninterrupted flanks, forward-leaning stance, aerodynamic fastback profile.
The Ford Taunus P3 (17M) sold in Europe 1960-1964
It’s now well documented that the Ford Taunus, mixed with European sports car designs, seeded the Mustang. And thus it is most accurate to say the entire “American” Mustang lineage traces to a 1.5-liter V4 drivetrain made in the German Ford plant that supplied Hitler’s invasions, from Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1939 through motorizing the Wehrmacht’s disastrous ill-fated campaigns until 1945 (Hitler unquestionably had lost the war by the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, meaning his next three years before surrender were used by Germans to scale-up genocide until his suicide). The Ford-supplied Wehrmacht trucks were the literal engine of genocide, built on two decades of antisemitic campaigning by Ford.
Ford 1962 1.5-liter V4. Power: 109 hp. Top Speed: 120 mph.
The Mustang I is what gave the entire brand its name, its pony badge, and the Total Performance campaign that launched the production car. And it looked like this:
The Mustang I was Ford catching up to a European sports racer idiom that had been running at Le Mans, the Targa Florio, and Sebring for roughly a decade. Calling it innovative in 1962 is like calling a 2020 Ford EV innovative for having a battery. In fact, Mustang I used Lotus “wobbly-web” wheels, so even those were literal European hardware. Some suggest the 1953 Porsche 550 Spyder was the underlying concept.
Here’s another fun fact from history. The designer we associate with the Mustang I also did a Porsche 911 four-door one-off stretched version in 1968, commissioned by Texas Porsche dealer William J. Dick Jr as a Christmas gift for his wife. Basically 21 inches were added to the wheelbase. People want to call this “original Panamera” when in reality it was just a return to the Czech Tatra, the car the Nazis stole in 1938 and renamed VW.
Hitler admired things about Ford that Americans rarely admit, even though Ford workers protested them at the time.
Ford opposed unions because he believed they were a Jewish conspiracy. American autoworkers and their children in 1941 protest Ford’s relationship with Hitler. Source: Wayne State
Prince Louis Ferdinand recounted Hitler at lunch in 1933 declaring he would put Ford’s theories into practice in Germany. While Ford put hate-filled newspapers on the front seat of every car he sold, he never won an election. Hitler however had used Ford-like hate campaigns to seize an entire state. Ford’s antisemitism was scaled in Germany past anything the Dearborn Independent and The International Jew achieved in America, because Hitler adopted radio and deployed it through institutions that Ford never commanded (Reichsrundfunk was a Nazi state broadcasting monopoly pushing cheap Volksempfänger engineered to receive only its signal).
That is the background to Hitler awarding Ford the Grand Cross of the German Eagle on July 30, 1938, four months before Kristallnacht.
Give credit where credit is due for the Porsche design? Tatra had filed ten very clear patent claims against Porsche, and they were about to settle when Hitler announced that he would “solve his problem”. He illegally invaded Czechoslovakia. Over 500 of the T97s had already been built before production was terminated by Hitler in 1939. So VW and Porsche designs were literally stolen. We know this all because VW settled the case out of court in 1965 at around one to three million Deutsche Marks.
Henry Ford and Hitler.
Porsche and Mustang.
Far more in common than Americans tend to admit. Think about the European history of the Mustang, next time one is near.
The papers of the day somehow didn’t do Ford as much damage as he deserved for being Hitler’s inspiration and supporter.
The sad days of DOS. Any program could peek and poke the kernel, hook interrupts, write anywhere on disk. There was no safety.
The fix wasn’t a wrapper, or a different shell. It was a whole different approach to what was being done. The world already had rings, virtual memory, ACLs, separate address spaces. Thirty years of separations that Unix had from the start were ignored, and it finally caught up to the world of DOS.
I’m not saying DOS wasn’t wildly popular. Oh my god. I remember one dark night in a bar in Chicago, a drunk Swedish IT consultant jumped onto a table and said “listen up everyone!”. As he waved his beer mug around, sloshing carelessly, with wobbly legs, he said he was in town to work on Wal-Mart Point-of-sale (POS) devices running MS-DOS. Why was he acting like this? He was happy, very, very happy. He wanted us to know he loved his work, something like “CAN YOU BELIEVE WAL-MART HAS HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DOS MACHINES WITH ALL YOUR F$%#$%NG PAYMENT CARD DATA?! HAHAHA! AND IT ALL HAS ONE PASSWORD THAT EVERYONE SHARES! YOU WANT IT?! I GOT IT RIGHT HERE! FREEDOM, AMERICA, F$#%$K YEAH!”
True story. Both the guy and Wal-Mart put ALL customer information on MSDOS with exactly zero safety.
NCR had just announced a new MS-DOS-based PC…we decided to build a custom solution for Wal-Mart. I managed to connect a cash drawer and a POS printer to the new PC and wrote a dedicated Layaway application in compiled MS Basic. For the first time, Wal-Mart could store customer info on a disk. A clerk could search by name in seconds, and more importantly, the system tracked exactly where the merchandise was tucked away in the backroom. It was a massive efficiency win, and NCR ultimately rolled it out to all Wal-Mart stores.
Personal identity information was never breached faster! Massive efficiency win, indeed. When Wal-Mart was breached in 2006 they naturally had to wait three long years to notify anyone. So efficient.
Agent gateways feel like we are racing backwards into the MS-DOS era. At any minute in a bar I expect a drunk Swedish IT consultant to be standing on a table waving his lobster around, swearing about his single token for all agents. Because, let’s face it, when you look at gateways out there they can hand the model an exec tool and trust it. One process, one token, with the LLM holding the line.
NVIDIA clearly has seen the storm brewing and therefore published a thoughtful tutorial walking through a “NemoClaw” self-hosted agent setup on DGX Spark.
Use NVIDIA DGX Spark to deploy OpenClaw and NemoClaw end-to-end, from model serving to Telegram connectivity, with full control over your runtime environment.
I appreciate this effort. Real engineering, carefully done. I took the tutorial to learn and I followed it in Wirken, a gateway I’ve been building, to document what each step looked like.
The tutorial has you bind Ollama to 0.0.0.0 so the sandboxed agent can reach it across a network namespace. Then it pairs the Telegram bot by sending a code through the chat channel. It next approves blocked outbound connections in a separate host-side TUI. Each of those seem to be steps to address a real problem, which is how to put security around something that doesn’t work when it has security around it. It’s what an architecture requires when the sandbox sits around the whole agent.
Call me old-fashioned but I anticipated a lot of this in Wirken by giving the agent more safety by shrinking the boundaries. Each channel is a separate process with its own Ed25519 identity. The vault runs out of process. Inference stays on loopback because the agent is on the host. Shell exec runs in a hardened container configured at the tool layer, rather than trying to wrap around the whole agent. Sixteen high-risk command prefixes prompt on every call; others are first-use with a 30-day memory.
Register the NVIDIA container runtime with Docker, set cgroup namespace mode to host. Foundational setup because the agent runs inside a container.
No equivalent step. The gateway runs as a host process. Docker appears only as a per-tool-call sandbox for shell exec, provisioned lazily.
2. Ollama
Override OLLAMA_HOST to 0.0.0.0 so the sandboxed agent can reach inference across its own network namespace.
Ollama stays on 127.0.0.1. The agent is a host process, so loopback is enough.
3. Install
curl-pipe-bash from an NVIDIA URL.
curl-pipe-sh as well. The installer verifies the release signature with ssh-keygen against an embedded key, fail-closed on every failure path. The installer’s own SHA is pinned in the README for readers who want to check the script before piping.
4. Model
ollama pull the model, then ollama run to preload weights into GPU memory.
Same pattern. Both delegate inference to Ollama.
5. Onboarding
Wizard produces a sandbox image with policy and inference baked in, as a named rebuildable unit.
Wizard writes provider config and channel registrations. The permission model lives in the binary; runtime state is which action keys have been approved.
6. Telegram
Pairing code sent through the chat channel; user approves from inside the sandbox. Binds a platform user to the agent at first contact.
Bot token into an encrypted vault, fresh Ed25519 keypair for the adapter, no in-chat pairing. Approval granularity is per action and per agent rather than per channel user.
7. Web UI
Localhost URL with a capability token in the fragment, not shown again.
Localhost URL, loopback-bound, no token required.
8. Remote access
Host-side port forward started through OpenShell, then SSH tunnel. The extra hop is because the UI lives inside a netns.
SSH tunnel only. The WebChat listener is already on host loopback.
9. Policy
Enforces at the netns boundary. Outbound connections are surfaced in a TUI with host, port, and initiating binary. Approve for the session or persist.
Enforces at the tool dispatch layer. Sixteen high-risk command prefixes always prompt; others are first-use, remembered 30 days. Approved commands run inside a hardened Docker container with cap_drop ALL, no-new-privileges, read-only rootfs, 64MB tmpfs at /tmp, and no network.
Looking at my audit logs
The architectural claims above are recorded in the logs of the tutorial work. Wirken uses a hash-chained audit database of the webchat session, so here’s what that looked like in version 0.7.5.
Read-only file system is the kernel refusing to open a new file against a read-only mount. Not a DAC check, the rootfs itself. ws_ok=1 confirms the workspace bind-mount stayed writable. tmp_ok=1 confirms the tmpfs at /tmp did too.
Both receipts are consecutive rows from the same session, hash-chained through to the attestation signatures at seq 9 and seq 18. wirken sessions verify replays the chain and confirms every leaf hash matches its payload and every chain hash matches SHA-256(prev_hash || leaf_hash).
How big is your boundary?
The workarounds in the tutorial are trying to make the best of a foundation that doesn’t separate concerns the way engineers typically like. Bind to 0.0.0.0 because the sandbox can’t reach loopback. Pair through the chat channel because there’s no separate identity plane. Wrap the whole agent in a container because the agent itself isn’t yet trusted. Approve at the netns boundary because the tool layer has no concept of permission.
Each of those is a compromise; response to a constraint. The constraint is worth revisiting like it’s 1985 again and we can stop Bill Gates.
Abort, Retry, Fail today but tomorrow I promise there will be a better shell.
In 1973 Unix got process separation, user separation, file permissions, and pipes between small programs. By 1995 I was all-in on Linux, building kernels by hand and starting this blog named flyingpenguin, because it had inherited them and made them the default.
In 2020 Microsoft finally admitted Linux was their better future, which everyone knows today.
Back in 2001, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer famously called Linux “a cancer” … During a [2020] MIT event, [Microsoft president Brad] Smith said: “Microsoft was on the wrong side of history”
The agent space is still early and some people never learn the past. Wirken is one take on what it looks like when you remember. Like, remember the sheer horror of trying to protect anything in DOS? Remember the Wal-Mart breach of 2006, reported in 2009?
It’s just a question of whether we apply what computer history already knows to how we make agents safe for daily use. There are dozens of others doing versions of their own Wirken, and I’d genuinely like to hear from people working on the same problem; the architectures can converge in more than one way.
