May 4, 2026

MAJOR ARSON SUSPECT OBSESSED OVER LUIGI MANGIONE AND WANTED TO KILL THE RICH, PROSECUTORS SAY:

The suspect accused of starting one of the largest wildfires in Los Angeles history, fixated on Luigi Mangione weeks before starting the blaze out of resentment for the rich, according to federal prosecutors.

Federal prosecutors said in a trial memorandum that 30-year-old Jonathan Rinderknecht demonstrated an obsession with Mangione in the days before he started the Lachman and Palisades Fires on January 1, 2025. Mangione has developed a cult following among the Left after he was arrested for gunning down Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare.

“On January 24, 2025, when investigators asked defendant why someone might commit arson in the Pacific Palisades, he responded that it would be out of resentment of the rich enjoying their money as ‘we’re basically being enslaved by them’ and compared such an act of ‘desperation’ to the murder for which Mangione was charged,” the memo said.

The memo added that Uber passengers who rode with Rinderknecht on December 31 and January 1 recounted him being “angry, intense, driving erratically, and ranting about being ‘pissed off at the world’ and Luigi Mangione, capitalism, and vigilantism.”

Related: At the Wall Street Journal’s Substack, former Popular Mechanics editor James Meigs writes: Political Violence Is Cool Now.
Why do so many elites support violent extremism?

We used to have a stereotype that political violence typically emerges from the uneducated mob. Today, the opposite is true. Some of today’s most bloodthirsty rhetoric can be heard on college campuses or from influencers embraced by political elites. “Kill those motherf——,” Mr. Piker once said, speaking of landlords. “Let the streets soak in their f— red capitalist blood!” In a New York Times column originally headlined, “Hasan Piker is Not the Enemy,” liberal centrist Ezra Klein argued that Democrats should not write firebrands like Mr. Piker “out of acceptable political discourse.” The celebration of violence isn’t some depravity found only in America’s political swamps. It’s a viewpoint widely tolerated, even encouraged, among denizens of our cultural high ground. Yes, the right has its share of scary extremists, too. But their ideas get far less prominence in our mainstream culture. And, unlike some leftist icons, they’re not teaching at Ivy League universities.

Once, I would have argued that education is the best antidote to violent extremism. People need to learn tolerance for other viewpoints and the value of fair-minded debate. Again, the opposite appears to be true today. A recent survey by the Skeptic Research Center found that people with advanced academic degrees “were about twice as likely to support political violence than those with less formal education.” And the people committing violence aren’t anonymous losers. Both Luigi Mangione and Cole Allen, the latest would-be presidential assassin, were graduates of elite universities.

Miegs concludes, “To get out of this spiral of violence, our country will need to reset its moral compass. I’m not hopeful that such reform will come from the top down. It may have to come from the bottom up.”

But leftists with a love of Radical Chic will do everything they can to prevent that change from happening:

“Exploiting the grief of the people in the Palisades:”

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

IRAN FIRES UNSUCCESSFULLY ON US NAVY SHIP, IN RESPONSE…:

Some ceasefire, eh?

Posted at 2:31 pm by Stephen Green

YOU BOYS COULD USE A LITTLE CHURCHIN’ UP:

Or as America’s Newspaper of Record suggests:

(Classical reference in headline.)

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

FRAUD, ALL THE WAY DOWN: Daycare Fraud, Visa Fraud, Flashy Cars, And Communism. “You know, if I were a communist-connected foreign national committing welfare and H1-B visa fraud, I would think you would want to keep a low-profile and drive something like a Honda Accord, a Toyota Camry or a Ford F-150.”

Posted at 1:44 pm by Stephen Green

UNDER A BLOOD RED STATE SKY:

Related:

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW:

And it’s starting to feel like it.

Posted at 1:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

DID MR. KISS KISS FANG FANG EXPOSE HIS WANG WANG? Eric Swalwell Sent Women ‘Videos of Him Masturbating’ and Other Perverted Messages After Joining Snapchat to Restore ‘Faith’ in ‘Democracy’: Report.

One young woman claimed Swalwell would send her Snapchat messages about her future, before asking inappropriate questions such as, “What are you wearing?”

Two other women told CNN that Swalwell sent them “sexually explicit messages and unsolicited nude photos and videos of himself” in 2021, while a third woman also claimed to have received “sexually tinged messages and videos.”

One former congressional staffer allegedly developed a consensual sexual relationship with Swalwell after he began flirting with her on Snapchat in 2021.

During the relationship, Swalwell reportedly sent “nude photos of himself and videos of him masturbating,” which showed the congressman’s “face and naked body.”

The videos, which were saved by the woman, were shown to CNN.

“His stories would be his, like, congressional content, but then he would be sending me dick pics,” she alleged, adding that Swalwell sent her another “explicit video” late last year, just weeks before he announced his 2026 California gubernatorial campaign.

No wonder Swalwell was taken out so quickly last month by his own party.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

SPRINGTIME FOR PLATNER: Democrats Go Into Their Dance.

“Don’t be stupid, be a smarty – come and join the Platner party!” is the collective refrain from Democrats (with rare exceptions) as they close ranks around the guy with the Nazi tattoo.

Now that Governor Janet Mills has dropped out of the primary race, the opportunity for Graham Platner to be the Democrat candidate for United States Senate in Maine is all but assured, and Democrats are willingly spinning this news as “happy and gay.”

Yes, yes, Graham Platner covered up his Totenkopf tattoo with a really shitty wolf-ish thing, but let’s all remember two things. First, he knew what that tattoo was (his own former campaign manager attests to that, as do other people who heard him talk about it), and second, he was totally fine with keeping that tattoo UNTIL he was running for office. So no, the Nazi apologetics coming from Democrats are pathetically disingenuous. Example A of this apologia comes from “Pod Save America” Obama bro Jon Favreau, who tried giving Hasan Piker an out (and Piker made a fool of him by affirming his fanboy love for Hamas), who is desperately singing a tune that he would rightfully rip Republicans for, if there was a Republican who had a Nazi tattoo running for office. As he himself says, he’s doubling down because of loyalty to the Party. Ahem. 

In 2014, Daniel Hannan wrote, “The greatest cultural victory of the Left has been to disregard the Nazi-Soviet Pact:”

To the modern reader, George Orwell’s depiction of how enmity alternates between Eurasia and Eastasia seems far-fetched; but when he published his great novel in 1948, such things were a recent memory. It suited Western Leftists, during and after the War, to argue that Hitler had been uniquely evil, certainly wickeder than Stalin. It was thus necessary to forget the enthusiasm with which the two tyrants had collaborated.

Flashforward to 2026, and Oceania has never wanted to punch Nazis: 

Tweet concludes, “It’s a story about how years and years of moral indignation from the Very Serious People™ class proved to be a paper-thin veneer over your team jerseys.”

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

WIKIPEDIA IS NOT A RELIABLE SOURCE:

Posted at 12:26 pm by Stephen Green

HOW IT STARTED: What’s really behind Trump’s clash with the Pope?

Donald Trump’s latest clash with the Catholic Church stunned even the most hardened veterans of culture-war X. According to the President of the United States, the Chicago-born Pope Leo XIV, the conspicuously holy spiritual leader of 1.3 billion people, is “WEAK on crime and terrible on foreign policy.” He also claimed that, “If I wasn’t in the White House, Leo wouldn’t be in the Vatican.”

For commentators accustomed to the fog of modern diplomatic platitudes, such trash talk was the equivalent of a Holy Roman Emperor hurling insults at a medieval pontiff. In the year 963, for example, the Emperor Otto I accused Pope John XII of fornicating with his own niece, “making the sacred palace a whorehouse” while he drunkenly murdered his enemies and consecrated a ten-year-old bishop.

Trump’s rhetoric may have been mild in comparison, but the fact remains that not once in the 250-year history of the United States has a Commander-in-Chief launched a personal attack on the Supreme Pontiff.

—The Spectator, April 27th.

How it’s going:

 

Deace’s tweet concludes, “Barely 2% of West Virginia is Hispanic. Barely 1% of the state speaks Spanish. This is a purely political appointment by a woke pope trying to shoehorn his open borders agenda into a state Trump has won by 40 points three times. There’s nothing prophetic here, but it’s all shamefully political. An open borders agenda the pope himself isn’t forced to abide by, because Vatican City has strict enforcement policies and walls. This is like if MSNBC picked offices in the church, all the while never allowing the illegals in Martha’s Vineyard where their primetime hosts spend their summers.”

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

CHANGE:

But: “Good job! But it came too late; if it had happened 20 years ago, it would have solved many problems. For today’s Sweden, only remigration will solve it. The immigrant population of non-European origin accounts for 16%, one of the top 5 highest in Europe.”

Posted at 11:24 am by Stephen Green

NO ENEMIES TO THE LEFT, NOT EVEN ACTUAL NAZIS:

Posted at 10:53 am by Stephen Green