The News You Need on Thursday, April 23rd, 2026.
The news you need today from Scott Horton and Charles Kaiser. Palantir's facist manifesto, how techbros are colonizing politics and Trump is bailing out the UAE.
‘We were terrified they were going to kill us’: fishermen describe their encounter with Hegseth’s Lethal Warriors
The Guardian
Scott: Most Americans learn all about Pete Hegseth’s supposed drug interdiction operations strictly through the unchallenged (but usually substantially false) press reports issued by US Southern Command, which always claim that the persons attacked were drug smugglers and then list the number of deceased supposed drug dealers killed in the operation. But as a senior Drug Enforcement Agency official tells me, if the claim that the target is moving drugs is accurate half the time, that would be a good number.
Today, The Guardian has chronicled one of these attacks involving an Ecuadorian fishing vessel. It was searched and no drugs were found, so US personnel sank the vessel and sent the fishermen off to prison in El Salvador—which then released them.
A group of Ecuadorian fishers have described how they were attacked in a double drone strike and then detained at gunpoint by soldiers on a US-flagged patrol vessel, in a rare first-hand account by victims of Donald Trump’s militarized campaign against alleged drug-trafficking boats off South America.
At least 178 people have been killed in US military airstrikes in the Caribbean and Pacific since the offensive began in September, according to a tally by the Washington Office on Latin America (Wola).
The US has provided no evidence that any of the vessels were involved in drug trafficking, and legal experts and rights groups say the attacks amount to extrajudicial killings as they apparently target civilians who do not pose any immediate threat. The White House insists the killings are lawful.
The Don Maca, a 35-ton fishing vessel that worked with six smaller boats, was about 200 miles (320km) north-west of the Galápagos Islands, when it disappeared on 26 March. About a week earlier, it had departed from Manta, a port city in south-western Ecuador that has become a focal point in the country’s escalating “war on drugs”.
Its 20 crewmen, all from nearby communities including San Mateo, Santa Marianita and Jaramijó, insist they were fishing when they were attacked.
Earlier that day they had seen a military vessel flying US colours, but thought nothing of it. “They did not signal to us, so we just carried on fishing,” said Palacios.
The first drone strike hit the bow of the boat, and the second hit the antenna, knocking out all communications, he said.
Debris from the explosion raked through the crew. One of the fishers, Erick Fabricio Coello Saltos, 27, said his hearing and his vision were both damaged in the blast. “When I heard an explosion, my eardrums ruptured terribly ... I was covered in blood from the shrapnel,” he told Radio Contacto.
The fishers claim drones continued to circle overhead after the blasts, leaving them fearing another strike. Mobile phone footage of the aftermath of the attack shows the terrified crew huddled at the stern of the ship, with an alarm sounding as one of them waves a white shirt. One man appears to be wiping blood from his nose.
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Alex Karp, Super Villain
The Guardian
Scott: When Palantir published a screed derived from Peter Thiel’s alter ego—CEO Alex Karp’s book entitled The Technological Republic—veteran tech bro observer and press secretary to California governor Jerry Brown Gil Durán instantly labeled it as Palantir’s “Fascist Manifesto.” That assessment was pretty much on the money and squared with many other observers, but Thiel and Karp promptly had their buddy Elon Musk ban Durán from his social media platform X.
Of more commercial significance, however, the publication sounded alarm bells with defense ministries in the United Kingdom and Germany, and various police outfits then in the process of contracting with Palantir.
Thiel is of course famous for talking of “freedom” and “democracy” and saying “you can’t have both.” But the manifesto made perfectly clear that Palantir’s mission is to supplant both with a new technocratic state in which the tech bros—and not elected representatives of the people—had total information access and de facto political power. The Guardian takes a look at the controversy here:
The US spy tech company Palantir published a manifesto extolling the benefits of American power and implying some cultures are inferior to others – in what MPs have called “a parody of a RoboCop film” and “the ramblings of a supervillain”.
“Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive,” wrote Palantir in a 22-point post on X over the weekend, which also called for an end to the “postwar neutering” of Germany and Japan.
The post exhorted the US to reinstate a military draft, saying that “free and democratic societies” need “hard power” in order to prevail.
It also predicted a future dominated by autonomous weapons: “The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.”
The pronouncement is the most recent of a number of high-profile statements from Palantir and its chief executive, Alex Karp, which appear to indicate that Karp views himself as not simply the head of a software company, but a pundit with important insights into the future of civilisation.
It led to criticism from several MPs, who said that it raised yet more questions about the UK’s portfolio of contracts with the company. Palantir has built up more than £500m in contracts in Britain, including a £330m contract with the NHS, as well as deals with the police and Ministry of Defence. These deals have come in for increasing criticism.
“Palantir’s manifesto, which embraces AI state surveillance of citizens along with national service in the USA, is either a parody of a RoboCop film, or a disturbing narcissistic rant from an arrogant organisation,” said Martin Wrigley, a Liberal Democrat MP who is a member of the commons science and technology select committee.
“Either way it shows that the company’s ethos is entirely unsuited to working on UK government projects involving citizens’ most sensitive private data.”
The Only Battle Trump Really Cares About…
…is the battle for white supremacy in America
Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance
Charles: The Department of Justice was created in 1870 to prosecute the Ku Klux Klan and to defend the civil rights of freed slaves.
Today its rightful name is the Department of Vengeance, because that’s the only thing it’s allowed to prosecute under the Trump administration. In the ultimate betrayal of the department’s original purpose, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and Kash Patel have announced an insane indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center–because it has done more than any other institution to destroy the Klan.
Joyce Vance explains:
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) was founded in 1971 in Montgomery, Alabama, by a lawyer named Morris Dees. His goal was to protect civil rights and combat hate groups. He went about it with precision, using a civil lawsuit to bankrupt and cripple the Ku Klux Klan in 1981, when other approaches, including criminal prosecution, failed to make headway.
So it makes sense that Kash Patel’s FBI would sever all ties with them, which happened last October. Until then, SPLC’s insightful intelligence product on domestic hate groups had been shared with the FBI and was widely viewed as being very helpful. They had access to information other groups, even law enforcement, didn’t have as they committed people and resources to programs like KlanWatch.
But apparently, that wasn’t enough. Tuesday morning, the interim President of the SPLC, Bryan Fair (full disclosure: my colleague at the University of Alabama School of Law), announced that the Center was under criminal investigation. Then, in a 5:30 p.m. press conference, DOJ announced it had indicted SPLC. Kash Patel called it “a massive sweeping indictment” charging fraud. The claim is the SPLC was paying the leadership of the hate groups it was keeping track of, and that it was defrauding its donors. He called it a “decade-long, multimillion-dollar” fraud, using the banking system and a series of fictitious entities to perpetuate the fraud. Only the Center is charged. No individuals are named, although Blanche said, “we’ll go from there,” and that it should be “obvious from the indictment that the investigation was ongoing.”
Todd Blanche, under questioning during the press conference, explained the case like this: The SPLC raised money to dismantle racism. It used some of the money to pay informants for information and access. When questioned about how a group like SPLC could be accused of supporting the very groups it was committed to disassembling, Blanche repeatedly said, “That’s what the grand jury found.” When pressed further, he explained that because the SPLC is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt entity, they have to disclose to donors what they’re going to do with money that they raise—and, per Blanche, they never said “we’re going to give a million bucks to the Ku Klux Klan,” so “that’s wire fraud.”
This is a speaking indictment with a story to tell; it’s an effort to rewire the public perception of a longstanding civil rights organization as a criminal enterprise, starting with headings like “The SPLC’s Paid Informants Network” and “The SPLC’s Fictitious Entities,” that sound ominous. Then we get to the charges:
There are six counts of wire fraud, taking place on just a single day, April 25, 2023. Wire fraud is found in 18 U.S.C. § 1343 and involves the use of electronic communications like the internet, or, as here, a bank wire transaction, allegedly to intentionally deceive someone and steal money or property. The allegation is that SPLC
There are four counts of making false statements to a federally insured bank in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1014. The law prohibits knowingly making false statements or concealing material facts. The jury instructions used in the 11th Circuit explain that “The heart of the crime is the attempt to influence the action of the institution by [knowingly] [willfully] making a false statement or report. The Government does not have to prove that the institution was actually influenced or misled.”
One count of conspiracy to commit money laundering, in violation of 18 U.S.C.1956(a)(1)(B)(i)
At first blush, these allegations feel like an extension of the revenge docket and the attacks on universities and law firms, an effort to delegitimize and marginalize an organization that is pushing back against the administration. We’ll have a chance to study the charges as we learn more about the government’s evidence. The government’s core theory is that the SPLC paid high-ranking white supremacists, but they seem to ignore the reason—that the use of paid informants was essential to the intelligence the Center was gathering on the groups they were members of, including intelligence that was shared with the FBI.
Just like the federal government pays cooperating witnesses, including some within white supremacist domestic terror groups, in order to prosecute crimes those groups commit, the SPLC used paid informants to obtain information. “Klanwatch” refers to a project established in 1981 to monitor, investigate, and litigate against the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist hate groups in the United States. It focused on exposing extremist activity and curbing racist violence through legal action. There are obvious reasons for not publicizing the fact that you are recruiting sources, and that you’re paying them to accomplish your goals. But the proof is in the pudding, and this is a group that not only tried to take down white supremacist groups, but it was also highly successful. Suggesting that they were taking action designed to enrich the informants they were paying for some nefarious, unspecified reasons would be silly if the consequences here weren’t so serious.
Morris Dees. Photo by Tim Pierce
Bryan Fair, the interim president of the SPLC declared, “We will not be intimidated into silence or contrition, and we will not abandon our mission,” Fair said. “We will vigorously defend ourselves, our staff, and our work.”
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Pedro Sánchez Tackles the “Silent Colonialism” of AI
El País
Scott: When JD Vance and Donald Trump—well as the US State Department and Justice Department—attack the EU and individual European nations these days, the attacks are more often than not scripted by the tech bros.
The Faustian bargain behind the 2024 election involved the tech bros giving Trump cash and support in many other forms (most of which is likely still little understood by US media) in exchange for control over US government organs for all the issues that matter to them: quashing the regulatory state, putting an end to antitrust, and mobilizing all the resources of the US government for war with governments which—unlike the United States—actually presume to regulate and rein in their excesses.
Within the EU today, there is a growing consensus, unexpectedly fueled by the Vatican’s own doctrinal stance on artificial intelligence, that control over AI must be exercised imminently or the tech bros will soon emerge triumphant. Alongside Pope Leo, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has emerged as one of the most tenacious critics of the tech bros and their agenda.
Pope Leo and Sánchez are both among the few world leaders who have a clear understanding of the dominant position of the tech bros behind the Trump administration, and of their rapid accumulation of power and influence.
For Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, the concentration of power around AI is a fact. The Executive he leads wants to place Spain at the front line of the development of this technology, while warning of the risks entailed by its uncontrolled deployment: it can enhance social gaps, concentrate wealth, erode democracies and influence climate change. Its regulation and those who guide its direction have been placed at the center of the challenge. “We defend that the governance of AI should be in the people, and not in the hands of a small group of people,” he said this Wednesday at the first meeting of the UN Panel of Experts on Artificial Intelligence, held in the Congress of Deputies.
Sánchez highlighted that, right now, the direction of AI is not defined by society, nor by democratically elected governments, nor by the market, but by a small group of large companies: “Five of them concentrate almost 60% of the world market. All from the same country.” We are facing a “silent colonialism,” he warned.
During his speech, Sánchez said that it is not a “concentration of capacity; we are talking about a concentration of power, because technology is power.” “We need a global multilateral response, where there is an alliance between business, academia, scientists, legislative power and executive power,” he emphasized.
In his opinion, the panel of experts that he chaired today represents a “transcendental” step in the commitment of Spain and the international community to respond to the phenomenon. “Social networks promised a more open, connected and democratic society. But today they are a failed state,” he stated.
What Even Is Going On with Kash Patel?
After Sarah Fitzpatrick laid out Kash Patel’s alarming and excessive drinking habits in The Atlantic, he sued the publication for defamation.
On Wednesday, Scott of Horton-Kaiser fame joined Ian Masters on Background Briefing to discuss the exposé and how long Patel might last in his job.
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Another Chapter in the Disintegration of the World Liberty Scam
Wall Street Journal
Scott: Chinese-born crypto billionaire Justin Sun was among the earliest supporters of Qusay’s and Uday’s cryptocurrency venture World Liberty Financial. Now he’s suing. He alleges that the Trump-brother driven business froze his $75 mn investment, blocked sales, and stripped away his voting rights the instant he got a bit critical. Specifically, Sun says he was pressured to buy more and retaliated against when he refused—calling it a scheme to “profit through fraud.”
Crypto tycoon Justin Sun sued the Trump family’s crypto venture, accusing World Liberty Financial of “criminal extortion” for freezing valuable digital tokens over his refusal to invest more money with the company.
The lawsuit, filed late Tuesday in a California federal court, said Sun remains “an ardent supporter of President Trump and the Trump family,” but that World Liberty’s managers “see the project as a golden opportunity to leverage the Trump brand to profit through fraud.”
The lawsuit underscored Sun’s dramatic turn from early and vocal supporter of the Trump-backed company to its critic-in-chief.
The Chinese-born billionaire accused World Liberty of blocking him from selling WLFI tokens he began to amass in late 2024, just after Trump’s re-election. Sun initially bought $30 million’s worth of WLFI tokens, making him the first significant investor in the then nascent project.
Night and (Earth) Day
This image, released in celebration of Earth Day, shows the terminator—the line between night and day—on Earth. The Artemis II astronauts captured this view on April 2, 2026, during their journey to the Moon.
NASA science improves life on Earth every day. The agency provides insights on our home planet that can only be gathered from space to help put actionable satellite information in the hands of decision-makers.
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Russia’s War has Stalled on the Edges of Ukraine
Seymour Hersh
Charles: Seymour Hersh has been consistently bearish about Ukraine’s prospects on the battlefield. But this week he offers a much more somber assessment of Russia’s prospects:
The war in Ukraine, which began with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion in February 2022, has gone on longer than the Soviet war against Nazi Germany. With its huge army and population, Russia seemed in the early years to be on the verge of winning only to have Putin, behaving like the irrational czars of the past, reject peace plans that gave him control of some of the territory his troops had taken inside eastern Ukraine. And now, I have been told, a war that Russia seemed to be winning has turned in the last year into an economic and military nightmare for Putin and the Russian army led by General Valery Gerasimov, the battle-tested commander who is one of three men in Russia with access to the nation’s nuclear codes.
The war is now a war of drones, in the view of one military expert who has toured the front under cover, with Ukraine holding a distinct edge. Bedraggled Russian soldiers at the front find themselves under deadly drone attack the moment they crawl out of their bunkers. “Ukraine has a vast drone surveillance network that is picking off Russians as soon as they appear,” the expert told me. He added that he was repelled by the horrid living conditions for all the soldiers on both sides of the front lines.
One fix to the growing Russian battlefield losses was to offer potential recruits a bonus of hundreds of thousands or millions of rubles to sign up. The bonus is not fully paid out in most cases, I was told, until the recruits finish their basic training and get to the front. Once there, the corruption reaches new heights because officers demand payments to keep the new recruits from being sent to combat zones at the front, where death by drone awaits.
The result of the corruption and the intense Ukrainian drone surveillance, the expert told me, is that the Russian army “is no further along in its invasion than it was two years earlier. They can’t move—have no offensive capability. This is the same army that went from Moscow to Berlin in World War II. Now the army has gone only one hundred kilometers into Ukraine. No real progress at all.”
General Valery Gerasimov
America First, Emirati Edition
New York Times
Scott: Who suffers from Donald Trump’s war on Iran?
The number is legion, and those likely to suffer the most are the millions who will face food scarcity and famine as a result of crop failures which are the predictable consequence of fertilizer and fossil fuels not moving out of the Gulf. But Trump doesn’t much care about them. Nor is he terribly concerned for the moment about the plight of American consumers.
On the other hand, the Emirati sheikhs who have given millions to his family businesses and supported Trump and like minded Republican politicians through a myriad of paths—many of them plainly illegal—get a lot of attention. And today, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announces the makings of another multi-billion dollar bailout designed to show that Trump really cares for those who treat the Trump Organization and the Kushner Companies right.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Wednesday that he backed the idea of providing economic support in the form of a currency swap to the United Arab Emirates, an oil-rich ally that has been contending with economic fallout from the war in Iran.
Speaking at a Senate hearing, Mr. Bessent said that the Emirates, along with several other countries in the Persian Gulf and Asia, had inquired about the possibility of a swap. He said such a maneuver would prevent the disorderly sale of U.S. assets as nations look to secure access to dollars. The war in Iran has damaged oil and gas infrastructure throughout the Middle East, dealing a blow to economies such as the Emirates that rely on the Strait of Hormuz to transport crude around the world.
The Treasury secretary said that providing a currency swap to the Emirates could benefit the United States by stabilizing foreign exchange markets and protecting American assets around the world. He added that it could be provided by the Federal Reserve or by the Treasury Department, which can deploy its Exchange Stabilization Fund to buy another nation’s currency.
“Swap lines, whether it’s from the Federal Reserve or the Treasury, are to maintain order in the dollar funding markets and to prevent the sale of the U.S. assets in a disorderly way,” Mr. Bessent said. “The swap line would both benefit the U.A.E. and the U.S.”
Needless to say, Bessent does not believe that he or Trump need congressional approval for this maneuver—nor for much of anything.
Your Online Moment of Zen
THIS LAND IS YOUR LAND
Just seventeen years, three months and four days ago, America finally fulfilled the original promise of the Declaration of Independence by inaugurating its first African-American president,
Pete Seeger and Bruce Springsteen led a gigantic audience in front of the Lincoln Memorial in one of the most gorgeous celebrations of all time.
We will see many more moments like this in our own lifetimes.
This song is Woody Guthrie’s magnificent gift to America.
His machine killed fascists.
The Horton-Kaiser Report is edited by Imogen Sayers.