Apple has recently announced that Tim Cook, its current CEO who has overseen the launch of plenty of new hardware and software, is moving to a new role as Executive Chairman. 

John Ternus, Cook’s direct report, has been announced as Apple’s new CEO and will start his new role from September 1st 2026 – presumably in time for the annual iPhone hardware launch which usually takes place in September, and could reveal the iPhone Fold. 

But who is John Ternus and what has his career looked like?

We explain everything we know about John Ternus, from his career with Apple to being mentored by Tim Cook himself.

Two companies that launched last year with plans to create gene-edited babies have already shut down, citing money issues and internal conflict.

One of them, Manhattan Genomics of New York, closed abruptly shortly after announcing a team of scientific advisers in October that included a prominent fertility doctor, a data scientist who worked for de-extinction company Colossal Biosciences, and a scientist who pioneered a “three-parent” IVF technique. The other, California-based Bootstrap Bio, said it ceased operations in late 2025, as first reported by Mother Jones.

Manhattan Genomics and Bootstrap Bio had ambitions to edit DNA in human embryos with the goal of preventing serious disease in babies. Known as germline editing, the idea is highly controversial because any changes made at the embryo level would be passed on to future generations. It’s different from gene-editing treatments currently being tested on patients, which only affect the treated individual.

The safety and efficacy of germline editing is also unproven. One concern is that the technology can result in unintended, potentially harmful “off-target” edits. Many researchers worry that permitting embryo editing to address serious diseases will inevitably lead to it being used for enhancement purposes, such as appearance or intelligence, to make “designer babies.” It’s currently prohibited in the US and many other countries to initiate a pregnancy with an edited embryo.

There are three known children who were gene-edited as embryos as a part of a now infamous 2018 experiment conducted by Chinese scientist He Jiankui. The revelation shocked the international scientific community, and a Chinese court sentenced He to three years in prison for illegal medical practices. Once taboo, the prospect of gene-edited babies has been recently revived by biotech entrepreneurs, futurists, and Silicon Valley investors. But the path to a viable gene-edited baby business is apparently presenting some challenges.

“We ran out of money. We had some promising results in the lab but I couldn’t get enough investors interested for us to keep our operation going,” Bootstrap Bio CEO and cofounder Chase Denecke told WIRED via email. The company still exists but isn’t actively operating, he added.

Bootstrap has had other problems. In August 2025, federal officers arrested the company’s chief science officer at the time, Qichen Yuan, and charged him with attempted sex trafficking of a child, as Mother Jones reported. Yuan is now set to appear in federal court in Boston. When reached via email, Yuan’s lawyer declined to comment.

Denecke told WIRED that he didn’t know about the charges until after the company “ceased active operations.” Yuan worked as a contractor for Bootstrap Bio in 2024 and 2025 until the company shut down, according to Denecke. “We would have let him go earlier if we had known,” Denecke said over email.

Bootstrap Bio had early interest from investors. In a 2024 LinkedIn post announcing the formation of the startup, for example, Denecke mentioned that a venture capitalist flew him out to Honduras.

Manhattan Genomics, which also went by Manhattan Project, planned to pursue human embryo editing for disease prevention. In a since deleted X post from March, cofounder Cathy Tie said the startup shut down due to a “cofounder conflict.” At the same time, she publicly announced the formation of a new company, Origin Genomics, to advance germline gene correction.

Manhattan Genomics’ cofounder Eriona Hysolli told WIRED that she and Tie parted ways due to “fundamental disagreements stemming from the coexistence of a Cayman-based entity with the same name with separate governance by my cofounder, and which confounded the open and transparent mission of Manhattan Genomics.”

Pronto, an Indian instant house-help startup, is finalizing a funding round led by tech investor Lachy Groom that would value the fast-growing company at about $200 million after investment, TechCrunch has learned.

The deal is expected to bring in about $20 million in fresh capital and would mark a sharp jump from the $100 million valuation at which the company raised $25 million in a Series B round led by Epiq Capital in early March, doubling its valuation in a matter of weeks, two people familiar with the matter said.

Bengaluru-based Pronto completed about 500,000 orders last month and is currently handling around 24,000–25,000 orders daily, up from about 18,000 daily bookings in March and roughly 1,000 last year.

Founded in 2025, Pronto connects households with on-demand domestic help for services such as cleaning and chores, promising quick turnaround times through a managed network of workers.

In March, Pronto founder Anjali Sardana told TechCrunch the startup had expanded from one city to 10 — including Delhi NCR, Bengaluru, and Mumbai — and from five to more than 150 micromarkets. However, much of its activity remains concentrated in a handful of markets, with the National Capital Region accounting for about half of total bookings.

The startup has over 4,500 active professionals on its platform, around 99% of whom are women, Sardana said last month, adding that demand continued to outpace onboarding of new workers as bookings grew about 20% week over week.

Before this funding, Pronto had raised about $40 million in total. Its investors include Epiq Capital, Glade Brook Capital, General Catalyst and Bain Capital Ventures.

Pronto and Groom did not respond to requests for comment.

Google DeepMind’s AlphaFold has already revolutionized scientists’ understanding of proteins. Now, the ability of the platform to design safe and effective drugs is about to be put to the test.

Isomorphic Labs, the UK-based biotech spinoff of Google DeepMind, will soon begin human trials of drugs designed by its Nobel Prize–winning AI technology. “We’re gearing up to go into the clinic,” Isomorphic Labs president Max Jaderberg said on April 16 at WIRED Health in London. “It’s going to be a very exciting moment as we go into clinical trials and start seeing the efficacy of these molecules.”

Jaderberg did not elaborate on the timeline, but it’s later than the company had planned to initiate human studies. Last year, CEO Demis Hassabis said it would have AI-designed drugs in clinical trials by the end of 2025.

Isomorphic Labs was founded in 2021 as a spinoff from Alphabet’s AI research subsidiary, Google DeepMind. The company uses DeepMind’s AlphaFold, a groundbreaking AI platform that predicts protein structures, for drug discovery.

Built from 20 different amino acids, proteins are essential for all living organisms. Long strings of amino acids link together and fold up to make a protein’s three-dimensional structure, which dictates the protein’s function. Researchers had tried to predict protein structures since the 1970s, but this was a painstaking process given the astronomically high number of possible shapes a protein chain can take.

That changed in 2020, when DeepMind’s Hassabis and John Jumper presented stunning results from AlphaFold 2, which uses deep-learning techniques. A year later, the company released an open-source version of AlphaFold available to anyone.

In 2024, DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs released AlphaFold 3, which advanced scientists’ understanding of proteins even further. It moved beyond modeling proteins in isolation to predicting other important molecules, such as DNA and RNA, and their interactions with proteins.

“This is exactly what you need for drug discovery: You need to see how a small molecule is going to bind to a drug, how strongly, and also what else it might bind to,” Hassabis told WIRED at the time.

Since its release, the AlphaFold platform has been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins known to researchers and has been used by more than 2 million people from 190 countries. The breakthrough earned Hassabis and Jumper the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2024, with the Nobel committee noting that AlphaFold has enabled a number of scientific applications, including a better understanding of antibiotic resistance and the creation of images of enzymes that can decompose plastic.

Earlier this year, Isomorphic Labs announced an even more powerful tool, what it calls IsoDDE, its proprietary drug-design engine. In a technical paper, the company touts that the platform more than doubles the accuracy of AlphaFold 3.

The startup has formed partnerships with Eli Lilly and Novartis to work together on AI drug discovery and is also advancing its own “broad and exciting pipeline of new medicines” in oncology and immunology, Jaderberg said.

“The exciting thing about the molecules that we’re designing is because we have so much more of an understanding about how these molecules work, we’ve engineered them to be very, very potent,” Jaderberg told the audience at WIRED Health. “You can take them at a much lower dose, and they’ll have lower side effects, off target effects.”

Last year, Isomorphic appointed a chief medical officer and announced it had raised $600 million in its first funding round to gear up for clinical trials. Meanwhile, the company has been building a clinical development team. Its mission is to “solve all disease.”

“It’s a crazy mission,” Jaderberg said. “But we really mean it. We say it with a straight face, because we believe this should be possible.”

Mammotion’s latest robot vacuum isn’t for your living room. It’s for your pool, and it’s doing something most rivals can’t.

The Spino S1 Pro launches on Kickstarter on April 28 and sets itself apart from a growing number of pool-based cleaners with a robotic arm that can lift itself out of the water to recharge. This removes one of the biggest annoyances of pool cleaners.

Most robotic pool vacuums still need to be hauled out manually when they’re done. The Spino S1 Pro sidesteps that with what Mammotion calls its AutoShoreCharge system. It uses an articulating arm to climb onto its dock and recharge on its own. This is a small idea on paper, but in practice it means genuinely hands-free cleaning, at least in theory.

Home security giant ADT has confirmed a data breach after the ShinyHunters extortion group threatened to leak stolen data unless a ransom is paid.

In a statement shared today, the company said it detected unauthorized access to customer and prospective customer data on April 20, after which it terminated the intrusion and launched an investigation.

This investigation determined that personal information was stolen during the breach.

“The investigation confirmed that the information involved was limited to names, phone numbers, and addresses,” ADT told BleepingComputer.

“In a small percentage of cases, dates of birth and the last four digits of Social Security numbers or Tax IDs were included. Critically, no payment information — including bank accounts or credit cards — was accessed, and customer security systems were not affected or compromised in any way.”

ADT says the intrusion was limited and that it has contacted all affected individuals.

ShinyHunters leak site listing

This statement follows ADT’s listing on the ShinyHunters data leak site, where attackers claimed to have stolen 10 million records containing customers’ personal information.

“Over 10M records containing PII and other internal corporate data have been compromised. Pay or Leak,” reads the data leak site.

“This is a final warning to reach out by 27 Apr 2026 before we leak along with several annoying (digital) problems that’ll come your way.”

ADT did not confirm the volume of data theft claimed by the attackers.

ShinyHunters told BleepingComputer they allegedly breached ADT through a voice phishing (vishing) attack that compromised an employee’s Okta single sign-on (SSO) account. Using this account, the threat actors claimed they accessed and stole data from the company’s Salesforce instance.

Since last year, the extortion group has been conducting widespread vishing campaigns that target employees and BPO agents’ Microsoft Entra, Okta, and Google SSO accounts.

After gaining access to a corporate SSO account, the threat actors steal data from connected SaaS applications such as Salesforce, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, SAP, Slack, Adobe, Atlassian, Zendesk, Dropbox, and many others.

This stolen data is then used to extort the company into paying a ransom, or the data will be leaked.

ADT has previously disclosed data breaches in August and October 2024 that exposed customer and employee information.

AI chained four zero-days into one exploit that bypassed both renderer and OS sandboxes. A wave of new exploits is coming.

At the Autonomous Validation Summit (May 12 & 14), see how autonomous, context-rich validation finds what’s exploitable, proves controls hold, and closes the remediation loop.

Claim Your Spot

Summary: Europe’s effort to protect children online has collided with its own privacy architecture. The ePrivacy derogation allowing voluntary CSAM scanning expired on April 3 after Parliament voted 311-228 to reject its extension, the EU’s new age verification app announced April 15 was hacked in under two minutes, and the CSA Regulation (“Chat Control”) remains stuck in trilogue with a July deadline. The ECHR has ruled encryption backdoors violate fundamental rights, while the GDPR, DSA, and proposed CSA Regulation each require knowing whether a user is a child, which itself requires collecting the data that privacy law says you cannot collect about children.

On April 3, the European Parliament voted 311 to 228 to let its temporary ePrivacy derogation expire. That derogation had allowed platforms such as Meta, Google, and Microsoft to voluntarily scan private messages for child sexual abuse material without violating EU privacy law. When it lapsed, the legal basis for those scans disappeared. Twelve days later, the European Commission announced a new privacy-preserving age verification app designed to protect children online. Researchers hacked it in under two minutes. Between the expired law and the broken app sits the entire problem: Europe wants to protect children from online exploitation, but every tool it builds to do so runs into the privacy architecture it spent a decade constructing. The result is a regulatory system at war with itself, where the mechanisms needed to find abused children require collecting exactly the data that EU law says you cannot collect about children.

The scanning gap

The ePrivacy derogation was introduced in 2021 as a stopgap. The European Commission had proposed the Child Sexual Abuse Regulation, known formally as the CSA Regulation and informally as Chat Control, which would mandate that platforms detect and report CSAM in private messages, including end-to-end encrypted ones. The regulation was supposed to replace the voluntary framework within three years. It did not. Trilogue negotiations between the Parliament, Council, and Commission have dragged on since 2022, with the next scheduled meeting on May 4 and a target of reaching political agreement by July. In the meantime, the derogation expired. The National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children in the United States, which processes the majority of global CSAM reports, warned that the lapse would cause a measurable drop in referrals from European platforms. Meta confirmed it had paused voluntary scanning in the EU. The Parliament’s position is that the derogation was incompatible with the fundamental right to privacy of communications. The child safety organisations’ position is that the Parliament just made it legal for platforms to ignore abuse material sitting in their systems.

The CSA Regulation as proposed by the Commission would require platforms to use detection orders issued by a new EU Centre to scan messages for known CSAM, new CSAM, and grooming behaviour. The Parliament stripped out the most contentious elements: it rejected scanning of end-to-end encrypted messages, limited detection to known material using hash-matching technology, and excluded real-time communications. The Council, led by a rotating presidency that has pushed harder on law enforcement access, wants broader scanning powers including for unknown material and grooming. The distance between the two positions is not a detail to be negotiated away. It is a fundamental disagreement about whether private communications can be systematically monitored to protect children, and the European Court of Human Rights has already indicated where it stands.

The encryption wall

In February, the ECHR ruled in Podchasov v. Russia that requiring platforms to weaken or backdoor end-to-end encryption violates Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the right to respect for private life and correspondence. The ruling was directed at a Russian law compelling messaging services to provide decryption keys to the FSB, but its logic applies directly to the CSA Regulation’s proposed detection orders. If a platform cannot scan encrypted messages without weakening the encryption, and weakening the encryption violates fundamental rights, then the regulation cannot mandate what its authors intended it to mandate. Signal’s president, Meredith Whittaker, said the organisation would leave the EU rather than comply with any law requiring it to compromise its encryption protocol. Apple disabled its Advanced Data Protection feature for users in the United Kingdom after the British government issued a technical capability notice under the Investigatory Powers Act demanding backdoor access to iCloud data. The encryption debate is no longer theoretical. Companies are already making jurisdictional decisions based on where governments demand access to private communications.

The European Data Protection Board and the European Data Protection Supervisor have both issued opinions warning that the CSA Regulation as drafted by the Commission would be disproportionate and incompatible with EU fundamental rights. The EDPS specifically flagged that client-side scanning, the technique proposed as an alternative to breaking encryption by scanning content on the device before it is encrypted, still constitutes mass surveillance because it processes every message to identify the illegal ones. The distinction between scanning before encryption and scanning after encryption is technically meaningful but legally immaterial if the outcome is that every private message is analysed by an automated system. The Parliament’s negotiating position reflects this analysis. The Council’s does not.

The age verification paradox

While the CSA Regulation stalls, individual member states have moved ahead with age-based restrictions. France prohibits children under 15 from accessing social media without parental consent. Spain has set the threshold at 16. Greece will ban social media for under-15s from 2027. Austria’s threshold is 14. Norway plans to ban social media for under-16s and is developing a national age verification system to enforce it. Europe’s accelerating push for social media age limits has produced a patchwork of national laws with no common enforcement mechanism, which is precisely the problem the EU age verification app was supposed to solve.

The Commission’s app, announced on April 15, was designed to verify a user’s age without revealing their identity to the platform, a zero-knowledge proof system that would confirm someone is over a given age threshold without transmitting their date of birth, name, or any other personal data. It was presented as the technical solution to the paradox of verifying age without collecting age data. Security researchers demonstrated within two minutes of its release that the app’s verification process could be bypassed, undermining the credibility of the one tool the Commission had offered as proof that privacy-preserving child safety enforcement was technically feasible. The EU’s new privacy-preserving age verification app was meant to demonstrate that the trade-off between child protection and data minimisation could be resolved through engineering. Its immediate failure demonstrated the opposite.

The legal collision

The Digital Services Act, which entered full application in 2024, requires platforms to assess and mitigate systemic risks to minors under Article 28, including exposure to harmful content, manipulation through interface design, and processing of personal data in ways that exploit children’s vulnerabilities. The DSA’s guidelines instruct platforms to implement age-appropriate protections but do not specify how platforms should determine a user’s age. The GDPR sets the age of digital consent at 16, with member states permitted to lower it to 13, and requires parental consent for processing children’s data below that threshold. GDPR fines increasingly target child data violations, with regulators across Europe treating children’s privacy as an enforcement priority. But to enforce age-specific protections, platforms must first determine who is a child, and determining who is a child requires collecting or inferring personal data about every user, including the adults who have a right not to be age-checked.

This is the circularity at the centre of Europe’s child safety framework. The GDPR says you cannot process children’s data without heightened protections. The DSA says you must protect children from harmful content. The CSA Regulation says you must detect abuse material in private messages. Each obligation requires knowing whether a given user is a child. Knowing whether a given user is a child requires processing their personal data. Processing their personal data to determine their age may itself violate the data minimisation principles that the GDPR enshrines. The age verification app was supposed to cut through this knot. It was broken on arrival. The ePrivacy derogation was supposed to buy time for the CSA Regulation. It expired without a replacement. The CSA Regulation was supposed to create a harmonised framework. It remains stuck between a Parliament that will not accept mass surveillance and a Council that will not accept a regulation without scanning powers.

The July target

The trilogue negotiators have set July as the deadline for political agreement on the CSA Regulation. The compromise proposals circulating in Brussels would limit mandatory detection to unencrypted platforms and known CSAM using hash-matching, with a review clause that could expand the scope if technology improves. Encrypted platforms would face obligations to report when CSAM is detected through user reporting or metadata analysis, but not through content scanning. The EU Centre for child sexual abuse prevention would coordinate cross-border referrals and maintain the hash databases. Whether this compromise can hold is uncertain. Law enforcement agencies across Europe have lobbied heavily for broader scanning, arguing that encrypted messaging is the primary distribution channel for abuse material and that excluding it renders the regulation largely symbolic. Privacy advocates argue that any mandatory scanning infrastructure, once built, will inevitably be expanded to other categories of illegal content, a slippery slope that the ECHR ruling in Podchasov was designed to prevent.

The honest assessment is that Europe has not resolved the tension between child safety and privacy because the tension may not be resolvable through regulation alone. The tools that would protect children, scanning messages for abuse material, verifying ages before granting access, monitoring interactions for grooming patterns, all require surveillance capabilities that EU law exists to prevent. The member states that have moved unilaterally with age bans have done so without a credible enforcement mechanism. The Commission’s age verification technology failed its first public test. The Parliament killed the one legal instrument that allowed voluntary scanning. And the regulation that was supposed to replace it all remains, after four years of negotiation, a document that nobody can agree on because the two things it is trying to protect, children’s safety and everyone’s privacy, demand opposite things from the same infrastructure.

Sometimes, a major discovery is exactly what you were hoping not to find. That’s the case with a team at Penn State who seem to have recently closed the door on any new physics stemming from a longstanding discrepency in the magnetic moment of the muon. It turns out, the model was fine, and we just needed better calculations.

The Muon is a heavier cousin to the electron. Like the electron, it has an intrinsic magnetic moment, but the traditional methods to calculate it did not quite match experiments, which was very exciting because it made us hope our models could be improved. Rather than try the traditional approximation methods for the unsolvable equations, the group at Penn State set up what you can think of as the Quantum Chromodynamic equivalent of a Finite Element Model (FEM) simulation–a grid of discrete steps in space and time. Tiny ones, of course, because the muon, like the electron, is a point-like particle with no lower size limit. In any case, according to their paper in Nature, after a decade of refinement and increasingly expensive supercomputer runs, the mystery can be put to bed. Instead of the discrepancy that so exited physicists 25 years ago when it was first found, theory and experiment now match to 11 digits, or a 0.5 sigma discrepancy, if you prefer.

Statistically, the Standard Model works– and that kind of sucks. It sucks, because it’s the gaps in the model where new physics are possible, and everyone has been pushing at those few gaps for the last 50 years to try and find what might be behind the standard model. Even [Zoltan Fodor], the principle investigator behind this project, is sad to see it work out. Sure, it’s a feather in his cap to get the calculations right at last–but ask anybody in the field, and they’d rather keep the door open to new physics than be right. We were certainly hoping it was something novel, last time the topic came up.

You might think muons are the last thing a hacker would ever encounter, but since there’s a steady rain of them from the sky in the form of cosmic rays, it’s not only easy to interact with them, you can actually put them to practical use– like muon tomography, or navigation indoors and underground.

Header Image Credit: Dani Zemba / Penn State

from the but-who-will-remember-the-good-things-about-Harry-Byrd dept

The state of Virginia is trying to break with its racist past. It’s not pretending it doesn’t exist. But, better late than never, it’s trying to undo some of the damage still being perpetrated by Virginians and their legislators. Governor Abigail Spanberger signed a bill into law that stripped confederate-friendly organizations of their tax exempt status. (She also signed a bill that ended the production of specialty license plates featuring Robert E. Lee.)

Now, there’s a legitimate argument to be made against this legislation. (And a more nuanced argument to made in favor of it.) And we’ll get to all of that in a moment.

But not yet. That’s why you’re getting the headline I gave you, because I’m not the one making a nuanced argument for or against this bill. And that’s why The Federalist is getting all the bile I can fit into a handful of words because it for goddamn sure isn’t making any valid arguments in support of letting historically racist organizations continue to operate as tax exempt entities.

Hayden Daniel (scope the rest of his output to confirm your suspicions about this Federalist contributor) of The Federalist seems to think that separating confederacy supporters from state tax exemptions is one of the more noxious violation of rights he’s ever had the opportunity to witness.

Spanberger’s signature represents, as The New York Times put it, part of “a yearslong Democrat-led push to shake off the state’s legacy as the capital of the 11 Southern, slaveholding states that seceded from the country in the 1860s.”

And indeed it has been a years-long campaign by the left to erase Virginia’s, and America’s, history. The era that began with the inauguration of President Barack Obama in 2009 and reached its fever pitch during the fiery George Floyd riots of summer 2020 saw the slow but sure disappearance of Confederate history from the public sphere. 

“Erase history.” What a convenient turn of phrase. Making entities like the United Daughters of the Confederacy (whose splash page pic looks about as inclusive as a “Gone With The Wind” cast photo) and the Sons of the Confederacy continue to do the apparently essential work of reminding people that there are still plenty of racists in Virginia without a state-sanctioned leg up is hardly “erasing history.” Everyone will remember the Civil War and the racists who lost the war they started because they were hooked on free, imported labor.

And try as you might, you’re not going to find Daniel arguing against the deliberate erasure of history being perpetrated by the Trump administration, which is steadily stripping parks and national monuments of anything that might portray white Americans as anything but fault-free heroes and saviors. (In fact, a perfunctory search immediately surfaces the opposite: The Federalist’s active participation in this administration’s bigoted erasure of US history.)

That’s the way it always goes with these people. The only history they think needs to be preserved is the stuff when white males were legally considered to be the owners or overseers of every other race and sex. These are people who yearn for simpler times when women and minorities couldn’t vote and people were willing to die to keep white Christian nationalists in power.

Moving on from this complaint about (non)erasure of Hayden Daniel’s favorites parts of US history, he then decides to pretend that white people who love the confederacy have been terrorized by people who don’t.

During a BLM riot in Richmond, Virginia, in May 2020, extremist agitators attacked the headquarters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy with “incendiary devices.” The building, deeded to the organization by the state in 1950, was filled with countless Civil War-era documents and artifacts. The resulting fire and destruction caused $4.1 million in damage to the building and its contents, according to a lawsuit filed by the UDC. The wanton vandalism that night also extended to the multiple Confederate monuments on Monument Avenue, including the famous equestrian statue of Robert E. Lee that was removed in 2021.

Wow, man. That’s rough. It’s almost as though it outweighs the decades of torture and slavery that were followed by more decades of terrorism perpetrated against Blacks by people who just couldn’t accept that non-white humans were actual human beings. A statute goes down and a pro-confederacy HQ gets torched and this nation is nowhere near breaking even in terms of what this state’s “legacy” is when it comes to slavery and the treatment of those who were only allowed their freedom after enough Virginians had died trying to prevent their emancipation.

Summing things up, Daniel veers into the hyperbolic:

[T]his law signed by Spanberger constitutes a new escalation. It is no longer about pieces of paper that need to censored or statues of bronze that need to be ripped down; it is about people who need to silenced and punished for daring to believe that America, and the South in particular, has its own unique identity independent of the left’s racialist and globalist dogma.

Spanberger is sending an unequivocal message — it’s open season on those who would honor American history and the heritage of their ancestors. And the full force of the state will be used to quash them.

Advertisement

I have no idea why you would want to “honor” that particular sliver of American history or celebrate the “heritage” left to you by racist slaveholders and the descendants that love them. You’re not using words like “history” and “heritage” because you don’t want Americans to ever forget the horrors we inflicted on others during our history. You’re just an awful person who wants similarly awful people to continue to be awful without fear of consequence.

A people without a history, or who are ashamed of their history, are easily manipulated by the whims and ambitions of the dystopian, tyrannical left. 

Tell that to Trump, you mook. You aren’t actually ashamed of this history. You — and the people running the party you love — are secretly proud of their racist past and bigoted present. That doesn’t make you immune from manipulation. It just means the people who subject you to their whims and ambitions not only won’t be members of an opposing political party, but they won’t be any smarter than you think you are.

Now… having said all that, here’s the argument against this law, which does make sense:

The new law strips property tax exemptions from the pro-Confederate groups, while leaving them in place for all the others. That’s pretty obvious discrimination based on political ideology. The Virginia state legislature could end this tax exemption for all the groups in question, or reduce it in various ways. It could eliminate some groups but not others based on nonideological criteria. But it cannot do so based purely on the views of the groups in question.

Such viewpoint discrimination with respect to tax exemptions and government benefits is a potentially very dangerous tool that government can use to penalize opposition (even as it rewards its supporters). If courts were to uphold the Virgina law against First Amendment challenges, it would set a dangerous precedent that state and federal officials of various political stripes could exploit to target their opponents.

Advertisement

That’s the argument Hayden or anyone else from the Federalist could have made. That would have clearly demonstrated the inherent danger of giving the government the legislated power to engage in viewpoint discrimination. But no one at the Federalist is apparently capable of coming up with cogent, nuanced arguments, not when the livelihood of people who resolutely celebrate the racist losers of America’s only Civil War (to date!) is on the line.

Beyond that, there’s the question of whether or not tax exempt status is government speech, which means viewpoint discrimination may actually be lawful if the government prefers not to throw tacit support to groups it doesn’t care for. That doesn’t make it much better than openly violating the First Amendment, but it does give it something to work with if this law is challenged in court.

For now, the sons and daughters of the confederacy will have to try to make do without their tax exempt status. On the hardship continuum that involves the Confederacy, this doesn’t even amount to a rounding error.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, abigail spanberger, celebrating losers, free speech, racism, slavery, virginia

Companies: sons of confederate veterans, the federalist