Hello, and welcome to Thursday, April 26, 2026. It is Saint George’s Day, the feast day of the patron saint of England. It’s also the anniversary of the founding of the Army Reserve, Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day, and Administrative Professionals Day. Oh, and it is National Cherry Cheesecake Day, German Beer Day, National Picnic Day, National English Muffin Day, and National Talk Like Shakespeare Day.
(Gotta work that last one in, somehow. Don’t worry, I’ll think of something.)
As I mentioned, today is German Beer Day. The reason for that is our first listing:
1516: Duke Wilhelm IV of Bavaria endorses the German Beer Purity Law (Reinheitsgebot) and adds to it standards for the sale of beer in Bavaria, ensuring beer is only brewed from three ingredients: water, barley, and hops.
Talk Like Shakespeare Day is referenced in the second historical listing:
1597: William Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor is first performed, with Queen Elizabeth I in attendance.
1789: President-elect George Washington moves into Franklin House in New York City, the first official residence of a U.S. President.
1861: Robert E. Lee is named commander of Virginia’s Confederate forces.
1867: Queen Victoria and Napoleon III turn down plans for a channel tunnel. The ultimate government project was completed 127 years later, in 1994.
1924: British Empire Exhibition opens at Wembley, London.
1932: Shakespeare Memorial Theatre opens at Stratford-on-Avon, England.
1939: Ted Williams hits his first Major League home run while playing for the Boston Red Sox.
1954: Hammerin’ Hank Aaron hits the first of his 755 homers.
1962: The New York Mets win their first game ever, after starting the season with nine losses, beating the Pirates 9-1. (So, an 11-loss streak is a new thing?)
Birthdays today include: William Shakespeare, English poet and playwright; William Penn, English admiral and politician and father of the founder of the Province of Pennsylvania; President James Buchanan; Stephen A. Douglas, U.S. senator from Illinois (Lincoln-Douglas debates); Howard Engstrom, American computer designer (co-creator of Univac computer); Shirley Temple, 1930s child star (Bright Eyes, Heidi) and diplomat; Ray Peterson, American pop and rockabilly singer (“Tell Laura I Love Her”); “The Big O” Roy Orbison, American rock singer-songwriter (“Pretty Woman,” “Only The Lonely,” Traveling Wilburys: “Handle With Care”); Lee Majors [Harvey Lee Yeary], film and TV actor (The Six Million Dollar Man, The Fall Guy); Sandra Dee (Alexandra Zuck), actress (Gidget, Imitation of Life); Valerie Bertinelli, actress (One Day at a Time, Hot in Cleveland), and Tommy DeCarlo, American rock singer (Boston, 2007-26).
If today is your day also, enjoy it!
* * *
What do the No Kings protests, the 2017 Charlottesville Unite the Right rally, Jussie Smollett, and the Southern Poverty Law Center share? Indirect connections to George Soros and his organizations.
The SPLC and Unite the Right
In an article posted just yesterday, CBS News reports that a federal grand jury in Alabama indicted the SPLC on 11 counts of wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. CNBC suggested in its reportage that the SPLC was manufacturing the very extremism it claimed to be fighting, paying sources to stoke racial hatred while publicly denouncing the same groups on its website.
One of the SPLC’s paid informants was a member of the online leadership group that planned the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally — where a woman was killed — and helped coordinate transportation for attendees. The DOJ says that person collected $270,000 for his efforts. Where did the money come from?
NPR, of all places, says that to move the money without detection, the SPLC created fictitious entities, shell operations with names like Fox Photography and Rare Books Warehouse, to funnel donor funds to informants and conceal the transactions from banks. This is no bookkeeping error. This is a deliberate architecture of concealment. The DOJ investigation confirms this.
As a result, the money trail isn’t simple to follow. Then again, it never is when an organization this sophisticated doesn’t want it followed. I spent two cups of coffee digging into the connections — and what I found tracks. The indictment confirms it moves through layers upon layers before it hits the street.
The SPLC calls this an informant program that “saved lives.” Maybe. But the indictment had to reach back to 2013 to find a program that, according to an MS NOW report, even a former SPLC spokesperson who was openly critical of the organization had never heard of.
According to Reason Magazine (which for a change, is actually useful), the SPLC raises hundreds of millions of dollars telling donors their money fights hate. Turns out, though, some of that money went to an imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, a leader of the National Socialist Movement, and a member of the Aryan Nations.
The Daily Signal reported back in 2024 that The Foundation to Promote Open Society, one of Soros’s grossly mislabeled philanthropic vehicles, gave the SPLC a $75,000 grant in 2016 “to convene an ‘Anti-Hate Table’ of national anti-bias and Muslim, Arab, and South Asian community organizations.” And that was mere months ahead of the Charlottesville event. We now understand, by way of the indictments that hit the news yesterday, that the SPLC actually funded the KKK’s involvement with that rally. It is unclear how much of the monies the Soros group provided went into that manufactured event. However, I suggest that one could not possibly have occurred without the other.
In late 2016, the Open Society Foundations also announced a broader $10 million initiative to confront hate crimes, which mentioned the SPLC as a reference point for tracking harassment incidents, though whether the SPLC received a direct grant from that specific initiative isn’t fully itemized in public records, a point which Daily Signal pointed out at the time:
So how did PolitiFact supposedly “debunk” the connection? The outlet acknowledged that “Soros’ grant-making organization, Open Society Foundations, has awarded grants to some groups … linked to the demonstrations.” Yet PolitiFact downplayed this link, stating that “connections between Soros’ money and specific campus protesters involved several degrees of separation.”
Uh huh. So, in other words, the funding is funneled through a shell game. Indeed, that’s the purpose of Soros having so many shell groups, or, as he labels them, “philanthropic vehicles.” It makes money flows harder to trace.
As it happens, I was in Charlottesville the day after the Unite the Right rally. I’d made a delivery at a nearby outdoor music venue the day before. I watched a rather underwhelming crowd march up U.S. Route 29, ostensibly heading toward D.C. to protest racism. They never made it. The press coverage dissolved, and the supposedly angry marchers dissolved with it. I sat in my car, watching the whole thing fall apart, sipping my coffee, and thinking: No grassroots movement looks like this. The whole thing absolutely reeked of contrivance and manufactured outrage, cynically deployed. Yesterday’s DOJ announcement cemented what I suspected that morning.
Jussie Smollett
The connections between Jussie Smollett and Soros are less than direct as well, and travel through a name we’ve not heard in a while: Kim Foxx. You will recall that Smollett staged an attack on himself, apparently trying to “prove” racism exists.
Evidently, there wasn’t enough real racism around, so he felt required to create a straw man. Rather like No Kings, which protests a king we don’t have, and the SPLC funding Unite the Right. Here, too, is a pattern worth noting. In each case, fakery is used to support their public positions, and Soros money is used to pay for that fakery. And in all cases, the legacy media gobble it up and send it to us under the guise of “news.”
In a paywalled article, The Washington Times reported that Foxx’s campaign was funded in large part by a group called Illinois Safety & Justice, which was gifted with $408,000 from Democratic mega-donor George Soros, part of an effort in at least 20 jurisdictions to elect progressive and minority prosecutors. Foxx was the quintessential Soros DA. The Washington Free Beacon, in a March 2020 article, reported that, after Foxx’s office dropped charges against Smollett following his staged hate crime, Soros later poured $2 million into a state-level PAC created for the sole purpose of keeping her in office during her 2020 reelection. Wow, it’s like magic.
But wait, there’s more!
A name that doesn’t get heard much anymore, either, is Tina Tchen, Michelle Obama’s former chief of staff. (Tell the truth: You just knew the Obama name was going to come into this at some point, didn’t you?)
Tchen reached out to Kim Foxx on behalf of the Smollett family after it became clear he had not been attacked as he claimed. That same Tina Tchen was subsequently hired by the Southern Poverty Law Center to investigate allegations of workplace harassment in the wake of the firing of co-founder Morris Dees.
Starting to see a pattern here?
Related: Democrats: Trapped by Their Own Ideology
And now, the No Kings protests
The key link between Soros and the No Kings nonsense runs through a group called Indivisible, which is the primary organizing group behind those events. Fox News’ Preston Mizell reported last October that Soros’s Open Society Foundations, through the Open Society Action Fund, issued a two-year $3 million grant to Indivisible in 2023 “to support the grantee’s social welfare activities.”
Fox also reports that, in total, the Open Society Foundations have awarded $7.61 million in grants to Indivisible since the organization’s founding in 2017. They mention in a separate article, that Indivisible was “managing data and communications with participants” for the No Kings protests. If we actually had a king, there would be massive numbers in jail for protesting. So, more Soros money and more fake causes.
There are also links between these groups and Neville Roy Singham, but that’s for another column.
Be watchful of the discovery phase of the SPLC trial, because the Soros name is going to come up. Of that, I have no doubt.
In all these cases, we are dealing with deceivers preaching virtue. Seems appropriate, then, since it is National Talk Like Shakespeare Day, that my Thought of The Day should quote Iago, from Shakespeare’s Othello, Act 3, Scene 3: “Men should be what they seem, / Or those that be not, would they might seem none!”
And from As You Like It, scene 3: “Fare you well, and God mend your voices.”
I’ll see you tomorrow.
Do you enjoy PJ Media’s conservative reporting that takes on the radical left and woke media? Support our work so that we can continue to bring you the truth.
Join PJ Media VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.
