The Squad Got Another Seat. Pay Attention
Plus: the Altman attacker had a kill list, Thomas named progressivism, and Former VA Lt. Gov Fairfax did what his 2019 file warned.
It’s Friday!
We opened the pool yesterday! That also means I will be spending my weekend clearing up the backyard and probably doing a little power washing. So fun for me.
But I am grateful to be heading into the weekend and, for the most part, signing off from the news cycle. If the president could do everyone a solid and stay off his social media for the weekend, that would be swell.
Also, I love this clip!
Ok, let’s get into the news.
In today’s Brief:
NJ-11 just voted for The Squad in Mikie Sherrill’s old seat.
The Altman attack has a Discord post, a podcast tape, and a kill list.
Clarence Thomas named progressivism. He’s right.
The Fairfax murder-suicide tracked the 2019 warnings almost line by line.
Plus: Lebanon-Israel ceasefire, the Iran blockade goes global, Lyons out at ICE, and Gen Z is going back to church.
NJ-11 Just Voted Abolish-ICE In Sherrill Country
Analilia Mejia, Bernie Sanders’ 2020 national political director and an AOC endorsee, beat Republican Joe Hathaway in Thursday’s NJ-11 special election. AP called the race minutes after polls closed. A child of illegal immigrants, she ran openly on Medicare for All and abolishing ICE, and did not soften those positions in the final week. The district did not care.
NJ-11 is Mikie Sherrill country. Moderate House Dem, retired Navy helicopter pilot, flipped the seat in 2018 and held it by fifteen points in 2024. The exact profile the DNC spent a decade selling as the road back through the suburbs. Mejia is the opposite of Sherrill on nearly everything, and the seat still went to her comfortably.
Hathaway did everything a sensible Republican is supposed to do in a district like this. He hit Mejia on her Gaza “genocide” rhetoric. Jewish voters are a key bloc in the district, and he made her record on Israel the central argument of his closing. A local pollster called his plan to peel off crossover Democrats “a pipe dream.” The numbers never moved.
Mamdani in NYC. Mejia in Congress. Two progressive-over-moderate fights in twelve months, in places that were supposed to be immune. The DNC’s private line is that the Sanders-AOC wing is loud and unelectable in districts like this. The tally might saying otherwise.
The Altman Attack Had a Manifesto, a Podcast, and a Kill List
Daniel Moreno-Gama, 20, a Texas college student, was arrested Monday and charged with attempted murder and attempted arson after allegedly throwing a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman’s San Francisco home, then showing up at OpenAI headquarters with a kerosene can, a lighter, and a list of AI executives plus their home addresses.
In December, Moreno-Gama posted on a Discord run by the anti-AI group Stop AI, asking whether it would get him banned. He then told producers of a podcast called The Last Invention what he had in mind was “Luigi’ing some tech CEOs.” Per the WSJ exclusive, they recorded an interview with him in January. They sat on the tape. The attack happened. Then they published it on Wednesday.
Host Andy Mills went on the record this week with the NYPost. Mills says Moreno-Gama walked the comment back on tape (”I didn’t really mean that as a threat”), but also came off “pumped” to appear and carried what Mills called “a hint of martyrdom.” Mills has interviewed violent people before. He says this one didn’t set off the alarm. That should worry everyone.
Altman’s blog response blamed “incendiary” coverage, an obvious shot at a recent magazine profile. The copycat problem is real. A parallel case: Chamel Abdulkarim, charged with torching a Kimberly-Clark warehouse in Southern California while filming himself and invoking Mangione. The cultural glamorization of Luigi Mangione is itself the problem, and very few people with platforms are willing to say so.
From the Archives
Is America's Left Developing an 'Assassin Culture'?
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In roughly four months: Mangione folk-heroed online after murdering a health-insurance CEO, a warehouse arsonist quoting him on camera, and a kid with a Molotov and a kill list. When the culture makes political assassination aesthetic, a small but real slice of unstable young men will take it as permission. The media is still calling Altman “controversial” while the suspect had addresses. That imbalance is the rot.
Thomas Named Progressivism. He’s Right.
Justice Clarence Thomas gave a rare public speech Wednesday at UT-Austin for the 250th anniversary of the Declaration. He didn’t hedge. He named progressivism, called it “incompatible” with founding principles, and warned it “seeks to replace the basic premises of the Declaration” by holding that rights come “not from God, but from government.”
This is the speech the conservative legal movement has been waiting for Thomas to give. The argument is simple and true. Progressivism locates rights in the state. The founders located them in something higher. If government grants rights, government can revoke them. If rights are prior to government, they can’t be legislated away. That single disagreement sits beneath every serious fight in American politics right now, and Thomas said it out loud at a university podium.
The detail that makes the speech land is in his own biography. Thomas grew up in the segregated South. The principle that all men are created equal “survived” Jim Crow precisely because it “came from God, not man.” The state that denied him his rights couldn’t actually take them away, because it hadn’t given them in the first place. That is the whole case for natural rights, delivered by the justice who lived inside the counterexample.
Related
The Podcast Class Is Not America First. They're America Comfortable
On Easter Sunday, Donald Trump posted an expletive-laden ultimatum to Iran, demanding the Strait of Hormuz be reopened, or he would destroy Iranian infrastructure. By the next day, some of his most prominent supporters were calling him a genocidal lunatic. Those weren’t Democrats. That was Tucker Carlson. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Candace Owens. The people who spent years building the MAGA brand are now burning it down in real time over foreign policy.
In the same week, Sotomayor spent the week walking back a shot at Kavanaugh's working-class background. Jackson took the Yale podium to call the conservative majority "corrosive." Both reached for character. Thomas reached for first principles. When the two most progressive justices on the Court can't find a bigger argument than each other's manners, the justice who explains that rights come from God, not the government, is doing the actual work.
The Fairfax Murder-Suicide Tracked the 2019 Warnings
Former Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax shot his wife, Cerina, in their Fairfax County home Monday, then killed himself. The story is staying in the news because the court filings keep confirming what the public record already suggested.
The couple’s divorce hearing was scheduled for April 21, five days after the shooting. Fairfax had been ordered weeks earlier to leave the home, with custody and financial rulings going against him. The worst of the filings: an alcohol problem Cerina had documented in writing for months, and a handgun Fairfax bought in 2022 with cash his wife had set aside for the kids’ horseback-riding lessons.
The hardest detail: the 16-year-old son, Cameron, found his mother and made the 911 call. He told the dispatcher he thought she’d been stabbed.
Fairfax was one credible sexual-assault allegation from being Governor of Virginia in 2019. Two allegations later, the Virginia Democratic Party chose not to pursue his removal. The state party decided the mess wasn’t worth the reckoning and quietly waited him out. The accusers got buried. One of them, Vanessa Tyson, said this week she’d seen “decades of signs.” You don’t have to take her word for it. The divorce file has the receipts: the drinking, the money hidden from the kids, the ignored court orders, the gun.
Roasting European Becomes X Latest Past Time
Quick Rundown
Lebanon-Israel ceasefire is in effect. Ten days, started midnight Friday. Trump-brokered. Hezbollah gave ambiguous statements and isn’t a signatory. Lebanon’s refugee minister called the $60M US humanitarian pledge insufficient and publicly asked for $88M a month.
Iran blockade goes global. Trump said he’d fly to Islamabad if the deal signs there. The US has expanded the blockade worldwide to target Tehran’s “dark fleet” anywhere it sails. Three US carrier groups, two Marine assault ships, and ten destroyers now sit off Iran’s coast.
Todd Lyons resigns from ICE. Last day May 31. Roughly 584,000 deportations on his watch. Reporting also indicates Lyons privately opposed the elevation of Bovino, the Border Patrol official relieved after the Minneapolis ICE shootings. Agency now has no Senate-confirmed director during a shutdown partly driven by ICE reform demands.
Trump nominates Schwartz to lead CDC. Former deputy surgeon general. Reporting thin so far.
Gallup: Gen Z is going back to church. The decade-long “young people are done with faith” narrative stopped matching the numbers. Good.
Let’s Talk About It
Mamdani in NYC, Mejia in NJ-11. Is the DNC’s suburban-moderate era actually over, or is this a few loud data points that a 2026 midterm will wash out?
Wrong answers only: Which single detail from today’s Brief are you bringing up at dinner tonight?
Drop your takes in the comments. I’ll see you Monday.
The Brief publishes Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Forward to someone who needs to understand what’s actually happening.