Dear Weekend Jolter,
The tenor of political coverage leading up to this week’s redistricting vote in Virginia was that voters were confused: Is the proposal good or bad? Who’s for it? Barack Obama was seen decrying gerrymandering in ads aired by both sides. Others featured now-Governor Abigail Spanberger, years ago, calling the tactic “detrimental to our democracy.”
While the campaigns puzzled voters, the fact that leading proponents of the push were demonstrably on record railing against the very thing they were doing only underlined how hypocritical the exercise was. The confusion, in that sense, was unavoidable. “Vote no” was able to use Democrats’ words against them. “Vote yes” ads were plain awkward, first blasting Republicans for having moved to redraw other states’ congressional maps mid-decade, then urging Virginians to do the same thing to “level the playing field,” on a “temporary” basis.
You know what happened: The question passed, narrowly, though the courts still have a say.
Even by gerrymandering standards, the Virginia redistricting plan is brash, shifting congressional representation from a 6–5 Dem/GOP split to a projected 10–1 split for now. Northern Virginia, where I live, would hold enormous sway. As John Fund writes, “One district will stretch in a narrow corridor from Reagan National Airport near D.C. all the way to Williamsburg.” Less a salamander, more a snake.
But the result is the latest, unmissable demonstration from the state’s Democratic leaders and an influential part of its electorate that the party line triumphs no matter the values it tramples, at least while President Trump holds office.
Recall that for all the Trump-era talk about character and Beltway yard signs preaching “kindness,” the state elected Jay Jones as attorney general in November despite revelations (first reported by NR) that he had fantasized about shooting a Republican official and wished death upon the family’s kids. The current governor has steadily shed her “moderate” persona to advance progressive-preferred policies including the gerrymander.
In the background, there is the tragic and disturbing case of Justin Fairfax, the former lieutenant governor who this month fatally shot his estranged wife before turning the gun on himself while their kids were in the house. Fairfax had struggled to repair his reputation after sexual assault allegations surfaced in 2019. Had they surfaced in 2026, who’s to say whether the establishment and voters would have been so judgmental.
As for the gerrymander, Jeff Blehar speculates about the governor’s long-term goal: “The real hope is that she can starve the statewide Republican Party into irrelevance over the next half decade by denying it the opportunity to develop a bench.” Which, given the outcome, might happen.
Jeff, in part, faults Trump for touching off the latest redistricting arms race by pressuring Texas to redo its maps. Indiana Republicans managed to resist presidential pressure and stand on principle last year. Virginia Democrats, meanwhile, abandoned theirs to end-run the bipartisan redistricting commission some of them had supported six years ago.
Voters don’t need to look far into the past to see the contradictions. As NR’s editorial notes, Spanberger said in August of last year, “I have no plans to redistrict Virginia” — which, if one were to parse it, would indicate that she had no plans to redistrict Virginia.
It was not so. From NR’s editorial, again:
Term-limited in a state with two Democratic senators, Spanberger correctly intuited that her loyalty is to the national Democratic establishment and its primary electorate, not to her state’s citizens.
* * *
Before turning things over to the week’s highlights, consider this a polite reminder that we are webathon-ing, raising money as part of our spring fundraising campaign. We’ve seen a surge in donations since last weekend and have raised the goal to $150,000. For those who’ve donated, thank you. For those who haven’t, would you consider it? To sweeten the pot, we’re now offering a free, signed copy of Noah Rothman’s forthcoming book, Blood and Progress: A Century of Left-Wing Violence in America, to those who donate $250 or more (just be sure to enter your address in the address field when you donate).
Onward!
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
Here we go again: The Illusive Iran Deal
The Beijing Consensus deserves to come undone: The China Model Falters
On the SPLC indictment: Manufacturing Racism
The Virginia vote editorial, once more, is here: Virginia Votes Against Its Citizens While National Republicans Sleep
ARTICLES
Andrew McCarthy: Trump DOJ Bows to Inevitability and Drops the Powell Probe
Dan McLaughlin: The Powell Investigation Was Everything Wrong with Trump’s Second Term
Dan McLaughlin: SPLC Indicted for Gain-of-Function Research into Racism
Charles C. W. Cooke: Hasan Piker Is the Enemy
Daniel J. Flynn: What’s with the Allergy to Patriotism?
Joseph Loconte: The Pope, the President, and the Pacifist Illusion
Becket Adams: The Return of ‘We Missed the Story’
Kamden Mulder: Michigan Dems Nominate Lawyer Who Praised Hezbollah for Powerful University Post
Kamden Mulder: Ilhan Omar ‘Completely Ghosted’ Committee Investigating Somali Fraud Schemes, Minnesota Lawmaker Says
Roy Eappen: The Transgender House of Cards Just Came Crashing Down
Brittany Bernstein: Are the Eleven Dead or Missing U.S. Scientists Really Connected?
Rich Lowry: The Rise of the Dearborn Democrats
Mackenzie Eaglen: Why Trump’s Historic Defense-Budget Request Matters
As a final note — Jim Geraghty’s on a roll in identifying those cabinet members ripe for dismissal: Last Call for Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer
CAPITAL MATTERS
Canada’s Liberals are now free to govern as Trudeau did, for at least a few more years: Carney Gets His Free Hand
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Armond White, on the Michael Jackson biopic: Michael Unwraps the Smear
Brian Allen visits “a Prado on the prairie,” for a retrospective on a staggeringly good Spanish painter you might not have heard of: Discovering Raimundo de Madrazo and Spain’s Sparkling 19th Century
EXCERPT TASTING NOTES: CRISP, HINTS OF CEDAR, KUMQUATS, PUNGENT
Come for the delicious headline, stay for Dan’s breakdown of the Southern Poverty Law Center indictment:
The federal indictment of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) for wire fraud and money-laundering conspiracy, in the Middle District of Alabama (which includes its headquarters in Montgomery), is a richly deserved humiliation and comeuppance for one of the most toxic organizations in American politics. It is also objectively hilarious. That said, we should bear in mind two things: that the allegations in the indictment have yet to be proven in court and might not be true (or at least may be missing crucial context) and that even if true, the charges may not stick legally.
The story here is that the SPLC, which bills itself as an organization aimed at rooting out racism, was actually secretly bankrolling major figures in racist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, the National Socialist (i.e., Nazi) Party of America, and a member of the leadership group that planned the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va. The indictment details just shy of $2 million in transfers to those figures over the past twelve years. . . .
Given the small and marginal nature of these groups, the obvious conclusion is that the SPLC found that demand for racism outstripped the supply, so it had to spread cash around to keep talking up these fringe groups. That got out of hand — in ways helpful to the SPLC — at the Charlottesville rally. In that sense, the story reeks of the same Frankenstein’s monster effect that we saw with the National Institutes of Health financing “gain of function” research on viral respiratory pathogens in Wuhan, China, and thereby recklessly contributing to a global pandemic.
Donald Trump, having repeatedly made a political mess for himself with his comments at the time on Charlottesville, would very much like to retail the narrative that the whole thing was a left-wing false-flag put-up job all along. For the SPLC’s political allies, Charlottesville was a gold mine: Joe Biden claimed that it was his reason for running for president, and the Lincoln Project even staged a famously failed stunt seeking to tie it to Glenn Youngkin in the fading days of the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial race.
The facts recited in the indictment, even if true, don’t go nearly as far as Trump would like, but they do allege that $270,000 (about $30,000 a year) was paid between 2015 and 2023 by the SPLC to a source who “was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned” the rally, “attended the event at the direction of the SPLC,” “made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC,” and “helped coordinate transportation to the event for several attendees.” It seems noteworthy that the SPLC kept this person (unnamed, like all the recipients, in the indictment) on its payroll for six years after involvement in a racist rally that left a woman dead.
Other dubious recipients with leadership positions in extremist groups allegedly included a former “Imperial Wizard of the United Klans of America,” a person who “led the National Socialist Party of America” and “was the former director of a faction of the Aryan Nations,” a “former chairman of the National Alliance,” “the reported National President of American Front” who was “a convicted federal felon for his participation in a cross burning,” and a Klan member who was the spouse of “an Exalted Cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan.” (A marriage between two Klan members? Hey, love is love, right?)
In other words, this wasn’t just a matter of paying the small fish in these groups to rat out the big ones. The SPLC was allegedly bankrolling the leaders. While the money in most cases isn’t that much on an annual basis, it’s hard to argue that this played no role in helping such fringe organizations, which by their nature run on a financial shoestring and tend to be led by the kinds of people who are often not employed in prestigious fields.
Everyone, especially those who might look to the Beijing model for inspiration, should read up on China’s economic woes, in NR’s editorial:
Headlines can be misleading. Last week, Chinese GDP figures came in better than expected, on track for 5.3 percent economic growth. But nearly all that growth is fueled by Beijing’s leviathan state. Consumer spending is weak, hurt by falling property values, and net exports are down. To compensate, the CCP is pouring money into government-run railroads and infrastructure projects.
Zoom out in time, and China’s economic picture looks even bleaker. The nation saw explosive growth over the last several decades, rising to the second-largest economy in the world behind the United States. It became conventional wisdom in the economics profession that China would overtake the U.S. economy by 2030. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman yearned to adopt Beijing’s model, if only for a day.
That dogma is now undone. China’s GDP has barely budged in the four years since the pandemic, compared to its previous expansion. The Chinese economy was 78 percent of the size of the United States’ in 2021; that share had fallen back to 64 percent in 2024. While American equity markets have been on a tear during the same period, Beijing’s have shriveled.
External shocks cannot fully explain the slowdown. China faced higher energy costs after the invasion of Ukraine but supplemented its supplies by purchasing sanctioned Russian fuel at a discount. Exports to America have collapsed due to President Trump’s tariffs, but only in the last year.
Rather than a short-term contraction, China’s economic slump appears to be caused by structural forces. Household consumption and private-sector investment have stalled out. Exports to the entire world — not just the United States — are stagnant.
That has left government spending as the only remaining engine of growth, largely through the “investments” of state-owned enterprises. Unfortunately, the Chinese people are not too interested in what they have produced. . . .
In its 21st-century contest against China, the United States has one great advantage: Our model works, and theirs doesn’t. Economic liberty, for all its messiness, still has no superior. American policymakers would be foolish to trade it in for the industrial statism that has met a dead end in Beijing.
Joseph Loconte takes a deeper look at the pope’s commentary on war:
Never has the democratic West appeared more fragmented and befuddled in the face of new threats to human freedom.
President Trump has belittled the British military, alienated most of America’s NATO allies, and, most recently, lashed out publicly against Pope Leo XIV for his criticism of the U.S.-led war in Iran. The president’s insulting rhetoric aimed at the leader of the world’s largest Christian denomination demeans the American presidency. Let’s also stipulate that Mr. Trump has made a series of false and, at times, grotesque remarks concerning the war.
Yet, for all that, the statements by Pope Leo and the Vatican about the Iran war beggar belief: If taken at face value, the Catholic Church is led by a man who appears ready to abandon 1,500 years of Christian moral theology about war, justice, and the problem of radical evil.
Let’s begin with the pope’s blanket claim — directed at the U.S. war with Iran — that “military action will not create space for freedom or times of peace, which comes only from the patient promotion of coexistence and dialogue among peoples.”
The statement is not only patently false. It is morally repugnant to anyone acquainted with the history of the 20th century. It is impossible to overstate the extent of the horrors committed because facile views like this — ignoring the reality and depth of human malevolence — prevailed for too long in the West.
Indeed, the Catholic Church’s “concordat” with Adolf Hitler in 1933 — granting him international respectability in exchange for a measure of civic freedom for the church in Germany — could not tame his hatreds or his lust to dominate. The “patient promotion of coexistence” could not stop the Nazi blitzkrieg, the death camps, the plan to annihilate the Jewish people, and the desire to destroy what was left of Western civilization.
The only force that could stop Hitlerism and “make space for freedom” in subjugated Europe was the combined military might of the Allied Forces in the most destructive war in world history — a just cause if ever there was one under heaven.
Yet the pope seems indifferent to the Christian just war tradition, articulated by Catholic thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas, which teaches that nation-states not only have the option but also, under the right circumstances, the moral obligation to use lethal force to punish or prevent a great evil.
As I have written elsewhere, the just war tradition provided the conceptual basis for the Responsibility to Protect, a doctrine defending the use of force to protect civilian populations from genocide or other atrocities.
CODA
Inspired by Guy Denton’s lovely tribute to David Bowie in the magazine two issues back, I’m dropping “Five Years” in this slot. What a way to kick off an album.
Have a fine weekend, and thanks for reading.
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