Dear Weekend Jolter,
For a brief period last Friday, Virginia Democrats seemed to take the fatal judicial blow against their mid-decade gerrymandering push in stride. “We respect the decision of the Supreme Court of Virginia,” Virginia House Speaker Don Scott said after the court’s ruling.
The mood of restraint and civic sobriety in Richmond was not to last.
By Monday, Scott and other state Democrats were party to a long-shot appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court seeking to block the decision and preserve one of the most extreme redistricting efforts in the country. The emergency stay application, backed by the NAACP, was unconventional in that it asked the top federal court to scrutinize the decision of a state court on state constitutional matters. In their reply Thursday, Republicans called it “extraordinary” and “baseless.” The Supreme Court rejected the application the next day, as expected. But Democrats’ SCOTUS filing was plain vanilla compared with the other options floated this past week to end-run the ruling.
As the pendulum swung from calm resignation to feverish fantasy, Democrats toyed with a break-glass plan to lower the retirement age for Virginia Supreme Court justices and force a wholesale replacement of the bench, per the New York Times. According to the New Republic, Democrats have since cooled to the scheme; Governor Abigail Spanberger said she doesn’t support it and reportedly indicated that elections will proceed with the existing map. But the responses underscore how desperately the redistricting wars are being fought across the country, and how the left’s rank-and-file outrage over their side’s setbacks is unlikely to settle soon.
Jamelle Bouie wrote in the Times that it was a “mistake” from the outset to respect the court’s decision, which found that Democrats violated procedure by seeking initial legislative approval after early voting in last year’s election had begun, when an election is supposed to be held between two legislative votes. Taking issue with the court’s counting early voting in its definition of “election,” Bouie called for Democrats to “fight back in the name of the people.” At the national level, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has vowed a “massive Democratic redistricting counteroffensive,” not just in Virginia.
Even with the Virginia court loss and the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, the political environment still favors Democrats in House races this year (and . . . as long as President Trump talks like this about voters’ financial concerns, that is unlikely to change). But the narrative taking hold in progressive circles is that the Virginia saga is a crystalline example of Democrats’ being unwilling or unable to go as far as Republicans to break the rules and get their way.
This, in turn, puts yet more pressure on elected officials to go to extremes to prove the narrative wrong.
Charles C. W. Cooke, weighing in on The Editors, said he’s pleased to see the Virginia forced-retirement plan fizzle but described the flirtation with court-packing and adjacent schemes at the state and federal levels as a dangerous game: “I do think it gives us an indication of where the Democratic Party is.” In The Week, our editors warn against the “primal partisan rage” driving the gerrymandering fights from both sides.
Last week’s ruling was, without question, an embarrassing — and costly — outcome for state Democrats. They should not forget, though, that they risked exactly this post-referendum scenario. As NR’s post-ruling editorial recalled, it was Democrats who “opposed the court’s deciding the question before the vote.” The hope was that “the justices would be too cowardly to overturn a ballot measure that had already been voted on, and they lost their big gamble.”
In closing, Charlie proposes a reliable exercise for progressives angry about the timing of the decision: Imagine if it were Trump.
NAME. RANK. LINK.
EDITORIALS
On Trump’s visit to Beijing: The Trump–Xi Summit
Unspeakable, unimaginable: The Sexual Barbarism of October 7
The crisis that animated the Tea Party is considerably worse now: Ignoring the Debt Won’t Make It Go Away
Use donors, not taxpayers: Congress Should Say No to Funding the Ballroom
DEI just never seems to DIE: Ending Racial Bias in Admissions
ARTICLES
Andy Smarick: AI in the Classroom Is Our Most Senseless Education Experiment Yet
John O’Sullivan: Behind the King’s Speech
Christian Schneider: Universities Offer Up Counterfeit Credentials
Charles C. W. Cooke: I’m Beginning to Think the Court-Packers Have Not Thought This Through
John Gustavsson: Why Nigel Farage Will Never Be Prime Minister
Abigail Anthony: DOJ Finds Yale Medical School Discriminates Against White and Asian Applicants
Rich Lowry: The Vietnam Problem
Jeffrey Blehar: Spencer Pratt Seems Like the Only Sane Man in Los Angeles Politics
Marian L. Tupy: Bill Maher’s Category Error on Socialism
Jim Geraghty: On Patrol for Russian Gray-Zone Warfare
Gad Saad: Misguided Empathy Is Killing Us
Brittany Bernstein: Kristof’s Extraordinary Claims About Israeli Rape Require Extraordinary Evidence. The Times Doesn’t Have It
Brittany Bernstein: Indiana Republican Got ‘Trumped’ for Voting Against Redistricting — but He Would Do It All Again
Dan McLaughlin: Disbarring John Eastman Breaks Yet Another Norm Against Lawfare
Tony Morley: The West Is Good
CAPITAL MATTERS
Thomas Stratmann writes about the problems with “anti-big ideology”: A Chance to Reset Antitrust After Spirit Airlines
LIGHTS. CAMERA. REVIEW.
Come for the sumptuous tapestries and frescoes, stay for the rivalry with Michelangelo. From Brian Allen: Raphael Goes to Rome, Courtesy of the Met
A “Hollywood version of revenge porn” is how Armond White rates Is God Is: A Hollywood Revenge Sermon
FROM THE NEW, JULY 2026 ISSUE OF NR
Robert VerBruggen: Why the Fight Against Fraud Must Be Won
Adam Omary & Jeffrey A. Singer: Autism Overdiagnosis Is a National Scandal
Charles C. W. Cooke: I, Obama: Our Insufferable Ex-President
Rebeccah Heinrichs: Strengthen NATO, Don’t Wreck It
James Rosen: The Ali–Inoki Fight at 50
Noah Rothman: The Scourge of Left-Wing Violence
EXCERPTS PITHIER THAN A POMELO
Andy Smarick has one of those stop-what-you’re-doing-and-read-this-whole-thing essays — on the generational danger of AI in the classroom:
We know that childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood are pivotal times for human development. It should go without saying that, when it comes to education, we need to get the basics right and, maybe even more importantly, avoid getting big things wrong. That’s a daunting charge, but we’re not flying blind. Humans have literally thousands of years of experience in teaching and learning, and brain science has made astonishing gains in recent decades. We know a great deal about what works and what doesn’t. If ever there’s a place for the tried and true — and a place needing protection from the risky — it’s the classroom.
But for whatever reason, we too often treat schools like labs and students like test subjects. Dodgy ideas are brought to life, and kids often pay the price. In the 1970s, schools knocked down walls to build “open classrooms,” which turned out to be noisy and chaotic. Professors invented “whole language” reading instruction, pooh-poohing phonics and longstanding teaching techniques, and harmed countless students’ learning in the process. We filled classrooms with iPads and Chromebooks and allowed students to have constant access to their phones, and now we wonder why kids are addicted to screens. Then there are the political vogues: When the 1619 Project was hot, we invited its curriculum into schools; as trans issues dominated our politics, we allowed schools to hide students’ social transitioning from their parents. And most infamously, we closed schools during the Covid pandemic — in many places, for over a year — and told ourselves that a few hours of online learning was a fine substitute.
But all of these mistakes are likely to pale in comparison to the future costs of today’s senseless experiment with AI.
Students in K–12 schools and higher education are now outsourcing the most important parts of learning to chatbots and similar programs. Instead of reading, students have AI summarize books and articles for them. Instead of brainstorming ideas for projects and reports, they use AI to conjure up ideas. Instead of drafting, editing, rewriting, and reediting, they have AI produce and then improve their papers. Somehow, we’ve suddenly forgotten arguably the most crucial aspect of schools’ academic mission: having students do hard things.
Yes, of course, AI can finish many tasks faster than a human. But that’s precisely why we should not allow AI in the classroom. Learning is seldom about swiftly generating a final product. It’s about the slow, arduous work necessary for getting to a final product. From a great teacher’s perspective, what a student wrote in her final paper is less important than the weeks of researching relevant sources, assembling evidence, and outlining an argument. That great teacher doesn’t want a student to just write the correct answers on the exam; he wants the student to spend hours and hours reading texts closely, figuring out why that formula works, or trying different approaches until landing on the right method.
Jim Geraghty is back in Europe, reporting on how NATO nations continue to grapple with the Russian threat. Here he is detailing the extensive bomb shelters in Finland. And here he is reporting on Russian shadow fleet interference:
The Gulf of Finland, south of Helsinki — I’m on board one of the Finnish Border Guard’s RV20-class coastal patrol vessels when a pair of rubber-hulled fast boats come zipping up behind us. The boats are with the Finnish Border Guard’s special intervention units, the guys who chase down suspicious vessels and climb on board. The fast boats, each carrying four masked operators, live up to their name, passing us on both sides with blazing speed, and our vessel rocks in the wakes created by the fast boats.
Captain Mikko Simola, the commander of the Gulf of Finland Coast Guard District, is showcasing his agency’s capabilities, and the challenge it faces, for a group of visiting American journalists.
On any given day, 2,000 ships are in the Baltic Sea, a fairly narrow and shallow body of water. A significant portion of those ships are part of the Russian shadow fleet, smuggling oil sanctioned by the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union. Simola said that the waters off Finland see the same number of vessels passing by as before the sanctions went into effect, but now the boats are older, the crews less well-trained and reliable, and the ships’ flags and ensigns (signaling their official country of origin) and the paperwork of who actually owns them and runs them are often a deliberately obfuscatory and confusing mess. Earlier in the week, I mentioned the ongoing efforts to jam global positioning signals in the Gulf of Finland; Simola tells me, “This year, we’ve had ships radioing our command center, asking, ‘Please give us our position, we don’t know where we are.’”
The Finnish Border Guard is considered part of the national armed forces, but reports to the country’s Ministry of Interior, not the Ministry of Defense, much like the way the U.S. Coast Guard is part of the U.S. armed forces but reports to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
On top of that, vessels in the Russian shadow fleet often attempt to spoof their position. So not only is the GPS sometimes jammed, sometimes the transponder’s reported locations of the ships don’t match up with reality. While all this jamming and spoofing hasn’t caused a large-scale collision yet, it’s a pressing concern for the Finnish Border Guard.
In addition to all the oil tankers moving east and west, large ferries regularly transit between Helsinki on the north side of the Gulf of Finland and Tallinn, Estonia, on the south side. Simola mentions the nightmare scenario would be a nighttime collision between a passenger ferry and an oil or chemical tanker that has a false sense of where it is because of GPS jamming or spoofing.
Besides transporting sanctioned oil, the Russian-aligned tankers sometimes do extra favors for Moscow’s interests by deliberately damaging undersea cables and other critical underwater infrastructure.
Taking a step back from the day-to-day, Tony Morley challenges the popular attitude that the West is something, somehow, to be ashamed of:
They would ask you to ignore, reject, and dismantle the values, cultural norms, and institutions that have made the West a place where people flee to rather than flee from.
People with the ability to move freely elect, with almost no exception, to move from autocratic rule to freedom. From poverty and dearth to wealth and abundance. From hunger and want to satiation and plenty. From danger and violence to safety and peace, and from bleak prospects toward the opportunity for a better future. Those who already have these conditions may well elect to visit the world of those living without, but they almost never elect to move there permanently. Many moonlight in rejecting the West, but, if pressed, they’re not much keen on giving up what the collective Western cultural system provides. The unique synthesis of ideas, cultural adaptations, innovations, and institutions that have emerged from the West have become humankind’s blueprint for prosperity and progress. No other collection of values and ideas than those of the Enlightenment has resulted in freer, longer, healthier, and richer lives. . . .
We’ve been goaded, bullied, threatened, and canceled into turning our backs on these values. Too many Westerners have become tolerant or even supportive of such ideas as authoritarian socialism, theocracy, selective law enforcement, and violence against political opponents. The West risks losing ideological and intellectual ground first and foremost because those who once believed in Western values have lost their confidence in them. We have sunk into a complacency made possible by the absence of the very values we have ceased to espouse.
As with all cultural constructs that make civilization possible, it is belief in the system itself that binds together the mechanism of its operation. We will remain free and prosperous only if we believe that freedom and prosperity are worth striving for. If the Enlightenment values of the West don’t survive the next century, economic growth will contract, progress and living standards will falter, and the specters of autocracy, war, hunger, ignorance, illness, and poverty will rise again. It’s time we returned to respectfully saying, “The West is good.”
CODA
I stumbled across this languid Doors song over the weekend, nestled in one of the darker corners of the Morrison Hotel. That band’s non-hits tend to blend together, to my ear, but this one, “The Spy,” is not like the others.
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