The ceasefire against Iran is up the air. United States (US) troops have boarded and seized some Iranian ships, while President Trump announced a renewed ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon. By the time you read this who knows what will have developed in the rapidly unfolding events in the Gulf.

Meanwhile the battles over the redistricting of congressional districts reaches new highs in Virginia, the Democratic Party continues to plumb the depths of antisemitism, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is indicted, we mark Earth Day, and the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation remembers history’s most destructive ideology.

Virginia’s Lobster District

Elbridge Gerry, one of this country’s founding fathers, was the governor of Massachusetts from 1810 to 1812. During that time, he redrew congressional districts to favour his party. One district ended up looking like salamander leading someone to coin the term Gerrymander, the term used when districts are drawn in often ridiculous ways to ensure one party is advantaged.

Gerrymandering has been going on ever since and both the Republicans and Democrats are guilty of it. Normally congressional districts are redrawn every 10 years after a census is taken and a more accurate picture is drawn of who is living where, but in recent years states have been monkeying around with districts in between the decadal resets. Each party ratchets up the degree to which the districts are redrawn, to the point that it is all becoming quite absurd. In recent years New York redrew its districts to favour Democrats, then Texas redrew them to favor Republicans, then California redrew them to favor Democrats and just this week the voters of Virginia voted on a ballot initiative to redraw their districts.

Virginia is seen as a purple state, neither Red (Republican) or Blue (Democrat), but flipping back and forth. The northern suburbs of the state around Washington, DC, are heavily Democratic while most of the more rural southern areas are much more Republican. During the 2024 presidential election, the state was pretty evenly split, with 51.8% voting for Kamala Harris and 46.1% for Donald Trump.

Virginia elected a new governor last November, the Democrat, Abigail Spanberger, who campaigned as a moderate and who opposed redistricting. She has governed as a radical, raising taxes and spending and embracing every woke idea out there. And true to herself, she and the Democratic-controlled state legislature went ahead with a redistricting ballot initiative.

The Virginia ballot initiative was worded as follows:

“Should the Constitution of Virginia be amended to allow the General Assembly to temporarily adopt new congressional districts to restore fairness in the upcoming elections, while ensuring Virginia’s standard redistricting process resumes for all future redistricting after the 2030 census?”

Anyone who hasn’t really been paying attention to the new proposed maps might walk into the voting booth, see the words “restore fairness” and think, “well, who could be against that?” Except the new districts are anything but fair. The Democrats won in a close ballot, with 51% voting Yes and 49% voting No.

The new districts will disenfranchise almost all Republicans. Most districts now stretch from the rural southern Republican areas right up to the DC suburbs, so that the more densely populated Democratic areas can nullify any Republican votes. One district looks like a lobster, with its claws going deep into rural areas. What was once a fairly even 6 Democrat to 5 Republican split, will now likely be 10 Democrat to 1 Republican.

But that, apparently, is “fair” according to the Democrats. Sometimes the phrase “Orwellian” just doesn’t do it justice.

And the ratchet keeps on ratcheting. In response to this Democratic redistricting gambol, the Republican-controlled Florida legislature and governor say they will follow suit. How about we just stop this nonsense, draw districts based on population and stop trying to disenfranchise one side or the other.

Democrats and Israel

While we’re on the topic of the Democrats, the party is becoming increasingly anti-Israel. Just FYI, your correspondent is a registered Independent, in case you think I’m being overly harsh on the Dems, I’m not.

Last week I wrote about Maine’s Democratic Senate hopeful, the Nazi tattoo-sporting, Jew hating socialist, Graham Platner. Over in Michigan this week Hasan Piker was out and about campaigning for Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. For those who don’t know, Piker is a good-looking young media personality who recently doubled down on his hatred for Israel by saying on the Pod Save America podcast that Hamas is “a thousand times better than Israel” and that he would “vote for Hamas.” Now, just so there is no confusion here, Israel is a free and open Western democracy that enshrines the rights of minorities and where Arab Muslims sit in the Knesset, sit as judges, and have the same rights as anyone else. Hamas, on the other hand is a genocidal terrorist organisation that, when it isn’t killing Jews and Christians and Muslims in Israel, busies itself by killing fellow Palestinians in Gaza.

Call me crazy, but you’d think that a candidate for the US Senate might want to distance himself from someone with such utterly vile views. Apparently not in the modern Democratic party where the more hateful your views, the better. For his part El-Sayed has called Bibi Netanyahu a war criminal and has claimed that Israel’s actions in Gaza amount to genocide. Call me even crazier, but I always thought that a genocide referred to the deliberate destruction in part or in whole of a population, like what happened to the Armenians at the hands of the Turks, or the Jews at the hands of the Nazis, or the Tutsis at the hands of the Hutus. How you can have a population INCREASE, as has happened in Gaza since October 7th, and still call it a “genocide” is baffling to me. Where is Mr. Orwell when you need him?

While Piker was campaigning for El-Sayed, 40 of the 47 Democratic senators voted on a resolution to block arms sales to Israel. The resolution failed thanks to solid Republican opposition. There was a time when support for the only democracy in the Middle East, the long-standing ally of the US was bipartisan. That is no longer true and those of us who care about this outpost of western civilisation in a hostile region should worry deeply about the prospects of a Democratic president and Congress that aligns itself with the likes of Hasan Piker.

The hate watchdog spreading hate.

A huge story that Warwick Grey covers on these pages concerns the Southern Poverty Law Center’s funding of far-right hate groups, like the Ku Klux Klan. Some readers may remember that President Trump was accused of calling the neo-Nazi types who marched in Charlottesville in 2017 as “very fine people.” That was a lie. Trump explicitly excluded those neo-Nazis in his remarks about the people who, for whatever reason, didn’t want to have historic statues torn down. Now we find out that not only was the media lying about Trump’s statement, but that the entire march was a put-up job by the SPLC.

The whole episode highlights one important fact about the US: the demand for racism far exceeds the supply. Wilfred Reilly, a political scientist from the Kentucky State University has done a great job of documenting all the hate crime hoaxes over the past few years. But even if you truly believed all the fake hate crimes, surely the fact that millions of people with black and brown skins risk their lives to come to the United States should have people questioning just how hateful and racist this country is. I’m no historian, but I think I’m probably on solid ground when I say that in the face of rising antisemitism in 1930s Germany, few Jews were risking their lives to enter that country. In fact, the opposite was true.

With huge financial resources the SPLC has become a truly loathsome organisation, raising vast amounts of money to spread division and hate, rather than fight it, as its charter claims it does. Take just one group which SPLC calls a “hate group”: Do No Harm. This excellent organisation was founded by Dr Stanley Goldfarb, a professor of medicine at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. Do No Harm works to root out identity politics, including racism and the trans ideology, from medicine. The organisation, and Dr. Goldfarb, are the opposite of a hate group. Again … paging Mr. Orwell.

Hopefully the Trump Administration’s actions against the SPLC will lead to people really recognising who is spreading hate. If there is any justice, it will lead to a boost in support for groups like Do No Harm.

Scrap Earth Day, let’s have Simon Day

This week we marked Earth Day when we are all supposed to lament the deterioration of the environment and our collective impending doom. Thankfully our friends over at Human Progress have issued the latest Simon Abundance Index, named after the great Julian Simon, about whom I have written previously.

I won’t go into here, as Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley do a better job than I ever could. Long story short: we are not facing doom. There are not too many people. Our world is getting better and cleaner and thanks to trade, exchange, markets, and free enquiry, we are using our resources better and more productively all the time.

I live in hope that at some point we scrap the whole Earth Day nonsense and instead celebrate Julian Simon Day.

The Victims of Communism

On Thursday I was honored to be invited to attend the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation’s annual wreath laying ceremony in Washington. This was the 19th time the Foundation held the ceremony, and it was attended by numerous embassies of former communist countries as well associations representing those still living under the Marxist jackboot.

Representatives from every former European communist country, including Ukraine (Russia was not invited or present as far I could tell), solemnly laid wreaths in a deeply moving ceremony. In addition, representatives of Tibetans, Uyghurs, Vietnamese, and Cubans all remembered those currently living under communism. The sight of former Cuban political prisoners shouting “Cuba Libre” was particularly moving and poignant now that that wretched regime is on the brink of collapse the prospect of the Cuban people being free is tantalisingly close.

Who was absent at the event? Africans were absent. Even though Washington, DC has a large Ethiopian population, there were no representatives from that country. Perhaps as many as 1.5 million Ethiopians died of starvation or were killed during the Derg’s brutal rule in that country. You’d think that someone might want to come and remember them, but apparently not. And no one from Angola or Mozambique or the Republic of Congo turned up either. Even though Zambia, Tanzania, and Ghana were not strictly communist, they implemented socialist ideas that drove those countries deeply into poverty and despair.Yet no one from those countries marked the day or remembered those who suffered thanks to those policies.

Why does this bother me? Well, if you want to grow, prosper, and thrive, you don’t only need to implement good public policies, you also need to understand and remember the bad policies. Communism embodies the worst, most evil and destructive ideas. Those ideas need to be understood and remembered so we don’t repeat them. Maybe next year some Africans, who have suffered under communism’s foul ideas will put the event on their calendar.

That’s all for this week except for one final note. Last week I made a prediction that President Trump would drop the investigation into Fed Chairman Powell, which would pave the way for the Senate confirmation of Kevin Warsh.As I was working on this week’s Dispatch, the Trump Administration announced it is dropping the investigation. I don’t mean to sound boastful, but as no one else will blow my trumpet, I guess I will have to. Toot Toot.