Virginia Gerrymandering Decision Brings Out Dems’ Inner Insurrectionists

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks. This week, we look at the Democrats’ response to a Virginia Supreme Court ruling on redistricting, and we cover more media misses.

Read more Virginia Democrats Escalate Redistricting Fight to U.S. Supreme Court

‘Give Us Gerrymandering or Give Us Death!’

When the Virginia Supreme Court rejected the state’s mid-decade redistricting effort last week, Virginia House Speaker Don Scott issued a statement saying, “We respect the decision of the Supreme Court of Virginia.”

But in the days that have followed, it’s become clear that many Democrats do not, in fact, respect the court’s ruling, which dashed their hopes to create a map that favored their party by a margin of ten to one.

While Virginia voters approved the new map in a referendum last month that cost the state $5.2 million, the court’s majority found that the legislature made procedural errors in how it placed the question on the ballot last month, thereby rendering the referendum vote “null and void.”

Pundits and lawmakers are now floating several ideas to bypass the court, including open defiance or even a complete takeover of the court.

Hasan Piker, the cosplay Communist, believes the court is giving leftists no choice but to resort to violence.

“[T]he va supreme court denied the results of the redistricting referendum. scotus gutted the voting rights act and tennessee carved up the last dem district destroying black voter power in the state,” Piker wrote in a post on X.

“[T]hose who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable,” he added.

Senator Ted Cruz replied to Piker’s post saying, “This is who Democrats are campaigning alongside,” a streamer who is “openly calling for ‘violent revolution.’”

Piker defended himself, saying, “it’s a jfk quote. you went to harvard. you know better.” But social media users pointed out President John F. Kennedy’s quote was not about legally sound court rulings, but instead about oppressive regimes in Communist countries such as Cuba — a country Piker believes has a lot to recommend it — denying their people basic freedoms.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that Virginia lawmakers are also “discussing an audacious and possibly far-fetched idea for trying to restore a congressional map.”

The “most dramatic” idea the lawmakers floated, according to the report, was to go so far as to replace the entire Virginia Supreme Court in order to reinstate the map. That idea “drew mixed reactions,” the Times said.

The report cited a “private discussion on Saturday that included Democratic House members from Virginia and Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the minority leader, the lawmakers vented anger at their defeat at the Virginia Supreme Court, spoke about a collective determination to flip two or three Republican-held seats under the existing map and discussed a bank-shot proposal to redraw the congressional lines anyway.”

Democrats “did not land on a specific course forward,” the report adds.

In order to replace the entire court, Democrats are considering an idea proposed by The Downballot, a progressive newsletter, that suggested state Democrats move to lower the mandatory retirement age for state supreme court justices from 75 to 54, the age of the youngest current justice, or younger. Democrats hold a trifecta of power in Virginia and could lower the age, and then move to appoint Democrat-friendly judges to the court.

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New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, for his part, urged Virginia voters to “call their delegates and senators and demand that they ignore this illegitimate ruling.”

NR’s Charles C. W. Cooke called out the absurdity of the plan, asking readers to imagine what the reaction would be if it were President Trump floating a similar plan to keep himself in power.

And still, the knee-jerk reaction of the mainstream media was to somehow blame Republicans.

PBS News Hour host Amna Nawaz, taking inspiration from California Governor Gavin Newsom, asked a recent panel on the show if Republicans are “rigging the system.”

Newsom writes that there were no votes to change the maps in several Republican-leaning states which have advanced maps to pick up more red seats, including Tennessee, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, and Texas.

“Virginia’s voter-approved maps are thrown out. MAGA has rigged the system,” Newsom wrote, with Nawaz asking panelists, “What do you make of that? Are Republicans rigging the system?”

Atlantic staff writer David Brooks said, “This is a classic case of how democracy decays” and spoke out about gerrymandering on both sides, though he suggested President Trump blew through the existing restraints and made the situation even worse.

Meanwhile, on MS NOW, law professor James Sample said that while the Virginia court’s decision was “probably right on the law” that it was nonetheless a “disaster for our democracy.” In the same segment, MS NOW analyst Basil Smikle claimed Republican-led redistricting and the recent Supreme Court decision on racial gerrymandering are essentially “an American version of apartheid.” We took on similar arguments in this column last week.

Headline Fail of the Week

The Daily Beast leaned into fearmongering to generate clicks for its recent coverage of the Hantavirus: “Health Officials Confirm Worst-Case Scenario in Rat Virus Cruise.”

As NR’s Noah Rothman pointed out, “You’d have to read beyond the paywall to learn that the WHO has assured the public that this ‘is not the next Covid.’”

Rothman also cites several news outlets that have taken a more down-to-earth approach in their coverage of the virus, including the New York Times and NPR.

“It’s good to be cautious, but there’s no need for concern over a global outbreak,” one immunologist told the Times.

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Media Misses

• The New York Times issued a whopper of a correction earlier this month after it learned that a remark it attributed to Canadian Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre was actually an AI-generated summary of his views about Canadian politics that AI rendered as a quotation. The story was on the Times’ website for more than two weeks before the editor’s note was added at the very bottom of the story. “The reporter should have checked the accuracy of what the A.I. tool returned,” the note adds. “The article now accurately quotes from a speech delivered by Mr. Poilievre in April. He said, ‘My personal opinion is that when a member of Parliament goes back on the word they made to their constituents and switches parties, constituents should be able to petition to throw them out and have a byelection. That would put the people back in charge of our democracy rather than having dirty backroom Liberal deals by Mark Carney determine our destiny.’ He did not refer to politicians who changed allegiances as turncoats in that speech.”
• Don Lemon is still hinting at a potential 2028 presidential run. “I’m a man of a certain age,” he said when asked about the possibility of running for president during the Vanity Fair “Truth Tellers” summit. “Why not?”When moderator Kara Swisher laughed, Lemon replied: “You laugh. I’m a self-made millionaire, from a country where my ancestors were enslaved, so I think that’s a pretty big accomplishment. . . . I made it to the top of my profession.”