Ben Domenech

I regret to inform you that America’s decrepit media commentators are once again attempting to play a game of rope-a-dope with Republican voters. This time around, their choice is Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin, who has experienced increased media attention of late as a potentially less divisive alternative for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024, compared to the supposedly more controversial potential of Florida governor Ron DeSantis. The Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty writes: There are plenty of Democrats who believe the man who campaigned as a sunny suburban dad in a zippered vest is really a Trump in fleece clothing. But Virginia — which was trending blue until his victory — is clearly warming up to Youngkin.

On a day many Americans on both sides of the abortion issue thought would never come, the Supreme Court reversed the "settled law" of Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Justice Samuel Alito's finding for the court will have massive ramifications for American politics, culture, and law. The opinions are worth reading in their entirety — particularly the concurrences of Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Justice Clarence Thomas, the former for warning states that may seek to subvert federalism, the latter for its monumental achievement of criticism of substantive due process. It will take time to digest this ruling responsibly as a legal matter.

The recent controversy over prominent legal commentator Ilya Shapiro's employment at Georgetown University Law Center ended last week. In a Wall Street Journal column on a Friday, Shapiro declared that his cancel culture nightmare was over, vindicated after a four-month investigation into a troublesome tweet. On Monday, the WSJ ran the rare immediate follow-up column, where Shapiro announced his decision to quit the university rather than subject himself to an inevitable future cancelation. Shapiro's experience was astounding in how much it reveals about the insanity of the woke left brigades, and how much their heckler's veto is empowered by the administrators at universities like Georgetown.

This week brought revelations that a consortium including multiple interested leftist participants has banded together to attempt to buy a number of Spanish-language radio stations across the country. The effort, backed in part by George Soros, is unsurprising. But it is also an underrated indication of the weakness of vision on both the left and the right. It illustrates an approach used by the left toward Hispanic outreach, which has been consistently top-down. As opposed to listening to the priorities of these communities and making any effort to meet them where they are, the left has instead tried to assert and propagandize to them. Univision, Fusion, and a number of other left-driven media outlets have attempted to control the narrative heard by Spanish speakers in America.

For the anti-free-speech left, the most dangerous man in America today is Greg Lukianoff. The president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education for the past 16 years, the free-speech attorney has now decided to guide the organization, previously focused on free-speech battles within academia, into the broader territory of free-speech battles across the nation. FIRE has been rebranded as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and Lukianoff intends to take it into space once occupied by free-speech stalwarts like the ACLU. He has a massive new investment from supporters to the tune of $75 million.