Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos. Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.   I don’t watch much Women’s National Basketball Association games. Apparently most Americans have not in the past. But there was an incident the other day between two teams, the Phoenix Mercury and the Indiana Fever, and the sensation of women’s basketball is six-foot-tall former Iowa college basketball sensation, Caitlin Clark. And here’s the rub.  She was playing this game, and she was knocked down. Two or three of the Phoenix Mercury team members kind of swarmed her. She almost got a knee in the head, and one player, Alyssa Thomas, was sort of resting on her and then took her fist and pressed right onto her jugular vein or throat on her neck.  If that had happened just out in public, the public sphere—if you saw somebody knock somebody down and then sort of rest on top of them and put that on their neck—it would be a felony assault.   But this was in a basketball game. And what made it worse was the referees were right there. They not only did not call a flagrant foul, they didn’t react to it.  It was only when the people who were watching the game got so angry in public opinion that the league then, I guess, forced the referees to rescind, and they assessed Thomas a foul, but it was only a one-day suspension.  So what is going on? Well, what’s going on, according to the popular press—I’m not sure I’m qualified to adjudicate that—is that the league is mostly 65% to 70% black.  It kind of mirror-images, it’s a completely meritocratic league. It mirror-images the NBA, and many of the black players, as true of women’s sports, has a higher percentage of lesbians than the normal population. And all of a sudden, this white girl from Iowa, six feet tall, who you might think would be under the basket rebounding in women’s basketball—  She’s kind of lanky, but she turns out to be one of the best outside shooters in the history of women’s basketball. So for her first two seasons, she was roughed up a bit, but she took the league by storm, and she continued her historic excellence that came out of college basketball with the University of Iowa team.  And she parlayed that into excellent play and kind of skyrocketed the Indiana professional team.  But here’s the problem. She’s, for good or evil or happy or sad, she’s responsible, by many estimates, for a 25% increase in revenue, not to mention millions of people are watching women’s basketball because she is such a different type of player.  Not because of her sexual orientation—that is heterosexual—her race, which is white, but because she has finesse. She’s a great passer, and she can shoot from the outside.  Now, you would think the league would welcome that and highlight it. But what’s happened is attention has turned from the low-attendance prior league to the high-attendance, high-revenue new league because of Caitlin Clark.  Part of it is jealousy. Part of it may be race or sexual orientation, but whatever the cause is, the players often are acting against their own self-interest. They’re beating her up.  The subtext is that she’s lanky and tall, and she shoots from the outside, so they’re going to rough her up. And Fox News not long ago listed a series of 10 or more incidents, including where she had a ruptured eardrum, she was slammed.  In the game I’m speaking of, she was knocked down by another player in a flagrant foul.  And so it doesn’t seem to make sense. Why are they doing that? Why are the players trying to systematically hurt someone?  Now, maybe it’s just a strategy of basketball—that if you intimidate her enough and she goes out on the floor and thinks, somebody’s not going to be playing normal basketball but try to hurt me, then her shooting will be off, her passing will be off. Psychologically, she’ll be damaged.  And that’s happened. Her  third year has not been as impressive as her first two, and she’s racked up a series of knee and back injuries.  But what the general public that now has been attracted to this new phenomenon of Caitlin Clark is very angry because what they see is systematic reverse racism: that black women players resent the attention that Caitlin Clark is getting and the new audiences that she’s winning, and even the new revenue of which they are beneficiaries.  And they believe that they’re going to play tough, physical basketball and injure her, or at least injure her, or at least psychologically put terror into her so she doesn’t have the same excellence as she had before.  That’s pretty clear if you look at the list of injuries.  Now, what’s going to happen?  Well, there’s only three alternatives.  If you look at the sports commentary, it’s divided. The left of center sportswriters, and by the way sportswriters are among the most left-wing of all journalists. I don’t know how that’s possible. They used to be middle of the road or conservative, but now they are left-wing. I think it’s because of DEI, and they see sports as a social experiment, sort of.   But they fault Clark, and they say well, she’s just too sensitive. She’s a whiner. She complains. She looks for injuries that are not there. She just has to grow up, this is the big leagues. That kind of stuff.   But not the general public. And not many of the players, they know what’s going on. They know what’s going on. So, again, what will happen?   The first is, if the owners of the league, the commissioner, the referees, and the players continue this, then she will be permanently disabled—maybe in a year or two—injured.   Or she’ll be so intimidated that she understands she’s not playing basketball but football, or mixed martial arts, and people are going to try to hurt her. And she knows that.  And more importantly, she knows that the referees will not enforce it, because they are either afraid of the other teams, or the management, or they are afraid of the players. Or they sympathize with the players.   Who knows? But they have not been doing their job.  And then she will be injured, she will leave the league. People will be very angry, and the league will rescind back into obscurity and go broke probably, because it won’t just be neutral.   This great gain and revenue and attention that it’s gotten because of Caitlin Clark—if she’s gone, and forced out and injured, there will be a double reaction. It won’t just be that they will lose their new fans. They will lose old fans too.  The second is that she just says, Why do I have to put up with this? I know what’s going on. They know what’s going on. Nobody wants to stop it.  It’s racism, pretty clear it’s racism. If she were black, and perhaps homosexual, she wouldn’t have these problems people say.   So there would be some problems because envy and jealousy is a natural human condition. But there wouldn’t be this extent of problems.   So she just says I’m gonna leave. I’m gonna go to Europe, where these problems may not exist to the same degree, and I will have my own career, I will do very well. And bye-bye. See you, wouldn’t want to be you, WNBA.  Or, three, the referees will get together, the management will get together, the coaches will get together, the players will get together, and they will say privately, We know what’s going on with everybody. We are trying to hurt this woman, some of us are. And some of us know that others are trying to hurt her. And they’re not doing anything.   We’ve got to stop it for financial reasons. It’s going to hurt us. And we’re on the verge of becoming mainstream and very, very wealthy and prosperous, and we’re going to destroy ourselves. We’re going to commit collective suicide.   So it has to stop. It’s wrong, it’s racist. It’s sexist. And we’re not going to do it anymore. And we’re not going to pick on one particular player and try to injure her.  Of those three alternatives, she now quits and goes to Europe and saves her career and flourishes. The league suffers. The league reforms and stops it or she’s permanently disabled.   I have a feeling it’s going to be number one. Tragically, that they’re not going to do enough, or they’re not going to do anything or someone is either going to punch her in the neck, or kick her in the back, or knock her flat, and she’s going to be so permanently injured or psychologically traumatized that she knows she can’t shoot. She can’t pass. And she is going to retire.  And I think that is the purpose of a lot of the players doing this.  And nobody in this racially charged country can speak explicitly in the truth, but that’s the truth.  We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson tried to pull a fast one on the American people Tuesday. The court upheld West Virginia’s law preventing men from competing in women’s sports, finding that the law does not constitute discrimination on the basis of sex in violation of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. The court split along familiar ideological lines: the six Republican-appointed justices joined the majority opinion, while the three Democrat-appointed justices did not. However, the liberal justices didn’t write full dissents—they actually said they agreed with the ruling’s central holding. While Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote an opinion that Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined, Jackson wrote a separate pseudo-dissent that reveals how the liberals tried to smuggle transgender ideology into a ruling delivering sanity. The Pseudo-Dissents on Women’s Sports B.P.J., a middle-school boy who identifies as a girl, claimed West Virginia’s law violated Title IX by preventing him from competing in women’s sports. He claimed the law violates Title IX, but also that the state discriminated against him in violation of his 14th Amendment right to the equal protection of the laws. Sotomayor agreed with the court’s majority that B.P.J.’s Title IX claim fails, but she argued that the Supreme Court should not have resolved the 14th Amendment claim. West Virginia’s policy aims at “ensuring safety and preventing unfair competitive advantages in women’s sports.” B.P.J., however, claims that neither of those goals apply to him, because he did not go through male puberty and he did receive cross-sex hormones, and therefore lacks “any athletic advantage that is inherent” to his “sex identified at birth.” Sotomayor does not flatly state that West Virginia’s law violates the 14th Amendment. Instead, she says a lower court should decide, because lower courts engage in fact-finding, while higher courts decide contested matters of law. She wrote that West Virginia could prove that its law achieves its aims without harming B.P.J., but the Supreme Court’s ruling leaves “unresolved factual questions.” “The ban is absolute, so B. P. J. cannot practice on girls’ teams, even if she [sic] would not take anyone’s spot in an eventual competition, even if everyone who tries out for the team makes it, and even if having the chance to participate could aid immensely in treating B. P. J.’s gender dysphoria,” the liberal justice writes. Jackson writes to disagree with the court’s majority in ruling that the term “sex” in Title IX “cannot plausibly be interpreted to refer to anything other than biological sex.” “Title IX makes room for individuals to live in the gender they choose,” Jackson writes. “It cares not just about sex assigned at birth but also about individuals’ ability to match (or not) their gender presentation to their gender identity. Because West Virginia’s law forces B.P.J. to live—in this case, to play—as a boy though she is a girl [sic], it might well run afoul of Title IX properly construed.” What the Liberal Justices Reveal Notice how the liberals admit that West Virginia’s law might not violate Title IX, even while they take pains to use language in line with transgender ideology. Jackson concedes the central point in the case—apparently because she feels she must—while at the same time attempting to smuggle in the exact opposite conclusion, based on the notion that, on an unspecified metaphysical level somehow beyond biology, B.P.J. is actually female. This case relies on the plain fact that males, on average, are physically stronger than females and enjoy an inherent advantage in most sports. The idea that protecting women from competing against men could possibly violate Title IX—which Congress passed in order to advance female opportunity—is fatuous, and frankly, insulting to Americans’ intelligence. Poll after poll has demonstrated that Americans overwhelmingly support rules requiring people to play sports according to their sex, not their claimed gender identity. The problem is, the Left can’t really split the baby on this one. You either believe that a person’s stated gender identity overrides his or her biological sex or you don’t. You either believe that we should adopt preferred pronouns, allow men in women’s spaces, and champion mutilation as a form of “care,” or you don’t. Men in women’s sports may be the least popular part of the transgender agenda, such that even Ketanji Brown Jackson will side with sanity, for now. But this is an ideological divide with relentless logic on either side, and if you admit that Title IX actually supports fairness in women’s sports, you eventually have to acknowledge that B.P.J. is still a man, whether he sees himself that way or not. So long as Jackson and the other liberals insist on kowtowing to transgender ideology, internal logic won’t let them judge the cases accurately. They may say they agree with the majority opinion, but if you read carefully, you’ll find them laying the groundwork for smuggling transgender ideology in, anyway.

California’s budget has grown roughly 40% since Gov. Gavin Newsom took office in 2019, but a former state senator who helped oversee the budget says the governor squandered a once-in-a-generation opportunity to put the state’s finances on stronger footing. In some of Newsom’s final acts as governor, he passed a $351 billion spending budget for 2026-27, a whopping 40% increase since he was elected to serve Californians in January 2019.  When Gov. Gavin Newsom first took office, California entered the budget cycle with a projected $21.4 billion surplus, thanks to the work of previous Gov. Jerry Brown. Since then, California has experienced years of record spending and recurring multibillion-dollar budget deficits. Many Californians might wonder what Newsom has to show for it. The newly approved spending plan continues Newsom’s focus on expanding Medi-Cal, funding homelessness and housing programs, and investing in public education, wildfire prevention, and climate initiatives.  It also adds more funding for special education and child care, while relying on several revenue-generating measures, including extending taxes that help fund Medi-Cal and limiting certain business tax breaks. Many have criticized this budget, including Assemblyman David Tangipa, who pointed out that the fund for illegal immigrant services is over $10 billion, while veteran services has only about $500 million. This is just sad.California spends 8 to 10 times more on services for illegal immigrants than it does on veterans services from the General Fund.And now the legislature is trying to mislead the people of California with another Trojan horse ballot title by calling this… pic.twitter.com/mryiPNUqgY— David Tangipa (@DavidTangipa) June 26, 2026 In an interview with the Daily Signal, John Moorlach, senior fellow and director at the Center for Public Accountability at the California Policy Center, shared his concerns about Newsom’s budgets. He also expressed worries for the future, saying Newsom didn’t focus enough funds on paying down existing debts. Moorlach is all too familiar with the governor’s financial mismanagement; he served as a California state senator from 2015 to 2020 and served on the Budget and Fiscal Review Committee. “Spending went up, and reducing debts was not focused on as strongly as it should have been,” Moorlach said. “The state didn’t attack its unfunded liabilities for retiree medical, nor did it make aggressive increased payments to the pension plan. “So, it’s one of these massive, missed opportunities because paying down debt—even though it’s a good, smart thing to do in a household—is not sexy and it’s not fun.” Since 2012, Moorlach has been ranking each state by how much unfunded pension debt there is for each resident.  When the previous governor handed things off to Newsom, California was in 41st place in Moorlach’s rankings. However, after almost eight years, California dropped to 44th. Moorlach gained access to the state’s 2024 Annual Comprehensive Financial Report and saw a suspicious number that caused California to improve. Since 2012, Moorlach, a CPA by profession, has been monitoring the United States’ unrestricted net positions. In 2024, Moorlach noticed a huge positive improvement: states had improved their unrestricted net positions by $100 billion. But when Moorlach went to investigate how that was done, he saw that around half of that money—$46.2 billion—was tied to California. When he looked deeper, that money was all due to “error correction.” “Now, thanks to a really radical error correction, [California] is moving up to 43rd. But he left it in a lot worse shape than Jerry Brown handed it off to him,” he said. “You would think we should be much higher because of who we are—we’ve got Silicon Valley, and we’ve got six of the top corporations on the stock market. But instead of benefiting from the unique good fortune and being diligent about managing the resources properly for future generations, Gavin Newsom’s just had a fun time just spending it all. So, if we do go into a recession, it will get really ugly.” What Moorlach referenced was the unfunded liabilities still hanging over Californians’ heads. When those debts aren’t paid down by the governor, they don’t go away—they become the responsibility of Californians. If the state goes into a recession, residents will still have to worry about those payments, except they will be making substantially less money to cover them. Moorlach finished by saying Californians shouldn’t be surprised: “It’s not unreasonable to think about, because [Newsom] is a leftist, liberal politician who did what one would expect of someone who is not focused on being fiscally conservative.”

As July begins, Virginians brace for higher gas taxes, hoping that the $68 price of a barrel of crude oil will start to bring the price at the pump back down. However, they will very soon be hit with a 7% increase in their electric bills. Iran? No. Trump tariffs? No. This is because, as Gov. Abigail Spanberger promised the lords of the Green Energy Cabal, Virginia has reentered the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. This is the classic cap-and-trade scheme with a cool new, hip name. Not a week passed after she announced the reentry into the initiative before Dominion filed with the State Corporation Commission for rate increases to cover the fees they will have to pay to the overseeing body for the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. You have to pay for credits if you use more than your allotment of carbon credits to generate your electricity. You buy them from members who don’t, and if there aren’t any to buy, the money just goes into the initiative’s bank account for when someone does have credits to sell. Under the heading of “win-win” for Spanberger, she can blame all that electric use on data centers, not former Gov. Ralph Northam’s economic suicide pact with California called “Green Virginia 2030,” which already had Dominion take two power plants offline and turn Virginia into the largest importer of electricity in the USA. (Thus, that controversial “Valley Link” power line project.) However, there is a commonwealth not far away that—to the surprise of many—pulled itself out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. That commonwealth is Pennsylvania. Similarities? Sure, they have a Democrat governor; they even have a Democrat governor who fancies himself a contender for the presidential nomination in 2028. That’s where the similarities start to fade. Their Democrat governor, who fancies himself a contender for the presidential nomination in 2028, realized that hitting his citizens with a massive electric bill increase was not a good path to that end goal. So, Josh Shapiro did what no other U.S. governor except Glenn Youngkin has done: pulled his state out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. Maybe Virginia’s governor should have called Harrisburg and asked Shapiro for advice. However, after Senate leader Louise Lucas told Washington, D.C., press that Spanberger has reached out to talk to her fewer times than the Republican Youngkin ever did, you start to wonder if maybe Spanberger has a reaching-out problem. Pennsylvania’s Shapiro has made it very clear that he has great concerns over the increase in Pennsylvania’s utility bills. He said repeatedly on the campaign trail that the initiative is bad for Pennsylvania. However, when that commonwealth’s courts ruled that the initiative’s carbon tax was unconstitutional, the governor had the decision appealed. So, he may not believe in his heart that the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative is bad policy, but that doesn’t matter. His citizens are not going to be paying higher electric bills because when somebody sees a presidential campaign looming, ideology and/or party platform planks can go out the window. Another note on Pennsylvania: They are also trying to reinvigorate a long and illustrious history of industry, building everything from tractors to most of the steel in the USA at one point. Shapiro must have realized that Pennsylvanians working are surely going to find life in the Keystone State more—how does Spanberger say it? Oh yes, “affordable.” Did the fact that Pennsylvania has a Republican majority in its General Assembly play into this? I would not try to insult your intelligence by saying it didn’t. However, despite the number of seats in deficit the Republican Party finds itself in Virginia’s General Assembly, the district-by-district deficit is a percentage point or two after millions of out-of-state dollars were spent on Democrat candidates. Add to that only 40%—and sometimes 35%—voter turnout, and it becomes clear that Virginia is not far from the same kind of Republican majority in the House and Senate that Pennsylvanians have. Until then, Virginians are going to be paying higher electric bills because too many Republicans stayed home on Election Day and didn’t deliver at least one house in majority to stand up to the governor’s plans to increase everyone’s electric utilities. For good measure, Spanberger signed a law this year making it illegal to do what Youngkin did when he pulled out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative. Now there has to be legislation passed and signed by the governor to rescue us. Maybe that can be the plot of “Shrek 6.” We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.

A federal judge in San Francisco just halted the Trump administration’s policy of arresting migrants at immigration courthouses—everywhere in the country, for everyone. On June 23, 2026, Judge P. Casey Pitts of the Northern District of California issued a 71-page ruling in Pablo Sequen v. Albarran vacating three ICE courthouse-arrest policies and a separate waiver that had extended short-term detention from the longstanding 12-hour limit to 72 hours. The ruling applies nationwide. There’s one problem. The Supreme Court already told district courts they can’t do this. Well, almost. In Trump v. CASA, Inc., 606 U.S. 831 (2025), a 6-3 Supreme Court majority held that universal injunctions—orders blocking federal policy against everyone, not just the parties before the court—”likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has granted to federal courts.” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote the majority. The statutory anchor was the Judiciary Act of 1789; nothing like a universal injunction existed in English courts of chancery at the founding, so district courts can’t issue them now. Judge Pitts anticipated that argument and rejected it. His ruling rests on APA vacatur, Section 706 of the Administrative Procedure Act, which directs courts to “hold unlawful and set aside” agency action that is arbitrary and capricious. Pitts found that ICE’s 2025 courthouse-arrest guidance was “an irrational departure” from prior rules. He concluded that because the challenged policies were nationwide agency actions, nationwide vacatur was the appropriate remedy. CASA, he held, addressed injunctions, a different legal vehicle. He’s not wrong about the distinction, but he may be wrong about the result. The APA’s “set aside” language has been understood to reach agency-wide policies. That reading has majority support among circuits, and some support on the Supreme Court itself; Justice Kavanaugh has defended it, and Chief Justice Roberts called the government’s contrary position “radical” at oral argument. The CASA majority explicitly left APA remedies intact. Pitts isn’t operating in defiance of CASA—he’s operating in the gap the Court left open, then walking through it at speed. But the practical result is identical to what CASA was designed to prevent. The structural problem is the same regardless of the procedural vehicle. When a single district judge can vacate a national executive policy for 330 million people, the forum-shopping incentives are obvious. The Northern District of California, the Southern District of New York, and the District of Maryland have become preferred venues for challenges to Republican administrations for the same reason plaintiffs choose the Fifth Circuit in Texas when challenging Democratic ones. Congress has two pending proposals to address this. The Judicial Relief Clarification Act would limit non-party relief in federal courts to representative-capacity suits under Rule 23. The Restraining Judicial Insurrectionist Act would require three-judge panels for any suit seeking equitable relief against executive branch action, eliminating the single-judge choke point. Neither bill has reached a committee vote, let alone the floor. Both have sat in Senate Judiciary since the spring of 2025. The equal-opportunity argument is crucial. The Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness plan was vacated by a district court on APA grounds. The Obama EPA’s Waters of the United States rule was set aside by district courts across multiple circuits. APA vacatur is a weapon that points in all directions. The question isn’t which administration it’s aimed at today, but what the rule should be for every administration, permanently. The Founders designed three separate branches to prevent any one institution from accumulating the authority to make, execute, and void law simultaneously. Article III courts review executive action for constitutional compliance. They weren’t designed to function as a standing veto on national policy, one summary judgment motion at a time. A single district judge in California overriding national executive policy for every American is a structural problem the Constitution’s design was built to prevent. The Supreme Court drew the line on injunctions. It left the APA question open. That question is now running at full speed through the Northern District of California. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of the Daily Signal.