Barack Obama is a real piece of work. Seriously, he has no shame. One week after the former president successfully gaslit a small majority of Virginians into voting for a redistricting initiative that got rid of the state’s two majority-minority congressional districts, he has the gall to condemn the Supreme Court’s ruling against the practice of redistricting along racial lines. He doesn’t really care about giving black voters better representation—he cares about the Democrats’ grasp for raw, naked political power, by any means necessary. What Is Racial Redistricting? While the Constitution generally prohibits sorting citizens based on race, lower courts have long interpreted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 as effectively mandating redistricting along racial lines. This process has ensured that Democrats have more congressional districts in the South—maintained by the legal fiction that drawing maps based on race will give black voters an equal playing field. Yet the Supreme Court on Wednesday put an end to all that. In Louisiana v. Calais, Louisiana’s Legislature had drawn a redistricting map that preserved one majority black district, but a court mandated that the state redraw the map, to create a second majority black district. Louisiana did so, and faced a court challenge. The Supreme Court’s majority opinion found that the Voting Rights Act only forbids redistricting explicitly aimed at racial discrimination—not political advantage. This effectively means that southern states can redraw their congressional maps and eliminate majority-minority districts, so long as they do so for political, not racial, reasons. Democrats hate this, because it destroyed their legal backstop to maintain Democratic congressional districts inside red states. Obama condemned the Supreme Court ruling, suggesting he was doing so on principle. “Today’s Supreme Court decision effectively guts a key pillar of the Voting Rights Act, freeing state legislatures to gerrymander legislative districts to systematically dilute and weaken the voting power of racial minorities – so long as they do it under the guise of ‘partisanship’ rather than explicit ‘racial bias,'” Obama wrote on X. Obama faulted the Supreme Court for “abandoning its vital role in ensuring equal protection in our democracy and protecting the rights of minority groups against majority overreach.” That’s ironic, because if he really cared about the principle of “protecting the rights of minority groups” in voting, he wouldn’t have supported the blatant partisan power grab in the Old Dominion. The Virginia Power Grab While she was running for governor, Democrat Abigail Spanberger said she had no intention of redistricting. After all, Virginia voters had overwhelmingly approved a non-partisan redistricting process in 2020 via constitutional amendment. Yet, after Eric Holder’s National Democratic Redistricting Committee sent a cool $150,000 her way, she changed her tune. The Democratic map is a farce. It parses out the northern Virginia suburbs—home to many current and former government employees—between five districts, ensuring that my leftist neighbors can outvote Virginians in the middle of the state. It gets worse, however. Under Virginia’s current congressional map, adopted after the 2020 census, two districts have a majority-minority voting age population. The Democrats’ proposed redistricting maps would dilute those populations. A.C. Cordoza, who was the sole black Republican in the state’s House of Delegates before losing his reelection campaign in November, condemned Democrats as “completely hypocritical.” “These are southern Democrats, who are using their power to disenfranchise African American voters, and minority voters,” he previously told The Daily Signal. “Tell me how that is not the definition of Jim Crow, and they can’t do it.” Virginia Dems overall strategy? Redraw maps to connect Northern Virginia to central Virginia to dilute Republican votes. But the new maps would also put more white voters in the 2 majority-minority districts Virginia has now. 3/7 pic.twitter.com/ZSCcfYbluD— Tyler O'Neil (@Tyler2ONeil) April 11, 2026 Yet Obama aggressively championed the redistricting effort, hectoring Virginians about the need for Democratic partisan advantage—oh, I’m sorry, I mean “fairness”—in our maps. Obama doesn’t really care about whether black voters get more proportional representation. If he did, he never would have endorsed this monstrosity. If Obama isn’t opposing the Supreme Court’s Calais ruling on principle, why is he opposing it? He’s doing so for the very same reason he supported the Virginia redistricting effort—it’s all about pure partisan political power. Partisan Political Power The Supreme Court’s ruling allows Republican majority legislatures in the South to do the same thing that Democrat majority legislatures in the Northeast have done for decades—draw congressional maps that effectively disenfranchise the minority party for purposes of representation in Congress. It’s a naked political ploy, and it can backfire—because maximizing the number of Republican-leaning districts means that you have more districts where the likely Republican margin of victory is smaller. Even so, partisan redistricting has often worked. President Trump won about 37% of the vote in Massachusetts in 2024, but the state has nine Democrats and zero Republicans in the House, for instance. Connecticut (42% Trump in 2024) has five Democrats and zero Republicans. Of course, a few Republican states have also gerrymandered out Democrat votes. While 38% of Utahns voted for Harris in 2024, the Beehive State has four Republicans and zero Democrats in Congress. While Trump won 38% of Californians in 2024, Republicans only have nine seats of the 52 total seats, for about 17%. Trump won 43% of the vote in Illinois, and Republicans have only three of 17 seats, only 18%. Republicans arguably started at a disadvantage, because the U.S. Census Bureau over-counted left-leaning states and under-counted right-leaning states. Since the population number determines how many U.S. House seats a state receives, these errors yield a partisan slant—before any voting takes place. In all this context, Obama’s hypocrisy is yet more breathtaking. Let’s stop pretending Obama cares about principle here—this is all about political power.

Zyns are super popular. They are little pouches people tuck into their lips to get a hit of nicotine. Zyn has competitors, like Velo and On!, but Zyn has most of the market. Young people love the pouches. They are safer than cigarettes. Their nicotine is addictive, but nicotine isn’t what makes tobacco deadly. “[The] mix of chemicals—not nicotine—cause the serious health effects,” says the Food and Drug Administration. That’s why the FDA supports nicotine pouches.   Still, some anti-tobacco activists oppose all nicotine use. “It’s a pouch packed with problems!” Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., tells cameras. Some states ban certain flavors and impose high taxes. This makes pouches about as expensive as cigarettes. That’s dumb. “It’s not the nicotine that kills you. It’s smoking,” says Guy Bentley, director of consumer freedom at the Reason Foundation, in my new video. “You shouldn’t treat a nicotine pouch the way we treat cigarettes. The more expensive you make the safer product, the more the most dangerous product will be sold.” After Minnesota imposed a 95% tax on vaping, smokers who would have quit … didn’t, thousands of them. The ban-things crowd says they must protect children. “These nicotine pouches seem to lock their sights on young kids,” claims Schumer. New York politicians say high taxes will make it “harder for children to buy them.” I liked one New Yorker’s reaction: “By the time somebody says it’s for the kids, they’re really just trying to tug on the heartstrings and make you stop thinking about it so much.”  Bentley points out, “Almost no kids use these products.” Only about 0.6% of high schoolers, according to The National Youth Tobacco survey, use them frequently. “This is an incredibly low proportion of youth,’ says Bentley. ”It is adults buying this stuff. Seven million American adults use nicotine pouches, and that’s growing, particularly among people who smoke. That’s a good thing, not a bad thing!” Finally, bans and high taxes don’t make popular products disappear—they create black markets.  Black markets nourish crime. Australia taxes cigarettes heavily. “What do we see?” asks Bentley. “We don’t see smoking rates continue to fall. You see hundreds of arson attacks.” Arson attacks? Yes, black market cigarette sellers firebomb competitors. Where taxes are very high, people make money outside the law. “That is what government tax policy has done,” says Bentley. “We haven’t had firebombings here,” I note. “We haven’t, but we’ve seen what a disaster the war on drugs was. Why would we want to replicate that with nicotine?” Good question. I took it to the activist groups pushing bans and high taxes. None would agree to an interview. It’s too bad. I still would like Truth Initiative to tell me about their plan for “the end of … nicotine use.” “A nicotine-free society,” says Bentley, “is as ridiculous and insane as a gambling-free society, an alcohol-free society, a junk food-free society, a society free of life’s little pleasures that we all indulge in.” “People want government to protect us,” I push back. “They want government to protect other people from themselves, but when it’s something you’re consuming and government interferes, people start to complain. If you want to use nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, place a bet on a football game or play poker … That should be up to you. This is part of the taste, texture, and color of life.” He’s right. We should make those choices for ourselves. When politicians limit our choices, they almost always make things worse. COPYRIGHT 2025 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC. We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

Black conservatives perennially face the slur that they’re “not really black” if they aren’t on the left. Not only that, they are tools of white racists if they dissent from the NAACP hard line. When the Supreme Court voted 6-3 to overturn a racially gerrymandered congressional district in Louisiana, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, was outraged by the local Deseret News in Salt Lake City prominently featuring an Associated Press photo of a lone black protester in front of the court holding a sign that said, “Thurgood is watching you, Clarence.” That implied Thurgood Marshall was disappointed in Clarence Thomas. Lee tweeted: “They’re going after Justice Thomas for being conservative while Black. That’s racist. And it’s very, very wrong.” He added: “It’d be absurd to assume that Justice Alito should agree with the late Justice Brennan because he’s white. It’s racist and offensive for @Deseret to suggest that Justice Thomas should agree with the late Justice Thurgood Marshall because he’s Black.” Rep. Burgess Owens, R-Utah, a black conservative, seconded that thought: “When the Left can’t beat a Conservative Black man’s argument, they attack his Blackness.” For example, the Congressional Black Caucus has a membership of 60 Democrats, but none of the five black Republicans in Congress. This kind of slur greeted Thomas when he was nominated for the Supreme Court in the summer of 1991. NBC reporter Bob Herbert uncorked a commentary underlining “David Duke, former Ku Klux Klan leader, is crazy about Clarence Thomas.” Columnist Carl Rowan wrote Thomas had no talent, only the ability to “bootlick” Reagan and Bush, that “If you gave Clarence Thomas a little flour on his face, you’d think you had David Duke talking.”  That same spirit continues today, as the ladies on ABC’s “The View” were upset with Thomas. Joy Behar complained he “didn’t stick up for his own.” Two years ago, Behar complained that Sen. Tim Scott doesn’t understand being black, “the systemic racism that African Americans face in this country and other minorities. He doesn’t get it. Neither does Clarence. And that’s why they’re Republicans.” At the time, Scott tweeted: “When a Black conservative who believes in the future of this nation stands up to be counted, they lose their minds.” The standard leftist line is represented by Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., pushing hyperbolic lies. “Morning Joe” championed his tweet that Thomas & Co. gave “a green light for unconstitutional attacks on the voting rights that generations of Americans bled and died to secure.” But no one has been denied the right to vote. The Left insists that unless blacks get to elect other blacks, they have no voting rights. So, what happens when a majority-black district elects a white guy (Steve Cohen in Memphis) or an Indian guy (Shrinivas Thanedar in Detroit)? Did their voting rights disappear? It got worse. Booker told MS NOW’s Jonathan Lemire that the Court’s verdict is “eliminating black representation, disenfranchising African American voters by drawing creative districts that completely take away any kind of representation.” So, all 65 black members of Congress are going to lose their seats? Or too many Democrats might? It’s also bizarre that Booker would talk about “drawing creative districts,” when that is exactly what many majority-minority districts look like on a map—as it was in this court case, the 6th District of Louisiana, which looks like a squashed centipede intersecting the district of Speaker Mike Johnson. Black conservatives aren’t in favor of “eliminating” black legislators or “disenfranchising” black voters. But leftists will villainize them like this because negative campaigning can work. Pretending only black Democrats are black isn’t going away. COPYRIGHT 2026 CREATORS.COM We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

Massive sums of money are being spent on the midterm elections to determine control of Congress. As groups spend record money on ads and donations to support candidates across the country, here are some key trends that could help determine the balance of power in Washington after November. MAGA INC. President Donald Trump’s allies have amassed a huge war chest ahead of the midterms. MAGA Inc., a pro-Trump political action committee, had almost $350 million on hand at the end of March. How the group chooses to spend the money could have a major effect on the outcome of critical races. So far, the group has been relatively conservative in its spending. In 2025, however, the group spent $1.7 million in support of Rep. Matt Van Epps, R-Tenn., to hold onto the seat of retiring Republican Rep. Mark Green. Democrat Senate Candidates Democrats need to net four additional seats in order to gain control of the Senate. And so far, they’re fundraising effectively. In the first quarter of 2026, Texas Democrat Senate candidate James Talarico brought in over $27 million. Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., seeking to hold onto his seat, also raked in over $14 million. The high individual fundraising numbers for Democrat candidates do not paint the full picture, however, as the National Republican Senatorial Committee outraised its counterpart, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, in 2025, and candidates such as Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, have brought in significant funds through authorized fundraising committees. Ad Spending Records Spending on political ads for this midterm cycle is through the roof. A study from S&P Global Market Research projects “local TV political ad revenue reaching $4.02 billion in 2026.” This would be a 15% increase from the last midterm cycle in 2022. That means political ads are likely to crowd the airwaves unlike in any other midterm cycle to date. Big Tech Money Big tech players are spending big in 2026. In the first quarter of 2026, Leading the Future, a pro-tech super PAC supported by the tech company Palantir’s co-founder Joe Lonsdale and the investment firm Andreessen Horowitz, raised over $15 million. Leading the Future has funded candidates in both parties.

“Duty to Disobey,” a documentary examining the experiences of U.S. service members who refused the COVID‑19 vaccine mandated by former President Joe Biden’s secretary of defense, is set to hit theaters in June. The film details what happened to men and women in uniform who declined the mandate. It explores physical injuries linked to the vaccine among some service members, and it frames their experiences as a case study in civil liberties, constitutional limits on government authority, and the costs of dissent within hierarchical institutions. Featuring testimony from former and active-duty service members across multiple branches and ranks, “Duty to Disobey” argues that the stories matter to all Americans. The filmmakers highlight what they describe as courage under pressure, institutional failures within the military, and what they call the often-unseen boundary between lawful authority and unlawful orders. One of the featured testimonies is from former Army Specialist Karolina Stancik, who says she suffered “a debilitating heart condition.” According to the film, the Army acknowledged the condition in a memorandum stating it was linked to the COVID‑19 mRNA vaccine. “I was left behind and trampled,” Stancik said in an interview posted on social media. “They watched it, they came back, walked all over me, then left again.” Another individual featured in the documentary is Nick Kupper, a retired airman who served more than 20 years in the U.S. military. The film states that Kupper nearly lost his career—and faced the possible loss of medical benefits for his disabled daughter—after refusing the COVID‑19 vaccine. Kupper ultimately remained in the service following a 2023 injunction filed against the Department of Defense by Children’s Health Defense, according to the documentary. He later retired on his own terms and now represents Arizona’s 25th District in the state House of Representatives, where he advocates against vaccine mandates. Similarly, Lt. Col. Carolyn Rocco, U.S. Air Force, refused the COVID‑19 vaccine and was not forced out of the service. According to the film, she continues to serve in a special assignment in Washington, D.C. Others, however, were not as fortunate. John Frankman, a retired U.S. Army captain, was separated from the military in the summer of 2023 for refusing the COVID‑19 vaccine mandate. A former Special Forces Green Beret, Frankman has since spoken publicly about his experience and advocates on behalf of other service members that he says were harmed by what he describes as an unlawful mandate. Frankman is now running to represent Florida’s 1st Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives.