Same old, same old: Target Trump.

At the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, President Donald Trump was the target of yet a third assassination attempt — this time in full view of the Washington press corps.

The event was presented as a spirited night with Trump.

After 11 years of avoiding the predominantly left-wing media event, he decided to revisit the dinner. He anticipated that he would be the object of ridicule inside the hall — and that he might see possible violence outside it.

Indeed, protesters ringed the hotel. In grimly prescient fashion, the usual sort of crowd that night was channeling John Wilkes Booth — sic semper tyrannis — with placards reading “Death to Tyrants.”

They again almost got their wish.

The Supreme Court of Virginia, otherwise known as SCOVA, heard oral arguments Monday morning over legal and constitutional challenges to the gerrymandered congressional map that was approved via referendum last Tuesday, and a few of the Justices had pointed questions for the pro-gerrymander side.

As RedState previously reported, Virginia voters approved an amendment to the state constitution that removes redistricting power from a non-partisan commission and places it with state lawmakers (a/k/a, Democrats).

The final numbers were closer than expected, with the yes side garnering around 51 percent of the vote and the no side coming in at 48.5 percent. Those numbers could still change as the counts from mail-in ballots are finalized.

The result of last week's election was that voters essentially signed off on the brazenly gerrymandered map designed by Democrats that would move the commonwealth from a 6D-5R congressional makeup to a 10D-1R one. There's only one thing that can stop it from being adopted: the courts. And that brings us to Monday's showdown at SCOVA.

Newly declassified intelligence shows that U.S. intelligence discovered the threat of Chinese access and control of U.S. election systems — then buried the evidence and punished those who exposed it.

In 2022, the election security firm True the Vote broke the story that a company called Konnech in Michigan was storing data on American election workers on servers in China. True the Vote leaders Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips were, of course, ridiculed by the so-called mainstream press.

Then it got worse.

Engelbrecht and Phillips were actually jailed because they would not give up the name of their source, who had blown the whistle on Konnech.

The federal government didn’t seem to give a damn that a hostile foreign power might be able to influence our elections.

It did seem very intent on making sure no one knew about it.

Now, four years later, we can see that it was much, much worse than that.

According to John Solomon, at the time True the Vote was being silenced, the Intelligence Community had assessed the situation, recognized the risk, and issued a report outlining the danger we faced.

And that report and that assessment were hidden from the public, even as patriots trying to protect the republic were being persecuted and jailed.

The bulwark of a free, moral, civil society is a free press.

I want to make it clear that I believe there is a sharp, black line between the free press and “media,” and that distinction between a constitutionally protected free press and modern “media” is not semantic but structural.

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects the act of publishing itself, not the quality, intent, or civic value of what is published. In that sense, the press is a function open to anyone, from the pamphleteers of the founding era like Thomas Paine to today’s institutional newsrooms.

What we now call “media” is an industry, and like any industry, it responds to incentives — chief among them attention, engagement, and revenue.

That shift has blurred the line between information and entertainment, producing content that often prioritizes emotional reaction over factual clarity or public utility.

The result is a system in which material designed to provoke or entertain is afforded the same constitutional protection as serious investigative reporting, despite serving a very different purpose.

So last week, Anthropic published its labor market impact study and the internet did what the internet does. Headlines about a “Great Recession for white-collar workers.” Lists of the ten most exposed occupations. Think pieces about whether your CS degree was a waste of money.

I wrote one of those pieces myself. It’s easy to get caught up in the flow of opinion if you don’t stop and really think about the other side of the messaging.

There’s a thing about the Anthropic data that got buried under all the alarm: the same numbers that measure displacement also measure opportunity.

And the opportunity side of the ledger is potentially enormous, if you know how to read it.

Anthropic’s key finding was the distance between what AI can theoretically do and what people are actually using it for. In computer and math occupations, theoretical capability sits at 94 percent. Observed usage is 33 percent. That’s a 61-percentage-point gap.

The doom reading: that gap is closing, and when it does, jobs disappear.

The other reading: that gap represents trillions of dollars in unrealized productivity. And closing it requires people. Lots of them, doing work that mostly didn’t exist three years ago.