In January 2011, a man in Tahrir Square held up a handwritten sign that read “Facebook: against every unjust.” Fourteen years later, almost to the day, Mark Zuckerberg sat in a place of honor at the inauguration of Donald Trump, ahead of the incoming cabinet. Same exact platform. Radically different relationship to power.

That contrast is the starting point for a piece I’ve spent the last month working on, published yesterday at Liberalism.org, exploring the intersection of decentralization and democracy: Enshittification, Despotification, and the Open Internet. It tries to explain how the internet technology we were told would liberate us is now being used as part of an authoritarian crackdown on rights and freedoms — and, more importantly, why that outcome was arguably built into the architecture from the start.

The key argument builds on Cory Doctorow’s encapsulation of how centralized systems get enshittified — big companies take control of chokepoints to extract ever-greater value from users — but extends it to show how those same chokepoints become targets for political manipulation as well. It also makes the case that infrastructure choices are far from neutral — they shape the incentives that determine who ends up with power:

What changed was that the underlying incentives of that centralized architecture had time to work. Centralized systems create chokepoints. Chokepoints, once they exist, attract everyone with an interest in squeezing them: companies looking to extract more value from users, governments looking to extract compliance from companies, and political movements looking to extract influence from both. In 2011, Facebook hadn’t yet figured out how lucrative those chokepoints would be, or how much leverage they offered to the powerful.

By 2025, everyone had figured it out.

This is the part most debates about tech and democracy miss. The real question is whether the underlying architecture creates incentives that concentrate power or that distribute it. It’s not about whether technology is inherently good or bad, liberating or oppressive. Architecture shapes incentives; incentives shape outcomes. And once you’ve built a chokepoint, the attempts to capture it will be relentless, because the payoff for whoever controls it just keeps growing.

That’s the Doctorow half of the argument — enshittification, the corporate extraction playbook. But the piece extends it into territory Doctorow didn’t name: despotification, the political analog, where the same chokepoints that enable corporate extraction also enable authoritarian control:

The problem of centralized systems is that they create an irresistible temptation to control and exploit. Users who found value early on feel stuck: they can leave, but doing so means abandoning their community. That lack of easy exit creates lock-in, and lock-in enables enshittification.

And the same chokepoints that let companies extract value also let governments extract power. Those seeking control hunt up and down the network stack for leverage, and centralized providers concentrate it.

Call this despotification: the political analog of enshittification, where the same chokepoints get exploited to extract compliance from platforms—and ultimately to gain control over what people can say and hear.

The temptation of those in power to twist the knobs to their liking became irresistible. This took many forms: X downranking posts with links to external sites, Amazon choosing which products to show you as the promoted results, Instagram choosing which content deserves to be sent to you as a reminder notification, Substack choosing which newsletters to suggest to you. Each of these choices can be tweaked in ways that enable greater usage, engagement, and revenue, and not necessarily in the interests of the users.

But the piece doesn’t just diagnose the problem — it argues that none of this is inevitable. The same way democracy requires active defense, so does a genuinely decentralized internet:

Decentralization, like democracy itself, is something we have to fight for. Absent deliberate effort, the default trajectory runs toward centralization, because centralization is convenient, and convenience wins in the short term.

Which means the decentralized alternatives have to be genuinely better, not just philosophically purer. The centralized platforms won the last round because they removed friction. They didn’t ask users to manage config files or understand network topology—they said “click here and it works,” and most people took that deal. Any decentralized successor that requires users to become their own sysadmins will lose the same way the last generation of open protocols lost.

What’s different now is that we’re closer than we’ve ever been to having decentralized systems that are actually more convenient and more empowering, where the user experience is competitive with the centralized incumbents, and the democratic benefits come built in rather than bolted on. The goal is to build systems where those two things point in the same direction.

There’s a lot more in the full piece, including a section on how this same chokepoint logic is already being embedded into the infrastructure of whatever comes next — and why the architectural decisions being made right now will matter as much as anything that happened with social media.

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History is written by the winners, they say. But it can also be written by losers.

Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. In response, he told everyone the election had been rigged, if not actually stolen. He said some of this to his faithful MAGA followers the morning the election results were to be certified. The rest is, as they say, history. His supporters stormed the Capitol building for the sole purpose of preventing the election from being certified. They broke into the building, assaulted police and federal officers, forced the Senate into hiding, and walked off with whatever souvenirs they could.

Many of these insurrectionists were ultimately arrested, charged, and convicted for their crimes. When Trump was elected president for a second time, one of the first things he did was issue pardons to the people who broke the law on his behalf back in 2021.

As awful and self-serving as that move was, it wasn’t the end of it. Playing both sides of a lawsuit, Trump managed to secure a revenge fund via a “settlement” by the IRS over the leaking of his tax files years earlier. Trump claims it’s an “anti-weaponization” fund meant to soothe the nerves of supposedly politically persecuted members of his MAGA flock with cash rewards for criminal acts.

Of course, he didn’t say exactly that, but everyone knows how this $1.776 billion slush fund is going to be used. The court handling the lawsuit seeking to dismantle the fund knows it as well. Whether or not it can find a way to shut it down remains to be seen. There’s not a whole lot of precedent on transparent self-dealing by a sitting president, mainly because most presidents (and their cabinets) are generally a little more careful to obscure their true motives.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is continuing to erase history it doesn’t like. This project started far from the White House, forcing national parks to take down anything that presented America as anything less than perfect. This effort, however, takes place on the administration’s home field. Rather than simply allow history to exist, the DOJ is proactively deleting evidence of the agency’s past actions.

A review by NBC News found that the vast majority of press releases pertaining to Jan. 6 defendants have been removed from the DOJ website as of Friday evening.

The move to wipe hundreds of press releases from the official government site is the latest attempt by the Trump administration to reframe the Jan. 6 siege and to paint the rioters who participated in it as victims.

It’s not like the DOJ or administration gave anyone a head’s up that this purge would be happening. It took regular people noticing it for the government to respond. And respond it did, as only this administration can: by gleefully admitting it was engaging in the sort of memory-holing we used to condemn foreign autocracies for doing.

Washington Post journalist Meryl Kornfield pointed out the “quiet” disappearance of January 6 indictment press releases from the DOJ’s website. The DOJ’s “Rapid Reponse” X account jumped in immediately to gloat about its destruction of the public record:

Nothing “quiet” about it.

We are proud to reverse the DOJ’s weaponization under the Biden administration. We will do everything in our power to make whole those who were persecuted for political purposes. This includes stripping DOJ’s website of partisan propaganda.

There it is: yet another middle finger to Americans from an administration that claims no one loves America as much as it does. Sure, press releases may contain statements from government prosecutors that contain as much opinion as facts, the rest of the releases generally just state the facts as dryly as possible so there’s little room for interpretation.

The question is where the DOJ goes from here. Is it willing to start destroying court records and/or placing these under seal where they’re inaccessible to the general public? Will it deliver a fresh set of non-facts to replace all of the history it’s erasing?

While this makes it more difficult to trust the DOJ to maintain its own records, it doesn’t change the fact that most things on the internet are forever, whether you want them to be or not. What’s been deleted has already been archived. Even if this government is willing to block sites like the Internet Archive from preserving history as it happens, it can’t keep dozens of other people from preventing this administration from simply wishing all of its wrongdoings into the internet cornfield.

Lawfare is just one site that’s making sure the permanent record remains permanent since this administration is objectively opposed to letting its history speak for itself. The results of its ongoing efforts to prevent Trump, et al. from simply pretending this never happened can be accessed here.

What’s detailed in the deleted documents isn’t evidence of “partisan propaganda” or “DOJ weaponization.” What happened actually fucking happened. The DOJ is supposed to handle federal crimes and it did exactly that. The truth is that Trump supporters committed several crimes in an effort to undermine — if not actually destroy — the democratic process. This was one of the darkest moments in American history. It should never be minimized, much less discarded just because it makes the people in power (and the people who support them) look as awful as they actually are.

These are the acts of a dictator and his enablers. It’s the antithesis of the independence that’s going to be celebrated by the same people who are busy destroying everything this country is supposed to stand for. It’s not something to be tolerated. And it should never be forgiven.

There’s just an exhaustingly long list of reasons why the $111 billion planned acquisition of Warner Brothers by Larry Ellison and Paramount is very, very bad. Bad for consumers, bad for labor, bad for journalism, bad for democracy, and bad for markets.

For one thing, it’s financed by a bunch of murderous overseas autocrats. The massive debt load from deals like this always result in mass layoffs, higher prices for consumers, and corner cutting, resulting in a steadily shittier company, worse overall products, and a less healthy media. There’s also issues with Ellison trying to buy up all the news outlets and turn them into (even worse) right wing coddling bullshit and agitprop machines helmed by incompetent bad actors like Bari Weiss.

So it’s great timing for former Democratic California Attorney General Bill Lockyer to pop up over at The Hollywood Reporter to give a pathetic defense of the deal that pretends none of this is happening.

Trade mags are generally terrible. Most of the merger coverage at places like The Hollywood Reporter, Deadline, and Variety go comically out of their way to avoid acknowledging these giant deals are always bad. As in, it’s not any sort of actual debate. There are fifty years of very clear history on this subject, recently culminating in the giant turd that was the AT&T–>Discovery–>Warner Bros disaster.

But here comes the 85-year-old Lockyer, who pretends to care about antitrust reform, right before he insists that people should ignore all of the terrible problems with Paramount’s latest deal. One of the central themes in his piece is that Paramount and Warner Brothers have to merge because it’s the only way they can compete with Netflix, Amazon, and Apple:

“Traditional studios are no longer competing only with one another. California cannot and should not ignore that reality. Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery are competing against global technology platforms and streaming giants like Netflix, Amazon, Apple and others with enormous financial resources, diversified revenue streams and worldwide reach.”

That’s simply not how any of this works.

A Trump-allied oligarch and his nepobaby kid taking on a mountain of debt doesn’t magically result in a company that’s healthier and more competitive. All the debt costs are offloaded onto the back of workers, consumers, and product quality. These mergers always result in a less healthy company than ever, regardless of whatever silly smoke David Ellison is trying to blow up the ass of Hollywood elite.

It’s possible Lockyer is engaged in a DC policy paid advertorial on behalf of Paramount, though the Hollywood Reporter doesn’t offer any sort of financial conflict of interest disclosure, so one just has to assume Lockyer, like so many Democrats, doesn’t have any idea what he’s talking about when it comes to things like modern politics in the authoritarian era, or modern antitrust reform.

Though given Lockyer’s personal history of approving harmful consolidation (like his office allowing the Hearst Corporation-owned San Francisco Examiner to acquire its competitor the San Francisco Chronicle in 1999) or weak-kneed settlements or antitrust policy failures (Microsoft, Sutter Health), it’s maybe not surprising that he thinks one of the worst mergers in media history should be approved.

Lockyer’s also quick to shoot down concerns that Ellison’s domination of media is any sort of real world problem:

“Some have raised broader concerns about media ownership, editorial influence or political viewpoints, as the combined company would own both CBS News and CNN. This debate will undoubtedly continue to dominate talk shows and social media. I, too, worry about plutocratic dominance of media markets. But merger enforcement should remain focused on competition and the potential for consumer and worker harm — the core pillars of antitrust — not political disagreements over content or viewpoint.”

But this isn’t 1997. It’s now impossible to untangle corrupt authoritarian domination of media, and their relentless dismantling of media consolidation limits, from broader antitrust arguments (though I know there are centrist Democrats and MAGA “antitrust enforcers” who would very much like to). There are vast harms caused by the destruction of what’s left of journalism and public interest media, and any “antitrust reform” that doesn’t factor in media audience welfare and the health of electoral consensus in the age of Elon Musk and Larry Ellison enabled fascism isn’t reform, it’s patty cake.

Meaningful DOJ Antitrust reform would be nice, but it can’t fix things alone. We need an FCC that also actually cares about media consolidation. And it might be nice, as Gigi Sohn has long argued, to begin looking at meaningful media ownership diversity requirements in a bid to protect minority and independent journalism.

But we don’t have that. We have an FCC actively waging a war of censorship on anybody critical of an unpopular autocrat. We have a DOJ actively encouraging harmful consolidation at the hands of technofascist billionaires keen on pummeling the electorate with right wing agitprop. And an opposition Democrat party with weak knees and zero credibility on antitrust or media reform.

Trump and friends are self-serving autocrats dead seat on dismantling whatever’s left of meaningful competition and opposition. That Netflix, Comcast, Disney, and Apple still exist isn’t any consolation if the obvious ultimate end goal is zero restrictions on total consolidation. Instead of proudly advertising he doesn’t understand current political and market realities, Lockyer should probably just enjoy retirement.

While we’ve focused a great deal on RFK Jr.’s war on vaccines in America, it’s worth remembering that his ambitions for making people sicker extend beyond the American border. We’ve already discussed Kennedy’s 2019 trip to Samoa, where he used the unfortunate accidental mixing of vaccine doses with muscle relaxers that killed two young children, about which he appears to have lied to Congress during his confirmation hearing. Once in office, roughly a year ago, Kennedy also decided to pull all funding from Gavi, an international public/private partnership to get vaccines to underserved nations, claiming that there would be no American funding because it “ignored vaccine safety”. He followed that up in April of this year by withholding hundreds of millions of dollars that Congress had appropriated for international vaccination programs for the same reason.

Kennedy says the children are getting obsolete shots with dangerous ingredients that the U.S. has long since phased out. He is holding up $600 million Congress appropriated for the vaccines to pressure the international humanitarian group, Gavi, that distributes them.

“Gavi has refused to provide the United States with the specific data, studies, or detailed accounting of how U.S. funds are used,” Emily Hilliard, senior press secretary at the Health and Human Services Department, said in a statement to POLITICO.

That’s an excuse, of course. Kennedy doesn’t like vaccines, so he’s keeping poor people around the world from getting them. It’s as simple as that. Why he’s been allowed to veto the powers of the purse in Congress as the Secretary of HHS is a question that can be answered by pointing and laughing at our feckless Congress, but the result is the poorest human beings in the world being less protected from dangerous, infectious diseases.

It’s easy to be anti-vax when you aren’t confronted with the realities of these diseases. When, however, you get a vicious outbreak of a new strain of Ebola in Africa, and you start seeing pictures and hearing stories about the rashes, the uncontrollable bleeding, the piercing stomach pain, and the fountains of waste leaking out of people, well, that seems to have a way of clarifying the mind.

I can’t think of a better explanation as to why Marco Rubio informed Congress recently that the State Dept. was going to get involved to get us back to funding Gavi to combat this and other diseases.

U.S. Secretary of ​State Marco Rubio said on Tuesday that the U.S. would re-engage with the global vaccine alliance Gavi amid the Ebola outbreak ‌in several African countries. Rubio told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the decision had been made a few weeks ago to re-engage, after the Trump administration pulled funding from Gavi last year.

Rubio said that Secretary Kennedy had taken a leading role in determining what was going to happen next with Gavi, but the State Department would now re-engage because “we need to drive this to an outcome”.

“The State Department a few weeks ago made the decision that we were going to re-engage on this issue of Gavi, respecting what ​HHS’ (Department of Health and Human Services) views are on it as well,” Rubio said. “We’d like to get this issue resolved in an outcome that’s ​acceptable both to Congress and also to our goals on global health.”

Rubio can massage the messaging on this all he likes, but it’s plain what is going on here. Craven as he may be in this current time, Rubio also isn’t an idiot. He damn well knows that outbreaks of infectious diseases, particularly those as horrifying as Ebola, will eventually impact his State Department and the homeland. This is him figuring out how to get an actual adult in the room to counteract Kennedy’s obstinate insanity.

And given that we don’t really know yet just how bad this Ebola outbreak is, it’s understandable that Gavi is sighing in relief at this news.

Gavi’s chief executive Sania Nishtar said she was “very encouraged” by Rubio’s remarks.

“Unlocking the funds that Congress has appropriated to Gavi would enable us to keep the world safe from infectious disease threats,” she said in a statement. Gavi’s work on Bundibugyo underlined the importance of this work, she said.

Between the courts and the Trump administration itself, there has been a great deal of blocking, tamping down, and walking back RFK Jr.’s activities.

So why not just get rid of him?

There were some rumors earlier this week that, as it was facing a lot of pushback in court, in the media, and even among (a few) fellow Republicans in Congress, Donald Trump was going to drop his blatantly unconstitutional, illegal, and corrupt $1.776 billion slush fund for MAGA insurrectionists. And now it’s… sorta officially dead… but not really.

Testifying before Congress, Acting Attorney General and full-time Trump toady, told representatives “we are not moving forward with the weaponization fund.”

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche said Tuesday that the Trump administration is scrapping plans to create a $1.8 billion fund meant to compensate allies of the Republican president after widespread political backlash and setbacks in the courts.

“We are not moving forward with the fund, period,” Blanche said.

But if you watch the actual video, it’s not quite so concrete:

As Rep. Grace Meng asks for Blanche to put it into writing that the fund is not moving forward, Blanche declines to do so. Furthermore, he refuses to say if the equally corrupt, illegal, and problematic deal to not have the IRS audit the president and his family is also going away (meaning that it’s not going away). Of course, he also lies and claims that the settlement is between “the IRS” and Trump, which is simply incorrect. The IRS never signed the agreement. It was done by Blanche and the DOJ. He also tries to (falsely) claim that the audit immunity is “not blanket immunity,” which is just false:

As Rep. DeLauro reads, Blanche’s order (again, not an official “settlement with the IRS despite Blanche’s false claims) gives very clear blanket immunity to Donald Trump, his family, and his businesses:

The United States RELEASES, WAIVES, ACQUITS, and FOREVER DISCHARGES each of the Plaintiffs from, and is hereby FOREVER BARRED and PRECLUDED from prosecuting or pursuing, any and all claims, counterclaims, causes of action, appeals, or requests for any relief, including injunctive relief, monetary relief, damages, examinations or similar or related reviews, appeals, debt relief, costs, attorney’s fees, expenses, and/or interest, whether presently known or unknown, that as of the Effective Date of the Settlement Agreement-have been or could have been asserted by Defendants against any of the Plaintiffs or related or affiliated individuals (including, without limitation, family or others filing jointly), or parties including trusts, parent, sister, or related companies, affiliates, and subsidiaries, by reason of, with respect to, in connection with, or which arise out of (1) any matters that were raised or could have been raised in the Case or the Pending Agency Claims; (2) Lawfare and/or Weaponization; or (3) any matters currently pending or that could be pending (including tax returns filed before the Effective Date) before Defendants or other agencies or departments.

That is blanket immunity. Full stop.

But here’s the tell: if Blanche’s “we are not moving forward, period” were actually true, you’d expect the people who stood to benefit to be disappointed. They’re not. January 6th insurrectionists, including Proud Boys Leader Enrique Tarrio — convicted of seditious conspiracy and later pardoned by Trump — still seem to think they’re going to cash in. Tarrio has been saying he deserves tens of millions of dollars, and rather than expressing any disappointment at Blanche’s testimony, he’s explaining why this is actually good news for him, because it means he can get more money from the US government with less oversight.

If you can’t see that, it’s Tarrio texting reporter Liz Landers:

This isn’t an abandonment. They simply state they’re going to wait two weeks… I believe even if this fund is killed in courts or at a congressional level, the President will find a way… They can just settle the tort claims and lawsuits. That has no judicial review or congressional oversight. And it would mean a lot more money in compensation.

Tarrio’s theory — and likely shared by other J6ers — is that they sue the US government, Trump and Blanche agree to “settle,” and millions of taxpayer dollars flow out through the existing Judgment Fund (the same pot the anti-weaponization fund was drawing from) with zero oversight and zero congressional approval.

And he might not be wrong.

It’s also why a competent Congress would step in and shut all of this down. If we had a competent Congress. Which we don’t.

At some point there needs to be a real reckoning with how broken the system already is — that Trump and Blanche got this far is itself an indictment of how bad things are.

Trump-allied billionaire Larry Ellison hired blogtroller Bari Weiss to turn what was left of CBS News into a right wing safe space for oligarchs and autocrats like Trump and Netanyahu. If the patient died during surgery, I don’t think Ellison would lose any sleep. But I do think Ellison hoped that Weiss could at least turn CBS News into a viral, right wing propaganda vessel certain people actually wanted to watch.

But Weiss’ tenure has been a bumbling mess on all fronts. MAGA folks aren’t interested in CBS News’ bland agitprop. And most existing viewers have been running for the exits, resulting in CBS News recently seeing its worst ratings in a quarter century. Her clumsy attempted censorship of stories critical of the president have also caused a mass exodus of any actual remaining journalists.

Those who are left are even more pissed after Weiss recently fired 60 Minutes executive producer Tanya Simon, her deputy, and two correspondents (Sharyn Alfonsi and Cecilia Vega). In her place she put Nick Bilton, a former tech journalist and documentary filmmaker with no broadcast experience.

Bilton’s a fairly typical fail upward type remembered by many in tech journalism for the time he tried to take credit for the Wall Street Journal’s coverage of Elizabeth Holmes and the Theranos scandal:

His introduction as the new boss of 60 Minutes did not go well.

Leaked audio of a recent meeting between Bilton and CBS News staff was dropped in the lap of the New York Times and Status. In it, 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley accused Weiss of “murdering” the longstanding Sunday news program, told Bilton he had “slender” qualifications for his new job and questioned the network’s commitment to the future of the program:

“She is murdering ‘60 Minutes,’” the correspondent said. “She does not love this place. She was brought in to kill it, and she’s been doing exactly that.”

Mr. Pelley added: “She has no qualifications for her job; you have slender qualifications for this job. The changes that she’s made at the ‘Evening News’ have been catastrophic, so why should we expect that any of this is going to be any better?”

There are several parts of the meeting where Bilton and his staff clearly try to shut Pelley up, quite unsuccessfully:

CBS obviously didn’t take Pelley’s comments well and has now fired him. Pelley in response offered an even more blistering statement accusing Weiss and CBS News of “injecting falsehoods and bias” into his stories. After Weiss came in swinging an axe and dismantling 60 Minutes with a total disregard for journalism, history, or tact, she accused Pelley of creating a “hostile work environment”:

Weiss ran a small blog full of trolls and c-tier columnists whose primary purpose is to blow smoke up the ass of wealth and power and punch down and left. I genuinely do think Ellison hired Weiss thinking she had the savvy to revolutionize and modernize CBS News for the social media era. But Weiss has shown repeatedly that she’s marginally competent and has the media savvy of a 90-year-old Conservative man.

Rich Republicans certainly do love to destroy and attack journalism that critiques wealth and power. But they don’t just destroy their targets. They’ll purchase a traditional news brand or communications platform, then leverage any remaining reputation to seed the public with lazy, oligarch-friendly agitprop (see: Newsweek, The Baltimore Sun, The Las Vegas Review-Journal, Twitter, TikTok, CBS, and soon CNN).

In a country with fairly terrible media literacy standards, it takes most of the public years to notice anything has changed at these hijacked zombie publications and platforms, if they notice at all. If you are cogent enough to notice and vocalize any resistance, like Scott Pelley did, you’re treated as a problematic rabble rouser undermining company interests.

If Weiss was competent, she’d make changes with some amount of subtlety resulting in a propaganda outlet that isn’t quite so ham-fisted. If she was competent, the end product at CBS News, however partisan, would already be something that was at least grabbing ad eyeballs. She’s not competent, or subtle. And the backlash is proportional.

Everybody’s piling on. Former 60 Minutes executive producer Bill Owens praised Pelley and hinted at Weiss being a “fraud.” Santiago Campos, a recent student journalist recipient of the Mike Wallace Memorial Scholarship, trashed Weiss and CBS News in a recent award speech:

“While I want to thank CBS News for funding this generous gift towards my education, I want to also acknowledge how the recent direction of the outlet stains the legacy of Mike Wallace, the namesake of this scholarship,” Santiago Campos said onstage to enthusiastic applause from the audience.”

Management has already started to scale back Weiss’ responsibilities, and I strongly suspect she will be replaced by somebody worse (but better for ratings) by the end of the summer.

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The Supreme Court’s conservatives have spent years systematically dismantling the Voting Rights Act, but the last seven months have been something else — a rapid-fire series of emergency docket rulings, procedural maneuvers, and carefully worded opinions that, taken together, make it effectively impossible to challenge racial gerrymandering. Not difficult. Impossible. And Justice Alito, in particular, seems almost gleeful in how mask-off he is in enabling the suppression of Black votes.

Yesterday’s per curiam ruling in Allen v. Milligan is the exclamation point on that project. None of the conservatives were willing to put their name on it. They didn’t need to. The result was never really in doubt — not after what they’d already done in Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama over the preceding months. This was just the moment it became undeniable that the rule is: if it disenfranchises Black voters, we’ll allow it, if it empowers Black voters, we’ll block it.

Here’s the trail.

1. In November last year a (Trump appointed!) judge threw out Texas’ gerrymandered brand new maps, by pointing out that they clearly violated the Voting Rights Act prohibition against race-based gerrymandering. As the judge pointed out, if Texas had done the gerrymandering for political reasons (to block Democrats from being elected), that would have been legal under a different recent (but still troublesome) Supreme Court ruling. But the incompetent Trump DOJ had pressured Texas explicitly over the racial makeup of its maps, which was seen as the clear racial reason for doing the gerrymandering.
2. In December last year, the Supreme Court put the racist gerrymandered maps back into play, with a ruling by Justice Samuel Alito saying that, even though the lower court found those new maps (which had only been created months earlier and used in no elections) to be clearly illegal for being created for racist reasons, “Texas needs certainty on which map will govern the 2026 midterm elections.” Given that (1) the primaries were still many months away and the ramification of rejecting these new maps was simply… going back to the same map that Texas had used during the last Congressional election, none of this made any sense.
3. In April, the Supreme Court came down with its decision in Louisiana v. Callais, in which the conservatives on the court said that to show gerrymandering was done for racial reasons (which the Voting Rights Act makes illegal), plaintiffs can’t just show evidence of the impact — they have to produce additional evidence of actual racist intent behind the redistricting. In this ruling, Justice Alito said that the ruling had no bearing and did not overturn previous rulings, either about the Voting Rights Act or in an earlier case the Supreme Court had heard, in which it found that Alabama’s new voting maps gerrymandered to deprive Black people of representation in Congress.
4. In May, Justice Alito (again, that guy) took the surprising step of rushing to certify the Callais ruling (something that is very, very rare) to assist the state of Louisiana in redrawing its maps for the election that was happening days away. Again, there is no way to square Alito’s step there with his statement about “certainty” in December unless the only “certainty” is “Black people’s votes shouldn’t count.”
5. Then, just a few weeks ago, the Supreme Court weighed in on an updated challenge to the Alabama maps — a follow-up to the earlier case where the Court itself had found Alabama violated the law. Despite lower courts finding that Alabama’s latest maps were still illegally race-based, the Supreme Court said that under Callais, those maps could go into effect anyway — eight days before the election. So: in Texas, Alito said you couldn’t remove racist maps four months before an election because people needed “certainty.” In Alabama, Alito says you can install more racist maps eight days before an election. The only certainty Alito seems interested in protecting is the certainty that Black voters get suppressed.
6. The election occurred 8 days later, but the State of Alabama, buoyed by the Supreme Court’s “racism is okay now!” attitude, simply discarded the votes in four districts, while keeping them in other districts, and said “we’re going to redo those primaries with our more racist maps later in the summer.”
7. Last week, a three judge panel (two of whom were appointed by Donald Trump) at the district court, taking instruction from all of those recent Supreme Court rulings, still found that Alabama’s new maps were clearly violating the Voting Rights Act, showing in another very detailed ruling that there was tremendous evidence that the maps were created specifically for racial reasons to suppress the impact of the Black vote. They were directly following the rulings in both Callais and Allen, where Sam Alito and friends said you have to be able to show actual racist intent to violate the VRA. The judges (yes, including a majority appointed by Trump) said “okay, yes, here we have overwhelming evidence of racist intent.”
8. Those three judges laid out pages upon pages showing that the most fair, the most constitutional, and the most reasonable conclusion — under the very Supreme Court rulings Alito had authored — was to throw out this map, exactly as the Supreme Court itself had done a few years earlier.

So that brings us to yesterday. Alabama had rushed to the Supreme Court’s emergency docket, because of course they did. And the conservatives on the court did what they were expected to do: in a per curiam ruling that none of the conservatives were willing to put their name on, they shoved the (already deemed racist by multiple lower court rulings) Alabama map back into effect while the election was already underway.

The ruling claims this is necessary after Callais — that the lower court didn’t apply the new standard correctly. But that’s a misreading of what the lower court actually did (and also the Court’s own ruling in Callais!). The district court found overwhelming evidence of racist intent. That’s exactly what Callais demanded. The Supreme Court’s stated reason for overriding that? The lower court “did not heed the presumption of legislative good faith.”

Even more ridiculous, the ruling claims that the district court’s ruling would have upset that “certainty” so close to an election again:

We have repeatedly cautioned that lower federal courts should not “alter the election rules on the eve of an election.”

I mean come the fuck on. These same six twerps literally “altered the election rules” in neighboring Louisiana a month ago and altered Alabama’s election rules just a few weeks ago. This new map is what “alters the election rules on the eve of an election.”

The sheer racist chutzpah it takes to scold a lower court for “changing the map at the last minute” while actually changing the maps with the very same ruling is something else.

There is, yet again, a dissent written by Justice Sotomayor (and joined by Justices Kagan and Jackson) laying out the ridiculousness of all of this, including calling out the conservatives past claims of trying to avoid “chaos and confusion” while guaranteeing that these recent elections are nothing but chaos and confusion:

Before the Court are two paths. Down one lies an orderly election, held under a tried-and-tested congressional map that protects Black Alabamians’ right to vote and with which all voters, elections officials, and candidates alike are familiar. Down the other lies a chaotic election, held under a never-before-used congressional map that intentionally discriminates against Black Alabamians, that Alabama adopted in unashamed defiance of a prior court order directly affirmed by this Court, and that will require officials to change the voter registrations of hundreds of thousands of voters in just days at best, a task that Alabama previously represented would take months.

Sotomayor points out that the last time this case came before the court — when the majority agreed the Alabama maps were racist — Alito and Kavanaugh whined that changing the maps with months to spare would cause “chaos and confusion.”

She points out that what is happening now, because of the same rulings endorsed by Alito and Kavanaugh, we are now seeing actual chaos and confusion, including already made votes being thrown out:

After this Court’s order, Alabama announced that it intended to use the 2023 Redistricting Plan for the upcoming election and took the unusual step of splitting its congressional primary. In the three congressional districts unaffected by the change in congressional map, the May 19 primary election went ahead as scheduled. In the other four districts, voters still cast their ballots. Their votes for Congress, however, did not count. Instead, Alabama’s Legislature passed a law permitting the Governor to call a special primary election in the four congressional districts whose lines changed as a result of this Court’s order, and the Governor set that election for August 11.

Sotomayor repeats how multiple district court rulings and the Supreme Court (with the same makeup) had already found that the Alabama maps violated the law. And she points out that, unlike the Supreme Court the district court followed the earlier rulings in looking at the actual evidence:

The District Court’s account of the evidence here is more than plausible. The record is bereft of evidence suggesting that Alabama took seriously this Court’s finding of discriminatory vote dilution in Allen. Speaker of the Alabama House of Representatives Nathaniel Ledbetter put it bluntly: “‘If you think about where we were, the Supreme Court ruling [in Allen] was five to four. So there’s just one judge that needed to see something different.’” Singleton, 782 F. Supp. 3d, at 1348. That admission, the District Court observed, suggests “that Speaker Ledbetter was not focused on trying to remedy likely vote dilution” when the Alabama Legislature passed the 2023 Redistricting Plan.

As she notes, under the current Alito-doctrine, there is simply no way to ever invalidate a gerrymandered map:

The record is crystal clear. Even if Alabama may have unintentionally drawn the first racially discriminatory map, when it later adopted redistricting criteria that made it mathematically impossible to remedy racial discrimination, the District Court drew the obvious (and certainly not implausible) inference that Alabama intended to discriminate. If the District Court clearly erred by doing so, then there is no realistic case in which the presumption of legislative good faith can ever be rebutted.

Then she goes back to the point she made in her dissent on the last ruling. Callais is entirely about the Voting Rights Act. But the maps in Alabama didn’t just violate the VRA, they also were found to violate the Fourteenth Amendment. And while the Supreme Court can rewrite the VRA, it can’t ignore the Constitution. Yet it did. And it did so again in this ruling, pretending that Callais also covers the Fourteenth Amendment.

It is hard to see how the District Court’s finding of discriminatory intent under the Fourteenth Amendment could have departed from an opinion that purported to say nothing about how to find discriminatory intent under the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court’s apparently oblivious insistence to the contrary today cannot be squared with what Callais said on its face just over one month ago.

And then there’s the chaos argument, which is where Alito and Kavanaugh’s earlier hand-wringing gets turned directly against them.

As the District Court explained, the path of least change in Alabama is keeping the District Court’s remedial plan in place. According to Alabama Director of Elections Jeff Elrod, all voters in Alabama are currently assigned in countylevel voter rolls to congressional districts based on the remedial map that the District Court previously ordered and that the State used for the 2024 election cycle. 2 App. 135. To run an election using the remedial map, then, the State need not make any changes to its voter rolls or change the status quo.

To switch to the 2023 Redistricting Plan now, however, county elections officials will have to reassign hundreds of thousands of voters across the State to new congressional districts.

Once again, the only actual consistency from the conservatives on the court seems to be “you cannot upset maps if they are racist against Black people” but “you can absolutely shake up maps at the last second, throwing out votes, if the new maps will be racist against Black people.” The only clear “consistency” is that it is only okay to disenfranchise Black voters.

And there will be massive chaos:

Elrod testified below that county elections officials would have to reassign those 600,000 voters manually. “The system,” he explained, “is not automatic” and “requires manual input” from elections officials who must “physically manually interface with the system.” Id., at 146. Reassigning voters in precincts split across two districts is particularly complicated, he continued, as it “cannot be done with a simple click” and instead requires officials to check street-level data to determine how to assign individual voters. Id., at 156–157. Worse yet, Elrod warned that reassigning voters requires using complicated computer software that officials must be trained to use, as “most of the counties’ registrars are not tech savvy” and “registrars are the only ones who can make the changes . . . to a voter’s record.” Id., at 147– 148. This process also requires many prechecks and backend quality control steps, all of which add to its time-intensive nature.

[….]

Here, county officials do not have four months. When Alabama filed these applications on May 27, they had just seven days. Elrod explained that voter rolls were locked throughout the State following the State’s May 19 primary election, meaning that county officials could not reassign any voters to their new congressional districts under the 2023 Redistricting Plan for the August 11 special primary election. ECF Doc. 530–1, p. 17. The rolls were unlocked on May 27, but they are set to lock again today, June 2, ahead of Alabama’s primary runoff election on June 16. As a result, county officials in the three most heavily impacted counties in Alabama had at best just seven days to reassign 600,000 voters by hand. The two smaller counties, which are together responsible for reassigning 100,000 voters, each have just three elections officials who can make these changes. 2 App. 122. Mistakes will inevitably occur, as overworked elections officials sprint around the clock to make all the necessary changes. Even then, the officials may fall short. As far as Elrod is aware, no county in Alabama that was split under a redistricting plan has ever managed to complete voter reassignment in just seven days.

That seems bad. That seems like the kind of inconsistency, chaos, and confusion that the conservatives on the Supreme Court insisted could not be allowed (when it would mean getting rid of a racist map). Weird that here they are not only fine with it, they are encouraging of the chaos.

In fact, Sotomayor points out that Alabama officials have changed their position on how much chaos would be caused depending on which result helped them more:

Alabama has taken wildly inconsistent positions on how much time it needs to implement a new redistricting plan throughout these cases, which suggests it is attempting to game this Court’s emergency docket through shifting positions on the equities. As noted above, Alabama previously sang a very different tune. In January 2022, it asked the District Court to stay its initial preliminary injunction in these cases. See ECF Doc. 110. In its motion, the State complained that changing its congressional districts four months before Alabama’s primary election that year “thr[ew] the [2022] election into chaos” and left “almost no time for maps to be redrawn, hundreds of thousands of voters to be reassigned to new districts, and thousands of new signatures to be obtained by candidates and political organizations seeking ballot access.” Id., at 20. Alabama continued: “To pull the rug out from . . . candidates and their voters in the run-up to an election requires extraordinary justification,” for “‘elections are complex to administer, and the public interest is not served by a chaotic, last-minute reordering of districts.’” Id., at 21 (alterations omitted). The State made similar arguments to this Court when it successfully sought a stay following the District Court’s denial. See Merrill Application 38 (citing “the last-minute reassignment of hundreds of thousands of voters to new districts” as imposing significant “harms not only [on] the State,” but also on “voters and candidates”).

If all the above was true in 2022, then it is also true in 2026. Alabama, however, no longer seems to think so. What was previously impossible to achieve in four months is suddenly possible to achieve in less than one week, as concerns about the administrative burdens associated with “the last-minute reassignment of hundreds of thousands of voters to new districts,” ibid., have apparently melted away. A State that once decried pulling the rug out from under voters, elections officials, and candidates now seems determined to do just that. The Court should not reward such gamesmanship, especially when it accepted Alabama’s arguments in granting Alabama a stay in 2022.

Again, Alito and Kavanaugh explicitly called out the supposed “chaos and confusion” that would be caused by adjusting maps with four months notice in 2022. Yet here, they seem to see zero issue with it happening in mere days.

Once again, there is no way to square all of this that does not come down to the judges who voted for this simply supporting blatant disenfranchisement of Black voters.