ESCHEWING RESPONSIBILITY:

We Are Sliding Back Into the Middle Ages (Katya Ungerman, 5/17/26, NY Times)

Demonic vexation, teleportation, increased interest in religious practice — those phenomena are all signs that life feels, to many, increasingly charged with unseen forces. You might say it has been re-enchanted. There’s a widespread feeling that the material explanation is no longer sufficient; that something uncanny, maybe even numinous, is diffused into the texture of ordinary American life.

Any excuse is better than accepting that they are the authors of their own misery.

NO RACISM REQUIRED:

Why Neutral Maps Could Empower Black Voters as Much as the Voting Rights Act (Nate Cohn and Eve Washington, May 17, 2026, NY Times)

A race-neutral, nonpartisan redistricting process could create just as many House districts where the candidate preferred by nonwhite voters — usually a Democrat — would be favored to win.

One way to tell whether nonwhite voters would lose their power in that kind of redistricting process is by looking at computer simulations of hypothetical congressional districts. The algorithms, first designed by a team of political scientists in 2022, try to draw compact districts that respect county and municipal lines. After the Supreme Court weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, we reran the simulations without consideration of race. Using the algorithms to draw new districts thousands of times with those compactness constraints can give a good sense of what neutral maps could look like.

And the simulations yield roughly as many so-called minority-opportunity districts across the South as existed under the Voting Rights Act.

In other words, the act didn’t create minority representation that couldn’t have existed otherwise. Nonpartisan, race-neutral redistricting would still preserve many such districts, even if in a different configuration…

CONSPIRACIES HELP THEM EXPLAIN AWAY PERSONAL FAILURES:

12 Things Everyone Should Know About Conspiracy Theories: The strange psychology of suspicious minds (Steve Stewart-Williams, Nov 15, 2025, Nature-Nurture)

Some personalities are more fertile soil for conspiracy theories than others. Research on the Big Five personality traits, for instance, shows that low agreeableness and high neuroticism tilt the odds toward conspiratorial thinking. Other personality predictors include entitlement, low inquisitiveness, low humility, and a victimhood mentality.

But the single strongest personality predictor is narcissism. Narcissists are particularly prone to conspiracy theories because they have a strong need for uniqueness, are prone to paranoia, and can also be remarkably gullible.

ASSUMED IDENTITY:

Black Candidates Do Not Need Black Voters to Win (Deroy Murdock, May 15, 2026, American Spectator)

In her dissenting opinion, liberal Justice Elena Kagan argued: “If other States follow Louisiana’s lead, the minority citizens residing there will no longer have an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.”

Can Kagan read the minds of “minority citizens?” If not, how would she know whether the “candidates of their choice” are minorities, Democrats, or anything else?

Also important: Where is it written that minority candidates must represent minority voters?

Tennessee’s 9th Congressional District is 61.3 percent black and only 24.5 percent white, the Census Bureau reports. And yet, since 2006, this majority-black, greater-Memphis electorate has voted 10 times to send Steve Cohen to the U.S. House. Cohen is white.

Conversely, the Left whines that black Democrats can win only if a majority of voters of color (typically black) elect them. They assume that black contenders cannot secure a plurality or even a majority of white votes. This racist argument suggests that black candidates lack the charm, ideas, or ideas to win white votes, and/or whites are too bigoted to back blacks.

Thus, race-obsessed Democrats concentrate black candidates in constituencies that resemble South Africa’s Apartheid-era Bantustans. Predominantly minority congressional districts recall Bophuthatswana, KwaZulu, Transkei, and other black “homelands.” And yet, for decades, constituencies with neither black majorities nor shapes like Rorschach blots have elected black Democrats and Republicans.

EMPOWERING MINORITY VOTERS:

Key Jeffries ally endorses aggressive tactics to create more blue seats (Riley Rogerson, 05/14/2026, Politico)

Asked specifically if he would be supportive of unseating Republicans by redrawing deep-blue New York City districts held by minority lawmakers, like his own, to extend instead into less diverse suburban areas, he said, “I’m going to win, but we’ve got to get more Democrats, also.”

“We’re going to have a level playing field,” added Meeks, the longtime leader of the Queens Democratic Party.

Forcing potential representatives to court their votes.

MAU-MAUING THE VERSE CATCHERS:

The Wrong Kind of Black Poet (Ernest Jesuyemi, May 04, 2026, Compact)

But something about the current drift of things is concerning. In 1946, George Orwell articulated some of the reasons in his essay “The Prevention of Literature.” “But what is sinister,” Orwell says, “is that the conscious enemies of liberty are those to whom liberty ought to mean most . . . The direct, conscious attack on intellectual decency comes from the intellectuals themselves.”

It is sinister, especially, when looked at through poetry. Orwell believed that even under a climate of censorship, poets can thrive: “The destruction of intellectual liberty cripples the journalist, the sociological writer, the historian, the novelist, the critic, and the poet, in that order.” The poet is last on the list because tyrants do not have the sense to get what he is saying (or to care).

The dynamics have changed. Today, poets don’t only consider it their job to scream at “tyrants”; they not only make demands like thugs; more than that, they act like the Stasi, going around with tiny torchlights looking for racism and sexism in works of art.

Responding to a poem I shared with him, an American poet told me it was musically sound, but also added (parenthetically), “you’d have a hard time publishing a poem in the US with the word ‘whore’ in it. ‘Sex worker’ is what you have to say now, which of course is absurd and immediately ruins the poem.” (The “whore” is myself.) I have hawked the poem around and no one has taken it. Certain words can so trigger people now that choosing a word for how it rings next to another word has become a political act.

As Geoffrey Hill said of Shakespeare, the true poet knows what is justly and unjustly demanded of him, and finds his way around it. Every such challenge tasks his inventiveness; if he succeeds, his triumph is greater because of it. But if the eccentricity of a phrase, in the context of a poem, if the use of a word like “Negress” without the quotes in Dickman’s poem, is deemed too offensive to be read—what is to become of John Stuart Mill’s much-cherished “eccentricity of action,” which is fundamental to a liberal society? How are we to live if we cannot risk offense in a poem?

BREAKING THE BANTUSTANS IS DEMOCRATIC:

Poll: Democrats would give up Black voting power to beat the GOP (Erin Doherty, Andrew Howard and Riley Rogerson, 05/14/2026, Politico)

It’s a stunning admission from a Black lawmaker who represents a majority-Hispanic Los Angeles district: Defeating Republicans might be more important than protecting districts like hers.

And it’s a real possibility the party would have to deploy the tactic if it hopes to stand a chance against the most aggressive Republican gerrymandering possible. To draw House seats with the best margins for the party — especially in states like Illinois and New York — district lines would likely need to be altered in a way that packs large numbers of Black voters into red-leaning areas in order to make them bluer.

It’s not just a few Democrats switching their minds. Consider the Harris voters who initially say they would protect majority-minority districts: When asked about countering the GOP, they split roughly evenly, with 46 percent saying it’s more important to draw more blue seats and 41 percent saying the majority-minority districts should be kept together.