For years, we lived blocks from a “Fuck Joe Biden” flag flying at full staff above a crowded collection of limos and tow trucks. The mast matured into a celebratory Donald Trump flag with MAGA’s victory last year. But recently, after years of taunting nylon-threaded political vitriol, that flag suddenly disappeared. In its place: a lonely Texas flag now fluttering at half-staff. For the flood victims, we imagine. While the years have taught us to be cautious in what we clutch after, especially hope, maybe this is emblematic of a turning tide for the conspiracy cult at MAGA’s heart, built upon demonization and fabrication.
Trump’s inability to shake the Epstein stain—and his urgency to decide next year’s midterms now—seems to suggest that something of the like is afoot.
If there were any remaining questions about the potential for a free and fair election in 2026, they have been squelched by Trump’s phone-in order for five new Congressional districts from Texas. It’s like 2020 and Trump needs Georgia to “find” him another 11,780 votes—only this time Trump is on the horn with our more pliant Texas Governor, a perpetually overcompensating beta rumored to only have one answer when Trump calls: ‘Da, Krasnov.’
Abbott has turned his attention to remaking our political maps to ensure Trump’s power consolidation continues even as his popular support crumbles.
Dozens of elected Texas Dems are attempting to blend into Chicago. Or thereabouts. They’re in hiding from both bomb threats and the agents of a growing domestic terror state (as ICE is described in this statement filed by the Thirty-Fifth General Synod of the United Church of Christ). They rightly recognize their fight as seeking to deflect the point of a spear that would spark similar electoral misbehavior across the U.S. and head off the usual mid-term House flip.
Carving up the maps to further disenfranchise Black and Brown voters with one hand, and with the other signaling for the permanent removal of Gene Wu, Minority Leader of the Texas House of Representatives, and his fellow Democrat resisters, Governor Abbott has again made his allegiance clear. He’s here for the rising autocrat, Felon-in-Chief, long-term Epstein bestie, and convicted sexual predator (ie. “rapist,” US District Judge Lewis Kaplan reminds us) over any continued experiments in American democracy. In kickstarting a national gerrymandering “arms race,” as Justin Miller writes at the Texas Observer, Abbott may have finally shaken the nation out of its “cold” civil war phase into…something much warmer… as Trump seizes local policing power in D.C.
As has become clear, moves along this course—attacks on birthright citizenship, the street seizures of non-white people by masked agents, the relocation without trial of those caught up to the most destitute of human-engineered landscapes—are just one aspect of a carefully orchestrated effort to eliminate 100 years of civil rights (and social contract) progress. Capital freed from popular control or public obligation was always the Project 2025 design.
Long back on their heels against Trump’s winner-keeps-all flex, Democrat-led states are finally beginning to respond in kind. Or at least threaten to.
Wu, whose family fled deadly CCP abuses in China, is now enduring regular racist taunts from Texas Repubs. Still, he stood firm in denying Trump the new Texas carveup, calling it his moral duty to “sound the alarm — by any means necessary.”
“Let me be unequivocal about my actions and my duty. When a governor conspires with a disgraced president to ram through a racist gerrymandered map, my constitutional duty is to not be a willing participant,” Wu said.
Thanks in part to previously gerrymandering, Texas already has a disproportionate slice of MAGA in Washington as compared to actual voters. While only 56 percent of Texas voters tapped Trump’s name in 2024 voting booths, 70 percent of the state’s U.S. House members carry Rs after their names. The new maps, however, would seek to establish 30 of 38 Texas U.S. House Reps under Republican control. That’s an 80 percent share of the state’s Congressional House caucus.
Texas Impact broke down the GOP’s proposed redistricting changes by racial lines, and found that while white Texans make up less than 40 percent of the state’s population, their representation under the Republicans’ new maps “would rise [from 70 percent] to 84 percent of the congressional delegation.”
One among dozens of Texas Dems hunted across state lines, state Rep. Diego Bernal insisted that Abbott could direct millions to flood relief even without the Legislature.
“This is not about going back to work” for Texans, Bernal said in a recent video post. “This is about being called back to obey.”
The result of obedience, as Bernal correctly frames Abbott’s demand to support Trump’s nation-scale vote rigging, is to lose democracy. Obedience means a likely permanent state of disenfranchisement—not only for Democrats, but any political movement or party unaligned with or at odds with Trumpism. That includes now-splintering aspects of MAGA itself, such as Elon Musk’s hopes for a new nationalist party. And it’s what makes the Democrat’s fight one of concern to the unaffiliated, to non-voters, independents, and third-party adherents. Democrats can take their stand and make their case, but it’s the people who decide what happens next. And that is what makes the cracks forming in Trump’s base so vital.
The background noise to all of this is a million QAnon heads still exploding over Trump’s abrupt 180 on the Epstein files, the scrubbing of Trump’s name from the files themselves, and Trump’s disparagement and insults directed at the followers to whom he once pledged justice (if not heads rolling).
Trump’s core supporters may never retreat from their celebration of violence against immigrants, but the Epstein betrayal hits at a core identity and promise. For that, it poses an actual threat to Trump. A psychiatrist who sought to warn the world about the danger of putting an aging malignant narcissist in power has a theory as to why.
“[Trump’s] failure to release the files shatters the trust and pierces through the dynamic of ‘identification with the aggressor,’” Bandy X. Lee told Huffington Post. “Like the awakening of a cult or a gang member, this may serve as a crack in the authoritarian bond.”
Even the ‘QAnon Shaman’ has stirred near enough to reality to tweet: “Fuck this stupid piece of shit. … What a fraud.”
Soon enough, those living with such shattered trust may also begin to calculate the personal costs of Trump’s tariffs and his dismantling of federal programs previously supporting (to varying degree) struggling folks of all colors.
And that is when the evisceration of facts, that gaping core carved from the heart of our political discourse, will come to call. And it is here we must together hold the line. Toward that end, the strategic importance of the principled noncooperation being exercised by Gene Wu and other Texas Democrats cannot be overstated.
This is in fact the core message of a recent series of trainings called One Million Rising, organized by Indivisible and led by seasoned organizers like Daniel Hunter of Choose Democracy, whose writings we’ve shared previously, and Maria Stephan, who researches people’s movements from around the world to defeat authoritarian rulers.
The goal of One Million Rising is to move people from the kind of expressive street protests we saw earlier this year at Hands Off and No Kings to building power locally toward strategic and coordinated noncooperation with authoritarian takeover—the approach scholars of fascism argue provides the best antidote to strongmen.
We may not be in the position of a Gene Wu, but we are all part of institutions whose support autocratic regimes assume and depend upon. As such, we can all work together with friends and neighbors to figure out the most strategic ways to pressure institutions—our workplaces, churches, schools, unions, and trade associations—to withhold compliance or refuse to obey.
There is one more One Million Rising training left, to be held 7pm Wednesday, August 13. You can register here and also catch up on the first two trainings as well.
We take comfort in the knowledge that all autocrats and cult leaders fall, eventually. How long it takes and the amount of damage done is the unknown. So let’s not waste time: Keep about the work of strategic noncooperation—the Tesla takedowns, the Target boycotts, the neighborhood ICE watches, the “everyone is welcome here” posters in classrooms—but also of designing the world we all deserve.
