If you’ve ever wanted to watch democracy get hogtied, blindfolded, and dragged through a puddle of Bud Light piss while Ted Cruz narrates the action like it’s a high school wrestling match, look no further than Texas. The Lone Star State’s Republican Party is back in the saddle, and this time they’re using electoral maps like a serial killer uses a hacksaw—methodically, surgically, and with the cold-blooded joy of someone who knows the cops are never coming.

Welcome to Texass, the anatomical center of America’s long, proud tradition of making sure your vote matters slightly less than a fart in a hurricane. Gerrymandering has always been a favorite pastime for political parties—especially the ones that can’t win unless they cheat—but Texas has taken the sport to new heights. It’s NASCAR meets apartheid.

Let’s get something straight: the Texas GOP doesn’t redraw district lines. They obliterate them. They take a map, strap it to the hood of a Ford F-150, run it through a Bible study session, then shoot it 14 times and bury it under a Buc-ee’s. And when the map wakes up, it’s magically transformed a state that’s nearly 40% Latino into a lily-white Republican fortress, held together with prayer, crude oil, and pure gall.

DICK DRAWINGS IN POLITICAL FORM

We’ve known since Elbridge Gerry first traced a congressional district shaped like a colonial tapeworm that America was doomed to draw its own electoral colonoscopy. But Texas? Texas is special. This is the state that took one look at the Voting Rights Act and said, “What if we used this as a blueprint for who to screw over harder?”

The newest redistricting maps, passed after the 2020 census, are a psychosexual Rorschach test for masochists. In a state where nonwhite voters accounted for 95% of the population growth, Republicans somehow emerged with more white-majority districts, as if the laws of math had suddenly started taking bribes.

How? Simple: they sliced up liberal strongholds like Austin and Houston into spaghetti strands so convoluted they make M.C. Escher look like an Ikea floor plan. The 35th District is now shaped like the curve of a limp erection. The 6th looks like a lopsided swastika. You half expect to find a crude drawing of a dick hidden in the border between Waco and Fort Worth.

This isn’t electoral strategy. It’s a crime scene.

MINORITY RULE: NOW WITH EXTRA WHITE GUYS

Texas Republicans claim they’re not racially gerrymandering, they’re just “protecting incumbents.” Which is rich, because that’s like saying you didn’t steal your neighbor’s car—you just hotwired it to keep it safe from theft.

The truth is, minority voters are getting packed, cracked, and fracked like the Permian Basin. “Packing” means stuffing every Black and Latino voter you can find into one district so they can only win that one. “Cracking” is when you split them into five districts so they can’t win any. “Fracking” is the new one—they just inject bullshit into the map until democracy explodes and leaks voter suppression toxins all over the countryside.

The results speak for themselves: despite being a majority-nonwhite state, Texas now has more white-majority congressional districts than before. This would be laughable if it wasn’t a roadmap for future authoritarianism. The GOP’s new mascot should be a white dude riding a gerrymandered centaur into a town hall with a flaming copy of the Constitution shoved up its ass.

REDISTRICTING: THE COCAINE OF AMERICAN POLITICS

Let’s not kid ourselves—this isn’t just a Texas problem. Gerrymandering is the cocaine of American politics. Everybody’s done it. Democrats, too. Maryland, Illinois, California—plenty of blue states have carved out safe havens like they were divvying up the last gram at 4 AM. But Republicans? Republicans treat gerrymandering the way Alex Jones treats supplements: they hoard it, they mainline it, and they tell you it cures tyranny.

The difference is ideological. Democrats gerrymander to preserve their sanity. Republicans gerrymander like they’re trying to reenact Braveheart, only this time the Scots are public school teachers and the English are Greg Abbott’s donors.

Texas, being the evangelical meth-lab of red-state dreams, just takes it to the next level. There is no pretense. No shame. They will look you dead in the eye, holding a map that turns a 50/50 electorate into a 70/30 white nationalist fantasy camp, and say, “This is what fairness looks like.”

It’s like a dog taking a dump on your couch and insisting it’s abstract art.

FROM THE COTTON GIN TO THE COMPUTER ALGORITHM

Gerrymandering has evolved. It used to be some cigar-chomping old white dude drawing lines with a crayon while muttering something about “them people.” Now it’s an AI-enhanced hydra of demographic data, behavioral modeling, and voter psychographics so invasive it makes the NSA look like a dial-up dating service.

In Texas, the algorithm doesn’t just know who you voted for. It knows what kind of beer you drink, what church you don’t go to, and how many times you’ve Googled “how to move to Oregon.” They feed it everything—race, age, income, whether your name ends in a vowel—and it spits out a district map optimized for maximum suppression and plausible deniability.

They call it “race-neutral.” That’s like calling Jim Crow “scheduling preferences.”

In one district, a suburb was surgically detached from a diverse city and glued onto a rural county full of cattle and Confederate flags. Why? Because cows don’t vote, but racists do—and with just enough white voters and some creative cartography, you can cancel out thousands of Black and brown ballots with one angry white guy in a lifted Dodge Ram.

THE ROAD TO AUTOCRACY IS PAVED WITH ZIP CODES

The real horror here isn’t just that Texas is doing this—it’s that it works. Republicans have made themselves virtually invincible in a state where they should be fighting for their lives. A state where the population growth is fueled almost entirely by nonwhite voters now has a legislature that looks like a Duck Dynasty family reunion.

Greg Abbott could strangle a mariachi band on live TV and still get reelected, because the voters who’d hold him accountable have been locked inside an electoral escape room with no exits.

This isn’t about districts. It’s about power—raw, shameless, white-knuckled power, the kind that doesn’t just fear losing elections, but fears having to compete in the first place. It’s apartheid via spreadsheet.

THE ENDGAME: GOVERNMENT BY GHOULS

What do you get when you gerrymander a state to hell and back? You get school boards that ban books about Rosa Parks. You get courts that rubber-stamp six-week abortion bans. You get a governor who throws migrants on buses like they’re trash night at Mar-a-Lago. You get Ken Paxton.

You get government by ghouls. Elected by maps. For the benefit of oil executives, megachurches, and whatever lizard men fund Turning Point USA.

You get a state that’s literally killing off its future—young, diverse, progressive—and calling it “freedom.” You get a system so rigged that even if every millennial and Gen Z voter turned out wearing Beto O’Rourke cosplay, it still wouldn’t matter.

And worst of all? You get a blueprint. Because what happens in Texas doesn’t stay in Texas. It metastasizes. It spreads. Georgia, Florida, Ohio—they’re all reading the same playbook, and it’s written in the blood of a functioning democracy.

SO WHAT NOW?

You can sue. You can protest. You can run harder, organize better, scream louder—but the truth is, until gerrymandering is outlawed, American democracy will continue to be a Potemkin village run by real estate developers and rodeo clowns.

It’s time to stop pretending the system just needs a tweak. This isn’t a bug. It’s a feature. Gerrymandering is the cancer that metastasized into our electoral bloodstream decades ago, and Texas is just the terminal stage. The tumors are inoperable. The lines are permanent.

Unless, of course, we redraw them. With fire.