It’s only mid-2025, but both “major” US political parties are already well into their campaigns to win US House and Senate seats in the 2026 midterm elections. They’re talking up potential candidates, trotting out actual candidates, and, in the case of the House, going all-out to ensure that those pesky voters don’t get in the way of partisan ambitions.

Their current election-rigging schemes revolve around the decennial practice of “redistricting” based on the most recent US census.

Their tool/tactic of choice is called “gerrymandering,” after a Massachusetts newspaper noticed that the boundaries of state senate district created under legislation signed by then-governor Elbridge Gerry in 1812 resembled a salamander.

In Texas and Missouri, Republican-dominated state legislatures are trying to figure out how to maximize the number of House seats held by the GOP, and minimize the number of House seats held by Democrats, after next year’s elections. In California, New York, and Maryland the parties’ positions are reversed.

One perpetual wrench in the machinery of redistricting is race. Historically, black civil rights groups have held that districts must be drawn so as to allow black voters to support “the candidate of their choice,” as if the race of a candidate is or should be the sole factor black voters consider in choosing a member of Congress.

Personal honesty compels me to insert here that I doubt the efficacy and legitimacy of “representative democracy” at all. Not only do I disapprove of giving government any significant power or authority, but I find the idea of a single politician “representing” the interests of BOTH myself AND the other 750,000 or so people in “my district” silly in the extreme.

That said, if we’re going to do this thing, partisan goals and ethnic divisions shouldn’t be part of the calculation. “Redistricting” should be this simple:

First, figure out how many House districts a state is entitled to.

Second, plug the state’s population data into software that chooses a random point within the state and draws the most compact districts possible, from that point, based on population density.

No accounting for partisan voter registration. No accounting for clusters of different ethnicities. One person, one vote, period.

We should no more draw congressional districts based on the proportion of Republicans to Democrats or the proportion of whites to blacks to Latinos, etc., than we should draw them on the proportion of plumbers to sous chefs or the proportion of Led Zeppelin fans to Swifties.

Gerrymandering isn’t about representing the interests of voters, whether as individuals or members of groups. Gerrymandering is about the desires of the country’s two main political parties to maximize their power at the expense of each other’s.

Ending gerrymandering wouldn’t solve the myriad problems with “representative democracy,” nor would it solve our biggest problem: The poverty of expecting political power to actually resolve our conflicts.

It would, however, reduce the “obviously rigged clown show” element in our elections, perhaps freeing up our time and energy so that we can start addressing those larger issues.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Israeli “security fence” separating Israel proper from the occupied West Bank. Photo by Justin McIntosh. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

On July 23, the Israeli Knesset voted 71 to 13 in favor of a “non-binding” motion to “annex” the West Bank, where Palestinian Arabs have lived under Israeli military occupation since 1967.

Naturally, Knesset speaker Amir Ohana disagrees with that plain statement of fact.  Channeling Adolf Hitler’s ethno-nationalist claims on Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland, Austria, etc., Ohana proclaimed that “Jews cannot be the ‘occupier’ of a land that for 3,000 years has been called Judea.”

Will Benjamin Netanyahu heed the “non-binding” will of the Knesset?

If so, what will the effects, both internationally and for the area’s  2.1 million Arab inhabitants, look like?

Internationally, it’s unlikely that most other regimes will recognize the annexation.  Of the UN’s member states, 147 recognize the state of Palestine as the “legitimate” ruling entity in the West Bank. The UN itself recognizes Palestine as an observer state, and it’s a member state of Interpol and the International Criminal Court.

All of that tracks with Israel’s own agreement, as a condition of its UN membership, to the borders set in 1947’s UN Resolution 181. While it’s never actually kept to that agreement and has always occupied territory outside those borders, those borders have never changed where international law is concerned.

UN-backed military intervention to liberate Palestine from Israeli occupation seems unlikely, but some regimes would likely levy sanctions on Israel over the matter.

And then there are those 2.1 million people.

For nearly 60 years, they’ve been treated as rightsless serfs in an apartheid system.  They’re ruled by the Israeli regime, with the “Palestinian Authority”  — which hasn’t held an election in 19 years — serving as a sop to “self-rule.” Their property is subject to confiscation to provide Lebensraum for Israeli “settlers.” Some of them are, occasionally, allowed to cross into Israel to do menial labor for their Israeli masters.

But if Israel annexed the West Bank, it seems to follow that its inhabitants would all instantly become Israeli citizens, with full freedom to travel at will between (for example) Ramallah and Tel Aviv.

Newly minted Israeli citizens of Arab ethnicity probably wouldn’t continue to tolerate segregated facilities like “Jews Only” roads.

They’d presumably demand full and equal access to Israel’s courts to contest property thefts based on ethnic differences.

And, of course, they’d presumably enjoy voting rights and representation in the Knesset.

I have to suspect Ohana doesn’t see things quite that way.

With the annexation of the West Bank, Israel’s population would go from 9.4 million to 11.5 million — with the the Arab percentage of its electorate more than doubling.

That doesn’t sound like the kind of policy an ethno-state dedicated entirely to the supremacy of one group (Jews) would implement vis a vis another group (Arabs).

What’s the missing piece of the puzzle?

What comes after “annexation?”

Ethnic cleansing, up to and including genocide, to get rid of those pesky Arabs and their rights.

Accompanied, of course, by simultaneous affirmations and denials of that goal, and by screeches that anyone opposed to the idea is an “antisemite.”

Ethno-nationalism is a cancer, whether its perpetrators are Nazis or Zionists.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“There was a treasonous conspiracy in 2016,” US Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard alleged in a July 18 press release, “committed by officials at the highest level of our government.”

If the timing of that release, which revisits the “Russiagate” hoax, feels opportunistic/propagandistic, that’s because it is.

The walls seem to be closing in on US president Donald Trump as he unsuccessfully seeks to distract attention from his once … close … friendship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Meanwhile, Gabbard completed her transformation from opportunistic political gadfly to fully compliant junior Trump propagandist last month when she reversed her (true) claim that the US intelligence community doesn’t believe the Iranian regime is trying to develop nuclear weapons to support Trump’s claim that it is.

The best distractions, though, are factual distractions. All we’re really getting in Gabbard’s latest document dump is confirmation of, and details on, things we already knew to be true, but those details and confirmations are worth having.

We’ve known, for years now and beyond reasonable doubt, that “Russiagate” was simply an after-the-fact attempt on the part of the Democratic Party establishment and its allies in the federal bureaucracy to shift blame for Donald Trump’s “surprise” victory in the 2016 presidential election away from themselves and their candidate.

Hillary Clinton simply COULDN’T have lost because she was among the most universally loathed individuals in America politics, or because she ran a lazy and ineffectual campaign. There had to be some other reason, and the reason they settled on was “Russian influence.”

Their efforts came to even less than naught: Not only was the story never credible, but it gave Trump gallons of the “victim” cred he so thrives on. Now he’s returning to the well for another bucket full of accusations, probably true ones, to pour on the heads of his Epstein-obsessed pursuers.

I doubt it will work, but again, the more information we have on the Russiagate hoax the better. Exposing these machinations makes future attempts to put over such hoaxes less likely.

BUT!

No, the Russiagate hoax, while certainly a conspiracy, was not “treasonous.”

The term “treason” gets thrown around a lot by Republicans and Democrats alike to describe each others’ actions, but it’s a word with a specific legal meaning laid down in Article 3 of the US Constitution:

“Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.”

Treason is a crime of war. The US  has not legally been in a state of war since December 31, 1946 (when Harry Truman signed a presidential proclamation declaring the end of World War 2).

That’s why the only successful US treason prosecutions SINCE World War 2 have been for actions taken DURING World War 2. It was literally impossible to commit treason against the United States in 2016 (and it’s literally impossible to do so right now).

By all means, learn from these disclosures — but don’t let hype about “treason” distract you from demanding the truth about the Trump-Epstein relationship too.

Thomas L. Knapp (X: @thomaslknapp | Bluesky: @knappster.bsky.social | Mastodon: @knappster) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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