In the primary for a newly gerrymandered Texas congressional district, Donald Trump and a bunch of Big Tech oligarchs are backing a Republican candidate who’s been unapologetic about his bigoted opinions.
Jace Yarbrough — a conservative lawyer running in the primary for Texas’ 32nd Congressional District with the endorsement of the president and the financial backing of conservative tech executives like Peter Thiel — is a perfect example of how racist gerrymandering can give rise to racist lawmakers.
Trump pushed for Texas (among other states) to gerrymander its districts to help Republicans ahead of this year’s midterm elections. In Texas, this was largely achieved by diluting the voting power of Black and Latino communities in a number of districts, making Texas’ 32nd District what the Texas Tribune called “the safest bet for Republicans out of the five Democratic seats targeted by the GOP’s new congressional gerrymander.”
The Guardian listed some of the bigoted viewpoints that Yarbrough espoused at a candidate forum just last week:
On immigrants, he said: ‘We no longer share common values with people that we see in the grocery store or at our public schools, people that are at the local mall. Because we’re not from the same place, we don’t have the same formation.’ He also called for repealing the Hart-Celler Act, the 1965 law that ended race-based immigration quotas – a longtime white nationalist policy demand that has increasingly been voiced in organs of the Maga movement.
But wait, there’s more:
On Islam, Yarbrough said: ‘Our first introduction, for most of us, was 9/11. And then what happens? Then we see hordes of Islamic immigrants coming and attempting to set up Sharia law here in the United States, which is fundamentally incompatible with American citizenship.’ In general, Yarbrough told the audience: ‘The kind of good government that I want to offer, that you and I agree with, they call it bigoted and backward and oppressive and Nazi-ish.’ He added: ‘I am past trying to placate that in any way, shape or form.’ He’s no friend to the First Amendment, either. Yarbrough represented Elon Musk and his social media platform, X, in its lawsuit against Media Matters for America over the watchdog’s coverage of extremism on the platform. And he represented X and video platform Rumble in their lawsuits against advertisers reluctant to promote their products on the platforms. The president may say he is “falsely … called a Racist” — but a quick survey of the Trump administration’s staffing list, its social media channels and the bigotry on display from congressional Republicans suggests that the U.S. is witnessing a level of racism and extremism from conservative political figures, led by the president himself, that arguably rivals the Ku Klux Klan’s prominence in the early and mid-20th century, when Klan members and white supremacist sympathizers attained some of the highest levels of the federal government. Yarbrough and his prominent backers appear emboldened about adding his name to this resurgence. It’s critical here to acknowledge the role that racist gerrymandering is playing in this. Candidates, like Yarbrough, who espouse white supremacist viewpoints gain an unfair opportunity when districts like Texas’ 32nd are engineered to dilute non-white voter power.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. 
