TN Republicans Dying Of Klan-Gasms As They Steal Last Democratic District From Black Voters

Remember that Republicans always, always, always overplay their hands.

voters protesting outside the TN State Capitol (screengrab, ABC24 Memphis)

There was a time when Christian fascist Republicans, countrywide but especially in the South, gerrymandered simply because the racism in their hearts guided them to do so, and also because gerrymandering Black people and Democrats out of representation has been their project ever since Lee Atwater was winking dramatically while making sure not to say the N-word out loud, at least not in mixed company, we reckon.

In Tennessee, we saw a particularly egregious example a few years ago when white supremacist Republicans in the Legislature decided they had a “thriving, rich, exponentially growing metropolis” problem in Nashville, and the problem was that — despite their mythmaking, even though Matt Walsh and Tomi Lahren moved there AND EVERYTHING — the damned place is full of liberals, the vaunted “conservative” country music industry was full of liberals, all these new artist types flowing in like it’s the new Austin are liberals, shit, even the Christian kids are liberals. Davidson County, which is basically coterminous with Nashville, votes just as blue as majority Black Memphis!

Well, at the time, they couldn’t do anything with the congressional district that included Memphis, as it was protected by the Voting Rights Act. (You see where this post is going in two paragraphs now.) But Nashville wasn't! So they sliced and they diced and they blew Nashville’s congressional representation right on down!

Did You Know Nashville Doesn't Have Congressional Representation?

And no, but sorry, white Republicans, the candidates your pigfucking child-molesting asses put on offer are not valid representatives for the decent, educated human beings of Nashville.

Look at how it works when one of those hayseed cumstains, Rep. Andy Ogles, comes to visit Belmont University, an institution with a reputation for being on the more conservative end of higher education.

We repeat, Nashville does not have representation in Congress.

But now, it is the year of our Lord 2026, and Republicans have started an official gerrymandering war in a desperate bid to preserve their stolen power in Congress. Because they know that making voters like them, and/or convincing voters they have better ideas are simply not options they have available to them in their Rebel Army knapsacks.

And then came the Supreme Court to explain that actually it is anti-white discrimination not to let white landowners also own Black people. Sorry, oops! That is incorrect, we seem to be channeling future Roberts Court rulings. But they decided it’s definitely anti-white discrimination to not even let white conservative men make all the voting decisions on behalf of whatever handfuls of poor Black people they graciously allow to live within the boundaries of the plantation districts they have drawn for the express purpose of preserving their power.

So come on down, Tennessee’s Ninth Congressional District! It is time to call an emergency session to redraw the maps to eliminate that fucker entirely, which would leave Tennessee with zero (0) Democratic majority districts, in a state that, as red as it is, still saw 34.47 percent of its voters choose the Democrat in the 2024 presidential election.

And that is exactly what the Lege is doing — literally right now, today, it’s passed the state House and the Senate will finalize it — shooting little Klan-hood-shaped jizz ropes while they redraw the maps, while Christian fascist Republicans like Governor Bill Lee and Senator Marsha Blackburn, who hopes to take Lee’s place, ride them squealing like the racist MAGA piggies they are. It’s like if Birth Of A Nation was overdubbed with nothing but white nationalist shrieking.

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That map above is the new map from the Tennessee Republicans. If you zoom in around the middle, you can see how Davidson County (Nashville) is shared by three districts that all fan out in various directions, so that none of those fuckin’ liberals — AKA the people who largely subsidize the continued prosperity of Tennessee — are allowed to have a voice anywhere. It’s a minor change from the current map, but only in that it switches out one of the districts that currently shares Nashville.

Now look at the Southwest corner. That’s Shelby County, AKA Memphis. It has long been represented by Democrat Steve Cohen, who at least up to today has been in a real primary for his political career against state Rep. Justin Pearson, a member of the famous Tennessee Three.

What you see in the picture is what Tennessee Republicans are going to do to the Ninth, AKA Memphis, AKA this writer’s hometown.

Downtown, some white liberals, some poor Black people? Put them in the redrawn Fifth, which would snake up the Mississippi River through a bunch of redneck wastelands next to Kentucky, before ending up in Richie Rich Williamson County, home to ritzy Nashville suburbs like Brentwood and Franklin. Carve out more majority Black neighborhoods alongside the state line and put them with more redneck wastelands along the Mississippi border and … shit, the new Ninth would end up in Williamson County too. (That’s where Bill Lee and Marsha Blackburn and most of the conservative “Nashvillians” like Tomi Lahren actually live.)

And then the whitest, richest parts of Shelby? Let’s put a bunch of them in the new Eighth. Can’t put too many of Memphis’s liberals in that one, because there’s a medium-sized town about a third of the way from Memphis to Nashville called Jackson that could potentially make that district competitive if they fuck up this gerrymander.

Cleverly drawn, racist MAGA trash! Cleverly drawn! As Democratic state Sen. Jeff Yarbro remarked, “Give me a break. It’s the most blatant dilution of Black voting power since the height of Jim Crow.”

Bonus? As Memphis journalist Wendi Thomas pointed out on Facebook, in the new Ninth — orange in the map above — you have both southeastern Shelby County and Giles County, home of Pulaski, birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan.

We’re sure that detail is putting an extra tent in Tennessee Republicans’ Klan hoods right about now.

The Tennessee state Capitol is currently full of protesters, decrying what the motherfucking slavers who make up the Republican legislative supermajority are doing today.

Both Cohen and Pearson, whose primary fight may well be moot by the end of today, weighed in:

“This transparent effort to create a seat for a member of Congress who will rubber stamp Trump’s increasingly bizarre and dangerous agenda will also dilute the Black vote in Tennessee to the point of irrelevance,” Cohen said in a press release. […]

“If Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, if we don’t fight together now, we will see the greatest dilution of Black political power since the end of Reconstruction,” said Justin Pearson, a state representative who is challenging Cohen in the Democratic primary for the district. “Today in this special session they’re talking about taking our district, District 9 back home in Memphis, but tomorrow they’re going to be talking about taking all of our representation.”

So that’s today’s Tennessee fascism.

But Pearson also said at a rally on Tuesday against the measure, “[I]f we keep marching, if we keep pressing, if we keep fighting, the future that our descendants will live into will be a better one than this one. And our message to the Republican Party, our message to that racist, white-supremacist president Donald Trump is that we will fight.”

Indeed, this might be the day Republicans look back on as the day they overplayed their hand, bigly. Why? Well, for one thing, we might also look back on this day as the day the good people of Tennessee — and there are many — really woke up to fight these motherfuckers.

And then there’s also just math. Even in deep red Tennessee, gerrymandering dilutes the redness of some of these districts, because all those Democrats have to go somewhere. Did we mention Nashville is growing like kudzu? We should mention again that Nashville is growing like kudzu. And despite how Christian nationalists see Tennessee as their great white supremacist hope, it remains the case that Nashville is not actually attracting up-and-coming rich conservatives, because that’s really not a thing.

Is Nashville the next Atlanta? Uh, maybe. Watch this video about the explosive growth of Nashville and imagine what happens if another million get added to its metro population, or another two million. Know what happened to Georgia when Atlanta became the new Atlanta?

Memphis isn’t experiencing that kind of growth, but hell, if it’s sharing congressional districts with suburban Nashville, it could still be a thing that helps make those districts more competitive.

And then consider that Republicans and Donald Trump are approximately as popular as exposed anal tumors, all patriotic Americans absolutely loathe them, and people don’t trust Republicans alone with their children, especially not if they don’t want their kids to get Epsteined. Trump is the most hated and mocked president in human history and there is no reasonable hope on the horizon for Republicans turning that around, at least not in an honest way.

Oh yeah, and there’s the fact that Tennessee, while it is indeed a red state, is also a non-voting state, and a voter suppression state. Get people mad enough to vote, and hell, you never know what might happen.

Yeah, this could bite Republicans in the asses one day.

All we know is that today wasn’t the end of a fight, it was the beginning.

[The Institute for Public Service Reporting Memphis]

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