Hey, good morning. It is Saturday, May the 9th. I'm Ali Velshi, and there's a story unfolding right now in the American South that might not be at the top of your news feed. But I happen to think it's the most urgent problem facing every one of us today, no matter where in the country we live.

It's a story you might even think you know because it started like so many second-term Trump emergencies

looking like a shameless power grab by a wannabe dictator facing the electoral consequences of his deeply unpopular regime.

But two major developments in recent days have turned

this cynical Trumpian scheme into a real-time deconstruction of our multiracial democracy.

What we're witnessing as a result is the dawn of a new Jim Crow era, one that uses the same

pernicious strategy of leveraging bad faith

pretense and dirty tricks to rob American citizens of their voting rights or of the weight

and value of their vote. The first part, the laying of the groundwork, you probably remember.

Donald Trump was afraid of his party losing the midterms because his policies are so fantastically unpopular,

so he set forth a plan quite openly of targeted gerrymandering to rig congressional district maps

so that Republicans would pick up extra seats without picking up any extra votes.

It began in Texas with a phone call from Donald Trump to Governor Abbott.

Last August, Trump states his desires very plainly.

We have an opportunity in Texas to pick up five seats.

We have a really good governor, and we have good people in Texas.

And I won Texas.

I got the highest vote in the history of Texas, as you probably know, and we are entitled

to five more seats. Entitled? It spreads state to state anywhere where the Republican state house.

One of the only GOP led states to buck the request from Trump was Indiana, where a handful of state senators, Republican

state senators, voted down the effort to change their state map. Trump was quick to target them

for retribution. In fact, this past Tuesday in the Republican primaries in Indiana, six of eight

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