Hey, hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Homefront Live. I am your host, Reid Galen. Today, I am joined by Evelyn Quartz. Evelyn, welcome.

Thanks, hi, Reid. Thanks so much for having me back. No, it's great. So it's been a little while since we've, well, you and I talk a fair bit, but since we've done this. And so there were a few things that I wanted to go through today.

And the first one is about what we're seeing in the news a lot and something you recently wrote about, which is gerrymandering.

Now, I have spent many years in the independent political reform space, helped pass Prop 11 in California

back in 2008. Here in Utah, I helped pass Prop 4 back in 2018, which was still in the courts

here in Utah. Texas is in the midst of attempting the Texas Republicans, I should say, of doing a sort of a mid-cycle

redistricting that might do it in Florida, might do it in Missouri. Democrats are now threatening

to counter in kind. In your latest piece, though, and you have received some, say, strong reaction

to, you say that this is actually not the right way to go about it.

So give us a sense of why you said that.

Yeah, yeah.

So to me, it's clearly a power grab by the Democrats.

And I think it's masked in this kind of protecting democracy concept that is largely unscrutinized.

So I guess this goes back.

We've spoken about this before to my argument that if you make Trumps the singular villain

in the story, you ignore the broader forces that have eroded democracy. And so you make it

much harder for people to participate. And the thing is, like, if Trump's the only bad guy,

it allows the parties, in this case, the Democrats, to ignore their complicity in policies that have left people wanting to turn to authoritarianism.

I think we're going to talk about this a bit later with your piece.

So to me, it's like, it's a clear, I get the emotional reaction.

And I think nearly everybody I read said the phrase, fight fire with fire.

But I think it's only going to deepen the crisis of legitimacy by further insulating the Democrats

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