Hello and welcome once again to the roundtable, your weekly publishers and editors podcast here at The American Mind.

I'm your host, Spencer Claven, associate editor of the Claremont Review of Books and Heterofatalist editor of the American Mind.

I am joined this week by the OG crew publisher and president Ryan Williams

and managing editor Mike Sabo. I don't think I can preview our topics this week any better

than just to read to you all a text message from a noted dad rock enthusiast Mike Sabo

that ended up in my group chat feed just this morning.

Quote, yeah, the big balls topic is good because there's so many angles.

So, dear listener, you have this week.

To quote, Archer, a phrasing, Mike phrasing.

There's got to be a better way to say that.

So having given you that little teaser, we're going to make you wait and suffer through, or perhaps romp through a little gerrymandering story.

We promise you'll like it. It's going to be really fun. Actually, this is, to me, a really delightful and highly American little political drama.

You may have heard that the Texas legislature is moving to redistrict, which otherwise known as

to gerrymander, that is to redraw the lines of their electoral map, to gain another five

easy red congressional seats in advance of the midterm.

It seems pretty widely agreed that this was done at Trump's prompting and request.

It doesn't seem, I mean, who does want to lose a midterm, but especially Donald Trump

doesn't want to be hamstrung by another hashtag resistance with political teeth. This has been

greeted, perhaps predictably, by Democrats not only in Texas, but across the country with a kind

of catastrophic, apocalyptic, wailing and gnashing of teeth. In Texas, the Democrats have

done something that I didn't know they could do, which is they've

just left. They just kind of skipped town and went to Illinois, which broke quorum,

...