“No other modern democracy does this, to allow politicians to draw lines and choose their voters! It’s literally insane!” David Daley on gerrymandering. 

A peculiar word, “gerrymander“, Daley, an authority on gerrymandering eloquently explains the meaning and the origin as we begin our conversation on why the GOP hopes to gerrymander its way to a Midterms victory. “Republicans,” says David “fearful of losing the House next November, have embarked on an audacious and antidemocratic campaign to hold on to their narrow House majority by rigging the midterms in advance”. Daley goes on to point out that in a recursive set of rulings on voting rights and districting cases, John Roberts and the US Supreme Court have essentially given the GOP free rein. While Texas is the headline news right now, there’s no sign the Republicans will stop there. Ohio will remap next. Florida, Indiana, Missouri, and North Carolina could follow. Kentucky and New Hampshire are also vulnerable to right-wing takeovers of their congressional delegations. Redistricting will give Republicans a massive, unearned boost heading into the midterms—especially since frustrated Democrats again find themselves with limited options to retaliate. David Daley explains how gerrymandering became such a forceful tool in determining winners and losers; and the role of John Roberts and the US Supreme Court in making this problem worse. “This is a problem in need of national solutions,” Daley writes, “They exist—chiefly in reforms such as ranked-choice voting, multimember districts, and proportional representation. But as the gerrymandering battles erupt once more into all-out partisan warfare, the important reforms to preserve the integrity of one person, one vote in our embattled democracy may well be on life support. If you hated the consequences of partisan gerrymandering before, just wait.”

David Daley is a senior fellow at FairVote. He is the author of the national best-seller Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count, which has been credited with sparking the modern drive to reform redistricting and end partisan gerrymandering, and the basis for the award-winning documentary Slay The Dragon. His second book, Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy, chronicles the victories and defeats in state efforts to reform elections and uphold voting rights. A frequent lecturer and media source about gerrymandering, he is the former editor-in-chief of Salon.com. David’s journalism has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times. the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Slate and many other publications.

For several years, Andrew Marantz, a New Yorker staff writer, has been embedded in two worlds. The first is the world of social-media entrepreneurs, who, acting out of naiveté and reckless ambition, upended all traditional means of receiving and transmitting information. The second is the world of the people he calls “the gate crashers”–the conspiracists, white supremacists, and nihilist trolls who have become experts at using social media to advance their corrosive agenda. Antisocial ranges broadly–from the first mass-printed books to the trending hashtags of the present; from secret gatherings of neo-Fascists to the White House press briefing room–and traces how the unthinkable becomes thinkable, and then how it becomes reality. Antisocial reveals how the boundaries between technology, media, and politics have been erased, resulting in a deeply broken informational landscape–the landscape in which we all now live. Marantzshows how alienated young people are led down the rabbit hole of online radicalization, and how fringe ideas spread–from anonymous corners of social media to cable TV to the President’s Twitter feed.

Music to close the show, an off-center example of splendid electronic dub courtesy of a producer from Poland, Marcin Cichy who goes by the moniker of Meeting By Chance. Classically trained on piano since his youth and one of the youngest Polish National TV music composers ever, Marcin quickly developed a taste for electronic music, composing soundtracks for some of Poland’s influential and pioneering video artists throughout the 80s and 90s. But it was when he founded the acclaimed jazz duo Skalpel with Igor Pudło in 1998, that things really got going. over the course of their three albums and many EPs to date Scalpel have won huge acclaim, signing to Ninja Tune, and, winning Poland’s most prestigious cultural award Paszport POLITYKI as well as performing with Mira Calix, Clark, Kronos Quartet and AUKSO Orchestra among many others. Following a serious skateboarding accident, Marcin backbone was broken in two places which meant a year spent between a bed and on a wheelchair. This period saw the beginning of his solo career as Meeting by Chance (the name inspired by a series of pictures by Duane Michals showing the reaction of two men crossing in an alley). Lines Of Change is from his Measuarment EP.

The gerrymander image: Original cartoon of “The Gerry-Mander”. This is the political cartoon that led to the coining of the term ‘’gerrymander’’. The district depicted in the cartoon was created by the Massachusetts legislature to favor the incumbent Democratic-Republican party candidates of Governor Elbridge Gerry over the Federalists in 1812. Public Domain – Wikkimedia Commons