This Is What Jim Crow Looks Like in 2026

The next pandemic could already be here, and you can ask Trump why we're not prepared. Meanwhile, his administration is using the FBI and the EEOC to punish a newspaper.

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Last weekend, I wrote about how I believe Democrats are going to sweep the midterms despite GOP gerrymandering. I still very much believe that. If you’re feeling hopeless, I’d recommend going back and reading that. But we still have to address how this redistricting is going to affect Black voting power.

Southern Republicans Trade the Literacy Test for Gerrymandered Maps

Memphis has had the same congressman since 2007. By Thursday afternoon, Memphis no longer had a congressional district.

On April 29, the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority handed down its ruling in Louisiana v. Callais, striking down Louisiana’s 2024 congressional map that had created a second majority-Black district. The decision was 6-3 along strictly partisan lines.

Election law experts called it one of the most consequential and damaging Supreme Court decisions in a generation. Although the court technically left Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act on the books, the ruling continued a years-long pattern of decisions that have gutted the landmark 1965 law born from the Civil Rights Movement.

Republican state legislatures heard the starting gun and sprinted.

Just one day after the ruling, Trump took to Truth Social to announce he had spoken with Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, who committed to redrawing the state’s congressional maps to deliver another GOP House seat. By Thursday, it was done.

Tennessee lawmakers passed a new congressional map dismantling the state’s 9th Congressional District. It was the only majority-Black district in the state, centered in Memphis and held by Democrat Steve Cohen since 2007. Under the new lines, Shelby County would be carved up between three separate districts, and every one of Tennessee’s nine congressional seats would have backed Trump by at least 20 points.

The scenes inside the Tennessee statehouse were extraordinary. Democrats linked arms and walked out of the chamber after the vote. Protesters flooded the gallery with shouts of outrage, booing Republican lawmakers as they left the floor. One Republican member arrived on the House floor wearing a Trump campaign flag as a cape.

Tennessee’s special session came just days after Louisiana suspended its House primaries outright to buy time for new maps. Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina are all moving to redraw their lines. Between those states alone, five majority-minority Democratic districts are now in the crosshairs. Florida didn’t even wait, as lawmakers approved four new GOP-leaning districts within hours of the ruling.

Republicans aren’t even pretending that this isn’t about race. It is explicitly about whether Black communities in Memphis, New Orleans, and Birmingham have a voice in their own government — and the GOP, with the Supreme Court’s blessing, has decided the answer is no.

The Next Pandemic Might Already Be Here

On May 2, the World Health Organization was notified of a cluster of severe respiratory illness aboard a Dutch cruise ship, the MV Hondius. As of this week, three people are dead, and cases have been confirmed across multiple countries.

Passengers who disembarked before the outbreak was identified have now dispersed across at least a dozen countries, with exposed travelers turning up in five US states: Arizona, California, Georgia, Texas, and Virginia.

The specific strain is the Andes virus, the only known hantavirus that can spread between people. Scientists know relatively little about how that human-to-human transmission works, which is where things get uncomfortable for the Trump administration.

In June 2025, the NIH issued a stop-work order shutting down all ten Centers for Research in Emerging Infectious Diseases, a network launched in 2020 with $82 million in funding specifically designed to study pathogens that could jump from animals to humans. One of those centers was running a pilot project to better understand how hantavirus passes from rodents to people.

Trump’s NIH killed it, saying the research was “not a good use of taxpayer funding.”

It gets worse. RFK Jr.’s HHS fired virtually the entire staff of the CDC’s Vessel Sanitation Program, the team responsible for keeping cruise ships from becoming floating outbreak vectors. Notably, those employees’ salaries were paid by the cruise industry, not taxpayers. The cuts saved the federal government nothing.

When asked about the outbreak this week, Trump called the reporter asking the question fake news, then said he hoped it was under control and that “a lot of great people are studying it.” Those would be the people his administration didn’t fire.

Public health experts say the alarming thing is not the hantavirus itself. It is what the administration’s sluggish response suggests about America’s readiness for something bigger.

The War on the Press Just Got a Lot More Explicit

The Trump administration has spent eighteen months telling you it views a free press as an enemy. This week it used two federal agencies in two days to prove it meant every word.

The FBI this week launched an investigation into New York Times reporter Elizabeth Williamson after she published a story revealing that FBI Director Kash Patel had assigned federal agents to chauffeur and protect his girlfriend. Patel’s girlfriend claimed the reporting constituted stalking. FBI agents queried databases for information about Williamson, and Justice Department officials eventually found no legal basis to proceed.

On the same day, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a lawsuit against the New York Times alleging racial discrimination in its hiring and promotion practices. The plaintiff is a white man who says he was passed over for a promotion. The timing was not lost on anyone in the industry.

Neither of these cases may go anywhere. That is not the point. The point is that a reporter now has to wonder whether their sources will call them back knowing the FBI might be watching. The point is that a newsroom’s lawyers are now in the room when editors are deciding what to publish and what to hold.

AlterNet America does not have a broadcast license, a pending merger, or a general counsel calculating the exposure on every story. We are not publicly traded. There is no advertiser to call on Wednesday morning asking us to cool it.

What we have is readers, and that is the only reason we can write this without anyone running it through legal first.

Independent journalism doesn’t get threatened with license revocation. It gets starved. The way to keep it alive is straightforward: fund it. If you’ve been reading for free, this is a good week to change that. Become a paid subscriber.

We’ll keep reporting. Our white guys seem fine.

—Ryan Rose

Co-founder & Managing Editor, AlterNet America