I remember seeing an article on Salon or wherever about how laughing at Pajama Boy was racist – I think the reasoning was that we were ridiculing weak white men who wouldn’t protect white women against perceived black brutes or something. These were the Obama years, when if you weren’t 100% in lockstep with the President EVERYTHING was racist. This being right when Twitter was becoming a mature media platform, it really poisoned the political discourse in a way that’s only gotten crazier since. Thankfully the race card has really dissipated, perhaps because the Left realized it really irritated the people they needed to convince and maybe because there’s more diversity of thought in the anti-Republican/Trump coalition since. The most parsimonious explanation of the Alabama and Tennessee redistricting since the recent Supreme Court ruling is that they’re to gain Republican seats in a near-evenly-divided Congress rather than to deny Black representation, to the extent that a zero-sum electoral game separates the two, but the latter is the most efficacious way to get a court to invalidate the maps. I’m going to give our side the benefit of the doubt and assume it’s not just a cynical ploy and they actually believe it, but I ain’t doing the activism. Obnoxious political behavior casts a long shadow, as the Trump Republican Party should keep in mind as it defends and digs in on the ever-growing overreach.