Authored by Matthew Vadum via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A federal judge who was outvoted in a judicial panel’s decision to strike down a redrawn election map in Texas issued a blistering 104-page dissent on Nov. 19.

Texas state Rep. Matt Morgan holds a map of proposed new congressional districts in Texas during a legislative session at the Texas State Capitol in Austin on Aug. 20, 2025. Sergio Flores/Reuters

Judge Jerry E. Smith of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, who was appointed to a three-judge U.S. District Court panel hearing the case, said the 2–1 majority opinion of Nov. 18 invalidating the map was the “most blatant exercise of judicial activism that I have ever witnessed.”

The majority opinion “has dramatic political consequences by meddling in the orderly processes of a duly-elected state government,” he said.

“The main winners from Judge [Jeffrey V.] Brown’s opinion are George Soros and Gavin Newsom. The obvious losers are the People of Texas and the Rule of Law,” Smith said.

Soros is a high-profile financier and billionaire philanthropist known for heavily funding Democratic Party candidates and progressive nonprofits. Newsom, a Democrat, is the governor of California, who recently championed Proposition 50, a statewide redistricting referendum approved by voters on Nov. 4 that was designed to reduce Republican representation in his state’s congressional delegation. Newsom said the referendum was called to counteract the Texas redistricting that favors Republicans. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is suing to block the California redistricting plan.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey V. Brown wrote the majority opinion in League of United Latin American Citizens v. Abbott. U.S. District Judge David C. Guaderrama joined it.

Brown said the state may not use the new map because “substantial evidence shows that Texas racially gerrymandered the 2025 Map.”

Gerrymandering refers to the manipulation of electoral district boundaries to benefit a particular party or constituency. The Supreme Court has previously ruled that race-based gerrymandering violates the U.S. Constitution, but redrawing boundaries to boost partisan fortunes passes constitutional muster.

In the majority opinion, Brown said that earlier this year, President Donald Trump urged Texas to redraw its map for U.S. House of Representatives elections “to create five additional Republican seats.”

When the Trump administration characterized its request “as a demand to redistrict congressional seats based on their racial makeup, Texas lawmakers immediately jumped on board,” Brown said.

On July 7, Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, sent a letter to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton “making the legally incorrect assertion that four congressional districts in Texas were ‘unconstitutional’ because they were ‘coalition districts’—majority-non-White districts in which no single racial group constituted a 50% majority,” Brown said.

The department said it would take legal action if the state didn’t immediately redraw these districts, which was “a threat based entirely on their racial makeup,” Brown said. “Any mention of majority-White Democrat districts—which DOJ presumably would have also targeted if its aims were partisan rather than racial—was conspicuously absent.”

Brown said that two days after the letter was sent, Abbott added redistricting to the agenda of the state Legislature’s special session, and in doing so “explicitly directed the Legislature to draw a new U.S. House map to resolve DOJ’s concerns.” This meant the governor “plainly and expressly disavowed any partisan objective and instead repeatedly stated that his goal was to eliminate coalition districts and create new majority-Hispanic districts,” he said.

Various senior lawmakers said the Legislature had acted “to achieve DOJ’s racial goal of eliminating coalition districts,” Brown added.

Dissenting Opinion

Smith said he was given inadequate time to respond to Brown’s 160-page opinion, which means the dissenting opinion is “far from a literary masterpiece.”

“If, however, there were a Nobel Prize for Fiction, Judge Brown’s opinion would be a prime candidate,” Smith said.

Not giving Smith enough time to prepare has the effect of “diminishing the impact of the dissent,” the judge said, because the majority could not address Smith’s concerns in its opinion. Because Smith was unable to assemble his dissent in time for the release of the majority opinion, it had to be listed separately in the court docket, making it less accessible to the public, the judge said.

Smith said the question at hand was whether Texas state lawmakers carried out a “mid-decade congressional redistricting to gain political advantage,” or “to slash the voting rights of persons of color.”

Because the “obvious reason” for the redistricting was “partisan gain,” Brown “commits grave error in concluding that the Texas Legislature is more bigoted than political,” Smith said.

Smith also suggested Brown acted hastily in issuing the injunction blocking the new map instead of waiting for the Supreme Court to rule in Louisiana v. Callais, a case in which Smith said the high court is poised to resolve the tension between the federal Voting Rights Act and racial-gerrymandering jurisprudence.

During oral argument in that case on Oct. 15, the justices seemed likely to limit the use of race-based districting concerning Louisiana’s congressional map.

Smith said Brown should have considered denying the injunction, “recognizing that a fundamental shift in voting-rights jurisprudence” will likely happen soon.

“It is reckless for this court to proceed with opining on the merits, which amounts to nothing more than a general guess as to whether existing voting-rights jurisprudence will survive Callais,” Smith said.

Because certain statute-mandated election deadlines for the 2026 cycle “kicked in in September 2025,” and candidates began filing for federal and state office on Nov. 8 of this year, the injunction “turns the Texas electoral and political landscape upside down,” Smith said.

Hours after the majority opinion was made public on Nov. 18, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) said the claim that the map was discriminatory was “absurd and unsupported” by testimony, adding the state would appeal directly to the Supreme Court.

“The Legislature redrew our congressional maps to better reflect Texans’ conservative voting preferences–and for no other reason,” Abbott said.

Republicans currently enjoy a razor-thin majority over Democrats in the U.S. House. Republicans now hold 25 of the U.S. House seats in Texas. Democrats hold 12 seats. Congressional elections are scheduled for Nov. 3, 2026.

Hoping to ride New York City’s wave of surging Marxism, socialist City Council member Chi Osse has filed federal paperwork to challenge House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. The move adds new a new dimension of entertainment value to next year’s midterms, but has sparked some discouragement from prominent members of the far left.

“The Democratic Party’s leadership is not only failing to effectively fight back against Donald Trump, they have also failed to deliver a vision that we can all believe in. These failures are some of the many reasons why I am currently exploring a potential run for New York’s 8th Congressional District,” Osse told Axios. 

A comrade of mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, the 27-year-old Osse represents a diversity triple-play, as he’s queer, black and Chinese. His late father was a prominent hip-hop media personality known as Combat Jack. Osse will be vying to represent New York’s 8th district, which includes areas of south and east Brooklyn. Jeffries has held that seat since 2013. 

Can socialist Chi Osse take down House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries?  

Osse has been weighing a big against Jeffries for weeks, according to the New York Times, ruffling the feathers of figures who readers would otherwise assume to be supportive, including New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and New York City mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. While both are allies, each has expressed disapproval of Osse’s run. 

Mamdani’s reluctance to be associated with Osse’s attempt to unseat the top Democrat in the US House is so strong that Mamdani reportedly disinvited Osse from Mamdani’s election night watch party — this despite the fact that Jeffries refused to endorse Mamdani until the eleventh hour, and even then did so with language that didn’t exactly exude enthusiasm. 

To this point, Mamdani has largely kept his criticism of Osse’s bid private — or at least opaque. When asked about Osse’s potential bid on Monday, before the run became official, Mamdani told reporters, “I believe that there are many ways right here in New York City to both deliver on an affordability agenda and take on the authoritarian administration in the White House.” 

Supposed class warrior Chi Osse at the 2023 Met Gala 

According to Times sources, Mamdani and his advisors worry that another far-left targeting of an establishment Democrat could undermine the mayor-elect’s attempt to nudge establishment Dems into supporting his ambitious socialist agenda, which includes “free” child care for all, rent-freezes for a million apartments, “free” buses, a higher minimum wage, city-run groceries, and higher taxes for corporations and top earners. 

Another New York City leftist luminary has been publicly pointed with her dismay. “I certainly don’t think a primary challenge to the leader is a good idea right now,” AOC told Axios. Similarly, at the national level, Progressive Change Campaign Committee leader Adam Green told Politico, “It is not the right moment to launch a primary challenge against Hakeem Jeffries.”

AOC’s throwing of cold water on Osse’s run against a powerful establishment Democrat has a waft of hypocrisy. After all, AOC took down Rep. Joseph Crowley, who was the fourth-ranked Democrat in the House and viewed as a potential successor to then-Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi. Mamdani similarly seems to be saying, “Establishment upsets for me, but not for thee.” 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unseated a top establishment Democrat, but is throwing cold water on Osse’s bid against Jeffries (Dayton247Now)

Some of Osse’s fellow leftists have questioned his devotion to socialism. He rankled some by joining the New York City Democratic Socialists of America in October 2020, only to ditch the group a month later, but then rejoin the group earlier this year. Writing this week at The Socialist Tribune on Substack, Holden T unloaded on Osse:

Chi is dedicated to himself and his career. During the George Floyd Uprising, he and a clique of models and influencers donned black berets, called themselves ‘the Warriors in the Garden’, and sought out attention at every turn with few political principles to guide them. Now, he comes sprinting back to NYC-DSA after Zohran’s historic success in the mayoral primary and general election.

Last month, Jeffries pledged legal retaliation against Trump officials and associates if Democrats retake power, telling MSNBC’s Chris Hayes: 

“These people don’t have immunity. And the reality is the statute of limitations is five years, and there will be accountability with the next administration, if not before, when Democrats take back control of the House of Representatives.” 

Authored by William Andersen via The Mises Institute,

The doctrines of socialism have been with us for more than 150 years, but no one had really tried it in a total way until the advent of the Soviet Union from the 1920s to the early 1990s. During that period, a number of communist/socialist revolutions occurred in Asia, Cuba, and Africa, all of which provided a laboratory to observe how these socialist economies would perform.

The socialist economies failed spectacularly, as Ludwig von Mises had predicted. His works on socialism published in 1920 and in 1923 show that, as an economic system, it was doomed before it ever was implemented because it had no practical system of economic calculation. Despite the propaganda beamed at people both from socialist governments and the western media that socialist economies were lifting vast numbers of people from poverty, the reality of socialism was what Mises had predicted.

By 1989, even die-hard socialists like Robert Heilbroner had to admit that socialism had been a huge failure. Indeed, by the mid-1990s, the only countries attempting to continue with the socialist experiment were Cuba and North Korea, and neither economy was one to be envied. Heilbroner wrote in The New Yorker:

The Soviet Union, China & Eastern Europe have given us the clearest possible proof that capitalism organizes the material affairs of humankind more satisfactorily than socialism: that however inequitably or irresponsibly the marketplace may distribute goods, it does so better than the queues of a planned economy…. the great question now seems how rapid will be the transformation of socialism into capitalism, & not the other way around, as things looked only half a century ago.

Yet, Heilbroner—echoing Joseph Schumpeter’s belief that capitalism could not survive in the modern age—was not convinced that a capitalist economy would do well under the cultural and political assaults coming from academic, social, and government elites that would always demand more from it than it could produce. Heilbroner admitted that Mises was right, that a socialist economy lacked the necessary economic calculation to flourish, but he could never get himself to endorse the capitalist system itself.

Today, when we see poverty, prices of goods increasing, housing shortages in New York City, or high food prices, the usual suspects blame capitalism, and they blame what has become the overriding symbol of capitalism—the billionaire. It does not matter that the housing problems are caused by rent control and other supply-restricting government interventions, that inflation is a government-caused phenomenon, and that Federal Reserve policies of creating financial bubbles have created a lot of on-paper billionaires, as the critics will blame free markets no matter what. Their arguments do not need to be coherent or logical to have an effect. As I recently wrote, many of the most economically-illiterate people in our midst have become wealthy by making public statements on economics. In our modern media age, even the most ignorant sage is considered an “expert” if one has the “correct” politics.

But despite socialism’s many failures as an economic system, it is more popular than ever as a political system. Declares the socialist publication Jacobin:

For socialists, establishing popular confidence in the feasibility of a socialist society is now an existential challenge. Without a renewed and grounded belief in the possibility of the goal, it’s near impossible to imagine reviving and sustaining the project. This, it needs emphasis, isn’t a matter of proving that socialism is possible (the future can’t be verified) nor of laying out a thorough blueprint (as with projecting capitalism before its arrival, such details can’t be known), but of presenting a framework that contributes to making the case for socialism’s plausibility. (emphasis theirs)

In other words, socialists don’t need to be successful in actually producing goods and services and ensuring people receive them. Instead, all that is needed is for them to promise those things, even if they cannot deliver on their promises, and then win elections. The socialist publication The Nation emphasized five years ago that the only victories needed are at the ballot box:

Most importantly for DSA (Democratic Socialists of America), Democrats cannot control their ballot lines like they once did. There are no mechanisms for dissuading DSA challengers from running; blocking a candidate from the ballot is far more difficult than it used to be. Today’s Democratic Party is a shell waiting to be inhabited by whoever claims the prizes of elected office.

If Bernie Sanders, a democratic socialist, is elected president of the United States, the Democratic Party will slowly become his party. And if he loses, inspiring still more DSA recruits and fueling down-ballot victories, socialists can continue to win council, legislative, and even congressional seats on Democratic lines, wielding tangible clout.

In New York, there is one socialist in the state legislature: DSA member Julia Salazar. She has helped lead campaigns for public control of power companies and a universal right to housing. Five DSA-backed candidates are seeking legislative seats this June, challenging establishment-backed Democrats. If they all win, they will start to gain back the momentum of the 1920s.

This time, there will be no reactionary legislative leaders to unseat the new socialists, no Red Scare to feed a public frenzy against their anti-capitalist views. Salazar is a member of the Democratic majority, an ally of the progressive block, unlikely to lose an election anytime soon. The DSA members seeking to join her will be free to advocate for radical change. It’s a future that would have surprised the class of 1920 because Socialists never took over New York, let alone America. But today’s socialists march into the 2020s without the daunting roadblocks of a century ago. They don’t need their own party anymore. They can just take someone else’s.

Today, the socialists not only have captured the mayor’s office of New York City, but also Seattle, where yet another so-called democratic socialist won by emulating Zohran Mamdani’s “affordability” campaign in New York, and the movement looks to capture the Democratic Party. Understand that neither Mamdani nor Katie Wilson in Seattle will be able to successfully keep even a fraction of their campaign promises, and whatever they impose will make life even more difficult for the people who voted them into office but their failures not only will not matter but rather will be reinterpreted as successes.

In his review of Paul Hollander’s Political Pilgrims, in which Hollander wrote about how western elites idealized communism, Paul Schlesinger, Jr., wrote:

In his account of the mechanisms of self-deception, Professor Hollander makes effective use of the concept of “contextual redefinition.” By this he means the way that activities are transformed by their context, so that what is detestable in one society becomes uplifting in another. Thus the left-wing intellectual feels that any society based on state ownership, whatever its superficial flaws, is essentially good; any society based on private ownership, whatever its superficial attractions, is essentially corrupt. Poverty represents a shameful failure in capitalism; but when associated with egalitarianism and the subordination of material to spiritual needs, it expresses a simple, uncorrupted way of life. Manual labor is demeaning under capitalism, ennobling under Communism. Child labor is abominable in the United States, but in Cuba the sight of children working 15 hours a week in the fields is symbolic of high and unified purpose. As Angela Davis once said, “The job of cutting cane had become qualitatively different since the revolution.” Contextual redefinition, Professor Hollander writes, also produces “euphoric response to objects, sights, or institutions in themselves unremarkable and also to be found in the visitors’ own societies.” “There is something about a Russian train standing at a station that thrills,” wrote Waldo Frank. “The little locomotive is human…. The dingy cars are human.”

Moreover, socialists (and especially socialists in higher education) are able to use words to create the imaginary capitalist hellhole that we supposedly inhabit. John Fea—history professor at the Christian college Messiah University—wrote the following screed in the now-defunct webpage “Current”:

As capitalists, we have a deep and abiding trust in financial markets. We believe that the economy, complete with the conspicuous consumption that fuels it, will be our salvation. We stare at the bottom of our screens as the ticker streams by, praying fervently that this will be the day the gods of the Dow perform their magic and bestow us with blessings.

But the prophet Adam Smith has only heard the prayers of a few. The invisible hand has done little to prevent inequality, instability, and environmental degradation. As historian Eugene McCarraher writes in Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity, we worship at the throne of “capitalism’s ontology of pecuniary transubstantiation, its epistemology of technological dominion, and its morality of profit and productivity.” These gods have few answers when the pandemic comes, or when Black men and women are killed in the streets, or when we give birth to children who will live in a world that is becoming more uninhabitable by the year.

That Fea is describing an imaginary world is irrelevant in his domain and the domain of academic and media elites. To Fea and his fellow faculty members at Messiah and at most colleges and universities, the US economy is a living hell in which most people live in squalor (except for the billionaires), only a few people receive healthcare benefits, the capitalists have utterly polluted our planet, and where profits are gouged from the broken bodies of American workers. Nothing is permitted to contradict this belief. As Thomas Sowell has written about people like Fea:

It is usually futile to try to talk facts and analysis to people who are enjoying a sense of moral superiority in their ignorance.

Socialism, Fea claims, “is based on the fundamental belief in the worth and sacredness of man,” and it is the only moral form of social organization. Fea also argues that democratic socialism has nothing to do with communism and the dictatorships that accompanied that ideology. Yet, many of his blog posts show alliances with the hard leftists that did support those communist dictatorships.

Understand that Fea is not a fringe character in Christian higher education. He writes regularly for Christianity Today and is a sought-after speaker at Christian colleges.

Someone like Fea does not want to be bothered with issues of economic calculation—and since economic calculation depends upon things like market prices and profits, all of which Fea believes are immoral, any argument based upon economic calculation fails to pass the morality test in his view. What matters is intent and only intent. Socialism, he argues, is founded upon the highest ideals of the founding of the United States, so to oppose it is to oppose truth and decency itself.

Fea does address the so-called human nature argument against socialism, claiming that it is easily discredited, since good government via democracy will offset any innate selfishness in human beings. He quotes Ben Burgis of the radical socialist publication Jacobin:

The core of socialism is economic democracy. Whether we’re talking about decision-making in an individual workplace or bigger decisions with a broad impact on the course of society, socialists think that everyone who’s impacted should have a say.

One of the reasons that’s so important is precisely that giving anyone too much power over their fellow human beings creates the danger that their power will be abused. No system is perfect, of course, but the best recipe for minimizing the possibility of abuse as much as possible is to spread around power — political and economic — as much as possible.

The idea that the political process is a morally superior substitute for economic processes is not surprising coming from a college professor who would never accept free markets. But Fea and his allies believe that as long as people can vote in elections, then we can have “economic democracy,” which is little more than an abstract concept that has never squared with reality.

Note that in none of the current socialist writings does anyone actually attempt to deal with real economic questions. Instead, as Jeff Deist has written, socialists practice what he calls “antieconomics”:

Antieconomics…starts with abundance and works backward. It emphasizes redistribution, not production, as its central focus. At the heart of any antieconomics is a positivist worldview, the assumption that individuals and economies can be commanded by legislative fiat. Markets, which happen without centralized organization, give way to planning in the same way common law gives way to statutory law. This view is especially prevalent among left intellectuals, who view economics not as a science at all, but rather a pseudointellectual exercise to justify capital and wealthy business interests.

While socialists like Fea will appeal to “economic democracy,” in reality, the only entity that can carry out the kind of economic organization socialists demand is government. Granted, one will not ever read anything but abstract reasoning from socialists, since a successful socialist economy functions only in imaginary space. After all, Fea and the socialist journalists at The Nation and Jacobin don’t need to concern themselves with ever having to make large-scale economic decisions but they can score points simply by denouncing capitalism and demanding a “just” economy without having a clue as to how an economy even works. They don’t have to be right; all that is needed is for them to be seen as moral by their peers.

In the end, socialists are very good at discussing election strategies, not economics. They speak of their attractive candidates and the prospects for electing new socialists to office. What they cannot do is to present a coherent view on the economy, and when elected, they will have no more success than did the commissars and economic planners of the former Soviet Union who at least had the good sense in 1991 to close shop and turn out the lights.