The gerrymandering doom spiral is gaining downward momentum, exactly as expected.

Virginia is poised to become the second state, after California, where Democrats will seek to unravel reforms that took redistricting out of the hands of partisans. That’s in response to similar Republican power grabs in other states — especially Texas, where the GOP kicked off the nationwide partisan warfare this summer in a shortsighted attempt to protect its slim House majority.

Democrats currently control six of Virginia’s 11 congressional seats, accurately reflecting the commonwealth’s evenly divided electorate. By calling a special session, Democrats hope to nab an additional two or three districts by aggressively redrawing the map in their favor.

California’s redistricting effort will go before voters as a special ballot initiative on Nov. 4. Democrats there, who congratulate themselves as defenders of democracy, say the only acceptable response to Texas’s “election rigging” is to rig their own elections, too. Polls show that more than 60 percent of likely voters have embraced that backward logic, so Proposition 50 appears poised to pass.

Last month, North Carolina Republicans muscled through a map that they expect will help their party pick up one more seat in next year’s midterms. Missouri Republicans did the same a month earlier.

Despite the overly confident proclamations from partisan analysts about how such redistricting will change the balance of Congress, nobody knows how things will play next November. It was never certain that Texas’s efforts would win Republicans enough seats to stem the tide of a potential Democratic wave in the midterms. Nor has it ever been guaranteed that a Democratic wave would emerge, even if that’s the historical pattern. Anybody who has paid attention to the last decade of American politics should be wary of making firm predictions, especially amid a realignment in which young Hispanic and African American men have drifted toward Republicans.

As it looks now, Texas’s mid-decade gerrymandering could very well end up backfiring on the GOP; after all, California is far bluer than Texas is red. It could also end up as a wash, with broader political trends playing a more important role. It’s also very possible that there could a backlash to such raw displays of partisanship. This could boost Democrats statewide in the Lone Star State, where there may be a competitive gubernatorial or Senate race next year.

The guaranteed losers in all of these changes will be voters. By the time the midterms roll around a year from now, the country will have fewer competitive districts where politicians will have to work hard to win over Americans, especially independents. Credit goes to the Republican legislators of Indiana and Kansas who have admirably withstood intense pressure from national leaders to gerrymander their state’s map, at least so far. It’s a pity that so many others, including Democrats in Virginia, are willing to compromise their principles for perceived, short-term partisan advantage.

— The Washington Post

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SOMEWHERE UP NORTH, Minn. — Like so many big things, it started small, this fall tradition, a father and son from the Twin Cities area venturing to a friend’s place “Up North” to try their luck at ruffed grouse hunting during the long MEA weekend when kids get two days off from school.

It was October 1999 (give or take a year), and they’d just completed their firearms safety training together, so there was a bit of a learning curve in figuring out where and how to hunt the birds, which can be either incredibly wary … or incredibly not wary.

Some might say dumb, but I’ve been humbled enough to say otherwise.

Whether the birds were wary or otherwise, there was plenty of public land to explore within a few miles of camp, and so opportunities weren’t hard to come by.

This wasn’t a hardcore dawn-to-dusk kind of hunting trip. Instead, days at camp were pretty laid-back. Ruffed grouse hunting doesn’t require venturing out before dawn — a big attraction for some in this crew — and can be as laid-back or intense as a hunter wants it to be.

A typical day would start with a late morning hunt, followed by a mid-afternoon siesta and a late afternoon hunt to close out the day.

As a campfire blazes, an NHL hockey game is projected on a 10-by-20-foot screen at a northern Minnesota hunting camp Wednesday, Oct. 15, 2025. (Brad Dokken / Forum News Service)

Nights were usually spent by the fire — at least when it wasn’t raining — taking in the sounds and smells of northern Minnesota in the fall. Saturday night was devoted to watching “Hockey Night in Canada” on the Canadian Broadcast Corp., one of the few over-the-air channels available back in those early days so far in the boonies.

The ruffed grouse — or “partridges,” as many people Up North incorrectly call them — were abundant enough to keep this father and son coming back.

So it was that a tradition was born. Just like the traditions that take place at so many hunting camps everywhere.

Crew expands

Over time, other friends joined the crew and put the annual “October Trip” get-together on their calendars. A bunkhouse was built to accommodate the larger crew — up to nine people have been in camp at various times — and the addition of a patio made time around the firepit even more comfortable.

So did the addition of a projector, a portable 10-by-20-foot screen, a Roku stick and high-speed internet for streaming hockey games and the occasional B-movie outside by the firepit.

Totally unnecessary, of course, but now part of the tradition.

Also part of the tradition, thanks to the culinary skills of two in the crew, meals turned into five-star affairs. This year’s camp menu included steaks and garlic-mashed potatoes, antelope in plum reduction sauce with twice-baked potatoes, antelope stew with a zing that was absolutely amazing and, for the final evening, the traditional grouse casserole.

New twist

More recently, the Minnesota youth deer season that coincides with the MEA break has added a new twist to the weekend for the youngest member of the crew. Now 15, he shot his first deer during the 2021 youth season and has filled his youth tag every year since.

This year, he shot a 9-point buck late in the afternoon on the second day of the season. As if that wasn’t good enough, he also shot his first limit of ruffed grouse during the trip.

“For one 15-year-old, four days in October is better than Christmas,” his dad would say later. “It is groups and trips like this that will keep a kid coming back for the rest of his life.”

And so it went during four days in October, a fine gathering despite some occasional weather setbacks. While some of the “old guys” in the crew are slowing down and spend more time lounging by the fire than traipsing through the woods, the two “youngsters” in the group — the oldest “kid” now 37 — are keeping the tradition burning strong.

As it should be.

May that tradition burn for many years to come.

At hunting camps everywhere.

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Seventy-some years ago, local filmmaker Leya Hale’s grandparents met as students at the Sherman Institute in California.

The boarding school was one of many that Native kids, like Hale’s Diné grandparents, were forced to attend as part of federal assimilation programs, and the schools were notorious for abusive practices and harsh cultural suppression.

But these were not the stories Hale’s grandparents chose to tell about their education, said Hale, who’s Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota on her mother’s side and Diné on her father’s, and now works as a documentary producer for Twin Cities PBS in St. Paul. Instead of recounting the negative experiences, she said, they talked about the joy of meeting classmates from other tribal cultures and forming friendships through activities like dance and sports.

Leya Hale is a documentary producer for Twin Cities PBS in St. Paul. (Courtesy of Leya Hale)

This perspective also guides Hale’s upcoming TPT documentary “Medicine Ball,” which follows two Native basketball players at the University of Minnesota Morris, a campus that traces its own history back to a boarding school called the Morris Industrial School for Indians. In the documentary, the players — and the audience — learn about basketball’s historical and continuing importance to Native culture from Syd Beane, a local Flandreau Santee Sioux Dakota historian who grew up playing basketball in the boarding school system.

“This film is me carving out a little space for us to share those stories — resilient, hopeful stories — that came from that era,” Hale said. “It’s important to educate and bring awareness to the most awful things that occurred during that time. But it’s also for our own community’s sake to remember those good stories, because it’s those good stories that made us survive.”

Modern basketball was invented in the 1890s at a training school run by the organization then called the Young Men’s Christian Association (now the YMCA). Boarding school administrators, tasked with assimilating Native kids into white Christian American society, approved of the sport’s origins and hoped it would push kids to develop a religious sense of self-discipline.

Native students, for their part, also quickly embraced the game for its similarities to common tribal ball-and-basket sports they were familiar with.

Contrary to administrators’ hopes, basketball ultimately became a way for Native students to build camaraderie within an oppressive environment and strengthen a shared Native identity across tribal backgrounds, Beane said on an episode of the Minnesota Historical Society’s “Minnesota Unraveled” podcast.

The basketball court “was one of the places where the culture was retained,” he said. “It’s what saved them from that trauma.”

Hale’s film “Medicine Ball” is in post-production and is scheduled to premiere next year, though a specific release date has not yet been announced.

When it does premiere, though, it won’t be in the style of a traditional documentary, with talking-head interviews spliced alongside historical footage, Hale said. She wants to make the point that history can be a story, not a set of facts to memorize, so she said she tries to take a more contemporary cinematic approach.

“Even though we’re PBS, we don’t have to always produce traditional PBS films,” she said. “I really try to create films that take you on a journey. You’re feeling those ups and downs of someone’s life and you’re learning with them, and those types of stories really connect you to whatever you’re watching.”

A 6-year-old Leya Hale, front row on the right, stands with her family’s Eagle Spirit Dancers group in this family photo. Hale, now a documentary producer at Twin Cities PBS, makes films exploring various aspects of Native American history and culture. (Courtesy of Leya Hale)

Hale studied media and communications as an undergraduate in California and earned a master’s degree in American Indian Studies from the University of South Dakota, then moved to the Twin Cities for a job at the Division of Indian Work teaching an after-school program on producing TV public service announcements. In the early 2010s, she was hired as a temporary production assistant for the TPT documentary “The Past Is Alive Within Us: The US-Dakota Conflict,” and was ultimately promoted to co-producer and offered a full-time role creating original history documentaries at the station.

In contrast to a movie studio set, which might be supported by an entire production team, Hale is the primary writer, director, casting agent and business manager on her projects at TPT. It’s up to her to find ideas, secure funding and bring the story to screen.

“You have help all the way, but you’re the one leading it all,” she said. “We’re low budget here, we’re not Marvel Studios, so you have to stretch a dollar and make sure you’re telling the best story you can possibly tell with the amount of resources you’re able to obtain.”

That’s where organizations like Vision Maker Media come in. The nonprofit, which distributes grants to filmmakers like Hale who are telling stories of Native culture and history, has supported several of Hale’s films, including “Medicine Ball.”

But the funding landscape for public broadcasting has changed considerably over the past few months, making stories like “Medicine Ball” harder to tell, Hale said. Over the summer, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — the nonprofit that directs federal money to public radio and television stations — was defunded and shuttered over alleged concerns of partisan bias.  This not only affected programming and staffing at local stations like TPT but also other organizations like Vision Maker, which received CPB funding.

In 2025, Hale was among 22 Indigenous filmmakers who received money through Vision Maker’s annual Public Media Fund to help with research and production costs; that pool of money, the organization says, is now empty.

Even if she has to be more creative in finding those resources, as she put it, the story Hale is telling in “Medicine Ball” — of Native young people, today just as in boarding schools a hundred years ago, finding basketball a symbol of hope and connectedness — remains important, she said.

“I was always taught that our people are resilient,” she said. “That in any situation we’re in, we always find the ability to share stories that help you through those negative experiences.”

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Free speech for me, not for thee.

That’s the oldest trick in the hypocrite’s playbook. And over the past few weeks, Republicans and Democrats have both taken a page from it.

Witness recent events at Rutgers University following the murder of Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist who founded Turning Point USA. The group’s Rutgers chapter circulated a petition demanding that the university fire history professor Mark Bray for his alleged links to antifa, a left-wing anti-fascist movement.

“Having a prominent leader of the antifa movement on campus is a threat to conservative students,” the petition warned, noting that Bray had “regularly referred” to “mainstream conservative figures” as fascists. “This is the kind of rhetoric that resulted in Charlie Kirk being assassinated.”

Never mind that Kirk himself insisted that people “should be allowed to say outrageous things,” as he told the Oxford Union earlier this year. “There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And all of it is protected by the First Amendment,” Kirk posted on social media in 2024.

And never mind the time-honored right-wing complaint about “cancel culture” on American campuses. For years, conservatives have charged that universities censored them by imagining speech as violence. If you opposed affirmative action, for example, you were threatening nonwhite students. We need to protect them from harm, the argument went, so we’re shutting you down.

Now conservatives are turning that same argument against figures such as Bray. “In the current political climate, it’s paramount to protect students from radicals who wish violence upon them,” the Rutgers Turning Point petition claims, explaining why Bray should be dismissed.

Bray is a scholar of antifa but denies being a member of the group, which President Donald Trump’s administration recently called a “domestic terrorist organization.” It’s not clear that antifa — a highly decentralized movement — qualifies as an “organization” at all. And even if it does, civil rights attorneys have claimed, Trump lacks any legal authority to designate it as “terrorist.”

But the GOP has become the party of cancel culture, and Trump is the canceller-in-chief. In January, after returning to the White House, Trump issued an order restoring free speech to the nation.

He then embarked upon a wide-ranging campaign of censorship, especially against universities.

The White House revoked the visas of student protesters, penalized schools for allegedly antisemitic speech, and pressured them to scrub websites of any language related to diversity, equity and inclusion. And at the University of Pennsylvania, where I teach, we were forced to apologize for letting a trans female swimmer compete on the women’s team.

You might think that an attack of this magnitude would cause the American left to make a full-throated defense of free and open expression. But you’d be wrong.

Sure, Trump’s victims have condemned him for trampling on their free speech rights. But they have also demanded the censorship of right-wing voices, including — you guessed it — Turning Point USA.

At Rutgers, for example, nearly 7,000 people signed a petition asking the university to disband its Turning Point chapter because its allegedly violent rhetoric made people feel unsafe. “It’s imperative that we take decisive action to restore security and the feeling on inclusivity to the campus,” the petition urged. “The safety and well-being of our students and faculty must be prioritized.”

Sound familiar? It’s almost exactly what Turning Point said about Bray. He’s using dangerous words, so we need to shut him down.

After Turning Point demanded his dismissal — and Fox News picked up the story — Bray received several death threats, causing him to flee the country with his family. That’s horrible, of course, but it’s hardly a valid reason to shut down Turning Point. You might just as well censor Bray for the murder of Kirk, whose assassin made references to fascism.

Let’s be clear: Nobody should be allowed to make direct threats of physical harm, such as Bray suffered. But once we decide to censor speech on the grounds that it might cause violence — or make someone afraid — we won’t be able to speak at all.

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That’s a lesson we still refuse to learn. After Rutgers sought to remove two leaders of its Turning Point chapter — because, the university said, they weren’t registered as officers of the group — they denounced the move as a“politically motivated” attack on their freedom of speech. “We want differing values, we want different beliefs, we want to have conversations with people,” said Ava Kwan, one of the student leaders.

But Bray was a different story, Kwan insisted. He should be fired because he has praised antifa, and antifa has promoted violence. “We don’t feel safe on campus with him around,” Kwan claimed. “We don’t feel safe having him appointed at Rutgers.”

In other words: Free speech for me, not for thee. And if that’s what you believe, you don’t believe in free speech. You just want your own side to win.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of“Free Speech and Why You Should Give a Damn” and nine other books.