The Southern Poverty Law Center announced Monday a $100 million, decadelong investment in voter outreach across five Southern states.
The civil rights organization, which has been criticized in recent years for an anti-conservative bias, will be partnering with other groups through its year-old Vote Your Voice initiative.
While all five of the targeted states — Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi — had increased voter turnout in 2020 compared to 2016, three of them ranked among the dozen with the lowest participation rate last year. Only Florida (15th) and Georgia (25th) ranked higher than 40th.
Each of the states underperformed the national average for turnout, although Georgia and Mississippi were just slightly below. Only Mississippi exceeded the national average for turnout among Black voters, while Florida was more than 10 points below.
According to the liberal-leaning Brennan Center for Justice, since the 2020 election 19 states have enacted a total of 33 laws that make it harder for people to vote. Georgia has been cited nationally as one of the states to impose the most restrictive changes, after the state went for a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time since 1992. The Republican-controlled Legislature has since taken a number of steps to tighten voting rules.
Florida has also been cited by voting rights advocates for its own sweeping changes to voting laws.
“[To] ensure a government exists that truly is by the people and for the people, we must expand our efforts to push against the anti-democratic statements and actions of many state and local officials in the Deep South,” said SPLC President and CEO Margaret Huang. “We are thankful for the hard work of all of our grant partners; these organizations’ successes help to empower voters whose rights have been violated for too long.”
Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill, who oversees elections, told WSFA12 News that he is concerned SPLC’s investment is biased against conservatives.
“It is a targeted effort to ensure that liberal special interest groups that have been targeted by the SPLC are identified and motivated to go to the polls,” he said.
Grants awarded through Vote Your Voice will support civic engagement programming, increasing fundraising opportunities, training new political leaders, building engagement in advance of the 2030 round of redistricting, and developing new tactics and tools.
Another Southern state was in the news Monday, when the Justice Department announced it had filed a lawsuit against Texas for racial discrimination in the redistricting process.
While a number of states that had been subject to a Voting Rights Act provision that required them to get prior approval from the federal government before making election-related changes, that “preclearance” section has been struck down by the Supreme Court. But the DOJ retains the power to enforce other elements of the act.
“Our complaint today alleges that the redistricting plans approved by the Texas state Legislature and signed into law by the governor will deny Black and Latino voters an equal opportunity to participate in the voting process and to elect representatives of their choice, in violation of the Voting Rights Act,” Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta said at press conference. “Our complaint also alleges that several of those districts were drawn with discriminatory intent.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office called the suit “absurd.”
The Justice Department alleges that Legislature intentionally drew state and federal district lines to minimize the votes of minorities, even though increases in the Black and Latino populations drove the changes.
“For example, Texas will gain two new congressional seats because of its population growth, almost all of which is due to growth in the state’s minority population. However, Texas has designed both of those new seats to have white voting majorities,” said Gupta. “The congressional plan also deliberately reconfigured a West Texas district to eliminate the opportunity for Latino voters to elect a representative of their choice. This is the third time in three decades where Texas has eliminated a Latino electoral opportunity in this same district, despite previous court determinations that this violates the law.”
While the Supreme Court has determined states should be the arbiters of partisan gerrymandering, the federal government may still intervene when racial gerrymandering is discovered.
And in North Carolina, the courts have become involved in a fight over new maps, with four cases working through the system.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
____
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.