I’m not a lawyer, so here’s the plain-English version.

A federal court just blocked Texas’s 2025 congressional map. The judges say Texas didn’t redraw the map for normal political reasons. They redrew it because the Trump-era DOJ sent a letter telling the state to dismantle specific districts based explicitly on race.

Not strategy. Not partisanship. Race.

The court found the state could have gained seats politically, but that was NOT what drove the redraw. The judges described the DOJ letter as “legally unsound,” “erroneous,” and full of basic mistakes, but that letter is what pushed the Governor to add redistricting to a special session and target “coalition districts” for elimination.

Why does this matter?

Because it’s exactly the pattern in this chart:

Pioneer Fund → New Right messaging (Thomas Ellis) → CNP → Heritage/Project 2025 → Modern Outputs (Replacement framing, Christian nationalism, civil-rights rollback).

This ruling is proof of the last stage of that flow: federal legal pressure → racial engineering of districts → modern policy outcomes that match the Project 2025 / CNP / Heritage playbook.

The map wasn’t redrawn because Republicans wanted more seats. The court says it happened because DOJ reframed the whole thing in racial terms, and Texas acted on that.

This case is a real-world example of the machinery in this chart operating exactly as designed.