Tuesday, May 12, 2026

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: How the Trump Regime, the GOP, and the national MAGA movement are trying to destroy black political representation and power by openly dismantling and attacking/assaulting the human, constitutional, and civil rights of African American citizens. Leading journalist, historian, author, and Public intellectual Adam Serwer and outstanding Tennessean politician and progressive community leader Rep. Justin Pearson On What is currently transpiring in this national public struggle against the repressive far rightwing forces of White supremacy in both federal and state governments that are engaged in massive voter suppression campaigns via both the fascist Trump/MAGA regime, the GOP, and the racist and deeply racist, corrupt, and reactionary Supreme Court against Black American voters throughout not only the South but throughout the rest of the nation as well,

Polls Say Trump Is Tanking. Adam Serwer Doesn’t Believe Them. | Bulwark Podcast

The Bulwark

May 8, 2026

VIDEO:  
 


Tennessee just completely disenfranchised its black voters after the Supreme Court gave red states the green light to rig the midterms by redistricting black majority districts out of existence—as long as lawmakers pretend they don’t see color when they’re doing it. And while partisan gerrymandering is A-OK with Alito & co., it apparently is not alright for Democratic voters in Virginia to do anything like that to Republicans. Sure sounds like the free speech rules of the Trump administration, where people are free to say what Republicans want said. Plus, the burning rage in the Democratic base, the male doomer industry is selling a bill of goods, and Trump’s very Victorian underestimation of Iran’s ability to fight back. The Atlantic's Adam Serwer joins Tim Miller for the weekend pod.

SOME OF THE COMMENTARY IN RESPONSE TO THIS PODCAST/VIDEO CONVERSATION:


3 days ago

People aren’t as naïve as they pretend to be and people who say people/family are naïve know in their heart that they are not. People VOTED FOR HATE because they are HATEFUL

687

3 days ago

We have a winner...Trump validates their hatred/anger - that's all he needs to do. The only naive ones here are the ones who discount the power of hatred.

56

2 days ago

The Vichy media and super rich super villains have carried the load for the Southern racists during the last 30 years. They will not stop, they must be replaced.

2


3 days ago

All conservatives want is a colorblind society.

3

3 days ago

but conservatives have never actually implemented that when they’ve had the chance. I don’t think the KKK is voting for a Black woman. And I’ve never heard of them getting indicted or their leaders raided. But I did see a Black woman a few days ago get raided for wanting to do the same thing Texas does. It’s just strange the seeming two faced actions.

12

3 days ago

Why did Trump dine with Fuentes or his DHS post racist posts? “One of ours, all of yours.” For example. On a podium.

6

3 days ago Oh No, they don't want a colorblind society. They want a completely blind society

10

2 days ago

1

2 days ago

Even if one does not exist? Can not exist, because of them. Which is ironic.

2 days ago

pretend. Because will never be colorblind. People in this country never let you forget how you are different. They even subdivide races based on place of birth.

1

1 day ago

Hahaha! Good one!

3 days ago

I live in rural Tennessee and I approve this message.

22

2 days ago
 
 You guys used to be more liberal. The Gores came from your State. Senator and Governor. How did we regress?

3

3 days ago

I love Tennessee, and, in 31:31 particular, Memphis, and this saddens me.

2

3 days ago

Thank you! I'm so sick of the cult excuse

15

Reply


3 days ago
 
 Trump does have a cult of personality though. It doesn’t include everyone who supports him politically, but there are plenty of Americans who absolutely worship that old creep.

10

Reply


3 days ago
 
He does have a cult and that cult is the core of the problem, without them Trump would not be in power and would not be operating as a King.

7


3 days ago

“working class economic-anxiety” sh. YT supremacy plain and simple

7

3 days ago

As far as I'm concerned SCOTUS in its current form is so corrupt they are no longer legitimate. Dems who don't support serious court reform are committing governance malpractice

551

Reply

3 days ago

They are not low information voters; they are awful people.

269

3 days ago

SCOTUS is 0% naive and 100% malicious and evil.

637

3 days ago

Nah, Trump voters voted exactly for this. They will never live this down in my eyes. There's folks that will never again be welcomed at my home. You don't like rights for people like me; you will not have the friendship of this individual. That's how it goes; F'em.

292

3 days ago

One thing that I don't buy is that these people are naive. John Roberts is a racist, same with Alito. The KKK traded in their hoods for black robes. What educated white person believes for one second that racism doesn't exist, and that black people aren't discriminated against? It's absurd

257

3 days ago

I am so discouraged. I live in Indiana and racism is rampant here. I was a teenager during the Civil Rights movement and I marched for equality. I am so very angry.

93

1 day ago

Thank you for your work. 


How Tennessee Republicans Are Trying to Destroy Black Political Power

Zeteo

May 7, 2026

VIDEO: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfLX7mWGL4M


“You're forcing the only Black majority and Democratic majority district to be cut up and cracked up… That doesn't seem fair… To target and to devastate Black political representation and the opportunity at Black political representation in Memphis, which is one of the Blackest cities in the United States of America.” After the far-right Supreme Court issued a ruling weakening the Voting Rights Act, Republican Governor Bill Lee arranged for a special legislative session about redistricting the state. Tennessee Republicans are set to redraw and eliminate the only majority-Black congressional district in the state today. Prem Thakker sits down with Rep. Justin Pearson who lays out how Republicans scrambled to redraw the district he’s running in, why he’s fighting for future generations and how Democrats failed to prevent this moment. In the conversation, Rep. Pearson details the history of racism and voter suppression in the South, noting the stakes in Tennessee and the rest of the US and how it reflects on inaction of Democrats. He also takes a moment to look back at the history that led up to this moment and why he’s pushing an effort to save Black political power in the South. This live conversation took place last night on zeteo.com, the day before Tennessee Republicans passed a congressional map to break up the state’s only Black-majority district


“They’re Rigging the Map”: Justin J. Pearson on Tennessee Redistricting Battle

Katie Couric

May 9, 2026

VIDEO: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMrEho2OhGI




 
Posted by at

Monday, May 11, 2026

LONG LIVE THE BLACK RADICAL TRADITION: Charles Hamilton Houston and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson

“What’s Past is Prologue…”
 
LISTEN: Justice Jackson uses history to reject ‘race-neutral’ argument in major voting rights case
 
Ketanji Brown Jackson
 

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court, on Tuesday pushed back against the notion that states should not consider race when drawing electoral lines to comply with the Voting Rights Act. At the heart of the Merrill v. Milligan case is Alabama’s 2021 congressional map. A three-judge district court ruled that the map violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act because it diluted the votes of Black Alabamians by packing those voters into one district, even though about 27 percent of Alabamians are Black and only make up a majority in one of the state’s seven congressional districts. The district court agreed with challengers of the map, who argued that those voters deserved a second congressional district based on their proportion of the population. However, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 vote, allowed the map to take effect. During oral arguments Tuesday in the redistricting case, Alabama Solicitor General Edmund LaCour said the state’s legislature drew the map “in a lawful race-neutral manner” – an argument that Jackson rejected. “I understood that we looked at the history and traditions of the Constitution, at what the framers and the founders thought about. And when I drilled down to that level of analysis, it became clear to me that the framers themselves adopted the equal protection clause, the 14th, the 15th Amendment, in a race-conscious way,” Jackson said. “That we were, in fact, trying to ensure that people who had been discriminated against, the Freedman, during the Reconstruction period, were actually brought equal to everyone else in society.” Voting rights advocates worry that the conservative majority on the high court is prepared to once again cut back the Voting Rights Act, considered the crown jewel of the civil rights movement. 

Charles Hamilton Houston (September 3, 1895-April 22, 1950) was a legendary black lawyer and teacher who helped play a major role in dismantling the national Jim Crow laws and helped train and mentor future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall. Known as “The Man Who Killed Jim Crow”, he played a role in nearly every civil rights case before the Supreme Court between 1930 and Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Houston’s brilliant plan to attack and defeat Jim Crow segregation by using the inequality of the “separate but equal” doctrine (from the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision) as it pertained to public education in the United States was the master stroke that brought about the landmark Brown decision.

“This fight for equality of educational opportunity (was) not an isolated struggle. All our struggles must tie in together and support one another. . .We must remain on the alert and push the struggle farther with all our might.”

Born in Washington, D.C., Houston prepared for college at Dunbar High School in Washington, then matriculated to Amherst College, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1915.

From 1915 to 1917, Houston taught English at Howard University. From 1917 to 1919, he was a First Lieutenant in the United States Infantry, based in Fort Meade, Maryland. Houston later wrote:

“The hate and scorn showered on us Negro officers by our fellow Americans convinced me that there was no sense in my dying for a world ruled by them. I made up my mind that if I got through this war I would study law and use my time fighting for men who could not strike back.”

In the fall of 1919, he entered Harvard Law School, earning his Bachelor of Laws degree 1922 and his Doctor of Laws degree in 1923. In 1922, he became the first African American to serve as an editor of the Harvard Law Review.

After studying at the University of Madrid in 1924, Houston was admitted to the District of Columbia bar that same year and joined forces with his father in practicing law. Beginning in the 1930s, Houston served as the first special counsel to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and therefore was involved with the majority of civil rights cases from then until his death on April 22, 1950.

He later joined Howard Law School’s faculty, establishing a long-standing relationship between Howard and Harvard law schools. While at Howard, he was a mentor to Thurgood Marshall, who argued Brown v. Board of Education and was later appointed to the Supreme Court.

Houston used his post at Howard to recruit talented students into the NAACP’s legal efforts (among them Marshall and Oliver Hill, the first- and second-ranked students in the class of 1933, both of whom were drafted into organization’s legal battles by Houston).

By the mid-1930s, two separate anti-lynching bills backed by the NAACP had failed to gain passage, and the organization had won a landmark victory against restrictive housing covenants that excluded blacks from particular neighborhoods only to see the achievement undermined by subsequent legal precedents.

Houston struck upon the idea that unequal education was the Achilles heel of Jim Crow. By demonstrating the failure of states to even try to live up to the 1896 rule of “separate but equal,” Houston hoped to finally overturn the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling that had given birth to that phrase.

His target was broad, but the evidence was numerous. Southern states collectively spent less than half of what was allotted for white students on education for blacks; there were even greater disparities in individual school districts. Black schools were equipped with castoff supplies from white ones and built with inferior materials. Black facilities appeared to be part of a crude segregationist satire – a design to make black education a contradiction in terms.

Houston designed a strategy of attacking segregation in law schools – forcing states to either create costly parallel law schools or integrate the existing ones. The strategy had hidden benefits: since law students were predominantly male, Houston sought to neutralize the age-old argument that allowing blacks to attend white institutions would lead to miscegenation, or “race-mixing”. He also reasoned that judges deciding the cases might be more sympathetic to plaintiffs who were pursuing careers in law. Finally, by challenging segregation in graduate schools, the NAACP lawyers would bypass the inflammatory issue of miscegenation among young children.

The successful ruling handed down in the Brown decision was testament to the master strategy formulated by Houston.

Houston was a member of Alpha Phi Alpha, the first intercollegiate Greek-letter fraternity established for African Americans.

Houston was posthumously awarded the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal in 1950 and, in 1958, the main building of the Howard University School of Law was dedicated as Charles Hamilton Houston Hall. His importance became more broadly known through the success of Thurgood Marshall and after the 1983 publication of Genna Rae McNeil’s Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for Civil Rights.

Houston is the namesake of the Charles Houston Bar Association and the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School, which opened in the fall of 2005. In addition, there is a professorship at Harvard Law named after him

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FASCIST AMERICA 2026: The Ongoing and Now Centuries Long Struggle To Free Ourselves From the Brutal Tyranny, Oppression, Exploitation, and Homicidal Destruction of White Supremacy, Global Capitalism, Settler Colonialism, Patriarchal Domination, Imperialist Hegemony, and Fascist Propaganda

'All eyes ought to be on the South': Imani Perry and Eddie Glaude on the GOP's 'white power grab'

MS NOW

May 10, 2026

VIDEO: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhJqHfpb3qs

#GOP #Politics #Gerrymandering

Southern states are taking advantage of a pair of recent Supreme Court decisions in order to quickly re-make their congressional maps ahead of November’s midterms. In effect, the political power of many Black Americans are being taken away. “All eyes ought to be on the South,” Harvard professor Imani Perry tells Antonia Hylton. Princeton professor Eddie Glaude adds that what’s happening is “a political will to white power.”


Trump’s GOP’s alarming talent: dismantling multiracial democracy


MS NOW

May 9, 2026


VIDEO: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dh6PFFZOVU

#Trump #GOP #VotingRights

Trump’s Republican Party is carrying out a coordinated assault on Black political and economic power, and the consequences for Black America could last for generations. The question now facing the nation is whether the political will exists to confront those determined to dismantle multiracial democracy.


Prof. Kimberlé Crenshaw: After the gutting of the VRA, 'our democracy is on its knees'


MS NOW

May 9, 2026

VIDEO: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nDGTNPrZAU

Trump’s Republican Party is carrying out a coordinated assault on Black political and economic power, and the consequences for Black America could last for generations. The question now facing the nation is whether the political will exists to confront those determined to dismantle multiracial democracy.

 
They’ve ‘turned back the clock on history’’: TN Rep. Justin Jones on GOP’s forced redistricting



MS NOW

May 10, 2026

VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIGZaPD7pgs&list=PLDIVi-vBsOExyfDOHI3VpzbMRm8ApIx2z

#Tennessee #GOP #Politics

Tennessee has long been a battleground for civil rights, from the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins to Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in Memphis. This week, that legacy was tested again as Tennessee Republicans redistricted and eliminated the state's only majority-Black congressional district. Democratic representative Justin Jones says we must call this moment for what it is. “Whether they do it with crosses and violence or with the sophistication of suits and decorum,” he warns the fight is far from over. They have “turned back the clock of history” and “we must err on the side of action.”


The Shocking Truth Behind America’s Democracy Crisis!



Dr. Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.

May 9, 2026
The Shocking Truth Behind America’s Democracy Crisis! Welcome to our YouTube channel, "Dr. Eddie S. Glaude Jr. TV. Like and subscribe to make these videos widely available. Thank you!! Get ready for short, insightful videos highlighting his groundbreaking work on race, democracy, and American society. From bestselling books like "Democracy in Black" to his thought-provoking commentary on platforms like MSNBC and TIME Magazine, Dr. Glaude challenges us to confront our history and envision a better future.  

VIDEO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6Ne8zMcJ6o 


'They're coming for everyone': Stacey Abrams warns GOP redistricting push will extend nationwide



MS NOW

May 7, 2026
 
 
 

 
Voting rights activist Stacey Abrams joins The Weeknight just after Tennessee Republicans fast-tracked a new gerrymandered map that wipes out the state’s only Democratic, majority-Black district.

Posted by at

Saturday, May 9, 2026

FASCIST AMERICA 2026: The Direct Links Between the Destruction of the Voting Rights Act, the overt political support and White Supremacist consolidation of fundamentally fascist ideas, values, and principles by the Trump regime, the Supreme Court, and the massive white nationalist and fervently rightwing evangelical Christian MAGA movement since the spring of 2024

https://truthout.org/articles/black-disenfranchisement-has-not-been-this-intense-since-jim-crow/

 
Black Disenfranchisement Has Not Been This Intense Since Jim Crow

The federal government is carrying forward a white nationalist backlash to the mass uprisings that took place in 2020.

by Austin C. McCoy
May 8, 2026
Truthout

 
Voters check in before casting their ballots on the first day of early voting at the Louisiana State Archives on May 2, 2026, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Tyler Kaufman / Getty Images

The Supreme Court’s decision to invalidate Louisiana’s congressional map creating two Black-majority districts continues to remind us of how much the U.S. has backpedaled away from the so-called racial “reckoning” of the summer of 2020. The Supreme Court ruling in Louisiana v. Callais undermines another key plank of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, passed more than 60 years ago with the intent of protecting Black Americans’ voting rights and political representation.

With SCOTUS ruling majority-minority districts as a form of discrimination against non-Black people, Republican-led states are poised to dilute Black political power in a manner echoing the Jim Crow era when white southerners retook power from elected Black lawmakers and neutralized Black Americans’ voting rights for multiple generations. During Reconstruction, hundreds of African Americans won elected office as thousands of newly emancipated citizens engaged in the electoral process. The number of Black officeholders declined following Reconstruction’s end in 1877, when federal troops were withdrawn from the South. White supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan launched terror campaigns against Black communities in efforts to blunt Black political power. Many whites also justified their attempts at undermining Black power by claiming African Americans were corrupt and thus not fit to participate in self-governance.

White theft of African Americans’ civil rights and economic power accompanied the destruction of Black political influence following the end of Reconstruction. White southerners moved to pass laws instituting segregation in education, public accommodations, and in the private sector. Jim Crow laws also entailed enforcing policies preventing Black Americans from voting, such as poll taxes and literacy tests.

One difference between the racial dictatorship of Jim Crow and the burgeoning racial regime is the contemporary manifestation of oppression is grounded in what sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls “colorblind racism,” or non-racialized actions and policies that reinforce Black and Brown marginalization. In 2013, Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the conservative majority, justified invalidating Section 4b of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder by pointing to the “great strides” in Black participation in electoral politics. Justice Samuel Alito echoed Roberts in his opinion for Louisiana v. Callais: “First, vast social change has occurred throughout the country and particularly in the South, which have made great strides in ending entrenched racial discrimination.”

However, eliminating minority-majority districts threatens to leave millions of Black Americans without representation that reflects their interests. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed off on a new congressional map which could award up to four more GOP seats. Tennessee Republicans have drafted a new map that would eliminate the only predominantly-Democrat, and predominantly-Black, district. Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey’s call for state Republicans to revisit Alabama’s map is striking because she is framing her actions as an attempt to remain in compliance with the law. Again, this ruling allows Republicans in states to disenfranchise Black voters under the guise of following “colorblind” law.

SCOTUS’s decision is the latest in a series of rollbacks in civil rights not seen since the post-Reconstruction era. Since Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, his administration has sought to eliminate any policy associated with addressing historical instances of racism. The administration’s attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies has led to historic job losses for Black women. According to economist Katica Roy, more than 319,000 Black women lost their jobs in three months in 2025.

Many red states, especially in the South, continue to wage a war against Black history, especially the aspects of it that challenge myths of colorblindness and white innocence and victimhood. After complaining about how anti-racist activists have tried to “erase” history by tearing down Confederate monuments during his first presidency, Trump’s federal government continues its efforts to whitewash history, from its unsuccessful attempt to remove mentions of George Washington enslaving Black people at Independence Hall in Pennsylvania to reinstating names of military bases named after Confederate generals. This follows the ongoing assault that Republicans and higher education administrators in Florida, Texas, and Alabama have waged against DEI programs in education and the teaching of African American Studies, race, and gender studies. These attacks on anti-racism descend from the “Lost Cause” myth that emerged amid Reconstruction, which erased slavery as a cause of the Civil War and instead emphasized how the Confederate South fought valiantly to defend “state’s rights.”

Diluting the Voting Rights Act, attacking Black history and employment, challenging birthright citizenship legalized in the 14th Amendment — another pillar of Reconstruction policy — and eliminating immigration from “less desirable” countries in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East are all part of this administration’s strategy to maintain the United States as a white nationalist country. The “Great Replacement” theory animates these attacks as many Americans believe that people of color threaten to overrun the U.S. and replace and oppress white Americans.

Like white reactionaries in the South attacking Black Americans’ freedoms and white northerners’ defense of segregation after the Civil War, this administration’s efforts to curb Black political and economic power and immigration are a backlash to the global racial justice uprisings in response to Breonna Taylor’s and George Floyd’s murders by police in 2020. The 2020 protests represented everything that many white nationalists feared — a multiracial, multinational, and working-class movement against police violence, racism, colonialism, and capitalism. It seemed that a new political majority seeking a long overdue reckoning with the histories of racism and settler colonialism was on the cusp of formation amid the rebellion.

The backlash to the anti-racist conflagration emerged soon after the summer of 2020. Believing that anti-racist education projects like the 1619 Project lay at the foundation of the rebellion, Trump tried to undermine it with the “1776 Project,” which asserted a whitewashed and American exceptionalist interpretation of U.S. history. Attacks on critical race theory and DEI efforts followed and continued after Trump left office, as right-wing activists like Christopher Rufo waged a culture war against anti-racism. Democrats like then-Rep. and now-Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger and President Joe Biden criticized calls to defund the police. Biden called for funding law enforcement, further undermining one of the main demands of 2020 demonstrators.

Resistance to this racist regime may start in a manner similar to Black Americans resisting Jim Crow and structural racism in the North during the 20th century civil rights movement and the organizing that laid the foundation for the 2020 protests — local people resisting “colorblind” racism and organizing protests and movements against the structures of white supremacy. Minnesotans have demonstrated the power of collective solidarity and community defense while resisting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection’s attempts to round up immigrants. And, as Jonathan Stegall and Anne Kosseff-Jones wrote in January for Truthout, Minneapolis’s anti-ICE resistance would not have transpired without the city’s 2020 racial justice uprising.

Collective political education is once again relevant as state legislatures and the federal government have sought to ban Black history, ethnic studies, gender studies, and other disciplines critical of settler colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. Political education programs such as Study and Struggle and efforts such as the hundreds of Black churches creating history programs to educate their communities are great examples of critical education capable of countering right-wing propaganda about race and racism, gender, war, immigration, and capitalism. Studying how power operates, organizing tactics and strategies, and histories of resistance also prepares us for confronting and defeating authoritarianism.

The only path to stopping this regime from completely disenfranchising everyone but its most privileged adherents is to make good on the longstanding calls by Black activists like W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., Angela Davis, and groups like the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and the Black Workers Congress to transform U.S. society. We also learned from the range of abolitionist organizations and formations in the Twin Cities fighting against state violence like Black Visions, Reclaim the Block, the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee, and the recent collective opposition to ICE that we cannot reform ourselves out of structural racism. The structure of white power that can rear its monstrous head in response to racial justice movements must be destroyed and a new, more just and equal system must be built in its place.



ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Austin C. McCoy

Austin McCoy is a scholar of African American history, labor, social movements, and popular culture. He is also the author of Living in a D.A.I.S.Y. Age: The Music, Culture, and World De La Soul Made. Follow him on Bluesky.


https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/supreme-court-demolishes-voting-rights-act/


Politics 


The Supreme Court Has Completed Its Quest to Kill the Voting Rights Act

In its 6–3 decision, the court gutted the legislation that ended apartheid in this country—and once again gave white people the ability to suppress Black political power.

by Elie Mystal
April 29, 2026
The Nation
 
PHOTO: Demonstrators outside the US Supreme Court Building during oral arguments for Louisiana v. Callais, Oct. 2025.(Eric Lee / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The 1965 Voting Rights Act is the most important piece of legislation in United States history. It is the law that freed this country from apartheid. Before the Voting Rights Act—despite the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and the Reconstruction Amendments and the various civil rights acts passed throughout history—the white majority could systematically disenfranchise Black citizens, as well as other minority groups. White folks could prevent non-white people from voting; they could make it harder for non-white people to vote; or they could simply make their votes not matter. And they could do this by means of violence, poll taxes, gerrymandering, and any other mechanism white people could dream up.

The VRA was the first piece of legislation that seriously tried to change this, to ensure every citizen the ability to participate in democratic self-government. It did this by enforcing the 15th and 19th Amendments and their prohibitions on denying the vote on account of race or gender. Remember, constitutional amendments mean nothing if there is no legislation to support them. Nobody, for instance, went to jail for having a beer in violation of the 18th Amendment’s prohibition on alcohol; instead, people went to jail for violating the Volstead Act (which attempted to enforce the 18th Amendment in the most draconian and stupid way possible). Similarly, every Black person alive in the South between 1865 and 1965 could tell you that nobody got to vote because of the 15th Amendment. Black people got to vote because of the Voting Rights Act.

To be clear, the VRA did not remove white supremacy from politics; it opened a door, and Black political power flooded into the white’s-only space of the US government. In 1964, there were only four Black people in Congress, and zero in the Senate. By 1968, that number had more than doubled to nine. Today, there are 67 Black people and 56 Latinos in Congress, the highest number for both groups in this country’s history.

The story is similar for women. In 1964, there were just 13 women in Congress; today, there are 154. (Always remember that the 19th Amendment did nothing for Black women, who have become the heart and soul of the Democratic Party, until the VRA got their back). And everybody should know that just 43 years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, this country elected a Black president. The Voting Rights Act changed the face and the structure of American politics—and government.

Some people have never gotten over it—and six of those people sit on the Supreme Court. Chief Justice John Roberts has made it his lifelong crusade to oppose the Voting Rights Act and its democratization of political power. He opposed the expansion of the VRA when he was a young lawyer working in the Ronald Reagan White House, and he has done everything he can while on the Supreme Court to cut out the very heart of Black political power.

On Wednesday, Roberts and his cabal of ruling Republicans finally completed their quest to suppress the strength of the emerging non-white majority in this country. In Louisiana v. Callais, the court ruled, 6–3, that the Voting Rights Act cannot be used to protect minority political power from being diluted through gerrymandering. The ruling effectively ends the VRA, and with it the all too brief era of multiracial democracy in America.

Current Issue
 

The nuts and bolts of the decision are fairly straightforward. Louisiana has six congressional districts, and about a third of its population is Black. Mathematically, that means Louisiana should have two majority-minority congressional districts, but its 2020 redistricting allowed for only one. The state was sued under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and forced to draw a map with two Black districts. It did. Then white people sued, arguing that they were somehow constitutionally entitled to congressional overrepresentation, and that the two majority-minority districts discriminated against their white-bred interests.

In Callais, the Supreme Court ruled for the white people. It holds that the Voting Rights Act cannot be used to force Louisiana to draw a second majority-minority district. The majority opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, makes two key points:

States cannot use race as a factor in districting even when those states are trying to prevent the disenfranchisement of nonwhite minorities.

The Voting Rights Act only protects against intentional discrimination.

What this means in reality is that white people can gerrymander away Black political power, just like they did in the old days, as long as they say they’re only trying to take away Democratic political power. It means that even if you can show that the gerrymander was obviously targeted to dilute the Black vote and not the “Democratic” vote (as was the case in Louisiana, where neighborhoods full of white Democrats were left untouched but neighborhoods full of Black people were chopped up) it doesn’t matter unless the white gerrymanderers say something like, “I drew this map because I hate Negroes” or some other similarly vile statement bold enough to get Alito excited. It means that the Voting Rights Act is effectively dead.

I have to say “effectively dead” because Alito spends most of his opinion arguing that it’s not. He says that the VRA “properly construed” (emphasis his, not mine) still exists, it just has to be construed exactly as Alito wants it to be and not as Congress intended it to be. Congress explicitly intended the VRA to include “disparate impact”—the idea that a law that results in racism is indeed racist whether or not the racists who wrote the law admit to their nefarious plans. Alito’s construction explicitly rejects this concept. Nobody elected Alito or the other Republicans on the court to make this decision for us, but they’ve decided that only Republicans on the Supreme Court know what racism truly is.

Alito doesn’t want to say he’s killing the VRA; he just wants to turn it into a zombie. That’s a bit of a departure for Alito and for the Republican supermajority. After all, this is the same Alito who seemed almost gleeful when directly overturning Roe v. Wade and consigning women to second-class status. In this case, he clearly wants you to think, and the media to report, that the Voting Rights Act still exists. I suppose it is more comforting to white people if they are allowed to believe that they’re not living in an apartheid state again. The white folks who are against voting rights don’t all want to feel like they’re Elon Musk.

In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan brings clarity to what Alito tries to hide. She writes: “I dissent. The Voting Rights Act is—or, now more accurately, was—‘one of the most consequential, efficacious, and amply justified exercises of federal legislative power in our Nation’s history.’… It was born of the literal blood of Union soldiers and civil rights marchers. It ushered in awe-inspiring change, bringing this Nation closer to fulfilling the ideals of democracy and racial equality. And it has been repeatedly, and overwhelmingly, reauthorized by the people’s representatives in Congress. Only they have the right to say it is no longer needed—not the Members of this Court. I dissent, then, from this latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.”

The phrase “now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act” is the only analysis that matters. The VRA has been demolished, as the Republicans have long intended.

American-style apartheid was not constructed in a day, and multiracial democracy will not disappear in a night. Given that all the states interested in mid-decade redistricting already have their plans well underway, it’s unclear if, and I’d say unlikely that, this ruling will have a huge impact on the upcoming midterm elections. All it’s likely to mean is that states that were already trying to dilute the Black vote will indeed be able to dilute the Black vote. Florida will be bad, but Florida was always going to be bad, and this Supreme Court was never going to stop white-boots DeSantis from being bad.

The real bite of this ruling will come in 2030, when there’s a new Census and a new round of redistricting. That’s when we’ll see red state after red state dismantle Black and Latino voting power. Louisiana had one majority-minority district. It should have two. By 2030, it will have zero.

There’s only one way out of this, and it involves people using what voting power they have to to send people to Congress committed to multiracial democracy. Congress can overrule the Supreme Court on this. It can pass a new Voting Rights Act that explicitly defines what “intentional” discrimination looks like over and above what Roberts and Alito say it does. It can outlaw vote dilution. It can require disparate-impact analysis, and it can attempt to hold the Supreme Court to Congress’s interpretation of the Constitution through the practice known as “jurisdiction stripping.” Essentially, Congress can say “our interpretation of the 15th Amendment can be enforced by this new Voting Rights Act, and our interpretation is final.”

Beyond that, if Democrats take back the House and the Senate, kill the filibuster, and elect a Democratic president in 2028, Congress can pack the court and fill it with people who do not believe in a white’s-only theory of voting rights. Those new justices could overrule not just Callais but all of the other voting rights cases the Roberts court has issued to try to destroy minority voting rights. Those new justices could overturn the court’s prior gerrymandering decisions. A new court could reject the white supremacy the Roberts court embraces.

All of that will require a lot of political will, but it can start with the midterms. Democrats simply must take control of Congress and the Senate in November. Then, they must win the presidency in ’28, and hold that control through the 2030 Census. Thanks to Callais, this may be the last opportunity for Democrats to do so, because after 2030, if Callais has not been thrown in the trash, it will be very hard for Democrats to wrest political control from Republicans for decades.

Black people have used their political power to support the Democratic Party since the passage of the Voting Rights Act. In response, the Republican Party has set out to kill the VRA and reduce Black power to that of the Jim Crow era. Republicans have succeeded. We’ve got about four years to reverse their gains, or their victory will be complete.

The Voting Rights Act is dead. We need a new one, or the racists win. It’s as simple and as depressing as that.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Elie Mystal

Elie Mystal is The Nation’s justice correspondent and a columnist. He is also an Alfred Knobler Fellow at the Type Media Center. He is the author of two books: the New York Times bestseller Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution and Bad Law: Ten Popular Laws That Are Ruining America, both published by The New Press. You can subscribe to his Nation newsletter “Elie v. U.S.” here

Mystal on Southern state redistricting: ‘This is Jim Crow 2.0’


MS NOW
May 9, 2026
 
VIDEO:  
 
 

#GOP#Politics#Redistricting

Elie Mystal says the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais is reminiscent of the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson decision “in terms of the racism that the Supreme Court has ushered in.” “This is Jim Crow 2.0.” 

"What's Past is Prologue..." 
 
DEFEAT FASCISM BEFORE FASCISM DEFEATS YOU

FROM THE PANOPTICON REVIEW ARCHIVES
 
(Originally posted on February 29, 2024):

Thursday, February 29, 2024

THE FIX IS IN: Brilliant Lawyer, Activist, Critic, Public Intellectual, and Fearless Advocate For Justice Elie Mystal On Exactly How and Why the Truly Heinous and Criminally Rightwing Supreme Court is 100% In The Bag For the Fascist MAGA GOP Leader and Former President Donald J. Trump

https://www.msnbc.com/the-beat-with-ari/watch/n-ari-mystal-240228-205139013789

The Beat with Ari

SCOTUS under fire for ‘trying to make Trump win’

The Supreme Court agreed to decide whether former President Donald Trump can claim presidential immunity over criminal election interference charges. MSNBC’s Ari Melber is joined by former RNC Chair Michael Steele and The Nation correspondent Elie Mystal, who says SCOTUS is “trying to make Trump win.”

February 28, 2024

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=He0IU4-lo40
 
 
The Supreme Court agreed to decide whether former President Donald Trump can claim presidential immunity over criminal election interference charges. MSNBC’s Ari Melber is joined by former RNC Chair Michael Steele and The Nation correspondent Elie Mystal, who says SCOTUS is “trying to make Trump win.”

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/trump-coup-trial-delayed-as-supreme-court-agrees-to/id1314172351?i=1000647482638

Trump coup trial delayed as Supreme Court agrees to hear ‘presidential immunity’ case  
 
The ReidOut with Joy Reid
MSNBC
February 28, 2024
Politics
 
#Trump #SCOTUS #immunity
In breaking news from the Supreme Court, the 6-3 conservative majority has decided to hear the case of Trump vs. the United States on whether Donald Trump can claim presidential immunity over his criminal election interference charges.
 
VIDEO: 
 
Joy Reid leads this episode of The ReidOut on MSNBC with breaking news from the Supreme Court. The 6-3 conservative majority has decided to hear the case of Trump vs. the United States on whether Donald Trump can claim presidential immunity over his criminal election interference charges. Plus, Mitch McConnell is stepping down as the Senate Republican leader in November. “But the fact remains--no individual has done more damage to the Senate than Mitch McConnell,” Joy says. Joy gives her analysis of what she calls McConnell’s "shameful legacy." All this and more in this edition of The ReidOut on MSNBC. 

Posted by Kofi Natambu at 1:49 AM

Labels: 2024 Presidential election, Ari Melber, Elie Mystal, GOP. MAGA, Joy Reid, Michael Steele, MSNBC,Rightwing Judges, The Beat, The Reidout, The Supreme Court

They're coming for everyone': Stacey Abrams warns GOP redistricting push will extend nationwide

 
Voting rights activist Stacey Abrams joins The Weeknight just after Tennessee Republicans fast-tracked a new gerrymandered map that wipes out the state’s only Democratic, majority-Black district. 



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