The Supreme Court sure seems dead set on setting up some form of Jim Crow 2.0. I'm sure it'll look different in some ways. I'm sure it'll be AI powered or something. But what the Supreme Court has been up to recently, especially in conjunction with the insane gerrymandering we're seeing, is distressing to say the least. But it's also not an area that I'm an expert [00:00:19] on. So I decided to branch out and rely on the experts I know. So we are very lucky to have a guest in this segment. uh Ellie Mistal is a justice correspondent at the Nation. an author of Bad Law, 10 Popular Laws That Are Ruining America. Ellie, welcome to the show. Man, why [00:00:35] do I gotta be an expert in this? Man, there's so many more lucrative things to be an expert in than this crap. I don't know, it provides a lot of opportunities for you to come on and talk about what you know at the very least. And I've been enjoying your writing in this area for some time. So look, I throw out and other people throw out Jim Crow, Maybe that's [00:00:57] incendiary. Again, I'm not an expert on this sort of stuff. But I know you've been talking about some of the recent decisions, the shredding of the Voting Rights Act, as well as some of the obstacles along the way. So we've got the US District Court decision with Alabama. Can you tell us about that? How significant is it? Yeah, well, what is Jim Crow when we think [00:01:15] about, let's break down what that means, right? And I think that one way of looking at it politically is the systematic disenfranchisement. of African American voters in the South. That is a 30,000 foot pretty non controversial definition of what Jim Crow is, right? Now what stops Jim [00:01:36] Crow? Well, you can argue that Brown v Board of Ed is the first kind of shot across the bow at Jim Crow trying to end the segregation, the literal apartheid that we had in America where black people were forced to be apart from, live apart from white folks. That is the definition [00:01:53] of apartheid. I tend to look at the 1965 Voting Rights Act as the end of American apartheid, as the end of Jim Crow. Not that the Voting Rights Act solved racism, didn't usher us into a post-racial utopia. But it made for the first time the promise of the 15th Amendment real, [00:02:14] right? The 15th Amendment says that you can't discriminate voting on the basis of race. And then we had absolutely no enforcement of that amendment until 1965. until the Voting Rights Act, right? Now the Voting Rights Act didn't just improve the ability of black people to [00:02:30] participate in the democracy. It also obviously greatly affected Latinos, it greatly affected women. The 19th Amendment, which arguably gave women the right to vote, didn't mean a damn thing for black women. That was a white woman suffragette uh constitutional amendment, [00:02:49] didn't mean a damn thing for black women until the passage of the 1965. So the 1965 Voting Rights Act is what makes us a democracy. I would argue that we were functionally not a democracy before 1965. And white people have hated it. Certain white people have never [00:03:08] gotten over it. Certain white people have never for a day accepted the idea that we should live in a fully equal country with equal political participation for all. Certain white people have never accepted that premise. And one of those white people is Chief Justice John Roberts [00:03:26] on the Supreme Court. John Roberts has spent his entire career trying to gut the Voting Rights Act. Literally his first job out of law school is working in the Reagan White House, arguing against the extension of the Voting Rights Act in 1982 that Ronald Reagan eventually [00:03:44] signed. Now John, Ronald Reagan is not known as a champion for racial equality. Hardly. But John Roberts is in his office being like, we can't sign this. And even Reagan's like, I don't know, the Gipper has to sign the Voting Rights Act. The Gipper can't be so overtly [00:04:04] racist, Mr. Roberts. That's the conversation happening in 1982. Roberts loses the battle in 1982, but he never gives up the ghost. He never gives up the fight. He's always on that lost cause. And when we fast forward to 2026, when we fast forward to this most recent decision [00:04:21] from the Supreme Court in a long line of decisions gutting the Voting Rights Act. Finally, John Roberts has killed his white whale for lack of a better analogy, right? He's finally gutted [00:04:36] the Voting Rights Act to the point where it's no longer operable. And the way that he's gutted it is to say that uh the only way you can prove discrimination in the only uh unconstitutional discrimination in voting rights that annoys the 15th Amendment is intentional discrimination. [00:04:56] And how do you prove intentional discrimination? Well, apparently only when the racist self report, right? So if you draw a map and you say, I'm not doing this, I don't have a racist bone in my body, apparently that's okay. It's only racist if the guy who draws the map says [00:05:13] on the top of the map, written by Jimbo. somebody who hates Negroes, you have to have that level of proof or else your map is fine according to John Roberts. And that's why we say we're going back to Jim Crow. Okay, really, do you even buy if they had that evidence with that [00:05:33] even? I feel like it is so explicit. I feel like we're supposed to pretend that any of this either on the legislature or governor side or on the Supreme Court side. has any principle to it other than wanting to limit black political and voting power. And I just I don't have the [00:05:50] energy to pretend that at this point in American history. I'm a jackass on the Internet, you're the expert, so maybe you feel differently. This is just raw racism from the Supreme Court, right? There's no greater judicial or constitutional principle at play here. It's absolutely raw racism. People always like to say that, you can't tell what's in a person's hearts. No, [00:06:10] I can't, but I can tell what their actions are. And John Roberts walks and talks like a racist. I have to believe that he is a racist also in his heart. I do think it's that level of moral turpitude. But to answer your specific question, even if they had that evidence, would it matter? [00:06:27] I think it would. And I say that, John, only because we live in a world where sometimes the racists are like, man, do I hate Negroes? Oh, boy, I just hate. Sometimes they actually say it, right? We are in this crazy phase where sometimes stuff out of Donald Trump's mouth, [00:06:47] the stuff out of Magga's mouths are so overtly racist that I do think occasionally even that's too racist for John. Even that's too racist for Roberts. He's like, it's that. what that [00:07:04] southern genteel racism like he's there for the racism. But he doesn't like it when they're frothing at the mouth. And sometimes these people out here now, they be frothing at the mouth. And so I do think that there is an evidentiary standard where you could prove racism. But [00:07:20] again, the racists basically have to self report. And if they don't self report, if they don't give you that smoking gun, if they don't use the N word. then there is no racism that John Roberts is capable of saying. I think he's still capable of being like, well, I don't think [00:07:39] Negroes in Paris is exact, like he's able to go there. what he's literally talking about is disparate impact. The way that you can infer that a facially race neutral law is in fact [00:07:54] racist is that it disproportionately affects black and brown citizens. That kind of racism. Robert says doesn't exist anymore. You know what TYT has always been about, taking on the corrupt greedy establishment. For us, it's the corporate media. We've been fighting that fight for over 20 years. For the cell phone industry, it's the same story, a handful of massive corporations [00:08:14] ripping you off. That's why we're partnering with Noble Mobile. They're the only wireless company with the same mission as ours, to fight back. Their Noble plan offers unlimited data for just $50 a month. But here's the best part, for any data that you don't use, you get cash back. Real money you can spend however you want. 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