This week, we talk about the dismay our friends in Canada and other nations are expressing about the decline of America as a good neighbor. We also talk about two events that are taking place this weekend: 1) Jemar is attending the “All Roads Lead to the South” event, a day of action in Selma in response to the dismantling of the voting rights act; and 2) Robby is attending the Trump administration’s Christian nationalist event called “Rededicate 250” that is taking place this Sunday on the National mall in Washington, DC. Diana gives some hopeful examples of how Virginia, home to the former capitol of the Confederacy, is honestly facing the troubling parts of its past while illuminating a new path forward.

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In this live episode, we talk about the hollowing out of the Voting Rights Act that the U.S. Supreme Court has accomplished with its recent LOUISIANA v. CALLAIS ET AL. ruling. The court’s conservative majority found that the Louisiana district represented by Democrat Cleo Fields relied too heavily on race. In its wake, a number of southern states with white Republican-dominated legislatures have raced to redraw their electoral maps to further dilute the power of African American voters. We talk about the perfect storm of the erasure of history, faulty logic, and gaslighting that is turning the clock back on voting rights for Black Americans and what we can do in response. And we took viewers questions on a wide range of topics in the last half of the show.

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The White House released a report on so-called “anti-Christian bias.” But who counts as Christian in these claims?

Diana, Kristin, and Jemar discuss how this regime is narrowing the definition of Christianity to a particular ideological and political express, while positioning that version as under threat.

This is not about defending religious freedom, it’s about reframing power as persecution.

Then we turn to the Voting Rights Act and how the latest decision from the conservative majority on the Supreme Court renders it all but a dead letter law.

The justices’ claim to colorblindness actually ignores the historical conditions that made an intervention like the VRA necessary in the first place. The ruling is part of a pattern on the far-right to view structures built to address racial inequality as unfair while leaving the inequalities themselves in place.

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