American Apartheid

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]The Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. It was the beginning of America working toward the final chapter of black oppression left over from the Civil War. It marked the end of Jim Crow, an invention of white racist southerners that was designed to keep their black neighbors in their place by putting various obstacles in their way to keep them from voting. It also created majority-minority districts that assured black voters the opportunity to make their voices heard. In 1986, a previous Supreme Court unanimously held that the Voting Rights Act outlawed voting schemes that impaired the ability of cohesive groups of language or minority groups to participate equally in the political process and to elect candidates of their choice, and that's a quote. But even then, it would take until 2015, another 50 years, before black Americans' share of the house was approximately equal to their overall share of the population. So, that was real progress. It's taken that long, however, for Republicans to find a sympathetic court to come along and conclude, basically, that blacks don't need these protections any longer because racism isn't really much of a problem anymore. The Roberts Court had been chipping away at the Voting Rights Act since 2013 until now, when the Roberts Court came along to gut Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the main remaining nationwide protection against racial discrimination in voting. It struck down a Louisiana congressional map that had created a second majority-black district. The majority said the map relied too heavily on race in drawing the districts and lacked proof that racial discrepancies were intentional.

[00:01:45]Right. [sighs] And so, boom, like that, states throughout the South began showing the court how wrong it was. This is shattering and shameful for those of us who thought when this nation elected Barack Obama that we'd finally turned the corner, that we'd headed on a path to an America that had freed itself from its shameful past. Instead, I'm afraid it was the birth of MAGA. It led to the embrace of a charlatan like Donald Trump who began his rise to political prominence by launching a blatantly racist campaign to prove that Obama had actually been born in Kenya. This is a man, Trump, who took out newspaper ads calling for the Central Park Five to be hanged from the gallows and held on to that position even after they were proven innocent and another man had confessed to the crime.

[00:02:38]Trump has never apologized for that because Trump never apologizes for anything. Whether it's cheating on a pregnant wife with a porn star or advocating that we execute five innocent young men of color.

[00:02:51]Now, I would argue that Americans are facing an existential crisis. One of our two major political parties has become the white Christian nationalist party.

[00:03:00]If you're not white or Christian, you need not apply. Billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel bring an apartheid South African ethos to the party and Donald Trump is the Pied Piper for the great unwashed.

[00:03:14]That's why people like me are saying that this November and again in 2028 you will be casting the most important votes of your lifetime because if we fail, we're likely to leave our future generations an America looking more like Nazi Germany than a democratic America.

[00:03:32]So, let's help to make America a democracy again. Vote blue this November because losing is out of the question.

[00:03:40]Onward.