How sick is our democracy right now? (Not in the skateboard-trick way.) Jared and Mike are joined by Ari Berman to find out. He’s the national voting rights correspondent at Mother Jones and one of the country’s leading reporters covering issues related to elections. 

This episode reviews how recent Supreme Court decisions weakened the Voting Rights Act, why states like Tennessee have become a blueprint for dismantling majority-Black districts, and the contradiction between years of MAGA claims about “rigged elections” and the GOP’s open embrace of aggressive gerrymandering.

Faithful Posting Through It listeners know this is a topic that has stressed out the hosts (especially Mike) for a long time. Viktor Orbán may have fallen in Hungary, but his vision of weakening a country’s democratic infrastructure to produce authoritarian outcomes is alive and well in the United States.

Links for Ari Berman:

• Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It (2024)

• Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America (2016)

• Bluesky / X (Twitter)

Jared's piece at Open Measures: Pro-Trump Communities Spent Years Claiming Elections Were ‘Rigged.’ Now They Support Gerrymandering.

Transition Music: “nu cringe part 2” by Battikh