Anat and I are both longtime fans of Naomi’s work, which includes groundbreaking books like The Shock Doctrine and No Logo. (Make sure to pre-order her new book, End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World, co-written with Astra Taylor, which comes out September 15, and subscribe to her new Substack.) Naomi has spent decades explaining how capitalists and authoritarians manufacture chaos to control us — and she says that AI is the worst offer she’s ever seen capitalism make to the public. They’re not even trying to hide that the goal is taking away our jobs and making worthless the education we go into debt for.

Naomi pointed out that democratic socialism has always scared the powerful more than communist authoritarianism ever did, because it threatens to actually deliver what people want. It’s why the US orchestrated coups in Latin America; it’s why we’re seeing so much elite panic over DSA-backed candidates winning elections; and it’s why Zohran Mamdani’s successes at not just winning, but governing, are so important and revealing.

But when the AI bubble bursts or the next disaster comes, we need to be prepared. We discussed how a great model for that is the “Minnesota miracle” — which wasn’t a miracle at all, but the product of deep organizing work and coalition building, especially with faith and labor groups. Anat talked about how the “Greater than Fear” campaign she helped create in 2018 helped define “Minnesotan-ness” — that being Minnesotan is being the kind of person who helps dig your neighbor’s car out of the snow. That sense of identity and belonging helps make the difference between “flash mobs,” as Naomi put it, and movements that last and spark real change. It’s why some of the most meaningful work we can do is just getting to know our neighbors — the ones who live where we do, not just online.

I added the idea of “no exit” to this equation. Unions and churches are such effective organizing institutions in part because once you’re in them, you’re part of a community that is difficult to leave. They give people structures and incentives to build reciprocal relationships, exercise collective power, and act like citizens, not just consumers. By contrast, as Naomi pointed out, exit is the billionaire’s dream.

We covered a lot of other ground, including a rundown of Tuesday’s election results; how a 2026 blue wave could transform what the Democratic caucus looks like, not just who controls the House; the power of anti-corruption narratives here and abroad; and how extreme wealth “deranges” those who hold it in addition to distorting our politics.

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It’s well-known that Trump’s apparent gains with Latinos in 2024 evaporated after he started terrorizing immigrants and wrecking the economy. Right now, Equis has Democrats at about 55% with Latinos on the two-way generic ballot in the competitive House battleground, a rebound from the 49% Democrats got in those same seats in 2024. But it’s not a full recovery: those same districts gave Democrats 57% in 2022, 59% in 2020, and 67% in 2018.

What’s more, those percentages aren’t the full picture. I used the concept of CDM (Contribution to Democratic Margin) to show how much the Latino vote actually contributed to Democratic victories in key states over the last several election cycles. It takes into account not just how wide a margin Latinos supported Democrats by, but also how large a slice of the electorate they made up.

In particular, Democrats will benefit when Latinos who don’t always vote in midterms turn out in higher numbers. Carlos polled Latinos who didn’t vote in 2024 right after the election, and a plurality said they’d have gone for Trump if they had — but those same people are now breaking two-to-one for Democrats in the generic ballot. Historically about 9% of midterm voters overall didn’t vote in the prior presidential, but in 2018’s surge it was 14%. Carlos’s guess for Latinos in 2026 is 12-15%, which could make a difference in key races.

We talked about how “immigration” is actually (at least) two different issues — how to treat immigrants who already live here, and how to treat those who want to come. Those concepts are called “stock” and “flow,” respectively, in academia. And Latinos, like most other people worldwide, are more favorably inclined to stock arguments than flow ones. In 2024, flow (“the border”) dominated the discourse; in 2026, the Trump regime’s monstrous treatment of immigrants and citizens alike will likely be top of mind.

We discussed other nuances about the Latino electorate that most political analysts miss. In particular, Carlos noted that Latinos aren’t a monolith, and how strongly they support Democrats depends greatly on how strongly they identify as Latino. It also depends on things like age (younger is more Democratic) and how far removed they are from the immigrant experience. The Obama-era Latino electorate was more heavily first-generation immigrant, whereas today’s is more second-generation — which doesn’t necessarily mean “more conservative,” but it does mean less predictable.

We also talked about how network effects and the media landscape can change partisan trends among Latinos. Anyone, regardless of their demographics, is more likely to consider voting for Republicans or Trump if they see others like them doing the same. Among Latinos, it’s become more socially permissible to support Republicans for many reasons — including Latinos running for office as Republicans at the local level when they were shut out of establishment Democratic pipelines. And Carlos discussed how the collapse of Univision’s near-monopoly (plus its greater Trump-friendliness) and the rise of ideologically mixed Spanish-language YouTube is reshaping the Latino media diet.

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Stop Kids from Being Disappeared

Sarah explained that when Trump was re-elected, Stephen Miller and Tom Homan said on the record that unaccompanied minors were a top target. They’ve made good on that threat in a multi-layered attack that’s less visible than the broad-daylight ICE kidnappings we’ve all heard about, but deserves every bit as much public attention and outrage.

First, kids who’ve been living for years with family members or vetted sponsors are being pulled out of those homes by armed agents, under the guise of a “wellness check.” Many of those agents are effectively bounty hunters for ICE — local law enforcement incentivized to kidnap as many kids as possible for $22,500 a head.

Second, the regime is racing to build concentration camps to hold thousands more kids, even though the number of kids in federal custody has fallen: bids for multiple 3,000 bed facilities and reported plans to open a converted military base in Louisiana, previously deemed toxic and polluted with “forever chemicals,” into a site to hold children. They’re building these camps because they intend to fill them, which means more raids to lock up and traumatize more children.

Third, the regime is taking away the lawyers these kids need to help them avoid deportation to unfamiliar or dangerous countries. Their current lawyers haven’t been paid in seven months and are owed $65 million in back pay. Now HHS has refused to renew their contract — while awarding a no-bid contract for $150 million to a law firm with zero experience in immigrant rights or child welfare.

Finally, the regime is trying to take away basic rights for children in detention under the pretense of fighting child trafficking, with bills like the Kayla Hamilton Act that would allow kids as young as 12 to be strip-searched and sent away to a prison with no judicial review, and the Permanent Trump Secure Border Act that would create mandatory long-term detention for children and families.

Sarah pointed out that under Trump 1.0, it took about two years for the public to catch on to the horrors of family separation. Now is the time to act and keep history from repeating itself. Especially if you live in Texas or Louisiana, flood your city council meetings to demand a halt to building new concentration camps for kids. Call your member of Congress to demand that all kids have basic rights and competent legal counsel, which means HHS paying legal service providers what they owe and renewing their contract, and to oppose harmful bills like the Kayla Hamilton Act and the Permanent Trump Secure Border Act.

Don’t Make Republicans’ Arguments For Them

Abdul El-Sayed beat Haley Stevens in the most expensive Democratic Senate primary ever, despite being massively outspent by outside groups and facing a steady drumbeat from establishment voices fretting that he wasn’t “electable.”

There’s a concept from the early ‘90s, credited to the late Paul Tully, called the message box: a four-square grid made up of what you want people to believe about you and about your opponent, and what your opponent wants people to believe about you and about them. Some Democrats have developed the troubling habit of adopting the Republicans’ side of that box against their fellow Democrats — using the primary not to hash out real issue differences, but to pre-load the opposition’s attack ads for the general election. Every dollar spent doing that is, functionally, an in-kind contribution to the GOP. The FEC just doesn’t require anyone to report it that way.

As Anat put it, “‘Electability’ is telling people that voters will never vote for, or find unseemly or untoward, certain kinds of Democrats.” What we should be saying instead, relentlessly, is that voters are turning out in record numbers to kick MAGA to the curb.

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Kermit joined me on Weekend Reading Live this week to talk about his thesis: that the real “founding” we should look to as a model isn’t 1776 and the Declaration of Independence, but the Gettysburg Address and Reconstruction. Thomas Jefferson’s lofty language about equality and inalienable rights was not about how an independent American nation should treat those living there; it was a preamble to a list of grievances against the British crown. In other words, Jefferson was not writing as a “founder” of the American nation, but as a subject of the British nation — it was about his and the other signers’ rights. It would not have occurred to any of them that they were promising the world a new nation founded on those principles for all. It was never intended to address how that government, or any government, should treat “outsiders” (enslaved people, Native nations, immigrants).

Kermit emphasized that we don’t need to bash the founders; we just need to be honest about where they were coming from, and understand that “all men are created equal” only became a promise to everyone thanks to a strategic choice of the abolitionists. This frees us from trying to reconcile our ideals of American equality with the founders’ slaveholding and other flaws, and lets us be proud of a history that includes heroes like Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, and Harriet Tubman.

It also lets us see things like January 6th and the Roberts Court’s anti-Black voting rights rulings in their proper context: an effort to recreate the insiders’ herrenvolk democracy that the founders, especially the Southern ones, would recognize and endorse. And it lets us see why it’s a losing battle to try to argue for greater equality based solely on “what the founders intended.”

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Anat also talked to this week’s special guest, Paigelynne Gonyea — a poll worker and content creator from Syracuse, New York, who was threatened by DHS over a January Instagram post that simply named the ICE agent (Jonathan Ross) who killed Renee Good. DHS agents sought her out at her polling place and warned that she would be in violation of federal law unless she took the post down. Instead of complying, Paigelynne didn’t just keep her post up — she reshared it and spoke out about it. This created a classic Streisand Effect, where the attention DHS tried to bury instead went viral, bringing renewed scrutiny back to the ICE murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Paigelynne talked about why she spoke up, how she’s not the only one being targeted by ICE for her speech (but is happy to be the loudest one), and what’s next for her — from a possible First Amendment lawsuit against the government to a new cookbook to be published soon.

Once I finally got on, we went straight to the midterms — specifically, what the New York Times’ new Senate battleground polling really tells us about Democrats’ chances to net four seats to flip the Senate. Any realistic path includes winning two of five red states (Texas, Ohio, Alaska, Iowa, or Nebraska). But as I outlined here, the path to getting there isn’t about convincing Trump voters to switch sides (although some undoubtedly will). It’s about turning out the still-vast pool of anti-MAGA voters who have proved that they will show up to vote against Trump or MAGA when the stakes are clear. This especially includes what I’m calling the “one and dones,” who showed up to vote against Trump once or twice in 2018 or 2020, but dropped off after that thanks to disillusionment with Biden and Democrats.

Every pollster has to make educated guesses about how many people who sat out 2024 will turn out this time. In Texas, the Times modeled roughly 10% new voters, consistent with 2022, 2014, and 2010 — but not with 2018, when new voters were 20% of turnout and broke for Beto by 20 points, which is exactly what made that race close. The question for 2026 is whether this cycle’s anti-MAGA turnout looks more like 2018 or more like the quieter midterms around it — and the early signs, including a real shift in party ID among previously unaffiliated voters, point toward the former. So forget the margin of error. What matters now is the margin of effort.

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Less amazing were the technical difficulties we experienced, which included the Live unexpectedly ending after the first 15 minutes (video of that first part below) and my audio completely cutting out for much of the rest. Nonetheless, we had a great conversation.

Anat and I started off by discussing Graham Platner — the courage of the survivors who came forward, and the outrage we should feel (as I posted about on Bluesky) that they were forced to be so courageous in the first place because Platner, like so many other entitled men accused of assault while seeking high office, refused to do the decent thing by stepping aside before the story broke publicly. Anat also surfaced the odd symmetry between the old-school candidate selection processes and the more insurgent approach we’re seeing today — that both (with major exceptions like Mamdani) are often more concerned with winning elections than with the actual business of governing. And I argued that Dan Osborn is doing so well in Nebraska not because of his ideology or distance from the Democratic Party, but because he built genuine bona fides in the state by running a nearly year-long successful strike against John Deere.

Follow Jiggy on Substack, as well as at @DefianceDispatch on Bluesky, Instagram, TikTok, and Threads.

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We had a rich discussion about the life experiences that led Doran to become a community organizer in Minnesota — from her upbringing in an Iowa town devastated by corporate greed in the wake of a defeated meatpacking plant strike (which was documented in the 1990 film American Dream), to her theatre career in Chicago, to her life-altering experience learning about faith-based organizing (despite not growing up as a practicing person of faith) — and about the philosophies and practices she brings to community organizing today.

Doran powerfully argued that the job of organizing is to identity and develop leadership, network it at the human scale (in real relationships with 25 or 30 other people at a time), and sustain it over time with organizations that help people channel and exercise their collective power. Unfortunately, not all organizations actually do this; as Doran also noted, we've spent decades systematically hollowing out the actual experience of political agency for ordinary people, replacing the hard work of building relationships with lists and email blasts. And into that vacuum, authoritarianism rushes in — because at least it offers people something to be part of.

She walked through how these theories played out concretely in Minnesota this spring, when her network helped organize the state's first general strike in 46 years in about ten days flat — proof of what's possible when you've already built the infrastructure for people to lead before the crisis hits.

We also began by discussing the final disastrous rulings of this Roberts Court term — and why, as I put it, our side needs to stop trying to find silver linings in shit clouds. A 5-4 ruling just barely upholding the obvious legitimacy of birthright citizenship is not a victory, and treating it as one just allows the opposition to keep moving the Overton window in disastrous directions.

Make sure to read Anat’s messaging guidance on the Roberts Court in general, and specifically on birthright citizenship and the horrendous TPS ruling stripping protections from Haitian and Syrian people who have built lives in this country.

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Esosa founded Onyx Impact with a clear mission — nonprofit research, media, and technology dedicated to amplifying Black voices and protecting Black communities in an era of deliberate, accelerating propaganda.

We talked about Aisha, the AI assistant Onyx Impact just launched — built from the ground up specifically for Black communities. That’s important because, as Esosa explained, the most powerful information tool of a generation was being handed to Black communities in a form that actively harmed them. And given its better sources, deeper cultural context, and more robust privacy protections than other AI’s, it has better results for everyone. Aisha launched last Thursday and has already been downloaded more than 50,000 times.

We did a live comparison right there on the call; I asked both ChatGPT and Aisha how a parent should talk to their son about interactions with the police. The differences were…telling.

We also discussed the fact that, as Esosa put, the opposition understands that their path to permanent rule runs through destroying Black political power — which is why they work so hard to do just that, from the Roberts Court’s rulings to the Trump regime’s war on DEI. The latter is documented exhaustively in the Blackout Report, where Onyx Impact tracked more than 15,000 sourced, concrete harms to Black communities — such as deleted historical information, funding cuts, or harmful policies — in just the first eight months of the Trump regime.

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Prentiss Haney, board member and former co-executive director of OOC, joined Anat and me this week to tell the group’s story and give every organizer watching a guide to what to do if this comes to your door. His core message was “act free to be free,” because the only way to win is in the light: The instinct to lay low and hide behind lawyers may be understandable, but it also lets the regime control the narrative with lies and further intimidate others.

Within 24 hours of the raid, OOC helped launch the Hands Off Ohio campaign. Their courage became contagious; when federal agents came after protesters in Minnesota shortly after, people were already saying we need to be like Ohio — come out swinging first.

Here is Anat’s messaging guidance on the OOC raid. For more on how to talk about protecting our vote in the 2026 midterm elections, see the Hands Off Our Vote guide.

Before Prentiss joined us, Anat and I dug into Tuesday’s primary results, where candidates backed by Zohran Mamdani won big in New York. Brad Lander’s win over incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman is a case study in what actually works: talking to voters instead of donors, and keeping your base mobilized after you win to help actually get your agenda passed. There’s a tendency to flatten Mamdani and his allies’ successes into the idea that they just have a better message or are good at TikTok. But it’s actually about having something real to offer and being willing to fight for it.

We also got into a truly excellent essay, “Turn Out for What?”, which Anat co-wrote with Research Collaborative CEO Derek Johnson. It argues convincingly that “A Democratic victory in 2026 that leaves the operating assumptions of institutional Democratic politics intact may make repudiating authoritarianism even harder than electoral loss would.”

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The conversation ranges widely from there: what Gramsci’s “monsters” of an interregnum really represent, why Indigenous worldviews and the renewables revolution offer genuine reasons for hope, how Silicon Valley’s oligarchs have gone from “cute liberals” to authoritarians controlling the actual infrastructure of thought, and why framing climate change as a matter of individual consumer choice has always been a way of letting the real culprits off the hook.

It’s a sweeping, often very funny, and always enlightening conversation that’s worth watching in full.

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I’ve been professionally involved in every federal election since 1976. As almost anyone who has been involved at that level could tell you, the most important, and unbiased, post-election autopsies are not publicly available. Those that know don’t talk, and those that talk don’t know.

And why would we talk? Why would we spend millions of dollars to learn how to run better campaigns, only to publish those learnings for anyone to read, including our opponents? Nike doesn’t send out a press release about why their last ad campaign failed, and if they do, everyone knows that releasing it is for PR purposes. Same deal here. It’s not that everything publicly available is BS, it’s that without seeing everything, there’s no way to know.

So what are the public autopsies for? They’re about intraparty power struggles. They’re not about what Democrats should say in the next election cycle. They’re about who Democrats should listen to — and more to the point, who they should hire to consult. By the same token, they’re also about who should take the most blame for the previous losses (and thus who shouldn’t be listened to, or hired, again).

There’s a lot more detail, and plenty of caveats, on all of that in our conversation.

And speaking of Nike, Anat and I discussed how the big takeaway of the most candid autopsies we’ve read — like this one at The Bulwark by Rob Flaherty, Harris’s deputy campaign manager — is that the Harris campaign basically lacked a coherent brand. This is a point that Anat and I hammer often. Candidates and political parties need to tell a consistent and compelling story about themselves — ideally, a story that people can see themselves belonging to and being a part of. That’s what Trump has offered his supporters, and it’s the main reason (other than Roberts Court interference, or elected Democrats failing to do what was necessary to hold Trump accountable) that he’s stayed afloat despite so many scandals and criminal indictments.

We also discussed why Ken Paxton didn't just beat, but demolished, John Cornyn in Tuesday's runoff, despite Cornyn having narrowly led in the March primary. We’ll have more confirmation on this when the voter files are updated, but my best guess is that the March primary voters included proportionately more four-of-four regular voters, who are often more “mainstream” Republican, whereas this runoff drew much more MAGA energy.

Paxton’s win gives James Talarico a big opportunity. Anat counseled that he should respond to attacks like “Tala-freak-o” by confidently standing up for his own values, while at the same time calling out MAGA for picking our pockets and being “pedophile protectors.” Encouragingly, Talarico did almost exactly that — calling out Ken Paxton for letting an admitted child rapist back on the streets: “If Ken Paxton is worried about freaks, he should stop giving Epstein-style sweetheart deals to pedophiles.”

For more on the Democratic Party’s brand problem — and some actually-useful free advice on how to fix it — check out:

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Rick’s four-book series chronicling the rise of the American right, from Goldwater through Reagan (Before the Storm, Nixonland, The Invisible Bridge, and Reaganland), is the most comprehensive historical account of, to use his metaphor, how the right-wing storm gathered. It’s not the kind of teleological synthesis that tells you all of it was inevitable, but a day-by-day history — one that I recognize, because I lived through nearly all of it. It should be read to hold accountable all the pundits and commentators who have been making up a version of that history that suits their own purposes.

We covered a lot of ground — the right-wing movements of the 60s and 70s that most historians ignored at the time, the tragedy of how the left and center responded (or didn’t), and the through-lines to where we are today.

We dug deep on the battle between individualism and communitarianism — a framing war that the right won, and that Democrats helped them win. The right managed to convince half the country that freedom means getting the government off your back. But what about getting the boss off your back? What about the real freedom that comes from having the things you need to actually flourish — healthcare, education, information, some floor of material security?

We talked about how making collective demands of people in power is the best way to gain these types of freedoms — and how unions, for all of their historical flaws, have been the only institution that gives ordinary working people this kind of collective, truly democratic power.

So it’s no wonder that people in power, from both parties, have worked so hard to marginalize unions. When Gary Hart called unions “just another special interest group,” that was a key break in Democratic politics — one that still drags the party down today, as they try to narrowly poll and message-test their way to victory instead of building real power and consensus.

Rick just finished the manuscript for his next book, The Infernal Triangle. It covers the period from 2000-2010 and argues that Republican authoritarianism, Democratic fecklessness, and mainstream media complicity have created a doom loop for American democracy.

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She just published a beautiful piece about Callais and her family history in Louisiana that you all should read: “The System My Grandfather Deserved: Our Political System Isn’t Broken. For Millions of Americans, It Was Never Built.” Stasha’s grandfather, Gustave Rhodes (not her great-grandfather — her grandfather) was a sharecropper on a sugarcane plantation in South Louisiana. Gustave organized his fellow workers and successfully sued to collect the wages they had been denied. But then, realizing that “Winning one battle inside a deeply unequal structure was not the same thing as transforming the structure itself,” he moved into voting rights organizing and worked alongside John Lewis.

The conversation covered, among other things:

• Why the South gets ignored until something explodes. Stasha talked about how Washington dramatically underestimates how widespread the feeling of institutional powerlessness actually is, and how it cuts across party lines. That convergence is both a warning sign and a political opening — if organizing can meet people where that feeling lives.

• The incremental reform trap — Stasha emphasized that things like same-day voter registration and stronger ethics rules absolutely matter. But incremental reforms become a trap when political leaders offer them not as steps toward bigger change, but as substitutes for it.

• “Ragency” — Anat brought in a word from organizer Ashley Fairbanks: rage + agency = ragency. Stasha pushed it further: anger is only power if you’re organizing it toward something.

• What we owe the next generation. The democracy we want to leave our children is one that’s inclusive enough to hear every voice, representative enough to reflect every community, and resilient enough to hold through whatever economic, political, or technological changes that come next. That’s substantively different from what we have now, which is a system built with deliberate exclusions that have never been fully reckoned with. The question this moment is asking us is whether we’re willing to name that gap honestly, and organize at the scale it actually requires, instead of continuing to negotiate against ourselves before the fight even begins.

More is coming soon from me on the Roberts Court, Callais, and where all of this fits into the larger picture.

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The organizing driving this is a direct response to what the Roberts Court did in Callais: state legislatures across the South are already moving to redraw maps designed to lock in a catastrophic imbalance of representation not just for Black Americans, but for all of us.

Here is Anat’s latest messaging guide on the destruction of the Voting Rights Act.

The bulk of our time in this week’s “Meeting the Moment” was me walking through a slideshow, previewing charts about Callais and the Roberts Court that will soon be published with a fuller narrative at Weekend Reading.

But for now, here are a few numbers that deserve emphasis:

• During the Jim Crow era, white Southern elites had almost twice the political weight they would have had if every vote counted equally. (I say “elites” because the facially neutral measures that kept Black people from voting also suppressed the votes of many poor and working-class white people.)

• Callais is about to take us back to that awful status quo — not for individual Black Southerners’ rights to cast a ballot, but for their collective rights to elect the representatives of their choosing. In the seven deep South states where majority-Black districts are now in jeopardy, about 50% of Black voters, compared to about 70% of white voters, cast their ballot for a candidate who actually won their district in 2024. After the maps get redrawn, that number is expected to be cut in half for Black voters, dropping to just 25%. White voters in those same states go from 70% to 71%.

Again, the charts from this presentation (and more) will be published here soon with the full context they deserve. I also posted two of them on Bluesky right after the decision dropped. What I wanted to convey in this informal Live presentation was the through line showing how the Roberts Court’s rulings aren’t just a series of unfortunate events, but components of a single project.

Before my Callais slideshow, Anat shared some remarkable dispatches from her recent travels globetrotting against authoritarianism. In Barcelona, she worked with the coalition around Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez navigating a challenge from the far right, and found the same playbook she recognizes here: scapegoating refugees and foreigners, exploiting economic anxiety, and flooding the media zone.

From there she went to Berlin for a multi-country conference on confronting authoritarianism. She was struck by seeing the Stolpersteine, or “stumbling blocks” — small brass plaques set into sidewalks across Germany and other countries, each commemorating a victim of the Nazi regime at the place they last lived or worked. The artist, Gunter Demnig, started the project in 1992 to create a decentralized memorial where you literally can’t walk down the street without stumbling across the history. They reminded Anat of the signs she saw in Washington, D.C., marking the spots where ICE has abducted people.

D.C. was Anat’s final stop on her way home, where she met with organizers, many from Texas, to hold public vigils in front of the White House and Tidal Basin memorials to demand the closure of the ICE concentration camps.

Some recent Substack Live conversations on related topics:

Legal education, Shaun explained, gives students a tragically necessary skill — the ability to translate real social problems into legal categories, much like a doctor has to translate pain into a diagnosis. But too often, the human, social, and moral consequences get lost in that translation. He uses torts as an example: law schools teach about individual negligence, while two of the biggest sources of harm in society — state violence and domestic violence — get cordoned off as something else.

We had a rich conversation about the role of politics in legal decision-making (especially in the Roberts Court); how labor law, which was already too difficult to enforce, has been even further weakened; why public interest lawyers shouldn’t be immune from honest criticism; and how progressives focused so much on winning legal battles over civil rights that it drew energy away from the movement organizing needed to push for deeper and more lasting change.

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Highlights included:

• There should be limited impact on the 2026 midterms, Amy said, given things like filing deadlines and the risks of dummymandering in what will likely be a huge Democratic wave year. (But stay tuned; hours after our conversation yesterday, Gov. Jeff Landry announced he plans to suspend the primaries in order to redraw the maps — even though the Louisiana filing deadline has passed, mail ballots have already been sent overseas, and early voting was about to start.)

  • Check out Cook Political Report’s coverage on redistricting, including its Redistricting Tracker that has been updated to account for the Roberts Court ruling.

• The real fight is 2028. We have every reason to expect Republican-controlled legislatures to aggressively redraw maps mid-cycle just like they’ve been doing, which Amy said will likely ramp up the pressure on blue states to respond in kind if they haven’t already. But blue states may have less room to maneuver, meaning that whatever happens ahead of 2028 will likely net to Republicans’ advantage.

• Kafka would be jealous of the ruling in Louisiana v. Callais: it allows racial gerrymandering (of Black voters, who overwhelmingly vote Democratic) as long as it doesn’t interfere with a state legislature’s partisan goals.

• I presented data showing how dramatically Black representation in Congress increased, especially in the South, in 1992, the first election with majority-minority districts after Thornburg v. Gingles upheld Congress’s strengthening of the VRA to require them. Black voter participation skyrocketed almost immediately after the Voting Rights Act was enacted in 1965, but casting a ballot isn’t the same thing as having your vote count; Black people in the South rarely got to elect the candidates of their choice who would represent their communities’ interests.

• The overall 2026 midterm landscape:

  • We discussed highlights from Cook Political Report’s latest polling of competitive House districts. The D+6 generic ballot suggests a roughly 8-point swing for Democrats from 2024 — which could easily be larger in many districts, especially if disillusioned non-MAGA Republicans stay home.

  • Plus, many Republican incumbents in gerrymandered districts have never run a real general election and lack the political infrastructure (consultants, TV ad experience, messaging discipline) to handle a competitive race.

  • The Senate: Amy said the four key pickup opportunities for Democrats, in order of most to least likely, are North Carolina, Maine, Ohio (more complicated because Sherrod Brown has a loyal cross-partisan voter base built over multiple elections), and Alaska (Mary Peltola has higher favorables and an outsider identity, making her competitive). Texas is a massive $500 million question mark. In Nebraska, Dan Osborn (running as an independent but coded as a Democrat) is a compelling candidate, but unlike 2024, Republicans won’t be caught off guard this time.

• The key to victory for Democrats running for Senate in red states? Timing. Not moderate policies, not messaging tweaks. I presented data showing that in the 21st century, almost the only Democrats who have won Senate seats in red states were either pre-existing incumbents (light blue) or rode a wave year (2006, 2008, 2012). And 2026 could be just such a wave year.

So why do we almost never hear about religion in political reporting? As Robby and I discussed, it’s a third rail for reasons that are understandable, but not defensible. Nobody wants to risk offending or essentializing people’s most deeply held beliefs — but those beliefs, and the institutions behind them, are too important to ignore.

Other highlights of our conversation included:

• Why Trump can’t take Catholic voters for granted. He’s never had a lock on Catholics the same way he has on Evangelicals — and that was before his war on Iran and his public attacks on Pope Leo XIV. (Also, Vance is the one who should be more “careful” about theology; the Pope has been so outspoken about the war in Iran because Catholic doctrine is very clear about the immorality of wars of choice.)

  • More at Robby’s Substack: “How Trump’s Fight with Pope Leo XIV May Hurt Republicans in the Midterms.”

• How Pete Hegseth’s anti-DEI crusade is really about mainstreaming white Christian nationalism in the military.

• Why reporters who refuse to use the term “Christian nationalism” are out of step with well-grounded social science research.

• The enormous influence of Christian media on those within its bubble (which doesn’t include most political reporters).

• How the Roberts Court has weaponized (individual) religious liberty to curtail other freedoms.

Make sure to pre-order Robby’s new book, Backslide: Reclaiming a Faith and a Nation After the Christian Turn Against Democracy, here.

In addition to the book and his research at PRRI, be sure to follow his popular weekly Substack newsletter, Redeeming Democracy.

Redeeming Democracy by Robert P. Jones

Research and reflections on religion, racial justice, & the moral work of protecting democracy. Hosted by NYT bestselling author Robert P. Jones, president/founder of PRRI.

In this week’s “Meeting the Moment,” Anat and I addressed two different topics where we've been hearing a lot of discomfort from folks along these lines. I also gave a forgotten-history lesson about what the Nuremberg trials should tell us about our current era.

Was it a good idea for Virginia voters to choose to redraw their maps?

To defend themselves (and all of us) from a fascist movement trying to seize an illegitimate House majority by doing the same thing? Of course it was a good idea! But Republicans would love you to think otherwise, judging by all the ads that misleadingly suggested Obama was against the redistricting measure.

Won't that just give MAGA an excuse to declare the midterm results illegitimate?

They don't need an excuse! We know they're going to try to do that, because that's what they always try to do when they lose. Emphasis on “try.” We can make sure they don't succeed by doing two things: preparing people to reject the BS we already know MAGA will pull, and win by so much that they can't even try to contest the results. (That's one lesson we should take from Hungary in 2026, as Kim Scheppele explained on Weekend Reading Live.)

Should we really say that Trump and ICE are holding people in “concentration camps”?

Yes — because it’s both true and strategic.

It’s true because that's what they are, as Andrea Pitzer explained in our recent conversation: a place where people are held without due process after being rounded up based solely on what they look like and where they come from.

It’s strategic because it signals that this is an extreme circumstance that demands an urgent response. Think of it this way: can you imagine a bunch of Texas moms deciding to caravan down to Dilley and protest because in America, we don't have…detention centers? You can make that term more toxic if you're trying to free a specific sympathetic population, like children, but most of the victims here are single men who also deserve freedom.

Pop quiz: What crime were the Nazis tried for at Nuremberg?

Did you guess something like genocide? That was part of it. But the first charge, and the primary motivation for trying the Nazis, wasn't specifically about the Holocaust; it was “crimes against peace.” After two devastating world wars, the international community wanted “never again” to mean: never again should any country start an aggressive war, because the consequences to the entire planet could be too devastating.

Only in the 1960s did that narrative shift, largely because the U.S. and the Soviet Union decided that they didn't want the same prohibition applied to them.

When we define “never again” as being strictly about the Holocaust, it becomes too easy to let ourselves off the hook. Nothing is as bad as that, so we can't compare ourselves to it. Things couldn't get that bad. We haven't gone that far. Which means almost any atrocity short of murdering 6 million people isn't “far enough” to sound the alarm about and move heaven and earth to stop.

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Lisa Graves, author of Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights, is one of the nation’s foremost experts on the billionaire-funded right-wing capture of the Supreme Court, and one of the best people I could think of to talk about these revelations with.

We discussed why people should be enraged about not just the Roberts Court, but also its billionaire backers — and the media that erases the influence of those backers while giving institutional cover to an illegitimate, captured body.

We covered, among other things:

• Why Roberts has always been the one undermining the legitimacy of his Court, not the people calling him out for it.

• How the leaked memos reveal his improper, politicized pre-judgement of the case about Obama’s Clean Power Plan.

• The extraordinary influence of dark money, especially from the fossil fuel industry (e.g. Charles Koch) on capturing the Supreme Court, and why we so rarely hear about it in mainstream court coverage.

• Why the “liberal” justices are often the real conservatives on the Court (e.g. trying to defend precedents that were themselves compromises handed down by Republican justices);

• How the capture goes beyond SCOTUS; for instance, the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo, who selected Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, also worked to place sympathetic attorneys general like West Virginia’s who could bring strategic cases like one against the Clean Power Plan.

• Why the “rule of law” tends to mean “rule by lawyers,” even and especially among liberal institutionalists, and how to focus instead on the rule of justice.

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We covered:

• How taxes can be a mobilizing lever. Messaging tip: Instead of calling for billionaires to “pay their fair share,” say they should “pay what they owe.” Where “fair” is in the eye of the beholder, owing suggests they’re already behind in their payments, which is true!

• May Day Strong on May 1, when millions will walk out of school and work and opt out of shopping. It’s a day to flex our collective economic power and make it too costly for corporations to support the Trump regime and MAGA. It’s also a day to build organizing muscle and get more people mobilized to shut down cities in case Trump “goes nuclear” (either figuratively or literally).

• Some suggested May Day slogans from Anat: No funding for fascism, no money for murder, no payouts for pedophiles.

• Who the targets of a general strike should be. In the U.S., we tend to not realize that the target of a general strike is supposed to be the capitalist class, not the government. Most people’s ire is understandably directed at Trump, but he wouldn’t be in office or have the power he does if not for the billionaires, oligarchs, and corporations propping him up. We are letting too many corporations claim to be on the side of justice while giving Trump and MAGA some of the estimated $3 billion they’ll be raising the midterms.

• Why banks are an effective protest target: they’re both sensitive to consumer pressure and have a lot of structural power to stop or prevent the regime’s abuses. Most protest targets are only one or the other. (e.g., Palantir is powerful but very loyal to the regime; Target is moveable but not ultimately very powerful.)

Upcoming Days of Action:

• April 16: 10,000 Moms Go Live: Digital day of action for moms to read children’s letters from the Dilley concentration camp in Texas (toolkit here).

• April 18: Caravan of moms to Dilley concentration camp to demand the release of children held there.

• April 25: Communities Not Cages National Day of Action to Stop ICE Warehouse Detention, from Detention Watch Network

• May 1 (May Day): May Day Strong, No work, no school, no shopping. Sign the pledge and find or host an action at maydaystrong.org.

• Labor Day: The next major structure test after May Day. Stay tuned.

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