<p>How sick is our democracy right now? (Not in the skateboard-trick way.) Jared and Mike are joined by <a href="https://www.aribermanauthor.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow"><strong>Ari Berman</strong></a> to find out. He’s the national voting rights correspondent at <em>Mother Jones</em> and one of the country’s leading reporters covering issues related to elections. </p><p>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.</p><p>Faithful <em>Posting Through It</em> 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.</p><p><strong>Links for Ari Berman:</strong></p><ul><li><p><a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374600211/minorityrule/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow"><u><em>Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It</em></u></a><em> (2024)</em></p></li><li><p><a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250094728/giveustheballot/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow"><u><em>Give Us the Ballot: The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America</em></u></a><em> (2016)</em></p></li><li><p><a href="https://bsky.app/profile/ariberman.bsky.social" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow"><u>Bluesky</u></a> / <a href="https://x.com/AriBerman" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow"><u>X (Twitter)</u></a></p></li></ul><p><strong>Jared&#39;s piece at Open Measures: </strong><a href="https://openmeasures.io/2026-midterms-redistricting" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow">Pro-Trump Communities Spent Years Claiming Elections Were ‘Rigged.’ Now They Support Gerrymandering.</a></p><p><strong>Transition Music: </strong><a href="https://battikh.bandcamp.com/album/iteration-pour" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow"><u><strong>“nu cringe part 2” by Battikh</strong></u></a></p>