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Mia Wong
Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast where the thin veneer of democracy that has hitherto veiled, the settler colony of the United States in the mask of humanity is being increasingly ripped away, leaving behind, I think calling it a new Jim Crow is. That title's already been used for something else, but it's a return overtly to some of the worst discrimination of the Jim Crow era. So I'm your host, Mia Wong. Let's talk about what is actually at issue here. And that is a recent Supreme Court ruling called Louisiana v. Calais. On a sort of micro level, this is about the question of can Louisiana just eliminate the two majority black districts that it had in its congressional map in 2024? Getting to this map in the first place was a subject of really intense civil rights litigation. To get to the point where there were two majority Black districts in 2024, on a macro level, what is at stake here is can a state create an electoral map where they spread all of the black voters across different districts in order to make them a minority in every district, thus making it impossible for black voters to select a candidate of their choosing? Until now, the answer was no, because this is specifically what the Voting Rights act was passed to stop.
Podcast Co-host or Guest
Like this.
Mia Wong
Specifically like this. This is one of the very specific things I cannot emphasize this enough. This specific thing, which is spread out the black vote across a whole bunch of districts where everyone else is white, so that black people cannot choose who they want to elect. This is like one of the specific things it was designed to stop. Again, up until now, you have not been allowed to do this, and this has led to the creation of what are called minority majority districts. This is a long and complicated history that frankly could be its own, probably is like multiple people's doctoral dissertations. The short, short version of what a minority majority district is, is it's a district where the majority of voters are from a minority group, thus allowing people from a minority group to select a candidate of their choosing. There are a lot of these districts in the south specifically to prevent Republican politicians from making it impossible for black voters to elect anyone they chose. And fundamentally, what's at stake here, right, is the constitutional right to elect a candidate of your choosing if you are part of a minority group. Right. This is why all of this stuff was passed in the first place. Because under what we call Jim Crow, it was extremely easy for a white majority to simply effectively deny the rights of black people. And this is other non white people too. But like this is primarily black people. It was very, very easy to simply deny them from ever getting to elect anyone by just drawing maps where a candidate they would vote for can never be elected.
Podcast Co-host or Guest
This is one of the bases of
Mia Wong
Jim Crow overt discrimination.
Podcast Co-host or Guest
The Supreme Court has decided.
Mia Wong
No, actually, what they've decided is that if the Republican Party that controls the legislature draws a map that does the thing we've been talking about, where they spread out all of the, like specifically the black vote into a bunch of districts so that black people can't elect a representative. In order to challenge this as violation of your. Of your voting rights, you have to
Podcast Co-host or Guest
prove, definitively prove that the intent was
Mia Wong
racism and not literally anything else. So, for example, and this is, this is the thing that's really at issue here, right? You have to prove that they specifically wanted to do this out of racism and not just because they want to elect Republicans by gerrymandering it partisan. Lee. Which is, amazingly, a thing that's legal to do in the United States for reasons that are incredibly baffling.
Podcast Co-host or Guest
And also, you have to be able
Mia Wong
to prove that they created this map specifically out of the intention to disenfranchise a minority group.
Podcast Co-host or Guest
And also you have to create a
Mia Wong
map that would allow them to achieve whatever other goals they supposedly want, like, for example, again, making sure that Republicans have all the seats in a state, but also not be racist. So you have to create a map for them that would allow them to do this in order to prove that there could be another map that achieves their goals of, like, partisan gerrymandering that isn't also racist.
Podcast Co-host or Guest
It's completely unhinged legally. This is, this is a shambles. We have covered some downright, like, hideous
Mia Wong
nonsense on this show in terms of Supreme Court decisions, right? Like, this Supreme Court has just the lowest level of legal literacy in, like, living memory of any Supreme Court. It is astounding the kinds of just absolute horseshit they are popping out with this.
Podcast Co-host or Guest
This is maybe their worst ruling, which is difficult to prove because there have
Mia Wong
been so many abhorrent ones. Even just from a pure legal perspective, this one is so bad it defies belief. So, okay, one of the main issues Here is section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. I'm just going to read what it says. Quote, no voting qualifications or prerequisite to voting or standard practice or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any state or political subdivision in a manner which results. Keep that in mind later. Which results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color or in contravention of the guarantees set forth in section 1973, baby. So again, I can't emphasize this enough, right.
Podcast Co-host or Guest
The way this is written is that it says that you can't apply qualification
Mia Wong
or prerequisite to voting or have any standard or practice or procedure cannot be imposed by the state or any other political subdivision that results in the denial or abridgement of the rights of citizens to vote in account of race. Right?
Podcast Co-host or Guest
It specifically says results.
Mia Wong
It does not say intent.
Podcast Co-host or Guest
Now this is incredibly important because Alito is like, no, fuck that. Actually, you have to prove intent.
Mia Wong
I'm going to quote from a piece in SCOTUS blog by Edward Foley, who has an extremely long title of the
Podcast Co-host or Guest
Charles B. Ebersold and Florence Whitcomb Ebersold
Mia Wong
Chair in Constitutional Law, is the director of Election at Law at Ohio State University. He's written a book on electoral law. He is a constitutional law professor who specifically does election law. He is like, by no means a leftist. He's coming in to the right of, like, Justice Jackson and her dissent in this case. Right?
Podcast Co-host or Guest
But even he. I'm going to quote what he.
Mia Wong
What he writes about this. He calls this ruling an abomination, which is like a thing that you don't really get from, like, legal people. They don't say shit like that. I'm going to quote what he says about this quote. The ruling purports to interpret the Voting Rights Act Section 2, but it destroys the central meaning of the section, converting it into the exact opposite of what Congress meant for it to do.
Podcast Co-host or Guest
The one thing that is UNAMBiguous about Section 2 is that the 1982amendment to
Mia Wong
the sections test creates a, quote, results test for determining whether there is liability under the section replacing the intent test that the Supreme Court had previously adopted for Section 2 claims. As the text states, quote, no standard practice or procedure shall be imposed which results in a denial or abridgment of the right of any citizen to vote on account of race. Yet the case defiantly converts Section 2 back to an intention query rather than a results analysis. So what happened here, right, to make this extremely clear is that Congress in 1982 had amended this. They amended what this thing said, right? Because Supreme Court had been adopting a standard of intent, right? Which means that you have to prove that, like, these people were like mustache twirling, saying the N word in fucking Klan robes, doing Nazi salutes. You have to, like, prove that they intentionally did this for racist reasons and not any other reason. And Congress went back and went, no, fuck that. If the result of it is racist, then you can't do it even if, like nominally. What you're saying out loud is that you're doing this for non racist reasons. If the result is racism, then you have to not do it. And Alito goes, yeah, no, fuck that. We're just like flipping it back to a intent standard for no reason other than I want to be able to do racism and help the Republican Party win seats. The other thing that fully talks about is the court is arguing that like, Congress can't draw from the 15th Amendment in order in order to like have the Voting Rights act work in the first place. I'm going to quote him again. Yeah. The court in this decision did not need to consider the question of congressional power to enforce the 15th amendment. That is because the power of Congress to enact Section 2 of the Voting Rights Amendment for the purposes of the case could have been sustained not under the 15th Amendment, but under Article 1, Section 4 of the Constitution.
Podcast Co-host or Guest
Congress has full power under Article 1, Section 4 to enact laws governing the, quote, time, place and manner, manner of congressional elections. Thus, Congress can enact a prohibition against
Mia Wong
minority vote dilution for congressional districts under a disparate impact theory without any consideration of discriminatory intent and not rely on the 15th Amendment at all. So, okay, what does this mean? Right. What Alito is saying is that like, oh, well, actually Congress doesn't have the authority to like write the section of the Voting Rights Amendment. They don't have the authority to do it under the 15th amendment because it like oversteps the rights of states to, you know, like run their own elections. Right? So I'm gonna do the thing I did last time with fully's thing and just read the full Article 1, Section 4 of the Constitution. By the way, when something says like Article 1, Section 4, you have to remember that all of the amendments, right, the amendment that got rid of slavery, even like the first Amendment, right, the freedom of speech, that's an amendment that's not in the original text that had to be added onto it. And obviously we have something called the Bill of Rights that like, you know, was like the first 10amendments that was passed with the Constitution. But that's not stuff that was like put like freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of worship. That was not in the original text of the Constitution. That was the amendments put on.
Podcast Co-host or Guest
This is something that the people who
Mia Wong
wrote the Constitution were like, fuck it, this is going to be in the original thing, right? So Article one, Section four, this is from like the original fucking body of text of the Constitution says, quote the Times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof. But the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations, except as to the places of choosing senators.
Podcast Co-host or Guest
So yes, obviously they can fucking do the Voting Rights Amendment. They literally have the ability. Like it says in Section 1, Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations.
Mia Wong
By such regulations, they mean the times, places and manner of holding elections. They could just do this, right?
Podcast Co-host or Guest
So obviously they can fucking do the Voting Rights Amendment. It's. It's just. It's literally just there in the Constitution.
Mia Wong
It just says that.
Podcast Co-host or Guest
It's all like this. It's gibberish. It's like, oh my God, you can just read the text of the Constitution and it says you can do this. It's God. Holy shit.
Mia Wong
Even from the perspective of like, if you treat the law as real, this
Podcast Co-host or Guest
is just pure Calvin Ball shit. Like, I mean, it's just. Jesus Christ.
Mia Wong
Okay, you know what's real and not Calvin Ball? It's. It's these products and services.
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Robert Smigel or Humor Me Podcast Host
Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guy not quite on Humor Me with Robert Smigel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier this week. My guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel help an acapella band with their between songs banter. Who's the worst singer in the group?
Mia Wong
The worst?
Robert Smigel or Humor Me Podcast Host
Yeah, Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard you only got in because your parents made a huge
Mia Wong
donation to the group? To the group the Yard Birds. Right?
Podcast Co-host or Guest
That's the name.
Robert Smigel or Humor Me Podcast Host
The Harvard Yard. They're open if you have a name suggestion, we're open. Since you guys are middle aged one erection, listen to Humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.
Mia Wong
Humor me. I need some jokes to make me seem funny.
Tom Bogart
American soccer is about to explode.
Tab Ramos
The World cup is coming.
Mia Wong
Ramos sending on Ernie Stewart the ch.
Tab Ramos
I'm Tab Ramos.
Tom Bogart
I'm Tom Bogart. On our podcast Inside American Soccer. You'll get the real storylines.
Tab Ramos
I'm not worried about Pulisic. I'm not worried about Baligan. I'm not worried about McKinney. My only concern is what happens in the back.
Tom Bogart
The biggest decisions.
Tab Ramos
You're gonna look at stats and numbers. He has no shot at making this World cup team.
Tom Bogart
And the truth about the U.S. national team.
Tab Ramos
It wouldn't be a huge surprise if our team ends up in the quarterfinals or potentially a great run into the semifinals.
Tom Bogart
The World cup is almost here. Experience it all with us. Listen Inside American Soccer with Tom Boger and Tab ramos on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Podcast Announcer
This is Saigon, the story of my
Podcast Co-host or Guest
family and of the country that shaped us.
Tab Ramos
The United States States will not stand by and allow any power, however great, take over another country.
Saigon Podcast Narrator
From iHeart podcasts, Saigon, please allow me
Mia Wong
to introduce Joseph Sherman.
Saigon Podcast Narrator
You don't think I'm serious about a free Vietnam?
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I like hearing you talk.
Saigon Podcast Narrator
One city, a divided country and the war that tore America apart.
Mia Wong
This is for Vietnam.
Podcast Co-host or Guest
I've taken a hit from Japanese ground fire to.
Robert Smigel or Humor Me Podcast Host
Do you read me?
Mia Wong
They're pouring petrol all over him.
Podcast Co-host or Guest
He's holding matches. I'm on a landmine for freedom. Let's get out. Freedom for midnight.
Saigon Podcast Narrator
Run Saigon. Starring Kelly Marie Tran and Rob Benedict.
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Staying here's madness.
Mia Wong
The world should hear about this. There's a fire coming to this country
Podcast Announcer
and it's going to burn out everything.
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Listen to Saigon on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Mia Wong
We are back. So, okay, what has the result of this been? It's been about two weeks since the court did this decision. The court immediately followed this up by allowing Alabama to gerrymander the shit out of their upcoming election. They're doing this via again the shadow docket, which is their ability to just be like, no, fuck you. We're not ruling on this case without actually issuing a decision. An unsigned one paragraph thing from the court can just dictate what the law is. It's great.
Podcast Co-host or Guest
It's amazing.
Mia Wong
And by amazing, I mean Jesus fucking Christ. This happens about a week after the
Podcast Co-host or Guest
original Supreme Court decision.
Mia Wong
This shadow docket allows Alabama to put in place a map that was already
Podcast Co-host or Guest
found to be explicitly racially motivated. A thing Alito said in the decision that he wouldn't do. Right. Alito says in the decision that he won't overturn A, cases that are like overt discrimination and B, that he wouldn't overturn this exact case. And then they did it anyways. Jesus Christ. Just like, oh my God.
Mia Wong
So the short version of the Alabama conflict I'm drawing here from Slate's story on this thing is that Alabama tried to do a map that would let them get rid of like both of the congressional black congressional candidates in the states by gerrymandering the black vote. There's a whole bunch of court cases about this. In 2023, the Supreme Court said that they couldn't do this and they had to make fairer districts that didn't like, violate the Voting Rights Act. So this was three years ago.
Podcast Co-host or Guest
This like the Supreme Court said they
Mia Wong
had to do this. Here's some Slate quote, Alabama, however, refused
Podcast Co-host or Guest
to comply with that order. Again, like they got an order from
Mia Wong
the Supreme Court and refused to do it, quote.
Podcast Co-host or Guest
So the lower court imposed its own
Mia Wong
map featuring two districts where black voters had a real shot at choosing their representative. The court also found that in defying its previous mandate, the Alabama legislature had engaged in intentional racial discrimination, violating the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause in addition to the Voting Rights Act. Up until Monday, this decision had prevented the legislature from joining the former Confederate states. Now racing to eliminate black representatives from their congressional delegations, Alabama Republicans pressed the district court to lift its bar, but it refused. So they filed an emergency request at the Supreme Court asking permission to re gerrymander black communities in light of this decision. Now, I can't emphasize enough this vote from when they were granted this position, this vote is in like eight days, right? People, people had already started voting for candidates in primaries, right? And Supreme Court was like, yeah, sure, yeah, you can, you can fucking re gerrymander this thing eight days before the election. That's absolutely fine. Even though, again, I cannot emphasize this enough in the ruling. Alito specifically said in the majority opinion that they wouldn't overturn this exact case. And then they did it. It's mind boggling.
Podcast Co-host or Guest
It used to be like, it really
Mia Wong
truly did used to be that if you were going to do shit like this, you had to like, sort of like pretend that you were following some
Podcast Co-host or Guest
kind of legal order.
Mia Wong
And now you just don't.
Podcast Co-host or Guest
You can just fucking do Calvin Ball shit.
Mia Wong
You can just literally lie about what you're doing in your decisions and then just fucking do whatever you want about it. And obviously, you know, as Slate points out, and this has been pointed out by a whole bunch of different outlets, the Supreme Court also had used another legal principle to prevent states that would have, were trying to like, make more democratic maps, both in the sense of, like, not being racist, and also that would elect more democratic politicians. And even though it was three months before the election, the court was like, well, it's actually too soon. Like, it's too close to the election for you to be changing this stuff. But then also now they're just letting Alabama do one of these, like, eight days before an election. So it's so incredibly clear that what's happening here is that the court is trying to allow Republican politicians to just
Podcast Co-host or Guest
straight up rig elections for them by doing gerrymandered districts in a way that lets them eliminate the ability of non white people to vote.
Mia Wong
And this is a huge fucking deal. Getting the 1965 Voting Rights act was one of the major achievements of the civil rights movement, right? It's like one of the biggest goals of the moderate wing of the movements was to have elections in which black
Podcast Co-host or Guest
people got to actually fucking vote and not have their vote intentionally diluted so they could never actually elect a candidate.
Mia Wong
And that's what's being done here, right? And this has been pointed out. It's like anyone who's read any kind
Podcast Co-host or Guest
of analysis of racial politics in the U.S. one of the consistent themes of this sort of, you know, what you would call, I guess, like the era of black uprising, right? The sort of modern era stretching from roughly Ferguson, although I guess you could talk about the stuff in the bay before that, roughly from Ferguson through 2020,
Mia Wong
was that the US was not a
Podcast Co-host or Guest
democracy before the 1965 Voting Rights act,
Mia Wong
because the principle of one person, one
Podcast Co-host or Guest
vote was not real, because you could simply disenfranchise anyone from a minority group.
Mia Wong
And that was the status quo of the south, and also like a lot of other parts of the country, too, was this very overt ability of these people to, you know, not only just like this is. This is one of the components of segregation, right? It's not just like imposing segregation legally
Podcast Co-host or Guest
in public spaces, Right? It's also, you know, like, preventing. It's preventing black people from voting.
Mia Wong
And this is the thing that the Supreme Court ruling has just effectively destroyed, right? It's the thing that, like, made it possible to even sort of like in
Podcast Co-host or Guest
the loosest sense possible, call this country a democracy.
Mia Wong
And it's gone. It's just gone. And now, you know, it's like, okay, like, what. What fucking is this now?
Podcast Co-host or Guest
And, you know, I don't know. It's like, it's.
Mia Wong
It's an even more just extremely overt Jim Crow state. This is what the goal of the Republican Party has always been like, they want resegregation. It's been the basis of modern Republican politics forever, right? It's, you know, dating back to if you want to look at like what Trumpism descends for. We've talked about this at length on the show. The thing that became the sort of religious right was originally born out of like the school choice movement. And the thing about the school choice movement was that it was an anti integration thing. After losing their fight to be able to have whites only schools, a bunch of these sort of right wingers were like, okay, well we'll just do private
Podcast Co-host or Guest
schools or we can do that.
Mia Wong
And that's the basis of modern Republican politics, right? Of, you know, sort of both evangelicalism
Podcast Co-host or Guest
and sort of the Bush administration and Trumpism and Reagan too, is this shit.
Mia Wong
And this has been what the Republicans have done when they've been in power, right? This is a lot, a lot of the Trump administration, like what they were
Podcast Co-host or Guest
doing, like all the stuff about dei, all the stuff about wokeness.
Mia Wong
This is also a lot of what
Podcast Co-host or Guest
Doge was doing was trying to make it so that black people couldn't work for the US government, right? It was a huge purge of black women from the U.S. government. And now we're seeing this on the level of elections and on this level, what the Republicans are trying to do
Mia Wong
with these gerrymandered maps is remove non
Podcast Co-host or Guest
white people and especially black people from Congress so they can just have untrammeled white supremacist rule.
Mia Wong
And they're doing it by claiming both that it's actually partisan, it's just partisan gerrymandering, which is legal to disenfranchise black voters because black voters won't openly vote for the party of white supremacy. And they're also claiming that like not doing this is like infringing on the civil rights of white people. A thing that like is completely, you know, just gibberish world turned upside down nonsense.
Podcast Co-host or Guest
But they can just do that now because they're in power and because the court will just let them do this shit. And so I think in a way that really has not been conveyed in the media and in the discourse, this is one of the bleakest moments of this administration. Right on top of just the multiple genocides they're committing, right on top of just the ethnic cleansing of non white people from the US that ICE is doing, what they're doing right now is attempting to end multiracial democracy in the US and obviously politically I have my critiques of electoral democracy as a concept. But having it just revert back to only white people get to decide who politicians are is something even worse than what we've had so far. You know, it's a seismic shift in just literally what this country is toward. Something that unbelievably and unfathomably bleak state of pure white rule. And the people who are talking about this think that it can be reversed just by voting more. But no, it can't. The whole point of this, right, is to make sure that elections and whatever the will of the people is, is incapable of actually affecting the white supremacist state because not white people just don't get votes. You can't just vote harder your way through all of this shit. You have to actually do things. And, you know, if we don't want to live in a white supremacist society, we're going to have to actually take action to combat and actually resist the fact that this is like, this is just a pure white supremacist Jim Crow state now. Yeah. So this has been. It could Happen here. I don't have a non bleak way to end this, but the common refrain is if you've ever asked yourself what you would be doing in Nazi Germany, it's right now. And I think you can also add to that, right, if you've ever asked yourself what would you be doing during Jim Crow? The answer is whatever the fuck you're doing now. And if you're not happy with that answer, then it's time to move.
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It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts you can now find sources for It Could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
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This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.
Host: Mia Wong (Cool Zone Media/iHeartPodcasts)
Date: May 14, 2026
In "The Return of Jim Crow," host Mia Wong delves into a recent Supreme Court decision—Louisiana v. Calais—that, in her view, revives voting restrictions reminiscent of the Jim Crow era by gutting protections in the Voting Rights Act. The episode explores the legal, historical, and political ramifications of the ruling, its impact on minority voting rights, and the broader consequences for democracy in the United States. The discussion is urgent, direct, and grave, with Mia framing the moment as a seismic shift toward the re-establishment of white supremacist political control via the courts.
The episode is direct, angry, and urgent. Mia Wong pulls no punches, using profanity and clear moral language to underline the stakes: “Jesus fucking Christ,” “pure Calvin Ball shit,” “a pure white supremacist Jim Crow state.” There’s an insistence on facing the gravity of the crisis, rejecting euphemism or false optimism.
This episode is a fierce, clear-eyed breakdown of how recent Supreme Court decisions have eviscerated voting rights protections, with direct lines drawn between these legal developments and the return of Jim Crow-style disenfranchisement. Wong situates the current moment as a pivotal, grim juncture in U.S. history and calls for concrete action beyond electoral politics. The podcast serves both as a legal analysis and a call to self-examination and resistance.