WEDNESDAY: Blake is still playing it safe!

WEDNESDAY, MAY 13, 2026

Cupp says it's Trump being Trump: CNN's Aaron Blake is a good, decent person. He's also a perfectly capable political journalist. 

That said, Aaron Blake's persistent behavior continues to get a pass! We base that assessment on Blake's new essay for CNN. The headline above it says this:   

President Trump’s bizarre behavior often gets a pass. 

Actually, that's just part of the CNN headline. Full headline included, Blake's essay starts like this:  

Trump’s bizarre behavior often gets a pass. That’s starting to change   

The week is still young. But it’s already been a humdinger for President Donald Trump.

In the span of 24 hours, he appeared to doze off (again) while his top health official espoused the dangers of declining teenage sperm. He called the White House a “shit house.” He mused about making Venezuela the 51st state (after having already captured its leader). He struggled to identify Indiana University football coach Curt Cignetti, despite standing right next to him and having seemingly looked directly at him moments earlier.

And late Monday night, he unleashed a wild social media flurry that stood out even by his often-outlandish standards: posting and reposting more than 50 times in less than an hour. Those included long-debunked theories about Dominion voting machines deleting millions of votes in the 2020 election, posts about the decade-old Hillary Clinton email server controversy, a made-up claim about a GOP senator from a hoax website, unflattering AI images of prominent Democrats, three derogatory videos about Black people (including one captioned “Always scheming…”) and two separate posts advocating for the arrest of former President Barack Obama.

It’s the kind of behavior that undeniably prompts concern. But Trump, who turns 80 in June, has so far avoided a true reckoning about it. And that’s in large part because he’s spent more than a decade doing bizarre things in public, long before he was considered elderly.  

Blake continues from there at substantial length. He cites data from opinion surveys to drive his principal claim, according to which the public is growing more concerned about the possibility that the president may be "well, a bit off."  

Could Blake's journalism possibly be "a bit off"—be a bit too soft? For the record, here are the findings in question:   

A recent poll from Reuters and Ipsos showed 61% of Americans and even 30% of Republicans said Trump had become “more erratic with age.”   

Another showed Americans said 71%-26% that Trump is not “even-tempered”—wider than the 62%-37% split that the Pew Research Center showed after the 2024 election.

A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll last month showed 59% of Americans said Trump didn’t have the mental sharpness required to serve as president—the highest such number to date and a full 16 points higher than in 2023.

And the same poll showed 67% of Americans said Trump doesn’t carefully consider important decisions. Even 30% of Republicans agreed with that statement.

Plainly, those are unflattering survey data—but citizens, is it true? Is it true that the president's behavior has become "more erratic?" 

We aren't entirely sure. He's been erratic for a good long while. Nor is that the obvious point.

We do know that Blake stays on the same old path. For better or worse, he carefully uses euphemisms to hint at the possibility of cognitive decline, and he never mentions the fact that major medical observers began suggesting, long ago, that dangerous mental health / mental illness problems may have been there all along.  

Remarkable, isn't it? Even after the experience with President Biden, today's muckrakers can't even bring themselves to use straightforward language is discussing the less complicated, more familiar matter of possible cognitive decline! 

No medical specialists were cited in the course of Blake's lengthy report.

As for the refusal to see what's right before them, there went S. E. Cupp again! Last night, she guested on Erin Burnett OutFront—and it seems to us that she took the predictable dive.  

To her credit, Burnett went out of her way in her opening segment to describe the president's many strange behaviors during the previous 24 hours.

To our ear, Cupp decided to run off and hide:

BURNETT (5/12/26): That's the president of the United States, and his behavior today came after he spent much of the night seemingly awake. Maybe that's why he's so testy, posting and reposting on social media. In fact, since 10 o'clock last night, overnight, [he's posted] more than 75 times.

Do you know anybody who does that, including posting a picture of a $100 bill with his own face on it? He posted that.

He also posted Mount Rushmore with his face being etched into the stone, and then he posted an A.I. generated image of former Presidents Obama and Biden, along with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, swimming in sewage. So, he posted all of those things in those 70-plus posts.

The president had been up all night, offering remarkably strange Truth Social posts. Below, you see what Cupp said when she was asked to comment:

BURNETT: ...I mean, 75 posts overnight!

CUPP: Yeah.

BURNETT: Look, that's disturbing. Yes. Okay. I find that disturbing. Any American should find that disturbing, right? That means you're not sleeping. It means you're not in a good place. Yes. And these include Mount Rushmore with his face, $100 bill with his face. It's not as if he's not posting deep policy thoughts.

CUPP: If our child or our parent were doing this, we'd be very worried about them. But this is a pattern of Trump's. You can always tell when his back is against the wall. He goes on these late night binges to flood the zone.

Go back to all the late-night binges. He was really up against it, either in polling or in terms of messaging, selling something that he couldn't sell, having to answer questions he didn't want to answer, whether it was Epstein or the war or tariffs. I mean, he's done this before and he really is losing a lot of the support he could once count on, both from his own voters on the war, but also you know, influencers and Fox News.

You know, he's railing against Fox News constantly because they are not helping him sell this war or this economy. And he's up against it. This is what he does. 

Our translation would go like this: 

If your parent did it, you'd be quite concerned. But this is just Trump being Trump! 

It's also the press corps doing what the press corps does. For better or worse, this familiar practice—the practice of agreeing not to see and not to say—doesn't seem likely to stop.

ALL AGAINST ALL: In the summer of 82...

WEDNESDAY, MAY 13, 2026

...the fuzzy language appeared: We don't think of The View as a place to go for outstanding political commentary. That said:

On the Fox News Channel's Gutfeld! show, the five women who serve as co-hosts of The View are routinely compared to cows, to pigs, to cattle and horses, to whales, but also to "livestock." 

On the "cable news" program we've mentioned, a disturbed man performing behind several beards won't stop behaving this way. He won't stop behaving this as people like Kat Timpf look on.   

Everyone in Blue America's upper-end press corps has accepted this disturbed behavior as part of the modern cultural norm. Last week, one of the women of The View made a comment which we regard as worth considering.   

Sunny Hostin, age 57 and a lawyer, was the co-host in question. 

The women of the Fox News Channel join the men of the New York Times n endorsing the way Hostin is routinely insulted on the Gutfeld! program, with a sewage leak down to The Five perhaps beginning to show. Hostin's comment was cited in this recent report by the New York Times:   

How ‘The View’ Landed at the Center of a Free Speech Battle

President Trump’s wide-ranging campaign to punish his perceived media critics has come for newspapers like The Wall Street Journal, The Des Moines Register and The New York Times; broadcast outlets like the BBC, NBC News and CBS News; and the late-night hosts Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert.

But now it is bearing down on a new opponent, one that remains politically potent and has a storied place in Mr. Trump’s oeuvre of media grudge matches—the long-running ABC daytime talk show, “The View.”  

[...]

“It is unbelievable to me,” Sunny Hostin, a host, said this week, “that there are still people—despite the fact that they don’t have health care, despite the fact that the Department of Education has been gutted, despite the fact that they can’t afford to buy eggs—they are still with their guy.”  

So said Hostin last week. We sometimes have similar thoughts, in which we marvel at the degree of support the president retains.

At such times, we remind ourselves of an obvious fact—there are cultural phenomena which may be keeping some or many voters from coming over to those of us who are Blue.  

Are we seeing some of those factors on display in the (understandably) heated reactions to the Supreme Court's recent decision about the Voting Rights Act?  Do (some) people roll their eyes and move away from our own Blue American world when they turn on their TV machines and hear comments like this?  

If somebody fell asleep in 1896 and woke up today in 2026, they would simply say the only difference is now Negroes have a T.V. show and we wear nice suits. 

As we noted yesterday, an accomplished person made that remark on CNN this Monday night. Have endless remarks of that general type helped create the dangerous difficulty in which Blue America remains mired?   

We offer that as a tiny question. We would assume that the answer is yes. 

Full obvious disclosure:

The mountains of suffering created by the role of "race" within our brutal American history continues to mean that these difficulties remain hard to escape. But for today, we turn to a simpler question: 

With respect to the Voting Rights Act, how did it get this far?  

How did it [ever] get this far? How did it ever reach the point where states were ordered to create "majority minority" districts, but then were told that the districts they created were constitutionally impermissible.

How did it [ever] get so confusing? That strikes us as an excellent question. Fuzzy language plays a key role, as conceivably does a type of bad faith, perhaps on the part of both of our two major parties. 

How did it ever get this far? Please consider this: 

As everyone surely knows by now, the original version of the VRA became law in 1965. Much of the current discussion concerns Section 2 of that landmark legislation—but when the VRA was signed into law by President Johnson, Section 2 said only this:   

Voting Rights Act of 1965; August 6, 1965

[...]

SEC. 2. No voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure shall be imposed or applied by any State or political subdivision to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color.   

There would be no more (disgraceful) requirement that potential voters would have to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar! There would be no more "poll taxes," no more "citizenship exams."

States would have to let their citizens vote! So declared Section 2 in August 1965.

Given the ugliness of our history, that small chunk of language represented a gigantic societal breakthrough. But that's all that Section 2 said at that point in time. 

Well, time passed, and now it seemed, the two major parties were sharing a dream! In 1982, Congress passed a major addition to Section 2 of the VRA. Some fuzzy language arrived on the scene, along with one rather plain assertion.

As you'll see below, the new language in Section 2 passed both Houses of Congress by very large margins. As of 1982, Section 2 now said this:   

SEC. 2. ø52 U.S.C. 10301¿ (a) No voting qualification 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 in a denial or abridgement 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 4(f)(2), as provided in subsection (b). 

(b) A violation of subsection (a) is established if, based on the totality of circumstances, it is shown that the political processes leading to nomination or election in the State or political subdivision are not equally open to participation by members of a class of citizens protected by subsection (a) in that its members have less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice. The extent to which members of a protected class have been elected to office in the State or political subdivision is one circumstance which may be considered: Provided, That nothing in this section establishes a right to have members of a protected class elected in numbers equal to their proportion in the population. 

You can see the same language here.

Perhaps you can spot the fuzzy language which the Congress, by huge majorities (see below), inserted in that new part (b). We'll briefly consider that fuzzy / murky language in the next few days. For now, you can surely spot this one clear statement:

[N]othing in this section establishes a right to have members of a protected class elected in numbers equal to their proportion in the population. 

Please note: That provision doesn't mean that some "protected class" can't end up with "proportional representation." It does say, fairly clearly, that such outcomes are not guaranteed.

How did we get from there to here? That's a long and murky story. For today, we'll show you what the leading authority on this matter has to say about the way that last provision got into this amended / extended version of the VRA's Section 2. 

Amendments to the original Voting Rights Act involve a long and winding road. You'll have to fight through some of this on your own:

Amendments to the Voting Rights Act of 1965

[...]

As the special provisions neared expiration again, Congress reconsidered the Act in 1982.

[...]

During the nine days of Senate hearings concerning whether to amend the Act, Section 2 was the primary focus —in particular, whether to amend Section 2 to create a "results" test that prohibited any voting law that had a discriminatory effect, irrespective of whether the law was enacted or operated for a discriminatory purpose.

President Reagan opposed creating a results test because its impact would be uncertain.  Furthermore, some members of Congress, such as Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT), raised concerns that a results test would fundamentally alter American democracy by requiring courts to impose proportional representation for protected minority groups as a remedy. 

To assuage this concern, Senator Robert Dole (R-KS) proposed legislative language explicitly disclaiming that a results test would require proportional representation. This compromise won support from the Senate, the House, and the Reagan Administration.  The House passed this version of the bill by a 389–24 vote, and the Senate passed it by an 85–8 vote.  President Reagan signed the legislation into law on June 29, 1982. The creation of the Section 2 results test shifted the majority of litigation brought under the Voting Rights Act from claims of Section 5 violations to claims of Section 2 violations. 

Senator Dole created the language which explicitly said that "proportional representation" would not be required. With that language added to part (b) of Section 2, this addition to the VRA passed both Houses of Congress by very large margins.

A great deal of confusion followed, leading right up to the present day.

States were told that they had to add "majority minority" districts. States were also told that they couldn't add such districts.

Journalists pretended to explain the nature of the legal reasoning involved in various rulings and cases. In recent years, we've never seen a news report which was really able to explain the legal reasoning driving a welter of court decisions under terms of the VRA. 

If not for all the fuzzy language, there would frequently be no language offered at all.

At any rate, there you see the new language passed by the Congress in the summer of 82. Tomorrow, we'll let Carl Hulse of the New York Times recall what happened from there. 

On Friday, we'll show you what happened, just last weekend, when the Harvard professor and the Princeton professor spoke with the Harvard grad. 

People out in the country were watching. With a hat tip to co-host Hostin, we'll venture a guess about what (some of) those people may have believed that they saw.

Tomorrow: If memory serves, this was all understood and discussed at the time

TUESDAY: The sitting president continues to fail!

TUESDAY, MAY 12, 2026

As does everyone else: As if the rest isn't bad enough, consider us the people. This report by the Washington Post tells a remarkable tale:   

Many Americans think Trump assassination attempts were fake, survey finds

About 1 in 4 Americans think the April shooting at the White House correspondents’ dinner was staged, with a marked partisan divide, according to a survey published Monday.

Roughly 1 in 3 Democratic respondents said they believed the event was staged, compared with about 1 in 8 Republicans, according to a survey published Monday by NewsGuard, a company that rates the reliability of online news outlets. Respondents between the ages of 18 and 29 were also more likely than older people to think the incident was staged, according to the report.

[...]

The NewsGuard survey found that 24 percent of U.S. adults believe the incident at the Washington Hilton was fake, compared with 45 percent who believed it was legitimate. An additional 32 percent said they were unsure. The survey of 1,000 American adults was conducted by YouGov from April 28 to May 4.

The survey was conducted by YouGov, a serious polling outfit! And good God:

"Roughly 1 in 3 Democratic respondents said they believed the event was staged."

Please bring on the grand inquisitor to save us Americans from ourselves! Simply put, it isn't clear that we the people were built for this line of work.   

Then too, you have to consider the failing state of the sitting president. Here's one of the headlines he's generated at Mediaite in the past few days:

Trump Posts Image of Obama, Biden, Pelosi Bathing in Feces in New Truth Social Meme Spree

President Donald Trump posted a Photoshopped image of former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden bathing in sewage with former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) during a Truth Social post spree on Tuesday.

In the post, captioned “Dumacrats Love Sewage,” Obama, Biden, and Pelosi could be seen bathing up to their necks in a version of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool that was filled with human waste. 

And so on from there, astonishing photo included. You can also click on such cries for help as these:

Trump Drowns Feed With MAGA Praise in Late-Night Truth Social Dump Celebrating Himself
(For report by Mediaite, click here)

Trump Says the White House ‘Was a Sh*t House’ With Columns ‘Falling Down’ When He Moved Back In
(For report by Mediaite, click here)

Trump ‘Seriously Considering Making Venezuela the 51st State,’ Fox News Reports
(For report by Mediaite, click here)

And on and on, with little respite, from there. 

Cognitive decline is always a human tragedy. So is serious mental illness, especially where such medical issues may have preceded a later decline.  In this instance, for obvious reasons, those conditions are also dangerous.

That said, we the people simply aren't built for this demanding line of work. Meanwhile, the sitting president clearly seems to be hanging on by a thread.    

Also, the mainstream press corps is still determined to avert their gaze from what's sitting right there before them. Along the way, those of us in Blue America are telling the world things like this:

If somebody fell asleep in 1896 and woke up today in 2026, they would simply say the only difference is now Negroes have a T.V. show and we wear nice suits.

We're giving you the anthropology. Anthropology can be cruel, and it hurts!

ALL AGAINST ALL: Bakari Sellers is a high achiever!

TUESDAY, MAY 12, 2026

But also, here's something he said: Last evening, Abby Phillip imagined a world where "the war of the all against all" had completed its race to the bottom.  

Phillip may be the most dignified person in all of cable news. Ironically, she hosts CNN Newsnight with Andy Phillip, which may be the least signified of all our "cable news" programs, until you cross the border and enter the disordered realm of an outright departure like Gutfeld!  

Phillip is thoroughly bright. Last night, she briefly followed a dystopian path out of the recent Supreme Court ruling concerning the Voting Rights Act:  

PHILLIP (5/11/26): One of the interesting things about Tennessee that we should also keep in mind is—that [Memphis] district that they did away with existed prior to the Voting Rights Act. So Memphis, as a city, has been a district even before they were trying to rectify racial discrimination with the Voting Rights Act.

So you know, we're going to start to see—maybe Virginia might try again and create that. Maybe they might try to create an 11-0 map because now, according to the Supreme Court, you can. We might live in a country where, all around the country, we have states where the minority political party has effectively zero representation in Congress.  

For the CNN transcript, click this.

Yikes! At the end of that presentation, Phillip had pictured a dystopian future—a FutureWorld run like this:

Under current arrangements, "political gerrymandering" is legal; "racial gerrymandering" is not. Could the day come, Phillip now asked, when various states—possibly even all fifty—have gerrymandered their maps in such a way that the dominant party in that state was winning every House seat? 

Under current arrangements, could a day come, Phillip asked, where Democrats win all eleven House seats in Virginia—not just the ten seats the state's Democrats continue to seek through their proposed new congressional map?  Could a day come where every state was gerrymandered to that extent? 

Could some such day ever arrive, in all fifty states? Almost surely not! But Tennessee is seeking to eliminate its lone Democratic House district—the district which currently includes "most of Memphis and its inner suburbs," though not the wealthier eastern parts of the city.

Assuming that proposal succeeds, Tennessee will have nine Republican-friendly districts and none that favors Democrats! (For better or worse, Massachusetts is already configured that way, whether through gerrymandering or not.)

Under current rules of the game, there's nothing which says that some such arrangement is illegal or unconstitutional. Unless the Congress acts to regulate gerrymandering, partisan gerrymandering is legal and constitutional, no matter how squiggly are the district lines which create a map of that type.  

Phillip was picturing a world which included a lot more partisan gerrymandering by the various states. As our nation's "war of the all against all" proceeds, Tennessee may soon have a one-party House delegation, with other states hoping to follow. 

For the record, Phillip is a Harvard grad; she's also plenty smart. Below, you get a tiny glimpse of the route this highly dignified person took on the way to her current post:   

Abby Phillip 

Abigail Daniella Phillip (born November 1988) is an American CNN news anchor who anchors CNN NewsNight and CNN Saturday Morning Table for Five. She previously worked for Politico covering the Obama White House, The Washington Post as a national political reporter, and ABC News as a digital reporter for politics.  

Of Afro-Trinidadian descent, Abby Phillip was born in Alexandria, Virginia, to June Phillip, now a realtor, and Carlos Phillip, a teacher and later an educational psychologist. She has five siblings. When she was a child, the family briefly moved back to Trinidad and Tobago and returned to the U.S. when she was nine years old. The family moved to Germantown, Maryland, before settling in Bowie, Maryland.

Phillip attended Bowie High School. In 2010, she graduated from Harvard College with a Bachelor of Arts in government, after originally intending to study pre-med. At Harvard, Phillip wrote for The Harvard Crimson. 

And so on from there, leading to last night's program, where a bit of street-fighting broke out.

Last night, Phillips pictured a dystopian future, and the dystopian present her producers have wrought briefly crashed down on her head. What happened last night after Phillip spoke? 

Eventually, her program briefly took part in the all against all, with Mediaite eager to tattle:   

‘Don’t Be a D*ck’: Bakari Sellers Scolds ‘Utterly Disrespectful’ Kevin O’Leary in Tense Exchange 

CNN NewsNight panelist Bakari Sellers scolded “utterly disrespectful” Kevin O’Leary in a tense exchange on Monday night.

The heated conversation unfurled as the panelists discussed red states’ recent pushes to redraw their congressional maps, after the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the path for Alabama to eliminate one of two largely Black congressional districts.

O’Leary told his fellow panelists to “get over” the Supreme Court’s decision and map redraws.   

[...]

Sellers, who is no stranger to tense exchanges with O’Leary, criticized him for his comments.    

Briefly, things went downhill from there as Sellers dropped a D-bomb on O'Leary. To appearances, that almost seems like the way this cable news program has been designed to work. 

Under that theory, O'Leary had been booked on the program because he does behave like a "d*ck!" Producers know that O'Leary—co-host of CNBC's Shark Tank—can routinely be counted on to perform that role. 

How did a signified person like Phillip ever get tangled up in a shoutfest program like this? We can't answer that question—but CNN NewsNight routinely functions as a version of the old Crossfire program on a potent diet of steroids. 

It's a program whose panelists are selected with the knowledge that they will end up getting into high-decibel, name-calling fights. 

Under this theory, O'Leary was booked because he is inclined to be "utterly disrespectful" of those with whom he disagrees. With apologies, a person could imagine that Sellers was booked, not so much because he would end up calling O'Leary names, but perhaps because he would open the discussion of the recent Supreme Court decision by making a statement like this:

SELLERS: I want to take a step back and look at this from a 50,000-foot view. 

To be completely honest, I think Ashley [Etienne] and I have to wrestle with the fact that we are going to be the first generation [of black Americans] to actually leave this country worse than the one that we inherited. And I think, for black millennials, the progress that our parents and grandparents gave us, that we're watching being ripped away from us, is something that our generation's going to have to really wrestle with in figuring out how we get out of this conundrum.

If somebody fell asleep in 1896 and woke up today in 2026, they would simply say the only difference is now Negroes have a T.V. show and we wear nice suits. They've—they swapped out Klan hoods for Brooks Brothers suits. And that is the problem. 

I mean, Plessy v. Ferguson was 7-1, and it gave birth to 50 years of Jim Crow. What we have with this Court right now, what we're seeing is watching people who have fought and died and bled so that we would have access to the ballot box, so that we would have access to our voices being heard in Congress, being ripped away. 

Sellers is obviously very smart. In our book, he's an impressive high achiever. The leading authority speaks:

Bakari Sellers

Bakari T. Sellers is an American attorney, political commentator, and politician.

Sellers served in the South Carolina House of Representatives for the 90th District from 2006 to 2014, and was the 2014 Democratic nominee for Lieutenant Governor in South Carolina. Since 2015, Sellers has served as a political commentator on CNN.

Sellers was born on September 18, 1984, and is the son of Gwendolyn Sellers and civil rights activist and professor Cleveland Sellers. He grew up in Bamberg County, South Carolina, and was educated at Orangeburg-Wilkinson High School, a public high school in Orangeburg. 

In 2005, Sellers earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in African-American Studies from Morehouse College, a private all-male and historically black, liberal arts college, in Atlanta. In 2008, he earned a Juris Doctor from the University of South Carolina School of Law. Sellers has worked for Congressman James Clyburn and former Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin.

[...]

Sellers represented South Carolina's 90th district in the lower house of the state legislature from 2006 to 2014, becoming the youngest African American person elected official in the country at age 22.

In our book, Sellers is a high achiever. Last night, he also said this:

If somebody fell asleep in 1896 and woke up today in 2026, they would simply say the only difference is now Negroes have a T.V. show and we wear nice suits. 

Meanwhile, who are the people who have "swapped out Klan hoods for Brooks Brothers suits," thereby creating "the problem?"  Presumably, that would be southern Republican politicians, but also the Supreme Court majority, or so it might possibly seem. 

That said, might we add a further thought? Is it possible that Sellers' statement about the sweep of American history might represent one of the ways we Blues help create "the problem?"

The Supreme Court's recent decision has exacerbated a pre-existing war of the all against all. In our view, O'Leary was briefly disrespectful as Sellers spoke last night. In our view, his endless inanity on programs like Gutfeld! contribute to the current version of the very dangerous "problem we all [currently] live with."

But how about this? As our former nation slides toward the sea, is it possible that Sellers, however well intentioned, may be an unintentional part of the growing problem too?

At this site, we want to get to the heart of the matter involved in the twists and turns of the Voting Rights Act down through the annals of time. We even want to show you the language which was added to Section 2 of the VRA in 1982—the addition to Section 2 which included this specific statement:

Provided, That nothing in this section establishes a right to have members of a protected class elected in numbers equal to their proportion in the population.

Say what? How did we get from that explicit 1982 provision to the explicit "racial gerrymandering" of the 1990s (and beyond), and now back again to the current state of affairs?

Simply put, our American discourse isn't mature enough to cover so complex a topic! But before we attempt to tackle that sprawling topic, we want to ask an overdue, obvious question:

When will we self-impressed denizens of Blue America come to see ourselves in the way others do? 

Also, is it possible that our own behavior has perhaps, in some admittedly tiny way, possibly helped to lead our failing nation to this dangerous killing ground? Do we Blues keep finding ways to fall short as we play this dangerous game?

Tomorrow: The Harvard professor and the Princeton professor speak with the rising star

MONDAY: Nicholas Kristof reports from the world!

MONDAY, MAY 11, 2026

Attention should be paid: Putting it mildly, the New York Times' Nicholas Kristof is in the middle of a very distinctive journalistic career.   

Routinely, he describes the world we actually live in. With apologies for what follows, so it is today.  Headline included, his essay starts as shown:

The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians   

It’s a simple proposition: Whatever our views of the Middle East conflict, we should be able to unite in condemning rape.

Supporters of Israel made that point after the brutal sexual assaults against Israeli women during the Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Benjamin Netanyahu and many U.S. senators, including Marco Rubio, condemned that sexual violence, and Netanyahu rightly called on “all civilized leaders” to “speak up.”

And yet in wrenching interviews, Palestinians have recounted to me a pattern of widespread Israeli sexual violence against men, women and even children—by soldiers, settlers, interrogators in the Shin Bet internal security agency and, above all, prison guards.  

There is no evidence that Israeli leaders order rapes. But in recent years they have built a security apparatus where sexual violence has become, as a United Nations report put it last year, one of Israel’s “standard operating procedures” and “a major element in the ill treatment of Palestinians.” A report out last month, from the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a Geneva-based advocacy group often critical of Israel, concludes that Israel employs “systematic sexual violence” that is “widely practiced as part of an organized state policy.”  

That's the way today's essay starts. The testimony by victims, named and unnamed, begins after that. We suppose we should include some such material as this:

[Continuing directly from above]
What does this standard operating procedure look like? Sami al-Sai, 46, a freelance journalist, says that as he was being taken to a prison cell after his detention in 2024, a group of guards threw him to the ground.

“They were all hitting me, and one stepped on my head and neck,” he said. “Someone pulled my pants down. They pulled down my boxers.” And then one of the guards pulled out a rubber baton used to beat prisoners.

“They were trying to force it into my rectum, and I was bracing myself to prevent it, but I couldn’t,” he said, speaking with increasing anxiety. “It was so painful.” The guards were laughing at him, he said. “Then I heard someone say, ‘Give me the carrots,’” he recalled, adding that they then used a carrot. “It was extremely painful,” he said. “I was praying for death.”  

And so on at length from there. This too is part of the world.

We're reminded of a discussion we had with a person whose memory we treasure when we were both 17. The topic that day was this:  

If a person knows that suffering is happening around the world, doesn't that person have an obligation to go off into the world and try to address it?  

We didn't want the answer to be yes, but it seemed to us that it was.  

That was the spring of 1965. The eucalyptus trees would have been extremely fragrant. This next connection is much more recent:

Why have some young people, perhaps on college campuses, sometimes seemed to be less sympathetic to Israel (at least as Israel currently functions), and more "pro-Palestinian," than their elders may tend to be? 

Several years ago, we suggested a possible answer. It could be that the younger people know certain things about that endlessly tragic situation that their elders may not know.  

(Teach your parents well, the famous song suggested.)

The younger people may know things that their parents don't! That doesn't mean that the younger people will have perfect judgment concerning the things they know because, of course, they won't.

Nicholas Kristof is off in the world! Also, as we all know, reports like his long report today will almost always lead nowhere.

ALL AGAINST ALL: We Blues keep looking for ways to lose...

MONDAY, MAY 11, 2026

...this war of the all against all: Why does a person watch Fox & Friends Weekend? Perhaps for the chance to see presentations like the we'll link to below.   

It was quite a presentation! Here's the way it went down:

Yesterday morning, in the 6 o'clock hour, the friends were discussing the sudden turn of events in the redistricting wars.

For one thing, the state of Virginia's Supreme Court had rejected Virginia's proposed redistricting map—the map which was designed to let Virginia's Dems win ten of eleven House seats.

Also, the United States Supreme Court had ruled that co-called "racial gerrymandering"—the deliberate construction of so-called "majority minority" congressional districts—violates constitutional strictures.

With that pair of judicial decisions, the tide does perhaps seem to have turned against the Democrats in the ongoing, highly unusual, mid-census redistricting war. As our former nation slides toward the sea, it's turning into a "war of the all against all"—something resembling the kind of war Thomas Hobbes once described:

Bellum omnium contra omnes

Bellum omnium contra omnes, a Latin phrase meaning "the war of all against all," is the description that Thomas Hobbes gives to human existence in the state-of-nature thought experiment that he conducts in De Cive (1642) and Leviathan (1651)...   

In Leviathan itself, Hobbes speaks of "war of every one against every one," of "a war of every man against every man" and of "a perpetual war of every man against his neighbor," but the Latin phrase occurs in De Cive.

And so on from there.

In Hobbes, it's every individual for him or herself without the various protections afforded by the state. In fairness, that isn't quite what we're facing today, as the nation's governors change district maps like hockey teams changing lines in the fly.

This isn't quite "the war of the all against all." But if you throw in cable news and the nation's podcasts, it starts to come pretty darn close!

In the current redistricting war, it's a war into which two tribes may descend when one or both has abandoned all adherence to prevailing societal norms—and sure enough:

We're now suck in a deeply consequential partisan war. And, though your mileage may differ from ours, it seems to us that those of us in Blue America keep looking for ways to lose it!

We return you now to the conversation we watched on yesterday's Fox & Friends Weekend:

Yesterday morning, there they sat! Two of the regular weekend friends were present, joined by substitute friend Kevin Corke. 

As you can see by clicking our link, a festive atmosphere prevailed. 

The friends were chuckling about the recent turn of events in the redistricting rampage. We'll start with Rachel Campos-Duffy, who chuckled as she said this:

CAMPOS-DUFFY (5/10/26): It's so crazy. They always go back to this!

First of all, we've been talking about the freakout on the side of the Democrats. We haven't been talking about the elation that's been happening on the Republican side, because this is not—

They weren't sure how this was going to turn out, and it really did come up roses for them.

Briefly, let's be fair:

At this point, it does look like the Republicans may emerge as winners of this race-to-the-bottom redistricting war—of this Red versus Blue tribal war which pits the all against all.

Maybe it won't turn out that way! But maybe it actually will. 

Imaginably, the GOP could retain control of the House in November's midterm elections! But plainly, that's the way it seemed to the friends as their presentation continued:

CAMPOS-DUFFY (continuing directly): Look at this map. It really couldn't have been worse for the Democrats, but they started this war. 

It's just that the Republicans ended up looking like they're going to be winning this one.  And it's going to save them in the midterms, Kevin!

CORKE: I think so, for sure. 

Say what? It was the Democrats who started this highly unusual mid-census redistricting war? That's what Campos-Duffy said, and no one challenged her statement.  

Full disclosure! As our nation continues to split in two, we the people, Red and Blue, tend to hear differing sets of factual claims:

In Blue America, we hear that President Trump started this highly unusual war when he insisted that the state of Texas rework its House map.  

That's what we Blues hear. But over on the Fox News Channel, viewers tend to hear that it really started in New York, or possibly up in the New England states, where no Republican House members currently exist. 

(The New England states have twenty-one House members. At present, all twenty-one are Democrats.)

For better or worse, those are the dueling presentations our two tribes tend to hear. Whatever she may have meant by her statement, you can see what Campos-Duffy now said. 

Moments before, she had played tape of five liberals and Democrats allegedly bemoaning the newly emerging state of play in the redistricting wars. Speaking of the last person shown, this is what Campos-Duffy, interrupted by Corke, had laughingly said:  

CAMPOS-DUFFY [laughing]: They're going back to that one! It's not gonna work!  You started this—

CORKE: I was looking this up, and I can't believe he actually said that! I've got it in my notes. Come on!

CAMPOS-DUFFY (as shown above): It's so crazy. They always go back to this!...   

And so on from there. The friends were chuckling about what had been said—but what were they laughing about? 

They were chuckling about what Elie Mystal had said. On Saturday, he had appeared on the Velshi show on MS NOW. 

It isn't going to work, Campos Duffy said—but what was she laughing about? As you can see on the Fox & Friends Weekend tape, here's (a tiny part of) what Mystal had said:  

MYSTAL (videotape, 5/9/26): It is being framed as a Democrat versus Republican issue, as a battle for the soul of the House of Representatives. It is not. It is an attack by white people against the very concept of black representation. It is Jim Crow 2.0.

CAMPOS-DUFFY [laughing]: They're going back to that one! It's not gonna work!   

So it went as the friends played a brief excerpt from Mystal's extensive remarks. Rightly or wrongly, the friends all thought that Mystal's approach wasn't going to work for Dems.

You can see Mystal's full remarks on the Velshi program simply by clicking this. Regarding his extensive remarks, we would offer this:   

Except at one brief point, Mystal didn't criticize President Trump, or Republican pols, for the new redistricting surge in some southern states. Instead, he seemed to criticize "white people." 

In fact, he seemed to frame the situation that way again and again and again. By clicking, you can see Mystal's full remarks, with Velshi nodding along:

Rightly or wrongly, he said the United States Supreme Court had issued "a white supremacist decision." He said the decision by the Court was "an attack on black people specifically" in search of "a reconstituted apartheid state." 

He compared the Supreme Court's decision to Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), adding this:  

When white people get it in their heads that they are allowed—to use Trump's word, that they are "entitled"—to be this racist, that's the kind of generational-long timeline we're talking about.

Soon, he added this remark about These White People Today:

White people aren't going through a phase right now. They have decided, since 1964, that the project of a multi-racial, multi-ethnic democracy, based on fairness and justice, is not a project they want to be in.

At one point, he did refer to"the few whites of good conscience" which our country apparently contains. He said they've worked in favor of that project, but then he added this:

Unless white people get over themselves, unless they reverse themselves and their ancestors and their voting habits since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, they will get exactly the racist country that they have long desired.

These White People Today! Mystal went on at substantial length, with Velshi seeming to agree with his striking generalizations. 

Mystal was speaking about the peregrinations of the venerable Voting Rights Act—about its absurdly complex and incoherent political / judicial history. But mostly, it seemed that he was speaking about These White People Today.

Over the weekend, we saw several chunks of peculiar commentary on several MS NOW programs. That said, Mystal's presentation, which on one occasion seemed downright delusional, pretty much took the cake.

On this campus, reaction was instantaneous:

There we go again, one young analyst cried. The youngster then took a guess—a guess with which we're inclined to agree: 

There we go again, she cried. This isn't going to work!

Campos-Duffy most likely had it right! Or so this youngster surmised.

Tomorrow: Pathways to defeat