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