If you want to boil down what Martin Luther King Jr.’s life’s work was about, you can boil it down to one thing. He grabbed America by the scruff of the neck and forced it to look at the high-minded writings of our nation’s founders, demanding that it live up to its ideals. And if you want to boil down what America’s history is largely made up of, you can do worse than saying it’s a long struggle between those who want a white supremacist nation and those who oppose them.

The Voting Rights Act (VRA) was a big win for the good guys, a serious step in the direction of creating the world’s first multiracial, multicultural democracy. Unfortunately, we have a chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States in John Roberts who has made it his mission to gut the VRA, first with Shelby County v. Holder, and most recently, with this week’s horrible 6-3 Louisiana v. Callais decision.

I’ll leave the legal beagling on Callais to Adrastos because that’s his area of expertise, and we have enough people in this world blabbering about things they don’t fully understand. One thing I will note is that one of the things Roberts did in Shelby County is declare a Day of Jubliee, i.e. the end of racism in America.

This was an incredibly outlandish thing to say, but there were a fair number of Americans who were ready to say just that after Obama was elected, and not just on the right. I suppose for some white people, it was a relief. We wouldn’t need to talk about all that race stuff, right? But this was never true.

Trump was elected, and soon it was obvious that racism was certainly not dead. Charlottesville, for example, was a key moment you couldn’t ignore, and on January 6, 2021, Confederate flags were carried through the Capitol Building. Now, we have a president who routinely does things like call a Black Supreme Court justice and non-white elected officials “low-IQ.” 

Despite the obvious proof that the idea of racism no longer being a problem in the United States is just not true, Roberts pushed ahead with his pet project. Roberts is really no different, in many ways, from Jefferson Davis. He is a white supremacist and anti-democratic.

This is the latest moment in the fight against white supremacists. Sometimes this fight gets hot, in moments such as the massacres of Native Americans in California in the pre-Civil War era, the lynchings and massacres of Black Americans in the post-Civil War era, and the Civil War itself. Sometimes it’s more genteel, like the deep racism of people such as William F. Buckley.

But that’s the story of our country. The battle between racists and non-racists continues. Right now, it is impossible not to see Trumpism as an attempt to return us to the Confederacy. Many of our elite institutions are all in with all this or too spineless to push back. Notice how fast DEI went away in many organizations? They couldn’t wait to scrap it.

With this Supreme Court, there is no way we will be able to take back what we have lost under Trump and the Roberts court. Our democracy is in danger as well. This is impossible to argue with:

5 out of the 6 Supreme Court Justices who gutted the Voting Rights Act were nominated by a president who came into office having lost the popular vote.70% of Americans support the John Lewis VRA. The Supreme Court is historically unpopular.It is not a democratically legitimate institution.

— Max Berger (@maxberger.bsky.social) 2026-04-30T14:45:34.741Z

If we want a country that is not white Christian authoritarian nationalist, the only way to do that is through some very serious and deep Supreme Court reform, and yes, that means expanding the court. It might not be easy, but it is naive and child-like to think that this is too radical an idea.

The last word goes to The Strokes.