Ari Berman on Voting Rights Erasure

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250815.mp3

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Mother Jones (8/6/25)

This week on CounterSpin: In July last year, CounterSpin recalled a statement from Donald Trump on Fox & Friends in 2020, that if voting access were expanded—meaning easing of barriers to voting for disabled people, poor people, rural people, working people—if voting were made more widely accessible, Trump said, “You’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” Many of us wondered at the time why news media wouldn’t call that out as anti-democratic, and talk up the multivocal, multiregional, multiracial democracy we’ve always said we’re aspiring to.

But here we are, dealing with the fallout of, among many things, that news media failure—now including the possible erasure of the landmark Voting Rights Act. Ari Berman is national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones, and his new book is called Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It. We talk about that with him this week.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250815Berman.mp3

Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look at press coverage of Trump’s DC occupation and starvation in Gaza.

https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin250815Banter.mp3