“The country’s most important civil rights law no longer effectively exists, and that’s going to have ramifications on American democracy for a very long time.” Mother Jones correspondent Ari Berman reacts to the Supreme Court’s recent 6-3 decision rejecting key principles of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Since the court issued its ruling last week, Republican-controlled states have begun to redraw their voting maps in a “gerrymandering arms race” that “could lead to the largest drop in Black representation since the Jim Crow era,” explains Berman. “We’re returning to the days of literacy tests and poll taxes — not through those devices, but through specifically trying to eliminate Black office holders. And Southern legislators are very clear they are going to do this. They feel unshackled by the Supreme Court ruling. They are being pressured by President Trump to do it, and they feel like all the guardrails are off right now.”

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won big in state-level elections this week, with the Hindu nationalist BJP now controlling over 70% of the country. Leading opposition politician and Chief Minister of West Bengal Mamata Banerjee has refused to recognize the results as legitimate, accusing the Modi government of mass disenfranchisement. Ahead of elections, 9 million names were deleted from the rolls under a process called “Special Intensive Revision” (SIR). The process, conducted by India’s Election Commission, “vitiates and creates an electoral advantage by pitting Hindu voters against Muslim voters,” says political scientist Gilles Verniers. Rather than the advertised purge of deceased and duplicate voters, SIR appears to have primarily affected Muslims and other minorities. Nearly 3 million voters in West Bengal, where more than a quarter of the population is Muslim, were unable to cast their vote.

From New Delhi, journalist Arfa Khanum Sherwani says blatant election interference has destroyed Indians’ faith in democratic elections. “The general public does not think the elections are free and fair in India,” she explains. “So this is a sad day for democracy, for people who believe that not only today, but tomorrow’s India should also be democratic.”

Gaza is facing an “environmental and biological apocalypse” under Israeli bombardment and blockade, reports Palestinian aid worker Eyad Amawi of the Gaza Relief Committee. Israel’s destruction of infrastructure has become a “generator for disease,” with sewage contamination and rodent infestation now an everyday hazard for refugees living in tent camps. “[It’s] no longer just bombardment or physical destruction. It is the collapse of every essential condition required for human survival: water, food, health, dignity, shelter, safety, everything.” Amawi also comments on the extended detention of two international activists with the Global Sumud Flotilla. Thiago Ávila and Saif Abukeshek will not be released before this weekend, according to the latest update from the Israeli military. Neither has been charged with any crime.

Leading scholar in the field of critical race theory Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality,” which she has described as a “lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects.” Crenshaw, a professor of law at UCLA and Columbia University and executive director of the African American Policy Forum, has just published a new book, Backtalker: An American Memoir.

“Backtalker is a frame that I use to encourage people to talk back against claims that the world as we have experienced it is the way it can only be, that there is no reason to continue to advocate for change,” says Crenshaw. She also discusses the Supreme Court’s recent gutting of the Voting Rights Act and the sociopolitical environment that allowed for Clarence Thomas to be appointed to the Supreme Court despite Anita Hill’s claims of sexual harassment against him.

The Israeli military issued new evacuation orders in southern Lebanon on Wednesday, warning residents of 12 towns and villages, including some north of the Litani River — beyond its current zone of occupation — to leave their homes. Those warnings were followed by reports of airstrikes in the south.

Israel and Hezbollah agreed to a fragile temporary ceasefire in mid-April that has since been extended, but fighting has continued at a lesser scale. More than 1 million Lebanese, nearly one-fifth of Lebanon’s population, have been displaced.

“So this is dozens of villages that now no one can technically access. They’re calling it a 'forward defensive zone,'” says Lylla Younes, an investigative journalist based in Beirut. “There’s nothing defensive about it. It’s an offensive operation, and they’re using the word 'cleanse' to describe what they’re doing there. They’re just bulldozing homes.”

Reporters Without Borders warns press freedom has fallen to its lowest level since the group began publishing its annual World Press Freedom Index in 2002. The index has charted how press freedoms have deteriorated in the United States and elsewhere over the past 25 years. The U.S. was ranked 17th in the world in 2002. In the latest index, the U.S. is down to 64th, falling seven places since last year.

“It’s tempting to lay all of this at the feet of President Donald Trump, and to be clear, he is the single biggest threat to American press freedom today,” says Clayton Weimers, the North America director for Reporters Without Borders. “But the mere fact that we fell from 57th last year tells us that this isn’t just a Trump problem. We have structural deficiencies that are imperiling the future of press freedom in this country.” Weimers cites these deficiencies as the consolidation of U.S. media and loss of journalism jobs, “emboldened” politicians’ attacks on reporters, and violence against journalists by law enforcement agents.

Weimers also comments on the January FBI raid on the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner shooting and Israel’s attacks on journalists in Lebanon and Gaza.

As more people cut the cord and drop their cable TV subscriptions, public access channels are losing a vital source of revenue. For decades, cable television companies have paid franchise fees to local municipalities as compensation for use of the public right of way, through which the companies route cables and utilities. Those fees have funded local stations focused on public, educational, and governmental access programming.

“As there’s migration to digital entertainment and to streaming, there is no local investment — there’s no local jobs, there’s no local programming,” says Michael Max Knobbe, executive director of BronxNet in New York.

We also speak with Joe Barr, executive director of Access Sacramento in California, who says the station is “of the community, by the community, for the community.” He adds that as the corporate media continues to consolidate, “it really could be a dire situation for getting a broad spectrum of viewpoints.”

As President Trump continues to attack media organizations and journalists, we speak with a sitting member of the Federal Communications Commission about how the administration has weaponized the FCC to go after his perceived enemies in the media. Anna Gomez is the sole Democratic commissioner on the FCC, which is currently operating with just three commissioners instead of the usual five. She criticizes the agency’s recently announced review of ABC television licenses, which comes after President Trump called for the firing of ABC late-night host Jimmy Kimmel. Under Chair Brendan Carr, the FCC has repeatedly gone after critics of the president by threatening to revoke valuable broadcast licenses.

“This administration is using any point of leverage that it has to go after its critics,” says Gomez, who was appointed by President Joe Biden in 2023.

Gomez also discusses how media consolidation impacts public choice, including the pending merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery, which would bring an unprecedented number of properties under the ownership of the Trump-aligned Ellison family.

We speak with Middle East history professor Toby Jones about the ongoing crisis in the Strait of Hormuz, where overlapping blockades by Iran and the United States have disrupted shipping and the wider global economy since the start of the war in late February. Jones says this latest conflict is part of a decadeslong project by the United States to exert imperial control over the oil-rich region, but that it’s now in danger of a strategic loss signaling a deeper imperial decline.

“Through an unprovoked assault on Iran, Trump has accelerated, or at least clarified, the real limits of American imperial power,” says Jones. “He’s definitely put the United States in a much more vulnerable and weakened position globally as a result of this war.”

We discuss the ongoing crisis in the Strait of Hormuz with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft’s Trita Parsi. U.S. officials are denying Iranian reports that a U.S. vessel was struck by Iranian missiles amid the two countries’ dual blockade of the strait. The warring nations still say they are observing a fragile temporary ceasefire as negotiations continue for a possible longer-term deal. However, says Parsi, “both sides are making maximalist demands,” so a diplomatic solution is unlikely. “As long as Trump continues to listen to those forces, the very same forces that also sold him this blockade that has backfired, we’re not going to see a diplomatic breakthrough. It requires a far more disciplined and flexible approach to the negotiations, and right now we’re not seeing that from either side.”

We get a firsthand account of the violent raid, arrest and detention of members of the Global Sumud Flotilla, after Israeli forces intercepted the humanitarian mission in international waters Thursday. “We were held in a makeshift prison with shipping containers and barbed wire. Many people were subject to aggressive physical force. Of the 56 aid-carrying vessels attempting to break Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza, more than a third were seized by the Israeli military,” recounts flotilla member Hannah Smith. Some flotilla members had to be rescued after one boat was “left sinking,” Smith reports.

Two members, Saif Abukeshek of Spain and Thiago Ávila of Brazil, are now being held without charges in an Israeli prison. “It is a favorite tactic of the Israeli regime to try to bully people into silence and submission, to threaten people, and they’ve gotten away with it for decades,” says Rania Batrice, a Palestinian American member of the Global Sumud Flotilla’s communications team. Abukeshek’s wife, Sally Issa, says her husband “started a hunger strike, and he was treated very bad, so bad that all the activists on the boat could hear him screaming.” The Spanish and Brazilian governments have denounced the arrests as “flagrantly illegal” and are demanding their citizens’ release.

In a major blow to abortion access, a federal appeals court decision siding with the state of Louisiana has placed major restrictions on the abortion pill mifepristone. The medication, used in roughly two-thirds of all abortions in the U.S., can no longer be sent by mail or prescribed through telemedicine. But previous abortion restrictions show that curtailing access doesn’t reduce the prevalence of abortions. Instead, they make the procedure more dangerous, and even deadly. “They’re trying to stop the unstoppable. And as a result, these restrictions are pretty draconian and increasingly absurd,” says The Nation’s abortion access correspondent Amy Littlefield, who also explains what alternate steps patients and providers can now take to access medication abortion. The decision is expected to be challenged at the Supreme Court, making the anti-abortion movement “top of mind once again in a midterm election year.”

On International Workers’ Day, we take a look at the state of workers’ rights and freedoms in India, where pressure on fuel supplies from the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran has deepened the cost-of-living crisis and labor unrest is on the rise. In mid-April, tens of thousands of workers from the industrial hubs around New Delhi blocked roads to demand a fair wage and better working conditions.

“Various governments in India and the central government have been trying to dilute labor laws,” says Neha Dixit, an investigative journalist and author based in New Delhi. “And there have been constant protests and strikes against this.”

Dixit’s new book is The Many Lives of Syeda X: A People’s History of Invisible India.

As workers around the world rally to mark May Day, International Workers’ Day, we speak with organizers in Los Angeles and Chicago. The May Day Strong coalition here in the United States says 3,000 protests and events are scheduled across the country with organizers calling for “no school, no work, no shopping.”

The largest May Day protest in Los Angeles is planned at MacArthur Park. Pedro Trujillo, the coordinator of the Los Angeles May Day Coalition, says the July presence of immigration agents with SWAT gear and armored vehicles in MacArthur Park laid the foundation for a high May Day turnout. “That’s why we see such a strong coalition coming together, over 120 organizations and unions here in Los Angeles endorsing this march. We haven’t seen this level of support, of engagement, in a very long time,” says Trujillo.

“We are creating a coalition to resist the tyranny of billionaires in this moment,” adds Stacy Davis Gates, president of the Chicago Teachers Union and president of the Illinois Federation of Teachers. “Billionaires put a president in place to dismantle democracy, a right-wing Congress to watch it and a right-wing Supreme Court to block us from doing anything about it.”

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments this week on President Trump’s push to strip temporary protected status from 350,000 Haitians and 6,100 Syrians living in the United States. The TPS program grants protection from deportation and work authorization to immigrants whose home countries are deemed unsafe to return to, most often because of war or natural disaster. The case could ultimately have ramifications for more than 1 million TPS holders from over a dozen countries.

TPS holders from Haiti and Syria say their countries remain unsafe and that DHS did not follow proper procedure. The lawsuit brought by Haitian TPS holders also accuses the administration of being motivated by racism — an allegation supported by a lower court ruling in February.

“Haiti is still in bad shape, and [TPS holders] cannot return there. So, you can imagine now the uncertainty that they live with on a daily basis,” says Vilès Dorsainvil, a plaintiff in Trump v. Miot, the case brought by Haitian TPS holders. Dorsainvil is the co-founder and executive director of the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, Ohio. President Trump targeted the Haitian community in Springfield in 2024, falsely saying Haitian residents were eating pet dogs and cats. “We’ve been scapegoated as a community,” says Dorsainvil.

We speak with author and activist Bill McKibben about the worsening climate crisis and why the world must rapidly transition to renewable energy in order to stave off the worst impacts. He says the Iran war has exposed the “utter folly” of fossil fuel dependence. “Sunlight has to travel 93 million miles to reach the Earth, but none of those miles go through the Strait of Hormuz,” says McKibben. “That makes it a very appealing alternative, especially now that it’s cheaper than burning coal and gas and oil.”

We speak with Lebanese-born academic Gilbert Achcar about the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, U.S. foreign policy under President Trump and more. Achcar says Trump’s military actions in Venezuela and Iran are not as dramatic a departure from U.S. policy as some commentators have suggested, calling it “an old-new imperial doctrine.” While the George W. Bush administration believed in “regime change,” says Achcar, Trump is “just going back to 19th-century gunboat diplomacy: You bomb a country until they submit.”

Achcar’s new book is Gaza Catastrophe: The Genocide in World-Historical Perspective.

Attorney and civil rights activist Maya Wiley responds to the Justice Department’s fraud case against the Southern Poverty Law Center, which centers on the group’s history of paying individuals to infiltrate white supremacist groups in order to monitor their activities. The SPLC has rejected the charges as politically motivated, saying its informant program was used to monitor threats of violence and that the information gathered was routinely shared with local and federal law enforcement.

“It’s political persecution,” says Wiley, head of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a civil rights coalition that includes the SPLC. “There’s a pattern in the development of tyranny in countries across the globe where the person who wants to have that power finds ways to discredit the lawful advocacy of organizations that are fighting to ensure that democracy survives,” she says.

The U.S. Supreme Court has effectively gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the last remaining major provision of the landmark 1965 law that was a crowning achievement of the civil rights movement.

In a 6-3 decision along partisan lines, a majority of justices ruled Wednesday that Louisiana must redraw a congressional map that was designed to create a second majority-Black district in the state, where African Americans have long faced racial segregation and barriers to voting. They said the electoral map “relied too heavily on race,” an interpretation that is set to usher in another wave of redistricting across the South to help Republicans win more seats in Congress.

“This is central to whether or not we maintain a multiracial democracy in this country,” says lawyer and civil rights activist Maya Wiley, head of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. She calls Wednesday’s ruling “a free pass to discriminate.”

The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments Monday in a case that could determine whether thousands of cancer patients can keep suing the manufacturers of the popular weed killer glyphosate, known as Roundup. Critics of Roundup have long alleged a link between the herbicide and cancer. It was developed by Monsanto, which was bought by Bayer in 2018.

Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting recently released a major investigation by Nate Halverson that looks at how the U.S. Forest Service has been rapidly expanding its use of Roundup despite concerns about its safety. “The majority of glyphosate is still used in agriculture, but … we were able to show that the fastest-growing use is actually now for forestry,” says Halverson.

The United Arab Emirates announced Tuesday it would be leaving OPEC, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, on May 1. The UAE has long disagreed with Saudi Arabia over oil production quotas and says it is leaving the group to focus on “national interests” and increase its production capacity.

“The fact that the UAE has pulled out means that this cartel will have less ability to be able to push up the price when it wants,” says Akshat Rathi, senior climate reporter at Bloomberg News. “We’ve already seen some of it not working, because there are all these other producers, like the U.S.A., but also places like Guyana, that are increasing their production a lot.”

Meanwhile, Rathi adds that as countries across the globe brace for the ripple effects of the energy shocks created by the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran, transitions to clean energy could be accelerated. “In the past, when countries were faced with this kind of energy shock, they had options that were quite limited,” says Rathi. But now countries can “try and deploy as much renewables so that they can build energy supply at home.”

Negotiations between the United States and Iran to end the war are at an impasse as the conflict enters its third month. The Wall Street Journal reported late Tuesday that Trump has told aides to prepare for an extended blockade of Iranian ports to ramp up the pressure on Tehran.

Iran is saying it will enter into direct talks with the U.S. “when President Trump lifts what Iran considers to be the illegal military naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz,” says Drop Site News co-founder Jeremy Scahill. “Iran has maintained that it’s not shut down the strait, but that it’s just shut it down for any vessels that are linked to the U.S. war in any way.”

Scahill says a disorganized Trump administration is pushing a “total propaganda narrative” that it has the upper hand in negotiations, while Iran believes it has the “three M’s” on its side: munitions, markets and the midterms.

More than 50 countries are gathered this week in Santa Marta, Colombia, in a groundbreaking effort to establish another forum of international cooperation on phasing out fossil fuels and halting the climate crisis. This comes after years of frustration over the United Nations-led COP process, which requires consensus. The initiative was launched in the final hours of the COP30 conference held in Belém, Brazil, last year, as fossil-fuel producing countries led by Saudi Arabia and Russia blocked the formal commitments sought by more ambitious nations.

“This gathering in Santa Marta is about breaking the deadlock, creating a space where mission is not held hostage, and where real pathways to phase out fossil fuels can be discussed openly and honestly,” says South African activist Kumi Naidoo, president of the Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative.

As Democracy Now! broadcasts from Toronto, we speak with Avi Lewis, the new head of Canada’s progressive New Democratic Party. Lewis was elected leader in a landslide last month, winning over party members on a democratic socialist platform that vowed to prioritize affordability, address the climate crisis, fight the Trump administration’s attacks on Canada and more. Lewis takes over as the NDP has only five seats in Parliament and just as Prime Minister Mark Carney secured a majority for his Liberal government following three special elections in April.

Lewis acknowledges that “the NDP has a lot of rebuilding to do,” but says there is “wide-open political space” in Canada for a populist left-wing agenda. “I think young people in particular are really responding to a vision where life just doesn’t have to be so grindingly unfair,” Lewis says. “We need nonmarket solutions to a time of market failure.”

Lewis is a longtime activist and filmmaker whose late father Stephen Lewis led the Ontario NDP in the 1970s. He is married to the acclaimed author Naomi Klein.

The Trump administration is continuing its attacks on DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, that has given deportation relief and work permits to immigrants who came to the United States as children. The Board of Immigration Appeals — an administrative court within the Justice Department — recently ruled that DACA status is not enough to spare someone from deportation, a decision that sets a precedent potentially putting hundreds of thousands of people at risk.

Democratic Congressmember Delia Ramirez from Illinois, whose husband is a former DACA recipient, calls the BIA decision “very concerning” and part of a larger effort “weaponizing the court system” against immigrants. She says Congress must act and pass legislation to end the legal limbo of DACA recipients and millions of other immigrants.

The Justice Department is bringing back the use of firing squads and lethal injection using pentobarbital as it seeks to expedite and expand federal death penalty convictions and executions. No federal executions have been carried out since 2020, when the first Trump administration broke with over a decade of precedent and executed 13 people on death row. The second Trump administration is now pursuing the death penalty in dozens more cases across the country. Renowned anti-death penalty activist Sister Helen Prejean says Trump’s push to restart federal executions is entirely unsurprising. “His first instinct almost always seems to be demonize someone as an enemy and then kill them and destroy them.”

Writer Jeff Sharlet responds to the shooting event at White House correspondents’ dinner this weekend. We discuss the motivations of Cole Allen, the man accused of breaching security in an attempt to assassinate members of the Trump administration, as well as gun access in the United States and the growing violence across the political spectrum of what Sharlet calls a “slow civil war.”

We speak to Congressmember Ro Khanna about the apparent assassination attempt against President Donald Trump and members of his administration at the White House correspondents’ dinner. “Political violence strikes at the very heart of democracy. We cannot have a democracy if people are saying we’re going to kill you if we disagree with your viewpoint. And that has to be condemned in the most strong, unequivocal terms,” says Khanna. He also gives an update on his work calling for the full public release of the Epstein files and comments on Trump’s attacks on press freedoms.