Thursday Afternoon Breaking News Updates with Ben - 4/30/2026

28:38This is life or death. There are American people struggling right now. Most American people are struggling. What is that crap? And of course, the Iranians are mocking it, but it just makes you look deeply unserious. One of the interesting things too, as I've been studying international affairs and just seeing what's going on across the country, one of the interesting things is that even these kind of right-wing MAGA parties in other countries are coming out against Donald Trump right now. You have the French Le Pen party with that guy Bardella from the, what's that party called? The National Unity Party or Jordan Bardella, which is Le Pen's party basically, and he's their leader.

29:28I mean, this was like the MAGA aligned party in France and dudes like Donald Trump's policy is now completely erratic. No one is able to predict what he wants. By definition, when you change your position very regularly, when you're not consistent, you no longer provide certainty, especially as the leader of an allied country. And obviously the situation harms the reliability and credibility of the United States on the international stage. So what like the far right wing French party, that's like their MAGA party is out there. He said, I don't need to promote the guy anymore. And the reality is, is that there is no reliability or credibility.

30:06We all grew up, and I hope you thought you have to be a person of your word, right? And trust is everything. And Donald Trump's whole life, he's been a con artist and a scammer. That's his whole thing. The whole Trump thing is being a scam or I saw with this visit by King Charles recently, some articles from the 1990s surfaced of Donald Trump would make up all of these lies about the royal family buying apartments at Trump Towers and the royal family begging for memberships at Mar-a-Lago and all of these things. He would say really weird and creepy things about Diana and going on a date with Princess Di.

30:58And also, he made some very crude remarks about her as well. And then the royal family back then would have to deny it and say, no, he's lying. He's lying. This guy's been... You got to understand, the guy's been a liar and a con man his entire life, objectively. And my big problem with it all is that we need facts. We need the truth. And going back to what I was saying too about the economy in our Washington, D.C. Bureau before I took this circuitous path, which is our Washington, D.C. Bureau people were asking these politicians questions about the economy. And so I'll show you, for example, when our D.C.

31:41team spoke with MAGA Republican Congress member Babin, he gives Donald Trump an A or a B on the economy. I mean, what do you mean you're giving him an A or a B on the economy. That's stupid. Come on. First, he walks past our camera and dodges it. And then he's like, all right, who are you with? Who are you with? Watch this MAGA Republican congressmember here play this clip. Congressman, real quick, has Donald Trump kept his promise to lower prices?

32:09No, I know. I know. Congressman, has Donald Trump kept his promise? Who are you with? Midas Touch. Who are you with? Midas Touch. Okay. Has Donald Trump kept his promise to lower prices? I'm asking all your Republican colleagues. We saw the prices come down dramatically, but we're involved in a conflict with the worst regime, terrorist exportation regime, probably in the last hundred years. And this is going to be over soon. We'll get these prices down. I live in my district is in the epicenter of energy in Southeast Texas, the greater Houston region. You're going to see prices come down as soon as we get through with this.

32:48The president keeps his promises. If it was a report card, what grade would you give him on the economy? I'm sorry, I couldn't. If it was like a report card, say, what grade would you give Trump on the economy then? On the economy? I think he's got a B average right now. But he had an A, it went to a B, and it's going to go back to an A. Thank you, Congressman. I'll show you Byron Donald's MAGA Republican Congress member from Florida who's running for governor there. Let's play this clip. Congressman, do you think Donald Trump has delivered on his promise to lower prices? Yeah, he actually has.

33:21I know gas prices are a little bit higher because of what's happening in Iran, but across the country, a lot of prices actually have stabilized. I think, you know, inflation is hard, but I remember where we were with the Biden administration. You know, airline tickets jumped 50 percent. It was insane. So he's doing a great job. We need, you know, the other side of the aisle to come and help us just do common sense business. But the president's doing great. If he were a report card, what grade would you give him on the economy? Oh, he gets an A. An A? Yeah. Got it. Thank you, Carson. What about Senator Tim Scott when he did an appearance earlier today?

33:57What about Senator Scott? Let's play it. That's great news, by the way. The fact of the matter is that all of the cylinders are kicking. It is good news. You can even feel in our environment how good things are getting. Gas prices continue to come down, which means that your groceries will come down a little bit as well. We've got a lot of good signs in the economy. We just need to continue to execute and have confidence in the choices the American people have made by making President Trump their president and keeping majorities, Republican majorities in both the House and the Senate. I mean, come on.

34:36doesn't it just like it's such a transparent con and scam and like a little bit impressive like if if if if if i don't even i just genuinely don't know how you lie like that with such a straight face and go yeah of course things are amazing things are great things are great But like they must think, again, they think we're stupid. They think that they can say that. Like, oh, I guess you said it's amazing in an A. So maybe I'm wrong. Maybe all of the things that I'm feeling are incorrect right now. And in fact, things are, they are saying things are great. They're not. Enough of this crap. And this is why people hate politics.

35:23And this is why I think regardless of political party or anything, what we need to be focused on, all of us here, just objective facts, okay? And we need to make sure that we center everything in the people. And yes, we're a network, a news network, so we talk, right? News networks, we talk. But we need to listen. And I think the most important thing that we can be doing right now is just listening to what people are actually experiencing and talking about those things. Not this kind of constant gaslighting that you hear over and over again. All right. I want to also talk about the Pete Hegseth cross-examined hearing that took place before the House and the Senate.

36:17How atrocious was Hegseth? I want to talk about the Supreme Court ruling, the Voting Rights Act ruling, what that really means. I want to break it down for you in a way that you understand, because I want to explain why it's such a horrific ruling, but what can be done about it also. And a few more things. Let's just take a quick break. We'll be right back. Just make sure you hit subscribe. You may think you're subscribed, but you may not be. Just double check that you're subscribed. We'll be right back after this quick break. The older I get, the more I find myself wanting to be more intentional about the way I live, eat, and take care of my body.

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40:33Great ad reads right there by Brett and my brothers. The discount code are in the description below. Jordy works really hard on negotiating good discount codes. He thinks these are products that you would like. and the sponsors help support the network. So support the sponsors if you like it. And again, discount codes in the description below. By now, you probably heard about this Supreme Court ruling, which strikes down essentially Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act passed in the mid-1960s, one of the crown jewels of the civil rights movement. Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 prohibits voting practices or procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in one of the various minority groups.

41:25And it was specifically enacted because the history of racism in states and what states would do is they would work. And as we see now, they would not say, hey, we're racist states, everybody, look at us, we're the racist state of this. But they would implement voting maps and strategies that would significantly dilute the vote of, very frequently it was, of black majority congressional districts. So in a specific state where, say, there's 35 % of the population is black, a state that may have a 65 % white population would say, okay, rather than ensuring that the black community had congressional representation, we will draw maps that basically dilute the black population's voting power by carving up the 35 % into various districts and moving those into majority white districts so that there would be no majority black districts in a state or maybe one where the representation, if it was fair and say it was 65-35 or 60-40, if there were 10 seats, you would expect there to be at least four seats that would be reflective of the Black population in the state or closely reflective of it so that there could be the right representation for the community.

43:04So the way the Voting Rights Act dealt with this is they had different procedures to ensure that states would not impose racist maps.

43:15Ben Meiselas:And part of the Voting Rights Act required something called preclearance. So when a state would do a gerrymander, we all know about gerrymander, so when a legislature would want to change their maps, the preclearance meant that a state had to submit it to the DOJ and then frequently to a three-judge federal court panel, and it had to be approved and analyzed before it could become an effective map. It wasn't presumed to be the right map. It had to go through a DOJ review and then a three-judge panel review. That was called preclearance. Well, there was a case in 2013 as a concerted movement was taking place by the Federalist Society and other right-wing forces.

44:05They put before a right-wing Supreme Court that had a slimmer right-wing majority in 2013, a case called Shelby County v. Holder. And there, the Supreme Court struck down the formula for coming up with a preclearance determination. And by striking down the formula, it basically struck down the very nature of a preclearance requirement in the first place. So what that meant is when the new census would take place in 2020, and then thereafter, when a legislature would create

44:43Ben Meiselas:new congressional maps based on the new census, that map would automatically be deemed to be a valid map because you didn't have to pre-clear it. So you can challenge that map by a lawsuit, but the initial presumption is that a state map was valid, and then the lawsuits would have to come. And you know, lawsuits take a lot of time. And then if you were preserving the status quo, you could be preserving the racist map. So then what states realized is, look, we're not going to say we're diluting Black votes. We're just going to say this is a political gerrymander because there is no law against political gerrymandering.

45:25Democrats have tried in the

45:28Ben Meiselas:past to put forward federal legislation that bans all gerrymandering, political gerrymandering and all forms of gerrymandering. The Democrat position is no gerrymandering at all. Let's just come up with a system where it's fair across the country, okay, and that districts don't look like salamanders or whatever it looked like all over the place. Republicans fought against that and blocked that piece of legislation from becoming law. So now we have this system. So now if a state says, ha ha, we're doing a racist map, it would then be struck down under section two. But the states said, we're not going to say that because then we'd run afoul of section two.

46:15Ben Meiselas:Even if we put forward the invalid map, it would be challenged. We'll lose if we say it's a racist map. So they just say it's a political map. We're bringing in political interests. So the Texas map, we weren't carving it out to put this population or do it based on race. We're just doing it based on political considerations, because we're trying to get more Republicans in districts, not less Black people, more Republicans, which, as you know, often equates, though, to pretextually isolating certain racial groups. So what Section 2 was still interpreted to basically mean is, okay, we can look beyond a state saying that they're not, or the legislature saying they're not racist, and we can look at its impact and see, okay, is the impact of what they did clearly racist or have a racist effect or effect in the end of the day?

47:20Ben Meiselas:And then we can determine, ah, when you were saying it was political, it's really pretextual. We know the reason you were doing this, you wanted to dilute the black vote. It's obvious. Look what you did and how you specifically targeted Black voters, right? And so we can still look at the implications, even if your express words were that you were not doing a racist map. And so what this Supreme Court case was basically saying is that you challenging the racist map, you saying that we should have majority black congressional districts, that you even saying that that should exist is a racist thing.

48:05Ben Meiselas:You being an anti-racist to challenge what you believe is a racist map. When the legislature says it's political, in essence, what the Supreme Court saying is, whoa, whoa, whoa, you're being the racist for saying you want a majority black congressional district. We've moved beyond racism in this country. That's literally what Justice Alito essentially writes in his opinion, that we should overturn our prior section two of the Voting Rights Act precedent because we've moved beyond racism at this point. So there should be nothing that allows people to even ask for a majority black congressional district because that in and of itself is factoring in race.

48:54Ben Meiselas:And actually the Voting Rights Act says we shouldn't be factoring in race. So aren't you violating, you see how warped this is, section two, by promoting anti-racism, by even focusing on racism at all. And the non-racist are the racist because they're just being political and you're making accusations against them. and we shouldn't pry into anything other than what they say their map is. So what this ruling basically enables a state to say is, look, just say that it is a political gerrymander and you're good. We're not even going to look beyond that. So any state, feel free to dilute congressional black majorities.

49:41Ben Meiselas:Just don't say you're doing it for that purpose. And we're not going to look into its impact or its consequence or anything like that. We're just going to look into what the legislative pronouncement is. I'm oversimplifying it slightly, but not by that much. So as a result of this, the question is, is how big of a shift can we have? To the extent there's good news, it's that this decision has been made late in the process and it's going to be hard for a lot of states to these Republican state legislatures to all of a sudden change their maps when there's lots of primaries coming up. And so, and this, Florida was going to do its gerrymander anyway.

50:26Ben Meiselas:And the Florida gerrymander that DeSantis is working with Trump on may be a dummymander as well, because it's based on Latino voting behavior and the Latino voting population has moved away from Trump. And so if they're going to now create plus eight to plus 10 Trump districts, we're seeing in Florida and elsewhere, plus 12 to plus 20 Democrat over performances in special elections. But the Florida thing was coming regardless. But in 2028, we're now going to see all of these Republican states or these state legislatures. They're no longer going to feel constrained by Section 2, and they're going to do racist maps.

51:06Ben Meiselas:and so and they're just going to say it was political gerrymander so then the democrats are going to have to respond where the democrats can't unilaterally disarm and in states that have constitutional amendments that prohibit political gerrymandering that's going to have to be amended there's going to be referendums put on and then those other states are going to have to now change their dynamic and so now we're going to have an entire country that's going to be completely gerrymandered and it's going to be one-off. Republicans are going to do this and Democrats are going to do this. And then it's just going to be a gerrymander fight.

51:40Ben Meiselas:It's going to, I think, create a country that's far more divided potentially. But I don't know about you, but I think that people are absolutely sick of this. And this is what the Supreme Court, this is the result, a more divided country, a more racist country, a more, why would we want any of these things? What we should do is have none of this gerrymandering. right? We should have, I mean, just think about all of the ways these right-wing Supreme Court have butchered our constitution, butchered the constitution, right? I mean, whether it's the Citizens United decision, which allows these unlimited corporate expenditures with super PACs and all of that, you know, to flood the zone with money where Elon Musk's and other people are trying to buy elections, where Miriam Adelson is saying, I'll give you$150 billion or half a billion dollars, but you have to promise to do this and that for Israel and my agendas here or Elon Musk saying, I'm going to do this and that, but you have to do this for Tesla and this for X and this for my companies or whoever the companies are, right?

52:48Ben Meiselas:We had McCain-Feingold. That's bipartisan. McCain-Republican, Feingold-Democrat. McCain-Feingold, campaign finance reform. Democrats, Republicans came together. The legislatures, think about this for a second. Pull back, because this is what I teach my law students and undergrads. And maybe I won't get into the Hegs and stuff, because I'll just focus on the type of lectures that sometimes I give. And this isn't political. It's actually apolitical, what I'm saying right now. Just think about it. Campaign finance reform. Democrat and Republican come together. McCain and Feingold. They passed this incredible piece of legislation that would reduce corporate influence on our campaign, which we know is so horrible today.

53:36Ben Meiselas:They saw the problem because it was building and building and building, and they created something to stop the problem. They diagnosed it. They created the medicine. And on a bipartisan basis, we worked together and we created a great piece of legislation. and then the Supreme Court goes, eh, that violates the Constitution. Why? Why does it violate the Constitution? Explain that to me. Why does it violate the... Corporations are people. What? They're people. They have a First Amendment. What are you saying? Corporations should do whatever they want because they're a human being. A corporation's a human being.

54:13Ben Meiselas:Yes. That's my Supreme Court voice. I'm not sure why, but yes. Really? Yes. Okay. I'm not really sure. Show me where in the constitution that says a corporation is a freaking human being. So you're going to overturn what article one did and, and was signed into law by article two, you right-wing Supreme court, just you're going to say that the constitution says something that the constitution doesn't. Yes. We're going to say that clearly corporations are human. Uh, I don't, I don't, I don't know, but think about all of these laws, you know, the civil rights act, uh, the Voting Rights Act, right?

54:50Ben Meiselas:The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed on a bipartisan basis. You had Democrats, you had Republicans, you had during that era, Lyndon B. Johnson pushing through a lot of this legislation as well, based on his background as a lawmaker, as an unexpected person to be a champion of a lot of this civil rights legislation. I mean, heck, the environment, meant the EPA was created basically under Nixon and expanded, you know, and expanded under some other Republican administrations. I mean, just think about some big environmental protections in California were done under Reagan in California. Nixon signed the EPA.

55:33Ben Meiselas:These weren't actually, these weren't controversial things. They've been made this way, but that's not actually the way it has been. I often ask my students, and I ask you, I'll ask you in the chat, how many people believe that the Civil Rights Act of 19, or the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Civil Rights Act, Title IX, all of this civil rights legislation, right? Do you think that in 2026, the Voting Rights Act could be passed in 2026 with our Congress? Of course, the answer is no, right? Do you think that McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform could be passed in 2026? Of course, it couldn't be.

56:24Ben Meiselas:Do you think Title IX, which respects men, female equality in sports or in educational institutions in general, and also prohibits like sexual harassment and discrimination at a federal level in education institutions that take federal money. Do you think that could be passed? Of course it couldn't be passed. None of it could be. I mean, look, and a major part of it is Trump, is what Trump and Trumpism and MAGA, what this cancer has done to our body politic. And as, oh, you don't like Trump, you don't like Trump. I'll give you an example. I'll give you an example. On a bipartisan basis, Biden worked with Lankford, a really right-wing Republican senator, Lankford, right?

57:16Ben Meiselas:And Biden worked on a bipartisan piece of legislation for immigration reform. and it would have had strong, this is what Biden was trying to do during his term. It would have strong borders pouring millions of dollars. At that point, it was to ice and border patrol for the borders, not to invade the places and go after Americans and people who were hardworking people, to stay at the border. Border patrol, border, not go and invade Minnesota or California, this place, and throw gas in people's faces and torture them and terrorize them for the freaking border. It would have invested hundreds of millions in immigration law judges.

58:02Ben Meiselas:It would have expedited asylum proceedings to ensure that only meritorious asylum claims could get through the system quickly. It created a pathway to citizenship that was compassionate, recognize that your country, you got to have borders, but at the same time, we should come up with a pathway for citizenship, people who have been living in the shadows so they can pay taxes and continue to contribute if they raise families so they're not scared. It would have actually addressed a lot of these issues. But what did Donald Trump say? Trump said it out loud. He said, immigration is a winning issue for me.

58:45Ben Meiselas:I get to win by creating chaos and I want there to be problems because I can use the issue to divide. Now, that is a tactic that actually is not unique to America. We see that with Putin in Russia, Orban in Hungary, going back to, you know, in France, that so-called National Unity Party. We see it in the tactics that are used by Nigel Farage. We saw that in the so-called Reform Party in the UK, they all have names like that, by the way. We saw Maple MAGA, right, with Pierre Poliev, who was before Trump and before Prime Minister Carney ascendancy, you know, Poliev probably would have been the Prime Minister of Canada.

59:31Ben Meiselas:And he was dragging Canada into a big Maple MAGA, Daniel Smith kind of direction over there, which would have been disastrous and catastrophic for the country. But using the same divisive tactics and masks and no masks, it's about finding issues that divide. And this is what the Russians were great at, their intelligence services and others are able to kind of find the cultural division points that naturally exist, and then just push right on those things as ways to divide us. And that's kind of the very reason for existence of MAGA, of what it's all about. Find ways to divide bathrooms, male, female sports, bully transgender, eating cats and dogs, blame the immigrants.

1:00:28Ben Meiselas:Let's talk about Somalians. Let's do this, that. It's always creating a crisis, finding division points, accentuating divisions, pushing hard and preventing actual results from happening. Right. We could have had bipartisan immigration reform and that would have been great. I mean, you know, there was lots of legislation coming out of the Biden administration that Trump is undoing right now, you know, which invested in clean energy and all these things. That's jobs. Clean energy equals jobs, regardless of what you view about climate change. In my view, you should believe it's a real damn thing.

1:01:03Ben Meiselas:Of course it is. But it's also economically, it's creating jobs. Like, I don't like windmills. I don't like solar. What do you mean you don't like those? You don't like creating jobs? What are we talking about here? What are we doing here? So I know I veered off a little bit and talked about some of these topics instead of showing you the hexade clip and this and that and the other. But I think it's important to reflect on that there was a time when we were able to talk about these issues and we were able to bring people together and have bipartisan legislation. And then ultimately, whether it was the Supreme Court or Trump or whatever, it would cause divisions in bipartisanship.

1:01:40Ben Meiselas:I still believe that there's about most issues are actually 70, 30 or 80, 20 issues on some of the biggest issues that Americans mostly agree on things. I think we all agree on common sense gun control and gun reform. I think we all view in common sense climate legislation. I think generally people overwhelmingly believe, as I do, of course, in women's reproductive rights and bodily autonomy. I think we all believe in equality. I think we all believe that America is a country of immigrants and that we should have, yes, there should be strong borders, but there should be a compassionate policy regarding immigration.

1:02:25Ben Meiselas:I think we all agree that there should be a more fair tax code that addresses the fact that billionaires and decamillionaires are not paying their fair share and have all of these loopholes. I think we all agree that some of the critical issues impacting people are issues like people needing to be paid wages with dignity and that the corporate CEO should not be paid, you know, a thousand X of what the workers, you know, are making. People should be able to, I think we all agree generally that people should have healthcare and it should be free or at the very least very affordable. And I believe for you, I think we all believe that health is a human right.

1:03:05Ben Meiselas:I think we all agree that these data centers and unrestrained AI poses very serious risks and that we could recognize the importance of technological innovation, but that there needs to be a balancing of interests to make sure that the significant natural and job-related consequences are not catastrophic. I think that there are very basic things that we agree on. And I think that it's the plan of MAGA and the right-wing Supreme Court often to find ways to break that. And in breaking that, hoist up a strongman proxy for the right-wing oligarchs, a la Putin, a la what Orban was doing in Hungary.

1:03:59Ben Meiselas:And if you've all been following Hungary, right, you all know that those oligarchs in Hungary, they've been fleeing. They've been trying to push their money into the United States and hide their money here and there and elsewhere. And Peter Magyar, their new prime minister, keeps on aggressively calling out what's happening there. But, you know, that's that's to me, it's just fascinating when you hear, you know, all these right wing people talk about capitalism and this and that and rail against socialism. I mean, right now there's socialism for the billionaires. That's what exists. There's socialism for the billionaires and they're getting all the benefits.

1:04:36Ben Meiselas:I mean, I'll give you an example right here because something that I teach as my semester wraps up, it's something that I teach as well. So if you're a billionaire and you buy a sports team, your purchase price of the sports team is 100 % deductible over the course of like a 10-year, I forget if it's a 10 or 12-year period under the tax code. So if you're a billionaire and let's say you buy the Carolina Panthers, I think this is a real example, for$2.6 billion, over the next 10 to 12 years, you can deduct that purchase price to reduce your tax basis generally by the purchase price. So while the asset appreciates, and you're not being taxed on the appreciation of the asset of your sports team, right?

1:05:35Ben Meiselas:Go, what's the Carolina Panthers valued at right now? $5 billion,$6 billion,$7 billion, right? until there's a sale and then there's schemes to not actually pay the tax on that. But you're not being taxed on the increase in the valuation of your team. And in fact, your purchase price is then deductible. So if you're making like a wealthy person like that, say they're making a billion dollars a year and you purchase the team for$2.6 billion, do the math. You divide 2.6 into 12 separate parts, whatever that number is, you get like a$200 million deduction or one, whatever it is, every year because you bought the sports team.

1:06:22Ben Meiselas:So your tax basis is already decreasing and you apply that over the next 12 years while your asset is appreciating. And then you have the municipalities buy the stadiums for you. And so it's a way to shield your money ultimately from the taxes. And then ultimately, when you make a sale, you have it at a lower tax bracket based on the capital gains or however they've structured it. And so you just think about all of these things, and it's so detached from the everyday experience of what Americans are experiencing, what Americans are experiencing. And I just think it's so to benefit all of these right-wing oligarchs while people on a day-to-day basis are just getting screwed.

1:07:13Ben Meiselas:I think people get it. I think people see it. I think people are sick and tired of the lingo and the desire, you're a socialist, you're a lefty. People, let's just be normal. Let's be fair. I don't think anybody's saying, you know, we want to, you know, not have people who reach levels of success make money. I just think we're saying make the system, keep the system fair. Don't rig the system. Keep it fair. So people, and if we keep a fair system, then everybody benefits. We all live in a better place with better services. Everything's better. Anyway, that's my that's my spiel that's my spiel for you before I go watch the brother show tonight I didn't even show you any of the clips I just ranted I hope you're okay I didn't even do this show I was supposed to do I just went off on that tangent what can you what can you do next time watch the brother show I'll go over the stuff that I was supposed to cover I'll save it save it for the brother show exactly you're gonna get a very different brother show than this show this is the show where I just start talking about something that ended up talking about this.

1:08:23All right.

1:08:24Ben Meiselas:There you go. That's Ben on breaking news and me ranting about whatever I just ranted about. Hopefully you liked it. Hit subscribe. Thanks for watching. Help us get 7 million subscribers. We appreciate you. I'll see you on the brother show tonight, 8 Eastern, 5 Pacific. Shout out Midas Mighty.

1:08:47You'll get daily recaps from Ron Filipkowski, add free episodes of our podcast, and more exclusive content only available at MidasPlus.com.

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