The John Mason Talk-Walk, May 5, 2026

I speak about the Supreme Court's Callais ruling, and of the need to defend the right to vote. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:07

Hello, hello, hello, how is everybody? This is John Mason. Tomorrow is Mother's Day. And that is the time we pay our respects to all the women in our lives, our mothers and our wives, and our girlfriends, and our sisters, and every other woman that we come across. Happy Mother's Day, ladies. And if we want the best for the women in our lives, we must protect their reproductive rights. There are all these states going around that places the most onerous restrictions on abortions. Like you can only have an abortion after so many weeks before you even know the woman even knows that there's a fetus inside of her. And you remembered uh Katie Brett, the senator from Arkansas, who had this very ham bad case of ham acting after uh after Biden's uh State of the Union address. Is that the best Republicans can do? Well anyway, she has this bright idea of a database. She's proposing this bill that would establish a database for all women who are pregnant. Hello, hello, hello, John Mason. How is everybody? Hope you're all well. Well they did it. The Supreme Court of the United States has continued its strife for the for the conservative Republican limit the vote to our people movement. In the case of Louisiana versus Calais. In this ruling, the Supreme Court decided to weaken the enforcement section of section two of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 came about after the march on Selma for voting rights. And at that incident, just about every police officer in Alabama came down on the marchers and attacked them. John Lewis, who later became a respected congressman from Georgia, was struck on cracked on the head by a police officer's truncheon, and he could have died. People literally died for the right to vote. Is that important? And the court has also hobbled the efforts to challenge gerrymandering of legislative districts. And right after that decision, Louisiana has called off its primary elections so that the legislature can withdraw, uh redraw their legislative districts, along with southern states as Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee. Which in turn as such limitations limit the power voting power of working people altogether. Throw the white uh workers a few more crumbs to give them the impression of superiority that all white people are in this on the same side. No, they're not. To create a division among black and white workers and other demographics of workers. We can't fall for that. This shows the need to organize and vote. And it is very important to overcome divisions among the working class according to race. We must organize in our neighborhoods, in our in our work sites, in our communities to overcome this movement towards fascism. Yes, and we're well on the way towards fascism in this country. All the power is going to uh the billionaires. All kinds of billionaires from the current tech moguls, Bezos and Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, and Peter Thiel of Palantir, to the old-fashioned uh oligarchs of iron and steel and automobiles and etc. I mean different industries, different technologies, same class ruling over us. And all we want is our seat at the table. And we are going to get our seat at the table. We have to, in the immortal words of Shirley Chisholm, if you don't have the seat at the table, bring a folding chair. We're going up on the table so you don't become at the menu. So on May 19th, that is primary election day, Pennsylvania. I want everyone listening to me to get out there and vote. So that so that we can defeat all these oligarchs and their political lackeys and their schemes of destroy of taking away our rights to vote. And once that they're taken away, all kinds of other rights are taken away. It won't start with black people or women or people of color. It'll start with uh certain religious groups. It could go into certain religious groups and it'll go back to the way it was at the time of the signing of the Constitution, 1787, and an oligarchy. The state constitutions of the of the original 13 states around the time of the signing of the constitution uh stipulated uh certain financial uh qualifications for voting, like having so much money, owning so much head of cattle, owning so many slaves, owning so many acres of property. So, and those are the good old days that the conservatives want to bring us back to. It's all there in black and white in Project 2025, the Manifesto of the Heritage Foundation, which quite explicitly tells us what they plan to do to us. But we won't let them get out there and vote, get out there and hit the streets, and we shall be free. And on that Cheering One advertisements, all this work on my podcast and my YouTube and my and my blog and my poetry and my fiction, they're all work. And I need to get paid for my work. I pay money to bring this material onto these various platforms. I need to be compensated and with enough money to raise it all to a higher level. So please get on my website, johnomason.com, and click either the PayPal button or the Buy Me a Coffee button and see what you can give. I would greatly, greatly, greatly appreciate it. Thanks. And Hyperific is a lovely little CBD product store located on Snyder Avenue near 15th Street in South Philadelphia. There you'll find some of the finest cannabis-infused products. Gummies and candies and flour and drinks and teas and hand sanitizer and lip balm and dog trees. Yeah, dog trees. Look them up, please. Himperificlc.com. And also my beloved career and business coach Michelle Snow. Michelle is excellent in helping you develop your professional career or small business. Let you know what you're doing right when you need work and help you network with other up-and-coming entrepreneurs and professionals. Please look her up. Grow with snow.com. Okay. Alrighty. That's the fight we have ahead of us. It's a fight we can't run from. We owe it to the fighters in the past and the generations coming after us. Thank you. Have a good week ahead of you. Bye.