Factually! with Adam Conover - LA Mayoral Race Heats Up and Supreme Court Dumps Voting Rights w/ Guy Branum & Sam Roudman

Episode Date: May 22, 2026

(In addition to your regularly planned episode of Factually, we’re bringing you a Friday news roundup where we check in on the week’s biggest stories as well as some that need amplification.) This week, Adam is joined by comedian Guy Branum and show producer Sam Roudman to talk about the LA mayoral race, the Supreme Court dumping minority voting rights, and Harvard dumping giving out so many A’s.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a headgum podcast. Well, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. It's Friday. So we're breaking down the news with a smart person and a funny person and also me. As usual, the smart person is funny and the funny person is smart and I am neither. This week I am joined by Guy Branum, a very funny stand-up comedian, writer for hacks and many other television shows. And we got Sam Roudman who, Sam, how do you describe yourself?

You're a journalist, you're a writer, and you've done. We've worked together in a research capacity. for many, many years. Yeah, I feel like I'm a writer-producer who used to work in journalism as now is stranded in Hollywood like everybody else. You're like the guy who every dumb-ass host calls to say, I want to do a video about something. And can we, can you, could we figure this out together? I like being that guy.

I'll take it. It's great. Okay, well, this week, we got a lot of shit to talk about. Our first topic is the L.A. mayor's race, which for a while I resisted talking about in the show because I was like, That's going to be too nitty gritty. We're going to be, it's going to be like zoning and bus lanes and stuff like that. But in the last like week and a half, this race has become like truly nationalized because it's become

part of the right wing media hate machine industrial complex to break down really quick. Karen Bass is the current mayor of Los Angeles. She's been in term for one, but in office for one term. She's catastrophically unpopular. She has like a 24% approval rating. She has drawn a couple challenges. One of them is Nithia Raman, who is a programmer. progressive city council member.

And to disclose, I have volunteered for her. I worked for her campaign for a couple weeks at the beginning. I've known her since 2020. I've been a supporter of hers for a long time. So I'm not unbiased because I think she's a good person. Her husband once bought me a pot. A pot? What kind of pot?

Like a nice cooking pot as like a thank you. Oh, that's really nice. So look, I have skin in this game. I can't deny that. Niddy's husband is also a TV writer, which is presumably how you guys met. Yes. The third candidate to make news is Spencer Pratt, who you might remember from him shouting and being drunk on a reality show in 2014 called The Hills. Since then, he squandered his fortune, moved in with his parents, slowly rebuilt his life somehow.

Then his house in the Pacific Palisades burned down in the fires last year. He became very angry and he is now running for mayor. And what's crazy is he has like very quickly started to do like a Donald Trump two kind of thing really directly. Former reality star running on a personal grievance against a Democratic woman that the right wing doesn't like. And the media is constantly giving him the press of like, can he really do it? Whoa, this is so crazy. And he has like popped over the past couple weeks. He has now been endorsed by Donald Trump and Steve Bannon and a bunch of other people.

it's pretty fucking nuts guy you you are involved in local politics as well what do you make of this it's very it's very interesting that spencer pratt is the person who has been able to successfully run the donald trump game plan and it is because he is a reality show person like that is the model that don't trump has what's most interesting is seeing the press do the thing that they did in 2015 which is like wouldn't this be crazy without realizing that it's a very real possibility if you like continue to platform this person. And it's not just about platforming. It's about not challenging them.

Like at this point in time, Spencer Pratt, his behaves as though his job is just saying racist things about homeless people. Yeah. And the press doesn't seem to be interested in doing anything to push past that or challenge his actual granular understanding

of this city and its needs. He has no understanding of the city and it's. I mean, he's truly just like a dumb guy. Yeah. Like he is his house burned down and that's bad and the city should make improvements. He's not wrong about that, right? But he doesn't, he does not seem to have a plan for the rest of what the city needs to do. Yeah.

And right now we are in a situation where this city is in various ways dysfunctional. It will be very hard for the most capable of person to solve this problem, especially the Los Angeles mayor, doesn't have a huge array of powers in the way that the New York City mayor does. And so, you know, so many. of us, I voted for Karen Bass four years ago and appreciated and supported her and her experience. But she is somebody who has a very bad approval rating right now. And also just has proved, as somebody who is very much a participant in the systems of democratic politics in this very one party state, hasn't been able to sort of like pull out of them when it comes to relationship with some of the larger unions that the city has to deal with when it comes to. just making spending more efficient such that the city government is taking care of what it should.

She's such a pure politician, you know. I remember when we were on strike in 2023, she didn't show up at the picket line because she didn't want to choose a side. And it was like, just show up and take your photo. Like, and you'll make 10,000 constituents very happy. I love complaining about California legislative term limits. Back in the 1990s, it was sort of like a Republican thing nationally to be like term limits. Let's get these crooks out of office and California past term limits. And since then, all California politicians do is exchange offices with each other.

And Karen Bass is somebody who is, I believe, a former speaker of the California State Assembly, got into that vibe, got into that vibe of what you're doing is keeping the job and maintaining relationships with other people so that they will make sure you always have a job. And that has led to bad government. Yeah. Sam, what do you think? Yeah. I totally agree. Bass is part of this class of just gray-faced institutional California Democrats.

The ones that are also flooding our governor's campaign. And it became so clear she wasn't up to the task of just like basic leadership in the wake of the fires. And then I hate to be like an annoying left-wing housing guy. But she stopped her housing plan because it was too successful over a successive of years. And like, there's so many problems, but housing is so essential. And if you're not going to build housing, you're not going to be able to solve homelessness. So we see the other month. There's this multi-hundred million dollar program led by Bass. It takes unhoused people off the streets. And then most of them end up back on the streets because we're not building actual

housing that people can live in in the long term. And to some extent, after the fires, Karen Bass took advantage of what one can do in municipal politics. on the West Coast, which is just hope that people don't pay attention. Instead of having a real moment where she talked about the failures and admitted to them and dealt with them, she sort of relied upon the notion that it's easy to not pay attention to local politics. And that is exactly the energy that is making Spencer Pratt possible. Because it is grand frivolity.

Like, imagining that you can just hand things over to Mad Guy from reality show and that if it goes awry, that's not going to impact people's lives. There is a really important policy conversation to have in Los Angeles. And the way, we've had a progressive wave over the past couple years since Nithia was the first, when she ran for city council, she was the first person ever to unseat a sitting city council member in like 20 years because they had all run this way, right? Don't pay attention to me. Yes.

And I remember somebody from a very well respected political media outlet telling me like, she doesn't need to do that. David Rue's fine. And like Los Angeles politics runs on blah, blah, blah is fine. Because, I mean, we are a one-party state. We are a one-party system. And I'm not saying that the Democrats are bad or the left is bad. I'm saying people not being challenged or questioned isn't the best for politics.

Yeah. And so here's what's happened. Like, for instance, Karen Bass, as her fine making peace with everybody thing, right? In her first year, the cops were asking for, for a massive raise. The LAPPL, the cop union, had run against her in, in her first campaign. So she gives them a larger raise than they were even asking for. She like gives them this huge amount of money, which bankrupts the city almost literally, right? Like we, we are literally not able to fix potholes and streetlights. Nithia was one of the only people to vote against this.

That is now what she's running on, right? She's like, we, it's like progressive fiscal responsibility. Let's not spend so much money on cops who don't need it. We're not getting more cops. We're just paying them more. And let's do stuff that actually makes Angelino's lives better. But that message is getting swamped in the crazy reality star who buys crystals is running. I think there's this thing that Guy was alluding to where we're talking about Spencer Pratt through the lens of media criticism and as a media phenomenon, rather than as like someone

who will be in charge of one of the largest cities in the world. the country. And he has nothing. He has absolutely nothing. He said something to the effect of, you know, for the bikers, we'll not just give them bike lanes. We'll give them tubes in the sky. It's like literal like tubes in the sky for like the yimbies and the bikers. And there's nothing to it. And he has no experience. And at the bottom of it, it's like how much, what is the rage that is guiding people to support and be enthusiastic? for someone who literally just plans to do nothing and break the system? Like, what is undergirding that?

And how have these other two candidates, whether it's Nithia or Abbas, not been able to tap into that or respond to it? Like, I would say, Spencer Pratt also speaks to all of us missing the monoculture of 2007 daily mail articles. Like, you just, like, that is so pitch perfect the kind of thing you do to get a press cycle in 2007, 2008. and like I respect that skill set. But like when you drive through,

I went to my friend's dad's house in Holmby Hills and like you saw Spencer Pratt signs. You know, you go through certain parts of the city that don't feel represented and it is largely our golfing classes. It is wealthy people with big homes who want to feel like the city is still for them.

And the thing is, there used to be like a class of California Republicans who were sort of socially moderate, fiscally conservative, your Pete Wilson's out there. And those people could still have something of a play. But like, that has really shifted with the like hard right social turn of national politics. It does mean you kind of need somebody with a little bit of crazy to pull that off in an LA terms. And Spencer is just that. I also think it's an open question whether Spencer Pratt like even wants to be mayor or if it's just a media play. I mean, he's literally making a reality show right now about his mayorship run.

And like he doesn't need to win. He probably even if he gets to the general will not win or the numbers will be against him. I mean, anything could happen. Right. Karen is so unpopular. There could be a scandal. She could die, whatever. shit could happen just like it did in 2016.

But like if he loses, he gets to be a right wing media star for the rest of his life. And like the what is happening right now is the race is just becoming a focus of right wing media. So literally what happened to me yesterday was I made an Instagram video, TikTok, et cetera, a vertical video in which I say, you know, vote for Nithia if you want to keep Spencer out of the general election. Because we have a top two primary system for those who don't know. all the candidates of the different parties, everybody runs against each other. The top two go to the general. So if Nithia comes into second place,

Spencer Pratt will be excluded from November. We won't have to hear about the motherfucker for the next six months, right? So I make this case in a little video. The Daily Mail did an entire article in which they said, unlikable woke comedian, which guilty on all counts,

goes on rant, you know, telling, ordering Angelinos not to vote for Spencer Pratt. Now, my video got 200,000, views, right? That's, that's an okay number, you know? It's not fucking news. The only reason they posted it is because they'll get clicks and they'll make money off of the thing being posted. That's the same thing he's doing. The Daily Show sensibility of thinking, they're all idiots, really has destroyed American politics. Yes. Yeah. Because there, like, there is no idea of,

we need to do the thing that is best or better so that we can have a city, a state, a country that runs better. There is this anger on the right. All of these leftists, all of their virtue, virtue signaling, their trigger warnings. And then Trump represents this thing of like, what if instead of that the option was pure vice all the time? What if it was unleashing of id, unleashing of insanity? With Spencer Pratt, it's odd. Like, what is his future? Because the future for Republican power is that there is no daylight between Republican media influence and Republican power. It's been that way for decades. Rush Limbaugh has had more power than Rachel Maddow ever could have hoped to have. And so he's creating this power for himself in the right wing

media sphere. But then, you know, I look at like who's reposting his tweets or whatever. And it's something to the effect of, man, you got to love this guy. And it's like from Jeb Bush. or Ted Cruz that are just like totally like amped on this guy. And those aren't the voters of Los Angeles. Like is he even geared towards this race? Like, or as you were saying, just building towards something else entirely. But like I do think all of them like particularly Trump and Spencer play into this anxiety of boomer white wealthy people who had small frivolous things of in their lives questioned.

Like words that they were used to. just saying that we're questioned, behaviors that they were making that were not the biggest and most racist or sexist or homophobic things, but we're suddenly taken away from them. And like these people represent taking back. These people represent, finally, we can speak openly. And, you know, it, like, it is interesting how to have a conversation. One of the things have been interesting about this is the way that it is reopening. So many people being like, oh, we should have punished the South.

more after the Civil War. People reexamining, people reexamining the way that we handled things coming out of the Civil Rights Movement. And I think how, what is the space for people in a society that is trying to move past some of their bullshit? Yeah.

I mean, Spencer Pratt's homes says plan is literally throw them all in jail, which is literally unconstitutional. And he does not care. That's all he's saying. And if he gets an office, he won't be able to do it. That is still just the city paying to house and feed them. Yeah, it still is.

And at greater expense than what Nithia wants to do. But so it's such a titanic, like, battle of approaches. Like if just rationality and like, hey, let's try to make the world a little bit better, can't win over media bullshit. Like, it is a real problem in America. It really gets to this idea that politics in America is a little bit untenable right now. And the question that people most frequently ask me about Nithia is like, can she actually do it? And it's so interesting because it's like, Karen Bass is one of those figures that we know will keep things just going the way that they've been going that no one's really happy with.

And we know, like objectively, Spencer Pratt can't. We know that both of those questions have an answer and that people's response. to Nithia is this curiosity of could a person who actually wanted to work hard and fix these problems, fix these problems is like really daunting. Like, that trying is the thing we're most scared of. Sam, you lived in this city for a long time. You have like, you know, watched the progressive surge as much as anybody. We now have like four or five city council members depending how do you want to count them out

of, what is it, 15 or 16, who are like progressives of various, flavors. We've got technocrat progressives. We've got union progressives. We've got social justice movement progressives. And it feels like we're in danger of being, of that being entirely swamped. What do you think? Well, I don't think that our progressive council people or the progressive movement, such as it is, is going away in Los Angeles. I think Nithia's run is a sign of its strength to a great degree, but there are serious divisions in there. I mean, if you're looking at the city council where a series of progressive council members this week decided to endorse Bass, that shows there isn't unity on the left. And if there isn't unity on the left and Nithia

is going to need to create a movement to win, there's a question of like, well, what's happening here? I'm wondering like your thoughts on that. Like what does that mean? I can tell you the reason like they endorsed Karen Bass, it was not surprising to anybody who follows the politics really closely because Nithia jumped in in the race at the last minute. Like literally the morning that it was possible, last morning it was possible to jump at the race. And the reason she did that was because two other people like declined to run like two days prior, whoever one thought was going to run.

So she saw a lane open. Hold on a second. Nobody real is going to run against Karen. You know what? I can do it. I'm, I've, you know, there's a lane here. Right. And so she didn't do the careful coalition building of like, let me call everybody for like a

and a half and signal I want to run and put together my forces, right? And that's sort of like, honestly, her strength as a politician. That was like, why she ran in the first place. Nobody thinks it's possible. I'm going to fucking do it. She's always voting against stuff in city council that like everybody else is going along with like the police raises. So, um, you know, the bet for her is not can I, you know, marshal a coalition of unions and other electives. It's like, can I actually convince the people of LA to choose a better path. I'm going to go directly to the voters. Like, and that was always going to be the, the path, right?

So the fact that the other progressives are like, let's just endorse Karen, because that's what everyone expects us to do. I'm kind of like, yeah, man, Hugo Aonisus, whatever, go for it, guys. Like, I, that's a fine bet to take from your perspective. But when in these very blue states or very blue cities, problems are getting solved, elections are getting decided by phone calls and people within the political establishment, like using their relationships with each other so that everyone gets taken care of, it like breaks off the relationship between those politicians and their electorate.

Exactly. People feel disconnected. And like I've seen it so many times with people I knew who were like going to run for something, like they had been in government and then they were going to run all gay guys. We're going to run for something. And then somebody higher up in the Colorado Democratic Party was going to run. And so they pop out. And it's like a little bit you've got to get.

get in there and swing so that people know that you were swinging for them. Yes. And, you know, I really respect that Nithia has done something that if it doesn't work, we'll be dumb for her political career. She took a risk and we should be respecting that. I was, you know, again, I know her personally. When she jumped in, I texted her. I was like, I'm proud of you.

That was a balzy thing to do because she burned a lot of bridges. Like she had previously endorsed Karen Bass and she pissed Karen Bass. I like for me, if I had, I don't like it when people are mad at me, you know, to like do something like that is scary. But it's the reason she did it is because she literally is not trying to build some larger political career. If she loses this race, she'll go run some nonprofit somewhere and do a lot of good in the world. Right. She's like, 44 years old. She's got a long career ahead of her.

She's like, yeah, it's time to like put up or shut up and try to do something or say, you know what? I did my best. I'll do something else. We need some doses of real populism. Yeah. need some doses of people, like, building a relationship with voters to remind everybody that this is a democracy. And you've seen such excitement on the left with Bernie and AOC being able to make things like that happen. And like, what makes Spencer Pratt and Donald Trump powerful

is it not their management of political systems, but their relationship to the electorate? And if you can have somebody pull that off, it will give them power within those political system. And final thoughts on this? Anything? The comparison has been to Zoron, right? Yeah. Like she's Zoron, but she's not Zoron. And Los Angeles is not New York City. Yeah.

And so the challenges of running here with this sclerotic huge city that has like poor representation, it's unclear to me, you know, like how you break through that in the way that Spencer Pratt is breaking through to some people with, well, just throw all the unhoused people in jail. You know, like, how do you make a complex and nuanced argument about zoning to, like, a mass public that is pissed, that is angry? How do you connect those things? Yeah. It's a challenge and it remains to be seen.

It's also, like, harder than people think. And look, Zonon's victory, wonderful thing, right? Very inspiring. But the fact that, first of all, he had years more to plan to do it than Nithia did. He had been working with his video team for like three years. He was sitting in the State Assembly, which is a job that, like, take, you don't got to do shit there. You did a bunch of protest votes, whatever. So he didn't have to, like, have a record, right?

And he also has this, like, undeniable personal charisma and incredible political instincts, right? That has given us this belief that, like, at least on the left among progressives, that, like, it's all up to the candidate. And so you see people go, oh, well, you know, she's not zoran, right? Or whatever, as though that's some knock when, like, the idea of, like, truly progressive ideas. And by progressive ideas, I mean, just people actually trying to make the world better instead of fucking around. Actually getting that kind of change to happen is really, really hard. And you can't just wait around for the perfect person to line up and have all the star signs align and the clouds part at the right moment. Sometimes you have to fucking like muddle through with someone who's like, you know, like just doing their best.

And we're all going to pull in the same direction. Because guess what? They're trying. I'm trying. We're all going to do our best today. And, you know, just as an example of this, like, Nithia has been in office for six years. She's taken a lot of votes that, like, Zoran didn't have to take and a lot of other people didn't have to take.

And so if people want to go through a record with a fine tooth comb, they can find something like, oh, I don't agree with this vote, right? And guess what? Yeah, you could do that to Bernie, too. And you could do that to AOC and anybody else who's actually legislated or governed. But if you are going to just, like, wait for the perfect person. to come along. Nothing will ever happen.

And you have to just like do what she did. Jump in, take a bed on yourself, take a bet on your community and just like try because it's so hard on the best of days. Absolutely. And, you know, I've seen polls where she's close with Pratt right now. Like this is not decided. Oh, yeah. They're neck and neck.

Just like the question of what can push her over the top relative to what I understand clearly to be a Pratt strategy. I don't know, but it, you know, it'll be, it'll be up to the voters in a couple weeks. This is like the biggest national news we haven't covered on the, on the show yet. The Supreme Court's disastrous voting rights decisions. These are really bad. The Supreme Court has put another nail in the coffin of minority political representation in the Clay, did I pronounce it right?

Clay v. Louisiana ruling, which undoes major parts of the landmark, you know, voting rights act, just the, just one of the land. landmark civil rights reforms that, you know, just ended Jim Crow. We're just undoing the laws that ended Jim Crow. I could go into some more detail, but Guy, you actually have a law degree. So can you flesh it out a little bit for us? Essentially, the Supreme Court said, you know, people don't die as much in auto accidents. So we probably don't need seatbelts anymore.

Like, essentially, the Supreme Court has decided that there is no more racism in America. and the Voting Rights Act that was originally passed in 1965 and has been reauthorized repeatedly by Congress required that states in the South that had previously had problems with denying votes to people of color had to run any changes in voter requirements past the Justice Department and the D.C. Circuit Court. And there had been previous decisions that said that creating majority. minority districts in those states, districts for Congress that made sure that there were black members of Congress from the South was permissible. So the question is, is like, must the government be perfectly racially blind? Or is it possible for the government to take into account race to try to undo the racism of the past? And the present, and racism of the present, racism, racism does still exist. There's no more, there's no more racism. John Roberts has decided.

Oh, thank God. There's no more racism. So Louisiana, like Louisiana is one third black. And you could easily gerrymander. Also, to be clear, political gerrymandering is perfectly legal. You can do like you can gerrymander Louisiana so that Democrats do not have a member of Congress. And that would be perfectly constitutional. And actually one of the only things that was stopping worse partisan gerrymandering was that there was a law against doing it for racial reasons.

Right. So the courts would step in and say, oh, well, oh, because the black. people tend to vote Democrat in the state, you actually made it, took away black representation. And so that would like undo a little bit of the partisan gerrymandering. But now we don't even have that. So Calais was a white person who lived near Baton Rouge and was put into one of these majority minority districts so that there were, you know, Louisiana's one third black. So they have six congressional districts.

And so the courts had said that they needed to have two black districts. And now that is no longer a requirement. and he said, oh, you're diminishing my vote by saying I have to be in this district. And like it's really scary because you look at some of these states in the south. Like in Alabama, Alabama is our blackest state and does such a good job of being uniformly white and Republican when it comes to elected offices. It really is stark and scary. And also right now they're doing a really good job of taking away the right of Indeastern. to sue about these things.

I'm basically saying only the attorney general can do it, which means if we have a president who is a Republican, these things will not get enforced in any way. It's just boggling to me that I remember being educated in American public schools and learning that the heroic era of 1960s activism, the civil rights era is one of the things we should be proudest about as Americans. Like Martin Luther King, the March on Washington. And that effort, that profound and inspiring effort that we thought as the best thing created two huge pieces of legislation.

And we are murdering one of them in real time. We are taking like the proudest thing we have from 20th century American social movements. And we are ending it. just to undo the two big arguments you hear from the writer for the Supreme Court about this. A, that like America isn't racist anymore. Like when we're talking about the Jim Crow era, like that was the people who threw rocks at the black kids going into the schools,

they're still alive, right? They're what, 70 maybe? Right. Like they're not that old even. They're alive. They vote. They have kids. Let's just accept those people are racist.

right, you're throwing rocks at a black kid going into school. You're racist. Okay, you're screaming at them. How do you think they raised their kids? They're probably raised them to be racist, right? So we're not talking about a lot here, right? And then the black folks who like marched in their church shoes, right, to Selma or whatever, they're also still alive. Like this is, we are not, it is not a history lesson.

It's real. And then the idea that the government should be race blind. The government was race. Well, actually, no. The government was prioritizing the rights of white. white people in most ways for hundreds of years. Let's just assume maybe it was race blind for a little bit, right? The whole point of the 60s was to say, hold on, the government's job is to make sure

that racial discrimination is less than it used to be. Like that was something that we wanted the government. There's the whole point of the civil rights movement. It was a lobbying movement of to get LBJ to do something. And a guy, guy mentioned this, but this act was reauthorized. over and over again. Most recently in 2006, and what was the vote from the George W. Bush War on Terror Senate, 98 to zero to reauthorize this. Wow. Like, this is directly at odds with all aspects of conservative jurisprudence. They're supposed to be, oh, Congress makes laws. The Supreme

Court doesn't. The court's don't. It is supposed to be like a deference to like the written, like, Constitution and law. And like the 14th and 15th Amendment like have enforcement clauses that give Congress the power to do things like this. There is extensive case law saying that Congress has the power to do this. And they have made up the idea that this is no longer necessary. Their logic is, well, but black people vote now. But they're ignoring the fact that like it's less than 10 years since they started letting these states do things like ID laws that allow you to again limit the votes of poor people and black people. Like, they're, they're just turning a blind eye because they don't want to have, like,

they don't want to have to think about the fact that this is real. And it's also, let's be really blunt. It's a specific project by the Republican appointed justices to give Republicans a structural advantage in the election. And like, here's a little piece of evidence for that. I only learned this like a week ago. Chief Justice John Roberts, what was one of his previous jobs?

Oh, is advising George W. Bush in the recount procedure between him and Al Gore, like to come up with a legal argument for why George W. Bush should win and stop the recount and, et cetera. Like, like, this is literally the guy's job before he even became a Supreme Court justice

was using the law to help Republicans win. And to some extent, every politician does this, right? like says, let's look at the laws. Let's adjust them and work within them. Let's manipulate them a little bit. That's, it's just like, like an NBA player working the ref or, you know, drawing a foul to some extent. But this is like above and beyond.

Yeah. And I hate to do this thing, but like, let's play out the repercussions for democracy. Let's do it. Because it's bad. It's really, it's really bad. So, like, I think generally in America, we believe that people vote for their politicians. and the politician might suck or represent them not well, and then they vote them out.

We basically have a system where politicians now can choose their voters and are locked in by an idea of what those voters should vote for. It's just like a profound and fundamental betrayal of any little smidge or vestige of democratic ideals. The thing is, we have to some extent done this to our sense. ourselves as voters. We have done like people like things like term limits, which I was pitching about earlier. People like things that make elections easier for them. And when you have a gerrymander district that means you pretty much know, oh, based on where I live, a Democrat's going to be there. I don't have to think about this. Like it makes you feel more comfortable while at the same

time letting some dude stay in office for 50 years and do nothing. And like the end of competitive districts has been really, really bad for America. Like we have. have to do some work. Like we, we can't, it can't be easy. I want to ask for you guys take on this, because I've only heard one good, like, positive spin from a Democrat or someone to the left on the rise of gerrymandering, which is it may make Republican districts more brittle, right? Because if they're spreading the Republicans that exist in Louisiana or wherever across more different districts, then they are reducing the margin in those districts. And in a wave election, such as we might have later this year, when Democrats have sort of a momentum-based advantage, there might be more

districts that flop back the other way because there are more brittle districts rather than safer districts for Republicans where they've, you know, if it's like, okay, if they're going to do a three and two, then those districts are almost secure. But if they're trying to get five Republican districts, then maybe more of those get washed out. Do you, do you think this is true at all? Those black districts were good for Republicans in the South. Those black districts, like, forced you to put all of the Democrats in one place. And, like, Texas, in their redistricting, they sort of gave, like, an, like, eight, 10 point advantage to Republicans so that they could get more seats.

But it looks like this could be an election, but only if we show up, where Democrats could outperform the previous election by, like, 11 or 13 points, in which case, there could be a lot of Democrats showing up from Texas or two years. Yeah. I think it's possible in this huge wave election that we can overcome the effects of this horrific partisan gerrymandering. But the deck is stacked against Democrats nationally. The idea that every national election, you are starting with a four percentage point

national handicap and you need to be five points ahead of Republicans just to like get even in the House is insane and anti-democratic. And it provides just enough kind of wiggle room so we can pretend that like, oh, no, no, no, there's still Democrats and there's still Republicans in there. But the impacts are massive. And I think we'll require at some point massive reform. Yeah. And what that'll take will be not just Democrats winning a House election in two years, but Democrats having a trifecta, House, Senate, and the presidency, unless something fundamentally changes

in the parties politically, which, but, and then the first thing they need to pass is a new voting rights act, which they had a bill on the floor to do this after Joe Biden won. It was like HR one or whatever, right?

It was like a bunch of Democrats are like, first thing we got to do is pass democracy reform. And they just didn't do it. Maybe for filibuster reasons. I don't remember it was a couple years ago, but like that's what it's going to take. and it's like the job gets harder every single year.

Right. Just saying, please, we got to get rid of the electoral college. Isn't going to fix anything for anyone. And so anyone out there who's saying that as though that's helpful, like we're not going to get to, there are so many things we need to do before we could get to the point to do that.

And we need to do those things. And there's been a lot of shitting on Democrats for not getting shit done. But Democrats have not had 60 senators since the like six weeks that Ted Kennedy was alive in Barack Obama was presidents. What we need to do is win a motherfucking election. And we cannot get mad at Democrats who have 48 seats in the Senate for not adding four members to the Supreme Court. Like it, like you, it's going to take voters handing power like at, like at a deficit with

a four point deficit. We have to win a real election. and then we need to be fire underneath our elected representatives to get that shit done. But like if we come to another situation where the Senate is 51, 49, and Federman is our 51, like sweeping change is not going to happen. Oh, yeah. Well, I mean, the best silver lining you can say for any of this is they, the right wing is pushing so hard. They're cramming Democrats into this smaller and smaller.

box that maybe there will finally be some kind of like metastatic political response of people fighting back that like, you know, the, I guess we just need to have another civil rights movement, you know? Like people love bringing up the Jefferson saying there needs to be a revolution every generation as though that means that we need to burn down the entire government and write a new constitution. But there have been revolutions every generation. We have had revolutions that have pulled women into the election.

force. We have had revolutions that have equalized to some extent racial voting in this country. It takes real work. And so many of us grew up feeling like government was the responsibility of other people. And so much of us have grown up with an idea that there is something virtuous about taking to the streets, but not virtuous about campaigning for someone or actually voting. And we have this fucking system. We better use it because burning it down and building up a new one. It's very hard. And also, it's probably not going to turn out the way you want it to. Yeah, that's why I don't feel bad about telling you which fucking politicians I support on this show. Okay, I want to do one more story real quick. This is our fun one. We do a fun one at the end of the show.

Sam, you brought this one in. This week, faculty members at Harvard University voted to cap the number of A's for undergraduate students. They were given out too many A's and people, and they were mad about this. They're like, this is a real problem. We got grade inflation. Now, Only 24% of the students can get A's. They can give out as many A minuses as they want, but only 24% A's. Is this, Sam, is this, is this good? Is this going to fix Harvard? No, it's, it's not going to fix Harvard.

I think Harvard was being more true to itself and more honest by letting all the undergrads get A's. Because Harvard for undergrads, it's not really an educational institution. it's more of like a gestation pod for elite reproduction this sort of like slimy mass

You get in there they hand you your bow tie and your low furs and like slowly over the full years and you just kind of like ooze into the eating hall and like meet the other aristocrats and it doesn't matter how you do in class because you're meeting everybody

and those people are going to be your friends forever. And you've, you've, you've, you've, you've, you've, you've, you've, mented your ticket into the upper echelons of society. Like, the idea that, like, your A's matter when you go to Harvard. That doesn't matter. Your A's matter when you go to Baruch College.

Your A's Degree College. Your A's do not matter at Harvard. You already won. You have A's for life. What, what grades did Al Gore and Tommy Lee Jones get when they were roommates? We don't know. We just know that they were roommates. My worry

for the mental health professionals of Cambridge, Massachusetts, they're going to have a lot on their hands once these little boys and girls, like, fail for the first times in their lives. Yeah. I mean, to me, what really pisses me off about this is it feeds into this idea that, like, grades are meritocratic in any way and that school is competitive and that, like, you need to earn a good grade. Like, I don't understand why that's a concept in education

whatsoever. Like it's not, we don't even have that really in other parts of, as a stand-up comedian, I don't get graded. Nobody gets great. But it also,

I think the reason they give a shit is because they see Harvard as a grade in life. You got into Harvard, that means you're better. So within Harvard, there must be a hierarchy of value as well.

And I'm like, hey, what if we're all God's creatures and we all have the capacity to learn, bitch? It's a zero-sum game. It is imagining that the success of some requires the failure of others.

Like, it is for building an aristocracy for this country. It was founded as a Puritan Calvinist cemetery. It was founded as a Puritan Calvinist seminary with a distinct idea that there is a limited number of people who get into heaven and those people will do well in the world. And then everyone else will be sad, pathetic sinning failures. And these are ideas we have imported. The biggest stain on Harvard is like, okay, if they really believe they're the best educational institution in the world, why are they not giving that education to more people? It's the richest university, I think on planet Earth.

Yeah. They have billions of dollars. Why not open, okay, keep the one little Harvard, but why not open a massive public campus where you educate hundreds of thousands of people like make the world a better place? No, they don't believe that other people deserve that. they believe their main power is creating a small elite, just as you said, Sam, a small core of only a couple people went to Harvard. They think that if more people get education,

that makes the education worse. That is false. It's the opposite of the truth. It's inimical and a horrible. To be fair, most of the ivies are opening up campuses in China and Dubai so that they can make money off it. Right.

So, you know, and let me just contrast. I went to a school card called Bardcock. I like this college. It's a liberal arts college as well. Recently was in the news because the president was in the Epstein files thousands of times. Oh, yeah. Thousands of times. And he has since resigned. He had his reasons. And, you know, we don't need to get into that too much, but that did happen.

However, it's also a private liberal arts institution. But what that institution spends their money on is they open college programs in prisons, in poor neighborhoods. Like literally they go to places where education is underserved. they say, you know what, our duty is to bring this education to people who don't otherwise have the opportunity to get it. And, you know, not a perfect institution, but I think that that's a little bit better than saying, no, no, no, we always want less. Less people can get in. Less people can get A's. We want to restrict the benefit so that those who get it feel more powerful. That's the

opposite of what a college should do. When people tell me, oh, I went to college with so and so, like a big deal person, a name dropping person, my response has always been to say, yeah, and I went to college with 7,000 Latinos. Like, I went to Berkeley. I went to a school that is good and does that on a scale. Like, I went to a school, like, part of a system, the UC system I'm so proud of, like, trying to create excellent universities so that a large portion of Californians have access to a top-rate education.

And I think forgetting that this is possible and that government is capable of providing good education to a lot of people is something we've lost track of. Like, the most profoundly amazing thing that the United States has done without there being a mandate for it in the United States Constitution is public education. And it created a revolution between 1880 and 1960. And at the point in time when it got desegregated, so many communities in America said we no longer need to invest in this thing. And it's very sad to me. Harvard has something like $50 billion in their endowment. The idea that this incredible world historical conglomeration of wealth and prestige and power can't let more people in, it was like straight up embarrassing.

Build a new dorm, dumbasses. What the fuck? Yes. Yeah. And like when we have to like on those rare occasions run into someone who like went to college, you know, like. in Boston, in Boston, or just outside of Boston. Like, we're always confronted with their own, like, sense of their own self and superiority. And it's insane.

And it's unfair. And it's bad. And I went to public schools. I'm proud of it. And I'm a better person for it. And public things are better than private things. Yes. Is, like, one of my baseline American values, but it isn't for Spencer Pratt and it isn't for

John Roberts and it isn't for Harvard. and that's what we're all fighting against as a society in my view. I'm going to leave it there. Thank you guys so much for being here. Guy, where can people find you? I'm going to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with my show, Be Fruitful.

I will be there for all of August. So if you're going to be at the fringe, please go to my Instagram or my website and buy tickets. At Guy Brandem across all social media. Incredibly funny show. People should go see it. And Sam, where can people find you?

You can find me on Instagram at Roudman Graham, and you can find me working in the background of this podcast, helping produce it for Adam and helping write and research his videos. Thank you so much, guys so much for being here. This has been Factually. If you want to support the show, patreon.com slash Adam Con over five bucks a month gives you every episode of the show ad free. And we'll see you next week with a couple more episodes of Factually. Thanks so much for being here. That was a HeadGum podcast. Hi, I am Mandy Moore. Sterling K. Brown. And I'm Chris Sullivan. And we host the podcast. That was us now on HeadGum. Each episode, we're going to go into a deep

dive from our show, This Is Us. That's right. We're going to go episode by episode. We're also going to pepper in episodes with different guest stars and writers and casting directors. Are we going to cry? Yes. A little bit. Are we going to laugh?

A lot. A whole lot. That's what I'm hoping, man. Listen to that was us on your favorite podcast app or watch full video episodes on YouTube or Spotify, new episodes every Tuesday.