YouTube and The Great Gerrymandering War of 2026 | Hour 3

What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all of the links, become a patron, go to thepeakclendarshow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free right to your smartphone or tablet, and again, thank you so much for your support. You can also get the peat pod the podcast at the peapod dot com. You just follow it, subscribe to it. It's totally free, and then it shows up. It's a native to the Speaker platform. But it's on all of the major podcasting platforms for you, well except for YouTube now because YouTube terminated my account apparently along with millions of others. Apparently they've been just terminating millions of accounts over the last two or three weeks. It's gotten pretty crazy ever since. Because I started talking about this on Monday, because it happened to me over the weekend, and I didn't even have videos that were available for people to see. I just like it was my live streams that I do, and so those are paywalled via the Patreon page, so you don't get access to it unless you have the link through Patreon, and so like they're like, there weren't any videos for me to be in violation of their terms of service and got I was like pretty ticked off about it, mainly because like, now I have to redo you know, how I do the live streams, which was kind of that was kind of choppy last night. I appreciate everybody hanging in while we were fixing all the technical difficulties that inevitably arise when you start doing the live streams on a new platform. But I also lost all of my subscription, like all of the channels that I was watching, you know, my favorites. I had like probably forty of them. That I just you know, oh I like this this episode, I'll watch watch a couple of episodes. Okay, I like this person's content, and so I, you know, subscribe, and I lost all of those. So now I'm trying to rebuild libraries in Spotify to try to figure out I try to remember who all was I following what, you know, what shows was I following? So so I posted about it and then I'm now the Twitter algorithm, UH is feeding me all of these people, and I'm getting more and more and more and more people that are you know, showing up in my feeds about being demonetized. They demonetize diaper diplomacy. That channel. Like this guy creates the cute baby videos using AI and he takes like a clip from like the latest one he put out today was the Marco Rubio Q and a part of the Q and A and he just like superimposed or he gets like the AI to swap out all of the people in the press briefing with babies, and then he has all these hilarious like cutaway shots and you know, reaction shots and all this stuff. And apparently he does all of the like he does those facial expressions himself. He'll record his own face and then he like maps like a little baby Marco rubial face onto him to do the expression and then he puts that into the I don't know how he does it all, but like they're great videos, they're hilarious, they're adorable. And YouTube nuked him, they terminated his account, and in some cases they are there. They're demonetizing content creators but leaving their videos up. So the creator can't make any money on the video, but YouTube is still dropping ads in the video, so YouTube is keeping is keeping the money? Like that seems kind of like theft, especially when you provide no examples of the violations, right, Like if I violated your term of one of your terms of service, then you should tell me how I violated it, Like specifically, what video are you talking about that I did something that is against the rules. Show me what I did, because you just saying I did something doesn't make it true. And the fact that you're using AI to scrape through all of these videos and start banning everybody and then you can appeal, and then they come back in an hour and they're like, Nope, appeal rejected. There's no human review going on here. So yeah, apparently it's millions of accounts and people are now getting organized into like a class action lawsuit. Like you should at least have to say if your YouTube, you should at least give us the example of what the infraction is. Right, Let people correct whatever it is that you're citing them for. Give them the opportunity to correct it before you obliterate all of their work. Some people have lost their channel and they've got like thousands of videos and they're all just gone. You can't access them. So you should give people the opportunity to correct it or have a human review, give them a corrective path. Also, you should not be making any money. If you're going to demonetize the creator, then you shouldn't make any money off of it either, because whatever they did to violate the term of service, then you would be violating the terms of service as well by continuing to make money off of a video that you claim is inauthentic content. Is what they're calling a lot of these creators. Inauthentic content as identified by AI. Hey, so the computer model is going to tell us what's authentic and not. Okay, rant over, Sorry, I just I did not mean to start down that rabbit hole. It's just like, this is what I've been seeing for the last four days. It's gotten completely out of control. So I moved over to Rumble. I'll, you know, if I'm gonna do videos and stuff, I start doing them over there. Building up you know, the my subscriber or the subscription list, you know, the shows that are available on Rumble, you know, and just like anything else. I mean, it's been around for several years, I want to say, like five years now. And you know, the more people get booted off of YouTube and want an actual free platform to post their content. And Rumble has like they lay out their terms right, very clear, and they show you the process like this is what happens, human review, appeal, blah blah blah. They have it all spelled out for you, very simple. So anyway, all right, last hour I was talking about the Virginia Speaker or sorry, Senate President pro tem and the raid on her office, her business and several other marijuana dispensaries and such. And this is now being twisted and framed into an argument against Donald Trump, but of course, right, because all things must be viewed through the prism of Trump. And this is obviously Donald Trump taking revenge on the Senate leader because of the redistricting, the gerrymandering that Virginia is trying to ram through, which is still we are still waiting on the Virginia Supreme Court to rule on whether or not this thing was constitutionally done, which it clearly was not. Clearly it was not. I mean, it's very The constitution is very clear. And there were three different ways that the Democrats violated the state constitution in order to get this map approved. So I don't know if like this. It doesn't seem like a very good sign to me that it's taking this law. Because a lower judge already kind of looked at the merits and said, okay, yes this is unconstitutional. That is and that is, and blocked it. And then the Supreme Court overturned that block allowed the vote to occur because they said, you know, if it goes down, then there's then it doesn't matter. The point is moot. So we're not going to hear the case basically unless the vote passes. Well, the vote squeaks through, and so now it goes back to the State Supreme Court. But it's been. A couple of weeks now, and that that does not make me feel good because that tells me that there may be some judges trying to figure out a way to read between some lines and be like, okay, yes, fine, it may have been constitutional, but it's okay, right, Like they're going to try to they're going to try to interpret a living constitution to allow Democrats to do this. So here is a statement from Senator l Louise Lucas or Triple l as I call her. Today's actions by federal agents are about far more than one state senator. They are about power and who is allowed to use it on behalf of the people. What we saw if it's a clear pattern from this administration. When challenged, they try to intimidate and silence the voices who stand up to them. Just two weeks ago, Virginians sent a powerful message when they voted to stop Trump's scheme to manipulate the twenty twenty six midterm elections. Voters across this commonwealth made clear that power belongs with the people, not with politicians like me who try to take power away from them like we did with the jerrymandard maps. Right, So it's all about Trump, right, It's all about Trump, even though the investigation actually started under Biden. So yeah, the DOJ was already probing, they were already on the trail. But there are a bunch of other states that are now looking to redistrict and this may not work out as Democrats think it's going to. You know, stories are powerful. They help us make sense of things, to understand experiences. Stories connect us to the people of our past while transcending generations. They help us process, the meaning of life and our stories are told through images and videos. Preserve your stories with Creative Video started in nineteen ninety seven and Minhill, North Carolina. It was the first company to provide this valuable service, converting images, photos and videos into high quality produced slide shows, videos and albums. The trusted, talented and dedicated team at Creative Video will go over all of the details with you to create a perfect project. Satisfaction guaranteed. Drop them off in person or mail them. They'll be ready in a week or two. Memorial videos for your loved ones, videos for rehearsal, dinners, weddings, graduations, Christmas, family vacations, birthdays, or just your family stories all told through images. That's what your photos and videos are are. They are your life told through the eyes of everyone around you and all who came before you, and they will tell others to come who you are. Visit creative video dot com. Alrighty, So redistricting aka jerrymandering, because gerrymandering is just like when the other team does it right. If you're on the blue team and the red team is drawing the maps, well, then the maps are gerrymandered. And if you're on red team and the blue team is drawing the maps, then the blue team is jerrymandering. Gerrymandering is when the other team does it okay. And it's like I've been saying for years, when Democrats say they want quote fair maps, which actually you don't hear that language very much nowadays. It's interesting how quickly that's been discarded. But yeah, when a Democrat says they want a fair map, they mean a map that advantages them because in states that they control the line drawing process known as redistricting, they minimize Republican representation. We've gone over these examples. The easiest one, I mean, the most egregious jerry mander is Illinois has been for a very long time. But then there's the entire New England cluster of states. All of those states they do actually have Republican voters up there. They do, in fact, like there's a US senator who's a Republican up there. I'm not kidding, Susan Collins. She's from Maine and that's basically Canada, and she's a Republican and she keeps winning reelection. She's up for election this year. So Republicans do vote, and they exist up there, and they do vote up there. They're about depending on which state you're in, there's somewhere between forty forty five percent of the populations. Yet there is not a single representative from New England because Democrats draw the lines and those are fair maps for them, right, But now they're very upset becus. You know, Texas started this, okay, as I've gone over in the past. I think two weeks ago I went through the history of the Texas redistricting. It was prompted by lawsuits that were filed and joined by the Biden DOJ in order to get Texas to redistrict. And meanwhile, you've got these court cases. The one in Texas came about through litigation that prompted rulings, and they didn't all work out the way the Democrats wanted them to work out, and so Texas redistricted. And they were responding also to what was going on up in New York at the time with the Mander, the hcal Mander, where they tried to, you know, disenfranchise even more Republicans than they already were. They got smacked down in the court. Anyway, Redistricting has now turned into an all out War, the Great Redistricting War of twenty twenty six, And this is from Isabelle Vincent at the New York Post. Democrats and Republicans, you know, redrawing these lines ahead of the upcoming midterm elections. But the problem is, like a lot of states are on, you know, like you've got primary elections going on, and so you've got these timeframes where you can't do things that would mess up the district lines too close to an election, Like in North Carolina. They call it the well. I think it's actually I think it's a US Supreme Court ruling, is the Percel principle where if it's too close to an election, you can't mess with these district lines because then you've got people who have filed to run in certain districts. It upends all of that. You've got voters who are now moved into different districts, they don't know who their candidates are and all that. So there's a much smaller window here. I saw South Carolina. They've just voted to give themselves some more time. I think they I think it was South Carolina, like they're pushing back the well. I shouldn't say that because I don't know that maybe Alabama or Tennessee. Or Arkansas or yeah. I forget, but I've got. A list here of all the states, but one of the states. Let me just say that one state is delaying their primary so they can redistrict to the Republican's advantage. And then you had the Calais ruling out of Louisiana that the US Supreme Court just decided that when the Constitution says that you cannot redistrict based on race, like you can't use race, that means you can't use race. And so what had been happening for decades basically is that liberals on the Supreme Court had issued their, you know, earlier interpretations of Section two of the Voting Rights Act, and their interpretation allowed Democrats to jerry mander based on race. To create majority minority districts. Clarence Thomas, a black justice on the Supreme Court, has been against this from the beginning. He is, like he has always said, the Voting Rights Act does not say you can do this, It does not allow you to create a majority minority district Okay, But Democrats, and you know, Thomas was always in the minority of that view until this ruling from Louisiana. But under that old interpretation by liberals, that empowered Democrats to go and draw districts quote based on race, but race was simply a proxy for Democrat seats, right, so they would say, oh, it has to be a majority black district. But that was simply a way for the Democrats to keep a Democrat in the seat. And it's funny too, because they're like complaining about out like the South Carolina effort that's looking to get underway. They're like, oh my gosh, we'll never get it because I got Jim Clyburn down there and his district would be at risk, and like, oh my gosh, we won't have any member of Congress who's black from South Carolina. Yeah, except Tim Scott, who won state wide in a red state and he's black too, So don't tell me it can't happen. New York Post reports while both parties have enacted plans to redistrict since July of twenty twenty five, Republicans are potentially poised to flip up to fourteen US House seats in their favor following last week's bombshells Supreme Court decision. This is the Calais ruling. The Landmark ruling said Louisiana unconstitutionally jerry mandered by race to form a new voting district, and that ruling set a new president. This has spurred a movement to redraw political district in several Southern states, including Florida, Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina, which could result in the new GOP seats. I would just emphasize the word could, because a lot of the reporting I'm seeing as words like Republicans would pick. Up blah blah blah. Yeah, I there's a reason you hold the elections, and what you think you might have done in your maps may not actually turn out to be the results that you thought you were going to see, right, So could not would, Let's always use could. Republicans currently hold a slim majority in the House of Representatives with their two hundred and seventeen seats to two hundred and twelve for the Democrats. There's also one independent, Kevin Kyleie out of California, but he was a Republican. He flipped to independent. Because of the California redistricting, So he's I'm guessing he's going to try to run for reelection as an independent there. There were also five vacancies, at least three of which will be filled ahead of the November third midterms. Okay, so that's the status of it now. Two to seventies. So Republicans have a five seat majority, well six if you count Kevin Kyleie and he does vote with Republicans, So they've got a six seat majority right now three unfilled seats. California, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, and Texas have already passed new congressional maps, and a lawsuit led by a voting rights group in Utah also resulted in a new congressional map there. So if we go through the individual states, we got Louisiana as I went over right, they had they had their maps, they had to redraw the maps. That's looking like it could be a two seat pickup for Republicans Tennessee. The Republican governor Bill Lee has called a special session to redraw their map. Lee is targeting the sole Democratic House seat in Memphis. Which this is kind of hilarious because Democrats have said, well, oh my gosh, now you know you're you're not going to get a black congressman. That district is represented by a white guy, a Democrat, Cohen, Steve Cohen. So so it's not a racial thing. And remember the Supreme Court in the Rucho case that came out of North Carolina named for Bob Rucho, right from here in Mecklimburg County, although I think now he lives outside of the county. I think he moved away. But that was the one that said that there is no federal prohibition on gerrymandering or redistricting by party affiliation. Right now. A state can do that on their own. A state can set up their own districts. And by the way, like California supposedly did this and it resulted in a gerrymandered map of course for Democrats. Virginia did this, and they actually had probably the fairest map quote unquote fairest map if you're looking at it from a proportionate representative model. In other words, the way the Virginia people vote is pretty close. It's like fifty five forty five or so, and in favor of Democrats, and so Democrats had six seats and Republicans had five, and so that was that map was as a proportion of the voting records, right, Like that was a fair map. If that's your criteria, which Democrats have been telling us in North Carolina is the criteria we should be followed. But for some reason in California, those aren't fair maps. In a fair map in California is one that favored the Democrats, like forty one to nine. Even though forty percent of the population votes Republican in California, they don't get forty percent of the seats, see what I mean. Like Democrats, they talk well, they say whatever they have to say in whatever state they that they're in in order to try to get the advantage. So if they have to attack jerrymandering on racial lines, they'll do that. If they have to do it along partisan lines, they'll do it along that. Right, fair maps in this state, But if we're in control, then no fair maps. Right. I've been covering this topic a very long time, and this is why their are arguments in North Carolina never seem to apply to any of the states that they control, which has led me to believe that you really cannot take politics out of this now. To me, the larger concern is that it seems like this is indicative of a complete breakdown and unwillingness to even abide by an opposing view, right to even allow that. And that's on both sides of this debate, or both sides of the political spectrum here, right. You got Republicans that are like, draw out every Democrat, and you have Democrats saying, draw it every Republican. And what does that mean. It means like we're going to ignore this half of the electorate. We're just not even going to give them any representation at the national level. And to be clear, both parties have been doing this forever for different reasons, in different states, in different times. And so for anybody to say, well, Republicans started it in Texas, that is that's if you believe that history began this year, and it did not. This has been going on since the founding of the country. I mean, heck, the guy what's his name Elbridge, Gary that is named after so it should be Gary Mandering. But he was, like I think he was, he was in the cabinet or he was like the vice president for Madison like that. That's how long this has been going on. He was the one that had the district that looked like a salamander, hence Gary's mander, the Gary Man. That's how they came up. That's how that word came into being. This has been going on since the founding of the country, so did not just started Texas, and it's been going on. You know, both sides have been playing this game. And now there then that's what this is. It's a fight for raw power at the House, at the congressional level House of Representatives, and I don't see a way for any side to unilaterally disarm. So these are the rules. We'll see how it turns out. This article, by the way, from Semaphore by David Weigel, who's the politics reporter for The Outfit, And this is often the case a lot of reporters covering Congress and politics up in DC, a lot of their articles almost seem to be like, here's some free advice for Democrats. This is what you should do, and just a heads up on this stuff. And that's how I take this article about the redistricting headline, Republicans prepare for long term redistricting domination. The growing conventional wisdom is that the gerrymandering wars of twenty twenty five, twenty six will end in a draw that's better than Democrats expected at the start, but they should not celebrate yet. In two elections, last night's Indiana primaries and last month's Virginia referendum, both parties learned that their voters will, if given the chance, eliminate the other party's seats. And on that I think he is exactly correct. I think this is a symptom of where we are, where people cannot live with each other. Right, the big sort that is occurring. Right, people are moving from blue states if they are not Democrats and not you know, radical leftists whatever, they're fleeing those states, and people who want to live in those communes, well, actually they're not really going up there either. So it's going to be really wild to see if the census does account that does not include illegal aliens, to see what kind of impact that would have, Like how many seats would those blue states actually lose. I mean, I've heard all sorts of estimates, ranging from like ten to all the way up to like two dozen. But voters are perfectly fine. Jerrymann during the other team completely out of the game, And I got a text here on the text line from Allen who says, well, Pete, they are comedy. So this is the best way I know how to get rid of them. I mean, aside from stopping the counting of non citizens, and that's not going to happen when they have the appearance of equal representation and exercise outsized power. Right, I mean, which is more unattractive to you? Which is more unpalatable? Right, being governed by radical leftists or gerrymandering, That's what it seems like to me. Like, yeah, I don't like either of those options, but if those are my choices, then I'm gonna say it's more palatable to gerrymander right now, I don't like it any more than you. However, I think we have to kind of recognize where we are. Wigeo goes on to say this brings up an important reminder. There will be more chances to draw maps again for twenty twenty eight right republic led states which are not redistricting right now because they ran out of time or expected to jump in after the November election. Right, So in twenty twenty seven, expect more states to do redistricting, and he mentions Indiana right, where Republican voters tossed out six of the or seven I forget of the Republicans that opposed the redistricting, and they got i mean defeated in a landslide in like six of the seven races. They were defeated in landslides. I mean some of them, like by fifty something percent. It was just a blowout. So Indiana, by the way, is also a message. It's a message to all of the other Republicans, just like a defeat, as I mentioned yesterday, a defeat for John Cornyn in Texas in his primary, that's a message, right that if you are elected as a Republican in a Republican state or a heavy Republican district. Right, I'm not talking about districts that are, you know, purplish. I'm not talking about districts that are like R plus ones, R plus two's that kind of thing. I'm talking deep red states and districts like your voters expect you to vote as a Republican. So the message that these defeats in Indiana sens to other Republicans is you better not do what they did. That's the point of housting these people in the primaries. Democrats know this. They just primaried three of their sitting state lawmakers right, Carl Cunningham, the Sifmajd. Shelley Willingham. Before nineteen sixty five, most black voters lived in the South, where Democrats ran every state legislature and did not draw seats where black voters could win. Right, So it was the Democrat who were gerrymandering in order to prevent blacks from winning in nineteen sixty five or up to nineteen sixty five. But by twenty twenty this meant that Democrats could win just forty one percent of the white vote and they could take the electoral College and control the House and Senate. The safest seats in the Democratic House were majority minority districts, which even deep red states like Alabama were required to draw to comply with. The Voting Rights Act. This is what I said. Democrats have been using that interpretation of Section two of the Voting Rights Act in order to pad their numbers in order to keep seats that they otherwise would not be able to win. All of that enabled a much uniformly progressive Democrat party, pro choice, pro LGBT, pro gun control, pro amnesty for non citizens. It allowed the party to win a governing majority. The premise of the Trump era GOP is that this majority is a mirage enabled by law. Yes, correct, correct, take away the VRA districts, Republicans argue, and the current version of the Democratic Party cannot win the House. Yes to that as well. Yeah, that is true too, right. And again, as I say all the time on this stuff, which is, if black voters voted as every other racial demographic, Democrats would never win. And so if black voters are in a district where the Republicans control, then they're going to be voting for Republican candidates in the primaries and it helps to break that sort of racial block demographic halt immigration and stop counting non citizens in the census. And its current coalition cannot get to the two hundred and seventy electoral college votes necessary to win the presidency. And yeah, and that is why they are doing the interstate compacts to try to ignore the electoral College, so this way California and New York can dictate the presidency. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, So if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to dpetecalnarshow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.