In a wildly inflammatory segment on Saturday's edition of The Weekend: Primetime, MS NOW analyst Basil Smikle declared Republican-led redistricting and other moves tantamount to “an American version of apartheid.” In his view, forbidding the use of race in redistricting is "the removal of the civic opportunity, civic engagement, for black people." Earlier in the segment, law professor James Sample admitted that the Virginia Supreme Court’s decision striking down the Democrat mid-decade power grab was “probably right on the law” — before declaring it a “disaster for our democracy” anyway. Yes, really. Professor James Sample: “The decision of the Virginia Supreme Court, I think, is a disaster for our democracy. It’s probably right on the law, and it’s actually a pro-voter protection decision.” Basil Smikle: “This is going to be tantamount to an American version of apartheid… restricting black civic engagement… That to me rings very true to an American version of apartheid.” The panel then pivoted from that explosive claim to wallowing in doom and gloom, repeatedly declaring the situation “very, very grim” and suggesting Democrats have almost no legal recourse. WATCH: MS NOW Analyst: GOP Moves = 'American Version of Apartheid' pic.twitter.com/LyN9aFR8xe — Mark Finkelstein (@markfinkelstein) May 10, 2026 The striking admission that the Virginia Supreme Court got the law right — combined with the immediate pivot to hysterical “apartheid” rhetoric — perfectly captures the modern Democratic/liberal media mindset. Even when the other side follows the rules and wins fairly, it’s still illegitimate, racist, and catastrophic. This is what happens when your side loses on the merits: You don’t reconsider your position. You just crank the apocalyptic language up to eleven and scream “apartheid!” The hypocrisy is breathtaking. Democrats spent months ramming through a procedurally flawed mid-decade referendum (after over a million Virginians had already voted early), and when the court correctly called them on it, the response is to compare it to the most notorious modern example of white segregation. Welcome to the resistance, 2026 edition. Note: At the end of the segment, MS NOW Republican Elise Jordan admitted that from the jump, the law was against the Virginia Democrats' attempt to push through the redistricting, but it was "a valiant effort" to motivate their base. Funny: we didn't hear much of that honesty earlier, when the Dems and the liberal media were extolling the referendum as manna from heaven! Here's the transcript. MS NOW The Weekend: Primetime 5/9/26 6:04 pm EDT ANTONIA HYLTON: So James, you and I had a conversation the other day about all of this as I was processing these rulings in real time. You do a very good job of bringing us back down to earth. You called the Virginia decision a quote, “defensive, or defensible ruling,” an “indefensible landscape.” Break that down for me. PROFESSOR JAMES SAMPLE: What I mean by that, Antonia, is that the ruling in Virginia is defensible — and from the very beginning, as far back as October, as far back as a couple of weeks ago when the district court in Virginia came up with seven grounds on which the district court found the process problematic, I said that this one ground, the ground on which it was ultimately held to be unconstitutional under the state constitution of Virginia, was at the very least a credible — serious, non-frivolous argument. And let’s be clear, Virginia put in place state constitutional provisions that were intended to safeguard and to be structural protections that make it difficult to amend their constitution as a matter of state constitutional law. They didn’t put that in place for this, it’s been in place for decades. And the basic synopsis of why this was held to be unconstitutional under Virginia law is that in order to amend the Virginia State Constitution, you need to pass an amendment through the House of Delegates, through the Assembly. There needs to be a general election for the House of Delegates, and then it needs to pass again, so you have two different legislatures pass the same amendment. What happened here is that voters started voting for the legislature in September of 2025. Forty percent of the voters who cast a vote in the general House of Delegates election voted prior to the amendment being passed in the House of Delegates in late October. To be clear, the decision of the Virginia Supreme Court, I think, is a disaster for our democracy. It’s probably right on the law, and it’s actually a pro-voter protection decision. . . .  BASIL SMIKLE: I said this when Texas entered the fray to try to do their redistricting, and I said, this is going to be tantamount to an American version of apartheid, because it’s not just about congressional seats — what the congressional seats allows states to do is then redistrict state legislative seats, city council seats, all the way down to even school board elections, right? So when you think about the removal of the civic opportunity, civic engagement, for black people, the fact that the president reclassified certain jobs where there are concentrations of women, particularly women of color, as professionals, making it difficult to get student loans, restricting now with the Supreme Court’s help, who can go to college and what colleges they can go to, and then how many hundreds of thousands of African American women lost their jobs. So there’s also an economic attack on African Americans here.  So when you put those two things together, to me it says you’re trying to, through centralized, you’re trying to centralize through our entire federal bureaucracy and have it trickle down to the states, the restriction of black civic engagement and economic, that to me rings very true to, you know, of an American version of apartheid that is not easily unshakable [sic] in the near term. AYMAN MOHYELDIN: So the question is, do the Democrats have any legal recourse here with all of this redistricting that’s taking place? They’re trying to level the playing field, or is it just gonna come down simply, at the ballot box that they’re going to have their best and final chance at regaining power? JAMES: I don’t think they have much legal recourse. They certainly don’t have legal recourse in Virginia. This is an independent and adequate state ground, which means that the U.S. Supreme Court doesn’t really have jurisdiction to overturn what happened.  . . .  I am less optimistic than many people. I don’t know that, I think that we could end up with sixty percent of the vote producing forty percent of the seats. Let’s be, I mean, this is very, very stark, and Antonia said I bring her down, but realistically -- SMIKLE: I agree. SAMPLE: That's what I was talking about earlier. It is not just grim, it is really, really, grim. SMIKLE: But now we're in a situation where things do look very, very grim. . . .  ELISE JORDAN: Like you said, like I think that James’s point, he’s addressing reality. The law was against them [the Virginia referendum promoters.] And it was a valiant effort, in the sense that they mobilized their supporters, they got to show the energy, and they get to see what’s there and who’s there to fight, but it just wasn’t gonna go to the finish line.