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Jonathan Capehart Had a Bad Night on PBS Newshour

Amy Curtis
Amy Curtis  |  May 04, 2026 10:00 AM

Jonathan Capehart, co-host of MS NOW's "The Weekend," went on PBS Newshour over the weekend, where things did not go well for him, at all. 

Some of his favorite narratives, including the Left's support of violence, the Supreme Court, and gun control, were all destroyed. We'll start with the Left's support of violence. Poll after polls shows that the Left supports using violence as a tool for political gain.

David Brooks pointed out the Left's propensity for violence, and Capehart did not like that.

"And if you look at who thinks violence is justified, it tends to be younger people by a lot. Most progressives and most conservatives oppose violence, but you get two and a half times as many progressives say it's justified than not," Brooks said. "But what strikes me about this guy, about the guy who shot in Butler, about the guy who shot Charlie Kirk, they hadn't seemed to have thought about it that much."

"It seems almost flippant, the way they go into these things. Almost like half thought through and jokey," Brooks continued, "and I can't quite make sense of what that kind of lighthearted nihilism that drives people to, on a whim, almost, do something that is horrific and life-changing."

Capehart was then given a chance to respond.

"I'm not going to just let the comment that, you know, progressives more than folks on the far-Right are, you know, think that violence is justified," he said. "It is something that the American people feel, they're a little more comfortable with it than they were five to ten years ago."

He then went on to classify the attempted assassination as just another case of gun violence.

"The thing now, a week out, that I've been thinking about and I keep coming back to it, when I heard the five bangs ... my immediate action was so instinctive: drop to the floor, under the table, and be quiet," Capehart said. "I've never been in a situation like that, but as an American and certainly as a journalist, having to cover all these things, and to listen to the recordings and the films, you sort of learn through osmosis what to do. And to me the bigger issue here is gun violence. That, why was I not surprised that this happened?"

Maybe because Democrats routinely call for the President to be assassinated? Maybe because most of the mass shootings are carried out by members of the Democratic Party's base, whether it's trans individuals or career criminals that Democrats refuse to throw in prison?

But Capehart didn't stop there. He said the Supreme Court is taking us back to the time before 1965.

"The Voting Rights Act of 1965 is what killed Jim Crow. The VRA is only 61 years old. When it was passed and became law, it was the first time that America truly was a democracy," Capehart said. That's part of the problem, of course. We're not a democracy, we're a republic.

"Meaning that the words in the Constitution equally applied to all of its citizens, including African Americans, by giving them the right to vote," Capehart continued, "61 years. I am 58 years old. My mother is 84, so my mother is older than true American democracy and so for those justices in the majority to say that ... racism is over in voting and we don't need this anymore, I keep thinking about what Justice Ginsburg said in her dissent in the Shelby v. Holder case which invalidated Section V ... she wrote, 'Throwing out pre-clearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet."

"For Justice Alito to focus on the elections of 2008 and 2012, when there was a black man on the ballot, to say that racial disparities are no longer a problem, and then ignoring that Shelby in 2013 led to just a rush of changes in voting laws in the states, is to ignore reality and to ignore history and to drag us back to a time when America was not America," Capehart said.

That is also not true. What this did was give representation back to all voters, rather than allow Democrats to racially gerrymander districts that concentrated the power of urban areas over rural voters, including rural Black voters.

This is true. Facts are anathema to the Left's narrative.