The thirteenth episode of the Diogenes Club opens on a title that sounds like a joke and lands like a thesis. Nick Paro has been working all night on the line — “What are they good for?” — and Eric Lullove walks straight into it: “I just know that they’re gonna take my vote away next week.” Within two minutes, Walter Rhein has named the moment as a finger-counting exercise — “Can we count from 10 to 0 on the 10 list of rights that they are going to take away?” — and Nick has refused the premise. “I’m done letting them take any rights. I am taking their right to take my rights away back from them.” The naming dispute that follows is the episode’s tonal anchor. Nick wants to retire “Republican” because they aren’t that anymore — “they’re just the regressive right.” Eric pushes harder: “No, they’re fascist Nazis. Call them what they are.” Walter goes further still and corrects them both: “No, they’re fascist Confederates. They’re older than Nazism. They’re fascist Confederates.” The distinction is not pedantry. It is the operating frame for the rest of the hour. Eric reads Niemoller’s “First They Came” into the record, places himself inside it as a Jew, and observes that the regime is running out of constituencies to alienate. “Who’s left to speak for him when this is all said and done?”
The core argument arrives with the Supreme Court’s 6-3 evisceration of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and Louisiana’s overnight response. Eric reads the Landry-Murrill joint statement aloud — the state is “currently enjoined from carrying out congressional elections under the current map,” primaries postponed, ballots already mailed — and the room metabolizes it in real time. Dana DuBois, calling in while walking to her day job in Seattle, names the tactic: “chaos agents. They’re just trying to put elections in so much chaos because Americans already have a problem with not voting in big enough numbers.” Eric collapses the legal logic into a sentence: “The remedy that was supposed to cure the remedy basically undid the remedy, which now makes it legal to go back to where we were back in the 1800s.” Nick remembers it was the Court itself that telegraphed the destination: “Well, I mean, they did say they wanted to go back to the 1800s.” Eric draws the through-line — Rucho v. Common Cause in 2019 blocked political-gerrymandering claims, this ruling kills the racial ones, and what remains is a permission slip. The John Lewis Voting Rights Restoration Act sat on the table; Schumer would not “pull the nuclear weapon” on the filibuster, even after the Senate had already shredded it for appointees, judges, and treaties. The receipts are stacked. The complicity is bipartisan.
Nieta Greene’s arrival reframes the fight as continental, not regional. She makes it explicit that the Court did not just gut a Southern protection: “It’s also language minorities.” She walks the room through the 1920s New York English-literacy regime, the disenfranchisement of Puerto Ricans by the 1960s, and the Latino-majority municipal fights in places like Port Chester, then closes the loop: “every community needs to wake the fuck up and understand that this shit is going to roll downhill.” Nick hears her and revises in public — “we forgot that the entire fucking country exists, and there is no north-south in the U.S.” From there the conversation moves to the harder question Walter has been holding all season: defending rights without asking the abuser for consent. Nick names it directly: “we cannot ask for consent to defend our rights.” He links it to imposter syndrome as a tool of oppression — “That’s entirely white supremacy thinking, where you’re afraid to even try to make things better because you’re so convinced you’re going to make it worse.” Brittany Jones’s gubernatorial pitch on enforcing treaty law surfaces as a concrete lever Democratic governors and AGs are simply not pulling. Nieta sharpens the broader stakes: the gutting will be used “so they can reverse gay marriage across the country and make it hodgepodge legal depending on which state you live in. And so they can say they don’t have to educate people with disabilities.”
The closing movement turns the analysis into a marching order. Walter refuses the trap of “we can’t fix anything because anything we implement will also be sabotaged” and tells the room their job is to act anyway. Nick hands him the frame: “we’re not problem finders. We’re supposed to be problem solvers.” Eric points to a Palm Beach state Senate special election where the progressive Democrat beat the Trump candidate by thirty points and notes that the people who pushed back have “more money than I could ever attain in a lifetime” — the wealth-versus-fascism alignment is not as fixed as the regime needs voters to believe. Nieta closes her segment with a class-and-race correction that none of the men try to soften, traces post-1968 Black flight and the gentrification cycles that followed, and pitches Disability Community for Democracy’s “Nothing About Us Without Us” — five bucks a month, last day of the annual sale — because that newsletter is the only thing paying for the Restream and Zoom subscriptions that get candidates booked. Eric trails Peter Thiel’s capture of HHS, CDC, and FDA into a forthcoming Blue Amp piece on MAHA and eugenics, and notes Alex Karp’s pitch that legalizing war crimes would be more profitable. Nick lays out a matching-fund plan to seed independent younger creators with every annual subscription. The episode does not tie a bow on the VRA — there isn’t one to tie. What it does instead is what the title actually demanded: refuse to count down from ten, name the regressives as fascist Confederates, and stop asking permission to fight back.
I’m Nick Paro, and I’m sick of the shit going on. So, I’m using poetry, podcasting, and lives to discuss the intersections of chronic illness and mental wellbeing, masculinity, veteran’s issues, politics, and so much more. I am only able to have these conversations, bring visibility to my communities, and fill the void through your support — this is a publication where engagement is encouraged, creativity is a cornerstone, and transparency is key — please consider becoming a paid subscriber today and grow the community!.