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Americans flipped on their TVs this past Friday expecting thoughtful analysis from All In With Chris Hayes. Instead, we all got some hard-to-swallow insinuations from the Nation’s correspondent, Elie Mystal. He all but claimed that Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas are essentially against equal voting rights for African-Americans.

The entire hullabaloo began with Hayes’ opener on the Supreme Court’s decision, led by Alito, that stood by a redistricting plan with a 6-3 conservative majority, while the liberal members dissented.

Not missing a beat, Mystal instantly launched into a critique of Alito and Thomas. According to him, there’s a narrative connecting both justices’ recent notorious stories and their stances on voting rights. His verdict: they don’t want African-American votes to hold the same weight. Quite a claim, isn’t it?

Before we could even digest his statement, Mystal was asked about his views on Justice Thomas. In response, Mystal resoundingly confirmed his belief, even suggesting that Thomas’s marriage to a white woman is tied to some alleged self-loathing. According to Mystal, Thomas stated he didn’t believe in the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause safeguarding African-Americans’ voting rights. But the reality is, Thomas said no such thing—it’s an inaccurate portrayal of his words.

Back to his chief point, Mystal argued that both justices dismiss the legitimacy of any election that doesn’t result in a victory for Trump. According to Mystal, Alito and Thomas believe that only the white votes for Trump should matter, effectively side-lining any other voting demographics.

Expanding his argument, Mystal then steered toward the recent gerrymandering case. He stated that Alito and Thomas’s decisions said, in essence, that African-American voters can have their votes diluted and their voting rights stripped away just because they lean Democrat.

Without mincing words, let me state this clearly—Justices Thomas and Alito do believe in equal voting rights for all Americans. The hitch here is that they disagree with Mystal’s assertion that voting rights equate to his favored candidate always winning. Isn’t that the idea of a democratic election? Your candidate doesn’t always cock a snook at the general public.

To round this up—were Alito and Thomas’s views and judgements appropriately represented by Mystal on the show? Far from it. Like any American, they believe everyone’s vote should hold equal weight. No insinuation, fact-twisting, or opinion can distort this truth.

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