Happy Halloween!
Posted: October 31, 2018 Filed under: just because 9 Comments( I couldn’t resist posting these cute kids!!)
Don’t forget our live blog on GOTV Tuesday where we can hang together instead of separately!!
Monday Reads: White Nationalist Terrorism … call it what it is …
Posted: October 29, 2018 Filed under: just because | Tags: deadly racism, political animals, Trumpism, white nationalism 30 Comments
Vote Vote Vote!!!!!
Next Tuesday is the day to say no to all this, Sky Dancers! Get out there and start voting because lives depend on it!
Last week has taught us that we have a well armed, aggrieved group of white nationalist men out there that aren’t afraid to take the out the rest of us. I’m with Greg Sargent of WAPO on this one: “Trump’s hate and lies are inciting extremists. Just ask the analyst who warned us.” They have one of their own installed at the very top and they aren’t afraid to let the freak flag and bullets fly.
Sargent interviewed “Daryl Johnson, the former Department of Homeland Security analyst who created a big stir when he authored a leaked report in 2009 warning of a rise in right-wing extremist activity. Conservatives reacted with outrage, and the Obama administration decided it needed to do damage control.”
This is part of the interview:
THE PLUM LINE: Your 2009 report talked about the rise in right-wing extremism as a reaction to Barack Obama’s election and the financial crash. What are the ingredients now?
DARYL JOHNSON: We’ve had almost eight years of far-right groups recruiting, radicalizing and growing in strength. Typically during Republican administrations we see a decrease in activity. But under this administration they continue to operate at a heightened level. One reason why is the rhetoric coming from Donald Trump.
Building a border wall, deporting immigrants, a travel ban on Muslim countries — these are themes discussed on white-nationalist message boards and websites for years, now being endorsed and talked about at the highest levels of the government. He’s retweeted messages about Muslims from conspiracy sites. What keeps these groups energized and active is the fact that the administration has mainstreamed their message and tried to put it forth as policy.
PLUM LINE: Why do these groups usually go into decline during other Republican administrations?
JOHNSON: Militias and anti-government groups get energized under a Democrat because of fear of gun control; the hate groups get active because of liberal Democratic policies extending rights to immigrants, gays, and minorities. During Republican administrations the fear and paranoia get dialed back because they feel the administrations are not going to repeal gun rights or extend rights to minority groups.
PLUM LINE: This is different.
JOHNSON: Yup. Because of the viciousness of the rhetoric painting Democrats as evil and corrupt. And the different themes that resonate with extremists.
PLUM LINE: How does the Pittsburgh shooting fit into all of this?
JOHNSON: The conservative media has echoed the president … about how Democrats are contributing to this migrant exodus coming up from Central America. There’s a conspiracy theory that the Jews are controlling that. There’s been a mainstreaming of the extremist narratives. Things that were once on the outer fringes are now being brought to the forefront by Trump.
Trump juices them up at every rally and every opportunity he gets to speak to them on Fox. We’ve seen 3 recent attacks and attempted attacks by right wing men who feel emboldened and empowered to take matters into their own hands. Even the one that denounced Trump still spouted the same memes as the others about Jewish Financier George Soros echoing the ongoing and deeply historical conspiracies about Jewish communities controlling the press, the banks, and the financial systems of the world.
All of these men were outraged by the thought of women and children from Honduras coming to seek political asylum in this country as is their right. The “caravan” of “invaders” is being hyped by Trump at every turn because he thinks it will turn out his base at the polls. Then, of course, there is forever the trope that Black people take jobs, hand outs, and life style from the white. Racism is at the root of all of this. White christian patriarchy is at the root of all of this and Trump embodies it all with his freak flag flying at endless political rallies.
https://twitter.com/drvox/status/1056947328530042880
Last week, one white supremacist, frustrated by lack of access to a black church where he could’ve slaughtered more, stomped into a store and killed two elderly black people point blank, execution style. What does it mean when in this country one white man feels so aggrieved he will attack elderly people doing their weekly chores?
Two black senior citizens were murdered in Louisville, Kentucky, on Thursday. Maurice Stallard, 69, was at a Kroger supermarket when Gregory Bush, a 51-year-old white man, walked in and shot him multiple times. Bush then exited the store and shot Vickie Lee Jones, 67, in the parking lot before an armed bystander reportedly fired back, prompting him to flee. Police were unable to confirm accounts that Bush encountered a second armed man, who engaged him in a brief standoff where no shots were fired, according to the New York Times. “Don’t shoot me and I won’t shoot you,” the man’s son, Steve Zinninger, claimed Bush told his father. “Whites don’t kill whites.” Police apprehended Bush minutes later.
Bush had no known connection to either of his victims. Any doubt of a racial motive seemed quelled when surveillance footage showed the shooter forcibly tried to enter a black church minutes before moving on to the supermarket. The Times reports that a member of the 185-year-old First Baptist Church of Jeffersontown grew alarmed when she saw Bush yanking “aggressively” at its locked front doors. Up to ten people were inside the chapel following a midweek service. “I’m just thankful that all of our doors and security was in place,” church administrator Billy Williams said.
The murder of black seniors is a relatively rare phenomenon in the U.S. People over 65 accounted for just 2 percent of black homicide victims in 2014, according to a 2017 Violence Policy Center report, citing that year as the most recent for which data was available. Yet they have been central victims in recent racist killings. From Charleston to New York City and, now, possibly Louisville, some of the 21st century’s most notorious white supremacists have targeted black seniors for violent deaths. The unique cruelty of this pattern magnifies its obvious illogic, demonstrating yet again that white rhetoric framing black people as threats is shallow cover for terrorizing the vulnerable.
Terrorizing the vulnerable is what Trump excels at … this is why he’s sending US military to frighten rather than provide aid and comfort to women, children and families seeking refuge from violence in their country that we’ve basically enabled. Again, from WAPO: “A conspiracy theory about George Soros and a migrant caravan inspired horror” by Joel Achenbach shows us this same pattern of race baiting.
Conspiracy theories are flourishing in America, from the Oval Office to the fever swamps of the Internet. They include the viral notion that the liberal 88-year-old billionaire George Soros, a Hungarian American Holocaust survivor, is funding the migrant caravan slowly making its way from Central America in the direction of the United States.
It’s not true, but it has apparently fueled homicidal rage in recent days.
Cesar Sayoc, the Florida man whom authorities have accused of mailing more than a dozen bombs to people and organizations President Trump has criticized, appeared to be obsessed with Soros, mentioning him dozens of times on one of his Twitter accounts. Authorities say he mailed one of his bombs to Soros.
Robert D. Bowers, charged with killing 11 people Saturday at a Pittsburgh synagogue, also reposted several viral comments on a since-deactivated social media account about the migrant caravan. One post described the “third world caravan” as a group of approaching “invaders.”
Bowers directly posted a comment referring to “the overwhelming jew problem.” He spoke of the U.S. having a Jewish “infestation,” and reposted another user’s anti-Semitic comment: “Jews are waging a propaganda war against Western civilization and it is so effective that we are headed towards certain extinction within the next 200 years and we’re not even aware of it.”
The Soros/caravan theory dates to late March, when an earlier wave of migrants was heading north, according to an extensive blog post on Medium by Jonathan Albright, director of the Digital Forensics Initiative at Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism. One Twitter post, which had no factual foundation, stated, “Caravan of 1,500 Central American Migrant Families Crossing Mexico to Reach U.S. Border All organized by Soros groups to cause more division.”
Jonathan Chait of the Intelligencer at New York Magazine says “Trump’s Ideology Is Anti-Semitism Without Jews.”
In 1991, Pat Robertson, the Christian Right’s most influential leader, wrote a book titled The New World Order. It received almost no attention — who wants to slog through a Pat Robertson book? — until four years later, when Michael Lind called attention to it in the New York Review of Books. Lind’s review provoked a furor by revealing the fantastical conspiracy theory Robertson had unspooled, in which a cabal of “European bankers” had secretly orchestrated two centuries of world events for their personal benefit.
Some of the furor centered on whether Robertson or his worldview should be described at anti-Semitic. In his defense, Robertson insisted that the book made no explicit reference to Jews as the architects of the nefarious global conspiracy he claimed to uncover. This defense was true, as far as it goes. Robertson had essentially removed references to Jews while preserving the framework of a classic anti-Semitic theory. It was anti-Semitism minus Jews.
The divide around which this argument took place is the same grounds upon which President Trump and his defenders argue that they have no relationship with, or responsibility of any kind for, Robert Bowers’s murderous rampage in Pittsburgh. “The evil act of anti-Semitism in Pittsburg was committed by a coward who hated President Trump because @POTUS is such an unapologetic defender of the Jewish community and state of Israel,” insists White House press secretary Sarah Sanders,denouncing press coverage linking Trump’s rhetoric to both the pro-Trump bomber Cesar Sayoc and Bowers.
The far-right faction with which Bowers identifies does oppose Trump as a pro-Jewish sellout, citing such betrayals as his support for Israel and the marriage of his daughter to a Jewish man. Those differences between Trump and murderous anti-Semites are hardly trivial.
Still, Bowers does identify with some of Trump’s goals and rhetoric, because Trump has inspired the racist far right to a degree surpassing any modern American president. His depiction of immigrants as inherently criminal, and his attempts to connect immigration to shadowy cabals of financiers, closely track white supremacist tropes. During the 2016 campaign, Trump has inadvertently slipped over the line between explicit and implicit anti-Semitism when he tweeted out a meme produced by anti-Semites calling Hillary Clinton the “most corrupt candidate ever!” inside a Star of David. (The star signaled to anti-Semites that Clinton’s alleged corruption was in reality a form of control by the Jews.)
More often, he would invoke anti-Semitic themes without any explicit reference to Jews or Judaism. Trump’s closing campaign ad on television denounced “a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets of a handful of large corporations and political entities,” over images of Janet Yellen, George Soros, and Lloyd Blankfein, all of whom happen to be Jewish. Trump lambastes his enemies as “globalists,” which, through its implication of extra-national loyalty, closely tracks the primary accusation made against Jews.
Most right-wing thought in general tends to laud the traditional values found in ethnically homogenous rural areas (“real America,” as conservatives habitually call it), and to censure the cosmopolitanism and libertine values of the cities. As a largely urban, educated, and liberal group, Jews naturally find themselves on the negative side of this implicit moral divide. The more sinister strains of this thinking develop conspiracy theories connecting the role of elites and the larger numbers of foreign hordes who seem to pose a threat to the nation’s character.
As David Roberts puts it, this is form of inciting folks to frenzy via conspiracy theories is now rampant in all parts of the Republican party. It is no longer confined to right wing radio loonies like Limbaugh or even the dread Dobbs of Fox.
https://twitter.com/drvox/status/1056740807527456769
Additionally, there’s the dread “both siderisms” practiced by most in the media and others trying to equate outrageous acts of terror and murder with citizens expressing anger at public officials in restaurants.
https://twitter.com/adamdavidson/status/1056893142761439234
Further exploration of that topic can be found here at Vox by Ezra Klein: “Is the media making American politics worse? A difficult conversation about the state of political journalism.”
I want to go a bit further than that. Far from how do we defend American institutions, how do we stop making them worse?
One thing you always get into when you get into any criticism of journalism is that people immediately point to the investigative reporters. God bless the investigative reporters, but that is not what everybody is doing. That’s not what most of what is happening on cable news, for instance, and cable news drives a lot of politics.
Journalism has a definition of newsworthiness. We always say the word means “important,” but it doesn’t really mean important. It is some mixture of important, new, outrageous, conflict-oriented, secret, interesting. There’s a lot of things happening in it. But one of the ways you can hack it is you can just go outrageous enough.
I think of this as the Donald Trump-Michael Avenatti problem. What Donald Trump understood is if you just do the create enough craziness, enough conflict, enough drama, you get all the oxygen in the room. I don’t want to compare him to Trump in his ethics or morals, but I think Michael Avenatti has recognized this way of hacking the system too.
I think about Amy Klobuchar, the senator from Minnesota, probably the most popular senator in the country, given the partisan lean of her state. That’s a remarkable thing. Part of the reason is that she speaks in a way that a lot of people can hear her without getting defensive. I mean, even in the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, he began by saying, “Hey, look, I may hate all these other Democrats, but Sen. Klobuchar, I like you.” Then he got in trouble by attacking her, and he actually apologized.
But how does she get coverage speaking like a normal human being? Why does arguably the most popular member of the US Senate not get more day-to-day coverage than Avenatti?
So, I’m going to end with this bit of an interview with Hillary Clinton. I’m pretty sure it’s a distraction and not helpful to the midterms which is exactly what Journalists try to do. Create more horse races when not enough exist for them. Our focus should be on the races coming up Tuesday next and getting a few folks across the finish line to start working on getting rid of Trumpism and stuffing white nationalists back under their rocks or jail whichever is necessary.
Hillary Clinton has indicated she could make a bid for the White House in 2020, saying, “I’d like to be president”.
It comes amid growing speculation that the former Democratic presidential nominee could announce another run following the midterm elections.
Asked whether she would run again by journalist Kara Swisher at a live event in New York, Ms Clinton initially said no.
But when pressed on the issue, Ms Clinton said: “Well I’d like to be president.
“I think, hopefully, when we have a Democrat in the Oval Office in January of 2021, there’s going to be so much work to be done.”
She continued: “I mean we have confused everybody in the world, including ourselves. We have confused our friends and our enemies.“They have no idea what the United States stands for, what we’re likely to do, what we think is important, so the work would be work that I feel very well prepared for having been at the Senate for eight years, having been a diplomat in the state department, and it’s just going to be a lot of heavy lifting.”
Asked if she personally would be doing any ”lifting”, Ms Clinton said: “I have no idea.”
“I’m not even going to even think about it ‘til we get through this November 6 election about what’s going to happen after that,” she said.
“But I’m going to everything in my power to make sure we have a Democrat in the White House come January of 2021.”
How are these statements indicative of a run? I ask you? What’s the purpose of not taking her at her word about she’s done?
The only thing each and every one of us has to do is get as many blue wave voters to the polls including ourselves. This crap has to stop.
Anyway, I have to finish up grading and hide from more news including another school shooting where one student shot and killed another in North Carolina.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Friday Reads: “What fresh hell is this” to infinity and beyond!
Posted: October 26, 2018 Filed under: Breaking News 30 Comments
Well, Sky Dancers!
Two more bombs discovered and an arrest this morning are happening as I frantically type this post! The bombs were on their way to NJ Senator Corey Booker and James Clapper via CNN.
The FBI said they think that regional post office processing center is where the pipe bombs first passed through, meaning some if not all of the 10 bombs were mailed from that area to top Democrats and others in New York, Washington, Delaware and Los Angeles
A man in his 50s has been taken into custody and we’ve recently learned that he has been put under arrest. The police are currently towing a white van that’s plastered with bumper stickers. The stickers are all right wing in nature. So much for the false flag meme. Most of it is pro Trump.
Sen. Cory Booker and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper are the latest high-profile figures to be targeted, sources said. –The shops and restaurants at the Time Warner Center in New York, the same complex that houses CNN, were briefly evacuated Thursday night after a false alarm over unattended packages inside the mall, police said.
–Federal investigators chasing leads pointing them to South Florida as a suspected origin of some of the 10 mail bombs sent to prominent Democrats and other public figures, sources said.
–Nationwide investigation underway.
–All 12 suspicious packages went through the U.S. postal system, sources said.
–The suspected mail bombs have been taken to the FBI’s lab in Quantico, Virginia, to be analyzed.
A suspect *is in custody for* a suspected mail bombing *campaign* that targeted top Democrats and other prominent figures across the country, officials said.
Sarah Isgur Flores, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Justice, confirmed on Twitter Friday morning that one person is in custody. The suspect has not been identified.
“We can confirm one person is in custody,” she wrote.
There’s a presser scheduled for later today.
I’d just like to say that we’ve seen nothing on the scale of this attempt to assassinate leaders since the assassination of Lincoln and the conspiracy to murder other members of his leadership team. Their other targets were Cabinet members.
Perhaps the strangest thing about the Lincoln assassination was how many people were familiar with the president’s murderer.
Even in the rogue’s gallery of people who have tried to kill a president, John Wilkes Booth still gets top billing. A member of the Booth acting clan—the Barrymores of the 19th century—he was a popular actor both north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line, appearing in theaters as far west as Leavenworth, Kansas.
When news of Lincoln’s assassination spread throughout Washington on Friday night and Saturday morning that April 150 years ago, people speaking of it referred to his killer as “the actor Booth.” No other identification was necessary.
To this day, Booth has fascinated historians and the general public alike, because he, more than any other assassin, wreaked such havoc on the nation’s history.
But there is another reason: Unlike his fellow killers, Booth was not demonstrably insane and he was certainly no marginalized nobody. On the contrary, he was a celebrity—an astonishingly handsome and successful actor.
Booth is perhaps one of first examples of the aggrieved white man who has privilege but feels that he’s been oppressed by rights gained by others. The Trial of Booth and his co-conspirators really is history lesson like no other. Perhaps, today’s arrest will unravel more evidence of that dark side of who we are.. I hope you take the opportunity to follow this link and discover how our government found and brought these men and one woman to justice.
Meanwhile, let’s see the Trumpsters wiggle out of this one.
I was going to write a lot more about how this event seems closely linked to the same kind of cultural grievances held by the Trumpsters but the news is getting away from us and today, we have experienced a mass assassination attempt unlike anything we’ve see this century.
The danger to our leaders may be over but the danger to our democracy continues.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Monday Reads: The Midterms are coming
Posted: October 22, 2018 Filed under: Afternoon Reads | Tags: hate groups, Krewe of Boo, Proud Boys, voting 17 Comments
Not in here Magats per “The Bank Street Bar”
Good Afternoon Sky Dancers!
I usually go down to the Quarter to see the Krewe of Boo this time of year. I had grades to do and there were some unwelcome visitors there this weekend. I can’t take any more of the Magats so I stayed home.
We got a visit from the hate group “Proud Boys” who seemed to stage a deliberate breakdown of their vehicle in front of Jackson Square so they could set up a really offensive float called “The Trump Bridge.” Of course, they did not have the appropriate paperwork, even selling those terrible red Magat hats illegally from the truck bed. All activities were without licenses so quite illegal. The NOPD watched them but did nothing.
With the exception of a few lone bars that I really didn’t know existed down there anyway, they were refused service and forced to drink in the streets. All in all, the entire city did a great job of ignoring them.
Several “watchers” from progressive groups spent time documenting and following them in the hopes of catching any of their usual hateful antics. We do have a local chapter of them and recently, a Plaquemines Parish Deputy Sheriff lost his job for his association with them
The Proud Boys say they’re not a hate group and that they’re not a part of the alt-right, the catch-all euphemism for various groups of Nazis, white nationalists and white supremacists. The founder of the Proud Boys criticized the eruption of violence in Charlottesville, but a prominent member of that organization had organized the “Unite the Right” rally and later tweeted that “Heather Heyer was a fat, disgusting Communist. Communists killed 94 million. Looks like it was payback time.” According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the founder of the Proud Boys says he expelled the writer of that tweet from his group “once his racist views became known.” To hear that founder tell it, the Proud Boys is a multi-racial, multi-ethnic group of Western chauvinists who part ways with the alt-right on “the JQ,” that is, “the Jewish question.”
In its website’s HateWatch feature, the SPLC notes that the founder of the Proud Boys “denies any connection between his group and the far right, dismissing the fact that they show up to the same events, take fashion cues from each other, read the same books, sympathize with each other’s viewpoints — including, at times, anti-Semitism — and joust in the shadows of the same windmills.”
Green, the Plaquemines deputy, scrubbed his Facebook feed of his Proud Boys posts, but not before they’d been screen shot and sent to his employer. His Facebook profile described him as “Deputy Sheriff, Father, Proud Boy.” His profile photo showed him in his law enforcement uniform with the words “The West Is The Best” superimposed on the picture.
Also in his Facebook feed, there had been posted a video in which Green appears to recite the Proud Boys oath, “I’m Brian Green and I’m a proud western chauvinist who refuses to apologize for creating the modern world.”
There is nothing positive about chauvinism of any kind. Furthermore, it’s safe to say that nobody reciting the Proud Boys oath had anything to do with the creation of this modern world. That oath makes as much sense as me refusing to apologize for having created blues music, jazz and rock-and-roll when all those things were here when I was born.
I do have a few reports from friends that I will put up here just so you have some first hand accounts as well as they pictures and videos taken. I’m going to leave their names off because I don’t want to accidentally dox them to the wrong people.
So can we talk about the fact that the NOLA Proudboys (an SPLC-recognized violent white supremacist hate group) managed to have the “Trump Unity Bridge” (basically a giant mobile hate-campaign) ‘break down’ conveniently right in front of Jackson Square before the Krewe of Boo parade this evening– a halloween parade largely attended by families and kids. The police didn’t even tow that junk off of Decatur, and instead let them set up shop right along the parade route where they (illegally) sold MAGA hats to the crowd, yelled racial slurs at kids and passers by, threatened a few people who took their picture, tried to provoke violence, paraded around in blackface masks, oh and I’m told finally punched a woman and beat somebody with a flagpole shortly after I left. If you find that state of affairs as disappointing as I do, please call or write the Mayor’s office and tell her that you expect better in the so-called “city of yes” . . . that oughtn’t to mean ‘yes’ to every kind of white supremacist intimidation and depravity, especially anywhere that children are concerned. 504-658-4900, mayor@nola.gov
Here’s the link to the SPLC site that gives you more information about them.
As you know, a number of them were arrested in New York for a brawl which is basically what they always go looking for.
The founder of the far-right group the Proud Boys said on Friday that he was arranging the surrender of several members whom the police are seeking in connection with a violent brawl outside a Republican club in Manhattan last weekend.
At the same time, a senior official said the police had opened a broad criminal inquiry into the group’s activities.
Gavin McInnes, 48, a polemical far-right speaker who started the Proud Boys in 2016, said several suspects would turn themselves in. By late Friday afternoon, two of the nine men sought by the police had been arrested. A police official said a lawyer representing at least four of the suspects had called the 19th Precinct on Friday to work out the details of their surrender.
Though it was unclear how many might face charges, Mr. McInnes said the rest would soon be in custody. “They are going to be in the Tombs,” he said.
The Proud Boys are a fraternal organization of so-called Western chauvinists that Mr. McInnes has sometimes referred to as a gang. The group has clashed with anarchists and left-wing protesters at political events across the country several times in recent years.
They fought with anti-fascist demonstrators on Oct. 12 shortly after Mr. McInnes gave a speech at the Metropolitan Republican Club, a bastion of establishment conservatism on the Upper East Side.
There’s some national news about the midterms and other things we should discuss. This headline is startling. From Time: “Trump Plans to Tear Up a 31-Year-Old Nuclear Weapons Treaty. Now What?”.
President Donald Trump revealed Saturday the United States intends to withdraw from a 31-year-old nuclear weapons agreement with Russia, delivering a severe blow to the arms control regime that helped preserve peace since the Cold War.
“We’re going to terminate the agreement and we’re going to pull out,” Trump told reporters after a rally in Elko, Nevada, without indicating what the next steps might be.
The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, first signed by President Ronald Reagan and Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev in December 1987, was the first and only nuclear arms control agreement that ever eliminated an entire class of nuclear weapons. The treaty forced the superpowers to scrap more than 2,600 missiles with ranges 310 to 3,420 miles — weapons considered destabilizing to the European continent because of their capability to launch a nuclear strike from anywhere without early warning.
Gorbachev has called the move ‘Not the Work of a Great Mind’.
President Trump’s announcement that the United States would withdraw from a nuclear disarmament treaty with Russia drew sharp criticism Sunday from one of the men who signed it, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who called the decision reckless and not the work of “a great mind.”
In making his announcement Saturday, Mr. Trump cited Russian violations of the pact, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which was signed in Washington in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan and Mr. Gorbachev.
Mr. Gorbachev, who is now 87 years old, cast Mr. Trump’s decision as a threat to peace.
In an interview with the Interfax news agency, Mr. Gorbachev called Mr. Trump’s rollback of the disarmament agreement “very strange.” He added: “Do they really not understand in Washington what this can lead to?”
The last Soviet leader, who is perceived more warmly in the West than inside Russia, has already watched his domestic reform agendas supporting democracy and greater freedom of the press unravel in recent years. Nuclear disarmament also defined his legacy.
Eric Levitz opines this for New York Magazine today: Tribalism Isn’t Our Democracy’s Main Problem. The Conservative Movement Is.
In the middle of the 20th century, America was home to liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. The most important fault-lines in Congress weren’t partisan but regional; on many issues, southern Democrats and western Republicans united in battle against northern (and typically, liberal and/or labor-aligned) members of their respective caucuses. On economics, the two parties’ agendas were distinct, but far less disparate than they are today. On civil rights and immigration, the divisions within each side of the aisle were more important than those between them.
This utter dearth of partisan polarization undermined democratic accountability. A liberal could vote for Democratic candidates in New York, and unwittingly empower arch-segregationists in the Senate; many voters had no clear heuristic telling them which party would best represent their interests and ideological goals, nor which one was to blame for Congress’s failure to advance such aims.
In response, the American Political Science Association (APSA) released a report in 1950 that called on Republicans and Democrats to heighten their contradictions, arguing that “popular government in a nation of 150 million people requires political parties which provide the electorate with a proper range of choices between alternatives of action.”
Sixty-eight years later, we’ve done just as the APSA advised.
Today’s party system offers voters a wide — and clearly labeled — range of alternatives. While myriad policy debates remain stifled by bipartisan consensus (the proper size and role of the U.S. military, for example), it is nevertheless the case that Democrats and Republicans now provide the electorate with stark choices on health care, taxation, social spending, immigration, racial justice, abortion, environmental regulation, labor rights, and myriad other issues. It has rarely, if ever, been more clear what — and whom — each party in the U.S. stands for.
And rarely, if ever, has “popular government” been a worse misnomer for what transpires in our nation’s state and federal capitals.
In 2018, polarization still looms large in the discourse on our democracy’s failings. But these days, it’s seen less as an elixir than a cancer. In fact, some pundits and political scientists regard it as the root of all the Trump era’s evils. In this new telling, our republic may be suffering from a variety of disfiguring illnesses, but all trace back to the damage that hyperpartisanship did to its immune system: Our president may be a kleptocratic conspiracy theorist who oozes contempt for America’s highest ideals (and ignorance of high-school civics) — but only because conservative voters came to despise the Democratic Party more than they loathe self-proclaimed pussy-grabbers. Congress might be barely able to fund its own paychecks, let alone find consensus solutions to policy challenges — but voters only tolerate such gridlock because they’ve come to see compromise as a synonym for their side’s defeat. And Americans might be losing confidence in public institutions, the integrity of their nation’s elections, and the value of democracy itself — but this is largely because so many of them have decided that one of their nation’s two political parties poses an existential threat to their bedrock ideals.
I was happy to see Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum pull ahead in the polls. Evidently, the group of old white fogies at The Villages fear him. Being an old fogie myself, I wonder why they hate their Medicare and Social Security so much, but then, I don’t think in terms of black people taking things away from me. I think in terms of Republicans doing that.
President Donald Trump’s loyalists here at Florida’s premier retirement community fear Andrew Gillum.
It has nothing to do with his race, they insist, when asked about the 39-year-old Democrat who could become the state’s first African-American governor. Instead, The Villages’ deeply conservative residents are convinced a Gillum victory would trigger an era of high crime, higher taxes and moral failing.
“He’ll kill everything that’s good about Florida,” says Talmadge Strickland, a 66-year-old retired firefighter wearing a “Trump 2020″ baseball cap at a rally for Gillum’s opponent. “He will hurt us; he will physically hurt us with his socialist mentality.”
In an era defined by deep political partisanship, there’s perhaps no state where the divide runs deeper than Florida, which is in the grip of a fierce culture clash over guns, race, climate change and the president. Gillum sits at the center of the melee, his campaign a proxy for the larger fight between Democrats and President Donald Trump’s GOP.
Gillum’s fate is inexorably linked to fellow Democrats whose success could determine control of Congress. That’s especially true for three-term Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson, who could benefit from Gillum’s appeal among young voters and minorities.
As early voting begins in Florida this week, that link is tenuous.
“New voters and infrequent voters are everything to us winning,” Gillum told The Associated Press when asked about his impact on Nelson’s race. “I think they will vote for both of us, and that will be to his benefit.”
Young people and minorities are traditionally among the least reliable voters, particularly in midterm elections. Meanwhile, white voters in place like The Villages are lining up behind his opponent, former Republican Rep. Ron DeSantis.
The electorate in Florida this year is especially unpredictable due to an unusual collision of events: a massive hurricane, the nation’s deadliest high school shooting and Gillum’s historic candidacy.
Those of us that have had anything to hear from or do with a Trump voter know exactly how angry and ugly they are. But, be prepared for ads from the RNC that basically say that Dems are the angry mob. We may be angry, but our protests are hardly mob like and Greg Sargent of WAPO’s Plum line explains why we’re angry right back at them.
President Trump and Republicans have adopted a closing electoral strategy that depicts the Democratic Party and “angry” leftist protests against Trumpian rule as the only real reigning threat to our country’s civic fabric and the rule of law. A new Republican National Committee video juxtaposes footage of leading mainstream Democratic figures with that of angry protesters, while decrying “the left” as an “unhinged mob.”
As absurd as this conflation is on its face, it has smuggled itself into the mainstream debate, where it is getting a quasi-respectful hearing, in the form of a public argument over whether Democrats are “going low,” or tacitly egging on their voters to violence, or, by adopting the smashmouth media tactics of Michael Avenatti, succumbing to “Avenatti-ism.”
But much of the resulting debate over all this is hollow, because it is not putting these basic realities front and center: Trump, more than any leading U.S. figure in recent memory, has actively tried to stoke civil conflict on as many fronts as possible. He has concertedly subverted the rule of law, not just to shield himself from accountability, but, more to the point for present purposes, with the deliberate purpose of exciting his minority base — and enraging millions on the other side of the cultural divide — in a manner that is thoroughly corrupt to its core.
Here in New Orleans we like our food, our parades, our holidays, and our music. Most of us like our beer and bongs and whatever libations that goes along with watching the Saints or celebrating 300 years here. Yet, every time we have one of those celebrations we get angry white people doing disrespectful things. We get Westborough Baptist during our Southern Decadence celebration of the GLBT community here. We get big ol’ sign carrying christians telling us that we’re all about as sinful as you can get during Carnivale. Now, we get the Proud Boys and their ugly little float during Mardi Gras and our annual celebration of Halloween. None of them are loving of people or fun. They are here to buzz saw any one that isn’t like them.
We used to have to endure them during small little windows of time, but now, they assault us daily on all forms of media and in every walk of life. I get weary of all that resentment, hate, and privilege rattling.
Why do they come here to piss on other people’s celebrations? Why do they have to have laws that cause other people to live their lives according to some other person’s idea of how life needs to be.
We have a few more weeks of these awful rallies and the even worse pictures and words of these poor excuses for human beings. I’m not sure where the 20 million voters that never show up are, but please, please, please, get rid of these Ugly Americans. Get them back under their rocks and out of our lives and sight.
I want to go back to a January article by Rebbecca Solnit at the Literary Hub. ” 20 MILLION MISSING PEOPLE COULD SAVE AMERICA. ON LIFE IN THE DARK TIMELINE, AND THE MORAL CAUSE OF OUR MOMENT”.
But who is missing? It’s not only the women directors, the black screenwriters, the not-so-misogynist lead journalists in the mainstream.
It’s voters.
Voting is a form of speech, a way you say who you believe in, what kind of world you want to see. Having a voice doesn’t just mean literally being able to say things; it means having a role, having agency, being able to say things that have an impact whether it’s I witnessed this police brutality, or no I don’t want to have sex with you, or this is my vision of society.
As far as I can estimate, about 20 million voters were disenfranchised in the last election. Voter ID laws, the cross-check system, purging voter rolls, the undermining of the Voting Rights Act, making sure there were not enough polling stations or cutting back polling hours, harassing people when they showed up at those stations, taking the vote away from ex-felons—the means are many, and the consequences are that a lot of people have been denied their rights, so much so that it’s the other new Jim Crow. (There is no clear tally of how many voters are missing, and it’s also complicated by the fact that some populations—more than six million Americans with felony convictions, for example—are prevented outright from voting, some face obstacles and harassment—via voter ID laws, for example—that thin out their numbers.)
Politics is how we tell the stories we live by, how we decide if we value the health and well-being of children or not, the autonomy of women’s bodies and equality of our lives, or not, if we protect the Dreamers who came here as small children, or not, if we act on climate change, or not. Voting is far from the only way, but is a key way we decide on what story to base our actions on. We choose a story about who and what matters; we act on that story to rearrange the world around it—and then there are tax cuts to billionaires and children kicked off healthcare, or there are climate agreements and millions of acres of federal land protected and support for universities. We live inside what, during postmodernism’s heyday, we’d call master narratives—so there’s always a question of who’s telling the story, who is in charge of the narrative, and what happens if that changes.
Sometimes when journalists like Ari Berman at Mother Jones—the best voice on this issue—write about the suppression of the votes, people assume they’re saying Hillary Clinton should have won the last presidential election. If you changed who had access to the ballot in 2016, that might be the outcome, but the story is so much bigger than that, and the potential outcomes are so much more radical than that. The Republican Party has maintained a toehold on national power by systematically, strategically, increasingly suppressing the votes of people of color over decades. They are a minority party. They could never win a fair election nationally with their current platform of white grievance and misogyny and favors for the one percent, so they’ve set about to have unfair elections. (And they have also gerrymandered the daylights out of a lot of states to hang onto majorities at the state and national level; in 2012, they took the majority of seats in the lower house of Congress with a minority of overall votes.)
Imagine that those 20 million votes were not suppressed. The Republican Party would be defunct or be unrecognizably different from what it is today. But the Democratic Party would be different too. Imagine that the Democratic Party had to answer to more young people, more poor people, more nonwhite people, more people who believe in strengthening human rights and social service safety nets, economic justice, stronger action on climate change. Imagine a country where Democrats weren’t competing for moderate-to-conservative voters because the electorate was far more progressive—as it would be if all those people who lost their voting rights actually had them (and yeah, more younger people showed up). It wouldn’t change something as small as the outcome of the 2016 election. It would mean different political parties with different platforms and different candidates, different news coverage, different outcomes. It would change the story. It would change who gets to tell the story.
By voting, we can remove the tyranny of the shrinking minority before they completely set the game up so that we never can.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Friday Readings: Vote because Our Lives depend on it
Posted: October 19, 2018 Filed under: 2018 elections, Afternoon Reads, Voting Rights | Tags: Louisiana Ballot Initiative 2, VOTE DAMMIT!, voter suppression 24 Comments
Good Morning Sky Dancers!
The mural to the left is of Georgia gubernatorial Candidate Stacey Abrams located on a building in the Edgewood neighborhood of Atlanta. This building is just blocks from MLK Jr.’s childhood home. White Republicans in Georgia are actively trying to beat her any way they can.
You can tell there is a lot at stake in this election due to the SCOTUS gutting of the Voting Rights Act because there is increasing opportunity and effort to suppress the votes of indigenous peoples in North Dakota and Black people in every southern state and else where. Republicans are trying to hold power in the Senate to continue the reign of terror and murder of US democracy.
The struggle continues . Dozens of black seniors on their way to early voting in Georgia were ordered off a bus in Jefferson County.
As early voting began Monday in Georgia,a group of black senior citizens gathered for a voter outreach event at Jefferson County’s Leisure Center. Members of Black Voters Matter, one of the groups behind the event, offered to drive the group of about 40 seniors to the polls.
But shortly after the seniors boarded the organization’s bus, county officials stopped the trip, prompting new accusations of voter suppression in a state already dealing with several such controversies.
The event, according to ThinkProgress’s Kira Lerner, was a part of Black Voters Matter’s “The South is Rising” bus tour across seven states to host voter outreach and engagement events. Black Voters Matter is nonpartisan, and the group’s leadership did not encourage the senior citizens to vote for a particular candidate or political party, according to LaTosha Brown, the organization’s co-founder.
Jefferson County Administrator Adam Brett countered that the Monday event constituted “political activity,” noting that a local Democratic Party chair helped sponsor it.
“This is voter suppression, Southern style,” Brown told Think Progress. According to recent Census figures, Jefferson County is 53 percent black, and voting rights advocates cite a lack of transportation as a particularly high barrier to voting for black Georgians. Civil rights groups most recently raised this point in August when a majority-black Georgia county proposed closing all but two of its polling places.
There seems to be nothing White Republican men will do these days to hold on to power. It’s astonishing but not surprising. It’s not even subtle any more. One of the more strange things coming out of Georgia is forcing voter registration clerks to “match signatures” as if they’re experts on handing writing analysis. From Slate: “Georgia Is Using Amateur Handwriting Analysis to Disenfranchise Minority Voters. The scourge of “signature mismatch” laws strikes again.”
Say you live in Georgia. You’re eager to vote in this year’s election—a tight race between Democrat Stacey Abrams and Republican Trump acolyte Brian Kemp—so you fill out an absentee ballot and mail it in. Then, days or weeks after the election, you receive a notice in the mail. The signature on your absentee ballot, it explains, looked different from the signature on your voter-registration card. So an election official threw out your ballot. There is nothing you can do. Your vote has been voided.
If Georgia’s signature-mismatch law remains in effect through the November election, this fate will befall thousands of would-be voters. The statute directs elections officials to apply amateur handwriting analysis to voters’ signatures and reject any potential “mismatch.” Nearly 500 ballots in Gwinnett County alone have already been rejected for mismatch, a disproportionate number of them cast by minority voters. Now the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia is suing, demanding that the state give all citizens an opportunity to cure ballots rejected for mismatch. Its suit will help determine how successfully Georgia will suppress minority votes in the upcoming race.
Signature-mismatch laws are a scourge of American elections. The very premise makes no sense: In a similar lawsuit filed in New Hampshire, a forensic document examiner testifiedthat effective signature comparison requires 10 signature samples “at a minimum” to account for variability. Even then, experts may struggle to verify a signature, because our signatures often change over time. Voters who are disabled or elderly, or are nonnative English speakers, are especially likely to have variation between signatures. That’s one reason why New Hampshire’s mismatch law disproportionately impacted seniors, California’s disproportionately impacts first-generation Asian Americans, and Florida’s disproportionately impacts Hispanics.
But there’s likely something more insidious going on here too. The extreme racial disparitiesamong those affected by mismatch laws may also reflect the broad discretion that election officials have to toss ballots. In states with stringent mismatch rules, a handful of election officials are frequently responsible for the vast majority of ballots voided for mismatch. And those officials routinely work in counties with large minority communities.
One of the most important ways to circumvent being stopped at the polls or slowed down at the polls on election day is to vote early. Early votes are pouring into Virginia. The number of absentee ballots arriving to be counted is nearly unbelievable. It’s another reason that Republican legislatures are trying to shorten early voting periods and create long drives to early voting sites.
The number of voters in Virginia who have cast early ballots ahead of the November elections is dramatically up compared with last year, suggesting an electorate that is energized by several hotly contested races for Congress that are spread across the state.
Virginia allows voters to cast “absentee” ballots in person if they have valid excuses for not being able to vote on Election Day.
Nearly 78,000 people have completed ballots since absentee voting began Sept. 15 — more than double the number who voted early by this point last year, according to an analysis of voting data by the nonprofit Virginia Public Access Project.
That number is still shy of the 123,221 absentee ballots cast during the 2014 midterm elections, state data shows.
But with a little less than three weeks before the Nov. 6 elections, local election officials say this year’s absentee totals are on pace to eclipse 2014 and may even approach the turnout for the presidential election of 2016, when a near-record 496,452 Virginians cast their ballots early.
“It’s actually quite shocking,” said Richard Keech, deputy director of the elections office in Loudoun County, which has seen a 239 percent jump in absentee voting this year, with 11,106 ballots either already cast or mailed to voters so far.
“This would be the first time without a president on the ballot that we’ve seen this kind of increase,” Keech said
Fairfax County, the state’s largest jurisdiction, has seen a roughly 100 percent increase since last year, with 21,582 absentee votes cast so far, officials said. Nearby, Prince William County, the second-largest jurisdiction, has climbed by about 114 percent to 4,693 absentee ballots cast.
Here’s a suggestion from MIchelle Goldberg to prevent “political despair”. She suggests we “join the women trying to save America from Trump.”
This week, a friend texted me, “I feel a panic that won’t stop.” I didn’t have to ask what she meant; we are, after all, less than three weeks from the midterms. “#MeToo,” I replied.
Many women I know — though, of course, not only women — are walking around with a churning knot of terror in their stomachs. The confirmation of the cruel former frat boy Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court brought back the anguish and degradation so many of us felt after the 2016 election. Donald Trump grows more thuggish and mendacious by the day; “gaslighting,” a term taken from a play about an abusive husband trying to drive his wife insane, has become a byword of our national life.
Republicans are increasingly explicit about campaigning to preserve male power. Criticizing the #MeToo movementearly this month, Trump said it’s “a very scary time for young men in America.” Republican congressman Andy Barr of Kentucky ran a commercial attacking his opponent, former Marine fighter pilot Amy McGrath, for describing herself as a feminist. The Washington Post wrote about how an “outbreak of male resentment” is poised to play a “defining role” in the midterms.
I too have this underlying, nagging anxiety all the time. No matter how many times I say the mani and take deep breaths. I cannot shake the feeling that the bad guys are pulling out all the stops to stop the rest of us from rising.
Meanwhile, Georgia still stands out as the worst example while the ghost of Lester Maddox grins somewhere from hell.
A handful of states, most of them led by Republicans, are using someone’s decision not to vote as the trigger for removing them from the rolls. No state has been more aggressive with this approach than Georgia, where Brian Kemp, the secretary of state, oversaw the purging of a growing number of voters ahead of his own run for governor, according to an APM Reports investigation. Voting rights advocates call it a new form of voter suppression, and they fear it will soon spread to other states.
Even by Georgia standards, the voter purge of late July 2017 was remarkable. In a single day, more than half a million people — 8 percent of Georgia’s registered voters — were cut from the voter rolls. Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp, an avid supporter of President Donald Trump who has described himself as a “politically incorrect conservative,” oversaw the removals eight months after he’d declared himself a candidate for governor.
The purge was noteworthy for another reason: For an estimated 107,000 of those people, their removal from the voter rolls was triggered not because they moved or died or went to prison, but rather because they had decided not to vote in prior elections, according to an APM Reports analysis. Many of those previously registered voters may not even realize they’ve been dropped from the rolls. If they show up at the polls on Nov. 6 to vote in the heated Georgia governor’s race, they won’t be allowed to cast a ballot.
Kemp’s opponent, Democrat Stacey Abrams, is vying to become the first African-American woman in U.S. history to serve as a governor. The state has undergone a dramatic influx of African Americans and Latinos whose votes could challenge Republican dominance, and her campaign is trying to turn out people of color, who are more likely to be infrequent voters. If the race is close, the July 2017 purge could affect the outcome.
The APM Reports analysis is the first estimate of the so-called “use it or lose it” policy’s possible impact in Georgia. While 107,000 people may seem like a small number in a state with a population of 10.4 million, elections have been decided by far smaller margins. For instance, the 2016 presidential election was decided in favor of Donald Trump by a total of 77,744 votes in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Using someone’s decision not to vote as the trigger to remove that person from the rolls is a highly controversial — yet legal — tactic that voting rights advocates say is a potential tool for voter suppression. And its use is on the rise.
APM Reports found that at least nine states — most of them with Republican leadership, including the key battlegrounds of Georgia and Ohio — have purged an estimated hundreds of thousands of people from the rolls for infrequent voting since the 2014 general election. States with these policies are removing voters at some of the highest rates in the nation, no matter the reason.
People are fighting for our right to vote. They have fought over the years and decades to expand the right to vote for all of us. We have the duty and obligation to honor their hard work. I live in a state that seems hopeless and a city that is well represented by Americans of all backgrounds. This election will send my Congressman Cedric Richmond back to the leader of the Congressional Black Caucus. But, I have to admit that I am paying a lot more attention to the judicial races than I used to. Every race counts these days.
There is one ballot amendment here that will be a statewide vote that would bring significant justice to those incarcerated for major crimes with juries that are not unanimous. Overturning this law would be a significant step forward for Louisiana and I fully support this ballot effort to do so.
What would this ballot measure change about convictions?
Amendment 2 would require the unanimous agreement of jurors to convict people charged with felonies. As of 2018, Louisiana requires the agreement of 10 of 12, or 83 percent, jurors to convict people charged with felonies. Amendment 2 would not affect juries for offenses that were committed before January 1, 2019.[1]
Do other states allow for non-unanimous jury convictions?
As of 2018, Louisiana is one of two states—the other being Oregon—that does not require the unanimous agreement of jurors to convict people charged with felonies. Oregon does, however, require unanimous convictions in murder trials.[2][3]
Have the courts addressed the non-unanimous juries rule?
In Apodaca v. Oregon (1972), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution required unanimous juries to convict persons in federal criminal trials, but that the Fourteenth Amendment did not extend the requirement of unanimous juries to state criminal trials.[4][5]
Oddly enough, the Koch network is supporting this ballot initiative too. As we say, politics can sometimes make for odd bedfellows.
A conservative organization funded by the Koch network launched a digital ad Monday aimed at ending Louisiana’s law that allows split juries to convict people of serious felony crimes, an outreach effort that puts the group at odds with some of its usual allies.
Americans for Prosperity-Louisiana announced the online advertising campaign will be combined with direct-mail pieces and other outreach in support of the constitutional change on the Nov. 6 ballot that would do away with the Jim Crow-era law.
Currently, some serious felony trials in Louisiana, including some murder cases, can be resolved when 10 out of 12 jurors agree on a person’s guilt. Louisiana and Oregon are the only two states that allow non-unanimous verdicts in felony cases. But even Oregon requires a unanimous verdict in murder trials.
Amendment 2 would require jury verdicts in Louisiana to be unanimous to convict someone in all felony cases.
Americans for Prosperity’s 30-second online ad — set to music and without narration — targets libertarian-leaning and conservative voters with a focus on constitutional rights, saying Amendment 2 will “protect American freedom and liberty.” It says Louisiana’s current law makes it “easier to send innocent people to prison.”
“Louisianans deserve a justice system that values, above all else, the rights of the accused in a jury trial. A system that places a higher value on conviction rates than the pursuit of the truth is a system that has no place in our society,” John Kay, Louisiana state director of Americans for Prosperity, said in a statement.
The organization is the main political advocacy group for billionaire Charles Koch, who has supported criminal justice overhauls in several states, including Louisiana. With support of the unanimous jury amendment, along with the criminal-sentencing-law changes, the Koch network has diverged from some other high-profile conservatives in Louisiana, including Republican Attorney General Jeff Landry and several tough-on-crime district attorneys.
But Amendment 2 has drawn an unlikely, bipartisan coalition of support across the political spectrum, from conservative and religious groups to liberal activists.
The constitutional amendment required two-thirds support of lawmakers to reach the November ballot. When Sen. J.P. Morrell, a New Orleans Democrat, first proposed the idea, passage during the regular legislative session was seen as a longshot.
The legislation became the surprise measure of the session, reaching a public vote with widespread support from Democrats and Republicans, picking up steam each step of the process.
I would like to say the only stand out thing about the Louisiana Election this year is that we are working to remove this Jim Crow Era law . Our Republican Secretary of State has also purged voter rolls. I made sure I checked my registration earlier this week. Our State AG is a doozy. We pretty much hate him here in New Orleans. “AG Landry: Free election day bus rides illegal”.
Lafayette City-Parish Councilman Bruce Conque withdrew a resolution from Tuesday’s agenda that would have provided free bus rides in the city of Lafayette on election days.
Conque said he spoke with Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry who concurred with city-parish attorneys’ advice that free bus service is not legal.
“Jeff (Landry) … said he considers it a violation of the Louisiana constitution and he would legally challenge it if we moved forward,” Conque said.
Landry told The Daily Advertiser the Louisiana Secretary of State asked for advice on the matter, so Landry sent him a 1996 Attorney General opinion. That opinion said a school board could not use school buses to bring voters to election polls.
Even though the Lafayette buses would not directly bring riders to the polls, Landry said it is not allowed. The facts of the opinion may differ from the Lafayette case, he said, but the principle behind the conclusion is the same.
This impacts the poor and the elderly. Additionally, here’s some evidence of the Secretary of State’s voter suppression tactics from the Daily Beast. Rachel Maddow has been focusing on this issue of voter suppression over the country. We have not yet been featured but Louisiana has done it too. Here’s our experience with voter purges from Louisiana Weekly.
In July 2018, the Brennan Center for Justice released a report analyzing voter purging across the country showing that between 2014 and 2016 officials removed more than 16 million people from voting rolls nationwide. That’s four million more names than states removed between 2006 and 2008 (the last time frame analyzed).
The center attributes this increase in purging to an increase in the use of sometimes flawed data matching software across states to remove names, as well as conservative activist groups lobbying for, and sometimes suing to get, more purges and tougher legislation to protect against potential non-citizen voters.
Louisiana’s last voter purge was in 2017, a routine post-election clean up that resulted in 55,000 names removed from an inactive voter list of more than 100,000. (There are some three million registered voters in total in the state).
Voters become inactive after they don’t vote in a federal election and, “we don’t have a way to reach them by mail or phone,” says Louisiana secretary of state’s spokeswoman Meg Casper Sunstrom. “In other words, we can’t verify they are living where they are registered to vote. As soon as they participate and vote, they can be removed from the inactive list.”
Some voting rights advocates have criticized past purges in Louisiana, particularly a post-Katrina purge that resulted in a federal lawsuit against the state in 2007. Many displaced people registered for driver’s licenses and acquired temporary residences in other states, and data matching systems subsequently flagged their names as potential “double voters” – people registered to vote in multiple states. Millions of people are registered in two places, and research shows that since 2000, around 30 cases of voter fraud have been validated in the United States.
Despite little to no evidence of illegal voting across the country, the Trump Administration has aggressively pursued efforts to curtail even the possibility of fraud – creating a now defunct national voter fraud task force and asking states to turn over detailed information on individual voters. Then, Louisiana secretary of state Tom Schedler declined the task force’s request, offering only the same (less extensive) data available for purchase to political candidates online.
We must stop this dreadful disenfranchisement and removal of rights from citizens. If we don’t attack it by voting and by bringing attention to voter suppression efforts it will only get worse. It can only benefit Trump and the white patriarchy who oppresses the majority of people in the country and can only contain them with gerrymandering and voter suppression. Increased voter participation by the rest of this lessens the chance they are successful.
Don’t forget to vote!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
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ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
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quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
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