by Robert M. Traxler
Jim Crow on steroids? Any law the wonks and cancel culture disagree with.
We keep hearing references to any voting law that reverts to the law before the last election and the COVID-19 “emergency changes to voting laws” as Jim Crow on steroids. Our president said it and it was mimicked hundreds of times by the Democrats and the compliant and unquestioning media, a group that has become mostly a vast echo chamber for the socialist movement.
The logical question is, what were Jim Crow Laws and how are things like voter identification so much more onerous than they were before COVID-19?
According to Encyclopedia Britannica “Jim Crow law, in U.S. history, any of the laws that enforced racial segregation in the South between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and the beginning of the civil rights movement in the 1950s. Jim Crow was the name of a minstrel routine (actually Jump Jim Crow) performed beginning in 1828 by its author, Thomas Dartmouth (“Daddy”) Rice, and by many imitators, including actor Joseph Jefferson. The term came to be a derogatory epithet for African Americans and a designation for their segregated life.”
Jim Crow laws banned African Americans from voting by using poll taxes and literacy tests. For African American voters, there were Jim Crow laws that singled out African Americans and forced segregation in schools, housing, transportation, medical care, jails, bathrooms, water fountains, parks, theaters, restaurants, houses of prostitution, pools, phone booths, and even cemeteries.
The goal was to prevent any contact between black and white that could be seen as promoting equality. Jim Crow was the law, and jail was the penalty for violations.
So just how is requiring all voters of all races colors and creeds to identify themselves more onerous than “separate but equal?” Damned if I know. The party line is that white people have access to personal identification and people of color do not; folks, you can’t make this stuff up.
Our vice president said that people in rural areas do not have the ability to copy documents, citing a nonexistent requirement to submit a copy of your identification to vote. Well, we all live in what most Americans would classify as a rural area; have you seen any separate but equal signs at places that copy documents?
Many of us have a printer for our computers, a shocking revelation to our vice president. We even have computers, and even those of us in Dorr Township have indoor plumbing and electricity, Madame Vice President.
The rhetoric is over the top stupid, but very logical according to the media and their puppet masters in the socialist movement. Jim Crow laws were dehumanizing and plain old-fashioned wrong. The return to voting laws that were in effect before COVID-19 is nothing even close to the separate but not very equal days of Jim Crow, let alone “Jim Crow on steroids.”
Who in the media will call out the socialists on this outrage? Not one damned person, as they live in stark terror of the cancel culture, wonks, terrorists, and in fear of losing their employment and destroying their futures.
On a separate subject. Censorship is needed for our own good, said the White House spokesperson on July 16. Socialism needs intimidation and a big brother spying service in every neighborhood to be successful. The White House is working with Big Tech to monitor and censor anti-vaccine language on your social media pages; think that one over and ask yourself what is next.
The First Amendment be damned; the government using big tech as an enforcing agent or as Jen Psaki’s White House press person said in defense of working with Facebook to get what they deem only “trusted content” to the public, is censorship plain and simple. This is scary stuff, but cheered by the left.
Psaki also remarked that if a user is banned from one platform “for providing misinformation,” as determined by the government, that user should be banned from all others. Please note the word all meaning silenced, canceled, banned. This action is the government censoring the public, not a “private business.”
Let us hope the midterm elections can overcome the unfair media and cancel culture in social media and put us on a road back to a United States that follows the Constitution.
My opinion.
AB,
Would you please stop presenting those pesky facts? You will be censored next! Additionally, thanks for the history lesson that is no longer being taught………..
Cheers!!
Mr. Wilkens,
John, thanks for the comment. It is concerning that we need to be worried about what we say in the T.B.
Seriously folks can’t make this up
Ted Cruz has compared President Biden and the people in his administration working to stop Covid to “Nazi stormtroopers.” Republicans in his state are trying to ban any mention of Susan B. Anthony, Cesar Chavez and Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. from their schools’ textbooks and give Republicans the power to challenge and even reject votes they don’t like in future elections. What is going on here?
There are a lot of words thrown around these days, from democracy and republic to fascist, socialist, communist, theocrat, oligarchy, white supremacist, liberal, conservative, autocracy and dozens of others. But they all fall into one of two buckets.
Those two buckets are democracy and autocracy.
In a democracy, governance is conducted in accordance with the wishes of the majority of the people. Typically today that will is expressed through majority-wins voting for representatives, and that governance is conducted within the constraints of a constitution and common law; what the Founders called “a republican form of government.” Starting in the late 1600s, this form of government and its variations were also often defined as “liberal.”
In autocratic forms of government the will of the majority of the people is secondary to the will of those in power. That would include priests and mullahs who claim to rule by a god’s will (theocracy); a bureaucracy that porports to know what’s best for the people (communism); a puppet government elected as a result of moneyed interests controlling public opinion (oligarchy/fascism/conservatism); and a government that excludes portions of the populace because of their economic status, race or religion (fascist/Nazi/white supremacist/oligarchy/conservative).
What’s unique about today’s moment in post-1965 American history is that one of our political parties — the Republican Party — has fully embraced autocratic governance and is doing everything it can to stop “will of the majority” democracy.
In 1965, Democratic politicians (with a few Republicans) passed laws overturning 100 years of Jim Crow laws that prevented minorities (particularly African Americans and Native Americans) from voting and otherwise participating in the governance of our republic. The entire history of America up to that point, while we called ourselves a democratic republic, had actually been a form of white supremacist autocracy with a thick whites-only democratic patina.
The Republican Party’s response to America enfranchising African Americans was immediate. Former Vice President Richard Nixon (VP 1953-1961) reached out to the mostly-Southern and -Western white supremacists who’d been part of the the Democratic Party’s coalition and invited them to join him in the Republican Party. Numerous former Democratic politicians followed Nixon’s lead, changing their party affiliation from Democratic to Republican (as West Virginia’s governor recently did).
They included such familiar names as Ronald Reagan, Strom Thurmond, Stanford Morse, Jesse Helms, Bob Barr, Trent Lott, John Connally, Elizabeth Dole, Bill Bennett, Roy Moore, David Duke, and Rick Perry.
The GOP then began a steady move away from democracy and toward autocracy, openly embracing several dimensions of that form of governance.
Reagan/Bush advisor George W. Bush formed an alliance between the white protestant evangelical wing of Christianity and the Republican Party as both Reagan and Bush switched positions on a woman’s right to choose to get an abortion (Reagan had signed the nation’s most liberal abortion law as California governor, and Bush was an open supporter and fundraiser for Planned Parenthood). Soon politics was being preached from the pulpit, and hard-right Catholics changed parties as well. The GOP embraced theocracy, often referring to America as a “Christian nation.”
In 1971, tobacco lawyer Lewis Powell wrote his infamous “Powell Memo” urging billionaires and big corporations to create an oligarch-friendly infrastructure of think tanks, media operations and influence groups while putting partisans into colleges and universities and packing the courts.
The GOP embraced oligarchy, and the judges they appointed declared that giving politicians money in exchange for tax breaks, subsidies and other “favors” was no longer bribery or corruption but “Constitutionally-protected Free Speech.” Powell, who Nixon put on the Supreme Court in 1972, actually wrote the decision giving billionaires and corporations this “right.”
The Republican Party has now so openly embraced oligarchy that they continue to do the bidding of the fossil fuel industry, which is literally threatening the future survival of humanity, by promoting climate change denial and fighting any legislation to reduce atmospheric carbon.
The Republican Party began campaigning on racist slogans and memes like “Law and Order,” “War on Drugs,” and running ads featuring Black criminals like Willie Horton. With a few rare exceptions, Black politicians found the only party welcoming them were the Democrats; the GOP openly embraced white supremacy and racism, culminating in the Trump presidency and the Party’s current moral panic about Critical Race Theory.
The GOP’s current war on voting is another clear dimension of their embrace of autocracy, and now that they have laws in place in 17 states saying that partisans can decide which votes count and which will be thrown out, who can vote and who gets purged, it’s entirely possible — as numerous commentators have pointed out — that in 2024 a Republican could lose the popular vote by millions, and lose the electoral college vote with an initial count of the votes, but still be established in the White House. (The last Republican to take the White House with a majority of the popular vote was George HW Bush in 1988, but if these laws has been in place last year Donald Trump would now still be president.)
The Democratic Party hasn’t been entirely blameless through this period. Today in the Senate, for example, there are several Democrats (Joe Manchin being the most “famous” example) who are still deeply in the pockets of fossil fuel oligarchs. But overall Democrats have, by and large, aggressively embraced the idea of democracy in our republic.
As Thomas Paine — a fierce advocate for multiracial democracy in America — famously said, “These are the times that try men’s souls; the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but … [t]yranny, like hell, is not easily conquered..”
CAPT,
Thanks for your contribution………….Next time try to use your own words……….
Cheers!!
Mr. Annable,
Thank you for the comment. Please give Mr. Tom Hartman cred for writing this piece, quotes around his work would be proper. You could site his column in your comment then use quotes.
OH!!!! Look more of those ” pesky” facts. What is this world coming to ???
Thanks Mr smit , I realize they can’t handle the truth no matter the source. More to come in the future.
Mr. Annable,
Sir, Your comments are welcome, however this is not your work and you give no credit to Mr. Tom Hartman who writes in the Random Length news, a Progressive news magazine. To pass this off as your work and not his is larceny and wrong. The work has a number of out and out falsehoods and not the truth. If more plagiarism is what you promise , when stating “More to come in the future” it is wrong but it fits the socialist narrative so it is fine with the TB.
Larceny Definition
Created by FindLaw’s team of legal writers and editors | Last updated January 22, 2019
Larceny is what most people think of as common theft – the taking of someone else’s property without the use of force. The Model Penal Code and the laws of several states place larceny and certain other property crimes under the general category of theft. However, there are some states that retain the traditional common-law distinctions in which larceny is its own crime, separate from other property crimes like embezzlement or robbery.
Larceny Definition: Elements of the Crime
The following elements must be proven in order to obtain a conviction for larceny:
The unlawful taking and carrying away;
Of someone else’s property;
Without the consent of the owner; and
With the intent to permanently deprive the owner of the property Mr Hartman’s blogs are always a share , so thank you for mentioning his work again. So I noticed you failed to mention those false hoods. More pesky facts!
Mr. Annable,
Thank you for making my point. What you did was a larceny per the definition you quote you stole Mr. Hartman’s property passing it off as your own, his column. When a hole the rule one is stop digging. Oh, and put quotes around the two items you quote.
Mr traxler I noticed you couldn’t come up with those false hoods you mentioned and calling Mr Hartman a liar is slander.