sexual harassment
Suddenly, Democrats Are Offended by Nazi Analogies | Townhall
Damon Higgins/Palm Beach Post via AP
May 27, 2021
Republican Jewish-space-laser kook Marjorie Taylor Greene offered up a nonsensical Holocaust analogy the other day, comparing vaccine passports to yellow stars worn by Jews during the Holocaust. Though Greene has problems grasping historical context, she apparently possesses the ability to induce the entire left wing to pretend they are offended by dumb Nazi analogies.
It’s a quick turnaround. The media spent four years acting like the 2017 inauguration was akin to von Hindenburg handing power to Hitler. What am I saying? They’re still doing it. This very week you can read, for example, a Chris Cillizza piece headlined, “A majority of Republicans are living in a fantasy world built around the Big Lie.” The “Big Lie” — highly popular among Democrats (and Donald Trump) — is, of course, referring to a tactic the Nazis deployed against their political enemies. No one seemed upset when President-elect Joe Biden claimed Ted Cruz was a latter-day Goebbels spreading the “Big Lie.” If challenging the legitimacy of an election is tantamount to fascistic disinformation, Democrats have been running the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda for the past five years.
Let’s face it: Taylor Greene is a rank amateur at playing the Nazi card. We have been drowning in reductio ad Hitlerum. “Donald Trump increasingly compared to Adolf Hitler,” explained a CBS News piece that treated Trump’s asking attendees at a rally to raise their hands and pledge to vote as if it were Nuremberg. “Is it wrong to compare Trump to Hitler?” asked a Philadelphia Inquirer columnist this past January. The answer? “No.” “Don’t compare Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler. It belittles Hitler,” noted a Washington Post op-ed. “Trump’s last days and the echo of one specific Hitler analogy,” wrote pundit Ishaan Tharoor. “I’m beginning to see what happened in Germany,” said four-time Godwin’s Law champion Jim Clyburn. Jerry Nadler is no slouch on the matter, either.
There are endless iterations of this theme. I could do this all day.
When Jamil Smith, a writer for Rolling Stone, tweeted, “First, they came for the undocumented,” he was conjuring up the famous poem by Martin Niemoller — “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out” — a Nazi who had a change of heart once he was sent to a concentration camp. “First they came…” is prevalent among the Trump-is-Hitler crowd. Russian collusion expert Benjamin Wittes had the temerity to plug his friend, former FBI director James Comey (found to have violated DOJ and FBI policies), former deputy director of the FBI Andy McCabe (found to have illegally leaked information to The Wall Street Journal and then lied about it), and Lisa Page and Peter Strzok (FBI agents who conspired to undermine an election) into Niemoller’s poem, as if these media darlings, who never had to seriously worry about their safety or comfort, should be compared to those forcibly taken from their homes and families to work, at best, as slave laborers.
Where was Chuck Schumer when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez diminished the suffering of millions of dead Jews by comparing holding facilities on the Southern border to concentration camps? At the time, several media personalities attempted to defend the congresswomen by pointing out that the idea of a “concentration camp” predated the Holocaust — as if Ocasio-Cortez were conjuring up images of the Boers rather than Buchenwald. But it was the congresswoman who stressed that we should be “concerned enough with humanity to say that ‘Never Again’ means something and… that concentration camps are now an institutionalized practice in the Home of the Free.”
Suddenly, Democrats Are Offended by Nazi Analogies | Townhall
Commentary: Why Does the Left Hate Israel? | Georgia Star News
by Victor Davis Hanson
As over 3,000 rockets are fired into Israel by Hamas, the establishment of the Democratic Party seems paralyzed over how to respond to the latest Middle East war.
It is not just that they fear that the squad, Black Lives Matter, the shock troops of Antifa, and the woke institutions such as professional sports, academia, and the media are now unapologetically anti-Israel.
They are in terror also that anti-Israelism is becoming synonymous with rank anti-Semitism. And soon the Democratic Party will end up disdained as much as was the British Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn.
The new core of the Democrats, as emblemized by Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), has in the past questioned the patriotism of American Jews who support Israel, and often has had to apologize for puerile anti-Semitic rants.
The Left in general believes we should judge harshly even the distant past without exemptions. Why then, in venomous, knee-jerk fashion, does it fixate on a nation born from the Holocaust, while favoring Israel’s enemies, who were on the side of the Nazis in World War II?
It was not just that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin al-Husseini, was a Nazi sympathizer. Egypt, for example, welcomed ex-Nazis for their hatred of Jews and their military expertise—whether the infamous death camp doctor Aribert Ferdinand Heim or Waffen-SS henchman Otto Skorzeny. The Hamas charter still reads like it is cribbed from Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
The Left claims it champions consensual government and believes the United States must use its soft power clout to isolate autocracies. But the Palestinian Authority and Hamas refuse to hold free and regularly scheduled elections. If an Israeli strong man ever suspended free elections and ruled through brutality, U.S. aid would be severed within days.
If history and democratic values cannot explain fully the hatred of Israel on the Left, perhaps human rights violations do. But here too there is another radical asymmetry. Arab Israeli citizens enjoy far greater constitutional protections than do Arabs living under either the Palestinian Authority or Hamas.
Is the Left bothered by the allies of Hamas? After all, most are autocracies such as Iran, North Korea, China, and Russia.
We return then to other reasons for the woke furor directed toward Israel.
In part, the Western Left despises the unapologetically successful—as if they are always beneficiaries of unfair privilege. Underdog Israel was not so hated from 1947-1967. Then it was poor, more socialist, and in danger of being extinguished by its many neighboring enemies.
But after the victories in the 1967 and 1973 wars, the Israeli military proved unconquerable, no matter how large the numbers, wealth, and armaments of its many enemies.
For the Left, Israel’s current strength, confidence, and success mean it cannot be seen as a victim, but only as a victimizer. The more its Iron Dome missile defenses knock down the flurry of Hamas rockets, the more its planes take out those who launched them, so all the more the Left bizarrely believes Israel wins too easily and acts “disproportionately.”
In the virtue-signaling world of the contemporary West, Israel has become caricatured as playing the role of the American white police, the Palestinians a foreign version of the oppressed Black Lives Matter movement. The Palestinians then are woke, the Israelis not so much.
The Left also has a strange idea of current “imperialism” and “colonialism.” The general rule is that Westerners cannot settle in numbers in the non-West. But the reversal is certainly not true. Millions of Middle Easterners are welcomed into Belgium, France, Germany, the U.K., and the United States.
Yet, Jews have been in what is modern-day Israel since nearly the dawn of civilization. And their 1947 borders only grew after they were attacked and threatened with extinction.
Again, the Left always claims that its anti-Israelism has had nothing to do with anti-Semitism.
But it is almost impossible now to make that distinction when woke criticism obsesses over democratic Israel and ignores far greater oppressors and oppressed elsewhere.
Why are there no demonstrations in major Western cities damning the Communist Chinese government that has put 1 million Muslim Uighurs in camps? Why are the world’s millions of former refugees—the Volga Germans, the East Prussians, the Cypriot Greeks—long ago forgotten, and yet the Palestinians alone deified as perpetually displaced by the Jews?
Our formal NATO ally, Turkey, received little global pushback for its treatment of the Kurds, or its frequent intolerance of religious minorities. Why then does the Jewish state alone always earn such venom?
Hating democratic Israel while it is under attack is not just a reflection of the new woke and ethically bankrupt Left. It is also a symptom of a deeper pathology in the West, one of moral equivalence, amoral relativism—and self-loathing.
Hating Israel, then, has become the surrogate Western way of hating oneself.
– – –
Victor Davis Hanson is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness and the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He is an American military historian, columnist, a former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won and The Case for Trump.
Photo “Free Palestine March” by Alisdare Hickson. CC BY-SA 2.0.
The post Commentary: Why Does the Left Hate Israel? appeared first on The Georgia Star News.
CNN Fires Contributor Who Praised Hitler | The Epoch Times
May 17, 2021
A CNN contributor who had a history of praising Nazi leader Adolf Hitler saw the broadcaster cut ties with him after his latest missives. Adeel Raja on Sunday posted on Twitter, “The world today needs a Hitler.” He later deleted the post. “Adeel Raja has never been a CNN employee. As a freelancer, his reporting contributed to some newsgathering efforts from Islamabad,” a CNN spokesperson told news outlets in a statement. “However, in light of these abhorrent statements, he will not be working with CNN again in any capacity.” The spokesperson initially said he had never heard of Raja, the Washington Examiner reported. A review of Raja’s Twitter history showed he has posted positively about Hitler, who oversaw the Holocaust, multiple times. In 2014, Raja wrote, “My support for Germany is due to what Hitler did with Jews!” “Hail Hitler!” he also said. Raja defended himself on Monday, responding to …
Never Forget | “The Rise of Utilitarian Extremism, and How to Recognize It” | Mercola
In an April 29, 2021, opinion piece published by Newsday,1 Arthur Caplan and Dorit Reiss, Ph.D., argue for the implementation of vaccine passports as a strategy to regain our freedom to travel and the “safe” reopening of schools and businesses.
Caplan is the director of medical ethics at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and Reiss is a law professor at UC Hastings College of the Law and a member2 of the Parent Advisory Board of Voices of Vaccines.
Caplan is also co-chair of the Vaccines Working Group on Ethics and Policy, a group formed specifically to address “key policy challenges associated with the testing and distribution of vaccines intended to prevent COVID-19 transmission in the United States,” and Reiss is a member of the board.3
Part of their argument is that vaccinations have “always” been “necessary for travel,” which is patently false. Proof of vaccination requirements are rare, and strictly limited to travel to certain destinations where the risk of contracting a disease and bringing it back to a population with nonexistent immunity against it is high. You’ve never had to show proof of vaccination when flying to Paris, France, for example.
Arguing for Unconstitutional Practices
Caplan and Reiss also argue that prohibiting businesses from requiring vaccine passports, which some state governors are now doing, is “unusual and irrational,” as private businesses have the right to make their business more attractive by increasing the safety for its staff and patrons.
The problem with that argument is that it is the government’s job to protect the Constitutional rights of all Americans. Allowing or encouraging businesses to create a two-tier society where unvaccinated people are barred from participating in civic society is unconstitutional on its face.
What’s more, proof of vaccination against COVID-19 will not ensure safety. It won’t even remotely promote it, as the so-called vaccines are designed to merely reduce symptoms of the infection. They don’t make you immune. You can still contract the virus and spread it to others. The only one who might benefit from the jab is the one getting it.
Of course, Caplan and Reiss make no mention of this crucial point, but since the vaccinated person is the only one getting any protection, no one needs to know your vaccination status, as it doesn’t affect them either way. A COVID-19 vaccinated individual poses the same risk to the community as an unvaccinated one.
So, the only reason for a vaccine passport is a control-related one, and Reiss and Caplan are keeping busy, trying to convince you otherwise. In a February 2021 Barron’s article,4 they argued for letting employers mandate vaccines for their employees, using the same lame arguments.
What’s happening here is that the U.S. federal government recognizes that it cannot legally mandate vaccine passports. It would be unconstitutional, as it would create a two-tier society built on medical discrimination. So, government is depending on private businesses to push through this measure. Reiss and Caplan’s efforts are part of this strategic subversion of Constitutional rights.
Caplan and Reiss also paired up for an opinion piece published April 27, 2021, by The Hour,5 in which they sank to typical propagandist lows, bashing parents of vaccine damaged children who fought against the removal of religious exemption to vaccination in Connecticut.6
The Threat of Utilitarianism
Caplan’s and Reiss’ one-sided obsession with utilitarianism, where risks to the individual are ignored and the idea of self-determination and personal choice is ridiculed, is clearly spelled out in an article published in the January/June 2020 issue of the Journal of Law and the Biosciences:7
“There is a large literature about school mandates, and a somewhat more limited literature on adult mandates, but there is less principled discussion of when is it appropriate to mandate a specific vaccine. Field and Caplan suggested an ethical framework to consider when school mandates ought to apply …
Their framework explains that autonomy, beneficence, utilitarianism, justice, and non-maleficence are the values affected by immunization mandates. Applying the framework here provides important insights on the suitability of a COVID-19 vaccine mandate …
[U]tilitarianism — acting for the benefit of the greatest number for society as a whole — supports a COVID-19 mandate, as it supports other vaccine mandates … The current pandemic is causing harms in lives and suffering, and also economic harms as preventing loss of more life requires measures like sheltering at home, closing businesses, and the closing of public spaces. Preventing these staggering costs is a huge social benefit.
Once a vaccine is available, the justification for measures like shelter at home will decrease, but preventing harms will depend on vaccine use. A mandate will increase use, boost herd immunity and reduce costs. The only caveat is that the balance of costs and benefits depends on the safety of the vaccine.”
Utilitarianism is a discredited pseudo-ethic that has repeatedly been used to justify horrific human rights abuses. By now, we can accurately predict what the outcome will be if we allow it to be used to justify vaccine passports and mandatory COVID vaccinations.
In short, utilitarianism is based on a mathematical equation that some individuals can be sacrificed for the greater good of the majority. In other words, if some people are harmed by vaccines, it’s an acceptable loss because society as a whole may or will reap gains.
Caplan and Reiss express this as “acting for the benefit of the greatest number.” The flip-side is that a smaller number — it could be 49 out of 100 — may be harmed and that’s acceptable, because the people harmed is still a smaller number than the majority.
More Than 11,000 COVID Vaccine Deaths Logged
The latest data on COVID-19 vaccine side effects suggest governments are already operating under this horrific utilitarian ideology.
How else do you explain the fact that the European Union’s vaccine injury reporting system had logged 330,218 adverse event reports, including 7,766 deaths, as of April 17, 2021,8 and the U.S. reporting system had logged 118,902 adverse event reports as of April 23, including 3,544 deaths and 12,618 serious injuries,9 yet all of these injuries and deaths are simply ignored and the call for everyone to get their jab continues unabated — all while bashing vaccine hesitancy as a mental illness, intellectual deficit or act of domestic terrorism?!
In a utilitarian system, you cease to be an individual with rights to autonomous decision-making and become a tool of the government, and that’s exactly what we’re seeing here. Government has apparently decided that some people — quite a few people, apparently — are expendable, which is the exact converse of what they’re telling us publicly.
They say we all must get vaccinated to save lives, especially the elderly. Yet lives are being taken, and these are not people who already have one foot in the grave. While COVID-19 kills the elderly and the seriously ill, these gene therapy injections are stealing the lives of younger, healthy individuals who are in the prime of their lives. How can you even compare those two scenarios and come to the conclusion that mass vaccination is the greater good?
While utilitarianism was a popular ideology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it went out of fashion in the mid-20th century, after the Third Reich employed the utilitarian rationale as an excuse to demonize and eliminate minorities judged to be a threat to the health, security and well-being of the State.10 Its abhorrent and unethical nature was clearly recognized and clarified during the Nuremberg trials.
Although we may disagree about the quality and quantity of the scientific evidence used by doctors and governments to declare COVID-19 “vaccines” safe, at our peril do we fail to agree that, while government may have the power, it does not have the moral authority to dictate that individuals born with certain genes and biological susceptibilities give up their lives without their consent for what the ruling majority deems is the greater good.
Having everyone conform to a normal weight and not having insulin resistance issues would be for the greater good of society. Does that mean government should have the power to send everyone above a certain BMI to a forced internment camp where they are exercised and underfed until they no longer pose an increased health care cost risk?
We really ought to think long and hard before we jump on the utilitarian wagon and start pumping our fists in the air in endorsement of the “greater good” narrative.
Most people in the U.S. are engaging in lifestyle practices that put them at a seriously increased risk of being a financial burden on society and the health care system, so don’t fall for the baseless idea that unvaccinated people, specifically, will end up costing more because they’ll end up with more serious cases of COVID-19. There’s no data at all to back that up.
Conspiracies Blamed for Growing Sensibility
As more and more people are starting to realize the perilous road we’re on and where it’s taking us, the mainstream propagandists are turning up the heat, blaming vaccine hesitancy on one “conspiracy theory” after another. They simply refuse to admit that people can, and most want, to make their own decisions.
Rising anti-vaccination sentiment is being blamed on everything from Russian bots and trolls spreading misinformation online and making a tiny minority appear larger than what it actually is,11 to rebranding “harmful anti-vaccine views” as a civil liberties issue or a part of some other conspiracy theory involving the drug industry or Bill Gates.12
The fact is, the vaccine mandate pushers have nothing but foul language and mockery at their disposal. They have no facts with which to prove that COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective, or that mass vaccination will save lives. They cannot disprove the financial incentives and ties that exist between Gates, the World Health Organization, vaccine makers and government.
Gates is one of the largest funders of the WHO, which has been responsible for the global response to the pandemic, while simultaneously being heavily invested in COVID-19 vaccines and funding censorship of vaccine information.13
The WHO is also promoting global censorship of vaccine information, in part through its “Stop the Spread” campaign14 aimed at stopping the spread of COVID-19 “misinformation,” and a coalition of groups is calling on the Biden Administration to put together a disinformation task force.15
Showing just how ludicrous this suggestion is, the task force would “explore ways to crack down on deliberate disinformation campaigns in ways that don’t unduly limit free expression.” In other words, they’re to figure out how to censor people without making it a clear breach of the First Amendment.
Well, we already know one way in which they’re doing that, and that is by calling on private companies like Twitter and Facebook to censor for them. It’s still a violation of the First Amendment, though; it’s just harder to see.
Vaccine mandate pushers also cannot disprove that the pandemic is being used to roll out the Great Reset and global “build back better” plans that will decimate the U.S. Constitution and rob the working class of its wealth and autonomy. In short, they have no counter-arguments. All they can do is paint people who question their flimsy utilitarian narrative as crackpots of one sort or another.
If the vaccines were truly fantastic, word of their miraculous nature would spread like wildfire, just as reports of horrendous vaccine side effects now are, and people would flock to get them even in the absence of advertising and celebrity promotion.
The fact that name-calling and smear tactics are employed en masse to paint dissenters as crackpots and terrorists rather than presenting actual data and evidence that supports their pro-vaccine stance is proof positive that there’s something strange afoot.
Utilitarian Extremism Is on the Rise
I’ve previously written about the sudden influence wielded by a group called Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) — a progressive cancel-culture leader with extensive ties to government and global think tanks that recently labeled people questioning the COVID-19 vaccine as a national security threat.
The CCDH has published two reports16,17 naming me as one of the top 12 individuals responsible for 65% of vaccine “disinformation” on social media, and in true utilitarian fashion, CCDH founder Imran Ahmed is calling on all platforms to silence me for the public good.
Ahmed has also published an article18 in the journal Nature Medicine, calling for the “dismantling” of the entire “anti-vaccine industry.” In it, he repeats the lie that he “attended and recorded a private, three-day meeting of the world’s most prominent anti-vaxxers,” when, in fact, what he’s referring to was a public online conference open to an international audience.
All attendants have access to the recordings as part of their attendance fee, so unless he illegally hacked his way into the conference, he didn’t have to record a thing. We gave it to him. When you lie about something that stupid, it really puts your credibility about larger issues in question.
The CCDH is partnered with Anti-Vax Watch, which held a demonstration outside the halls of Congress in this bizarre getup. While the CCDH claims to be fighting the good fight against dangerous crackpots and extremists, they work with people who look like they epitomize those terms.19
This is hardly the look of people standing on higher moral and ethical ground. This is pure theatre, which makes sense, seeing how they don’t have facts and data with which to make their point.
Gates-Funded Doctor Demands Terrorist Experts Attack Me
Dr. Peter Hotez, president of the Sabin Vaccine Institute,20 recently cited the CCDH in a Nature article in which he goes so far as to call for cyberwarfare experts to be enlisted in the war against vaccine safety advocates and people who are “vaccine hesitant.”
“Accurate, targeted counter-messaging from the global health community is important but insufficient, as is public pressure on social-media companies,” Hotez writes.21
“The United Nations and the highest levels of government must take direct, even confrontational, approaches with Russia, and move to dismantle anti-vaccine groups in the United States.
Efforts must expand into the realm of cyber security, law enforcement, public education and international relations. A high-level inter-agency task force reporting to the UN secretary-general could assess the full impact of anti-vaccine aggression, and propose tough, balanced measures.
The task force should include experts who have tackled complex global threats such as terrorism, cyber attacks and nuclear armament, because anti-science is now approaching similar levels of peril. It is becoming increasingly clear that advancing immunization requires a counteroffensive.”
This appears to be part of the campaign to pressure the White House administration into creating an information warfare task force, as mentioned earlier. Not surprisingly, the Sabin Vaccine Institute has received tens of millions of dollars from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.22,23,24,25 Most recently, funds from the Gates foundation were used to create a report called “Meeting the Challenge of Vaccine Hesitancy.”26,27
A Well-Informed Humanity United Is the Answer
Even while censorship and utilitarian-driven extremism heats up, we must never stop seeking out and sharing information that impacts our health and freedom. Informed consent demands transparency of the bad along with the good. Right now, all people are given free access to is the supposed benefit, while all potential harms are whitewashed and scrubbed from the internet.
Nothing good can come of this. As noted in Kennedy’s October 24, 2020, online speech,28 “International Message of Hope for Humanity” — which kicked off a day of protest against the coup d’état by the technocratic elite — we must shed our imaginary fears, reject media fearmongering, insist on freedom of speech and engage in the democratic process.
“The only way we can win it is with democracy,” he said. “We need to fight to get our democracy back, to reclaim our democracy from these villains who are stealing it from us. Notice the people who are getting richest from this quarantine are the same people who are censoring criticism of the quarantine.”
The same is true for vaccines and vaccine passports. Kennedy also stressed another crucial point, namely the need to unify. We must put aside our quibbles over nonessential things like race, religion and political affiliations, and stay laser-focused on the real enemy.
“What the Big Tech villains … want us to do is fight with each other. They want Blacks fighting against Whites. They want republicans fighting against democrats. They want everybody polarized. They want everybody fragmented because they know that if we all get together, we’re going to start asking questions and those are questions they can’t answer …
Stop identifying yourself. The enemy is Big Tech, Big Data, Big Oil, Big Pharma, the medical cartel, the government totalitarian elements that are trying to oppress us, that are trying to rob us of our liberties, of our democracy, of our freedom of thought, of our freedom of expression, of our freedom of assembly and all of the freedoms that give dignity to humanity …
The free-flow of information, the cauldron of debate, is the only thing that allows governments to develop rational policies in which self-governance will actually work and triumph.
You are on the front lines of the most important battle in history — the battle to save democracy, freedom, human liberty and human dignity from this totalitarian cartel that is trying to rob us, simultaneously, in every nation in the world, of the rights that every human being is born with …
And I pledge to you: I will go down dying with my boots on, fighting side-by-side with all of you to make sure that we return these rights and preserve them for our children.”
I too will continue fighting for human rights, free speech and medical freedom. Without these, what are we? What is life reduced to? What’s the point of preventing a few COVID-19 cases and deaths if the entire global population — including the billions who are at no risk from this virus — must gamble their health in the process?
The Rise of Utilitarian Extremism, and How to Recognize It | Mercola
Commentary: Election Integrity and the Jim Crow Slur | Mackubin Thomas Owens
by Mackubin Owens
Not too long ago, a good friend of mine took umbrage at a Facebook post that compared a proposed “vaccination passport” to the requirement that Jews in Nazi Germany carry papers identifying them as such. As a Jew, my friend argued that such a comparison trivialized the horrors of the Nazi regime that culminated in the Holocaust.
My friend’s objection was justified. But this same individual has not hesitated to join the president of the United States in comparing the recent Georgia voting law to Jim Crow. Anyone who makes such a claim has no idea of what Jim Crow entailed. Second only to slavery, the Jim Crow era represents the darkest period in U.S. racial history, far darker than Reconstruction or the decade that followed.
Indeed, the racial oppression, segregation, and violence that prevailed throughout the South during the era of Jim Crow in many respects exceeded that of the period of slavery. At least during slavery, there were free blacks in the South who, while denied most civil rights, were protected by laws that left them free to go about their business unmolested and did not prevent commercial interactions between the races.
Jim Crow is usually lumped together with Reconstruction and the period that followed: the Compromise of 1877, during which the South was “redeemed” by the Democrats’ overthrow of the “carpetbagger” regime in the reconstructed South and the end of Republican governance. But even after federal protection of blacks in the South was withdrawn following the Compromise of 1877, blacks continued to vote and to hold political office. As C. Vann Woodward writes in The Strange Career of Jim Crow, for a decade, alternate approaches to race relations not involving disenfranchisement, segregation, and violence competed as attempts to address the race problem in the post-Civil War South. Indeed, during this post-Reconstruction period, blacks were making substantial economic, political, and social progress. This all came to an end with the Jim Crow era, which began in the late 1890s.
Jim Crow, especially in the decade after World War I, marked the high point of racism, not only in the South but also in the United States at large. Jim Crow was enabled by the triumph of progressivism and its corollary, “scientific” racism. Both shared the same intellectual roots and involved the explicit rejection of the principles of the Declaration of Independence.
The administration of Woodrow Wilson came down foursquare on the side of racism, dismissing most African Americans from the civil service and resegregating those few who remained. It sanctioned the rise of the “Second” Ku Klux Klan that far exceeded the power and influence of the short-lived Klan of Reconstruction. Segregation and repression of African Americans were enforced by the barrel of a rifle or the end of a rope.
To compare Georgia’s law, which seeks to achieve election integrity, to the dark period of Jim Crow is an abomination, pure and simple. It is a smear and a libel, not worthy of a reasonable person. But yet we have presumably respectable people, including the current occupant of the White House, making that claim.
The ludicrous claim that Republicans in Georgia want to reinstate Jim Crow is part of a broader false narrative. It acknowledges the racist past of the Democratic Party and its role in defending slavery and Jim Crow, even the racism of the Progressives like Woodrow Wilson. But, goes the argument, the parties subsequently changed places. The Republicans adopted a “Southern strategy,” which sought to appeal to the racism of white Southerners. Thus the Party of Lincoln and the Declaration of Independence became the party of racial bigotry.
The “Southern Strategy” narrative persists because it offers comfort to Democrats who wish to atone for their racist past. But it is false. According to this narrative, white Southerners decamped to the Republicans in response to the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The proof? Any political party that appeals to Southern white voters is racist because Southern whites are by definition irredeemably racist.
In addition to the blanket slur against white Southerners, many of whom worked within the limited political and social environment available to them, there are a number of other flaws with this argument. First, African-American voters began to shift to the Democratic Party during the era of the New Deal. They did so because they perceived it was in their economic interest to do so. Why didn’t the white Southern racists exit the Democratic Party then?
Second, many more Republicans than Democrats supported the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Why would those motivated only by race shift their support to a party that did not share their racist outlook?
Third, many former Democrats left the party because of its feckless foreign policy and continuing government overreach. I was raised in a Southern Democratic household. From 1968 through 1976, I voted for Democrats. Jimmy Carter turned me into a Republican. Race had nothing to do with my odyssey from Democrat to Republican.
Fourth, white Southerners continued to this day to vote for Democrats. Indeed, since 1964, many Southern states have voted for Democrats in presidential elections, including Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Barack Obama.
Racism in the guise of both slavery and Jim Crow was at odds with America’s founding principles. If the principles of the Declaration are not universally true, then there is no logical reason not to pursue racist policies. The American tragedy represented by both slavery and Jim Crow is that we have often failed to live up to these principles. But there have always been Americans of good will—including many white Southerners—who have worked to bring American practice into line with American principles, no matter how imperfectly.
Which brings us back to elections. Elections are the lifeblood of a self-governing people. Accordingly, the integrity of the electoral process is of critical importance. People who persist in comparing Georgia’s efforts to ensure the integrity of the electoral process to Jim Crow—an evil, unconstitutional, and inhumane monstrosity—are engaged in slander, pure and simple.
– – –
Mackubin Thomas Owens is a retired Marine, professor, and editor who lives in Newport, RI.
Photo “Worker at polling counter” by Governor Tom Wolf CC 2.0.
The post Commentary: Election Integrity and the Jim Crow Slur appeared first on The Georgia Star News.
Bannon’s War Room | Episode 2230 | Saturday Edition Hour 2 | Recorded October 15, 2022 | Video: 48 Minutes 59 Seconds
Episode 2230: How we Need To Go On Offense Over The Next Three Weeks; Financial Markets, The Border, All Continue To Be Under Attack By The Regime.
If not a FOIA, how DID Politico get those sexual assault and service records on Jennifer-Ruth Green? | Hot Air
Oh, holy schamoly. There’s been some really interesting and potentially illegal developments in the case of the “released” Air Force service records of LtCol and congressional candidate Jennifer-Ruth Green. When last we heard, she was blasting her Democratic opponent and Politico for invading her privacy and using her “unauthorized, unlawfully released” – as she alleged – military personnel records for what was basically a political hit job. One in which she begged them not to run with the details of her personal trauma.
In the best spirit of the liberal #MeToo tradition – believing all women and respecting their right to privacy – they wrung them out, and published every last tidbit in them anyway. . .
Bannon’s War Room | Episode 2229 | Saturday Edition Hour 1 | Recorded October 15, 2022 | Video: 48 Minutes 58 Seconds
Episode 2229: Clean Elections For 2022: Dearborn Michigan Continues To Be The Battleground Against Child Indoctrination.
Never Forget | Glenn Greenwald Discusses Media’s Disgraceful Coverage of Julian Assange | Video: 12 Minutes 27 Seconds
Glenn Greenwald exposes the fact that Congress itself is under the surveillance of the U.S. intelligence agencies, which includes the very Congressmen and women that are supposed to have oversight over those same agencies. This is why Congress is afraid of them. Never Forget.
Never Forget | Greenwald Claims Trump Impeached to Stop Assange Pardon, CIA Declassification | Glenn Greenwald
In an interview at Mar-a-Logo, Candace Owens presses Donald Trump on why he did not pardon either Edward Snowden or Julian Assange, Dec. 29, 2021
As I’ve often said, Pompeo was a neocon who manipulated and deceived Trump by flattering him and staying in his good graces. So Pompeo was the one who was the one we knew we had to overcome in the transition. But there were enough people pushing Trump that we started to hear and believe based on very good, reliable information, that there was more than a 50 percent chance that Snowden was going to pardon Trump and less than 50 percent, but very far from zero, that he would pardon Assange.
Now, as we know, Trump left the White House and he pardoned neither of them. And I was angry about that because I knew it was a real possibility. And here’s the tweet I posted on January 20th, the day Trump left the White House and Joe Biden moved in, I tweeted quote “Trump left the White House about his week, cucked and submissive as it’s possible for a grown adult to scamper away.”
Now you can obviously see the anger and disgust in that tweet, because I knew that Trump wanted to pardon Edward Snowden and had strongly considered pardoning Julian Assange, but got scared into pardoning neither of them for reasons I’m about to explain to you.
Now, remember what happened after that Politico article on December 24th? After all of these indications were coming that Donald Trump was considering pardoning both Snowden and Assange, he was considering declassifying the JFK files. He was considering a whole variety of other acts that the establishment in Washington, meaning the establishment wings of all parties or petrified he was going to do.
What happened, they brought a second impeachment trial against him after January six. They brought in impeachment proceedings against the president, who they knew they had no time to impeach and remove from office. Why would they do that? It never made any sense from that perspective. Why would you try and impeach somebody who is obviously going to be leaving the White House before you have a chance to impeach them?
The reason is is because that gave them enormous leverage Republicans in particular over Trump being able to say to him, we know you want to do things like pardoning Edward Snowden and are considering Julian Assange and are considering declassifying CIA documents from 60 years ago about the JFK assassination and other matters that we don’t want you to do. And now we have leverage over you. If you do something like pardoning Julian Assange or Edward Snowden, we will vote to convict you in that impeachment trial that will render you potentially barred from seeking office in the future. You will have been the first president or the second president and the first president in over a century to be impeached and then convicted. It was a serious threat that Trump wanted to avoid. And the Republicans like Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham, who were working with Liz Cheney to prevent these pardons, suddenly had a lot of leverage over Trump. . . .
Video Transcript: The Semi-Inside Story of Why Trump Refused to Pardon Snowden and Assange