STEALING/SUPPRESSING VOTES, A LONG, “PROUD” TRADITION

by Ruth A. Sheets

Last evening I watched a documentary, “Vigilante, Inc,” a film by Greg Palast. It was a story of the racism, fearmongering, and unamerican behavior of people, mostly Republicans  in Georgia whose efforts are designed to stop people of color from voting.  The mostly white legislature passed bills to let any citizen challenge any voters on the rolls, as many as they wish, without even a legitimate reason, and Governor Kemp signed it into law.  Kemp is a major proponent of this voter suppression project. 

In addition to purging the voter rolls, the voter suppression team uses fear and intimidation to silence anyone who questions this clearly unconstitutional project.  The ultimate goal seems to be to get county election boards to refuse to certify elections if the candidate who won was not the person the governor and his buddies want to win, including for President of the United States.  This is just the modern version of the well-practiced KKK voter-suppression of yore. 

Gov. Kemp has been using his various positions to reinstate the old Jim Crow laws, referred to by Black leaders as “Jim Crow 2.0.”  Kemp regularly does and says things that are pure racism and has no shame in doing it.  He does claim this voter purge is for the good of the state but his explanation is lacking. 

in the film, I learned that Brian Kemp’s family was one of the largest landowners in Georgia.  He uses their land for his own personal gain no matter how it harms the state or its communities.  His family’s wealth was built on the labor of enslaved persons.  At first, slavery was illegal in Georgia, but one of Kemp’s ancestors forced slavery into Georgia and it shaped the Georgia economy for generations.  A descendant of the first enslaved people in Georgia commented, “if you suppress the history, you suppress the vote,” and suppressing history of everyone but white men is on the chopping block in Georgia and numerous other states and so is voter suppression. 

Through this disturbing but important film, one can see that white supremacists have decided that attacking, intimidating, threatening, even  killing Black people and other people of color, young folks, and their allies are mostly successful tactics they can use to maintain their power and to keep certain people from voting.  Purging the voting rolls and arresting people who help citizens vote are also powerful suppressors. 

“True the Vote” is a master mind for the Vigilante movement.  They originate in Texas but have whipped up MAGAs all over the country, getting them to believe they had the right to attack voters as non-citizens, criminals, or with no stated excuse at all.  The group has signed up 40,000 vigilante volunteers monitoring potential voters of color and young people, getting names and addresses to challenge their right to vote.  Once Vigilantiism gets started, there are scared white people desperate for attention who will jump in to do their party’s bidding.  They choose names that sound Black or Hispanic or Asian, and claim those people are “illegal aliens” or some other such nonsense since lying is acceptable in this project.  They get a thrill and get away with it because they are white, mostly women.  Those women seem especially vulnerable to the Republican Lying and blaming.  In some districts, law enforcement is being used to intimidate voter registration programs, confiscating equipment, arresting the workers, etc., all of which are unconstitutional unless one believes “free speech” is only for Republicans. 

For me, there is no excuse for challenging voters and denying them the right to vote.  Voter registration should be automatic from the moment a citizen turns 18 and the registration should be till death.  Only change of address or political party should affect voter registration.  Our Constitution says everyone has the right to vote.  If our courts actually had decent people serving, people who understand the requirement of our Constitution, little to none of this bad behavior on the part of Republicans would be permitted, but even our Supreme Court Republican majority won’t stand with our Constitution.  That is truly scary.  It would help if all of us who are not brainwashed into the Trump/Kemp cult would stand up and call out the efforts of the purgers, those anti-American actors who would deny their fellow citizens the sacred right to vote in our democracy.

NAR AND OTHER THINGS YOU MIGHT NOT KNOW ABOUT. I DIDN’T!

By Ruth A. Sheets

Yesterday, I attended an online workshop about a religious entity I had no knowledge of.  One would think a Christian minister would be acquainted with most of the religious movements in this country and many of those in other countries.  I have knowledge of many, but not this one, and it’s functioning right in our neighborhoods and growing. 

NAR stands for New Apostolic Reformation.  If you think that sounds radical, you are right.  If you think that sounds like a name someone would give to a group of Christian Nationalists, you are also right.  NAR is a collective of mostly white Evangelicals who believe this nation must be Christian and that their brand of Christianity is the one to take over all aspects of our lives.  Some of their principles include: 

• Only Christians get to vote
• Women are inferior to men in all things and should not vote
• Public schools must be eliminated because children must be educated in the NAR’s weird pseudo-christian principles instead.
• Violence for their version of god is acceptable and even encouraged.  They will identify the targets and what should be done about them.
• Their goal is to take over our government at all levels from school boards and town councils to the presidency and our courts.
  

For a branch of this collective, Pennsylvania is where they believe the center of the Christian world is, and they should be in charge.  One of the big proponents of that is a woman.  I guess like the Phyllis Schlafly movement of the Republican anti-abortion actions, this woman thinks she will somehow be the one woman who does not have to be as submissive as all the other women, perhaps even in charge of getting those other women under control.  She would be  the specially anointed one, well, until her usefulness wanes.

This “movement” has been active in some form since the 1950s but has blown up in the past 2 decades, including members of the Tea Party and other right-wing radical groups.  It is clear that Donald Trump is one of their boys, but even if Trump should lose in November, their movement will continue, grabbing power where they can.

One of their proud acolytes is Doug Mastriano.  You might remember him as the Republican candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania in 2022.  He seems to be one of those true believers.

One potential member is J.D. Vance who spoke at a recent Pennsylvania NAR event.  Mike Johnson, our House Speaker says he is inspired by them.  It seems that for both, the power the NAR and its affiliates plan to wield is more than tempting, as it is for other Republican legislators.  Powermongers that they are, they are moving toward full participation since they already hold most of the NAR’s ideas of "governing.”

The group’s precepts come nearly exclusively from the Hebrew Scriptures rather than the Christian gospels and letters.  It seems the leaders are creating a religion that encompasses the things they like and the punishments and controls their brains imagine them doing to others, in the name of god, of course, just like Medieval times and the Inquisition.  In my reading and listening I heard nothing in their message that involves love, being a neighbor, caring for poor and other disadvantaged persons.  Jesus is hardly mentioned, but people on the “left” are being proclaimed as demons and for the NAR cult, it is not a metaphor.

The NAR’s racism is sometimes covered up by their attempts to recruit members and leaders of color.  None of the basic beliefs are impacted in any way by having token others.  Women as mentioned previously are essentially handmaids who bear children for years, raise them, and bow to every male whim.  Yes, it has the hallmarks of a cult, but on a large scale.  Maybe it’s a collection of cults with a similar purpose, which seems to be, “take over government and do whatever you want to those people, while claiming it is for god and naturally, somehow they have god’s ear, a god who is OK with a fascist rule, all white men in charge of course.

Ah, white men are truly terrified of everyone, just as their ancestors were, so want to control everything.  It appears they want to remain toddlers and do as much harm to others as they can while not being harmed at all or held accountable.  Those few women in leadership will take care of every little need for those toddler-men while enduring the disrespect of those toddlers.  Other religious groups have tried this and some made it last for centuries, but the world has changed.

This is just an introduction.  I still don’t know how to effectively address this, but I plan to learn.

OUR MEDIA COULD - SHOULD - MUST DO BETTER

By Ruth A. Sheets

I’ve been a news junkie since childhood.  My family watched the news most evenings.  It was Huntly and Brinkley or Walter Cronkite who faithfully broadcast the day’s news.  Those who either read the news or reported from the field seemed honest, fair, and to be “telling it like it is.” 

When I was a kid I didn’t know that the news could be shaped to get out just what certain people in power wanted us to know.  When they told us they were reporting from somewhere in the world, we had no doubt that was true.  When they showed us violence in Birmingham, Alabama, we saw police and their dogs attacking people, true.  When a rocket was launched into space, we watched the story with intense interest and worry for the astronauts. 

Of course, not everything was exactly as presented, but we had a sense that the basics were accurate.  We had 3 networks back then plus Public Broadcasting.  There were also radio, newspapers, and magazines to add some depth to the TV broadcasts.  One of the most powerful broadcasts I remember was the one in which CBS’s Walter Cronkite, having visited Vietnam to informally assess the situation, declared we could not win the war there.  I was shocked because media support up until that time seemed complete.  They did show protests, but which looking back on after the Cronkite statement, I realized was often not favorable or even unbiased.  At the time I supported the war because I couldn’t believe our president would be putting so many men into a war that was unwinnable and unjust.  That broadcast and a diary our Civics teacher assigned to keep of the events of the war for February 1968 helped turn me away from support of the Vietnam war.  A few amazing protest songs pushed me the rest of the way.  

I don’t believe the broadcast media has been as well-respected since then.  That is probably the fault of the media themselves.  Newspapers had their zenith with reports on Watergate, the FBI’s spying on our own citizens, and “The Pentagon Papers” in the early 1970s.  It isn’t that there were not good reporters and writers but that somehow over time the reporting became watered down and really negative.  Clinton’s sexual conduct, which was pretty normal in politics at the time seemed more important than the actual challenges the world was facing.  They somehow missed the lead-up to the 2008 crash (or somehow didn’t communicate well what was happening). 

In 2015, an inexperienced con artist sucked up all the air that could have kept our media honestly balanced.  Donald Trump brought his racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and general ignorance further onto the public stage and was covered as though he really had something amazing to offer this nation after his claim that Obama was a bad president and not really American.  His opponent in 2016 was Hillary Clinton, a very prepared, competent, experienced candidate, yet the media, whenever they blasted us with Trump’s bombast, whining, and hatred, felt they just had to mention Clinton’s emails (using a private server while in office, a common practice among government employees) or Ben Gazi (where 4 American officials were killed by terrorists in 2012).  The newspapers did somewhat better, but still covered nearly everything Trump said and did.  Tom Patterson of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy wrote in 2017,

“The mainstream press highlights what’s wrong with politics without also telling us what’s right.  It’s a version of politics that rewards a particular brand of politics. When everything and everybody is portrayed as deeply flawed, there’s no sense making distinctions on that score, which works to the advantage of those who are more deeply flawed. Civility and sound proposals are no longer the stuff of headlines, which instead give voice to those who are skilled in the art of destruction.” 

And now, that negativity in coverage continues.  We have thousands of media sources mostly online, but also on TV, radio, and in print.  They know well that Trump is unfit for office, has lied in public more times than anyone I know of has counted, and is a supporter of and model candidate for “project 2025.” Those things are poorly covered and our media try to “sane-wash” Trump’s disjointed, menacing, hate-filled, and lie-saturated events.  Our various media managed to make the June 27^th debate seem like Biden’s inadequacy and old age were disastrous while nearly totally skipping the reality that Donald Trump lied at least 30 times and made no sense.  That fact is now out here, but it is still not seen as being as problematic as Biden’s old age despite Trump being only 3 years younger than Biden, essentially no difference by their age.  Biden is still working as president and getting things done; Trump travels around the country fearmongering, blaming immigrants for crimes that have not happened, and of course, lying at every opportunity, yet receives far too much coverage. 

I don’t understand our media’s need to prop up Trump, Vance, and the rest of their Republican ticket in the face of their hatred, incompetence, and attempts to promote a Trump dictatorship.  Or, maybe it’s just the media’s corporate obsession with political negativity and the value of disruption and chaos. 

The media now are facing a real challenge, interesting, intelligent, caring, prepared, patriotic candidates in Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.  They are careful, creative, and refuse to take Trump’s baiting nor respond to his insults.  Some of the media, at least are covering their current speeches and rallies alongside Trump’s and possibly by quirk of fate, Harris and Walz are looking ready to assume the positions of President and Vice President while Trump is looking more and more like the incompetent child-man he really is.  I hope people are noticing.