How Far Will the GOP Go To Steal the 2022 Election?
The corrupt Republican Party, a wholly-owned division of corporate and billionaire America, has dropped all pretense of having any governing ideas that will help or improve America. Instead, they've gone all-outrage, all-the-time and believe that getting white people all cranked up about America's racial history will provide a veneer of "issues" while they work hard in the background to rig and then steal elections. This is not new for the GOP. Back in the 1960s they were hysterical about young people smoking pot and "open homosexuality." And they were doing everything they could to block people of color from voting through programs like William Rehnquist's Operation Eagle Eye that involved standing outside polling places and "challenging" people of color, thus forcing them to go home and get ID before they could vote"on the accurate assumption that most wouldn't return. (This was before ID laws; you only needed ID to register to vote, and the biometric of your signature was how you verified identity on voting day.) In the 1970s they were freaking out about Black people protesting police violence: every single "riot" through the late 60s and early 70s was triggered by an incident of police violence against unarmed Black people. Nixon fed his "Southern Strategy" in 1972 with poisonous rhetoric about "burning cities." Throughout the Reagan 1980s Republicans worked hard to destroy labor unions, cut taxes on the rich while raising taxes on working-class people, and freaked out even more about Black people (see George HW Bush's infamous 1988 "Willie Horton" ads). And abortion; with Reagan's 1980 election, the GOP went from pro-choice to pro-forced-pregnancy. The 90s saw the GOP hysterical -- positively hysterical -- that President Clinton might have had sex with a consenting adult in the White House and lied about it. They were also working as hard as they could to ship factory jobs overseas (with, stupidly, help from Clinton) because de-industrializing America would destroy our labor unions, who generally supported Democrats. And, of course, they were getting "tough on crime" with stop-and-frisk and "three strikes" to make life miserable for Black people...who then could no longer vote because they'd been busted for a crime. In 2001, Osama bin Laden gave the GOP a huge gift with 9/11, and the Bush administration and Congress reacted exactly as bin Laden had publicly predicted: wasting trillions of dollars, starting unnecessary wars, and dialing back on the civil liberties that have historically been at the core of American values. And, of course, when President Obama was elected in 2008 they went nuts again about Black people. The second decade of the 21st-century saw the GOP fully embrace open and naked fascism with the 2016 election of Donald Trump, who then doubled down on his party's racism with attacks on Muslim Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, and, of course, Black people, both in America and in what he called "shithole countries." But where they're going now to suppress the vote of non-white people is so over the top that even Barry Goldwater or Richard Nixon didn't dare try it. In Arizona they're in open violation of federal law, "inspecting" actual ballots and voting machines and even hauling some of them off to a "cabin in the woods in Montana" for "more careful examination." You can safely expect that any day now they'll tell us that Trump "actually won" Arizona, and then the race will be on to "inspect" ballots in other swing states. Next Page 1 | 2  (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).