#Municipal election 2020 | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

mariacallous · 2 months ago

Text

Election workers in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, are not destroying mail-in ballots cast for former president Donald Trump. The Department of Defense did not issue a directive last month giving US soldiers unprecedented authority to use lethal force against Trump supporters who riot if the former president loses next week. And no, 180,000 Amish people did not register to vote in Pennsylvania—given there are only 92,600 Amish living in the state, including minors. Ron DeSantis never said that Florida would not use Dominion Voting machines in next week’s election. And municipalities in California are not allowing noncitizens to vote in this year’s presidential elections.

These are just a small sample of the flood of voting-related disinformation narratives that are being seeded and spread on social media platforms like X, Instagram, and Facebook in the build up to November 5.

The election denial movement never left, and it’s bigger than ever.

In the weeks before the 2020 vote, Trump and his allies had already begun to spread claims that the election would be stolen, but those allegations were vague and unorganized. Over the past four years, however, a well-funded network of election denial groups across the US have worked tirelessly to marshal their supporters and drum up conspiracy theories about voting machines flipping votes in the middle of the night, votes being shredded by the bagful, and “mules” stuffing drop boxes with ballots.

These conspiracy theories are being shared by right-wing election denial networks, the Trump campaign, and Russian propaganda groups. With a week left to go before the historic vote, fully formed conspiracy theories about threats to voting are being pushed to audiences that have been primed to believe everything they hear.

Many of these narratives are spreading virtually unchecked on social media platforms like X, Instagram, and Facebook, where those in charge have all but abdicated their responsibility to fact-check information around one of the most critical votes in US history—and have also made it harder for everyone else to see what is going on.

“What worries me most about this year is that we have a much more opaque window into the penetration of these lies, no matter where they come from,” says Nina Jankowicz, the former Biden administration disinformation czar who is now CEO of the American Sunlight Project. “Social media platforms have by and large stopped moderating such content, and just as worryingly have cut off researcher access to data streams that allowed us to objectively report on the scale of these campaigns, all due to political pressure on disinformation researchers and social media platforms.”

So when voters in Oregon heard earlier this month that the state’s Democratic secretary of state, LaVonne Griffin-Valade, had removed Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, from her website, they believed it was part of a plan to undermine Trump. The narrative was boosted by right-wing influencers and Trump supporters on platforms like X and Instagram and gained so much traction that Griffin-Valade’s office was forced to shut down its phone lines.

The reality is that the Trump campaign had decided not to provide a statement to Oregon’s Online Voter’s Guide, unlike the Harris campaign, which is why the vice president’s name was on the guide.

“Society as a whole is much less equipped to be proactive in the face of election lies,” says Jankowicz.

Similar conspiracy theories about down-ballot races have spread across the country. “It may not be altogether surprising, but it is striking that we have already seen election fraud narratives reminiscent of those we saw four years ago,” Sam Howard, NewsGuard's politics editor, tells WIRED. “A baseless claim about machines switching votes started spreading in Tarrant County, Texas, on the first day of early voting. A similar false narrative about vote-switching took off during the first week of early voting in Georgia. The narrative in Georgia even involved Dominion Voting Systems.”

Last week, a viral video emerged claiming to show election workers in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, destroying mail-in ballots cast for former Trump, the very behavior that pro-Trump networks have spent years claiming happened in 2020.

Days after the video went viral, the FBI, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and he Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency issued a joint statement saying they had determined that the video was part of Russia’s efforts to influence the outcome of the election.

“This Russian activity is part of Moscow’s broader effort to raise unfounded questions about the integrity of the US election and stoke divisions among Americans,” the agencies said. “In the lead-up to election day and in the weeks and months after, the [intelligence community] expects Russia to create and release additional media content that seeks to undermine trust in the integrity of the election and divide Americans.”

Many of these new conspiracy theories about voter and election fraud have emerged from activists at a local level, whose accounts are then amplified by the coordinated network of election denial groups that have emerged in the wake of the 2020 election. These groups have continued to grow and establish strong connections to other national groups run and supported by some of the powerful figures in the conservative world.

The Election Integrity Network, an election denial group run by former Trump adviser Cleta Mitchell, has spent months holding online seminars to push disinformation around voter rolls and the baseless claim that millions of illegal immigrants will vote in the election. In the days ahead of the election, the group has produced a social media posting guide for its members on the best tactics to get these messages to the widest audience possible.

“Be SASSY but don’t say anything on social media you wouldn’t say in front of your grandma,” the guide’s authors write, adding that the best time to post is between 10 am to 4 pm on a weekday. “ALWAYS use graphics—and brains love faces.”

The guide, reviewed by WIRED, points users to mainstream platforms like Facebook and X, as well as fringe pro-Trump networks like Truth Social, Gettr, and Rumble.

True the Vote, an election denial group that pushed the bogus “ballot mules” conspiracy in 2020, even created its own social media platform that is dedicated to sharing election fraud conspiracy theories.

The Heritage Foundation, a group which has been at the forefront of election denial content in recent years, has been paying for ads on X to promote an ebook called 5 Shocking Cases of Election Fraud, which seeks to further undermine trust in elections by citing alleged fraud cases in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Indiana, and California.

The proliferation of disinformation has helped create a fragmented information ecosystem where voters can find “proof” for almost any election-related conspiracy. And tech companies and their refusal to adequately moderate their platforms has made the situation much worse.

“This has created an environment where anyone can find content online that proves their beliefs to be true, no matter if it’s rooted in reality or not,” says Nicole Gill, the cofounder and executive director of Accountable Tech. “The public has fewer options to anchor themselves in truth and reality, and there’s no denying that Big Tech absolutely played a role in that.”

8 notes · View notes

racefortheironthrone · 1 year ago

Note

In a hypothetical situation where Moris Hilquit wins the 1917 mayoral election by a plurality, how do you think the ideal socialist for successful dentists would have performed as mayor of new york?

That is a tricky scenario to pull off, as alternate histories go.

In "original timeline" New York City, Morris Hillquit (SPA-NYC) got 145,000 votes for mayor, which is impressive....for third place, with the Democratic nominee (John Francis Hylan, a man who had impressively worked his way up from railroad laborer to engineer and then to lawyer, and who managed to win the support of both Tammany Hall and William Randolph Hearst) winning 314,000 votes, and incumbent reform mayor John P. Mitchel (having largely alienated his Fusion alliance) winning 155,000.

So the first thing that would have had to happen was Mitchel not running and splitting the anti-Tammany vote. However, Hillquit and Mitchel together would still be 14,000 votes short - and you know what happens when there's a close mayoral election and Tammany Hall is on the ballot.

So the second, and arguably more important thing that would have to happen is for Hearst to run against Tammany, like he did in 1905 (as a "Municipal Ownership League" candidate, no less!) and 1909, splitting the Democratic vote. (Words cannot describe what a weird guy William Randolph Hearst was politically. Depending on what part of his life you're talking about, he was an imperialist or an isolationist, a supporter of the New Deal or an outright Nazi.)

As for how Morris Hillquit would have done as mayor of New York City, I think he would have faced a pretty unrelentingly uphill battle on a lot of fronts. Hillquit was running as an anti-war candidate at a time when the country as a whole was starting to shift in a pro-war and anti-socialist direction - which would ultimately see five Socialists ejected from the New York state legislature in 1920. (Note that it would take until 2020 for New York socialist electoral politics to reach its former high-water mark.) Mayor Hillquit might well have joined them as a casualty of the First Red Scare.

While I think that Hillquit's support for municipal ownership of the subway and other utilities, women's suffrage, and the Socialist Party's proposal for government food-purchasing to help deal with the crippling cost-of-living crisis would have been quite popular, I think he would have had a very hard time getting socialization of the subway through the Board of Alderman.

Whatever its temporary woes in mayoral or gubernatorial races, Tammany was always strongest in the legislative branch (in no small part because that's where the money was) - and Tammany's empire of corruption rested upon a foundation of bribes and kickbacks paid by private companies looking to get "franchises" (i.e, private monopolies) for water, gas, electricity, commuter rail, and subways. They would have fought tooth and nail to stop Hillquit from taking these utilities under public ownership and stopping their gravy train, so Hillquit would have had to win a majority on the Board of Aldermen as well.

So I think that Tammany would have tried to do to Hillquit the same thing they did with reform mayors like Seth Low and John P. Mitchel: wait him out. (Incidentally, this is what made Fiorello LaGuardia a terrifying enemy to Tammany Hall: he was the first reform mayor to ever get re-elected, which gave him the time he needed to push through a new charter that abolished the Board of Aldermen, essentially permanently crippling Tammany.)

#history #nyc history #nyc mayor #socialism #morris hillquit #alternate history

31 notes · View notes

deadpresidents · 2 years ago

Note

I found out recently that William Harrison was a Presidential Elector and was wondering if any other Presidents or Vice-Presidents ever served as Electors?

Yes, it's actually much more common than you might imagine. The people chosen to serve as Presidential electors by the political parties in each state are often leading figures in that party -- from local party chairs and municipal office holders to incumbent and retired major elected officials. Just for example, Bill Clinton was an elector in New York in 2016 and 2020 (Hillary was a 2020 elector, too).

#History #Presidents #Electoral College #Presidential Elections #Presidential Electors #Politics #Presidency

7 notes · View notes

beardedmrbean · 2 years ago

Text

Sofia city council voted on March 9 to instruct mayor Yordanka Fandukova to ask the state to move the Soviet Army Monument from the centre of the Bulgarian capital city.

The monument was erected in 1954, while Bulgaria was under communist rule. It commemorates the Soviet invasion of Bulgaria at the close of the Second World War. The communist line was that the 1944 invasion, which led to the end of the monarchy and to decades of communist rule, was a “liberation”. To date, left-wing parties continue to revere the monument.

The vote to ask for the removal of the monument was 41 in favour, 13 against, with one abstention.

Those who voted in favour were the GERB-UDF group, Democratic Bulgaria, Patriots for Sofia and independent city councillors.

The request, to be made to the Sofia district governor, is to move the monument to the Museum of Socialist Art or to some other state-owned land away from the city centre.

Democratic Bulgaria tabled the proposal in 2020, but the matter did not proceed because GERB-UDF kept it off the agenda. This changed recently when GERB-UDF leader Boiko Borissov made a public call for the removal of the monument.

Some weeks ago, an inspection by municipal officials found that the condition of the monument was a hazard to the public, and it considerably exceeded the size originally approved.

The morning of the city council meeting saw protests at the monument and outside Sofia city council headquarters against the removal of the monument. Participants in the protest, in which red flags rivalled Bulgarian flags in number, pelted the city council building with eggs and red paint.

Caretaker Prime Minister Gulub Donev said on March 9 that a decision on the fate of the monument should taken only after Bulgaria’s April 2 early parliamentary elections.

#nunyas news #wonder what Borissov is trying to hide #by doing this #bulgaria managed to pick the wrong side in both world wars #but nobody remembers that so it's ok #they kept their Jewish population safe #would have been nice if they'd stopped some of the trains #but that could have cost the lives of everyone

13 notes · View notes

theculturedmarxist · 2 years ago

Text

In 2022 and early 2023, a highly publicized petition campaign sought to recall New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell. Louisiana law sets high hurdles for recall initiatives; in a jurisdiction the size of New Orleans, triggering the process requires valid signatures from twenty percent of registered voters on a petition requesting a recall election, and the effort ultimately failed. Nevertheless, the campaign is worth reflecting on for three reasons.

First, it at least bears a strong family resemblance to right-wing Republican attacks on Democrat-governed cities that recently have escalated from inflammatory rhetoric to concerted attempts to disempower, by extraordinary means, jurisdictions Democrats represent. To that extent, the Cantrell recall campaign is of a piece with the many Republican efforts at voter suppression around the country and the right’s broader and more openly authoritarian assault on democratic institutions at every level of government about which Thomas Byrne Edsall sounded the alarm in the New York Times.1 Second, the NOLATOYA campaign illustrates how race can function as a condensation symbol, a shorthand, diffuse, even tacit component of a discourse of political mobilization while not necessarily defining the mobilization’s policy objectives. Third, the character of the campaign, especially in light of the larger tendency of which it may be an instance, and the opposition’s responses also demonstrate the inadequacy of race-reductionist understandings even of the racialist element that helped drive it and the other reactionary initiatives, such as the Mississippi legislature’s move to undercut the authority of Jackson’s elected government.

The recall’s sponsors sought to stoke and take advantage of anxieties about street crime—most conspicuously the waves of porch piracy, carjackings, and homicides that spiked in New Orleans as in many cities during and after the Coronavirus pandemic and lockdown—as well as the prodigiously bad, borderline dangerous condition of municipal roads and streets, a seemingly inexplicable and chronically unresolved breakdown of the city’s privatized sanitation pick-up operation, and the at best inconsistent quality of other public services.2 The campaign also played on hoary, racially inflected tropes such as generic allegations of incompetence and evocations of charges of immoral and “uppity” behavior, for example, in attacks on Cantrell for allegedly having an affair with a police officer on her detail, living at least part-time in a municipally owned luxury apartment on Jackson Square in the heart of the Vieux Carré, and flying first class at the city’s expense on international trade junkets.3 Recall supporters eventually leveled inflammatory allegations of incompetence, hostility to law enforcement, or corruption against the black, recently elected Orleans Parish District Attorney and unspecified judges and suggested that subsequent recall initiatives should target them as well.

The campaign’s titular co-chairs were black: one, Belden “Noonie Man” Batiste, was a perennial candidate for electoral office who received five percent of the vote in the 2021 mayoral primary that Cantrell won with nearly sixty-five percent; the other, Eileen Carter, is a freelance “strategy consultant” who had been a first-term Cantrell administration appointee.4 Its sources of financial backing remained shadowy for months, but disclosures eventually confirmed that more than ninety percent of the campaign’s funding came from a single white developer and hospitality industry operative, Richard Farrell, who, in addition to having contributed to Cantrell in the past, had been one of Louisiana’s largest donors to the 2020 Trump presidential campaign.5 Opponents of the recall argued that the fact that the initiative was funded almost entirely by a Trump mega-donor and its organizers’ attempt to purge the voter rolls in order to reduce the total number of signatures needed to force a new election6 indicated a more insidious objective, that the campaign was a ploy to advance the Republicans’ broader agenda of suppressing black voting and to discredit black officials.7

After much hype, the campaign failed abysmally. Certification of the petitions confirmed both that organizers had fallen far short of the minimum signature threshold required to spur a recall election and that support was sharply skewed racially. The latter was no surprise.8 The campaign originated in one of the wealthiest, whitest, and most Republican-leaning neighborhoods in the city. And, as I have indicated, proponents’ rhetoric—notwithstanding their insistence that the initiative had broad support across the city—traded in racialized imagery of feral criminality, and it too easily veered toward hyperbolic denunciation of the mayor’s purported moral degeneracy and an animus that seemed far out of proportion to her actual or alleged transgressions, which in any event hardly seemed to warrant the extraordinary effort of a recall, especially because Cantrell was term-limited and ineligible to pursue re-election in 2025. The extent to which recall advocates’ demonization of her drifted over into attacks on other black public officials also suggested a racial dimension to the campaign that no doubt made many black voters wary.

A racial explanation of the recall initiative offers benefits of familiarity. It fits into well-worn grooves of racial interest-group politics on both sides. It permits committed supporters of the recall to dismiss their effort’s failure as the result of blacks’ irresponsible racial-group defensiveness to the point of fraudulence and conspiracy, and it enables opponents to dismiss grievances against Cantrell’s mayoralty by attributing them to an effectively primordial white racism linked via historical allegory to the Jim Crow era.9 So, when journalists Jeff Adelson and Matt Sledge estimated that, although fifty-four percent of registered voters in Orleans Parish are black and thirty-six percent are white, seventy-six percent of the petition’s signers were white and just over fifteen percent were black, the finding was easily assimilable to a conventional “blacks say tomayto/whites say tomahto” racial narrative. The authors’ punchy inference that “White voters were more than seven times more likely to have signed the petition than a Black voter” reinforces that view.

By Adelson and Sledge’s calculation, more than 23,000 white voters signed the recall petition compared with roughly 7,000 blacks. At first blush, that stark difference seems to support a racial interpretation of the initiative. Yet that calculation also means that more than 57,000 white voters, for whatever reasons, did not sign it. That is, roughly two and a half times more white Orleans Parish voters did not sign the recall petition than did. One might wonder, therefore, why we should see support for the recall as the “white” position. Signers clustered disproportionately in the most affluent areas citywide, and those least likely to sign were concentrated in the city’s poorest areas. As Adelson and Sledge also note, there are many reasons one might not have signed the petition. Those could have ranged from explicit opposition to the initiative; skepticism about its motives, likelihood of success, or its impact if successful; absence of sufficient concern with the issue to seek to sign on; or other reasons entirely. That range would apply to the seventy percent of white voters who did not sign as well as the nearly ninety-five percent of black voters who did not. From that perspective, “race” is in this instance less an explanation than an alternative to one.

Organizers and supporters of the recall no doubt also had various motives and objectives, and those may have evolved with the campaign itself. Batiste and Carter are political opportunists and, as a badly defeated opponent and a former staffer, may harbor idiosyncratic personal grievances against Cantrell; they also cannot be reduced merely to race traitors or dupes not least because roughly 7,000 more black voters signed onto the recall petition. Farrell and the handful of other Republican large donors who sustained the initiative likely had varying long- and short-game objectives, from weakening Cantrell’s mayoralty to payback for the city’s aggressive pandemic response, which met with disgruntlement and opposition from hospitality industry operators, to fomenting demoralization and antagonism toward municipal government or government in general, to enhancing individual and organizational leverage in mundane partisan politics, including simply reinforcing the knee-jerk partisan divide. And, even if not in the minds of initiators all along, voter suppression in Orleans Parish may have become an unanticipated benefit along the way.

Other enthusiasts no doubt acted from a mélange of motives. Demands for “accountability” and “transparency,” neoliberal shibboleths that only seem to convey specific meanings, stood in for causal arguments tying conditions in the city that have generated frustration, anxiety, or fear to claims about Cantrell’s character. Those Orwellian catchwords of a larger program of de-democratization10 overlap the often allusively racialized discourse in which Cantrell, black officialdom, unresponsive, purportedly inept and corrupt government, uncontrolled criminality, and intensifying insecurity and social breakdown all signify one another as a singular, though amorphous, target of resentment. The recall campaign condensed frustrations and anxieties into a politics of scapegoating that fixates all those vague or inchoate concerns onto a malevolent, alien entity that exists to thwart or destroy an equally vague and fluid “us.” And that entity is partly racialized because race is a discourse of scapegoating.

But race is not the only basis for scapegoating. As I indicate elsewhere, “the MAGA fantasy of ‘the pedophile Democratic elite’ today provides a scapegoat no one might reasonably defend and thus facilitates the misdirection that is always central to a politics of scapegoating, construction of the fantasy of the ‘Jew/Jew-Bolshevik-Jew banker’ and cosmopolite/Jew and Jew/Slav subhuman did the same for Hitler’s National Socialism.”11 The scapegoat is an evanescent presence, created through moral panic and just-so stories and projected onto targeted individuals or populations posited as the embodied cause of the conditions generating fear and anxiety. As an instrument of political action, scapegoating’s objective is to fashion a large popular constituency defined by perceived threat from and opposition to a demonized other, a constituency that then can be mobilized against policies and political agendas activists identify with the evil other and its nefarious designs—without having to address those policies and agendas on their merits.

A Facebook post a colleague shared from a relative long since lost to the QAnon/MAGA world exemplifies the chain of associations undergirding that strain of conspiratorial thinking and its scapegoating politics: “It’s time for Americans to stop hiding behind the democracy dupe that has been used as an opiate to extort American wages to wage war against any country that said no to Rothschild’s money changing loanshark wannabe satan’s cult.” My colleague underscored that the antisemitism apparent in that post was a late-life graft onto the relative’s political views; neither Jews nor Jewishness had any presence in the circumstances of their upbringing, neither within their family nor the broader demographic environment. Antisemitism, that is, can function, at least for a time, as an item on a checklist that signals belonging in the elect of combatants against the malevolent grand conspiracy as much as or more than it expresses a committed bigotry against Jews or Judaism.

It is understandable that the partly racialized recall campaign would provoke a least-common-denominator objection that it was a ploy to attack black, or black female, political leadership. It no doubt was, at least as an easy first pass at low-hanging fruit in mobilizing support. However, complaint that the recall effort was racially motivated missed the point—or took the bait. Scapegoating is fundamentally about misdirection, like a pickpocket’s dodge. A politics based on scapegoating is especially attractive to proponents of anti-popular, inegalitarian agendas who might otherwise be unable to elicit broad support for programs and initiatives that are anti-democratic or facilitate regressive redistribution.12 And the forces driving the Cantrell recall campaign fit that profile.

That it was backed by significant right-wing donors yet failed so badly raises a possibility that the recall campaign may never have been serious as an attempt to remove Cantrell from office.13 If their prattle about accountability, transparency, and responsibility to taxpayers were genuine, organizers should have admitted the failure and not bothered to submit their petitions and thereby avoided the administrative burdens of the certification process—unless forcing that extraordinary undertaking were part of a Potemkin effort to simulate a serious recall campaign. Instead, well after it should have recognized and acknowledged failure, the campaign organization attempted to keep recall chatter in the news cycle by means of coyness and dissimulation regarding the status of their effort and continued to manufacture supposed Cantrell outrages, no matter how dubious or picayune, to feed the fires of salacious exposé of the “you won’t believe what she’s doing now!” variety. When authorities confirmed the magnitude of the failure, including evidence of thousands of obviously bogus signatures nonetheless submitted, organizers fell back on the standard MAGA-era canard in the face of defeat—challenging the credibility of the officials designated by law to determine the signatures’ validity. Notwithstanding the complex motives and expectations of individual supporters, all this further suggests that the recall initiative at one level was suspiciously consistent with the multifarious assaults on democratic government that right-wing militants have been pursuing concertedly around the country since at least 2020.

That larger, more insidious effort and its objectives—which boil down to elimination of avenues for expression of popular democratic oversight in service to consolidation of unmediated capitalist class power14—constitute the gravest danger that confronts us. And centering on the racial dimension of stratagems like the Cantrell recall plays into the hands of the architects of that agenda and the scapegoating politics on which they depend by focusing exclusively on an aspect of the tactic and not the goal. From the perspective of that greater danger, whether the recall effort was motivated by racism is quite beside the point. The same applies to any of the many other racially inflected, de-democratizing initiatives the right wing has been pushing. With or without conscious intent, and no matter what shockingly ugly and frightening expressions it may take rhetorically, the racial dimension of the right wing’s not-so-stealth offensive is a smokescreen. The pedophile cannibals, predatory transgender subversives, and proponents of abortion on demand up to birth join familiar significations attached to blacks and a generically threatening nonwhite other in melding a singular, interchangeable, even contradictory—the Jew as banker and Bolshevik—phantasmagorical enemy.

An important takeaway from the nature of this threat is that a race-first politics is not capable of responding effectively to it. Race reductionism fails intellectually and is counterproductive politically because its assumption that race/racism is transhistorical and its corresponding demand that we understand the connection between race and politics in contemporary life through analogy with the segregation era or slavery do not equip us to grasp the specificities of the current moment, including the historically specific dangers that face us. This is not a new limitation. That anachronistic orientation underwrote badly inaccurate prognostications about the likely political impact of changing racial demography in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and was totally ineffective for mounting challenges to charterization of the Orleans Parish school system and the destruction of public housing in the midst of the city’s greatest shortage of affordable housing.15 Race-reductionist interpretation could specify neither the mechanisms nor the concatenation of political forces that impelled either of those regressive programs. Race reductionists seemed to assume that defining those interventions, as well as the regressive real estate practices commonly known as gentrification and the problems of hyper-policing, as racist would call forth some sort of remedial response.16 It did not.

Similarly, just as assertion that mass incarceration is the “New Jim Crow” does not help us understand or respond to the complex political-economic or ideological forces that have produced mass incarceration,17 criticism of contemporary voter suppression efforts by tying them to those at the end of the nineteenth century does not help us specify the nature of the threat, the objectives to which it is linked, or approaches to countering it. Regarding voter suppression and disfranchisement, even in the late nineteenth century, while a) its point was openly and explicitly to disfranchise blacks and b) there is little reason to doubt the sincerity of the commitments to white supremacy expressed by disfranchisement’s architects, disfranchising blacks for the sake of doing so was not the point either; neither was imposing codified racial subordination an end in itself.

The racial dimension of the reactionary campaign then was also a smokescreen that helped to facilitate assertion of ruling class power after the defeat of the Populist insurgency by attacking blacks as a scapegoat, a misdirection from the Democrat planter-merchant-capitalist elites’ sharply class-skewed agenda, including codified racial segregation, which they could not fully impose until the electorate had been “purified.” From the architects’ perspective, the problem with blacks’ voting was ultimately that they did not reliably vote Democrat. If black voters could have been counted on to vote for the Democrat agenda, committed white supremacy likely would have found expression in areas other than suffrage. Indeed, one facet of Bookerite accommodationist politics at the time—articulated by, among others, novelist Sutton Griggs—was that black Americans’ reflexive support of Republicans had forced Democrats to resort to disfranchisement and that, if principled Democrats felt they could count on black votes, they wouldn’t need to pursue such measures.18 Among advocates of voter suppression today, black voting is in part a metonym for a composite scapegoat that includes Democratic or “liberal” or “woke” voters, all of whom, like the liberal pedophile cannibals, are characterizable as not “real Americans” and whose voting is therefore fraudulent by definition. And propagandists meld the images together in service of deflecting attention from the right’s regressive policy agenda.19

It is instructive that at the same time contemporary rightists commonly tout evidence of support from blacks and Hispanics. Of course, that move is largely a cynical ploy—the lie, straight from the fascist agitator’s handbook, accompanied by a knowing wink to the faithful—to deflect criticism of their obvious racial scapegoating. However, knee-jerk dismissals of that reaction as disingenuous or of black and Hispanic supporters as inauthentic, dupes, or sellouts are problematic. There is certainly no shortage of malicious racism within the right wing, but black and Latino supporters of right-wing politics cannot all be dismissed as the equivalent of cash-and-carry minstrel hustlers like Diamond & Silk or cash-and-carry lunatics like Ben Carson and Clarence Thomas, just as the 7,000 blacks who signed the Cantrell recall petition cannot be dismissed as dupes of the NOLATOYA campaigners. While the percentages remained relatively small, increases in black and Hispanic votes for Trump between 2016 and 2020 indicate that those voters see more in the faux populist appeal than racism or white supremacy.20

What is true of those black and brown voters who are unlikely to see themselves as racists21 is no doubt also true for some percentage of whites who gravitate toward the reactionary right’s siren song.22 I do not mean to suggest that we should pander to the reactionary expressions around which the right has sought to mobilize those people. Nevertheless, I do want to stress that what makes many of them susceptible to that ugly politics is a reasonable sense that Democratic liberalism has offered them little for a half century. Obama promised transcendence and deliverance, based on evanescent imagery deriving largely from his race. His failure to live up to the “hope” he promoted set the stage for an equal and opposite reaction.

Most of all, race-reductionist explanations and simplistic historical analogies are counterproductive as a politics because they fail to provide a basis for challenging the looming authoritarian threat. I have asked supporters of reparations politics for more than twenty years how they imagine forming a political coalition broad enough to prevail on that objective in a majoritarian democracy.23 To date, the question has never received a response other than some version of the non sequitur “don’t you agree that black people deserve compensation?” or sophistries like the flippant assertion that abolition and the civil rights movement did not have a chance to win until they did.24 Recently, a questioner from the audience, someone with whom I have had a running exchange over many years regarding racism’s primacy as a political force, catechized me at a panel at Columbia University [beginning at 1:01:48] for my views on the Mississippi legislature’s attacks on the city of Jackson. There was no specific question; the intervention was a prompt for me to acknowledge that the Jackson case is evidence of racism’s independent power. That interaction captures a crucial problem with race reductionism as a politics. It centers on exposé and moralistic accusation.

But what would happen if we were to accept as common sense the conviction of advocates of race-reductionist politics that “racism” is the source of the various inequalities and injustices that affect us—including the anti-democratic travesties being perpetrated on Jackson’s residents and elected officials? What policy interventions would follow? And how would they be realized? Those questions do not arise because the point of this politics is not to transform social relations but to secure the social position of those who purport to speak on behalf of an undifferentiated black population. Insofar as it is a politics at all, it is an interest-group arrangement in which Racial Spokespersons propound as “racial” perspectives points of view that harmonize with Democratic neoliberalism. For the umpteenth time,25 a politics focused on identifying group-level disparities within the current regime of capitalist inequality is predicated logically, but most of all materially, on not challenging that regime but equalizing “group” differences within it. That anti-disparitarian politics hews to neoliberalism’s egalitarian ideal of equal access to competition for a steadily shrinking pool of opportunities for a secure life.26 And, as has been explicit since at least 2015, when the Bernie Sanders campaign pushed a more social-democratic approach toward the center stage of American political debate, anti-disparitarian “leftism” is a militant ideological force defending neoliberalism’s logic against downwardly redistributive threats, to the extent of denouncing calls for expanding the sphere of universal public goods as irresponsible and castigating appeals to working-class interests as racist.

Decades of race reductionist assertion and resort to history as allegory in lieu of empirical argument and clear political strategy27 have propagated another discourse of misdirection. Insistence that any inequality or injustice affecting black people must be understood as resultant from a generic and transhistorical racism, for instance, shifts attention away from the current sources of inequality in capitalist political economy for reductionist antiracists just as culture war rhetoric does for the right. As the genesis of the “racial wealth gap” has shown, the premise that slavery and Jim Crow continue to shape all black people’s lives and forge a fundamentally common condition of suffering and common destiny has underwritten a racial trickledown policy response that is a class politics dressed up as a racial-group politics.28 The sleight-of-hand that makes capitalist class dynamics disappear into a narrative of unremitting, demonic White Supremacy does the work for Democratic neoliberals, of whatever color or gender, that the pedophile cannibal bugbear does for the reactionary right. Thus race reductionism can present making rich black people richer and narrowing the “wealth gap” between them and their white counterparts as a strategy for pursuit of justice for all black people or attack social-democratic policy proposals as somehow not relevant to blacks and indeed abetting white racists, or attempt to whistle past the fact that the Racial Reckoning produced by the Summer of George Floyd culminated most conspicuously in a $100 million gift from Jeff Bezos to Van Jones and a flood of nearly $2 billion of corporate money into various racial justice advocacy organizations.

The rise of the authoritarian threat should raise the stakes of the moment to a point at which we recognize that this antiracist politics has no agenda for winning significant reforms, much less a strategy for social transformation, that it is not only incapable of anchoring a challenge to the peril that faces us but is fundamentally not interested in doing so. There seems to be a startling myopia underlying this politics and the strata whose interests it articulates—unless, of course, its only point is to secure what Kenneth Warren characterizes as “managerial authority over the nation’s Negro problem,”29 no matter what regime is in power. In that case, the Judenrat is in effect its model, and therefore all bets are off.

#race politics #racism #race reductionism #adolph reed #new orleans #republicans #democrats #antiracism

5 notes · View notes

allthebrazilianpolitics · 8 months ago

Text

Study shows higher Covid mortality in pro-Bolsonaro cities

Cities with a high percentage of voters for former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro recorded higher mortality during the peaks of the Covid pandemic, according to a study published on Monday in a Brazilian journal on public health.

The study focused on the peaks of excess mortality during the pandemic, in August 2020 and April 2021. “Excess mortality” measures the increase in the number of deaths during a certain period compared to a previous average and includes deaths from all causes. For a period in late March 2021, Brazil reported over 3,000 Covid deaths per day.

“Considering the 2018 election results, we observed a strong association between excess deaths at the two peaks of the pandemic,” the authors wrote.

“In general terms, each 1 percent increase in municipal votes for Bolsonaro from 2018 to 2022 corresponded to a rise of 0.48 percent to 0.64 percent in municipal excess mortality during the COVID-19 pandemic peaks,” they added.

#brazil #politics #brazilian politics #coronavirus #covid 19 #image description in alt #mod nise da silveira

31 notes · View notes

lboogie1906 · 2 months ago

Text

Attorney Fani Taifa Willis (October 27, 1971) is an attorney. She is the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, which contains most of Atlanta. She is the first woman to hold the office.

She was born in Inglewood. Her father was a member of the Black Panthers and a criminal defense attorney.

She graduated from Howard University with a BA in Political Science, cum laude. She moved to Atlanta to attend Emory University School of Law, graduating with a JD. She spent 16 years as a prosecutor in the Fulton County district attorney’s office. Her most prominent case was her prosecution of the Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal. She went into private practice. She ran for a seat on the Fulton County Superior Court and lost. In 2019, she became chief municipal judge for South Fulton, Georgia.

In 2020, she was elected district attorney for Fulton County, defeating a six-term incumbent and her former boss.

On February 10, 2021, she launched a criminal investigation into Donald Trump’s attempts to influence Georgia election officials—including the governor, the attorney general, and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger via a telephone call—to “find” enough votes to override Joe Biden’s win in that state and thus undo Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.

In January 2022, she requested a special grand jury to consider charges of election interference by Trump and his allies. In May, a 26-member special grand jury was given investigative authority and subpoena power and tasked with submitting a report to the judge on whether a crime was committed.

On April 24, 2023, she announced the decision to charge Trump and his associates during the Georgia Superior Courts.

In May 2022, her office indicted Young Thug for 56 counts of gang-related crimes under Georgia’s RICO statute and felony charges for possession of illicit firearms and drugs that were allegedly discovered after a search warrant was executed. The rapper has been held in Cobb County jail since his arrest.

She married Fred Willis (1996-2005). They have two daughters together. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence

8 notes · View notes

bllsbailey · 2 months ago

Text

Apparently There's Evidence of Ballot Harvesting in This Swing State

With Election Day just four days away, all eyes are going to be on potential cases of voter fraud to avoid a repeat of the 2020 election in which lawsuits claim there was mass ballot rigging that resulted in President Joe Biden’s win.

The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is ramping up concerns over possible cases of ballot harvesting in Wisconsin, one of the most critical swing states that could decide the outcome of the 2024 election. CPAC Chairman Matt Schlapp filed a complaint with the Wisconsin Elections Commission, citing evidence of ballot harvesting being committed in plain sight.

Schlapp claimed he had photogenic evidence and an eye witness who saw alleged ballot-stuffing outside Milwaukee City Hall.

The complaint states that the witness saw an individual stuffing at least 500 ballots into an unguarded ballot box and then took off once the individual realized they were being watched.

“As part of CPAC’s efforts to ensure elections are free and fair, CPAC has filed a complaint with the Wisconsin Election Commission (“WEC”) and reported to local law enforcement allegations of potential efforts to commit fraud or corruption in the voting process by an unknown individual,” Schlapp said in a statement. “CPAC received reports of illicit ballot harvesting at the dropbox location outside Milwaukee City Hall. A witness reported an individual depositing a significant number of absentee ballots into the dropbox before fleeing the scene. Ballot Harvesting is illegal under Wisconsin Law.”

Ballot harvesting, collecting completed absentee ballots from voters and delivering them to polling places or election offices, is illegal in Wisconsin. The law states that ballots are to be “mailed by the elector, or delivered in person, to the municipal clerk issuing the ballot or ballots’ unless the elector is disabled.”

Below is a portion of the witness’s statement:

I have personal knowledge of the matters set forth herein, and if called as a witness, I could and would testify competently as to the truth of such matters. On October 25, 2024, at approximately 7:55 pm, I witnessed an individual who appeared to deposit a bag full of absentee ballots into a dropbox. It is my understanding that ballot trafficking is a violation of Wisconsin state law and that each elector must deliver their own absentee ballot unless the elector is disabled. I was sitting in my car with my son outside of the City Hall dropbox location at 200 E. Wells Street, Milwaukee, WI 53202. An individual approached the dropbox carrying two bags. One of the bags was a drawstring backup. The other bag was a large green bag with a zipper on the top. The green bag appeared to be full. I would estimate that the green bag could hold between 50 and 500 absentee ballots. The individual walked up to the drop box and reached into the green bag at least five times to empty the contents of his bag into the dropbox. While walking away from the dropbox, I watched the individual fold up the now empty green bag and proceed to put it in the drawstring backup. When the individual realized I was watching and taking pictures, the individual sprinted away.

Wisconsin has a history of razor-thin margins in national elections. In a Marist poll released Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris has a three percentage point lead over former President Donald Trump, 51-48 percent.

However, a USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll from earlier this week shows Trump and Harris tied in the state, 48 to 47 percent.