In October 2016, our future Twittiot in Chief said,
I couldn’t wait for Hillary Clinton’s response:
You’re right, Donald. The election is rigged. And you know it, because your cronies are rigging it: Kobach, Husted, Kemp. Your knuckle-draggers are purging, blocking, disqualifying and stomping on the votes of Black, Hispanic and young voters. And I won’t tolerate it.
I know: she didn’t say that. In fact, she promised to tolerate it; the purging, the stomping, the disqualifying, the reversal of Martin Luther King’s Dream. It was A-OK with her, with all Democrats for that matter. She promised, no matter what happened to the votes of America’s underclass, she solemnly swore to let Trump’s Jim Crow operation do its worst, and she’d salute.
Why?
Why?
Why?
Wherever I speak, I get the same question: If, as you say, Palast, the elections were stolen, if voters of color—that is, Democrats—were savaged, then why don’t the Democrats say something?
Why?
Al Gore, the victim of the 2000 purge, was despondent after his loss. He grew a beard, divorced his odious wife, piled up a billion dollars—but never defended the Black people in Florida whose votes were stolen.*
Why? Why? Why?
Let me level with you: I don’t know. But, I have some theories. Stick with me on this.
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At the last debate in 2016, even the Fox News moderator was horrified by Trump’s suggestion that he would challenge a rigged vote. Chris Wallace said what all Good Americans were told to believe, and he scolded Trump:
No matter how hard-fought the campaign, the loser concedes to the winner, and the country comes together, for the good of the country.
If you question an election, you’re against the good of the country, a scoundrel, a conspiracy nut. Even if an election is indeed stolen before your eyes, it’s just un-American, unacceptable to say it out loud. Like the die-hard Communists on their way to their execution ordered by Stalin; they praised the dictator and the Party rather than question The Faith. Likewise, American politicians and pundits would rather accept electoral death than expose the rot under The American Way.
Mark Braden, former chief counsel of the Republican National Committee, is typical:
The most important thing in the system is that the winners win and the losers lose. Almost as important as that is that the rational people that support the loser believe that the winner won.
Note the word “believe.” To question The Belief, to question The Faith in American Democracy, well, it’s as crude and unacceptable as farting at a debutante ball.
And there’s another problem. In 2000, when I uncovered how Bush won Florida and the White House—stole the White House—when the Florida Secretary of State removed tens of thousands of Black voters as felons (and none were), the story ran at the top of the BBC Television news in Britain and the front page of the Guardian newspaper in London. But it was not reported in a single US newspaper.
Oh, yes, there was an opinion column in the New York Times mentioning the purge. But that “opinion” was expressed by columnist Bob Herbert. Black columnist Bob Herbert.
But a white radio host, Al Franken, challenged my discovery of the purge of Black voters. “If this were true, how come I didn’t read it in the New York Times?” Good question. But shouldn’t he have asked the Times?
That film we made of Christine Jordan, Martin Luther King’s 92-year-old cousin, tossed out of the Georgia voting station, purged from the rolls, was picked up by a zillion TV and news outlets. So sad. So ironic: King’s cousin! But not one network news broadcast mentioned the story that went with the video: that Ms. Jordan was on the list of 340,134 Georgians purged by Brian Kemp. And that the list stole the election for Georgia’s Purge’n General, Governor Kemp. Nor did my investigation prompt the New York Times, the Washington Post, or any other US media organization to undertake their own investigation to either confirm or refute my findings. The topic isn’t important enough?
No one attacked or challenged our solid, here-is-the-evidence facts. They simply buried them, unmentioned. It was better to have one story, King’s cousin, we could all feel bad about. But, other than that “one mistake,” the system worked.
The important thing is that “the loser believes that the winner won.” But something went wrong in Georgia. The “loser,” Stacey Abrams, doesn’t believe. She doesn’t believe in Tinkerbell, nor in Santa Claus, nor that Brian Kemp had defeated her. She barnstormed America, telling the story of Christine Jordan and—crucially—the story of the 340,134 voters erased by Jim Crow’s love child, Kemp. And she took our list into a federal court.
But then, Ms. Abrams is, well, not white.
After I exposed Kris Kobach’s Crosscheck scam in 2016, Congressman Alcee Hastings told me he walked across a bridge on the Potomac to personally place my Rolling Stone article in the hands of the Attorney General. “I didn’t want her to say she never got it in the mail.”
Hastings is the dean of the Congressional Black Caucus. I’m still waiting for a word from the Congressional White Caucus.
The New York Times, after the 2016 election, repeated my story of Kobach and Crosscheck . . . but, curiously, never mentioned that the voters wrongly removed were named Rodriguez, Jackson and Kim. The story was deracinated, sanitized for public safety.
It’s telling that an outlet like MSNBC (or is it MSDNC?) rails about the attack on voters before each election, calling out the crazy ID laws, the long lines, the refusal to register voters. But after any election, you won’t find MSNBC nor any US outlet doing the math and proclaiming, that election was stolen. They are, in the end, good Americans. Good American drones.
Not long after Clinton announced her candidacy for President, she told the Urban League in Florida, “They stole the election. I can’t get that out of my head.” They cheered. So did I.
But, apparently, her head had a leak. When November 2016 brought us “Florida 3.0,” with Black voters purged and blocked, not a word left her lips about it. Not that Hillary didn’t bitch and moan. She bitched and moaned about white women enslaved to “pressure from fathers and husbands and boyfriends and male employers not to vote for ‘the girl.’” She bitched and moaned, Joe McCarthy style, that Jill Stein was a Russian agent.
That’s “Agent” Jill Stein, who put up $9 million to count those 75,355 uncounted ballots in Detroit. Hillary’s votes.
Clinton knows that it’s legit to say the Russians did it . . . because no American, even a Trump-American, would ever steal a vote.
I make it sound like vote thievery is all racial. Not at all.
When Congressman Alcee Hastings walked across that bridge, he put my exposé of Kobach and Crosscheck in the hands of an Attorney General, Loretta Lynch, an African-American, or more accurately, a Harvard American (BA/JD). She did nothing. Indeed, Obama’s commission on voting endorsed the Crosscheck purges.
As Marvin Gaye said, “What’s going on?”
An African-American lawyer (a source I’d believe more than my mother) told me that when he met in the White House with his old colleague Obama, the President said, “You know and I know that 70% of Black folks’ problems are of their own making.”
Obama was barely more disguised in his dismissiveness of voting barriers when he said, repeatedly, that voting, especially early voting, “is pretty easy and it only takes a few minutes.”
Maybe it’s only a few minutes when you have the Secret Service to clear the way; only a few minutes in your upscale Hyde Park enclave where you vote with Rahm Emanuel and other Goldman Sachs alumni.
You’d say voting “only takes a few minutes” if you haven’t waited in a freezing parking lot with the Freedom Faith Missionary Baptist members at the polls in Dayton for five hours; “pretty easy” if you haven’t been tagged a “felon” and are told to prove your innocence with documents that don’t exist.
With few exceptions, our betters, who vote with the ease of getting a table at Cipriani, know their votes count, and they simply don’t believe it could ever add up to a stolen election.
The haughty view of one privileged voter, Barack H. Obama, with his PhD mother and a father who earned his masters at Harvard, suggests that more than race is the driver of vote suppression.
Underneath, it’s about income, wealth, power. It’s about class. Blacks are targeted because communities of color are economically disarmed. All my studies for these two decades show the same stats: the white poor are screwed out of their vote as often as the Black poor, or nearly so.
Vote suppression is simply class war by other means.
* Gore knew about my discovery of the Florida faux felon purge. Before conceding, Gore was informed of my Guardian revelations on the Florida purge. Sources told me that Gore, intrigued, said, “Who is the reporter?” When told, Gore said, ”We hate that sonovabitch.” He’s correct, I’m an S.O.B., but I doubt that led to his vow of complicit silence.