Inside the Racist Republican Voter ID Sham in North Carolina

You are right. The reason that voter ID fraud is even an issue is a mindful effort by the GOP to make it an issue, in order to reduce DEM lending voters. It's a shame. But people eat up that without questioning and when faced with fact, fact be damn. This work quite well with a particular segment of the population and under a particular party.

No, you can't change people that doesn't care about basic fact. You can certainly change (or persuade) people that are open up to it - which I like to think is the majority of folks here in the US. And everything you said above in bold is about persuading people to your cause.

The fact is the GOP has enacted policy to suppress voter turnout in a way that is outright racism in nature. It's not just racism, it's anti-democratic and unconstitutional.

 

Do you have a college degree?

 

This could probably have it's own thread but Texas just got caught lying to voters about ID rules...

Paxton should be forced to resign. They were exposed by the 5th Circuit for their discriminatory intentions and then try an end run by actively misleading people.

 

As a subscriber to American history and its more unsavory angles, you've given me a lot to consider in that post, but I'll add to this point.

I'm optimistic that we've entered an age where state sponsored shennanigans with voter rights will have to end. As the Bernie Bros discovered, it happens in both parties. Change will not come through through court mandates or teeth pulling with largely transient political reform, rather through technology and by people who really have to give a **** to use it in the right way.

I hope we've come to the point where the institutional wing minority interests will consider that third political party or at the very least implicitly support drives for minority participation in the political process. This can be shown by busing the disenfranchised to primaries and earlier rather than the day-of for the cynical goal of their people looking at the letters D, R, and sometimes I.

With relatively cheap and time tested technology, the power is already there to bypass age old racially motivated 15th Amendment violations and it's ongoing political shennigans at the state and party level. I think the main hurdles will be trust among the poorer communities that electronic registrations will work or as equal as pulling the symbolic lever. The other hurdle is whether there will be cover fire at the political level in order not to close those avenues already available for voters connected to the internet.

It's really a matter of time, but having more people care about this to give their time would undoubtedly influence the course of things more than one singular vote or dollar. Knowledge is power. No one is going is enfranchise the disenfranchised unless they really give a **** about it.

 

^This reminds me of a podcast that went over the origins of welfare. It was designed to assist single white mothers so that they wouldn't have to work or do manly things. Even the wording of the legislation back then made it clear to sound like it was assisting a citizen rather than supporting a sovereign dependent. It later went on to describe the misaligned origins of the Welfare Queen (**** you Reagan) and how welfare became a racially charged synonym despite more whites being on it than any other race.

It's too bad I can't remember the podcast's name.

 

Actually, there's a fascinating account at Slate.com, written by Josh Levin, about the actual person Ronald Reagan based his "welfare queen" rhetoric around. It's way too long to post here in it's entirety, but it does a thorough job of chronicling "Linda Taylor"...one of the over 80 aliases she used (and which she was tried for fraud under in 1976)....

...lots of people considered this lady to be a fiction...but she actually was an incorrigible, shrewd and conscienceless career criminal. Among the many unbelievable things I found out about her, was that a 1930 Census listed her as a white woman...

 

Points taken.

And I agree...the calculus has to change to effect political change in our democracy. How that happens...restoring some semblance of balance between capital and labor primarily (which has undeniably skewed disproportionately towards labor through local, state and federal legislation)...because as I am often reminded by my more "conservative" countrymen, a "moral" aptitude is what black people on average lack...

...avoiding of course, the history of such a mantra rising in the domestic prosperity legislated almost exclusively for "white" Americans during the Great Depression and in the years after World War II, which consequently created this American ideal of what "right" and "wrong" is in a contemporary sense...

...incidentally, as often as it has been pointed out about how much (or how little) has changed for black Americans under President Obama's terms, the sobering fact is that there has been almost no legislative agenda put forward by many black "leaders" (of which there are supposed to be plentiful...the "Congressional Black Caucus", for one...)...not in the ways that LGBT issues or even immigration issues were brought to the administration's attention...

...but there is currently some legislation in the House of Representatives that seeks to address some sort of police reform that's been as yet unattended. I doubt anything comes of it now that the President's term is nearly over...

 

...

...just wanted to correct something I stated earlier....
...legislation has skewed disproportionately towards capital, not labor....

 

It has and at a rapid rate, it seems like.