Mr. Biden, Georgia voting laws are NOT ‘Jim Crow on steroids’

Shortly after Gov. Brian Kemp signed new legislation to overhaul election protocols in Georgia, place new restrictions on voting by mail, require voter ID, and increase legislative control over the voting process, Joe Biden immediately referred to the bill as “Jim Crow on steroids.”

But not even the Washington Post — they supported Biden for president and editorialized against the Georgia legislation — supported Biden’s ridiculous and politically motivated conclusion. After fact-checking him, the paper awarded Uncle Joe with “Four Pinocchios” for spreading misinformation about the state law’s impact on voting.

Putting aside his obviously hyperbolic pandering for a moment, Mr. Biden is simply wrong to draw any parallels between Georgia voting laws and Jim Crow.

My friend Derrick Wilburn —  past contributor to The Strident Conservative and Executive Director of the Rocky Mountain Black Conservatives — recently explained in his email newsletter that the Jim Crow laws passed in states throughout the American south existed from 1876 until 1965 when they were overturned by the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Wilburn pointed out how these horrific laws supposedly established “separate but equal” rights and facilities for Whites and Blacks, but they were segregationist, immoral, and anything but “equal.” Jim Crow laws were beyond sick, beyond racist, beyond bigotry. They were the inspiration behind domestic terror against people of color who, under their provisions, had to live as 3rd class citizens for nearly a hundred years.

In this day and age of ignorance and/or indifference about American history and the Constitution, most people simply line up behind the party or personality they agree with — truth and facts be damned. This is why those on the far-left are in the Biden/Democrat camp calling Georgia voting laws “Jim Crow in the 21st Century” while so-called conservatives are in the nationalist/Republican camp calling for boycotts against companies exercising their constitutional rights.

In a piece featured on Jewish World Review by Boston Globe opinion columnist Jeff Jacoby yesterday, we get an excellent analysis of why the political machinations used by Mr. Biden and the Democrats concerning Jim Crow distorts the vital lessons America has learned since that horrible time in history.

Not every charge made by those condemning the law falls into the category of honest opinion: Some of it is just dead wrong. For example, President Biden, by way of explaining why he considers Georgia’s new law to be “sick” and “outrageous” and “un-American,” claimed repeatedly that it requires the polls to be shut at 5 p.m., thereby keeping working people from voting.

“You’re going to close a polling place at 5 o’clock, when working people just get off?” he said in an ESPN interview. “This is all about keeping working folks, and ordinary folks that I grew up with, from being able to vote.”

But as The Washington Post’s fact checker concluded, this was a “Four Pinocchio” whopper, completely at odds with the truth. (The Post, it should be noted, editorialized against the new law.) Far from curtailing voting hours, the new law expands them and also adds an extra Saturday of voting.

The new law also confirms that Georgians have the right to vote absentee without having to give a reason, and it provides a three-month window before an election in which absentee ballots can be requested. It authorizes at least one drop box per county for the convenience of early voters (more populous counties can install additional drop boxes), thus institutionalizing a practice that didn’t exist in Georgia before the COVID-19 pandemic.

It empowers the state attorney general to set up a hotline to report any allegations of possible voter intimidation or fraud. And, yes, it prohibits activists from giving voters standing in line “any money or gifts, including, but not limited to, food and drink.” These tweaks may be sound or unsound, but how anyone can honestly call them “sick,” “outrageous,” or “un-American” beats me.

With Biden’s lies about Georgia voting clearly established, Jacoby explains how comparisons to Jim Crow are simply indefensible.

What I really find incomprehensible, though, is the accusation that Georgia’s law amounts to a revival of Jim Crow, the pre-Civil Rights racial oppression that prevailed throughout the South. It is hard to overstate what a smear and a libel that is. Second only to slavery, Jim Crow segregation and persecution was the very worst thing in American history — evil, unconstitutional, and inhumane.

Jim Crow was a monstrosity in numerous ways, only one of which was the near-total denial of the right of Black Southerners to vote. Eventually Jim Crow was overturned by the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and a generation of Americans has grown up knowing of it, if at all, only through history books.

To call something “Jim Crow” is the equivalent in American terms of calling something “Nazi” — both are terms so toxic that they should be reserved only for genuine examples of brutal, totalitarian repression and cruelty. …

But in the 50-plus years since Jim Crow was crushed, Black people in Georgia and elsewhere across the South are anything but shut out of the political system. “Georgia’s congressional delegation has five Black representatives and one Black senator,” writes Jonah Goldberg . “Its state legislature is 27 percent Black. The mayor of Atlanta is a Black woman. Georgia has a large and politically powerful Black middle class, not to mention plenty of Black celebrities and 1-percenters. Do we really believe the state is one election law away from a system of legal lynchings and separate water fountains?”

There’s a lot more to Jacoby’s article and I hope you’ll check out the whole piece via the link above. But in just these few paragraphs, we can see how wrong, politically biased, and agenda-driven Mr. Biden and the Democrats are being when they compare Georgia voting laws to Jim Crow.

George Orwell once said, “The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”

Unfortunately, with political correctness and “wokeness” serving as the official agenda of the Far-Left, and with feckless, politically motivated Republicans as the only opposition, labeling Georgia voting as Jim Crow brings America one step closer to her destruction.

 

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David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties.

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