Posted at Hartmann Report on Aug. 27, 2024
Confederate Voter Intimidation 2.0: The GOP's Dark Strategy for Winning
From Reconstruction to DeSantis to Paxton: How Republicans Are Keeping Power by Any Means Necessary…
The Republican attorney general of Texas sent armed police officers after Black voters in their 80s to intimidate, threaten, and destroy them financially by forcing them to hire lawyers to defend themselves, even though they are perfectly legal voters.
It's a manifestation of the new unofficial Republican slogan:
"If you can't win on the issues, cheat. And if cheating doesn't get you over the top, intimidate!"
As is the case with so many bad Republican ideas (outlawing labor unions, ending welfare programs, banning abortion, gutting women's voting and economic rights, etc.), this one started during the failure of Reconstruction in the 1870s. White supremacists had taken over the federal government and, in the states, Black voters were routinely threatened with violence and imprisonment when they tried to vote.
We thought those days were over. But in August of 2022, three months before he would face voters for reelection, Florida's Republican governor Ron DeSantis reprised the neo-Confederate strategy of using the levers of official state power to intimidate Black voters.