Somehow, the President managed to insult the memory of every American that died in the Civil War and Civil Rights movement, paint his political opposition as the equivalent of Confederates and the Ku Klux Klan, and use one of the most grossly ridiculous analogies in the history of modern politics, all in service of a lie, in a single statement, and all for his own political power.
“We are facing the most significant test of our democracy since the Civil War.” President Joe Biden declared earlier this week at what was billed as a “major” speech in Philadelphia on voting “rights.” To ensure there was no mistake, that he meant precisely what he said, he added “That’s not hyperbole — since the Civil War.” President Biden was alluding, of course, to the riot at the Capitol building on January 6, “The Confederates back then never breached the Capitol as insurrectionists did on Jan. 6. I’m not saying this to alarm you. I’m saying this because you should be alarmed.”
In reality, what we really should be alarmed about: Anyone, much less the President of the United States, who would make such a ridiculously absurd and offensive comparison to support what is nothing other than a pure power grab by Democrats, and that a willing media would repeat it as if there were any truth to the assertion. Where were the fact checkers, once ubiquitous every time Trump exaggerated something, now completely supine and silent? Where are the screaming hordes insisting demagogues have no place in office?
Let’s take a look at the facts. The Civil War saw somewhere around 620,000 killed in battle, 476,000 seriously injured, and another 400,000 missing never to be seen again. To put the scale of this devastation in perspective, the total population of the United States at the time, including slaves, was 31,443,321 according to the 1860 census, meaning about 2% of the people in the country were killed outright, 1.5% were seriously injured, and 1.2% were missing. If you applied these numbers to modern America, over 6,500,000 people would be dead, over 4,900,000 injured, and over 3,900,000 missing. The Capitol riot death toll, by comparison, stands at 5, if you count people that died from strokes and heart attacks. Only one person was killed by violence at the scene, and that person was one of the rioters killed by a policeman whose name we still do not know.
Moreover, the struggle for a truly representative democracy didn’t end when Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox. In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the remaining Confederates reconconsituted as the infamous Ku Klux Klan, conducting a reign of terror and atrocity throughout the South. The situation was so incredibly awful and the killing so widespread the Union effectively went to war again, deploying troops in Southern states. One of the leading Union generals during the war, Philip Sheridan, was in Texas in July 1866 when a white mob attacked a state constitutional convention in New Orleans, wiring to Grant himself back in Washington, “The more information I obtain of the affair of the 30th in this city the more revolting it becomes. It was no riot; it was an absolute massacre.”
According to sociologist and activist W. E. B. Du Bois, “Armed guerrilla warfare killed thousands of Negroes; political riots were staged; their causes or occasions were always obscure, their results always certain: ten to one hundred times as many Negroes were killed as whites.” In North and South Carolina alone, over a period of about 18 months ending in 1867, there were some 197 black Americans murdered and 548 cases of aggravated assault. In November 1868, over 2,000 people were killed in Louisiana before the Presidential Election. At the height of their power, the purported leader of the Klan, former Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest claimed they had 550,000 members and could call up a force of 40,000 men in as little as 5 days. These attacks and massacres continued through the 1870’s.
They were accompanied by a relentless campaign of disenfranchisement against new black voters. Poll taxes, literacy tests, property tests, and more, all aimed exclusively at blacks. White voters were “grandfathered” in and not subject to any of it. The goal was simple: Suppress the black vote at any cost. Some version of these tactics, including a newly reconstituted Ku Klux Klan starting in about 1915, continued through the mid-20th century, until passage of the Voting Rights Act, and this doesn’t even consider that women, even white women, didn’t get the right to vote until 1920. On top of it all, in the early 1900’s the Klan was so acceptable that Democrat politicians regularly sought their endorsement, even legendary Presidents like Harry S. Truman briefly flirted with the KKK.
These are the facts. Who in their right mind would claim that anything happening today compares to these atrocities, either in scale, public acceptance, or actual policy? These were some of the darkest periods in American history, death, destruction, torture, lynching, and violence the likes of which we can scarcely imagine safe behind our computer screens, and, surely, President Joe Biden knows better. He’s lying, flat out and completely unconvincingly, for purely political purposes, prompting the obvious question: What purposes are those? What does he propose to save us from the worst threat to democracy since the Civil War?
According to President Biden and his progressive allies, a bill known as H.R. 1, already passed through the House of Representatives yet rejected by the Senate, is, in fact, the savior of democracy. This bill purports to improve “voter access, election integrity and security, campaign finance, and ethics for the three branches of government.” “Specifically, the bill expands voter registration (e.g., automatic and same-day registration) and voting access (e.g., vote-by-mail and early voting). It also limits removing voters from voter rolls.” There are additional provisions including forced redistricting, election security, campaign finance, codes of conduct for even the Supreme Court, and tax disclosure laws for Presidential candidates.
In short, it’s the 2020 election on steroids, except we already know the 2020 election was conducted unlike any other. Time Magazine of all places revealed a conspiracy and a shady cabal to change election laws under the false pretenses of the coronavirus pandemic. “In the end, nearly half the electorate cast ballots by mail in 2020, practically a revolution in how people vote. About a quarter voted early in person. Only a quarter of voters cast their ballots the traditional way: in person on Election Day.” In order to enact these changes, they met in secret and lied in public. For example, because there were “serious impediments to holding safe, secure and inclusive elections in November” and “the health risks involved in going to polling locations will be unacceptably high,” former President Carter urged “leaders across the country to take immediate steps to expand vote-by-mail and other measures that can help protect the core of American democracy – the right of our citizens to vote.”
Now, they want to make these changes instituted on false pretenses permanent, lying again that democracy is at risk. For the self-proclaimed champions of democracy, progressives have a funny way of showing it: They plan a federal takeover of elections in contravention of the Constitution and American history, they won’t stand up for basic principles like Freedom of Speech, they want to pack the Supreme Court and dictate the conduct of a separate and equal branch of government, they want to add two Democrat states to the Union, and they seek the elimination of the filibuster, all long-standing democratic norms they themselves variously supported once upon a time, as in just a few years ago.
Ironically, President Biden was delivering his big speech while drama was unfolding in the Texas statehouse around an election integrity bill. The Republican controlled legislature and Governor planned to pass a bill that requires identification for absentee ballots, but also expands early voting hours and even hours on election day to give people more time to vote. It does ban some of the more insecure practices we’ve seen like drive though voting and 24 hour voting, and it prohibits unsolicited applications for mail in ballots from local officials, but none of these practices existed before last year. In short, it’s a relatively mild bill based on the experiences of 2020 and if the polling on a similar law in Georgia is accurate, one that likely has majority support in the state.
In response, however, Texas Democrats have literally fled Texas, in a private jet no less, to prevent a vote on the bill. Republicans have the necessary majority and the bill will pass over their opposition, so they are refusing to provide a quorum for business to be conducted. Bizarrely, Democrats and their enablers in the media are describing this complete breakdown of democracy as some kind of brave show, lauding the misbehaving, cowardly politicians. According to CNN’s resident propagandist, Stephen Collinson, “They’re trying to save democracy by walking out on it.” This can only be translated as: Democracy is what the Democrats claim it is, nothing more and nothing less. “We are coming to DC to put pressure on them to act, because this isn’t just Texas,” Texas Democratic state Representative John Bucy III told CNN on Monday. “All over the South and in Republican states, we are seeing voter suppression bills. We need Congress to pass the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.”
Of course, there is nothing in the bill that will suppress a single vote. This indisputable fact is resulting in some incredibly odd contortions from leading Democrat politicians to explain their behavior. Vice President Kamala Harris met with some of the lawmakers in exile. In addition to comparing these pampered frauds to the ex-slave turned champion of the Constitution and civil rights activist, Frederick Douglas, she opined on the voter identification requirement for absentee ballots, “Because in some people’s mind, that means well, you’re going to have to Xerox or photocopy your ID to send it in to prove you are who you are. Well, there are a whole lot of people, especially people who live in rural communities, who don’t… there’s no Kinkos, there’s no OfficeMax near them.” Bear in mind that Kinko’s went out of business four years ago, but Harris still pressed on, “People have to understand when we’re talking about voter ID laws, be clear about who you have in mind and what would be required of them to prove who they are. Of course people have to prove who they are, but not in a way that makes it almost impossible for them to prove who they are.”
Yes, in the year 2021, Vice President Kamala Harris believes providing identification would make it “almost impossible” for voters to prove who they are. These are incredible, unbelievable claims, especially when the Supreme Court has weighed in time and time again on voter identification laws. For example, in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, the Federal appellate court noted that the impact of the law was so mild that they could not identify a single person negatively affected. “There is something remarkable about the plaintiffs considered as a whole…There is not a single plaintiff who intends not to vote because of the new law—that is, who would vote were it not for the law.” The court continued to note that the “the inability of the sponsors of this litigation to find any such person to join as a plaintiff,” indicated disenfranchisement wasn’t a real problem.
In addition, progressives have a warped view of the impact of voter fraud. They operate under the assumption that any requirement for identification or to do basically anything at all to cast a vote is an undue burden, while not acknowledging that anyone who votes illegally is effectively cancelling out another legal vote. This means there is a necessary balance to be struck between voting accessibility and voting security, one progressives flat out refuse to consider. Fortunately, this is not the way the courts see it. In the case mentioned earlier, for example, the court specifically rejected the idea that requiring identification was equivalent to a poll tax, explaining “the purpose of the Indiana law is to reduce voting fraud, and voting fraud impairs the right of legitimate voters to vote by diluting their votes—dilution being recognized to be an impairment of the right to vote.”
Incredibly, despite the nauseating and insulting exaggerations, the public isn’t buying it. A recent Monmouth University poll found that a full four out of five Americans, 80%, support voter identification requirements, and only 18% oppose them. The Democrats are belittling themselves and the history of the country for that rump level of support. Even more amazingly, only 40% of independents and 26% of Republicans support making mail-in balloting easier, once again indicating that the Democrats’ idea of democracy is whatever they want and they don’t care what you think in the least.
Ultimately, one has to ask themselves what this is all about: Why is it that any and all reversion to the way elections were conducted prior to 2020 considered an assault on democracy, worse than anything since the Civil War? What could possibly prompt that level of offensive, ridiculous hyperbole on a practically daily basis? Power, of course. That’s what all of this is about, from the nonsensical lies about voting rights to the filibuster to packing the Supreme Court. Democrats want it and they will say and do anything to get it. Longstanding Democrat Representative James Clyburn said as much just recently. “We screw up this voting thing and [Raphael] Warnock ain’t going to be in the Senate and we ain’t going to win nothing in North Carolina and we won’t have a chance down in Florida,” he said.
Finally, “unfit for office” is a strong phrase. I do not use it lightly: President Biden insulted the memory of every American that died in the Civil War and Civil Rights movement, painted his political opposition as the equivalent of Confederates and the Ku Klux Klan, and used one of the most grossly ridiculous analogies in the history of modern politics, all in service of a lie, in a single statement, and all for his own political power. If he truly believes this, he has no business being President. If he doesn’t, he has no business being President. This is, after all, the same standard that was regularly applied to former President Donald Trump’s every utterance. I’ll leave it up to you to decide.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 
“In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, the remaining DEMOCRATS reconstituted as the infamous Ku Klux Klan, conducting a reign of terror and atrocity throughout the South.”
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