GOP

Trump and others of his ilk are constantly railing against diversity, equity, and inclusion. In my opinion, it’s the new N-word.

As Republican candidates for president compete for the first votes in the GOP primary season, they have been exposed as having insulting views on slavery and the horrific reality of how brutal it was for Black Americans.

In this congressional session, House Republicans have chosen to hold America hostage with extreme demands that threaten funding for Social Security, Medicaid and programs that support children and senior citizens. Or else, they say, they will not support raising the debt ceiling.

Many people are still mystified about one of the greatest ironies of American politics. That is, how Trump, a guy that almost no one in the GOP political establishment liked in the beginning, and despite everything dirty about him still owns and runs that establishment lock, stock and barrel.

It must be difficult to be a Republican. Beyond the necessary deference to their former president, what issues and attitudes require their support?

Everyone expects politicians to exaggerate. A hyper-positive pose is what successful politicians assume. However, Republicans have taken this to an exorbitant level that so distorts the truth that many voters will find it difficult to determine what they should support. The most damaging example of this is Donald Trump’s insistence that he won the presidential election but his victory has been denied by fraud and corruption.

First, it was Juneteenth. Now it’s Willie O’Ree. Let’s take both and then try to see what the GOP is up to.

It started almost the instant that Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden announced that California senator Kamala Harris was his VP pick in 2020. The “it” was the sniping, rumor-mongering, and flat-out attacks on Harris.

The GOP’s relentless war on alleged rampant voter fraud targets not thousands, as many critics have noted, but millions of eligible voters.

Prominent Black business CEOs have rescued American democracy. They united in unequivocal opposition to efforts of numerous states to establish voting rights restrictions. They asserted that “voting is the lifeblood of our democracy … and is the most basic and fundamental right of all Americans.”

All eyes have been on Georgia’s blatant effort to shove the state permanently back in the red-state column with its unabashed Jim Crow-style vote-suppression ploy. But this is just the warmup for the GOP’s main act, to once and for all erase from the books the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

While Black activists are celebrating Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election, conservatives are working to assure that their candidate will not lose the election in 2024. They understand the narrow difference between victory and defeat.