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Five days in the battleground of the 2024 election
Atlanta, GA– There’s a reason I couldn’t sit on the sidelines in California and watch this election like a spectator sport, I could just feel that something important was going to happen here. To be a witness to history that you just don’t get looking at on TV. I am here at the invitation of the nationally recognized investigative journalist Greg Palast who has just produced a documentary on voter suppression in Georgia. Aside from outright attacks and procedural hurdles that suppress the vote and give Republicans an edge, there is another two-pronged attack in the Republicans’ war to preserve minority white rule in America. The first prong is that a faction of Republicans wants to find a new answer to the broad question, “Who deserves representation in the United States?”And late on election night in Georgia it looks like the MAGA Republicans have won it against all the best efforts to stop Trump.
In the early morning of Nov. 5, there were five bomb threats on polling places around Atlanta in Fulton County and another in a town south of here called Camilla where they had to move the polling place for security reasons. There have also been some 340,000 challenges of specific voters by a handful of political operatives that is documented in Palast’s film Vigilantes Inc. which is a name that the Klu Klux Klan used in the 1940s to similarly suppress the Black vote in the South.
In response to potential threats to the election, the National Guard has been put on alert in ten states and the FBI has been activated to respond to domestic terror threats at the polls. Did any of this scare voters from the polls? It didn’t seem so given the exuberance of the Harris/Walz campaign election watch party at the Park Tavern Restaurant just east of the capital. Some 3,000 volunteers and local celebrities showed up to hear Sen. Ralph Warnock (D-GA) speak and watch the Morehouse College marching band perform. But by the end of the night, it turned out that this wasn’t the Blue Wave the Democrats were hoping for.
On the day of the election, I had the opportunity to interview C.K. Hoffler, the lead lawyer for Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH organization… one of the leading civil rights groups in Georgia, and she has been heading up the National Transformative Justice Coalition to protect the vote in this state. Her group of lawyers and law students feverishly fielded calls from all over the nation on election violations. How is this even possible that the candidate who espoused a fascist agenda for America can even get this close to winning? The phrase that when fascism comes to America it will come draped in the flag and carrying a Christian cross may well come to pass as a prophecy.
What I can tell you is that of all the people I have interviewed who were undecided, they are like people who watch a football game without understanding how the game is played and why it comes down to a contest between two competing teams. I believe that half of this country either doesn’t understand the rules or values money over the basic ideals of democracy. With a candidate like Kamala Harris who has five times the experience as the man in this race, it is perhaps the height of sexism that a woman loses to a convicted misogynistic criminal. This can’t be the American idealism that I believe in.
As the 45th president becomes the 47th, it appears we are in for the rise of white Christian nationalism and a whole lot more racist rhetoric from the bully in the bully pulpit at the Oval Office. How it is that 71 million voters have fallen for another Trump campaign full of rambling, repeated lies only makes me wonder how 51% of the voters can be so completely gullible or easily duped. It appears that Vice President Kamala Harris has lost the popular vote by some five million votes, the majority of those cast in the rural areas. This election only explains how deeply divided the nation still is with over 66 million people (48% of the votes) going for Harris.
This certainly is a day when America has decided to turn back the clock on progress and turn its back on what could have been a much more inclusive future. This ends up being a dark night in Georgia and for America, it’s like the worst version of Back to the Future that I can imagine.
