Thom Hartmann For Buzzflash: If You Can’t Stop Them (Black and Browns) From Voting, Just Help Them Die?

July 16th 2020

By Thom Hartmann

First, Georgia’s governor Brian Kemp, as Secretary of State, did everything he could to keep hundreds of thousands of Black and Hispanic voters in Georgia from having their votes counted or even being able to vote at all.

In the months running up to his own race for governor, he conducted massive purges of the voting rolls, closed polling places in Black and Hispanicneighborhoods, and refused to certify the recent voter registrations of about 50,000 African Americans.

Now it appears he’s decided that if he can’t prevent Black and Hispanic people from voting he should just help them die.

Kemp, like the entire nation, learned on April 7, when the New York Times and the Washington Post both ran front page stories about it, that Black and Hispanic people were dying at disproportionate rates from Covid 19.

No doubt purely by coincidence, that was also the week that everyone from right wing talk show hosts to major rightwing influencing groups to the Trump administration all pivoted from concern and caution about the coronavirus to the message, “It’s time to open America back up and do it now!”

Trump tweeted “Liberate!“ And white guys with guns and Nazi and Confederate flags showed up in state capitols to demand that all those disproportionately minority front-line workers get back to work.

It was as if the racists across the country, and Stephen Miller and Donald Trump in the White House, figured out that if they wanted to actually reduce America‘s Black and Hispanic population, this was their chance. They could use this virus to, “Make America white again.“

Call it the “Republican Party’s 21st Century Eugenics” program.

Doubling down on this apparent strategy, yesterday Georgia’s Governor Brian Kemp officially banned cities in Georgia from enforcing their own face mask requirements.

Georgia cities with large Black and Hispanic populations like Savannah and Atlanta had passed mask ordinances and their mayors were trying to enforce them.

Governor Kemp just put an end to all that.

As Georgia’s hospitals are reaching capacity and the virus is ripping through communities of people who can’t easily telecommute or work from home, the governor is taking an official step that could dramatically increase infection and death rates among low income and minority people across the state.

It’s hard to imagine that elected public officials, even if they won by fraud like Kemp and Trump, would be so craven as to engage in policies that specifically target minority groups for illness and death.

There has to be another explanation, right?

I just can’t figure out what it is.

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the War on Voting and more than 30 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.