Voting

Both the Democrats and the Republicans want to change American voting laws.  The Democrats want to make it easier to vote and make it more difficult to confirm that voters are legally eligible to vote.  The Republicans want to make it easier to confirm that voters are eligible to vote without denying any eligible voter the right to vote. 

I favor the old-fashioned method of having every voter to personally to a voting booth in his precinct.  He should have picture ID which would be inspected by poll workers to make sure that he is someone on their list of registered voters.  The precincts should be small enough that they do not have to handle thousands of voters trying to vote at once, creating unwieldy lines and long waits.  Americans voted like this for hundreds of years and can keep doing so.  Black voters were discriminated against and prevented from voting, but not because they had to vote in person; it was because of other requirements imposed specifically to keep blacks from voting.  Absentee ballots should be difficult, but not impossible to get for people who really need them.  They should be return by election day. 

The Democrats want to change the laws to make it easier for more and more black people to vote, because blacks vote on only one issue – race – which means they almost all vote automatically for Democrats.  In the last election, Democrats assumed that Hispanics would vote like blacks and vote overwhelmingly Democratic, but Hispanics vote because of their views on a number of issues and do not vote as a bloc as blacks do.  Many successful Hispanics are dug into the American free enterprise system and vote relatively conservatively.  However, new immigrants like those currently flooding in from Central America predictably vote Democratic, which is why the Democrats are so eager to get them in and naturalized as quickly as possible.  If they get more power, they will certainly shorten the wait time and reduce the requirements to become American citizens who can vote. 

The states that put Biden over top in the 2020 election changed their laws to make it easer to vote shortly before the election.  Now they complain that the Republicans are changing voting laws while there is much more time to discuss them publicly.  The Republicans are in part trying to undo the changes that the Democrats made in 2020 and go back to the way we have voted for a hundred years. 

1619 Was Not the Beginning of Slavery

4th of July Independence from Britain 1619 was not the beginning I was stuck that very little of the media coverage of the recent 4th of July mentioned that the day celebrates the American colonies’ independence from Britain. All the criticism of present-day America and its racism seemed to hypothesize that America emerged fully formed from some dark womb of non-history, when in fact it was many years old and had already formed much of its nature from its years of colonization before 1776. The hatred of the 1619 project should be directed at Britain, which ruled the colonies in 1619. The 4th of July marks the independence of the American colonies from the oppression of the British king and his rule. To ignore America’s colonial past is not just revisionist history, it is made-up history to justify hatred of the white race. Despite what blacks claim, the first slaves in North America probably did not come directly from Africa, but from trade with the existing Portuguese and Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and South America, which began in 1526, according to Wikipedia. Virginia Company records indicate that the 1619 slaves were taken by privateers from Portuguese or Spanish ships transporting them to Brazil or Mexico. Slavery did not start by American planters sending ships to Africa to bring back slaves. It was an unplanned spreading of what the Spanish and Portuguese had been doing for years. There may have been some slaves in the Spanish colony of Florida in the 1500s. Many of the slaves brought to the US in the 1700s were brought by British ships, until Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807, the same year that the US banned the importation of slaves in the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves of 1807, according to Wikipedia. The French also participated in the slave trade and allowed slaves in French colonies like Haiti. Slavery was not a uniquely American problem. It became an important aspect of the European colonization of the entire Western Hemisphere. To denote slavery as beginning in America in 1619 is misleading. There was no “America” in 1619, and slavery was endemic in all the other colonies surrounding those that eventually became the United States. The emphasis on slavery around the July 4, 2021, Independence Day celebrations was very misleading. It obscured the actual history of what happened on July 4, 1776, and was intended to foment anger and discontent in the United States. Mainstream and social media are selling black hatred of the US to the US population, just like they sold liberal hatred of Donald Trump to the US. Hatred sells, and the media will do anything for money.

I'll Take My Stand

A recent blog by the Abbeville Institute was about the book I’ll Take My Stand, The South and the Agrarian Tradition. Google has a preview of the book which is missing a number of pages but still provides an oppotunity to see what it contains. Published in 1930, there are essays by twelve well-known Southern authors. Here is a link to the Google preview. A lot has changed since 1930, but these essays give some inkling of what the Old South was like after the Civil War and before wide-spread industrialization, a useful counterpoint to the seemingly ever-present condemnation of the South by liberal politicians and the liberal media. In Gone with the Wind, I see Rhett Butler as the representative of the New South, and Ashley Wilkes as the representative of the Old South. I’ll Take My Stand was the voice of the Old South, a call for gentility and grace, peacefulness in the face of industrialization It was made up of the voices of twelve Southern writers, including the poets from The Fugitive at Vanderbilt, including Robert Penn Warren.