Joe Biden was in Bryan County, Ga., on Tuesday, celebrating the groundbreaking for a brand new Hyundai plant that will manufacture electric vehicles and batteries.
For Biden, what’s not to love, right? “Hyundai’s commitment to invest more than $5 billion and create more than 8,000 jobs making electric vehicles and batteries will help boost the entire community around Bryan County with good jobs people can raise a family on, and ultimately help lower costs for the American people,” he said.
The plant is supposed to produce about 300,000 vehicles a year starting in 2025 — if the demand is there. But Biden wasn’t so congratulatory in 2021 when the Georgia legislature passed a law that lengthened polling hours, increased early voting, and generally made it easier to legally cast your ballot.
“Jim Crow 2.0 is about two insidious things: voter suppression and election subversion. It’s no longer about who gets to vote; it’s about making it harder to vote. It’s about who gets to count the vote and whether your vote counts at all,” Biden said of the law on Jan. 11, 2022, in Atlanta. “It’s not hyperbole; this is a fact” (emphasis added).
Well, Joe, here are some “facts” for you from the Georgia Secretary of State’s office.
The numbers: Through Sunday, 740,615 Georgians have voted early in person. Another 76,247 have voted absentee, for a total of 816,862. “Saturday’s total marks an astounding 159% increase from day six of 2018 midterm early voting and shattered the turnout record of day six of early voting in the 2020 presidential election by 20%,” the office said.
“Georgia has had record early voting turnout since the first day of early voting this year,” the office continued, “surging to nearly twice the number on the first day of early voting in 2018. Totals have remained within striking distance of the 2020 presidential election turnout, and have shattered previous midterm turnout records by 50% or greater during every day of early voting this week.”
A record turnout? Where is the law “making it harder to vote”? And Biden’s bald-faced lie that the bipartisan vote-counters wouldn’t count people’s votes is dangerously and deliberately absurd.
In the finest traditions of the Democratic Party, Joe Biden used race-baiting as a political weapon. Not to necessarily scare white voters — although laying a racial guilt trip on whites is another device invented by Democrats — but to scare black voters into going to the polls.
But why not warn Hyundai about opening a plant in a state that practices “voter suppression”? Why not scold the company for not having the same courage as professional athletes? Why praise a company that’s going to reward a Republican governor and Republican legislature by bringing 8,000 jobs to the state that suppresses black voters and enacts a law dubbed “Jim Crow 2.0” not by some hysterical anti-white black activists but by the President of the United States?
“I think that today’s professional athletes are acting incredibly responsibly. I would strongly support them doing that,” Biden said during an ESPN interview in January 2021 after it was proposed that the All-Star game be moved out of Atlanta.
So now, huge numbers of Georgia voters, including huge numbers of black voters, are taking part in the 2022 midterm elections. There is no Jim Crow 2.0. There is no Jim Crow on steroids. There is no 21st-century Jim Crow. It should be said that this is not a surprise. Many observers noted at the time that the Georgia bill would make incremental improvements in the state’s voting procedures and would not in any way hinder the ability of Georgians to vote. They noted at the time that Biden’s Jim Crow talk was ugly demagoguery. They tried, unsuccessfully, to cool down all the media talk that amplified Biden’s ugly demagoguery.
In the end, the Georgia legislature and other state officials did not back down. The law is now in effect. And voters are voting in droves. Voting is so suppressed that turnout records are being broken on a daily basis. Do not look for President Biden or those who echoed his words to apologize. That’s not going to happen. But events have proven them wrong, wrong, wrong.
When the “watchdogs” become “lapdogs” and lick the hand of the master that feeds them, you have to ask: who is the real threat to democracy — an out-of-power president and his 70 million supporters or those who brazenly lie and arouse hatred against those of another race?
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