https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2021/05/03/stacey-abrams-fount-of-disinformation/?utm_source=recirc-
She says there’s a new Jim Crow. Here’s the truth.
Stacey Abrams opens her book, Our Time Is Now, with an anecdote about talking to her grandmother in 2018 when she was making her run for governor.
The Georgia Democrat’s grandmother grew up in Jim Crow Mississippi and, according to Abrams, told her how when she got her first opportunity to vote, in 1968, she was too frightened to go to the polling place. Abrams writes that this “perversion of democracy continues to play out across our country every day.”
“Voter suppression,” she continues, “works its might by first tripping and causing to stumble the unwanted voter, then by convincing those who see the obstacle course to forfeit the race without even starting to run.”
The problem with using her grandmother’s story to illustrate this point is that, after her initial hesitation, her grandmother indeed went and voted — just as pretty much all the people Abrams alleges are being scared away from the polls today are going to vote, too.
When Abrams writes that “across America, would-be voters continue to turn away like my grandmother did,” it’s literally true — because they aren’t turning away at all.
This isn’t in any way to discount her grandmother’s fear, born of living for so long under a system of racial tyranny. But the contemporary relevance of her experience is almost nil. In the old Jim Crow era, most blacks were barred from voting in the South by transparently pretextual measures, and sometimes by outright intimidation and violence; in what is supposedly the new Jim Crow era, blacks are full participants and often determine the outcome of races, as they did in the Georgia runoffs last January.
Spot the contradiction in this sentence that evidently escaped Abrams and her editors at Henry Holt. She writes of her experience running for governor: “I watched in real time as the conflicts in our evolving nation became fodder for racist commercials, horrific suppression — and the largest turnout of voters of color in Georgia’s history.”
Stacey Abrams is one of the great founts of disinformation in contemporary American political life. She’s managed to convince almost all Democrats to accept her ridiculous contention that she was the rightful winner of her 2018 gubernatorial race against Brian Kemp, which she never conceded. Her framework of looking at disputes over voting rules not as matters reasonable people can disagree about, or as fights for partisan advantage, but as an existential struggle over the attempted imposition of a new system of racist repression has prevailed on the center–left. Finally, she’s led the way in characterizing the new Georgia electoral law as the onset of Jim Crow 2.0, prompting denunciations of her state from corporate America and leading Major League Baseball to pull the All-Star Game from Atlanta.
She’s paid no price for her dishonesty and hysteria; rather, she’s been celebrated in verse and song. She’s been featured in Vogue (“Can Stacey Abrams save American democracy?” the headline asked) and was somewhere in the very outer orbit of Joe Biden’s VP short list. The way that Senator Elizabeth Warren slammed the new Georgia law is typical of her party’s Abrams-centric view of Georgia: “The Republican who is sitting in Stacey Abrams’ chair just signed a despicable voter suppression bill into law to take Georgia back to Jim Crow.”
Abrams is treated as an authority on all matters related to voting, when, in reality, the beginning of wisdom on such questions is realizing how utterly wrong she is.
