Month: November 2024

Why Did Trump Win? What Should Democrats Do Now?
Current Events and History

Why Did Trump Win? What Should Democrats Do Now?

11/26/2024 Bruce Strom 0

Trump’s only path to victory in 2024 was to continue stirring up the hate and prejudice that won him the election in 2016. Simply put, more Americans approved of Trump’s divisive message than disapproved. Trump’s question to black journalists: When did Kamala Harris turn black? may have been more calculating than it seemed. Since Kamala Harris could pass for white, Trump wanted to hammer home the message to his base that Harris was as black as a burnt black kettle.
In this past election, we learned that many older white voters who will vote for an old boring white guy will never vote for a younger black woman, whether she could pass for white or not. Joe Biden won in 2020 because he was an old boring white guy with significant support from black voters. Unfortunately, in 2024 black and liberal voters did not turn out in sufficient numbers to tip the balance. My gut feeling is that a Tim Waltz-Kamala Harris ticket would have won, but that was a political impossibility given the short time frame needed to swap the candidates. After Biden’s disastrous debate performance, he was not seen as a winner.
Again, do not forget that half the country lives in the news bubble dominated by right-wingnut media, including Fox News, Newsmax, Breitbart, Steve Bannon’s podcast, and Alex Jones, that lie with abandon. […]

Eugenics Under Jim Crow America and Nazi Germany: Sterilization, Euthanasia, Lynchings, and Holocaust
Civil Rights

Eugenics and Scientific Racism in the Jim Crow Deep South and Nazi Germany

11/22/2024 Bruce Strom 0

Was there a similar Final Solution in America? True, there were no gas chambers in the Deep South, nor was there a similar system of systematic mass murder, but there were riots such as the Tulsa Riots where the homes, businesses, and churches of thousands of blacks were torched and looted, and many blacks were injured and murdered. In these riots, mostly occurring in many cities during the interwar years, on rare occasions when there were police arrests, they arrested the black victims who fought back. The major difference is that the Nazis murdered far more people much quicker, and their regime lasted only a decade, as opposed to the seventy-year reign of Jim Crow racism in America. […]

Redemption Era of Jim Crow, Reconstruction Ends after Contested 1876 Election
Civil War and Reconstruction

After Grant: Southern Redemption and Jim Crow, Reconstruction Ends after Contested 1876 Election

11/09/2024 Bruce Strom 0

What were his greatest accomplishments? Chernow states that “Grant showed a deep reservoir of courage in directing the fight against the Ku Klux Klan and crushing the largest wave of domestic terrorism in American history. It was Grant who helped to weave the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteen Amendments into the basic fabric of American life.”
Chernow rues: “Once Reconstruction collapsed, it left southern blacks for eighty years at the mercy of Jim Crow segregation, lynchings, poll taxes, literacy tests, and other tactics designed to segregate them from whites and deny them the vote. Black sharecroppers would be degraded to the level of debt-ridden serfs, bound to their former plantation owners. After 1877, the black community in the South steadily lost ground until a rigid apartheid separated the races completely, a terrible state of affairs that would not be fixed until the rise of the civil rights movement after World War II.” […]

President Grant's Indian Policy, and Custer's Battle of Little Bighorn
Civil War and Reconstruction

President Ulysses Grant’s Indian Policy, and Custer’s Defeat at the Battle of Little Bighorn

11/06/2024 Bruce Strom 0

Custer had a reputation for cruelty to both Indians and to his own men. Chernow notes: “In 1867, Custer was court-martialed for ordering deserters to be shot and Grant thought he was guilty. The following year, Custer and his cavalry obliterated an Indian village,” “wantonly murdering more than a hundred Southern Cheyenne, including women and children.”
Grant told Sherman and Sheridan that he did not want Custer to lead a force in the campaign against the Sioux Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. Custer had the chutzpah to request a personal interview with Grant at the White House to appeal this decision, but Grant refused to meet with him. But with Sheridan’s intervention, Grant gave in and allowed Custer to join the expedition against the Indians. […]