Hong Kong, Voter Suppression, and Republican Hypocrisy

The Republican Party is taking a firm stance against China’s anti-democratic policies designed to thwart free elections and autonomy in Hong Kong. The Beijing government is foisting new election laws on the former British colony intended to end the “one country, two systems” policies that allowed Hong Kong to exist as a democratic enclave in an otherwise totalitarian state.

Last year, GOP Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell praised Hong Kong’s pro-democracy, “demonstrations against the repressive grip of the Chinese communist party.” And he hailed the fact that “Hong Kong voters with American flags in hand dealt crushing defeats to Beijing’s preferred puppet candidates in elections last fall.”

McConnell continued his support for Hong Kong democracy this year by criticizing new Chinese laws restricting voters’ rights in the enclave. “The Chinese Communist Party is trying yet again to tighten their grip,” he said. “New laws supposedly related to national security aim to stifle dissent and curtail Hong Kongers’ civil liberties.”

Sen. Ted “Cancun” Cruz, R-Texas, also supported Hong Kong’s civil rights movement, saying last

January, “I’ll continue to support and stand alongside those of you speaking out against tyranny and fighting for freedom.”

China’s authoritarian government and its attempts to destroy democracy in Hong Kong deserve the strongest condemnation. Yet the GOP’s response to the Chinese restrictions would be more admirable if it weren’t so hypocritical.

At the same time McConnell criticized China’s new laws curtailing the civil liberties of Hong Kong’s citizens, the Republican Party was launching a multitude of state-level voter suppression laws to prevent American citizens of color from casting votes in future elections. And, as in Hong Kong, the reason for passing these anti-democracy laws was that the GOP suffered crushing election defeats in November 2020.

In February, the Brenner Center for Justice reported that “33 states have introduced, prefiled, or carried over 165 restrictive bills this year.” In the first two months of 2021, Republican state legislatures introduce four times the number of voter suppression bills than introduce in the whole of 2020. The Center described this anti-democracy legislation as “a backlash to historic voter turnout in the 2020 general election and grounded in a rash of baseless and racist allegations of voter fraud and election irregularities.”

Salon reported that number to be much higher, claiming the “tidal wave of (Republican) voter suppression” included 253 bills in 43 states.

These bills aim to limit mail-in voting, which became popular in 2020 during the COVID crisis; impose stricter voter ID requirements, which makes voting difficult for the elderly and minority voters who don’t drive; slash voter registration opportunities, also aimed at the elderly and people of color; and enable more aggressive voter roll purges, all aimed at removing people of color from the voting rolls.

Georgia—where a massive voter turnout helped give Joe Biden the presidency and sent two Democrats to the U.S. Senate—is one of the states scrambling to make it harder for its citizens to vote. On March 26, the state's governor, Brian Kemp, signed into law a bill that bans automatic voter registration, limits Sunday early voting days and ballot drop boxes, and restricts absentee voting. It also prohibits volunteers from passing out free food and drinks to people forced to stand in lines for hours because of the state's failure to provide adequate polling places in minority neighborhoods.

Georgia’s Republican legislators introduced the bills in response to Donald Trump’s baseless claim of widespread voter fraud in the state.

The Georgia restrictions are so heinous and so obviously aimed at Black voters they are being compared to the Jim Crow laws which existed in the U.S. from the end of the Civil War until 1968. “We know their targets are Black voters,” said Cliff Albright, co-founder of the Atlanta-based Black Voters Matter. "These (legislation) notes are dripping in the blood of Jim Crow.”

Jim Crow laws were state and local laws that marginalized African Americans by denying them the right to vote, hold jobs, get an education, or marry outside their race. Violating Jim Crow laws often faced arrest, fines, jail sentences, violence, and death.

Lest there be any doubt as to the oppressive nature of the Jim Crow laws, they were so admired by Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler he used them as a model for the German racial purity laws that restricted the rights of Jews, Blacks, Slavs, and Roma.

The Republican Party did not suffered setbacks in November 2020 because of voter fraud. Repeated investigations by federal and state agencies declared the election one of the cleanest in U.S. history. Fifty lawsuits filed by Trump supporters alleging voting fraud were found without merit by state and federal courts. The Republicans lost because their presidential candidate was widely unpopular because of his hateful rhetoric, unprecedented corruption, and dictatorial ambitions.

Both the Chinese government and the Grand Old Party need to realize governments only suppress the vote because their policies are unpopular. If you want to win over voters and win elections, don’t restrict people’s right to vote, change your policies.

That Time When Business Greed Nearly Lost the Allies WWII and How It Relates to the Covid Crisis

We are plunging toward a dark and dangerous winter. A third wave of Covid-19 infections is surging around the world. At this writing, U.S. Covid cases are increasing at a rate of more than 100,000 new infections per day. One thousand Americans are dying from the virus each day. The health care facilities of nearly every state are being overwhelmed by Covid caseloads.

It is a sad fact that all this could have been avoided.

If more state governments had been responsible and closed the bars, restaurants, gyms, and political rallies that act like petri dishes for the virus’s growth, Covid’s impact could have been mitigated. But too many politicians bent to the pressure placed on them by both small businesses and corporations to avoid such lockdowns. Even in states like California, where a lockdown did start to contain the virus, politicians eventually caved and lifted restrictions too early and too quickly.

We’ve seen this same profit-at-any-price mentality in this country before when another scourge threatened American lives, and businesses refused to adapt to the situation to save lives. The last time we saw this kind of thinking, we nearly lost WWII.

Operation Drumbeat

Within weeks of declaring war on the United States, Adolf Hitler launched a U-boat offensive against the American East Coast called Operation Paukenschlag (Operation Drumbeat). On January 14, 1942, the first German sub arrived off the coast of Rhode Island, soon followed by four more. The German sailors were delighted to find tankers and freighters sailing alone without escort. Even more surprising, they found the coast brightly lit by shore lights that provided U-boats with perfectly silhouetted targets.

Blackouts are a necessity of war. Across the Atlantic, blackouts were imposed on every English, French, and German shoreline. Even before entering the war, American military officials realized the potential need for blacking out the Eastern seaboard at night. But local chambers of commerce, fearing a loss of profits, fought every attempt to impose a coastal blackout.

The result was devastating.

In just weeks, those first five U-boats sank 16 ships totaling 104,761 tons. Allied logistics experts estimated the loss in ships, cannon, vehicles, and fuel was equivalent to the damage caused by 30,000 German aerial bombing sorties. And it was just the beginning.

Like the coronavirus, the U-boat onslaught came in waves. The first wave may have come as a surprise—though it shouldn’t have—but there was no excuse to not be prepared for the following waves. But, just as with the Covid crisis today, America remained unresponsive to the threat

The blame can’t be laid entirely at the feet of East Coast business interests—though they fought tooth-and-against blacking out shoreline enterprises. Just as with the Covid crisis, there was ineptitude at high levels of government where bureaucrats would not accept the reality of a U-boat threat in American waters.

The Anglophobe Admiral

Admiral Ernest King, chief of naval operations, was an Anglophobe. A British official described King as “intolerant and suspicious of all things British, especially the Royal Navy.” Before America entered the war, King rejected all calls for preparing for a U-boat attack on the United States, refusing to believe Germany had such a capability despite the fact U-boats had operated in American waters in WWI.

Merchant ship Dixie Arrow torpedoed off Cape Hatteras by U-71, 26 March 1942.

Like Donald Trump’s refusal to accept the reality of the Covid crisis, King refused to acknowledge the threat facing merchant ships sailing in American waters or his own failure to protect them. Even after the first German submarine onslaught, King’s Anglophobia made him resist implementing any of the hard-won lessons the English learned about fighting U-boats in three years of war. He adamantly refused to adopt a convoy system to protect Allied shipping as the British had despite the fact that convoys—groups of merchant ships protected by sub-hunting ships and patrol boats—was used by the American Navy in WWI. King’s attitude, and that of many of his subordinates, was summed up by U.S. Rear Adm. R. S. Edwards. “Americans must learn by their own mistakes,” he told a British colleague, “and we have plenty of ships.”

In fact, we did not have plenty of ships.

By mid-March, the loss of oil tankers was so great that the Petroleum Industry War Council warned the U.S. would run out of oil in six months. By June 1942, Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall worried “that another month or two of this . . . [and] . . . we will be unable to bring sufficient men and planes to bear against the enemy . . .”

The danger to the war effort posed by King's ethnocentrism prompted General Dwight D. Eisenhower to write, “One thing that might help win this war is to shoot King.”

To the British, the Battle of the Western Atlantic was a “holocaust.”

A convoy system wouldn’t be organized until mid-1942, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered King to implement one.

And still the lights shone

In February 1942, FDR issued an executive order giving the military authority to order coastal blackouts. Once again, seashore businesses pushed back, and the military hesitated to implement the order. Admiral King sent the coastal defense commander a “request” to implement a “dimout” of shore lights, but he still refused to call for a full blackout.

U-boats victories mounted as did merchant ship losses. For the tourists and party clubbers enjoying the well-lit coastal nightlife, the war came home the hard way. At night, they could see torpedoed ships burning offshore. In the mornings, those same fun lovers found the scorched bodies of merchant sailors that had washed ashore. Eventually, coastline businesses began to lose money simply because people did not want to be that close to the reality of war. And still, they refused to execute blackouts until much later in the year.

By then the damage was done. In the first six months of 1942, nearly 400 Allied merchantmen were sunk in American waters at a cost to Germany of only six U-boats. Unlike Pearl Harbor, none of the ships were salvageable. No one was ever held responsible for these terrible losses. It would still take until the first half of 1943 before American anti-submarine warfare capabilities caught up with those of Britain and Canada.

(New York Times)

Today Americans face a similar deadly threat, one that threatens the well-being of us all, not just a relative few merchant sailors. Yet we’re are seeing the same inaction and ineptitude that nearly lost us the war against the Axis Powers. While European countries are seeing positive results by reimposing restrictions on restaurants, bars, and other gathering places, too many Americans still resist taking basic precautions that can slow the spread of the virus and save hundreds of lives (see graph). At this writing, just shy of a quarter million Americans have died from the disease, and the number keeps climbing every day.

In his book Operation Drumbeat, author Michael Gannon concludes, “Civilian avarice and carelessness must take their places on the list of agents accountable for the U-boat triumphs.”  When the history of America’s war against Covid-19 is written, what will the historians say of us?

Militia Plots: A Rare but Serious Threat

The news shocked many Americans. The FBI announced they had thwarted an armed rightwing extremist militia plot to capture local government officials and hold them hostage.

You may think I’m talking about the October arrests of more than a dozen Michigan militia henchmen who were planning to abduct Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and put her on trial for the heinous crime of trying to save Michiganders from the coronavirus.

You’d be wrong if you did.

What I described above was a 1934 plot to seize control of the San Diego, CA city hall by a rightwing militia of quasi-Christian zealots called the Silver Shirts. Founded in 1933 by William Dudley Pelley (right), a one-time presidential candidate, the Silver Legion of America was patterned after the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s Black Shirts with the intention of establishing a “Christian Commonwealth” in America that would exclude all Jews and nonwhites.

The Silver Legion was a pro-fascist/Nazi group, one of several that existed in the U.S. in the 1930s. (See: American Fascists: A Forgotten History.) The local contingent of Silver Shirts concocted a plan to overthrow San Diego’s city government when they heard rumors that a group of communists was making similar plans (they weren’t). Two Marines from Camp Pendleton uncovered the plot when they infiltrated the Legion while investigating a series of weapons thefts from local military units.

Militia coup attempts like those thwarted in San Diego and Michigan might seem rare, but they aren’t unknown, and they are no laughing matter. They pose a very real threat to American citizens and to our democracy.

 The first antigovernment militia coup was the 1791 Whiskey Rebellion. Contrary to the belief of many radical gunowners that the Second Amendment was intended by our Founding Fathers to provide for the overthrow the government, the Whiskey Rebellion was quickly put down by a federal force led by then-President George Washington. (See: The Myths that Drive America’s Love of Guns.)

Anti-government militia plots have been the bane of American life, particularly since the 1990s. Several militia plots were uncovered during that decade. Members of a group called the North American Militia planned to bomb several targets in Michigan, including a federal building and an IRS building, and even discussed assassinating various government officials.

In 1997, members of a Missouri militia group planned a July 4 attack on Fort Hood, Texas, as the military base hosted an annual “Freedom Festival” attended by 50,000 men, women, and children. Fortunately, the FBI and the Missouri State Highway Patrol thwarted the plot. (See: The Militia Movement.) And in March 2011, the FBI charged nine members of an extremist militia group in Michigan with seditious conspiracy for plotting to attack law enforcement and spark an uprising against the government. (See: Domestic Terrorism: Focus on Militia Extremism.)

These rebellions were stopped or quickly suppressed before they started. But that doesn’t mean militia coups are not dangerous. In 1898, a white supremacist militia successfully overthrew the biracial city government of Wilmington, NC. There was no response to the deadly coup from local police, the state government, or Washington, DC. Its success is having unfortunate repercussions in today’s presidential politics, as Donald Trump keeps holding up that event as a model for future coups. (See:  The White Supremacist Coup that Trump Uses as a Template.)

Many Americans like to believe Timothy McVeigh’s April 19, 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building that killed 168 men, women, and children was the act of a “lone wolf” terrorist, Timothy McVeigh. In fact, in addition to McVeigh, three accomplices were also charged and tried for the crime. They had hoped the bombing would initiate an uprising that would take down the U.S. government. McVeigh was also a member of Christian Identity, a rightwing, white supremacist militia, which the FBI believed may have also been involved with the plot. (See: Were There More OKC Conspirators?: The Elohim City Connection.)

The last four years saw a rise in militia activity, thanks to the hateful and extremist rhetoric of Donald Trump. Armed militia members confronted peaceful Black Lives Matter protestors and marched to protest social distancing practices implemented by local governments in the wake of the coronavirus. Even before planning to abduct Gov. Whitmer, Michigan militia gunmen marched on the state capitol in an obvious threat to state lawmakers.

Not all rightwing coup plots were the work of militia movements. In 1933, a group of wealthy conservative bankers and financiers plotted to raise a private army and use it to overthrow the American government and establish a fascist dictatorship. Called The American Putsch and The Bankers Revolt, the plot was thwarted by the man they approached to lead their army. Smedley Butler, a retired Marine Corps major general and two-time recipient of the Medal of Honor, played along with the conspirators and collected evidence for the FBI. One of the alleged conspirators was a wealthy, pro-Nazi financier named Prescott Bush, father and grandfather of two U.S. presidents. (See: American Fascists: A Forgotten History.)

Unlike George Washington riding forth to preserve the country and democracy during the Whiskey Rebellion, Donald Trump has done nothing to mitigate the threat from these rightwing extremist groups. On the contrary, Trump appointed self-avowed pro-fascist, white nationalists like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller to his staff. He’s referred to white nationalist groups as “some good people” and told the Proud Boys to “stand by.” Trump has also called for armed militia members to act as “poll watchers” during the balloting. His failure to condemn these hate groups or their malicious plots only encourages them to continue their terrorist plots. More conspiracies will be on the horizon as long as this irresponsible president remains in power.

And despite the best efforts of law enforcement, the next plot may not be stopped in time.