• jon

    Posted 1307 days ago

  • I was moved by Newkirk's letter to his mother and how she instilled a fighting spirit in him, to always push for progress. For example:

    In school textbooks, the black-and-white photographs of civil-rights protests suggested that America had vanquished its demons ages ago. But you told me that the people marching in those photographs were the people who sang in the choir at church and who brought chitlins to family reunions.

    Then the history of how the ballot was won was very good, but he lost me towards the end at making suggestions for how to secure voting rights. I'm not a fan of grouping Republicans into a big category saying they are opposed to voting rights. They aren't. Sure there are state legislatures who are doing it, but I just think the vast majority of people don't care and don't think about. If someone says you have to bring an ID to vote, people just say sure I don't care about that, I always have my driver's license. They don't necessarily make the connection that it marginalizes communities that don't have a tradition of being integrated seamlessly with state beaurocracy.

    It's a very, very hard stretch for people to come to this conclusion. So i don't know if the effort should be around pushing constitutional changes, or if it should be delivering a direct and concise message. I think things are going decent right now with that messaging and "voter disenfranchisment," but there can be a bigger effort to try and show how this impacts real life people. It's just so hard for the average Republican voter to get up and go to work and then worry about voter laws. It's just not a priority and it will never be, so we have to figure out how to frame these discriminatory laws in a language that everyone can understand, not draped in the rhetoric of the Left.

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