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Georgians Are Waking Up To Governor Kemp's Authoritarian Takeover

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Thom Hartmann
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Consider how Brian Kemp became governor.

As Secretary of State in 2018, he did what Jeb Bush ordered SoS Kathrine Harris to do in Florida in 2000, purging hundreds of thousands of Georgia voter s from the voting rolls, including massive numbers of African Americans (as documented in granular detail in my book The Hidden History of the War On Voting).

When Stacy Abrams ran against him for Governor in the election of 2018, the group she ran registered over 53,000 Black people to vote.

Then-Secretary of State Kemp refused to process those registrations before the day of his own race for governor when he ran against Abrams. He "won" the Governor's seat by just over 50,000 votes.

Democracy in Georgia was crippled by Kemp's actions, even before he yesterday outlawed Democrats running their own precincts to keep voting lines short, and criminalized giving water to 90-year-olds standing in lines Republicans configure to last for 8 or more hours.

The German survivor continues, as if he'd been living in Georgia or Iowa or Wisconsin for the past decade:

"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter. ...

"To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it -- please try to believe me -- unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop.

"Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, 'regretted,' that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these 'little measures' that no 'patriotic German' could resent must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing.

"One day it is over his head."

A week ago, we all thought we had a fine constitutional republic that had just been batt=ered a little bit by a crazy billionaire con man.

Today, we're discovering that throughout the past five years and really since 2001 with Bush's PATRIOT Act/torture/war/wiretap response to 9/11 we've been incrementally changing our country with every Republican administration, particularly at the state level, and most Americans didn't even realize it.

And then, Brian Kemp signs a one-day-to-pass piece of legislation that guts democracy in Georgia and the GOP announces they're going to push other states to do the same, and we suddenly realize that while everything still looks the same, in reality everything has truly and deeply changed.

We are farther along in the process than most Americans understand. America has now sunk so low in the rankings of democratic nations because of the way Republicans have rigged state governments and use the filibuster in the US Senate that we are as dysfunctional as Argentina or Hungary.

This, Mayer's German informant suggests, is how fascism will always take over a nation.

"You see, one doesn't see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for the one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don't want to act, or even to talk, alone; you don't want to 'go out of your way to make trouble.' Why not? -- Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty."

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Thom Hartmann is a Project Censored Award-winning New York Times best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk program on the Air America Radio Network, live noon-3 PM ET. www.thomhartmann.com His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People," "What Would Jefferson Do?," "Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle (more...)
 

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