Category Archives: History

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, August 6, 2020:  

In announcing its multi-million dollar ad buy on Wednesday, the Biden campaign let the Associated Press see an advance copy of its ad titled “Better America” targeted specifically to black voters. The AP quoted part of the one-minute ad:

We must choose to fight for that better America. And just like our ancestors who stood up to the violent racists of a generation ago, we will stand up to this president and say “No more” because America is better than him.

 

So we choose to be bigger. We choose to be bolder. We choose to bring back justice, respect and dignity to this country. We choose Joe Biden to lead us all towards that American promise together.

Except that a large bloc of those black voters aren’t choosing Biden. The results from the American University Black Swing Voter Project, which were just released, showed that the most reliable Democrat bloc remains those black voters over 60. The Project said that 86 percent of them plan to vote for former Vice President Joe Biden in November.

But of those between ages 30 and 59,

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, July 31, 2020: 

“Swing” voters — defined as those Democrats who voted for Obama in 2012 and for Trump in 2016 — are staying with Trump, according to Rich Thau, a focus group moderator. Thau, head of the Swing Voter Project for the polling consultancy firm Engagious, told CNN on Wednesday:

Focus groups are early-detection systems of shifting public opinion. Before something important appears in polling it often bubbles up first in focus group conversations.

 

And, each month for the past 17 months, I’ve had a unique window into the Americans largely responsible for giving the president his slim Electoral College victory: [the] so-called “Obama-Trump” swing voters across the upper Midwest.

 

Our Swing Voter Project has uncovered that many of these people … prefer Trump over Biden. In fact, 22 of 33 respondents [in Ohio, Iowa, Pennsylvania and Michigan] feel this way.

Thau explained why:

• They think a businessman is best suited to turn the country around;

• They feel that COVID-19 was not Trump’s fault;

• They equate the Black Lives Matter protestors with the rioters attacking federal buildings and retail businesses;

• They don’t want historic monuments torn down;

• They dismiss the idea of defunding the police as “ridiculous”;

• They want America to be first;

• They oppose immigration policies that grant benefits to foreigners at their expense; and

• They like a leader who fights back instead of a politician who “folds in the face of special interests.”

From his focus group conversations with these voters, Thau learned that most of them “couldn’t name a single thing [that] Biden had said or done regarding the pandemic. In bellwether Macomb County [Michigan], on July 21, none of the nine voters I interviewed could name a single thing Biden had achieved in nearly 50 years in national politics.”

And several told him they perceived Biden as a “puppet” of special interests if he were elected, while others said they were convinced that Biden has dementia, even mocking him after viewing videos of his gaffes online.

He noted the difference in their views of Biden compared to Hillary Clinton:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, July 24, 2020: 

In the press release that followed President Trump’s first-ever virtual fundraiser held on Tuesday, hostess Kimberly Guilfoyle, chair of the Trump Victory Finance Committee, exulted:

Trump Victory’s groundbreaking fundraising record proves the American people are passionate about gaining four more years under President Trump’s strong leadership.

 

Across the nation, the SILENT MAJORITY are coming together to donate their valuable time and hard-earned money to help make this President’s re-election a reality.

 

The most important measure of success in this race is enthusiasm, and the enthusiasm from President Trump’s supporters cannot be matched.

In fact Democrat Party presumptive candidate Joe Biden can’t even come close. His most successful virtual fundraiser brought in just $7.6 million.

More than 300,000 donors contributed to the record set on Tuesday, with the average donation nearly $67. When supporters express enthusiasm in polls, that’s one thing. When they express it by debiting their credit cards, that’s another thing altogether.

The enthusiasm “gap” between the candidates was revealed in an Emerson College poll in late April, which found that

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Wednesday, July 22, 2020:

The shrinkage of support for the Democrat Party’s presumptive presidential candidate Joe Biden among young black and Hispanic likely voters in November’s election has caught the attention of Harry Enten of CNN.

Enten is one of the new breed of political journalists specializing in data-driven reporting and was one of the first people Nate Silver hired when he relaunched his FiveThirtyEight polling website under the auspices of ESPN in 2013. He not only writes for CNN but also produces The Forecast Fest, which focuses on the 2020 presidential election.

Noted Enten on Tuesday, “Trump continues to do something perhaps unexpectedly among Black voters: hold his own against Biden relative to many people’s expectations.”

Those expectations were that Biden would

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Tuesday, July 21, 2020: 

Upon learning that the executive committee of the Democratic Party of Georgia had selected her to succeed John Lewis as the representative from Atlanta’s 5th Congressional District, Georgia State Senator Nikema Williams said:

Nobody could possibly fill the shoes of Congressman Lewis. His leadership and fighting spirit is needed now more than ever in this country.

 

I believe it is imperative that we choose someone with a long track record of fearlessly standing up for what is right and someone who will take on the endless attacks on our rights that we’ve grown accustomed to seeing from the Republican Party.

With that statement, she gave notice that little if anything is going to change: The voice from the 5th District of Georgia will continue to be noisy, shrill, and demeaning to Republicans, especially the president.

As one of 131 people vying to take John Lewis’ place, Williams campaigned on Zoom featuring a framed picture of Lewis’ mugshot from his arrest during a Nashville sit-in during the 1960s. She declared herself to be “a student of the John Lewis school of politics,” which “practiced the art of getting into ‘good trouble.’”

This was a phrase no doubt familiar to members of the executive committee. In 2016, Lewis made a presentation at the U.S. Department of Transportation where he quoted Martin Luther King, Jr.:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Monday, July 6, 2020:  

In announcing that he had signed an executive order creating a National Garden of American Heroes during his Mt. Rushmore speech on Friday night, Trump displayed a masterful understanding not only of the national psyche but how such an order would put his critics on the defensive.

The national psyche is fed up with destruction, especially of national monuments celebrating American heroes. It reflects an increasing level of disgust and distrust of the national media, which opposes “everything Trump.” His executive order is a mark of political genius.

At Mt. Rushmore on Friday night the president said:

I am announcing the creation of a new monument to the giants of our past. I am signing an executive order to establish the National Garden of American heroes, a vast outdoor park that will feature the statues of the greatest Americans to ever live.

 

Let us go forward united in our purpose and rededicated in our resolve. We will raise the next generation of American patriots, we will write the next thrilling chapter of the American adventure, and we will teach our children to know that they live in a land of legends, that nothing can stop them, and that no one can hold them down. They will know that in America, you can do anything, you can be anything, and together, we can achieve anything.

His executive order made clear the purpose of the statuary park:

America owes its present greatness to its past sacrifices. Because the past is always at risk of being forgotten, monuments will always be needed to honor those who came before. Since the time of our founding, Americans have raised monuments to our greatest citizens….

 

These statues are silent teachers in solid form of stone and metal. They preserve the memory of our American story and stir in us a spirit of responsibility for the chapters yet unwritten. These works of art call forth gratitude for the accomplishments and sacrifices of our exceptional fellow citizens who, despite their flaws, placed their virtues, their talents, and their lives in the service of our Nation.

 

These monuments express our noblest ideals: respect for our ancestors, love of freedom, and striving for a more perfect union. They are works of beauty, created as enduring tributes. In preserving them, we show reverence for our past, we dignify our present, and we inspire those who are to come. To build a monument is to ratify our shared national project.

His order names a task force to plan for the park, to be completed no later than July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The statues “should depict historically significant Americans … an individual who was, or became, an American citizen and was a public figure who made substantive contributions to America’s public life or otherwise had a substantive effect on America’s history.”

His order provided guidelines for his task force:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Sunday, July 5, 2020:

In his “Salute to America” speech given on Saturday night from the White House South Lawn, President Donald Trump sharpened his attacks on America’s enemies while reiterating themes from his remarkable speech the night before at Mt. Rushmore.

He referred to the Trump “phenomenon” as “our movement [which] is based on lifting all citizens to reach their fullest God-given potential,” adding:

Never forget: We are one family and one nation. This rich heritage belongs to every citizen, young and old, first-generation American and tenth-generation American. This heritage belongs to every citizen, young and old — first-generation American — we want to go from first generation to tenth generation; it matters not. We are American. We are from the USA. This great heritage belongs to citizens of every background and of every walk of life.

But there are people, efforts, movements and campaigns to keep that from happening, said the president:

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Friday, July 3, 2020:  

Stony Brook University political science professor Helmut Norpoth appeared on “Lou Dobbs Tonight” on Friday, predicting that President Donald Trump has a 91 percent chance of winning reelection in November.

He’s been making the media rounds, and his prediction, for months. On May 29, in an interview on “The Ingraham Angle”, he explained: “The key to the November election is the primaries. And the primaries are already giving us a lot of information.”

On June 20 he told the New York Post: “I don’t remember any uncontested campaign for a sitting president like this. People don’t normally turn out in large numbers for a race without a challenger.” But in 23 of the 27 states that held primaries this year the president has racked up higher totals than President Obama did — often doubling or tripling his numbers.

For example,

This article appeared online at TheNewAmerican.com on Thursday, June 11, 2020: 

A poll conducted by UCLA for its Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape project revealed that younger black voters hold much more favorable opinions of President Trump than do their elders.

According to results released on Wednesday,