Which of the following are true? Police in Graham, N.C., on Sunday gassed people peacefully marching to a voting poll. President Donald Trump has been encouraging violence for four years, and Republicans were sewing racial division in 1964 when Congress passed the Civil Rights Act into law.
All of the above, according to Deadspin writer Julie DiCaro.
"On Sunday, for the first time in my life, I saw Americans gassed on their way to vote," DiCaro wrote of the North Carolina incident. It reminded her of photos she'd seen of Southern sheriffs turning dogs and fire hoses on civil rights demonstrators in Selma and Birmingham. "How could something so anti-democratic happen in America? Now we know."
On Sunday, Marchers in the “I Am Change” rally had the proper permit for a march from a Black church to an early voting polling site. But they "were met with police in quasi-riot gear and something the local sheriff called 'tear vapor,' because it looks really bad to admit to gassing your own citizens with a chemical outlawed in war since just after World War I by the Geneva Protocol," DiCaro writes.
Witnesses said the crowd was listening to a speech near a Confederate monument when police ordered the assembly to disperse. Children and senior citizens were gassed. Eight people were arrested. "All because they were peacefully marching to the polls. Seemed like things were pretty safe until the police showed up," Di Caro writes.
In Texas, a pro-Trump caravan surrounded a Biden campaign bus and tried to run it off the road, DiCaro claimed, adding:
"The whole surreal scene earned a thumbs up from the President, who has been encouraging violence against his detractors since the early days of his term."
The Graham Police Department's statement explained that it had worked closely with the event's organizers for a sidewalk march. However, marchers disobeyed police orders and impeded traffic by blocking a road and driving vehicles in the wrong direction on that road. Police ordered the unlawful assembly to disperse, but the warning went unheeded. Eight people were arrested for various offenses, including one count of assault on a law enforcement officer. Police said they sprayed the ground and never directly into the crowd.
DiCaro then goes to great lengths to make the argument that baseball's first African American player, Jackie Robinson, a Republican himself (appearing in photo), had forewarned about so-called racist Republicans 56 years ago in an op-ed for the Philadelphia Tribune. DiCaro said GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater was "no stranger to racist dog whistles when whipping up his supporters."
Robinson's op-ed include this quote:
“A new breed of Republicans has taken over the GOP. It is a new breed which is seeking to sell to Americans a doctrine which is as old as mankind—the doctrine of racial division, the doctrine of racial prejudice, the doctrine of white supremacy... I know it is true because I have felt it and experienced it as I lived through the unbelievable hours of the National GOP Convention. If I could couch in one single sentence the way I felt, watching this controlled steam-roller operation roll into high gear, I would put it this way, I would say that I now believe I know how it felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany.”
Since then "white America has Disney-fied and whitewashed Robinson’s political history," groans DiCaro, who knows a thing or two about selectively whitewashing history. She does not mention that former KKK Klansman and U.S. Senator Robert Byrd, Sen. Al Gore Sr. (and Sen. Goldwater) were among those who voted against the Civil Rights Act (CRA). She fails to mention that 80 percent of House Republicans voted for the CRA, compared to 63 percent of Democrats.
As for who is stoking up violence, in the last four years GOP offices in North Carolina and California were firebombed and a Republican office in New York was vandalized. So who's advocating violence?
DiCaro further poisons voters against her imagined racist GOP.:
"If you’re voting today, head into that booth knowing what you’re voting for and what you’re voting against. And don’t let anyone tell you that what you are seeing from the GOP is anything other than a naked font of racism, xenophobia, and bigotry, intended to sow discord and division. In essence, to run the idea of a multicultural America off the road."
After all, Jackie Robinson saw this all a long time ago, concludes DiCaro.
The devil always seems to be in the details for the far Left-wing propagandists at Deadspin. Don't confuse them with the facts because their biased minds are made up.
