This Thursday at 3 Eastern I’ll be doing another Substack live with Israel expert, journalist and historian Marc Schulman, following up on the American and Israeli elections. Watch for details.
In the immortal words of Bart Simpson, “Don’t have a cow, man! Pick another protein.”
Cindy Hyde-Smith’s tone-deaf response to soaring food prices became the most devastating ad of the recent campaign for Scott Colom and looks like it will propel him to victory once all the provisional (or as they call them “affidavit”) ballots are finally counted.
That’s in part because they come from blue areas of the state and in larger part because many of those suppressed voters abruptly taken off the rolls, the ones who needed those ballots, surprise, surprise, were people of color. And who said Jim Crow was dead? Some were purged at the last minute.
Over 230K Mississippi voters marked inactive days before midterm elections (MPB)
Mississippi voters say they were purged in error (NBC)
Some call it karma. I call it Korah, the infamous Jan. 6-er of the Bible, who used demagoguery and deception in an attempt to usurp Moses’ leadership. But the tables were turned on him, not by a tsunami, but an earthquake that swallowed up him and his cronies.
Korah in this case had another name, Callais, as in the infamous Supreme Court decision that supercharged gerrymandering for this cycle, a tactic that subsequently supercharged minority voting in the South, which propelled this historic rebuke. Like many MAGA leaders, Korah tried to pass himself off as a populist, a man of the people, which he was most definitely not. And in this scenario, Moses was the supposed elitist, when in fact Korah represented the one percent.
See Rabbi Jonathan Sacks Midrash on Korah: A Cloak Entirely Blue - Korah uses deception to embarrass Moses - in this case a blue cloak. How fitting!
And Cindy Hyde-Smith, who has remained out of sight for days, had the chutzpah to claim that she was defending election integrity. Such a woman of the people! Such a defender of democracy!
We know that is not the case. It is Mississippi that systematically tried to squelch the vote and snuff out the hopes of the descendants of the people they once enslaved. Scott MacFarlane reports in his Substack today that an attorney familiar with the election protection efforts told him, “Most remaining affidavit ballots were cast by voters placed on the inactive list by Mississippi’s shameful voter purge program earlier this year.”
And now, the shameless Korahs of Racississippi are clutching their pearls like Susan Collins, praying for the affidavit votes they deliberately purged to redeem them - and they won’t.
So Korah wanted to devour Moses’ leadership and was summarily devoured. And Racississippi wanted to devour voting rights and will now have to watch the drip-drip-drip of democracy kill their red hegemony, one affidavit at a time.
This reversal has played itself out dramatically across the country in red states where Trumpian arrogance infected the leadership with overconfidence and overreach. In southern Texas, where the Gestapo tactics of ICE turned Hispanics against the man they voted for in ‘24; in Ohio, where instead of eating dogs and cats, they dined on Ramaswamy and Husted; in Georgia, where Brian Kemp’s systematic voter purges and MAGA “reforms” could not stave off the flood of new blue voters that has turned their state a lovely shade of peachy-blue.
Dixie is not the same Dixie as it was even a week ago.
On Saturday night, I turned on Georgia vs Ole Miss. It has a different feel now, post midterms. Even the Chick-fil-A “Eat Mor Chikin” cows opted not to pick another protein.
But of course, in some ways, the change had already happened, as was noted in the infamous racist posting about the complexion of the Texas student body by Bo French, who subsequently lost his race. The earth swallowed him up too. Even Karl Rove couldn’t vote for him. Another pearl clutcher.
Somewhere, Willie Horton is smiling.
And so is John Lewis. And so is Medgar Evers, whom Colom evoked in his soaring final campaign ad. And so are James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, whose 1964 murders for the sake of voting rights may not have been in vain. And so is Emmett Till. Their deaths were not in vain.
I know the final votes have yet to be tallied, and maybe I’m jinxing things, but I have faith in the racism of MAGA, that those provisional voters will not waste their moment in the spotlight and will seal MAGA’s doom in Mississippi. I believe with a perfect faith that Cindy Hyde-Smith is headed to the bowels of the earth and the dustbin of history, alternate proteins and all.
And Lewis, Evers, MLK and Till will join the rest of the American electorate in bringing a huge sigh of relief to the persecuted peoples of the world. Autocrats everywhere are quaking in their boots today, especially in the Kremlin and the White House (and yes, the Knesset too, which, God willing, will change hands this week). And on the streets of Iran, where they quiver at Trump’s bait and switch, they can believe in America again and hope for democracy to return there someday. What goes around comes around. The ones who sought to devour democracy are themselves being devoured.
What a delicious irony. As delicious as a juicy steak (or tofu burgers for vegetarians like me).
Cowabunga!
