Can Our Leaders Stop Using Fear and Race to Divide Us?
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Maybe we need to stop letting them
Living in Georgia amid a crucial run-off election, I became fatigued with the relentless campaign texts, mail, and political ads interrupting my video streaming. It ended with both Reverend Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff winning against David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler. This campaign season, like the last four years, has been a rollercoaster. That’s to be expected. But, between David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, I have never seen more race-baiting and fear-mongering in my life.
The pandering of Perdue
Perdue mocking Kamala Harris’s name at a Trump rally made me cringe. He knows what her name is because he’s served in the Senate with her. Yet, he drew the racist bully card in front of a crowd who cheered him on.
He reminded us that racism is an acceptable currency in our politics.
Eallier, he released a campaign ad deliberately enlarging his opponent Jon Ossoff’s nose, playing on anti-semitic tropes, which he later downplayed. Most of his ads are scare tactics that use conservative buzz words like “radical” and “socialism.”
While he was busy attacking Ossoff and attempting to scare voters, he could not talk in detail about how he’s helped his constituents. The one item he did discuss focused on was how a member of his staff helped a veteran, not himself.
He is also among the Republican senators who support objecting to the Electoral College vote. Sixty judges, Republican election officials, governors, and Trump’s former Attorney General and personal presidential attorney, William Barr, said no election fraud occurred. Still, he supports this last ditch effort that is doomed to failure for political positioning.
Loeffler’s one-note attacks
Drawing from the same playbook, Ann Coulter’s more evil twin, Kelly Loeffler, continually called Reverend Raphael Warnock a “radical. ” Her main political talking point, she said it at least 14 times in their last debate because she had no statements of substance to make. She couldn’t defend opposing relief to individuals at the beginning of the pandemic and offered nothing but deflection about her profiting off her COVID-19…