The country holds its breath as Election Day approaches. The major candidates hold massive rallies in a last-ditch effort to mobilize voters in their favor, even as they confidently predict victory for themselves and their followers nervously watch the early vote totals and crunch the latest poll numbers. People in the electorate struggle to sort out fact from fiction in the face of a constant onslaught of disinformation (complete with “deep fake” videos and posts on X), they speculate among each other about the latest developments, they argue in favor of their preferred candidates, or they debate the merits of participating in the electoral process at all. For someone trying to understand the political intrigues and make an informed voting decision, things can get quite confusing.
In the final week leading up to the November 5 general election, the main antagonists decided to give the public a little push, making their “closing arguments” in an effort to secure as many votes as possible by providing a peek as to how they plan to move the country forward (or backward).
One Last Appeal to the Voters
On Sunday October 27, former president Donald Trump held a rally at Madison Square Garden (MSG), at which a comedian referred to Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage” among other racist and otherwise xenophobic remarks from a variety of speakers (https://www.npr.org/2024/10/28/nx-s1-5167948/the-offensive-rhetoric-used-at-trumps-madison-square-garden-rally; https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/10/trump-madison-square-garden-rally/680424/). Trump acolyte and political advisor Stephen Miller continued the authoritarian language (“America is for Americans and Americans only”; https://forward.com/opinion/668440/miller-trump-madison-square-garden-immigrants/) he had used to threaten opponents of the Trump administration years ago when Trump was in the White House. And Trump himself, when asked later to apologize for the rally’s more divisive and xenophobic rhetoric, instead tried to disavow any knowledge of such hateful rhetoric and insisted that the event was an “absolute lovefest”, reminiscent of his insistence that the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol was “a day of love”. Critics and analysts compared this event to a Nazi rally at the same Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1939_Nazi_rally_at_Madison_Square_Garden). Trump’s MSG rally came within a week of former Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s manic and misogynistic “Daddy’s home and you’ve been a bad girl” screed at an October 23 Turning Point Action rally in Duluth, Georgia (https://newrepublic.com/post/187485/tucker-carlson-daddy-trump-spanking-speech). The level of vitriol at these rallies led Puerto Rican musician Nicky Jam, who Trump had referred to as a “Black music superstar” and misgendered as “she” at an earlier rally, to withdraw his endorsement for Trump, stating that Puerto Ricans “deserve respect.”
On Tuesday October 29, vice president Kamala Harris derided Trump as “deranged and unhinged” at a rally she held on the same grounds where Trump had delivered his January 6, 2021 speech that had helped incite the insurrection and attack on the US Capitol, and made what has been billed as her “closing argument” in which she formally asked for the votes of the American people. She touted the planks of her agenda designed to protect women’s reproductive rights, provide tax breaks to middle class and working families, and lend an ear to those who disagree with her policies, in contrast to Trump’s claims that he would seek to prosecute and imprison those who oppose him as “the enemy from within”.
Propaganda and Scuttlebutt
Harris has been derided by her political opponents for her supposed lack of intelligence, a claim that frankly does not hold water, as well as her alleged support for “putting ‘illegals’ up in five star hotels” (a charge that has been repeatedly disputed) and providing sex-change operations for prisoners (a charge made repeatedly with carefully selected video snippets in commercials approved by Trump). Others have questioned her Blackness, spurred on by Trump’s claim at a National Association of Black Journalists event earlier this summer that Harris, a graduate of Howard University and a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority “suddenly became Black”, and she has been pilloried by some in the Afrikan-American community for allegedly not planning any policies that would specifically benefit Black Americans. While these claims have also been disputed, and she has herself increased her outreach to Afrikan American groups and announced a number of policies (homeowner credits, child tax credits, assistance in starting small businesses) that, if implemented, would assist Black voters, this has not convinced a number of her critics whom it has been alleged have held her to a higher standard of proof than her Republican opponent.
Meanwhile, Democratic supporters point to Trump’s embrace of international autocrats (Viktor Orban of Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, Kim Jong Un of North Korea, former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, former Philippines president Rodrigo Duterte and Russia’s Vladimir Putin); his romanticizing of historical dictators (his former Chief of Staff, John Kelly, recently recounted Trump’s comments that he wished he had “Hitler’s generals” working for him); his comments about being “a dictator for one day”, getting rid of the Constitution and jailing his political opponents; and the policies that have been directly espoused by Trump (which many of his supporters claim is their motivation for voting for him): mass deportations, a return to “stop-and-frisk” policing, elimination of the Department of Education, expansion of the ban on abortions that was started by the Supreme Court’s striking down the historic 1973 Roe v. Wade case on June 24, 2022, and an increase in “drill baby drill” oil exploration in deep water locations, Indigenous territories and protected ecosystems among others. Project 2025, the “Mandate for Leadership wish list” produced by The Heritage Foundation, is most often referenced in this regard; its 922 pages are an intimidating read for many, but a more abbreviated version can be found on Trump’s own Web site in his Agenda 47, or his “promises to the American people”.
Check out The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 here: (https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf)
Read Donald Trump’s Agenda 47 at his Web site here: (https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform/)
Read the Democratic Party’s political platform here: (https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/FINAL-MASTER-PLATFORM.pdf)
Blotting Out Third Parties
In the meantime, the voices of Green Party presidential candidate Dr. Jill Stein and independent candidate Dr. Cornel West, both of whom have made reparations for the descendants of enslaved Afrikans, environmental stewardship and justice for Palestinians currently cowering under a genocidal assault from Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli Defense Forces major planks in their presidential agendas, are being silenced by the mass media’s obsession with the two-party race between the Donkey and the Elephant. And the platform of the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), whose candidate is Claudia De La Cruz, gets even less attention, to say nothing about that of the Libertarian Party’s Chase Oliver.
Read the Green Party platform here: (https://www.gp.org/platform)
Check out Dr. Cornel West’s platform here:. (https://www.cornelwest2024.com/platform)
Read the Party for Socialism and Liberation’s platform here: (https://votesocialist2024.com/about-the-candidates)
The Libertarian Party’s platform can be found here: (https://www.lp.org/platform/)
Historic (and Ahistoric) Implications
To be sure, this election carries historic implications even if one’s tunnel vison keeps one focused only on the two major political parties and their standard bearers. Kamala Harris may yet become the first woman US president in history, accomplishing the feat that former First Lady, Senator and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had failed to accomplish in 2016 (though she actually did beat Trump by several million votes, losing only because of the slave-era Electoral College and its arcane method of allocating a disproportionate number of electoral votes to the southern states). Harris would follow former president Barck Obama as the second president of Afrikan ancestry (her father is Afro-Caribbean) and make history again as the first president of East Indian ancestry (her mother was East Indian). Meanwhile, Trump would establish a somewhat dubious historical precedent himself, becoming the first president (or one of the first) to win the White House, lose it somewhat resoundingly in the following election, then win it back later; he could also become the first president who had been impeached twice and indicted for a number of felonies (including inciting an insurrection) before and after winning the White House a second time.
The implications of this election have been emphasized (some would say hyped) in classic dualistic, good-vs.-evil fashion. Some examples:
- Abortion (“pro-choice”) versus anti-abortion (“pro-life”): women’s reproductive rights versus going back to the days before Roe v. Wade when women bled to death in alleys, only this time dying because of a wider ban on reproductive care of practically any kind, including in cases pf rape, incest or when the life of the woman is in danger. (Anti-abortion activists might consider this a reasonable trade-off, while abortion-rights activists have recently pointed out that in some states, a woman is not allowed to abort a pregnancy until she is literally at death’s door; a compromise might involve protections for a fetus past an agreed point in a pregnancy but not cause undue risks to the health of the mother.)
- Environmental stewardship versus a return to “drill baby drill” and the elimination of electric car mandates, though Harris has herself stated that she will not stop hydraulic fracturing or “fracking”, which is a particularly devastating procedure involving injection of toxic chemicals into the ground to facilitate extraction of natural gas.
- Establishment of a legal pathway to citizenship for immigrants versus mass deportations. Trump supporters accuse Harris of trying to import millions of illegal immigrants and use them to illegally vote her into office. Opponents of Trump point to the singularly cruel practice of separating children from their families during his presidential term. Between 500 and a thousand of these children still had not been reunited with their families as of earlier this year, and critics have stated that, concerning the Trump administration policy, “the cruelty was the point.”
- Police review boards versus “stop and frisk” and qualified immunity for police officers who abuse citizens. Despite Trump’s attempts to paint the January 6, 2021 insurrectionists, who had injured numerous Capitol Police that day, he continues to support the brutal actions of police across the country, at least when they brutalize “others” (Afrikan Americans, immigrants and the “libs” that he and his supporters want to “own”).
- Expansion of voting rights versus voter suppression in the name of “ballot security” and “stopping voter fraud” (cases alleging this, largely in Afrikan American districts, have been dismissed in courts across the country).
- Embracing democracy versus supporting international autocrats, living and dead, including Adolph Hitler.
- The Death Penalty. While this issue has not received as much attention as perhaps it should, it must be pointed out that, when the execution of Marcellus Williams was debated in the Supreme Court in September, the six Republican-appointed justices (Alito, Thomas, Cavanaugh, Coney-Barrett, Gorsuch, Roberts) voted to execute him, while the three Democratic-appointed justices (Sotomayor, Brown-Jackson, Kagan) voted to block the execution. As a result of the Supreme Court decision, Missouri’s Republican governor Mike Parson, attorney general Andrew Bailey and the Missouri Supreme Court proceeded with the execution of Williams on Tuesday, September 24, over the public objections of the victim’s family (who simply did not want him executed) and the original case’s prosecuting attorney (who was now convinced Williams might have been wrongly convicted). This is somewhat consistent with the trend among Republican governors, presidents and judges in favor of “hang ’em high” capital punishment regardless of evidence of possible innocence. (https://www.scotusblog.com/2024/09/supreme-court-allows-marcellus-williams-to-be-executed/)
Dr. Ron Daniels, founder and president of the Institute of the Black World (IBW), posted a commentary (Democracy in Danger: Black Led Rainbow Wave to the Rescue – Dedicated to Rev. Jesse L. Jackson on His 83rd Birthday, by Dr. Ron Daniels, October 8, 2024) that essentially urged readers to go to the polls in unprecedented numbers to support Harris, based largely on the critical need to prevent a Trump presidency that could usher in a dark chapter in the United States of autocracy, repression and White Supremacist terrorism. (Read the article here: https://ibw21.org/commentary/vantage-point-articles/democracy-in-danger-black-led-rainbow-wave-to-the-rescue/?sourceid=1041761&emci=86dbe1e0-9c85-ef11-8474-6045bda8aae9&emdi=8889e938-bd85-ef11-8474-6045bda8aae9&ceid=10955336)
Electoral Poly-Tricks
As we have mentioned above, all of this has obscured information on the other “third party” candidacies of Dr. Cornel West, Dr. Jill Stein, Claudia De La Cruz and Chase Oliver. As a result, we careen into election season with limited to no knowledge about our full plate of options. Some would say that this helps to crystallize the real issues because the likelihood that anyone other than Harris or Trump will win the election is practically nil. Still, it has been stated often that a well-informed populace is necessary to a healthy democracy, and in many ways we as an electorate are often anything but well-informed. This article is admittedly late to the party, since a large percentage of the electorate has already voted early or by mail, but those who plan to go to the polls on Election Day and have time to follow some of the above links might gain some perspective that they did not have before. Our concern is that people go to the polls with some perspective, and that we think before we make a knee-jerk voting decision.
On Saturday, October 12, a Pan Afrikan Community Town Hall Meeting was held at the Temple of New African Thought (TNAT) on Harford Road in East Baltimore. The panel included Dr. Ausar Winkler, a trauma expert, counselor and founder of TNAT; Bro. Everett Winchester, co-president of the UNIA-ACL Division 106 Barca-Clarke in Baltimore; and Bro. Nnamdi Lumumba, founder of the Ujima People’s Progress Party (UPP), which is building a Black worker-led political party in Maryland. The topic of the Town Hall was “Electoral Poly-Tricks”, designed to discuss the community’s understanding and approach to the electoral process and not to hold a candidate’s forum or push any particular political platform. The panelists discussed their different political positions, whether they involved the community’s specific issues, reaching out to the grassroots or supporting third parties. The attendees, in person and on Zoom, expressed their support for Kamala Harris (most importantly to “stop Donald Trump”), their interest in candidacies like those of Dr. Cornel West and Dr. Jill Stein, their unfamiliarity with the issues proposed by PSL’s De La Cruz, or their ambivalence about voting altogether. (It was acknowledged that the attendees would be less likely to vote for Trump or even the relatively conservative Libertarian candidate, Chase Oliver.) They also stressed the need for us as Afrikan People to do a better job of connecting the activists with the grassroots community and to establish our own Pan Afrikan Agenda, linked with an independent political organizing body, separate from Democratic, Republican or other outside influence, built to represent the people’s needs. (Read our report on the October 12 Town Hall here.)
Our take at the October 12 “Electoral Poly-Tricks” Pan Afrikan Community Town Hall was, and is, this: choose to vote or choose not to vote, but as long as one is working in some way to lift up our community, their personal belief should not be denigrated. It comes down to a personal choice whether one votes for Harris, votes for a third party, votes for Trump (though it appeared no one in attendance was voting for Trump, and his platform, with all of its self-professed misogyny, racism and autocracy, does seem to us to be completely inimical to Pan Afrikan uplift) or chooses not to vote at all.
We recognize that, for some, they see little difference between Harris and Trump: both will allow extractive industries to continue, both oppose reparations for enslavement, both will support Netanyahu and Israel even as their actions in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and now Iran skirt international law and even break it altogether. Some of us will refuse to support imperialism from either a Harris or Trump administration, and that principled stand is honorable. Others, however, see the differences, many of which have been listed above, but most importantly, the embrace of international dictators and domestic White Supremacist terrorists by Trump, and the efforts to eliminate all form of reproductive freedom by the Republican Party in general, which has become a political party in full thrall to the Orange One. Those who are focused on these contrasts see “stopping Trump” and preventing the United States from plunging into a possible full-blown dictatorship that could endanger the entire planet as Priority One, to be pursued before any of the other issues that we have with both political parties can even be confronted.
Whatever your motivations are and whatever your political calculus is, the important thing is that you think about your voting decisions and not simply make them by rote, for convenience or out of pure emotion. Know why you are casting a ballot for one candidate or another, or refusing to cast a ballot at all. But also know this: whoever becomes the next president of the United States is not your savior, especially if you are a person of Afrikan descent. We all hailed Barack Obama as our hero when he was elected in 2008. The Rev. Jesse Jackson cried on camera. We danced in the streets, jubilant that Our Hero had won and would sort everything out. We were in a Post-Racial America, the pundits said. Then the drone attacks in Afghanistan increased. Then the whistleblowers were increasingly prosecuted instead of heeded. Then the 2009 follow-up review sessions of the 2001 World Conference Against Racism were minimized and even snubbed. Then, in March of 2011, Libya, once one of the most literate nations in the world and the African Union’s largest single benefactor, was bombed into the last century by the US and NATO, and Muammar Gadafi, the onetime Pan-Arab supporter of terrorist organizations who had apologized for his past, made reparation to the survivors and families of the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, pledged to suppress Arab terrorism and converted to a position of Pan-Afrikanism, was killed by rebels in Libya as a result of the US and NATO strikes, resulting in Libya becoming the basket case it is today and its military arsenal falling into the hands of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Labat (ISIL) and Nigeria’s Boko Haram, the abductors of the Chibok Girls less than a year later. These things occurred under the Obama administration, and we can expect other objectionable actions by the US to occur under a Harris administration, or even a West or Stein administration, and certainly under a Trump administration.
The point is this: a “president of the United States” is going to do “president of the United States”-type things. Some of those things will be reprehensible, and we must be ready to fight them. No matter what decision you make in this election, know that you will have to be ready to resist and fight whoever wins, even the candidate you support. Our great mistake as a people has been that we either go to sleep when “our hero” is elected, expecting them to handle everything for us, or we run and hide when “the enemy” wins, waiting for the storm to pass in four years, instead of asserting our Constitutional right as American citizens to use our voice and leverage our right to free speech to oppose those deeds that go against the people and against truth, justice and righteousness.
Vote or don’t vote. But do something to lift up your community, and if you do vote, know who and what you are voting for, know what the consequences will be of your decision, and be ready to continue to organize our community for the time that we will need to raise our voices. For rest assured, that time will come.