Raphael Warnock
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The United States of America was redefined on January 5th and 6th, 2021. Never underestimate the pivotal power of these two dates in our nation's history. And do not believe that a likely Senate failure to convict Donald Trump will change any of it.
On January 5th, the voters of Georgia chose a black preacher and a Jewish filmmaker to successfully flip the empowered majority of the United States Senate. No one died. But the vote merged an epic demographic shift with a massive grassroots election protection movement to remake our nation.
The next day, Donald Trump incited an armed, violent mob to invade the US Capitol and kill his Republican Vice President, Mike Pence, before Pence could certify the nation's choice for a new president. Five people died. The mission failed.
And it left intact nationwide what we had won in Georgia the day before...a demographically remade America, the real enemy of the Trump mob.
Since the 1600s, Georgia and the slave south have been defined by violent White Supremacy. Today that history is commemorated in a bitterly contested giant carving at Stone Mountain, where the Ku Klux Klan was reborn in 1915 -- right after a bigoted mob infamously lynched a young Jew named Leo Frank on false charges of rape.
That the Peach State would someday simultaneously elect a black guy and a Jewish guy to the US Senate would seem insane -- until now.
For decades the legacy of the Atlanta-born Martin Luther King has chipped away at that foul mountain of bigotry and violence. It reached a new plateau in 2018, when Stacey Abrams rightfully won the governorship of Georgia. As she was poised to become America's first female African-American governor, the victory was stolen by a Klan-supported secretary of state who ran his own fraudulent election.
But with national notoriety and support, Abrams has helped remake Georgia's electoral landscape. In concert with superb grassroots organizers like Andrea Miller of People Demanding Action and Ray McClendon of the Atlanta NAACP, the election protection movement guaranteed young, black, Hispanic, Asian-American, and indigenous citizens what was once unthinkable -- the right to vote with paper ballots that were actually counted. It is no accident that the black senator elected in January was pastor at Dr. King's Atlanta church.
In November 2020, the King-Warnock "dream" was foretold nationwide. In the decisive states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona, Millennials/Zoomers of youth and color hugely rejected Trump's racist bigotry, costing him the election.
From immigration to segregation, evangelicalism to outright fascism, Trump's appeal has always been to White Supremacists living in terror of America's changing demographic.
Where once the most downtrodden white man could consider himself superior to anyone darker, now multiracial citizens of the "lower caste" actually cast hand-marked paper ballots and got them counted.
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