Again, if you did support Trump at the beginning of the year, and don't support him now that tells me 2 things about you:
1) You aren't very smart
2) You don't listen to Black people
The fact that you don't support him now, doesn't convince me that you've gotten any smarter, or started listening.
This is important, because "Should we elect Trump," is not the last important decision that these people will have to make.
And making better choices in future, requires both being smart, and listening to Black people.
And neither of these things are likely to happen.
mekka okereke
Unknown parent • • •@bici
I've explained this so many times. Black voters, particularly Black men, did not shift towards Trump. They didn't shift rightwards. They shifted leftwards. So far left of mainstream Dems that they refused to vote for Biden.
hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/113…
The percent of Black men that support the GOP hasn't changed significantly in over 40 years. What has changed, is the percent of Black men willing to turn out to vote for their preferred candidate.
If y'all had listened to what Black men were saying about Biden for the 4 years of his term, you would have seen the warning signs that record turnout from Black men was needed to win, and he absolutely was not going to get that.
Harris won some of it back, but then panicked at the end and did exactly the things that caused Biden to lose support. 🤦🏿♂️
mekka okereke :verified: (@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io)
Hachyderm.iomekka okereke
Unknown parent • • •@bici
There are 50,000 people in ICE detention, which is horrific. There are over a million Black people unjustly incarcerated. That's 100X worse.
ICE just got $45 billion to increase detention capacity. That's horrific. At the height of the pandemic, when Black people needed help, Biden transferred ~$50 billion away from Covid relief funds, and towards funding cops. That's worse.
3 people that we know of have died in ICE detention under this regime. That's horrific. In 2024, at the height of Black lives matter, the biggest civil rights campaign in US history, Biden encouraged the creation of "get tough on crime" SCORPION units. The result? 2024 was the most deadly and most murderous year for police violence in US history. That's worse.
The number of people incarcerated went down under Trump. It went up under Biden. Biden wrote the crime bill that caused the US to become the biggest mass incarceration regime in the world. Biden forced state and local jurisdictions to increase mandatory minimum sentencing, and remove judges' discretion. We have only 5% of the world's population, but 25% of its prisoners, mostly due to Biden's direct actions.
All of this doesn't make Black men say "I like Trump now!🤡"
It makes Black men say, "I'm not excited to vote for a system that's OK with fascism for me, but democracy for everyone else. Either we all get democracy, or we don't. I'm staying home."
Not all Black men stay home! But a shift of even 5% is enough to lose the election.
Violet Madder
Unknown parent • • •@bici
Yet people try to call him a "decent" man.
mekka okereke
in reply to mekka okereke • • •@bici
I can show people an unlabeled graph of mass incarceration trends in the United States, and tell them that as a senator, Biden was responsible for the legislation that massively ramped up the rate of growth, with genocidally devastating impact on life expectancy and incarceration probability for Black people. I can tell them that when these harms were known, there was an attempt to reduce mass incarceration, and for a few presidents, the rate of growth was flat, and even declined. But then I can tell them that Biden got back in office, and reversed the declining trend, and got it to increase again.
You can physically see Biden's policies in the chart. Someone with no knowledge of US history, can read the above paragraph, and look at the chart, and accurately place when the "War on Drugs" and "Crime Bill" passed, and when Biden got into office as president.
2024 was both the year that US cops killed more Black people than any other on record, and the year with the highest level of police funding ever achieved, not just in the US, but in any country in the history of the world.
This was also the year when Americans expected more Black men to vote more for the Democratic nominee, with higher turnout, than in any election in US history.
Those two sets of facts are incompatible.