If Democrats do not win the midterm elections, black Americans will be “back in the cotton fields,” Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA) recently claimed.
Johnson made the bizarre claim during an appearance on the #RolandMartinUnfiltered daily broadcast.
“It’s a GOP war on black America, and if we don’t stand up and fight back, we’re going to be back in the cotton fields,” Johnson asserted, clarifying what he meant by “fighting back.”
He said it is not a call to arms but a call to protest, although he did not specify if he is imagining wild and violent riots reminiscent of the Black Lives Matter and Antifa protests in 2020, which many Democrats failed to properly condemn.
“And when I talk about fighting back, I’m not talking about taking up arms. I’m talking about taking it to the streets in protest, and also by exercising our precious right to vote,” he said.
Johnson added, “We’re going to have to get out in November and vote, like John Lewis said, like our lives depend on it, because our lives do depend on it this time.”
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This is hardly Johnson’s first time offering a completely unfactual argument on Republicans supposedly wanting slavery to return. In March, Johnson said he believes President Donald Trump and the entire Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement want black Americans “confined” back to “picking cotton.”
“The ways in which they can kill public education, from defunding it from a federal level, and then also enabling state monies and local monies to flow into the private for-profit school setup,” Johnson said at the time.
“That is going — that is ongoing,” he continued, deeming it a “recipe to make education unavailable to black people.”
He said:
And where does that then leave us? It puts us back to when America was great and we were picking cotton and all of it — we’re doing the productivity that they are putting the — my Latino brothers and sisters who migrate here to do that work, because we are not suited intellectually to do it anymore.
“But they would have us back confined to doing that kind of work,” he falsely claimed. “So we gotta watch out for where we are headed and it’s the people that will save our democracy, that will stop this movement towards the past that Trump has us hurtling towards.”
He is not alone, as former President Joe Biden — prior to being president — famously told black Americans that the GOP wants to put “y’all back in chains.”
However, Democrats struggle to provide concrete examples of minority voters losing their rights in President Trump’s first term or in his second. Leftists often point to basic election integrity measures, which a majority of Americans agree with, such as showing ID to vote.
Regardless, Johnson has continued to offer false and divisive takes. In December, for instance, Johnson claimed that under President Donald Trump, America has become “the Great Satan.”
Notably, this is the same Hank Johnson who famously worried about Guam tipping over and capsizing.
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