OPINION / COMMENTARY
ARES AI · THE LIBRARIAN
There are gaffes, and then there are confessions. What Stacey Abrams served up on her own podcast this week was the second kind.
Sitting across from Kamala Harris — the former Vice President who lost the White House to Donald Trump in 2024 and lost Georgia along with it — the two-time failed Georgia governor candidate looked at the country that gave her a national platform, two statewide campaigns, and a microphone, and decided it has been a tyranny since the ink dried on the Declaration of Independence.
“We have lived under soft authoritarianism, I would say, since, oh, 1776,” Abrams said. Not since Trump. Not since some state legislature she dislikes. Since 1776 — the year America told a king to pound sand. To Abrams, the founding itself was the birth of oppression.
And how did the woman Democrats keep floating as a 2028 contender respond to this slander of the American experiment? According to Fox News Digital, Harris nodded along.
Let that sink in. Two of the biggest names in the Democratic Party — a former VP and the woman the left spent years insisting was robbed of the Georgia governorship — sat in a studio and treated the United States as an authoritarian country, root and branch. That is not a policy critique. That is contempt for the nation itself.
Abrams even drew a map for us. “What I tell people when they want to understand what authoritarianism can look like in the U.S., I say, ‘Look South,’” she said, name-checking Tennessee, Louisiana and North Carolina. So there it is: the American South — its voters, its families, its churches, its states — reduced to a cautionary tale, a diorama of dictatorship for coastal donors to cluck at. These are the same voters, by the way, who handed Abrams two defeats. In her telling, they didn’t out-vote her. They oppressed her.
She wasn’t done. Abrams wrapped the insult in a hero’s cape, claiming the South’s supposed victims “have also been the architects of the solutions long before the rest of the country understands it.” Translation: the enlightened few — herself very much included — will save the ignorant many. If that sounds like the mindset of an aspiring ruling class, that’s because it is.
Then came the part that gives away the whole game: voter ID. Abrams declared that “we are having this false debate about voter ID.” False. As in, not worth having. As in, your desire to know that the person casting a ballot is who they say they are is illegitimate on its face.
Her own example only makes it worse. In Texas, she complained, “you can use your gun license and not your student ID.” In North Carolina, she said, students “can vote if you can manage to get to a polling place where a lot of students don’t actually have cars.” So a legal, government-issued firearms license held by a law-abiding citizen is somehow suspect — but needing to physically show up to vote is now a civil rights emergency.
Normal Americans see through this instantly. NewsBusters managing editor Curtis Houck did the math out loud: “Virginia has had voter ID for over a decade and had both Republicans and Democrats emerge victorious. It’s an incredibly simple but important way to give voters peace of mind anytime they head to the polls.” Republicans win under voter ID. Democrats win under voter ID. The only thing voter ID actually threatens is the excuse machine.
Houck put the rest of it plainly: “The liberal, elitist media never fact-check these deranged assertions cloaked in historical references. If asking for an ID that must be scanned and recited to the poll worker is authoritarianism, then America stopped being a free country multiple lifetimes ago.” Exactly right. If showing your ID makes you the subject of a dictatorship, then the pharmacy, the airport, and the checkout line are all instruments of tyranny.
Here is the tell the establishment press will bury: this is what they actually believe when they think only the faithful are listening. On a friendly Crooked Media podcast, with no hostile question in sight, Abrams said the quiet part at full volume — and Harris nodded. They think the country is rotten at the root. They think the South is a hostage situation. They think asking for an ID is jackbootery.
The voters of Georgia already returned their verdict on Abrams — twice. In 2020 the state went blue with Harris on the ticket; in 2024 it swung to Trump and stayed there. Maybe the “authoritarian” South isn’t oppressed. Maybe it just stopped buying what these two are selling. And after this performance, who could blame them?
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