A cursory look back at the last six months of American history (because this is all history, as soon as we live it), reveals a country that remains deeply affected by the continuing mis-and disinformation coming from Fox News and by the perpetuation of the Big Lie from the Former Guy.

Here's the news flash: we have a new, legitimately elected President and Vice President of the United States. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have been sworn into office, despite the unending machinations of the Republican politicians and their minions (see Cyber Ninjas) to declare the election suspect.

Here's another headline: according to website FiveThirtyEight, over 50% of Americans approve of the Biden administration. Many agree that health care should be more affordable, that the minimum wage should be a living wage, and that every American citizen should have the right to vote without waiting in line for hours.

Fun fact: The 50 Democratic U.S. Senators represent 41,549,808 more people than the 50 Republican Senators. That's 40 MILLION MORE citizens represented by Democrats. This data comes from Ian Millhiser, in an article entitled “America's anti-democratic Senate, by the numbers” in the November 6, 2020, online edition of Vox. He continues, “Congress's upper house is malapportioned to give small states like Wyoming exactly as many senators as large states like California, even though California has more than 68 times as many people as Wyoming… The implications...are breathtaking....Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett were all nominated by a president who lost the popular vote and confirmed by a bloc of senators who represent less than half of the country.”

These facts explain why the Republicans are so determined to limit voting by any means necessary and why they are scared to death of people like the brilliant Stacey Abrams, founder of Fair Fight, an organization created to protect voter rights.

The conservative Heritage Foundation founder, Paul Weyrich, said in 1980 in Dallas at a meeting of the evangelical right, “I don't want everybody to vote…As a matter of fact, our leverage in the election quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down.” This video is available on YouTube, entitled “Paul Weyrich - “I don't want everybody to vote” (Goo Goo)”.

The Heritage Action for America group (an offshoot of the Heritage Foundation funded by conservative billionaires) has earmarked $24 million to draft voter suppression legislation across the country. In a leaked video recently obtained by Documented and available to watch on YouTube, entitled “Leaked Video: Dark Money Group Is Writing Voter Suppression Laws”, Heritage executive Jessica Anderson says, “We are working with state legislators to make sure they have all of the information they need to draft the bills across the country. In some cases, we actually draft them for them,” she said, “or we have a sentinel on our behalf give them the model legislation, so it has that grassroots, from-the-bottom-up type of vibe.”

According to an April 7, 2021, NY Times article by Nick Corasaniti and Reid Epstein, Heritage “proposals include limiting who can vote by mail, preventing ballot collection, banning drop boxes, enacting stricter voter identification laws, restricting early voting and providing greater access to partisan election observers.”

The bottom line is this: Voting still matters.