On the Martin Luther King Day edition of PBS NewsHour, host Judy Woodruff gave far-left Reverend William Barber a forum to push his anti-poverty agenda in which he claimed that there is so much "voter suppression" that there are fewer voting rights than there were in 1965. Fact-checkers in the house?
Online, the interview was headlined "On MLK Day, the need for a 'deeply moral argument' about American injustice." Apparently, exaggerating "injustice" is moral. Reverend Barber also suggested that poverty in the U.S. is as bad as 50 years ago even though, as technology advances, the poor people of today are generally better off than the poor of decades past.
Woodruff set up the segment by recalling that, before his death, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. planned to promote a "Poor People's Campaign" against poverty, and noted that Reverend Barber has adopted the name for his advocacy efforts. The segment included a pre-recorded interview with Barber in which he complained about "voter suppression" and the state of poverty in America.
REV. WILLIAM BARBER: We did a study. We did something called The Souls of Poor Folk, auditing America 50 years after the Poor People's Campaign. What did we find? Today, there are 140 million poor and low-wealth people.
Today, there are 250,000 people that die every year from low wealth. We have less voting rights today because of the gutting of the Voting Rights Act than we had in 1965, that we have 62 million people who are working poor, who work less than a living wage, and 14 million children who are in poverty.
Judy Woodruff offered no fact check. She merely replied "Those numbers are overwhelming. They're daunting. You're not proposing to do away with poverty, are you?"
This whole segment was a welcoming forum for leftist propaganda...with taxpayer support.
Barber continued by claiming that there are five injustices. "That is systemic racism -- particularly as seen through the lens of voter suppression, where people use voter suppression to get elected, and then once they get elected, they pass policies that hurt the poor."
He then complained about "ecological devastation, the war economy and militarism, and the false moral narrative of religious nationaism that says you don't have to address those issues."
It was not mentioned that, even though Georgia was the state which received the greatest accusations of "voter suppression" from Democrats, there was record voter turnout in 2018.
