“Under Siege,” shouts the cover page in big bold letters. And beneath it, an even more ominous subhead: “The Plot to Destroy Democracy.” Listen closely, and you can almost hear the dark, dangerous, cinematic suspense track.

The “it,” in this case, is the National Urban League’s annual report, a slickly designed document produced by the historic civil rights and urban advocacy organization and meant for consumption by a gullible audience beyond its 90 nationwide affiliates and the 300 urban communities it serves. But to describe the report as overwrought is to understate the matter. Take the language from its accompanying press release:

Factions of state and federal lawmakers, working in concert with shady political operatives and violent extremists, are dangerously close to dismantling American democracy and establishing autocratic rule. The National Urban League’s 2022 State of Black America® report, “Under Siege: The Plot to Destroy Democracy,” outlines the conspiracy and the urgent case for a national mobilization to protect and defend our most sacred constitutional right.

Ahh, so what we have here is a “conspiracy” to deny black Americans the right to vote. And it’s being perpetrated by “shady political operatives and violent extremists.” But who might these shady violence-doers be? The press release doesn’t say. But if we had to venture a guess, we’d say they’re talking about Republicans. After all, the Republican Party — the anti-slavery, anti-Klan, anti-lynching, anti-segregation, anti-Jim Crow, pro-Civil Rights party — is the natural enemy of American blacks, right?

In fact, we’d go so far as to label this annual report a purely political document. It’s little more than an alarmist restatement of the Democrats’ “voting rights” talking points, and thus an attempt to gin up the black vote ahead of the midterms. Recall that the Democrats failed to push their pro-fraud HR 1 bill through Congress, even though they resorted to the worst of racial demagoguery. And recall that President Joe Biden shamefully led the way. Remember “Jim Crow 2.0,” “Jim Crow on steroids,” and “Jim Eagle”? Remember how he said in a speech, “Do you want to be on the side of Dr. King or George Wallace? Do you want to be on the side of John Lewis or Bull Connor? Do you want to be on the side of Abraham Lincoln or Jefferson Davis?”

Of course, Wallace, Connor, and Davis were Democrats, and Lincoln was a Republican, but the Party of Joe Biden has never let facts get in the way of a nasty narrative.

And if we remember how Democrats reflexively blame others for that which they themselves are guilty, we see it right here, before our very eyes. As the Urban League press release continues: “In acknowledgement of Georgia’s status as ‘ground zero’ in the assault on democracy, the National Urban League released the report at an event at Clark Atlanta University featuring students from Atlanta’s four HBCUs, Urban League affiliate presidents from around the country, and other national civil rights leaders.”

Georgia is “ground zero,” all right. For Democrat voter fraud. Or has the Urban League’s hyper-partisan leadership not been paying attention to what happened in and around Atlanta during the state’s razor-close 2020 election and razor-close Senate special elections, both of which went to the Democrats?

We can’t make this stuff up. But we can certainly push back against it. The Democrats are desperate to avoid a shellacking on November 8, and nothing is beneath them. Not even race-baiting tripe about blacks being “under siege” and about some Republican “plot to destroy our democracy.”

PS: It’s a republic. If we can keep it.