White Supremacists in Charlottesville 2017
Fox News Star Tucker Carlson
KKK march in Washington – 1925
“They [Mexico] are sending people that have lots of problems, and they are bringing those problems to us. They are bringing drugs, and bringing crime, and their rapists.” Donald Trump 2016 Campaign Speech.
"So I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term 'replacement,’ if you suggest the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the third world… But they become hysterical because that's, that's what's happening actually. Let's just say it. That's true."
Tucker Carlson, April 2021
It’s a page right out of Hitler’s crusade against Jews, translated into English, of course. That chant in the above title sent chills down my spine when I saw the anger of the Nazi sympathizers (some actually carried Nazi flags) from the marchers that hot summer night in Charlottesville, Virginia pictured above. But instead of fading out as the un-American rantings of a tiny band of extremists, with a lot of help from Fox’ Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump and more than a few Republican members of Congress, that replacement assumption is now firmly embedded in the mainstream GOP messaging.
White evangelical traditionalists, including “no-rules” gun advocates, seem to include a large number of White supremacists. Guns and racism, expressed in replacement theory, have combined for a litany, a literal record-breaking number, of mass shootings and other unrestrained violence against Jews and people of color, particularly Blacks, Latinos and Asians. As New York Times journalists, Nicholas Confessore and Karen Yourish point out in their May 15th/16th article, White supremacy-driven replacement theory is no longer related to a rare few; that false assumption has gone mainstream:
“One in three American adults now believe that an effort is underway ‘to replace native-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains,’ according to an Associated Press poll released this month. The poll also found that people who mostly watched right-wing media outlets like Fox News, One America News Network and Newsmax were more likely to believe in replacement theory than those who watched CNN or MSNBC.
“Underlying all variations of replacement rhetoric is the growing diversity of the United States over the past decade, as the populations of people who identify as Hispanic and Asian surged and the number of people who said they were more than one race more than doubled, according to the Census Bureau…
“Inside a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, a white man with a history of antisemitic internet posts gunned down 11 worshipers, blaming Jews for allowing immigrant ‘invaders’ into the United States… The next year, another white man, angry over what he called ‘the Hispanic invasion of Texas,’ opened fire on shoppers at an El Paso Walmart, leaving 23 people dead, and later telling the police he had sought to kill Mexicans.
“And in yet another deadly mass shooting, unfolding in Buffalo on Saturday [5/14], a heavily armed white man is accused of killing 10 people after targeting a supermarket on the city’s predominantly Black east side, writing in a lengthy screed posted online that the shoppers there came from a culture that sought to ‘ethnically replace my own people.’
“Three shootings, three different targets — but all linked by one sprawling, ever-mutating belief now commonly known as replacement theory. At the extremes of American life, replacement theory — the notion that Western elites, sometimes manipulated by Jews, want to ‘replace’ and disempower white Americans — has become an engine of racist terror, helping inspire a wave of mass shootings in recent years and fueling the 2017 right-wing rally in Charlottesville, Va., that erupted in violence…
“A Times investigation published this month showed that in more than 400 episodes of his show, Mr. Carlson has amplified the notion that Democratic politicians and other assorted elites want to force demographic change through immigration, and his producers sometimes scoured his show’s raw material from the same dark corners of the internet that the Buffalo suspect did…”
Who are we as Americans? A nation built on the idea/invention explosion based on our incredible diversity. The folks sitting on our southern border seeking asylum are only fleeing the cartel-driven ultraviolence in their home countries, only made possible by the influx of millions of illegal (there) arms (including assault weapons) easily obtained in the US and smuggled south. And yet, despite all of his words and deeds, Donald Trump, who set the tone for replacement theory, continues to repeat: “Well, I am not a racist, in fact, I am the least racist person that you’ve ever encountered.” (2016 campaign interview, with those words repeated numerous times into the present day).
According to our recent Census, African Americans, who have borne the brunt of racism, account for a mere 12.1% of our population, Hispanic or Latino, 18.7% and Asian, a mere 5.9%. The United States is still overwhelmingly White (57%). People who identify themselves as Jewish form a mere 1% of our population, roughly the same number for Muslims.
Writing for the May 16th Los Angeles Times, David Lauter tells us that The U.S. suffers from a “toxic mix: Conspiracy theories and fear of immigrants… Political establishment has lost its ability to rein in the spread of dangerous falsehoods… Conspiracy theories are shaping the 2022 election debates… Nearly 1 in 5 American adults believe at least a of major tenets of that [replacement theory], according to a new study from the National Opinion Research Center and the Associated Press…
“[Yet o]verall, the American public remains largely supportive of immigration, the new AP-NORC study found. Almost 40% of Americans say that the number of immigrants to the U.S. should remain at about its current level, while 25% think the number of immigrants should be larger.
“On the opposite side, 36% say the number of immigrants should be reduced, with 19% saying the number should be cut ‘a lot.’… Support for immigration restriction continues to be a major rallying cry for the Republican base. A lot of the rhetorical ire is aimed at illegal border crossing, but proposals to dramatically reduce legal immigration became official White House policy under Trump and remain important to a large segment of his core supporters…
“There is a partisan gap — people who score high on the conspiracy scale tend more often to be Republicans and also tend to identify as evangelical Christians. That’s especially true of white conspiracy thinkers, who are heavily Republican and voted for Trump in 2020…
“Conspiratorial thinkers also are more likely to believe they have been discriminated against, the study found. That’s especially notable among white conspiracy thinkers: On a series of questions about whether people believe they have been discriminated against because of their race in seeking jobs, getting a house, obtaining healthcare or applying for a loan, about 30% of white conspiracy thinkers said yes, compared with about 10% of whites who aren’t conspiracy thinkers.”
Irrational fear seems to be the driving force. Fear of change. Fear of the future and economic decline. Fear of their safety. Fear is particularly strong among those who see the barrier of rising of educational requirements for higher paying jobs as “out of touch” elitists (including “Jews”) dominating American politics. White supremacists seeks to find specific groups to blame for their trepidations.
The world, very much including the United States, has seen these patterns repeatedly in the past. It’s time for the Republican Party officially to disavow “replacement theory,” purge White supremacists and their spokespeople from the party and begin to accept reasonable gun control… or accept their role as aiders and abettors of mass murder and the very cause of terrified asylum seekers lined up at the border. Stop catering to irrational fears! Accept responsibility!
I’m Peter Dekom, and when there is a sizeable segment of the electorate driven by fear and blame, things NEVER work out well… and never work out the way such thinkers believe they will happen.
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