August 18, 2021

By Thom Hartmann

They’re convinced that there’s an international conspiracy, funded by Jews, to “replace” European-ancestry whites with people of color whose ancestors came from outside of Europe.

They’re frightened by the new census data showing that whites are a decreasing majority in America, and terrified by the prospect that Afghans who risked their lives for America might move here.

They’re all over Twitter with the hashtag #remigration (essentially: “Send Black and other people of color ‘back where they came from’ and don’t let more in”), and have a huge presence on Facebook and other social media.

The source of their terror is their totally wrong and unscientific belief that skin color is a reliable indicator of intelligence, temperament and trustworthiness. Therefore, they believe, skin color must always determine who has political, cultural and economic power in American society.

If nonwhite people seize power, they preach, that power will be used to demand “extreme reparations” from white people: strip whites of their jobs, bank accounts and homes; reduce whites to poverty and near-slavery conditions.

They not only believe these things; many are willing to take up arms and kill others to defend their “right” to live in an exclusively white-controlled region or country. They’re in police departments across the country, they form heavily armed “militia” groups primed for a “race war” in America and they occupy about one in every three residences in any random white neighborhood across the country.

And these “average” white people are picking up the permission cues to release their personal racist anxiety in public.

A Florida teacher dubbed “Kings Lake Karen” was caught on video shouting racial slurs at biracial children, demanding to know of their mother if she’d slept with a Black man.  A white man tells a Black train conductor who merely asks him to put on his mask, “Wait till the f**king train leaves, n****r. White people are gonna give an ass-whuppin' on you.” Even Tucker Carlson repeatedly highlights the racist “Replacement Theory” on his top-rated Fox “News” show. 

Over the past five years there’s been an explosion of videos showing “average white people” going nuts on people of color. While such behavior has long been the norm and today more people are filming it, it’s also growing: since the Trump presidency and the “conservative” media’s embrace of Replacement Theory, white people have felt empowered to express their racist sentiments more openly than during, for example, the Obama presidency.

And its not just random middle-class white people openly expressing racism: since Trump lost the 2020 election, it’s spread across “conservative” media outlets, with freak-outs about white Replacement Theory happening with increasing frequency.

Swanson Foods heir Tucker Carlson, with the approval of the heir to Rupert Murdoch’s billions, began this in a big way during prime time on Fox “News” with an April 8th rant saying, “[T]he Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World.”

Four days later, Carlson explained to his mostly white Fox audience the Replacement Theory and how, in his opinion, Democrats were its main advocates.  “Demographic change,” he said, “is the key to the Democratic Party's political ambitions. In order to win and maintain power, Democrats plan to change the population of the country. They're no longer trying to win you over with their program. … They don't even really care about your vote anymore. Their goal is to make you irrelevant.”

On April 15th, Carlson echoed the Nazi theory that the pinnacle of evolution was, as Hitler preached, the white (Aryan) race.  “Acknowledge the reality of evolutionary biology,” he demanded, sliding into the evening news buzzwords that every white supremacist in America instantly recognized. “It is real.” 

He added: “They are changing everything, whether we like it or not. A new language, new values, new biology, new curricula, new social mores and hiring standards and body types. A brand-new national population. And then, because that is still not enough change, a whole new system of government. … What will the consequences of that change, of that revolution be? In your bones, you know the answer. It's terrifying, and it does not have to happen.”

Fox’s Laura Ingraham said it out loud: “Of this my friends you can be sure, your views on immigration will have zero impact and zero influence on a House dominated by Democrats who want to replace you, the American voters, with newly amnestied citizens and an ever increasing number of chain migrants.”

And now the end of the US occupation of Afghanistan is supplying them with a whole new slew of talking points.  At first, they criticized President Biden for his “incompetence” in not getting translators and other US-employed Afghans out of the country before our departure.

Senator Rick Scott, for example, previously the CEO of the company convicted of a billion-dollar Medicare fraud (the largest in American history) called for the eviction of President Biden from the White House for incompetence.

“After the disastrous events in Afghanistan,” Scott tweeted, “we must confront a serious question: Is Joe Biden capable of discharging the duties of his office or has time come to exercise the provisions of the 25th Amendment?”

But once Biden began moving toward bringing those brown-skinned folks to safety, the racist right rapidly changed their tune.  Now Biden was too competent!

Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s brown-kids-in-cages policy, weighed in on twitter: “It is becoming increasingly clear that Biden & his radical deputies will use their catastrophic debacle in Afghanistan as a pretext for doing to America what Angela Merkel did to Germany & Europe.” (Merkel, of course, welcomed over a million Syrian and other nonwhite refugees into Germany.)

Carlson piled on: “If history is any guide, and it’s always a guide, we'll see many refugees from Afghanistan resettle in our country in coming months, probably in your neighborhood. And over the next decade, that number may swell to the millions. So first we invade & then we're invaded.”

Rightwing media star Charlie Kirk then weighed in, referencing Ilhan Omar, a Black woman who was born in Somalia and lived in a refugee camp before becoming an American citizen and today a member of the US House of Representatives. Biden, Kirk said, “wants a couple hundred thousand more Ilhan Omars to come into America to change the body politic permanently.”

There is a historic endpoint toward which all this white supremacist rhetoric is leading:

• Stop nearly all immigration of people of color into America (a goal Trump temporarily accomplished) while ignoring domestic incidents when immigrants are harassed and violently attacked here.

• Prevent nonwhite people from voting or otherwise participating in American governance.

• Deny racial and religious minorities economic opportunity or the right to live, work or go to school wherever they may want. 

• Teach children in public schools a sanitized version of American history that fails to include any honest mention of the Native American genocide, 300 years of enslavement of Black people, or 100 years of legal apartheid.

• Kill racial and gender minorities when one feels provoked, without consequence.  Imprison them in vast numbers, often for trivial offenses.

If this sounds bizarre or dystopian, just ask a Boomer about the America they grew up in. This was America before 1965, when all these things were both socially acceptable and fully (or at least practically) legal.

Before being changed in 1965, our immigration policies were run along racial lines, so there was an absolute limit to how many people of color could come into the United States in any given year.

States could legally deny Black people and other minorities the right to vote if they couldn’t recite the Constitution from memory or perform some other superhuman feat, and even when they did qualify to vote their names were regularly purged from the voting rolls just before elections.

Black men like young Emmett Till were routinely murdered with impunity both by civilians and police, and those who weren’t murdered were instead imprisoned in such vast numbers that America, with 4% of the world’s population, ended up holding 25% of the world’s prisoners.

Redlining and workplace discrimination were both legal and widely practiced; one result was that people of color were almost entirely absent from the media and when they did show up in movies and on TV screens it was to play the role of buffoons, minstrels or bad guys.  

And the history of this country, taught both in our schools and media, portrayed noble cowboys fighting bloodthirsty Indians, happy slaves, and idealized the “lost cause” of the Confederacy.

As a bonus for the white men who exclusively ran the country back then, women couldn’t get a credit card without their husband’s signature, couldn’t get a legal abortion and generally couldn’t turn to the law when beaten or raped by their husbands or predators in the workplace like Harvey Weinstein.

Scaring white people that they’re about to be “replaced” while signaling a thumbs-up to violent racists is part of a very intentional and specific strategy to prevent America from becoming a truly diverse and egalitarian society and to return us to that pre-1965 world.

This was the “great” America that Trump and his MAGA followers want us to become again: a racist, sexist, repressive and dangerous apartheid state.

The website of origin for this commentary is HartmannReport.Com.

Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of The Hidden History of the War on Voting and more than 30 other books in print. His most recent project is a science podcast called The Science Revolution.

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