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Cutout figures - white with one black
No one can pretend anymore they don’t realize how deadly the continuous spread of racial hatred can be in America. It keeps bursting into the open every few months with the racially motivated mass murders we all know can take place at any moment in any community.
After the most recent one committed by a delusional young man who traveled 200 miles to kill 10 Black people and wound three others in a Buffalo supermarket, three-quarters of Black Americans in a nationwide poll said they worried they or someone they love would be attacked because of their race.
Think about that the next time some white woman stands up to scream at school board members that teaching children racism exists in America makes her children uncomfortable.
That’s why it’s frightening the defeated racist President Trump continues to hold power over the Republican Party. The party’s rightwing propaganda network Fox News distorts the views of their voters with lies and conspiracy theories including Trump’s racist warning to whites they were being replaced by Black and Brown immigrants.
The Great White Hope?
Trump made the so-called Great Replacement Theory a central tenet of his presidency. On Sept. 9, 2016, he called himself the last chance for white Republicans. “I think this will be the last election that the Republicans have a chance of winning because you’re going to have people flowing across the border . . . and they’re going to be legalized and they’re going to be able to vote and once all that happens you can forget it.”
A mainstream political party was publicly embracing a fringe theory espoused by virulent racists objecting to America’s racial diversity. We now know the deadly consequences of unleashing that kind of toxic hatred in a nation with such easy access to guns. The Buffalo murders pushed mass shootings this year past 200 in less than five months.
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Lies and Conspiracy Theories
That hasn’t stopped Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson and other elected Republican Senators and House members from continuing to spew their hatred about Democratic support for humanitarian treatment of immigrants and refugees fleeing violence as an intentional plot to “replace” white voters.
Johnson and all the others deny they’ve ever supported racist replacement theory, but that’s just another provable lie like their claims the Jan. 6 insurrection was a group of peaceful Republicans lobbying their elected representatives. On a rightwing radio show last August, Johnson complained President Biden’s Border Patrol wasn’t arresting enough immigrants crossing the border. “Why are they doing it?” Johnson asked. “I mean, are they literally trying to change the electorate? . . . I don’t know how you can come to any other conclusion.”
Speaking in Buffalo a few days after the murders, Biden condemned the lies of politicians and media that have intentionally “radicalized angry, alienated, lost and isolated individuals into falsely believing that they will be replaced . . . by the other, by people who don’t look like them” they’re told are “lesser beings.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer took the fight directly to the largest source of rightwing, racist disinformation in America. In a letter to Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of the Fox Corporation and other top leaders at Fox News, he called on the Republican network to cease its constant promotion of the fraudulent, rightwing, white replacement conspiracy theory.
“For years, these types of beliefs have existed on the fringes of American life,” Schumer wrote. “However, this pernicious theory, which has no basis in fact, has been injected into the mainstream thanks in large part to a dangerous level of amplification by your network and its anchors.”
American Dog Whistles
A recent Associated Press poll found viewers of Fox News were three times more likely to believe the false racial replacement theory than viewers of other television networks. The New York Times reported Tucker Carlson alone devoted more than 400 episodes of his show to claiming Biden wants to “change the racial mix of the country” through “the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from faraway countries.”
If you don’t know what a legacy American is, that’s code for white people who were born here in Tucker’s world. He doesn’t want to water down America’s stock by letting in a lot of Black and Brown riffraff. Republican state legislators don’t even think all Americans should vote. They’re passing laws creating new barriers to voting and asserting their power to throw out results that don’t go their way.
That’s not a democracy. The overwhelming majority of Americans regardless of party really do support American democracy. Racist white replacement theory is part of the anti-American dregs of the defeated Trump presidency.
It’s long past time for Republicans to become an American political party again in the racially diverse America that really exists. It’s a great country that could become a lot greater. It doesn’t have to be an ugly, hateful, angry, violent country.
