Fox ‘News’ has some of the slimiest people in the industry working for them … ol’ Rupert Murdoch sure does know how to pick ‘em. The only credible journalist at Fox is Chris Wallace, son of the long-esteemed Mike Wallace, and I often wonder why he doesn’t get a job at a more reputable network. Among the worst of the lot is Tucker Carlson, a man who would argue with a tin can if it were marked “Democrat” or contained lima beans.
Charles M. Blow has written an editorial for the New York Times that I think bears reading if you want to try to understand the current white supremacist movement by the Republican Party to disenfranchise Black, Hispanic, Asian and immigrant voters. The current push is nothing new, merely an upgrade of what white supremacists have always tried to do.
Tucker Carlson and White Replacement
This racist theory is rooted in white supremacist panic.
Charles M. Blow
Opinion Columnist
On Thursday, Fox News host Tucker Carlson caused an uproar by promoting the racist, anti-Semitic, patriarchal and conspiratorial “white replacement theory.” Also known as the “great replacement theory,” it stands on the premise that nonwhite immigrants are being imported (sometimes the Jewish community is accused of orchestrating this) to replace white people and white voters. The theory is also an inherent chastisement of white women for having a lower birthrate than nonwhite women.
“I know that the left and all the gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term ‘replacement,’ if you suggest that 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 what’s happening, actually. Let’s just say it: That’s true.”
Carlson continued, “Every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter.”
The whole statement is problematic. First, what is the third world? This label originated as a way to categorize countries that didn’t align with Western countries or the former Soviet bloc. It’s now often used to describe poor countries, or developing countries, and by extension, mostly nonwhite majority countries.
When Carlson worries about immigrants from the third world, he is talking about Hispanic, Asian and Black people who he worries will outnumber “current” voters. Current voters, in this formulation, are the white people who make up the majority of the American electorate.
Second, and revealingly, he is admitting that Republicans do not and will not appeal to new citizens who are immigrants.
But although white replacement theory is a conspiracy theory, the fact that the percentage of voters who are white in America is shrinking as a percentage of all voters is not. Neither is the fact that white supremacists are panicked about this.
White supremacists in this country have long worried about being replaced by people, specifically voters, who are not white. In the post-Civil War era, before the current immigrant wave from predominantly nonwhite countries, most of that anxiety in America centered on Black people.
Judge Solomon Calhoon of Mississippi wrote in 1890 of the two decades of Black suffrage following the Civil War, “Negro suffrage is an evil.”
Calhoon worried that white voters had been replaced, or outnumbered, by Black ones, writing: “Shall the ballot remain as now adjusted, the whole country in the meantime taking the chances of the rapid increase of the blacks, and leaving, in the meantime, the whites as they now are in those localities where they are outnumbered?”
Calhoon would go on to become the president of the state’s constitutional convention that year, a convention called with the explicit intention of codifying white supremacy and suppressing the Black vote. States across the South would follow the Mississippi example, calling constitutional conventions of their own, until Jim Crow was the law of the South.
The combination of Jim Crow voter suppression laws and the migration of millions of Black people out of the South during the Great Migration diluted the Black vote, distributing it across more states, and virtually guaranteed that white voters would not be outnumbered by Black ones in any state. The fear of “Black domination” dissipated.
Indeed, as extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act was being debated in 1969, The New York Times made note of the fact that Attorney General John Mitchell, a proponent of a competing bill, was well aware that even if all the unregistered Black people in the South were registered, their voting power still couldn’t overcome the “present white conservative tide” in the South. As The Times added, “In fact, Mr. Mitchell is known to believe that Negro registration benefits the Republicans because it drives the Southern whites out of the Democratic Party.”
A reporter at the time asked an aide of a Republican representative, “What has happened to the party of Lincoln?” The aide responded, “It has put on a Confederate uniform.”
But now, in addition to Black voters voting overwhelmingly Democratic, there is a wave of nonwhite immigrants who also lean Democratic. And tremendous energy is being exerted not only by white supremacists in the general population, but also Republican office holders, to attack immigrants, curtail immigration, disenfranchise Black and brown voters and assail abortion rights.
One of the surest ways of preventing a Black person from voting is to prevent them from living. As The Times reported in 1970, Leander Perez, a man who had been a judge and prosecutor and “led the last stand against integration” in Louisiana’s Plaquemines Parish, once famously linked Black birth control to racial dominance, stating: “The best way to hate a [expletive] is to hate him before he’s born.”
I would even argue that the bizarre obsession with trans people is also rooted in part in white anxiety over reproduction.
The architects of whiteness in America drew the definition so narrowly that it rendered it fragile, unsustainable, and in constant need of defense. Replacement of the white majority in this country by a more multiracial, multicultural majority is inevitable. So is white supremacist panic over it.
The United States Postal Service (USPS) is in the news again this week as Postmaster General Louis DeJoy is testifying before Congress about the dire failures of the postal service to meet the nation’s needs. The mail … at least important mail … has been so slow that the Pony Express could have delivered it faster (funny how the junk mail and advertisements always get through, though), but then DeJoy was hired for one reason only: to slow the mail to a snail’s pace prior to last November’s election in order to interfere with our mail-in ballots arriving in a timely manner. He succeeded in slowing the mail, but we managed to get our ballots in on time despite his efforts to lose or delay them.
Interestingly, Representative Liz Cheney, one of ten republicans in the House who voted to impeach the former guy and who has taken considerable flack from the Republican Party as a result, gave a speech yesterday at the Reagan Institute in Washington, where she said …
A little over 240 years ago, two of my ancestors put on the uniform of George Washington’s Continental Army and marched into battle, willing to die if it meant bringing their fledgling nation inches closer to independence. Centuries later, in 1992, I followed in their footsteps and joined the Army.
Justice Clarence Thomas has had a seat on the United States Supreme Court since 1990 when he replaced one of the most-respected Justices in the history of the nation, Justice Thurgood Marshall. Thomas’ confirmation was sticky, to say the least, with a less-than-stellar ranking from the American Bar Association, his reticence to answer many questions, and lastly allegations of sexual misconduct, but still he was confirmed. He leans to the right … a bit too far for my tastes, but nonetheless, I’ve had no truck with him. His wife, however, is another matter.
Ginny Thomas, it appears, has played a significant role in the recent purges within the Trump administration … purges not based on incompetence, but rather on not being considered to be ‘loyal’ enough to Trump. Loyalists, or close allies of Trump, provided him lists of names of those who were perceived as not being 100% on board with Trump, and Ginny Thomas was one of the leaders of the pack.
Tucker Carlson of Fox News fame is a grade-A jerk. No surprise there, we’ve known that for years. But, he may have crossed a line this time.
On Ingraham’s show, The Ingraham Angle, it was suggested by her guest John Yoo, with no evidence whatsoever, that Colonel Vindman was guilty of ‘espionage’, a felony punishable by death. It should be noted here that Colonel Vindman received a Purple Heart after he was wounded in Iraq. He is a Ukrainian-American immigrant who was 3 years old when his family fled to the United States. Even some republicans were incensed by this, including Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, and Liz Cheney, daughter of former Vice-President Dick Cheney, who called Mr. Yoo’s accusation “shameful”.
The first, of course, was Mike Flynn who took up his position on the day of Trump’s inauguration, 20 January 2017, and lasted exactly 24 days, resigning after information surfaced that he had misled the FBI about the nature and content of his communications with Russian Ambassador to the U.S., Sergey Kislyak.
The second was General Herbert Raymond (H.R.) McMaster, who took office on 20 February 2017, just one week after Flynn’s resignation, and he lasted an entire 413 days, until 09 April 2018! McMaster either resigned or was fired by Trump and his imminent departure announced by Twitter 18 days before his departure date. The issue between McMaster and Trump was McMaster’s disagreement about foreign policy decisions, particularly those involving Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
And then, on April 9th last year, came John Bolton, the one who has had itchy fingers to bomb Iran for decades. Bolton lasted 499 days, until Monday when he either tendered his resignation, or Trump tendered his bootheel. Bolton was a war hawk who, given a choice would prefer settling differences by war rather than diplomacy. He had long advocated for regime change in Iran, Syria, Libya, Venezuela, Cuba, Yemen and North Korea. He supported the Iraq war, supported withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal, and was a staunch critic of President Obama.
So, what comes next. Trump says he will announce his new choice next week, but meanwhile, the position will be filled by the Deputy National Security Advisor, Charles Kupperman. Kupperman came on board 11 January 2018 and is said to be a war hawk very similar to Bolton. His tenure is likely to be short-lived.
Filosofa's Word 