The Great Replacement

A Popeye: I Have To Fisk This Smoking Gun Opinion Piece, Because My Head Will Explode Beyond Repair If I Don’t…Part 2: “The Hell I Won’t!”And “The Great Replacement”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

The comments on Wajahat Ali ‘s anti-US rant almost make my planned fisking of his revolting opinion piece unnecessary. Almost.

If you want to read his lament “Is It Time for Me to Leave America?”without my annoying commentary, go to the link or Part I, here.

I am in sympathy with the commenters who feel that Ali’s gaslighting isn’t worthy of the time it takes to read or rebut: it is a bit like shooting the proverbial fish in a barrel. But as soon to be Sheriff (Black) Bart (Cleavon Little) says before he hits Taggart (Slim Pickens) over the head with a shovel in “Blazing Saddles,” “I gotta!”

Now that I’m committed, however, it is clear that I can’t begin to do Ali’s rant justice—meaning to punch it in its metaphorical mouth so it slides down into a mudhole—in a single post. So I’ll primarily devote Part 2 to his “Great Replacement” claim.

Here we go…

“Is it time to leave? I’ve caught myself asking my wife this question several times over the past year.”

I’ll state up front: I don’t believe him. The threat to leave the United States is a uniquely leftist bluff, and almost always employed to cheaply make the point that “I really, really don’t like where democracy is taking us right now.” The proper reaction to that is, “Oh, shut up. Running away is un-American; if that’s your response, you don’t belong here anyway.” It’s such an arrogant and presumptuous threat.  Why do you think anyone cares whether you leave or not, man? “Do things the way I want or I’m quitting!” is infantile. Continue reading →

Comment Of The Day: “Thoroughly Disgusted Ethics Sign-Off, 5/15/2022: Our Despicable, Untrustworthy Media”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The Buffalo shooter’s “manifesto” [the link is here] has given the mainstream media and others one more possible avenue of attack against Republicans, or so they apparently believe. Follow along, now: the idea is that “the Great Replacement” conspiracy theory is at the core of U.S. white supremacy; the Republican party has been dog-whistling it as it carries on in its usual racist way; Tucker Carlson of Fox News has been a prominent whistler; Payton Gendron’s long crazy-town screed shows his fealty to the concept, and thus Republicans, Fox News and Carlson have blood on their hands. Why worry about inflation and Biden administration incompetence when there’s that to focus on?

I try to line-up Comments of the Day in rough order of reception, but Humble Talent’s discourse on “The Great Replacement” was so timely that I jumped it ahead of the line. (It also reminds me that I have to finish a post about the explosion of the myth that Hispanic-Americans were always going to be part of the reliable Democratic Party coalition. That was always false—Humble Talent explains one of the reasons—and it is now obviously false.)

Here is his Comment of the Day on the post, “Thoroughly Disgusted Ethics Sign-Off, 5/15/2022: Our Despicable, Untrustworthy Media”:

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“The Great Replacement” was, in fact, despite how hard they’re trying to peddle away from it, a contention from the Left. The idea was, in the wake of Obama’s first win, that the Left could cobble together an alliance out of the diaspora of the dispossessed and create a winning coalition forever, particularly as the parts of the diaspora were growing faster than the population at large.

It isn’t controversial to say that they held these views, at least then, which was only 10 years ago. James Carville wrote: “40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation” in 2011 saying explicitly things like “Demographics are Destiny”. Carville wasn’t a historical supporter of Obama, saying things like “If Hillary gave up one of her balls and gave it to Obama, he’d have two.” in 2010, but he had been around the party as an insider for decades. There is an approximate zero percent chance that he wrote the book without having floated these ideas internally to a general approval. Continue reading →

The Complete El Paso Shooter’s Manifesto, With Ethics Commentary, PART II [UPDATED]

/ Jack Marshall / 40 Comments

[Before continuing with the Ethics Alarms commentary to follow, readers should take the time to read the entire El Paso shooter’s manifesto here, in Part I.]

Observations (cont.):

4. To be clear, the man is mad as a hatter. He is surprisingly articulate and thoughtful, however—more than many of the pundits that have tried to exploit his screed for their own purposes.

5. The basic inspiration for both the manifesto itself and the attack it preceded was the “Great Replacement,” a fevered  conspiracy theory posited by Renaud Camus, a French writer. The idea is neither novel nor complicated. It is like the “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” although it is more like the invasion of the culture snatchers. Unrestrained immigration by an alien culture allows the majority, predominant culture to be replaced before it knows what has happened.

In the introduction to his manifesto, the shooter says, “My motives for this attack are not at all personal. Actually the Hispanic community was not my target before I read “The Great Replacement.” For the record, President Trump has never said or written anything that echoes or references the  “Great Replacement” paranoia. Pat Buchanan, when he was the champion of the GOP far right in the 80s and 90s, espoused similar theories, but never Trump. The President has never attacked the concept of immigration, only illegal immigration. Tying the manifesto to the President is another despicable example of representing opposition to illegal immigration as a variety of xenophobia or racism.

6. The manifesto is not partisan. “The inconvenient truth is that our leaders, both Democrat AND Republican, have been failing us for decades,” it states early on. This is true, incidentally, regarding illegal immigration. Like most conspiracy theories, there are elements of truth in the shooter’s arguments; the problem is the extreme and unwarranted conclusions they lead him to adopt.

The shooter does finger the Democratic Party as the greater culprit, because they “intend to use open borders, free healthcare for illegals, citizenship and more to enact a political coup by importing and then legalizing millions of new voters.” Again, there’s nothing crazy about that theory, which has been posited by many for decades by non-crazy people, and it still seems more likely than not. Again, it contains elements of truth, and there is nothing about objecting to such strategy or finding it cynical and unethical that makes the argument racist. Still, “the Republican Party is also terrible,” the shooter writes.

7.  Most of the shooter’s ideological positions could hardly be more contrary to Trumpism (whatever it is) or conservatism: Continue reading →