It seems that the new mantra of the Progressive Left is “far-Right ‘Replacement’ conspiracy theory.” One heard it from the President in his May 17 commentary on the racist hatred that spawned the Tom’s supermarket shootings in Buffalo. And the thought was immediately parroted throughout the legacy media commentariat.
Both the president and the unthinking echo chamber of the press are conflating two things in an all-too-familiar attempt to both smear their political foes and gaslight the American public while they’re at it.
“Replacement Theory” is a longstanding thought in the United States that “outsiders,” usually the latest wave of immigrants, are going to “replace” those already here. In the 1920s through the early 1960s the idea was racialized thanks to the efforts of Southern Democrats like
Theodore Bilbo, governor of Mississippi and US Senator 1935-47. He had his successors in Arkansas’ Orville Faubus, Alabama’s George Wallace, West Virginia’s Robert Byrd and others.
The current iteration traces to France with author Renaud Camus and his 2011 book “Le Grand Remplacement,” which claims that French liberals and progressives in France are trying to “replace” France’s white population with non-whites.
Democrats usually describe the thought in the most lurid terms and in some ways they are right to do so. In others, not so much.
For example: can a conspiracy be a conspiracy if its proponents talk about it openly?
Philip Bump’s recent screed in The Washington Post cited a Pew poll that found that almost half of Republicans (and more than one in five Democrats) believed that “there is a group of people in this country who are trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants who agree with their political views.” This is not, however, the “Great Replacement Theory,” which focusses on racial purity, not politics. About the latter, and the expressed views of the Americans Bump fumes about, there is plenty of talk – on the Left, not the Right.
In 2003, John Judis and Ruy Teixeira wrote a book titled “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” that celebrated Democrats building a new electoral coalition “in which white America is supplanted by multiracial, multiethnic America.” In 2012, Greg Sargent of The Washington Post wrote “The story of this election will be all about demographics… defined by what Ron Brownstein has called the ‘coalition of the ascendant’ — minorities, young voters, and college educated whites, particularly women”; in 2013, the Center for American Progress stated, “Supporting real immigration reform that contains a pathway to citizenship for our nation’s 11 million undocumented immigrants is the only way to maintain (Democrat) electoral strength in the future.”
In 2015 now-President Biden, speaking about the need to force demographic change in the United States to insure perpetual Democrat control, opined during a White House Summit that America being “flooded” with an “unrelenting” “wave” of immigrants was a good thing. “It’s not going to stop,” Biden said. “Nor should we want it to stop. As a matter of fact, one of the things I think we can be most proud of.”
“An unrelenting stream of immigration. Nonstop, nonstop. Folks like me who are Caucasian, of European descent, for the first time in 2017 [sic] we’ll be an absolute minority in the United States of America. Absolute minority,” Biden continued. “Fewer than 50% of the people in America from then and on will be white European stock. That’s not a bad thing.”
For an academic take consider professor Brittany Cooper of Rutgers University who, during an online discussion on “Whiteness” September 21 of last year, said simply “The thing I want to say to you is, “We got to take these motherf-ers out,” Only she didn’t censor herself, because she has tenure and can say what she really thinks. She’s one among thousands of terminal-degree clones in fancy and expensive schools who agree publicly with politicians like Sandra Ocasio-Cortez and Nancy Pelosi that the country’s southern border basically shouldn’t exist because it keeps brown and black people out.
Such is the very public calculus of race on the left. And it’s not “theory.” It’s practice.
Because of the Biden administration’s studied indifference, people have been entering the United States illegally in droves for the past year and remaining here – also illegally. In fiscal year 2021 approximately 1.7 million people crossed our southern border illegally. That’s the third-largest number in ninety-two years. Few were turned away or repatriated, save under “Title 42,” which allows immediate expulsion for suspected COVID cases. The rest – more than 1.5 million illegal entrants from more than 120 countries including Yemen, Sudan, Venezuela and Cuba, were bussed or flown to various destinations throughout the US at taxpayers’ expense.
That’s right. The Biden Administration is using taxpayer dollars to aid and abet violation of Federal law.
I know… these illegal entrants are given cell phones – also at taxpayer expense – and told to appear for their “asylum hearing,” usually a year or so hence. Few do so. But no Democrat, save perhaps those running towns along the border, sees any problem whatsoever with this useless practice. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who is nominally in charge of every aspect of border protection recently testified before Congress that the border is “completely under control.” Nothing to see here, folks. It’s all going according to plan.
Mark my words, after another few years of this, the Democrat “Immigration Reform” chorus will swing into action, demanding amnesty and citizenship for these fine upstanding new residents. After all, a “border” is just an imaginary line and to use the words of Speaker of the House Pelosi when she introduced the entirely inappropriately named “For the People” bill, “These newcomers make America more American. And we want them, when they come here, to be fully part of our system. That means not suppressing the vote of our newcomers to America.”
Aaaaaannnnnnd…..the cat’s out of the bag, folks.
So. From looking at actual people saying actual words in the real world, it seems that the “far-Right ‘Replacement’ conspiracy theory” is neither a conspiracy nor a theory. It is instead a plan of action concocted by those who want only more chaos, conflict and rage as stepping stones to permanent political power. And it appears to be well under way. Ask Secretary Mayorkas: things are going swimmingly.
For a few of us.
