Make no mistake: The idea that apparently inspired a white supremacist who is
accused of killing and injuring more than a dozen people at a supermarket in
Buffalo, New York — that nefarious elites are using immigration to “replace”
white Americans with pliant foreigners — is virtually indistinguishable from
mainstream Republican rhetoric.
اضافة اعلان
“This administration wants complete open borders,”
said Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin last month.
“And you have to ask yourself, why? Is it really
(that) they want to remake the demographics of America to ensure that they stay
in power forever?”
“The media calls us racist for wanting to build
Trump’s wall,” said J.D. Vance, the Republican nominee for the US Senate in
Ohio, in a campaign ad.
“They censor us, but it does not change the truth.
Joe Biden’s open border is killing Ohioans, with more illegal drugs and more
Democrat voters pouring into this country.”
Hours after the shooting, a Republican Senate
candidate in Arizona, Blake Masters, said on Twitter that “The Democrats want
open borders so they can bring in and amnesty tens of millions of illegal
aliens — that is their electoral strategy.” On Monday, the No. 3 Republican
in the House of Representatives, Elise Stefanik of New York, declared that it
was a “FACT that DEMOCRATS have been explicitly pushing for amnesty for years —
specifically for political and electoral purposes.”
Republican politicians aside, there is also Tucker
Carlson, whose Fox News program is a direct conduit for white nationalist
ideas, including the idea of “the great replacement”. There are more than 400
episodes of his show, according to a recent New York Times investigation, in
which Carlson has either amplified or promoted the theory that Democrats and
other members of the liberal elite (like billionaire philanthropist George
Soros) are using immigration to replace the native-born majority with a new,
foreign-born electorate.
The reason President Joe Biden has not ended illegal
immigration to the US, Carlson charged in a monologue last year, is because he
wants to “change the racial mix of the country” and “reduce the political power
of people whose ancestors lived here, and dramatically increase the proportion
of Americans newly arrived from the Third World”.
This policy, Carlson continued, is “sometimes called
the great replacement — the replacement of legacy Americans, with more obedient
people from faraway countries”.
One way to try to foreclose the most expansive and progressive possibilities — to secure capital and hierarchy against equality and democracy — is to weaponize divisions and anxieties and perceived prejudices; to play to the fear of loss in hopes of overcoming a call for solidarity.
The point of making the connection between this rhetoric
and that of the accused shooter is not to say that Carlson or Republican
politicians are directly responsible for the ideas in his manifesto or for the
slaughter itself. But the shooting in Buffalo is only the latest in a series of
mass shootings inspired by this particular racist conspiracy theory.
The Republican politicians and conservative media
personalities who traffic in this rhetoric did not create the idea of the
“great replacement”, but they have adopted it. They have chosen to swim in the same
ideological waters as the people responsible for these shootings and have
chosen to amplify the “great replacement” theory to the world even as it
poisoned minds and produced violence.
But in American politics, this rhetoric serves a
purpose.
We are living through a moment of social and
political tumult. Our society is more than a little unsettled, and as a result
there are many new opportunities for change and transformation. One way to try
to foreclose the most expansive and progressive possibilities — to secure
capital and hierarchy against equality and democracy — is to weaponize
divisions and anxieties and perceived prejudices; to play to the fear of loss
in hopes of overcoming a call for solidarity.
It is not as if this comes out of nowhere. It would not be
the first time in this country’s history that reactionaries fanned violence in
order to win a favorable settlement for themselves.
Read more Opinion and Analysis
Jordan News
.jpg)
.jpg)
