"Replacement theory" has a long and undistinguished pedigree. In its original form, starting about a century ago, it was all about the fear of minority cultures outbreeding dominant cultures. Catholics, for example, had more children than Protestants and would therefore soon take over the country by sheer numbers. Ditto for Eastern European and Black communities.
Needless to say, none of this happened. Despite that—or maybe because of it—it has morphed in recent years into an argument that Hispanics will eventually take over the country because they are outbreeding the white population and swarming into the country illegally. As with the original version of replacement theory, it is mostly the preserve of hardcore white supremacists.
This is what makes Tucker Carlson's recent approval of replacement theory so toxic:
I know that the left and all the little 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.
....Everyone wants to make a racial issue out of it. Oh, you know, the white replacement theory? No, no, no. This is a voting right question. I have less political power because they are importing a brand new electorate. Why should I sit back and take that?
Carlson's rant has gotten some attention, but surely not as much as it deserves. What it deserves is for Carlson to have been fired immediately. Carlson knew exactly what kind of history he was drawing on, and he gleefully went ahead and did it anyway.
So why hasn't there been a stronger reaction? Part of the reason, I suppose, is that a lot of people write it off as just more of the usual drivel from Fox News.
But I suspect something else as well. Several years ago I made the argument that using "white supremacy" as an all-purpose synonym for "racism" was a mistake. There's a wide range of racist behavior, and it's useful to be able to make distinctions between, say, a bigoted cop and Adolf Hitler. The former is a racist; the latter is a white supremacist. One is much worse than the other.
Obviously I lost that argument and white supremacy has become firmly ensconced as a routine descriptor for any kind of anti-Black behavior. So now, when Carlson adopts an argument that is really and truly a product of white supremacist culture, the phrase has lost its sting. It sounds as if we're merely accusing him of racism, something that we quite correctly accuse Fox News of all the time. So people just shrug and figure that Fox is gonna Fox and it's not that big a deal.
I'm not pointing this out as some kind of gotcha. It's just an example of something that I think could benefit from a much stronger than usual description. Carlson isn't merely tiptoeing around his usual appeal to white racism, he's explicitly adopting an argument promoted by the likes of the KKK and the Nazi party. We need a word that elicits the kind of outrage this deserves, but we no longer have one.
I disagree with this assessment. I think what has happened is that white supremacy has become much more present in our culture, with prominent white supremacists like Carlson being given a prime time platform on FOX for example. Ten years ago or so the idea that white supremacists were going to be a force in our society again seemed absurd. Today it is the reality we live in. White supremacists are out and proud now. The term may have lost its sting but it's because we have a lot more of them around and visible than we used to.
As someone said "White supremacy is in the soil of America" (like anthrax biding its time to do its work, I suppose). The contagion was released with Trump's election. It will be a while before it is contained again.
"Obviously I lost that argument and white supremacy has become firmly ensconced as a routine descriptor for any kind of anti-Black behavior."
Not quite right. Now it is said that white supremacy is used as a descriptor for seemingly all white behavior, unless you personally fall exactly in line with racial activists. There is zero tolerance for debate. All of our laws and institutions are said to be based on white supremacy, and certainly all conservatives are racists. The same language used to describe the Old South describes America in 2021. It’s absurd. If the Republican Party experiences a revival in the next few years, it will be because of this kind of unchecked extremism coming from Democrats.
Claims of “white supremacy” and “systemic racism” being everywhere has silenced journalists who might question this. The price they pay for questioning any of it is just too high.
In this environment, do liberal-progressives really expect no push back? I don't like Tucker Carlson at all – he was a big Trump enabler. But what he said is nothing new - this has been said by many conservatives for years. Now that Carlson entered it loudly in the culture wars, it will take on new momentum.
Look at this from the average conservative’s point of view. If you debate progressives/liberals you will see lots of glee about a future America where whites are not a majority, and the Democratic Party rules supreme. Someone told me recently they couldn't wait for baby boomers to die off. At the same time, Democrats want to maintain immigration at record levels, and they are excited about our multi-cultural future . And you think that many conservatives won't conclude you are out to replace them? To them it’s just connecting the dots.
Consider the deep cynicism Democrats feel about conservatives. Well, right wingers are even more cynical toward you. Of course they will think you are trying to replace them.
I'm not sure you understand the meaning of 'systemic racism'. As the term suggests, it refers to racism that is embedded in systems. Whether individuals hold racist attitudes is irrelevant.
To give a simple example, we know from abundant research that managers recruiting new staff will be inclined to select people like themselves. If most executives are white, prejudice will be embedded in the system, just as systemic sexism still governs so much behavior. In similar fashion, if the education system is set up so that primarily Black districts are funded to have lots of manual arts and pre-trade courses while most others focus on preparation for college, that's systemic racism.
When my father got home in 1946, he hired into the shop and got onto the skilled trades track. When a Black man hired in, he went to the foundry--hard, unskilled labor--and stayed there.
My father's wages paid for his children to complete college. The Black in the foundry was able to send his children to community college and start them off in a skilled trade.
Now their grandchildren are competing for the same jobs, only there's more competition, and my father's grandchildren are finding it harder to compete--and NOW there's a problem, according to Tucker Carlson.
Democrats don't want to 'replace' anyone, but virtually all of them think the world would be obviously a better place if every conservative simply dropped dead, and conservatives take that to mean white people.
Exactly. You just proved the point ProgresOne was making.
Yeah, I think you're right.
It's been around in conservative circles for a while, although they didn't call it as such. I remember visiting a couple of Tea Party conservative blogs ten years ago just to see what they were saying to each other, and it was chock full of "DEMS want to bring 10/20/100 MILLION ILLEGALS into the country to vote for welfare, etc".
They used to call it Demographic Winter.
Well look at the SCOTUS. Catholics DID takeover.
Carlson: "It's a voting rights question. In a democracy, one person equals one vote. If you change the population, you dilute of the political power of the people who live there. So every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter."
By that logic, every time someone turns 18 he becomes disenfranchised as a current voter. Nonsense. of course. Would he object to anyone turning 18, or being born, for that matter, because that would disenfranchise his political power? Should we shrink the population because that would increase the political power of the people who live here? Imagine how much more power each of us would have if we cut the population by half. Or down to one million. Or to ten!
At what point does the fallacy become obvious?
Net immigration, just like net new births, grows the population, but rather than reduce the relative power of the people here, both serve to increase the relative economic and political power of the country as a whole.
Maybe Tucker can find a desert island where he can live in a democratic utopia of one.
I just wanted to thank you for posting what I was trying to verbalize, but couldn't.
Well said. I see that on average in the US that some 3,5 million teens reach 18.
I think "white supremacy" as a term has lost a lot of its sting in recent years. If you go back to the 90s "white supremacy" was the remembered and visualized context for the civil rights and voting rights movements, and it meant Bull Connor and the dogs, the water cannon, the Birmingham church bombing. (That's part of the reason why Reagan starting his campaign in Philadelphia MS was so powerful a kick in the teeth to so many, but I digress.)
While those images have lost their power for new generations that didn't really see them, I think we've also become less binary culturally-- that applies to gender, to race, to just about everything, really. We live in a world where we interpret cultural matters along spectrums or scales much more than binary choices. Not quite that "everything is everything," but nuance isn't serving us well dealing with something as stark and binary as what Carlson is peddling now.
And there's also the Rodney King effect, or moving the Overton window, or however you want to think of it-- as realrobmac says, it's out there enough that people get more used to it and don't see it as a fundamental statement about the America that should be, the way proponents mean it, but just as something else the talking heads put out there.
Carlson is trying to be cagey framing it as a voting rights issue, but that's actually much closer to what white supremacy really is than what the tiki marchers in Charlottesville were doing, imo. Voting is about power, and politics is the power of the state, and white supremacy says white people ought to have special or exclusive access to defining and using that ultimate power. (It takes a special kind of brass to say that about the use of state power after seeing videos from the Chauvin trial, or from Brooklyn Center, or from eastern Virginia, doesn't it?)
In the old segregationist days the way they said it was, "this is a white man's country." We need a bumper-sticker phrase with that kind of punch to label what these birds are up to.
I couldn't agree more that lefties have abused the term "white supremacy" because it packs an electoral punch... but I doubt it describes what's going on with most rank and file Republicans.
Here's a thought experiment: I live in a northeastern town that is overwhelmingly Dem. In 1990 Hispanics were about 10% of the population, now they're about 30%. As the Hispanic population of the public schools increased over this time, there was an accelerating downward spiral of white kids moving from public to private school. Now, our public schools average about 25% white kids, and "economically disadvantaged" kids are around 70%...
this results in test scores being bad as expected, and next year more "economically advantaged" kids fleeing to private school, rinse and repeat.
So the question is: Are all of the White Dems in my city white supremacists? Because I highly doubt my town is an outlier, and I suspect this is about 90% of what's driving the "immigration" issue nationwide.
Let's leave Carlson and Fox News' blatant racism to one side for a moment to discuss a much less important point. Although he tries not to give the appearance of being too triumphant, Kevin is using this incident as a means to declare victory for a petty semantic argument that he lost several years ago. And he lost that argument because it was dead stupid then and it remains dead stupid now. While obviously not nearly as bad or as important as the fact that Carlson, who maintains that white supremacists are a myth, ow feels free to spew undiaquised white supremacist "theory" that has been used to justfy multiple recent acts of geocidal terrorism,
(let me finish if I may, so this crummy program posted my comment while I was still writing it and gave me no edit option)
nonetheless, Kevin metaphorically jumping up and down and gleefully proclaiming "I told you so" is infuriating.
Carlson also a homosexual. Yet, that little fact never seems to matter. Carlson is a boss who's job is to keep "whitey" good soldiers of zion. Nothing more or less. Keep on supporting globalism, which the Republicans need for survival.
Blind squirrel just found a nut.
Didn't think shooter's first truth written would be about Tucker Carlson's lovelife, though.
Using the term white supremacy for Zionist shills like Carlson is lolz. He is a dialectical dog whistle. Once, again. " the left" is pure dialectical irrelevance. Carlson doesn't even like "white history", he like Fox News like Zionist organization. Yet, progtards keep on falling for it. Replacement theory is thus again, a con to keep whitey in line, force Zionism as your own, or get rejected and hunted by the elite themselves.
What chapter are you currently working through in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Nazi?
He's working on The Turner Diaries now.
So, your complaint is that we no longer have the means to grab the attention of people when we have *real* white supremacists in our midst, as opposed to the plain old racist folk?
Trust me, non-White people are alarmed right now and outraged. Most Republicans OTOH have always been giving a long pass on both racists and white supremacists; you were never going to convince most of them that they have a problem within their ranks.
But to entertain your nuance fetish, why not go with the 5-Star Hitler Rating System?
Tucker? 3-Star Hitler
Donald? 4-Star Hitler
Stephen Miller? 4-Star Judenrat
I'm surprised Carlson didn't end up in a furious argument with Steyn the Smirker. Because while Steyn subscribes 100% to replacement theory, it's a different replacement theory. One of his books claimed in 2006:
Hispanics or Islamists - who will triumph? It will be like Godzilla vs Kong all over again!
Maimonides has entered the chat.
"We need a word that elicits the kind of outrage this deserves, but we no longer have one."
Oh, I can think of a few.......
"Obviously I lost that argument and white supremacy has become firmly ensconced as a routine descriptor for any kind of anti-Black behavior. "
I just don't think this is correct. There are constant stories of racism in the news, because racism runs rampant in the US. But few, as a percentage, are labelled white supremacy. The fact is white supremacy ideology has grown far more mainstream and espoused by major figures in the GOP and leading pundits in right wing media. That's why this is being taken is stride. Not because stupid liberals whined too much. Because right wing white supremacists have taken over one of our political parties. You might remember they recently tried to overthrown the government just a short 3 months ago.
I think the lesson you should be taking from Tucker's screed, the muted reaction and your own argument that argument that 'using "white supremacy" as an all-purpose synonym for "racism" was a mistake' is that you were wrong and vastly underestimated the level of racism, and yes, white supremacy in this country.
+
When my mom was growing up, you couldn't have the Irish going to the Italian church. When Puerto Rican or Mexican people moved in, well, at least they were Catholic.
There has been red lining and white flight, oppression and suppression, overt and covert. People do not want to have that discussion, and lash out.
Some of the pandemic policies in place, such as no cash bail or not throwing the book at minor offenses, has actually worked well. Basically extending "white privilege" to everyone has a positive effect.
Yep that's the America my parents grew up in in Northern New Jersey. Racism wasn't just in the South. Everyone had their own neighborhood, my dad, Irish/German had relataives in Hoboken and grew up in Irvington among Irish Catholics in a rented dark apartment. My mom's parent, well they had a "mixed" marriage, her mom was Scottish but really of Irish ancestry her dad was from Sweden and clearly a foreigner, so they only neighborhood they could purchase a lot in to build a custom house was in the Jewish section of Elizabeth. I think the parish my mom went to was mostly Irish as well.
Back in those days you were most definitely an Other if you were not native born, if you were of southern European heritage and even if German or Irish you were below the English and Dutch in the social hierarchy of New Jersey.
Codes sometimes are hard to decipher, and often when you've grown up with them, poliție conversation.
This is America. An uneducated public, including myself with my many various blindspots, converse in loaded and biased language daily, never batting an eye and wondering why people wrinkle their brows when someone speaks of replacement by the Third World.
Coarse, vulgar, and proud of it. We fetishize it. Of course I paint with a broad brush, I'm an American.
A lot of social conservatism is founded in the anxiety of discovering yet another reason why you're not really the center of all existence.
If you calm someone down about that you undermine social conservatism.
>> So why hasn't there been a stronger reaction? <<
Because is there anybody who has been paying even the mildest attention who doesn’t already know that Tucker Carlson is a white supremacist?
So? Just call him a Nazi, or maybe Nazi-adjacent.
It’s not just the “white supremacist” terminology that may have lost its sting: the word “racist” itself is losing meaning. If a word is applied to everything, it no longer means anything. And the term racist has been thrown around everywhere recently. To some extent, that might be trump’s fault: as president he made some genuinely racist comments, and that helped push the use of the word “racist” into overdrive. But the term has also been applied in countless other circumstances. After people hear that everything from their breakfast food to their school district to their president to their hairstyles to their music is racist, it simply won’t sound like as big a deal anymore if the same word is then applied to a Fox News host. I personally seem to belong to an ever decreasing minority who feel that the term “racist” is used excessively these days. And if my words strike some as racist, I think that kind of proves my point. Reserve such words for the Tucker Carlsons of the world, then maybe we’ll be better able to deal with such people.
White supremacy is just another word for political racism, I would think. What is worrisome is not that people are getting used to certain words but to a certain trigger being pulled. That trigger is victimhood.
For a person to say "Blacks aren't as clever as us, so I really must give more to charity to help them" is racist but not dangerous. When Hitler said Germans were the victims of the Jews, that's when things got bad. Replacement theory pulls that same trigger: the other goes from inferior to a danger. From there it's only a small step to ethnic violence.
You may hate Carlson, FoxNews and the whole Murdoch empire. But why are you paying for them?
https://unfoxmycablebox.com/
You know, if your life depends so much on cable TV, what with all the alternatives out there, you might need to look at your life.
White Nationalism
"Catholics, for example, had more children than Protestants and would therefore soon take over the country by sheer numbers. Ditto for Eastern European and Black communities.
Needless to say, none of this happened."
If Catholics haven't taken over the country, they are certainly quite prominent. There are a lot of Catholics here! The president is Catholic. A lot of the Supreme Court is Catholic. The Speaker of the House is Catholic. There are so many Catholics in the US that about 1 in 10 Americans are ex-Catholics.
And this is fine. There's nothing wrong with having a lot of Catholic people around.
This is a very important point. It DID happen. The top ten ethnicities in the US:
Rank Ethnicity Number
1. German 46,403,053
2. Black/African-American (non-Hispanic) 38,785,726
3. Mexican 34,640,287
4. Irish 33,526,444
5. English 24,787,018
6. American 22,746,991
7. Italian 17,285,619
8. Polish 9,385,766
9. French 8,272,538
10. Scottish 5,409,343
See English got pushed down to #5 below Irish, below Germans and GASP below Mexicans and African-Americans.
Actually, I have realized that we are living in a KKK nightmare from 100 years ago. The Supreme Court is largely Catholic, the president is Catholic, the Speaker of the House is Catholic, and the Senate Majority leader is a Jew of Eastern European extraction.
All this is fine. But a lot of Americans from 1890 or so would be horrified.
White supremacy is racism. There are forms of racism that are not white supremacy. The reason the word has been used more often than in earlier days is not so much that the distinction has been lost (among those who make such distinctions in the first place at least). The reason is that white supremacy has an awful lot of supporters in Trump's circle. The fact that Trump was President has lead to more attention to the phenomenon and many whom we would have called racist have turned out to be white supremacists as well. Tucker for example.