In an exercise in guilt by nonassociation, Associated Press reporter David Bauder explains in what pretends to be a balanced news story that there is widespread, “right-wing” hate behind the Buffalo shooting. This misfortune, he says, is related to Joe Biden’s decision to open the southern U.S. border to those who may wish to join us in this country. Lots of unkind Americans have questioned allowing millions of illegal aliens to enter the United States and providing them with de facto amnesty, together with government-financed transportation to the interior of the country. Tens of millions of Americans, apparently quite irrationally, view these steps as an attempt to create a permanent Democratic electoral majority.
For Bauder, such speculation is evidence of widespread bigotry, and he cites Mark Pitcavage of the Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism about a “mainstream view,” which “baselessly suggests that Democrats are encouraging immigration from Latin America so that like-minded potential voters replace ‘traditional’ Americans.”
Many of those who hold such apparently baseless suspicions also adhere to a “great replacement conspiracy theory,” which argues a concerted effort is underway by American elites to use immigration to replace a predominantly white population with a nonwhite one. The chant by Charlottesville demonstrators in 2017 that white Americans would not be replaced was only the tip of a racist iceberg; and Bauder and Pitcavage link this war against being “replaced” to among others Fox News host Tucker Carlson and U.S. Representative Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.). Both have accused Biden and the Democrats of using illegal immigration to establish a permanent Democratic majority. Stefanik, although depicted as a very centrist Republican, delivered a supposedly frightening tirade last year about how “radical Democrats” were engaged in a “permanent election insurrection” by granting amnesty to undocumented immigrants. Bauder and Pitcavage associate such rhetoric not only with the Buffalo shooting but also with white racist violence in Norway, New Zealand, and the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in 2018.
Equally dangerous, it would seem, was the book Le Grand Remplacement published by the gay French deconstructionist Renaud Camus in 2011. According to Camus, “Europe was being invaded by Black and brown immigrants from Africa;” and this was creating a cultural and political crisis. Camus, whom we are led to believe published something comparable to the pro-Nazi Turner Diaries, allegedly provided a theoretical foundation for the recent disturbing manifestations of white supremacy ideology that Bauder and Pittcavage see all around us.
Except for the following facts, that Camus published Le Grand Remplacement, that Stefanik did warn (and quite properly so) against the use of illegal immigration as a Democratic electoral tool, and that the Buffalo killer hated blacks, there is nothing in Bauder’s partisan propaganda that is even vaguely true.
Americans have every right to be steamed over the cynical use of borders kept open to create a permanent Democratic majority. Among the prices being paid for this outrageous, unconstitutional action are the flooding of our country with fentanyl (much of it originating in China) and Central American criminal gangs. The attempt of Biden and his administration and their media drones to link these justified complaints to psychopathic mass murderers (mind you, only the white racist not the black racist ones) has left me livid with rage.
Moreover, Camus’ book, which I have actually read, is not a racist tract but a careful examination of the implications of the demographic changes that France is now undergoing. A detailed literature on the correlation between increased crime and increased African immigration into France already exists, as does printed evidence of the increasing Islamization of the country and the weakening of its Christian or traditional republican character. Pointing out such problems is hardly an invitation to murder. It is data that citizens should be able to weigh in making electoral decisions in a country that still describes itself as a constitutional democracy.
Finally, and most irritatingly, the “great replacement” rhetoric in this country arose on the Democratic Left as something to notice and celebrate and is now being opportunistically pinned on everyone to the right of woke Democrats as an indication of their racism for noticing. The Emerging Democratic Majority by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, first published in 2002, laid out the Democratic blueprint for achieving a permanent Democratic majority by encouraging the arrival of loads of Latin Americans as future Democratic voters. As the country became less white, so this thinking goes, the more the Democrats would benefit. And the faster this could be achieved, the faster the electoral transformation would occur.
This idea went from strategic planning to the later Democratic practice of dumping on white people. On August 12, 2021, Washington Post celebrated “the end of white America,” and its star “conservative” columnist Jennifer Rubin announced “the fabulous news” that white American society was now shrinking. If this does not describe a gaudy celebration of “the Great Replacement,” I’ve no idea what does. While Camus may have warned against this development, the American media and Democratic Party are rejoicing in it nonstop.