Anti-Semitism theory, written in Medford

 Tucker Carlson on Fox:

     "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. But they become hysterical because that's what's happening actually. Let's just say it. That's true."

Kevin McDonald, at the Occidental Observer, in response:

     "Of course it's true, and what's being replaced is the traditional White population of the country."

America is experiencing a familiar response to immigration. We have been here before, fearing Catholics into Maryland in the 18th Century; of Irish into Boston in the 19th; of Italians and Greeks and Jews in the early 20th; of the Chinese into California always. Now the target is people from Latin America and Asia. The objections are familiar, too. Those outsiders are essentially different people, with different culture. They are genetically inferior and will debase the overall quality of the American genetic stock. They are dangerous and bring crime. They will take the jobs of "real" Americans and will work harder for less money. They will outvote us and take over.

The chant, "You will not replace us" climbed into national consciousness during the Charlottesville demonstrations. Then-president Trump famously said that there were "good people on both sides."

The fear that culture-changing people are worming their way into America to destroy us has been around forever, but the term replacement has found voice in anti-Semitic publications. They promulgated a theory that Jews in particular are a parasitic group taking advantage of the naive innocence of Americans of northern European heritage. The notion has traction within White nationalist groups. It was voiced in the manifestos of mass shooters in El Paso of Hispanics, in Pittsburgh at a synagogue, and in Christchurch, New Zealand at a mosque. 

Kevin McDonald, the editor of the Occidental Observer, lives in Jacksonville, Oregon, a small town just outside of Medford. He is a retired professor of Evolutionary Psychology at California State University at Long Beach. The Occidental Observer is the intellectual voice of anti-Semitic alarmism in America. I understand McDonald to argue that Jews are carrying out a group evolutionary strategy to control the American host country. He writes that Jews are a coherent race with the group "mind" of a parasite or virus, seeking a larger population to infect and exploit. He is living here quietly under an assumed name--famous internationally as the intellectual thought leader for anti-Semitic replacement theory, but invisible locally except within a local music scene where he talks music, not race theory. (He told an interviewer at Tablet, an on-line Jewish periodical, that he was considering moving from Oregon to Maine. His identity had been discovered by local citizens by happenstance.) 

The Occidental Observer is a "serious" website, with longish, semi-academic articles by writers on the theme of America under siege. It reminds me of National Review for anti-Semites. I have a link to it below, not to promote it, but to warn of it and show its connection to ideas that have become mainstream.

Replacement theory had been a fringe idea. No longer. It has gone mainstream into the GOP and Fox News, not as replacement by Jews specifically, but by the wrong kind of foreigners generally. Within GOP circles, there is less talk of "Jews" than of "George Soros." People who want to get the connection, get it. Immigration is thought to be a calculated and cynical plan by Democrats to flood the country with new Democratic voters. Tucker Carlson is saying it openly and proudly. This is our country and we have the right to say who gets to live here and we don't want our voices over-ruled by unwanted interlopers. They don't respect our culture and laws, and they vote in gratitude to the Democrats who are co-conspirators in the invasion.

https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net

The fear of invasion by foreigners informs the Trump-GOP theory that the 2020 election must have been stolen. Their theory of the case is that Trump's vote total increased substantially in 2020 over 2016 because of an outpouring of support for this charismatic president; that makes sense. Meanwhile, the vote total for Joe Biden, the frail, senile man hiding in a basement blathering out socialist nonsense, is only understandable if there were votes cast illegally by fraudsters allowing non-citizens to vote. The fear is that the Democratic tactic of flooding the country was already working. Replacement isn't a theory. It is a reality.

The current effort by Republicans to tighten rules for voting have dark roots, but one need not agree with Tucker Carlson or Kevin McDonald to want elections rules to be well-drawn. There are legitimate good government reasons to want elections to be free, fair, and legitimate.  But the subterranean thread of anti-Semitism has come closer to the surface, in the form of Tucker Carlson's open and proud nativism. He speaks of immigrants. It is the anti-Semites who observe and welcome the connection. One does not need to be an anti-Semite to be anti-immigrant, and one does not need to be anti-immigrant to be a Republican, and one does not need to be a Republican to want voting rules to be fair and rigorous enough to create legitimate elections.

So, to be clear, I am not saying that all people who want fair elections are anti-Semites.

But Tucker Carlson did the world a favor by his recent monologues. He brought something out in the open. He is advocating the anti-immigrant nativism that has been the undercurrent of GOP thinking, voiced prominently by Pat Buchanan in 1992, and a sharp reversal of Reagan's pro-immigration thinking. It is the new GOP.  

Nativism and suspicion of foreigners have deep roots in American thinking. Tucker Carlson made it text, not sub-text. Kevin McDonald is applauding.