Replacement Theory Simplified

Long before he ran for the Presidency, Donald Trump saw the open­ing to divide Americans along racial lines. He said he would run as a Republican because they were the most gullible, the stupidest.
Imagine Donald Trump sin­gling out any­one for being stupid?
But Trump was onto some­thing, not that the Democratic par­ty is much bet­ter on race but because the Republican par­ty is pret­ty much a white peo­ple’s party.
There are a few Blacks who still sup­port the Republican par­ty out of sheer igno­rance and stupidity.
The Hispanics are hard­ly any bet­ter; they are con­fused, unable to deter­mine whether they are brown or white. As far as they go when the rub­ber meets the road, white peo­ple are not shy about let­ting them know what hue they are, so there is that.

The fact that the nation reached a cer­tain matu­ri­ty plateau in 2008 when the Democratic par­ty, for the first time in its his­to­ry and the History of the United States, nom­i­nat­ed some­one oth­er than a white male to rep­re­sent a major par­ty for the pres­i­den­cy was a water­shed moment.
It was a sign that some of the old ways were dis­si­pat­ing, and a new­er, more enlight­ened point of view on race was tak­ing shape. Barack Obama was that can­di­date; he spoke about America’s path for­ward not being a straight line but two steps for­ward, on to the side and one step back .…..
How prophet­ic were those words? After the nation elect­ed him to the pres­i­den­cy in 2008, how could the same nation eschew Hillary Clinton and elect Donald Trump?
It makes no sense, right?
Well, it does make a lot of sense if you think about it.
The same peo­ple who elect­ed Jimmy Carter elect­ed Ronald Reagan. The same vot­ers who were once called white work­ing-class union work­ers in the rust belt of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and the mid­west­ern states of Minnesota, and Missouri, and oth­ers who vot­ed for Democrats Clinton and Obama are the very same peo­ple who became Trump voters.….and you are left won­der­ing what changed?

The data changed!!!
Even though there was joy among Blacks and many whites when Obama was elect­ed and reelect­ed in 2012, a strange reset start­ed to take shape. An awak­en­ing emerged like a light light­bulb being turned on in a dark room… or Bugs Bunny sit­ting in the pot of water heat­ing by the sec­ond, chomp­ing on a car­rot, stir­ring the pot, then final­ly real­iz­ing that he was the meat for the stew.
“Wait just a minute,” in my best Bugs bun­ny voice.……
The eupho­ria sud­den­ly changed, and the T‑Party and oth­er right-wing hate groups were born from the check­books of David and Charles Koch.
The gen­er­al fear was and is that a great replace­ment was going on. That it empow­ers more peo­ple of col­or to vote, thus replac­ing white peo­ple’s pow­er. In fact, they believed that the Democrats sup­port immi­gra­tion for exact­ly those rea­sons, and there­fore they are vehe­ment­ly opposed to immigration.
To book­end that they ramped up their oppo­si­tion to abor­tions, by mak­ing no excep­tion for a woman raped, as far as they are con­cerned a woman has no auton­o­my over her body and there­fore must car­ry to term a rapist’s baby.
Former Ohio Republican rep­re­sen­ta­tives argued” we can­not main­tain our civ­i­liza­tion with oth­er peo­ple’s babies”, ref­er­enc­ing nom-white babies.
South Carolina Republican US Senator Lindsay Graham said ‘if we play fair we will nev­er win anoth­er elec­tion”. But this is not just about win­ning elec­tions, it is about stop­ping oth­ers from vot­ing, a process that will inex­orably change the way racial set-asides and prac­tices have divid­ed the coun­try, empow­er­ing some and mar­gin­al­iz­ing a great many others.
Remember that for most whites Americans belonged to them and all deci­sions about the coun­try rest with them.

Right-wing media hous­es dis­card­ed truth for pro­pa­gan­da and lies. By the time Donald Trump start­ed his cam­paign of lies against Barack Obama and every­one else he hated.….lies had long become an accept­ed real­i­ty in right-wing circles.
So while peo­ple in the cen­ter and left of cen­ter wrung their hands and lament­ed the demise of truth, Trump the great men­di­cant was heav­i­ly immersed in build­ing a web of lies on which he would fur­ther tear the coun­try apart in order to gain pow­er so he may enrich him­self and his crim­i­nal acolytes.
An entire cot­tage indus­try sprung up around white suprema­cy, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and a whole host of stars emerged to spew the same racist bile on FOX and oth­er media outlets.
Talk radio became the new right-wing church for the old-guard too stu­pid to nav­i­gate the web.….. for the younger swamp crea­tures the inter­net offered a whole new avenue from which they would poi­son the minds of the intel­lec­tu­al­ly weak, defi­cient, and feeble.
Fox in-house racist-in-chief summed up the right’s point of view on vot­ing rights this way.

“Now I know that the left and all the lit­tle gate­keep­ers on Twitter become lit­er­al­ly hys­ter­i­cal if you use the term “replace­ment,” if you sug­gest 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”.

Carlson recent­ly made that state­ment on FOX, but that sense of fear has been behind Donald Trump’s racist attacks on Barack Obama since he start­ed run­ning for the pres­i­den­cy. It was behind the Koch big mon­ey that drove Republican strat­e­gy, and it has been behind the John Roberts Supreme court deci­sion, Shelby County, Alabama Vs. Holder in 2013 that evis­cer­at­ed the 1965 Voting rights act, right after Obama secured a sec­ond term.
It is what pro­pelled Trump to the pres­i­den­cy. It is behind the cult fol­low­ing of Trump, a man they know is a cer­ti­fied idiot but nonethe­less revere because he has the pow­er to mobi­lize the worst instincts of all the swamp creatures.
It is a tough row to hoe because white peo­ple see their pow­er threat­ened by diver­si­ty at all lev­els of the American body-politic.
It makes them stark rag­ing mad that a time may soon be here that they will be forced to com­pete on a lev­el play­ing field.
That’s what dri­ves the right.
If it means destroy­ing this democ­ra­cy to keep what they have, they will do it.
They would rather drain the pool than share it; that’s how dement­ed they are.

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com.