UPDATE: Here’s conservative activist Charlie Kirk, who readers will recall endorsed Colorado GOP candidate for governor Heidi Ganahl with much fanfare recently:
Here’s white Christian nationalist Charlie Kirk spouting #ReplacementTheory on his April 13 show. Full quote in the video. Hilarious that he pretends not to even know what “replacement theory” is as he articulates it perfectly. #ChristianNationalism https://t.co/qnKaSqfv2i pic.twitter.com/xbjmir64Qx
— Samuel Perry (@profsamperry) May 16, 2022
And if that’s not enough for you:
There is an undeniable War on White People in The West.
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) April 28, 2022
That won’t go over well at Cinco de Mayo.
The New York Times reports in the aftermath of another horrific mass shooting this past weekend–this time in Buffalo, New York, and perpetrated by an avowed white supremacist who followed the by-now familiar procedure of posting his racist political manifesto online and then livestreaming the attack:
Inside a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, a white man with a history of antisemitic internet posts gunned down 11 worshipers, blaming Jews for allowing immigrant “invaders” into the United States.
The next year, another white man, angry over what he called “the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” opened fire on shoppers at an El Paso Walmart, leaving 23 people dead, and later telling the police he had sought to kill Mexicans.
And in yet another deadly mass shooting, unfolding in Buffalo on Saturday, a heavily armed white man is accused of killing 10 people after targeting a supermarket on the city’s predominantly Black east side, writing in a lengthy screed posted online that the shoppers there came from a culture that sought to “ethnically replace my own people.”
“Replacement theory” was long confined to the fringe of far-right Republican debate over immigration policy, but here in Colorado it’s been openly courted by the GOP establishment for many years. A talking point in various forms of archetype anti-immigrant extremist Rep. Tom Tancredo back in the mid aughts, the Western Conservative Summit hosted annually by Colorado Christian University’s political arm the Centennial Institute later brought in globally prominent anti-immigrant politicians like Geert Wilders of the Netherlands, who built his notoriety on the idea that Muslims are “replacing” the White population of Europe.
It was the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and the subsequent revitalization of open racism seen at the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia that helped mainstream what were once considered views so repellent that even Republicans had no room for them in their tent. At the nation’s largest conservative media outlet Fox News, primetime host Tucker Carlson has referenced the idea hundreds of times since 2016.
And yes, as we’ve noted in this space several times, Colorado’s own far-right blast furnace of outrage Rep. Lauren Boebert has made “replacement theory” a central component of her platform. In April of last year:
BOEBERT: That’s because walls work. Any Democrat who tells you otherwise is an open borders nutjob. The truth is, they want borders wide open. It helped Democrats take over the entire state of California, and now we’re seeing in New York they are paying 15 grand to illegal immigrants. Fifteen grand because you came here illegally.
And by last September, as you can watch in the clip above, embracing the theory by name:
BOEBERT: To top it off, they want to grant amnesty and a path to citizenship to eight million illegal aliens. Yes, there is definitely a replacement theory that’s going on right now. [Pols emphasis] We are killing American jobs and bringing in illegal aliens from all over the world to replace them if Americans will not comply with the tyrannical orders that are coming down from the White House.
Since the mass shooting Saturday in Buffalo, Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York has been a focal point of criticism after her own ads accusing Democrats of plotting a “permanent election insurrection” through mass immigration. Stefanik has enjoyed a rapid rise to leadership as a fastidiously loyal servant of Trump’s, and has been cultivating a power base through support for downballot candidates in this year’s midterms including Colorado gubernatorial candidate Heidi Ganahl and CD-8 candidate Jan Kulmann. With Boebert and Stefanik both out there pushing their respective versions of the Buffalo shooter’s manifesto, every Republican they’ve touched should now face questions about it
Because the shooter chose to spell out his motivations in detail, there’s no debating them–any more than it can be debated that the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood shooter committed his crimes in 2015 sincerely believing that he was stopping the sale of “baby parts.” Or that Trump knew exactly what he wanted when he told his supporters on January 6th to “fight like hell” or they “won’t have a country anymore.”
In all of these cases, responsibility can no longer be rationally denied.
The denial must be willful.
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Lauren Boebert: "that's because walls work."
What planet is she living on? The border wall has been climbed over, tunneled under, and sawn through. This is all documented. But of course, Ms. Boebert is someone for whom real facts don't matter.
Not to mention that many aliens that are here "illegally" have overstayed visas and thus didn't have to scale a "wall" at all.
That’s a good reminder, Spaceman. Yes, the majority of undocumented persons are here on expired visas. Funny that Trump did nothing about that little problem.
Like the one between East Berlin and West Berlin?
They don’t care who gets hurt as long as they can keep their base fired up. I’d be willing to wager deep down they are cheerleading for these terrorists. Their espoused beliefs are all the proof you need to see.
I know that for these racist hatemongers, the truth does not matter. They lie without conscience. But why are their lies so easily disprovable? The best estimate I was able to find of the population in the US of unauthorized immigrants was 11 million, in 2018. Department of Homeland Security. The current US population is approximately 330 million. So, 3 % of the population is unauthorized immigrants, not 20%. It is an outrageous lie that the bigots eat up.
Los Angeles County is geographically about the size of a combined Yuma and Washington County. One footprint has 10 million residents, the other 15,000.
No, honey, America is a long way from “full”
Well, I think Colorado is full. Maybe we need to stop Republican immigration from California, Illinois and Texas into Colorado.
It's war on Colorado values. They're trying to replace us with Christian Nationalists and Chick Filets
Averages aside, the U.S.– with 4 pct of the world’s population — already burns 25 percent of the world natural resources. Add a couple hundred million more, with their SUVs and Big Mac, and global environmental collapse will follow.
Give it a f*cking rest, tt. Stop stirring the shit.
It's pretty clear V was not primarily talking about overpopulation as a cause of environmental collapse, but of overutilization of energy resources by the US population.
" overpopulation" is also a way of saying "overpopulation".
And Tim-Tam is just a way of saying racist/ageist/sexist troll😅😅
I am glad tim-tam is here to codify what is sound and valid for all of us. We'd be lost otherwise.
And down the rabbit hole we go….or not.
I think not.
This was legitimately the coolest “rabbit hole” gif I found.
Not to mention that we're down 100,000 people in the damn-demic.I really do think we can fit those folks in.
Missing a zero, there, notaskinnycook … the official count just went by 1 million, which would demand six zeros and two commas. And the current CDC estimate on COVID-19 "excess deaths since 2/1/2020 across the United States: 1,119,908."
Yep. Oops!! My bad.
"America is full….." A missing point here is that while Yuma and Washington Counties have only 15,000 residents, do they have enough water for even another 15,000?
Availability of water is becoming the 800 pound gorilla in the room (with apologies to the beautiful creatures that are lowland and mountain gorillas).
Sure they do. Ag still consumes around 80% of the water, almost all of that consumption is for corn. An acre of corn is going to use at least an acre-foot of water (I’m being generous, some years it’s 50-100% more than that). That 325,900 gallons will almost supply a household for a year. There are 500,000 acres in the Republican River Water District alone. The mathematical answer to your question is easy (not being snarky, CHB)
There’s more than enough water in the Ogallala for ‘people’. Give me a thriving greenhouse industry that uses a fraction of the water, grow *actual* food and employ thousands. It’s not that we don’t have solutions – we have no political will.
Conservatives are concerned with being abandoned thus why they need victimhood. They have seen much of what they thought of as culture fall out of popularity. It’s difficult being a bigot when more and more people are excluding you thus this need for victim ideology.
Regardless of the cultural element this victim ideology is pervasive in conservative circles. Ask what burden has been placed on you, your family, your manhood… by M&M’s cartoon characters wearing a different heel?
If you are not a victim to cartoons, potato heads, or the lead of a movie not being your race or sex, then why waste your life with losers who are afraid of cartoons, potato heads, leads in movies a different race or sex than them?
That IS the $64,000 question, isn’t it? My Cat and I often discuss this.
A feeling of persecution is a handy place to put your grievances…they fit so neatly together. It seems to me a common thread in the narrative that continues
to fire up the Orange Horde.
One key word is missing in your monologue. You need the word “Some” (without the quotes) at the very beginning.
I haven’t been abandoned and neither have any of my conservative friends. None of us feel like we’re victims.
As for “culture falling out of popularity,” my conservative father walked me by the home of D.C. Stephenson, on the east side of Indianapolis in the early 1960s, when I was a kid. He explained that D.C. was a thoroughly evil man, multiple reasons why, and how he “fell out of popularity.” (you can look D.C. up on Wikipedia).