The great irony of POTUS 45 Trump’s first term, his victory in November 2016, and before that, his anti-immigration rhetoric during his winning presidential campaign, is this: It was not Trump, as leftists insist, who galvanized the GOP on immigration and and energized discussion of The Great Replacement. It was Trump’s defeat, and now, 18 months of Biden's refusing to enforce U.S. immigration law. Occidental Dissent’s Hunter Wallace saw it coming, he noted in his blog about the $PLC’s recent poll. It shows that Americans believe they are being replaced. That’s frightening enough...for $PLC. But GOP elected officials openly discuss the Great Replacement, which is even worse [Poll Watch: SPLC Poll Finds Substantial Support For “Great Replacement” Theory and Other Hard Right Ideas, June 1, 2022].
Not discussing it would be like not discussing an asteroid destined to hit New York City in less than a month, but anyway, Wallace has repeatedly said that “white populism” is the GOP’s future:
In hindsight, the George Floyd riots and Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election were a major turning point. We didn’t get what we wanted out of the Trump administration. Things kind of froze in place under Trump. Public opinion has changed rapidly though under Joe Biden.
Thus, $PLC’s poll of 1,500 Americans 16 years and older to “to examine the extent to which the extremist beliefs and narratives that mobilize the hard right have been absorbed by the wider American public,” as the anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-American hate group put it.
A new SPLC survey with @TulchinResearch indicates that the great replacement narrative cited by the alleged killer in Buffalo, New York, has become ingrained into the right wing. Nearly 70% of Republicans buy into the racist theory.
— Southern Poverty Law Center (@splcenter) June 1, 2022
Read more here:https://t.co/rZkqdMjR9N pic.twitter.com/AS3F1pSQqg
Those ideas “have become thoroughly mainstream on the political right”:
Nearly 7 in 10 Republicans surveyed agree to at least some extent that demographic changes in the United States are deliberately driven by liberal and progressive politicians attempting to gain political power by “replacing more conservative white voters.” Across the political spectrum, we found substantial support for threatening or acting violently against perceived political opponents.
We also uncovered a widespread feeling — especially among right-leaning Americans — that transgender people and “gender ideology” pose a threat to children and society at large. These anti-LGBTQ, misogynistic and racist narratives have been promoted by many Republican politicians and other powerful right-wing figures, helping the ideas infiltrate the mainstream and contributing to an increasingly volatile and dangerous political environment.
[SPLC Poll Finds Substantial Support for ‘Great Replacement’ Theory and Other Hard-Right Ideas, by Cassie Miller, SPLCenter.org, June 1, 2022]
And $PLC is mighty concerned that 44 percent of those polled—53 percent of Republicans and 39 percent of Democrats—believe civil war is coming.
Good thing is, $PLC is terrified that the Great Replacement, as VDare’s Washington Watcher has observed, is openly discussed, and seriously so.
As America’s demographics have shifted, the narrative of white replacement has become ingrained in the rhetoric of right-wing pundits and an increasingly extreme wing of the Republican Party. “This administration wants complete open borders. And you have to ask yourself, why?” U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin asked during a Fox News segment in April. “Is it really [that] they want to remake the demographics of America to ensure that they stay in power forever?” His statement echoed others made recently by U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, U.S. Senate candidates J.D. Vance and Blake Masters, and, most consistently, Tucker Carlson. A recent investigation by The New York Times found that the Fox News host has amplified the narrative that Democrats are deliberately forcing demographic change in more than 400 of the 1,150 episodes of his show they analyzed.
In a telling show of how deeply the great replacement myth has embedded itself within the GOP, many Republicans and right-wing figures doubled down on the narrative in the aftermath of the Buffalo shooting. U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, the No. 3 House Republican leader, tweeted two days after the attack that “Democrats desperately want wide open borders and mass amnesty for illegals allowing them to vote,” and later that Democratic policies “have created chaos at the southern border and has endangered every American community.” Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich espoused a version of replacement theory while attempting to downplay the racism at its core: “There is a legitimate cultural — not racial — fight to be had about the degree to which the Left seeks to erode American culture and the historic model of assimilation by allowing our legal immigration system to be totally overwhelmed.”
Though the poll supposedly “found that a plurality of Americans has a positive view of the country’s changing demographics,” the detailed data show that might not be true, which apparently worries the worthies at $PLC.
Those who don’t have such a “positive view” are mostly Republicans, 67 of whom “believe the country’s demographic changes are being orchestrated by ‘liberal leaders actively trying to leverage political power by replacing more conservative white voters.’”
But even a substantial number of Democrats polled think the same thing. Though almost the same percentage of Democrats, 64 percent, think the browning of America is a good thing, 25 percent say whites are being replaced, and 35 percent say leftists are orchestrating the replacement.
So for years, the $PLC and its Treason Lobby allies have been telling white Americans they will be replaced.
They listened, and don’t like it. The $PLC–Treason Lobby Axis of Evil is frightened.
Good.
