Elise Stefanik is one of the “Great Replacement”ists.

Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), the No. 3 House Republican, and other GOP lawmakers came under scrutiny Sunday for previously echoing the racist “great replacement” theory…

The one the Buffalo mass murderer embraces.

The baseless conspiracy theory claims that politicians are attempting to wipe out White Americans and their influence by replacing them with non-White immigrants. The theory was cited repeatedly by 18-year-old shooting suspect Payton Gendron in an online document that appeared to have outlined his intention to carry out his planned attack in Buffalo because of its significant population of Black people.

How dare Black people live in Buffalo, right? They should all live in Philadelphia, Mississippi, reliving all the horrors every day.

While Stefanik has not pushed the theory by name, she and other conservatives have echoed the tenets of the far-right ideology as part of anti-immigrant rhetoric that has fired up the Republican base ahead of the midterm elections.

Hmmm, Stefanik – looks kind of foreign, doesn’t it. Immigrants in the family tree possibly? Can we send her back?

Adam Kinzinger pointed out her replacementism in a tweet.

Kinzinger was referring to a series of Facebook ads published in September 2021 by Stefanik’s campaign committee that charged that Democrats were allowing undocumented immigrants into the United States as a ploy to outnumber, and eventually silence, Republican voters.

“Radical Democrats are planning their most aggressive move yet: a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION,” reads one of the ads, which shows a reflection of migrants in sunglasses Biden is wearing. “Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.”

It’s a similar argument [to the one] frequently espoused by Fox News host Tucker Carlson, leading the Anti-Defamation League to repeatedly call for his firing since April 2021 after he appeared to endorse the concept during one of his segments.

Oh well, she’s only in Congress; what harm can she do?

This is not a decent person.

There was a gathering of women today in Manchester, and the women were joined by some men in black hoodies and masks who wanted them to stop gathering.

The vibe is not “protest” but “threat.”

Well, women gathering. I mean to say.

Substitute a statue of Rosa Parks or John Lewis or Thurgood Marshall. Imagine a gang of white supremacists taking over said statue. Think about that. Mmhm.

Like adding a hoe for chopping cotton to a statue of Marshall, or a box of Aunt Jemima Pancake Mix in the hands of a statue of Parks.

We can’t have anything of our own.

Aaron Blake at the Washington Post last September:

As we wrote a while back, the Republican Party’s increasing embrace of replacement theory — the idea popular in white supremacist circles that immigrants are being brought in to replace native-born (read: White) Americans — has been a slow build. For years, it was an idea relegated to infrequent mentions by fringe Republicans who operated outside the political mainstream and weren’t generally welcomed in politer circles of the GOP. When it was mentioned, it was dressed up as something besides replacement theory, per se.

Well, sure. There are a lot of ways you can dress up such things. In fact “replacement theory” itself is a dressing up – it sounds thoughtful and academic-ish, when really it’s just Y U let all those darkies in?

[Tucker] Carlson last week doubled down and used the actual label favored by racist groups — “great replacement” — and more recently got some backup from a member of Congress, Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.).

Carlson had been disavowing “replacement theory” while also promoting it, then he dropped the disavowing part.

In a segment last week recapped by The Washington Post’s Philip Bump, though, Carlson explained that what Biden was doing was, in fact, not just replacement, but a great replacement.

“In political terms, this policy is called the great replacement, the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from faraway countries,” Carlson said Wednesday.

And Matt Gaetz tweeted a Right on bro! Dressed up a little – the cleanest T shirt he could find.

So that’s two prominent figures on the right describing this as, in fact, “the great replacement” and “replacement theory.” And the former did so after his boss said he had “decried and rejected replacement theory.” This comes on top of certain congressional Republicans, including one who spoke to a group of white nationalists, floating the idea forming a caucus for which a draft document said immigrants were undercutting the “unique identity” of the country. (The idea was later shelved after an outcry.)

Let’s go full racism! Oops, wait, it’s not going over well – back off a little. [looks at watch] Ok try again!

Martin Pengelly in The Guardian last September:

After the Anti-Defamation League renewed its call for Tucker Carlson to be fired from Fox News for voicing the racist “great replacement” theory about immigration, the primetime host had a pithy response: “Fuck them.”

…

Claiming the Biden administration was trying “to change the racial mix of the country”, Carlson said: “In political terms, this policy is called ‘the great replacement’, the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far-away countries.”

That’s the one Nicholas Confessore cited on Fresh Air the other day. It’s definitely an attention-grabber. Goebbels-like.

The “great replacement theory” originated on the far right. Perpetrators of recent mass shootings have cited iterations of the theory in “manifestos” attempting to justify their actions.

The link is to the El Paso mass shooting aka local genocide.

Carlson raised the theory in April, claiming it was not racist but a matter of hardball politics. The ADL chief executive, Jonathan Greenblatt, called for Carlson to be fired.

That didn’t happen, as we know. It will go on not happening. Everything will just get worse.

Matt Gaetz says Carlson is correct.

Canadian Women and Sport think men belong in women’s sport.

I would link to the statement on their website instead of Twitter, but it’s not there. They posted it on Facebook and Twitter but not their website.

They bother to have a thing called Canadian Women and Sport but then they undercut it by making a public statement that they think men belong in it.

I wondered if there’s a comparable group for First Nations in sport and found Aboriginal Sport Circle. It’s unfortunately all male on the main page until the very bottom where it promotes a group that’s explicitly for women and men. At any rate, I wonder if they would ever issue a statement saying that trans-aboriginal people belong in Aboriginal sport. I wonder if the Trudeau government would issue such a statement. I wonder if it’s only women who are stabbed in the back this way.

When in doubt, bully women some more.

Since the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, they have issued various edicts restricting the freedom of women – banning them from government jobs, secondary education and from traveling more than 45 miles (72km) without a mahram, or male guardian.

Some women in Afghanistan say the edict about the use of face veils is just the latest attack on their human rights.

Well what else would it be? A defense of their human rights?

Herat University graduate Najma thinks it’s time the international community did more to put pressure on the Taliban when it comes to women’s rights.

Whatever “the international community” may be. Russia? Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan? North Korea? China?

“It breaks my heart, I feel so weak because I feel I have no option other than to obey these stupid rules,” she says.

“I cannot describe how bad this situation is, they are pressuring women and girls and putting us in a cage.”

Identify as a man. That should take care of it.

Here he is saying it. Just one of many.

What was that about “replacement theory”? Just yesterday? Now jump ahead to today:

A man has opened fire at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York while live-streaming on Twitch, killing at least 10 people and injuring several others, local officials and witnesses say. He also posted an online manifesto in which he described himself as a white supremacist.

Tucker Carlson whips white supremacists into a rage for ratings, which translate to money. To make himself rich, Tucker Carlson talks a lot of racist garbage on tv to an audience of millions, and here is this result. This isn’t correlation taken for causation, not when the guy live-streams himself and says he’s a violent racist.

The exact number of victims was not immediately clear, but officials told The Buffalo News that at least 10 people were killed and 3 injured, including two who were in critical condition. A recently retired Buffalo police officer who worked security at the store is among those killed.

A 106-page online manifesto, believed to have been uploaded by the shooter, explained that he was motivated by a conspiracy theory that white people are being replaced by other races. In the document, he says he is 18 years old and a self-described white supremacist and anti-semite.

“If there’s one thing I want you to get from these writings, it’s that White birth rates must change. Everyday the White population becomes fewer in number,” the document says. “To maintain a population the people must achieve a birth rate that reaches replacement fertility levels, in the western world that is about 2.06 births per woman.”

Originally a comment by Artymorty on Realizing there are no sheep left.

How can it be that men who are claiming to actually be women despise the sex they aspire to be or become so much? If they loathe women as much as they do (and far too many of them do), why on earth would they ever want to be one?

It’s like a jumbled kind of mind-body dualism deployed in service of misogyny: they love women’s bodies but they hate women’s souls.

I think many trans-identified men are like many other men in that they’re preoccupied with women’s bodies, but not keen on the female people who “inhabit” them. Damn that pesky business of women as autonomous persons who are different from men, and who are in control of their own bodies — the ones men want so badly to possess and control.

It’s surprising how many trans activists more-or-less come right out and say this: a “woman’s” body inhabited by a male soul is therefore the ideal woman to be, and a woman’s body inhabited by a female soul who is obedient to your demands is the ideal woman to have. Your soul is male so you can possess a woman’s body if you bloody well say so, and her soul is female, so you need to keep her under control.

You can see why so many misogynistic trans-identifying males call themselves “lesbians”.

Helen Lewis in The Atlantic:

Say what you like about the ACLU; it knows how to get people talking. But not necessarily in terms favorable to the ACLU. Late last month, the civil-liberties organization was revealed to have ghostwritten Amber Heard’s contentious Washington Post op-ed about suffering from domestic violence; the article was timed to coincide with the release of her film Aquaman. And on May 11, the ACLU once again caught the moment, posting a tweet that perfectly encapsulates a new taboo on the American left: a terrible aversion to using the word women.

And not just the left but the…what to call it…the mainstream, the middle, the Major Media, the organizations. They all heed that taboo.

Helen quotes the ACLU’s ridiculous list of “people” harmed by the unavailability of abortion, the one that doesn’t mention women even once.

To a casual reader, though, the ACLU has used phrasing that reads like an incantation—a list of disadvantaged groups that are more interesting than women. There’s something of the record-store hipster about it all: I care about groups with intersecting oppressions you haven’t even heard of.

And why would the ACLU want to sound like a record-store hipster? I’d have thought it had bigger fish to fry.

To be generous, perhaps the ACLU didn’t mention women because the organization views their disproportionate victimization by abortion bans as a given—a fact too obvious to mention. “I don’t think anyone is at serious risk of forgetting that most of the people who need abortions are women,” the ACLU communications strategist Gillian Branstetter told me. “Certainly nobody within the ACLU.” Although the tweet attracted a storm of criticism online, Branstetter said my concerns were the first she had heard.

Oh man. What a pack of lies. Some “communications strategist”! Imagine Gillian Branstetter saying that if the issue were race. “I don’t think anyone is at serious risk of forgetting that most of the people who need racial justice are Black.” She wouldn’t, not in a million years. She wouldn’t remove the word “Black” from all of the ACLU’s campaign and promotion material, and then say no one is in danger of forgetting about Black people. It’s only women we’ve all been conditioned to ignore and conceal.

And if it’s true that she was unaware of the outrage, she’s not doing her job.

This isn’t the first time the ACLU has dodged the W-word. Last year, the group infamously rewrote a Ruth Bader Ginsburg quote about abortion access being central “to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity” to remove the gendered language.

They waited until after she died, too, which seemed sneaky and craven as well as disgusting.

The ACLU is not alone in neutering its campaign for abortion rights. Last week, a friend who wanted to raise funds for the cause asked me to recommend an American organization still willing to acknowledge that abortion is a gendered issue. Finding a candidate was surprisingly tricky. The word women has been purged from the front page of the NARAL website, while the Lilith Fund helps “people who need abortions in Texas.” (However, the group notes elsewhere that most of those who call its hotline are “low-income women of color.”) Fund Texas Women has been renamed Fund Texas Choice. The National Abortion Federation’s response to the Supreme Court leak noted that it will “keep fighting until every person, no matter where we live, how much money we make, or what we look like, has the freedom to make our own decisions about our lives, our bodies, and futures.”

What I’m saying. It’s systematic. Which is not just infuriating but also such idiotic politics. How do you organize the workers while never mentioning the workers? What are lesbian and gay rights if you can’t ever say “lesbian and gay”? How would it help to change BLM to LM?

A Great Unwomening is under way because American charities and political organizations survive by fundraising—and their most vocal donors don’t want to be charged with offenses against intersectionality. Cold economic logic therefore dictates that charities should phrase their appeals in the most fashionable, novel, and bulletproof-to-Twitter-backlash way possible. Mildly peeved centrists may grumble but will donate anyway; it’s the left flank that needs to be appeased.

Well I hope those mild centrists get furious enough to slam shut the wallets.

When I questioned the wisdom of foregrounding the small minority of people who seek abortions but do not identify as women, the ACLU’s Branstetter told me, “Transgender people do not have the privilege of pretending that we do not exist. When we use inclusive language, it’s because we recognize that transgender people do exist.”

The language isn’t “inclusive” though. I’m very confident that Branstetter would agree if the issue were erasing the word “Black.” Guess what: it works the same way for women. Erasing half of humanity is not “inclusive.” (Also, are we to conclude that Branstetter is a man who calls himself a woman? Because that would explain a lot right there.)

But something is lost when abortion-rights activists shy away from saying women. We lose the ability to talk about women as more than a random collection of organs, bodies that happen to menstruate or bleed or give birth. We lose the ability to connect women’s common experiences, and the discrimination they face in the course of a reproductive lifetime. By substituting people for women, we lose the ability to speak of women as a class.

We lose sight of the fact that it’s because women are the people who need abortions that women are treated as the subordinate sex, and that the ACLU and other right-on organizations feel entitled to erase us from the conversation.

Arwa Mahdawi says it’s not a time to Calm Down Dear.

On the same day that prominent columnists were telling people to calm down – and less than 48 hours after the leaked supreme court opinion – Republicans in Louisiana advanced a bill that would redefine personhood to begin at the moment of fertilization and make abortion a crime of murder. Yes, you read that right: the moment of fertilization. I’m sure the people involved in drafting this law have no idea about how reproduction actually works (they like controlling female bodies, not learning about them), but between one-third and one-half of all fertilized eggs never fully implant. Which means someone in Louisiana needs to arrest God – he’s responsible for a hell of a lot of abortions!

Yes but when God does it it’s Divine Will, when we do it it’s Sluts Defying God.

It’s unclear whether the Louisiana bill will become law anytime soon. But what is clear is that we are going to see more and more extreme proposals like this. As I discussed in a previous Week in Patriarchy, radicalized Christian nationalism is a growing threat in the US; a small but very organised group of people are intent on turning the country into a modern theocracy.

And referring to their opponents as Pedo Grifters along the way.

It doesn’t say the girls are trans.

A teacher has been arrested after allegedly sexually assaulting four girls.

The 28-year-old suspect, who works at a school in Birmingham, is also accused of sending indecent images of himself.

I take it he’s not trans and the girls are also not trans?

I wonder if he’s transitioning right this minute, and will be informing the police of his new reality with the swiftness of thought.

In a statement, the police said: “We’re investigating sexual assault accusations against a teacher at a Birmingham school.

“It’s alleged the 28-year-old man assaulted four different girls and sent indecent images of himself.

“He was initially arrested on 9 May on suspicion of sexual assault and released on police bail with conditions including not to have unsupervised contact with children.

“However, we moved to arrest the man again in the early hours of this morning [Saturday] at his home in Birmingham, having received additional information. He remains in police custody for questioning.”

But is he a cis man or a trans man? Oddly, the police don’t say. And are the four different girls trans girls or cis girls? How can we know?

Man brags about inserting himself into an abortion rights protest.

He shouldn’t be “really proud” of that. He should be really ashamed of it. He doesn’t need abortion rights, he’s not a woman, the war on abortion rights isn’t a war on him, he should sit down and be quiet.

He’s right you know.

It is, literally (all too literally), the kind of language that aspiring or existing fascist strongmen use to incite violence against The Chosen Enemy. It’s not just rude or over the top or “extreme,” it’s intended to provoke hatred then rage then violence.

“Pedo grifters.” That’s getting into blood libel territory.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Equally valid.

What follows is likely old hat to many here, but it’s something I’ve come to realize, partly in the course of writing this very comment. It might be completely off-base, but still, I’ll run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes.

Tatchell is being surprisingly candid, and perhaps unconciously so. First, he’s distinguishing between biological women (in reality, the only kind there is) and socially constructed “women” who do not share the biological characteristics of actual women. The claim of “both” being “equally valid” depends on the admitted existence of actual, biological women. The putative “equal validity” of “socially constucted women” (i.e. TiMs) has nothing to emulate, aspire to or usurp without the existence of an original, authentic prototype or exemplar. Without women, TiMs have no destination, no end point to aim at. And everyobody knows this. Everybody knows what a woman is. Without women, TiMs have nobody alongside of whom they can declare themselves to be valid. The paradoxical attempt to dilute or dissolve the definition of “woman” is an attempt to lower the drawbridge long enough to be admitted into the inner circle of the definition they must overthrow to be included in. Once they’re “inside” they need a definition of “woman” that includes them, but still permits actual women in whose reflected existence and validity they can bask.

Like the contradictory and self-defeating need of TiM sports cheats infiltrating women’s leagues and teams, it stops offering affirmation and validation if everyone else on the team or in the league is a TiM. They’re no longer “one of the girls” because at this point there are no real girls left. Ultimately, this is as disastrous as “lesbian” TiMs having only other TiM “lesbians” from whom to find dates. They know that other TiMs are not really women either. Cheating is only a worthwhile strategy so long as there are enough honest players against whom it can be deployed. It’s like the Larson cartoon where a group of wolves in sheep’s clothing are just realizing to their surprise and disappointment that there are no real sheep left. It’s not really much of a “community” at all if the presence of other ostensible “community” members ruins your strategy of selfishness, which only works for “lone wolves.” It’s a pyramid scheme that can only ever satisfy the first ones in. Johnny-come-lately joiners fail to win the big payoff of validation, which has been skimmed off by the pioneering TiMs who managed to gain access while there were still enough women to satisfy the TiM-narc supply.

The near pathological contempt and hatred that some trans activists evince comes across as a variation of the Madonna/whore dichotomy. How can it be that men who are claiming to actually be women despise the sex they aspire to be or become so much? If they loathe women as much as they do (and far too many of them do), why on earth would they ever want to be one? Perhaps it’s more than just the realization that, because humans can’t change sex, they can never achieve their goal. Maybe discussion of exclusively female experiences and issues is triggering for more reasons than the fact that TiMs will never experience them. Maybe part of the rage is their unacknowledged dependence upon the existence of female humans as a role model or standard in the first place, and why erasing them completely is self-defeating for their own impossible goals?

TiMs count on women’s socialization to “be kind” in trying to gain access to women’s spaces, yet never show “womanly” kindness themselves. Yet if they drive women from single sex spaces, the absence of women will deprive them of the validation they’ve come for in the first place. A women’s rape crisis centre that ends up having only TiMs as clients stops being attractive to them because there are no real women among whom they can situate themselves, which was the point of accessing these spaces in the first place. It’s the “team full of TiMs” all over again. Forced inclusion ends up being self-defeating. Would Clymer and Admiral Whatshisname have been happy to preside over a group of “lesbians” made up of TiMs only? No. It would be like ending up with a gender neutral toilet. That’s like getting a participation award when what you want is to win the gold. Being given a space of your own is pointless when what you really want is access to women’s spaces. That doesn’t happen if all the women have left. Then you’ve got to go find out where the women have gone, locate whatever facilities and services that they’ve set up for themselves, and then demand access to that. It’s a never ending cycle of perpetual dissatisfaction. They can never win for long. They will always need women to intrude upon, to be “women” alongside them. They realize, as does Tatchell, that they are not actually women. Never have been; never will be.

Julie Bindel had a very horrible time at York University last week.

It was a sign of the times that the group that invited me to give a talk on feminism at York was the university’s Free Speech Society. It was scheduled for February but trouble immediately materialised and both the feminist and the LGBTQ societies got it cancelled. But my hosts did not back down and, pledging to guarantee the safety of both students and speaker, rescheduled the talk. It happened last week, in an atmosphere I found both deeply disturbing and profoundly distressing. 

…

I heard the noise before I saw the crowd. ‘Bindel, out!’ ‘Not welcome on our campus,’ ‘Decrim(inalise) sex work now’ and the like. I could have cried. How has this mad transgender ideology so captured the female students who, just a few years ago, would have welcomed me warmly as a mentor? 

It would be understandable if the university had been swamped by neo-Nazi students, but this is the Left devouring its own. This is why we can’t have nice things.

My hands were shaking. I could not let the protesters see how sick I was feeling, so I approached some of them and tried to speak to them, but was blocked by a man who kept pushing a sign in my face: ‘Not on our campus’. 

Every time I tried to take a photograph to record what was happening to me, he would thrust the sign towards my face as though he was going to hit me with it. 

Someone waved a ‘Kiss my man boob’ placard at me. There were explicit comments about what I should do to their ‘trans dick’. Students — and a few members of staff — shouted vile things at me through megaphones. Female students turned their backs on me. It felt aggressive and hugely, horribly personal. I have reported from war zones — these were just a bunch of students. And yet it was devastating to hear them scream at me. 

Because she doesn’t think prostitution is a great career option for women, and because she doesn’t believe men can become women.

How can I answer the charges when they are so at odds with reality? I speak all over the world on the global sex trade and its harm to women and girls, including at the United Nations. I have campaigned with sex trade survivors to change the law so that women convicted of prostitution-related offences have their records expunged. 

Yet one twenty-something activist felt moved to mischaracterise my beliefs to her social media followers in this way: ‘Bindel is an advocate for the Nordic model. This is a model that criminalises sex-working individuals and denies them worker rights, which has been proven to put them at an increased risk of rape, murder, and coercion. Bindel’s whole career is founded in supporting the mass homicide of sex workers.’

Mass homicide? Of women I’ve campaigned alongside for 40 years? 

Ffs.

All very normal, very healthy, nothing to worry about.

Why did we elect those pedo grifters, anyway? I forget.

That sounds kind of familiar.

Fresh Air on Tucker Carlson part 2.

DAVIES: One of the things you hear a lot on his show is him looking into the camera, as he does in his opening monologues, and speaks to his audience and says, they don’t like you. They don’t care about you. They want to control your lives. Who’s the they?

CONFESSORE: In Carlson’s telling, in his narrative, they is the ruling class. And the ruling class is pretty much anybody he wants it to be. It’s people who actually are in charge and have power and are elected to office – presidents, vice presidents, people in Congress. It’s pro athletes. It’s Chelsea Clinton. It’s comedians who make jokes about America. It’s pretty much anybody who’s in the news that day for whatever reason. And his great skill as a broadcaster, among others, is that he can always take whatever’s happening that day and make it part of his narrative of the ruling class. If someone’s talking about making pot legal, he goes on the air and says that the ruling class is trying to legalize pot because a plying population is a good population. So it doesn’t matter what the story is, it always gets wrapped back into the narrative of the day versus you.

They is the snobs, versus The Salt of the Earth. Trump is The Salt of the Earth, because, and schoolteachers are snobs, because.

A lot of it is about fear, Davies says.

CONFESSORE: Yeah. You know, I would – I talked to one former Fox employee about the programming strategy on Carlson’s show and across it – or board more broadly. And what he said – I’m going to paraphrase – is, anger gets people to tune in and stay locked onto the network, keep their TVs on. But what’s better than anger? Anger and fear. And what you see on Fox in the last few years, but especially on Carlson’s show, is rage inflation. You see an effort to just dial it up to 11 every night. And the point is, keep people tuned in.

Why not rage about the failure to do anything about climate change though? Or about the yawning gap between wages and housing costs? Or predatory payday loan companies? Or the Sackler family?

How much do ratings drive the content?

CONFESSORE: What our story shows is that from the beginning, Carlson’s show, his provocations on the air, his escalating rhetoric are all part of a careful and intentional effort to build and hold Fox’s audience in an era when the cable audience in general is in decline. And it’s been incredibly successful overall. You saw that in 2020, Carlson attracted more viewers than any other show in the history of cable news. And on one night during the George Floyd protests, he had the highest rated show on all of television, broadcast and cable. It’s very potent. And for a lot of people, it’s really gripping viewing. And so I think it’s important to understand that – I think these are his real views. And we show in the story kind of how he got there.

But I also say that, you know, I was talking to two people who worked with him at The Daily Caller, which is an online tabloid he founded in 2010. And they each separately volunteered a quote from Kurt Vonnegut, and it really struck me. And the quote was basically, we are who we pretend to be. And if you think about that, I think it explains a lot about how you build a personality on cable TV. You start with what you think and know, but you’re also watching what the audience responds to. And in the case of Fox, you are seeing a minute-by-minute analysis of the ratings, right? You’re seeing, down to the minute, what makes the audience change the channel. And so, of course, you give them more of what makes them stay, and that becomes who you are, and that becomes your persona.

In other words, what there is of democracy and solidarity in the US is being systematically ground to powder so that one tv network can make lots and lots of money. A trivial self-interested motivation and a catastrophic turn of events. It’s a tad annoying.

DAVIES: You and I are speaking on Wednesday. And Tuesday night, I watched Tucker Carlson’s opening monologue, which was about Karine Jean-Pierre, who is the new press secretary who is replacing Jen Psaki. And, you know, he spent a long time mocking her and the fact that she is Black and LGBTQ and that she’s the first person in that role from that background. But he also repeatedly said how she had no qualifications. And the fact is, she has a fairly substantial history in political communications. Is this a common theme of his? Is he tough on women of color in particular?

CONFESSORE: He definitely is. I mean, he’s tough on a lot of people. He thinks a lot of people are stupid. But what we found in our reporting was that he really seems to reserve special scorn for Black women. In his cast of characters, you really see a disproportionate focus, I think, on Black women – on Kamala Harris, who he’s insinuated only has her job today because of who she dated; to Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who he’s demanded the LSAT scores of – I don’t recall him demanding the LSAT scores for Brett Kavanaugh – Karine Jean-Pierre. And on Carlson’s show, it’s not just that they’re wrong or they have bad ideas. They’re stupid and evil and unqualified. And you see that theme, you know, over and over. And certainly it’s not only Black women, but that jumped out when we saw – you know, often repeating the same words about different people over and over again.

$$$$$$

CONFESSORE: White nationalists and neo-Nazis love Tucker Carlson’s show. They watch it. They talk about watching it. They post clips from it. They cheer it online. And the reason is simple. He has taken ideas that were caged in a dark corner of American life, on a few websites that don’t get that many visitors, and he made it the animating force on the most popular cable news program in history. And if you listen to them, what they say is, Carlson is taking our ideas. He is the most effective popularizer of the importance of white identity of any person around today. And Carlson just kind of waves us away. He says, if you want to know what I think, watch my show, which is a way of evading the question.

And there’s Putin. Apparently we’re all wrong to think Putin is not a fine head of state.

CARLSON: Good evening, and welcome to “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” Since the day that Donald Trump became president, Democrats in Washington have told you, you have a patriotic duty to hate Vladimir Putin. It’s not a suggestion. It’s a mandate. Anything less than hatred for Putin is treason. Many Americans have obeyed this directive. They now dutifully hate Vladimir Putin. Maybe you’re one of them. Hating Putin has become the central purpose of America’s foreign policy. It’s the main thing that we talk about. Entire cable channels are now devoted to it. Very soon, that hatred of Vladimir Putin could bring the United States into a conflict in Eastern Europe.

Hating Putin is a mandate? I totally missed that.

Before that happens, it might be worth asking yourself, since it is getting pretty serious. What is this really about? Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity? Does he eat dogs? These are fair questions, and the answer to all of them is no. Vladimir Putin didn’t do any of that.

He did other things though. Anna Politkovskaya? Alexander Litvinenko? Sergei and Yulia Skripal? Alexei Navalny? Ring a bell?

So why does permanent Washington hate him so much? If you’ve been watching the news, you know that Putin is having a border dispute with a nation called Ukraine. Now, the main thing to know about Ukraine for our purposes is that its leaders once sent millions of dollars to Joe Biden’s family. Not surprisingly, Ukraine is now one of Biden’s favorite countries. Biden has pledged to defend Ukraine’s borders even as he opens our borders to the world. That’s how it works. Invading America is called equity. Invading Ukraine is a war crime.

That “for our purposes” is interesting.

Fresh Air did a conversation about Tucker Carlson of Fox “News” yesterday.

If you follow cable TV at all, you probably know that Fox News host Tucker Carlson is one of the most influential commentators in conservative media and one of the most provocative. He’s known for praising authoritarian leaders such as Vladimir Putin and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and warning his viewers about the dangers of foreign immigrants and elites who want to control their lives. Our guest, New York Times reporter Nicholas Confessore, recently wrote a series of articles about Carlson drawing on an analysis of more than 1,100 episodes of his show, “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” conducted by Confessore and a team of Times reporters as well as interviews with dozens of current and former Fox executives, producers and journalists.

One thing they found, to the surprise of no one, is that Carlson isn’t careful about truth.

CONFESSORE: Well, I thought it was important to capture his whole story. And I set into this with an open mind. On many occasions, I asked myself, so what is Carlson correct about on his show, and what’s he wrong about on the facts – not on the opinions but on the facts? And what we found, first of all, was just a long pattern of overhyping and wrong facts and misleading statements on the show. You could pick almost any show and find one.

“Wrong facts” are not facts at all. (Again, as with Tatchell, this is just the product of live interview-having to think on your feet: flubs are inevitable.)

Upshot: they found a lot of racism.

And I’ll give you one example, which we can come back to. This idea of replacement theory – you’ve probably heard about it. And even if you’re not paying much attention to cable news, you’ll probably recall that last spring he got in some hot water for saying, yeah, the elites in this country are trying to replace Americans with obedient people from what he called the Third World.

Now, that is a direct borrowing of language and concept from white nationalists and not just conservatives. I’m talking about people who are neo-Nazis, open nativists, white nationalists, people who get together in dark corners of the internet, mostly, and propound theories about how a cabal of elites – sometimes Jews, sometimes broader – are trying to replace Americans. Now, that theme hadn’t just popped up on the show last April. A version of it has been present in 400-plus episodes of the show.

But then what is it to “replace Americans”? It’s a nation of immigrants. The immigrants mostly displaced (and abused and genocided) the people who had been living here for centuries. Americans who aren’t Native Americans are all the product of immigration. (I suppose you could say the same about the people who moved in when the Bering Sea wasn’t a sea, but that was a hella long time ago.)

Then they play a sampler of Carlson saying The Thing. The breaks indicate different shows.

TUCKER CARLSON: They can embrace the issues the middle class cares about, or they can import an entirely new electorate from the Third World and change the demographics of the U.S. so completely they’ll never lose again.

Democrats know if they import enough new voters, they’ll be able to run the country forever.

Dramatic demographic change means many Americans don’t recognize where they grew up.

As with illegal immigration, the long-term agenda of refugee resettlement is to bring in future Democratic voters.

Illegal immigrants are the key to their power.

The point is to import as many new Democratic voters as possible.

The whole point of their immigration policy is to ensure political control, replace the population.

This policy is called the great replacement, the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from faraway countries.

That last one startled me a bit. Legacy? Wtf? In the cutthroat world of university admissions, legacy students are children of alumni/ae who wouldn’t otherwise get in. I guess “Legacy Americans” are the ones who get to be here because their very preppy ancestors got here before them? Something like that?

CONFESSORE: Well, we went and looked. We were like, so where does he get that? Where did that come from? We could find no trace of that phrase in mainstream media until he started using it. Where we found it was far-right sites. It was VDARE, which is a nativist site also popular with white nationalists, with some other corners of the internet. He literally plucked that phrase from the racist right and started using it on the air on Fox News.

DAVIES: And it means what?

CONFESSORE: You know, it’s a little bit of code, right? It doesn’t explicitly mean white Americans, although certainly it suggests people who are already here – right? – or have been here for some generations. And it harkens back to an earlier era, Carlson’s childhood and mine, when America was not just majority white but disproportionately and overwhelmingly composed of white citizens. So when I hear legacy Americans, I hear a dog whistle.

Preppy. Preppy, white – same thing.

(Not really. Preppy just assumes white; it’s much more about class. Class, money, and class.)

More later.