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Opinion: The Great Replacement as old as America itself, says Morristown man

Posted 5/18/22

To the Editor: “Civilization’s going to pieces…The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged…It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out …

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Opinion: The Great Replacement as old as America itself, says Morristown man

Posted

To the Editor:

“Civilization’s going to pieces…The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged…It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.” – Tom Buchanan, in The Great Gatsby

The Great Replacement, or white replacement theory, the vile racist lie that American, European, modern, and/or western civilian is in danger from demographic change, is at least as old as America itself. F. Scott Fitzgerald demonstrates the loathsomeness of the character Tom Buchanan by having him spout the theory at a dinner party early in the novel. White replacement theory inspired the Buffalo shooter on Saturday, May 14, who murdered 10 people with a gun that he scrawled slogans on including the vilest racial slur and the number “14,” which stands for the fourteen word white supremacist slogan, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”

The killer himself, of course, is responsible for murdering 10 people in a Buffalo supermarket. But these acts of violence don’t happen in a vacuum. Extreme nationalist, xenophobic, anti-Muslim, anti-immigration figures like Putin, Orban, Le Pen, and Trump have risen to prominence, and in some cases, power, spouting Great Replacement rhetoric.

Tucker Carlson, host of America’s most watched cable news show, and the North Country’s own Elise Stefanik, third ranking Republican in the House, both dabble in Great Replacement rhetoric. Tucker, according to an in depth New York Times analysis of 1,150 episodes of his nightly White Power Hour, “warns his viewers they inhabit a civilization under siege – by violent BLM protesters in American cities, by diseased migrants from south of the border, by refugees importing alien cultures.”

Elise has ads accusing President Biden of a “permanent election insurrection” through a “plan to grant amnesty to 11 million illegal immigrants [to] overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority.” Tucker and Elise play with such rhetoric, at a safe distance, for the viewing audience or the votes, with neither care nor concern for what those ideas might inspire in lost souls like the Buffalo shooter.

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that held them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

Sean Pidgeon
Morristown