How the racist 'Great Replacement' theory keeps fueling Trumpism

Ray Hartmann
August 28, 2023, 2:09 PM ET



Former President Donald Trump greets supporters at a campaign rally on April 27, 2023 in Manchester, New Hampshire. Trump, who is currently dealing with a growing number of legal cases against him, is the Republican frontrunner for the Republican presidential ticket. Spencer Platt/Getty Images


The white nationalism that remains a virulent strain throughout Donald Trump’s MAGA base received a jump start with the election of a U.S. president.

But white nationalism alone didn’t bring the man now known as “Inmate #P01135809” into power in 2016.

It was the election of President Barack Obama eight years earlier.


When Obama made history by becoming the nation’s first Black president, he also reignited an ugly part of America’s past: fear of “the Great Replacement.” That’s the theory, dating back to the 19th century, that white people faced grave danger, with the severity of the danger increasing in direct proportion to the expansion of freedom for Black people.

Jacob Ware, a national expert on right-wing militant movements who works as a researcher at the Council on Foreign Relations, told Raw Story that the rise of Trumpism was rooted in the explosion of white nationalist backlash to Obama’s election.

“Great Replacement theory has been floating around in the U.S. context since the Civil War – it was one of the justifications for the Civil War,” said Ware, the co-author of “Guns, God and Sedition,” a book about far-right terrorism due to be released later this year. “This is a very dangerous ideology that has been growing over time.


“But the one really big factor that cannot be overlooked is that before Trump, there was the election of Barack Obama,” Ware said. “A Black person being elected president and things that followed sent a message to an unfortunately quite large population in America that they were being replaced by minorities.”

A group of Republican leaders famously gathered on the night of Obama’s first inauguration in 2009 to plot a campaign of obstruction to ensure he would fail — and become a one-term president.

That meeting didn’t come to light until 2012 in a book by journalist Robert Draper. But in retrospect, it was a precursor to the backlash to Obama's election.

The plotters at that meeting at a D.C. steakhouse included 13 members then serving in Congress – seven from the House and six from the Senate. A little-known fact? Only two still hold office: House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (at the time an obscure second-term congressman) and Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), who lost re-election for his Dallas-area district in 2018 only to reinvent himself as a congressman now representing a district about 100 miles to the south.


No one at the meeting has been known for trafficking in the Great Replacement theory, specifically. But might such an extraordinary event have been related in some way to the arrival of America’s first Black president?

“Although I cannot say for sure that this meeting was driven by ‘great replacement’ theory, much of the backlash to Obama's election certainly was,” Ware says. “The most conspicuously racist reactions included allegations that Obama was Muslim and foreign-born. Unsurprisingly, this led to a substantial increase in hate crimes and terrorist incidents perpetrated by white supremacists both inside the U.S. and beyond.”

The racist birtherism conspiracies would help launch Trump’s political career. The stage was also set for Trump’s racism by Black Lives Matter protests and what many whites saw as “a permissive environment for that kind of activism” under Obama.

During the same period, when Obama was president, an immigration crisis in Europe related to unrest and wars in the Middle East had exploded. By the time Trump descended his golden elevator in 2015, and announced his presidential bid, he had plenty of xenophobic winds at his back.

In retrospect, it shouldn’t come as a shock that a defining characteristic of the Trump presidency was his tacit embrace of Great Replacement theory.

“Donald Trump used that,” Ware says. “He used that in his campaign, at Charlottesville and throughout his administration. And a huge factor here as well is the way that these individuals, these extremists, perceived themselves to be suffering replacement.

“The really important thing about that is that when you're being replaced and it's active, there is an urgency to act. Otherwise, it’s an existential threat to your survival. And that leads to a lot of violence and we see that language in a lot of terrorists’ manifestos,” Ware said.

Trump inspired racists and extremists long before the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, Ware added.

“The message received from the movement was that sometimes violence was going to be protected from the very top of the American political system,” Ware says. “Everyone knows what Trump says about there being fine people on both sides at Charlottesville” where the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally led to death and destruction.

“Richard Spencer, the white supremacist, said Charlottesville would not have happened without Trump. I think that’s a good way to look at this: A lot of what we’ve seen would not have been possible without Trump. That you’ve got a Confederate flag being paraded through the U.S. Capitol on January 6 wouldn’t have been possible without him.

“They felt they had permission from the White House,” Ware said.

But how does an expert on counter-terrorism explain Trump’s ability to connect with so many more far-right extremists than anyone else?

“Trump’s ultimate genius can be seen in two things that he said from the very start and then repeated tens of thousands of times, and those are the phrases, ‘fake news’ and ‘deep state’,” Ware says. “Because of that repetition, any counter-arguments or anything that didn’t go his way could easily be dismissed as fake news, or having come from the deep state.

“And tens of millions of people just believe him.”


https://www.rawstory.com/raw-investigates/great-replacement-donald-trump-obama/

 

Probably the most whacked out explanation of how Trump managed to slip the throne that had been promised to Hillary out from under her.

Typical despicable bloviation. Not Hillary's fault, not despicables fault.

Nope. The fault of a whack racist theory going back to the days of overt despicable racism. That is somehow now converted to deplorables.

Now we gotta admit, that right there is some above average propaganda!

Good find stumbler

 

Eric Trump smiles for photo with Proud Boy host of neo-Nazi chat group: report

Kathleen Culliton
November 9, 2023 5:23PM ET



(Photo by Hiroko Masuike-Pool/Getty Images)


Eric Trump beams and gives a big thumbs up in a photo that ties him to a Proud Boys chat group where members enjoyed Neo-Nazi symbols and racial slurs, according to a new report.

Talking Points Memo released Thursday a deep-dive investigation into “OperationFlagDrop,” the Telegram channel whose members include U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez's QAnon-boosting challenger Tina Forte, convicted insurrectionist and Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, and far-right activist Dion Cini, who “laughed off” reporters’ questions about Nazi symbols shared in his group, according to the report.

“Neo Nazi content …LOL,” Cini replied. “The story is a illegitimate before pen goes to paper. I make flags I hang flags, that’s my story.”

In the photo, Cini wears a red “Make America Great Again” hat and stretches out a hand to rest on Eric Trump’s shoulder. Between them stands a man Talking Points Memo identifies as an “OperationFlagDrop” member who partook in a disturbing interaction in the group chat:

“Can we still say white power on Twitter? OperationFlagDrop asked.

“White Power,” Pot Roast replied.

Neither Eric nor former President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign responded to Talking Point Memo’s request for comment.

The report details Cini’s years of Trump family support and includes a picture taken in the White House about a month before the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Cini was later interviewed by House Jan. 6 investigators who asked him about his ties to the Proud Boys and a series of boat rallies during the 2020 election season.

"Did you have as attendees at one of your rallies Either Eric Trump of Don. Jr.?" Investigators asked.

"I plead the Fifth."

The "OperationFlagDrop" administrator was more forthcoming in a 2021 interview with Insider about his penchant for waving Trump banners at baseball games.

“I’ve interacted with the Trump family multiple times,” Cini told Insider. “They know what I’m doing, and they like it.”

Read the full report here.



https://www.rawstory.com/eric-trump-dion-cini/

 

Ah, the statue they will have of Biden is him stumbling as a true racist. What a scum father he is.

 

Ah, the statue they will have of Biden is him stumbling as a true racist. What a scum father he is.

 

So you are also a Nazi and white supremacist supporter? Why am I not surprised?

 

People believe Trump because they believe that the changes that began in American society in 1964 have been bad changes. In 1963 whites were ninety percent of the U.S. population, and most Negroes were restricted to de facto second class citizenship.

Despite Trump's glaring flaws of character, intellect, and personality, he is the front runner for the next presidential election. He may be the first presidential candidate to campaign from a prison cell and to win.

 

The election is still a year a way. So any predictions about the race is premature. The American people will decide. But Trumptards have already shown they don't respect our elections.

 

"Neo-Confederate is a reactionary, revisionist branch of American white nationalism typified by its predilection for symbols of the Confederate States of America, typically paired with a strong belief in the validity of the failed doctrines of nullification and secession."

 

How do we know this is not true? The northern colonies and later states prospered quite well without an enslaved work force.

This is nothing more than another blatantly racist attempt to try and Whitewash historyy.



Fox News host praises 'slave owners' because 'we don't have a country' without them

David Edwards
November 20, 2023 3:23PM ET



Real America's Voice/screen grab


Fox News host Brian Kilmeade praised "slave owners" because he said the United States of America would not exist without them.

Kilmeade made the remarks on The Charlie Kirk Show on Monday while promoting his book about Booker T. Washington and President Theodore Roosevelt.

"But for the most part, we are a country that was born, like every other country, every continent had slaves," Kilmeade said. "In the South, most houses, most plantations had slaves. Nobody condones it. But without those slave owners, we don't have a country. So you make your choice."

ALSO READ: A convicted January 6 attacker faces prison. So he went to Mar-a-Lago to see Trump first.

The Fox News host said he was on "a mission to win the war on history."

"Because the 1619 Project was the formal first salvo," he claimed. "I mean, I'm older than you, and in 1976, I was in grade school, and they launched this thing called Roots, the most successful miniseries ever, averaged 60 million a night. It was the story of slavery and all its brutality."

"Nobody was ever ducking our past," Kilmeade insisted. "I don't know what people were talking about. And no one ever said, oh, segregation, not that bad. Slavery, well, it happens."


https://www.rawstory.com/brian-kilm...because-we-don-t-have-a-country-without-them/

 

Army blows off Republicans' request to keep Confederate memorial: report

David McAfee
December 16, 2023 3:04PM ET



Confederate memorial (Shutterstock)


The U.S. Army has reportedly decided it will move forward with the removal of a Confederate memorial, despite the fact that dozens of Republican lawmakers cautioned against it.

The Army says it will start next week on the removal of the memorial from the Arlington National Cemetery, according to the Washington Post.

"A woman representing the American South, standing atop a 32-foot pedestal, lords above most other monuments within America’s most revered resting place," it reported. "It portrays, according to the cemetery’s website, a 'mythologized vision of the Confederacy, including highly sanitized depictions of slavery.'"

ALSO READ: A Christmas wish: Republican immigration policy worthy of Baby Jesus

The Army was planning to remove the memorial as part of its ongoing efforts to rid itself of "rebel imagery," according to the Washington Post. But Republicans then stepped in.

"This month, 44 Republican lawmakers cautioned Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, the first African American to hold the post, that the Pentagon would overstep its authority by removing the memorial and they demanded that all efforts to do so stop until Congress works through next year’s appropriations bill," the Saturday article states. "The memorial 'commemorates reconciliation and national unity,' not the Confederacy per se, the group led by Rep. Andrew S. Clyde (Ga.) claimed."

Apparently, that wasn't enough to disrupt the Army's plans.

"The Army, which operates Arlington Cemetery, informed lawmakers Friday that it would proceed with the monument’s removal, officials told The Washington Post, because it was required by the end of the year to comply with a law to identify and remove assets that commemorate the Confederacy," according to the article. "A congressional commission had previously decided the memorial met the criteria for removal. The task will cost $3 million."

You can read the full article from the Washington Post right here.



https://www.rawstory.com/army-blows-off-gop/