AP NEWS reporter David Bauder offers up a piece ostensibly explaining how White ‘replacement theory’ fuels racist attacks. That theory apparently drove the racist motivations of the 18-year-old shooter in the May 2022 attack on a supermarket in a predominantly black Buffalo, New York neighborhood. Bauder offers:
A racist ideology seeping from the internet’s fringes into the mainstream is being investigated as a motivating factor in the supermarket shooting that killed 10 people in Buffalo, New York. Most of the victims were Black.
Ideas from the “great replacement theory” filled a racist screed supposedly posted online by the white 18-year-old accused of targeting Black people in Saturday’s rampage. Authorities were still working to confirm its authenticity.
Certainly, there was no mistaking the racist intent of the shooter.
What's missing from this whole allegedly explanatory article? The deeper roots of its origin. It's clear that Replacement Theory is explicitly collectivist. And from which end of the spectrum has collectivism entered the political landscape? From the Left. Downstream of collectivism, racism is obviously collectivist, and Replacement Theory is obviously racist. Racism has become endemic to Leftist ideology. In fact, so ubiquitous is racism to the ideological DNA of the Left that it is rarely acknowledged, even though it is hidden in plain sight.
As an example, consider Trenton must do more to help N.J.’s hungry, a NJ Star Ledger Editorial Board op-ed. In bemoaning the alleged widespread “food insecurity” problem in New Jersey, the SLEB writes:
Start with the math. More than 285,000 households lacked access to affordable food at the height of the pandemic, and it hit hardest along racial and ethnic lines. In 2021, 14% of Black households and 18% of Latino households in New Jersey indicated that they sometimes or often did not have enough food, compared to 5% of white households.
Leaving the hunger issue aside, one would ask, Why divide this issue along racial "lines"? Groups don't experience hunger. Only real live individual human beings do. Black, Latino, White: It makes no difference to a hungry individual. They're all hungry just the same. But that is the Left’s racist identity politics “seeping into the mainstream.”
Another example relates to the way auto insurance rates are calculated in NJ. NJ Spotlight News reports
Social and consumer advocates say the use of nondriving factors like credit scores and education history to calculate insurance premiums is leading many New Jerseyans, especially those who are Black and brown, to pay hundreds of dollars more in premiums. Advocates want the state’s Department of Banking and Insurance to prohibit these practices.
Would credit scores and education be less problematic if they mainly affected non-black and brown folks? Would these “advocates” think it less unfair? If these insurance criteria are unfair, an individual’s skin color makes no difference to folks paying the higher insurance rates. But again, race collectivists don’t care about actual individual people. They see only groups based on skin color; i.e. these so-called advocates are racists, whether they choose to acknowledge their own racism or not. But that is the Left’s racist identity politics “seeping into the mainstream.”
Collectivists of whatever political stripe always forget the smallest minority, the individual. That’s why the Left can be racist without seeing the obvious—that they themselves are racist. This is what I mean when I say racism is endemic to Leftist ideology. Almost every issue includes some obligatory reference to ethnic minority groups or “people of color,” as if color is essential. This highbrow endemic racism, masquerading as concern for the “disadvantaged”, was evident during the looter riots of the George Floyd “protests” when that violence was minimized, excused as “protest”, and sometimes even justified because the thugs were black. It was evident in the Democrats’ 2021 COVID “relief” bill. The examples go on and on.
But every action, in politics no less than in physics, triggers an equal and opposite reaction. This type of race-framing grows out of the Left’s racial identity politics. And it is everywhere in the mainstream. And it doesn’t end there. Bauder reports:
A more mainstream view in the U.S. baselessly suggests Democrats are encouraging immigration from Latin America so more like-minded potential voters replace “traditional” Americans, says Mark Pitcavage, senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism.
To some of the more extreme believers, certain white supremacist mass killers — at a Norway summer camp in 2011, two Christchurch, New Zealand, mosques in 2019, a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015 — are considered saints, Pitcavage says.
Those “accelerationist white supremacists” believe small societal changes won’t achieve much, so the only option is tearing down society, he says.
The italicized passage is mine. Where have we heard that “solution” before? That is straight out of Karl Marx’s Communist ideology. Marx, too, saw the tearing down of society through terror as the only path to achieving his social/political goals.
Once again, we see the Leftist roots of Great Replacement Theory. But that’s only an “extreme” view, not to be pinned on the more “moderate” “mainstream” believers, you say? Well, Marx’s extreme call for violent revolution came to fruition, did it not? Societies from Russia to China to Cuba were literally torn down to make way for Marxian socialism.
The fact is, any ideology can only be understood by focussing on its most extreme—that is, most philosophically consistent—adherents. That’s where you can trace out the logically realistic end result, if the ideology is not discredited and destroyed first. The Great Replacement Theory is straight out of the same Marxist/collectivist roots of the modern Left.
Is it any wonder that collectivist racism is growing on the Right? The Right Wing racism of Replacement Theory in America did not arise in a vacuum. It’s been around a while at the lunatic fringes. But why is it now “seeping into the mainstream,” as some now put it. I believe it is a reaction to the long-established mainstream collectivism and racism of the Left. On the political surface, Replacement Theory is ridiculous. Its danger lies in its collectivist orientation, because collectivism, having taken over the Left, is now taking over the Right. Individualism—the only antidote to collectivism—is increasingly being squeezed out of American politics and culture.
Yet this article evades the ideological/historical roots of the racism that underpins Replacement Theory. Historian Andrew Bernstein called out the Left's collectivism in his piece The Left Pushes America Toward Race War. Bernstein warned of the coming of Buffalo-style atrocities three and a half years ago:
When identity politics and racial victimization becomes a dominant cultural trend–and especially when it is maintained that character and identity are determined not by individual choice but by racial membership–it is logically inevitable that members of every tribe and racial sub-group band together into political gangs seeking protection from the other. One need not be a genius to discern the end game of such a trend.
Indeed, we have already seen a microcosm of it in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August, 2017. The bloody street battle between rival gangs fighting race/class war should be sufficient to give all thoughtful Americans pause. We must re-think our fundamental philosophic, moral, and political principles. Otherwise, we inexorably stagger toward the horror of race war.
If you've been following the news, you know that he is right, not hyperbolic. That piece was published three and a half years ago. Is it any wonder that Replacement Theory may, as AP reports, be going "mainstream" today? The Left's collectivist/racist/sexist/class warfare ideological worldview has long been mainstream. Why should we be surprised that it's triggering an equal reaction on the Right?
Mainstream media, mostly oriented Leftward, misses or doesn't want to see the connections. But they are there. My point here is not to in any way deflect blame, or minimize or in any way justify the Buffalo culprit, or to engage in whataboutism. Great Replacement Theory is evil. My point is to highlight the real enemy—collectivism. As long as the vampire of collectivism lives on in people’s souls, racism will keep resurfacing under new guises. Collectivism—the idea that the group is the standard of moral/political concern and the individual is to be judged by his group affiliation rather than individual character and choices—is our common enemy, regardless of its source. This fact, plus the truth that individualism is the only antipode to collectivism, shouldn't be ignored if Americanism is to be saved.
Related Reading:
Critical Race Theory’s new disguise by Ayaan Hirsi Aly
‘Anti-Racism’, or the re-Mainstreaming of Racism
Biden’s Racist Education Trial Balloon
Booker’s Racism Charge Against Trump’s ‘Go Back’ Rant is Rich
SEC’s Boardroom ‘Diversity’ Rule Is Racist, Unnatural, and Politically Motivated
The Founding Fathers, Not ‘Diversity,’ is the Solution to ‘Our Racialized Society’
Starbucks/USA Today’s Racist “Race Together” Campaign
Don’t Allow the Left to Own ‘Diversity’
AMERICA: A RACIST NATION? BY ANDREW BERNSTEIN
Clark, NJ: ‘Systemic’ Racism, or just Random Racism?
We Have Overcome: An Immigrant’s Letter to the American People by Jason D. Hill
The Racism of the ‘Anti-Racists’
Great Replacement Theory Is a Grand Delusion by Ramesh Ponnuru for Bloomburg
Related Viewing:
John McWhorter: America Has Never Been Less Racist -- Reason interview
Replacement Theory, Buffalo Shooter, Leftists and Conservatives -- The Yaron Brook Show
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