The Steady Drumbeat of Apocalyptic Rhetoric Has Consequences
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On Saturday, Buffalo, New York became the site of the latest mass murder fueled by the Great Replacement Theory. It followed the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, the El Paso Walmart shooting, and the Christchurch shooting. The latest suspect even cribbed from that latter sicko's manifesto. Versions of the theory are highly popular among powerful Republicans in Congress and the right-wing tastemakers of Fox News.
Tucker Carlson, the new high priest of this diseased political movement, has been all-in on this stuff for years. A New York Times investigation found he got into it on 400 different episodes of his show. Elise Stefanik, the number three in House GOP leadership who jettisoned everything she purportedly believed to thrive in Trumpland, has run Facebook ads suggesting that "Radical Democrats are planning their most aggressive move yet: a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION." And what does the sinister plot look like? "Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington." J.D. Vance, a Trump endorsee who won the Republican nomination for Ohio Senate, was on Fox News peddling the nonsense that Democrats are shipping undocumented immigrants in to vote for them in the election set to occur in a few months. Blake Masters, an Arizona Senate candidate, said that "the Democrats want open borders so they can bring in and amnesty **tens of millions** of illegal aliens — that’s their electoral strategy." He tweeted this at 7:30 p.m. on May 14, 2022—that is, a few hours after the shooting.
In reality, President Biden has continued Trump's hardline deportation policies at the border. The most prominent is Title 42, a pandemic measure that's now very dubiously legal. It may come to an end this month, but it's not about the details. It's about the apocalypse. A big chunk of this country has been subject to the steady drumbeat of apocalyptic rhetoric for years now, and we would be fools not to see that this has consequences. The Democrats, in league with a cabal of globalist elitists, are facilitating an INVASION! of brown people who will replace the white people whose country this really is and rob them of their birthright. Similarly, the last election was stolen in a historic fraud that nobody can provide much proof of. But more than that, the rhetoric often leads us to believe, the country itself is being stolen away. "We fight like hell," Trump said on January 6 before sending his mob to attack another branch of government, "and if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore."
Eventually, the bills come due for this stuff. You cannot say that The Enemies are coming to take everything from you and your children, day after day, week after week, and not expect some share of the people listening to respond as if that threat is real. That is the frightening element here: the internal logic within this paranoid unreality makes some sense. If the Other Side is allowing a mass invasion of gang members and other dehumanized rabble, and they're using massive voter-fraud schemes to steal the election away from the true American candidate, of course some people are going to take up arms. They've been told for years that they're under direct attack! You are cultivating a nationalist siege mentality where The Others are breaking down the doors of the pure American citadel. But the uncut racism undergirding this was made clear in Buffalo: having written up a lengthy manifesto about immigrants and global conspiracies, the shooter just went and shot Black people who were grocery shopping.
It should be noted the rhetoric of apocalypse does appear on the left. The main issue there is that while the five-alarm rhetoric is often appropriate on say, the climate crisis or the threat the Republican Party now poses to American democracy, the words are belied by the complete lack of action from the Democratic Party. We face onrushing climate catastrophe, but also the party controls both houses of Congress and the White House and passed next-to-nothing on the climate front? Republicans are positioning themselves to steal future elections, but not a single measure has moved forward to shore up our democracy? Yes, Manchinema, but we also just don't hear about this stuff that often anymore. In the end, the alarmism rings phony.
On the right, though, there is action. It comes from the top, with the barbaric immigration policies imposed by the Trump administration to combat an invented invasion, and from the grassroots, with people who lose their grip on reality turning to violence against innocents. You cannot scream for years that dark and shadowy forces from inside and out are working to steal or defile or destroy America and not expect something horrible to ensue. That is the inevitable consequence of this rhetoric, whether its practitioners are willing to acknowledge it or not. They may tell themselves they're just trying to siphon off a couple more votes, or boost the ratings after they've scoured the minute-to-minute reports and found the audience appetite for this stuff is wide and deep. But the costs of stoking tribal war are usually paid in blood.
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