By now, you’ve heard. A fascist walked into a grocery store and committed a massacre. He seems to have killed ten people because of the color of their skin, and wounded more. A cop was killed, trying to defend them. The fascist wore body armor and carried a machine gun — oh, sorry, an assault rifle. He wrote a long, foolish, ugly “manifesto,” citing “the great replacement.”
On Sunday and Monday, I wrote about the far right turning fascist, and openly wanting to slit democracy’s throat — motivated by “the great replacement.” On Thursday and Friday, we published those posts. And on Saturday, a massacre happened, and the perpetrator literally cited the great replacement.
There are days when being right makes me feel nauseated, angry, and sick. This is one of those days. I take no pleasure in issuing warnings that come true just days later at this point. It’s a depressing and futile job, frankly, to have to do, for societies that don’t listen. I’d much rather be making music. But here we are. Do you believe me yet?
You didn’t have to be a genius to see it coming. You just had to be a vaguely sane and thoughtful person. I’m sure that you felt this coming in your bones, too.
They accuse me, often, of hyperbole. Of exaggeration. They keep calling us alarmists. For warning of horrors like this. Over and over again. “The far right? They don’t want to slit democracy’s throat! Come on, they’re just joking around! LOL — guys, stop exaggerating!” Meanwhile, fascists are out there committing massacres. Think about how idiotic this is for a moment, how genuinely painfully frustrating this cycle of denial is.
Let’s talk about what just happened, and grieve for democracy together, caught in this suicide pact between fascists and the complicit, weak-minded idiots who enable them.
The “great replacement.” What is it? An ugly, stupid, and false pseudo-“theory.” Where does it come from? It originated with a French pseudo-intellectual. He imagined — made up out of whole cloth — the idea that “real” French people, meaning of course white ones, were being “replaced” by immigrants. That theory spread like wildfire, from America to Australia to Britain and beyond. It is now one of the ideological foundations which turned yesterday’s dull conservatism into today’s violent, raging, murderous neofascism.
And it’s everywhere, even if you don’t know it. Who’s cited it? “A French presidential candidate, conservative Valérie Pécresse, referred explicitly to the ‘great replacement’ on the campaign trail in the winter. Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) highlighted its tenets in a congressional hearing last year. And Tucker Carlson, the most-watched host on Fox News, has championed the ideology, which holds not just that immigration is reshaping demography and politics but that a cadre of elites is engineering population changes for political gain.”
“The great replacement,” in other words, has gone mainstream. And in that sense, the hate of the far right has consequences. This wasn’t just “the work of a lone gunman.” No, he wasn’t crazy — go ahead and ask my wife the doctor, who’s worked in psychiatric wards with actually crazy criminals. Crazy doesn’t make you a mass murderer. What does? Being goaded, radicalized, rewarded, incentivized to believe hateful things. Like theories which justify mass murder in pre-emptive retaliation for the “genocide” of “your race.”
Like all fascist fantasies, “the great replacement” is a delusion, and like all delusions, it’s based in reality, only an imaginary, exaggerated version of it. It’s true that rich countries have declining birth rates in majority, meaning “white” populations. America’s fertility rate is 1.6, France’s is 1.8, and so on.
The reason for declining birth rates, though, is not some malign conspiracy from — of all people — immigrants. Can immigrants force anyone to have less babies? Of course not. The reason for declining birth rates is very simple. Young people can’t afford to have kids as much anymore. Go ahead and look at Millenials and Zoomers. They’re doing what economists call “deferring consumption” — in the real world, that means delaying having families. Why? Because they barely make any money, can’t afford to move out of their parent’s homes, and so they are basically stretching adolescence into adulthood.
Go ahead and tell me how much fun it is trying to make a baby when you’re barely earning poverty wages at some pointless internship — and you’re living in Mom’s basement.
Declining birth rates, in other words, are a consequence of inequality between generations. Boomers had it good, Gen X had it way less good, pretty bad, in fact, and Millennials and Zoomers are out there getting absolutely hammered by stagnation. They’re wrecked — at least in America — by student debt, by homes that are laughably expensive for which they’ll never be able to even really afford down payments.
Hence, many of them have given up — and shifted into a pattern of not even trying to save. Because that’s an adaptive response to a failed economy. It makes sense to try to enjoy your days now, if you know you’ll never be able to afford a home, retirement, “getting on with life” in the old sense. But that also means that starting a family is probably going to be far, tougher, on average, than it was for older generations, who hold all the resources, from homes to money — and that’s why birth rates have declined.
So the “great replacement” is a collective paranoid delusion. When people are faced with adversity like this, plenty of them can’t take it. They look for answers. Some turn to fanatical religion — and some blame the nearest scapegoat. In this case, immigrants have been scapegoated for declining birthrates — but like I said, that poor Syrian or whomever can’t exactly stop you from having a kid. That’s your choice, and it’s been taken away from two or three generations at this point because our economies have failed them. Collective delusions are in this way the result of economic stagnation.
The “great replacement” is a new form of an old, old idea: “white genocide.” White genocide, the idea that they’re out to get us, has been around for centuries. Americans used it to justify slavery, in fact. It has a long and sordid history, from the days of the Fugitive Slave Act, to the Nazis who were inspired by it. When you zoom out, it’s easy enough to see why. “White” people — they’re actually pink, LOL — are a global minority. Most people on this planet are not “white.” They never have been. They are everything else. Hence, it’s easy enough for members of this “race” — and let’s remember “races” are imaginary things cooked up during, ironically, the Enlightenment — seem to feel persecuted, by sheer virtue of being a global minority.
“White genocide” therefore seems all too real to a simple mind living through the dislocating experience of declining birthrates, falling living standards, and stagnation throughout the developed — meaning “white” — world. It seems all the more real because it’s parroted — in the novel form of “the great replacement” — at every turn, if you surround yourself with paranoid right wing media and culture. Its politicians will bellow about it, its pundits will shout it, it’s message boards will scream in rage about it. And pretty soon, a simple mind will get radicalized.
It will really believe all this claptrap and nonsense bombarding it day after day — and think to itself something like: “My God! My race is under attack! And ‘race’ is the only form of community and belonging there is — it’s in the blood. I need to defend it, before it’s wiped out!” That’s how you get to a kid massacring people at a grocery store. And writing a manifesto about it, because such a mind really believes that it is taking on a noble cause, which the whole world needs to know about. It has no idea it has fallen prey to a collective paranoid delusion, peddled by demagogues, enabled by a sycophantic media, which legitimizes this theory and its ilk as just another “side.”
These aren’t “sides.” It is not an acceptable or legitimate side in a democracy that preaches hate and encourages violently killing scapegoats. It is a remarkable shame that despite this obvious fact, the far right doesn’t just have a foothold in culture — it has a stranglehold over it. From Elon Musk buying Twitter to the capture of the Supreme Court to fascism rising across the globe to conservative glee, to pundits and politicians both openly espousing violence motivated by delusional “theories“ like “the great replacement.”
There aren’t two sides here. There’s a number of groups in society who value democracy — from gay to straight to minority, men and women, all kinds. And there’s one group who wants to end it, violently. Both-sidesing what’s essentially at this point open fascism plays a critical role in our societies collapsing at the hands of fanatics and lunatics, because it cheats all the other groups of recognition, and democracy itself of legitimacy and strength.
The far right has a goal by now, and a means to get there. It goes like this. Its leaders espouse crackpot theories like “the great replacement.” They scapegoat vulnerable groups. They encourage their foot soldiers to target them. And they do. After they do, the far right walks it all back, and pretends to be horrified, surprised, and shocked. The media, gullible and feeble, swallows this lie. It presents all this bad faith as “good faith.” The violent fanatics are said to be “lone wolves” or “bad apples” or what have you. And the larger understanding that the far right is literally making an organized attempt to kill democracy is lost.
That is why our side is losing. And it is losing badly.
Context is everything. This attack doesn’t come out of the blue. Far from it. It comes a year and a half after the American Capitol was the scene of a bloody, violent coup attempt. It comes at a moment, when the far right has subsumed the right whole, consuming it like a shark eats a school of fish — and then openly threatens society with violence.
Out of the blue? Not at all. This attack comes at a time when teachers are being smeared as “pedos.” When you literally can’t say the word “gay” to kids in schools. When books are banned. When tip lines have been set up to report on all the above. When bill after bill modeled on the Fugitive Slave Act, creating a society of citizen-vigilante-informants, is being deployed…against women, gays, minorities, kids.
You would have to be a fool to think this attack comes out of the blue. The context here is as chilling as it is simple. The far right has learned that it can use what are essentially terror tactics to demoralize and frighten people into losing their democracy. It threatens everyone from teachers to parents to politicians. Member of Congress who are part of it make death threats to their colleagues, thinly disguised as “jokes.” This attack comes at a moment when the far right is literally building the apparatus of a totalitarian-fascist society — planning to stop women from leaving states, erasing the existence of gay people, scapegoating minorities, rewriting history for kids so slavery never happened, monitoring, surveilling, enforcing.
The far right’s goal now — in plain sight, formally, procedurally, in speech and in action — is total control of society, through intimidation, fear, and terror. Total control of all its words, ideas, expressions, social connections, relationships, forms of intimacy, knowledge, truth, collective and individual action. Everything. Everything is to be ground to dust under the banner of a fascist-theocratic crusade, from freedoms of bodily autonomy to speech to association.
That is the context for this attack.
And when you understand that, it makes a whole lot more sense, doesn’t it?
So what sense can we make of this horror? The cycle of denial prevails. Who bears responsibility? Who’s culpable for these deaths? From the media which enables demagogues to spout theories like this as if they’re legitimate, to the politicians who parrot them, to those who encode in slightly more subtle forms. This is not about “lone wolves” and it isn’t about “bad apples” and it certainly isn’t people being “crazy.” It is about a far, far bigger problem, a structural one, an ideological one, a systemic one. That problem is the far right.
The far right is the problem, because it is hate, violence, and terror.
That is not “what it wants” or “what it might do” or “something it’s capable of.” That is what it is. It is just that, and nothing more. There is nothing to be redeemed in it, no greater truth to be glimpsed in it, nothing to learn or understand from it. It is just hate, violence, and terror. And for that reason, either it exists, or democracy does for the rest of us.
Hate has consequences. When hate like this is allowed to flourish and breed, when it’s legitimized and normalized, this is what happens. Violence. Innocent people get massacred, because of course the point of hate is to take people’s personhood away, and this is where that road ends.
Hate leads to violence. History teaches us over and over again — and yet, even our side is full of useful idiots to the other one, who will not understand this simple enough point. Must it keep being taught in blood? At what point is denial complicity?
Learn something today, my friend. Learn it well, and never forget it. They want to kill us. To erase us. To take away our personhood. To make us unpeople. This is what they want. They are showing you, as clearly as a thing can ever be seen.
And yet, as Orwell is said to have stated: “In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” Wake up. It doesn’t matter how “safe” you think you are. Ah, but I’m not gay, Black, a woman, a minority, you think to yourself. It doesn’t matter. They are showing you what they want. To kill anyone who stands in the way of their goal. A Reich. A society only for the pure and true, meant to last a thousand years, of persecuted heroes, who’ve risen to become Ubermen again. No good, no evil. Just power.
Hate becomes violence. And violence becomes death. This is all that the far right is. Just this. Nothing more. At its core, beneath the delusions called “theories,” made by crackpots, legitimzed by gullible fools — there is just this. Hate becomes violence and violence becomes death.
Or will it take another massacre for us to get it?
