A DEFINING MOMENT?

Every time one of these damned events happen, some good person will say, “Yes, this is the defining moment. This is the time when the Good People will finally overcome the Bad People and we will see Serious Results happen as the result of Good People learning about this heinous event, this defining moment.”

Bullshit.

I’m old enough to remember a shooting in Stockton, California, back in the mid-1990s that actually was a “defining moment.” The school shooter used an AR-15, the first time the Weapon of Choice of Mass Murderers was put to such use. The result was that new Senator Dianne Feinstein introduced a bill that managed to pass both Senate and House and get to President Clinton, who signed it, and - Voila! - we had the Assault Weapons Ban. There was never going to be any more of this sort of thing happening again.

Baloney. We all wished.

The opposition immediately focused on the definition of what constitutes an “assault weapon.” The regulations kept getting challenged - no, this one isn’t an “assault weapon,” the firing chamber is different; this one isn’t either, because the loading mechanism is different. Blah blah blah, bullshit bullshit bullshit, baloney baloney baloney. These weapons of mass murder continued. We have a constitutional right, don’t’cha know, to hunt deer with military weapons designed to wound, not kill, because one soldier dead gets left on the field, while one soldier wounded means at least two unwounded soldiers have to carry him off the field on a stretcher, thus reducing the number of soldiers with guns on the battlefield by three, rather than one. Yes, that is the operational philosophy behind the AR-15 and its .223 bullet. The AK-47, with its 7.62mm round, follows the Russian military philosophy of Kill ‘Em All And Let God Sort ‘Em Out.

And then when the ban came up for renewal, it was the ban that got banned. Of course.

And then the Columbine School shooting was a “defining moment;” and then there was the killing of a Filipino mail carrier by a white supremacist who traveled to Southern California from the HQ of American Nazidom in Idaho to commit his murder, and that was a defning moment; and then there was the killing of a lot of people who made the mistake of going to the movies in Aurora Colorado so a sick piece of shit with an AR-15 equipped with a 100-round drum could open fire on them during the opening ads, and that was a defining moment; and then there was the sick piece of shit who killed his mommy because she was mean to him and took her AR-15 and went to Sandy Hook Elementary School and killed 5-year olds and 6-year olds and 7-year olds and the teachers who tried to hide them, and that was a defining moment; and then there was the sick piece of shit in Florida who decided to kill his classmates at Parkland High School, and that was a defining moment; and then there was the mass murderer in Boulder, Colorado last year who opened fire on shoppers in a shopping center, and that was a defining moment.

There aren’t any fucking defining moments, and stop thinking there are, because this country is too full of shitheads with small penises who vote other shitheads with small penises into office so they can have an unlimited right to own and posses their penis enlargers, er, I mean their AR-15s, their AK-47s, their Rugers, their whatthefuckevers because Mah Fwee-dumbs.

And most of them are the dumbass white boys who are now upset to find out that sleeping through school doesn’t mean that they can automatically get a good job for the accident of their spawning.

Yesterday, Saturday, May 15, 2022, 18-year-old Payton S. Gendron opened fire on supermarket shoppers in a predominantly black neighborhood, killing 10 and wounding three. All but two of the victims were black. There’s no need to use the word “allegedly” here, since Gendron left a record of careful planning right down to outfitting himself in tactical gear and body armor; he penned a “manifesto” he copied from another piece of shit mass murderer, in which he talks about white people in America being “replaced” by nonwhites. He then live-streamed his mass murder on Twitch, a social media site for gamers. He inscribed "14" on the rifle he used to do this, in addition to scribbling the names of prior racial shooters on the weapon. The "14" is in reference to "The 14 Words,"an Aryan Brotherhood oath that all members pledge: "We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children."

There is no difference between the "Great Replacement Theory" that Tucker Carlson preaches all the time and "The 14 Words" pledge that Aryan Brotherhood ascribes to. Do you SEE why white nationalists buy into Tucker so hard? Why he's their poster boy?

This is one time the inspiration CAN include a “media personality” as an inspirer of murder.

Those condemned to follow the news of these events know this is not the first time “replacement theory” has been the inspiration for the ravings of a white supremacist mass murderer. Four years ago in 2018, in Christchurch, New Zealand, Brandon Tarrant, a 28-year-old old Australian, also wrote a “manifesto,” titled “The Great Replacement,” arguing that white Europeans had a right to fight against “racial and cultural replacement” by immigrants, which he published on the internet before live-streaming his massacre on Facebook. The concept of a “Great Replacement” of white people by non-white people was coined in 2011 by French extremist Renaud Camus.

Later that year, “Replacement Theory” also figured in the Tree of Life synagogue massacre in which 11 people dwere murdered by Robert Bowers, a white supremacist loser who was obsessed with the idea that Jewish charities were helping bring “invaders that kill our people” to America .

A year later in 2019, in El Paso, Texas, 21-year-old Patrick Crusius, killed 23 people in a Walmart as his “patriotic act” to thwart a “Hispanic invasion” of the United States.

We know these ideas are out there. We also know that “replacement theory” is being mainstreamed on the Right, most particularly on the Fox News Channel.

We all remember that Fox News segment broadcast in April 2021 where frozen food heir Tucker Carlson proudly defended replacement theory with crazy-ass metaphors like “well, what if you were a kid and you and your siblings saw your parents adopt a bunch of new kids, give them more stuff and treat them better, huh?”

We all remember “hot presidential possibility” Tucker - as he is thought of by many on the Right - insisting that yes, indeed, the Democrats are “trying to ‘replace’ the current electorate … with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World.” Because those “voters from the Third World” are dumb enough that they couldn’t possibly become swing voters or even shift Republican.

In September 2021, Tucker Carlson came right out and said it, saying the Democrats’ “policy is called the great replacement, the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from faraway countries.”Professional FratRat Matt Gaetz cheered him on and joined the chorus, insisting that “replacement” is not about race while claiming Democrats are “importing new voters” to replace the victims of their “failed policies in the cities they control.”

“Legacy Americans.” I think Tucker means people like me, descended from refugees from the Thirty Years War, the great European religious war that had Catholics and Protestants killing each other in what was for those days “industrial scale”, who bumped into North America in the colony of Pennsylvania, missing by 100 miles the land of the Pilgrim Fathers, where the refugees - being Quakers - would have been arrested and tried as heretics, with a hot poker put through the tongues of the men so they could no longer speak their heresy and lead god-fearing Good People to hell. (The women would have been tried as witches, because you know only a witch would ever associate with a heretic.)

Somehow, I actually don’t think Tucker would include that particular group of people on his list of “Legacy Americans,” since seven years after they arrived and established the village of Germantown, a three-day wagon trip outside Philadelphia, they passed a rule that no one who owned a slave could attend Meeting - meaning said enslaver couldn’t marry off children, buy and sell property, or partake in the socio-economic life of the community. (Yes, that happened in 1688, and my tenth great grandfather, Peter Klebber, was Reader of the Meeting)

Maybe Tucker would include my mother’s paternal grandfather, Henry Weist, Civil War veteran, professional buffalo killer, and “Indian fighter.” Also the son of Peter Weist, professor of humanities at the University of Frankfurt and member of the Congress of Frankfurt that in 1848 tried to overthrow the Prussian monarchy, the failure of which led to his arrival in America with his family and a Prussian price on his head. Nah, that guy sounds like a “trouble maker,” though his son certainly “got with the program.”

Very definitely, Tucker wouldn’t include as “Legacy Americans” the people my great-grandfather massacred with glee, or the people whose humanity my tenth great grandfather recognized.

See what I did there? There’s Very Good People and Very Bad People running around in that little story, and they’re all found in the same family. That’s because American history is messed up that way. Which is something a fucking moron like Tucker Carlson and the rest of the idiots found at the Fox Propaganda Channel will never understand.

Freed by Tucker and the rest of the Fox propagandists, the single worst person in the House GOP - uber-opportunist and “moderate” turned Ultra-MAGA zealot and chair of the House Republican Caucus Elise Stefanik - jumped on the bandwagon with a Facebook ad claiming Democrats were going to use amnesty for illegal immigrants to “overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.”

This hateful, stupid, paranoid nonsense is also the epitome of the “collectivist identity politics” the Right deplores in progressives.

The mainstreaming of “replacement theory” discourse has spread like socio-political COVID-19.

With the blessings of Fox propagandists and Republican leaders across the country, a poll released this past week has ONE-THIRD OF RESPONDENTS agreeing with the statement, “There is a group of people in this country who are trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants who agree with their political views.” Seventeen percent agreed with “native-born Americans are losing economic, political, and cultural influence in this country because of the growing population of immigrants.”

Yeah, 17 percent of Americans harbor strong “replacement theory” fears.

How many of them are susceptible to Crusius/Gendron-style radicalization?

If we lived in a sane and decent political climate, media figures and political figures on the Right would quickly and emphatically disavow “the great replacement” as un-American, race-baiting nonsense.

But that would mean they would have to disavow Conservative Saint William F. Buckley, Jr., who believed that white people were entitled to control America because they were “civilized.”

They’d have to disavow Richard M. Nixon, who rode to the White House on the votes of Southern Whites opposed to the civil rights movement with the GOP adoption of The Southern Strategy.

They’d have to disavow Sainted Ray Gun, who is on tape in the Nixon Library archives calling the president after a vote in the United Nations to complain that most of the delegates who voted the wrong way “don’t want to wear shoes, dammit!” Who went on to give the speech in which he announced his campaign for president in 1980 in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the town in which civil rights workers Goodman, Schwerner and Cheney were killed by the local officials who held office by their membership in the Ku Klux Klan, where he claimed he believed in “states’ rights.”

They’d have to disavow George H.W. Bush, whose campaign ran the “Willie Horton ad” about the the Black criminal allowed - by Democrats - to have a weekend out of jail, during which he raped and killed a white woman, the Black Crime that White America most fears and hates.

And for those who say, “What about the Democrats?” “What about the Solid South?” I will point out that the Democrats willingly sacrificed the power they had from the “Solid South” of Jim Crow apartheid. In 1964, on the night he signed the Voting Rights Act, President Lyndon Johnson - born and raised in that “Solid South” - told his Press Secretary, Bill Moyers, “We’ve lost the South for a generation.” It turns out, LBJ was an optimist.

So no, I’m sorry, no kittens and rainbows here. They’re all out of stock on Aisle Nine.

Yesterday will only be a “defining moment” in defining just how fucked up things are in this country. I wish to hell I was wrong.

But that doesn’t mean we give up the fight. Despite all evidence to the contrary, I will continue to believe that one of these days there will be a Defining Moment. After all, LBJ told Bill Moyers what he did as the result of a “defining moment” on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. And nobody expected that until it happened.

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