Replacing The Truth With Bigoted Lies

Ever since he rode down the escalator in 2015 to launch his presidential campaign with an attack on Mexicans, overt racism has been a key component in Donald Trump’s rhetoric: “They’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime. They’re rapists and some, I assume, are good people.”

Trump, whose father was arrested at a Ku Klux Klan rally, later tried to sanitize the proud Nazis at Charlottesville in 2017. These “fine people” were shouting, “Jews will not replace us” and “blood and soil,” an official slogan of Hitler’s Nazis.

Campaigning in 2024, Trump lied loudly about Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating pets. And Vice President JD Vance – at the time Ohio’s senator who should have known better – echoed the hatred, ignoring local law enforcers’ statements that such claims had no merit.

At the time, NPR reported, “The city has often been cited by Vance and other Republicans as what they view as a cautionary tale of the economic woes caused by immigration.”

Trump, Vance and other Republican race-baiters embrace The Great Replacement Theory, the notion that “superior” white people will be nudged out of power by great hordes of dark-skinned people.

Raw racism. Demonstrable ignorance.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks the nation’s bigotry, calls the theory “inherently white supremacist. It is also anti-Semitic.”

Among the most vocal exponents of this bigotry are right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson and Stephen Miller, who is Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security advisor.

SPLC notes Carlson’s “repeated invocations of eminent white extinction” and his use of the “great replacement” dog whistle.

In August, The Revealer, the organ of New York University’s Center for Religion and Media, reported:

“In a recent White House briefing, Miller shouted that mainstream media’s [supposed] sympathy for immigrants is an example of the ‘cancerous, communist, woke culture that is destroying this country.’”

He has been one of the administration’s most vocal defenders of Trump’s personal militia of hooded men roaming the country and snatching people [if they’re lucky] off the street, at work, out of their homes, at schools and day care centers.

Miller’s anti-immigrant screeds run counter to his own family’s history. As reported by The Revealer, his ancestors “came to the United States fleeing pogroms in Belarus at the beginning of the 20^th century. His uncle, David S. Glosser, says he ‘shudder[s] at the thought’ of what would have become of Miller’s ancestors if they had been subjected to the ‘policies Stephen so coolly espouses – the travel ban, the radical decrease in refugees, the separation of children from their parents, and even talk of limiting citizenship for legal immigrants.’”

Of course, Trump’s progenitors are also recent arrivals in the U.S. His mother was born in Ireland. The first Trump to arrive here was grandfather Frederick, who came in 1885 at the age of 16 to avoid conscription into the German army. [Hmmm.]

One feels compelled to point out that the U.S. banned the slave trade in 1808. This means that most African-Americans in this nation have older ties to this land than such major migrations as those from the Irish potato famine and the defeat of republican aspirations in Germany – both in the 1840s. Southern and Eastern Europeans came even later. Who replaced whom?

Of course, the not-so-great replacement theory focuses on skin color, with a side order of religious bigotry.

Some public Christians, spouting very un-Christian hate-speak, ignore what should be their origin story. Their inerrant Bible says that all people are descended from Adam and Eve. That makes us all cousins.

Scientists tell us that everyone on the planet is related to Mitochondrial Eve, who lived in East Africa about 99,000 to 148,000 years ago. M-Eve was not the only woman on the planet then, just the only one whose mitochondrial DNA is represented in today’s world population.

Yes, still cousins – even those who share DNA with Neanderthal or Denisovan hominin groups, which pre-date home sapiens.

Demonizing others justifies treating them inhumanely. Embracing ignorance makes it easier.

In his Wisdom Takes Work, the fourth book in his Stoic Virtues Series, Ryan Holiday observes:

“What’s so striking is that years later the beliefs underpinning the worst actions humans have taken against one another, from slavery to the Holocaust, are almost incomprehensibly stupid. It’s not just that they’re offensive and dangerous, it’s that they are almost childlike in how nonsensical they are. Yet people were marched off in chains and into ovens over them all the same.”

There are people among us who still haven’t received the update.