You can’t make it up.
The other day, Fox’s Tucker Carlson had the nerve — the nerve! — to make the points quoted below in a discussion with Mark Steyn. The topic: replacement of voters and one culture with a population of new voters and another culture. Said Tucker (bold print for emphasis supplied):
I’m laughing because this is one of about 10 stories that I know you have covered where the government shows preference to people who have shown absolute contempt for our customs, our laws, our system itself and they are being treated better than American citizens. Now, I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term “replacement,” if you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World. But they become hysterical because that’s what’s happening actually. Let’s just say it: That’s true …
If you change the population, you dilute the political power of the people who live there. So every time they import a new voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter. So I don’t understand what we don’t understand cause, I mean, everyone wants to make a racial issue out of it. Oh, you know, the white replacement theory? No, no, no. This is a voting right question. I have less political power because they are importing a brand new electorate. Why should I sit back and take that? The power that I have as an American guaranteed at birth is one man, one vote, and they are diluting it. No, they are not allowed to do it. Why are we putting up with this?
Like clockwork, Tucker’s left-wing critics attacked. Here’s the headline from the Washington Post:
ADL demands Fox News fire Tucker Carlson over anti-Semitic trope: ‘This has deadly significance’
The story focused on the remarks of the Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive and national director of the ADL (and, no accident one suspects, a former operative in both the Clinton and Obama administrations). Mr. Greenblatt told CNN’s Brian Stelter that “I think we’ve really crossed a new threshold when a major news network dismisses this or pretends like it isn’t important. This has deadly significance.”
Also on CNN was my former colleague and anchor Don Lemon with a similar attack on Tucker. Said Don:
We got to talk about what’s happening over on the propaganda network, the Fox propaganda network. I don’t concern myself of what the other guys are doing. But let me tell you why I am doing this because this is the mainstreaming of white supremacist propaganda to your neighbors and your family members, and it is coming from Tucker Carlson who is promoting the so-called replacement theory. Theory is really too good a word for it. It’s a lie. The lie that liberal elites are plotting to replace the white population with immigrants of color.
Got it. Duly noted. To oppose the replacement of one culture or set of voters with another is both racist and anti-Semitic.
But wait!
With an almost blissful unawareness, neither Jonathan Greenblatt nor Don Lemon seems aware that the staunchest opponents of replacing populations with the “other” are people with names like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Sens. Bernie Sanders and Cory Booker, and, yes indeed, the lefty filmmaker Spike Lee, an African American. They are progressives one and all.
Say what?
All of these dastardly people, and oh so many more, progressives one and all, are staunch opponents of a replacement theory known as “gentrification.” What is gentrification? It is described here in a Quillette piece headlined this way:
Why Do Progressives Hate Gentrification?
The story reports this:
The word “gentrification” was coined in 1964 to describe the influx of wealthy newcomers into low-income inner-city neighborhoods, resulting in rising property values, changes in neighborhood culture, and displacement of original residents. Though gentrification predates the modern era, it has only become the target of criticism in recent decades, as cities like Washington, D.C., Atlanta, and Boston have witnessed rapid transformations. Opponents of gentrification have ranged from residents directly affected by it to wealthy college students directly responsible for it, as well as prominent Democrats such as Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Critics of gentrification give two main reasons for their opposition: (1) wealthy newcomers drive up monthly rents, thereby displacing original residents; and (2) rapid change to neighborhood culture represents an injustice to original residents. Both critiques are magnified by the presumed skin color of the gentrifiers and the gentrified, who tend to be white and black or Hispanic, respectively.
The same article reports this of the famously left-wing writer Ta-Nehisi Coates:
The following passage, from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s We Were Eight Years in Power, is representative:
“ … I know that ‘gentrification’ is but a more pleasing name for white supremacy, is the interest on enslavement, the interest on Jim Crow, the interest on redlining, compounding across the years, and these new urbanites living off of that interest are, all of them, exulting in a crime. To speak the word gentrification is to immediately lie.”
Which is to say, exactly as Tucker Carlson is saying, progressives believe gentrification is all about “importing a brand new electorate” and diluting “the political power of the people who live there.” Which is to say, diluting the political power of progressives. And, apparently unbeknownst to Jonathan Greenblatt and Don Lemon, progressives are flatly opposed to this.
Here is Rep. Ocasio-Cortez tweeting on the subject:
Gentrification represents a potent issue at the intersections of economic, social and racial justice.
It’s about political corruption, foreclosure & rising rent, criminal justice, immigration, organizing & more.
Addressing it in a time when it’s considered “taboo” is powerful.
Shades of Tucker Carlson.
Over there in New York magazine was this:
Spike Lee’s Amazing Rant Against Gentrification: ‘We Been Here!’
Among the things the famous lefty filmmaker was ranting about in his expletive-filled, seven-minute rant are as follows:
Then comes the motherf***in’ Christopher Columbus Syndrome. You can’t discover this! We been here. You just can’t come and bogart. There were brothers playing motherf***in’ African drums in Mount Morris Park for 40 years and now they can’t do it anymore because the new inhabitants said the drums are loud. My father’s a great jazz musician. He bought a house in nineteen-motherf***n’-sixty-eight, and the motherf***in’ people moved in last year and called the cops on my father. He’s not — he doesn’t even play electric bass! It’s acoustic! We bought the motherf***in’ house in nineteen-sixty-motherf***in’-eight and now you call the cops? In 2013? Get the f*** outta here!
I mean, they just move in the neighborhood. You just can’t come in the neighborhood. I’m for democracy and letting everybody live but you gotta have some respect. You can’t just come in when people have a culture that’s been laid down for generations and you come in and now sh*t gotta change because you’re here? Get the f*** outta here. Can’t do that!
Spike Lee … Tucker Carlson on steroids. Who knew?
By Don Lemon and Jonathan Greenblatt’s standards, Spike Lee and Rep. Ocasio-Cortez are, yes indeed, racial bigots and anti-Semites.
In fact, progressive opposition to replacing populations and cultures, with accompanying political changes, is common. Very common. From New York to Seattle, from Washington, D.C., to Detroit, to support the essence of exactly what Tucker Carlson is saying about attempts to replace one culture with another is progressive doctrine.
In Los Angeles and around the country, progressive protests against gentrification and the replacement of one culture with another have even turned violent, as reported here in the Huffington Post. The headline:
A New Generation Of Anti-Gentrification Radicals Are On The March In Los Angeles – And Around The Country
Perhaps the best places to look for signs of growing national momentum, however, are Chicago and Austin, Texas.
The story reports this (bold print supplied for emphasis):
The protest at Mariachi Plaza didn’t seem, at first, like a declaration of war.
In fact, the Feb. 7 event looked like the same sort of grassroots, anti-gentrification gathering that might have taken place in any big American city at any point over the past 10 years as higher-income transplants have increasingly colonized lower-income urban communities, remaking once marginalized neighborhoods in their own cold-brew-and-kombucha image.
But this one was different.
That’s because it was organized by Defend Boyle Heights, a coalition of scorched-earth young activists from the surrounding neighborhood — the heart of Mexican-American L.A. — who have rejected the old, peaceful forms of resistance (discussion, dialogue, policy proposals) and decided that the only sensible response is to attack and hopefully frighten off the sorts of art galleries, craft breweries and single-origin coffee shops that tend to pave the way for more powerful invaders: the real estate agents, developers and bankers whose arrival typically mark a neighborhood’s point of no return.” …
As a result, like-minded groups in other cities — Chicago, Austin, New York — have adopted the same hard-line tactics. Their ranks are small and their methods are controversial, even within the communities they purport to defend. But their members are drawn from the most politically radical, economically anxious generational cohort in recent memory — young millennials of color — and their cause has the makings of a national movement: a new, more militant war on gentrification….
Neighborhoods from Fort Greene in Brooklyn to the Mission District in San Francisco have become wealthier — and whiter — in the process.
Got that? “Young activists” from “the heart of Mexican-American L.A.” are bound and possessed to not allow their culture and population be replaced by the Other — defined in essence as white “invaders.”
And that reference to New York’s “Fort Greene in Brooklyn”? Over there in the Jewish Press there is this: “anti-gentrification groups will continue to target the Jewish community for hate and harassment.”
Which is to say, progressives in those anti-gentrification groups are in fact engaged in serious anti-Semitism. And where is Mr. Greenblatt?
Where, for that matter, is ex–Bush 43 aide turned Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson? Gerson wrote a column for the Post, the paper that is the very embodiment of identity politics — aka the son of segregation. Gerson, with that same blissful unawareness as the rest of the Tucker critics, says Tucker’s opposition to replacement is “a putrescent pile of racist myths and cliches.” Trumpism, asserts Gerson with utter innocence, is “an argument in favor of cultural purity, of social hygiene.
Alrighty, then. Michael Gerson has just said all those progressives around America fighting gentrification are, you guessed it, really fighting for “cultural purity” and “social hygiene.” Progressive opposition to gentrification equals racism, Gerson accidentally admits. Duly noted.
Look. The bottom line here is Tucker Carlson has spoken an obvious truth. No matter the players, when one group or culture settles inside another and proceeds to try and change that culture, changing the political dynamics along the way, there is bound to be opposition.
The Democratic Party is in fact deliberately seeking to do exactly this, making red states blue in their obsessive quest for political power. But at the same time, as if to prove Tucker’s point exactly, the real opposition to taking over a local culture and changing it completely both culturally and politically is coming from progressives around the country.
Yet not a word that these progressives are “racist” or “anti-Semitic.”
So what just happened here? Tucker Carlson’s critics took careful aim — and shot themselves in their progressive feet.
Imagine that.
