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      What is ‘great replacement’ theory and how did its racist lies spread in the US?

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      What is ‘great replacement’ theory and how did its racist lies spread in the US?Buffalo gunman is suspected of posting a 180-page racist diatribe in which he repeatedly referenced the extremist conspiracy theory Why are we talking about the ‘great replacement’ theory?On Saturday, a white man armed with an AR-15-style rifle entered a supermarket in Buffalo in New York state and killed 10 people, almost all of whom were African American. The gunman is suspected of having posted a 180-page racist diatribe in which he repeatedly referenced the extremist conspiracy theory known as the “great replacement”.The Buffalo shooter drew heavily on the white supremacist rantings of the gunman in the 2019 massacre at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which 51 people were killed. His similarly hate-filled statement was titled “The Great Replacement”.At its heart, the theory claims falsely that white people are being stripped of their power through the demographic rise of communities of color, driven by immigration. The lie has been integral to many of the most horrifying recent acts of white supremacist violence in the US.Far-right protesters at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which led to the killing of a woman, chanted “You will not replace us”. Replacement theory featured in the rants of mass shooters at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 in which 11 people were murdered; a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in which 23 were killed in 2019; and a synagogue in Poway, California, the same year in which one person died.What is the theory and how did it emerge?Replacement theory is a set of racist and antisemitic paranoid lies and delusions that has cropped up around the world in the past decade. In the US it is expressed as the false idea that an elite cabal of Jews and Democrats is “replacing” white Americans with Black, Hispanic and other people of color by encouraging immigration and interracial marriage – with the end goal being the eventual extinction of the white race.The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) traces replacement theory back to early 20th century French nationalism. It began to receive popular attention in 2011 with the writings of the French critic Renaud Camus.In the US, the racist ideas were initially adopted by fringe websites including the chat boards 4chan and the technically now defunct 8chan.How has it spread through US society?More recently, the idea has been enthusiastically embraced by rightwing news outlets that have injected these hate-infused falsehoods into the mainstream of American public life.In particular attention is now falling on Tucker Carlson, the most avidly watched host on Fox News. A recent deep exploration by the New York Times found that his show, Tucker Carlson Tonight, had on occasion drawn inspiration from white supremacist sites such as the neo-Nazi Stormfront.The newspaper found that in more than 400 episodes Carlson took up the idea that immigration was being exploited by elites to change the demographics of the US. Last year the ADL called for the TV host to be fired after he accused the Democrats on-air of “trying to replace the current electorate … with more obedient voters from the third world”.What has the theory done to American political debate?Having metastasized from fringe websites to Fox News, the idea of the imperiled white voter has spread its tentacles through the nation. An opinion poll last week by the Associated Press and the NORC center for public affairs research found that one in three US adults now subscribe to the false idea that a plot is under way to replace US-born Americans with immigrants, and that those US-born citizens are losing influence and power as a result.The notion has been taken up by Republican politicians at the highest levels. In the wake of the Buffalo shooting Liz Cheney, the Republican congresswoman from Wyoming, accused the leadership of her own party in the House of enabling “white nationalism, white supremacy, and antisemitism”.Cheney did not mention by name Elise Stefanik, who took over the number three role in the Republican House leadership from her after Cheney was ousted for having criticized former president Donald Trump. Stefanik has promoted a politicised version of replacement theory, claiming that Democrats are attempting a “permanent election insurrection” by seeking citizenship for undocumented immigrants in order to “overthrow our current electorate”.Other prominent Republicans who have amplified the lie include Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House, and far-right members of Congress, including Marjorie Taylor Greene and Paul Gosar.Is pressure mounting for something to be done about this?Cheney has called for Republican leaders to “renounce and reject” white supremacy. Adam Kinzinger, a Republican member of Congress from Illinois, has gone further, calling for several top Republicans themselves to be replaced.“The replacement theory they are pushing/tolerating is getting people killed,” he said.Charlie Sykes, a moderate conservative commentator who edits The Bulwark, wrote that responsibility for the Buffalo murders “lies with the murderer himself … But as conservatives once understood, ideas also have consequences; and poisonous demagoguery can have deadly results”.Such comments reflect a growing unease about the accommodation with replacement theory within rightwing politics and media. So far though the criticism is coming from individuals who have been pushed into the margins of the conservative movement, with no sign of change coming from the top.TopicsBuffalo shootingRepublicansRaceNew YorkUS politicsThe far rightexplainersReuse this content More

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      Fox News suddenly goes quiet on ‘great replacement’ theory after Buffalo shooting

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      Fox News suddenly goes quiet on ‘great replacement’ theory after Buffalo shooting Suspect was allegedly motivated by the theory, but network has barely mentioned gunman’s reasoning, even after Tucker Carlson pushed the concept in more than 400 of his shows As details of the Buffalo mass shooting emerged over the weekend, much of the media focussed on the shooter’s self-stated motivation: his racist belief that white Americans are being deliberately replaced through immigration in a “great replacement” theory.Over at Fox News, however, there was barely any mention of the white gunman’s alleged reasoning for opening fire at a supermarket, killing 10 people and wounding three more, in a predominantly Black area.The absence of coverage of the motive was revealing, given Fox News’s most popular host, Tucker Carlson, has pushed the concept of replacement theory in more than 400 of his shows – and has arguably done more than anyone in the US to popularize the racist conspiracy.Fox News, according to Oliver Darcy, a media correspondent for CNN, “largely ignored” the fact that the shooter had been inspired by replacement theory. Darcy searched transcripts from Fox News’s shows, and found one brief mention, by Fox News anchor Eric Shawn.As Americans absorbed news of the shooting and struggled to understand why it had happened, it seemed a glaring thing for the network to disregard. But given Carlson and his colleagues’ promotion of the theory, which has been unchecked by Fox News’s top executives, experts see the network as being left in a bind.“What can they say?” said Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a watchdog of rightwing media. “There’s no way for anyone at Fox News to really issue a convincing and compelling, forthright denunciation of great replacement theory, because it’s being discussed on the network’s primetime hour on a near constant basis.”Great replacement theory, or white replacement theory, states that a range of liberals, Democrats and Jewish people are working to replace white voters in western countries with non-white people, in an effort to achieve political aims.It is not a new concept. But Carlson has led the charge in reintroducing it to mainstream rightwing thought. In April a New York Times investigation found that in more than 400 hundred of his shows Carlson had advanced the idea that a “cabal of elites want to force demographic change through immigration”.In a monologue on his Monday night show, Carlson did not directly address replacement theory. He claimed the Buffalo shooter’s manifesto was “not recognizably left wing or right-wing: it’s not really political at all”, despite the rambling document referencing a number of right-wing conspiracy theories.Carlson referred to the gunman as “mentally ill” and launched an attack on “professional Democrats” who had “begun a campaign to blame those murders on their political opponents.”In April 2021, after Carlson claimed on his show that Democrats were “diluting” his vote by “importing a brand-new electorate”, the Anti-Defamation League wrote to Fox News to sound the alarm.“Make no mistake: this is dangerous stuff. The ‘great replacement theory’ is a classic white supremacist trope that undergirds the modern white supremacist movement in America,” wrote Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the ADL.“It is a concept that is discussed almost daily in online racist fever swamps. It is a notion that fueled the hateful chants of ‘Jews will not replace us!’ in Charlottesville in 2017. And it has lit the fuse in explosive hate crimes, most notably the hate-motivated mass shooting attacks in Pittsburgh, Poway and El Paso, as well as in Christchurch, New Zealand.”The ADL called for Carlson to be fired for his comments, but instead the rightwing host – whose show is the most-watched on cable news – has thrived, and his passion for the topic of replacement has spread to his colleagues.But Carlson is not alone on Fox.Laura Ingraham, who hosts an hour-long show at 10pm, has told her viewers that Democrats “want to replace you, the American voters, with newly amnestied citizens and an ever increasing number of chain migrants”, while Jeanine Pirro claimed on a radio show that liberals were engaged in “a plot to remake America, to replace American citizens with illegals who will vote for the Democrats”.“​​To be clear, Fox News is far from the only place where you might hear such dangerous rhetoric,” wrote Tom Jones, a senior media writer at the Poynter institute.“[But] the size of Fox News’s audience is what is notable. Fox News is the most-watched cable news network, and Carlson’s show is the most-watched on cable news, routinely drawing more than 3 million viewers a night.”Fox News declined to comment when asked if it planned to condemn the idea of white replacement or take action against Carlson. A spokeswoman pointed to examples of Carlson denouncing violence on his show. Fox News was one of six media organizations which the gunman claimed, in his manifesto, were disproportionately influenced by Jewish people.The network’s popularity has given it an outsized influence over the Republican party, an influence and relationship which was revealed recently when leaked text messages from the phone of Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s former White House chief-of-staff, showed Meadows in frequent communication with Fox News hosts as supporters of Trump besieged the US Capitol on 6 January.It should perhaps be little surprise, then, that Trump-supporting Republican politicians like Elise Stefanik and JD Vance have also embraced replacement theory.“It’s been gradually moving from the fringes into the mainstream,” Philip Gorski, a professor of sociology at Yale, told the Washington Post. “First it was the entertainment wing of the GOP. Now it’s the political wing as well.”The Buffalo shooter did not mention Fox News as an influence on his political beliefs, but said he had been radicalized through the extremist online forum 4chan, where he had found “infographics, shitposts, and memes that the White race is dying out”. From there, the gunman said, he had discovered sources including the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer.Curiously, the founder of the Daily Stormer has called Tucker Carlson “literally our greatest ally”, and praised the Fox News host in 2021, in the wake of his replacement theory comments.“[Carlson was] dropping the ultimate truth bomb on his audience: Jews aggressively lobby for the same demographic policies in America that they openly declare would destroy their own country,” Anglin wrote.Since the shooting Carlson and his fellow Fox News hosts have justifiably drawn criticism for their promotion of replacement theory. But Gertz said the issue ultimately runs deeper, all the way to the Murdoch family which controls the channel.“Everyone knows the score here,” Gertz said.“Tucker Carlson is doing his job. He is providing the content that the Fox News brass, the Murdochs, want out of their 8pm slot.“If they didn’t want him to do this, they could make him stop – but they’ve decided not to. And they have decided not to do that because he is still profitable for them.”TopicsBuffalo shootingFox NewsUS television industryUS politicsRaceThe far rightfeaturesReuse this content More

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      US gun violence over weekend puts focus on easy access to weapons

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      US gun violence over weekend puts focus on easy access to weapons Violence includes Buffalo shooting that left 10 people dead, as well as two dead in Houston, one in Los Angeles and five in ChicagoAmerica on Monday was picking up the pieces from a weekend of gun violence that – outside the cost of lives – has refocused the country’s leadership on the toxic interplay of political ideology and easy access to handguns and battlefield weapons.Scrutiny of Republicans who embrace ‘great replacement theory’ after Buffalo massacreRead moreIn the most recent case, two people were killed Sunday and at least three others hospitalized after a shooting at a large Houston, Texas, flea market. In California, also on Sunday, at least one person died and five were wounded – including four listed in critical condition – after a shooting at a church with a predominantly Taiwanese congregation in Orange county, south of Los Angeles.In Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot enacted a weekend curfew for unaccompanied minors at a city park after a 16-year-old boy was killed there. At least 33 people were shot, five fatally, in weekend violence across the city, police said.The shootings, each horrific in their own way, punctuated the weekend’s main horror: an 18-year-old espousing white supremacist ideology who went to an African American neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, on Saturday and – in less than two minutes – gunned down 13 people at a grocery, killing 10.That shooting – one of the deadliest racist massacres in recent memory – has renewed scrutiny on internet-promulgated hate speech, access to assault-style guns and body armor, and the inability of law enforcement authorities, elected politicians, religious leaders and the commercial sector to stop such violence from recurring.In the Buffalo shooting at Tops Friendly grocery, white suspect Payton Gendron is accused of specifically targeting a Black neighborhood and taking aim at Black victims – shoppers, grocery workers and a security guard.He had purportedly made threatening comments that brought police to his high school last spring, raising questions about whether authorities botched an opportunity to short-circuit Saturday’s killings.Gendron was never charged with a crime, and investigators had no further contact with him after his release from a hospital where he was mentally evaluated for about 36 hours.Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia said the threat Gendron had made was “general” in nature and unrelated to race. “Nobody called in,” he said. “Nobody called any complaints.”New York is one of several states that, in recent years, have enacted “red flag” laws which are intended to prevent mass shootings, but they rely on a legal petition to temporarily seize people’s firearms, or prevent them from buying guns.Federal authorities, led by the FBI which is investigating the attack as a hate crime, have said they are working to confirm the authenticity of a racist 180-page document, purportedly written by Gendron, that laid out a plan to terrorize nonwhite, non-Christian people.Buffalo shooting: what we know about the victims so farRead moreIn a Twitch livestream video of the attack, Gendron allegedly trains his gun on a white person behind a checkout counter before apologizing and moving on.A purported screenshot of the video circulating online showed the N-word scrawled in white, along with the number “14”, which is an apparent reference to this 14-word white supremacist phrase: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”Gendron, the Buffalo police commissioner Gramaglia said, planned to continue his assault in the surrounding neighborhood. But he was apprehended outside the grocery after removing his body armor and setting down his Bushmaster rifle with an extended 70-round magazine.“This individual came here with the express purpose of taking as many Black lives as he possibly could,” the Buffalo mayor, Byron Brown, said Sunday.Representing families of the massacre victims, renowned civil rights attorney Ben Crump told reporters at a news conference Monday that cable news pundits who have spoken fawningly of the same extremist ideology embraced by the alleged shooter should be held accountable.The manifesto attributed to Gendron talks about the racist theory that Democrats are pushing open immigration policies to “replace” Republican voters with people of color and retain control of the country’s levers of power.Crump called pundits airing the ideology on mainstream news channels as “accomplices”.“Even though they might not have pulled the trigger, they loaded the gun,” he said.Released, recorded radio transmissions between emergency services showed the speed of the Buffalo massacre and how little time authorities had to intervene. Police had Gendron in custody within six minutes of being alerted to the attack, yet 10 people were still killed.“Radio, send as many cars as you possibly can,” a responding officer says at about 2.33pm. Less than 30 seconds later, firefighters radioed in that there were at least three people down on the ground and that police “have him” about 20 ft from where they were. At 2.36pm, police reported they had arrested the suspect and confiscated a gun.But the shooting has brought, as many times before, questions about what authorities can do to confront individuals espousing violently racist intentions before they act on them. And it has brought pressure on social media platforms to flag content posted on their sites.Before the 2018 massacre of 17 students at a high school in Parkland, Florida, and the killings of more than two dozen people at a Texas church in 2017, authorities had received information indicating the assailant’s violent intent or history.On Sunday, New York governor Kathy Hochul promised action on hate speech that she said spreads “like a virus”. President Biden is expected in Buffalo on Tuesday to meet with victims’ families. Those slain included an 86-year-old woman who had just visited her husband in a nursing home, a man buying a cake for his grandson, and a church deacon helping people get home with their shopping.As political figures visited the area over the weekend, some said it was urgent to separate the bonds between gun ownership and religious faith or extremist ideologies.But for many in the targeted Buffalo community, Gendron’s intent wasn’t the salient problem – it was how the shooting was rooted in US social history.“The present is the past – same thing,” community activist Marietta Malcolm said. “Don’t think like this is an isolated incident, or act like we haven’t had 300 years of it. Every time people say racism doesn’t exist, somebody does something to prove that it does.”TopicsUS gun controlBuffalo shootingUS politicsRacenewsReuse this content More

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      Liz Cheney says Republican leadership has ‘enabled white supremacy’

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      Liz Cheney says Republican leadership has ‘enabled white supremacy’Her scathing tweet may have targeted Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, who has complained of immigrants replacing white voters Wyoming congresswoman Liz Cheney has accused her Republican party leadership of enabling “white nationalism, white supremacy, and antisemitism”, in a scathing message after the racist massacre at a grocery store in Buffalo.Cheney, who was removed from her position as the No 3 House Republican last year after she joined the panel investigating the 6 January Capitol attack, urged party leaders in a tweet to “renounce and reject these views and those who hold them”.The House GOP leadership has enabled white nationalism, white supremacy, and anti-semitism. History has taught us that what begins with words ends in far worse. @GOP leaders must renounce and reject these views and those who hold them.— Liz Cheney (@Liz_Cheney) May 16, 2022
      Her remarks were made amid increasing scrutiny of Republican figures who have embraced the racist “great replacement theory” the Buffalo killer is said to have cited in a manifesto he used to justify the murders.The far-right ideology expounds the view that immigration will ultimately destroy white values and western civilization.Although a growing number of Republican lawmakers and hopefuls have promoted the discredited conspiracy theory, including JD Vance, the Donald Trump-endorsed candidate who won last week’s Republican Senate primary in Ohio, many believe Cheney’s message is directed at one person: the Republican House conference chair, Elise Stefanik.The New York congresswoman, who was swiftly installed to replace Cheney when the House minority leader and Trump loyalist, Kevin McCarthy, orchestrated Cheney’s ouster last year, has used the great replacement theory to make false accusations that Democrats were plotting a “permanent election insurrection” by replacing white voters with immigrants.The Illinois congressman Adam Kinzinger, who is the only other Republican on the House panel investigating Trump’s insurrection efforts, posted his own tweet slamming Stefanik’s promotion of the theory as “despicable”.On Sunday he added another post, demanding that Stefanik, McCarthy and extremist Republican congress members Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn be “replaced”.McCarthy is one of five Republicans who received subpoenas from the House panel last week as it seeks more information about Trump’s actions to overturn his election defeat by Joe Biden, including the deadly riots at the Capitol on 6 January 2021.Stefanik, meanwhile, has been furiously tweeting this morning, doubling down on her claims that Democrats are purposely manipulating immigration policy “specifically for political and electoral purposes”.TopicsRepublicansRaceUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Buffalo shooting: how white replacement theory keeps inspiring mass murder | Jason Stanley

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      Buffalo shooting: how white replacement theory keeps inspiring mass murderJason StanleyThis once fringe ideology, which was at the heart of Nazism, has gained mainstream traction thanks in part to the likes of Tucker Carlson on Fox News On Saturday, 18-year-old Payton Gendron parked his car in front of the entrance to a Tops Supermarket in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. Exiting the car wearing metal armor and holding an assault rifle, he shot and killed a female employee in front of the store, and a man packing groceries into the trunk of his car. After entering the store, he murdered the store’s guard, and by the end of his killing spree, he had shot 13 people, killing 10 of them.Eleven of the people he shot were Black, and two were white. As the manifesto he left behind makes clear, this was fully intentional. The first listed goal in his manifesto was to “kill as many blacks as possible”.Gendron was a meticulous planner. He live-streamed his massacre, and the video begins with him following to the letter the beginning of the plan he lays out in the manifesto.. But the manifesto – which is meant to inspire and instruct subsequent attacks – also outlines the ideology that inspired the murders. Gendron was motivated by a classic version of White Replacement Theory, the view that a cabal of global elites is trying to destroy white nations, via the systematic replacement of white populations. According to White Replacement Theory, the strategies employed by these “global elites” include the mass immigration of supposedly “high fertility” non-whites, and encouraging intermingling between members of non-white races and whites. Gendron was deeply influenced by a series of recent mass killers who were animated by white replacement theoryincluding Brenton Tarrant, whom Gendron openly acknowledges as his model. In Christchurch, New Zealand, Tarrant massacred 51 people at a Mosque in the name of White Replacement Theory, also live-streaming his actions.Gendron’s manifesto begins in a similar fashion to Tarrant’s, by decrying the “white genocide” that will result from the supposedly low fertility rates of white populations and the high fertility rates of non-white immigrants brought in to “replace” them. It is more openly anti-Black than Tarrant’s manifesto – it is a deeply American version, with roots in Jim Crow and lynching. It is also vastly more explicitly antisemitic. Ten pages of Gendron’s manifesto are devoted to arguing for a genetic basis for the racial IQ gap, as well as (ironically) a genetic basis for higher rates of violent crime. It’s clear that Gendron closely follows various academic debates about race, IQ, and crime. According to the ideology guiding Gendron, Black people are not intelligent enough to engineer the replacement of whites, and the destruction of their civilization. The real actors behind White Replacement, according to Gendron, are the Jews, a topic which occupies the subsequent 29 pages of his manifesto.Gendron’s lengthy section on Jews purports to document Jewish hatred of non-Jews. It includes a section of Talmud quotes supporting Gendron’s thesis that Jews hate Christians, and a section documenting supposed control of academia, media, and industry (focusing on the pharmaceutical industry). Gendron ties Jews to child abuse and pedophilia. The section mocks a supposed Jewish fixation on environmental causes of Black crime. Gendron argues that Jews are behind Black social and political movements and organizations, including the NAACP and Black Lives Matter.Gendron also argues that Jews are behind the movement for transgender inclusivity, supposedly sponsoring transgender summer camps for “Scandinavian style whites”.The section ends by blaming Jews for creating “infighting” between people and races. The example Gendron’s manifesto provides is that “Jews are spreading ideas such as Critical Race Theory and white shame/guilt to brainwash Whites into hating themselves and their people”.The ideology that motivated Gendron’s mass murder in Buffalo, White Replacement Theory, has a lengthy and blood-soaked 20th century history. Since 2011, it has been the explicit motivation for over 160 murders, including Norway’s Anders Breivik’s slaughter of 77 people, mostly immigrants, in 2011, Dylann Roof’s mass murder of Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, the Tree of Life Synagogue killings in 2018, and the murder of 23 people, mostly immigrants, in El Paso, Texas, in 2019.Mass atrocities do not occur in a vacuum. They are enabled by a present normalization of a lengthy previous history, a process that the philosopher of mass killing Lynne Tirrell labels the social embeddedness condition. White Replacement Theory was the dominant structuring narrative of Nazi ideology. Adolf Hitler also announced his genocidal intent in a lengthy manifesto about the supposed Jewish threat to white civilization, entitled Mein Kampf, which was published in 1924. Hitler also was obsessed by mass immigration, and the threat it posed to “white civilization.”Currently, White Replacement Theory has been mass popularized and normalized, perhaps chiefly by the American political commentator Tucker Carlson. It is rapidly moving to the center of the mainstream narrative of America’s Republican party. In this form, it appears stripped of its explicit connection to antisemitism. You will not find Tucker Carlson asserting that the Jews are behind the mass replacement of American whites that he bemoans regularly in what is regularly the most watched cable news show in the United States among adults 25-54.But what Carlson has been doing is spending an entire year repeating a conspiracy by Christopher Rufo that says that American education has been infected by a pro-Black ideology (CRT) that was created by German Jewish Marxist intellectuals (the Frankfurt School). And that while the CRT version of this conspiracy theory is new, it is a direct descendent of the “cultural marxism” conspiracy theory, which was a primary topic of Breivik’s manifesto.The fact that Carlson does not mention American Jews as a target by name should be cold comfort to American Jews. Every single right wing anti-Semite in America who watches Tucker Carlson’s show hears him as denouncing Jews when he regularly platforms the 20th century’s worst anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.Some American Jews hope that by identifying as white, and lending their support to racist narratives about IQ and crime, they can diminish rightwing American antisemitism. This is a terrible error. American Ku Klux Klan ideology in the 1920s strongly overlapped with Nazi ideology, placing Jews at the center of a conspiracy fomenting a supposed race war to overthrow white civilization. American Jews who support Tucker Carlson and his ilk, that is, others who repeat the White Replacement narrative, are supporters both of anti-Black racism, and antisemitism in its most violent form.It is in the tracts of the 20th century’s most explicit antisemites that we find the development of White Replacement Theory, who used it to justify the mass killing of Jews. Gendron’s manifesto reveals yet again the unbreakable historical link between anti-Black racism and antisemitism. Any supporter of White Replacement Theory is a clear enemy of the Jewish People.America has many mass shootings. But this mass killing of Black Americans in a Buffalo supermarket must serve as a wake-up call to our country. White Replacement Theory is deeply ingrained in the worst aspects of American and European history. With its attacks on “Critical Race Theory”, this is a fact that the American political right is deliberately and knowingly trying to erase from our collective consciousness, so they can appeal to it again as a political weapon against liberal democracy.As Gendron’s manifesto makes clear, White Replacement Theory is not just an attack on minorities. It is a weapon directed by fascists at American democracy itself.TopicsUS newsOpinionBuffalo shootingNew YorkAntisemitismRaceUS politicsThe far rightcommentReuse this content More

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      ‘A history maker’: Karine Jean-Pierre set for White House press secretary role

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      ‘A history maker’: Karine Jean-Pierre set for White House press secretary role She will be the first Black openly gay woman to step into the role, a symbol of change after the Donald Trump era This week the blue door will slide back, a Black woman will walk to the lectern and a piece of White House history will be made.Karine Jean-Pierre, facing rows of reporters and cameras, will be making her briefing room debut as the first Black woman and first openly gay person in the role of press secretary. Not that there will be much time to stand on ceremony.“Karine is the right person to carry the weight of being a history maker but that aspect of it will last all of five warm minutes at the podium,” predicted Patrick Gaspard, a longtime colleague who is now chief executive of the Center for American Progress thinktank in Washington.“About five minutes in, being the first ever is going to mean hardly anything to folks who are hearing from her and certainly it’s not a crutch that Karine is going to rely upon. She knows that she’s got to be better prepared than anyone.”‘Long-overdue’: all-Black, female second world war battalion to receive congressional gold medal Read moreIt does indeed promise to be baptism of fire. Jean-Pierre takes over as top messenger for a Joe Biden administration grappling with inflation, Ukraine and a national shortage of baby formula as the Democratic party is bracing for November election losses that could end its control of Congress.But the symbolism of the appointment is inescapable after the Donald Trump era in which all four press secretaries were white. Jean-Pierre once declared: “I am everything that Donald Trump hates. I’m a Black woman, I’m gay, I am a mom. Both my parents were born in Haiti.”The 47-year-old was born in Martinique to Haitian parents and raised in the Queens Village neighborhood of New York. Her early career included a stint working for James Sanders, then a city council member in New York, now a state senator, and at the Center for Community and Corporate Ethics, pushing big companies such as Walmart to change their business practices.She has not always picked winners. Jean-Pierre was press secretary to Congressman Anthony Weiner of New York, later jailed for sending sexually explicit text messages to a minor, and served on the presidential election campaign of John Edwards, who also fell from grace in a sex scandal.But her big break came when Gaspard hired her to work on Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign and then in the Obama White House as a regional director in the office of political affairs. Gaspard, the son of Haitian immigrants, said: “She and I have been in the trenches together. We’re Haitian-American family.“She and I can sometimes finish one another’s thoughts just on the basis of the culture that we’re steeped in. There is a deep sense of public service and the integrity of governance that’s really important to most immigrant communities and certainly for Haitian-Americans who appreciate that there are opportunities in democratic service available to them here that are tragically denied at home.”Jean-Pierre was deputy campaign manager on Martin O’Malley’s 2016 presidential campaign, then chief public affairs officer for the progressive grassroots group MoveOn.At one of its events in 2019, an animal rights protester leaped on stage and tried to seize then Senator Kamala Harris’s microphone. Jean-Pierre kept her cool, springing from her chair to shoo him away. Old colleagues say she has the ideal temperament for the pressure cooker of the briefing room with its sometimes hostile questioning.Ben Wikler, a former senior adviser at MoveOn, now chair of the Wisconsin Democratic party, said: “One of Karine’s superpowers is to keep her nerve in the face of chaos and high stakes.”“She has a deep wealth of experience in working on the political side and communications roles and doing a lot of live television work has really given her a sense of poise and confidence about handling delicate and breaking news situations.”He added: “Everyone’s blood temperature went down when she had the microphone because they knew that she is so effective at bringing things back to the message that needed to be conveyed.”Jean-Pierre appeared as a political analyst on the NBC and MSNBC networks but, with Biden’s election, returned to the White House. As principal deputy press secretary she has sometimes briefed in Psaki’s absence, for example when the latter was ill with coronavirus.Psaki, a self-declared policy wonk, has told the New York Times that, before the door to the briefing room slides open, both women often do a dance to shake off their nerves. With Psaki now reportedly heading to MSNBC, Biden offered the top job to Jean-Pierre in the Oval Office.A day after her appointment, she received a standing ovation at a recent media awards ceremony in New York organised by the LGBTQ+ organisation Glaad. Sarah Kate Ellis, its chief executive and president, said: “Just when we thought her standing ovation would subside, the audience at the Glaad Media Awards issued another wave of applause, because representation matters.“When Karine takes the podium as press secretary, every little girl, especially Black girls, and every LGBTQ kid, will see they can belong just as they are, that you can be LGBTQ and can contribute and be valued wherever you go. Karine represents the best of America and what we can be.”Jean-Pierre’s partner is Suzanne Malveaux, a correspondent at CNN. Amid questions over potential conflicts of interest, the network has said Malveaux “will continue in her role as CNN National Correspondent covering national/international news and cultural events but will not cover politics, Capitol Hill, or the White House”.On Friday, at her 224th and final briefing – more than all Trump’s press secretaries combined, though with rather less drama or viewers – Psaki was asked what lessons she wants to pass on to Jean-Pierre, who smiled from her familiar position at the side of the room.“The last thing I would say is that it can be repetitive in here from time to time,” she reflected. “That’s not a critique. You are all doing your jobs. But in the age of social media, always provide the context and all of the details, because you never want to be a meme with one line.“But otherwise be yourself and Karine, as I said last week, is going to bring her own magic, her brilliance, her style to this briefing room.”TopicsBiden administrationUS politicsRaceLGBT rightsnewsReuse this content More

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      What caused the rise of anti-Asian hate crime in the US? Politics Weekly America – podcast

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      Last year, President Biden signed the anti-Asian hate crimes bill into law. Jonathan Freedland speaks to Prof Claire Kim of UCI about what’s behind the recent rise in anti-Asian hate in America, why this is an issue both sides of Congress can actually agree on, and what influence Asian-American voters could have in the midterms and in 2024

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      Archive: NBC, ABC Claire Jean Kim is professor of political science and Asian American Studies at the University of California Irvine Listen to this week’s episode of Politics Weekly UK with John Harris Send your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

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      ‘Birthing while Black’ is a national crisis for the US. Here’s what Black lawmakers want to do about it

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      ‘Birthing while Black’ is a national crisis for the US. Here’s what Black lawmakers want to do about it For Black women in Congress, maternal mortality hits close to home. The Black Maternal Health Caucus seeks changeWhen Alma Adams’s daughter complained of abdominal pain during a difficult pregnancy, her doctor overlooked her cries for help. The North Carolina congresswoman’s daughter had to undergo a last-minute caesarean section. She and her baby daughter, now 16, survived. “It could have gone another way. I could have been a mother who was grieving her daughter and granddaughter,” Adams told the Guardian, following a week in which the White House highlighted the crisis of pregnancy-related deaths among Black women. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Black women die at three times the rate of white women.For Adams and other Black women in Congress, who formed the Black Maternal Health Caucus, the issue hits close to home. Last week, during Black Maternal Health Week, they talked about how their experiences and the work of advocates had propelled legislation, known as the Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act of 2021, to fight a healthcare crisis that disproportionately affects Black women regardless of income.The US has the highest maternal mortality rate among industrialized countries. Since 2000, the maternal mortality rate has risen nearly 60%, making it worse now than it was decades earlier. More than half of these deaths are preventable.Health experts point to the fact that other industrialized countries have significantly different approaches to motherhood than the US, including paid maternity leave, access to comprehensive postpartum care and enough maternity care providers, especially midwives, to meet the needs of their populations. Policy advocates add that the crisis among Black women is a symptom of racism in the nation’s healthcare system – from who has access to care to attitudes toward Black people and their bodies.“It doesn’t matter what your socioeconomic status is. It doesn’t matter how much insurance you have, or how much education you have,” Adams said, adding that her daughter, Jeanelle Lindsay, had a master’s degree and health insurance. “Those things don’t matter. This could happen to anyone. Look at women like Beyoncé and Serena Williams, who had these near misses because the doctors really didn’t pay the kind of attention that they should have.”Black women in the House used the week of recognition to bring attention to several bills that are part of a sweeping Momnibus package to address the dangers of birthing while Black. Their efforts to elevate the longtime work of organizations such as the Black Mamas Matter Alliance showed the power of representation in putting issues affecting Black women on the congressional agenda, said Lauren Underwood, an Illinois congresswoman and registered nurse.“It takes women in these spaces to call out problems, set an agenda, and bring together a coalition of legislators, advocates, and community members to work toward comprehensive, evidence-based solutions that will save moms’ lives,” Underwood said in an email.In January 2019, after Underwood received her committee assignments, Adams met with her to see if she wanted to launch a caucus focused on Black maternal health. One of Underwood’s friends, an epidemiologist at the CDC, had died three weeks after she gave birth. “I was still grappling with her death when I came to Congress,” Underwood said.Three months later, they launched the caucus with 53 founding members, including Ayanna Pressley, Lucy McBath and Barbara Lee. Today, it has 115 members from both parties.After consulting with maternal health advocacy groups, Underwood and Adams introduced the Momnibus Act in March 2020, nine bills aimed at combating maternal health disparities through investment in community-based programs and other efforts to rectify social determinants of health – the conditions in which people live, work and grow up – that affect who lives and who dies in childbirth.Their legislative pursuit was timely, coming before a pandemic that would bring racial health disparities to the public’s attention. Between 2019 and 2020, the mortality rate for Black and Latina women and birthing people rose during the first year of the pandemic.Kamala Harris, the nation’s first Black and South Asian female vice-president, amplified the issue last week during a speech at the Century Foundation, a progressive thinktank based in Washington DC. Harris called for “building a future in which being Black and pregnant is a time filled with joy and hope rather than fear”.As a US senator from California, Harris was lead sponsor for the Senate version of the Momnibus Act in 2020, which stalled in committee. Underwood and Adams, along with Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, reintroduced the Momnibus bill in February 2021.Most of the proposals in the package are included in the Build Back Better Act, a social spending bill that is stuck in gridlock.“Were it not for Black women in the Congressional Black Caucus, there would not be a Black Maternal Health Caucus,” said the Massachusetts representative Ayanna Pressley. “When we say that we are the voice of Congress, we mean that.”Pressley lost her paternal grandmother, whom she never knew, when she died giving birth to Pressley’s uncle in the 1950s. “Decades later, the Black maternal mortality crisis continues to rob us of our loved ones and to destabilize families,” she said during the Century Foundation event.What explains the disparities in outcomes between Black and white mothers boils down to what Pressley called “policy violence”. It’s not just the discrimination that Black women and birthing people experience, but also the lack of access to quality healthcare and medical coverage.“These are the result of centuries of laws in a systematic, systematically racist health care system that too often discounts our pay, ignores our voices, disregards our lives,” Pressley said. “Birthing while Black should not be a death sentence.”In November 2021, Joe Biden signed into law one of the bills in the Momnibus package that invests $15m in maternity care for veterans. But other legislative efforts remain stalled in Congress. Eight bills that were part of the original Momnibus package are part of the Build Back Better Act, according to a tracker by The Century Foundation. They include awarding grants to community organizations to help pregnant people find affordable housing, documenting transportation barriers for pregnant and postpartum people, expanding food stamp eligibility and permanently expanding Medicaid coverage for mothers in every state for a year after childbirth.And on Friday, Booker and seven other lawmakers introduced Mamas First Act, which would expand Medicaid to cover services from doulas and midwives.“We’ve made historic progress, from the enactment of the first bill in my Black Maternal Health Momnibus Act to the recent cabinet meeting Vice-President Harris led, the first-ever White House cabinet meeting convened to address maternal health disparities as a national priority,” Underwood said.Adams pointed to another piece of the legislation that feels very close to home: the Kira Johnson Act, named after a 39-year-old Black mother who, after complaining of abdominal pain, died in 2016 from a hemorrhage following a routine caesarean section. The bill would direct the health and human services department to send grants to community groups focused on improving the maternal health outcomes for Black, Latino and other marginalized communities and for training to reduce racial bias and discrimination among healthcare providers.The connection between Johnson’s and her daughter’s situations resonated with Adams. The pain they experienced was dismissed – a familiar form of racial bias that the Momnibus package attempts to address.“Either you have a mother, you are a mother, or you know women who are moms,” Adams said. “When we raise the tide for Black women, who are among the most marginalized and the most vulnerable, we ultimately raise the tide for all women.”TopicsUS CongressParents and parentingFamilyKamala HarrisAyanna PressleyHouse of RepresentativesUS SenatefeaturesReuse this content More