The current 48% of Trump voters (as described below) are definitely racists, because anyone who supports the racist poison that Trump is spewing must be racist. I can't imagine anyone putting other issues (economy, abortion...) ahead of the issue of racism and say, "I am going to ignore his racism and vote for him because of inflation".
Therefore 48% of 335 million represent 167 million Americans who are racists.
Despite all the efforts expended over two centuries to make the US a civilized place that lives up to its proclamations of being a beacon on a hill, a "nation" with a manifest destiny, "the" bastion of democracy, a melting pot of diversity, Tump is proving all these claims absolutely fallacious.
For even if we reduce democracy to the ability of people to vote for their representatives, the current efforts of the 167 million racists in this country to eliminate millions of people from the voting rolls because they can't show a birth certificate or their married last name is different from their pre-married last name or they don't have a driving license or any number of bureaucratic obstacle to voting, the mere fact that half the country is ostensibly racist debunks the claim to democracy.
This "whites-only" democracy in the US is what makes this country so much in love with the "Jewish-only" democracy claim of Israel. In the US, which does really belong only to its indigenous Amerindians, we are all one-, two-, three- or four-generations up immigrants or "settlers" if you wish, and the white anglo-saxons are trying to keep more immigrants from coming ashore. In Israel, the country really belongs to its indigenous native Palestinians, and the Jewish "settlers" are also a couple of generations away from the initial European invaders, but are trying to "finish off " the indigenous population.
But the difference is that in America we have essentially finished the job of ethnically cleansing, killing, massacring, starving and otherwise deporting the indigenous population. In Israel, the Jewish settlers are desperately trying to imitate the Americans by eradicating the natives, but are finding this to be a monumental task and an unreachable objective. The barbarity of Israelis vis-a-vis the indigenous Palestinian population is indeed in direct proportion to the despair of the Israelis at erasing Palestine.
Another difference is that immigrants into America are often separated by large oceans from their countries of origin, while the native Amerindians were isolated on this large island that the American continent is. In Israel, the "pool" of Arab sympathizers of Palestine surrounding the Zionist colony is huge and unsurmountable, which means that in a global sense and on the longer term, Israel is doomed as a foreign implant in a vast sea of natives.
Consider for a moment the dynamics of various immigrant groups to the US. If you take Chinese and Asian immigrants, they would come in large numbers, which allowed them to create "safe" zones for themselves in what we know as "Chinatowns". But the flow of immigrants would ebb and flow depending on the global situation and given time most Asian and Chinese immigrants integrate into the American fabric.
If I look at the Lebanese immigrants - excluding the broader Arab immigration because of religous differences, the Lebanese being mostly Christians while the other Arabs are mostly Muslim - they were relatively small in numbers and could not create "safe" zones for themselves, and given that they were Christian Catholics, they tend to integrate rapidly and did not need such safe zones anyway.
On the other hand, hispanic immigration is a very different issue. Behind the hispanic immigrants lies a long history of conflicts between Spain and England in the rush to control the new continent, a mutual history between the US and Mexico, and most importantly the contiguity of the hispanic continent with the territory of the United States. Hispanic immigrants generally find a favorable environment in those states that used to belong to Spain and/or were part of Mexico and where the population speaks Spanish and maintains cultural traditions, and they do not need "safe" zones, but still without fully integrating.
The reason is that the geographic contiguity of the US with a huge reservoir of hispanics stretching from Mexico all the way to the southernmost tip of South America, and the constant flow, legal and illegal, of hispanics into the US will prevent integration into the dominant white anglo-saxon population.
Which explains the desperation of Trump and his 167 million racist followers at fighting immigrants, building walls, denying them voting rights.... I must agree with Trump that the white Anglo-Saxon population is under siege, not by some devilish plan or conspiracy for a "Great Replacement", but by the natural evolution of demographic, historical and geographic dynamics. No one here is at fault for recognizing this evolution. The fault lies in those who reject that fact and react to it with violence and racism.
The colonial French used to own 50% of the North American continent, from northeastern Canada across the Great Lakes into Western Canada, down the eastern seaboard into the mid-Atlantic states, and a large swath down the Mississippi Valley into today's Louisiana. Today, the remnants of that empire are in the Province of Quebec and a vanishing smattering in Louisiana.
Because immigration to the US from white European countries has basically stopped, and because there is no geographic contiguity between North America and Europe (unless Trump ends up buying Groenland as he once suggested), while the immense hispanic reservoir of immigrants south of Mexico will never dry up, I predict that hispanic culture will continue to crawl northward into the United States over the next couple of centuries.
Should the reaction of the white American anglos be to build a wall, a "safe" zone for themselves, as Trump is telling them they should, by using violence and racism? Or should they welcome the natural change and integrate in it as much as they expect others to integrate into their own?
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Opinion - Trump is at 48 percent. How could this be possible but for widespread racism?
Juan Williams, Opinion Contributor
Mon, September 23, 2024
Opinion - Trump is at 48 percent. How could this be possible but for widespread racism?
At this point, the racism is obvious. How else does it make sense that 48 percent of registered voters in last week’s Fox News poll say they have no problem putting Donald Trump back in the White House?
Who are these people who look the other way when their candidate tells a bold lie about Black immigrants eating a mostly white Ohio town’s cats and dogs?
How can it be that not a soul among the 48 percent cares that Trump’s vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, says it is okay to “create” racist lies about immigrants eating pets “so the American media actually pays attention”?
How can 48 percent of voters back a candidate who says immigrants coming from “infested” places are “poisoning the blood of our country?”
Is it just snowflakes who notice when one of Trump’s close allies says, “The White House will smell like curry” if Vice President Kamala Harris, the daughter of an Indian immigrant, wins the presidency?
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R- Ga.), no snowflake, condemned the comment as “appalling,” “racist” and “hateful.”
Do these voters also prefer to sail past Trump once calling a Black woman and former aide a “dog”? And he called Alvin Bragg, the Black Manhattan district attorney who successfully prosecuted him for business fraud, an “animal.”
Maybe Trump’s 48 percent don’t excuse his racism so much as get the message. They are inside a Republican Party that is 82 percent white. Most of those white Republicans are in small towns and rural areas.
“Beginning in the early 2010s — and accelerating during the presidency of Donald J. Trump…” The New York Times noted earlier this year, “white voters without a degree, increasingly moved toward the Republican Party. Nearly two-thirds of all white, non-college voters identify as Republicans or lean toward the Republican Party.”
This is the heart of Trump supporters who told YouGov pollsters they believe Trump is telling the truth about Haitian immigrants “abducting and eating pet dogs and cats.”
The YouGov polls also found that 80 percent of Trump supporters also buy his lie that Venezuela is “deliberately sending people from prisons and mental institutions” into the U.S. I wrote a 2018 book about Trump’s history of racism. Vice President Harris echoed the book’s research in talking last week of Trump’s racist past. She pointed back to his participation in the “birther” lie, the incendiary claim that the first Black president, President Obama, had not been born in the U.S.
Harris said Trump can’t be trusted to serve as president after “engaging in…hateful rhetoric that, as usual, is designed to divide us as a country…to have people pointing fingers at each other.”
In this year’s campaign, one of Trump’s regular dog-whistles at his rallies is his false claim that big cities, full of racial minorities and immigrants, are scary places full of crime and failure. Last week he flatly lied at a rally when he said a parent who leaves a child alone on the New York subway has “about a 75 percent chance that [they’ll] never see [their] child again. What the hell has happened here?”
Trump’s use of racism to stir up his white supporters was called out by writer Fran Lebowitz back in 2018. Trump, she wrote, has “allowed people to express their racism and bigotry in a way that they haven’t been able to in quite a while and they really love him for that…It’s a shocking thing to realize people love their hatred more than they care about their own actual lives.”
There are real consequences to all these racist lies. Last week, a Trump-supporting sheriff in Ohio encouraged people to report their neighbors who displayed Harris-Walz lawn signs. This incident called to mind parallels with police in Nazi Germany.
Widening the racial and political divide leads to alarm over possible violence. USA Today recently reported that more than one-third of Republicans who have a favorable view of Trump “say political violence is acceptable.”
According to a new Deseret News-HarrisX poll, 77 percent of U.S. voters say they are “very” or “somewhat” concerned about political violence before Election Day, including 80 percent of Republicans and 82 percent of Democrats.
“We are seeing an unprecedented and extremely disturbing level of threats of violence and violence against public officials,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said last week in a speech.
The 48 percent backing Trump try to move away from his racism by talking about the need for a better economy. But Trump’s main economic plan is to impose tariffs that will drive up prices. He has no plan to improve health care or provide more affordable housing.
It was less than 30 years ago when Bob Dole, the 1996 Republican presidential nominee, stared down racism in the GOP. “If there’s anyone who has mistakenly attached themselves to our party in the belief that we are not open to citizens of every race and religion…,” Dole said at the 1996 convention, “the exits, which are clearly marked, are for you to walk out of as I stand this ground without compromise.”
Where are those Republicans now?
Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.
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