He’s done it again…
The flitting brain cell of Wisconsin’s so-called Senator continues to leap with glee from one steaming pile of ideological offal to another...like some disease-bearing fly. The freshly excreted pile du jour is White Replacement “Theory.”
Yup. Johnson has landed on a pile of White Extinction Anxiety. He is wallowing in it, up to all six of his spindly little knees. Johnson is rubbing his head, thorax and abdomen in it. He is baptized, sanctified, and here to testify! “Tell it, Brother Ron!”
(Pause for sustained audience laughter.)
To borrow a line from comedian Steve Martin, “How can he be so f**king funny?”
We know this: for ten years, Johnson has spewed bat-shit crazy “splanations” from his unmonitored maw.
They range from the “cause” of climate change (Duhhh! Sunspots! Stupid Libs!) to the best way to spread Ebola virus in the US. Yeah. The proof gurgles out of his media appearances and his congressional record: consistent incoherence so abundant it’s a trip hazard. Senator Sockpuppet is just a natural. The connection between one of his oral eruptions and a current event he thinks he’s talking about will invariably range from byzantine to bizarre to nonexistent. That’s how he can be so f**king funny.
Johnson latches on to big-idea memes, concocted (and sometimes exhumed and reanimated) by right-wing focus groups. He also loves him some apocalyptic conspiracy theories, the bigger in scope the better. But these big ideas are really big conceits- cavernous, content-free...they're sound and fury, signifying nothing- and they're cherished by right-wing neurotics and paranoiacs. The last big idea he buried his head in was Election Fraud. Turned out to be froth. He couldn’t produce a single molecule of evidence for that flop. His latest big and empty “theory” is a retread that ropes in an elite Republican bloc: white supremacists. Hell, gotta throw them a bone once in a while...
Last Thursday, Senator Conspiracy-Theory-is-My-Name appeared on (Oxymoron Alert!) ‘Fox Business News’ to flatulate the latest GQP doomsday scenario: “Them Demcrats is fixin’ ta replace us with brown-skinned for’ners!”
(Pause for sustained audience laughter.)
Sidebar to Ron: Sane Wisconsinites are fixin’ ta replace you with an actual Senator, and to cut the strings of those personality-disordered puppeteers who set you dancing and make your jaw flap. The best thing you can do about it right now is to keep spouting stupid as fast as you can…
LARRY KUDLOW (HOST): Let me ask you one last question here in our waning moments, and appreciate your time as always, where is Vice President Kamala Harris on this? I thought she was in charge of the immigration problem or immigration crisis? Is she going down to the border? Or is she going to do anything? Or what is happening, is there a task force, what? Anything?
SEN. RON JOHNSON (R-WI): No, she's AWOL. And of course she was on my committee. And we held something like 30 hearings on border insecurity and, you know, problems with human trafficking. So she should be fully aware of this. She is fully aware of this, and yet this administration wants complete open borders. And you have to ask yourself why? Is it really they want to remake the demographics of America to insure their -- that they stay in power forever? Is that what's happening here? Because the human depredation that's being caused by their policies, just they're just untold. It's unconscionable, but she is completely AWOL on this.1
Sidebar to Kudlow: That’s a pretty scatterbrained Question-Bomb. Ever think of writing your questions down, or using a Teleprompter? Maybe consider...preparing? Thinking? And why aren’t you asking Vice President Kamala Harris? Do you lack credibility in that much larger citizen-set known as Americans-who-are-not-Fascist-Tools, so Harris won’t return your calls or take you or your network seriously? Ah, of course...your boss at Fox ordered you to advance a Looney-Tune white supremacist “theory,” so instead of talking to legitimate authorities you type ‘Flaming-Idiot Republican Senators’ into Google, and “Whooosh!”, Ron Johnson pops up like a whack-a-mole!
Hunting for the most incoherent, nut-job explanation to be had, were you? Rhetorical question, pinhead.
Harris was a member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee during the 116th Congress, when Ron Johnson chaired that Committee. She and fellow Democratic members developed very strong eye muscles from all the eye-rolling they did while having to listen to Johnson’s conspiracy theories and incoherent nonsense. So she is fully aware that anything she tells Johnson will enter his auditory grinders, get the spin-cycle/tumble dry treatment in his cranial drum, and be regurgitated in shreds, wrinkled and two sizes smaller. You can bet she would never depend on him to relay anything she said about immigration!
And get serious Kudlow. What do you expect Harris to do at the border? The problem centers around Republican cowardice about tackling immigration reform, and those cowards (“Cough-ron johnson-Cough!”) are cowering in Congress, not anywhere near the border. Stuuuupid question, Kudlow.
You held 30 hearings, Johnson? And the actionable conclusions, the enacted reforms, were…?
...Yeah, the nation is still waiting...So, under ‘Immigration Reform’ Johnson, Trump, his Ship of Fools and Sociopaths, and the GQP, all earn a collective FAIL...
Johnson frequently projects Republican failings and incompetence onto Democrats. And he does so using his trademark leaps in logic, mangled syntax, and non sequiturs. His “performances” leave informed listeners baffled. “What could he mean? Did I nod off and miss the point?” Nope. There was no point. Johnson’s expectorations are case studies in non-meaning, pure word-salad. From the extended quote above:
“Because the human depredation that's being caused by their policies, just they're just (sic) untold. It's unconscionable, but she is completely AWOL on this.”
“...their policies...” Johnson's “thinking” can be summarized as “Lies and Leaps.” Ron, read this:
10/30/2020-...new data shows that over the last four years (the Trump Administration), detention times lengthened as the number of children held at the border soared to almost half a million. The detentions, which included both unaccompanied children and children with their families, peaked last year at over 300,000, with 40 percent held longer than the 72-hour limit set by a patchwork of legislation and a court settlement.
“The government regularly violated the 72-hour rule,” said Dr. Bill O. Hing, a University of San Francisco law professor and immigration lawyer who was part of an inspection group touring border stations in the summer of 2019 at the height of the crisis. Hing said he witnessed minors being held for increasingly long hours in unsafe facilities designed to hold adults, not children and babies.
“72 hours in a cage with concrete floors and freezing temperatures and terrible conditions is 72 hours too many for — honestly in my view, for anyone,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Washington and vice-chair of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration and Citizenship. “But particularly for children, regardless of if they’re with they’re families or unaccompanied.”2
Context, Ron, context. Which administration aggravated and enlarged this “depredation” you‘re blathering about, via their sadistic policies? Ah, I know. And so do you.
A series of policy shifts by the Trump administration have made these obligations harder to meet. In early 2018, the federal government increased vetting requirements for potential sponsors, and required more information sharing about sponsors with ICE. As a result, it took longer and longer to place unaccompanied children with appropriate sponsors, and to find sponsors- some of whom might be undocumented themselves- willing to risk coming forward to claim them. For children who arrived with a parent, a crackdown on who qualifies for asylum on the basis of credible fear of domestic violence, gangs and other threats led to high rates of denial, leaving these children stuck in ICE family detention centers with their parents.
Along with a host of other immigration policies- including child separation and restrictions on immigration judges’ authority to handle caseloads- these steps have had a cascading effect, clogging up nearly every part of the immigration system.ibid
Say, Ron, could you have done something about it, given your status as a US Senator? What if you, I dunno, held, say, thirty hearings? Could'ja have gotten something done? Anything!?!?
“The back-ups at CBP (Customs and Border Protection) in2019 should have been preventable,” said Mark Greenberg, a former Acting Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services, where he oversaw the office that provides care for unaccompanied minors at the border. “The surge didn’t happen overnight, and there were clear warning signs about the need to take action earlier to prevent it.”ibid
Here’s what context looks like: “Ron Johnson’s brain cell has been AWOL for over a decade.”
Put him and Harris in front of a panel or committee on immigration, put tough questions to them about the scope of the immigration/border problems, trafficking, smuggling, sadistic and sociopathic ICE agents, you name it, and ask for viable, sustainable solutions, and Harris will wipe the floor with Johnson. He just doesn’t have the mental capacity to comprehend such problems, and he refuses to do his homework, much less cite credible sources, before puckering his pie hole and puking his stupidities.
This pustule doesn’t hesitate to eject absolute lies in defense of his idiocies. He said, “...this administration wants complete open borders.” That is a lie.
And after that lie he resorted to one of his signature weasel-moves: he asked leading questions. Lazy move. He did it because he had no facts to present, had done no research, had no solutions, hell, had no ideas, but then, he doesn’t want low-interest, low-information Fox listeners to understand the problem, to read widely about it, and to form rational, data-supported opinions. He doesn’t defer to actual experts or original sources. No, he wants to lead low-interest, low-information viewers, once again, down a rabbit hole to his latest wacky, and I mean wacky, conspiracy theory!
The following, also excerpted from the longer quote above, is a jumble of projection, racism and xenophobia. In low-information right-wing minds, it “makes sense”:
Is it really they (sic) want to remake the demographics of America to insure their -- that they stay in power forever? Is that what's happening here?
Is it really the case that you want an honest answer, Ron? Is that what’s happening here? “No” and “No” are the correct answers. Actual journalists ask, “Where is the evidence?” Ron Johnson sputters and spins...and then accuses them of bias! Hah!
Want a reality-based look at how Republicans themselves are currently striving to “stay in power forever” ? Examine their ludicrous gerrymandering of Congressional Districts and peruse the voter suppression laws introduced into forty seven state legislatures.3 The shape of ‘Gym’ (“Look-the-Other-Way”) Jordan's Congressional District looks like the path you'd get if you fed LSD to a rat and set him loose in a maze.4
Ever the weasel, Senator I-am-not-an-unwitting-white-supremacist has been ordered by his handlers to dog whistle the dicey topic of White Replacement “theory” at the GQP's base, without actually calling it by name. He is, of course, also forbidden to identify the sources of this laughable conceit.
The Anti-Defamation League calls it the “Great Replacement Theory”, and defines it as "the hateful notion that the white race is in danger of being 'replaced' by a rising tide of non-whites."5
Pennsylvania GOP Rep. Scott Perry made similar comments on Wednesday during a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on immigration.
“For many Americans, what seems to be happening or what they believe right now is happening is, what appears to them is that we’re replacing national-born Americans, native-born Americans to permanently transform the landscape of this very nation.”ibid
Perry has been instructed to be as weaselly in his word use as Johnson is, using “...what seems to be happening or what they believe right now is happening...”, i.e., letting implanted impression/supposed “anecdotes”/made-up shit, take the place of fact, evidence, statistics. Keep it groundless and conspiratorial, Scott. Actual journalists shout, “Show us the evidence!” and Perry sputters and spins...and then he, too, like Johnson, accuses them of bias!
The deeper you look into White Replacement “Theory,” the more empty space you find. It is stunningly shallow. It requires adherents to be incurious, exclusive, and intolerant, to a stupefying degree, about concepts of race, racial identity, culture, ethnicity...and to advance gargle-brained conceits like “racial purity,” “genocide by substitution,” and to ask, seriously, “Are the white nations dying out?”
(Pause for sustained audience laughter.)
At least a century ago, white racists and white supremacists concocted a prophesy: “The extinction of the white race is imminent!” It proved an effective way to mask and invert their infantile fears about strangers. If their anxiety-ridden brains could speak without any filters, it would sound like, “I’m uncomfortable about having “their kind” around, I just am, I don’t know why, and it’s their fault!”
Tell us, white supremacists, about these fears of “White Replacement.” Where did they come from? Were you born with them? Or did you selflessly agree to adopt them and raise them as your own?
And tell us, oh pinheaded Scott Perry, and you, Ron Johnson, his pinheaded twin, hasn’t a version of your dreaded “replacement” already taken place on this continent? Why, yeeeessss it did. Native-born Americans were replaced by unwelcome immigrants, who by and large came from Europe. And get this: some of those Europeans kidnapped Africans and forcibly transported them to this continent! Bet if you’d been living in those centuries you two would’ve done all you could to stop that Great Replacement from “transform(ing) the landscape of this very nation.”
If ever the nation needed a sign of just how collectively infantile the Republican mindset can be is, White Replacement Theory is that sign. This minority party, and the minority of Americans who swear allegiance to it, now scramble for some traction in a nation disgusted by their open, savage racism. Sooooo...of all the choices before them, all of the possible prosocial ways in which they could improve their own lot, all of the ways in which they could establish legitimacy, they chose...none of them.
The “leaders” of the Republican Party could have tossed out their grab bag of fear-inducing memes, these crafted and deployed to rouse the base whenever the party leaders want to make another assault on Democracy, plurality, diversity, equity, equality, women, minorities...the list of their “outgroups” is long. A move like that would have gained the party some voters. They could have even gained voters by resorting to such alien tactics serving constituents and securing broadly-shared prosperity…
But no. They didn’t.
Instead they latched onto...of all things...a Great White Hope gambit: White Replacement “Theory.” And their point guards for the attack? Established idiot-puppets like Scott Perry and Ron Johnson.
Johnson’s “Race-planation” has proven very insightful...but not in they way his addled brain cell intended it to be. He has shown that the personality-disordered monsters who make up his party, both the leaders and the followers, will stoop to the lowest, most vile and scurrilous means, and tell the greatest lies and spin themselves dizzy, in their manic quest for power and control. They've done so since Nixon.
Entitlement. They ooze it.
Sane, informed and moral Americans, to secure the blessings of liberty, need to “Replace” these Fascists, and exclude their Party to its rightful extinction.
Further Reading
www.msnbc.com/…
www.rawstory.com/…
Bibliography
1. www.mediamatters.org/…
2. www.themarshallproject.org/...
3. www.nbcnews.com/...
4. en.wikipedia.org/...'s%204th%20congressional%20district%20spans,being%20similar%20to%20a%20duck.
5. americanindependent.com/…