I don’t have to go over the bad news from home to Haiti to Afghanistan to a tropical storm headed towards Florida a state drowning in Covid as it is. It is all over the front page in the online New York Times.
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There is one item of good news there coming from columnist Charles M.Blow. He explains in his column why “it was a terrifying census for white nationalists.” The census is over, it’s done, signed, sealed and delivered as it were. There can be no further attempts to sabotage its results as Trump did. All that remains for the Right is to try to make the best of the results, and of course they will try.
Excerpt from Blow’s column:
Much of what we have seen in recent years — the rise of Donald Trump, xenophobia and racist efforts to enshrine or at least extend white power by packing the courts and suppressing minority votes — has been rooted in a fear of political, cultural and economic displacement.
The white power acolytes saw this train approaching from a distance — the browning of America, the shrinking of the white population and the explosion of the nonwhite — and they did everything they could to head it off.
They tried to clamp down on immigration, both unlawful and lawful. They waged a propaganda war against abortion, and they lobbied for “traditional family values” in the hopes of persuading more white women to have more babies. They orchestrated a system of mass incarceration that siphoned millions of young, marriage-age men, disproportionately Black and Hispanic, out of the free population.
On every level, in every way, these forces, whether wittingly or not, worked to prevent the nonwhite population from growing. And yet it did.
Despite all their efforts to keep the non-white population from growing, it did. For the first time in census history the white population declined.
Blow writes that “we are now seeing a shocking, blatant attempt at voter suppression across the country. I believe that this is just the start of something, not the end — that efforts to disenfranchise minority voters will grow only more brazen as the white power movement becomes more desperate.” Makes sense, the Republicans are selectively not stupid.
- Not stupid: They know that voter suppression is the only major tool they have to maintain power to offset the change in population demographics for favor likely Democratic voters.
- Stupid: their vaccination and mask positions will eventually fail as more and more Republicans succumb to a virus that has no political affiliation.
Pew Research describes the reverse migration of non-whites to the South and also the Southwest where Hispanics account for more and more of the voting-age population in key swing states.
Blow concludes that “the passage of power is not a polite and gentle affair like passing the salt at a dinner table. People with power fight — sometimes to the end — to maintain it. There’s going to be a shift, but not without strife.”
I don’t know if Blow deliberately meant “passing the salt” to be a metaphor for white nationalism, but whether he did so consciously or not did these bigoted dinner gatherings will have more and more pepper on their tables.
