Van Jones, the ex-Obama official who, while chuckling, once said he was basically “a communist,” has stated that he was “shaking” listening to GOP candidate Vivek Ramaswamy during Wednesday’s Republican primary debate. What disturbed the former “green czar” so? Did Ramaswamy, a wealthy entrepreneur, throw shade on Karl Marx?
Actually, the candidate talked about Democratic policy — a policy that has two different names.
When critics warn about it, Democrats call it a fringe idea dubbed “Great Replacement theory.”
When Democrats kvell about it, they call it “immigration policy” — when they call it anything at all.
At issue is our immigration regime (as well as illegal migration), which has ensured that 85 to 90 percent of our post-1967 immigrants would come from the Third World, and which has caused America’s European-descent population to shrink from being close to 90 percent of the country 55 years ago to barely 60 percent today.
Some believe this is avoidable and, since the immigration pattern is continuing, that there must be some human agency behind it. Others, apparently, believe this immigration is just inevitable, akin to a force of nature or act of God, like the tides, the rising and setting sun, or a lightning strike. Jones is seemingly in the latter camp.
For the record, the video and transcription of Ramaswamy’s remarks about the Great Replacement Fact are below.
So while we don’t know if Jones’s reaction was more genuine than Bill Clinton’s tears at Ron Brown’s funeral (there’s a trip down Bad Memory Lane for you), that was what evoked it. And here’s what the Shaker said on CNN, immediately following Wednesday’s debate:
That guy [Ramaswamy] is dangerous. That’s dangerous, when those people were saying Jews will not replace us, Jews will not replace us.
That slogan sits on top of a very sick and twisted view, that if you bring enough people of color here, we are so deficient, we are so stupid, we are so unwanted that we will be zombies to fill out the ranks for some Democratic Party agenda that Jewish people are manipulating and driving forward.
That leads to violence. That puts at risk Jewish people. That puts at risk people of color. It is wrong. And the smug, condescending way that he just spews this poison out is very, very dangerous because he won’t stop Trump, but he’s going to outlive Trump by about 50 years. And you’re watching the rise of an American demagogue that is a very, very despicable person.
I was shaking listening to him talk because a lot of people don’t know that is one step away from Nazi propaganda coming out of his mouth.
Wow, it could just make one wonder when the Left will discover that Indians are technically Caucasian and then accuse Ramaswamy of being an off-white supremacist. Anyway, a video of some of Jones’s remarks, preceded by Ramaswamy’s reaction to them, is below.
One could be puzzled, though, at why this is is even a controversy. After all, Democrats themselves have spoken of the Great Replacement Plan.
Just consider our “paper of record,” the Gray Lady. The great replacement is a “Fringe Conspiracy Theory … Refashioned by the G.O.P.,” read a 2022 New York Times headline atop an article that blamed commentator Tucker Carlson for promoting the idea. This is interesting because the paper itself ran the 2018 headline, “We Can Replace Them.”
In the latter article, which deals with Democrat Stacey Abrams’ 2018 Georgia gubernatorial run, Times writer Michelle Goldberg concludes with, “In a week, American voters can do to white nationalists what they fear most. Show them they’re being replaced.”
But since “white nationalists” constitute a fringe and are not actually in power, just what “replacement” was Goldberg referencing?
But she’s not alone. As Tucker Carlson put it last year, Democrats have said repeatedly that there’s a “political component” to their immigration policy. “They’ve written books on it and monographs and magazine articles,” he continued. “They have bragged about it endlessly. They talk about it on cable news constantly and they say out loud, ‘We are doing this because it helps us to win elections.’”
Carlson then provided numerous examples, such as:
JULIAN CASTRO [when San Antonio mayor in 2008]: “In a couple of presidential cycles, you’ll be on election night, you’ll be announcing that we’re calling the 38 electoral votes of Texas for the Democratic nominee for president. It’s changing. It’s going to become a purple state and then a blue state because of the demographics.”
[Illinois senator] DICK DURBIN: “The demographics of America are not on the side of the Republican Party. The new voters in this country are moving away from them, and instead they’re moving to be independents or even vote on the other side.”
BIDEN: “An unrelenting stream of immigration, nonstop, nonstop. Folks like me, who are Caucasian of European descent for the first time in 2017 will be in an absolute minority in the United States of America, absolute minority. Fewer than 50% of the people in America from then on will be White European stock. That’s not a bad thing. That’s a source of our strength.”
(Note: Biden was wrong about the 2017 projection, perhaps confusing white people in general with white children.)
Here is the Biden video:
Then there was Barack Obama saying in 2015 that he was “optimistic” conservatism would be extinguished “because this country just becomes more and more of a hodgepodge of folks.”
So the Democrats are playing a claim-then-blame game. This was epitomized beautifully on X (tweet below), too, by someone responding to the controversy.
Note that the first tweeter, a man identifying as an ex-Democrat who worked in the Obama campaign, wrote that we “discussed diluting the white vote openly. It wasn’t even something we concealed…. It wasn’t a big deal at all.”
“Then in 2016, it became a good issue for Republicans to exploit so it became a ‘racist conspiracy theory,’” he later added. “It was wild to witness.”
But, hey, just remember, if you believe in the “Great Replacement,” remove that tinfoil hat from your chicken-fried head and plant that noggin firmly in the ground.