The actual reasons behind the MAGA ‘replacement theory’
The ‘replacement theory’ that motivated the lethal 2017 Charleston ‘Unite the Right’ march is largely factual. Its causes have nothing to do with those that espoused by the MAGA party. It has been almost two decades since the little 2005 book, On Bullshit, by highly respected Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt, became an unlikely best seller. It established the critical distinction between telling lies, telling the truth, or spouting bullshshit, in that the bullshitter is not necessarily lying, but is presenting facts in a way intended to mislead and control. By examining the dichotomy between the actual reasons behind ‘replacement’ of the less educated young white males of the Charleston riots and the racist misogynistic fears of the MAGA mentality. We realize that the bullshit is not about replacement, which in one sense is actually happening but the reasons why and its causes. Its not caused by illegal aliens stealing jobs, nor is it caused by declining male testosterone, or the lack of strong man government or the host of other far-right alleged reasons. Imposing a MAGA/alt. Right ‘solution’ for ‘replacement’ will not turn out well for woman’s rights or the economy
Culture, Education, Economics and the Pill
The simple fact is that as anthropologist Alice Evans puts it, “Over the past 50 years, new technology and cultural narratives have worked in concert to fuel women’s success. With contraceptives enhancing control and media raising ambitions, teenage pregnancy plummeted.” She makes the point that with control of their fertility, young women could invest in their education, making them more competitive in filling the need for more educated workers. But the same factors that led to the creation of new jobs worked against the less educated manual workers, as sophisticated manufacturing and advanced robotics took over. Manufacturing employment peaked in 1979 at 19.5 million and declined 35% to 12.8 million by 2017. This level of decline is not new. It mirrors the impact of technology and agribusiness on the farm workforce. In 1930, 41% of the US workforce worked on farms; in 1970, 4%; in 2000, 1%. The less educated end of the labor force bore the brunt of these changes.
B.S. Solutions that create fear and division will make things much worse
Trump claims deporting all illegals is will revitalize the job market for less-educated workers in manufacturing while lowering food prices. Bullshit. A quick review of USDA stats shows that approximately half the farm workers in the U.S. are undocumented. So even if considerable labor can be found, an acute labor shortage threatening farmers ability to tend and harvest their crops. A Kansas State University report shows how expensive it can be to screw up immigration policy, while not fixing the farm-labor market can be. Lack of farm labor in the State resulted in over 23, 843 unfulfilled positions, causing Kansas an estimated $11.7 billion in additional output across the state between 2000 and 2023. Examination of the agriculture business also exposes Trump’s flawed tariffs: the Council on Foreign Relations documents that the government had to pay out 93% of the $66 billion in taxes to protect the farmers who lost billions when China shot back against Trumps tariff war and hit US farm exports,
No Plan, No chance of success so who to blame next?
Trump does not have even a concept of a post-election plan to level up job opportunities, but is focused on preparing some form of January 6-style insurrection, holding rallies designed to foment violence, threatening to release The Proud Boys and convicted Jan 6 rioters if elected. His lack of fact-based planning guarantees he will be unable to deliver on his promise on Make America Great Again. He will blame on not going far enough in suppressing “the enemy within.” He will resort to increasingly fascist behavior to appease his supporters, and it is hard to see how he will fail to attempt further removal of rights that empower women. He is proud of his role in destroying Roe vs. Wade. Access to contraceptives will be next. The case: Griswold vs. Connecticut, which established rights for access to contraceptives, the basis for several key court decisions on women’s health and the entire underlying basis for right to privacy. Both Justice Thomas and Alito are Catholic, and have signaled skepticism of a constitutional right to privacy.
Just Like Germany in the ’30s
Fascist leaders are often obsessed with, among other things, declining masculinity, shrinking family size, and loss of numbers amongst their chosen population. In a 1937 speech blaming declining population on homosexuality, Heinrich Himmler, (who had abandoned Catholicism for the occult) stated: “A people of good race which has too few children has a one-way ticket to the grave.” He also started the program that would become the Holocaust, along with eugenics program leading to the sterilization of over 400,000 Germans deemed genetically undesirable, He also instituted the Lebensborn program designed to take care of women impregnated by SS troops and the kidnapping of suitably ‘Aryan’ children for adoption by suitable German Families. Himmler was an avid follower of occultism, dating from the Hapsburg area with notions of popular nationalism plus advocacy for Aryan racism and German world rule. In her study of the Proud Boys, Professor Margo Kitts of Hawaii PacificUniversity describes how these points have much in common with other white-supremacist groups, including a yearning for some kind of lost golden age, lionizing a supposedly heroic leader (Trump?) along with revulsion for the dilution of culture and race that inevitably accompanies globalization.
These groups also seem to have an almost homoerotic fantasy, based on maintaining bodily purity to preserve masculinity and increase family size, if those families are of ‘approved’ ethnicity. This thread runs to Nazi heath programs through JD Vance’s 2021 Ohio Senate campaign, through the Proud Boys ‘rules’ on masturbation, as cited by Professor Kitts, down to Tucker Carlson. Declining birth rates are more subtly discussed by JD Vance in his 2021 campaign for the Ohio Senate seat, delighting the pronatalists by calling for larger working-class families, declaring, “I think we have to go to war against the anti-child ideology that exists in our country.” All too obviously inspired by German propaganda art and films of the ’30s, Carlson’s documentary, The End of Men, attributes society’s decline to reduced testosterone in American males. He ‘explains’ this while touting a health ‘professional’ who is an expert on ‘brotherapy.’
You really expect us to believe you are not a Nazi?
Anybody who thinks that MAGA and the far-right is not selling a return to the worst of ’30s attempts to increase the population of pure ‘Aryans,’ and control women, obviously has not read this article, The Pronatalists of Silicon Valley, from the Heritage Foundation. It lists a veritable ‘Who’s Who’ of wealthy techbros funding startups that gather masses of intimate, personal, private, individual information on women’s fertility cycles, all potentially of great value to people like the Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. He is taking aim at Federal privacy regulations in an attempt to find and prosecute women who had left the state to obtain abortions.
How much do we trust Silicon Valley’s elites to not monetize this data? To protect the security of this most personal data? So much of Silicon Valley’s ‘fake it till you make it’ philosophy falls under Professor Frankfurt’s concern of bullshit’s threat to values of basic civilization, that some educated people can develop an arrogant disrespect for the truth. He also rightly points out that the goal of marketing everything, from products to politicians and policy, depends not on telling the truth, but persuading people to buy the B.S.
We must never give up the fight against the forces that divide us. Winston Churchill ends this essay with his essential words: “But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”