(The Conversation) – Thousands of people were evacuated along Maui’s popular west coast on Aug. 8 and 9, 2023, as wildfires spread through buildings and hillsides, whipped by strong winds from Hurricane Dora. Much of Lahaina, Hawaii, a tourist town of about 13,000 residents that was once the royal capital, burned, and at least six people died, Maui Mayor Richard Bissen told reporters.

Most fires in the U.S. are suppressed before they have a chance to threaten communities, but the winds were too strong to send helicopters into the sky to help contain Maui’s fires on the first day, leaving firefighters to battle the blazes from the ground. The U.S. Coast Guard rescued several people from waters off Lahaina who were trying to escape the smoke and flames.

With more fires burning on the Big Island of Hawaii, Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke issued an emergency declaration, activating the National Guard to help.

Fires have become an increasing risk in many areas of the U.S. that people once considered safe.

Over the past two decades, a staggering 21.8 million Americans found themselves living within 3 miles (5 kilometers) of a large wildfire. Nearly 600,000 of them were directly exposed to the fire, with their homes inside the wildfire perimeter. That number – people directly exposed to wildfires – more than doubled from 2000 to 2019, my team’s recent research shows.

But while commentators often blame the rising risk on homebuilders pushing deeper into the wildland areas, we found that the population growth in these high-risk areas explained only a small part of the increase in the number of people who were exposed to wildfires.

Instead, three-quarters of this trend was driven by intense fires growing out of control and encroaching on existing communities.

That knowledge has implications for how communities prepare to fight wildfires in the future, how they respond to population growth and whether policy changes such as increasing insurance premiums to reduce losses will be effective.

What climate change has to do with wildfires

Hot, dry weather pulls moisture from plants and soil, leaving dry fuel that can easily burn. On a windy day, a spark from a power line, campfire or lightning can start a wildfire that quickly spreads.

Recent research on California’s fires found that almost all of the increase in that state’s burned area in recent decades was due to anthropogenic climate change – meaning climate change caused by human activities.

Our new research looked beyond just the area burned and asked: Where were people exposed to wildfires, and why?

Where wildfire exposure was highest

I am a climate scientist who studies the wildfire-climate relationship and its socioenvironmental impacts. Colleagues and I analyzed the boundaries of more than 15,000 large wildfires across the lower 48 states and annual population distribution data to estimate the number of people exposed to those fires.

If you picture wildfire photos taken from a plane, fires generally burn in patches rather than as a wall of flame. Pockets of homes within the fire boundary survive, but many also burn.

While the population has grown in the wildland-urban interface – the region where houses intermingle with forests, shrublands or grasslands – we found that population growth accounted for only about one-quarter of the increase in the number of humans directly exposed to wildfires across the lower 48 states from 2000 to 2019.

Three-quarters of the 125% increase in exposure was due to fires increasingly encroaching on existing communities. The total burned area increased only 38%, but the locations of intense fires near towns and cities put lives at risk.

In California, the state with the most people exposed to fires, several wildfire catastrophes hit communities that had existed long before 2000. Almost all these catastrophes occurred during dry, hot, windy conditions that have become increasingly frequent because of climate change.

What communities can do to lower the risk

Studies have shown that even in conservative scenarios, the amount of area that burns in Western wildfires is projected to grow in the next few decades.

How much these fires grow and how intense they become depends largely on warming trends. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions will help slow warming. But communities will also have to adapt to more wildfires. Developing community-level wildfire response plans, reducing human ignitions of wildfires and improving zoning and building codes can help prevent fires from becoming destructive.

This article was updated Aug. 9, 2023, with six deaths reported. This is an update to an article originally published July 3, 2023.

Mojtaba Sadegh, Associate Professor of Civil Engineering, Boise State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Community members warned lawmakers that the bill was discriminatory

Chinese citizens who live and work in Florida have filed a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of a law recently signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis restricting any “foreign principal” from China or six other “countries of concern” from purchasing property in the state.

The suit contends that the law, set to go into effect on July 1, will codify and expand housing discrimination against people of Asian descent in violation of the U.S. Constitution and Fair Housing Act.

The federal lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court, Northern District of Florida, Tallahassee division.

The ACLU of Florida and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund filed the lawsuit in coordination with the Chinese American Legal Defense Alliance on behalf of four citizens of the People’s Republic of China who lawfully reside in Florida, as well as Multi-Choice Realty, a real estate brokerage that primarily serves Chinese and Chinese American clients.

The complaint lists Florida Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson, acting Florida Secretary of the Department of Economic Opportunity Meredith Ivey, and Florida Real Estate Commission Chair Patricia Fitzgerald as defendants. Their agencies are charged with enforcing the law.

The legislation (SB 264) restricts ownership of real estate by Chinese buyers and individuals from the other countries of interest within 10 miles of a military installation or critical infrastructure, with some exceptions.

Foreign principals who already own property within those zones must register with the Florida departments of Agriculture and Consumer Services and Economic Opportunity. Failure to file a “timely registration” is subject to a civil penalty of $1,000 for each day the registration is late and may result in a lien being placed on the property for unpaid penalties.

The House language was co-sponsored by Miami Republican David Borrero and Palm Beach County Democrat Katherine Waldron and received bipartisan support in both chambers. In the House, nearly half of the Democratic Caucus joined all of the Republicans in supporting the measure.

But the bill was severely criticized by Chinese Americans throughout the state, including dozens who testified in person against the bill during one committee meeting, with many of them expressing concern about being discriminated against when purchasing real estate. Some warned it would lead to hate crimes.

“All Asian Americans will feel the stigma and the chilling effect created by this Florida law, just like the discriminatory laws did to our ancestors more than a hundred years ago,” said Clay Zhu, an attorney with DeHeng Law Offices P.C., in a written statement. “We shall not go back.”

Article continues after bonus IC video
The Young Turks: “DeSantis Signs Law Blocking Foreign Nationals From Buying Property”

Similar bills have been debated in state legislatures around the country as tensions between the Chinese and U.S. governments have escalated in recent years, but Florida is the first state to pass such a measure. Waldon told the House State Affairs Committee last month that the measure was meant to be “proactive and not reactive.” She referred to recent events including the U.S. Department of Justice’s arrest of two Americans for operating a secret Chinese police station in New York City.

“Florida is taking action to stand against the United States’ greatest geopolitical threat — the Chinese Communist Party,” DeSantis said in a press release after he signed the bill earlier this month.

“I’m proud to sign this legislation to stop the purchase of our farmland and land near our military bases and critical infrastructure by Chinese agents,” he continued, adding that “we are following through on our commitment to crack down on Communist China.”

Ethnic discrimination alleged

Although the law specifies that such land cannot be purchased by foreign principals from China or Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, or Syria, the lawsuit claims that the law defines those areas are so broadly “that they bar affected individuals from being able to purchase property across much of the state.”

“The central feature of the new law is that it broadly prohibits Chinese persons from purchasing or acquiring any real property, or interests in real property, within Florida based on their race, ethnicity, color, alienage, and national,” the suit says. [Emphasis in original.]

The suit lists the specific circumstances of the four plaintiffs. None are citizens or permanent residents of the United States or members of the Chinese government or the Chinese Communist Party, it says.

• Yifan Shen holds a H-1B visa for nonimmigrant workers. She has lived in Florida for four years. She has signed a contract to buy a single-family home in Orlando which “appear to be located within 10 miles of a critical infrastructure facility and within five miles of a military installation.” She is set to close on the home in December, after the law’s effective date. The suit says she stands to lose all or part of her $25,000 deposit if forced to cancel her real estate contract.
• Xhiming Xu was persecuted by the Chinese government and fled to the United States. He has lived in Florida for four years. In early 2023, he signed a contract to buy a single-family home near Orlando that “appears to be located within 10 miles of a critical infrastructure facility.” The closing date is some time after July. The suit says he stands to lose all or part of his $31,250 deposit.
• Xinxi Wang holds an F-1 visa, a nonimmigrant document for international students and has lived in Florida for five years. She own a property in Miami which “appears” to be located within 10 miles of a critical infrastructure facility. She is subject to the law’s registration requirement, which the suit claims is “burdensome, discriminatory, and stigmatizing to Ms. Wang.”
• Yongxin Liu holds an HB-1 visa and has lived in Florida for four years. He is an assistant professor at a Florida university and own a property close to Daytona Beach. Because his property “appears” to be located within 10 miles of a critical infrastructure facility, the registration requirement is “burdensome, discriminatory, and stigmatizing to Mr. Liu.”
• The suit says that Liu plans to purchase a second home in Pelican Bay near a critical infrastructure facility. “Mr. Liu reasonably fears that real estate agents will refuse to represent him because he is Chinese, and that his search for real estate will be more costly, time-consuming, and burdensome as a result.”

The suit asserts that Multi-Choice Reality, a real estate brokerage that primarily serves Chinese-speaking clients in the United States and China, was involved in 74 property acquisitions in 2022, most of which for Chinese or Chinese American clients. The firm says the new law will force it to lose one-third of its business.

A spokesperson for Agriculture Commissioner Simpson said the department is “currently reviewing the lawsuit.”

The Department of Economic Opportunity did not respond to a request for comment, while the Phoenix could not reach the Real Estate Commission for comment.

Mitch Perry

Mitch Perry has covered politics and government in Florida for more than two decades. Most recently he is the former politics reporter for Bay News 9. He has also worked at Florida Politics, Creative Loafing and WMNF Radio in Tampa. He was also part of the original staff when the Florida Phoenix was created in 2018.

Published under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

The story revolves around a Pakistani-American 16-year-old girl from Jersey City who resents her strict and protective parents and wants to attend a comic book convention in *gasp* the evening and to wear a Captain Marvel uniform as cosplay. The hero, Kamala Khan, is played engagingly by Iman Vellani, a young Pakistani-Canadian actress. Ultimately, she sneaks off to the convention with a boy-who-is-a-friend (not a boyfriend) Bruno Carelli, played by Matt Linz (who played Henry in AMC’s The Walking Dead). Her grandmother had left a bracelet, and Kamala adds it to her Captain Marvel ensemble in hopes of winning a contest for best costume at the convention. It turns out that the bracelet is sort of like Aladdin’s lamp, bestowing superpowers of extension on her. She uses those powers at the convention but inadvertently causes some mayhem. She returns home to find her mother in her room waiting for her, aware that she had sneaked out. She is grounded.

At one point in the first episode, when she despairs of being allowed to go to the convention, she says, “Anyway, it is not as if the brown girls are the ones who save the world.”

Obviously, the point of the series is to disprove this defeatist point of view.

The television series is written by Pakistani-British comedian Bisha K. Ali, and Adil El Arbi, Bilall Fallah, Meera Menon, and Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy direct.

The streaming show is based on the award-winning Ms. Marvel comic books and graphic novels, which were begun by Sana Amanat and G. Willow Wilson, both Muslims, with art by Adrian Alphona.

Sana Amanat is a Pakistani-American raised in Jersey City, so there is a lot of her in Kamala. She had a career in magazine publishing, and then was hired in 2009 by Marvel Comics in a quest to make the company more diverse. She is now Director of Content and Character Development at Marvel, and has worked on other characters, such as Hawkeye, as well.

G. Willow Wilson is a novelist who deploys techniques of magical realism, and was the author of the first few years’ worth of Ms. Marvel comics.

Kamala Khan as played by Vellani is a sympathetic character, and she could end up helping do for Muslim Americans what the sitcom Will and Grace did for gays.

Some Muslim American commenters have worried that the depiction of Kamala’s very pious older brother and her strict parents will solidify rather than dispel some stereotypes. Me, I remember immigrant sitcoms like the Danny Thomas show in the 1950s that had some similar tropes. When Uncle Tannous visited from Lebanon, he thought Thomas’s American wife was way too skinny and wouldn’t be up to pulling a plow. Or there was Jimmy Durante, the Italian-American comedian who made fun of his own people’s syntax with phrases like “Yes, we have no bananas.” From that point of view, Ms. Marvel’s cliches stand in a long line of New World/ Old World tropes.

Some conservative Muslims have objected that Kamala Khan does not cover her hair. But I lived in Pakistan, and was interested to note that veiling is much less common in South Asia than in the Arab world. (It wasn’t so common in Egypt up to about 1990, either). So this criticism may come from differences between Muslim American traditions.

The generally positive and human depiction of Muslims is in any case a big change. We have had entire series, like Fox’s “24,” premised on Islamophobia. Muslims became stock villains. Rami Malik (a Coptic Christian of Egyptian extraction) even got a lot of cred for refusing to have his Bond villain be a Muslim in No Time to Die. This refusal is only newsworthy because the Muslim villain had become the default.

It wasn’t just dramas. I can remember being outraged some years ago when I saw a CNN report on violence by a small group of Muslim extremists somewhere, and they ran stock footage of ordinary Muslims praying in a mosque to illustrate it.

The American public has not always had a poor image of Muslims. In the Cold War era, they were often considered allies against Godless Communism. The Eisenhower administration even gave aid to Saudi Arabia to expand rail lines to Mecca to encourage Muslims to go on pilgrimage.

The September 11 attacks were carried out by a terrorist group that included secular-minded individuals such as the Lebanese hijacker Ziad Jarrah, who had a live-in Turkish girlfriend and some of whose family members were secular Baathists. Other members were a weird sort of Muslim nationalist. Al-Qaeda has never been more than a fringe extremist group in the Muslim world, akin to the KKK in the United States, and certainly does not represent Islam. Nevertheless, many Americans went on to tag Muslims in general with extremism and violence in subsequent years, very unfairly.

As I discussed for Tomdispatch this winter, even US law enforcement has been so obsessed by the small and for the most part remarkably well-behaved Muslim American community that they didn’t bother to keep sufficient watch on white supremacist groups such as the Proud Boys, enabling the Capitol insurrection.

There are something like 3.8 million Muslim Americans now, about 1.15% of the population, and their numbers are roughly half that of Jewish Americans. Muslim Americans are roughly divided into four major groups, white converts — mostly Sufis– Arab Americans, South Asian Americans, and African Americans.

By South Asia I mean Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka. There are now roughly half a million Pakistani Americans in particular, which would make them about 13% of the Muslim American population. The majority are Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi rite, but Shiites form a significant minority (20% ?) among them. Their national language is Urdu, which is related to Hindi but with more Persian and Arabic vocabulary. Pakistan itself however, is ethnically diverse, having Punjabis, Pukhtuns, Baloch, Sindhis and Urdu-speaking immigrants from India known as Muhajirs.

Despite the four broad rubrics given above, Muslim Americans are extremely diverse, hailing from Senegal and Bangladesh, Egypt and India, Algeria and Malaysia. Many have been bewildered to be put by other Americans under the sign of al-Qaeda, since it comes from a narrow religious tradition and the hothouse atmosphere of Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, and is completely different from their own traditions. It is sort of as though the KKK carried out a terrorist action in China and then Chinese started being suspicious of Methodists and Roman Catholics.

Ironically, the virulent Islamophobia of the Trump administration appears to have caused Americans to rethink their views of the minority. A 2019 Pew Research Center poll found that 89% of Americans say they would welcome a Muslim as a neighbor. 79% say they would welcome a Muslim as a family member. I suppose that means they would be all right with their son or daughter marrying one. While you have to regret the bigotted 19%, these attitudes are a huge improvement on those held even a decade ago.

On the other hand, half of Americans have doubts about whether Islam is compatible with democracy.

Myself, I have doubts about whether the contemporary Republican Party is compatible with democracy.

But those views are not mainstream. In the U.S. Congress, China-bashing is welcomed by Republicans and Democrats alike, not much different from 130 years ago. Two years before the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act a Puck columnist wrote “What possible difference can it make to John Chinaman whether Democrats or Republicans have the upper hand? Both parties are his enemies.”

<
i>Where both platforms agree–no vote–no use to either party / J.A. Wales, Puck, July 14^th, 1880. Image is from the Library of Congress and is in the public domain.

Unlike America in 1880, liberals these days pride themselves on sensitivity to racist memes. Calling black protestors criminals would be vigorously denounced; smearing all Muslims as terrorists likewise; labeling Hispanics rapists didn’t get far with liberals either, any more than Jew-baiting would, but China-bashing has a way of working its way into the most liberal habitats without detection.

Take the PBS series “Around the World in Eighty Days,” which displayed plenty of good, liberal credentials. Almost every episode was imbued with a keen sensitivity to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

In the South Asian village episode, we met with many sympathetic characters, including a beautiful pair of young lovers and an intelligent Brahmin woman who deftly countered Mr. Fogg’s colonial biases.

But when it comes to the Hong Kong episode, there are no Chinese loving couples; no intelligent men or women; no one who comes across as “human just like me.” The only Chinese person we meet is a sneaky, ruthless gangster with an obsessive obedience to something I think was supposed to be “Confucian ritual.”

In India Ms. Fix was happy to eat with her hands, but in Hong Kong she shouts in disgust (paraphrase) “Thousands of years of civilization and they haven’t learned to use knives and forks!” Of course, what White people do is always better than what dark people do, and those dark folks had better catch up.

I don’t doubt that the screen writers meant well; possibly they had been misinformed.

Elsewhere I’ve explained how the sneaky Chinese stereotype began with Enlightenment figures like Fénelon, who was in disbelief that the Chinese could have been as advanced as Europeans. Racially inferior, they couldn’t have accomplished so much unless they had cheated!

Hegel’s Philosophy of History intensified that myth, which survives today as a center piece in the Trump/Biden campaign to paint Chinese officials, enterprises, and scientists as irrevocably dishonest.

Speaking of dishonesty, that is the central theme in the recent film Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. The plot makes liberal use of China stereotypes, but likely no one will notice because the film is crammed with virtuous sentiments.

The heroine is wonderfully portrayed by Michelle Yeoh. Yeoh’s daughter in the film has a woman partner, but we soon learn that Yeoh and her father don’t approve, and verbally abuse their children to boot.

The central theme revolves around Michelle Yeoh’s attempt to cheat the IRS by claiming to own an impossibly large number of unrelated businesses so she can write off every mundane payment as a business expense.

This is the sneaky, double-dealing Chinese of the Trumpian imagination, but not everyone will see past the film’s laudable defense of personally chosen gender identities.

For those who aren’t liberal, what is likely to stick is this: here is a film made by Chinese people, and even they admit that the Chinese abuse their children and cheat on their taxes! So, what are they good for?

At a time when Asian people are being pushed in front of trains, you have to wonder how a film like that could help? Presumably the screen writers’ intentions were honest, but the result only reinforces stereotypes being pushed in Washington and across the media.

Ang Lee’s 1993 film Wedding Banquet addressed many of the same themes—gender intolerance; mendacity—but his film was suffused with warm humor and what in Chinese is called renqing, that sympathy for the human condition which comes from knowing that we all make mistakes. Like the term “liberal” in its original sense, renqing requires us to put ourselves in the other person’s shoes.

Wedding Banquet shows that life’s tragedies often are inflicted, not by inveterate villains, but by those who love us, and not because they are racially defective, but because of ignorance, misunderstanding, or misdirected kindness, all these being common features of the human condition.

In the “Everything” film, the children awaken their parents to what we are supposed to see as modern, Western virtues like tolerance and honesty (think “Trump”). In the Ang Lee film, we discover it isn’t only the children who have something to teach; it turns out the children have preconceptions too, because we’re all human.

I would like to see a film featuring Mencius’ core value, spontaneous empathy for the vulnerable. The Bourne Identity was all about that, but the heroes were all white, and in the Bourne Legacy, the one assassin who was described as completely lacking in empathy just happened to be cast as East Asian.

Ok, then how about the Confucian idea that everyone has dignity, irrespective of wealth or status? That notion was institutionalized in China a thousand years ago, and China’s histories are filled with film-worthy stories illustrating courageous defense of that principle.

Of course, the U.S. Constitution also defends that idea, imperfectly perhaps, but by 1880 even black men had acquired some rights—not the Chinese though. Astutely the Puck columnist observed that if people really want to rid the world of Chinese, we must “dispense with the luxury of tea, fans . . . and other things too numerous to particularize . . . But neither candidate for President would have the temerity to advocate the cause of these Mongolians.”

The same logic holds today, when our representatives willingly abandon reliable supply chains, control of inflation, and global stability just to inflict pain on a racial rival. Call it Racism over Reason.

Earlier this year Jack Zhang of the Kansas University Trade War Lab explained how “policy measures designed to hurt China also create collateral damage for American businesses and consumers that are linked to China by supply chains and vice versa.”

Back in 2020, China expert Kishore Mabhubani couldn’t believe how normally rational Americans could be so irrational when it comes to China. In his book Has China Won? he wrote: “Above all else, America is known to be a rational society, with many competing points of view debated all the time. Yet in Washington, DC, today, it is virtually impossible to make the case that China is not a military threat to America.”

In the Brookings panel Professor Jane Hong showed how “these legacies [of racist animosity] don’t just go away.” That is unfortunately true, which is why whenever “inferior” peoples manage to out compete the West there is always hell to pay. Remember what happened to Japan when it got too good at making automobiles?

And so, liberals in Congress don’t dare to call out China Bashing, when they would immediately call out Jew-baiting, Islamophobia, or any other variant of the racism virus. Unfortunately, the racism virus doesn’t play favorites. In the end, everyone gets hurt. In a Guardian op-ed last year Robert Reich explained why:

The greatest danger we face today is not coming from China. It is our drift toward proto-fascism. We must be careful not to demonize China so much that we encourage a new paranoia that further distorts our priorities, encourages nativism and xenophobia, and leads to larger military outlays . . .

Looking back from the present, it seems no one was listening. Maybe that’s because the function of racism is to make good people blind to what is really going down. Did de-regulation leave you with costly internet and bad service? Blame the immigrants. Is the trade war with China adding to inflation? Blame the Chinese.

Recent travesties in the Ukraine have brought some liberals over to the pro-war camp, and not without reason, but in a recent op-ed Robert Delaney warned that tolerance for xenophobia could backfire on American democracy. Raising the alarm on Steve Bannon’s machinations at home and abroad, he wrote:

While brave Ukrainians who are dying to protect the kind of democratic civil society that American Republicans broadly used to support, the rest of us in the Western world who support the cause need to realise that the fight [for such a society] is also at our doorsteps.

Xenophobia can destroy a democracy; it cannot build one. Maybe serious liberals should chuck the Hollywood “tough guy” image and try a little renqing?

Martin Powers has written three books on the history of social justice in China, two of which won the Levenson Prize for best book in pre-1900 Chinese Studies. His recent book, published by Routledge, traces the impact of Chinese political theory and practice on the English Enlightenment. He is currently professor emeritus at the University of Michigan

The shooter’s hate-filled manifesto denounced immigrants and Black people as “replacers” of white people just as Carlson did. In April last year, Carlson said “The Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World.”

Both he and the racist shooter hate diversity. In 2018, Carlson blamed ethnic diversity for “radically and permanently changing our country” and questioned its value: “I don’t see that diversity is the strength of our country — why don’t you explain it to me?” In his manifesto, which does not mention Carlson by name, the Buffalo terrorist echoed Carlson’s viewpoint: “Diversity is not a strength. Why is diversity said to be our greatest strength? Does anyone even ask why? No one can give an answer.”

Carlson helped popularize the far-right ideology that coincided seamlessly with the rhetoric of Republican Party members who also describe immigrants seeking asylum as an invasion or infestation. On America’s most-watched cable news show, Carlson warned viewers that Democrats want “demographic replacement” through a “flood of illegals” in order to increase their voter base.

Is it possible that Carlson read the terrorist’s screed and saw the same Fox/Republican race-baiting nonsense about white replacement that he has been pushing for a year? Maybe he thought to himself: “I have the same ideology as a mass murderer, maybe I should re-think my position.” As a good Episcopalian Christian, possibly Carlson had a Saint Paul-on-the-Road-to-Damascus-type of spiritual and intellectual awakening?

Well, no, he made a dark turn and took a non-saintly road. More MAGA than Christian, Carlson — despite hosting “the most racist show in the history of cable news,” according to reporter Nick Confessore — claimed he was the victim of race politics, not its purveyor. Carlson’s condemnation of race politics was aimed at those denouncing him for his promotion of the vile “Replacement Conspiracy Theory.” He said that the mass shooting resulted from mental illness, not the same racist ideology that he preaches. In this way, he dismissed the racist pronouncements of the Buffalo shooter as the product of a “diseased mind,” yet through some mental gyrations he views his racist declarations as the product of a rational mind. Rational or not, violence inevitably erupts out of Carlson’s white supremacist ideology.

The Carlson creed that motivated the mass murder in Buffalo — “White Replacement Theory” — has a lengthy and blood-soaked history. Since 2011, it has been the explicit motivation for over 160 murders, including Norway’s Anders Breivik’s slaughter of 77 people, mostly immigrants, in 2011; Dylan Roof’s mass murder of Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015; the Tree of Life Synagogue killings in Pittsburgh in 2018; the massacre of 51 Muslims in shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019; and the murder of 23 people, mostly Latino immigrants, in El Paso, Texas, in 2019. Most come with a manifesto that “justify” the killings as a defense against “white genocide” — protecting white people from being replaced by non-whites.

This is not about passive demographic change. These racist fanatics promote the preposterous notion of an apocalyptic threat — a frightening future of decline, degradation and chaos — perpetrated by a cabal of mostly Jewish elites to eradicate the white race. Linked by almost identical ideological manifestos, these white power gunmen are part of a global terrorist movement that share an ideology — an old, dangerous, and idiotic ideology that white people are endangered and about to be made extinct.

Racist mass atrocities like these do not occur in a vacuum. The Buffalo massacre is not only facilitated by Republican resistance to gun control that put a semi-automatic weapon of war in the hands of a teenager, but was enabledby a normalization and mainstreaming of their white supremacist ideology by the former Racist-in-Chief, by Fox News, and by the Republican Party. They created a miasma of hate and intolerance that promotes violence. Like the terrorists themselves, they are not only adherents of the ideology, but evangelists for it as well.

The Muslim-hating Christchurch assassin hailed Trump as “a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose.” Saturday’s Buffalo killing spree was a disgusting symptom of the white-power President’s viral contamination. His open stoking of racial animus and xenophobia unshackled Fox News and the Republican party to openly spew its racist viewpoint.

”Far-right ideologies, such as the Replacement myth, are normalized through mainstream political discourse by framing immigration as an existential threat,” wrote Cynthia Miller-Idriss, author of Hate in the Homeland. “In recent years this conspiracy theory has made its way from the far-right fringes into the mainstream spotlight, helped both by political speeches and media commentators.”

Tucker Carlson and Fox News played a key role in tweaking the “the white replacement” myth — swapping out Jews for Democrats. Carlson lied to his audience, telling them that Democrats want “demographic replacements” from the non-white world. This has the advantage of not sounding anti-Semitic while making the Republican’s political opponents responsible for eradicating white people. Fox’s Laura Ingraham warned viewers that “the Democrats want to replace many of you,” suggesting there is an “invasion of the country.” Fox’s Jeanine Pirro said that Democrats were involved in “a plot to remake America – to replace American citizens with illegals who will vote for the Democrats.”

Following Fox News’ racism, ambitious Republican lawmakers use the same inflammatory and contemptible rhetoric, reiterating their embrace of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, once relegated to far-right lunatics. Third-ranking House member Elise Stefanik ran a series of Facebook ads that explicitly used “great replacement” rhetoric: “Radical Democrats are planning their most aggressive move yet: a plan to grant amnesty to 11 million illegal immigrants that will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.” But she’s far from alone.

One of the nation’s dumbest senators and an anti-Vax proponent, Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson falsely said, “This administration wants complete open borders. They want to remake the demographics of America to ensure that they stay in power forever.” Johnson may soon have more like-minded colleagues in the Senate who believe that Democrats’ are planning an insurrection to import enough non-white voters to take over control of the electorate for good. At least a half-dozen Republican Senate candidates have voiced similar sentiments on the campaign trail in recent weeks, a sign of how mainstream and deeply ingrained, in Republican orthodoxy, this conspiracy theory has become.

Ohio GOP Senate hypocrite nominee J.D. Vance — a former moderate now sporting MAGA gear — charged, on multiple occasions, that President Biden wanted to end Title 42, which automatically sends asylum-seeking immigrants who cross the border back to Mexico, because Democrats see them as guaranteed future votes. At a late-April town hall, Vance claimed that lifting Title 42 would mean 250,000 immigrants entering the U.S. every month, allowing Democrats to import 10 million to 15 million future voters, 70 percent of whom he claimed, without evidence, would vote Democratic. “This shift in the democratic makeup of this country that would mean we [Republicans] never win.” Supported by the former Liar-in-Chief, Vance also got a big early boost in his race from billionaire PayPal founder Peter Thiel, who gave $10 million to his super PAC.

Thiel’s other major campaign investment was to his former employee and protégée Blake Masters, who’s running for Senate in Arizona. Masters has floated similar rhetoric for months. “The Democrats want to change the demographics of this country,” Masters said on a podcast in late April. “They think that if they can bring in millions and millions and millions of illegal aliens, someday they’ll be able to grant them amnesty, grant them citizenship, and make them reliable Democrat voters.”

Even when mainstream politicians do not actively circulate conspiracy theories, they help validate them by failing to denounce them.“Silence is complicity,” said President Biden in Buffalo this week. Republican conservative Liz Cheney agreed: “The House GOP leadership has enabled white nationalism, white supremacy, and anti-Semitism. History has taught us that what begins with words ends in far worse. GOP leaders must renounce and reject these views and those who hold them.” But they won’t. The mainstreaming of replacement theory will promote racism and xenophobia and help mobilize individuals to violence because it fosters an apocalyptic sense of crisis and emergency.

In moving away from terms like “white genocide” and “Jewish cabal,” Republicans have repackaged the replacement conspiracy as one driven by political partisanship. By ignoring the violent and anti-Semitic underpinnings of these extremist beliefs, Republicans expose more people to their racist ideology, potentially radicalizing them. Simultaneously, Republican attacks on ”critical race theory” try to stifle, in schools, any discussion of the history of racism and xenophobia, protecting white people from feeling bad.

“Mainstreaming is critical to the growth of far-right movements globally, wrote Miller-Idriss in Hate in the Homeland, “because it helps them recruit, radicalize, and mobilize individuals toward violence, while reducing the likelihood that the public will raise the alarm about their efforts.” At the same time, normalizing extreme racist and xenophobic ideas by smuggling them into apparently mainstream Republican campaigns helps the far right achieve political goals related to border closures, restrictions on immigration, and deportations.

The normalization of white supremacist ideas has become more widely accepted by the general public. An Associated Press-NORC poll showed that fully one-third of Americans, and almost half of Republicans, believe that “there is a group of people in this country who are trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants who agree with their political view.” What were once written off as deranged conspiracy theories and doomsday cult fantasies about white extinction are gaining traction as mainstream beliefs. Racist replacement rhetoric that purports to protect white people from annihilation is another Republican weapon, another attempt to “justify” extreme, anti-democratic, and even violent means to re-gain power in 2022 and 2024.

( Cronkite News ) – PHOENIX – One in four Asian households in the U.S. report fearing physical attacks and threats because of their race, according to a recent survey by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

The survey, taken Aug. 2 through Sept. 7 as the delta coronavirus variant swept the country, showed other minority households also reported fears for their safety. In addition, households across the country said they were worried about finances and other stressors during the summer surge of COVID-19 infections.

The survey found that 21% of Black households, 22% of Native Americans and 8% of Latino households report similar mental health stressors and anxiety because of their race or ethnicity. The survey used a nationally representative sample of 3,616 adults 18 or older and was released in October.

“In the field of psychology, there is such robust literature that we have done in our research team and with my colleague Dr. Tahirah Abdullah and so many other folks that suggest that racism is, by and large, connected to mental health challenges, to depression, to anxiety and stress,” said Jessica LoPresti, co-founder of BARE Mental Health &amp; Wellness. LoPresti, who also is a clinical psychologist at Suffolk University in Boston, focuses on promoting resilience, health and well-being among people and communities of color.

According to the FBI, physical and verbal attacks on Asians, Black Americans, and other minorities have increased since the start of the pandemic in March 2020.

Related story

Arizona hate crimes hit their highest level since 9/11, and it’s likely an undercount

In Arizona, hate crimes rose to 282 in 2020, from 209 the year before.

“One of the most significant barriers that communities and people of color face are not necessarily only that Black people aren’t accessing mental health care, it’s that when we do that the mental health care is not culturally responsive,” LoPresti said. “Folks are entering therapy and sort of sitting across from someone and saying, ‘You have no idea what I experience, how who I am affects my mental health, so how could I possibly talk to you and find help in our sort of relationship?’”

The NPR survey – which asked respondents about finances, health care, racial or ethnic discrimination, education, caregiving, work and well-being – also found that 38% of U.S. households report facing severe financial issues in the past few months. This has a significant contribution to mental health problems, experts say.

“Reducing socioeconomic inequities, that kind of goes across the board of realizing that there is a connection with poverty, racism, how racism contributes to poverty, how poverty then contributes to mental health problems – all of this is intermingled,” said Imelda Padilla-Fraustro, a research scientist at the UCLA Center for Health Policy Research. She focuses on the social determinants related to these communities’ inequities.

She and LoPresti have dedicated their time to studying the multilevel impacts that race has on mental health and the barriers faced by underrepresented communities. Their research and the NPR study offer evidence that fearing for your safety adversely affects mental health, and that poverty exacerbates all mental health challenges.

Phoenix

Breanna Isbell expects to graduate in May 2022 with a bachelor’s degree in broadcast journalism. Isbell will be working in the Phoenix News Bureau and plans to pursue a master’s degree.

I pointed out in April that Tucker Carlson’s “White Power Hour” on Fox (Joy Reid’s term) is full of contradictions on replacement theory, and that Carlson’s immigrant Catholic Italian ancestor could have been lynched once upon a time by English racists angry that he was trying to replace them.

Dan Patrick is the truly odious Lt. Governor of Texas, a former right wing shock jock who has turned his adolescent and racist radio schtick into public policy. He sort of promised us he would die of COVID so that his grandchildren would not have to wear masks or socially distance, but he reneged on that pledge as he has on so many others. The Lt. Governor is the real power in Texas, not the governor, and so Patrick is behind some of Texas’ most reactionary policies. He has now also gone in for replacement theory, like the Nazis in Charlottesville, who chanted “Jews will not replace us.” They were referring to the malicious lie that Jewish business people push for immigration to get cheap brown and black workers that can replace higher-salaried whites.

Actually, our current immigration laws were passed by a largely WASP Congress in 1965 and signed off on by a Christian president, Lyndon Johnson.

Patrick, born in Baltimore, is in part of immigrant German ancestry and changed his name from Dan Goeb. I am also in part of immigrant German ancestry, but we declined to pretend to be English. Plus we’re still hoping in vain for royalties on that slaw we invented.

Patrick told Laura Ingraham, the second nuttiest person on TV, according to the Houston Chronicle,

“Let me tell you something, Laura, and everyone watching,” Patrick said. “A revolution has begun. A silent revolution by the Democrat party and Joe Biden to take control of this country.”

Patrick called on red states to petition President Joe Biden for “protection from invasion” and intoned direly about immigrant families coming to America and having children who grow up to vote for Democrats.

“Laura when I say a revolution has begun…they are allowing this year, probably two million — that’s who we apprehend and maybe another million — into this country. In at least 18 years, even if they all don’t become citizens and before then and can vote…In 18 years, if every one of them has two or three children, you’re talking about millions and millions and millions of new voters. And they will thank the Democrats and Biden for bringing them here. Who do you think they’re gonna vote for?

“This is trying to take over our country without firing a shot.”

So here are all the falsehoods in Gruppenführer Patrick’s screed.

1. In most years, a little over 1 million immigrants come into the United States.

2. The birth rate of immigrants is 2.0, i.e. it is at replacement, and is only slightly more than native-born Americans. In recent years fertility among immigrants has fallen faster than that among people born here.

So just to underline this, in 18 years if immigration laws and trends remain the same, we can expect 18 million more immigrants in a country of 345 million or so. They won’t have three children they will have two, just replacing themselves, and the children won’t be of voting age for the most part.

3. Only 45% are likely to be naturalized US citizens, so that is only 8.1 million new voters. They will be 2.3% of the population and spread all over the country.

4. On average, about 20% of recent immigrants in the U.S. vote Republican. About 30% say they have no political leanings. The rest, about 50% do vote Democratic.

So of the 8.1 million new voters among immigrants, 1.6 million will vote for Dan Patrick and his like, and we have no idea how another 2.5 million or so of them will vote, if they vote at all.

So we are down to about 4 million new Democratic Party voters in a country of 345 million, spread all around the country. It is highly unlikely that they would affect any but the very tightest races. And it is just as likely that the immigrant Republicans, depending on where they settle, could become a swing vote for that party.

5. 20% of immigrants are white.

So of the 8.1 million new voters, 1.6 million will actually be white people, the sort Patrick likes.

It is good for the US to grow the population somewhat, since a falling population presents economic challenges (who is going to pay into social security?) It is also good for the US to become more diverse ethnically, since it has been proven that a diverse workplace is better at problem-solving.

In any case, we have gone from Patrick’s image of being swamped by millions and millions of new immigrant voters, all black and brown or Asian, and all Democrats, replacing white people, to a mere 8.1 million new voters over 18 years, a fifth of them white and a fifth of them surely Republicans, with another 30 percent unknown as to affiliation.

If Patrick’s problem is that he thinks minorities vote Democratic, that is his own fault. Lots of Asians and Hispanics tilted Republican 20 years ago. George W. Bush got 40% of the Hispanic vote. It was the turn of the Republican Party to strident white nationalism that chased them into the arms of the Democrats. American Nazis desperately need to be replaced with humane people.

—–

Bonus Video:

GOP ‘Great Replacement’ Theory Takes Shape

Imagine being forced from your home by the government, being imprisoned in a detention camp under armed guards and behind barbed wire – and then being required to join the military to fight for the nation that had locked up you and your family.

That’s what happened in a little-known chapter of U.S. history, in which many of those men went on to become American military heroes, some making the ultimate sacrifice. These soldiers, along with all other Japanese Americans who served in the U.S. armed forces during World War II, are being honored with a new U.S. Postal Service stamp on June 3, 2021.

From the time the first immigrants had arrived from Japan in the 1880s, people of Japanese ancestry in the U.S. – whether they were American citizens or not – faced decades of discrimination. The inequities stemmed from politicians promoting anti-immigrant sentiments, workers and businesses fearing economic competition, and tensions relating to Japan’s rise as a military power. The attack on Pearl Harbor whipped those prejudices into a frenzy of fear that swept the nation. After Dec. 7, 1941, anyone with a Japanese face, especially on the West Coast, had the face of the enemy.

A little more than two months later, on Feb. 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing the forcible removal of about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry from California, Oregon, Washington and parts of Arizona. Without any evidence of disloyalty or charges brought against them, these people – including my grandparents, parents and their families – were sent at gunpoint to hastily constructed detention facilities in desolate inland locations, where they spent the duration of the war.

Two-thirds of those incarcerated were “Nisei” – American citizens, born in the U.S. to Japanese immigrant parents. Their first-generation parents, called “Issei,” were barred by federal law from becoming citizens. Lacking any political clout or any effective allies, the community was powerless to fight against removal and imprisonment.

My forthcoming book, “When Can We Go Back to America? Voices of Japanese American Incarceration during World War II,” chronicles the stories of many who experienced this travesty of justice simply because of their race. I also tell of the roughly 33,000 Japanese Americans who served gallantly in the U.S. military during the war, fighting for a country that had unconstitutionally wronged them, their families and friends.

Segregated units

On Jan. 5, 1942, the War Department reclassified Japanese American men from being draft-eligible to “enemy aliens” not eligible for the draft. Yet as the war continued into 1943, the U.S. government put out a call seeking Japanese American volunteers to join the army. Thousands of them rushed to sign up, agreeing to serve in a segregated all-Nisei unit under the command of white officers.

Most of these volunteers were from Hawaii, where the Japanese American population had generally been allowed to stay in their homes. Future U.S. Sen. Daniel K. Inouye, then a college student, was among the first to enlist.

On the mainland, about 1,500 Nisei men volunteered from the 10 euphemistically named “relocation centers.” Of these, 805 were accepted into service, having satisfied a loyalty test administered only to incarcerated Nisei. Some used their Japanese language skills in the Military Intelligence Service in the Pacific theater, while others formed the 100th Infantry Battalion, which fought in Europe, including as a unit attached to the Nisei-staffed 442nd Regimental Combat Team.

Going for broke

By the end of 1943, U.S. military leaders had grimly realized they were running short of manpower. The political decision to reclassify the Nisei as ineligible for the draft was being reconsidered, as commanders were hearing impressive reports of Nisei volunteers in their training. Mike Masaoka of the Japanese American Citizens League was also lobbying the military brass for the opportunity to show through a “demonstration in blood” that Japanese Americans were loyal Americans.

On Jan. 20, 1944, Secretary of War Henry Stimson announced the reinstatement of the draft for all Nisei men. Young Japanese American men were now considered loyal enough for compulsory military service. These draftees from the detention camps subsequently fought in some of the bloodiest battles in Europe.

The Nisei soldiers shared a spirit, and a motto, of “Go for Broke,” Hawaiian gambling slang for wagering everything on one roll of the dice. They wanted to give it all to defend their country and prove their patriotism.

The Japanese American soldiers helped drive the German army out of Italy and continued into eastern France, fighting nonstop for nearly two months in the Vosges Mountains. Their last-ditch effort rescued over 200 soldiers from Texas, who had been stranded behind German lines for nearly a week.

By the time the Nisei troops emerged from the Vosges, the number of dead and wounded outnumbered the living. One company had started out with 185 men, but ended up with only eight. This terrible casualty rate earned the 442nd the nickname of the “Purple Heart Battalion.”

Approximately 18,000 Nisei soldiers served in the combined 100th and 442nd, and collectively they and their units earned more than 14,000 awards, making it the most decorated military unit for its size and length of service in all of U.S. military history.

One top military official in the Pacific theater credited the Nisei MIS interpreters with saving tens of thousands of American lives and shortening the war by as much as two years.

Their legacy

The Nisei soldiers might have prevailed over the Nazis in Europe and the Japanese in the Pacific, but they came home to racial prejudice that had only intensified during the war. In 1981, MIS veteran Mits Usui recalled that as he returned to his hometown of Los Angeles, wearing his U.S. Army uniform, a bus rider called him a “Damn J*p.” Inouye described how after he was released from the hospital as a decorated second lieutenant with a hook replacing the arm he had lost in combat, a San Francisco barber refused to cut his “J*p hair.”

Vigilantes were terrorizing the veterans’ families so they would not return to their West Coast homes. Some were threatened with bodily harm. The government promoted stories of the Nisei soldiers’ valor as part of a pro-Japanese American publicity campaign to combat the terrorism.

For U.S. Sen. Spark Matsunaga, President Ronald Reagan’s signing of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 was important recognition of the Nisei’s wartime sacrifices. That legislation officially apologized for the incarceration and provided token reparations payments to the surviving incarcerees. A decorated 100th/442nd member, Matsunaga recalled, “We feel now that our efforts at the battlefront – giving up our lives and being wounded and maimed and disabled – all this was for a great cause, great ideals … to remove the one big blot on the Constitution that has been there for over 45 years.”

In 2005, surviving Nisei veterans and their families launched a campaign to have the U.S. Postal Service issue a stamp honoring all Japanese Americans who served in World War II, including the women who served. The campaign has had support from bipartisan local, state and federal legislators, as well as from French citizens and officials who have not forgotten the Nisei heroes who freed their towns from German forces. The stamp is one of only a few in U.S. postal history to feature an Asian American or Pacific Islander.

Susan H. Kamei, Lecturer in History; Managing Director of the Spatial Sciences Institute, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The earliest Asia-bashing in the West was China-bashing, and history shows it was periodically deployed to defend the privileged classes in Europe. We are living through one of those moments now, so it might help if we understood how the practice originated.

The earliest anti-Asian mudslinging was aimed at China because its very existence threatened Europe’s race and class-based hierarchies. This isn’t to say that imperial China didn’t have its own inequities, but Western ire toward China erupted at the very moment that China’s example exposed institutionalized privilege in the West. China today offers an alternative to austerity independent of ideology, and the mudslinging has started again.

In Ancien Regime France, you had to be French, Catholic, and noble to exercise power. Louis Le Comte’s 1697 Memoires explained how any educated man in China could serve in government. His book was banned, then burned.

Christian Wolff admired China’s secular moral system and the religious tolerance it enabled. He was told to leave town in 24 hours or be hanged.

Such dire threats to aristocracy called for a smear campaign. Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755) thereupon invented the two most toxic anti-Asian stereotypes in history: The Despotic Oriental and the untrustworthy, or Sneaky Oriental. To this day these stereotypes infect our hate speech, our history textbooks, and our foreign policy.

Oriental Despotism

Western Civilization textbooks tell us that Baron Montesquieu was a champion of liberty and a critic of despotism. What they don’t mention is that “liberty” back then referred to the privileges of the nobility. Europe’s feudal notion of “liberty” in fact, was one reason why China seemed so strange to men like Montesquieu.

Late Imperial China had no aristocracy. Its government administration welcomed men of all races and class backgrounds. So long as they could demonstrate competence in blind civil service exams, the Ministry of Personnel (not the emperor) would assign them an office.

Montesquieu dubbed that system “despotism” because it would deprive men like himself of their liberties: “Abolish the privileges of the lords, of the clergy, and of the cities in a monarchy; and you will soon have a popular state, or else a despotic government.”

Your textbook also didn’t mention those liberties that people in China enjoyed, but Europeans didn’t. One was that men and women, rich and poor, could utilize the justice system because the state paid the cost of legal services. Grievance Offices allowed anyone to blow the whistle, anonymously. Innocence was presumptive, and capital cases required review by a higher court.

In addition to positive liberties such as blowing whistles, we now recognize “negative” liberties, such as freedom from obstacles to living. Mencius maintained that all people should be free to make a living, and “live their lives happily with full bellies.” As a result, Imperial China adopted statist policies on a large scale.

These included a progressive tax system; state administered disaster relief, and no-interest loans of grain and tools for needy farmers, among others. All that social spending was justified on the principle of promoting the people’s happiness.

Finally, as in the Muslim World stretching from the Middle East to South Asia, religious toleration in China was standard.

Why should Western Civilization textbooks mention all that? Because when news of those policies made its way to Europe, progressive thinkers like Voltaire, Samuel Johnson, and many more began calling for an end to hereditary privilege, seeking a government more responsive to people’s needs.

In the opening pages of Common Sense (1770), Thomas Paine’s remedy for aristocratic abuse included: 1. abolish hereditary privilege; 2. take the power of appointment away from the monarch, and 3. establish the people’s happiness as the legitimate end of government.

All three made their way into the American political system, and all three were standard practice in China, but this only further energized the Despotic Oriental myth.

The New China Threat

China’s merit-based government, along with its statist policies, constituted an existential threat to Western aristocracy.

The fact that some of Europe’s leading intellectuals embraced those policies constituted a threat to European face.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) had a solution for both. Though familiar with the Enlightenment literature on China, he chose to ignore it, declaring in Philosophy of History that “The Emperor is the Patriarch—the supreme authority in matters of religion and science as well as government.”

By resurrecting the Despotic Oriental, Hegel created a totalizing fantasy portraying all individual perspectives as extinguished within the singular consciousness of an all-powerful despot. That fantasy served as an apt foil for the “liberty” Hegel would attribute to European tradition.

But totalizing fantasies about ethnic others are, by definition, racist.

Hegel’s reductive racism reappears almost verbatim in John King Fairbank’s Cold War textbooks from the 60s, the main source of China knowledge for generations of China hands.

It resurfaced again in Samuel Huntington’sClash of Civilizations. That theory divides the entire world into democratic and authoritarian camps, The West and The Rest. Huntington’s zero-sum framework cajoles readers into believing that those Western aristocracies Tom Paine detested must have been democratic all along.

As Foreign Affairs described it, “any of the Huntington civilizations can be summoned in a moment to ratify whatever action the West and its remaining superpower deem rightful.” Nowadays we might call it just so much “malarky,” so how did it acquire that much influence?

Western Civilization textbooks conduct ethnic cleansing on non-European sources for Western history. Whether it’s the Islamic world or Imperial China, key discoveries from across the globe get systematically erased, leaving the impression that every noble concept in human history was the spawn of Western genius.

It is, of course, that textbook account of the West that erases the humanity of the Rest. In place of “Asian genius,” we are left with stereotypes like the Sneaky Oriental.

The Sneaky Oriental

Montesquieu maintained that “honor” was a characteristic feature of aristocracies but China, as you’ll recall, didn’t have one. On this foundation, Hegel expanded his totalizing account of China’s national character:

“As no honor exists, and no one has an individual right in respect of others, the consciousness of debasement predominates, and this easily passes into that of utter abandonment. With this abandonment is connected the great immorality of the Chinese. They are notorious for deceiving wherever they can.”

The 19^th century literally went to town with Hegel’s stereotype. Witch trials were not a feature of late imperial Chinese culture, yet period theater fantasized about white men accused of witchcraft by the sneaky Chinese.

In the 20^th century, John King Fairbank made the Sneaky Oriental the Cold War gold standard for academic rigor. From his books, sinologists like myself learned how to dismiss as false any impressive achievement in China’s history. Since anything a Chinese person might say was suspect, scholars could dismiss whatever they pleased, putting their own words into Chinese mouths.

Washington’s China hawks deploy a similar method to good effect.

Anti-Asian Dog whistles and Foreign Policy

When the Trump administration first started its anti-China campaign, it was quickly recognized as an attempt to scapegoat China for Trump’s disastrous policies. Unabashed, Trump Team persisted, and before long a fixed set of dog whistles appeared in the media ranging from Breitbart to mainstream venues.

Mike Pompeo called for a “clean” network, with Chinese tech products being smeared as “untrusted,” Although no credible evidence of government tampering had been documented, Trump’s base certainly took on board the racial slurs masquerading as policy.

After the election, Joe Biden and his team set about reversing many of Trump’s racist policies, but not when it came to China. The recent China Economic and Security Review Commission report comes straight out of the Trump Team playbook.

In the report, actions applauded in Western nations—such as building prosperity or developing new technologies—were demonized as “aggressive” for China. The report in fact, used the term “aggressive” 39 times because, if you say it often enough, it must be true.

The commission’s co-chair declared “The story the Chinese Communist Party ‘is telling around the world is one that is often based on lies and half-truths.” Not surprisingly, her committee proposed a Huntingtonian front by the West against the Rest.

To appreciate the subtle racism informing the report’s rhetoric, consider how the press responded to a genuine threat from white people. Back in December when Russian hackers compromised key U.S. agencies, the Washington Post and its sources responded as follows:

“The Russians used a variety of sophisticated tricks to penetrate the networks in last year’s attack . . . ‘We are not going to keep a nation-state attacker who has targeted you out,’ said Williams, president of Rendition Infosec. ‘They are going to outfox you.’”

The China threat remains pure speculation, while the Russians have ruptured our national security, yet the first is a “threat”, and the latter “sophisticated”. It would be naive to imagine race was not a factor here.

White Nationalism Goes Left

The New Republic recently published a piece on White Nationalist Steve Bannon’s anti-Chinese campaign as well as his collusion with the Republican Party and their media enablers like the lunatic Epoch Times. Fox News retains its anti-China fever, and a rebranded QAnon is now conflating Chinese and Jewish people as existential threats.

There are in fact good reasons why White Nationalists vilify all things Chinese. Apart from serving as scapegoat, China’s political system stands as a living refutation of two propositions White Nationalists hold dear: 1. The intrinsic superiority of the White Race; 2. The confusion of austerity economics with Freedom.

The former requires no elaboration, but the latter is in fact the key. During the past forty years, austerity economics has become a core feature of American-style democracy. Our free-market electoral system is the product of that transformation.

The problem is that austerity generates rampant inequality. Privilege is empowered by inequality, and that invites populist movements on the right, and a credibility gap on the left. Both lead to instability, but right-wing ideologues fear that less than social spending.

To justify this new “democracy,” authorities claim that a corporation’s liberty to manipulate elections is necessary to protect free speech. The pandemic exposed the lie in that theory. Such measures may protect liberty in Montesquieu’s sense, but they do nothing to promote liberties such as the right to carry on your life free from poverty, violence, or disease.

In contrast, if you look at China’s major policy initiatives, most have been beneficial to the populace (and others not), which is why our Republican Party would reject every last one:

• Republicans invest in green energy? No way, and so China is the world leader in green technology.

• Invest in high-speed rail? No way, yet China’s rail network has energized economic growth.

• Invest big-time in the poor? No way, yet China has brought hundreds of millions out of poverty and into the middle class.

• Finally, despite that never-to-be-forgiven hesitation at the beginning of the pandemic, China acted effectively to prevent the virus from ravaging the population. That required concerted action from the central government in cooperation with local governments. Again, Republicans flatly reject that approach.

All these efforts yielded palpable gains for China’s people, which is why the risk of far-right populist movements in China is low. Whether you’re talking feudalism or proto-fascism, inequality is the precondition for privilege, so it’s natural that Republican apostles of austerity see China as a threat.

What remains puzzling is why the Biden administration should see those same policies as requiring a crusade by White Nations united against the Yellow Peril? This race-based agenda makes even less sense when you consider that Biden’s professed goals argue strongly for cooperation with China.

• Biden supports a scientific response to climate crisis, and there is widespread agreement that the human race will not survive unless the U.S. and China work together.

• Biden’s solutions to the pandemic echo closely those pioneered in China.

• Like the Chinese government, Biden plans to invest in underdeveloped regions of the country, is sympathetic to high-speed rail, and wants to expand the middle class.

Biden’s progressive vision reassures the left, yet his foreign policy remains as ill-considered and as biased as Trump’s. The hallmark of China-bias, as always, is the double standard, so when Biden seeks to expand the middle class, his team calls it Democracy; when China achieves that goal, it’s Authoritarian.

In fact, there is no apocalyptic divide here except in the racist imagination. The Republican Party’s austerity addiction shares more with Erdogan’s AKP than with the old Republican Party, while Biden’s statist reforms share more with China than with Tea Party Republicans.

In today’s world no nation–East or West–fits the stereotypes anymore. If we are to survive this chapter in human history, the left needs to acknowledge that its alliance with right-wing sociopaths is corroding its own, core values. It is those values that will permit the nation to survive climate disaster, not the nation per se, and certainly not the race.

—–

Bonus Video:

Guardian News: “US and China officials publicly rebuke each other in first in-person talks of Biden era”