First, a little backstory before I get to the Ann Coulter part.
The day after the Republicans made massive gains in the 2010 mid-term elections, I penned an essay taunting older white conservatives — those most responsible for the night’s results.
You know, the Tea Party types.
The message was simple: drink up and enjoy your win because the demographics of the nation are changing and eventually, there won’t be any white folks left who can nostalgically remember the pre-civil rights era, thus demanding to “take their country back” to such a time.
That, I said, would be a good thing.
Not because I wanted them to die, but because nostalgia for that era, which causes older white folks to believe America was “great” then and needs to be made great like that again, holds us back.
What I was trying to suggest was that once those folks had passed into loving memory, we could more easily get on with the business of multicultural democracy.
I’m not going to say it was my best work; far from it.
First, it was overly optimistic about the inevitability of progressive change, seeing as how things have gotten worse.
But more to the point, it was mean-spirited. It struck a tone for which I am genuinely sorry.
It was an intemperate screed, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the intervening years, it’s this: screeds are best when temperate.
Within hours of it going viral, wishes for my death or offers to make it happen were pouring in.
There was “Robbins Mitchell” from Houston, who e-mailed me to say, among other things:
I trained as a Cadet at the USAF Academy in unarmed combat…and I know 12 ways to kill a man without using a weapon…so what say I come up there and give you your choice of those 12 ways?
Then there was the guy who phoned up the speaker’s bureau that represents me, leaving this message:
Tim is calling for the genocide of white people. And we’re going to go after him and hang his Jewish ass.
I wasn’t calling for genocide, of course, although edited and spliced-together versions of my words (made into memes by overt white supremacists in years to come) would give that impression to more than a few.
I was merely noting that whites were much older, on average, than Black and Latino folks, and older people tend to die sooner than the young. Thus, it was inevitable that over time, whites would become less than a majority.
Oh, and the white folks remaining as a plurality would be better, on balance, than those who had gone before because they wouldn’t be able to pine away for the Leave It To Beaver days since they hadn’t experienced them.
My favorite, though, was the guy who called up — again, to the speaker’s bureau — and challenged me to a duel, explaining:
…the worst thing this country ever did was abolish duels. OK? Because if this country wouldn’t have abolished duels, then spineless liberals wouldn’t even exist.
Fun times.
To the far-right, I was either calling for white genocide or at least celebrating the pending minoritization of whites in America.
Either way, I was confirming their fears: liberals and leftists — and especially Jews — were promoting what we now know as “The Great Replacement.”
It’s the theory that terrorists like Payton Gendron in Buffalo, Patrick Crusius in El Paso, Brenton Tarrant in New Zealand, Dylann Roof in Charleston, and Robert Bowers in Pittsburgh endorsed as the motive for their killing sprees.
OK, fine, but get to the Ann Coulter part, Tim…
This brings us to reactionary ghoul Ann Coulter, whose column from May 18 quoted several liberal or left folks, myself included, who supposedly prove that the underlying claims of the “Great Replacement Theory” are valid.
In her piece, she referenced my 2010 column as the ultimate demonstration of what these terrorist shooters feared. Though she didn’t go so far as to suggest my words made such terrorism legitimate, she did imply that it made the fears that animated it understandable. As Coulter put it:
To Wise, the best way to kill the antisemitic trope of Jewish elites waging war against whites is to be a Jewish elite waging war against whites.
See what she did there?
First, she semi-mocks the idea of such a conspiratorial Jewish plot but then slyly suggests that, at least for this one Jew, there really is a war being waged on white people.
By that guy — right there, in Nashville, armed with a 12-year-old essay.
And already this morning (because a few people still read Ann’s ventilations despite her break with Trump), the death threats have started again.
No challenges to a duel or updated tough-guy threats from Robbins “My hands are a lethal weapon” Mitchell. The day is young, though.
Either way, my security measures are, let’s just say, in place.
Is praising demographic change proof of replacement theory?
Anyway, what Coulter is trying to do — and others have joined her in this since Buffalo — is suggest that the real believers in replacement theory are liberals and leftists.
Only, in our case, we welcome it rather than being afraid of it. We celebrate it.
Thus, we are hardly in a position to mock those who express alarm about demographic change since we admit, gleefully, that it’s happening.
And if it’s OK to praise the decline in the white population, they insist it must also be OK to oppose that or prefer the maintenance of a white majority.
As in, if we conservatives are being racist for wanting the nation to maintain its traditional racial character, then why aren’t you leftists being racists for wanting to change it?
It has a certain logic to it.
Then again, so does the claim that if it’s OK to have Black History Month, it must be OK to have White History Month, and if you disagree, you’re the racist.
Makes sense.
So long as we ignore history and the social context that makes advocating one of those as opposed to the other far more problematic.
The same is true with demographic change.
If I’d said — if any leftist did — that we’re happy the U.S. is becoming less white because of some inherent awfulness about white people, that would be bigoted.
And that would be parallel to what racists afraid of so-called replacement are saying: that “those people” are dirtier, less intelligent, criminal, and incapable of sustaining a workable society.
But that’s not what I said or believe. And so far as I know, it’s not what any of the other people Coulter quoted believe either.
I was speaking of the evolution of white America from a group top-heavy with those nursing a segregation jones to one populated with those whose age makes them the children of integration, multiculturalism, and the Obama presidency.
The only replacement I was giddy about — prematurely, given the terrorist proclivities of several young white men and the mere existence of 4Chan — was one type of white person for another.
The part about the browning of America was less a celebration than a statement of fact.
Immigration aside, the white population will continue to decline as a share of the total due to differential birth rates. We’re just too old, on average, to make enough kids to maintain a white majority.
Any celebration about this on my part stemmed from a belief that as America sheds its 1950s nostalgia — because the persons for whom those were the “good old days” are no longer — it will tend to become more accepting and politically pluralistic.
This appears to have been naive. But it wasn’t hateful.
It wasn’t intimating that those passing into that good night were terrible people. Just historically and politically blinkered.
To that, conservatives might say politics is all they’re concerned about too.
They might say their opposition to demographic shifts is less about hostility to newcomers as people and more about the fear that they’ll vote liberally, producing outcomes they oppose for ideological, not racial, reasons.
In that sense, there’s no difference between those opposed to change and those happy about it — both are expressing political preferences, so what’s the big deal?
Here’s the big deal.
The people who desire the maintenance of white hegemony do view the newcomers as inferior.
They do call them dirty.
They do suggest they come from “shithole” countries.
They do question the value of diversity, not merely the political leanings of those who would make America more diverse.
Even as Latino voters have shown increased willingness to vote for Republicans, these voices have not softened their tune. It seems they’re just as upset about too many brown Trump supporters as they are brown Democrats.
Ultimately they take the position of white nationalist Jared Taylor, shared in a debate with me twenty years ago.
After Taylor praised Asian American success — mainly as a way to “debunk” the idea of racism in America — I asked him why, if Asians are so capable, he didn’t want more of them in the U.S. Wouldn’t that boost the economy and add to productivity?
I knew his answer before he offered it, of course.
He wouldn’t want more of them because, however excellent they may be, they aren’t white.
And America was for white people.
There is a fundamental difference between arguing that and arguing, as I am, that this is an ideational nation that should embrace all who seek to make it home and expand the true meaning of those national principles.
To miss that difference is to miss the distinction between a welcome mat and a “no trespassing” sign.
It ignores the difference between those who would set a table large enough for all and those who would keep the table and its bounty to themselves.
And although Ann Coulter saw lots of Grateful Dead shows — oddly, we were both at the July 4, 1990 show at Sandstone Amphitheater outside Kansas City — she never did acid or weed at them (just Chardonnay), so she can tell the difference here.
She knows but doesn’t care.
Because her sympathies lie with the terrorists — at least with their ideological predispositions.
Mine reside with the victims and the best principles of the nation we’re trying to make great for the first time.
