If you’ve ever done any kind of personal growth work you know that one of the central tenets of a lot of such work is that, while you cannot necessarily control the world around you, you can control your response to the world around you. 

On the other hand, one of the core principles of the new conservatism is, who can we blame?

I don’t know what people thought would happen after we had 30 years of right wing “Talk” Radio and 25 years of Fox “News.” The only thing these people are interested in is arousing our emotions and telling us whom we should blame for our problems.

In other words, whom we should hate.

And they’ve been very successful at it.

There is a film maker who directed a whole film about it. Her name is Jen Senko. Her film is called The Brainwashing of my Dad, and it looked at the phenomenon in a very personal way, focused on one particular human being.

But what happened to Jen Senko’s Dad happened to a lot of citizens in the United States.

So now we have another guy, another pasty, skinny, pathetic, virginal, resentful, conspiratorial, pseudo-masculine teenage white prick shooting up a grocery store because it was in a black neighborhood.

On the very next day after this kid’s rampage, by the way, we had a 60 year old Chinese man shooting up a Taiwanese church in California. Not quite the same thing, but close.

Now ask yourself, when was the last time that a black panther shot up a church of white evangelicals?

When was the last time someone from Antifa shot up a bunch of klansmen at a rally?

Can’t remember?

It’s because that’s never happened.

There has been a lot of commentary about how once fringe theories, like the Great Replacement Theory, have gone mainstream in recent years.

Although Republicans have been mining racial resentment for a long time — see, for example, this ad from Jesse Helms that ran in his 1990 Senate race — the Great Replacement Theory is a new level of race baiting and paranoia. The theory originates with French intellectual Renaud Camus, who in his younger years was a gay socialist activist.

Now he’s just a reactionary jerk.

Allegedly, he developed his theory when he observed in 1996 that a lot of old villages in the Herault region of southern France were filling up with Muslim and dark-skinned immigrants. By 2011 he had written a book (The Grand Replacement) that argued that with the complicity of French elites, the white European populations were being “replaced” with non-white peoples, especially Muslims, through mass migration, demographic growth and a drop in the birth rate of white Europeans.

Oy.

This theory has progressively been adopted by white supremacists and Tucker Calrson. This is, of course, the same Tucker Carlson about whom a federal court recently decided that no “reasonable” person can believe what he says.