Kendall Stanley: It’s alright to be white?

The cleanup of the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, has, if you have ears attuned to the far right media, been botched because the people who live there are predominantly white and supporters of former president Donald Trump and thus are being ignored.

As The Guardian put it, “Leading the charge, as is so often the case with such white-America nativist fearmongering, is the Fox News star Tucker Carlson. ‘East Palestine is overwhelmingly white, and it’s politically conservative,’ he said recently. ‘That shouldn’t be relevant, but it very much is.’"

Carlson went on to describe East Palestine as a ‘poor benighted town whose people are forgotten, and in the view of the people who lead this country, forgettable’. He highlighted the indisputable suffering of local residents who were forced to evacuate a two-mile area and since they have returned home remain fearful about the quality of the air and water.

Then Carlson contrasted such hardship with what he called the "favored poor" who live in “favored cities" such as Detroit and Philadelphia — a clear euphemism for urban centers, often led by Democratic mayors, with large Black populations.”

In other, shorter words, East Palestine gets ignored because it’s a white city. You want ignored? Talk to the people in Jackson, Mississippi, and Flint.

Carlson continues to play the “poor white people” card suggesting white Americans are an embattled and unappreciated segment of society.

That is also part of the replacement theory that those in power, read Joe Biden, are willing to let other nationalities into the country to replace and overrun the white population. Where those white people are supposed to disappear to is a question that needs to be asked.

Oh wait, Tucker would ask a question like that, but there’s no answer for it other than the whites are just going to be replaced.

Remember the chant of some white nationalists in Charlottesville — “Jews will not replace us!” Yes indeed, replacement theory in the flesh.

The idea of Western civilization being overrun by the dark-skinned hordes is the premise of the book “The Camp of the Saints” by French author Jean Raspail. The book has been a mainstay of white supremacy groups in Europe and the United States.

The Social Contract Press, founded by Petoskey’s late John Tanton, the architect of the modern American anti-immigration movement according to The New York Times, published an English version of the novel.

The publisher’s note to the Social Contract edition explains how, unlike in a work of nonfiction, “storytellers can advance notions prohibited to others,” predicting that the book could “become the ‘1984’ of the 21st century,” referencing the famous George Orwell novel about totalitarianism.

More on the white front came a couple of weekends ago when Scott Adams, author of the cartoon strip “Dilbert,” went on a rant about black people hating white people and white people should just avoid them.

Adams made his claims after a survey by Rasmussen and called Black Americans a “hate group” and said White people should “get the hell away from” them.

As reported by The Washington Post, which pulled Adams’ cartoon, “the once widely celebrated Adams, who has been entertaining extreme-right ideologies and conspiracy theories for several years, was upset Wednesday by a Rasmussen poll that found a thin majority of Black Americans agreed with the statement “It’s okay to be White” — a phrase sometimes associated with racist memes.

“If nearly half of all Blacks are not okay with White people … that’s a hate group,” Adams said on his live-streaming YouTube show. “I don’t want to have anything to do with them. And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to White people is to get the hell away from Black people … because there is no fixing this.”

Adams rightly figured that after his rant on his live YouTube channel that his career is probably shot at this point. He’d be right.

One could grow weary of all those who are decrying the poor plight of White people.

Not that there isn’t a large group of White folks whose lives, to be succinct, pretty much suck.

The constant harping by Carlson and his ilk continues to push the idea that White people are being discriminated against through the efforts of those who are the elites, media, black and brown people, who look down on them.

It is playing to the idea of them and us. Carlson may push the idea he’s just backing the people in East Palestine in their fight against the others but in reality he’s part of the media elite.

It’s all about the ratings folks, all about the ratings (see Dominion suit against Fox News where Fox’s talking heads knew they were lying to the American public when they kept pushing election fraud commentaries).

The next time you hear about “reverse discrimination” or replacement theory, ignore it, whether you’re Black, brown and yes, white.

— Kendall P. Stanley is retired editor of the News-Review. He can be contacted at kendallstanley@charter.net. The opinions expressed in this column are those of the writer and not necessarily of the Petoskey News-Review or its employees.

This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: Kendall Stanley: It’s alright to be white?