Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties.
The state of the GOP is not good.
Tucker Carlson, the top-rated host on Fox “News” Channel, has been attracting attention for a while with his vile rhetoric against immigrants. Yet now he’s reached a new low.
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On Thursday night, Carlson moved even closer to white supremacist ideology by explicitly endorsing the Great Replacement theory, which holds that shadowy elites are orchestrating a plot to replace native-born White people with immigrants of color. The New Zealand shooter’s manifesto was literally headlined “The Great Replacement,” and the neo-Nazis who marched in Charlottesville chanted “Jews will not replace us.”
Carlson knows exactly how toxic the word “replacement” is when used in the context of immigration, but he nevertheless put his imprimatur on it: “Now, I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term ‘replacement,’ if you suggest that 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. But they become hysterical because that’s what’s happening actually. Let’s just say it: That’s true.”
Andrew Kaczynski and Em Steck at CNN:
Texas Republican Party chairman Allen West falsely suggested that Texas could secede from the United States and become an independent country, a CNN KFile review of his comments in recent months shows.
In radio interviews after the 2020 presidential election, West suggested Texas could vote to again become a republic, as it was before joining the United States in 1845.
"This is something that was written into the Texas Constitution," the former congressman said in one late December radio broadcast. "Or it was promised to Texas when we became part of the United States of America-- that if we voted and decided, we could go back to being our own republic."
Experts, however, say that Texas cannot legally secede and leave the United States to become its own republic. The annexation resolution West is referring to stipulates that Texas could, in the future, choose to divide itself into five new states, not divide itself from the US and declare independence. West mistook the congressional annexation resolution that made Texas a state for the Texas constitution.
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Speaking on the Truth and Liberty broadcast on January 4 --two days before the Capitol insurrection which would leave five people dead--West said the US was already engaged in an "ideological civil war."
"I heard one person say, 'but man, this can cause us a civil war,'" the host, Andrew Wommack, argued. "And the other person says, 'well, we've already fought one. Was it worth it? Was it worth it to free the slaves? "Is it worth it to save our Constitution?' You can't judge what's right. Based on how other people are going to respond. You just have to do what's right. And face the consequences."
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In other interviews, West contended that states could choose not to follow executive orders or even federal laws they deem unconstitutional.
"I think it was North or South Dakota, this constitutional nullification," West said in February 2021. "Because we have to have state legislatures that say, look, if you are signing executive orders that are not constitutionally sound, we're not obligated. We're not going to follow these things. So we want you to go through the right process."
