Tijuana anti-immigrant protests & Tucker Carlson's definition of races

In 1978, I led a group of American educators on a tour of China. It was an exciting time to visit. President Nixon had ended 25 years of US attempts to isolate the People's Republic of China just six years earlier, and we were among the first western tourists to visit since the revolution in 1949.

While in Beijing, we were given a tour of the National Minority Institute, where we were told of the more than fifty national and ethnic minorities that live in China, the ongoing struggle against discrimination and great Han chauvinism. As we were leaving the institute, I overheard a white member of our overwhelmingly white tour group say:

I don't believe they have any minorities in China. They all look Chinese to me.

I was reminded to that comment Monday evening by Tucker Carlson. He was focused on one of his usual subjects - the Honduran migrant caravan making its way through Mexico to the US border. Under the leadership of Donald Trump, he and the rest of the Fox News crowd have been crying wolf about what they call an "invasion" of poor refugee families. US white supremacists, led by Donald Trump, have effectively taken over the Republican Party, and have been using anti-immigrant agitation as a gateway to their more extreme goal of creating a white ethnostate.

Tucker Carlson, Fox News 19 Nov 2018

In Tijuana, on Sunday, there was a small anti-immigrant protest by Mexican citizens who support Trump's position on the Honduran caravan. While most Mexicans have been very accepting and supportive of these Central American refugees, Tijuana has become the center of anti-immigrant activities in Mexico. There Mayor Juan Manuel Gastélum, who has been called "The Trump of Tijuana" and "Donald Trump Jr.," because of his hateful rhetoric directed at the caravan, has created a favorable climate for that opposition.

It might be said that Donald Trump has adopted him with this tweet:

The Mayor of Tijuana, Mexico, just stated that “the City is ill-prepared to handle this many migrants, the backlog could last 6 months.” Likewise, the U.S. is ill-prepared for this invasion, and will not stand for it. They are causing crime and big problems in Mexico. Go home!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 18, 2018

The neo-Nazi Daily Stormer also supports him. They quote extensively from the Mayor's "choice words for this group of brown movers," saying "those certainly sound like statements that someone from ICE or the KKK would make," before complaining that "Simply saying that a group of brown people are committing crimes is an act of racial hatred."

Of course, one reason Tijuana has such a massive problem is although thousands of refugees are trying to seek asylum, the US is playing a game of asylum suppression, not unlike the Trump campaign policy of voter suppression, by accepting claims at a handful of legal ports of entry like San Diego, where they are processing only 100 claims a day.

Mayor Juan Manuel Gastélum in a Trump styled "Make Tijuana Great Again" hat. Does he realize how ironic it is that he says this in ENGLISH, or did he just want to make sure it could be read by his target audience? Does he also agreed with the way Trump talks about Mexicans? Trump talked about the Mayor again in his Thanksgiving call to the troops in which he said he also authorized the US army to use "lethal force" at the border "if they have to." Does this "Mexican patriot" also support Trump on that?

Tijuana has already had its own challenges in recent years, like more than 2000 homicides in 2018, before 3000 refugees started camping out near the border crossing. Given encouragement from the mayor, the anti-immigrant propaganda coming from north of the border, and who knows what other incentives, it's surprising that they could only muster about 300 "Mexico First" protesters willing to say things like:

"Trump was right! This is an invasion!"

However, those 300 where enough for Tucker Carlson to build a show segment around because he thought he could use this protest to demonstrate that the dislike of immigrants he promotes nightly was universal [xenophobic], and not racist. Tucker thought that since they were Mexicans protesting immigrants from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, he could use them to argue that white supremacy was not behind the anti-immigrant campaign in the US either. The Daily Stormer thought they could use the story the same way:

It looks as if the Jew-run media is mostly trying to ignore what’s happening in Tijuana. That’s because there’s no way they can really spin a narrative in their favor. For weeks they were claiming that the bad orange man in the White House was lying about the caravan. But what’s happening in Tijuana proves that he was right. The mere fact that the Mexicans want these invaders to go back to where they came from is proof of this.
...
They do however have multiple videos about Jim Acosta’s press pass and a video about Apple’s CEO Tim Cook talking about how he wants to brainwash children into becoming faggots.
...
Their narrative about the caravan was wrong and they can’t start calling Mexicans racist for being angry at the situation. And they definitely want to ignore the fact that Tijuana’s mayor is basically agreeing with Trump in saying that these invaders need to go back to their shitholes.

Since Tucker pretends to be "Fair & Balanced," he can't be that direct, so he invited on Enrique Acevedo, an anchor at Univision, to be his guest for this segment on the Tijuana protest.

Tucker played Fox News interviews with four protesters. The show used subtitles even though all the Mexican protesters they interviewed were speaking very intelligible English. They said things like "these are bad people", "they don't belong here", "this is not about racism," and "these caravans are committing crimes." Tucker then proceeded as though those were majority opinions in Mexico, and put his main premise to his guest:

Tucker: I'm confused. We just saw a group of Mexican citizens in Tijuana saying basically the same things that President Trump says, almost to the word endorsing Trump. Are they white supremacists?

Enrique: Well, you have to understand that unlike human beings, intolerance, hate, and even racism flow freely across borders, and that's what you saw in those interviews. They're not running for president. They're not running for president in the United States either. They are part of a group of around 300 protesters in a city of 1.3 million who, like many others along the way of this Caravan, are opposed to their presence in Tijuana, and you know, the overwhelming majority of people in Tijuana welcome immigrants. It's a city of immigrants.

Tucker: Wait but, wait but, I'm sorry, can I just backup a little bit? Its a big city for sure. Hold on. Woe, I think you just said that they're racist but they're Latino, Spanish-speaking Latinos attacking other Spanish-speaking Latinos. So where's the racism?

Enrique: Well, we're not a monolithic community Tucker. We have people from Central America, from Venezuela, from Colombia. Different backgrounds, different ethnicities, and yes, racism exists in Mexico toward Central Americans. It's not new. It's happened through...

Tucker: Okay, but I'm not quite sure how it's racism if they appear to be of the same race?

Anti immigrant protest in Tijuana getting violent. They start attacking woman defending Honduran migrants in caravan. Yelling perra (bitch) pic.twitter.com/aeauXYoASt

— Emily Green (@emilytgreen) November 18, 2018

Like that educator on my tour that could see only Chinese in China, Tucker Carlson puts everybody south of the US southern border into the same race of brown people. That's how he thinks about race. He is white and all of them are brown, including, no doubt, the Mayor of Tijuana, and those are objective, immutable racial categories, and not his subjective and culturally derived opinion.

He is delusional.

He should start with the objective reality that while humans of all races and nationalities have eyeballs and teeth that are white (more or less), nobody has skin that is objectively the color white. The main determinate of human skin color is its density of melanin. As the English rulers of colonial America begin to create a system of African slavery as a solution to their labor problems, they sought to built a pro-slavery unity among all those exempt from slavery based on their lighter skin color, and for this new synthetic "race" they appropriated the label "white" because it carried with it many positive attributes. Soon after that, they began to label the Africans they were enslaving "black," although their skin color was not black like their hair color. They labeled them "black" because that color already had many negative connotations. These labels were chosen to support slavery and white supremacy. This happened in the 17th century in what would become the United States.

It was a marketing and branding coup d'état, and the inauguration of white supremacy. People like Tucker, who don't understand the fraudulent nature of the title "white," and think of themselves as white, also assume that racism or white supremacy is limited to the sphere of conflict or interaction between "white people" and "people of color," indeed they strive to limit it to that, as though the racial categories he has in his head have some objective, persistent reality to them. This makes it hard for him to understand that their was a time when people he may now welcomes into the white race, such as the Irish, Jews, and less than a hundred years ago, as I reported in The Rise of Xenophobia, the Poles, where not considered white and were subjected to racism, or white supremacy, by those that did consider themselves white. I wonder in Tucker considers Jews white, even today. I know his Daily Stormer buddies don't. I'll bet Gastélum thinks he is white, although Tucker thinks he is the same race as every other Latino.

It is also problematic for racists like Tucker to conceive of a white supremacist hierarchy existing among people he considers all to be in another race. This is a simpleminded view of the world.

Anyone familiar with African American culture and history knows very well that there is a racist hierarchy of discrimination based on skin color, with lighter skin being favored. This discrimination is supported by the white power structure, but it also is a reflection of white supremacy within the oppressed race. In other places, I have report on how even in Sudan, Africa, among the brown and black skin population, where exists a white supremacist hierarchy enforced by those who think themselves "white" no matter how brown they may look to European eyes.

The Guardian also reported on this protest. Sarah Kinosian wrote:

On Sunday, anti-caravan protesters chanted: “Out Hondurans, we don’t want you here”, “Tijuana first” and “Long live Mexico”, and waved Mexican flags and signs reading “no to the invasion” and “no more migrants”.

The group, which at its height numbered about 300, gathered in front of a statue of the Aztec warrior Cuauhtémoc before making their way to a sports complex serving as a temporary shelter to about 2,500 migrants from the caravan.

She also wrote about how this Mexican anti-immigrant movement had been influenced by the US:

While many have welcomed the migrants – as they have the thousands of others who have come to the city over recent years – some Tijuana residents have expressed hostility to the caravan, amid intense media coverage and aggressive rhetoric from the US president, Donald Trump.

The Associated Press echoed this sentiment, saying that while some blamed the backlash on the sudden arrival of the caravan:

Others point to social media and the hostile rhetoric of U.S. President Donald Trump, who said it harbored criminals and gang members and was planning an "invasion."

There has been a well developed social media campaign at work building this anti-immigrant movement in Mexico. Karla Zabludovsky on Buzzfeed wrote about this 15 November  2018 in The Racist Backlash To The Migrant Caravan Is Building In WhatsApp Groups In Mexico:

Several Facebook and WhatsApp groups advocating for the caravan's deportation have sprung up in the month since the migrants set out from Honduras, underscoring escalating anti-immigrant sentiment in northern Mexico. The violent language used against Central Americans in these groups echoes that used by Trump supporters in the US, referring to the caravan as an "invasion" and issuing a call to arms in defense of borders.

Inside the WhatsApp chat, people have felt free to share their unfiltered views:

"These people are a Cancer that signals the end of Mexico."

"I'm asking the men here to defend their women and children... Since the majority of Central Americans who've arrived are men, violent thefts will start any moment now."

"Plagues are confronted with venom. And [bullets] are the venom here. Hondurans are equal to gonorrhea."

Other messages in a WhatsApp group called "Citizen’s Blockade" — which BuzzFeed News had access to after joining a related, closed Facebook page — included suggestions to deliver pizza and hamburgers filled with pesticide to migrants, and a call to burn down one of the biggest shelters in the city. The group has more than 250 participants.

Considering that all that they still had only 200-300 protesters at their rally. These are the people Tucker supports-a minority of haters who advocate violence. James Fredrick, writing for NPR described them as a "few hundred Tijuanenses gathered in the city's high-end Rio area." While some of the marchers headed for Mayor Gastélum's office, other headed off towards a shelter where more than 2,500 immigrants are staying. Alonzo Castillo, 37, a construction worker from Honduras was not intimidated by their tactics, and had no trouble putting a name to what they are facing:

“I’m not afraid of them, this is just racism.”

Tucker Carlson may think that opposition to Central American immigrants in Mexico can't be based on racism because they all "appear to be of the same [brown] race," but as CNN Contributor Ruben Navarrette Jr. wrote in 2012 In Mexico, racism hides in plain view:

The enduring taboo subject is skin color, whether an individual's complexion betrays an allegiance to the Spanish who conquered the Aztec empire in 1521 or the Aztecs who were conquered. It's no exaggeration to say that, in this country and especially in this city, the best, highest-paying, most important jobs often seem to go to those who, in addition to having the best education and the strongest connections, have the lightest skin.

On television, in politics and in academia, you see light-skinned people. On construction sites, in police forces and in restaurant kitchens, you're more likely to find those who are dark-skinned. In the priciest neighborhoods, the homeowners have light skin, and the housekeepers are dark. Everyone knows this, and yet no one talks about it, at least not in elite circles.

He also talked about the role this racism has played in holding Mexico back:

Nor do Mexicans seem all that eager to discuss the larger dynamic that race feeds into: the fact that this is, and has always been, a country of deep divisions. In the 100 years since the Mexican Revolution, one part of Mexico has often been at war with another: urban vs. rural, rich vs. poor and, yes, dark-skinned vs. light-skinned.

It's one reason that institutions such as the economy, the political system and the social structure haven't matured as quickly as they should have, given Mexico's advantages.

This country of 120 million people has ports, highways, airports and skyscrapers. It takes in billions of dollars every year in revenues from oil and natural gas, and billions more from tourism and remittances from Mexican migrants living abroad. Mexico's economy is growing faster than the U.S. economy, and investments are flowing in from Asia and Europe. It's consistently within the top three of trading partners for the United States. But what good is all that when only a small number of the population can live up to their full potential? Prejudice kills progress.

Those like Tucker Carlson who promote the narrowest possible view of the problems caused by racism are just wrong. It was a core feature in the development of early capitalism because white supremacy was developed as a ideological tool that could be used to justify domination not only of the newly created "non-white" people of the Earth, but the very Earth itself. Just as it has held back Mexico's develop, so has it held back revolutionary development worldwide. Capitalism can never be transcended so long as white supremacy has so many under its spell.

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Fox News host @kilmeade compares refugee caravan to oil spill

This morning on Outnumbered, Fox News personality Brian Kilmeade said that he thought all US citizens should see the refugees fleeing violence as if they were an oil spill head towards our shores:

There are difficult issues to figure out, and they're easy issues to figure out where both parties stand, but I thought this would be as black and white as the Deepwater Horizon oil leak, when everyone who saw when that platform exploded, that oil leaking into the water in the Gulf, they said "We've got to stop that!" And Obama paid the price because it took forever to do it, he was just starting. We all agreed "Stop the oil leak!"

When you have eight thousand people, roughly, marching towards our border, who we know nothing about, who Sarah Carter just told me on the radio, she's in Guatemala, most of them are men, very few families. We know nothing about them, coming to our border. I would think Democrats and Republicans would go "Yeah, this is a problem. We have a System."

Dehumanizing immigrants and refugees in not new on Fox News, their mouthpieces gleefully parrot President Donald Trump when he implies all undocumented Latinos are MS-13, and refers to these immigrants as "animals," but this may represent a new low in their efforts to stoke the genocidal side of racism.

Fancying myself something of a wordsmith, I can appreciate how well crafted these 146 words are. First, he adopts a causal attitude while stating that his position is a "no-brainer," that the only two possible parties, or positions, obviously should agree with it. With that out of the way, he brings to mind questions of race with his reference to "black and white." There is a lot being done with those three words here, so we must spend a minute on them.

Those words are used often in reference to race on Fox News, so naturally they bring to mind that topic, but here Kilmeade is using them as synonyms for "good" and "bad," or "right" and "wrong." These are the primary, immutable, even pre-cultural meanings of these words. The application of the word "white" to the European settlers in the "New World," and eventually to Europeans everywhere, and the simultaneous labeling of Africans, or in many cases, all people of color, as "black," are secondary definitions these words acquired less than 400 years ago as African slavery was being established in colonial America. The original trick of white supremacy was the fraudulent claiming of the label "white," together with all its virtuals, for a selected group of people based on a lighter skin color. I have written more about this in The two meanings of white. Here Kilmeade encapsulates all of that in his choice of these three words as he segues into his racist analogy: He compares people fleeing violence to an oil leak that needs to be stopped.

Eight thousand was an over-estimation when he said it.

The choice of "roughly" as a synonym for "approximately" was also not an accident. It was designed to support the image of men marching towards our border, and to support the lie that this is not a caravan of families, which it is.

He brings up Obama, but then gives him a pass. This is to show that he's not a racist.

He has the gall to claim "We know nothing about them," in spite of the fact that, by now, just about every major news organization in the US, including Fox News, has reporters among the marchers. The message: They aren't human like us, a point he makes twice.

He evokes these racist images of white and black again with his oil spill analogy. He doesn't have to mention the colors again. The image he brings to mind is that of black oil spoiling our white beaches.

These forty seconds simply reek with racist imagery. This was a purposefully crafted statement, almost certainly read from a teleprompter. It was no accidental outburst. Fox News is quite consciously attempting to create a fear of immigrants of color coming to what they project as a white country under siege. The way they chose to do this lays the psychological basis for the most inhumane treatment of refugees, including genocidal mass murder. After all, we put fire on advancing oil slicks to stop them from reaching our shores, didn't we?

Attempting to contain Deepwater-Horizon oil spill with fire	Honduran migrant caravan on the move
Oil soaked pelicans from the spill (Daniel Beltra/Greenpeace)	Fox News lies, many women & children are in the caravan

Every major genocide of the last century was proceeded by a propaganda campaign carried out by  media outlets designed to paint the targeted people as less than human. In Rwanda, it was radio stations that called the Tutsi "cockroaches," in Nazi Germany, Goebbels' control of all media labeled the Jews as "rats." Now we have Fox News referring to refugees as an oil leak. David Moshman wrote about the role such dehumanization plays in promoting genocide in a paper titled "Us and Them: Identity and Genocide," 2007 Department of Educational Psychology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

In dehumanization, those deemed to be members of the out-group are denied the status of persons. Rather than being seen as members of a human community with individual identities of their own, they are construed as elements of a subhuman, nonhuman, or antihuman collective (Woolf & Hulsizer, 2005).

In the period leading up to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, for example, the Tutsi were persistently portrayed in Hutu Power propaganda as inyenzi, cockroaches. Not only were they a group distinct from the Hutu, regardless of their individual identity commitments, but they were increasingly construed as a group distinct from humanity, not capable of meaningful individual identities. Thus the killing of Tutsi was no more a violation of individual rights than the killing of cock roaches or, in another metaphor also popularized by Hutu Power, the pulling of weeds. On the contrary, given the threat allegedly posed by the Tutsi to the future of Rwanda, their elimination was deemed a moral imperative.

Similarly, a key aspect of the path to the Holocaust was the relentless dehumanization of Jews (Stannard, 1998, pp. 182–183). As Germans with Jewish ancestry were increasingly seen as Jews above all else, they came to be seen as less than fully German, and ultimately as less than fully human, part of a nonhuman mass of Jews. For Hitler, Jews were anti-human. Weitz (2003) provides a concise summary of the biological metaphors of Hitler’s Mein Kampf: “Jews were the maggots feeding on a rotting corpse, the parasites that had to be surgically removed, the sexual predators preying on German women, a spider that sucks people’s blood, a plague worse than the Black Death, the sponger who spreads like a noxious bacillus and then kills his host” (p. 106). Franz Stangl, in contrast, did not share Hitler’s animosity toward Jews, but Stangl’s blander dehumanizations were sufficient to enable him to serve as commandant of the death camp Treblinka (Moshman, 2005b; Sereny, 1983). To him the Jews were more like “cattle,” a mindless herd, making its way toward the slaughterhouse where it would be transformed into “a mass of rotting flesh” that “had nothing to do with humanity.” The Jews were “cargo” to be transported and their bodies were “garbage” to be disposed of. “I rarely saw them as individuals,” he explained. “It was always a huge mass.” (Sereny, 1983, p. 201)

This brings us right back to the Fox News analogy of the Honduran refugee masses hoping to be saved by coming to the United States as a dirty, smelly, dark, oil slick approaching our white beaches. A danger that clearly must be warded off at all costs. This is first rate racist propaganda. Goebbels would be jealous.

In many racist memes, the people to be dehumanized are called some other animal, like a monkey, rat, or cockroach, in Kilmeade's metaphor, the Honduran refugees aren't even considered animals, not even the distressed oil-soaked birds above. They are likened to the oil.

Its hard to imagine a more racist projection. Its easy to see how it supports the psychology of genocide. A billionaire's corporation is promoting this in the United States today for a reason.

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Excusing Trump's racism: Tucker Carlson is not as stupid as he looks

A most hypocritical complaint:

"We've gotten to a place where nobody can be honest about anything."
                                                             -Tucker Carlson @ 03:19

Tucker Carlson began his Thursday evening Fox News show with a full-throated defense of President Donald Trump and his labeling of Haiti, El Salvador and unspecified African countries "shitholes."

He had Jose Parra, the "Latino communications director for Barack Obama's 2012 campaign," on as a guest. Carlson couldn't understand why anybody thought Trump's comment was racist. As usual, he acted as if it was just beyond the understanding of an intelligent white guy like himself and he called upon Parra to explain. He also called upon Parra to defend Haiti.

Carlson: President Trump said something that almost every single person in America actually agrees with. An awful lot of immigrants come to this country from other places that aren't very nice. Those places are dangerous. They're dirty. They're corrupt. They're poor, and that's the main reason those immigrants are trying to come here, and you would too if you lived there. President Trump asked why America doesn't receive more immigrants from places you might want to visit on vacation. Why aren't we getting more people from Norway, he said, which by almost any measure including the UN's measures is the most developed and richest country in the world. While saying this Trump used an expletive, and that's not surprising either since he uses them all the time and was speaking privately and yet for some reason virtually everyone in Washington, New York, and LA considered this a major major event. @00:11

Carlson's generalizations of various third world countries as dangerous, dirty, and corrupt is, of course, a racist stereotype that tells us more about the workings of his own mind than it does about Haiti, El Salvador or Africa. All around the world, you will find big cities that are "dirty" or have "dirty" parts depending on how you define "dirt" [see yesterday's blog], and dangerous and corrupt, make me think of Putin's Russia first, although there are a host of contenders. And while Norway may be a great place to vacation, it might not be for everyone. Business Insider ranked it the third most expensive place in Europe to vacation, at $183.76 per night, more expensive than Rome ($153.84), London ($151.40), or Paris ($145.89). Carlson probably also isn't a fan of Norway's 27% corporate income tax rate.

Carlson is sidetracking the discussion to avoid the main issue, which is that Trump didn't just swear, he used a word that raises very potent primeval images because it speaks darkly to the unconscious mind of the racist. The main tactic he uses to sidetrack the discussion is to set up a straw comparison so he can complain about "dishonesty," as through he honestly can't see why people say Donald Trump is a racist:

Carlson: I think we're kind of having that debate but what bothers me about the explosion this afternoon is the dishonesty in it, and I'll just give you one example: Joan Walsh over at MSNBC, an analyst over there, was asked just a minute ago would you rather live in Haiti or Norway, and she said with a straight face "I can't say." Now that's lying! If we've gotten to a point where we all have to pretend that every country is exactly as nice as every other country then we're being dishonest.

Even a billionaire like Haiti's Gregory Brandt above can't do this on most days in Norway.

While Carlson is clearly striving to equate Norway with "good" and Haiti with "bad," the question of which place an individual might prefer to live in is not as clear cut as Tucker would like us to believe. It really is a question of personal preference, and Carlson is forgetting at least two important facts: 1) The rich live well everywhere, and 2) Norway is cold no matter how rich you are. Also 8 hours of sunlight is the longest day, 18°C (64°F) is about the hottest, and cold is a whole nother story, so it certainly won't be everyone's cup of tea.

Carlson: We know he said these countries are crummy places, okay? They're holes or whatever profanity, but the people who left those countries, some of them rode trains all way through Mexico or hid in a wheel well of a plane to leave, they would agree with that. So why the outrage? Is it you have to lie, and pretend as Joan Walsh does "I don't know if I'd live in Norway or Haiti." Like we've gotten to a place where nobody can be honest about anything.

Carlson most conveniently forgets that Haiti was wrecked by an earthquake exactly eight years ago today,  3 million people were affected and as many as 316,000 lost their lives, and El Salvador was been ravished by civil war that led to 40,000 political murders and other manmade problems, and with regards to those, the United States has a lot to answer for:

Carlson: I mean one is the richest country in the world [ed note: Qatar ($124,930) > Norway ($70,590) per capita] , the other is one of the poorest countries in the world. You think it's immoral to point that out? It's a statement of values? I'm asking you a very simple question: If Haiti isn't such a bad place why don't we say to the people who are here temporarily in refuge from Haiti go back? It's great! We don't say that because it's not great actually. It's everything the president said. It was not an attack on Haitians. It's an acknowledgement that their country is not as nice as other countries, and if you can't even say that out loud without being called a racist by people like you, and the morons over on MSNBC...I'm saying anybody who says that's a racist statement should explain how it is.

The whole point of the segment was to defend Trump's "shithole countries" statement by claiming that it wasn't a racist slur. The denigration of Haiti and Joan Walsh was just fill, and Tucker Carlson managed to talk his way through the segment without mentioning "shit" by that or one of its many other names. He acted as though he was ignorant of what it was about Trump's comment that made it so incendiary, and thoroughly racist to the core. I would point him to yesterday's blog, How Trump's "shithole" comment reveals the psychology of his racism for an education, but he has already made it clear in at least one past show that he clearly understands even his own infantile obsession with feces and how it is intertwined with the mythology of racism.

Tucker Carlson used the feces fantasy to condemn Roma people, which he called "gypsies" moving to Pennsylvania. Anna Merlan wrote about it in Jezebel, 18 July 2017:

[O]n Monday, he invited a Roma filmmaker named George Eli on his program and demanded to know why his people can’t use toilets:


Eli gently suggested that both the townspeople and the new arrivals “are suffering from a little bit of culture shock.” But Carlson had poop on his mind, and could not be swayed.

“I have heard a lot of people mention, I hate to say it, public defecation,” Carlson told Eli. “There are a lot of news stories about this going back a long time in the UK and here.” He mentioned pooping on “playgrounds and sidewalks and front steps... That seems to me to be a hostile act.”

Eli chuckled but kept it together, telling Tucker that while he didn’t know exactly what was going on in Pennsylvania, “I’ve been Roma all my life and my family’s been Roma all my life and we use bathrooms... I can’t respond to something I’ve never seen as a Roma person.”

Tucker could not be swayed. He wanted to talk about the poop. “What’s that about?” he inquired. “It’s not something you need to do. So you have to assume it’s a statement.”

Eli did his best here, pointing out that some Roma people are from rural areas without great sanitation, while also clearly thinking to himself, “Why does this guy want to talk about poop so bad?”

Tucker Carlson wanted to associate the Roma people with poop for the same reason Donald Trump has taken to calling poor countries populated by people of color "shithole countries."  This infantile association is one of the strongest fortifications white supremacy has built into western culture and in times when white hegemony is being threatened, they feel the need to rev it up.

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