Hispanics did it

When I was a kid, I had an imaginary friend named Mo-mo. Every time I did something wrong, like drawing on furniture, I told my parents that Mo-mo did it. That Mo-mo was a bad actor and I was just a victim of his poor choices.

It seems the conservative White people have a similar scapegoat, except theirs is not imaginary. Their scapegoat is and always has been brown people. They’ve been blaming people of color for everything from assaulting women to taking jobs since the end of the Civil War.

Now, the right is blaming brown people for spreading COVID. The new disinformation campaign claims undocumented workers are bringing the virus across the border from Mexico. Of course brown people are doing it because dumb White people are incapable of spreading a communicable disease that’s killing them. The right has combined their fear of COVID, immigrants, and caravans into one terrifying narrative. The gullibility and lack of self-awareness among the Republican base is truly stunning. They would be funny except that a major political party embraces, or at least exploits, their views. 

 It’s like racist White folks and the people who exploit them for political gain are on some sort of historical loop. They keep repeating the same bullshit over and over again until they are beaten into oblivion, just to rise again fifty years later. This time, they’re blaming immigrants as much as they are blaming African Americans. 

In their world view, they’ve determined that they have a moral superiority based on their fundamentalist beliefs and skin color. Brown people are always trying to take what is theirs, but their vengeful God will protect them. That God will also forgive hate and violence in the name of keeping brown people in their place—and for Hispanics, that place is not on this side of the border. 

 Republicans and conservative media personalities are starting to gin up the fascist narrative about replacement. They’re telling the base that Democrats want to replace “traditional, classic Americans” with foreigners. They are echoing the “Great Replacement,” a white supremacist theory that influenced several mass shooters in recent years. It also echoes the chants of the White supremacists in Charlottesville who chanted “Jews will not replace us.” 

The sentiment has been promoted by Tucker Carlson and Newt Gingrich. Nobody in the GOP will rebuke the racist language. The ugly, if laughable, theory that COVID is being spread by immigrants instead of by the idiots who won’t get vaccinated will become part of the lore. The GOP leadership will give it a wink and a nod because baseless rumors and outright disinformation are key to motivating their base. 

History shows that if we don’t push back and call out this racist bullshit that it leads to bad outcomes. That a major political party tolerates and encourages such hate is disturbing and dangerous. We’ve already watched the GOP morph from a traditional conservative party to a nationalistic populist one in just a few short years. Their shameless exploitation of an ignorant, angry, and disaffected segment of the population edges us closer and closer to even greater civil discord. 

My parents didn’t let me get away with blaming Mo-mo for my misbehavior. They made me take responsibility. Republicans need to take responsibility for their silence and complicity in letting evil rumors spread and fester.