Megyn Kelly and the Rising Tide of Color

I have been processing the Supreme Court’s recent decision regarding TPS and its implications for hundreds of thousands of Haitians and others in this country. I will leave the legal arguments to the experts. What is clear to me, and it has been clear since the beginning, is that the decision, like much of the immigration policies of this administration, is driven by Great Replacement and by an idea that the country belongs only to white people. For many, any policy decision that threatens that assumption is deemed an imminent danger to the Republic. No matter the legal contortions of Justice Alito and his gaggle of conservative companions, that fact—that racist fact—motivates this decision.

But what struck me was the way a certain segment of the country corroborated that view. Megyn Kelly went on a racist rant about the presence of Haitians in the country.

I reposted this video and described it as racist and morally reprehensible. The responses speak volumes about the hellscape that is X, its algorithm that spews racist hatreds like a broken sewage pipe, and the permission structure that Trump and Stephen Miller have given so many in this country to voice openly their white nationalist views.

I was called a nigger for calling out Kelly’s hatred, told to leave the country, labeled a racist, accused of playing the race card (which they declared no longer works) alongside a host of other vile things.

This is the nature of X. Musk has platformed hatred. That much is clear. But I can’t help but read Kelly’s response and the bile she unleashed against the backdrop of the 250th anniversary. She traffics in an old paranoia. Wrapped in the garment of patriotism is a maddening sense of panic, a fear that the white race of this country will be overrun by Black and Brown folk.

In 1920, Lothrop Stoddard published The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy. He stoked the fears that the so-called inferior races threatened the extinction of the white race. Stoddard made the stakes clear:

Finally perish! That is the exact alternative which confronts the white race. For white civilization is to-day conterminous with the white race…. If white civilization goes down, the white race is irretrievably ruined. It will be swamped by the triumphant colored races, who will obliterate the white man by elimination or absorption. What has taken place in Central Asia, once a white and now a brown or yellow land, will take place in Australasia, Europe, and America. Not to-day, nor yet to-morrow; perhaps not for generations; but surely in the end. If the present drift be not changed, we whites are all ultimately doomed. Unless we set our house in order, the doom will sooner or later overtake us all.

These fears had led to the rebirth of the KKK in 1915. They gave voice to a sense of American identity threatened by “internal enemies” who were Black, Catholic, Jewish, immigrant, communist, and in their eyes, morally corrupt. The slogan “100 Percent Americanism”—a country made up of white, native-born men and women dedicated to preserving the institutions, principles, and traditions of America—became a clarion call for many who felt the country slipping away from their fingers.

Kelly and her ilk stand in that tradition, and they should be treated as such. So do the immigration policies of Trump and the legal reasoning of the Court. We can’t sugarcoat this. As I have written before, we have to name the devil that has us by the throat.

We must now contend with what this court decision has unleashed and justified. Lives ripped apart. Hatreds ablaze. And for what? For the likes of Megyn Kelly to declare their possession of this country as theirs and theirs alone and to justify the cruelty that comes with this insidious need to be white and superior.

A haunting repetition in the 250th year of this country.

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