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America’s True Life A Path Forward From Here

The most advanced industrial democracy on the planet stands today in deep distress; critical societal divisions, political dysfunction, and severe economic challenges. In a society that champions individual and local states’ rights, average families and most local agencies are in deep despair. This discord appears to have revitalized the fervent seed which burns in soil of America. - racial intolerance and oppression. And that seed has produced disastrous fruit.

A recent poll by the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that one in three Americans believe some derivation of the Great Replacement theory. This formerly extremist, right-wing proposition holds that immigrants and non-white citizens are engaged in a plot to displace the political power, the economic prominence, and the culture of white people in Western cultures. Apparently, it has moved to the mainstream of American psyche.

Ennis Leon Jacobs, Jr.

I do not ignore the political actors, the talking heads, and others who are advocating this theory, with varied motives, generally stoking fear and trepidation within society. However, they are not completely ignored – they are center stage in words from long ago; Psalms 94:1-15, and Isaiah 10:1-4.

Instead, the focus here goes to the dark bedroom of Payton Gendron, the 18 year-old young man who killed 10 people in a Buffalo, New York supermarket. Details of this young man, much from his own diary, suggest confusion about basic issues of history, and of race, and extreme vulnerability to rancid misinformation he found online. In dark isolation, he anchored his thoughts and beliefs to the Great Replacement theory, and to the underlying cultural, stereotypical and racial biases on which it relies. Growing up in a nearly all-white Conklin, NY, he lacked interracial and intercultural relationships and experiences that would counteract the extreme biases integral to the Great Replacement theory. The unjust violence by some law enforcement, the Buffalo shootings, subsequent attacks on Asian Americans, as well as attacks on Jewish Americans, and others now frame a moment of reckoning for America. How substantial is the influence of extremism inow HHexteremism American mainstream culture?