Josh Marshall caught this little racist “tell” from Trump last night:
Curious how many people caught this reference about people in Georgia who claim “we were here also” and will “take over your farm” under the Democrats.
2/ Confiscations of white farms in southern Africa is a huge topic on the white supremacist right in the US. He’s dog whistling that, saying that slave reparations will mean black folks will be given your farm.
3/ remember this?
4/ Writing for Media Matters, TPM alum @EricKleefeld points out Trump appears to be riffing on a recent episode of Tucker Carlson’s show where he predicts White Farmers in America will soon suffer the same fate as those in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe.
Originally tweeted by Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) on December 6, 2020.
That Kleefeld article is kind of hair raising:
Fox News host Tucker Carlson and other right-wing media outlets are fearmongering about a bill proposed by three Democratic senators, meant to repair historical discrimination against Black farmers, by saying it would amount to the kind of land seizures and social tumult seen in Zimbabwe under the late President Robert Mugabe.
Carlson previously used his show as a platform for far-right theories about farm violence in South Africa — where farmland is heavily owned by whites, as a legacy of the apartheid system — ultimately inspiring a tweet by President Donald Trump as part of the Fox-Trump feedback loop.
Right-wing media also have a long history of attacking any efforts to address the well-documented history of discrimination by government entities against Black farmers in the United States.
On the November 24 edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, Carlson singled out the Justice for Black Farmers Act, a bill announced last week by Sens. Cory Booker (D-NJ), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY). The bill appears to have gained attention on right-wing site Red Elephants, which said Tuesday that “an American nationalist” reached out to the site “to raise awareness” about the proposal.
The official press release for the bill said that it “will enact policies to end discrimination within the [U.S. Department of Agriculture], protect remaining Black farmers from losing their land, provide land grants to create a new generation of Black farmers and restore the land base that has been lost, and implement systemic reforms to help family farmers across the United States.”
Also to be clear, the bill’s own language makes it clear that land would be purchased from “willing sellers” at fair market value — not the sort of land seizures that were conducted in Zimbabwe during Mugabe’s long presidency.
Carlson issued a dire warning to his viewers — tying the bill to the possibility of Democrats winning the U.S. Senate runoffs in Georgia on January 5.
This stuff is just everywhere now and Trump is going to be even more loose with it than he was as president as hard as that might be to believe. He’ll be completely unleashed. Whether he will be able to draw the kind of crowds he does now is yet to be determined. But you know he’ll up the ante to give them what they want.
And it’s pretty clear what they want …
Update: Here’s a piece from the Washington Post’s media reporter Eric Wemple on Tucker Carlson’s shameless propaganda on this subject.