(NOTE: My first contribution to Daily Kos a few days ago (“Those Noises You’re Hearing Are the Death Throes of Male White Supremacy Ideology”) trended far beyond my wildest expectations. Thanks to those who encouraged me to keep spouting off. Here it is!)

I’m the last person seeking to stoke the fires of mass delusion of white male supremacists regarding their “Great Replacement Theory.”  But it seems to me that they are  people who should be replaced — or at least incarcerated — for the way they’re behaving toward their fellow citizens.  And many of them have been, post-January , 2021 as a result of their attack on our democracy.  I sincerely hope their ringleaders (the ones still walking around at Mar a Lago and in the halls of Congress) follow them to those hollow halls in the not-too-distant future.

The Great Replacement Theory is male white supremacists’ delusion of a concerted effort to flood the United States with people of color in such numbers that white people end up being as marginalized and mistreated as their white male supremacist policies have been treating everyone who isn’t a white male. And I suppose I might be mildly upset if I lent even a scintilla of credence to that claptrap, since I’m a white trans male.

Here are the facts. Given the global population, white people are just a tad over 10% of it at this time. If people of color were intent on destroying us, they could have done so quite easily (outnumbered as whites have always been) during the eras when we were “colonizing” their continents, destroying their cultures, sequestering them on reservations, stealing black and brown and yellow men and women to serve as slaves, butchering the wildlfe that sustained them, lynching and raping them…

I could go on and on, but you get my drift.

I am not afraid of being replaced except by white male supremacists who will stop at nothing to get thir way, including denying the vote to people of color,  attempted insurrections, attacking LGBTQIA+ individuals, and more.

My gut doesn’t clench when I come into proximity with  black, brown, red, and yellow individuals. It does clench when I run across open-carry white men who won’t go anywhere in public without packing.

I don’t consider them “good guys with guns.”  I consider them individual powder kegs, looking for confrontations and “bad guys”  in all the wrong places. If you want to go to war, fellas, please feel free to enlist at your nearest armed forces kiosk!  (But woe be it to our armed forces and subsequently to the world at large should they elect to accept you.) Don’t signal your readiness to kill by  intimidating the rest of us.

But if your open carry behavior signals fear instead of fight (which I’m more than half convinced it does), perhaps you ought to look around you to see all of the other people who are going about their day without displaying weapons. Most of us are perfectly fine shopping among a diversity of souls.

What the far right needs to do is stop demonizing those of us who aren’t on the white male supremacist bandwagon. There are far more of us than there are white male supremacists, and all we seek is a level playing field. We want to be able to live our lives without worrying which white bastards are going to ruin our lives and the lives of our loved ones by insisting on their way or the highway.

Yes, ours is a counter-cultural movement away from the vision of white male supremacist, slave-owning founding fathers. There were founding fathers (and mothers) who decried slavery and insisted on the separation of church and state., so we aren’t Johnny-come-latelies. We’ve always been here. It’s far past time to find out what  the United States can become when we all have a hand in forming its policies and future.

I have a feeling everyone will breathe sighs of relief — including white male supremacists. Because being a bully is a heavy weight to carry.

Case in point: I know a man who used to wear black leather Hells Angels garb and heavy chains around his neck. He weighed well over 350 pounds and rode a Harley. He was a real badass-looking dude and he loved the attention and deference he always received.

But one day, he stepped off his hog and started walking up a sidewalk.  A small, white-haired old lady saw him approaching in her direction, visibly panicked, clutched her purse to her chest, and crossed the street. She looked utterly terrified.

In that moment, he felt like an abject fool. Following that encounter, he told me he divested himself of his badass accoutrements, ashamed of having visibly and viscerally intimidated a fellow citizen.

And it turns out, he was one of the nicest guys I ever met. He adored animals, really did love people, and he eventually became a well-regarded IT guy at Warner Bros. because someone led him in a different direction from the one he’d been on before he scared someone spitless.

I expect there are a lot of really nice guys who are masquerading as badasses.  Prove me right, please. Step away from the sociopaths and identify yourselves. It’s time to stop pretending that what white male supremacists have been doing is okay with you.

We’re waiting to welcome you with open arms.