Molineaux is co-publisher of The Fulcrum and president/CEO of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
Let’s look at historic migration and demographic shifts. All humans descended from homo sapiens in Africa, spreading across the globe and growing from family nomadic groups to larger tribes; then to regional communities and now nation states. Through it all, we have fought over land, wealth, political power and prestige.
Our ancestors were no better and no worse than our neighbors; some were oppressed or supplanted, others oppressors and plunderers.
The “great replacement” nonsense (GRN), the idea that the white race will be relegated to minority status and lose power, is myth-making of the highest order. There are good guys (white people), damsels/children in distress (sex trafficking) and bad guys (migrants, supported by liberals and socialists). It’s the classic, if perverted, hero’s journey. We worship heroes in Western culture, so much so that we are easily manipulated by this perverted story that “those people” are out to get “us and our livelihood.”
The book that outlined the demise of “white-centered culture” misses the point. We are all human, descended from Africa. And the projected demographic shifts are a modern fairy tale about land, wealth, political power and prestige; who has it and who doesn’t deserve it. It is based on a myth that our physical characteristics define us. They don’t.
Taken from a historical perspective, our fellow humans are doing what we’ve always done: migrate and propagate. It’s not about replacement. It’s about desire and ambition for something better. Something better for our children.
Putative migration waves out of Africa. Saioa López, Lucy van Dorp and Garrett Hellenthal/ Wikimedia
If migration is part of the human experience, how could we prepare for it? Instead of retreating into our bunkers of ideology and groupthink of victimhood, how can we manage migration better?
In the United States, the answer might be an immigration policy overhaul. Creating a system that is coherent and not contradictory. Of course, people who are fighting over land, wealth, political power and prestige don’t want the competition. They like our society as it is. And fear becoming a minority in their own nation.
Which leads me to wonder what it would look and feel like to protect minority rights, instead of stripping them away. If we could reach a point where we are all protected, being in the minority doesn’t matter. But what about the land, wealth, political power and prestige? At least we are addressing the real issues instead of the fake differences. And we will continue to fight about these things, because we are human.
And this brings up another human behavior – our tendency towards group-think as a way to belong. I recently wrote about how easily we can be manipulated by our sense of belonging. And the GRN is another example of providing a story that some people would prefer and then manipulating people to take action that could lead us into a dystopian reality. Unfortunately, and with growing frequency, we are seeing people take violent action against the "other." Just look at what happened in Buffalo last weekend.
Then I ask myself, how do we move forward? Loretta Ross suggested The New York Times that we need to develop an attitude to co-create a better future, through calling-in instead of calling out:
“As it turns out, all of that shaming may be counterproductive. Multiple studies,” Ms. Crockett said, “have found that shaming can make people more resistant to change.”
“When you ask people to give up hate, you have to be there for them when they do.” said the Rev. C.T. Vivian to then new employee Loretta Ross.
“We have a saying in the movement: Some people you can work with and some people you can work around. But the thing that I want to emphasize is that the calling-in practice means you always keep a seat at the table for them if they come back.”
This is our challenge. Using our hearts to connect and belong, our minds to persuade others to share with a sense of dignity for all, and our bodies to produce acts of kindness and demonstrate love to our fellow humans. We all come from shared ancestors and we cannot be replaced.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.