Right-wing Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania drew headlines this week when CNN reported that he cast the Ku Klux Klan as the “military wing of the Democratic Party” during a closed-door congressional briefing on antisemitism. But Perry also promoted the anti-immigrant and antisemitic great replacement theory at the same Oversight Committee briefing, titled “the Origins and Implications of Rising Antisemitism in Higher Education.”
“Replacement theory is real,” Perry said of the extremist conspiracy theory that the white majority is being displaced by a nonwhite population they consider to be “inferior.” Perry then launched into a rant about “importing” people into the country that “have no interest in being Americans.” He also suggested a coordinated effort was underway “to chill the conversation so that we can continue to bring in more people that we never met that are un-American.”
Perry was arguing that a version of the great replacement theory was already afoot in America, being led by what he later called the “radical Left.”
Perry’s comments may have caused a stir but they are anything but exceptional in today's Republican Party. The pro-immigration group America's Voice has identified a staggering 165 members of the 118th Congress who have used replacement theory rhetoric in their official capacity.
More specifically, Republicans have seized on the word “invasion” to amplify the idea that immigrants are flooding into the country to replace white voters at the ballot box.
Donald Trump spent the final weeks of the 2018 midterms hyping a migrant “invasion” that he surely hoped would blunt Democratic momentum at the polls. Trump failed to prevent the blue wave election, but he did succeed in inspiring the El Paso shooter who murdered 22 people in 2019 to supposedly fend off a "Hispanic invasion."
And he is not the only mass shooter to use such rhetoric. Next week marks the two-year anniversary since an avowed white supremacist opened fire in a Buffalo grocery store in a predominantly Black area, killing 10 people and wounding three.
The Buffalo shooter mentioned invasion or invaders 39 times in his racist screed, according to Zachary Mueller, senior research director at America's Voice, who helped assemble a report in advance of the Buffalo massacre anniversary. The report is titled, “Two Years After the Deadly Terror Attack in Buffalo, the Replacement Theory has Only Gone More Mainstream.”
“Fighting the invasion of replacers was core to the [Buffalo shooter’s] stated motive,” Mueller told Daily Kos in a statement. “Invasion is not a synonym for large but implies the coordinated effort to overtake and dominate a country.”
Mueller added that Republicans aren't simply pushing hyperbolic language, they are “arguing migrants constitute a literal military invasion as defined by the Constitution.”
Mueller also sees the word “invasion” as a useful tool to track the escalation of the dangerous conspiracy theory. While some politicians, such as Perry, will explicitly defend “replacement theory” by name, most don't.
“Often, we are looking for coded versions or core rhetoric associated with the idea that there is an intentional plot to facilitate an invasion of non-white migrants to shift the voting power of ‘real’ Americans in favor of Democrats,” Mueller explained.
Coded language leads to the same extremism over time, but it's generally harder to track. “The rhetoric of ‘invasion’ allows us to measure the problem,” he adds.
In the current congressional session, Republicans have introduced a dozen pieces of legislation using the "invasion" conspiracy theory, according to the America's Voice report. “They have used the language 31 times in Congressional hearings and 96 times on the floors of Congress.”
And their spending on ads pushing replacement theory rhetoric has skyrocketed. So far this year, Republican-aligned campaigns have aired 46 unique broadcast ads costing $10.7 million that use the “invasion” language. In 2020, a campaign that unfolded amid the pandemic, Republican campaigns spent just $173,000 on ads citing an "invasion."
Republican leaders are currently promoting new legislation that will bar noncitizen voting—which is already illegal and also exceedingly rare. Yet at a press conference this week announcing the bill, Speaker Mike Johnson said the law would allow states to track voting by non-U.S. citizens, calling it a "clear and present danger."
"We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections," Johnson claimed without providing any evidence, conceding, "But it's not been something that's easily provable. We don't have that number."
Trump has claimed to be the victim of supposed illegal noncitizen voting for almost a decade.
“I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” Trump claimed in 2016 after Clinton trounced him in the popular vote by nearly 3 million.
Early in the 2024 presidential race, Trump began pumping the notion that Democrats are letting migrants flow into the country so they can register them to vote.
“I think they really are doing it because they want to sign these people up to vote. I really do,” Trump said at a Mason City, Iowa, campaign event in January. “They can’t speak a word of English for the most part, but they’re signing them up.”
There’s very little distance between that claim and the Charlottesville white supremacists chanting “You will not replace us!” in 2017.
Immigration is going to be a top-of-mind issue for many voters this year. Republicans are making sure of that through their ad dollars, their legislation, and their appeal to any voter who will listen that their power is being subverted by an “invasion’” of noncitizens who are inferior and “un-American.”
It's a racist conspiracy theory with roots in 1930s Nazi Germany that is being fully embraced and strategically deployed by the Republican Party from top to bottom.
Navigator collects, analyzes, and distributes real data on progressive messaging. The Hub Project's Bryan Bennett and Gabriela Parra talk with Kerry about what they are seeing in their research this election cycle, and which messaging can help progressive candidates win elections in 2024—and beyond.
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