Bigoted Conspiracies About Immigrants is the GOP’s Main Campaign Pitch and Their Excuse to Overthrow Our Democracy if They Lose
White nationalist and antisemitic replacement theory has become a central theme of the Republican message and how they are preparing their supporters for Jan.6 round two.
Next Tuesday, May 14, marks two years since a white nationalist steeped in the replacement conspiracy drove 200 miles to Buffalo, New York, explicitly to murder Black people and intimidate nonwhite immigrants whom he believed to be “replacers” and part of an ongoing “invasion” to destroy the nation.
On Tuesday this week, Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA), who represents a district a little over 200 miles from Buffalo, defended the replacement theory in a closed-door meeting of the House Oversight Committee. “Replacement theory is real,” Perry said in recordings obtained by CNN. “They added white to it to stop everybody from talking about it.”
Disturbingly, Rep. Perry is far from an outlier in his party. In the two years since the horrific terrorist attack that left ten of our fellow Americans dead, the Republican Party has fully adopted the replacement theory as their main orientation to immigration politics and a central theme of their 2024 electoral message.
This bigoted conspiracy rooted in white nationalism and antisemitism was once confined to the avowed white supremacists like those who marched with tiki torches in Charlottesville, Virginia, where neo-Nazis chanted “Jews will not replace us.” Tragically, no longer. Our new report documents the size and scale of this growing problem inside the GOP. Here are three quick stats from the report that underscore the sad reality that this is no longer a problem of the fringe but one capturing the mainstream right:
165 Members of the 118th Congress have employed replacement theory rhetoric and done so 584 times in their official capacity.
They have amplified the bigoted conspiracy 31 times in Congressional hearings and 96 times on the floor of Congress.
In the first four months of 2024, there have been 46 unique TV and CTV ads from Republican-aligned campaigns, which have spent $10.7M on ads that push the “invasion” rhetoric, according to data assembled from AdImpact. We have further identified 202 unique Facebook ads that use the “invasion” language this year.
Meanwhile, a more subtle version of this conspiracy theory was being advanced by leading Republicans this week, who were peddling baseless conspiracies about non-citizens voting in elections. They claim, admittedly without any evidence, that there is some massive plot afoot of non-citizens (unstated as non-white) who are polluting our ballot box.
On Wednesday, white nationalists Stephen Miller, Ken Cuccinelli, a leading proponent of the replacement theory who just launched an effort whose main goal is to stop the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, and Cleta Mitchell, who New York Times described as the “Lawyer Who Plotted to Overturn Trump Loss,” the Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, led a press conference with other Members of Congress to peddle the non-citizen voting lie. As the Brennan Center for Justice has previously said, non-citizen voting “is already illegal – and vanishingly rare.”
"We all know, intuitively, that a lot of illegals are voting in federal elections,” Speaker Johnson said at the press conference. “But it's not been something that's easily provable. We don't have that numbers.”
Cool.
Rep. Ted Lieu’s (D-CA) mocking response was particularly choice, writing “I will be introducing a bill to ban elementary school students from voting even though it’s already illegal for them to vote in federal elections. I intuitively know young kids are voting in federal elections but can’t prove it. However my cousin’s friend read it on the internet.”
And yes, these are clowns we should laugh at, but they are also extremely dangerous ones. While they are hostile to reality, the replacement conspiracy which the GOP is enthralled convinces the MAGA movement to completely disregard elections they don’t like. The collective delusion serves a purpose.
Outside the context of this political moment, this effort could be understood simply as a bigoted canard to advance voter suppression efforts under the guise of protecting democracy, as earlier iterations of this campaign that the nativist anti-democratic right has run before. However, with the widespread adoption of the replacement theory by the GOP we must understand this effort in that context.
As Arthur Delaney noted for HuffPost, the Speaker’s election-denial-fueling press conference on the site of some of the most intense violence on January 6. The symbolism is hard to miss for those willing to pay attention.
In case there was any doubt of the point the Republicans were trying to spell out, Rep. Brian Babin (R-TX) wrote on X after the press conference: “How can Americans trust in fair elections when the Left is enabling illegal aliens to take part?” This is the same Congressman who has repeatedly said some version of: “they want to change America; they want to replace the American electorate with third-world immigrants.” Babin, the replacement theory true believer, was one of a handful of Members backing up the Speaker at the press conference on Wednesday.
The push on the non-citizen voting attack is filtering down to the hard-right election denial groups who are looking to use the nativist lie for some good old-fashioned voter intimidation tactics, as an excellent report from Khaya Himmelman for Talking Points Memo details. The hard-right group True the Vote, which is aligned with the so-called Constitutional Sheriffs movement, is encouraging vigilante voter intimidation under the guise of non-citizen disinformation.
Meanwhile, X is cashing in on an ad that right-wing media outlets like the Washington Times are running on the platform, pushing their misleading piece on the matter. It’s a pattern that feeds the nativist narrative machine and creates the validation structure to support the Republican anti-democratic replacement theory electoral pitch.
The total of the week’s events makes Republicans' 2024 message clear: “Immigrants are an immediate existential threat; their invasion, orchestrated by Democrats, will replace you. And either Republicans win in November or the election has been stolen by replacers.” Said another way, Republicans are trying to win an election with bigoted conspiracies about non-white immigrants and are seeking to justify overturning democracy with those same nativist conspiracies if they don’t win.
It is an inherently anti-democratic message that actively courts racist political violence like we saw in Buffalo and on January 6. We doubt the seriousness of the “I win power or I take it with force” proposition, but the Republican Party is telling us exactly how they view the election in November at the nation's peril.
WEEKLY STATS OF NATIVIST NARRATIVE
222 Republican ads running with immigration-related attacks on TV and CTV
Total spending on nativist ads for the week of May 6th -- $11,086,836 (AdImpact)
16 new Republican-aligned immigration-related Facebook ads
Year to date
Total nativist TV and CTV ads: 706
Total spend on nativist TV and CTV ads --- $143,225,139 (AdImpact)
Nativist Ad of the Week
In the Republican Primary for West Virginia Senate race, Legacy PAC has a new Facebook ad video starring candidate Joe Earley using the Great Replacement Conspiracy theory that “we have an invasion going on at the border right now, we have military aged males that are from unknown countries, not just Central America…logistically supported by the Biden Administration” with clips of male migrants at the border.
Of the 525 GOP Twitter accounts we track, this week, they sent:
336 original tweets peddling anti-immigrant attacks mentioning “border”
82 original tweets about “open borders,” with Rep. Steve Scalise tweet having the most reach with 382K Views, 12.7k Retweets, and 21.6k Likes.
34 original tweets that used “Biden Border Crisis” with Sen. Ted Cruz tweet having the most reach with 206.1K Views, 667 Retweets, and 3.3k Likes.
31 original tweets that mentioned both “fentanyl” and “border” with Gov. Greg Abbott tweet having the most reach with 47.6k views, 420 Retweets and 1.9k Likes.
Top Articles on Social of the Week (Right-wing media still dominating the conversation online)
This past week there were 417.8k interactions, an increase of↑ 2% and 12.4k articles published, an increase of ↑ 9% from last week. Interactions and article count are both lower than the previous week. Data assembled from Newswhip.
WPXI: “New rule aims to speed up removal of limited group of migrants who don't qualify for asylum”
Facebook: 8.7K Interactions
Daily Wire: “More Americans Trust Trump Over Biden To Handle Economy, Immigration, Crime”
Facebook: 6.3K Interactions
NY Times: “Immigrants With DACA Protections Will Be Eligible for Obamacare”
Facebook: 4.5k Interactions X: 1.1k Shares