Combating the Nativist Narrative
Week of October 2, 2023
The regularity of Republican’s white nationalist rhetoric and downstream violence:
Speaking to a far-right outlet last week, Donald Trump said that migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” white nationalist rhetoric that eerily parallels that of Hitler’s. Jonathan Greenblatt, the chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, makes the critical connection from this rhetoric to the downstream violence, telling the New York Times: “We have seen this kind of toxic rhetoric inspire real-world violence before in places like Pittsburgh and El Paso. It should have no place in our politics, period.” Intertwined with the increased intensity and frequency of his antisemitic and white nationalist language is a range of other rhetoric courting political violence. While nothing entirely new – a fact that should be deeply disturbing in its own right – the frequency and intensity that the titular head of the Republican Party is looking to set his followers on a march towards further political violence is starting to get much-needed attention. A NBC News report published on Monday headlined, “Trump ramps up violent rhetoric,” and a headline from Axios that reads, “Trump's words turn violent as pressure on him builds” are two examples. But as Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert in authoritarianism, told the Associated Press for a story on Trump’s rhetoric that published this week, “Violence is his political project now.” And that call for violence isn’t going unnoticed by his supporters. “When Donald Trump howls into his metaphorical microphone, it’s on a frequency that gets picked up by the likes of Ryan Martinez,” Will Bunch wrote about a MAGA movement supporter who pulled out a gun and started shooting a rally of progressives in New Mexico over the weekend. Yesterday, a man in Wisconsin was arrested after repeatedly seeking an audience with the Democratic governor while brandishing a gun. But as we repeatedly document, Trump is far from the only Republican regularly embracing white nationalist rhetoric that has a body count attached to it. For example, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) peddled the white nationalist “invasion” conspiracy this week, comparing the Normandy Beach D-Day invasion to that of migrants seeking to request asylum along the southern border. Far from mere tactless hyperbole, this rhetoric seeks to normalize, if not encourage, a violent response to these migrants. Obviously, not all of the violent rhetoric nor the downstream violent actions are related directly to the white nationalist orientation to immigration politics or the violent rhetoric that the Republicans have embraced, but it would be dangerously naive to believe that these actions and rhetoric are not interrelated across issue areas or with one another.
COMBATING THE NARRATIVE: Confronting a single piece of atrocious and dangerous political rhetoric is difficult enough, but we risk becoming overwhelmed or numb when such behavior becomes countless and slowly escalates in degree. This is the challenge of combating this strategy. But as Ben-Ghiat correctly notes, the violence is now the point. And it is in this turn that we must reckon with the fact we are not dealing with a Republican Party at all interested in the politics of compromise and governing but a dangerous anti-democratic movement increasingly more comfortable with political violence as part of their calculations for holding power.
Physically dividing America and building the wall between states:
Earlier this week, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) announced that he would introduce a bill allowing states along the southern border to construct their own walls and become individual arbiters of immigration policy. Sen. Hawley’s efforts will, of course, go nowhere in the Democratic-controlled Senate, but it's worth pausing on the fact that Sen. Hawley is pushing to allow states to erect hard barriers and act as individual nation-states. While the proposal is narrowly tailored for the southern border, it lays the groundwork for hard borders between states. And before anyone diminishes such talk as outlandish, it is worth remembering just how rapidly the GOP has descended into nativist extremism over the last several years to see how this disastrous idea might take root as a party priority. Last week, Texas Governor Greg Abbott was already making that connection, saying, “not only are we building border barriers between the border of Texas and Mexico, we are also having now to build border barriers between Texas and New Mexico.” Governor Abbott was linking the extremism of the Republican Party on immigration and reproductive rights, referencing the travel bans from Texas to New Mexico that Republicans are attempting to erect to prevent women in the state from traveling for reproductive care.
COMBATING THE NARRATIVE: Republicans’ extremism does not have borders. The radically restrictive cruelty in one issue area fuels the radically restrictive cruelty in another. The intentionally deadly barriers that Republicans want to erect to keep non-white migrants out may end up being the intentionally deadly barriers that trap women in. All of which has the Republican leaders of one of the largest states in the union positioning itself in a hard-right states' rights opposition to federal authority, a position that has repeatedly dark history.
Fentanyl disinformation pollutes much-needed efforts to find solutions:
This week, U.S. officials announced a slew of criminal indictments and economic sanctions against a number of companies and individuals based in China related to the production and distribution of synthetic opioids and precursor chemicals. This latest news aligned with the Biden administration's stated plans to disrupt the supply chains of drug trafficking networks as part of the effort to combat the fentanyl crisis, as well as the DHS ongoing joint law enforcement operations “Artemis” and “Rolling Wave” targeting the supply chain of precursor chemicals. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other top Biden administration officials also traveled to Mexico City for top-level bilateral meetings where combating synthetic fentanyl was a top concern. All of this is stark confirmation that abetting the crisis cannot be found in a myopic focus on the border. No one should roll out the mission accomplished banner for the administration's actions, but they are likely a step in the right direction. One that moves the conversation away from the counterproductive nativist political attacks and toward a more helpful conversation about sanctions and international cooperation. Unfortunately, most Republicans are hostile to that conversation, instead preferring to exploit the pain and suffering of Americans to pack a harder punch to their nativist cudgel.
COMBATING THE NARRATIVE: Those who make the fentanyl crisis out to be a border issue, claiming that sealing the border will in any way solve the problem, are lying to you. They want to use the very real pain that this crisis has wrought, hoping to trick people into believing that this problem can be solved if we just have harsher crackdowns at the border. These conmen aren’t interested in solving the problem, and their lies prolong the crisis as they pollute our ability to find real answers. Solutions are urgently needed to address this crisis, but anyone starting and ending with border policy should be dismissed out of hand. See more on the topic this week from Gabe Ortíz, HERE.
POLITICS UPDATES
House dysfunction: In a historic move, Republicans threw their own guy out of the Speaker’s office. The reason? He wasn’t extreme enough. But no one should be under the delusion that Kevin McCarthy was a bulwark against extremism or that he wasn’t fully committed to the Republicans’ nativist project. To the very end, McCarthy maintained that advancing the party’s xenophobic extremism remained his top priority. While it is unclear who will next take the gavel, it is without any doubt they will continue to double down on the investment in nativism. Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), who was the first to officially throw his hat in the ring for the job, has already repeatedly asserted that the party’s obsession with the border will be his top priority. As Ron Brownstein noted, this week, it is the nurturing of replacement theory ideas amongst their base that is feeding this cycle that calls for harsher and harsher measures. Evidenced by Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) take, which called for House Republicans to be “more aggressive,” calling for the top priority to be a sham impeachment of DHS Secretary Mayorkas framed in terms of the white nationalist “invasion” conspiracy. Despite House Homeland Security Chairman Mark Green’s assurances to Fox News that the latest chaos from his party won’t delay their work on the issue, none of it is about actual solutions. The xenophobic grandstanding and political attacks are the totality on offer. As Paul Waldman wrote this week, for Republicans on immigration and border challenges, “Fixing the problem would be an unsustainable political model. The current system, on the other hand, suits them just fine.” This latest move will likely only result in the GOP further pressing down the gas as they barrel down the white nationalist path. As Maribel Hastings and David Torres ask, “what’s frightening about all of this is that it’s just the tip of the iceberg, because if the MAGA Republicans are capable of unseating their own chamber leader, considering him to not be sufficiently radical, what can we expect if Trump wins the Republican nomination and is elected in 2024?”
OH-09: J.R. Majewski is running again in what should be a competitive district. The definition of a MAGA Republican, Majewski gestured at political violence in his opening campaign ad in the 2022 cycle, echoed the deadly white nationalist conspiracy about a so-called migrant invasion, and attended the Jan. 6 rally. Majewski’s extremism turned this competitive district the GOP eyed as a top pickup opportunity into a 14-point loss. The GOP hasn’t learned from the cost of their extremism but instead only continued to double down, so it is fitting that Majewski is back again to be an avatar for the unwavering radicalization.
AZ Sen: Hard-right agitator and failed Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake has officially thrown her hat in the ring for the Arizona Senate race. We wrote about the coming xenophobic doom loop in the GOP primary with Lake at the lead here before.
WEEKLY STATS OF NATIVIST NARRATIVE
Of the 525 GOP Twitter accounts we track, this week, they sent:
934 original tweets peddling anti-immigrant attacks mentioning “border”
160 original tweets about “open borders,” with Vivek Ramaswamy tweet having the most reach with 1M Views, 1,878 Retweets, and 14.4K Likes.
36 original tweets that used “Biden Border Crisis” with Ted Cruz tweet having the most reach with 95.7K Views, 1,443 Retweets, and 5,058 Likes.
48 original tweets that mentioned both “fentanyl” and “border” with Nikki Haley tweet having the most reach with 4.2M views, 3,123 Retweets and 7,118 Likes.
