Combating the Nativist Narrative
Week of August 28, 2023
CNN Provides Fuel for Right-Wing Nativist Misinfo Machine:
On Tuesday afternoon, CNN ran a sensational headline approaching the xenophobic clickbait that is typically relegated to right-wing media like FOX News. The headline read, “Exclusive: Smuggler with ties to ISIS helped migrants enter US from Mexico, raising alarm bells across government.” But buried in the story and the accompanying TV segment was the relevant information that “the Biden administration was able to understand this more as a case of kind of run-of-the-mill human smuggling less than a potential terrorist threat. U.S. officials now say no evidence that any of these migrants are involved in any terrorist ISIS plotting, ISIS planning.” Pulitzer Prize-winning immigration and border journalist Molly O'Toole delivered a biting response to the story that is worth a read. My real concern here, however, is the predictable exploitation of this CNN headline by the nativist misinformation machine. Right-wing media outlets quickly ran stories with similar headlines, while several Republicans, including the official GOP Senate account, began promoting the headline without linking to the original CNN story that contained the relevant context. Reps. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) and Mike Collins (R-GA) meanwhile added the false assertions that there was a terrorist and ISIS plot afoot. Indicative of the nativist misinformation machine at work, the NRCC created a graphic that wields the CNN headline as a political attack to maximize the anti-immigrant fearmongering. Even as this particular story fades over time, I suspect that we could see this headline reemerge in political ads throughout the cycle. Right now, team Trump is up with a national ad buy that implies the need to drop bombs in Mexico with comparisons to ISIS, and while the facts of this story don’t support Trump’s campaign message, it's not hard to see how their team might exploit the CNN headline to drive their misleading nativist narrative.
COMBATING THE NARRATIVE: There is an important point of media accountability here around the downstream consequences of valuing clicks over a desire to inform, especially in a shifting media environment that contains a vast ecosystem committed to pushing an increasingly dangerous nativist narrative. Along this vein, Dan Froomkin wrote an interesting piece surveying a few dozen experts on the urgency of the media to get this moment right. Of immediate relevance here, he quotes Jennifer Mercieca, a historian of political rhetoric at Texas A&M University, “It matters if we call the situation at the border a ‘humanitarian crisis’ or an ‘invasion’ or a ‘relief effort.’ News organizations should choose frames that humanize people and promote democracy.” And if you want to dive a bit deeper into the CNN story, check out this piece from Gabe Ortíz, HERE.
Another Deadly White Supremacist Terror Attack.
Last weekend, a man with a swastika emblazoned on his gun murdered three of our fellow Americans in Jacksonville, Florida. The racist-fueled terror attack was the latest in a deeply disturbing pattern of attacks casting a dark shadow over the nation. The following day, in Pennsylvania, another potentially racist mass murder was narrowly foiled as yet more evidence of an urgent threat of racist political violence. And then, on Thursday, white nationalist Proud Boy leader Joe Biggs was sentenced to 17 years for his seditious conspiracy conviction relating to his leadership role in the violent coup on January 6. While deadly reminders abound of the threat of white nationalist violence, politicians and pundits continue to peddle the white nationalist conspiracies that animate this threat.
COMBATING THE NARRATIVE: “From Charlottesville to Pittsburgh to Poway to El Paso to Buffalo and now Jacksonville, we’re witnessing a cycle of white supremacist violence – fueled by increasingly normalized conspiracy theories and hate promoted directly by politicians and pundits and enabled by social media,” said Amy Spitalnick the CEO at the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. There is a throughline from the bigotry, racism, and anti-Black hate spewed by politicians and pundits to the white supremacist ideology that motivates these attacks. We must acknowledge this mainstreaming and hold accountable those who normalize hate so that Black and Brown communities are protected and so that no community lives in fear,” said Erin E. Wilson, Senior Director for Extremism and Human Rights. "When political leaders mainstream racist conspiracies, they normalize the very ideas inspiring the domestic terrorists and foster a climate for more racist political violence,” said Vanessa Cárdenas, America’s Voice Executive Director.
Desperate to Make Fentanyl a Border Issue, Republicans Bang the Drums of War:
Fentanyl is not an immigration issue. “Ending the opioid crisis does not start, and it won’t end at the border,” Kemp Chester, Senior Advisor to the Director of National Drug Control Policy, recently said in testimony before Congress. But Republicans believe that turning the fentanyl crisis into a border and immigration issue is good for them politically, so serious proposals to address the issue aren’t warranted. Instead, they call for sending troops into Mexico and maintain a myopic focus on the border despite these proposals revealing a fundamental misunderstanding of this deep challenge our nation faces. Republicans get the fentanyl crisis and the drug trafficking networks wrong and are saber-rattling for a cyclical, short-term political play that is likely only to make the situation worse. The calls for unilaterally sending troops into Mexico to address the fentanyl crisis is as dumb as it is dangerous. Nevertheless, Republicans are taking these calls seriously, and so we should take them at their word that they will pursue bad policy no matter the downstream cost to the American people. We have seen with Trump’s border wall how lousy policy ideas floated on the campaign trail can quickly turn into applause lines and racist chants, then into doctrinal policy positions for the party overall. The call and response to have Mexico pay for the wall was a nativist absurdity in 2016 now, we risk a set of much more dangerous and deadly bad nativist policies and slogans taking root in the Republican party.
COMBATING THE NARRATIVE: Affirmation of the fact that solutions won’t be found in immigration policy can be found in the FEND Off Fentanyl Act. A first and limited step that looks to expand sanctions of transnational criminal organizations, the Act is a bi-partisan piece of legislation, sponsored by Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) and Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH), which recently passed in the Senate as part of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). While Sen. Scott may see the importance of crafting policy beyond the border, Presidential candidate Scott has happily promoted the nativist disinformation that undercuts the urgent discussion for addressing the crisis. A contradiction that belies the problem. When politicians and pundits falsely conflate the issue of fentanyl as a border or immigration policy failure, it throws sand in the gears of solutions to address the urgent fentanyl crisis.
POLITICS UPDATES
AZ Senate: White nationalist great replacement theory promoter Blake Masters is again throwing his hat in the ring for the Arizona Senate race, according to reports from the Wall Street Journal. A Peter Thiel protégé, Masters ran as a nativist extremist and lost big in the purple state against Sen. Mark Kelly. Master’s is far from the only xenophobic extremist in the race, and this late primary, just a few weeks shy of a year away, is sure to be one of the ugliest in the country.
DeSantis: As I noted last week, Florida Governor and Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis has made calls for summary executions an applause line for his campaign. Now DeSantis is hawking novelty t-shirts promoting his calls to leave alleged drug dealers, “stone-cold dead” for $35 a pop. The fact that a leading contender in the race for the White House is campaigning on extrajudicial killings along the border is troubling enough, but the dehumanization of turning it into a slogan for t-shirts for supporters crosses another dangerous threshold. The devaluing of the seriousness of deadly violence combined with the strategic racism of the DeSantis campaign courts racist political violence. Novelty t-shirts might not seem like that big of a deal, but that is precisely the point. The causal nature of making t-shirts with political calls for deadly violence should be of grave concern.
FL Sen: Former Democratic Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell announced she will challenge incumbent Republican Senator Rick Scott for the Florida Senate Seat. Chairman of the NRSC at the time, Sen. Scot,t oversaw the embarrassing returns for Republicans during the 2022 midterm cycle. In that position, Sen. Scott helped hold the door open for extremists into the party. And for his part, Sen. Scott has pushed the white nationalist “invasion” conspiracy. During the ‘22 cycle, Scott put out a pamphlet outlining his vision for the country that relied heavily on nativist narratives and called for slashing Social Security, and Medicare funding.
WEEKLY STATS OF NATIVIST NARRATIVE
Of the 400 GOP Twitter accounts we track, this week, they sent:
270 original tweets peddling anti-immigrant attacks mentioning “border”
52 original tweets about “open borders,” with Greg Abbott tweet having the most reach with 473.1K Views, 3,615 Retweets, and 17K Likes.
20 original tweets that used “Biden Border Crisis” with Ted Cruz tweet having the most reach with 1.2M Views, 751 Retweets, and 2,579 Likes.
33 original tweets that mentioned both “fentanyl” and “border” with Byron Donalds tweet having the most reach with 246K views, 5,930 Retweets and 18.3K Likes.
