Heritage Promotes Fake Fliers and Antisemitic Replacement Disinfo:
On Monday evening, The Oversight Project - an outfit of the Heritage Foundation, the lead organization behind Project 2025 - amplified an obviously fake flier they used to advance antisemitic replacement theory claims and attack DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas before the sham impeachment was dismissed by the Senate. The fake flier insinuates that HIAS, a Jewish immigrant relief organization, is encouraging fraudulent votes from non-white migrants to steal the election for Joe Biden. The buffoonish stagecraft of this stunt would be laughable if the transparent disinformation campaign wasn’t so quickly adopted by Members of Congress as “evidence” of the deadly replacement theory. Even Fox News’ Bill Melugin, the leading anti-migrant propagandist, was skeptical, writing that “this flier seems fake or doctored, even at first glance."
The fake flier made the spurious connection, to attack the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) even though HIAS is not affiliated with the organization the doctored flier is supposedly from. The Heritage Foundation used this to further attack Secretary Mayorkas. Their Oversight Project continued with more antisemitic notes, pulling out their red string in an attempt to connect the whole operation to George Soros. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), pushed the antisemitic tropes and replacement theory even further in a Homeland Security Committee hearing this week. Pointing to a large printout of the fake flier, Greene falsely accused the Jewish organization of “financing the invasion of the country but also telling illegal aliens to vote.” It is hard to overstate the dangerous depravity of these remarks, considering the last post of the antisemite who murdered 11 people at a synagogue in Pittsburgh accused HIAS of bringing in “invaders.”
Republican candidate in Virginia’s 7th House District, Cameron Hamilton, also amplified the flier, adding more antisemitic tropes. Check out Gabe Ortíz’s excellent write-up on Hamilton for more HERE.
Hard-right influencers and right-wing blogs with massive platforms pushed the fake flier as yet more “evidence” for election deniers of the plot to steal the 2024 election. For example, Rogan O’Handley, also known as DC_Draino, wrote to his 1.4M followers, “They’re trying to replace American voters” in a response to the fake flier. Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s 2024 National Press Secretary, asked the rhetorical question referencing the replacement theory, “Why won’t Joe Biden shut down the border, you ask?”
The anti-democratic vigilante violence downstream of this right-wing elite validation is already taking shape as the founder of the organization targeted in the fake fliers has already received death threats on Trump-aligned platforms. Tragically, the downstream violence will continue to flow from the normalization of this bigoted conspiracy theory.
COMBATING THE NARRATIVE: The pace and coordination of the spread of this clearly false antisemitic disinformation is illustrative of the centrality of the replacement theory for the right this cycle and the threat it poses to our democracy. Not many will remember the particular details of this fake flier a month, but for the MAGA base, these stories each lay another brick in the foundation of “proof” of a plot to steal the 2024 election, building over time the justification for another violent assault on our democracy. This story is critically important for what it reveals about the violence, antisemitism, and xenophobia that are being weaponized into conspiracies to undermine the world's oldest democracy. The threat can appear buffoonish, but we dismiss or ignore this narrative at our own peril.
GOP’s Census Replacement Theory Push:
After Elon Musk spent last month pushing a version of the replacement theory, bemoaning claims about census reapportionment that fall apart at first glance, Republican Members of Congress have picked up the charge. Last week, House Oversight Chairman James Comer (R-KY) introduced legislation re-upping calls for adding a citizenship question to the decennial census. This is a bad policy with wide-ranging potential harms, with the only benefit being a policy fig leaf Republicans get to add to try to mask their replacement theory arguments. But Comer is far from alone. In a Senate committee hearing last week, Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) pushed the coded replacement theory census argument when questioning DHS Secretary Mayorkas. When speaking to Fox News last week, Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) drew the conspiratorial connections more explicitly, saying, “I think with respect to counting illegal aliens in the census proportioning congressional districts, most Americans just don’t believe that. That could be true. But it is, and that’s what’s been happening and that is exactly the motive behind all of this that’s happening in our border right now … this quest for power and their desire not to lose congressional seats to red states.” In an Oversight Committee hearing on Tuesday, Rep. William Timmons (R-SC) affirmed coded replacement theory rhetoric from the witnesses the Republican majority brought to testify before going on to peddle the fearmongering replacement line about the census.
COMBATING THE NARRATIVE: The downstream violence from this bigoted anti-democratic lie should be easier to locate with the hindsight of Jan. 6. The fig leaf legitimization of the replacement theory through baseless arguments around the census is a dangerous rhetorical argument. But the GOP does not intend to keep these purely as rhetorical conspiracies but as weapons to take power through undemocratic means. Engineering the census count to shift representation, the GOP’s alleged defense of democracy becomes the justification for its partisan perversion. Hypocritical, yes. But a logical conclusion when you start from the bigoted conspiracy that too many of the wrong type of people are participating in our democracy.
Congress Continues to be Home for GOP’s Normalization of Deadly Bigoted Conspiracy:
This week saw the culmination of the efforts to impeach DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The Senate found both articles to be unconstitutional for not having alleged a high crime or misdemeanor. This effort was a months-long political stunt that enabled dozens of Members of the Republican Party to espouse the dangerous replacement and invasion conspiracy in almost every corner of Congress. Republican Members of Congress in Committee hearings, official press releases, and on the floor of both chambers of Congress continued to describe the situation at the US/Mexico border as an “invasion,” intentionally facilitated by the Biden Administration to secure votes, or over inflate the political power of Democratic-leaning states in the electoral college. Republicans on key Committees in the House called witnesses who espoused the same dangerous conspiracies on an “invasion,” which, in the witness’s previous writings, required the use of military force to thwart.
Elected officials have a very important role in this process. Their willingness to legitimize this dangerous rhetoric, amplifying it day in and day out in the halls of Congress, is enshrining white nationalist, antisemitic conspiracies into the historical record of the country.
COMBATING THE NARRATIVE: The threat posed by the spread of bigoted conspiracy theories that court racist political violence is coming from inside the House. Literally. The problem is not one of the margins, as on display this week, the default position for the GOP in Congress is to view the border and immigration through the lens of the white nationalist replacement and invasion conspiracy. Meaning our challenge here is not to keep these deadly anti-democratic and bigoted ideas out of the mainstream, but we must now directly confront them if we are going to have a chance to root them out of the mainstream.
POLITICS UPDATES
AZ-Sen: GOP Senate candidate Kari Lake, who has been flipping and flopping over abortion, has taken a new tack to distract: arming her supporters. The New York Times reported, “‘We are going to put on the armor of God. And maybe strap on a Glock on the side of us just in case.’ The crowd roared its approval, and she continued, ‘You can put one here,” gesturing to the side of her hip, ‘and one in the back or one in the front. Whatever you guys decide. Because we’re not going to be the victims of crime. We’re not going to have our Second Amendment taken away.” Lake is, of course, an extreme election-denying MAGA candidate who often promotes the replacement theory. But, she’s not the only leading Republican promoting violence this week. Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton encouraged vigilante violence against peaceful protesters. Republicans, like Lake and Cotton, regularly invoke the language that inspired mass shooters. This week, they took their commitment to violence even further.
President: MAGA Inc., a superPAC supporting Donald Trump that spent the past year attacking Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, is running an ad that invokes the MS-13 gang, featuring a decade-old photo that has appeared in numerous ads over the past few years. In fact, this image was taken nearly a decade ago (in 2013) in El Salvador, inside a prison surrounded by the military. We expect to see variations of this ad over the next seven months, with the same stock photo, as Trump and his allies make attacking immigrants their top issue. Trump has spent months falsely claiming there is a crime wave being committed by undocumented immigrants. That’s not borne out by any data. And, as Mavi Garcia, whose sister was murdered, said, the only time Trump and Republicans seem concerned about crime victims is when the alleged perpetrator is an undocumented immigrant.
GOP House Primaries: American Prosperity Alliance, a 501c4 organization “with ties to former Speaker Kevin McCarthy,” is running ads targeting Reps. Bob Good (VA-05), Eli Crane (AZ-02), and Nancy Mace (SC-01). Those three Republicans voted to depose McCarthy as Speaker last year. The ad begins with white nationalist language, “Our country is being invaded. This is a war.” McCarthy’s allies are attacking these three members, who are facing primary opponents, for not being extreme enough on immigration when all three are consistently anti-immigrant zealots themselves. This represents another attempt to normalize the replacement theory language by using it to attack other Republicans. It is also a case study of how the GOP’s radicalization process as in-party nativist attacks back and forth as candidates compete publicly for how far right they can go as they dehumanize immigrant communities.
WEEKLY STATS OF NATIVIST NARRATIVE
Anti-immigrant political ads:
124 Republican ads running with immigration-related attacks on TV and CTV
Total spending on nativist ads for the week of April 15 -- $5,093,682
According to data compiled from AdImpact
33 new Republican-aligned immigration-related Facebook ads
Year to date
Total nativist TV and CTV ads: 598
Total spend on nativist TV and CTV ads --- $107,220,987 (AdImpact)
In the Republican primary in Indiana’s 8th US congressional district, Richard Moss has a TV ad attacking Mark Messer, calling him “Mexico Mark Messer” and editing a photo to place a sombrero on Messer’s head with the voiceover intones: “Messer authored bills to give illegal immigrants in state tuition and driver's licenses.”
Of the 525 GOP Twitter accounts we track, this week, they sent:
672 original tweets peddling anti-immigrant attacks mentioning “border”
172 original tweets about “open borders,” with a tweet from Rep. Matt Gaetz having the most reach with 377.1K Views, 6.3k Retweets, and 19k Likes.
31 original tweets that used “Biden Border Crisis” with Sen. Ted Cruz tweet having the most reach with 56.6K Views, 491 Retweets, and 2k Likes.
29 original tweets that mentioned both “fentanyl” and “border” with Rep. Chip Roy tweet having the most reach with 213.6K views, 530 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 408.3k interactions, a decrease of ↓ 1% and 10.4k articles published, an increase of ↑ 2% from two weeks ago. Interactions and article count are both lower than the previous week. Data assembled from Newswhip.
Washington Times: “Laken Riley murder suspect released over lack of prison space” - Facebook Interactions: 2.3k & X Shares: 8.8k
Fox News: “Lindsey Graham says DHS told him Laken Riley's alleged murderer was paroled into US illegally” - Facebook Interactions: 2.4k & X Shares: 119
Daily Signal: “Illegals Instructed to Vote Biden for Border NGO to 'Stay Open'” - Facebook Interactions: 2.2k & X Shares: 217