The Right’s Massive Desperation to Sell the Big Lie 2.0 Ahead of the Election Results
For Republicans, immigrants are to blame for all our troubles and the reason why voters should abandon American democracy
All corners of the right, from their political candidates and officials to their media and influencers, to their nonprofits and political organizations, are desperately trying to convince the American people of a bigoted conspiracy theory that there is a plot by liberal elites to manipulate immigrants to cast fraudulent votes to steal the upcoming election. This lie has been widely and repeatedly debunked, but Republicans and their allies have made the conspiracy theory a core part of the electoral message to lay the foundation for denying unfavorable results.
The nation has for now averted the government shutdown demanded by Donald Trump as part of his anti-immigrant and anti-democratic agenda, after House Republicans passed a short-term government funding bill that doesn’t include their SAVE Act. The proposal purports to combat noncitizen voting when noncitizen voting is already illegal, harshly punishable, and vanishingly rare. In reality, the SAVE Act is nothing more than a figleaf to provide further legitimacy to election denial conspiracies and create new barriers making it harder for eligible Americans to vote.
Trump had demanded a shutdown that would have likely put many federal employees out of work heading into the holidays unless Republicans passed the redundant bill as part of a spending package keeping the government open. With a shutdown now averted through Dec. 20, there’s no chance the SAVE Act will come up again before Election Day. But we’d be remiss to think we’ve managed to avoid the ongoing dangers posed by the Big Lie 2.0 early voting is already underway in a number of states, including Virginia. The Big Lie 2.0 – which is the basis of the SAVE Act and uses bigoted fiction about widespread voting by undocumented immigrants as an excuse to purge and terrorize voters like great-grandmas while building the foundation to reject the rightful election results – remains the core of the GOP’s ‘24 campaign. We noted last month:
Whether it’s lies about noncitizens voting or conspiracy theories about importing voters, the American right is encasing a significant segment of the American public in a 360-degree surround sound amplification of the replacement theory. They are using fears and lies about immigrants to normalize an assault on American democracy. Plan A is to use the lies to justify voter suppression and intimidation tactics ahead of the election. Plan B, if they lose, is to use the nativist lies to mobilize a segment of the MAGA base to wage another violent assault to overturn winning results.
Johnson has been a fervent promoter of the Big Lie 2.0 – including traveling to Mar-A-Lago to kiss Trump’s ring – but pulled the spending package that included the SAVE Act when members of his caucus derailed his plans after objecting to other aspects of the package. Nevertheless, the top Republican in Congress has known the entire time that he doesn’t have the facts to back up his assertions, publicly admitting that his bigoted conspiracy theories are based purely on bigoted vibes.
In just one example of how pervasive the Big Lie 2.0 has become within the GOP base, a new report from the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights details how election denialism has spread from the bloodied steps and halls of January 6 to “county election commission meetings, courtrooms,” and “cyber symposiums,” with the noncitizen voting lie as a critical component.
One top face of this effort is Mike Lindell, a conspiracy theorist popular among the weirdest factions of the right and the creator of the MyPillow product you’ve probably seen in late night commercials. But don’t be fooled by the pillow peddler’s “clownish” persona. Instructions to the Lindell network have included the support of SAVE Act-like bills and the reporting of perceived “irregularities” on Election Day. We have already seen the effects of baseless snitching. Rudy Giuliani’s outrageous, fact-free targeting of Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and daughter Shaye Moss during the 2020 race “subjected them to a torrent of racist and violent threats and turned their lives upside down,” NBC News reported last year. The two eventually won a more than $150 million defamation lawsuit against the disgraced former mayor. The Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights on the Lindell project:
Before elections, activists are encouraged to work on trying to pass legislation making it harder to vote and to count votes: shrinking elections to single-day voting, requiring hand-counted paper ballots, eliminating ranked-choice voting, eliminating mail-in voting, eliminating drop boxes, requiring local clerks manage registration, precinct-level counting, and stricter voter ID requirements. Based on conspiracy-driven false narratives about the accuracy of states’ voting rolls, several of the network partners have also attempted to purge voter registration rolls.
For election periods, activists are trained to keep an eye out for alleged irregularities and report those through the Lindell Election Crime Bureau App or the FrankSocial platform. When ballots are coming in, Lindell’s Cause of America has an app activists can use for “early detection and tracking of voting anomalies” used for canvassing of homes. Lindell even showcased a device strapped to a drone called the WMD that can hover around polling places and sniff for alleged connections between voting machines and the internet.
To see the Big Lie 2.0 in action against eligible voting Americans, just look over to Texas, where Paxton used his bigoted conspiracy theories as a pretext to send armed agents to harass Latino voters ahead of a critical election, including raiding the home of an 87-year-old great-grandmother who has spent years educating seniors and veterans in her community on voting registration.
This is not a bug, but rather a feature, because in states where Republicans have launched flawed probes based off of completely bananas conspiracies, it’s been American voters who’ve come under scrutiny. “Exhibit A: Alabama’s error-ridden voter purge,” Ari Berman reports for Mother Jones. Berman writes that in Alabama, GOP Secretary of State’s Wes Allen purge of alleged noncitizens from the voter rolls ensnared hundreds of U.S. citizens who had already proven their eligibility to vote:
That meant the eleventh-hour voter purge had an error rate of more than 22 percent. The DOJ said that in Alabama “potentially several hundred or even thousands more registered, eligible voters from the list—U.S. citizens—remain in inactive status, stand to be harmed, and risk disenfranchisement just weeks before the upcoming federal election.”
Crackdowns on alleged non-citizen voters frequently ensnare naturalized US citizens or even those who have been citizens since birth, due to sloppy methodology by partisan election officials. William Pritchett of Montgomery County told NPR he’d received a letter from the state recently saying his registration was being canceled even though he was born in Alabama and has always been a US citizen.
These efforts within the states and the federal level work in tandem with the relentless, 360-degree surround sound amplification from right-wing media and disinformation purveyors on social media.
“Fox Business, Fox News, and Newsmax have peddled the false conspiracy theory that noncitizens vote en masse at least 141 times since House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) unveiled the text of the SAVE Act messaging bill,” Media Matters reported Oct. 14. “Fox anchor Maria Bartiromo and her shows have been some of the biggest propagators of the claims.” Bartiromo, one of the most fervent MAGA propagandists on the network, recently spread a thirdhand lie about noncitizen registration that was so unhinged that it was debunked by the state GOP in addition to being called “kind of racist” by a spokesperson with the Texas Department of Public Safety.
Meanwhile, tech billionaire Elon Musk is behaving like a one-man pro-Trump super PAC, following reporting this week that he gave $50 million to Citizens for Sanity, a “dark money” organization closely aligned with former Trump official and white nationalist Stephen Miller, to run some of the most nativist ads of the 2022 midterms. This cycle he is much more personally involved. Just last month, The Guardian had reported that Trump’s ground game in battleground states was now also being backed by the billionaire. While Musk has been silent on the reporting, his embarrassing cheerleading at Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania last weekend said it all.
Using his time at the Trump rally to spread the Big Lie 2.0. Musk followed up with an interview with white nationalist peddler, Tucker Carlson, where Musk pushed the lie that if Trump doesn’t win “this will be the last election” based on replacement theory Big Lie 2.0. Disturbingly, Musk argued that the threat wasn’t just from fraudulent votes but that non-white immigrants would eventually become citizens, asserting that their nationalized status would be a permanent marker against their ability to cast a legitimate vote. Rich irony coming from the naturalized immigrant spending so much to shape the outcomes of this election.
Despite the onslaught of nativist attacks and intimidation tactics against U.S. citizens, there are some signs the efforts could backfire. In Texas, where Paxton has targeted and harassed Latino political candidates and Latino U.S. citizens working to register eligible voters, community members and organizers are only feeling more amped up. The League of United Latin American Citizens, which saw at least one member targeted by the political raids, said it “will not stand idly by” and has launched a “Know Your Rights” campaign “to empower individuals to protect themselves when law enforcement comes knocking and to recognize and combat voter suppression and intimidation.” The organization also said that a team of pro bono lawyers is set to defend Latino voters facing intimidation for attempting to exercise their right to vote. NBC News reports:
Texas LULAC President Gabriel Rosales said in a phone interview that along with the fear, the raids “kind of lit a fire from Hispanics around Texas. We are hearing from all over.”
‘No hay mal que por bien no venga,’ Rosales said, repeating a phrase that his mother told him that he said is similar to saying, ‘When a door closes, a window opens.’
Among those refusing to back down under Paxton’s attacks is 86-year-old businessman, U.S. military veteran, and American GI Forum commander Roman Peña. Mr. Peña “said he will step in to do the work” that 87-year-old Lidia Martinez, the great-grandmother raided by Paxton in August, “can no longer do,” NBC News reported. That Mr. Peña has selflessly volunteered to stand in the place of Ms. Martinez is deeply admirable; that Mr. Peña and Ms. Martinez, both senior citizens who have already given so much of themselves to their country, were put in this position by Paxton and his allies should fill them with a deep sense of shame. But these are people incapable of shame.
“Our members have gone from shock to anger to resolve,” LULAC CEO Juan Proaño told NBC News, “and are doubling their commitment to register voters and get them to polls.” Millions of racially diverse eligible immigrants have also naturalized ahead of the election, the National Partnership for New Americans said earlier this year. Survey results have revealed that nearly all of the new Americans polled by the organization have expressed a high commitment to vote.
Monitoring the spread of the Big Lie 2.0, its consequences and its threats has painted a portrait of stark contrast around this election. On one side, we see billionaires, grifters, and powerful politicians peddling nativist conspiracy theories in the hopes of ending the American experiment in multi-racial democracy. On the other side, we see the heroic efforts of everyday Americans determined to reject the lies and fear and reinvigorate the promise of our democracy with their votes.
