America’s Voice Blog Post Examines How Republicans are Openly Espousing the White Nationalist Replacement Theory
Washington, DC – At a Trump rally in Mesa, Arizona, on October 9, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene took center stage to boost the Republican candidates running in the battleground state. In front of thousands of supporters, Taylor Greene peddled an unambiguous rendition of the white replacement lie:
Biden’s five million illegal aliens are on the verge of replacing you. Replacing your jobs. And replacing your kids in school. Coming from all over the world, they’re also replacing your culture.
This statement is indistinguishable from manifestos written by deadly white nationalists who have killed dozens of Americans in acts of terrorism over the last few years. In Charlottesville in 2017. In Pittsburgh in 2018. In El Paso in 2019. At the Capitol in 2021. And in Buffalo in May of this year.
While Taylor Greene elevates deadly racist lies about immigrants at a rally to boost turnout for Arizona Republicans, those same Republican candidates are deafeningly silent.
In the hotly contested battleground in Arizona’s Sixth Congressional District, Republican Juan Ciscomani hasn’t said a thing to distance himself from the rally just north of the district where some speakers explicitly named Ciscomani as a candidate those in attendance should help support.
The top-of-the-ticket Republican slate of candidates, Abe Hamadeh (Attorney General), Kari Lake (Governor), and Blake Masters (Senate) all took the stage after Taylor Greene’s explicit white nationalist comments and failed to condemn or distance themselves from these statements. Far from distancing herself from the white nationalism of Taylor Greene, Lake took the stage and reiterated her promise to declare migrants and asylum seekers an “invasion.” This rhetoric that is inexorably tied to the replacement theory and the racist mass murderers who have killed Americans all over the country. Lake has made this absurd and deadly conspiracy theory the centerpiece of her campaign. Masters and Hamadeh have also amplified this white nationalist fiction in their television commercials and throughout their campaigns.
According to Zachary Mueller, Political Director of America’s Voice:
The only thing worse than the dangerous embrace of extremism and white nationalism increasingly espoused by many in the GOP is the insidious silence by the mainstream of today’s Republican Party. Republicans’ silence in the face of full-throated embrace by their colleagues of the same white nationalist lies espoused by several domestic terrorists is not just a gross failure of leadership, it is active complicity in the deadly downstream consequences. Racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric, including encouraging more white nationalist domestic terrorism, is laying the groundwork for destabilizing American democracy through the myth there is an organized force of illegitimate votes cast by non-white ‘replacers.’
For Republicans like Juan Ciscomani and other candidates around Arizona and the nation, the silence on this issue is deafening.
