The second night of the Republican National Convention (RNC) on Tuesday was rife with speakers spewing ugly anti-immigrant rhetoric, including the deadly white nationalist and antisemitic great replacement theory. From the House Speaker to other GOP House leaders to senators and candidates, speeches used language that inspired multiple deadly terrorist attacks and advanced lies that actively threaten American democracy.
Despite being sandwiched in between a handful of speakers spewing versions of the antisemitic replacement theory, fourth-ranking House Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik had the gall to claim to be a champion of combating antisemitism. She relayed how she has spent the last few months positioning herself as a supposed foe of antisemitic speech, invoking the House GOP’s investigations of campus antisemitism. “President Trump will bring back moral leadership to the White House,” she claimed, “condemning antisemitism and standing strong with Israel and the Jewish people.”
While the alarming rise in both antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents since the start of the Israel-Gaza conflict is absolutely concerning and should be unacceptable in a multiracial democracy, the record clearly shows that Stefanik is in no way a good faith broker here. Instead, she has been a leading broker in bringing the antisemitic replacement theory into the mainstream.
Shortly after winning a leadership seat by defending Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 violent coup attempt, Stefanik began running replacement theory ads to more than a million Facebook followers beginning in 2021. Stefanik continued her despicable assertions the following spring, falsely claiming just days before the horrific mass shooting in Buffalo in May 2022 that our nation was under a supposed “invasion.” And then sending out a fundraising email defending her rhetoric just a few days later. Again, this is all antisemitic rhetoric, period.
When reporting revealed that the racist gunman had cited this same rhetoric, Stefanik dared to feign outrage. But the headlines didn’t lie: “Stefanik echoed racist theory allegedly espoused by Buffalo suspect,” The Washington Post reported. “Racist Attack Spotlights Stefanik’s Echo of Replacement Theory,” The New York Times said. NBC highlighted Stefanik’s craven embrace of this white nationalist rhetoric in order to advance her political career: “Stefanik’s echo of ‘great replacement’ rhetoric offers clues to her national ambitions.”
Other GOP speakers on Tuesday advanced a similar collection of dangerous lies and conspiracies once confined to the fringe corners of the internet. In his remarks, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz claimed we are facing “a literal invasion” and that Democrats have “cynically decided they wanted votes from illegals more than they wanted to protect our children.” Let’s be clear: these dangerous replacement lies actively endanger our democracy and instigate the possibility of more political violence and attacks against immigrants.
Cruz’s lies are outrageous enough on their own but become even more sickening coming ahead of the fifth anniversary of a white nationalist-inspired massacre in his home state.
Just two weeks shy of the five year mark since the El Paso terrorist attack, Cruz’s rhetoric echoed the white nationalist and antisemitic manifesto of the Walmart shooter who massacred 23 people, as well as other deadly attacks in Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and elsewhere. Cruz “sounded disturbingly similar to the white nationalist mass murderer who carried out a targeted attack in his home state just five years ago,” America’s Voice Executive Director Vanessa Cárdenas said on Wednesday.
House Speaker Mike Johnson also echoed some of these dangerous lies, claiming that we “cannot allow the many millions of illegal aliens they’ve allowed across our borders to harm our citizens, drain our resources, or disrupt our elections,” which Rolling Stone reported was “nodding to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory that Democrats are deliberately trying to flood the nation with immigrants to win elections.”
Two members of Johnson’s caucus, Texas Rep. Monica De La Cruz and New York Rep. Mike Lawler, were also at the convention on Tuesday. Following the reprehensible gun violence incident directed at former President Trump and his supporters at a Pennsylvania rally last weekend, both issued tweets condemning the violence.
“In America, we resolve political differences with ballots — not bullets,” Rep. De La Cruz tweeted. Rep. Lawler issued a number of statements, tweeting that “political violence has no place in our country,” “should not be tolerated by anyone,” and that “we must lower the temperature on rhetoric.” But as vocal as Rep. Lawler was following political violence against a member of his party, that’s how quiet he was in response to a convention of white nationalist and deadly “replacement” and “invasion” rhetoric.
Rep. De La Cruz was also silent, instead claiming during an earlier event on Tuesday that Latinos were better off under the former president. “Hispanics, especially in my community, it’s not about what you say. It’s what you do,” she said in remarks reported by The Dallas Morning News. But as white nationalist violence has already shown in her home state, what you say can have tragic consequences. During her convention speech the next day, Rep. De La Cruz also touted her personal story as the granddaughter of Mexican farmworkers. But when it comes to her party leadership’s demonization of today’s immigrants, including these same farmworkers, she said nothing.
