This month marks five years since a white supremacist gunman who believed the lie of a supposed “Hispanic invasion of Texas” drove for 10 hours to the peaceful border town of El Paso to murder 23 innocent people who were simply going about their daily lives. It also marks seven years from the racist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, where following chants of “you will not replace us, Jews will not replace us” a white nationalist murdered Heather Heyer.
90-year-old Luis Alfonso Juarez, the oldest victim of the El Paso tragedy, was a naturalized American citizen and raised seven children with his wife of seven decades. “In a statement to The New York Times, Juarez’s family said he had ‘lived the American dream,’” the AP reported. Javier Amir Rodriguez was 15 and the youngest victim. “Rodriguez was about to enter his sophomore year at Horizon High School when the tragedy occurred,” the El Paso Times reported.
Despite the fact that this horrific tragedy was inspired by white nationalist “invasion” rhetoric, Rep. Mike Lawler (NY-17) has remained silent as GOP leaders and colleagues in Congress have embraced this once-fringe conspiracy theory as an integral part of their speeches, advertising and campaigns.
Unfortunately, this is part of a pattern. Rep. Lawler has also remained silent as fellow Republicans have echoed antisemitic “replacement” rhetoric from 2017’s deadly Charlottesville rally. The family of Heyer has since kept her final resting place a secret in order to protect it from neo-Nazi defacement.
Yet earlier this year, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump horrifically downplayed this white supremacist rally as “a little peanut.” In one of the most startling examples yet of how deadly white nationalism and antisemitism have totally gripped the GOP, no Congressional Republican vocally denounced Trump’s outrageous remarks – including Rep. Lawler.
While Rep. Lawler has remained silent on violent and dehumanizing language echoed by GOP leaders and colleagues, he did quickly react following the recent gun violence directed at former President Trump and his supporters at a Pennsylvania rally in July. “We all have a responsibility to debate the issues, but the hateful rhetoric that is inciting people to violence has got to stop,” he said. “Political violence should not be tolerated by anyone,” he said in another tweet.
On this terrible incident, Rep. Lawler is right. While our political and policy differences may be different, violence is never the answer, and elected officials and candidates with their immense and influential platforms have a unique responsibility in helping prevent political violence by avoiding dangerous and inflammatory rhetoric.
Words matter, as Rep. Lawler acknowledges in condemning the political violence seen in Pennsylvania. So why does Rep. Lawler continue to support a presidential candidate who has, as Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby reported at Popular Information in July, “spent his political career advocating and encouraging violence”? Can Rep. Lawler at the very least, vocally condemn the rhetoric that has inspired multiple deadly attacks?
Show me your friends, and I will show you who you are. And Rep. Lawler’s friends are wantonly promoting bigoted conspiracies linked to political violence.
We need to know what Rep. Lawler is going to do to address the violence inspired by the words of his friends.
