J. Scott Applewhite / AP
House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, leads his panel’s first meeting under the new Republican majority as he organizes the operating rules, at the Capitol in Washington, Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2023.
Friday, Feb. 3, 2023 | 2 a.m.
View more of the Sun's opinion section
The House Judiciary Committee, now under the control of Republican Chairman Jim Jordan and a GOP majority, held its first hearing Wednesday. The hearing was a startling example of GOP extremists using the national spotlight cast on this important committee to openly spread central propaganda arguments employed by fascist movements for more than a century.
Billed as the “Hearing on the Biden Border Crisis, Part 1,” Jordan opened the proceedings by asserting that the crisis of immigrants and asylum seekers at the nation’s southern border is a plot by Biden and the Democrats. “I think it’s intentional. … It seems deliberate, it seems premeditated, it seems intentional,” he said. Jordan went on to say more directly, “Make no mistake about it, the Biden administration is carrying out its plan.”
This sounds an awful lot like the “great replacement” conspiracy theory that has been touted by neo-Nazis and KKK members in the United States for nearly half a century. It’s a conspiracy theory whose roots go back to the late 18th century and was one of the early incitements used by Adolf Hitler that climaxed in the genocide of millions of Jews during the Holocaust.
Early in the last century, fascists in Italy and Spain employed anti-immigrant conspiracy theories to gain control of their countries. Today, incipient fascist parties in Spain, Italy, Greece, Hungary, parts of Germany and even Sweden and the UK are using anti-immigrant replacement lunacy to attract votes.
“Great replacement theory” was also used to justify more recent mass murders committed by white supremacists, including the 2014 Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church shooting in Charleston, S.C.; the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, Pa.; the 2019 Chabad of Poway synagogue shooting in Poway, Calif.; the 2019 mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and the 2022 Tops grocery store shooting in Buffalo, N.Y. Antisemitic chants of “Jews will not replace us” echoed through the stteets the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville, Va.
David Lane, who was convicted of the targeted assassination of a Jewish activist and radio host, as well as former KKK Grand Wizard, David Duke, have both wrote extensively about the great replacement theory.
We would like to believe that a sitting United States congressman isn’t actively spouting neo-Nazi tropes from the dais of the House Judiciary Committee, but this wasn’t the first time that Republican congressional members were caught spreading white supremacist propaganda.
Just a few seats away from Jordan during Wednesday’s hearing was Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla. In a 2020 interview on Fox News’ “Justice with Judge Jeanine,” Gaetz claimed that liberals were engaging in an “attempted cultural genocide” that sought to “replace America.”
Gaetz received criticism for those comments at the time, so it’s not as if he or Jordan would have been unaware of its white supremacist roots. Yet that didn’t stop Jordan and Gaetz from invoking the theory and other racist tropes at Wednesday’s hearing.
Jordan and Gaetz each repeatedly sought to link the record number of Latin American asylum seekers crossing the border in between ports of entry to the rise of fentanyl-related deaths in the United States.
But as Rep. Eric Swallwell, C-Calif., noted during the hearing, “96% of the fentanyl seized in the last fiscal year was seized at ports of entry. And 86% of the convictions around fentanyl coming across our border were convictions of U.S. citizens.”
Judge Ricardo Samaniego, who presides over immigration and asylum cases in El Paso County, Texas, and one of the three witnesses who testified at the hearing, confirmed Swalwell’s data. He testified that “There is no invasion of migrants in our community … nor are there hoards of undocumented immigrants committing crimes against citizens or causing havoc in our community.”
Despite the testimony and the fact checking, GOP members of the committee doubled down on their purposeful and hateful rhetoric. After the hearing, they took to Twitter, accusing a Washington Post reporter who cited statistics from the U.S. Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement to further verify Swalwell’s data of “lying on behalf of Democrats.”
This is bigotry, pure and simple, and it’s a strategy that has played out in every far-right attempt to take a nation over for more than 100 years. Claiming immigrants are the enemy and there is a plot behind immigration is the birthing groan of every extremist movement.
After all, bigots don’t have to make coherent arguments to achieve their goals, they only need to spread the lies, misinformation and conspiracies that divide communities, silence opposition and distract the public from the real sources of real problems facing everyday Americans.
As Rep. Mary Kay Scanlon, D-Pa., explained, “by falsely suggesting that migrant families seeking asylum are the source of the fentanyl epidemic, we can’t even start to craft policy measures that could actually address either of these issues.”
She’s right. And as long as there are bigots spreading neo-fascist propaganda leading the House Judiciary Committee, there’s little hope that Congress will take meaningful action to solve today’s challenges, let alone the challenges of tomorrow. That failure will continue to feed fear, resentment and divisions in our communities.
Take heed, America. The once-proud GOP is allowing leaders to grease the wheels of racism, antisemitism and oppression. If we don’t push back against their manipulation and misinformation now, we run the risk of undoing 150 years of progress (albeit slow and bloody progress) in human and civil rights, and becoming the villains we decry.
