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Exposed: The 'Bigoted Conspiracy Caucus' in US Congress
"Invasion and great replacement theory rhetoric, both deeply rooted in white nationalist and antisemitic tropes, are no longer a bug on the Hill, they are a regular feature," said one campaigner.
Aug 02, 2024
Republican U.S. lawmakers who embrace and amplify racist, xenophobic, and antisemitic conspiracy theories about undocumented immigrants are helping to stoke deadly politically motivated violence, according to a report published Friday by a coalition of advocacy groups.
The report—titled Bigoted Conspiracy Caucus—"exposes the normalization of xenophobic 'great replacement' and 'invasion' conspiracies within the 118th Congress, documenting their historical roots and widespread promotion by members of Congress."
"The great replacement conspiracy claims Jews are orchestrating the replacement of white Christian Americans with nonwhite immigrants, people of color, or others who they think are inferior and 'easier to control,'" the report states. "Today's versions may generally avoid referencing race and religion explicitly, instead emphasizing culture, immigration status, or political power."
"Invasion conspiracies describe immigrants as 'invaders' who pose an existential threat to American 'culture,' or 'traditions,' and implicitly call for hate-fueled attacks to counter this imagined threat," the publication continues.
The report details how "invasion" rhetoric "has metastasized and spread within the 118th Congress," and how "it is not only immigration hardliners" who are engaging in it.
"As of publication, the 118th Congress has held more than 30 congressional hearings where bigoted conspiracies of cultural replacement or an invasion were espoused" and dozens of "immigration hardliners, far-right figures, and members of SPLC-designated anti-immigrant hate groups were called to testify, the paper notes, referring to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which designates and monitors hate groups.
"In total, there have been 1,411 unique social media posts from official congressional accounts promoting the same bigoted conspiracies," the report's authors wrote.
Examples cited in the report include Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) producing an ominous video titled " Alien Invasion" and Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) publishing an xenophobic opinion piece in his official capacity on the far-right new website Daily Caller, which in 2017 published a video encouraging running over protesters with cars. This, just months before James Fields, a neo-Nazi supporter of former President Donald Trump's anti-immigrant policies, used his car to murder civil rights activist Heather Heyer at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The report details how right-wing lawmakers also engage in "coded versions of replacement-style ideas," including by "warning of supposed nefarious plots to import a new voting bloc of immigrants as well as intentionally importing a number so large it will change the demographics in favor of the Democrats, who are often alleged to be behind the scheme."
For example, House Homeland Security Committee Chair Mark Green (R-Tenn.) appeared on Fox News and asserted that President Joe Biden "is more concerned about future votes for his party than he is the security of the American people." Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) declared on social media that Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas "have spent nearly four years working to systematically replace the American people."
The report shows that "this rhetoric has gone beyond posting and public comments and has shown up in official legislation."
Examples include Rep. Lance Gooden (R-Texas) introducing the " No Tax Dollars for the United Nations' Immigration Invasion Act," which would ban the federal government from funding crucial U.N. refugee and migrant agencies that the U.S. has backed with bipartisan support for over 70 years, and Rep. Jodey Arrington's (R-Texas) resolution to invoke the Constitution's invasion clause to give states "sovereign power to repel an invasion." Arrington's proposal is backed by at least 50 GOP colleagues.
Lawmakers' "great replacement" and "invasion" rhetoric has had deadly consequences. The report highlights the massacres in Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Christchurch, Poway, and El Paso. The mass shooting in Texas—in which another white supremacist Trump supporter gunned down dozens of mostly Latino people in a Walmart after penning a manifesto citing the great replacement theory—took place five years ago Saturday.
The report argues that anti-immigrant rhetoric threatens democracy by adding "fuel to election deniers' claims that elections cannot be trusted because the ballot box is polluted with fraudulent undocumented immigrant votes." When given false legitimacy by lawmakers, this erodes "public trust in elections and gives justification for overturning unfavorable results."
"The 'great replacement' and 'invasion' conspiracies are a danger to individuals, communities, and democracy itself."
The eight groups that produced the report are: America's Voice, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, Help Refugees & Asylum-Seekers (HIAS), Jewish Council for Public Affairs, Presente.org, Southern Poverty Law Center, and Western States Center.
"The 'great replacement' and 'invasion' conspiracies are a danger to individuals, communities, and democracy itself," Rabbi Jason Kimelman-Block, Washington director of Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, said in a statement Friday. "These lies have inspired violence and mass murder in places such as El Paso, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo."
"But instead of calling out and marginalizing these reckless falsehoods, far too many members of Congress have instead amplified them and brought them into the mainstream for their own cynical gain," he added. "It is long past time to hold these elected officials accountable for their recklessness. American Jews will not be silent in the face of this threat not only to our safety, but to the safety of so many communities in our broader American family."
HIAS vice president of U.S. policy and advocacy Naomi Steinberg said that "invasion and great replacement theory rhetoric, both deeply rooted in white nationalist and antisemitic tropes, are no longer a bug on the Hill, they are a regular feature."
"It is incumbent upon all of us to speak up to denounce this language every time we hear it and to insist upon good faith, fact-based debates about how to address immigration challenges in the U.S.," she added, "rather than the dangerous hate-slinging that has taken over the immigration debate in the halls of Congress and on campaign trails around the country."
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House GOP 'Imploding' as Gallagher Resigns and Greene Moves to Oust Speaker
"House Republicans had a bad day," said one reporter, listing challenges and changes to leadership as a government shutdown looms.
Mar 22, 2024
The U.S. House of Representatives started a two-week recess on Friday, but not before a series of events that provoked fresh declarations of what has become a familiar phrase over the past few years: "Republicans in disarray."
Before leaving Capitol Hill, House members passed a spending package intended to prevent a partial government shutdown that could still occur unless the Senate acts. Fewer than two dozen Democrats and over 100 Republicans opposed the bill. Democratic opposition was largely related to Israel's war on the Gaza Strip.
Meanwhile, far-right Republicans like Texas Congressman Chip Roy have made comments like, "Everyone that I know and trust about the border, about overall spending, see it as a complete and total failure and a capitulation by Republicans. And leadership worked the deal, so it's on leadership."
Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) not only opposed the package but also filed a motion to vacate, hoping to remove House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.)—which would only require a simple majority if it came up for a vote.
The \u201cRepublican-controlled\u201d House just passed a $1.2 trillion spending bill that doesn\u2019t secure our border, but funds full term abortion and trans ideology on our youth.\n\nI filed a Motion to Vacate because the House needs a Speaker who\u2019s able to win for Republicans and our\u2026— (@)
House Republicans elected Johnson to the leadership role in late October, after ousting former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.)—who then opted to leave office at the end of last year—and rejecting three other candidates for the post: Reps. Tom Emmer (D-Minn.), Steve Scalise (R-La.), and Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).
Noting that Greene filed a regular motion rather than a privileged one, meaning it could be referred to a committee, "where it would likely languish," NBC Newsreported Friday:
Greene told reporters that her motion to vacate was "more of a warning than a pink slip," saying she does not want to "throw the House into chaos," like the three and a half weeks that the chamber was without a speaker when McCarthy, her close ally, was ousted.
"I'm not saying that it won't happen in two weeks or it won't happen in a month or who knows when. But I am saying the clock has started. It's time for our conference to choose a new speaker," she said.
Johnson's October election led Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.)—who filed the motion to vacate targeting McCarthy—to declare that "MAGA is ascendant," a reference to the "Make America Great Again" campaign slogan of former President Donald Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee for the November election.
While Gaetz voted against the spending package on Friday, he also said that "if we vacated this speaker we'd end up with a Democrat. You know, when I vacated the last one, I made a promise to the country that we would not end up with a Democrat speaker and I was right. I couldn't make that promise again today."
Asked if he thinks Johnson's job is safe, Gaetz responded, "It is."
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) also responded dismissively when questioned about Greene's motion on Friday, tellingPunchbowl News, "She's a joke."
A spokesperson for Johnson, Raj Shah, toldPolitico that the speaker "always listens to the concerns of members, but is focused on governing. He will continue to push conservative legislation that secures our border, strengthens our national defense, and demonstrates how we'll grow our majority."
However, Johnson's limited control over the House is dwindling. Congressman Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.), who backed the spending bill, revealed that he is resigning from his seat effective April 19 after previously saying that he would not seek reelection. Friday was also the last day of Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.), who announced earlier this month that he would step down from his seat.
The Washington Post noted Friday that "Buck and Gallagher are the sixth and seventh members of the House who are quitting midterm simply to leave for the private sector, a trend we dubbed 'the Great Resignation' last weekend. It's also the highest number of lawmakers quitting public service altogether in at least 40 years."
Responding to Gallager's announcement on social media, HuffPost's Jennifer Bendery said that "House Republicans are imploding in plain sight."
In yet another disruption to the chamber's GOP leadership, Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas)—who announced last year that she wouldn't seek reelection—wrote in a Friday letter to Johnson that she plans to step down as chair of the House Appropriations Committee.
Granger told the speaker she would stay in the post until the Republican Steering Committee chooses her replacement and then remain on the panel through the end of her term to offer "advice and counsel for my colleagues when it is needed."
The Texas Tribunepointed out that "the Appropriations Committee will need to pass another set of federal funding bills before the end of September to keep the government funded. Congress has failed to meet that deadline for nearly 30 years, and Granger acknowledged in her letter that election years in particular often distract Congress from passing spending bills on time."
GOP members of the upper chamber were also accused of sowing chaos on Friday, as the midnight shutdown deadline loomed.
Senate Budget Committee Chair Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said on social media, "Well, it looks like we're headed for a shutdown at the hands of Senate Republican gremlins who (1) know that amendments can't pass because there's no House to send an amended bill back to (they adjourned) and (2) want amendments anyway."
"And (3) can't decide amongst themselves what won't-pass amendments they want," Whitehouse added. "I sure hope I'm wrong. But the Republican Senate caucus is a rudderless ship right now, so the gremlins are running the show."
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Trump: Rhinoceros in Chief
An example of absurdist drama that prophesied Trumpist transformation is Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros—the classic play in which an entire town devolves into rhinoceroses that silence any hope of coherent conversation.
Jan 19, 2024
In 1968, the Youth International Party nominated a pig named Pigasus for president; in 2024, the Republican Party will likely nominate a Traitor named Trump for president, a dumber and more corrupt candidate than Pigasus. The Youth International Party—the anarchic, counter-culture Yippies— nominated the pig as an absurd joke. While it’s absurd to nominate an indicted felon who tried to overturn the 2020 election, the GOP is not joking.
The Yippies’ pig had no chance of becoming president: according to the Constitution Pigasus wasn’t qualified, being younger than 35 years old. Trump as an insurrectionist is—like the pig—unqualified to be president, according to the Constitution. Yet, unlike Pigasus, he has a good chance to become president: The Supreme Court will likely discount the Constitution, he leads Biden in some polls, and, if he loses, he will try to steal the election again, threatening “bedlam” if that happens.
To rational people, it is mindbogglingly surreal that an incompetent, ignorant megalomaniac and sexual abuser like Trump, whose grating voice alone rattles teeth, would be deemed fit for the presidency, let alone close to winning power. Yet he is. Despite his enabling of the pandemic, his 2020 defeat, his instigation of the January 6 attack on the Capital, the 91 charges across four criminal cases, and his never-ending hurricane of lies, millions of reality-challenged Americans worship and support him.
Exposing its total MAGA-tization, the Republican Party has crawled with Trump into a moral abyss that turns out to be a bottomless pit of unreality. The fake GOP primary delivers phony, cowardly candidates Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, who are terrified of criticizing him and have promised to support him even if he were a convicted felon. They continue their sham candidacies, hoping that the laws of gravity will reverse on Trump and he will be sucked up into the vacuum of outer space. Failing that, it is perfectly fine with them that the defeated president attempted a coup and, though stopped, he can still return to the presidency.
The deranged Trump swamped his “opposition” in the Iowa caucus by 30 points. Watching cable news afterwards, it felt like I was living in Russia and Putin was running against two puppet candidates. The pundits seriously discussed the micro-details of the race and how each of the candidates fared in Nowheresville, Iowa, and no one screamed, “This is insanity—this is the cult of a madman!”
The craven cult that inflates Trump’s already-enormous self-esteem has given him the power to bend the arc of reality.
The nightmarish possibility of electing the shameless septuagenarian— a self-described dictator—is helped by his politically weak octogenarian opponent Joe Biden who frames the election as a choice between him and doomsday, but provides doomsday-style weapons and unconditional support for Israel’s Gaza genocide. In addition, Biden risks a “Red Sea War” by bombing Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the world.
Angry with Biden, pro-Palestine anti-war progressives might turn away from him in disgust—not voting or voting for third party candidates, undoubtedly funded by Republican donors. Other voters don’t like him because he is too old. In any case, Biden-hating voters might help elect the Muslim-hating, also elderly Trump, who is even more supportive of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu than Biden. In his first torturous term, Trump moved the American embassy to Jerusalem and left Palestinians out of the Abraham Accords, which many viewed as a betrayal of Palestine.
In his first term, Trump’s brutality and corruption were slightly mitigated by his ignorance and laziness. In a second, Trump—older and lazier—would better understand the system’s vulnerabilities and loopholes. On inauguration day 2025, Trump will be an indicted or convicted outlaw. He will commit the first crime of his second term at noon: His oath to defend the United States Constitution will be a perjury.
In a second term, he would install an army of political loyalists whose fealty to his most unhinged demands will take precedence over their commitment to the Constitution or legal governance. They will help him drive a much more focused agenda of vengeance against his adversaries and impunity for himself. For his own survival, he must destroy the rule of law by stopping all state and federal, civil and criminal cases against him. If a president can order the justice department to stop a case against him—as Trump would surely do—then obstruction of justice becomes a normal privilege of the presidency.
A former insurrectionist re-elected to the Presidency, he would use the Insurrection Act to order the military to crush protests—which he hoped to do during the summer of 2020—and turn the power of the federal government against his perceived enemies. Paraphrasing Hitler, he said, “We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” It has always been Trump’s supreme political wish to wield military violence as personal weapons of power—a wish that many in his party now seem determined to help him achieve.
As xenophobe-in-chief, he hopes to institute a program of mass detainment and deportation of undocumented immigrants, who he says are “poisoning the blood” of the country, employing the rhetoric of European totalitarians. His aides have already drawn up plans for new detention centers at the U.S.-Mexico border, where anyone suspected of illegal entry would be held until officials have settled the person’s immigration status.
If Trump is returned to office, he will undoubtedly make January 6 a national holiday—the Day of the Patriotic Martyrs.
American democracy will disintegrate piece by piece as a second Trump term erects a postmodern fascist state modeled on Victor Orbán’s Hungary—destroying the legitimacy of elections, trampling constitutional rights, instituting a nation-wide abortion ban, cutting off immigration, suppressing derogatory media, promoting Christian nationalism, and undermining the rule of law.
Even beyond this horror, the craven cult that inflates Trump’s already-enormous self-esteem has given him the power to bend the arc of reality. His hallucinating supporters believe in an elaborate MAGA phantasmagoria that Trump has concocted: that the previous election was stolen, that Biden is an illegitimate president, that Biden has weaponized the legal system to prosecute his strongest opponent Trump, and that the January 6 riot was not an insurrection by Trump supporters but an instigation by the FBI and antifa.
In a brief moment after the January 6 Capitol attack, many in the GOP thought the Trump monster had been banished, a pariah in the Party. Republican leaders blamed him for the insurrection. Party fund-raisers assured donors they were done with him. Trump’s own loyalists turned against him. Former Attorney General Barr said Trump’s conduct was a “betrayal of his office and supporters.”
The Murdoch-owned lapdog Wall Street Journalargued that Trump was done: “This week finished him as a serious political figure. He has betrayed his loyal supporters by lying to them about the election and the ability of Congress and Mr. Pence to overturn it. He has refused to accept the basic bargain of democracy, which is to accept the result, win or lose.” Trump also got blamed when the 2022 midterms went seriously awry as Trump-endorsed election deniers lost winnable races and the much-hyped “red tsunami” turned into a dribble. In her book, purged Republican Liz Cheney reported that afterwards Trump was depressed and refused to eat.
After condemning Trump for January 6 and even suggesting that he resign, now-deposed House Speaker Kevin McCarthy traveled to Mar-a-Lago and, in an historically spineless act of recantation, embraced and absolved the starving former President. Cheney and many others have identified this as a pivotal moment in reviving the former president’s political viability and appetite.
Still, previous to this submission, the Republican Party threw away its best chance to bury him forever when 43 senators voted to acquit him in his impeachment after the Capitol riot. They could have relegated him to Palm Beach and saved America from hearing the despicable rants of this malfunctioning moron and putting the police and the nuclear button under his thumb.
Trump resumed eating, lying, and constructing a new absurd reality that has proven more politically salient with the GOP and its voters than many of us thought possible on January 7, 2021, even after seeing it happen over and over for the previous six exhausting, gut-wrenching years.
Pulling off a kind of double coup, this psychopathic fabricator added to the original Big Lie about the “rigged election.” He called January 6 “a beautiful day,” and he designated the nearly 1,300 defendants arrested in connection with the Capitol attack ”martyrs” and “hostages.” He has promised to pardon insurrectionists and threatened to lock up the police who tried to defend the Capitol that day. If Trump is returned to office, he will undoubtedly make January 6 a national holiday—the Day of the Patriotic Martyrs.
The GOP and the right-wing media echo system has been so effective in pumping out Trump’s upside-down-world propaganda that polling recently found that, in the intervening three years, the number of Republicans who believe Trump’s lies about a “rigged election” has, in fact, gone up. Today, only 31% of Republicans believe that Biden is the “legitimate” president, down from 39% in late 2021. The poll also showed that Republicans thought the insurrectionist mob were mostly peaceful.
For millions of people, Trump has managed to transmute historical events that everyone saw with their own eyes into theater of the absurd, an anti-realistic dramatic genre characterized by dark humor, incoherent language, strange symbolism, and themes that relate to human irrationality.
An example of absurdist drama that prophesied Trumpist transformation is Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros—the classic play in which an entire town devolves into hard-skinned, monstrous rhinoceroses that issue ear-shattering bellows that silence any hope of coherent conversation. Rhinoceros thundered onto the stage, in 1960, with a chilling yet farcically funny allegory of how fascism can mutate ordinary people into angry, violent, mindless beasts whose articulateness dissolves into a cacophony of guttural honks.
Writing in the wake of Hitler and Stalin, Ionesco painted a picture of a society succumbing to the contagion of “rhinoceritis,” a disease that erodes individuality and replaces it with groupthink and casual brutality as well as a hatred of non-rhinoceroses. The transformative infection suggests the dehumanizing force of tyrannical ideologies.
Becoming a huge, horned rhinoceros is gradually normalized: A formerly concerned character Jean dismisses his friend’s terror at the multiplication of grotesque rhino mutations and their deleterious effects on human freedom. Jean debases himself and enables rhinoceritis when he says that despite their savage deformity, they’re “harmless, docile herbivores” and “seem so sure of themselves.” This mindless acceptance and rationalization foreshadows the insidious nature of the disease, disguising its destructive potential.
Ionesco’s play exposes the lure of surrendering to a mass authoritarian movement and abandoning the burden of independent thought. Among Trump’s abettors are numerous verifiably insane congresspeople who have been infected by rhinoceritis for a long time such as Marjorie Taylor Green, Lauren Boebert, and Matt Gaetz. But it’s the transformed normies that are most pathetic.
Current House Majority Whip Tom Emmer angered Trump when he voted to certify Biden’s election, unlike 147 colleagues who voted to overturn the election. When Emmer ran for his dream-job Speaker of the House, Trump sank his candidacy, warning that he would be a “tragic mistake” and calling him a “Globalist RINO” (not a rhinoceros). Two months later, Emmer—like nearly 100 members of the House, said, “I am proud to endorse Donald J. Trump for President.” Expressing his gratitude to Emmer for his miserable self-abasement, Trump smirked, “They always bend the knee.”
One of the more pitiful examples of “Trump Debasement Syndrome” is Sen. Josh Hawley, the guy who egged on the January 6 rhinoceros-thugs with a fist-pump that lamely showed solidarity with them and then was recorded in security footage fleeing for his life to avoid those same stampeding thugs. Hawley has decided to “forget” his traumatic escape from the mob, though he had not endorsed King Rhinoceros as the Iowa caucus approached. Exhibiting concern for Hawley’s electoral health, Trump warned him to “be very careful” in his Senate re-election campaign. Shortly thereafter, Hawley joined the Republican Rhino herd and publicly endorsed Trump saying, “I’m with him.”
Rhinoceros explored the erosion of moral values, the seductive nature of power as people become mere instruments of brute strength and aggression. As authority figures collapse and undergo metamorphosis, other people find it easier to justify why becoming a rhinoceros is desirable. As one character declares, “It‘s the strength that counts, don’t you want to be strong?”
Once a rising conservative normie in the party—an acolyte of former Republican VP candidate Paul Ryan, Rep. Elise Stefanik has transmogrified into an automated MAGA rhinoceros. She trumpeted Trump’s reference to the January 6 criminals as “hostages,” and embraced the claim that the 2020 election was an “unconstitutional circumventing of the Constitution.” Stefanik refused to commit to certifying the results of the 2024 election, saying “We will see if this is a legal and valid election.” After calling the media biased against Trump, she said the “border crisis is poisoning Americans.” Desperately thirsty for Trump’s VP spot, Stefanik has become a eager demagogue.
What began, in Rhinoceros, as isolated incidents becomes a rhinoceros contagion as the town’s residents witness an astonishing metamorphosis as more and more people sprout horns, grow enormously huge with hard green skin, and succumb to the allure of the rampaging Rhino fascists. There are no elections in Rhinoceros Town so the entire society is transformed, except for one individual Berenger who shouts, “I’ll take on the whole of them! I’ll put up a fight against the lot of them! I’m the last man left, and I’m staying that way until the end. I’m not capitulating.”
The entire Republican Party—elected officials and voters—have capitulated. They’ve chosen the sickness, nihilism, and absurdity. Fortunately, we still have democracy. Stopping the Trump contagion will not suddenly eradicate the disease and make America perfectly healthy, but it is vital to embrace reality, reject the absurd, prevent further suffering, and preserve the possibility of progress.
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