Unmasked: The “Fanatical Conspiracy Caucus” in the US Congress

“The Great Replacement Conspiracy claims that Jews are orchestrating the replacement of white Christian Americans with nonwhite immigrants, people of color, or others they view as inferior and “easier to control,” the report said. “Current versions generally avoid explicit references to race and religion, instead emphasizing culture, immigrant status, or political power.”

“Invasion conspiracies portray 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 post continues.

The report details how the “invasion” rhetoric “metastasized and spread throughout the 118th Congress” and how “it is not just immigration hardliners” who are engaging in it.

“As of press time, the 118th Congress has held more than 30 hearings in which cult conspiracies of cultural replacement or invasion have been advocated,” and dozens of “immigration hardliners, far-right figures, and members of anti-immigrant hate groups designated by the SPLC have been called to testify,” the paper notes, referring to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which designates and monitors hate groups.

“In total, there were 1,411 unique social media posts from official congressional accounts promoting the same cult conspiracies,” the report’s authors wrote.

Examples cited in the report include Rep. Andy Biggs’ (R-Ariz.) disturbing video titled “Alien Invasion” and Rep. Matt Gaetz’s (R-Fla.) posting of a xenophobic opinion piece in his official capacity on the new far-right website. Daily callwho posted a video in 2017 encouraging people to run over protesters with cars. This was just months before James Fields, a neo-Nazi who supported 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 are also engaging in “coded versions of replacement-type ideas,” including “warning about alleged nefarious plots to import a new voting bloc of immigrants and intentionally importing numbers so large that they will shift demographics in favor of Democrats, who are often blamed for the project.”

For example, House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green (R-Tenn.) appeared on Fox News and claimed that President Joe Biden “is more concerned about future votes for his party than the safety of the American people.” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said 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 public publications and comments and has found its way into formal legislation.”

Examples include Rep. Lance Gooden (R-Texas) introducing the “United Nations Immigration Invasion Act,” which would ban the federal government from funding the critical United Nations refugee and migrant agencies that the United States has supported with bipartisan support for more than 70 years, and Rep. Jodey Arrington’s (R-Texas) resolution to invoke the Constitution’s invasion clause to give states “the sovereign power to repel an invasion.” Arrington’s proposal is supported by at least 50 Republican colleagues.

Lawmakers’ rhetoric about the “Great Replacement” and “invasion” has had deadly consequences. The report highlights massacres in Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Christchurch, Poway and El Paso. The Texas mass shooting — in which another white supremacist Trump supporter gunned down dozens of mostly Latino people at a Walmart after writing a manifesto citing the Great Replacement theory — happened five years ago Saturday.

The report argues that anti-immigrant rhetoric threatens democracy by “fueling election deniers’ claims that elections are unreliable because ballot boxes are polluted by fraudulent votes from undocumented immigrants.” When legislators grant it false legitimacy, it erodes “public confidence in elections and justifies overturning unfavorable results.”

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 pose a danger to individuals, communities and democracy itself,” Rabbi Jason Kimelman-Block, director of Bend the Arc: Jewish Action in Washington, D.C., said Friday. “These lies have inspired violence and mass murder in cities like El Paso, Pittsburgh and Buffalo.”

“But instead of exposing and marginalizing these insane lies, far too many members of Congress have instead amplified them and pushed 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 remain silent in the face of this threat not only to our security, but to the security of so many communities in our broader American family.”

Naomi Steinberg, HIAS’s vice president of U.S. policy and advocacy, said that “the rhetoric of invasion and the Great Replacement theory, both deeply rooted in white nationalist and anti-Semitic tropes, are no longer a problem in Congress; they are a regular feature.”

“It is incumbent upon all of us to denounce this language whenever we hear it and insist on the need for good-faith, fact-based debates about how to address America’s immigration challenges,” she added, “rather than being swept up in the dangerous hate speech that has pervaded the immigration debate in the halls of Congress and on campaign trails across the country.”