Two years after the Buffalo shooting, Trump’s Republican Party relies on the racist theory that motivated it

Two years after a racist gunman massacred 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket in a black neighborhood, the conspiracy theory that motivated him has become mainstream within the Republican Party.

The “Great Replacement Theory” – a claim pushed by white nationalists that non-white immigration is part of a liberal (often Jewish-led) plot to overthrow the American way of life – had been linked to several mass shootings before Buffalo shooting at Tops supermarket. on May 14, 2022. Donald Trump (no stranger to anti-immigrant conspiracies) helped popularize the rhetoric of the great replacement years before the Buffalo shootings – polling data at the time of the shooting indicated that A majority of Trump voters in 2020 believed it.

And Trump has only intensified this rhetoric since then. It’s common today to hear MAGA Republicans spewing the toxic bigotry that forms the basis of the Great Replacement Theory, even touting the conspiracy by name.

Trump, for example, claims that the Biden administration’s immigration policies are part of a “plot to overthrow the government.” He and House Speaker Mike Johnson have pushed replacement theory to the center of the Republican agenda through baseless claims that undocumented immigrants could illegally influence federal elections. That Trump would make such claims after pushing Republicans not to pass strict immigration reforms underscores his intent to use immigration to sow fear among voters.

“The replacement theory is real,” Trump-loving Pennsylvania Republican Party Rep. Scott Perry told fellow lawmakers last week in audio discovered by CNN. Other Republicans have been only slightly less open in promoting the conspiracy theory.

Nearly all Republican members of the House, for example, voted to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who is Jewish, over absurd accusations that he and the Biden administration deliberately enabled an “invasion.” of immigrants across the United States-Mexico border. Several Republican governors have used similar allegations of an “invasion” of liberal-aligned immigrants to justify their own anti-immigrant crackdowns — some of which usurp federal authority, a tactic that has pushed right-wing extremists to demand civil war.

Two years after one of the replacement theory’s many supporters gunned down innocent people in a black neighborhood — one of many acts of violence it inspired — Republicans are always using it to incite racist fury among their supporters.