Trump’s Dehumanizing and Conspiratorial Rhetoric is Setting Up Another Violent Assault on Our Democracy:
In a campaign speech in Ohio to boost the Senate campaign of Bernie Moreno last Saturday, former President Donald Trump told the crowd that migrants are “not people” and referred to them as “animals.” This definitional dehumanization, as history and research have definitely shown, actively courts political violence. The former President was also quite explicit about the violence he expected from his followers, saying that if he didn’t get elected, “it’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.” While this violent and dehumanizing language has been fairly consistent throughout Trump’s 2024 campaign, the “blood bath” and “not people” comments broke through in the media. The Washington Post headline read, “Trump says some undocumented immigrants are ‘not people,’” while the New York Times stated, “Trump Says Some Migrants Are ‘Not People’ and Predicts a ‘Blood Bath’ if He Loses.” Trump’s language is, of course, a further example of how he intends to weaponize immigration and related fears, lies, and conspiracies to pursue power. His shocking and extremely dangerous language has already led to real-life violence as he seeks to further undermine trust in our elections. What’s also different now is that his dangerous rhetoric is backed up by policy proposals to enact them. America’s Voice did a deep dive into Trump’s 2025 immigration agenda to outline what he intends to do if he wins. But as Rex Huppke noted for USA Today, there is a deep reservoir of conspiratorial, dehumanizing rhetoric that threads throughout Trump’s Ohio speech that should raise additional concerns about the violent threat to democracy Trump is positioning. Trump began with a literal salute to the “unbelievable patriots'' who have been tried and convicted for the violent anti-democratic insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6. The presumptive GOP nominee has been praising the insurrections for months, making a disturbing rendition some have sung of the national anthem core to his campaign, as well as promising pardons if he can find a way back into the Oval Office. While Trump’s allies and apologists were quick to use his rambling inconsistencies as a defense, the story that Trump and the GOP are telling about the 2024 election is quite clear. They claim that non-white immigrants are a vehicle from which their enemies will pollute the ballot box against the will of “real” Americans, making his loss only possible through a conspiratorial stealing of the election. These immigrants, they say, are “poisoning the blood” of our people, and these non-humans are stealing our democracy. The result of that electoral theft must be a bloodbath. But don’t worry, the perpetrators of the deadly violence who conceived of this conspiracy are destroying our democracy in the name of protecting it. Trump’s message to those willing to engage in violence: You are a patriot, a hero, who will be pardoned of any accusation of crimes that you committed against those animals. The President salutes you. This is the story Trump is selling to his followers and it is one that makes non-white immigrants the central dehumanized villain in a conspiracy that is being socialized to set up another violent assault on our democracy. Trump has been telling this story in rally after rally for those who listen.
COMBATING THE NARRATIVE: We are all watching this in real-time, as Trump is actively setting up a violent clash to underturn the world's oldest democracy, meaning the choice still remains for us to do something about it well before there is another raid on the U.S. Capital. In response to Trump’s comments, leading immigrant, progressive, civil rights, and labor advocacy organizations, spoke out, including Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice, who said: “Trump’s continuous use of language that devalues the humanity of immigrants is a threat to our democracy and the core of who we are as a nation. This is the same rhetoric that he used to summon a violent mob on January 6 and then recklessly directed them to attack the U.S. Capitol. It’s also the same dehumanization of immigrants that has inspired domestic terrorist attacks like the mass murders at an El Paso Walmart, Buffalo grocery store, and a Pittsburgh synagogue. We cannot become numb to the fact that a major candidate for president relies on lies and dehumanizing immigrants and calls to violence as the bedrock of his campaign.” Our colleague Maribel Hastings also wrote a must-read column, “Trump already instigated a bloodbath on January 6th.”
Legal Whiplash of Texas’ SB4 Show-Me-Your-Papers Law:
Texas’ SB4 remains on pause after a back-and-forth in the courts with the Supreme Court 6-3 partisan ruling that overturned long-standing precedent of holding federal jurisdiction over immigration matters and allowing the show-me-your-papers law to go into effect. Shortly after, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals put the law back on pause as they looked to resolve some legal technicalities. In short, the law would allow the state’s law enforcement agencies to act as immigration agents to be able to arrest, detain, and deport noncitizens without even a hearing before an immigration judge. If this law were to go into effect, local law enforcement would be empowered to ask individuals to have their documents at the ready to prove their citizenship status. In the practical daily reality in Texas, this would mean the color of one’s skin or the accent someone speaks with will be a marker for local law enforcement to question if any Texan is American enough. Texas cited the white nationalist invasion conspiracy as its legal justification for creating a legal end run around the federal government's jurisdiction, claiming that migrants seeking safety in the United States constitutes a literal military-style invasion that they can repeal using war powers granted to the states in the Constitution. Not only is this rhetoric aligned with the bigoted conspiracy that has inspired multiple deadly terrorist attacks, including one in Texas in 2019, but it also undermines the United part of the United States, allowing all 50 states to set their own immigration policy. As the New York Times reports, other Republican-controlled states are following closely with many more show-me-your-papers bills set to be passed into quick succession if Texas’ SB4 is allowed to take effect. The chaos of this patchwork of policies and its downstream consequences are hard to overstate, not least of which will be turning most of the country into a place where you will need to carry your identification papers, particularly if you are not white, Christian, and don’t speak with an accent distinct to the United States. But it is this sort of massive red state deportation army to transform America into a white nationalist state that Donald Trump and his key advisor Stephen Miller have been promising to create if given the chance in 2025. Resting in the 5th Circuit isn’t just a bad immigration policy, but a devastating policy that will ripple with seismic consequences across the country.
COMBATING THE NARRATIVE: Regardless of the final ruling on SB4, two facts were made undeniably clear by the SCOTUS ruling. (1) The courts cannot be relied upon to halt the extremes of a second-term Trump agenda. The 6-3 ruling on SB4 did not reveal this on its own, but they made clear that an ad hoc cruelty and chaos immigration agenda reliant on bigoted and baseless conspiracies is fair game. (2) Even in the unlikely chance the 5th Circuit decides in favor of a longstanding precedent instead of allowing the discriminatory chaos of allowing SB4 to go into effect, Texas and other Republican-controlled states will test the waters again with another law designed to get the same approval from SCOTUS. The threat from this legislation is not abstract, nor will it be confined to Texas. This threat should be another clarifying moment of the stakes of the election.
Musk’s Ongoing Amplification of the Replacement Theory Uses Immigrants To Sow Election Distrust:
X owner Elon Musk has been under fire in recent months for his unapologetic platforming of the white nationalist and antisemitic replacement conspiracy theory to more than 170 million followers on his website. Musk is continuing his replacement conspiracy, launching a series of claims in recent days that have stoked unfounded fears over the U.S. Census count, Gabe Ortíz writes. “Most Americans are still unaware that the census counts ALL people, including illegal immigrants, for deciding how many House seats each state gets,” Musk wrote in a March 7 tweet. Well, most people probably do know that at this point, despite his dehumanizing language. The census counts a lot of people who cannot vote, including children. Nevertheless, Musk continues: “This results in Dem states getting roughly 20 more House seats, which is another strong incentive for them not to deport illegals.” Musk’s conspiracy is violently dumb on multiple levels, but the fact is that 95% of all noncitizen growth went to GOP states for the last 5 years as the Cato Institute found. Musk’s tweets are not random speculation. He’s instead an active participant in a right-wing campaign attempting to use immigrants to sow doubt and distrust in our electoral process, socializing the idea that any election result they do not like can be blamed on this conspiracy of fraudulent immigrant voters. Congressional Republicans have validated his nativist fearmongering, including Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who tweeted that Musk was “exactly right.” The Census, however, is not part of a nefarious plot to erase the votes of “real Americans,” but instead a constitutionally-mandated count of all people in the U.S. Far from disempowering “real Americans,” the Census ensures that everyone is counted so that all communities get their full federal resources. The more accurate a census count, the better communities’ needs can be met. “Those federal dollars include medical assistance programs, highway planning and construction, Pell grants, social safety net spending, and more,” we noted in 2019. “An undercount in a state would deprive that state of the resources required to meet the actual needs of its population.” In his key commentary on Musk’s extremism, The New Republic’s Greg Sargent writes how the X owner’s feed has been busy promoting the deadly “replacement” theory and “purports to lay bare a vast conspiracy among Democrats to ‘flood’ the country with ‘illegals’ to lock in a ‘permanent voting majority.’ … it illustrates the growing sophistication of far-right information spaces … Musk can deny embracing ‘great replacement theory’ all he wants. But it’s a scam. In addition to pushing it himself, he’s used X to create a far right information safe-space where an extraordinary outpouring of ‘great replacement’ and ‘white genocide’ propaganda is absolutely flourishing.” AV has long highlighted the real world dangers – as already witnessed in places such as Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Charlottesville, and El Paso – of the right-wing’s continued mainstreaming of the “replacement” conspiracy and its related “invasion” assertion. These dangers are ever-more real given the growing amplification of such conspiracies by Musk and other right-wing actors along with Republican candidates and elected officials.
COMBATING THE NARRATIVE: Musk’s unfounded attacks certainly demand clarity about what the Census really is, and what it isn’t. Besides ensuring that Congressional seats are mostly equally distributed, the Census helps determine where an estimated $1.5 trillion in federal dollars a year will be spent. Nativists’ anti-immigrant obsession is further highlighted by the fact that they don’t fixate on other non-voters also counted by the Census, including children, immigrants in the process of naturalizing, and prisoners. But what shouldn’t get lost are the overall threats posed by amplification of the replacement and invasion conspiracy as part of an attempt to scapegoat immigrants in order to undermine our democracy. Some may tune out when they hear attacks on immigrants thinking that they are not immigrants and therefore they do not need to worry. But the far-right’s obsession with immigration and the non-white ‘other’ coming to do us harm threatens every American and the tenets of our democracy.
POLITICS UPDATES
OH-Sen: On Tuesday, Ohio Republican primary voters chose Bernie Moreno as their nominee to challenge incumbent Democrat Sherrod Brown in November. Moreno, who was once an avowed critic of Trump, morphed into a devout MAGA adherent to secure the endorsement of Trump. His trajectory was similar to Ohio’s other Senator, Republican J.D. Vance. At the same rally where Trump vowed a bloodbath if he loses and said immigrants were “not people,” Moreno (an immigrant born in Colombia) touted support for mass deportations, stating, “If you’re in this country illegally, listen clearly — listen very clearly. Starting in January 2025, you will be deported.” Like most Republicans, Moreno has regularly invoked white nationalist “invasion” rhetoric when talking about immigrants. I guess Moreno, who was born in Bogotá, Colombia, is hoping that if he is friends with those doing who are doing the planned round-ups, they won’t come for him first.
NY-24: Rep. Claudia Tenney has spent over $18,000 in taxpayer dollars this week to air a TV commercial that peddles the white nationalist invasion rhetoric, according to data collected from AdImpact. Tenny echoes the bigoted conspiracy straight to camera saying, “The invasion at our southern border is an existential threat.” Tenny’s district runs outside Buffalo, where in May 2022, a white nationalist terrorist wrote, “We are experiencing an invasion on a level never seen before in history,” before murdering 10 people. An adherent to the white nationalist and antisemitic replacement theory, the terrorist who attacked Buffalo did so inspired by the very bigoted conspiracy Tenney is using taxpayer dollars to broadcast into homes. Even more egregious, Tenney aired the spot at least once in the Buffalo media market. Tenney is using her "Members’ Representational Allowance” to air the ad, which she is alone in using, but her ad feels much more like a standard political ad than others who have used this money for TV ads. Beyond the white nationalist conspiracy, Tenney touts her vote for the sham impeachment of the DHS Secretary, which was also reliant on replacement and invasion. It also peddles the disinformation about open borders.
Invasion Legislation: This week, Rep. Roger Williams (R-TX) was the latest to introduce legislation that employs the deadly white nationalist invasion conspiracy theory. Williams’ duplicative and unnecessary bill, H.R. 7733, dubbed the ‘Identifying Potential Terrorist at the Border Act of 2024,’ claims to enhance screening of certain individuals listed on the Federal Terror Watchlist. However, these activities are already codified in US code. The bill is really just a vehicle to peddle dangerous conspiracies of an immigrant “invasion.” In his press release, the representative provides a quote that reads, “Joe Biden is encouraging a deadly invasion of fighting-age men on American soil,” but the only thing that is dangerous is the rhetoric of the Congressman from Texas. Immigrant communities are far safer than non-immigrant communities, and rhetoric which espouses false claims of an “invasion” is central to the Great Replacement Theory and the screeds penned by the mass murderers in El Paso, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh, among others.
WEEKLY STATS OF NATIVIST NARRATIVE
Of the 525 GOP Twitter accounts we track, this week, they sent:
544 original tweets peddling anti-immigrant attacks mentioning “border”
120 original tweets about “open borders,” with Gov. Greg Abbott tweet having the most reach with 590.4K Views, 2.7K Retweets, and 7.2K Likes.
39 original tweets that used “Biden Border Crisis” with Sen. Ted Cruz tweet having the most reach with 290.4K Views, 3.2K Retweets, and 12K Likes.
11 original tweets that mentioned both “fentanyl” and “border” with Rep. Laruen Boebert tweet having the most reach with 126.6K views, 415 Retweets and 1.7K Likes.
Top Articles on social of the week: (Right-wing media still dominating the conversation online)
This past week there were 927k interactions, an increase of ↑16% and 18.1k articles published, an increase of ↑ 30% from last week. Interactions and article count are both higher than the previous week and article count is higher.
NY Post: “Illegal migrant from Lebanon told border authorities he’s a Hezbollah terrorist and hoped ‘to make a bomb’ in US” - Facebook Interactions: 12.9k and X Shares: 11.6k
NY Post: “Over 100 migrants break through razor wire, knock down guards as they illegally cross El Paso border in wild scene” - Facebook Interactions: 11.4k and X Shares: 3.6k
Fox News: “Judge rules illegal immigrants have gun rights protected by 2nd Amendment” - Facebook Interactions: 13.8k and X shares: 391