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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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The Very Dangerous Reasoning Behind the Freedom Caucus' Hatred for Kevin McCarthy
The far-right Opposed-to-Big-Government cultists are dead set on destroying the working class.
Jan 06, 2023
While Kevin McCarthy’s struggle to become Speaker of the House of Representatives appears to be about personality and struggles within the House Republican caucus, it’s really about something much larger: the fate and future of American “big government” and the middle class it created.
Ever since the Reagan Revolution, the phrase “big government” has been on the lips of Republican politicians. They utter it like a curse at every opportunity.
It seems paradoxical: Republicans complain about “big government,” but then go on to support more and more government money for expanding prisons and a bloated Pentagon budget. Once you understand their worldview, however, it all makes perfect sense.
First, some background.
From the founding of our republic through the early 1930s the American middle class was relatively small. It was almost entirely made up of the professional and mercantile class: doctors, lawyers, shop-owners and the like. Only a tiny percentage of Americans were what we would today call middle class.
Factory workers, farmers, carpenters, plumbers, and pretty much all manner of “unskilled laborers” were the working poor rather than the middle class. Most neighborhoods across America had a quality of life even lower than what today we would call “ghettos.”
As recently as 1900, for example, women couldn’t vote, senators were appointed by the wealthiest power brokers in the states, and poverty stalked America.
There was no minimum wage; when workers tried to organize unions, police would help employers beat or even murder their ringleaders; and social safety net programs like unemployment insurance, Social Security, public schools, Medicare, food and housing supports, and Medicaid didn’t exist.
There was no income tax to pay for such programs, and federal receipts were a mere 3 percent of GDP (today its around 20 percent). As the President’s Council of Economic Advisors noted in their 2000 Annual Report:
“To appreciate how far we have come, it is instructive to look back on what American life was like in 1900. At the turn of the century, fewer than 10 percent of homes had electricity, and fewer than 2 percent of people had telephones. An automobile was a luxury that only the very wealthy could afford.
“Many women still sewed their own clothes and gave birth at home. Because chlorination had not yet been introduced and water filtration was rare, typhoid fever, spread by contaminated water, was a common affliction. One in 10 children died in infancy. Average life expectancy in the United States was a mere 47 years.
“Fewer than 14 percent of Americans graduated from high school. ... Widowhood was far more common than divorce. The average household had close to five members, and a fifth of all households had seven or more. …
“Average income per capita, in 1999 dollars, was about $4,200. … The typical workweek in manufacturing was about 50 hours, 20 percent longer than the average today.”
The Republican Great Depression of the 1930s, though, was a huge wake-up call for American voters, answered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
His New Deal programs brought us, for the first time, “big government” and the people loved it. They elected him President of the United States four times!
FDR created Social Security, unemployment insurance, guaranteed the right to unionize, outlawed child labor, regulated big business by creating the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and other agencies, and funded infrastructure across the country from roads to bridges to dams and power stations.
He raised taxes on the morbidly rich all the way up to 90% and used that money to build schools and hospitals across the nation. He brought electricity to rural parts of the country, and put literally millions to work in various “big government” programs.
“Big government,” in other words, created the modern American middle-class.
By the 1950s a strong middle class representing almost half of Americans had emerged for the first time in American history.
By the late 1970s it was around 65 percent of us.
And that’s when the billionaires (then merely multimillionaires) decided enough was enough and got to work.
In 1980, David Koch ran for vice president with the Libertarian Party, an organization created by the real estate lobby to give an air of legitimacy to their efforts to outlaw rent control and end government regulation of their industry.
His platform included a whole series of positions that were specifically designed to roll back and gut FDR’s “big government” programs (along with those added on by both Nixon and LBJ’s Great Society) that had created and then sustained America’s 20th century middle class:
— “We urge the repeal of federal campaign finance laws, and the immediate abolition of the despotic Federal Election Commission.
— “We favor the abolition of Medicare and Medicaid programs.
— “We oppose any compulsory insurance or tax-supported plan to provide health services, including those which finance abortion services.
— “We also favor the deregulation of the medical insurance industry.
— “We favor the repeal of the fraudulent, virtually bankrupt, and increasingly oppressive Social Security system. Pending that repeal, participation in Social Security should be made voluntary.
— “We propose the abolition of the governmental Postal Service.
— “We oppose all personal and corporate income taxation, including capital gains taxes.
— “We support the eventual repeal of all taxation.
— “As an interim measure, all criminal and civil sanctions against tax evasion should be terminated immediately.
— “We support repeal of all law which impede the ability of any person to find employment, such as minimum wage laws.
— “We advocate the complete separation of education and State. Government schools lead to the indoctrination of children and interfere with the free choice of individuals. Government ownership, operation, regulation, and subsidy of schools and colleges should be ended.
— “We condemn compulsory education laws … and we call for the immediate repeal of such laws.
— “We support the repeal of all taxes on the income or property of private schools, whether profit or non-profit.
— “We support the abolition of the Environmental Protection Agency.”
— “We support abolition of the Department of Energy.
— “We call for the dissolution of all government agencies concerned with transportation, including the Department of Transportation.
— “We demand the return of America’s railroad system to private ownership. We call for the privatization of the public roads and national highway system.
— “We specifically oppose laws requiring an individual to buy or use so-called ‘self-protection’ equipment such as safety belts, air bags, or crash helmets.
— “We advocate the abolition of the Federal Aviation Administration.
— “We advocate the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration.
— “We support an end to all subsidies for child-bearing built into our present laws, including all welfare plans and the provision of tax-supported services for children.
— “We oppose all government welfare, relief projects, and ‘aid to the poor’ programs. All these government programs are privacy-invading, paternalistic, demeaning, and inefficient. The proper source of help for such persons is the voluntary efforts of private groups and individuals.
— “We call for the privatization of the inland waterways, and of the distribution system that brings water to industry, agriculture and households.
— “We call for the repeal of the Occupational Safety and Health Act.
— “We call for the abolition of the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
— “We support the repeal of all state usury laws.”
Today’s challenges to Kevin McCarthy are mostly coming from members of the Republican House Freedom Caucus, pretty much a reinvention of the Tea Party Caucus, funded in substantial part by rightwing billionaires and CEOs who share the late David Koch’s worldview.
The world is made up of “makers” and “takers,” they’ll tell you. The billionaire “job creators” shouldn’t be taxed to support the “moochers” who demand everything from union rights to a living wage to free college.
Why, these Freedom Caucus members ask, should their billionaire patrons be forced — at the barrel of an IRS agent’s gun! — to pay taxes to support the ungrateful masses through “big government” programs? Isn’t it up to each of us to make our own fortunes? Wasn’t Darwin right?
These Republicans believe our government should really only have a few simple mandates: maintain a strong military, tough cops, and a court system to protect their economic empires.
That’s why they’ll support massive prison expansions and nosebleed levels of pentagon spending but (metaphorically) fight to the death to prevent an expansion of Social Security or food stamps.
And that’s why they hate Kevin McCarthy.
In the past, McCarthy has shown a willingness to compromise and negotiate with Democrats. Most recently, as Congressman Chip Roy pointed out on the House floor yesterday when nominating Byron Donalds to replace McCarthy, he failed to block the $1.7 trillion omnibus bill through Congress that was loaded with what rightwing billionaires consider “freebies” for “taker” and “moocher” Americans.
It appears all or nearly all of the Freedom Caucus members, dancing to the tune first played by David Koch, don’t believe in our current form of American government. They want us to go back to the pre-1930s America, before FDR’s New Deal.
Those were the halcyon days when workers cowered before their employers, women and minorities knew their places, and government didn’t interfere with the business of dynasty-building even when it meant poisoning entire communities and crushing small businesses.
They appear to agree with the majority of the Supreme Court Republicans who recently began dismantling the “big government” administrative state by ending the EPA’s power to regulate greenhouse gasses.
They’ve already succeeded, over the past 40 years of the Reagan Revolution, at whittling the middle class down from 65 percent of us to around 45 percent of us: NPR commemorated it in 2015 with the headline: “The Tipping Point: Most Americans No Longer Are Middle Class.”
Now they want even more poverty for workers and more riches for their morbidly rich funders, and don’t believe that “moderate” Republicans will get them there. As Ginni Thomas and a pantheon of “conservative” luminaries wrote yesterday in an open letter opposing McCarthy’s speakership:
“[H]e has failed to answer for, or commit to halting, his coordinated efforts in the 2022 elections to promote moderate Republican candidates over conservatives.”
The “conservative” Republicans have already announced that once they get their act together in Congress with a new speaker, their first order of business is going to be to cut more taxes on billionaires.
While the battle for House Speaker appears to be about personality, it’s really about ideology and policy. It’s about the future of “big government” and whether or not we will continue to have an American middle class.
And as long as Libertarian-leaning billionaires continue pouring cash into the campaigns and lifestyles of Republican members of Congress, this battle that’s been going on for over 40 years to tear apart the American middle-class is not going to end or go away any day soon.
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'There Is Evidence of Criminality': Jan. 6 Panel Meets to Decide Referrals to DOJ
The committee is reportedly considering criminal referrals for former President Donald Trump and four associates: Jeffrey Clark, John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, and Mark Meadows.
Dec 11, 2022
Members of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol are expected to finalize decisions on criminal referrals during a virtual meeting Sunday afternoon.
CBS News' Margaret Brennan inquired about the panel's plans earlier Sunday, when Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.)--a member of the subcommittee created to deal with outstanding issues, including potential referrals--to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ)--appeared on "Face the Nation."
Pointing to reporting that the committee is considering referrals for former President Donald Trump, ex-DOJ official Jeffrey Clark, right-wing attorney John Eastman, former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and ex-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, she asked, "Is there a consensus on whether to send a referral for criminal prosecution to the Justice Department, and would doing that be anything more than symbolic?"
"I think we are in common agreement about what our approach should be. I'm not ready or authorized at this point to tell you what that is. We are, as a subcommittee--several of us that were charged with making the recommendation about referrals--gonna be making that recommendation to full committee today," Schiff said, adding that the decisions will be included in a panel report set to be released later this month.
Schiff continued:
What I can tell you about the process is we're looking at: What is the quantum of evidence that we have against individuals? What is the impact of making a referral? Are we gonna create some suggestion by referring some, that others, there wasn't sufficient evidence, when we don't know, for example, what evidence is in the position of the Justice Department?
So, if we do make referrals, we want to be very careful about how we do them. But I think we're all certainly in agreement that there is evidence of criminality here and we want to make sure that the Justice Department is aware of that.
In the wake of Trump's announcement last month that he is seeking the GOP's presidential nomination for 2024--despite his various legal issues and inciting last year's deadly Capitol attack with his "Big Lie" about the 2020 contest--Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith, a longtime federal prosecutor, as special counsel to oversee ongoing investigations involving the twice-impeached former president.
The DOJ notably does not need a referral from Congress to bring charges. Referencing the department's probes, Brennan asked Schiff, "So what does the committee sending a referral do other than look political?"
"Well, look, we have been far out ahead in most respects of the Justice Department in conducting our investigation," the congressman responded. "I think they have made use of the evidence that we have presented in open hearings. I think they'll make use of the evidence that we present in our report to further their investigations."
"And I think it makes an important statement, not a political one, but a statement about the evidence of an attack on the institutions of our democracy and the peaceful transfer of power, that Congress examining an attack on itself is willing to report criminality," he added. "So I think it's an important decision in its own right if we go forward with it and one that the department ought to give due consideration to."
\u201c"Every bingo card should have in the center Donald Trump. It's near inconceivable to me that they would make a referral or more... and it not be Trump. It's really the thrust of what they've been going towards for several months" - @harrylitman w/ @NicolleDWallace\u201d— Deadline White House (@Deadline White House) 1670626830
Committee Chairman Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) had confirmed to reporters on Thursday that the committee planned to make decisions about criminal referrals during Sunday's meeting.
"I think the more we looked at the body of evidence that we had collected," he said, "we just felt that while we're not in the business of investigating people for criminal activities, we just couldn't overlook some of them."
The panel's only two Republicans--Vice Chair Liz Cheney (Wyo.) and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (Ill.)--are both leaving office in a few weeks and the GOP is set to take control of the House. Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), who hopes to be the next speaker, has vowed to hold hearings investigating the committee.
The Hillreported Sunday that McCarthy and the other four members of Congress who ignored subpoenas from the committee--GOP Reps. Andy Biggs (Ariz.), Mo Brooks (Ala.), Jim Jordan (Ohio), and Reps. Scott Perry (Pa.)--could be referred to the House Ethics Committee rather than the DOJ.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), a constitutional law expert who chairs the subcommittee focusing on referrals, pointed to the relevant part of the U.S. Constitution.
"The speech or debate clause makes it clear that Congress doesn't hold members of Congress accountable in the judiciary or other places in the government," he said. "Members of Congress are only held accountable through Article 1 in their own chambers for their actions."
This post has been updated with reporting about the five House Republicans who defied subpoenas from the panel.
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