Ms. Stefanik on the fringe
To any responsible politician, Saturday’s mass shooting in Buffalo would be a warning to stop indulging the sort of wild conspiracy theory that allegedly drove the suspect to shoot up a supermarket and end the lives of 10 victims.
Tragically, but sadly unsurprisingly, such basic restraint eludes Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-schuylerville. She is as unburdened as ever by the special responsibility she bears as a member of the House of Representatives and leader of the GOP conference to be mindful of the consequences of her words and actions. She is as unapologetic, as combative, and as seemingly incapable of self-reflection as the demagogic expresident she so slavishly emulates, Donald Trump.
Ms. Stefanik has for months embraced the essence, if not the precise words, of the “great replacement theory” that the suspect in the Buffalo shooting was so deeply immersed in. The “theory,” long promoted by white nationalists, white supremacists, neonazis, and some right-wing radio hosts, holds that hordes of nonwhite forhouse, eigners are coming to the U.S. (and some European nations) to outbreed white people and become the new majority. Some apply it to Muslims or Jews as well. It’s been convoluted into a political plot that Democrats are bringing in illegal immigrants on a massive scale in order to grant them citizenship and voting status in order to take over the country.
It’s racist paranoia run amok, but it keeps voters agitated and campaign donations flowing. And Ms. Stefanik is one of the Republican politicians who have run with it to one degree or another, accusing Democrats of staging a “permanent election insurrection.” She has lately used the nation’s baby formula shortage to further this anti-immigrant narrative, decrying the government for providing baby formula to immigrant infants being held at the border with their parents — as heinous an “us vs. them” narrative as we have ever heard a politician spew.
But that isn’t even the limit of Ms. Stefanik’s flirtation with and indulgence of conspiracy theorists. In a Twitter post on the formula shortage last week, she referred to the “White House Dems, & usual pedo grifters” — shorthand for pedophiles, a slander that plays into the outrageous claims from Qanon conspiracists of a child-molesting cabal in government. The convergence of that fantasy with the anti-immigration narrative has lately sent some armed Qanon vigilantes to the southern border to intercept children in order to, as they tell it, save them from sex trafficking rings.
And then of course there’s Ms. Stefanik’s ongoing support of Mr. Trump’s lie of a stolen election, even after that falsehood prompted the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol while Ms. Stefanik and most of her GOP colleagues were inside trying to block Congressional certification of the election that Mr. Trump lost, fairly and decisively.
We do not draw a straight line from Ms. Stefanik to the Buffalo tragedy. But we do hold her responsible for using her public position to validate these reckless delusions that are increasingly finding their way from the fringe to the
mainstream of the Republican Party. It poisons our political discourse. It poisons our society. And it poisons minds, turning certain confused, fearful and angry people into vigilantes, into mass shooters, into insurrectionist mobs.