Politicians offer comments akin to ‘replacement theory’
Some Florida Republican politicians, including U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, state Sen. Dennis Baxley and two congressional candidates, have espoused rhetoric similar to the racist “great replacement theory” cited by the suspect in the Buffalo mass shooting on Saturday.
Supporters of the theory allege Black and brown immigrants are being brought into this country by Democrats and a secretive, Jewish cabal to “replace” white voters.
In September, Gaetz defended Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who despite claiming ignorance of the theory this week has promoted it more than 400 times, according to the New York Times.
“@TuckerCarlson is CORRECT about Replacement Theory as he explains what is happening to America,” Gaetz wrote.
Asked about his comments this week, Gaetz said in a statement that he has “consistently rejected ethno-nationalism.”
“I’ve never spoken of replacement theory in terms of race,” Gaetz wrote. “... I charge that Democrats seek unchecked immigration to replace the people who have relied on them most to their detriment.”
Baxley, R-Ocala, was harshly criticized in 2019 when he gave two interviews saying Western Europeans were being replaced by immigrants amid debate over an anti-abortion bill he sponsored.
“When you get a birth rate less than 2 percent, that society is disappearing,” he told South Florida radio station WLRN. “And it’s being replaced by folks that come behind them and immigrate, don’t wish to assimilate into that society and they do believe in having children.”
He also told Gainesville TV
station WCJB, “You look at Europe, they’ve been under two percent birth rate and they’re not replacing themselves and so what’s happening is they’re migrating in a population as a workforce ... They’re replacing that society.”
On Wednesday, Baxley said he was only talking about demographic trends.
“I think it’s just an observation of what happened in Europe,” Baxley told the Orlando Sentinel. “And if you’re not protecting the lives of children, you’re not having children … and you’re instead growing only by migration, and they’re having lots of children, then you’re changing the nature of that culture. That’s just an observation.”
Two candidates in the Republican primary for Congressional District 7 in Seminole and Volusia counties have also used similar language.
Cory Mills, a defense consultant and U.S. Army veteran, wrote in March 2021, “the plan is to flood the US [with] illegal aliens, provide them stimulus checks to buy the vote. … The Dems have a plan to break US election integrity and never return confidence in our democracy. This is a power grab.”
In July, Mills wrote, Democrats want to “empower illegal immigrant voters to continue their power grab. That’s what they want.”
Jeremy Liggett, whom ProPublica reported is a member of the right-wing Three Percenters militia and who spoke at a pre-Jan. 6 rally in Washington wearing a flak jacket, wrote in July 2021 of the Biden administration’s COVID restrictions on nonessential travel, “By essential travel they mean illegal immigrants, to stack votes for the Democratic Party.”
In a post last month, Liggett was more concise.
“There is a war on White people in America,” he wrote.
Aubrey Jewett, a professor of political science at the University of Central Florida, pointed to an AP-NORC poll this month that showed almost a third of American adults believed in some aspects of the theory.
“It seems that more and more Republicans and conservatives use that language and talk about that concept,” Jewett said. “... Ten or 20 years ago, I don’t know that this was an issue at all, honestly. But it seems to have emerged, and it seems like it’s becoming somewhat more mainstream in Republican and conservative circles.”
The 18-year-old Buffalo shooter’s direct reference to the theory in an online rant, before being charged with shooting and killing 10 Black people in a Buffalo supermarket, has brought more attention to a concept that has been circulating in white supremacist circles for centuries.
Most recently, replacement theory came to national attention during the Charlottesville white nationalist event in 2017, when neo-Nazis chanted, “Jews will not replace us” during an infamous night march with tiki torches.
The theory was also mentioned in the online screed by the Christchurch shooter in New Zealand, who killed 51 people at two mosques in 2019 and who was in turn cited as an inspiration by the Buffalo shooter.
One prominent Florida conservative Republican, Rep. Randy Fine, R-Palm Bay, was outspoken against the Charlottesville mob.
“We Jews don’t want anything to do with these pathetic losers, let alone ‘replace’ them,” he wrote on Twitter at the time.
Fine, however, also has posted extreme rhetoric about illegal immigrants.
In January, he responded on Facebook to a false viral report that illegal immigrants had been sent to a Maitland hotel by claiming they were dropped off “by Joe Biden.”
He called for the president’s impeachment over the issue, and called on Floridians to “use every tool at our discretion ... to stand vigilant” against the so-called “invasion.”
The migrants turned out to have been here legally on visas after being hired by a local company for seasonal agricultural work.