Former President Barack Obama, during a speech to Latino business leaders this past weekend, called out the “dangerous,” anti-immigrant rhetoric of elected Republicans who have unflinchingly adopted the xenophobic vocabularies tied to multiple racist mass murderers. In just one example, the racist who in 2019 traveled hours to kill Mexicans at a Walmart in El Paso had complained about an “invasion.” Yet Ted Cruz has defiantly continued to use this word in the context of immigration, endangering his own constituents.
“Right now, the biggest fuel behind the Republican agenda is related to immigration and the fear that somehow America’s character is going to be changed if, people of darker shades, there are too many of them here,” Obama said at the annual L’Attitude conference in San Diego. “I wish I could be more euphemistic about it except (they’re) not that subtle about it—they’re just kind of saying it,” he said in remarks reported by The San Diego Union-Tribune.
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“You hear it on hard-right media, you hear it from candidates and politicians, you hear things like ‘great replacement theory’—I mean, this is not subtle,” the former president continued, The San Diego Union-Tribune reported.
“A lot of toxic rhetoric in the atmosphere that characterizes ‘those people’ as ‘different’ and wanting to ‘tear down America’ as opposed to build it up,” he said. “When you have that kind of rhetoric floating around out there, we’ve seen in history that is dangerous rhetoric. It’s dangerous wherever it appears, and it’s dangerous here in the United States.”
We’ve tragically seen this play out just this past year, when a racist mass murderer who believed in invasion and “great replacement” conspiracies traveled to Buffalo, New York, this past spring to kill Black people. But just months beforehand, New York lawmaker and number three House Republican Elise Stefanik had been running ads promoting so-called replacement theory. Following the shooting, Stefanik’s team issued a lie that claimed she’d “never advocated for any racist position.” Of course she did, they were her own ads. But she was quickly back at it, anyway.
“Just 22 minutes later (and less than 48 hours after the shooting), Stefanik tweeted out a thinly veiled defense of … ideas tied to ‘great replacement’ theory,” MSNBC reported. “’Democrats desperately want wide open borders and mass amnesty for illegals allowing them to vote,’ her tweet read.”
Obama also touched on the prospects of immigration reform in Congress, saying that “nless we’re able to return to a more inclusive vision inside the Republican Party, it’s going to be hard to get a bill done.” I’d diverge from the former president on this one, because if we’re waiting on the GOP to change, we’ll be waiting on a tiger to change its stripes, and that’s time immigrants just don’t have. Certainly, small groups of Republicans have supported recent legislative efforts to put young immigrants and farmworkers on a pathway to citizenship. But the legislation passed because of the overwhelming support from Democratic lawmakers. But if Republicans want to join, great.
America’s Voice noted that other officials also recently condemned the GOP’s embrace of anti-immigrant ugliness. Notably, Transportation Sec. Pete Buttigieg called Ron DeSantis’ despicable campaign using human beings as props “the kinds of stunts you see from people when you don’t have a solution.”
“It’s one thing to call attention to the problem when you have a course of action … it’s another to just call attention to a problem because the problem is more useful to you than the solution and that helps call attention to yourself,” he said in remarks at the Texas Tribune festival. “Human beings are being impacted. You flee a communist regime in Venezuela, you come here, and then somebody tricks you … it’s not just ineffectual, it’s hurting people in order to get attention.”
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“Right now, the biggest fuel behind the Republican agenda is related to immigration and the fear that somehow America’s character is going to be changed if, people of darker shades, there are too many of them here,” Obama said at the annual L’Attitude conference in San Diego. “I wish I could be more euphemistic about it except (they’re) not that subtle about it—they’re just kind of saying it,” he said in remarks reported by The San Diego Union-Tribune.
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“You hear it on hard-right media, you hear it from candidates and politicians, you hear things like ‘great replacement theory’—I mean, this is not subtle,” the former president continued, The San Diego Union-Tribune reported.
“A lot of toxic rhetoric in the atmosphere that characterizes ‘those people’ as ‘different’ and wanting to ‘tear down America’ as opposed to build it up,” he said. “When you have that kind of rhetoric floating around out there, we’ve seen in history that is dangerous rhetoric. It’s dangerous wherever it appears, and it’s dangerous here in the United States.”
We’ve tragically seen this play out just this past year, when a racist mass murderer who believed in invasion and “great replacement” conspiracies traveled to Buffalo, New York, this past spring to kill Black people. But just months beforehand, New York lawmaker and number three House Republican Elise Stefanik had been running ads promoting so-called replacement theory. Following the shooting, Stefanik’s team issued a lie that claimed she’d “never advocated for any racist position.” Of course she did, they were her own ads. But she was quickly back at it, anyway.
“Just 22 minutes later (and less than 48 hours after the shooting), Stefanik tweeted out a thinly veiled defense of … ideas tied to ‘great replacement’ theory,” MSNBC reported. “’Democrats desperately want wide open borders and mass amnesty for illegals allowing them to vote,’ her tweet read.”
Obama also touched on the prospects of immigration reform in Congress, saying that “nless we’re able to return to a more inclusive vision inside the Republican Party, it’s going to be hard to get a bill done.” I’d diverge from the former president on this one, because if we’re waiting on the GOP to change, we’ll be waiting on a tiger to change its stripes, and that’s time immigrants just don’t have. Certainly, small groups of Republicans have supported recent legislative efforts to put young immigrants and farmworkers on a pathway to citizenship. But the legislation passed because of the overwhelming support from Democratic lawmakers. But if Republicans want to join, great.
America’s Voice noted that other officials also recently condemned the GOP’s embrace of anti-immigrant ugliness. Notably, Transportation Sec. Pete Buttigieg called Ron DeSantis’ despicable campaign using human beings as props “the kinds of stunts you see from people when you don’t have a solution.”
“It’s one thing to call attention to the problem when you have a course of action … it’s another to just call attention to a problem because the problem is more useful to you than the solution and that helps call attention to yourself,” he said in remarks at the Texas Tribune festival. “Human beings are being impacted. You flee a communist regime in Venezuela, you come here, and then somebody tricks you … it’s not just ineffectual, it’s hurting people in order to get attention.”
We need your help to write 10,000,000 letters to infrequent but Democratic-leaning prospective voters in key congressional districts and Senate swing states this election, urging them to exercise their right to vote. Sign up with Vote Forward and join the most popular and effective Get Out the Vote (GOTV) activity in Daily Kos history.