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ROUNDUP: J.D. Vance Slammed For Promoting Dangerous “Great Replacement” Conspiracy Theory

May 18, 2022

Columbus, OH — This week, California Vance earned wall-to-wall coverage for promoting the dangerous “great replacement” conspiracy theory that radicalized the Buffalo terrorist. Since launching his U.S. Senate campaign, Vance’s rhetoric has echoed the deadly white supremacist rhetoric identified in forums across the internet, according to experts on hate speech.

“J.D. Vance will do or say anything to get elected and does not care about the risks of promoting deadly fringe racist conspiracy theories. Vance’s statements are disqualifying and show he is unfit to serve in the United States Senate,” said Michael Beyer, a spokesperson for the Ohio Democratic Party.

Associated Press: Republican Senate candidates promote ‘replacement’ theory
Steve Peoples
May 17, 2022

  • Several mainstream Republican Senate candidates are drawing on the “great replacement” conspiracy theory once confined to the far-right fringes of U.S. politics to court voters this campaign season, promoting the baseless notion that there is a plot to diminish the influence of white people in America.
  • In some cases, the comments have gone largely overlooked given the hard-line immigration rhetoric that has become commonplace among conservatives during the Trump era. But a weekend mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, that may have been inspired by the racist theory is drawing new attention to the GOP’s growing embrace of white nationalist creed.
  • And in Ohio, Republican Senate nominee JD Vance accused Democrats of trying to “transform the electorate.”
  • Warning of an immigrant “invasion,” Vance told Fox News Channel that Democrats “have decided that they can’t win reelection in 2022 unless they bring a large number of new voters to replace the voters that are already here.”
  • Five experts on hate speech who reviewed the Republican candidates’ comments confirmed that they promote the baseless racist theory, even though the Republicans don’t mention race directly.
  • “Comments like these demonstrate two essential features of great replacement conspiracy theory. They predict racial doomsday, saying that it is all part of an orchestrated master plan. It’s only the language that has been softened,” said American University professor Brian Hughes, associate director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab. “The basic story they tell is the same one we see in white supremacist chats across the internet: An enemy is orchestrating doom for white Americans by plotting to fill the country with nonwhites.”
  • Vance told Breitbart News last month that Democrats are trying to give 15 million immigrants in the country illegally the right to vote. “They are trying to transform the electorate of this country,” he said.
  • He made similar comments days later at a town hall in Portsmouth, Ohio.
  • The Vance campaign declined to comment.

Chronicle-Telegram: Editorial: A poison in our politics
May 18, 2022

  • President Joe Biden got it right Tuesday when he called white supremacy “a poison.”
  • That venom coursed through the American political bloodstream until it reached an 18-year-old who opened fire in a Buffalo supermarket Saturday. He killed 10 people and wounded three others. Eleven of the victims were Black.
  • An unhinged manifesto allegedly written by the white gunman made clear his hatred for Blacks and other minorities. Based on his writing, in which he called his victims “replacers,” it’s apparent that the gunman subscribed to the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which holds that white Americans are being systematically replaced by people of color.
  • Another is author and venture capitalist J.D. Vance, who recently won the Ohio GOP primary in the campaign to replace retiring U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, R-Cincinnati.
  • The AP reported that Vance warned Fox News of an “invasion” of immigrants.
  • The point is not only that Vance says horrible, untrue things, but that he won the GOP primary in spite of them.
  • Or, worse, because of them.

Columbus Alive: Local Politics: J.D. Vance and the mainstreaming of the great replacement conspiracy
Craig Calcaterra
May 17, 2022

  • On Saturday, a teenage gunman opened fire at a supermarket in Buffalo, killing 10 people and injuring three more, almost all of them Black. Just before he went on his murderous rampage, the shooter posted a manifesto rife with racism and xenophobia in which he claimed that white Americans are under siege and are being replaced by non-whites, non-Christians and immigrants.
  • But it’s not just a conspiracy advanced by mass murderers. It is, increasingly, one endorsed by putatively mainstream political figures. People like the man favored to be Ohio’s next senator, J.D. Vance.
  • Vance has spent a great deal of time of late giving voice to some of the central talking points of the great replacement conspiracy, particularly as it relates to immigrants “invading” the United States and voting for Democrats. In an early April debate, Vance, on the defensive for dismissive comments he made regarding the war in Ukraine, said that Ukraine was “not our fight,” but rather, that it was a “massive distraction” from the “border invasion” occurring in the United States. The day before that debate, Vance dropped an ad in which he lamented “Joe Biden’s open border,” which will lead to “more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”
  • The extent to which extreme-right concepts such as the great replacement conspiracy have entered mainstream political discourse is shocking. That they are embraced by the Republican nominee for Ohio’s open senate seat is appalling. That this nominee, J.D. Vance, has yet to talk about any of this, at least as of this writing, is telling. If, as I expect, he refuses to repudiate these toxic views, it is disqualifying.

Washington Post: Opinion: How Elise Stefanik and the GOP sanitize ‘great replacement’ ugliness
Greg Sargent
May 16, 2022

  • The extent to which “great replacement” ideas have migrated from the fringe into something more routine among Republican lawmakers appears new. As many have noted, Fox News’s Tucker Carlson has relentlessly promoted versions of the idea, and numerous Republican officials have done the same.
  • Or take J.D. Vance, the GOP Senate nominee from Ohio. He recently claimed that President Biden’s “open border” will ensure “more Democrat voters pouring into this country.”
  • But once again, for the same reasons that Carlson and Stefanik cannot be permitted to get away with this scam of feigning racial neutrality, none of these Republicans can pretend to be warning only of electoral consequences.
  • This sort of trickery works on still another level: It recasts racist conspiracy theorizing in a more acceptable form. As Gorski puts it, the talk about new voters is really a “fig leaf to hide white supremacy.”

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