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“While immigration will not be a top issue for a majority of all voters, it is an important issue for the MAGA base, and Republicans believe immigrant-bashing favors their electoral prospects,” the America’s Voice report said. “To that end, GOP candidates across the country will continue to insert into the debate dangerous anti-immigrant rhetoric that has already led to violence.” The group has in fact identified hundreds of ads featuring “invasion” rhetoric, which should be noteworthy considering it’s been spewed by numerous racist mass killers. (Gee, too bad this isn’t seen as offensive as the president correctly labeling fascists “fascists.”)
America’s Voice said it “found over 2,130 ads and 400 campaign emails that use nativist dog-whistles this cycle. We tracked an average of around 2,700 tweets from Republican candidates and campaigns a month that move anti-immigrant messages.”
Just this morning, Tuesday, Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst fired off a gem complaining that “enough fentanyl to completely wipe-out entire cities in the U.S. has been seized at the southern border.” This goes with the GOP-pushed trope that migrants are pushing drugs (this is a shameless lie) across an “open border” (another shameless lie). “The vast majority of that fentanyl was smuggled by US citizens through ports of entry (often in passenger vehicles), and will be sold and purchased by other US citizens once in the US,” responded American Immigration Council Policy Director Aaron Reichlin-Melnick. “Senator Ernst, our own people drive the demand and smuggle in the supply. It's not migrants.” Even when it was indisputably people with legal immigration status behind drug smuggling, Republicans like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis have blamed undocumented immigrants anyway.
Relatedly, Ernst voted against funds “that would screen more cargo for dangerous drugs like fentanyl,” America’s Voice noted in March. “Republicans are not interested in solutions, only in fear mongering.” Clearly. Nor was Ernst the only Republican pushing this shit today. Republicans continue to be very mad that drugs are getting seized:
Waldman and Sargent say in their column that “GOP fulminations about immigration—especially the more repulsive stuff that’s in those ads—may be receding to what’s largely a base issue. Even as GOP immigration messaging remains torqued to maximum intensity, and even as border Republicans ramp up wretched stunts like busing migrants into major cities, momentum is shifting toward Democrats in the midterms, including among independents.”
“Republicans are indulging in the worst kind of White nationalist rhetoric,” America’s Voice Executive Director Frank Sharry told The Washington Post. “And an issue they thought would win over swing voters is at best a base mobilizer for voters they already have.”
That right-wing political candidates are “indulging in the worst kind of White nationalist rhetoric” is not at all a stretch. Sharry is actually calling out Republicans in the most polite terms, considering abortion extremist and Arizona Republican Senate nominee Blake Masters has one despicable ad that’s turned asylum-seeking families and individuals into a cartoon mass attempting to cross the southern border. “The faceless animation he uses is more reminiscent of a zombie videogame than the real-world issues at hand,” Zachary Mueller, political director at America’s Voice, recently said.
The organization noted that former officials with the previous administration were blaming then-candidate Joe Biden months before he was even elected to the White House.
“For example, former Acting ICE Director Tom Homan appeared on Fox News in August 2020 blaming Biden for a 40% increase in border crossings—three months before the 2020 election and five months before Biden took office.” Shameless doesn’t even come close.
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