The headline published in The Hill on Thursday evening tells a sordid tale: “House Republicans refuse to join Democrats in denouncing white supremacy.”
Once again, the House GOP’s bigotries are exposed for all to see, and with an instrument as blunt as an open letter, no less. Ta-da!
Obviously, this is the headline Democrats on the House Oversight Committee sought when they solicited Republican signatures on a letter purportedly denouncing “white nationalism.” As you might expect, the letter didn’t condemn hate alone. It wasn’t even tailored so as to constitute an attack on what Democrats regard as expressions of racial hostility by Republican representatives, though Republicans would be as loath as Democrats to condemn their fellow members for expressions of blatant bigotry. The letter also accused Republicans of being complicit in racist acts of violence.
“As you might recall,” read the letter from Oversight Committee ranking member Jamie Raskin (D., Md.) to the committee’s Republican chair, citing an early February hearing, “several Committee Republicans invoked dangerous and conspiratorial rhetoric echoing the racist and nativist tropes peddled by white supremacists and right-wing extremists.”
Like what? Raskin contends that Republicans crossed the line when they accused the Biden-Harris administration of “deliberately” engineering a border crisis that has no recent precedent. He adds that the rhetorical flourish of calling the surge of migrants at the border an “invasion” is equally racist. These are arguably valid critiques of overheated rhetoric, but Raskin then proceeds to engage in precisely the behavior he’s condemning.
His letter contends that Republicans are deploying language that “borrows from the ‘Great Replacement’ theory” — the paranoid belief that America’s elites are intentionally importing migrants to reshape American politics — and therefore cannot be divorced from “violent acts of domestic terrorism.” Among them, the 2018 massacre of Jews at Pennsylvania’s Tree of Life Synagogue and the 2022 murder of ten African Americans in a Tops supermarket in Buffalo.
It’s unwise to underestimate the capacity of some Republicans on the committee, such as Paul Gosar (R., Ariz.) and Marjorie Taylor Green (R., Ga.), to issue bone-headed and, yes, racially suspect statements. It is, however, a stretch to expect the rest of the committee’s Republican members to endorse their own complicity in acts of mass murder.
Alleging that Republican rhetoric translates, directly or indirectly, into the killing of American minorities is a heavy charge. It demands far more evidence than Raskin produced.
The shooter in Buffalo did subscribe to racist conspiracy theories, but he was attracted to violence and exhibited signs of mental illness long before that attack. He talked of shooting up his high school and was referred to mental-health counseling. Amid his racist ramblings, he also railed against conservatives and endorsed “eco-fascism.”
A grotesquely opportunistic attempt to tie Donald Trump to the 2018 murder of Jewish worshippers in Pittsburgh was not derailed by the shooter’s own hatred of Trump, whom he did not vote for and portrayed as “a puppet of Jews.”
Also cited in Raskin’s letter was the Texas man who shot and killed 23 people at an El Paso Walmart. Viciously xenophobic, he also had “lifelong neurological and mental disabilities,” according to his attorney, was treated with anti-psychotic medication, and had been found by prison mental-health professionals to be in a “psychotic state.”
“Can we say definitively that this mass shooting would not have happened under a different president?” criminology professor Adam Lankford replied when asked by L.A. Times reporters how much blame Republicans bear for the El Paso shooter’s radicalization. “I’m not comfortable saying that because it’s possible the perpetrator would have found a different justification for his shooting.”
Can the mentally deranged be influenced by irresponsible political rhetoric? Of course. That’s not a phenomenon that is exclusive to either Republican or Democratic politics, however, and not just because psychopathy is not correlated with particular political affinities. It’s because the mentally disturbed are, by definition, influenced by a wide variety of stimuli that otherwise fail to register among those with sounder mental faculties.
Raskin’s letter concludes by citing Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s “acknowledgment that white supremacy and white nationalism are ‘definitely not American,’” and provides Republicans on Oversight with yet “another opportunity” to reaffirm what the leader of the Republican conference has already established. The two-sentence statement “denouncing white nationalism and white supremacy” itself is uncontroversial. But because several paragraphs implicating Republican members of Congress in racial massacres precede that anodyne statement, it’s hard to avoid concluding that the document was drafted with the express intention of being a nonstarter.
It would be nice if Republicans avoided the temptation to play to the cheap seats and moderated their rhetoric. It’d be just as lovely if Democrats did the same. They might avoid accusing the GOP of being murderers by proxy, thereby licensing all sorts of other extremism, and it would be good if they were less inclined to leverage racial violence for maximum political value, cheapening the cause they claim to support. But that’s not the world we inhabit today.