From Embrace to ‘Replace’ – By Susan Milligan (US News) / May 20, 2022
A decade ago, the GOP recognized that it needed to diversify to win. Now, many of its members are implicitly defending a conspiracy theory aimed at keeping non-whites from the country entirely.
No one was harder on Republicans’ lack of outreach to minority communities, and the party’s accompanying losses at the polls, than the GOP itself. In a brutally frank self-examination, the party concluded in a 100-page “autopsy” of the 2012 election that it was focusing too much attention on white, Christian, straight Americans, ignoring the demographic changes that threatened to make an unchanged GOP irrelevant.
“If Hispanic Americans hear that the GOP doesn’t want them in the United States, they won’t pay attention to our next sentence. It doesn’t matter what we say about education, jobs or the economy,” the 2013 report warned. “If Hispanics think that we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies. In essence, Hispanic voters tell us our Party’s position on immigration has become a litmus test, measuring whether we are meeting them with a welcome mat or a closed door.”
Nine years later, the dialogue has taken a far uglier turn, with a substantial number of Americans buying into the “great replacement” theory, the discredited argument that policies welcoming immigrants are a disguise for a plot to “replace” native-born (and generally white) Americans with minority groups. In its most extreme and violent form, the great replacement conspiracy theory has been cited by racist marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 and in an online screed that authorities say was penned by the shooter who killed 10 Black people at a Buffalo supermarket last Saturday.
