While speaking in support of Trump-endorsed candidates this past Sunday at the ex-president’s “Save America” rally in Mesa, Arizona, Georgia Representative and self-described Christian nationalist Marjorie Taylor Greene incited political violence and invoked the neo-Nazi “Replacement Theory.”
This fascist mantra is promulgated around the world by far-right forces who claim there is an international Jewish-communist conspiracy to displace the white Christian race with various “inferior” peoples—Jews, Muslims, blacks, Hispanics, etc.
Greene warned the crowd that “Joe Biden’s five million illegals are on the verge of replacing you.”
“Criminal illegal aliens” will be “replacing your jobs and replacing your kids in school … they are also replacing your culture,” she raved.
The August 2017 “Unite the Right” event in Charlottesville, Virginia, featured a torch light parade through the University of Virginia campus at which neo-Nazis carried swastika banners and Confederate flags and chanted, “Jews will not replace us!” After one of the fascists drove a car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer and wounding 35 other anti-fascist protesters, Trump infamously said there were “very fine people” on both sides.
At Sunday’s rally, Greene went on to claim that the “Biden regime” was orchestrating an “invasion” across the Southern border, which she linked to “human trafficking.” Under Biden, she said, human trafficking was “encouraged and incentivized.”
The claim that the Democratic Party trafficks humans for profit, particularly children, is a tenet of the QAnon conspiracy theory, to which Greene and other prominent Republicans, including Virginia Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, adhere.
The deranged conspiracy theory, with its murky origins in the depths of right-wing online message boards, presents Trump as a Christ-like figure who will one day purge the US of his satanic political enemies through a mass execution known as “the storm,” followed by the creation of a theocratic dictatorship.
QAnon and “Replacement Theory” rhetoric and memes have increasingly become a staple of Republican rallies. And the appeal to anti-Semitism has grown increasingly overt.
This is a significant expression of the transformation of the Republican Party under Hitler-admirer Trump into a fascist party. The hatred and fear of socialism and Marxism that have historically animated fascist movements have invariably been linked to the promotion of anti-Semitism.
At Sunday’s rally, Greene endorsed the Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, Kari Lake.
In August, Lake, a vehement proponent of Trump’s “big lie” of a stolen election, endorsed Jarrin Jackson, an Oklahoma legislative candidate, who, like Greene, is a proponent of the “Replacement Theory.”
Jackson lost his run-off primary but not before he was endorsed by Republicans Mark Finchem, who is running to become secretary of state, and Arizona State Senator Wendy Rogers. Both Finchem and Rogers are Oath Keepers and were given a shout-out by Trump during Sunday’s rally.
In an August 17 statement on Twitter announcing the endorsement of Jackson, Lake said, “Jarrin is an America First patriot and does so much to advance our America First movement. RINOs [Republicans in Name Only] & the Soros media attack him relentlessly because he’s over the target.”
The Oklahoman reported that on his personal Telegram account this past January, Jackson wrote that he is “not beholden to Jews or any other group.”
A week later Jackson offered a review of a right-wing documentary, which he could not recommend because the film did not “outline & detail the evil,” which he said included: “The Jews. Illuminati. Covid shots kill. Rothschilds. Communists. Woke pastors. Social gospel.”
Trump himself has increasingly sounded anti-Semitic themes. At his rally last month in Warren, Michigan, a working class suburb of Detroit, he praised Henry Ford, who was notorious not only for his violent attacks on union organizers but also for his admiration for Hitler and his virulent anti-Semitism.
Near the end of his speech, Trump said, “We inherit the legacy of Michigan Patriots who gave their blood, sweat and tears for this beloved nation. This is the state where Henry Ford invented the assembly line. How about that?”
Ford published the anti-Semitic Dearborn Independent, in which he printed The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a notorious forgery penned in tsarist Russia that libeled the Jews for supposedly plotting to rule the world by manipulating the economy, controlling the media, and fostering religious conflict.
In Pennsylvania, Republican gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, an election denier and participant in the January 6, 2021 siege of the US Capitol, is running against Democratic candidate Josh Shapiro, who is Jewish.
Mastriano is another Qanon adherent, who invokes “the storm” and other apocalyptic themes at his campaign rallies. During an online rally last month, Mastriano denounced “people like Shapiro” who, he said, “have disdain for people like us.” Mastriano said Shapiro and his children went to “privileged, exclusive, elite” schools.
This was a means of pointing to the fact that Shapiro and his children attended local Jewish schools.
Earlier this year, it was revealed that Mastriano’s campaign paid $5,000 to advertise on the far-right social media platform Gab. The site was founded by Andrew Torba, a fascist and proponent of the “Replacement Theory.”
When the news broke of Mastriano’s payment to the Gab social network this past summer, Torba defended Mastriano, saying, “We’re not bending the knee to the 2 percent anymore,” referencing American Jews.
In a live stream on Gab, Torba said that he and Mastriano “are going to build a coalition of Christian nationalists,” and that Shapiro was a “Soros puppet” (a reference to Jewish billionaire George Soros) who participated in voter fraud in the 2020 election.
This filth is being promoted in the state where the Tree of Life synagogue massacre took place four years ago. The mass shooting in the Pittsburgh-area synagogue killed 11 people, making it the deadliest act of anti-Semitic violence in US history. Robert Bowers posted anti-Semitic tracts on Gab before embarking on the massacre.
There is no mass support in the American population for the establishment of a fascist dictatorship, nor is there a mass paramilitary force of fascist thugs analogous to Hitler’s brown shirts. But it would be a fatal mistake to discount the danger of fascism, which arises from the toxic crisis of capitalism and the absence within the two-party system of any democratic or progressive alternative to the far right.
The working class is completely disenfranchised and suppressed under a political system monopolized by two parties of big business. The fascistic right, meanwhile, receives increasing support within the corporate-financial elite, the military, the intelligence apparatus and the police.
The social force that can defeat the danger of fascism and dictatorship is the working class, which is moving into mass struggles in the US and internationally. This movement must break free of the trade union apparatus and combine its industrial power with an independent, socialist and revolutionary political orientation, through the building of the Socialist Equality Party.