Kari Lake goes all in on racist 'Great Replacement Theory'

It’s not like U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake hasn’t cozied up to white nationalist, antisemitic, xenophobic bigots before.

It’s just that the failed Republican candidate for Arizona governor and Donald Trump sycophant finally has decided to go all in.

She’s saying the quiet part out loud.

With Trump leading the way, Republican candidates like Lake apparently have decided to fully embrace the “Great Replacement Theory,” a crackpot connivance perpetuating the notion that elites (meaning, mostly, Democrats) are working to replace native-born Americans with immigrants.

Lake says Democrats want illegal voters

Lake, who has failed at every attempt to prove election fraud in court, continues to play the embittered victim, recently telling an audience, “This is why they had to stop me. My plan to shut down the human smuggling and their open borders policies would thwart their agenda to register illegal voters.”

She added, “They need the human smuggling to fill the voter rolls with new Democrat voters.”

Replacement theory manages to mix racism, xenophobia and antisemitism into a kind of all-purpose bigotry.

And, sadly, it’s not new.

Several years ago the Anti-Defamation League on its website wrote, “Since many white supremacists, particularly those in the United States, blame Jews for non-white immigration to the U.S. the replacement theory is now associated with antisemitism.”

Her heroes and associations say it all

All the proof needed to verify that belief happened when white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017 chanting “Jews will not replace us,” and “You will not replace us.”

You may remember as well how Trump said there were “very fine people” on both sides of that horror show.

During what became an uncomfortable moment in the 2022 campaign, Lake endorsed Jarrin Jackson, a Republican candidate for Oklahoma state Senate who said, among other things, that “the Jews” are evidence that “evil exists.”

When the national press picked up on that, Lake backed off and issued a statement saying she “absolutely denounces bigotry in all its forms, especially antisemitism.”

Trump and Lake invent: A new kind of terrorism

But does she, if she backs the replacement theory? And does she, if she expresses affection for someone like Arizona U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar, who has cozied up to white nationalists and antisemites for years?

On social media Lake said, “Congressman Gosar is ‘the GOAT.’ We need strong, America First Patriots like Gosar at every level of government.”

Likewise she has called Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers, who has praised white nationalists while suggesting her enemies be hanged, “a hero.”

Replacement theory rehashes a painful past

What Lake is doing and saying now is a rehash of the worst of our anti-immigrant nativist past.

The Alien and Sedition Acts of the late 1700s. The anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, anti-Irish, anti-German activism of the Know Nothings of the 1850s. The Chinese Exclusion Act in the 1880s.

The early 20th century hostility toward Eastern and Southern European immigrants from places like Russia, Poland, Italy, Greece and elsewhere.

The Eisenhower administration deportation of 1 million or so alleged Mexican undocumented immigrants known by the pejorative term “Operation Wetback.” (Trump has vowed to revive that.)

This is the platform Republicans like Lake are running on. This is the ugly history, the ugly reality.

The ugly present.

Reach Montini at ed.montini@arizonarepublic.com.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Kari Lake is all in on racist 'Great Replacement Theory'