Boebert echoes white nationalist lies in latest fundraising ad

Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) falsely claimed in a campaign video released on Saturday that Democrats are for “open borders” and said that Democrats had used the votes of immigrants to “take over the entire state of California.”

Boebert’s reelection campaign posted the video, which echoes racist tropes from the white supremacist movement, to her Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Attacking President Joe Biden’s halt of construction of Donald Trump’s border wall, Boebert said walls work, adding that “any Democrat who tells you otherwise is an open borders nutjob.”

“The truth is, they want borders wide open,” she continued, “It helped Democrats take over the entire state of California. … We have to take our country back.”

Boebert’s statements in the ad echo those of other Republicans who have sought to stoke conservative voters’ fears of immigrants as part of a strategy to reverse the massive political losses the party has suffered in the last few years.

The trope of taking back the country resonates with the racist concept of the “great replacement,” according to which, in this case, white Americans must fight against their potential replacement by people of other races coming into the country that, they insist, rightly belongs to those white people.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson came under fire from the Anti-Defamation League after an appearance on April 8 during which he promoted the great replacement theory. In a letter to Fox News, Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said, “Carlson’s rhetoric was not just a dog whistle to racists – it was a bullhorn.”

The “great replacement” idea has also been cited by the perpetrators of the 2019 shooting at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, that killed 51 and the mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, that same year that killed 22.

The neo-Nazis and other white supremacists who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 chanted,”You will not replace us!” in another callback to the theory.

Boebert has a history of affiliation with fringe and extremist ideas. During her 2020 run for Congress, Boebert embraced the QAnon conspiracy theory and took photos with supporters sporting logos from the Three Percenters militia group.

From a campaign video posted April 10:

LAUREN BOEBERT: That’s because walls work. Any Democrat who tells you otherwise is an open borders nutjob. The truth is, they want borders wide open. It helped Democrats take over the entire state of California, and now we’re seeing in New York they are paying 15 grand to illegal immigrants. Fifteen grand because you came here illegally.

 

You can’t make this stuff up. We have to take our country back. It’s time to get fired up. I need you to stay engaged and hang in there with me.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.