Florida’s Governor continues to weigh in on issues well beyond Tallahassee and the grind of the Legislative Session.
Ron DeSantis amplified a conservative commentator’s post about undocumented immigrants, in which the original poster seemed to embrace the controversial “great replacement theory.”
“This is how much they hate us. They lock us down and poison us and destroy the economy with printing money for covid. Then take the covid money and give it to our replacements,” posted Daniel Horowitz, amplifying a New York Post story about Washington state allocating $340 million in federal economic impact payments to individuals who should have been disqualified based on their immigration status.
DeSantis reposted Horowitz’s take, adding his own remarks.
“Sending $1k checks to illegal aliens — from COVID funds no less — is the political equivalent of flipping off every taxpayer and productive citizen,” the Governor said, commenting on what was by then a four-day old story in a tabloid.
The National Immigration Forum explained replacement theory as stating “that welcoming immigration policies — particularly those impacting nonwhite immigrants — are part of a plot designed to undermine or ‘replace’ the political power and culture of white people living in Western countries.”
The theory is a popular trope of “anti-immigrant groups, white supremacists, and others,” with invasion rhetoric, voter replacement, and antisemitism being subsets of the larger theory, according to the group.
DeSantis predicated much of his presidential campaign on asserting his administration’s willingness to leave people crossing from Mexico “stone cold dead” at the border, and during an announcement of the deployment of the State Guard, he framed the legally questionable commitment as a move to “stop the invasion.”
The DeSantis campaign and supporters flirted with other questionable tropes throughout his presidential campaign as well, including amplifying a video created by a former staffer that depicted the Governor at the center of a Sonnenrad.
The Anti-Defamation League notes it is “one of a number of ancient European symbols appropriated by the Nazis in their attempt to invent an idealized ‘Aryan/Norse’ heritage.”
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