Bannon And January 6 Organizer Now Pushing Anti-Immigrant Rallies
Podcaster and former Trump strategist Steve Bannon pushed the white supremacist “great replacement” conspiracy theory while hosting Tea Party Patriots leader Jenny Beth Martin, who was on to promote an anti-immigrant rally in Georgia.
Martin co-founded the Tea Party Patriots, a conservative grassroots organization formed in 2009 that has spread conspiracy theories and claims about alleged voter fraud in the 2020 election. The group sponsored a pre-insurrection rally in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021.
During the March 1 interview, Martin promoted a rally calling for “an end to the invasion on our border” and centers around the recent death of student Laken Riley. The suspect in Riley’s death is an undocumented person from Venezuela, a fact right-wing media have used to whip up hysteria about so-called “migrant crime.”
“We’re going to deport 10 million illegal alien invaders,” Bannon said. “They’re not going to sit here and continue to perpetrate crime on our cities, taking away health care, taking away the little education that is happening in the cities for these kids today.”
Later in the interview, Bannon invoked the white supremacist “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which asserts that migrants will replace white people in America and vote for Democrats. This conspiracy theory has previously motivated mass shootings against minority communities.
“This whole thing is to break the minority communities on wages, to destroy their schools, their education. They want to replace them,” Bannon said. “They want to replace the existing African American and Hispanic population in this country because, guess what, they understand they’re turning right.” While Bannon describes this imaginary replacement of Americans specifically as a threat to Black and Hispanic communities, his career laundering extreme racism into the mainstream belies this cheap slight of hand.
This interview continues Bannon’s extreme anti-immigrant crusade. Given Bannon’s prominence in the MAGA media universe, his show sometimes functions as a platform for message testing on issues that Trump-aligned figures hope to capitalize on ahead of the 2024 election.
Reprinted with permission from Media Matters.
