Texas Republican Representative Chip Roy may have stirred up disunity in the GOP earlier this year with his threats to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson, but he’s in lockstep with the rest of his party on one thing: Democrats want to “end Western civilization” with open borders.
In an interview with Fox News’s Harris Faulkner on Tuesday, Roy was asked about the Senate’s passage of a $95 billion foreign aid package, which dedicates assistance to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan.
The Freedom Caucus member accused Democrats of not “[having] any interest in sitting down at the table” to discuss border security—less than a week after Republicans killed a bipartisan bill that included border funding alongside the foreign aid package, at the urging of Donald Trump.
Roy went on to baselessly claim that Democrats, who he snidely called “colonizers,” “want to flood the zone” with “the chaos created by wide-open borders.”
“It’s not just political,” said Roy. “They want to remake America. They want to end Western civilization.”
Roy also complained about the number of “foreign-born” people in the United States.
The demographic conspiracy espoused by Roy, a variant of the explicitly white supremacist “great replacement theory,” is becoming an increasingly popular talking point in the GOP. What was once confined to the hinterlands of white nationalist message boards has been adopted whole cloth by the Republican mainstream and is now repeated by lawmakers like Roy on television.
Roy also took the opportunity to take a potshot at same-sex marriage, accusing Democrats of “trying to force their beliefs” on “countries in Africa who dare to say that marriage is between one man and one woman.”
Roy’s was not the only mention of the threat to Western civilization by the global right this week; Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in his own Fox News interview, called the bombardment of Rafah part of a “battle of the forces of civilization against the worst forces of barbarism on the planet.”
Roy’s and Netanyahu’s comments are emblematic of a global right obsessed with conspiratorial ideations of civilizational decline and collapse. For Fox, it makes for a good segment.
link: https://newrepublic.com/post/178981/republican-congressman-chip-roy-western-civilization-migrants
archive: https://archive.ph/mUXbi
You know what I’ve noticed? Back in the 70s, traveling between the US and Canada meant saying “nothing to declare” and waving at the crossing guard when hopping across the border.
Now it’s “papers please”, a potential TSA frisk, metal detectors and vehicle scans, selective “let’s take the vehicle apart” sessions, and the requirement to have a passport, planned itinerary with names, addresses and times that they’ll be checking on when you return to the border.
So the lack of thought isn’t even limited to race; it’s an entire false narrative built to say whatever they want whenever they want. It just seems racist because THEY are racist.
I crossed back and forth into Canada in the 90's with just a state ID and telling the border guard I was visiting friends. Only one time did I get stopped, and then my car was full of friends who wouldn't shut up (drinking age was 19 in Ontario).
9/11 changed all that.
I know it's fiction, but there's much history baked into Cormac McCarthy's The Border Trilogy books. Mexicans came up to work a bit, wandered back. Americans wandered down, fucked around, wandered back. Pretty much just a cop in a toll booth saying, "Aight. Go on." Both ways.
The drug war fucked it all up. And I'm well aware these desperate migrants aren't drug mules, I get that. But still, the drug war is the genesis of all this shit. Gods, that's a whole 10 conversations...
There are real concerns, and yes, illegal immigration is spiking. Lemmy doesn't want to look at numbers because the GOP is using (some) facts for once. Trying to look at the current issue: "tHaT's RaciSt!" (Not baggin' on you OP!)
Nah. We're staring at a humanitarian crisis. We have to talk about how we're handling this influx. Look at the government chart above (first link), we have to figure out what to do with all these extra souls. If Democrats ignore it, the issue gets worse and the GOP gains ammo.
Conservatives play the issue for votes, liberals downplay the issue as mere racism. Meanwhile, real human families are caught in the middle. FFS, I'm screaming here, this isn't a mere political issue, people are suffering. And yes, that includes Americans.
My wife is Pilipino, trying to get her youngest over here. She has a permanent Green Card and is married to an American. The paperwork is still like rocket science and takes years. Imagine what these South Americans are going through. My step-son merely wants a better life. These people are running from hell. And there's a LOT of them.
tl;dr: We gotta talk about this. Downplaying it is backfiring.