Congressional Hearing Witness Calls for Media Figures to Be Questioned by Lawmakers for Spreading ‘Great Replacement Theory’

The University of Chicago’s Robert Pape — a political science professor and the director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats — appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday to opine on domestic terrorism at the invitation of the panel’s Democrats.

Speaking before the committee on Tuesday, Pape urged the committee to hold another hearing in which right-wing media figures would be called to appear so they could be questioned about their alleged role in propagating “Great Replacement Theory.”

“It would make a lot of sense to focus directly on the role of the Great Replacement in mainstream media and to bring on the actual people [in the media] with academic researchers and we can have a real discussion of why is it those folks in the media don’t think they’re increasing violence,” suggested Pape.

“Let’s have a real, national conversation,” he continued.

Since the Capitol Riot on January 6, 2021, Pape has made the event a focus of his research. Among his work on the topic includes an analysis of participants in the riot and a poll of the general population.

In a article for Foreign Policy published on the one-year anniversary of the riot, Pape wrote that the “the people who stormed the U.S. Capitol weren’t poor, unemployed red-staters. Many were middle-class professionals motivated by the ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory.” But this conclusion cannot be drawn from Pape’s research, which he uses as the evidentiary basis of his piece.

Pape’s claim conflates the data from the aforementioned analysis and poll to broader conclusions about the GOP electorate. In his report on those who participated in the storming of the Capitol, Pape gathers no data on their views about “Great Replacement Theory.” His analysis focused on biographical and demographical information, not motivation.

In a broader poll of the electorate, Pape found that eight percent of Americans believed that Joe Biden’s ascension to the presidency was illegitimate and that force would be justified to reinstate Donald Trump as commander-in-chief. He further found that a significant majority of that eight percent believed that “The Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate…with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World.” No part of the the poll identified subjects as actual participants in the violence on January 6.

Pape is extrapolating the results of a poll participated in by a random sample of the general population and applying them to an extremely small group who actually participated in a violent event at the seat of Congress.

In front of the Judiciary Committee, Pape argued that politicians and media figures were incentivized to promote election fraud conspiracy theories and Great Replacement Theory, flitting back and forth between the two in an effort to link them in the same inextricable way he did in his article for Foreign Policy.

Moreover, the professor conflates the maximalist version of Great Replacement Theory, which describes an effort by Jewish elites to import immigrants to serve their own ends, with the description of a strategy frequently articulated by Democratic strategists and politicians.

Former Obama administration Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro suggested in 2018, for example, that because “the Hispanic vote in Texas will continue to increase” it would be possible for Democrats to carry Texas, Arizona and Florida in the 2024 presidential election.

“A big blue wall of 78 electoral votes,” noted Castro.

Similarly, Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D., Ill.) suggested last year that “The demographics of America are not on the side of the Republican party. The new voters in this country are moving away from them.” At Tuesday’s hearing, Durbin played a video of Fox News personalities describing the same phenomena, which he said was responsible for “inspiring acts of racist violence” across the country.

A manifesto published by the gunman who killed ten people in a supermarket in an African American neighborhood in Buffalo, N.Y. last month suggests he believed white Americans were being replaced by racial minorities. But the gunman explicitly declared his hatred for Fox News and conservatism in the screed, which he posted online shortly before the massacre.