GOP 'mainstreamed' a conspiracy theory that is driving white nationalists to terrorism: NYT contributor

Wajahat Ali, contributing opinion writer at the New York Times, told CNN Friday that the New Zealand mosque shooter was motivated by the “white genocide” conspiracy theory — which has been mainstreamed here in the United States by the Republican Party.

“What we’re witnessing around the world is the death rattle of white supremacy that has become the death march of white supremacy,” Ali said. “This is a globalized ideology of supremacy that believes that white people, whoever represents white people, are superior and they have a shared fear and conspiracy theory, something called the ‘white genocide’ or the ‘great replacement’, which says that Jews are the head of this cabal that are trying to weaken an trying to subordinate the white race through the savages.”

Ali said the mosque shooter wasn’t the first to use the “language of invasion”, citing prior anti-immigrant, anti-Islamic mass shootings in Norway and Quebec, and slammed the Republican Party for its role in promoting the ideology.

“This has been mainstreamed by Republican elected officials such as Congressman Steve King who have sworn by the replacement theory,” Ali said. “He’s tweeted about it, that ‘we cannot replace our civilization with their babies.’”

“Donald Trump in the midterm elections in 2018, when he's promoting the anti-Semitic conspiracy of George Soros, the Hungarian Jewish-American billionaire, allegedly funding the caravan of rapists and criminals and Middle Eastern suspects, who are coming here to invade us, that language sounds very similar to the language used in this manifesto,” he went on.

“That's why there's a link here. There's a reason why the number one domestic terror threat in America, according to the FBI are these white supremacists,” Ali continued. “It’s the number one domestic terror threat in the number of plots and we have to call it what it is: an act of domestic terrorism making all our communities unsafe.”

Watch the video below.