The defense is that she was talking about voters, not race. Read the ads with that defense in hand, then ask who exactly is being replaced, and by whom, and on whose instruction.
Five days ago a gunman drove three hours to Buffalo's East Side and murdered ten people in a supermarket he chose by zip code, citing the Great Replacement by name in the document he left. In the days since, a great deal of American political energy has gone into establishing that nobody in public life had anything to do with the ideas in that document.
So it is worth going back to August and September of 2021, when Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, the chair of the House Republican Conference and the third-ranking Republican in the chamber, ran a series of Facebook advertisements. They reached more than a million users. Their argument, in their own capital letters:
Radical Democrats are planning their most aggressive move yet: a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION. Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.
-- FACEBOOK ADVERTISEMENTS RUN BY THE CAMPAIGN OF REP. ELISE STEFANIK, AUTUMN 2021
SOURCE: THIS PAGE, NOTE 1.
I. THE WORD THAT GIVES IT AWAY
Her office's position is that she has never promoted replacement theory and that anyone saying so is smearing her. Take the strongest version of that defense seriously: she is discussing immigration policy and its partisan consequences, which is ordinary politics, and "electorate" means voters, not a race.
Now apply the one question the dossier uses to sort this: who is doing the replacing, and why?
The ad answers it in a single sentence. The agents are "Radical Democrats." The instrument is eleven million immigrants. The purpose is to "overthrow our current electorate." Not to win it, not to persuade it, not to add to it. To overthrow it and install a permanent replacement. That is not a forecast about turnout, it is an accusation of a deliberate population swap for political power, which is the replacement thesis with the racial noun removed and the pronoun "our" left standing in its place.
The word "current" is doing the same work. An electorate that can be "overthrown" and replaced wholesale is not a set of voters who happen to be registered this cycle. It is a people, and the ad is telling a particular audience that it is theirs.
II. WHAT SHE DID AFTER BUFFALO
The instructive part is not the 2021 ads. It is this week.
Confronted with the ads after the shooting, Stefanik did not withdraw them, contextualize them or express regret about the phrasing. She denied the premise, attacked the people raising it, and then escalated the same rhetoric. That is the tell that separates a clumsy ad from a deliberate strategy: a clumsy ad gets quietly deleted the week ten people are shot by someone citing its logic.
Two Republicans said so out loud, which is worth recording because they are the exceptions that prove how the rest behaved. Rep. Liz Cheney wrote that House GOP leadership "has enabled white nationalism, white supremacy, and anti-semitism." Rep. Adam Kinzinger named Stefanik directly. Both had already been read out of the party for other reasons, and neither had a future in it.
CLAIM: "The gunman never mentioned Stefanik. Blaming a congresswoman's campaign ads for a mass murder is exactly the kind of guilt-by-association this site claims to be against."
THE RECORD: He didn't, and nobody here says otherwise. There is no evidence the Buffalo gunman ever saw a Stefanik ad, and this page has been careful about that distinction since Pittsburgh: the man who pulls the trigger owns the murder, entirely. The charge against Stefanik is not incitement. It is that the third-ranking Republican in the House spent 2021 selling a million voters a premise, that the premise is the same one the gunman acted on, and that when the overlap was pointed out she chose to double down rather than draw any line at all. She could have said the obvious thing... that people are not cargo and elections are not invasions... at no political cost, in a week when ten people were dead. She said the opposite, louder. That is a choice about what the party's message will be, made with full information, and it is fair to record it as one.
Polling this month puts the share of Americans who believe a deliberate effort is underway to replace native-born Americans at roughly one in three, and at 61 percent among 2020 Trump voters. Those numbers did not come from message boards. They came from a million-impression ad buy and a nightly cable slot, and the people who bought the ads are currently explaining that they have never heard of any of this.
SOURCES -- THIS PAGE
- PolitiFact, May 17, 2022: "Elise Stefanik's Facebook ads examined after Buffalo shooting," quoting the advertisements and documenting their reach.
- NPR, May 17, 2022: "After Buffalo shooting, Republicans are on defense about 'replacement' theory."
- NBC News on Stefanik's rhetoric and her response; Salon on the eight months between the ads and the shooting, including the Cheney and Kinzinger statements.
- Polling: AP-NORC and Yahoo News/YouGov, May 2022, as cited in this site's Buffalo entry.
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