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The Republican Party has grown more racially and religiously homogeneous and its politics more dependent on manufacturing threats to the status of white Christians. This is why Trump frequently and falsely implies that Americans were afraid to say "Merry Christmas" before he was elected, and why Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham warn Fox News viewers that nonwhite immigrants are stealing America. For both the Republican Party and conservative media, wielding power and influence depends on making white Americans feel threatened by the growing political influence of those who are different from them.

As scholars such as Leo Chavez and Otto Santa Ana have shown, threat narratives of replacement, conquest, invasion, and infestation have circulated for well over a century. What is new is how this racist rhetoric is being promulgated by a particularly influential set of forces that includes a white nationalist president, formidable conservative media ecosystem, and an empowered anti-immigrant and alt-right political contingent, often undergirded by a persistent gun culture." Together, this nativist assemblage has taken up the white nationalist rhetoric of the "great replacement"-a conspiracy theory in which white people are being systematically "replaced" by people of color through mass migration (possibly orchestrated by Jews and other "globalists"). Fox hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham in particular characterize white Americans as being "replaced through immigration to the benefit of Democrats." Ingraham tells Fox viewers that "the Democrats want to replace many of you. with newly amnestied citizens and an ever-increasing number of chain immigrants"...Pushing a conspiracy theory that Democrats are encouraging noncitizens to vote to win elections, Trump, Fox, and other antiimmigrant forces have created a xenophobic resonance machine that continually characterizes Mexicans and other Latinx populations as an invasive force. Speaking to Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick, Ingraham characterized Texas as "completely overrun by this illegal invasion" and said that "calling it anything but an invasion at this point is just not being honest with people."

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