The Ku Klux Klan is the “the military wing of the Democratic Party,” and migrants coming to the United States “have no interest in being Americans,” Republican Representative Scott Perry said in a closed-door meeting with other lawmakers Tuesday.
CNN obtained a recording of Perry, whose district encompasses south central Pennsylvania, making the remarks during a House Oversight Committee member briefing on “The Origins and Implications of Rising Antisemitism in Higher Education.”
“The KKK in modern times, a lot of young people think somehow it’s a right-wing organization, when it is the military wing of the Democratic Party. Decidedly, unabashedly, racist and antisemitic,” Perry said in the recording.
“‘Replacement theory’ is real,” Perry added, referencing the discredited, racist idea that elites are deliberately replacing white people with immigrants and other racial groups. “They added white to it to stop everybody from talking about it.”
His comments at the meeting didn’t end there.
“What is happening now is we’re importing people into the country that want to be in America … but have no interest in being Americans, and that’s very different, and to disparage the comments is to chill the conversation so that we can continue to bring in more people that we never met that are un-American,” Perry said, according to the recording.
When CNN contacted Perry for comment, he claimed that he was taken out of context.
“Once again, the radical Left twists facts in order to silence conversation about its own crimes and Biden’s intentional failures to enforce laws and close or regulate our borders. My point is proven yet again: when the Left loses an argument, it debases and smears instead of engaging in debate on merits,” Perry said in a statement.
Perry’s statement doesn’t actually dispute his recorded comments, which sound damning in just about any context. The irony of stating his beliefs on replacement theory is that it is very much connected to antisemitism, with many claiming that Jewish people are the “elites” leading the efforts to replace white people. These days, replacement theory has been tied to massacres like the Buffalo shooting, parroted by people like Elon Musk, and used by some Republicans to justify regressive policies on abortion and immigration alike.
This is yet another mark on Perry’s record, as the Pennsylvania congressman has been extensively linked to Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election on January 6, 2021, even having his cell phone briefly seized by the FBI and narrowly escaping a lawsuit from his own state to be removed from the 2024 ballot for his part in the insurrection.
