Rep. Matt Gaetz speaks to the press outside the U.S. Capitol as the House votes on a continuing resolution Sept. 30, 2023. Photo by Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images

Contributing Columnist Emily Tamkin October 4, 2023

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy temporarily averted a government shutdown by agreeing to a bipartisan deal. He was punished gravely for doing so.

The event itself had a kind of ceremony: The motion to vacate the speaker’s chair, the speeches in defense of and against Speaker McCarthy, the vote to remove him, the gavel at the end a final performance of decorum.

The driver of it all was a man who has grabbed headlines for being the opposite of decorous: Matt Gaetz, the Republican representative from Florida who led the charge to oust Kevin McCarthy from his speaker’s chair.

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Gaetz has in the past made headlines for everything from possible violation of sex trafficking laws to raising an ex-girlfriend’s younger brother as his son. He tried, in his speech before the House on Tuesday, to draw a contrast not only between his bombast and Congress’s studied civility, but also between his moral compass and that of his colleagues: “I take no lecture on asking patriotic Americans to weigh in and contribute to this fight from those who would grovel and bend knee for the lobbyists and special interests who own our leadership — boo all you want! — who have hollowed out this town and have borrowed against the future of our future generations,” he said in a clip he later shared on social media.

Gaetz has made his mark during his six years in office. But he is not just a bombastic politician, someone who will make a rousing speech about lobbyists in order to remove a politician from a given position, turning on his party’s own leadership when convenient.

Matt Gaetz is those things. But he is also a peddler of hateful conspiracy theories — and the chaos and conspiracy are inextricably linked.

“The point of such performance art is to get eyeballs,” Time said of the Florida lawmaker. More than policy or substance, the spectacle of destruction is the point. In the House of Representatives and online, in action and in word, Gaetz sows distrust and discord.

Antisemitism and xenophobia

Gaetz has, for years, pushed antisemitic rhetoric and excused antisemites. In 2018, he invited Charles “Chuck” Johnson as his guest to the State of the Union. Johnson, whom Politico described as an “alt-right troll,” had been banned from Twitter and was accused of Holocaust denial and white supremacy. 

The two met after another unnamed member of Congress sent Johnson to talk to Gaetz about “cannabis and cryptocurrency.” Gaetz had recently learned that his father would not be able to attend the State of the Union with him, and so offered a ticket to Johnson.

Gaetz said he did not know who Johnson was before inviting him. But he did not rescind the honor after being made aware of Johnson’s beliefs. In fact, Gaetz insisted that Johnson was “not a Holocaust denier, he’s not a white supremacist,” even though, a year prior, Johnson had actively spread Holocaust denial conspiracies. In a Reddit Ask Me Anything on the since-banned subreddit r/altright, he wrote, “I do not and never have believed the six million figure” and “I think the Red Cross numbers of 250,000 dead in the camps from typhus are more realistic.”

In October of that same year, Gaetz suggested that George Soros, the Hungarian-born billionaire Jewish philanthropist and favorite bogeyman of the right, was behind the migrant caravan, pushing an idea that manages to be both antisemitic and xenophobic at the same time (antisemitic because one Jewish person is credited with manipulating a wave of migration; xenophobic because it strips agency and cause from those trying to come to the United States).

Gaetz would return to this fertile ground of conspiracy and chaos. In 2021, then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson pushed the racist, xenophobic and antisemitic replacement theory, in which shadowy forces orchestrate the replacement of white nationals with non-white immigrants. Carlson did this in a segment discussing voting rights and disenfranchisement. When the Anti-Defamation League criticized Carlson for this, Gaetz leapt to his defense.

Gaetz tweeted, “@TuckerCarlson is CORRECT about Replacement Theory as he explains what is happening to America,” adding, “The ADL is a racist organization.”

This was three years after a shooter who blamed Jews for bringing in “invaders” killed 11 Jewish people in a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. A year after his tweet, in 2022, when a shooter penned a manifesto that included replacement theory and killed 10 Black people in Buffalo, New York, Gaetz offered that he had “never spoken of replacement theory in terms of race.”

Open and unabashed hate

Unlike allegations of sexual misconduct and illicit drug use, Gaetz’s antisemitic and xenophobic behavior is not alleged. He did and said all of this out in the open, in plain view and for public consumption.

This is who we’re talking about when we talk about Congressman Matt Gaetz. He’s defended an apparent Holocaust denier and pushed a conspiracy theory that has shown up in the most violent manifestos of recent American history.

Maybe this is simply how we live now. Maybe it is unreasonable to expect that the congressman in the limelight in any given week will not have a history of saying and doing things that further antisemitism, or hatred or suspicion of any group.

But just in case it still matters, it is worth remembering that, when Matt Gaetz steps into the middle of a circle of reporters, this is the person being interviewed. In this way, he is not dissimilar to his political ally, former U.S. President Donald Trump, or to entrepreneur Elon Musk: All so regularly attract so much media attention, and do so in such an over-the-top, circus-like way, that they can seem like performers or protagonists in a drama.

But they’re not just that, and we are not just watching a show. These individuals are prominent people who have platforms and power, and who choose, over and over again, to use those platforms to push conspiracy theories and hateful rhetoric, to foster distrust and disillusion not just with Congress, but with one another. And if Matt Gaetz is a congressional star, all of that is burning right along with him.

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