President Joe Biden isn’t a hot seller in the right-wing circles where Republicans need to stoke a lot of anger heading into 2022. The economy is recovering faster than most analysts predicted, in large part due to the cash infusion from the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package passed by Democrats. So, robbed of a presidential-sized villain and an economic cudgel, Republicans are returning to their go-to bread-and-butter issues to animate their base: racism and xenophobia.

Republicans have been seizing on rising crime (which began while Trump was still president), hyping the theoretical coronavirus leak from a Wuhan lab (still unproven), demonizing critical race theory as a K-12 scourge (it’s a collegiate-level teaching framework), and of course, scapegoating migration and immigrants for all societal ills. 

At a CPAC event last weekend, Donald Trump paid lip service to the “caravans” (which aren’t really a thing right now and he’s more animated by his 2020 loss anyway). GOP Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is promising to build a border wall (that will never get built) instead of fixing the state’s energy grid to avoid more preventable deaths on his watch. In short, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a throw-away line at an otherwise raucous rally, a Texas-sized political ploy, or a hearing room on Capitol Hill: Republicans are bent on stoking the fears of white Americans any way they can.

“We can be having a debate about anything in Ways and Means relating to tax and they will bring in the border and immigration, and the invasion of children,” Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas, a veteran member of the House Ways and Means Committee, told The Hill. “It’s all wrapped around fear and hate.” 

Forget infrastructure or any other solutions-driven policy, Doggett said, “They want to continue talking about matters that involve race and scare people to the polls while blocking our voters from getting to the polls.”

Leveraging racism at the polls has been a GOP staple for decades, but in 2016 Trump rode an unapologetically racist campaign platform right into office—barely. Republicans forget that last part. They also forget that Trump’s fabricated caravan crisis backfired spectacularly in 2018 and didn’t manage to do the trick for him in 2020 either. 

But hey, when you’re a party that doesn’t have any fresh ideas—let alone any good ones—just revert to form.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is actually quite excited by the advent of the GOP’s latest racially charged fabrication: Critical race theory (CRT). After cycling through Dr. Seuss, Mr. Potato Head, and cancel culture, CRT is finally whipping up enough furor among conservative activists that they’re showing up to school board meetings to spout off about something that isn’t even being taught at the K-12 level. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about schools in Florida, Kentucky, or Virginia, CRT isn’t actually part of the curricula. 

But McCarthy sees nothing but gold in the ignorant hysterics that have been on display at a smattering of local board meetings. Here he is working himself into a lather in an appearance this week on BlazeTV’s The Rubin Report. 

“The next election is going to be big, because all these things about defunding the police. All these Democrat policies that are now going in place, we’re seeing the outcome: the wokeism, the open border, the inflation. Where we’re going to have the biggest victory? School boards,” McCarthy exclaimed. 

“Critical race theory goes against everything Martin Luther King has ever told us — don’t judge us by the color of our skin — and now they’re embracing it, right? They’re going backwards,” McCarthy added.

If there’s one thing McCarthy is expert in, it’s going backward.

And just to clarify on McCarthy’s “defund the police” claim—it was Democrats who voted to keep police and other local first responders funded in their $1.9 trillion pandemic relief package. Every single congressional Republican voted against the bill, which meant they voted against that funding. 

GOP Rep. Darrell Issa of California offered a clarifying insight about Republicans’ 2022 strategy to The Hill. 

“In bad economic times, it’s the economy. In good economic times, it’s other issues,” Issa explained. For Republicans, “other issues” always mean race and racist fearmongering. 

But if Republicans want to be the supposed party of law and order, they can start by getting serious about investigating Jan. 6—an unprecedented attack on the homeland that posed one of the biggest threats to U.S. government since the Civil War.

YetRepublicans, who killed a bipartisan probe of that homegrown attack, are desperate to talk about anything but. Why? Because it reveals white Americans and Trump supporters, in particular, as posing a bigger threat to the republic by far than any uptick in violent crime or migrant crossings at the border.

Republicans cannot be allowed to credibly carry the banner of law and order into the 2022 midterms if they continue to willfully sweep the Capitol siege along with its mostly white, Trump-supporting perpetrators under the rug.