Advertisement

Rep. Myrick’s conspiracy theory: Immigrants have Farsi tattoos, must be Iranian-Venezuelan secret agents.

During a conversation with Rep. Gary Miller (R-CA), Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC) managed to combine two of her favorite obsessions — demagoguing against immigrants and fearmongering about an Iranian terrorist attack — into a wild, intertwined conspiracy theory. Myrick said she believed that Iranian agents are traveling to Venezuela, learning Spanish, then using their education to sneak into America through Mexico, posing as undocumented workers. Myrick admitted that the only evidence she has for her story is that some prisoners in California have tattoos written in Farsi — a concern to Myrick because many prisoners also have tattoos in Arabic. Despite the flimsy evidence for this plot, Myrick said her own theory “scares” her:

MYRICK: Well the thing that concerns me, and you mentioned this briefly, Iran is working with Venezuela. And they’re transiting through Venezuela, taking Spanish for maybe six months. They’re getting the false documents that they need, coming up through Mexico and if they’re stopped, they just say well I’m Spanish. And it, oh I mean Mexican, and it only takes a smart border agent who knows the difference in the accents. He can tell, but if he doesn’t have that, there’s no way to know.

And the other thing that we’re seeing, and we’re seeing it in your state in particular in the prisons is Farsi tattoos. Farsi is basically a Persian language, which Iran is, and we know we’ve seen Arabic tattoos in our prisons for a long time, but we havent seen Farsi tattoos in a long time. That’s a pretty good indication that these people coming across our border are not just coming from Mexico and other countries that are looking for work. And that’s what scares me. Being on Intelligence, we know there are people who are are here who do want to do us harm who are already in the country and it’s not a matter of will they get in anymore, it’s a matter of they’re already here because of our lax border laws.

Watch it:

Advertisement

Myrick is the ranking member of the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Intelligence Community Management, and would become the chairwoman if Republicans take back the House of Representatives in the midterm elections.