Some things a member of Congress does can be explained away as a bad day, a staffer's mistake, or a sentence that came out wrong. And then there are things that keep happening.
Scott Perry has represented the Harrisburg and York area in Congress since 2013. Over the last several years he has posted a notorious antisemitic image on his campaign's Facebook page, told fellow lawmakers in a closed-door briefing on antisemitism that the white nationalist "replacement" conspiracy is real, compared Democrats to Nazis from a conference stage, and — according to sworn testimony from a former Trump White House aide — asked the president for a pardon after January 6.
That is not a bad day. That is a record.
The meme
In late June 2024, Perry's campaign Facebook account shared an image showing a group of stereotypically Jewish bankers with hooked noses and thick beards playing Monopoly on a game board balanced on the bent backs of naked people. Text above it read, "If the people stand … the game is over." The campaign added its own comment: "Says it all ..."
The image wasn't ambiguous, and it wasn't new. As Jewish Insider first reported, it was lifted from "Freedom for Humanity," a 2012 London street mural by the artist Mear One that was condemned as antisemitic and removed. It's famous enough that Jeremy Corbyn, the former British Labour leader, publicly apologized in 2018 for having defended it, calling the image "deeply disturbing and antisemitic."
Perry's campaign took the post down — but only after Jewish Insider asked about it. The explanation it gave, as reported by the Philadelphia Inquirer, was this:
"After receiving a media inquiry, learning the history of the image, and contacting several members of the Jewish community (some who were familiar with it and some who were not) out of grave concern that it is considered antisemitic — we removed it immediately."
Read that again. It's not an apology. It says the campaign had to go learn the history of a cartoon of hook-nosed bankers ruling over naked bodies before it could tell whether it was antisemitic.
Jewish leaders in his own district were not impressed. The Jewish Federation of Greater Harrisburg and the Pennsylvania Jewish Coalition issued a joint statement on July 5, 2024 saying they "strongly condemn the recent post of a horrific and plainly anti-Semitic image by the campaign of U.S. Congressman Scott Perry (PA-10)." They called what the campaign offered "only a brief and anodyne explanation," and wrote that Perry "should have taken ownership of his indefensible promotion of the image, expressed only antipathy for this infamous slander of Jews, and condemned anti-Semitism in all its pervasive and pernicious forms" — and had failed to do so.
He never did.
"Replacement theory is real"
Two months before the meme, on May 7, 2024, House members attended a closed-door briefing titled "The Origins and Implications of Rising Antisemitism in Higher Education." Someone in the room recorded it, and the audio got out.
According to the Inquirer's account of the recording, Perry used a briefing about antisemitism to say this:
"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."
And this:
"Replacement theory is real."
He also said migrants have "no interest in being Americans." His office's response was not to dispute the quotes but to complain that the "radical Left twists facts."
It's worth being precise about what "replacement theory" is, because Perry's defenders like to pretend it's just a comment about immigration numbers. HIAS, the Jewish refugee organization, defines it as "a white nationalist conspiracy theory that dangerously and falsely asserts that Jews and others are orchestrating the deliberate replacement of white Americans with non-white immigrants and people of color."
That theory has a body count, and part of it is in Pennsylvania. The man who murdered 11 worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 — the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history — believed it. Before the attack he posted online accusing HIAS of bringing in "hostile invaders" who would kill "his people." HIAS also links the conspiracy to the 2019 Poway synagogue attack, the 2019 El Paso Walmart shooting, and the 2022 Buffalo supermarket massacre.
Perry told a room full of colleagues, at a briefing convened because antisemitism was rising, that the theory is real.
It wasn't the first time either
Three years earlier, on April 14, 2021, Perry brought the same idea into a House Foreign Affairs Committee meeting. CNN reported his words at the time:
"For many Americans, what seems to be happening or what they believe right now is happening is what appears to them is we're replacing national-born American — native-born Americans to permanently transform the landscape of this very nation."
CNN's headline called it what it was: how the racist replacement theory "came to Congress." Perry brought it there.
Two months after that, in June 2021, Perry took the stage at the Pennsylvania Leadership Conference and compared Democrats to Nazi-era Germans, telling the crowd, "Not every citizen in Germany in the 1930s and '40s was in the Nazi Party." The Harrisburg Jewish groups cited that episode too, in the same statement about the meme — this was a pattern they had already watched build.
And when the House voted in October 2020 on a resolution simply condemning QAnon and rejecting its conspiracy theories, it passed 371 to 18. Perry was one of the 17 Republicans who voted no. We wrote about that vote when we looked at the one member who couldn't even bring himself to pick a side. Perry picked one.
The pardon
On June 23, 2022, former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson testified under oath before the January 6 committee. Asked whether Perry had spoken to her about a pardon, she answered plainly: "Mr. Perry asked for a pardon, too."
Perry denies it. His office called it a "false pardon narrative," and his spokesman put out this line, as WESA and WITF reported: "I stand by my statement that I never sought a Presidential pardon for myself or other Members of Congress."
You can decide who to believe. What isn't in dispute is the conduct around it. Perry pushed to install Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark as acting attorney general so Clark could reverse the department's finding that there was no widespread fraud. He circulated a claim that Italian satellites had flipped votes — a theory so far out that it reached the Defense Attaché in Italy. And the FBI seized his cellphone in 2022, making him the only sitting member of Congress whose phone was taken in the 2020 election investigation.
People with nothing to worry about don't usually need a pardon.
He's not an outlier — but he's ours
Perry is not the only Republican on this site whose record runs in this direction. Paul Gosar spoke at Nick Fuentes's white nationalist conference two years running and defended Fuentes to the FBI on congressional letterhead. Wisconsin's Tom Tiffany went on a podcast whose host praised Hitler and then accepted the host's offer to campaign for him.
What separates Perry is that he did his in the places that are supposed to be safe from it: a committee hearing, a briefing on antisemitism, his own campaign's Facebook page.
It also isn't limited to Jews. In March 2026, Perry stood on the House floor, read the First Amendment's religious freedom clause out loud, and then spent ten minutes arguing that Muslim families move into a neighborhood until they reach "critical mass" and take it over — the same replacement story with a different target. We wrote that one up separately: ten years of Perry's anti-Muslim record.
In May 2026, after Janelle Stelson won the Democratic primary to face him again, Perry called her "the same carpetbagging, racist, tax hiker we defeated less than two years ago." He beat her by 5,133 votes in 2024.
Scott Perry is comfortable throwing the word "racist" at an opponent. He has still not offered the plain, unqualified condemnation of antisemitism that the Jewish Federation in his own hometown asked him for after his campaign put that image on the internet.
We deserve better.
Sources
- Rep. Scott Perry posts, then deletes, antisemitic meme to campaign Facebook account — The Philadelphia Inquirer, July 3, 2024
- GOP congressman Scott Perry shares antisemitic meme on social media — Jewish Insider, June 2024
- JFGH & PJC Condemn Antisemitic Posts by Campaign of Cong. Scott Perry — Jewish Federation of Greater Harrisburg, July 5, 2024
- Scott Perry: The KKK is not right-wing, but actually a militant part of the Democratic Party — The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 8, 2024
- How the ugly, racist White 'replacement theory' came to Congress — CNN, April 15, 2021
- Pennsylvania Congressman Scott Perry asked for pardon, Meadows aide said — WESA/WITF, June 24, 2022
