Who Is Behind The Great Replacement Theory Movement and Where Will It Take US?

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The Racist ‘Great Replacement’ Conspiracy Theory Explained

The man who allegedly shot dead at least 10 people at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket on Saturday may have been preoccupied by the so-called “great replacement” conspiracy theory. A sprawling propaganda document released online under his name in advance of the attack obsessively references that theory. Authorities have yet to confirm the authenticity of the document, but if it was indeed written by the killer, it further exposes the deadly consequences of white supremacy.

This racist conspiracy narrative falsely asserts there is an active, ongoing and covert effort to replace white populations in current white-majority countries.

Buffalo Police confer at a Tops Friendly Market on May 14, 2022, in Buffalo, New York. According to reports, at least 10 people were killed after a mass shooting at the store. (Photo by John Normile/Getty Images)

In some periods of American history, paranoid narratives of “white extinction” have appeared to exist only on a radical fringe of racist political movements. In other periods, some of the nation’s highest political officeholders have repeated these ideas, leading to forced sterilization programs at the state level and a racial quota system becoming federal immigration law for four decades. No longer on the fringe, such narratives now have currency among some of the most powerful and influential actors in right-wing media and politics.

The “great replacement” theory is inherently white supremacist. It depends on stoking fears that a non-white population, which the theory’s proponents characterize as “inferior,” will displace a white majority. It is also antisemitic. Some proponents of the “great replacement” do not explicitly attribute the plot to Jews. Instead, they blame powerful Jewish individuals such as financier and philanthropist George Soros or use coded antisemitic language to identify shadowy “elites” or “globalists.”

Along with invocations of the “great replacement” narrative, the online screed believed to have been written by the man charged with the Buffalo shootings included copious false assertions about the intellectual inferiority and inherent criminality of Black people and false, antisemitic allegations of wide-ranging Jewish conspiracies against whites.

The attack in Buffalo is not the first time that the narrative has been linked to racist violence in recent times. The suspect accused of a mass murder at a Pittsburgh synagogue in October 2018 and the killer behind an attack at a mosque and a community center in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March 2019 each cited the “great replacement” theory. So did the suspect in the August 2019 attack on a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, and the individual who opened fire at a synagogue in Poway, California, and set fire to a mosque in Escondido, California, in 2019.

The alleged Buffalo shooter not only cites the “great replacement” in his online writings but appears to have lifted passages wholesale from the Christchurch attacker, whose manifesto took “The Great Replacement” as its title. The accused El Paso attacker also directly referenced the Christchurch attacker’s screed.

European roots

Renaud Camus, a racist French writer, coined the “great replacement” formulation. Camus falsely depicted non-white immigration to France from the decolonized Middle East and Africa as an attempt by a sinister “replacist” elite to destroy native French demographics and culture.

White supremacy and coded antisemitism were baked into Camus’ narrative from the outset.

His ideas, featured in books published in 2010 and 2011, directly influenced the growth of the far-right, anti-immigrant European identitarian movement in the ensuing decade. With national branches in several European countries, identitarians attempted to put a respectable gloss on anti-immigrant politics, though some progressed from online propaganda and banner drops to attempted interceptions of boats carrying migrants across the Mediterranean Sea.

The leader of Austria’s Generation Identity, Martin Sellner, was investigated by law enforcement in that country in 2019 after he was found to have corresponded with the mass shooter who attacked Muslims in Christchurch, though various charges against his group were eventually dismissed by a judge. The shooter also donated money to Sellner’s organization.

Members of Identity Evropa, an American offshoot of the identitarian movement, were prominent participants in the deadly 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Camus acknowledged the influence on his own ideas from far-right anti-immigrant British politician Enoch Powell, interwar French literary fascist Charles Maurras and Jean Raspail, author of the 1973 racist, dystopian novel, The Camp of the Saints. Raspail’s book fell out of print, but The Social Contract Press – the publishing house founded by John Tanton, the architect of the modern-day anti-immigrant movement – brought it back into circulation in 1994.

Tanton-founded groups, such as Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) and the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), heavily influenced thinking on immigration, refugee and asylum policy in the Trump administration, as led by Trump’s senior adviser and director of speechwriting, Stephen Miller.

More than a century of fearmongering

The “great replacement” can also be seen as a variation or elaboration on false narratives of “white extinction” that have circulated since the 19^th century in Europe and in white-majority countries subject to European colonization and settlement.

In 1892, British-Australian author Charles Pearson warned that one day soon, white people would “wake to find ourselves elbowed and hustled, and perhaps even thrust aside by peoples whom we looked down upon.” His book National Life and Character launched a genre that included even more apocalyptic visions of white extinction from American authors, including the racist and antisemitic New York lawyer Madison Grant.

Grant’s own scientific-racist 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, warned of the decline and extinction of America’s “Nordic” racial stock. (Scientific racism is the discredited, pseudoscientific belief that scientific evidence exists to support racism and racially biased state policy.) Grant did not write from the fringes: His book influenced the widespread adoption of eugenic policies, restrictions on non-white immigration and anti-miscegenation laws in the U.S. in the interwar period. (Eugenics is a debunked pseudoscience whose believers are obsessed with controlling heredity through hateful notions like “racial hygiene” to preserve supposedly superior races and ethnicities.)

Grant’s book had an influence far beyond North America. In devising their own racist political order, Germany’s Nazi regime and Hitler himself drew on narratives of white extinction and on American policies influenced by Grant and like-minded authors. The Nazis falsely attributed the declining “racial hygiene” of white races, and the advance of “Bolshevism” in Europe, to Jewish plots.

In many majority-white countries in the early 20^th century, ideas of white extinction were recited in the halls of power and fed into policies of racial exclusion, segregation and genocide.

Figureheads of the U.S.-based eugenics movement – such as Harry Laughlin of the Eugenics Record Office and Wickliffe Draper, who provided the first endowment for the eugenicist Pioneer Fund – collaborated with lawmakers, researchers and political groups to sustain the eugenic policies, ensure a white-Christian majority and quash efforts to achieve racial equality.

Laughlin, for example, helped structure the racist quota system used in American immigration policy that President Calvin Coolidge signed into law in 1924. (The 1924 Immigration Act’s provisions were overturned in the 1960s.) Draper’s Pioneer Fund and Laughlin, who was also its first president, communicated with Nazi scientists who established the conceptual framework for Hitler’s own aspirations for “racial hygiene” in Germany.

Laughlin and others also supported the forced sterilization laws that passed in 31 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico. Women of color and women with disabilities were disproportionately victimized by these laws. In 2016, NPR reported that “as many as 70,000 Americans were forcibly sterilized during the 20^th century.”

In more recent times, a formulation of white extinction anxiety known as “white genocide” has circulated broadly on the far right and was included in the accused Buffalo shooter’s propaganda post alongside the “great replacement” narrative.

White nationalist David Lane – who was imprisoned for crimes committed as a member of the white supremacist terrorist group The Order – popularized this idea in his “White Genocide Manifesto,” which he wrote in prison.

Lane and others who promote the idea of “white genocide” portray the fear at the heart of the “great replacement” – non-white immigration – alongside other supposed dangers to whites, including mixed-race families, abortion, same-sex relationships, mass media (which they falsely portray as a vector for Jewish propaganda) and drug and alcohol dependency.

And while “great replacement” propaganda is frequently aimed at newer immigrant cohorts – Middle Easterners, South Asians and Africans in Europe, and Latin Americans in the United States – “white genocide” proponents often falsely depict Black people as pawns in a Jewish plot to undermine white America with violence and crime.

Modern racist conspiracy

The rhetoric in the alleged Buffalo shooter’s document indicates that he has absorbed a wide range of apocalyptic racist propaganda in online forums that have played a part in radicalizing other perpetrators of racist violence. But great replacement narratives circulate far beyond sites such as 4chan.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s rise to the top of cable news ratings, and the peak of his influence on right-wing politics, has been accompanied by repeated invocations of imminent white extinction. Carlson has used the phrase “great replacement” on air. He seems to otherwise avoid using the terms favored by open white power activists, but he nevertheless regularly portrays everything from immigration at the United States’ Southern border to falling birthrates as existential threats to white people.

Carlson has a direct influence on the thinking of other powerful actors, as was seen in 2019. After Carlson ran a segment claiming white South African farmers were facing a genocidal threat – an idea that had bubbled up from the so-called “alt-right” over preceding months – then-President Donald Trump announced on Twitter that he had asked then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to look into “the large scale killing of farmers” in the country.

As Hatewatch reported the same year, Stephen Miller, the Trump administration adviser and speechwriter, recommended in 2015 that Breitbart run articles on The Camp of the Saints, the book whose vision of a Europe overrun by non-white immigrants inspired Renaud Camus to condense these fears of white extinction into a single, memorable phrase.

Hatewatch also noted that Miller repeatedly emphasized the importance of the 1924 Immigration Act and its political sponsors.

In a June 2, 2015, email containing a link to an MSNBC story noting the beginning of Immigrant Heritage Month, Miller wrote, “This would seem a good opportunity to remind people about the heritage established by Calvin Coolidge, which covers four decades of the 20^th century.”

Two years later, Miller was part of the Trump administration, which combined draconian immigrant and refugee detention with narratives of migrant caravans orchestrated by Jewish billionaires.

Fears of white extinction can inspire state violence just as surely as they do the violence of mass shooters. And while “great replacement” as a term may have been coined abroad, the white supremacy at the core of the conspiracy is dyed in the fabric of this country’s hard history.

The Great Replacement: From the Fringe of White Supremacist Circles to the Mainstream

The “Great Replacement” is one of the most dangerous white supremacist conspiracy theories out there. While it has floated around in racist echo chambers for quite some time, today — from Fox News to the mouths of politicians around the globe — it’s everywhere. And as far-right figures mainstream this dangerous, white supremacist theory, the mass casualty attacks inspired by it continue to mount.

Scroll down to see examples of US politicians spreading this racist and anti-immigrant conspiracy theory.

What is “The Great Replacement” and why is it dangerous?
The Great Replacement conspiracy theory is a white supremacist, xenophobic, and anti-immigrant concept that posits white people are being replaced by immigrants, Muslims, and other people of color in their so-called “home” countries. The conspiracy often blames the “elite” and Jews for orchestrating these changing demographics. The Great Replacement was conceived of by a Frenchman, Renaud Camus, who popularized the idea in his 2011 book Le Grand Remplacement. The concept spread like wildfire in Europe, particularly through the sprawling transnational white supremacist group Generation Identity and its social media accounts.

Believers in the Great Replacement have been responsible for an astounding number of mass casualty terrorist attacks across the globe in recent years. They include:

The 2017 violence during white supremacist riots in Charlottesville, Virginia, where racists chanted “Jews will not replace us” and “you will not replace us.” One anti-racist activist was murdered in a car-ramming attack and dozens were injured.
The 2018 attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where the shooter was targeting the offices of HIAS, a Jewish agency that for decades has worked to resettle refugees. Eleven people were murdered.
The 2019 shooting at an El Paso, Texas, Walmart, which the gunman specifically chose in the hopes of finding a large population of Latin American immigrants. Twenty-three people were murdered.
The 2019 shooting at a Poway, California, synagogue, which the gunman chose because he believed Jews were planning a “genocide” of Europeans. One person was murdered. He had earlier set an Escondido, California, mosque on fire.
The 2019 Christchurch, New Zealand, mosque attacks, where the gunman was targeting Muslims whom he believed did not belong in the country. Fifty-one people were murdered.
The 2019 Halle, Germany, synagogue attack, where the gunman was targeting a Yom Kippur event at which 52 people were present. Unable to enter the synagogue, the gunman murdered a passerby and a man in a kebab shop.
The 2020 attacks on two Shisha bars in Hanau, Germany, which the gunman targeted because immigrants frequented them. Nine people were murdered.
The 2022 Buffalo, New York, shooting at a supermarket. The gunman was racist and antisemitic and believed in the Great Replacement. Ten people were murdered.

Great Replacement Used to Demonize Immigrants
The Great Replacement’s arguments became better known throughout the US when white supremacists, including Richard Spencer, yelled “you will not replace us” and “Jews will not replace us” during the 2017 racist Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. It’s also been used by white supremacists in protest of taking down Confederate monuments. Other prominent American white supremacist groups, such as American Renaissance and Vdare, have spread the theory’s ideas, and in May 2022 it was cited in the alleged Buffalo, New York, shooter’s manifesto as the reason for his murderous attack.

The Great Replacement conspiracy theory’s talking points have also been used to drum up fear among white voters that they are intentionally being replaced by new voters in a plot to destroy their political power and erase their culture and values. To stoke this fear, the Great Replacement’s advocates spread unfounded and hateful anti-immigrant and anti-refugee sentiment across the globe, often using warlike language by speaking of an orchestrated invasion of the United States and other countries.

Such fearmongering has increasingly come from mainstream political figures. Former President Donald Trump repeatedly demonized immigrants, calling Mexicans rapists on the first day of his 2015 campaign and warning of an invasion from the South. Such arguments have been used to justify voter suppression tactics and laws that make voting more difficult.

In recent years, additional prominent figures on the far right have been spreading the theory into the mainstream. Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, and others on the far-right have spread these white nationalist and anti-immigrant talking points. Bannon even asserted that one of his favorite books is The Camp of the Saints, long beloved and sold by white supremacists and a fictional depiction of a violent, murderous invasion of France by South Asian migrants. More recently, the executive director for Turning Point USA, a group known for its connections to racists, Charlie Kirk said “Biden intentionally let Afghanistan fall because he ‘wants a couple hundred thousand more Ilhan Omars to come into America to change the body politic permanently.’”

Moving toward the mainstream, Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham have used the racist Great Replacement talking points numerous times on their shows, which is particularly troubling because they reach millions of viewers. But they are not the only ones to blame for Great Replacement talking points moving from the fringes into the mainstream.

Sadly, this fearmongering has found fertile ground. A May 2022 AP poll found that one-third of those polled believed “an effort is afoot to replace native-born Americans with new immigrants for electoral purposes.”

Conclusion

There are several reasons the border is open, one is to bring in cheap labor, Corporations do not like paying high salaries. They became addicted to cheap labor in China, but they are no longer willing to pay the price or the assault on the integrity of their companies. So what is the best way to do this, mirror the conditions that exist in China. The second is to change the the political view of the country. They realize that they can’t keep on cheating, eventually the people will revolt. So bring in millions of Democratic voters, simple fix. One problem, they are all illegal, not a problem if you control all three branches of the Federal Government. The final key just fell into place as I am writing this article. I was listening to a recorded Dan Bongino Saturday show. They mentioned that George Soros is buying out all of the Spanish Radio Stations. Now that they have them here, they need a way to keep them on your team. Real smart, I am just surprised that it took so long for them to do it.

Resources

splcenter.org, “The Racist ‘Great Replacement’ Conspiracy Theory Explained.” By Jason Wilson and Aaron Flanagan; globalextremism.org, “The Great Replacement: From the Fringe of White Supremacist Circles to the Mainstream.”; immigrationforum.org, “The ‘Great Replacement’ Theory, Explained.”;

Addendum

The ‘Great Replacement’ Theory, Explained

Common Sense and Ramblings In America

Who Is Behind The Great Replacement Theory Movement and Where Will It Take US?

European roots

More than a century of fearmongering

Modern racist conspiracy

Scroll down to see examples of US politicians spreading this racist and anti-immigrant conspiracy theory.

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European roots

More than a century of fearmongering

Modern racist conspiracy

Scroll down to see examples of US politicians spreading this racist and anti-immigrant conspiracy theory.

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