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 鈥済reat replacement鈥� 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.
In some periods of American history, paranoid narratives of 鈥渨hite extinction鈥� have appeared to exist only on a radical fringe of racist political movements. In other periods, some of the nation鈥檚 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 鈥済reat replacement鈥� theory is inherently white supremacist. It depends on stoking fears that a non-white population, which the theory鈥檚 proponents characterize as 鈥渋nferior,鈥� will displace a white majority. It is also antisemitic. Some proponents of the 鈥済reat replacement鈥� 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 鈥渆lites鈥� or 鈥済lobalists.鈥�
Along with invocations of the 鈥済reat replacement鈥� 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聽in October 2018 and the killer behind an attack at a mosque and a community center in Christchurch, New Zealand, in March 2019聽each cited the 鈥済reat replacement鈥� 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 鈥済reat replacement鈥� in his online writings but appears to have lifted passages wholesale from the Christchurch attacker, whose manifesto took 鈥淭he Great Replacement鈥� as its title. The accused El Paso attacker also directly referenced the Christchurch attacker鈥檚 screed.
European roots
Renaud Camus, a racist French writer, coined the 鈥済reat replacement鈥� formulation. Camus falsely depicted non-white immigration to France from the decolonized Middle East and Africa as an attempt by a sinister 鈥渞eplacist鈥� elite to destroy native French demographics and culture.
White supremacy and coded antisemitism were baked into Camus鈥� 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聽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鈥檚 Generation Identity, Martin Sellner, was investigated by law enforcement in that country 聽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鈥檚 organization.
Members of Identity Evropa, an American offshoot of the identitarian movement, were prominent participants in the deadly 2017 鈥淯nite the Right鈥� 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鈥檚 book fell out of print, but The Social Contract Press聽鈥� the publishing house founded by John Tanton, the architect of the modern-day anti-immigrant movement 鈥� brought it back into circulation in 1994.
Tanton-founded groups, such as Federation for American Immigration Reform聽(FAIR) and the Center for Immigration Studies聽(CIS), heavily influenced thinking on immigration, refugee and asylum policy in the Trump administration, as led by Trump鈥檚 senior adviser and director of speechwriting, Stephen Miller.
More than a century of fearmongering
The 鈥済reat replacement鈥� can also be seen as a variation or elaboration on false narratives of 鈥溾�� that have circulated since the 19th 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 鈥渨ake to find ourselves elbowed and hustled, and perhaps even thrust aside by peoples whom we looked down upon.鈥� 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鈥檚 own scientific-racist 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, warned of the decline and extinction of America鈥檚 鈥淣ordic鈥� 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 鈥渞acial hygiene鈥� to preserve supposedly superior races and ethnicities.)
Grant鈥檚 book had an influence far beyond North America. In devising their own racist political order, Germany鈥檚 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 鈥渞acial hygiene鈥� of white races, and the advance of 鈥淏olshevism鈥� in Europe, to Jewish plots.
In many majority-white countries in the early 20th 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 鈥� such as Harry Laughlin of the Eugenics Record Office and Wickliffe Draper, who provided the first endowment for the eugenicist Pioneer Fund聽鈥� 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鈥檚 provisions were overturned in the 1960s.) Draper鈥檚 Pioneer Fund and Laughlin, who was also its first president, communicated with Nazi scientists who established the conceptual framework for Hitler鈥檚 own aspirations for 鈥渞acial hygiene鈥� 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 鈥渁s many as 70,000 Americans were forcibly sterilized during the 20th 肠别苍迟耻谤测.鈥�
In more recent times, a formulation of white extinction anxiety known as 鈥渨hite genocide鈥� has circulated broadly on the far right and was included in the accused Buffalo shooter鈥檚 propaganda post alongside the 鈥済reat replacement鈥� narrative.
White nationalist David Lane聽鈥� who was imprisoned for crimes committed as a member of the white supremacist terrorist group The Order 鈥� popularized this idea in his 鈥淲hite Genocide Manifesto,鈥� which he wrote in prison.
Lane and others who promote the idea of 鈥渨hite genocide鈥� portray the fear at the heart of the 鈥済reat replacement鈥� 鈥� non-white immigration 鈥� 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 鈥済reat replacement鈥� propaganda is frequently aimed at newer immigrant cohorts 鈥� Middle Easterners, South Asians and Africans in Europe, and Latin Americans in the United States 鈥� 鈥渨hite genocide鈥� 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鈥檚 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鈥檚 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 鈥済reat replacement鈥� 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鈥� 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 鈥� an idea that had bubbled up from the so-called 鈥渁lt-right鈥� over preceding months 鈥� then-President Donald Trump announced on Twitter that he had asked then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to look into 鈥渢he large scale killing of farmers鈥� in the country.
As Hatewatch reported聽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, 鈥淭his would seem a good opportunity to remind people about the heritage established by Calvin Coolidge, which covers four decades of the 20th 肠别苍迟耻谤测.鈥�
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 鈥済reat replacement鈥� 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鈥檚 hard history.
