Beware ‘The Great Replacement’
If you haven’t heard of “The Great Replacement” and “White Identitarian” you better get up to speed because they are the latest forces that are driving the country into the grave of bigotry and hatred.
You have to be on your toes to stay current with the latest bigoted, anti-Semitic, white supremacist tropes and the constant demonization of nonwhite immigrants and what better place to get an education than to switch on Fox News and Tucker Carlson, that repository of all that is hatred and prejudice.
Carlson’s latest rants have to do with the two tropes that were in full view during the attack on the Capitol and which are the single greatest cause of racism, xenophobia and anti-Semitism that have been sweeping the country. Just to make you feel even more irrelevant, for more on the subject, check out a popular website called “PragerU” or read a book important to conspiracists, called “The camp of the Saints.”
Last week, Carlson argued that immigration to the United States would “dilute the political power” of Americans in a segment that also referenced “white replacement theory.” The Anti-Defamation League called for Carlson’s firing for his “open-ended endorsement of white supremacist ideology.” Fox news did not respond.
“The Great Replacement” and “White Identitarian” represent the fears that whites of European and Christian descent are quickly and steadily and systematically being overrun and replaced by people of color, Jews and other minorities. Both are retreads of the anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany and racism in the U.S., with different names that might sound a bit less offensive, but they are part of the same conspiratorial belief that whites and Christians are being replaced by non-whites and non-Christians who will take over the nation, while supported by global elites, particularly by the likes of Jews like George Soros.
The term “Great Replacement” was popularized by the French author Renaud Camus in his 2011 book “Le Grand Remplacement” (English: The Great Replacement). Renaud associated the presence of Muslims in France with potential danger and destruction of French culture and civilization. The theory has been adopted and bastardized by white supremacists and others in the U.S. and elsewhere in the western far right movements.
Carlson is only the latest to embrace the “Great Replacement” conspiracy. Stephen Miller, a former top advisor to Trump, was an advocate who warned about white genocide through immigration, race science, and eugenics.
Miller also praised the genocidal book, “The Camp of the Saints” and Raspail’s dystopian warning that by the year 2000 there will seven billion people “swarming on the surface of the Earth. And only 900 million of them will be white. What will happen when the teeming billions of the so-called Third World — driven by unbearable hunger and despair, the inevitable consequences of insensate over-population — descend locust-like on the lush lands of the complacent white race.”
In 2017, white supremacists, neo-Nazis and KKK members marched at the Unite The Right Rally in Charlottesville, Va., and used slogans that alluded to similar ideas of ethnic replacement, chanting “You will not replace us” and “Jews will not replace us.”
The man responsible for killing 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand in 2019 and the gunman who killed 20 people, seven of them Mexicans, at a Walmart in El Paso, also referred to the replacement conspiracy.
In October 2018, former Republican congressman Steve King endorsed the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. King, an unapologetic anti-Semitic and racist, specifically blamed George Soros and said that “if we continue to abort our babies and import a replacement for them in the form of young violent men, we are supplanting our culture, our civilization.”
In May 2019, Florida State Sen. Dennis Baxley spoke about the replacement theory in relation to abortion.
“When you get a birth rate less than 2 percent, that society is disappearing, and it’s being replaced by folks that come behind them and immigrate, don’t wish to assimilate into that society and they do believe in having children,” Baxley said.
The following month, Nick Isgro, deputy leader of the Maine Republican Party, claimed that financial subsidies were promoted for abortions in the U.S. to “kill our own people” and that asylum seekers were “human pawns who are being played in a game by global elites and their partners here in Augusta.”
Trump’s violent opposition to Muslims and other immigrants and labeling them as “invaders” is a signature of the Great Replacement conspiracy.
And now about PragerU. PragerU is not a university but rather a non-profit organization that claims it has provided 4.9 billion views of free right wing videos with titles like “Back the Blue,” “Why I left the Left,” “Was the Civil War About Slavery,” “Discipline=Freedom,” “White Privilege is Nonsense” and “Make Men Masculine Again.” The organization often uses cartoonish characters to draw young viewers and claims to counter the “bias in America’s education system.”
“If critical race theory, the 1619 Project, the ideas of Howard Zinn and Karl Marx, and the like, are being taught in schools, we demand that students are presented with balanced information and empowered to draw their own conclusions,” the PragerU website says.
The National Vanguard, one of the more virulent, racist and anti-Semitic groups noted, “For White nationalists it (replacement) refers to the most fundamental fact of our time: that White people are being replaced in their ancestral homelands by the brown and the black dregs of the world.”
The group’s website drew a clear connection between the replacement conspiracy and Hitler.
“Indeed, anyone who reads Mein Kampf knows that Hitler was very aware of the ‘rising tide of color’ and the ‘passing of the great race’ and that all his efforts were meant to combat that. Hitler was anti-replacist, to say the least. But as for the Jews you can be sure they will always replace us — if we let them,” the website warns.