“Great Replacement”, the 4chan to Fox News sewage pipeline
White supremacists at the Charlottesville protests in August 2017 chanted, "The Jews will not replace us!" referencing the "great replacement" theory. (Photo: The Associated Press)
Authorities are calling Saturday's mass shooting that killed ten people and wounded another three in Buffalo, N.Y., a racially motivated attack. Payton Gendron traveled from Broome County, N.Y., some 200 miles away, to carry out his attack which was born in Reddit, planned on Discord, and live-streamed on Twitch. The overwhelming majority of the victims were Black.
Payton Gendron, the 18-year-old white male suspect, allegedly wrote a 180-page document filled with hateful rants about race and internet memes tied to the "great replacement." In his screed, Gendron wrote that the decrease in white birth rates equates to a genocide. The supermarket shooter claimed—alongside other extremists—that the U.S. must close its border to immigrants.
Conspiracy theory explained
The “great replacement” theory states that nonwhite individuals are being brought into Western countries to drown out white voters and achieve a political agenda. White supremacists argue that the influx of immigrants, people of color more specifically, will lead to the extinction of the white race.
The Buffalo shooting is only one of many examples attributed to the "great replacement." Nine people were killed at a South Carolina church in 2015; 11 at a synagogue in Pennsylvania in 2018; 23 dead at an El Paso Walmart in 2019; and 50 more people shot and killed at a New Zealand mosque the same year.
Between 2010 and 2020, the percentage of Americans who identified as "white only" declined by more than 10% from 72-62%. During that same decade, several Western European countries saw record influxes of migrants from Muslim nations. All the while, against this backdrop of changing demographics, replacement rhetoric accelerated in recent years.
Spread like the plaque
A recent poll conducted by the Associated Press found that one in three American adults now believes in a version of replacement theory.
The speed this false narrative has penetrated American discourse since French ethnonationalist Renaud Camus coined the term roughly a decade ago—though its antisemitic roots date as early as the 1900s—has stunned even extremism experts who have tracked the spread of hate-filled ideologies.
"We have literally watched as ideas that originate on white supremacist message boards, or like the dark web—the places that are very difficult to get to—move," said Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the Anti-Defamation League. "They literally jump to [internet message boards like] 4chan and 8chan, which are much more accessible, [then] they jump to web sites like The Daily Caller or Breitbart, and then they jump to Tucker Carlson's talking points or Laura Ingraham's talking points, or other AM radio DJs' talking points. And then you have theoretically mainstream Republican politicians repeating some of this stuff."
'Sanitized' version
In April 2021, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, one of the most influential voices of the political right, argued against the Democratic efforts to create citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants, the majority of whom are from Mexico and Central and South America.
"Everyone wants to make a racial issue out of it. Oh, white replacement. No. This is a voting rights question. I have less political power because they're importing a brand new electorate. Why should I sit back and take that?" Carlson said.
His comments build on other similar anti-immigrant arguments he's made. He regularly bemoans the country's changing racial demographics and demonizes immigrants, who he says make the US "poorer and dirtier and more divided." In over 400 episodes of his show, Carlson crystalizes the notion that Democratic politicians and other assorted elites want to force demographic change through immigration. His producers even scoured raw material from the same dark web that Gendron did.
Moreover, this orchestrated narrative gained legitimacy through the endorsement of elected Republicans, notably former President Donald Trump and Elise Stefanik, the third-highest ranking Republican in the House of Representatives.
This version of the baseless conspiracy has been able to enter the mainstream of Republican politics and spread among Americans with some minor tweaking of language. In moving away from white nationalist terms like "white genocide" and "Jewish cabal," the conspiracy has been repackaged as one driven by political partisanship.
