- The Observer
20 11.08.19 Special report
spiracy theory, sometimes referred to
as “white genocide”. It’s the idea that
shadowy elites – usually Jewish and
almost always liberal – are orches-
trating the destruction of white cul-
ture through demographic change.
The theory goes that white culture
is deliberately being eroded mainly
through migration and birthrates:
more black and brown people are
arriving in majority-white countries,
the ones already there are having
more and more babies, and birthrates
are declining among the soon-to-be-
oppressed white people.
But belief in this theory, and the
idea of a demographic threat to a
white (male) hierarchical structure,
is no longer confi ned to extremists
lurking in the netherworlds of the
internet. White supremacy, and the
ideas and motivations that drive it,
is fl ourishing in plain sight in the
United States.
Most notoriously, Donald Trump
has become a fan of “great replace-
ment” talking points. Many of the
Democrats hoping to become their
party’s presidential candidate in 2020
have called the president a “white
supremacist”. But Trump is far from
alone, and in recent years the idea has
caught fi re among more and more
mainstream Republicans. Fear of the
looming loss of their political infl u-
ence permeates every move the party
has made for decades.
A
nxiety about racial
decline goes back a
long way , but this
modern version of it
comes from the French
writer Renaud Camus ,
who was known in the 1980s as a
pioneering gay novelist. He coined the
phrase “great replacement” in a 2011
book of the same name, articulat-
ing the conspiratorial idea that black
and brown migrants were invading
Europe to destroy white culture.
Camus’ theory doesn’t include a
Jewish plot, putting the blame on
global and liberal elites who are push-
ing for a “genocide by substitution”,
but he still has a distinctly anti semitic
streak. As James McAuley noted in the
Nation, Camus even bristled at the
number of Jewish hosts on French
public radio, lamenting that “the
French experience as it has been lived
for 15 centuries by French people on
the French soil” was being presented
by members of “the Jewish race”, who
could never understand French cul-
ture, no matter how long they or their
families had been there.
It is a weird path that takes the
ideas of a race-obsessed French
novelist into the Trump
White House, but it’s been
helped along by Rupert
Murdoch’s pugilistic
network Fox News.
One of the network’s
hosts, Tucker Carlson ,
is a good example: in
August 2018 he dedicated
a segment of his show to a
story about black gangs kill-
ing white farmers in South
Africa, and the government
then seizing their land.
It is a widely shared rumour
online, popular with white nation-
alists because it seems like a clear
example of a government liter-
ally committing white genocide, but
there’s no evidence that it’s true.
Carlson ultimately retracted the story,
but not before Trump had tweeted
that he was directing Mike Pompeo,
the secretary of state, to investigate.
Even when Carlson’s show isn’t
clearly cribbing notes from white
nationalist forums, he is promot-
ing their ideas in slightly more coded
ways. He has railed against diversity,
asking rhetorically: “How exactly is
diversity our strength?” In 2018 hecomplained about demographic
change in the US, saying: “This is
more change than human beings are
designed to digest.”
Andrew Anglin , who founded
the neo-Nazi website the Daily
Stormer, has called Carlson “liter-
ally our greatest ally”. After Carlson’s
South Africa segment, Anglin said
Tucker Carlson Tonight is “basically
Daily Stormer: The Show ”. Experts in
white supremacist thought largely
agree that Trump is actively spread-
ing the ideas that underpin this ide-
ology. Christian Picciolini , author
of Romantic Violence: Memoirs of an
American Skinhead and a former
neo-Nazi who set up Life After Hate,
which aims to deradicalise extrem-
ists, told the Observer: “Donald Trump
is using nearly identical language to
what white supremacist movement
language is; language that I used 30
years ago in lyrics and in promoting
white supremacist ideology.”
Alexandra Minna Stern , an expert
on the history of eugenics and
author of Proud Boys and the White
Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right Is
Warping the American Imagination,
said: “The way I describe it is that
President Trump has really set up a
baseline for bigotry in political dis-
course in the United States that has
helped create the terrain where this
is more possible.”
Other frontline Republicans are
following Trump’s lead. In 2017 Iowa
congressman and standard-bearerof the far right, Steve King, tweeted :
“We can’t restore our civilisation with
somebody else’s babies.” In a 2018
interview with an extreme right-
wing propaganda site in Austria,
King proved he was fl uent in white
nationalist tropes, saying: “If we don’t
defend western civilisation, then we
will become subjugated by the peo-
ple who are the enemies of faith, the
enemies of justice.”
The rise of white supremacy is
being driven in part by demographic
change, although racism fl ourished
in the US long before whites were in
sight of losing their position as the
majority. The US census predicts that
by 2050 white people will no longer
be the majority. A report from 2015
predicted that, by the time the 2020
census is conducted, more than half
of American schoolchildren will be
non-white, meaning that, although
white people will be the largest group,
they will no longer be a majority.
For some white Americans this is
an abhorrent loss of status. According
to a study by the Pew Research Centre ,
46% of white adults believe “a major-
ity non-white population will weaken
American culture”.
Things look even worse if you are
a Republican politician. Decades of
playing to white grievances, plus years
of relentlessly maligning the first
black president, have stymied their
ability to win support from non-white
voters. After 2012, when Mitt Romney
failed to even come close to unseat-LEFT
The controversial
photo of Donald
and Melania
Trump posing
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orphan of
the El Paso
shootings. EPAABOVE
Far-right
marchers in
Charlottesville,
Virginia, in
August 2017
chanted ‘Jews
will not replace
us’. GettyBELOW
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who hosts a
Fox News show,
was called ‘our
greatest ally’ by a
neo-Nazi website
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