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ANALYSIS | How White "Replacement Theory" Evolved From Old Guard Racists To Online Teens, And The Inspiration Of Another Racist Mass Shooting

2022-05-21T13:16:34.673Z


We explore how "replacement theory" evolved from fringe lectures, to memes, to serving as the basis for mass shootings.


(CNN) --

"Replacement theory" is the product of a strategy by wealthy white nationalists to break into the mainstream.

It's based on ideas, honed over decades in the racist publications and conferences they funded, that remained mostly in the fringes until 2014, when through a bizarre turn of events it found its way into the internet's biggest meme factories.


It has been the expressed motivation of mass murderers ever since, and is why white supremacists chanted "Jews will not replace us" at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

More recently, it has made its way in a mitigated way into American politics.

And in the past week, it emerged as the clear inspiration for the 180-page online document attributed to the 18-year-old white man charged in America's latest racist gun massacre.

The elements that make up the “replacement theory” have been around for a long time.

The term was popularized by French writer Renaud Camus with his 2011 essay, "Le Grand Remplacement," which posited that white Europeans were being replaced by Muslim immigration.

For white nationalists today, the replacement theory, according to hundreds of posts, interviews, and podcasts, goes like this: Jews, whom Camus didn't mention, evolved to be intelligent;

people across the southern hemisphere evolved to be less intelligent and have more sex;

women evolved to be complacent and conformist.

And this is how this strange theory plays out: Jews convince white women to have children with people of color, and white men to become transgender, all to make the population less white and more black. easy to control.

They sometimes claim that the Jews are in cahoots with "the elite", but that is usually just another way of referring to the Jews.

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The goals of supporters of this conspiracy theory are vague, often represented by idealized images of white families with square-jawed husbands and meek wives, or just blonde women in wheat fields, literally just pictures of women in the fields. .

Some want to stop immigration to the United States or expel people of color, Jews, liberals or transgender people from it.

But there is also an overwhelming feeling of nihilism.

A post on the online forum 4chan after the Buffalo shooting reads: "This world is hell. I hope we live to see it burn more."

Fascism has made great strides in the last decade in the United States and Europe.

Understanding how "replacement theory" grew and spread helps explain why.

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An effort to shed the "garbage" label

In the 2000s, white nationalists were frustrated at being branded "white trash," so they focused on trying to cover up their racism with a high-brow academic veneer.

An important vehicle for this was the Charles Martel Society (CMS), created in 2001 by textile heir Bill Regnery, who died last year.

The group has been very secretive.

"I don't know how you get information about it," white nationalist lawyer Bill Johnson told me about CMS last year.


"I've been told not to say anything about it."

The Charles Martel Society is a secret society of white nationalists who consider themselves intellectuals.

"CMS is, in many ways, the heart," said Matt Heimbach, who co-founded the Traditionalist Workers Party and said in 2020 that he abandoned white nationalism and is now a Marxist-Leninist.

Other groups have different messages: the National Policy Institute, led by Richard Spencer and designed to "raise white consciousness";

the Occidental Quarterly, run by CMS Fellow Kevin MacDonald and billed as an academic journal;

American Third Position, later renamed the American Freedom Party, led by Johnson with "a platform that is based on the preservation of our traditional European roots."

"All of the fronts have a specific purpose to attract slightly different groups of people," Heimbach said.

"But deep down, it's the same 30 guys."

Through this network, white nationalists produced pseudo-academic books and magazines purporting to demonstrate that whites evolved to have higher IQs and commit fewer crimes than people of color and Jews, that they evolved to deceive whites and support the diversity.

These false claims were not just delusions;

they had a public policy objective.

The argument was that racial inequality is the product of evolution dictated by nature, not the rules and norms of society made by people, so government efforts to reduce inequality are doomed to fail.

People couldn't override biology, unless they were Jewish, in which case the limits seem, according to this propaganda, limitless.

It was about eugenics, a now discredited concept that is most closely associated with the Nazis and that was the basis for the forced sterilization of people of color and disabled people in various US states until the 1970s. Whites, including Regnery, preferred softer euphemisms such as "group differences" or "human biodiversity," their public writings and group emails show, as if opposition to interracial families were part of the same noble spirit that exists behind efforts to save rainforests.

"We were going to be academically correct. Since we had science, the whole world would have to agree with us, because you know, science," said Matt Parrott, who has publicly identified as a white nationalist since 2009 and co-founded the Traditionalist Workers Party with Heimbach.

The thought was: "We have to be more professional and academic and not be cheap racists."

CMS people met at conferences, and according to National Policy Institute head Richard Spencer, the message was always the same: "IQ scores, crime stats, vote Republican."

Republicans, for the most part, kept their distance, with occasional incidents like a senator's aide resigning after his neo-Confederate past was revealed, or senators returning donations from a white nationalist group after a mass shooting, or a governor issuing a statement clarifying his position on a segregationist group or a presidential candidate denying having read or written racist newsletters bearing his name.

"Elected officials see our opinions as a kiss of death," Johnson told me.

Word spreads in a dark alley of the internet

Then, in 2014, "Gamergate" happened, which nearly every white nationalist I've talked to said dramatically changed the white power movement.

The Gamergate issue is complicated, but the bottom line here is that the site 8chan has welcomed trolls upset by calls for more diversity in gaming.

There, and on 4chan, they mingled with neo-Nazis, and a massive wave of young people entered what had been an old world of white nationalism.

Parrott was 27 when he became an outspoken white nationalist and said that in five years he went from being the youngest to the oldest in the room.

The alleged shooter in Buffalo appears to have followed a similar path, according to the document he posted online.

He went to 4chan for forums on guns and the outdoors, but found the /pol/ forum, for "politically incorrect," where neo-Nazis dominate the discourse.

"There I learned through infographics, posts and memes that the white race is dying out," the document says of him.

"I had never seen this information until I found these sites."

The energy and malleability of these 4chan folks was apparent to many, including Steve Bannon, who ran the Breitbart news site in 2014.

Bannon, who would go on to be one of President Donald Trump's top advisers, told author Joshua Green for his 2017 book: "You can activate that army. They come in through the Gamergate or whatever, and then they get into politics." and on Trump."

Bannon was unavailable for comment for this story, a spokesman said.

But after Charlottesville, Bannon said, "I was of the opinion that both racists and neo-Nazis need to be condemned because they're getting a free ride ... from Donald Trump," he told CBS's "60 Minutes."

"They are giving them a cat for a hare. Because it is a small group, it is a vicious group. They do not add any value."

A few weeks earlier, he had said: "Ethnonationalism ... is for losers. It is a fringe element," according to the British newspaper The Evening Standard.

Some of the early members of the movement may have started out as "tongue-in-cheek" racists, trying to troll people with the worst they could imagine.

But, over time, it prevailed.

In 2016, Spencer told me that young people would come up to him and say that they had initially researched scientific racism just to be better online trolls, but in the process they became convinced of white supremacy.

Spencer, then still enamored with the new wave of internet racists, marveled: "It started as a joke and then it turned into something real."

The trolls didn't fit the stuffy style of the former professional racists, but they found utility in their pseudo-scientific graphics.

Day after day, they published the same charts and graphs purporting to show stark racial differences, stripped of all context.

The culture of competition, combined with the limitless space of the Internet, made some publications on "replacement theory" impressive, both in their disregard for human life and in their exhaustive detail.

In 2015, Dylann Roof murdered nine people at a historically black church in Charlestown, South Carolina.

Roof did not explicitly mention 4chan and neither does the psychological evaluation of Roof presented as evidence at his sentencing.

But evaluation offers a window into this process.

He says that during the "critical years between the ages of 14 and 18," Roof read racist information online but had no real-life conversations with people who could dispute those claims.

Roof "explained that the more extreme views he encountered on the Internet were off-putting to him at first, but that he got used to them as he continued to read."

When Roof's own document explaining his motivations was posted online, Regnery emailed other white nationalists saying he was "astonished" by their intelligence.

"Based on Roof's essay, he is the type of young man we could have invited to a meeting," Regnery wrote.

The document posted by the alleged Buffalo shooter includes the same graphics that have circulated on 4chan for years, and some of it is copied from the documents of other mass shooting perpetrators.

At least one of the charts cites a former white nationalist publication as a source.

Another party makes the false claim that "Jews are spreading ideas like critical race theory and white shame/blame to brainwash them into hating themselves and their people."

Again, this lie is central to the value of replacement theory as propaganda: anything that is presented as a well-intentioned effort to make society more equal is actually a nefarious plot to harm white people.

  • What is and what is not critical race theory?

Before the Buffalo shooting, Spencer had read a book with a similar thesis to "Le Grand Remplacement," also by Camus, whose name doesn't come up much on white nationalist forums, and has since read the shooter's document, he said. .

When an idea like replacement theory "comes into the realm of 4chan, it becomes mimetic in the sense that it's trying to reproduce and evolve. It's a gene. And in order to reproduce and reach more people, it takes more salacious forms... . It just descends into this horrible place to breed," he said.

Spencer doesn't want to participate in the white nationalist movement, he said, but he still thinks "race is real."

How the old guard lost control

Of course, to the outsider, the pillars of replacement theory are a big pill to swallow.

The white power movement knows this.

At the 2017 Unite the Right rally, protesters initially chanted, "You will not replace us."

It was a deliberate political tactic.

"As for optics with the potential to reach the 'normies' [normal or basic person], I thought this slogan was perfect," read an essay posted after the event on the white nationalist website, Counter Currents.

The slogan positioned the protesters "as if we were on the defensive against an outside assault that others have launched against us."

It had had some success, he said, until "my successful 'red pill' strategy for that whole crowd of 'normies' was cut short when someone shared a video that made it clear that the protesters were, in fact, yelling, 'Jews don't They will replace us.

The watered-down version of the slogan would have paved the way for radicalization, he wrote: "I could have explained later more carefully the role that Jews have tended to play in American immigration policy. And they wouldn't have been scared off."

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Older white nationalists had been glad the internet was attracting more young people, according to interviews with Heimbach, Parrott and Spencer, until efforts to speak their language sparked huge public backlash and violence.

In 2018, Regnery berated Spencer for the state of the white power movement, according to emails seen by CNN.

Since the height of the 2016 election, Regnery wrote to Spencer and other white nationalists, the far right had engaged in a "descent into banality."

He recorded 10 embarrassments, failures and feuds.

Several of them were the product of wanting to get the attention of the Internet crowd.

When in 2016, Spencer saluted Trump as if he were Hitler, it was "the perfect mistake that turned a landmark event from victory to retreat," he wrote.

"A handful of twenty-something males were wowed by a heady mix of rhetoric and testosterone to pull off a heist worth a thousand incriminating charges."

In Charlottesville, they were "made to look like Hells Angels in khaki, Polo and loafers".

These actions, Regnery said, had "made it easy for Silicon Valley social media curators to deplore the movement."

Within a couple of years, however, a watered-down version of "replacement theory" began to appear in mainstream quarters.

He replaces the Jews with the elites.

Instead of stoking fears about interracial sex, it's immigration and riots.

And the objective is more concrete: political power.

So, in the watered-down version of replacement theory, liberal elites are filling the country with immigrants and making it easier to vote so they can get more power in Washington.

When Fox News host Tucker Carlson speaks of "replacement theory," he suggests that the voting population, not the general population, is being replaced, even though the purported motivation is the same: to bring in people who are more easy to control.

"I know that the left and all the little Twitter gatekeepers get literally hysterical if the term 'replacement' is used, if it is suggested that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters who now vote, with new people, most compliant Third World voters," he said in April 2021. "But they get hysterical because that's what's happening, actually. Let's just say it: It's true."

  • Tucker Carlson Says Buffalo Shooter's Writing 'Not Really Political'

Following the Buffalo shooting, Carlson said, "There's been a lot of talk lately about the 'great replacement theory'... We're still not sure exactly what it is. ... Here's what we do know for sure: There's a strong political component to the Democratic Party's immigration policy. It's not an assumption of ours. We know it, and we know it because they've said it."

A few days after Carlson's remarks in April 2021, Republican Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania said "a lot of Americans" believed "we're replacing native-born Americans, native-born Americans, to transform permanently the landscape of this very nation.

That September, the campaign of Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York posted a Facebook ad that stated: "Radical Democrats are planning their most aggressive move yet: a PERMANENT ELECTORAL INSURRECTION... Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will topple our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington."

Last month on Fox News, when asked why President Joe Biden was allowing "virtually an open border," Brandon Judd, president of the union that represents US Border Patrol agents, said, "I think that they're trying to change the demographics of the electorate; that's what I think they're doing.

Perry's spokesman told CNN this week that "any attempt by partisans and their facilitators in the media to label Congressman Perry as a racist or acolyte of any racist theory or belief is dangerous, dishonest and downright disgusting."

Stefanik's office referred me to a statement her senior adviser made this week: "The shooting was an act of evil and the criminal must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Despite sickening and false reports, Congresswoman Stefanik has never advocated any racist position or made any racist statement."

As for the head of the border union, "neither Mr. Judd nor the National Border Patrol Council had even heard of the replacement theory"

when he made those comments, an agency spokesman said, adding that Judd supports legal immigration.

"However, changing the demographics of the electorate is something that has been talked about many, many times in the past by the left."

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So what do supporters of any or all of these ideas want to happen?

For those who defend the whitewashed version of the “replacement theory”, there are political solutions: more restrictions on immigration and voting, and what to say, these measures could end up keeping many of them in power.

For those who believe in explicit versions of white supremacy, the options are vague or distant, such as dividing the United States into regions for different ethnicities.

For anonymous 4chan users, whom the alleged Buffalo shooter seems to have taken so much inspiration from, the options are darker.

Explicit violent threats on 4chan are often dismissed as "fedposting," or motivated by a desire to create evidence for federal law enforcement.

But mass murderers become icons.

A group of trolls dubbed themselves the "Bowl Patrol", after Roof's haircut.

When I read the document published by the author of the Christchurch shooting in 2019, my first thought was that he wanted to become a brand recognized by racist teenagers: to become a meme.

And he did it.

The racist writings of the Buffalo shooter make many references to Christchurch, and he imitated it in some of the ways he carried out his assault.

He probably knew, as did the Christchurch author, that he couldn't affect white birth rates, but he could become a meme.

Source: cnnespanol

All news articles on 2022-05-21

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