In Buffalo this past weekend — as in El Paso, Pittsburgh, Charleston and Christchurch, New Zealand, before it — the “great replacement” conspiracy theory appears to have inspired another mass shooting.
The theory says that elites are using government policy to replace white people with nonwhite and non-Christian ones.
This has prompted concerns about the radicalizing power of social media sites like YouTube and Twitch, and has become a major theme on some prime-time shows.
The great replacement conspiracy ideas are far older than now. It has repackaged the reactionary ideas and anxieties that have fed nativism, racism and antisemitism in the United States and Europe for centuries.
Those ideas were embedded in legal systems and political institutions and enforced through a blend of state and extralegal violence. Jim Crow laws, for instance, had the veneer of a nonviolent system of legal segregation but required both police brutality and the violence of the Ku Klux Klan to keep the system in place.
Looking back into history, racist conspiracy theories fueled pogroms and insurrections across the late 19th century South, and in the 1910s, spread “yellow peril” talk of an imminent attack from places like China and Japan.
At the turn of the century, the great replacement conspiracy theory allowed obsessions over the falling birthrates of white Americans and the mass migration of people from southern and Eastern Europe, who at the time were not considered fully white (both birthrates and immigration are central themes of great replacement conspiracy theories).
In the 1970s, the book “The Turner Diaries” circulated widely in white-power circles, and it ultimately served as an inspiration for the Oklahoma City bombers in 1995.
Another book “The Camp of the Saints” found new popularity in right-wing political circles in the 2010’s and described the flow of migrants and refugees in both Europe and the United States as an invasion.
Over the last decade, the great replacement conspiracy theory became institutionalized in right-wing nationalist politics in both America and Europe, where the seed of a pan-European movement to oppose migration, especially nonwhite and Muslim migrants, emerged. The conspiracy theory is nimble enough to cross borders.
But getting conspiracy theories like the great replacement into the mainstream took work. In the 1980s and 1990s, members of neo-Nazi groups and the Klan found they could gain respectability and attention by appearing in some of the most popular television venues in the country.
On shows hosted by Oprah Winfrey, Phil Donahue and Geraldo Rivera. Ms. Winfrey hosted an entire panel of skinheads on one of her shows in the late 1980s. She hoped the episode would expose their racism; her producers hoped it would be ratings gold.
The producers were right and Ms. Winfrey was wrong.
The ex-Klan leader David Duke showed up in a suit, speaking in cleaned-up language in an attempt to present their violent ideologies as mere political differences. This was part of the strategy was to present white-power ideas as more palatable.
We need to think about traditional and social media in tandem, part of an infrastructure of radicalization. Not only because they are part of the same strategy, but also because they overlap more than we generally think.
For instance, Tucker Carlson’s content on social media, where clips circulate regularly in right-wing and far-right spaces, and ideas from the more extreme parts of the internet often find their way on to the show.
Carlson has refashioned himself into a right-wing economic populist who emphasized and empathizes with people’s financial struggles, then offers pungent conspiracy theories to explain their plight.
By arguing that white Americans face economic and cultural decline purposefully engineered by political elites, Carlson’s plays an important role in spreading and legitimating the great replacement conspiracy theory and other white-supremacist ideas.
A recent AP-NORC poll showed that nearly a third of Fox News viewers believe in the great replacement conspiracy theory.
Carlson has no desire to remove his show from the infrastructure of radicalization, no matter how important a role it plays. And as the massacres continue, that becomes an ever more damning decision.
Here at the National Association of Black and White Men we are an anti-racism organization committed to fostering supportive environments wherein racial and cultural barriers can be overcome and the goal of human equality realized.
Join us in MInneapolis for our 2022 convention July 6-9 to learn more about our work.