Back on April 13, the Canadian culture magazine Vice published on its website a short news item that, since I was researching the Great Replacement Theory, caught my eye. The headline read, “Republican Uses ‘Great Replacement’ Theory to Justify Abortion Ban.” Here are the first three paragraphs of the brief story.

“As Nebraska Republicans moved to ban most abortions in their state on Wednesday, one legislator used arguments straight from the racist ‘great replacement’ conspiracy theory to push for the bill’s passage.

“Nebraska Sen. Steve Erdman argued that abortion had caused slow population growth in the state over the last half-century—and argued that it had hurt Nebraska economically.

“‘Our state population has not grown except by those foreigners who have moved here or refugees who have been placed here. Why is that? It’s because we’ve killed 200,000 people. These are people we’ve killed,’ Erdman said during debate, after lamenting that if abortion had been illegal that would have resulted in more people who ‘could be working and filling some of those positions that we have vacancies.’”

Since I couldn’t find any reference to Erdman’s social location in the stories I saw, I suppose it’s possible that Erdman himself is a “foreigner.” Or, perhaps, a “refugee.” Probably not, though.

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third novel, The Great Gatsby, was unsuccessful upon publication, but the book is now considered a classic of American fiction and has often been called the Great American Novel. So says the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Here’s an excerpt from Chapter One of that 1925 novel, featuring the narrator, Nick Carraway, speaking with his cousin Daisy and her “brutish, absurdly wealthy husband Tom Buchanan.” (As the Encyclopedia described him.)

“Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read ‘The Rise of the Colored Empires’ by this man Goddard?”

“Why, no,” I answered, rather surprised by his tone.

“Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”

“Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. “He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we———”

“Well, these books are all scientific,” insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. “This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”

“We’ve got to beat them down,” whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun.

“You ought to live in California—” began Miss Baker, but Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair.

“This idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are, and—” After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod, and she winked at me again. “—And we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?”

Why am I quoting from The Great Gatsby? I offer this excerpt from the Great American Novel because, while there are more precise descriptions to be found (I’ll offer some in a moment), Fitzgerald here captures the essence of the “scientific” theory known today as The Great Replacement Theory as it was understood in Fitzgerald’s day (the 1920s), and as it continues to be understood today by the millions of people who apparently still believe it in the year 2023.

A Simple, but Toxic, Theory

You may recall the nutshell definition of the Great Replacement Theory, or GRT, from the London Guardian that I published in NN #700: The Great Replacement “is a set of racist and antisemitic paranoid lies and delusions that has cropped up around the world in the past decade. In the US it is expressed as the false idea that an elite cabal of Jews and Democrats is ‘replacing’ white Americans with Black, Hispanic and other people of color by encouraging immigration and interracial marriage – with the end goal being the eventual extinction of the white race.”

While the Guardian’s brief summary is accurate enough, I think it’s worth our time to consider a few other comments about GRT that may deepen our understanding of this toxic theory.

The Southern Poverty Law Center tells us that “the ‘great replacement’ theory is a central tenet of white nationalism. Steeped in racist and antisemitic narratives, it falsely asserts there is a concerted and covert effort to replace white populations in white-majority countries with immigrants of color.”

Here’s what the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism says:

“The Great Replacement conspiracy theory is a white supremacist, xenophobic, and anti-immigrant concept that posits white people are being replaced by immigrants, Muslims, and other people of color in their so-called ‘home’ countries. The conspiracy often blames the ‘elite’ and Jews for orchestrating these changing demographics. The Great Replacement was conceived of by a Frenchman, Renaud Camus, who popularized the idea in his 2011 book Le Grand Remplacement. The concept spread like wildfire in Europe, particularly through the sprawling transnational white supremacist group Generation Identity and its social media accounts.”

And finally, here are a couple of paragraphs from a 2019 paper from the Anti-Defamation League called simply “The Great Replacement: An Explainer”:

“Once largely relegated to white supremacist rhetoric, ‘The Great Replacement’ has made its way into mainstream consciousness in the past several years. From the chants of ‘Jews Will Not Replace Us’ on the University of Virginia campus to then-U.S. Rep. Steve King’s tweeted protest, ‘We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies,’ to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson’s complaints that the Democratic party is attempting to ‘replace the current electorate’ with ‘third-world voters,’ the racist conspiracy theory has well and truly arrived.”

After noting that GRT was born in 20th Century France, ADL notes that “The ‘great replacement’ philosophy was quickly adopted and promoted by the white supremacist movement, as it fit into their conspiracy theory about the impending destruction of the white race, also known as ‘white genocide.’ It is also a strong echo of the white supremacist rallying cry, ‘the 14 words:’ ‘We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.’”

If you think that white fears about “the eventual extinction of the white race” reside only in the hearts of a tiny number of the ignorant who dwell on the fringes of US society, I recommend you aim your search engine at “white genocide” and read as many of the 53 million search results as you can take. Or, just keep reading this issue of Nygaard Notes. The next essay is all about how this formerly-fringe idea is getting on the agenda of our political and media leaders.

A few days after a young white man cited the Great Replacement Theory as the motivation for his shooting rampage that killed 10 black people in Buffalo NY last year, the Center for American Progress Action Fund (CAPAF) published an article under the heading “A List of MAGA Republicans Who Took the ‘Great Replacement’ Theory Mainstream.” They led off by saying that “A once-fringe conspiracy theory, made more prominent by leaders on the right, continues to violently divide the United States.” After they listed a dozen-and-a-half prominent Republicans (and you should read some of what they said!), they concluded with these words:

“The Great Replacement theory has motivated mass murder both in the United States and around the world. It was forced from the dark corners of white supremacist platforms into the mainstream right by then-leader of the Republican Party, President Donald Trump, and his administration; the highest-rated cable news host, Tucker Carlson; members of the Republican Party’s congressional leadership; a number of the party’s rank and file in Congress; several high-profile Republican candidates for Senate; and the governor and lieutenant governor of Texas, among many others.

“But,” says CAPAF, “what’s more concerning and harder to capture in a list such as [this one] are the enablers in the Republican Party who have stayed silent while this conspiracy theory has gathered momentum. For instance, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) refused to denounce the Great Replacement theory this week during a press conference after being asked directly about it three times. And House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) ousted Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) as GOP conference chair for calling out election denialism and Trump’s actions around January 6—replacing her with Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), who has gone on to promote the Great Replacement theory.

CAPAF concludes with these ominous words: “If the voices promoting this dangerous ideology are allowed to grow louder, the rising trend of white supremacist violence will almost certainly continue.”

Born in France, Grown in Whiteness

The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism tells us that “The ‘Great Replacement’ is one of the most dangerous white supremacist conspiracy theories out there.” Originating in France in the early 20th Century, the modern version of GRT draws heavily on the ideas of Renaud Camus, who articulated the toxic brew in a 2011 essay titled simply “The Great Replacement” (“Le Grand Remplacement.”)

The Global Project continues: “While it has floated around in racist echo chambers for quite some time, today — from Fox News (owned by Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdoch) to the mouths of politicians around the globe — it’s everywhere. And as far-right figures mainstream this dangerous, white supremacist theory, the mass casualty attacks inspired by it continue to mount.”

A list published in 2019 by the Anti-Defamation League gives a hint of what is meant by the reference to “politicians around the globe”—by which they undoubtedly mean white politicians around the globe:

* In April 2019, Heinz-Christian Strache, campaigning for the Freedom Party of Austria ahead of the 2019 European Parliament election, endorsed the ‘great replacement’ theory.

* The Identitarian movement [which originated in France and Italy and has spread into southern, central, and northern Europe as well as the United States], has promoted the ‘great replacement’ theory. Martin Sellner, the head of Generation Identitaire in Austria, is a particularly vocal promoter.

* Marine Le Pen, a far-right French politician, also promoted the idea of the ‘great replacement.’

* In March 2017, then-GOP Congressman (IA) Steve King tweeted his support for Geert Wilders, a well-known anti-immigration activist from Europe. ‘Wilders understands that culture and demographics are our destiny,’ the Congressman wrote. ‘We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.’ The tweet, which won praise from white supremacists, was a clear reference to replacement theory. In August 2018, King gave an interview to a far-right magazine in Austria, in which he promoted the ‘great replacement’ theory.

Media, Foreign and Domestic

Media also bear responsibility for the mainstreaming of the ideas of Camus:

* In July 2017, Lauren Southern, a Canadian far-right activist, released a video titled, ‘The Great Replacement,’ promoting Camus’ themes. That summer, Southern was involved in ‘Defend Europe,’ a project lead by European white nationalists to block the arrival of boats carrying African immigrants. Southern’s video further popularized Camus’ theory.

* In October 2018, on Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle, host Laura Ingraham said, ‘your views on immigration will have zero impact and zero influence on a House dominated by Democrats who want to replace you, the American voters, with newly amnestied citizens and an ever increasing number of chain migrants.’

* In October 2019, Fox TV personality Jeanine Pirro was discussing Democrats’ hatred of Trump on Fox Nation’s The Todd Starnes Show. She declared, ‘Think about it. It is a plot to remake America, to replace American citizens with illegals that will vote for the Democrats.’

* On April 8, 2021, on Tucker Carlson Tonight, the host explicitly promoted the ‘great replacement’ theory. Carlson discussed ‘Third World’ immigrants coming to the US who affiliate with the Democratic Party. He asserted, ‘I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term ‘replacement,’ if you suggest that the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate — the voters now casting ballots — with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World, but they become hysterical because that’s what’s happening, actually. Let’s just say it. That’s true.’

* On April 11, 2021, Andrew Torba, the founder of [far-right networking service] Gab, posted on his own platform: ‘Now today the Anti-Defamation League is trying to cancel Tucker Carlson for daring to speak the truth about the reality of demographic replacement that is absolutely and unequivocally going on in The West. These are not ‘hateful’ statements, they objective facts that can no longer be ignored.’

The process of embedding new ideas into the hearts and minds of the general public is what I call Mainstreaming. And we can get a hint of how many hearts and minds are being captured by Mainstreaming by looking at public opinion polls. I’m usually quite skeptical of polls, but I think we can learn something useful in the case of GRT. Read on…

In the modern United States, anyone with a keyboard and an Internet connection has access to virtually any idea you can imagine. And many ideas you cannot imagine. So, crazy ideas circulate and get reproduced, accessible to anyone who is motivated to look for them.

But most people are not all that motivated to look for new ideas, crazy or not. They will only consider ideas that are placed in front of their eyes. And the process by which transformative ideas get placed in front of the eyes of this Silent Majority, and thus allow them to begin the journey from being simply ideas to becoming policies and systems, is the process that I call Mainstreaming.

Ideas that nobody has heard of are ideas that nobody will think of. Mainstreaming starts with repeated exposure. You hear it, you see it, your friends and family talk about it, and it pops up on some or all of the various screens that are in front of our eyes every day. And soon, an idea that used to seem crazy, or dangerous, has Mainstreamed its way to having broad popular support. Public opinion has shifted.

The dangerous idea that is the subject of this issue of Nygaard Notes—the idea known as The Great Replacement Theory—is in the process of being Mainstreamed even as I type these words. Let’s have a look at what the polls say.

Believing in Conspiracies

There’s an organization called NORC at the University of Chicago that was founded in 1941 as the National Opinion Research Center. Wikipedia says it is “one of the largest independent social research organizations in the United States.” In recent years they have teamed up with the Associated Press, and a little over a year ago they published a study titled IMMIGRATION ATTITUDES AND CONSPIRATORIAL THINKERS: A Study Issued on the 10th Anniversary of The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.

Right off the bat (page 2) we find a chart listing “Things You Should Know About the AP-NORC Conspiracy and Immigration Poll.” Among American Adults, they say:

* 32% are concerned that immigrants are being brought to the country by a group of people for political gains – one of the central arguments of so-called “Replacement Theory.”

* People who tend to engage in conspiratorial thinking are about twice as likely as the general public to believe in that idea (64% vs 32%).

* 50% of high conspiratorial thinkers fear immigration will trigger economic and political losses – 36% of Republicans and 26% of Democrats share this view.

* 36% of Americans are in favor of restricting the number of immigrants to the United States, including more than half (54%) of white high conspiratorial thinkers.

High Conspiratorial Thinkers

NORC attempted to assess how many of their respondents tend to believe in conspiracies in general, which provides some interesting context in our current highly-volatile political environment. They refer to such people as “high conspiratorial thinkers,” and here’s how they define that group:

“To capture belief in conspiracy theories, the study drew upon a validated scale asking Americans the extent to which they agree or disagree with four statements. Responses to the questions were combined in a single measure, and the high conspiratorial thinkers referred to in this report scored in the top 25th percentile.”

NORC found that “Seven times as many high conspiratorial thinkers agree that our lives are being controlled by plots hatched in secret places (85% vs. 11%) and that big events like wars and the outcomes of elections are controlled by small groups of people working in secret (89% vs. 13%) than their low conspiratorial counterparts. High conspiratorial thinkers believe the people who run the country are not known to the voters [and they believe this] at triple the rate of the rest of the general population (94% vs. 31%), and they are about twice as likely to agree that a few people will always run the country (96% vs. 48%).”

NORC also mentioned political affiliation and race, finding that “About a third (32%) of all Republicans register as high conspiratorial thinkers, compared to about a quarter of Democrats (24%) and independents (25%). White conspiratorial thinkers are also far more likely than other white Americans to believe they face discrimination in their daily lives because of their race.”

Amherst Poll

The University of Massachusetts Amherst conducted a poll last October in which they found that fully one-third (33 percent) of respondents agreed that “The growth in the number of immigrants in the country means that America is in danger of losing its culture and identity.” Oddly, 26 percent said that they “neither agree nor disagree” with this provocative statement.

37 percent agreed that “Some elected officials want to increase immigration in order to bring in obedient voters who will vote for them.” On this point, fully 30 percent said that they “neither agree nor disagree.”

This was a random sampling of the general population, not just Republicans.

In late April 2022, the Southern Poverty Law Center and Tulchin Research conducted a poll of 1,500 Americans “to examine the extent to which the extremist beliefs and narratives that mobilize the hard right have been absorbed by the wider American public.” Here’s some of what they said:

“We found that the ideas underpinning the white nationalist ‘great replacement’ narrative recently cited by an alleged white supremacist terrorist in Buffalo, New York, have become thoroughly mainstream on the political right. Nearly 7 in 10 Republicans surveyed agree to at least some extent that demographic changes in the United States [i.e. white people becoming the minority in coming years] are deliberately driven by liberal and progressive politicians attempting to gain political power by ‘replacing more conservative white voters.’ Across the political spectrum, we found substantial support for threatening or acting violently against perceived political opponents.”

“As America’s demographics have shifted, the narrative of white replacement has become ingrained in the rhetoric of right-wing pundits and an increasingly extreme wing of the Republican Party…”

“We found that a plurality of Americans has a positive view of the country’s changing demographics. But the same is not true for Republicans, a majority of whom viewed those changes not only negatively, but as a threat to white Americans. And a large majority—67 percent—believe the country’s demographic changes are being orchestrated by ‘liberal leaders actively trying to leverage political power by replacing more conservative white voters.’

“Republican responses were in stark contrast to those of self-identified Democrats, 64 percent of whom say they find the county’s increasing diversity to be at least a somewhat positive development, 25 percent who say demographic changes represent a threat to white Americans, and 35 percent who say those changes are being orchestrated by liberals.”

“Most Republicans see the 2020 racial justice protests not just in a negative light, but as an attack on white people. When presented with three descriptions of the 2020 racial justice protests — one that said they drew necessary attention to the ongoing and shameful problem of racial inequality, a second that said that while they drew attention to the problem of racial inequality they were ultimately ‘counterproductive and violent,’ and a third that said they were destructive and an ‘overreaction that has unfairly made white people the enemy in America’ — a majority of Republicans agreed with the third statement. Older people were also more likely to agree that the protests made white people into the ‘enemy,’ even among Republican respondents.”

“Republicans are also most likely to have a negative view of the Black Lives Matter movement and the 2020 racial justice protests. Three-quarters of Republicans says they at least somewhat agree that Black Lives Matter activists are a threat to the country, compared to 34% of Democrats.”

I have previously in these pages quoted Yale professor Jason Stanley, author of a book called “How Fascism Works”. Here is an edited excerpt from a September 22 2022 interview with Mila Atmos, the producer and series host of a podcast called Future Hindsight.

Atmos noted that a fascist social political movement, which builds support in part by identifying its members as victims, transforms itself once it has gained power. After observing that “even after being victorious, claiming power, they continue with claiming victimhood.” How can it be, she asked, that “there’s this endless grievance, even when in power.”

It shouldn’t be surprising, Stanley replied, saying, “Dominant group victimhood is the core thing here. The logic of fascism is great replacement theory so that the dominant group is going to be replaced. . . The logic is great replacement theory; and the logic of great replacement theory requires constant paranoia, constant paranoia that you’re going to be replaced. So the greatest victims in the world are the dominant group because they’re victims of whatever minority is being targeted today. And fascism is a sort of incoherent ideology that will switch targets depending upon which scapegoat they can use.

“But for the politics to work, there has to be a constant fear of replacement. In her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt is quite clear about this: Fascism creates the very conditions for its politics to work. You want to keep people anxious and fearful. You know . . . the very things you promised to solve in order to stay in power, you have to keep very visible. But soon in the United States, what we’re going to have is a situation where you won’t be able to get [people who are] essentially fascists out of power because they will lock that in as they have locked in their power in multiple Southern states via gerrymandering.”

Whose Country?

One of Donald Trump’s most famous declarations from his “insurrection” speech, delivered to his supporters outside the White House on Jan. 6, 2021, was “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

That infamous speech has become well known, but it’s hardly the only time that Trump has warned his followers that the country they think of as “theirs” is under threat. Here he is speaking at a campaign rally for Missouri Senate Republican candidate Josh Hawley in 2018:

“If you want your children to have a country vote Republican – [or else] you won’t have a country! If you don’t want America to be overrun by masses of illegal aliens and giant caravans you better vote Republican.”

And here’s then-President Trump speaking at the Republican National Convention in August 2020: “We will have strong borders. And I’ve said for years, without borders, we don’t have a country. We don’t have a country.”

And again, this time at a “SAVE AMERICA RALLY” (that’s what he calls his rallies) in Ohio in September of last year: “The choice this November is simple. If you want to continue this national catastrophe, vote for the radical left Democrat. Let’s do it, go ahead. You won’t have a country left.”

At his first official 2024 presidential campaign rally on March 25th, in Waco Texas he said: “2024 is the final battle. . . . This election is everything. We’re not going to have a country left if we don’t win this election.”

Whether or not Trump is a genius—as he claims—he knows that his supporters can put two and two together. He trusts that his repeated threat that “we” won’t “have” a country will be taken by his followers to mean that “they” WILL have a country. And there you have the core of the appeal, and the threat, of Trumpism: The Great Replacement Theory.

If you’ve read this far you know that this issue of Nygaard Notes is all about The Great Replacement Theory, or GRT. I was going to write just a brief “explainer” about GRT but, as I looked into it, I came to believe that this idea—or set of ideas—is much more prevalent in the minds of white people than I had thought. And more terrifying. So I expanded the explainer to fill up an entire issue! This essay explains why I did that.

Fear is the emotion that is most easily conjured, and most easily manipulated, by those in power and those seeking to be in power. And one of the greatest fears of all is the fear of not having a home. Of not having a country. Of not belonging.

It would be easy to ridicule The Great Replacement Theory, as the factual basis for its construction is easily refuted. But the fear of being replaced—of not having a place—is very, very real. And, for white people, the place where they have long felt that they belong is at the top of a rigidly-stratified racial order. If they are displaced from that position, then… Where are they? It’s terrifying!

I wrote an essay in 2019 that I called Trumpism, The Wall, and Terrified Whiteness, in which I said that “Every time Trump makes comments or publicly takes actions that dehumanize people based on religion, sex, race, ethnicity, class, disability, sexual orientation (or whatever) it reassures all who are ‘not one of them’ that they belong here, that this society is theirs.” He’s addressing their fear.

Trump won the presidency in 2016 by promising to build a wall, and that coded reference had the effect of getting people to focus on the actual, physical wall, when the real project was the building of a conceptual wall, symbolized in the person of Donald Trump. And, as I said in 2019, in this project every attack by Trump on immigrants or people of color or, in recent days, “communists” and “socialists,” is another brick in that wall, a wall that separates winners from losers, that separates the in-group from the innumerable out-groups, that separates the virtuous from the wicked, that separates Us from Them.

It’s easy to ridicule Trump. But, beware! The cartoonish narcissist himself is one thing, but the symbol that is Trump is not to be ridiculed. There are people around Trump who are happy to use him as a symbol of aggrieved Whiteness, of resistance to the movement toward a true multiracial democracy. And, with Trump as figurehead, they threaten to seize the reins of power and not relinquish their grip until they have beaten back what they see as a growing culture-wide movement to abolish our longstanding white supremacist sociopolitical order.

Trumpists, and potential Trumpists, see threats to the existing order everywhere they look: The first black president; White people becoming the minority in the United States of America; The rise of Black Lives Matter and the police abolition movement; The accelerating growth of radical anti-racism organizing and the increasingly-audible calls for a long-overdue racial reckoning. All of these things terrify white people, who fear that we may be headed for a New Reconstruction in this country.

White people’s fear of losing their place is already producing a violent backlash—shootings, stabbings, bombings—that some are calling acts of terrorism, and others are calling hate crimes. But what gets white people to pull the trigger is not hate. It’s fear. And that fear, that terror, while aimed at whatever group is the scapegoat of the day, is a terror born of terror. And that terror resides in the heart of whiteness.

This is why so-called white people bear a special responsibility to help build a nation where everyone belongs. Including them!

The North Carolina history website NCpedia reminds us that “Redemption” was the name given to the efforts of Southern Democratic political leaders and white supremacists who worked to undo gains made by the Republican party and black people following the Civil War.

A century-and-a-half ago, the political support for Redemption was built on fear. And, to stoke that fear, those political leaders and white supremacists promoted the myth that vindictive Radical Republicans were planning to fasten what they called “Black supremacy” upon the defeated Confederacy.

In 2023, gains continue to be made in the never-ending movement for racial justice. And modern political leaders and white supremacists, like their 19th-Century predecessors, seek to undo those gains by invoking fear among the people whose support they will need to carry out a modern-day Redemption. But the boogeyman in the 21st Century is no longer “Black supremacy.” It’s The Great Replacement Theory. And that is what this issue of Nygaard Notes is all about.