About the great replacement theory

An issue that is at or near the top of concerns among voters on the political right (I call the mainstream right the authoritarian radical right) is immigration. An important factor in raising fear and anger about uncontrolled immigration is a bit of powerful, polarizing propaganda called the Great Replacement Theory (GRT). Since this idea has powerful appeal to millions of voters, it makes sense to discuss it. The fear and anger this issue foments could be a necessary factor that gets DJT re-elected in 2024.   

Wikipedia describes the GRT like this:

The Great Replacement (French: Grand Remplacement), also known as replacement theory or great replacement theory, is a white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory espoused by French author Renaud Camus. The original theory states that, with the complicity or cooperation of "replacist" elites, the ethnic French and white European populations at large are being demographically and culturally replaced by non-white peoples—especially from Muslim-majority countries—through mass migration, demographic growth and a drop in the birth rate of white Europeans. Since then, similar claims have been advanced in other national contexts, notably in the United States. Mainstream scholars have dismissed these claims of a conspiracy of "replacist" elites as rooted in a misunderstanding of demographic statistics and premised upon an unscientific, racist worldview. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, the Great Replacement "has been widely ridiculed for its blatant absurdity."

An article the WaPo published in May of 2022 (not paywalled) discusses the GRT and some of the violence it has inspired in recent times:

The man authorities say opened fire in a Buffalo grocery store Saturday, killing 10, appears to have left behind a white supremacist document centered on the idea of a plot to replace the White population with immigrants.

This far-right conspiracy theory, known as the “great replacement theory,” has inspired a lot of recent violence, including the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand, where the shooter warned of “White genocide.” He later pleaded guilty to 51 murders, 40 attempted murders and engaging in a terrorist act.

Some of the torch-bearing “Unite the Right” demonstrators, including Ku Klux Klan members and neo-Nazis, who terrorized Charlottesville in 2017 were also motivated by the theory, which warns that an increase in the non-White population fueled by immigration will destroy White and Western civilization.

But while the great replacement theory has inspired horrific violence in the past five years, it’s a lot older than that. More than 70 years ago, a U.S. senator published a book warning of the same destruction of White civilization.

Theodore G. Bilbo, a Democrat, had twice been governor of Mississippi before he served in the U.S. Senate from 1935 to 1947, when “the growing intolerance among many whites toward public racism and anti-Semitism” led to his fall, according to an account in the Journal of Mississippi History.

An equal-opportunity racist, he addressed some of his letters with slurs against Italians and Jews, depending on the recipient. But the bulk of his loathing and fear was reserved for Black Americans, as spelled out in his 1947 book “Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization.”

A showboater and self-promoter, he began the book with this modest preface: “For nine years I have read, studied and analyzed practically all the records and everything written throughout the entire world on the subject of race relations, covering a period of close on to thirty thousand years.” ( Note: Bilbo was a liar -- the earliest known writing is from southern Mesopotamia ~3400 BC, not ~28,000 BC)

Bilbo saw an existential threat in the growing ranks of American-born descendants of enslaved Africans. His solution? Ship them back.

“The great civilizations of the ages have been produce[d] by the Caucasian race,” he wrote. When Black people moved in, he wrote, mighty societies such as ancient Egypt were destroyed and mongrel races were created. “The mongrel not only lacks the ability to create a civilization, but he cannot maintain a culture that he finds around him,” he wrote.

“A White America or a mongrel America — you must take your choice!”

The GRT is playing a role in the current elections. As usual for America's authoritarian radical right, authoritarian propaganda is mostly fact-free lies and slanders: 

U.S. Senate candidate Kari Lake claimed without evidence Sunday that Democrats are allowing undocumented immigrants to flood across the border as part of a nationwide plot to pad voter rolls while registering that group for Medicare and Medicaid benefits.

The Republican front-runner echoed the "great replacement theory" favored by white nationalists as she mixed accusations of election fraud with welfare fraud to a credulous Maria Bartiromo on her “Sunday Morning Futures” show on Fox News.

Lake has repeatedly employed these themes, in part to explain her 2022 gubernatorial loss. Lake is currently running for the U.S. Senate seat held by U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz.

The authoritarian radical right Faux News has been a 

major proponent of GRT lies and slanders for years

Part of the loyal Faux News audience 

Some recent research on belief in the GRT suggests that emotions, especially feelings of insecurity and fear, correlate with belief in the GRT. By contrast, reasoned thinking correlates with disbelief in the GRT threat: 

According to the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, mass immigration to Europe and the U.S. is part of a secret plot to replace White and Christian population with non-White and Muslim immigrants. With the aim of exploring psychological factors that play a role in believing in the “great replacement” theory, the present research focused on individual differences in reflective thinking. Using data from a cross-sectional study (N = 906), we found that cognitive reflection [roughly, reasoned thinking] was negatively associated with belief in the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, even when political ideology and sociodemographic characteristics were controlled in the analysis. The findings highlight the key role of reflective thinking in countering conspiracy theories.  

Conspiracy theories can be toxic to democratic political discourse. By insinuating that societal groups or global elites have hidden agendas, they delegitimize certain opinions and political preferences, which harms constructive debates and can facilitate radicalization and evoke acts of political violence, including terrorism (Davey & Ebner, 2019; Marcks & Pawelz, 2022; Obaidi et al., 2022; Rottweiler & Gill, 2022). A globally relevant topic of political discourse where conspiracy beliefs can be particularly harmful is immigration. 

The GRT is a propaganda tactic frequently used by radical right authoritarians in Europe:

The idea that ethnically homogeneous populations in European nations are being demographically ‘replaced’ by people of non-European origin has been propagated by far-right actors for some time (Bjørgo and Ravndal, 2019). However, the idea of a ‘replacement’, orchestrated by liberal and/or left-wing elites, is also being propagated from the top, most notably by (illiberal) leaders such as prime minister Viktor Orban of Hungary and former prime minister Róbert Fico of Slovakia (Plenta, 2020).

The GRT and the insecurity and fear it generates is likely to be one of the top two or three authoritarian radical right propaganda issues that will motivate people to vote for DJT in 2024. 

That is the case because the Republican Party in congress recently killed a border immigration control bill that congressional Republicans themselves wrote. Once DJT realized that proposed legislation would help calm the emotions that border chaos and the GRT could foment (and the credit Biden would get for fixing the border), he ordered his party to block its passage into law. Being morally rotted and authoritarian, the GOP obeyed and killed their own proposed immigration law for purely partisan politics.

Before Faux fired Tucker, he was

a major proponent of GRT lies and slanders