Great Replacement
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 4/13/21
The Great Replacement (French: Grand Remplacement), also known as the replacement theory,[1][2] is a white nationalist[3] conspiracy theory[4][5][6] which states that, with the complicity or cooperation of "replacist" elites,[a][4][7] the white French population—as well as white European populations at large—is being demographically and culturally replaced with non-European peoples—specifically Arab, Berber, South Asians and sub-Saharan Muslim populations from Africa and the Middle East—through mass migration, demographic growth and a European drop in the birth rate.[4][8] This theory is popular among anti-migrant far-right movements in the West.[9] Scholars have generally dismissed the claims of a "great replacement" as being rooted in an exaggerated reading of immigration statistics and unscientific, racist views.[10][11]
While similar themes have characterized various far-right theories since the late 19th century, the term "Great Replacement" was popularized by the French author Renaud Camus in his 2011 book Le Grand Remplacement (English: The Great Replacement). It specifically associated the presence of Muslims in France with potential danger and destruction of French culture and civilization. Camus and other conspiracy theorists attribute this process to intentional policies advanced by global and liberal elites (i.e., the "replacists") from within the Government of France, the European Union, or the United Nations, and describe it as a "genocide by substitution".[4]
The "Great Replacement" is included in a larger white genocide conspiracy theory that has spread in Western far-right movements since the late 20th century, notably through the efforts of American neo-Nazi activist David Lane.[9][12] Despite their common reference to a "genocide" of indigenous white peoples and a global plan led by a conspiring power, Camus's theory does not include antisemitic claims of a Jewish plot, which have been replaced in the European context with Islamophobia.[13][12] The absence of antisemitism in Camus' conspiracy theory, along with his use of simple catch-all slogans, have been cited as reasons for its broader appeal.[13][14][15]
Description
The current notion of replacement theory finds its historical antecedents in the 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race by American eugenicist, Madison Grant.[16] This text was highly influential amongst eugenists at the time of its publishing and informed the policies underlying the American Immigration Act of 1924. Grant's idea of replacement was also later adapted by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party to support eugenic policies and, ultimately, the ideology of hate towards Jewish populations throughout conquered Europe.[17] We can find the same discursive constructions that call for racial purity, the defense of Christianity, and Western civilization's superiority embedded in 21st-century versions of replacement theory.[18]
In the early 21st century, the "Great Replacement” theory was adapted by French author Renaud Camus, initially in a 2010 book titled L'Abécédaire de l'in-nocence ("Abecedarium of no-harm"),[ b][20] and the following year in an eponymous book, Le Grand Remplacement (introduction au remplacisme global).[c] Camus has claimed that the name Grand Remplacement "came to [him], almost by chance, perhaps in a more or less unconscious reference to the Grand Dérangement of the Acadians in the 18th century."[21] Commenting on the name, he has also declared that his theory was the "implementation in real life" of Bertolt Brecht's quip that the easiest thing to do for a government was to change the people had the people forfeited its confidence.[22]
According to Camus, the "Great Replacement" has been nourished by "industrialisation", "despiritualisation" and "deculturation";[d][23][24] the materialistic society and globalism having created a "replaceable human, without any national, ethnic or cultural specificity",[25] what he labels "global replacism".[26] Camus claims that "the great replacement does not need a definition," as the term is not, in his views, a "concept" but rather a "phenomenon":[27][14]
Renaud Camus, progenitor of the Great Replacement theory. March 2019
A people was here, stable, had been occupying the same territory for fifteen or twenty centuries. And suddenly, very quickly, in one or two generations, one or several other peoples substitute themselves for him. He is replaced, it is not him anymore.
— Renaud Camus, 2013 interview for Action Française.[7]
In Camus's theory, the indigenous French people ("the replaced")[e][21] is described as being demographically replaced by non-European peoples—mainly coming from Africa or the Middle East—in a process of "peopling immigration" encouraged by a "replacist power".[a][4][28] According to French philosopher Pierre-André Taguieff, the validity for using the term "conspiracy theory" to define Camus's concept indeed lies in the second part of the proposition:
To [the theory of a replacement through mass immigration], that claims itself to be an observation or a description, is added in the "anti-replacist" vision a conspiracy theory which attributes to the "replacist" elites the desire to achieve the "Great Replacement". From the ideas of "peopling colonisation" and "mass immigration", "anti-replacists" went to that of a genocide by ethnic, racial and cultural substitution, involving the completion of a programme or an action plan.
— Pierre-André Taguieff, 2015.[4]
Camus frequently uses terms and concepts related to the period of Nazi-occupied France (1940–1945). He for instance labels "colonizers" or "Occupiers"[f] people of non-European descent who reside in Europe,[29][30] and dismisses what he calls the "replacist elites" as "collaborationist".[31] Camus founded in 2017 an organization named the National Council of European Resistance, in a self-evident reference to the World War II National Council of the Resistance (1943–1945).[32] This analogy to the French resistance against Nazism has been described as an implicit call to hatred, direct action or even violence against what Camus labels the "Occupiers; i.e. the immigrants".[31] Camus has also compared the Great Replacement and the so-called "genocide by substitution" of the European peoples to the genocide of the European Jews during World War II.[32]
The Occupation provoked among the French, and especially among the resisters, a very intense feeling of hatred [...] Moreover this occupation was made of persons in uniforms [...] How could you not provoke, with such an analogy, a hatred that some will judge salutary towards any immigrant they will meet [...]? It appears to be contradictory on your side to say that you condemn hatred, while at the same time drawing inspiration from that incendiary analogy to describe our times.
— Alain Finkielkraut, 2017.[31]
Origins
Context
Renaud Camus developed his conspiracy theory in two books published in 2010 and 2011, in the context of an increase in anti-immigrant rhetoric in public discourse during the previous decade.[33] Europe also experienced an escalation in Islamic terrorist attacks during the 2000s–2010s,[34] and a migrant crisis that began in 2015,[35] which participated in exacerbating tensions and preparing the public opinion for the reception of Camus's conspiracy theory.[36][7] As the latter depicts a population replacement said to occur in a short time lapse of one or two generations, the migrant crisis was particularly conducive to the spread of Camus's ideas—even though France was not the main European country concerned with the migration flows—while the terrorist attacks accelerated the construction of immigrants as an existential threat among those who shared such a worldview.[7]
Camus's theme of a future demise of European culture and civilization also parallels a "cultural pessimistic" and anti-Islam trend among European intellectuals of the period, illustrated in several best-selling and straightforwardly titled books released during the 2010s: Thilo Sarrazin's Germany Abolishes Itself (2010), Éric Zemmour's The French Suicide (2014) or Michel Houellebecq's Submission (2015).[37]
Claimed influences
See also: The Camp of the Saints and Rivers of Blood speech
Renaud Camus cites two influential figures in the epilogue of his 2011 book The Great Replacement: British politician Enoch Powell's apocalyptic vision of future race relations—expressed in his 1968 "Rivers of Blood" speech—and French author Jean Raspail's depiction of the collapse of the West from an overwhelming "tidal wave" of Third World immigration, featured in his 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints.[13][38]
Camus also declared to British magazine The Spectator in 2016 that a key to understanding the "Great Replacement" can be found in his 2002 book Du Sens.[39] In the latter he wrote that the words "France" and "French" equal a natural and physical reality rather than a legal one, in a cratylism similar to Charles Maurras's distinction between the "legal" and the "real country".[g][40] During the same interview, Camus mentioned that he began to imagine his conspiracy theory back in 1996, during the redaction of a guidebook on the department of Hérault, in the South of France: "I suddenly realized that in very old villages [...] the population had totally changed too [...] this is when I began to write like that."[39]
Similar themes
Main article: White genocide conspiracy theory
Despite its own singularities and concepts, the "Great Replacement" is encompassed in a larger and older "white genocide" conspiracy theory,[41] popularized in the US by neo-Nazi David Lane in his 1995 White Genocide Manifesto, where he asserted that governments in Western countries were intending to turn white people into "extinct species".[42][43] The idea of a "replacement" of indigenous white people under the guidance of a hostile elite can be further traced back to pre-WWII antisemitic conspiracy theories which posited the existence of a Jewish plot to destroy Europe through miscegenation, especially in Édouard Drumont's antisemitic bestseller La France juive (1886).[44] Commenting on this resemblance, historian Nicolas Lebourg and political scientist Jean-Yves Camus suggest that Camus's contribution was to replace the antisemitic elements with a clash of civilizations between Muslims and Europeans.[13]
To succeed in their attack on Christian civilization, Jews in France had to deceive, lie, and take the disguises of free thinkers. If they had said frankly: "We want to destroy this ancient France, which was so glorious and beautiful, to replace it with the domination of a handful of Hebrews from all countries", our fathers, who were less softened than us, would not have let themselves be taken in.
— Édouard Drumont, La France juive, 1886, Livre 1, Ch. 3
Maurice Barrès's nationalist writings of that period have also been noted in the ideological genealogy of the "Great Replacement", Barrès contending both in 1889 and in 1900 that a replacement of the native population under the combined effect of immigration and a decline in the birth rate was happening in France.[45][44] Scholars also highlight a modern similarity to European neo-fascist and neo-Nazi thinkers from the immediate post-war, especially Maurice Bardèche, René Binet and Gaston-Armand Amaudruz.[46][47] Influenced by Binet's 1950 Théorie du Racisme[48]—with its idea of an "interbreeding capitalism" aiming at creating a "uniform inhumanity"[49]—French 1960s far-right movements such as Europe-Action used terms that echo Camus's concepts, labeling the Algerian immigration an "invasion", arguing that "systematic race mixing is nothing more than a slow genocide",[50] and fearing a future France "occupied by twenty million Maghrebi Arabs and twenty million Negro-Africans":[51][52]
In France, the significant immigration of colored elements is a grave issue […]. We also know the size of the North African population [...]. What is serious for the future: we know that the basis of European settlement, which allowed for civilizing expansion, was that of a white ethnic group. The destruction of this balance, which can be quick, will lead to our disappearance and that of our civilization.
— Dominique Venner, Europe-Action, nº 38, February 1966, p. 8.
The associated and more recent conspiracy theory of "Eurabia", published by British author Bat Ye'or in her 2005 eponymous book, is often cited as a probable inspiration for Camus's "Great Replacement".[53][54][55] Eurabia theory likewise involves globalist entities, that time led by both French and Arab powers, conspiring to Islamize Europe, with Muslims submerging the continent through immigration and higher birth rates.[56] The conspiracy theory also depicts immigrants as invaders or as a fifth column, invited to the continent by a corrupt political elite.[57][58] Scholars generally agree that, although he did not father the theme, Camus indeed coined the term "Great Replacement" as a slogan and concept, and eventually led it to its fame in the 2010s.[59][60]
Analysis
Demographic statistics
While the ethnic demography of France has shifted as a result of post-WWII immigration, scholars have generally dismissed the claims of a "great replacement" as being rooted in an exaggeration of immigration statistics and unscientific, racially prejudiced views.[10] Geographer Landis MacKellar criticized Camus's thesis for assuming "that third- and fourth- generation 'immigrants' are somehow not French."[11]
Researchers have variously estimated the Muslim population of France at between 8.8% and 12.5% in 2017,[61][62] making a "replacement" unlikely according to MacKellar.[11] The Pew Research Center projected that above-average fertility rates would increase it to 12.7% by 2050 in the absence of immigration, or to 18% with a high-immigration scenario.[61] According to the INSEE, 28.15% of newborns born in Metropolitan France in 2018 had at least one parent who was born outside of Europe.[63]
Racial connotations
In German discourse, Austrian political scientist Rainer Bauböck questioned the conspiracy theorists' use of the terms "population replacement" or "exchange" ("Bevölkerungsaustausch"). Using Ruth Wodak's analysis that the slogan needs to be viewed in its historical context, Bauböck has concluded that the conspiracy theory is a reemergence of the Nazi ideology of Umvolkung ("ethnicity inversion").[64]
In May 2019, political journalist Nick Cohen described the Great Replacement as a form of racism and propaganda, alongside a fear European men are not virile enough.[65] The same month, historian Anne Applebaum wrote that the conspiracy theory was used as a gateway from discussing the effects of immigration and Islam's compatibility with the Western world to forms of extremism, such as advocating for the "remigration" or the murder of migrants.[66]
Popularity
Camus's tract for his 2014 "day of anger" demonstration against the "great replacement": "No to the change of people and of civilization, no to antisemitism"
The simplicity and use of catch-all slogans in Camus's formulations—"you have one people, and in the space of a generation you have a different people"[14]— as well as his removal of antisemitism from the original neo-Nazi "white genocide" conspiracy theory, have been cited as conducive to the popularity of the "Great Replacement".[15][13]
In a survey led by Ifop in December 2018, 25% of the French subscribed to the conspiracy theory; as well as 46% of the responders who defined themselves as "Gilets Jaunes" (Yellow Vest protesters).[67] The theory has also become influential in far-right and white nationalist circles outside of France.[68]
The conspiracy theory has been cited by Canadian far-right political activist Lauren Southern in a YouTube video of the same name released in July 2017.[14] Southern's video had attracted in 2020 more than 686,000 viewers[69] and is credited with helping to popularize the conspiracy theory.[70] Counter-jihad Norwegian blogger Fjordman has also participated in spreading the theory.[71]
Prominent right-wing extremist websites such as Gates of Vienna, Politically Incorrect, and Fdesouche have provided a platform for bloggers to diffuse and popularize the theory of the "Great Replacement".[72] Among its main promoters are also a wide-ranging network of loosely connected white nationalist movements, especially the Identitarian movement in Europe,[73] and other groups like PEGIDA in Germany.[74]
Political influence
Europe
Austria
See also: Kalergi plan
Identitäre Bewegung Österreich (IBÖ), the Austrian branch of the Identitarian movement, promotes this theory, citing a "great exchange"[h] or replacement of the population that supposedly needs to be reversed.[75] In April 2019, Heinz-Christian Strache campaigning for his FPÖ party ahead of the 2019 European Parliament election endorsed the conspiracy theory.[76] Claiming that "population replacement" in Austria was a real threat, he stated that "We don’t want to become a minority in our own country".[77] Compatriot Martin Sellner, who also supports the theory, celebrated Strache's political use of the Great Replacement.[78][79]
Belgium
In September 2018, Schild & Vrienden [nl], an extremist Flemish youth organization, were reported to be endorsing the conspiracy theory. The group, claiming that native populations of Europe were being replaced by migrants; they proposed an end to all immigration, forced deportation of non-whites, and the founding of ethnostates.[80] The following month, VRT detailed how the organization was discussing the Great Replacement on secretive chat channels, and using the conspiracy theory to promote Flemish ethnic identity.[81]
In March 2019, Flemish nationalist Dries Van Langenhove of the Vlaams Belang party, repeatedly stated that the Flemish people were "being replaced" in Belgium, posting claims on social media which endorsed the Great Replacement theory.[82][83]
Denmark
Use of the Great Replacement (Danish: Store Udskiftning) conspiracy theory has become common in right-wing Danish political rhetoric. In April 2019, Rasmus Paludan, leader of the Hard Line party, which is widely associated with the Great Replacement,[84] claimed that by the year 2040 ethnic Danish people would be a minority in Denmark, having been outnumbered by Muslims and their descendants.[85] During a debate for the 2019 European Parliament elections, Rasmus used the concept to justify a proposal to ban Muslim immigration and deport all Islamic residents from the country, in what Le Monde described as Rasmus "preaching the 'great replacement theory'".[86]
In June 2019, Pia Kjærsgaard invoked the conspiracy theory while serving as Speaker of the Danish Parliament. After the alleged encouragement of Muslim communities to "vote red", for the Social Democrats; Kjærsgaard asked "What will happen? A replacement of the Danish people?".[85]
France
Much of the European spread of the Great Replacement (French: Grand Remplacement) conspiracy theory rhetoric is due to its prevalence in French national discourse and media. Nationalist right-wing groups in France have asserted that there is an ongoing "Islamo-substitution" of the indigenous French population, associating the presence of Muslims in France with potential danger and destruction of French culture and civilization.[87][88][89]
In 2011, Marine Le Pen evoked the theory, claiming that France's "adversaries" were waging a moral and economic war on the country, apparently "to deliver it to submersion by an organized replacement of our population".[90] In 2013, historian Dominique Venner's suicide in Notre-Dame de Paris, in which he left a note outlining the "crime of the replacement of our people" is reported to have inspired the far-right Iliade Institute's main ideological tenet of the Great Replacement.[91] Referring to the conspiracy theory, Marine Le Pen publicly praised Venner, claiming that his "last gesture, eminently political, was to try to awaken the French people".[90]
In 2015, Guillaume Faye gave a speech at the Swedish Army Museum in Stockholm, in which he claimed there were three societal things being used against Europeans to carry out a supposed Great Replacement: abortion, homosexuality and immigration. He asserted that Muslims were replacing white people by using birthrates as a demographic weapon.[92]
In June 2017, a BuzzFeed investigation revealed three National Front candidates subscribing to the conspiracy theory ahead of the legislative elections.[93] These included Senator Stéphane Ravier's personal assistant, who claimed the Great Replacement had already started in France.[94] Publishing an image of blonde girl next to the caption "Say no to white genocide", Ravier's aide politically charged the concept further, writing "the National Front or the invasion".[95]
By September 2018, in a meeting at Fréjus, Marine Le Pen closely echoed Great Replacement rhetoric. Speaking of France, she declared that "never in the history of mankind, have we seen a society that organizes an irreversible submersion" that would eventually cause French society to "disappear by dilution or substitution, its culture and way of life".[90] Former National Assembly delegate Marion Maréchal, who is a junior member of the political Le Pen family, is also a proponent of the theory.[96] In March 2019, in a trip to the U.S., Maréchal evoked the theory, stating "I don’t want France to become a land of Islam".[97] Insisting that the Great Replacement was "not absurd", she declared the "indigenous French" people, apparently in danger of being a minority by 2040, now wanted their "country back".[98]
National Rally's serving president Marine Le Pen, who is the aunt of Maréchal, has been heavily influenced by the Great Replacement. FAZ newspaper has described the conspiracy theory creator Renaud Camus as Le Pen's "whisperer".[99] In May 2019, National Rally spokesman Jordan Bardella was reported to use the conspiracy theory during a televised debate with Nathalie Loiseau, after he argued that France must "turn off the tap" from the demographic bomb of African immigration into the country.[100]
In June 2019, Éric Zemmour pushed the concept in comparison to the Kosovo War, claiming "In 1900, there were 90% Serbs and 10% Muslims in Kosovo, in 1990 there were 90% Muslims and 10% Serbs, then there was war and the independence of Kosovo".[101] Zemmour, author of The French Suicide, has repeatedly described "the progressive replacement, over a few decades, of the historic population of our country by immigrants, the vast majority of them non-European".[102] Later that month, Marion Maréchal joined Zemmour in invoking the Great Replacement in relation to the Balkan region, stating "I do not want my France to become Kosovo" and declared that the changing demographics of France "threatens us" ("nous menace") and that this was increasingly clear.[101]
Germany
SPD politician Thilo Sarrazin is reported to be one of the most influential promoters of the Great Replacement, having published several books on the subject, some of which, such as Germany Abolishes Itself, are in high circulation.[84] Sarrazin has proposed that there are too many immigrants in Germany, and that they supposedly have lower IQs than Germans. Regarding the demographics of Germany, he has claimed that in a century ethnic Germans will drop in number to 25 million, in 200 years to eight million and in 300 years: three million.[84]
In May 2016, Alternative for Germany (German: Alternative für Deutschland, AfD) deputy leader Beatrix von Storch co-opted and distorted the meaning of a 2001 United Nations report titled "Replacement migration", which focused on how to manage the replenishment of the population of eight low-fertility countries (France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Russia, U.K. and U.S.), in order to push the theory.[103] Storch claimed that a mass population exchange ("Massenaustausch der Bevölkerung") had been planned by the UN since the publication of the report.[104]
In April 2017, a few months before he assumed the leadership of the AfD, Alexander Gauland released a press statement regarding the issue of family reunification for refugees, in which he claimed that "Population exchange in Germany is running at full speed".[99][104] In October 2018, following Beatrix von Storch's lead, Bundestag member Petr Bystron said the Global Compact for Migration was part of the conspiracy to bring about systemic population change in Germany.[104]
In March 2019, Vice Germany reported how AfD MP Harald Laatsch [de] attempted to justify and assign blame for the Christchurch mosque shootings, in relation to his "The Great Exchange"[h] theory, by asserting that the shooter's actions were driven by "overpopulation" from immigrants and "climate protection" against them. Laatsch also claimed that the climate movement, who he labelled "climate panic propagators", had a "shared responsibility" for the massacre, and singled out child activist Greta Thunberg.[103]
Similarly, right-wing publicist Martin Lichtmesz [de] denied that either Anders Behring Breivik's 2011 manifesto, which referred to the Eurabia variant of the "white genocide" narrative, or Brenton Tarrant's 2019 The Great Replacement manifesto, had any connection to the theory. Claiming that it was, in fact, not a conspiracy theory at all, Lichtmesz said both Breivik and Tarrant were reacting to a real phenomenon; a "historically unique experiment" of a "Great Exchange"[h] of people.[103]
Greece
[x]
Ilias Kasidiaris, a Greek politician who lost his seat in the Hellenic Parliament alongside all other representatives of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn as a political party in the aftermath of the 2019 Greek legislative election before leaving it to found his own Greeks for the Fatherland party that he led at the onset for the verdict of Golden Dawn's trial, where it was convicted as a criminal organization, while Kasidiaris himself was found guilty for being one of its leading members.
Ilias Kasidiaris, both as leading member of Golden Dawn and founder and President of Greeks for the Fatherland, has accused immigrants of taking the resources, jobs and opportunity meant for Greeks, predicting that they will be a minority in their country in less than 100 years.[105][106]
Hungary
Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and his political party Fidesz in Hungary have been associated with the conspiracy theory over the course of several years.[107][108] The Sydney Morning Herald detailed Orbán's belief in and promotion of the Great Replacement as being central to the modern right-wing politics of Europe. In December 2018, he claimed the "Christian identity of Europe" needed saving, and labelled refugees traveling to Europe as "Muslim invaders".[98] In a speech, Orbán asserted: "If in the future Europe is to be populated by people other than Europeans, and we accept this as a fact and see it as natural, then we will effectively be consenting to population replacement: to a process in which the European population is replaced".[109]
He has also stated: "In all of Europe there are fewer and fewer children, and the answer of the West is migration," concluding that "We Hungarians have a different way of thinking. Instead of just numbers, we want Hungarian children." ThinkProgress described the comments as pushing a version of the theory.[110] In April 2019, Radio New Zealand published insight that Orban's plans to cut taxes for large Hungarian families could be linked with fears of the Great Replacement.[111]
Republic of Ireland
Immigration to the Republic of Ireland has been substantial in number since the 1990s. As of 2016, 82.9% of the population was Irish or Irish Traveller in ethnicity; 9.5% other white (including British and continental Europeans); 2.1% Asian; 1.3% Black; and 4.1% other/not stated.[112] Great replacement rhetoric has been spread by a community of far-right and anti-immigration political figures, including the journalist Gemma O'Doherty and a variety of minor political parties (National Party, Irish Freedom Party, Anti-Corruption Ireland), which have had very little electoral success.[113][114] A Lidl advertisement that featured a White Irish woman, her Afro-Brazilian partner and their mixed race son was targeted as part of an attempt at a "Great Replacement" by O'Doherty; online harassment meant that the family had to flee the country.[115][116][117] The term has also been in use with respect to the direct provision centres, used to house asylum seekers.[118]
Writing in 2020, Richard Downes said that "Rather than seeing the increase in non-Irish people living and making their lives here as being a normal part of a modern European country, some of the new nationalists see it as a conspiracy to overwhelm Ireland with foreigners. For many of them the conspirators include the Irish government, NGOs, the EU and the UN. They believe that these organisations want to replace Irish people with brown and black people from abroad."[119]
The term "great replacement" was also used when the RTÉ News featured the three first babies born in 2020, born to Polish, Black and Indian mothers; journalist Fergus Finlay saying "I don’t care about the vulgar abuse, but I really do believe that these hatemongers should be prosecuted when they incite others to hatred and violence against people whose only crime is their skin colour or religion. I find it hard to understand why the State hasn’t acted already against these cruel ideologues who think they can say whatever they like under the banner of free speech. They may be small in number now, and on the surface they may just seem bonkers, but we’ve been here before. Political movements have been built on hatred of the other, and we know the damage they have caused."[120]
Garda Commissioner (national chief of police) Drew Harris spoke about far right groups in 2020, saying that "Irish groups [believing] in the great replacement theory" had plans "to disrupt key State institutions and infrastructure. This included Dublin Port, high profile shopping areas such as Grafton Street in Dublin, Dáil Éireann and Government departments."[121][122][123]
Italy
Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini of Italy (2018-2019) has repeatedly adopted the theme of the Great Replacement.[107] In May 2016, two years before his election to office, he claimed "ethnic replacement is underway" in Italy in an interview with Sky TG24. Accusing nameless, well-funded organizations for importing workers that he named "farm slaves", he stated that there was a "lucrative attempt at genocide" of Italians.[124][125]
The Netherlands
In April 2015, writing on the publishing website GeenStijl, scholar of Islam Hans Jansen used Great Replacement rhetoric, suggesting that it was an "undisputed" fact that among the European Union's governing elite there was a common consensus that Europeans were "no good and can be better replaced".[126] In May 2015, Martin Bosma a Dutch parliament Representative for the Party for Freedom (PVV), released his book Minority in their own land [nl]. Invoking the conspiracy theory, Bosma wrote about a growing 'a new population' of immigrants which lent itself to an apparently 'post-racial Multicultural State of Salvation'.[126]
By September 2015, it was reported that the two right-wing political parties Christian Democratic Appeal and the Reformed Political Party had distanced themselves from the ideology of the Great Replacement.[127] In March 2017, Thierry Baudet, founder and leader of the right wing Forum for Democracy (FvD) party, was said to promote the theory after he claimed that the country's so-called elite were deliberately "homeopathically diluting" the Dutch population, in a speech about "national self-hatred". He said there was a plot to racially mix the ethnic Dutch with "all the people of the world", so that there would "never be a Dutchman again".[126]
In January 2018, PVV Representative Martin Bosma endorsed the Great Replacement theory, and one of its key propagators, after meeting with Renaud Camus at a PVV demonstration in Rotterdam and tweeting his support. Filip Dewinter, a leading member of the Flemish secessionist Vlaams Belang party, who had traveled to the Netherlands on the day of the protest to meet with Camus, named him as a "visionary man" to the media.[128]
Party for Freedom politician Geert Wilders of the Netherlands strongly supports the notion of a Great Replacement occurring in Europe.[129][130] In October 2018, Wilders invoked the conspiracy theory, claiming the Netherlands was "being replaced with mass immigration from non-western Islamic countries" and Rotterdam being "the port of Eurabia". He claimed 77 million, mainly Islamic immigrants would attempt to enter Europe over the course of half a century, and that white Europeans would cease to exist unless they were stopped.[98] In 2019, The New York Times reported how Camus's demographic-based alarmist theories help fuel Wilders and his Party for Freedom's nativist campaigning.[2]
In September 2018, Dutch author Paul Scheffer analyzed the Great Replacement and its political developments, suggesting that Forum for Democracy and Party for Freedom were forming policy regarding the demography of the Netherlands through the lens of the conspiracy theory.[131]
United Kingdom
According to November 2018 research from the University of Cambridge, 31% of Brexit voters believe in the conspiracy theory compared to 6% of British people who oppose Brexit.[132]
In July 2019, English musician Billy Bragg released a public statement which accused fellow singer-songwriter Morrissey of endorsing the theory. Bragg suggested "that Morrissey is helping to spread this idea—which inspired the Christchurch mosque murderer—is beyond doubt".[133][134]
North America
Canada
YouTuber Lauren Southern of Canada has helped amplify the conspiracy theory.[98][135] In 2017, Southern dedicated a video to the Great Replacement, gaining over half a million views on her channel, before it was deleted.[14][136][137] 2018 mayoral candidate for Toronto Faith Goldy has publicly embraced the replacement theory.[138][139] In 2019, in the aftermath of the Christchurch mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, Vice accused Goldy of routinely pushing the same ideas of birthrate declines and the population replacement of whites, found in the gunman's The Great Replacement manifesto.[140] Long-time white nationalist Paul Fromm, when he co-opted the pre-1967 Red Ensign flag of Canada, referred to it as "the flag of the true Canada, the European Canada before the treasonous European replacement schemes brought in by the 1965 immigration policies".[141]
In June 2019, columnist Lindsay Shepherd claimed that "whites are becoming a minority" in the West, describing her assertion as "population replacement".[142] She was criticized by Canadian MP Colin Fraser at a House of Commons justice committee for not denouncing the concept,[143] while Nathaniel Erskine-Smith accused Shepherd of openly embracing the conspiracy theory.[144]
United States
In 2017, white supremacist protesters at the Unite The Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia used slogans that alluded to similar ideas of ethnic replacement,[145] such as "You will not replace us" and "Jews will not replace us".[146][147] After that event, Camus told Vox that he did not support violence, and disputed any association between his ideas and neo-Nazis; however, he said he approved of the feeling behind the chant.[68]
In October 2018, Republican congressman Steve King endorsed the conspiracy theory,[148][149] stating: "Great replacement, yes," referring to the European migrant crisis that "these people walking into Europe by ethnic migration, 80 percent are young men."[150] King presents the Great Replacement as a shared concern of Europe and the United States, claiming that "if we continue to abort our babies and import a replacement for them in the form of young violent men, we are supplanting our culture, our civilization."[151] He has blamed George Soros as an alleged perpetrator behind the conspiracy.[152]
In May 2019, Florida State Senator Dennis Baxley was reported to use the replacement theory in relation to the abortion debate in the United States.[153][154] Speaking of Western European birthrates as a warning to Americans, he said: "When you get a birth rate less than 2 percent, that society is disappearing, and it’s being replaced by folks that come behind them and immigrate, don’t wish to assimilate into that society and they do believe in having children."[155] The following month, Nick Isgro, deputy leader of the Maine Republican Party endorsed the conspiracy theory after claiming financial subsidies were promoted for abortions in the U.S. to "kill our own people", and that asylum seekers were "human pawns who are being played in a game by global elites and their partners here in Augusta." Greg Kesich, a writer for the Portland Press Herald, reported that the current Mayor of Waterville's speech displayed the sentiment of the Great Replacement.[156]
In July 2019, Keith Ellison, the Attorney General of Minnesota, stated how increasing and varied hate crime, exacerbated by the 2016 Brexit vote and election of Donald Trump, was "united by so-called "replacement" theory", and that communities needed to "vigilantly and consistently counter each of these acts of violence and expressions of hate".[157] At the same time, Mick Davis, the Chief Executive and Treasurer of the Conservative Party, published his outrage of the concept. Writing in The Jewish Chronicle, Davis named the Great Replacement, "a driving force behind far right terror", as worse than merely a conspiracy theory, in that it was "profoundly antisemitic".[158]
According to the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, US president Donald Trump has referenced the Great Replacement and a 2019 tweet in favour of his proposed Border Wall was interpreted by many as endorsing the theory. They also stated that Trump's Twitter account was one of the most influential accounts promoting the theory.[159] His history of describing Muslims and migrants as "invaders", according to SBS News, closely mirrors the language of explicit supporters of the theory.[107]