Media Matters last night tweeted this compilation of “replacement theory” rhetoric spread by Fox News. It has been spreading for years and has accelerated since Donald Trump’s reelection loss in 2020.
In “‘Replacement Theory,’ a Racist, Sexist Doctrine, Spreads in Far-Right Circles,” Nellie Bowles wrote in 2019 (New York Times):
Before the massacre of 50 people in New Zealand mosques last week, the suspect released a document called “The Great Replacement.” The first sentence was: “It’s the birthrates.” He repeated it three times.
If the phrase about replacement sounded familiar, perhaps that was because it echoed what white supremacists bearing tiki torches shouted in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017: “You will not replace us.” It is also the slogan of the neo-Nazi group Identity Evropa.
Behind the idea is a racist conspiracy theory known as “the replacement theory,” which was popularized by a right-wing French philosopher. An extension of colonialist theory, it is predicated on the notion that white women are not having enough children and that falling birthrates will lead to white people around the world being replaced by nonwhite people.
And like so many fundamentalist ideologies, the foundation of this one requires the subjugation of women.
The French philosopher was Renaud Camus. His “Great Replacement” theory has been percolating on the right since about 1996 and went to print in two books he published in 2010 and 2011 (per Wikipedia).
My first exposure was a 2006 Wall Street Journal editoral by Mark Steyn, “It’s the Demography, Stupid.” It had all the “Wake up, Amurca!” subtlety of the parody right-wing radio commentator, Earl Pitts – American. The secular west needs to face its slow suicide by contraception, Steyn warned, long before Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale became a TV series.
I wrote at the time:
Steyn argues that just ground-pounding the Muslims wouldn’t prevent the fall of the Christian west. We suffer from an alarming birthrate gap vis-à-vis the Muslim world, Steyn warns, and the Christian world risks being eventually overrun because of “our lack of civilizational confidence.” (The cure for which is, no doubt, civilizational Viagra.) Americans are not afraid enough of the urgent threat posed by Muslim children and must retaliate by stockpiling more of our own.
To plagiarize a quote from a review of one of nuclear-alarmist Jonathan Schell’s old books, “I shudder to think how I’ve failed. I shudder for Mark Steyn, for all the time he’s spent banging away at his typewriter instead of banging away elsewhere.”
Steyn’s target was Muslims. Donald Trump expanded the target list to Latinos and Asians. Basically, to anyone on our soil who is non-white and not of the Republican persuasion. And citizen or not, as recent street violence against Asians demonstrates. Immigrants must be stopped, Fox News warns, from diluting the voting pools of Real Americans™, white-Christian-Republican Americans.
I remember just where I was when news got out of the Rwandan genocide.