The fear of annihilation is found throughout the conspiracy theories of white supremacy and Nazi programming. Could these theories actually be igniting these lonely, depressed, misguided shooters to over identify with angry ideology of being replaced. Think about the nearly two dozen people killed in a 2019 El Paso, Texas event by a gunman claiming he was fighting against a “Hispanic Invasion.” Think of the 2021 murders at a Pittsburgh synagogue by a killer who commanded that all the people there needed to die. At a 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, participants marched on the University of Virginia campus, carrying Tiki torches and crying out “Jews will not replace us!”
Spectacle sometimes gets in the way of understanding these shooters, especially as these mass shootings come at us in such a quick succession. There’s no time to think, only to back away in repulsion. But if we listen, and we sift through the manure of their racist manifestos, we can isolate strands that connect to Great Replacement thought.
Unfortunately, this maligned ideology is not exclusive to message boards and internet forums that are the benchmark of “The Dark Web.” As noted in a May 18, 2022 analysis by Philip Bump, Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson has espoused the theory in over 400 episodes of his program since 2016. Carlson fully embraced it in early 2021 and Republicans m. ade it mainstream. They include New York Representative Elise Stefanik, third-ranking House Republican, who attacked President Biden for securing baby formula for only undocumented immigrants (not true) while “American mothers” suffered during a nationwide formula shortage. Stefanik plays into QAnon theories and attacks Democrats as “pedo grifters. She circulates the “Great Replacement” ideas that a Jewish-controlled elite class wants to replace and disempower (if not disembowel) white Americans.
Adolphus Belk, Jr., a professor of political science and African American studies at Winthrop University, sees white nationalists like those mentioned here (and let’s not hesitate calling them what they are) as worried that “they will no longer be a majority of the general population, but a plurality, and [they] see that as a threat to their own well-being and the well-being of the nation.”
We need only to go back to Donald Trump’s seemingly benign motto “Make America Great Again” which loses its apparent innocence when we juxtapose it with his war cry, “We Will Not Be Replaced.” We can start fighting white nationalists and centuries-old hate-filled ideologies by staying awake to all injustice, speaking up whenever necessary, and voting out the politicians who control through paranoid rhetoric and scare tactics.