Over the weekend people gathered at West Virginia’s Berkeley Springs castle to attend a conference held by VDARE — a white nationalist hate group. Speakers at the event included well-known white nationalists and antisemites such as Jared Taylor, Steve Sailer, and Kevin DeAnna. It also included former Department of Justice official John Lott.
Lott is an economist whose discredited pro-gun research made him into a right-wing media fixture. Over the years he has promoted misinformationabout gun violence, altered a post on his blog to falsely accuse a critic of misquoting him, and posed online as a young woman to defend his own research.
At VDARE’s Spring 2024 Conference, Lott gave a speech titled “Immigration and the Collapse of Law Enforcement in the US.”
Lott referenced the white supremacists who gunned people down at a pair of Christchurch, New Zealand mosques in 2019, an El Paso Wal-Mart in 2019, and a Buffalo supermarket in 2022. And he falsely claimed that these mass murderers were not right-wing, and adopted white supremacist beliefs because they were fanatical environmentalists.
The Buffalo shooter was a self-described “white supremacist” and “fascist,” made no mention of environmentalism in his manifesto, and was concerned not only that Black people were having too many children but that white people were having too few. And while the Christchurch and El Paso shooters mentioned that non-whites were destroying the environment and using up resources, this was not their main motivation.
What connected all three of these terrorist attacks was a belief that majority-white countries were being “invaded” by non-white people, and that this was part of a sinister plot to “replace” white people within their own countries. This white nationalist conspiracy theory is known as the “Great Replacement,” and it was championed by the very people Lott was speaking to.