How White ‘replacement theory’ evolved from elderly racists to teens online to the alleged inspiration for another racist mass homicide

Fascism has been making some big moves in the past decade in the US and Europe. Understanding how replacement theory grew and spread helps explain why.

An effort to cast off the ‘trash’ label

In the 2000s, White nationalists were frustrated with being portrayed as “White trash,” so their focus turned to trying to develop an upscale, academic veneer to their racism. An important vehicle for that was the Charles Martel Society, created in 2001 by textile heir Bill Regnery, who died last year. The group has been highly secretive. “I don’t know how you’re getting information regarding that,” White nationalist lawyer Bill Johnson told me last year of CMS. “I’ve been told not to say anything regarding that.”

The Charles Martel Society is a secret society of White nationalists who consider themselves intellectuals. “CMS is in many ways the heart,” said Matt Heimbach said, who cofounded the Traditionalist Worker Party and in 2020 said he left White nationalism and is a Marxist-Leninist. Other groups have different messages: the National Policy Institute, fronted by Richard Spencer and designed to “elevate the consciousness of whites”; the Occidental Quarterly, run by CMS member Kevin MacDonald and presenting itself as a scholarly journal; American Third Position, later rebranded as the American Freedom Party, led by Johnson with “a platform that is predicated on the preservation of our traditional European roots.”

“All the different fronts have a specific purpose to bring in slightly different groups of people,” Heimbach said. “But at the heart of it, it’s all, like, the same 30 dudes.” Through this network, White nationalists produced books and pseudoacademic journals purporting to show White people evolved to have higher IQs and commit less crime than people of color and Jews, who evolved to trick White people into supporting diversity.

These false claims were not just wild ravings; they had a public policy objective. The argument was that racial inequality is the product of evolution as dictated by nature — not by the rules and norms of society made by people — so government efforts to reduce inequality are doomed to fail. People could not override biology, unless they were Jewish, in which case the bounds appear, according to this propaganda, limitless.

It was eugenics, a discredited concept that is most closely associated with Nazis and was the basis for forced sterilization of people of color and the disabled in several US states into the 1970s. But White nationalists, including Regnery, preferred softer euphemisms, like “group differences” or “human biodiversity,” their public writings and group emails show — as if opposition to interracial families was part of the same noble spirit behind efforts to save the rainforests.

“We were going to be academically correct. Because we had science, everybody would have to agree with us, because science,” said Matt Parrott, who has publicly been a White nationalist since 2009 and cofounded the Traditionalist Worker Party with Heimbach. The thinking was, “We’ve just got to be more professional and academic and not be trashy racists.” The CMS crowd got together at conferences, and, according to National Policy Institute frontman Richard Spencer, the message was always the same: “IQ scores, crime stats, vote Republican.”

Word spreads in a dark online alley

Then in 2014, Gamergate happened, which nearly every White nationalist I’ve spoken with said dramatically changed the White power movement. Gamergate is complicated, but the important part here is imageboard 8chan welcomed trolls angry at calls for more diversity in video games. There, and on 4chan, they mingled with neo-Nazis, and a massive wave of young people entered what had been an old man’s world of White nationalism. Parrott was 27 when he became an open White nationalist and said over five years he went from being the youngest guy in the room to the oldest guy in the room.

The alleged Buffalo shooter seems to have followed a similar path, the document he posted online indicates. He went to 4chan for forums about guns and the outdoors but found the /pol/ — for “politically incorrect” — forum, where neo-Nazis dominate the discourse. “There I learned through infographics, s**tposts, and memes that the White race is dying out,” his document says. “I never even saw this information until I found these sites.”

The trolls did not match the old professional racists’ stuffy style, but they found use in their pseudoscientific graphics. Day after day, they posted the same charts and graphs purporting to show stark racial differences, stripped of all context. The culture of one-upmanship, combined with limitless space on the internet, meant some posts about replacement theory were breathtaking both in their contempt for human life and their exhaustive detail.

When Roof’s own document explaining his motivations was posted online, Regnery emailed other White nationalists that he was “flabbergasted” by his intelligence. “Based on Roof’s essay he is the kind of youth we could have invited to a meeting,” Regnery wrote.

Before the Buffalo shooting, Spencer had read a book with a similar thesis to “Le Grand Remplacement” also by Camus — whose name doesn’t come up much on White nationalist forums — and since then has read the accused shooter’s document, he said. When an idea like replacement theory “goes into the realm of 4chan, it becomes mimetic in the sense that it’s trying to reproduce itself and evolve. It’s a gene. And in order to reproduce itself and reach more people, it goes into more salacious forms. … It just descends into this horrible place in order to reproduce,” he said. Spencer does not want to be involved in the White nationalist movement, he said, but still thinks “race is real.”

How the old guard lost control

Of course, for outsiders, the pillars of replacement theory are a big pill to swallow. The White power movement knows this. At the 2017 Unite the Right rally, marchers initially chanted, “You will not replace us.” This was an intentional political tactic. “As far as optics with the potential to reach normies goes, I thought this slogan was perfect,” read an essay posted after the event at the White nationalist website, Counter Currents. The slogan positioned the marchers “as standing on the defensive against an outside assault which others have initiated against us.”

He’d had some success, he said, until “my successful red-pilling of that whole crowd of normies was cut short when someone shared video making it clear that the marchers were in fact yelling, ‘Jews will not replace us.'” The softened version of the chant would have made for an easier path to radicalization, he wrote: “I could have later explained more carefully the role Jews have tended to play in American immigration policy. And they wouldn’t have been scared away.”

The older White nationalists had been happy the internet brought in more young people, according to interviews with Heimbach, Parrott and Spencer, until efforts to speak their language led to enormous public blowback and violence. In 2018, Regnery reprimanded Spencer over the state of the White power movement, according to emails seen by CNN. Since the high point of the 2016 election, Regnery wrote to Spencer and other White nationalists, the alt-right had taken a “descent into banality.” He cataloged 10 embarrassments, failures and feuds. Several were the product of catering to the internet crowd.

A few days after Carlson’s April 2021 statements, Republican Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania said “many Americans” believed “we’re replacing national-born Americans, native-born Americans to permanently transform the landscape of this very nation.” That September, the campaign of Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York posted a Facebook ad that claimed, “Radical Democrats are planning their most aggressive move yet: a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION … Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.” Last month on Fox News, when asked why President Joe Biden allowed “virtually an open border,” Brandon Judd, president of the union that represents US Border Patrol agents, said, “I believe that they’re trying to change the demographics of the electorate; that’s what I believe they’re doing.”

Perry’s spokesman this week told CNN “any attempts by partisan hacks and their media enablers to label Congressman Perry a racist or an acolyte of any racist theories or beliefs are dangerous, dishonest, and downright disgusting.” Stefanik’s office referred me to a statement her senior adviser made this week: “The shooting was an act of evil and the criminal should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Despite sickening and false reporting, Congresswoman Stefanik has never advocated for any racist position or made a racist statement.” As for the border union chief, “neither Mr. Judd or the National Border Patrol Council had even heard of the replacement theory” when he made those comments, an agency spokesman said, adding Judd supports legal immigration. “However, changing the demographics of the electorate is something that has been spoken of many, many times in the past by the left.”

So, what do adherents to any or all these ideas want to happen? For those advancing the laundered version of replacement theory, there are policy solutions: more restrictions on immigration and voting — and what do you know, these measures could end up keeping many of them in power. For those who believe in the explicit White supremacist takes, the options are vague or distant, like dividing America into regions for different ethnicities. For the anonymous users on 4chan, from which the alleged Buffalo shooter seems to have drawn so much inspiration, the choices are darker.