The dangerous ideology of the American right
Great Replacement Theory is nothing but a vehicle for racism and attacks on Jewish figures
In May, 18-year-old Payton Gendron walked into a supermarket in Buffalo in New York state and opened fire on the predominantly black shoppers. Five minutes after the attack began, the gunman surrendered to police. Thirteen people, 11 of them black, lay wounded, 10 of them fatally. The suspect’s motives? An 180-page manifesto he allegedly posted online drips with antisemitism, racism and white nationalism. It parrots the key tenets of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which holds that “global elites” are using immigration to supplant the white race. Although he targeted black Americans, the suspected gunman wrote that Jews were “the biggest problem” and could be “dealt with in time”.
The presenter of America’s most popular cable news show chose to skate over these facts. Instead, Tucker Carlson, host of Fox News’ nightly political talk show, said the manifesto was “not really political at all” and dismissed talk of his motives by suggesting the teenager was “mentally ill”.
Yet Mr Carlson seems familiar with the various iterations of the replacement theory. As the New York Times reported a month before the shooting, he “amplified the idea that a cabal of elites want to force demographic change through immigration” in more than 400 episodes of his show.
Fellow Fox News hosts and leading congressional Republicans sing from the replacement song sheet. Polling suggests one in three Americans — including nearly half of Republicans — are humming along, too. The Buffalo shooter is not believed to have watched, or been influenced by, Mr Carlson’s show. But with his huge ratings, the Fox News commentator has helped to bring the thinking swirling around the conspiracy theory — with the rougher, antisemitic and anti-black edges smoothed off — from the fascist fringes of the internet into more mainstream political discussion.
Mr Carlson has condemned political violence and suggested his concerns are rooted in worries about voting, not race, but such talk is still playing with fire. Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, calls the Great Replacement “the most mass-violence-inspiring idea in white supremacist circles right now”. This idea, she believes, “has superseded almost everything else in white supremacist circles to become the unifying idea across borders”.
Mr Carlson has some fans with real power, most of all, Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán.
When the American Conservative Political Action Conference was held in Budapest last month, Mr Orbán singled out Carlson for lavish praise as he railed against “the rule of the liberal media”. He said: “Programmes like his should be broadcast day and night. Or as you say, 24/7.”
Last summer, Mr Carlson spent a week broadcasting from Budapest, lauding Orbán’s Hungary as a “small country with a lot of lessons for the rest of us”. Mr Carlson’s paean to Orbánism was capped with an interview with its gracious founding father.
Mr Carlson and Mr Orbán have a shared dislike of what Hungary’s leader dubs the “international left” and “gender madness”; his government last year launched a further clampdown on LGBT rights. But the two also share hostility to immigration. After taking the oath of office following his re-election in April, Mr Orbán parroted the Great Replacement lie, warning of “recurring waves of suicidal policy” in the West to implement a “population replacement programme”, which aims to “replace the missing European Christian children with migrants”.
The two men also agree that one of the principal threats to “Christian Europe” is George Soros. The supposed danger posed by Jewish billionaire philanthropist — a generous benefactor of liberal causes and long-time bogeyman for Orbán’s regime — was set out by Mr Carlson in a documentary in January. Hungary vs Soros: The Fight for Civilisation praised Orbán and damned Soros in equal measure.
Mr Carlson claimed the philanthropist was “waging a kind of war — political, social and demographic war — on the West”, while working with the EU to “undermine democracy in Hungary”. Soros’s Open Society Foundation, moreover, was “trying to eliminate national borders, to oust democratically elected leaders, and install ideologically aligned puppets into positions of power”.
As US academic Cas Mudde told website Vox, such talk of governments being overthrown and “puppets” imposed in their place was “not just factually wrong but also… very much in line with classic antisemitic conspiracy theories”.
In a Fox News curtain-raiser for the documentary, Mr Carlson was blunt about the Soros “programme” to make societies “more dangerous, dirtier, less democratic, more disorganised, more at war with themselves, less cohesive”. He added: “It’s a programme of destruction, aimed at the West.”
The “conservative Disneyland” Mr Carlson believes Orbánism is building in Hungary is a sham. Orbán’s populism, like that of Carlson and their hero, Donald Trump, has no time for the principles which decent conservatives have long advocated and upheld: respect for rule of law, belief in constitutionalism and an understanding of the importance of strong, healthy civic society institutions.