Fringe conspiracy theory refashioned by Republicans
Inside a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, a white man with a history of antisemitic internet posts gunned down 11 worshippers, blaming Jews for allowing immigrant “invaders” into the United States.
The next year, another white man, angry over what he called “the Hispanic invasion of Texas,” opened fire on shoppers at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, leaving 23 people dead, and later told police he had sought to kill Mexicans.
And in yet another deadly mass shooting, unfolding Saturday in Buffalo, N.Y., a heavily armed white man is accused of killing 10 people after targeting a supermarket on the city’s predominantly Black east side, writing in a lengthy screed posted online that the shoppers there came from a culture that sought to “ethnically replace my own people.”
Three shootings, three different targets — but all linked by one sprawling, ever-mutating belief now commonly known as replacement theory. At the extremes of American life, replacement theory — the notion that Western elites, sometimes manipulated by Jews, want to “replace” and disempower white Americans — has become an engine of racist terror, helping inspire a wave of mass shootings in recent years and fueling the 2017 right-wing rally in Charlottesville,
Va., that erupted in violence.
But replacement theory, once confined to the digital fever swamps of Reddit message boards and semi-obscure white nationalist sites, has gone mainstream. In sometimes more muted forms, the fear it crystallizes — of a future America in which white people are no longer the numerical majority — has become a potent force in conservative media and politics, where the theory has been borrowed and remixed to attract audiences, retweets and small-dollar donations.
By his own account, the Buffalo suspect, Payton Gendron, followed a lonelier path to rad
calization, immersing himself in replacement theory and other kinds of racist and antisemitic content easily found on internet forums, and casting Black Americans, like Hispanic immigrants, as “replacers” of white Americans. Yet in recent months, versions of the same ideas, sanded down and shorn of explicitly anti-black and antisemitic themes, have become commonplace in the Republican Party — spoken aloud at congressional hearings, echoed in Republican campaign advertisements, and embraced by a growing array of right-wing candidates and media personalities.
No public figure has promoted replacement theory more loudly or relentlessly than Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who has made elite-led demographic change a central theme of his show since joining Fox News’ prime-time lineup in 2016. A New York Times investigation showed that in more than 400 episodes of his show, Carlson has amplified the notion that Democratic politicians and other assorted elites want to force demographic change through immigration, and his producers sometimes scoured his show’s raw material from the same dark corners of the internet that the Buffalo suspect did.
“It’s not a pipeline. It’s an open sewer,” said Chris Stirewalt, a former Fox News political editor who was fired in 2020 after defending the network’s decision to call Arizona for then-presidential candidate Joe Biden, and who wrote a forthcoming book on how media outlets stoke anger to build audiences.
“Cable hosts looking for ratings and politicians in search of small-dollar donations can see which stories and narratives are drawing the most intense reactions among addicted users online,” Stirewalt said. Social media sites and internet forums, he added, are “like a focus group for pure outrage.”
In just the past year, Republican luminaries such as Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker and Georgia congressman, and Elise Stefanik, a center-right New York congresswoman-turned-donald Trump acolyte (and third-ranking House Republican), have echoed replacement theory. Appearing on Fox News, Gingrich declared that leftists were attempting to “drown” out “classic Americans.”
In September, Stefanik released a campaign ad on Facebook claiming that Democrats were plotting “a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION” by granting “amnesty” to immigrants living in the country illegally, which her ad said would “overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.” That same month, after the Anti-defamation League, a civil rights group, called on Fox News to fire Carlson, Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-fla., stood up both for the TV host and for replacement theory itself.
“@Tuckercarlson is CORRECT about Replacement Theory as he explains what is happening to America,” Gaetz wrote on Twitter. In a statement after the Buffalo shooting, Gaetz said he had “never spoken of replacement theory in terms of race.”
One in three American adults now believe that an effort is underway “to replace native-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains,” according to an Associated Press poll released this month. The poll also found that people who mostly watched right-wing media outlets such as Fox News, One American News Network and Newsmax were more likely to believe in replacement theory than those who watched CNN or MSNBC.
Throughout his presidency, Trump filled his public speeches and Twitter feed with often inflammatory, sometimes false rhetoric about immigrants, and he employed the term “invaders” in arguing for a border wall. Such language has been more broadly adopted by his most ardent supporters, such as Wendy Rogers, an Arizona state senator who last summer said on Twitter, “We are being replaced and invaded” by immigrants living in the country illegally.
Efforts to reach Rogers on Sunday were unsuccessful. Reached by email, Gingrich declared replacement theory “insane,” adding that he was opposed to all antisemitism as well as “the white racist violence in Buffalo.”
Carlson’s replacement rhetoric comes without the explicitly antisemitic elements common on racist web platforms. There is no indication that the Buffalo gunman watched Carlson’s show, or any other show on Fox News, and Carlson has denounced political violence even as he fans his viewers’ fears.
But there are also notable echoes between Carlson’s segments and the Buffalo suspect’s long litany of grievances, reflecting the blurry boundary between internet-fueled griping and lines of attack now common in conservative media and politics.
“Why is diversity said to be our greatest strength? Does anyone even ask why? It is spoken like a mantra and repeated ad infinitum,” the suspect wrote. The line nearly matches one of Carlson’s go-to attacks on Fox News: “How, precisely, is diversity our strength?” Carlson asked in a 2018 segment, one of many segments in which he has hit on the question. “Since you’ve made this our new national motto, please be specific as you explain it.”
A Fox News spokesperson declined to comment.
Amy Spitalnick, executive director of Integrity First for America, a group that waged a successful civil suit against organizers of the 2017 Charlottesville rally, argued that the broader promotion of replacement rhetoric normalized hate and emboldened violent extremists.
“This is the inevitable result of the normalization of white supremacist replacement theory in all its forms,” Spitalnick said. “Tucker Carlson may lead that charge — but he’s backed by Republican elected officials and other leaders eager to amplify this deadly conspiracy.”