On Saturday, a gunman murdered ten people and wounded three others at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York. The suspect, who is eighteen, used a weapon painted with a white-supremacist slogan and live-streamed his attack. Prior to the shooting, he also allegedly posted a manifesto, which relies heavily on the so-called great replacement theory, a racist conspiracy that has become increasingly mainstream in a number of Western countries, from France to the United States. To help understand that theory, and the dangers of white-supremacist violence more broadly, I spoke by phone with Kathleen Belew, an assistant professor of history at the University of Chicago and the author of “Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America.” During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed the alleged shooter’s influences, why the notion of a “great replacement” has gained a foothold in the United States and elsewhere, and how the media and political actors have used the theory to their benefit.
This theory seems to be useful for people in many different countries, and to target many different groups. Can you describe what it is, how it has changed over time, and how it’s become so useful to people such as this alleged shooter?
We can get into the textual background of the term if you want to, but it’s basically a new language for the same set of ideas that have worked to connect many different kinds of social threats into one broadly motivating, violent, and frightening world view for people in the white-power movement and on the militant right. The idea is simply that many different kinds of social change are connected to a plot by a cabal of élites to eradicate the white race, which people in this movement believe is their nation. It connects things such as abortion, immigration, gay rights, feminism, residential integration—all of these are seen as part of a series of threats to the white birth rate. One thing you’ll notice in the manifestos and in the talking points, really going back through the twentieth century, is this focus on the reproductive capacity of white women in maintaining the white race as a nation.
You mean the manifestos generally, or the manifesto last night?
Generally, and also the manifesto last night. The manifesto last night is also, broadly, copied from the Christchurch manifesto. [In March, 2019, a white gunman killed fifty-one people during Friday prayers at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.] We’re dealing with a genre of writing in which these threats are brought up to paint a picture of a race under siege. It changes the logic for some of the issues that we think of as capital-“C” conservative. So opposition to immigration is not simply about national security. It’s about the reproductive capacity of immigrants and the fear that the white race will be overwhelmed and eradicated by intermixing. It is seen as an apocalyptic threat to their race.
The “great replacement” comes about relatively recently from “The Camp of the Saints,” a novel that depicts a surge of migrants that usurps European culture. But it’s really the same ideology as the New World Order conspiracy, the idea of the Zionist occupational government—which is how people talked about this in the nineteen-eighties and early nineties. We see versions of this going all the way back to the eugenics movement in the early twentieth century, the writings of Madison Grant, and things such as “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” All of these are the same set of beliefs packaged with the cultural context at the time.
The French origins interest me, because it seems like you can plug in these different “enemy” groups in different places, right?
Absolutely.
It can be Muslims in France, and it can be Mexican Americans in the United States, or African Americans. Can you talk a little bit about that?
It allows an opportunism in selecting enemies so that you can tack to the scapegoat of a particular time and place, but it also follows the central motivating logic, which is to protect the thing on the inside, regardless of the enemy on the outside. It’s about the fundamental importance of the preservation and birth rate of the white race. So the elements that are consistent across time are the idea that the white race can be threatened by intermixing and the idea that there is some kind of evil, élite force interested in eradicating it.
It’s not just about passive demographic change, and the news stories we see pretty often about when a county or a city or the nation will no longer be majority white. It’s about an apocalyptic threat perpetrated by what these conspiracists think of as a cabal. They see, for instance, abortion as a scheme to lower the white birth rate. They see residential integration as a scheme to lower the white birth rate. They see feminism as a scheme to keep white women out of the home and lower the white birth rate.
Who do they think is running this cabal? Is there any intellectual interest to that, or is it irrelevant?
The evil élites are typically rendered as Jewish, and I use that word “cabal” knowing that it tends to invoke an idea of Jewish élites. But this movement is also generally distrustful of all kinds of élites. Sometimes it’s about the United Nations as the élites trying to wage this war on the white birth rate. Sometimes it’s about global outsiders. But there is a heavy current of anti-Semitism that links the idea of the manipulative élite with Jewish conspirators.
When people such as Tucker Carlson try to do the “respectable” version of this, they often say, Oh, we’re worried about illegal immigration, and they pretend that they’re not saying something quite as bad as what they mean. It’s almost always about immigrants, not African Americans. I assumed that was because it would be hard to pretend that African Americans haven’t been here for a long time. Is this shooter’s focus on African Americans notable in any way?
The “great replacement” comes from that novel, “The Camp of the Saints,” which is specifically about the threat of immigration. So it comes up a lot in the manifesto of the Christchurch shooter, who was focussed on immigrants as his victims. This document that has been circulated that we believe to be the manifesto of the shooter in Buffalo is largely drawn from the Christchurch manifesto. The anti-immigration rhetoric is sort of being used as the frame for an act on African Americans.
In the past few years, we’ve had a series of mass attacks employing this ideology on different kinds of victim groups: the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh, the El Paso shooting of Latino folks at a Walmart. The Christchurch shooting targeted Muslim congregations in New Zealand. The Charleston shooting by Dylann Roof targeted African Americans in a church. All of those gunmen share an ideology. They are using the same framing language in their manifestos. They’re all identifiable as white-power gunmen. This is a movement with a long history.
When you say “movement,” does that imply a structure or something with leadership?
When I say “movement,” what I’m talking about is a set of groups and actors who are working with a common ideology and with interpersonal connections toward the same end. As a historian, I don’t think we’ll be able to see the interconnections for at least another ten years. But there’s good reason to think that they are there because this movement works the same way now as it has since the late nineteen-seventies, and there’s been no decisive change in how we’ve prosecuted or surveilled the movement. There’s no reason for it to change its method of organizing.
What we’ve seen in the earlier period is broad-based interconnection of money; weapons; exchange of ideas; travel between groups; people with multiple memberships; people changing memberships; and social connections such as marriages, churches, counselling services, picking each other up from the airport, staying with each other when they come through town. It’s a deeply networked social movement. It’s been using the Internet in one way or another since the nineteen-eighties. It’s the same movement that has perpetrated a long string of racially motivated attacks, including the Oklahoma City bombing. And we’ve never had a moment of coming to terms with it or of dedicating sufficient resources to stopping its activity.
I know you said that this manifesto was essentially plagiarized from the Christchurch manifesto. Was there anything unique about this one that you think is important, or is it basically just the same old story?
The Christchurch, El Paso, and Buffalo manifestos are increasingly seen as tactical documents. This is one of the reasons that I would encourage people who are nonexperts to not post or share these documents. A lot of them are dedicated to things such as selecting weapons and protective gear, assessing the target, where to strike—things that are meant as instructional materials for other potential shooters.
We see a very clear connection between the gunman in New Zealand and the alleged Buffalo shooter, both in the use of the manifesto itself and in the live streaming, and he says that the New Zealand shooter is the sort of inspiration for his action. So there’s a clear through line, and there’s also a genre change toward the tactical in the manifesto itself. But that’s not entirely new, either. This movement has been figuring out how to share tactical information in similar ways. But the live streaming is new, and the radicalizing capacity of the manifesto document and the live stream together are very new and concerning.
Tucker Carlson is often discussed as the most prominent person who has mainstreamed this ideology. Is that your sense as well? More broadly, are there certain things you look for? There are a lot of politicians in America who rail against immigration in racist ways. Are there tipoffs or coded language that suggest people are talking more about a “great replacement” than just about immigration? How do you differentiate those things?
We’re operating on a continuum rather than in two camps of ideology. It’s very difficult to think Tucker Carlson and others who are using the words “great replacement” don’t have some knowledge of what they’re doing, or of the consequences in radicalized groups. There’s no way to think about “great replacement” as a phrase separated from its long record of violent acts against communities of color and its broader project of undermining democracy in the United States. There’s a section about this in the manifesto, which I think will be an interesting one for experts to look at. It’s about how democracy is effectively mob rule, and how acts like this are meant to bring order back.
This is a fundamentally anti-democratic movement that’s interested in overthrowing the U.S. government and creating a race war. So that’s the fringe. The militant right would like to do that. This shooter was interested in that, and the people who have perpetrated this string of violent acts are interested in that. The big question for us is how to draw the connection between extremist acts of violence by militant right-wing actors and what’s going on in our political mainstream.
It’s very complicated, but here’s the thing: either Tucker Carlson and others, like Stephen Miller, like Donald Trump himself, are invoking this language in order to gin up frustration, violence, anger, and acts like this for their own purposes, or there’s a degree of sincere belief. I’m not in a position to know which one of those it is. I don’t know whether somebody like Stephen Miller, who was circulating “The Camp of the Saints,” did that because he earnestly believes in the ideas that are in it, or whether it’s an operational, opportunistic move to access this particular, very active segment of extremist fervor. It’s hard to know.
But, at another level, it doesn’t matter, because once that is ginned up it does not go away. It is not containable, and there will definitely be shootings like this. So the question is: how do we deal with things like January 6th, where we see these same groups participating, although in a small number, in a major attack on the Capitol? The long record of the white-power movement gives us a long history in which these two kinds of violence are deeply intertwined. By that, I mean mass attacks on vulnerable communities on the one hand, and major show-of-force recruitment violence, like January 6th, on the other. These are part of the same story, and our capacity to see them as such is going to be key in mounting a real response.
