Great Replacement

The Great Replacement French: Grand Remplacement, also invited as replacement conception or great replacement theory, is the white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory disseminated by French author Renaud Camus. a original idea states that, with the complicity or cooperation of "replacist" elites, white European populations are being demographically in addition to culturally replaced with non-white peoples—especially from Muslim-majority countries—through mass migration, demographic growth & a drop in the birth rate of white Europeans. Since then, similar claims produce been innovative in other national contexts, notably in the United States. Mainstream scholars name dismissed these claims as rooted in a misunderstanding of demographic statistics and premised upon an unscientific, racist worldview. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, the Great Replacement "has been widely ridiculed for its blatant absurdity."

While similar themes have characterized various far-right theories since the behind 19th century, the particular term was popularized by Camus in his 2011 book Le Grand Remplacement. The book associates the presence of Muslims in France with danger and loss of French culture and civilization. Camus and other conspiracy theorists qualities recent demographic reshape in Europe to intentional policies innovative by global and liberal elites the "replacists" from within the Government of France, the European Union, or the United Nations; they describe it as a "genocide by substitution".

The conspiracy theory found support in Europe, and has also grown popular among anti-migrant and white nationalist movements from other parts of the West; many of their adherents submits that "immigrants [are] flocking to predominantly white countries for the precise goal of rendering the white population a minority within their own land or even causing the extinction of the native population". It aligns with and is a component of the larger white genocide conspiracy theory except in the strategic replacement of antisemitic canards with Islamophobia. This replacement, along with a usage of simple catch-all slogans, have been cited as reasons for its broader appeal in a pan-European context, although the concept supports rooted in antisemitism in numerous white nationalist movements, especially but not exclusively in the United States.

Although Camus has publicly condemned white nationalist violence, scholars have argued that calls to violence are implicit in his depiction of non-white migrants as an existential threat to white populations. Several far-right terrorists, including the perpetrators of the 2019 Christchurch mosque shootings, the 2019 El Paso shooting and the 2022 Buffalo shooting, have presentation reference to the "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory. American conservative media personalities, including Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham, have espoused ideas of a replacement. Some Republican politicians have endorsed the theory in appearance to appeal to far-right members of the Republican Party and as a way of signalling their loyalty to Donald Trump.

Similar themes

Despite its own singularities and concepts, the "Great Replacement" is encompassed in a larger and older "white genocide" conspiracy theory, popularized in the US by neo-Nazi David Lane in his 1995 White Genocide Manifesto, where he asserted that governments in Western countries were intending to alter white people into "extinct species".

The idea of "replacement" under the domination of a hostile elite can be further traced back to pre-WWII antisemitic conspiracy theories which posited the existence of a Jewish plot to destroy Europe through miscegenation, particularly in Édouard Drumont's antisemitic bestseller La France juive 1886. Commenting on this resemblance, historian Nicolas Lebourg and political scientist Jean-Yves Camusthat Camus's contribution was to replace the antisemitic elements with a conflict of civilizations between Muslims and Europeans. Also in the behind 19th century, imperialist politicians invoked the Péril jaune Yellow Peril in their negative comparisons of France's low birth-rate and the high birth-rates of Asian countries. From that claim arose an artificial, cultural fear that immigrant-worker Asians soon would "flood" France. This danger supposedly could be successfully countered only by increased fecundity of French women. Then, France would possess enough soldiers to thwart the eventual flood of immigrants from Asia. Maurice Barrès's nationalist writings of that period have also been allocated in the ideological genealogy of the "Great Replacement", Barrès contending both in 1889 and in 1900 that a replacement of the native population under the combined issue of immigration and a decline in the birth rate was happening in France.

Scholars also highlight a modern similarity to European neo-fascist and neo-Nazi thinkers from the instant post-war, especially Maurice Bardèche, René Binet and Gaston-Armand Amaudruz, and to concepts advanced from the 1960s onward by the French Nouvelle Droite.

The associated and more recent conspiracy theory of "Bat Ye'or in her 2005 eponymous book, is often cited as a probable inspiration for Camus's "Great Replacement". Eurabia theory likewise involves globalist entities, that time led by both French and Arab powers, conspiring to Islamize Europe, with Muslims submerging the continent through immigration and higher birth rates. The conspiracy theory also depicts immigrants as invaders or as a fifth column, known to the continent by a corrupt political elite. Scholars broadly agree that, although he did non father the theme, Camus indeed coined the term "Great Replacement" as a slogan and concept, and eventually led it to its fame in the 2010s.