The actions and written motivations of an evil, crazed mass shooter in Buffalo, New York earlier this month has forced the purportedly white nationalist phrase “Great Replacement Theory” to the forefront of the public consciousness. Ever true to form, the political left sees this as an opportunity to tarnish the right with the “white nationalist” label, seizing on aspects of the conspiracy theory that on the surface, if twisted enough, might seem remotely like things they’ve heard Fox News host Tucker Carlson and other conservative media and politicians say.
It’s completely dishonest, of course, but when has the left ever let actual facts get in the way of the opportunity for a good smear? To a *real* white nationalist, the “Great Replacement Theory” apparently involves a Jewish conspiracy to somehow “replace” white people with minorities. The wide brush they paint with is as nonsensical as the left smearing anyone who criticizes leftist billionaire George Soros as “antisemitic.” Pointing out evil from someone of Jewish descent is NOT antisemitism, obviously, but claiming Jews as a group are somehow “responsible” for some societal ill most certainly is. So we’ll go ahead and repudiate that from the start.
Further, the establishment media correctly points out the mathematical absurdity of the “replacement” concept. What, are white people going to be sent off to Canada or something? That would be horrible! No, simply adding people to a country does not equate to “replacing” existing members of that population. Duh, right? But does the phrase have a meaning beyond that simple, easily-knocked-down strawman? That’s what they DON’T want you to discuss.
Interestingly, the person who coined the term “great replacement,” a gay ex-socialist French author named Renaud Camus, doesn’t seem to be antisemitic or even particularly crazy. Read The Washington Post’s recent biographic as well as this write-up detailing Camus’ legal issues, which seem to stem more from the lack of legally-protected free speech in France than anything he actually said or wrote that’s truly hateful or overly off-the-wall. From what I’ve seen, even IF he overstates the actual problem, Camus mostly just doesn’t want to see Europe overrun with Muslim immigrants - and in my opinion and that of many on the right, that’s an entirely reasonable position.
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In other words: sure, nobody’s being “replaced.” However - and this is a BIG “however” - adding to a population does have its political and societal issues, and pointing out those issues is what’s gotten Carlson and others in so much hot water. Nevermind that manipulating favorable demographics has been a Democratic theme for decades. Don’t believe me? Check out my recent Twitter thread on the subject for plenty of examples. The hard truth is, starting with the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act that eliminated national origin quotas, Democrats have actively been prioritizing immigration from the Third World in a blatant attempt to create a permanent Democratic majority. Simply put, there’s a reason they want to make this a taboo discussion issue for the right.
Debating the 1965 bill, Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy promised it would “not flood our cities with immigrants,” nor would it “upset the ethnic mix of our society,” “relax the standards of admission,” or “cause American workers to lose their jobs.” But as anyone knows and plenty predicted even then, all of those things happened, and more. Instead of the vast majority of immigrants coming from places whose culture and values generally aligned with the existing U.S. population, over 90% now come from Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. (For an excellent, in-depth analysis of the country Lyndon Johnson, Ted Kennedy & crew helped create, read this excellent piece by former Breitbart editor and Trump staffer Julia Hahn.)
Of course, concern about or even daring to merely state that fact is automatically labeled “racist” by the powers-that-be in what has generally been a pretty successful effort to shut down such discussion. But is it really? Before going to the R smear, ask yourself how Democrats would react if Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had the ability to unilaterally allow massive numbers of nonwhite but commie-hating Cubans to immigrate to Florida. Call me cynical, but my guess is they’d act just like former Democratic California Gov. Jerry Brown and then-Senator Joe Biden did in 1975 when former President Gerald Ford brought in hundreds of thousands of commie-hating Vietnamese immigrants (spoiler alert: they didn’t want them). So it’s not about race, though the left loves to pretend otherwise when smearing the right. For many if not most conservatives, it’s about bringing in people on an as-needed basis that generally align with the culture and values of the existing population.
Conceivably, if you were to actually “replace” the entire population of a country with one dominant culture, religious tradition, and set of laws/freedoms with another population that has an entirely opposite set of all those things, the former country would become unrecognizable. Replace the inhabitants of a Sharia-law Muslim country with Christians and things would change quickly. Do the opposite in the West, and laws and customs would also change, and freedoms once enjoyed by the former population would quickly disappear.
So, while people themselves aren’t technically being “replaced,” their laws and their dominant cultures certainly can be if people who believe otherwise suddenly become the political majority. It’s a concept that Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban understands clearly, saying in a 2018 radio interview: “I think there are many people who would like to see the end of Christian Europe. They believe that if they replace its cultural subsoil, if they bring in millions of people from new ethnic groups which are not rooted in Christian culture, then they will transform Europe according to their conception.”
And even after the Buffalo shooting in America, the Hungarian leader doubled down, calling unlimited immigration “suicidal policy.” Said Orban: “One such suicide attempt that I see is the great European population replacement program, which seeks to replace the missing European Christian children with migrants, with adults arriving from other civilizations.”
Orban has got the left all hot and bothered by his rhetoric, worldview, and nationalistic approach to governance, but is he wrong? This sense of “replacement,” of foreign populations coming in and replacing the offspring your people aren’t having is, after all, a very real thing, and Orban has developed policies that encourage Hungarians to have their own children, not import everyone else’s. Is anything morally wrong with this? If a nonwhite place like Japan were doing it, would they generate the same uproar? We know the answer, because Japan is doing exactly that!
WaPo described how Camus, the person who initially coined the phrase, has lost friends and even his publisher amidst the controversy. This passage is telling in so many ways:
Longtime friend Emmanuel Carrère, considered by many to be one of the greatest living French writers and filmmakers, publicly condemned Camus’s views in an open letter in 2012. Immigrants should not have to act like “well-behaved guests” who are “grateful for our leniency,” Carrère wrote. In perhaps a typically French penchant for the existential, Carrère granted that while the world’s population grows, it “makes, I agree with you a thousand times, life necessarily less sweet, the neighbors more numerous, noisier, more harmful.”
But, he concluded, “what can we do if not push ourselves to make room?”
Even while acknowledging the societal ills unlimited Third World immigration nearly always brings, Carrere resigns himself to the inevitability. But why must we? Instead of having a reasonable immigration policy that wouldn’t spark conspiratorial talk of “replacement” in the first place, the powers-that-be choose to blame people who dare to point out what’s going on for the actions of evil, unstable people. For those of us who believe in logic, common sense, and a better life for our own neighbors and countrymen, it’s not going to work.
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