Great Replacement

The Great Replacement is a conspiracy theory holding that political elites are deliberately changing a country’s demographic composition through immigration in order to displace its existing population. It takes its name from Renaud Camus’s 2011 book Le Grand Remplacement.

Lineage

The New York Attorney General’s investigative report into the May 2022 Buffalo shooting sets out the theory’s history, and it is longer than the 2011 date suggests. The underlying argument about white demographic decline reaches back to at least the nineteenth century and motivated the twentieth-century eugenics movement in the United States and Europe. In the late twentieth century this was propagated by white supremacist extremists as a theory of “white genocide” — a conspiracy claim naming a specific group as its author. The “Great Replacement” is a version of that theory under a newer name.

The founded field on this page records 2011 because that is when the name entered use, not when the argument began.

Prevalence, stated precisely

The claim that “one-third of Americans” hold this belief is close to a real finding but overstates it, and the earlier version of this page repeated the overstatement.

AP-NORC, polling in May 2022, found that 32% of U.S. adults agreed that a group of people is trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gain, and that 29% were concerned that increased immigration is causing native-born Americans to lose economic, political and cultural influence. These are two separate questions. 17% agreed with both — and it is agreement with both that AP-NORC identifies as the theory’s central tenets.

Movement into mainstream discourse

The Attorney General’s report finds that what was for a decade a fringe theory has entered mainstream political discourse through commentary television, naming Tucker Carlson of Fox News as having repeatedly referenced it, particularly in relation to Democratic politics. The report cites a September 22, 2021 clip in which Carlson describes immigration policy as “the Great Replacement, the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from faraway countries”.

The previous version of this page put a specific number on this — “over 400 television segments” — in both the body and a connection description. That figure comes from a newspaper analysis that could not be retrieved for verification here, and it has been removed. The Attorney General’s report supports “repeatedly”, not a count.

Relationship to violence

The Buffalo shooter’s manifesto took this theory as its most prominent theme, and the report documents how he encountered it — largely through memes on imageboards rather than through Camus. The report also traces the further step some adherents take, that violence will hasten a racial confrontation, which is the link to accelerationism.

The earlier version of this page listed three attacks by location and year as connected to the theory. Only the Buffalo case is documented by a source cited here; the others have been removed rather than asserted, and belong on pages that can cite their own evidence.