How a Racial Conspiracy Theory Took Hold in America

Immigration and growing diversity have become lightning rods for white fear of “replacement”

Diversity is increasing in the US. Last month, researchers at the Hofstra School of Medicine published a study finding that, according to CDC data, non-white births outpaced white births in the US for the very first time in 2024. White births constituted 49.6% of all births, and the proportion of all nonwhite groups hit 50.4%, with Hispanic, Black, and Asian births being the largest subsets.

These demographic shifts have stoked fear in people concerned with maintaining a white majority in the US. One such person is Elon Musk.

Nearly every day last month, Musk took to X to megaphone his fears about race. As The Guardian reported, “the richest man in the world posted about how the white race was under threat, made allusions to race science or promoted anti-immigrant conspiracy content on 26 out of 31 days in January.”

On January 9, for example, Musk re-shared a post that read, “If White men become a minority, we will be slaughtered… [and people who aren’t white] will be 1000x times more hostile and cruel when they are a majority over Whites. White solidarity is the only way to survive.” He added the “100” emoji, indicating agreement.

In another instance, on January 22, Musk posted, “Whites are a rapidly dying minority.”

Musk has tremendous cultural and social influence. On X, he reaches an audience of over 200 million. He was the single largest donor to 2024 political campaigns — giving close to $300 million to Republicans and Republican causes — and he spent part of last year as a special government employee working alongside the president.

Now he is amplifying claims about efforts to “eradicate white people.” This fanaticism is tied to something called “replacement theory” or “white replacement theory,” a conspiracy theory according to which white people are under threat of being overtaken demographically and replaced.

The origins of replacement theory

Replacement theory can be traced to Le Grand Replacement (“The Great Replacement”), a 2011 book by French author Renaud Camus.

In a time of increased immigration to France in the early 2000s, Camus saw the growing presence of Muslims as a threat to French culture. Thus, Le Grand Replacement speaks of immigration in terms like “replacist” and “invasion.” Camus claimed in a 2017 New Yorker interview with Thomas Chatterton Williams that he is not part of the “extreme right.” He just “wanted France to stay French.”

Camus had previously written obscure novels exploring sexuality, so he didn’t seem like a likely candidate to start an anti-immigrant cultural revolution. But, in the years that followed the publication of Le Grand Replacement, France was experiencing a migrant crisis. This seemed to give credence to Camus’s warnings and boosted the book’s popularity among far-right groups across Europe.

French author Renaud Camus

Camus’s ideas would seem to have less applicability in the US, a nation of immigrants. Unlike Europe, where nations are often defined around a dominant ethnicity in its homeland, the US is a nation of immigrants. “It is ludicrous,” Williams writes, “for a resident of the United States to talk about ‘blood and soil.’” But despite this inherent tension, in just a few years, ideas from this obscure Frenchman would make inroads in the American political landscape.

Replacement theory gets Americanized

The theory’s meaning shifted when it broadened beyond Camus’s original application to France and took hold in the US. As it slowly spread through fringe corners of the internet and conspiracy-minded groups, a distinctly American version of replacement theory formed.

In Camus’s framing, “white replacement” takes place mainly because of geopolitical factors such as foreign wars and resulting migration, and it has the effect of cultural upheaval. But in the US, replacement is not spoken of as an unfortunate byproduct of unplanned cultural change. It is instead seen as a sinister plot being carried out by bad actors for political ends.

Tucker Carlson is particularly responsible for spreading the notion that Democrats favor immigration as a way of changing the electorate. Over the course of five years on his Fox News show, he made this claim some 400 times. In September 2021, Carlson told his audience that border policy under Biden, which caused an increase in unauthorized crossings, was a way to “change the racial mix of the country.” He explained, “In political terms this policy is called the ‘great replacement,’ the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from faraway countries.”

Carlson also said, “I know that the left and all the gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term ‘replacement,’ if you suggest the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate… with new people, more obedient voters from the third world. But they become hysterical because that’s what’s happening, actually. Let’s just say it. That’s true.”

Carlson claimed that this replacement is already in progress and will be “suicidal” for the US unless the country reverses the trend of nonwhite immigration. Other conservative commentators, such as Matt Walsh and Charlie Kirk, agreed, speaking of “replacement” as a threat to our democracy.

Walsh has claimed, “This isn’t a conspiracy theory… It’s just a fact.” Charlie Kirk echoed that view, saying, “The great replacement strategy, which is well underway every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different… They have a plan to try and get rid of you… and they won’t stop until you and your children and your children’s children are eliminated.”

Some elected Republicans, such as former Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney and former Illinois Representative Adam Kinzinger, condemned the promotion of replacement theory. Others voiced agreement. Former Florida Representative Matt Gaetz tweeted that Tucker Carlson “is CORRECT about Replacement Theory and what is happening to America.” Current Pennsylvania Representative Scott Perry said that “what seems to be happening [is]… we’re replacing… native-born Americans, to permanently transform the landscape of this very nation.”

Tucker Carlson

Just last week, these claims turned up in congressional testimony. Jeremy Carl is the Trump administration’s nominee to be assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs. He has referenced Camus approvingly, and in his confirmation hearing he defended his past claims about the erasure of white culture, saying that immigration “weakens” it. This led Utah Senator John Curtis to announce that he opposed Carl’s nomination.

Given that one of the major political parties is divided over replacement theory, it’s not surprising that a large fraction of Americans express agreement with its tenets. A 2022 study from the Associated Press and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that nearly one in three Americans agree with core claims of replacement theory, such as the idea that “a group of people are trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains.” Another 2022 poll, by Yahoo News and YouGov, found that among people who voted for Trump this was a majority view, at 61 percent.

Violent extremism

Replacement theory has contributed to a wave of extremist violence. Over the past decade, the manifesto of just about every white supremacist mass shooter has invoked replacement theory as the message the shooter hoped to spread in the world. To give a handful of examples:

In August 2017, at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA, crowds of white people chanted, “You will not replace us” and “Jews will not replace us.” (Jews have been a particular target of Americans who espouse replacement theory, often blamed for supporting policies that promote mass immigration and interracial marriage.) An attacker deliberately drove his car into a crowd of peaceful counter-protesters, killing one and injuring 35 others.

In October 2018, a shooter killed 11 people in a Pittsburgh synagogue, injuring six more. The shooter said he carried out the attack because he believed that HIAS, a Jewish nonprofit, was working to “bring invaders in that kill our people” and that he “can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered.”

In March 2019, in Christchurch, New Zealand, a shooter killed 51 people in a pair of attacks targeting Muslims. Forty-nine more were injured. The shooter’s manifesto, titled “The Great Replacement,” was exactly what it sounds like. This particular attack was referenced by two copycat killers in the US who carried out terrorist murders in California and El Paso before the year was over.

In April 2019, a shooter who attacked a California synagogue, killing one person and injuring two others, said he did so because he believed Jews were “destroying the white race” and was inspired by the Pittsburgh and Christchurch attacks.

In August of the same year, a shooter entered an El Paso Walmart, killing 23 people and injuring dozens more. Just before he carried out the attack, he shared a replacement theory manifesto online, referencing “cultural and ethnic replacement” and the “Hispanic invasion of Texas.” He turned himself in and was forthright in explaining that he was targeting Hispanics.

2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia

In May 2022, a shooter carried out an anti-Black attack in a grocery store in Buffalo, NY, killing ten people and injuring three others. He shared a 180-page white supremacist manifesto that centered on replacement theory.

Despite how extremists have interpreted and acted on his warnings about a white genocide, Camus maintains his cause. He spoke to The Washington Post after the Christchurch attacks, saying he had condemned the violence carried out by his adherents — but in the same conversation, “Camus added that he still hopes that the desire for a ‘counterrevolt’ against ‘colonization in Europe today’ will grow, a reference to increases in nonwhite populations.”

The dawn of increasing diversity

Talk of “white replacement” necessarily endorses a racialized, zero-sum view of the world. But in reality, white people are not facing an existential threat, nor are they suffering from systemic discrimination. White Americans fare better by essentially every metric for success. They have higher median incomes, much more wealth, better health outcomes, and longer life expectancy than most of their non-white counterparts.

As for the changing racial demographics of the US, they are not due to a conspiracy to decrease the white population. The fact is that white women in the US, as the Hofstra researchers found, “tend to delay childbirth, which often leads to difficulties conceiving and a decision to have fewer children.”

According to Census Bureau projections, we are roughly two decades out from a time when white people will constitute less than half of the US population overall. The bureau explains that this shift will be the result of declining white birthrates and growing minority populations (with the latter due to various factors, including higher birthrates and immigration). But even then, white Americans will still be the largest group by far.

White Americans are projected to make up 49.7% of the total population in 2045, which is roughly double and four times the population of the two next-largest groups, Hispanic (24.6%) and Black (13.1%) Americans. It is misleading to say that white people are soon to be a “minority” amid a non-white “majority” — “non-white” is not a uniform group. It would be more accurate to say that we are approaching a future in which no single racial group is a numerical majority.

The way we make sense of demographic shifts matters. Researchers at USC have found that how white Americans respond to news of changing demographics depends on how it is framed. When the data are presented in a way that positions white people as a dwindling minority, this “greatly heightens expectations of rising anti-white discrimination,” which isn’t surprising. “But, crucially, no other story” — no other way of speaking about rising racial diversity — “yields this effect.” The issue is a narrative that reinforces stark binaries and positions racial groups as battling one another in a struggle for power.

We do not need to accept the idea that gains by people of color, or their mere existence, will lead to white people’s losses. These assertions pull from the same scripts that have historically been used to convince us that we are competing along racial lines and fundamentally opposed to one another.

The ongoing diversification of the American population does not indicate a tipping point at which white people become losers. Instead, it may represent the dawn of a truly multiracial society wherein no single group is dominant, racial categories are less salient, and talk of racial winners and losers is obsolete.