For white nationalists, the theory of substitution – according to hundreds of publications, interviews and podcasts – now states: Jews whom Camus does not mention have evolved to be smart; people throughout the Southern Hemisphere have evolved to be less intelligent and have more sex; women evolved to be conformist and conformist. And here’s how this weird theory unfolds: Jews trick white women into having babies with colored people, and they trick white men into becoming transsexual, all in the service of making the population less white and easier to control. Sometimes they claim that the Jews are in agreement with the “elite”, but this is often just a code for the Jews.
Fascism has made some major strides in the last decade in the United States and Europe. Understanding how replacement theory is growing and spreading helps explain why.
Attempt to remove trash.
In the 2000s, white nationalists were disappointed with their portrayal as “white trash,” so their focus shifted to attempts to develop a high-quality academic cover for their racism. An important tool for this was the Charles Martel Society, founded in 2001 by textile heir Bill Regneri, who died last year. The group was very secretive. “I don’t know how you get information about this,” White Nationalist lawyer Bill Johnson told CMS last year. “I was told not to say anything about it.”
The Charles Martel Society is a secret society of white nationalists who consider themselves intellectuals. “The CMS is the heart in many ways,” said Matt Heimbach, co-founder of the Traditional Workers’ Party and said in 2020 that he had left white nationalism and was a Marxist-Leninist. Other groups have different messages: the Richard Spencer Institute for National Policy, designed to “raise the minds of whites”; Occidental Quarterly, led by CMS member Kevin MacDonald and presenting itself as a scientific journal; American Third Position, later rebranded as the American Freedom Party, led by Johnson with a “platform based on preserving our traditional European roots.”
“All different fronts have a specific goal of attracting slightly different groups of people,” Heimbach said. “But at the heart of it all is the same 30 guys.” Through this network, white nationalists created books and pseudo-academic magazines that claimed to show that white people evolved to have a higher IQ and commit fewer crimes than blacks and Jews who evolved to deceive whites. people to support diversity.
These false allegations were not just wildly crazy; they had a purpose in public policy. The argument was that racial inequality is a product of evolution dictated by nature – not by the rules and norms of man-made society – so that the government’s efforts to reduce inequality are doomed to failure. People cannot abolish biology unless they are Jews, in which case the boundaries seem, according to this propaganda, unlimited.
It was eugenics, a discredited concept most closely associated with the Nazis and at the heart of the forced sterilization of people of color and disability in several American states in the 1970s. But white nationalists, including Regner, prefer softer euphemisms, such as “group differences” or “human biodiversity,” their public writings and group emails show – as if opposition to interracial families is part of the same noble spirit behind rainforest rescue efforts. .
“We were going to be academically correct. Because we had science, everyone had to agree with us, because science, “said Matt Parot, who has been a public white nationalist since 2009 and co-founded the Heidbach Traditional Workers’ Party. The thinking was, “We just need to be more professional and academic, not dirty racists.” The CMS crowd gathered for conferences, and according to National Policy Institute frontman Richard Spencer, the message was always the same: “IQ scores, crime statistics, vote Republican.”
Republicans most often kept their distance, with occasional incidents such as the resignation of a senator’s aide after the revelation of his neo-Confederate past, or senators returning donations from a white nationalist group after a mass shooting, or a governor issuing a statement clarifying his position. on a segregationist group or presidential candidate who refuses to read or write racist bulletins bearing his name. “Selected officials view our views as a kiss of death,” Johnson told me.
The rumor is spreading in a dark online alley
Then in 2014 came Gamergate, which almost every white nationalist I spoke to said drastically changed the movement of the white power. Gamergate is complex, but the important part here is that imagechan 8chan welcomes trolls angry at calls for more variety in video games. There and on 4chan they mingled with neo-Nazis and a huge wave of young people entered the world of white nationalism of the elderly. Parot was 27 when he became an outspoken white nationalist and said he had gone from being the youngest person in the room to the oldest person in the room in five years.
The alleged Buffalo shooter appears to have followed a similar path, according to a document he published online. He went to 4chan for weapons forums and openly, but found / pol / – for “politically incorrect” – a forum where neo-Nazis dominate the discourse. “There I learned through infographics, s ** tposts and memes that the White Race is dying,” the document said. “I never even saw this information until I discovered these sites.”
The energy and flexibility of these 4chan people was obvious to many, including Steve Bannon, who ran the Breitbart news site in 2014. Bannon, who will later become a top adviser to President Donald Trump, told author Joshua Green of his 2017 book: “You can activate this army. They enter through Gamergate or whatever and then turn to politics and Trump. Bannon was not available to comment on the story, a spokesman said. But after Charlottesville, Bannon said: “I was of the opinion that you should condemn both racists and neo-Nazis because they get it for free … from Donald Trump,” he said. in front of CBS ’60 Minutes. “They get free travel. Because this is a small group, this is a vicious group. They don’t add value. “A few weeks earlier, he had said,” Ethnonationalism is a loser. It’s a peripheral element, “according to The Evening Standard. Some of the young members of the movement may have started out as” ironic “racists. In 2016, Spencer told me that young boys would come to him and say that they had originally studied scientific racism. Spencer, who was still in love with the new wave of internet racists at the time, wondered, “It started as a joke and then became a reality.” .
The trolls did not fit the suffocating style of the old professional racists, but found application in their pseudo-scientific graphics. Day after day, they published the same charts and graphs to show serious racial differences devoid of any context. The culture of excellence, combined with unlimited space on the Internet, meant that some publications on substitution theory were breathtaking, both in their contempt for human life and in their comprehensive details.
In 2015, Dylan Ruf killed nine people in a historic black church in Charlestown, South Carolina. Roef did not explicitly mention 4chan, nor did Ruff’s psychological assessment come into evidence when he spoke. But evaluation offers a window into this process. It says that during the “critical years between the ages of 14 and 18”, Rufus read racist information on the Internet, but did not have real-life conversations with people who could oppose the allegations. Ruf “explained that the more extreme views he encountered online were repulsive at first, but he became more and more accustomed to them as he continued to read.
When Rufus’ own explanation of his motives was published online, Regneri emailed other white nationalists that he was “struck” by his intelligence. “Based on Roof’s essay, he’s the type of young man we could invite to a meeting,” Regnery wrote.
The document, published by the alleged Buffalo shooter, includes the same charts that have been circulating in 4chan for years, and some of it has been copied from documents of other mass shooters. At least one of the diagrams cites an old white nationalist publication as a source. Another part makes the false claim that “Jews spread ideas such as critical racial theory and shame / guilt of whites to brainwash whites to hate themselves and their people.” Again, this lie is central to the value of substitution theory as propaganda: anything presented as a benevolent effort to make society fairer is in fact a vile conspiracy to hurt white people.
Prior to Buffalo’s shooting, Spencer had read a book with a similar thesis on Le Grand Remplacement, also by Camus – whose name is not common in white nationalist forums – and has since read the accused shooter’s document, he said. When an idea like substitution theory enters the realm of 4chan, it becomes mimetic in the sense that it is trying to reproduce and evolve. This is a gene. And in order to reproduce and reach more people, it turns into more depraved forms … It just goes down to this horrible place to reproduce, “he said. Spencer does not want to participate in the white nationalist movement, he said, but still believes “the race is real.”
How the old guard lost control
Of course, for outsiders, the pillars of substitution theory are a big pill to swallow. The white power movement knows this. At the Unite the Right rally in 2017, protesters initially chanted: “You will not replace us.” This was a deliberate political tactic. “As for the optics with the potential to reach the norm, I thought that …
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