The Conspiracy Narratives of White Nationalism
By: Jacob Woolf
Tags: Antisemitism, White Nationalism, Conspiracy Theories, Replacement Theory, Cultural Marxism

The Conspiracy Narratives of White Nationalism

To combat the rise of white nationalist terror attacks, we need to understand the conspiracies driving them Jacob Woolf Sep 24, 2019·14 min read

If there is a single dominant strain of thought across the white nationalist shootings we’ve seen over the past few years, it is belief in the conspiracy of Replacement Theory or ‘white genocide,’ an attempt to shore up fear of immigration by convincing white people that it will entail their own ‘erasement.’ This belief is false, misleading, and very, very dangerous for Muslims, Jews, and all other potential targets of white nationalists. Combating this conspiracy is vital for the safety of minority communities, and to that end there needs to be a greater understanding of its beliefs and functionalities.

Since the rise in white nationalist mass shootings there have been numerous efforts in mainstream publications to examine and debunk the Replacement Theory. While I’m happy to see this increased awareness, I have decided to write my own due to these articles failing to properly explain either the conspiracy’s place within the white nationalist doctrine, how it builds on already popular conspiracy narratives, or its deep intersections with antisemitism.

I know some will object that I shouldn’t give this kind of conspiratorial thinking any kind of legitimization, and that discussing it with this level of seriousness can only function to spread it further. I understand these concerns, but we are unfortunately now long past the point where ignoring it is a viable option, and need a way to effectively combat its spread. Arguing directly with white nationalists is almost certainly a waste of your time, but if your friends or family come across these ideas you should be able to explain to them exactly why they’re bullshit and the extremist elements and aims they originate from.

Another reason people need to be aware of the dangers of this conspiracy is that white nationalists are never open and honest about their beliefs, and will always try to conceal what they really want behind a framing of reasonableness. Any time I’ve infiltrated one of their private online spaces, or read reports from antifascist activists who’ve done the same, an estimated 50–80% of the serious discussions have just been about how to disguise and package their beliefs in a way that won’t scare off ‘normies.’ By learning to recognize what they are hiding behind their buzzwords and ‘legitimate concerns’ you can immunize yourself and those around you from being pulled in. The straightforward version most believe is that The Great Replacement is a deliberate plot against them orchestrated by Jews, but they won’t admit this to you unless they believe you are ready to buy into it.

The dehumanization of minority groups isn’t limited to the political fringes, it has been an accepted part of mainstream discourse for years

Finally, although it would be convenient to act like this type of conspiratorial thinking is confined to the far right fringes of politics and internet culture, the truth is there are plenty of much more mainstream outlets, pundits and politicians happy to make winks and nods to it for personal gain, some of whom have spent their entire careers engaging in the othering and dehumanising of Muslims and other migrant groups that has been culturally dominant since the early 2000s. It is a firm belief of mine that without this well-financed effort carried out by numerous popular publications and news channels the conspiracy narratives inspiring ever more frequent bouts of violence could never have achieved such widespread acceptance. Recognising this and holding the responsible accountable is essential if we want to stop these ideas from spreading further and activating more terror attacks. The list of politicians and media figures I could mention by name is far too long to go into here, so I will stick to outlining the dangerous narratives their fearmongering has fed into.

Why Replacement Theory

The main function of Replacement Theory is to serve as a rebranding of the already established ‘white genocide’ conspiracy, probably nudged by the inherent ridiculousness of a ‘genocide’ that doesn’t feature any actual mass-deaths or violence. ‘Replacement Theory’ on the other hand sounds almost scientific, the kind of thing you could have a qualified round-table discussion on. It doesn’t even sound like a typical conspiracy, and can be freely disseminated without those doing so needing to out themselves as white nationalists. What’s important to get correct from the start is that the main claim of the conspiracy is not simply that demographics are undergoing changes, but that these changes are being deliberately engineered by a secretive, powerful group of people with nefarious intentions. And yes, this group invariably turns out to be the Jews.

The most common statistical deception of Replacement Theory is that it jumps from showing that non-white people will probably be a lower percentage of the total population sometime in the future to the entirely separate claim that this means there will be vastly less white people in total, even though the same models they use show that the aggregate numbers of white people will at most slightly shrink. No models have white people in danger of going extinct. And even the models that have the white population shrinking make an assumption currently being fiercely debated among demographers, which is that all children of at least one non-white parent will continue to identify as non-white, rather than be absorbed into whiteness as many racial groupings have in the past.

Replacement Theory also makes the rather unlikely assumption that short-term demographic trends can be extrapolated into accurate predictions of long-term trends going decades or even centuries into the future. Other tricks include finding academics to take out of context in support of the theory and just straight-up lying about state programs, such as Project Ireland 2040 or the UN Migration Pact, claiming that they’re really Replacement policies and hoping people believe this without doing their own research.

The Origins of the Conspiracy

Replacement Theory came about as an extension of another, already popular conspiracy, the gist of which is that feminism, civil rights, LGBTQ movements, and all other social justice campaigns of the past half century have been part of a deliberate plot devised by the Frankfurt School, a group of almost entirely Jewish academics who developed what is now known as Critical Theory. So goes the conspiracy, that failing to secure a communist society through revolution the members of the Frankfurt school decided to invade the West’s academic institutions, taking them over and using them to control and subvert the cultural make-up of wider society in order to make them palatable to their Marxist desires. Among the strongest recurring themes of the conspiracy is a belief that all educational and cultural institutions are secretly controlled by ‘Marxists’ for the purpose of indoctrination.

This comic isn’t so much getting Marxism ‘wrong’ as using its own definition of what Marxism *is*

The conspiracy is absurd on its face, but I should mention that anyone who’s actually studied Critical Theory at any level could tell you it woefully mischaracterises the beliefs and exaggerates the influence of The Frankfurt School to fit into its narrative. Likewise its definition of what modern Marxists believe is so twisted as to have a meaning completely divorced from the writings and ideas of Marx, Engels, and their contemporaries. I’ve written about this before, in the context of examining why people on the further right fringes keep labeling liberal capitalists such as Angela Merkle or Hillary Clinton as Marxists, and how they managed to arrive at such a flagrant misuse of the label. A notable Irish example was during the referendum to repeal the 8th Amendment of the Irish constitution, when a prominent Catholic publication accused the Repeal campaign of being a Marxist plot. ‘Marxist’ when used in the context of this conspiracy is often just a code-word for either ‘Jew’ or ‘agent of the Jews,’ though the person using the term may not be aware of this themselves. For the Neo-Nazis who drove the popularisation of this usage the ambiguousness is entirely intentional, as it allows them to disseminate their ideas while leaving a plausible deniability as to their real intent.

There is nothing new or recent about these narratives. For as long as there have been populist mass movements, those invested in maintaining the status quo have been manufacturing conspiracies to dismiss their public appeals and demands. The use of ‘manufactured’ here is deliberate: These conspiracies never come to prominence through normal social channels. Every time there has been groups of powerful people behind them, pumping resources into their dispersal in order to keep their own actions unscrutinised. This is why antisemitism was for many years widely known as “socialism for fools.”

A still occasionally relevant example of this was the response from Conservatives in the United States to the 1945 election victory of the United Kingdom’s Labour Party. Fearing the possibility of an electorally viable socialist movement forming in their own country, they quickly built up a grand conspiracy around the moderate social-democratic Fabian Society, who were and early influence on the policies and philosophy of the Labour Party. This conspiracy penetrated the American right so deeply that iterations of it are still found today, such as when the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for the United States Ben Carson claimed that the sexual assault allegations against Justice Brett Kavanaugh were part of a centuries old Fabian Society plot to turn the US into a socialist country. Many of the allegations currently made against the Frankfurt School are just updated versions of what was once blamed on the Fabian Society. Should the Jewish social democratic candidate for the United States presidency Bernie Sanders secure his party’s nomination, I believe we can look forward to a revival of conservative fears about a Fabian Society takeover.

A flyer promoting the conspiracy. Take note of the Frankfurt School and Fabian Society references, and who is depicted as the power behind them.

The most modern iteration of this conspiracy was for a few years commonly referred to as Cultural Marxism, but the word’s use has died down recently. This is probably due to the increasing obviousness of it being used as a stand-in for conspiracies about Jews, as evidenced by all the main supposed perpetrators and financiers being Jewish and the way it’s clearly based directly on the Nazi conspiracy of Cultural Bolshevism. Which itself was often used as a dog-whistle for the more openly antisemitic Judeo-Bolshevism. Proponents are constantly on the lookout for cultural phenomenon they can twist into ‘proof’ of the conspiracy, and have claimed that communism, ‘degeneracy’ (a dog-whistle for LGBTQ acceptance), social media, political correctness, advertising, and even the new Star Wars films as being covert weapons being used by Jews against the white race. It is often referred to with the safer, vaguer term ‘Globalism,’ which handily can be picked up by anyone and used to describe whatever grievances with the world they happen to have, unaware of the broader conspiracy they’re giving voice to. The conspiracy has been cited as a driving motivation behind multiple mass shootings, including the ones at the Synagogue in Pittsburgh, the Mosques in Christchurch, and the Workers Youth League summer camp in Norway.

Manufacturing a Villain

As a final detail, no all-encompassing conspiracy of this scale would be complete without a wealthy Jewish puppet master pulling the strings behind it. This serves a number of functions: It gives people a face to appropriate blame onto, which is easier than an abstract theory. It serves as a go-to explanation for both inconsistencies in the theory and opposition to its proponents, who believers can dismiss as duped agents of a higher power and thus avoid needing to engage with their arguments.

‘Cultural Marxism’ and it’s specific appropriation of blame on to the Frankfurt School of critical theory is a relatively recent twist on conspiratorial themes and narratives that have been consistently resurrected under differing names going back hundreds of years. And every time this conspiracy becomes mainstreamed, it finds itself a new Jewish bogeyman to attribute the concurrent social changes to. The most famous are the Rothschilds, but today the focus is almost entirely on George Soros.

It’s sometimes said that every conspiracy eventually leads back to antisemitism

One reason the chosen bogeyman is always Jewish is that this can serve as as a gateway to more overt white nationalist beliefs about Jewish people as a whole. Especially if the importance of their Judaism is not at first made explicit. Those responsible for mainstreaming the conspiracy may not personally hold antisemitic beliefs, but they are always at least aware that these beliefs exist in the public and can be manipulated for gain. George Birnbaum and Arthur Finkelstein, the Jewish-Americans responsible for transforming George Soros into the world-famous scapegoat for social ills we know him as today, have openly admitted that their claims about him were almost entirely made up to help Viktor Orbán win a reelection campaign. Once the success of this strategy became apparent it was quickly copied by other cynical and unscrupulous political powers, and has since engulfed much of Europe and North America.

Tying it all Together

Where Replacement Theory comes into this is the added belief that the master plan of these shadowy social manipulators is to lower the birth-rates of white people while orchestrating high levels of non-white immigration in order to eventually ‘breed out’ white people from existence, who will be unable to resist because of the social weakening implemented via social justice movements. The version that tends to be propagated in the open is rooted in Islamophobia rather than antisemitism. It states that immigration from MENA countries to European ones is part of a larger plot of which every immigrant who happens to be Muslim is supposedly involved in. Their alleged ‘plan’ is to move into secular mostly white countries and through generations of large families eventually form a population majority and take over. This is how the worldview of believers in this conspiracy can become warped to the point where they see migrants seeking a better life as a threat to their existence. In North America this theory easily maps onto one that swaps out hatred and fear of Muslims with South American asylum seekers, who it should be pointed out are often fleeing national emergencies directly caused by the interventionist policies of the United States. Once you pair this theory with even superlatively white supremacist beliefs, it becomes necessary to seek out a higher power behind it all, a power which must have both nefarious intents and self-interested motivations. And as far as social groupings go, the ones best able to fill this gap in the conspiracy narrative are the Jews.

This is where the conspiracy neatly ties into white nationalism and other far-right ideologies, since the supremacists who promote this theory believe themselves to be the only ones intelligent enough to uncover the Jewish powers behind it, and thus the only threat to their authority. To them, a world without white people is a world Jews can control unopposed. This is usually attributed to the supposedly innately higher IQs of white people, which white nationalists hold to be both the most significant marker of intelligence and rendered genetically immutable over generations.

Antisemitism: The “Intellectual Core” of White Nationalism

That’s me there, in a tweet from a white nationalist troll account. You should by now understand what they’re implying

One important purpose of raising Jewish power to fantastical heights is that it allows white nationalists to maintain their conviction in the inferiority of other races, even as they self-organise themselves and slowly win back the rights denied them. How else could someone whose entire worldview and sense of self hinges on a believed innate superiority to other races maintain them in a world where members these ‘lower’ races continuously achieve and strive, with one of them even rising to become the respected leader of the most powerful nation on the planet. Only by insisting on their being merely puppets of a higher order can this be squared with the lens they see the world through. It is for this reason that antisemitism is different to other forms of prejudice, and why it can be classified as an entire worldview rather than a simplistic bigotry.

That civil-rights groups run by black people couldn’t possible be capable of achieving victory on their own and therefore must be controlled by Jews was an argument explicitly made by Neo-Nazis like George Lincoln Rockwell. Rockwell was among the early originators of the conspiracy that the goal of this Jewish leadership is to ‘race-mix’ white people out of existence, which continues today as the Replacement Theory.

Open proponents of Replacement Theory will insist that they’re not antisemitic, but take a look at the sources they use and you’ll inevitably find them originating with people happy to state explicitly their belief that the Jews, or sometimes ‘The Zionists,’ are behind it all. If you’re foolish enough to wander into the comment sections of their articles and videos, you’ll find the audience mostly agrees. And even if a believer of conspiracies like these does not initially incorporate them into an antisemitic worldview, once you buy into the idea that things like increased cultural representation for women and minorities came about due to the plots of ‘Marxists,’ you’re eventually going to want to know exactly who these powerful schemers are and what they hope to accomplish. Without the Jewish aspect of the conspiracy the whole thing falls apart, which means that you can only go on believing it for so long before you are forced to go all the way for the sake of the world continuing to make any kind of sense to you.

I trust most reading this will take as given that this is all counterfactual nonsense, but even so it would be irresponsible of me to repeat these ideas without at least referencing a more thorough debunking than the one I have near the beginning, so here’s a video essay on Replacement Theory taking the main claims apart. In the wake of the New Zealand shooting the New York Times commissioned their own debunking, which does a good job falsifying the main claims but fails to properly account for how deeply entwined it is with antisemitism. This is an aspect that cannot be overstated: At the very core of white nationalism is the belief all evils present in the world are caused directly or indirectly by the actions of Jews. This is why a man decided to shoot up a Synagogue in Pittsburgh that was helping asylum seekers who his President and news media told him were coming as an invading ‘Caravan’ at the behest of George Soros. This is why Neo-Nazis marched with tiki-torches while chanting “Jews will not replace us.” As Andrew Anglin, editor of Neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer puts it: “The Jews should always be the beginning and the end of every problem, from poverty to poor family dynamics to war to the destruction of the rainforest.” Eric K. Ward, in his excellent guide on the white nationalist movement in the United States, refers to antisemitism as its “intellectual core.” Understanding this basic fact is essential to combating its spread.

It is in the interests of white nationalists to separate their ideology from the conspiracy narratives, intense hatred, and inevitable violence that must come with it. To that end, we must not allow ourselves to be fooled by their calls for ‘dialogue’ or dressings of ‘legitimate concerns’ or demands that they be given a ‘fair hearing.’ We know what these beliefs are, we know how to spot them, and as shown by both the shootings we have seen and the ones we tragically, inevitably, are going to continue seeing, we know exactly where they lead. If we wish to continue living in a tolerant society, if we wish for Muslims, Jews, and other minority groups to have lives free from the violence these beliefs are inspiring, it is absolutely essential that we combat white nationalism, both as the pernicious conspiracies it spreads and the common-place racism that allows it to thrive.