Before carrying out his deadly attack on a Buffalo supermarket, gunman Payton Gendron claimed its customers belonged to a culture trying to “ethnically replace my own people”.
Eleven out of the 13 victims were black.
In a 180-page manifesto being investigated by police, the 18-year-old described black Americans and immigrants as “replacers” who “invade our lands, live on our soil, attack and replace our people”.
The ‘great replacement theory’ has been referenced by several white extremists before, including those responsible for the Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand and El Paso terror attack in Texas.
But it is also used in varying forms by people on the US Right, with some Republican politicians, candidates and broadcasters claiming Democrats are plotting to replace white people with immigrants to help them stay in office.
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New York attorney general: Gunman was ‘sick, demented individual’
What is the ‘great replacement theory’ and where does it come from?
The great replacement theory in its modern form takes its name from the 2011 book Le Grand Replacement by French white nationalist writer Renaud Camus.
Camus’s book lays out the far-right conspiracy theory that non-white people are ‘replacing’ white people in Europe and the US.
Believers claim this is being done in two ways, Dr Tim Squirrel, head of communications and editorial at the UK-based think tank the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (IDS), explains.
“One strand is immigration, with proponents claiming the government and other ‘elites’ are either deliberately importing non-white people or are powerless to stop them from entering,” he tells Sky News.
“In some cases this has an antisemitic basis, with Jews acting as the ‘elites’ who want to eliminate the ‘white race’.”
Image: Members of the Ku Klux Klan amid protests in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017
At the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where three people died and almost 50 were injured, white nationalists were heard shouting “Jews will not replace us”.
Great replacement theorists also believe non-white people often deliberately have more children than white people in a bid to outnumber them.
In his online manifesto also entitled ‘The Great Replacement’, Brenton Tarrant, who murdered 51 people at the mosque in Christchurch in 2019, repeatedly claimed “it’s the birth rates”.
Image: Brenton Tarrant in court after he murdered 51 people in the Christchurch mosque attack of 2019
Dr Gavin Hart, lecturer in criminology at Liverpool Hope University, describes the theory as “nothing new” and a “well-established trope that has been pedalled by groups on the extreme right for a long time”.
“According to this theory, the end result of an increasing flow of migration from Asia and Africa and forms of internal demographic engineering is a form of ‘white genocide’, in which white Christians would either be diminished destroyed or enslaved,” he says.
“There is, of course, no evidence to support this argument, but that hasn’t impacted upon its longevity.”
How did it rise to prominence in the US?
Elements of replacement theory have origins in the US that stretch back to the Reconstruction Era of the 1800s.
After the 15th amendment ruled that suffrage could not be restricted on the basis of race, efforts were made by white nationalists to discourage black people from voting to stop them ‘replacing’ white voters at the polls.
More recently the 1978 novel by William Luther Pierce, The Turner Diaries, has been referred to by the FBI as the “bible of the racist right”. Its plot centres around a violent revolution in the States that results in white people winning a deadly race war against non-whites.
Since then, the theory has become increasingly mainstream, with a recent AP poll revealing one in three American adults believe there are efforts under way to “replace native-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains”.
The same survey found this was more likely among people who watch Fox News, One America News Network and Newsmax.
US replacement theory also focuses on immigration from Latin America, with regular claims the Democrats want to open the US-Mexico border to encourage mass immigration from Central America.
Who has advocated for it there?
Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson has repeatedly referred to the great replacement theory on his show, with a recent New York Times investigation showing he has referenced it on more than 400 occasions.
Image: Fox News host Tucker Carlson in 2017
Republican congressman for Florida, Matt Gaetz, has tweeted that Mr Carlson is “correct about replacement theory as he explains what is happening to America”.
Since the Buffalo shooting and accusations of it being advocated by the Republican Party, he said he has “never spoken of replacement theory in terms of race”.
Elise Stefanik, however, the third-ranking House Republican for New York’s 21st congressional district, has made no efforts to distance herself from the theory since the Buffalo attack.
Image: Florida congressman Matt Gaetz at a rally in Florida in February
She tweeted on Monday: “Democrats desperately want wide open borders and mass amnesty for illegals allowing them to vote.
“Like the vast majority of Americans, Republicans want to secure our borders and protect election integrity.”
Ms Stefanik has repeatedly made claims Latino immigration is part of a Democrat plot to create a “permanent liberal majority in Washington”.
Image: Elise Stefanik on Capitol Hill in February
Dr Hart adds that while former US president Donald Trump “did not explicitly invoke the suggestion that there was a replacement conspiracy taking place in the US, he did invoke about people ‘flooding across the US border and fundamentally changing society”.
He recalls Mr Trump’s failure to condemn nationalist Charlottesville protesters, instead saying there were “some very fine people on both sides”.
“Very few Republicans have explicitly condemned replacement theory,” Dr Hart says.
“I don’t think we can state that the Republican Party is now endorsing it, but not is it going out of its way to condemn these ideas.”
What happened in Buffalo?
Payton Gendron drove 200 miles (320km) from his home in Conklin, New York, to Tops supermarket near Buffalo to carry out the attack, police said.
He shot 13 people, 11 of which were black, killing 10.
Image: Picture from the scene of the mass shooting in Buffalo, NY. Pic: AP
Gendron, who has now been charged with first degree murder, acted alone, wearing military clothing and a helmet cam that he used to livestream the first two minutes of the attack on Twitch – before the feed was cut off. He has pleaded not guilty.
Before he carried out the attack, Gendron posted his manifesto online.
In it he mentions beginning to use forums such as 4chan and 8chan as the result of “extreme boredom” in the 2020 COVID lockdown.
Image: Victims of the Buffalo shooting. Clockwise L to R: Buffalo victims Roberta Drury, Heyward Patterson, Ruth Whitfield, Aaron Salter, Celestine Chaney, Pearl Young, Andre Mackneil, Geraldine Talley, Margus Morrison, and Katherine Massey
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Dr Hart says: “One of the key places in which these types of ideas continue to flourish is in lightly regulated spaces on the internet.
“Sites such as 4chan and 8chan and certain other social media operators have created a space where these types of discussions can take place in an entirely unregulated fashion.”
He adds that while details are still emerging, Gendron’s manifesto appears “heavily plagiarised” from the one published by Tarrant in New Zealand.
“In both documents, replacement theory is explicitly cited as an idea that has underpinned these forms of abhorrent, extremist violence,” he tells Sky News.
“Both killers inhabited online spaces in which they were able to participate in the sharing of extremist content.”
