Nearly two years before a bunch of white nationalists with tiki torches stormed Charlottesville, VA, chanting "Jews will not replace us," Donald Trump announced his bid to be the next U.S. president by proclaiming that Mexico wasn't "sending their best" to America.
"They're not sending you," Trump told his audience in June 2015. "They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs. They're bringing crime. They're rapists."
But it wasn't just Mexico, it was "coming from all over South and Latin America, and it's coming probably -- probably -- from the Middle East,” Trump spitballed.
They're not sending you, Trump explained to the U.S.-born Americans listening, they're sending a slew of troubled brown people. In other words, "you" are being intentionally replaced ("they're sending") with inferior substitutes ("people that have lots of problems").
After Charlottesville's racist "Unite the Right" rally shocked the nation awake in August 2017, Trump struck a sympathetic view of the neo-Nazis, declaring "very fine people on both sides" of the event that night.
Trump didn't invent the "great replacement theory" that U.S.-born Americans were being purposely replaced by immigrants, but he rode the racist narrative straight into office and then resurrected it every election cycle, repeatedly warning of the "caravans" coming for America.
So when Fox News' Tucker Carlson chose last year to begin making the fringe conspiracy theory central to his show, he was actually catching the same GOP wave Trump had caught in 2016.
“I know that the left and all the little gatekeepers on Twitter become literally hysterical if you use the term ‘replacement,’ if you suggest for the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World,” Carlson told his audience in April 2021. “But they become hysterical because that’s what’s happening, actually.”
But where Trump's appeal more-so implied the "replacement" was intentional, Carlson made the intentional engineering explicit and assigned the effort to Democrats.
“Demographic change is the key to the Democratic Party’s political ambitions,” Carlson said on the show last year. “In order to win and maintain power, Democrats plan to change the population of the country.”
Now, about 1 in 3 Americans—including nearly half of Republicans—believe an intentional effort to replace U.S.-born citizens with immigrants for electoral gains is actually commencing, according to an AP/NORC poll conducted last late last year.
More than 20% of Republicans "strongly agree" with that fringe theory and are "extremely concerned" by it, according to the Washington Post's Philip Bump.
Nearly 30% of respondents also believe that native-born Americans are losing economic, political, and cultural influence because of immigrants coming to the country.
And finally, almost 20% of Americans believe the U.S. election system discriminates against white people.
"As might be expected, those who preferred Fox News were more likely than Americans overall or than those who preferred CNN or MSNBC to agree with the replacement theory idea," writes Bump.
In fact, believing the great replacement theory isn’t even extreme within the Republican Party anymore. Based on the polling, it’s very nearly the majority opinion. In other words, one of the nation’s two major political parties has become a virtual cesspool of fringe racist conspiracy.
