A New Great Replacement

We must secure the existence of all people and a future for all children

On May 14, 2022, a self-described white supremacist named Payton Gendron, donned in body armor, a military-grade helmet, and mistaken lethal ideology, unleashed a torrent of bullets from a modified Bushmaster XM-15 rifle at a Tops Friendly Markets store in a predominantly black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, killing ten and wounding three. Eleven of the victims were African American. “Zip code 14208 in Buffalo has the highest black percentage that is close enough to where I live” he wrote, adding “Top’s Market is an area in zip code 14208 where a high percentage and high density of blacks can be found.”

The motivation for this bloodbath was Gendron’s belief in blood, literally and metaphorically. Here is his explanation on page 4 of his 180-page screed (“manifesto” is too lofty a descriptor) under the subhead “What do you want?”

We must ensure the existence of our people and a future for white children.

If these 14 words have a familiar ring to them it is because it is a copy-and-paste from the screed issued in 2019 by the Christchurch New Zealand mass murderer Brenton Harrison Tarrant (51 dead, dozens more wounded), who himself repeated the 14-word slogan originally coined by the white supremacist David Lane while in federal prison where he was serving a 190-year sentence for his role in the 1984 murder of the Jewish radio talk show host Alan Berg. Here are the original 14 words:

We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.

The reach and talismanic symbolism of the 14-word phrase may be seen when the number is rendered, as it sometimes is, as 14/88, with the 8s representing the eighth letter of the alphabet—H—and 88 or HH standing for Heil Hitler.

Gendron’s plagiarism of Tarrant continues when he writes:

If there’s one thing I want you to get from these writings, it’s that White birth rates must change. Everyday the White population becomes fewer in number. To maintain a population the people must achieve a birth rate that reaches replacement fertility levels, in the western world that is about 2.06 births per woman.

Here is what Tarrant wrote: “If there is one thing I want you to remember from these writings, it’s that the birthrates must change.” Tarrant then cites the replacement fertility level of 2.06 births per woman, grousing that “not a single Western country, not a single white nation,” reaches this level, leading inexorably, he declared, to “white genocide.”

Here is a screenshot of the opening page of Gendron’s screed. As we shall see, plagiarism is the least of his offenses.

In page after page Gendron cobbles together screenshots from a variety of sources, all converging to his inexorable conclusion that the White race is dying. Below I provide a few of the hundreds of screenshots in order to better understand the thinking behind this malignant ideology. In his own Q&A in the document he asks himself “Do you actually believe this garbage?” and answers: “Yes, I have never felt more sure about anything else.”

In white supremacist circles this kluge of bigotry is known as The Great Replacement theory, the title of a 2012 book by the French author Renaud Camus, who asserted that white Catholic French in particular, and white Christian Europeans in general—through a combination of immigration and higher birth rates—are being systematically replaced by people of non-European descent, most notably from North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Arab Middle East.

The US version focuses on African Americans, Hispanics and, naturally, Jews. Because he targeted African Americans in his rampage shooting, the media has fingered Gendron as an anti-Black bigot, but in fact dozens of pages of his screed are devoted to “the Jews” and their purported nefarious goings-on in America. After destroying “the high fertility replacers” first, of which he includes Hispanics, Gendron then says the Jews “can be dealt with in time.”

The Nazi Jew baiter Julius Streicher would have proudly featured these images from Gendron’s document in Der Stürmer:

Added to the mix are the usual suspects of conspiracy theorists:

It goes on and on like this for page after cringeworthy page, also railing against Asians and, not surprising to those of us who track conspiracy-minded ideologues, paying taxes. (“Until our nations are run by men and women loyal to our cause, taxation should be considered theft, and refusal to pay taxes a sign of racial loyalty,” Gendron writes, so “take the prison time, take the beating or even fight back. But do not pay taxes to anti-whites.”) Where did Gendron get these ideas? After claiming “I was not born racist nor grew up to be racist. I simply became racist after I learned the truth,” he reveals his sources:

I started browsing 4chan in May 2020 after extreme boredom, remember this was during the outbreak of covid. I would normally browse /k/ because I’m a gun nut and /out/ because I love the outdoors and I eventually wound up on /pol/. There I learned through infographics, shitposts, and memes that the White race is dying out, that blacks are disproportionately killing Whites, that the average black takes $700,000 from tax-payers in their lifetime, and that the Jews and the elite were behind this. From there, I also found other sites, like worldtruthvideos.website, dailyarchives.org, and dailystormer.cn where through data and exposure to real information I learned the truth. We are doomed by low birth rates and high rates of immigration. I never even saw this information until I found these sites, since mostly I would get my news from the front page of Reddit. I didn’t care at the time, but as I learned more and more I realized how serious the situation was. Eventually I couldn’t take it anymore, I told myself that eventually I was going to kill myself to escape this fate. My race was doomed and there was nothing I could do about it.

The connection with the New Zealand killer is then revealed:

But then after browsing /pol/ one day I saw a short gif of a man walking into a building and shooting a shotgun through a dark hallway. I didn’t think anything of it, but then I saw it again, and I looked up who this person was. I thought to myself, “Why did this person do it?” That person was Brenton Tarrant, and after some searches I found the 17 minute livestream of him attacking the Al-Noor mosque. I eventually found his manifesto and I read it, and I found that I mostly agreed with him.

None of this is original to Tarrant. This is classic 19th century blood-and-soil anti-Semitism and bigotry, on display throughout much of the 20th century and on into the 21st, such as at the “Unite the Right” event in Charlottesville, Virginia in August of 2017, when white supremacists shouted slogans like “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us.” Given that there are only about 15 million Jews in the world, Judaism employs no missionary effort at conversion, and birthrates among Jewish families are among the lowest in the world, why would anyone worry about being “replaced” by Jews? They’re not. They’re reflecting the conspiracy theory that Jews control the media, politics, banking, and finance, a belief that animated Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, in which the Nazi Führer growled:

What we must fight for is to safeguard the existence and reproduction of our race and our people, the sustenance of our children and the purity of our blood, the freedom and independence of the fatherland, so that our people may mature for the fulfillment of the mission allotted it by the creator of the universe. Every thought and every idea, every doctrine and all knowledge, must serve this purpose.

Even Hitler’s rantings were not original, as when he invoked the earlier “stab in the back” conspiracy theory, popular in Germany in the 1920s, asserting that the only reason Germany was defeated in the First World War was that they were stabbed in the back by the “November Criminals”—the Armistice was signed on November 11, 1918—who the Nazis claimed were Jews, Marxists, and Bolsheviks.

Even the “stab in the back” calumny wasn’t new. Elements of it could be found in the hoaxed document known as The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which purported to be the proceedings of a secret meeting of Jews plotting global domination, for which there is even a US connection: the American industrialist Henry Ford published his own conspiratorial tract titled The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem, which he subsequently withdrew from circulation when he found out the Protocols document was a fake.

In Part II of this commentary I will explore the deeper historical, psychological, and evolutionary origins of bigotry, racism, and anti-Semitism, so let me end Part I by acknowledging one correct observation by the disturbed Mr. Gendron, when he notes:

The greatest weapon a human has is not a firearm, explosive, or nuclear weapon, but the mind. We as humans are blessed to have such a powerful brain that can effectively solve nearly any problem that comes our way. Through logic, reasoning, and willpower, humans dominated the Earth. The brain is the most important tool a person uses everyday, and is the most deadly weapon an attacker can use.

He closed his rantings with this farewell and collage:

Payton Gendron symbolizes why we need police, intelligence agencies, gun control, mental-health awareness, and strict laws against discrimination and violence of all forms, but he also reminds us that this battle against bigotry and hate will ultimately be won in hearts and minds. The challenge is to convince people like Gendron that they are wrong. To that end we need to replace the old 14-word Great Replacement slogan with a new one we can all embrace:

We must secure the existence of all people and a future for all children.