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In a 180-page missive posted online before the May 14 mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, alleged gunman Payton Gendron wrote that he wanted "to spread awareness to my fellow whites about the real problems the West is facing."

The problems, according to the alleged shooter? Mass immigration and white people not having enough babies.

"This crisis of mass immigration and sub-replacement fertility," the 18-year-old white man wrote, "is an assault on the European people that, if not combated, will ultimately result in the complete racial and cultural replacement of the European people."

Though he did not call it by its name, Gendron was referring to a far-right conspiracy theory known as the Great Replacement, which says Western elites, Jews in particular, are bringing in immigrants to replace whites.

In addition to the Buffalo shooting that killed 10 Black people and wounded three others, extremism experts say the racist theory has inspired attacks on ethnic and religious minorities as far away as Christchurch, New Zealand, and El Paso, Texas.

French origins

The idea that nonwhite immigrants could eventually displace native-born white Europeans has roots in 20th century French ethnic nationalism. But the term itself was coined and popularized by French white nationalist author Renaud Camus (no relation to Albert Camus).

As he recently told the right-wing outlet Konflikt Magazin, he first came up with the expression in the 1990s in a small, medieval village in the south of France.

There, near "Gothic windows and Gothic fountains," were Muslim women in veils and men in djellaba robes, he recalled. "I was, of course, accustomed like everybody else to seeing the change of people in [the predominantly Arab and Black] suburbs, but there it was especially striking."

Camus said he later gave a speech titled "The Great Replacement" in a nearby town, and in 2011, self-published a book of the same title in French.

Though never translated into English, the book helped spur the launch of a trans-European far-right network with connections to extremists in the United States, according to Wendy Via, co-founder and president of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism.

"The ideas were picked up almost immediately, and they comported with other white supremacist ideas here in the U.S. and other places," Via said.

Describing it as a "plain fact" and not a "theory," Camus said the great replacement is simply "a change of people with a change of culture and civilization."

Extremism experts say it's more than that.

"The great replacement theory is a conspiracy theory that says that white people are purposely being replaced with immigrants, migrants, Muslims, refugees across the world, primarily affecting the Western European countries and the United States," Via said.

American proponents

The white replacement idea gained traction in the United States among white supremacists who adopted it as a substitute for their theory about "white genocide" as they sought to rebrand themselves as white nationalists in recent years.

"The idea of replacing is somewhat easier to understand than genocide for people to accept," said Michael Edison Hayden, a spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Though Camus did not blame Jews, American white supremacists have adopted his phrase as an anti-Jewish slogan.

Many Americans first became familiar with the term in 2017 when alt-right activists organized a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where activists chanted, "You will not replace us," and "Jews will not replace us."

The rally turned deadly when a neo-Nazi sympathizer drove his truck into counter-protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.

Link to violence

Camus denies his words have inspired violence. But extremism experts say the replacement idea has helped propel a string of deadly attacks by white supremacists on Jews, Muslims, Hispanics and Blacks in recent years.

Those include the massacre of 13 worshippers at a synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018; the slaughter in 2019 of 51 Muslims at two mosques in New Zealand; and the mass killing of 23 people, most of whom were Hispanic, at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, in 2019.

"It is a substantial influence on these types of attacks," Hayden said.

Hayden noted that before the replacement idea gained currency in recent years, most mass shootings in the country did not appear to be ideologically motivated. For example, the gunman in the 2012 massacre at a movie theater in Colorado suffered from severe mental illness and had no known extremist beliefs.

Now, shooters have found an ideology to justify violence, Hayden said.

"This functions in almost the same way that terrorists of all kinds are able to find sociopathic people or unstable people and fill them with a sense of purpose," he said.

In his manifesto, Gendron wrote that the person who "radicalized" him the most was Brenton Tarrant, the Christchurch mosques shooter whose 2019 massacre manifesto was titled "The Great Replacement."

"Brenton started my real research into the problems with immigration and foreigners in our white lands," Gendron wrote.

Gendron added that he decided to take matters into his own hands after "learning the truth" on the right-wing message board 4chan that the "white race is dying out, that Blacks are disproportionately killing whites and that the Jews and elites were behind this."

A Media Matters search of the message board found that users have mentioned the terms "great replacement," "white replacement," or "white genocide" more than 90,000 times since July 2018.

Camus has sought to distance himself from the shooting in Buffalo and other attacks allegedly inspired by the great replacement theory.

A Twitter account apparently linked to Camus said Sunday that neither the Buffalo shooter nor the New Zealand mosques attacker had referenced Camus or his book, rejecting the suggestion that his book was a call to hatred or a call to violence.

Going mainstream

The replacement idea is no longer confined to the outer edges of the far right. Increasingly, prominent conservative television hosts and politicians have faced accusations of using it as a trope to condemn "mass immigration."

One prominent personality accused of promoting the conspiracy is conservative Fox News host Tucker Carlson. Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Media Matters, said Carlson started regularly discussing the idea in 2019.

"It was a core white supremacist conspiracy theory that suddenly he was talking about on his Fox News show, and then suddenly, other Fox News hosts were doing the same thing. And then Republican politicians," Gertz said.

During a segment last year, Carlson said that Biden's policy of "mass immigration" is designed "to change the racial mix of the country."

"In political terms, this policy is called the great replacement the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far away countries," Carlson said.

In comments on Monday night, Carlson said the Buffalo shooter was mentally ill and not politically motivated and that "the great replacement theory is coming from the left" where activists and politicians push a demographic shift for political advantage.

During a visit to Buffalo to pay tribute to victims of the shooting, President Biden said he condemned "those who spread the lie" about white replacement. The White House has previously dismissed suggestions that it is promoting an "open borders" policy.

Other Fox News hosts such as Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham have charged that Democrats are seeking to bring in immigrants to replace Americans for political gain, according to Gertz.

In the wake of the Buffalo shooting, Republican Congresswoman Elise Stefanik has drawn criticism from Democrats and some Republicans for promoting the racist theory. She has denied the charge.

Continued here:
What is the Great Replacement Theory? - Voice of America - VOA News

BURLINGTON Two rocks were thrown through the front door of the Pride Center of Vermonts community center on South Champlain Street on Tuesday morning, the Center reported.

Video footage shows that at around midnight, an unknown person walked up to the Center's doorway and threw two rocks through the door before running on foot towards Pine Street.

The Centers physical space closed following the vandalism, but will reopen next week once the safety of the space can be more thoroughly assessed. Property management has responded and has boarded the front door and will be replacing the glass pane in the coming weeks. The door is also being covered by a pride flag.

All virtual events will still occur, and the SafeSpace Anti-Violence support line will remain open as scheduled, unless otherwise noted.

Pride Center of Vermont was established to advance community and the health and safety of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ+) Vermonters.

Burlington acting Police Chief Jon Murad says officers are investigating the vandalism with an eye toward the very real possibility that it was motivated by malice related to the Pride Center.

Burlington Police say they are investigating the incident as a possible hate crime.Police say that when a crime in Vermont is determined to have been maliciously motivated it may be enhanced as a hate crime, the perpetrator can be given additional penalties at sentencing.

Burlington Mayor Miro Weinberger said he was troubled to learn about the vandalism.

Our city is using its full resources to investigate who committed this crime and why," Weinberger said in a statement. Acts of hate have no place in Burlington."

This targeted act of intimidation and vandalism is not new to the organization. In 2007, the Pride Center, then located on Elmwood Avenue, experienced several instances of vandalism, including a brick thrown through a front window and graffiti displaying the words Burn in Hell.

In February 2019, the front door was plastered with alt-right propaganda. Since then, the Center has reported a rise in the amount of hateful letters and messages delivered to it's mailbox, increasing in the level of harmful rhetoric and threats. This attack on the Center comes on the heels of an escalated climate of anti-trans violence, including the murder of a community member, Fern Feather.

The Center said it is grateful for and strengthened by the solidarity of the neighborhood, where people informed the Center of the incident, showed up to help sweep broken glass, dropped off flowers and offered their support.

The community is invited to come together in "joy, celebration and resiliency" on Saturday, May 7, for the annual TransPlants Sale & Block Party from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at 255 South Champlain Street.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Pride Center vandalized, it's not the first time - Bennington Banner

Teachers have raised concerns about the influence of incel subculture on teenage boys, as a survey revealed that seven in 10 female teachers have been victims of misogyny in school.

The poll by the NASUWT teachers union confirmed a significant culture of sexual harassment and misogyny in classrooms, with almost 60% of those who participated saying they had experienced misogyny from pupils.

The union, which has 300,000 UK members, says it is deeply concerned about the level of misogyny that is faced by women, trans and non-binary members, and students, on a regular basis.

It is also worried about a lack of government initiatives to tackle the subculture of involuntary celibates (incels), warning that teenage boys are finding themselves drawn into their views because of a lack of support from other, more appropriate, sources.

The term incel is used for men who define themselves as unable to get a romantic or sexual partner and express online hostility and resentment towards those who are sexually active, particularly women. Discussions in such internet forums are often hate-filled and deeply misogynistic.

According to recent reports, Jake Davison, who gunned down seven people, killing five, in a rampage in Plymouth in 2021 has been lionised by the online incel community, and data has shown the number of visits to forums has increased by almost sixfold in nine months.

Delegates taking part in the NASUWT annual conference in Birmingham over the Easter weekend will debate the issue, after a survey of more than 1,500 female members showed 72% had been a victim of misogyny in their school and more than half (53%) said their school was not doing enough to tackle the problem.

The motion up for debate calls on the national executive to lobby government for misogyny to be recognised as a hate crime. It also says the incel community should be considered an extremist group, based on its links to alt-right viewpoints and hatred of women, and calls for further research into the effect incel communities have on young boys within schools and colleges, which will report back to conference next year.

The motion also calls on the union to lobby for fully funded mental health and wellbeing programmes aimed at boys, stressing the need for early intervention from mental health services.

Kathryn Downs, a secondary school teacher from Leeds who proposed the motion, said: A study in October 2021 suggested that there was a 6.3% chance of being suggested an incel-related video by YouTube within five hops of a non-incel related video. Given the amount of time our young people spend on social media, this is 6.3% too much. Clearly this shows the dangers of failing to support and improve the mental wellbeing of boys within schools.

According to the NASUWT poll, misogyny emanated from across the school community 58% experienced misogyny from pupils, 45% from the senior leadership team, 42% from other teachers, 30% from their headteacher and 27% from parents.

The majority of respondents complained of intimidatory, undermining or unprofessional behaviour (76%), comments about ability (51%), intellect (33%), body (32%), teaching style (30%) and clothing (29%), while 3% of cases cited sexual and physical violence.

One in 20 said the misogyny had been posted on social media including Facebook, WhatsApp and TikTok. Of those respondents who reported misogyny to their school, 45% said no action was taken and one in five teachers said they were not believed or their claims were dismissed. Two in five said misogyny had affected promotional opportunities and more than a quarter (27%) said it affected pay.

Participants in the survey provided a long list of examples of the kind of misogyny they faced. One said: Children regularly make sexist comments about womens roles in the home and in the workplace. Children making comments about feminism being a terrible thing and explaining it as man hating, or even the wish to kill men.

Another teacher wrote: Students exposed themselves during a lesson, sexual gestures, sex noises made during the lesson to intimidate.

Another contribution said: Year 9 boys asking in class if Id had breast implants. I have had my backside grabbed in corridor by pupils. Another said: My mentor when I was teacher training said he was going to tie me up and rape me.

On misogyny from colleagues, one said: WhatsApp group which included only male members of staff. A member of SLT commented that I was hot and several teachers agreed. Another reported: Senior leaders being dismissive and undermining of female teachers in front of male pupils. Male pupils ignoring instructions from female teachers.

Dr Patrick Roach, the NASUWT general secretary, said: It is outrageous that so many women teachers continue to suffer this kind of appalling abuse in their workplaces. Our schools and colleges must be safe places for all staff and no woman should ever feel harassed, scared or intimidated just by going to work.

A government spokesperson said: In no circumstances should teachers be subjected to abuse simply for doing their jobs. Any report of sexual violence or sexual harassment to school leadership teams should be taken seriously.

Staff working in education should also receive regular safeguarding training to support them to spot and handle instances of abuse and harassment among pupils or staff.

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70% of female teachers have faced misogyny in UK schools, poll shows - The Guardian

The modern environmental movement and the far-right movement might appear to be on opposing sides of the political ideology spectrum. But overlap does exist and researchers say it's growing. Christian Aslund/EyeEm/Getty Images hide caption

The modern environmental movement and the far-right movement might appear to be on opposing sides of the political ideology spectrum. But overlap does exist and researchers say it's growing.

At first glance, the modern environmental movement and the far-right movement including anti-immigrant and white supremacist groups might appear to be on opposing sides of the political ideology spectrum. But overlap does exist.

Researchers say this intersection between the far-right and environmentalism is bigger than many people realize and it's growing.

"As climate change kind of turns up the heat, there's going to be all sorts of new kinds of political contestations around these issues," Alex Amend said.

Amend used to track hate groups at the Southern Poverty Law Center. These days he researches eco-fascism. He says once you start to look at this overlap, you find two big misconceptions.

"One that the right is always a climate denialist movement. And two that environmental politics are always going to be left-leaning," Amend said.

Conservative leaders from Rush Limbaugh to former President Donald Trump have certainly denied climate change in the past.

But today, a different argument is becoming more common on the conservative political fringe.

On the podcast "The People's Square," a musician who goes by Stormking described his vision for a far-right reclamation of environmentalism.

"Right-wing environmentalism in this country is mostly especially in more modern times an untried attack vector," Stormking said. "And it has legs, in my opinion."

"Attack vector" is an apt choice of words because this ideology has been used in literal attacks.

In El Paso, Texas, in 2019, a mass shooter killed more than 20 people and wounded more than 20 others. He told authorities he was targeting Mexicans. He also left behind a manifesto.

"The decimation of the environment is creating a massive burden for future generations," the shooter wrote. "If we can get rid of enough people, then our way of life can be more sustainable."

Abel Valenzuela, local of El Paso, meditates in front of the makeshift memorial for shooting victims at the Cielo Vista Mall Walmart in El Paso, Texas, on August 8, 2019. Paul Ratje/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

He titled that manifesto, "An Inconvenient Truth," which was also the name of Al Gore's Oscar-winning 2006 documentary about climate change.

Anti-immigrant environmental arguments pop up in more official places too like court filings.

Last July, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich filed a lawsuit against the federal government. He claimed that the Biden administration's decision to stop building the border wall was a violation of the National Environmental Policy Act.

"I wish people like, you know, the environmentalists cared half as much about human beings and what's going on in Arizona as they do, or they supposedly do, about plant and wildlife, Brnovich said in an interview with KTAR News.

Brnovich argued that because migrants leave trash in the desert, a border wall is needed to protect the environment.

"We know that there's information out there that says that every time someone crosses the border, they're leaving between six and eight pounds of trash in the desert," he said. "That trash is a threat to wildlife. It's a threat to natural habitats."

Mainstream environmental organizations take the opposite view that a wall will harm ecosystems on the border. A federal judge ultimately tossed out Brnovich's case.

Workers reinforce a section of the U.S.-Mexico border fence, as seen from eastern Tijuana, Mexico, on January 18, 2019. Guillermo Arias/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

This strain of anti-immigrant environmentalism may be growing today but it isn't new. And that brings up another misconception that environmental politics are always left-leaning.

The truth is, eco-fascism has a long history, both in the U.S. and in Europe. Blair Taylor is a researcher at the Institute for Social Ecology. He said even the Nazis saw themselves as environmentalists.

"The idea that natural purity translates into racial or national purity that was one that was very central to the Nazis' environmental discourse of blood and soil," Taylor said.

In the 90s when Taylor started reading books about the environmental movement, he stumbled upon some ideas that seemed very wrong.

"There is this earlier very nativist, exclusionary and racist history of environmental thought," Taylor said. "It was very much based on this idea of nature as a violent competitive and ultimately very hierarchical domain where, you know, white Europeans were at the top. So that's been rediscovered, I think, by the alt-right."

Taylor was kind of horrified to learn that in some ways, the environmental movement was founded on ideas of white supremacy.

The word "ecology" was even coined by a German scientist, Ernst Haeckel, who also contributed to the Nazis' ideas about a hierarchy of races. This history applies to the United States, too.

A view of the Lower Falls at the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone National Park on May 11, 2016. Mladen Antonov/AFP/Getty Images hide caption

Dorceta Taylor is a professor at Yale University and author of The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection.

Taylor's research helped reveal parts of American environmental history that had not been widely known.

"We see a taking of Native American lands to turn into park spaces that are described as empty, untouched by human hands, pristine, to be protected," Taylor said.

"Environmental leaders are very, very at fault for setting up this narrative around, you know, untouched spaces. And to preserve them, Native people must be removed, the lands taken from them and put under federal or state protection ... so this is where the language of preservation really crosses over into this narrative of exclusion."

Taylor read the notes and diaries of early American environmentalists and learned that the movement to preserve natural spaces in the U.S. was partly motivated by a backlash against the racial mixing of American cities.

"White elites, especially white male elites, wanted to leave the spaces where there was racial mixing," she said. "And this discomfort around racially mixed neighborhoods infuses the discourse of those early conservation leaders."

John Muir was a Scottish-born American naturalist, engineer, writer and pioneer of conservation. He campaigned for preservation of U.S. wilderness including Yosemite Valley and Sequoia National Park, and founded The Sierra Club. Universal History Archive/Getty Images hide caption

The connections between environmentalism and xenophobia in the U.S. are long and deep. In recent years, some prominent groups, including the Sierra Club, have begun to publicly confront their own exclusionary history.

"We're not just going to pretend that the problem's not happening. We're actively going to do the responsible thing and begin to address it," said Hop Hopkins, the Sierra Club's director of organizational transformation.

The organization went through its own transformation. In the 20th century, the group embraced racist ideas that overpopulation was the root of environmental harm.

In fact, in 1998 and again in 2004, anti-immigrant factions tried to stage a hostile takeover of the Sierra Club's national board. They failed, but the organization learned a lesson from those experiences you can't just ignore these ideas or wish them away.

"We need to be educating our base about these dystopian ideas and the scapegoating that's being put upon Black, indigenous and people of color and working-class communities, such that they're able to identify these messages that may sound like they're environmental, but we need to be able to discern that they're actually very racist," Hopkins said.

It's common to come across people who say they believe in the environmental movement and the racial justice movement, but don't believe the movements have anything to do with each other. That disbelief is why Hopkins said he does the work he does.

That work goes beyond identifying the racism and bigotry in the environmental movement. It also means articulating a vision that can compete with eco-fascism. Because as climate change increases, more people will go looking for some narrative to address their fears of collapse, says Professor Emerita Betsy Hartmann of Hampshire College.

"If you have this apocalyptic doomsday view of climate change, the far-right can use that doomsday view to its own strategic advantage," Hartmann said.

In that way, the threat of eco-fascism has something in common with climate change itself.

The problem is visible now and there is time to address it, but the longer people wait, the harder it's going to be.

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The far-right's vision of environmentalism has long roots in the US - NPR

The overview of Matthew Roses A World After Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right (Yale University Press) in this recent column stopped well short of addressing the religious perspective the author brought to the material under analysis. I characterized Roses worldview as Christian humanist without much confidence that the brand name would be instantly recognizable. Indeed, to anyone shaped by the culture-war arguments of recent decades, Christian humanism will sound like a contradiction in terms. It might be the one point on which Jerry Falwell and Christopher Hitchens would have agreed.

The thinkers discussed in A World After LiberalismOswald Spengler, Julius Evola, Francis Parker Yockey, Alain de Benoist and Samuel Francis, a group whose work spans the decades between the First World War through the start of this centurytend to think of Christianity as the root of egalitarianism, liberalism, democracy and related blights undermining the natural hierarchy that should prevail in a well-ordered world. They are more culturally sophisticated than any given pocket of misanthropic xenophobes or mens-rights movementarians on social media, to be sure; otherwise, the world views overlap quite a bit. That similarity is not necessarily grounds for dismissing these philosophers of the radical right, but rather an indication that their doctrines have a constituency.

I finished my column on Roses book feeling not quite up to unpacking his Christian-humanist perspective but also wanting to ask him a few things. Fortunately, he was agreeable to the idea of an email interview. A transcript of our exchange follows.

Q: Of the five authors you discuss, only Oswald Spengler is a name familiar outside a pretty small milieu. What led you to this particular rabbit hole?

A: The authors I cover started to be mentioned by journalists in Europe and the United States in early 2016, during their coverage of the refugee crisis and the Trump campaign. It took only a little bit of reading for me to discover that there was an intellectual tradition on the far right that was different from what I had assumeddeeper, more modern, more philosophical, more reflective about contemporary thought and life, and more suspicious about the place of Christianity in Western culture. I didnt share any of their ideas, but I had to admit that this intellectual tradition sometimes posed serious questions. In March 2018, I published an essay on intellectual foundations of the alt-right in the magazine First Things, and the response to it was really overwhelming.

Q: Was there any model in mind in writing the sort of political/intellectual profiles that make up your book?

A: One of the hardest parts about writing this book was that theres so little scholarship on most of these figures. There are a few people out there doing great work, and I pay tribute to them, but I didnt have any obvious models for the book itself. I cite my old teacher Mark Lilla, and I would recommend his style as a model for how to write intellectual history for a wide audience. I should also mention Isaiah Berlin, whose books are really galleries of individual intellectual portraits. For me, the best kind of writing helps the reader to see the unity or tension between a subjects thought and life.

Q: You interrogate these mens ideas from a distinct stance that I characterized in the review as Christian humanism. That was, admittedly, guesswork, based on what seemed like echoes of Charles Taylors critique of secularity and Alasdair MacIntyres perspective on modern ethics. Heres your chance to set the record straight, or to clarify where youre coming from, in any case.

A: Good guess. I am Roman Catholic, and Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre have certainly influenced how I understand modern moral thought. But since my book is about authors that arent well-known, let me mention a philosopher whos influenced me, but whose name might not be familiar to many: Heinrich Rommen. Rommen was a star student of Carl Schmitts but was later imprisoned by the Nazis for his involvement in underground Catholic publishing. Rommen went on to write a number of important books about Christian democracy, which deserve to be better known.

My approach to the radical right is similar to the approach that Rommen took to his former teacher. [Schmitts work in political theory has been influential despite his membership in the Nazi party between 1933 and 1936. SM] I see it as inspired by a religious and moral critique of modern life, especially modern notions of equality and justice, which the radical right thinks are corruptive of the highest human aspirations, And here I partly agree: liberalism is unsatisfying. Our need to be loyal to a community or people to the exclusion of others, our need to inherit and transmit a cultural identity, our need to admire human greatness, our need to experience spiritual transcendencethese are needs of the human soul that liberalism cant satisfy. But they are real needs, and a culture that ignores or impugns them is inviting disaster.

Q: A recent Pew survey found that most regularly churchgoing white Americans (including those identifying as Catholic) voted for Trump in 2020. The former president has tapped into many of the same concerns as the strain of radical-right, anti-Christian/neo-pagan thought you analyze. This seems contradictory on some level. Any thoughts?

A: My book is about an ignored chapter in 20th-century intellectual history. It is explicitly not a book about what happened in 2016 or a guide to the new right in 2022. Many books about the far right essentially argue that it represents a powerful political demographic but also that its intellectually backwards. I sometimes joke that my view is the opposite: I think its a small movement but one that has some sophisticated thinkers.

Q: Fair enough! Do you have other work in progress?

A: I do. Right now Im going through Samuel Huntingtons archives at Harvard. Did you know he was writing about religion at the end of his life?

Q: Other than about a clash of civilizations with Islam?

A: Yes, near the end of his career, Huntington became especially interested in the relationship between religion and national identity. Im still working through a manuscript that he never finished (or published), and Im fascinated to see that he was thinking about theology. One obituary of Huntington reports that he said he wished to be remembered for his patriotism and his faith.

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Interview with Matthew Rose on 'A World After Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right' - Inside Higher Ed