Replacement Conspiracy Theory and Aotearoa

This episode of Unsettling Extremism is a little bit different than what you're used to today, rather  than talking to a scholar about their research we are taking on a particular topic, great replacement conspiracy theory. As the research center charged with countering and preventing violent extremism, I wanted to take a closer look at how this conspiracy theory relates specifically to an Aotearoa context to do this. I had conversations with some of Aotearoa, leading experts on the topic. First, I spoke to Dr Max Soar, Research Fellow at He Whenua Tarikura, who has seen the way the replacement conspiracy theory shows up in Aotearoa through his research on how white supremacist dynamics show up in politics and science. Then, I had a group conversation with the esteemed scholars, Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies, Paul Morris of Victoria University and distinguished Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Paul Spoonley from Massey University, who share with us their understandings of replacement conspiracy theory and its local manifestations. 

References 

The Venomous Rhetorical Web of Far-Right Terrorists by Julia Kupper https://gnet-research.org/2022/10/17/the-venomous-rhetorical-web-of-far-right-terrorists/

Fear:  New Zealand's Hostile Underworld of Extremists by Byron Clark
https://www.harpercollins.co.nz/9781775542308/fear/

Histories of Hate: The Radical Right in Aotearoa New Zealand, Edited by
Matthew Cunningham, Marinus La Rooij and Paul Spoonley

Edelman Trust Barometer 2025 https://acumennz.com/acumen-edelman-trust-barometer/acumen-edelman-trust-barometer-2025/

The Great Replacement’: The Violent Consequences of Mainstreamed Extremism by Institute of Strategic Dialogue,  https://www.isdglobal.org/isd-publications/the-great-replacement-the-violent-consequences-of-mainstreamed-extremism/

The Jan. 6 Insurrectionists Aren’t Who You Think They Are by Robert Pape of Chicago Project on Security & Threats https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/01/06/trump-capitol-insurrection-january-6-insurrectionists-great-replacement-white-nationalism/

UK Islamophobic assaults surged by 73% in 2024, anti-hate crime charity reports by Aamna Mohdin and Chris Osuh in the Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/feb/19/uk-islamophobic-assaults-surged-by-73-in-2024-anti-hate-charity-reports

Transcript

Unsettling Extremism Episode 9 

Replacement Conspiracy Theory And Aotearoa  

Avery Smith  00:10 

Kia ora koutou listeners, this is Avery, and I wanted to let you know that this episode of Unsettling Extremism is a little bit different than what you're used to today, rather  than talking about research we are taking on a particular topic, great replacement conspiracy theory. As the research center charged with countering and preventing violent extremism, I wanted to take a closer look at how this conspiracy theory relates specifically to an Aotearoa context to do this. I had conversations with some of Aotearoa, leading experts on the topic. First, I spoke to Dr Max Soar, Research Fellow at He Whenua Tarikura, who has seen the way the replacement conspiracy theory shows up in Aotearoa through his research on how white supremacist dynamics show up in politics and science. Then, I had a group conversation with the esteemed scholars, emeritus professor of religious studies, Paul Morris of Victoria University and distinguished emeritus professor of sociology, Paul Spoonley from Massey University, who share with us their understandings of replacement conspiracy theory and its local manifestations.  

But before I get into what they had to say, I want to give you a brief overview of what replacement conspiracy theory is, so the conversations we have later make more sense.  You've probably heard of replacement conspiracy theory before. Some call it great replacement theory, but if you're like me, you probably wrote it off as fringe the domain of white supremacists. Unfortunately, this conspiracy theory has made its way from the margins to the center on a global scale in the last several years. Although the ideas that make up replacement conspiracy theory are reprehensible, we can't ignore it, because it's become a mobilizing force for a global shift to the right for political and social changes and has been the impetus for violence and murder of targeted communities.  

Those of us in Aotearoa are familiar with its consequences, because it's what drove the shooter in the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks to kill 51 innocent people in their place of worship. Its influence was so great that the shooter named his manifesto the great replacement after these ideas, the story of replacement conspiracy theory is both old and new. The racist ideas that underpin replacement conspiracy theory have been around for centuries, as long as the notion of race. Replacement conspiracy theory is a repackaging of these ideas under a catchy and alarmist heading. Here are a few things you need to know about replacement conspiracy theory.  

First, it's a far-right white nationalist and identitarian conspiracy theory that claims immigrants are taking over western or white dominated countries, amounting to quote unquote white genocide, or quote unquote replacement through substitution. According to this theory, this is being accomplished through immigration, differential birth rates between whites and non-whites, and a social push for multiculturalism. Central to this notion is the quote unquote incompatibility of and assumed inferiority of non white, non-Christian cultures. This theory asserts this is an organized takeover meant to seize power and overthrow Western countries. The most recent version of replacement conspiracy theory is focused on Muslims from Africa and the Middle East. But this conspiracy theory has proved to be elastic. It has since been contorted to include Jews as the elites which orchestrate mass immigration. It has been used as justification by terrorists to kill Muslims and Jews, Latinos and Black Americans, or really anyone who will bring attention to this cause. Using this perverse logic, anyone who wasn't white or wasn't Christian, be came a threat. Additionally, LGBTQIA people and Feminists can also be targets of this conspiracy theory, which positions them as going against prescribed gender roles and lowering the birth rate of the white population.  

Second, it relies on fear as a way to attract and galvanize followers, which is exactly what makes it so dangerous. Believers of replacement conspiracy theory fear being replaced that their way of life will be destroyed and losing what they feel entitled to. The fear of this can lead people to take extreme measures. Not everyone who believes in replacement conspiracy theory will turn to terrorism, but we have already seen the devastating impacts of those who have.   

Third the term great replacement theory was popularized by French writer Renaud Camus, known for his steamy gay sex diary Tricks and his travel writing prior to this, he popularized the term when he self published the grand replacement in 2011 according to a 2019 study by the Institute of Strategic dialog, Camus was the top influencer of ideas on replacement conspiracy theory on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, beating out president of the US Trump, who came in eighth. Camus, got the idea for great replacement theory when he was writing a travel piece in Heralt, a small area in France that contained a medieval village complete with a church and a fountain. It was there that he saw Muslim women in veils amongst the medieval architecture in quintessentially French surroundings, and it shook him to his core. The changing demographic of this town made him fear the replacement of French people, French culture and Christianity in his homeland. In short, he freaked out about Muslims in the French countryside, and wrote a book about it, which has since been picked up by white supremacists, identitarians and the far right.  

Replacement conspiracy theory is fatal as it's been the inspiration for mass shootings worldwide, including the Christchurch shooting here in New Zealand, according to Julia Cooper's article on GNET, between 2011 and 2022 10 mass shootings motivated by race or ethnicity have taken place worldwide. We know the Christchurch shooter's actions were motivated by replacement conspiracy theory, and that he was the inspiration for future shootings, including one that targeted Latinos at Walmart in El Paso Texas later in 2019 and the Buffalo shooter in 2022 who targeted Black Americans in a supermarket. Replacement conspiracy theory was also the motivation for a gunman that targeted Jews at their synagogue in Poway, California in 2022. But even before the Christchurch shooter, replacement conspiracy theory motivated mass shootings in 2011 the same year Camus published his screed, mass shootings took place at a mosque in Quebec City, Canada, and a mass shooting and bombing in Oslo Norway.  A year before Christchurch in 2018 there was an attack at a Pittsburgh synagogue that was also motivated by replacement conspiracy theory. Fifth, this once fringe theory has crept into the political mainstream worldwide. World leaders such as Trump in the US, Orbán from Hungary, Le Pen from France, and Meloni of Italy, are just some leaders that support principles of replacement conspiracy theory. You might be familiar with the unite the right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017 you know the one with the white men and the Polos and the khakis carrying torches, you know where they chanted, you will not replace us, which morphed into Jews will not replace us. Well, that was a direct manifestation of replacement conspiracy theory's impact also in the US, there was the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol. Research out of the Chicago project on security and threats, identifies fear surrounding replacement conspiracy theory to be a primary motivating factor of those arrested in connection with the insurrection that day. 2024 saw Islamophobic attacks jump by 74% in the UK, which is not surprising given the anti-immigration riots aimed at Muslims in the summer of that same year, principles of replacement conspiracy theory were present in the spread of disinformation that fueled the violence of these race riots. As we know, New Zealand has not been spared from the encroachment of replacement conspiracy theory. In 2018 Canadian far right speakers Lauren Southern and Stefan Molyneux came to New Zealand on a speaking tour, although they weren't able to find a place to speak, their appearance did increase the curiosity about their message. Southern ended up getting 1000s of New Zealand based hits on her great replacement theory video. The Christchurch shooter even donated to Molyneux news podcast and YouTube channel. Several small far right groups in New Zealand have spouted rhetoric drawing on replacement conspiracy theory, including the group that postered University of Auckland with white lives matter, and let's take our country back. Okay, that's it for now. This rundown of replacement conspiracy theory will come in handy as you listen to the conversations I have with Max Paul Morris and Paul Spoonley, because they will all refer to some of these events in our discussions.  

First I spoke with Max, Research Fellow at He Whenua Taurikura. I’m truly lucky to have amazing colleagues to work with. He’s brilliant, dedicated to his work, and when it comes to replacement conspiracy theory, he really knows his stuff. I’ll let him tell you a little bit about himself.  

Max  10:00 

My name is Max Soar. I'm a Research Fellow at He Whenua Taurikura and my areas of research interest are the politics and ideologies of science and technology and in particular, the ways in which those interact with white supremacist far right and fascist political dynamics under contemporary capitalism. This theory of the great replacement has quite an extensive modern life that prefigures Camus, right? He's, he's kind of, his formulation has been recently influential. But these kind of, these myths and these theories about white extinction go back much, much, much further if we start talking about theories about white genocide or white extinction, which the great replacement in its modern form, is one. We can also look to the neo Nazi David Lane in America, who, published a manifesto that I believe was called White extinction. We can also look to back to France, to Alain de Benoit as one of the founding thinkers and figures of the French new right, who, in the 60s talked about multicultural societies as a form of quote, ethnocide, and thought that different cultures within France should be separated and not mix. We can also even look to American eugenicists in the early 20th century like Madison Grant, who talked about fears that the Nordic race in heavy quotation marks was the also in heavy quotation marks, founding stock of the US population, and was under the threat of assimilation by non-white people. And in particular, those ideas of from the American eugenicists were very influential in Nazi Germany and with Hitler in particular. So I think it's important to point out that while Islamophobia is a real kind of central part of the present articulations of the great replacement, there's also a deep anti-Semitism that comes with the suggestion that this change in global populations is orchestrated by somebody behind the scenes. And we can see that in even in New Zealand history, right in 1905 A elderly Chinese man was murdered in Wellington, in the capital of Wellington, by a man called Lionel Terry. And he did this to awaken New Zealanders to the peril of Asian immigration. But this was also a phenomena that he claimed was organized by powerful Jewish interests, which is where that kind of anti-Semitic part of the conspiracy that is sometimes emphasized and sometimes not emphasized, but is almost always present or subtextual, and those ideas have been revitalized more recently here in the 80s, by the British National Front and other far right organizations, even before you know the events in Christchurch in 2019 one of the things that was clear in my research is that the great replacement as a theory doesn't fit as comfortably here in Aotearoa, New Zealand, as it does in parts of Europe and maybe in the United States or in France, because we have a very strong and vocal and visible indigenous Māori population in New Zealand, right? And the, you know, te reo Māori is a official language. You know,  New Zealand has always liked to claim it has some of the best race relations in the world. But there's, there's a part of our national identity that is at least acknowledges the kind of special place of Māori as indigenous people and as tangata whenua. And so the logical conclusion of the great replacement theory, right is the creation of a white ethno-state. It is about the expulsion of non-white people from a nation. That's much less simple to maintain in a settler colony, right? Where it is, it is the colonization of the country by the British. That is even the reason that there are white people here. 

Avery Smith  15:26 

Sure, sure, exactly. You're right, because I can see how that works in France and Europe, right? But in a country like this, how, how, who are you re immigrating? Are you? Are you all ready to go back to Europe? Or what? I mean, what's the deal? 

Max  15:40 

Exactly like, if you take it very, very literally, it's like, well, all the white people should pack up and go home, but, and so I think for people that advocate for the theory here, there's a certain amount of kind of twisting of the narrative that has to Go on to justify it, right? So they start drawing their ancestry back to Europe in certain ways, but they also perform this maneuver where they need to justify kind of the traditions and the cultures and the institutions that they associate with European civilization as premier institutions and cultures and kind of arrangements of society. And so you get this argument that scholars call civilizationism, right where their argument about replacement, comes not from the fact that New Zealand is their homeland, but that all of the things that they think are great about society were imported from Europe and established here, and any excess immigration from non-white people threatens those institutions and threatens that kind of idea of a perfect European society that they're striving for. And so that the thing that that argument does is it starts to collapse a lot of things together, right? You take ideas like race and ethnicity and their, you know, the associations with biology, and they start to collapse into culture and civilization and institutions of government and social structures and things like this. And so it becomes less a narrative about protecting one's homeland, which it might be in France, and becomes about protecting the superiority of European or white culture, which is very similar, but it's a slightly different it's a slightly different relationship to the argument. The right has adopted, I wouldn’t say positions, but has adopted certain language that we might otherwise associate with decolonial movements, anti-colonial movements. And it's part of a kind of really, kind of confusing and dislocatory political position that we find ourselves in at this point where the theory and the language and the tactics that have a history that's been brought up through these struggles against white supremacist and oppressive structures are all of a sudden being co-opted by the defenders of those structures in order to paint themselves as victims, in order to paint themselves as oppressed, people who are scared of white extinction are responding to is the consequences of colonization coming home to roost, right? Which is very, very different from reverse colonization, right? But it is, it is what some scholars are called the boomerang effect, right? It is the what happens when the kind of politics of colonialism and imperialism and those and military aggression overseas comes back to the Imperial core and is turned inwards. But these are the consequences of the aggressive action. Right? Like it's not, it's both the fear of it, but it's also like, well, the consequences of your ancestors actions are, you know when, when an imperial power destabilizes huge portions of the so called Global South, makes places difficult to live in, makes them politically unstable. Where are people going to want to go? They're going to go, want to go to the places that have held themselves up as wealthy and stable and democratic, 

Avery Smith  20:09 

And when you extract those resources right to make your country rich and leave and leave other places in shambles? Well, yeah. I mean, what do you think is going to happen?  

Max  20:19 

Totally, yeah, the process of wealth extraction from the peripheries into the Imperial core, it causes destabilization at one end for the wealth and benefit of people at the other, and suddenly we're surprised when people want to move. And so there is an extent to which you can look at the great replacement, and this is to an extent, reductive, but I think it is relevant, see it as an attempt by the privileged to protect their wealth in terms of land, in terms of capital, in terms of privilege. 

Avery Smith  21:06 

Well said, Max really. Well said, thanks for talking with me today and giving us something to think about.  

Max  21:12 

Cool. All good. Any time 

Avery Smith  21:15 

For my next conversation, I had a zoom call with Emeritus Professor Paul Morris and distinguished Emeritus Professor Paul Spoonley. Between them, they have decades of research and analysis on the issues that replacement conspiracy theory encompasses. I'll let them introduce themselves. Paul Morris, would you like to go first? 

Paul M  21:33 

 Yeah, I'm emeritus professor of religious studies at Victoria University, and the religious studies is in the School of Social and Cultural Studies, and I see myself in my training as a social scientist. My particular interest is in religion in Aotearoa and in more broadly, in the Pacific. I also have taught courses on Judaism and Jewish culture and civilization, and which brings me into the orbit of anti-Semitism, and more broadly, into prejudice, discrimination and those broad concerns.  

Avery Smith 

Paul Spoonley, would you mind introducing yourself?  

Paul S  22:23 

Yes, Tena kōrua, Shalom. So I'm really been very interested in recording and analyzing the development of contemporary extremism, and particularly right-wing extremism in New Zealand. I've had an interest in anti-Semitism as a subset of that. And then, of course, the recent development, developments of the last two decades in terms of the new stage, or the new manifestations of that extremism around the world, and coming really to a bit of a point during the COVID pandemic, and the development of new constituencies, new messages, and, of course, new ways of conveying ideas, particularly online.  

Avery Smith  23:09 

Could you just give us a general kind of definition of what the great replacement theory is?  

Paul S  23:17 

The pivotal moment really is the appearance of a book by a French writer called Renaud Camus, called Le Grand Replacement in 2011 and Camus talked about white genocide, or genocide by substitution. And the key argument was that in a demographic sense, the non-Christian, non European world was taking over that European Christian world in terms essentially, of a demography. So there's talk of minorities engaging in what has been called mass strategic breeding. Now I think the Camus book gives us the name for what we're talking about, but I would actually go back to previous writers such as Enoch Powell, who gave a very powerful and influential speech in 1968 called the rivers of blood speech. By the way, Camus, early this year, wrote an elegy for Enoch Powell. And then, more recently, particularly in the early 2000s we get generation identity with Martin Sellner in Austria, beginning to preface some of these debates around the Islamization of the West, of again, talking about global elites, which was quite often simply a code word for Jewish control, and combining it with these conspiracy theories and really revitalizing or reinterpreting the idea of impurity. So impurity is what immigrants and non-Christians do, and ethnic minorities do to your society in quotation marks and the existential threat, so the threat to whites. 

Paul M  25:28 

Can I? Can I come in and add to that, reading Camus is really interesting. He's obsessed by what he calls replacist elite, the elites, the replacement elites, and of course, the replacement elite, for him are the French socialists, the but also the middle of the road right as well. But of course, for them, and it's a very European context, it's the EU, the next level up. And then, of course, it's the UN and so it's a kind of escalating, globalized image. But what makes him unique in two ways, one is that he isn't very interested in anti-Semitism, but he is hideously focused on the 10% of France that's Muslim and their higher birth rates. He's obsessed with birth rates more generally, but what marks off his book as strange is this isn't just happening and to be resisted, but it's a very conscious and deliberate policy. The these elites, these replacist elites are planning this. It's a setup. It's a very deliberate policy to undermine European Christian culture and civilization. 

Avery Smith  26:53 

But that's what makes it a conspiracy theory, right? Well, 

Paul M  26:55 

and we should rather if you just say the grand replacement theory, it sounds it's a bit like, you know, critical race theory. I mean, no one who uses it calls it that and, and what do they call it? Well, the great replacement, it doesn't, it's not a theory, not a theory, it's hypothesis. 

Avery Smith  27:16 

I'm giving it more credit. Yeah, forget it.  

Paul M  27:19 

And so in that sense, it's not a theory, but, but of course, I think you're absolutely right. We should always say we should replace theory with conspiracy, or conspiracy theory, because it only ever is a conspiracy and but it looks as if it isn't. It was very difficult, because they don't have accurate religious figures for the French at all. So all figures were estimates, the estimates of the number of Muslims. I mean, there's only an estimate and ranges between seven and 10 million, and we don't have any accurate figures for their reproductive rates or their mortality rates, because the French don't keep figures in this way. And so that led it created a space for the conspiracy. I mean that the these figures, and of course, they're always these dreadful Paul knows much more about demography, but they're always based on predictions, on the forecasts that focus on particular demographic elements or focus on white and define it in a particular way, or don't include particular racial mixtures as well see them all as non white. And so it's open to alarmism. 

Avery Smith  28:42 

I mean, this is the way it was talked about in the media and at large. It was the immigration crisis, right? I mean, the way that you even talk about that, it creates this fear and this, you know, obviously that it's a big problem, but the way that we frame it really does have, I think, a big impact on the way that we can think about these issues. So sort of implicit in the great replacement theory is an idea of the people who are us and the people who are not us. And I mean, it's hard to talk about that without talking about race and religion. And so I wonder if you could pick that apart a little bit and sort of speak to what you think about that 

Paul M  29:28 

The religious issue is a very interesting one, because Camus, going back to Camus, isn't religious, but has very, very strong Catholic identifications, as does Sellner I mean. And the appeal in Catholic Europe is rather different from in Protestant Europe and so and it's it's been taken up as part of this former European culture that's. Made and vested in these centuries of Christianity, and in that sense, it may well be, for some I mean, adherence of this conspiracy theory, that it has an existential component. They may actually be communicants and Catholic in that sense. But what is very, very clear is that it's a civilization. It's about Christendom. It's about the rule, the unquestioned rule, of white European Christians rather. And so it's a civilizational way of talking, and very often race is avoided by by these conspiracies, I mean the talk is of the loss of culture, the loss of rationality, the loss of the Enlightenment, the loss of art and music. And all of this will be diluted. And to use what PIL Paul's word polluted by this, these avalanche of invaders who have other cultures and other values. So much more about Christendom than Christianity. And so it, but it is a it's very much a religious and a religio-cultural reference and resonance, and the absurdity of this is in the is Eric Zemmour, who was a candidate in the last French election, who defined himself as an atheist Jew, who was totally supportive, not only of the great replacement conspiracy explicitly, the first French politician to be explicit about it, but he also valorized, I read a number of his speeches, Catholic culture as an atheist, as an atheist Jew. So it doesn't have to be about religion in a kind of pietistic sense, but it is about religion in this much, in this broader cultural sense. And that takes, it's about, you know, the clash of civilizations. It's about Christian culture and its supposed 1400 year war with this other, this other culture, Islam and, of course, and beneath that, less so in France, but beneath that, right back to St John's Gospel. It's the Christian versus Jewish, or the fight for supremacy.  

Avery Smith  32:38 

Well, and you know this brings up too, because so much of the rhetoric in this conspiracy theory has to do with purity and anti-miscegenation and not mixing, right? And it's hard to talk about that without talking about racism. And 

Paul S  32:56 

I think in addition to what the the clash as a scene that Paul's talked about, I think we need to accept that there's a there's a new we're in a new period of ethno-nationalism, where, you know the purity of the nation is critical to the success of the state. Can I just go back one thing, though, and say the in terms of the grand replacement, the first to pick it up on it were the extreme white supremacists. So the book appeared in 2011  Breivik picks up arguments in Norway in terms of a mass shooting in 2011 and then we get a whole series of events, like the Tree of Life, synagogue in 2018 El Paso 2019 and, of course, Christchurch in 2019 where the shooter names his manifesto the great replacement. So there's a, there's there's a part of the racist right, which cottoned on to it quite quickly. But what we've seen, certainly in the last 10 years, is then the normalization, in terms of it, migrating into those who are politically active and politically successful. So you know you can go through a roll call, Geert Wilders the Freedom Party in Netherlands, Giorgia Meloni, the Brothers of Italy. In Italy, AFD, Marine Le Pen national rally, Orbán, Austria, Slovakia, Croatia, Hungary, and all of them are now all of these right wing, anti-immigrant sort of pro purity of the Ethno national state are all now referencing the grand replacement, and it has migrated. And when you begin to look at the support, I mean a third, I think of Austrian voters now agree with Kickl and the and the position in Austria of the of their views when you think about Thuringia (Germany) and the election there recently, and AFD winning the largest proportion of the vote. So part of what we've seen, I think, is the is the migration of these ideas and the mainstreaming of them, the normalization of those ideas in terms of our broader political spectrum, which I think is very concerning. So alongside the religious dynamics that that Paul's talked about, and what's seen as the conflict there, I think the idea of the pure nation as the basis for a state, and the idea that impurity is injected, included represented by the other, whether that's an immigrant other, a religious other, whether it's a indigenous other, is become a very significant part of many politics in many countries.  

Paul M  36:14 

I's agree with that. The interesting thing is the way in which the same rhetorical frame has been used in a explicitly racist way about purity. But it also has another register which has allowed for the mainstreaming if you go back, if we go back to Camus again. I mean, he gave three reasons. I mean, there was de industrialization, the industrialization. De industrialization took away from the peasant values, the values of Europe. But the second, he calls it de spiritualization, which is the loss of the Catholic resonances that created cohesion and community. But the third, which is the idea that's been incredibly mainstreamed, is what he called deculturization, which is a lack of honor and respect and value given to this European culture. And deculturization as now I just read Oliver Wilde's new book, The French social theorist, and he's absolutely obsessed, and he's incredibly mainstream and a major figure with deculturization, that Europe is losing its culture and its European culture, and this is a later segue to Aotearoa, but that European culture, when seen as colonists and colonizing and imperialistic and patriarchal and vested and with privilege, is when you when that's all you can see Is your culture, you become decultured, and what you and the loss is much greater than the this semblance of justice that we pursue. And so I 

Paul S  38:11 

I would, and I would use the phrase that I love, and we're going back to a past that never was, you know, it's an imagined past. It's an imaginary past, and it's not one that, you know, you can find. So we've been, we started to talk about the Christchurch shooter before, but, you know, in his manifesto and um, honors gun, there were references to, you know, a history that not even recent, that goes back to the Crusades. So you've, you've got this intermingling of histories, as though they provided a period in which something took place, which, when you look back, was never the case.  

Avery Smith  38:11 

It also sees culture as the static thing. Yes, that never changes. Exactly that, right? And it's like you have to go back to the past, to the time when it was pure, whatever German or French or whatever that culture was, but it doesn't take into account the way the culture shifts and changes over time.  It's like an imagined past, right? Yeah, 

Paul S  39:16 

An imagined past, yes.  

Paul M  39:18 

I think the links, just to pursue this one moment, I mean the links, it's not just the title. I mean the Christchurch shooter begins his manifesto with, it's the birth rate, it's the birth rate, it's the birth rate which comes straight out of Camus. The rally at Charlottesville in 2017 'Jews will not replace us. You will not replace us.' come straight out of Camus. So the impact is enormous on, as Paul said, the far right, but it's always had, and was always Camus intention writing for this much broader audience. There is a cultural milieu which is much broader, and its interest, its intention and its intended audience is not the far right, but, but is, is a much broader constituency. 

Avery Smith  40:12 

I want to come back to the point you made earlier. It's about the the dangers and the normalization of it, right? So some of these ideas, like you said, are becoming increasingly mainstream, and they're not getting it's almost taken as common sense, like, oh yeah, that's actually, you know, so there's not this interrogation of it. And so these narratives are then used to, you know, base policy, base practice, base, you know, if you're in one of these groups, terrorist actions, right? 

Paul M  40:44 

Well, the strange thing is, you get the normalization of the mainstream, give creates a kind of little legitimization to the extreme, right? It's a different form of accelerationism, and so people clearly pick up on it, I mean, and as often mediated through social media. But the kind of validation of of these, these sorts of positions as they translate into action, seems to be fostered and promoted by the normal, this very normalization. But it's worth talking about the normalization. It was incredibly shocking for me, looking at the particularly from the French election, where, I mean, this became just normalized and with Marine Le Pen, with national rally, but the but there was very little challenge to it by the other parties. And so, I mean this, and the response from some of the mainstream parties was to say, well, you know, we're going to, we're going to deal with immigration as well. I mean, don't worry. You don't you don't own the immigration crisis and so and the American election we've just had, well, was really shocking. I mean, the elements that we've been looking at, what were just so evident. It wasn't just that we have, you know, Stephen Miller and, I mean, his immigration work, but exactly the same European and extreme right resonances about deportation, about illegal migrants, about the threat, and, of course, about the activities and inhuman behaviors of migrants, legal or otherwise. But that the, the difference between France is that it's so explicitly anti-semitic, yeah, and, and this does strike the I've just been reading the the Esther agenda from the Project 25 which is the, I don't know if this is going to come around. This is from the Heritage Foundation, but Trump is very committed to combating anti Semitism, and that's something I'm interested in. Combating anti-Semitism is good, but the one of the profile of the dangers of where do we find anti-Semitism? And you find it in the great replacement theory. And you find that what project Esther has to combat is the influence of the Governor of Illinois, who's Jewish, but we've got to combat George Soros and his foundation, because these are the elites who are betraying America. They happen to be Jews and others, but mostly Jews, and how are they betraying America? Well its the legacy of everything you think they're letting migrants in to challenge white numerical supremacy. They advocate feminism, which stops women breeding and being at home. They advocate abortion, which means etc, etc. And so suddenly, these things have been fitted together to give you the right-wing agenda, and behind this are these activist Jewish voices who are deliberately undermining with their globalist agenda. 

Avery Smith  44:30 

Well, we've been talking a bit about the great replacement theory and sort of how it has happened globally, France, Europe, the US as well. But I'm wondering what you all are seeing here, as far as how has the great replacement theory made it here. Now we've talked about the Christchurch shooter, but I think we could talk more about more about that and other ways that you see either historically or more currently. How you see the great replacement theory taking hold here? Yeah, 

Paul S  45:03 

Can I start on that one? Because what's puzzled me a wee bit, particularly post 2016 when Trump was first elected as president, and then through COVID, was the growing influence of international ideas and movements in New Zealand. I'm thinking particularly of Q Anon. But as part of that, we're seeing the great replacement beginning to have echoes here it really came to me when we tried to understand the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto. And so there you've got a very explicit outlining of what one extremist and activist saw as the great replacement, but we also begin to see other groups, so the Dominion movement, which then morphed into action Zealandia, is very explicit around What it regards as being the threat to the nation state. And, of course, what they mean, of course, is the White nation state of New Zealand. There's talk, a articulation, really, of what they see as the, quote, revitalization of European culture and identity, the fact that we are, and again, quote, bound, by blood, and we begin to get this, this development of a New Zealand version of great replacement. Because, of course, there's a major issue for all of these political movements and how they want to articulate their policies in New Zealand, and that is the indigenous group, of course, tangata whenua, Māori. And so what role do they play in all of this? How do they? How do you, how do you articulate it in terms of a nation that is here, and that you really want to say is British in some sense, and how does, how do Māori get involved in that. Now what we've seen is that we've got actors like Lee Williams or Kyle Chapman who attack directly Māori as uncivil. All these are in quotation marks, but as uncivilized as not deserving of many of the rights that they seem to have accumulated, and we've got very explicit and very racist attacks. I think it gets a bit more murky as you get further out. So there are a number of groups that have echoed great replacement theories, Right Wing Resistance, of course, is there, Wargus Christi is there. So you've got individuals and groups that continue to maintain that. And of course, we've got actors like Kerry Bolton, who's been around since the 1960s who in a sense, predates the current wave of great replacement theory by his own great replacement arguments. And all he's done is really update and include some of the more recent versions, borrowing from identitarian politics. He's a major contributor. He's written a lot of books around his conspiratorial views of the world. He is a he was a contributor to Right Wing Resistance, and he has made his views very, very clear there. In 2013 he wrote a book called Babel incorporated multiculturalism, globalization and the New World Order, in which he argued that multiculturalism was a form of social control. So he's been very clear about how he's articulated his view. So, you know, Carl Chapman, Kerry Bolton, you've got a number of Lee Williams, you've got a number of people who've who, who've articulated that in the New Zealand setting. Yeah, no, 

Paul M  48:54 

I think I that you, you raised the historic issue. I mean, my own view, which may not be the same as Paul's, is that New Zealand doesn't have a very good record in embracing the ethnically, racially different, the culturally different. And although these are all moving feasts, and we should come back to that, that theme the I've a former student who's writing a book at the moment about anti-Semitism in the Labour Party in the 1930s and coming having him sharing some of the correspondence, some of the data. I mean, it was quite alarming and widespread and often pragmatic, which is worse than ideological. It had a constituency, but New Zealand has always been defensive about immigration, and it's always been potentially problematic.  In relation to what Paul was saying. I mean, it is clear that there is tangata whenua issue, the Action Zealandia response is to say, well, they're not indigenous, and that solves that problem once and for all. But the in terms of Aotearoa, there's been this huge mainstreaming of these ideas. So there is Lauren Southern, who came here, but her 1000s and 1000s of New Zealand hits on her 2017 the great replacement YouTube video. And so we're now aware of these issues and the language and much broader than the cast of characters that are, I mean, from the extreme right, but also, more recently, that the issue of racial privilege is the kind of reverse of this, and it raises issues about DEI hires. It raises issues about all sorts of what used to be called positive discriminations and the issue there is about cultural transformation, and cultural transformation and new cultural voices threatens and largely creates a status quo, a culture that wasn't there is now valorized. And so in that way, I think it's, again, it's broader, because one of the things we're testing and playing out at the moment with the principles, the principle of the treaty bill, is the groundswell against racial definition, but racial definition in reverse, as an Australian historian puts it, I mean, is the kind of colonisers revenge. 

Avery Smith  51:58 

Say more about that. What do you mean?  

Paul M  51:59 

Oh, this is A. Dirk Moses  who wrote about it, who argued he was looking at he's an expert on extreme right in Australia, and he was amazed at how many white settlers in Australia turned out to be far right, racist and mainstream racist, who were obsessed with invaders, and the thought of being colonized by Muslims and from other people 

Avery Smith  52:33 

I know. I know. 

Paul M  52:34 

He has a psychological explanation of this. It's about Freud. It's about projection. I don't believe in psychology, but it's hard not to want to see it in some of those terms, but I think some of that is going on. And part of his point is that you, you generate the culture by its opposition and so, and there's a deep perversity about the categories being used so you're being threatened by something, and the threat is exactly what you've imposed. 

Paul S  53:11 

Can I just riff on that? Because I think there are a couple of things here which the political scientists have referred to as well. One of them is strategic polarization, and this was the Identitarian Movement. One of their strategic goals was to create counter cultures that first of all would attract young people, but then would radicalize them, and they would radicalize them in a way that shifted the Overton window. So the Overton Window is about enlarging this spectrum of accepted views. I think the other dynamic, which I think Ali Hochschild really captured in her book, Strangers in Their Own Land, was what the Americans call the left behind, about sort of working class and middle-class America that was feeling marginalized, both economically but also politically. And as part of that strategic polarization, you identified the enemies, and those enemies might be in the media. They might be politicians, the deep state, all the arguments about the deep state. And so we get this very interesting dynamic, which is combining sort of, economic hardship, with political marginalization, or the feeling of political marginalization to create new constituencies. And so we've talked already about the normalization, but I do, I do think there's a dynamic in many societies, including many liberal democracies, where the spectrum of views that are acceptable has now changed. And of course, I would want to add into that the significance of online platforms as a means, as a mechanism for for changing the Overton window and encouraging that strategic polarization 100% 

Avery Smith  55:06 

There is a couple of things that came up for me as you were talking and I think it's so interesting that it's utilizing that fear, fear of that loss of entitlement, that fear of white genocide. But as I was preparing for this interview a couple, it was about a year ago actually, I wrote a piece for E-Tangata, and it was about the KKK in New Zealand about a year ago. There was this thing that happened where some people dressed up in KKK robes. You remember this? And they went to the they went to this quiz night, and they brought, like, petrol cans with them. So, like, they were really doing up the whole KKK thing, you know, it caused a big stir. Nobody said anything to them, of course, at the time, but it was, it was a big deal. And I was thinking to myself as a Black American, like, what is, what is that doing here? Like, I don't, I don't understand that. You know what? I mean. It's very different history, you know, as I was doing the research for writing that piece, I found that there were, you know, the KKK wasn't like the first white race organization here. You know, there was, like the anti-Asiatic immigration folks, the White Defense League, and all of these other organizations that actually espoused, I mean, it wasn't called the great replacement then, but it was those basic ideas, like the Chinese are going to come in and take over, if we let too many of them immigrate, they're going to take over and take all the jobs and take all the women. And to me, it was just interesting to see the sort of, sort of the historical parallels 

Paul S  56:38 

And in the hours after the shooting in Christchurch, I wrote a piece around what I saw as being the exceptionalist arguments around New Zealand, that somehow our race relations were good quotation marks, that we were not going to experience the sorts of events that You see in other countries, and in this case, a mass shooting based on sort of racism and religious hostility. And that's simply not the case. We can go through New Zealand history and show historically, as you've referred to, those groups that were formed to preserve the privilege of white principally British migrants. As Paul well knows, during prior to the Second World War, we had a policy of not accepting Jewish refugees because they did, quote, not fit in with our Anglo-Saxon culture. You can pick practically any group, the group that were called Dalmatians, Asians, Chinese Jews, and you can point to events in New Zealand history where those groups were demonized and excluded. So you know, we're not exceptional. We are part of the expansion of Europe and the ideas of race and racism that were accompanied that expansionism. And so we shouldn't be surprised that there's an audience for the great replacement arguments in this day and age in New Zealand, because there are going to be constituencies that have always felt that way. 

Paul M  58:26 

But we need to, I think we need to qualify this quite heavily. I while it's clearly the case that people have named and personified their insecurities in terms of outsiders of various sorts, what Eric Kaufman in London calls 'white shift' seems very significant here. What it means to be white isn't stable either. And you know the migrant communities in the United States who now identify with white it seems incredible to me that Fuentes, is clearly Hispanic, but is a is a white fascist leader? You know, welcome at Mara-lago if you want mainstreaming. But the idea of Hispanic whites is very strange. In 1924 with the aliens act, Jews in America became white, they moved to being Northern European. I wasn't white. Now, I'm white. And this has happened in New Zealand too, with different communities. I mean identifying in different ways. And there is both a white shift and a non-white shift, and these are permeable, flexible characteristics that both have a really positive view and a negative view. The negative view is that you have new constituencies that aren't just the old Anglo British, I mean, the Anglo Irish. I mean, aren't a New Britain Constituency, but are a new constellation of whiteness. And the new constellation of whiteness in our global communications links you not, not just to the KKK, but links you to other shifting white constituencies and but the opposite of whose non white also shifts in exactly the same way. The positive view of this is our census, and so it's back outside my areas of expertise to demography. But I mean, what's very interesting about our census and the Hikoi is the all sorts of new coalitions, and the coalitions are often about the blurring of categories, of racial categories, the blurring of ethnic categories, the overlapping and multiple ethnicities in a way that is positive and creates new constituencies which are broader and differently exclusive and inclusive. And so I think in Aotearoa these things are both. Things are happening at the same time, and that this permeability and this new openness and flexibility could be seen as very positive too. 

Avery Smith  1:01:23 

Should New Zealanders be concerned about the great replacement theory? 

Paul S  1:01:27 

Yes, because of several aspects that have emerged. One is the way in which we seem to have been influenced. And I'm talking the we in terms of particular constituencies seem to be have been influenced by some of the developments of the last 10 years, particularly some of the arguments that appear online. And I'm would cite Q Anon as a for example, the way in which it combines with the anxieties that we've talked about before in terms of the community. So we're on a journey, as Paul has commented, but that journey has its ups and downs, and at the moment, we are seeing a denial of rights and of identity to a particular part of the community of tangata, whenua. So if it is going to be directed at them, why wouldn't it not be directed at others? And we only need to go back to the 1990s in that period from 1993 to 1996 when we saw that major mobilization against Asians, and the characterizing those Asian migrants that were quite new to the country then as being somehow a threat, both existential and banal, I mean in terms of every day, but the obvious of that, I think, is what the Edelman Trust Barometer tells us about the institutions of our democracy, and I'm talking New Zealand, but also many countries here where there is declining trust in those institutions, those core institutions. So if we're going to have a discussion about the sorts of topics we're talking about today, where do we have that discussion, apart from as a podcast at He Whenua Taurikura type thing and for me, I think we need to, we need to rethink, and, you know, as part of koi too, and Peter Gluckman Center here at the University of Auckland, we are thinking about these things. But you know, what should politics look like in a digital age, in an age where these anxieties are combining with digital technologies to produce quite different dynamics and what is concerning is the toxicity and the vitriol and the threat that we now see playing out in our communities, which has been heightened recently, and of course, you know, we've got to acknowledge that events like a pandemic have added to those negative aspects of our community. So for me, I would want to talk about social cohesion. What does social cohesion entail? What should we be talking about? What is it that we want to do? How do we want to repair some of the broken down relationships in our community? How do we overcome distrust and mistrust, misinformation and disinformation? And so I do think when we talk about great replacement, is one of the cogs in a very complex set of dynamics which are deeply for me, at least concerning. 

Paul M  1:04:39 

I too, want to say yes and but think there is a really interesting contemporary resonance back to France again in the first decade. One of the things that comes out of the great replacement theory in the French context is an opposition to neoliberalism, the in opposition to everything being its global price. And we've you find this incredibly explicit, and think in the far right in New Zealand, with Action Zealandia, but we're increasingly finding it in the current debates we're having, which is we have a government that doesn't want Marsden to fund Humanities and Social Sciences and wants to fund half of the other funded projects are to be immediately monetized. What's significant here is back to France again, is deculturation. I mean, part of what Neo liberalism and the great replacement share this kind of globalizing impact, and the response to it can be French deculturation, deculturation response. But what we need to do is preserve our culture and preserve its institutions and preserve its values, and that preservation paradoxically brings us back to the great replacement. I mean, a kind of cultural conservatism that we don't want to lose As Paul suggested, there needs to be for for cultural discussions and for cultural discussions that are broader than party politics, broader than our contemporary racial politics, and broader they have to be both about Aotearoa New Zealand, but aware of international resonances of of the world in which we survive and thrive, and there's a real danger of closing down places where, I mean sites which are where conversations can take place and that that is, I think that that is very worrying. The awesome thing about all conspiracies is that they move from the existential. They move from our experience, but rapidly spiral somewhere else and we need to between the our experience, our daily experience, and the spiraling. There's a place for discussion, 

Avery Smith  1:07:22 

I think, you know, coming back to it, and like trying to, trying to put a bow on this and wrap it up a little bit. You know, we were talking about how the great replacement theory comes from this place of anxiety, of unsettledness, right? And the great replacement conspiracy theory provides an answer. Provides here's the reason, here's what we need to do. So it gives us a narrative. It gives people a narrative, not us, not me, but it gives people a narrative to help understand what's happening, and you know what they can do to ameliorate that. It's both an opportunity and also very dangerous, right, because people are going to be looking for something to help them with this, to help explain it, to help give them a narrative, a story about what to do. And so I thank you for pointing that out. I just want to thank you both for your time today and your expertise and your knowledge on this really, really important issue.  

Paul S  and Paul M1:08:26 

Thank you, Avery. 

Avery 

This episode was a biggie and we covered some important ideas about RCT. There  is no way I could summarise everything we talked about, but here are some of my top takeaways.   

•  In Aotearoa, RCT often possess aspects of a civilsiationism, espousing the supposed superiority of European Culture and Institutions  
• Immigration to Western countries may be seen as the impact of the boomerang effect, where the consequences of wealth extraction and political destabilisation come back to the Imperial Core.    
• Purity is a concept that comes up in RCT.  The ideal country is  ‘pure’ ethnostate which immigrants and non-whites ‘pollute’.  
• Direct talk of race of often avoided and instead preservation of European culture, art, and rationality are used as a talking point.  
•  The normalisation of RCT politically has shifted the Overton Window as to what is politically acceptable  
• International ideas, such as QAnaon have had growing influcene in NZ  
• NZ is part of the expansion of Europe and is not immune to ideas of race and racism that came with colonization  
• What it means to be white is not static. ‘white shift’ or how what it means to be white changes in societies over time continues in countries like the US and New Zealand.   
• We need to have a space where people can have open and honest discussion that build understanding and trust  

Thanks for listening to this episode of UE. If you like content like this please like and follow us on your favourite podcast platform. Mā te wā! See you next time.