“The murder of 10 people and wounding of 3 others carried out by an 18-year-old white supremacist who targeted black shoppers at a Buffalo, New York supermarket was another in a list of U.S. massacres motivated by hate and what’s called the “Great Replacement Theory,” designed to instill fear that the white race is under attack.
Previous racist mass shootings include the 2015 murder of 9 African Americans at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, South Carolina; the shooting deaths of 4 Asian Americans in Atlanta in 2021; the massacre of 22 Mexicans and Latinos at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas in 2019 and the murder of 11 Jewish Americans at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh the same year.
The vast majority of hate crimes in the U.S. in recent years have been committed by those on the extreme right. The FBI has declared that white nationalist violence poses the most dangerous domestic terrorist threat to the nation. Ruth Ben-Ghiat is professor of history and Italian studies at New York University and author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Ben-Ghiat about the Buffalo mass murder in the context of the Republican party and Fox News’ embrace of the racist “replacement” conspiracy theory and effective ways to defeat dangerous authoritarian and fascist political movements.
RUTH BEN-GHIAT: At its core, it’s the idea that Jews and other elites are plotting to import non-whites into Western countries to displace and disempower white people, to have more babies like immigrants who would come in and have more babies. And you have a whole range of variations of this: racists who think they’re going to be diluting the gene pool, people who think they’re going to kind of outperform demographically white people.
That’s part of it. And this goes back to fascism. I’ve studied Mussolini for many years and he talked in the 1920s before Hitler came about, white people being — he used the word submerged by more, you know, fertile races from Africa and Asia. And then finally the version that some of the Republicans are kind of repurposing for America, including Tucker Carlson, says that it’s the Democrat elites who are you know, allied with these shadowy forces and pedophiles, but they’re importing immigrants so they can kind of re-engineer the population to get Democratic victories.
But what they have in common is the idea of evoking primal fears of being annihilated, being replaced. Plots — and so it grafts onto conspiracy theories. It’s one of these paranoid theories that, as you see, has been going on for a hundred years because it lends itself, like all good propaganda to being adapted for every place and time.
SCOTT HARRIS: Professor Ben-Ghiat, conservative Wyoming Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, who came out against the attempted coup and has since been basically thrown out of the Republican Party leadership, she’s accused her party’s leaders of enabling white nationalism, white supremacy and anti-Semitism. What should our listeners know about the Republican party’s promotion of racist, hateful rhetoric and the toxic and vile effect these conspiracy theories are having on our country?
RUTH BEN-GHIAT: Well, there’s the “us or them,” which leads people to feel that they have to do extreme things. But that can lead to everything from kind of, I see Jan. 6th as a kind of leader cult rescue operation. “We have to keep our leader in office or else.” Right? So it leads to acceptance of nondemocratic and violent actions. It’s also designed to play on these primal anxieties of being controlled by others, whether it’s Jews who manipulate everything behind the scenes. Or Qanon: “It’s a cabal of Jews and liberals and blacks and pedophiles.”
What’s so terrible about the mainstreaming of this extremism? It’s appearing everywhere around our country. Taken collectively, all of these theories are designed to wreck civil society, to wreck the horizontal bonds of community that bind us and keep our societies healthy. And to get people in the mind to follow demagogues like Tucker Carlson. I was on MSNBC last week, and I called him a fascist demagogue. And I study fascism, so I don’t actually use the word lightly.
But he has mentioned “great replacement theory” 400 times in episodes, separate episodes, 400 times since 2016. And as a historian of propaganda, I know that that’s exactly what you need to do to get people to accept this dogma. Propaganda works through repetition over and over. You hammer home the same message.
And so he’s just doing it in a very concentrated fashion. But around the country, GOP politicians are having their own versions of these kinds of replacement. “Puppet master” all of these shadowy images. And they’re working together to really harm our democracy.
SCOTT HARRIS: As you’re saying here, it seems that the United States is facing a fascist threat today. And if so, how should defenders of democracy respond?
RUTH BEN-GHIAT: I think that we under use our power as citizens and also as consumers. I’m also a big believer because it’s backed up by studies, in the power of nonviolent mass protest. And we had two good examples just very recently in America, the Women’s March, which had a direct, you know, had a direct influence on the 2018 midterms. It brought over 90 candidates into office, you know, historic levels of women and people of color now in office.
And then of course, the Black Lives Matter protests, which were multigenerational, multiracial — the biggest, you know, movement in American history which directly influenced voter turnout. And we got rid of Trump that way. So I foresee a new round of such protests. I also would hope we would have consumer boycotts of these businesses that are, you know, backing haters.
And the effect will be limited because there are many business owners and corporate CEOs who are for the Republicans no matter what they do. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t try and influence them and pressure them.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Ruth Ben-Ghiat (28:33) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the Related Links section of this page.
For more by Ruth Ben-Ghiat, subscribe to her e-newsletter at lucid.substack.com.
