‘Replacement theory’: The view from an immigration-wary Georgia district

Justin Walis, a 26-year truck driver, doesn’t see his beliefs in the Buffalo, New York, shooting last weekend. 

Mr. Walis wears his fourth-generation German immigrant status like a name tag, praises foreign-born colleagues, and says he supports more legal immigration. 

But at the same time, Mr. Walis voted for one of the country’s most ardent anti-immigrant politicians in recent memory – Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has spread the so-called great replacement theory that there’s a plot to diminish the power or population share of white Americans. Many might say Mr. Walis believes a version of it himself. 

According to authorities, that idea is one of the motives Payton Gendron listed in his 180-page screed before driving 200 miles to a Buffalo supermarket and shooting 13 people – 11 of whom were Black and 10 of whom died. 

To Mr. Walis, fault rests with the individual. “If some whack job dreams up a manifesto and decides to go out and kill people, that’s on him – no one else,” he says.

But the 18-year-old Mr. Gendron listed outside influences in his document, alluding to other mass shooters apparently driven by racial or ethnic hatred in Charleston, South Carolina; Pittsburgh; and El Paso, Texas. 

In the week since Saturday, the country is asking how another racially motivated mass shooting could happen. Much of the media attention has turned to replacement theory’s role as a motive and, by extension, to the elites who voice it. In the process, public attention is also focusing on how strains of this thought – often in subtle forms – have taken root in America. Polling suggests millions of Americans believe some, albeit less extreme, version of replacement theory as well.

And the range of views can be confusing: To what degree are old debates over immigration and cultural change synonymous with “replacement” rhetoric? 

Racist conspiracy theories tend to change temperature over time, says Pam Nadell, a historian at American University. And they’re heating up now due to decaying institutions, political violence, economic displacement, and online radicalization. In that way, she says, replacement theory’s recent change from a simmer to a boil is a sign of how Americans influence and are influenced by the political context around them.

“It boils over because of the crisis we’re living in,” says Dr. Nadell. “It’s a manifestation of the crisis.”

A spectrum of views – and rhetoric

And it manifests in different ways. Replacement theory is used to refer to a wide spectrum of beliefs, including at the extreme the strident white nationalism of Mr. Gendron, but also general fears of white Americans’ approaching minority status.

That variety plays out among elites. Fox News host Tucker Carlson invoked replacement theory last year in saying, “The Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate ... with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World.”  

Meanwhile Rep. Elise Stefanik, the third-ranking Republican in the House, ran a Facebook ad last year claiming Democrats wanted to use “amnesty” to “overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.”

“It’s almost like there’s a hardcore version and a softcore version,” says Dr. Nadell. 

According to an Associated Press-NORC poll last December, 32% of respondents strongly or somewhat agreed that “there is a group of people in this country who are trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants who agree with their political views.” Compared with Democrats, Republicans were almost twice as likely to agree with the statement.

Some of those Republicans are like Mr. Walis.

He started believing there was an organized effort to stifle free-thinking Americans while his oldest son finished high school. In his view, Democratic-tilting coalitions like teacher unions and academics create a system where young people become obedient and close-minded.

At 18, his graduating son “hung his head and basically held onto the tail of the elephant in front of him.” 

Meanwhile Mr. Walis’ youngest, at 5 years old, “still believed he could be whatever he wanted,” he says. “The difference between the two broke my heart.” 

As interviews in this Georgia congressional district reveal, concerns tied to changing demographics vary and are often hard to pin down in political labels or easy cause-effect relationships.

Dave Shaw, a retiree doing some business at the Paulding County Courthouse, makes emphatically clear that he did not vote for Ms. Greene, and he scoffs at the use of replacement theory to fire up conservative voters. “We stole this land from the Native Americans, so I’m not sure we can say much about replacement.”

Yet he also echoes a theme voiced by some replacement theory proponents – the worry that America’s political culture is straying from its Judeo-Christian roots. He believes there’s a concerted behind-the-scenes effort to remove religious values from public life in order to better control the population.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia departs the House chamber at the end of votes, at the Capitol in Washington May 12, 2022. Ms. Greene railed against what she often calls a corrupt and leftist media for suggesting that Republicans have mainstreamed "replacement theory."

Mr. Walis, for his part, quotes Thomas Jefferson, who once wrote about Shays’ Rebellion that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants.” The quote is often used by extremist groups to imply that Democrats and globalists are part of a cabal against that liberty, justifying a violent response.

Replacement theory’s long history 

Today is far from the first time that concerns about immigration and cultural change have taken on forms of replacement theory. 

In the mid-1800s, the concern of American replacement theorists was Irish and German immigrants. After the Civil War, it was freed African Americans. By the end of that century, it was the Chinese, Eastern Europeans, and southern Europeans. 

Responses to the fear took on the characteristics of each era. Following Reconstruction, Southern states enacted Jim Crow laws excluding Black Americans from politics. With the rise in nativism during the Gilded Age and the eugenics movement of the early 1900s, Washington passed strict immigration laws, culminating in the quota-based Immigration Act of 1924.

Especially since the 2016 election of Donald Trump, which itself followed decades of failure to reform the country’s immigration system, such concerns have again started to rise, says Michael Barkun, a political scientist and professor emeritus at Syracuse University in New York.

“It’s not simply white supremacists who are pushing this,” he says. “It’s one of the cycles of nativism that appear periodically in America whenever you have an upswing in immigration.”

And just like before, the current version of replacement theory resembles today’s politics – polarized and bitter. That political situation was much of what first led Mr. Walis to support Mr. Trump and Ms. Greene.

The 14th District, where he lives, stretches from the northwest corner of the metro Atlanta area, to the Alabama border, and all the way up to the Chattanooga, Tennessee, television market. It’s 90% white, and 75% of voters there picked both Mr. Trump and Ms. Greene in 2020. Mr. Walis was one of them. 

Some of his concerns are over immigration, from illegal entry to cities like New York allowing noncitizens to vote. But more important to him was that Ms. Greene and Mr. Trump are fighters who seemed to recognize the same system that he thinks stifled his son’s dreams.

This week, Ms. Greene railed against what she often calls a corrupt and leftist media for suggesting that Republicans have mainstreamed replacement theory, and now bear responsibility for the violence in Buffalo. Before last Saturday, Mr. Walis had never even heard the term “replacement theory.” He now thinks Republicans like him should “flood the polls” to protect conservative values. 

Pushing back on prejudice

But the 14th District isn’t a monolith, and to some residents replacement theory isn’t new. Nor are its consequences. 

Jasmine Dixon, a young Black woman, was raised in Paulding County and feels tension around race throughout the area.

As of last week, a group of Black parents and students is suing a local high school after it suspended students for protesting in Black Lives Matter T-shirts. White students who wore Confederate symbols were spared. It reminds Ms. Dixon of the time school officials asked her to change her Afro hairstyle during high school sports. To some, she says, equality is treated like a threat. 

Hence, the shooting in Buffalo last weekend doesn’t feel so distant from the 14th District, its politics, or even the idea that motivated Mr. Gendron. 

“My sense of replacement theory is that it’s driven by a sense that if minorities ever get the upper political hand, they will turn on white people – do to white people what white people have done to us,” says Ms. Dixon.

“And that is so messed up,” she says. “All we’re doing is fighting for things that we have all along been told are, in fact, ours.”

Noah Robertson reported from Alexandria, Virginia.