The Curious Case of the Disappearing White People
And how the white right can’t face the monster in the basement
White people, the far right and its sturmpodcasters keep telling us, are disappearing. And, at the risk of alarming some of my more liberal readers, I have to admit that they’re not wrong.
Of course, before we get much further we should be clear about what we mean by white people, or at least about what the white right means by white people, or at least what it currently means by white people. After all, just a few generations ago it was Wasp gospel that Jews, Italians, the Irish and the Slavic peoples weren’t white, but today whiteness has flung open its doors to all those groups, proving that, at least in one respect, it can be as open-minded as any scholar of intersectional studies.
However you define white people, though, the fact remains that the descendants of the people who lived in Europe before the advent of colonialism, and who now either still live in the old country or have been Americans or Canadians or Australians or South Africans for generations, are dwindling away.
If you live outside of South Africa, or inside one if its more sunburned enclaves, you’ve probably heard a slightly boiled-looking person blame some of that decline on a White Genocide™ that is supposedly taking place in my country right now.
(If you’re hoping to learn more about the White Genocide™ in this essay, I’m afraid I must disappoint you. I have very little information for you, partly because it doesn’t exist and partly because I tend to avoid the local crybullies and race grifters who patented the idea of White Genocide™ and now use it as a sort of grubby cardboard sign to hold up outside the gates of Mar-A-Lago: ‘PRECARIOUS JOB, WEAK CURRENCY, WILL TELL YOU RACIST FAIRY-TALES THAT CONFIRM YOUR WORLD VIEW IN RETURN FOR $$$.’)
In the rest of the white world, however, a slightly more complex suspect seems to have been identified with all investigative rigour of Abigail Williams deciding that she saw Goody Proctor with the devil; and it is this bogeyman that, I think, can help us understand some of what is happening now and what is likely to keep happening for the next few years.
The Jewish Catholic Yellow Italian Muslim Mexican Haitian Indians With H1-B Visas Peril
Nativism and xenophobia are not unique to white people. It’s also not necessarily racist for the working poor – that is, every working person who is not financially independent – to be worried that cheaper labour will be imported to undercut and ruin them. But to understand the current paroxysms of the white right, and the intense, race-based gaslighting that we’ll continue to see in the next few years, I think it’s useful to look at the example of the United States and the many decades it has spent trapped in an almost constant moral panic about Them from Over There coming Here to Take Our Jobs.
The roots of white nativism probably stretch as far back as the virulent and ultraviolent antisemitism endemic to Europe for the last thousand years. In the age of nation states, though, white nativism in the West and especially the US has focussed its fear and rage on immigrants arriving at its borders, from Irish Catholics disembarking in New York and Chinese prospectors joining the California gold rush in the mid-1800s to Italians arriving after the Civil War and even Indians coming to work in Silicon Valley right now.
The campaigns of dehumanizing propaganda or violence faced by these new arrivals haven’t always been a reaction by local thugs or small-time politicians. The racist moral panic of the ‘yellow peril’ or ‘yellow terror’, for example, was in part generated by European colonial powers as a geopolitical tool to help soften up their populations to the idea of colonising China. But whether they were planned in the courts of Kaisers or in sweaty Tammany Hall backrooms, the versions that reached the white working poor were almost always the same: dirty, devious foreigners were coming to steal their jobs, violate their women, and take over their country.
In Los Angeles, this relentless messaging fuelled one of the worst mass lynchings in US history, and twenty years later it was the turn of Italians as the festering racism that saw them often referred to as ‘white n*****s’ exploded into murder: after a New Orleans police chief was murdered and a number of Italian immigrants were rounded up, a mob broke into the jail, dragged out both accused and acquitted alike, and lynched eleven of them.
(Teddy Roosevelt, just three years away from the presidency, opined that the mass murder was ‘a rather good thing’, while the New York Times explained to its readers, perhaps to reassure them, that the victims had been ‘sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins’. For his part, the man who riled up the lynch mob, a John M. Parker, was elected governor of Louisiana in 1911.)
By the 1960s the US was beginning to grapple with race politics and civil rights, but white governments elsewhere needed new racist phantoms with which to frighten voters, and the decolonizing world provided plenty. In 1968, for example, as a microscopic fraction of the people Britain had colonised began to move to the UK hoping to share in the prosperity their ancestors had helped create, Enoch Powell invoked Virgil’s Aeneid to warn:
As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see ‘the River Tiber foaming with much blood’.
‘We must be mad,’ he said, ‘literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents… It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.’
When 9/11 and Islamist attacks in Europe once again presented the West with new bogeymen – Muzzlems! – it seemed that the same old cycle was repeating.
But in the 21st century, with western culture dominated by liberalism and its politicians coached by public relations firms and media advisors, I suspect that the old-timey lynch-mobs and even the urbane, Savile Row primitives like Powell understood that if they were going to win over public sentiment, they needed a new approach.
For starters, they understood, they needed to stop looking so emotionally and mentally fragile: after all, when large racial majorities with lots of money and nuclear weapons howl that they are being usurped and even oppressed by the arrival in their country of relatively small groups of poor, unarmed people, the ones doing the howling tend to look either like histrionic snowflakes or ungenerous fools.
What they needed, therefore, was a way to put on the same performance of victimhood that their ancestors had put on, but this time have irrefutable evidence that, unlike those ancestors, they really were victims; some sort of revelation that would confer on them gold star victimhood, explaining and proving to themselves and the world how it was that they could have all those guns and all that money and still be victims.
And in 2012, they found their revelation in a book by a man who lived in a castle in France.
The Great Replacement
Le Grand Remplacement by Renaud Camus didn’t simply claim that white French people were being replaced and usurped by Muslim immigrants. It implied that it was happening on purpose as part of a plan by white race traitors.
Muslim immigrants, Renaud fretted from inside his extremely expensive 14th century pile, were not merely scattered wanderers seeking a better life in France. Instead, he said, what was happening was a form of reverse colonization, overseen by the ‘Davos-cracy’, a liberal cabal personified by people like Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron and dedicated to destroying France by replacing indigenous (white) French people with obedient voting fodder and cheap labour – a ‘genocide by substitution’.
The book was dismissed by reviewers and experts as racist hallucination, but as the Syrian civil war pushed millions of Muslim refugees into Europe, the fundamental and fundamentalist idea of Le Grand Remplacement found an increasingly anxious and eager audience at home and abroad, even among people who might have considered themselves fairly uncomfortable with the concerns of the white right until then.
Right-wing influencers like Tucker Carlson were careful at first not to name the theory directly as they paraphrased or euphemised its claims, but the people who absorbed their shows and stewed in the racist subcultures they emboldened had no such qualms: in 2017, Ku Klux Klan members in Charlottesville chanted ‘You will not replace us ‘ and ‘Jews will not replace us’, while the terrorist who murdered 51 people in two mosques in Christchurch in 2019 disseminated a manifesto entitled ‘The Great Replacement’ in which he wrote about ‘white genocide’, the same imaginary genocide our own Afriforum had been alluding to for years.
By the time Carlson stopped hedging and openly cited the theory on a Fox News segment in 2021, it was being repeated as a verifiable, scientific fact, not least by the late Charlie Kirk, many of whose fans admired his eagerness to go all in on the fantasy of white victimhood.
That same year, for example, while admitting that that forming armed citizen militias to patrol the US-Mexico border in Texas might seem ‘dramatic’, Kirk added:
‘[But] you know what’s dramatic? The invasion of the country. We’re going to talk more about that, we’re going to talk about how the other side has openly admitted that this is about bringing in voters that they want and that they like and honestly, diminishing and decreasing white demographics in America. We’re going to say that part out loud, as so many people in the corporate media are afraid to talk about it.’
It goes without saying that ‘the other side’ – presumably US Democrats – has never ‘openly admitted’ to anything of the sort: like so many of the handmaidens of Trumpism, Kirk was highly skilled at what MAGA strategist Steve Bannon called ‘flooding the zone with shit’ – pumping out dishonest arguments or outright lies faster than they could be repudiated.
The point, however, is that in the echo chamber of the right, where culture warriors keep claiming that there are things you’re not allowed to say, and then say those things to huge audiences with no repercussions except that they get even more followers and make even more money, the narrative of an invasion – a ‘war on whites’ – has become an article of faith.
The call to arms has gone out from race hustlers like Carlson and Kirk, or European counterparts like Geert Wilders, exhorting self-identifying whites first to pretend that they have a shared history and culture, and then to defend those inventions from criticism and mockery.
And it’s working. Millions of their followers are heeding the call, dressing themselves in the ideological and spiritual uniform of the moment: a patchwork coat roughly sewn together out of self-aggrandizing historical cliché, racial fantasy, the lingering dregs of 19th century race science and things they’ve seen on TV.
It goes without saying that many of these new, self-proclaimed scholars of history have very, er, specific interests: most of the white, far-right men I see on social media claiming to be inheritors of Enlightenment thought seem far less interested in the history of, say, the Enlightenment’s role in shaping constitutional democracy than they are in the glories of ancient Sparta, Rome or the Vikings. But perhaps they’re researching those blood-drenched, slave-owning, hierarchical societies to more fully understand the gains of the Enlightenment at a later stage. Right, guys? Guys?
Many on the white right, however, don’t need even these extremely short forays into history to feel connected to the mythical past. For many, it seems, far vaguer allusions to ‘white history’ and ‘Western civilization’ carry enough of a charge to become an animating energy, whether inspiring them to wrap themselves in the flag of St George in the UK (because nothing says you’ve had enough of foreigners like waving a Genoese flag adopted by a combined French-English crusader force and dedicated to a Turkish cleric) or flooding social media with Disney-Lite images of old Europe – castles, cathedrals, pretty towns – and asking how immigrants from failed or failing states could possibly improve on them.
The white right would have us believe that this energy is organic upwelling of healthy pride; that at last it is taking back its historical and cultural birthrights, and celebrating its deep connection to a past that has been for too long maligned and denied by liberal revisionists and their coteries of reality-deleting postmodernists.
But I’m not buying it.
On the contrary, I believe that this intense focus on history and culture is, like the Great Replacement theory that both feeds it and feeds on it, a psychological coping mechanism; a pillow snatched up by the white right and pressed over its eyes so that it doesn’t have to see the horror that waits deep down in the basement of long-denied, endlessly deferred reckonings.
Yeah but no but yeah but no
I first started thinking about this as I watched a peculiar paradox play out: the white right celebrating the very things that are causing white people to start disappearing.
Immigrants, I kept reading, were ‘flooding’ into the white world to take advantage of countries shaped by ‘Western values’, where scientific innovation, mercantilism, colonialism and the Industrial Revolution had produced capitalist, ruggedly individualistic societies that represent the pinnacle of human endeavour.
Curiously, however, there was not a whisper about the effect of all this wealth, health and stability was having on birth rates.
Of course, the collapse of birth rates in the majority white world isn’t solely attributable to the inevitable result of a population growing richer and having more access to education, healthcare and personal choice. One must also factor in the fertility-crushing effects of late capitalism, whereby it has become increasingly difficult to scrape together the humanity, the breathing space and, above all, the money to buy a home and raise a family. And this is to say nothing of how the white right, with its admiration for Andrew Tate and Musk, and its contempt for feminism and education, has turned itself into one of the most effective prophylactics yet devised.
I understand why this third factor was largely unexamined in most of what I read. But what stood out for me was how the first two were also ignored. The right’s online army of amateur historians and social scientists could account for every half-hour between the founding of Rome and the end of the Clinton administration, but when it came to a literal existential threat, with clear, factual, easily accessible statistics explaining that threat, the performance of intellectual rigour disappeared and was replaced by, well, the Great Replacement.
Recently, that denial has tipped over into absurdism in the UK.
According to provisional figures published by the UK’s Office of National Statistics, ‘white British’ mothers in England and ‘white’ mothers in Wales had just fewer than 75,000 babies in the first quarter of this year.
Last year, meanwhile, the ONS recorded just fewer than 569,000 deaths in England and Wales, or roughly 142,000 deaths per quarter.
In other words, if England and Wales relied entirely on white mothers to maintain their populations, those two countries would be shrinking by around 67,000 people per quarter or 270,000 per year – the equivalent of a city like Newcastle simply blipping off the map every 365 days.
So how is the British white right responding to the fact that the UK is doomed without mass immigration?
It’s not just small X accounts spitting the dummy: in September we watched the richest man in the world, and arguably the planet’s second-most powerful propagandist after Rupert Murdoch, channeling Enoch Powell as hundreds of thousands of white people marched through London to insist that Britain needed to be saved, and that the only way to save it was to guarantee its collapse.
(In Musk’s defence, he’s not just worried about white people disappearing: the same month he also tweeted that mass migration would destroy Japan, apparently because nobody has told him that Japan is evaporating at a rate of 75,000 people every month.)
The monster in the basement
It’s grimly entertaining to gape at these wildly emotional reactions to a cool and disinterested demographic trend, but I think it’s also important to understand why the global white right can’t name or even face the real cause.
It’s also unfair to single out the right for its cowardice when many centrist or liberal governments are also paralysed by their refusal to sit down with their voters and explain the demographic birds and bees.
Still, the right is particularly trapped, not only because, thanks to its deeply conformist, binary worldview, criticism of capitalism might feel like support for socialism, but because it might force it to confront the monster in the basement.
Speaking to The New Yorker in 2017 about the Great Replacement, Renaud Camus revealed the heart of this trap as he denounced the ‘Davos-cracy’ and its view that people are ‘interchangeable units’.
‘“This is a very low conception of what being human is,” he said. “People are not just things. They come with their history, their culture, their language, with their looks, with their preferences… The very essence of modernity is the fact that everything—and really everything—can be replaced by something else, which is absolutely monstrous,” he said.’
For Camus, this fungibility is the ‘essence of modernity’, but I would suggest that what he and all those he’s influenced are really experiencing is the essence of late capitalism, and how it reduces human beings to entirely interchangeable parts in an entirely impersonal machine.
Certainly, it seems more than a coincidence that the Great Replacement theory took such a firm hold in the half-decade following the 2008 financial crisis, as the white working poor watched the economic system they were raised to venerate show them it would eat their children alive to make another quarter percent for the billionaire class.
I suspect that that exposure to late capitalism, red in tooth and claw, was a shattering trauma because it forced the white right to confront a simple, horrifying truth.
Two interchangeable parts must, by definition be identical.
And if capitalism could replace a white man with a dark-skinned foreigner without stopping the machine for a single instant, it could only mean one thing.
White people are the same as dark-skinned foreigners.
This, I believe, is the monster in the basement; the unthinkable, unspeakable, unbearable reason the white right has gone to increasingly absurd lengths to avoid criticizing capitalism or connecting it to demographic collapse. Sounding like a socialist would be bad, but having to accept that the sweat on a white forehead is not intrinsically worth more than the sweat on a darker forehead must feel like obliteration.
And so they invent sinister plots perpetrated by liberal elites, and fling themselves ever deeper into the warm embrace of historical fantasy that offers them a world in which the old hierarchies are still safely intact, and, more importantly, in which they – alienated, fungible fragments of modernity being shuffled here and there by a capitalist system that doesn’t give a damn about who they are as people – are heroes.
It’s a form of self-delusion that produces some extraordinary spectacles.
When FBI director Kash Patel ended his valediction to the murdered Charlie Kirk by saying ‘We have the watch, and I’ll see you in Valhalla,’ it wasn’t just a chilling nod to Nazi fanboy tropes or a moment of supreme abasement as the child of Asian immigrants prostrated himself before the white American white and whimpered: ‘Pick me!’ It was also ridiculous, the stuff of pre-teen fantasy role-play, as Patel told the world with a straight face that Kirk – an upper-middle class suburban Presbyterian, whose calling came not from one of Odin’s ravens but from the radio on which he listened to Rush Limbaugh as a teenager, and whose career as a warrior ended when he was rejected by West Point – now sat in Odin’s longhouse.
It should have made large sections of ‘rational’, tell-it-like-it-is right squirm. And yet it was met with a solemn nod – because anything else might open that basement door.
Whitey withers, so whither Whitey?
Unwilling to pull capitalism into the conversation, the white right’s ideas on how to stop the honkypocalypse have thus far tended to focus on persuading women that what they want most in the world is to be brood mares, or at least the aspirational, Instagram-friendly version: the tradwife. For his part, Kirk urged women to get off birth control, perhaps sharing a little too much of his private life as he claimed that ‘it created very angry and bitter young ladies and young women’.
Another option might be to roll back developmental gains, and there certainly seems to be some interest in this in the US, whether it be fantasies of putting white-collar workers into factory jobs or limiting access to vaccines.
Until the white right lowers the pillow from its face, however, it will keep watching fertility rates fall and fear will continue to trump reason.
Ex Africa semper aliquid novi
Of course, that approach will suit many on the far right just fine, who, like MAGA influencer and January 6 insurrectionist Isabella DeLuca, make a living selling the Swart Gevaar to frightened whites.
This particular tweet was unremarkable: just another day and another fraction of a dollar for DeLuca. But it did make me smile because, yet again, it was example of the far right getting up against a truth and then cringing away in terror.
The truth that DeLuca flinched from is that Asia and Africa are the future, or at least the foreseeable future, and that eventually Africa will stand alone in making most of the young people in the world.
The white right can have its paroxysms of rage and fear, and cling to its soothing conspiracy theory about white genocide, but demographics don’t watch Fox News or care who Elon Musk is.
The future is already in motion, serene and unstoppable; and as the developed world grows old and bent, and turns in on itself, Africa will once again find itself the wellspring of human hope and vigour, as it was in our collective past; once again sending out from itself young, strong, fertile humans to shape the planet in ways we can’t begin to imagine.
Very informative and wide-ranging analysis with a glorious punchline. Out of Africa 2.0 here we go!
Brilliant piece Tom, and some excellent points about late stage capitalism being a largely ignored component in the 'argument'. You also taught me something about Roosevelt ... had no idea about him (ahem) whitewashing that bit of grotesque history. I can only be amazed at the lack of cognitive dissonance felt by these influencer-Klan who's ancestors felt no shame in immigrating to any part of the world that offered either plunder (worst case) or a new start at life (best case). So no quid pro quo? No then. Seems fair 🤔. Anyway, the task now is how to distill important messages like this one for an audience with the attention span of a TikTok short, and an apparently unquenchable desire to be foie gra'd with far-right lies and rhetoric?