The shooter who took ten lives at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket on May 14 cited “the great replacement theory” as his rationale for randomly gunning down Black people. This paranoid fantasy shared by millions of Americans says that Democrats have hatched a diabolical plot to replace white Americans with people of color (imported or domestic).

Where did this concept come from? A recent New York Times analysis of more than 400 episodes of Tucker Carlson’s nightly ranting on Fox News showed that the onetime news host at CNN, PBS, and MSNBC was openly promoting this racist propaganda. On one show, he directly warned a category of viewers he respectfully called “legacy Americans” that they were in danger of being replaced by voters from “the Third World.” Given that Carlson has also alleged that those protesting the murder of George Floyd were not objecting to police brutality but looking to inflict “ideological domination” on the country, his racist antagonism is not surprising. But the amplification of a lie into a “theory” is both absurd and very dangerous.

First, “legacy Americans” sounds like something traded on a market (ironically, like a certain class of humans once were), showing how we’ve come full circle since Citizens United gave corporations more voting power than any human being. It also sounds like a bogus indicator of quality: Chairman’s Reserve, President’s Choice, Vintner’s Finest. Legacy Americans and heritage tomatoes . . . both at a roadside stand outside Greenwich.

Second, how could this anachronistic Preppy Handbook poster child for legacy admissions even dare use the L-word to a MAGA audience? “Legacy Americans” used to belong to only one class—The Mayflower Society, the Daughters of the American Revolution. It was a culture based less on money than exclusion: midwestern hillbillies need not apply.

Finally and most important, with “legacy,” Carlson was corroborating the assumption of Fox viewers and eventually the Buffalo killer that white supremacy was the intention of the Founders, and for that reason it was meant to be defended.

Fox News and the party of MAGA maintain an obsession with the Founders because “originalism” conjures a time when slavery was allowed to flourish in half the states and only white men with property could vote—a time when an unwritten code of white supremacy led to the killing of a continent full of original people. Even among the New England Puritans, anxieties about racial purity underlie much of the colonial scapegoating. One staple of the fantastical accusations during the Salem witch trials were testimonies of citizens having seen women dancing naked in the woods, something they had seen the native inhabitants do. Under the smokescreen of witchcraft, they were terrified of miscegenation and would do whatever it took to stop women from being the point of entry.

The Founders generally believed that American democracy would work even if some Americans were rotten people. But this assumption never got put to a stress test in 1787 because there were topics none of their clique wanted to talk about: slavery, for instance, and the willful creation of a permanent class of sub-citizens; or if there should be any restrictions or protections placed on immigration. Ben Franklin couldn’t even get past allowing German immigrants into the English-run colonies. He complained in 1753 that the Germans who had already arrived were “generally of the most ignorant stupid sort of their own nation” and their continued entry would bring down the colonies and whatever future nation emerged. In a speech advocating the acceptance of Chinese immigration over a century later, Frederick Douglass grappled with the issues that the Founders failed to: “If the white race may exclude all other races from this continent, it may rightfully do the same in respect to all other lands, islands, capes and continents, and thus have all the world to itself. Thus what would seem to belong to the whole, would become the property only of a part.”

For jurists like Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, “originalism” is the modern codeword for what they consider the Founders’ unwritten code of white nationalism. Despite the wisdom of Douglass and other progressives, federal legislation enacted in 1790, 1882, 1907, and 1917 placed restrictions on non-white immigration, with the crowning achievement the Immigration Act of 1924, which prevented immigration from Asia and set quotas on the number of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe—all “to preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity.” Congress has been actively lobbied by racist eugenicists like Charles Davenport—one of America’s raceologist rock stars to Hitler and other budding Nazis at the time—who argued that miscegenation between white and Black populations led to biological and cultural degradation. (Hence the more polite codeword: homogeneity.)

Carlson’s “great replacement theory” propaganda is targeted at two perceived threats to a majority-white America: the influx of immigrants of color and the decrease in birthrates among white Americans. In April, he released a curious trailer for a self-produced documentary titled The End of Men. The trailer features buffed-up, bare-chested men wrestling, chopping wood with huge axes, and firing guns to the Sturm und Drang of Richard Strauss’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra while a British narrator predicts the collapse of society and the inevitable takeover by strong men. The images practically drip of homoeroticism (you have to wonder which end of men?), but the tell is the fact that the men are all white. Given Carlson’s fears of declining fertility among white men, I imagine he would be terrified at the forceful words of Douglass’s 1867 immigration speech: “It is no disparagement to Americans of English descent, to affirm that much of the wealth, leisure, culture, refinement and civilization of the country are due to the arm of the negro and the muscle of the Irishman. Without these and the wealth created by their sturdy toil, English civilization had still lingered this side of the Alleghanies [sic], and the wolf still be howling on their summits.”

The white population in the United States began to decline in 2016, with fewer births and more deaths. At the same time, people of color became more prevalent among the young. With the pandemic, U.S. population growth fell to a historic low: only 0.1% growth between July 2020 and July 2021. In 2021, just over 51% of U.S. live births were white, and the U.S. Census Bureau has projected that by 2044, the nation’s white majority would become merely a white plurality.

To promote their deranged theory, Carlson and other Fox propagandists try to tie together the decline in white birthrates with the decline of the American economy. They want to make this an economic issue, with the dearth of white babies hitting the wallets of Fox viewers. (Which is not too difficult considering that being replaced is what every American worker worries about, whether it’s by an AI bot or someone 20 years younger.) From its start in 1996, Fox News has communicated to viewers that whiteness is a valuable commodity, and that if the non-white people in town get access to whatever you have access to, that asset’s value will plummet . . . probably to the point where it’s no longer an asset. Since the institution of owning Black people as property was made illegal, white nationalism has made whiteness itself the property (an heirloom!) to be reliably inherited tax-free. Although “legacy Americans” has a ring to it that suggests scarcity, Carlson and his fellow propagandists make clear that this property only appreciates in value when there’s more of it, not less of it.

It’s hard not to think of the great replacement rollout as the warmup act for the Supreme Court’s overturning Roe v. Wade last week, with Alito, Thomas, and their Trump-appointed backup trio weaponizing the technological limitations of the eighteenth century in the service of white nationalism. How do we know that? At a Trump rally on June 25, U.S. Representative Mary E. Miller thanked the ex-president “for the historic victory for white life in the Supreme Court yesterday.” I don’t know how long the “pro-life” movement has been about “white life,” but racism has a parasitic way of latching on to any host made vulnerable by fear.

One giveaway of this underlying racism is the extreme right’s sudden fixation on banning contraception. In his opinion on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Thomas said that Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case that protects the right to use contraceptives, should be reassessed. Even 30 years ago, the pro-life movement would never think to go there, but now everything is on the table. We’re not talking here about inflicting a Christian God’s will on a secular nation; we’re talking straight out about making it a crime to prevent pregnancy. When the same party that in the 1990s accused poor Black woman of intentionally having “anchor babies” to maintain welfare payments suddenly wants to make contraception illegal, you know they’re not talking about illegal for everyone.

What many Americans are now realizing to their horror is that the influence exerted by pro-slavery interests in 1787 America has remained shockingly consistent through two centuries and counting. Among “legacy Americans,” white nationalism survived the Civil War and flourished in coded language and laws. New codes are added all the time, and Fox News gets them out on the chyron whatever the show. The good guys are ICE and the bad guys BLM. Those trying to replace your kids on the honor roll are CRT and those trying to replace you in your job are DEI. Reciting the letters has no connection to knowing what they stand for or understanding why in 2022 America there is a need for them. Although the House January 6th Committee hearings are giving people hope that we can hold individuals accountable for subverting the Constitution, we can’t force Americans to stop seeing the Constitution and the Founders through their own racist lens. Even if Donald Trump wasn’t losing some of his chokehold on what remains of the Republican party, it’s pretty clear that the “legacy Americans” who constitute his base will demand an even more potent product. Neither the internet nor Trump created this brand of Americans, but both forces have brought them out of the shadows. While holding on to free and fair elections can limit the potential damage of their beliefs, it will not make their hatreds go away. §