Two-Thirds of US Republicans Agree With “Great Replacement” Conspiracy Theory Pushed by Global National Conservatives

US media is report­ing on a new sur­vey indi­cat­ing that 2/3 of Repub­li­cans agree with a core belief of the so-called “Great Replace­ment” con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry. As the Vice report describes, the the­o­ry holds that Democ­rats are bring­ing in immi­grants to the US to replace more con­ser­v­a­tive white voters:

Two-thirds of Repub­li­cans sur­veyed agreed with a core belief of the “great replace­ment” con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that holds that Democ­rats are import­ing immi­grants to replace “more con­ser­v­a­tive white vot­ers,” accord­ing to a new­ly released sur­vey. Of Repub­li­cans sur­veyed, 68 per­cent said they believed that the recent shift in U. S. demo­graph­ics is “not a nat­ur­al change but has been moti­vat­ed by pro­gres­sive and lib­er­al lead­ers active­ly try­ing to lever­age polit­i­cal pow­er by replac­ing more con­ser­v­a­tive white vot­ers.” That includes 38 per­cent who strong­ly agreed with the state­ment, with 30 per­cent of Repub­li­cans say­ing they some­what agreed. The poll was con­duct­ed in April by Tulchin Research for the South­ern Pover­ty Law Cen­ter, a civ­il rights orga­ni­za­tion that mon­i­tors extrem­ism and hate groups. The orig­i­nal “great replace­ment” con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry, and its main­streamed Repub­li­can coun­ter­part, have grown in pop­u­lar­i­ty on the hard right in recent years. The orig­i­nal white suprema­cist ver­sion of the false the­o­ry posits that there’s a secret cabal of elites push­ing to import immi­grants to “replace” the native white pop­u­la­tions of the U. S. and Euro­pean coun­tries. Many ver­sions claim that Jews are behind this, with the goal of hav­ing immi­grant pop­u­la­tions out­breed native whites to cre­ate a pop­u­la­tion they can bet­ter con­trol. The GOP ver­sion swaps out Jews for Democ­rats, and claims that lib­er­als and big busi­ness are col­lud­ing to import huge num­bers of immi­grants for cheap labor and to swamp Repub­li­cans at the polls and con­trol elec­tions so they nev­er lose again.

Read the rest here.

The Vice report goes on to note that Fox News star Tuck­er Carl­son has played a key role in help­ing the con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry achieve main­stream status.

US media also report­ed last month that Hun­gar­i­an Prime Min­is­ter Vik­tor Orbán is also a pro­po­nent of the Great Replace­ment. Accord­ing to a Vox report:

On May 16, just days after the dead­ly mass shoot­ing in Buf­fa­lo, New York, moti­vat­ed by con­spir­a­to­r­i­al fears of white West­ern­ers’ “Great Replace­ment” by minori­ties, Hun­gar­i­an Prime Min­is­ter Vik­tor Orbán endorsed the shooter’s ide­ol­o­gy in a nation­al­ly tele­vised speech.“Part of the pic­ture of the decade of war fac­ing us will be recur­ring waves of sui­ci­dal pol­i­cy in the West­ern world. One such sui­cide attempt that I see is the great Euro­pean pop­u­la­tion replace­ment pro­gram, which seeks to replace the miss­ing Euro­pean Chris­t­ian chil­dren with migrants, with adults arriv­ing from oth­er civ­i­liza­tions,” Orbán said.Orbán is a close observ­er of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics; the speech lit­er­al­ly con­tains an exhor­ta­tion to “make Hun­gary great again.” It is implau­si­ble, as the Guardian notes, that he was unaware of the con­cern in Wash­ing­ton over “Great Replace­ment” ide­ol­o­gy — a con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that posits a shad­owy plan to “replace” the white West­ern pop­u­la­tion with immi­grants and the chil­dren of nonwhites.

Read the rest here.

The Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) report­ed last month on the Con­ser­v­a­tive Polit­i­cal Action Con­fer­ence (CPAC), a US Repub­li­can event held this year in Budapest. As we not­ed,  the event was head­lined by Hun­gar­i­an Prime Min­is­ter Vik­tor Orban and also fea­tured speech­es from Don­ald Trump, Fox News host Tuck­er Carl­son, and Trump’s for­mer White House chief of staff, Mark Mead­ows. We also report that what was described as a “noto­ri­ous Hun­gar­i­an racist” was a fea­tured speak­er on the sec­ond day of the CPAC conference.

Tuck­er Carl­son has fig­ured promi­nent­ly in a new and devel­op­ing alliance between US con­ser­v­a­tives and Euro­pean nation­al­ists, a poten­tial means for Rus­sia to exert covert influ­ence in Europe and the US, using Hun­gary as a plat­form. GIOR recent­ly pub­lished a report on this alliance titled “The Nation­al Con­ser­vatism Alliance: An Oppor­tu­ni­ty for Russ­ian Influ­ence?” The GIOR report details the role that Vik­tor Orban and the Hun­gar­i­an gov­ern­ment have been play­ing in the Nation­al Con­ser­vatism Alliance.

The full report can be down­loaded here.

In April, the Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) report­ed on Carl­son’s con­tin­u­ing sup­port and defense of Hun­gary and Vik­tor Orban. At the same time, we report­ed on the reelec­tion of Vik­tor Orban as Hun­gar­i­an Prime Min­is­ter, described as “the Russ­ian Pres­i­den­t’s clos­est friend inside the EU and NATO.”