The 19th-century writer Charles Péguy once remarked that “one must always say what one sees. Above all, which is more difficult, one must always see what one sees.”

This is the exact difficulty of discussing the Great Replacement—a term popularized by Péguy’s fellow Frenchman, Renaud Camus.

Camus’ 2011 book, Le Grand Remplacement, transformed an influential, prize-winning gay writer into something of a right-wing hero and an establishment scandal. Camus’ “scandal” was just to accurately observe the reality around him. In the Seine-Saint-Denis suburb of Paris, Mohamed is the most popular baby name. It has shot to the top of the list elsewhere in France as well. As Christopher Caldwell explains in the Claremont Review of Books, there are large sections of Paris in which immigrants account for a vast majority of new births.

“Rape gangs,” wrote one commentator on the epidemic of Asian Muslim-on-white rapes in England, “are a result of force social engineering; a predictable outcome of rapid demographic change, cultural alienation and community breakdown.” Anywhere racial dynamics change at breakneck pace, power dynamics shift as well.

To many native Frenchmen, this is a scandal. To establishment politicians, it is a non-issue. Small wonder, then, that Camus’s cause has been taken up by politicians such as Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour, who, despite universal establishment condemnation, are currently drawing enough support in the Prime ministerial race to make up 1/3 of the electorate.

There is, of course, a reason why the Left and the media are so hysterical in attacking the notion of the Great Replacement. They are terrified that whites, feeling understandably fearful about their replacement, will attempt to fight against it, by organizing themselves politically. Thus, they wish to boil the frog slowly.

That is why it is the trend that dare not speak its name.

Replacement By the Numbers

In America, it is beyond dispute that the far Left is pursuing and celebrating its own Great Replacement.

In 1970, the census taken two years before I was born, the U.S. population was 83% white non-Hispanic, and 11% African American. Another 1% was native American—so America’s population was 95% comprised of populations with longstanding roots in America. Most of the remainder was a Hispanic population, much of which itself had long roots in America in states like Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona, sometimes going back hundreds of years.

By 2020, the numbers of non-Hispanic whites had dropped to 57.8%, while the African-American, Asian-American, and Hispanic populations had rocketed upward. Today, there are more than 45 million immigrants, and immigrants make up a greater percentage of the population than any time in more than a century. The U.S., despite its geographic isolation, has more than 20% of the world’s immigrants while having only about 4% of the world’s population.

As the Brookings Institution’s William Frey observed, the decline in the white population is even starker than the headlines show. The number of white children under 18 has dropped from more than 43 million to just over 34 million since 2000, and that decline is accelerating.

Replacement is happening because of both fertility decline among whites and a dramatic change in America’s sources of immigration. Today, just 17% of America’s immigrant population are white non-Hispanic, which substantially overstates the white percentage of current arrivals, since this reflects also older immigrants who were disproportionately more likely to be white. Birth rates have been falling consistently, and white birth rates are the lowest of any group in the U.S. except for, by a small margin, Asian-Americans—who, because of rapidly increasing immigration, are America’s fastest growing immigrant group (having grown 81% since 2000).

The immigration crisis under the Biden Administration has thrown this process into overdrive. Catch-and-release has been replaced by catch-and-bus, where by the tens to hundreds of thousands each year illegal migrants are bussed, flown, or simply released into the U.S. interior with specific information hidden as much as possible from American citizens. Few illegal aliens who cross the border and apply for asylum will ever be deported.

Even our legal immigration is heavily tilted toward groups with little connection to America’s founding stock. And this is very much intentional. Witness how the Democrats have ferociously resisted all attempts to end scams like the diversity visa, which in 2021 brought in 132,000 people on totally random lottery, regardless of skills, where the primary requirement was simply that their country had relatively few immigrants to the U.S. previously. The diversity visa is literally the Great Replacement as official government policy.

The Rhetoric of Replacement

White Americans need not apologize for our desire not to be replaced. While I am deeply appreciative of America’s Founding Fathers and founding documents, I feel no need to assert the superiority of Western culture nor denigrate other cultures and peoples. I need no more justification for preferring America’s culture and traditions than that I grew up with them and am comfortable with them. By bringing in millions of people whose traditions are often foreign to those of the West, the Great Replacement threatens a culture that my children’s ancestors have lived in and helped to build for generations—especially since the ideology of patriotic assimilation has largely been abandoned for multiculturalism.

And the source of immigration does matter. It is impossible to imagine the recent glut of overturned statues, attacks on America’s founders, and insults to historical American leaders, absent the enormous importation of groups who do not, as a whole, feel invested in validating America’s history and wish to write a new narrative of it, starring themselves.

That this position even requires defense from charges of “white supremacy” is symptomatic of our dishonest rhetoric around the issue. Can one imagine the absurdity of calling Han Chinese people “Chinese Supremacists” for not wanting to be a minority in China, or Ethiopians “Ethiopian Supremacists” if they did not want their country to be a European majority? Yet we are supposed to pretend it is laudable and acceptable to use this sort of language in denigrating white Americans.

“You know, today I saw a thing that said a lot of men—white men—are committing suicide,” said Richard Fochtmann, former Democratic candidate for Maine State Senate, “and I almost said yeah! Great!” Mark Eves, former speaker of Maine’s House of Representatives, agrees: “Maine’s whiteness is bad news.”

The legacy media is eager to agree, but also to discourage the wrong people from noticing: “Headlines that tout a white population in decline further provoke existing fear, anxiety and anti-immigrant loathing.” CNN explains. These replacement apologists darkly warn of “conspiracy theories that view demographic shifts as fundamentally reordering power relations” precisely because, of course, demographic shifts do reorder power relations, and the Left is extremely aware of this fact—which is why it is so eager to undertake them. 

Great Replacement or Whiteshift: Which Way, Western Man?

The Left is always eager to highlight a few deeply disturbed individuals who, motivated by Great Replacement theory, have committed serious hate crimes. But these unhinged fanatics are the extremely rare exception, and not the rule.

The reality remains that the overwhelming majority of interracial violent crime in this country is committed against whites, not by them. And while many of these are mere crimes of opportunity, many are explicitly racialized in terms directly encouraged by the elites who celebrate the Great Replacement. “Where’s our reparations for four hundred years of f***ing slavery?” demanded Winston Glynn, in police custody on charges of murdering a 19-year-old Burger King employee. But you will not hear concerns raised about that kind of extremism in the corporate press.

None of this is to deny the inevitable reality that the U.S., like all countries, will change. Contra our new race-mongers on the Left, there is no inherent genetic “whiteness” we must preserve in amber to pass along American culture and traditions. Instead, what America should attempt is what race and ethnicity scholar Eric Kaufman has referred to as a “whiteshift,” wherein many Americans with multiethnic backgrounds will come to adopt the mores and traditions of, and to identify with, America’s founders and history. Already we see this in a significant number of the children of white and minority mixed marriages. But our current culture discourages this, providing both legal and cultural incentives for these children to claim a non-white identity.

A culture can in fact be inherited without a genetic legacy. The Magyars invaded Hungary in the late 9th century from the Ural Mountains, and gave substantial parts of their cultural, historical, and linguistic identity to modern Hungary. Yet, they left little genetic trace in modern Hungarians.

The ancient Magyar contribution to Hungary, is, in the felicitous phrasing of geneticist and writer Razib Khan, “written in their memes, not their genes…. Genetically, the Magyars are but a ghost, but culturally they remain with us…. Sometimes language, myth and legend live on long after flesh and blood have been washed away.”

The flesh and blood of America’s founding stock will not be washed away in a future America, but their rich cultural, historical, and institutional legacy will be if we do not assimilate newcomers into a unified American identity. Crucially, we can only reconstitute a unified American ethnic identity by dramatically slowing the pace of immigration and eliminating the financial and status incentives which currently come from claiming non-white status.

To do this, we must utterly defeat the Great Replacement as a political strategy, and permanently remove from power all who advance it.