Donald Trump, Elon Musk – and the violent ‘Great Replacement’ campaign

Donald Trump and Elon Musk are the faces of a scare campaign that looks set to dominate the headlines in 2024.

ANALYSIS

US Presidential wannabe Donald Trump is pouring fuel on racial and religious hatred to boost his chances of winning in 2024. And Elon Musk appears to have jumped on the bandwagon.

During a rally speech in New Hampshire, Trump once again pulled a line from Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf:

“When they let 15-16 million immigrants into our country, we’ve got a lot of work to do. They’re poisoning the blood of our country. That’s what they’ve done,” he told cheering audiences at a 2024 US Presidential Campaign address. “They’re coming from prisons, from mental institutions — from all over the world.”

Historians the world over immediately linked it to Hitler’s fascist dogma used to justify the institutionalised massacre of Gypsies, disabled people, Jehovah’s witnesses, homosexuals, Jews – and political opponents.

“All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning,” Hitler wrote in his rambling 1925 autobiography.

Donald Trump leaving the stage after speaking during a campaign rally at the University of New Hampshire's Whittemore Center Arena in Durham, New Hampshire, on December 16. Picture: Joseph Prezioso / AFP

But the source of Trump’ electoral scare campaign has roots much older than Nazism. It was a central plank of the Confederacy’s secession from the United States of America and the Civil War of 1860.

In recent decades, it’s been revived in two words as the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that has taken firm hold among white Christian nationalist America, conspiracy cults such as QAnon – and Elon Musk’s social media platform X.

In November, the tech billionaire told advertisers abandoning X (previously called Twitter) to “go f**k yourself” after his own controversial comments triggered an upsurge of hate-based content.

Musk publicly agreed with a tweet claiming that Jewish communities have been “pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.” Picture: Michael M. Santiago / Getty Images via AFP

“Great Replacement” asserts some group – it can alternately be the Democrats, Jews or any immigrant population or group with different ideas – is deliberately “engineering” the US population with non-white immigrants. And this is designed to produce a “white genocide”.

Musk insisted he was sorry for declaring a post linking “Great Replacement” to the Jewish race as being “the actual truth”. But, after Musk travelled to Israel in an effort to save his business, the hate-based content on X continues to rise – seemingly unopposed.

And the dogma has already been exported to Canada, Europe – and Australia.

“In its decades-long fight against terrorism, the United States regularly criticised countries such as Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia for exporting extremist ideologies and violence,” says Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) counter-terror analysts Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware.

“Ironically, today the United States stands accused of doing the same.”

America – the terror state

“The spread of homegrown American conspiracy theories, beliefs in racial superiority, anti-government extremism, and other manifestations of hate and intolerance has become such a problem that some of the United States’s closest allies — Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom — have designated both American groups and citizens as foreign terrorists,” Hoffman and Ware write in Foreign Policy.

But Ware recently told US media the “Great Replacement” conspiracy was an evolution of the Confederate states losing control of the 390,000 enslaved Africans they had imported as unpaid labour in 1865.

Their fear, he says, was that “white people faced grave danger, with the severity of the danger increasing in direct proportion to the expansion of freedom for Black people”.

It’s always been there, with its most obvious expression being the Ku Klux Klan.

“But the one really big factor that cannot be overlooked is that before Trump, there was the election of Barack Obama,” Ware said. “A Black person being elected president and things that followed sent a message to an unfortunately quite large population in America that they were being replaced by minorities.”

Then US President Barack Obama speaking during a town-hall meeting at Fox Senior High School in Arnold, Missouri in Aril 20029. Picture: AFP PHOTO / Saul LOEB

Trump seized on that fear during the 2016 campaign, falsely – yet repeatedly – claiming Obama was a foreign-born Muslim. He is, in fact a Protestant Christian. And he was born in Honolulu, Hawaii.

“Unsurprisingly, this led to a substantial increase in hate crimes and terrorist incidents perpetrated by white supremacists both inside the US and beyond,” says Ware.

Now Trump’s stirring those same fears again.

“Fascists are obsessed with purity,” argues University of California political philosophy researcher Mark Reiff. “They long for a world where they can live among their own racial, ethnic, religious and ideological kind on land they view as exclusively theirs. True purity of community is an aspiration that can be made real only through violence and subjugation. Hence the Holocaust, genocide and ethnic cleansing, and other more limited attacks on minority and immigrant populations.”

Inmate #P01135809

No US president had ever been indicted before 2023. Then, in the space of just five months, Trump’s past caught up with him.

In Washington DC he is accused of four felony counts over attempts to overthrow the 2020 election result. In Georgia he faces 13 felony counts for electoral interference. In New York he is up against 34 felony charges over tax evasion and hush money paid to a porn star. In Florida he’s up against 40 charges for illegally possessing classified White House documents and impeding efforts to recover them.

In August, he earned the designation Inmate #P01135809 when booked at an Atlanta jail.

Donald Trump surrendered on racketeering charges and had his mugshot taken at a Georgia jail on August 24, 2023. Picture: FULTON COUNTY SHERIFF'S OFFICE / AFP

Trump won few friends while in government. Especially among his own personally chosen staff.

General Mark Milley, who was appointed by Trump to serve as the nation’s highest-ranked military officer, had reassured the Chinese there would be no surprise attack from the US during Trump’s final days in office. The former president accused the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of “treason” and demanded he be “executed”.

In April, Trump threatened New York that his indictment would result in “death and destruction”.

In October, Trump urged his devout followers to “go after” New York Attorney-General Letitia James for charging him with business fraud.

But Trump’s belief in violence as a valid tool extends beyond political opponents. In September, he told a cheering Californian Republican Party convention: “Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving”.

And, earlier this month, Trump declared he would rule as a “dictator” from “day one” of his second term of office.

“This rhetoric may seem like crazy bluster, which is no doubt why many people appear prepared to ignore it,” argues Reiff. “But put in its historical context, what Trump is doing is echoing views that are part of a long tradition of outright fascist thought. For fascists have always seen the use of violence as a virtue, not a vice.”

Musk’s X-factor

“If somebody’s gonna try to blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money? Go f**k yourself,” Musk spat during an interview last month. “Go. F**k. Yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is. Hey, Bob, if you’re in the audience!” He appeared to be addressing Disney chief executive Robert Iger.

“What I care about is the reality of goodness, not the perception of it. And what I see all over the place is people who care about looking good while doing evil. F**k them,” Musk added.

However, independent observers have continued to monitor extremist and racist content on his platform. In one case, where media watchdog Media Matters tracked high-priced ads appearing alongside posts promoting Nazim, Musk’s response was to sue for “defamation”.

X CEO Elon Musk raises a fist during the Atreju political meeting organised by the young militants of Italian right wing party Brothers of Italy (Fratelli d'Italia) on December 16, 2023. Picture: Andreas SOLARO / AFP

Earlier this month, financial analysts expected X to have lost $1.5 billion in advertising revenue in 2023. But it will still manage to pull in $2.5 billion.

While Musk conceded he had “handed a loaded gun” to his detractors and white supremacists, he immediately pivoted to a variation of the Great Replacement conspiracy theme.

The day after he told Israeli President Isaac Herzog – “We need to do everything possible to stop the hate” – Musk began boosting the repeatedly debunked “Pizzagate” conspiracy.

This attempts to link Democratic Party executives to organised child abduction and paedophile rings – and the mediaeval-era fantasy that Jews used the blood of Christian children for religious rituals.

He posted, “does seem at least a little suspicious”, alongside a meme asserting “Pizzagate is real”.

But Pizzagate itself proved the danger of such fake allegations.

In 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch opened fire with an AR-15 assault rifle inside a Washington DC pizza restaurant while searching for what QAnon had asserted was a secret underground abuse chamber. It wasn’t there. He was sentenced to four years in prison.

Nevertheless, Musk has responded to such content on X five times since late November.

Yearning for armageddon

“You know what solves it? When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell, and everything is a disaster, then you’ll have riots to go back to where we used to be – when we were great,” Trump said during a 2014 rally.

Trump isn’t alone in exploiting the profoundly ingrained cultural insecurity of the US. Fellow Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy this month asserted: “Great replacement theory is not some grand right-wing conspiracy theory, but a basic statement of the Democratic Party’s platform.”

While he deleted that initial tweet – on X – he followed it up with a slight variation before a recent candidate debate (which Trump didn’t attend).

Can’t make this stuff up. Here’s Biden, nearly a decade ago, sitting next to none other than Mayorkas proselytizing the grand “right-wing myth” known as the Great Replacement Theory. Turns out it’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s just the basic immigration policy for Democrats. pic.twitter.com/8B7CapEJzJ

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) December 5, 2023

Ramaswamy was born in the US to two non-citizens. His mother has since taken the Oath of Allegiance. But the pharmaceutical billionaire is following in Trump’s electioneering footsteps – despite being much further behind in the polls.

An American Values Survey conducted by the Brooking Institution has found Americans are increasingly divided in their beliefs and values: “Key findings include a growingly disproportionate amount of support for political violence, a willingness to ignore the rule of law to win political power, and a belief in untrue conspiracy theories,” the report finds.

Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) president Robert Jones says: “We’re clearly in for a pretty rough ride in this country over the next 12 months.”

“We found that the numbers of Americans who say that “Things have gotten so far off track that true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save the country” has gone up over the last few years, from 15 per cent to 23 per cent.”

One in three Republicans believe this as against 13 per cent of Democrats.

“Among those who believe that America was intended by God to be a promised land for European Christians, nearly four in ten believe they may have to resort to violence to “save” the country,” he adds.

Jamie Seidel is a freelance writer | @JamieSeidel