The ties between the Big Lie and the Great Replacement Theory
If you still believe the election was stolen you probably are starting to believe the country is being taken away from you too.
I spend a lot of my time looking for people on Facebook. It’s just something you have to do as a reporter because pretty much everyone is on Facebook, and it’s also where people comment about things that have happened — like a school shooting, or a car crash, or the hoarder in your neighborhood. Or an election.
Since January I’ve been looking at lots of people on Facebook who believe lies about elections. Many of them also have power over elections here in Georgia, which is obviously very troubling to many people who are reading this but also very comforting to lots of other folks who think Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election despite, well, just about everything you can possibly read on the subject.
I see them on Facebook and read their posts. In real life they’re also easy to point out because they usually have a Let’s Go Brandon sticker on their truck or a Blue Lives Matter flag on the back window.
Believing election lies is one thing. Believing that there’s a coordinated effort to replace White Americans with foreigners so that Democrats can take over the country with these new, liberal voters is entirely another. Unfortunately, it’s getting to the point where we just can’t really separate the two conspiracies anymore.
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The young terrorist who killed innocent Black people in Buffalo a few weeks back had been radicalized on 4chan, a hellhole filled with every variety of hate you can imagine, including much discussion of the Great Replacement Theory. While most people will never find themselves in the depths of the messaging boards that the killer spent so much time in, we’re all slaves to algorithms that too many Americans don’t even understand are dictating their online lives. I shouldn’t even say online, because with super computers in all of our pockets there is little separation between what happens on the Internet and what happens in real life. Spend even a little time scrolling through Facebook and you’re bound to find an old friend who now posts daily updates, showing how the algorithm has radicalized them. The algorithm doesn’t discriminate on age, race, or sex. It feeds you what you want to see and then just keeps bludgeoning you with it until you begin to believe insane things. In the case of the Buffalo terrorist it was that White people are being replaced by non-whites in a coordinated effort to fundamentally remake America. In the case of many older, White conservatives and Republicans, the algorithms have told them that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.
The algorithms and the people who feed them have already begun telling those same older Whites that future elections will be stolen as well. I know this because I’m in a group called VoterGA, where I watch older White people post every single day about how some facet of our elections are broken, fraudulent, or rigged. Right now they’re all up in arms about a post from a far-right writer that Trump promoted on his social media app, Truth Social. I’ll spare you the details but suffice to say that pretty much everything the writer said in her article on the recent Georgia primary election absolutely did not happen. If you want to read all the ways in which she was wrong you can read this column at the AJC.
Still, the older Whites in VoterGA believe the article when it says that there’s no way Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensberger could have won their races in Georgia.
“I don’t know anyone who voted for Kemp, Ratensberger, or do nothing Carr! Do you?” said one man who apparently has not a single person in his life who would vote for anyone other than who Trump told them to vote for. “The results don’t seem correct!”
While it’s most certainly a problem that millions of Americans believe in false claims about election fraud, it’s probably a bit more troubling that many also believe in the Great Replacement Theory. But the distance between believing that the 2020 election was stolen and believing that Whites are being replaced is not a long one. I’m far from the only one saying this. Those who believe the 2020 election was rigged are “more likely than not to reject, at least tacitly, the idea of a multiracial United States and to repudiate the intrinsically American principle that government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed,” former Navy officer Theodore Johnson wrote in the Bulwark last week.
He’s saying what is pretty obvious if you cruise around some of the chat rooms and profiles of older Whites: people who believe election lies are often racist and fascist.
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That picture is from the Facebook profile of a woman who recently ran for the Chatham County Board of Elections on an election denier platform. She’s emblematic of how election denierism segues into anti-immigrant sentiment and, for many, Great Replacement. Knowing that Facebook’s algorithms will feed us what we want to hear — in an ever-increasing volume and level of polarization of content — it doesn’t take long for someone who believes that the election was stolen from Trump to be fed content about how America is becoming less White. What remains to be seen is how it will metastasize in real life.
But we have some clues.
Check out the comments on the Uvalde Police Department’s Facebook page and you’ll find plenty of evidence of the belief that undocumented immigrants captured by law enforcement are part of an invading army. (The commenters are apparently too stupid to think that maybe the migrants are wearing camouflage so they won’t be caught by police.) Fear of immigrants has led in recent years to abhorrent treatment of migrants, bands of armed citizens attempting to patrol the border, and other acts of neo-fascism under the guise of protecting the homeland. But if believing election lies is a gateway drug to believing in Great Replacement, we already know how government officials will act. That’s because we’ve seen, since 2020, how Republicans across the country tried to overturn the results of that election, then whiplashed into action to create barriers to voting in state legislatures nationwide. In Georgia, they made it illegal to hand out water to people waiting in line to vote.
So we already know how they’ll act when they all start believing that Democrats are planning to give citizenship to millions of undocumented immigrants just to secure their votes. As Johnson wrote:
If the Big Liars and replacement theorists feel political losses are imminent and enduring, they suddenly become more accepting of anti-democratic actions to rig the game by weighting the areas where they hold power.
A growing number of Republican politicians are now publicly espousing the Great Replacement Theory, so we’ll start seeing these “anti-democratic actions” more and more as the demographics of this country continue to change. And those politicians are backed up by their voters: a Southern Poverty Law Center survey found that as much as 70 percent of Republicans believe in some aspect of Great Replacement. That means the Facebook radicalization engine chugs on, pointing White Americans in an even darker direction.
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You should also know about this:
Republicans are engaged in widespread and highly coordinated efforts to create an “army” of poll workers who believe election lies, and are simultaneously setting up the legal apparatus to call results of future elections into question. (That’s why November’s midterms are so important: they will be a test run for these GOP efforts, and a stress test for our democracy.)
These efforts have caused fear in Michigan that election deniers are seeking to become poll workers or watchers, thus causing chaos at polls in Democrat-heavy precincts.
Here in Savannah, voters dodged a bullet by electing to keep a moderate Republican on the board of elections instead of replacing her with one of two candidates, both of whom believe in election lies and one of whom is a full-on QAnon nutter, I found for The Savannahian.
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P.S. The photo at the top of this post is from just outside Johnson County, where I was reporting on Herschel Walker for the Guardian. I’m going to be doing a lot of election stuff at Where Do We Go From Here in the coming months, not only because I think it’s important but also because I’m a freelancer and I have to report on things that publications will buy and right now, everyone is interested in that. But that could change one day if I get enough subscribers to chip in a few bucks each month for this newsletter. So, if you liked what you saw here today, please subscribe and consider spreading the word. Every little bit helps.