QAA Podcast - The Great Replacement Goes Global (Premium E339) Sample

Episode Date: June 6, 2026

Annie Kelly takes the wheel for a deep dive into how “Great Replacement” theory went global. We trace how a once-fringe white-nationalist panic moved through Generation Identity, the alt-right, YouTube, the manosphere, Tucker Carlson, Stephen Crowder, and into mainstream electoral politics. For more insights, Annie talks with Dr. Michael Feola, author of The Rage of Replacement, about “melancholic nationalism,” “remigration,” and how demographic paranoia mutates into both political strategy and violent rage. The Rage of Replacement https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/The-Rage-of-Replacement-by-Michael-Feola/9781517916800?srsltid=AfmBOoqQCCb9joMKbbCv1TfrqMVH_3JmXeFzuFPLFxLMo-gE4enUaoBq Subscribe for $5 a month to get all the premium episodes: www.patreon.com/qaa Check out our new podcast series network Cursed Media! All episodes of Spectral Voyager Season 2 are out now! Binge the entirety of Truly Tradly Deeply by Annie Kelly and Megan Kelly as well as Science in Transition by Liv Agar and Spencer Barrows: cursedmedia.net Produced by Liv Agar & Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe and Jake Rockatansky. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (instagram.com/theyylivve / sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (pedrocorrea.com) qaapodcast.com QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.

If you're hearing this, well done, you've found a way to connect to the internet. Welcome to the QAA podcast Premium Episode 339. The Great Replacement goes global. As always, we are your host, Jake Rakatansky, Julian Fields, Annie Kelly, and Travis View. Greetings, beloved listeners, and welcome to another episode helmed by your UK correspondent, Annie Kelly. Today's episode is going to be something of a deep dive on a topic that I think most of our regular. listeners will probably have heard of before, the conspiracy theory known as the Great Replacement. In a nutshell, that is the narrative that elites are deliberately and systematically replacing

majority white populations with non-white people through the dual strategies of mass migration and the suppression of white birth rates. That's so awesome. It's just the exact fear that we would do colonialism. Yeah. Or it's the exact fear that they would do colonialism to us in the way that we did it to them like kind of fear yeah i love it it's probably the most dangerous conspiracy theory out there yeah yeah in fact the counter colonization thing um is actually supposedly what the great replacement was called before it was called the great replacement but we will we'll get to that a little bit oh so we've

discussed this idea a lot on this show because it's probably up there with q anonon and antivax in terms of the most influential conspiracy theories of our current era and similarly to both of these conspiracies why One of the most horrific ways that it's affected the modern world is through its very significant death toll. I think I first mentioned it on the podcast five years ago when I was talking about the Christchurch mosque shootings of 2019. Sadly, that would not be the last act of terrorism in which the person responsible directly referenced the Great Replacement as a motivation. The suspect in the 2019 El Paso shooting in which 23 people were killed, and the 22 Buffalo shooting which killed 10, both described themselves in their manifestos as fighting against the ethnic, replacement of the white race. And in May this year, while I was writing this episode, actually,

two teenage gunmen fatally shot three people outside of the Islamic Center of San Diego. According to reports, they left a manifesto which mentioned the Great Replacement 11 times. Yeah, I mean, this is Ryan's case. Sometimes people would ask me if I, you know, if I thought like Q&O was like the most dangerous conspiracy theory, I said, no, it's clearly great replacement. Just in terms of body count, you know, it's like Q&ON followers weren't going on suicide missions with a goal of murdering dozens of people, but the Nazis who are very deep into the Great Replacement were. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of just explicitly murderous.

It's logic as a conspiracy theory, I think, which QAnon, I mean, QAnon has obviously a very dark kind of like desire at its heart, which is about seeing your kind of political enemies punished and humiliated. But I don't think it's quite that direct in the sense that the Great Placement literally does just say that people having babies, just living alongside you peacefully having babies, is just like a direct threat to you. Like there's no conclusion I think you can take from that,

which isn't murderous. Yeah. It's almost reductive to call it a conspiracy theory. It's, you know, an entire way of thinking of other races. It's a racial animus. It's like, you know, a combination of like white man's burden and manifest destiny just kind of translated into like fuck my neighbors or my local mosque or whatever. Yeah.

And comparing, you know, comparing migrants to like, you know, bugs. comparing it to like a, yeah, dehumanization. And also, yeah, QAnon people aren't like putting their own Nazi skins on their guns, for the most part, I feel like. Recently, though, I've been reading a book which argues that the influence of the Great Replacement Theory extends far beyond the dark and radicalized corners of the internet. The American academic Ibrahim X Kendi, best known for his 2020 New York Times bestseller, How to Be an Anti-Racist, has recently released a new book called Chain of Ideas, The Origins of, The Origins of, The Origins of, of our authoritarian age. Chain of ideas revolves around the Great Replacement, which Kendi argues has become foundational

to modern right-wing politics. In fact, he says, it is the animating principle behind the recent surge of far-right populist parties across the globe. He charts the term's inception, beginning in 1996, when the French novelist Renaud Camus took a trip to Ereau in southern France. Seeing how many African immigrants were living there,

the author would later express that, wondering around, he had gotten the impression that, France was in the process of changing people. We see one, we take a nap, then there is another, or many others. Wait, wait, is he saying that he, like, was on the beach and there was, like, a bunch of, like, white people, and then he, like, fell asleep, and when he woke up, they were all black. They were all replaced. Yeah, I mean, I guess he's kind of saying that, but civilizationally, essentially,

that France, you know, the white French are asleep at the wheel. Essentially, they're not conscious of the fact that they are being replaced. In fact, as Kendi notes, African immigrants made up no more than 4% of the total population of a row at the time, and they were less than half of all the immigrants coming to the region, most of whom were from Europe, and thus either unnoticeable or unobjectionable to Khmer. Nonetheless, the vision haunted him, and in 2011 he would publish his book on the topic, The Grand Replacement. From there, in a relatively short space of time, Great Replacement, or GRT,

has moved from being widely viewed as a disreputable conspiracy theory associated with mass shooters to a guiding political force on the international stage. Kendi writes, When Camus first imagined great replacement theory, in hero on the eve of the 21st century, his conspiracy theory staggered around the fringes of global politics, but after the semi-retirement of the communist boogeyman when the Cold War ended in 1991,

after the terror attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, after report's surface of white populations losing their majority status in some countries, after anxiety spread over white birth rates and migrations of peoples of color. Then Camus' fringe theory reached the borders of mainstream political thought. When he published the Great Replacement in 2011, politicians had already started using a theory on voters in multiple countries. By the time Camus turned the chant, You Will Not Replace Us, into a book seven years later, the theory had invaded nations across the world.

And now, at the quarter century mark of the 21st century, it has some time. taken over global politics. So this, I think, adds to my theory that though Americans are usually portrayed as the most conspiratorial people, France, it seems like the responsible for the origin of many of the conspiracy theories that plague us today. Oh yeah. We have a crazy amount of just like racist and colonialist views in France. It's offensive and depressing. Yeah, that was actually one. So I remember even taking this note while I was reading this book, which was that France's punching above its weight in in this field. Like a lot of this stuff can be traced back to, not even Renoc Camus, but like earlier French thinkers and kind of, yeah, colonial era as well.

It's really interesting. And yeah, things like the book, the Camp of Saints as well, which is it really, really influential on the far right as well. It's also a French book. Yeah. So, yeah, you could say they're kind of, their world exporters and racism. Also, 2011 was such an ass year. Do you guys remember? Terrible horrible movies out. 2012 was at least fun because it was like, oh, like is the world going to end? Like, we don't know. And we got a couple good, I think 2012 did come out that.

Yeah, it was a decent apocalypse movie. But 2011, it was like, I think Contagion was out. Oh, predicting the pandemic. It was an ass year. 2010 felt like there was going to be so much promise. And then 2011, there's something about it. Maybe this is it. Maybe this is where the timeline switched.

Yeah, there's another universe out there where Renoka Moon never writes his book and also a load of great movies come out. Yeah, we need better. I'm looking here. Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy. That's such a 2011 movie. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Super 8.

This is when we began copying the 80s. This is, you know what? He's out of control. You know what? I think actually I might be on to say. something here. Yeah, you're on something. The third season of Spectral Voyager can be about the alternate timeline of 2011.

Yeah. What if better movies? I'll do more research. You've been listening to a sample of a premium episode of the QAA podcast. For access to the full episode as well as all past premium episodes and all of our podcast miniseries, go to patreon.com slash QAA. Travis, why is that such a good deal? Well, Jake, you get hundreds of additional episodes of the QAA podcast for just $5 per month.

For that very low price, you get access to over 200 premium episodes plus all of our miniseries. That includes 10 episodes of Man Clan with Julian and Annie, 10 episodes of Pervers with Julian and Liv, 10 episodes of the Spectral Voyager with Jake and Brad, plus 20 episodes of Trickle Down with me, Travis View. It's a bounty of content and the best deal in podcasting. for once, I agree with you. And I also agree that people could subscribe by going to patreon.com slash QAA. Well, that's not an opinion. It's a fact. You're so right, Jake.

We love and appreciate all of our listeners. Yes, we do. And Travis is actually crying right now, I think. Out of gratitude, maybe? That's not true. The part about be crying. Not me being grateful. I'm very grateful.