This is a lightly edited transcript of the April 11 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: Good afternoon, everybody. This is Perry Bacon. I’m the host of The New Republic show Right Now. I’m honored to be joined today by Ibram Kendi. He’s a professor at Howard University. He’s also the author of a few books now—How to Be an Antiracist, The History of Racist Ideas—and he has a new book out that we’re going to talk about today. Professor, welcome.
Ibram Kendi: Thank you for having me.
Bacon: So let me talk about the book itself. The book is about this idea of the global replacement theory. So talk about replacement theory and what that means. The title of the book is Chain of Ideas, I should say. We’re going to talk about about the chain of ideas ... but the book is about replacement theory, so talk about what that means for people who don’t know.
Kendi: Sure. In Chain of Ideas, I’m chronicling the reemergence of what’s known as “great replacement theory” over the last two decades, but also showing its much longer history. After chronicling that history, I ended up defining great replacement theory as a political theory that suggests that there are these powerful elites who are enabling peoples of color to displace the lives and even livelihoods of white people, who apparently need authoritarian protection.
When we hear things like “immigrants are invading the nation,” we’re hearing great replacement theory. When we hear ideas like “the enemy is inside the gates,” or “they’re poisoning the blood of the nation,” or “diversity programs are discriminatory,” or “we need to engage in mass deportation,” or “anti-DEI” programs in order to save the nation—we’re hearing great replacement theory.
Bacon: Is there a place it originated, or is it a more recent phenomenon, or has it been existing a long time but proliferated in the last decade or so?
Kendi: So a French novelist named Renaud Camus named the theory with a book he entitled The Great Replacement in 2011. And ideas are different than people, and ideas can live for quite some time before anyone names them. This is an idea that really emerged in its totality in the late nineteenth century, when you had some colonial officials thinking that if decolonization ever came—if African people who were colonized, or Latin Americans, or even Asian folks were to free themselves—these colonial officials imagined that they wouldn’t stop there, that they would then try to come and colonize Europe and engage in displacement and genocides, and essentially do to Europeans what had been done to them.
What’s ironic about that origin story is even Camus, writing in 2011, and again in 2018 when he wrote a book, You Will Not Replace Us—he described the so-called great replacement as counter-colonization.
Bacon: So in the U.S., I think the obvious example is the tiki torch–holding students at the University of Virginia in 2017. That’s when I thought about this, because they actually said, “You will not replace us.” But give other examples of where you’re seeing this play out.
Kendi: We can go all the way back to 2011. That is the year in which ... the sixth link in the chain of ideas is this notion that white Christians are indigenous to the nation. And when I say the sixth link—the chain of ideas is organized around these 10 ideas that are the building blocks for great replacement theory.
This idea that white Christians are indigenous to the nation and everyone else, no matter how long they’ve been here, are eternally immigrants, and certainly not American, is one of the ideas that undergirded birtherism, [which] of course Donald Trump expressed first in 2011.
That was also the year when a group of scholars and scientists in New England found that white people had recognized Black progress, but the majority of white people that they surveyed believed that Black progress had come at white expense. They empirically found the existence of what’s known as zero-sum theory, which is also a foundational idea within great replacement theory—an idea that has been relentlessly debunked.
Bacon: How does it play out in other countries? Because ... it’s not white versus Black, or white versus people of color, [like] in the U.S.
Kendi: So what I found is that even as Renaud Camus and even maybe a Donald Trump positioned and conceived of these as a racist theory in which Black people were replacing white people—it’s mutated. And it’s mutated to not just a racist theory. It’s mutated to be an ethnocentric theory, whereby in a country like India, Modi, the prime minister, is positioning the Muslim minorities as replacing the Hindu majority.
Or similarly in nearby China, in which it’s imagined that Chinese Muslims are replacing and displacing the Han majority, so they’re being actually rounded up in concentration camps. In other countries, it may be the minoritized ethnic group that’s positioned as a replacer.
Or in a country like Russia, whereby Putin has described queer people as replacing the traditional values of Russian Christians. Or gender. In the U.S. context, like in other countries, it’s imagined that “gender ideology,” as they call it—another term for feminist ideas, or ideas that express equality between queer people and cisgender and heterosexual people—that those are destroying the nation. Or white women who decide not to have three or four children are contributing to declining birth rates, which is leading to the replacement of white people.
Bacon: Does this depend on demographic change, or is it almost distinct from that? Because in the U.S. we’ve had a growing population of people of color, so there is a numerical case for changes—not necessarily that you’re being replaced, but ... does this theory depend on change, or is it more a feeling of change that people are expressing, that they’re really opposing?
Kendi: Again, going back to Renaud Camus—in writing and conceiving of great replacement theory, he acknowledged that data and science were not necessarily on his side. He more or less told his readers to not really look to science or data to describe what is happening—that instead you should look to how you feel.
Bacon: OK.
Kendi: I’m literally sort of quoting him. This is not a theory that makes logical sense. Even if you take the United States, which has the largest foreign-born population in the entire world—86 percent of people in the United States were born in the United States. And in the European Union, 91 percent of residents in the European Union were born in the European Union, even as it’s being described as being taken over and invaded by “African migrants” who are mostly Muslims.
Bacon: The book is called Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age. So connect the ideas with authoritarianism.... Why does replacement theory lead to authoritarianism?
Kendi: When you can make a group of people—or even a person—believe that their lives are under attack, that they’re indeed facing a genocide, that their jobs are being stolen, that their electoral power is being taken away, that apparently their elections are being stolen, that their culture is being eroded, that their nation is being lost—it allows you to then turn around and claim that you are going to be their savior and their protector.
What’s happened around the world is the way in which these politicians have gone about being people’s protectors and saviors has been creating these militarized, heavily policed states with some of the largest forms of kidnapping and incarceration in the world, while simultaneously taking away the rights and freedoms of the very people they’re claiming they want to protect. The authoritarian states become justified on the notion that in order to protect you from these losses, I have to apparently do away with democracy.
Bacon: Does Donald Trump—just to give an example—think there’s a replacement happening, or is he just weaponizing that? Does he know there’s not? Does he think there is? Is he weaponizing it? What’s the agency of people who are used in milking this idea? Do they know they’re lying, or is it more unconscious? I know you think it doesn’t really matter—we’ll come back to that. But do they know they’re lying, or is it more unconscious?
Kendi: As a historian of ideas, this is always a tricky subject, because I can only truly, as a scholar, convey that this is what the person said, as opposed to ... it’s always tricky when I say, This is what the person truly believes. We really don’t know what a person believes. So I actually don’t know.
What I do know is that many of these authoritarians, like Donald Trump, claim that they are against mass migration when they engage in or support policies—or even attack countries—that destabilize them, which then leads to migration. Many of these politicians are heavily funded by some of the wealthiest people in the world who are also heavily investing in AI and other new technologies that are leading to jobs being taken from the very people who they’re trying to get to believe that their jobs are being taken by immigrants, Black people, and Muslims. I certainly know it’s an effective strategy to hoodwink and distract people, but whether people are true believers is not something I necessarily know.
Bacon: So I asked about leaders, and you said that’s not certain, but there’s some polling suggesting actual, white working-class voters—to be very reductive—in the U.S. do believe this, even if it’s not true. What about the people who are being influenced? Are they being hoodwinked? Do they actually know the demographics of America?
You go to Ohio ... you can go to a Trump rally, you’ll find people who say, Black people get all these jobs and so on, but they work at companies; they know who’s in charge of the company, I think. So is this playing into latent biases? Do they really think they’re being replaced, in terms of the average person?
Kendi: This is one of the reasons why I not only wanted to write about the history of great replacement theory, but I wanted to break it down into its component parts. If we think of zero-sum theory—that if Black people are making progress, then I’m losing out as a white person—what that means is if you have a huge minority of Black people in your particular company, people could still perceive that two percent as taking from them, or that single Black person in a position of power in their space as somehow an indication that opportunities are being lost to you.
There’s also an emphasis, as I write about in Chain of Ideas, on defining racism as essentially interpersonal discrimination. What happens is it compels a white working-class person to say, if they didn’t get access to housing or that job, it’s because they’re white, even if there’s no evidence to support it.
Bacon: I remember in The History of Racist Ideas, in the conclusion, you had this part in which ... you argued basically that you have a society where there’s all this inequality based on race, so racist ideas are in some ways invoked to justify this. In some ways the racist policies lead to racist ideas. Is there a similar interplay here?
Kendi: I think so. I think the authoritarianism and the erosion of democracy is being justified via great replacement theory. I also think the policies that are allowing for growing amounts of economic inequality are being covered up via great replacement theory. What it’s allowing is an economic and political class to continue their, frankly, hoarding of power, and then getting the very people who they’re taking power and rights from—like they are the rest of us—to believe that they’re actually protecting and saving them.
It’s also operating among cultural workers. These are people who are writing or philosophizing or covering—there have been many people who are white and male, who feel that their opportunities are being lost at the hands of those Black thinkers and writers and intellectuals who they imagine are receiving preferential treatment, or they’re talking about an issue like racism that isn’t that important. So there’s also an anxiety and a resentment there. That’s why in Chain of Ideas I talked about how even as great replacement theory is primarily identified as a far-right theory, it has also infiltrated centrist and even leftist spaces.
Bacon: This idea of zero-sum—you’ve mentioned it a couple of times now—sort of rings true. What makes people think that way, and is there a way to get them to stop thinking that way?
Kendi: It is such an old idea. I even wrote about how Thomas Jefferson articulated this idea in his Notes on the State of Virginia. He argued for gradual emancipation, but then argued for colonization of Black people back to Africa, and argued that if Black people remained and were given their rights, there would be a perpetual race war. I want to emphasize: This is an idea as old as the United States, in the U.S. context.
But I talked about in Chain of Ideas what’s known as positive-sum theory, which is the notion that as that other group gains, my group gains. When you look at the history of the United States and the times in which we have instituted equitable and just policies, the majority even of white people benefited more than they benefited from the privileges that came along with racist policies and practices.
Bacon: The 1960s ... Social Security, most Medicare and Medicaid, the Civil Rights Act, all at the same time, essentially. You mentioned the symbolism—how much in the U.S. is this like, we have a Black president, so therefore that creates the idea? If Hillary Clinton had been president—well, she’s a woman—if Joe Biden had been president in 2008 forward, would this have taken off in the U.S. the way it did?
Kendi: Probably not. As I write about in Chain of Ideas, in 2008 there were two major historical events that allowed these theorists and politicians to really capitalize on these situations and spread great replacement theory. One was the Great Recession, in which they were able to tie people’s economic struggles to immigrants, Black people, and Muslims.
But also the election of Barack Obama—these theorists at that time positioned this one Black man being elected to the presidency as an indication that Black people in general had taken over the entire United States. Frankly, they argued that Black people had taken over the world. That became a trigger for the spread of great replacement theory.
Bacon: If you don’t mind, connect the three books ... I haven’t read this book yet—but connect the Racist Ideas book, How to Be an Antiracist, Chain of Ideas. What are you trying to do as an intellectual project, if you don’t mind me asking?
Kendi: The way that they’re connected is: Stamped from the Beginning chronicles the history of anti-Black racist ideas—from their origins in 15th-century Portugal to 2008. So the narrative ends in 2008. The narrative of Chain of Ideas largely begins in 2008 and comes to 2025, and chronicles that the most dominant anti-Black racist idea in the world today is great replacement theory. So it extends that history. Instead of taking a holistic look at a number of different types of anti-Black racist ideas, it looks at one specific one, in terms of great replacement theory, which also happens to be the most dominant bigoted idea and political theory in the world today.
What’s striking [with] great replacement theorists: You take somebody like Camus writing in 2011—even in You Will Not Replace Us in 2018—he argued as early as 2011 that the force that was bringing on the great replacement was anti-racism. He has relentlessly argued that it was anti-racism, apparently, that he imagined was genocidal, was harmful to white people, was harmful to the world.
I didn’t know, when I was writing How to Be an Antiracist, that I was walking into this building storm that was coming to really engulf any of us who were actually showing what anti-racism has the capacity to do—which is ensure democracy, ensure equality, ensure equity for everyone.
Bacon: I am glad you moved to that, because the backlash—I don’t love the term “backlash,” I think the term “countermobilization” is better, because it actually describes what happened—but we’re almost six years from when a lot of people I know bought your book How to Be an Antiracist.
I’m not sure if they all read it, but they were suddenly walking around with it, and they were purchasing it, and that was a useful thing, I thought. But by the end of the next three years, the book was banned by all these legislators, banned from classrooms, criticized by every Republican politician I can think of, and so on.
What have you made of what’s happened—with your writing, but also Nikole Hannah-Jones’s writing, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s writing? I hate the term “racial reckoning,” but we had something that happened in 2020, and then these last five years we’ve seen the ideas be suppressed and banned. What have you made of that, as someone who’s experienced it personally?
Kendi: It’s been interesting. The level of political force that has come down to discredit us as authors—and even to ban or restrict our books—what that says to me is that these individuals who did that did not feel comfortable having a robust conversation on the merits of the actual books, or even on the merits of our integrity as writers and journalists and scholars. Instead they had to figure out ways to get people to not take ... me or Nikole or Ta-Nehisi or others seriously, or to not read our books.
One of the ways in which they went about doing that was positioning our work as harmful to the nation, as harmful to white people, even in certain cases harmful to Black people. I talk about in Chain of Ideas what I call the inversion of anti-racism—the ways in which these great replacement theorists inverted our work as somehow anti-white. This was happening at the same time they inverted feminism, they went about inverting LGBTQ activism as somehow anti-Christian. Really any thinker who is seeking to defend or advocate for a particular group has been positioned—I should say repositioned—as seeking to harm another group, which has been one of the driving forces of great replacement theory.
But I should add this: Countermobilization, to use your term, didn’t just come at the hands of Republicans. It came at the hands of Democrats. It came at the hands of people who imagined themselves as progressive and radical, who had issues with people who weren’t themselves receiving spotlight or attention. I think we received it and were attacked really from all sides.
Bacon: What does that mean for you now? You’re six years from that, you’re releasing a new book. Can you do anything about that? I see you’re being reviewed everywhere, so it’s not like you’ve disappeared. But has it affected how you present your ideas and how you go about promoting them and talking about what you’re seeing and what you’re researching?
Kendi: One thing I will say is when you are a writer or a scholar who is under scrutiny, it becomes that much more important to ensure that you’re fact-checking, to give an example. The intensity of the fact-checking that we did for Chain of Ideas was unlike any book that I had done. We wanted to ensure that it may not have been perfect in terms of facts, but we damn near tried to make it such.
Even as a scholar, knowing that I’m writing on, frankly, propaganda, I didn’t want to—I also know the ways in which my work has been misinterpreted and misrepresented—I didn’t want to continue that age of misrepresentation. By doing that, I was very careful in trying to ensure I was representing the words of people accurately and citing those speeches and articles, and putting the entire note section for Chain of Ideas online so that people can click through the speech for themselves.
Bacon: I’ll finish here: We’re about to start a Democratic presidential primary—a lot of people are running for president. What I observe is a lot of the candidates now feel like they can’t discuss race or gender or identity or LGBT issues. There’s something called “wokeness,” something called “identity politics,” and these things are bad. Even the people I like—the AOCs, the Ro Khanna’s—are being advised: Don’t touch any issue that doesn’t affect white men the same as anybody else. Those of us who think there is racism, there is sexism, there is homophobia, there is Islamophobia—what should the rest of us be doing? Because I get the sense the politicians we vote for are no longer going to speak about these issues honestly.
Kendi: Certainly we should, as everyday people, never look to our politicians to eradicate racism. We should always be organizing among ourselves and simultaneously organizing and mobilizing and pushing them to represent our interests.
But if there is a candidate for the Democratic Party that does not talk about racism and sexism and Islamophobia and xenophobia, it’s highly likely that candidate is going to lose.
We have seen all over the world, and I document this in Chain of Ideas, that when candidates who are opposing these great replacement politicians—when they either adopt some of their ideas, in the way the Democratic Party did in 2024 by saying that it was more equipped to engage in border security, or they just don’t demonstrate how the racism and sexism that party is engaged in is harming everyone—when they don’t do that, they lose. That’s why these great replacement politicians are surging all over the world.
Can you imagine in any other field or posture of competition where someone has a very specific strategy that is winning, and you’re being advised: You can’t counter that? It’s very difficult for you to win in any capacity.
There’s a way to counter it while also not saying to white men: You are the oppressors. There’s a way to counter it by saying: White men, you’re being manipulated and hoodwinked too. They’re distracting you from those super-wealthy white men who are actually taking your jobs, through racist ideas, to convince you that those women and people of color are taking your jobs.
Bacon: I’m glad you said that, because I’ve read your books, I’ve read TNC and Nicole; I’ve read a lot of authors who write about racism and so on. This idea that they’re all portraying white men as oppressors—I don’t think that’s a line I read in How to Be an Antiracist.
Is this because white people have more numbers and power than we do? I’ve read these books. People who didn’t read these books have created this narrative about them that we can’t debunk. Is that just purely a numbers game? What do you think happened here?
Kendi: I think it’s a number of different factors. One, it’s an assumption that people have. They assume that if someone is attacking racism, then they must be attacking white people. And maybe because they themselves know how responsible white people are—
Bacon: They think we will oppress. This is what the subtext is.
Kendi: Exactly. But I also think that there are some writers who are saying those things, and so what’s happening is they conflate the people who are saying them with the people who are not saying that. To give an example—my book How to Be an Antiracist was oftentimes conflated with Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility, in which she did say that pretty much all white people are racist. There were things on which we had obvious disagreements on.
But what oftentimes happens—particularly when you have a popular book by a white author and a popular book by a Black author—is the ideas that are expressed by the white author become the norm that’s applied to the Black author, and then people end up critiquing the Black author as if he or she said those things.
I think that those ideas do exist and they have been misapplied. I also think it really is a projection—you have people who are deeply racist and who are white who believe that if we’re challenging racism, we must be challenging them. And actually, we are—because they’re racist, not because they’re white.
Bacon: We’ve had a discussion about ideas that are not positive, and a theory of the world that we wish was eradicated. I hate to ask the question, but do you see anything—I’ve been encouraged by the Palestinian protests, the protest movement that has emerged, which is not necessarily about a racial idea but is a call for equality. A lot of the people involved in that have been reading your books. A lot of people who were involved in the 2020 protests supported Mayor Mamdani and are also involved in the Palestinian protests. Are there any things like that you see positively happening—where people are hearing the right ideas and acting on them—that you see in your work or your travels?
Kendi: I do. I see, for instance, people in the United States not falling for the propaganda of this administration about the war in Iran that, of course, the U.S. and Israel are waging. To me that’s a positive development. That antiwar impulse—and, frankly, anti-genocide impulse—that galvanized many people when Israel was bombing Gaza, is now, to a certain extent, extending to this U.S.-Israeli war in Iran, which is to me a good development, because people are recognizing the nuance.
You can simultaneously see the ways in which this regime in Iran is an authoritarian regime, while at the same time recognizing the authoritarianism regimes in the United States and Israel, and be like: All of y’all have issues, and we’re opposing, in certain ways, all of you—but we’re also opposing the aggressors in this particular situation. People are recognizing that nuance. That to me is positive, because this is a very complicated situation and people are learning and expressing those complications.
Bacon: Ibram, thanks for joining me—congrats on another great book, and on all your work. I’m so honored to talk to you. You’ve done some very important work these last few years, so thanks for the time. Good to see you.
Kendi: Of course. Thank you for having me.
