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Abstract

Based on a digital ethnography on the imageboard platform 4chan/pol, this article traces the biopolitical compression of Population Replacement Conspiracy Theories into memes, which have populated far-right boards in the last decade. The article makes an argument for the relevance of studying the relation between the intellectual elaboration of Conspiracy Theories and their compression into concise and easily consumable memes, by fleshing out the functionality of memes in the argumentative economy of Conspiracy theories, (a) as encoding and compressing their core components; (b) by filling in the (unspoken) gaps in the logic of Conspiracy theories; and (c) by advancing a biopolitical understanding of social life.

Keywords

Conspiracy theories great replacement racism antisemitism biopower memes digital ethnography 4chan

Introduction, on ‘race’ and memetic wars

There is an ongoing and unstoppable ‘race war’ confronting two hermetically sealed off camps: whites versus non-whites; the latter aiming to replace the former. This ‘replacement war’ is the outcome of a nefarious scheme, a conspiracy of sorts, devised and implemented by mighty agents and ubiquitous forces. Moreover, so the argument goes, the main warfare replacing strategies consist of the migration of non-white people to the West (the seed of replacement), non-whites’ higher birthrates (the long-term scheme), indoctrination through gender ideology and feminism, the emasculation of white masculinity, and the advancement of LGTBQI agendas (stratagems geared toward curtailing/stopping white biological reproduction and achieve hegemonic consent). All these alleged warfare tactics purportedly seeking to transform Europe and the West into a geography in which non-whites will both rule and represent the majority of the population, and as a consequence, the white population will either go extinct or become a minority. By and large, these are the main structural narrative components of Population Replacement Conspiracy Theories (PRCT) postulating the ‘decline’ and ‘degeneration’ of Europe and the West as the outcome of a deliberate process to replace the white population by non-whites.¹ During the last two decades, these Conspiracy Theories have been primarily ideologically elaborated through the racial conspiratorial names of: Eurabia, Great Replacement, Islamization, White genocide/extinction/suicide, Umvolkung/Omvolking, and the Kalergi-plan (Bangstad, 2012, 2013; Carr, 2006; Hafez, 2019; Moses, 2019; Zia-Ebrahimi, 2018).

Population Replacement Conspiracy Theories have had multiple points of spatial-temporal emergence, and, in effect, they draw on and rework a plethora of historical archives (see below). However, their ongoing intellectual and ideological articulations can be traced back to books mostly published in literature and political commentary. Eurabia is one of those articulations, which made its debut in 2005 in Ye’or’s (2005) Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, and was also elaborated by Italian journalist Fallaci (2004) and van Amerongen (2015) in the Italian and the Dutch context respectively. French littérateur Camus (2011) crafted the Great Replacement Conspiracy Theory at the beginning of the 2010s, while the Islamization Conspiracy Theory has had different points of articulation with notably Sarrazin (2010, 2018) and his books Germany Abolishes Itself and Hostile Takeover in the German context. The Kalergi-Plan Conspiracy Theory was penned by Austrian writer Gerd Honsik, and more recently, the bygone national socialist concept of Umvolkung (German) (Klemperer, 2020 [1947]; Nemec, 2017) has been dusted off and reactivated by authors postulating a population replacement such as cat novelist Pirinci (2016) in Germany and far-right politicians in Belgium and the Netherlands referring to omvolking (Dutch). On the other side of the Atlantic, the contemporary articulation of white genocide can be traced back to The Turner Diaries (Pierce, 1978) in the US. As author and journalist Shafak (2019) succinctly put it, in order to understand the far-right you ought to ‘look to their bookshelves’, and as I argue throughout this article, we ought to look at their memes too, as they have become one of the main vehicles whereby the far-right produces and distributes its ideas, narratives, and Conspiracy Theories (Fielitz and Thurston, 2019); memes have thus become an arena of struggle, of memetic warfare.

In spite of the different names and details these PRCT share strikingly common characteristics: (a) they posit or assume the existence of deleterious forces (globalism) or agents (European, Jews, Arab elites) conspiring to replace populations; (b) they are mounted in a racial, Manichean, and belligerent world view opposing the ‘white race’/Europeans to Muslims, migrants, and overall non-whites; (c) they are preoccupied with the biological and social reproduction of the nation and thus PRCT invoke and mobilize gender and sexuality in different ways and for different purposes.²

Population Replacement Conspiracy Theories are on the rise, and they arise at the intersection of a plethora of discourses such as racism and xenophobia, Islamophobia and antisemitism, demographic anxieties, concerns about fertility and biological reproduction, attacks on feminism and gender studies, as well as eco-fascism and neo-Malthusianism. Elsewhere, Sarah Bracke and Hernández Aguilar (2020) proposed to approach Population Replacement Conspiracy Theories as a ‘discursive palimpsest’, in other words, as a flexible discursive formation in constant rewriting and thereby accumulating layers of meanings in its travelling, adapting to national and local discursive traditions, while keeping intact the core idea, an orchestrated nefarious plot to replace white populations by non-whites. The racial weltanschauung advanced by PRCT has been adapted and modified to local/national contexts, as such the ‘main enemy’ can be Muslims, Latinxs, African-Americans, Jews, Arab and European elites, white women, the left or liberals. This article centers on a key digital layer of the population replacement palimpsest, namely, the biopolitical compression of PRCT into easily consumable, ephemeral and yet powerful memes in the context of a race-memetic war.

Based on a digital ethnography on the infamous 4chan/pol imageboard website,³ and building upon the growing literature on far-right subcultures on the internet (Back, 2002; Fielitz and Thurston, 2019; Froio and Ganesh, 2019; Tuters, 2019, 2020; Wilson, 2018), this article dissects the functionality of memes within the economy of PRCT.⁴ For 10 months during 2021 (January–October 2021), I visited 4chan/pol on a day-to-day basis as a ‘lurker’, with extended periods of immersion. Using digital ethnography as the main approach (Pink, 2011; Pink et al., 2019) combining non-participant observation, and encoding and decoding (Hall, 1980)⁵ I spent between one or 2 hours reading and digitally storing the relevant threads of the day, often visiting hyperlinks to external sites (blogs, YouTube videos) posted by the anonymous users (anons hereafter), tracing the different versions and mutations of memes. On occasion I visited the site on different hours of the day if I had identified a potential polemic/dense thread to unfold during the day.

4chan/pol is a vast virtual location to discuss a wide range of topic. At the outset, and following a purposive sample strategy (Given, 2008), I concentrated on posts and threads explicitly mentioning, discussing, or advancing any of the versions of the PRCT. By and large, the great replacement and the white genocide Conspiracy Theories tended to be the dominant versions of PRCT on 4chan/pol during the time period under investigation, although Eurabia, Kalergi-plan and Umvolkung appeared as well but not so frequently. However, given the variety of discourses being articulated within PRCT, soon my sampling also expanded to other topics, for instance, a transphobic post can rapidly be linked by some of the anons to PRCT (non-binary, queer, and transgender identifications are seen by a significant number of users as one of the causes of replacement, since they do not ‘produce’ white babies, that is, future white populations), this also holds true for pornographic images of white women on the site, which are often discussed in a wistful manner, as lost to either non-white man, professional careers, or again to homosexual identifications. After the collection of data, I processed and organized the threads and memes with the aid of software of qualitative analysis MAXQDA. Then I proceeded to identify the main discursive strands of PRCT on 4chan (see below), and read them against the body of literature postulating a population replacement (Ye’or, Camus, Sarrazin) seeking similarities, differences, complementary relations, and how the memes are encoded and decoded on the imageboard (Hall, 1980), to finally select particular discussion threads and memes to be analyzed in-depth.⁶

I argue that memes perform a crucial biopolitical compression of large content; memes condense, abbreviate, and repack the vast amount of (mis)information postulated by the intellectual sources of PRCT. Such biopolitical compression, furthermore, is articulated by animating, re-creating, and threading racism, sexism, and homophobia with satire, humor, and ingenuity, as such, these memes articulate the biopolitical discourse on defending the society, they call for stopping the replacement by any necessary means, they appeal for more white reproduction, curtailing non-white, and stopping migration. Furthermore, Population Replacement memes offer another key functionality to the economy of Conspiracy Theories by filling in the blanks left out by the original sources. Neither Bat Ye’or, Oriana Fallaci, Renaud Camus, Thilo Sarrazin, nor the political parties advancing PRCT postulate the replacement of populations as a conspiracy orchestrated by ‘Jews’, but in the antisemitic world of 4chan/pol (Tuters and Hagen, 2003), this is taken for granted, and further re-elaborated and expanded. In effect, Population Replacement memes in 4chan/pol complete the closed-circuit narrative of these Conspiracy Theories, they provide details, simple explanations, and blatantly announce the logic behind replacement. Ultimately, I argue, 4chan/pol is one of the central terrains where PRCT are entertained, mobilized, reworked, compressed, and further disseminated to easy consumption.

Three sections structure the article. I begin by briefly canvasing the main discursive lines of PRCT. In the second section, I combine the notion of compression (Lovink and Tuters, 2018) with the conceptual framework of biopolitics (Foucault, 1997; Stoler, 1995; Weheliye, 2014) to give an account of memes, to finally discuss three memes as examples of biopolitical compression in the 4chan/pol imageboard. There is no scarcity of Population Replacement memes in 4chan/pol, some of the most renown and widely disseminated memes have been put at the service of PRCT, from pepe the frog, the feels guy, remixes on charts and maps to cartoons featuring the antisemitic ‘happy merchant’. During my digital ethnography on 4chan, I collected a vast number of memes and selected three for analysis as they represent typical cases in the 4chan/pol universe compressing and expanding the core arguments, they engage with the experiences of 4chan users, and by means of this, these memes stand in as incitements to discourse (Foucault, 1990).

Repacking old racisms in new conspiratorial packages

While PRCT may seem as a relatively new phenomenon harking back to the turn of the century, they can be approached as discursive bricolages (Foucault, 1997; Stoler, 1995), namely, older racial and eugenic discourses being recovered, reworked, and reformulated in newer discursive articulations. PRCT almost unequivocally draw on the eugenics and Malthusian archives, as well as on the structural narratives of antisemitic Conspiracy Theories. Building upon the scientific discourse on race, these archives inaugurated the discourse on white extinction, and suicide, and emphasized the vital need to intervene on the level of biological reproduction as the only means to secure the life of the ‘superior’ race (Foucault, 1997; Saini, 2020; Schuller, 2018; Weheliye, 2014). In the context of the eugenics movement, the racially structured arguments of Lothrop Stoddard (1920), Grant (1916), and Ross (1901) figured prominently in depicting an ‘apocalyptic’ sociodemographic (racial) scenario where the white man will no longer rule the world and would instead pass away (Grant), or be defeated by the ‘tide of color’ (Stoddart). And although these archives were US based, the eugenic movement was transnational since its origin, which entailed a continuous transatlantic exchange of ideas, becoming one of the cornerstones of the National Socialist movement in Germany and other fascisms in Europe. Significantly, a postcolonial and influential articulation of the population replacement palimpsest emerged in France through the apocalyptic racial novel of Raspail (1973), The Camp of Saints, as well as in Enoch’s Powel’s speech Rivers of Blood in Britain.

Back then and now PRCT have circulated not only in the world of literature but have also been mobilized by populist far-right parties, currently with significant electoral success at the national and European level such as the Party of Freedom (PVV) and the Forum for Democracy (FvD) in the Netherlands; Le Rassemblement National (RV) in France; and the Alternative for Germany (AfD). PRCT have also been espoused and mobilized by pan-European social movements such as Generation Identity, the Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the Occident (PEGIDA), as well as the counter-jihad movement. Furthermore, PRCT have been used by white supremacist terrorists to justify their deadly political violence. These Conspiracy Theories have been the ideological source of political violence in Utøya, Norway (2011), Christchurch, New Zealand (2019), the Quebec City mosque shooting in 2017 (Canada), the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in 2018 (US), El Paso Texas shooting in 2019 (US), the Halle synagogue and kebab shop shooting in 2019 (Germany), the Bærum mosque shooting in 2019 (Norway), the Bayonne mosque shooting in 2019 (France), the Hanau shootings in 2020 (Germany), and most recently the Buffalo shooting in 2022.

Pertaining to the study of contemporary Population Replacement Conspiracy Theories, the signatures Eurabia, Islamization, and Great Replacement have been investigated against the growing hostility and hatred against Muslims in the post 9/11 context (Bangstad, 2012, 2013; Carr, 2006; Fekete, 2012). In other words, the context of appearance of these Conspiracy Theories is Islamophobia and the emergence of the ‘Muslims Question’ in Europe (Bracke and Hernández Aguilar, 2020). However, although the lion’s share of attention and hatred centers on a Muslim figure, PRCT cannot be reduced to Islamophobia as they heavily draw on classical antisemitic theories such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Zia-Ebrahimi, 2018). These Conspiracy Theories, moreover, become flexible (in regard to their target) in the context of their local articulations. In this sense, it is important to note that while Eurabia, Islamization, and Great Replacement are not explicit antisemitic Conspiracy Theories but rather Islamophobic, the same cannot be said about the Umvolkung, white genocide and Kalergi-Plan.⁷ And it is precisely against this discursive flexibility that the metaphor of the palimpsest can help to unravel and organize the different forms and shapes PRCT take.

Scholarly inquires have also put forward an argument that links the rise of PRCT with the strengthening and the expansion of far-right ideologies into mainstream politics (Ashbee, 2019; Bangstad, 2019; Bergmann, 2018; Camus, 2019; Sedwick, 2019), but significantly as well as key components in the identity work of far-right groups and organizations such as PEGIDA (Keskinkilic, 2016; Shooman, 2016), and Generation Identity (Zúquete, 2018). We also know that PRCT have found a prolific niche to reproduce and expand on the internet (Davey and Ebner, 2019; Ebner, 2019), and that they have also become a point of encounter between different fractions and position within the sometimes competing right and far-right political spectrum (Bogerts and Fielitz, 2019; May and Feldman, 2018).

Another key component of PRCT pertains to a double engagement with gender and sexuality. Every iteration of PRCT has been preoccupied with sexuality and has mobilized sexuality in a bifurcated manner. First, the sexuality of the non-white Other is represented as violently excessive (see: de Hart, 2017), i.e., hyperfertility as a tactical warfare for the replacement of ‘European natives.’ Conversely, European sexuality is chastised as not being ‘fertile enough’ to withstand the challenges in population dynamics and growth. Within these contours, PRCT postulate different ‘solutions’, including banning abortion for European women to have more European babies, ‘remigration’ of ‘non-Europeans’ to their supposed countries of origin as a way to stop the replacement, and employing different economic and ideological incentives to exponentiate ‘native’ European fertility (Bracke and Hernández Aguilar, 2020, 2021). Far from being a discourse confined to the demonization of the ‘non-European Other’ and the closing of the European borders, PRCT also hinge on controlling European women’s sexual practices. Second, proponents of population replacement Conspiracy Theories hold a staunch position against the advances of the feminist and LGTQBI agendas, and blame gender equality ideas and policies as destroying Europe, what Sabine Hark and Paula Irene-Villa (Hark and Villa, 2015; see also: Lang, 2015) have aptly denominated as anti-genderism.

Biopolitical compression

PRCT operate in a biopolitical framework, the technology of power identified by Foucault (1997) centered on the production of the population as a political problem “affected by overall processes characteristic of birth, death, production, illness and so on” (Foucault, 1997: 242–243). A population which becomes the locus of a myriad of techniques of control and regulation oriented toward reaching homeostasis. Biopower stands in as a technology not only producing the population as a political problem but also as a unity fractured by racialized and sexualized divisions (Schuller, 2018; Stoler, 1995). These divisions are crucial for the biopolitical discourse on defending the society from its internal enemies. Elsewhere (Bracke and Hernández Aguilar, 2020) we have argued that biopower informs and fashions the different versions of PRCT as they advance biopolitical questions and rationalities unequivocally preoccupied with the population as a political problem, specifically with what they postulate as a twofold interconnected process, the zero-sum game between the reproduction of white and non-white populations, the replacement of the former by the latter. Such questioning and rationale, however, are the outcome of how biopolitics reframes the historical race war discourse, thus, in words of Foucault, shaping the imperative of “We have to defend society against all the biological threats posed by the other race, the subrace” (Foucault, 1997: 61–62) that lives among us, that is, the ones who want to or are replacing ‘us’. Social reality is then understood as a deadly confrontation within the social body wherein, in order to live, you must kill, which, in a racist logic, gets translated into “if you want to live, the other must die” (Foucault, 1997: 256). Memes, as I argue below, do not only compress the content of PRCT, but also offer a contracted biopolitical understanding of social life and death. For this, I turn now to the notion of compression.

Lovink and Tuters (2018) approach memes as ‘densely compressed’ units, ‘empty formats’ designed to travel. By and larger, compression entails “the necessity to synthetize ideas into a univocal concept, as a contraction of thought” (Portanova, 2008: 3), that invariably causes the reduction or loss of data, which in turn, opens up space for a new compressed version. In this sense, Lovink and Tuters (2018) propose to see the functionality of memes as “a kind of vernacular compression technique a means by to ‘decode’ and ‘encode’ the operative dynamics of dominant hegemony”. Thus, a meme can synthetize and present PRCT in a compressed, succinct, and ironic manner. Replacement memes encode the structural core components (the plot, racial world, biological reproduction, eugenics, eco-fascism, white supremacy) into an ephemeral bricolage of image and text, a remix thrown out of the web to be decoded by its consumer (Hall, 1980). Building upon the argument of Lovink and Tuters (2018) about memes as compressive techniques in the struggle for hegemony, I explore how memes compress not only the main structures of PRCT, but also a biopolitical understanding of the world. My argument is that on 4chan/pol the compression of these Conspiracy Theories requires as well the compression of the biopolitical tenets (population is a political problem, the population is divided by race, one of the races has to die in order for the other to live).

The meme as a.zip file of the great replacement

Both journalistic and scholarly inquiries into the terrorist violence justified by and through PRCT have stressed the digital world as a key arena where the perpetrators consumed ideologies and expressed their views, where they announced their plans and posted manifestos, and even livestreamed their deadly violence (Van Buuren, 2013; Davey and Ebner, 2018; Fielitz and Thurston, 2019; Gardell, 2014; Rose, 2022; Schwartzburg, 2019; Tuters, 2020; Wilson, 2019). Within the vast universe of the digital world, imageboard sites like 8chan and 4chan have become spaces where discourses on white supremacy, all empirical manifestations of racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia have thrived given the structural features of the websites (Lovink and Tuters, 2018; Tuters, 2020).⁸ As Tuters (2019) points out, the platform 4chan offers a variety of affordances. First, the posts are made anonymously, with the only information available being the country where the post originates (which can be manipulated by the use of VPNs). The radical anonymity of 4chan (no signing up required nor a profile needed to participate) enables the posting of content that, if traceable to a concrete profile, may potentially be auto-censored and it also requires from the anons a certain ‘subcultural literacy’ whereby they could “see themselves as standing in oppositions to the dominant culture of the surface web” (Tuters, 2019: 40). In addition, posts on 4chan are ephemeral, as the threads are removed on a regular basis, entailing an active and constant commitment to the website in order to not miss out relevant symbols, memes, discussions, and knowledge or else running the risk of being left out.⁹

Having set the biopolitical analytic as the framework of Population Replacement Conspiracy Theories, this section discusses the functionalities of memes within the Population Replacement Conspiracy Theories economy. As Bogerts and Fielitz (2019: 137) have pointed out, the far-right has identified the production and circulation of memes as a crucial arena for developing and expanding their views, as well as important tools to recruit new adherents and build identity and coalitions. In effect, memes are seen as an arena of war, of memetic warfare. This is also important due to the fact that memes, in the context of the far-right, can “express tensions that can’t be spoken in the politically correct vocabulary of the mainstream media” (Lovink and Tuters, 2018), and these tensions include entertaining, discussing, asserting, and reproducing the ‘veracity’ of racial and sexist Conspiracy Theories as well as fantasizing on (biopolitical) violence as the only method to put an end to the purported replacement of populations.

By and large, the following categories organize the discussions on Population Replacement Conspiracy Theories on 4chan/pol: (1) general arguments of PRCT (what they are, how they happen, the proper name to describe them, how to stop them); (2) critiques against arguments denying PRCT (debates on indoctrination, mainstream media, anons self-experiences, nostalgias for an ‘imagined’ past); (3) forces driving population replacement (identification of the agents orchestrating the replacement such as the United Nations, ‘Jews’, and George Soros, but also white complacency, the left, and liberals); (4) denial and critiques towards race as a social construct (discussions on the validity of race as a biological category, and linking race to PRCT); (5) problematization of white biological reproduction (chastising of white youth and men, discussions on incel culture); (6) denunciation of white women and ‘sexually diverse white man’ (general abhorrence of ‘feminism’, misogynist discussions on women’s partner choice and life-career decisions, critiques toward emasculated white men); and (7) glorification of white supremacist terrorism (in particular giving praise to the Christchurch white supremacist terrorist as a true hero and as a martyr to the cause). These categories of discussion indeed match some of the original narratives of PRCT in the literature but significantly expand the content and make explicit some of the denotative messages. Ye’or’s Eurabia refrains from discussing biological reproduction, but in 4chan/pol there is ample discussion of it, and how it relates to the replacement of populations. For instance, an anon discussing a thread on the proper name for the replacement of populations commented:

Without the constant reinforcing by the media and academia of feminist ideology and general free love ideology, and the economic requirement that women work full time jobs, women naturally want to have plenty of children, no force will be necessary to fix our birth rates, once the ideological rot has been rooted out of our nations.

Here the anon has identified the differential rate of birthrates (white vs non-white) as the main strategy of replacement, and similarly positions ‘feminist ideology’ as the ideological driving force, the blue-pill, alienating (white) women from the ‘true’ desire, i.e., having children.¹⁰ This is a patriarchal fantasy that seeks to recruit white women into “white natalist politics in which the wombs of white women are mobilized to reproduce more white babies” (Bracke and Hernández Aguilar, 2020: 694). The anon then explicitly links feminism to the replacement of populations, and thus made his inscription into the palimpsest. On 4chan/pol, the discussions, threads, and memes on PRCT multiply and diversify the main tenets of PRCT, and contrary to the original sources which abstain themselves to openly call for violence, in 4chan/pol violence is appraised and advanced as a legitimate instrument to safeguard the present and future of white populations.

Within this context, memes accomplish several functionalities in the economy of Population Replacement Conspiracy Theories: (a) they offer a biopolitical compression of the Conspiracy Theories; (b) they fill in the gaps in the explanations; and (c) they help to create a common language to the anons thereby enhancing a sense of community. Consider the meme below featuring Wojak, the feels guy, vis-à-vis the formulation of PRCT in political commentary and literary books.¹¹ Including its 10 appendixes and bibliography, Ye’or’s (2005) Eurabia fills in 384 pages of dense conspiratorial prose. Even a true believer or a sympathetic reader would still need to find time and patience (as well as 49 Euros to buy the book) to go through Ye’or’s detailed exposition of the not-so-secret plot to Islamize Europe. In other words, consuming the Eurabia Conspiracy Theory from the original source would require time and different resources. A similar argument can be made on Sarrazin’s (2010) bestseller on the dilution (Verdünnung) of the German Volk with its 464 pages of statistics, eugenics, apocalyptic nightmares, and racial characterization of Muslims and migrants. Renaud Camus’ Le grand replacement is perhaps the most accessible of the books postulating PRCT given its literary style and brevity, and yet it also requires an investment of different resources (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Wokaj and the great replacement.

The meme featuring Wojak the Feels Guy accomplishes to effectively deliver the message of Ye’or, Sarrazin, and Camus in a matter of seconds. The meme has a three-panel structure. In the first one, we seek Wojak thinking ‘the great replacement is a conspiracy theory’ surrounded by more Wojaks, all of them white and male. This panel already sets the stage by linking two interrelated ideas: first, it imagines and projects a portrayal of a past where the nation was racially homogenous; and second, it puts the great replacement argument in doubt by dubbing it a Conspiracy Theory, that is, it also engages with the critiques toward Le grand replacement.¹² Moving to the panel below, the same cloud of thought is reproduced, but now the crowd surrounding Wojak is no longer made up of white Wojaks, but of brown ones too; here the allegory links the formerly (fictive) homogenous white nation with immigration, and the fear of small numbers (Appadurai, 2006). Finally, on the third panel, Wojak is the only white character, it is now surrounded by only brown figures, and instead of reiterating the first two cloud thoughts, Wojak, now expressing stress and regret, states WTF.

This meme delivers the main message and core components of PRCT in a matter of seconds. It has successfully encoded the message that white populations are being replaced in front of our eyes. The process is gradual (dilution), but it will eventually lead to the extinction of the white race. Furthermore, Wojak stands as a witness and as an accomplice of the great replacement. In this sense, the meme also articulates and compresses a critique towards critical standpoints against Conspiracy Theories. This stands as a perfect example of one of the tenets of 4chan, Wojak has swallowed the blue pilled and has accepted social reality as produced by the mainstream, a production of social reality in which the great replacement is undoubtedly a Conspiracy Theory. Wokaj is another ‘normie’, and the meme also announces the future of the normies: their believing that the great replacement is a myth will lead to extinction (Nagle, 2017). It is from this dire urgency, a matter of life and death, that within 4chan/pol discussions on the great replacement, violence is routinely praised as one of the very few available means to stop the replacement of populations and the extinction of the white race. Faced with a ‘reality’ in which global forces are conspiring to replace whites, “what can an anon do?”, a commenter asked. Thus, in this meme Wojak embodies the indoctrinated blue-pilled white subject, someone who was taught to deny their own experiences and senses, caught in an indoctrination geared toward unwillingly consenting to be replaced. This is a crucial subject position in the context of 4chan/pol, as it represents the opposite to those who took the red pilled, the anons, but more importantly, the ones how proceed with actions, like the perpetrator of the Christchurch massacre.

In relation to this, another central feature of this meme pertains to the subtle and intertextual call to rely and trust your experiences, your senses, your eyes, and instincts. Against the ‘mainstream’ blue pilled argument denouncing the great replacement as a Conspiracy Theory, the meme articulates a position in which seeing reality ‘as it is’ will allow you to uncover the truth, in effect, the great replacement in undeniable, you just have to see it but first you have to get rid of the illusions of the mainstream. A call for relying on experience is a common topic and reply in discussions on population replacement on 4chan/pol. For instance, on a very unusual day, an Original Poster (OP hereafter) initiated a thread with significant traction on debunking the great replacement Conspiracy Theory. The OP posted a long text, explaining the loopholes in the Conspiracy Theory particularly criticizing the widely referenced United Nations’ report on replacement migration as a proof of the ongoing plot to replace white populations.¹³ In the thread, the OP was first heavily chastised for daring to post a long text and thereby breaking 4chan’s unwritten rule of immediacy and wittiness.¹⁴ Second, the attacks against the OP and the thread also concentrated on denouncing the OP as a blue pilled traitor, an undercover ‘Jew’ agent infiltrating the site to make them believe the great replacement is a hoax, in other words, to turn them into the first Wojak. And thirdly, the reasoning and argumentation of the OP was criticized by the anons by relying on their own experiences. For instance, one anon simply replied “Just go out and see for yourself”. While another anon elaborated a more detailed argument based upon his national context:

Scotland here. You probably have an image of what Scotland’s like. You're wrong …. Do not presume to tell me it’s not happening. I see it with my own eyes and experience the hell of it every single day, and despair for the country of my ancestors.

Another anon simply drew on the antisemitic common shared language of 4chan/pol to discredit the OP’s post by replying ‘(((conspiracy theory)))’. In 4chan/pol the triple parentheses are a well-established antisemitic meme, functioning as an ‘audio echo’(Tuters and Hagen, 2003) to identify ‘Jewish sounding names’. In this reply, denoting either the great replacement as a Jewish orchestrated conspiracy, or that ‘Jewish influences’ have made us believed that the great replacement is a Conspiracy Theory, while in effect, is a ‘real’ conspiracy.

By means of encoding and compressing the main narratives of population replacement Conspiracy Theories, the Wojak meme also offers a condensed version of biopolitics, both compression techniques working in tandem. The population of Wojaks becomes a political problem, enacted by the creation of a racial caesura, white versus brown Wojaks. And here the life of the brown Wojaks is tantamount to the death of the white ones. Indeed, in the compression of the Conspiracy Theory, information has been lost: we do not know exactly how the populations were replaced from the first to the third panel, whether was migration, higher fertility rates or a combination of both. The main message, however, centers on showing the great replacement as an effectual process with the end result of the extinction of the white race.

Consider also the meme below on the great replacement, a gloomy mappa mundi filled in with figures in two colors: black and white. Here biopolitics has become global in essence, the world population is divided into black and white. The white population encroaching upon a last bastion of territory in the northern part the of the western hemisphere, while the ‘tide of color’ rises. Western and Central Europe as well as the US have turned black; Australia is on the verge of becoming black too. Once more, this invites the user to draw on and compare their experiences against the arguments denying PRCT. Here again, information on how this process took place has been lost, but the meme has encoded and compressed both the great replacement Conspiracy Theory as well as the biopolitical understanding of social life. Black lives are the cause of the death of white lives in a zero-sum game. The upward movement of Black lives (geographically but allegorically socially and economically too) entails the displacement of white lives from the territory and a numerical subtraction (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

The great replacement!.

In a typical remix (text, map, figure and caption) this meme creates a sense of urgency. Without being openly alarmist, it seeks to portray an almost lost scenario, a process that seems both inevitable and unstoppable. But being ‘almost lost’ is central to the narrative of these Conspiracy Theories. If the map were to be filled in exclusively by black figures, there would be no room for action, the possibilities would be foreclosed to the anons, or for those red pilled white subjects to do something against the replacement of populations, to become agents, patriots, to regain their identity, to become heroes and ultimately martyrs to this plot, as it were. In this simple meme remix, a very subtle and intertextual layer exists that calls for action, perhaps, that layer has been encoded in the exclamations signal (!) in the caption.

Another key functionality of memes pertains to adding racial details and information to the original sources despite their compressed nature. Elsewhere, we considered (Bracke and Hernández Aguilar, 2020) the apparent symbiotic relation between mainstream authors postulating population replacement and the fringes of the internet, with the former delineating the structure and rules of the narratives, while the latter offering details, exponentiating the threats, and all of this while potentially reaching wider audiences. Drawing on the palimpsest metaphor, the original sources from the literature can be seen as first inscriptions, delineating the themes, arguments, narratives, and core ideas, becoming an intertextual repository then mobilized in forums like 4chan/pol, which in turn, create new inscriptions, adding details, satire, and open racism and sexism.¹⁵

One of these ‘filled in’ details is the antisemitic argument positing the replacement of populations as a ‘Jewish’ plot.¹⁶ As mentioned, Eurabia, Islamization, and great replacement literature refrain from postulating the replacement of white populations as a ‘Jewish plot’. While Camus’ globalism, as the driving force of replacement, could be interpreted as a code word for ‘international Jewry’ he has vehemently fought accusations of antisemitism in the past (von Bredow, 2000). Ye’or, in effect, sees Muslims and Islam as a threat to both Christian and Jews, and Sarrazin, in a philosemitic-eugenic manner, praises the high intelligence of Jews in comparison to the lower of Muslims and migrants (see: Gilman, 2012). This, however, does not apply to the 4chan/pol universe in which antisemitism is not concealed but openly expressed (Tuters and Hagen, 2003). For instance, in another discussion on the veracity of the great replacement, an anon posted a meme remix featuring an image of Thomas P.M. Barnett, a US military geo-strategist, a mappa mundi dividing regions based on IQ percentages (the African continent having the lowest IQ percentage while the West and China having the highest), and a text supposedly quoting Barnetts’ 2004 book The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century.¹⁷

The meme is entitled ‘Jews explain why they bring millions of Muslims and African immigrants to Europe’. The text has a straightforward argument, in order to achieve world peace, the different races of the world have to mix to create a light brown docile yet productive new European race, which, moreover, will be below average in terms of intelligence, especially in comparison to the intelligence of current white Europeans and westerners. Here the population replacement is given an ultimate aim: world peace. It should go without saying that the text is a fabrication, such a paragraph or something resembling it does not appear in Barnett’s book, but the veracity of the quote is not the what is at stake. The meme has encoded the arguments of mainstream population replacement literature and goes beyond it – it offers an explanation nowhere to be found on the original sources. It is, moreover, an ultimate explanation that resonates via intertextuality with the content and discourses on 4chan/pol: the meme brings into the present, in a matter of seconds, the vast and deadly western antisemitic archive of antisemitic Conspiracy Theories, which the meme recycles, reactivates, and further disseminates. The meme, then again, advances biopower, but here ‘Jews’ are the ones who have been orchestrating the regulation, control, and mixing of populations, and who ultimately will kill any resistance against their plans.¹⁸

Conclusion

On 4chan/pol, memes turn Population Replacement Conspiracy Theories quickly, efficiently, and ironically into incitement to discourse. The memes – connotatively, denotatively and intertextually – call to talk about and discuss the replacement of populations while prescribing a particular manner to think about replacement. A manner of thinking which in turn is decoded by the anons and then linked to their own experiences. This then allows the anons to express their views, emotions, experiences, fears, and grievances, all while expanding and reinscribing the population replacement palimpsest. The compression of PRCT by memes then entails encapsulating a rather long narrative and details into an image causing the loss of data during the compression while adding new details and information that the original sources do not elaborate. Such a new information, moreover, given the affordances of 4chan/pol, is usually blatant racism and sexism.

In this article, I made an argument to fully engage with memes and 4chan/pol as one of the most important and prolific contemporary arenas articulating, expanding, and disseminating PRCT. The relevance of population replacement memes resides not only in offering a compressed and easily digestible version of large Conspiracy Theories, while significantly expanding the narrative and core components by adding explicit and virulent racism, sexism, homophobia, and white supremacy, but also by becoming ironic and witty incitements to discourse, steady proliferations of population replacement narratives, ideas, and details. In this article, I focused exclusively on the functionalities of memes in the circuit narrative of the PRCT and this entailed taking ‘selective directions’ (Stoler, 1995) during the analysis. The categories of gender and sexuality are crucial for structuring the narrative of PRCT (Bracke and Hernández Aguilar, 2020, 2021), and indeed, there is a lack of academic analysis of how gender and sexuality shape Conspiracy Theories in general (Thiem, 2020). 4chan/pol is infamous for the sexism and homophobia posted on a daily basis, during my 10 months digital ethnography on 4chan/pol mostly pornographic images of white women were used to mourn a loss, the replacement of populations. For some of the anons, this has entailed ‘involuntary celibacy’, and these discussions recruit their self-experiences into making the replacement of populations a lived-experience, which is a further venue of future research that I was not able to fully pursue in the scope of this article. There is, moreover, another dimension that would necessitate, in and of itself, a research project, namely, all those hidden and open elements within memes that contain implicit incitements to violence, that seek to create despair, a sense of urgency, a call to regain ‘what is ours’, and many other ideas and statements that are tangible to those familiar with the 4chan/pol universe. Further research could expand on these elements, with the potentiality to identify which dimensions of PRCT can be analytically linked to political violence.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work has been partially supported by the research program EnGendering Europe’s “Muslim Question” (project number 016.Vici.185.077), funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).

ORCID iD

Luis M Hernández Aguilar

Notes

Author Biography

Luis M Hernández Aguilar is a Research Associate at the Europa-Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt Oder, and also a Guest Researcher at the University of Amsterdam.

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Memeing a conspiracy theory: On the biopolitical compression of the great replacement conspiracy theories

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction, on ‘race’ and memetic wars

Repacking old racisms in new conspiratorial packages

Biopolitical compression

The meme as a.zip file of the great replacement

Conclusion

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

Author Biography

References