For Ibram X. Kendi, It’s Nazis All the Way DownNEWS | 07 May 2026A conspiracy theory is soothing to the believer not just because it promises a complete explanation for all that appears wrong with the world, but also because it confirms the sense that something is wrong with the world. Society is in flux: New technology is altering how we work and think, centuries-old definitions of gender are collapsing, long-trusted institutions are crumbling, the weather itself seems to be in revolt. Any or all of these changes might make you feel unmoored, as if you are no longer in control. The conspiracy theorist comes along and says you are right. And more than that: Someone, or some group, is completely to blame; they are actively working to take away what you so recently took for granted. If this answer flies in the face of all observable truth, if it reduces life to a zero-sum game, it can still feel plausible because the conspiracy theorist is speaking to a human anxiety about the good and prosperous life being a limited commodity. As Naomi Klein put it in her recent book, Doppelganger: “Conspiracy theorists get the facts wrong but often get the feelings right.”
Ibram X. Kendi correctly calls the “Great Replacement” theory, which jibes perfectly with the description above, “the most dominant political theory of our time.” The idea that nefarious forces, usually Jews (or “globalists,” in the more polite versions), are opening the gates to Black and brown immigrants in order to eradicate white culture has propelled extreme-right nativist movements over the past 15 years. We’ve heard this from the mouth of Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk, but also from Marine Le Pen and Viktor Orbán. In Kendi’s new book, Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age, he sets out to capture this theory’s spread.
The goal is an admirable one—the danger of this idea has been proved again and again as it’s shown up in the scrawled manifestos of mass shooters from South Carolina to Norway. But the book Kendi has written reads less like an effort to understand why these conspiracy theorists are so effective and more like a murder board in a detective’s office, laying out an expanding web of evidence meant to prove that this theory has been deliberately engineered and that its proponents are in cahoots. Faces of leaders such as the far-right British politician Nigel Farage and Argentine President Javier Milei are pinned up and threads are strung between them—or tied to their parental histories, or to books they may have read, or to places where they may have all gathered together.
A great deal of research clearly went into amassing the copious data points that fill this nearly 600-page book, but the result is a slog to get through, because—beyond a vague nod toward the manipulation of “anger” and economic anxiety—Kendi almost completely ignores the people who are attracted to this worldview or the reasons they might be. Instead, he gives us something less helpful: another conspiracy theory.
In Kendi’s telling, the Great Replacement theory is itself a mask, one covering an ism we already know and loathe: Nazism. He aims to show, through a “genealogy of theory and tactics,” how little has changed beyond a slight “renovation.” Although “great replacement parties” across Europe may have banished open racism, pivoted from denouncing the pollution of blood to lamenting the erosion of culture, and occasionally chosen leaders who were not straight, white men, they “did not abandon the house of Hitler,” Kendi writes. “They gutted it. They renovated it. New walls and fixtures and furniture.”
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These extreme-right parties have manufactured a feeling of scarcity, he explains—the same emotion Hitler produced when he sought to persuade Germans to destroy “International Jewry” before it destroyed them. The story of replacement has no basis in reality, Kendi writes. Even in European countries supposedly being flooded by immigrants, they still represent a small minority. But white politicians everywhere are using fear to gain political power and then argue for authoritarian forms of control, which “everyday White people” are willing to accept in order to preserve their tiny bit of privilege over society’s most marginalized.
So far this might seem like run-of-the-mill white supremacy rearing its head in the 21st century, albeit in less shrill tones. Yet Kendi argues that the Great Replacement theory is not just the most recent manifestation of racial anxiety, but something far broader, more all-encompassing, and more manufactured. This is why it is a “theory” and not a “philosophy,” he writes: because “it blends elements from philosophies across the spectrum, including populism, centrism, socialism, nationalism, liberalism, conservatism, and especially fascism.” What other theory has a similar “philosophical hybridity,” according to Kendi? Nazism.
All this feels quite muddled, but what I came to understand as Kendi expanded his Great Replacement net was that he wants it to capture any kind of mindset in which those most privileged in a society imagine themselves to be its victims. This is more than just a racial inversion—though that is often the form this über-theory takes. It could also include anti-vaxxers pinning yellow stars to their shirts because they are convinced that they’re going to be targeted by their government, or French protesters angry over a proposal to raise their retirement age. What Kendi is interested in is finding links between such manifestations, but all I could see as I read (and read, and read) is that there is potentially no end to this anxiety; it is as old as the conflict between Cain and Abel or Jacob and Esau. It is also not unique to white Europeans and Americans. Wasn’t this same fear of reversal behind the massacres of the Tutsis in Rwanda and the Rohingya in Myanmar?
For Kendi, however, this is not a pattern of human nature but a modern plot. And so he expends a lot of energy connecting the dots on that murder board in order to prove that like minds are working together. A 2011 book by the French writer Renaud Camus, The Great Replacement, which expresses fears that Muslim immigrants are going to destroy French civilization, shows up at the bedside of various leaders. A meeting by the far-right German party AfD (Alternative for Germany) on how to expel migrants from the country is held a suspicious eight kilometers away from the site of the Wannsee Conference, where the Nazis gathered to plot the “Final Solution.” “It may not be a coincidence,” Kendi decides.
Often he simply lets two facts sit side by side, rubbing provocatively against each other: “On June 15, 2025, Trump announced his administration’s ‘very important goal of delivering the single largest Mass Deportation Program in History.’ German Nazis and their collaborators executed one of the single largest mass deportation programs in history when they forcibly remigrated millions of European Jews to concentration camps outside of their home countries.”
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Great Replacement, in Kendi’s widening definition, starts to encompass so many disparate examples that it loses its explanatory power. Is Canada’s conservative politician Pierre Poilievre a “great replacement leader”? Kendi’s logic for including him is largely based on the fact that Poilievre spoke to the concerns of those 2022 trucker protesters who were responding to COVID lockdowns by demanding a return of their “freedoms.” He was addressing constituent complaints about business closures and school lockdowns, which is what all sorts of politicians did. El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, makes it onto the board because of his harsh crackdown on gangs, though crime was genuinely an acute problem in the country and most Salvadorans were very happy to see him attack it. He has weakened democratic institutions and countenanced claims of torture and other abuses, but I’m not sure this puts him ideologically in league with Orbán and Le Pen.
For all the material Kendi brings together, his conclusion reduces it to the size of a small cabal meeting in a back room: “The actual protagonists in this story are the great replacement financiers, politicians, theorists, and soldiers. They are striving to bring into being the actual great replacement humans should fear in the twenty-first century: the replacement of democracy with dictatorship.” This implication—that far-right puppeteers are working together to manipulate the masses as part of their plan for world domination—doesn’t seem much different to me than imagining George Soros pulling the strings of immigration policy in order to generate a new and permanent Democratic majority.
The worst thing about Kendi’s theorizing is that it allows him to avoid seriously contending with why conspiracy theories appeal to so many people. He could begin by examining his own need for a totalizing rationale. “I did not find the subject of this book,” he writes. “The subject of this book found me.” After the 2020 George Floyd protests, Kendi’s expansive ideas about racism, encapsulated in his 2019 book, How to Be an Antiracist, were widely circulated—and attacked. That book argued that racism is as pervasive as air, that it flows through all of our institutions and our social arrangements. If you tolerated these unequal systems, you were racist; if you fought to undo them, you were anti-racist.
Many people objected to this strict binary, and Kendi experienced the resulting backlash as the kind of inversion he has written about in this new book. The “great replacement politicians and theorists have misrepresented, maligned, and villainized me—and many intellectuals like me—as anti-White, as ‘racist,’” he writes. (He was also credibly accused of mismanaging Boston University’s Center for Antiracism Research, which was set up under his leadership, a charge he disputed at the time but doesn’t mention in this book.) It seems to me that he decided to fight fire with fire; instead of addressing criticisms of overreach head-on, he chose to suggest that those who accuse him of being racist are, by his expansive definition, neo-Nazis.
Why do people feel that they are going to be replaced? Understanding this is not the same as justifying it, especially when it comes to the violence these beliefs often inspire. But Kendi has identified a real and dangerous human problem—a deep, pathological sense of grievance—even while not really endeavoring to comprehend it. To see how that might have gone, read the work of sociologists such as Arlie Russell Hochschild. Her book Strangers in Their Own Land, which Kendi mentions in passing, identified the “deep story” that working-class white people in Louisiana were telling themselves about their place in society. This was “the story feelings tell,” as Hochschild put it, of “hopes, fears, pride, shame, resentment, and anxiety.” These people felt like the world was rushing ahead of them; like they were overwhelmed; like they were waiting patiently in line while others were cutting ahead of them.
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Kendi might answer that it is not his job, or any Black person’s job, to unpack the anxieties of white people, and I’d be sympathetic to his exasperation. But if he really believes, as he writes near the end of his book, that Great Replacement politicians will do whatever they need to keep manipulating these feelings to their advantage, even “triggering World War III to extend their rule,” then he should consider not just connecting the dots, but looking more closely at the individuals who keep gravitating toward these ideas. His plan for getting past this zero-sum thinking is for us all to recognize our common humanity—and that goal is hard to argue with. But the only way to get there is to first contend with those humans who don’t partake in such a magnanimous vision, who reach for the easiest of answers to make sense of why they feel something is being ripped away from them. Maybe we should start by recognizing not only that the disorientation and uprootedness behind this sentiment is real, but that right now it might be one of the few things most of us genuinely do share.Author: Gal Beckerman. Source
