Rightwing ‘great replacement’ fears mask tech's real great replacement | Jason Stanley

Across the world, “great replacement” theory has been employed again and again as the political foundation for fascism. Some of its fundamental tenets, such as the view that “whites are a dying minority”, have been amplified by tech billionaires and their platforms.

According to the version of this theory most employed in Europe and the United States, white replacement theory, white populations are being “replaced” by non-white populations, a replacement engineered by a shadowy global elite. For example, the need for skilled labor is supposedly being used by global elites as an excuse to bring in non-white immigrants to replace white workers.

Great replacement theory – a phenomenon Ibram X Kendi extensively documents in his recent book, Chain of Ideas – is the governing ideology of Europe’s far-right parties. It also serves as a justification for the US’s remorseless and violent politics of mass deportation or “remigration”, the term introduced by the far-right Austrian nationalist Martin Sellner in a 2024 book of that title. While a powerful international far right promotes this theory, a real great replacement is happening: of humanity with artificial intelligence.

Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is Europe’s most prominent extreme far-right party, whose central platform is, essentially, remigration. Elon Musk is a vocal supporter of this party, having given a speech remotely at the AfD campaign launch in January 2025, stating: “You have to go all out to convince people to vote for AfD.” AfD’s party program for Saxony-Anhalt explicitly uses the concerns of the fake great replacement theory to justify implementing the real one. Point 28 of its agenda for “Immigration and Remigration” begins:

An AfD-led state government will develop a strategy for Saxony-Anhalt focused on technological upgrading, digitalization, and AI. This strategy is intended to help alleviate bottlenecks in the local labor market. Furthermore, it aims to avoid the immigration of skilled workers from culturally dissimilar backgrounds.

AfD proposes “financial support for technological upgrading, digitalization, and the use of AI by small and medium sized enterprises through the establishment of a dedicated funding program” as well as other kinds of support for companies to adopt AI. Again, this is not listed as part of AfD’s economic program – that is another section. Replacement of human jobs by AI is rather part of its immigration program – that is, its program motivated specifically by its central ideology of great replacement theory.

Palantir’s multi-billionaire CEO, Alex Karp, while rejecting AfD’s Russia-friendly politics, has argued that AI will make mass migration obsolete, by obviating the need for skilled immigration into western countries.

At the same time as the global far right is promoting fear about non-white populations replacing white populations, tech companies are engineering the mass replacement of humanity by AI.

The panic about the replacement of white populations by non-white populations distracts attention from this real great replacement.

The global elite are in fact in a conspiracy to replace people. But the global elites in this instance are not liberals or Jews or Marxists or Islamists – they are the heads of giant companies. And their productions threaten not the replacement of white people by non-white people – they threaten to replace all people with AI agents.

On 18 April, Palantir posted a 22-point summary of Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiski’s book The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. Point 21 was:

Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures … have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

According to this ideology, what makes for a superior culture are the skills and crafts it nurtures, and the productions (the “wonders”) that are the result of these skills.

If the goals of its creators are met, AI will replace human skills, and with it, human skilled production – indeed, even human cognitive skill by the cognitive labor of AI agents. And if you are in the game of ranking cultures, and in the business of replacing human production with AI production, you are going to logically end up with the view that humanity itself should ultimately be discarded.

Transhumanism is the view, popular among the Silicon Valley tech elite, that humans can be technologically augmented to give rise to a superior species, the “transhuman” (Elon Musk’s company Neuralink is devoted to merging humanity with AI).

Transhumanism can be viewed as a contemporary version of eugenics, the project of using genetics and selective breeding to engineer supposedly “superior” humans, an endeavor central to Nazism.

But I believe almost as popular as transhumanism among the Silicon Valley elite is AI successionism – the view that humans should give way to AI agents. With that handover, the center of moral concern should also change, from human welfare to the welfare of AI agents. It is not hard to imagine the creators of this new species wanting to survive in remote bunkers or outer space, with the knowledge that they have, like gods, been the agents of such a succession.

The fear that white workers will be replaced by non-white workers is masking the reality that all workers are being replaced by non-human workers. Similarly, the fear of the replacement of European civilization by foreign civilization is masking the threat of the replacement of all human civilization with an artificially designed one.

The global promotion of the fascist great replacement theory, the replacement of white workers by non-white workers, and the supposed deplacement of “white civilization” is nothing other than a distraction from the real threat of a genuine great replacement, of humans by AI agents.

• Jason Stanley is the Bissell-Heyd chair of American studies at the Munk School at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control The Future