Radio ReOrient 13.6: “Islamophobia and the ‘Great Replacement’ Conspiracy,” with Sarah Bracke and Luis Manuel Hernandez Aguilaran, hosted by Marchella Ward and Hizer Mir

Summary

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Podcast Summary:

Radio ReOrient 13.6: “Islamophobia and the ‘Great Replacement’ Conspiracy,” with Sarah Bracke and Luis Manuel Hernandez Aguilar
Hosts: Marchella Ward and Hizer Mir
Guests: Sarah Bracke, Luis Manuel Hernandez Aguilar
Date: November 26, 2025
Podcast: New Books Network

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Overview

This episode of Radio ReOrient explores the development and impact of the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, particularly as it relates to Islamophobia and far-right movements in Europe. Hosts Marchella Ward and Hizer Mir interview sociologists Sarah Bracke (University of Amsterdam) and Luis Manuel Hernandez Aguilar (European University of Adrina, Frankfurt), co-editors of The Politics of Replacement: Demographic Fears, Conspiracy Theories and Race Wars (2024). The conversation dissects how the theory operates as a mechanism of racial and gendered anxieties, its historical genealogies, its mainstreaming in European politics, and the urgent need for counter-imaginaries.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins and Intellectual Genealogy of the Project

([04:46]–[10:28])

• Engendering Europe's Muslim Question:
  • Bracke’s project began with examining the “Muslim question” in Europe, looking for frameworks beyond the label “Islamophobia.” They identified systematic, genealogical forms of problematizing Muslims.
  • Recognized the “Great Replacement” as a central concept connecting gender, sexuality, and conspiracy theories of population replacement.
  • The resonance with Europe's historic “Jewish question” was highlighted—both frame a marginalized group as existential threat via fantasies of “takeover.”

Quote:
“We needed more than the term Islamophobia…there’s something systematic, part of long European genealogies.”
— Sarah Bracke, [05:12]

• Conspiratorial Racial Supremacy:
  • Hernandez Aguilar points to how conspiracy thinking about population replacement is spread via new and old means—political parties, internet fora, cultural tropes.
  • Biopolitical and eugenic logics are core to these conspiracies: “fostering one type of life (whiteness)” and “letting die other forms of life.”

Quote:
“Entitlement to women is one of those… you should have access to women not only because you are a male, but also because it’s part of a duty in reproducing the national body.”
— Luis Manuel Hernandez Aguilar, [13:12]

2. Main Elements of Great Replacement Discourse

([10:28]–[18:59])

• Intersections with Gender and Incel Ideologies:
  • Obsession with birth rates links misogyny, patriarchy, and racism—seen explicitly in manifestos like that of the Christchurch shooter.
  • Online spaces (e.g., 4chan) facilitate radicalization, where entitlement to women and anxieties about emasculation are foregrounded.
  • “Racist sexism and sexist racism” (Gisela Bock): not only are Muslims racialized, but patriarchal anxieties are mobilized to defend “the nation.”

Quote:
“At the heart of it is this idea that white men should have access to women…as part of a duty in reproducing the national body.”
— Luis Manuel Hernandez Aguilar, [13:12]

• From Internet to Political Mainstream:
  • The trope of “replacement” circulates from online forums into the rhetoric and manifestos of mainstream and far-right political parties.
  • Moments like the pandemic lockdown allowed scrutiny of politicians’ personal libraries, revealing widespread reading of figures like Renaud Camus.

3. Historical Genealogy and Longevity of Replacement Anxiety

([18:59]–[28:21])

• Beyond Renaud Camus:
  • The “Great Replacement” concept has a much longer genealogy than Camus’s book. It draws from Nazi “Umvolkung” terminology, US “race suicide”/“white genocide” ideas, and older anti-Semitic conspiracy structures (e.g., Protocols of the Elders of Zion).
  • The “floating signifier” (Stuart Hall): while the group framed as the threat changes (Jews, blacks, Muslims), the underlying structure persists—fear of losing white/Christian hegemony.

Quote:
“The paranoid fear of losing privilege is decried as replacement, being rendered irrelevant, or equating it with being extinguished: a death by equality.”
— Sarah Bracke (quoting Sahar Gumkhur), [23:52]

4. Race, Religion, and the Imagining of Europe

([28:21]–[36:03])

• Christianity, Secularism, and Whiteness:
  • Contemporary French and European Islamophobia is expressed through both secular and Christian anxiety: secularism as a mask for anti-Muslim sentiment; Christianity as an implicit “heritage” marker.
  • The notion that “Europe is Christian” vs. “Europe is white”—with divisions even among far-right theorists over the precise basis for exclusion. Pagan, Christian, and racial identities sometimes overlap, sometimes conflict—united in their whiteness.

Quote:
“What sorts of things does this tell us about how Europe is imagined in these conspiracy theories? Is there this panic about what Europe will be?”
— Marchella Ward, [32:01]

• Lack of Counter-Imaginaries:
  • A key point is the failure of the left and inclusive political movements to advance their own imaginative visions of “post-white” Europe.
  • Most political and academic work fails to “imagine Europe after the end of the white world.” Instead, the far right leads in depicting future worlds—however dystopian.

Quote:
“The imagination of Europe after the end of the white world is really lacking, I think...these thinkers, they are imagining going back to a white world, but where are the other imaginations?”
— Sarah Bracke, [34:31]

5. On Knowledge Production and Academic Responsibility

([44:08]–[46:23])

• The “great replacement” theorists themselves understand the importance of narrative and academic production—often positioning professors or “intellectuals” at the center of their fiction or polemics.
• The challenge: radical/reparative knowledge production is often hindered by institutional vulnerability or direct attack.

Quote:
“We also don’t have appropriately political or appropriately radical modes of knowledge production...the great replacement theorists also seem to have got that memo.”
— Marchella Ward, [44:54]

6. Mainstreaming and Hegemony

([46:23]–[55:37])

• From Edge to Center:
  • The “Overton window” has shifted—ideas once seen as extremist are now publicly acceptable, spread through memes, media narratives, and policy proposals.
  • Everyday encounters (e.g., on public transport) show how perceived demographic change and fear become lived “realities.”

Quote:
“Camus makes the great replacement constructed as a social reality, as an experience, something that you live, that you walk by…”
— Luis Manuel Hernandez Aguilar, [48:10]

• Struggle Over Hegemony:
  • Bracke frames the battle as a contest for social and narrative hegemony—the far right successfully mobilizes affective (emotional) responses around food, space, and nation.

Quote:
“This is a struggle over hegemony…they have been winning good parts of the struggle.”
— Sarah Bracke, [53:09]

7. Afterthoughts and Panel Reflection

([56:34]–[68:42])

• Panelists highlight how the Great Replacement theory functions as a “victimhood” narrative, recasting whites as persecuted minorities-to-be.
• The myth glosses over Europe’s colonial and multi-ethnic histories, centering itself as a “defensive” project to resist an imagined dystopian future.
• There’s an urgent call for more vibrant, inclusive, justice-focused visions of the future to challenge the dystopias projected by far-right ideologues.

Quote:
“Those who believe in this, this ridiculous conspiracy theory of the Great Replacement are in a sense ahistorical… it’s all about positioning the immigration of non-white people and especially Muslims into Europe as a very recent thing.”
— Marchella Ward, [64:50]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Entitlement to women is one of those…as part of a duty in reproducing the national body.”
  (Luis Manuel Hernandez Aguilar, [13:12])

• “The paranoid fear of losing privilege is decried as replacement…a death by equality.”
  (Sarah Bracke quoting Sahar Gumkhur, [23:52])

• “The imagination of Europe after the end of the white world is really lacking...these thinkers, they are imagining going back to a white world, but where are the other imaginations?”
  (Sarah Bracke, [34:31])

• “As a social reality, [the Great Replacement] has its own effects and it sort of moves through political parties, through the couple on the train…”
  (Luis Manuel Hernandez Aguilar, [51:15])

• “This is a struggle over hegemony… they have been winning good parts of the struggle.”
  (Sarah Bracke, [53:09])

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Project Genesis & Objectives: [04:46]–[10:28]
• Incel Communities, Biopolitics, and Replacement Logics: [10:28]–[16:49]
• From Online Forums to Political Parties: [16:49]–[18:59]
• Long Genealogy of Replacement Theory: [18:59]–[28:21]
• Christianity, Whiteness, and the ‘Imagination’ of Europe: [28:21]–[36:03]
• Imagination & Knowledge Production: [44:08]–[46:23]
• Mainstreaming Replacement Theory & Struggle for Hegemony: [46:23]–[55:37]
• Panel Synthesis & Challenge to Imagine Alternatives: [56:34]–[68:42]

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Tone & Language

• Participatory, academic but accessible—scholars sharing conceptual frameworks in a clear but urgent fashion.
• Occasional interweaving of personal reflection and anecdote (e.g., Aguilar’s Berlin metro story), always connected to theoretical themes.
• Calls to action for more imaginative, inclusive counter-narratives are earnest and self-critical rather than celebratory or simply oppositional.

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Conclusion

This episode is not just an outline of the history and dangers of “Great Replacement” conspiracies, but a challenge to academics, activists, and broader publics to reimagine Europe’s future beyond whiteness. Bracke and Hernandez Aguilar emphasize that the intellectual (and affective) work of the far right is successful in part because they offer a vision—however destructive. The task now, the hosts and guests urge, is to out-imagine such dystopias with robust alternatives grounded in justice, history, and plurality.

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Transcript

[Marshall Po]

Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder of the New Books Network, and if you're listening to this podcast on the New Books Network, I bet you like to read. I know that I do. That's why I founded the New Books Network. So as readers, we need to know what to read. And I have a podcast to recommend for you. That being the Proofread podcast, Do you have a goal to read more this year? How about a goal to read more of what you love and less of what you don't? The Proofread podcast is here to help you. Hosted by Casey and Tyler, two English professors and avid readers with busy lives, Proofread helps you decide what books are worth spending your precious time on and what books aren't. They have 15 minute episodes that give you everything you need to know about a book to decide if you should read it or skip it. They offer a brief synopsis, there's fun and witty commentary, and there are no spoilers and no sponsored reviews. Life's too short to read a bad book. So subscribe to the Proofread podcast today. And by the way, there's a new season coming soon.

[Sarah Bracke]

This is a real good story about.

[Chella Ward]

Bronx and his dad, Ryan, real United Airlines customers.

[Ryan]

We were returning home and one of.

[Radio Reorient Host]

The flight attendants asked Bronx if he.

[Ryan]

Wanted to see the flight deck and meet Kath and Andrew.

[Sarah Bracke]

I got to sit in the driver's seat.

[Saeed Khan]

I grew up in an aviation family, and seeing Bronx kind of reminded me of myself when I was that age.

[Sarah Bracke]

That's Andrew, a real United pilot.

[Saeed Khan]

These small interactions can shape a kid's future.

[Chella Ward]

It felt like I was the captain.

[Ryan]

Allowing my son to see the flight deck will stick with us forever.

[Saeed Khan]

That's how good leads the way.

[Marshall Po]

Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges, basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your Podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Radio Reorient Host]

Foreign.

[Chella Ward]

Listeners. And welcome back to another episode of Radio Reorient. In this episode, his Amir and I sat down with Sarah Bracker and Louis Manuel Hernandez Aguilar to talk about their recent book the Great Replacement.

[Claudia Radovan]

The Great Replacement conspiracy theory underlines as we will hear so much of Europe's racism and Islamophobia. So it was fascinating to hear about a sustained project that is working on this issue and its long genealogies.

[Amina Essat Das]

Episode is also an interesting example of the way in which resistance can be part of academic work and research. So it contributes to our season theme. Here we learn how defining concepts can allow us to articulate liberatory ideas.

[Saeed Khan]

It is an important conversation for thinking about the intellectual work that is involved in resistance to racism and Islamophobia. So let's listen in.

[Radio Reorient Host]

Assalamu alaikum, dear listeners, welcome to another episode of Radio Reorient. Today we are joined by Sarah Brack and Louise Aguilar, who will be speaking to us about the Great replacement theory and various interactions it has with other parts of the far right with what's going on in the world at the moment. So please, Sarah and then Louise, could you please introduce yourselves for our listeners?

[Sarah Bracke]

Yes, hi, and thanks for having us. So I'm Sara Bracke and I'm a professor of Sociology of Gender and Sexuality at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

[Louis Manuel Hernandez Aguilar]

Yes, also for my part, thanks for having us. My name is Luisa Aguilar. I'm a researcher at the European University of Adrina in Frankfurta, Germany.

[Chella Ward]

Yeah, great. Thanks very much both of you for joining us. It's great to have you on the show. I wondered whether you could start, just for the sake of our listeners, by giving us a kind of a little intellectual biography of this project. Whether you could tell us a bit about where the idea came from, how did it interact with the other research you were doing? What sort of brought you to working on this topic?

[Sarah Bracke]

Yes, well, maybe I can start, because in a sense, this project came out of another large project that I had luckily enough gotten research money from the Dutch Research Council and that is called engendering Europe's Muslim question. And the idea of that project really was that we are looking at the theorizing and looking at the ways in which Muslims are problematized in very systematic ways in Europe, in ways that we thought that we needed more than the term Islamophobia, with all the good work that has been done on Islamophobia. But we thought there's something more, something more systematic part of long European genealogies. And so that's how we came up with that, or not came up, but that's how we connected to that concept of the Muslim question and tried to theorize it, but with a very steady eye on questions of gender and sexuality, hence engendering the Europe's Muslim question. And within that large five, six year project, we came across the importance of replacement, population replacement, conspiracy thinking in the ways that Muslims are problematized in Europe. Really this kind of conspirational racial supremacy thinking at the heart of Europe's so called Muslim question. And of course, when we say Muslim question, there is immediate, the resonance with Jewish question. Right. That is one of the things that in this project that we wanted to also explore. And also in Europe's Jewish question, there's this conspiracy thinking of population replacement. So this idea of that Europe, and we have to think white Europe, Christian Europe is being taken over. Right. And so but if this fantasy of takeover in the context of the Jewish question focuses on this idea of.

[Chella Ward]

Power.

[Sarah Bracke]

Behind the scenes and money, financial power. So that is like the. Yeah, the fantasy of Europe's Jewish question. Well, in the case of Europe's Muslim question, the fantasy of takeover goes through the birth rates. And so once we really saw how important that was at the heart of how Muslims are problematized in Europe. So also through migration, of course, but this idea of there's a takeover through population, so migration and birth rates. Yeah. Then it was important for us. It was important to really put the focus on these conspiration theories. And. Yeah, that's why we wrote this book.

[Louis Manuel Hernandez Aguilar]

Yes. And if I may add, so within the project, one of the first things we did was write a piece on biopolitics and eugenics, how biopolitics and eugenics are at the core of these conspiracy theories. And I remember pretty well, Sarah, that we were sitting in some chair and we start to look at certain images, both from the blogosphere, but also from political parties.

[Saeed Khan]

Right.

[Louis Manuel Hernandez Aguilar]

In particular, one of the German party alternative for Germany, in which there is this emphasis on bird rates, on natality, Right. On sort of fostering one type of life, whiteness and letting die and other forms of life. And within that framework, we saw how crucial was the conspiratorial structure that it has been proven historically as a very successful way of creating an alien body, of creating threats of, in Foucaultian sense, activating the defense of the society.

[Radio Reorient Host]

Right.

[Louis Manuel Hernandez Aguilar]

We need to defend the white national body or society from this threat. Right. So that how it started. We started to think about these conspiracy theories through a biopolitical lens. We wrote the article, and if I mention as well, then we organized a conference, which is the background of the book, because what we saw and thought at that moment was that there was so much to research, so much to think of, and that it was a task that we appraised. It was better done together with scholars from different fields, from different regions. And so we organized that conference during Corona, sort of at the moment in which Corona happened. Then we cancel. We continue in touch with the authors. And after a while, the conference took place, which was an amazing moment to discuss, to think. And that's also part of the background of the book that we have this opportunity to meet to talk with amazing scholars from different angles, from different regions, to think about this idea that populations have been. That there is a process of replacing populations. The bird race, migration, indoctrination, and. And yeah.

[Radio Reorient Host]

So I just want to kind of jump in here to ask about the other side of what you both have spoken about in terms of, you know, replacing populations and things like this. And I wonder how much does your research then intersect with, or take into account theories of concepts that you find, for example, within the incel community, where they are attempting to preserve a certain sort of whiteness. So, Louise, you spoke about biopolitics and eugenics. Obviously, if you look at the incel community with their obsession with chins and how one looks. And so if you have a stronger chin, you are a more masculine man, and therefore you will. And obviously, this kind of. So I was wondering whether this intersects with your research. If you've brought this in, how. How does that fit in with the replacing people idea, if at all?

[Sarah Bracke]

Louis, I don't know if you want to go deeper into that. Also, given some of the, you know, the. What is it? The rabbit holes that you went down in on the Internet is. It's clearly these communities and these ways of thinking. Yeah, they. They meet, they influence each other. I also think it's really symptomatic for the ways in which eugenics is back right in so many different ways, indeed, in incel communities and then in these replacement conspiracy theories communities that we have been focusing on. The book at this moment does not focus on incel communities as such. I mean, we do bring questions of gender and sexuality, sexism, heteronormativity. We do raise these questions because obviously, if you think about this obsession with the birth rates, and let's just also remind that those were the opening lines of the manifesto of the Christchurch killer, right? It's the birth rates. It's the birth rates. It's the birth rates. And so that obsession. Yeah, if you want to change the birth rates, one of the ways to change the birth rates is actually really intervene in reproductive rights. So clearly, questions of sex, sexism, reproductive autonomy and the threats to reproductive autonomy are also very central in what we're thinking about. I do think that the incels are like a very specific kind of community and we have not focused on it yet. But the links are definitely there. And I could imagine that the research would go there as well.

[Louis Manuel Hernandez Aguilar]

Yes. And so part of the larger project, I. I took some time to research fora where population replacement is discussed. This is one of the building blocks of replacement, how it's disseminated and compressed and further articulated in this fora, like 4chan, for instance, where the affordances of the website allowed anonymity and basically you can say whatever you want. The link, all the. All the things that are on set or dog whistle in intellectual elaborations of these conspiracy theories are stated there in. In these forays where you fill in all the details, close the gaps. And entitlement to women is one of those, right. There is a sense that. Which is part of the discourse, right, that you are entitled to women that you should have access to, not only because you are a male, but also because it's part of a duty in reproducing the national body, right? So there's these twin, you know, moments of patriarchy and racism, right, Working together, what Gisela Bock calls racist sexism and sexist racism, right, like these two moments. And there. And I think one of the main discourse issues when someone posts something about great replacement is access to women, right? And the whole incel background, of course, not everyone discussing their identifying themselves as incel, but entitlement to women, it's a key part of it, right, which is tied to one of the main dimensions of these conspiracy theories which. Which explain or construct the idea that there is certain form of indoctrination, right, that European males and females have been indoctrinated by gender studies, by feminism, by queer studies, by LGBTQI ideas and narratives and struggles, and that this creates emasculated men that have no access to women and cannot compete to Arab men, Muslim men, and I'm using here quotation marks in the air that they cannot compete against this. And we know the tropes, right? These testosterone bombs as Wilders mention, and so on, so forth. And on the other hand, feminism has created a subject position, right? A white woman who is emancipated, who goes to work and decides not to have children. And these are all discussed in detail in very sexist, misogynistic ways in this fora. And this discourse easily can be linked to incel ideologies, incel cultures, and. But at the heart of it is this idea that white men should have access to women, that they are entitled to be with women, white women.

[Chella Ward]

So what you've drawn out there, I think is a really fascinating and extremely disturbing network of the different ways that this conspiracy theory is actually drawing on all sorts of very long existing prejudices, especially, you know, very terrifying types of misogyny and racism. And I'm sort of wondering, you know, you also talked to us about the different places where this. This sorts of conspiracy thinking manifests themselves. I mean, you talked a lot about the Internet, but then you also mentioned other more real world places, right? Politicians, political parties. And I'm sort of wondering whether you can tell us a little bit about where this comes from. There was, wasn't there on the Internet perhaps about five years ago now? It was fairly trendy for people on the left to point out when they saw Renaud Camus book the Great Replacement on the shelf of a right wing politician or a white supremacist politician when they saw that book to kind of screenshot a picture of it. And you must be right, Louis, when you talked about the Corona context of this. It must be because those politicians were giving interviews from their homes because they were in lockdown, that we got the chance to see their personal bookshelves. And we saw that, you know, this book, Le grand rend placement, the great Replacement, was in fact everywhere in the kind of intellectual worlds of politicians who were sort of positioning themselves often on almost the center. Right, Right. We're trying to be the sort of. The sort of soft right maybe, but were nonetheless deeply influenced by this extremely racist conspiracy thinking. So where does it come from? Does it come from that book? Is it much older? I'm thinking about the way that it rel on much older tropes about the idea that Europe is formed in a pre Muslim world where Muslims can only be a sort of late coming invasion to disturb that world. I could sort of imagine us telling a very long history of this conspiracy as well. So I'm sort of wondering where does it come from, this idea?

[Sarah Bracke]

Yeah, you are very right to point out that there's long histories probably right in the plural. Like there's long lineages of this idea and that it's indeed not because. Because Renaud Camus wrote this book. You know, it doesn't start with Camus. That's very clear. I mean the name of the book at the moment is kind of the umbrella term for these different ways of thinking that also go through different names. Because if we really look at Camus main point of like Muslims are replacing white French people in the street, that scene that immediately comes from Batior's Urabia as well. Right. So there's under other names, this ide has been rehashed and rehashed in the book. In the introduction, we do sketch a genealogy that doesn't go as far back cela as what you suggested. Like it's not even though there's one chapter that actually looks at kind of medieval Europe and kind of a whiteness and Christianity of medieval Europe. But the genealogy that we sketch is a modern one where you could say that at this. In this current post colonial moment if you want. And we can come back to the question of backlash later. But so Eurabia le grand en placement, you could situate them in this post colonial moment. But then of course there's the Nazi moment with the idea of um volkung, which in the Netherlands where I'm based, the Dutch word for replacement is um volking. So it's straight from Nazi terminology. And that idea, yeah, is an important articulation of replacement thinking as well. And a very consequential one, a very murderous one. But then it also doesn't start with the Nazis. And the first moment in our genealogy, again, I think you're right, Cela that we could take it back further. But in the book we start with kind of the US the turn of the century. So the 1900s standards, the turn of the 20th century where the notion of race suicide was developed by a sociologist, by the way, by a fellow sociologist, Ross, at Stanford University. Actually he got fired and it was one of the first cases before tenure existed of thinking about academic freedom. But so he developed the notion of race suicide, which over the decades became white genocide. Right. The notion that is very Much still with us. And you know, the, the newly elected president in, in the US uses that notion of white genocide, right? So that's like 100 years from race suicide to white genocide, of yet another genealogy that is this part of this, this broader picture. So it is an old idea that can also has a bit of, you know, Stuart Hall's floating signifier. The, the group that supposedly replaces people can shift, right? It's African Americans, Jews, Muslims. So it's. Yeah, it's that kind of story that can be rehashed, focused on a different group. And then of course, it does make you think about what holds it, what holds it all together. And I don't think in the book we fully go there like it really is with a community of scholars beginning to map out how can we think this. But I think Louis and I have been thinking further since then, of course, and at the moment, for instance, I'm writing a paper trying to make the colonial dimensions of all of this visible. So putting coloniality in that genealogy. Because we all know from the scholarship on colonialism, European colonialism, that the anxiety around population is very much part of colonial governance, right? And different kinds of anxiety, the anxiety of miscegenation and so forth, but also really the anxiety, let's call it very bluntly, of the revenge, right, the revenge of the colonized subject. You know, they will kill us, right. That is kind of the colonial subject's anxiety. And that anxiety runs through all of these instances that I briefly mentioned in this genealogy. It's the anxiety of. And actually, if you will permit me, I think there's one quote in the book that really brings all of this together and that is the wonderful quote by a wonderful scholar, Sahar Gumkhur. And I'm just going to read it for you, if you permit me. So I quote, what of a greater terror than white people who have historically been in the position of privilege, imagined in full recognition, seeing themselves as no longer superior to others, but as equals. The paranoid fear of losing privilege is decried as replacement, being rendered irrelevant, or equating it with being extinguished, a death by equality. And I think this. End of quote. And I think this quote really captures, goes to the heart of these anxieties. And, and then really also specifically in our so called post colonial moment, which is also a moment of, you know, gender equality and so forth. So in that moment where some of these power structures have actually been dismantled, right, there has been decolonization, there has been emancipation. This anxiety comes back with a vengeance.

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[Louis Manuel Hernandez Aguilar]

Yes. And I think one of the challenges we face when thinking about these narratives, these ideas or conspiracy theories, however we want to address them, is that they build upon a vast archive of ideas, sometimes opposing, sometimes complementary. And they also relied on certain structures in terms of narrative. And you're completely right, Cela. So I'm thinking of the work of Francois Oyer and antisemitic conspiracy theories in the Iberia peninsula after the Reconquista. Right? And sort of the letters from the Jews of Toledo to the Jews of Constantinople. Right. And that there is already there a structure, a very clear structure about infiltration, the enemy from within, turning the institutions and destroying the Spanish social body. Right. And also, for instance, how Norman Cohen thinks about how, for instance, those letters were sort of the seed of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Right. Again, another very powerful narrative in terms of structure, in terms of what it mobilizes and that it mobilizes what Sarah is mentioning, sort of this deep seated anxiety of losing privilege, of not being in the position of power. I'm not trained in psychoanalysis at think there is something of the return of the repressed in there. I think there are certain mechanisms that resonate because I think that is also crucial, that resonate in the regular reader, in the regular consumer, or someone who just sees these kind of things. And that all these bus archives are mobilized and put together in different packages again and again, right? From books like Camus and Bajior and Telosarrasin, but also memes or political campaigns. And I think that's one of the challenges of thinking of this discourse in terms of history and genealogically, the archives that are mobilized and also how it's constantly repack and reworked.

[Chella Ward]

Effy, I really can't wait to see that work, inshallah, about this kind of colonial, the idea of colonial revenge. Because what really fascinates me about this is actually how it goes to the heart of the question. Well, what is Europe? If Europe is no longer this thing that is violently dominating, you know, most of the world, then what is it? You know, what will it be? What will hold it together, does it have to any kind of unity apart from that experience of violently dominating most of the world? And so I think that's so important, and I think for me, more than psychoanalytical, that's a political question as well that Europe is dealing with. And when I say that, I don't mean kind of party political, I mean political in terms of. It goes to the heart of the bigger story that Europe tells about itself. And the one thing that I just want to push on there and then I'll stop pogging the conversation and let Hisa ask some questions, because he is much more of a specialist on these kinds of texts than I am. But I'm thinking about also the relationship here between Christianity and Europeanness, because one of the weird things about the Renaud Camus, or the weirdest example that Camus gives, in my opinion, in Le Con grand placement, is the bit where he's talking about the threats that this, this great replacement might cause in the future. And one example that he gives is the idea that a village, a little. He gives this picture of a little quaint French village, you know, that is currently called Colombe les des Glises, you know, Colombe of the two churches. And he says the threat is that one day that quaint little French village will be called Colombe les Deux Mosquis, right? Colombes, the two of the two mosques. So what's fascinating to me about this is because, you know, so much of French Islamophobia, French state Islamophobia currently is expressed through this commitment to secularism, through this idea, you know, that, that laicite, you know, is the most important freeing thing in French society. But yet what we see in these kinds of great replacement theories is a. A lingering attachment to an idea of Christianity being the sort of true thing that connects up Europe, right? Being. Being the kind of thread that Europe can rely on for its identity, even though we know that, you know, increasingly it's not true. And increasingly Europe. Well, in fact, Europe has always been a multi religious place, just as it's always been a multi ethnic place. And I'm interested too, in the way that there's been a slippage between, you know, this idea of Christianity being replaced by Islam and the idea of whiteness, you know, being replaced by. By racialized people, racialized populations. I'm thinking about the way that, you know, when I first reverted to Islam, the most common comment that was made to me by other white people was that I'm a race traitor and I Thought that was fascinating that immediately they saw this as a discourse about race. And we know, of course, that Islamophobia is a kind of racism. So in that sense, it's not surprising that what is spoken about as if it were a religious anxiety about a Christian heritage versus Islam is of course, actually racially, you know, manifested is, of course, you know, becomes a discourse of racism. So I guess my question is, what sorts of things does this tell us about how Europe is imagined in these conspiracy theories? Is there this panic about what Europe will be? Yeah. What's going on there in terms of how Europe is defined as an idea politically?

[Sarah Bracke]

Yeah, so I think it's a really good question, but it's also really complex in the sense that, okay, depending from where you study it, but there you also have the national differences. And given that France was already mentioned and the French laicite and so forth. In the French case, for instance, it is not so entirely clear. Let me put it like this relationship to Christianity is somewhat ambiguous. So in some of these theories, indeed, Christianity, or at least the idea of Christian culture, which then, you know, sometimes is called judo Christian culture after a Shoah. It took a Shoah for it to become Judo Christian culture. So sometimes that link is put forwards. But actually some of the intellectual production that Camus relates to, and there's a chapter on the book, the chapter by Lou Muset on the notion of reverse colonization, how that notion works within these theories. So some of that intellectual lineage goes back to the group called Gresse and the New Right, really, the emergence of the New Right in France. And they actually have a lot of critique on Christianity and the lineage that they sketch is a more pagan one. And I think we know that from Nazi ideology as well. Like, yes, there was Christianity, but also a pagan lineage. So I think there's actually more ambiguity in relation to Christianity than there is in relation to this idea of whiteness. Right. So if we think of, like, race, religion, constellations, yeah, you see that something different is happening with religion, which we could kind of see as they're trying to imagine a white Europe. Is that better imagined through Christianity or is that better imagined through pagan, Celtic paganism? Right, so there's, there's. Yeah, there's differences there. There's really fractions who don't agree, but they do agree on the whiteness. And so. So, yeah, so that is going on there, I think, and, and needs more kind of detailed empirical study to understand, like who is reimagining Christianity and who is not. Who is actually reimagining paganism. But what I do think, I like that you put the question of imagination on the table because all of these imaginations are or attempts to imagine Europe are happening very clearly in this population replacement thinking. I think the place, some of the sites where reimagining Europe is not happening is politically on what we would call the left or more inclusive agendas. Right. More inclusive political stances. There seems to be really the lack of reimagining what Europe could mean at the end of the white world. Right. And I use this expression of the end of the white world because it was used for, as a blurb on one of the books that has been crucial, the novel Le Conde Dessein by Jean Raspail that has been crucial for Camus also for his ideas. So in its English translation, I think in 1975, the blurb was, this is a book about the end of the white world. So let's for a moment say that, yes, we are now talking about the end of the white world. We're also in the time of Gramsci's monsters, right? Like the monsters trying to defend the white world. But the imagination of Europe after the end of the white world is really lacking, I think. So these thinkers, they are imagining going back to a white world, but where are the other imaginations from Europe? Rethinking Europe after the end of the white world? I think there's work for people like us to do, and that's where the imagination is lacking.

[Louis Manuel Hernandez Aguilar]

And go, sorry.

[Radio Reorient Host]

Oh, okay. It's fine. I just wanted to kind of jump in because Ashley said I had usually I don't do this. I usually don't pick on one quote that an author uses in a book, especially in an edited collection, because obviously we like to take it all together. But I want to quote you. Well, I want to quote your usage of Atwood as saying, and I'm paraphrasing here, that no new system can replace an old one without incorporating many elements of the latter. Now, what does it, especially since you've just spoken about, you know, the post white world and we've spoken about coloniality, and I want to bring this to decoloniality as well. So then what does this mean then, for any thinking that claims to be post whiteness or post Westernese? What does this mean for any kind of thinking that claims to be post white?

[Sarah Bracke]

Then I. I mean, I can briefly say something, but then I. I'm gonna let Louis also really engage with this. But I wanna pick up on. Because I think it's really Interesting. I wanna pick up on this so called Atwood quote. It's actually not Atwood herself who argues this, but she puts it in the words of academics. So it's from the epilogue of A Handmaid's Tale. And the epilogue of A Handmaid's Tale is this imaginary academic conference where frankly, Atwood is also like, I don't know, laughing at academic conferences. And so it's a quote from.

[Chella Ward]

One.

[Sarah Bracke]

Of the professors who tries to explain how the Republic of Gilead came into being, right? And says, okay, this dystopian republic of Gilead did not just come from anywhere. It already was connected to the society as it was before. And the big connection here in the story of the Handmaid's Tale is that there already were replacement anxieties in that society. And basically, you know, Atwood. But it's not throughout the novel, it's really in those few pages in the epilogue. Basically suggests it's because of replacement anxieties that we ended up in this dystopian republic of Gilead. So that's the academic who puts it out there. But there's a lot of. I find, you know, those pages on the academic conference filled with like understated, I don't know, sarcasm and, you know, basically laughing at academic conferences. And so. So we could also take that quote kind of with a grain of salt, right? Like this is what the academic makes of it. Afterwards, with the wisdom of hindsight, what happens when we're in the midst of it? Is it always necessarily the case? I guess afterwards we can indeed always trace that there's no tabula rasa, that there has been continuity in one form or the other, I think, and. And then I'm gonna. Would love to hear Lewis on this, but I think I'm gonna go back to the word of imagination, right? So imagination, I think, can be so powerful to come up with the new. But when we're in a situation of a lack of imagination, and I think in Western Europe or in Europe, and specifically from the position of white people, right? So positionality in the mix here as well. So from the position of white people in Europe, the imagination of how. How Europe post white world could look like is absent. And I think, well, absent as good as absent. And I think that ensures that the same will be reproduced. So I think if we do good imaginative work in Solidarity Collective, that gives us a chance not to reproduce the same. If we don't do that, and if we don't know the histories and don't do the imaginative work yet. Then we will reproduce the same.

[Louis Manuel Hernandez Aguilar]

Yes. And I will return to the issue of Christianity to then go to the future and the imagination, Right. I think I was sort of trying to emphasize that this is a very complex discourse which moves, which adapts, that it's able to capture different archives, very similar as this definition of racism as a scavenger discourse that it takes from here and there, there. So it can uses Christianity and it can oppose Christianity. At the core is the idea how the population will be replaced, right? So we have this beautiful chapter in the book by Jonathan o' Donnell on evangelicals, right? How the discourse of population replacement is tied with the end of the world, right. We have also, for instance, in more not mainstream articulation, all these reference to the past, to a Christian past with reconquista, right? And so Ras Pale, I think in an interview in 1985 was advised, no, 2006, I think, was advising that we have to engage in a reconquista, right? Sort of mobilizing imaginaries of the past. We know that this white supremacist terrorists carve their weapons and have all these reference to the Crusades and so on. So Christianity kind of be used as a module or sort of as a working package of the conspiracy theory. And this is linked to imaginaries of the future, right? So one of the things that these conspiracy theories or narratives do is move through temporalities situated in the past. They sort of draw on an imaginative past in order to create ideas of the future. And I think one, because the book has not been translated, but Tilo Sarassin, right, Which was crucial here in Germany in order to. For instance, he does not use great replacement, but he uses the delusion of the Volk, right? Like how it gets diluted and it's called quite interesting and different to Camus or to Baggior, because it's not full fledged conspiracy theory, but rather a statistics, right? He's using statistics. But at the end of his book he has this in a way also epilogue in which he presents his dreams and his nightmare for Germany. And his nightmare is that in 100 years there will be the end of the story is that the German flag has the same colors, but the crescent and moon, right? Everything has been replaced and so on. And his nightmare is also extremely interesting in that he dreams that around 2020, something like that there will be a Islamic terrorist attack in Germany. And then Germany will come to realize that, oh, we are in the wrong path. And they will start to do a bit of eugenics. And a bit of this and that in order to stop that replacement.

[Saeed Khan]

Right.

[Louis Manuel Hernandez Aguilar]

So the imagine and. But to the point of Sarah, this is these intellectuals, because I think we have to take them as intellectuals, are able to project fantasies and imaginarios and provide ideas about how the next 100 years will look like. Right. And sort of pander the fears or whatever, or also the hopes and the love for the nation. Right. Because I think there is also part of that it that if we don't want that the German flag as a crescent moon, we have to do something because we love this nation and we love the flag and so on and so forth. And I think these courses have been very productive in the Fougodian sense of creating imaginaries, fantasies, dreams about how the future would look like.

[Chella Ward]

Can I make just one quick comment, Hizar, before you go on with the next question? It's just an observation really, based on kind of Sara's comments about the role of the imagination, but also the kind of bringing together of Margaret Atwood's satirizing of the position of the academic, together with the author that you just mentioned, Louise, and that sari you mentioned earlier as well, Jean Raspail, and that novel, that sari you mentioned earlier, the Camp of the Saints, which also has also features the. This academic at the center of that novel. Right. So the idea of the novel is essentially that Catholic priests, Belgian Catholic priests, have been encouraging children to be taken from a kind of fictionalised India in a kind of colonial way. And that there's then a group of people from India who arrive on the shores of Europe. And it's about. That's where the kind of Brit replacement theme comes in. But it's told through the point of view of this kind of old professor who is sitting in his house, he's called Calguez, I think, who's sitting in his house with all of his books. And so I'm thinking about, as you're talking about the need to do new imaginative work. I'm thinking about also the way that on all sides of this conspiracy theory, partly what's enabling this is that we also don't have appropriately political or appropriately radical modes of knowledge production. Right. You know, you've got this sense that the work, the academic work we're doing, as well as the imaginative work we're doing, is also not producing, you know, this post Westernese world, this post white Europe, you know, that's also. So I just wanted to bring up that this is also an academic question, a question of knowledge Production as well as a question of the imagination. And. And the great replacement theorists also seem to have got that memo right. They seem to know that just as well as those on the other side do.

[Sarah Bracke]

Kind of fully agreed with that. And yeah, no, I think that that's very right. But let's. I also want to add maybe some of this work is happening, but that is then under attack, right?

[Chella Ward]

Yeah, that's.

[Radio Reorient Host]

Yeah, yeah. Speaking about under attack, so I want to kind of go on to a question about what happened over the summer in the uk. So over the summer in the United Kingdom, racist mobs around the country targeted Muslims, people of color and immigrants with abuse and physical attacks. Earlier in the year, even earlier than summer, we had a party of Germans chanting Germany for Germans, foreigners out in what became a very viral clip on various social medias. So I wanted to ask the two of you, do you think then the Overton Window has shifted enough in the west to make these ideas mainstream in public discourse? So not necessarily. I know we've already spoken about politicians having these books in their bookshelves, but just like everyday kind of parlance, people might not necessarily even be interested in politics. Have, have we come to the stage now where the Overton Window has shifted so much that there simply is now common sense? Or is it still mainly the purview of the so called dark intellectuals?

[Sarah Bracke]

I don't know, Luis, if you want to jump in first or.

[Louis Manuel Hernandez Aguilar]

Yes, I can. Maybe I will share a little story like before we started this, and I think I shared the story with Sarah as well. I was with my son, I live in Berlin. We are on the train on a metro and there's this old couple, right around their 60s or something, and I'm standing, the. The metro is full packed and one of them shows them a meme, right through their phone. And I'm standing and I'm seeing the meme, right? And the meme was about somehow someone has come from holidays and a future, dystopian future, right? And.

[Radio Reorient Host]

And.

[Louis Manuel Hernandez Aguilar]

That person narrating their own holidays, he said, and I'm extremely happy because I could find one person that could speak German, right? Sort of this idea that in the future no one's speaking German, everyone's speaking Arabic or Turkish and so on and so forth, right? And they laugh. And I remember seeing the metro and that for them it was reality, right? Because Berlin has London and Amsterdam and many cities. We have people from all different parts of the world or born here, but that they look not as white, let's say, right? And I think one of the most effective things, and this is also something that Camus does pretty well, is make the great replacement, like, constructed as a social reality, as an experience, something that you leave, that you walk, walk by, that. We have the chapter from San Margarete about the gastropolitics of replacement, that it has to do with food, with dress, with languages, with minarets and mosques and this and that it's an experience you can have and that it's one of the most efficient ways to make these racial ideas normal, because you cannot. You can not trust your eyes, your smell, and so on and so forth. I think that's a key part in sort of enabling the mainstreaming of it. Right. I also think that these conspiracy theories are narratives of the nation. And as narratives of the nation, the seed of whiteness has always been there. It never left. Right. Like the German nation has always been thought of as white, as the French and so on, or as Christian and sort of it in this scavenger mode, it recruits many things, right? It recruits emotions, sense feelings, national imaginaries, and it makes it extremely efficient in terms of spreading and in terms of creating veracity. And so what we sort of have seen is that it has moved easily not only in these dark corners of the web, but mainstream politicians. Right. We have also this chapter by Nick Linders, how the conspiracy theory has been mainstream in the Dutch context. And I think it's gaining a lot of momentum and strength, and I would say is one key narrative of the narration of the nations and of Europe. And as such, it has been able to become mainstream, to become part of it. And it types on many, many, many things, right? Like this old imagined idea that. That there was a racial homogeneity in Europe or that there was this patriarchal order that make everything in order, right? Like with the white male at the top controlling everything and determining. So it taps in so many, many layers and discourses that it creates this reality. And as a social reality. And this is very sociological, Right, right. As a social reality has its own effects, and it sort of moves through political parties, through the copalized on the train, to content, to novels, to the web. And yeah, I think we are in a moment in which it's one of the most important narratives about what the west is about what the. What Europe and each of the countries, right. With their different tones.

[Sarah Bracke]

Yeah, Maybe just to add on that, because there is that discussion, right? Like, is it. Are these dark parts of the Internet, dark corners of the Internet, the alt. Right. But to Me, Yeah, there is. There is that. There's a question of mainstreaming. But I don't want to get too caught up in dividing, cutting up these things, because the way that I see it all together is that this is a struggle over hegemony, right? And a struggle over hegemony needs different sites. There's the sites, indeed, the more radical sites where the ideas are produced, and then there's the more, you know, then there's a political arena, there's elections. And indeed, Louis pointing out to the sphere of emotions and affects, if you really think of hegemony, it's, you know, that's one of the places through food, right, this idea that when halal food is offered somewhere in a canteen, you can actually convey the affect to a part of the population that your tradition, your food, your cuisine is being taken away because another food is offered. So it's. And that battle has been won to a large extent. So one of the affects of like, indeed, when halal food is offered, that many people will experience it as something is taken away from me that is a social construction. But that has been very, very successful. Right? And so, yes, the struggle over hegemony, which unfortunately, those propagating replacement conspiracies have been winning good parts of the struggle. Obviously not the full struggle, obviously not. So we are in the midst of struggle, but they have been winning good parts of the struggle. And I'm saying this sitting here, literally in a country where the speaker of the House of the Representatives is actually in the Netherlands, the only, quote, unquote, intellectual. He's not an intellectual, but the only one who has written a full book on replacement thinking. The book is called in translation, the title is Minority in One's Own Country. So, yeah, so he's the speaker of the house. About 30% of of the votes went to parties who have replacement thinking in their political manifesto, which still doesn't say anything of politicians in other parties where it's not in the political manifesto, but who might think like this. So basically, yeah, it's a very serious struggle over hegemony. And there's a lot of power on all of these different levels, not only the dark sides of the Internet. That in a sense, if it were only in the dark sides of the Internet, I think we would would be writing and doing this work with less anxiety than we're doing it now. But, yeah, it's a struggle for hegemony and it's nasty. And just look at what happened in the U.S. trump is very clear in his discourse on white Genocide. And I think we will see many policies that are driven by that kind of anxiety. And so, yeah, we are in Gramsci's time of the monsters.

[Radio Reorient Host]

I completely agree with the idea that it's different sides of hegemony. My own research into the far right, the alt right, has brought up websites like Counter Currents Publishing where they will write books about how you can read Batman through the right. And obviously in gaming, one of the main arenas of the alt right, obviously there's been all sorts of things about wokeness in gaming and diversity, equality and inclusion. And so don't buy these games because they have. Have consultants who are trying to, you know, make them more equitable, etc. Etc. So I think we could carry on the conversation for quite a while on all of these different things. But I'd like to wrap up there. I'd like to thank Sarah and Louise for giving their time to us. And dear listeners, we hope to see you on the next episode.

[Sarah Bracke]

Thank you very much for doing this episode.

[Louis Manuel Hernandez Aguilar]

Yeah, thank you very much. It was a lovely conversation.

[Chella Ward]

You're listening to Radio Reorient, the Decolonial podcast in partnership with the New Books Network. This is radio exploring the Islamosphere and navigating the post Western. How should we study the things that we study after the critique of Orientalism? Now let's discuss what we've heard with.

[Saeed Khan]

Saeed Khan, Claudia Radovan, Isa Miya and me, Chella Ward.

[Chella Ward]

So this was a really interesting conversation that we had with Sarah and Louis around a book that they've co edited that came out in 2024, the politics of Demographic Fears, Conspiracy Theories and Race Wars. It's obviously a book that has come out of an enormous amount of collaborative scholarship. It begins its life as a conference, but it's clearly part of a sustained conversation that brings scholars of different fields together. What was especially interesting to me about it, it is the way that it concerns a kind of retelling of the history of this concept. I think that's probably the thing that, that I found most surprising in the course of this interview. So I know that term, great replacement from the book Le Grand Placement by Renaud Camus. So, you know, to me it feels like a term that comes out of that kind of French, specifically Islamophobic discourse.

[Claudia Radovan]

Because.

[Chella Ward]

Because the. The book is very much a book that is about this kind of imaginary of a Muslim takeover of France. There's a part of the book where he's talking about what he's afraid of and he talks about how a little kind of Imagined idyllic village in rural France that's called Colomb Les Eglise. So Colomb of the two churches. And he says, you know, the real threat is that Colombia de is going to become Colomb de Demosque. Right. Colombia of the two mosques. So it's very specifically Islamophobic threat that he's talking about. What was interesting was in the course of this conversation, we were able to understand that for Sarah and Louis and their contributors in the volume, this is something actually with a much longer history that goes back, you know, not only through kind of Nazi projects of. Of the term the Nazis use, but all the way on their reading to a kind of medieval European idea that Christianity is something that needs to be protected. So it pulls at kind of those threads that we're often thinking with in, in the reorient project around the racialization of Christianity as a kind of whiteness, of Muslimness as antithetical or oppositional, with notions of Westernness that are defined by being post Christian, even if they're secular. So this really seems to me to be a book that speaks to in a kind of long history or long genealogy way to questions that we're often asking at Radio Reorient.

[Saeed Khan]

Well, go ahead, Claudia.

[Claudia Radovan]

I was going to say there was sort of a couple of interesting points that you made, Shalin, and the one that sort of always catches my attention is the idea of Christianity needing protecting, which sort of seems to ignore a hugely long history where Christianity, the message of Christianity was spread through colonialism. And that often said phrase about when people talk about Islam and the religion of the sword. And when you think about that, Christianity was very much literally spread by the violence, the likes of which is almost incomparable, except when we refer to something like Nazi Germany. And obviously politically, historically, it's not very popular to make that comparison. The acknowledgment that what Hitler did in Europe, a lot of Europe, had been doing elsewhere for quite some time. But I also think it's a very interesting and apposite conversation when you think about what's happening in the UK right now with the far right pogroms that happen in 2024, post Southport stabbing, but also with the quite regular waves of violence in the UK at the minute with, with far right protests and obviously Tommy Robinson organized the large March on September 13th. I think it's interesting when you think about the not all of these people speaking for the far right mention the great replacement, but it's the kind of language they use to talk about what it is that they fear. And it's always about protecting our women and children. God forbid our women don't end up with white men, the violence they will be subjected to and all of these kind of ludicrous notions and how that's tied to other issues like it's often linked to terrorism, to the grooming gangs, to issues of citizenship, illegal immigration and things like that. And they don't explicitly, or they don't always explicitly mention the Great Replacement, but it's always sort of there latent in the background in a lot of these conversations.

[Saeed Khan]

Well, I find that there's an irony to this, that within the Great Replacement theory is really at its core victimhood. And I always find it to be interesting how the political right talks about victimhood culture today as being synonymous with the so called woke culture which they associate with the political left. When we find here that the whole notion of demographic anxiety and demographic victimhood is very much at the very, at the very inception of this movement. But I look at whiteness when I think about this particular episode and its expansion and its contraction beyond northern Europe. Remember of course, that at one time the Irish, the Slavs, even southern Mediterranean Europeans were all considered to be non white. And I wonder now that as the numbers are dwindling and as there is this demographic anxiety that's at the crux of replacement theory, whether or not there is going to be an expansion of the definition of whiteness and who will take the bait to then want to belong to this particular members club. And you see this happening with contestations within some of the Arab community here in the United States and others who simply want to take part and in fact preserve and conserve the old architecture.

[Sarah Bracke]

Absolutely.

[Amina Essat Das]

And that kind of the expansion of it really gets me thinking about the Judeo Christian. That too is a relatively recent expansion if you think about the atrocities that have been committed within the boundaries of Europe and who fulfilled those criteria of whiteness. But I was really also thinking about in relation to the Great Replacement Theory and the articulations of it in the recent protests that we've seen or even the roundabout painting, flag bearing iterations over the summer of 2025, and the notion that they're coming over here and they're stealing our jobs and they're stealing our women, et cetera, really the lack of willing or perhaps even capacity to see the other side of that. And really thinking about that late stage capitalist decline that we're really seeing here in terms of declining birth rates, declining living conditions, brain drain and so on. And so forth. So there's this emphasis that's placed on Muslimness without ever actually looking or perhaps even further pointing the finger at sort of the largest structures that are creating this sort of climate of decline. And it becomes this sort of convenient way of shifting the gaze from power to really allowing the everyday people or fostering conditions for the everyday people to fight and to create these divisions and cleavages within society.

[Chella Ward]

I think one way maybe of sort of bringing together or summing up what you've just said, Amina, and bringing that together with what Saeed just said might be to say that those who believe in this ridiculous conspiracy theory of the Great Replacement are in a sense ahistorical, right? That's to say, you know, they, they have Ms. They haven't understood the history of the world or at least they, they've co opted the history of the world to serve their own ends. I think that was very clear in what you said about the idea of the Judeo Christian right, that this is a identity category that comes about, you know, really in order to forge a kind of white connection or to whiten, you know, the, that connection and comes about really flying in the face of what for much of history would make much more sense, which is the Judeo Islamic Right, which is a term that we almost never hear except in, in kind of activist works of scholarship. And that makes me think about how this is a project or this, this notion of the Great Replacement, those who believe in it are engaged in an ahistorical project because it's all about, you know, positioning the immigration of non white people and especially Muslims into Europe as a very recent thing. And when of course, you know, we, we know that the presence of, of non white folks and Muslims in Europe is not at all recent and is, is absolutely part of, of the long history of Europe. But at the same time as it's an ahistorical project, it's also a kind of future focused project, right? It's a project that's about imagining what is for these kinds of white supremacists a dystopian future where whiteness can no longer count on the idea of being in the majority in Europe. And I'm thinking about that, you know, through those kinds of classic texts of, of white supremacy novels like Jean Raspail's Le Condai, the Camp of the Saints, which 1972 French novel which has as its blurb, you know, on the back cover the idea that this is about what happens in the future. And on the back cover it says that this is the future in quotations at the end of the white world. Right? So this is all a project of. A dystopian project of imagining a future after the hegemony of whiteness. And Sarah makes the point in this episode that the question of how we defeat these kinds of great replacement conspiracy theories is really a question about how we imagine that future and what she says. And I think it's really quite, quite interesting. She. She gives this kind of challenge to all of us who, you know, who don't identify with these kinds of ridiculous conspiracy theories. So those of us who are either on the left or who are just in favor of a. A more inclusive or a more justice focused world order. And what she says is that the difficulty is that the white supremacists have been very good at imagining the future. They have projected an imaginary, to use that quotation again from the back cover of Jean Raspael's book, an imaginary at the end of the white world. And on the other side of things, we have not been so good at imagining that future. Right. There isn't that kind of very clear imaginary of what that future will look like? So I think that asks a question that is in a way really key, or at least I think it's really key to the Reorient project, which is, you know, what is the relationship between how we understand history and how we imagine the future? And it makes me think of that very first issue of the Reorient Journal, whereas part of the editorial, you know, it included the idea that this was really a project of writing. And now I'm going to quote the editorial of writing a new history of the world. Why do you need a new history of the world? Well, because you want to imagine a different kind of future. So I think what this episode is sort of bringing to the Critical Muslim Studies Project, and I'm very grateful to Sarah and Louis for bringing it to us. Us is this question of how do we do better at imagining that more just future? And, you know, particularly that historiographical question of what do we have to do to our understanding of history to enable a more just future. So I think this is a key question that no doubt we're going to continue thinking with throughout the project and throughout the season. I think we probably don't have the time to go into it right now, so we will stop there. I want to say just before we stop, thank you ever so much to everyone for listening. Thank you to my co hosts, Claudia Radovan, Amina Essat Das and Saeed Khan, we hope that you have enjoyed this episode, and we hope, insha', Allah, that we'll see you again on another episode of Radio Reorient.

[Radio Reorient Host]

Sam.

[Ryan]

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