The white genocide, white extinction, or white replacement conspiracy theory is a white supremacist conspiracy theory that states that there is a deliberate plot, often blamed on Jews, to promote miscegenation, interracial marriage, mass non-white immigration, racial integration, low fertility rates, abortion, pornography, LGBT identities, governmental land-confiscation from whites, organised violence, and eliminationism in white-founded countries in order to cause the extinction of whites through forced assimilation, mass immigration, and violent genocide. Less frequently, black people, Hispanics, and Muslims are blamed for the secret plot, but merely as more fertile immigrants, invaders, or violent aggressors, rather than the masterminds.
White genocide is a political myth based on pseudoscience, pseudohistory, and ethnic hatred, and is driven by a psychological panic often termed "white extinction anxiety". White people are not dying out or facing extermination. The purpose of the conspiracy theory is to justify a commitment to a white nationalist agenda in support of calls to violence.
The theory was popularized by white separatist neo-Nazi David Lane around 1995, and has been leveraged as propaganda in Europe, North America, South Africa, and Australia. Similar conspiracy theories were prevalent in Nazi Germany and have been used in the present-day interchangeably with, and as a broader and more extreme version of, Renaud Camus's 2011 The Great Replacement, focusing on the white population of France. Since the 2019 Christchurch and El Paso shootings, of which the shooters' manifestos decried a "white replacement" and have referenced the concept of "Great Replacement", Camus's conspiracy theory (often called "replacement theory" or "population replacement"), along with Bat Ye'or's 2002 Eurabia concept and Gerd Honsik's resurgent 1970s myth of a Kalergi plan, have all been used synonymously with "white genocide" and are increasingly referred to as variations of the conspiracy theory.
In August 2018, United States President Donald Trump was accused of endorsing the conspiracy theory in a foreign policy tweet instructing Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to investigate South African "land and farm seizures and expropriations and the large scale killing of farmers", claiming that the "South African government is now seizing land from white farmers". Unsubstantiated claims that the South African farm attacks on farmers disproportionately target whites are a key element of the conspiracy theory, portrayed in media as a form of gateway or proxy issue to "white genocide" within the wider context of the Western world. The topic of farm seizures in South Africa and Zimbabwe has been a rallying cry of white nationalists and alt-right groups who use it to justify their vision of white supremacy.
History
The idea of a distinct white human race began with German physician and anthropologist Johann Blumenbach, who in 1775 claimed that there were five such races, Caucasian, Mongolian, Malayan, Ethiopian (or Negroid), and American Indian. Previously, François Bernier had in 1684 published a four-page essay postscript which posited four races, combining Europeans ("except for part of Muscovy") with the inhabitants of North Africa, Arabia, Persia, Mongolia, India, part of China, Myanmar, Thailand, Sumatra, Java, Borneo, as well as the Americas, and described their skin color as "merely accidental". Prior classifications of ethnicity and culture were narrower and more mutable through antiquity, drawing distinctions closer to those of tribal and familial groups, and were based on environmental factors such as geography and climate as well as appearance, physiology, and learned behaviors such as language and diet. Present-day racial and ethnic distinctions are only loosely correlated with genetic ancestry, with which they are being replaced in medical science.