Nazi philosophy takes hold on Fox News and the American conservative camp
The most common version of this whiny idea, imported from the more hysterical fringes of the French Right wing, holds that Jewish capitalists are importing cheap immigrant labor to replace more highly-paid white workers.
Notoriously, the Nazis who marched in Charlottesville, Va., in
2017 against the removal of Confederate statues chanted "Jews will not
replace us."
The
shooter who killed 11 Jewish Americans at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018
espoused the idea of the "great replacement."
The
hateful ideology is shamelessly promoted by Fox Cable News, the CEO of which is
Lachlan Murdoch, with the worst offender being the Lord Haw-Haw of the
twenty-first century, Tucker Carlson, who exposed his audience to the great
replacement excrement 400 times in the
past year.
Republican
legislators across the US have been putting in laws against the teaching of
critical race theory, which helps us understand the hold and the effect of
ideas like the great replacement, and which hasn't killed anyone. They don't
seem to be as eager to legislate against Nazi ideas. (It is a Nazi idea.)
The
racist notion of the "great replacement" originated in Europe and had
many exponents of various stripes. Contrary to what is sometimes alleged,
however, the phrase itself was not coined by Maurice Barres
in early twentieth-century France, though he certainly believed in
the ideas behind it.
The
phrase, and the most extensive elaboration of the theory, originated with the French
Nazi Rene Binet (1913-1957),
who served during WW II in The Waffen
Grenadier Brigade of the SS Charlemagne, which consisted of French
collaborators. 
French neo-Nazi Rene Binet
You don't get more fascist than that– the Charlemagne Brigade
were the last troops to defend Hitler's bunker before his suicide, and staged a
failed, desperate fight against the Soviet army's advance into Berlin.
Binet fulminated after
the war against "the invasion of Europe by Negroes and Mongols," by
which he meant Americans and Soviets. He saw Americans as an impure mestizo
"race" (he was a biological racist). He also launched diatribes
against unbridled capitalism and the ways in which Jews were using it to abet
the replacement of civilized white Europeans.
So
this supposedly far right American nationalist idea actually originated in
hatred for Americans and a denigration of their supposed "whiteness"
by the European Right, which did not see Russians as "white" either.
It is worth noting that unlike cowardly boot-lickers like Benet, the true patriots were the multi-cultural French. The French Army and then De Gaulle's Free French Army included thousands of riflemen (Tirailleurs) from Senegal.
HIstory.net explains:
"During World War II the French recruited 179,000 Tirailleurs; some 40,000
were deployed to Western Europe. Many were sent to bolster the French Maginot
Line along its border with Germany and Belgium during the German invasion in
1940—where many were killed or taken prisoner. After the fall of France, others
served in the Free French army in Tunisia, Corsica, and Italy, and in the south
of France during the liberation."
I
had two uncles who served in WW II, one at the Battle of the Bulge. In my family,
we are not in any doubt that it was the Allies who were the good guys. And,
yes, the Allies were multi-racial. They included the Tuskegee Airmen, who
bombed Nazi targets, The Allies were the diverse American rainbow, and it was
their diversity that gave them the strength to prevail.
People
like Tucker Carlson are pitifully ignorant of history and so are wielding an
anti-American, highly unpatriotic notion for the sake of their television
ratings. Ironically, Tucker's intellectual forebear, Binet, would have
considered him a mongrel "Negro." As defenders of illiberalism and
implicitly of hatred of Jews, these useful idiots of the far right are
symbolically still deployed around Hitler's bunker, defending it from the
approaching Allies.
Juan Cole teaches
Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. His
newest book, "Muhammad:
Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires" was published
in 2020. He is also the author of "The New Arabs: How the Millennial
Generation Is Changing the Middle East" (2015) and
"Napoleon's
Egypt: Invading the Middle East" (2008). He has
appeared widely on television, radio, and on op-ed pages as a commentator on
Middle East affairs, and has a regular column at Salon.com. He has written,
edited, or translated 14 books and has authored 60 journal articles.