The popularity of these ideas on 4chan has bubbled up into the mainstream. While these claims have no basis in modern biology or sociology, they are established doctrine on 4chan, where even conversations on a board devoted to cooking frequently veer into racist slurs and junk race science. The manifesto even seeks to back up its claims with the long-abandoned pseudoscience of phrenology, which studies the sizes and shapes of craniums. One particular image, sourced from 4chan, claims to show “the truth about race” – compiling a handful of debunked, misunderstood, or cherrypicked studies to assert the claim that certain races are inferior to whites. The manifesto details the baseless racism that underpins the philosophy, including the idea that Jewish people secretly control the world, and that the genetic differences between the races make them incompatible.
“We have seen (the great replacement myth) playing a greater role in mobilizing individuals to violence because it has a somewhat unique ability to foster a sense of emergency,” said Amarnath Amarasingam, assistant professor in the school of religion at Queen’s University and author of an upcoming book on the radicalizing power of conspiracy theories. That so-called great replacement myth, sometimes more bluntly termed “white genocide theory,” has found particularly fertile ground in places like 4chan.