Project 2025 Supporters Promote White Nationalist Great Replacement Theorists

Individuals at several of the Project 2025-affiliated organizations, a 900+-page manifesto detailing plans to strip American citizens of their civil rights and radically restructure the U.S. government, are becoming increasingly fond of some of the most radical European advocates of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory (see Global Project Against Hate and Extremism’s (GPAHE) analysis on Project 2025 here). 

The Great Replacement is a racist conspiracy theory that alleges that political elites in the United States are secretly conspiring to “replace” the “native” white population with a non-white, oftentimes Muslim, immigrant population in order to win elections, and has been a primary factor promoting white supremacist terrorism globally over the past decade. The belief has its origins in the white nationalist, European “Identitarian” movement and was originally accepted by only the more extreme white nationalist groups in the United States, such as those who marched and chanted “You will not replace us” at the 2017 Charlottesville, Va., “Unite the Right” rally. 

Over time, however, this racist conspiracy theory has increasingly permeated the American far right, and spread to previously more mainstream organizations such as the Project 2025 sponsor Heritage Foundation, and into our political discourse. As conservatives fall in line with Donald Trump’s radical and dangerous immigration agenda, Project 2025 supporters are increasingly publicly supporting the theorists at the center of this conspiracy theory. 

This was recently the case for Heritage Foundation “academy fellow” Elizabeth Stauffer, also a former contributing writer for the conspiracist outlet World Net Daily, known for popularizing the Birther conspiracy theory that Barack Obama wasn’t an American. Writing for the Legal Insurrection, Stauffer cited a tweet from prominent Identitarian activist and former neo-Nazi Martin Sellner to make the argument that “unchecked immigration has dramatically reshaped the demographics of Vienna’s classrooms” (see GPAHE’s profile of Sellner here). In her piece, Stauffer stoked fear that Austrians were being “replaced” by a Muslim minority and posited the Austrian far-right party Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (Freedom Party of Austria, FPÖ), a party with a history of holding Nazi sympathies, as the answer. The Sellner tweet in question referred to a reported rising number of Muslim students in Viennese schools that Sellner described as “brutal population replacement,” an “illegal settlement policy that destroys our culture and the sovereignty of our people,” and the “biggest crime of the 21st century.”

Heritage is not the only Project 2025 supporter with Identitarian sympathizers. Far-right university Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), which includes Heritage’s Kevin Roberts and Hillsdale College’s Larry Arnn on the board of trustees, organized an entire conference panel around the subject called, “Global Replacism: Reading Renaud Camus in and Beyond the French Context” in November 2024. 

Camus is the French literary theorist responsible for conceiving of and popularizing the Great Replacement through his 2010 book Le Grand Remplacement (The Great Replacement). He recently had his visa to the United Kingdom revoked prior to a visit to the country to speak at an event organized by the British neo-Nazi Homeland Party due to his presence being “not conducive to the public good.” The ISI panel sought to explore “Camus’ “ideas on cultural and demographic shifts, their implications for the West, and how they resonate in broader political and intellectual debates.” Speakers included Rod Dreher, an American senior fellow at the pro-Orbán think tank Danube Institute, which has close ties to Heritage (see GPAHE’s previous reporting on these ties here), and Rusty (R.R.) Reno, the editor of First Things and speaker at several pro-Orbán NatCon events. 

Dreher, who heads the Danube Institute’s “network project,” oriented towards promoting a positive image of the Orbán regime abroad, took the opportunity to connect Camus’ writings to Orbán’s strict anti-immigration policies and claim that Arab and Muslim immigrants are naturally antisemitic and violent. Another speaker, going by the pen name “N.S. Lyons,” spoke about “replacism” as a form of modern colonialism characterized by immigration and multiculturalism leading to supposed cultural erasure, and the far-right “populist” movement as “anti-colonial,” sentiments long echoed by French far-right figures such as Éric Zemmour.

Another speaker at the event was University of Florida political theorist Nathan Pinkoski, a senior fellow at Russell Vought’s Project 2025 member organization, Center for Renewing America, which advocates against the academic discipline Critical Race Theory (CRT) in schools, and against Birthright Citizenship. As with the other speakers on the ISI panel, Pinkoski was previously a speaker at NatCon III conference in 2022. 

On April 21, took the opportunity to publish his thoughts from the conference in the Orbánist publication The Hungarian Conservative in a piece entitled “Renaud Camus on Replacement.” For this, he received a personal message from Camus thanking him for the “splendid general introduction to my way of thinking” which was “certainly one [sic] of the best, if not the best, ever written.”