Reversing “Replacement”: The TikTok Movement Recruiting Women to Have White Babies

Scrolling through TikTok, you come across a painting of a 1950s family stepping out of a white clapboard church, the women in floral dresses, the men in pressed suits, children gathered at their feet. The caption reads: “Bring back good morals.” You keep scrolling. More images follow: manicured suburbs, smiling nuclear families, sunlit kitchen tables. Pretty. Nostalgic. Straight out of a Norman Rockwell illustration. You then open the comments, and you realize that you were being fed content about the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, designed specifically to target women.

The “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory is based in white-supremacy and centered on the belief that white people are being systematically replaced by immigrants, Muslims, and other people of color in their so-called “home” countries. Often, proponents of the theory blame “elites” and Jews for orchestrating these demographic changes.

The theory also relies on an undercurrent of misogyny and anti-feminist ideology, positing that falling white birthrates are the result of white women actively choosing their careers and self-advancement over their duty to make the next generation of white children. In the mind of true believers women are the primary way to slow the Great Replacement by having more white babies.

As a result, some Great Replacement adherents are leveraging TikTok, likely due to its large female user base and powerful algorithm, to recruit young women to embrace a 1950s styled, “traditional” version of the American family. This content is ultimately intended to push women further down a radicalization pipeline toward content that is more explicitly white supremacist. After women accept this version of America and become further enthralled in the conspiracy theories, it becomes easier for them to be relegated to a more submissive, second-class citizen role. The idea is that it will be easier to keep women at home, pregnant, catering to their husbands, and, most importantly, raising the next generation of white children.

Pretty History

The accounts that first lure you into this world are not explicitly white supremacist. Instead, they seek to portray a pretty and polished version of the past, featuring pictures and paintings of their version of a pre–Civil Rights era America. The images are full of the suburbs, church dresses, and smiling white families. The posts often include phrases like “Embrace Traditionalism” and “Bring back good morals.”

Of course, because the photos come before a time of integration, the families are almost exclusively white, with the few featuring people of color being segregated. Some of the images are explicitly Christian too, depicting families in churches with crosses or Bibles. The videos often amass hundreds of thousands of views, and the accounts that post them can have follower counts ranging from hundreds to hundreds of thousands. These images mirror recent posts from multiple federal government social media accounts, including those posted by the Department of Homeland Security.

While the posts themselves often seem innocuous, the comments raise little doubt as to the type of users who are engaging with and sharing this content. On one account, @the.american.way, a post showing a painting of people dressed in 1950s-era clothing outside a church inspired a barrage of racist and antisemitic comments. One commenter wrote, “Back when America was white!!” Another commented, “what happened???” with a photo of a person’s nose, likely attempting to make the connection to a stereotype of Jewish people.

Some accounts are much more explicit about their beliefs but still seek to frame them through the aesthetic images of Americana. One account, @heritageamerican, posts content that uses known white nationalist slogans, such as one post with images overlaid with “By God we’ll have our home again,” a reference to a song written and popularized by white nationalists, including the racist Proud Boys. Another post from the account included the words “tolerance of replacement and displacement is suicide by invitation,” “tolerance is imminent extinction,” and a lengthy caption that includes phrases like “We will reject the forces, globalist, woke, foreign, that demand we step aside.”

These accounts generally steer clear of posting explicitly political or white supremacist content. Instead, they reshare or repost content from avowed white nationalists who believe in and promote the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. One of the most popular accounts for these types of images, @queenstellaria, frequently reposts users who spread the conspiracy theory. @queenstellaria has more than 20,000 followers and more than 2 million likes across their posted videos.

The Women Having Kids for the White Race

Then there are the accounts of women in the United States and Europe who promote their large, all-white families alongside writings about how the white race is going extinct and they are having babies to “save” it.

One account @queenstellaria frequently reposts is @ladysarahelizabeth, belonging to Sarah Elizabeth Tenney, an American-born woman currently living with her husband and six children in Armenia. Sarah’s husband, Joel Tenney, is an evangelical pastor with ties to the Trump administration, previously giving an opening prayer at a 2024 Trump campaign rally.

The Tenneys frequently post pictures of their six children across their multiple social media platforms. Sarah is the most active and popular on her TikTok page, which has over 64,000 followers and 3.6 million likes across her posts. Tenney’s posts often include images or videos of her children and a message about the importance of having white children to preserve the “declining white race.”

Tenney frequently frames having a large white family as both a religious calling and a racial imperative. In March, Tenney posted a video of her and her husband overlaid with the words “POV: You know your race is a minority race and need to bring it back to its former glory so you have six kids.” Another post from February featured a video of her family overlaid with the words “Christians let’s start trusting God and grow our families. The Muslim and other religions are having large families and openly say they are going to out breed us. God’s 1st commandment, ‘be fruitful and multiply.’”

Tenney’s posts frequently make claims about a falling white birthrate in various countries, a classic talking point of the Great Replacement conspiracy theory. In one post, again featuring a video of her and her children, Tenney writes “Did you know the birth rate in Minnesota among Somali women is 6 children per woman on average. And with white women in Minnesota it is 1.5 per woman, well below the replacement rate.” While her claim about white births in Minnesota is mostly accurate, the claim about the Somali birth rate is not. She likely found this number in a 2023 National Institute of Health Study which focused on adverse pregnancy outcomes for Somali women in Minnesota. The study cites the CIA’s 2016-2017 World Fact Book when discussing Somali women’s high fertility rate, but the World Fact Book is not talking about the Somali community in Minnesota, but the birth rate of the country of Somalia. She has made similar statements about England and the United States as a whole.

The connection between the Tenney family and Donald Trump (and by extension, the mainstream conservative right) illustrates a key dynamic: this ideology does not exist in a sealed extremist bubble. It is situated directly alongside mainstream conservative and Christian nationalist spaces, introducing the premise to their large audiences in order for them to then spread overt white nationalism and supremacy. Among the many influencers posting this racist content, Sarah is the most popular and has the most powerful connections.

Other women in this TikTok space are much more explicit with their white supremacy. One account posted a video overlaid with the words “I only had one white baby to keep the white race strong but I’m raising an army.” The caption of the video included #88 and #88rising, referencing the white supremacist use of “88” as code for “Heil Hitler.” Another posted a video overlaid with the words “I’m disowned in my family for advocating to keep our white bloodline pure! The trillions of brainwash propaganda didn’t work on me.”

Why TikTok?

TikTok is one of the most popular social media platforms for young women and teens in the U.S. It also has the added benefit of an incredibly powerful algorithm which is designed to maximize the user’s engagement with the platform. In other words, the longer the algorithm can keep someone using the app, the better. For this reason, the algorithm (on any platform) tends to feed users emotionally provocative or controversial material based on content the user previously viewed, liked, shared, or watched for an extended period.

On TikTok, this means that the platform will try to feed you content that is more intense or more extreme to keep you engaged longer. So, after consuming enough vaguely white supremacist content, the algorithm feeds you more explicit content based on what it thinks you want to see, in this case white supremacy.

A similar issue emerged in mid-2024, when the popularity of the “tradwife” influencer was at its peak. Tradwives (an abbreviation of “traditional wife/wives”) are women who embrace “traditional” gender roles and values and often tend to reject feminist autonomy and modern societal norms. This content, while not explicitly white supremacist in nature, tended to push individuals down far-right rabbit holes, sometimes to users who had an explicit white nationalist agenda.

Using a new account and only engaging with the type of content discussed above, TikTok fed a GPAHE researcher a variety of explicitly white supremacist accounts and videos. These included:

• A video of a woman wearing a t-shirt produced by a clothing brand that uses white supremacist imagery and slogans, overlaid with the words “‘This was such a good neighborhood until these white people moved in…’ Said nobody ever.” The account’s bio includes the words “white pride.”
• Multiple different accounts whose primary posts are edits of vintage video clips with audio clips of neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes.
• A video of a woman in an American flag sweater overlaid with the words “Merry Christmas and Remigration Now,” a reference to the white supremacist policy concept of remigration, which calls for the forced removal of all immigrants, refugees, and their descendants based on race, ethnicity, culture, being perceived as “non-white,” or a failure to “assimilate.”
• A recruitment video from The National Organization for Vital Action (NOVA). NOVA is a white supremacist organization whose website claims to be a “national community of pro-White families, activists, organizers, artists, employers, and professionals.”

The move to make recruitment content more feminine and appealing to a wider audience is part of a larger effort to soften white supremacy and bring it further into the mainstream. For years, white supremacist recruitment was loud, easier to identify, and aimed primarily at men. This content is softer, meant to allow the viewer to let their guard down, and let TikTok do the rest of the work.

TikTok is not an innocent bystander in this story. The platform’s algorithm is working exactly as designed when it leads a user from nostalgic imagery to neo-Nazi recruiting ads. The platform is choosing to optimize engagement at any cost. TikTok has the tools to dismantle this pipeline and prevent users from being fed this content.