Donald Trump describes the enemy as “global financial powers”. For Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, they’re “international speculators” with hidden faces. For Matthew Goodwin, national populism’s chief British ideologue, they’re an alliance of liberal elites and corporations against the white working class. In America, it’s been fashionable to throw in satanic paedophiles as well.
This century, as their impact has grown across Europe and North America, national populists have developed an increasingly detailed common narrative and language. A liberal (or “expert”, “graduate”, “urban”, “metropolitan” or “cosmopolitan”) elite—as like as not organised in a “uniparty”—is using its powers in politics, higher education and the “legacy media” to impose “luxury” or “woke” beliefs on the nation to demoralise, confuse and corrupt its “forgotten majority”. To defeat this elite and its secretive financial backers, national populism has sought to redraw the postwar political fault-line, opposing both social and economic liberalism—Blairism and Thatcherism—with a new political cocktail of social conservatism (anti-immigration, pro-family) and economic interventionism—the deal currently being offered to the British people by Nigel Farage.
But beyond all that lies an older theory, whose peculiar power is to entwine hatred of the rich and fear of the poor in one coherent hypothesis.
The left-liberal conspiracy theory dates back to the French Revolution, which was blamed by some on the machinations of the Bavarian Illuminati and, later, on the Freemasons. But the idea of a plot by a racially defined financial cabal was fully weaponised by a Tsarist forgery whose material was largely copied from a mid 19th-century French satire against Napoleon III. It was first published in a Russian newspaper in 1903 and then, in 1905, as The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, the final chapter in a work by a Russian mystic called Sergei Nilus.
This work was feeding, of course, on a very ancient prejudice. The Protocols, which were seen as prefiguring Bolshevism, were subsequently promoted by the industrialist Henry Ford in his newspaper the Dearborn Independent and endorsed by mainstream British journals and public figures until they were exposed as a piece of “clumsy plagiarism” by the Times in 1921. Unsurprisingly, they were also admired by Hitler, and published and republished as authentic by the Nazi party.
Purporting to be the minutes of a series of meetings, the Protocols describe how a group of shadowy Jewish Elders overthrew a benevolent landed aristocracy to impose an “aristocracy of our educated class headed by the aristocracy of money”. Their aim was to subvert the cohesion of nations by undermining the institution of the family, controlling the press (through which “we have gained the power to influence while remaining ourselves in the shade”) and corrupting the culture (“we have created a senseless, filthy, abominable literature”). Thus the Elders “have fooled, bemused and corrupted the youth”, advancing “so many contradictory opinions” that the people will “lose their heads in the labyrinth”.
Then, having “laid a pitiless and cruel yoke upon the necks of the workers”, the Elders “appear on the scene as alleged saviours of the worker from this oppression”, recruiting them to “the ranks of our fighting forces—Socialists, Anarchists, Communists—to whom we always give support”. The Elders’ control of gold and practice of usury allows them to provoke “a universal economic crisis whereby we shall simultaneously throw up on the streets whole mobs of workers in all the countries of Europe”, and institute “a despotism” of “magnificent proportions”.
The theory of the Protocols is based on two contradictory propositions. The first depicts the poor both as a savage and violent revolutionary mob, and as a supine, sheeplike and manipulated mass (“there is nothing more dangerous to us than personal initiative”). The second concerns the mercurial Elders themselves, who appear to be both wicked capitalists and violent revolutionaries. As Hitler put it in a speech in 1922: “While Moses Kohn sits in the director’s meeting, advocating a policy of firmness… his brother, Isaac Kohn, stands in the factory yard, stirring up the masses.”
Following the horror of the Holocaust, the idea of a communist-capitalist conspiracy re-emerged in a more sanitised, less overtly antisemitic form. In the United States, the John Birch Society (JBS) was founded in 1958, named after an intelligence officer and missionary alleged to be the first American to have died in the Cold War. In the society’s Blue Book, its founder Robert Welch wrote that “both the US and Soviet governments are controlled by the same furtive conspiratorial cabal of internationalists, greedy bankers and corrupt politicians”, whose ultimate aim is the creation of a “collectivist New World Order, managed by a one-world socialist government”. In its journal the New American, the JBS describes abortion, homosexuality and moral degeneracy as part of the conspiracy to render the US vulnerable to globalism. In his 1971 book None Dare Call it Conspiracy, JBS spokesman Gary Allen claimed that New York bankers—some of them Jewish—financed the Russian Revolution and that the middle class was now being pressured from above by bankers and below by the Black Panthers and student revolutionaries: “We are going to have a Dictatorship of the Elite disguised as a Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”
In the UK, an openly antisemitic version of the same idea was at the core of The New Unhappy Lords—a treatise written in 1965 by the National Front’s first chair, AK Chesterton (cousin of GK)—which declared that “Communism and loan capitalism” were “twin instruments with which to subdue and govern... all mankind”, with immigration acting as an essential, race-mixing tool. “Are these master-manipulators and master conspirators Jewish?” he enquires. “The answer is almost certainly ‘yes’.”
Enoch Powell too was convinced that “we live in an age of conspiracies”. Two years after his 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech, Powell claimed that Britain was under attack from “forces which aim at the actual destruction of our nation and society”, from rebellious students to civil rights marchers in Northern Ireland to “similar combustible material of another kind”—non-white immigrants—whose “accumulation” was “not without deliberate intention in some quarters”. On the extent, character and purpose of immigration, Powell argued, the people had been so misled that “one begins to wonder if the Foreign Office was the only Department of State into which enemies of this country were infiltrated”. As a consequence, “the majority are reduced to a condition in which they finally distrust their own senses… and surrender their will to the manipulator”.
Jump forward to the 21st century, and the rise of national populism, for which immigration is the dominant issue, is increasingly influenced by the “Great Replacement” theory, developed by the French thinker Renaud Camus. In 1999, Camus was researching a travel book in France’s Hérault region, and “stumbled on a cluster of veiled Muslim women outside an ancient stone church”, concluding that “they did not belong there”. From this epiphany, Camus concluded that Muslims were taking over from indigenous French and indeed western people.
In Enemy of the Disaster, Camus describes “ethnic substitution, the great replacement” as the most important event in French history. Immigrants to France are not French: “If they are just as French as I am then French does not mean much.” This invasion of “aggressive, violent and conquering” migrants, largely from North Africa—which Camus calls “counter-colonialisation”—is
supported by a dominant “media-political complex”.
For Camus, employers want cheap immigrant labour and his “media-political complex” (ie the progressive liberal elite) favours immigration for political reasons. But he denies that this is a conspiracy. He does not believe that “arch-mandarins” plotted to “deculturate” the population, nor that North Africans decided one Friday “to conquer Europe”. But, “the important thing to note is that it is indeed occurring”.
The seeping of the Great Replacement into popular consciousness is detailed in a 2019 report by Julia Ebner and Jacob Davey for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a thinktank based in London . They identified 1.5m tweets about the theory between 2012 and 2019, with the number of tweets nearly tripling between 2014 and 2018. Politicians who have cited the Replacement as an imminent or established fact include the Austrian former vice chancellor HC Strache (of the far-right Freedom party), the German AfD’s Björn Höcke and Marine Le Pen’s niece Marion Maréchal-Le Pen. In the UK, a YouGov-Cambridge Centre for Public Opinion Research poll found that 30 per cent of Leave voters in the Brexit referendum believed in the Great Replacement.
Some American politicians claim that migration is part of a plan to supplant the existing population
For Camus, the AfD, the Freedom Party and other factions on the far right, the threat of replacement requires a policy of “remigration”—the deportation of all people of foreign heritage. On 29th May, it was revealed that the US State Department is proposing the establishment of an Office of Remigration, while in August Nigel Farage announced his plan for mass deportations. In June, former Conservative and Ukip MP Douglas Carswell called for the “mass deportation of Pakistanis from Britain. I don’t care how long you’ve lived here. Out”—a 1970s National Front policy dropped as too extreme by its successor the British National Party two decades later.
A thousand miles to the east, a version of the Great Replacement echoes the full Protocols thesis more distinctly. For Roger Eatwell and Matthew Goodwin (National Populism: The Revolt against Liberal Democracy, 2018) Hungary’s five-times elected prime minister Viktor Orbán argues that “liberal politicians within the EU, along with the billionaire Hungarian-Jewish financier George Soros, are engaged in a plot to flood Hungary and ‘Christian’ Europe with Muslim immigrants and refugees, which they see as part of a quest to dismantle western nations and usher in a borderless world that is subservient to capitalism”. In 2019, Orbán himself said, “There are political forces in Europe who want a replacement of population for ideological or other reasons.”
And in a 2018 speech Orbán mimicked the conspiratorial tone and content of the Protocols: “We must fight against an opponent which is different from us. Their faces are not visible… they do not fight directly, but by stealth… they do not believe in work, but speculate with money; they have no homeland, but feel that the whole world is theirs.” Later, Orbán listed his enemies as the foreign-maintained press, “trouble-making protest organisers” and “a chain of NGOs financed by an international speculator”, Soros. Every opponent in the upcoming Hungarian election, Orbán insisted, was a “Soros candidate”, who “dare not admit the identity of their master”.
In the UK, the most vociferous proponent of the global/liberal elite idea is Goodwin, described by Prospect editor Alan Rusbridger as the British right’s philosopher-in-chief (and whose tortuous political journey was charted in these pages by James Bloodworth). Originally an academic, Goodwin wrote an excellent 2014 book (with Robert Ford) on Ukip. Since then, he has morphed from analyst into advocate. In National Populism, he describes the idea of Soros planning to flood Europe with Muslims to destroy nation states as “not entirely without credence”. In a 2021 piece in the Daily Mail, Goodwin used a critique of “woke capitalism” (companies supporting liberal causes) as evidence for the existence of an “informal alliance between white elites, corporations and minorities against the white working class”. Elsewhere, this project is defined as “hyper-globalisation”, a two-pronged project by the elite class and global corporations to export well-paid and secure jobs overseas, while importing masses of low-skilled immigrants into the US and the UK in their stead.
In the US, the Great Replacement increasingly dominates far-right rhetoric. Its most prominent and extreme manifestation was the chanting at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia of “You will not replace us” and “Jews will not replace us”. Rally speaker Mike Enoch said that white genocide was “the deliberate and intentional displacement of the white race”, and that the concept of “white privilege” had been “brought to us by Jewish intellectuals, to undermine our confidence in ourselves”.
It was the Charlottesville rally—and the opposition to it—which provoked Donald Trump to say that there were “very fine people, on both sides”. During his 2016 campaign, Trump echoed the core conspiratorial thesis when he stated that “Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of US sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers”. In his campaign launch speech, he attacked migrants as criminals and rapists. By the 2024 campaign, he was defining immigration and the Biden administration’s failure to control it as “a conspiracy to overthrow the United States of America”, by encouraging migrant voters “to collapse the American system, nullify the will of the actual American voters and establish a new base of power that gives them control for generations”.
The “they” is the Democratic party, but there are other agents involved; immigrants are foot soldiers in a wider plot. For patrollers of the southern border, they are terrorists directed by drug cartels or part of a plan whose “endgame is a world without borders”. No surprise, then, to hear rumours that Soros has been accused, baselessly, of funding the caravan of central American migrants who marched to the Mexican-American border in 2018.
Other American politicians claim that migration is part of a plan to supplant the existing population. In 2021, Republican congressman Brian Babin claimed the Democrats “want to replace the American electorate with a Third World electorate that will be on welfare”. At the same time, senior politicians suggested that supporters of legal abortion are deliberately encouraging a decline in the birthrate of white Americans. In September 2021, broadcaster Tucker Carlson defined Joe Biden’s immigration policy as the deliberate “replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from faraway countries”. “Obedient” clearly means people who’ll vote for the party that admitted them, but it has a wider meaning. On 24th October last year, Newsweek published an opinion piece by Sohrab Ahmari (US editor of the British publication Unherd, which, as Jon Bloomfield and I argue in the Little Black Book of the Populist Right, frequently promotes national-populist ideas) headlined “Progressives Are Pushing for an Economy Built on Migrant Serfdom”. The piece argued that elites have imported “a large underclass of serfs who don’t speak the language and lack the power to organise”, “pliant, submissive workers” unable “to forge solidarity and mount collective action”. These are of course a contemporary version of the malleable, supine working class of the Protocols.
Frank Furedi, former guru of the Revolutionary Communist Party, now runs a Brussels thinktank devoted to Orbán’s brand of national populism. Like Orbán and the leaders of Israel, Russia and Georgia, Furedi is much exercised by foreign NGOs, particularly their “central role in promoting American woke values”. Echoing Gary Allen, Camus and the Elders of Zion, Furedi claims student demonstrators are both “Foot Soldiers of the Cultural Elite” and an “infantilised and conformist” mass. He argues that, for the EU’s “technocratic managerial elites”, mass migration undermines national consciousness and therefore assists their “imperial ambition to turn their institutions into a federal state”. Indeed, “from a globalist-cosmopolitan perspective it is essential to deny the moral significance of borders to… [delegitimise] the status of the nation and the sovereignty of its people”, by “provoking cultural confusion and uncertainty”. Furedi quotes the British political theorist Margaret Canovan’s insistence that nations are “inherited common worlds, sustained by the facts of birth and the mythology of blood”. The nation is thus a club of which no immigrant can be a member.
The Great Replacement is the Protocols of Zion adapted for the era of global movement of peoples. The perceived evils of immigration start with familiar complaints about stealing jobs and suppression of wages; they expand to embrace a plot by left-wing parties to create a permanent electoral majority; they pull in a plan to reduce the domestic birthrate by promoting feminism and abortion and LGBT+ rights. Immigration is exposed as a conspiracy to destroy the nation culturally as well as demographically; and finally—thanks to the heroic efforts of their opponents—the conspirators are revealed as an unholy alliance between the cosmopolitan elite and global finance capital, both determined to destroy the nations and impose a one-world dictatorship.
Sex has always been at the core of the Maga conspiratorial universe. In his BBC series The Coming Storm, Gabriel Gatehouse argues that the Jeffrey Epstein affair is “the conspiracy theory of everything”. Certainly, in conspiratorial terms, it has everything. Following -Pizzagate (the myth that there was a high-level paedophile ring operating from an Italian restaurant in Washington DC) and QAnon (which elevated this ring to a Satanic paedophile cabal and cast Donald Trump as the anointed saviour who would expose and break it), the Epstein theory centres on a former teacher running an undistinguished finance company who amassed an improbable degree of riches, was convicted of sexually abusing a 14-year-old and jailed for 13 months in a sweetheart plea deal, and nonetheless gained and maintained a huge network of elite contacts (Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Noam Chomsky, Prince Andrew). Rearrested on federal charges of sex abuse and trafficking, Epstein hanged himself in 2019 in a Manhattan jail.
The failure to release the alleged Epstein “client list”—demanded before last year’s presidential election by the future FBI head Kash Patel, his deputy Dan Bongino, the vice president JD Vance and (a little more circumspectly) Trump himself—contributed to a narrative in which, as Gatehouse describes it, Epstein ran a profitable blackmail operation in the interests of a cabal. Epstein was thus “the way the cabal exercised power over its members… a brief glimpse of the control mechanism at the heart of the global network secretly controlling the world”. And, contributing to a theory which already has a liberal elite and a sinister cabal, Epstein was, of course, a Jew.
As outlined by Ezra Klein, the big problem with the theory, from a Maga point of view, is that Epstein’s circle included Trump himself, who now calls on his supporters not to waste “Time and Energy” on “somebody that nobody cares about”, describing the Epstein “hoax” as a “lunatic left” plot. As the toys fly from his pram, the president might reflect that those who live by conspiracy theories may yet die by them.
Central to the contemporary theory is the idea that the liberal elite is in cahoots with global finance capital. As Jon Bloomfield and I point out in our Little Black Book, Goodwin’s version requires its adherents to believe that his New Elite are liberal on social issues but also “economically liberal”—more in favour of open markets and unconcerned about rising inequality. As the Goodwin Elite is more or less defined by being university graduates, he needs to persuade us—against the evidence of his and everyone else’s own eyes —that today’s graduates are largely closet Thatcherites.
While global tycoons may combine economic and social liberal values—though Silicon Valley’s fawning over Trump suggests their number may have been exaggerated (see Ethan Zuckerman, p22)—the vast majority of people who believe in socially liberal causes, such as antiracism, feminism and net zero, do not own global companies or winter in Davos. Despite the efforts of the real elites running the tabloid press, the progress of popular opinion on those causes, among graduates and non-graduates alike, has moved in a dramatically progressive direction over the past 50 years.
The dangers of the full-fat conspiracy theory are obvious. But part of its cunning is that you don’t need to buy into the whole deal at once. You can believe in a power-hungry liberal elite without thinking they are in cahoots with global capital. Trump’s “international bankers” aren’t specifically Jewish. But the wrapping up of antiracism with feminism, abortion and LGBT+ rights and, increasingly, environmentalism as part of one mutually dependent conspiratorial package means that hostility to one of these causes can slide ever more easily into belief in the entire theory. Crazy, it may obviously be. But, as the past 100 years and the endurance of the grotesque fakery of the Protocols shows, this conspiracy has worked before. And there is alarming evidence that it’s working now.
