Amid raids, vitriol and violence, the great replacement theory rears its head in Minneapolis

Tear gas tossed by federal immigration agents fills the air as agents clash with residents in Minneapolis, Minnesota on Jan. 13. Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images

Joel Swanson January 16, 2026

It’s a truly grotesque moment in American political history: A fundraising campaign supporting Jonathan Ross, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent who shot and killed Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, injected overt antisemitism against Minneapolis’ Jewish mayor into its pitch.

While a parenthetical noting Frey’s Jewishness — in the phrase “anti-American traitors like Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey (who is Jewish)” — was eventually removed from the fundraiser after public condemnation, the insertion was not merely accidental. Rather, it was a deliberate dog whistle to an audience steeped in the conspiratorial logic that has fueled deadly recent far-right attacks. And its presence tells us something significant about the ideology behind our current wave of anti-immigrant rhetoric and activity.

It all comes back to the great replacement conspiracy theory, which suggests that a cabal of elites — often interpreted, by the antisemitic, as “Jews” — is deliberately flooding the United States with immigrants to “replace” white Americans. The conspiracy posits that immigration and demographic change are not organic shifts that emerge as a result of historical and economic processes that lead to migration. Instead, they are the result of a deliberate conspiracy to erode white dominance.

That theory, first articulated by French writer Renaud Camus, has migrated from the niche domain of online extremists to the rhetoric of mainstream Republican politicians in the U.S. For instance, during his first presidential term, President Donald Trump falsely suggested that the Jewish political donor and Holocaust survivor George Soros might be behind Central American migration to the U.S.

It is not hard to see how a conspiracy about a group of financial and media elites orchestrating a conspiracy to undermine white American families would quickly come to target Jews. And that’s exactly what happened in the fundraiser: By explicitly naming Frey’s Jewishness, while describing him as a traitor, the post’s authors were saying the quiet part out loud: Jews support immigration, which means Jews are enemies of the state.

The rise of the great replacement theory goes hand-in-hand with the Trump administration’s increasingly overt turn toward white nationalist rhetoric. Over the past year, the administration has referred to immigration an “invasion” and claimed that “mass migration poses an existential threat to Western civilization.” At the same time, federal agencies, including ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, have leaned into social media and recruitment materials that critics warn are infused with imagery and language that resonates with white nationalist motifs.

The Department of Labor recently posted the slogan, “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage,” which some have argued is a deliberate echo of the Nazi slogan “One People, One Realm, One Leader.” Other agencies have used deliberately nostalgic imagery evoking manifest destiny and the settlement of the American West. After the fatal shooting of Good, DHS even used a neo-Nazi anthem as a recruitment tool.

One particularly shocking DHS social media post employed the phrase “Which way, American man?” invoking the title of a 1978 book, Which Way, Western Man?, written by an avowed white supremacist who argued that Jews and Black people posed existential threats to Western civilization. In another, DHS wrote “We’ll have our home again” on social media, a lyric from a song often used by the Proud Boys and other white nationalist groups.

The clear ideological affinity between U.S. immigration policy under Trump and the white nationalist narratives that animate the great replacement conspiracy should deeply alarm us. When supporters of a murderous ICE agent amplify the Jewish identity of the mayor of the city in which he acted, as if it inherently makes him suspect, they are doing more than engaging in crude bigotry. They are feeding a larger ecosystem of grievance that has already inspired violence.

In that context, objecting to ICE’s newly brutal tactics is about rejecting a worldview that says some people — including Jews — are less American, less worthy, or less deserving of safety and dignity. It’s about preserving a country that rejects conspiracy-fueled hatred, stands up for the vulnerable, and refuses to let fear be weaponized against those who are different.

The great replacement is a destructive myth that has already inspired violence against Jews, Muslims, Black Americans, and many other marginalized communities. Countering it requires courage and a deep sense of shared humanity, one that transcends the false divisions sown by those who would profit from fear. The stakes are no less than the very principles of democratic pluralism that have made this country a relatively safe place for Jews for generations.