A conspiracy used to make policy
The great replacement theory claims that white people are being displaced by non-white populations as part of a plan by a hidden global elite. It has become a central ideology for Europe’s far-right parties, and in the United States it has been used to justify mass deportation, or “remigration.” Austrian far-right nationalist Martin Sellner introduced the term in a 2024 book.
The Alternative for Germany (AfD), Europe’s most prominent far-right party, has made remigration central to its platform. Elon Musk openly supports the party. In January 2025, he addressed the launch of its election campaign remotely and urged people to do everything they could to persuade others to vote for AfD.
The party’s Saxony-Anhalt platform puts the contradiction in plain sight. Its section on immigration and remigration proposes a state strategy for technological renewal, digitalization and AI adoption to address labor shortages while avoiding the recruitment of skilled workers from culturally dissimilar countries. The same section calls for financial support to small and medium-sized businesses making those changes.
That placement matters. Automation is not presented as a separate economic policy; it sits inside a program built around the supposed threat of demographic replacement.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp, a billionaire who opposes AfD’s pro-Russian policies, has also argued that AI will make mass migration unnecessary because Western countries will no longer need to recruit skilled migrants.
Who is doing the replacing?
Jason Stanley argues that the replacement panic distracts from a more consequential shift: technology companies are developing AI agents that could displace people across racial and cultural groups, not just one group of workers.
On April 18, Palantir published a 22-point summary of The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, by Karp and Nicholas Zamiska. Point 21 says that some cultures have achieved important things while others remain dysfunctional and backward, even as all cultures are treated as equal and criticism is prohibited. The text argues that this doctrine ignores the achievements of some cultures and the average, regressive or harmful results of others.
In this account, a culture’s standing is measured by the skills and crafts it teaches and the achievements produced through them. Stanley’s concern is that the same logic can turn against humanity: if AI replaces human skills and the products of skilled labor, including people’s cognitive abilities, then achievements once used to rank cultures may instead be credited to AI.
Transhumanism, popular among Silicon Valley’s technology elite, holds that technology can improve people and create a superior species of “transhumans.” Elon Musk’s Neuralink, for example, works on merging humans with AI. Stanley sees transhumanism as a modern version of eugenics, the project of creating supposedly perfect people through genetics and selective breeding, which was central to Nazi ideology.
He argues that another idea is nearly as popular among Silicon Valley elites: AI succession, in which people give way to AI agents. In this vision, moral concern would shift from human well-being to the well-being of AI agents. Stanley speculates that those who create this new species might seek to survive in remote bunkers or in space, having caused the succession themselves.
The displacement in plain sight
The rhetoric of replacement is powerful partly because it directs attention toward a fabricated threat while leaving a material one less examined. I think the most revealing detail is not that AfD supports automation, but that it places AI adoption inside its immigration policy: replacing workers is treated as an answer to the prospect of admitting them.
Stanley’s argument goes further than a warning about jobs. If human capacities and achievements are the measure of a culture, and AI systems are meant to supplant those capacities, then the logic can extend from replacing workers to questioning the value of humanity itself. That is an interpretation, not a stated goal of the companies or political figures discussed here.
Stanley concludes that claims about white workers being replaced by non-white workers, and about white civilization being displaced by another culture, draw attention away from the possibility that AI agents could replace people and, eventually, human civilization.
Jason Stanley is the Bissell-Heyd Professor of American Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future.
Daily AI news
Every day we pick what actually matters in AI and explain it plainly — no hype, no filler. Subscribe if you want to follow where the industry is going.
Only what matters — every day
Follow on X