Spectator Pushes Replacement Theory

Fraser Nelson, editor of the increasingly alt-right Spectator magazine, has in the past affirmed his support for immigration. To this end, he has commissioned material from the likes of Lionel Shriver, a foreign-born author who has recently immigrated to the UK. Ms Shriver wants it to be known that she will not be cancelled, which, freely translated, means she will say more or less anything in order to move copies and get clicks.

Lionel Shriver. Not to be confused with a journalist ...

In the recent past, this has meant her telling the Independent, in an interview last year, that “Two-thirds of coronavirus fatalities would have probably died within the year anyway”, a claim so devoid of reality, or indeed empathy, that even self-promoting TalkRADIO host Julia Hartley Dooda might have stopped and thought before making it.

Yet more recently, she told readers of the Speccy that “The UK’s immigration figures are a fantasy”, going on to muse “This is purely anecdotal, but in my formerly white, working-class neighbourhood of south London, the proportion of Africans on the streets is high. In the 11 years we’ve lived there, that proportion has palpably risen. One inevitably puzzles over the aegis under which all these people from a different continent took up residence”.

One of those from a different continent being herself. But now, Ms Shriver has gone full Replacement Theory as she declares - once more, in the Speccy - “More than a third of UK births now involve at least one foreign-born parent; in parts of London, 80 per cent of births are to foreign-born mothers”. Foreign-born parents like our alleged Prime Minister, and indeed the late Duke of Edinburgh. Or Fraser Nelson’s wife.

Fortunately, Adam Rutherford, who you can tell as he’s a doctor, has read the article, so you don’t have to. The author of How To Argue With A Racist has concluded “Thanks to everyone flagging up Lionel Shriver’s piece in the Spectator. I have read it, and it is very unsophisticated Replacement Theory, and lands straightforward far-right conspiracy theory talking points which haven’t changed in more than a century”. There is more.

“These ideas, robustly present by racists such as Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddart in the 1st decades of the 20th century formed the ideological basis for eugenics policies in the US, and later in Nazi Germany. Hitler cited Grant’s work as ‘his Bible’ … Shriver’s piece echoes these sentiments very specifically. She is biologically and historically illiterate on this matter”. He then segues neatly into an aside on F Scott Fitzgerald.

“Fitzgerald was acquainted with many of the key founders of US eugenics, notably Mary Harriman - widow of railroad tycoon E. H. Harriman and her daughter, who was so into eugenics she was nicknamed Eugenia … Harriman funded the Eugenics Research Office from its foundation, lead by Charles Davenport, and run by Harry Laughlin. Laughlin wrote eugenics legislation in the US that was the basis for the 1933 Nazi ‘Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases’”. Yes, “Mr E H Harriman of the Union Pacific RR”.

... or anyone with a twitchy right arm

As Sir Sean nearly said, I think we got the point. And all this at the same time that Tucker Carlson, top-rated host at Fox News Channel (fair and balanced my arse) “says the Biden administration is allowing Afghan refugees to enter the US in order ‘to change our country. They'll never lose another election. That's the point, as you know’”.

The Spectator is not yet on a par with Der Stürmer. But you can see it from there.

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