Kev Collins’ Youtube channel his here. Ben Scallan writes for Gript.



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That’s a clip I played on the podcast a while back, it’s from one of the far-right protest a while back, and we’ve had a couple more of those anti-immigration protests in the last while. I saw some comments on social media about those protests, one in particular that caught my eye with, some let’s say unflattering photos of a group of protesters, and the comment was ‘Not one junior cert between the lot of them‘.



I’m certainly not going to argue that that woman in the clip or any of her cohort will be winning any Nobel prizes, but I don’t think that it’s constructive to call them stupid. It might cheer the troops, but it’s unhelpful for two reasons. First, it doesn’t win any converts. That is a debate well worn, so I’m not going to get into it.






But secondly, it’s dangerous to assume that everyone who doesn’t agree with you, doesn’t agree because they are stupid. At best, that leaves you dangerously unprepared.



And it’s important to recognise that that what you’re hearing there isn’t just random nonsense. There are clever people out there who are who are promoting very extreme messages.



I don’t know if that woman is aware of it, but the version of the conspiracy theory that she is giving was created by a French far-right figure called Renaud Camus, who published a book in 2011, Le Grand Remplacement, basically saying what that woman was saying, although Camus’ book was specific to France. Renaud Camus, by the way should not be confused with Albert Camus, who actually is a noted philosopher. Renaud Camus’ conspiracy theory has been spread widely on far-right websites, and adapted for many other countries including, as we hear there, for Ireland.



It is by no means original as a conspiracy theory, the nazis had a similar concept which they called Umvolkung, which referred to the supposed dilution of the Germanic people by Slavs  in ethnically-mixed areas Eastern Europe, supposedly organised by the Jews, and in 1995 the American neonazi David Lane published his White Genocide Manifesto, which claimed that civil rights for African Americans was a plot to wipe out White people, organised by the Jews, and earlier the American lawyer with, let’s say a deep interest in ethnic issues, Madison Grant wrote a book in 1916 called The Passing of the Great Race, which claimed that the post-slavery migration of African Americans to the big industrial cities was an effort to wipe out White people organised by … the Jews … you might be noticing a pattern here.



Various incarnations of this theory have also been promoted by people on the fringes of polite society, including American journalists Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, French politician far-right leader Marine Le Pen, and it has inspired terrorism, including the 2019 attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, which killed 51 people, the 2011 attack on the Norwegian island of Utøya in which a total of 77 people were murdered,