If liberal academics spent as much time investigating and lamenting the negative consequences of Islamist ideologies on the lives of Muslims and non-Muslims, it would be easier to take more seriously their warnings about the dangers of right-wing authoritarianism and fascism.
Yes, fascism is evil and must be opposed. Fascist rhetoric deserves study—but only if the investigators ask questions such as: What makes people willing to listen to figures like Oswald Mosley or David Duke? What, if anything can be done to address legitimate grievances before people take to the streets with tiki torches, chanting the “The Jews will not replace us”?
To ask and answer these questions requires acknowledging that Westerners have legitimate interests to protect and a right to pass on the imperfect but largely free and productive societies they have inherited to their children and grandchildren. It also requires recognizing that failure to protect a country’s borders from immigrants who refuse to assimilate is a likely prelude to violence.
The Politics of Replacement contains no such acknowledgements. Rather, it portrays the desire to protect Western democracies from unchecked immigration and Islamist disruption as precursors to genocide, motivated by hatred or “Islamophobia.”
To be fair, the authors document some frightening and hateful rhetoric. In her troubling and powerful essay, “Das Boot Ist Voll, The Boat is Full: Genealogy and Policy Consequences of an Ecological-Nativist Paradigm,” Esther Romeyn, a scholar at the University of Florida, documents the troubling rhetoric directed at immigrants in European countries. Ominously, the “full boat” metaphor traces back to a 1942 speech by a Swiss politician, who used it to justify the country’s ruthless enforcement of border controls and expulsion of Jewish refugees.
Yes, the language of “mongrelization” and “cross breeding” is profoundly troubling in any context—Germany especially—but some warnings about unchecked immigration causing increased violence against women proved prophetic. The mass sexual attacks that Muslim immigrants perpetrated in Germany in 2015 and Italy in 2025 are cases in point. Likewise, the wisdom of the British dictum that “few numbers make for better race relations” seems to be borne out by the rape-gang crisis that fueled the rise of the far right in the United Kingdom (an event entirely absent from this collection).
The Politics of Replacement seeks to render any discussion of assimilation in Western democracies taboo. If the authors and editors have their way, the problem they hope to wish away will only worsen.
