The Racist, Far-Right Conspiracy Theories Behind Trump's Policies
Donald Trump's policies and executive orders don't make any sense ... unless you know the crazy conspiracy theories they're based on.
During a Tuesday appearance on Fox News, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. went on a passionate tirade about diseases, the military and teenage boys’ low sperm counts.
The Daily Beast dutifully noted the misinformation in the statement, calling it a “bizarre rant.” The Economic Times described the premise of RFK Jr.’s hypothesis as a “wild claim.” Jezebel asked why the former drug addict who disposed of Yogi Bear’s body apparently wants more teen fathers. However, every single news outlet seemed to overlook one critical aspect of RFK Jr.’s worm-brained, science-less screed:
It was based on the “white genocide” theory.
The idea that immigration policies, multiculturalism and easily available abortions were part of an international conspiracy to erase white Protestant men from the planet have floated around far-right extremist circles for years. Still, white genocide was just a little-known conspiracy theory bandied about by the alt-right until former Fox News host Tucker Carlson found out about it, under its new name:
The Great Replacement Theory
After inspiring mass murderer Dylann Roof, justifying a racial massacre in Buffalo, N.Y., and contributing to the rise of French politician Marine Le Pen, the rebranded white genocide dogma made its mainstream political debut with Donald Trump. White nationalists at the Unite the Right rally chanted “you will not replace us.” Replacement theory is the dirty little secret behind mass deportations, Trump’s pledge to build a Mexican wall and his concern for South African farmers. And according to recent reports, it’s why Trump has finally come up with a plan to make America great again.
He’s going to make more white people.
While individuals of European descent account for approximately 16% of the world’s population, the United States is only 58.4% white, a 21% decrease since 1980, when non-Hispanic whites made up 80% of the U.S. population. Between 2010 and 2020, the U.S. Census Bureau reports that the white community has experienced an 8.6% decline. At the same time, the number of multiracial Americans increased a whopping 276% (sorry, Dr. Umar).
On the bright side, non-Hispanic whites account for:
60% of people seeking fertility treatment
66% of newlyweds
66.4% of Fulbright scholars
70% of the rural population
57% of Trump voters
If these seemingly unconnected statistics seem arbitrarily chosen or random, they are not. The Trump administration is targeting these groups as part of an effort to persuade women to have more babies.
According to a recent report by The New York Times, a team of MAGA policymakers inside the White House is workshopping ways to resurrect white, Christian babies. Some of the immaculately conceived ideas include subsidizing IVF treatments, setting aside scholarships for married candidates who apply the government’s prestigious Fulbright fellowships and increasing funding for the rural red states areas with higher than average birth rates (translation: places where white people live).
The New York Times reports:
Those ideas, and others, are emerging from a movement concerned with declining birthrates that has been gaining steam for years and now finally has allies in the U.S. administration, including Vice President JD Vance and Elon Musk …
The behind-the-scenes discussions about family policy suggest Mr. Trump is quietly building an ambitious plan to promote the issue, even as he focuses much of his attention on higher-profile priorities such as federal cuts, tariffs and mass deportations. Project 2025, the policy blueprint that has forecast much of Mr. Trump’s agenda so far, discusses family issues before anything else, opening its first chapter with a promise to “restore the family as the centerpiece of American life.”
Much of the movement is built around promoting a very specific idea of what constitutes a family — one that includes marriage between a man and a woman, and leaves out many families that don’t conform to traditional gender roles or family structures.
To be fair, there is some truth behind the theory. Scientists around the world have observed that the global population is aging because the birth rate has fallen below replacement levels — the number of live births required to maintain a stable population across generations. The U.N. even produces an annual report on the subject. But before you start worrying about human extinction, there’s an important caveat to all this political and scientific hand wringing:
Replacement theorists are only talking about white people.
As crazy as it sounds, the presidential plan to address the white genocide is just one example of Trump basing political strategy on kooky, white-wing conspiracies. In fact, understanding obscure white supremacist ideology and exotic extremist dogma might be the only way anyone can comprehend the logic behind some of this administration’s most puzzling decisions.
That’s why we made a list.
Here are some of the others.
The War on White Masculinity
Along with RFK Jr.’s claims about sperm, men’s rights activists argue that feminism, LGBTQ rights and DEI are part of an attack on white men. Supposedly, the plan to reduce white men to spermless, asexuals who can’t fight is lurking everywhere, from the COVID-19 vaccine to the military-industrial complex.
In fact, when discussing Project 2025, most reporters understandably overlooked a seemingly random statement in the Conservative Promise: “The Army no longer reflects national demographics to the degree that it did before 1974 when the draft was eliminated.”
What does that even mean?
For years, conservative media outlets, Nazis and men’s rights activists have been whining about the steep decline of white enlisted in the U.S. fighting ranks . That’s why Trump replaced the U.S. military’s Black and female leaders with less-qualified white men. It’s why Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth purged trans people from the military but re-enlisted 8,700 men who refused the COVID-19 vaccine. It’s why Hegseth, who doesn’t believe women should serve in combat roles, often uses the term “warfighters” to describe the military personnel he is most concerned about.
Christian Nationalism
Christian nationalism is the belief that the founding slaveholders fathers built America on Anglo-Protestant values, and the government has a duty to keep it that way. It’s why evangelical conspiracy theorists believed Catholics like John F. Kennedy would be controlled by the pope, Barack Obama studied in a madrassa and Muslim mosques would eventually lead to “Sharia law.”
While reporters have decried Trump’s executive order eradicating anti-Christian bias, his Feb. 7 order establishing a White House Faith Office has flown under the radar. Perhaps it is because, according to Pew Research, 81% of white evangelical Christians believe “America should be a Christian nation.”
While the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships has been around since the Bush administration, Trump’s version is part of the Domestic Policy Council, charged with formulating policy on education, health, justice and immigration. But the first meeting of the group dedicating to ending “anti-Christian bias” was led by Attorney General Pam Bondi, confirming the fears that a Christian nationalist president would weaponize the justice system to enforce religious doctrine.
More importantly, as his secretary of Jesus, Trump selected Paula White, who one group called “a Christian Nationalist powerbroker who’s spent much of her career operating in the shadows to influence public policies that discriminate against women, LGBTQ+ people and religious minorities, and the nomination of partisan judges who will support those harmful policies.” On Wednesday, White told Real America's Voice host Steve Gruber that it is a duty of women to submit to "real men" because “God has an order.”
But if you’re still wondering: “What would Jesus do?” the answer is clear:
Not that.
Race, Science and White IQ
Race science advocates like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Trump believe that race is not a social construct. According to this pseudoscience, white people are genetically more intelligent than “sub-Saharan Africans,” and that programs like affirmative action contradict the biological reality.
This is the real reason behind Trump’s anti-DEI campaign. It’s why they believe any high-ranking Black person is a “diversity hire” and why at least 17 of Trump’s executive orders mention the word “meritocracy.” It’s impossible to understand his executive order “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” without knowing about this obscure conspiracy theory. But now that you know about it, one of Trump’s accusations against the Smithsonian makes sense:
The exhibit … promotes the view that race is not a biological reality but a social construct, stating “Race is a human invention.”
“The Jews”
No list of conspiracy theories is complete without antisemitism.
While the Trump administration has followed the Project 2025 directive to dismantle government agencies and protocols that collect racial and ethnic data, the age-old belief in a Jewish conspiracy remains intact. When MAGA followers rail against “globalists” and the “deep state,” they mean “the Jews.”
The president regularly erupts into anti-semitic rants, even alleging that his Jewish son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was “more loyal to Israel than the United States.” The first Trump administration had an actual Nazi, and Jewish leaders have repeatedly called for Trump to fire senior White House adviser Stephen Miller. And, on Wednesday, the Trump administration texted faculty members at Barnard College to ask if they were Jewish. But perhaps no single person embodies the collective antisemitism of the Trumpworld more than one man:
George Soros.
According to MAGA , Soros is a Jewish supervillain who funded a migrant “caravan,” started Black Lives Matter, paid for the Ferguson uprising and was the mastermind behind the Jan. 6 attempted coup. So when Trump began issuing executive orders attacking his political enemies, he began with the worst of them all:
Perkins Coie has worked with activist donors including George Soros to judicially overturn popular, necessary, and democratically enacted election laws, including those requiring voter identification.
The directives and policy goals set by the current administration are not conservative or Republican. Thanks to Donald Trump, we are now living in a country where fringe ideologies and fictional narratives are part of mainstream politics. Moreover, journalists cannot adequately explain the current administration’s reasoning without referencing these far-right conspiracy theories. Even worse, no reasonable person with intelligence, common sense or a modicum of critical thinking would ever believe these insane ideas. Anyone who believes in them isn’t just crazy, they’re objectively dumb.
Make conspiracies great again.