The Pipeline from Fringe Conspiracy to Trump Policy

Official Trump policy is increasingly driven by once fringe right-wing conspiracy theories. How can we fight back?

Announcement

Mark your calendars! On Tuesday at 11:30 AM ET / 8:30 AM PT, I’m hosting my friend Ben Wikler for a Substack Live. Ben is a longtime political organizer, former chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party, and author of the new book This Is the Plan: How to End America’s Meltdown and Save Democracy.

I’m really looking forward to our conversation. Be sure to tune in!

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America only accepts white refugees now. That’s not an exaggeration. In 2026, every refugee admitted via the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program was white. And of the 6,668 refugees admitted from October 2025 to today, all but three were White South Africans.

You might read that stat and wonder if you’ve missed something. Was there a coup or a civil war in South Africa? Why are white South Africans (AKA Afrikaners) in need of refugee status?

They aren’t. The South African government has made clear that Afrikaners are in no danger. Alvin Botes, South Africa’s deputy foreign minister, has said publicly that claims of discrimination by some Afrikaners “do not meet the threshold of persecution required under domestic and international refugee law.” An Amnesty International report on South Africa’s human rights record only mentions Afrikaners once, referring to “the US government’s misinformation campaign.”

Misinformation is the wrong word. The so-called plight of Afrikaners is a false conspiracy theory commonly known as White Genocide. It posits that white farmers in South Africa are being persecuted and murdered in an attempt to reclaim land by Black South Africans. Like many other false conspiracy theories, it taps into an ugly history (Apartheid) and relies heavily on racist stereotypes to propagate.

How did a false conspiracy theory from another nation end up driving government policy in the U.S.? Because Donald Trump’s MAGA coalition is built on a foundation of disinformation and false conspiracy theories, and Trump feeds them a constant diet of conspiratorial red meat. And it fuels a dangerous feedback loop.

Trump’s campaigns have always relied heavily on communities such as QAnon and MAHA to win elections and drive media narratives. Now that he’s back in power, the false conspiracy theories MAGA adherents believe, no matter how insane they sound, are increasingly driving policy, legislation, and the White House’s political priorities.

From The Right-Wing Fringe To White House Policy

The White Genocide conspiracy theory and how it traveled across the Globe is the perfect illustration of what I’ve coined the 4chan to Trump Pipeline. Around 2016-2018, the conspiracy theory percolated on far-right forums such as 4chan’s /pol/ board. Leaked logs from a far-right discord server show that many of the trolls spreading white genocide conspiracies knew them to be false but didn’t care. One poster even referred to it as the “white genocide lie in SA.” They understood the power of the lie and how it played into the global right-wing fear that white people would lose status and power on a global scale.

Then-Fox News host Tucker Carlson—who has been open about the importance of 4chan as a source for “salacious” stories—began covering the false white genocide conspiracy theories on his primetime Fox News TV program, exposing a large American audience to them for the first time.

One of Carlson’s viewers, President Donald Trump, took to Twitter and directed his then-secretary of state to look into the matter, tagging Carlson and Fox News to indicate where he’d seen the information.

This episode brings to mind a similar instance from 2020, during the peak of the anti-critical race theory (CRT) fervor that had bubbled up on the right, when right-wing journalist and anti-CRT crusader Christopher Rufo went on Tucker’s show to declare that “critical race theory has become, in essence, the default ideology of the federal bureaucracy and is now being weaponized against the American people.” Avid Fox viewer Donald Trump, then in the final months of his first term, quote tweeted the segment with a short and sweet caption:

As Breitbart reported just two days after Rufo’s appearance on Tucker, “At the direction of President Trump, the White House Office of Management and Budget will move to identify and eliminate any trace of “critical race theory” in the federal government.” And who implemented that order? Then-Trump Office of Managment & Budget Director, Russ Vought—he of Project 2025 fame—proceeded to tweet himself that “The days of taxpayer funded indoctrination trainings that sow division and racism are over.”

Now, Tucker may not be on Fox anymore, but in Trump’s second term, with white supremacists and MAGA loyalists serving at the highest levels of government and with Trump serving without any constraining guardrails within the administration, the pipeline now takes a much more direct route.

“Remigrate”

Take the white supremacist Great Replacement conspiracy theory, whose proponents claim there is a global plot to replace white people in America and European Nations with non-white immigrants. It is racist, xenophobic, and anti-migrant. According to the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, believers of Great Replacement have been responsible for at least 14 mass casualty terrorist attacks across the globe, including three mass shootings here in the U.S.

Hand in hand with the Great Replacement is “remigration,” a concept popularized in far-right communities online and off, starting around 2016. Remigration is the forced removal of non-white people from mostly white countries to their so-called ethnic homelands, a form of ethnic cleansing. As Chris Mathais, a longtime journalist covering the far-right, told The Big Picture during a recent interview, “back in 2017, I could read terms like ‘great replacement’ and ‘remigration’ in the Identity Evropa chat messages stolen away by antifa spies. Now those terms are used by people in the White House.”

And like clockwork, remigration has become core to the Trump administration’s immigration policy. Last May, Axios reported the Trump State Department planned to create an Office of Remigration, backed enthusiastically by White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller. By October, “remigration” was part of the official policy of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS.)

Then, in December, the White House released a National Security Strategy memo that declared without evidence that “Europe will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less” and used Great Replacement-coded language throughout the document. Cut to this past May, when Trump’s State Department formally rejected a United Nations migration declaration by accusing the U.N. of being part of the so-called Great Replacement effort in its formal statement. As Newsweek reported,

“The United States did not participate in the International Migration Review Forum and will not support the May 8 ‘progress’ declaration,” said the statement, adding that the administration objects to U.N. efforts “to advocate and facilitate replacement immigration in the United States and across the broader West.”

How has this led to specific policy? On the campaign trail back in 2024, Donald Trump and his then-VP nominee JD Vance used their campaign platform to spread debunked racist claims about the community of Haitian immigrants living in Springfield, OH. Two years later, President Trump has successfully canceled for hundreds of thousands of Haitians as part of a broader movement that stripped Temporary Protected Status from 1.3 million migrants in the U.S. This meant anyone with TPS could now be deported at any moment, even if they’ve lived in the US legally for decades.

The Great Replacement Theory, along with Trump’s continued insistence that the 2020 election was stolen from him due to election fraud (another false conspiracy theory), also drives policy around elections and voting rights from the Trump White House. Trump has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that non-citizens voted in the 2020 election, swinging it to Joe Biden in Georgia and other states. In fact, the theory on the MAGA fringe is that Joe Biden purposely let millions of migrants enter the country to create permanent Democratic majorities; to essentially “replace” white American voters. Enter Trump’s latest obsession: the so-called SAVE Act, which ostensibly targets voter fraud, but according to analyis from the Brennan Center for Justice, if passed, millions of American citizens would be blocked from voting. But Trump doesn’t care about that. As political analyst Philip Bump has called the SAVE Act The Great Replacement Theory in legislative form.

As Bump elaborated.

This idea that immigrants are illegally influencing elections, then, is simply too perfect not to embrace.

That’s particularly true because it overlaps with the increasingly normalized claim within America’s political right that there is a deliberate effort underway to flood the country with immigrants who will vote Democratic. This is, in essence, the “great replacement” theory, an idea transmitted from the racist fringe into the mainstream by Tucker Carlson and, later, prominent Republican officials.

And who needs Tucker Carlson when you have Elon Musk mainstreaming this notion, even tactily threatening anyone who would oppose the bill with death.

Of course, no discussion of Trump immigration policy being driven by MAGA fringe conspiracies would be complete without acknowledging the ICE surge in Minneapolis / St. Paul earlier this year. While Trump launched Operation Metro Surge in the Twin Cities in early December, that deployment was on steroids after Nick Shirley’s Dec. 26 video purporting to expose Somali daycare fraud in Minneapolis went viral.

As Vox reported after Nicole Good’s death,

the video, with its 3.4 million views, kicked off a wider national scandal. The federal government promptly froze child care payments to the state. On Monday, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz abruptly dropped his reelection campaign. The Trump administration also surged hundreds of ICE agents to the Minneapolis area as part of a major enforcement action that left one woman dead.

ICE would, of course, go on to murder Alex Pretti in that surge as well, which ultimately led to a so-called “draw down” of ICE agents in the city. But more than six months on, ICE continues its mandate of rounding up and deporting people Trump and his MAGA base simply don’t think belong in the U.S., immigration status (or criminal record) be damned. And as we have seen over the past few days, ICE continues to murder people in the streets.

“Do Your Own Research” is Now Public Health Policy

This tendency of Trump to turn fringe theories into White House policy is not limited to immigration. Trump has long been a believer in anti-vaccine disinformation and false conspiracy theories, claiming in an interview that he believed vaccines caused autism as early as 2007, a claim he continued to repeat on the campaign trail and in the White House.

During his 2024 run, Trump received the endorsement of Robert Kennedy Jr., previously a candidate himself, who harnessed the power of the MAHA Moms, a movement of anti-vaxx activists who switched their allegiance to Trump once the latter promised to put RFK Jr. in charge of reforming America’s public health system.

As Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kennedy has made quick work of turning America’s public health policy into an anti-vaxxer’s fever dream. Kennedy overhauled the recommendations for childhood vaccines and disbanded the board of experts that previously advised the CDC on vaccines. Trump’s FDA changed its recommendation on Tylenol, encouraging pregnant women not to take it because of the debunked claim that acetaminophen causes autism. Research and development funding for mRNA vaccines was slashed.

But it doesn’t stop at just vaccines. The Trump White House has issued multiple executive orders attempting to limit access to gender-affirming health care for the trans community. Kennedy is working to end the sale of fluoride settlements that help protect children’s teeth. Billions of HHS research grants have been delayed or canceled. The White House even launched a website promoting the Covid Lab Leak conspiracy theory.

What Can We Do?

This is no way to run a country. America desperately needs elected officials who don’t believe in false conspiracy theories and aren’t beholden to those who do. This November’s midterm elections are our earliest and best opportunity to course correct. We can vote out the Infowars lab leak crowd in favor of politicians who will support truth and science, and who listen to experts rather than online mobs.

Beyond that, it’s crucial that we rebuild our media ecosystem and disrupt the 4chan-to-Trump pipeline. As academic researchers and experts, Dean Jackson and Jon Bateman state in their 2024 report, Countering Disinformation Effectively, “there is no silver bullet or best policy option,” and democracies need to take a “portfolio approach” which includes experimenting with multiple interventions and strategies.

A healthy policy portfolio would include tactical actions that appear well-researched or effective (like fact-checking and labeling social media content). But it would also involve costlier, longer-term bets on promising structural reforms (like supporting local journalism and media literacy). Each policy should come with a concrete plan for ongoing reassessment.

From a systemic view, this might include bolstering local news as a public good and forcing tech platforms to stop incentivizing the spread of hate and disinformation through robust regulation. But no matter the tactic, each has unique challenges and unique avenues for implementation. As Jackson’s and Bateman’s report lays it out:

As individuals, we perhaps have more power than we realize, especially since Trump’s approval rating is low and continues to sink. There’s never been a better time to have some of those tough conversations with our family and friends who are susceptible to the sort of disinformation that bubbles up into government policy. You can learn to spot disinformation and conspiracies yourself using the SIFT method, and to talk to people in your life effectively using this guide from PEN America.

This piece was originally published in The Big Picture, one of my favorite political newsletters. Thanks so much to Todd and the crew over there for hosting me.

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