This essay was originally published in The Emancipator, an award-winning nonprofit media organization that provides news, expert analysis, and investigative reporting about the structure of racism and antiracist efforts to abolish it.

He wore tactical gear and a helmet-mounted camera on March 15, 2019.

As he livestreamed himself on Facebook, Brenton Harrison Tarrant, a thirty-year-old White Australian, entered Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. He shot and killed forty-four Muslims. He left, climbed in his car, talked to his online audience, and sped to Linwood Islamic Centre three miles away. He then murdered seven more Muslims. New Zealand police captured him as he drove to a third mosque.

His carnage didn’t conclude seven years ago. Tarrant aimed to inspire more terror.

Thus, the livestream.

Thus, his posting a 74-four-page screed titled, “The Great Replacement.”

Thus, his writing that the mosques had a “large group of invaders … that seek to occupy my peoples [sic] lands and ethnically replace my own people.”

Investigators found a printed copy of Tarrant’s screed, as well as homemade firearms, ammunition, components of explosives, and notes on making more firearms and bombs in two homes in Florida’s St. Johns County near Jacksonville, earlier this year.

Someone had tipped off the sheriff’s office that 14-year-old Julian Davis and his friend, Charles Williams, 13, had discussed homemade weapons and armed robbery on Telegram. The sheriff’s office and St. Johns County School District investigated, searched the teens’ homes, and announced their arrests on August 7. Sheriff Robert A. Hardwick said, “We are thankful to have prevented a tragedy in St. Johns County.”

These White middle schoolers were likely planning a terror attack on Muslim Americans. They seemingly saw themselves as the Christchurch shooter saw himself: defending against the purported replacement and annihilation of White people.

Over the last fifteen years, there have been mass shootings of Muslims, of Black people, of Latinos, of Jews, of White progressives, of immigrants. Shooters believed in the same great replacement theory as critical masses of people, as popular media figures like Tucker Carlson, as authoritarian politicians like Donald Trump, as oligarchs like Elon Musk—all tanking democracy to accumulate ever more wealth and power and privilege.

Actually, these shooters believed in the most extreme great replacement theory: White genocide theory.

They imagined a political plot to bring on the genocide or extinction of White people. They deputized themselves to defend White people from this invented genocide by carrying out terror attacks against peoples of color and many White people.

I termed these globe-spanning terrorists of humanity great replacement soldiers in my new book, Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age.

These great replacement soldiers have usually been young.

Dylann Roof, 21, killed nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.

Ali “David” Sonboly, 18, murdered nine people at a McDonald’s patronized by immigrants and a nearby shopping center in Munich, Germany, in 2016.

John Earnest, 19, opened fire and killed a Jewish woman and wounded three more Jewish Americans at a synagogue in Poway, California, in 2019.

Patrick Wood Crusius, 21, targeted Latino shoppers and fatally shot 23 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, in 2019.

Payton Gendron, 18, murdered ten Black shoppers and workers at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, in 2022.

Ryan Christopher Palmeter, 21, shot dead three Black people in 2023 at a Dollar General in Jacksonville, Florida, after being turned away from nearby Edward Waters University, a historically Black university.

On May 18, 2026, Cain Lee Clark, 17, and Caleb Liam Vazquez, 18, shot and killed a security guard and two members of the Islamic Center of San Diego.

To be clear, there have been very young school shooters. Colt Gray, 14, murdered four people at a Georgia high school in 2024. But Gray, like other school shooters, primarily obsessed over school shootings, namely Columbine (1999) and Sandy Hook (2012), not great replacement theory.

No great replacement soldier has been as young as 14 and 13-years-old, making this recent averted terror attack in Florida unique.

And uniquely chilling.

Great replacement soldiers are seemingly getting younger and younger. Seventeen in San Diego, and now 14 and 13 in Florida.

This, to me, demonstrates that the most dangerous political theory of our time—great replacement theory—is spreading deeper into human consciousness.

This, to me, demonstrates the predictable outcome of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis leading a movement to remove antiracist education that protects young people from ingesting the harmfully racist idea that Black and Brown people are coming to take over.

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Florida has the nation’s fifth-largest Arab American population. Jacksonville has long been a hub for this community, with a thriving Syrian population dating back to 1890. Many of the city’s Muslim Arab Americans pray and fellowship at the Islamic Center of Northeast Florida.

Did the White teens plan to target this largest mosque in the region? Did they plan to target a mosque right there in St. Johns County: the Islamic Center of St. Augustine?

Their stockpiling of murderous weapons and ideas happened as Islamophobic great replacement theory is rising in the United States; worse now than at any point in recent history. The week after Abdul El-Sayed’s August 4 victory in Michigan’s Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate, anti-Muslim social media posts increased by twenty times the pre-primary rate, according to research by the Center for the Study of Organized Hate (CSOH). On August 10, Donald Trump said to the press in the Oval Office that “we have jihadists being elected all over the place.”

These anti-Muslim posts often use the “language of ‘invasion,’ ‘conquest,’ and ‘Islamification,’” which “mirrors the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, recasting Muslims as a population threat engaged in deliberate civilizational conquest,” CSOH found.

An April report from CSOH found that over the previous 13 months, 89 elected officials published 1,111 Islamophobic posts on social media, introduced eight anti-Muslim bills, and established a “Sharia-Free American Caucus” that amassed 65 members. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) designated this caucus “an anti-Muslim hate group.”

One member of this hate group is Florida Congressman John H. Rutherford, a former police officer who represents St. Johns County and thereby these two White middle schoolers.

Directly south of Rutherford’s district is the congressional district of Randy Fine, a leader of the Sharia-Free American Caucus, and perhaps the most anti-Muslim member of Congress.

“We’re going to stand strong against the Islamification of America,” Fine said during a town hall meeting with his constituents on February 23, 2016. During a December congressional hearing, Fine said, “I don’t know how you make peace with those who seek your destruction. I think you destroy them first.” On November 14, 2025, Fine imagined, “This isn’t immigration. This is a full scale invasion of mainstream Muslims overtaking America.”

These two White middle schoolers read Fine’s ideas echoed in the pamphlet of the Christchurch shooter.

“This crisis of mass immigration and sub-replacement fertility is an assault on the European people that, if not combated, will ultimately result in the complete racial and cultural replacement of the European people,” Tarrant wrote.

Tarrant’s manifesto stirred great replacement soldiers long before these Florida teens.

“In general, I support the Christchurch shooter and his manifesto,” the El Paso shooter wrote.

The Buffalo shooter wrote, “Brenton started my real research into the problems with immigration and foreigners in our White lands.”

The Dollar General shooter in Jacksonville expressed: “Brenton Tarrant: Main inspiration for my methods. . . and targets. Tarrant took the fight to his invaders, and I will take the fight to mine.”

The San Diego shooters in May titled their manifesto: “The New Crusade: Sons of Tarrant.”

Tarrant came of age in an Australian political discourse shaped by Sen. Pauline Hanson, the founder of One Nation, now the most popular party in Australia, according to a recent poll.

“In my first speech in 1996 I said we were in danger of being swamped by Asians,” Hanson said on September 14, 2016, after being reelected to Parliament for the first time in nearly twenty years. “Now we are in danger of being swamped by Muslims, who bear a culture and ideology that is incompatible with our own.”

During the home searches, deputies found a black tactical vest chalked up with numbers, symbols, and acronyms at the home of Davis, the 14-year-old. The chalked-up vest seemingly operates as the manifesto of these middle schoolers.

They drew a huge Nazi Black Sun symbol in the middle of the vest. The teens inscribed, “RWDS,” an acronym for “Right Wing Death Squad.”

RWDS dates back to the squadrons that terrorized political opponents unleashed by CIA-backed Latin American military dictators like Chile’s Augusto Pinochet. One of Pinochet’s allies was Michael Kast, a Nazi lieutenant turned Chilean businessman who fled to Chile after World War II, like the upwards of 1,000 Nazis escaping accountability for their war crimes. Kast’s son, José Antonio Kast, a longtime defender of Pinochet, ran for president on great replacement theory. He took his oath of office as president of Chile on March 11, 2026.

The teens wrote, “88,” a numerical sign for “Heil Hitler.” They wrote, “14.” This corresponds to these fourteen words: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.” These words were written by David Lane, one of the nine founders, in 1983, of The Order, a short-lived neo-Nazi paramilitary organization.

The teens wrote, “hh – 51.” This stands for “Heil Hitler” and the number of Muslims Tarrant murdered in Christchurch, New Zealand: 51.

Students at Switzerland Point Middle School chalked all of this on a bulletproof vest they stored next to their guns, ammunition, and explosives.

Thirteen and fourteen years young.

The flood of great replacement theory, now in middle school.

This essay was originally published in The Emancipator, an award-winning nonprofit media organization that provides news, expert analysis, and investigative reporting about the structure of racism and antiracist efforts to abolish it.

In 2021, a former student of University of Cambridge history professor William O’Reilly accused him of plagiarism. The student noticed his prose comprised nearly half of O’Reilly’s article in the Journal of Austrian-American History published in 2018.

O’Reilly claimed he “accidentally” copied around 4,000 words from two essays by this student without any citation.

In 2023, a university tribunal found O’Reilly had plagiarized his former student. The journal retracted the article, stating its information “was presented without credit.” But the university tribunal seemingly believed O’Reilly’s explanation.

It ruled the plagiarism was “the product of negligent acts but was not deliberate.” O’Reilly was “baffled” at the conclusion.

The Financial Times was the only major news outlet to cover O’Reilly’s case. According to NewsCord, a UK media watchdog, the UK media published 249 articles in 22 days on Jason Arday, a University of Cambridge professor accused of plagiarism by a racist propagandist. After three weeks of unremitting media coverage, Arday died on Friday.

Arday was Black. O’Reilly is White.

The Howard University Institute for Advanced Study investigated U.S. media coverage of Arday and O’Reilly. We selected 15 mainstream media outlets with a large and influential reach and across the ideological aisle: MSNOW, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, NPR, Associated Press, ABC News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, Fox News, CBS News, NBC News, and the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.

We searched closed-caption transcripts of broadcast clips via the Internet Archive’s TV News Archive. For each of the fifteen outlets, we also used Google to perform site searches for “Jason Arday” in the past year up until Tuesday at 9 a.m. and for “William O’Reilly” since January 2018. For any sites where the search turned up no results, we searched directly on the outlet’s websites and YouTube.

We found that 15 U.S. media outlets published at least 30 pieces about Arday in the 12 days before his death. The outlets publishing the most pieces were the New York Post (7), the Wall Street Journal (5), and the New York Times (4).

We could not find any coverage of O’Reilly in any of these outlets.

No stories about any of the allegations against him from the past few years.

No mention of him or his case in any coverage of Arday from those 15 outlets.

We reached out to the outlets that published the most stories about Arday, but have not yet received a response.

What makes these findings chilling is that O’Reilly’s case is much more serious than Arday’s. The U.S. and UK media coverage was hardly proportionate to the seriousness of the allegations against these two Cambridge professors.

Arday was accused of falsifying details from his life story and plagiarizing journal articles and his doctoral thesis. The institution where Arday obtained his PhD, Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU), investigated his thesis and some journal articles for plagiarism. The university concluded he had not plagiarized and similarities to other academic works were likely caused by “honest and reasonable error.” Last week, Cambridge announced an investigation into Arday’s work and appointment.

In O’Reilly’s case, a professor plagiarizing a student’s paper from a class signifies two serious acts of misconduct: plagiarism and an abuse of power. Professors can more easily cover up plagiarizing an unpublished student paper than the published paper of a fellow scholar. With the professor and the student the only two who usually have access to student papers for classes, it often falls on the relatively powerless student to find, report, and prove the plagiarism of their professor, putting their career at risk.

The student whose essays O’Reilly plagiarized told Cambridge’s student newspaper, Varsity: “I spent over two years going through the University’s complaints process, and despite my complaint being upheld, they have refused to explain how they reached the conclusion of accidental plagiarism.”

The fifteen U.S. media outlets we investigated did not cover this story.

O’Reilly was accused again of plagiarism in 2024. He was accused of lifting sizeable amounts of material without crediting sources in three journal articles between 2006 and 2016. He told Varsity that he “never consciously sought to represent the work of others as mine.”

It’s unclear whether the University of Cambridge investigated these allegations. The fifteen U.S. media outlets we investigated did not report these new allegations.

In 2018, O’Reilly was in charge of student welfare at Trinity Hall, a college within Cambridge. When a male student was accused of sexual assault, O’Reilly named a panel to investigate, then testified on behalf of the student, whom he knew personally. The student was cleared.

In 2020, when Tortoise, a news website, broke the news, more than 220 students signed a letter calling on the history faculty to investigate O’Reilly’s actions. Students were especially furious that O’Reilly was allowed to be in charge of the sexual assault investigation even though he himself had been accused of sexual assault. He has denied those allegations, and the Financial Times reported that this “led to no further action being taken against him.”

The Emancipator reached out to the University of Cambridge for a response.

None of the fifteen U.S. media outlets published any stories or op-eds about O’Reilly amid this major sexual assault scandal at Cambridge.

In addition to the 30 pieces in the two weeks before Arday’s death, these same 15 U.S. media outlets published 35 pieces between his death on Aug. 14 and the morning of Aug. 18. The majority of these pieces covered his death, vigils, and official reactions.

But several of them continued the media’s pile-on.

The pile-on after Arday’s passing primarily came from those outlets – the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times – that had published the most stories before his death.

On Aug. 15, The New York Times published, “Professor’s Death Leaves Behind Hard Questions for Cambridge on Race and Hiring” with five reporters having a byline for this story.

The Atlantic piled on with “The Truths That Failed Jason Arday” on August 15 and “Jason Arday’s Final Self-Delusion” on Tuesday.

On Aug. 17, the New York Post published, “DEI made Jason Arday’s career — and its cult of woke killed him.”

In total, we found that the 15 U.S. media outlets published a total of at least 65 pieces about Arday between Aug. 3 and 9 a.m. on Aug. 18. Again, we found zero pieces in these U.S. outlets on his former colleague, William O’Reilly, who remains a professor at Cambridge.

Ella Wagner contributed to the research study.

Dr. Ibram X. Kendi is the Carter G. Woodson Endowed Chair in History, and the director of the Howard University Institute for Advanced Study. Dr. Kendi is a #1 New York Times best-selling author and National Book Award winner. His newest book is an instant best seller, Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age.

This essay was originally published in The Emancipator, an award-winning nonprofit media organization that provides news, expert analysis, and investigative reporting about the structure of racism and antiracist efforts to abolish it.

The death yesterday of Jason Arday, a 41-year-old Black scholar who resigned from the University of Cambridge after waves of attacks over the last few weeks, hits close to home. His death left me so devastated I had no words when the news broke. But I woke up this morning with words.

To be a prominent antiracist Black scholar is to know you are a target, almost totally surrounded by resentments. Prominence is relative. You can be prominent at your university, in your field, in your local community, in your nation, across oceans.

As a prominent Black scholar, you know that at any point, the attacks can come like a lynch mob. And then, one day, the attacks come.

The attacks come from racist propagandists, resenting you for shining a light on anti-Black racism, hoping their baseless claims are finally picked up by everyone. They know to dim your light is to dim the light on their anti-Blackness.

The attacks come from centrist and progressive White scholars and writers, resenting your positions and honors and pay. They believe the great replacement theory that you’ve taken their spots, their honors, their money, like the followers of Trump and Farage.

The attacks come from Black scholars and writers, resenting your prominence, treating you as a competitor as opposed to a comrade, demonstrating their capitalist and anti-Black orientation, even those identifying as anti-capitalist and pro-Black. They end up spending more time in private and public undermining you than the racist White scholars and writers that are actively undermining them and you.

The attacks come from social media users across ideologies who see attacking you is trending. And then, they join the fray as if you are not a human being, as if you aren’t going to feel the harm they unleash for shares and follows. But when in memory have Black people been treated first and foremost as human beings?

The university that propped you up for years now abandons you amid all the attacks. It announces an investigation to protect its reputation at the expense of yours, even when it knows the attackers have been coming at you for years, even when it knows they are the problem that need to be investigated not you.

The media doesn’t investigate the problem: those attackers bent on your “downfall,” believing as you fall, they will rise. The media circulates their attacks. And piles on and on and on and on. The media published 249 articles in 22 days on Jason Arday, according to data from NewsCord, a UK media watchdog. By comparison, in 2024, in the weeks after the released Epstein files showed long-standing ties between Epstein and Peter Mandelson, former UK Ambassador to the US, the UK media mentioned Mandelson 119 times. In 2023, only one outlet, the Financial Times, covered when William O’Reilly, a White Cambridge professor, was found guilty of plagiarism. All told, a Black Cambridge professor endured 249 times more media coverage for an accusation of plagiarism by a known racist propagandist than a White Cambridge professor found guilty of plagiarism.

A similar media pile on happened to me in the fall of 2023 when I was a professor at Boston University. We had to let some staff go to ensure the financial sustainability of the Center for Antiracist Research, after huge declines in fundraising. Many antiracist organizations were facing similar declines in fundraising and engaging in similar layoffs to right their financial ships. We gave our staff three months notice and severance, and allowed them to spend those next three months looking for a new place of employment. Upset at me for the layoffs, the staff retaliated by baselessly accusing me of mismanaging the center. The university launched an “inquiry” when it knew nothing was there. When I was cleared of mismanagement after an audit weeks later, the media suddenly went quiet. There were hardly any reports of this news. It was a miserable time, navigating all these attacks.

I’ve seen other prominent Black scholars face these attacks time and again.

And if you die from all the attacks, the media still calls the attacks on you “accusations” to wash their hands of the blood. Your lynchers announce your death as if they had no role in your lynching.

But you know what your lynchers won’t announce: when you are cleared of wrongdoing. We won’t be seeing a media pile on for that news on Jason Arday or other prominent Black scholars.

The media will bury its culpability while we bury Jason. I hope he finally receives what we have never received as prominent Black scholars: peace.

Dr. Ibram X. Kendi is the Carter G. Woodson Endowed Chair in History, and the director of the Howard University Institute for Advanced Study. Dr. Kendi is the #1 New York Times best-selling author of How to Be an Antiracist and Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won the National Book Award. His newest book is instant best seller, Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age.

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