How America got Europe's far right to stop pretending
Heidi Beirich, an expert on the far right, says Donald Trump has emboldened those pushing for "remigration."
If one thing is clear after the May 30 "remigration" summit in Portugal, it's that they're not hiding it anymore. In 2026, Europe's leading neo-fascists — including lawmakers from far-right parties like Vox in Spain and Germany's AfD — are now open about their plans for ethnic cleansing.
And they're joined in this by MAGA figures like Greg Bovino, the one-time face of President Donald Trump's mass deportation agenda, and Stefano Forte, president of the New York Young Republican Club and a key nexus between right-wing extremists on both sides of the Atlantic.
Charles R. Davis
Less than three years ago, the Austrian white supremacist Martin Sellner was politically toxic, his proposal for "remigration" — the mass removal of all non-white people from Europe — publicly rejected by Alternative für Deutschland, the far-right party now leading in German opinion polls.
In 2023, the investigative outlet Correctiv revealed that Sellner had pitched his plan to AfD leaders at a secret meeting in Potsdam. Nationwide protests followed, many Germans remembering what happened the last time the far right decided some Europeans were more European than others. The AfD was forced to come out and reject the notion of deporting legal residents and citizens of Germany.
Now? AfD lawmaker Lena Kotré was a featured speaker alongside Sellner and other extremists in Portugal, including the leader of a Swiss neo-Nazi group, Junge Tat, and a Belgian activist who has been convicted of hate crimes and Holocaust denial. Instead of distancing itself from the event, the AfD sent its party-affiliated newspaper, Deutschland Kurier, to draw further attention to it.
Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, has spent decades tracking the American and European far right. Speaking to Critical Support — co-hosted by The Redoubt's Charles R. Davis and journalist and historian Shirin Sadeghi — Beirich explained what "remigration" really means, why we're now hearing so much about it today and what it all has to do with the 2024 U.S. election.
Listen to this interview by clicking play below or by subscribing to Critical Support on Patreon, Apple, Spotify or YouTube.
CHARLES R. DAVIS: I am very excited to introduce Heidi Beirich, who is the co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, and an expert on the American and European far right. And I can't think of any better way to start, Heidi, than to ask you why you decided to dedicate yourself and your life to following the worst people alive. Like, can you tell me a little bit of the story about what was behind the founding of the Global Project, and why you find this work so important.
HEIDI BEIRICH: Yeah, so I've been tracking extremist movements domestically in the U.S. and abroad for like a really, really long time. We founded the Global Project in 2020. I had worked at the Southern Poverty Law Center before that, and the reason for founding the global project is these movements have become really transnational. You can't just look at them through a domestic lens, it doesn't make any sense. Twenty years ago, there wasn't a far right in all the places where we have it today, but over the years I've just watched this, these kinds of movements, from the hardest core neo-Nazis and white supremacists to folks in suits and ties, grow and grow and grow. It's been distressing, and I've devoted my life to it, because I think these movements are a unique threat to democracy and human rights, and as a result they need to be exposed, and if possible, counteracted.
DAVIS: And that is why you were the person to reach out to when I was reporting the other week on this remigration summit that just occurred in Portugal. As you well know, it was kind of a who's who of transatlantic neo-fascists: Greg Bovino from the United States, Stefano Forte from the New York Young Republican Club, but also the most prominent far-right extremists in Europe, Martin Sellner from Austria probably the most famous amongst them. And they were there to discuss this thing called "remigration," which — when I brought this up with Shirin the other week — she didn't know what that was, and I think a lot of people don't know what that is, because until a few years ago it was like this fringe far-right term that you didn't need to know. What is this term, "remigration," and why are we suddenly seeing it everywhere?
BEIRICH: So remigration, it has a longer history than this, but Martin Sellner, who you already mentioned, is the key person driving it into the mainstream over the last few years. Martin Sellner is a former neo-Nazi, then became the head of the Identitarian movement in Europe. He headed the Austrian chapter, that's where he's from. And what it is is a plan to ethnically cleanse European countries or others — the United States, Canada, places that were historically, you know, majority white populations — to get rid of the populations that are non-white. This includes immigrants, refugees, but also importantly, naturalized citizens, or citizens, right, whose heritage is from other parts of the world who they believe are polluting and destroying Western civilization and the countries that they've migrated to.
It's a pretty radical and scary idea. And just a couple years ago, there was a leak and a story written about Sellner meeting with members of the Alternative for Deutschland, the Alternative for Germany party, the far-right party in Germany, and it actually caused an uproar. People took to the streets against this idea in Germany, and yet here we are, just a couple years later, and the AfD party has actually said that their official policy is remigration.
SHIRIN SADEGHI: Wait, when did all this start? When did a concerted program for ethnic cleansing in former European colonies and Europe start?
BEIRICH: Martin Sellner proposed remigration about two-and-a-half years ago. That's when this started. That's when the term became popularized.
SADEGHI: And it's just growing very fast then.
BEIRICH: It's incredible how fast it's grown. But there's a backstory to this; a longer period of infiltrating the mainstream with something called the "great replacement" conspiracy theory. So the great replacement conspiracy theory — the term was actually coined by a Frenchman — is the idea that there's a plot, a plan, it's sometimes put at the hands of Jews, sometimes globalists, to replace white populations across the Western world with immigrants and refugees. And this idea has been around now for, I don't know, probably 25 years. It's also called at times "white genocide," and it started in white supremacist circles. The Identitarian movement was popularizing it, and Sellner in Europe, and it actually has inspired multiple terrorist attacks — at a synagogue in Halle, Germany; at a synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019 — and I'm telling you all of this because the far right has been pushing this great replacement idea, like it moved from neo-Nazis and white supremacists into far-right parties.
And remigration is the policy solution to the great replacement — even though it's a conspiracy theory, even though it's not real. This is the policy answer. So, when Sellner proposed this a couple years ago, what he was doing was saying, okay, we accept that the great replacement is happening, there are too many non-white people in these countries, so what we need to do is we need to forcibly remove them from those countries.
SADEGHI: Do they think that non-white people are getting together and planning this, or do they think this is something that has befallen them?
BEIRICH: So they don't believe non-white people are plotting. In fact, they, you know — these are white supremacists, they don't think non-white people are very smart. Generally, what they think is that Jews — this is the case of the guy who shot up the Pittsburgh synagogue, that Jews are plotting this — or, alternatively, they say globalists, people like George Soros, the Hungarian-born Jewish philanthropist, who now I think lives in the United States. They do believe there's a plot, and the reason we call the "great replacement" a conspiracy theory is because it's a conspiracy either put together by Jews, in their view, or by people like Soros and people on the left who have global power. So they really believe it's a plot, but it's not the immigrants and the migrants that are doing it, they're simply the tool for these people to undermine white power. That's their theory.
SADEGHI: And they feel that all Jews, or the euphemism "globalists," are trying to eliminate white people.
BEIRICH: Yeah, they believe that they're trying to undermine their power. I think that's sort of the first step, in other words: overwhelm them with a majority of non-white people. So they'll often point to the fact that the Census Bureau has said that, you know, sometime — maybe 2040s, 2050s — that whites will no longer be a majority in the United States, they will become a minority, and it'll be a country that's a population with a bunch of different kinds of minorities. And they look at that demographic data as the proof that this plan is happening, and yes, some of them believe that there is a Jewish conspiracy behind this.
One thing a lot of people don't know is that when the shooter entered the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, he wasn't actually going into the main sanctuary. He was trying to get at the offices of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. This is an organization that's been around years and years and years, helped relocate people prior to the Holocaust and after the Holocaust, out of Germany and Poland and areas like that. He wanted to stop that organization, whose shorthand is HIAS, and he viewed that as a Jewish plan; like there's the proof those Jews are bringing in non-whites into the United States, and they have to be stopped.
DAVIS: Now, we can see why a conspiracy theory so strongly rooted in antisemitism would be toxic in 2023 Germany, which is the year that Martin Sellner was revealed to have met with these AfD lawmakers. But what I'm wondering is why, since that secret meeting, has the AfD now kind of openly associated with Martin Sellner and not seem to have suffered such a great setback? Is it that they've kind of tapped into what I think is like Donald Trump's one weird trick for getting away with everything, which is learning that — if you just do it out in the open – there is no scandal for an investigative journalist to reveal?
BEIRICH: Well, that's probably true. I also think Donald Trump plays a bigger role in this than what you're indicating. You know, he tweeted during the campaign in 2024 "remigration." He personally popularized this term. There had been nobody in any far-right party that I know of in Europe or anywhere else who had picked up on Sellner's ideas, especially because it was so scandalous at the time, right? But he did, and therefore Trump popularized this idea, gave sanction to Sellner's idea, and made it okay for people like Alice Weidel, the head of AfD, to embrace the concept. And now we've got people from far-right political parties all over Europe, as well as the American government, openly endorsing the idea of remigration, even though it is rooted in white supremacy and hate. There's just no way around it.
Charles R. Davis
SADEGHI: And a number of these high-profile far-righters and extremists are not even white. What about this Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes? I mean, what? Can you explain this to us?
BEIRICH: Well, there are a handful of people like that. Also, I'd mention that one of the shooters of the Islamic Center in San Diego, from a couple of weeks ago, who was pushing the great replacement conspiracy theory and these ideas, was also non-white.
SADEGHI: He was Latino.
BEIRICH: Exactly. We've seen a handful of people like that who've bought into this. They usually, as was the case with the shooter in San Diego, try to self-identify as white or align themselves with white culture. I know this sounds bizarre, but that's the way they see it. There was another shooting in Allen, Texas, a couple years ago, by a Latino at a mall who was motivated by neo-Nazism, the great replacement. He wrote in a manifesto how he so much had wished he'd been born white, because being white is where the power is. So, there's some weird psychological stuff going on here.
DAVIS: And isn't there like some weird irony? This is what I kind of grapple with as I'm consuming, or at least going through, this far-right propaganda. Because it's all based on the idea that, like, white people, and particularly white men, are just naturally at the top of the hierarchy, that colonialism was a product of white people rightly demonstrating their cultural superiority, and that entitled them to the resources of the developing world, etc.
So, on the one hand they say white people are at the top of everything because we are just naturally better, that's just the way it is when you're smarter, stronger, faster, and then that is paired — like five seconds later — especially if you're in the Discord chat, like I looked into the Reconquista Discord chat, when I was researching this — that white supremacist, like chauvinist attitude is paired with antisemitic whining: that actually it's the Jews that run everything in the world, and you know what, like, it's not fair. They're somehow breaking the unspoken rules about global domination that is rightfully in the hands of white Western Europeans. I don't know if you could comment on that irony, if you've picked up on that.
BEIRICH: Yeah, there is an irony there, right? If white people are so superior, how can they be victims at the same time? Which is how they present themselves. And I think that what this taps into is the idea that there's these conspiratorial forces, right? If there weren't these malign conspiratorial forces, of course, you know, white people would be in charge of everything, because they are superior, they're smarter. They created Western civilization, they deserve to colonize, they created the greatest countries, the greatest art, the greatest literature, etc. So, there have to be nefarious forces that you're not aware of that are undermining this.
It's almost like there's a supernatural force undermining white people's control of places. They talk about other things too ... about the idea that white women aren't having enough babies. This is something that came up at the remigration summit in Porto this past weekend, so that that can be part of the plot as well. White women aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing, which is, you know, staying in the kitchen and having lots and lots of white babies to, you know, keep that demographic edge at the end of the day.
What these people can't handle is that what difference does it make what your population distribution is, right? We're all people. This isn't a plot, it's just natural births and population shifts, and for them that's just — that is intolerable. And they think they're victims in other ways, because they talk about things like, oh, only 8 percent of the world's population is white, so it must be that the Chinese and the Indians are intentionally swapping us out; there's just more conspiratorial kind of victim thought, and there is an irony here. If white people are so superior, why can't you do something about it? Which I guess is what Sellner thinks he's doing.
Charles R. Davis
SADEGHI: Can you explain to us the Trump phenomenon on this, because this is where it's gotten dangerous when you have the head of a government, a very powerful government, using these terms. You said that Trump tweeted ... the term "remigration." [But] he has a family that all of his children are married to Jewish people, many of them Orthodox Jewish. Is his family okay with this? Do they know he's doing this? Why is he doing this? Where did he learn that word? Tell me about Trump on this.
BEIRICH: Well, Trump has been pushing the great replacement conspiracy theory, going all the way back to his first time in office. I don't know how he can sort of reconcile the Jews in his family with pushing an idea that leads to slaughter at synagogues, but he does, and he doesn't seem to care. And he seems to want to motivate his base on the basis of immigration, it's sort of his biggest thing, right? Or it has been for a long time, and he has repeatedly done and said things that are in line with white supremacist terminology.
I mean, look, our entire refugee program in the United States only allows in white South Africans, for example. The use of white supremacist terms, I don't think bothers him at all. The Department of Homeland Security has also posted things like "remigration now," and our State Department has plans — they seem to be [trying] to create a Department of Remigration.
Any connection — saying this idea is from, you know, a former neo-Nazi? This idea is from a white supremacist? It doesn't seem to have any impact on Trump. He doesn't seem to care. I guess whatever riles up his base against immigrants is what he wants to see. It's a bit astounding to see the most powerful elected person in the world repeat a slogan coming from a former neo-Nazi, but that's what we've got going on, and ... I don't see Republicans getting up in Congress and denouncing Trump for using this language. The party doesn't turn against him.
It's shocking how extremism has been accepted by Trump and by a lot of people in the GOP. We posted at one point a list of GOP elected officials who were trading in the great replacement conspiracy theory, and it was, you know, dozens and dozens of them. So when it comes to bashing immigrants, they don't seem to care about these connections to real extreme — and frankly, in the case of remigration — ethnic cleansing ideas.
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SADEGHI: When you say ethnic cleansing, that's terrifying, and you've given us a little bit of a background now on this concept, which I don't think most of our listeners know of this remigration concept.
Where is this headed? Do you see this headed somewhere extremely dangerous? I mean, some people might say it's already there, where we are ethnically cleansing. And right now we're not, you know, killing "the other" or the unwanted, but we're removing them. Do you see a place, a time in America soon, where it's not just replacement? It's killing?
BEIRICH: Look, the mass deportations that have been enacted in the United States have already led to deaths. Yes, deaths in detention centers, the killing of, you know, Alex Pretti and Renee Good, the protesters in Minneapolis. It's not on the scale that a Sellner would hope, because I think what he's thinking about looks a little bit more like what happened in Germany in the Holocaust, like mass roundups and removals.
SADEGHI: Yes, that's what it sounds like.
BEIRICH: Yeah, sometimes they soft-pedal it, and they talk about, well, what we're going to do is enact policies that will lead to self deportation, which apparently is what this office of remigration at the State Department will do, like help people choose to remove themselves from your country. And I say softer version, but it's still the same sort of idea. I don't know how far this ends up going.
When Trump came into office, his support was quite high on his immigration policies, and now they have fallen and fallen and fallen as people watched all these terrible things happen. So, I don't think that the American public is on board with that kind of mass removal.
In Europe, the idea is mostly concentrated among far-right parties that do not have political power at this point in time. So, you know, that could change, right? AfD seems to be surging in the polls in Germany. If they were to take a majority, would they follow in the path of Trump and these mass deportations? I don't know. Maybe there are more sort of civil rights and human rights policies in Europe stopping that.
Here in the United States, the president has almost all the power in the world over immigration policy. That's not to say that people can't challenge things in the courts, and they have, but in Europe it might be a little bit trickier. That said, a lot of mainstream political parties in Europe have moved to the right on this issue, and the EU, even just, I think, passed some kind of an immigration pact that's more hardline. So even if you don't get Sellner's policies, thank God, you are seeing a hardening line against immigrants in a lot of places. So Sellner and his allies in these movements [are] moving politics to the right on immigration.
Charles R. Davis
DAVIS: Heidi, what do you think is actually driving this? Because I'm sitting here talking to you from Vienna, Austria, and I just read a headline about how new asylum admissions to Austria are now at like a 14 year low. And then you can also look at a news story and see the far right Freedom Party is scoring 38 percent in opinion polls, which is enough to beat every other party.
So it doesn't seem like it's actually tied to the number of immigrants coming into a country, and unlike the 1920s, 1930s, it's not tied to any great economic depression. So you don't really even have that materialist explanation for why people would like to unleash the ugliest version of themselves.
Is it social media? Is it the fact that you now have people like Elon Musk that are embracing this idea and have a whole social media platform to promote it on?
BEIRICH: Well, I think that's definitely a part of it. I mean, social media has unleashed, you know, heinous ideas, radicalized, you know, God knows how many people in ways that just couldn't — these things couldn't happen in the past, right? There was just no reach like that. So, I do think that's part of it.
It's, of course, a shame when prominent people like Trump, like Musk and others endorse these ideas, furthering them. But it's also been the case that the far right, when it comes to power, even if we're talking about in the 1930s, often does it on the back of scapegoating a population. And immigrants have become the scapegoat, right? You don't necessarily need to have a fully thought out policy agenda to address whatever you might want to address, you just bash immigrants, and that brings people to your side.
And it's a sad fact to say about humanity, but you know we've seen this over and over and over again, and not just in the European context, but in other countries, where political parties or leaders come to power on the back of demonizing various populations. For example, the former far-right president in Brazil, who's now in prison for attempting a coup, a January 6-like coup, he bashed the LGBTQ population and indigenous people, and that led to his rise to power. It seems to be endemic in far-right movements that they have to demonize marginalized populations to grow.
DAVIS: Is there at least any sort of glass-half-full interpretation of the fact that remigration has gone mainstream? Because, in years past, I know we on the liberal left would have this, like, very intense discussion about free speech, and whether it was proper to censor these far-right views, or if it was better just to debate them out in the open. And wherever we sided in that debate, we are now in a situation where it is out in the open. Is that something that we, who oppose this agenda, can use to our advantage?
BEIRICH: Well, I do think, at least in the case of the United States, actually in the case of Europe too, I mean the agenda itself — the actual mass deportation plans — did not go well, and did not sit well with the American public. There's still been a horrific amount of damage. I don't want to make light of that: families split apart; people dying; people becoming critically ill; a lot of bad stuff to get to a point where the public's like, "Whoa, whoa, wait, wait a minute." However, that is where we're at.
And in Europe, what's interesting is that the dislike of Trump is actually so massive that some far-right parties are trying to distance themselves. I think I saw it might have been Politico that did a poll that, like, only 8% of Germans think Trump is an ally, so he may be hurting the far right with his actions, and that's of course about the tariffs and all these other things he's done right that have been disruptive in other places, or the Iran war and gas prices. But regardless, it may dampen the enthusiasm for far-right political parties in Europe. We'll just have to wait and see, but it is instructive that just a few years ago many countries in Europe didn't have far-right political parties, and now they do.
SADEGHI: But the thing is, in Europe, the problem it seems to me they have with Trump is that he isn't, as you mentioned earlier, soft pedaling — he isn't promoting a more moderate face of this. He's not being polite about it. He's not being civilized. Like maybe they don't have a problem with remigration. They just don't like the way Trump is saying it.
BEIRICH: That's probably true, and they don't like what they're seeing from Trump on a bunch of fronts. I just think he's giving far-right politics a bad name in Europe because it's harming Europeans and it's kind of ugly, right? And they didn't really have to face what it really looked like when someone had the power to do all these things; what that would actually be, as opposed to someone just proposing them. We'll have to see.
Charles R. Davis
DAVIS: As I alluded to in one of my earlier questions, Heidi, here in Austria, you know, we have a coalition government between the left and the right that has also embraced some anti-immigrant policies in an attempt to neuter the far right. And as I mentioned with the polling data, that does not seem to be working. So, I'm wondering, what advice you would give to public figures, political leaders who do not support the remigration agenda, but seem to feel — at least their consultants are telling them — that they need to cede ground on this whole immigration thing. What do you think they should be doing?
Because it seems to me that that is ceding ground, actually, to the far right and saying "they're kind of right about the problem, but their actual, specific policies aren't right," which doesn't seem super persuasive to your median voter. I guess, speaking for myself, I would like to see a forceful defense of immigration and the value it brings to societies, but I don't know if I'm naive in thinking that that would actually be politically beneficial.
BEIRICH: Well, you know, there's been a lot of research on this, and what it generally finds is that when you move to the right on immigration, you think you're going to capture far-right voters, right — like you're talking about in Austria, bring them to the coalition — but what actually happens is they say, "Well, why, if you're just kind of milquetoasty on anti-immigrant stuff, but you're saying immigration is a problem, why would I vote for you? I'll vote for the far right." In other words, it empowers the far right, it's a bad strategy.
That said, I do think defenses of immigration and facts around immigration would make a difference if someone was willing to stand up for it. They don't seem to be; what you're seeing in Austria seems to be happening in quite a few places, actually. But it's not going to harm the far right.
There is, however, something else I think we all need to just acknowledge and face, which is the old politics of a left and a right are dead. What we tend to have now are political systems that have like a center, which can be a mix of like social democrats and Christian democrats in the European space, and then a far right. I think Hungary is instructive. The recent elections that ousted their far-right leader, Viktor Orbán, who was also rabidly anti-immigrant, it was a party that brought together all those different factions against the far right. So we live in a different political dynamic than we did, say, 20 years ago, and I just don't hear people acknowledging that reality, even here in the United States.
Poli-sci studies show that the Democratic Party has moved further and further to the center, while the Republican Party has moved so far to the right that it's more like the AfD in Germany or the FPÖ in Austria. So, what we have once again, is sort of a centrist conglomeration, and a far right, which makes the pandering on immigration by the center even more problematic, because it shows that the far right has an issue that they should, that people should vote for, and it doesn't help this problem. We need defenses of civil liberties and human rights and democracy coming from the center, and we have to understand that politics are sort of forever changed with this dynamic, and the defense has to be for the system against the far right, which is going to harm people, demonize people, and undermine democracy and human rights.
Charles R. Davis
SADEGHI: Heidi, as we close this important interview, I wonder if you could tell our listeners what they could do. What can the public do to stymie this movement, to stymie this rise of hate, to do anything at all?
BEIRICH: Yeah, I think there's a lot that people can do, especially in local communities, which is standing up to this demonization stuff here in the United States. That might mean people holding events that make a community welcoming; electing politicians who stand for welcoming policies; voting for candidates who believe that people shouldn't be demonized; letters to the editor; writing your representatives. All that applies, but most importantly: voting, because if we don't exercise power at the ballot box, then we're just giving an open pass.
I also think people should denounce the demonization, and they should also tell those tech companies to stop spreading antisemitism, anti-Muslim hatred, anti-immigrant hatred. One unfortunate thing, since Trump has come into office, is most of the big social media companies have just sort of abandoned content moderation, so the ideas are spreading even further, and you know, saying "I'm against that" is really important. We've got to stand up for democracy and civil rights, or we're going to lose them.
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