Donald Trump and Wajahat Ali
I.
President Donald Trump's administration has warned in a new report that, due to falling birthrates and mass (largely uncontrolled) migration from the Third World, Europe faces civilisational erasure ... [1]
It's a catchy phrase, but is this stark warning something that European leaders should take seriously?
Most don't seem to think so - even if the native peoples of Europe are increasingly concerned with issues around changing demographics and cultural identity (thus the emergence of populist parties such as the AfD in Germany and Reform in the UK).
II.
Interestingly, these remarks from the Trump administration are echoed (and inadvertently lent weight) by those of Wajahat Ali, an American Muslim commentator and provocateur.
Speaking on The Left Hook - his Substack, which he describes as "a thoroughly opinionated and biased intellectual playground for people who enjoy political, cultural, and religious hot takes without corporate censorship and nonsense centrism" [2] - Ali had this to say to his white viewers:
"You have lost. You lost. The mistake that you made is, you let us in in the first place.
See, that's the thing with brown people - and I'm going to say this as a brown person - there's a lot of us. Like a lot. There's like 1.2 billion in India. There's more than 200 million in Pakistan, there's like 170 million in Bangladesh. Those are just the people there. I'm not even talking about the folks who are expats or immigrants. There's a bunch of us and we breed. We're a breeding people.
And the problem is you let us in [...] and once you let one of us in, you know what happens with brown folks? Our grandmother comes, our grandfather comes, our uncle comes, our aunt comes, our cousin comes, our second cousin comes, our third cousin comes, then we have kids, a bunch of kids [...]
So, we're embedded. We are everywhere." [3]
III.
Obviously, this is designed to be inflammatory - cheap rage bait, as Matt Walsh describes it. And one assumes it's also intended to be satirical; mocking the kind of rhetoric (and hate speech) used by those on the racist far-right whom Ali despises.
The problem, however, is it's also accurate; there are a lot of brown-skinned people in the world and they do tend to have larger families than white westerners. And they are, as Ali says, embedded within European and American society in a way that they weren't fifty years ago.
Thus, as I indicate above, Ali's short video gives credence to narratives concerning the Great Replacement [4] and civilisational erasure spun by white nationalists. In other words, the satire not only fails to be recognised as humour, but it backfires on the satirist and works in favour of the lampooned group by promoting their ideas to a wider audience whilst reinforcing them among their existing followers.
It thus appears that Ali has never heard of Poe's Law, which informs us that without a clear indicator of the author's intent it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so
obviously exaggerated that someone somewhere won't mistake it for a sincere expression of those views [5].
Note
[1] See the article by Brandon Livesay discussing the report on the BBC News website (5 Dec 2025): click here.
[2] Wajahat Ali, writing on the About page of his Substack 'The Left Hook': click here.
[3] The full rant (just under a minute-and-a-half in length), from which I've extracted these lines, can be found on Rumble: click here.
[4] Replacement theory has its origins in the work of French author Renaud Camus, who argues that - with the complicity of governments and global elites - the native populations of Europe are being replaced by non-white peoples, particularly from Muslim-majority countries.
Although such claims have repeatedly been dismissed by scholars and those in the mainstream media, the idea of a Great Replacement continues to circulate in both European and American far-right circles. Readers who wish to know more, may like to begin with Camus's Le Grand Remplacement (2011). An English edition, translated by the author, was published in 2024 as The Great Replacement: Introduction to Global Replacism.
[5] Poe's Law was named after Nathan Poe who came up with the idea in 2005, or rather nicely summarised what others had already noted about the need to explicitly indicate sarcasm, irony, or parody when writing online or texting on social media; that winking smiley is crucial if you don't want an attempt at trolling to be taken seriously.
