But for budding racist influencers, perhaps the best marketing feature of “the Great Replacement” is that it offered fantastic possibilities in search results. On Google and YouTube, there are not a lot of sites and videos tied to that keyword — and, in particular, there are not that many sources countering their arguments.

Which brings us to why I’m writing to debunk the theory now: when a man killed 50 people in a mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, last week, he called his loopy manifesto “The Great Replacement.”

“The attacker was structuring his manifesto not only to speak to audiences but to algorithms,” said Joan Donovan, director of the Technology and Social Change Research Project at Harvard. “‘The Great Replacement’ is a ‘data void,’ in the sense that it would be very easy to capture that space on the front page of Google.”

Which is just what happened. After the shooting, Google searches for “great replacement” spiked. And although Google returns several skeptical articles and videos for the term, it also gives a lot of pro-conspiracy content — including, for much of the weekend, the shooter’s manifesto on the first page of search results.

Consider this column, then, an attempt to fill that data void. Research shows that when you present white people with facts that counter the white-extinction theory, they become less alarmed and anxious about demographic change.

So, to anyone who got to this piece after searching “great replacement,” here are some facts:

Nobody really knows if whites will become a minority in the United States.

Racial categories are blurry, and there’s a big debate among demographers about how one of the fastest-growing racial groups — people of mixed-race who have one white parent — will identify in the future. It could be that they will not be thought of as “white.” It could also be that they will marry white people, have mostly white children, and generally become “absorbed” into mainstream white culture, which is what has happened with previous generations of immigrants who were not considered white (like Eastern and Southern Europeans). Under the most inclusive definitions of whiteness, America could remain a white-majority society indefinitely.

White Americans are not facing a social and economic dead end.

It’s true that there are some pernicious social problems affecting white Americans, among them a rise in death rates from drug overdoses and suicide, known as “deaths of despair.”