From Pittsburgh to Christchurch, and now El Paso, white men accused of carrying out deadly mass shootings have cited the same paranoid fear: the extinction of the white race.

The threat of the “great replacement,” or the idea that white people will be replaced by people of color, was cited directly in the four-page screed written by the man arrested in the killing of 22 people in El Paso over the weekend.

The phrase was coined in 2012 by the French author Renaud Camus, whose writing on white genocide echoes at least a century of white supremacist views. But some experts now fear the doctrine of replacement is being embraced more readily by lone wolf white terrorists and even some politicians, producing a particularly dangerous climate.

“These series of shootings all have an element of fear and anxiety created by this concept of being replaced,” said Oren Segal, the director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. “When you think your race is going to go extinct, you will do anything to protect that.”