Ibram X. Kendi has been relatively quiet since 2025, when his Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University closed its doors. The center, which raised over $50 million in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, was founded in order to “transform how racial research is done.”

If Kendi transformed “racial research” at all, then he transformed it from an already troubled enterprise into a complete dumpster fire. After a wave of layoffs in 2023, ex-employees began complaining of a “workplace culture that included fear of retaliation and discrimination.” The ultimate indictment of the center, however, was its lack of output. Given three years, several dozen staff members, and the budget of a midsize Hollywood action film, Kendi’s research center managed to produce just two research papers before collapsing under the weight of its own pointlessness.

One could have predicted this outcome based upon the dubious quality of Kendi’s previous work—in particular his best-selling 2019 book How to Be an Antiracist. In that book, Kendi argued that there is no such thing as a race-neutral public policy. “Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity,” he proclaimed. Even a policy as mundane as the capital gains tax, Kendi argued, must be either racist or anti-racist. The book was a bestseller.

Kendi’s new book, Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age, is equally nuanced. But without the atmosphere of 2020’s racial reckoning to buoy the book, it appears to be falling flat. Even the left-leaning Guardian, which reviewed his last book positively, described Chain of Ideas as “Neither artful in prose nor powerful in statement.”

Ostensibly, Chain of Ideas takes aim at the “Great Replacement Theory” (GRT from here on out)—the far-right conspiracy theory that powerful (and often Jewish) elites are engineering mass immigration in order to replace white majorities with left-wing voters of color. This “theory,” if it even merits the word, can be traced back to a 2011 book by the French novelist Renaud Camus called Le Grand Remplacement; his way of framing mass migration—as a “replacement” of one people by another, or even “genocide by substitution”—has grown in popularity on the political right in the years since...