Ibram X. Kendi with Angela Rye — The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age
National Book Award winner Ibram X. Kendi traces how 'great replacement theory' evolved from fringe ideology to global political dominance, in conversation with Angela Rye.
Why we picked this
Kendi's project here is historical rather than polemical — tracing a specific ideology's mutation across continents and decades — and that analytical distance is what makes this evening worth attending over a standard political commentary event.
Ibram X. Kendi’s new work asks a question that cuts beneath current political noise: where exactly did the ideas now driving authoritarian movements come from, and how did they travel from the margins to the mainstream? The historian and MacArthur Fellow who wrote Stamped from the Beginning (National Book Award) and How to Be an Antiracist brings the same archival rigor to tracing “great replacement theory” — its origins, its mutations across different national contexts, and its consolidation into the dominant global political narrative of this era. The evening is structured as a conversation with Angela Rye, lawyer, host, and social justice advocate who co-hosts Native Land Pod and founded the 200-organization coalition State of the People.
The format — two intellectuals in dialogue rather than a straight lecture — means the evening goes where the questions take it. Rye is not a sympathetic interviewer so much as a demanding one, and their exchange is likely to push into the uncomfortable territory that Kendi’s scholarship occupies: how do ideas that seem obviously wrong gain institutional power, and what does safeguarding democracy actually require once that’s happened?
Tickets include a copy of Kendi’s book, and the event at Town Hall Seattle’s Great Hall is presented under the Oculus Series, which brings major intellectual figures to Seattle for substantive evenings rather than celebrity appearances.