camp of the saints

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RWW

11/05/2025

Kyle Mantyla

Heidi St. John is devastated by the Democrat's sweeping wins in the off-year elections: "This is the fruit of our broken education system, and a nation that has rejected the roots of its Christian faith. Our founding fathers are turning in their graves!"

Shane Vaughn is aghast that Zohran Mamdani was electedmayor of New York City: "Make no mistake, folks — this is not politics. This is prophecy. This is a harbinger — the torch of Liberty trembling in her own hand."

Rick Joyner warns that "America is in even more jeopardy than almost anyone thought. The Marxist 100 Year Plan has been at work for 95 years now with relentless devotion. They think they have won, and the next 5 years will likely determine if America remains free, or succumbs to the worst form of tyranny the world has ever known, or fight to eliminate the Marxist threat to our land."

William Wolfe relentlessly blames the election results on immigration, urging people to read the anti-immigrant novel "The Camp of the Saints."

Finally, Joel Webbon blames the election results on allowing women to vote: "You can save your country or you can allow women to vote. But you cannot do both."

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/11/postliberalism/

salon kat j

...For Hazony, the primary issue was about how conservatives understand China, the rising superpower that NatCons see as America's No. 1 rival. Their conference had banned all speakers who are "pro-Xi, pro-Putin, racists or antisemites," although that standard seems malleable at times. (As Political Research Associates' Ben Lorber reported, this year's NatCon included a meditation on the viciously xenophobic French novel "Camp of the Saints," approving mention of antisemitic Action Française leader Charles Maurras and an address by a former Trump speechwriter fired for alleged ties to white nationalists.) But some integralists, Hazony charged, had "always had a soft spot for dictatorship, for imperialism and for China," and in recent months that had become impossible to ignore, as members of the movement wrote articles praising China's government or culture.

Then there was Compact Magazine, the hybrid "radical American journal" Ahmari co-founded last March with fellow Catholic Matthew Schmitz and Marxist populist Edwin Aponte. Its professed agenda was to wage "a two-front war on the left and the right" and promote "a strong social-democratic state that defends community — local and national, familial and religious — against a libertine left and a libertarian right."

Although Compact has declined to specify who funds the magazine, a source familiar with its operations told Salon that it was launched with significant support from right-wing tech billionaire Peter Thiel — who has funded numerous other "new right" projects, from NatCon conferences to the political campaigns of J.D. Vance, Blake Masters and Josh Hawley — and Claremont Institute chair Tom Klingenstein (another top NatCon donor). Klingenstein did not respond to requests for comment. A source close to Thiel denied that Thiel has directly funded Compact, but couldn't rule out the possibility that an entity Thiel funds has in turn donated to the magazine. In a statement, Ahmari said, "Compact is an independent, for-profit publication supported by our subscribers. A group of investors helped us jump-start it. We respect their privacy and decline to name them."

Both Thiel and Klingenstein spoke at NatCon this year, and a handful of other NatCon speakers attended the integralist conference too. But on the whole, Hazony said, Compact was a bridge too far for most NatCons. While many in the movement were open to "rethinking the commitment to the free market as an absolute principle," and might even support targeted business regulations, he said, there was "no appetite, no capacity among nationalist conservatives to accept the ideal of social democracy as an alternative to the market mechanism."

Integralists had their own complaints. Some also involved foreign policy questions, like whether NatCons' enthusiastic defense of Ukraine amounted to a creeping neoconservative revival, or whether their strident hostility to China reflected warmed-over Cold War politics. But their main concern was more fundamental: NatCons, they charged, were abandoning the populist promise of Trumpism for a seat at the establishment table.

To be sure, NatCon 3 featured critiques of big business, but, with limited exceptions, most amounted to dragging "woke corporations." Ron DeSantis (introduced in Miami as "the future president") spoke dutifully about how free enterprise should be seen as a tool to help "our own people" rather than an end in itself. But his real firepower was saved for war stories: his battle with Disney over Florida's "Don't Say Gay" law, his resolution banning state pension funds from weighing environmental or social justice concerns in investment decisions, a promised law to help Floridians sue tech companies that commit "viewpoint discrimination."

Other speakers called forblacklisting banks that disinvest in fossil fuels; seizing universities' endowments; and making it illegal for employers to ask if applicants attended college, in order to disincentivize young people from entering the "inherently liberalizing environment" of higher education. (In a more recent example, after contrarian billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter and numerous companies stopped advertising on the platform, Republicans suggested that congressional hearings into "leftist corporate extortion" might be in order.)...

from Breivik:

In 2003, Jensen returned to Norway, where he attempted to make a name for himself as a public intellectual. At first, he was hostile to feminism, accusing feminists of destroying Norwegian manhood. But the focus of his concerns soon switched to Islam. He started writing under the pseudonym “Norwegian Kafir” on an American blog calledLittle Green Footballs, which loudly and fervently supported the invasion of Iraq. From then on, his writing appeared in English, on American-hosted blogs. There, he hammered into shape the narrative of elites, specially identified with the EU, who are destroying and betraying Europe by the deliberate encouragement of mass immigration.

At this point in time, the Eurabian conspiracy appealed largely to those who had long perceived a conflict between Islam and the Judeo-Christian west – with Israel as a beleaguered and persecuted outpost of western values. These people, largely on the American right, were among the earliest exponents of Eurabia – but as they never ceased to complain, theirs was not an attitude very widely shared in Europe. What would soon supply the emotional force of the fantasy was another set of ideas about global migration, less conspiratorial in their essence, but much more widely accepted among generally apolitical Europeans. These, also, originated in France, where they were known as the“great replacement”.

The idea of the great replacement had its origin in a blatantly racist French novel of the 1970s, The Camp of the Saints, in which France is overthrown by an unarmed invasion of starving, sex-crazed Indian refugees when the French army is not prepared to fire on them. Themoral of the book is that western civilisation can only be saved by a willingness to slaughter poor brown people. Steve Bannon, among the founders of the rightwing news site Breitbart and a former adviser to President Trump, has referred to it repeatedly.

Throughout the 80s and 90s, the naked racism of The Camp of the Saints kept it largely out of public debate. But the rise of Islam as a global force allowed the question to be recast. If the threatening masses were defined by religion rather than by skin colour, then hating them could be presented as an intellectual commitment rather than a racist one.

And the paranoid did have a large, shadowy half-truth to fall back on. The demographic shrinkagefacing Europe is real and undeniable, and it was obvious in the early years of this century, too. So are the much greater birth rates in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia. In 2002, Russia and Pakistan both had populations of about 145 million; by 2017, Russia’s population was 144 million while Pakistan’s was 200 million.

The next stage in the development of a xenophobic populist worldview was for the two narratives to merge, so that Islam and Muslims became both a conspiracy and a demographic threat.

The 9/11 attacks changed attitudes to Islam in much of Europe and the US. Israel and the US now shared a sense of being under attack from Muslims. Without 9/11, Littman would have remained an obscure crank, and Jensen more obscure still. But the assault on the twin towers unleashed an immense backlash of wounded American pride and nationalism that led to the devastation of two whole countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, and countless deaths. It also fuelled a demand for explanations. Theories about the unique malevolence and danger of Islam answered a popular hunger. George W Bush declared at the time that the US had no quarrel with Islam, but many of his compatriots disagreed.

an 1220

Age of Trump and its cruelty were not made possible by shades or ghosts or nameless, anonymous bureaucrats and followers. These were people who made the kinds of choices Hannah Arendt warned us about: "The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil."

In total, the Age of Trump was made possible and given life by people, real human beings who should be held accountable to the fullest extent possible, by the law as well as the judgments of history and people of conscience.

The Age of Trump and its cruelty were not made possible by shades or ghosts or nameless, anonymous bureaucrats and followers. These were people who made the kinds of choices Hannah Arendt warned us about: "The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil."

Miller has repeatedly taken Trump's worst instincts and made them worse yet.Examples include the child separation policy, mass detention centers along the border and a general policy of cruelty toward nonwhite migrants and refugees, sabotaging pandemic relief efforts, and an overarching strategy of mainstreaming white supremacy into public policy and attempting to overturn America's multiracial democracy.

In this conversation, Guerrero explains how Miller was radicalized as a teenager into the ideology of white supremacy and other forms of right-wing extremism. Guerrero also details how the right-wing political machine mentored and elevated Miller, first as a rising star in high school and college and then all the way to the Trump White House. She also offers an explanation of Miller's profoundly damaged sense of masculinity, which manifests itself through an obsession with gangster movies and a ghoulish fixation on violence. This is a trait Miller shares with Trump, and one that helped to bond the two closely together in their shared political project.

Ultimately, "Hatemonger" is a reminder that human monsters must be created. They are not born that way.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Why has there been such denial among the mainstream news media about the white supremacists inside the Trump administration? Most notably, of course, I mean Stephen Miller. This has continued throughout Trump's four years as president.

Stephen Miller does a really good job of laundering white supremacist ideas through the language of "heritage" and "economics" and "national security." People who have racist inclinations do not like to perceive themselves as racist. Even those people who are racist and creating those public policies can continue to entertain such a fantasy.

Once you start to familiarize yourself with white nationalism and its literature, those concepts are being repeated almost verbatim by the likes of Stephen Miller and others in the Trump administration, as well as their spokespeople and media. The policies of the Trump administration were drawn specifically from a blueprint created by think tanks supported by John Tanton, the eugenicist who believed in population control for nonwhite people. He also believed in race-based pseudoscience and the genetic superiority of whites.

Part of the denial about that reality is a function of systemic issues, such as a lack of diversity in newsrooms and publishing. There are white managers in those spaces who are really reining in their reporters, telling them to not use terms like "racist" or "xenophobe" when describing people like Donald Trump. There is the narrative that such language should not be used to describe Trump, because we "don't know what is in his heart." I did not write my new book "Hatemonger" to tell the public what is in Stephen Miller's heart. What I can tell you is that Stephen Miller is fluent in the language of hatred. He speaks the language of people who hate. I cannot necessarily tell you if there is hate in his heart. Stephen Miller is a hatemonger. He has been engaging in hate-mongering in a deliberate way. He does this through cruel policies, such as systematically separating children from their parents, basically obliterating the asylum system at the U.S.-Mexico border and slashing refugee admissions to historic lows.

What is Stephen Miller an example of?

He is a case study in indoctrination and radicalization.Stephen Miller is the story of what happens when a person is exposed to an extremist ideology during a vulnerable and difficult time in their life. Such a person then ends up becoming consumed by extremism. And then, in the case of Stephen Miller, said person goes on to become the most powerful adviser in the White House.

Stephen Miller was going through a tough time as a teenager. His father is a real estate investor, like Donald Trump, and he was tangled up in legal disputes and bankruptcies related to his business. Miller's father ended up losing a lot of money and the family had to move to a slightly smaller house in a less affluent, less white neighborhood. My conversations with people who knew Miller at the time, people in his family, revealed that Stephen Miller's life was unraveling in a small way, to the extent that he lost his place in line as a rich white male. He felt entitled to that privilege. He was looking for somebody to blame.

At the time there was extreme anti-immigrant hostility in California. The Republican governor, Pete Wilson, was talking about a migrant "invasion" at the border and blaming it for everything that was going wrong in the state. Stephen Miller is really a product of that political and social moment. Miller internalized a lot of that racist rhetoric andended up meeting some very far-right figures, one of whom was David Horowitz.He introduced Stephen Miller, during this vulnerable time in his life, to the idea that values such as equality and freedom, and other parts of America's civic religion and national mythos, are entirely thanks to white men.

Of course, that is obviously and completely ahistorical. Stephen Miller is a Jewish American. He is the descendant of refugees from Europe. But Miller really saw himself as a white man and began to rally around this idea that America was in danger because of brown and Black people who were coming into the country. David Horowitz introduced a young Stephen Miller to the mission that he needed to save the United States from an existential threat, in the form of the Democratic Party and its alliances with people of color.

How did the right-wing political machine elevate Stephen Miller?

David Horowitz was worried that Stephen Miller was not going to get into an elite universitybecause he was so unpopular in high school and constantly attacked students of color, as well as initiatives to remedy the negative impact of racial inequality.

Horowitz allowed Miller to publish self-promotional articles on his website about all the changes that he had allegedly brought to his high school. Another leading right-wing figure, Larry Elder, allowed Miller to come onto his radio program regularly, when he was a teenager, to complain about his high school.

At Duke University, he continued to use David Horowitz's ideas to get a bigger and bigger platform. For example, Miller was given a column at the Duke newspaper by leveraging the language of "diversity." That tactic is something that Horowitz taught him: Use the language of the civil rights movement against it. He was consistently drawn to racial controversies while at Duke. Miller would get national media exposure from that. But Miller graduated without a job. He was again a fringe figure.

Horowitz comes to Stephen Miller's rescue and gets him his first job, with Rep. Michele Bachmann, the Tea Party congresswoman. And then from there he gets Miller a job with Rep. John Shadegg from Arizona, and finally with Sen. Jeff Sessions from Alabama. Over time Stephen Miller became extremely well connected in the far-right movement, and that helped him get a job working for Donald Trump.

What does Stephen Miller want?

There are two answers to that question.

One of them is very much focused on immigration. He was indoctrinated into the belief that too much immigration from brown and Black countries is detrimental to the United States. What Miller wants is to attack immigration from those countries through whatever means available. That could be through reducing the actual number of people allowed to come to America from those countries or implementing cruel policies in order to deter or frighten nonwhite people from coming at all.

Secondly, and this is why the Stephen Miller story is so important regardless of whether one cares about immigration or not, he is responsible for Donald Trump's most polarizing rhetoric. Miller is also responsible for why Trump was so combative in general. Stephen Miller is truly a master at pitting groups against one another by using wedge issues.

He understands that when you get people fighting with each other, whether it's based on their skin color or their political affiliation or whether they want to wear a mask during the coronavirus crisis, it creates media attention.

Both Miller and Trump believe that any media attention is good media attention, regardless of whether it is negative or positive. Those distractions also allowed Miller and Trump and the administration to push through their agenda. For example, the disastrous response to the coronavirus public health crisis. Instead of focusing on the distribution of masks and medical equipment, Trump and Miller divided the American people by closing the door to legal immigration and denying green cards.

For Stephen Miller, what does it mean to be "white"? Jewish people were not necessarily considered "white" in America until the 1950s or 1960s. Miller has taken that to the most grotesque extreme by becoming a white supremacist.

I believe that Miller would avoid the question. He tries to avoid the topic of race and skin color because he has been taught to launder white supremacist ideas through the language of "heritage," "economics" and "national security," as a way of making hate more palatable.

I believe that an honest answer to that question from Stephen Miller would be that whiteness to him is associated with positive values and ideals. Stephen Miller has been brainwashed to perceive people who are not white as being something evil and beastly. Stephen Miller's reading preferences are very powerful evidence of his beliefs.

Miller has endorsed the**explicitly white supremacist novel "The Camp of the Saints."**

In 2015, through his connections at Breitbart, he urged staff there to write articles showing parallels between that book and real life. "Camp of the Saints" is about the destruction of the "white world" by this horde of brown refugees who are described as animals and beasts and monsters. The book explicitly promotes hatred and violence against brown and Black people by white people as a way of ensuring the latter's survival. "The Camp of the Saints" is a book about the "white genocide" conspiracy theory, the same conspiracy theory that white terrorists have used to justify their acts of violence. We saw this in the horrible massacre in El Paso.

From a very young age, Stephen Miller would write things such as, "I'm Jewish, but Jewish people are a minority and so even though Jewish holidays are important to me, American holidays are much more important to me." Stephen Miller was very obsessed with the idea of being perceived as American. And for him to be American was associated with whiteness and the white male heroes he held dear, such as John Wayne. The types of movies and the types of people that Stephen Miller idolized were consistently associated with what he understood whiteness to be. To Miller, whiteness is associated with positive ideals. Miller is also obsessed with mobsters and organized crime and the idea that there is no rule of law apart from "might makes right." It all has to do with power for Stephen Miller.

Stephen Miller's obsession with organized crime figures suggests that he is a fragile and weak man who suffered some type of trauma or other harm to his sense of manhood. He is a remarkably dangerous but cartoon-like figure, an adult man who dresses up like a mafioso from the movies.

I spoke at length to one of his longest and closest friends who told me about how, as a child and then well into his 30s, Stephen Miller was obsessed with mobsters. One of his favorite movies was "Casino" with Robert De Niro.

Stephen Miller would go so far as dress up as De Niro's mobster character. Miller would actually go to Las Vegas dressed that way to celebrate his birthday and on vacations with friends and family. Dressing up like a mobster was not something he just did as a child. Stephen Miller actually incorporates the facial tics and hand gestures of the mafia figures he admires.

When Miller was in high school, he disavowed one of his closest friends because he was Hispanic. That signals to the type of man that he would later become.....

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/scholar-explains-how-the-conservative-movement-transmits-sanitized-versions-of-white-supremacist-ideology/

paul r salon

As the longest sustained period of racial justice protests in American history segues into the heat of election season, dark shadows have appeared, from the vigilante _{killing of protesters}_ in Kenosha, Wisconsin — and _{widespread conservative defenses}_ of the teenage accused murderer — to ludicrous _{charges against protesters, including "terrorism,"}_ to the Trump administration's _{crackdown on federal antiracism training}_, calling it "anti-American," and Attorney General Bill Barr's call for _{protesters to be charged with sedition}_.

So much for the notions that Donald Trump has no ideology, or, for that matter, that getting rid of him will make America great again. In July of 2016, I wrote about _{why such views were myopic}_: "Trump advances core paleoconservative positions," researcher Bruce Wilson told me, including "rebuilding infrastructure, protective tariffs, securing borders and stopping immigration, neutralizing designated internal enemies and isolationism."

Trump's record as president has been surprisingly consistent for such an erratic figure, with his purely rhetorical support for infrastructure as the most notable exception. And therein lies a key to the current moment:With infrastructure removed from the equation — the most broadly popular position Trump's ever embraced — the remaining white nationalism stands out in stark relief, highlighted in the frenzied push toward violent confrontation around the election, and beyond.

Dr. James Scaminaci III has just published a report about the long historical genesis of this recent push for Political Research Associates, "_{Battle With Bullets: Advancing a Vision of Civil War}_." Scaminaci has a PhD in sociology from Stanford and has worked as a civilian intelligence analyst with expertise on the former Soviet Union, the former Yugoslavia, and organized crime. So the spread of social chaos, internecine violence and associated enabling ideologies is a subject he's familiar with.

Scaminaci traces the roots of culture-war and race-war narratives as far back as the Haitian revolution of the early 19th century. He observes that Steve Bannon nurtured those carefully at Breitbart News and they have played a key role in radicalizing Trump's base over the past five years, to the point where some of his supporters are visibly preparing themselves for violence. Some parts of this story have been relatively well covered, but Scaminaci provides a much more integrated and historically extensive account of how we reached our present state. I reached out to him recently for an interview by email to discuss some of his key insights and how they provide us with a much clearer picture of the forces pushing America toward civil war. The following has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

In your article, you write: "Over the last several years, a narrative around the threat of civil war — and more specifically, a racial civil war — has been growing on the Right." You observe that this comes in different versions and has deep historical roots, dating back to the colonial era. Before getting into the details, why is it important to recognize this history and learn about it?

I wanted to convey that what we are seeing now on the right wing has a long history, a history that is either overlooked or ignored. Jill Lepore and other scholars looking at the right have noted that modern day "patriots" cast themselves as lineal descendants of the founding fathers and the American Revolution — that they are revolutionaries against the existing "tyrannical" federal government. But that history is drenched in violence and blood against Black and indigenous peoples. That context cannot be omitted. And the idea that whites are under existential threat from Black folks also needs to be put into historical context.

Second, the right-wing idea that the federal government is "tyrannical" is largely the product of white supremacist politicians, both Republican and Democratic, and intellectuals like William F. Buckley. This was the idea that post-World War II federal support for civil rights was federal overreach, was unconstitutional, and that it upset allegedly harmonious race relations in the South and eventually in the North.

According to white supremacists, the existential threat to white people in the Jim Crow South came from Black folks, whether children or adults, even touching anything that could be shared with whites. A schoolbook touched by a Black child became a Black textbook. Blacks and whites could not share drinking fountains or sit in the same seats on a bus.

What I wanted to portray in "Battle With Bullets" is that whites have long viewed any expression of nonviolent Black agency as an existential threat to themselves that required whites to resort to a brutal, genocidal racial civil war. One can understand the palpable fear of a slave revolt before 1861. But white supremacists have claimed that registering to vote, voting, moving into a white neighborhood after a history of redlining, moving into managerial or foreman positions in the workplace, or being cast as heroes or superheroes are existential threats.

You write that "The most dangerous versions of that [civil war] narrative come from leaders with paramilitary forces, while other appeals seem intended to generate a heightened sense of crisis." Can you give an example of each and then help us understand how the two are related?

Roger Stone is a political operative who has graduated from ratfucking political operations into calling for a civil war or violence or martial law. He is an ideological chaos agent. He can help set the narrative mood for the right wing. As Chip Berlet has written, elites know how to write the score for scripted violence. Somehow, the gunmen always know who to kill. In a similar category are the numerous Christian right leaders who broadcast the same civil war message to their Christian nationalist supporters and followers. I also quoted [Dallas megachurch pastor] Robert Jeffress in the article.

David Neiwert owns the beat on tracking the transmission of fringe ideas to the conservative mainstream. Even a decade before Trump, the ideological lines were blurring.

In 2008,Michael Savage, a right-wing radio host, said, "[T]he white person is being erased from America's future. ... There is a racial element to the immigration invasion." Then Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly claimed, "So now, it's becoming a race war."The _{Center for American Progress}_ went on to note that O'Reilly claimed that immigration reformers "hate America ... because it's run primarily by white, Christian men" and were seeking "to change the complexion...of America."

That is no different from Jean Raspail's theme in "The Camp of the Saints" or the narrative at The Social Contract, a white nationalist journal which published Raspail's novel. Or Glenn Beck on Fox News in February 2009, airing his _{racial civil war scenario}_ within one month of the first Black president taking office. Or a variety of Christian Right leaders during the Obama years calling for or suggesting a racial civil war is coming, including_{Tony Perkins}_, _{Larry Klayman}_ and _{Rick Joyner}_.

In 2006, the Southern Poverty Law Center noted the "_{symbiotic dance}_" between white supremacist groups and John Tanton's hardline anti-immigration movement, as well as the _{sharing of conspiracy narratives}_ between white supremacists and the "patriot" militia movement.

The conservative movement, both the political and religious wings, transmit sanitized versions of white supremacist ideology. The latter is premised on preparing for, if not instigating, a racial civil war in America.

John Jackson, a scholar who covers "scientific" racism, in a recent article titled, "_{Going Full Nazi}_,"asked the question: "[W]hat is the point of drawing a line between the 'mainstream' and the 'alt' right? Perhaps there is no useful distinction to be made." The angry white guys with guns are dangerous because they have weapons of war. But the dividing line between them and the "Fourth Generation Warfare" chaos agents creating a crisis of legitimacy is increasingly blurred.

You write that this rhetoric is rooted in a narrative adapted from the1973 French novel you just mentioned, "The Camp of the Saints." Can you explain its basic narrative?

The novel has seven key ideas that its critics and proponents have noted. One, mass migration is an invasion. Two, immigrants and refugees are invaders. Three, the invaders will eventually destroy Western culture and replace Western populations. Four, the West's political elites do not have the moral strength to defend the West. Five, the invaders must be physically removed and/or violently repelled. Six, there is a difference between the "real country" and "real citizens" and the "legal country" and "legal citizens." Seven, multiracial, multiethnic or multi-confessional societies are not only unstable but undesirable, and lead to the "balkanization" of societies — a view also imported from Serbian genocidal propaganda into the American and global right.

The main variations within this "Camp of the Saints" worldview are whether thepolitical elites lack moral strength to resist the invasions ("Great Replacement"), enact immoral policies which weaken Western societies to invasion ("demographic winter") or actively collaborate with the governments of the invading migrants to facilitate the invasion (as in John Tanton's network). The other variation distinguishes the neo-Nazis from all the other segments: whether or not the Jews are responsible for the destruction of their societies ("white genocide").

You note that for both France and the United States, the historical roots of this narrative go back to the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804. In the U.S. this has produced the "white genocide theory" and in France the "great replacement" theory. What distinguishes them and what draws them together?

The "white genocide" theory is premised on the fear of a Black slave revolt against the white slave-owning society. The "great replacement" theory is based on the fear of massive nonwhite immigration coupled with lower white birth rates leading to a "replacement" of the white population with a nonwhite population, and the transformation of the culture.

White supremacists use the more palatable, more sanitized "great replacement" theory interchangeably and conflate them. But they have different causal mechanisms.

On the other hand, the neo-Nazis and other proponents of the "white genocide" narrative consider any action by Black people to improve themselves, to gain access to privileged white spheres of social action or to more equitably redistribute power and status as an existential threat. "Great replacement" proponents do not share this outlook. Nor do "great replacement" proponents, in general, blame Jews for what they consider to be massive immigration.

You write, "It would be a mistake to see these various 'White Replacement' narratives as isolated from mainstream conservative thought in Europe or America." How has their influence spread through terrorist acts?

In the right-wing information sphere, ideas swirl around, mix, recombine and mutate over time to fit changing circumstances. Raspail's "Camp of the Saints" is foundational to this narrative or worldview. Raspail directly influenced the emergence and popularity of the "great replacement" theory, which is the catchall theory cited by white terrorists.

But Bat Ye'or's conception of the problem — that European elites conspire with Arab elites to produce both subservience to Islam and the "great replacement" — directly influenced the Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik, who was motivated to provoke a decades-long civil war to stop the formation of what Ye'or called "Eurabia." Breivik, as well as the "great replacement" narrative, have inspired numerous white terrorist acts around the globe.

Returning to the American context, How did Steve Bannon and Breitbart spread their influence?

Bannon'sprincipal contribution was to use Breitbart News to mix white supremacist ideology into the Republican Party and the Christian Right, and to heavily promote Raspail's "Camp of the Saints." In 2015 and 2016, Breitbart was the largest driver of ideological influence on the right.

How has this spread through the Trump administration?

The "Camp of the Saints" worldview largely shapes Stephen Miller's approach to immigration issues. Raspail's bottom line was that "the barbarians had to be repelled" either by violence or cruelty or both. Trump's _{immigration policy has been cruel}_, and as Adam Serwer noted, "_{cruelty is the point}_."

You also call attention to the Christian right's specific variant called "demographic winter," and argue that this has played a central role in evangelical support for Trump and his wall. What should people know about that?

The term "demographic winter" appears to have come from Don Feder, communications director of the World Congress of Families [a far-right, anti-LGBT Christian group]. He is the most prominent WCF official _{linked to the Tanton}_ _{anti-immigration network}_ and was apparently influenced by Bat Ye'or's "Eurabia" ideas, which circulate widely in conservative and right-wing Jewish circles.

In November 2005, Feder's view of Muslims in France reflected the worldview of Raspail and other "Eurabia" writers. Feder blamed the French riots of that year on "_{demographic winter}_," "lax immigration policies" and "brain-dead multiculturalism." Where "demographic winter" differs from Raspail, the "great replacement" and the Eurabia narratives is that liberal elite support for women's reproductive freedom and gay marriage are the principal culprits, in addition to massive Muslim immigration.

What resonates with conservative Christians and Christian nationalists is the idea that Christian (Western) civilization is under threat from nonwhite immigration, Christians are being persecuted in the West and around the world, and _{only a strong, authoritarian leader building a wall can save them}_.

Survey data supports my contention that white evangelical Protestants have a "Camp of the Saints" worldview: Seventy-eight percent favor strict limits on "legal immigration," 76% favor "building a [border] wall," 69% support a "temporary" Muslim ban and, 54% favor "preventing refugees from coming into the United States," according to October 2019 PRRI data.

The last section of your article deals with the emergence of the "Boogaloo boys"during the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests. How can we better understand them in terms of the longer history you've laid out? What lessons need to be learned?

The first lesson to be learned is that Donald Trump and _{local elected}_ _{Republican}_ _{officials}_, especially the so-called "constitutional sheriffs," have a much closer relationship to the armed wing of the Christian right. _{Bruce Wilson}_ and _{David Neiwert}_ have been _{tracking that}_.

The second lesson is that Trump is openly orchestrating armed demonstrations of force against Democratic Party governors and mayors.

The third lesson is that it is very easy to take off your camouflage fatigues and put on a Hawaiian shirt and pretend you just got concerned — but not before you spent around $2,000 on a rifle, tactical gear and ammunition. Journalists should stop being so credulous.

The last lesson is that claims that the "patriot" militia support Black Lives Matter protests are preposterous. The BLM protests are not simply about wrongful deaths at the hands of law enforcement — something a majority of whites can see and empathize with.

BLM is calling for reckoning, a "Third Reconstruction" of America — politically, economically and culturally — in the context of a deliberate confrontation with that racist, violent history. Even at the intellectual level of the "Never Trumpers," those potentially most sympathetic to BLM, there is a blindness or an inability to confront that larger American history and the smaller Republican Party history regarding racism. To think that "angry white men with guns" have thought it through is absurd.

What's the most important question I haven't asked? And what's the answer?

I do not know the answer to the question: "Why do scholars and journalists not consider the religious basis of America's long-term crisis of legitimacy in terms of politics and science?" But I would suggest that scholars and journalists have glommed on to the least important of Richard Hofstadter's explanations, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," and ignored his more trenchant analysis in "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life," which focuses on the epistemological disruption caused by fundamentalist Protestantism. They also ignore Marty Lipset's and Earl Raab's use of the concept of monism in describing the right wing in "The Politics of Unreason." Those old guys were on to something.

https://yyy.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/16/the-myth-of-eurabia-how-a-far-right-conspiracy-theory-went-mainstream

guk no lnx

The long read

The myth of Eurabia: how a far-right conspiracy theory went mainstream

Once an obscure idea confined to the darker corners of the internet, the anti-Islam ideology is now visible in the everyday politics of the west. How did this happen? By Andrew Brown

Fri 16 Aug 2019 01.00 EDT Last modified on Fri 16 Aug 2019 07.48 EDT

In July 2011, a quiet European capital was shaken by a terrorist car bomb, followed by confused reports suggesting many deaths. When the first news of the murders came through, one small group of online commentators reacted immediately, even though the media had cautiously declined to identify the attackers. They knew at once what had happened – and who was to blame.

“This was inevitable,” explained one of the anonymous commenters. And it was just the beginning: “Only a matter of time before other European nations get a taste of their multicultural tolerance that they’ve been cooking for decades.”

“Europe has been infested with venomous parasitic vermin,” explained another. “Anything and everything is fine as long as they rape the natives and destroy the country, which they do,” said a third.

As the news grew worse, the group became more joyful and confident. The car bomb had been followed by reports of a mass shooting at a nearby camp for teenagers. One commenter was “almost crying of happiness” to be proved right about the dangers of Islam. “The massacre at the children’s camp,” another noted, “is a sickening reminder of just how evil and satanic the cult of Islam is.”

A couple of hours after the first reports of the bomb explosion in central Oslo, a few doubts emerged to cloud the picture: “Because the targets in the shooting were all good little leftists, won’t the shooter be played up as a rightwing extremist, whatever his actual motives?” one person asked.

When information emerged to suggest that the attacker might be a “tall Nordic guy”, one of the commenters, who called himself “Fjordman”, realised the true nature of the disaster: “Judging from some of the recent information, it must be treated as a serious possibility that this is actually some Timothy McVeigh, not a Muslim. It is too early to tell. If that is indeed the case … it would practically destroy my country, and make the working conditions for people like myself incredibly difficult for a long time to come, I’m afraid.”

The truth turned out to be worse than Fjordman feared. The massacre in Oslo had not been committed by Muslims. It was the work of a white supremacist, Anders Behring Breivik, who had detonated a bomb in Oslo, killing eight people, and then shot dead 69 others, many of them teenagers, at a youth camp run by Norway’s Labour party. And, according to the manifesto he published online, Breivik had been directly inspired by Gates of Vienna – the blog where all these comments appeared on the day of his massacre. Breivik called the ideology that justified his murders “The Vienna school”, after the blog.

Fjordman, whose real name is Peder Are Nøstvold Jensen, now lives in obscurity in provincial Norway. He outed himself as the man behind the pseudonym to a Norwegian tabloid in the weeks following the massacre – butmanaged to avoid testifying at Breivik’s trial, thanks to the intervention of high-powered lawyers paid for by the Middle East Forum, a rightwing American group that would later sponsor Tommy Robinson– real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – in Britain. Nonetheless, Jensen’s influence on Breivik, however indirect, had been considerable.

Breivik borrowed part of the title of his manifesto, A European Declaration of Independence, from one of Fjordman’s blog posts, and many of the chapters in it were simply reprintings of Fjordman’s postings on various blogs, mostly Gates of Vienna, but also a far-right and passionately anti-EU site called the Brussels Journal.

Gates of Vienna was, and still is, run by Edward “Ned” May, an American computer programmer from Washington DC. It was among the first in a wave of blogs that urged the US to war after the shock of 9/11, and almost certainly the most fanatically anti-Muslim. It takes its name from the siege of Vienna in 1683, when an Ottoman Turkish army was defeated by a Polish-led one. Its essential thesis is that this was only one battle in a long war and that Europe and its civilisation are constantly threatened by a Muslim invasion.

On these varied online forums, the narrative was always the same: a liberal cabal was conspiring with hostile Muslim powers to hand over the decent working people to Islam. This was the animating myth of the bloggers, calling themselves the “counter-jihad”, who congregated at Gates of Vienna and other like-minded sites – and inspired both the violence of Breivik and the message of the racist far-right parties that have transformed European politics in the past decade.

But all of these later conspiracy theories took inspiration from a founding myth of contemporary Islamophobia: an invented plot, known as “Eurabia”, to destroy European civilisation. This is the doctrine that Jensen promoted and Breivik acted on, a hidden underpinning of a movement that has changed the world.

Once an ideology confined to the kookier corners of the internet, the idea of Eurabia is now visible in the everyday politics of the US, Australia and most of Europe: when Trump tweets about stabbings in London and falsely claims that crime in Germany is “way up”, he is invoking the Eurabian myth, taken as fact on Fox News, that European liberals have surrendered their cities to Muslim criminals.

The spread of the belief that elites conspired to push Muslim immigration on their native populations is also the story of a conspiracy theory that was nourished on some of the very first blogs and message boards, started appearing in mainstream discourse after 9/11, and thentook on a life of its own, even while the supposed facts behind it were exposed as ridiculous. It is a lesson in the danger of half-truths, which are not only more powerful than truths but often more powerful than lies.

Eurabia is a term coined in the 70s that was resurfaced byGisèle Littman, an Egyptian-born Jewish woman who fled Cairo for Britain after the Suez crisis, and then moved to Switzerland in 1960 with her English husband. She wrote under the name of Bat Ye’or (Hebrew for “Daughter of the Nile”). In a series of books, originally written in French and published from the 1990s onward, she developed a grand conspiracy theory in which the EU, led by French elites, implemented a secret plan to sell out Europe to the Muslims in exchange for oil.

The original villain of Littman’s story was General Charles de Gaulle. It is difficult for an outsider to understand how De Gaulle, who led the French resistance to the Nazis and was probably the greatest conservative statesman in French history, could be reinvented as the man who betrayed western civilisation for money. But Littman had lived many years in France, and the French far right hated De Gaulle, and indeed tried several times to assassinate him. Not only had De Gaulle fought the Vichy government, he had also admitted defeat in the long and hideously bloody war of Algerian independence – granting an Arab Muslim country its freedom at the expense of the French-Christian settler population, who had to retreat to France (and whose descendants formed the backbone of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front).

Agreeing to Algerian independence was understood by the French far right as a betrayal. De Gaulle had been brought out of retirement and restored to power in 1958 because he was believed to be on the side of the settlers in their war, which was opposed by much of the left. And so, to the far right, the Mediterranean came to seem like the frontline in a long, shifting struggle between rival colonialisms, Christian and Muslim, in which the Muslims had won a great victory in Algeria. Where would their new advance stop?

Littman’s argument, framed by her experience in Egypt (which a French force had invaded, along with the British and Israelis, in 1956), was that Islam imposed a second-class status on all non-Muslims, whom they ruled. This status of “dhimmitude” – a coinage of Littman’s, meaning subjection to Islamic rule on pain of “forced conversion, slavery or death” – was now to be extended to Europe.

According to Littman, her books describe “Europe’s evolution from a Judeo-Christian civilisation, with important post-Enlightenment secular elements, into a post-Judeo-Christian civilisation that is subservient to the ideology of jihad and the Islamic powers that propagate it.”

She saw tentacles of the great conspiracy in committees of blameless tedium and obscurity, such as the Euro-Arab Dialogue, an institution set up by the European Economic Community and the Arab League in the 70s to promote greater discussion between the regions. Her conspiracy theory was dismissed in 2006 by the Israeli historian Robert Wistrich as “the protocols of the elders of Brussels”, but what mattered more was the place he chose to challenge her ideas: a conference in Jerusalem on antisemitism to which she had been invited despite her lack of academic status. September 11 had changed everything for Littman, she told Haaretz after the conference: “In the United States, I am certain that the September 11 attacks woke people up, including the Jewish community that had previously ignored me, because it belongs more to the left.”

She explained to Haaretz the future she saw for Europe. “We are now heading towards a total change in Europe, which will be more and more Islamicised and will become a political satellite of the Arab and Muslim world.”

This was the idea that the Norwegian Jensen was enchanted by, and which, as Fjordman, he transmitted to Anders Breivik.

[Marine Le Pen, president of France’s far-right National Rally (formerly National Front) party, applauds the former US presidential adviser Steve Bannon after his speech at the party’s annual congress in March 2018.]

Jensen is unusual among Eurabia believers in that he has actually had some experience of the Muslim world and even speaks Arabic. He is the son of a socialist politician in Norway and studied Arabic in Cairo – his earlier university studies in Bergen had included English (which he writes fluently), Russian, Arabic and Middle Eastern history. In 2000, he had been interviewed by the local paper back in Norway, and spoke enthusiastically about his hosts in Egypt: “Outside the tourist areas, you meet friendly, hospitable, curious and open people who want to get to know you. I have been part of their daily lives. We’ve been invited to their homes, and talked and smoked shisha together.”

That was Jensen’s first encounter with Islam, and he was still in Cairo at the time of the 9/11 attacks. He says he saw then that there were some Muslims who celebrated the slaughter, and he also saw that this wasn’t reported in the Norwegian papers. The next year, he worked for the Norwegian Refugee Council in the disputed city of Hebron in the occupied West Bank.Unusually among Scandinavians who have worked with Palestinians in Israel, he identified with the Israelis.He narrowly escaped a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, at a bar where two of his colleagues had been killed in another attack the previous year. The experience cemented his growing fear and loathing of Islam.

The fact that the Norwegian press took a generally pro-Palestinian line while he and his friends had been the victims of Palestinian terrorism helped to convince Jensen that Islam was an existential threat to European civilisation which the politically correct establishment was wilfully ignoring. Like Littman, he seems not to acknowledge any element of nationalism in Palestinian consciousness: it is all either Arab or Muslim. In fact, the belief that Islam is hostile to national consciousness is quite widely held on the right: the philosopher Roger Scruton brought it up in a controversial speech on nationality in Hungary in 2013, in which he contrasted European Christian nations with Islamic empires.

The next stage in the development of a xenophobic populist worldview was for the two narratives to merge, so that Islam and Muslims became both a conspiracy and a demographic threat.

One of the many bad fruits of 9/11 was the new atheist movement, a phenomenon marked by mutual self-praise and undeviating hostility to Islam. Even if the ostensible target of much of the hostility was Christianity, the new atheists tend to consider Islam far worse and more “religious” a religion. The American writer Sam Harris’s breakthrough book The End of Faith from 2004 now reads like Bat Ye’or without the inconvenient scaffolding of easily disproved facts. “We are at war with Islam,” he writes. “It may not serve our immediate foreign policy objectives for our political leaders to openly acknowledge this fact, but it is unambiguously so. It is not merely that we are at war with an otherwise peaceful religion that has been ‘hijacked’ by extremists … Armed conflict ‘in the defence of Islam’ is a religious obligation for every Muslim man ... Islam, more than any religion humans have ever devised, has the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death.”

In the run-up to the Iraq war, and after the invasion, coverage in American newspapers and on television was, to a European eye, jingoistic in the extreme. The possibility of defeat was unthinkable. Nonetheless, a new wave of bloggers began using the term “MSM” for “mainstream media” as a disparaging reference to the large media organisations’ pretended neutrality. One of the earliest and most influential of these was Little Green Footballs, founded and run by Charles Johnson, a Los Angeles-based former session guitarist with an interest in web design. It was typical of the moment that he was an opinionated amateur with no credentials, whose real advantage was that he could build websites at a time when this required some programming skill.

Jensen, commenting on Little Green Footballs as Norwegian Kafir, made it a distribution point for Eurabian ideas. Another was Gates of Vienna itself, run by Ned May under the moniker Baron Bodissey after a sage in the sci-fi novels of Jack Vance. Then there was Jihad Watch, run by the American author Robert Spencer. Both Spencer and his frequent collaborator Pam Geller were banned from the UK in 2013 for making statements likely to foster hatred and violence between communities.

The only European blog of note in this constellation was the fanatically anti-EU site the Brussels Journal, where the Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan was a contributor. The Brussels Journal was run by Paul Beliën, a far-right Belgian journalist and author. Jensen was active on all these sites, taking part in discussions in which the Eurabian beliefs gave rise to something that called itself the counter-jihad movement.

Nowadays, when Facebook effortlessly spreads disinformation around the world, it is difficult to recapture the sense of revelation, and of belonging, that once accompanied the discovery of a new blog. The cramped but, to its adherents, strangely comforting thought world of the counter-jihad blogs turned politics into a gigantic online game. Anyone could play and everyone could find in it their inner child: “Some people think I’m weird; some think I am exceptionally intelligent,” Jensen had told a reporter when he was still a student in Cairo.

The boundaries between these blogs and the “MSM” they affected to despise were porous. Some writers aimed for a high-minded tone about the dangers of Muslim immigration: the former Financial Times columnist Christopher Caldwell published in 2009 a book, Reflections on a Revolution in Europe, that recapitulates the idea of a slow-moving Muslim barbarian invasion from a position of Olympian disdain: “Immigrants also bring a lot of disorder, penury and crime … Muslim culture is unusually full of messages laying out the practical advantages of procreation … If you walk north across the Piazza Della Repubblica in Turin, you see, mutatis mutandis, what the Romans saw. To the east, two well-preserved Roman towers remain, and so do the walls built to separate citizens from barbarians. Today, in the space of about 60 seconds on foot, you pass from chic shops and wine bars through a lively multiethnic market into one of Europe’s more menacing north African slums.”

Some were less highbrow. In 2004, the Daily Telegraph gave a column to the Canadian prophet of American greatness Mark Steyn, who had originally made his name as a witty critic of musical theatre. Doom and horror was all he saw in Europe’s future. As early as 2002, he said: “I find it easier to be optimistic about the futures of Iraq and Pakistan than, say, Holland or Denmark” – a remark he was still proudly quoting for Telegraph readers in 2005, when Iraq had become a slaughterhouse.

In terms that anticipated Jensen, Breivik and the alleged manifesto of the man charged with the Christchurch massacre, Steyn wrote (and the Telegraph published) this prophecy: “In a democratic age, you can’t buck demography – except through civil war. The Yugoslavs figured that out. In the 30 years before the meltdown, Bosnian Serbs had declined from 43% to 31% of the population, while Bosnian Muslims had increased from 26% to 44%.”

[painting naked white? woman sucks finger, others gawk; ‘Europeans, vote for AfD, so that Europe will never become ‘Eurabia’!’ reads a campaign poster in Berlin for the far-right party during this year’s European elections.

Compare Steyn in 2005 with the manifesto of Patrick Crusius, who confessed to murdering 22 people in El Paso earlier this month: “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion ... America is rotting from the inside out, and peaceful means to stop this seem to be nearly impossible.”

In 2007, the believers in a counter-jihad began to meet up in the real world. After a preliminary meeting of bloggers, commentators and Danish and Norwegian sympathisers in Copenhagen, attended by Jensen, a conference was arranged by May and the far-right Flemish party Vlaams Belang, in Brussels in 2007. This brought together most of the ideologues of Eurabia, as they attempted to transform it from an idea into a movement. Littman was the keynote speaker. Others present were Geller and Robert Spencer from the US, and Gerard Batten, later briefly the leader of Ukip in Britain. Ted Ekeroth, of the nationalist, rightwing Sweden Democrats, also attended.

As both Ukip and the Sweden Democrats rose to become powerful political forces, anxieties about terrorism were subsumed into much wider anxieties about demography, and about status within the old order. The American anthropologist Scott Atran has carried out extensive research into the mindset of the young men who become Islamic terrorists: the combination of wounded pride with the delight of belonging to a movement which has both global, apocalyptic significance and a living presence in a friendship group is tremendously important in recruiting jihadis. The same dynamic operates among their enemies: Breivik was remarkable chiefly in that he was so solipsistic that he could radicalise himself without the aid of any friends in real life, only those he imagined on the internet. He had at one stage approached his intellectual idol, Jensen, via email, who brushed him off as “boring as a vacuum cleaner salesman”.

You do not have to be a jihadi to feel the tug of these compulsions. The counter-jihadis, just as much as their enemies, believed they were entering an apocalyptic battle between good and evil. This is a century of wounded pride and anxieties about status for almost everyone.

Despite all this, there were some signs, even before the Breivik killings, that the original Eurabian front would break up. Those who were opposed to immigrants in general began to separate from those who hated Muslims in particular.Johnson, the founder of Little Green Footballs, excommunicated most of his followers in 2010 because of their increasing closeness to parties of western Europe that he regarded as being descended from fascists – the Vlaams Belang in Belgium and the Sweden Democrats, although he also denounced the English Defence League. Johnson was a genuine philosemite, who could not forgive the taint of antisemitism.

The anti-immigrant right had good reasons for separating itself from the anti-Muslim right. If the logic of the “Vienna school” – Jensen, Spencer and Geller, May and Littman – led inexorably to civil war and the righteous slaughter of Muslims and their leftie enablers, then most of the right shrank back from it. Commenters such as Douglas Murray and Caldwell quite genuinely believed that Breivik was insane, and that his actions had no relation to the ideas that he espoused. There may in this have been an element of self-deception, but it is also a testimony to the sort of instinctive, unthinking decency we all need sometimes to rescue us from the consequences of our ideas. It seemed that some kind of pragmatism would prevail.

The hope now seems deceptive. What changed this was above all the election of the US president, Donald Trump, whose then adviser Bannon was a believer in a “brutal, bloody ... global war” against “Islamic fascism”. They showed that there was a huge constituency for racialised hatred and despair and – for them – no real negative consequences, electoral or otherwise, in pandering to it.

Since Breivik’s massacre, his own beliefs have only become more widespread.They have spread into the politics of all European countries. In the campaign for the European elections this May, the German far-right party AfD ran posters showing a naked white woman being pawed by dark-skinned men in Arab headgear. One had stuck his fingers in her unresisting mouth. “Europeans, vote for AfD, so that Europe will never become ‘Eurabia’,” said the caption. Millions of people who have never heard of Bat Ye’or, of Fjordman, or even of Breivik and Bannon, now understand that poster at a glance, and no amount of evidence will shake their certainty. They now believe all politics comes down to the words of one of Trump’s more recent tweets: “The losers all want what you have, don’t give it to them … Be strong & prosper, be weak & die!”

But who, in this situation, are the losers, and who are the strong? Last week, in an apparent attempt to emulate Breivik, a rich, disaffected young Norwegian, Philip Manshaus, shot his way through the entrance gates to a mosque in the upmarket suburb of Oslo where he lived and started firing at the congregation. He was wrestled to the ground by an unarmed 65-year-old Muslim, Mohammed Rafiq, who then held him down, with the help of another man, until the police arrived. On the Gates of Vienna blog, this episode was not deemed worthy of mention. Instead, its devoted readers were told that Muslims had been responsible for a recent outbreak of animal cruelty in Sweden.

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https://www.alternet.org/trumps-embrace-new-white-supremacist-conspiracy-theory-hits-dangerous-low-his-authoritarian-ranting

marcotte

Wednesday, Donald Trump briefly interrupted his ongoing Twitter tirades denouncing various investigations into his shady behavior with a bizarre tweet about "the large scale killing of farmers" and "land and farm seizures and expropriations" in South Africa. It didn't take long for journalists to figure out what Trump was talking about. He was referencing a racist (and false) conspiracy theory that floats around white supremacist and neo-Nazi websites and had been elevated by Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host who has grown increasingly bold about mainstreaming ideas picked up from the white supremacist fringe.

That Trump often expresses racist views is neither new nor surprising information, so while news sites dutifully published pieces debunking this conspiracy theory — which implies that the South Africa government is working with vigilantes to steal land from white farmers through violence — it seems likely that both the media and the public will rapidly move on, especially since there are so many other big stories vying for attention.

But this strange interlude deserves more consideration, even amid the constant drumbeat of Trump-is-a-racist stories. By embracing this particular false narrative, the president of the United States has moved beyond garden-variety racism and is now openly pushing a white nationalist myth that has been used for decades to justify a violent ideology, one that occasionally leads to terrorism.

“'White genocide' is probably the most popular theme in the white supremacist world," Heidi Beirich, head of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told Salon. The South African narrative Trump referenced "is a subset of that,” she said.

"White genocide" -- the thesis that there is a grand conspiracy to wipe out as many white people as possible, and/or to destroy their collective power -- is an idea that's been kicking around white nationalist circles for decades now, Beirich explained. Its purpose, she said, is "to strike fear in the hearts of white people in countries that are diversifying."

Racist beliefs or impulses are sadly common, and arguably drive most of the support for Trump. But the concept of "white genocide" takes racism to another level, because it's used to justify a commitment to a white nationalist agenda. By floating this conspiracy theory, which white nationalists use as "evidence" that black and brown people are trying to wipe out white people, Trump and Carlson are attempting to turn ordinary bigots into paranoid white nationalists, people who believe, as Beirich explained, that "we can’t share politics and political spaces with people of other races, because their goal is to exterminate us."

Derek Black, the son of former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and Stormfront founder Don Black, told Washington Post reporter Eli Saslow in 2016 how white nationalists have long sought to push movement conservatives past their occasional use of racist stereotypes and into overt paranoia about the supposed danger black and brown people pose to the very survival of whites.

“If we say it a thousand times — ‘White genocide! We are losing control of our country!’ — politicians are going to start saying it, too," said Derek Black, who "rejected the white nationalist cause" several years ago, in his words, and has been speaking out against his father's movement since then.

What white nationalists believe, and with some reason, is that ordinary white conservatives may hold racist beliefs, but don't generally possess a concrete ideology to frame it. They may crack racist jokes or make personal choices — such as where they choose to live or whom they vote for — that reinforce racial inequality. But most of them will draw the line at openly supporting explicitly racist policies, like legal segregation or bans on interracial marriage.

So white nationalists crafted this "white genocide" line, Beirich says, to radicalize those people into supporting the concept of a "white ethno-state" by convincing them that their very survival depends on it.

Obviously, the real-world evidence that white people are in danger of being wiped out by genocide is nonexistent. So white nationalists rely on conspiracy theories, such as the one about South African farmers, to scare people. They also lean heavily on fiction, Beirich notes, especially science fiction, to create this fear that "the white apocalypse is coming."

Last month, playwright Ian Allen an article piece for the New York Times examining the small but robust world of "white genocide" dystopian sci-fi, books that "act as a kind of binding agent, a Bible-like codification of basic principles that underpin the various denominations" of white nationalism.

Allen writes about a number of these books, but the two most important are likely "The Turner Diaries" and "The Camp of the Saints." The former, written by the late white-supremacist leader William Luther Pierce (under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald), tells the story of Earl Turner, a fictional hero who wages an insurgent war against the government -- which is presented as a tool of Jews and black people -- and becomes a martyr in the process of creating a worldwide, all-white fascist regime. The latter is a 1973 novel by French author and explorer Jean Raspail, recounting the future history of Europe being overrun byArabs,Africans and other dark-skinned people, who are characterized as violent, filthy and parasitic.

"The Turner Diaries," in particular, has been implicated in a great deal of violent crime, influencing a number of white supremacist and right-wing terrorists, including Timothy McVeigh, who bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people. "The Camp of the Saints," a marginally more respectable literary work, is a favorite not just of professed white nationalists and hardcore immigration foes, but also of former Trump adviser Steve Bannon.

All this paranoia about "white genocide" is perhaps best understood as an extreme form of projection, a way of taking the murderous history of European colonialism and reversing the roles of oppressors and victims. The obsession with South Africa's land policy— which is meant to reverse the damage caused by the widespread white dispossession of African land, and the denial of both economic justice and civil rights under apartheid — illustrates this clearly.

While racism continues to be a major problem in the United States, this notion of "white genocide" has mostly lingered on the fringes of American culture. But by actively championing this South African conspiracy theory and other white nationalist beliefs on his prime-time Fox News show, Carlson is clearly betting that many more conservatives can be radicalized in that direction. By tweeting his support Wednesday, Trump is directly helping to normalize these views.

That's dangerous. If millions of Americans start to believe that white people are literally under threat of genocide, that belief can be used to justify all sorts of atrocious policy and disgraceful or violent behavior. The Trump administration's family separation policy offers a good example of how ugly things can get if frightened people become convinced that brutal human rights violations are necessary for their own survival. In the worst case, that may be just the beginning.