Last week, the American journalist Tucker Carlson interviewed Bret Weinstein, a professional biologist who became a public intellectual after he and his scientist wife were driven out of their woke university for refusing to cooperate with a diversity program they regarded as racist. Though he has been a lifelong leftist and atheist, Weinstein’s iconoclastic observations and commentaries have been embraced by conservatives who are more interested in truth than ideological conformity. It turns out that people like him, who find themselves thrust outside the bubble of epistemic closure, often see things that the rest of us do not.
On the Carlson program, Weinstein reported on his recent visit to the Darién Gap, the densely forested patch of land in Panama, through which all migrants headed north from South America must pass. For most of the millions of migrants who have passed this way headed to the United States in recent years, this is the most perilous part of their journey. Weinstein, who is familiar with the area from his field research there as a biologist, was shocked to see NGOs everywhere in the Darién Gap, and also the United Nations migration office.
“The United States Government is facilitating this economic migration,” he said on the show. “It’s unmistakable.”
Even more shocking was a separate refugee transit camp for Chinese migrants. This was the only camp that Weinstein and his companion were not allowed to visit by the Panamanian government. These are all men who made their way from China to Ecuador (where they can be admitted without a visa), and then northward towards the United States. When the Americans approached Chinese men who had left their camp to buy supplies, the Chinese set themselves apart from all other migrants by refusing to talk about their journey.
Weinstein concluded that these Chinese men are not interested in reaching America for the sake of economic opportunity, like most of the migrants. Theirs, he believes, is an “invasion” cloaked within an economic migration—one that the Biden administration has taken no actions to stop. What’s more, he says, this cloaking makes it hard to discuss the Chinese issue.
The scientist was shocked to see no mainstream U.S. journalists on the ground there, reporting on this extraordinary event—the presence of large numbers of fighting-age men from an enemy superpower making their way to the U.S. border. Why is the U.S. government not only letting this happen, but paying for it? Why doesn’t the media care?
Weinstein has a theory that he concedes is just that: a theory. He thinks it’s possible that the Chinese have bought off American politicians to turn a blind eye to the invasion. Is he wrong? Maybe. It does seem like a nutty thing to say. But the scientist says he cannot come up with a better explanation for what he saw at the Darién Gap.
Which brings us to the most valuable thing I heard the scientist say in the conversation: “I think we have to stop punishing ourselves for considering things that once seemed crazy.”
Not “believing,” but “considering.” No question, there really are plenty of berserk conspiracy theories afoot. If you use social media, you know. Nevertheless, we have lived through enough tumult and madness these past few years to understand that people in authority calling someone “crazy” or “evil” for a postulate might be simply a means of suppressing discourse troubling to those in power.
In 1998, clerical sexual abuse survivor Phil Saviano approached the Boston Globe with evidence that the Catholic Church had covered up thousands of cases of priests molesting and raping children. Saviano, who is portrayed in the 2015 Oscar-winning film Spotlight, was at first not taken seriously. He some survivors of youth sexual trauma, seemed mentally shaky—and his allegations against the Church were thought to be too terrible to be true.
But they were.
Last week, an Italian news site reported that police in Catania had taken six Egyptian migrants into custody in connection with the gang rape of a 13-year-old girl. The migrants allegedly held back the girl’s boyfriend and forced him to watch them assault his girlfriend.
It’s just another day in Europe, where public parks such as the one where this young teenage girl was assaulted, have been taken over by male migrants. Feminists marched to protest the Catania rape, but insisted on rejecting “xenophobic” explanations for the savage attack on this girl barely out of childhood. One leader, speaking to La Repubblica, blamed “the patriarchy,” and called for more government programs, and sex education in schools.
Last October, Pope Francis gave a speech in which he told Christians that they have a duty to migrants. “Welcoming, protecting, promoting and integrating: this is the work we must carry out,” said the Pope.
Does Francis or any other of these sentimentalist humanitarians in clerical collars ever speak out about those who suffer from migrant crime, or who lose their public spaces to those illegally here? You may be certain that St. Peter’s Square will never host a tent encampment of migrants or homeless drug users.
Meanwhile, in England, an Afghan migrant named Abdul Ezedi is wanted in police for a savage attack on a woman and her children that ended up injuring twelve people, three of whom are still in the hospital. He allegedly doused them with a skin-melting alkaline substance. “Her lips were completely black,” a witness said of the mother. “Her face looked really burnt, like stripped off basically.”
Ezedi, finally allowed into the UK in 2016, on his third attempt. Two years later, he became a registered sex offender. Yet he was granted asylum after an unidentified vicar vouched that he had converted to Christianity, and would be persecuted if returned to Afghanistan.
There are true converts from Islam to Christianity, who face execution if sent home. I have met some; their stories are gutting. But critics say that naïve clerics are pawns in a “pray to stay” system in which Muslim migrants pretend to convert to Christianity to increase their chances of winning asylum in Britain. Pastors are easy marks. Sky News revealed the other day that local vicars are busy with all the baptisms from migrants pressing asylum claims.
As with Italian feminists in Catania, progressives and establishment figures like Conservative Education Minister Gillian Keegan, in this car-crash interview, said this is not an issue of migration and asylum, but of violence against women. Where is intersectionality when you need it?
The issue of governmental elites offering succor to foreigners at the expense of their own people entails more than criminal offenses. In Boston, state and city officials recently closed a recreational center that served a poor black neighborhood, turning it into a temporary shelter for migrants. Black residents bitterly complained that they have so little, yet the government was taking from them to give to foreigners who broke the law to come into the country.
Why do I bring this up? Because the 1973 Jean Raspail novel The Camp of the Saints predicted it all.
In the novel, humanitarians in the church, the media, the government, and elsewhere in the establishment fall all over themselves to welcome vast numbers of Third World migrants, treating them as sacred victims who stand only to enrich Western culture, and to redeem it from its sins. The novel is not so much about the migrants as it is about the fecklessness of Western elites, who sell out their own countrymen for the sake of migrants.
The novel is undeniably, repulsively racist in parts. The migrant horde, all from India, are depicted as almost subhuman. Raspail, who died in 2020, characterized the mass migration chiefly as a racial conflict, in which the white race and European cultures are destroyed by brown people from the Third World. Since the book first appeared, it has been strongly condemned as a dystopian white supremacist fantasy.
I read it in 2015, when a million people moved into Europe, mostly from the Middle East. It was unpleasant reading, to put it mildly. It really was more or less as racist as what many of its critics said. What surprised me, though, was how beneath the racism, Raspail articulated a savage truth about elites in his own culture. As I wrote in a 2015 essay titled “Good Lessons From A Bad Book”:
Even a bad book may have something valuable to say to us. This is true of The Camp of the Saints. One aspect of the novel that I can’t shake off, though, is Raspail’s portrait of the migrants as not giving a damn about European civilization. It’s nothing personal; rather, they don’t believe they are coming to Europe as beggars who ought to be grateful for charity, but move as a mass that believes it is entitled to what the Europeans have. Europeans, by contrast, are, in the book, the ones who agonize over their civilization, whether it is worth defending, and what it means to be truly Western. The leaders in The Camp of the Saints are not consciously surrendering, but rather they mask their cultural surrender with humanitarianism. They think that by flinging their doors open to the Third World masses, they are being good Westerners.
This is why the real villains in Raspail’s novel aren’t the migrants, but the European elites. He believes, it appears, that the Europeans ought to do whatever it takes to defend their civilization from the barbarian invasion. Raspail denounces contemporary France, though, as an exhausted civilization that is eager to be relieved of its burdens.
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In the book, the militant pro-migrant humanitarianism of the elites and the masses that follow them do not reflect moral strength, but actually exemplify moral exhaustion. Camp is a dystopian fantasy, certainly, but the core questions it poses regarding what European civilization is, what Christian civilization is, and the lengths to which Europeans ought to be prepared to go to defend what they have, are important ones, even if Raspail answers them in a way that provokes disgust, and that Christians, at least, will find unacceptable.
That is not at all what I was expecting from a book I had been prepared to take as nothing more than far-right racist ranting. It was surprising to learn that Raspail, a cultivated and well-traveled man, wrote passionately in support of the various peoples he visited the world over, especially the native peoples of South America’s Patagonia region. For Raspail, the deepest issue is not racial supremacy, but the decline and fall of particular cultures and civilizations. As a Frenchman, he was understandably angst-ridden about France’s dissolution. It may shock Anglophone readers to know that while Raspail’s novel was indeed condemned by France’s elites, he was so respected as a writer that the Academie Française in 2003 bestowed upon him its Grand Prix for Literature, honoring the entire body of his work.
In a Spectator essay appearing after Raspail’s death, Gavin Mortimer took up the question of whether or not the Frenchman was racist. Mortimer never answers the question, perhaps because it is impossible to read the lurid racist lines in the book and declare that its author held no racist opinions. What Mortimer does, however, is indicate that even if Raspail was a racist, he was also right about what mass migration would do to France, and to Europe.
Consider the education of Laurent Fabius. In 1985, France’s Socialist prime minister denounced Raspail as an alarmist bigot over a newspaper article, co-written with a demographer, in which the two men warned that mass migration from North Africa was becoming a serious threat to France. Yet in 2015, Fabius, by then France’s foreign minister, himself sounded an alarm over the uncontrollable number of migrant-laden boats crossing the Mediterranean from North Africa.
“Raspail can boast himself about being a prophet,” Jean-Yves Camus of the French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs, in an interview with The New York Times. “People now buy The Camp of the Saints because they want to read the book written by the writer who saw what would happen before everybody else.”
To put it another way, the late M. Raspail was punished for considering something that once seemed crazy, but which is now Europe’s reality—and America’s. And, to borrow a formulation from Weinstein, the sad reality that Raspail larded his book with racist language and symbols makes it possible for the real message of the book to be hidden from view—especially from the eyes of those who don’t want to confront the terrible facts.
A final point: once people cease to trust institutional authorities—in the church, in the government, in the media and so forth—to tell them the truth and to deal effectively with real-world problems, they are at risk for trusting anyone at all, no matter how insane or malicious the explanations they offer may be. On the migration question, it is hard to see why, at this late stage in the crisis, anybody should trust a word that politicians, churchmen, or the press have to say. An elderly Frenchman who once wrote an ugly dystopian fantasy about mass migration wiping out European civilization while those responsible for defending it prattled on about how ‘diversity is our strength’—he had clearer vision about reality than those who condemned him as a bigot.
The case of Raspail and his controversial novel does not mean that race hatred is morally right, God knows. We really do have to be on guard against true bigotry. But indeed, we also have to stop punishing ourselves for considering things that once seemed crazy. It’s not a conspiracy theory if it’s really happening.
In Praise of Conspiracy Theories: From The Camp of the Saints to Camps in the Darién Gap
Migrant caravan moving toward Mexico’s border with the United States in January 2024.
Photo by STRINGER / AFP
Last week, the American journalist Tucker Carlson interviewed Bret Weinstein, a professional biologist who became a public intellectual after he and his scientist wife were driven out of their woke university for refusing to cooperate with a diversity program they regarded as racist. Though he has been a lifelong leftist and atheist, Weinstein’s iconoclastic observations and commentaries have been embraced by conservatives who are more interested in truth than ideological conformity. It turns out that people like him, who find themselves thrust outside the bubble of epistemic closure, often see things that the rest of us do not.
On the Carlson program, Weinstein reported on his recent visit to the Darién Gap, the densely forested patch of land in Panama, through which all migrants headed north from South America must pass. For most of the millions of migrants who have passed this way headed to the United States in recent years, this is the most perilous part of their journey. Weinstein, who is familiar with the area from his field research there as a biologist, was shocked to see NGOs everywhere in the Darién Gap, and also the United Nations migration office.
“The United States Government is facilitating this economic migration,” he said on the show. “It’s unmistakable.”
Even more shocking was a separate refugee transit camp for Chinese migrants. This was the only camp that Weinstein and his companion were not allowed to visit by the Panamanian government. These are all men who made their way from China to Ecuador (where they can be admitted without a visa), and then northward towards the United States. When the Americans approached Chinese men who had left their camp to buy supplies, the Chinese set themselves apart from all other migrants by refusing to talk about their journey.
Weinstein concluded that these Chinese men are not interested in reaching America for the sake of economic opportunity, like most of the migrants. Theirs, he believes, is an “invasion” cloaked within an economic migration—one that the Biden administration has taken no actions to stop. What’s more, he says, this cloaking makes it hard to discuss the Chinese issue.
The scientist was shocked to see no mainstream U.S. journalists on the ground there, reporting on this extraordinary event—the presence of large numbers of fighting-age men from an enemy superpower making their way to the U.S. border. Why is the U.S. government not only letting this happen, but paying for it? Why doesn’t the media care?
Weinstein has a theory that he concedes is just that: a theory. He thinks it’s possible that the Chinese have bought off American politicians to turn a blind eye to the invasion. Is he wrong? Maybe. It does seem like a nutty thing to say. But the scientist says he cannot come up with a better explanation for what he saw at the Darién Gap.
Which brings us to the most valuable thing I heard the scientist say in the conversation: “I think we have to stop punishing ourselves for considering things that once seemed crazy.”
Not “believing,” but “considering.” No question, there really are plenty of berserk conspiracy theories afoot. If you use social media, you know. Nevertheless, we have lived through enough tumult and madness these past few years to understand that people in authority calling someone “crazy” or “evil” for a postulate might be simply a means of suppressing discourse troubling to those in power.
In 1998, clerical sexual abuse survivor Phil Saviano approached the Boston Globe with evidence that the Catholic Church had covered up thousands of cases of priests molesting and raping children. Saviano, who is portrayed in the 2015 Oscar-winning film Spotlight, was at first not taken seriously. He some survivors of youth sexual trauma, seemed mentally shaky—and his allegations against the Church were thought to be too terrible to be true.
But they were.
Last week, an Italian news site reported that police in Catania had taken six Egyptian migrants into custody in connection with the gang rape of a 13-year-old girl. The migrants allegedly held back the girl’s boyfriend and forced him to watch them assault his girlfriend.
It’s just another day in Europe, where public parks such as the one where this young teenage girl was assaulted, have been taken over by male migrants. Feminists marched to protest the Catania rape, but insisted on rejecting “xenophobic” explanations for the savage attack on this girl barely out of childhood. One leader, speaking to La Repubblica, blamed “the patriarchy,” and called for more government programs, and sex education in schools.
Last October, Pope Francis gave a speech in which he told Christians that they have a duty to migrants. “Welcoming, protecting, promoting and integrating: this is the work we must carry out,” said the Pope.
Does Francis or any other of these sentimentalist humanitarians in clerical collars ever speak out about those who suffer from migrant crime, or who lose their public spaces to those illegally here? You may be certain that St. Peter’s Square will never host a tent encampment of migrants or homeless drug users.
Meanwhile, in England, an Afghan migrant named Abdul Ezedi is wanted in police for a savage attack on a woman and her children that ended up injuring twelve people, three of whom are still in the hospital. He allegedly doused them with a skin-melting alkaline substance. “Her lips were completely black,” a witness said of the mother. “Her face looked really burnt, like stripped off basically.”
Ezedi, finally allowed into the UK in 2016, on his third attempt. Two years later, he became a registered sex offender. Yet he was granted asylum after an unidentified vicar vouched that he had converted to Christianity, and would be persecuted if returned to Afghanistan.
There are true converts from Islam to Christianity, who face execution if sent home. I have met some; their stories are gutting. But critics say that naïve clerics are pawns in a “pray to stay” system in which Muslim migrants pretend to convert to Christianity to increase their chances of winning asylum in Britain. Pastors are easy marks. Sky News revealed the other day that local vicars are busy with all the baptisms from migrants pressing asylum claims.
As with Italian feminists in Catania, progressives and establishment figures like Conservative Education Minister Gillian Keegan, in this car-crash interview, said this is not an issue of migration and asylum, but of violence against women. Where is intersectionality when you need it?
The issue of governmental elites offering succor to foreigners at the expense of their own people entails more than criminal offenses. In Boston, state and city officials recently closed a recreational center that served a poor black neighborhood, turning it into a temporary shelter for migrants. Black residents bitterly complained that they have so little, yet the government was taking from them to give to foreigners who broke the law to come into the country.
Why do I bring this up? Because the 1973 Jean Raspail novel The Camp of the Saints predicted it all.
In the novel, humanitarians in the church, the media, the government, and elsewhere in the establishment fall all over themselves to welcome vast numbers of Third World migrants, treating them as sacred victims who stand only to enrich Western culture, and to redeem it from its sins. The novel is not so much about the migrants as it is about the fecklessness of Western elites, who sell out their own countrymen for the sake of migrants.
The novel is undeniably, repulsively racist in parts. The migrant horde, all from India, are depicted as almost subhuman. Raspail, who died in 2020, characterized the mass migration chiefly as a racial conflict, in which the white race and European cultures are destroyed by brown people from the Third World. Since the book first appeared, it has been strongly condemned as a dystopian white supremacist fantasy.
I read it in 2015, when a million people moved into Europe, mostly from the Middle East. It was unpleasant reading, to put it mildly. It really was more or less as racist as what many of its critics said. What surprised me, though, was how beneath the racism, Raspail articulated a savage truth about elites in his own culture. As I wrote in a 2015 essay titled “Good Lessons From A Bad Book”:
More:
That is not at all what I was expecting from a book I had been prepared to take as nothing more than far-right racist ranting. It was surprising to learn that Raspail, a cultivated and well-traveled man, wrote passionately in support of the various peoples he visited the world over, especially the native peoples of South America’s Patagonia region. For Raspail, the deepest issue is not racial supremacy, but the decline and fall of particular cultures and civilizations. As a Frenchman, he was understandably angst-ridden about France’s dissolution. It may shock Anglophone readers to know that while Raspail’s novel was indeed condemned by France’s elites, he was so respected as a writer that the Academie Française in 2003 bestowed upon him its Grand Prix for Literature, honoring the entire body of his work.
In a Spectator essay appearing after Raspail’s death, Gavin Mortimer took up the question of whether or not the Frenchman was racist. Mortimer never answers the question, perhaps because it is impossible to read the lurid racist lines in the book and declare that its author held no racist opinions. What Mortimer does, however, is indicate that even if Raspail was a racist, he was also right about what mass migration would do to France, and to Europe.
Consider the education of Laurent Fabius. In 1985, France’s Socialist prime minister denounced Raspail as an alarmist bigot over a newspaper article, co-written with a demographer, in which the two men warned that mass migration from North Africa was becoming a serious threat to France. Yet in 2015, Fabius, by then France’s foreign minister, himself sounded an alarm over the uncontrollable number of migrant-laden boats crossing the Mediterranean from North Africa.
“Raspail can boast himself about being a prophet,” Jean-Yves Camus of the French Institute for International and Strategic Affairs, in an interview with The New York Times. “People now buy The Camp of the Saints because they want to read the book written by the writer who saw what would happen before everybody else.”
To put it another way, the late M. Raspail was punished for considering something that once seemed crazy, but which is now Europe’s reality—and America’s. And, to borrow a formulation from Weinstein, the sad reality that Raspail larded his book with racist language and symbols makes it possible for the real message of the book to be hidden from view—especially from the eyes of those who don’t want to confront the terrible facts.
A final point: once people cease to trust institutional authorities—in the church, in the government, in the media and so forth—to tell them the truth and to deal effectively with real-world problems, they are at risk for trusting anyone at all, no matter how insane or malicious the explanations they offer may be. On the migration question, it is hard to see why, at this late stage in the crisis, anybody should trust a word that politicians, churchmen, or the press have to say. An elderly Frenchman who once wrote an ugly dystopian fantasy about mass migration wiping out European civilization while those responsible for defending it prattled on about how ‘diversity is our strength’—he had clearer vision about reality than those who condemned him as a bigot.
The case of Raspail and his controversial novel does not mean that race hatred is morally right, God knows. We really do have to be on guard against true bigotry. But indeed, we also have to stop punishing ourselves for considering things that once seemed crazy. It’s not a conspiracy theory if it’s really happening.
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