The Slatest

Bannon, Adviser Behind Travel Ban, Is Fan of Novel About Feces-Eating, Dark-Skinned Immigrants Destroying White Society

Steve Bannon at the White House on Feb. 23.

Win McNamee/Getty Images

Details are starting to leak out Monday morning about Donald Trump’s revised ban on travelers from several majority-Muslim nations. Steve Bannon, Trump’s top adviser, has reportedly been heavily involved in both creating and revising the ban. He’s also, as this Huffington Post piece documents, a major fan of a staggeringly racist 1970s novel about feces-eating, dark-skinned immigrants overrunning “the white world.”

The book, published in 1973 by a French writer named Jean Raspail, is called The Camp of the Saints. The Southern Poverty Law Center has described it as “a racist fantasy about an invasion of France and the white Western world by a fleet of starving, dark-skinned refugees.” (In the novel, the leader of the refugees is described as regularly eating human feces.) Raspail once said that “the proliferation of other races dooms our race, my race, to extinction.”

HuffPo lists a number of occasions on which Bannon has cited the book approvingly and said that its plot—in which, for instance, “the queen of England is forced to marry her son to a Pakistani woman” and the mayor of New York is forced to live with three black American families after a “black tide” overruns the Upper East Side—resembles actual world events:

“It’s been almost a Camp of the Saints-type invasion into Central and then Western and Northern Europe,” he said in October 2015.

“The whole thing in Europe is all about immigration,” he said in January 2016. “It’s a global issue today—this kind of global Camp of the Saints.”

“It’s not a migration,” he said later that January. “It’s really an invasion. I call it the Camp of the Saints.”

“When we first started talking about this a year ago,” he said in April 2016, “we called it the Camp of the Saints. … I mean, this is Camp of the Saints, isn’t it?”

You can read here and here about denigrating comments Bannon has made about Asians; about his alleged displeasure at the idea of his daughters attending school with Jews; and about his support for the career of disgraced hate-speech hero and pedophilia advocate Milo Yiannopoulos, who used Bannon’s website—Breitbart.com—to praise racial segregationists such as Nazi fetishist Richard Spencer.

USA! USA! USA?