Above the Village of Chamounix: A Left-Realist Defense of Renaud Camus

“Hear my tale; it is long and strange, and the temperature of this place is not fitting to your fine sensations; come to the hut upon the mountain. The sun is yet high in the heavens; before it descends to hide itself behind your snowy precipices and illuminate another world, you will have heard my story and can decide. On you it rests, whether I quit for ever the neighbourhood of man and lead a harmless life, or become the scourge of your fellow creatures and the author of your own speedy ruin.” As he said this he led the way across the ice; I followed. 

The small French town of Chamounix has a problem. Housing prices are out of control. Rampant financial speculation has begun to price locals out of their own city, reducing the small town’s population, transforming a place to live into a place to visit. Forcing the locals of tiny Chamounix to compete with global capital is slowly replacing Chamounix, replacing a village of people with a city of second homes owned by American, Chinese, and Saudi multi-millionaires. Over 70% of real estate are secondary residences. The city has banned any construction of houses that are intended to be secondary residences. The mayor has said, “We are working to create conditions to keep the local population in place. We are losing our soul as we lose residents.” Residents, like Dylan Hatzenberger, say, “I have mourned the idea of returning to my hometown. I pass through it every day, but every evening I have to leave it. It's very hard to live with.”

In the little city I am from in the mountains of Montana, the state government has passed some of the most pro-building housing policies in the nation. For some time, local residents have been unable to afford local homes as Missoula, Montana, has been one of the worst real estate markets in the nation. Locals, on average earning less than $40,000 a year, have had to compete with Silicon Valley salaries, which allowed work-from-home white collar employees to outprice locals, making affordable housing impossible. The state has solved that by opening up building opportunities.

Chamounix does not want its local population to be replaced by wealthy residents, so they have passed laws to prevent further growth and construction. For them, the booming market was the problem. Missoula wants to keep new residents in Montana while building new housing to mitigate the displacement of the local population by newcomers, in other words, to manage replacement for the result of growth. For Missoula, the frozen market was the problem. Yet, for Missoula, the question remains: how do you build all of these homes?

As a local magazine wrote, “The average wage for general workers is about $35,000…”  and the living wage for a Montanan with kids is $32 an hour, or $66,560 a year, just enough to make ends meet.  Montana construction companies pay people around $16.50 - $25.00 an hour. There is a shortage of construction workers because Americans will not work for so little in a hard, manual labor job, which offers no retirement benefits, often no union protections, and is dangerous.

To solve this labor shortage, this red state imports H-2B visa labor and relies on undocumented laborers. The alternative to raising wages is replacement workers, ideally undocumented workers, who allow their employer to—by nature of being in Montana illegally—avoid expensive laws relating to workplace injury, workers’ compensation, pay theft, and OSHA compliance.  A red state that goes for Trump, Montanans regularly vote for mass deportations and to prevent illegal immigration. They vote for Trump because they want higher wages for construction workers, and Trump promises to deliver that through deportations and deregulation. You may not like that plan, but that is the plan people voted for.

But in the meantime, housing is not being built, locals are further priced out of their own homes, growth is managed poorly and slowly, and a certain portion of the population is beginning to want no growth. Those who build houses are not raising wages, and they cannot raise wages. After all, they do not want to raise the price of houses further, which people already cannot afford, because their employers in turn are not raising wages. This causes an economy-wide race to the bottom that ends in the importation of legal and illegal labor.

It is easy to understand why little Chamounix chose to prevent growth and why Missoula chose to embrace growth. Missoula is less than 150 years old, is still quite small, and has had a housing crisis since 2008. The city has been lost economically, and so is thirsty for an income.

Chamounix is an ancient town that belonged to the feudal house of Savoy in the 11th century. As early as 1821, access to Chamounix was being regulated by local communes. Jewish children were hidden in the village of Chamounix in WWII, protected by both the kindness of the locals and the soaring walls of the Alps. Not far from Chamounix, Theodor Adorno, the famed German Marxist philosopher, died suddenly one day while visiting the mountains for silence, far from the industrial life of the city that stressed him so much. His doctor hoped that his stress would be relieved by the mountains, but instead, he died of a heart attack while shopping for shoes.

One of the greatest regrets of my life is that when I had the chance to visit Chamounix, staying in the nearby Swiss city of Montreux, I instead chose to wander idly through the little mountains that overlook Lake Geneva. I was lost in the alpine vertical courtyards for hours. That alone was a beautiful experience. But being new to Europe, I did not realize how close everything was, or how much history surrounded me. I did not know how close I was to the past and to the written words of Shelley and to Adorno’s last pilgrimage.

Chamounix is where Victor Frankenstein first confronted the humanity of his monster, who spoke to his creator,

How can I move thee? Will no entreaties cause thee to turn a favourable eye upon thy creature, who implores thy goodness and compassion? Believe me, Frankenstein, I was benevolent; my soul glowed with love and humanity; but am I not alone, miserably alone? You, my creator, abhor me; what hope can I gather from your fellow creatures, who owe me nothing? They spurn and hate me. The desert mountains and dreary glaciers are my refuge. I have wandered here many days; the caves of ice, which I only do not fear, are a dwelling to me, and the only one which man does not grudge. These bleak skies I hail, for they are kinder to me than your fellow beings. If the multitude of mankind knew of my existence, they would do as you do, and arm themselves for my destruction. Shall I not then hate them who abhor me? I will keep no terms with my enemies. I am miserable, and they shall share my wretchedness. Yet it is in your power to recompense me, and deliver them from an evil which it only remains for you to make so great, that not only you and your family, but thousands of others, shall be swallowed up in the whirlwinds of its rage. Let your compassion be moved, and do not disdain me. Listen to my tale; when you have heard that, abandon or commiserate me, as you shall judge that I deserve. But hear me. The guilty are allowed, by human laws, bloody as they are, to speak in their own defence before they are condemned. Listen to me, Frankenstein. You accuse me of murder, and yet you would, with a satisfied conscience, destroy your own creature. Oh, praise the eternal justice of man! Yet I ask you not to spare me; listen to me, and then, if you can, and if you will, destroy the work of your hands.

I do not want Chamounix to become a city for tourists, with no locals. I do not want Chamounix to commit suicide, replacing the children of the children of the children of the village the monster stood high above, with replaceable workers in replaceable hotels working for replaceable tourists. I want Chamounix to defend itself and not grow; I want Chamounix to deny Elon Musk the right to build a home there.

I cannot imagine in a hundred years a person traveling to Chamounix and stopping there to ponder Mary Shelley’s words in the quiet of the mountains while a Trump hotel blocks the view. If Chamounix was humanity, was the place where the monster was judged, then I fear what judgements the new Chamounix might make. Would real estate speculators judge Frankenstein’s monster kindly? Would Chamounix, if it were a ski resort rather than a village, have sheltered Jewish children? Or turned them over to attract SS customers?

In Montana, secret hot springs are buried on mountain roads, of which only the locals know. In a certain hot spring, locals have a reputation for bathing nude. There are seventeen pubs in the Bitterroot Valley, my English teacher was also a bartender. Where I lived was settled mostly by Germans and so reproduced some of the peculiarities of Europe: the love of craft local beer and pub culture, comfort with occasional nudity, relaxed norms around sex and gender, and no one locked their doors at night. Little of that is threatened by the growth we are experiencing. People are integrating. Drugs are a problem, as is housing still, but Montana is a state larger than Germany and has a population of only one million, and so can make room for some more locals. In twenty years, the population has grown by 26%, from 900,000, to 1.1 million. 2008 destroyed any chance of good growth management, but people are not really against growth. After all, you only move to Montana for the culture, sports, beer, and hot springs. Everyone speaks the same language. People want development so that there are industries besides marijuana, casinos, welding, and elder care. Reasonable, better growth is the idea.

Chamounix is not the same. Chamounix has lived for 1,000 years. Chamounix is not making new locals, Chamounix is replacing them with the richest people on earth.

And Chamounix is where I will defend the monster Renaud Camus. I am defending Renaud Camus because I am defending your right to know how and why he has beaten you.

Two ideas portray Renaud Camus a monster. The first is that he a fascist white supremacist, the second is that he causes violence. Journalists in English, such as Jacob Furedi, who recently interviewed Renaud Camus in The Dispatch, have sought to advance these simplistic interpretations of his work and legacy.

I will work to disabuse you of both notions. I will offer a left-realist defense of Renaud Camus. Not because I share his views or fully agree with him, but because his tale is long and strange and not his own. The story of Renaud Camus is the story of hundreds of millions of people and how they have experienced change. His story is the story of contemporary politics in France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Britain, Sweden, and the United States.

Understanding Renaud Camus correctly is important because understanding hundreds of millions of people is important.

I will keep no terms with my enemies

First and most obvious, a fascist would not say they are not a nationalist. A fascist would not reject the history of French ultra-nationalism and revisionist views on Vichy France. A fascist would not call flag and troop worship a “little bit ridiculous.” A fascist would not love one of the most anti-fascist writers of the 20th century, Theodor Adorno. A fascist would not criticize Henry Ford on the grounds that he turned people into replaceable industrial cogs, dehumanizing them. Fascism as a movement was about the embrace of the future, the embrace of industry, of nationalism, of making a nation of humans into cogs for war machines that could carry the nation into the future and into new lands. A fascist would not ask for a more united and stronger Europe composed of many nations, with a united European army to resist Russia under the tyrant warlord Putin and defend Ukraine.  

On antisemitism, in the 1990s, he caused a bit of controversy. As The Nation described,

“They are roughly four out of five on every broadcast, or four out of six, or five out of seven, which on a national or almost official platform constitutes a net overrepresentation,” Camus complained. The problem, he wrote, was not so much the number of Jews on France Culture as the fundamental impossibility for a Jew—even one whose family has been French for generations—to understand and explain French culture to a French audience. He lamented that “the French experience as it has been lived for 15 centuries by French people on the French soil” had “for its principal spokesman” members of “the Jewish race.”

He later shared that he regretted using the word “race,” but did not regret his broader statements. Vauban Books has argued Camus' actual point was not that he believed the problem was “too many jews” but that he believed there were “not enough others” on France's national radio. Regardless, he had only one regret from the encounter. As The Nation relays from the French writer Marc Weitzmann,

“If he had just said, ‘I don’t like Jews’ and ‘Fuck you,’ that would have almost been fine, because at least that would have been coherent. But when I asked him, he told me that to write what pleased him did not make him anti-Semitic, and that the only word he regretted having written about the Jews was ‘race.’

Some French Jews have become some of Renaud Camus’ most prominent defenders, precisely because Renaud Camus was an early opponent of the cause of the rise of antisemitism in France. Renaud Camus has strong comments about the problem of antisemitism in France, which has caused some French Jews to flee, and which is almost entirely the result of the mass migration of Muslims into France, which was even called by a professor quoted in the New York Times, “blindingly obvious.” Or as The Nation wrote in 2019, “12 Jews have been murdered in France over the past 15 years (in each case by at least one assailant of West African or North African descent).” The full article by The Nation, “How Gay Icon Renaud Camus Became the Ideologue of White Supremacy,” is worth reading as an alternative view of Renaud Camus, though I disagree with its conclusions.

The French culture has a high tolerance for intellectuals’ incendiary statements. Rousseau, in his The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, which Renaud Camus shared as a favorite book, explained how he gave up five of his children to a foundling hospital. Foucault's crimes are too innumerable to list. Today, there are some leading French Jews who support Renaud Camus, perhaps because, being French, they share their culture’s understanding that having intellectuals means allowing people to make controversial statements that progress the social conversation. They may also find his upsetting journal reflection from the 90s preferable to being stabbed.  Discussions of Jews and media culture are indeed uncomfortable; it is also true that they are not uncommon. In the United States, this ranges from satirical ideas that mock antisemitism to serious discussions in media and academia. Examples include SNL with Dave Chappelle, Larry David, and Rolling Stone.

I say all of this because reading about Renaud Camus' alleged antisemitism genuinely surprised me. That's it? This is the man who is too dangerous to enter Britain? Kanye has a new song in which he sings, “All my niggas nazis” and almost every week goes on long antisemitic rants. Kanye has a planned UK and Europe tour right now. Listen to WW3.

For almost ten years, it has been acceptable to shout “Jews will not replace us” on the right, ever since Charlottesville. In the United States and Europe, antisemitism and racism on podcasts, social media, and in popular culture are stronger than at any point in my lifetime. You can be an antisemite if you want to be.

But Camus does not write “Jews will not replace us.” Instead, he writes, “You will not replace us,” and “you” for Renaud Camus is Davocratic hyper-capitalism.

“You” is Rishi Sunak, whose migration policy failed to satisfy the European right by focusing on boats crossing the channel rather than mass migration itself; “you” is the real estate market in Chamounix, pricing out the locals through natural market competition against the global elite; “you” is Davos hosting the World Economic Forum that argues that migration is a vital economic good; that the vast numbers young people in developing countries should be allowed into the world’s top thirty economies to work.

“You,” for Renaud Camus, is the set of people that ignore that these young people are by and large from war-torn countries, much more illiterate, are much more conservative on sex and gender than Europeans, are going to nations where the pressures are towards cultural fragmentation rather than assimilation, and would be joining large numbers of migrants already in Europe, many of whom are a net drain on the economy—both in Europe and the United States and demonize, condemn, and suppress any opposition.

“You,” for Renaud Camus, is the combination of historical events that caused Europeans to lose their sense of national identity as the simultaneous result of decolonization and the rise of petit-bourgeois culture. This, in turn, caused people, at the mass level culturally, to support mass migration as a way to introduce culture into tired and cultureless Europe, which coincidentally also helped capitalism and corporations, as migrant labor, often illegal, is easier to exploit, cheaper, and increases consumption.

Nothing is holding Renaud Camus back from being a fascist or white supremacist because there is nothing to hold back. One can understand why he believes mass migration happened purely by reading the notes of consultants for global capital.

One can also understand why he is against this. As an example, in some places in London, Muslim men rely on the welfare system to provide for their unemployed wives and daughters, who, in Pakistan, would not have traditionally worked at all. Over time, polygamy has increased, even as assimilation was expected. The generosity of welfare is a vital part of the story of fragmentation, as welfare allows women to stay at home, not work, and not interact with others. They exist apart from society as a fragment of society. Men then take on more importance in the home, reducing women’s freedom and mobility. Muslim women are one of the least-employed groups in the United Kingdom, not because of Islamophobia, but because those are the gender norms of Pakistan.

The use of social welfare as a means of support for migrants rather than as a means to support citizens has placed Renaud Camus, who began his life as a socialist, on the right. That is true not only for him, but for millions of people in Europe and the United States who do not like the impacts of mass migration, even if they once supported socialist policies. But that does not make him a white supremacist or a fascist. You can be against mass migration without being either of those things. And there are, every day, more conservatives who think like Renaud Camus, who become enemies of what Renaud Camus calls “replacism,” as Nathan Pinkoski has explained.

For all the criticism of Renaud Camus, what do you think is more realistic to happen in your lifetime: that a politician is elected that makes life better so that you have more friends and a healthier social life, or a politician is elected that allows Meta to make you AI friends, substituting human relationships with an artificial replacement? Replacism is a useful word.

“Replacism: the tendency to replace everything with its normalized, standardized, interchangeable double: the original by its copy, the authentic by its imitation, the true by the false, mothers by surrogate mothers, culture by leisure activities and entertainment, knowledge by diplomas, the countryside and city by the universal suburb, the native by the non-native, Europe by Africa, men by women, men and women by robots, peoples by other peoples, humanity by a savage, undifferentiated, standardized, infinitely interchangeable posthumanity.”

Do you ever fear that the world will be an international, mechanical system of grey androgynous post-humanity? So does Renaud Camus. So did George Lucas, though a more relevant and poignant cinematic expression of a conservative view of dystopia is Crimes of the Future.

Renaud Camus talks of race. Fascism indeed speaks of race, scientific and mythological, but fascism does not speak of race as a plastic idea with twenty meanings in poetry and literature. Pseudo-scientific racism had one idea of race, and that was the most important idea of race to the fascists. The terrible results of pseudo-scientific racism: genocide, eugenics, and segregation ravaged the 20th century. The phenomenon of scientific racism existed simultaneously in fascist regimes, the liberal capitalist United States and the conservative Jim Crow South, survived in socialist Russia—though the socialists deserved credit for as early as 1930 coming out against scientific racism—and reactionaries of all stripes, like Julius Evola, have entertained pseudo-scientific racist beliefs. Renaud Camus does not. He expresses belief in human biodiversity, a notion not out of place in any anthropology textbook. A white supremacist would not be against colonialism; they would be for colonialism and a return to colonial empires. A white supremacist would not support the idea that peoples should have their own nation, all peoples, including non-white peoples. 

Renaud Camus has before called himself a racist. He does so because, in his own words, “anti-racist has changed” and therefore so has “racist.”  When he says he is racist, he is referring to the use of the term “race” before the advent of what was called “scientific racism.” That is, the use of the term “race” in the poetry of Walt Whitman, where he speaks of the “race of rangers,’ or race as W. E. B. Du Bois spoke of race in The Souls of Black Folk, or race as Hideo Matsumoto speaks of race, addressing the distribution of immunoglobulin G. Race has many meanings and historically has been used in many ways, always connoting a type of person bound by something in common.

He calls himself a racist to obey the rules of our society, which would define his use of one of the twenty meanings of “race” as racist. Ibram X. Kendi, in his now removed glossary of terms, wrote that,

Racist is one who is supporting a racist policy through their actions or inactions or expressing a racist idea. Antiracist is one io is supporting an antiracist policy through their actions or expressing an antiracist idea. Racist idea - A racist idea is any idea that suggests one racial group is inferior or superior to another racial group in any way. Racist ideas argue that the inferiorities and superiorities of racial groups explain racial inequities in society. There is no such thing as a not-racist idea, only racist ideas and antiracist ideas.

If these are the terms, then Walt Whitman, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Hideo Matsumoto are racist. They make the mistake of identifying a group, which in itself is the same as being racist, because for Kendi, “Race is a mirage.” To identify a race, be that a race of rangers, a nation, an ethnic group, a genetic marker, is to be a racist. That is the problem with anti-racism: there is no way to discuss race because to discuss race is to discuss differences, which is to discriminate—in the most classic sense of the word as to recognize a distinction between things—which means to be racist. Camus calls himself a racist because, by these terms, basic human feelings such as national or cultural pride, a pride in the achievements of one’s people and ancestors, have themselves become shameful, almost no different from throwing someone onto a boat to Rwanda yourself.

For antiracists, there is only one way to address race. As Kendi writes,

It is one of the ironies of antiracism that we must identify racially in order to identify the racial privileges and dangers of being in our bodies. Latinx and Asian and African and European and Indigenous and Middle Eastern: These six races—at least in the American context—are fundamentally power identities, because race is fundamentally a power construct of blended difference that lives socially. Race creates new forms of power: the power to categorize and judge, elevate and downgrade, include and exclude. Race makers use that power to process distinct individuals, ethnicities, and nationalities into monolithic races.

That one way is that one must identify as a race and then identify one’s racial privileges and the dangers of “being in our bodies.” Kendi’s writings have specifically been proven to cause people to find racism where none exists.

While Kendi makes allowances for ethnicities, nationalities, and individuals, the practice of anti-racist thinking does not. Words matter little when good and evil have been redefined in systemic terms. This is because when one speaks, one is not a person, but the voice of a system, and is therefore guilty of the system’s crimes.

And that is how most people have practically experienced anti-racism over the past decade. Anti-racism is more culturally widespread and dominant in the lives of regular people and their families than any other left-wing cultural product or idea. Antiracism is on TV and taught at work. Chapo is on Patreon, and BreadTube is no different from daycare.

Renaud Camus is, on these terms, a racist. He does not believe in the biological superiority of “whites.”  He believes that a French person should be able to prefer French culture to Arab culture. He believes it is good for France to be French and that keeping France French is preferable to making France not French. He prefers France to Mélenchon’s “Creolization.” He would rather Proust be taught to children than Hanafi Islam. Like many on the right, he finds the idea of a single new people absurd, both strange and evil in its way, but also absurd because the obvious fact in Europe is that the pressure is towards seperatism, cantons, enclaves; a fragmented society far more than a creolized one.  

Renaud Camus is winning because European liberals no longer pretend his ideas are radical. For example, in the United Kingdom, there are twenty-nine ethnic communities with upwards of 100,000 members in the UK who can claim minority status. In the words of the UK’s Sir Trevor Phillips, “The assumption was there’d be an organic process of assimilation, in which minority groups would be relatively small, and they’d become pretty much like everybody else. The truth of the matter is pressure towards cultural fragmentation has actually gone the opposite way.” Where in 20th-century feminism was the promise of the reinvention of polygamy?  The only European socialists to hold onto power were those in Denmark, who took a strong stance against mass migration. If cantonization and creolization mean polygamy existing in London, people will vote against it.

The American left stares at Europe, eyes wide and stupid, and asks why the cantonized, creolized left loses to the European right. Perhaps it is because they are in Europe with Europeans, and the Europeans enjoy European culture. Culture is real. Want proof? In Montana, nude hot springs are maintained not by law, but by norm; there are none in Pakistan. 

Speaking of “Europe” and “nations” and “cultures” has become fascistic or right-wing and has reproduced a repeat of a split that emerged in a 19th-century debate among the socialist left. In writings like On Nationality, the 19th-century Italian intellectual Giuseppe Mazzini expressed a belief in the fundamental right of every nation to determine its destiny and govern itself. He thought of nations at the small scale, even favoring provincial or city independence. His nationalism was Christian, informed by the logic of a brotherhood of nations gifted unique traits by God. National and cultural differences were, in the mind of Mazzini, to be celebrated; the culture of Lombardy was precious to him as the culture of Corsica. Renaud Camus shares similar beliefs, though on more secular terms. He defended Cajun French, though also saying it was casual, incorrect, and not the best form of French. He’s not wrong there sha bebe.

Like Mazzini, Renaud Camus was once a socialist, and like Camus, Mazzini was persona non grata to the left in his time. Marx, Engels, and Bakunin attacked Mazzini for his advocacy of nations. Mazzini made the mistake of caring more about the Italian Risorgimento, or unification of Italy, than he did the Paris Commune of 1871. In the end, though, Mazzini was right to care more about the Risorgimento, which mattered more to history and people than a few months of violence in Paris.

If you love Italy or Italian culture, pour one out for Mazzini. You can thank him for The Sopranos and The Bicycle Thief. Mazzini won because people love their nation, even socialists. That is because a nation is not a social construct, an imagined community, or a bourgeois trick. Bella Ciao, one of the most famous anti-fascist songs of the 20th century, sings of invaders and homeland mountains, not international solidarity. The Internationale, even, the communist anthem which I've sung drunk late into the night with Chinese and Russian Marxists, is not “the anti-nationality.”

If you are French and take issue with the idea of “France for the French”, because you are motivated to ask, “What is French?” Renaud Camus sees you as a decultured victim of the Little Replacement, a person severed from your heritage and culture, a human whose humanity has been replaced with pop culture, a human so impoverished by education that you were not educated about the national family into which you were born. Your silver spoon was taken from your mouth and replaced with heavy-metal tested baby formula.

If you find him calling himself a racist distasteful, you are exactly the person he wants to challenge. By calling himself a racist, he is performing a classic attack on mainstream thought. This is no different than how famous transexuals, like Susan Stryker in “My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix,’ turned the Frankenstein monster idea of the transsexual into a humanizing idea, which helped transsexuals win gay allies. In 1994, calling yourself a Frankenstein transsexual in the way Stryker did was weird and bad. And then, for nearly thirty years, the transexuals won. In 2025, calling yourself a racist in the way Camus does is weird and bad. Throughout time, great writers, poets, and musicians have taken on words for monsters in revolt. They often have a strange way of winning.

That is why we should afford ourselves the dignity of understanding him.

He is saying that society has redefined anti-racist and racist in such a way that he is considered a racist, and does not care about being called one, because these terms are illegitimate. He is saying that there is something so precious in what has been defined as racist that he would rather be a racist than an antiracist. That precious thing is not being white; that precious thing is Proust, that thing is Western acceptance of homosexuality, and that thing is French Jews living in France. That thing is Chamounix, which is as threatened by global capitalism as Samuel Paty was by his students, who were brought to France as refugees.  

Renaud Camus’ vision of the future is that instead of adding more police to schools, instead of permanent barriers at Christmas markets, instead of the development of Chamounix, those who have come to France should be non-violently removed to their homelands through financial incentives and orderly deportations. Global capitalism should be prevented from furthering the decline of traditional French village life. Renaud Camus says “no” to the replacement of the village of Chamounix with a Chamounix brought to you by Mohammad Bin Salman; he says “no” to the replacement of laïcité, an idea born during the overthrow of the Ancien regime, with a pale shadow, “a framework for living will together.”

The Enlightenment did not lift society from poverty and tyranny through cantons and creolization. The opposite. The Enlightenment gave the French a standard language forged by great writers like Voltaire and Rousseau. A shared language and set of ideas united people and allowed them to forge an alternative to ten thousand years of kings and slavery. Renaud Camus, though he is called a fascist and white supremacist, and though, from a certain point of view, one could see him as demonic and anachronistic as Julius Evola is, Renaud Camus is also, from another perspective, a last and hated defender of the Enlightenment. Not the vague liberal idea of uplifting people, but the real Enlightenment, which specific people brought into being at great personal cost and in great controversy, and which is in danger because of the large number of people brought to France. Because, of that large number, a large enough portion exist who are violent enough to cause the entirety of the national education system to have to move from an culturally secure and humanistic laïcité towards a “framework for living together” secured not by a united culture, but by batons, by cops in every classroom; and which nonetheless does not prevent the killing of teachers, because laïcité will always mean girl students cannot wear a niqab in class and that means that someone’s brother will always be ready to kill a teacher. In France, 49% of teachers have had to censor themselves more than once in discussions of secularism.

Renaud Camus is a racist, on Kendi’s terms. By that measure, so was the antislavery Walt Whitman, and so was W.E.B. Dubois and indeed they have been seen as such. Their actual views on racism and race are quite complicated, like Camus, because they are not simple men.

To understand “the Great Replacement” and its historical emergence, it’s helpful to remember that, in the United States, white northern industrial workers saw the chattel slave-labor system as a threat to their existence, replacing American life with life around a small group of all powerful landowners whose exploitation of non-citizen laborers, black slaves, led to economic competition with the industrial north. Walt Whitman shared these views; he was a poet writing for white Americans. White northern workers, many of whom embraced lay culture attitudes about race that would be controversial today, nonetheless supported the abolition of slavery to destroy the slaveholding interest, not out of benevolent abolitionism. This view survives today in the native citizen working class and their love of Donald Trump, as they oppose illegal immigration by non-citizens as a matter of protecting their class interests, pairing an egalitarian defense of citizen's rights with lay culture attitudes about race that would make polite society uncomfortable, but which are fundamentally distinct from pseudo-scientific racism.

Modern antiracists cannot comprehend historically existing racism or modern lay culture attitudes about race because they have an ahistorical definition of racism that is totalizing. On Whitman, a modern antiracist would write, “How Whitman could have been so prejudiced, and yet so effective in conveying an egalitarian and antiracist sensibility in his poetry, is a puzzle yet to be adequately addressed.” I laugh; it has been addressed a thousand times before. It was addressed this past November when Donald Trump was elected by a coalition of multiracial working class people alongside traditional republican voters that didn’t care at all about his comments about immigrants because they cared more about defending the interests of citizens against non-citizens. American egalitarianism is not a pretty or simple tradition. Another interesting parallel to our modern crisis is that the U.S. Constitution uses “migration” and “importation” together. A ban on the trans-Atlantic slave trade was anti-migration.

“The Great Replacement” is the native European term for how they experience mass migration. In 1695, Sweden lost 10% of its population to “The Great Famine.” If a change in population of 10% is worthy of a name, then it’s not inappropriate to call the current change process in Europe the Great Replacement. The Great Replacement is the term to describe the fact that in 25 years, nearly a tenth of Sweden’s population became Muslim. This is not called “The Great Conversion” because people converted; it is called “The Great Replacement” because aging Swedes were replaced with poor Muslims to stabilize the economy. The Great Replacement describes that, as Pew has projected, Sweden could become “31% Muslim in the high scenario by 2050, compared with 21% in the medium scenario.” There must be a name for this process, this massive change in people. “The Great Replacement” is said like one might say the Great Terror, the Great War—an event that happened with parties to it but was itself something more than the sum of its parts. Sweden was once a model nation with world-class healthcare and gender equality, two core socialist values. Today, Sweden is wracked by gang violence mostly as a result of this movement of people. This led the state to aggressively pursue remigration through legal and financial reforms. The problem of gang violence in Sweden is not 100% the result of mass migration; nevertheless, a well-known gang leader is named Ismail Abdo. The Sopranos has a running joke where Tony Soprano and Silvio use accusations of anti-Italian discrimination to deflect from mob violence.

Renaud Camus is called dangerous for demanding remigration, even though remigration is already happening. Remigration is mass deportations, remigration is financial incentives, remigration is revoking citizenship for threats to the state. Like Renaud Camus’ Great Replacement, Renaud Camus’ remigration, decolonization, is already a fact.

Camus’ views are not so different from those of Cardinal Sarah, a Cardinal in the Catholic Church from Guinea, whose statements about mass migration as an invasion are different from those of Renaud Camus. He represents the old Africans in Africa, who lament that their young people leave, because this only furthers African decline and post-colonial dependence on Europe. 

Being able to understand Renaud Camus is important. For all the talk of the far-right, of white supremacy, of fascism, one must remember that he is a writer who keeps a journal and records his observations. The Great Replacement is his observation.

The socialist left is repeating the Mazzini mistake, focusing on the 21st-century Paris commune, Palestine, even as a second Risorgimento has been born in Europe and the United States, even as a second great debate over non-citizen labor commences, and even as assimilation fails.

Remember, thou hast made me more powerful than thyself

Our cultural conversation in the United States has become dominated by hustle-grindset, moral grandstanding, conspiracy, and simplicity. I was recently reminded of this when watching Pete Buttigieg on Flagrant. When discussing the government research with the boys, Pete used the Internet as an example of “basic research” the government does and the private sector does not to explain why government research matters.

The problem is that Pete lied to Andrew Schulz.

The government did not invent the Internet for “basic research” because a for-profit company would not. No government labs are doing “basic research” because we don’t know if they will have a return on investment. There are government labs all over the nation solving specific problems that matter for society. The Internet’s wireless communication was invented to allow communication during a nuclear war. Another, recently mocked by Elon Musk, is the famous “shrimps on a treadmill” story. The United States government gave a scientist money to build a treadmill for a shrimp that cost about $50. This was to test how coastal life, vital to the American South, would respond to disease. Elon lied to his fans.

The conversation with Pete concluded that the government’s job is to provide public goods. But Pete still lied, as did Elon. We funded the Internet for national security, not for basic research. We put the shrimp on treadmills to save Cajun culture, not for fraud.

And Camus calls himself a racist using the terms of Ibram X. Kendi, not the terms of David Duke.

Our public conversation is not served by simplification and obfuscation. Camus calls himself a racist as an incendiary attack on mainstream society. People relate to what he says. In any bar in America, you can hear someone say, “Everything is racist nowadays” without them reading Renaud Camus.

Renaud Camus was made a racist because society redefined racism in a way that emboldened actual racists by diluting the term’s significance, made not-racist people actual racists through the blowback to antiracism education, and made not-racist people racist by defining almost everything as racist. We should take the time to understand him. If you can understand Renaud Camus, you can understand everything right-wing much better.

If we do not take the time to understand Renaud Camus, we might understand the Internet as “basic research,” we might think putting “shrimp on treadmills” is dumb, we might ignore the significant cultural impact of antiracism, we might never learn why the European right opposes surrogacy. Understanding takes an open mind, patience, and a willingness to learn and listen. Understanding requires curiosity about why things that sound strange and incendiary may not be.

Most journalists and media talk down to people. They do not uplift people and teach them more about the world. They do not explain the Internet, they do not explain Renaud Camus, and they do not explain the shrimp on the treadmills. They talk about Renaud Camus without listening to him, they talk about shrimp without listening to the scientist who designed the test, they talk about the Internet without listening to historians of computer technology. In a world where there is so much not worth listening to, I relate to this instinct. But as important as it is to know what is worth ignoring, it is also important to know what to not ignore. Writers like Jacob Furedi and public figures like Pete Buttigieg and Elon Musk make us dumber by simplifying our world. They infantilize us.

You open Furedi’s article in The Dispatch and know within five seconds know what he wants you to do.

Fortunately, dear reader, The Meteor is here for you.

And I will tell you that if you are on the left, you have lost to Renaud Camus. The monster in the wild has won. He has beaten you, and he beat you without you knowing. He will beat you for decades even after he is dead, because there is now a generation of Europeans and Americans who are much closer to Renaud Camus than they are to you. He will beat you again on June 24th, 2025, because Zohran will lose. After all, the actual multiracial working class believes that Zohran’s multiracial working class is not them, and Renaud Camus has already told you that. He beat you, because you think it is impolite to notice that the multiracial working class, a class of blue-collar citizen-laborers, does not benefit from a multiracial class of non-citizen laborers. They know that, so they vote against you. You stare with eyes wide and stupid and ask why they are racist.

He beat you because when they said mass migration was good for the economy, hundreds of millions of people patiently waited and saw themselves become poorer. When they said Walt Whitman was racist, hundreds of millions nodded along, each in their way thinking privately of something they knew was not racist yesterday that had suddenly become racist today. In a valiant defense of the freedom to think, the socialists said, “All eyes on Palestine.”

And they chased you into the political wilderness.  

Yes, people do not support the war in Palestine. But people also do not support mass migration and antiracism, both of which affect them more. So, they chased you and not the felon into the wild. You laughed at him when he said they ate the cats and dogs. You think people liked that because they have some dark evil inside them. But you failed to realize there was something of Leaves of Grass and Moby Dick in that impossible, panicked statement. That thing is that American culture has always paired rude lay culture attitudes about race, sex, and religion, with resentment, humor, and egalitarianism. Trump tapped into real American culture, the liberating lack of American respect for polite society, the total embrace of impossible ideas, and the utter conviction that this land is your home to enter justified. The left-liberal response was to spit out tea in shock.

Left-realism does not mean agreeing with every single right-wing opinion on earth. Left-realism does mean understanding that for hundreds of millions of people in Western nations, they are essentially anti-replacist. They are pro-nation but mostly not nationalist; racist by Kendi’s terms but not actually racist; anti-managerial but not anti-government; reasonably for de-growth (and reasonably for growth) and reasonably for ecology; rationally against mass migration but not irrationally tricked by the rich into hating foreigners. They have views motivated by a rational and cogent understanding of the world. So often, the left reduces populism to boredom, evil, or stupidity.

I do not like saying about a public figure, “How can you criticize him if you haven’t read his books?” because so often when “public figures” and their fans insist we read their books, like Vivek Ramaswamy, they are asking us to waste our time reading a ghostwritten book at the “4th grade reading level.” Of course, we refuse to be infantilized more in a society that is so infantilizing.

But Renaud Camus is different. He will not infantilize you. He will challenge you. He will tell you about a dialogue of Plato. Camus is a relevant, important, and talented writer of historical significance and he should not be ignored.

And I will tell you: Renaud Camus will enter the canon of Western philosophy. He will go down in history. Like Nietzsche, Mazzini, and Adorno, he will go down in history, and I know this because he is like them—hated, banned, chased by controversy, hated by journalists, dangerous, reactionary, and futuristic in equal parts, negative and visionary, and honest. Vivek will not go down in history. That is the difference, and that is why you should read him. He will not talk down to you. He will demand that you step up to him. What is your view on Plato’s Cratylus?

Renaud Camus is like Theodor Adorno in more ways than one. In his early career, Adorno was dedicated to literary pursuits like operas, but his life changed for good when the Nazis revoked his right to teach. A German Jew, and worse—a Marxist—he had to flee. He would commit himself to dark, negative writing for the rest of his life. Renaud Camus loves Adorno’s quartets.

After WWII, Theodor Adorno began to see holocaust everywhere. He saw fascism in jazz. He would deliver insights that outlasted him, sometimes veering on the absurd. His dedicated readers in the German student movement criticized him for refusing to endorse the revolution they believed he called for. Once, topless young women ambushed him during a speech. He went to his death in the Alps in search of silence, chased from Germany by leftist students and controversy to the still mountains. He sought the quietude that is today considered a warning sign of fascism. Ironically, actual fascist music—the screaming car horns of the Italian futurists—is now taken for granted to be the music of city life, hate of which is taken as a sign of hidden fascist tendencies. The meaning of fascism is different—the meaning has been replaced.

Love of silence, of which Adorno died in pursuit, is now called fascist. That is why you should ignore anyone who tells you Renaud Camus is a fascist. Those who believe they understand fascism the most and are the most ardent opponents of fascism would have found Theodor Adorno to be unbearably in love with silence and classical music. If he were alive today, they would treat Adorno like Renaud Camus. They would have chased one of our greatest writers into the hills when he told them he was considering a trip to Israel. In fact, they did, in 1969.

Adorno believed that jazz was doomed to die as early as 1933. He believed jazz was emasculating, simplistic, and has said embarrassing things about jazz musicians. If I told him I loved jazzy Japanese lo-fi, Adorno would give me a thousand-yard stare.

Adorno became more open to Israel as time went on. Listening to his students sing, “hang the professors,” drove Adorno towards Israel, closer to Jewish mysticism, and further from the young left. Some of his most beautiful writing was born in dialogue with Gershom Scholem.

If Renaud Camus were truly a racist, white supremacist, or fascist, he would say so. There is no harm in doing so today. But he talks about the etymology of race, not phrenology. He speaks of replacism as a capitalist phenomenon, building on Baudrillard’s simulacra and simulation, which is the result of a vision of the human being as a spare part, that does not value culture, the particularities of time and place, of nations, traditions, or literature. I always found it odd that the European right was against surrogacy. Renaud Camus told me why: the European right is antireplacist.

He is so honest that if he were a white supremacist, he would have written a book about it called Why I Am a White Supremacist. But he did not. He wrote On Meaning, and he called the 63.3 million foreign-born residents of Europe colonizers, speaking of them as one would speak of Elon’s hypothetical colony on Mars, of a group of people from one place moved somewhere else where they are alien and do not belong.

Reading great writers is not about handing them your heart and mind. You read great writers because great writers are men and women of great genius and absurdity. Because they are often popular and important, and understanding them, even if you find their views deplorable, means you can better understand the world.

Whereas Adorno was a communist, Camus was made by the times in which he lives a reactionary, though on religion, sex, homosexuality, women’s rights, the environment, and economics, he remains a humanist and ecologist. The story of Renaud Camus is in this way the story of hundreds of millions of people in the United States and Europe, who—in quiet revolt against the new culture of high liberalism, the culture of corporate art and Ibram X. Kendi—reveled in their banishment, because to be banished was to live with the monster in the glaciers, which nonetheless was felt to be a more human animal than those in the village below.

The political ideologies of the 20th century: liberalism, socialism, conservatism, and the reactionary tradition, were developed to regulate and distribute political power in a nation-state. No wonder politics has become silly, mixed up in our times of mass migration.  In modern Japan, the categories “liberal,” “conservative,” and “socialist” mean little. The state is governed by a duopoly of neo-imperialist militarists allied with Buddhist pacifists. Postwar life permanently warped the nature of Japan, as the Global War on Terror and mass migration have similarly warped our political life. As we have returned to the 19th century of great power conflict and imperialism, we have returned to the 19th century life of politics—an era of abnormality and confusion.

Those who oppose mass migration sound like Adorno, the Marxists sound like Edward Said, the liberals sound like Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump sounds like Mao. It is as if we are playing a game of musical chairs. The vast change that we have experienced has warped traditional political categories, worsened by the ever-tighter constraints enforced by states and parties alike on political views and speech. In this context, the suppression of Renaud Camus is as toxic as the requirement to not boycott Israel. Suppression warps political discourse and radicalizes people further.

Like Adorno’s slow move towards Israel after witnessing the chaos of the student left, Camus’ move to the right for Israel and against what he calls Arab colonization is the result of two decades of Islamist terrorism in Europe. Both philosophers adopted more positive views on Israel as a result of the real violence and chaos of European political life. Whereas Adorno slowly embraced mysticism, Camus has embraced Deus Vult, along with our Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, whom I profiled here.

Camus wants to prevent harm to France, harm like cantonization and creolization, for the sake of French culture. For Camus, culture is our inheritance—we matter because we are part of a culture and a story. After all, we have inherited something. To speak of “the French” is to call forth friendly ghosts. Without religion, culture provides us with meaning, an origin, and a destination. He fears that “the French” will be changed in a way no different from being destroyed. He fears that Rousseau and Proust will be cantonized, creolized, securitized, replaced. No longer will they be philosophers to challenge students, who are the best of the nation you belong to, but men to be taught carefully at risk of offending a student from Ingushetia, Russia, because your student might behead you. Of course, it is not Rousseau that is at stake as much as the French social contract.

10% or 5%, it does not matter for Renaud Camus. Like metal detectors at the airport, one incident is enough to change the entirety of a nation. To curb stabbing deaths in the UK, Idris Elba has called for national innovation, which means removing the point of kitchen knives. What liberals ignore about mass migration is the real way that society is frequently asked to change to accommodate a small number of people. What the left ignores is that this is happening. At least the right dares to condemn the replacement of the sharp edges of life with dull edges.

If French socialists once called for us to “remove the cop in our heads,” Renaud Camus calls for you to remove the metal detector from your classroom, to fight against there being one, because to surrender the classroom to the metal detector is to kill teaching in a classroom. It is to make Foucault’s nightmare of indistinguishable schools, prisons, and hospitals real, by making the classroom a prison, the teacher’s desk an operating table, and the doorway to learning an airport screening facility. And no, this is not happening because people are psychologically fascist, which is a popular idea on the left; it is happening because there are actual criminals in the classroom, from Ingushetia, Russia, and they have cut off someone’s head.

Renaud Camus is not a fascist or white supremacist; he is, by the terms of Kendi and modern anti-racism, a racist, and we should expend the same energy learning what those terms are as we may have expended learning what Ibram X. Kendi meant when he wrote Antiracist Baby. Quite literally, Antiracist Baby was replacement literature for “Laura Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie series or Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” Do you know why the right cared so much about Antiracist Baby? It is because they are antireplacists. We should give Camus the same opportunity to explain that we gave Kendi, who was afforded the opportunity to propose a constitutional amendment by Politico.

Centrist Emmanuel Macron has worked to prevent American antiracist ideas from entering French society because their Islamo-leftist tendencies are destabilizing. “Islamo-leftist” is a word any serious American should know, because it is important in France today, and what is important in French usually ends up being important in English.

Unlike Kendi, Renaud Camus is a serious writer of international political significance and a philosopher in the tradition of the best Western intellectuals, following in the footsteps of giants like Adorno, Baudrillard, and Heidegger.

He is keeping alive a 2,500-year-old dialogue on words and meaning that began with Plato's Cratylus and has refused to compromise his belief in the right answer, no matter the cost. He has been removed from society, prevented from entering countries, and banished by his publishers because he believes he knows the right answer to a 2,500-year-old debate.

The New York Times has said that Renaud Camus, in his little castle, has “…the perspective of a novelist and aesthete without recognition of real-world consequences.” The famed Greek philosopher Diogenes was banished in controversy for a coinage scandal and was said to live in an ancient barrel. After receiving applause for defining man as a featherless biped, Plato was rudely interrupted by Diogenes, who brought into the lecture hall a rooster plucked clean of all of its feathers. Diogenes then announced, "Here is Plato's man."

Diogenes shared Camus’ disregard for reputation. Both men asked, “What is a man?” to people who thought they had an answer. Philosopher hermits are supposed to be equally cherished and reviled. They pluck feathers that people would prefer remain unplucked, including feathers of my own. If Renaud Camus has no care for real-world consequences, why does he care so much about the language that we use?

A joke on the right is that liberals have no theory of mind for conservatives. This is true. Renaud Camus knows the real-world consequences of language, and he opposes them. The NYT may not like that, but it is not up to the NYT to decide. It is up to the people. 44% of French people see validity in the Great Replacement, and 66% fear the possibility, while The Southern Poverty Law Center has claimed 7 of 10 Republicans believe an American variant of the Great Replacement. Antireplacism is in everything from opposition to transsexuality and surrogacy, to viewing the judicial system as a foreign colonial imposition.

The right’s intellectuals are few, but they have thoughts on Plato's Cratylus. They believe that words have historical meaning, not relative meaning, and for them, that is the first brick of many bricks that built their victory. They are winning and have little internal opposition, except for Vivek Ramaswamy. Change has come so fast that now Vivek is a moderate on national identity for the American right. That is the depth of Renaud Camus’ victory. That is how fast the Cratylian conquest of the American right happened. Nativism did not take over by accident.

As I said, I am defending Renaud Camus because I am defending your right to know how and why you were beaten.

The acceptance or rejection of mass migration in the West came to hinge upon one man’s interpretation of a dialogue of Plato in a book in French called Du Sens, On Meaning, that has never been translated into English, but which has an idea so simple that anyone can understand it: words have historical meaning, therefore, nationality is more than a piece of paper. It is not so much that the world hinged on Renaud Camus, but actually, that the world hinged on hundreds of millions of people, who each, in their way, agreed with Renaud Camus. Maybe they found a man saying they are a woman as absurd as Renaud Camus found a woman in a niqab saying she was French. It could have happened in a thousand ways, but the result was the same. The right became fundamentally antireplacist. That is why they beat you.

The Nation called Renaud Camus kitsch and insignificant.

These bleak skies I hail

Of everything that Renaud Camus has ever written, less than half of one percent has been officially translated into English. The small sliver of his total work that has been translated is almost solely composed of his politically incendiary work. Reading Camus today is like reading The Communist Manifesto in 1871 in English, in the early days of socialism, when revolution, violent revolt, and new ideas were in vicious contestation. Of course, that is a dangerous thing to do.

Critics allege that Renaud Camus wants violence. In April 2014, Camus was fined €4,000 for incitement to racial hatred after he referred to Muslims acting as hooligans as their soldiers, “as the armed wing of their conquest.” [an earlier version of this article misquoted Mr. Renaud Camus] By American standards, his speech would not have made the morning news. In Europe, most violence is done by the far right and Islamists. The attacks by Islamists are deadlier, more frequent, and more common. Since 2016, in the United States, we have had five Islamic terror attacks. In Europe, five attacks happen in six months. This has been going on for more than a decade. There is already a war in Europe, in the same way the Italian police and the Red Brigades were in a war in the 80s.

Renaud Camus has been linked to some right-wing violence. A few shooters have used the “Great Replacement” phrase in their manifestos, and the media have tried to hold Renaud Camus responsible for their actions.  Renaud Camus’ full articulation of his theory of replacism and “Great Replacement” was brought to the English-speaking world just this last year, in 2024. Before that, only the speech, “The Great Replacement,” escaped from French into English and was transmitted into the West not by intellectuals, but by Lauren Southern, Jared Taylor, and Tucker Carlson. The term was changed and transmitted, moving from Renaud Camus’ non-conspiratorial economic explanation of why mass migration is a feature of contemporary hypercapitalism into the online right. It did become racist, not in the new way, but the old way. The Great Replacement, ironically, was itself replaced—by exactly the people who would have hated Renaud Camus the most for his opposition to antisemitism, for his historical rather than conspiratorial explanation of change, and for his emphasis on the particularities of nations, like France, over meaningless solidarity with a “white race.”

The English-language “Great Replacement” is a historically distinct idea from the continental European idea of Le Grand Remplacement, which 67% of French people believe is not a fantasy, but a fact. The Great Replacement that we know is the Great Replacement of the Charlottesville marchers, but this is not the Le Grand Remplacement of Renaud Camus, which is enormously popular across the continent, including in Italy, Portugal, and Sweden. Le Grand Remplacement is not far right. It is just right-wing. To pretend that, in 2025, the Great Replacement is a fringe and irrelevant conspiracy theory is to ensure that you do not understand continental European or American politics.

When covering European continental politics, English language media rely almost entirely on media resources that have in mind Charlottesville, meaning that continental migration politics are passed through the lens of an American-centric experience of race politics, which is radically different from Europe. The world is not the U.S.A. Indeed, as Renaud Camus has said, the issue is that race and antiracism have become dominated by American ideas that have no relevance to Europe. Macron agrees.

Understanding things correctly and understanding how ideas change in transnational dialogue is important. For example, Joseph Stalin’s idea of dialectical materialism bears little resemblance to Marx’s theory of history. There has been a fringe racist idea of the Great Replacement, and there is also Renaud Camus’ popular idea of Le Grand Remplacement. Learning the latter is much more important than learning the former, because the latter is politically important internationally and is fundamentally distinct. Many who speak of “the Great Replacement” in English have conspiratorial and absurd beliefs and radical politics, but every day they move closer to Renaud Camus and farther from Lauren Southern. Ideas change with time.

Americans do not know what Europe is like, how real rule of Europe from Brussels and Davos is. Americans directly elect presidents, not bound by any international law or norm, for good and ill. Europe is different. While the European Union is considering remigration now, the EU has clashed with different countries over their attempts to pursue anti-migration policies for literally years. The idea of a foreign authority preventing a nation from enacting a tougher migration policy is not a fantasy, but a fact for Europe.

Davos is not a boogeyman. What Davos says and does matters. Davos is quite literally a forum for some of the richest and most influential people on earth to build political consensus with one another. Believing that this affects world politics is no more insane than believing that the New York Stock Exchange, the Democratic National Convention, or the United Nations affect world politics. Davos has advocated for coping with aging populations through mass migration for years.

Instead of developing African nations, Davos believes African populations should move to Europe and Japan and send remittances home. This is not good for Africa or Europe, as relying on a non-citizen labor force brings the cultural challenges with which Renaud Camus is most in touch and has historically resulted in vast strife and violence. Mass migration does not develop Africa. Mass migration lessens the population burden on corrupt African states by reducing the human biomass that must be fed and sustains Europe’s pensions through biomass alone. Renaud Camus is in non-violent revolt against the dehumanizing process of the biomass for GDP trade. Davos is in the Swiss Alps, a five-hour drive from Chamounix. For the World Economic Forum, Chamounix is best suited to be a place of second homes to temporarily rent, not a place for people to live.

The feeling that your government is not your own is becoming normal, as is violence. To lay this at the feet of one man is both convenient and absurd. The 19th century was violent, and we seem to be returning to that in full. In American pop culture, Mangione is a saint.  BLM riots featured enormous property damage, and leftists have tried to assassinate political figures. Some white supremacists have shot up black churches. There was a bombing in Sweden nearly every day in January. 

These are years of fire and milk and plastic batons and transparent backpacks, of the feeling of an overwhelming need for change and of dark knowledge of the blood price of change, and that will not be stopped by pretending that Renaud Camus does not exist.

If you believe Renaud Camus, the unnatural management of humanity as biomass has brought us to these doom-driven years.

When there is low-social trust, when there is nothing that positively unites people, when the legal system has lost legitimacy, when radical political thinkers claim there is no legal method to resist these forces, when voting fails as a method to resist these forces, when there are substantive disagreements between factions with lives at stake, then you will have violence. People will choose to pay the blood price.

My job for many years was understanding war and peace. As part of that job, I went to many post-war places. The most educational was Sarajevo. There, in Sarajevo, all the buildings are still shot up. There are bullet holes in schools. There is wreckage everywhere. The town hall is a library that was burnt down during the war. The building and its surrounding blocks are clean and modern, but the buildings are covered in bullet holes around a block away. Plaster walls are still broken off. The war was thirty years ago, but it looks as if it could have happened yesterday.

I wondered if the bullet holes are kept as a badge of Sarajevo’s pride, or not repaired to bring Serbians shame. Or if the damage is just detritus, that doesn’t mean much to anyone. Or that there are so many gunshots and people are so poor that the damage was impossible to repair. Or if the damage is just there, a stupid finger-bone relic from a past many would like to ignore.

I learned later that there is a term for this in the Balkans: inat, which means to do something as a silent, hateful protest.

The Ottoman Empire’s rule of the Balkans created a situation where the visible possession of wealth was bad for people. If a Serbian Christian were noticeably rich, their wealth would be taken. Even though the Ottomans left, deep suspicion, low social trust, and paranoia about self-protection remained. After the breakup of Yugoslavia, especially in Bosnia-Herzegovina, this tendency became even more heightened because of the inter-religious and ethnic violence.

Walking around Sarajevo today, you might step inside a door that is labeled something like “Chess Club” and instead find one of the most beautiful and cozy restaurants you’ve ever been to, where a Bosnian-Muslim grandfather will make you a delicious stew, and by candlelight, you’ll drink dry red wine and smoke cigarettes.

Inat is when you hide wealth, beauty, and trust behind a façade of garbage and litter. Inat is when you litter out of spite. Inat is when the public square is a hidden courtyard because the public square is dangerous. Inat is when you do not have an open mind because there's a shooter on the hill. Inat is when you know there are people around you willing to pay the blood price. Inat is when you know it takes just one bad day and there's a group out there that's having lots of bad days.

In low-trust societies, a tendency towards the careful cultivation of appearances emerges. In the UK, this means leaving your Rolex at home. In Washington, D.C., this means don’t ever wear a Canada Goose jacket on the metro. Or, if you are an intellectual or a writer, don’t ever give a sign to anyone that you talk to bad people. Or, if you are an actual racist, only share that in your MAGA group chats on Discord or Signal. Or, if you go to CVS, this means shampoo is behind lock and key. The more inat we have, the less safe we are and the stupider we become. Inat is the silent, spiteful fragmentation of society, the process of making a trash heap of the public square. The devolution of social relationships and trust is not good.

Societies that are deeply ethnically split and have low social trust are poor, do not develop, and do not have the functioning social welfare or universal healthcare systems that I want my society to have. Mass migration produces ethnic division and low social trust, produces poverty and inat. Fragmentation, not assimilation, is the result of mass migration. The idea that we can push for stronger unions in this society is absurd. Union workers know that. They went for Trump. Why trust your union when CVS does not trust you? Why trust the liberals on healthcare when assimilation did not happen? Why trust when you have inat?

How do we expect a left led by AOC, who said of immigration, “What problem?” to accomplish the difficult task of winning a popular democratic mandate to establish a universal healthcare system—a highly complicated task of the state—when the fundamental tasks of the state: the securing of a border, retaining the monopoly of force within your borders, upholding the rule of law, assimilating immigrants—have become unimportant? Why vote for Bernie when you cannot wear a certain jacket on the train? Inat is the enemy of progress, yet people seem upset if you mention that CVS shampoo has a security system.

Every single ethnic group in American society supports deportations. There are degrees of difference. Many people support immigration; they do not support illegal immigration or mass migration and extensive protections for criminals. The Great Replacement is not a racial idea, and it is not an anti-immigration idea. Renaud Camus is fine with individuals' immigration to new societies, given that they assimilate and are few in number. The problem is the movement of peoples to new societies, who move together in large numbers, who do not assimilate but create ethnic cantons and enclaves, and who then clash with the locals and commit crime. This, plus labor competition, moves everything right.

Nativism in America is on the rise; that is, multi-racial nativism represented on the left by recent clashes between the black descendants of slaves in California who are seeking preferential admissions and Asian Americans, and on the right by Sam Hyde. If we are to follow the French path, the future of the American right is nativism, the future of the American left is creolization and cantonization. Nativism is the logical, mechanical result of mass migration, so is cantonization and creolization. Ignoring this is not going to make it go away.

if you will, destroy the work of your hands

For Theodor Adorno, in the slam of a car door, one could hear holocaust—the industrial mechanics of mass death.  For Camus, in the society of first names, you can hear the Great Replacement—the artificial closeness of people, who must be artificially close, because they cannot develop deep relationships with their neighbors, because they cannot afford to live in the same place for a long time. Do you call your landlord by their first name? Spiderman did not. In 2004.

Some days, I think Adorno was stupid, thinking that you can hear fascism in the slam of a car door. Some days, I fear that Camus is. How paranoid do you have to be to think that you can hear the Great Replacement in the society of first names? Somedays I think that I am a fool to believe that you can hear sniper fire over Sarajevo when you go to CVS and the shampoo is behind a lock.

Then, the people who call me naive for caring about locks at CVS also tell me, with eyes wide and stupid, that I am a fascist for caring about the lock. I do not believe them because they also told me that fascism is the same thing as desiring silence, but I am a historian, so I know what Adorno died looking for.

The holocaust actually did happen. In a generation, European demographics were actually altered in a way none in 1990 would have foreseen. Desiring silence is not actually fascist. Cratylus actually had a point, maybe. There actually was sniper fire over Sarajevo. Sweden actually had a bombing almost every day in January. Renaud Camus was really considered too dangerous, despite being 78, to enter Britain.  Denmark’s socialists actually did keep winning. Davos actually is a real place. Chamounix is actually fighting against global capitalism. Americans have actually had to train their replacements. Replacism is actually a useful word. Shampoo is actually behind a lock and key. Americans actually do understand European politics solely through the lens of Charlottesville.

In the 21st century, people actually believed that radical philosophy would survive in the university system. Enrollment was higher than ever after all.

People actually believed that in their own time, when a philosopher was suppressed and banished, that this was the height of righteousness; while actually also believing that every other time in history that a philosopher was suppressed, that it was actually barbaric, and the height of ignorance.

The secret gardens of Sarajevo were actually beautiful. They were actually scavenged for Alfalfa to eat when people began to starve. They were a haven when the snipers came. The public square was a shooting gallery. Society was a series of battlegrounds, of cantons and courtyards, stretching on forever.

The idea that caring about this is stupid, paranoid, naive, is actually stupid, paranoid, and naive.

Above the village of Chamounix, there actually is a monster.

This is a companion article to my interview with Renaud Camus.

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