‘Don’t be evil’ may be dead, but ‘don’t be Frankenstein’ is alive



Some still remember when Google defined itself by a simple motto: “Don’t be evil.” When Google reorganized under Alphabet in 2015, the new parent company adopted the somehow less confidence-inspiring, “Do the right thing.” Another phrase with a lower bar also made the rounds — “to organize the world’s information” — but rest assured, that was never the motto. It was simply ... uh ... the mission statement.

Anyway ...

The AI doomers’ strange brand of apocalypticism is: Let’s create an evil god so we can save the world from it.

It took until this week for some of the most powerful voices in tech policy to circle back explicitly to a prime directive: Avoid hellacious acts. For that, thank the AI doomers, whose strange brand of apocalypticism — let’s create an evil god so we can save the world from it — finally breached technology insider-dom and splashed across the political timeline.

The high-stakes soap opera has, as usual, deeper currents than the news feed can convey. But the key development is that the White House and its allies moved at warp speed to establish a few basic touchstones that take us back to the good old days of not being evil.

Trump has received most of the attention for memeing his stern-looking self above the caption “Americanism, Not Effective Altruism!” But his vice president captured the matter in a single line that’s tough to beat. “If you’re building Frankenstein,” he said, “stop!"

Note the emphasis. Trying to build an evil god — for instance, one with a statistically nonzero chance of wiping out the human race — is fortunately still considered axiomatically evil. But JD Vance’s reference underscores that trying to build a "new man," even with the best of intentions, is also evil.

According to the doomers, the best way to save the world from evils they might create is for the rest of us to give them some form of planetary governing control. Vance endorsed a more commonsense approach: The best way to spare the world from evils you’re responsible for is to ... not do them in the first place.

RELATED: Silicon Valley is building a god in its own image

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The vice president may, like every one of his predecessors in living memory, carry a pronounced partisan identity. But his folksy-clever line echoes in anti-doomer rhetoric now blaring from the industry’s rooftops. Microsoft, of all places, recently published its own rulebook for what not to build. On X, Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman promoted the new “Humanist AI Code of Conduct,” which insists AI “is not conscious and should not be designed to imitate consciousness. It should,” Microsoft avows, “be engineered to avoid representing as though it has feelings, subjective preferences, or intrinsic motivation.”

Microsoft also flatly states: “We reject the pursuit of legal personhood, or the idea that models might deserve welfare, or be entitled to rights.” No Frankensteins here!

Or rather, no Frankenstein’s monsters — which means no Dr. Frankensteins running amok in the lab.

At Palantir, outspoken CTO Shyam Sankar made a similar point in a 2025 interview. “I think the secularists in Silicon Valley are filling the God-shaped hole in their heart with AGI,” Sankar said.

“The people who have religion are the most skeptical” of the doomers’ build-a-god-and-save-the-world-from-it thesis — which, yes, does itself resemble an inverted religion. For “the people who are kind of transhumanists,” Sankar concluded, “it becomes what they wish were true.”

Even Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, not known for Bible-thumping, recently struck an economic note with more than a whiff of spirituality.

“If we’re not confident about the safety of the products, like all companies ... if you build a product or a service and you’re not confident in its functionality, capability, or safety, then don’t release it,” he said. "And so that’s a very obvious thing to do. You pace yourself until you are confident you’re releasing something that the market would appreciate. The market forces are already there. We don’t need any new laws. We don’t need new regulations.”

RELATED: Poll: Most think AI could do this to humanity — but don't agree on what to do about it

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Translation: Hear a little voice in your head, or more likely, your heart? Whispering, “No, this product is bad”? Don’t take it to market.

Turns out, you can just not do things!

Of course, Huang’s logic is a bit deceptive. We would like to believe the market will punish bad people for taking bad things to market, but that is not always how it works. As we speak, present-day Dr. Frankensteins are transplanting human brain organoids into mice engineered to lack most of their cerebral cortex, allowing the human tissue to occupy much of the vacant space and wire into the animals’ nervous systems.

No, doctors! Bad! Evil! Don’t!

Except they are. In the end, it matters that people examine their own hearts for evil before looking elsewhere and pointing fingers. But spiritual insistence alone will not keep society on the rails. It is not enough to scowl at our mad doctors, however good their intentions, as their creations erode the boundaries around our sacred human bodies and being — supercomputers or no.

The Iran Deal’s Surprising Role in End Times Prophecy | Mark Hitchcock | Ep 1365
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The Iran Deal’s Surprising Role in End Times Prophecy | Mark Hitchcock | Ep 1365

Don’t let ‘Disclosure Day’ doom you to spiritual death by discourse



Steven Spielberg this week will drop “Disclosure Day,” his long-awaited engagement-bait alien movie. On cue, the internet is abuzz — with soyfacing and fangirling, dunking and slop farming, chin-stroking and opining, opining, opining. Somehow, therefore, more, but also dramatically less, needs to be said.

I was early to the disclosure discourse. Five years ago, as the topic began to heat up in earnest, I tried to get ahead of the conversation by focusing on the religious dimension. Back then, that wasn’t center stage. The alien thing was still mostly Joe Rogan- and "X-Files"-coded, disclosure a cause célèbre for freedom-minded individualists sure that the evil secret government was hiding the TRUTH that only heroically skeptical intellectual rebels could force to come to light.

In the coming age, many — even believers — will be deceived.

To me, that felt incomplete. At best. The American experience with “alien encounters,” I underscored, had always been depicted and acculturated religiously — not just as a matter of “having a religious experience,” good or bad, but of actual theology.

Its manifestation as popular culture belied not secular origins but spiritual ones: When your religious belief is that “organized religion” is bad and the only authority you can really trust is your own, you’ll see what’s at stake in the alien debate as the ultimate nature of the universe, one where perhaps everything we thought we ever knew about God and our relation to Him could be completely debunked.

The desire to overthrow the authority or even the existence of the unbroken Christian church, that is, doesn’t stem fundamentally from secular principles. It actually stems from a desire to actualize a much different, ostensibly higher or ultimate, spiritual order.

Among us

That is why in 2021 I emphasized that aliens are so often interpreted as proof that Christianity is not the truth that will save us — that the Christian era is over, Christianity is defunct, a new religion is not only “needed now” but has arrived, whether we like it or not. “The invaders are here,” I summed up the claim, “and they impose on us the responsibility of accepting a new age from which there is no turning back. Humans are but one organism, a weak and inferior one, whose only hope of salvation is in satisfying whatever it is the aliens herald and demand.”

I went on to push back on this master narrative by way of Father (perhaps soon to be Saint) Seraphim Rose. He got ahead of the disclosure discourse decades ago, citing key scholars who showed the overwhelming pattern among “alien encounters” is of experiences impossible to distinguish from encounters over the millennia with spiritual entities — specifically fallen angels. Demons, in other words.

“Aliens,” Rose explained, do not behave like angels, who appear as holy messengers cautioning people at once to not be afraid. Instead, like demons, they zoom around at will, produce terrifying illusions, and violate and persecute victims in their bodies and minds.

Nevertheless, as anyone knows who grew up in the spiritual anarchy of the 1980s — where the lines blurred dangerously between “progressive” Christianity, New Age cults, and straight-up demonic occultism — there was already back then a huge and growing swath of alien believers who nursed a kind of syncretism with Christianity or some kind of “biblical” religion.

That was what troubled Rose the most. Today, many people speak of the Antichrist and the apocalypse, topics very close to Christ’s warning that in the coming age, many — even believers — will be deceived that He has returned or the end is nigh.

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Yes, millions of people may now be catching up to what counted as the frontier of the disclosure debate in 2021. X is full of eager, Spielberg-fueled arguments over whether aliens are compatible with Christianity, with both sides producing scripture, doctrine, lore, and receipts in the now-familiar style of the “global public square,” where every question is debated until it has been pulverized.

Even alien-skeptical Christians, or those aligned with Michael S. Heiser-style caution, can find serious authorities noting that the cosmos exceeds human comprehension. The existence of other rational created beings somewhere in that vastness cannot simply be ruled out.

But that is precisely the point. Some matters are best left to God. The human mind can crack them open with curiosity, only to find itself wandering a vast mental labyrinth — and once there, easy prey for delusion, pride, and disbelief.

Take, for one example making the rounds today, the question of whether He has perfect knowledge of all possible counterfactuals — a question that first made the rounds centuries ago thanks to Luis de Molina, a Jesuit theologian who touched off a furious and protracted round of discourse and debate, an effusion of energy that might well have been better spent in other ways.

What other ways? Well, here is where the new frontier of the disclosure debate appears.

Haunted halls

In theaters right now is a film called “Backrooms.” It’s close to being the opposite of “Disclosure Day,” at least in the sense that “Backrooms” is about the danger, and ultimately the tragic horror, of today’s deepening temptation to understand on our own terms the things that confuse and weaken us the most — things of our own flawed and falsely independent mental constructs.

Today the foremost of these false realities — what the ancient monks called logismoi — is the creepy combination of depression and pride that makes people curious to know “for themselves” what is really good and what is really evil.

Rather than trusting God on this matter or trusting God to sort it out and seeking refuge in humble self-denial of what even secular medicine calls the call of the void, we are all being carried along on a massive wave of belief that we somehow must subject all things to intellectual processing in order for us to function.

Increasingly, we treat human beings as if our only real function is intellectual processing. Everything becomes reducible to intelligence, or optimized as an operation of intelligence. Intelligence becomes the only thing that matters because it is treated as the only thing that truly exists. Everything else — the body, the soul, love, worship, suffering, memory, family, place — becomes merely an expression or construct of intelligence.

Under this view, nothing remains for us to do except intellectualize everything. We keep refining thought, language, and computation until we produce an intelligence so pure and complete that it no longer needs the rest of the human person at all, except perhaps for a time as fuel.

RELATED: ‘Backrooms’ is horror for a self-justifying age

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This insane belief has become compelling because it fits the modern mind. It is becoming a new “organized religion,” even among people who most loudly hate organized religion. We entered the current stage of technological development already convinced that spiritual truth could be uncovered, created, or replaced through endless discourse: talking, writing, printing, disseminating, propagandizing, discussing, debating, and filling the world with more and more words.

Eventually, we looked around and saw only language. Not merely spoken language, but language as thought itself. Reality had been swallowed by interpretation. And once everything became words, it was only a matter of time before we mistook the processing of words for the fullness of being human.

In 1962, Beat Generation drug hellion William S. Burroughs, author of “Junkie” and “Queer,” wrote that language is a virus from outer space — in other words, an alien. Any Christian must know that, in reality, the Word, the Logos, is the opposite of a deadly xenomorph. But severed from the divine Word, the merely human word swiftly becomes something alien, monstrous, devouring. (“Time to leave the Word-God behind,” Burroughs wrote in his final doped-up years.)

That is why the frontier of the disclosure debate now expands from the recognition that being sucked into the disclosure debate, by the “Disclosure Day” debate and all the alien debates, is a labyrinth with a minotaur inside our own delusional creation. This is the not-too-cryptic message of “Backrooms,” a message most strongly conveyed in the film by what’s also the cure for our servile and self-destructive yapocracy: silence. Holy silence.

Inside the mind of a Catholic exorcist: Fr. Chad Ripperger talks shop with Shawn Ryan



Former U.S. Navy SEAL Shawn Ryan routinely has warriors on his podcast who have battled men using modern weaponry. Last week, he spoke to a warrior who battles demons using timeless weaponry: Christ's name, prayer, and the authority of his vocation.

Over the course of his four-hour conversation with Ryan, Fr. Chad Ripperger — a Thomistic philosopher, psychologist, and founder of the Doloran Fathers — shared insights drawn from years serving as a Catholic exorcist in the Archdiocese of Denver, as well as from his study of church history and Christian theology.

In addition to discussing potential signs of the Antichrist's imminence and the possibility that extraterrestrials might be the trappings of a demonic psy-op, Fr. Ripperger explained the different types of diabolic influence and described how the Church's major exorcism rite is carried out.

Varieties of diabolic influence

Fr. Ripperger — who stressed that he had "no intention of being an exorcist" and only does it out of obedience — identified several forms of diabolic influence, beginning with infestation, "where they infest houses or locations, inanimate objects, animals."

'The demon's not necessarily in the driver's seat all the time.'

The exorcist priest turned to Scripture for an example of animal infestation, referencing the ruination of pigs by the evil spirits cast out by Christ from the demoniac in Gergesa.

Fr. Ripperger suggested that infestations are often the localized byproduct of sin: "It's because somebody has done something particularly evil in a location and, as a result, the demons have gotten their foot in the door there."

Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images

While occult activity can grease the way for an infestation, the exorcist said the sins demons tend to "gravitate toward the most — because they're easiest to get human beings to fall into — are the sins against the Sixth Commandment like fornication, masturbation, pornography, those types of things."

Another form of diabolic influence — "the primary way" and a universal challenge — is ordinary temptation, where demons plant notions "in our imaginations," skew perspectives, and manipulate emotions. Though relatively subtle, Fr. Ripperger noted that this form of influence can still be destructive, particularly within relationships and families.

Diabolic obsession is another variety in which demons "attack our interior faculties, specifically the imagination and emotions again — but unlike ordinary temptation, this is extraordinary, where it's very powerful and very strong," capturing the victim's attention and imagination and leaving them with a kind of spiritual "tunnel vision."

While someone experiencing diabolic obsession may initially have periods of lucidity, Fr. Ripperger said those moments of reprieve can diminish over time if the influence persists. Eventually the victim may capitulate and commit a grave sin at the demon's urging — or possibly even become possessed.

The priest described two kinds of diabolic possession. The first is "perfect possession, where the person has given themselves over to the demon entirely, and then the demon possesses the whole body, and the demon is manifested all the time."

According to Fr. Ripperger, this condition — outward signs of which include malice, mendacity, animus, and destructiveness — is rare. Individuals in such a state rarely seek out priests, since they are not desirous of liberation.

Partial possession, by contrast, refers to a temporary and localized possession of part of the body where "the demon's not necessarily in the driver's seat all the time."

The exorcism rite

When asked about the process of conducting an exorcism, Fr. Ripperger said the approach is structured, though the particulars vary depending on what is known about the individual, whether they have had prior encounters with dark forces, and what stage of diabolic influence they appear to be in.

"So in many cases, if the person who's possessed can tolerate it, we'll actually offer Mass so that the person can receive Holy Communion, which then weakens the demon significantly," he said, noting that confession is encouraged beforehand.

After Mass but before the exorcism ritual begins in earnest, a series of prayers are recited "to provide everybody protection that's in the room."

"So we do a series of prayers — binding prayers — which bind the demon from being able to do certain things, and then we'll actually start the formal ritual."

The Latin ritual typically begins with the Litany of the Saints. According to Fr. Ripperger, this serves as a kind of diagnostic tool because a demon's reaction to the names of certain saints can reveal clues about "the demon's particular sin" and how best to proceed.

From there, the exorcist alternates between "deprecatory and imprecatory prayer" — the former asking Christ for help and the latter commanding demons directly, ordering the evil spirits to consider specific truths that cause them pain.

The goal, Fr. Ripperger explained, is to allow the demon's pain "to build to where they finally give you what you need to know in order to get them out."

Canon law stipulates that "no one can perform exorcisms legitimately upon the possessed unless he has obtained special and express permission from the local ordinary."

Such permission is granted "only to a presbyter who has piety, knowledge, prudence, and integrity of life."

The Catholic Church also requires that a suspected demoniac undergo "thorough examination including medical, psychological, and psychiatric testing" before being referred to an exorcist.

The Church distinguishes between minor exorcisms — used, for example, in baptismal preparation — and major exorcisms, the rite discussed by Fr. Ripperger, which may only be performed by a bishop or an authorized priest.

Fr. Ripperger told Ryan that "Protestants have a certain degree of efficacy [in exorcisms] by using Christ's name because it has a force of its own."

However, he suggested that certain types of possession require the authority of the Catholic Church and its clergy — authority that traces back to Christ's commissioning of the apostles.

Bad signs and end times

Asked where evil appears to be gaining ground in society, Fr. Ripperger said the forces of darkness have increasingly targeted good families — "families that historically led good lives, were raising their kids properly, very often very religious, doing the things that they're supposed to do."

The priest suggested this "full-blown attack" on previously resilient targets may indicate that demons are emboldened by a worsening moral climate — or that they "know their time is short," possibly because a divine "corrective" is approaching.

'That is not a reference to the Jewish temple.'

Ryan asked whether such developments might signal the approach of the end times.

While acknowledging that "we don't really have any certitude," Fr. Ripperger said several conditions traditionally associated with the Antichrist appear increasingly plausible.

Among them:

  • "A worldwide implosion of people's morality," in which "people just aren't following the laws of God or the natural law in any sense of the term";
  • The emergence of technological and institutional systems — such as unified global financial systems and digital currencies — capable of controlling populations on a mass scale; and
  • Internal crisis within the Catholic Church prior to a future renewal.

Fr. Ripperger also expressed skepticism about the idea that rebuilding a third Jewish temple in Jerusalem is a necessary precursor to the end times. He argued that the Church Fathers consistently held that such a temple would never be rebuilt and that the prophecy often cited in this context has been widely misunderstood.

RELATED: Understanding hell — Part I

Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images

"The difficulty is people tend to misinterpret the Book of Daniel, which says when the abomination of desolation takes its seat in the temple," he said. "What they don't realize is that that is not a reference to the Jewish temple."

Instead, he suggested that the New Covenant superseded the Old Covenant and that the "holy place" referenced in such passages should be understood as the Catholic Church.

'It permanently robbed a person of the possibility of the beatific vision.'

Whatever the signs of the times, Fr. Ripperger emphasized that Christians must remain faithful.

It is critical, he said, that believers "follow Christ regardless of the personal cost."

Demonic psy-op

Former President Barack Obama claimed in an interview last month that aliens are "real."

Although Obama later walked back the remark, President Donald Trump announced he would nevertheless be "directing the Secretary of War, and other relevant Departments and Agencies, to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs)."

Asked about UFOs and extraterrestrials, Fr. Ripperger suggested that some sightings could simply be government experiments — a suspicion reinforced by a 2025 Wall Street Journal report that found the Pentagon had at times disseminated false information about aliens to obscure sensitive weapons programs.

However, he noted that many accounts of alien abductions closely resemble descriptions of demonic encounters.

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Photo by JOSEPH PREZIOSO/AFP via Getty Images

"If you strip the veneer of the alien aspect of it off, then in point of fact what you're dealing with is just — they're just demons," he said.

Fr. Ripperger added that some unidentified anomalous phenomena could also be what he called "diabolic mirage[s]" — supernatural illusions permitted by God in rare circumstances.

Abortion: Demonic empowerment

After Ryan brought up Baphomet — the goat-headed occult figure whose likeness the Satanic Temple adopted as its logo and displayed in a statue in the Iowa Capitol in 2023 — the conversation turned to abortion.

Ryan asked about the demonic interest in child sacrifice.

Fr. Ripperger said demons are empowered by abortion not only because it involves the killing of an innocent but because it denies the child the opportunity for baptism.

"We know of no other means of their salvation other than baptism. ... And so historically, the Church always considered abortion to be such a heinous crime because it permanently robbed a person of the possibility of the beatific vision. This is why the Church considered it so evil," he said.

Obtaining an abortion is an excommunicable offense in the Catholic Church.

The priest argued that demons "are so wed to" the widespread practice of abortion that they will "expend enormous amounts of energy protecting it" in order to prevent children "from ever seeing God."

According to the Guttmacher Institute, an estimated 1,038,000 abortions were executed in states without total bans in 2024. There were nearly 600,000 abortions in the first six months of 2025.

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Jean Raspail’s notorious — and prophetic — novel returns to America



“The Camp of the Saints” by Jean Raspail is one of the most interesting and controversial novels of the 20th century — which is why it’s good news that Vauban Books, a small publishing house, is coming out with a new edition, complete with a fresh translation by scholar Ethan Rundell.

English-language copies of the book, first published in the United States in 1975, have been passed around like samizdat. “The Camp of the Saints” became popular again in the 2010s, but the original publisher refused to reprint it — that is, until Vauban managed to secure the rights.

In the era of the Great Replacement, it is the most politically incorrect and the most vital lesson we need to hear.

“The Camp of the Saints” depicts mass immigration destroying European civilization. In the novel, a gigantic flotilla of boats filled with destitute Indians sets course for France to seek refugee status. After much hand-wringing, the government allows them to land rather than take the only other option available, which is to massacre them. France — and very quickly all of Europe — turns into a dystopian third-world slum.

Raspail’s novel was written in the 1970s when the “boat people” fled Vietnam for Europe. The book caused an enormous sensation. It was a best-seller in France and the U.S. and eventually globally. Many have hailed it as a great and important work of prophecy. But, predictably, it was then — and is now — denounced as a horribly racist screed that only white supremacists would be interested in reading.

Contrary to the critics, “The Camp of the Saints” is a great novel, and Jean Raspail is a great writer. You should do yourself a favor and read it.

What of the book’s supposed racism? Well, it certainly contains much imagery that will shock the American reader. The Indian refugees are portrayed in vivid passages as wholly disgusting and bestial.

However, here I must point out a number of things. First, it seems that American and French cultures have different definitions of what counts as “racist.” To this Frenchman, it has always seemed puzzling that Americans seem to separate the signified and the signifier, or the thing itself and the intent.

In American culture, any grossly negative or caricatured portrayal of a non-white person is seen as “racist,” regardless of what was meant by it. “Blackface” is considered malum in se, regardless of whether it’s done to wound or express contempt for a group of people or whether one just decided to attend a costume party. (A French athlete was recently embroiled in controversy when he proudly posted photos of himself dressed up as a Harlem Globetrotter, in what he clearly intended to be a laudatory homage to a group he admired.)

This bizarre American form of Tourette’s can sometimes become downright vile: While the bodies of Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, who had been murdered by Islamic terrorists for their refusal to stop mocking Islam, were still warm, American cultural commentators denounced their drawings as racist. A French person would have pointed out that while their caricatures of minorities were certainly unflattering, so were their caricatures of everyone else — and therefore concluded that there was no racism.

In fact, in “The Camp of the Saints,” nobody looks good. Indeed, the novel’s central topic is not the refugees themselves but the bizarre form of cowardice and self-hate of Europeans that leads them to consent to their own replacement. In this sense, it is like Evelyn Waugh’s “Black Mischief,” whose portrayal of Africans is decidedly “racist” by our contemporary standards but whose portrayal of whites — and everybody else — is equally savage and outlandish.

Everything in “The Camp of the Saints”is over the top, not just its unflattering portrayal of refugees. It has a dreamlike quality, complete with baroque imagery, which is integral to the artistic style of the novel. This is what makes it such a powerful and fascinating work of art. To dismiss it as “racist” is not just inaccurate — it is Philistinic.

It’s also worth pointing out that Raspail was not some caveman pumping out racist tirades from some cave somewhere. He wrote dozens of novels and received some of the most prestigious literary awards France can confer, including the Grand prix de littérature of the Académie française and the Prix Jean-Walter for historical writing. Raspail was made a knight and an officer of the Legion of Honor. Of course, France has historically been much more open-minded when it comes to honoring artists and intellectuals who may be politically incorrect.

Getting past the caricatures

As a young man, Raspail started out as a travel writer. His first publishing success was a recounting of a trip he took following in the footsteps of Father Marquette, the French Jesuit who discovered the Mississippi.

Raspail kayaked down the length of the river, from Trois-Rivières in Québec all the way to New Orleans, exploring the history of a region that was once New France. He would later return to America and write ethnographies of remaining American Indian tribes in reservations and would be a lifelong activist for protecting indigenous peoples — a strange pursuit for a “racist.”

In France, Raspail is better known for his historical adventure novels, which young teenage males of a certain Catholic conservative persuasion tend to read avidly.

Many of them involve the fictional Pikkendorff family, penniless aristocrats from Bavaria who end up as knights-errant, mercenaries, or colonial administrators in the service of other great families. One of his novels has members of the French and German branches of the Pikkendorffs secretly meeting in Switzerland to try to negotiate an armistice during World War I.

Another leverages some fourth-wall-breaking postmodern tools, since it ostensibly presents itself as a first-person work of nonfiction written by Raspail in his own name. That novel features Raspail’s research into the Pikkendorff family, complete with extensive footnotes referring to nonexistent tomes of historical research. It ends with the depressing discovery that the last heir of the Pikkendorffs runs a successful chain of pizza restaurants.

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Another novel, “The Fisherman’s Ring,” starts with the premise that the Council of Constance, which ended the Great Western Schism that had sundered the Catholic Church in two, picked the wrong pope and that ever since, there has been a succession of secret, true popes.

“Seven Riders” takes place in a fictional, nameless country somewhere at the edge of Europe at some unspecified time, though the fact that people move either by horse or steam train gives a hint. The country has been stricken by a series of unexplained events, including plagues and destructive madness circulating among the youth. The Margrave, the ruler of this broken kingdom, sends out seven riders to try to find the outside world and discover a remedy for the bizarre afflictions affecting the country. Above all, he wants to find his daughter Princess Myriam, with whom the head of the expedition, Colonel-major Silve de Pikkendorff, is secretly in love.

Perhaps Raspail’s most ambitious novel is 2003’s “The Kingdoms of Borea,” which is hard not to read as an implicit reply to critics of “The Camp of the Saints.” The work, which stretches over several centuries, takes place in a fictional country at the northeastern edge of Europe, by the Russian steppes and Scandinavian fjords. In the deep forests unexplored by the white man, at least until the modern era, lives “the little man with bark-colored skin,” an indigenous people of the forest who fear the white man.

A French person would have pointed out that while their caricatures of minorities were certainly unflattering, so were their caricatures of everyone else — and therefore concluded that there was no racism.

The mystery of the true identity and nature of the little man, who is always elusive, is the running thread of the plot. As European civilization and industry keep encroaching on the little man’s forest over the centuries, turning timber into factories, his people and their way of life are doomed to extinction.

This is another story about demographic replacement — but one in which the whites are the clear villains and the non-whites are the clear victims. The novel is a tour de force, with contemporary descendants of 17th-century nobles and Jewish merchants somehow ending up on the path of their forebears and a stunning halfway reveal about the narrator’s true identity. It is a great historical fresco, a panorama of history’s greatest crimes.

A peaceful and prosperous Jewish community is ravaged by pogroms fomented by the kingdom’s evil ruler. One character immigrates to the Antebellum South, where he becomes a wealthy planter and happily joins the South’s rebellion, but not before freeing all his slaves. Upon returning to his home after the war, he is confronted by the devastation the Union Army caused and sets up schools and workshops for his former slaves.

Another trace of the little man is found in East Prussia in 1945. Then, Raspail reminds us vividly, the ethnic German populations of Eastern Europe were systematically butchered by Stalin’s troops, a World War II genocide that is remembered by no memorial or museum.

All genocides are bad

“All genocides are bad,” Raspail seemingly wants to say through this book. This sounds like the most trite thing imaginable until you remember that some genocides are more politically useful than others. “Don’t you understand? It’s always bad,” he seems to be screaming, grabbing us by the lapels. It’s bad when white people are the perpetrators, and it’s bad when white people are the victims, says Jean Raspail, a lifelong anthropologist and activist on behalf of Native American tribes.

For Raspail, it is clear that pogroms of Jews are bad and massacres of civilian German populations are bad. Antebellum slavery was bad, but so was destroying the South to stop it. It’s bad regardless of your politics. It’s bad even when the victim population cannot be held up as a politically convenient totem. Which is the least racist message imaginable. But in the era of the Great Replacement, it is the most politically incorrect and the most vital one we need to hear.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published at the American Mind.

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The bombardment of doomsday climate commentary has already contributed to widespread environmental anxiety among children and young adults.
Trump Will SAVE the Economy
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Trump Will SAVE the Economy

Is the Eclipse the Apocalypse? Rapture??? (Hint: No)
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Is the Eclipse the Apocalypse? Rapture??? (Hint: No)