Troll Nation: How the Right Became Trump-Worshipping Monsters Set on Rat-F*cking Liberals, America, and Truth Itself by Amanda Marcotte & Teri Schnaubelt & David Talbot

Author:Amanda Marcotte & Teri Schnaubelt & David Talbot
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Nationalism, Politics & Social Sciences, Political Parties
ISBN: 9781978606029
Publisher: Brilliance Audio
Published: 2018-04-24T06:00:00+00:00

It sounds very learned and erudite, with all those names, right? But, as Jamelle Bouie at Slate pointed out, there’s not really a clear throughline between those names and, more importantly, it erases the fact that enslaved people and immigrants did the actual work of building the infrastructure Bannon is praising.

But Bannon’s favorite allusion to make himself sound smart is a 1973 novel called The Camp of Saints, written by a loony French racist named Jean Raspail. Name-dropping an obscure French novel is très pretentious, but even though it’s written in French, the book is a piece of trash and is very, very, very racist. Raspail literally portrays dark-skinned immigrants as people who eat shit and who are eager to “invade” white, Western nations to turn them into supposed savages.

“Indians stream on shore, trampling to death the left-wing radicals who came to welcome them,” Paul Blumenthal and JM Rieger of HuffPost write, explaining the plot.

The book describes black and brown people as “thousands of wretched creatures” who are “starting to rot, all wormy inside.” Raspail imagines a shipful of Indians as a writhing orgy, writing, “Everywhere, rivers of sperm” then he imagines “streaming over bodies, oozing between breasts, and buttocks, and thighs, and lips, and fingers.”

At the time of publication, the book sold well, because terrible people are always with us. But reviewers from the period were less impressed. Paul Gray, reviewing the English translation in Time in 1975, said it was a book for those “who have always wondered what it would feel like to be worked over by the Gestapo.”

“The publishers are presenting The Camp of the Saints as a major event,” the contemporaneous Kirkus Review noted, “and it probably is, in much the same sense that Mein Kampf was a major event.”

Bannon fucking loves this book. HuffPost found four instances of Bannon referencing it over a period of less than two years. In every reference, he treats the book like great literature and a reasonable prediction of what will happen if Europe and the United States continue to allow immigration.

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

Bannon is a monster, but, as with Trump, monsters are hot with the Republican base these days. After all, if you really want to scandalize those snowflake liberals, well, calling people of color turd-eating animals is a pretty swift way to get the job done.

The funny thing about trolls, though, is that once they get the taste for trolling, their appetites grow and grow. They become restless trolling the usual targets and start wanting to expand their trolling horizons. Pissing off liberals with overt racism stops feeling like a challenge. The troll wishes for something more, something to really test his trolling powers.

So it was with Bannon. After years of trolling the left with race-baiting and making up fake scandals about Democratic politicians and liberal institutions, I think he got bored. Liberals, with all their morals and do-gooding, are just way too easy to ruffle.

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