In Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992), a novel that channeled perfectly the libertarian imagination of the post–Cold War moment, the territory once known as the United States has been shattered into privatized spaces: franchise nations, apartheid burbclaves, and franchulets, a world of what I have called “crack-up capitalism.” The threat in the plot is the Raft, a maritime assemblage several miles across: a decommissioned aircraft carrier lashed to an oil tanker and countless container ships, freight carriers, “pleasure craft, sampans, junks, dhows, dinghies, life rafts, houseboats, makeshift structures built on air-filled oil drums and slabs of styrofoam.” The Raft “orbits the Pacific clockwise” bearing a cargo of “Refus” or refugees, welcomed aboard by an entrepreneurial tech evangelist who has just cornered the global fiber optic grid and has schemes to subjugate the population through a computer virus administered as a bitmap narcotic. The Raft’s passengers are dehumanized and anonymized: a mass of insects “dipping its myriad oars into the Pacific, like ant legs” at whose arrival the coastal residents of California live in terror, subscribing to a “twenty-four-hour Raft Report” to know when the “latest contingent of 25,000 starving Eurasians has cut itself loose” to swim ashore.
Stephenson’s descriptions are stomach-turning, indulging in a grotesque racist imagery of nonwhite danger. The Raft was the fodder for, as he wrote, “a hundred Hong Kong B-movies and blood-soaked Nipponese comic books.” As the race scientist and former National Review journalist Steve Sailer noted, the Raft also had an obvious antecedent: the “Last Chance Armada” of Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel, first published in French, The Camp of the Saints. In that book, a disabled messianic leader from the Calcutta slums boards millions of indigent Indians on a lashed-together fleet of old ships to travel West “in a welter of dung and debauch.” The novel revels in what one scholar calls “pornographic prose” in its depiction of coprophagy, incest, and pedophilia aboard the armada. The plot ends in an orgy of violence after what the author sees as the suicidal embrace of the armada by the foreigner-friendly French population.
The first English translation of The Camp of the Saints was published by Scribner’s in 1975 to many positive reviews. The cover image showed a single Caucasian hand holding up a globe from grasping brown hands with a catch line reading: “a chilling novel about the end of the white world.” The book returned to public discussion during the first successful presidential campaign of Donald Trump as an alleged inspiration to his advisers Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, but it was already a common touchstone decades earlier. It was reissued in 1986 by the white supremacist Noontide Press and in 1987 by the American Immigration Control Foundation (AICF), which, along with the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) helped mainstream anti-immigrant arguments in part by piggy-backing on the mailing lists of right-wing magazines to help seed a national movement.
In 1991, John Randolph Club (JRC) founding member Sam Francis described the book as “a kind of science fiction novel” that had become American reality. “The future is now,” he wrote. The vision of the maritime refugee indexed with the evening news in the early 1990s. There were more than 30,000 interceptions of Haitians at sea in 1992 and nearly 40,000 Cubans in 1994; the same year, the Golden Venture ran aground in Rockaway Beach, carrying 300 Chinese would-be migrants. Raspail’s novel “forecasts the recent landing of the Golden Venture,” as one letter to the Washington Times put it in 1993. The Social Contract Press reissue featured a photo of Chinese men wrapped in blankets after disembarking from the vessel in the background. Introducing the novel, the nativist ideological entrepreneur and FAIR director John Tanton wrote that “the future has arrived,” citing the Golden Venture and other instances of maritime flight that had taken Raspail’s plot “out of a theorist’s realm and transposed it into real life.” Fiction can be more powerful than fact,” wrote JRC member and American Renaissance founder Jared Taylor in a review of The Camp of the Saints. “The novel,” he wrote, “is a call to all whites to rekindle their sense of race, love of culture, and pride in history for he knows that without them we will disappear.”
The Camp of the Saints had a special place in the paleo imagination. Ahead of the first JRC meeting, the Ludwig von Mises Institute’s Lew Rockwell claimed partial credit for the book’s circulation in the United States in 1975. In his talk “Decomposing the Nation-State” at the Mont Pelerin Society in 1993, Rothbard wrote that he had previously dismissed the novel’s vision, but “as cultural and welfare-state problems have intensified, it became impossible to dismiss Raspail’s concerns any longer.” He referred to his proposal of privatizing all land and infrastructure discussed in the last chapter as a solution to the “Camp of the Saints problem.” When the JRC met in Chicago in December 1992, the conference was titled “Bosnia, USA” and Hans-Hermann Hoppe spoke in the lead-off session named after The Camp of the Saints.
The year between the first and second meeting of the JRC had been momentous. The Los Angeles riots in April, Buchanan’s run for president, and Rothbard’s proposal of a strategy of right-wing populism made 1992 look like, in the words of author John Ganz, “the year the clock broke.” Another notable event was the publication of an article in National Review by the scheduled keynote speaker at the club: the journalist Peter Brimelow, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in England in 1947. When the article was published as a book by Random House in 1995 with thanks given to Rockwell and Jeffrey Tucker at the Ludwig von Mises Institute (as well as his agent Andrew Wylie), Alien Nation was described as a “non-fiction horror story of a nation that is willfully but blindly pursuing a course of suicide.” Historian Aristide Zolberg writes that the book “marked the ascent to respectability of an explicitly white supremacist position … that had hitherto been confined in the United States to shadowy groups.” Alien Nation came in the immediate wake of the passage of Proposition 187 in California, blocking access to education and health services for undocumented immigrants, one of the earliest instances of local governments “trying to retake immigration control into their own hands.” “No writer has argued more effectively for this change of policy than Peter Brimelow,” wrote Brimelow’s former colleague at Forbes, David Frum. “No reformer can avoid grappling with [his] formidable work.”
In 1999, Brimelow took his project online — “fortunately the Internet came along,” as he put it later — founding the website VDARE.com, named after the first child born to white settlers in North America, Virginia Dare. Serving as what the Washington Post called a “platform for white nationalism,” the website has hosted prominent advocates of scientific racism like Jared Taylor, J. Philippe Rushton, and Steve Sailer as well as alt-right activists Richard Spencer and Jason Kessler.
An amplifier for themes and tropes of the Far Right, a search of the website yields more than 20,000 posts with the term “white genocide,” more than 13,000 with “race realism,” and 6,000 with “Great Replacement.” Brimelow is also proximate to more mainstream figures in the United States. He was hosted at the home of then-president Donald Trump’s economic adviser Larry Kudlow in 2018 and held a role at the same time at Fox reporting directly to Rupert Murdoch. Brimelow has become Jean Raspail’s spokesperson for the 1990s and 2000s.
Where does the resurgence of the Far Right come from? Scholars attempting to explain how apparently fringe political ideologies have moved to center stage since the election of Trump in 2016 have split into two camps. The first locates the origins of the Far Right in culture: racism, chauvinism, xenophobia, the “tribalism” of “white identity politics,” or a longing for “eternity.” As a group, these commentators seem to ignore the admonition from Frankfurt school sociologist Max Horkheimer repeated so often that it threatens to become a cliché that “whoever is not willing to talk about capitalism should also keep quiet about fascism.”
Capitalism can be hard to find in this literature. A recent book on “the far right today” does not mention the term once. Four other books on the alt-right and white power movement barely mention it, and a fourth only to say that the alt-right is “skeptical of global capitalism.” References to “identity” outnumber “capitalism” at a ratio of several dozen to one. The assumption seems to be that Far Right ideology is either post- or pre-material: it inhabits a space of culture detached from issues of production and distribution. This is startling given the fact that the radical Right’s central issue is nonwhite immigration, an eminently economic issue with a vast specialized literature.
By contrast, the second school of interpretation finds the origins of the Far Right in the spirit of capitalism itself. Rather than a rejection of neoliberalism, they see the Far Right as a mutant form of it, shedding certain features like a commitment to multilateral trade governance or the virtues of outsourcing while doubling down on Social Darwinist principles of struggle in the market translated through hierarchical categories of race, nationality, and gender. Brimelow’s work helps us see how the nation is understood as both a racial and economic asset to the Far Right.
Brimelow is described variously as a “white nationalist,” “restrictionist,” or “Alt Right figurehead.” Yet he is almost never described the way he described himself: as a libertarian conservative or even a “libertarian ideologue.” It is rarely, if ever, noted that he was a fixture in the standard networks of neoliberal intellectuals seeking to rebuild the foundations of postwar capitalism. He spoke at a Mont Pelerin Society (MPS) regional meeting in Vancouver in 1983 alongside Margaret Thatcher’s speechwriter and later National Review editor John O’Sullivan. Brimelow’s interviews and lengthier features in Forbes in the late 1980s and 1990s drew almost exclusively from the MPS roster. This included profiles and interviews with Thomas Sowell (twice), Peter Bauer, Milton Friedman (twice for Forbes and twice for Fortune), and Murray Rothbard. His longer features were built around the research of Gordon Tullock, Hayek, Friedman, and MPS member Lawrence White. He wrote a glowing review of Milton and Rose Friedman’s memoirs, recounting Milton’s first trip overseas to the inaugural MPS meeting and praised the couple’s contributions to “the free-market revolution in economics that has overthrown the statist-Keynesian-socialist consensus.”
To describe Brimelow as nativist and white nationalist may be correct, but it threatens to banish his concerns from the domain of the rational and the economic. In fact, he was a typical member of a transnational milieu linking Thatcherite intellectuals taking their own version of a cultural turn around the Institute of Economic Affairs’ Social Affairs Unit with social scientists like Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein concocting theories linking race, intelligence, and economic capacity as well as neoconservatives from the United States to Singapore to Japan rediscovering the relevance of “Asian values” for capitalist success. For the new fusionists of the free-market Right, the economic was not a pristine space quarantined from matters of biology, culture, tradition, and race. Rather, these thought worlds overlapped and melded with one another.
Brimelow’s first book was not about politics or race. It was called The Wall Street Gurus: How You Can Profit from Investment Newsletters, marketed alongside books like The Warning: The Coming Great Crash in the Stock Market and Wall Street Insiders: How You Can Watch Them and Profit. Like the authors of those newsletters, investment was simultaneously a strategy of money-making and leveraging symbolism and accruing influence. We can understand his turn to whiteness as the outcome of a portfolio analysis. The nation was a safe asset. The pro-white play looked like a payday.
Excerpt adapted from Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right by Quinn Slobodian. Copyright © 2025 by Quinn Slobodian. Published by Zone Books.