Patrick Buchanan

According to his apologists, Patrick Buchanan is neither a racist nor an antisemite. He merely says racist and antisemitic things. As a former speechwriter and pundit, Buchanan has certainly resorted to words in order to make a living. Yet it would be unfair to suggest that, instead of being a true bigot, Buchanan was only playing one on TV.

Regarding race relations in the US, Richard Nixon, who employed him at the time, summarized his press secretary’s position as “segregation forever”. As for Jews, Buchanan’s statement on Treblinka not being an extermination camp squarely falls under the rubric of Holocaust denial – not to mention his kind words about Hitler. As fellow conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer once remarked, “(t)he interesting thing (about Buchanan) is how he can say these things and still be considered a national figure.”

One should add that even his most fervent advocates never tried to argue that Buchanan’s homophobic, xenophobic and sexist rants did not reflect his true self. At best, they might have claimed that the views he proffered on the AIDS epidemic – nature’s revenge on homosexual practices – immigration – an existential threat – and the role of women – “building the nest”, like “Momma Bird” – were less his own than those of the God he worships.

Born in Washington in 1938, Patrick Buchanan was raised as a traditionalist Catholic. His great-grandfather fought under General Robert E. Lee, and he remains a proud member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. A streetfighter and a bully in his youth – his family’s Jewish neighbors were his favorite target – “Pat” eventually matured, attending the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University and starting his journalistic career at the Saint-Louis Globe-Democrat.

In 1966, Buchanan was hired by Richard Nixon’s campaign team to write the speeches meant for the candidate’s conservative base. Among other accomplishments, he coined the phrase “Silent Majority”. After the election, he worked as White House assistant and speechwriter, kept his job during Nixon’s unfinished second term and remained faithful to his boss until the bitter end – he even urged the President to burn the Watergate tapes in order to stay in power.

When Gerald Ford took office, the new administration briefly considered making Buchanan the US ambassador to apartheid South Africa. However, because of his segregationist inclinations and his excessive enthusiasm about getting the job, the State Department eventually rescinded the offer. Temporarily retired from politics, Buchanan embarked on a long and successful career as a news commentator, first at NBC radio then on cable TV – where he successively joined NBC’s The McLaughlin Group and CNN’s Crossfire and The Capital Gang. In these popular shows, Buchanan was typically cast as the conservative voice pitted against a liberal counterpart.

The renowned pundit came back to the White House in 1985 as Ronald Reagan’s Communications Director. During his two-year tenure, Buchanan was instrumental in the organization of the President’s visit to the German cemetery of Bitburg, where 48 Waffen SS members were buried. While busy defending the Administration’s decision – in the face of widespread outrage – the Communications Director used his spare time fighting the deportation of suspected Nazi war criminals to countries of the Eastern bloc. For Buchanan, honoring the Wehrmacht’s sacrifice and frustrating the plans of “revenge-obsessed Nazi hunters” were two sides of the same mission – one that his great-grandfather would have surely condoned.

After leaving the Reagan administration and returning to punditry, Buchanan felt freer to embrace his favorite causes. In 1989, for instance, he paid yet another tribute to his Confederate ancestor by writing a column about the so-called Central Park Five case: in his article, he called for the public hanging of at least one of the Black teenagers falsely accused of having raped a white jogger.

At about the same time, Pat started encouraging his sister Bay, who had also worked for the Reagan administration, to pursue her “Buchanan for President” initiative. The siblings’ platform was two-pronged.

On the domestic front, Buchanan lambasted the open border policy promoted by the globalist wing of the Republican party – or at least by the contributors to the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal: mass immigration from non-European countries, he warned, would fatally imperil the cultural and moral fabric of the United States.

With respect to foreign affairs, the former speechwriter argued that the closing of the Cold War should also mark the end of US military involvement throughout the world. Hence his staunch opposition to the Gulf War in 1990, which prompted his decision to run against George H.W. Bush two years later.

In the Republican primaries of 1992, Buchanan ran as the paleoconservative candidate: he challenged the incumbent President, whom he accused of harboring both a liberal and an imperialist agenda. Bush, Buchanan complained, had not only reneged on his “no new taxes” pledge: even more importantly, his administration had failed to curb immigration, to hinder women’s access to abortion and to suppress gay rights. Meanwhile, he added, the Jewish lobby and its neoconservative proxies were allowed to dictate the terms of America’s foreign policy.

Buchanan failed to win the nomination but still received almost a quarter of the votes. He also delivered his famous “culture war” speech at the Republican convention, where he claimed that America was in the grips of a decisive struggle for its own soul: the choice was between remaining “God’s country” or descending further down the liberal and multicultural path of moral decline. Though some commentators blamed the Republican defeat in the presidential election on the chilling effect of Buchanan’s oratory, the paleoconservative tribune persisted. After returning to Crossfire, he created a foundation called the American Cause to prepare himself for his next bid. He ran against Bob Dole, in the 1996 primaries, and was defeated once again.

After his second attempt, Buchanan began to despair of the Republican party, which he left in 1999. The following year, he ran as the candidate of the Reform party. While his campaign failed miserably, he inadvertently played a decisive role in George W. Bush’s controversial victory. In Palm Beach, Florida, about 2,000 ballots meant for Al Gore, the Democratic candidate, were mistakenly credited to him. Because the conservative Supreme Court rejected Gore’s request for a recount, his opponent was declared the winner in Florida, which gave him enough delegates to become President.

After 2000, Buchanan gave up on presidential politics and left CNN for MSNBC, where he was one of the few pundits who opposed Bush’s decision to invade Iraq. He also became even more overt in the defense of his other pet causes: one of his columns stated that the UK should not have declared war on Nazi Germany and his book entitled Suicide of a Superpower explicitly lamented the waning of white supremacy in America. Yet it was not until 2011 that MSNBC decided to end his contract.

Five years later, Donald Trump won the presidential election on a platform that largely echoed Buchanan’s. The latter had endorsed the MAGA candidate of course, though Trump’s success must have been bittersweet for the culture war veteran – who continued to write articles, mostly for Peter Brimelow’s white supremacist site VDARE, until 2023.

Similarities between their outlooks notwithstanding, the extent of Buchanan’s actual influence on the 47th President is open to debate. What his charmed professional life reveals, however, is the fact that long before Trump, Washington’s mainstream media and political establishment would already welcome an unapologetic segregationist and Hitler sympathizer as one of their own.

Raphaël Lemkin

Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959) was a Jewish Polish lawyer trained at the Lwów law school (now Lviv, Ukraine), who escaped to Sweden and eventually to the United States after the occupation of Poland by the Nazis. He coined the term genocide and was pivotal in clarifying its multifaceted legal definition, with which state-led mass murder could be criminalized. 

In the early 1920s, Lemkin was already scrutinizing the systematic elimination of the Armenian people that had accompanied the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Then, two decades later, he became one of the first legal scholars who not only perceived the specific nature of the crimes committed against the European Jews, but who also extended the notion of genocide to instances of settler colonial violence, such as the treatment received by some Slavic groups during the Second World War. 

As outlined in his major research on Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, genocide “is intended (…) to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group¹.”

 ¹ Raphael LEMKIN, Axis rule in occupied Europe : laws of occupation, analysis of government, proposals for redress, Washington, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Division of International Law, 1944, p. 79.

Francesca Albanese

Francesca Albanese is an Italian international lawyer and academic affiliated to Georgetown University and the organization Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development. She has served as the UN Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories since 2022, and her three year mandate was renewed in 2025.

Since her first report, calling for action to end the Israeli settler-colonial occupation and apartheid regime, including through boycotts and sanctions, Albanese has personally been the target of recurrent smear campaigns, along with delegitimation attempts against the United Nations. Her latest report presented in March 2024 at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva expounded detailed evidence for Israel’s intentional enactment of at least three “genocidal acts” against the Palestinians. 

She is currently preparing a report on Israel's experimentation with new military technology, such as remote-controlled quadcopters, autonomous lethal weapons and killer robots.

Tucker Carlson

Born in 1969 in San Francisco, Tucker Carlson began his career in journalism at The Weekly Standard in 1995, after having unsuccessfully attempted to enlist in the Central Intelligence Agency. Far more interested in television than in print, even though he is the author of three books, he joined CNN in 2001, where he became one of the leading conservative commentators, notably on the debate show Crossfire. Ousted in 2005, he moved to rival channel MSNBC before becoming one of the central figures on Fox News from 2009 to 2023.

Although his affiliation with the radical right has been evident since the beginning of his career, his ideological orientation has nevertheless undergone three significant shifts¹. First, in 2004, he renounced his support for the invasion of Iraq and more broadly rejected the “regime change” doctrine advocated by neoconservatives. Then, after the financial crash triggered the Great Recession, the neoliberal with libertarian leanings reinvented himself as a populist ostensibly concerned with American workers’ jobs and the country’s deindustrialization—even as he continued to frame immigration and welfare as the principal causes of decline. Finally, having found in Donald Trump the ideal vessel for his new convictions, Carlson gradually established himself as one of the most uncompromising spokesmen of the MAGA movement. This trajectory ultimately contributed to his departure from Fox News after he criticized his employers when they distanced themselves from the 45th president following the assault on the Capitol in January 2021.

After his show moved to X in 2023, and even more so following Trump’s return to the White House, the commentator-turned-influencer distinguished himself through a political line that could be described as neo-paleoconservative, given how prominently it foregrounds themes associated with Sam Francis and Patrick Buchanan. In the footsteps of the head of state and his most devoted supporters, Carlson devotes much of his airtime to stigmatizing immigrant workers and racialized Americans, invoking the specter of the “Great Replacement”. He also launches diatribes against women opposed to patriarchy and against sexual minorities, whom he suggests should be socially punished rather than merely left to “eternal damnation”. At the same time, he does not hesitate to diverge from the official line of the Trump administration. He has explicitly suggested that white and Christian supremacy — articulated under the banner of “America First” — should not automatically encompass Jewish Americans, nor treat Israeli interests as synonymous with U.S. national security.

To underscore the importance he attaches to these positions, Carlson has gone beyond criticizing U.S. participation in strikes against Iran or expressing hostility toward Christian Zionism, long cherished by segments of the evangelical right. Convinced that a new generation of MAGA activists may be receptive to ideas once advanced by Buchanan, he increasingly devotes airtime to denouncing the influence of the “Zionist lobby” and condemning the actions of the Israeli army in Gaza in terms as forceful as those that have led pro-Palestinian activists to be fired or deported. He notably interviewed Francesca Albanese, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, despite her having been sanctioned by the Trump administration and barred from entering the United States.

In parallel, his apparent belief that a substantial portion of the president’s admirers are ready to distance themselves from Israel, and even to revive older forms of antisemitism, has led him to host particularly controversial guests. His show has featured the amateur historian Darryl Cooper, known for blaming World War II on Winston Churchill and minimizing the responsibility for the Shoah by attributing it to the mismanagement of concentration camps; as well as the streamer Nick Fuentes, who has encouraged his followers to rid themselves of the guilt that “the international Jewry” has allegedly imposed on white Christians since 1945.

Will we say that Carlson and his colorful guests are just histrionic figures with no influence within the administration? While the Groypers, the name given to the Nazis and other incels who ensure Fuentes' popularity on the web, have so far remained on the fringes of the circles of power, the same cannot be said for Fox News’ former star attraction. The creator of Tucker on X is present at all major events where Trump’s inner circle gathers around their leader, from the inauguration of his second term to the memorial service in honor of Charlie Kirk. And, each time, his appearances are eagerly awaited by the media and his loyal followers alike. Furthermore, Carlson can boast of being the first American journalist, if he can be described as such, to interview Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin after the invasion of Ukraine. He is also one of the favorite interviewers of Viktor Orbán, to whose glory he produced a documentary entitled Hungary vs. Soros; as well as Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, whose prisons are overflowing with migrant workers deported by the Trump administration.

Finally, and most importantly, this free spirit, who is nonetheless well connected, has been growing closer to J. D. Vance for several years. His own son is in charge of communications for the vice president, and it is said that he was the one who convinced Trump to choose the Ohio senator as his running mate². However, the reasons for the closeness between the two men are as much political as they are personal. Vance claims to be a post-liberal Catholic, which is not only the most radical strand of thought within the religious right—in terms of executive privileges and opposition to the separation of church and state—but also the most resistant to Christian Zionism. During his interview with Fuentes, Carlson was quick to point out that while neoconservatives remained influential in the Senate and the State Department, the vice president was a sincere supporter of “America First” .The editorialist therefore predicted that if Vance ran for the Republican nomination in 2028, he would be the candidate most likely to free US foreign policy from the Israeli yoke.

¹ See Jason Zengerle, Hated by All the Right People. Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind, Penguin Random House, 2026.

² See Jonathan Swan et Maggie Haberman, "How Tucker Carlson helped sell J.D. Vance as Trump’s Running Mate", The New York Times, 16 juillet 2024.

Dominique Venner

Dominique Venner is a key figure in the mutations of the far right’s ideology and organization in France during the second half of the 20th century. First a violent militant within radical factions, he then converted to more legal and institutionalized forms of political activity. Later on, he dedicated himself to the task of being a “historian” of the movements he partook in, publishing a dozen works that became an ideological backbone of the “new right”. He was largely responsible for organizing the transition between the far-right of the 20th century, one focused on anti-communism, antisemitism, and the defense of the colonial French empire, and the far-right that is familiar to us today: obsessed with matters of identitarianism, immigration, and Islamophobia.

A great deal about Venner’s life was revealed to the public through his autobiography, The Rebel Heart, published in 1994. Born in Paris in 1935 into a bourgeois family, Dominique Venner was the son of Charles Venner, an architect of churches and chapels who was involved in Jacques Doriot’s Popular Party of France, one of the main parties to have collaborated with the Nazis during the Occupation. In this family of five children, in perfect alignment with the Pétainist family model, Dominique Venner grew up frustrated by the stagnation of his father’s party. From high school onwards, he rejected the “bourgeois right” and became interested in far-right circles.

At the age of 18, much to his father’s dismay, he enlisted in the army for a two-year contract. He was sent to Algeria from 1954 to 1956 as an officer and led a team of soldiers. At the age of 20, in the Aurès Mountains, he easily adapted to the violent guerrilla tactics used by the French military to hunt down FLN militants and terrorize the Algerian population. He covered up acts of terrorism committed by the men under his command and committed them himself with virtual impunity. Eventually, an investigation was opened into a fire they started during a visit to a farm. He wrote the following about his years in Algeria: “We fought to keep what was ours, to preserve a land acquired by conquest, blood, sweat, and colonization. We fought to defend our birthplaces and our cemeteries on this land. We fought to protect our people in danger”.

During a leave of absence in Paris in 1955, he learned of the existence of the far-right group Jeune Nation and joined them upon his return from Algeria. In a movement primarily composed of students, Venner was able to share with his peers his willingness to protect the French empire and his disdain for his army superiors in Algeria, whom he considered weak. Jeune Nation would be the matrix for many of the far-right organizations and parties that followed it: the Federation of Nationalist Students, Europe-Action, the Defense Union Group (GUD), etc. Formed in 1949 and popularized after 1954, Jeune Nation took as an enemy anyone its militants considered as opposants of the national cause. Among them were communists, whose desire to erase borders was in stark opposition to the defense of the French empire; supporters of Algerian independence; and technocratic and financial elites, described in antisemitic terms, accused of not doing enough to preserve the empire’s greatness. Supremacists, its militants dreamed of a white nation—without communists, without women in the workforce, without democracy. Dominique Venner quickly stood out within the small group and became the right-hand man of Pierre Sidos, co-founder and leader of Jeune Nation. He added his personal reading recommendations (Georges Sorel, Nietzsche) to the militant training program and took the lead in violent clandestine actions. For the activists, belonging to a far-right youth movement meant beating up their political enemies.

On November 7, 1956, Venner and his peers at Jeune Nation joined a gathering under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. The aim of the gathering was to support the Budapest insurrection and to denounce the Soviet tanks that had crushed the revolt. Chanting anti-communist slogans, they successfully spurred the crowd to walk toward the Communist Party’s headquarters. With Venner leading the way, some managed to enter the building, ransack it, and prompt the beginning of a fire. Evacuated by firefighters, they then directed themselves toward the offices of the newspaper L’Humanité, not far from there, where militants of the Communist Party were waiting for them. Thirty people were hospitalized, including three in serious condition. Jeune Nation continued to incite other altercations of this sort, whose mediatization allowed them to garner more supporters.

The Pflimlin government was formed on the night of May 13-14, following the Algiers putsch organized by pro-French Algeria figures whose goal was to end the Fourth Republic and bring the army, which supported French Algeria, to power. On May 15, 1958, it dissolved Jeune Nation in an attempt to calm tensions in France related to the Algerian War. Dominique Venner was imprisoned in La Santé prison for three weeks. Upon his release, he and Pierre Sidos reconstituted the faction under the name “Parti nationaliste” , whose founding congress took place on February 6, 1959—a nod to the violent far-right demonstration of February 6, 1934. The formation of this new group was invalidated seven days later, and the co-founders were charged with reconstituting a dissolved league. Venner kept a low profile to avoid arrest, but he was eventually detained for assaulting four Martinican students with his comrades near the Gare du Nord in Paris. He returned to La Santé prison for three months and was stripped of his civil rights for five years.

Venner was not discouraged by his time in prison. Upon his release, he threw himself back into politics. After de Gaulle’s address in favor of Algerian self-determination on September 16, 1959, he supported the reaction of French Algeria’s defenders, who erected insurrectionary barricades in Algiers from January 24 to February 1, 1960. Venner organized protests in Paris, which led to the issuance of a new arrest warrant against him. This did not prevent him from taking part in the actions of OAS-Métropole, the mainland branch of the Secret Army Organization, a terrorist group formed by diehard supporters of French Algeria in February 1961 in response to the January 8, 1961 referendum, in which 75% of voters declared themselves in favor of Algerian self-determination. He attempted to organize a putsch targeting the Élysée Palace. He planned everything in detail: for example, he contacted decorated military officers who supported French Algeria, though they would later withdraw their support, and considered using trucks equipped with machine guns. However, he did not have time to carry out his coup. On April 19, 1961, he was arrested for undermining state security and reconstituting dissolved leagues. He returned to La Santé prison for the third time, this time for a year and a half, at just 26 years of age.

This period of incarceration proved crucial for Venner. Three days after his arrest, on April 22, 1961, the attempted coup by generals opposed to Gaullist self-determination failed in Algiers. Dominique Venner was furious. From his jail cell, he heard echoes of actions carried out by the OAS, whose ranks were expanding. Yet he disapproved of their methods. During his sentence, inspired by the failure of the putsch, he wrote “For a Positive Critique”, a text he managed to smuggle out and which circulated clandestinely among his former comrades in Jeune Nation. An extreme right-wing counterpart to Lenin’s What Is to Be Done?, this manifesto questioned the effectiveness of clandestine action, the principal strategy adopted by nationalist militants over the previous decade. He wrote in particular: “The ‘nationalists’ who use the word ‘revolution’ without knowing its meaning believe in a spontaneous ‘national awakening’! [...] They do not understand the need to educate supporters through a sound doctrine that explains the causes of Western decadence, proposes a solution, and serves as a guide for thought in action.” According to him, nationalist programs were outdated and their “political arsenal dates back half a century.” He believed they had to abandon their obsession with the empire and their nostalgia for Vichy, update their list of enemies, and rethink their strategy. He thus proposed an ideological shift for the far-right. Carrying out isolated clandestine shock actions in the hope of triggering an insurrection—and expecting the army to rally in support—alienated the population rather than mobilizing it, as the events of April 22, 1961 had demonstrated. Instead, he advocated constructing a “common ideological reference” to ensure unity among far-right movements. For Venner, “revolution is not the act of violence that sometimes accompanies a removal from power. Nor is it a simple change of institutions or political clans. Revolution is less about seizing power than about using it to build a new society.” He set out the first principles of this “new revolutionary theory”: capitalist elites, who did not respect the “fate of national communities”, had to be replaced by a revolutionary elite; militants should no longer think in terms of the nation alone but of “European civilization” in order to stand up to the Soviet Union and “ensure [our] civilizing mission”; and activist organizations had to be restructured, removing notables concerned only with preserving their positions. Finally, in addition to winning over public opinion, activists would need to infiltrate the government “from within”. He urged them to prioritize the dissemination of this doctrine—without which the nationalist revolution, in his view, would be impossible—throughout civil society and the political sphere. For any takeover to succeed, the far right would first have to lead the population to adopt its values.

Upon his release in October 1962, seven months after the signing of the Evian Accords, which brought the Algerian War and French colonial rule to an end, Dominique Venner rejoined his former comrades, now organized within the Federation of Nationalst Students, of which he became a leading figure. To initiate a renewed propaganda effort, he founded the magazine Europe-Action in January 1963. As its name indicates, the publication sought to give far-right ideology a distinctly pro-European orientation. Venner contributed extensively to it, shaping the intellectual foundations of this new phase of the movement. He co-signed the 1963 pamphlet “What Is Nationalism?”, written with his colleagues from Europe-Action, in which he reiterated and expanded upon arguments first developed in his earlier text “For a Positive Critique”, particularly the need to transform the far right’s repertoire of action. While traditional themes such as anti-communism and antisemitism remained present, Venner introduced ideas that reoriented the discourse. Drawing on the writings of Nazi activist Rene Binet, he advanced the notion that an ancient European civilization was under existential threat from non-European immigration—an idea later popularized by Renaud Camus under the term “the great replacement”. For Venner, European civilization extended beyond the continent’s geographical borders to include territories settled by white populations, such as South Africa and the United States. Unlike “For a Positive Critique”, “What Is Nationalism?” explicitly linked the defense of “European civilization” to the protection of what it described as a superior “white race”, promoting pseudo-scientific eugenic concepts under the label of “biological realism”. Under Venner’s intellectual leadership between 1963 and 1967, this shift helped shape the trajectory that segments of the far-right continue to follow.

Concurrently, Europe-Action developed into an organized movement composed of activists from Jeune Nation and the Federation of Nationalist Students, as well as veterans of earlier far-right currents, including: former French SS members such as Saint-Loup, Jean Castrillo, and Pierre Bousquet, and former collaborationists such as Henry Coston, Jacques Ploncard, and Saint-Paulien. To expand its influence, Europe-Action opened a library in Paris’s sixth arrondissement. Following Venner’s strategic line, the movement launched an official effort in December 1963 to enter institutional politics by supporting the presidential candidacy of Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour in the 1965 election. Venner met Jean-Marie Le Pen, who served as campaign manager, and together they oversaw the working group responsible for anti-immigration propaganda. Tixier-Vignancour ultimately received 5.2 percent of the vote. Seeking to secure a more durable electoral presence ahead of the 1967 legislative elections, Venner founded the European Rally for Freedom. After another electoral failure (its candidates received fewer than 30,000 votes in total), Venner withdrew from direct participation in party politics, though he remained influential within far-right intellectual circles. In 1968, he co-founded, with around forty activists, the Groupement de recherche et d'etudes pour la civilisation europeenne (GRECE), bringing together former Europe-Action supporters and members of other nationalist groups. GRECE’s objective was to advance ethnonationalist, white supremacist, Islamophobic, and xenophobic ideas within the cultural and intellectual sphere, targeting journalists, academics, and writers rather than focusing solely on electoral politics. Its members, often referred to as the “Grecs”, were notably active in the editorial offices of Le Figaro Magazine until the early 1980s, enabling their ideological framework to reach a broad readership.

From 1968 onward, Dominique Venner devoted himself fully to what far-right circles call “metapolitics”, a term used to describe the cultural conquest of values. Presenting himself as a historian, he continued his ideological work from his home in Normandy, where he dedicated himself to writing and hunting—two of his favorite pastimes. Between 1972 and 2000, he published twenty-five books on weapons and hunting. At the same time, he authored numerous historical essays in which he reinterpreted the past through the lens of his ethnonationalist convictions, portraying far-right militants and collaborationists in a favorable light, notably in Histoire de la Collaboration (2000). Under the more respectable label of historian, Venner reshaped his public image, downplaying his earlier involvement in clandestine activism and framing his arguments as grounded in scholarly method. He founded two journals, Enquête sur l’histoire (1991-1999) and La Nouvelle Revue d’Histoire (2002-2017). His writings remained influential in far-right milieus and were frequently used as reference material in the ideological training of new activists, contributing to the centrality of identity politics in contemporary far-right agendas.

In 2009, Venner launched a blog under his own name, where he commented on current political developments. In 2013, he became actively involved in La Manif pour tous, a movement opposing the “marriage for all” law legalizing same-sex marriage in France. The movement organized large demonstrations across the country. Venner described the bill as “one of those perverse projects through which fanatics of deconstruction and globalization want to destroy the last structures that hold European societies together”. On May 21, 2013, four days after the law’s adoption, he took his own life inside the Notre-Dame Cathedral, shooting himself in the choir of the cathedral at the age of 78 and offering himself as a pseudo-martyr.Though personally anti-clerical, he chose Notre-Dame for its symbolic significance, noting that it had been built on the site of an earlier pagan temple. In his 2011 book The Shock of History, he had expressed admiration for what he termed ideological suicides. His final blog post, “La manif du 26 mai et Heidegger”, published on the day of his death, read as a political testament addressed to his supporters. In it, he condemned the adoption of same-sex marriage but gloomily rejoiced that when France “falls into the hands of Islamists,” they will surely abolish it, “not to please us, as we might expect, but because [it] is contrary to Sharia law”. He affirmed the “reality” of the “great replacement,” which he believed was “an otherwise catastrophic danger for the future”, and concluded by predicting his suicide and calling on his comrades to “authenticate [their words] with actions”: “New, spectacular, and symbolic gestures will certainly be needed to shake people out of their slumber, rouse their numb consciences, and reawaken the memory of our origins”.

Earlier that same day, he had lunch with three of his associates—Philippe Conrad, Bernard Lugan, and Jean-Yves Le Gallou—informing them of his intention. He asked them to establish, in his memory, the Institut Iliade (Institute for Long European Memory), which since 2014 has organized conferences bringing together numerous French and European far-right figures, as well as training programs aimed at cultivating new cadres. Venner’s strategy of cultural activism, prioritizing intellectual and symbolic influence over direct party politics, has been adopted in different forms within contemporary far-right movements, including efforts by Marine Le Pen to rebrand and normalize her party’s public image.

Sources

Dominique Venner, Le cœur rebelle, Pierre-Guillaume de Roux Editions, 2014.

Blog https://www.dominiquevenner.fr

“Dominique Venner, 60 ans d’extrême droite française”, récit documentaire de Sylvie Fagnart dans “Affaires sensibles”, France Inter, 18 mars 2024.

“Dominique Venner et le renouvellement du racisme”, par Stéphane François et Nicolas Lebourg, Fragments sur les temps présents, 23 mai 2013.

Friedrich Ratzel

Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904) was a German geographer and zoologist who had a major influence on German geopolitical thought at the turn of the 20th century. Intoxicated by his social Darwinism, he developed dubious biologistic concepts to describe the differential development of states and their spatial expansion. 

His ideas are considered a decisive impetus for the “Lebensraum” ideology of National Socialism, the postulate that a strong and self-sufficient nation-state requires ample space and resources to feed its population and support its industry, which in turn legitimizes plundering neighboring territories. 

Eighty years after Hitler’s defeat, Ratzel’s infamous concept seems to be enjoying a rebirth of sorts, at least among the advocates of a “Russian World” that would absorb Ukraine, of a “Land of Israel” that would annex the West bank and Gaza, and even of a “Greater America” that would range from Greenland to the Panama Canal and even include Canada

Clyde Snow

“Being dead is not a problem, dying is.” Clyde Snow often repeated these words, as the bodies he autopsied lay at the bottom of mass graves. An expert listener to such silent witnesses, the American medical examiner and anthropologist spent years reconstructing the story of their final hours by documenting the traces of abuse, torture, beatings, or execution engraved in their bones. Snow’s work was ultimately aimed at identifying these bodies and restoring their dignity.

Forensic anthropology began in 1865, when Clara Barton was commissioned by Abraham Lincoln to identify unknown soldiers who had fallen on the battlefield during the Civil War. In 1984, the discipline took on a new dimension. Clyde Snow's expertise was then called upon in Argentina, where it was no longer just a matter of restoring the identity of human remains, but of proving, through anthropometric study, the “dirty war” waged from 1976 to 1983 by the military dictatorship of General Videla.

Clyde Snow enthusiastically accepted the mission, seeing it as an important new application of forensic anthropology: documenting human rights violations. He thus headed to the mass graves where death squads had piled up some of the 30,000 desaparecidos. Bullet wounds and perimortem fractures were among the evidence that the anthropologist then presented at the trial of the Argentine generals responsible for these massacres, leading to the conviction of five of them.

In Croatia, he discovered the remains of 200 patients and hospital staff executed by soldiers. In El Salvador, he found the skeletons of 136 children and infants who had been shot by army squads. In the Philippines, Bolivia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Rwanda, Chile... all over the world, Clyde Snow has excavated bodies from mass graves and provided evidence of atrocities committed by governments, dictatorial regimes and generals, so that those responsible can be brought to justice. As one of the main witnesses at Saddam Hussein’s trial for genocide against the Kurdish ethnic group in 2007, the anthropologist stood for four hours presenting detailed forensic evidence of the use of sarin gas and summary executions.

A member of the United Nations Human Rights Commission, Clyde Snow became the father of a movement that put forensic anthropology at the service of human rights campaigns against genocide, massacres, and war crimes. In more than 20 countries, he scientifically and psychologically trained experts in excavation techniques designed to preserve evidence, identify human remains in conflict situations, and reconstruct the conditions of their death.

Bones never lie and never forget, Clyde Snow used to say. “Their testimony is silent, but very eloquent.”

Ghassan Abu-Sittah

Ghassan Abu Sittah is a British-Palestinian surgeon, who regularly intervenes in conflict and crisis situations, including in Palestine where he first came as a medical student at the time of the First Intifada. During the Nakba, his father’s family were expelled from their land and became refugees in the Gaza Strip, before moving to Kuwait and later to the United Kingdom. 

Amidst the urgency of October 2023, Abu Sittah once again returned to Gaza to volunteer with Doctors Without Borders, performing numerous amputations and other procedures at al-Shifa, al-Awda, and al-Ahli hospitals. The latter was targeted by a first Israeli attack on October 17 of that year, killing and injuring hundreds of civilians, as Abu Sittah was conducting an operation inside the hospital. 

With his first-hand experience of devastating injuries, including burns caused by white phosphorus, he has supported multiple investigations into war crimes. There have been multiple attempts to silence Abu Sittah and to suspend his medical license. In April 2024, Germany banned him from obtaining a visa for one year in the entirety of the Schengen area.

Candace Owens

Candace Owens, 36, is a leading figure in American far-right media and a controversial pundit known for her unrestrained conspiratorial tendencies. On YouTube, Instagram, and X, she has roughly six million followers on each platform, and her influence continues to grow. Hundreds of thousands of viewers comment on her live streams, and her most viral video has been viewed nearly 100 million times. Young, dynamic, and platform-savvy, she has leveraged her African American background to legitimize positions widely described as racist, carving out a space for herself in an overwhelmingly white and male environment and serving as a trendy figurehead for the reactionary camp in the United States.

In the mid-2010s, Owens was still writing anonymous blog posts critical of the Tea Party for her New York–based company. The primaries of the 2016 presidential election proved to be a turning point. Donald Trump’s attacks on what he called the corrupt media were, she later said, a revelation: she claimed to have become a conservative “overnight”. “I realized that liberals were actually the real trolls”, she declared in 2017. She began on YouTube under the pseudonym RedPillBlack, urging viewers to leave the “simulation” (a reference to The Matrix) and confront what she framed as uncomfortable truths. Her videos bore provocative titles such as “I Don’t Care About Charlottesville, the KKK, or White Supremacy”. One of her earliest clips mocked a gay coming-out narrative while announcing her own political conversion and anticipating persecution from the left. Owens also embraced the “trad wife” model, promoting rigid binary gender roles, stereotypical femininity, large families, and strict parental control over education.

Embraced by Fox News, her pseudo-transgressive activism quickly brought her into contact with a range of conservative organizations, from Turning Point USA—where she toured campuses alongside Charlie Kirk—to The Daily Wire, co-founded by Ben Shapiro, where she hosted her own show. She also joined the Blexit movement, which aims to encourage Black voters to leave the Democratic Party, which she provocatively calls “Democratic plantations”. Her rise to fame drew the attention of the 45th President of the United States who invited her to the Oval Office in 2018 and reportedly described her as “intellectual”, “brilliant,” and “very precious to our country.” Within a few years, Owens had become a prolific content producer in support of Trump and the MAGA movement. While relentlessly attacking minorities and the Black Lives Matter movement, she was even floated by Republican Senator Ted Cruz as a potential future Supreme Court justice. In March 2024, she was dismissed from The Daily Wire following antisemitic remarks posted on X. She subsequently appeared alongside the white nationalist streamer Nick Fuentes and was later banned from entering New Zealand and Australia for similar reasons. In 2025, Owens distanced herself from Trump, criticizing U.S. military involvement in Iran and Venezuela. These growing tensions within the far right led her to redirect much of her rhetoric toward pop culture and what she describes as the exposure of occult or hidden truths.

Beginning in March 2024, Owens devoted extensive airtime to Révélation, a book by French author Xavier Poussard speculating about the gender identity of Brigitte Macron. After more than eleven hours of commentary in her podcast series Becoming Brigitte, she concluded that transgender identity represents the “greatest violation of civil rights of our time,” claiming it was “worse than Jim Crow laws, because we are mutilating the bodies of children”. Public health measures during the COVID-19 pandemic had already been a central target of her commentary. She repeatedly denounced lockdowns and, in 2021, went so far as to call for an American “invasion” of Australia in response to its strict restrictions. Among her other conspiracy claims are assertions that the Apollo 11 landing was staged, that George Floyd died of an overdose rather than from police violence, that climate change is a fabrication, and that Jewish actors played a central role in the transatlantic slave trade. She has also used the Jeffrey Epstein case to implicate the Mossad, the KGB, and the CIA, alleging that “we are being governed by pedophile satanists working for Israel.” Owens’s rhetoric moves fluidly between social and cultural flashpoints: from denunciations of “yoga pants” trends to portrayals of isolated news stories as symbols of “woke” excess, to attacks on the Democratic establishment or rumors drawn from the international jet set. Celebrities frequently serve as material for her broadcasts. She has aligned herself with divisive figures such as Kanye West and targeted public personalities like Cardi B or Colin Kaepernick, capitalizing on the waves of controversy that ripple across social media.

David Lane

“We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White children”. These are the grimly famous “Fourteen Words”, coined by the American neo-Nazi David Lane in the 1980s, which earned him the status of one of the most influential ideologues of the contemporary white supremacist movement. Today, this slogan continues to circulate and remains a source of inspiration for those who adhere to “White Power”.

Born in 1938 in Woden, Iowa, David Lane grew up in a family marked by his father’s domestic violence before being placed in an orphanage at the age of six. He was later adopted by a Lutheran family. Deeply religious, his adoptive parents moved him from parish to parish, which fostered in Lane a profound sense of boredom and a radical rejection of Christianity, soon replaced by a fascination with Hitler. After high school, he attempted a career as a realtor but quickly lost his job after refusing to sell houses to Black clients in white neighborhoods.

He then became further radicalized. He joined the John Birch Society, a far-right group obsessed with the communist threat, which he soon left, accusing its members of targeting the wrong enemy. According to Lane, the real threat to the future of the white race was Jewish people. The 1980s provided him with opportunities to become even more extreme. After publishing his first manifesto, The Death of the White Race, Lane joined the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Denver, Colorado, and associated with activists promoting an antisemitic ideology claiming that Jews were the descendants of Satan.

In 1983, he met Robert Jay Mathews, who invited him to join Brüder Schweigen, also known as The Order. Frustrated by what he perceived as the ineffectiveness of neo-Nazi groups, Lane found in The Order an organization explicitly committed to violence, whose goal was the eradication of Jews and the creation, by force, of an exclusively white nation. A year later, the group launched a campaign of armed robberies and attacks against the U.S. government, which its members believed was controlled by a Jewish cabal. To finance their plan to establish a white homeland, they carried out bank robberies and car thefts. On June 18, 1984, David Lane, along with several members of The Order, escalated their violence by participating in the murder of Alan Berg, a Jewish radio host who was shot outside his home in Denver for publicly criticizing white supremacists. Within six months, Lane was arrested by the FBI and, for his various crimes, was sentenced to a total of 190 years in prison, which he served in several high-security facilities.

Far from abandoning his ideological activity after his imprisonment, Lane continued to cultivate his fanaticism from his cell. He wrote numerous texts, including his most famous works, 14 Words and 88 Precepts, which enhanced his influence within far-right circles. 88 Precepts, whose title refers to the Nazi salute (“Heil Hitler,” with H being the eighth letter of the alphabet), reaffirmed his belief that white people were threatened by the loss of territorial dominance and by what he described as forced racial mixing. In addition, he wrote Strategy, an article urging white families to relocate to the mountains to produce Aryan children and establish their own political system.

In 1994, Lane married Katja Lane, with whom he founded the publishing house 14 Word Press, enabling him to develop and disseminate his writings alongside his religious doctrine, Wotanism. Wotanism, also known as WOTAN, stands for “Will of the Aryan Nation.” In 2007, David Lane died in prison following a seizure.

Many neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other identitarian activists around the world revere Lane as a prophet. They have designated June 30 as “World Remembrance Day” in his honor. His slogan continues to surface in connection with numerous terrorist attacks. In 2008, Lane’s ideology played a central role in a plot to assassinate 88 African Americans, including Barack Obama. In 2012, the gunman who attacked a Sikh temple in Wisconsin had the number 14 tattooed on his hand. In 2015, the man who murdered nine African Americans at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston made repeated references to the code “1488.” He also brought 88 rounds of ammunition to the scene. In 2018, the antisemitic attacker who carried out a massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh displayed “1488” in his social media profile and endorsed the view that “Jews are the children of Satan.” In 2019, the Islamophobic attacker in Christchurch, New Zealand, cited David Lane’s slogan among his sources of inspiration in his manifesto, The Great Replacement, alongside that of Renaud Camus.

Enoch Powell

Enoch Powell was one of the most influential British politicians of the 20th century. He was a Tory MP during the post-war transformation of conservatism. An intellectually eccentric and controversial figure, he became a herald of the striking convergence between zealous neoliberalism and unabashed racism that was instated in Great Britain in the 1970s, and which pushed the thesis formulated by Friedrich Hayek, according to which collective culture or identity is necessary for the well-functioning of the market, toward its most unconscious and discriminatory regulations.

Following an early academic career in ancient Greek literature, which allowed him to cultivate a mythological romanticism tinged with glorious militarism between Cambridge and Sydney, he embarked on a political career rooted in his experience of World War II. From 1941, he spent two years stationed in Cairo as secretary to Military Intelligence. Determined to become Viceroy of India, he continued learning Urdu, which he had begun in London, before being posted to Delhi as a lieutenant colonel. He was promoted to colonel and then brigadier at just 32 years of age, making him the youngest person to hold this rank in the British Army. In December 1953, along with forty other Conservative MPs, he joined the Suez Group to fight against what he saw as the Empire’s tragic withdrawal from the Middle East, a commitment for which he and his colleagues received the support of Zionists who saw the Suez Canal as the cornerstone of the Commonwealth.

Starting at the end of the 1950s, Powell began fighting tooth and nail for economic policies that aimed to dismantle the consensus of the time, and which prefigured the rise of Thatcherism, including: the control of the money supply, privatization of various public services such as postal and communications services, as well as deregulation and drastic tax cuts. A member of the Mont Pelerin Society, he participated in its meetings and gave several lectures there. In this neoliberal evangelism, he inspired and collaborated with various think tanks such as the Institute of Economic Affairs and the European Research Group. Several associations were galvanized by this movement, led by Powell among others, such as the Middle Class Alliance and the People’s League for Freedom, and sought to push the Conservative Party ever further in these reforms, waging a relentless battle against inflation, trade unions, and minimum wage controls. Thus, in 1970, Enoch Powell was able to argue that the Conservative Party should stop apologizing for being capitalist.

In conjunction, the dismantling of the British dominion over the Commonwealth engendered in Powell a nationalist turn and defiant Euroscepticism, which he defended with wartime rhetoric within various parliamentary groups campaigning for national independence and refusal to join the European Economic Community. This hatred of continental federalism followed in the footsteps of other figures such as Somerset de Chair, future father-in-law of Jacob Rees-Mogg, champion of Brexit and minister under Boris Johnson. Powell thus supported a free capital market for decades while balking at endorsing a free labor market. This new type of patriotism offered a peculiar combination of migration paranoia and nativism devoted to those nostalgic for imperialism, accompanied, as needed, by conspiracy theories or anti-American tendencies.

Above all, Enoch Powell will be remembered for his “rivers of blood” speech delivered in Birmingham in 1968, which, due to its virulence, led to his expulsion from his own party by Conservative leader Edward Heath. This did nothing to dampen the Powell cult among the most ardent reactionaries, including Nigel Farage, who would occasionally serve as his driver and correspondent. It was in this speech that Powell most bitterly developed the theme of native-born citizens feeling like strangers in their own country, a refrain taken up by xenophobes of all stripes. Powell’s racism was particularly directed against populations from the former Empire, and the Wolverhampton MP went so far as to call for a massive repatriation policy and the abolition of birthright citizenship, which Thatcher succeeded in revoking in 1983.

Powell’s speech followed hot on the heels of the controversial arrival of some 20,000 British citizens of South Asian origin from Kenya, as well as the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. two weeks earlier. It was too good an opportunity to pass up, allowing him to portray America as a victim of “community unrest” and urge the British to avoid a similar fate. Thus, through an apocalyptic panorama of elementary symbolism, presenting a nation on the brink of civil war, Powell became the spokesperson for the “modest English population” that had become “a persecuted minority”. The speech was a landmark event and marked a turning point for the unapologetic far right, which has since freely hurled insults at its own people and immigrants, in Westminster and beyond.

Maurice Barrès

Maurice Barrès was born in Charmes, in the Vosges region, in 1862 and died in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1923. He arguably embodies better than anyone else the type of xenophobic and anti-Semitic French intellectual that first appeared in the last third of the 19th century and endures to this day. Barrès was a novelist, an essayist, and a politician. As such, he served as a Boulangist deputy in Nancy in 1889 and 1893 and, after several failed attempts, as a representative of the Republican right in Paris, from 1906 until his death.

His literary career began under the banner of what he called the “cult of the self” – the title of his first trilogy of novels. During his early years as a novelist, he indulged in a narcissistic exaltation that quickly made him an idol for all aspiring dandies. Among his admirers, Léon Blum—whom he would soon disappoint—wrote of him: "An entire generation, seduced or conquered, breathed in this heady mixture of conquering activity, philosophy, and sensuality. " However, as evidenced by his first successful novel, Sous l'œil des Barbares (Under the Eye of the Barbarians), Barrès's manic temperament was already predicated on phobic anxieties. Adorable as it was supposed to be, the unfortunate self was nevertheless surrounded by envious rivals conspiring to bring about its downfall. Fortunately, to cope with this hostile environment, it could count on the grounding provided by its native land and on the spirits of its ancestors, who helped the self stand tall and believe in its genius.

The transition that led Barrès from the cult of the self to the veneration of roots took place during his first venture into politics, in support of General Boulanger. A conglomeration of monarchists, Bonapartists, radicals, former Communards, and Blanquists, Boulangism was a motley movement, to say the least. Its supporters had little in common other than their aversion to a parliamentary system which they considered corrupted by capitalists with ties to foreign powers. To break with the subordination of national sovereignty to cosmopolitan bankers and industrialists importing labor, the Boulangists were setting their hopes on a constitutional reform that would restore the power of the people through referendums and put an end to the shady maneuvers to which legislators were prone by strengthening the executive branch.

Summary and relatively vague as long as Boulanger's reputation for integrity and patriotism was enough to ensure his popularity, the worldview held by his supporters paradoxically became clearer as the prospect of political victory faded. After the General's death, Boulangism took the form of what Barrès, who became his main ideological heir, called “revisionist socialism.” The unity of the nation that he promoted was based on the solidarity of the social groups that composed it— a call premised on the presumption that the factions responsible for national disunity were finding support beyond the country's borders.

The goal of this revisionist socialism was certainly not the collectivization of the means of production. At the turn of the 1890s, Barrès was careful to distinguish the legacy of Proudhon, which he claimed, from the “Judeo-German” theories of Marx. The reforms he proposed were aimed solely at easing tensions between workers and capital owners by persuading both sides to work together to rebuild the country.

The economic program of this socialism was akin to total protectionism. It included credit regulation to prevent speculators from diverting capital into international finance, higher customs tariffs to save artisans and small farmers from ruin, and significant restrictions on foreign workers' access to the labor market to ward off rising unemployment and falling wages. Altogether, reducing the porosity of the territory was seen by “revisionists” as the best way to restore prosperity while strengthening the ties between the classes that contributed to it. In their view, it was the permeability of borders that predators exploited, both to siphon off the wealth created by French producers and to stir up tensions between them.

Politically, Barrès charted his own course, rejecting both the political and economic liberalism practiced by so-called “opportunistic” Republicans and the proletarian internationalism professed by Marxists. In his view, the nation was an organism that could only function properly through the cooperation of its healthy parts and the removal of parasites that thrived on its resources. As he wrote in his essay Contre les étrangers (Against Foreigners), “the law of economic harmony, that is, the solidarity of the different parts of the social body, is only true within the same country.”

National recovery was not merely a matter of alliance between the productive elements of the nation, however. Barrès also insisted that the nation needed adversity as much as solidarity to rebuild itself. However, this did not primarily mean seeking national unity by way of taking on foreigners outside its borders. Before even considering revenge against Germany or colonial expansion, Barrès advocated purging French society of the foreign elements that have already infiltrated it. Mainly directed against Jews and immigrant workers, mostly Belgians and Italians at the time, his calls for deportations, or at least racial discrimination, would therefore play a dominant role in his nationalism: “The idea of homeland,” he wrote, "implies inequality, but to the detriment of foreigners and not, as is the case today, to the detriment of nationals. "

Although several notorious anti-Semites were already among Boulanger's earliest supporters, it was not until his retirement from political life that the heirs to his rebellion fully identified their cause with the denunciation of parasitic finance, of which Rothschild was said to be the grand orchestrator. The Jews were then accused of corrupting politicians by bribing them, of strangling businessmen by imposing usurious loans on them, of swindling stock and bondholders by speculating with their savings, and of deceiving public opinion by taking control of the press.

Because hostility toward money lenders was likely to cut across class lines, the designation of a population atavistically inclined toward money-related professions was in line with the organicist view of society proponed by revisionist socialists. Pointing the finger at a breed of brokers and lenders who derive their income from what the natives produce allowed them to combine in a single condemnation the feelings of social injustice and patriotic indignation that Barrès and his ilk saw as the seeds of national solidarity.

As anti-Semitism took on greater importance in his musings, Barrès associated more closely with Edouard Drumont - the author of La France juive (Jewish France) and editor of La libre parole (Free Speech) - and attended the lectures of the racialist neurologist Jules Soury. With Drumont, he shared the conviction that Jews were playing both sides: liberalism to bribe politicians and extort French business owners, but also communism to dissolve the patriotism of French workers in the fiction of international proletarian solidarity. As for Soury’s teaching, it reinforced Barrès’s conviction that Semites and Aryans behave “completely differently in the same circumstances, because the heterogeneity of their natures is largely irreducible.”

Thus Barrès found himself poised to become the anti-intellectual intellectual, that is to say, the anti-Dreyfusard par excellence. His novels composing the “national energy” cycle —Les déracinés, L’appel du soldat, Leurs figures—but also his essays—in particular Scènes et Doctrines du nationalisme—not to mention his speeches and his diaries certainly dealt with the judicial aspect of the Dreyfus affair. However, for him, the real issue lied at another level, summed up in his famous phrase: “That Dreyfus is capable of betrayal, I conclude from his race.”

Yet Jews were not the only ones to suffer from his xenophobic rants. Immigrant workers were also accused of parasitism. In his Étude pour la protection des ouvriers français (Study for the Protection of French Workers), Barrès began by using statistics from the Labor Office to justify his call for restrictions on immigration: he first asserted that the large number of immigrants led to a substantial increase in unemployment and put downward pressure on the salaries of French workers; he added that their presence in the country was a heavy burden on the public treasury; finally, he pointed out that foreign nationals were exempt from military service, which made them more attractive to employers.

However biased and flawed, this supposedly factual account of the number and cost of foreigners was merely an introduction to his main argument, which was culturalist and racialist: Barrès lamented that, aside from taking up space and depriving French people of resources, foreigners were altering the fabric of national identity—especially when cohabitation led to mixed marriages — and thus hastening France’s decline.

Similar to his anti-Semitism, which portrayed Jews as predatory capitalists and confiscatory collectivists, Barrès' xenophobia was mired in contradictions. He sometimes blamed foreign workers for being excessively docile, which made them easy prey for exploitative bosses, and sometimes claimed that they were naturally insubordinate, which drove them to delinquency, rioting, or laziness. Furthermore, whatever the criticism, the proposed etiology pointed to contradictory causes: the faults attributed to foreigners could be alternatively traced back to their culture of origin—the rudeness of Belgians, the aggressiveness of Italians, the trickery of Germans—and to the uprooting that resulted from their emigration. Finally, the danger they were supposed to present could either stem from their propensity to remain among themselves and from the racial mixing caused by their presence: in one case, the migratory peril was likened to a cyst on the skin of the social body, in the other, to an infection causing national degeneration.

As contradictory as they might seem, the grievances directed at immigrant workers found their coherence, just like anti-Semitic rhetoric, in the contrast they offered between their alleged flaws and the virtues Barrès attributed to the French people. The vitriol directed at foreign workers was meant to highlight the image of an indigenous population that was as hard-working as it was committed to justice—particularly when it came to fair remuneration for its efforts—and as deeply attached to its roots as it was spontaneously hospitable—to the point of obscuring the fact that its guests, who did not share its values, were only settling in France to take advantage of its people’s innocence.

Deeply affected first by Dreyfus's pardon and then his rehabilitation, Barrès nevertheless regained his enthusiasm as the First World War approached. A great supporter of the Union Sacrée (Sacred Union) on the eve of the conflict and of unrestrained belligerence during the war, his passion for combat, in which he never participated, earned him the gentle nickname “nightingale of carnage” – given to him by Romain Rolland. His warmongering—followed by enthusiastic support for the harshest clauses of the Treaty of Versailles—led him to revise his anti-Semitism somewhat: while he never apologized for his antidreyfusard stance, the number of Jews who died for France suggested to him that they might have a place there after all. The fact that so many streets still bear the name of Maurice Barrès—but also that the centenary of his death was included on the list of National Commemorations—shows that France is a country where Renaud Camus and Michel Houellebecq are anything but anomalies.

Robert D. Bullard,“ father of environmental justice”

Of the $370 billion invested in climate policies under the Joe Biden administration, $60 billion was allocated to “environmental justice”. This concept was coined by African American sociologist Robert D. Bullard in the early 1980s. In a seminal article published in 1983, Bullard examined the spatial distribution of waste disposal sites in Houston, exposing the overexposure of predominantly African American neighborhoods to health and environmental risks.¹ Socio-racial and environmental inequalities appeared to be closely intertwined.² His seminal work, Dumping in Dixie, published in 1990, has since become a classic of environmental literature. In 2021, Bullard even became an advisor to the White House.³

Born in 1946, Bullard came from a Black family that had acquired land as early as 1875, just ten years after the official abolition of slavery in the United States. This allowed his family to maintain a degree of financial independence under Jim Crow laws and to fund the education of Bob and his four siblings through the sale of timber harvested from their land. After studying at Alabama A&M University, Bullard enlisted in the Marines during the Vietnam War, though he was never sent to the front lines. Thanks to the GI Bill, he went on to pursue a master’s degree and embarked on an intellectual journey marked by the influence of his role model, the writer and civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois, before turning his attention to environmental issues beginning in 1979.

That year, his wife Linda McKeever Bullard asked for his help with a class-action lawsuit aimed at preventing the establishment of a landfill in a middle-class Black neighborhood in Houston. Tasked with identifying the locations of the city’s other landfills, Bullard, along with his students, conducted a study revealing the racially biased distribution of environmental nuisances: while Black residents made up only a quarter of Houston’s population, the city’s five municipal landfills, six of its eight incinerators, and three of its four private landfills were located in Black neighborhoods. In 1987, however, the courts ultimately approved the landfill’s construction, despite the findings of this sociological study. Bullard then set out to conduct a more in-depth analysis of the disproportionate exposure of communities of color to water, soil, and air pollution.

At the time, the issue of environmental racism was met with skepticism, both within the civil rights movement and among mainstream environmental organizations. It was not until 2020 that the largest U.S. environmental organization, the Sierra Club, publicly criticized the racism of its founder, John Muir^.4

Environmental justice thus shares a notable affinity with other critical currents in ecology, such as the ecological Marxism developed by James O'Connor, Joan Martinez-Alier’s “ecology of the poor”, the subsistence feminism of Maria Mies and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, and the social ecology of Murray Bookchin.⁵ All share a common thread: linking the environmental crisis to social relations of class, race, and gender.⁶

Photo credit: ©The Bullard Center of Environmental and Climate Justice

¹ Robert D. Bullard, "Solid Waste Sites and the Black Houston Community", Sociological Inquiry, vol. 53, nº 2‑3, avril 1983.

² Robert D. Bullard, Dumping in Dixie. Race, Class and Environmental Quality, Westview Press, Boulder, 1990.

³ Cara Buckley, “At 75, the Father of Environmental Justice Meets the Moment”, The New York Times, Sept. 12, 2022.

⁴ LucyTompkins, “Sierra Club Says It Must Confront the Racism of John Muir”, The New York Times, July 22, 2020.

⁵ Pour une autre formulation classique de la justice environnementale, voir Giovanna Di Chiro, "Nature as Community: The Convergence of Environment and Social Justice", dans William Cronon (dir.), Uncommon Ground. Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, New York, Norton, 1996, p. 298 à 32

⁶ Marius Bickhardt, Gauthier Delozière et Cannelle Gignoux, Le marxisme écologique, La Découverte, à paraître en avril 2026, p. 9.

Vannevar Bush

Vannevar Bush (1890–1974) was an engineer and high-ranking administrator of scientific research programs in the United States. During World War II, he was in charge of the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), the agency that coordinated essential military research and development, from decisive advances in radar to the launch of the Manhattan Project. He considered scientific research a pillar of national security as much as of economic growth. He also played a key role in the creation of the National Science Foundation.

In this capacity, after having been commissioned a year earlier by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to write a report on the stakes of scientific research in peacetime, Bush published in 1945 a now-famous report titled “Science: The Endless Frontier”¹. Revisiting the frontier imaginary introduced by historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893, Bush replaced its finitarian anxiety tied to the exhaustion of the pioneer frontier with a cornucopian promise. According to him, the territorial limits imposed by the official closure of the U.S. frontier at the end of the nineteenth century could now be offset by the limitless power of science and technology, while terrestrial constraints on the surface could be transcended by the abundance of fossil energy underground.²

In 1951, the American historian Walter Prescott Webb, for his part, reiterated that the Great Frontier, the fruit of four centuries of colonial expansion, had definitively turned a corner by the end of the twentieth century³. He denounced the “fallacy of new frontiers”, according to which science and technology would constitute a vector of permanent emancipation from natural limits. Webb highlighted the finite nature of non-renewable fossil resources, with explicit reference to the work of American engineer M. King Hubbert, who coined the term “peak oil”⁴. As he wrote: “Science has shown us how to capture the fossil fuels, where they are hidden, and how to use them. Technology has given us luxuries and comforts in a riotous holiday in which we can eat and breed, but all the time it is sawing off the limb on which it complacently sits, on which civilization rests.”⁵ The historian called on us to draw conclusions from the advent of a “borderless society”: “If the frontier is gone, we should have the courage to recognize the fact, cease to cry for what we have lost, and devote our energy to finding solutions to the problems that now face a frontierless society”.⁶

As Pierre Charbonnier underscores, Bush’s Promethean imaginary is once again at play in the contemporary context of U.S. industrial policy⁷. During the elaboration of the Endless Frontier Act, Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer explicitly drew on Bush’s legacy, as confirmed by his speech to the Senate on July 27, 2022. “Nearly 80 years ago, Dr. Vannevar Bush, the head of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research, wrote in a report to President Truman that ‘without scientific progress, no amount of achievement in other directions can ensure our health, prosperity, and security in the modern world.’ The name of that report? It was called ‘Science: The Endless Frontier.’ It is the inspiration for much of the work we have dedicated to passing this bill today”.⁸ Bush’s original security concerns are thus transposed into the context of Sino-American rivalry. The Endless Frontier Act, designed to increase investment in cutting-edge national research, and the CHIPS for America Act, aimed at relocating semiconductor manufacturing to the United States, were merged into the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act, which seeks to strengthen U.S. competitiveness vis-à-vis China.

¹ Lettre de Franklin D. Roosevelt à Vannevar Bush, 17 novembre 1944, en ligne : https://scarc.library.oregonstate.edu/coll/pauling/war/corr/sci13.006.4-roosevelt-bush-19441117.html; Vannevar Bush, Science, the Endless Frontier: A Report to the President on a Program for Postwar Scientific Research, Washington (D C), U S Government Printing Office, 1945.

² En histoire environnementale, ce passage du sol au sous-sol a été décrit par la définition par ailleurs contestée des énergies fossiles comme « forêts souterraines ». Voir Rolf Peter Sieferle, Der unterirdische Wald. Energiekrise und industrielle Revolution (La forêt souterraine. Crise énergétique et révolution industrielle), Munich, C. H. Beck, 1982.

³ Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Frontier, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1964 (édition originale 1951).

⁴ M. King Hubbert, « Energy from Fossil Fuels », Science, vol. 109, no 2823, 4 février 1949, p. 103–109, doi: 10.1126/science.109.2823.103. Sur Hubbert, voir Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, Sans transition. Une nouvelle histoire de l’énergie, Paris, Seuil (coll. « Écocène »), 2024.

⁵ Ibid., p. 299-300.

⁶ Ibid., p. 302.

⁷ Pierre Charbonnier, Vers l’écologie de guerre, op.cit., p. 253.

⁸ Congressional Record Volume 168, Number 125 (Wednesday, July 27, 2022).

Oriana Fallaci

Oriana Fallaci is a striking personification of the rampant radicalization to the right within cultural milieus at the turn of the twenty-first century. The journalist and writer went, in just a few decades, from being a celebrated reporter admired in liberal circles to a pamphleteer espousing distressing Islamophobic ideas, whose later writings would prove more controversial yet no less popular on the peninsula and throughout the rest of the world.

Raised in Florence in a family with antifascist leanings, she participated, while still a young teenager, in the Resistance movement. She embarked very early on a journalistic career that would earn her, for life, the reputation of a brave and passionate woman, notably through her reporting from war zones. Many remember her in the famous photograph of her fleeing under Vietcong fire, or mourning her Greek lover, who was assassinated under the colonels’ regime and whom she celebrated in her novel A Man. Yet, it was paradoxically as a reporter in the Muslim world, from Lebanon to Pakistan, that she consolidated her reputation. Her combative interviews with leading political figures such as Sharon, Arafat, Meir, Khomeini, Kissinger, and Gaddafi also contributed to her resounding media success.

Following 9/11, she published, within the space of a few years, three controversial works: The Rage and the Pride in 2001; The Force of Reason in 2004; and Interview with Myself: The Apocalypse in 2004. These rapidly made her a leading figure in global Islamophobic circles, a movement whose vehemence she fueled with xenophobic denunciations and inflammatory rhetoric. Less well known, her controversial novel Inchallah, published in 1990, had already drawn a stark contrast between a democratic, liberal, and peaceful Eden and the sectarian Islamic “threat.” In Fallaci’s diatribe, the civil war in Lebanon, described as an “ethnic conflict,” is triggered by the sudden and massive arrival of Palestinians, who overturn the established order “with their anger, their pain, their money.” The racism on display is already predictable and crude, with familiar metaphors of stray dogs and rats multiplying to invade the city.

The vehement tone of The Rage and the Pride, her first best-seller, is justified in the name of Al-Qaeda’s victims in New York. Meanwhile, her second pamphlet, no less nauseating despite its title, The Force of Reason, is dedicated to the “dead in Madrid.” In this heated conflict between civilization and barbarism, the perspectives outlined in Fallaci’s books remain the same: a hardening of migration policies and an antagonistic reaction from the Christian West. Fallaci adopts the theories of the British polemicist Bat Ye’or on Eurabia, announcing the imminent death of Europe under Muslim invasion. She also mixes her culturalist shortcuts with pseudo-feminist considerations, as when she declares that “There is something in Arab men that disgusts women of taste.”

Exiled in New York at the end of her life, Fallaci’s final years were marked as much by illness as by the lawsuits brought against her in Italy and elsewhere in Europe for insulting a religion recognized by the state, racism, blasphemy, or incitement to hatred. A few hours after her death, Forza Italia proposed naming a street or square in Florence after her, but for once the center-left rejected the idea. Fallaci nevertheless remained surrounded by the highest civic and cultural honors of her country, awarded by both the right and the left. She also enjoyed particularly favorable media coverage, supported by the two main national press groups, RCS and Mondadori, owned by Berlusconi, as well as by the television channels belonging to him, not to mention the public channels he controlled as Prime Minister. This publicity enabled her to sell millions of copies of her later works and to be recognized as a leading writer despite her lack of imagination and creativity.

Representing the consensus view of a large section of the far right, Orianna Fallaci simultaneously attacked pacifists, the Italian left (which she accused of collaborationism), and the Catholic Church, which she considered too lax in the face of the proliferation of minarets on the Old Continent. However, this did not prevent her, as a self-described “Christian atheist,” from finding a rare ally, even a kindred spirit, in Pope Benedict XVI. He received her at Castel Gandolfo in 2005, following the visit of the envoy of fundamentalist Catholics, the Superior General of the Society of Saint Pius X, Bishop Bernard Fellay, and other dissident theologians. Her main confidant was also a clerical figure, Archbishop Salvatore Fisichella, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization, responsible for resisting the decline of Christianity in Western countries. In 2004, during the Easter ceremonies, racist activists read excerpts from Fallaci’s latest inflammatory book on the steps of Milan Cathedral, in front of the city’s archbishop, who was celebrating the rite of the washing of the feet for immigrant workers.

Moshe Dayan

For anyone who came of age during the Cold War, and particularly among supporters of Israel, Moshe Dayan (1915–1981) is an iconic figure. One of the first prominent Israeli politicians to be born in Palestine, he joined the Haganah, the Zionist paramilitary organization, at the age of 14, before enlisting in the British Army during World War II. From the declaration of independence in 1948 until his death in 1981, Moshe Dayan held numerous positions in the army and government: he was Chief of Staff from 1955 to 1958, Minister of Agriculture in the early 1960s, Minister of Defense in the governments of Levi Eshkol during the Six-Day War and Golda Meir during the Yom Kippur War, and finally Menachem Begin’s Minister of Foreign Affairs between 1977 and 1979, at the time of the peace negotiations with Egypt.

A fervent supporter of the occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza, Dayan campaigned after 1967 for a dual strategy of quelling resistance while integrating Palestinians into the Israeli economy, notably through the widespread distribution of work permits.

Moshe Dayan's name has recently returned to the headlines because of a famous eulogy: On April 30, 1956, the then chief of staff of the army visited the Nahal Oz kibbutz on the Gaza Strip border to pay tribute to Ro'i Rothberg, a kibbutznik killed the day before by Palestinian refugees who had returned to the place from which they had been expelled eight years earlier.

Moshe Dayan's speech remains famous in Israel, mainly because it called on Israelis never to let their guard down. However, it is the fact that the Nahal Oz kibbutz was one of the places most violently attacked by Hamas militants on October 7, 2023, that has brought it back into the spotlight. For advocates of Israeli “reprisals,” Moshe Dayan's call for uncompromising firmness in 1956 is more relevant than ever today. But critics of the ongoing destruction of Gaza focus on two other aspects of the famous general's speech.

First, they recall that when Moshe Dayan took the floor at Nahal Oz, he began his speech as follows: “Yesterday morning, Ro'i was murdered. Intoxicated by the serenity of dawn, he did not see those who were waiting for him in ambush at the edge of the plowed field. But let us not cast shame on his murderers. Why blame them for the burning hatred they feel toward us? For eight years they have lived in the refugee camps of Gaza, while before their very eyes we have made our own the land and villages where they and their ancestors lived. It is not the Arabs of Gaza we should ask to account for Ro'i's blood, but ourselves. How could we have closed our eyes and refused to face our destiny and the mission of our generation, in all its cruelty?”

Second, as historian Omer Bartov points out, Moshe Dayan’s lucidity proved short-lived. For when he recorded his eulogy for Israeli radio the next day, there was no trace of the passage about the refugees and their good reasons for rejecting the settlers rule¹.

¹Omer Bartov, As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel, The Guardian, 13 August 2024

Yosef Weitz

Yosef Weitz (1890-1972) was one of Modern Israel’s founding fathers, emigrating from present-day Ukraine in 1908 to champion the Zionist cause, becoming director of the Land and Afforestation Department of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) during the Mandatory Period. 

He had a notorious role in the frantic expropriation of Palestinian lands, and in consolidating the war’s spoils over decades through agriculture and arboriculture. He thereby implemented Israel’s founding prime minister David Ben Gurion’s call to “make the desert bloom”, all the while uprooting hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their lands. The Ottoman property laws, taken up by the British mandate and then by the Israeli occupation, were employed to legitimize, through its cultivation, colonial ownership of the land seized from the local population.