First Things made the unfortunate decision to a publish a positive review of a book beloved among white supremacists. The editors made a better choice to print John’s letter highlighting some of the book’s many problems here.

Below is what it said:

Is The Turner Diaries next? ­Nathan Pinkoski’s effort to move The Camp of the Saints from its current position on the white supremacist fringes and back into the mainstream of cultural discussion is deeply troubling. Linda Chavez once called the book “shockingly racist,” and with good reason. Pinkoski trumpets author Jean ­Raspail’s accolades to argue that he was not really a racist. Yet Raspail clearly wrote some racist things. See his description of the nameless “brown and black” immigrants playing the foil—the sort of thing Pinkoski waves away as “excessive, but . . . not gratuitous”:

And everywhere, a mass of hands and mouths, of phalluses and rumps. . . . Everywhere, rivers of sperm. Streaming over bodies, oozing between breasts, and buttocks, and thighs, and lips, and fingers. Bodies together, not in twos, but in threes, in fours, whole families of flesh gripped in gentle frenzies and subtle raptures.

A key character, a defiant French professor, describes how the generations after him went wrong: “That scorn of a people for other races, the knowledge that one’s own is best, the triumphant joy at feeling oneself to be part of ­humanity’s finest—none of that had ever filled these youngsters’ addled brains.”

Pinkoski contends that Raspail’s fictional French resistance is meant to show “how not to act.” That interpretation seems dubious, and Pinkoski does little to defend it despite noting that those taking a more conventional view “are legion.” Members of that legion sing the book’s praises at racist outlets like American Renaissance. But why is this magazine amplifying it? This follows pieces like “­Rancher Rebels” (August/­September 2021)—a glowing treatment of the racist Cliven Bundy—and comes amid a pattern of strategic silence ­regarding the January 6 riot. With new friends like these, the exodus of old friends who fondly remember Richard John Neuhaus will ­only grow.