In mid-February 2019, US president, Donald Trump, declared a national emergency to combat an immigration “crisis” and “invasion” that is not based in fact, but in deep-rooted fears about the end of white, Western civilization. That is: the president’s national emergency is about more than just placating an angry electorate. He is waging an ideological battle that is heavily scripted by 20th-century white nationalist thought.

It is this same script that informed the “Great Replacement” manifesto of the New Zealand mosque terrorist, who killed at least forty-nine worshippers a month later. It is a script that European far-right politicians and intellectuals have increasingly enlisted to resist pressure from the EU to accept climate refugees and asylum seekers into their countries. Now would be a good time to shed some light on this script—a script that is so vile, so apocalyptic, so dehumanizing that it makes sense why more people haven’t done a deep dive.

I mean more specifically The Camp of the Saints, a 1973 dystopian apocalyptic French novel about the crisis of immigration, the fear of ethnic replacement, and the invasion and end of the white West. I read this toxic book so that you don’t have to. And yet I think everyone should read it in order to uncover the fictional source code for the tropes, language, rhetoric, and style that invent the crises of invasion and replacement—and to uncover the very real consequences of (mis)taking these fictions as fact.