The Caravan Is A Steve Bannon PR Dream

The Henry v MOA trial has taken up a lot of my time lately, and monopolized the blog, but there are other things I've wanted to say.  I'll try a couple non-trial posts today.


A while back I wrote about a book I found on a list of Steve Bannon's favorite books, The Camp of the Saints.   In it a flotilla of nearly a million Indians leaves India for the South of France.  Here's how that post started:

"It's a disgustingly racist novel about 1000 old ships that leave India for Europe with 'the Ganges horde' of nearly 1 million people, led by the giant 'turd-eater' who carries the monster child on his shoulders.  I did try hard to read this book to see if it would help me understand something about Bannon and others who supported Trump.  I wasn't able to finish it - it's really hard to read this stuff - before it was due back at the library.  But I think I got enough to get the gist."

But the post also looks at the insightful analysis of the left wing news media at that time and how it was probably one of the guidelines for Fox and other far right media.

What better image could the Trump folks have that a caravan of wretched refugees coming to invade us?  While the 'caravan' is only 1000 or (compared to the book's 1000 ships) the imagery enables Right Wing fanatics to fan the anti-refugee flames and maybe get more of their voters out by next week.

This caravan comes ready made with an origin story that puts George Soros in the role of God.  That's all too perfect for me.  One of the Right's tactics is to accuse the Left of all the things it's doing itself.  (Think about accusations of Democratic voter fraud as the excuse for real Republican voter suppression, for example.)

Given that such a caravan is the main character of one of Steve Bannon's favorite books, I wouldn't be surprised if conservatives helped organize this group.  I'm not making the accusation, since I only have the circumstantial evidence of their past behavior and the plot of a book.  But I sure hope someone looks into this and finds out how the caravan really got started and who first called it 'a caravan.'  It just seems far to convenient a talking point to accidentally happen just before the elections.

The book itself has an interesting, if disturbing, analysis of post 60's Europe and how the political lines were drawn.  You can read my original post on it here:  The Camp Of The Saints Is a Mean And Racist Diatribe But Given It's A Steve Bannon Favorite, Worth Knowing About

It will also help people understand where a lot of the virulent anti-immigrant sentiment is coming from.  Not that that many people have read the book, but they are getting propaganda themes right out of the book.

[UPDATE Dec 6, 2018:  This piece at Buzzfeed offers some evidence supporting my suspicions here, though to be clear, this is still speculative.  It's about a hijacked FB account used to promote the caravan early on.]