General
Update on the AfD
From an email list:
Despite the unprecedented agitation against the AfD in recent days, the AfD candidate Uwe Thrum won the most votes in the district election in the Saale-Orla district this Sunday (14 Jan, 2024).
Thrum received the most votes with 45.7 percent, followed by Christian Herrgott (CDU) with 33.3 percent, the SPD candidate Regina Butz with 14.2 percent and the Left candidate Ralf Kalich with 6.9 percent. The Greens did not put forward their own candidate.
The current state government of Thuringia consists of a coalition of Die Linke, SPD and Greens. The LEFT and SPD candidates together only achieved 21.1 percent in this district election. The AfD alone reached 46 percent.
In two weeks there will be a runoff election between the AfD candidate Uwe Thrum and the SPD candidate Regina Butz. AfD candidate Thrum was ahead in the election in 47 of the 59 cities and municipalities.
In the remaining twelve communities, Herrgott received the most votes. Butz and Kalich were unable to win a community.
A ban on the AfD has been propagated by all system media and is supported by the vast majority of system politicians. The AfD is accused of wanting to return millions of foreigners to their home countries, which is confirmed by the AfD-leadership as repatriation.
But the system calls the AfD-repatriation-program “expulsion”. Some system politicians are warning against a ban on the AfD. Apparently they fear chaos, disenfranchising almost half of the electorate by banning their preferred party.
The call to ban the AfD is justified with the phrase: “They want to destroy our democracy.” Taken literally, they are right, of course. The AfD wants to destroy this Orwellian democracy of the globalists. But only to take back democracy.
How can a system that only enjoys the trust of 9 percent (Poll Körper-Foundation) of the population babble about “our democracy”?
This seems to be a constant refrain on the left—that parties of the right that oppose immigration or want repatriation of immigrants are a threat to democracy no matter what percentage of the population wants it. But the bar for banning the AfD is quite high: it must be proved they are intent on overthrowing democracy:
Paul Joseph Watson on an AfD Bundestag Member Calling for Deporting Millions of Foreigners
Paul Joseph Watson on the AfD’s increased support (24%), resulting in calls to ban the party supported by 47% of voters—in the name of democracy. The AfD’s great sin of course is that at least some among them are planning to deport foreigners.
AfD Bundestag member René Springer has promised to deport foreigners from Germany “by the millions” as his party just hit a new high in approval polls.
Springer made the comments in a post on X in response to a media narrative that the AfD has a secret plan to expel migrants.
The politician asserted that the so-called “plan” wasn’t secret at all.
“We will return foreigners to their homeland. By the millions,” he wrote. “This is not a secret plan. This is a promise. For more security. For more justice. To preserve our identity. For Germany.”
Angela Merkel’s decision to accept over a million “refugees” from 2015 onwards led to the country experiencing a significant spike in crime and social disorder.
As we previously highlighted, a shop owner in Germany was denounced as a racist last month for complaining about migrants mass looting his store, while a left-wing politician sided with the criminals, saying they were “entitled” to steal.
The consequences have led to Germany becoming the latest major European nation to begin openly talking about re-migration. …
[A] shop owner in Germany was denounced as a racist last month for complaining about migrants mass looting his store, while a left-wing politician sided with the criminals, saying they were “entitled” to steal.
Two of Watson’s always entertaining videos, complete with commercials.
Defending democracy by banning political parties(!).
From a BBC article based on a report about a conference devoted to discussing the remigration issues.
Officially, the AfD rejects the principle of remigration. But Gerrit Huy, an AfD member of the German Parliament, said she had believed in the idea for years.
This was why, she said, the AfD no longer opposed dual citizenship: because it would allow migrants to be stripped of their German citizenship more easily, as they would have another to fall back on.
Responding to the report, Mrs Huy contradicted the party’s official stance by saying the AfD “is committed to remigration”.
The party confirmed to the AFP news agency that Mr Hartwig had attended the conference, but denied it would change its policy on migration.
Tucker Carlson and the Racist White Ladies
Rich white ladies pay $5,000 to be told they’re naughty little racists. What is that? Jason Whitlock knows. pic.twitter.com/rj2aQ6yUHi
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) December 15, 2023
White women are a very difficult and intractable problem for our side. Here we have an account of White women, all of whom are undoubtedly wonderfully liberal and virtuous, accepting that they are in fact horribly racist when told that they are racist by a Black woman and a child of Indian immigrants who have made a business out of such accusations. It’s a deep problem that even having a non-White “partner” and mixed-race children can’t erase. It’s in the DNA of all White women.
And the reality is that such mindless conformity to what is presented as virtuous is indeed influenced by the DNA of White people. Unlike the rest of the world where groups are based on kinship and morality is defined by what is good for the ingroup of kin (e.g., “what’s good for the Jews”), Western individualist culture is based on reputation in a moral community. In traditional Western societies, these moral communities were defined mainly by the Christian religion, but in the modern West, they are defined by elites in the media and academia.
It’s difficult to imagine White men in a similar situation be so unanimous in accepting that they are racist even if they have a long track record of voting Democrat, reading The New York Times and The Guardian, and contributing to NPR. I doubt they would be so conformist and self-abnegating (unless perhaps they are thinking of transitioning to being a woman). It’s more of a problem for White women than men, but unfortunately both sexes are prone to it. Here I’ll focus on the sex difference, based on material in my book Individualism and the Western Liberal Tradition, with most citations removed.
First, personality. In conformity with the evolutionary theory of sex, sociopathic traits are higher in men, while empathy and wanting to be loved are higher in women: On average, women are more altruistic and empathic than men, and they place more value on close relationships. For example, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century abolitionists often had strong religious beliefs and appealed to the empathic tendencies of their audience by graphically depicting the suffering of slaves conceptualized in a Christian religious context—a phenomenon that is quite apparent in contemporary society. Even though both sexes were responsive to these messages, women were more responsive than men:
“In Britain, the campaign to abolish slavery, like the other reform movements, was motivated not by ‘rational will’ but by humanitarian zeal, by compassion rather than reason.” [1] The movement realized that “the way to stir men and women to action is not by biblical argument, but through the vivid, unforgettable description of acts of great injustice done to their fellow human beings [i.e., in a “very lively manner” as Adam Smith noted]. The abolitionists placed their hope not in sacred texts, but in human empathy.” [2]
Empathy is strongly linked to Love/Nurturance, a trait that on average women are substantially higher than men. This implies that women will be more prone to being motivated by empathy for the suffering of others and pathological forms of altruism, particularly if these others are not seen as outgroup members but as members of a common humanity, which of course is bedrock ideology in the contemporary West—”there is only one race, the human race.” In turn, this has important ramifications in the contemporary world saturated with images of suffering refugees, immigrants, and “oppressed” non-Whites. Love/Nurturance involves the tendency to provide aid for those needing help, including children and people who are ill. This trait is strongly associated with measures of femininity as well as with warm, empathic personal relationships and psychological dependence on others.
People who are low on Love/Nurturance are prone to psychopathic personality—exploitative interpersonal relationships, lack of warmth, love, and empathy, an inability to form long term pair bonds and close, confiding relationships, and lack of guilt or remorse for violating others’ rights (i.e., your average successful Western politician). The finding that males in the general population are three times as likely as females to be categorized with Antisocial Personality Disorder fits with the robust sex differences in this system. Psychopathic personality, which is characterized by lack of empathy and social bonds, is associated with having many sexual partners, an uncommitted approach to mating, sexual coercion, many short-term sexual relationships, sexual promiscuity, and lack of nurturance of children.
Because the anti-White left dominates the moral high ground, expressing empathy for Whites makes anyone with such ideas into a moral pariah, as would advocating for their interests, with likely negative effects on career prospects. On the other hand, expressing hostility toward White identity and interests is a mark of virtue. Indeed, expressions of White identity and especially having a sense of White interests have been condemned by establishment media and academic figures as illustrating the lowest form of moral depravity, while anti-White hatred is increasingly prominent in the elite media and among politicians.
Of course, the motives involved in such cases may involve more than empathy for suffering others. While these elite Whites may feel genuine empathy for suffering others in foreign lands to the point of wanting to inundate the West with them, they are also in effect buttressing their status in the morally defined ingroup. They may even be attempting to be “more moral than thou”—competitive virtue signaling—by out-empathizing others in the group. And whether consciously or unconsciously, they may be aware of severe costs if they fail to conform to the norms of their moral community—as well as the benefits of conforming.
As expected given the above-noted sex differences in empathy, women are more prone to pathological altruism than men—the prototype being the long-suffering wife who continues to nurture an abusive, alcoholic husband. Pathologically altruistic people and even people within the normal range of empathy respond very strongly to images of suffering refugees, immigrants, and other non-Whites. And as noted regarding empathy, there are specific brain regions that are activated when a subject feels sympathy for others. Indeed, Williams Syndrome, a genetic disorder, is characterized by being overly trusting and sympathetic.
The conviction of self-righteousness characteristic of pathologically altruistic people need not be rational:
What feels like a conscious life-affirming moral choice—my life will have meaning if I help others—will be greatly influenced by the strength of an unconscious and involuntary mental sensation that tells me that this decision is “correct.” It will be this same feeling that will tell you the “rightness” of giving food to starving children in Somalia, doing every medical test imaginable on a clearly terminal patient … . It helps to see this feeling of knowing as analogous to other bodily sensations over which we have no direct control. [3]
In other words, the sensations of rightness and nobility act as psychological reflexes, and they are so pleasurable that people are inclined to seek them in their own right and without regard to facts or the long-run consequences to themselves.
Feelings of moral righteousness may thus be pleasurable and lead to addiction. “Sanctimony, or a sense of righteous outrage, can feel so intense and delicious that many people actively seek to return to it, again and again.”
The pleasure of knowing, with subjective certainty, that you are right and your opponents are deeply, despicably wrong. Or, that your method of helping others is so purely motivated and correct that all criticism can be dismissed with a shrug, along with any contradicting evidence. [4]
This type of sanctimoniousness is, of course, particularly common among the people labeled “Social Justice Warriors.” These are the people screaming “racist,” “misogynist,” “white supremacist,” etc. at any seeming violation of the norms of the moral communities of the left. And, because of the cultural hegemony of the left, such people can often be seen on social media (and in op-eds in the mainstream media) expressing their moral righteousness—a moral righteousness that fits with or extends the boundaries of the cultural left.
Another aspect of this is competitive altruism or competitive virtue signaling—a phenomenon on display in the White women in Tucker’s presentation. Given that expressions of moral righteousness are typically communicated in a social setting and are aimed at solidifying or enhancing one’s reputation within a group, there may be competition for ever more extreme expressions of self-righteousness—even among people who are not biologically inclined to be high on the Love/Nurturance system. Extreme expressions of moral righteousness are not only addicting, they may also raise one’s status in a social group, just as it’s common for religious people to express “holier than thou” sentiments. Strongly religious people compete to be most virtuous in their local church. On the left, we see vegan fanatics shunning vegans who even talk to people who eat meat or eat in restaurants where meat is served—even family members. I imagine there is a dynamic within antifa groups—the shock troops of the establishment’s views on race and migration—where people who do not condone violence or are unwilling to crack heads themselves are ostracized or at least have much less status.
Another personality system with strong sex differences is the fear system, with women being more prone to fear. This is an important reason why males with high social status are much sought after by females as mates because they would be better able to protect them. Being high on fear leads to conformity because in the contemporary West there is much to fear if one fails to conform to the attitudes of the mainstream moral community—loss of job, loss of friends and family, and general ostracism. It’s much safer to remain within the confines of the moral community.
Another factor is cognitive dissonance, for both men and women. Cognitive dissonance research has shown that people with strong beliefs, especially beliefs tied up with their personal identity, often do not change them when confronted by conflicting evidence. Fundamentally, the brain wants to avoid conflicting ideas and often uses illogical reasoning and other mechanisms to retain a sense of psychological comfort. For example, when presented with contradictory evidence (such as data showing genetically based race differences in intelligence), people may ignore the data in order to retain a self-image as a morally righteous person. Moreover, people tend to forget evidence that conflicts with their beliefs, and they tend to accept weak arguments that fit with their world view while rejecting strong arguments and data that conflict with it. They may focus their attention not on the evidence itself but on the person presenting the evidence, impugning their motives and accepting guilt-by-association arguments. Clearly, the mind is designed to go to great lengths to avoid psychological discomfort.
* * *
Tucker So here’s a bio that came across our desk the other day that seemed worth sharing. It’s from a woman called Siara Rao, and she’s got a business called Race2Dinner. This is how she describes herself. Listen, Siara (Not Sarah) Rao grew up in Richmond, Virginia, the daughter of Indian immigrants. For 40 years, she wasted her precious time aspiring to be white and accepted by dominant white society. A futile task for anyone not born with white skin. Several years ago, Siara began the painful process of dismantling her own internalized oppression. Very oppressed. Siara is a lawyer by training, a congressional candidate, a published novelist and an entrepreneur. So leaving aside the fact the lawyer, congressional candidate, published novelists probably aren’t oppressed. How is she an entrepreneur? What is she doing for a living? Well, she’s making a ton of money capitalizing on white self-hatred. And of course, there’s a bottomless well of that in the United States. There’s a new documentary about Siara Rao and her partner. It’s called Deconstructing Karen, and it’s about Siara and her partner, Regina Jackson, and their new company, Race to Dinner. So these two essentially host dinners for liberal wine moms all over the country. Here’s how it works. A group of affluent white women pool $5,000 to hire these two, Jackson and Rao, to come to their home for a dinner party. And then over the course of the night, they demean and degrade them and call them racist. They’re paid to do that. It’s a weird masochism ritual. So the point is for these damaged women to spend their husbands’ money to come to grips with their own suppressed white supremacy. This goes on for two hours from the appetizers to the dessert. There’s a whole film on this and we watched the whole thing and suffered as we did it. To bring you the highlights. Here’s how the typical dinner goes. So the night begins with the white ladies introducing themselves and conceding that they are the worst people in the world because they are white. Watch.
Woman I am a liberal white woman. We are absolutely the most dangerous women out there. We are the most dangerous women that exist because we’re going to love a little more, because we’re good frickin people. No, we are erasing their experiences. We are erasing their lives. We are erasing the danger that they’re in.
Woman I’m an artist. I’m a barista. And I learned about this through Saira, through your Facebook. The reason I’m here is because I’ve always thought of myself as being kind of woke. I mean, my best friend is Mexican. My partner is biracial. We have these conversations all the time. But then through following your posts and interacting on your posts, I realized. I’m not doing that great. And I feel like there’s a racist white man living in my brain. And it’s my dad’s voice.
Tucker “I hate my dad.” Of course, that’s what it’s all about on some level. But the best is white women: we’re the most dangerous people in the world. So of course, that’s not true. The silliest people in the world, for sure. The most dangerous. Hardly. But you’ll notice that’s not really self-abnegation. That’s not self criticism. It’s really bragging. “We’re so dangerous!” We’re so bad!” meaning we’re so strong and so powerful and so important, so significant in world history. So as the rich white ladies attack themselves, the instructors join in. You think you’re bad? You’re even worse than that. Watch.
Instructors You know what I expect of white women? Not a damn thing. Nothing. I expect nothing of you. Because you have never given me anything. I can’t trust you. You guys need to pull your heads out of your asses. Acknowledge your own racism. Make it right. Stop caping four white dudes. Join us. And let’s overthrow the patriarchy. You walk through the world with a different experience because you are a white woman. White women feel the desperate need to be nice. It’s white women’s niceness that is killing us all. At these dinners, we see white women behaving badly. White Democratic women are attacking white Republican women and vice versa. And you both are taking the moral high ground and you’re all the same. Before the dinners, white women respond much better to other white women than they would with us. And that, in a nutshell, is white supremacy. I have this discussion with people that I know, friends, lawyers, everybody. And they’ll say, well, Regina, you know, there are some good white people. And I go, Well, what have the good white people been doing for the last 450 years?
Tucker Of course, the white people just paid you $5,000 to yell at them over dinner. So funny. And of course, the Indian lady is a single what is person [sic] at the dinner. But “let’s overthrow the patriarchy.” Of course they already overthrew the patriarchy. That’s why they’re so desperately unhappy. So the dinner goes on like this for two hours, and at one point, finally, two white women speak up to say, actually, we don’t really think we’re that racist. That’s why we’re paying you $5,000 to show that we’re not. Ooh, I shouldn’t have said that. The instructors give them a public thrashing in front of the other ladies. Watch.
Woman I have two young children and it’s important for me that they grow up colorblind, right?
Instructor So I’ve heard this a couple times already. Colorblind. And you don’t see color. And I’m just going to drop the bomb here. That’s white supremacy.
Woman My kids are biracial, so my husband is Hispanic and white, and I don’t see color. I’m blinded to color like it doesn’t faze me at all.
Instructor You’ve mentioned it and you’ve mentioned it. Being married to a black person or brown person. Having brown or black children does not make you impervious to racism. You cannot, frankly, fuck your way out of racism.
Tucker You can marry a black dude, but you’re still racist because it’s blood guilt. Of course it’s inherent. You’re born with it. It’s in your DNA. Well, that’s just kind of Rwanda stuff at that point. But they keep going. At the end of the dinner. The instructors ask for a show of hands of who at the table can now admit that they’re racist. And of course, every single white woman, because they’re all sheep, raises her hand and the group cheers in celebration.
Instructor So who in this room…raise your hand if you’re a racist. Woo. We did it. Thank you. Thanks, guys.
Tucker So it feels like we’re watching something culturally significant. The fever’s probably already broken. That already looks a little bit antique watching it even now. But in ten years, we’re going to be living in a completely different country with a white minority, by the way, that will look even older and stranger. And what will we make of it? What should we make of it? What does that tell us about the people who run our country? Just to be clear, most people would never participate in something like that on either end of it, either as a host or one of the hapless, high paying guests. But the people who do stuff like that and improve it are the ones who are in charge of everything in America.
Uncensored: The Racist Dinner Ladies (tuckercarlson.com)
References
[1] In Gertrude Himmelfarb, Roads to Modernity: The British, French, and American Enlightenments (New York: Vintage reprint; orig. published 2004), 131.
[2] Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital (Chapel Hill, NC: North Carolina Press, 2006), 161.
[3] Robert A. Burton, “Pathological Certitude,” in Barbara Oakley, Ariel Knafo, Guruprasad Madhavan, and David Sloan Wilson (eds.), Pathological Altruism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012): 131–37, 135.
[4] David Brin, “Self-addiction and Self-righteousness,” in Barbara Oakley, Ariel Knafo, Guruprasad Madhavan, and David Sloan Wilson (eds.), Pathological Altruism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012): 77–84, 80.
Prove You’re Not ‘Easily Led,’ Evangelicals
In 1986, The New York Times described evangelicals as “more easily led than other kinds of voters.” Then in 1993, The Washington Post reported that evangelicals were “largely poor, uneducated and easy to command.” (The Washington Post issued a correction; the Times did not.)
For the past week, the media have been trying to prove the truth of those characterizations, gleefully reporting on the comical reasons Iowa evangelicals give for their stalwart support of Donald Trump.
One woman told the Times, “Trump is our David and our Goliath.” He can be felled by a pebble! Vote Trump!
Another Trump supporter said, “He’s the only savior I can see.” (I think he’s forgetting someone rather important.)
A “local evangelical,” Joel Tenney, who spoke at a Trump rally in Coralville, Iowa, got no response when he cited Scripture. But the crowd went wild for this: “When Donald Trump becomes the 47th president of the United States, there will be retribution against all those who have promoted evil in this country.”
I, too, am a big fan of retribution, but I’m trying to figure out which “enemies” the crowd thinks Trump will rain justice on.
Any good Revenge List would surely have to include The Swamp, criminals, illegal aliens, the people who locked down our country over the flu, and Democrats like Hillary Clinton.
Let’s review how Trump treated these problematic groups when he was president.
The Swamp?
He filled his Cabinet with ’em. Trump hired billionaire donors, Goldman Sachs bankers and the kind of people who need lots of illegal alien labor (like Trump). After railing against Goldman throughout the 2016 campaign, Trump ended up hiring more Goldman bankers than Presidents Obama or Bush.
Not surprisingly, the only legislation Trump got through in his first year in office was a tax cut for top earners — which happened to save the Trump family $4 billion.
Jeb-exclamation-point couldn’t be more proud.
Criminals?
Trump sure talks like a badass on crime, describing with gusto the terrible (and unconstitutional) things he’ll do to criminals. But as soon as he gets to the Oval Office, he becomes George Soros.
Thus, the only major legislation Trump got through his second year in office was “The First Step Act,” releasing drug dealers from prison — as well as more than a hundred violent criminals and sex offenders.
Why? Because Kim Kardashian told him to. Trump cares more about the opinion of Kim Kardashian than he cares about you, evangelicals.
Even after our country had suffered through four months of hideous violence — murder, arson, looting — in honor of George Floyd, at his first debate with Joe Biden, Trump bragged about releasing criminals:
“I’m letting people out of jail now!”
He also attacked Biden for calling repeat violent criminals “super-predators,” a name they apparently take exception to. Yes, the main thing voters needed to know about Biden was that he had called violent criminals a mean name.
Illegal aliens?
The reason Biden has been able to admit 6 million illegals in less than three years is that Trump didn’t build the wall, as he promised at every single campaign rally for more than a year. He didn’t even think about the wall until his last year in office, when he quickly erected 47 miles of fence — to protect a 2,000-mile border.
How fast do you think a wall will go up when he doesn’t need your vote anymore? I guess we have to keep our fingers crossed that Kim Kardashian will decide she wants a wall.
Trump deported fewer illegals than Obama did, tried to push through an amnesty, and constantly praised illegals (up to age 40) as “incredible kids!”
For most of his 2016 campaign, Washington Republicans treated Trump like a toothache. But some people supported him with tensile steel — me, for example — and also the “Angel Moms,” parents of kids killed by illegals.
After getting elected, Trump hired all establishment types, who proceeded to block the Angel Moms from the White House, lest they talk the president out of signing his third budget bill with no wall funding. Kellyanne Conway and Mercedes Schlapp actually screamed at the Angel Moms — you know, the people who had supported Trump six months before they had.
If Iowa evangelicals believe it’s Angels Moms who have “promoted evil in this country,” then I can see why Trump’s their guy. But that seems unlikely.
The Lockdown Fascists?
It was Trump who locked down the country. Trump who gave us “two weeks to flatten the curve.” Trump who picked Anthony Fauci to lead the White House Coronavirus Task Force. Trump who hung on Fauci’s every word. Trump who attacked the governors of Georgia and Florida for reopening “too soon.”
As luck would have it, one of those proved-right governors is running for president.
Hillary Clinton?
To the delight of his 2016 rally crowds chanting “LOCK HER UP!” Trump repeatedly promised to put Hillary Clinton in jail. (Nearly as often as he promised to build a wall!)
But then, two weeks after the 2016 election, he told the Times that he had no intention of investigating Hillary. “I don’t want to hurt the Clintons,” Trump said, adding that she had “suffered greatly in many different ways.”
OK, fine. But a year after admitting that the Hillary threat was just hot air, he started blaming his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, for not prosecuting her.
On July 25, 2017, he tweeted, “Attorney General Jeff Sessions has taken a VERY weak position on Hillary Clinton crimes (where are E-mails & DNC server) & Intel leakers!” Then, in September 2017, he told an Alabama crowd chanting “LOCK HER UP!”: “You’ve got to speak to Jeff Sessions about that.”
Apparently, it’s not just the media who think you guys are “uneducated” and “easily led.”
If you hate the media, evangelicals — and I think you should — please prove them wrong about how easy it is to con you.
COPYRIGHT 2024 ANN COULTER
NJP: A Postmortem
Editor’s note: This was posted by Matt Parrot on his Substack
Good riddance.
I had no special access to the inner workings of the NJP. The higher ups always held me in contempt, and would have kept me at arm’s length had I attempted to approach the project. I didn’t ask. They didn’t ask.
I remained in my lane and, up until the last few months, kept my mouth shut about the ill-fated project.
I did finally open my mouth earlier this year as Striker first took direct shots at me, and then started taking absurd shots at Keith Woods, Joel Davis, and other good actors. He was mounting these attacks as an NJP officer, and using NJP as a shield when I attempted to challenge him personally, and no other officer was either stopping him or clarifying that he wasn’t actually speaking on behalf of the project.
As such, I decided to go ahead and attack the whole damn project, targeting what I judged to be its most egregious flaw: Sven and McNabb were making arguments on their podcasts in favor of ultraviolence against non Whites while clearly associated with NJP, surrounded by party banners. This slimed everybody involved with very real legal exposure and effectively rendered the project a rolling liability for White Advocates.
You can’t do that.
These guys who narrowly evaded the Unite The Right trial by the skin of their teeth should have been among the first to appreciate how even tenuous association with violent rhetoric can’t be anywhere near real people doing real political activism in the real world. And here was Sven himself, the final boss of both the TRS and NJP projects, making the incriminating statements.
In hindsight, we can now gather that Sven was deliberately sabotaging NJP with such remarks, making a point about the primacy of old school TRS jackass radio irreverence over new school NJP political messaging and strategy. I unwittingly assisted Sven by spotlighting this situation, a situation that categorically required everything to blow up sooner or later. … [Continue at Substack]
Also available at Barnes & Noble
Also available at Barnes & Noble
Gavin Mortimer:
When it comes to changing Prime Ministers, Emmanuel Macron has much in common with the Conservative Party. Both are on their fourth premier in seven years with the French President this week unveiling Gabriel Attal as the latest leader of his government. …
Poll after poll puts Le Pen at the top of voting intentions, not just for the 2027 presidential election but also the Europeans in June this year. Last month, Le Monde newspaper claimed that Macron was “shaken” at the rise of Le Pen, which some have attributed to her “normalisation”.
When she replaced her father as head of the National Front in 2011, the Le Pen brand was toxic. But she has shaken off the sins of her father, in particular his anti-Semitism: in November, one of France’s respected Holocaust awareness campaigners expressed his delight that Le Pen and her 88 MPs were participating in a rally against the rise of anti-Semitism in France following Hamas’s attack on Israel.
Macron must bear much of the blame for this normalisation of Le Pen. He has presided over soaring rates of illegal immigration, Islamic extremism and insecurity, promising much but delivering little. Last month, Le Pen’s National Rally (as she rebranded the party in 2018) and the centre-right Republicans conspired to pass an immigration bill that she hailed as “an ideological victory” for her party. …
Another reason for Le Pen’s popularity is the way she has tapped into the anxieties of lower-income workers – France’s Red Wall – in a way no other party has managed. These are concerns not just about identity and insecurity, but also a cost of living crisis that shows no sign of easing.
In this respect, Le Pen is greatly helped by her No2, Jordan Bardella, a 28-year-old from a housing estate in Seine-Saint-Denis, an impoverished district to the north of Paris. He was elected president of the National Rally in 2022 and has swiftly made a name for himself as a deft debater with a good grasp of detail; a fortnight ago the French public elected their 100 favourite personalities of the year. Bardella was the top ranked politician at number 30; second was Attal at number 57. Macron was 63rd.
Jordan Bardella
It’s hard to see the dapper but privileged [and gay and Jewish] Attal winning the hearts and minds of blue-collar workers. They are angry, gloomy and frightened, and they blame Macron. Campaigning for the 2017 election, Macron said he was “neither left or right”, and when he was elected he declared in his victory speech that a “new page” had been turned in “our history”. But it wasn’t. He has proved to be just another elite Paris technocrat. Instead of transforming France into a Start-Up Nation, as he boasted he would do, he’s turned the country into a Broken Down Nation, bedevilled by riots, strikes, crime and a bloody drugs war between rival gangs [of non-French origin].
The French feel let down by their president so they are now thinking that as they’ve tried every other party, why not try Le Pen’s? After all, Giorgia Meloni hasn’t ruined Italy – despite all the fear-mongering on the left about her being Mussolini in a blouse. [Of course The Telegraph writer has a ridiculous idea of what ‘ruining’ would mean.]
Once, the prospect of a Le Pen in the Élysée would have been inconceivable, but now it’s a distinct possibility. Should it happen in 2027 then that really would mark a new chapter in the history of France.
Two years ago, after yet another couple of nights of rioting in the banlieues, twenty retired French generals wrote an open letter to Emmanuel Macron, then about to run for a second term, warning that the divisions between communities and increasing “violence and nihilism” in France would eventually cause a social breakdown, with a risk of “chaos” leading to a “civil war” that would then “require” a military “intervention… in a dangerous mission to protect our civilisational values and safeguard our compatriots”.
Strong stuff, co-signed by some 100 senior officers and about a thousand other members of the military, in a country where the Army is known as “the Great Mute”, i.e. never expressing a preference in national politics. …
Yet this week Olivier Véran, the cabinet spokesman, seemed to share those conclusions as, on a visit to the village of Crépol, south of Lyon, he warned that France might be at a “tipping point” after the fatal stabbing of a local 16 year-old boy. Condemning both the knife attacks during a Saturday evening dance and the subsequent march by right-wing activists intent on a fight into the neighbourhood where the suspects live, the minister vowed that the government would stand with the bereaved family and called for a harsh sentencing, “up to a life sentence [with] no mitigating circumstances”, for the culprits. He reportedly added that the government is “clearly” aware that violence from “packs” is ratcheting up “tensions… you can’t stand these gangs any more… neither can we”, promising the “full mobilisation” of the state to “guarantee the safety of all citizens”.
Too little, too late: the minister’s well-meaning words were badly received. One of the villagers reportedly shouted to Véran: “You’ve done much more for them than you do for the hard-working people in the countryside, who get no benefits and raise their children with values.”
“Them” means the problem groups in council housing, many of whom are children or grandchildren of Muslim immigrants, like the Crépol knife-wielding attackers who disrupted the Saturday evening dance, allegedly shouting “we’ve come to get whites”. The Valence judiciary refused, against general custom, to give first names for the suspects they arrested. The entire country suspects why the names were not given: in the well-meaning aim not to “stigmatise” an entire community whose immense majority is law-abiding.
This time, several newspapers chose to question that decision (the centre-left Le Parisien, which belongs to Bernard Arnault, the luxury magnate, printed the Arabic first name of the suspected killer).
For almost three decades, government after government chose not to look too closely at a worsening situation. France was for centuries a land of successful assimilation. Italians, Spaniards, Russian Jews, Poles came and became French. But sheer numbers, as well as the change from a requirement to “assimilate” to the easier one of “integrate”, mean the French model is broken.
Each separate failure concurs to the general breakdown of the national compact. The long-admired French education system is no longer fit for purpose: our schools have slid from the top to the bottom of the PISA rankings in just a few years, especially in those areas where non-French-speaking children account for the majority in most classes. School teachers are less and less respected by both the body politic – which allowed their salaries to fall by half in real terms – and by their pupils, disruptive and often violent. In some areas, the history of the 20th century, especially of the Holocaust, has been near-impossible to teach for years: inroads by Islamism in the classrooms, long denied, have contributed to the murder of two teachers in three years.
The police, meanwhile, are badly paid, badly considered, often afraid for their lives in the areas where they must keep order, they resign in droves. (The profession has one of the highest suicide rates in France.) As a result, training time has been reduced from a year to eight months, so bad is the need for boots on the ground.
As a result, trust between the ruling classes and the people has declined in lockstep with France’s economic and cultural decline. (If you live in the centre of Paris or Lyon, even Marseille, you can send your children to good private schools and Grandes Écoles, almost guaranteeing good jobs that will enable them to keep living where the crisis is not felt.)
Like his predecessors, Emmanuel Macron first displayed indifference towards the chaotic immigration system: the new Immigration Bill, about to be debated by the National Assembly, tries to correct the laxist trends of recent years, but it will neither address the problem of French-born citizens who profess hate for their country, nor the rising arrivals from troubled areas. It may not take much for the next round of riots, or for an equally violent blowback from a hard-right deciding to take matters into their hands. That civil war the generals prophesied two years ago may be around the corner.
Wilders faces setback in forming Dutch government as coalition-builder quits amid fraud allegations
Joe Barnes
Mr Wilders is expected to appoint a new scout [the person appointed by Wilders to negotiate with other parties to form a government]– someone with “more distance from politics” – by Tuesday.
It came as he warned mainstream Dutch politicians that their refusal to back him in forming a government would lead to his support getting “bigger and bigger”.
“Now we have become the largest party in the Netherlands by far,” he wrote on social media.
“But still some politicians don’t get it. Does the political box of tricks open again? Is it forgotten that if we do not get a chance to convert the vote and democratic mandate of millions of people into managerial responsibility, we will only get bigger and bigger? Because the genie is out of the bottle and won’t go back in?”
Wilders’ frustrations aimed at Ms Yesilgoz
Much of Mr Wilders’ frustrations are aimed at Ms Yesilgoz, whose VVD has led the last four Dutch coalitions after she refused to join his government.
“I find it incomprehensible that they are not participating now,” the PVV leader said, adding that it is an “emotional decision of the VVD” not to join his cabinet.
“I hope they come to their senses. It would be a shame if there was no centre-right cabinet.”
Mainstream politicians have been cautious about committing to support Mr Wilders because of his history of Islamophobic and Eurosceptic views.
Leo Varadkar’s Ireland is flirting with a new form of totalitarianism
Eilis O’Hanlon
Irish author Paul Lynch won the Booker Prize on Sunday. His novel, Prophet Song, imagines an Ireland that has fallen under Right-wing totalitarian control, and begins with members of the new secret police rapping on the door of a union leader to interrogate him for “sowing discord and unrest” against the government.
Novelists are free to dream up all manner of fictional scenarios, however far-fetched. The irony is that this is the exact opposite of what is happening in Ireland right now. The government in Dublin is indeed introducing extraordinary new legislation to restrict freedom of speech. But it’s not horrid Right-wingers conspiring to suppress nice, decent liberals. It’s nice, decent liberals scrambling to stamp out the opinions of what they call the “far-Right”. And far from being alarmed by this assault on basic freedoms, the broad swathe of progressive opinion in Ireland is fully behind it, including most voices in the broadcast and print media, and every major party.
Since riots broke out in Dublin last Thursday, following the stabbing of three children, the cries for action have become ever louder. The government led by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has now pledged to have the Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill on the statute book “within a matter of weeks”.
The new law would surely have escaped international attention had those riots not happened, but Dublin’s eagerness to regulate hate speech has, as internet parlance puts it, “gone viral”. Now the whole world knows that Ireland is poised to pass one of the most draconian pieces of legislation in modern times, which will see Irish people facing potential jail sentences of up to two years for the possession of literature “likely to incite violence or hatred” against others on the grounds of certain protected characteristics, including race, gender and sexual orientation.
The police and courts will not even need to demonstrate that the material in question was intended to be distributed to anyone other than the owner. It will be “presumed, until the contrary is proven” that it was. It’s reminiscent of the Soviet Union, where having copies of literature banned by the state, known as “samizdat”, was enough to fall foul of the KGB.
To make matters worse, the Irish government has not actually defined in the bill what “hatred” is, saying that to do so could “risk prosecutions collapsing”. Minister for Justice, Helen McEntee, continues to insist citizens will be able to speak freely, but a senator for the Green Party, one of three parties in the governing coalition, let the cat out of the bag: “We are restricting freedom,” Pauline O’Reilly said, “but we are doing it for the common good.”
Ireland, sadly, has a long tradition of censorship. There was once a body with a wonderfully evocative name, the Committee on Evil Literature, which recommended banning publications deemed harmful to the newly independent nation’s Catholic values.
The country prides itself on having come through that dark time, but all that’s actually happened is that the term “evil literature” has been redefined to suit contemporary values. They haven’t stopped enforcing orthodoxy. They’ve simply found a new woke dogma to enforce. No one is writing novels about that. After all, owning such a book could land you behind bars soon.