General

Ireland Decides

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As Ireland approaches a general election on November 29th it is worth considering the state of its politics and of the country. Ireland is currently governed by a Fine Gael-Fianna Fáil-Green coalition government. This government is by any comparative standard very left-wing. Its main policies have been to pursue elevated levels of immigration, hate crime laws, harsh covid lockdowns, massive increases in public expenditure, and extremely permissive “sex-education” in schools.

Despite there being a housing crisis whereby there is a general shortage of availability and exceedingly high rents, government policy has been to pursue elevated levels of immigration. Most coverage of this pertains to the increase in asylum claims, including from applicants who are present in the country without a passport after having discarded it on the aeroplane from which they disembarked.

However, most immigration comes in the form of legal immigration by virtue of government-issued work or study permits. That this policy is pursued during a housing shortage demonstrates that the government prefers ostensible economic growth rather than a decent standard of living for its own citizens.
The government has recently introduced a hate-crime law, while previous draft hate-speech provisions were abandoned after public opposition, though it is clear that some in government would like to see these re-introduced.

While an inquiry into Ireland’s covid lockdowns has recently been announced, it will have no statutory powers to compel witnesses or documents or make findings of fact. Ireland had among the harshest of lockdowns anywhere in the world. It was the only country in Europe to close its construction industry, cancel the secondary school-leaving exam, and coerce the public to take vaccinations. Ireland was also the only country which licenced the Janssen vaccine to the entire population despite its known risks.

There has been a massive increase in public expenditure with a doubling of nominal public expenditure over the last five years. Ireland has in recent years been in receipt of huge tax receipts from multinational corporate windfall profits which are being wasted by a spendthrift government in competition with opposition parties in a game of auction politics. What is really needed is a zero-based budgeting of all public expenditure.

Another aspect of the current government is their introduction of an extreme form of child indoctrination and sexualisation through the education system. This includes the infamous representation of Irish culture as backward and undesirable compared to multiculturalism. They have also introduced perverse and pornographic “sex education” into schools.

The outgoing government also attempted in constitutional referendums to redefine the family and remove the right of mothers to work in the home. These were defeated by the public with massive majorities. The overarching reason behind the aforementioned policies is the prevalence of Government-Organised Non-Governmental Organisations (GONGOs). These taxpayer-funded activist groups have become quasi-official policy advisors.

There are many parties competing in this election, but most are ideologically interchangeable with each other. The parties are as follows, with their most recently polled support levels in parentheses: Fine Gael — formerly a liberal-conservative party, now a woke neo-liberal party (22%); Fianna Fáil — formerly a conservative, social corporatist party, now led by a woke leader despite retaining a conservative membership (20%); Sinn Féin — formerly a socialist, nationalist party, now a woke social democratic party (20%); Labour Party — a woke, social democratic party (4%); Social Democrats — a woke, social democratic party (5%); Green Party — a woke, environmentalist party (3%); Aontú — an anti-woke, social democratic party (5%); Independent Ireland — an anti-woke, pro-business party (N/A); and Solidarity-People Before Profit — a woke, Trotskyist party (2%). There are many independent candidates, most of whom are conservative and pro-business. These are currently polling 19%.

The election campaign has been uninteresting because of the lack of serious alternatives on offer; however, the results could produce interesting outcomes. It is probable that Labour and the Greens could lose all of their seats which would call into question the future existence of those parties.

If the current government parties were to win a majority of seats, then they would form a government. However, the prospect of these parties winning a majority is seemingly unlikely. The makeup of the government after the election is not clear. It will almost certainly have to be composed of two out of Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil, and Sinn Féin, along with additional smaller parties.

A likely government formation is a Fine Gael-Fianna Fáil-Independent Ireland coalition. If these three would not entail a majority, they could be supported by independents. Such a government could be the most right-wing Ireland has had in living memory if Independent Ireland and the independents achieved reduced immigration levels, the defunding of of the activist GONGOs, and a general de-wokeification of public institutions.

If such a government did not materialise, the most likely alternative would be a Fianna Fáil-Sinn Féin-Social Democrats coalition. This could also require the support of left-wing independents. Such a putative government would be the most left-wing in the history of the State. If no government could easily be formed, another general election would be another possibility.

It is therefore the case that what has been a dull election campaign may produce interesting results which could lead to starkly different potential governments. This election will become interesting only when the votes have been counted.

Forum for Democracy: Romanians are not as passive as we thought

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By Stephen Baskerville, author of  Who Lost America? Why the United States Went “Communist” — and What to Do about It.  There are two reviews on TOO, by Eric Paulsen (here) and F. Roger Devlin (here).

Romanians are not so passive as we thought

Even the “far right” was asleep at the switch.

The first-round result in Romania’s presidential election has shocked the European political class.  Calin Georgescu, a candidate from the “extreme right,” who was ignored in pre-election news broadcasts or polls, just won first place with 23% of the vote.  The candidate favored by the media (and pollsters), current Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu, came in third with 19% rather than the predicted 26%.  In the second round, Georgescu will compete with another media favorite, Elena Lasconi, variously described as “liberal” and “center-right” (ideological labels are flexible in Romania) and an “ardent backer of Romania’s membership in NATO and the EU, as well as a vocal supporter of Ukraine” (in the description of Radio Free Europe).

Romania has long been known as a traditionalist and Christian country, like most of East-Central Europe.  Governments in Hungary, Slovakia, and Serbia reflect their populations’ preferences, but many assume that Romanians are too passive and apathetic about politics to challenge the Western-dominated liberal elites in the government, media, universities, think tanks – and polling firms.  It turns out that our image of Romanian passivity reflects the preferences of those elites themselves.

The image is reinforced by incumbent President Klaus Iohannis, an obedient servant of NATO and the European Union who reliably supports the Ukrainian government according to instructions but who also avoids a profile on the war or much of anything else.  Epitomizing today’s European politicians-on-the-make, who disdain their own people as they chase after European sinecures, he demeaned himself in the eyes of many Romanians earlier this year by openly – and unsuccessfully – angling for the post of NATO Secretary General.  In this election, the candidate from Iohannis’ National Liberal Party (PNL) scored below 9%.

Even the party usually dismissed as “extreme right” by the media, the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR), was caught off-guard.  The big unknown had been whether AUR would qualify for the second round against Ciolacu.  In the event, neither qualified.  Led by George Simion, AUR espouses a nationalism advocating reunification with the Romanian-speaking (but partially Russified) Republic of Moldova, an agenda that neither country wants and that serious analysts understand is both unlikely and undesirable.

AUR also distances itself from the dissenting politics of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, reflecting long-standing friction over the Hungarian-speaking minority in Transylvania.  Georgescu, by contrast, expresses admiration for Hungary.  He invokes peculiar new-age rhetoric and seems to have built his career pushing fashionable trends like “sustainable development” at the United Nations and similar places, but his “nationalism” hardly seems xenophobic or belligerent.

Contrary to the media narrative, Georgescu did not “emerge from nowhere”.  (He held prominent positions in AUR.)  He was quite deliberately ignored by the media and polling firms.  As recently as October, pollster Inscop listed him under “other” with less than 0.4% support (as reported in Reuters).  Earlier this month, it ranked him 6th with 5.4%.

His following was apparently built entirely through TikTok, at almost no cost, and it is overwhelmingly young.  One “takeaway” from this election is therefore that the mainstream media’s monopoly of information still works in places like Romania.  Informed and connected Romanians – including some who sympathize with Georgescu’s views – have either never heard of him or paid no attention.  On the other hand, the shift to social media for political information among the young has gone further than most of us realized.

Equally striking is that Georgescu polled a huge 43% among Romania’s important diaspora.  The “mainstream” candidates competed fiercely for the diaspora vote, because it is large, young, affluent, educated, and informed politically.  Their mistake was to assume that it is also liberal-left.

The last time the diaspora mobilized for a political cause was a few years ago, when Norway’s feminist child-protection gendarmerie seized the children of a Romanian couple for the “abuse” of raising them as Christians.  All five children were put up for adoption in separate homes.  Romanians amassed such determined protests at Norwegian embassies all over the world that they succeeded in getting all the children returned to their parents.

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Marc Andreessen Describes “Alarming” Meeting With Biden Admin That Prompted His Trump Endorsement

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Mark Andreessen epitomizes the disenchantment with the Democrat Party that was the deciding factor in the election. Like other former liberals now linked to Trump (e.g., Rogan, Musk, Gabbard, RFK Jr.) he sees the Democrats as seeking complete government control (while  spewing concerns that Trump will destroy democracy).

From ZeroHedge:

Marc Andreessen, the billionaire investor and co-founder of the influential Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, revealed in a new episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast that after an “alarming” meeting with Biden administration officials earlier this year was the moment he would have no other choice but to support Donald Trump.

For decades, Andreessen has supported Democrats, including Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton. However, a troubling spring meeting with Biden administration officials caused major concerns. During the meeting, officials explained their plan to control AI through government regulatory capture—a strategy reminiscent of Communist policies in China.

“We had meetings [Biden officials] this spring that were the most alarming meetings I’ve ever been in. Where they were taking us through their plans, and it was – basically just full government – full government control – like this sort of thing, there will be a small number of large companies that will be completely regulated and controlled by the government, they told us. They said don’t even start startups – there’s just no way that they can succeed – there’s no way that we’re going to permit that to happen.” 

In mid-July, Axios reported that Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz had donated to President-elect Trump’s campaign. At the time, their support was attributed to Trump’s pro stance on crypto and AI regulation. It’s another telling example of just how far-left Democrats in the White House spooked Silicon Valley heavy hitters, such as Elon Musk.

Back to the podcast, Rogan asked Andreessen: “When you leave a meeting like that, what do you do?”

Andreessen responded: “You endorse Donald Trump.” 

X user Ben Averbook condensed Rogan’s three-hour podcast into a series of the most important highlights:

Andreessen told Rogan about the federal government’s rogue “Operation Choke Point.” He described it as a move by the Department of Justice that initially targeted marijuana businesses and gun manufacturers. He said under Biden, it was then weaponized to destroy political opponents, tech founders, and the crypto community.

Rogan and Andreessen discussed the government workforce dilemma.

Andreessen spoke about Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s newly created Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and how they may have devised a plan to reduce the government workforce.

They spoke about national security threats.

The Make America Healthy Again movement.

Silicon Valley’s political views are fracturing.

AI censorship.

First’ Twitter Files’… YouTube files next?

Watch the full Rogan podcast:

The Dems’ Thanksgiving Story Deserves To Be Known

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Replacing ‘woke’ with ‘cope.’

This Thanksgiving, Democrats can be thankful that they have scores of deluded scribblers making excuses for Kamala Harris’ blowout loss to a man they’ve spent years calling a rapist, a convicted felon and America’s Hitler. (All I can say is, fellas, the Pulitzer Prize isn’t going to win itself.)

One point they want to make absolutely clear is: TRUMP DID NOT WIN IN A LANDSLIDE!

OK, fine, if that makes you happy, liberals.

In an interminable column in The New York Times, David Wallace-Wells spreads the good tidings that Democrats didn’t lose on account of their woke positions because they lied about their woke positions.

What do you say NOW, Trumpsters?

He proceeds to lie himself about Harris’ long-standing support for taxpayer-funded transgender operations for prisoners, claiming it was one innocent little remark she made in a 2019 ACLU questionnaire. I know the Times has nurtured and husbanded this lie, but there’s an internet, and Harris is all over it, bragging to a transgender interviewer about how, as attorney general, she made damn sure that trans prisoners in California would receive “gender-affirming” surgeries.

Wallace-Wells goes on to muse that perhaps Harris should have had a “Sister Souljah moment” on transgenders — then immediately denounces his own idea as “morally grotesque.”

Way to fake out the voters, David!

Praising Democratic phonies like Sen. Jon Ossoff for “pointedly disavow[ing]” a slew of Harris’ clearly held positions, like the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, defunding the police and abolishing ICE, Wallace-Wells argues, “it is really hard to see which if any supposedly toxic left-wing positions made their way into public policy or even campaign ads or speeches on the trail.”

Yes, exactly. Democrats’ positions are so toxic that smart Democratic politicians are forced to repudiate them. (Something Kamala never did.) That illustrates the toxicity of wokeness; it does not contradict it.

But Wallace-Wells can’t understand why Americans “continued to associate a social-justice agenda with Democrats, if so few of them have been publicly pushing those positions over the past five years.”

[Waving my hand frantically.]

Let’s take a look at the Democrats’ official 2024 party platform! It’s difficult to claim the voters were confused about what the Democrats stand for when party’s written declaration of what it stands for begins with a “Land Acknowledgement” about how we stole our land from the Indians:

“”We honor the communities native to this continent, and recognize that our country was built on Indigenous homelands. We pay our respects to the millions of Indigenous people throughout history” — and more such glop, for three more paragraphs. (How about you guys acknowledge the half-sheet of paper you wasted writing this stupid land thing?)

Has any group of people ever hated their own country as much as Democrats hate our country? This week, we’ll get rafts of these “We Suck” histories in honor of Thanksgiving, as media outlets, schools and universities publish their horseshit versions of our country’s past.

Take the Smithsonian Institution’s “Everyone’s history matters: The Wampanoag Indian Thanksgiving story deserves to be known“:

“The spirit of amity of the first Thanksgiving evaporated” [on account of the settlers’] “fear, xenophobia and self-righteousness … [F]ew English bothered to learn the Algonquin languages. … Resentment among sons and daughters [of the Indigenous] who had seen their fathers humiliated, threatened and robbed of their heritage could not be contained.” (Worst of all, they forgot the mini-marshmallows on the sweet potato casserole.)

That was written in 2017 by Lindsay McVay, a midwit senior at Central Florida University, who now goes by “They/Them” as “Global Communications Specialist” for Planned Parenthood. It remains on the website of one of our most esteemed national institutions and appears near the top of any Google search for “the true history of Thanksgiving.”

Sounds like Lindsay hates her own sex, live babies and America, so, really, who better to comment on our history?

I ask again: Has any group of people ever hated the accomplishments of their own ancestors as much as liberals hate our Founding Fathers? (Possible explanation: Perhaps their ancestors weren’t America’s Founding Fathers — another problem with mass immigration.)

For example, there are lots of political parties in Israel, many of them quite liberal, but it’s inconceivable that any would begin their party platform with an “acknowledgement … that our country was built on Palestinian homelands. We pay our respects to the millions of Palestinians people throughout history blah, blah blah …”

Does the Israeli Smithsonian have a write-up of the Israelis’ “fear, xenophobia and self-righteousness,” or the “sons and daughters [of Palestinians] who had seen their fathers humiliated, threatened and robbed of their heritage”?

Even when the superseding culture is not manifestly superior to the culture it replaced, as Israel and America’s are, do the winners anywhere else spend centuries apologizing to the losers? Do the Zulus in South Africa “acknowledge” that they’re living on land they stole from the Ndwandwe and Dutch? Do the Red Chinese begin party meetings with groveling apologies to Chiang Kai-Shek?

It’s like a guy wins you over from your old boyfriend and you’re now happily married, but for the rest of your lives, before you have sex, he has to read an acknowledgement: “We honor your previous boyfriends and recognize that our marriage was built on the foreshortened romances with [Jack, Joe, insert names of ex-boyfriends here].”

Manifestly, Simply? the Democratic Party is full of deeply disturbed individuals. This Thanksgiving, the rest of us can be thankful that voters noticed. In a landslide.

COPYRIGHT 2024 ANN COULTER

Matt Goodwin: Western elites are the problem

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Goodwin is absolutely right that the problem is our elites and that the only way to change things is to change the elites that currently rule the West. But of course he never attempts to describe the Jewish role in creating and maintaning our elites in the media, politics, and academia. How can you win if you can’t even describe your enemy?

Matt Goodwin: How to Take Back a Country

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From Europe to America, many people now (rightly) complain about mass immigration, the breakdown of borders, what we teach children, the rise of Islamism, and, ultimately, the dilution if not deconstruction of Western nations.

But these are all second-order problems which flow from the first-order problem— the need to change the ruling class, change the elite, change the institutions they dominate, reconfigure the state how it works. Do this and you will much more easily address the second-order problems.

One group of people who get this are Team Trump, who unlike their first term in office, in 2016-2020, now recognise that to take back a country you must start with taking back the bureaucracy of the state, with taking back the institutions, with establishing a ‘counter-elite’.

One group of people who have failed to recognise, on the other hand, are the British Tories, who despite having an enormous majority in 2019-2024, showed zero interest in this first-order problem and hence fumbled their way through trying and spectacularly failing to manage these second-order problems.

Comparing and contrasting the two is instructive. Trumpian Republicans want to smash the status-quo; British Tories are basically comfortable with it.

Trumpian Republicans want to take back control of the state; British Tories don’t really talk about it. Trumpian Republicans leaned into and expanded the realignment; British Tories completely squandered it. Trumpian Republicans understand the need to take on the institutions; British Tories are too scared and status-conscious to do anything that might upset their friends in the media and legacy institutions.

And Trumpian Republicans grasp we have now entered a completely different political era in which conservatism must change or die; British Tories, from Team Badenoch appointing the same advisors who guided the disastrous regime of Boris Johnson, to a Conservative parliamentary party that embraces the cultural left status-quo among the elite, have very clearly not.

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Liberal Yale Law Professor in the NYTimes: “There is no alternative to persuading our fellow citizens of our beliefs”

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Campus protests are fine unless they offend Jews

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This is yet another marker of Jewish power. Remember when Ivy League presidents were being hauled before Congress and then fired for not cracking down on protests against Israeli genocide? Universities have fallen in line.

How Universities Cracked Down on Pro-Palestinian Activism

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Stricter rules and punishments over campus protests seem to be working. Universities have seen just under 950 protest events this semester, compared with 3,000 in the spring.

“They say it’s to keep us safe, but I think it’s more to keep us under control,” said Tasneem Abdulazeez, a student in the teaching program.

The changes follow federal civil rights complaints, lawsuits and withering congressional scrutiny accusing universities of tolerating antisemitism, after some protesters praised Hamas and called for violence against Israelis.

Some students and faculty have welcomed calmer campuses. Others see the relative quiet as the bitter fruit of a crackdown on pro-Palestinian speech. They worry President-elect Donald J. Trump, who as a candidate called for universities to “vanquish the radicals,” could ratchet up the pressure.

In many cases, universities are enforcing rules they adopted before the school year began. While the specifics vary, they generally impose limits on where and when protests can occur and what form they can take.

Todd Wolfson, the president of the American Association of University Professors and an associate professor of media studies at Rutgers, said the restrictions have made people afraid.

“They feel like they’re being watched and surveilled,” he said. “I think there’s a strong degree of self-censorship that’s taking place.”

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Two law enforcement officers stand over traffic cones. Nearby at the top of stone steps, students are seen sitting at tables.
Police officers set up crowd-control barricades at Montclair State University in November near students who were holding an event to support Palestinians.Credit…MSU 4 Palestine

But Jewish students who felt targeted by protesters have praised the rules — and the speed at which universities are enforcing them — for helping to restore order and safety. Naomi Lamb, the director of Hillel at the Ohio State University, said the school’s new protest policies seem to be working well.

“I appreciate the response of administrators to ensure that there is as little antisemitic action and rhetoric as possible,” she said.

Some of the tactics protesters used last semester have been met with stringent responses this school year. At the University of Minnesota, 11 people were arrested after they occupied a campus building. Last school year, some universities let protesters occupy buildings overnight and even for days at a time.

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