Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…
A Danish newspaper warns that If Kamala Harris is elected, she will be the most left-wing American president ever.
The daily Berlingske Tidende has a reputation of being a bourgeois newspaper leaning right, but that does not mean that they are pro-Trump by any means. Another article, by Poul Høi (who is also known to castigate Donald Trump), titles that JD Vance called Kamala Harris a "childless cat lady"; He shouldn't have done that (here is JD Vance's reply to the "scandal").
Back to Helena Bang-Udesen's front-page article on Kamala Harris:
Kamala Harris' presidential campaign flopped in 2019 because she failed to articulate a strong political position. Now she almost has the Democratic nomination, but is struggling to make her mark in the political center.
Kamala Harris has always had difficulty articulating her political position.
Her previous announcements have gone in different directions, and the political uncertainty became the downfall of her campaign when she went for the nomination as the Democratic presidential candidate in 2019. …
Émission extraordinaire au Soir Info Été de CNews pour discuter la déclaration inatt5endue et explosive, de Joe Biden de ne pas se représenter aux élections de 2024.
Le porte-parole des «Republicans in France» Philippe Karsenty était l’invité de «Soir info été», ce dimanche 21 juillet sur CNEWS. Il s'est exprimé au sujet du retrait de la candidature de Joe Biden, président américain sortant, qui renonce à sa réélection sur fond de dissensions au sein même de son parti : «Un président qui ne peut pas se représenter et qui a de la rancœur, c'est très dangereux», a--t-il expliqué.
Khalil Rajehi de l'AFP:
Le président américain sortant, Joe Biden, a annoncé ce dimanche le retrait de sa candidature à l’élection présidentielle de novembre prochain, soutenant par la même occasion celle de sa vice-présidente Kamala Harris.
Originaire d’Oakland, dans la baie de San Francisco, Kamala Harris naît dans la Californie des années 1960, de parents immigrés. Sa mère indienne, chercheuse spécialiste du cancer du sein, aujourd’hui décédée, et son père jamaïcain, professeur d'économie, la plongent très tôt dans la lutte pour les droits civiques dans laquelle ils sont vivement impliqués.
Le parcours de Kamala Harris est d’ailleurs une histoire de premières fois. En 2010, elle devient la première femme noire et de descendance asiatique à devenir procureure générale de l'Etat de Californie. Idem en 2016 lorsque, suivant la vague de femmes accédant au Congrès, elle est la première femme élue sénatrice de son état de l'ouest américain.
Quant à Donald Trump, selon CNews,
«L'escroc Joe Biden n’était pas apte à se présenter à la présidence, n’est certainement pas apte à servir, et ne l’a jamais été !», a-t-il lancé dès le début de sa déclaration.
… «Il n’a atteint le poste de président que grâce à des mensonges, de fausses infos (...). Tous ceux qui l'entouraient, y compris son médecin et les médias, savaient qu'il n'était pas capable d'être président, et il ne l'était pas», a ajouté l'ancien locataire de la Maison Blanche, récemment victime d'une tentative d'assassinat.
Dans son message, Donald Trump a également accusé Joe Biden d'être responsable des nombreux maux du pays.
«Regardez ce qu'il a fait, avec des millions de personnes qui traversent notre frontière, sans contrôle ni vérification, beaucoup provenant de prisons, d'établissements psychiatriques et un nombre record de terroristes», a poursuivi le candidat républicain sur son compte Truth Social, avant de conclure par sa phrasé favorite : «Make America Great Again.
Parmi les autres de invités Soir Info Été sur CNews, le journaliste Régis Le Sommier a déclaré que
«Kamala Harris n'est pas le Barack Obama féminin».
En ce qui concerne Jean-Baptiste Soufron, l'avocat a affirmé que
«Ce qui se passe chez les démocrates américains, c'est aussi un changement de génération».
From Modi'in, an Israeli woman castigates the New York Times for its coverage (or lack thereof) of the current conflict in Palestine:
I write this as I mark Israeli Independence Day in the changed landscape of my neighborhood.
Across the street: the home of a soldier killed in Gaza. Up the block: those of three more fallen soldiers. The park next to the grocery store: dedicated to the memory of another fallen soldier. Inside, an amputee carries yogurt with his elbow because his lower arm is gone. Around the corner: the home of a young man murdered at the Tribe of Nova music festival on Oct. 7.Nearby: the home of my former student who defended Kfar Aza kibbutz until Hamas terrorists shot him. He’s been in the I.C.U. for seven months. Past the park: the home of Noa Marciano, a soldier and hostage who was murdered in Al-Shifa Hospital. Overhead: the drone of warplanes.
We are still under attack from Hamas and Hezbollah. No one in Israel is out of the cross hairs. We’re not sleeping soundly at night. We won’t breathe deeply until the hostages and our soldiers come home.
I want to start a school for religious Muslim and Jewish girls. I plan to spend next year studying Arabic. I dream of a two-state solution.
I think your coverage of this war would look different if you took a walk in my neighborhood.
Sarah Greenberg
Modiin, Israel
Just as Barack Obama knew that he stood for hope, Trump knows that he stands for defiance.
If you wish to have an iota of a chance to explain the GOP's candidate to a leftist, don't hesitate to head over to the New York Times, of all places, and send them The Secret of Trump’s Resurrection by , a man who admits to once writing a column titled “Donald Trump Is Finally Finished.”
How did Trump go from a disgraced has-been — even Fox News’s Laura Ingraham implied he was putting his “own grudges ahead of what’s good for the country” — to the man of destiny he had become even before he dodged that bullet on Saturday?
A simple explanation goes something like this: The G.O.P. ceased to be a normal political party in 2016 and became a cult of personality, less interested in winning elections than in burnishing the savior-victim myth of its charismatic leader. …
But this analysis, true to a point, falls short in at least three respects. It doesn’t give Trump the political credit he deserves. It fails to reckon with the Biden administration’s political blunders. And it reduces the Democrats’ problem to a Biden problem. Their problem is bigger than that.
First, Trump. Just as Barack Obama knew that he stood for hope, Trump knows that he stands for defiance. Defiance of what, or whom? Of the gatekeepers to cultural respectability in today’s America. And who, in the minds of Trump supporters, are they?
They are the reporters who said it was a “conspiracy theory” to suggest Covid emerged from a Chinese lab. Or the academic deans who insist every job applicant write D.E.I. statements and refuse to hire those who criticize them. Or the do-gooders who charge that Americans who want better control of the southern border are motivated by racism. Or the pundits who say, as one NBC contributor put it in 2016, that “100 percent of Trump voters are deplorable.” Or the journalists who claimed that “inflation is good for you.”
There is nobody in America whom the gatekeepers hate more than Trump. Ergo, there is nobody in America whom the haters of the gatekeepers love more than Trump. In his every beyond-the-pale, can-you-believe-he-said-that utterance, he signals his contempt for liberal pieties, his willingness to take the left’s slings and arrows, his willingness to be hated.
In MAGA world, all this translates into a picture of strength and a form of incorruptibility. Whatever else Trump stands for, he’s the sort of man who won’t be seduced into wanting to be loved by anyone.
Then there were Biden’s political blunders. One is obvious: He betrayed his implicit promise to be a one-term, transitional president. Had he stuck to it, he would have been spared the humiliation of last month’s debate and Democrats would not be the dispirited and divided party that they are today.
But Biden’s bigger blunder was the betrayal of his promise, made in his inaugural address, to end “this uncivil war that pits red against blue.” In September 2022, he delivered a blistering speech against “MAGA Republicans” whom he accused of threatening “the very foundations of our Republic.” But did he mean the Proud Boys who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 — or those who were “MAGA Republicans” mainly by virtue of voting for Trump?
It wasn’t clear. A speech that should have distinguished the two wound up conflating them. It cast tens of millions of Americans as if they were enemies of democracy itself.
More foolish was the effort of Democrats to try to “defend democracy” by seeking to kick Trump’s name off ballots — a fine instance of destroying the village in order to save it — while pursuing Trump in court. Whatever the respective merits of the many cases against him, the bald effort to embarrass, paralyze and ultimately criminalize a political opponent smacked, to millions of Americans, as a much graver danger to democracy than, say, whether hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels constituted a campaign-finance violation.
“If his name was not Donald Trump, and if he wasn’t running for president — I’m the former A.G. in New York; I’m telling you that case would’ve never been brought,” Andrew Cuomo told Bill Maher last month. “And that’s what is offensive to people. And it should be. Because if there’s anything left, it’s belief in the justice system.”
Finally, the Democratic Party itself, which keeps insisting it’s morning in America when poll after poll shows a country that thinks it’s darkness at noon. On the eve of the pandemic in 2020, 45 percent of Americans were satisfied with the way things were going, according to Gallup, the highest percentage in 15 years. Now it’s 21 percent. That gap alone explains why Trump looks to be on his way to victory.
It’s a fact of politics that the demagogue’s success rests less in outright lying than it does in speaking in half-truths. So long as Democrats persist in seeing nothing of Trump but his lies and outrages, they’ll miss what makes him strong. And so long as they fail to recognize their own mistakes, they may be unable to avoid the real disaster coming their way.
In my latest book, La Guerre Culturelle (The Cultural War), I talk about the history of this war launched by the Left over two centuries ago against the peoples in Western nations attached to their traditions, to their national sovereignty, and to Western culture. I explain how, for the past century, this war is being waged ruthlessly in the United States by the neo-Marxist left, domestic enemy, continuing Gramsci's evil plan to infiltrate, subvert, and undermine institutions. Needless to say, I devote a large part to Donald Trump who embodies the accomplished cultural warrior who fights fiercely in the arena, facing the gladiators and the wild beasts of the hateful left.
This metaphor has now become reality through bloodshed and an undefeated Trump, inviting us all to join the “fight”, with his raised fist against the background of the American flag, an unforgettable image. Trump seems to be the only prominent politician, the only Western leader (apart from Nigel Farage), to take into account this domestic conflict that others do not see and which they do not resist, unless it is to collaborate cowardly, as we have seen in France and the United Kingdom.
Trump is alone in encouraging us to fight this murderous left, not by using the Mafia means that said Left employs but by an implacable determination, thanks to us rightists having the numbers and the moral superiority.
Let's make no mistake, everywhere in our Western societies, Gramsci has emerged the winner. Gramsci's Cultural Marxism, the Frankfurt School, the “deconstructionists” and other notorious Marxists, allied with the globalist forces that populate the “deep states” of all Western countries, forming a “global swamp” of powerful and unelected people, has practically arrived at this victory for them which is also our planned suicide. In 2016, through his talent and the strength of his convictions alone, Trump succeeded in defeating Hillary Clinton, the candidate of the international left (including the European Union) and in accomplishing great things for his country, for the West (and for the entire planet), in a first term despite an unparalleled outburst against him from the left and pseudo-Republicans (RINOs) and like-minded Conservatives, offended by his “style”, his “personality”, or his mean tweets.
The people who have been harassing Trump since 2015 have tried everything, in vain, to destroy him: slander, baseless impeachment attempts, legal warfare (lawfare), idle accusations, shameless lies. The same creatures of the global deep state (which now decides the outcome of our elections and wants to rule our way of life) hate him because he embodies the only major obstacle to their total and irreversible victory. He is the man who has the will and the courage to stand against them to turn the situation around. Isn't that a good reason to eliminate him? It is exactly what far-left politicians have been encouraging in their murderous rhetoric. Joe Biden himself recently said it was “time to put Trump in a bullseye." Ever since they stole the 2020 election, the “Democrats”, that is to say the extreme left Marxists in power, have been accusing him from wanting to go back to the White House to do what they themselves do on a daily basis: the breaching of laws and of the Constitution, tyrannical government with censorship, tolerance and impunity for the worst crimes and for the organized violence that are committed by their supporters.
Trump arrived in a political landscape in ruins after Obama's disastrous presidency, adding a chapter to the doctrine of Manifest Destiny: an America protected by Providence even after the worst trials and that nothing can overcome in the nation's march forward.
This time, Providence has an embodiment. Its name is Donald John Trump.
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| Lou Dobbs at CPAC in 2017 |
Lou Dobbs, the Former FOX Business host of the (appropriately entitled) Lou Dobbs Tonight show, has died at the age of 78, writes David Rutz.
A statement posted on his X account called him a "fighter till the very end – fighting for what mattered to him the most, God, his family and the country."
"Lou's legacy will forever live on as a patriot and a great American. We ask for your prayers for Lou's wonderful wife Debi, children and grandchildren," it said.
… Former President Trump, a longtime friend of Dobbs, eulogized him in a post on Truth Social on the same evening he will accept the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
"The Great Lou Dobbs has just passed away — A friend, and truly incredible Journalist, Reporter, and Talent," Trump wrote. "He understood the World, and what was ‘happening,’ better than others. Lou was unique in so many ways, and loved our Country. Our warmest condolences to his wonderful wife, Debi, and family. He will be greatly missed!
Photo courtesy Sarah Hoyt
Email from Damian Bennett:
L'ex-président Donald Trump, candidat républicain à l'élection présidentielle, a été évacué après avoir été visé par des tirs lors d'un meeting de campagne en Pennsylvanie ce samedi 13 juillet.
Paul Reen on the BFMTV channel (or on DailyMotion, merci à Anntoinette pour les photos) 
about the assassination attempt on Donald Trump. Here is the full video (Paul at 5:25/5:55, Nicolas Conquer at 2:00:44)… I have been looking for my own appearances on CNews and BFMTV (July 15 at 9:30 and 10:30, respectively), as well as for other TV appearances of members of Republicans in France (RIF), but without luck…
C’est une image qui fera date dans l’histoire américaine. Donald Trump, est sorti blessé, mais sorti miraculeusement vivant, samedi soir lors d’une tentative d’assassinat à Butler, en Pennsylvanie. Le tireur présumé, âgé de 20 ans, a été abattu. La dernière information, selon la presse américaine, des explosifs auraient été retrouvés dans sa voiture. Un spectateur a également été tué, deux grièvement blessés. Comment cette attaque a-t-elle pu se produire ? Quelle motivation pour son auteur ? Quelles conséquences politiques, alors que nous sommes en période de campagne présidentielle américaine ?
On en parle avec : Benoît Ballet, envoyé spécial de BFMTV à Milwaukee, Wisconsin (États-Unis). Paul Reen, président de “Republicans in France”. Ulysse Gosset, éditorialiste international à BFMTV. Marjorie Paillon, journaliste spécialiste de la vie politique américaine. Christopher Mesnooh, avocat au barreau de New York, Washington et Paris. Guillaume Farde, consultant police-justice pour BFMTV. Jérôme Poirot, consultant BFMTV, ancien adjoint à la coordination nationale du renseignement. Chloé Giraud, journaliste à BFMTV. Le général Jérôme Pellistrandi, consultant défense pour BFMTV. André Kaspi, historien, spécialiste des États-Unis. Stéphane Bureau, consultant États-Unis pour BFMTV. Anne-Laure Banse, journaliste à BFMTV. Alain Bauer, professeur de criminologie au conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers. Nicolas Conquer, porte-parole des Republican Overseas France. Olivier Piton, avocat français installé aux États-Unis et auteur. Patricia Allemoniere, grand reporter spécialiste des questions internationales. Et Patrick Saint-Paul, rédacteur en chef du service International Le Figaro.
«Donald Trump est devenu une machine de marketing imbattable», a affirmé Philippe Karsenty ce lundi 15 juillet sur CNEWS. Ce porte-parole de Republicans in France est revenu sur l'image et le message passé par l'ex-président américain après la tentative d'assassinat à son encontre lors d'un meeting, samedi 13 juillet.Here is the full video of RIF's Philippe Karsenty on CNews from 24:48-55:10
Watch this video taken from a different angle at the rally in Butler, PA where Trump was shot. The counter snipers on the roof see something and immediately engage the shooter, killing him.
— WorldNetDaily (@worldnetdaily) July 14, 2024
These men are heroes. pic.twitter.com/TKYJOmD4xA
A video at the Times of India seems, if I'm not mistaken, to show the sniper(s) of the Secret Service shooting first (like Han Solo?) at, if not at the exact same time as, the gunman. If that is correct, that might help explain why Thomas Matthew Crooks (thankfully) missed his target…
Watch this video taken from a different angle at the rally in Butler, PA where Trump was shot. The counter snipers on the roof see something and immediately engage the shooter, killing him.
— WorldNetDaily (@worldnetdaily) July 14, 2024
These men are heroes. pic.twitter.com/TKYJOmD4xA
Donald Trump said in the presidential debate last month that without his pressure on European allies to increase defense spending, NATO risked “going out of business.” Mr. Trump’s critics, including many Europeans, say they worry the alliance might unravel if he returns to the White House.
NATO Matters More Than Ever to America’s Role in the World writes Dalibor Rohac, adding that "Washington won’t succeed if it tries to deal alone with the revisionists in Beijing, Moscow and Tehran" (thanks to Vincent Bourdonneau).
NATO’s primary purpose—“to keep the Soviet Union out,” as its first secretary general Lord Hastings Ismay put it—is as important as ever. For pro-American Eastern Europeans, distrustful of their complacent peers in Germany, France or Spain, Ismay’s second imperative—to keep “the Americans in”—is a matter of survival.
In a report for the American Enterprise Institute, Giselle Donnelly, Iulia Joja and I argue that American leadership in NATO isn’t an act of charity. Peace and security in Europe have always been vital to U.S. interests. Our nation fought two world wars on European soil precisely because we saw domination of Eurasia by our adversaries as unacceptable.
As for Berlin and others not paying their fair share, remember that according to Ismay, NATO’s third purpose was to “keep the Germans down.” The enduring fecklessness of Germany’s political elites is a testament to NATO’s success in solving what in the 1950s loomed large as the “German question.”
… Countries that do need defending, from Finland in the north to Romania in the south, remain committed to the alliance and to their security, spending well above the target 2% of gross domestic product on defense. Many members, including Lithuania and the Czech Republic, share Washington’s concerns about China and the Indo-Pacific.
To stay relevant, NATO must strengthen its deterrent posture on the Eastern flank, which it can do at little cost to the U.S. Poland and the Baltic states should be brought into the alliance’s nuclear-sharing system and Polish F-35 jets should be certified to carry nuclear missiles.
… The tasks of pushing against Russia in Eastern Europe, Iran in the Middle East and China globally are all connected. Washington can’t succeed if it tries to deal with them in isolation. NATO and the trans-Atlantic relationship are central to America’s role as the world’s leading superpower. It would be a tragedy for Americans if the incumbent or his Republican challenger squandered this asset.
Aarhus University's Jørgen Møller challenges the Economist's idea that “dictatorships are
rubbish at football” (soccer)
“How to win the World Cup” (June 9th) presented the heartening conclusion that “dictatorships are rubbish at football”. It would be neat if the beautiful game could only thrive in democracies. But this conclusion, which is based on data for the period between 1990 and 2018, is mistaken. Italy won two World Cups during Benito Mussolini’s dictatorship in the 1930s (beating an authoritarian Hungary in 1938). Latin American countries, such as Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay, have had excellent international sides both in democratic periods and when under military dictatorship.
Countries in communist east Europe, including Hungary, whose “Golden Team” lost just one match between 1950 and 1956 (the World Cup final in 1954), Czechoslovakia (World Cup finalist in 1962), Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union (four-time finalist in the European Championship), were an equal match for any national team in democratic Western Europe. Spain under Francisco Franco won the European Championship in 1964 and produced the most dominant club team of any period, the formidable Real Madrid side that won five consecutive European Cups in the 1950s.
A study of the relationship between democracy and football performance based on data after 1990, when communism had broken down in east Europe and military dictatorships had fallen in Latin America, suffers from selection bias. The countries that do well today are by and large the same countries that did well in the interwar period and in the decades after the second world war, namely countries in Europe and southern Latin America. They have dominated football irrespective of their political stripe. Dictatorships are, alas, not necessarily rubbish at football. But the countries that are still dictatorships today are.
PROFESSOR JORGEN MOLLER
Aarhus University
Aarhus, Denmark
Regarding the celebration surrounding the release of Julian Assange, the cartoonist has a different take on the Wikileaks founder's record…
I have always asked that if Assange (né Julian Paul Hawkins) deserves to be celebrated, even lionized as a hero for the ages, for disclosing secrets, why does he do so only with regards to the military of the United States? Why no "WikilLeaks" about the militaries of countries such as, I dunno, China, North Korea, Russia, Ukraine, France, the UK, Australia, Iran, Israel, or Denmark? Doesn't the public in each of those countries — as well as, for that matter, the public in America and, indeed, in the rest of the world — deserve to know about those governments' secrets as well?
Naturally, the same questions apply to Edward Snowden — so uninterested in revealing the Kremlin's secrets that he has obtained refuge in Moscow from Vladimir Putin — and Bradley (aka Chelsea) Manning…
