RIP Quentin Deranque, 23: In the Streets of Lyon, a Young French Rightist Is Beaten to Death (Video)

On February 12, a handful of young women belonging to a right-leaning group called Némésis came out in Lyon to protest against a meeting of the LFI (La France Insoumise party) deputy Rima Hassan, and among the dozen security personnel they had retained was a young Catholic math student named Quentin Deranque. 

That day, the seven women in le Collectif Némésis, an anti-immigration collective fighting violence against Western women are confronted by a dozen members of La Jeune Garde (The Young Guard), an Antifa-type organization created by LFI's Raphaël Arnault (and officially dissolved last June), some of whom land blows on and try to strangle some of the girls. The rightists fight back and it soon became "like a rugby match" (BFMTV video, Le Parisien video, Le Progrès video, and — best, IMO — Le Monde video). According to The Guardian, 

Images broadcast by TF1 of the alleged attack showed several people hitting three others who were lying on the ground, two of whom managed to escape. One witness told AFP: “People were hitting each other with iron bars.”

After Quentin Deranque falls down, the kicks keep coming, and two days later, he dies of a severe brain injury. It soon turns out that among the suspects arrested are collaborators of deputies from the radical La France Insoumise party. 

While the Left has duly gone through the gestures of condemning the murder — participating, for instance, in the minute of silence at the National Assembly — in practice, its reaction has been more of a cornucopia of blame missives fired against the (far) right, from a student saying "I am in favor of Quentin's death" as he tears down RNJ posters commemorating the late student and a mother in Caen holding a baby saying "No to violence from the far right" to VIPs claiming that "We are the ones who were attacked. People in Lyon are scared, because of the far right!" and demanding (as did LFI's Mathilde Panot) that Nemesis be kept away from the party's organizations, "or it's going to end badly!" 

La France Insoumise hurls broadside after broadside against the right, which allegedly wishes to "transform political debate into a form of civil war" while the LFI's leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, goes so far as to ask for the dissolution of Némésis because the collective made entirely of females roughly between 18 and 30 "is dangerous. It attacks our leaders, it threatens our lives." (Mise à jour: Merci à Sarah pour l'Instalien and to Tappa Keggabru for providing an English-language France 24 video.)

As the pauvre extrême gauche's Mathilde Panot tried to diminish the death of Quentin in the Assemblée Nationale, comparing one assassination to others in the past (notice that French Wikipedia's descriptions of Quentin Deranque and especially Némésis are so extremely partisan throughout that they are almost unreadable), the prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, has responded to the president of the La France Insoumise group in the National Assembly, "What you have just done is absolutely despicable and abject!" As a leftist assitant to a politician was denied entry to the National Assembly,  President Macron has condemned "an unprecedented surge of violence". 

Meanwhile, one of the main presenters of CNews, sort of France's Fox News, has declared that the leftist television channels "are putting a target on our backs." 

As you know, conservatives both inside and outside the United States are (rightly) questioning the mainstream media for branding them far right (in contrast to their opponents being described only as "the left"), but the murder of Quentin Deranque has finally led to the French interior ministry branding several as "extrême gauche" (the far left). This led in turn the LFI's Jean-Luc Mélenchon — who is caricatured on the front page of Charlie Hebdo with blood on his hands — to react with fury, denouncing France as a "the banana republic" "à la Trump".

RIP Jesse Jackson: The Reverend and the Obama Birth Controversy

RIP Jesse Jackson, whose life and career you will be reading about in all the usual media outlets (such as Instapundit [combining reports from The Times of London, PJMedia, and NRO] and The Daily Mail). FYI, I met him at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2001. (There were no camera cel phones or selfies at the time, so I handed my camera to one of the young students accompanying JJ on the Mediterranean beach asking her to use it to take a picture of us; Jackson duly obliged, and I don't know what happened, maybe she just pretended to snap the button — a girl I had met in Brazil did the same, and after I noticed that the number of photos remaining in the camera had not changed, this Karen-like ungrateful @#$$^&@ was unceremoniously dumped — but in any case when the negatives were developed in Paris, that photo did not show up.)

Nine years after Cannes, in July 2010, as the Obama birth controversy was raging, the reverend was part of one of the longest posts on this blog in 22 years, The JournoList Issue No One Is Bringing Up.  (A shorter summary, from the 2016 election campaign, is The 4 Key Facts About Obama's Birth Certificate Issue that Nobody Tells You.) The following is an extract from the one of those key facts, the point being that when have a father from a foreign country (Kenya) and when you have spent a major part of your youth abroad (in Indonesia), it is far from racist, twisted, and/or simply abnormal — whatever the color of your skin and whatever the name of your party — to be asked to provide reassurance of your birth place and whom you swear allegiance to. (Thanks for the Instalink, Sarah.)

Indeed, since then, it has transpired that two presidential candidates, both of them white, have been born abroad. 

Imagine, if in 2008, someone raised questions about John McCain, pointing out that he spent a lot of his youth outside the United States. Indeed, it turns out that the senator from Arizona was born in Panama. What if, in 2016, someone raised questions about Ted Cruz, pointing out that he seems to have spent a lot of his youth north of the border? And, indeed, it turns out that the senator from Texas was born in Canada. (Still, it turns out that both men qualified, or qualify, as natural-born citizens and thus as U.S. presidents — as, presumably would… Barack Obama (!), even if he indeed had been born abroad!)

From a combination of The JournoList Issue No One Is Bringing Up and the two updates of 2016 and 2018:

3. A Dispassionate Examination of the Facts, of the Nutjobs, and of Obama's Youth

May we be allowed to examine this issue — what MSM outlets like The Economist want us to dismiss instantly and categorically as "the absurd “birther” controversy" — fairly, coolly, and dispassionately?

[Update: Not until April 2011 did the White House finally release Barack Obama's original birth certificate.]

Let us find out to what degree it is demented, ludicrous, and/or offensive to put into doubt the Hawaiian birth of Barack Obama — a man who has complained that he can't spend all of my time with my birth certificate plastered on my forehead (something no one has asked him to do and thus turns out to be a(nother) straw man of his)…

Why are there some Americans who doubt the narrative that Barack Hussein Obama was not born in Hawaii, or elsewhere in the United States? After all, no one ever doubted that George W Bush was born in the United States or that John Kerry or Al Gore or Bill Clinton or Bob Dole or Ross Perot were born in the United States.

So, isn't this proof that only Obama's color is the only reason for these nutjobs, these racists, these birthers, to claim, preposterously, that Obama was born abroad — or that he is a Muslim, or a socialist, or indeed a communist?

But then, again, neither George W Bush nor John Kerry nor Al Gore nor Bill Clinton nor Bob Dole nor Ross Perot had a foreigner for a father (or for a mother) nor did they spend numerous years of their childhoods abroad — many years, if not most, of which were in a Muslim country.

Should Allen West, or JC Watts, or Thomas Sowell [or Herman Cain, or Ben Carson] run for president, no one would ask where they were born or demand to see their their (original) birth certificate as proof. But perhaps that is because those black men are Republicans (proving thereby that conservatives are biased)?

Hardly. That is because those African-Americans (emphasis on the "Americans" part) are known to have grown up in the United States and are known to have had parents who were not foreigners — certainly not at the time of their birth (i.e., if either of the parents was born abroad, he or she had become an American citizen by the time of his or her famous offspring's birth). And indeed, it is the same for left-leaning blacks (as it is for whites, left-leaning of otherwise).

Recall that Jesse Jackson tried running for president twice (in 1984 and 1988), and although he did not manage to become the Democratic Party's candidate, no one suggested that he was born abroad, and that for the simple reason that the Greenville, SC, native did not have a foreigner for a father (or for a mother) nor did he spend numerous years abroad. [Nor did Herman Cain or Ben Carson have to deal with such charges in their respective elections about a quarter century later, be it by Democrats or by the supporters of their GOP competitors.]

Similarly, it is unlikely that Al Sharpton (who grew up in Brooklyn) would ever be asked for his birth certificate. Neither Baptist minister would be likely accused of being a Muslim, although both might very well be described as socialists, or as communists — and that, for reasons that, in the final analysis, are pretty valid…

 … But in the event that Jesse Jackson, or Allen West, or Bill Gore, or George W Bush should be asked for their birth certificates — what is the big deal? Provide the (original) birth certificate and put the controversy behind you (and behind us — behind us all) … The very fact that they (i.e., the promisers of an era of transparency) refuse to provide something so simple, as James L Lambert points out, and get the controversy over with, once and for all, tends to be — whether you like it or not — suspicious.

After all, Barack Obama is not being asked to provide his tax statements or medical records (both of which actually turn out to be the norm for politicians to provide to the public and each of which is a far more intrusive document than a simple statement about an infant's birth location), nor is he being asked to provide some sort of far-fetched Jim-Crowe-era certificate, such as, say, the birth certificate of a grand-parent.

Besides, there are many basic things that a president, that any president (whatever the pigment of his — or her — skin), owes his populace, i.e., the people who are his "masters"…

 … to believe that an American citizen (whatever the color of his skin) born to a foreign father who lived much of his childhood abroad may indeed have been born in a foreign country turns out not to be that far-fetched at all.

Indeed, the difference between the Truthers and the Birthers is that in the first case, we are being asked to believe that 1) hundreds, if not thousands, of government officials were approached with a view to conspire to kill thousands of their fellow citizens, all (or most) of them innocent civilians, that 2) hundreds, if not thousands, of government officials agreed (apparently without a moment of hesitation) to conspire to murder thousands of innocent civilians, and that 3) none of these hundreds (thousands) of government officials has ever had a single, even fleeting feeling of remorse, or let the cat out of the bag, say while having too much to drink (no remorse?) during a Saturday outing to a local bar.

In the second case, we do not even have a conspiracy, but basically one single man hypothetically telling a falsehood — although it might even be termed a lie of omission — a lie about what offhand is a personal matter, but has turned into the only thing (allegedly) keeping him from power (Update: The New York Times' Double Standard on Conspiracy Theories).

Most damning of all, when you pause to think of it, the castigators' proof — if it can be called that — all lies in one fact (beyond the recently released certificate of live birth): and that fact is that Obama is a man, a person, a saint whose word should never be doubted, who is capable of no lying, no evil, no chicanery. If he tells you that, say, he is a Christian, then how dare you deny he is a religious man?! How dare you imply that he is a Muslim?! How dare you state he is a socialist?!

The person who ridicules the "Birther" theory as inane has no more proof than the born-in-Hawaii skeptic of where Obama was actually born [or didn't have any more proof until over two years into Obama's presidency]: his only argument — beyond the contention that the certificate of live birth and the newspaper clipping are incontrovertible proof that are not, can not be, fakes, bureaucratic mistakes, or misinterpretations — is the indisputable "truth" that Obama is someone whose honesty should not — should never — be questioned. (Whether in regards to his private life or to his political plans for America's future.)
[Update: As it happens, we would learn in 2012 (over four years after Obama was first a candidate and over three years after he entered the White House) that a "New Book Raises Questions About Obama's Memoir" (The New York Times' Michael Shear) and that, indeed, it turns out that Obama's memories were a "fantasy (like most of the President's own memoir)" (The Daily Mail). Adds Toby Harnden: "'Barack Obama: The Story' by David Maraniss catalogues dozens of instances in which Obama deviated significantly from the truth in his book 'Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance'. The 641-page book punctures the carefully-crafted narrative of Obama’s life."] 

[Moreover, as Lloyd Billingsley writes, there does seem to be quite a number of snags, significant or not (the reader will have to decide that for himself), in the former Barry Soetoro's past:

Clinton factotum George Stephanopoulos, one year ahead [at Columbia University in the early 1980s], and Matthew Cooper of Newsweek, a year behind, had no memory of the future president there. On that score, the pair had plenty of company. 

Wayne Allyn Root, the Libertarian Party candidate for vice-president in 2008, was in Obama’s 1983 Columbia political science and pre-law class, the identical course of study, and graduated on the same day. As Root told Matt Welch of Reason,  he “never met him in my life, don’t know anyone who ever met him.” 

In similar style, class of ’83 Columbia grads included a group of  25 lawyers, a doctor, several engineers and other professionals living in Israel. “Not one of us remembers Barack Obama . . . from our undergrad years, nor do we know anyone else who does,” explained Judy Maltz.]

When you think about it, it might be less worrying that some do not believe Obama was born in the United States (because of the circumstances linked to his entire childhood, much of it abroad) than that some are utterly convinced he must be born in the United States (because the Chicago pol is allegedly a sainted figure who can do, who can say no evil, who is incapable of or of lyingor of falsifying documents). Again, remember the desires of some of his followers who want(ed) the constitution to be changed, only so Obama could win one election after another and end up, in one way or another and in the best of all possible outcomes, as (de facto if not de jure) president-for-life? Let me ask everybody a simple question: Who is the truly terrifying fanatic, here?

 … There have been rumors that Obama may have attended college as a "foreign student" and that his book editor listed him as born in Kenya. Even if they are piddling issues, occasionally proven false, the point has nothing to with Obama per se. (As Breitbart states, "It is evidence — not of the President’s foreign origin, but that Barack Obama’s public persona has perhaps been presented differently at different times.") The point is that the mainstream media never bothered to devote even a minute to investigate the issue (or the strategy behind the different public personas); only new online media (Breitbart and Snopes) did so.

Indeed, the last point — and the kicker — of all three posts (2016, 2016, and 2018) is as follows:

Here comes the kicker: the so-called "Birther" charge (whether brought by a Democrat or a Republican) was never a charge leveled primarily at a man called Barack Obama or, for that matter, against a member of a minority or a person of a particular race.

It was a charge against the media. 

Indeed … the "birther" charge was, and is, an entirely justifiable charge against the mainstream media. It was never about birth certificates per se. It was about the double standards that the MSM demonstrate again and again, first, between a Republican and a Democrat, and, second, between the other members of the Donkey Party and the media's preferred (i.e., its "dream") candidate.

 … It was not by accident that the title of my "lengthy, in-depth, and dispassionate examination of the facts, of the nutjobs, and of Obama's youth" was The JournoList Issue No One Is Bringing Up. 

John Wayne Vs. Clint Eastwood — Hollywood Vs. Cinecittà, The 2nd Amendment, and the Final Word on Alex Pretti's Fate

There are two things that a person discovers the very first time he takes a real authentic firearm in his hands:

First of all, how much heavier the firearm is than thought after viewing innumerable motion pictures, both from Hollywood and abroad; and

Second of all, what a heavy responsibility you feel with what all of a sudden lies in your hands.

In the wake of Alex Petti's death, there has been a great deal of controversy over whether a person should carry a handgun to a protest — why shouldn't he, given that conservatives are always touting the Second Amenment as one of the rights of all Americans (indeed, of all people everywhere)? Aren't Republicans being hypocritical?

Here is the kicker — the final word on the matter, if you will, in a handful of sentences: when wearing a firearm in public and during protests, you should feel that extreme responsibility. Meaning that you stand back; you stand aside; you refrain, insofar as possible, from touching said gun; you remain calm and composed. You do not get involved in fistfights with other armed men (law enforcement officers or other). Indeed, you don't even get involved in shouting matches. You do not go berserk (think also Renée Good, armed not with a SIG Sauer P320 but with a Honda Pilot SUV). You do not yell. Again: you stand back. You remain calm and composed.

Which brings up the matter of the film industry. Remember that Europeans, echoing the drama queens of the Democrat Party, are always calling the United States as a place of violence, indeed a place where the neanderthals are addicted to violence or to guns, if not both.

Take two westerns that were released within two years of each other, one in America and one in Europe (although both were eventually released in each other's countries and in the rest of the world).

In 1964 came out the first of Sergio Leone's Man With Ho Name trilogy (called the Dollars trilogy in Italian), A Fistful of Dollars, which started the spaghetti westerns phenomenon.  Now, I don't want to sound like a spoilsport — I know it is all in fun, and, as it happens, no matter what I write below I still enjoy the Leone movies — but a number of things need to be pointed out.

In Per un Pugno di Dollari, Clint Eastwood guns down one villain after another, often 4 or 5 at a time. In the trailer alone, "the magnificent stranger" (the original shooting title of the film) kills about 14 people (they're not easy to count), often punctured with jokes ("Get three coffins ready" "My mistake, four coffins" "See, my mule don't like people laughin'"). At the end of the sequel, For a Few Dollars More (nine killed in the trailer), a joke in the final scene (at 3:12) has Clint Eastwood piling one gang member after another in a mule cart while he counts the reward money the dead will bring him. He tells Lee Van Cleef that he "thought I was having trouble with my adding".

Of the two heroes in Leone's Once Upon the Time… the Revolution (Duck, you Sucker!), Rod Steiger's total kill count comes allegedly to 37 while James Coburn's rises to 123. Having said that, there's no denying that that movie doubles as a war film; as does the third Man With Ho Name entry, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. A joke in what I believe is the latter is that Blondie (Clint) is faced with three bad guys in the desert (of Spain), the camera never pulls away from a focus on the gun in his holster as three shots ring out in quick succession, and the three men are lying dead on the ground; it turns out he has shot the trio so fast (à la Lucky Luke, "the man who shoots more quickly than his shadow") that the camera never manages to pick up the action.

Again, I don't want to spoil the fun, but the revolvers in these films are the epitome of the light handguns we think of as weighing no more than children's plastic toys — and used just as irresponsibly — although they certainly feature in most of American films (westerns or other) as well.  (In one of the most pro-American movies ever to grace the screen, Rough Riders [do click that hyperlink if you want to see one of the most patriotic scenes ever filmed], John Milius insisted that the actors be furnished with real rifles.)

INTERMISSION: To briefly change the subject — Notice that the trailer for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly gets it wrong — the Bad is usually said to refer to Lee Van Cleef's Angel Eyes (Sentenza) while the Ugly is usually said to designate Eli Wallach's Tuco. Having said that, Sergio Leone has declared that the title is intentionally misleading — at various points during the film, the viewer is not supposed to know for sure which of the three characters — including Eastwood's Blondie — is which person in the title. 

Speaking of getting it wrong, the original tile was Il Buono, Il Brutto, il Cattivo, so the American title gets the two last people mixed up (but that was obviously a deliberate decision, because it sounds better in English) — while the French title is mistranslated as Le Bon, La Brute et le Truand (although The Good, the Brute, and the Crook may also have been a deliberate decision, for the same reason in French). In any case, a young Jean-Paul Belmondo was happily surprised when learning that he was nicknamed "il brutto" among Italian filmgoers in the 1950s and 1960s until he discovered it was a "false friend" mistranslation. "Brutto" does not mean "Brute" (a bad boy term prized by bad boys) but "Ugly."

Update: Grazie, Signora Hoyt, per il Instalink and to Inge Scott for reminding us that "Fistful of Dollars copies Yojimbo. It's an Italian homage to a Japanese Samurai movie influenced by American westerns" — although Steven Fletcher is less diplomatic and calls it a remake or even a plagiary of the the Akira Kurosawa film. 

Incidentally, before I saw a single spaghetti western — or an American western or war movie for that matter — I knew their music through the purchase of LP records, notably the Ennio Morricone soundtracks. (While other kids preferred pop music rock'n'roll, as a teen-ager my favorite records (beyond Civil War songs) were motion picture soundtracks.) 

END OF INTERMISSION

Compare the first of the Man With Ho Name trilogy with a John Ford western that was released two years prior. In The Man Who Shot LIberty Valence, the legalistics of killing are discussed (among others, by none other than Lee Marvin) — "That ain't murder, Mister Marshall, that's a clean-cut case of self-defense!" — and I don't remember exactly how many people are killed throughout the entirety of the 1962 oater — but it's safe to say, hardly more than the fingers of one hand — however, as far as the bad guys are concerned, only one (Liberty Valence himself) is gunned down. His two henchmen — one of whom is Lee Van Cleef — are immediately told to refrain from reacting and to stand down, which they do immediately, threatened as they are by John Wayne's rifle. 

Moreover, the story doesn't end there, but the killing has consequences. A political rival — sounds like a locofoco Democrat, to be honest — tries to destroy Tom Doniphon for shooting Lee Marvin, "an upstanding citizen," while the key plot point revolves around the very fact that that Jimmy Stewart character wants to end his career in his guilt over shooting a man.

In Warlock (with Henry Fonda and Anthony Quinn, 1959), a full gang of outlaws who are every bit as vicious as those of Indio (Gian Maria Volonté) ride into town and confront the wounded sheriff, Richard Widmark — with only two of them ending up killed while the rest are held at gunpoint and arrested.

 The spaghetti westerns (the spaghetti oaters?) are how the drama queens — Europeans and leftist Americans alike — view America and the absolute horror of its terrifying gun culture.

Remember also, how we are always warned by the locofocos about the dangers of autocracy and genocide to the United States. Often, indeed, we hear about fascism descending upon America (but somehow always landing in Europe). Mass killings, in the form of genocide, have not usually occurred in North America — certainly not to the same extent as in the of the rest of the world — notably Europe itself. (Grazie, Second Amendment.)

While, again, I do think it is fine to enjoy Sergio Leone's westerns (along with Ennio Morricone's music) not least the black humor within, the Hollywood western — no matter how left-leaning its "artists" — was more likely to tote responsibility (not to mention real life) while the European westerns revel in mass murder — which it considers a joke — and fantasy. 

Needless to say, in the aftermath, Hollywood and the rest of the world's film industries followed the lead of the spaghetti western, both in oaters (e.g., The Wild Bunch) and in other films (e.g., Kingsman: The Secret Service, which, among other things, glorifies the alleged (in-bred?) violence of America's church-goers, as well as their mass murder).

Related: 18 years ago, a French TV station compared the 2008 campaign to a Sergio Leone film — Obama the Good, Bush the Bad, and McCain the Ugly (or, rather, using the film's French mistranslation, Obama the Good, Bush the Crook, and McCain the Brute).

Barack Obama, Why Are You Calling Africa a Racist Continent? And You, AOC: Why Are You Calling Denmark a White Supremacist Country?

Voting in a Danish school's baseball court: the white paper in the voters' hands is their IDs, 
and thus the proof of their identity (those dirty scoundrels must all of 'em be racists!) 

What to you mean, No Pasarán, with those provocative questions, "Why are you calling Denmark a white supremacist country, Joe Biden? Why are you calling Africa a racist continent, Barack Obama?"?! 

[That quote was the original title of this post, which first appeared in March 2021. An argument that has not been made enough regarding the 2026 SAVE act is that just about all the European countries — who, remember, are invariably being held up by Democrats as outstanding models that America should emulate — request voter ID, without their minorities or the recently-married EU wives (of whichever race) seemingly losing their power to vote. Back to the question in the title:]

When have AOC, Joe Biden, or Barack Obama ever said that?! Are you bonkers?!

That's just the problem, dear reader: they have not said that. 

But they should. According to the Democrats' own logic.

Actually…

Actually, scratch that: it turns out that, according to the Democrats' own logic, they have in fact said that, or, if you prefer, they have implied it… 

After all, if demanding voter IDs is symptomatic of racism and indicative of a Jim Crow culture, then Denmark is one hell of a racist (and rotten) kingdom, because it is a nation in which — horror of horrors! — you cannot go into the booth on voting day and vote unless… (wait for it) you produce… a special voting ID.

For each election (national, regional, and/or local) in the land of Hamlet, the voter gets a card in the mail, valid for that election day alone, and it must be presented when you go to the polls — in person, of course — and after being handed over, the voter's name is ticked off on the voting rolls before he enters the booth.

Further South, in France, the nation's electoral card lasts for 12 elections (national, regional, and/or local), duly stamped, after which it must be renewed. In addition, in any town or city with more than 3,500 citizens, the voter must also present a regular ID.

The details, and the specifics, may change, but in all cases, there is some sort of an ID to be presented in order to vote.

Aren't you outraged, drama queens?! 

 Aren't you outraged by the hatred, locofocos?! — by the bigotry?! — by the racism?!

Indeed, there is scarcely a country in Europe, as well as in Africa (including the Obama family's ancestral Kenya), Asia, Oceania, and South America — nor, for that matter, is there one among either of the USA's immediate neighbors, Canada and Mexico — where you do not have to present some sort of ID when you go to the polls. (And here I include even the autocracies and the pretend democracies…) 

And therefore it stands to reason that every single country in Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas is forever embroiled in the era of Jim Crow relics. 

Because there does not seem to be a single place on this planet — those rotten spitbowls, all of 'em! — where ideas akin to those found in HR1 are even entertained.

Lack of voter ID: No thanks.

Mail-in ballots: Non merci.

Acceptance of ballots up to eight days after the polls have closed: Nein danke. 

Etc: Nej. Nei. Nyet. Non.…

The only place where there are attempts to make those thing happen turns out to be… the United States of America.

It is the dreamers' attempt to "fundamentally transform the United States." (See The Leftist Worldview in a Nutshell: A World of Deserving Dreamers Vs. Despicable Deplorables.)

There is a caveat — one humongous whale-size piece of a caveat — to all this, a caveat which the reader (whatever his or her nationality) must absolutely become aware of:

Offhand, it might sound like the USA alone is in the process of turning into a banana republic (if it hasn't done so already), while every other country has more or less common sense voting laws (whether they reflect the reality of the situation in the particular country or not).

In a sense, yes, that is true. 

But a deeper truth is that there is one thing we must not forget: most other countries have no such things as the electoral college. And other countries have no such thing as the filibuster. (Or equivalents thereof.)

What this means is that is that the (more populated) city vote always prevails over the countryside vote. And what does "the city" mean? What does it entail? It means dependent (helpless?) citizens, it means a greater need for assistance, it means a vaster bureaucracy, it means anonymity, it means corruption, it means inside deals, and it means lots and lots of bureaucrats who "are here to help" (aka compassion (sic)).

In other words, these countries, whatever their names (la République française, the German Democratic Republic, etc…) are functions of (at best) democracies rather than republics. 

This is why the vast majority of other nations have no organization with the strength of the Republican Party (or of the Libertarians), certainly not at the level inside the U.S.A. (even when naïve RINOS dilute the strength of their own side).

This, in turn, explains why foreigners always oppose the USA's GOP (see November 2020 election) — often religiously — why foreigners always join Democrats in criticizing, ridiculing, and demonizing the flyover Americans, and why foreigners always support Democrats in their dreams to "fundamentally transform the United States." 

Foreigners support making the USA not into a one-party nation per se, but into a nation like their own, a democracy where the drama queens of basically some kind of (more or less rigid) pro-government party are always at the helm and where élites rule over the respective nations' unruly deplorables — whose youngsters are invariably being indoctrinated by the respective school systems.

I will end this post by saying that, needless to say, there is nothing new about this and by quoting a nine-year-old post where I said much the same as above, but while using slightly different language and arguments. If you have the time…

In July 2012, the Economist ended an article on voter fraud with the sentence: 

it would be awkward, to say the least, if Mr Romney won because new laws kept some of Mr Obama’s supporters from voting.

And I had the following reaction: 

Would it not be far worse if Barack Obama — or if either candidate, really — won because the absence of a voting law allowed fraudulent voters from his party (with or without the candidate's consent) to steal the election?

In the latter case, a candidate might win as a result of a crime — a crime which election and law officers were deliberately prevented from detecting. In the (hypothetical) case you mention, his adversary might win because of the unintended consequences in the fight against crime, which is surely a distinction worth making.

To take another (far worse) crime, how prevalent is murder? Not very, if you take the statistics in percentage (something like 0.0048 %). Well, no matter how rare murder is, you still need to criminalize it as much for justice — to bring perpetrators (however rare they may be) to justice — as for prevention — to prevent people from being tempted to use it.

The last I heard, one needs some sort of poll card to cast a ballot in Britain, as indeed one does in every other democracy on this planet. Due to the Democrats' hysterical race-baiting, we have been subjected to the (absurd) spectacle of being the only country where having this (common-sense) requirement can only be viewed as vile, outrageous prejudice. Well, if it is racist to require voter ID in America, then Britain and every other democracy on the planet (including, of course, in Africa) can only qualify as racist as well.

The height of ridicule occurred when Democrats organized hearings in Washington to hear the sob stories of these oppressed masses. Except that in order to get out-of-state to DC, the wretched martyrs who find it such a hardship getting around their home towns managed to board an… airplane by showing an… ID.

Related: • Of the 47 countries in Europe today — the nations and the continent that the Democrats are always telling us to emulate — 46 of them currently require government-issued photo IDs to vote
• Voter ID: Apparently not allowing minorities to cheat is a form of racial oppression
• In America, we learn from the French newspaper Le Monde (in July 2013), 
Most of the 39 Million African-Americans Do Not Have an ID to Vote  
• If the Democrats learned anything from their 2016 debacle, 
it’s that they didn’t cheat nearly enough (May 2017) 
• Let’s dispense with the myth that liberals are really against voter fraud;
Voter fraud is actually an essential part of their election strategy (from April 2014)  
• Democrats don't support voter fraud;
they just worry about disenfranchising the deceased
• Voter ID: Apparently not allowing minorities to cheat is a form of racial oppression 
• Isn't America Being Governed by a Mafia Family Dynasty, setting things up so that there will always be Democrats in power?
• Inside of a month, Democrats have redefined riots and election challenges from the highest form of patriotism to an attack on democracy — And by “democracy”, they mean the Democrat Party
• Voter Fraud: A Note to Leftists Who Claim that "Not a shred of hard evidence has been produced" 
• Dennis Prager: The Numerous (and Sweeping) Anomalies Regarding the 2020 Election That Cannot Be Ignored

And, evergreen: 

• The January 6 Protest Summarized in One Single Sentence 
• What the January 6th protest actually reveals is the criminal determination of the Democrats to establish a one-party state at whatever the cost 
• Let's Stop Using the Words "Trump Tried to Overturn the 2020 Election"; It's Unprofessional Journalism

The Great Taking: "We’re Living Through The Greatest Transfer Of Wealth From The Middle Class To The Elites In History"

 

The latest Bēhance poster by our good ol' friend Damian Bennett is called The Great Taking and is based on the book of the same name that he has been reading.

To understand what it is about, and the dire danger that the author is warning about, THE GREAT TAKING by David Rogers Webb can be downloaded for free — as can Damian's poster above — through a link at the latter's Bēhance page. Here is what Damian has to say about the matter (and about the book):

Regardless of politics or party, financial circumstance or station in life, The Great Taking comes for us all. You might never know though, because The Great Taking is not under-reported, there is virtually NO reporting at all. 

There are a few Cassandras in the financial press that have been warning of corruption and systemic collapse for years.

• We’re Living Through The Greatest Transfer Of Wealth From The Middle Class To The Elites In History (Carol Roth, Newsweek) October 24, 2021
  When historians look back on the decisions made beginning in March 2020 and still going strong, this period will be remembered as the "Great Consolidation"—the acceleration of a historic wealth transfer and power concentration out of the hands of the middle class and into those with political power and connections.
• $2.5 Quadrillion* Disaster Waiting To Happen (Egon von Greyerz) November 2, 2022
  Credit has increased dramatically through derivatives. All instruments being issued now by banks, pension funds, stock funds, it’s all synthetic. There is no real underlying payments in anything almost. Therefore, my estimate for derivatives would be at least $2 quadrillion, and I think that is probably conservative. Then, we have debt on top of that of $300 trillion, and we also have a couple hundred trillion dollars of unfunded liabilities. So, we are talking about $2.5 quadrillion, and that’s with a global GDP of $80 trillion. So, there is a disaster waiting to happen, and especially because all this created money has created no value whatsoever.
  * 1 Quadrillion = 1,000 Trillions
• Household Debt Tops $17.5 Trillion And Americans Are Feeling The Strain (Mike Maharrey) February 8, 2024
  On top of borrowing on credit cards, Americans are pulling equity from their homes to make ends meet. Balances on home equity lines of credit (HELOC) increased by $11 billion in Q4. ... Americans haven’t just been borrowing using credit cards. Every debt category increased in the fourth quarter.
• How America’s Paper-money System And The Federal Reserve Plunder American Taxpayers(Jacob G. Hornberger, FFF) October 14, 2025
  By inflating the amount of money in circulation, the Fed reduces the value of money sitting in people’s savings accounts or that they receive in income. Their savings and income buy less than before simply because the federal government, through its inflationary policy, has debased the value of money.
• Will The Next Big Crash Lead To The Great Taking? (Christopher Talgo, Heartland Institute)February 2, 2026
  In 2002, Warren Buffet stated that “derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal. … We view them as time bombs, both for the parties that deal in them and the economic system.”

Let's organize these interrelated problems (some of these I address here) as a cascade:

1. There is too much debt.
2. There is too much money.
3. Money is uncorrelated to wealth.
4. Money uncorrelated to wealth debases the currency.
5. Debasing the currency produces inflation.
6. Inflation produces stealth wealth from the middle class to the powerful. 

The eventual consequence of such bad fiscal stewardship will be catastrophic collapse. This 'collapse' will happen out of sight, as financial giants re-valorize worthless dollar valuations and divvy up the assets as what's owed them. You will wake up to the sun shining, the air sweet, everything pretty much as you left it at bedtime -- BUT YOU WILL LIKELY BE BROKE. Your investments, your house, your car, anything financed by debt, will be seized. THAT is the great taking. 

The intent of the taking is not wealth itself; the intent is wealth as power and with power, control. Decisions will be made for you by distant entities through powerless governments -- so, without one atom of your being having changed, you will be changed into a compliance slave. 

There is a general overview The Great Taking at Bēhance, but I strongly recommend watching the David Rogers Webb documentary linked there for a greater understanding of the history and theory -- and built-in theft expropriation -- of 'Security Entitlement' (Uniform Commercial Code §8-511.(a).(b).(c); click here for Wikipedia's no-worries gobbledygook or read the legalese itself here). 

 As always, if you like what you see, please click the blue appreciate button for a free chicken dinner.

End of transmission.

Update: Damian Bennett adds as follows:

For a comprehensive easy-to-follow overview watch the documentary THE GREAT TAKING, here on YouTube or here on Rumble. Download the book THE GREAT TAKING, for free here.

There is also a link for the PDF of a French-language version of Webb's book. 

Moving to Florida to Found Eudokia Wealth

 

The magazine Opinion Internationale has sat down for an interview with Sébastien Laye, a dual (French-American) citizen who, after living in France for the past 12 years, is now moving to Florida.

In Un libéral à la conquête de l’Amérique de Trump (entretien avec Sébastien Laye, fondateur d’Eudokia Wealth) — in French, the word "liberal" has never lost its original meaning — the former New Yorker discusses his recent book and explains that he has no plans for returning to the Big Apple in these dark times, but will be settling in Florida where he will be launching Eudokia Wealth.

I am launching Eudokia Wealth, a new company at the intersection of AI and finance. It's an operational platform for acquiring financial advisors … — in the rapidly growing Southeastern region of the United States, from Florida to Texas, including Georgia and Tennessee — and modernizing them with AI technologies: developed in-house, through third-party integration, and sometimes simply by training my teams of advisors. AI is entering its practical application phase, enabling the complete reconfiguration of existing and traditional professions. Wealth management in Palm Beach or Dallas is still somewhat old-school, unless you're working for a major New York bank. We're going to build an "AI-first" financial group.

When Michel Taube asks him if he is what most French people would consider an insult — a liberal (in the French sense) and a rightist — the (presumably soon-to-be-ex-)member of Republicans Overseas France answers that ever since he was 13 or 14, he has felt the same way:

Marxism, socialism, communism, statism — these are simply incompatible with my fundamental vision of life. I am an incorrigible liberal and independent, with all the arrogance that sometimes entails. But I have no intention of apologizing for it.