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…
Hoyt is that rare, outspoken conservative in the literary realm. It’s
a confession she didn’t make right away. Keeping her views to herself
took its toll.
“You’re constantly lying and watching every word you speak,” says Hoyt, who contributes to the conservative web site Instapundit. “It’s what I used to feel like at [fantasy] conventions.”
Life is easier now that she’s more open about her political philosophies. Revealing her ideology did have a downside.
“It’s very odd to see people who you’ve been friends with for 15
years say you’re a fascist,” she says of some publishing peers. “It
means they didn’t even bother to read what you wrote. They’re
desperately trying to stay with the ‘in crowd.’”
Groupthink isn’t relegated to Hollywood cocktail parties.
“The moment you say, ‘no, I don’t agree that the Democratic party is
the salvation of mankind and Hillary is our redeemer,’ suddenly you’ve
become a monster. You’re not a person,” says Hoyt, who calls her new
book “Through Fire (Darkship)” a “fictionalized French revolution.”
She says she initially kept her views private in order to break into the publishing industry.
“I recognized the power structure. I came from Europe. I’ve seen It
before,” she says. “I wanted to be published. There’s no great heroism
in not being able to reach the public.”
Congratulations, America: you have voted for a party, and a man, who wanted to "fundamentally transform the United States" and make it into Europe.
Into Europe, where governments dictate health care rules and where the ensuing rules help ensure that new employees are not hired into companies who no longer feel they can afford the price.
Into Europe, where poor and jobless citizens consequently need to turn to the state for aid, and for whose politicians who promise the intervention of "helpful" bureaucrats into their lives the said citizens subsequently vote…
… there is nothing magical or inherently virtuous about the “will of the people”
writes David French in an outstanding National Review column.
The people are just as capable of error, just as capable of
becoming tyrants, as any tin-pot dictator.
Thus, the Founders gave us a republic, if — as Ben Franklin is alleged
to have admonished — we can keep it. Every branch of government checks
the other. The people check the government. The Constitution is supreme
over all, protecting our core civil liberties from the will of the
majority and from the abuse of the rulers. At its heart, the entire
system depends on the understanding that no person is above the law.
But no government — no matter how wisely constructed — can long survive
in the absence of at least some degree of human courage and conviction.
People who abuse power can be stopped only by other people who have the
authority and responsibility to defend our liberties and our way of
life. And, yes, sometimes that means standing in front of democracy to
preserve the principles of the republic.
n 2012, Chief Justice John Roberts had the opportunity to do just
that. He faced an extraordinary federal power-grab — with the national
government for the first time in American history requiring individuals
to purchase a consumer product. The stakes were undeniably high. The
most consequential social program since the Great Society was hanging in
the balance, and if Roberts helped strike it down, he’d not only affect
tens of millions of citizens, it was possible that he could turn a
presidential election.
He punted to the people. He was unwilling to undo the work of their
elected representatives.
In 2016, FBI director James Comey faced a different choice, but one with
similarly high stakes. Evaluating the actions of the presumptive
Democratic nominee for president of the United States, he could have
applied the plain language of the governing statute to her reckless
treatment of classified information. But if he had, in all likelihood,
he would have upended the Democratic primary, and he might also have
turned the presidential election itself.
He punted to the people, laying out the case for accountability without
holding Clinton herself accountable.
I thought of these actions — or failures to act — as the Republican
delegates faced their own fateful decision at the GOP convention. Would
they hand the Party of Lincoln to a man who makes a mockery of the
party’s founding principles as well as the character of its founder?
Would they fulfill their intended roles as actual leaders of one of
America’s two great political parties — as guardians not only of its
electoral prospects but also of its values and ideals?
They punted to a plurality of the people.
Not everyone, of course. There was some brave dissent, and to the
extent the party survives as a viable (and valuable) American political
force, it will rebuild around those dissidents. Yet as I watched men and
women chanting for Donald Trump, I thought of the second part of that
John Adams quote, in which he diagnoses what happens when democracies
start to fail, when the people start to reject the world they made. They
turn to a savior:
They soon cry, “This will not do; we have gone too far! We are all
in the wrong! We are none of us safe! We must unite in some clever
fellow, who can protect us all, — Caesar, Bonaparte, who you will!
Though we distrust, hate, and abhor them all; yet we must submit to one
or another of them, stand by him, cry him up to the skies, and swear
that he is the greatest, best, and finest man that ever lived!”
In other words, when the guardrails crumble, the call for the strong man
echoes the loudest. Make America Safe Again. Make America Work Again.
Make America Great Again. Get on the Trump Train, citizens. Daddy’s
home.
with the announcement of a new ship being named in honor
of Harvey Milk, a Navy veteran and the first openly homosexual elected
official in California. The Village People are reportedly thrilled.
Milk, who was a city supervisor in San Francisco until his 1978
murder, is perhaps best known for his fight against the Briggs
Initiative, a statewide ballot question that would have banned openly
homosexual teachers from public schools. Governor Ronald Reagan, to his
discredit, opposed the measure and it failed by a wide margin. Milk, who had himself been a schoolteacher
on Long Island before moving to San Francisco, took the issue very
personally and for good reason—it targeted homosexual propagandists and
homosexual pederasts like him.
Yes, Harvey Milk liked ’em young. The public first learned of
his taste for teenage boys with the publication of his biography, “The
Mayor of Castro Street” by Randy Shilts. As the San Francisco
Chronicle’s first openly homosexual reporter Shilts covered the “gay
beat” and was of course supportive of the movement. Shilts was also a
friend of Milk’s and his biography reflects a friendly admiration. But
Shilts was also honest—a rare trait in the homosexual movement—and he
refused to obscure Milk’s track record with boys half his age.
According to Shilts’s (laudatory) biography, Milk took in a teen runaway
named Jack McKinley as his lover. “[S]ixteen-year-old old McKinley was
looking for some kind of father figure. Within a few weeks, McKinley
moved into Harvey Milk’s Upper West Side apartment and settled into a
middle class domestic marriage. At thirty-three, Milk was launching a
new life, though he could hardly have imagined the unlikely direction
toward which his new lover would pull him.”
… Aren’t homosexuals revolted by Milk’s underage relationships? Not
really. Their movement has ensured that Milk’s face appears on a postage stamp rather
than on a sex offender registry list where it belongs. In San Francisco
there are a plaza, a high school, and an airport terminal named in his
honor. His birthday is a state holiday
in California. If there are any homosexuals who dissent from all the
Harvey Milk idol worship they are awfully quiet. But aren’t they always?
Of course it would be inaccurate to say that all homosexuals are
child molesters but their community has a predator problem that they are
unwilling to even acknowledge. Homosexuals don’t seem disturbed by
grown men bedding young boys—not unless those grown men happen to be
Catholic priests, Boys Scout leaders, or Republican politicians. In that
case homosexuals become righteously indignant—though not because
kiddy-diddling bothers them.
The real reason they hate child-molesting
priests, child-molesting scoutmasters and child-molesting Republican
politicians is because they oppose, or once opposed, the homosexual
agenda. It’s the hypocrisy of it all that draws homosexuals’ ire. Yet
they cannot see their own hypocrisy. Isn’t there something inconsistent
about condemning the sex criminal and former Republican politician Denny
Hastert while simultaneously naming a ship after the sex criminal and
former Democrat politician Harvey Milk?
The “gay” “rights” movement has always been about sexual liberation
and not necessarily among “consenting adults.” The “consenting adults”
part was really a development of the 1980’s when the movement learned
that the public could be persuaded to soften its stance on sex between
men much more easily than its stance on sex between men and boys. In a
begrudging concession, activists told the child molesters to get lost—or
at least to simmer down.
Chad Sevearence is a good example. Sevearence is the former president
of Charlotte’s LGBT chamber of commerce and a tireless advocate for
that city’s “bathroom bill” that would have forced private businesses to
allow men into the ladies’ room if state legislation hadn’t cut it off
at the pass. Edge Media Network, a homosexual propaganda outlet, named
him “person of the year” in 2015. Sevearence is a registered sex offender, having been convicted in 2000 of fondling a sleeping 15-year old member of his church while he served as a youth minister. The local newspaper, the Charlotte Observer, omitted
this fact in its coverage of the bill which it openly supported on its
editorial page. Sevearence stepped down as president of the LGBT chamber
only after the right-wing (bless their hearts) made a stink about his
criminal record. This is a pattern within the homosexual community—it
takes public embarrassment to prod them to condemn pedophilia or
pederasty because there is no private embarrassment to speak of. If no
one had made a spectacle of Sevearence’s rape of a 15-year old he would
still be leading the Charlotte LGBT chamber of commerce.
Former congressman Barney Frank is another pedo-enabler. You’ve
probably heard of his 1980’s misadventures with Stephen Gobie (aka “Hot
Bottom”), the boyfriend he met through the Washington Blade’s thinly
veiled male prostitution ads. Yes, it’s true that Gobie ran a male
brothel out of Frank’s apartment—but that’s not all. Gobie was also a child pornographer. In 1982, he was convicted
of four felonies, among which was “production of obscene items
involving a juvenile.” The congressman wrote a series of letters on his
official letterhead to Virginia probation officials attesting to Gobie’s
“good character.” Apparently Frank believes that a guy can make
pornography starring children and still be a fundamentally good person.
He’s not judgmental, you see.
Massachusetts’s other “out” former congressman, Gerry Studds, was
more than just a pedo-enabler—he was an honest to goodness kiddy
diddler. In 1983, the House of Representatives voted to censure him for
his myriad sexual liaisons with teenage congressional pages.
… Ordinarily, censure means certain political death but Gerry Studds
was no ordinary congressman. The district he represented happened to be
one of the “gayest” in the nation, containing the rainbow wonderland of
Provincetown and the slightly less “gay” Hyannis. He was reelected six
more times after the page scandal because his constituents just didn’t care. Boffing the pages was really no big deal; it’s not like he voted against funding for AIDS research or something.
Then there’s the godfather of the homosexual mafia, the Oregon real
estate magnate and Human Rights Campaign (HRC) cofounder Terrence Bean.
In 2014, Bean’s ex-boyfriend Kiah Lawson claimed that the two of them
had together seduced a 15-year old boy in a hotel room. Bean was arrested. Unfortunately, the case fell apart at trial because the alleged victim refused to testify,
giving the judge no choice but to toss out the charges. I’m sure that
the alleged victim’s reluctance had nothing to do with the fact that
Bean paid
him $200,000 in hush money. Nor did it have anything to do with the
fact that Bean is one of the most politically connected men in the state
if not the whole country.
There really are two justice systems in this
country—one for rich jerkwads like Terry Bean and one for the rest of
us.
Bean played the victim role well, saying “I look forward to being
able to tell the story of this conspiracy of lies, deceit, blackmail,
malicious prosecution and homophobia now that this case has ended.” Yes,
he actually accused his boyfriend, who implicated himself in the accusation, of being part of a homophobic “conspiracy” against him.
If there’s a campaign within the homosexual community to expose child
predators like Terrence Bean, I’m not aware of it. Outrage is reserved
for those whom they already despise for other reasons, namely for their
“hypocrisy.” A movement that exalts the likes of Harvey Milk can’t
really have any moral qualms about child rape.
What [leftists fail] to grasp is that when openness and tolerance encounter
militant Islam in a dark alley, openness and tolerance get their butts
kicked
Angela Merkel owes her countrymen an apology—and her resignation. In
the wake of four terrorist attacks in the space of a week, all of which
were perpetrated by Muslims and three of which were committed by
refugees, she should have the courage to admit that she was wrong and
that her error has gotten people killed. But that won’t happen.
For those who missed Germany’s week of unspeakable carnage, let’s
take a moment to recap. On July 18th, a 17-year old Afghan refugee went
on a hacking spree using an ax and a knife onboard a train near Wurzburg. Three people were seriously injured. He was reported to have screamed “Allahu Akbar” as he slashed through human flesh. On July 22nd, a man possessing Iranian and German citizenships went on a shooting spree
in Munich, killing nine and wounding 35. When a memorial was held a few
days later to honor the victims, Islamists crashed the scene to shout “Allahu Akbar.” On July 24th, a Syrian asylum seeker hacked a pregnant woman to death
with a machete and wounded two others in Reutlingen. That same day, a
Syrian man killed himself in a suicide bombing in Ansbach, wounding 15
people. In a video recorded before the bombing he pledged his allegiance
to ISIS and called it “an act of revenge against Germans, because they obstruct Islam.”
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Last December 30th, Chancellor
Merkel delivered a New Year’s address in which she discussed the arrival
of over a million refugees to Germany in 2015. She spouted the
Pollyannaish nonsense that refugees represent an “opportunity for tomorrow”—whatever
that means. Exactly which opportunities Germans will miss out on if
they don’t accept millions of third world savages who hate them is
unclear. The chance to be hacked to death, perhaps?
The very next day, a misogynist mob struck Cologne
and other cities, taking advantage of the New Year’s Eve revelry to
prey upon vulnerable women. Creepy men speaking foreign tongues tore at
their clothes, stole their valuables, and in a few cases, forcibly raped
them. That same night, two train stations in Munich were evacuated when intelligence reports warned of an imminent suicide attack.
Hate to say I told you so, Frau Merkel, but I told you so. A
lot of other people told you so too, including Horst Seehofer, Minister
President of Bavaria, the federal state most impacted by the refugee
crisis. “All our predictions have been proven right,” said Seehofer. “Islamist terrorism has arrived in Germany.”
The tragedy of all this violence is its predictability. Everyone
knows that the third world is a dangerous and violent place but some
people are unwilling to admit that it’s the people who make it
that way. It is literally impossible to import masses of people from a
place like Syria and not import their problematic culture along with
them.
Supporters of the asylum policy have long labored under the flawed
assumption that people fleeing ISIS must necessarily loathe the
organization and everything it stands for. Not necessarily. A November
2015 study
from the Arab Center for Research & Policy Studies found that ISIS
has at least a few admirers among the Syrian refugee population. Four
percent of Syrian refugee expressed a positive view of ISIS and an
additional 9% said that their view was “positive to some extent.” Six
percent were undecided or refused to answer.
‘That’s just a few bad apples,’ they would argue. ‘The vast majority
are peaceful.’ It should be noted here that respondents weren’t asked
what they think of Sharia law, or whether they believe unbelievers
should be forced to lives as dhimmis—second class citizens. They weren’t
asked whether women who wear “revealing” clothing—by Middle Eastern
standards, that is—should be taught some modesty with a little sexual
assault. They weren’t [asked] if they can tolerate other people’s enjoyment
of pork or alcohol. In other words, an ISIS sympathy test isn’t an
effective filter to remove the bad elements.
But even if we assume for a moment that the 87% of respondents who
did not express admiration for ISIS are all good westernized liberals,
the remaining “bad apples” are still an enormous bloc in real numbers.
Approximately 1.1 million refugees arrived in Germany in 2015, and
220,000 thus far in 2016.
If “only” 13% of those refugees support ISIS, that’s still about
170,000 people. Those are on top of the radical Muslims who already
lived in Germany before 2015 of which there many.
Yet Angela Merkel is prepared to plow ahead with this insane refugee
policy, dooming future generations of Germans to minority group status
in their own country. She doesn’t care, she’s childless.
To understand the mindset of the pro-asylum crowd you have to see
this issue through their eyes. They understand that Europe, particularly
Germany, was infected in the relatively recent past with virulent
racism and violence. Since the end of World War II, Europeans have
managed to behave themselves reasonably well—the Balkan wars
notwithstanding. They’ve put down their rifles and their flags and
decided to be really, really nice. Asylum supporters fear that
slamming the door shut to immigration would signal the collapse of
Europe’s post-war ethos of tolerance and openness. That threatening
possibility is, in their estimation, a far greater danger than a flood
of refugees.
In the wake of these attacks, Chancellor Angela Merkel argued
that the assailants “wanted to undermine our sense of community, our
openness and our willingness to help people in need. We firmly reject
this.” Let me translate that for you: If we don’t let more of these
people in, the terrorists win! Yeah, barf. There’s no
indication that the attackers intended to goad Europeans into stemming
the immigrant flow. There’s plenty of evidence that at least two of them
considered themselves to be soldiers of Allah; why wouldn’t they want
reinforcements?
Yet the attitude persists that any attempt to change course is a
capitulation to our worst instincts. … Outrageous! As if Muslims will be forced to clean the streets with
toothbrushes if Austria decides not to be a dumping ground for the
world’s most dysfunctional populations. She paints a picture of
Austria—and presumably the rest of Europe—at a crossroads. Will
Europeans choose openness and tolerance, or will they be seduced by the
dark forces of hate? She fears it will be the latter.
[The New York Times’ central Europe correspondent Alison Smale, author of an abominable
piece entitled “Rise of Austrian Right Lengthens Shadow of Nazi Era”,] is quite right that Europe is standing at a crossroads. If
it doesn’t do something about immigration it will undergo profound and
irreversible societal changes. Indeed, this process is already underway,
with many European nations jettisoning hallowed values such as free
speech in an attempt to assuage angry Muslims. What Smale fails to grasp
is that when openness and tolerance encounter militant Islam in a dark
alley, openness and tolerance get their butts kicked.
Europe must choose its path, for sure, because it cannot be
Islamified and still be nice. Though it’s difficult to imagine modern
Austrians forcing Jews to clean the streets of Vienna with toothbrushes,
I can certainly imagine Muslim immigrants doing exactly that.
The pro-asylum faction’s stubborn attitude that they are the
defenders of decency has proven difficult to counter. In their own minds
they’re Mother Theresa and we’re Hitler. They build bridges, we build
walls. They leave the welcome mat on the front step for their neighbors,
we’re the cranky old guys shouting “Get off my lawn!”
What remains to be seen is if they are capable of learning their
lesson. When a once peaceful country like Germany suffers a mass
shooting, a suicide bombing, and two hacking attacks in the space of a
week, it stands to reason that European ideals are deteriorating.
Yes,
we’re seeing the reemergence of an ugly Europe, embroiled in hate in
violence—but the blame can’t be laid at the feet of those of us who
oppose Islamification. We were the ones screaming from the rooftops,
warning others to do something to avoid this very outcome.
learning French a quarter-century ago at high school in Scotland, the circumflex that perched atop certain vowels (ê) was an enigma. It lacked the flamboyance of the accent aigu (é) or accent grave (è),
modifying pronunciation so subtly I could barely discern it. Nor did it
possess the utility of the tréma, which divided vowel sounds in two (aï).
When I finally found out that the circumflex stood in for a discarded
letter S, everything clicked into place: Opaque words like bête, coût
and huître now morphed into their English equivalents before my eyes,
resolving themselves into “beast,” “cost” and “oyster.”
“Aha,” I thought. “That’s handy.”
As
I stumbled onward through my French textbook, on the other side of the
English Channel the venerable Académie Française was in the throes of a
rather more significant exercise. Guardian of the French language since
1635, the academy in recent times has gained a reputation as being out
of touch — and so, when it approved recommendations in 1990 for the
“rectification” of about 2,400 words, they did not stick. Week-end
should become weekend, said the academy to anyone who would listen.
Oignon (onion) would be better off as ognon. Paraître (to appear) had no
need for its silent circumflex. But no one was listening, and all of
this was quickly forgotten.
Now,
though, the reform has surged back to life. In November, the French
government belatedly decided to revive the 1990 proposals, prompting
educational publishers to announce new editions of their standard works;
from there, the story snowballed
into the biggest French language controversy since the advent of
“freedom fries.” And though the tone-deaf spelling changes and hyphen
cull have raised hackles, what has become most apparent is that the
French really, really love the circumflex.
… It
was the Académie Française that popularized the use of the mark in 1740
when it removed the so-called pre-consonantal S from a host of Old
Latin words and added the circumflex to create hôpital, hôtel, château
and more. The circumflex is also used in a handful of cases to
distinguish homophones: du (of) is pronounced the same as dû (due), but
the circumflex delivers readers from confusion. Either way, for many
French writers the circumflex is as much a badge of honor as it is a
diacritical mark.
All
of which brings us back to the recent uproar over the circumflex’s
rough treatment. Arrêtez! went the cry when the news broke, and a
protest hashtag was coined immediately: #JeSuisCirconflexe.
Christian Toto interviews Sarah A. Hoyt (via Instapundit).” a “fictionalized French revolution.”
