Instapundit Learns that Le Pen's Front National Is Actually Left-Wing, Something a French-Based Blog Has Been Reporting on (and Trying to Bring to Their Attention) for at Least 6 Years

So on Monday, February 6, Instapundit admitted that, contrary to reports that seemed to depict the iconoclasts of the Front National as perhaps a French equivalent to the members of America's tea party movement, Marine Le Pen turns out to be really quite Left-wing. Stephen Green authored the post after seeing a news item penned by the usually reliable Daniel Hannan.

Of course, this is hardly news to No Pasarán. Being a blog whose primary focus, when it debuted 13 years ago, was France and foreign anti-Americanism (the internal danger from the last eight years did change the focal point somewhat), many of whose bloggers through the years have been based in Paris — along with its sister (mainly French-language) blog Le Monde Watch — we have been reporting on the Le Pen clan and its party for years.

Throughout the years, No Pasarán and Le Monde Watch have reported on such various news items (most of them from the French newspaper of record, Le Monde) as the Front National's Marine Le Pen criticizing privatization and "extreme" free market policies, on her opining that France needs "a strong state", and on one of her top aides speaking of taking advantage of the fears engendered by globalization and surfing on insecurity and on social suffering.

Meanwhile, one leftist leader got incensed when journalists suggested that the Left and the extreme right's Le Pen family are fighting over the same (anti-capitalist) backyard.

Indeed, in 2015 one libertarian critic was led to ask, Is the Le Pen Party Extreme Rightist or Is It Actually a Reincarnation of the Communist Party?

Moreover, a Harris poll in the Fall of 2012 found that members of the Front National supported Barack Obama over Mitt Romney in that year's election by almost 3 to 1 (70% vs 26%).

Last but not least, there is Marine Le Pen's assertion that France Should Leave NATO, "Turn Its Back" on the American "Hyper-Power", and "Turn Towards Russia".

The post that summarizes all the rest is perhaps a No Pasarán item from the Spring of 2011, detailing the time when a New York Times reporter attempting to write an in-depth portrait on Marine Le Pen reported that, to his utter surprise, the economics of the leader of France's French "far-right party" turn out to be "frankly leftist"!

The money quote was the following:

Marine Le Pen sums it up in one sentence when the New York Times's Russell Shorto "pointed out [to her] that in the U.S. she would sound like a left-wing politician". She shot back that “Obama is way to the right of us”!

Since at least the Spring of 2011, just about every time that the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen has been mentioned on the internet (certainly if the coverage was positive), we sent emails to the blogger(s) involved and/or left messages in the appropriate comments section (if applicable) referring to the above-mentioned post with the NYT's in-depth portrait of Marine Le Pen and warning that the members of her Front National may not be the equivalent of America's tea partiers, while Marine herself may be no Geert Wilders and, certainly, no Nigel Farage (as the British iconoclaust pointed out himself by refusing to link his UKIP with her FN).

Of course, 10 years ago, a Le Monde interview with Michael Moore revealed the amazing (albeit hardly surprising) news that the director of Sicko and Capitalism (A Love Story) admits in so many words — "Dude, I am on Marx's Tomb!" — to being nothing less than… a full-grown Marxist(!). Ten years of attempting to contact American bloggers (again, by mail and/or in the comments section) every time Moore was in the news and/or mentioned in a post with this earth-shattering admission has likewise failed to register.

We don't know if we sometimes go overboard trying to contact you. Possibly we have, once or twice. But, generally speaking, we have tried to send you no more than one email or at most two emails a month.

All we wish to do here is join in spreading the good word and fighting the good fight.
Or, certainly, hand the ammunition to the band of brothers in the front-lines fighting the good fight.

It's simply, especially when we sometimes discern that our ammunition is occasionally of a particularly potent mixture, that we wish you would reach out and take the ammunition that we hand to you.


P.S.:

Speaking of really good, outstanding material: Last week, we found on a friend's Facebook page of all places — by a denizen from flyover country (in Tennessee, no less) — what we truly and honestly believe to be the very best singular statement (and not only of the past year) on Donald Trump's so-called Muslim ban, on immigration in general, on America's character, on the Statue of Liberty, and on the true and full meaning of the Emma Lazarus poem at its base.

Here, in a couple of sentences, Chip Crain sweeps away all the leftist arguments in the process of plunging to the very heart of the matter: it is hard to believe, he says, that

many people have read the entire poem or understand what was being said in it preferring to quote one part of one line "give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses" while conveniently ignoring the rest of the sentence "yearning to be free" or the rest of the poem itself.

 … I am against allowing those who want to change our country. I'm against those who are coming not with the intention of assimilating into a free society but rather to establish a society like they left. The poem doesn't protect those who are coming to our shores to recreate the life they left. In fact it says the opposite.

"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp. Cries she with silent lips."

In other words, stay at home those who wish to bring your old ways here. We aren't a society saying 'give us anyone.' We are opening our shores to those who want to live in a free society that is different from what you left.

(Read the whole thing™.)