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.
 |
| 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…
Happy July 4th! Here, for your entertainment today, is 20 minutes of good ol' American songs.
Back before Disney turned woke, indeed exactly 50 years ago, Disneyland and Walt Disney World opened an attraction called America Sings to help celebrate Bicentennial festivities. "It featured a cast of Audio-Animatronics animals singing songs from various periods in America's musical history," writes Wikipedia, and it remains one of my fondest memories during my visit to the Florida park.
Another biggie for me was the Hall of Presidents. (Is anyone besides me wondering what the Joe Biden robot looks and sounds like?) Needless to say, I didn't fully understand the speech chosen for Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln, even after I grew up to be an adult. (The speech chosen for POTUS16 has since changed, if I am not mistaken [now with a blue curtain background rather than a red one] — probably because the Lyceum Address sounded too close to home for Disney's left-leaning Imagineers, while the Battle Hymn of the Republic sounded too stirring and patriotic…)
Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the ocean and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth (our own excepted) in their military chest, with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years. At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer: If it ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide.
The show itself starts at 4:21, but then you will miss Dixie
(a longer version than the Disney version at 6:29).
 |
| Space X rocket over San Diego © Annette Farnaes |
 |
| Space X rocket over San Diego © Annette Farnaes |
A Danish-American couple were enjoying a cool evening in the mountains beyond San Diego on or about June 23 when the California skies were illuminated by the Space X rocket. The pictures tell the rest of the story.
All photos Copyright © Annette Farnaes
 |
| Space X rocket over San Diego © Annette Farnaes |
 |
| Space X rocket over San Diego © Annette Farnaes |
 |
| Space X rocket over San Diego © Annette Farnæs |
 |
| Space X rocket over San Diego © Annette Farnaes |
 |
| Robert Watching the Space X rocket over San Diego (in the background) © Annette Farnaes |
I felt like I was talking with Leon Trotsky in the years before the Russian Revolution
quipped (in typical Drama Queen fashion) in his "Unsettling" Interview With Steve Bannon. Lots of good stuff in the New York Times article, although the host of show “War Room”, as I have explained in the past, is totally out of his league with his views of Abraham Lincoln.
Do you see yourself in the same business that Fox News’s Roger Ailes was in, sort of right-wing journalism?
I’m not a journalist. I’m not in the media. This is a military headquarters for a populist revolt. This is how we motivate people. This show is an activist show. If you watch this show, you’re a foot soldier. We call it the Army of the Awakened.
I mean, Murdoch is a bigger enemy of ours than MSNBC. Because he’s the epitome of neoliberal neocon. And they’re the opiate of the masses. They’re the controlled opposition, right? They’re never going to want fundamental change. They’ll throw some shiny toys — Obama’s a Muslim, the kind of issues which we mock all the time.
Read the whole thing™…Let’s get back to the big narrative. Do you think immigration is the core issue here? That seems to be one issue that drives populist support everywhere.
Immigration, spending — it’s the lack of confidence and self-loathing of their own civilization and their own culture. That’s the spiritual part that’s at the base. Immigration is just the manifestation of a loss of self-confidence. And it’s shocking.
… If you look at it country by country, it’s all the same. The lack of jobs, the lack of opportunities, the lack of self-confidence.
What we should be doing is cutting the number of foreign students in American universities by 50 percent immediately, because we’re never going to get a Hispanic and Black population in Silicon Valley unless you get them into the engineering schools. No. 2, we should staple an exit visa to their diploma. The foreign students can hang around for a week and party, but then they got to go home and make their own country great.
Our movement is metastasizing to something that’s different than America First; it’s American Citizens First.
What does that mean?
It means Americans have to get a better deal. Right now, the American citizen has all the obligations of serving in the military, of paying taxes, of going through this grind that is American late-stage technofeudal capitalism. But tell me what the bonus is.
… We’re ascendant in Europe. We’re ascendant here. We’ve had no money. We’re not organized. It’s self-organizing. But our enemies — and they are enemies — continue to overplay their hand, and so we continue to rise.
… The historical left is in full meltdown. They always focus on noise, never on signal. They don’t understand that the MAGA movement, as it gets momentum and builds, is moving much farther to the right than President Trump. They will look back fondly at Donald Trump. They’ll ask: Where’s Trump when we need him?
“The totalitarian Left pushes forward like a steamroller, crushing everything in its path in order to impose its inverted reality, its absurdities, its neuroses, its psychoses, and its ideologies, all of them anti-humane if not outright criminal, and totally indifferent to the suffering of those infidels who will never give in to them"
— Evelyne Joslain, La Guerre Culturelle
One of the most important books of the past half century appeared last Spring. La Guerre Culturelle is in French, but Evelyne Joslain's masterpiece shows the conflict between right and left to such an extent and to such a depth, coupled with a clear-eyed vision and the exposition of the internal dangers facing America and the West, that its translation into English is a must. Indeed, the contents of The Cultural War are so important that it deserves an American (and an international) readership at the very earliest moment.
It's not every day that you open a book that is "the product of more than twenty-five years of reflection and personal archives that have left a lasting impression." However, this is the case with Évelyne Joslain's latest opus, which will remain, it is safe to bet, the masterpiece of a lifetime.
Évelyne Joslain's genius is to have a total vision of the dangers — above all, the internal dangers — which threaten the West and, if there are numerous books (in French as well as in English) which focus on one specific crisis or another created by the melodrama enthusiasts, aka the drama queens, to have the temerity to bring together all these elements (in four distinctive pillars) and to demonstrate that the decadence, depravity, self-hatred and barbarism (obrigado to Sarah Hoyt) all come from the same cynical master plan and from the same destructive vision, highlighting unsuspected links between all these actors and groups.
An example of Évelyne Joslain's 3-D chess mind is taken from several parts around the book, showing how the
Vietnam war ties in with the sexual revolution and the (undeclared) final goal of the Great Reset:
For the attacking cultural Left, the defeat in Vietnam was the first victory in a Cultural War that the right, attacked on all levels, was still struggling to recognize [p 154] … Chirac's attitude [during the Iraq conflict], considered "wise" by some, demonstrated that the cultural war had broadened to geopolitics and that the divisions in the Western camp served the plan of the transnational Left which was to weaken and discredit our country [France], the entirety of Western civilization, and primarily America [p 265] … Promoting sexual deviance and perversions, normalizing the abnormal, inverting universal values, cultural Marxists know that the sexual license of an entire population greatly facilitates societal and political revolution and that a society given over to vices will be weakened, in addition to being despised by its external enemies [p 276, "From American Psycho to Nip/Tuck"] … [These policies] went in the direction desired by the “global élites” [foreign as well as domestic]: a weakening of America allowing for a new world order to take shape, that of a multi-polar, multilateral world, where regional powers, Russia, the European Union, China, and Iran would no longer be confronted with American omnipotence and an order based on laws supposed to be recognized and respected by all [p 314] … Destroying society from within, bringing about the suicide of peoples and the end of Western civilization, knocking America off its pedestal [e.g., Vietnam] and reducing it to the rank of a ruined and weakened regional power, are no longer extravagant fantasies, but a reality in the making [p 475].
The Four Pillars of the Left's Culture War
A century of hatred for the traditions of Western culture, by individuals such as Woodrow Wilson and Joe Biden or such as Soros and Schwab, began to gain traction more than half a century ago when, in order to
destroy Western society, smarter (and more vicious) Marxists understood from Gramsci on that the right angle of attack was to seize not production goods in the economic sector, but production goods in the cultural field.What follows is "a long march through institutions", which aspires to undermine a society, a nation (and the entire West), to overthrow the pre-established order, and to take control of said institutions in order to have them filled by Neo-Marxist brothers-in-arms.
The four pillars of this Culture War are
“All this is linked and must lead to complete and inevitable globalization.”
The “current cultural war is America’s Hundred Years’ War” affirms Évelyne Joslain. And not just in the United States, she adds; the Culture War is taking place all over the West. After writing outstanding books on Donald Trump, Barack Obama, the Tea Party, and L'Amérique des Think Tanks, Evelyne Joslain proves to be an unbeatable woman on the subject of the United States, and, moreover, she is one on a plethora of subjects, from the ancient Greeks to Belgian serial killers.
The knowledge of this "Américaniste", whose writings have been featured on American Thinker, is striking, page after page, seems to produce revelation after revelation, whether explaining the influence of Epicurus on Thomas Jefferson, the historical difference between Whigs and Tories (that even the majority of English-speakers barely know), or the contrast between the humanism at the heart of the Renaissance and the current era's environmentalism.
I remember that Gorbachev, during a speech about 35 years ago, decided to praise a number of revolutions throughout History; yet, the leader of the USSR mentioned only the French revolution and the Russian revolution, leaving out the American revolution, something which raised an (entirely justified) outcry in the USA (even among left-wing media outlets — "Gorby" was their darling, after all, which contributed to the fact that the Russian "supertsar", but not his American partner, Ronald Reagan, alone received the Nobel Peace Prize).
We can count on Évelyne Joslain to get to the heart of the problem and find the explanation: Just like the Russian Revolution,The French Revolution was bloody and genocidal, turning its back on the Renaissance and making a clean sweep of the past. It is the example to be avoided and yet the one that has been the most imitated, while the American Revolution, which has everything to draw inspiration, remains without imitation and has become the object of neo-Marxist hatred. The former, our [France's] bloodthirsty revolution, is therefore a truly 180º revolution, while the latter, the American Revolution, is a 360º revolution, in other words one which returns to the traditional English norms resulting from the Magna Carta of 1215. It restores the rights of Englishmen in America, flouted by George III.
Following Britain's "politico-religious standoff" (with "brutal
savagery") and the Glorious Revolution (also, it turns out, ignored by
Gorbachev; in fact, here too we are faced with a "semi-revolution …
without a drop of bloodshed") in the half-century between the 1640s and
the 1690s, the English monarchy realized that it was prudent to refrain
from trampling on the rights of Englishmen. However, George III failed to
understand that the Bill of Rights of 1689 also applied to
English subjects in the colonies of America (and elsewhere), and treated
his subjects there with the absolutism of his ancestors.
Returning to the motto of the French Republic, however, Évelyne Joslain is concise and blunt:
Liberty and Equality are mutually exclusive [while] Fraternity… cannot be decreed
Illuminating Issues Galore
An unbeatable debater, Évelyne Joslain manages to take just about any subject under the sun and come out with an explanation, often incisive, which sheds sunlight on said subject:
On the Civil Rights Act (working from Christopher Caldwell's The Age of Entitlement [America Since the Sixties], duly mentioned), Évelyne Joslain puts a lot of today's miseries at the feet of LBJ's "rival constitution", aka the Riot Constitution of 1964 or the “new constitution written to cancel the Constitution of 1787 (!)”:
The 1964 law having invited subversion, all these “cultural revolutions” (sexual, feminist, artistic, ethnic, and others) shelter behind this law to end up erecting an absolutism and intolerance never before known in the United States, the very opposite of the country's founding philosophy. The primary goal is to delegitimize all those who resist and all the institutions that have not yet fallen. The Left is responsible for sweeping away all the “tiresome old certainties” of the conservative majority who find themselves having to prove the correctness of their views. In other words, it is those who are culturally attacked who must justify themselves to their attackers!On the Iranian revolution coupled (yes, yes) with the Russian intervention in Afghanistan:
Holy war or jihad [by Iran] against the "Saturday people", Israel and the Jewish dispora, then against the "Sunday people", the Christians, the Great Satan, America, and the Little Satan, Europe. Sensing this weakness, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December [1979], thereby expanding the Cold War theater into the Middle East (to its future misfortune).On the Arab Spring and the Syrian massacres:
Obama is jubilant because it is his beloved Muslim Brotherhood which is leading the revolt [in Egypt, which] will elect Mohammed Morsi in 2012. Obama was letting go of a valuable ally of the United States — as the Democrats know how to do so well. [As for Damascus and "the red line not to be crossed",] because Assad was well-liked by the Ayatollah Khamenei, Obama had no desire to harm the Syrian leader.On the CCP in Beijing:
China's attitude demonstrates that it has no doubt about its manifest destiny, which is to triumph over the West.On the reluctance of many Americans to support Kyiv, Évelyne Joslain, a regular guest columnist on the Dreuz website, heads back 20 years:
This Iraq war, or rather the spectacle that was given of it, knowingly orchestrated by the media [foreign as well as American], explains why fly-over America is hardly interested in the situation in Ukraine [especially if and when the U.S. is only] to ultimately be poorly thanked and invariably criticized, while also having to assume all the costs.On the Left's century-old tactics, exemplified by the colors the media chose to distinguish between Democrats and Republicans:
The patron saint of libertarians, Alfred J. Nock, lamented in a 1936 article in the Atlantic Monthly that the term liberal, coined by Jeremy Bentham in 1824, had been odiously perverted by the Left, and warned citizens against "imposture-words". The perversion of words that began with “progressiveness” remains a classic in the strategic arsenal of the Left in the United States.… the Marxist far Left therefore adapted by changing its name, the word socialist having too pejorative a connotation in public opinion, hence the idea of monopolizing the term liberal, which is positive. It was the first lexical diversion in a long series, a tactic tested by the masters of the Kremlin themselves: empty a word of its meaning and load it with another in order to cloud minds
… The media decided to build a contrast between' "red states" (conservative, although red was traditionally the color of Marxist revolutionaries!) and "blue states" (democratic, socialist states) distributed on both coasts. It was an inversion typical of the Left, one deliberately intended to sow confusion
Moreover, believe it or not, this Frenchwoman turns out to be something of an expert on the history of military strategy:
The idea of “unconditional surrender”, a formula tried and tested from General Ulysses S. Grant until the Second World War, was becoming an improbable concept. In fact, by dismissing General MacArthur in April 1951, Truman unknowingly created a new concept, that of "limited war" (an oxymoron used by General Marshall to define the Korean War), which would become the rule for future conflicts.
While it is undeniable that Truman was firm on freedom in Western Europe, he was “soft” on communism in Asia. After losing China in 1949, he seemed to lose interest in China and the countries that the latter nation attacked.
On the 2020 election, Donald Trump, and January 6:
… the increased detestation [of Donald Trump] by the transnational Left, primed to sympathize with external enemies … For the first time, an election had been decided by America's enemies, the domestic enemies within allied with the foreign enemies without … without November 3, 2020, there would have been no January 6, 2021 … Through a stunning inversion of the facts and a complete perversion of vocabulary, this vicious, insatiable, implacable Left accuses the “enemies of democracy” of the transgressions that it itself had committed. No one in their right mind could accept this crude narrative.
On the Left's "Nazi" demonization (tied in the excerpt below to Brexit) — in a couple of sentences, Évelyne Joslain manages to shed to pieces 80 to 90 years of the Left's fraudulent ad hominems and its upside-down assumptions:
What the multi-lateralist detractors of [say] Brexit never managed to analyze is that, in the term “Nazi”, where the evil lay and lies was and is in the Socialism part and not in the Nationalism part, something which is perfectly honorable when it is synonymous with patriotism: economic nationalism, national pride, national feeling. On the other hand, socialism, a precursor to communism, has never brought anything positive, yet it is prospering!
Regarding anti-war demonstrators (of the Vietnam conflict), praised to heaven for over half a century, Évelyne Joslain gives no quarter — none whatsoever:
the sophisticated class, privileged cowards who posed as virtuous conscientious objectors, accused the soldiers who returned, mutilated or traumatized in their stead, of being war criminals.
Hard Truths on Common Subjects
Let us tip our hats to Évelyne Joslain for expressing innumerable hard truths, all of them difficult to counter, on a myriad of subjects, whether on student strikes ("an aberration since the students do not 'produce' anything and the harm caused is first and foremost to their own selves"); on "migrants" (a "politically correct term for 'illegal immigrants', deliberately misleading by evoking the natural migrations of birds"); on “populism” (“the disdainful term for any protest of the people”); on the media (“masters of lies by omission”); on the green transition (it “is nothing other than crony communism recycled"); on the real goal of ecologists ("it is not at all to 'save the planet', but to redistribute the wealth of the North towards nations in the South, through the process of bestowing themselves with imaginary sins"); on Howard Zinn ("a false historian, but a real Marxist activist"); on the Neo-conservatives ("pro-American anti-communists and hawks on military matters"); on Europe ("foreign pseudo-allies"); on France ("We are surely the country which has the most useless ministries, sporting ridiculous names, occupied with treating the same equally ridiculous fake problems"); and, last but not least, on Lenin's tomb in the Kremlin ("One might ask if the Germans would have found it normal, had his body been available, to have Hitler's mummy enthroned in front of the Brandenburg Gate").
Regarding the sexual "liberation" dating from the 1960s, here are some more hard truths from Évelyne Joslain, sans merci: 
on (a) sexual orientation ("we note that the innocuous word "orientation" has definitively replaced the words "anomaly" and especially "vice", removing responsibility from the person concerned who follows their orientation like the weather vane follows the wind"), on sexual license (it "shelters behind the egalitarian pretext and the aspiration to a so-called spirituality to flout all laws, civil and religious"), on the LGBTQ+ movement (homosexuals dreamed up the term "'gay sexuality', thus forever ruining the positive connotation of an innocent adjective"), on transgenders ("what in the olden days would have been called 'trannies'"), on abortion (it "must be remembered that the idea of legal abortion, approved or even provided by the State, was introduced in 1921 by the Bolsheviks with the explicit aim of breaking up families"), and on the "religious right" (a "scarecrow agitated by the sexual Left"), as well as on the New Wave (a "French cinematographic movement which invented the jaded antihero and features free love along with non-conformist, nihilistic, and neurotic behaviors").
In the same way, Évelyne Joslain shares with us her admirable knowledge on the presidents of the 20th and 21st centuries, managing to provide a remarkable short description of each occupant of the White House: Woodrow Wilson was the first president who dared to attack the spirit of the Constitution as well as the country's institutions, Lyndon Baines Johnson the first president responsible for the Culture War, Richard Nixon the first Republican president confronted with the culture war and viciously harassed by the opposition, Jimmy Carter the first 1960s president of the United States, Bill Clinton the first fully 1968 president, George W Bush — the president who unleashed “a hatred never before seen against a Republican, worse even than the hatred against Nixon” — Barack Obama the first president elected thanks to affirmative action and the first Marxist president of the United States, one who had played the race card to the fullest, exploiting the color of his skin to hide the color of his politics, Donald Trump the gladiator president. As for Joe Biden, you will have to read the book (you will not be disappointed)...
The host of the Libre journal du Nouveau Monde on Radio Courtoisie (where, full disclosure, I have been a regular guest) for many years, Évelyne Joslain continues with a refusal to participate in the usual praise of figures as disparate as Napoleon and Voltaire, both "the hateful atheism" of the latter and that of his emulators as well as that of Marx. Like Paul Johnson, Évelyne Joslain sees the decline of religion as an unmitigated disaster:Christianity remains the religion most frequently mocked, ridiculed, covered with blasphemy because it reaffirms some disturbing principles — such as the free will of each person, his responsibility, his duties, and because it places man at the center of nature.Although nobody asked her to do so, Évelyne Joslain manages to provide a single-sentence summary of the difference between Western and Eastern Christianity and, by extension, an important explanation for the war in Ukraine:
Western Christianity distinguishes between what is God's, like nature, and what is Caesar's; unlike Eastern Christianity, in which the Orthodox Church does not distinguish the regal from the spiritual.Now we can better understand the lionization for Putin's presidency expressed by the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church. Évelyne Joslain has little more respect and patience for the generic "Philosopher" which brings to mind Paul Johnson's book, Intellectuals (From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky). This generic philosopher, this intellectual, “illuminated by contact with Ideas (i.e., absolute truth), is therefore ideally suited to impose the rules which govern mankind on the human magma swarming below him.”
Intellectual imposture cannot be right-wing. This is the work of the left-leaning mind. In the past as in the present.
From Diogenes to Marcuse:
25 Centuries of Drama Queen Strife
A columnist at the 4 Vérités weekly for many years, Évelyne Joslain moves effortlessly from Charlemagne to Descartes via Marc Dutroux, a notorious child murderer forgotten (deliberately?) by everyone these days. (I was surprised to learn, also about thirty years ago, that one of the fathers of one of the murdered girls had tried to enter politics, only to have his budding career scuttled by the Belgian political élites: Another question mark from my youth to which the remarkable Guerre Culturelle provides the answer).
Évelyne Joslain's work, which adapts Shakespeare's words to the modern world ("To be woke or not to be"), attempts to go back to the sources of the cultural Left and analyze all its aspects.
Indeed, it turns out that the modern conflict between right and the Left's drama queens "has existed since the dawn of time" — "their roots in immemorial times and in ancient myths" — and from the first chapter, we are alongside Ovid, Socrates, and Cicero.
Never, perhaps, has it been so well described to what extent the writings of Socrates and Aristotle describe the conflict of our day. Never, perhaps, has it been so well illustrated to what extent Diogenes ("cynicism") and Heraclitus (Hedonism) of Ephesus are the ancestors of Kinsey and Ginsberg, not to mention such leftists as the Frankfurt School's Herbert Marcuse.After covering 2000 to 3000 years of history, the author of one of the rare books in FrenchThey touted unhealthy and cynical pleasures of the same type [as today] … the pleasure of soiling the sacred … the pleasure of soiling beauty … and the pleasure of soiling childhood
… this self-destructive pattern is repeated today from Europe to the Pacific, where the decadent elements which constitute the internal enemy work in concert with the external enemies
which tells the truth about Barack Obama transports us full circle back to the 20th and 21st centuries.
We indeed arrive at Saul Alinsky and his manual, Rules for Radicals, which is the key book for "statesmen" such as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. It is
[their] bible and Alinsky, [their] mentor; the master of inversion of everything, values, concepts, vocabulary, the one who excels at duping unsuspecting right-leaning people.At the end of this work of horrors, there still remains a glimmer of hope: If the evil Left has the money and the power, the healthy right has the people, and therefore the numbers. If every citizen of the silent majorities (of all Western nations) rises up and begins, each within the limits of his or her means, to demonstrate his or her indignation and his or her refusal to follow, there remains a chance for Western civilization...
We can only hope that America will hurry to translate this outstanding description of the internal dangers which threaten the West.
“…to cover its excesses and its outrages, the irrational cultural Left has added the ad hominems 'conspirationist' or 'conspiracy theorist' to its long list of hackneyed slurs and insults (racist, sexist, xenophobic, Islamophobic, homophobic, transphobic… ad nauseam) to silence those who resist and cut short debates it cannot win"
— Evelyne Joslain, La Guerre Culturelle
