Paul Reen Interviewed by BFMTV on Joe Biden: A Republican in Paris Explains What a Terrible President the Liar in the White House Is

Following Joe Biden's disastrous performance during his debate with Donald Trump, Paul Reen was invited by BFMTV to give a Republican's perspective on the state of the union.

Trump's "illeism"? Referring to himself by name turns out to make perfect sense

In What Donald Trump Talks About When He Talks About ‘Donald Trump’ (thanks for the Instalink, Sarah), John McWhorter explores the verbal style of the 45th president, which the Columbia University linguist calls nothing less than 

fascinating. It’s sui generis.

Still, it’s possible to draw connections between Trump’s verbal mannerisms and other speech patterns in the world at large. The one that’s been on my mind this week is his habit of referring to himself by name, such as, “You wouldn’t even be hearing about the word ‘immigration’ if it wasn’t for Donald Trump.” In reference to making Barack Obama present his birth certificate: “Trump was able to get them to give something.” Also, “Nobody respects women more than Donald Trump” and “Eighteen angry Democrats that hate President Trump, they hate him with a passion.”

This may seem to suggest, variously, a Tarzanian linguistic tendency, a desire to market himself as a brand or just a plain old inflated ego. But the truth is more interesting because there is more to first-person pronouns — i.e., the “I” and “me” that we normally use instead of our own names — than simply ways of referring to the self. And there are many reasons that a person might seek to avoid these words, even in informal speech. There’s even a name for that tendency: illeism.

Sidestepping these pronouns can be a way to deflect attention from one’s self, to avoid seeming self-absorbed. [Thimk of] the colloquial way we can refer to ourselves in the third person: “Who just got a raise? This guy!,” while pointing to oneself, is perhaps a little less blunt than simply saying, “I just got a raise!” … Creating an exterior third-person perspective frames the departure as a scene someone else is acting out.

 … It’s another way of reminding yourself, “It’s not all about me.”

None of which explains Trump. When it comes to the former president, it is always, of course, all about him. To understand Trump’s aversion to first-person singular pronouns, we need to look to their other — and in some ways opposite — resonance.

 … Compared with the vulnerability of “I” and “me,” Trump’s self-reference sounds like a kind of verbal armor. “Eighteen angry Democrats that hate President Trump, they hate him with a passion” has a mic-drop feel, in contrast to “Eighteen angry Democrats that hate me, they hate me with a passion,” which sounds wounded.

“You wouldn’t even be hearing about the word ‘immigration’ if it wasn’t for me” sounds like someone struggling to get the recognition that is deserved, compared with the more defiant “You wouldn’t even be hearing about the word ‘immigration’ if it wasn’t for Donald Trump.”

 … If you watch the debates, it might be useful to perform a bit of on-the-fly translation. Every time he refers to himself as “Donald Trump,” recast it for yourself as “I” or “me.” Notice the difference?

Antifa Lets Loose on Counter-Protest Demonstration in Paris, Punching and Kicking the Girls in an All-Female Group (Video)

The hyper-violent videos of the girls of "Némésis" lynched with punches and kicks, last night, Place de la République in Paris while they intervened during a left-wing demonstration against the National Rally

The Morandini website's title can hardly be clearer, concerning members of the right-leaning traditional women's group Némésis getting punched and kicked while crashing a far-left demonstration (including Antifa and Mediapart) in the nation's capital last week. The top two videos (reproduced here) at Valeurs Actuelles are the most informative… 

The Némésis signs all follow the same basic message: 

Voting for the New Popular Front [the union of far-left parties] means voting for Mathilde Panot, called into court for being a terrorism sympathizer

Voting for the New Popular Front means voting for [Antifa militant] Raphaël Arnault who assaults women and threatens them with murder

Update: merci pour the Instalink, Sarah, who remarks that "IN THE FINAL ANALYSIS, THE LEFT IF ALWAYS FOR VIOLENCE WHEN IT DOESN’T GET ITS WAY"; please note that the protest and counter-protest took place last week, before Sunday's vote…

🔴 Des militantes du collectif féministe @Coll_Nemesis, dont @CordierAlice2, ont interrompu le rassemblement contre "l'extrême droite", place de la République, à Paris, ce soir. Elles et leurs agents de sécurité ont été attaqués et frappés par des manifestants. #RN #législatives pic.twitter.com/IaAGTJNcTd

— Valeurs actuelles ن (@Valeurs) June 27, 2024

Women punched by men in the street during the anti-RN demonstration last night and the boss of the CGT trade union who congratulates the attackers! Activists from the feminist collective Némésis, including its president Alice Cordier, were in fact violently attacked at la Place de la République in Paris.

The images are very violent because we can see the girls being punched while some are on the ground!

The group was the victim of insults and blows when they came to denounce certain people from the Popular Front.

"The activists of the Némésis Collective came to use their freedom of expression to remind people of what the New Popular Front really is: a collection of violent attackers with women, supporters of terrorists, anti-Semites” 

asserts the collective in a message published on X.

Members of Némésis displayed signs during the anti-RN demonstration on Place de la République in Paris, provoking the ire of some demonstrators.

Alice Cordier denounced the attack perpetrated by “men of the left”, highlighting the unprecedented scale of the violence and hatred they suffered. She thanked her security team for preventing a more tragic outcome.

Nemesis activists, shocked by the brutality of the attacks, strongly condemned the violence and hatred directed against them. They highlighted the premeditated nature of the attack, underlining the particular animosity of the attackers, in particular the Antifas. The collective affirms that 

“the danger today for women in France is THEM”

Note that this gathering was called by media committed to the left (Streetpress, Mediapart, Politis, Arrêt sur images, etc) but also by unions (CFDT, CGT, Confédération paysanne, FSU, etc).

⚠️Dans le cadre du rassemblement "contre l'extrême droite" organisé par @Fondspresselibre qui se tient ce soir Place de la République, les militantes du Collectif Némésis sont venues user de leur #libertédexpression pour rappeler ce qu’est vraiment le Nouveau Front Populaire : un… pic.twitter.com/qBtDuoe0gV

— Collectif Némésis (@Coll_Nemesis) June 27, 2024

The Némésis signs all follow the same basic message: 

Voting for the New Popular Front [the union of far-left parties] means voting for Mathilde Panot, called into court for being a terrorism sympathizer

Voting for the New Popular Front means voting for [Antifa militant] Raphaël Arnault who assaults women and threatens them with murder

Like them or not, "far-right" proposals such as limiting asylum rights open up the EU to democratic debate

In European Parliament elections this month, voters in most of the European Union’s 27 countries rallied to parties that hold the union in contempt.

In the New York Times, Christopher Caldwell of “The Age of Entitlement” (America Since the Sixties) fame has penned a guest essay, The E.U. Is Revealing Its True Identity. Europeans Don’t Like It. (Thanks for the Instalink, Sarah.)

Analysts have leaped to the conclusion that the European Union must have done something wrong.

It didn’t. The specific policy grievances that drove the election results were national, not continental. In France, where the once-taboo National Rally party outpolled the party of President Emmanuel Macron by more than two to 1, voters were angry about the president’s immigration policy and the snootiness with which he formulated it. In Germany, where a hard-right party anchored in the formerly Communist East got more votes than any of the three governing parties, voters cited highhanded energy policies.

Such local complaints, to be sure, occasionally echo frustrations with corresponding E.U. policies on immigration and energy. But the European Union’s governing machinery in Brussels is never where voters’ hearts and hopes are. Indeed, that is the real problem with the union: not what it does but what it is.

One way to look at the E.U. project, in fact, was as a codification of the values that had won the Cold War. That values win wars is a bold assertion, but back then, the West was in a self-confident mood. The prime minister of Luxembourg (and later, European Commission president) Jean-Claude Juncker was soon crediting European integration with having brought “50 years of peace,” even though the European Union had not yet been founded when the Berlin Wall fell. A more sober analysis would credit that peace to American occupation, NATO vigilance and Russian caution.

From the outset, the union was the expression of a love-hate relationship with the United States. On the one hand, it was emulative. Europe was to be, like America, a promise, a dream, a multiethnic experiment based on rights and principles, not blood and soil. It was a constitution-making project. On state visits to Washington in the late 1990s, Germany’s foreign minister Joschka Fischer would stroll around a Borders bookstore looking for books on the American founding.

On the other hand, the European Union was rivalrous with America. It meant to consolidate the continent’s nations into a military-economic bloc of almost half a billion people, partly so Europeans would no longer need to dance to the tune of the American empire.

 … There was only one way to get the power required to build a European superpower: by usurping the prerogatives of the continent’s existing nation-states. Tasks delegated to Brussels were considered to have been delegated to it permanently. 

 … An Orwellian vocabulary emerged. European Union leaders, widely viewed as politicians who had failed on their own national scenes, referred to themselves as “Europe,” and to anyone who opposed their state-building schemes as “anti-European.” Soon “anti-European” joined the list of intolerances that were grounds for ostracism and censure. You would hear politicians described as “racist, xenophobic and anti-European,” as if those were character failings of equal gravity.

 … The union’s rise brought a wave of public browbeating about the lessons of the Cold War, even though the 1968 generation had been profoundly divided over it, and about World War II, which that generation was too young to remember. It was as if Nazism and Soviet Communism were just two ways of being anti-European avant la lettre. As long as the baby boomers still had parents and grandparents to tell them about the horrors of World War II, this was sufficient to freeze opposition to the European Union in its tracks.

 … Europe’s preoccupations are closer to the 18th-century world of bread riots than to the 20th-century one of Save the Whales.

Hard-line parties like the National Rally and Alternative for Germany, with their proposals to limit asylum rights, to stop favoring electric cars over burners and to claw back retirement benefits, cater to this reality. Like them or not, such proposals open up the situation to democratic debate. The European Union’s role is often to close off such debate, citing refugee-treaty obligations that migrants be prioritized or budget-deficit ceilings requiring that welfare benefits be kept lean. These propositions are sometimes sensible, but publics are less inclined to listen to them than they were in the boom years of the 1990s.

 … Europeans are mostly not aware that they have been enlisted in a project that has as its end point the extinction of France, Germany, Italy and the rest of Europe’s historic nations as meaningful political units. Brussels has been able to win assent to its project only by concealing its nature.

In NYTimes Essay, Columbia U Professor Praises 1950s Communist Dad for Remaining True to His Convictions

On an otherwise pleasant day in May 1957, my father received two unwelcome visitors at his tool-and-die factory

writes Samuel G. Freedman in a New York Times guest essay titled My Father’s Day Gift From the F.B.I. The Columbia University professor goes on to bask in the alleged principles and heroics of his dad's communist sympathies in the 1950s, comparing the former Stalinist favorably to such "wretched" people as Donald Trump and Joe McCarthy and to such wicked groups as MAGA and McCarthyism. 

The younger Freeman does say that "Dad saw Communism for what it was as early as 1950 [yet] my father did not become a Whittaker Chambers," without noting that "Stalin’s tyranny [not only] sandblasted the romance off Communism for many other American followers", it also explained why Joe McCarthy and Whittaker Chambers, not to mention Donald Trump — far from being villains — fought, and fight, against communism, Marxism, and socialism.

[The two unwelcome visitors] were F.B.I. agents acting on years of informants’ tips that Dad had been a Communist Party member. The agents intended to use that information as leverage to turn my father, too, into a snitch. 

… the F.B.I. file on David Freedman … is a reminder of what I inherited from him — not just his politics, but the convictions that they were built on. And it has revealed to me and my siblings, Carol and Ken, details of my father’s actions under severe duress that were more impressive than anything we had anticipated.

 … Nor were we surprised that Dad confirmed to the F.B.I. agents that he had indeed been a Communist Party member from about 1946 to 1950. At times, I’d chided him for being “the last Stalinist,” regaling us kids with tales of Soviet heroism at Stalingrad, convinced almost until his death in 2010 that the Rosenbergs had been falsely accused of being Russian spies.

 … one of my father’s heroes, Henry Wallace, was the party’s candidate for president in 1948. … The direst period of the Red Scare might have ended by the spring of 1957, but the political climate was hardly safe. 

 … In interrogations by F.B.I. agents — first on May 8, then on July 1 — Dad stood up for his principles. He readily admitted having been a member of the Communist Party up until 1950. Then he explained that, far from being “the last Stalinist” of my jibe, he had cut loose from the party.

 … It matters a lot to my siblings and me that Dad saw Communism for what it was as early as 1950. Stalin was still being venerated then in many leftist quarters as the herald of world peace. Six years would pass before two events — the Soviet crushing of the Hungarian Revolution and Nikita Krushchev’s “secret speech” revealing Stalin’s tyranny — sandblasted the romance off Communism for many other American followers.

Yet my father did not become a Whittaker Chambers, either, devoting his remaining life to renunciation. He didn’t even become, as one of his Stelton friends did, a neoconservative. He voted Democratic till his death, and his greatest insult was to call someone so “bourgeois,” with an expletive for emphasis.

 … Reading the file has been like receiving a fatherly message from beyond the grave. It reincarnated the father to whom I had dedicated one of my early books as “the guardian of conscience.” 

 … But in the face of a real threat, Dad managed a laudable and difficult balance. He resisted being doctrinaire, being tribal, when facts and events contradicted dogma. He held true to his core beliefs about seeking a more equitable society.

I’ve been grateful that my father didn’t live to see Donald Trump and MAGA, with all of their wretched echoes of McCarthyism and fascism. But from the F.B.I., of all places, I have received the most valuable present for this Father’s Day: a reinforcement of the values that Dad would have been living by in these terrible days and would have wanted his children and grandchildren to share, most especially at this moment when democracy itself is in peril.

Update: Thanks for the Instalink by Sarah Hoyt, who adds:

CHANGE COMMUNIST TO NAZI. WOULD HE STILL BE PROUD? THE PHILOSOPHY IS JUST AS REPULSIVE. WHEN WILL WE STOP INDULGING THE HAMMER AND SICKLE FANATICS AND TREATING THEM AS CUTE PETS ?

Related: What the NYT's David French Doesn't Tell You About the "Racism and Hatred" Allegedly Encountered at His Church