Far-right ideas are gaining a renewed respectability in France

Liking your country as it is is apparently "far Right". Can anyone deny that Muslim immigration degrades the civility of a country?

“Nationalism is the safeguarding of all those treasures that are at threat without a foreign army crossing the border, without the physical invasion of territory. It is the defence of the nation against the stranger from within.” Thus wrote Charles Maurras, a reactionary and anti-Semitic French author, in “My Political Ideas” in 1937. After the disgrace and trauma of Vichy France, which officially branded Jews the stranger within, such thinking was for most of the post-war period banished to the fringes of French intellectual life. For decades it was intellos from the political left who dominated the salons and newspaper columns of Paris.

Today, however, France is seeing a disconcerting revival of ultranationalist thinking, and with it the rehabilitation of once-ostracised reactionary writers. Robert Laffont, a respected Paris publisher, reprinted the collected works of Maurras in 2018. This year a right-wing French publisher reissued “The Great Replacement”, which first came out in 2011; its author, Renaud Camus, is a hard-right writer currently appealing a conviction for incitement to racial hatred. As some nativists allege of America, Mr Camus argues that France is undergoing a demographic “conquest”, in this case involving the relentless replacement of the “French people” with those from its former colonies.

Assorted micro-movements and individuals on the extreme and ultra-Catholic right have long claimed to be the inheritors of reactionary fin-de-siècle thought. But these peripheral voices were dignified with neither serious scrutiny nor polite debate. Now, outlets such as Valeurs Actuelles, a right-wing magazine, and CNews, a French 24-hour news channel likened to Fox News, discuss little else. Mr Camus has turned from recluse to television-studio guest. Eric Zemmour, a pundit and polemicist, doubles as a populist radical hoping to stand in next April’s presidential election. His latest bestseller, “France Has Not Had Its Final Word”, is a lament for “the death of France as we know it”. Dressed in an intellectual veneer, the book identifies at every turn a threat to “the French people, their customs, their history, their state, their civility, their civilisation”.

Two sinister underlying obsessions link this contemporary discourse to the earlier reactionary and nationalist French essayists. The first is a belief in an immutable “eternal France”. Maurras, who was a leading figure in Action Française, a political movement that was founded in 1899 to defend “true France”, termed this le pays réel (the real country): a land of church spires, ancestral soil and family tradition. It was to be distinguished, in his view, from le pays légal (the legal country), or the artificial structures of the anticlerical republican administration.

Old enemies and new

Identity in this sense is not a fluid multiple construct, but rather is fixed and rooted in the earth. “The land gives us discipline, and we are the extension of the ancestors,” declared Maurice Barrès, another influential nationalist writer who was close to Maurras, in 1899. The iconography of Vichy France later embraced this blood-and-soil identity, celebrating rural life, church, family and work on the land. Indeed, Mr Zemmour entitles a chapter of his latest book “The Land and the Dead”, after a speech of that name by Barrès. In it, Mr Zemmour declares that the three members of a French family who were murdered in a terrorist attack at a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012, and who were buried in Israel, did not belong to France.

The second obsession is paranoia about decline, and the failure of elites to protect French identity. For Maurras, the chief menace to it was that enemy within: Jews, Protestants, Freemasons and foreigners. For Barrès, the enemy was principally without: Germany, and its military might. For Mr Camus and Mr Zemmour, it is above all Islam. Echoing the “great replacement theory”, Mr Zemmour claims that, in today’s France, “an Islamic civilisation is replacing a people from a Christian, Greco-Roman civilisation”. “Veiled women”, Mr Camus recently told a tv interviewer, “are the flags of conquest, of colonisation”.

Today’s reactionaries tap into a deep undercurrent of fear and paranoia in France, but also of anti-Semitism. An unapologetic anti-Semite, Maurras defended the French army’s accusations against Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French captain wrongly convicted by the French army of high treason in 1894. That was a time, among the Catholic and military French elite, of intense anxiety about spies and traitors, and of conspiracy theories about Jewish financiers. In “Jewish France”, a virulent anti-Semitic tract published in 1886, Edouard Drumont had warned of the threat of a “Jewish conquest” of France, led by a “hateful, gold-hungry” people bent on bringing about the “painful agony of a generous nation”.

Himself of Jewish and Algerian descent, Mr Zemmour occupies an ambiguous place in this tradition. By hinting today that Dreyfus may not have been innocent, or defending Vichy for “protecting” French Jews—because it deported foreign ones first—Mr Zemmour is confecting not a serious historical assessment but a studied provocation. As well as distorting history, this is a way of “signalling his link to a pillar of French society, which is the army, and to a particular set of right-wing values”, suggests Jean Garrigues, a historian at the University of Orléans.

That such views are given a legitimate airing is new, and disquieting. Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded the hard-right party that his daughter, Marine Le Pen, rebranded and now leads, appalled the salons of Paris and was treated accordingly. Mr Zemmour, who is well-read and flatters the French regard for the cultivé, is handled with respect. Aspiring presidential candidates are invited by debate moderators, with scarcely a blush, to offer their perspective on the “great replacement theory”.

Moreover, France lacks the counterbalancing intellectual voices of the past. “At the time of Maurras, Émile Zola and republicans fought back. But the intellectual left and radical left in France have been swept away,” says Sudhir Hazareesingh, a political scientist at Oxford University and author of “How the French Think”. Today, no French thinker has the towering stature of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Michel Foucault or others in turtlenecks and trench coats on the left bank whose influence lingered well beyond their lifetimes.

No left-wing political leader has a commanding influence, either. In this void, toxic theories are resuscitated, and used to frame discussion, without robust or persuasive rebuke. As elsewhere, reason and rationality seem, like contempt, to be fragile tools against the potent narrative force of populist reactionaries. The decline of the public intellectual on the French left removes one more line of defence.

https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2021/11/20/far-right-ideas-are-gaining-a-renewed-respectability-in-france

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Black killer suported by evil Leftist woman

So much hate

The hater

The killer

A woman has resigned from her job after a sarcasm-laden rant following the deaths of five people in a Christmas parade rampage.

An Illinois Democrat has been blasted for describing the deadly Christmas parade rampage in Wisconsin as “karma” for the acquittal of Kyle Rittenhouse.

Mary Lemanski has now resigned from her position with the Democratic Party in DuPage County after her comments were widely shared, Anne Sommerkamp, the organisation’s executive director, told Fox News in an email.

The social media director began her online tirade by snarkily dismissing the tragedy as “just self-defence.”

“It was probably just self-defence,” Ms Lemanski wrote in a tweet that appears to have since been deleted, the New York Post reported.

“Living in Wisconsin, he probably felt threatened,” another tweet read — referring to the driver, Darrell E Brooks, who is facing five counts of first-degree homicide over the Waukesha incident, which left five people facing and dozens hurt.

“I’m sure he didn’t want to hurt anyone. He came to help people,” she added in her sarcasm-laced missive.

Ms Lemanski appeared to be mocking Mr Rittenhouse’s self-defence claim before the 18-year-old was acquitted Friday of charges of homicide, attempted homicide and reckless endangerment in the deaths of Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26, and the wounding of Gaige Grosskreutz, 27, on Aug. 25, 2020.

Her comments were blasted online.

“Seriously how does it feel to completely flush your career down the toilet via tweet? Was it fun?” one user wrote.

“What career. She’s yeah and will always be. The entire country will see her tweets tomorrow and she will never recover,” another said.

A third user wrote: “I hope you never know the pain of losing a child. I hope the parents of those lost today in Waukesha never know you. I feel sad for both you and them.”

https://www.news.com.au/technology/online/social/woman-blasted-for-calling-wisconsin-christmas-parade-rampage-karma/news-story/2346a1488f168a971f8ab843cb0f0c13

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Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts

When my mom was 90, she was hospitalized for a procedure and started sundowning every night. For those who haven’t dealt with an elderly person, “sundowning” occurs when night falls and the older person starts hallucinating. Being in an unfamiliar environment triggers it, even in people who are not generally suffering from dementia.

What fascinated me about my mom’s hallucinations was how real they were to her. She told me that “the Germans” had entered her hospital room through the window, surrounded her bed, and been conversing with her. I took her to the window and showed her that (a) it was a non-opening window and (b) she was on the third floor. Mom was unable to accept this irrefutable evidence that her nighttime escapades with “the Germans” could not have happened. The experience was so real to her that it transcended all countervailing facts.

With that anecdote in mind — about a failing mind struggling with transitory dementia — I’d like you to look at this meme that’s popping up on leftist social media:

The meme repeats a tweet from Santiago Mayer. Who is Mayer? He’s an Act Blue operative who identifies himself on Twitter, not by the American flag, but by the Mexican flag.

So, Mayer made this statement and it’s being wildly shared all over social media. What’s important about it is that every fact within it is wrong.

Allow me to break it down:

1. The implication that Kyle committed a crime by crossing state lines. In America, we citizens can freely cross state lines. There is no penalty in America for doing so. It’s part of our constitutional system. When I left California for the Southeast, I did not have to report myself to the local police station. And of course, the whole “crossed state lines” mantra is ludicrous coming from the party that disavows national borders.

2. The “illegally” acquired gun. The reason the judge dropped the gun charge against Rittenhouse is that the rifle was neither illegally-acquired nor was Rittenhouse underage. The rules are different for long guns, and the measuring tape established that, when Rittenhouse entered Wisconsin (a mere 20 minutes from his home), and his friend loaned him the rifle, neither broke the law.

3. The “assault rife.” There is no such thing as an “assault rifle.” The “AR” in the name comes from the 15th model that Armalite Rifle manufactured in the 1950s. It’s now the industry standard.

I’ve also seen people refer to the weapon Rittenhouse was carrying as an “automatic weapon.” That’s not true either.

The AR-15 is a semi-automatic weapon, meaning that you have to pull the trigger for every shot. If it were automatic, pulling the trigger would release an unending stream of bullets until either the magazine emptied itself or the user took his finger off the trigger. Indeed, Rittenhouse showed exemplary trigger control at all times.

The AR-15 is beloved because (a) it has minimal kick and (b) it can be blinged out like crazy. The bling seems to be what scares lefties. This cartoon, about a chihuahua’s self-image, shows how lefties view an AR-15, compared to a less fancy rifle:

4. “Attended a MAGA rally.” Nothing that happened in Kenosha was comparable to a MAGA rally. No MAGA rally has ever involved burning a whole city down. People are cheerful, behave well, and clean up after themselves.

I know that leftists will point to January 6 as proof that what I just said is untrue but that is not a working analogy. First, of the more than 100,000 people who appeared in D.C. that day, upwards of 90% were far from the Capitol and were behaving in typical MAGA fashion: Cheerful and lawful.

Second, there’s good reason to believe that the FBI, as is its wont, had provocateurs, agitators, and agents in the crowd trying to entrap people.

Third, those arrested on January 6 were not armed.

Fourth, even at the height of the protest, nothing was burned or broken.

Fifth, the only violent death occurred when a Capitol police officer shot an unarmed woman in cold blood.

5. “Picked a fight.” Kyle did not “pick a fight.” The undisputed evidence at the trial, from the prosecution’s own witnesses and video footage, showed that Rittenhouse offered first aid, shied away from any conflict, ran as fast as he could away from Rosenbaum’s intended assault, and was also trying desperately to run away from Huber’s and Grosskreutz’s assaults.

When it comes to picking a fight, that same testimony showed that those whom he shot attacked Kyle first. We also know, even though the jurors didn’t, that the three whom Rittenhouse shot were people with long records of violence and perversion. While their conduct was not on trial, their records were consistent with their behavior their night.

6. Racism! And of course, the implication that this is about race is wrong, too. Not only is Kyle White, so are/were the people he shot. (See image, above.)

So, as I said, every “fact” in that meme is wrong. And here’s something else to chew on: If a Black teen had been in exactly the same situation as Rittenhouse — a young man who, seeing rioters destroy his father’s town, drove 20 minutes to try to protect businesses, armed himself with a legal rifle, and fired back when three felons attacked him with intent to kill — MAGA people would have been as strongly supportive of that teen as they are of Rittenhouse.

For conservatives, the principle at stake isn’t race; it’s the right to self-defense that is an integral part of being a citizen in a free society.

Another principle is that if the adults don’t act, children and teens who have been raised right and believe in a law-abiding system, will bravely step up and try to do what the adults refuse to do.

Oh, and another principle is that leftists are not only flogging the Rittenhouse case to stir up racial hostilities, they’re also using it to try once again to end the Second Amendment, not through a constitutional process, but by stirring up enough citizen outrage to ignore the Constitution.

The media feel their power. Their goal, as I’ve written before, is to replicate Charles Manson’s Helter-Skelter tactic: Sow dissent between America’s different races to create a race war. Once that war has leveled America, in the case of the media and their water carriers in Congress (the Squad and other morons), they imagine themselves as the leaders of a brave new socialist world. Racism will be over because everyone, Black, White, Yellow, Brown, Purple, and Green, will be firmly under the jackbooted feet of our new totalitarian leaders.

It is up to us to confront the lies, and to help those who have not become so demented that they cannot see the truth: And the truth is that we are being lied to and used so that ordinary Americans become the hate-filled engines of their own destruction.

I have a suggestion for confronting them. A wise man I knew used to say of interpersonal squabbles, “Don’t get furious; get curious.” E.g., if your spouse says something you see as an insult, before you get angry, ask an open-ended question to ensure that your spouse really meant to insult you. It’s a good policy, it prevents fights, and it makes you look like the mature peacemaker.

In this post, because it’s a monologue I called out the lies for what they are. However, if you’re conversing with leftists, in person or via social media, all that you must do is politely ask them to direct you to the facts supporting their conclusions.

Yesterday, although I normally never engage on Facebook, I couldn’t resist playing this game. Someone commented on a friend’s post that Judge Schroeder wore a black robe to hide his white robe. I posted a polite (albeit slightly dishonest) reply. “I haven’t been following this much (that was the dishonesty). I assume you’re saying this about the judge because Kyle Rittenhouse is a White supremacist, so the judge, by making rulings in his favor, must also be a White supremacist. Can you give me the facts about Rittenhouse’s White supremacy so I can understand what happened?”

The person who called Judge Schroeder a KKK member deleted his comment without even attempting to answer

Don’t get furious; get curious. Politely push them to share with you the facts supporting their claims. And if they return with provably incorrect “facts,” politely respond with irrefutable truth. Lots of them are going to be sundowners who cannot recognize the truth but others will be like Bari Weiss and realize that they’ve been the victims of a giant con.

https://www.bookwormroom.com/2021/11/20/a-meme-sums-up-90-of-the-lefts-kyle-rittenhouse-lies/

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Why The Left Always Projects

The Left is addicted to projection—the psycho-political syndrome of attributing all of one’s own sins to one’s opponents. The woke apparently do this out of some Freudian effort to square the circle of their own guilt or sense of privilege, by fobbing off their own fearful realities onto others. It is the atheist version of confession or medieval penance. In addition, in the spirit of “always being on the offense,” wokists know that those who slander do so most successfully when they lodge exactly those charges most familiar and applicable to themselves.

The Privileged Damn Privilege

Take for example, the worn-out charge of “privilege,” as in the phrase “check your privilege.” This trope originates exclusively from the Left. Purportedly, it signifies a rigged system in which white males have gained, unfairly and undeservedly, “privilege” to exercise cultural, economic, political, and social control over the “other”—occasionally defined as women, more often “people of color,” and most frequently African Americans.

How odd, given that by any indicator the political Left is the party of wealth and privilege. The wealthiest ZIP codes are found in blue states such as California, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New York. Twenty-six of the 27 wealthiest congressional districts, gauged by per capita incomes, are represented by liberal Democrats.

Registered Democrats on average have higher incomes than their Republican counterparts. Democratic presidential candidates have vastly outspent Republicans over the last 20 years. Note that the old liberal saw about “dark money” has steadily disappeared from the left-wing lexicon (nothing is darker than Mark Zuckerberg’s infusions of cash to warp particular voting precincts). Likewise, in the once trendy academic trifecta of “race, class, and gender,” class” has been dropped quietly.

The most elite and wealthy institutions in America are predominantly liberal bastions: Silicon Valley, entertainment, universities, professional sports, Wall Street, the mainstream media, and foundations. Most “people of color,” who are the loudest about focusing on the evils of privilege and lack of equity, are themselves multimillionaires or multibillionaires, such as the Obamas, Oprah Winfrey, LeBron James, Jay-Z, or Meghan Markle.

Accusing an entire group—white people, or conservatives, or Trump supporters—of being privileged deflects the apparent shame of elitism away from oneself on the cheap. After all, accusing some part-time lecturer or Trump deplorable of “white privilege” is a lot easier, both psychologically and materially, than giving up a nanny, trading in the gas-guzzling big Mercedes, or just saying no to private jets.

The elite accuser knows especially how to level such charges given his own intimacy with what wealth, power, and influence bring. Worse still, the projectionist feels he is making the greatest sacrifice of all by his empty confessions—even as he is a beneficiary of the rigged system that he demands be ended.

When Barack Obama flies to Glasgow to lecture the western world’s climate-wrecking middle class that it is going to have to be content with less—while acknowledging that his own wealth and privilege mean he will suffer less than others—one wonders why Obama simply does not, right now pledge to live in just one mansion rather than two?

After all, if Obama urges the middle to class to cut back on energy use and to forfeit lifestyle privileges, why wouldn’t Obama himself set the moral example, given his huge carbon footprint. Why would he be so cynical to warn the world that our shores will soon be inundated shortly after he himself bought a shoreline estate?

The answer, of course, is that by constantly projecting their covetousness onto others, the woke feel that they can enjoy their own privileges with diminished guilt, claim the psychological higher moral ground, and, as performance artists, show they suffer on our behalf as “traitors to their class.”

https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=13871&omhide=true

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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