Marine Le Pen: Emmanuel Macron Should ‘Definitely’ Resign, But He ‘Has Neither the Honesty to Do It, Nor the Panache’, by Matthew Poole.

Marine Le Pen, the leader of the National Rally party in France, in a Breitbart News exclusive interview on Monday called on French president Emmanuel Macron to resign the presidency, but said he is not honest or bold enough to recognize his worldview has been defeated.

In the United Kingdom, Le Pen noted, David Cameron stepped down as Prime Minister when the British people voted to leave the European Union back in 2016. And in 2019, Le Pen noted, Prime Minister Theresa May announced her plans to resign after the Brexit Party defeated her party and all others in the U.K.’s European Parliament elections. …

Speaking through a translator via phone for the exclusive interview on Monday, Le Pen explained the victory and why she believes her party won, while Macron’s was defeated.

“There are two main reasons: One is a European reason, and the other is on a national basis. Macron, in the early stages of the campaign, presented himself as the leader of the European Union that the French people do not want anymore,” Le Pen said. “The European Union despises the people. The European Union protects unfair competition specifically with products coming from China. And more than anything, the European Union is fully open to immigration to the European Union that will be submerged.”

“The second reason is a national reason. He established some policies, specifically on a fiscal level, that are particularly unjust and unfair to the popular classes, to the common person. For the past two years, he has displayed extreme arrogance and spite for the common people and the French people in general. What I and the list have been doing is explaining to the French people that the former divide between right and left wing does not exist anymore. And for the second time in a row, which means including the presidential election two years ago, the new divide is between the globalists and the nationalists. Twice in a row, this narrative that I have been explaining has become true and has been put in place by the vote of the French people.” …

“Globalism is a post-national spirit,” Le Pen said when asked to explain the differences between globalism and nationalism. “It carries a notion that borders must disappear, including the protection that such borders usually brings to a nation. It carries the concept that overwhelming markets decide about everything. This concept about globalism is pushed by technocrats that are never elected and they are the typical type of person who runs things in Brussels in the European Union. The people that believe in nations—the nationalists—it’s the exact opposite. They believe that nations are the most efficient way to protect national security, prosperity, and identity to make sure that people will prosper in the nations.”

Elite Contempt Is the Common Denominator in Populist Victories, by Caroline Glick.

The Brexit Party’s victory effectively ends the Conservative party’s monopoly on Britain’s political right for the first time in two hundred years. The Conservatives will respond to the trouncing in one of two ways. They can disintegrate completely by doubling down on outgoing Prime Minister Theresa May’s soft Brexit – with or without a second referendum — or they can start listening to their voters. …

Brexit, Trump, Israel, Australia, Europe:

One underlying issue is common in all of the elections. And until the progressive left and the establishment center right reconcile themselves to it, and find a respectful means to contend with it, they will continue to see populist forces grow stronger and win elections.

That issue is contempt. Throughout the Western world, beyond the economic issues and even beyond specific social issues like gay marriage or abortion rights, voters are motivated to vote for the populist, nationalist right in part due to their anger at the left and center-right’s undisguised contempt for them.

In the United States, the left’s snobbery reached its height with Hillary Clinton’s castigation of Trump’s supporters as “deplorables.” But her assertion wasn’t made in isolation. It was made in the midst of a general atmosphere in which Democratic politicians from Barack Obama to Nancy Pelosi and establishment Republicans felt comfortable putting down Americans who aren’t part of their club. Obama infamously referred to Clinton’s “deplorables” as “bitter” people in small towns who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

The media, which serves as an extension of the Democratic Party and embraces NeverTrump Republicans as a means to attack Trump and his voters, continuously broadcasts contempt for both.

Likewise, according to Australian professor and media analyst Stan Grant, one of the decisive factors in Australia’s election was religion. A large swathe of the public developed a sense that Labor leader Shorten held them and their religious convictions in contempt. …

By adopting an attitude of contempt for them, Shorten, like Clinton and Obama and May and French President Emmanuel Macron insulted the voters. …

Globalization cuts both ways:

The rise of the populist/nationalist/ideological right throughout the West demonstrates that globalization cuts both ways. Members of the global progressive and center-right elite embrace the same post-nationalist, post-industrial, and post-Christian values and agendas at elite conferences in Brussels and New York, at the United Nations, on network news and online. But back in their home countries, those they disregard are also online and also talking. The disregarded majorities are also listening to one another.

The most potent message that crosses the world each day and empowers populists and nationalist conservatives is one of exasperation and anger at the transnational elites’ solidarity in their contempt for their people. …

“Democracy” is being redefined by the elite to mean what they want:

For European Unionists and British Remainers, for the Israeli elite and the American establishment, the globalization of their values and agendas has brought them to believe that democracy means fixing the rules of the game. Through judicial activism and bureaucratic regulations, through intellectual terror and public shaming, these elites seek to render election results inconsequential. Ballot boxes, in their view, are no match for the combined forces of the elite media and academia and the bureaucracy. They determine norms. They determine policies – in the name of Democracy.

But throughout the West, the “deplorables” are listening to one another and rediscovering their power and voices at the ballot boxes. They realize that democracy is a means for the people to determine their course in the world. The elite may control the discourse, but the people decide who will run their countries.

Tommy Robinson sulks after humiliating defeat in European elections, by Joe Roberts.

Tommy Robinson has hit out at being banned on Facebook and Twitter as he suffered a humiliating defeat in the European elections.

The former English Defence League leader, who was hit with several milkshakes during the campaign, played down his chances of winning while speaking at the count in Manchester.

He said he had faced a ‘near impossible task’ in attempting to win one of the eight seats available.

Robinson said it was not a fair campaign as he was unable to get across his message on social media platforms. ‘I am not allowed social media,’ he said. ‘I am not able to interact with the public.’

He added: ‘But more than anything every community I have gone to – every working class estate – I have so felt loved, (more) than I have ever felt in my life.’

Scomo and Anal. Silly and meaningless post, but what an unfortunate accident of naming:

Erdoğan’s Istanbul Nightmare by Burak Bekdil (Gatestone Institute)

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
Photo: Wikipedia.org

Unbelievably, this is the man that Barak Obama said was, “His favorite foreign leader”.  On what basis, heaven only knows.

Much like Hitler fought Stalin – not over political philosophy, but rather “who would be in charge”, Erdogan fought ISIS. Not because he disagreed with ISIS’s leader, Al Baghdadi, but rather because Al Baghdadi had the temerity to “believe” HE was the new Caliphe – not Erdogan. Erdogan helped put him in his place, just like he has everyone else in Turkey – until now.

Erdoğan believed — and made the average Turk believe — that Turkey is a major world power. He claimed that his rule made miracles in the economy. Therefore, since his Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002, he has not lost a single election. Everything was coming up roses all the time. Not anymore.

Bekdil continues:

“Who wins Istanbul wins Turkey,” has been Erdoğan’s dictum since 1994, when he won mayoral elections in Turkey’s biggest city (home to nearly 15% of Turkey’s 57 million voters and accounting for 31% of its GDP). Twenty-five years later, his candidate for mayor of Istanbul, former prime minister Binali Yıldırım, lost in the local election — the first defeat in Istanbul for Islamists since 1994. Game not yet over, Erdoğan ruled.

Erdogan likely manufactured the failed coup attempt to purge his political enemies and secure his grip on the military using cronies instead of competent officers. (Wentworthmaven’s opinion).

Bekdil concludes:

Even if Erdoğan wins Istanbul in the re-run, he will have lost the last few remaining crumbs of his international credibility.

It’s a delicate balance of NATO and the USA playing on one side with Putin constantly trying to woo Erdogan away from the West.  Erdogan has been in the catbird seat for the last two decades; perhaps this will finally come to an end? Especially if the EU grows a backbone and holds him to task.  Unlikely, but then so was Trump, Brexit and European citizens finally waking up to a new reality.

China’s communists fund Jacinda Ardern’s Labour Party: What the United States Congress was told. By David Fisher.

An influential United States Congress hearing has been told “one of the major fundraisers for Jacinda Ardern’s party” is linked to the Chinese Communist Party and it showed China had penetrated New Zealand’s political networks.

As a result, US lawmakers needed to consider whether New Zealand should be kicked out of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance because of problems at its “political core”. …

The hearing of the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission was aimed at gathering evidence on China’s relationship with traditional US allies. …

China’s actions included getting people linked to the Communist Party or People’s Liberation Army elected and had made it worth the while of political figures “to parrot its line on issues it deems important”. …

The hearing heard testimony from former CIA analyst Peter Mattis who said the Chinese Communist Party had worked “very close to or inside the political core” of Australia and New Zealand and “one of the major fundraisers for Jacinda Ardern’s party has United Front links”. …

However, he said New Zealand “have denied that there’s a problem at all” and failed to follow Australia’s lead in setting up an inquiry into China’s activities.

As Glenn Reynolds notes, isn’t it weird that the NZ Labor Party  supports censorship, disarming citizens, etc.?

The US Cloud People cannot tolerate a rogue intelligence community, but nor can they just open all of this to public view. By the Z-Blog.

Supposedly, Trump told Pelosi and Schumer he was done dealing with them until they dropped the investigations. This is probably just a lie fed to the willing media, as part of the war. Most likely, the offer to drop all of it was made by Schumer, but Trump rejected it, as he now has the better hand in this fight.

Proof of this is the decision to hand over to Bill Barr the power to release classified documents related to this scandal and other scandals as yet unknown. That last part is the real issue here. It is pretty much accepted that elements within the FBI, and most likely the CIA, conducted an illegal surveillance operation on the Trump campaign and the Trump transition team. The only decision left on that front is whether or not these people face changes or the whole thing is swept under the rug.

That last part is where things get interesting. If everyone was sure the parties in the FBI scandal were stand-up guys willing to do their time and keep quiet [this would probably be] over and done with by now. The trouble is, they are not stand-up guys. Worse yet, there are too many of them and too well known to be Arkancided. …

That brings us back to the order to authorize Bill Barr to release classified documents into the public. … The real puzzle is the inclusion of the Department of Treasury and the Department of Energy. What could the Energy Department have in its files related to the FBI scandal? What would Treasury have?

One answer lies in the story of Uranium One, which is the turd that official Washington cannot seem to flush. This is the deal that sold off uranium resources and companies to a Russian firm. …

Of course, what this means is the Russian collusion story was just an effort to conceal the FBI spying scandal, which was an effort to cover a lot of other corruption, especially the Uranium One deal. That’s the item at the center of everything. That would explain why Treasury and Energy are on the list. It would also explain why the FBI under James Comey was so vexed by the Clinton e-mail scandal. Clinton was running a pay-for-play operation out of the State Department and a lot of people knew about it.

The question is why would everyone go along with it, but the history of the Clinton family is the story of exploiting the ambition of minor figures. …

Way back in the 1990’s, a truth obvious to many people was that the Democrats, desperate to regain power, sold their souls to the Clintons. They were willing to overlook their obscene corruption, as long as they delivered. It’s turning out that the Clinton family was not just a cancer on the party, but a cancer on American politics. Like the guy who sold his soul to the devil, official Washington is now realizing it was a horrible error to take the Clinton deal. Now they are at a loss as to how to get out of it.

As an aside, the old WASP virtue of keeping low-class people out of public life was not just about snobbery. It was an understanding that people like the Clintons were like an invasive species among the upper classes. High status people did not train their young to hair-split and subvert the rules. They trained them to uphold the rules. As a result, they could never compete with the sort of people who saw rules and customs as an obstacle to their ambitions. Exclusion was a form of self-defense.

Seeds of Labor’s election disaster planted years ago, by Nick Cater.

Labor would have won by a landslide if the lard-headed nincom­poops had paid attention.

Instead, they had “sent a message” to the Labor Party, Anthony Albanese told the ABC’s 7.30 host Leigh Sales last week. The message­ was that “we haven’t sold the message well enough”.

That Labor’s new leader should even bother talking about marketing the message, and not the message­ itself, shows that the implications of the party’s rejection have yet to sink in.

Labor will face the next election having spent 51 of the previous 75 years in opposition. The 13 years of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating are looking like an aberration. So long as it remains estranged from the workers it once represented, it is incapable of governing in its own right. …

The corruption of the mass party of the left:

The lure of identity politics is the key to Labor’s downfall. The first signs appear in a 1979 review that called on the party to do more to increase its appeal to women, ethnic communities and young voters. Yet, as the 2002 review acknow­ledges, affirmative action had the perverse effect of alienating Labor’s blue-collar base.

Female candidates were lawyers, teachers and academics. Few if any could boast low socio-econo­mic credentials. …

The Coalition comfortably held the seat of Menzies when the mighty wind of climate anger that was supposed to smite the Liberals in Victoria failed to lay low its strongholds. …

The 7 per cent swing against Labor in Chifley­ was in keeping with most seats in western Sydney, where the Coalition has strengthened its grip at every election since the early 1990s with two exceptions.

It lost ground in 2007, when Kevin Rudd fooled voters into thinking he was on the side of the battlers. And it slipped again in 2016, when the Malcolm Turnbull Experiment, as we now call it, worked in the blue-ribbon heartland but failed miserably in the blue-collar suburbs. …

No idea:

Chris Bowen responded to claims that Labor was not selecting enough working-class candid­ates in 2013 by arguing that Chifley would not be an engine driver if he were alive today. He claimed that thanks to Gough Whitlam’s abolition of university fees, Hawke and Keating’s re-intro­duction of fees, and Rudd and Gillard’s expansion of universities, “young Ben Chifley may well (have) become a lawyer, doctor, engineer or economist”.

[Michael Thompson, in his book Labor’s Forgotten People,] believes otherwise, concluding that Labor’s days as a mass party are gone.

The ultimate threat to Labor would be the rise of a leader in John Howard’s tradition, who talked­ over the head of the mainstream media and appealed directl­y to socially conservative Australians, who included large swaths of traditional Labor voters.

At the time of writing, Thompson could see no Liberal parliamentarian on the horizon with Howard’s instincts. After Scott Morrison’s emphatic victory and near-faultless campaign, he might be tempted to change his mind.

Elites blissfully out of touch with ordinary voters, by Maurice Newman.

Like Democrats claiming the American college system was rigged against them, the moral legitimacy of the just-elected Morrison government is already being questioned.

ABC presenter Fran Kelly was the first to ask: “Who really won this election — Scott Morrison or Clive Palmer?”

Perhaps she was channelling Labor Party national president Wayne Swan, who complained that a “$60 million spend by a conservativ­e-aligned billionaire in a preference recycling scheme for the Liberal and National Party cannot be allowed to stand”. Is Mr Swan calling for a fresh election? …

Clueless inhabitants of the left’s echo chamber:

Well may the media class wonder­ why it failed to pick the Trump victory in the US, the Brexit vote, the Indian election outcome and a Coalition majority government. Like pre-Revolution Russian aristocrats, the “intellectual” elite remains blissfully out of touch with and contemptuous of the lives of ordinary voters.

Little wonder that those voters trust only the ballot box with their political secrets. In a poll or a vox-pop, who wants to appear as a dumb, bigoted, greedy, mean-spirited­, coal-loving, climate-change denier? No doubt, the media left will console itself that blame for the Coalition victory lies with Palmer’s campaign, the Murdoch­ press, Sky after dark, ­insufficient time to explain comple­x policies, ignorant voters, and a Coalition scare campaign.

There will be no introspection. No thought given to groupthink, bias by omission, lack of integrity or fake news. Certainly not their unconvincing propaganda pushed as consensus opinion.

What are the left going to do about the election? Some are copying the US left:

Now Greenpeace is hitting back. The “climate-change elect­ion” verdict is unacceptable. It ­incites civil disobedience “to take the power back”.

Greens leader Richard Di Natal­e says he wants to regulate the media. Oliver Yates, the failed green “independent” candidate for the seat of Kooyong, tweeted: “I would seek to have the Murdoch­ press’s licence to operate in Australia removed if they continue to threaten our democracy and our safety.”

ABC gave us groupthink on steroids, by Chris Mitchell.

Was the ABC deliberately biased towards the ALP at the federal election, or was its gross fail just a problem of groupthink? …

The ABC is the best-resourced news organisation in the country, paid for by taxpayers who vote across the political spectrum. In Queensland, which swung strongly to the Coalition, the ABC’s many state-based staff apparently failed to see the trends in their own backyard. The ABC has news ­bureaus in Brisbane, the Gold Coast, the Sunshine Coast, Toowoomba, Bundaberg, Rockhampton, Mackay, Cairns, Townsville, Longreach and Mount Isa. …

[Chris Kenny on Sky] said no experienced political journalist could take a 51-49 poll to the ALP with a margin of error close to 3 per cent and say for sure Labor would win. Kenny asked why, if there were a range of views at Sky News, did literally everyone at the much larger ABC fall in behind the Labor narrative? …

Later last Monday night, Paul Barry on the ABC’s Media Watch lamented the bias of News Corp Australia papers, which largely got the election right, and defended the ABC, which he thought ran a fair and balanced campaign. It did not and the nation knows it. Viewers saw the maudlin performance of its election-night hosts — Barrie Cassidy, Laura Tingle, Annabel Crabb, Andrew Probyn, Michael Rowland and Leigh Sales — as they realised Labor was losing.

The nation had heard Tingle on the ABC’s 7.30 throughout the previou­s week proclaiming both sides knew the Coalition was gone. It had heard the anti-Adani campaigning of Radio National’s Fran Kelly and ABC Sydney breakfast radio host Wendy Harmer. …

News, like its Sky News subsid­iary, employs journalists with a ­diversity of views. Think of this paper’s writers from the left: Troy Bramston, Phillip Adams, Graham Richardson, Alan Kohler and, from the left of the Coalition, Peter van Onselen and Niki Savva.

The Courier-Mail has copped a bucketing on social media but its national affairs editor, Dennis Atkin­s, is a former Goss government staffer, as was former business writer and political columnist Paul Syvret. Long-time columnist Terry Sweetman is of the left. The nation’s biggest website, News Corp Australia’s news.com.au, is very left-wing.

This is as it should be because readers of the biggest newspapers in the country have diverse views. As do viewers of the ABC. Yet the ABC does not represent a diversity of views. …

The big issues:

Voters are smarter than journ­alists think. They were right on climate­ and Adani. They know Australia, with 1.3 per cent of global CO2 emissions, can’t change the climate. They support the aspirat­ion that is anathema to the public service culture of the ABC.

And on franking credits they knew Labor was just wrong. Franking credits are a refund for tax paid by a company to remove double taxation. Paying refunds to people who pay no tax is not a subsidy­. And self-funded retirees on low incomes were the big losers. Rich superannuants mostly do pay tax because they have investments in property and shares outside their super. The ABC should have understood this.

In the last week, I’ve met or heard of several people who are normally Labor supporters but effectively voted Liberal because of religious freedom. A progressive nonsense too far.