Roy Beck shows how Third World poverty is not helped by immigration into the United States.

His solution, let’s help them where they live, sounds nice. But the question remains, “How?”

Aid is counter-productive. It has rightly been called a curse. (That’s a link to a great essay, very well worth reading.)

Teaching capitalism is a better idea. It works. It’s the only system that cures poverty on a large scale.

As Dr. Yaron Brook makes brilliantly clear:

But capitalism is hampered, blocked, maligned, denigrated and anathematized by the ruling Leftist elites of the Western world, and the academies, and the media.

Because – what would Leftists do if there were no poor people to claim as their cause? To provide the excuse for their personal bitterness, envy, and anger?

Well yes, there is always Race. With a bit of luck, we’ll be able to enjoy the spectacle of white politicians, white professors and white journalists deploring “white privilege” for many years to come.

…. is that people have no issue.

People of Europe, people of the West in general, and people of Japan, have no children.

“The people who built our modern world are going out of business – voluntarily,” Mark Steyn tells all who will listen, in this video published yesterday (July 23, 2027).

He impresses on his listeners that he is speaking of present fact, not making a prediction.

On the bad side, the Muslims migrating into Europe and the West (not into Japan which is dying as a purely Japanese nation) are having many children.

“This demographic transformation and substitution” is the most important issue of our time.

And, as Mark Steyn says, the media don’t – won’t – even mention it. (In America, the media prefer to concentrate on making up ludicrous scandals involving President Trump, in the hope of destroying his presidency. Meanwhile, however, President Trump himself is aware and concerned that our civilization is under threat, as he showed in his great speech in Warsaw.)

.

So most of the more knowledgable, more enlightened, more inventive nations of the world are choosing to die.

No children! It is an overwhelmingly bleak thought. Could any prospect be more desolate? Could there be a greater loss? It means, of course, the loss of our civilization.

A couple of lines from an old song (composer unknown), The Maidens’ Song, come to mind, hauntingly:

Tell me now what beauty’s for,

What is the use of the cradle?                                                                                             

… to worthier tribes?

On Christmas Eve 2014, a former Prime Minister of Sweden, Fredrik Reinfeldt, said on Swedish TV that Sweden belongs to “the immigrants”, not to the Swedes.

We quote a report by Speisa (Sweden):

The former prime minister now claims that Sweden’s borders are fictional and that Sweden belongs to the immigrants who come here – not the Swedes. …

– It is a choice of what country Sweden should be, Reinfeldt told TV4.

– Is this a country that is owned by those who have lived here for three or four generations [sic!] or is Sweden what people who come here in mid-life makes it to be? he asked rhetorically.

– For me it is obvious that it should be the latter and that it is a stronger and better society if it may be open, said Reinfeldt. …

He went even further, claiming that Sweden’s borders are only imaginary.

– What is Sweden? Is this country owned by those who lived here for four generations or those who invented borders? he said condescending[ly].

Then he said that the Swedes are uninteresting as an ethnic group and that it is instead the immigrants that create the new Sweden.

He may be right that “the Swedes are uninteresting as an ethnic group” – unexpected as it is to hear a leader of them say so. No boring old patriotism for him! Patriotism? What is patriotism in the West these days but xenophobia, bigotry, racism, and – considering which immigrants in particular he is talking about without putting a name to them – “Islamophobia”?

But is being “uninteresting” a reason for the Swedish nation to wipe itself out?

What makes a people “interesting”? Fredrik Reinfeldt seems to think the Islamic religion does the trick. So “interesting” in this context means primitive, savage, cruel, intolerant, misogynistic, homophobic, supremacist, and totalitarian.

Nice liberal values à la mode, Mr. Reinfeldt!

Recently (July 16, 2017), Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, doomed the country she leads to self-extinction by the Swedish method.

From Deutsche Welle (Germany’s public international broadcaster) online:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel refused to place an upper limit on refugees that the country accepts, speaking in an annual interview broadcast on Sunday.

Distancing herself from the position of her conservative Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), Merkel, who leads the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), said placing a limit on refugees was not the way forward.

“As far as an upper limit is concerned, my position is clear: I will not accept it,” she said …

Reinfeldt, Merkel, and almost all the other European political leaders believe that to let their countries go to the Muslim invaders is the height of moral virtue.

The international Left, including the Democratic Party of the US – and of course Islam – agree with them.

So why would anyone be surprised that they despise the patriotic leader, President Trump, for wanting to make America great again?

Yesterday (July 6, 2017) President Trump said in the speech he gave in Poland:

The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost? Do we have enough respect for our citizens to protect our borders? Do we have the desire and the courage to preserve our civilization in the face of those who would subvert and destroy it? 

Our citizens did not win freedom together, did not survive horrors together, did not face down evil together only to lose our freedom to a lack of pride and confidence in our values. We did not and we will not. We will never back down. 

Giulio Meotti writes at Gatestone:

In a historic speech to an enthusiastic Polish crowd before the meeting of the G20 Summit leaders, US President Donald Trump described the West’s battle against “radical Islamic terrorism” as the way to protect “our civilization and our way of life”.  ,,,

After an Islamist suicide-bomber murdered 22 concert-goers in Manchester, including two Poles, Poland’s prime minister, Beata Szydło, said that Poland would not be “blackmailed” into accepting thousands of refugees under the European Union’s quota system. She urged Polish lawmakers to safeguard the country and Europe from the scourges of Islamist terrorism and cultural suicide:

Where are you headed, Europe? Rise from your knees and from your lethargy, or you will be crying over your children every day.

A few days later, the European Union announced that it would begin proceedings to punish Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic for their refusal to accept [Muslim] migrants …

These Central- and Eastern European countries know that Western Europe’s multiculturalism has been a recipe for terror attacks, for a start.

As Ed West of The Spectator noted:

Central Europe, chiefly Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, remain largely safe from the terror threat … It is precisely because the reasons for this are so obvious that they cannot be mentioned. Poland is 0.1 percent Muslim, most of whom are from a long-settled Tartar community, Britain is 5 percent, France 9 percent and Brussels 25 percent, and those numbers are growing.

What is presumably “obvious” here is that Poland and Hungary are not hit by Islamic terror attacks because they have very few Muslims, while Belgium and UK it is the reverse. Europe would probably [no, certainly – ed] have been safer if it had followed Eastern Europe’s example.

Eastern Europe not only shows a greater understanding of Western culture than Western Europe does; these Eastern countries have also been far more generous to NATO, the bulwark of their independence and security. Culture and security go hand-in-hand: if you take your own culture and civilization seriously, you will be ready to defend them.

A brief look at the NATO’s members’ military spending as a percentage of GDP shows that Poland meets the 2% target, unlike all the Western European countries. Only five of NATO’s 28 members – the U.S., Greece, Poland, Estonia and the U.K. – meet the 2% target. Where is France? And Belgium? And Germany? And The Netherlands? …

Poland – unlike Belgium, Italy and other European countries – is not a “free rider” but a trustworthy partner to its US ally. Poland showed loyal support to the United States both in Afghanistan and Iraq, where its troops fought the Taliban and helped to topple Saddam Hussein.

Which is why –

… President Trump selected Poland, a country that fought both Nazism and Communism, to call on the West to show a little willingness in its existential fight against the new totalitarianism: radical Islam.

The international Left is not against totalitarianism. It never has been. The Democratic Party is now a party of the far left.

The existential fight for our civilization, the defense of it “at any cost” that President Trump has called for, is a fight not only against “radical Islam”, but against the Left.

In America, the fight for our civilization is a fight against the Democratic Party.

Western Europe, a large part of the First World, is transforming itself into part of the Third World, a deliberate regression.

What are the rulers of western Europe thinking as they continue to insist on bringing hordes of hostile barbarians into their countries, eventually to rule over them? The demographic transformation costs an enormous chunk of each nation’s economy. The indigenous citizens suffer a huge increase of criminal attacks, rape, robbery, murder and terrorism. Yet the governments continue to invite vast numbers of aliens in; aliens whose culture, customs, morals, values, law, religion, ideology, and standards of everything from hygiene to education, are wholly incompatible with their own?

The indigenous populations are shrinking? They need more workers to maintain the welfare state? And if immigrants are parasites and not workers that’s still okay so there must some other reason? You’re sorry for them, they come from war-torn countries, you want to give them asylum because you want to show brotherly love to fellow-human-beings-in-distress? But aren’t these the very people who have made the wars? Aren’t these the same ones who are torturing and burning to death and drowning in boiling oil their fellow-human-beings-in-distress? Can’t they improve their own countries rather than wrecking yours by making yours quite as nasty as the ones they’ve left behind them?

Millions of Europeans don’t like losing their country, their property, and their lives to the barbarians, and they could stop it by changing their governments, but they don’t. They vote the same destroyers of their heritage back into power over and over again. Why?   

You say the answers to all these questions are in the mail? Or are they blowing in the wind?

Heather Mac Donald writes at Front Page:

Liberal ideology conceives of “safe spaces” in the context of alleged white patriarchy, but there was a real need for a “safe space” in Britain’s Manchester Arena on May 22, when 22-year-old terrorist Salman Abedi detonated his nail- and screw-filled suicide bomb after a concert by teen idol Ariana Grande. What was the “progressive” answer to yet another instance of Islamic terrorism in the West? Feckless calls for resisting hate, pledges of renewed diversity, and little else.

A rethinking of immigration policies is off the table. Nothing that an Islamic terrorist can do will ever shake the left-wing commitment to open borders—not mass sexual assaults, not the deliberate slaughter of gays, and not, as in Manchester last week, the killing of young girls. The real threat that radical Islam poses to feminism and gay rights must be disregarded in order to transform the West by Third World immigration. Defenders of the open-borders status quo inevitably claim that if a terrorist is a second-generation immigrant, like Abedi, immigration policy has nothing to do with his attack. (Abedi’s parents emigrated to Britain from Libya; his immediate family in Manchester lived in the world’s largest Libyan enclave outside Africa itself.) Media Matters ridiculed a comment about the Manchester bombing by Fox News host Ainsley Earhardt with the following headline: fox news host suggests ‘open borders’ are to blame for manchester attack carried out by british native.

Earhardt had asked how to prevent “what’s happening in Europe, with all these open borders, they’re not vetting, they’re opening their borders to families like this, and this is how they’re paid back in return”. Pace Media Matters, a second-generation Muslim immigrant with a zeal for suicide bombing is as much of an immigration issue as a first-generation immigrant with a terrorist bent. The fact that second-generation immigrants are not assimilating into Western culture makes immigration policy more, not less, of a pressing matter. It is absurd to suggest that Abedi picked up his terrorist leanings from reading William Shakespeare and William Wordsworth, rather than from the ideology of radical Islam that has been imported into Britain by mass immigration.

The Washington Post, too, editorialized that “defenders of vulnerable immigrants and asylum seekers, who in Britain as elsewhere in the West remain the targets of populist demagogues, could take some comfort from the fact that the assault apparently did not originate with those communities.” Well, where did the assault originate from — Buckingham Palace?

Since liberals and progressives will not allow a rethinking of open borders policy, perhaps they would support improved intelligence capacity so as to detect terror attacks in the planning stages? Nope. The Left still decries the modest expansions of surveillance power under the 2001 Patriot Act as the work of totalitarianism. Former New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly sought to gather publicly available information about dense Muslim neighborhoods in New York in order to monitor potential radicalization; his discontinued initiative is still denounced as anti-Muslim oppression. Internet companies protect encrypted communications from government access, to the applause of civil libertarians and the mainstream media. The National Security Agency’s mass data analysis, done by unconscious computer algorithms, is still being challenged in court. …

So what does the progressive and liberal bloc offer? Treacly bromides, combined with fatalism about the necessity of adjusting to future attacks.

A day after Manchester, the Washington Post admonished: 

As nations across the West have learned, it is not possible to prevent all such terrorist attacks, especially when they are staged by homegrown militants. What is possible is a response that focuses on uniting rather than dividing a diverse society. That’s what was happening in Manchester on Tuesday, as thousands of people of all races and faiths gathered for a vigil in the city’s Albert Square. “I’m not here as a person with brown skin or someone born Muslim,” a man named Amir Shah told a Guardian reporter. “I’m here as a Mancunian.” If that spirit prevails, the terrorists will have failed.

No, the terrorists will have failed if they can no longer slaughter children. They don’t care if a terror attack is met with candlelight vigils; they care if border restrictions and law enforcement make it impossible to destroy lives.

The flip side of the Post’s “terrorists will have failed if we light candles” conceit is the ubiquitous meme that the “terrorists will have won” if we modify our intelligence strategies or immigration policies in any way. The New York Times editorialized after the Manchester bombing: “It is important to recognize this attack for what it is: an attempt to shake Britain — and, by extension, the rest of Europe and the West — to its core, and to provoke a thirst for vengeance and a desire for absolute safety so intense, it will sweep away the most cherished democratic values and the inclusiveness of diverse societies.” This response is narcissistic. The attack was an effort to kill British girls and their parents, period. The terrorists win every time they pull off such massacres. They are not monitoring the legislative process and plotting how to move the needle on Western security protections in a way contrary to their own self-interest. If a society were exclusively Christian, Jewish, or even Muslim, it would be just as much the target of attack by ISIS or al-Qaida as a more “diverse” society.

Besides which, diversity per se is NOT a cherished value of the West. It is a suicidal policy of the Left. Western nations could and did accept newcomers of diverse origins if the immigrants were ready to live under the law of their hosts and were eager to be assimilated. But diversity in itself was not seen as a supremely good thing until the Left became obsessed with race and racism.

Moreover, how would the New York Times distinguish a terror attack that seeks to “sweep away . . . the inclusiveness of diverse societies” from one that was merely intended to kill? Any terror attack carries some chance (albeit an increasingly de minimis one) that it will result in a tightening of immigration or security policies, but that does not mean that such tightening is the goal of the attack.

Perhaps aware that the “candlelight vigil” strategy for fighting terrorism may seem a little wan, progressives make passing reference to actual security measures, but couched in such broad terms as to be almost meaningless. And they are only faking it, because those security measures would violate core tenets of progressive ideology. …

The [New York] Times says .. it is … “critical that immigrants, especially Muslims, are not stigmatized” … “understanding is critical” and [it] inveighs against “whipping up divisive ethnic, racist and religious hatreds”.

Here’s painful irony. The bien pensants of the Left, whose organ is the New York Times, are themselves passionately dedicated, heart-mind-hand-and-voice, to “whipping up divisive ethnic, racist and religious hatreds”.   

When it comes to terrorism … a country is apparently not allowed to say: “Enough is enough, the status quo is not working, we need to rethink the policies that have allowed this mayhem to flourish.” …

The writer asks why the emotions triggered by the attack, “horror, anger, sadness, fear, revulsion”, should not be politicized. We agree with her that they should be. Why should we pretend not to be afraid of Muslim terrorism? We are terrorized. Political action needs to be taken against those who are terrorizing us. 

Islamic terrorism in the West is an immigration problem. Until we have the law enforcement and intelligence capacity to detect terror plots, immigration policy has to change, both in Europe and in the U.S. …

The immigration of Third World barbarians – in particular Muslim barbarians – needs to be STOPPED.

The United States must not end up in the same situation. We need lower immigration levels and much tighter screening. The Manchester bombing vindicated President Donald Trump’s March 2017 executive order briefly limiting travel to the U.S. from half a dozen ISIS- and al-Qaida-riven countries, including Libya, while the administration reviews security screening in those countries. Yet three days after Manchester, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down that order, claiming that it “drips with religious intolerance, animus and discrimination”. This judicial crusade against Trump’s travel pause cripples the executive’s ability to protect the country from attack, by exporting phantom constitutional rights to the world.  Progressives’ passivity in the face of Islamic terrorism is not a consistent philosophy. It is rather the outcome of their commitment to open borders at any cost. That ideology has taken too many lives and must be overcome.

Yes, it must be overcome. But how?

The mailed answers never arrive. Or the wind blows them away.

Mark Steyn speaks of the millions of despairing Americans for whom “there is no next”, and are forgotten by the the Democrats, the Republicans, the commentariate – by all except Donald Trump.

Mark Steyn’s knowledge, insight, analysis, and his gift for effortless, simple, apt and witty expression make him a unique treasure of our time. 

(Hat-tip Robert Kantor)

The elections in the Netherlands have not brought Geert Wilders and his party to power, as we hoped they would.

But his campaign, chiefly concerned with saving his country from Islamization, has had a permanent effect on Dutch and European politics.

In order to hold on to power, Mark Rutte – then and now again prime minister – had to display a sudden resolve in dealing with the Muslim threat … well that’s not exactly how it was described, but anyway with the Turks in the Netherlands, and Turkey itself.

Robert Mackey wrote at The Intercept on the day before the election:

Pre-election polls in the Netherlands, one day before voters choose a new parliament, suggest that Prime Minister Mark Rutte could be returned to office as the head of the country’s largest party, boosted by a wave of approval for his feud with Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Rutte, who is trying to stave off a challenge from the virulently anti-Muslim xenophobe Geert Wilders, provoked fury from the Turkish government on Saturday by blocking Turkey’s foreign minister from the country. The foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, had planned to rally expatriate Turks in Rotterdam, ahead of an upcoming referendum in Turkey that would alter the Turkish constitution to give the office of the presidency more power.

Geert Wilders is not a “xenophobe”. That is the nasty name his enemies call him, they being the ruling elite of the Netherlands and the other European countries who have brought hordes of hostile Muslims into Europe to be a criminal threat and a financial drain. He is “anti-Muslim” in the sense that he does not want that suicidal policy to continue. (“Virulently” is thrown in to make Wilders, his Party, and his policies seem utterly disgusting and terrifying. It implies, “I, the politically correct journalist writing this piece, hate Geert Wilders and all he stands for.”)

After Rutte barred the foreign minister, and then expelled another Turkish minister who arrived in Rotterdam by car without permission, Erdogan first compared the Dutch to Nazis and then blamed them for the massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in 1995.

That massacre was, in fact, carried out by Bosnian Serb forces who overran the town, but a lightly-armed battalion of Dutch peacekeepers did fail to prevent the slaughter.

Images of the Dutch police using water cannon and dogs to disperse protests by Erdogan supporters in Rotterdam angered Turkish officials, but appeared to please the tabloid press and its readers in the Netherlands.

The Dutch pollster Maurice de Hond reported that 86 percent of those surveyed supported Rutte’s handling of the crisis, including an identical number of Wilders supporters.

As tensions between the two countries continued to escalate, members of President Erdogan’s ruling party beat a Norwegian journalist in Istanbul they mistook for a Dutch national, and Prime Minister Rutte told the BBC the Turkish leader’s comments were “more and more hysterical by the day”.

Wilders, a former member of Rutte’s center-right VVD party [Party for Freedom and Democracy] who now campaigns almost exclusively on a hatred of Islam — and praised Donald Trump’s efforts to ban Muslims from the United States — helped to stoke anti-Turkish sentiment last week, when he appeared outside the Turkish embassy in The Hague, surrounded by his bodyguards, and holding a banner that read: “Stay Away — This Is Our Country”.

Islam is a totalitarian, supremacist ideology. Everyone should hate it. And the reason Geert Wilders has those bodyguards – which the writer seems to be mocking him for, as if he were guilty of paranoia or cowardice – is that his life has been seriously threatened by you-can-guess-whom.

After Rutte’s crackdown on Erdogan supporters seemed to increase his popularity, Wilders tried to up the ante, calling for the Turkish ambassador to the Netherlands to be expelled along with his entire staff.

In response, Rutte told Wilders during a televised debate on Monday night that there was “a difference between tweeting from a couch and leading the country”. Wilders’ desire to escalate the confrontation even further, Rutte said, showed that he was not fit to lead the country.

In polling conducted after the start of the crisis, Rutte’s center-right party, the VVD, appeared to gain in projected vote-share, and seemed likely to emerge as the largest party in the next parliament, as the Wilders-led PVV [Party for Freedom] slipped to second in one poll and as far as fifth in another.

Buoyed by this surge in support, Rutte told the BBC correspondent Gabriel Gatehouse on Tuesday that he expected to defeat Wilders and keep the Netherlands from following in the footsteps of Britain and the United States by handing power to anti-immigrant extremists.

Despite a large number of undecided voters on the eve of the election, the Dutch system of proportional representation, combined with a splintering of support among a dozen or more parties, makes it likely that no one party will take more than 20 percent of the overall vote for the 150-seat parliament.

Even if the polls are off, and Wilders does emerge as the leader of the largest party, political analysts put his chances of leading the next coalition government at “the square root of not much” …

Well, now the election has been held.

Daniel Greenfield at Front Page tells “the real story of the Dutch election”:

The truly final results will only be known next week. But the current numbers show that the Freedom Party [led by Geert Wilders] has become the second largest political party in Parliament having gained five seats while the Labor Party has disastrously lost 29 seats.

Labor hit a post-war low. The media is spinning this as Prime Minister Rutte’s defeat of Geert Wilders, but the Labor half of the Second Rutte Cabinet just went up in flames. VVD [led by Mark Rutte] lost quite a few seats, but remains the largest party only because so much of the overall vote had dissipated. Rutte will now have to awkwardly build an unstable coalition out of four parties just to avoid dealing with Wilders.

It is quite possible though that Rutte will be trading the somewhat moderate Labor for GroenLinks [Green Left] which was formed out of, among others, the Communist Party of the Netherlands. When the media cheers that the “moderates” have defeated that terrible extremist, Geert Wilders, what they aren’t mentioning is that the alternative “moderate” coalitions may include the daughter party of the Communist Party.

The election was, in a sense, always rigged. The political system of the Netherlands fragments the vote and then puts it back together in government coalitions. The demonization of Wilders and the PVV was meant to ensure that even if his political party had won a majority, it would not have been allowed to form a government. And so Wilders won more by being in the second spot than by achieving the majority that some polls had predicted, while leaving the PVV unable to form a government.

Despite the attempts to kill it, smear it and destroy it, the Freedom Party continues to rise. And its enemies are being forced to respond to its ideas. The dangerous campaign by Turkey’s Islamist butcher, complete with threats and intimidation, helped Rutte salvage his government. But not his coalition.

The centrist politics that made Rutte’s government possible are imploding. The decline of Rutte’s VVD and Labor is an unmistakable rejection of the status quo. The gains in this election flowed to parties further out on the spectrum on the right and the left. The traditionally moderate Dutch are losing their patience. The polarization is eliminating the center and replacing it with some hard choices. …

Wilders had spoken of a “Patriotic Spring” sweeping the West. After the election, he said that the election results were a thing to be proud of. “The Patriotic Spring continues onward. And it has only begun.”

The media’s celebrations may also be badly misguided for another reason. In the wake of Brexit, the media largely forgot how it had mocked UKIP and [its leader] [Nigel] Farage as failures. But a political party doesn’t always have to win elections to have an impact. Rigging the system against UKIP didn’t keep the UK in the EU. Instead it ultimately had the opposite effect. Keeping Wilders and the PVV down may backfire.

Geert Wilders has fundamentally changed the conversation about Islam and immigration. And the political parties of the Netherlands are increasingly reacting to him. Wilders took an election in a country whose political shifts are generally of little interest to those living outside it and made it a matter of international interest. His courage and common sense have made him into a world leader.

Wilders had the courage to defy the assassins and murderers, the politically correct scolds and the bleeding hearts, the pallid men and women who counsel moderation in all things and at all times, to tell the truth about Islam and Islamic migration. That is what he will go on doing even as he lives under threat. And his courage inspires opponents of the Jihad in the Netherlands and around the world.

This election was an erosion of faith in the establishment and a show of support for Wilders. To become Prime Minister Wilders, the PVV will either need a truly massive victory or a fundamental change in the political environment. Wilders understands this. He knows that the role of his party is to fight a failing establishment. Everything he does builds support and momentum for either of the two roads.

The media is cheering a defeat that never happened. And just as with Brexit, it may find that it had overlooked the seeds of its own destruction in the dirty politics of its own making.

“This patriotic revolution,” Geert Wilders said, “whether today or tomorrow, will take place anyway.”

We fervently hope it will – in the Netherlands and other European countries. If it does not, Europe will be lost to the hideous tyranny of Islam.

Many environmentalists say the world is over-populated.

Yet the entire population of the world could fit into one building covering just a part of (say) the city of New York.

We wrote yesterday that a century of Leftism is coming to an end. (See the post immediately below, End of an atrocious era). The death throes can be seen in France, where the Socialist Party is about to lose power.

This is from PowerLine, by Paul Mirengoff:

The French Socialist party held its primary [on January 22] in the race to succeed Francois Hollande as the party’s standard bearer. Hollande’s presidency has been such a disaster that he declined to stand for re-election.

Former education minister Benoit Hamon came in first with around 36 percent of the vote. He will face former prime minister Manuel Valls, who captured around 31 percent of the vote.

Hamon is a left-winger. He represents what the BBC calls “the angry, radical wing of the Socialist party.” Apparently, his central policy idea is a guaranteed minimum income.

Valls is a centrist by French Socialist standards, anyway. As prime minister, he tried to implement a somewhat pro-business agenda. He also declared that France is at war with radical Islam and stated that if Jews flee France in large numbers, “France will no longer be France” and “the French Republic will be judged a failure.”

Unfortunately, Hamon has a very clear edge in the run-off. The third-place finisher, left-winger Arnaud Montebourg, is backing him. Combined, Hamon and Montebourg received more than 50 percent of the primary vote.

Valls has characterized the run-off as a choice “between an assured defeat [in the general election] and possible victory”. He’s right, I think, that defeat is assured if Hamon is the Socialist candidate. But it is probably a reach to say that victory is possible under Valls.

The big question is whether the Socialist candidate can finish second in the general election and thus make the runoff against against Francois Fillon, the closest thing to a Reagan-Thatcher conservative, at least when it comes to economic policy, ever nominated by a major party in France. Standing in the way is Marine Le Pen of the National Front party, a right-wing ultra-nationalist outfit. As far as I can tell, most observers expect that it will be Fillon vs. Le Pen in the runoff.

The bigger story here may be the collapse, at least for now, of socialist parties throughout Europe.

So Mirengoff cautiously allows for a resurrection of Socialism. We concede that its specter may haunt the world for ages yet, but we do not foresee it reigning again.

He quotes an article by Alissa Rubin in the New York Times:

The collapse of the establishment left in France is hardly a unique phenomenon. Across Europe, far-right populist parties are gaining strength, including in France, while the mainstream left, which played a central role in building modern Europe, is in crisis.

From Italy to Poland to Britain and beyond, voters are deserting center-left parties, as leftist politicians struggle to remain relevant in a moment when politics is inflamed by anti-immigrant, anti-European Union anger. …

In Italy, constituencies that used to routinely back the center-left Democratic Party are turning to the new anti-establishment Five Star Movement, which is Euroskeptic and anti-globalization …

Rubin quotes a professorial view:

“Wherever you look in Europe the Socialists are not doing well, with the exception of Portugal,” said Philippe Marlière, a professor of French and European politics at University College London. …

And Mirengoff comments, “Europe is in a state of tremendous flux and possibly a state of crisis.”

It is definitely in a state of crisis. At this critical moment in their history, Europeans have to choose between letting the socialist parties (a category that includes the parties calling themselves “conservative”) continue in power, which means the preservation of the European Union and the Islamization of the continent; or saving their nation states, their identity, their culture, their law, their heritage, their traditions, their liberty – in short, their civilization – by supporting the populist parties indiscriminately labeled “far-right” by the establishment and the media.

The outlook is brightening for the populist parties since Donald Trump won the US presidency. His success has invigorated them. Chances are they will soon win power in France, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy … and eventually even in Portugal.

End of the Marxist Left. 100 years. 1917-2017.

We date the century of Marxism from the Russian Revolution in 1917 to the success of the American counter-revolution in 2017, because we see Donald Trump’s election to the presidency of the United States – the most powerful position in the world – as the coup de grâce for the atrocious era.

The idea that people should be organized by governments and that the collective is more important than the individual has proved in practice to be a bad one. The experiment took the lives of hundreds of millions of individuals.

The Marxist Left has failed. The ideology that energized it is discredited. There will be no new Communist states.

Those who still believe that their lives should be ordered and sustained by government – regardless of the high price that must be paid by the loss of their freedom – are sure to find the change hard to accept.

However, Donald Trump’s movement is spreading. It has inspired and encouraged new political parties in Europe, and they are gaining strength. They want a “Europe of nations and liberty”.

     A meeting of the leaders of populist European parties

The parties still in power see that a change is happening, fear it, but do not understand it. They had a vision of a united states of Europe – which they tried to implement through the creation of the disastrous European Union – and ultimately a united states of the world. They wanted to abolish nations. They wanted a mingling of peoples. They invited the Third World, in particular Muslims, to come to Europe.

And all round them rebellious voices, growing ever louder, are demanding a return to nationhood, to secure borders, to self-determination, to individual freedom – to resisting the encroachment of Islam.

It seems that just one European politician in power “gets it”:

Breitbart reports:

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier says U.S. President Donald Trump’s election marks the end of an era, and Berlin will move quickly to secure “close and trusting trans-Atlantic cooperation based on common values” with the new administration. Steinmeier wrote in Bild newspaper on Sunday that “with the election of Donald Trump, the old world of the 20th century is finally over” and “how the world of tomorrow will look is not settled.” He says with any power change there are “uncertainties, doubts and question marks”, but a lot more is at stake “in these times of a new global disorder”.  Steinmeier says he will promote free trade and joint efforts against extremism with Washington. He added he’s certain Germany will “find interlocutors in Washington who know big countries also need partners”.

He will go to President Trump. He will speak of partnership and trade. But what he will really be seeking is enlightenment. And unless he is truly willing to yield power to the people, he will hear nothing for his comfort.

The “Women’s March”, organized to protest against Donald Trump’s rise to power, is glaring proof that the Left no longer knows what it is for.

Most of the marchers could only name what they were against: “Trump”.

Who funded the march? Some 50 of the participating groups are funded by the subversive George Soros.

Only one of the organizers of the American march knew exactly what she wanted.

The Gatestone Institute says of her:

Linda Sarsour [is] a self-described ‘Brooklyn-born Palestinian-American-Muslim racial justice and civil rights activist’, who serves as “the Executive Director of the Arab American Association of New York, co-founder of Muslims for Ferguson, and a member of Justice League NYC”,  her march bio relates.

She is working for the establishment of Sharia law in America. She tweeted:

Her following carried this banner:

And wore hijabs made out of the American flag:

But as yet Islam is not a serious threat to America itself. The Islamic State needs to be destroyed, and President Trump has declared his intention to crush it.

In Europe, the rulers of the old order will be overthrown and replaced. Europe will return to being a continent of nation states. Then the new leaders must deal with Islam, the enemy the Left let in.

As the Marxist Left was the terror of the last century, Islam will be the terror of the 21st. century. It is a barbarism that must be opposed and defeated by Western civilization – now recovering its strength and self-confidence.