A Tunisian man has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for raping two young women after posing as a tattoo artist and luring them to an isolated farmhouse near Milan.
As reported by Il Giorno, the victims had met at a residential center for troubled girls and formed a close friendship. The younger girl, who was 17, wanted the name of her 18-year-old friend tattooed on her arm as a symbol of their bond.
The pair met the 33-year-old man in Milan last spring after he claimed he could carry out the tattoo. Instead, he took them to a farmhouse, where he assaulted them and held a knife to the throat of one of the victims during the attack.
The prosecution had sought a 14-year prison term, but an Italian court handed down a 10-year sentence at a preliminary hearing in Milan following an expedited trial. The court also ordered the defendant to pay an interim award of €25,000 to each victim.
The man had been arrested in Spain and is now being held in Milan’s San Vittore prison.
After the verdict was delivered, he began protesting loudly inside and outside the courtroom. Speaking in Arabic, he complained about the severity of the sentence and shouted that it amounted to “death” for him.
France’s Rassemblement National (RN) leader Marine Le Pen has accused Hungary’s government of undermining the rule of law, warning that democratic principles are being eroded, with the “blessing” of those who believe to be in the “camp of the good.” She added that new prime minister, Péter Magyar is “protected by the European Commission.”
The comments were made in response to recent developments involving Hungary’s main opposition party, Fidesz. On Tuesday, July 21st, prosecutors arrived without prior notice at a facility hosting Fidesz’s servers and seized the party’s communications systems and databases.
In a statement shared on X, Le Pen said that “violations of the rule of law in Hungary are multiplying” and argued that democracy “does not belong to any camp,” adding
It has only rules, and those rules are being trampled on by Hungary’s new Prime Minister, who is protected by the European Commission.
Les violations de l’État de droit se multiplient en Hongrie avec la bénédiction de ceux qui se pensent dans le « camp du bien ».
La démocratie, elle, n’a pas de camp. Elle a juste des règles que le nouveau Premier ministre hongrois, protégé de la Commission européenne, est en… https://t.co/WMeG7aLEWy
Le Pen’s commented on the state of democracy in Hungary by sharing a tweet by Fidesz MEP Kinga Gál, co-chair of the Patriots for Europe group in the EP, of which RN is also a member, who accused the Hungarian authorities of using legal measures against the country’s largest opposition party.
Gál described the prosecutors’ conduct as “unprecedented” since Hungary’s democratic transition in 1990.
Gál argued that, after failing to weaken Fidesz politically, the Tisza government is now attempting to undermine the party through legal means. She said
In a democratic state governed by the rule of law, this is unacceptable.
The criticism from Patriots comes after several other instances of legally shaky steps pushed by the Magyar government that we have extensively reported on.
Kelvin Mackenzie, Britain’s most famous tabloid newspaper editor, interviews New Culture Forum Senior Fellow Rafe Heydel-Mankoo on Andy Burnham’s appointment as Prime Minister. This interview was recorded for Kelvin’s show on the exciting new YouTube channel UK LIVE.
In ten, twenty, or thirty years’ time, we won’t be able to tell our children – or our grandchildren, or ourselves for the longest-lived and luckiest among us – that we didn’t see it coming.
Spain is the emblematic case of tactical success within the best definition of “decadence” – that of Ross Douthat of The New York Times in his book The Decadent Society. Douthat’s thesis, in short, is that Western civilization is decadent without being doomed to collapse.
The question is the one posed by the Algerian novelist Kamel Daoud: “Why does the heart of the Arabs tend to support Spain in the 2026 World Cup final? Spain as an icon of the ‘Arabs’, of Muslims and Palestinians. Sánchez, an anti-Westerner in the heart of the West?”
Spain’s economy is galloping better than others (estimated growth of 2.6 percent, driven by consumption, services, and record tourism levels). The country dominates all the sports that bring glory and money (it is number one in football, tennis, and motorcycling) and, aside from the brazen corruption of the left in power, it is envied by many in Europe.
But at what price? Spain wins in the short term but hands the long term over to those who never accepted the defeat of 1492.
When a country is for sale, it begins to sell its foreign policy.
When Iran requested an urgent UN debate to condemn the United States and Israel, China, Cuba, Russia, North Korea and… Spain joined the vote. Yes, Spain.
In Europe, Spain is the asset of the Chinese regime.
Spain has not only armed Iran. It has sided with Tehran in the war, and Iran has thanked Spain.
Spain buys weapons from Erdogan’s Turkey. Hamas has praised Spain.
If Madrid were not in Europe, one would say it is more like a Middle Eastern emirate.
The price of the sale is well known. The peninsula that stopped Islamic expansion at the gates of Europe is transforming, with postmodern elegance, into the financial outpost of regimes that do not hide their expansionist ambitions.
In 2022, Qatar announced 5 billion in investments in Spain. Since then, the flow has not stopped. Another 327 million from Qatar for “sustainability.” And before that, another billion into a joint fund.
Then another two billion from Oman.
While Spain aligned itself, in international forums, with actors hostile to the West – Iran, Hamas, China and other authoritarian regimes – it welcomed capital that brings with it worldviews incompatible with the legacy of the Reconquista. The peninsula that managed to expel the Jews in 1492, also ended eight centuries of Islamic rule and ushered in the European Atlantic era. It now seems to be reopening its doors, not with the sword but with contracts and demographic flows.
Just read El Mundo:
“It is almost impossible to trace the path of petrodollars in our country, but it is estimated that current investments in Spain may amount to around 20 billion euros in active investments. Of what is on the table, of what is ultimately visible, the four largest economies of the Persian Gulf account for more than 10 billion euros just in listed Spanish companies.”
Spain, which was invaded by Muslims in 711 AD and remained under Islamic rule for eight centuries, is returning to Al-Andalus.
Will they succeed with money and demography? I do not rule it out.
Demography.
The New York Times seizes the opportunity to praise Lamine Yamal as the face of the “new Spain”: Muslim, son of Moroccans, multicultural. “In the last five years, more than four million immigrants have arrived in Spain, a country of fewer than 50 million inhabitants. This year, more than one million immigrants have come out of the shadows after the government invited them to regularize their status.”
Spain’s plan to naturalize illegal migrants will be “the largest measure in European history.” 1.3 million applications have been submitted, more than double the 500,000 expected by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez.
1.3 million out of 49 million inhabitants: if this is not the Great Replacement, it is very close to it.
And then El Mundo speaks of 3 million regularizations.
And we Europeans will all pay the consequences. Do we only remember Schengen when it suits us?
Spain – together with Italy and Greece – is the spearhead of the collapse of the birth rate in Western Europe. Today in Spain there are 1,027 villages with no children under the age of five. This is not taken from a film, but from an article in El País. 13 percent of Spanish municipalities have not registered a single birth since January 1, 2012. And 633 municipalities in Spain have no children under the age of eleven. In 420 municipalities there is not a single inhabitant under the age of fifteen.
Leader in tourism, Spain has turned sun, coasts, culture, and nightlife into a powerful industry. Barcelona, Madrid, the Costa del Sol, and the islands generate wealth. But this success reveals a great fragility: the country has become a “theme park” for foreigners (Arabs, Chinese, Russians) with a dependence on unstable global flows. Tourism exalts the hedonistic exteriority of the country, while the interior depopulates. It is a “picture-postcard country” economy that lives off past identity rent without renewing it biologically.
Barcelona and Madrid shine, the coasts teem, sporting successes feed a national pride that masks the demographic void.
Sánchez dismisses any “humanitarian” argument and admits that mass immigration has the sole purpose of demographic replacement: “Without immigration, Spain would lose 19 percent of its GDP by 2050 and 22 percent by 2075. While others use migration for political purposes, we are implementing a migration policy.”
No longer rhetoric, but a crude admission: without massive migratory flows, the social model implodes. A declared demographic engineering that trades cultural cohesion for quantitative growth.
An “American” model applied with a Mediterranean flavor: import labor to sustain welfare and consumption. It works, at least in the short term.
In 2025, the Muslim population in Spain is around 2.5 million.
With a net immigration of 300,000 Muslims per year and an average fertility rate close to 2.9 children per woman (compared to 1.2 for the rest of the population), the projection for 2050 is clear: 11 million Muslims out of a total population of 55.8 million.
That is 20 percent of the national population.
This is not speculation: it is a scenario in line with Pew Research Center projections and the latest Eurostat data.
Spain is winning the GDP race by paying the price of explicit replacement.
The signs are everywhere.
“The Monumental de Barcelona converted into a Mosque.”
This is not a joke. It is the proposal of Hasan Izquierdo, a convert to Islam and mayoral candidate for Barcelona for the Andalusian Party, an Islamist formation that aims to reconvert Spain into Al-Andalus.
All this in a country that regained its freedom through arms – the Reconquista that ended in 1492 and represents its national epic. Without it, Spain would today be nothing more than an appendage of Morocco.
From 720, Muslims crossed the Pyrenees and conquered southern France. They were stopped at Tours and Poitiers by the Franks of Charles Martel. The Carolingian dynasty and the Holy Roman Empire began. The liberation of the Iberian peninsula had started from the small Christian kingdom in the north of Spain, which, with Pelayo, had resisted the Muslims.
Islam has not changed. The Christian world has.
The number of Islamic places of worship in Spain has doubled in five years, reaching 1,400 (excluding private prayer rooms), twice the 700 of 2021.
From Salt, “the Spanish city with more mosques than Catholic churches,” to Catalonia, where in ten years the number of mosques has gone from 55 to 292, to Melilla, the first Spanish city to exceed 50 percent Muslim population since the Reconquista, the numbers are reversing.
The Spanish newspaper La Razón has accused Gulf funders, such as Qatar, of being a source of the Islamization of Spain.
The president of the European Jewish Congress, Ariel Muzicant, has meanwhile told Jews that it is better if they avoid Spain.
After five centuries, it is the return of Al-Andalus.
Western decadence, as Douthat intuited, is not collapse but a golden twilight in which tactical successes – GDP, medals, investments – hide the loss of the collective soul.
The question is whether the country still possesses the spiritual and demographic energy for a new Reconquista – not armed, but cultural and biological. Or whether, fascinated by its own elegant and corrupt decline, it will prefer to become a province of a soft caliphate financed by oil and legitimized by the global left.
The question is not whether it works, but what will remain of this sick Western organism that takes stimulants.
Content Notice: This article contains descriptions of child sexual abuse as described incourt documents which may be disturbing to some readers. Reader discretion is advised.
Disturbing new details have emerged in the horrific case of a trans-identified male babysitter accused of sexually assaulting a baby in Tacoma, Washington. Additional charges have been filed against William Kelso Flournoy IV, who uses the name “Isabelle,” after it was reveled that he may have also sexually abused the infant’s siblings, who appear to have been taught to refer to Flournoy as a “woman.”
As previously reported by Reduxx, Flournoy was first charged with first-degree rape of a child and sexual exploitation of a minor in March after Tacoma police received a “priority 1” level CyberTip from Google. The tip had flagged a photo uploaded through one of Google’s services described as depicting an “adult man, on his knees with a small infant in front of him.” The man, whose face was not visible in the photo, was penetrating the infant girl vaginally using his penis.
Detectives identified Flournoy as the male in the photo using both an IP address associated with the CyberTip, and by comparing identifying physical features noted from the child sexual abuse image. A detective confirmed that Flournoy had “two distinct moles” on his hands which had been clearly visible in the photo.
While in custody, detectives were able to locate the infant victim’s family by monitoring Flournoy’s jail phone calls. At one point, Flournoy called who would later be identified as the mother of the victim to admit he had been arrested for “sending something that I shouldn’t have.” Investigators later connected the number Flournoy called to an active CPS investigation, and located the victim’s family using Flournoy’s social media.
Once the victim’s parents were contacted, police were able to confirm it was their 4-month-old baby daughter in the photo by showing them a series of censored child abuse images taken from Flournoy’s devices.
The victim’s father told investigators that both he and the child’s mother had been working two jobs to make ends meet in 2023, when the incident is said to have occurred. He claimed that the struggling family, which was living in a motel at the time, had known Flournoy well, and had invited him and his partner to move in and help babysit the children while they worked.
A transgender pedophile in Tacoma, Washington, has been arrested on charges of raping a 6-month-old baby girl.
William "Isabelle" Kelso Flournoy IV was previously a volunteer with a local youth homelessness charity.https://t.co/KQjHmVyHb5
At the time of the initial arrest, Flournoy was already under investigation after being accused in a separate case of possessing and dealing child sexual abuse material. Documents related to that case state that files found on Flournoy’s Google account included what investigators described as ‘voyeuristic-style’ photos of clothed females ages 12–18, and video of Flournoy masturbating on the steps of a homeless shelter for youth in Tacoma. In total, there were 6 other CyberTip reports associated with his digital accounts.
Earlier this year, police stated that they intended to conduct interviews with the other children that had been present in the residence when Flournoy had been tasked with babysitting, both of whom are the infant victim’s siblings.
Those interviews are now complete, and Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Ivy-Rose Kramer has updated the charges against Flournoy to include child molestation in the first degree.
According to a supplemental declaration for determination of probable cause filed on June 16, Kramer noted that a sexually abusive photo had been found in Flournoy’s possession depicting the infant victim’s sibling. The girl, who would have been just 3 years old at the time the image was taken, was photographed “with her shirt pulled up and her bottom-half naked.”
During her forensic interview, the girl, now 6 years old, disclosed multiple instances of sexual abuse by Flournoy.
The child revealed that Flournoy had “peed” in her mouth while at a playground, and that the bodily fluid had made her ill, sending Flournoy into an apparent rage.
“[Victim] referred to Flournoy’s private parts as his ‘long thing’ and ‘yaya.’ [Victim] also mentioned a time where Flournoy urinated on her ‘tummy.’ [Victim] described Flournoy urinating out of his ‘long thing’ and mentioned it being yellow. I noticed that [Victim] went from being very hyper and jumping around to much more reserved while telling this story,” reads the forensic interviewer’s report.
When asked about her feelings towards Flournoy, the child described him as “kind, beautiful, I love her so much, will be on her side forever,” using feminine pronouns for him and referring to him as her “aunt.”
From the forensic interview with one of the child victims.
During the girl’s interview, she also disclosed that she had seen Flournoy physically assault her brother, something that was confirmed by the boy during a separate forensic interview. The boy, who would have been approximately 5 years old at the time of the incidents, disclosed that Flournoy had aggressively “kicked” him and had touched his genitals with his mouth.
As previously reported by Reduxx, Flournoy claimed to be a “youth advocate” on his Facebook profile, and he operated multiple social media accounts under the name Isabelle. On X, Flournoy followed multiple transgender pornography accounts, as well as engaged with racialized pornography that fetishized themes of white inferiority and the “black new world order.”
When the Tacoma Police Department searched Flournoy’s place of residence, officers found that he was in possession of a “baby’s binky,” a stuffed animal, and a child’s character plastic drinking cup. The investigator noted in his report that it “appears [Flournoy] is interested in infantilism.”
Flournoy previously volunteered with the Youth Action Board, a youth-led group connected to the REACH Center in Tacoma that provides input on issues affecting young people experiencing homelessness and housing instability.
Local media reports covering Flournoy’s arrest referred to him using “she/her” pronouns.
Flournoy is currently booked as a “male” inmate in the Pierce County Jail, but police reports included his alias as a “white female.”
Several people working in French ministerial offices and the wider state administration have been removed from their positions after testing positive for drugs, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has confirmed.
The revelation comes after Lecornu ordered an unprecedented campaign of surprise and mandatory saliva tests among ministerial staff, senior civil servants and officials with access to sensitive information.
“There have been positive tests, and people have been removed from their positions,” Lecornu said, without giving a precise number or identifying those involved.
“Members of ministerial cabinets and most senior officials have access to extremely sensitive information. To use drugs is to be vulnerable. And we cannot condemn the murders of 16-year-olds in the ‘neighborhoods’ and tolerate, at the same time, consumption in the ‘beautiful neighborhoods’,” the prime minister said in an interview with Paris Match, published on July 22.
“These controls will continue. The tests are random. And I have no doubt that my successors may go even further,” he added.
The Prime Minister had ordered the testing campaign in June as part of the government’s fight against drug trafficking and to strengthen what he called the state’s duty of “exemplarity”.
The tests were carried out among members of ministerial cabinets, certain senior officials and people holding sensitive positions, including in the defence and security sectors.
The government has refused to publish the results, citing medical confidentiality and the privacy of those tested.
“We are not a tribunal,” a source close to Lecornu said when the government announced that it would not disclose the number of positive tests or the identities of those concerned.
Lecornu’s announcement confirms that the campaign produced disciplinary consequences, after reports suggested that several hundred tests had been carried out and that people who tested positive could lose their positions.
The Prime Minister said the policy was intended to protect the state from the security risks associated with drug use among officials with access to sensitive information.
The campaign has nevertheless attracted criticism, with opponents questioning the legal basis for mandatory testing and the government’s decision to keep the results secret.
The French government has made the fight against drug trafficking a political priority as the country faces rising concern over organised crime and the spread of drug networks.
On Tuesday, authorities moved LR Mayor Christophe Rivenq to police protection after credible intelligence suggested an imminent attack by DZ Mafia, a prominent drug gang.
Earlier, several advisors and at least one senior official in the government were removed from their office after being involved with narcotics, triggering the tests.
Old Town Hall and St Sebastian’s Church (R) on Mannheim’s market square. Wikimedia Commons, Georg Buzin, CC-BY-SA-4.0
A man has been arrested after cutting down a flag pole with an LGBT rainbow flag in front of a Catholic church in Germany.
On July 13 at 6:45 p.m. local time, several witnesses saw a man use a saw to cut down the flag pole in front of the St. Sebastian church in Mannheim. The metal pole fell onto the market square, and no one was injured.
According to police, the perpetrator fled on foot afterwards.
The local police investigated the case as one of property damage and on Thursday arrested a 58-year-old man from Mannheim. The police did not publish any further information about the suspect or his motives.
The LGBT rainbow flag was put up by parish priest Father Lukas Glocker on the occasion of the local celebration of LGBT “pride month,” called “Monnem Pride.”
“The flag symbolizes that every person, regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity, background, religion, appearance, or skin color, should be treated with respect and dignity,” Glocker told Catholic News Agency (KNA).
As part of an ecumenical network, the Catholic parish of Mannheim participated in the “Monnem Pride” event for the third time this year. The motto was: “Love is good for the soul – hate harms the soul.”
The parish said in a statement that every human being is a creation of God and possesses an inalienable dignity and that the “rainbow flags in front of our churches are therefore a visible sign of our commitment to treating all people with respect and dignity.”
However, according to Catholic teaching, a necessary distinction must be made between the treatment of people who experience same-sex attraction and the practice of sodomy. According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, people with homosexual tendencies are to be treated “with respect, compassion, and sensitivity” (CCC 2358). At the same time, the Catechism states that homosexual acts are contrary to the natural law and are not to be approved (CCC 2357).
The LGBT “pride” movement encourages homosexual acts and transgender ideology, both of which are explicitly rejected by Church teaching. Erecting LGBT rainbow flags in front of Catholic churches signals adherence to a deeply anti-Catholic ideology.
At this junction, the Syrian man attacked the 65-year-old because of his Israel badge and seriously injured him. Google Maps
Horrific violence against a 65-year-old man in the Würzburg district! A 20-year-old Syrian is alleged to have beaten him up and seriously injured him simply because he was wearing a badge featuring the Israeli flag. The Public Prosecutor’s Office is investigating the case as attempted murder.
According to information obtained by the newspaper BILD, the Syrian man was standing next to the victim at a traffic light in Höchberg (Bavaria) in the early hours of Monday morning when he spotted the pin on the German man’s clothing. He is said to have initially spoken to him about it and then suddenly punched him in the face, whereupon the man tried to run away. However, the attacker caught up with him and knocked him to the ground.
The Syrian man is alleged to have kicked the victim repeatedly in the head and upper body until the police arrived. The 20-year-old then attacked the officers. Several patrol car crews were needed to arrest the 20-year-old. Police spokesperson Maximilian Basser said: “One police officer was slightly injured in the process.” Chief Public Prosecutor Sebastian Murrer confirmed information obtained by BILD, according to which the victim sustained a serious spinal injury: “In addition to numerous bruises, the 65-year-old suffered a fractured vertebra.”
According to Konstantin Mack (aged 29), chairman of the German-Israeli Society (DIG) in Würzburg, the victim is a member of the DIG. Mack told BILD: “We are deeply shocked. He is in intensive care. We hope he will not suffer any lasting damage. Further examinations will now have to show whether this is the case.”
The Public Prosecutor’s Office has classified the incident as attempted murder. The investigating judge in charge concurred with this assessment and issued an arrest warrant for the Syrian man, who was already known to the police as a violent offender. Hours earlier, he had been harassing visitors to the Höchberg market festival and had consequently been stopped by the police.
The DIG is calling for a rally against anti-Semitic violence on Würzburg’s market square this Friday at 5 pm: “We need to take a clear stand – on the streets, in political alliances and wherever anti-Zionism is presented as legitimate protest.”
The internal electronic communications of Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party were reportedly seized by criminal prosecutors on Tuesday, in a move the party has compared to the former communist regime in the country.
According to Budapest’s Blikk newspaper, the IT system of the nationalist-conservative Fidesz party was raided by prosecutors, who are reportedly set to examine the entirety of the opposition party’s electronic communications.
The paper reported that the party’s email system and website have been taken over by authorities and are currently inaccessible to party officials.
Blikk said that the raids on Tuesday are believed to be connected to an investigation into alleged misallocation of the National Cultural Fund (NKA), with claims that starting in 2024, some 17 billion forints ($53 million) were inappropriately handed out, allegedly including to members of Hunary’s artistic community with ties to the former Orbán government.
The raid came just days after the recently elected neo-liberal Tisza Party government of Prime Minister Péter Magyar forced President Tamás Sulyok, a political ally of Orbán, to resign from his office despite having three more years left of his term.
While Sulyok agreed to sign the amendment mandating his resignation, the former constitutional judge warned that the move by Magyar represented a “watershed” moment for Hungarian democracy.
“By removing public office holders in a manner that openly violates the rule of law… it sets a negative precedent that inflicts a deep wound on the constitutional values of democracy, the separation of powers and the rule of law,” he said per The Guardian.
The move to remove Sulyok from office came in the wake of the Magyar-led parliament passing legislation to impose term limits on the office of the prime minister.
Opponents noted that the legislation would bar only one person in the entire country from standing in the next election: former Prime Minister Orbán, the only living leader to have served multiple terms in office since the fall of the Berlin Wall. While Orbán was frequently accused of being a dictator by Western legacy media and establishment politicians, he stepped down peacefully from power on two occasions as well.
Commenting on the raids on Tuesday, the former prime minister’s political director, Balázs Orbán, said: “Nothing like this has happened in Hungary since the end of communism in 1990.”
“It is becoming increasingly clear that Hungary’s Brussels-backed liberal authoritarian Prime Minister intends to eliminate his democratic political opponents, crush all resistance to his arbitrary actions, and use the country’s law enforcement authorities as instruments to achieve that goal,” Orbán claimed.
“The question is simple: Will there still be free elections in Hungary, or will anyone who dares to run against the Tisza Party simply end up in prison? Aren’t the enlightened Western politicians and opinion leaders who support this even remotely ashamed?”
America’s hosting of the World Cup was clearly good for FIFA and the cause of promoting football (soccer) to Americans. The fact that hundreds of thousands of European fans also come home with a wider personal view of America may also prove to be good over the long term for conservative populists, too.
Europeans who travelled to watch their home countries’ squads had to go to parts of America few often visit. Games in Dallas, Houston, Atlanta and Kansas City brought fans to some of America’s largest and growing metropolitan areas, places with no traditional downtowns and utterly dependent upon automobiles. Even stadia in places like Boston, Philadelphia and New York are either in suburban locations like the cities mentioned above or are surrounded by massive parking lots to accommodate tens of thousands of cars.
Fans often were awed by the sheer size of these places. Every one of the 11 stadia which hosted matches could seat 64,000 or more fans. Only 24 stadia in all of Europe could accommodate that many, and many of those are not often used for club football. The American stadiums were also on average newer and had many more food and souvenir concession stands than their European cousins.
In short, simply attending the games themselves gave Europeans a glimpse of the massive wealth average Americans possess.
That impression would be cemented by any degree of travel outside of the areas around the venues. American houses are larger, with much more land surrounding them, than even nicer suburban areas. Cars are massive in the United States, with most people driving large trucks or sport utility vehicles that would be well beyond the capacity of middle-class Europeans to buy and operate. Shopping malls have a mixture of selection and consumer choice that few places in Europe can match.
The German traveller known by his X handle, @FreddyLA7, became an American sensation as he travelled throughout the country. He marvelled at the size of a Buc-ee’s gas station (they often have as many as 100 gas pumps along with a store that serves as a supermarket) along with the fact one could easily purchase rifles in many large stores. While he never mentioned it, he and other drivers surely noticed that petrol prices in the United States are between 50 and 66 per cent cheaper than in most of the European Union, too.
Tourists also noted how friendly many Americans were. Europeans who experience Americans abroad find them when many are uncertain and insecure, often not knowing their host country’s language or history. In their home milieu, though, Americans were open and accommodating to their guests. Those who expected snobbishness or impolite behaviour were surprised to find exactly the opposite.
These folks will now go home with a much clearer sense of what life in America is really like than any quick trip to a major tourist area or large American city can ever provide. They will know that Americans are nice, rich and free.
Conservative populist parties rarely say they want Europe to be more like America. But their platforms often call for lower taxes, freer economies and a devolution of power away from the stodgy bureaucracies that too often strangle European life in a maze of rules and papers. If these people liked what they saw in America, and the general reaction is that most did, they will have to ask themselves why they can’t have that life themselves.
Try as they might, the European establishment parties cannot satisfy that desire. Whether they are nominally left, centre or right, none embrace the emphasis on the consumer and the freedom of the average person that can ever approximate what the average American has. If the football tourists want what they experienced, they, and any of their friends and family they speak with, will have to look elsewhere when they vote.
That desire may not emerge overnight. But the more they compare the open, comfortable life they saw with the closed, stagnant lives too many have in Europe, they will likely want to see their homes look more like the US rather than humbly submit to the Eurocrats’ decrees.
A popular song in the US after the First World War asked, “How can you keep them down on the farm after they’ve seen Par-ee?” In a few years, wise Europeans will realise that they cannot keep their fellow countrymen down in the dumps after they’ve seen Buc-ee’s.
