Francesco Giubilei spoke to Remix News at CPAC Hungary 2023 as the director of the Italian conservative think tank Nazione Futura.
How is it to be a conservative now in Italy?
Italy is actually a rather conservative country. Compared with other Western European countries, people in Italy are more conservative, including many of those who do not define themselves as conservatives. Right now, we have not only a conservative cultural landscape but also a conservative political landscape. We have a conservative government that is quite good. And I think that it is important to start working on explaining what the values of conservative people are.
Would you say that Italy is now going the Hungarian and Polish way, with Giorgia Meloni at its head?
Western European countries have a different history from that of Central European countries. For sure, there are policies enforced by the governments of Hungary and Poland, like for example those in favor of the family and pro-natalist policies, that we need to enforce as well. But there are some policies that would be more difficult to have in Western Europe. Let us not forget that the idea of conservatism is always linked to all the national characteristics of a given country. That is why Latin conservatism is quite different from Central European conservatism, which is itself different from Anglo-American conservatism. So, it is important to try and find some conservative values in a different manner from country to country.
Francesco Giubilei (second from the right) speaks at CPAC Hungary 2023 during a panel discussion. (Source: Olivier Bault)
Talking about those conservative values that may differ from country to country, we are meeting at CPAC Hungary, the American and European conservative conference. I heard many sensitive things said here, but what is the point of meeting to say those things?
I think the point is to create a method. We start doing it with many European, but also American and Israeli think tanks and foundations. Our goal should be to find some common values and to have all of us defending those values in our respective countries. It is important if we want to be organized to fight the idea of political correctness and cancel culture, and not to be divided and isolated in our respective countries. We really need to find some common values and fight together to achieve good results.
At CPAC Hungary 2023, you took part in a panel discussion during which you talked about the cultural revolution and the fact that it has happened at least in big parts through schools and universities, with the left being very present in these areas. Do you think we can still reverse this cultural revolution?
It is a good question. What we should not try to do is to replace one cultural hegemony with another cultural hegemony. However, we must insist on the importance of freedom. A cultural counter-revolution could mean, for example, that the conservatives can have the opportunity to speak at big events that are not conservative ones. In our country, for example, there are many public state-sponsored events and when you look at the panels, there is no one from a conservative or a classical liberal or Catholic sphere, and this is not right. So what we have to do is to try to underline what is important to freedom in society and in politics. Bringing back freedom of speech in this present cultural moment would be in itself a kind of revolution.
What about the media in Italy? Is it diverse or is it dominated by the Left like in Germany, France and Spain?
We have many media outlets in Italy, including many conservative ones. We have conservative newspapers and magazines and some conservative TV channels, but generally speaking, the mainstream media in Italy also has a left-wing bias. Like all over Western Europe, the media outlets that present themselves as neutral are in fact more likely to be liberal.
During your panel discussion, you also talked about freedom having to be defended. Is freedom threatened in Italy?
Compared to other West European countries, Italy is in a good situation because people in Italy reject many crazy woke ideas. Italy too is at the center of an effort to spread political correctness and woke ideas, but this is not accepted by a majority of people. I do not know what the situation will be in 20 years or 30 years from now, but presently the situation in Italy is not like, for example, in Belgium or in France, and we also do not have problems of the same scale with immigration.
There is an evolution in a bad direction. I believe, however, that having a conservative government, this can be stopped and we, as conservative think tanks and foundations, can also contribute to reversing the trend.
You are yourself the chairman of Nazione Futura. What is Nazione Futura?
It is one of those conservative think tanks and foundations. It was created in 2017, and we now have more than 70 circles throughout Italy, in many towns and cities where we organize events and conferences. We are doing the same work that is normal for American and English think tanks but which is not very often encountered on the conservative side in Italy. Our idea is to create links with politicians and the cultural world in order to spread ideas and values that we think are part of a conservative view of society.
An upstate New York printing company on a no-bid contract mailed out voter registration cards to New York’s Nassau County voters ahead of the June 27 primary — and somehow, everyone who got one is now a registered Democrat.
That’s weird stuff given that 60% of the registered voters in that county are Republican. Well, now they are all Democrats, at least until “corrected” registration cards can be mailed out.
Hey, just a flub, they’re saying. Nothing to see here, move along.
An upstate printer has once again screwed up downstate election materials, this time by mailing registration cards to Nassau County’s nearly 1 million voters — identifying them all as Democrats.
“It’s a terrible error. People are upset. People are angry. There is a lot of confusion,” GOP County Executive Bruce Blakeman seethed at a Tuesday press conference.
Democrats make up about 40 percent of the county’s 972,000 voters, according to state Board of Election records from February.
Blakeman, though, who runs the Republicans, is a piece of work.
He can be heard dismissing his own party voters’ concerns as emotionalism and assuring everyone else that there’s nothing to see here, just a little printer error that doesn’t involve elected officials (who gave that company its no-bid contract):
He sounds like a very naive man at best, an odd thing for a guy from street-and-corruption-savvy New York who has equally street-and-corruption-savvy voters to answer to.
“I don’t think the Democratic Party is engaged in a conspiracy to ummm create havoc in their own primaries.”
I’ve lived in New York and I know what those people, including the Long Islanders, are like. I can hear the catcalls on that one. Actually, there are plenty of things worth investigating here.
Perhaps the Dems don’t want to create havoc in their own primaries but we do know they might like to create havoc in Republican primaries, when no one can vote in them. Is that what’s going on, or is this an anti-Trump move from the GOPe? Is the fix in for some favorite in one of the races, to keep the Trumpsters at bay, Blakey? Or is this switch in voter registration a bid to shake out the GOP base and leave the lo-fo, half-commited voters that both parties have, into the Democrat column as new Democrats, the better to harvest their votes?
Blakeman is remarkably incurious, resembling the same sort of GOP election officials we’ve seen in Georgia and Arizona.
All kinds of stuff could be going on with this one and it’s striking that Blakeman wants to excuse everyone before the matter can even be investigated.
To start, funny how this printing company keeps making mistakes in its relatively simple task to program correctly and proofread what they’re printing. That right there is a red flag.
They’re two for two on the mistake front, having made a different “mistake” in the 2020 election in nearby Brooklyn, sending ballots with one name on them accompanied by mail-in envelopes with another name on them.
According to Gothamist, in a piece dated Sept. 29, 2020:
On Tuesday, the New York City Board of Elections announced a plan to print and mail new absentee ballots to nearly 100,000 voters who received erroneous envelopes in their absentee ballot packages. The decision comes after an unknown number of Brooklyn voters received absentee ballots with the wrong name and address printed on the return envelope.
“It is essential that confidence be established in this process and that we make certain that all of the voters who potentially have a problem have a full and fair opportunity to remedy that problem,” said Michael Ryan, the executive director of the New York City Board of Elections. “It is also essential to point out that this is a vendor error,” he added, noting that the Rochester-based company, Phoenix Graphics, has agreed to pay for the cost of the additional printing of the ballots, while the Board will ensure those new ballots are processed appropriately.
This sounds like the kind of trickery we’ve seen described by Jay Valentine in his accounts of all the rigging shenanigans voting officials pull to get loose ballots floating around out there for ballot harvesters to get their hands on.
Then-governor Andrew Cuomo actually spotted that that may have been what was going on, asking that Phoenix Graphics only mail out new envelopes, not new ballots. Otherwise, voters would have been left with two valid ballots and one envelope, something that could have enabled some to vote twice, perhaps by mail as well as in person, or else left a lot of unmarked valid ballots in trash cans for the harvesters to get hold of and fill out. The request was ignored either by the company’s decision or elected officials’ decision (I could not verify) and Phoenix mailed out new ballots along with new envelopes.
A second red flag is that all the foofaraw around the first mistake was supposed to be “fixed” by having county officials go to the printing plant to double-check and supervise the activity to make sure no mistakes happened again, as well as end no-bid contracts.
Ryan told the Kings County Democratic Committee the BOE plans a new approach going forward, with plans to bid out the absentee ballot work for the next election and possibly send staff to oversee the actual printing and distribution of ballots.
Somehow, that didn’t happen. Why?
A third red flag is the money factor, starting with the contract.
The company was awarded a very controversial no-bid contract that shut out other vendors, including minority and women-owned businesses, who could have done the same job at a cheaper cost, according to a local paper, Bklynr, and that didn’t have a benign history.
A 2015 audit by state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli criticized the BOE’s prior no-bid contract with Phoenix, finding taxpayers would have saved $2.4 million had the board sought competitive proposals.
So they seem to be getting inflated contracts, which may have extended to 2023 even as they keep blithely making “mistakes.”
Another money factor is that these “mistakes” come at tremendous cost to the company — $300,000 for the latest mistake in Nassau, $10,000 for the earlier one in Brooklyn. What independent printing company can handle losses like that except if they are being handsomely overcompensated? Was that what was going on? They seem to have an abnormally large cushion for “mistakes.”
Yet another money factor from the local presses is that the company donates to Republicans in the main, but that looks incomplete as information and could be misleading.
Does it matter that Phoenix Graphics was a major recipient of printing projects from the now-late Rep. Louise Slaughter, a Rochester-area Democrat who was one of the most flamingly Bush-deranged leftwing pro-abortion congresswomen in memory, and very close to the Democrat establishment? Were the Phoenix donations ideological at all or was something else going on? Were they straw donors to weak Republicans in the primary to ensure that certain favored Democrats got elected in the general? These games have happened in San Diego — they may be happening elsewhere, too. And who did the top guys donate to? That I have not been able to find out, but it might be relevant as to why the “mistakes” keep happening.
The primary will be held on June 27, and the voting pattern in District 3 of Nassau County is interesting.
NY-04 is the second-wealthiest congressional district in New York, and among the wealthiest nationally.[4] It was one of 18 districts that voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election while being won or held by a Republican in 2022. It is also the most Democratic district in the country to be held by a Republican, with a partisan lean of D+5.
Really? The old coat with no coattails in that area? Seems like a prime area for paying very close attention to fraud given that voters motivated to vote don’t usually split their tickets, though it’s possible, what with the Long Island housewives said to be Trump-averse, yet somehow, no one knows why that happened.
Who’s on the ballot may have clues, too. Based on the official state list of certified candidates, it appears they are all just local judges. One name in Nassau County that sticks out, though, would be from the congressional race that will be decided in 2024: George Santos, who represents District 3. He’s a GOP rep under indictment for various frauds and says he won’t run again in 2024. His victory in the 2022 midterm was said to have come as a surprise. Obviously, Democrats want that seat back badly, so given the voter composition, any little rigging to give the Dems a voter registration boost could probably push them over the top. That couldn’t be operative here, could it?
It could be a state or local race a ‘mistake’ could boost, or it could even be a trial run for a national race. Anything could be behind this odd little mistake of casting every voter as a Democrat, but to insist that nothing untoward is going on — in Nassau’s volatile swing districts — is a bit strange for a Republican to be assuring about.
One final factor: “Mistakes” tend to occur in multiples, in clusters — as we have seen in Colorado, Riverside County, California, and Arizona. Why do those ‘mistakes’ always happen in the same places?
In this age of voter distrust of elections, every angle must be investigated in this Nassau County case. That may mean getting rid of these RINO Republicans who play Mr. Magoo any time something potentially corrupt happens that could undermine the GOP’s capacity to win. There’s no ratdog in them for spotting inevitably malign Democrat intentions or historic practices, they’ve always got the Spirit of George Bush in them, never suspecting that Democrats may want their won seats for themselves and seek to shrink the GOP’s already miserably low House majority, or other offices.
It’s wretched stuff to see the GOP trying to excuse these ‘mistakes’ which always go in one direction. They’ve got to start roaring like a lion or they’ll be field mice for the big cats among the Dems whose operating principle remains ‘by any means necessary.’
At Collège Émile Combes in Bordeaux, a halal beef sauté was offered on the canteen menu on Monday. A religious component that is causing great concern among some of the students’ parents. The movement Parents vigilants de la Gironde, founded by Reconquête! in 2022, warns against the politicisation of children on the menu.
Émile Combes (1835-1921), a French politician, pursued a very anti-clerical policy that led to the 1905 law on the separation of church and state and the introduction of secularism in educational institutions. [NDLR]
Cheese rolls, halal beef skillet, cauliflower, cheese and fruit. On the website Pronote, Collège Émile Combes in Bordeaux does not display an alternative to the main dish served in the canteen on Monday. “What is shocking is that the principle of secularism is being trampled on and that this is being accepted,” outraged Virginie Tournay, spokesperson for Parents vigilants in the Gironde region. The movement, launched by Reconquête! in September 2022, was alerted by the father of one of the middle school students, who was as concerned as he was outraged. “It’s disturbing because we are giving in to a community pressure that is targeting our children because they are malleable. They are taught a polarised way of living and seeing society, whereas the Collège should be precisely a bulwark against the problems of adults,” Virginie Tournay pointed out. […]
The Département de Gironde rejects this accusation. The choice of menus is at the discretion of the schools, which are also “allowed to offer halal meat without having to indicate this”. Le Figaro
“We would like to see net immigration in the tens of thousands,” then Conservative leader David Cameron told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show back in January 2010, just months before he took office as the first Tory prime minister in 13 years.
At the time, net immigration into Britain had been hovering at around 200,000 per year, due mainly to the EU enlargement of 2004, which saw nine Eastern European nations join the bloc, coupled with the liberal immigration policies enacted under Tony Blair’s New Labour.
“I’m in favor of immigration — we’ve benefited from immigration — but I think the pressures, particularly on our public services, have been very great,” Cameron told viewers.
“I think we should be focusing on the pressure on our public services, on health and education and housing,” he added.
However, the governing Conservative party’s own 13-year reign since this pledge was first made has only seen net immigration sky-rocket more greatly than any Conservative voter could have imagined, and both Britain’s mainstream parties have systemically ignored every vote by an electorate desperate to reduce the numbers.
Despite British voters backing the Conservatives as the largest parliamentary party in four general elections since 2010, during which a vow to drastically reduce immigration was a central pledge in each manifesto, net immigration has remained firmly out of control, no more so than last year when the figure climbed to a record 504,000 more people arriving in Britain than leaving.
And let’s not forget the Brexit vote of 2016, during which the largest number of people in British history turned out to back Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union — 17,410,742 people, the overwhelming majority of whom did so on the proviso that Britain would “take back control” of its borders, the famously used slogan by the Conservative-dominated Vote Leave campaign spearheaded by Boris Johnson.
However, this vote appears to have been in vain, and with this year’s estimates placing net migration north of 700,000 — and with some analysts predicting the figure could even top 1 million — it has been made abundantly clear that the Conservatives, a party rewarded with a historic landslide majority back in 2019, simply cannot be trusted to follow through on its promises. Even worse, the party has actively disregarded its manifesto pledges and pursued its own liberal agenda.
It’s important to note that these figures don’t even include the drastic rise in illegal immigration and the ongoing asylum crisis affecting England’s southern shores, with scores of new arrivals flooding into the country on an almost daily basis in small boats from mainland Europe.
As “small c” conservative broadcaster Nigel Farage claimed this week, “the numbers are exploding” and the Conservative party is guilty of a reprehensible “breach of trust” in overseeing the highest immigration figures ever witnessed on British soil.
“We bow to the god of GDP and we forget what this is doing to our communities, our chances of say getting a house for our children,” Farage told BBC’s Newsnight.
He’s right. The Conservative government has been obsessed with adding an extra percentage point or two to the British economy’s growth while failing to implement the necessary measures to ensure that infrastructure, such as roads, housing, schools, and hospitals, is in place to handle the population increase.
Some will argue rightfully that lawful immigrants working in Britain have a positive fiscal impact on the U.K. economy, and therefore claim it is the government that is acting negligently in failing to allocate the necessary funds to ensure public services aren’t saturated.
However, is it not also true that with an overly liberal migration policy, and by lowering wage thresholds for non-EU migrants to come and work in Britain, the government is effectively advocating unlimited immigration? And how can any administration possibly effectively allocate the funds each region needs to upgrade its infrastructure if they don’t know how many people are coming?
A counterargument to the view that Britain needs mass immigration to function is the indisputable fact that there are literally millions of working-age Brits who are not currently economically active. And instead of focusing on a mass training and recruitment drive to up-skill its own people, the government is taking the easy option of importing a new generation of workers.
By the government’s own figures, 22 percent of working-age people in England, Scotland and Wales were economically inactive in 2021. In a research paper by Bayes Business School and the International Longevity Centre (ILC) published in March this year, that figure had risen to 40 percent of all adults aged 16 or over.
The researchers urged the government to wake up to the “huge waste in human potential” that could turbo boost UK plc, and called for a “workforce strategy focusing on incentivizing workers and resolving pay issues, plus issues surrounding skills and health inequalities,” which it claimed would make all the difference.
Such a policy has been the priority of the Hungarian government under Viktor Orbán, for example, who earlier this year vowed to keep “Hungary for the Hungarians” by focusing on mobilizing economically inactive Hungarians to fill the estimated 500,000 workforce shortage. A policy to incentivize Hungarian citizens to get back to work in some capacity will add to the already existing pro-family policies promoted by the Orbán administration, including huge tax breaks for child-bearing women, the construction of more nurseries, and family housing subsidies.
Instead, Britain’s mainstream parties for decades have opted for the easy option, to simply open the borders on an unprecedented scale without any thought for the overwhelming majority of Brits who disagree with such a policy.
And if you think that the incoming Labour government, which polls have been predicting for the last two years, will be any better, think again. On Friday, Labour party chairwoman Anneliese Dodds told Sky News “that setting a net migration target isn’t sensible,” and while a Labour government would eventually focus on “training people up in our own country,” Dodds implied that in the short term Britain under Labour could see even higher net immigration.
British voters have tolerated this for far too long; however, the issue in the U.K. is that the two-party, first-past-the-post electoral system makes it almost impossible to upend the political establishment.
A YouGov survey conducted in December last year revealed that 57 percent of Brits believe immigration into Britain is too high compared to just 7 percent who believe it is too low. Furthermore, 72 percent of respondents totally disagree with the way the government is handling immigration, and more voters than not (30 percent to 24 percent) believe mass immigration has been mostly bad for the country.
Britain is a country of welcoming people with a proud history of introducing new cultures to its shores, and while you will find very few people who claim that immigration as a principle is a bad thing, the polling results above are a damning indictment of how multiple governments have exploited the good nature of a tolerant society, and not just ignored but duped the majority who have said the rate of immigration has occurred too greatly and too quickly.
Under the current electoral system in Britain, however, you can expect the unsustainable rate of new arrivals to continue for some time yet.
Ahead of the G20 meeting in Srinagar, Jammu and Kashmir, scheduled for May 22 to May 24, Pakistan has reportedly written a letter to the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) nations urging them to ‘boycott’ the G20 tourism working group meeting. Pakistan is writing these letters even as the failed state has descended into abject chaos with riots and looting being reported from across the country after the incarceration of Imran Khan.
Turkey, Indonesia, and Saudi Arabia are members of both the G20 and the OIC, an organisation of 57 countries. Bangladesh, Egypt, Nigeria, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates are among India’s special invitee countries.
Pakistan claimed, in its usual rant, Jammu and Kashmir was an “internationally recognized disputed territory,” citing the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) and Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) decisions.
It pointed to the repeal of Article 370 and informed the OIC member countries that G20 meetings or events in Kashmir demonstrated “blatant disregard for relevant UN Security Council resolutions.” According to sources, the UN Security Council resolutions required Pakistan to take the initial step of vacating Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK) and Gilgit-Baltistan. Pakistan was concerned that participation in the G20 summit or activities in Kashmir would offer “legitimacy” to India and had expressed this concern to the OIC.
It is notable that despite Pakistan’s desperate moves, the tourism secretary has said that the OIC member countries like Bangladesh, Indonesia, Oman, and UAE have confirmed their participation in the G20 event. However, Turkey, known for its inclination towards Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt are yet to confirm their attendance.
While this is being reported, it is pertinent to note that on May 18th, it was also reported that Saudi Arabia had decided to snub Pakistan and back India’s decision to hold G20 in Srinagar by sending its delegate.
On May 5, Pakistan’s foreign minister Bilawal Bhutto who received a ‘cold’ welcome in India for the Shanghai Cooperation (SCO) summit in Goa, had issued a veiled threat to India over the G20 meeting scheduled to be held in Srinagar. When asked about India holding a G20 summit in Kashmir, he said, “Waqt aane par aisa jawab denge jo yaad rahega. It shows pettiness. It is a show of arrogance that to hell with international laws, to hell with United Nations Security Council resolution, they will hold their events.”
In a befitting response to Bhutto, External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar had said that Pakistan has nothing to do with G20 and that they also have nothing to do even with Srinagar and Kashmir. He also added that Pakistan should talk about when will they be vacating the illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir (PoK).
“Pakistan has nothing to do with Kashmir or even with Srinagar. The only issue to discuss with Pakistan on Kashmir is when they will vacate Pakistan-occupied Kashmir,” EAM Jaishankar said.
It’s cultural appropriation of the snowflake kind that some Gen Z Americans are adopting faux English accents.
Whether thought up by Sir Winston Churchill or George Bernard Shaw, someone famous said something like, “England and America are two countries separated by a common language.”
The language as expressed by commoners in England is not always charming; sometimes it can even grate. Whom do you prefer listening to in Pygmalion: Polished professor Higgins or cockney Eliza Doolittle?
Evidence that the English language can separate the two countries occurs when a blabbering idiot, like an ex-English soccer player cum analyst, is accompanied by closed captions on TV so listeners can follow along. The main commentators of EPL games are respectable, but the diction of their sidekicks is so abysmal as to require frequent usage of one’s remote control mute button.
And if you visit Old Blighty, and inevitably get lost, be careful whom you ask for directions — you could be sent around the bend, matey.
Admittedly, the accents and cadence of more refined Brits can be engaging, something Gen Zers in America appear to recognize. Disconcertingly, some of that cohort even appropriate English accents as a defense mechanism. Just typical — the poor little Gen Zers, who once hid in safe zones, now need a defense mechanism. Now they are hiding behind agreeable English accents.
Stop it!
It’s tolerable that a luminary like astronomer Edwin Hubble would become an English dandy, complete with a pompous English accent after his Rhodes scholarship, but please, not Gen Z snowflakes. Some of them don’t know their elbow from their earhole.
They say imitation is the highest form of flattery, but flattery from some of today’s Gen Zers is hardly welcome. After their flailing in the self-esteem and de-masculinization movements, they are prone to sorrowful soppiness.
Become a Rhodes Scholar first, or at least do something to enhance the supposed “special relationship” between the two countries. Blimey, do anything useful for anyone; perhaps even follow Vivek Ramaswamy’s exhortation to serve. Then, after you attain the minimum level of consciousness to appreciate America’s exceptionalism, look across the pond to determine your Anglophilia credentials.
In the meantime, this quote, attributed to different people, comes to mind: “Tell me your friends, and I’ll tell you who you are.”
Radical Sunni Islam is the single biggest terrorism threat facing Europe, a senior French minister has reaffirmed.
Gérald Darmanin, France’s Minister of the Interior, has declared that radical Sunni Islam is the single biggest terror threat facing Europe.
The minister made the claim ahead during a visit to the United States to discuss plans for the Paris Olympics next year, emphasising that the sports tournament posed a significant security challenge for his nation.
During an interview with the AFP, Darmanin said that he urged authorities in the U.S. to tighten their security relationship with France, with the minister saying that collaboration between French and American intelligence would be an essential part of keeping people safe.
He also added that the U.S. needed to understand that it was radical Islam, not some sort of far-right ideology, that posed the largest terror risk to the games.
“We have come to remind them that for Europeans and for France, the primary risk is Sunni Islamist terrorism and that anti-terrorist collaboration between intelligence services is absolutely essential,” Darmanin explained.
“[A]t a time when the Americans perhaps have a more national view of disputes — white supremacism, repeated shootings, conspiracy — they must not forget what appears to us in Europe as the first threat: Sunni terrorism,” he went on to say.
The minister went on to explain that he was concerned about a re-emergence of a significant Islamist terror threat in Europe in the coming months and years, citing Western withdrawals from Afghanistan and the Sahel region of Africa as giving radical Muslims in the region space to breathe.
Likely contributing to Darmanin’s fears is the sudden surge of mass migration into Europe, with many Western nations seeing near-record numbers of boat migrants arrive on their shores in recent months.
Over 26,000 migrants arrived on the shores of Italy in the first three months of this year, alone, eclipsing even the number of arrivals seen at the height of the previous migrant crisis in 2015 and 2016.
This previous crisis coincided with a spate of deadly terror attacks in France, the most infamous of which being the Bataclan attacks in Paris, which killed 130 people.
A science-fiction/horror trope is that animals, having had it with human depredations, gain intelligence, organize, and march on humankind. Off the coast of Spain, though, it appears that orcas (aka “killer whales”) are doing just that. It’s a true case of life imitating the Simpsons (or, maybe, “Cows with Guns”). If this is what’s really happening, some climate changistas off the coast of New York and New Jersey had better get worried.
It seems to have started with one orca that experienced severe trauma during a run-in with a boat. That orca started attacking boats, and other orcas are, apparently, following her lead—and they’re organized. No fooling:
Orcas have attacked and sunk a third boat off the Iberian coast of Europe, and experts now believe the behavior is being copied by the rest of the population.
Three orcas (Orcinus orca), also known as killer whales, struck the yacht on the night of May 4 in the Strait of Gibraltar, off the coast of Spain, and pierced the rudder. “There were two smaller and one larger orca,” skipper Werner Schaufelberger told the German publication Yacht. “The little ones shook the rudder at the back while the big one repeatedly backed up and rammed the ship with full force from the side.”
Schaufelberger said he saw the smaller orcas imitate the larger one. “The two little orcas observed the bigger one’s technique and, with a slight run-up, they too slammed into the boat.” Spanish coast guards rescued the crew and towed the boat to Barbate, but it sank at the port entrance.
Two days earlier, a pod of six orcas assailed another sailboat navigating the strait. Greg Blackburn, who was aboard the vessel, looked on as a mother orca appeared to teach her calf how to charge into the rudder. “It was definitely some form of education, teaching going on,” Blackburn told 9news.
If that report sounds at all familiar to you, it’s because you’ve watched the Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror episodes and remember the “Snorky” one. I’ve embedded a video below but, if it vanishes, here’s the summary:
In a parody of The Day of the Dolphin and The Birds, Lisa takes pity on the star attraction of Springfield’s Marine World, a dolphin named Snorky, whose trainers let him be humiliated while forced to perform stunts for the crowd’s amusement. After Snorky’s show, Lisa sets the dolphin free to swim in the ocean. Unbeknownst to Lisa, Snorky is actually king of the dolphins and organizes the world’s dolphins into an army to declare war on humanity. The dolphins attack Springfield, first killing Lenny during his whiskey-soaked night swim (“alcohol and nightswimming: it’s a winning combination”) and then the Sea Captain (who claims he can stop them) before marching towards the town on their tails. During the town meeting, Snorky takes the stage and reveals he is capable of speaking. Snorky tells Springfield that dolphins used to live on land but were banished to the ocean by humans. Now the dolphins want to banish all mankind to live underwater. The humans refuse to submit to the dolphins’ will without a fight, only to find the dolphins greatly outnumber them. When Lisa is bitten by a small dolphin after removing a set of bottle rings around its face, Homer encourages the townspeople to fight back. A battle ensues between the dolphins and the humans, with heavy casualties on both sides. The end of the story reveals the humans lost the war and have been driven into the sea. Lisa admits she regrets freeing Snorky in the first place, but Marge comforts her that everyone will have to adjust to their new life as “marine animals”. As Marge says this, several corpses floating past form the words “The End?” nearby, much to her disgust and sadness.
The story also reminded me of the inspired Cows With Guns song and video. If you aren’t familiar with it, I’m pretty sure you’ll enjoy it:
You may even think of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (mentioned in the Snorky summary).
The bottom line is that it’s not just Hollywood anymore: the animals are organizing!
On a more serious note, if whales really are organizing, the environmentalists in America had better start to worry. That’s because Ahabs with spears are no longer the whales’ worst enemy. Instead, it’s environmental projects—specifically, an offshore wind project outside of New York and New Jersey that seems to be driving whales to mass death:
Scores of whale and dolphin carcasses have washed up along the East Coast in recent months, and particularly on New Jersey and New York-area beaches where no fewer than nine whales have washed ashore just since December. The evidence is not yet incontrovertible, but the deaths coincide with sonic testing in conjunction with massive wind turbine projects. Seismic testing can “injure and kill marine wildlife” such as whales and dolphins holds, according to one environmental group. The Natural Resources Defense Council once went all the way to the Supreme Court in a bid to stop the U.S. Navy’s seismic testing.
