‘We could have had a massacre’ – French MEP demands attempted murder charge after protesters burn police station and block exit

A French member of the European Parliament and former police commissioner called for attempted-murder charges Thursday after masked protesters set fire to the entrance of a Bordeaux police station, blocking officers inside as smoke filled the building.

Matthieu Valet, now affiliated with the National Rally, said the attackers blocked the main door of the Capucins station and ignited trash bins piled against it while officers were still inside.

“It’s a criminal act of extreme gravity; we could have had a massacre,” MEP Valet wrote on X. “The perpetrators must be found and prosecuted for attempted murder. Ten years after the Viry-Châtillon attack, where police officers were burned alive while trapped in their patrol car, nothing has changed.”

Bordeaux prosecutor Renaud Gaudeul said a group of about 10 hooded individuals deliberately stacked bins at the station’s entrance around 4 p.m. and set them alight during a high-school demonstration. The fire spread quickly along part of the facade. Three national police officers inside escaped through a rear emergency exit. No injuries were reported but the officers reportedly suffered from smoke inhalation.

Prosecutors opened an investigation for destruction of property by a means dangerous to people, committed because of the victims’ status as public officials, and for joining a group formed to prepare violence or property damage during a public demonstration. Those offenses can carry up to 20 years in prison. Authorities have not so far filed attempted-murder charges.

This is not the first time that protesters have been accused of setting buildings on fire and blocking exits. Earlier this week, rioters set fire to the entrance of Vauquelin High School in Paris and blocked the exit with 100 students and staff inside. A harrowing video from BFMTV captured the moment.

Graffiti reading “Vengeance for Eden” was sprayed on the station wall, referring to a student seriously injured by a police grenade launcher earlier in the protests in the Paris region.

The attack came on the margins of nationwide student blockades and marches over teacher shortages and school conditions, now in their third week. A high school in nearby Lormont was vandalized the same morning. Across France, the protests have produced thousands of arrests since late September, along with repeated use of fireworks mortars, stones and burning barricades.

The 2016 Viry-Châtillon case, in which officers were burned to death inside their vehicle during unrest outside Paris, remains a frequent reference point in French debates over attacks on police. Interior Ministry officials have defended recent tactics while announcing a temporary suspension of certain stun grenades after some minors picked them up and blew off their hands.

There have been horrific scenes throughout the country in recent weeks, including women being attacked with homemade flame throwers, teachers beaten in the streets, arson attacks on schools, teachers and staff doused in gasoline, and officers beaten unconscious.

In nearly every video, racial and ethnic minorities, mostly Blacks and Arabs, are seen driving much of the unrest and physical violence.

The latest figures from the interior ministry indicate that 761 police officers have been injured in the ongoing unrest, according to Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez in an Oct. 7 hearing before the National Assembly’s law committee.

The count covers injuries since Sept. 28.

On Thursday, Oct. 8 alone, the Interior Ministry reported 48 additional officers and gendarmes injured. Nuñez said arrests and detentions stood at 6,629 as of the evening of Oct. 6.

According to Education Minister Édouard Geffray, about 65 teachers and education staff have been injured in the riots.

rmx

OUTRAGEOUS! Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes Issues ARREST WARRANT for Eduardo Bolsonaro as His Brother Emerges as Favorite to Become Brazil’s Next President

Credit: (Marcelo Camargo/Agência Brasil)

Brazil’s Supreme Court tyrant Alexandre de Moraes, the justice critics have long called Alexandre de Voldemort, has ordered the arrest of Eduardo Bolsonaro, the son of imprisoned former President Jair Bolsonaro and the brother of Flávio Bolsonaro, the frontrunner to send socialist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva packing on October 25.

Eduardo’s brother, Senator Flávio Bolsonaro, has emerged as the frontrunner to become Brazil’s next president after defeating incumbent socialist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the first round of voting. Moraes did not wait for the runoff.

Moraes ordered Eduardo to begin serving a four-year, two-month sentence immediately, directed federal police to arrest him if he sets foot in Brazil, canceled his Brazilian passports, and suspended his political rights for the length of the sentence, according to Reuters.

The conviction became final on October 3 after appeals were rejected. Eduardo has lived in the United States, including Texas, since 2025.

His “crime,” according to the court’s First Panel, was speaking to the Trump administration about the weaponization of Brazil’s justice system against his father.

“Eduardo Bolsonaro” by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0

In June the panel, Moraes, Lula ally Cristiano Zanin, Cármen Lúcia, and Flávio Dino, convicted Eduardo unanimously of “coercion in the course of proceedings.” Prosecutors said he lobbied Washington for tariffs on Brazilian goods, Magnitsky sanctions, and visa revocations aimed at STF ministers, in an effort to pressure the court during Jair Bolsonaro’s trial.

The sentence starts in a semi-open regime, carries a fine, strips him of a Federal Police clerk post, and bars him from office for eight years after the term.

Moraes, who also ran the case against the father, wrote that Eduardo “cannot benefit from his own wrongdoing by fleeing the national territory” to thwart the sentence.

The same justice was sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury under the Magnitsky Act in July 2025 for arbitrary detentions and the suppression of speech. The Gateway Pundit reported when Treasury then hit Moraes’ wife and his Lex Institute, and when aides lost their U.S. visas.

Eduardo called the new order what it is. In a statement Thursday he said that even after voters delivered a clear “enough,” Moraes was again throwing the country into turmoil with a decision that is “arbitrary, ill-timed and ineffectual,” because the United States “has already made clear it does not comply with delirious decisions of this nature.”

He said the only practical effect, timed in the middle of an election, is to inflame the country, and that on October 25 Brazilians will elect Flávio Bolsonaro and, with a new Congress, “restore normalcy.”

thegatewaypundit

So Goes Europe

by Allan J. Feifer 

Britain is America’s mother country. Regardless of what one may think of the once-Great Britain today, much of America’s essence sprang from that island’s political philosophy, cultural inheritance, legal tradition, and national character. Our language, common law, conception of liberty, parliamentary instincts, and stubborn individualism all trace back directly to Britain. Britain may have declined, but the DNA of its greatness lives on in us. Its decline is therefore not merely a foreign story. It is a cautionary tale written in a language we understand because we inherited it. We ignore those linkages at our peril.

Margaret Thatcher represented perhaps the last great demonstration of Britain’s willingness to behave like a world power. The Falklands War was not merely a military victory; it was a psychological one. It proved that Britain still possessed the will to act decisively, defend its interests, and project power beyond its shores. For a moment, Thatcher restored something of the Churchillian confidence Britain had lost before that moment too faded away.

She could not reverse the forces already embedded in the country’s institutions. The political class increasingly embraced managerialism, the intellectual class fashionable self-doubt, and the bureaucracy technocratic caution. Britain turned inward, consumed by domestic demands and increasingly skeptical of the burdens of global leadership. Its decline was not simply imposed from outside. A nation that loses confidence in its own purpose eventually loses the political will to sustain it.

That is where the parallel to America becomes unavoidable.

Britain became increasingly burdened by internal social obligations that expanded faster than its economic capacity and political will. America has accumulated similar burdens for decades. However noble their original purposes, domestic obligations expand, demand resources, and rarely contract. A great power cannot be defined solely by what it redistributes. It must also be defined by what it builds, protects, and leads. When internal obligations consume the resources and political attention required for those purposes, national power begins to erode into irrelevance.

But Europe’s problem is not simply that its governments became more cautious or its welfare states ever more expensive. Europe also changed itself. Over the past several decades, large-scale immigration has transformed the demographic and cultural composition of countries built around relatively strong national identities and shared expectations.

France illustrates the scale of the transformation. In 2024, 7.6 million immigrants lived in France, representing 11.2 percent of the population. In 1968, nearly three-quarters of foreigners living in France were European nationals; by 2024, nearly half were African nationals and only about one-third were European.

Those numbers do not prove social failure on their own. They do, however, describe a profound demographic transformation. When that transformation occurs alongside concentrated communities, weakened assimilation, and the state’s reluctance to insist on a common civic framework, demographic change becomes a source of social and political friction rather than simply population growth.

And this is where immigration intersects with the larger problem of European decline. A confident state can absorb substantial change because it knows what it expects of those who enter it. A state that has lost confidence in its own culture, doubts its right to demand assimilation, and fears the political consequences of enforcing its laws has a much harder task. The question is no longer simply how many people a country can admit. It is whether the country still possesses the confidence and authority to insist that everyone living within its borders belongs to the same civic order — and what it must do when some refuse.

France may be showing us the next stage.

What makes the French crisis particularly dangerous is the convergence of three different pressures against the state: the red — economic grievance; the white — cultural conflict; and the black — violence and disorder. The red attacks its economic legitimacy. The white attacks its cultural legitimacy. The black attacks its monopoly on force. They are not a coalition or even a unified movement. Together, they constitute a stress test.

When those pressures erupt simultaneously, a parliamentary system built around compromise and negotiation becomes incapable of meeting the moment, hesitating when it must act and debating when it must decide. It fears backlash when it must assert authority.

The danger is not necessarily that the French state will be overthrown. It is that it will surrender functionally — by narrowing its ambitions, avoiding confrontation, tolerating disorder, and accepting that certain neighborhoods, groups, or behaviors are beyond its reach.

That is how decline accelerates, not through dramatic collapse, but through the quiet acceptance of limits that did not previously exist.

And, in the wings, our own Red, White, and Black forces are taking notes. America cannot simply watch Europe decline from across the Atlantic. The lesson of  WWII is that geography no longer protects a nation from the collapse of the civilization to which it belongs. Had America simply assumed that events across the Atlantic could never threaten us, the history of the twentieth century might have been very different. Oceans provide distance, not immunity.

Europe is not simply another collection of foreign countries. It is the civilization from which we emerged. If Europe loses the capacity to govern itself, defend itself, assimilate newcomers, and maintain the institutions that made the West prosperous and free, America may eventually discover that it is next.

This is not a prophecy of America’s future, not yet, but it is a warning.

Great nations do not remain great by accident. They remain great because their people choose renewal over resignation, responsibility over retreat, and courage over comfort. America still has the economic, military, cultural, and political capacity to help Europe regain its footing and, in the process, ensure our own stability.

We should do so not out of nostalgia or charity, but self-interest.

Europe helped create the civilization that made America possible. As the elder child, America now has a responsibility to help preserve it — not because Europe is entitled to American protection, but because a weakened Europe ultimately weakens the West.

If Europe recovers, America’s foundations are strengthened. If Europe continues to decline, America will eventually discover that oceans are no substitute for civilization.

So goes Europe.

God Bless America.

americanthinker

Orbán-Critical Media Receive More than €100,000 in EU Funding Ahead of Elections

Ahead of Hungary’s parliamentary elections in April 2026, the high-reach news outlets HVG and Telex received substantial financial support from the European Parliament (EP). While the Brussels institution stresses that the funded newsrooms enjoy full editorial independence, the timing of the grants so close to Hungary’s elections has sparked controversy.

Specifically, HVG secured funding for a project with a total value of €95,065, while Telex was awarded €149,618, reports Magyar Nemzet. Both media outlets were successful in the European Parliament’s 2025 call for proposals for communication activities. The corresponding list of beneficiaries was published on the EP’s official website. Under the funding criteria, the EP covers 60 percent of the total costs in both cases.

The funding program is administered by the European Parliament’s Directorate-General for Communication (DG COMM).

According to its official mandate, the multiannual work program is intended to strengthen the Parliament’s institutional visibility, promote democratic engagement and provide citizens with neutral, reliable facts.

Applications are submitted transparently through the European Union’s central Funding & Tenders Portal and fall into two main areas:

  1. Media funding calls

This funding stream provides co-financing for multimedia projects that report objectively, independently and pluralistically on the Brussels institution’s legislative and political processes. It is open to news agencies, broadcasters, print publishers, online media outlets and digital content creators on social media. The stated aim is to demonstrate the concrete impact of parliamentary decisions on citizens’ everyday lives and strengthen society’s resilience against targeted false information and disinformation campaigns. Under the program’s rules, the editorial independence of funded newsrooms remains unaffected.

  1. Initiatives for citizen and civil society participation

The second funding stream focuses on communicating European values, networking among NGOs and mobilizing civil society. National and pan-European non-profit organizations, citizen groups and youth networks are eligible to apply. The approved funding is used for online and in-person events, discussion forums, consultations and information campaigns, whose primary purpose is often to increase voter turnout.

All media content produced under the EU funding programs is subject to strict publication requirements: it must carry a standardized legal disclaimer.

The disclaimer states that the respective project was implemented with financial support from the EU, while editorial responsibility rests solely with the respective authors and the views expressed do not reflect the official position of the European Parliament.

Whether the approval and disbursement of these funds ahead of Hungary’s April 2026 elections—combined with financial support for newsrooms explicitly critical of Viktor Orbán—should be regarded as undue interference by an EU institution in the democratic will-formation process of a member state is left to readers to decide.

hungarytoday

UK: One migrant crosses Channel every six minutes during first week of October as Andy Burnham faces small boat surge

Medforth AI

One migrant has crossed the Channel every six minutes during the first week of October as Andy Burnham faces a surge of small boat crossings.

A staggering 1,739 people made the 21-mile journey to reach British borders between October 1 to October 7.

The shocking rate means six small boat migrants crossed the English Channel every hour throughout the week.

Monday witnessed the largest influx of illegals entering the UK as 609 people crossed in eight vessels.

An average of 76 migrants were packed onto each inflatable dinghy, bringing this year’s total of crossings to 20,935.

The embattled Prime Minister came face-to-face with the migrant crisis looming over Britain as soon as he entered office earlier in the summer.

Within his first two weeks of scaling the steps to No10, some 2,000 migrants crossed the English Channel.

On the latest figures, Chris Philp, the Shadow Home Secretary, condemned Labour for leaving borders “wide open”, stressing illegal migrants “go on to commit horrific crimes”.

“Labour has not smashed the gangs and their deal with France has just collapsed,” he said.

“They have allowed 95 per cent of illegal small boat migrants to stay, putting them up in hotels and flats. No wonder they keep on coming.”

Meanwhile, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage fumed: “It is an out-of-control disaster that poses a massive threat to our national security.

“It’s only getting worse under Open Borders Burnham.”

Ahead of Labour Conference, Mr Burnham blamed Brexit for damaging the Government’s ability to stop illegal migrants crossing the Channel.

The Prime Minister lamented the “loss of collaboration with neighbours” ever since the UK left the European Union at the start of 2020.

Last weekend saw a surge in illegal arrivals, with a total of 1,300 crossing over 48 hours, GB News revealed on Monday.

It is an astonishing surge in migrant crossings over such a short period, at a time of year when the number of illegal dinghy crossings would normally slow down significantly as the weather gets colder.

A total of 91 illegals arrived last Friday, followed by 164 on Saturday and a further 418 on Sunday.

Sunday’s total included 146 migrants who arrived in UK waters near the Isle of Wight after setting off in a mega dinghy in western Normandy.

Two men died on Monday morning while attempting a small boat crossing.

Authorities doubled down on pleas not to risk the journey but the surge in arrivals suggests such calls have fallen on deaf ears.

French authorities said the men, one thought to be in his 30s and the other in his 40s, died after leaving the coast at Berck on Sunday night.

gbnews

US: Man Who Brutally Murdered Female Hiker Blames ‘Gender Identity’ Struggles, Avoids Death Penalty

An Arizona man who fatally stabbed a woman 15 times and blamed his “gender identity and sexuality” for the brutal slaying has now avoided the death penalty. Zion Teasley, who wrote about his belief he was transgender in his diary in the days leading up to the slaying, told police he had viciously murdered 29-year-old Lauren Heike in April 2023 after flying into a jealous rage over her beauty.

The court heard that Teasley ambushed Heike and chased her along a hiking trail located near her home in Arizona before repeatedly stabbing her to death. Teasley and the victim had never interacted before the killing. He then abandoned her body, which a neighbor discovered while walking their dog a few days later. Police arrested Teasley after connecting him to DNA evidence found on Heike’s shoe.

Days after killing her, Teasley accessed photos of Heike from her social media accounts. Investigators also reportedly found photos of him wearing an outfit they say was similar to what Heike was wearing when he stabbed her to death.

During interrogation, Teasley told investigators he had been struggling with issues of sexuality and “gender identity,” and at one point, when shown a photo of Heike, stated, “That’s what I would want to look like.”

A nearly 400-page police report obtained by ABC15 revealed messages, internet searches, and journal entries in which Teasley discussed his gender identity.

“I have been battling with my gender identity and sexuality. I am Christian, so this isn’t allowed. I want to live a life of serving God, but how can I with these and other sins in the way. [I know] I am forgiven for my sins. But it’s still a lot of pressure and it’s hard to maintain a good Christian mindset 24/7,” the killer wrote.

Police note another screenshot which implies that Teasley may have been depressed, reading, “when I see a beautiful woman and I’m a man.” When Teasley was asked by investigators if he had planned Heike’s murder, they responded, “I’m telling you, if I was gonna do something like that, it definitely wouldn’t be premeditated.”

Detectives discovered that Teasley had been fired from his job for being “aggressive toward female employees” and for being suspected of stealing products.

During the course of the investigation into Heike’s murder, law enforcement also found that Teasley had knowingly received child pornography in 2019 or 2020. He pleaded guilty to one count of sexual exploitation of a minor for possessing child pornography.

Teasley’s attorneys referred to their client with feminine pronouns in the courtroom. The convicted killer has criminal charges dating back to 2020, and just five months before the slaying, he had been released after serving a three-year jail sentence for armed robbery.

According to a plea deal reached in court last Friday, Teasley will be sentenced to life in prison for first-degree murder. By pleading guilty, prosecutors agreed to dismiss their notice to seek the death penalty. The judge also said that the charges in an assault and burglary case, filed after Teasley’s arrest for Heike’s murder, would also be dismissed under the terms of the agreement.

In August 2024, aggravated assault and burglary charges were filed against Teasley for a January 2020 attack against another woman. The case also involved a knife, but the victim survived.

The Heike family issued an emotional statement supporting the court’s decision.

“After 3½ incredibly long and painful years, our family supports the State’s decision to enter into a plea agreement in Lauren’s case,” the statement read. “This means we will not have to endure a trial or sit in a courtroom and hear every painful detail of the crime that took Lauren from us. There is a tremendous sense of relief in knowing that we will be spared that additional trauma.”

The family continued: “We fully supported the State’s efforts to seek the death penalty, but we are in agreement with the plea offer made by the defendant. He offered to plead guilty to first degree murder and accept a natural life sentence,” the statement continued. “While no sentence will ever bring Lauren back, we are relieved knowing that he will never be released. He will never again have the opportunity to harm another person or cause another family to experience the unimaginable grief and trauma that ours has endured.”

According to the LGBTQ+ Bar Association, the state of Arizona allows trans-identified male convicts to be transferred into a women’s correctional facility. Inmates are initially processed on the basis of sex, but accommodation requests may be granted after undergoing a review conducted by a Transgender/Intersex Committee appointed by the state’s Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry (ADCRR).

The ADCRR’s Order 810, “Management of LGBTI Inmates,” implemented on April 1, 2022, states: “Inmates identified as transgender or intersex shall be asked and afforded the opportunity to voluntarily provide the following information: The appropriate personal pronouns for their gender identity; their own view of how they would be most safely housed, including female versus male housing.”

reduxx

Le Pen, Bardella Lay Out Economic Agenda for ‘Rebirth’ of France After Macron ‘Disaster’

France is on the precipice of the “abyss”, National Rally leader Marine Le Pen warned as she and her deputy Jordan Bardella presented their party’s financial plan to avert the looming debt crisis and revive the country’s economy.

Speaking from party headquarters in Paris on Tuesday, presidential candidate Marine Le Pen — the current favourite in the 2027 race — announced that if given power, the National Rally (RN) would look to deliver €140 billion ($158bn) in net savings by 2032, while restoring the budget to a primary balance within eighteen months, reducing the deficit to the EU limit of three per cent by 2030, and slashing the national debt by ten points over five years, Le Monde reported.

“If the French do not choose a political break, France is heading towards default,” she warned, while criticising the “disastrous record” of President Emmanuel Macron, whom she mocked for his supposed expertise in economics that was highly touted ahead of his election due to his history as a former banker for the Rothschilds.

“How many thousands of articles, each more dishonest and biased than the last, to explain that Emmanuel Macron, the Mozart of finance, would save our public accounts?” Le Pen questioned. “The French elites have deliberately failed and worse, have lied to thwart the RN’s victory.”

“Emmanuel Macron’s disastrous record isn’t just pie-in-the-sky figures: it translates every day into the purchasing power of the French people. The burden of spending and taxes, but also the economic gloom it generates, are largely responsible for the purchasing power crisis facing French families,” she added.

Le Pen asserted that taxes in France have risen in real terms by nearly 350 billion euros ($394bn) during Macron’s tenure in the Élysée Palace, and claimed that the current government would raise taxes further by 17 billion ($19bn).

“Emmanuel Macron has been unable to genuinely reduce public spending by implementing true structural reforms. The share of public spending in GDP in 2026 is substantially the same as in 2012,” she added.

At the core of the National Rally economic agenda is a “golden rule” for national budgets requiring them to aim for the gradual reduction of French debt until it reaches 60 per cent of GDP. Under the Macron government, French debt has soared to nearly 120 per cent of GDP and threatens to climb even higher. To counter this, Le Pen said her government would cut spending by €85.5 billion ($96bn), Le Figaro reported.

A large part of the budget-slashing effort will focus on reducing spending on immigration, Le Pen said, such as by slashing taxpayer cash spent on housing, medical care, and other social benefits for foreigners. Meanwhile, the party would look to ramp up efforts to prevent illegals from entering the country in the first place. In total, the RN leader said that some 12 billion euros (13.5bn) in savings could be made by simply refusing to give handouts to foreigners.

Le Pen also said that her government would look to cut back the bloat of the French bureaucracy. However, rather than conducting mass firings, she said that her government would reduce the number of government employees by refusing to hire replacements for those who retire. She also said that the National Rally would conduct a review of the country’s social security and pension systems, through which she expects to accumulate over 45 billion ($51bn) in savings.

Additionally, the populist leader said that her government would look to cut back on money to Brussels, reducing annual net contributions to the EU budget to five billion down from over nine billion at present.

However, the front-running presidential candidate also said that her party would look to cut taxes to spur a “competitiveness shock” to spark the stagnant French economy into a “rebirth”. Although counterintuitive in a push to reduce the debt and deficit, the cuts could increase overall tax revenue to the treasury if they spur economic growth, according to the phenomenon known as the Laffer Curve.

Among the taxes proposed to be slashed are the Value Added Tax (VAT) on energy and other essential products. Le Pen said a National Rally government would end the “punitive and self-serving vision of environmentalism” that has seen the government spend money “at a loss” on subsidising intermittent energy sources like solar and wind.

Meanwhile, she also announced plans to refit buildings with air conditioners and to redirect the existing Green Fund toward disaster relief and fire prevention. Eco taxes on cars will also be reformed, with the system set to provide financial incentives to buy vehicles produced in France.

Many businesses can also expect relief, with the National Rally leader vowing a €20 billion ($22.5bn) cut in production taxes, and a corporate tax reform to favour small businesses.

While many establishment prognosticators have been critical of Le Pen and the party’s often left-leaning economic policies, Tuesday’s announcement appeared to go down well in the bond markets, with Paris’ 10-year bond yield seeing its largest single-day decline since May, Reuters reports.

Commenting on the plan, National Rally president Jordan Bardella — widely tipped to be the next prime minister of France — said: “From now on, one must choose.

“Choose between useful spending and that which is not. Choose between increasing levies or restoring purchasing power to the French. Choose between continuing the headlong flight into debt or restoring order to our public finances.”

“France does not need new promises paid for by new debts,” Bardella added. “It needs a State that fights against waste, that prioritizes its objectives, and that spends taxpayers’ money intelligently.”

breitbart

The Left Doesn’t Count Votes. It Finds Them

Javier Miley and Flavio Bolsonaro. Argentina.gob.ar, CC-BY-4.0

by Matthew G. Andersson

If you saw a recent NYT report on Brazil’s election between incumbent socialist president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and conservative Flávio Bolsonaro, you may have noticed that the Left’s “paper of record” made an astounding, if unintended, admission in the headline: it reveals its conception of elections. In its words, “Flávio Bolsonaro’s first round lead leaves President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva three weeks to find the votes to stop Brazil’s rightward shift” (italics mine). It doesn’t say “prevail in the election by voter turnout,” but it casts the election as an implied political obligation to manufacture ballots to block voter will and engineer an imposed social order against it. This is clearly the Left’s intention in November.

While this may read as routine journalism, or perhaps just wishful thinking on the writers’ part, it may strike some readers as more of a Freudian slip about how the Left’s mental worldview works: leftist parties operate under a duty to manufacture enough ballots to overcome an election deficit. If your candidate falls behind, you intervene on the sidelines to close the gap. This is now their “normalized” concept of an election.

More than that, progressives have inverted the structure of an election from one that sets two opponents in passive receipt of votes to an actively managed, planned event that aids one side during the election. What was traditionally an arm’s-length contest becomes a pre-existing agreement.

Rather than preserving a quiet period after the close of campaigning to measure the public result of candidate marketing through voluntary voter turnout, the election becomes merely part of their total political campaign operation. It turns votes into indicators, and the indicators into corrective ballot measures.

This obviously goes by other names, such as rigging, stealing, cheating, and fraud, but the extraordinary aspect of this language in the NYT is how it reveals a shift in political psychology and a determination to make that abnormal psychology generally accepted behavior. It resembles the Left’s efforts to make people think that transgender athletes are legitimate contestants among biological females: it asks you to accept a fraud as a right, and, more than that, that you are wrong for questioning it. That is how election fraud works: objections violate a higher moral standing claimed by the victor, even though the victor obtained it through deception.

To use an analogy, it is like two horses in a race where the spectators rush the racetrack on the losing horse, inject him with amphetamines, block the other rider, and the racing judge looks the other way, while the crowd is asked to keep quiet out of fairness to the horse.

To use a good legal analogy, it would be like two legal opponents in a trial, along with their lawyers, actually accompanying the jury into the deliberation room and trying to measure which way they’re leaning and “tip” the scales. Jurors privately deliberate after closing arguments because they weigh what they heard and reach a protected verdict based only on the evidence presented in open court.

Elections are the same: voters effectively go into private deliberation after hearing both sides, cast their ballots in private, and the verdict is then announced in the open “public court.” We have certain appeal processes for election irregularity (e.g., Florida in 2000 and Bush v. Gore), or for an election “mistrial,” as in a deadlock (a runoff or recount), including the discretion to count state electors (e.g., Pence, 2021). In all cases, the counting or verdict is subject to a quiet period, and campaigning of any kind must stand down.

The other key factor in Brazil that is reframing the Left’s vision of elections is based on its paranoia that any conservative candidate is a Trump candidate and ally and part of a larger plan to aid and abet President Trump’s mandates (“Brazil Is a Sign of Things to Come,” NYT, 10.5.26). But South America (and Cuba as well) has been dragging behind the West economically for decades because of its leftist political corruption and because it swings in the extreme between Left populists and Right militarists. Rarely has an actual business conservative, or even a moderate leader, emerged.

Chile is somewhat of an exception, having hosted a path-breaking privatization of its state-owned telecommunications company, CTC, decades ago. Chile’s former president, Patricio Aylwin, whom our company hosted in Chicago on his 1990 state visit, was an enlightened man with a principled sense of nationalism, combined with priorities of trade and investment. He was a centrist Christian conservative who opposed Allende’s socialism. He famously (and wisely) remarked concerning Pinochet that he preferred a military coup to a Marxist takeover.

The US needs more conservative business allies to the South for our own national security—ones who can also keep a lid on orchestrated mass migrations across our border and who work toward a true North-South alliance in economic development, science, and trade. Lula is not likely to prevail against Bolsonaro for these reasons, but a two-way showdown isn’t until October 25th.

In the meantime, the Left is turning domestic election fraud operations into a global ambition. They need to be stopped. That will happen in part when they run out of countries to exploit; when conservative ideology more fully permeates the political realm; and when it delivers a level of public benefit that the Left can never match. That includes enforcing real elections with real voters.

Writer Shlomo Barer wrote a noteworthy book called “The Doctors of Revolution,” which chronicles the violent politics of radicals, including Marx, Bakunin, Lenin, and others. Today’s more urbane radicals might be called the “Doctors of Elections.”

The Brazil election seems to offer another example of how our domestic political Left projects its assumption of a revolutionary duty to find ballots as normal election behavior. And they see “President Trump” everywhere and anywhere they see a conservative candidate.

In both cases, it appears to demonstrate a mass psychology of anxiety, insecurity, and perhaps even paranoid disorder. It helps explain their party’s dysfunction and the basis for its historical turn to political violence. Along with major media, they will be insisting that the public “normalize” it in November.

americanthinker

Welcome to the pro-Pal Inquisition; the cancellation of Jews is allowed and justified without question today

by Giulio Meotti

The “Alhambra Decree,” which ordered the expulsion of all Jews from Spain, was signed by the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella on March 31, 1492, inside the Alhambra palace in Granada.

534 years have passed, and another Jew must leave Granada.

What happened is this: the Jewish writer Ariana Harwicz, shortlisted for the Booker International Prize, has been excluded from the International Festival of Art and Literature at the University of Granada.

Harwicz was due to take part on September 26 in an event devoted to her work. The invitation was withdrawn after protests by activists and university students who discovered something they considered extremely serious: Harwicz is a pro-Israel Jew (yes, it sounds strange, doesn’t it? How dare she.).

“There is great fear, not only on the part of those who are expelled, but also among the others,” Harwicz told El País. “You feel a great loneliness, and you fear they will send your books back and stop inviting you.”

She does not hesitate to accuse them of antisemitism.

“If I belonged to another minority, no one would have done this to me. In the cultural sphere, the cancellation of Jews is justified.”

In Spain, as in the case of the carnival in Andorra, that antisemitism can take the form of an effigy representing the State of Israel, subjected to a public “trial,” shot, and set on fire during festivities in which local officials also took part. The figure is symbolically tried, sentenced to death and hanged.

Or it can take the form of the three elderly Israeli Jewish women wearing the Star of David who were expelled from the famous Reina Sofía National Museum in Madrid. The women, one of them a Holocaust survivor, were attacked by visitors shouting “child killers” and “murderers!” Instead of removing the aggressors, museum staff asked the Jewish women to leave.

They speak of Zionism.

“Zionist is the demonized, instrumentalized form used to discriminate against Jews,” Harwicz says. “And they like the Jews who want to annihilate the State of Israel. They punish me for being the bad Jew. Why should they get to decide who is the good Jew and who is the bad one? I was the only person at the festival whose articles were all checked to see whether I would be allowed through or not.”

Six women writers had also signed a letter demanding her head from the authorities. Five hundred figures from the cultural world responded with a counter-letter of protest denouncing Harwicz’s cancellation, signed. among others. by the celebrated Spanish philosopher Fernando Savater and former French prime minister Manuel Valls.

The prize-winning Irish writer John Banville, a Booker Prize winner and the headliner of the festival, was meant to close it. Instead he left with a single sentence: “My cancellation was my statement.” He did not explain. He did not negotiate. He withdrew his prestige from a stage. A rare gesture, because it costs something. But it is almost all that, in an age of signatures and fear, a writer can still do. The same logic has already consumed other names.

In June, a famous far-left Israeli director, Nadav Lapid, winner of the Berlinale (and of the jury prize at Locarno and Cannes), was excluded from the Marseille Film Festival, which revoked his invitation to sit on the jury because of pressure from pro-Palestinian Arab actors and directors who had threatened to withdraw their films if Lapid took part.

“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,” the Monty Python declared in 1970.

The pro-Palestinian Inquisition, however, they should.

israelnationalnews