For years, Joe Biden has reminded me of someone else, but it’s been difficult to place my finger on who exactly that is. No face comes to mind — or rather, variations of different faces come to mind — nor does any name spring readily to hand. Earlier this year, I finally figured it out, and Thursday night’s debate only confirmed it: Biden is C.S. Lewis’s Unman. Although best known for the Chronicles of Narnia series, Lewis was a prodigious cultural critic and almost abnormally prescient thinker, enabling him to correctly anticipate many of the difficulties and evils we face in this 21st century. Two of his works in particular are worthy of the description “prophetic,” his Space Trilogy (better termed the Ransom Cycle), and the nonfiction treatise The Abolition of Man. Coupled together, these works predict and — almost a hundred years in advance — describe the inner workings and motivations of those who today champion evil in the Western world. The Unman Is Born Out of the Silent Planet, the first book of the Ransom Cycle is a straightforward enough story about a trip to Mars, born of a contest between Lewis and his Oxford colleague J.R.R. Tolkien to see who could write a better science fiction story. The story explores themes of language, communication and community, morality, and the inkling (no pun intended) of what we today call progressivism, and also serves to introduce the principal character of Elwin Ransom, a Cambridge professor, as well as the antagonists Edward Weston, a noted physicist, and Dick Devine, who later becomes Lord Feverstone. It isn’t until the second book, Perelandra, that Lewis introduces a more-than-merely-human villain: the Unman. Having been sent to the Paradise of Venus, Ransom finds himself confronted by Weston, his old nemesis. But this time, Weston claims to have adopted and (more alarmingly) further developed Ransom’s Christian beliefs, arguing that God and Satan are, in fact, one and the same person. “I am the Universe. I, Weston, am your God and your Devil. I call that force into me completely,” the scientist cries out, before beginning a series of horrific convulsions. (READ MORE: The Most Disastrous Debate Performance in U.S. History) The next time Ransom meets Weston, still on Venus, there has been a distinct and definitive — even a diabolical — change, though Ransom initially finds it almost impossible to identify precisely what that change is. “Something which was and was not Weston was talking: and the sense of this monstrosity, only a few feet away in the darkness, had sent thrills of exquisite horror tingling along his spine, and raised questions in his mind which he tried to dismiss as fantastic,” Lewis writes. Ransom then discovers Weston mutilating, with his bare hands, a little frog he has found and the two make eye contact: If Ransom said nothing, it was because he could not speak. He saw a man who was certainly not ill, to judge from his easy stance and the powerful use he had just been making of his fingers. He saw a man who was certainly Weston, to judge from his height and build and coloring and features. In that sense he was quite recognizable. But the terror was that he was also unrecognizable. He did not look like a sick man: but he looked very like a dead one. The face which he raised from torturing the frog had that terrible power which the face of a corpse sometimes has of simply rebuffing every conceivable human attitude one can adopt towards it. The expressionless mouth, the unwinking stare of the eyes, something heavy and inorganic in the very folds of the cheek, said clearly: “I have features as you have, but there is nothing in common between you and me.” … And now, forcing its way up into consciousness, thrusting aside every mental habit and every longing not to believe, came the conviction that this, in fact, was not a man: that Weston’s body was kept, walking and undecaying, in [Venus] by some wholly different kind of life, and that Weston himself was gone. Lewis and Ransom dub this iteration of Weston, the Unman. Much the same might be said of Biden, the Unman in the White House, the Unman on Thursday night’s debate stage. (READ MORE: Nine Takeaways From the Trump v. Biden Debate) When the Unman squats on the ground, Lewis writes, “The body did not reach its squatting position by the normal movements of a man: it was more as if some external force maneuvered it into the right position and then let it drop. It was impossible to point to any particular motion which was definitely non-human.” Ransom describes it as “watching an imitation of living motion which had been very well studied and was technically correct: but somehow lacked the master touch.” Could the same not be said of Biden? The decrepit old man stands, walks, talks, waves, shakes hands, and scratches his nose or his ear the same as you or I might, but that spark of humanity is missing. His face does indeed resemble the face of a corpse, as though some puppeteer had attached strings to make the President smile or frown or scowl. It would all be a brilliant technical achievement as far as imitation goes, but it would still be mere imitation. In fact, it is mere imitation. I’ll come back to this point shortly. The final installment in the Ransom Cycle, That Hideous Strength, introduces a shadowy cabal of politicians, bureaucrats, journalists, scientists, police officers, and sexual deviants allied with the Unman whom we might be excused for comparing to the Democratic Party, although Lewis refers to them as the Belbury group. The characteristics of the Belbury leaders are not unlike those of prominent Democrats. Lord Feverstone is charismatic, charming, and fairly good-looking, although the noble characters describe him as having “a mouth like a shark.” The aged civil servant John Wither is a master of speaking loquaciously and even eloquently, but only making matters more and more vague and obscure, even seemingly contradictory; he might be said to be a personification of relativism. The psychologist Augustus Frost is almost the opposite, cold and calculating, precise to the point of becoming somewhat nihilistic. The physiologist Filostrato is morbidly obese, the police chief Hardcastle is a butch lesbian, and the “mad parson” Straik is a bitter heretic. A Prescient Comparison to the Democrat Party These inane and increasingly disturbing figures are a perfect parody — almost a perfect replication — of the Democratic Party of today. It is little surprise to discover that the Belbury folk are directly beholden to demons, whom they call “macrobes,” devoted as ever to their scientific jargon. Given its rabid, almost religious promotion of abortion — a scientific jargon name for the horror of child sacrifice — and all manner of sexual, psychological, ideological, and spiritual depravities, it would be equally unsurprising to find that the Democratic National Committee was taking its orders straight from the mouth of Satan. Abortion is a prime indication of this demonic bent. Abortion itself is referred to by Democrats as a positive good — that is, a good in and of itself, not merely the imperfect or morally questionable means to a good end. Those who threaten access to child sacrifice are accused of threatening democracy, which is more and more frequently and openly referred to as “sacred.” Biden himself used that word in Thursday night’s debate. The use of the term “sacred” is no mere accident. Lewis describes this marriage between modern science and a warped, inverted awareness of the spiritual world in That Hideous Strength: A junction would be effected between two kinds of power which between them would determine the fate of our planet. … The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already, even in Ransom’s own time, begun to be warped, had been subtly maneuvered in a certain direction. Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to it, and a concentration upon mere power, had been the results. Babble about the élan vital and flirtations with panpsychism were bidding fair to restore the Anima Mundi of the magicians. Dreams of the far future destiny of man were dragging up from its shallow and unquiet grave the old dream of Man as God. The very experiences of the dissecting room and the pathological laboratory were breeding a conviction that the stifling of all deep-set repugnances was the first essential for progress. And now, all this had reached the stage at which its dark contrivers thought they could safely begin to bend it back so that it would meet that other and earlier kind of power. Indeed they were choosing the first moment at which this could have been done. You could not have done it with nineteenth-century scientists. Their firm objective materialism would have excluded it from their minds; and even if they could have been made to believe, their inherited morality would have kept them from touching dirt. … It was different now. Perhaps few or none of the people at Belbury knew what was happening; but once it happened, they would be like straw in fire. What should they find incredible, since they believed no longer in a rational universe? What should they disregard as too obscene, since they held that all morality was a mere subjective by-product of the physical and economic situations of men? The time was ripe. From the point of view which is accepted in Hell, the whole history of our Earth had led up to this moment. There was now at last a real chance for fallen Man to shake off that limitation of his powers which mercy had imposed upon him as a protection from the full results of his fall. If this succeeded, Hell would be at last incarnate. Bad men, while still in the body, still crawling on this little globe, would enter that state which, heretofore, they had entered only after death, would have the diuturnity and power of evil spirits. Nature, all over the globe … would become their slave; and of that dominion no end, before the end of time itself, could be certainly foreseen. We now return to Biden. The Catholic priest and exorcist Malachi Martin discussed a concept he called “perfect possession,” which is not the typical form of possession, whereby a demon takes control of a human individual’s body, essentially doing things against that individual’s volition — but is instead when an individual bends his volition so repeatedly, so concertedly, and so completely in line with the will of Satan himself that the two become, in a very real sense, indistinguishable. (READ MORE: Trump v. Big Government: The Department of Education Won’t Die Easy) Hell itself, I believe, necessitates an annihilation and absence of distinctions and distinguishing features, so that for such an individual, Hell on earth might be a reality. It is possible that Biden, who was raised a Catholic, has so abandoned the faith of his fathers, so rejected and repudiated God Himself, so embraced the will of Hell, that there is now no distinction between “Biden” and whatever demon he has modeled himself after. That Biden’s soul may now be in Hell, having invited Hell into himself so unreservedly, and his body might be kept walking and talking and (barely) undecaying here on Earth by demonic forces. Biden may be, in fact, the Unman. The post Biden Is the Unman on the Debate Stage appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

Special elections, or by-elections as they are called in Canada, are often said to be harbingers of the change that one might expect to see in an upcoming general election. In Canada, it’s trickier to make predictions because the ruling party can call a snap election at any time to prolong and consolidate its power if it thinks the wind is blowing in the right direction. The last general election in Canada was one of these snap elections. It was held during the pandemic even though Trudeau had promised not to do so — just one Trudeau lie among many. In any event, he did win but was only able to form a minority government. In normal times such a government usually lasts only around two years before a vote of no confidence brings it down. However, Trudeau has formed an informal coalition with the socialist New Democratic Party (NDP) because, since both plummeted drastically in the polls, they have held on together for dear life. The smart money says that there won’t be another general election for another year or so when it will be legally required. In the meantime, we have just had a very interesting special election in the electoral district next door to the one that I live in. (READ MORE: Gavin Newsom Is on Top of the World) Monday evening I was a volunteer scrutineer for the Conservative Party during the counting of ballots at one of the polling stations. This is something that I hadn’t done for some time but I remember well the very first time I did it. I was 14 years old at the time, so when I turned up at the polling station a debate ensued as to whether someone too young to vote should be allowed to participate in the counting of the ballots. Canadian federal elections are run by a federal agency called Elections Canada that sends one of its agents, called a returning officer, to every polling station to supervise the proceedings. This person has the final word in all disputes. In the end on that occasion, the returning officer determined that though I was not yet eligible to vote I was quite capable of counting ballots and also of judging whether any had been spoiled. Consequently, I was duly seated around a table with representatives from the other parties, the ballot boxes were opened and we examined and counted the contents one at a time. Yesterday evening I was pleased to learn that aside from a few minor procedural tweaks nothing had changed compared to my earliest experience in ballot counting. A Fiercely Contested Election in a Liberal District Canada is known for the integrity of its elections, so much so that she is often asked to act as an observer in the elections of sketchy foreign countries. In Canada, before each election, the voting roles are refreshed. An agent of Elections Canada visits every residence in the district to determine how many eligible voters live there. Very little mail-in voting is permitted and although there is some early voting, most of it occurs on election day and all voters must show up with a government-issued photo ID that shows the same address registered on the voting list. The returning officer is there is ensure that no exceptions are made to that rule. (READ MORE: That Debate Might Be the End of the Road for … Barack Obama) Not surprisingly, with the Liberals so deep underwater in the national polls, yesterday’s election was fiercely contested. It was considered to be a safe seat for the Liberals because they had held it for 30 years and during the last election they won it by 24 points. Nevertheless, under the circumstances, the party sent in some of its top guns including Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland to ensure they did not lose it. Also, not surprisingly, at the polling station where I was an observer for the Conservative party, the only other party that was represented was the Liberals. Apparently, the other parties decided to write this one off or perhaps they just didn’t have enough personnel on hand to cover all of the bases during the ground game. As we counted the ballots and the Conservative candidate started well and pulled ahead in the count the Liberal observer stood beside me red-faced with fury written all over her face — honestly, for a while there I was afraid that she might actually stroke out. We were observing at a rather small station that had needed to use only one ballot box to contain 86 ballots. In our only disagreement, the liberal scrutineer and I disputed over this number. Our dispute was quickly settled by the rule book at hand — we didn’t need to summon the returning officer. At the end of the count, the Conservative candidate had 41 votes to the Liberals 31 with the rest going to sundry other candidates and I was pleased to have helped preside over a happy result for my party. This count was encouraging, although not typical. The Liberals were getting superior numbers at other polling stations and by the time I showed up at the restaurant where the party was to be held, we were trailing by about 500 votes. Naturally, many eyes were glued to a big screen where the results were being tabulated as they came in. This is Canada and it was the evening of the final game of the NHL season between the Edmonton Oilers and the Florida Panthers, half the screen displayed the ongoing game and viewers alternated their comments between what was going on at the polls and what was happening on the ice. No Canadian team has won the Stanley Cup since 1994, and since hockey is Canada’s national sport, it was disappointing when the Oilers lost to the Panthers. When I left the party at midnight about 80 percent of the ballots had been counted and the Conservatives were still trailing the Liberals by about 500 votes. So wasn’t it just great to wake up the next morning to learn that we had won! We had flipped a rock-solidly safe Liberal seat by a two-point margin, enough to guarantee that with Canada’s strict voting procedures, this result would not change even if there were to be a recount. What Explains the Change in Canada? There are different ways that one might think of explaining this. There is, of course, the general discontent that I have already mentioned: There is ongoing inflation caused by wanton government spending, house prices, and rent have doubled since the Liberals took power, feckless carbon taxes are hurting middle-class pocketbooks, and dissatisfaction with the general divisiveness of Liberal rule, the most salient feature of which has been divide and conquer. (READ MORE: How Conservatives Can Finally Get Judicial Nominations Right) But there is another noteworthy factor that I think came into play in this particular district. Fifteen percent of its population happens to be Jewish, most of whom have traditionally voted Liberal. Since Oct. 7 that demographic has been feeling deeply betrayed. Anti-Semitism in Canada, as elsewhere, is surging and the Liberals have been doing nothing substantial to counteract it. On the contrary, they have been posing false equivalents between it and Islamophobia. Moreover, Canada has turned against Israel at the UN, so much so that after a vote early in the war with Hamas its leader, Dr. Ghazi Hamad has publicly thanked Canada for her support. This year during Toronto’s annual Walk for Israel 50,000 people showed up, about three times previous showings. Despite traditionally voting Liberal, the Jewish population of Canada is generally somewhat more conservative than its American counterpart. With the Biden administration constantly hampering and restraining Israel’s war effort by withholding arms shipments and trying to help the Israeli opposition topple the Netanyahu government, who knows how American Jewry will vote in November? Though it won’t be happening any time soon America sure could use some Canadian observers come November. The post A Canada Election Didn’t Go As Planned. Is it a Harbinger of Things to Come? appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

There’s the devilish look on little Zoe Roth’s face in the burning house meme, Harold’s long-suffering smile, and Chloe, the little girl who became famous for her expression, somewhere between confused and distrustful, from the back seat of the family car when her mother explained that they weren’t headed to school but to Disneyland. There is the Wile E. Coyote expression, as he glances towards the Roadrunner while falling a cliff for the umpteenth time, Alf’s look when he gets bored and bangs his little fingers on a table, and Colonel Smith’s amused expression when they are about to kill him and he calmly and ceremoniously lights his big cigar. (READ MORE: A Dismal Debate for Biden: Gen Z Responds) There is the look of Jesus to St. Matthew in Caravaggio’s painting, the droopy-eyed look of Walter Matthau to Jack Lemon in the movie Frontpage, the turquoise eyes of Elizabeth Taylor, the look of Scrooge McDuck gives Donald after giving him a caning, and the look of the male toucan to the female toucan on the wedding night. There is the look of Caesar to Brutus at his assassination, the look on the face of soccer player Toni Kroos while lifting Real Madrid’s 15th European Cup, and the look of my ex-girlfriend every time I told her I was having dinner with friends from work. The beautiful, albeit botox-infused, look of Angelina Jolie, the welcoming and charitable look of St. John Paul II, the leftist banging look of Milei, and the craziest look ever played by Jack Nicholson. There are looks that welcome, that reject, that invite, that love, that hate, that amuse, that question, that emphasize, that mislead, that frighten, and that have made history. There are all kinds and for every situation, and most of them can be framed within some general category because they repeat the same patterns. (READ MORE: The Most Disastrous Debate Performance in U.S. History) And yet, throughout history, whether you look in movies or politics, sports or music, you won’t ever find a look as thunderous, as iconic, as definitive, as eloquent, as the one Donald Trump gave Joe Biden in the debate, as the president put on his particular show of confusion, hesitation, and obvious mental collapse. That look is the meme of the year. Everything was encapsulated in Trump’s eyes and his stance. If you ask me which was the best speech in the history of the former president, I will tell you it happened last night. It was that look, without saying a single word. His head was slightly raised and cocked to one side, looking towards Biden, tight-lipped frown, an undeniable seriousness in every detail, except in the eyes, where you could see that he was going to great lengths not to crack up, because, at the end of the day, Biden’s show is humanly depressing. As if the look wasn’t enough, he added the tagline, a demolishing tagline, as if he wanted to win the elections there and then, in a hurry, in a single sentence: “I don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence, I don’t think he knows either.” There will be those who consider Trump’s position an abuse in the face of Biden’s obvious decrepitude, but I doubt that politics is the right place to engage in charity work with rivals, even more so when behind the adorable old man you have behind the wild politics of postmodern socialists: taxes and more taxes, agenda 2030, skyrocketing public spending, woke depravation, and cancellation of dissent. Trump is not crushing a harmless old man, but the one who represents the spearhead of that dangerous ideology that ruins nations, that ruins people, that ruins societies. (READ MORE: Nine Takeaways From the Trump v. Biden Debate) Anyway, I can think of a great idea so that the former president does not have to bully his rival and make him bite the dust in such a humiliating way: Someone among the Democrats should have the decency to understand that the use they are making of an old, incapable, and sick man is really disgusting. Biden was already a lousy politician when he was in top form. What he is now is a bad joke. The post Winning Elections With a Single Glance appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

French voters begin the two-round process of electing a new National Assembly (their House) on Sunday, and the fear — or is it a frisson? — is that Nazis will take most of the 577 seats in the venerable old Palais Bourbon. By now, large numbers of immigrants have gone full Islamist…. About which you hear no objections from Melenchon’s La France Insoumise party. With slogans plucked from antiquity — “Fascism is at the gates!” “Vote New Popular Front!” — demonstrators make an extraordinary show of virtuous indignation against racism, police brutality, Islamophobia, and other ills of our times. Individuals claiming to be “teachers” and “feminists,” among other subcategories of substitutes for the people (popolo, peuple, popular), man imaginary barricades while littering the streets, one guesses, with non-GMO carry-outs from joints run by Asian and African entrepreneurs. (READ MORE from Roger Kaplan: Every Spring Sport Has Its Glories — And Its Shame) This from pals in France with whom I have been on the phone for the past couple of weeks, trying to figure out why President Emmanuel Macron dissolved the Assembly and called a snap election. Granted, his Renaissance Party did not have a majority in the chamber, but does he expect to get one with this ploy which is permitted under the Constitution of the Fifth Republic, instituted in 1958 by Charles de Gaulle and drafted by Michel Debre, one of his close associates and first prime minister. I mention this because the smart money is that very few people — in France, I mean — know this, and while they know who de Gaulle is they most of the time cannot place Debre. They don’t know that Debre was a Catholic of Jewish parentage who did not think well of France-bashers. Nor do they know that the pre-World War II  “popular (ie, “people’s”) front” was led by an eminent,  literate gentleman, head of France’s Socialist Party, named Leon Blum. Jewish though nonobservant, highly cultured, Blum agreed to a tactical electoral alliance with the Communists and Radical Republicans (center-leftists) in 1936 because a coalition had formed around anti-Semitic, anti-parliamentarian, anti-republican parties for the explicit purpose of overthrowing France’s constitutional order. Blum won the election, and though he waffled on foreign policy (even supported the Munich agreement), he pushed for rearmament to prepare for war with Germany. Arrested by the pro-German Vichy government, he survived imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp and worked to restore French democracy following World War II. Apologies for the digression, but it is relevant to the present situation. Notwithstanding some wrong calls on policy, Blum never abandoned liberal democracy. He saved the “old house” of French socialism by leading a faction that after World War I rejected Lenin’s instructions to form the French Communist Party (PCF). He fought the radical left all his life and was not surprised when the PCF obeyed Stalin’s orders to support the Nazi-Soviet Pact that gave Hitler the green light to invade Poland, starting World War II. The “New Popular Front” is far from the humanism, however misguided, of the original. It is led by lifelong leftist firebrand, Jean-Luc Melenchon, whose alliance with anti-communist liberals and social democrats defies reason. Leaders of the soft left, including the Socialist Party, are joining with an apologist for river-to-the-sea anti-Semites to secure a few parliamentary seats. A Cover for Shameless Cynicism The “stop fascism” hysteria is a cover for shameless cynicism. If there is a fascist threat in France it is coming not from the Rassemblement National, led by Marine Le Pen, but from movements implanted in the immigrant neighborhoods of France’s major cities that share the goals of the Muslim Brotherhood (of which Hamas is the Palestinian affiliate). On the phone over the past fortnight, I get the impression that many in France are no less stumped than I am as to why Macron gambled on new elections. He may hope the French people, their minds concentrated as at a hanging, will return to a center-right majority. But with both Macron’s party and the remains of the Gaullists (now called Republicans) in disarray, such a majority would in most prognostications have to include the Nationalists led by Marine Le Pen. Macron has branded Melenchon and Le Pen as twin opposites, but the moral equivalence is not there. Whatever sins of anti-Semitism and racism Marine’s father Jean-Marie committed have been disowned. Marine Le Pen is rock-solid on Israel’s fight against Hamas and denounces the worst outbreak of anti-Semitism in France since the 1940s. Moreover, whereas the Melenchonistes are openly in favor of dismantling the Fifth Republic and “refounding” France along post-colonial demographics, the nationaux say and repeat they have no intention of challenging the institutions of the Republic, one of which happens to be presidential prerogatives in foreign affairs, regardless of who controls the Assembly. This has been the norm — termed co-habitation — when the legislature and the executive are controlled by different parties The decades-long habit of viewing the national movement in its most xenophobic light — a habit that, admittedly, Jean-Marie Le Pen did little to discourage (as your correspondent reported in these and other papers) — obscured, though it should not have, the connections between immigration and security. (READ MORE: The French March Against Anti-Semitism) Thus, feminist organizations and teachers’ unions protesting in the streets against fascism seem to be more concerned with the nationalists’ alleged anti-democratic tendencies than with the breakdown of order in public schools, where Islamists forbid girls to participate in sports or physical education and demand changes in the curricula to suit their views of history. Nothing perhaps could be more cruelly symptomatic of what is at the gates of France, indeed inside the gates, than the recent beating and rape of a 12-year-old Jewish girl at the hands of thugs mouthing anti-Semitic hate. And it cannot be dissociated from the far left’s apologetics for Hamas and its years-long campaign to stigmatize the police. The defender’s public order will be mobilized, with reinforcements from the gendarmerie and support from friends and allies, Bundespolizei, carabinieri, New Scotland Yard, FBI, and NYCPD, to keep the streets safe for the tourists who will be visiting during the Olympic Games (July 27-August 11). No one can object (except the Islamo-gaucheries), but where will this leave ordinary French guys and dolls? Going on in circles about this on the trans-ocean WhatsApp, it becomes clear this, in the end, is why no one gets these elections. No one gets these elections because no one wants to talk about the most important issue in France today — the loss of France to anti-French forces from within and without. No one, that is, except the Rassemblement National, which is the reason it is accused of “fascism.” Nor does anyone mention, and here you will forgive me a touch of pedantry again, Charles de Gaulle’s attitude in this matter. Yet it could not be clearer or more relevant. “Muslims, have you seen them? With their turbans and djellabas (baggy pants), you can see they are not French!” He was diagnosing a “clash of civilizations” avant la lettre, but he also was being pragmatic: “If you offer them citizenship,” (this was proposed as a way to end the war in French Algeria), “what will stop them from coming here, where living standards are so much higher?” And his famous quip: “Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises [his home town] will be called Colombey-les-Deux-Mosquees.” These well-known Gaullian lines were repeated and published in best-selling books, notably C’était de Gaulle, written by his close associate and minister, Alain Peyrefitte. No one has ever claimed these and similar statements such as the rapid doubling and tripling of the Muslim population are fabricated or do not reflect his convictions. But they are no longer recalled in public. Lately, they have been referred to in small circulation journals, such as Causeur and Revue des Deux-Mondes, that try to break through the politically correct mindset (called, aptly, la pensée unique) that cannot admit France for decades has been up against a growing existential threat from within. (READ MORE: A Message From Europe) De Gaulle was neither racist nor Islamophobic. He viewed with pride the successes of countless Muslim emigrants who, whether in humble jobs or elite professions, embraced France. However, he anticipated that there would be a normal communitarian trend in neighborhoods with a dense Muslim population. By now, large numbers of immigrants have gone full Islamist, or have been forced to by the thugs who prey on them — about which you hear no objections from Melenchon’s La France Insoumise party, which translated means “France Unbowed,” which is ironic indeed considering he has bowed to the descendants of the invading hordes stopped at the Battle of Tours by Charles Martel’s Christian army. This surely is why Pierre Rigoulot, a true Tocquevillian liberal (and occasional TAS contributor), who always opposed Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front and would prefer to see Macron get his act together and start behaving like a statesman instead of a self-regarding technocrat, this time says that if the choice in his district is between a Melenchoniste and a national, he will vote for the latter. But let us remain calm, he says. The two-stage election will most likely produce another dysfunctional assembly, wherein the Islamo-left and the nationaux will command large blocs but not majorities. It will then be up to Emmanuel Macron to rise to the occasion and make do with a minority government. Maybe he will be inspired by the Games? They began as the vision of an idealistic Frenchman, Pierre de Coubertin, in the 19th century. The idea was to play fair and with generosity toward your opponents. A fine example came in the 1924 Games, also held in Paris, when the British track team, led by Eric Liddell and Harold Abrahams, showed the kind of manly virtue that the American Jesse Owens, in turn, would display in 1936 in Berlin. Come on, Manny, Manny Martel! You can do it! The post Elections in France Could Bring Extremists to Power appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.

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