Biden Cannot Be Forced Out of Race Democratically by Oligarchs; What the U.K. and French Elections Mean for Establishment Politics in Europe
TIMESTAMPS:
Intro (0:00)
Under Pressure (5:58)
Centrist Collapse In Europe (50:06)
Outro (1:27:41)
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Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m.
Eastern exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, Joe Biden, or whoever determines what he says, has been making as clear as possible, day after day, that he has no intention whatsoever to withdraw from the presidential race.
As was easy to predict, someone like Joe Biden, who has chased the presidency his whole life, And those around him who control him and thus control that power do not easily just renounce that power voluntarily.
They usually cling to it as tightly as they can and for as long as they can.
And that is exactly what Biden and his inner circle are doing.
At the same time, liberal elites and media in Washington and Democratic Party donors are increasingly uniting in their determination to remove Joe Biden from the race, not because they care at all whether the U.S.
is nominally governed by a person suffering from various forms of dementia.
It goes without saying that if Biden were ahead of Trump in the polls rather than behind, they would be viciously attacking anyone who suggested that Biden's mental state was anything less than vigorous.
Indeed, just until a few weeks ago, when they all, like the herd animals that they are, switched on a dime.
That is precisely what they were all doing, insisting that Biden was as strong as ever and that anyone who said otherwise was both immoral and deceitful.
The only reason liberal elites have decided to try to push Biden out of the race is not because they care how the United States is governed, but because they fear that he will lose to Trump, and thus their own power and influence will disappear, along with the Democrats' control of the White House and possibly both houses of Congress.
No matter how often Biden says he is not leaving, no matter what, these power factions continue to attack him more and more every day as a crippled and unfit candidate.
Which in turn has led the Biden circle to start attacking Democratic Party elites as corrupted and irrelevant, as if Biden were Ralph Nader or Tucker Carlson or the host of this program.
Welcome Biden White House to the club.
Let's get together.
Biden come on our show and talk about how corrupted Democratic Party elites are.
Now, the problem with all of this is this little issue of democracy, the value that liberals have endlessly claimed that they and they alone are here to safeguard.
Regardless of how flawed and corrupted the Democratic Party primary was yet again, the legal winner of that primary is Joe Biden.
He is the legitimate, the only legitimate nominee for president of the Democratic Party.
Indeed, tens of millions of Democratic voters across America cast their votes for Biden to be their nominee.
What everyone might call the unified efforts of Democratic and Liberal elites in media and politics to drive Biden from the race against his will, Democratic is not one of them.
It is important to analyze this conflict from that perspective.
Then, a national election was held last week in the United Kingdom, and another was held over the weekend in France.
Though the headlines were somewhat similar, trying to imply that the Labor Party and Emmanuel Macron both enjoyed great success, thus proving the ongoing viability of center establishment politics against the far right, the details of what happened tell a much different story.
One might even say the exact opposite story.
Over the last few weeks, we have interviewed several experts about both the EU election and the French election.
I myself, sadly, have long been deeply focused on British politics because of my time at The Guardian and in part because of how much of the Snowden reporting required involvement in and analysis of the British political class.
So using all that expertise, including a guest we've had on our show that we have presented over the last several weeks, we want to examine the truly interesting and revealing implications about these election results, especially for the prospects of establishment politics in the West as a result of these elections in two of the most important countries in Europe.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
There are so many entertaining and revealing aspects of what is now this complete spectacle involving the question of whether Joe Biden is fit enough to run for president, whether Democratic Party elites believe that he is capable of defeating Donald Trump, which is really the only relevant metric that they have.
Now, as of course, all of you know, until the presidential debate, Where Joe Biden looked to everybody like a declining and crippled dementia patient, it was essentially taboo to mention in any sector of liberal media the fact that Biden was very visibly and obviously undergoing severe cognitive decline.
In fact, we've shown you many times the vicious attacks that were launched against people, the accusations that were made against them for anyone trying to raise these concerns, even though Polling data for years have shown that Americans themselves not only see it but are extremely worried about it.
It was still unmentionable in the liberal sectors of corporate media where the only recognizable and legitimate and accepted goal, the overarching mission, is to do everything possible to ensure that Joe Biden wins the election and Trump loses it.
And so any mention of this thing that everyone could see for themselves Was not only taboo, but essentially resulted in all sorts of recriminations against anyone who did so.
And we've shown you many times the history of this issue, namely that the very first people to raise the issue of Joe Biden's cognitive decline were not Trump supporters in 2023 or Bernie Sanders supporters in 2020.
It was actually Democratic Party insiders in 2018 and 2019 who were petrified that Biden would get the nomination simply because of name recognition.
And then proceed to lose the election to Trump because they knew he was in cognitive decline and they were saying that openly as a way to convince Democratic voters not to vote for Biden.
And it was only once Democratic Party voters, as usual, ignored these pundits and other people in the media and instead decided to elect Joe Biden did it suddenly become, that minute, Unacceptable any longer to question Joe Biden's cognitive appearance.
But if you go back and look at the debates, the Democratic Party debates in 2020, people like Cory Booker and Julian Castro, other candidates on the stage were openly mocking Joe Biden for being too old, for having memory issues, for not being able to function.
And Democratic insiders and media insiders were doing the same.
And so that was 2019.
And you can just already look at the impaired Joe Biden in 2020 and compare him to the Joe Biden of this year to see how radical and abrupt this decline has worsened to the point where not even the media could deny it any longer as a result of that debate.
Now, just to give you a little bit of a sense for how abrupt Was this complete shift in Democratic Party narrative and media narrative, where all of them are united, literally up until the day of that debate, in insisting that there was nothing wrong with Joe Biden, that he was as vigorous as ever, that anybody who suggested otherwise was a right-wing liar and a perpetrator of fake news.
And they weren't doing that a year ago or two years ago, although they were, but they were also doing it weeks Before the debate itself, we've shown you several times the video of Joe Scarborough.
A week before the Democratic Party debate, or two weeks, when the Wall Street Journal published an article, a deeply reported article, saying that people close to Biden have seen over and over that he is incapable of staying connected and focused, that he often has no idea where he is or what's being said.
And Joe Scarborough came out and angrily attacked the Wall Street Journal, as did the Biden White House and pretty much everybody else, claiming it was a partisan hit piece.
And Joe Scarborough said that he can assure the nation, as somebody who has spent a lot of time with Joe Biden recently, that he is more vigorous and more mentally agile than ever before.
But here is a similar video, also on MSNBC, where former Biden White House Press Secretary, that's still really her role, she just does it for MSNBC, Jen Psaki, had on to her show Congressman Jamie Raskin, the Democrat from Maryland.
This was June 16th, just three weeks ago.
And you can listen to what they say about people raising questions about Biden's mental capacity.
There's been, I mean, this all comes in a week where there was some New York Post report, inaccurate, false reporting that suggested the President, President Biden was kind of stalling, where he was paused, he was looking the other way.
I feel like there's a double standard.
I mean, do you feel like there's a double standard out there in how people are looking at their ages?
They can't mess with him on substance, so they go after what they see as his Achilles heel, which is his age.
And of course, you know, a lot of people see his age as, you know, something that helps explain some of his wisdom and some of his compassion.
The kind of compassion you see not just within his family, but outside of it.
That compassion for people in his family, which is real and authentic, becomes solidarity for everybody in the country.
That was three weeks ago, where the prevailing narrative among Democratic Party leaders and liberal media elites was that not only is Joe Biden not suffering as a result of his age, he's prospering because of it.
It's what gives him his wisdom.
The compassion for which he's so well known, the love and empathy that he exudes.
Part of that is because of his age.
We're lucky to have somebody as old as Joe Biden.
We were being told just three weeks ago.
And then the debate happened, and I believe it will go down in history as one of the greatest media scandals ever, that it became too evident, too visible, too viscerally clear for these media figures to hide any longer what the public had long been seeing, what all sorts of people have long been saying, which is that Joe Biden is an obvious and serious cognitive decline.
But because he was the only nominee they had against Donald Trump, they wanted to do everything possible, the media did, to lie to the public to conceal Biden's health in order to ensure that they dragged him over the finish line.
And it's by far not the first time they've lied to try and defeat Donald Trump.
They obviously did it in 2016 by inventing this insane, deranged conspiracy theory about Russiagate.
They did it in 2020.
When they presented these ex-intelligence officials to lie and claim the Hunter Biden laptop and all reporting based on it was unreliable and shouldn't be listened to because it wasn't authentic, but rather Russian disinformation.
So it's not a surprise that the media is willing to lie consciously and deliberately and repeatedly and in unity to get Joe Biden Democrats over the finish line.
They've proven that over the last two elections, just like they've proven in the Democratic Party in their primaries, that they don't care in the slightest about democracy at all.
None of this is new, but this is such a severe example of it that I think even people who didn't want to see it are now being forced to.
It is hard to overstate how unified is the attempt now to drive Joe Biden out of this race on the part of Democratic Party elites and their media allies, the same people insisting that there was nothing wrong with Joe Biden just three weeks ago.
It is a virtual requirement now for good standing in liberal politics and Democratic Party politics to do everything possible to try to drive Joe Biden out of the race.
Against his will to just badger him and coerce him and threaten him with funding and with punishments and leaks until they just force him out of the race.
The Democratic Party nominee who was democratically chosen.
And it is equally clear that Joe Biden He has no intention of leaving.
He does not want to leave.
He says it every day.
I do not intend to leave.
I'm not going anywhere.
And so they're not trying to persuade him.
They're trying to badger him and coerce him out of the race.
Here from the New York Times on July 2nd, the DNC member, a DNC member pitches a process to replace Biden as a nominee in a memo to party chair.
And this is what they've been doing.
These Democratic elites, these liberal elites have been inventing these fantasies about how they're going to create a process to choose Joe Biden's replacement once he's out of the race, even though he keeps saying, I'm not leaving the race.
Quote, the process outlined by James Zogby starts with an unlikely prospect.
Quote, President Biden announcing that he would drop out of the race.
I mean, this is the fairy tale in which these people are living.
Every pundit every day talks about how to choose Joe Biden's replacement, even though he keeps saying, I don't want to leave, I don't intend to leave, you can't make me leave, and I'm not going anywhere.
This is my favorite one, the favorite fantasy that liberal elites are creating for the New Republic on July 8th, which is today.
Quote, Democrats plot a celebrity-filled game plan To replace Joe Biden, two well-connected Democrats are circulating a plan on how to replace Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee.
They would hold a, quote, Bullets Primary, which would include candidate forums every week to engage voters, hosted by celebrities such as Michelle Obama, Oprah, and Taylor Swift, among others.
Now, the Democratic Party, over the last decade, has been remarkably in lockstep, remarkably unified.
Sension begins on August 19th.
Now, the Democratic Party over the last decade has been remarkably in lockstep, remarkably unified.
You almost never hear any dissent from within the Democratic Party.
And yet, over the past week, slowly, Democratic House members and even a couple of senators are now emerging to make clear that they think Joe Biden should leave the race.
Just constantly applying the pressure more and more on him every single day.
Here is one of those House members who exerts immense power but is very little known by the public.
His name is Adam Smith.
He's a longtime congressman from the state of Washington.
He represents the district where Boeing is based.
He gets massive amounts of donations from Boeing and the arms industry.
And he is either, depending on whether Democrats are in charge of the House or not, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee or the minority member.
He is a war hawk and a war longer, constantly supporting, as you would expect the representative from Boeing to be, massive military expenditures and endless war.
He's one of those guys just operates in the dark behind the scenes, but is a crucial player in Democratic Party leadership of the House.
He went on CNN today.
And here's what he had to say about Joe Biden.
There you see actually the graphic on the screen, breaking news, Congressman Adam Smith calls on Biden to drop out of the presidential race.
We got a good message.
The president has shown he is not capable of delivering that message in an effective way.
Just because, not, I shouldn't say just, because that 90 minute debate was a lot, but is this based entirely on that event?
No.
There was concerns leading up to it, in the terms of the president's ability to deliver a message, and it hasn't gotten better since the debate.
Now, I could spend the whole night just showing you Mainstream Democratic outlets and big Democratic Party donors coming out more and more saying that they don't think, that they think Biden must withdraw.
Here is The Economist on July 4th, so over the weekend.
Why Biden must withdraw.
The president and his party portray themselves as the saviors of democracy.
Their actions say otherwise.
It is amazing how all of these outlets have Almost reflexively decided that whatever they believe is the pro-democracy position.
So here you have The Economist demanding that despite being chosen by voters to represent the Democratic Party and be their presidential nominee, that Joe Biden be forced out of the race against his will, the ultimate anti-democratic position that we the elite should determine who the Democratic Party nominee should be, not the voters in their elections.
And yet they depict their view that Biden must leave as being the pro-democracy view or that Biden's decision to stay is somehow threatening democracy.
I suppose that's because what they do is they equate their views necessarily and inherently with defense of democracy, no matter what it is.
And any opposition to their views as inherently being anti-democracy, just like they believe that their views define truth and any opposition to or dissent from their views constitutes, quote, disinformation.
They've recreated language in such a radical way that you really have to pay attention to how they do it.
And that is what they believe.
They believe that the only way that American democracy can be saved is if the will of the American voters are thwarted, and Joe Biden is not permitted to run as a Democratic nominee, and that even though the majority of voters have said that they support Trump and want him to be reelected, or at least a plurality in every poll, pretty much, they believe that democracy can only be saved by ensuring that Trump does not get elected.
Here is Matt Yglesias, who is deservedly known as one of the most partisan Democratic loyalists in all of media.
And he has spent months, if not years, mocking viciously the idea that Joe Biden is not cognitively capable to be the president, that he should step down and they should choose another candidate.
And now all of a sudden he looks around him and he sees how isolated he is, that every single one of the other liberal pundits like him in his space, in his sphere, are saying the exact opposite of what he's saying.
Namely, they're now all saying, we want Biden gone from the race.
They all joined hands and switched views.
And so obviously people like Matt Uglasius have no ability to stand alone from the herd.
They're herd animals.
I think this is more than anything the thing that has corrupted journalism.
These people are petrified to even take one tiny little step out of line from what the prevailing media narrative is.
And as a result, here's Matt Uglasius today.
With his tweet promoting an article he wrote, quote, in case you missed it, why I sincerely expected Biden to prove the doubters wrong at the debate, why it was wrong, and why it's so much more than, quote, one bad night or whatever they're saying.
Matt Yoglesias has never deviated from the White House party line.
He, at best, makes very polite suggestions for how they could strengthen their message, things like that.
But it is remarkable to watch all these people read from the same script for months and even years.
And then on the same day, with the same signaling, they all just switch.
And now they're required, they're obligated.
Three weeks ago, they were required to say that Joe Biden was cognitively vigorous and capable.
And then the debate happened, and now they're all required to read from the opposite script, and they all obediently do so.
I still remember during Russiagate, this is one of the things that influenced me most in 2016, 2017, when I was still at The Intercept and I began expressing very serious skepticism about the Russiagate conspiracy theory, which is my first breach of the left, when I was getting emails and DMs from people inside major media corporations who were telling me, oh, I'm so glad you're out there expressing these doubts, demanding this evidence.
And obviously the subtext of it was I share those doubts.
But I can't do it myself.
And on the one hand, you can call them cowards, and maybe they do deserve that, but on the other hand, it's the truth that the media has become extremely tyrannical and despotic.
They don't tolerate any dissent.
And unless you're like a major, major media figure with a very secure platform, any attempt to just stick your head up just a little bit, to just kind of mildly question The prevailing narrative of corporate media will mean that you will get mauled on liberal Twitter and everyone will see it.
All your colleagues, your bosses, your future employers.
It will mean that you become unliked among the audience of CNN or NBC or the readership of the New York Times or the Washington Post or any of these thousand identical liberal media outlets, and they won't offend their readers.
And so if you do that, you become basically the black sheep of that media corporation.
It is enforced herd behavior.
And I really believe there is nothing worse for journalism and nothing worse for being a pundit or an analyst or a commentator than being petrified to take one step away from the herd.
That is the worst.
Conformism is the worst quality to have in journalism.
And yet it is what drives almost all of the corporate media.
Which is what explains how they can go from one vigorously believed, definitively enforced narrative one day to the exact opposite one, the next, and have each be equally obligatory and have basically everybody willing to read from one script one day and then the exact opposite script from the next with barely any recognition or acknowledgement that they've done so.
Now the interesting part of this episode up until now is that Joe Biden and the people who control Joe Biden, and it's important to note those people, whoever controls Joe Biden controls the power of the presidency, want very much to keep that power in their hands.
This has always been why I've been skeptical about their ability to drive Joe Biden out of the race.
Joe Biden was elected to the Senate when he was 29 years old in the early 1970s.
Obviously, if you get elected to the Senate in your 20s, the first thing you're doing is thinking about how you're likely to be a president.
It's you have your whole life to just plan that and to plot how you're going to do that and to figure out there's no other next step.
And Joe Biden has run for the presidency three times.
He ran in 1988, 16 years after he was first elected to the Senate.
He actually was one of the favorites to win the Democratic Party nominee until he was forced out of the race due to chronic and blatant serial lying about his life, as well as multiple incidents of nepotism, or rather plagiarism.
He then ran again in 2008.
And ended up getting crushed, but that was when Joe Biden, Barack Obama, selected him to be the vice president.
And then he ran again in 2020, secured the nomination, finally won.
He finally got a hold of this power and title that he's been seeking his entire life.
You think that Joe Biden, having spent his entire life chasing this thing that he just wanted and finally got his hands on, Is he, for the good of the country, just going to let it go and sacrifice his own self-interest and his own sensation of power and importance at the end of his life for some kind of broad, self-sacrificing, benevolent concern for some kind of social good?
What has Joe Biden ever done in his lifetime that suggests that he's that kind of person?
Absolutely nothing.
In fact, it's so rare for anyone to do that, that I was thinking about this the other day.
It happened a while ago, so I think a lot of people have forgotten, including myself, but when Edward Snowden first contacted me to talk to me about the archive that he had and wanted me to report on it, he obviously needed to contact me anonymously.
In an open email, an unencrypted email, say, Hi, I'm Edward Snowden with the NSA, and I'd like to hand you a top secret file.
So he had to be very careful and he used a pseudonym and the pseudonym he chose was Cincinnati's.
And the reason he chose that pseudonym is because his story was something that really impressed Snowden.
He had been a high-level official in Rome.
He had been a popular figure.
And once he was done, after a few years of power, he decided he wanted to retire and go back to his farm and wanted nothing to do with power or politics in Rome.
And when there was a major war that Rome found itself in, including a civil war, they needed a leader who could unite all the factions in Rome.
And he was the only person who had the popularity and standing to do that.
And so they begged him and pleaded with him to go back to Rome and assume the power he had given up.
And he finally reluctantly agreed to do that solely for the sake of Rome.
But he said, the minute this war is over, the minute the peace is restored, I don't want any of this.
I don't want any of this title, any of these powers.
I'm going right back to my farm.
And they said, OK, fine.
Well, no one believed him.
They thought, of course, he's going to come back and rule and then want to keep ruling.
But he followed through on his word.
The minute the peace was restored and the order was restored, he left Rome.
He gave up his titles.
He went back into private life on his farm the way he had wanted.
And Snowden was so impressed, because this behavior is so rare, that that was the pseudonym he adopted, Snowden did, when he first began contacting me.
I say that just to underscore how incredibly rare it is for human beings in general to willingly give up power, but particularly for a politician whose entire adult life has been about nothing but the pursuit of power.
Even if their brain is melting, the one part of their brain that will survive, kind of like cockroaches survive a nuclear holocaust, It's the part of the brain that craves power.
That is something Joe Biden will know he wants, no matter how dysfunctional his brain gets.
It's so embedded in who he is.
And as a result, no matter how many people come out and say that they're members of Congress, Democrats who demand that Joe Biden leave the race, no matter how many former enslaved media allies come out and say that, no matter how many big donors come out and say that, Every single day Joe Biden, or again the people controlling Joe Biden, are making extremely clear that they are not going to do that.
Now that doesn't mean that at some point in the future nothing could happen that could make Joe Biden change his mind, but at least for now The language that he's using is so absolute and even he's now attacking the power factions within the Democratic Party who are trying to drive him out of the race.
Something unthinkable to watch within Democratic Party politics.
It is very clear that Biden does not want to leave the race and that all of these efforts that are being escalated and intensified every day are designed to drive him out of the race, the sitting president, the elected nominee of his party, to drive him out of the race involuntarily, to force him out of the race through the consolidation of unified, unelected power in the hands of donors, media, and the political class.
And it's particularly ironic that this is the faction, the Democratic Party, that has claimed for months, in fact for years, that only they believe in the values of democracy, that only they can safeguard democratic values.
And yet so much of what they do and the way they run their primaries in 2016, where they cheated in 2020, where they conspired to drive everyone out of the race except for Bernie and Elizabeth Warren so that Biden got the entire vote.
And then in 2024, when they basically prohibited any primary at all, These people are the most anti-democratic faction imaginable.
And obviously I'm not a fan of Joe Biden, to put that mildly.
Although I do somewhat like this new elite that he's grown, of constantly ranting and raving against the evils of the Democratic Party elite.
But the actual real Joe Biden, obviously, is someone I'm not a fan of.
And I don't think the country would do very well if he stayed in power for four more years.
The way that democratic and liberal elites and media and finance and politics are trying to drive him out seems to have a whiff, not just of anti-democracy, but of kind of coup behavior that I think you should find very disturbing, no matter what you think of Joe Biden.
So here is, he said multiple things today.
To make clear that he does not want to go out.
Here is a statement that he posted to Twitter.
When I say he, I'm obviously talking about the people in control of his account and his statements.
Quote, he says, in the tweet, this morning I sent a letter to my fellow Democrats on Capitol Hill.
In it, I shared my thoughts about this moment in our campaign.
It's time to come together, move forward as a unified party and defeat Donald Trump.
And this is part of what the letter said, quote, I have had extensive conversations with the leadership of the party, elected officials, rank and file members, and most importantly, Democratic voters over these past 10 days or so.
I have heard the concerns that people have, their good faith fears and worries about what is at stake in this election.
I am not blind to them.
Believe me, I know better than anyone the responsibility and the burden of the nominee of our party carries.
I carried it in 2022 when the fate of our nation was at stake.
I also know these concerns come from a place of real respect for my lifetime in public service and my record as president, and I have been moved by the expressions of affection for me from so many who have known me well and supported me over the course of my public life.
I have been grateful for the rock-solid, steadfast support from so many elected Democrats in Congress and all across the country, and have taken great strength from the resolve and determination I have seen from so many voters and grassroots supporters even in the hardest of weeks.
I can respond to all of this by saying clearly and unequivocally, I wouldn't be running if I did not absolutely believe I was the best person to beat Donald Trump in 2024.
We had a democratic nomination process and the voters have spoken clearly and decisively I received over 14 million votes, 87% of the votes cast across the entire nominating process.
I have nearly 3,900 delegates, making me the presumptive nominee of our party by a wide margin.
This was a process open to anyone who wanted to run.
Now that's a total lie, but let's leave that aside for the moment.
Only three people chose to challenge me.
One fared so badly that he left the primaries to run as an independent.
That's RFK Jr.
Another attacked me for being too old and was soundly defeated.
That's Marianne Williamson.
The voters of the Democratic Party have voted.
They have chosen me to be the nominee of this party.
Do we now just say this process doesn't matter?
That the voters don't have a say?
I declined to do that.
I feel a deep obligation to the faith and trust the voters of the Democratic Party have placed in me to run this year.
It was their decision to make.
Not the press, not the pundits, not the donors, not any selected group of individuals, no matter how well-intentioned.
The voters, and the voters alone, decide the nominee of the Democratic Party.
How can we stand for democracy in our nation if we ignore it in our own party?
Yes, indeed, Joe.
Very good question.
How can Democrats stand for democracy if they do not even practice it in our own party?
He concluded, quote, I cannot do that.
I will not do that.
Now, the really interesting dynamic here is that you have the Democratic Party elites, and every day that they come out and bash Joe Biden as being too mentally crippled or too inept or too senile or too slow or too adult to be the nominee of the Democratic Party, they actually are harming Joe Biden's chances, obviously.
One of the big benefits of being the Democratic Party nominee is usually you have the entire media all day disseminating propaganda on your behalf.
Instead, anyone who tunes into CNN or MSNBC or reads the New York Times or the Washington Post or all those outlets that usually defend Democrats are hearing nothing other than, Joe Biden is too old, he's not up for the job, he's unfit to be president, he needs to leave.
So they're all in on this strategy.
How can they possibly go back after spending every day, day after day, and they're going to continue saying that Biden is unfit to be president because of his cognitive problems, that that was not just a single bad night of the debate, but instead is a condition that impedes Joe Biden in significant ways.
How can they continuously say that and now suddenly back off?
And say, you know what?
Okay, Biden is staying.
We now agree that he's perfectly fit to run for office.
That can't be done.
On the other hand, you have Joe Biden and the people around him who are clearly saying, we don't care what you think.
There is no chance we are giving up this power.
I'm sure they do believe that they're the best person to beat Donald Trump.
After all, People counted out Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
He got the nominee and then he went on to defeat Donald Trump and was the certified winner of the campaign.
So I'm sure Biden and the people around him genuinely believe that he's not only the best person to run, but also is entitled to it.
And it kind of reminds me of the war in Ukraine, where at the very beginning, NATO defined victory in such a maximalist way.
Namely, we demand the expulsion of every Russian troop from every inch of Ukrainian soil, including Crimea, something that was never going to happen, that made it impossible to find a resolution.
There's no way out of that war, because one side or the other will be too humiliated and can't accept that.
And so it just went on forever.
This seems to me very similar.
How can every one of Joe Biden's most strident cheerleaders, Continuously say that he's cognitively incapable of being president and then allow him to stay in the race and somehow think that they can just get behind him and convince Americans to vote for him.
Now I should say that there are some people in the Democratic Party who are actually stalwart defenders of Joe Biden and are saying that they think he should be the nominee.
Ironically, among the leaders of that group are people like AOC, who came out today and said, I don't think Biden should be driven from the race.
And Bernie Sanders, who over the weekend said, look, this isn't a Grammy award winning contest.
Biden can't run up the steps as fast as he used to.
Who cares?
That's the sort of thing that those people are saying.
saying.
It's ironic that the left wing of the Democratic Party, the supposed rebels against the Democratic Party have become the most devoted partisan loyalists.
But most of the press and most of the Democratic Party are against Joe Biden.
And the question is, how are they going to resolve that?
Now, just to underscore the point, Joe Biden called in today to his favorite TV show, Morning Joe, which he watches every day for obvious reasons.
It's Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski and the people they invite on are Joe Biden's biggest, most unquestioning and devoted fans.
Joe Scarborough was one of the people saying, oh, trust me, I'm with Biden all the time.
I talk to him all the time.
He's more cognitively fit than ever.
And so he called in today, and it's obviously the best platform for him to call into.
Also, he doesn't have to appear on camera, so he doesn't look like he's having those confused moments.
You can't see him, so his staff can be encouraging him to say anything or even writing out a script for him or pointing to what script he should read.
But there were points when Joe Biden got obviously angry, just like he did in the debate.
And this anger is actually a symptom of cognitive decline.
I don't know if any of you have had that experience where you've had to visit grandparents or parents in nursing homes.
And so many of the people there who are very sadly suffering from obvious cognitive disease, Alzheimer's or senility or various forms of dementia, Usually they're not docile.
They're actually quite aggressive, quite angry.
Sometimes I've had incidents when I've visited a nursing home that I've actually found kind of scary, like nightmare scenarios where these old men and women who seem like they shouldn't be moving at all are enraged.
And Biden had a lot of those moments when he got just so angry during the debate.
And he did the same when he called into Morning Joe today.
And here was one segment of that interview where he not only got angry, but got angry in a way that I found very revealing.
Listen to what he's ranting and raving against.
What would you say to those who are concerned by that answer?
It's not an option.
And I'm not lost.
I haven't lost.
I beat him last time.
I'll beat him this time.
And this is a guy who, look, we talk about debate.
Look at his performance with debate.
He lied over, you know, Trump has 50 lies.
I mean, look, this is a guy who says 10% of the universe.
Yeah, I don't want to get into it.
He's just a liar.
And he hasn't done a damn thing since the debate.
He's been riding around in the golf cart for 10 days.
He's down at Mar-a-Lago talking with his wealthy friends.
I'm not running because of these guys, Joe.
I'm running because, and you know me well enough to know this from the very beginning.
I ran because I never bought on in the trickle-down economic theory.
I never bought into the notion that we have to walk away from the rest of the world in a cave to Putin or anybody else.
I've never, never believed any of that.
And I'm confident that's what the American people are.
So what I did was, I went out and I wanted to make sure that there wasn't any slippage at all.
And with the average voter, I don't care what the millionaires think.
And by the way, 97% of all the people who contribute to us are people making under 200, contributing under 200 bucks.
I think we have the largest contingent ever in history.
I'm not positive of that, but I think that's true.
And so, I want their support, but that's not the reason I'm running.
I'm not running about what they think and what they care about.
And by the way, you don't see a whole hell of a lot of them flocking to Trump.
You don't see a whole lot of CEOs flocking to Trump.
You don't see any — you see the major economists out there talking about what I have been able to do.
I don't hear anybody talking about his economic plan, likely to bring America around and keep America first.
And by the way, here's Trump talking about all that he's done and all — and, you know, Trump — Trump and his debate night.
He's a pathological liar.
He lied about Roe.
He refused to accept the outcome of the election.
He refused to condemn January 6th.
And he says, he claimed, he spoke with Putin before he invaded.
What the hell are we doing, Joe?
What are we doing?
This is bizarre.
The American public is not going to move away from me as the average voter.
And again, I'm here for two reasons, pal.
One, to rebuild the economy for hard-working middle-class people.
Give everybody a shot.
Just a straight shot.
Everybody gets a fair chance.
Number one.
Number two.
Remember all this talk about how I don't have the black support?
Come on.
Give me a break.
Come with me.
Watch.
Watch.
I'm getting so frustrated by the elites.
Now, I'm not talking about you guys, but about the elites in the party who they know so much more.
If any of these guys don't think I should run against me, announce the president, challenge me at the convention.
I mean, when is the last time that you heard a Democratic Party leader railing against the Democratic Party elite and setting them as a faction that is contrary to the will of the ordinary voter, of the election?
Of course that's true.
But no Democratic Party official would ever dare say such a thing that the Democratic Party elite, the people who finance and run the Democratic Party, have interests completely separate than the ordinary Democratic voter, even though that's of course true.
And so you know we are in an extremely strange situation.
When Joe Biden goes on to Morning Joe and starts ranting and raving against the corruption and the evils of the elite financiers and media allies who have long been unified with him and starts ranting and raving against them because they're trying to drive him from the race.
And at the same time, he kind of challenges them and defies them and says, if you want to get me out of the race, come try and beat me at the convention.
Challenge me at the convention.
Come beat me there.
So I think what you can see from all of this is that this is a person, Joe Biden, who, whatever else is true about his brain, he does have clarity about the fact that he wants to continue to be the president.
He wants to continue to be the nominee.
He has no intention of withdrawing.
I think on top of all the other things I've said about why that is, about why he has no intention of withdrawing, just in general, again, I think most people have this experience that nobody who gets older wants to start acknowledging that they're incapable as a result of their aging.
People start finding all kinds of ways to deny this.
I remember the first time I ever had to start using reading glasses in my life.
I didn't think, oh, it's because I'm getting older and my eyes are more strained and less capable than they were when I was 25.
I started telling everybody that the print these days is so small, and how can this be?
And I remember, I used to remember my grandmother in her old age complaining about how the print on all sorts of bottles were so small that nobody could ever read it, and I quickly realized what I was doing.
This is normal.
This is the kind of thing that you want to resist, but it's even more serious when you're being told that you have cognitive impairment, that you're no longer fit to do the job that you've been doing your whole life.
No person wants to admit that.
It's very, very difficult to see Joe Biden admitting, look, I'm at the end of my life.
I'm going to now give in and capitulate to the people who I've been saying are acting improperly.
I'm going to admit that I have cognitive impairment and as a result, I'm going to relinquish The Democratic Party nomination that voters have given me and spend the rest of my life just sort of purposeless and out of the public spotlight, accepting that I'm now cognitively declining and dying.
That is not something that any human being can easily do psychologically.
And I think in the case of Joe Biden in particular, who has spent his entire life in Washington, it's very, very difficult to perceive that.
And so what you're really seeing now is in fact what Biden described, which is a war Between the expressed views of the Democratic Party based through what was by no means a fair election, they shut down the primaries, they allowed no debates, they announced in advance Biden was their nominee, but they at least nominally had a primary process and tens of millions of Democratic voters did in fact vote for Biden.
Polls always showed that he had a big lead on all other opponents, including RFK Jr.
and Marianne Williamson.
So I think it is fair to say that that was the choice of the Democratic Party voters to lead the nomination.
And unless Biden voluntarily decides to step down, the only way that these elites who think they control the party and should have everything done the way they want can force them out of the race is by basically using methods of a coup.
By just strangling him and encircling him with all kinds of threats about the abandonment of donors, about the way that the media will attack him and attack his legacy.
It really is an operation by liberal elites to drive the sitting president out of the race, the race that he was chosen by Democratic voters to be in.
And in this, you can really see the extreme contempt that liberal elites have for actual values of democracy, even as they spend their lives lecturing everybody on how the only way to save democracy is by keeping them empowered.
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There have been two extremely consequential elections, national elections, in two very important countries, or at least relatively important countries.
One that was held in the UK, and that was a general election that happened because the Prime Minister of the UK, Rishi Sunak, Was nearing the end of the period where he would be required to call for general elections.
The person elected and becomes prime minister of the party has a five year term.
That term was ending at the end of this year, but polls showed his party well, well behind.
The Labour Party, his party is the Tories, the Conservatives who have run Britain for the last 14 years, and for a bunch of different strategic reasons, he believed that it would be advantageous to call those elections a few months earlier than he had to at the end of the year, and so he called elections.
There's a six-week, I believe, election period from the time the Prime Minister calls until the actual vote, and the UK had its general election last week, and the headline was that the Labour Party The center-left establishment Labour Party experienced some great victory or some major resurgence.
And while it's true that the Labour Party did end up with an absolute majority in the Parliament and the Conservatives or the Tory Party collapsed, when you look at the actual data, which I think is very important to do, you will see that this was far from some sort of surge of support For the Labour Party, in fact, all of the available data, which we'll go over with you in a minute, shows the exact opposite.
That in fact, voters of the UK now hate both of the two parties that represent status quo establishment politics, including Labour and the Conservatives.
And even though Labour ended up with something like 65% of the seats in Parliament, They only got that party 34% of the vote of all voters.
34% of voters in the UK voted for the Labour Party.
They got fewer votes, just over 9 million, than they got four years ago in the general election, or five years actually ago, when they were led by Jeremy Corbyn, when they got 10 million votes.
And there was another national election held two years prior to that in 2017, also the Labour Party under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn, where they got 11 million votes.
So the Labour Party, far from getting this huge victory, actually got fewer votes, which we will show you in a minute, than they have.
And the thing that has gone up the most are non-voters, people so disgusted with the political system that they actually don't want to vote.
And then you have the French elections over the weekend, which we had several expert on this to discuss in advance of it.
And that happened because there were elections for the EU Parliament and Marine Le Pen's right-wing party got by far the most amount of votes in that election for the EU Parliament.
And as a result, Emmanuel Macron, despite not needing to at all,
decided he would dissolve Parliament, where his party had a majority of the seats, and the hand-picked successor he chose, Gabriel Attal, this young, gay Macronist, who had been Prime Minister of the French Parliament, he dissolved the Parliament and decided to have new elections, and for a long time it looked as though Marine Le Pen's party would end up with certainly the most amount of votes, if not an absolute majority.
As it turned out, that did not happen.
The right-wing party of Marine Le Pen came in third place.
Macron came in second.
And a coalition of left-wing parties led by what you could call a pretty far-left personality, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, ended up Winning the election.
None of those factions, none of those three has anywhere near a majority and so it's extremely unclear how France will be governed in their parliament and whether the Macronists will support a left-wing candidate to be the Prime Minister.
It looks unlikely that the right will now have as a prime minister but France is basically in paralysis because again voters turned against the centrist establishment politics of Emmanuel Macron and as a result turned either to the left or to the right.
And this is the thing that we're seeing over and over in the democratic world.
You can get different outcomes at different times for specific reasons relating to the moment in which the election is held with a specific country.
But the trend over and over in every one of these elections is growing disgust and contempt for status quo politics, for the establishment, institutions of the West that run the lives of people in Europe and the United States and Canada.
and throughout the democratic world.
And these two elections, despite their kind of top-line headline, oh, labor surges to a landslide victory, or Macron vindicated in his choice to try and keep the far end of power, end up telling very much the same story.
So first of all, let's go to the UK, where this election can pretty much be understood in a single chart.
And this is the vote share of every party from 1970 until the election that was just held in 2024.
Now, if you look at any newspaper headline, you will see Labor wins by a landslide.
And there is a sense in which you can justify that.
As I said, they got 65% of the seats in Parliament, an absolute majority.
As a result, the leader of the Labor Party, Keir Starmer, one of the most Uninspiring, vacant, and belief-free craven politicians you will ever see in your entire life was elevated to the Prime Ministership.
He's now the Prime Minister of the UK because the Labour Party has a majority seats of the Parliament.
But if you look at this chart, which is the percentage of the vote in every election from 1970 until the one that was just held, the line that represents the Labor Party is this red line here.
Red is the color of labor.
And you can see it there.
They had this uptick in percentage right here.
That was in 2017 when the party was under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn.
You see the line went straight up when they had a much more aggressive anti-establishment left-wing populist politics.
And then under Keir Starmer, you see it drop all the way to here.
So this is the current vote total of the Labour Party.
It's actually one of the lowest levels that they've ever had in their history.
At the same time, you can take a look at the Conservative Party.
Which is the Tory party that ruled for the last 14 years under people like David Cameron and Theresa May and Boris Johnson and then a couple of people they quickly circulated through including Liz Truss who was the Prime Minister for about 46 days and almost destroyed single-handedly the British economy.
Here you see the Tory party, the Conservative Tory party, which is easily the most important and dominant party in British politics in its recent history.
And you can see that their trend is they had a huge collapse.
They went from this level here, ahead of the Labour Party in 2019, and they just completely collapsed.
Because what this election was about, more than anything, Was discussed with the Conservative Party with the Tories for good reason.
Not only were they in power for 14 years and therefore the symbols of the status quo, they did this sort of thing in office that deservedly provoked the disgust of almost everybody regardless of political affiliation.
Probably their most harmful scandal was that at the beginning of the COVID pandemic through the next year and a half, the government, the British government under Boris Johnson, implemented some of the harshest and most suffocating stay-at-home and curfew and lockdown rules of any country in the democratic world.
People were barred from even going outside.
They were not able to gather in groups.
A lot of people lost their family members and weren't able to go to funerals.
And yet it turned out that the whole time, the leaders of the Conservative Party and the UK government were having major raucous parties inside 10 Downing Street, where they all were on top of each other every night, just violating all of the COVID protocols they had imposed on the entire population. just violating all of the COVID protocols they had imposed When they got caught, they repeatedly lied about it.
And then, by the time there was an investigation, everyone realized that they had done that, that Boris Johnson had lied, and Boris Johnson was forced to leave office, despite a pretty resounding victory.
And from there, they just had one scandal after the next.
Again, not an ideological scandal, but just sleaze and corruption of the kind voters hated.
So you can see here, this election had nothing to do with British voters turning to the center-left Labor Party.
In fact, they're as unpopular as ever, even though they won a majority.
What happened was a collapse of the conservative party because they were the party in power.
This was an anti-establishment, anti-status quo vote.
And I think the most important part of what this chart shows is that this gray line is by far the highest, and you see this huge increase in that gray line.
Gray line represents people who just refuse to vote.
It was 40%.
So 40% of the British population, only one other point was at higher after 2000, was the British public just of the opinion that none of these parties was worth voting for.
That was the only huge increase, huge shoot in this line.
With one exception, and you can see it here, this purple line that had a very sharp incline, And that is the party of Nigel Farage and the Reform Party that focuses on hardcore anti-immigration policies, on populist right-wing policies, and they had a sharp increase in the vote total even though they have
Even though they had no party structure, because the Reform Party is this brand new party, he used to have a different party called UKIP, and they're also part of this chart here.
But, and they had this big surge, they were the popular party during Brexit, but then they kind of disbanded, and then Najil Faraj came back during this election saying the Conservative Party had failed us, had abandoned all of our anti-establishment politics, and they took a huge amount from the Conservative Party.
They had an increase of millions of people who voted for Najil Faraj's Reform Party, took away a lot of votes from Conservatives, but also a lot of people who had previously been in the Labour Party.
It was this kind of right-wing populism focused on immigration and jobs that is rapidly becoming a more and more popular ideology across all of Europe.
So you can just see this tells the real story of what the actual population thinks.
There was a little bit of an increase for the Green Party.
This kind of centrist party called the Liberal Democrats didn't really have a huge increase in vote total, but they ended up getting something like 71 seats in Parliament just because of strategic expenditures of resources.
But in terms of the population, the only thing you can say is that they hate anyone associated with the status quo in the establishment, including both the Conservative Party, this establishment center-right Tory party, and the center-left Labour Party.
It's very important to see the UK election for what it actually is rather than what the headlines were leading a lot of people to believe.
Now, just to show you a little bit of more detail about this, here is the Labour Party's vote total in the last three elections.
There you see in 2017, under Jeremy Corbyn, who's a populist, anti-establishment, left-wing leader.
They got 12,800,000 votes, almost 13 million votes in 2017 under Corbyn.
In 2019, in the general election under Corbyn, where the Tories won by a big majority under Boris Johnson, the Labour Party got 10,200,000 votes.
And we always heard that, oh, Corbyn was a disaster for the Labour Party.
He drove the Labour Party into the ground.
He drove everybody away with his left-wing populist policies.
But if you compare the vote total that Labor got under Corbyn in the last two elections to the vote total that Keir Starmer just got in 2024, you see that the vote total has been declining for the Labor Party, and that if you compare what the Labor Party got in 2017 under Corbyn to what Keir Starmer just got with the Labor Party in this last election, the one where Labor supposedly had a huge landslide victory, you see that in that time, Labor has lost 3 million votes.
From basically 13 million to 9.5 million.
Really, 3.5 million votes.
So, do not believe any narrative that suggests that this was some victory for the center-left Labor Party in any way other than the happenstance that they ended up winning the most seats in Parliament.
Now, just to show you again how disparate the headlines are from the reality, here's a graph from the Financial Times, and they have two different Columns here.
This is the vote share that each party received, and here's the percentage of the seats in Parliament that they won.
So you see here, Labour got 34% of the vote, as we just showed you, of the overall vote of the people of the United Kingdom, and yet they ended up with 65% of the votes in Parliament.
And you might be wondering, well, how could that happen?
And the reason is because a lot of countries have what's called proportional voting.
Where you go and vote for multiple parties and more or less the parties end up with the percentage of seats in the Parliamentary House that they receive in terms of raw vote totals.
That's not how the UK holds their elections.
The UK holds their elections in what's called first past the post.
So You can win a constituency, which is analogous to a House district, with something like 23% of the vote total, 25% of the vote total, because the other party's divided up.
And as long as you're the leading vote total, there's no runoff, there's no requirement to get 50% of the vote in a runoff, you end up winning that seat for the constituency.
And Labor ended up winning so many seats with a very small vote total, In part because the Conservatives and Nigel Farage's more right-wing populist party ended up splitting so many of the votes that it enabled the Labour candidate to win with a very small percentage of votes.
The Conservatives got 24% of the overall vote total and only 18% of the Seats in Parliament.
And then here's the really interesting thing.
The Reform Party, which is Nigel Farage's party that led Brexit, that really represents his anti-establishment, hardcore right-wing politics, it got 14% of the overall vote total.
Again, a brand new party.
It used to be called something different.
It got abandoned, UKIP.
But basically, it was a brand new party with no financing, no structure, no seats in the Parliament, huge structural disadvantages.
Despite that, it got 14% of the vote total.
And yet they only ended up getting 1% of the seats in the Parliament.
And then here you see the Liberal Democrats got a fair 12 and 11%.
The Greens got 7% of the vote total and yet 1% in the Parliament.
So it's only because of the system that it makes it seem like the Labour Party had some major victory.
When in fact, from the perspective of what the people think, they hate the Labour Party almost as much as any other establishment party.
Here just is another chart from the BBC, rather from Al Jazeera.
You see their Labour Party got 35% of the vote, Conservative Party 24%, the Reform Party in third place with 14%.
So if you add together the centre-right party of the Conservative Party and the Reform Party, You end up with 38% of the vote.
Now, it's not really a fair way to look at it.
There was also vote splits among the left.
But the idea that establishment politics or center-left politics had some grand resurgence Is simply not the case.
Even The Economist, a very vocal supporter these days of the Labour Party and a hardcore opponent of right-wing populism, was willing to admit that in an article this week.
How shallow was Labour's victory in the British election?
"The British party system may be fragmenting, but voters delivered a coherent message." Quote, "This was not a popular triumph for labor.
In absolute numbers, the party attracted fewer ballots than it did under Jeremy Corbyn in 2019.
Labour's share of the vote at 34% is the lowest level for a governing party since at least the First World War.
Instead of inspiring the message, Sir Keir spearheaded a fearsomely efficient election winning machine.
It won 42 seats in parliaments for every 1 million ballots cast, higher than any other major party in the past century.
It is true that Labour's victory was as much as the Conservatives' defeat.
The Conservative vote collapsed by 20 percentage points, the largest decline by any governing party in British political history.
Voters abandoned the party in all directions, not just for Labour, but for the Liberal Democrats, Reform UK and the Green Party.
Reform UK, a Eurosceptic and anti-immigration party led by Nigel Farage, was the biggest beneficiary of the Conservative collapse in terms of vote share.
Reform UK achieved 14% of the vote nationwide, up by 12% compared with the Brexit Party, as Mr. Farage's vehicle used to be known in 2019.
That was a greater share of the vote than the Lib Dems, so it translated into 67 fewer seats than Sir Ed's party.
So that's the real story of what happened in the UK election.
You could actually call it a victory for right-wing populism, for Euro-skeptic right-wing populism, since that was the faction that had by far the greatest increase in votes, despite major structural disadvantages.
And now they have four seats in the Parliament, that party does.
Nigel Farage is going to be all over the media and the probability that his party will continue to rise at the expense of not only the Conservatives but also the Labour Party voters who they say they're targeting precisely because a lot of Labour Party voters also hate Brussels, the EU and massive uncontrolled immigration.
They can continue to attract a large number of voters, and that really is the story of the election that exists and resides below the headline that Labour Party had some sort of grand resurgence and landslide victory.
Now, France is a little bit different of a story, but more similar than different.
And the reason for that is that the big question heading into the French elections was whether Marine Le Pen's party, that most French and European establishment officials regard as a far-right or even fascist party, was going to be able to replicate their success in the EU elections by winning a majority of seats in the French Parliament, have their first ever Prime Minister in power,
And Macron's view was, every time Marine Le Pen or her party gets near power, the French voters come to me.
And I'm convinced that after they see this victory that Marine Le Pen had, if I dissolve the Parliament and hold new elections, the French electorate will come back to me, the person in the middle, the establishment figure, they'll avoid the far left, they'll avoid the far right, and I will end up winning the election.
That is not what happened.
It is true that the far right of Marine Le Pen, if you want to call it that, that's how it's called, ended up in third place.
Although they gained a lot more seats than they previously had.
But the winner of the French election, by any metric, was not the centrist establishment of Macron policy, it was the coalition of left-wing parties who despise Macron and who have a much more anti-Brussels, anti-EU, populist politics than Macron does.
Here's a chart from The Economist that just shows the pure vote totals of the French National Assembly seats after the second round of voting, which was held yesterday.
Here you see the New Popular Front, that's the coalition of left-wing parties, led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who is absolutely a hardcore left-wing populist politician.
That faction got around 180 votes in the assembly.
This is the ensemble party of Emmanuel Macron.
They got around 155, 160.
This Macron faction lost a huge number of votes.
Not as many as they looked like they were going to lose, but they lost a lot of votes.
They were the majority coalition.
And here's Marine Le Pen's National Rally Party that got Just under 150 seats in the parliament.
And so what you really have is this massive division for the first time in the history of the Fifth French Republic since World War Two, where they have this Partied that this inability to form a majority coalition in the French National Assembly that likely is paralyzing French politics for a long time.
But to me, again, the story here is that while Macron-centrist establishment politics have dominated French politics for at least the last eight years, this election resulted in a collapse of support for his faction and a rise of support for both the populist right and the populist left, A very similar story to what we see in the UK and what we're seeing throughout all of the West.
Here's the Washington Post just kind of giving a couple of bottom line facts.
The Washington Post from today.
A divided France enters unchartered political territory after historic vote.
Quote, even as left-wing supporters were still celebrating the unexpected defeat of France's far right at the polls, attention turned Monday to the sobering task of how to govern a deeply divided country as it moves into uncharted political territory.
While an alliance of leftist parties came in first with more than 180 seats, it is far from the 289 seats needed for a majority in the National Assembly, the powerful lower house of Parliament.
President Emmanuel Macron's centrist Together coalition got more than 160 seats.
While the far-right National Rally and its allies were third, winning 143, polls had predicted that the far-right would come in first and perhaps even win an outright majority.
Sunday's upset result could now prompt prolonged political gridlock in a quote, new era in French politics.
Macron's Prime Minister Gabriel Attal said Sunday night, he actually is the protege of Macron.
He was basically chosen by Macron to become the Prime Minister.
As I said, he's this young, gay Macronist who Macron thought would easily be his successor.
And yet, as a result of these election results, he resigned because he no longer has a majority in the Assembly.
And yet, quote, Macron on Monday rejected Atal's resignation, asking him to stay for, quote, the time being to, quote, assure the stability of the country.
France's divided left form to a surprising alliance in the lead up to this election to prevent a far right victory.
In part, the coalition was also forged by deep frustration with Macron.
So again, it's a defeat for not the right wing party of Marine Le Pen, who gained a lot of seats and just proved in the EU election that they have a lot more support than they ever had before.
It's also clearly a victory for these left-wing populist parties.
It's a defeat for the centrist establishment politics of Emmanuel Crone, just as is the case in the UK.
Now, just to conclude, I want to show you a couple of segments from an interview that Marine Le Pen did last week with CNN's Christiane Amanpour.
Because so often these parties are deliberately misunderstood in the United States.
Just like Trump's movement is often misunderstood because they're just labeled and smeared with this far-right label which is designed to imply That they want to round up minorities and put them in camps.
That's what far-right means in the history, in the context of European politics, in the context of US politics.
It's designed to suggest they're sort of the successors, ideologically, of the Nazis.
That they're far outside of the realm of anything decent or mainstream.
It's designed constantly to reinforce the idea that only establishment politics, not populist politics, is acceptable.
And here's Maureen Le Pen in her own words in this interview with Christiane Amanpour attempting to explain what it is that she actually believes and doesn't and seeing Christiane Amanpour's reaction to that.
Let's go ahead and play this video.
Let me get to foreign affairs.
You have in the past said things that cause people to worry about you regarding, for instance, Putin.
You've talked about how Crimea, you said it to me, was always Russian.
You said the sanctions on Putin should be removed, those that were put on him for annexing Crimea and invading parts of Ukraine.
Now he's fully invaded.
Are you committed to the victory of Ukraine?
Will France keep supporting Ukraine against this illegal invasion?
Do you call it an illegal invasion?
And will France... Now, just note there how it's amazing that in order to prove that you're an acceptable politician in the West, the number one goal, the number one task that you have is to pledge support to Ukraine.
The first thing Keir Starmer did, and he did it throughout the election, was say, no matter what, we are going to prove that we will stand by Ukraine until the end.
When Georgia Maloney was elected Prime Minister of Italy, they did the same thing to her that they did to Marine Le Pen.
Called her a far-right fascist, a protege of Mussolini, suggested that fascism was coming to Italy, that Italian democracy was threatened.
And all she had to do was one thing.
In order to get the West to accept her, have the New York Times run flattering profiles on her, and that was pledge her support for the NATO war in Ukraine.
And once she did that, all of those narratives disappeared.
She's no longer talked about that way.
And so here's Christiane Amanpour saying You are connected to Putin.
It seems like you have sympathy to Putin.
And so we want to understand whether you are a decent person.
And the question that she has to answer to prove she's a decent person is, will you support Ukraine against its war in Russia to the end?
This is somehow the litmus test in Western politics for whether you are acceptable and decent company.
And here was Marine Le Pen's answer.
Call it an illegal invasion.
And will France continue to provide Ukraine with weapons to defend itself?
Madame, I think we can consider that the situation in Crimea was much more complicated than it is made out to be.
But that has nothing to do with what Russia did now.
What Russia has done here is violate Ukraine's territorial sovereignty, violate Ukraine's freedom, and bring war to Ukraine.
From the outset, we have condemned Russia in this matter.
And we have supported Ukraine throughout these two years.
Indicating that we have two red lines which were sending French troops to Ukrainian territory because the French are, I believe, totally opposed to this and the delivery of long-range weapons that could hit Russia and therefore make France a co-belligerent in this conflict.
What is your final question?
I mean it is unbelievable that In order to be accepted in mainstream Western establishment political and media circles, you have to basically be indifferent to the risk of World War III.
And if someone like Marine Le Pen says nothing other than what used to be the position of the U.S.
government until it abandoned it, That the two red lines we have is we will not deploy our own country's troops in Ukraine to fight against the Russian army nor will we authorize the use of long-range missiles by the Ukrainians to attack Russia inside Russia because that will make our country co-belligerent in the war.
Those are the two limits that we have on Our willingness to get involved and that somehow that extremely reasonable attempt to avoid World War Three and the risks of nuclear war that go with it is regarded as evidence of fascism or fanaticism or right-wing extremism.
It's just the thing that dominates all of Western politics somehow now is pledging support for the war in Ukraine and the NATO war that seems to be an endless war.
Alright, let's look at one last question that she asked because I think it's so illustrative of how this discourse is so distorted.
The fact that your party did so well in the European elections, and so did Georgia Maloney's party, and so did AFD, I mean, you know, AFD, as you know, a little bit like the former National Front, is very scary.
The fact that the far right is becoming a very, very powerful force in Europe, and who knows, maybe now, with all that's going on in the United States, Donald Trump might win a second term.
How do you see Europe changing?
First of all, I strongly dispute the term far-right, which in your country refers to small groups that are extremely radical and violent.
If you like, the equivalent... You don't think you're far-right?
The equivalent of what we are in the United States is between the centre-right and the centre-left with regards to ideas.
So I think this... You're kidding me, right?
Yes.
What kind of comment is that for a journalist?
Oh, you're kidding me, right?
With her hands folded and her just smarmy expression on her face.
This is designed to say that we have put you in this category called far-right and I don't even have to make an argument as to why you belong there.
In fact, any attempt by you to say we're not actually in this extremist category is just going to provoke this kind of scoffing from me, because I know that's all I need to tell my audience that you're crazy and what you're saying.
This is such a bizarre way to conduct an interview.
This person that you've asked a question to explains her position, and you interrupt and do nothing other than say, you're kidding me, right?
Because you know that the CNN audience already has been convinced that Marine Le Pen deserves this title far right.
Listen to the rest of this.
Yes, I'm telling you very honestly.
I think this use of the term far-right carries a stigma and is very pejorative.
It does not correspond to what we are and not at all to what the far-right is in the United States.
That's the first thing to say.
Secondly, we can't put everyone in the same boat.
For example, in Europe, we distanced ourselves from the AFD party because we're in total disagreement with a number of their statements.
So together with Mrs Maloney, and with our differences too, are what we call patriots.
In other words, we defend the existence and the power of nations within the European Union, because nations are the expression of the French people.
When the European Union takes on certain roles without consulting anyone, it is no longer democratic.
We are defenders of nations.
We want a Europe of nations, a Europe that respects the decisions of the people and not a super-technocratic structure such as it exists today.
And that's the path that we want to follow.
A Europe of nations that's respectful, that leads projects, a Europe that doesn't restrict, that doesn't threaten, that doesn't blackmail when it comes to subsidies.
Because that's not our vision.
Our Europe is the Europe of Airbus.
Forgive me, it's a competitor.
It's the Europe of Ariane.
It's not the Europe of Madame von der Leyen.
And so we will fight within Europe to redirect Europe in the direction that we want.
No, the reason why I think that exchange is so telling is because to me this really does define modern day politics.
I think the President of the EU, this unelected technocrat, Ursula von der Leyen, is the embodiment of establishment politics.
You can find other people at Davos and other places, but to me, she is the kind of living, breathing embodiment of what establishment politics is.
There's no democratic electability to her.
She has no support within the people of the countries that form the EU, only within the elite halls in Paris and Berlin and other European capitals.
And her politics is one of allegiance to the neoliberalism of the international order, to massive international institutions that are far removed from anything that the people who are ruled by them believe in or have any say in.
It's why the UK left the EU, because they didn't want to be governed by these distant, unelected technocrats in Brussels.
And if you look at the requirements of what is deemed to be necessary to be an establishment politician, support for the NATO war, allegiance to the superstructures like the World Bank and the IMF and the EU and all of these conglomerates of concentrated power that have a very establishment ideology,
Of course those factions have succeeded in saying anyone who dissents from our ideology, anyone who declares their independence from our control and power, we're going to deem a far-right or far-left radical.
And that's why you had Jeremy Corbyn in the EU who, although he abandoned it when he was the leader of the Labour Party, clearly had a history of favoring Brexit and was very tepid in his support for staying in Brexit, which he had to do as the leader of the Labour Party.
But left-wing politics in the EU, including in France, is very hostile to Brussels, and so are these populist parties, these nationalist parties on the right, who are saying, we want to govern ourselves as France, not as under the rule of Ursula von der Leyen and the other unelected officials in Brussels.
And you can find that on the left and the right in Europe.
You can find that on the left and the right in the United States.
And that's so clearly part of the reason why I believe that our modern day politics is not really well defined by left versus right or conservative versus liberal in any of these traditional senses, but far more by whether you pledge allegiance to and believe in the dominant ideology of establishment factions or whether you oppose them.
And I think what all of these elections are showing is that more and more people are disgusted by that establishment ideology, don't believe these establishment factions have their best interests at heart.
A lot of them just respond by removing themselves from the political system altogether and not voting.
But when there are elections, what you see Again, sometimes more gradually, sometimes more abruptly, depending on the election, is a constantly and rapidly growing contempt for this establishment ideology that Christiane Amanpour is there defending and trying to label Marine Le Pen as a far-right extremist because of her refusal to accept it.
All right, that concludes our show for this evening.
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