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May 11, 2022 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
57:25
The Future of the French (And European) Right
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Hey, everyone.
Welcome to Left, Right, and White.
I'm your host, Gregory Hood, and we have a special episode today.
My guest is Guillaume Desrochers, who is one of the best commentators on the European, specifically the French, political scene, and he's also the author of The Ancient Ethnostate, Biopolitical Thought in Classical Greece.
How are you today, this morning?
I'm great.
It's good to be here.
Well, I guess the French election didn't work out exactly as some of us were hoping it would, but we do see the Reconquest Party getting ready for legislative elections.
Obviously, it's still something that the right was able to challenge Macron again, even though the left had a strong showing they couldn't even make it to the runoff.
What's your take on how the election went, and what do you think the future is going to be as far as the legislative elections go?
Well, a lot of things happened in this election.
Marine Le Pen's going to the second round, I think, was expected, and her losing in the second round was also expected.
There was an outside chance of her winning, depending on how much discontent there was with Macron.
Because we've had the Yellow Vest protests.
We've had rising energy prices and inflation.
We've had, of course, the COVID crisis, which had a basically totalitarian response from the government.
And so it was interesting to see how many more people would be so fed up with the government that they would switch to Le Pen.
And as I said, there was an outside chance that she would win.
And in the event, her showing was pretty mediocre.
I think she got 42% of the vote or something like that.
And the previous time, maybe 35%.
So there was some progress in that sense, but really fairly dismal showing.
Looking to the future, there have been two big developments.
One has been the rise of the far left Mélenchon.
Uh, and the other, the rise of Eric Zemmour.
Now, Mélenchon got over 20% of the vote in the first round because of tactical voting on the left, what we call le vote utile, which means that more moderate socialists, uh, Greens and so on voted for Mélenchon.
And now it looks like the left will have a united coalition Or the legislative elections.
So it's very likely that there will be a strong left-wing opposition in the National Assembly.
Now, Zemmour's performance was not bad for a first-time candidate, but ultimately disappointing.
It seems because of several factors.
He got, I think, about 7 or 8 percent of the vote.
So enough to cover his campaign costs, because you get reimbursed if you get over 5 percent.
But genuinely disappointing.
And this may be due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which I think hijacked the French presidential elections to a large extent.
And in fact, Macron barely campaigned at all.
He barely campaigned.
He just sort of won by default.
May also be because people could see that Zemmour was stalling to an extent in the polls, and therefore they switched their vote to Marine as a tactical vote, which actually made sense in the end because it was only through this tactical vote that Marine had more votes than Mnuchin.
There was a real risk that the nationalist vote would be so split that there would be no nationalist candidate in the second round.
Right.
It was pretty close.
It was like 2%, right?
It was.
Yes.
I think she got 24% and Mnuchin got 22%.
The other reason, and here you'd have to be people like myself, if people were a bit self-critical, may be that Zemmour attracts basically the groupies.
He attracts the people who are really invested in politics, who are really following things closely, but which is not necessarily representative of the broad mass of people, regular French people, that vote nationalist.
And I think that's the third reason.
And going forward, though, I think the Zemmour experience is very positive and is a sign of the necessary necessary reconfiguration of the French right.
There needs to be a reconfiguration where sort of moderate conservatives and stigmatized nationalists can work together.
And that's the whole Zemmour program.
And it is what has been impossible since the 1980s, essentially, and which would have really a center-right nationalist natural majority for France.
I mean, that's what most people are of that persuasion.
In fact, whatever people say.
But now Marine Le Pen is refusing any alliance with other parties for the parliamentary elections.
Marine Le Pen, it seems to me, doesn't really want to win.
And she wants to have her little family operation, family business. And this means keeping the
monopoly on the patriotic vote and not sharing power or having any shared agreements with
other parties like Roquinquette or doing any alliances with conservatives, because that
would mean she would be not beyond left and right, but would be right wing, where
she considers that she is beyond left and right. And I think she considers Roquinquette to be a
mortal threat to her political career and into her party and therefore she wants to have no alliances
with them.
And therefore there will be no significant nationalist presence in the next legislature, most likely.
So basically the worst case scenario.
In the short term, yes.
Longer term, I think we are seeing a lot of people who otherwise would be sucked into the Sterile Conservative Party moving to reconquête.
And these are bright people.
These are managers.
These are engineers.
These are people with money.
These are senior civil servants who don't feel that reconquête is as toxic as the Rassemblement National is.
And it might take a while.
And I think it will.
But I think there will be a breakthrough at some point.
And I would cite examples from other countries.
So, for example, in Romania.
A few years ago, they had a vote on banning gay marriage in the constitution of the country.
And this referendum was not successful.
They were not able to pass it because of insufficient turnout.
But that failed campaign was a moment of crystallization and collaboration of right wing and conservative and patriotic forces in the country.
And a few years later, a new nationalist party broke into the Romanian parliament for the first time in I think 10 or 15 years.
So I think we're at that kind of moment.
I think it's a moment of reorganization.
In the short term, it is disappointing, but I think there will be fruit in the longer term.
Of course, there is kind of a race against time here, because as immigration continues, we especially saw this in the last election, the way a lot of these migrants or descendants of migrants actually did support The hard left, which I think is one of the reasons he did so well in the first round, and now if they have a united front going into the legislative elections, is there a danger that they'll simply be able to liberalize immigration laws enough that even if the French right can ultimately unite, it'll simply be too late because the demographics are baked into the cake, as it were.
We have almost reached the American scenario, in that sense.
We are very close to that, the point where things become irrecoverable.
We are very close to that.
The racialization of the vote was very striking in this election, where in the first round, rural whites voted for Marine Le Pen, urban whites and especially white-collar whites You know, Bobo Whites, yuppies, they voted for Macron, but the non-whites, the Arabs and the blacks in the cities voted for Mélenchon.
And you saw this very strikingly in Paris, for example, where the whole Northeast voted Mélenchon and the center in the Southwest voted for Macron.
So this is a fact.
And I think Mélenchon got 70 or 80 percent of the Muslim vote, because we do have occasional statistics on the religious vote.
even if we don't have any on race.
So this is something which is happening.
And in terms of births, we again can only guesstimate, but probably 35 or maybe even 40% of births in France are non-European.
And so I'm saying non-European because the births, probably it's 50% non-French at this stage, probably there's a portion of the white births are Other European people, but not native French.
Right.
So this is something which is happening.
Now, I do tell people we shouldn't completely despair in the sense that, look, as long as we're in the system, we're doomed, right?
At some point, there has to be a total ideological change.
Of the kind that, you know, occurred with the French Revolution, or of the kind that occurred, you know, in Italy in the 1920s, or the kind that occurred with the collapse of communism in the late 1980s.
You're going to need that.
If we stay in this system anyway, you're always going to be stuck.
You know, you're always going to be, it'll be impossible to have policies that make sense in the long term for Native Europeans.
At some point, there's a breakdown, right?
And if there's a breakdown, well, it'll be unpleasant if you have, you know, a population which is full of ethnic and religious conflict.
But if you're in a different ideological system, things can change.
And, you know, we have a long history in France of military regimes, for example.
Look, if you want to know the future of France, you should be studying the history of Congo, the history of Algeria, the history of Turkey.
How do things work in the history of Lebanon?
How do things work in those countries?
Well, you have maybe a vicious ethnic civil war, and then you have a military government in place to pacify things.
Or if you have With democracy in one of these Islamic countries, well, very often they vote for an Islamist party to take power, as in Egypt or Turkey or Algeria.
And then you have a secularist military government come in to stop them from doing too much damage.
So I don't think this is for tomorrow.
You know, there's some talk of military coup.
There was a letter sent by some generals that were criticizing Macron.
I think they were retired generals.
Yeah.
I think this is a bit of a nothing burger that people were hysterical about.
But in longer term, 30-40 years, this is probable, you know?
I mean, these tensions will not go away.
And they'll probably be more severe than what you see in the U.S., for example.
Because Hispanics are pretty depoliticized.
And, you know, I don't see them leading revolutionary crusades.
But Islam is a very different animal.
One of the big questions is, I was pretty surprised actually about how non-whites and Muslim voters were essentially folded into the conventional French left in this election.
And sometimes you always hear these talk about how they're going to have their own parties, they're going to have their own institutions, but it seems that the white, conventional, destructive, anti-French left and the foreigners actually do seem to be able to work together, at least for now.
Do you think Muslims will eventually break away from that partnership?
Or do they realize this is the best chance they can get the most concessions from the system?
I think it works for them for now, because the main thing they want is more transfers.
That's the main concern.
And the left has been willing to more and more give way on secularism.
So France has a very strong tradition of laicite.
And this has been a big problem for them, on what position should they take on Muslim headscarves in school, Muslim headscarves among teachers, and this sort of thing.
But the new formula they're finding is simply to give way more and more, and so you're seeing local governments run by the left more and more say, well, you can wear a burkini, or you can wear a headscarf in this public institution, and this is not a loss for Feminism for equality for secularism one thing I'd like to add to what I mentioned earlier is that The demographic situation is what it is, but it's also true that if you were to stem the tide Soon you have to do this pretty soon The thing is France can also be replenished to some extent from other European countries and so it's not necessarily the case that
Why do you think Le Pen is so antagonistic toward the idea of uniting the French right?
I mean, do you think she just sees this as a career?
Europeans is not endless either, but that's just something to bear in mind.
Why do you think Le Pen is so antagonistic toward the idea of uniting the French right?
I mean, do you think she just sees this as a career?
I mean, I was pretty struck by your contention that she just doesn't really want to win.
I mean, after all, in this last election, it seemed like she was facing some dissent
from within her own family as far as what needs to be done with the French right.
Thank you.
Indeed, Marion Marichal Le Pen joined Zemmour's movement.
So she had not been active in politics for a while, but she joined Zemmour's movement, saying that the Rassemblement Nationale were, in effect, the useful idiots of the system, because it's this kind of Dead end.
You know, you can invest in this, but at the end you're never going to get 51%.
You're never going to be out of your little nationalist party ghetto.
You're never going to be able to make the links with the elites, because you do need a portion of the elites in any political change to be able to pull it off.
A revolution or political change without elites just doesn't work, and it usually ends really badly.
Um, so I think she is quite young, you know, she doesn't look that young anymore, but I think she's only 52.
So she has a long way to go.
I mean, Eric Zimor is, uh, 67.
So she can do this little game for the rest of her life for another 15 years.
And Eric Zimor shared a meme.
Uh, saying, uh, vote for us because if you go for Le Pen, you know, it's going to be the same story 20 years from now.
And you have the image of Macron and Le Pen both looking really old, you know, they'd use the face app or whatever to age them.
And this is the case.
This is, this is the, the, the program is to just, we're just, we're going to do this center, hegemonic center versus unelectable, um, whatever the RN is, uh, forever.
And this logic has to be broken at some stage.
And the right thing to do for patriots would be, and for the country, would be to do an alliance between the Ressemblance Nationale, Le Conquête, and elements of the Conservatives.
And this is important because the French parliamentary system doesn't have proportional representation.
It has a pretty complicated Two-round first-past-the-post system.
I know that sounds strange, but that's what we have, and it's designed to exclude marginal parties.
And in effect, it means that if you are not, if your side is not a united bloc, you need to pass alliances where, for example, you might have a communist candidate, a green candidate, and a socialist candidate for a given constituency.
And two of those agree to not campaign in the seats where You know, one party is most favored.
So for example, if you're in some suburb of Paris and the Green is the best, the most favored, well, then the far left and the Socialists agree not to campaign there.
And that way you're pretty sure the Green will get through.
But if you don't have this kind of electoral alliance, you simply don't get any representation.
And I don't know how many RN deputies there are in the National Assembly, but I think it's two or three.
You know, it's virtually nothing.
And even though they are The second most important party in terms of the first round vote and they're the most important party in the European elections where there you do have proportional representation and they have, uh, you know, 20 or 25% of the EU members of parliament.
So if you don't have the Alliance system in the national parliamentary elections, you will not get any representation and you won't be what you could be, which is the.
Official opposition to Macron.
You could be the main opposition party to Macron.
But I don't know why.
But I think I know why.
She, rightly, to be fair, feels extremely threatened by Reconquête.
Zemmour, for a while, really looked like she was simply going to overtake her.
And she would be yesterday's news.
And so she does not want to do any alliance with them.
Well, why did Zamora fade?
Like this is what I think has happened.
And it's very sad to see.
And at some point, if and if this is her reasoning, then it really indicates that she and her
party have to be overcome.
Well, what why did Zamora fade?
I mean, as you point out, I mean, I guess the Russian invasion messed up the entire
tack of the campaign that he was trying to run.
That would be my my indication from overseas.
But did you see any weaknesses within the party, within the movement that.
Led to this situation where essentially Le Pen still stayed essentially where she was
and this new movement that would actually have a chance of changing things wasn't able
to dislodge her.
Thank you.
There are different opinions on this.
Some people would say that he was too monomaniacal in his messaging.
That is to say that he was only talking about immigration, the Great Replacement, French identity.
I don't think that is quite fair because he did talk about other things like education, like the need for policing and this sort of thing.
And I think one problem is the lack of name recognition, because the more is does, you know, So that's a problem, let's say.
And that's something which you overcome.
It takes time to overcome that.
But is he known to depoliticize to people?
Probably not.
Is his appearance attractive to depoliticize to people?
Probably not.
So that's a problem, let's say.
And that's something which you overcome.
It takes time to overcome that.
And he didn't have the advantage that, say, Donald Trump had of winning the primaries
in the mainstream conservative party and dragging it to the right.
Instead, he wasn't allowed to run in the conservative primaries
and he had to organize his own operation.
Um, and.
And it is hard to get known outside your core issues and your core constituency.
And even when you do, for example, in education, the media construed what he was saying on having tailored education to different types of students.
So for example, to have different type of education for mentally disabled kids, they construed that as him wanting
to exclude them and to bully them effectively.
And you can imagine the kind of coverage that would get.
So the media is a factor, the hard to reach outside your core constituency.
And also, I mean, it's hard to tailor a message which will appeal to a maximum number of people.
And his economic policies for me are quite sensible, which is to say that he does want
to reduce the tax burden.
He does want to make it easier for small businesses.
And therefore, his message is more popular with retirees.
It's more popular with people who want sound economic management with business people.
Whereas Marine Le Pen is more economic populist, and she has more support among unemployed
people and among industrial workers.
And it's hard to reach out when it's true.
His program does not necessarily offer as much for them as Marines does.
Right, and of course, the key problem is you've got two parties here, which are,
as you say, the advantage that America had, that Donald Trump had, is once you win the Republican
primary, those identities are so ingrained that it almost doesn't matter who's running.
I mean, the same sorts of people, the same people voted for John McCain and voted for Donald Trump.
And you just don't have that kind of process in France.
But the big problem, as I see it, is that Beyoncé Moore, is there anybody else who could take over?
As you say, he's 67 years old, and could we get a situation where it's essentially a Le Pen versus another Le Pen for the future of the French right?
But I quite like Marion, so I guess I don't have a huge problem with that necessarily, although it would be quite funny if indeed it was two different Le Pens controlling the whole operation.
I think it is a risk.
I mean, this really is driven by personality.
It's driven by having a person who has the mass appeal, who has the networks, and who has the personal independence and capacity.
Mario Marischal now, technically.
I think it is a risk.
I mean, this really is driven by personality.
It's driven by having a person who has the mass appeal, who has the networks, and who
has the personal independence and capacity.
And I mean that also in terms of being stigmatized by your social circle, right?
We underestimate how important this is, that many conservative politicians and many people simply won't move up to the plate because they will be stigmatized by their social circle.
And I was very struck by the passage in Eric Zemmour's latest book, which is basically a sort of diary of political media life in Paris.
And he argues that Nicolas Sarkozy, for his re-election, In 2012, I believe, which failed, he did not propose a referendum on immigration, even though it might have put him over the bar.
And he didn't because he did not want to be attacked even more than he already was by the media and by his social circle for being an evil racist.
And it's relevant here that he is married to a left-wing singer.
And, you know, so it's her friends, it's all this.
This is relevant.
So there's not many people who have, as I say, the independence, the media appeal and just general appeal and network to do it.
So if he gets out the picture, he will probably be have a real problem for a while.
I don't know how good his health is, he seems to be alright, but he can't run more than one other campaign probably.
And there is a history in France of alliances between the socialists and the communists back in the day.
And there's a real double standard.
In the 80s, the Socialist Party under François Mitterrand made an alliance with the communists, who back then were bona fide Stalinists.
You know, they were supportive of the Soviet Union and of communist dictatorships across Eastern Europe, and they made an alliance.
And they were not stigmatized for that by the media, and they won in 1981.
And gradually the communists got, I think, four ministerial positions.
Not the most important, but they got four positions in government.
And the socialists were able to eat them up over time.
But this is a very natural alliance.
It shouldn't be morally, politically unacceptable.
For conservatives and nationalists to do the same thing.
Why shouldn't they be able to do the same thing?
But since the 1980s, that has been impossible.
And it's been a very explicit strategy of the left, of certain ethnic activist organizations, to say to conservatives, you cannot ally with this party because it is toxic, even though, frankly, the Front National has never been a Anti-Republican, you know, despotic party.
It has never been one of that kind.
It's always been a patriotic party, a big tent patriotic party.
But since then, it has been impossible.
And the challenge now is to break that down, because I don't see why we should not be allowed to ally and to be members of society.
It's something to reflect on, and something which actually I find quite blackpilling, that the double standard comes from somewhere, and I think it seems to be something deep psychologically in the kind of people that go into the media, the kind of people that go into academia, that alliance with the far left is never considered as bad as alliance with the far right.
Right.
I mean, the blackpilling element of this, and I was...
I was looking at some protests even just last night against the French government and everything else.
It doesn't seem that many people were very happy about Macron, but it was almost like the prospect of Le Pen, who has been demonized as this far-right nationalist, even though she's really not.
As you say, I mean, not really much of a threat to the system at all, really.
But people would almost rather suffer and see their material quality of life get worse, see possibly military confrontation with Russia, continuing immigration if they're not, even if they're not great fans of it, because they've been so successfully convinced that a far-right candidate is the worst thing that could ever happen, that it would mean death, that it would mean war, that it would mean all these terrible things.
And so you get this kind of And we're seeing this now in the United States, where with Democrats possibly being able to hang on to power this fall because of people exercised about the abortion issue.
And so they say, well, I may not be able.
My job isn't keeping up with inflation.
I'm not able to buy a house.
If you're a young person, buying a house in this country is basically impossible now.
Everybody's got student loan debt.
Crime is going up.
But it doesn't really seem to be changing anyone's mind.
And it's almost like democracy is a system that prevents change rather than facilitating the popular will, because if you've pathologized the far right as something that can never be allowed to really participate in government and anyone in it can never really be part of society, everybody just kind of puts up with their problems and things just continue to decline.
And it's very hard to see because we're We're talking about the same thing here in that if you stay within the system, you're going to ultimately be destroyed.
But at the same time, we're also saying, well, we need to get the broader right to unite.
But how can that happen if the very nature of the system is to prevent these kinds of alliances?
I mean, I think I saw the Republicans, right, the center right party there endorsed Macron for the second round.
Right.
Well.
The Republicans would do that.
It is interesting that some Republicans said that if Zemmour were in the second round, they would support him over Macron.
So François-Xavier Bellamy, who is the leader of the French conservatives in the European Parliament, for example, said that, and I think there were a couple others.
So you did see the edges of that cordon sanitaire, as we say.
You know, this barrier we're starting to fray.
But indeed, the standard line is still that we will support the center over the right.
I think one problem in this immobilism is simply that, you know, our societies are very old.
I think the average voter is like 50 years old, maybe more.
Yeah.
So people are pretty set in their ways in the state, you know, like every demographic block is pretty much stable and it slowly evolves over time and people are not going to change their, their leanings so much.
And so you just have this state of permanent blockage where you have a government which tries to, you know, kind of lowest common denominator government that sort of appeals to the acceptable segments of the society and you ignore the unacceptable segments.
So that's one problem.
Another problem, as I say, is this, in all the government, media, academic, and other institutions, if you do a straw poll of the people in them, most of them, unless they are explicit right-wing elected representatives, most people in these institutions are either going to be centrist, or they're going to be center-left, or they're going to be far-left.
You go to any university, any newspaper, you know, a political newspaper, that's what you're
going to find.
And so there's just this, this structural trend of the elites of the society being out
of sync with the base.
And that makes it very hard for people appealing to the base to be able to actually, you know,
get into office and actually function when they're in office.
And then there's a third factor I want to emphasize.
And this is more applicable in the case of France, but also to some extent with Trump
in the US when he was there, which is that the populist candidate actually isn't ideal.
And why are they not ideal?
Partly because they are so stigmatized and so toxic that competent people don't go there.
You know, people who have careers, people who have reputations, it'll take a lot for them to take the leap to give up what they can have, you know, as respected members of society to them, the much more insecure stage of you know populist politics where it's you know, it's
kind of all or nothing and even if you win You're still kind of you know hated by huge segments of the
elite So you're less competent and that's clearly the case with
Marine Le Pen's party. It would be very hard for her to find
Competent people if she had a government and the other thing is that you know her economic populism
And a lot of just I mean if you take most of her program most of it is not really desirable
I would say The main thing is immigration.
And even that, she started soft peddling.
But the main thing is immigration.
Otherwise, if you take the program as a whole, both good things like, you know, well, arguably good things like she wants to democratize the French system more.
She wants to have proportional representation in the parliament.
She wants to have more referenda.
And her economic policies.
Both these things are entropic.
Both these things, you don't know what they will lead to.
So the economic policies will probably destabilize things to a certain extent, but not really clear.
And then the added democratization, even if we could say this is good, because it could lead to good political changes, or it will give a voice to segments of society which have been marginalized for 40 years.
Strictly speaking, on a day-to-day basis, it will destabilize things.
Like, you don't know what it will lead to.
Um, so I can understand that, uh, the white collar voters and the retirees will, will not find that appealing.
Yeah, that's my sense as well.
And we definitely saw that with the Trump administration, where even after the victory, the first thing he did was turn everything over to Paul Ryan and the typical Republican machine, simply because he didn't have competent people lined up for staffing positions.
And there was apparently some sort of an effort where they were going to get people who had been with the Trump movement from the beginning into government.
But as I was told, and we're talking very competent people, experienced people, that the people who were in charge of staffing didn't even look at those people.
They just turned it all over to the typical GOP types.
And that, of course, led to years of leaks and internal sabotage and everything else.
But it's interesting that, you know, that Zamora was actually less toxic.
Maybe it's a class thing than Le Pen among certain urban elites and urban voters.
Is there a way these two kind of social classes can really be brought together because they may agree on immigration, but as you point out, the economic policies, they don't really share a common interest.
And one of the things that people were saying, and it didn't really pan out in the second round, but this was one of the narratives Well, I don't know that her messaging was wrong, you know, in the sense, electorally.
is focusing on immigration. She was talking about economic issues and the cost of living,
obviously all things that are very important in Europe and America right now considering inflation.
Well, I don't know that her messaging was wrong, you know, in the sense electorally. Like, I think
the policies she was pushing on economics were probably not necessarily correct, but
Electorally, they were correct.
I don't know if—Zemmour, if he'd gone to the second round, would have had to pivot his messaging significantly so that it would be in a language which the minority of people who turn on the 8 o'clock news could understand what he was saying.
So that's a factor.
So I wouldn't criticize her messaging so much.
Maybe it's the right one for the normies.
I think you can reconcile those two classes.
I think you simply need to have the alliance of the two parties.
You have one party representing left-wing economic sensibility and patriotism, and you have the other one representing economic liberalism and patriotism.
Then you negotiate.
Then you find a solution.
But I would say that if you have limits on immigration and if you have an understanding that
the country's resources are for the French, so for example the welfare system is
meant to service the French, then it makes it easier to have sensible economic policies
because people are willing to sacrifice, they are willing to have, you know, responsible government
if the government is on their side, if you show them you're on their side, so and I think
longer term the people can have their differences.
I think I think a more liberal economic policy would probably be in the interest of the French workers, because you cannot have this, you know, assistance as we say in French, this sort of assisted living state and having as we've had for 40 years, you know, anywhere between 8 to 12 percent unemployment, just always that we always have 8 to 12 percent unemployment.
How does that help French workers?
You can't just have all these artificial industries.
Of course, you could do some more exotic policies if you left the European Union and you left the Eurozone.
But even that I don't find super, super compelling.
And that didn't really work out for Le Pen last time.
I mean, that was one of the big reasons she lost by even more.
Yeah, it's a huge factor of instability, and it's not clear for the most part that it would lead to Uh, better outcomes.
I mean, just look at Brexit.
Brexit has not been disastrous.
I mean, you have, people are always, you know, too black and white.
It's always like, it's all good or it's all bad with the EU.
But you look at Brexit, did it lead to the Brits to starve to death?
Did it lead them to have a massive unemployment rate?
Did it destroy their economy?
As all the, you know, the weenies said, no, not even close.
Uh, some companies move their headquarters and things like that.
But basically, UK is still the UK, and people still want to move there, and its economy is doing better than your average European economy.
But has it done anything for British patriots?
No.
Brexit has achieved absolutely nothing for British patriots.
Do you think that there is any possibility of Zamora's type of message taking root in a sort of pan-European Political party, especially when it comes to elections with the European Parliament.
One of the big problems that we've seen with European nationalists is when they get into the European Parliament and they try to form a coalition.
A lot of the issues that might animate European nationalists, even some of the territorial disputes that you'll see, particularly in Eastern Europe.
End up breaking up these coalitions.
And so again, even if you get a very strong showing in the European parliamentary elections, it doesn't actually translate into anything because you don't actually have one faction that can operate together.
Do you see any advances on that front?
Or do you think that everyone's still just going to be kind of in their own ghetto?
So I think there's a two aspects, two ways of looking at that.
So There will not be a pan-European nationalist movement, let's say.
You're not going to have in politics something like the Institut Iliad or, you know, a real pan-European identitarian or something like Oh, shoot.
Identity Europa.
Not Identity Europa.
The Identitaire.
The Identitaire is something which is pan-European.
You have a French branch, you have an Austrian branch, you have other branches, and they have essentially the same optics, they're all on the same page, and it works because it's activism and it's focused on issues that we can all agree on, which is to say European identity and immigration.
But if you're in politics, you have to appeal to masses of voters and the concerns of voters are national.
And this is especially so for patriotic voters, where what will agitate a French patriotic electorate is not the same thing as a Romanian one or a German one or a Flemish one, etc.
So you won't have a pan-European movement in that sense.
And there will be less European.
Cooperation will be limited between any movements of this kind.
But what we are seeing is more, and this is the second aspect, second way of looking at it, you are seeing movements towards more structured cooperation between these different patriotic parties, and especially between the parties that are in, well basically, I'll name the parties, I mean there's Lega in Italy, there's Orban's party Fidesz in Hungary, there's PiS, the Law and Justice Party in Poland, and there's Reconquest.
And there's all and there's constant talk more and more of some kind of new patriotic grouping in the European Parliament between these and of somehow breaking down the again it's these kind of silos or this these walls of toxicity between the different groups.
Right.
Silofication, as they call it.
I mean, you see this all the time in institutions where you have this one chain of command and there's no communication between them, and then they can never get anything done because they're just stuck in their one rut and no common effort is possible.
And here, I would say the problem isn't even so much that they are of different nationalities, although this is sometimes a problem.
Like, you'll sometimes have problems between Uh, you know, North Europeans who don't want to give more money to Southern Europeans, right?
This is a real difference, you know, or between Romania and Hungary.
But here, I think the problem isn't so much that as simply, uh, people like Law and Justice in Poland don't want to associate with people one step to the right of them, you know, in their mind, the Poles, they're, we're just a Thatcherite party.
We're a respectable Thatcherite party and we want nothing to do with Rassemblement Nationale.
Whereas Fidesz, for example, is a bit more open-minded on these things.
So that's the problem.
So it's the same problem that we have of alliances between conservatives and nationalists in France, for example.
But you're starting to see this breakdown.
And what you might see is there's a grouping in the parliament called Conservatives and Reformists, which has the Brothers of Italy in it.
It has the Sweden Democrats.
It has Law and Justice of Poland.
Reconquest will probably join them, and Fidesz might join them.
So that would start to be pretty impressive, you know, that would start to look like something.
But you would need such a critical mass of decent conservative representatives and patriotic and nationalist representatives in the Parliament that they could overcome this Cordon Sanitaire, right?
Because the problem is, even though they had a big vote for the nationalists in the previous European elections, which I think were in 2019, the problem is the centrists, so the liberals, conservatives, socialists, and so on, just caucused a bit more tightly and just excluded them from any decision-making.
And that's how they get it.
So you'll need to have such a big critical mass that you could somehow have a conservative right-wing majority.
I don't think it's very likely.
But we are moving towards a new coalition with Fidesz, Brothers of Italy, peace and so on.
We are moving towards some kind of new coalition.
Fidesz was part of the center-right bloc, was the European People's Party, and they were expelled, as I recall.
And I think that everybody thought that this was it for Orban in the last election because the opposition had united against him.
They had recruited somebody who was supposedly a Christian conservative who was going to attack his base.
But the war in Russia and Ukraine seems to have actually helped him.
And that victory was very heartening but also very surprising because it really seemed like this was the toughest challenge he was going to face so far.
But is he just sort of the exception that proves the rule?
Because Hungary, while it's oppressive what they've been able to do, it is just one country as part of the continent, and because it receives money from the European Union, it doesn't have that much leverage on what the rest of the continent can do.
No, we need to replicate this example in other countries.
Hungary is 10 million people.
It has got a national conservative government, let's say.
is trying to increase the birth rate, which is the most important thing, and they've had
limited success.
They have had—they're making a real effort, and they're having some success, but it is
limited.
But, you know, the number of marriages in the country is going up, so we can be reasonably
hopeful that it will improve—the fertility rate will improve even more over time.
But it's just one country, and it's good that he can get reelected.
It's also maybe the war in Ukraine and other crises of that nature probably favor incumbents.
So probably once you're in power, it's easier to stay in power.
The Polish government is a little bit less solid from what I can see, but they're focusing a bit too much on things like banning all abortions.
Ban even for Down Syndrome, even if you've got a disabled fetus you can't abort.
I think this is pretty counterproductive and I doubt it will be sustainable.
But Orbán is going to face more and more pressure because the EU has been slowly but steadily increasing its legislative arsenal so that it can simply defund Hungary.
And it will try to move in that direction.
I don't know how in terms of procedure and legality they will do it and whether they will be able, but it's really moving in the direction where they will try to deprive Hungary of billions of euros, of a substantial percentage of GDP in transfers.
So that's something to watch out for.
Yeah, it's similar to the problem we have here in the states where you'll have a conservative state trying to do something and then the federal government says, well, if you do that, we're going to deny you all these billions of dollars.
And so then the state always backs down because at the end of the day, if people see their money taken away, they're going to blame the conservatives rather than the people who essentially blackmailed them.
When you bring up topics of abortion and also, you know, obviously the importance of the birth rate, people always The so-called experts say that Hungary's pro-natalist policies have been ineffective, but that's not what I've found, having done some analysis into this.
It's not maybe as dramatic as we would like, but there's definitely an effect there.
And I want to take this opportunity to talk about your book, The Ancient Ethno-State Biopolitical Thought in Classical Greece.
You contend how important the idea of heredity and kinship were to the Greek city-states,
and even though politically divided, they thought of themselves as a kindred people.
Does that provide a kind of model for how European nationalists could approach the continent?
Or – and this may be a bit radical on my part – are we getting to a point now where
nationalists in different countries have more in common with each other than they do with
their fellow citizens?
So for example, I feel closer to a European nationalist than I do to an American citizen
who just showed up yesterday and who has absolutely no identification with the historic American
nation.
Are we seeing the same kind of thing in Europe between French nationalists and German nationalists, who may have more in common with each other than they do with French leftists or German leftists?
Sorry, there's a lot of noise on my side.
Is it okay for you?
I can hear you okay.
Sounds like there's somebody hammering in the background.
Some neighbors are doing some works, I think.
We're trying to support the working class, so it's fine.
So I think this is a real problem of the alienation of nationalists from their own people.
Yeah.
We are peoples at war with themselves.
And it makes it very difficult, frankly, to to love our people when they want to destroy you for saying or acting upon what you think is true.
So, from our viewpoint, our people are morally inflamed by the enforcement of lies.
This is what they want to do.
And you can ask the question, this is a question people ask, they ask William Pierce this question, some people made this point to William Pierce, you know, do you want to save a people like that?
You know, psychologically, you know, it's it's it's you know, it's not necessarily it's hard to it's hard to love a people like that.
But.
But I mean, there are there are a lot of us in different countries.
I mean, I guess the question and maybe this is just too extremely online and obviously not something conducive to what the way normal people think in terms of politics and everything else.
But are these nationalists in all these different Western countries, like, are we ourselves sort of forming a people unto ourselves?
Now, granted, I'm speaking as an American here where there's a certain bias because a lot of the distinctions between different European nations have kind of been broken down into the larger racial category of white.
So we can kind of see it more clearly than Europe, where the divisions are still a lot It's going to be a lot tougher to get French and German and Italian nationalists to get on the same page, the same way white people in America can just think of themselves as white people.
I think it works at the level of the elites and intellectual activists.
So, for example, there was a recent event in Paris of the Institut Iliad, their big annual colloquium.
They had people from Belgium, from Germany, from Poland, from other countries, in addition to the French.
And so that works very well.
And I think people are facing the same challenges.
They're facing the exact same challenges in different countries.
But I think as you move into national activism and sort of, you know, achieving something in your particular country, I think then things get a bit more It depends.
I mean, to give an example, Christianity will not be a major factor for most French nationalists.
I say most.
It is a factor for some, but I think for most it's not a major factor.
Whereas if you're among Polish or Romanian nationalists, well, frankly, that's often very important to them.
Right.
So you get variations in that sense.
And I do think you're seeing A online subculture, which, you know, what they are, it is differentiated by language to some extent.
But if you, you know, go on to a, um, you know, French speaking, uh, identitarian forum, you're going to get a lot of the same memes as you have in the, in the Anglosphere, you know, you're going to get a local adaptations of those same memes.
So, uh, it is paradoxical and it's, um, Kind of not new.
I mean, I was reading Ernst Nolte, his books on fascism, and he stresses just how paradoxical fascism is because on the one hand, it is ultranationalism.
You know, it's people who really believe in Italy or the people who really believe in Germany.
But then you also end up having people who believe in fascist cooperation.
And so you have people like Oswald Mosley or you have people like the Robert Braziac and in France, who create who are sort of extremely supranational, you know, right?
Mostly calling for Europe, a nation and all that.
Yeah, it's it is quite paradoxical in that sense.
I've not thought through all the ramifications, but I think you will have a a let's say on the activists, the intellectuals, there is a kind of European emergence, but then among the bread and butter politics, I think it will stay very separate.
Last question, building off of that.
I mean, one of the underlying themes that we seem to be talking about here is that the existing political system cannot handle any broad-based right-wing nationalist movement.
It has to be suppressed.
Because once it gets into the system, it essentially delegitimizes that system.
But the problem is right now, in terms of suppression, as we saw at the last election, at least in France, they do seem to be able to do it.
And I think they're going to be able to continue to do it as long as they can get Muslims and non-Europeans to keep voting for conventional leftist parties, keep them on the plantation, so to speak, as they talk about blacks with the United States and the Democrats.
I don't see why they wouldn't be able to control them that way.
Am I being too pessimistic about this, or do you think that these structures that are holding us back, these hypocritical structures that rely so much on media power and repressing free speech, do you think that they're approaching a breaking point, or are they getting stronger than ever?
Basically, are you a black pill or not?
That's really hard to answer.
I think there will be some changes.
I think in Italy, for example, there's a very high probability that this country will flip nationalists within the next three years, simply based on the popularity of the Lega Nord and of the Brothers of Italy.
You have seen nationalist party breakthroughs in Spain and Romania and now in France with Reconquête, a new party.
Uh, you also saw one in Portugal, but is this all just, uh, you know, a bit marginal, you know, you get 10, 20% of the votes and then you, you have a national voice, but it doesn't really change, uh, direction.
Yeah.
That's often the case.
Um, I think, uh, I think it's possible, you know, I think it's possible for a nation like France to flip.
If the patriotic leaders are able to come up with a strategy where you break down the barriers, you know, the
toxicity, you break down the cordon sanitaire.
And it has been happening very slowly.
I mean, just have to recall when Jürg Haider was, came into the government of Austria,
I think in 2001, and the EU voted sanctions against Austria.
Right, right.
For its elected government, for its elected government.
And equally, you saw in, I think in France, it can change too.
And I think when it changes, I think it can be a reasonably decisive change, more so than what we saw in the US.
Just look at Hungary.
Yeah, yeah.
And there does seem to be, if we win in one place, we tend to start winning everywhere else all at once too.
So, if we start winning, it might catch on far more quickly than most people think.
So, with that kind of white-pilling note, I'll end it.
Thank you so much for joining us, and I want to encourage everyone to get out there and buy The Ancient Ethnostate, Biopolitical Thought, and Classical Greece.
Is there anything you would like to say to the audience to kind of conclude on?
I salute everyone, and I hope they do well and they take care of themselves.
All right.
Thank you, everyone.
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