France's Most Popular "Far Right Mayor", Woke Army Battlefield Superiority, Election Censors Get Rewarded by Biden Regime, Leicester's Sectarian Riots, Mongolian Warrior Culture Festival
Despite the Americans putting their European “allies” on their knees thanks to coercing them to sanction Russia and in the process destroy their own economies, there is a play happening just to the side of the main stage in that a bifurcation is taking place between the two.
As the Anglosphere continues its march towards a paradoxical authoritarian liberal utopia, the European continent keeps inching rightwards, evidenced by the strong showings of both the Swedish Democrats and the Brothers of Italy in recent elections in both of those countries. Europe’s shift to the right has mass; even though much of it can be chalked up to a protest vote, these parties have shown that they have staying power, and aren’t just temporary distractions. As they dig themselves into the corridors of power on the national stage, they will in time be able to challenge the liberal behemoth that dominates Brussels (but not just yet, of course).
The most important ingredient in this lurch to the right on the continent is the dissatisfaction with mass migration. The unwillingness of the centre, the liberals, and the left to listen to the people on this subject is what fuels the rise of the populist right. It’s just that simple. Yet they do not listen, because they are right and the people are wrong.
I describe this article as “curious” (or better yet, confused) because it can’t settle on how to treat Menard, a former leftist who helped found the global NGO Reporters Without Borders, due to his sharp right turn in office. It can’t fully understand why he is so popular (he won 70% of the vote, up 20% from his previous victory) with the locals, and figuratively shits on him in an insulting manner in the piece as well. What Ménard represents is the realization that has struck some of the 68ers (akin to Boomers, but in the French sense): they fucked up.
Ménard was re-elected as mayor of Béziers two years ago, receiving 70 percent of the vote – 20 percentage points more than the first time he ran. He is one of the most popular mayors in all of France.
He is also a man who said not long ago that he isn’t even considering opening up the schools in his city to the children of Syrian refugees. A man who has complained on Twitter that nobody is apparently being extradited from France any longer and who insists on referring to Sinti and Roma as "gypsies." Ménard also doesn’t shy away from extremist drivel: When Sadiq Khan was elected as the mayor of London, he espoused the right-wing conspiracy fantasy known as the "great replacement theory," according to which Europe’s Christian population is being replaced step-by-step by Muslims.
Ménard, a man who belongs to no political party and who once helped found the organization Reporters Without Borders, is one of the numerous right-wing extremist politicians who are taking on more and more political functions in the country. There are now 89 of them occupying seats in parliament in Paris, after having spent years expanding their ranks in regional councils and city halls. With the right-wing party of Marine Le Pen no longer taboo, right-wing populists are increasingly finding their way into positions of power.
The following would be denounced as “the normalization of the far right” in the Anglosphere:
But he also defends Le Pen. He says that she has accurately identified the problems facing the country, especially immigration, even if he doesn’t always agree with the solutions she proposes. "She says things that others don’t dare say because they have a bad conscience. But you have to be able to talk about problems if you want to fix them." He then looks directly at his conversation partner: "You in Germany, you all have a particularly bad conscience."
The French like him because despite being on the right wing, he’s not a man of simplistic stances. Ménard essentially defends the honor of all those who voted for the RN because they can no longer stand Macron, but who don’t necessarily support every line of Le Pen’s platform. He gives them the comforting feeling that political differentiation is also possible on the right. Whereas the right-wing extremist politician Éric Zemmour talks about the downfall of France, Ménard sees a path out of the misery. He prefers solutions.
Proximity leads to contempt:
Béziers is the kind of place where the Rassemblement National tends to do well. Located on the Mediterranean coast, it is considered one of the country’s poorest cities, with a higher-than-average share of retirees and 23 percent unemployment. The jobless rate is even higher among the younger demographic. Some 34 percent of the city’s inhabitants live below the official poverty line, compared to a nationwide average of 14.6 percent. And Béziers is home to a large number of people with foreign roots. Second- and third-generation immigrants from the Maghreb call the city home, as do Sinti and Roma.
Menard is not in Le Pen’s party (he prefers to remain independent), but his popularity can be used as a proxy to gauge support for RN’s policies.
In power:
Ménard’s predecessor in City Hall focused on promoting the construction of industrial zones and shopping centers on the outskirts of the city – and the middle classes likewise relocated to the periphery. The historic city center decayed. When Ménard took over, he established a two-year deadline for renovating building facades in the old town, promising penalties for those who lagged.
"I’m an authoritarian mayor," he says in the café, a claim largely confirmed by a look at his first term in office. Among other decrees, he issued a ban on spitting on the street in public. He also forbade hanging out laundry to dry on city center balconies and the installation of satellite dishes on historical buildings. He also established a temporary curfew between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. for children under the age of 13.
In 2015, he had posters put up around the city that could have come from Donald Trump: "From now on, the police have a new friend," they read. Next to the sentence was a picture of a semi-automatic handgun that he had ordered for the authorities. The poster can still be seen in City Hall to this day. Ménard is fond of such provocations, in part because it's an easy way of attracting attention. "I’m not a right-wing extremist," he says, "I’m just on the right."
RETVRN:
A lot has changed in Béziers since he came into office. Place Jean Jaurès – "it used to be a dusty square with a lot of cars and dog doo," says Ménard – was redesigned by a landscape architect, including broad flowerbeds with lavender and grasses waving in the wind. A "musical fountain" spurts brightly colored jets of water into the air every evening to the strains of French chansons from the 1960s and '70s. They are the sounds of a period that right-wing populists romanticize to this day because France, in their view, was still an idyllic, far simpler place back then. It was a time before wokeness and LGBT activists were allowed to define what is good and what is bad.
Menard is an example of a growing phenomenon on the continent: the increasing dissatisfaction with what the various national capitals and Brussels are dictating to the peons, and how they react to it. It’s a slowly growing tide that is still far off in the distance, but has the mass to engulf the whole of Europe should it not dissipate en route.
I am left with no choice but to continue to link to two pieces that I have written and published on this Substack because they continue to both be proven right and have resonance:
The Desquamation of America - how the USA is shedding a layer of skin and is in the process becoming much more ideological
Turbo-America - how the USA’s transformation is leading it on a quasi-religious crusade to dominate the globe
The success of the Ukrainian military over the past few months, along with the evolution of the Ukrainian state itself toward a more tolerant, more liberal norm, reveals what makes a better army in the modern world. Brains mean more than brawn, and adaptability means more than mindless aggression. Openness to new ideas and new equipment, along with the ability to learn quickly, is far more important than a simple desire to kill.
There are so many assumptions contained in this paragraph to render it completely worthless and not just historically illiterate. For example, brute force won WW2 on the Eastern Front. The Wehrmacht was as intelligent a force as history can show us, but they were no match for the repeated wave attacks by the Soviets. Historical lessons are now “irrelevant” if they do not support the party line, in this case being that liberalism and tolerance translates to victory on the battlefield.
Just look at this stupidity and ignorance:
The combination of education and technology overcame brute force during World War II, when the most militarily skillful and adaptable countries—the United States and the United Kingdom—were able to fight their enemies at a relatively small cost in casualties. The U.K., even though it fought around the world from 1939 to 1945, lost only 384,000 soldiers in combat. The U.S. lost even fewer, suffering approximately 290,000 battle deaths. The German armed forces, by contrast, lost more than 4 million soldiers.
That the British and American armed forces kept their casualties comparatively low is especially notable because they were confronted with an overwhelming majority of German arms, planes, and ammunition. Because of the sickening number of human casualties, the fighting on the Eastern Front between the Nazis and Soviets is widely deemed World War II’s largest engagement, but Germany had to send far more of its war production to fight the British and Americans than it did to fight the U.S.S.R.
This is because the Western Front was inactive for years, you lying shit. This is because the overwhelming majority of the fighting against the Germans on the European continent happened on the Eastern Front, you lying shit.
Here’s the kicker:
Just as the ability to absorb information is better than lunkhead hypermasculinity in a modern army, diversity and societal integration also bring major advantages. As Ukraine has become more diverse and tolerant, its army has benefited. In contrast with Putin’s homophobic military, the Ukrainian armed forces include LGBTQ soldiers who have incorporated “unicorn” insignia into their uniforms. The valor of these soldiers, and the rallying of the Ukrainian people around a vision of a tolerant and diverse society, have led to an overall increase in Ukrainian support for gay rights—and it underscores the belief that everyone has a role to play in the country’s defense.
The Russian experience could not be more different. Putin has made suppressing gay rights one of the hallmarks of his rule. Determined to capitalize on culture-war tropes of the American right, he has portrayed Russia as a victim of cancel culture. He has retained rigid control over Russian society. While the Ukrainians are opening up, he is clamping down—with what we are now seeing as rather extreme results.
Gay rights = victory on the battlefield.
It’s just that simple…..and it serves as good agitprop for the gullible.
Censorship is all the rage now, because it is a necessary tool to “defend democracy”. Thanks to Big Tech, governments can outsource censorship to willing (or coerced) “partners” without trampling on the Constitutional right to Free Speech. The most notorious example was Twitter’s and Facebook’s suppression surrounding the news of Hunter Biden’s laptop that was reported by the New York Post. This was urged to help “election fortification”, assisted by figures in intelligence and media decrying the report as “Russian disinformation”. They got away with it then, and they are now incentivized to continue to censor going forward.
A consortium of four private groups worked with the departments of Homeland Security (DHS) and State to censor massive numbers of social media posts they considered misinformation during the 2020 election, and its members then got rewarded with millions of federal dollars from the Biden administration afterwards, according to interviews and documents obtained by Just the News.
The Election Integrity Partnership is back in action again for the 2022 midterm elections, raising concerns among civil libertarians that a chilling new form of public-private partnership to evade the First Amendment's prohibition of government censorship may be expanding.
The consortium is comprised of four member organizations: Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), the University of Washington's Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, and social media analytics firm Graphika. It set up a concierge-like service in 2020 that allowed federal agencies like Homeland's Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and State's Global Engagement Center to file "tickets" requesting that online story links and social media posts be censored or flagged by Big Tech.
A public-private partnership to censor the news and to rig elections.
In its own after-action report on the 2020 election, the consortium boasted it flagged more than 4,800 URLs — shared nearly 22 million times on Twitter alone — for social media platforms. Their staff worked 12-20 hour shifts from September through mid-November 2020, with "monitoring intensif[ying] significantly" the week before and after Election Day.
The tickets sought removal, throttling and labeling of content that raised questions about mail-in ballot integrity, Arizona's "Sharpiegate," and other election integrity issues of concern to conservatives.
The consortium achieved a success rate in 2020 that would be enviable for baseball batters: Platforms took action on 35% of flagged URLs, with 21% labeled, 13% removed and 1% soft-blocked, meaning users had to reject a warning to see them. The partnership couldn't determine how many were downranked.
Effective:
It wasn't just blogs and individual social media users whose content was targeted for removal and throttling as "repeat spreaders" of misinformation. News and opinion organizations, including the New York Post, Fox News, Just the News and SeanHannity.com were also targeted.
The partnership's members published the 292-page public report in March 2021, though the most recent version is dated June 15, 2021. The launch webinar featured former CISA Director Christopher Krebs, "who led the effort to secure electoral infrastructure and the response to mis- and disinformation during the election period."
"I think we were pretty effective in getting [platforms] to act on things they haven't acted on before," both by pressuring them to adopt specific censorship policies and then reporting violations, SIO founder and former Facebook Chief Security Officer Alex Stamos told the launch webinar. (He and Krebs started their own consultancy after the election.)
"Platform interventions" in response to "delegitimization of election results," for example, went from uniformly "non-comprehensive" in August 2020 to "comprehensive" by Election Day, the report says.
Lucrative rewards:
The partners all received federal grants from the Biden administration in the next two years.
The National Science Foundation awarded the Stanford and UW projects $3 million in August 2021 "to study ways to apply collaborative, rapid-response research to mitigate online disinformation."
UW's press release about the award noted their earlier work on the partnership and praise for the report from ex-CISA director Krebs, who called it "the seminal report on what happened in 2020, not just the election but also through January 6."
Graphika, also known as Octant Data, received its first listed federal grant several weeks after the 2020 election: nearly $3 million from the Department of Defense for unspecified "research on cross-platform detection to counter malign influence." Nearly $2 million more followed in fall 2021 for "research on co-citation network mapping," which tracks sources that are cited together.
The Atlantic Council, which hosted then-Vice President Joe Biden for a keynote address at its 2011 awards dinner, has received $4.7 million in grants since 2021, all but one from the State Department. That far exceeds the think tank's federal haul in previous years, which hadn't approached $1 million in a single year since 2011.
…and they’re all embedded within the intelligence community:
The Washington Post said an August report by the two organizations exposed years of "covert campaigns" to promote American interests abroad by fake social media accounts, which Facebook and Twitter had repeatedly taken down for alleged U.S. military ties. The Pentagon is reportedly auditing its "internet information operation" in response.
Graphika and its cadre of former U.S. intelligence agents was the subject of a critical profile in February by The Washington Standard, which dubbed it "The Deep State's Beard for Controlling the Information Age."
The report also noted Graphika's work on the election partnership with the other organizations, and that SIO's founder Stamos is an adviser to NATO's Collective Cybersecurity Center of Excellence.
They will censor the news, “fortify” the elections, and then accuse you of extremism for daring to voice the opinion that the voting process is rigged.
The lying liars who lie to us will often lie by omission. The sectarian riots two weekends ago in Leicester, UK are a case in point. Going by the BBC’s initial dispatch, one would be left confused as to who was rioting, and why? This is journalistic malpractice as it refuses to answer the 5Ws that all reporting must strive to do.
Yesterday, the police responded to “serious disorder” in Leicester by using Section 60 powers to disperse or stop and search “large crowds” after an “unplanned protest”.
BBC News reported that, “large numbers of people became involved in disorder in parts of East Leicester”. They described those involved as “ hundreds of people, mainly men”. No motive was explained but the BBC revealed that it “is the latest in a series of disturbances to have broken out following an India and Pakistan cricket match on 28 August”. Community leaders were helping the police call for calm. The police also reported that there was footage of “a man pulling down a flag outside a religious building on Melton Road”. But which communities and which religion?
This wasn’t the first lie by omission:
An earlier BBC story stated that 27 people had been arrested previous for another “series of disturbances” which were also linked to the cricket match. They quoted the temporary Chief Constable thanking the community for calling for calm, although again, nobody says which community.
As official outlets covered up the story, the political manipulation was already in full swing:
Leicester East’s disgraced MP Claudia Webbe meanwhile took time out from praising anti-colonial leaders to call on “communities” to “share the message of tolerance” and stop the “hate-filled clashes”. She added that, Leicester “is a shining example of how people from different cultures can live together side by side. Our diversity is what makes Leicester special. We are the city where the minorities make up the majority. And we are richer for this vibrant exchange of cultures”. But in order to maintain that vibrancy, she called on people to combat “hatred and division in all its forms”.
Oddly, she failed to mention who was spreading this hatred and division, although she did criticise “far right elements” who are “using social media and other online communication to incite religious and racial hatred”.
SW1 simply searched Twitter for “Leicester Hindu” and “Leicester Muslim” and found out that:
Events began with a Hindu protest crowd, who were filmed walking down the road chanting sectarian slogans. In some footage they are clearly chanting “Jai Shree Ram”. Although it can be used as a greeting, in recent years it has been used by Hindu lynch mobs in India. There were claims some of the Hindus may have travelled from London to join the protest, although it’s unconfirmed.
In response to this, Muslim protestors quickly gathered and mobs formed to attack the Hindus. They managed to trap the Hindu protestors in a small area, with lines of police protecting them and keeping the mobs apart. On videos, Muslims can be heard blaming a minority of Hindu extremists, who they say hate Muslims.
As night descended and the two mobs remained kept apart by large amounts of police, more and more young men arrived to join. Groups of Muslims were said to be arriving from all over the West Midlands, whilst voices within the mob called for more reinforcements. Footage shows Muslim men chanting “Allahu Akbar” and “Takbir”, phrases often although not exclusively associated with jihadists.
All of this evidence is easy to find if you have an internet connection. There is no way that a competent journalist can be unaware of who is responsible and what the rioting is about. Claudia Webbe’s blaming of the far right suggests one possibility: that this is being deliberately censored so as not to allow right-wingers to present these events as a negative effect of multiculturalism.
Spin, slant, omission, and outright censorship are what we all have to deal with every single day when being bombarded with news from mainstream stories that try to get us to accept and support the narratives that they construct. They are all full of shit.
We conclude this weekend’s Substack with a piece (and photo gallery) of Naadam, Mongolia’s traditional national festival and most important holiday. It’s during these festivities that they especially celebrate their warrior heritage.
TSENGEL and HVOD – In a distant and violent past, Mongolians were once Asia’s most feared warriors, trampling the world under the hooves of their ponies, sacking cities and driving their enemies before them.
In the gentler days of the 21st century, the great khans and their fearsome cavalry armies are long gone, but Mongolia’s warrior heritage lives on.
That heritage was on full display this summer at Naadam, a centuries-old traditional festival and Mongolia’s foremost national holiday. After a two-year hiatus due to Covid, 2022’s event ran from July 11-13 across the nation’s villages, towns, cities and provinces.
Naadam is deeply rooted not just in the warrior ways of yore, but also in Mongolia’s nomadic customs and pastoral way of life. It focuses on three martial sports: wrestling, archery and horse racing.
It is manly stuff. As the country adapts to modernity, women can now participate in archery and horse racing but bokh – Mongolian wrestling – remains an all-male affair.
The festival kicks off with a traditional dance called biyelgee accompanied by musicians playing traditional instruments such as themorin khuur. Traditional cuisine, such askhuushuur (meat filled pastry) and traditional booze, such as airag(fermented horse’s milk), is consumed with gusto.
Although Naadam features a wealth of often quirky nomadic folk games – such as solving puzzles and smashing the knuckle bone with one’s palm – the biggest crowd puller isbokh.
It is said that the Emperor Chinggis (Genghis) Khan initiated bokh to keep his warriors strong and fit. For wrestlers today, winning a big tournament is a matter of great pride, honor and prestige. The biggest is the Naadam held in Ulaanbaatar, the capital city of Mongolia.
Thank you once again for checking out my Substack. Hit the like button and use the share button to share this across social media. Leave a comment below if the mood strikes you. And don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t done so already.
Ridiculous piece on a woke progressive Ukrainian army. I won't even get into the LGBT/diversity shit, Just going to point out that these western progressives love to brush over the fact that at the outbreak of the war, Zelensky banned males from leaving the country and mass conscripted them into this war. Western Lib journos who spent the last +10 years endlessly crying about misogyny, sexism, male privilege etc, did not even bat an eye when delivering that bit of news matter-of-factly in Feb.
When the cold hard reality of war came back and men were called upon to unquestionably take on their historic role as the willing, expendable, protectors of their nation, Western Libs just accepted, with zero sympathy.
The only real objection I heard of this in western media, was that the the wives might need these to help raise the kids, so no inherent value of the male's life other than how useful he is in supporting his woman.
Not complaining about the historic gender role of male fighter/protector for nation, just pointing out how deplorable western lib propaganda is, that outside of performative bs, they will still need old school tough males on the ground doing the dirty work.
Hit the like button and use the share button to share this across social media. Leave a comment if the mood strikes you (be nice!), and don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already done so.
I will turn to the Early Days of HIV/AIDS series once again tomorrow and hopefully have the next entry up in the evening. I appreciate your patience.
Ridiculous piece on a woke progressive Ukrainian army. I won't even get into the LGBT/diversity shit, Just going to point out that these western progressives love to brush over the fact that at the outbreak of the war, Zelensky banned males from leaving the country and mass conscripted them into this war. Western Lib journos who spent the last +10 years endlessly crying about misogyny, sexism, male privilege etc, did not even bat an eye when delivering that bit of news matter-of-factly in Feb.
When the cold hard reality of war came back and men were called upon to unquestionably take on their historic role as the willing, expendable, protectors of their nation, Western Libs just accepted, with zero sympathy.
The only real objection I heard of this in western media, was that the the wives might need these to help raise the kids, so no inherent value of the male's life other than how useful he is in supporting his woman.
Not complaining about the historic gender role of male fighter/protector for nation, just pointing out how deplorable western lib propaganda is, that outside of performative bs, they will still need old school tough males on the ground doing the dirty work.
Hit the like button and use the share button to share this across social media. Leave a comment if the mood strikes you (be nice!), and don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already done so.
I will turn to the Early Days of HIV/AIDS series once again tomorrow and hopefully have the next entry up in the evening. I appreciate your patience.