Marine Le Pen, former chair of the French Right-populist Rassemblement National and the leading opposition politician in France, has been convicted by a Paris court of embezzling public funds. She has received a four-year prison sentence, two of which are suspended and two of which are to be served under house arrest with an ankle monitor. Le Pen will also have to pay a fine of €100,000, and she has been deprived of the right to run for political office for five years. Le Pen is leading the polls in the race to succeed Emanuel Macron in the coming 2027 presidential election, with the support of over one-third of the French electorate. With this sentence, the Paris criminal court hopes to remove the leading candidate from the race entirely. Le Pen can of course appeal, but her prospects are uncertain and a favourable ruling may be years away.
Le Pen was convicted alongside eight other members of the Rassemblement National/Front National and 12 parliamentary aides. She did not personally embezzle funds or enrich herself from EU coffers. Rather, prosecutors accuse her of directing aides to undertake work for her party while they were receiving salaries from the European Parliament. They claim this happened between 2004 and 2016, and that Le Pen and her associates misappropriated over €4 million in this way. While nobody doubts the substance of the accusations, what Le Pen did was far from unusual and the sentence just seems ridiculous to me. Many European parliamentary representatives have used staff paid from parliamentary budgets for party projects – including Franziska Brantner, the present Co-Chair of German Green Party. Until recently this was a common practice, and even now the distinction between party and parliamentary work is not always easy to maintain, and both routinely and deliberately blurred.
Le Pen is a complex political figure, and she has not always been an unvarnished force for good. Her campaign to normalise the Rassemblement National (known as ‘dédiabolisation‘, or ‘de-demonisation’) came at devastating cost to Alternative für Deutschland during last year’s European elections. In service of casting the Rassemblement National as something less than ‘far Right’, Le Pen and her party attacked the AfD for its rhetoric surrounding ‘remigration’ and even seized upon Maximilian Krah’s inept remarks about the Waffen-SS to kick the entire AfD delegation out of the Identity and Democracy faction of the European Parliament.
In the wake of these fireworks, some German commentators have suggested that the AfD undertake a de-demonisation campaign of its own, for example by distancing itself from nationalist AfD politicians like Björn Höcke. Le Pen’s fate shows that programmes of optical moderation and attempts to claim the political centre provide no salvation. The European political establishment only claims to be worried about ‘the extreme Right’; its true anxieties attach to its hold on power and nothing else.
Le Pen’s sentence confirms an ominous anti-democratic tactic emerging across Europe, namely attacks on the passive suffrage of opposition politicians. At the start of this month, the Central Election Bureau of Romania withdrew Călin Georgescu’s right to run for office there, months after Georgescu emerged as the frontrunner in the first round of the Presidential elections and the Romanian Constitutional Court annulled the vote. In Germany, schemes to attack passive suffrage have also been gaining ground, with the CDU and SPD openly planning to use this measure against anyone convicted more than once of the broad and ill-defined speech offence of ‘incitement’.
This is very bad, and I fear it is a symptom of something much worse.
Europe is entering a new political era and its rulership class is rapidly aligning itself around a new great cause. Why Europe even needs to have great causes is a powerful question, but since 1945 we cannot get away from them. The Cold War was a very long and a very great cause indeed. When that evaporated, we moved on to the next great cause, which was climatism. This achieved a dubious peak during Donald Trump’s first term and drew momentum from a performative moral one-upmanship directed against his administration. Now we are at the start of Trump’s second term, climatism is collapsing even more rapidly than I expected, and European politicians are taking up the fight against “the Right” instead. Climatism was yesterday, antifascism is today.
You will notice that each of these great causes is directed against an enemy. In the Cold War we hoped to defeat communism and the Warsaw Pact. Afterwards, our elites were free as never before to incorporate Leftist themes (the communist threat having vanished), and so they took up arms against standard socialist villains like the energetically loathed if relentlessly under-realised ‘capitalists’, who destroy the world with unchecked industrial production and who must be brought to heel by the regulatory state. I very much fear that the new villains of the antifascist programme are simply the people, who are destroying ‘democracy’ with their unchecked personal aspirations, prejudices and wayward beliefs. They will try to bring us to heel too, via what tactics we can only imagine.
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A good finishing off clip, given that Snow supported the offence himself, a few years ago, under the recent panic!
And what’s happened to Dr Wolfgang Wodarg? He’s another one that’s dropped off the radar for quite some time now. Especially considering how vocal he was in opposing the scam in 2009, what’s been happening in Germany with excess deaths, restrictions and the court case of Dr Bhakdi, the death of Dr Arne Burkhardt, for example. It’s like he’s disappeared off the face of the earth but he was a strong ally at the beginning due to his knowledge and expertise.
I can update you on Dr Burkhardt. His colleague the lawyer Elmar Becker spoke to our meeting on Tuesday, until the results of the post mortem are published there is only speculation about Dr Burkhardt’s death. His son is unable to say what happened & there was no other witnesses.
Re Wolfgang Wodarg, I have no news.
Yes I was reading some rumours around his death possibly being suspicious on Telegram but there was nothing really factual, just vague with no details, so I didn’t pursue it. I just figured that he was 79yrs so we can expect people to die at that age, but one thing I read said something about him drowning, but really don’t know about the circumstances. As for W.W, last time I saw him was yonks ago on the Reiner Fuellmich videos, but nothing for best part of 2 years now. Lots been happening in Germany to speculate on too so bit surprised we’ve not heard any sort of comment from him on anything.
The last I heard from Dr Wodarg was in December last year. Link to meeting he spoke at if you’re interested in what he was up to then. I can’t remember what he was doing but he is working away below the radar – safest place to be if you’re doing important work & wish to complete it before going public.
https://rumble.com/v22vcbe-december-28-2022.html
Whatever happened to Reiner Fuellmich and the case he was putting together?
One also shouldn’t forget the so-called bird flu of 2004. That was the time when influenza vaccines started to be marketed aggressively. Until then, I wasn’t even aware that vaccinating against something as benign as the flu was even being considered.
And then, all our pandemicists save some unsavoury but relatively unimportant figureheads are still hiding in plain sight, polishing their honours while enjoying their sinecures, smiling warmly when thinking of silvery rainfall into their well-filled coffers and refining their plans for the next rerun of The Great Pandemic[tm] which will then – lessons duly learnt – hopefully last forever or at least, for a much longer time.
The current plan as far as The Liar Institute for Global Change goes is to have an “always on” approach to “vaccines and other injectables”. They intend to have a constant pipeline of adult vaccinations to keep the motors running and the $$ running so that you don’t have to scale up in a pandemic, the factories are already there churning out injections every day for the masses anyway. They advocate pushing an adult vaccination schedule for every country as standard as well as “long lasting injectables” for high cholesterol and heart disease. They see “demand creation” as key, (through persuading governments) otherwise without demand they can’t supply all those completely essential jabs.
Wodarg was one of the sane voices from the outset of the pandemic. I remember in March 2020 listening to a 10-minute video in which he explained what the coronavirus was. On 23 March I naively tried to write to as many MPs as I could asking them to listen to the video and vote against lockdown. I gave them a synopsis:
“There are about 100 flu viruses. Virologists used not to be interested in having tests for them, because there were so many and they keep on evolving. Recently we have developed tests for 8-10 of them.
“Why did the virus break out in Wuhan? Because Wuhan has the biggest safety laboratory for viruses in the whole of China. They found a new type and announced it to the world. In Berlin, which keeps a global database, virologists devised a test for the new variant. A protocol for the test was submitted to the WHO, and because of the panic in China it was accepted without the usual validation procedures. The test (such as it is) does not tell you how dangerous the virus is. For that, you need to survey an entire population and determine ‘excess mortality’.
“In Germany 20,000-30,000 deaths are attributable to flu. Around 10% (7%-15%) of flu viruses are coronavirus. Had tests been done specifically for that virus in previous years, therefore 2000-3000 per year would probably have been attributable to coronavirus. (1) We are nowhere near those numbers at the moment. (2) The numbers being reported do not establish that death was from this specific virus rather than from the other c. 90% that cause respiratory illness.
“Medical researchers have a vested interest in talking such things up. They want to feel important and have political influence; they need funds for their projects. In my opinion, the idea that we are dealing with a virus that, without draconian action, will kill tens of milllions is unsubstantiated.”
Factcheckers stamped on his message only a month later and subsequently YouTube pulled the video.
These people should really be called Factf***ers (or maybe F***checkers).
Like we saw around Climategate (2008) one battlefield of information is Wikipedia, in which an army of editors ensure that the Wikipedia entry for any individual who dissents from the Official Narrative is suitably “corrected”, often with new smears and spin. Dr Wodarg’s entry is no exception. Just as a superficial scan of the edits to Dr Wordarg’s Wikipedia entry illustrates the point. Prior to March 2020, the entry was fairly quiet in terms of number of edits per month, and were largely technical or stylistic changes or reasonable updates. Then the attack begins. You can roughly gauge the nature of the “corrections” and the intentions of the editors simply by looking for words like “notoriety”, “far-right” and “misinformation” added after 2020.
For example (taken from Wikipedia edits, my annotation in italics),
See also “Climategate: the corruption of Wikipedia” for the trial run of the army of self-appointed “fact-checkers”, before the term was invented but after schoolchildren took to using Wikipedia as the primary source for assignments!
The evidence is now there that they do seriously reduce fertility in males, with large amounts of spike protein being produced in the testes. Never believe a word of Wilipaedia, nearly all of the content is wrong in many ways.
The hysterical reporting at the time convinced my mum that our family were in grave danger at the time due to a planned trip to visit relatives in Australia, so we all got the swine flu shot. Thankfully the 2009 shot seemed to be mostly harmless along with useless, but that was my last encounter with a vaccinator. Funnily enough, when we got to Australia people were barely even aware of this “pandemic” that was meant to be ravaging the country. Coincidentally (or not), Daniel Andrews was health minister at the time and the state of Victoria rolled out the harshest restrictions and also performed the worst out of all Australian states. Just a practice run for the Dear Leader.
Just waiting for the WHO to declare the HSV-1 pandemic.
What a shame they didn’t have a Public Inquiry after the Swine Flu debacle. The Establishment/Government might have got some lessons that they could have learned.
Or perhaps they did hold a quiet inquiry, and learned the wrong lessons.
The swine flu ‘pandemic’ was definitely an attempt to bring in all the things they did for the Covid scamdemic….I think just not enough people died for them to keep it going!?
They obviously learned a lot of lessons…!?
I have posted this before but my friend, a nurse at the local surgery, told me that after the swine flu vax was known to cause narcolepsy..her surgery used it as that years winter flu jab, to get rid of the surplus..she told all her patients, even though she’d been advised not to…as it happens no one cared…the sheep just took it anyway…
…this article in Der Spiegel has been much quoted..and shows they did really try to get it going……
https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/reconstruction-of-a-mass-hysteria-the-swine-flu-panic-of-2009-a-682613.html