Latest / John’s Newsletter / Reflections on the French Revolution (Part 4)

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Reflections on the French Revolution (Part 4) · John’s Newsletter

• 0:00
  [music]
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: Good morning,
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: everyone,
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: and welcome to Around the world in 20 minutes,
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: where we try to make sense of the beguiling new planet that we find ourselves on.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: And we, as you're not going to be surprised, are heading right back to France.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Probably our greatest long term call has been the decline of Europe.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: 20 years ago,
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: my good friend Will Sherano and I wrote a piece for national interest called
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: The EU is Dead,
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: looking at the systemic problems that were bedeviling Europe
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: and forcing its decline.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: I remember at the time that I wrote this,
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: there were people like Charlie Kupchen,
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: a noted leftist Wilsonian who worked for Obama as every credential in the world.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: I like and know Charlie.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: I have to say that he's a good guy.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: But he's a terrible analyst,
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: and yet somehow he's the senior analyst at Council on Foreign Relations and
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: a professor at Georgetown,
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: and if he were in the private sector, no one would let him get coffee.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: Because he said the EU and its post-modern,
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: post-national approach would not only be a global power, but be the global power.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: That it's post nationalism was making knuckle draggers like us realist nationalists,
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: leaving us behind.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: And then Europe will go from strength to strength and around the world now,
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: because Charlie lives in the East German labor system where he cannot I'd be fired.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: There are no downsides to him saying this,
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: and he never has to worry about buying a drink in Europe.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: But that gives you an idea of the atmosphere that I was in when Will Sherrano and I,
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: Will and I made this call.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's a key fact, that it's easy.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's easy now to say, well,
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: look at all these terrible problems,
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: but trust people who've gotten it right for 20 years.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: 20 years ago,
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: we said unfettered,
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: unassimilated immigration,
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: energy costs,
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: and a lack of growth will doom Europe to failure and a relative decline,
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: if it's lucky.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: If not absolute decline.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: And this piece helped make me famous only because there were so many howls
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: of derision and mockery.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: Solana, who you might remember leading EU grandee at the time, specifically picked on me.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: I was just a young guy starting by name and helped make my name because
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: the more they argued about me, the more people stopped and said, what did he write?
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: And now this piece,
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: and Terry,
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: it's true,
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: it's aging like a good French wine,
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: ironically, because all those things have come to pass.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: And we outlined Kubler-Ross's stages of grief,
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: all the things the Europeans would do not to accept their decline rather than deal
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: with it, denial, anger, bargaining, and a lot of them.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: And this was said tongue in cheek, but also on the money and on the nose.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: And thank you, Will, for supplying the psychological background to my geopolitics.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's an interesting piece, and I commend it to you in national interest.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: The EU is dead.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: You get Will's psychological insights mixed in a hybrid way with my geostrategic insights.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_00: Often these hybrid pieces either really, really fail or they really, really work.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: And this one really, really worked.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: And we for 20 years have been saying this.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: And let me say,
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: you look at our record,
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: we're about to look at call records in December,
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: that I have never gotten poor or hurt my reputation analytically by betting
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: against Europe.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: Because this is a unique place where no one discusses what's wrong.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: As I've said before,
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: and as my tagline about it,
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: the analysis and the decadence is so pronounced that it's like being aboard
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: the Titanic and nobody bothering to even discuss the iceberg,
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: let alone do anything about it.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: Well now, bits of the snow are falling on the deck of the ship.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: And still we see efforts to move away from it.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: So stick with us.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_00: Please do support us because we've been right in the long haul and we've been right
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: in the specifics and we will steer you through the storm as we do all the others
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: with a sense of humor, with edge.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: With looking at things as they really are and then trying to make them better.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: And for that, we're demanding only 30 cents a day, $100 a year.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: To get Around the world in 20 minutes,
• 4:15
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• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: the Trump revolution,
• 4:19
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• 4:20
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• 4:22
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• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: And our much loved chat that you guys have taken ownership of.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I just said, and I've been loving the comments.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: Ms. Ba, that was brilliant yesterday.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_00: I enjoyed that a lot.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: Very droll.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: I love that.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: And I love that we are a functioning,
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: booming society of tens and tens and tens of thousands of you going through
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_00: the site, which that's what's going on, which has come to see what I'm up to.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: I know I've taken your chair.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: I apologize.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: In return, though, it's an honor system.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: We do demand that for all this extra work we do for getting it right,
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: unlike Mr. Bremer,
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: who can't figure out what's going on and Eurasia saying,
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: you know, it's not about immigrants.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: You know, it's a bit like H.L.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: Mencken saying if people say it's not about the money, it's about the money.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_00: If people say it's not about the unfettered immigration, it's about the unfettered immigration.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: For having the nerve and the bottle and the courage to see things as they are.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: As Aristotle said, as the basis of Western logic, what is, is.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: You can have different interpretations of facts, but you can't have different facts.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_00: And while Bremer tries to,
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: his worldview is on the line,
• 5:32
  SPEAKER_00: along with the macronesis, So I just wanted to update us.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: Macron stopped going yesterday to Celine Dion concerts.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: I couldn't make this up while France was burning.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_00: He didn't,
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  SPEAKER_00: of course,
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  SPEAKER_00: cancel his trip to the Gulf states because it's ever so much more fun
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  SPEAKER_00: to cosplay it being a great power,
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  SPEAKER_00: which France no longer is,
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: in the Middle East or to talk about Ukraine as though the French were ever going
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  SPEAKER_00: to do anything about that than actually govern France itself,
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  SPEAKER_00: which is rather difficult.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: So the trips haven't been canceled.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: He did go to the Celine Dion concert,
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: but he slotted in there in between the trip and the Celine Dion concert.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: He slotted in an address to the French nation where he said absolutely nothing.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: About the fact that on Sunday,
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: more than 700,000 people protested and rioted across the country,
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  SPEAKER_00: with 2,000 of them, more than 2,000 having been arrested at last count.
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  SPEAKER_00: Everybody has seen the pictures of it.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: And it's very, very clear what's going on.
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  SPEAKER_00: So let's call a spade a spade and move forward.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: This is the French alliance on the street of the far left voters,
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  SPEAKER_00: the socialist communist voters of La France Insoumise,
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  SPEAKER_00: around Jean-Luc Mélenchon,
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  SPEAKER_00: always trying out for that extra part on the off-Broadway version of Les Miserables,
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  SPEAKER_00: one of the great economic illiterates of his time.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: But I like him in the sense that he's honest about what he's doing.
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  SPEAKER_00: And unfettered,
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  SPEAKER_00: unassimilated migrants,
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  SPEAKER_00: primarily Arab migrants,
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  SPEAKER_00: let's be specific,
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  SPEAKER_00: from North Africa because of France's colonial history and the Middle East.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_00: Now the problem with these folks is that many of them are French citizens.
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: But you simply can't give people enough who want everything, as Charles de Gaulle said.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: Again, the answer to French problems can be found as often as the case
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  SPEAKER_00: in France's own history, if people would bother to look.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: But this is a key alliance of far left voters from La France Insoumise,
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  SPEAKER_00: primarily white,
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  SPEAKER_00: upper middle class,
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  SPEAKER_00: trendy folks like the boy with the keffiyeh
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  SPEAKER_00: who can't understand why we just don't give the people more.
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  SPEAKER_00: And again,
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  SPEAKER_00: as I said yesterday,
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  SPEAKER_00: think of the image of the friendship of state economically with the bond crisis,
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  SPEAKER_00: the huge debt,
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  SPEAKER_00: the non-growth for 20 years,
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  SPEAKER_00: unfittered,
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  SPEAKER_00: unassimilated immigration,
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  SPEAKER_00: absolute chaos, absolutely no form of aspirational capitalism.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's kind of what's going on here.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: But this alliance, and let's look at why this matters politically.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: That's what I wanted to do this morning.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: That this is an alliance where the two parts of the alliance
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: on their own wouldn't amount to much.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, let's not overdo it.
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  SPEAKER_00: La France Insoumise and Mélenchon gets in the teens in terms of his presidential voting.
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  SPEAKER_00: For the parliament, it did better.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: It got into the 20s.
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  SPEAKER_00: But this is decidedly a minority movement.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
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  SPEAKER_00: But France has a fragmented political system and a two-tier presidential system.
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  SPEAKER_00: All you have to do is come in second place.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: And you make it to that final runoff.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: And in terms of balance of power in the parliament,
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  SPEAKER_00: which in the French system in the Fifth Republic is weaker,
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_00: the president,
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  SPEAKER_00: think of de Gaulle,
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  SPEAKER_00: more monarchical in the French Fifth Republic, but the parliament still matters.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: Three blocks of relatively equal size,
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  SPEAKER_00: the populist right, the far left, and the Macronista technocrats in the center.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: None of them can insert their will on the others,
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  SPEAKER_00: all because Macron in his hubristic,
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  SPEAKER_00: arrogant,
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: moronic way,
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: and again,
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_00: anybody loved by European elites at the meetings I go to
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: at Aspen is almost undoubtedly incompetent.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's almost, it's like Yasser Arafat.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_00: If Yasser Arafat told me to go left, I'd go right.
• 10:10
  SPEAKER_00: If he told me to go up, I'd go down.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's almost a sure thing that if you're a darling of the economists, the FT,
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_00: or European conference goers,
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_00: you will be The poison, Miracle being a great example of that.
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: Macron, the latest,
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: well-coiffed,
• 10:25
  SPEAKER_00: well-suited,
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  SPEAKER_00: went to all the right schools,
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  SPEAKER_00: says all the right words,
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  SPEAKER_00: and has been utterly driven the Fifth Republic into a ditch.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: Incompetent beyond belief.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: But in this fragmented system,
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  SPEAKER_00: if far left voters make up 15,
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: say 20%,
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: because the voting for parliament was in the mid-20s,
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: the voting for Melenchon's in the upper teens.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: So safely, let's say about 20% of the urban hipsters vote.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: Left-wing teachers are now being accosted by their own students,
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: and yes, there is an element of karma here.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: My favorite ex-moment was the left-wing activist begging people not
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: to burn her store when she'd been supporting them all along.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: They laughed at her, moved her out of the way, and took her cash register.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: This is reality mugging you, literally.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: And I have to admit a certain amount of schadenfreude there.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_00: But the far left hipsters make up, say,
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: 20 percent unfettered,
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: unassimilated migrants, be they first, second or third generation.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: I don't care.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_00: They are not French.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: They are not loyal to France.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_00: That is the key to assimilation.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: Are the people who come here, do they become loyal to the country or are they benefit shopping?
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  SPEAKER_00: In Europe, it is the latter.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: In America, as we've described at great length before, it is the foremost.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, I'll see you next time.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_00: This is 15 or 20 percent of the cohort as well.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: On their own,
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  SPEAKER_00: neither of these two groups,
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: the unfettered,
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_00: unassimilated immigrants for second and third generation
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  SPEAKER_00: or La France Insoumise are going to amount to much.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: They are significant players on the scene, but minority players on the scene.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: As Mélenchon has grasped, though,
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: if you put them together together,
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: If you can excite the kids to vote because of the rioting.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: And my favorite images are the pictures of the unfettered, unassimilated migrants looking there.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_00: And remember,
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: this was supposed to be according to The Economist,
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: the FT, and the egregious people.
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: A student protest and a picture of these four decidedly not students looking in
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: a hate-filled way at the camera.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, they're protesting because their French class got cut,
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: their Racine poetry class has been cut,
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: and they don't have enough textbooks to do extra studying.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_00: This is utterly delusional.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_00: Utterly delusional.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: This is the problem with believing lies.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: And as you lie to others, you begin to believe the lie yourself.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: I love
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: these captions of these five hooded guys.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously not of French origin.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously not giving a damn about France as they burn it to the ground.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: And the captions are, yes, I demand my extra class on Moliere and Racine or I'm leaving.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, this is utter nonsense.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: And yet that's what CBS in America,
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_00: the BBC, the FT,
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: The Economist said,
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: remember when Zannie Mitten-Bettos,
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: maybe the worst editor and a poster child of what's wrong with
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_00: the Western establishment,
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: was mocking Elon Musk and calling him a racist
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: for saying unfettered immigration could lead to blood on the streets in France.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: I think Elon has the last laugh.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, as Aristotle said, what is, is.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: But what's happening politically is these two groups are moving together.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_00: They have a lot that's not in common.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: Everything socially is not in common, as is true in America.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: If you look at unfettered,
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_00: unassimilated immigrants and lefty hipsters in America,
• 14:19
  SPEAKER_00: gays for Palestine,
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_00: for instance, turkeys for Thanksgiving, they'd be thrown out of buildings in Gaza.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_00: But that's not the issue.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: The issue is they agree on,
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: they want the state to do ever more For the unassimilated immigrants because
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: of suicidal empathy on the part of the far left and because
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_00: the immigrants want things,
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: which at least is a more realist notion among the unfettered immigrants.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: But they both want that.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: They both hate the West.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: They both think that the West is oppressors and owes people a living doing nothing
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: but hating them.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: So they have that in common, and they are getting closer and closer together.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm waiting for new polling to see.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: Melenchon has been relatively even in second place in presidential voting, way,
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: way behind Le Pen,
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: but in with a chance at second, tied basically with the socialist candidate.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: And Edouard Philippe,
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: probably the most formidable of the Macronistas,
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: who's on the center right of Macron's team,
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: is actually a sensible guy saying,
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: well, we should have mandatory sentences for rioting.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: At least that's something rather than the palaver that Macron was given.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: But the Glucksmann,
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: who's the socialist,
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: probably the best version of that,
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: Philippe,
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: and then Melenchon are all battling in the teens for second with Le Pen in
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: the mid-30s before all this happened.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: Watch Le Pen's numbers go up to the mid-40s.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think she's going to get to 50.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_00: That's an awfully high bar to end it.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: But this, in effect, makes her winning much more likely.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: But it also means Melenchon could well move ahead of Glucksmann And Philippe
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_00: and end up the second candidate in the runoff with Le Pen.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: By all accounts, he'd lose by two to one overwhelmingly.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: The firewall keeping out the populist right after these riots is well and truly gone.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_00: And she would win overwhelmingly.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's when you need to look for civil war and blood on the streets.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: Because Melenchon will not go quietly into that good night.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: Rather, he'll do what the French do.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: He'll take...
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: And
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: then you're going to have yourself a major political risk crisis in the spring
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: if they get that far.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_00: But that's what's going on politically.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's where we're heading.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: That's where the ship is traveling.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_00: But again, I mean,
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_00: those who went berserk in France aren't interested in school books,
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: and they're not interested in dialogue.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: De Gaulle would get this.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: You can't give people who are berserkers what they want, because what they want is everything.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: I said this when I was asking Washington what to do with ISIS, and I said, kill them.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: Because you can't give them everything which is what they want.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_00: They are utopian.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: These people,
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_00: some of them want to bring about,
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: as Melenchon has mentioned, a sixth republic, to bring down the republic.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: And what gives them an opening for this is Macron attending the Celine Dion.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I wrote on X, that'll sort it.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: The French are going to have more committees and more meetings.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: And he's going to go on with things as though they're absolutely fine and head off
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: to the Middle East.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: Weakness.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: As the most enigmatic of the neocons I ran into, Rumsfeld, Donald Rumsfeld.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: And again,
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_00: at some point we'll do a,
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: I had a number of interactions with him and he was a fascinating man.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: Again, the most interesting of the neocons that I ran into.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: And one time he said to me, weakness is provocative.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_00: And French weakness, people not defending the Republic.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: Think of De Gaulle in 68 and the difference.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_00: And think of what happened after 68, by the way.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_00: 15 years of Gaullist dominance, of right-wing dominance in France.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: We're probably going to have the same thing.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: If only the right wing in France can rediscover capitalism,
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_00: then we'd have ourselves under Bardella,
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_00: perhaps, then we'd have ourselves a ballgame.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_00: But as de Gaulle said,
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_00: you can't give people who want everything and berserkers,
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_00: you can't reach a deal with them.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the problem.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: You have to show strength.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_00: A whiff of grapeshot, arrest them, stop the looting, and deal with that.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: The one thing that Macron said that really merits political discussion,
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: how can the French people do this to France?
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: He's genuinely confused as how French people can do this to France.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I can answer him by going back to our political comment.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_00: They're not French people.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_00: And they certainly don't want to work for the more, which is totally lost here.
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: And they hate France.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_00: They hate the West.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_00: They hate where they're living, even as they're fed.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_00: They're biting the hand that feeds them and they don't care.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_00: But they can do this to France precisely because they don't care.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: They don't care about France.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: The same with the far left,
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_00: the France Insoumise,
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: the LFI people around Melenchon, see the West in both cases as oppressors.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: It is a fairy tale, but a dangerous one.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: They see the left as the left sees France civilization,
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_00: Western civilization as oppressive,
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: as substandard and worse than all the other civilizations in the world.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's hard to believe, but that's what they think.
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: But that answers this question.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: How could French people do this to France?
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: The answer is they're not French people in the sense that they love the country
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: and are trying to better it.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: That is the problem.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_00: Again, the answer to this is De Gaulle.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: You strike them down.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: The republics have to defend themselves from anarchy and those who wish them ill.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: This is an example of that.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: Arrest them.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: A whiff of grapes shot.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: Napoleon would understand this.
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_00: De Gaulle would understand this.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: There is a French tradition.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: I saw Philip Lemoyne writes in accent.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes he's French, writes some interesting things.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: But here he's saying what all decadent failures say.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_00: We can't do anything now.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: There's nothing we can do.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: We can't come down hard.
• 20:30
  SPEAKER_00: On these people.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: If you don't, provocation is going to be weakness will lead to more provocation.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_00: Rumsfeld's right.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: And this will run a long, long way.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: Because they aren't being hard.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: Because Macron is attending Celine Dion concerts, hiding under his desk.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: Because the elite are not smashing obvious rioters who have nothing to do
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: with school books in France and don't care about France at all
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: because they're not fighting back.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_00: This will get far worse before it gets better.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: Far left,
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_00: far right presidential election where the far right wins
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_00: because they're promising what everyone wants in every republic in the world, order.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_00: This happened in 1972 when Nixon won 49 states.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_00: People were sick of the Manson family.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: Sick of the crazy hippies,
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_00: sick of the Patty Hearst stuff,
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: sick of all the campus demonstrations, and they wanted order.
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_00: A vast majority of people voted for order,
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: as they did in France under de Gaulle after the 68 riots.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone leaves that part of the story out,
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_00: which is that people,
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_00: the silent majority, as Nixon said, Joe, that's for you, want order.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_00: Republics have to have order to have benefit from it.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: Because the French elite are not giving it order,
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: you're more likely to have a far left, far right rule.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: The odds on that have gone from very low to extremely high.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: That is my reflection on the French Revolution.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: And we will be back to the story because it is the biggest thing going.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: It is the thin end of the wedge for the three ills plaguing Europe
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: that we have mentioned for 20 years now.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Will.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: For 20 years since the EU is dead.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: Anemic rates of growth,
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_00: nowhere near the 2% to make them viable societies in an advanced industrialized way,
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: unfettered, unassimilated immigration, and insane energy costs.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: Until the elite grasped these three nettles.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: More of this will continue to happen.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: And again,
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_00: my political risk call record has never been hurt by seeing this clearly and betting
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_00: against a feckless elite who won't even defend itself
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_00: or has any idea what's really going on.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks very much.