What happened with Marine Le Pen, the most popular politician in France who was just banned from standing for election on the flimsiest of pretenses, is no exception. It’s becoming the rule around the West and in other places, too, where being outside the mainstream of authorized establishment left-leaning globalist politics has become criminalized. In some places, like the UK and Spain, it takes the form of persecuting people for saying things that those in power don’t want to hear. In other places, like Germany, upstart populist parties that earned a significant number of votes are informally, and sometimes formally, marginalized and threatened with being banned. But it’s the criminal persecution of leaders that is becoming the go-to. It happened to Bolsonaro in Brazil, Netanyahu in Israel, Georgescu in Romania, and Le Pen in France. In each of these cases, the establishment authoritarians essentially attempted to frame a politician they couldn’t beat at the ballot box. Of course, their American analogs tried to do the same thing to Donald Trump here, and when that didn’t work, their allies tried to murder him. Thankfully, they failed at both – with the people who instigated these atrocities too dumb to know that they are the ones who should be the most thankful they failed.

These are not the acts of strong and confident leaders who believe in the strength and popularity of their ideology. These are the cowardly acts of authoritarians who differ from Putin not in their nature but only in their extent. They haven’t thrown anybody out of a fifth-story window yet that we know of, though we don’t know if they actively put the murderer who tried to kill Trump in Butler up to it – the one who tried to ambush him in Florida was an active member of their collective – but they would’ve cheered if either attempt had succeeded. Thankfully, America was not so far gone that the people’s choice could not prevail, though the resisters in the judiciary, the regime media, and elsewhere are doing everything they can to ensure that the man the people elected to govern can’t actually exercise the powers of office.

The European authoritarians, however, still have the ability to crush dissent. There are several reasons why, including the fact that most of the good Europeans long ago left for America, and the ones who remain are largely degraded and pathetic people. After all, Europe is an exhausted culture, too weak both morally and spiritually to come to its own defense. Its glorious cathedrals are museums now, and its armies are jokes. They can’t find the will or the courage to defend themselves, and Europeans have turned over their governance to corrupt, globalist fools who invite the Third World in to complete the destruction of what was the mother of civilization.