RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/26/a-jaundiced-take-on-national-conservatism/

Serious democratic conservatives in America, Britain, Israel, and Europe should be under no illusions about the contempt directed at them by Anne Applebaum and her bloc of liberal internationalists who claim to be the great arbiters of democracy in the world today.

The National Conservatism Conference first came to public attention in July, when its Washington, D.C., conference was widely covered in the media and generated scores of essays on the effort to combine traditional conservative ideas with the spirit of national sovereignty now sweeping the developed democracies. Now, the National Conservatism Conference held in Rome on February 3-4, titled “God, Honor, Country: President Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and the Freedom of Nations,” has attracted similar attention.

Introducing the conference, Christopher DeMuth, a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute, noted that the “legacy of national freedom and biblical morality” of Reagan, John Paul II, and Margaret Thatcher, was “under assault.”

“Sophisticated people in the political, media, and university establishments,” DeMuth said, “have become openly contemptuous of democratic choice.” Since the 1990s, we have witnessed “the consolidation of bureaucratic anti-democratic government in Western Europe” and are “beset by hegemonic progressivism, which seeks to quarantine religious observance, traditional culture, bourgeois social norms and the family itself.”

The Rome conference, like the Washington conference before it, featured several deep and penetrating talks and has prompted equally worthy commentary by independent observers (not all of them uncritical, of course). It has also—as DeMuth predicted—been attacked, sometimes with striking dishonesty, by the progressive Left.

One attack, however, came from journalist Anne Applebaum, the author of several admirable books on the history of the Soviet Union and Communism, who was once friendly to Reagan-Thatcher foreign policy conservatism. Her February 10 essay at The Atlantic, “This is How Reaganism and Thatcherism End,” creates a caricature of national conservatism and seriously misrepresents the substance and spirit of the conference at which I spoke.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/02/26/300-terrorists-to-be-released-in-france-by-2023/

Approximately 300 convicted terrorists currently held in French prisons are set to be released by 2023, with 43 of them to be released by the end of this year, according to Breitbart.

The announcement was made by French Justice Minister Nicole Belloubet, who said that in addition to the 43 set to be released in 2020, 60 more of them would be released by the end of 2021. Belloubet said that “they are the subject of a double measure” upon their release, consisting of “a judicial control which means that they are taken care of when they leave, and administrative surveillance measures.”

This decision was met with criticism from French law enforcement and intelligence agencies, with a statement from the Directorate General of Internal Security calling it “a major concern” to see so many terrorists released. One member of Parliament, Eric Ciotti of the Republican Party, has filed a parliamentary motion to keep terrorists in prison indefinitely if they pose a security threat.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15647/iran-election-result

In many respects the ayatollahs only have themselves to blame for this dire outcome. Prior to the poll they attempted to fix the election in their favour by refusing to allow large numbers of potential candidates, many of whom were highly critical of how the country is being run, even to contest the election.

This maneuver meant that around half of all candidates, including 90 serving members of the outgoing parliament, were disqualified prior to the election, prompting a nationwide boycott over what many Iranians regarded as a sham election.

The result is, as the outcome from the parliamentary elections has graphically illustrated, that growing numbers of ordinary Iranians are now desperate to see fundamental changes in the way their country is run, changes that can only take place when the ayatollahs finally admit that they can no longer have the support they need to keep their repressive regime in power.

Iran’s ruling regime is facing a credibility crisis in the wake of this week’s parliamentary election results, as the vast majority of Iranians demonstrated their contempt for the way their country is being run through the simple expedient of refusing to vote.

Prior to the vote, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s Supreme Leader, made an impassioned plea to voters to demonstrate their support for the regime by casting their vote for the regime’s designated candidates, warning that boycotting the election would provide US President Donald Trump with a propaganda victory.

“Anyone who cares about Iran’s national interests should participate,” he declared, adding that Iran’s “enemies want to see what the results of the US maximum pressure are” — a reference to the punitive sanctions regime that has been imposed on Tehran by the Trump administration.