“I’ve been a conservative my entire life. I fell hard for William F. Buckley as a teenager and my first job was as editorial assistant at Buckley’s National Review”.
So begins Mona Charen’s ideologically inconsistent diatribe titled “I’m Glad I Got Booed at CPAC”, published in the New York Times on Sunday
Charen — who has made a career promoting neoliberal economics and foreign adventurism within the safe confines of Conservative Inc. — is mighty sore that the effervescent Marion Maréchal-Le Pen was invited to speak at CPAC this year and delivered a dose of authentic conservatism:
“Ms. Maréchal-Le Pen is a member of the National Front party, and far from distancing herself from her Holocaust-denying, anti-Semitic and racist grandfather, she has offered him a more full-throated endorsement than her aunt has,” Charen complains. “So it has come to this: a conservative group whose worst fault in years past may have been excessive flat tax enthusiasm now opens its doors to the blood and soil nationalists of Europe,” she continues.
In truth Ms. Maréchal-Le Pen’s thoroughly traditionalist conservative (and Catholic) speech at CPAC proved she is anything but a “blood and soil nationalist”, and indeed her only real crime against Charen’s phony conservative, globalist worldview seems to be the desire to actually conserve her country, its people, and their way of life.
“I refuse the standardized world proposed by the EU. I consider that the people have a right to historical continuity. All I want is the survival of my nation,” Maréchal-Le Pen declared.
“This young French generation is not encouraged to connect and love [its] cultural legacy they are brainwashed with guilt and shame of their country.” she said. “The result is the development of an Islamic counter society in France. After 40 years of massive immigration, Islamic lobbies, and political correctness, France is in process of passing from the eldest daughter of the Catholic Church to the little niece of Islam, and the terrorism is only the tip of the iceberg.”
Indeed if Charen is truly against Maréchal-Le Pen’s sentiment, one must wonder just what it is exactly that Charen thinks she wishes to conserve when she claims to be a conservative.
One also has to wonder what Charen thinks about the fact that her alleged hero Bill Buckley was also perfectly willing to discuss the implications of mass migration and by all accounts opposed to it for much the same reasons as Le-Pen.
In a 1977 episode of Firing Line titled “The Problem of the Illegals” featuring then-governor of Baja California Roberto de la Madrid Romandia, Buckley mentions Jean Raspail’s novel The Camp of the Saints, which is about a sudden massive influx of third world immigrants into Europe and its inevitable disastrous consequences, and asks Romandia what the U.S. and Mexican governments can do to prevent such a situation occurring in North America.
Buckley also mentioned The Camp of the Saints again in a 2004 article about the prosecution of the crew of a German vessel which rescued shipwrecked illegal migrants.
“A great novel, The Camp of the Saints, appeared thirty years ago featuring great boatloads of Africans [sic] arriving in the south of France in legions too great to be simply turned aside, like the Cap Anamur. What to do? Starve them? Shoot them? We don’t do that kind of thing — but what do we do when we run out of airplanes in which to send them back home?”
The book is now demonised and reviled by pseudo-conservatives and liberals alike. Ms. Charen’s fellow travellers are, today, less Buckley and more HuffPo.
“For traditional conservatives, the past two years have felt like a Twilight Zone episode”, Charen writes in the Times. For the traditionally phony conservatives who have controlled the movement for the last few decades, perhaps.
But for actual conservatives — those who wish to conserve — the past two years have been a breath of fresh air, and the presence of Marion Maréchal-Le Pen at CPAC is equally as welcome.
Raheem Kassam contributed to this article
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