2024 was a truly remarkable year. It will go down in history as the year in which Donald J. Trump won a sweeping Grand Slam: the presidency, the popular vote, the Senate and the House. And now we can all think big again!
All over the West, this past year, we have witnessed the awakening of the great Legion of the Unwashed – the so-called “deplorables,” the “garbage,” the middle and working classes who do not think the way the self-styled smart folks do.
In the Netherlands, my party, the Party for Freedom (PVV), entered the government. We have also seen patriots win elections in Austria, France, Flanders, Germany. Patriotic parties attract ever more voters in Spain, Portugal, Italy, the Czech Republic and elsewhere. In June, we won the elections for the European Parliament, where the Patriots are now the third largest group. And we look forward to working with the Trump administration and with our Republican colleagues in Congress.
Like Trump, we were rewarded by the downtrodden electorate because we took their concerns seriously – their real concerns, such as the tsunami of illegal immigrants, inflation, economic stagnation, and the woke indoctrination rammed down our children’s throats – not the concerns of the sob sisters in media and academia, constantly wailing about rising temperatures, refugee rights, children who imagine they were born with the wrong sex, and the so-called “genocide” in Gaza, where Israel is fighting terrorists.
2024 will also be remembered as the year in which Israel eliminated Hamas, blew up pagers in the face of the Hezbollah leadership, and promised protection to Druze villages in Syria asking to be annexed by the Jewish State.
Unfortunately, apart from the good news, the past year has also been marked by bad news. One would have expected that the atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7th last year, in which hundreds of innocent people, including women and children, were butchered, raped, kidnapped for no other reason than that they are Jewish, would have led to a massive surge of solidarity with Israel. Instead, we have witnessed an orgy of anti-Semitism in Western Europe.
In the past decades, Western Europe has allowed millions of non-Western immigrants, many from Islamic countries, to enter its territory. The Wall Street Journal recently pointed out that Britain, France, the Netherlands and Germany are all home now to large Muslim communities that identify with the Palestinian cause, while Hungary and the Czech Republic have largely closed their borders to Muslim immigrants. This explains why today cities like Budapest, and Eastern Europe in general, are safer for Jews than cities like Amsterdam, and Western Europe in general.
We are sitting on an explosive barrel and we must defuse it before it is too late. There is no time to lose. For me and the PVV members in the Dutch government, this is priority number one! As Elon Musk said about the past elections, we were just one election away from disaster. Our countries have been saved by the voters in the nick of time. If we fail to correct the present situation, our children will end up in the chains of tyrants.
Early this month, I visited Israel. I met its President, its Prime Minister and other members of its cabinet, and I spoke in the Knesset, the home of the only democracy in the Middle East. It strikes me everytime I visit Israel: Israel is a miracle. Out of nothing the Jewish people turned the desert into fertile land. Out of nothing the Jewish people created the only democracy in the Middle East. Out of nothing the Jewish people created a haven of prosperity amidst a sea of corruption, oppression and fatalism. So much so that Syrian villages are now clamoring for annexation by Israel.
Indeed, the truth is that of all the Arabs in the Middle East, the most prosperous and free are the over 2 million Arabs with Israeli passports. The biased Western media never mention that these Arabs have democratically elected representatives in the Knesset, because mentioning this undermines their claim that Israel oppresses the Arabs.
The real obstacle to peace in the Middle East is not Israel but terrorist organizations using Arab civilians in Gaza and Lebanon as human shields, and dictatorships like Iran dreaming of a worldwide caliphate under Sharia law.
When I met my friend, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, I told him that I was shocked by the arrest warrant which the International Criminal Court issued against him and I repeated what I told the Dutch press earlier; that, rather than this insult and affront, Netanyahu deserves the Nobel Prize.
Alas, we have to admit that, while immigrants are responsible for many anti-Semitic incidents, they are supported by large numbers of indigenous Westerners. And these are not the so-called unwashed deplorables, but aggressive students, egged on by leftist professors, intellectuals, journalists and politicians.
Perhaps many of these people suffer from Stockholm syndrome – the psychological response of sympathizing with those whom one fears in the hope of being spared by them. However, I think there is a more fundamental explanation. Something Alexander Solzhenitsyn warned us of, 46 years ago. In his June 1978 lecture at Harvard University, Solzhenitsyn criticized the West for having lost the will to defend itself, not just against foreign powers, but also against internal critics determined to demolish everything we should cherish.
Solzhenitsyn did not mince words. “A decline in courage may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days,” he said. Solzhenitsyn lamented this “decline in courage, at times attaining what could be termed a lack of manhood.” And he added a stark warning: “Should one point out that from ancient times declining courage has been considered the beginning of the end?”
We need a culture of heroism, of heroes who stand for something. But we cannot be heroes anymore because the present culture of wokeness denies the existence of objective truths and transcendental values worth defending and dying for. Why do the leftist privileged classes in America and Europe despise the “deplorables,” sympathize with terrorists who want to drive the Jewish state into the sea, mock and ridicule Donald Trump?
Because they hate nations and peoples and individuals who courageously stand for something. They themselves do not stand for anything. They are, to use their own word, “fluid”: gender-fluid, value-fluid, conviction-fluid. These people are good at only one thing: hating those who are not fluid. Because those people remind them of what they themselves have lost: living in the truth.
Donald Trump has not even been inaugurated but his influence can already be noticed in the sudden willingness of Hamas to reach a deal with Israel about releasing the remaining Israeli hostages before Trump comes in, and in the equally sudden willingness of Western European leaders to push for peace negotiations in Ukraine before Trump imposes a peace deal.
My friend, the author Diana West, recently said that “the courage of Donald Trump is the unsung epic of our time.” There is a Latin saying: Fortes creantur fortibus: Heroes create heroes. In other words: Courage is contagious. The Reverend Billy Graham said it like this: “When one man takes a stand, the spines of others are stiffened.”
The biggest threat to the survival of our civilization is the current pandemic of the woke mind virus. It flourishes in our universities and schools, it flourishes in the media and the entertainment industry. These are the corrupt preserves of the radical left, the engines of wokeness, that have to be brought down and rebuilt.
Solzhenitsyn fought the Soviet empire. The modern empire of human destruction, the one that we have to defeat, is the Woke Empire. No politician can do that on his own. Winning elections is not enough, because politics does not determine the success of a nation; culture does. This is where you come in. This is where your example is needed to stiffen the spines of others. This is why your courage to speak out and stand for what is true and good, matters.
The West needs heroes, men and women fit for this age – the age of renewal, the age of the restoration of political sanity, the age of a new culture of civil courage and heroism, the age to end wokeness and live in the truth; in short, 2025 is calling for you!
Geert Wilders is leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV), the largest party in the parliament and government of the Netherlands.