Will the U.S. Follow Europe into Destruction?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday is that each nation must control its borders to protect and preserve its sovereignty. The rioting situation in France is an example of a lost nation. Riots are also taking place in Belgium, Italy, and Albania. The riots are so-called “student riots” – students upset about the condition of their schooling. The United States could follow in its footsteps if it does not control immigration, both legal and illegal. Victor Davis Hanson, in a discussion with Jack Fowler, discussed the situation in France. 

Well, it is kind of Orwellian, isn’t it? That you bring in millions of people, many of them illegally, you allow, and then 45% of your budget is social welfare, and you’re up to 125% [gross domestic product] in debt, and you’re giving people cradle-to-grave social support.

The unemployment rate of new immigrants is almost 50%. And with all that, life is heaven in France compared to Somalia, the Sudan, Libya, Algeria, Morocco, Syria, Afghanistan, etc. And then you start to riot in league with students who are, I guess, upset about shoddy conditions in their high schools and all of that.

And then you get socialists fanning it on and there’s allegations there’s Chinese money involved. So you’re destroying this place, and you’re a guest in this country, even maybe you’re second generation, some of them. But compared to where you came from, it’s still heaven. And your attitude toward your hosts that welcomed you in is not magnanimity, it’s contempt.

And so, the host is getting very angry.

They are deliberately targeting iconic buildings. They went after a 19^th-century government building that was a historical monument in one French city. There was a really disturbing scene in Milan where they were very close to the Duomo, that historic Christian church, and there were flames and everything.

And when you’re at 16%, 10%, 30% in Sweden maybe, then you start to see things. And one of the things you start to see is that these NATO countries will not support the United States and not even allow us to use their airspace because we are at war with a Muslim nation, and that resonates.

And even though they say, “We are the avatars of democracy and we support democracy,” and then there’s this little democracy in the Middle East, and they never miss an occasion to damn Israel and they’re boycotting produce and goods that are supposedly outside the 1947 or ’48 borders, and they’re siding with these radical Palestinians.

Remember, Europeans, you and the U.N. and the Bush administration said, “Hamas, we’re going to get all the Jews out of Gaza, and you can have an election.” And they had an election. There were no Jews since 2005. And what did they do? They threw all their opponents off high-rises and killed them, the Palestinian Authority rivals.

And then, for nearly 18 years, they didn’t build anything. For $40 billion in foreign aid from the U.N. and Europe, the United States, they built 350 miles of tunnels, and then they hid there while their civilians were used as shields, and then they slaughtered 1,200 Jews. That’s their experiment with democracy.

And you side with that over a free society in Israel. And so that’s their problem.

And it doesn’t do them any good, Jack, because they’re so paranoid about these unassimilated un-integrated populations that they turn on their protector, the United States. The only reason they said you can’t land here was Iran told them that we’re going to go after you.

And they did. They did do it at the RAF base in U.K. And so, they’re so scared of their own population that are Muslim and they get to go, “Well, if we help the United States, the Muslims, they may be mad at us, and they may riot.”

Well, they’re going to riot anyway. What good did that do to offend the United States and say, “You can’t use our airspace. You can’t land in Sicily. You can’t land in Spain. Now, Muslim populations, see what we did for you?”

And they said, “No. No. No. That’s not on our agenda, just, you know, helping Iran out. We’re going to take over the country because you don’t want it or you can’t defend it or you don’t deserve it, and we’re taking it over.”

And that’s their attitude. They don’t get it.

You know, our friend Bruce Thornton in 2007. He wrote a book called “Rise and Fall: The Slow-Motion Suicide of Europe.” And Roger Kimball published it at Encounter. It was a great book. It predated Douglas Murray’s book of nearly the same title by 15 years.

And he said in the book, as Mark Steyn did in his, “If demography continues as it does, if immigration continues as it does, as politics continue as it does, within 20 years, Europe will be unrecognizable.” And it pretty much was a prescient – a prediction….

And so, you have to ask yourself, this is a Western disease, and we’re affluent in leisure at the end of history. We solved all the problems. We have our iPhones, our iPads. We got our Teslas. We got everything we want. And now we’re at the point where we can afford to feel magnanimous.

We have our security, we have our money, and we have our nice ZIP codes, and we have private schools for our kids. But the theories that we advance about revolving door criminality, no bail, and decriminalizing theft, letting murderers out, that will fall on people that unfortunately we don’t really care about….

And that’s true in Europe and the United States. It’s the same thing. The only good thing about this horrific thing that’s happening is that we still have almost three weeks to look at what’s going on in Europe. And we should say what is going on in Europe is about a year and a half of what’s going on here.

And we’ve already seen some of it on the campuses of Columbia, at Stanford, trashing the president’s office in Philadelphia, chasing Jews into a library at Harvard, roughing up somebody and then getting an award at graduation, even though you roughed him up. And George Floyd, you know, 14,000 arrests, 35 people killed, $2 billion in damages, arson, da, da, da.

And you should vote against that….

But my point is the Left always has to hide what they are, because if they told you what they are, nobody would ever want them.

And that’s what we should remember when we go into this election. What you’re seeing in Europe is what you’re going to get here….

So this unrest in Europe should be very didactic. It should really give us a glimpse of the future here if we continue down this path.