October 26, 2021
THE rIGHT IS FRENCH:
Trumpism Finds a Home of Sorts in France's Eric Zemmour (Lionel Laurent, October 26, 2021, Bloomberg)
Zemmour doesn't share the Donald's obsessions with real estate or China. What he does have is a sense of declinism: "Things were better before" is a familiar refrain. Then there's his scapegoating and simplism: If only there were no immigrants and industrial jobs back onshore, the economy would prosper. His choice of language -- "rapists, assassins" -- to describe immigrants evokes Trump, too. [...]And although Zemmour isn't a promoter of QAnon or anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, he walks a similarly paranoid path. He is a fan of the racist "Great Replacement" theory, made notorious by white supremacists in Charlottesville in 2017. The fact that he is of Algerian-Jewish origin makes his open courting of anti-Semites all the more cold and calculating. He's gone to great lengths to whitewash the Vichy regime and cast doubt on the Dreyfus Affair.
Posted by Orrin Judd at October 26, 2021 12:00 AM