Mark Steyn on the suddenly fascinating-to-American-media Dutch politician Geert Wilders, with whom he has had a long association:
Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV).
Photo by Wouter Engler via Wikimedia Commons.
Times are bad, and the respectable chaps are explicit about their eagerness to make them more so — more mass immigration, more green bollocks, more “digital identity”, more “variants” and more “public health”, more mutilation and sterilisation of your middle-schoolers …
This last week I’ve received a bazillion queries demanding to know what I make of Geert Wilders. It’s true that a lot of commentary on his victory is close to witless: in America, he is apparently “the Dutch Trump” — because they’re both, er, blond. As David Reaboi pointed out on Twitter, Wilders has been a thorn in the side of the Dutch state since the days when “Trump was donating to Democrats”. In 2005, when The Donald was still sufficiently “respectable” that Hillary Clinton attended his wedding, Wilders had already been expelled from his party for objecting to Turkish membership of the European Union.
So he’s been at this a long time – and yours truly goes back a long way with him. He did me the great honour of inviting me to write the introduction to his book, Marked for Death, which is a cracking read — not just my bit, but his parts too: Geert writes way better in English than most anglo politicians do. (We have a few copies at the SteynOnline bookstore, and I’ll even sign it for you: the perfect Christmas gift for the “far right” members of your family.)
But here’s the most relevant aspect of how Wilders was ahead of the game. I try not to let my own twelve years in the dank septic tank of Washington pseudo-justice get to me, but, as you know, for me the only salient point about this US election season is that the multitudes of prosecutors and judges of the American state are willing to torture the plain meaning of the nation’s laws in order to get Trump convicted of … something, anything, as long as it gets him banged up in gaol for the rest of his days.
This is the central fact of our increasingly post-democratic age: the criminalisation of political opposition. If you’re in European-style multi-party systems, they’ll deny you bank accounts and seize your kids’ iPads, and if necessary find twenty coppers to jump you in the street. But, if you’re in America’s bloody awful frozen two-party system, the leader of Party A will unleash the resources of the world’s most lavishly funded Deep State on the leader of Party B and persuade anyone around him to cop a plea on crimes they didn’t commit — mainly because those crimes don’t actually exist.
In that sense, rather than Geert being the Dutch Trump, Trump is the American Geert. Until Biden came along, no other settled western democracy had been as zealous as the Netherlands in prosecuting opposition politicians for their policy platforms.
