by Kurt Schlichter, Townhall:
What happened with Marine Le Pen, the most popular politician in France who was just banned from standing for election on the flimsiest of pretenses, is no exception. It’s becoming the rule around the West and in other places, too, where being outside the mainstream of authorized establishment left-leaning globalist politics has become criminalized. In some places, like the UK and Spain, it takes the form of persecuting people for saying things that those in power don’t want to hear. In other places, like Germany, upstart populist parties that earned a significant number of votes are informally, and sometimes formally, marginalized and threatened with being banned. But it’s the criminal persecution of leaders that is becoming the go-to. It happened to Bolsonaro in Brazil, Netanyahu in Israel, Georgescu in Romania, and Le Pen in France. In each of these cases, the establishment authoritarians essentially attempted to frame a politician they couldn’t beat at the ballot box. Of course, their American analogs tried to do the same thing to Donald Trump here, and when that didn’t work, their allies tried to murder him. Thankfully, they failed at both – with the people who instigated these atrocities too dumb to know that they are the ones who should be the most thankful they failed.