Seán

"what should we do about the rise of the far left?" Another unexpected and excellent article in the legacy media this week. This time it is Eoin O Malley Malley writing for The Sunday Independent (he is also an Associate Professor in politics at the School of Law and Government at Dublin City University) who wonders if everybody has been wrongly focusing on so called "far right" when really it is the far left who are a threat to our society, with their propensity for being violent and encouraging violence in the pursuit of their ideological obsessions. We have put the full article within this post. He has a go at @pb4p here, and won't be popular with his students after the mid term for that. Perhaps he may even have to deal with what we have had to deal with on a regular basis now for years - unprovoked aggressive physical and verbal attacks from far leftists, along with targeted campaigns of harassment, that most often go unpunished. They view everything through the lens of oppressor versus oppressed, and apparently having an opposing view to them makes you "the oppressor", hence they feel they have a right to unleash hell upon you. We hope @AnMailleach will not have to deal with these so called "anti fascists" (they are of course the real fascists), yet that is the reality of what you have to put up with when these ideologues feel entitled to target you. The far left have really let their mask slip and others are FINALLY starting to see how dangerous they actually are, and how they've marched through our institutions, capturing them along the path. A lot of damage has been done by now - but we welcome the change of tone, even if it is as the clock strikes thirteen... "After alarmism over far right, has France shown we’re looking in wrong direction?" Every month, the Sunday Independent asks a sample of Irish people to choose the issues that most concern them. Top come cost of living, housing and immigration. At the bottom are usually social media, the Trump administration, Gaza and the rise of the far right. Though the polls show few people regard these as very important, the State spends an inordinate amount of time and energy on them. The rise of the far right was the reason the previous justice minister, Helen McEntee, wanted to introduce hate-speech legislation. When asked what the far right was, she couldn’t define it, but she saw it was people who might question migration policy and be "anti-government". I was in the US last week, having been asked to speak about the rise of the far right in Ireland. As many cities in France burned because of protests encouraged by far-left leaders, I asked whether concerns were misplaced. Should we not be asking what to do about the rise of the far left? The protests in France emerged from concerns over school funding and probably a sense that career progression has been upended. In the rioting and looting that followed, far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon praised “white and ugly”. We also see intellectuals such as Nobel prize winner Annie Ernaux defending the protests on the basis that they are standing up to “austerity”, ignoring the galactic cost of the French state. They stood up to austerity by looting luxury shops. Louis Vuitton for all? While some of that rioting and looting might have been opportunistic and recreational, one might have said the same about the Dublin riots two years ago. Yet those riots sparked reams of statements from politicians concerned about the rise of the far right. We see no such hand-wringing for events in France. In fact, People Before Profit has celebrated what it terms the “youth revolt”. The Denakryte party has a meeting next Thursday where it will bring together people to “build a movement here capable of confronting capitalism”. PBP wants to bring protests “from the streets of Paris to the streets of Dublin”. Were it not for the haplessness of PBP’s leadership, one might think that the State should do something about this. It is hardly overstating the case to say that the threat to France is existential. We absolutely do not want what we’ve seen on the streets of Paris brought to the streets of Dublin. *The danger of the far left is not confined to France.* Last week in Spain, the ethno-nationalist party Vox had its opening event in the Spanish election disrupted by masked anti-fascist protesters. Riot police were needed to allow the meeting go ahead. Anti-fascism looks an awful lot like fascism when they try to prevent those they disagree with from holding electoral events. The dangers of the far left are not confined to its violent attempts to upend the economy and democracy. It is also a threat to normal social relations. Take the Government-funded ad telling us that grandparents should think twice before hugging their grandchildren: one of these occasional flare-ups where ordinary people get to see the capture of the State by ideologues who have no sense of Irish people or their values. There is now, it seems, nothing that the far left feel the State should not regulate, including normal family relationships. We might dismiss this as a thoughtless and zany group pushing an agenda. But it is far from thoughtless. It is planned. The aim is to transform social relations, including how we think and speak. *Another example was the "Family A versus Family B" case study that was being taught* to our Junior Cert students through a SPHE curriculum that is pure ideology. It characterised a traditional red-headed family wearing Aran jumpers, who eat bacon and cabbage, play GAA and holiday in Ireland, as inferior to the “diverse” mixed-race “blended” family who holiday in Europe and eat exotic foods. As with the ads permission for a bus ad, that particular exercise was withdrawn because its absurdity was widely seen. But the ideological capture of the State continues through the state funding of NGOs."