Is Nikole-Hannah Jones the next Walter Duranty?(Mario Tama/Getty Images)
In the world of infotainment, every media brand needs its star. And nowhere is that more true than with one of today’s most influential outlets, the New York Times. In the space of just five years, the Times has succeeded in propelling its stellar asset, Nikole Hannah-Jones, to the rarified heights of celebrity journalism, lending her magnum opus, the 1619 Project, a sanctified glow. But just over two years since 1619 was launched, all that threatens to come tumbling down: the Project has become tainted by a series of errors and inaccuracies — some of which seem to have been committed wilfully.
There’s something uniquely fascinating about the persona of the journalist who betrays his or her professional ethics. There is no medical malpractitioner of historic notoriety, no lawyer so inept or corrupt that their infamy elicits international derision a century later. In fact, it might be only in the field of espionage that we find a parallel. The reason is that, like a nation’s spies, a citizenry loans journalists its most precious asset: trust. This is even more true in secular societies where social institutions take on the characteristics of religious bodies, guiding belief and shaping public perception of reality.
In this context, no American journalist has endured the same level of historical contempt as Hannah-Jones’s most notorious New York Times predecessor, Walter Duranty. One of the reasons Duranty’s name still echoes in the halls of ignominy is because his betrayal was of such an epic nature. He was not only the Times’s top Russia correspondent during the most important period of Russian-American relations in a century (namely, the very early days of the Soviet regime) but a celebrity intellectual.
Duranty’s star had risen so high that when the United States government officially recognised the Soviet Union in 1934, he was chosen to accompany its soon-to-be ambassador to the US — and escorted the newly minted American ambassador from DC back to Moscow. Indeed, it was Duranty himself who had advised Governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then at the end of his presidential campaign, that US recognition of the new Soviet regime was the correct course of action.
But that was no shock. Three years earlier, around the time that international headlines were beginning to report on a famine unfolding in the Ukraine, Duranty had reported the very opposite. It wasn’t simply that he downplayed the famine, which Robert Conquest estimated killed upward of five million people in two years; he actively denied it.
What’s often missed when discussing Duranty, however, is the intentional nature of his malfeasance. When the Times came under pressure from the Ukrainian-American community in the early Noughties to return the “Duranty Pulitzer”, the paper’s publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., went against the recommendation of a historian hired by the Times to assess the matter. The historian recommended (unsurprisingly) that the Times should return the prize. Sulzberger refused, chalking Duranty’s cover-up to nothing more than “slovenly” reporting.
But Duranty, an Oxford-educated polyglot, was anything but slovenly. The truth of the matter could be far more disturbing, and can be found in a statement Duranty had made years earlier. In June 1931, while visiting the US embassy in Berlin to renew his passport, Duranty made a remark to a State Department official so significant that the official recorded it verbatim and entered it into the State Department record: “In agreement with the New York Times and the Soviet authorities,” Duranty told the American diplomat, “[Duranty’s] official dispatches always reflect the official opinion of the Soviet government and not his own.”
We might be tempted to think that a correspondent of a previous century would have little to do with the most celebrated journalist of the present day. Certainly, it is inconceivable that anything can compare with Duranty’s attempts to deny the Ukraine famine — and the deaths that followed. But the parallels between Duranty and Nikole Hannah-Jones seem hard to ignore. Like Duranty, Hannah-Jones has become the New York Times’s marquee reporter, her public profile taking on celebrity proportions. Hannah-Jones, like Duranty, is as often the subject of headlines as the creator of them. And, of course, there’s the Pulitzer Prize both she and Duranty won relatively early in their respective careers. But perhaps more than any of these factors, the tone and tenor of the subject matter each reporter covered set the stage for a spectacular rise and, at least in Duranty’s case (for now), an equally precipitous fall.
In her first major piece for the New York Times Magazine, where she was a staff writer, Hannah-Jones focused on school segregation — and did so through the lens of her own experience as a mother of a school-aged child. The 2016 article, “Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City”, placed Hannah-Jones herself squarely at the centre of the all-encompassing topic of race relations in America.
The 10,000-word piece launched Hannah-Jones into that rare elite which consists of reporters who become the focus of a larger reportorial arc. Just a week after it was published, the Times covered Hannah-Jones in an article that was part of a “Times Insider” series. Called “‘Surreal’: A Reporter Is in the Center of a Story She Covered”, the piece was written in the first person by Hannah-Jones and offered a look into the sausage factory of producing a culturally resonant piece for the New York Times. By October 2017, the Times was trumpeting Hannah-Jones in rockstar-like terms, running pieces about her with headlines such as “The Best of Nikole Hannah-Jones”.
And then came 1619, which made her as close to a household name as a journalist can in America. From an Oprah-backed film and TV production deal to appearances on NPR’s Fresh Air and The Daily Show, a talk with Moonlight creator Barry Jenkins to a 1619 book and accompanying children’s book, Hannah-Jones experienced the dazzling embrace of America’s corporate culture machine.
Crucially, like that of Walter Duranty, Hannah-Jones’s celebrity has had the effect of coating her journalism with a lacquer which shields it from the buffeting forces of criticism. What unites that criticism, from both sides of the political aisle, is something fundamental to any work of journalism: accuracy. While some conservative outlets have attacked the 1619 Project on ideological grounds, the dozens of academics and many journalists who joined the debate intoned with a simple and hard-to-dislodge idea: the 1619 Project was not simply factually flawed, but deliberately, as Phillip Magness, one of the Project’s most vocal critics, put it, it amounts to “the sacrifice of scholarly standards in the service of the ideological objective”.
In the New York Times Magazine issue dedicated to the 1619 Project, there are the subtle but significant problems, such as the mischaracterisation of America’s early economy, which the Project emphasises was built on slavery, when, according to scholars who participated in the debate, slavery played a relatively minor role compared to the Northern industrial and commercial economy. Then there are the arguments that, when taken at face value, are simply absurd, such as the causal connection the Project draws between slavery and modern-day traffic jams in Atlanta or America’s love of sugary treats.
It’s the deeper claims of the Project, however, and specifically those made by Hannah-Jones herself, which are the most problematic — and which most closely tie Hannah-Jones to Duranty. The publication of a piece by Politico by Leslie Harris, a professor of African American history at Northwestern University, months after the 1619 Project was launched, identified the rot at the heart of the Project: “On August 19 of last year I listened in stunned silence as Nikole Hannah-Jones, a reporter for the New York Times, repeated an idea that I had vigorously argued against with her fact-checker: that the patriots fought the American Revolution in large part to preserve slavery in North America.”
This claim, that the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery, is the fulcrum on which Hannah-Jones’s argument swings. The reason is that the 1619 Project was not simply predicated on the idea that slavery was of consequence to American history; that is a claim most (if not all) of the Project’s most vociferous critics would not have objected to. Instead, the thesis of the 1619 Project is that America is rooted in slavery. In pursuing this mission, what Hannah-Jones attempted to do is not simply “reframe” American history (as one of the introductions to the 1619 Project claimed) but rework reality.
It’s this attempt to edit history that most closely unites Hannah-Jones’s project with that of Walter Duranty. In both cases, historical realities were tarred over in order to make way for a new narrative. But beyond the personal failings of Duranty and Hannah-Jones, there is a larger and more significant connection between the two journalists. And that, of course, is the New York Times.
It is no coincidence that two largely successful attempts to alter history and edit reality have been carried out under the aegis of the New York Times. While Duranty and Hannah-Jones took centre stage, the platform essential to each was provided by America’s self-described paper of record.
As with any corporate-backed endeavour, a costly investment such as 1619 is undertaken only when there is a likely outcome of commensurately rich rewards. This is what we so often miss about major corporate news organisations such as the Times, which is far less significantly a newsroom built on a system of editorial practices than it is a reputation, a social construct, that produces trust — as well as a business mechanism that monetises that trust and processes it into power.
This model applies equally to the denial of the Ukraine Famine and the creation of the 1619 Project. The case of the former is explained by the drive to be positioned at the very centre of the swirl of power, influence and profit presented by the nascent, rapidly industrialising economic power of the Soviet Union that was quickly modernising the agrarian economy of tsarist Russia. The USSR was a massive market of 150 million people that for nearly two decades since the revolution had been restricted to US corporate interests.
With the 1619 Project, the New York Times’s business interests are just as decisive a factor. The Times’s management is well aware that it has to replace its audience of ageing liberals with young adherents of progressive ideologies impassioned enough to pay for the digital subscriptions that are at the heart of its business model. For the Times, this is a matter of existential significance. As a New York Times Company vice president has explained, one of the aims of 1619 is, according to NiemanLab, to “convince more of its 150 million monthly readers to pay for a subscription”.
This makes good sense considering that over a third of the Times‘s revenue now comes from digital subscriptions — and nearly two-thirds of the Times’s American audience is made up of millennial and Gen Z readers. Print subscriptions, meanwhile, are in “steady decline”; advertising is falling by close to (and sometimes more than) double digits each year.
Like all dynasties, the Sulzbergers, the billionaire family that controls the New York Times, are, in part, motivated by financial self-interest. But in the current cultural environment, where a movement of ideological upheaval is at work, it is power as much as money that lies behind what is the most significant journalistic endeavour of the past decade. The Times’s progressive turn (like that of so many American brands) is more top-down than bottom-up; it is a quest for influence rather than principle. The Times knows which way the wind is blowing and in a raging storm why not sail downwind?
The only problem with this approach — in business as much as in life — is that it doesn’t work. As Captain MacWhir in Joseph Conrad’s novella The Typhoon shouts through the raging storm to the story’s young protagonist: “They may say what they like, but the heaviest seas run with the wind.” In its cynical embrace of progressive politics, the Times runs the risk of capsizing in storm waters it mistakenly believes it can control.
The same may well be true about Nikole Hannah-Jones. To her credit, unlike Walter Duranty, Nikole Hannah-Jones does not appear to be a passenger enjoying the cushy ride of celebrity. From all appearances, she is a true believer who is not just willing but eager to make the necessary sacrifices to bring about her vision of justice in the world. Whether that makes her more or less problematic than Duranty, only time will tell.
Ashley Rindsberg is author of The Gray Lady Winked: How the New York Times’ Misreporting, Distortions and Fabrications Radically Alter History
AshleyRindsberg 
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SubscribeUnfortunately this is what happens when mainstream politics ignores, insults and patronises large numbers of the electorate. They eventually grow indifferent to being demonised as “deplorables” and turn to someone who they perceive gets it.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of immigration, the refusal of so many politicians to engage constructively with the genuinely-held concerns of their voters was always likely to lead to this.
You are so correct!
Precisely, and the power elite never seem to get it. They created Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, Donald Trump, even the “intellectual dark web”. None of these would have been necessary had there had been honest media and honest governance.
Apparently, they are incapable of learning, only repeating.
WHat’s wrong with Fox News or Donald Trump or the intellectual dark web (except for the atheism of course)? The real problem is that that have become the BBC, CBC, NYT, WaPO, NBC, MSNBC…they have become radical progressives, and BLM supporting, gender-bending deniers of biology and natural law. It’s what they are and have become that is the problem.
The intellectual dark web was named and created by the left and consists mostly of those despised by the left. It is a standard tactic of the left: apply a name with negative connotations (racist, sexist, islamaphobe, transphobe, homophobe) to deter people from listening to more than one side of an argument. The name intellectual dark web suggests members have gone over to the dark side.
The name was created in a casual offhand manner by Eric Weinstein.
Oh, thank you. I guess it was how the left perceived him amongst others.
The name was intended more as a self-deprecatory in-joke than a serious announcement of a movement. It was really just an umbrella term for a bunch of people with very various views who were capable of disagreeing with one another politely without resorting to the usual schoolboy denunciations of one’s opponents as ‘Nazis’.
I believe one of its other members (or maybe it was Weinstein himself again) speculated that “Ineffectual Dork Web” might be more appropriate a clarification of what IDW stood for.
Because they don’t care – immigration creates insoluble problems that facilitate the institution of an increasingly repressive state, which suits established wealth
The ‘power elite’ indeed seem to be slow learners. If you try looking up ‘deplorables’ in the index of Hillary Clinton’s post-2016 election book, What Happened, you’ll find no entry. Evidently, Ms. Clinton still has no idea what happened, and her political sympathizers have never acknowledged the role they played in facilitating Trump’s rise in the first place, never mind drawn any strategic lessons from it. They still go out of their way to demonize, insult and ridicule half the electorate.
Unfortunately when a politician offer policies that the public want the public vote for them
Please rephrase coherently
Suspect the word “vote” is missing, two words from the end. The sentence then becomes both coherent and correct.
Sorry. Done
James below was right
Bingo!
And the immigration law being discussed in the French parliament will pave the way for Marine Le Pen in 2027.
At stake is a paragraph that allows to legalise illegal immigrants if they work in a field that experiences shortages…….like the hospitality industrie.
Simple trick…..enter the country illegally…….get yourself a waiter, dishwasher job……go to the Prefecture with a letter from the boss…..job done.
2027 is going to such a wake up call for these guys !!!! Still, I can already hear them dismissing Wilders score. European elections are going to be fun to watch in France.
It was the same in Sweden, no one would listen to the Democrats……and now ?? well, smell the coffee !!
It doesn’t really matter if Widers becomes PM, they will never be able to rule without his party, same as in Sweden
The label populist gets slapped as an insult on anyone not beloved of the elite, however the whole point of democratic elections is for people to vote for the politician they most trust to represent their views and address their issues. “Populists” should win every election.
Bingo! History amply confirms that when moderate voters realize their interests and concerns are being ignored by centrist parties they normally support, they become far more susceptible to siren voices at the extreme ends of the political spectrum.
Just like the handling of grooming gangs and clerical child abuse; you can marginalise, obfuscate and dismiss people’s concerns – and it appears to work and shore up the edifice for years sometimes – but the rot is spreading through the system until it collapses ‘unexpectedly’ and everybody is shocked and surprised.
Anyone to the right of hand-wringing, virtue-signalling Gary Lineker is described in the media as fascist.
“Right-wing populism is coming for the rest of Europe”.
What absolutely splendid news but NOT to for burnt out, feeble minded Britain sadly.
The British people are not feeble minded – they started the ball rolling in 2016 when they removed themselves from EU Freedom of Movement in order to reduce immigration numbers and handed the Tories a big majority in 2019 so they could stem the tide.
Unfortunately the ruling class doesn’t think this is a good idea and it seems that is what counts. We are yet to see whether the Dutch, French, German and Italian elites can neuter their own people as effectively.
My apologies, I should have been more specific and said the feeble minded self styled elite who temporarily rule over us.
There’s hope yet when Nigel emerges from the jungle.
True!
Don’t get too excited, Charles. This is an anti-incumbent phenomenon, not a left vs right phenomenon.
Woke progressivism is incumbent everywhere and has been for decades
You’re right I’m afraid, the ‘triumph of hope over expectation’.
Time for another Ovaltine!
Sadly the U K will next year have a left wing woke pro immigration government which wishes to rejoin the E U whilst the rest of Europe seems to be heading in the opposite direction!
Historically we do have rather a habit of doing that.
I do not know. If it can be shown as high status the British will vote for it in droves
Are there any populist politicians there?
Charles, you may not realise this but these people are thugs and murderers – if not themselves, then their close associates.
Look at the person who knifed Jo Cox.
Perhaps you don’t remember a little event called World War 2?
Or perhaps you think we should have all cosied up to HItler. Because from another post of yours, I’m getting the impression that you are none too fond of my semitic brethren.
Believe me when I tell you that even you might not enjoy living in Orban’s Hungary – for one thing, a site like this would be monitored for off colour jokes about leadership figures or your neighbours could dob you in for buying a foreign cigar.
You live in a relatively free country. Please appreciate that.
Why is this result a surprise to anyone?
The EU obsessed European governments have stuck their technocratic heads in the sand, turning the economic thumbscrews in the name of green policies, in the process riding roughshod over ordinary people.
Well, now comes the reaction.
Don’t count those chickens yet. His party must form a coalition and the ever-virtuous Dutch elite will do all they can to obstruct him. After all, there is that all important position of moral leadership on the world stage to consider. The ‘international community’ will (of course) be scandalised that so many Dutch citizens are not eager to pay the price for the elite’s ostentatious compassion.
What was the Dutch Republic’s attitude to their Jews in WW II?
Did that “ever-virtuous Dutch elite”, to use your excellent turn of phrase, perform well? Did they for example “display ostentatious compassion” and if NOT why NOT?
I gather at the other end of the world, the Dutch East Indies in fact, ‘they’, the self styled elite, in fact performed very poorly in the period 1945-1948/9.
Do you their emergence from three years of Japanese barbarity would have been a factor?
It cannot have helped.
Yes,the Dutch SS division and Prince Berhardt the Queens consort and SS officer for a start.
Ostentatious compassion has been gaining momentum in the West at least since the mid 1960s. The triumph of sentiment over intelligence – culminating in that contemporary cultural aberration dubbed ‘Woke’.
Amusing (in a depressing sort of way) when you see once revolutionary Left wing intellectuals/writers looking on in despair at this phenomenon and unwilling to admit that their own proselytising prepared the ground.
Warning shot? I hope it’s the starting pistol.
“Prepare to repel boarders!”:as the Navy used to say.
‘Left hand down a bit.’ is the one I remember.
I wonder if people marching in the streets for Hamas influenced Dutch citizens who voted for Wilders.
The media gives a false impression of the political strength of the Left, so they are always shocked when the people vote for the populist Right. Neo-liberal capitalism has left the working class behind, and the middle class drowning in debt. People turn to populists because there is no one else. It remains to be seen if the populists will help them. Trump did very little in his first term except cut taxes and gripe about his crowds. The economy may have been better, but no serious structural change occurred.
What is truly stunning however is how the college educated, upper middle class Left, year after year and lose after lose, has refused to acknowledge what is happening, preferring instead to disparage everyone as racist, misogynist, and transphobic and further alienating the voters they need to win elections. Their willful blindness is going to put Trump back in the White House.
Republicans have lost the popular vote in the US in every election except one since 1988. (please be a Trumper and tell us how he actually won in 2020 – I would love that!)
The Tories in the UK are about to get annihilated.
Canada has elected Trudeau three times.
France has elected Macron twice. Poland just rejected the right wing extremists. And so on and so on.
I guess you could go to Budapest or now Buenos Aires to get your conservative fix but otherwise you don’t have many options.
The only people who lose after lose are you lunatics. Enjoy it, bud!
I used to be a Democrat, until I came to believe there is little difference between Democrats and traditional Republicans, just as there is little difference between Labor and Conservatives. All are beholden to their corporate masters. I also was repelled by the meanness of liberals like you. Your assumptions about me only make you look foolish. A true socialist, champagne, or otherwise hasn’t won an election since the sixties in Britain and has never won one in America.
The last three Democratic Presidents in America have only had congressional majorities for two years and spent the rest of their terms passing Republican legislation like Clinton or issuing executive orders that were quickly rescinded by their successor like Obama. That’s not winning. Another fact that doesn’t get through to liberals and Democrats is that you can’t change America with 51% of the vote; 51% is fine for Republicans who don’t want to change anything.
I always thought Trump was a con man. He proves my point, however, that when you ignore people, as the left has, they will vote for anyone but you.
You say “beholden to their corporate masters” like it’s a bad thing….
Spot on.
So you are now saying that liberals don’t actually “lose after lose” but that they just don’t win big enough for your tastes.
That’s quite the reversal, bud!
What is this ‘bud’ thing? It sounds cracker to me. Am I right?
Ignore him he is a troll.
Don’t count on a fourth Trudeau victory! His numbers aren’t looking good.
Wrong, the conservative Pis party got 35% of the vote. More than Tusk. Its just the left wing losers will band together to scrape together a majority. A bit like Germany. Three loser parties SPD, Gruene and FDP.
No, the republicans won the popular vote in the majority of the states in the electoral college. We don’t believe in mob rule.
Trudeau is skating on thin ice….
I would prefer DeSantis…but will secretly smile if the liberals get their noses tweaked yet again, I don’t believe Trump will win though. The establishment will stop at nothing to get rid of him.
Bernie Sanders was doing pretty well in the US elections but due to their ingrained fear of anything resembling socialism (even a health system which might stop uninsured people from being left to die untreated) it didn’t progress.
Occupy was popular everywhere – the problems it addressed have been hijacked by the right wing populists just as socialism was hijacked by the Nazis.
Whether Boris Johnson or Orban, it is doubtful that right wing populists would ever protect the financially vulnerable from the ravages of neo liberal corporate Capitalism – that can’t be achieved in one country anyway and all parties lie about that.
It really is not hard .
The People do not want any immigration. None.
They have observed that adding a large amount of extra population that is low paid -mostly low or no tax payers- makes their countries poorer in per capita terms. They never voted for it they never wanted it. And politicians promised to stop it and lied.
It is not “right Wing” to object to immigration.
Billy presumes to speak for “The People” when of course he only speaks for himself and other racists. I suspect he is a BIG Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson fan.
Ah. There we go. Let’s brand someone a racist. That will end that discussion.
The question of immigration has been turned into a binary yes (you’re a good person) or no (you’re a racist) debate.
The question I would ask anyone who is pro immigration is this.
How much is too much?
No one is willing to answer that question with anything approaching honesty.
All I hear is “blah blah blah you’re a racist for even asking that!”
Ignore him, you can’t have reasonable arguments with trolls.
And what about the British who go to work and live abroad? Would you curtail that as well? Especially if they are skilled? Do you believe they should be compelled to keep their skills at home?
This idiotic opinion is clearly that of the stupid people. The Muslims are coming for you and your, dimbot.
Yes I’m against all of it now. People come to the US to make money, they care nothing for our history or culture nor do their descendants. My country is more than an economic zone.
Right or Left doesn’t really matter. The numbers don’t lie. In country after country immigration is way up compared to twenty or thirty years ago. And a lot of voters are unhappy about it.
I heard there was this new-fangeled thing called Democracy. Maybe we should give that a try.
ok, so who should we deport from England – everyone who is not Anglo saxon. Are you in favour of deporting everyone related to immigrants (which would be me)
In fact, if you got what you wanted and had zero immigration,unskilled working class people would rediscover the fact that their wages are low because it is a principle of right wing economics to keep them so – and they might start coming for the real parasites then.
How do the feral elite enrich themselves if not at the expense of average working people, regardless of their birthplace or antecedents?
Immigrants are not responsible for zero hours contracts (many so called middle class professions such as education and media use these) or lousy working conditions. They are an effect – not a cause.
Immigrants are not responsible for the fact that Thatcher flushed British industry down the toilet in order to conduct her vindictive vendetta against unions.
As for numbers, one true demographic strain is coming from the increasing numbers of the elderly. Yet I do not hear demands to have them pushed out onto ice floes in order to protect the NHS from collapsing.
Of course elderly non immigrant people are often treated like absolute dirt in this country which is why so many Brits go to Spain in their twilight years, a country where the over sixties are not routinely despised or shunted into homes where staff leave them to fester in their own urine.
You could call them asylum seekers actually – seeking asylum from how the British deal with the older generation.
And you can demonise immigrants all you like, but I know from experience that the majority of them do not treat their own family members like this.
I find it baffling how our leaders seem powerless or unwilling to make meaningful change to immigration and cultural issues.
What do they think will happen?!
Europe and the UK has been led by lambs. The worry is, what will the wolves be like when they appear?
I share that worry.
Discontented as we all are with our current leadership, sometimes I fear the ‘European Project’ will come to be seen one day as a greater Weimar. A failed hyper liberal progressive project foisted on an unwilling or unwitting demos.
The difference with 1933 and today is that this Weimar is continent-wide and comes with near unlimited potential liability for all the peoples of Europe at once. When the reaction comes, as it always seems to come, with the Consulate replacing the Directory, the domestic conflagration and political and ethnic strife will be compounded from the Thames to the Vistula.
Never forget, it is only 8 Miles from Goethe’s Weimar to the gate of Buchenwald.
And we still have the same elites as we had before WW1 and WW2
“Buchenwald” was NOT an Extermination Camp.
?
So that’s alright then? Ffs. Buchenwald was a forced labour camp where a fifth of the prisoners were worked to death. After the war until 1950, Stalin used it as an internment camp where a quarter of the prisoners died.
Do you think it was a Butlins, Charles? Were there redcoats and wet t shirt competitions?
He toned down alot of his usual rhetoric during the campaign, including things like stating explicitly he knew no overall Dutch appetite for a Brexit equivalent etc. It paid off. But it’s 33% of those who voted and way off a majority. We’ll see now if he can do ‘politics and policy design/implementation’ or limited to rhetoric and slogans.
Some of the concerns about immigration, and perhaps more so assimilation, is legit and if politicians get the language right, dial down the demonisation, they get a broader constituency who welcome sensible immigration but want assurance on liberal western values being paramount and an obligation.
23.7% not 33%.
It will be enormously difficult for other EU countries to leave the EU, as they have adopted the Euro. Fools, imo.
Everyone will go the opposite direction to the incumbent being blamed for the coming collapse. UK will go (more) left unfortunately…
Can’t wait for the great brexit switcheroo when the lefties want to keep us out of fascist Europe….
Gee I wonder why this is happening
Enough of the dilly-dallying. It’s time to round up the illegals, and either dump them in the Med or put them on an old junk ship to go whereever they wish, so long as it is not European.
No country is required to commit suicide by accepting even more of the Ancient Enemy, the Muslim illegals. For 1000 years, muslims have attempted to conquer Europe. Now, thanks to the idiot Merkel, they have been admitted to the countries in mass numbers. True to historical precedent, they come with mal-intent, raping, murdering, pillaging. GET THEM OUT!!!
Yes, I had that Sadiq Khan trying to murder, rape and pillage in my back garden yesterday. And the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens. So much more rapey than anti Muslim Donald Trump
We’ve all had enough; if we’re racist now we certainly weren’t a decade or two ago
For the world. We are about to experience a wave of Islamist terrorism in Western societies, originating not from outside but from within. They will have the sympathy, if not support, of the radical left, while the resulting backlash will drive domestic politics even further to the right. The center cannot hold.
[OT: This is my first post in these forums. How can I change my screen name? I see no way to do it on my profile page. Would appreciate any help.]
I don’t understand European political parties; coalitions appear to be obstructive resulting in absolutely nothing getting done.
..
So none of the countries mentioned has actually elected any of these far right clowns?
Some wave! LOL!
At last you are becoming sensible, rather than just insulting. As you know, this is a right-wing site of (mainly) old men. Now you should try putting forward some positive ideas.
Underneath all the adolescent sneering and knee jerk labeling of anyone not woke as being a Trump stooge and/or racist, AssPain Bolshevist has no positive ideas. He’s just another would be petty authoritarian dressing up his odious lust for power with specious, illogical and incoherent claims of moral virtuousness. In other words, a typical Gen Z wokie.
Um, pardon me for asking how do you get right wing old men to go for positive ideas (that are not racist, misogynist, homophobic etcetera) I really must go back into Hope Not Hate’s website to see how they do it.
Still only 24.7% of the seats. Not much of a ‘victory’.
The PVV got 23.7% of the vote, or 2.4 million votes. In a country with 15 million adults, and an electorate of 13.3 million. So less than 1 in 6 Dutch sitizens people voted for Wilders. That’s more a reflection on the Nederlands voting system than the Dutch people. Would we reasonably also say that 5 out of 6 Dutch people reject Wilders and his policies? So not really a Right Wing wave at all. Right Wing parties and policies are only standing out as the Centre and Left have lost focus.
ETA: hilarious to see the down-voting of my comment. Did you all not do Maths at school? I blame the education system when people think that 23.7% of the vote is a resounding victory! That’s 5% less than Corbyn got in 2019!
Maybe you are being down voted because of your ignorance of the workings of a multi-party parliamentary system. I suggest you re-read the article.
That is a good point. It certainly makes me happy that no country that I am a citizen of has a similar political system to the Netherlands.