On Jan. 4, I listened to a frequently featured Fox News “All-Star,” Leslie Marshall, declare Elon Musk to be “loser of the week.” Much to Leslie’s consternation, Musk expressed sympathy for Nigel Farage’s “far right, anti-Muslim, and racist” UK Reform Party, and for Germany’s the even more notorious right-wing Alternative für Deutschland party. CBS News has blasted Musk for the same infamies, as his heresy sends shock waves through our legacy media.

For decades, there’s been a ruling class consensus that any European political party not ideologically in sync with the globalist “liberal democracies” is intrinsically evil. The term “extreme right” is routinely attached to the European populist right, while even the most far-out party on the now radicalized European is viewed as almost boringly “moderate.”

Not surprisingly, when Keir Starmer of Britain’s Muslim-intoxicated Labour Party took over as Britain’s prime minister, the Murdoch press described his newly formed government as moderately leftist. At the same time, our respectable conservative press was fitfully consigning the French nationalist Rassemblement National and La Reconquête parties to the unspeakable “far” or “extreme right.” 

Since the neoconservative reshaping of our conservative establishment, it has become commonplace for our respectable right to treat any nationalist European party, even its spokesmen who are effusively pro-Israel, as an unwelcome presence. Supposedly these threats to democracy all betray the legacy of European fascism and on a more practical level, recoil from our liberal interventionist reason for existing as a superpower. In any case, it’s clear that once the Soviet menace receded, right-wing, not the supposedly “centrist right,” parties in Europe have been less inclined than they were before to follow the directives of our government and media.

The practice of ostracizing “anti-democrats” has found lockstep support in Germany. For much of our media establishment, and particularly our neoconservative nomenklatura, native Germans since World War II have been seen as only one step away from falling back into Nazism. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, I used to read as descents into madness the anti-German tirades in Commentary magazine, that is, before the torrential flood of Germanophobe literature emanating from the German government and German universities, bent on national suicide, became even more shrill. 

Lately much of this anti-national, supposedly anti-fascist rage is vented on the only significant non-woke political party in Germany, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), whose leader Alice Weidel is both a self-described feminist and lesbian. Weidel’s co-leader Tino Chrupalla attended Trump’s inauguration, where he was undoubtedly received with enthusiasm, particularly by AfD supporter Elon Musk.

The tech billionaire, who is now Trump’s close advisor, has already denounced Germany’s longtime, obsessively anti-national president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, as an “antidemocratic tyrant.” Given his repeated denunciations of the AfD and his strenuous attempts to ban his only noticeable political opposition, Steinmeier seems to hammer his critics at least as arbitrarily and savagely as Musk suggests. 

This, of course, overlooks the problem that the woke-left, anti-fascist coalition that stands behind Steinmeier and his Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, can still count on a high degree of electoral support. The AfD, by contrast, is isolated as it battles for a very mild form of German patriotism and the restoration of constitutional freedoms in its country. The party can only collect at most 20 percent of the national vote; and almost all of that comes from areas lying in the territory of the former East German government. Moreover, AfD members are routinely kicked out of positions controlled directly or indirectly by the German state; and so even the suspicion that one voted for that party in some local election can be a professional kiss of death. Violent, vandalizing demonstrations against the AfD take place with conspicuous government indifference if not open approval.

 Despite the ritualistic description of Weidel and her party as neo-Nazi or worse, the AfD stands quite close to the old centrist Christian Democrats (CDU), before former chancellor Angela Merkel pushed her party toward the cultural left, for example, by supporting massive, irreversible immigration from the Muslim Third World. Much of the AfD’s membership and even legal advisors, like Alexander Gauland, are refugees from what was an earlier German center. Except for occasional nationalist rhetoric, emanating mostly from the AfD’s Thuringian party leader Björn Höcke, AfD spokespersons sound very much like American constitutionalists such as Rand Paul. Their major interests are in restoring Germany’s constitutional liberties and halting the total destruction of a German national identity. 

The question for me is not whether the AfD fits the American conception of a perfect conservative party. (In truth, it’s not even as socially conservative as the CDU once was in the 1950s under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer.) What is at stake is the dwindling possibility of an opposition to monolithic woke leftist control in a Western country with a rich cultural past and a now half-buried constitutional tradition. 

One might also wonder whether the Germans (save for their brave, harried conservative intelligentsia) have a public image any longer that does not suggest masochism and moral posturing. The German government’s foreign policy focus seems to be prolonging the Russo-Ukrainian War, which Scholz and his ditzy minister for foreign affairs, Annalena Baerbock, view as an extension of their internal “struggle against the right” (“Kampf nach rechts”). If the Third Reich was Germany’s most brutal government, its present one is Europe’s most buffoonish, and a foretaste of what rule by the faculty of an American Ivy League university might look like. 

Unlike AfD leaders, Farage still has some friends in the Western media; and unlike spokespersons for its German counterpart, this highly articulate Brit has often been on Fox News and is known to be a longtime Trump-backer. When it comes to American politics, Farage expresses very conventional conservative establishment views. Not surprisingly, he treats his successful backing of Brexit as an opportunity for his country to build more solid economic relations with the U.S. 

Farage also has the advantage of hailing from a country that our authorized conservatives praise only slightly less than our “only democratic ally in the Middle East.” Unlike Germany, which lives forever in the Nazi shadow, England is the land of Churchill, or as Neema Parvini reminds us in his essay in this issue, “The Boomer Truth Regime,” of the Churchill myth; and Farage avails himself of that myth as often and as much as possible.

What the left nonetheless holds against Farage is that he has been too vocal in denouncing the violence, including rapes, inflicted by Muslim youth on English girls. Presumably, if Farage thought like the American, English, and German legacy media, he would understand that these crimes resulted from social inequalities, white Christian bigotry, and (lest I forget to mention this all-purpose explanation) Islamophobia.

Last summer, Farage reacted sympathetically to the “ultra-rightist” demonstrations that took place in Southport (outside of Liverpool) after three English girls were stabbed to death by a teenage male of Rwandan descent. Farage defended the demonstrators’ grievances rather than notice among them young men who had been associated with the (now disbanded) “ultranationalist” British National Party.

Although The Guardian pooh-poohed the claim that the killer had connections to radical Islam, it is the case, as reported by the Times of Israel, that his apartment was full of Al Qaeda recruiting literature. This clearly doesn’t matter to CBS News, Fox’s Leslie Marshall, or The Guardian, all of whom have branded Farage Islamophobic. Since he failed to cut some slack for the Rwandan youth, this also apparently proves his more general xenophobia.

One need hardly guess how desperately our elites have hidden the child sex exploitation scandal that rocked the Southern Yorkshire town of Rotherham more than a decade ago, when Muslim gangs (yes Muslim ones) “groomed” and raped British teenage girls. Musk has brought the scandal, cover-up, and light sentencing of the perpetrators back to light, which has further weakened Starmer’s already shaky administration. If Farage and his party choose to highlight this outrage, which they should, we can expect to hear more about their racism and intolerance from all the usual sources. 

In any, case we should be grateful to Musk for developing closer ties with those whom we at Chronicles consider the good guys. Their presence at Trump’s inauguration provided evidence of the rebirth of democracy (meaning national democracy) in the modern era. Although we remain critical of Musk’s plan to import scads of H-1B foreign workers to take positions that American citizens would fill at a higher cost, we applaud him for his efforts to rally to the victims of woke leftist slander. Elon’s building of an international populist alliance, embracing western Europe, is a commendable move in the right direction.

–Paul Gottfried