You are undoubtedly familiar with many efforts of the fascist left to use its control of government offices, bureaucracies, and other institutions to delegitimize and silence mainstream conservative speech: things like the Censorship Industrial Complex, otherwise known as pressure by government functionaries to induce social media platforms to shut down wrongthink on topics ranging from Covid to climate change to Trump; de-monetization of perfectly reasonable sites like PJ Media or Watts Up With That; the political prosecutions of presumptive Republican nominee Trump, including locking him in a courtroom to prevent him from campaigning; and many more such.
This week along comes a new and quite extreme instance that you may have missed. A European group called the National Conservatives scheduled a two-day conference for Tuesday and Wednesday in Brussels. The signature issue of the National Conservative movement is immigration, which they want to restrict; but beyond that their Conference appeared to feature a wide range of voices from Europe’s right, including some prominent elected officials.
Examples of speakers were Nigel Farage of the UK (one of the leaders of the Brexit movement, and now leading a political party in the UK called the Reform Party, that looks likely to win significant seats when the next election is held); Suella Braverman, a Conservative MP in the UK, and recently, if briefly, the Home Secretary (which is one of the top cabinet positions); Eric Zemmour of France, head of a political party called “Reconquête!”, and winner of about 7% of the votes in the last presidential election; and Viktor Orban, current (and since 2010) Prime Minister of Hungary.
And then what happened next? Several “mayors” of Brussels attempted to shut the conference down. (It appears that Brussels has multiple mayors, one guy who has some overall jurisdiction, and then separate mayors for each of many smaller districts that make up the city.). The New York Times has a piece here; and an independent journalist named Melanie Phillips, who is based in Israel and was one of the scheduled speakers, has a piece here. The two pieces present very similar facts, but Ms. Phillips’s piece is more detailed. The title of Ms. Phillips’s piece is “The Brussels Gangster State.”
First, Ms. Phillips describes the National Conservative movement:
National Conservatism, a movement underpinned by the thinking of the Israeli-American philosopher Yoram Hazony, promotes the nation state and the defence of its historic values against the nihilism of the post-moral, anti-western and anti-human ideologies that pass for much progressive thinking.
You can understand why people on the left would disagree with that. But instead they consider it so extreme that it must be silenced. Here is the technique:
Bowing to left-wing protests, a Socialist Party Brussels mayor, Philippe Close — who last year invited Tehran mayor Alireza Zakani, a member of Iran's tyrannical Islamist regime, for an official visit — pressured the NatCons’ venue, Concert Noble, to cancel the event. Concert Noble, a high-end event space, duly caved.
The conference organizers were sent on a scramble to get a new venue. They came up with a second venue, a hotel called Sofitel. And then a second Brussels mayor (also of the Socialist Party) pressured that venue to throw out the conference, and it too caved.
And then at the very last minute, the organizers came up with yet a third venue. And yet a third Socialist Brussels mayor got into the act to try to get that venue to cancel:
With remarkable persistence and determination, the organisers located a third conference venue, a nightclub called Claridge. They worked most of Monday night setting up from scratch all the equipment, food and other supplies necessary for a two-day conference. By the time the conference registration opened at 8 am on Tuesday morning, it was all up and running — a formidable achievement. This was, however, far from the end of the story. For yet another Socialist Party Brussels mayor, Emir Kir, issued an order to shut down the conference.
This third mayor is Emir Kir. Ms. Phillips quotes the reasons given by Mr. Kir to seek cancellation of the conference:
[NatCon’s] vision is not only ethically conservative (e.g. hostility to the legalisation of abortion, same-sex unions, etc.) but also focused on the defence of “national sovereignty”, which implies, amongst other things, a “Eurosceptic” attitude…. He also said that some of the speakers “are reputed to be traditionalists” and that the conference must be banned “to avoid foreseeable attacks on public order and peace”.
So when the conference opened on Tuesday, police officers showed up at the behest of Mr. Kir and “demand[ed] a shutdown with ‘immediate effect’ on the grounds that the opinions of Farage, Braverman and other speakers could lead to public disorder.”
The owner of the third venue, a Tunisian-Belgian named Yassaad Ben Yaghlane, stood his ground. The conference organizers turned cameras on the police to embarrass them into not shutting the conference down. By Tuesday afternoon, the Prime Minister of Belgium, Alexander de Croo (a center-right politician, not part of the Socialist Party), had weighed in on the side of having the conference go forward. But Kir would not back down. The conference organizers then went to court to get an injunction, which was initially denied. And then they went to an appeals court:
[T]he NatCons’ lawyers filed a plea to a more senior court, in a final attempt to get some sense out of the Brussels judiciary. At 2 am on Wednesday morning, that court ruled against the mayor. The barricade was lifted. The conference could go ahead as planned.
Really, what are these people so afraid of? Actually, the answer is simple: the right wing and anti-immigration parties look to be gaining significant ground in the European elections scheduled for early June.
It is likely that the antics of the three Socialist mayors of Brussels will backfire in terms of the political effect they were hoping for. The Times quotes Nigel Farage:
“This is what we are up against. We are up against an evil ideology. We are up against a new form of communism,” declared Nigel Farage of Britain. Mr. Farage, a former member of the European Parliament and a champion of national sovereignty, who helped drive his country’s exit from the European Union, was getting ready to speak when the authorities arrived. “This is like the old Soviet Union. No alternative view allowed,” he said.
UPDATE, April 19: SOMEWHAT RELATED: You may have seen that after Columbia University President Nemat Shafik testified before Congress on Wednesday, Columbia then finally called the cops on Thursday to clear anti-Israel protesters who had set up encampments in its main quadrangle and who were blocking access to parts of the campus and classes. However, don’t confuse that action by Columbia with its restricting the ability of these protesters to continue to protest. In fact, the protests continue — just in places where they are not obstructing campus activities, at least not too much.
Yesterday evening, after the police had cleared the obstructing protesters on the Columbia campus, I had occasion to walk by the main entrance to the campus at Broadway and 116th Street. There was a small (perhaps 50 people) but loud protest in progress just outside the gate, with the usual slogans being shouted (“Free, Free Palestine!”; “No Justice, No Peace!”). Several police were present, but not interfering. To enter the campus via the main gate, you would have had to walk through the protesters, who were somewhat threatening. I suppose you could have done it, but in a few minutes observing, I didn’t see anybody trying. (There are other gates for entering the campus, but this is the main one.)
When I headed home a little after 10 PM, the protest seemed to have finally dissipated, at least for the night. And then there turned up on the subway, sitting across from me, three kaffiyeh-sporting young women, apparently heading home themselves after a long day of demonstrating.
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