Pascal Clérotte: Ban on front-runner Marine Le Pen is “nail in the coffin of French democracy”
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France is one of the world’s oldest democracies, dating back to the French Revolution of 1789. It was reaffirmed as the Fifth Republic in 1958 under President Charles de Gaulle. Since then, France has held regular, competitive elections for both the presidency and the National Assembly. The world has regarded France as a liberal democratic nation with free speech, an independent judiciary, and regular elections.
That reputation is now at grave risk. A French court’s decision today to prevent presidential front-runner Marine Le Pen from competing in the next presidential elections is an extraordinary attack on democracy, says journalist Pascal Clérotte, with whom I recorded a podcast this morning.
French ruling elites are “just desperate,” he said. “They're scared because they know it's over for them, so they're trying to cling to power for as long as they can.” President Emmanuel Macron currently has (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-07/macron-s-approval-jumps-in-poll-as-french-worry-about-ukraine) a 31% approval rating.
The ruling comes two weeks after the Romanian government prevented the presidential front-runner from competing in elections, and at a moment when the Brazilian courts appear poised to incarcerate former president Jair Bolsonaro, who is also a presidential candidate. And, over the last four years, Democrats attempted to incarcerate and otherwise prevent President Donald Trump from running for reelection.
31 Mar 2025
Matt Goodwin: UK is “a big pile of wood covered in gasoline”
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No country did more than Britain to establish the values of free speech and equal justice under the law. In 1215, King John issued the Magna Carta, which established that even the king was subject to equal justice under the law, and in 1644, John Milton published his famous defense of free speech.
That tradition is now at grave risk of being destroyed, says UK journalist and professor Matt Goodwin. He says that the arrest by six police officers of a father who complained on WhatsApp about the local school “is merely the latest symbol of a much broader assault on free speech and free expression.”
And it comes at a time when the government’s Sentencing Council is recommending that judges give preference to non-white criminal defendants, undermining the principle of equal justice under the law.
26 Mar 2025
Roger Pielke, Jr.: “Climate change is going to fade from view like overpopulation did”
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Since taking office, President Donald Trump has pulled the US out of the United Nations Paris agreement on climate change, unleashed fossil fuel production, cut climate subsidies that were part of the Inflation Reduction Act, and chosen as his Secretary of Energy an oilman who helped create the fracking revolution. Given that Democrats have spent the last 20 years describing climate change as an “existential threat” and making climate policy their highest priority under Biden, one would expect there to be significant protests and other actions by progressives.
And yet we’ve seen no significant climate change protests since Trump took office two months ago. No Greta Thunberg marches — she’s moved on to Palestine. No drumbeat from the news media. No Extinction Rebellion activists blocking traffic in DC. “Climate emergency” was not among the words chosen by Democrats in Congress to put on the little placards they held up during Trump’s address to Congress earlier this month. In fact, to the extent there have been protests by Democrats, they have been against the world’s most pioneering electric car manufacturer, Tesla, and have nothing to do with climate change.
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372,005
Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025
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4.7 / 5
54 ratings
Podcast Authority Score: 81 / 100
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Quality
88
Social presence
0
YouTube
86
Engagement
97
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