I have spent the weekend struggling mightily with a new manuscript and have had little time to study the news.

The most notable event from the day is that in a stunning upset, French voters have rejected members of Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party in legislative elections. After the first round of votes, National Rally candidates appeared to be comfortably ahead, but left-wing and centrist candidates combined forces to prevent splitting the vote, and voters then flooded the polls to elect the candidates that coalition fielded. 

Le Pen has said her policies are the same ones advanced by Russian president Vladimir Putin and former president Trump. 

On Thursday, elections in the United Kingdom saw a landslide victory for the center-left Labour Party for the first time in 14 years. Lauren Frayer and Fatima Al-Kassab of NPR noted that it was the worst defeat for the Conservatives in their almost 200-year history. 

There are always many factors that go into any election, but these results at least raise the question of whether western politicians are finding effective ways to counter the techniques of Russian disinformation. France has been flooded with Russian disinformation trying to create divisions in society as Putin seeks to break European support for Ukraine. Russia openly supports Le Pen.    

The U.K. also has been similarly flooded with Russian disinformation for years now. Russian trolls lie on social media websites and populate the comments sections of popular websites both to end support for Ukraine and to exploit wedge issues to split people apart.

These efforts were part of what Russian political theorists called “political technology”: the construction of a virtual political reality through modern media. Political theorists developed several techniques in this approach to politics: blackmailing opponents, abusing state power to help favored candidates, sponsoring “double” candidates with names similar to those of opponents in order to confuse voters on the other side and thus open the way for their own candidates, creating false parties to split the opposition, and, finally, creating a false narrative around an election or other event in order to control public debate.

These techniques perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.

This system made sense in former Soviet republics, where it enabled leaders to avoid the censorship that voters would recoil from by instead creating a firehose of news until people became overwhelmed by the task of trying to figure out what was real and simply tuned out. But those techniques dovetailed with the rhetoric of homegrown far-right figures as well.

It has always been a question what people who have embraced a virtual world will do when they figure out that the narrative on which they have based their government is fake. It seems possible that they create centrist coalitions and turn out to vote in huge numbers to reassert control over their politics and their country. 

The United States has had a similarly contentious relationship with political technology, Russian disinformation, and far-right leaders echoing that disinformation as they seek to take power by dividing the American people.

And long before anyone had begun to call disinformation political technology, the United States had a small group of elite enslavers seeking to take control of the nation by hammering on their narrative that the only true basis for society was racial slavery and using racism to divide their opponents. 

When they managed to get Congress and the Supreme Court to give them the right to move slavery into the American West, where new slave states could work with southern slave states to make slavery national, voters woke up. Disagreeing about immigration, internal improvements, public education, tariffs, and finance—all hot-button issues in the 1850s—they nonetheless built a centrist coalition to stop elite enslavers from replacing democracy with an oligarchy. 

Indeed, their coalition was so effective that Illinois senator Stephen A. Douglas, who had sponsored the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act that permitted enslavement to move west, objected that it was unseemly for abolitionists who opposed human enslavement in principle to work with those like Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln, who focused on the Constitution and argued that it protected enslavement in the slave states. 

In 1854, Lincoln answered Douglas: “Our Senator…objects that those who oppose him in this measure do not entirely agree with one another…. [H]e…says it is not quite fair to oppose him in this variety of ways. He should remember that he took us by surprise—astounded us—by this measure. We were thunderstruck and stunned; and we reeled and fell in utter confusion. But we rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver. We struck in the direction of the sound; and we are rapidly closing in upon him. He must not think to divert us from our purpose, by showing us that our drill, our dress, and our weapons, are not entirely perfect and uniform. When the storm shall be past, he shall find us still Americans; no less devoted to the continued Union and prosperity of the country than heretofore.” 

Six years later, that coalition of voters elected Lincoln to the White House.

The French elections left no party in an absolute majority, so governance will be messy. Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez nonetheless cheered tonight’s results: “This week, two of the largest countries in Europe have chosen the same path that Spain chose a year ago: rejection of the extreme right and a decisive commitment to a social left that addresses people’s problems with serious and brave policies,” Sánchez posted on social media.

“The United Kingdom and France have said YES to progress and social advancement and NO to the regression in rights and freedoms. There is no agreement or government with the extreme right.” 

Notes:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/07/07/france-election-result-2024-left-far-right/

https://www.npr.org/2024/07/05/g-s1-8456/uk-labour-party-win-keir-starmer

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/30/france-russia-interference-far-right/

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-exposes-sick-russian-troll-factory-plaguing-social-media-with-kremlin-propaganda

https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/virtual-politics-and-the-corruption-post-soviet-democracy

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/interview/gleb-pavlovsky/

https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/peoriaspeech.htm

https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/france-election-runoff-results-07-07-24-intl/index.html

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GORDES, FRANCE — On Saturday night, I was at a birthday party here, in Provence, and everyone was asking everyone else whether they planned to vote fascist in Sunday’s election. Most of the attendees were Jews.

They were being a tad ironic. They don’t think the current incarnation of the National Rally party is actually fascist. No swastikas. No goose-stepping. 

But the party is fascist-adjacent. It’s the direct descendant of fascists: the National Rally (formerly known as the National Front) is run by Marine Le Pen, the daughter of the late Jean-Marie Le Pen, who founded the National Front in 1972 and hated Jews. (Among other Le Pen lowlights is this 1987 quip: “I’m not saying the gas chambers didn’t exist. I haven’t seen them myself. I haven’t particularly studied the question. But I believe it’s just a detail in the history of World War II.”)

But that was then. And now? Well, now the “fascists” and the Jews are bound together by a common foe: radical Islam, which has cut a gaping hole through the French body politic.

Now, the French far right and many of the country’s 500,000 Jews believe that they are under siege, and that unless something radical changes, France will soon be lost forever.

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Has the reason for Joe Biden’s obvious physical and mental decline been hiding in plain sight? Two July 6 reports suggest the president has been seeing a Parkinson’s disease specialist for months.

On Saturday, the New York Post reported that a doctor at Walter Reed Medical Center with expertise in Parkinson’s visited the White House January 17, hosted by the president’s physician Kevin O’Connor. A second report, published by Alex Berenson on his Substack, Unreported Truths, revealed that the doctor visited the White House nine times between July 28, 2023, and March 28, 2024. (The logs run through March 31, 2024, and are available for anyone to access online.)

The doctor in question is Kevin R. Cannard, a neurologist and retired Army colonel. His physician profile page shows he is a neurologist and movement disorders specialist at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center who researches treatments for early phase Parkinson’s disease. Berenson notes that Walter Reed “provides medical care to senior federal officials.” 

If Cannard is treating Biden, then the president has some explaining to do. Last Friday, during a televised interview designed to do damage control after his disastrous debate performance the week before, Biden was asked several times if he would submit to a complete neurological and cognitive exam done by independent physicians. (The Free Press called for such an evaluation last week.) 

Biden, 81, repeatedly demurred. “Look, I have a cognitive test every single day,” he said, referring to his performing the duties of the presidency. He also said, apparently referring to his physicians, “No one said I had to. No one said. They said I’m good.”

Whenever Biden has been pressed about his fitness for the White House, he’s often responded with a favorite catchphrase, “Watch me.” But the public has been watching—with increasing alarm. Neurologists, who generally wish to remain anonymous, have been watching, too.

One, an emeritus professor of neurology who has not treated the president, told The Free Press he believes Biden “has Parkinsonism, an umbrella term that refers to neurologic conditions that cause slowed movements, rigidity, and tremors. By observation, he has a masked face, reduced blinking, stiff and slow gait, hunched posture, low-volume voice, imbalance, freezing, mild cognitive disturbance, and difficulty turning.” 

Another neurologist, who wrote to Berenson after his story was published, echoed these findings: “All the disturbing symptoms we all see are called Parkinsonism. . . . In fact in medical school we watch videos of patients with Parkinsonism like Biden to illustrate to the students how this manifests.”

Coincidentally, just last week, Biden signed into law the National Plan to End Parkinson’s Act, which promises to “dramatically increase federal research funding, develop more effective pathways for treatments and cures,” and “improve early diagnosis” of the disease.

According to the results of a physical exam released in February, O’Connor declared Biden “fit to successfully execute the duties of the presidency,” adding that there are “no findings which would be consistent” with Parkinson’s. 

If Cannard has examined the president and agrees with this, he should say so publicly. 

It is also incumbent on the administration to explain Cannard’s multiple visits. If this neurologist has diagnosed and is treating Biden for a form of Parkinsonism—and this has been covered up—that’s a medical and political scandal. If his doctors believe he has this disease and are failing to inform and treat him, that is shocking malpractice. (House Republicans have already requested an interview with O’Connor.)

And let’s say Cannard is just an old-fashioned doctor who makes house calls to the White House to see patients other than the president. If that’s true, the public needs to know this, too.

Biden may say there is no necessity for him to get that comprehensive evaluation. But he’s wrong. The American people deserve to know what’s going on with the president.

Emily Yoffe is a senior editor at The Free Press. You can follow her on X at @emilyyoffe. 

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