A Convention of the Right met in Paris a few weekends ago. In France as in much of the EU, conservative and traditional beliefs are called extreme by the media. So, you can bet journalists assigned to the convention had their ears out for trouble — and did they get an earful.

A keynote speaker was writer and polemicist Eric Zemmour. His speech has been described as a blockbuster; he is currently being investigated by French authorities for “hate speech.” A link to an English translation of the speech, posted by the Daily Caller (a news and opinion website co-founded by Tucker Carlson), is given at the bottom of this page. First, I offer a few quotes to stir your interest.

The first section of the speech is all sarcasm, so unless that’s your taste, scan to where he offers this definition of Progressivism: “the religion of progress. A religious doctrine that makes the individual a god and anything from his/her desires to passing fancies a sacred and divine right.” He continues, “Progressivism is a divine materialism that believes that humans are indifferent, interchangeable beings without sex or attachment; beings constructed entirely like Legos and who can be deconstructed by the beings that created the universe.”

Zemmour describes the target of Progressivism’s aggression: “the sole enemy to knock down was the white, heterosexual, Catholic man.”

The next part, that got him in trouble, is an assessment of the clash of civilizations happening, however slow-motion, under every Frenchman’s nose. Zemmour describes France as trapped between late-stage capitalism and Islam. He says,

“We are thus caught between the anvil and the hammer of two universalisms that crush our nations, our people, our territories, our traditions, our ways of life, our cultures.

On one hand, [there is] market oriented universalism, which in the name of human rights enslaves our minds to transform them into uprooted zombies.

On the other hand, [there is] Islamic universalism, which easily takes advantage of our religion of human rights in order to protect its operation of occupation and colonization of portions of the French territory that it transforms little by little, thanks to the weight of numbers…”

He decries the replacement of the French “by another people, another civilization.” Elsewhere he says that never before have the French people been “threatened by replacement on their own soil.” He interjects,

“Well, I know people will accuse me of Islamophobia, I’m used to it. We all know that this nebulous concept of Islamophobia was invented to render critique of Islam impossible. To reestablish the idea of blasphemy in aid of the Muslim religion. An idea of blasphemy done away with, I recall, in 1789.”

Whether one agrees with him or not, one thing he surely gets right: “The future is not determined by economic curves but by demographic curves. These are relentless.” Looking at the plummeting native-born population — a feature, again, shared by most other EU countries — and recalling a thriving France that used to dispatch emigrant Frenchmen to the New World and Africa, he exhorts,

“Today, we experience a demographic inversion that brings about a reversal of migratory flows which brings about a reversal of colonization. I leave it to you to guess who will be their Indians and their slaves: it’s you!”

And:

“The question to us that now arises is the following: Will French youth accept living as a minority in the land of their ancestors? If yes, they deserve their colonization. If not, they must fight for their liberation. But how to fight? Where to fight? On what to fight?”

Here some see Zemmour issuing a call to arms, but he talks of using existing institutions:

“We must free ourselves from the power of our masters: media, universities, judges … We must abolish the oppressive laws that, in the name of non-discrimination, render us strangers in our own land.”

Let the reader judge. The link:

https://dailycaller.com/2019/10/07/eric-zemmour-speech-convention-de-la-droite/