Marion Le Pen, niece of French National Front leader Marine Le Pen, spoke before the CPAC audience today in National Harbor, MD. She drew parallels between conservatism and nationalism during her speech, and gave an international touch to the ethnocentric affair.
“Our freedom is now in the hands of the European Union,” Le Pen said. She framed the French struggle in terms that Americans could understand.
“Let me be clear here. I am not offended when I hear President Trump say America First. In fact, I want America First for the American first. I want Britain first for the British people, and I want France first for the French people!” Le Pen exclaimed to massive applause.
While Le Pen has been defamed as a fascist and a Nazi by the liberal media and other critics, she sounded downright libertarian during parts of her speech as she described the France she wanted to see moving forward.
“I came here to tell you that there is a youth waiting for this fight in Europe today. A youth who believes that the flag means something, who wants to defend individual freedom and private property,” Le Pen said.
During other parts of her speech, she echoed nationalist themes regarding immigration and national sovereignty. She bemoaned France’s descent “from the eldest daughter of the Catholic Church to the little niece of Islam” and mentioned that her generation yearns to “protect their children from eugenics, the elderly from euthanasia and humanity from transhumanism.”
“The terrorism is only the tip of the iceberg. This is not the France that our grandparents fought for,” Le Pen said.
She closed with a hopeful sentiment for the future, by saying: “When the people are given the opportunity to take their country back, they will seize it.”
Overall, Le Pen spoke for a little over ten minutes on Thursday afternoon before the CPAC audience. She received a warm reception, and there did not seem to be any resistance from the audience for her message. The ‘Never Trump’ resistance was confined to Twitter accounts to voice their grievances.
“Many hope Trump’s white nationalism is a passing GOP anomaly, but when @CPAC invites Marion Le Pen – a leader of Europe’s pro-Russia, anti-Semitic, nationalist movement – to speak after Pence, it’s a sign that Trumpism is the party’s new strategic direction, not a 24-hour flu,” former CIA operative and Trump presidential opponent Evan McMullin said in a Tweet.
“I know I should be over it, but the speed at which the organized conservative movement became the ideological home of Marion Le Pen, Seb Gorka, Nigel Farage, Dinesh D’Souza and their ilk remains shocking to me,” New York Times staff editor Bari Weiss said in a Tweet.
Regardless of the opinions of the haters, Le Pen – an impressive, stunning woman under the age of 30 – knocked them dead at CPAC. She is going to foment libertarian resistance against the globalist establishment, with allies such as Brexit engineer Nigel Farage, in European politics for many decades to come.
