By S.A. McCarthy

Europe has long been the cradle of Western civilization. Ancient Greece and Rome gave us democracy and the republic, the monarchs of England, France, and Spain preserved and protected Christianity throughout the ages, and the barons of England forged the Magna Carta. Countless unsung nobles, knights, merchants, farmers, poets, stonecutters, builders, architects, fathers, sons, mothers, and daughters throughout the storied ages have poured their very hearts and souls, in many cases their very lives, into founding, furthering, developing, defending, and beautifying the culture which we know and love as the West. But a great tragedy has since befallen the West. No war or conquest precipitated it, no bloodshed or mayhem heralded its fell advent.

America could once look to Europe as a son looks to his father and sees in his venerable and beloved elder the very traits that he admires in his own self: courage, strength, patriotism, and such values as were once common across the whole of the West, values such as freedom of speech, earnest political debate, and a largely-homogenous society. He may also see some shared traits of which he is less proud: greed, imprudence, doubt, and the still-sore scars of wars long over, which ache and throb from time to time, perhaps. But what if the son looks to his father and sees nothing in common with him? How, even worse, if he looks to his father and cannot even recognize the old man? This is the tragedy that has befallen the West, which has struck at the very heart of the cradle of Western civilization: Europe and America now have very little, if anything, in common.

Evidence of this devastating reality abounds, but a glaring recent example is that of French politician Marine Le Pen. As has been widely reported over the past several days, Le Pen and officers of her party, the National Rally, were accused of “embezzlement,” using funds intended for European Parliament aides to pay national political staffers. Le Pen was convicted by a Paris court on Monday of personally embezzling nearly a half a million euros (over a half a million U.S. dollars) in European Parliament funds to bankroll political activities in France.

Le Pen, who has long been the leader of the National Rally and often served as the party’s presidential candidate, was sentenced to four years in prison and fined 100,000 euros (nearly $112,000). Half of Le Pen’s prison sentence has been suspended and the other half is likely to be served on probation, but, alarmingly, the court also barred Le Pen from running for president in the next French presidential election, slated for 2027. While Le Pen can appeal the conviction and the sentence, the ban on running for president was declared by the court to take effect “immediately,” meaning it will remain in place while the National Rally’s best-recognized figure is fighting in appeals courts.

Over the past eight years or so, and the past year in particular, Americans have become increasingly aware of the machinations of the “Deep State.” Dismissed by some as little more than a conspiracy theorist’s bogeyman, the Deep State has proven that it is, indeed, real. The constant efforts of Democrats in the U.S. Congress to thwart and impeach President Donald Trump during his first term could have easily been explained as aggressive political feuding, and so it may have been. But Operation Crossfire Hurricane, the multi-agency effort to illegally and dishonestly spy on Trump’s 2016 campaign and transition team, should have proven, even on its own, not only the Deep State’s very existence but its wide reach and nearly inescapable grip.

For those who are unfamiliar with Operation Crossfire Hurricane and all that it entailed and all that followed it, a brief summary will have to do, but author and investigative journalist Lee Smith’s books, “The Plot Against the President: The True Story of How Congressman Devin Nunes Uncovered the Biggest Political Scandal in U.S. History” and “The Permanent Coup: How Enemies Foreign and Domestic Targeted the American President,” delve into the details. In July of 2016, then-president Barack Obama’s Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) collaborated with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and National Security Agency (NSA) to undermine and spy on then-Republican presidential nominee Trump’s campaign and, later, president-elect Trump’s transition team.

Under Obama, senior officers of the FBI, CIA, and NSA sought Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants in order to spy on the Trump campaign, specifically targeting foreign relations experts Carter Page and George Papadopoulos, who were affiliated with the Trump team, and, later, expanding the operation to encompass Trump’s National Security Advisor, retired U.S. Army lieutenant general and Defense Intelligence Agency Director Mike Flynn. The Obama administration lackeys relied heavily on the now-discredited Steele Dossier, a collection of unsubstantiated rumors compiled by British intelligence agent Christopher Steele and commissioned by then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC), claiming that Russian agents had infiltrated the Trump campaign and held some sway over Trump himself. The blackmail allegations were particularly vulgar.

Initially, FISA courts refused to issue warrants, determining that the Steele Dossier was insufficient evidence and unsubstantiated. Thus, FBI and NSA officials leaked portions of the Dossier to the press, which eventually culminated in the ridiculous “Russian collusion” histrionics that plagued Trump’s first four years in office. When intelligence agents returned to the courts with reports from major media outlets “corroborating” the Steele Dossier, they were granted FISA warrants and began spying on the Trump team. Although the purpose of the FISA warrants was ostensibly to ascertain whether or not there was any collusion between Trump and Russia to illicitly influence the 2016 presidential election, the warrants were renewed and even expanded numerous times, even when no evidence of collusion was found.

This “coup” against the duly-elected U.S. president continued with disgraced ex-FBI Director James Comey’s disingenuous testimony regarding Russian collusion before the U.S. House Intelligence Committee, the impeachment efforts against Trump, the orchestration of both COVID-19 lockdowns and the Black Lives Matter riots, and the widespread social media censorship campaign benefitting Trump’s eventual successor, Joe Biden, including suppressing the damning report on Hunter Biden’s laptop, which the very same intelligence officers who had relied on the Steele Dossier to target the Trump campaign dismissed as Russian disinformation. It can even be said that the “coup” continued even after Trump left office. The extensive lawfare campaign aimed at crippling his 2024 presidential bid was certainly an extension, relying on a warped narrative of the events of January 6, 2021 to paint the 45th and now 47th president as both a tyrant and a rebel.

In November, the will of the American people thwarted the efforts of the Deep State, at least for a time, and returned Trump to the White House. But Europe has also seen the slow, often far more convoluted, emergence of its own Deep State over the years. Le Pen is far less a conservative than Trump — her position on immigration, while a distinctly nationalist one, is much less severe than the American president’s, and many of her social and fiscal policies would appear level-headed and even moderate to the unbiased observer, although her policies do swerve into populism at times. Yet she made the fatal mistake of challenging the European Union’s (EU’s) open borders policy and, consequently, garnering political popularity. Those two factors together proved to bring about what Le Pen herself referred to as her “political death sentence.”

When running for president in 2012, Le Pen won 17.9% of the French vote — 21.3% in the first round of voting in 2016 (second behind incumbent French president Emmanuel Macron, who is term-limited and cannot run in 2027) —and 33.9% in the run-off, 23.15% in the first round of voting in 2022 and 41.45% in the run-off, the highest vote share ever obtained by a nationalist presidential candidate in French electoral history. A survey published last week showed Le Pen leading France’s more progressive presidential contenders in the 2027 race; according to the survey results, Le Pen could garner as much as 37% of the vote in the first round of voting, with the next closest contender trailing behind at 21%.

Le Pen’s immigration policies bear particular scrutiny: the French nationalist, for such she certainly is, has asserted that “multiculturalism” in Europe has failed, pointing to the Islamization of France and Western Europe more broadly. To remedy this crisis, she has advocated a moratorium on legal immigration, a halt to public benefits for illegal immigrants, and the repeal of laws allowing illegal immigrants to seek permanent legal residency.

Like Trump, Le Pen has also endorsed an agenda of economic nationalism, favoring energy independence and protectionism in an effort to return fiscal autonomy to the French people. To this end, she also previously supported pulling France out of the EU. Although she has since abandoned this policy, Le Pen has suggested significantly reducing France’s funding of the EU and restructuring the EU so that it is less an intrusive, federalist, governing body and more a confederate “Europe of the Nations.”

But France is not the only apple in the European Deep State’s eye, nor Le Pen its only target. Last year, police in Brussels, Belgium, which is the seat of the EU, attempted to forcibly close down the National Conservatism Conference and, for a time, even barricaded the venue wherein the event was being hosted. In 2016, Dutch Party for Freedom leader Geert Wilders was convicted by a Dutch court on charges of hate speech and incitement to discrimination for asking a crowd if they wanted fewer foreigners poured into the country. Germany’s anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland party has also been targeted, with German courts labeling the group a “suspected extremist” organization and ruling that the government can spy on the party’s activities.

Hungarian conservatives have also been targeted, especially Prime Minister Viktor Orbán. The European Parliament has formally declared Hungary an “autocracy” that “can no longer be considered a full democracy,” in response to the Orbán government’s efforts to eliminate LGBT propaganda and curb illegal immigration, which also earned the scorn of European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen. Hungary and nearby Poland have both been targeted by the European Parliament with sanctions relating to the countries’ laws on LGBT issues and immigration, although the sanctions against Poland have been lifted following the election of former EU official Donald Tusk as prime minister.

Vice President J.D. Vance emphasized the gravity of some of the actions of the European Deep State when addressing the Munich Security Conference earlier this year. While the vice president recognized that the U.S. and Europe have some “shared values,” he warned, “What I worry about is the threat from within, the retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values — values shared with the United States of America.” Vance pointed to the EU leadership’s delight that Romanian election results had been nullified, government officials’ plans to “shut down social media during times of civil unrest the moment they spot what they’ve judged to be ‘hateful content,’” police raids in Germany carried out “against citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist comments online,” and the United Kingdom’s penchant for criminalizing even silent prayer outside of abortion facilities.

“In Britain, and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat,” Vance warned. The recent actions against Le Pen, as the latest chapter in a story of biased actions against conservatives and Christians across Europe, may prove the vice president’s comments true. Vance continued, “Europe faces many challenges, but … if you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you. Nor, for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump.”

Conservative populism (or populist conservatism, depending) is growing in fervor and force across Europe at present. Hardline conservative groups won over 70 seats in European Parliament elections as progressive and centrist groups shrank. Le Pen’s National Rally won the first round of voting in the most recent set of French elections and was only relegated to second place in the second round of voting by an alliance formed between establishment moderates and progressives, while conservative factions made significant gains in national and local elections in Austria, Belgium, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and Spain, often displacing entrenched leftists. November proved that the American people have the resolve to confront the Deep State. The question now is whether or not Europe does too.

S.A. McCarthy serves as a news writer at The Washington Stand.