After a 400-year population boom, we need to reconnect with the Sun

By Tony Ryan, University of Sheffield

For almost all of our species’ 200,000-year history, man’s relationship with the Earth was no different to that of any other animal. All their energy was provided directly by the sun. Sunlight captured by plants using photosynthesis was converted into food and fuel. They ate roots, fruits and grains (and animals that also ate roots, fruits and grains) to provide their bodies with energy. They burned wood to keep themselves warm and fat to provide light at night.

It was a successful strategy for survival and over tens of thousands of years the human population spread across six continents.

However, locked in to this natural solar cycle, there was a limit to how many people their lifestyle could support, and the total number of inhabitants fluctuated below 500m depending on disease, wars and food supply.

Then, 350 years ago, everything changed. We began to supplement our energy needs with coal and oil (humans had been using coal since pre-historic times but not on a large scale). This was still energy from sunshine, but this time millions of years old. In less than two centuries the human population exploded, doubling in size to 1 billion people. It has continued to grow ever since, but the rate of change has increased significantly. It took 100,000 years to reach the first billion people: today we are adding a further billion every 12 years. The result is a huge squeeze on all natural resources. Over the next two decades we will witness huge increases in demand for energy, food and water – a perfect storm.

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1,000 American rabbis sign letter welcoming Syrian refugees

The Washington Post reports: More than 1,000 rabbis in the United States signed onto a letter urging elected officials in the country to “exercise moral leadership for the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program.”

The letter was published on the website of HIAS, a venerable U.S. charity once known as the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society that was originally founded in the 19th century to help bring over emigrants from Czarist Russia.

It marks an important intervention in the American conversation at a time when conservative politicians have used the pretext of terrorism — security fears that followed the Paris terror attacks last month — as an excuse to pass legislation that would restrict the flow of Syrian refugees into the U.S. (Never mind that no Paris attacker has yet to be identified as a Syrian refugee or national.)

The rabbis’ letter denounces this brand of politics by invoking the historical experience of Jews in the U.S. [Continue reading…]

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Muslim-owned cafe in North Dakota defaced with Nazi graffiti, then firebombed

The Daily Beast reports: When police catch the man who allegedly burned down a Somali-Muslim owned restaurant in Grand Forks, North Dakota last week, their first task will be to determine his motive. Regardless of what authorities find, the arson feels like an act of terrorism to the Somali-Muslim community there.

Two days before Matthew Gust allegedly sent his 40-ounce Bud Light bottle filled with gasoline crashing through the window of Juba Cafe, someone had vandalized the restaurant popular with the Somali-Muslim community by painting a crude Nazi SS logo on the window with “go home” beneath it.

If Gust was not responsible for that act of vandalism, Grand Forks Police have another potential bigot to track down.

For the better part of a decade, refugees from Somalia, Burundi, Bhutan, and Iraq have been vetted by the State Department and given safe passage to Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota. About 100 men, women and children a year come to Grand Forks, said Chuck Haga, a now-retired journalist and columnist who works with the Global Friends organization, which helps refugees assimilate in the area.

“These people, they’ve got nothing and all they want is a safe place to raise their kids,” Haga told The Daily Beast. “The Bhutanese especially are just overwhelmingly grateful for the opportunity. Many of them have spent as much as 20 years in refugee camps, never having lived in their own country.”

Acceptance of the refugees has been mixed over the years, said Jaylani Hussein, director of the Minnesota chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Exacerbating tensions are anti-Muslim grassroots organizations, conservative talk radio hosts, and Usama Dakdok, an Egyptian Christian who profits from this Islamophobic cottage industry that provides North Dakotans with misleading information regarding Islam, Hussein said. [Continue reading…]

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What Google search queries do and don’t reveal

Evan Soltas and Seth Stephens-Davidowitz write: Hours after the massacre in San Bernardino, Calif., on Dec. 2, and minutes after the media first reported that at least one of the shooters had a Muslim-sounding name, a disturbing number of Californians had decided what they wanted to do with Muslims: kill them.

The top Google search in California with the word “Muslims” in it was “kill Muslims.” And the rest of America searched for the phrase “kill Muslims” with about the same frequency that they searched for “martini recipe,” “migraine symptoms” and “Cowboys roster.”

People often have vicious thoughts. Sometimes they share them on Google. Do these thoughts matter?

Yes. Using weekly data from 2004 to 2013, we found a direct correlation between anti-Muslim searches and anti-Muslim hate crimes.

There are about 1,600 searches for “I hate my boss” every month in the United States. In a survey of American workers, half of the respondents said that they had left a job because they hated their boss; there are about 150 million workers in America.

In November, there were about 3,600 searches in the United States for “I hate Muslims” and about 2,400 for “kill Muslims.” We suspect these Islamophobic searches represent a similarly tiny fraction of those who had the same thoughts but didn’t drop them into Google. [Continue reading…]

Oh brother!

Let’s cut some slack for Soltas since he hasn’t graduated yet, but Stephens-Davidowitz dubs himself a data scientist. I guess he’s illustrating the fact that the quality of analysis generally matches the quality of the data.

Don’t get me wrong. I have little doubt that Islamophobia is peaking in the U.S. right now — much to Donald Trump’s advantage and with a lot of his assistance. What is much harder to determine is what qualifies as an Islamophobic search query.

As much as search algorithms have advanced over the last two decades, search engines have yet to perfect the art of mind-reading. The raw material they still work with is words — the thoughts that might lie behind those words remains a mystery.

If someone wants to kill Muslims, they might type “kill Muslims” in Google — although I’m not sure exactly what the query would be meant to solicit.

On the other hand, someone with a basic understanding of how Google works — that it matches queries with documents in which the query terms appear — might do the same search because they want to find out who’s writing about killing Muslims.

In other words, the query, “kill Muslims,” might be an expression of Islamophobia, or, it might be an inquiry about the prevalence of Islamophobia.

This is true even if the query is “I want to kill Muslims” because Google has no way of differentiating between the person making the query and the author of the documents it matches to that query.

This is the problem of disambiguation.

Type “kill Muslims” into Google and what you’ll find — apart from references to this op-ed — is much of the hard data on Islamophobia, such as a compilation of reports on hate crimes targeting Muslims occurring across the U.S. just this week.

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What many fear Trump could do, Putin has already done

Garry Kasparov writes: Putin has spent years actually DOING things that the Western media worry American politicians are even thinking about, and yet Putin still has an endless supply of apologists at every level in the West. Putin has destroyed democracy and civil society in Russia, invaded two neighboring countries, annexed two million Ukrainians in Crimea, and launched a coordinated assault against the institutions that make up much of the modern world order. His global propaganda network constantly smears American and European leaders and society.

And yet even today Putin is still treated as a potential partner in Syria, courted by John Kerry (headed to Moscow again next week) and politicians in Germany and France despite blatantly and repeatedly lying to them and openly acting against their nations’ stated interests of containing ISIS and ending the slaughter in Syria. Even during my book tour over this past month I’ve been told by so-called experts and pundits that, for example, Russia is a “poorly functioning democracy”. You can read this week on CNN.com that the Russian middle class is “happy” with Putin. How would you know after 15 years of his decimating all opposition and turning the media into a propaganda machine? If you’re actually popular you can have a free media and free elections. Putin knows very well he cannot permit either.

I was taunted and criticized for a decade for pointing out the trends of Putin’s Russia toward dictatorship. Now only the most pitiful Putin bootlickers deny what he has done. Only when he invaded neighboring Ukraine on the darkly familiar pretexts of racial unity and national pride, right on the heels of Olympic glory in Sochi, did my comparisons to Germany in the 1930s become too obvious to roll eyes at. Soon they were being echoed widely (even by Hillary Clinton) and now the “H-word” is again in the mainstream thanks to Trump’s call for religious discrimination on a global scale.

Donald Trump gets more attention and condemnation for sounding like Hitler than Vladimir Putin gets for acting like Hitler. But there is a reason for this paradoxical behavior. Trump has no power, Putin does. [Continue reading…]

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ISIS was coming even without the invasion of Iraq

Kyle Orton writes: Yesterday, Reuters had an article by Isabel Coles and Ned Parker entitled, “How Saddam’s men help Islamic State rule.” The article had a number of interesting points, but in its presentation of the movement of former (Saddam) regime elements (FREs) into the leadership structure of the Islamic State (IS) as a phenomenon of the last few years, it was a step backward: the press had seemed to be recognizing that the Salafization of the FREs within IS dates back to the Islamization of Saddam Hussein’s regime in its last fifteen years, notably in the 1990s after the onset of the Faith Campaign.

The authors do note that when IS swept across Iraq in June 2014 and “absorbed thousands of [Ba’athist] followers,” these “new recruits joined Saddam-era officers who already held key posts in Islamic State” (italics added). But the Reuters piece then adds:

Most former Baathist officers have little in common with Islamic State. Saddam promoted Arab nationalism and secularism for most of his rule. But many of the ex-Baathists working with Islamic State are driven by self preservation and a shared hatred of the Shi’ite-led government in Baghdad. Others are true believers who became radicalised in the early years after Saddam’s ouster, converted on the battlefield or in U.S. military and Iraqi prisons.

The notion of a cleavage in IS between true believers and “Ba’athists” doesn’t stack up in the article’s own presentation. The notorious Camp Bucca where IS deliberately infiltrated men to gather recruits, some of whom were FREs, was important. But the very formulation begs the question. Why were insurgent leaders using Islam, not Ba’athism, as their rallying cry? Why was there “no secular Sunni resistance at all,” as Joel Rayburn, a former intelligence officer who worked with General David Petraeus from 2007 to 2010 and wrote one of the best histories of post-2003 Iraq, once put it? Because Ba’athism had been dead as an ideology for at least a decade — and it was Saddam who killed it. [Continue reading…]

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This is how ISIS has spread beyond Syria and Iraq

Borzou Daragahi reports: His killers knew who he was and where he was going.

Hisham Barakat, Egypt’s top prosecutor, was driving away from his home in an upscale quarter of Cairo’s Heliopolis District. The force of the blast that struck the highest-ranking Egyptian official assassinated in decades shattered windows for blocks around. It was a clean hit. No one else was killed and no suspect was caught.

“The sound was horrible,” recalled Mona Murad, 58, the owner of a nearby women’s clothing store that was destroyed in the blast on June 29. “I was in the street. People were telling me, ‘Your shop is burning.’”

No one claimed responsibility for the attack, but it came amid a string of operations by ISIS’s branch in Egypt. ISIS thrives in collapsed states such as Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen, where it seizes control of territory and resources and attempts to set up its 21st-century version of the medieval Islamic Caliphate. But ISIS’s operations in Egypt provide a blueprint of how it can absorb a knowledgeable local jihadi group — in this case the Sinai-based Ansar Beit al Maqdis — to make its presence felt in countries that are not war zones. The local groups give ISIS and its ideology global reach. ISIS supplies Ansar Beit al Maqdis with weapons through smuggling networks and inspiration to roil a flailing state.

“Like a multinational company, the jihadis merge with ISIS, mostly because of the media, finance, logistics, and manpower it can provide,” said retired Egyptian Interior Ministry Gen. Hussein Hamoudeh. “They take the trademark of ISIS in the terror war. But it’s not just a brand. You have to take up the Daesh thinking,” he said referring to the group by its Arabic acronym.

The Egyptian jihadi group Ansar Beit al-Maqdis announced its merger with ISIS in November 2014. The killing of Barakat last summer came days before a multipronged attack on security forces that was among the first warning signs that ISIS’s Egyptian branch, called Wilayat al-Sina, or Sinai Province, was gathering momentum. In recent weeks, ISIS in Egypt has killed four soldiers in western Cairo and bombed judges in a hotel often used by foreigners and dignitaries in the northeast Sinai town of Arish. That was in addition to one of its most spectacular claimed attacks: the downing of a Russian civilian plane that killed 224 passengers and crew.

Though attacks in Egypt are down numerically and armed forces say the number of militants killed has increased, the attacks by Sinai Province have become more effective, thanks in large part to the local political knowledge of the ISIS branch and Egyptian security forces’ over-reliance on airstrikes and conventional military means to eradicate the group. The group has badly damaged the country’s economy and the reputation of its security forces. Tourism has plummeted since the downing of the jet. The Egyptian pound is trading at a 25-year low and stock market has drooped. [Continue reading…]

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Saudi Arabia bombs schools in Yemen

Amnesty: Saudi Arabia-led coalition forces have carried out a series of air strikes targeting schools that were still in use, in violation of international humanitarian law, and hampering access to education for thousands of Yemen’s children, said Amnesty International in a new briefing published today. The coalition forces are armed by states including the USA and UK.

The briefing ‘Our kids are bombed’: Schools under attack in Yemen, investigates five air strikes on schools which took place between August and October 2015 killing five civilians and injuring at least 14, including four children, based on field research in Yemen. While students were not present inside the schools during the attacks, the strikes caused serious damage or destruction which will have long-term consequences for students.

“The Saudi Arabia-led coalition launched a series of unlawful air strikes on schools being used for educational – not for military – purposes, a flagrant violation of the laws of war,” said Lama Fakih, Senior Crisis Advisor at Amnesty International who recently returned from Yemen. [Continue reading…]

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Libya’s rival factions agree date to sign UN peace deal

Reuters reports: Libya’s rival factions on Friday agreed to Dec. 16 as a target date for signing a United Nations-backed national unity government agreement meant to end their conflict.

The U.N. has been negotiating for a year to get Libya’s two rival governments and armed factions to end their war that has plunged the North African state into chaos four years after rebellion ousted Muammar Gaddafi.

Successfully signing an agreement would open the way for the international community to support Libya in the fight against Islamic State, which has gained ground in the chaos and controls the western city of Sirte.

But hardliners in both camps have been resisting a deal. Several past deadlines to sign have fallen through after opponents balked at details or demanded more concessions from their rivals.

“There was a wide consensus that only through rapid signature of the Libyan political agreement the country can be brought back to unity,” U.N. Libya envoy Martin Kobler said in Tunisia after two days of talks. [Continue reading…]

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A scientific approach designed to precisely calibrate the metrics needed for quantifying bullshit

Science News reports: Dutch social psychologist Diederik Stapel was known for his meteoric rise, until he was known for his fall. His research on social interactions, which spanned topics from infidelity to selfishness to discrimination, frequently appeared in top-tier journals. But then in 2011, three junior researchers raised concerns that Stapel was fabricating data. Stapel’s institution, Tilburg University, suspended him and launched a formal investigation. A commission ultimately determined that of his more than 125 research papers, at least 55 were based on fraudulent data. Stapel now has 57 retractions to his name.

The case provided an unusual opportunity for exploring the language of deception: One set of Stapel’s papers that discussed faked data and a set of his papers based on legitimate results. Linguists David Markowitz and Jeffrey Hancock ran an analysis of articles in each set that listed Stapel as the first author. The researchers discovered particular tells in the language that allowed them to peg the fraudulent work with roughly 70 percent accuracy. While Stapel was careful to concoct data that appeared to be reasonable, he oversold his false goods, using, for example, more science-related terms and more amplifying terms, like extreme and exceptionally, in the now-retracted papers.

Markowitz and Hancock, now at Stanford, are still probing the language of lies, and they recently ran a similar analysis on a larger sample of papers with fudged data.

The bottom line: Fraudulent papers were full of jargon, harder to read, and bloated with references. This parsing-of-language approach, which the team describes in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology, might be used to flag papers that deserve extra scrutiny. But tricks for detecting counterfeit data are unlikely to thwart the murkier problem of questionable research practices or the general lack of clarity in the scientific literature.

“This is an important contribution to the discussion of quality control in research,”Nick Steneck, a science historian at the University of Michigan and an expert in research integrity practices, told me. “But there’s a whole lot of other reasons why clarity and readability of scientific writing matters, including making things understandable to the public.” [Continue reading…]

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Mother Earth: ‘If you don’t take care of me, I cannot take care of you.’

Mashable reports: This one-minute film, which also has a version in French voiced by actress Marion Cotillard, is the latest in Conservation International’s Nature Is Speaking series, featuring several A-list celebrities lending their voices to personify various aspects of nature. Last month, Mashable debuted the first of this year’s films, Ice, voiced Liam Neeson. [Continue reading…]

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World leaders adopt 1.5 C goal — and we’re damn well going to hold them to it

Bill McKibben writes: Here’s the crucial plaintive paragraph from the preamble to the Paris climate agreement released today, written in the almost indecipherable bureaucratese that attends this international circus:

Emphasizing with serious concern the urgent need to address the significant gap between the aggregate effect of Parties’ mitigation pledges in terms of global annual emissions of greenhouse gases by 2020 and aggregate emission pathways consistent with holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C …

What it says is: The world is a doughy fellow who has promised to drop three suit sizes in time for his wedding, which is now only a month away. The world is an anxious student who has to ace the next morning’s test to pass the course but hasn’t yet started to study. The world has promised his kids a great raft of presents under the tree, but now it’s suddenly Christmas Eve and the shops have started closing.

The “significant gap” is the crucial thing. In the agreement, the world promises to hold the rise in the planet’s temperature to below 2 degrees Celsius. Heck, it promises to aim for 1.5 degrees, which is extraordinary. It’s what actually needs to be done; if we succeeded, it might just head off complete calamity. (We’re now at 1 degree above average pre-industrial temperatures, and considering what that’s already done in terms of melt, flood, and drought, 1.5 C will still be trouble, but maybe manageable trouble.)

But once you get past the promises part, the actual plans submitted by various governments commit the world to a temperature rise of 3.5 degrees, which is more or less the same as hell. It’s a broken planet. [Continue reading…]

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Grand promises of Paris climate deal undermined by squalid retrenchments

George Monbiot writes: By comparison to what it could have been, it’s a miracle. By comparison to what it should have been, it’s a disaster.

Inside the narrow frame within which the talks have taken place, the draft agreement at the UN climate talks in Paris is a great success. The relief and self-congratulation with which the final text was greeted, acknowledges the failure at Copenhagen six years ago, where the negotiations ran wildly over time before collapsing. The Paris agreement is still awaiting formal adoption, but its aspirational limit of 1.5C of global warming, after the rejection of this demand for so many years, can be seen within this frame as a resounding victory. In this respect and others, the final text is stronger than most people anticipated.

Outside the frame it looks like something else. I doubt any of the negotiators believe that there will be no more than 1.5C of global warming as a result of these talks. As the preamble to the agreement acknowledges, even 2C, in view of the weak promises governments brought to Paris, is wildly ambitious. Though negotiated by some nations in good faith, the real outcomes are likely to commit us to levels of climate breakdown that will be dangerous to all and lethal to some. Our governments talk of not burdening future generations with debt. But they have just agreed to burden our successors with a far more dangerous legacy: the carbon dioxide produced by the continued burning of fossil fuels, and the long-running impacts this will exert on the global climate. [Continue reading…]

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Is Trump on the way to becoming a pariah?

It’s unlikely Donald Trump will be planning to visit the UK any time soon. He might not get labelled as an “undesirable person” by the British government, as was the Islamophobic Dutch politician, Geert Wilders. Even so, since more than half a million Britons have already made it clear he’s unwelcome, I doubt that Trump would accept having to face the humiliation of seeking consent to travel to the country viewed by most Americans as the United States’ closest ally — a trip that in other circumstances doesn’t even require a visa.

The New York Times reports:

Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister of Scotland, has revoked Mr. Trump’s status as a business ambassador to Scotland, and Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen has stripped him of an honorary degree.

Prime Minister David Cameron, of the Conservative Party, castigated Mr. Trump’s position [on Muslims] as “divisive, unhelpful and quite simply wrong,” while J. K. Rowling, the author of the best-selling Harry Potter books, described Mr. Trump as worse than the series’ archvillain, Lord Voldemort.

Zac Goldsmith, a Conservative Party candidate for mayor of London, called Mr. Trump “repellent” and “one of the most malignant figures in modern politics,” according to news reports.

Trump has already cancelled a trip to Israel after having been criticized by Benjamin Netanyahu, while the Washington Post’s “Right Turn” Israel-friendly columnist, Jennifer Rubin, says Trump is “now is effectively a persona non grata” in the Jewish state.

It’s worth noting that Trump had already alienated himself from Jewish and Christian Zionists by refusing to express his commitment to Jerusalem as Israel’s “undivided capital.”

Trump is also now the target of a new campaign launched by activist hackers in Anonymous, which warned the presidential candidate, “think twice before you speak anything,” while claiming to have taken down the website for Trump Tower in New York City.

And in an effort to weaken Trump’s position in the business community, a new petition has been launched to “dump Trump” from the PGA Tour.

Will any of this have much impact on Trump’s supporters?

Certainly not those of the variety to whom Olivia Nuzzi spoke:

James “Owen” Greeson said it so casually that it almost didn’t sound strange.

He was talking about how, at 76 years old, he’s never picked a winner, has always thrown his weight behind some presidential candidate who’s got no shot. This time was no different, but he didn’t much care. He sent $2,700 from Georgia, where he lives, to Donald Trump’s campaign coffers, just because he likes the guy and thinks he’s entertaining, not because he figured he could be president. It’s not that Trump isn’t fit for the office or too divisive to get the votes. “Come on,” he said, “they’ll kill him before they let him be elected.”

He meant it literally.

“George Wallace was shot,” he said, by way of explanation. And in case I wasn’t convinced, “Huey Long was shot.

“If you get too popular, you’re gonna get dusted off, you know? That should be Donald’s biggest concern, that somebody busts a cap in his ass.”

Greeson, calm and soft spoken, was already sure that the government had orchestrated the 9/11 attacks, so what was one more death, really?

“It looked like a false flag to me, come on!” he said. “Two buildings burn like that? There’s been fires in other countries that burned for 15 hours and the buildings didn’t collapse.” (He said he wasn’t sure who did 9/11, but that Dick Cheney was a good guess.)

After Donald Trump announced, on Monday, a plan to stop Muslims from entering the U.S. “until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on,” I set out to talk to his donors about how it made them feel. I’d interviewed Trump donors before and found that above all else, they are quite a lot like the candidate himself. They aren’t all crazy or hateful or prone to shouting, necessarily, but they are fed up and they are politically incorrect. They feel as if the world and the country is changing too rapidly for us to understand it, and they resent being told that their questions are impolite or emblematic of a deeper intolerance. They see in Trump someone who would protect their interests the way he has protected his own, someone who would make a “yuge,” great deal for their benefit, perhaps. Like, really, really great. Big league.

So far, Trump’s success has not been achieved in spite of making enemies, but on the contrary, in large part it’s because he is so good at riling up his opponents. By co-opting the services of the media, his campaign has cost him virtually nothing and the criticisms he now faces, mostly have the effect of reinforcing the convictions of his base.

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The rise of right-wing populists

The New York Times reports: Mass shootings by Islamist militants. Migrants crashing borders. International competition punishing workers but enriching elites.

Across the Western world, a new breed of right-leaning populists like Donald J. Trump, Marine Le Pen in France and Viktor Orban in Hungary are surging in popularity by capitalizing on a climate of insecurity rivaling the period after the First World War.

Many of them — as Mr. Trump did this week — have made headlines by railing against Muslim immigrants, calling them a threat to public safety and cultural identity. Left-leaning critics have compared the populists to the fascists of the early 20th century. Some riding the wave, like the Freedom Party in Austria or Golden Dawn in Greece, have specific neo-Nazi roots.

Unlike earlier right-wing movements, this generation of populists disavows the overt racism, militaristic rhetoric and associations with fascism that until recently scared away many mainstream voters.

Before the recent terrorist attacks or the European migrant crisis cast a spotlight on Muslim immigration, the populists had built support as trade protectionists or economic nationalists appealing to working-class voters who felt disaffected from established parties and political elites. And, for the first time in nearly a century, established parties across Europe and the United States are struggling to fend off or counter the populist insurgents as their competition pulls the mainstream to the right.

“What you are seeing here is quite a radical shift,” said Roger Eatwell, a political scientist at the University of Bath who studies right-wing parties.

Ms. Le Pen is the best-known figure from more than a dozen right-leaning populist parties across Europe that have scored big gains over the last two years. This week, her National Front party won the largest share of the vote in the first round of regional elections in France, with 30 percent, making her a contender for the presidency in 2017. She campaigns against what she calls the Islamization of France and has compared Muslims praying in French streets to the Nazi occupation.

But Ms. Le Pen fuses her cultural chauvinism with appeals to the economic anxieties of working or lower-middle class voters who — like their counterparts across Europe — have suffered from high unemployment, stagnant wages and growing income inequality, especially since the financial crisis of 2008.

“They are pulling out all the stops for the migrants, the illegals, but who is looking out for our retirees?” Ms. Le Pen asked in a recent campaign appearance. “They are stealing from the poor to give to foreigners who did not even ask our permission to come here.”

Mr. Trump on Monday evoked comparisons to Ms. Le Pen and her European counterparts with his call to close American borders to all Muslims “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.”

Ms. Le Pen said that was too much for her, perhaps in part because she feared jeopardizing the progress she had made in shedding her party’s previous image as racist and anti-Semitic.

“Seriously, have you ever heard me say something like that?” she asked on Thursday when questioned about Mr. Trump’s comments during a television interview. “I defend all the French people in France, regardless of their origin, regardless of their religion.”

Others in Europe’s right-leaning populist parties, though, are applauding Mr. Trump for breaking with what they call the multiculturalist orthodoxy of dominant political elites. [Continue reading…]

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