Legacy media want you to think that Trump killed populism in Europe

Simion, the Washington Post wrote, is a “nationalist” who “during the campaign portrayed his movement as championing conservative values like patriotism, sovereignty and the family, and who styled himself as the Romanian analogue to U.S. President Donald Trump.”

The election was a choice between “East or West,” according to the Washington Post.

NPR, which, unlike the Washington Post, you subsidize whether you like it or not, similarly said the contest was “seen as a litmus test over whether populist nationalism or Western democracy would prevail.”

Now, that is NPR — a classical regurgitation of progressive cant. It is questionable, if not contentious or, worse, wrong, to present “populist nationalism,” whatever that means to NPR’s ideologically inbred news desk, as antithetical to Western democracy.

What is happening in many countries, in Europe and outside, is that sovereign feeling — and yes, feeling is the proper word for it — is reasserting itself after a period when the forces that seized the culture told us our nations were shameful. Open borders and the European Union’s haughty overreach have given that reckoning a helping hand, if not a kick in the behind.

But to think that it is undemocratic for majorities to rebalance the scales, or that attachment to nationhood lies outside Western tradition, is to have wholly imbibed the cultural Marxist gibberish the academy has taught for 20 years. It completely ignores everything Western from the Iliad to Churchill, passing through Aquinas, Locke, Burke, and Adams.

Athenians and Romans donned armor and went to war because they loved their nations, NPR.

Electorates are, in fact, rediscovering the Western tradition, and they don’t want to lose it to practices that are either foreign or the result of cultural contraptions expressly meant to bury the West. These voters are stirring in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Poland — everywhere, including Romania.

Simion’s loss is at least partly attributable to a brand of Romanian nationalism that, intentionally or not, may have scared enough of Romania’s ethnic Hungarians, estimated at 1.1 million in a country with a population of 19 million, to lose an election. And this imperfect candidate still garnered more than 46% of the votes cast.

If Simion learns to better handle the quicksilver of national feeling, to channel it to positive results, he may win future contests. He is only 38.

NPR, of course, also underscored that Simion was “a nationalist and admirer of President Donald Trump,” in correspondent Rob Schmitz’s opening salvo. Neither he nor the Washington Post, nor Politico, etc., said a peep about the ethnic Hungarian vote.

Schmitz did quote Clara Volintiru, whom he identified as regional director of the Black Sea Trust for Regional Cooperation, as saying that Simion’s loss will “calm fears in Europe that the democratic backsliding seen in parts of Central and Eastern Europe is not happening in Romania.”

Again, NPR wrongly interprets an electorate’s choice of parties aligning with national identity as somehow being antidemocratic. But whatever you call it, in Poland, the presidential election’s first round, also held on Sunday, was a conservative triumph.

The conservative Karol Nawrocki won 29% of the vote, just 2 percentage points behind the Left’s Rafal Trzaskowski, who underperformed expectations. If Nawrocki consolidates the votes that went to Slawomir Mentzen and Grzegorz Braun, both of whom are to his right and who won a combined 21.2% of the vote, he will be elected president in the second round.

Yes, there are divisions between Nawrocki, Mentzen, and Braun. The outcome is far from certain, Poles tell me. Still, if you add the three and others, the candidates on the Right far outstripped Trzaskowski. If Nawrocki wins, as many think he can, he can then thwart Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s radical agenda and pro-EU proclivities, and swing Poland toward traditional values.

And in Portugal, the Chega party won 23% vote, also on Sunday, stunning Brussels. Chega is another of these brand-new parties that makes liberals reach for the smelling salts. It champions national interests and opposes mass immigration. It may end up with more seats than the Socialists, who crashed to their worst election results since the 1980s.

To call these victories “democratic backsliding” is Orwellian doublespeak. But we should dig deeper into whom NPR quotes when it seeks analysis. It is often there that the reporter skews his reporting to present his own real opinion.

NPR presented the Black Sea Trust as “a project of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, a public policy think tank.” It is that. But who else has donated to the BST? A gallery of far-leftist institutions working hard to maintain the anti-national, globalist status quo, it turns out.

George Soros’s Open Society Foundation has donated to the BST, for example. So have the Rockefeller and MacArthur foundations. But it gets better — or actually worse.

The BST used to get cash from the U.S. Agency for International Development, which Trump closed for funding the Left. It also receives funding from the European Commission and the Romanian government, two governing centers that were targets for Simion.

EUROPE’S EMBRACE OF LAWFARE THREATENS ITS ALLIANCE WITH THE US

So, yes, in the insular world inhabited by legacy media, nongovernmental organizations, foundations, and bureaucrats, an assault on the status quo is the apocalypse.

But woe to whoever gets information from that world.

Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo senior fellow on E Pluribus Unum at the Heritage Foundation and the author of NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It. Heritage is listed for identification purposes only. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect any institutional position for Heritage or its board of trustees.