From LifeSiteNews

By Frank Wright

It remains to be seen how long the rule of lawfare can last against the rising demand for popular politics. The globalist remnants across the West are now liberal democracies in name only.

Marine Le Pen, the former leader of the populist French opposition party, has been sentenced to prison and barred from standing for election as president in 2027, following a court ruling against her for alleged financial crimes.

Le Pen is currently leading polls to win the presidential election, being 11 to 17 points ahead of the party of the globalist President Emmanuel Macron.

The ruling Monday on charges of “misuse of EU funds” sees Le Pen, leader of the National Rally (RN) party, facing two years’ imprisonment and a five-year ban on running for elected office. Her lawyer stated she would appeal the ruling.

Speaking a day before the verdict, Le Pen said, “There are 11 million people who voted for the movement I represent. So tomorrow, potentially, millions and millions of French people would see themselves deprived of their candidate in the election.”

She is to address the French nation in a televised statement Monday night.

Party leader Jordan Bardella responded on X, saying, “Today, it is not only Marine Le Pen who is unjustly condemned: it is French democracy that is being executed.”

Bardella has called for “peaceful mobilization” in support of Marine Le Pen, with a petition launched in protest at the “democratic scandal” of her effective cancellation as a candidate.

The RN won 33 percent of the vote in the first round of the 2024 French parliamentary elections, being the single largest party overall. It is prevented from entering government by a “cordon sanitaire” – an agreement between liberal-global and left-wing parties to “firewall” national-populists from power regardless of how many people vote for them.

The same system prevents Germany’s AfD and Austria’s FPO from governing. The AfD won 25 percent of the national vote, and the FPO came first in the Austrian elections – both held last year. More recently, Romanian presidential candidate Calin Georgescu saw his victorious presidential election canceled and him barred from running again, in what was described as a “globalist coup.”

Le Pen’s appeal would suspend the jail sentence and the fine of 100,000 euros – but would not be heard until 2026, effectively sabotaging her preparations for the 2027 election should she win. The ban takes effect when the appeal process is exhausted, meaning Le Pen is free to campaign until her appeal is heard in a year’s time.

The court ruled that Le Pen, whose RN was the single largest party in the recent French parliamentary elections, had misused 3 million euros in EU funds by paying party officials based in France.

She had told France’s La Tribune Dimanche on Saturday that “the judges have the power of life or death over our movement.”

The judges appear to have given her party a death sentence. Eight further RN members and twelve assistants were also found guilty in the same trial.

Elon Musk has warned the move will “backfire,” with globalist house magazine The Economist in agreement that “her sentence for corrupt use of EU funds could strengthen the hard right.” Its report stated, “Barring Marine Le Pen is a political earthquake for France.”

The shockwaves have reached across Europe, and around the world. Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini called the court’s ruling a “declaration of war by Brussels,” joining Dutch and Hungarian national-populist leaders Geert Wilders and Viktor Orban in condemnation of the move.

According to commentators, the legal ruling shows that the liberal-global regime is now canceling democracy. Independent journalist Michael Shellenberger said on X of worldwide globalist moves to criminalize its opponents: “This is a five alarm fire.”

Citing the lawfare undertaken against then-candidate Donald Trump, former State Department official Mike Benz described the many examples of the rule of lawfare were “a dagger in the heart of democracy”:

Donald Trump Jr. asked whether the French judiciary are “just trying to prove JD Vance was right” – referring to the vice president’s “blistering attack on European leaders” over their rising censorship and anti-democratic moves. Vance told EU and UK leaders in Munich, “Democracy rests on the sacred principle that the voice of the people matters. There is no room for firewalls. You either uphold the principle or you don’t.”

U.S. political strategist Steve Bannon also referenced populist figures facing legal persecution in his “War Room” rundown of the Le Pen affair today:

The move to legally “firewall” Le Pen has left even her political opponents disturbed, with the ruling Prime Minister Francois Bayrou reportedly “disquieted” by the verdict. Jean-Luc Melenchon, the leader of the left-liberal LFI and a determined political enemy of Le Pen, has said, “The decision to remove an elected official should be up to the people” – not the courts.

Right-populist leader Eric Zemmour, who coined the term “remigration,” warned of a “coup d’etat” of activist judges in 1997 – and said today that “everything has to change” as “it is not for judges to decide for whom the people must vote.”

Laurent Wauquiez of the conservative Les Republicains – who have also refused to work with the RN in coalition – said, “The decision to condemn Marine Le Pen is heavy and exceptional. In a democracy, it is unhealthy that an elected official be forbidden to stand for election.”

It seems this latest example of liberal-global lawfare may even see Le Pen’s party rise in the polls, with a survey today showing two-thirds of all French voters saying her ineligibility would not stop them voting for her RN party.

Nearly half of voters believe she was treated harshly “for political reasons,” with a quarter believing the move to bar her will be a “trump card” for the party overall.

Whether the move “backfires” or not, the message to Western electorates is becoming clear. You can vote for liberals of the left, right, or center – because anyone offering a real alternative will be locked out of power, or locked up in jail.

It remains to be seen how long the rule of lawfare can last against the rising demand for popular politics. After canceled elections, speech crackdowns, and criminalizing their opponents, the globalist remnants across the West are now liberal democracies in name only.

MxM News

Newly Revealed Documents Confirm Lab Leak Coverup

Quick Hit:

The global debate over COVID-19’s origins has taken a dramatic turn after newly uncovered reports indicate that intelligence agencies in Germany had determined with near certainty that the virus originated in a Chinese lab as early as 2020. Despite this revelation, German Chancellor Angela Merkel reportedly chose to suppress the findings, aligning with a broader pattern of obfuscation by Western governments and media outlets.

Key Details:

• German newspapers Zeit and Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that Germany’s intelligence agency, the BND, concluded in early 2020 with 80% to 95% certainty that COVID-19 leaked from a lab in Wuhan, China.

• The intelligence was based on a combination of public-domain research and classified investigations under the code name “Saaremaa.”

• Merkel’s administration allegedly buried the findings, with her successor Olaf Scholz continuing the suppression, ensuring the information remained hidden from the public until now.

Diving Deeper:

Journalist Alex Berenson detailed the shocking revelations in his Substack op-ed, underscoring how “the American media is doing its best to ignore the biggest news this week.” Berenson criticized legacy media outlets for fixating on the five-year anniversary of COVID-19 while sidestepping the implications of newly surfaced intelligence.

According to Berenson, German intelligence reached its high-confidence conclusion after analyzing public materials and conducting covert operations. “The material… indicated that there had been some risky research methods used there [at the Wuhan Institute of Virology], compounded by breaches of laboratory safety rules… [and] so-called gain-of-function experiments, in which viruses occurring in nature are manipulated [to become more dangerous or transmissible],” he wrote.

Rather than alert the world to the evidence, Merkel chose to suppress it. Berenson sarcastically noted, “Who immediately told the world of the findings and demanded a full investigation into what China’s totalitarian government knew and when it knew it? Nah, I’m funning you. Angela stuffed that report in a drawer and got back to doing what she did best, destroying Germany’s industrial base to make Greta Thunberg happy.”

The refusal to disclose this intelligence aligns with a broader pattern of deception from both governmental and media institutions, which spent years dismissing the lab leak hypothesis as a conspiracy theory. Berenson noted that during early 2020, “Dr. Anthony S. Fauci and Peter Daszak… were gently steering their fellow scientists towards a conclusion that COVID’s origins were 100 billion zillion percent natural.”

Even after Merkel left office in 2021, Scholz’s government continued to keep the intelligence under wraps. “The BND told her replacement, Olaf Scholz, ‘without the results finding their way to the public’ — as the British newspaper The Telegraph delicately put it,” Berenson wrote. Now that the findings have emerged, the German government has not denied the reports, leaving Berenson to conclude, “There’s about a 100 to 100 percent chance they’re true.”

The final takeaway? “We all sorta knew this already, right? Both the lab leak and the coverup,” Berenson observed. “But there’s knowing and there’s knowing. And it looks like the same American news outlets that spent 2020 and 2021 lying (or, at best, being hopelessly credulous) about China and COVID still aren’t ready to come clean.”

As new evidence continues to surface, the question remains: Will legacy media and world leaders finally acknowledge the lab leak theory as fact, or will they continue to deflect responsibility and protect their preferred narratives?