Thread by @MarlonEttinger

Follow along as I read Eric Zemmour's new book here

Zemmour talks about discovering the "brilliant works" of arch-neocon Samuel Huntington, like "The Clash of Civilizations" and "Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity," where he lamented what he saw as the rapid fall of French civilization.

"Not a day goes by when the police aren't accused of 'police brutality,' of 'systemic racism,'" Zemmour moans. Therefore, his work is not done.

Even worse: not a day goes by when a public TV channel doesn't broadcast a program describing the so-called "crimes of French colonization."

"Not a single little French village...[is without]...wild bands of Chechens, or Kosovars, or Maghrebians, or Africans who steal, rape, pillage, torture, kill."

Zemmour describes a "germano-Soviet pact" between "individualism" and "Islamic civilization" with one similar enemy: "the French people, their mores, their history, their state, their civility, their civilization."

Now a few pages from Zemmour about all the people who come up to him asking him to run for president over the years - including National Front politicians, and those who have maintained loyal to that idea or not. A few jabs at Marine Le Pen's intelligence.

Some boilerplate about how he never imagined presenting himself as a candidate for president - that was for the giants, the de Gaulles, the Mitterands, the Chiracs, not a small thing like him.

Zemmour bemoans the indiscretion of journalists reporting on sexual misconduct by politicians - an "odious American habit." As a journalist who's covered many politicians who became president: Chirac, Sarkozy, Hollande, he's learned many secrets he's proud to never have betrayed.

The most interesting part of the book so far is an account of a meeting between Marine Le Pen & Eric Zemmour earlier this year.

Le Pen says she considers them part of the same political family so she won't attack him. Zemmour says since we're part of the same political family...

...he'll tell her when she's done wrong: she humiliated them in 2017. She warns he won't get more than 3% of the vote and will prevent her from winning, and that politics is miserable, "look at me I'm alone." Zemmour says he thinks Macron wants her in the 2nd tour so he can win.

The France that we knew in the 60s and the 70s has disappeared, says Eric Zemmour - all you need to do is to watch the films from back then to see that.

"The 'great replacement' is neither a myth nor a conspiracy, but a relentless process."

Zemmour uses Serge July of Libération for a banal point the reactionary right tries to make a lot: former communists like July couldn't find the mythic ideal they wanted in the French worker, so they replaced him in their theories with a more perfect victim, the immigrant.

In Zemmour's analysis of the films of Gérard Oury, he compares Oury to de Gaulle: "the great re-conciliator," in cinema instead of politics

He says Oury's films in the 60s represented a brief period when France liked itself: when it could laugh at itself without hating itself.

"I defended the country, order, merit, hierarchy, excellence, assimilation. My discourse would have been banal in the 60s; after the great shakeup of the 70s, it was revolutionary. Revolutionary because it was reactionary." - Eric Zemmour discussing his time on TV in 2006.

"In the streets I was recognized; pretty girls smiled at me and boys saluted me..."

There's a pretty venomous chapter in here where Zemmour is gnashing his teeth about the "false" ideology of the 2006 movie Indigènes which purports to tell the story of the Maghrebis in the French colonial army and their role in the Second World War and in "building France."

This, Zemmour says, is "historically false but politically correct," a colonizing agenda, not an assimilating one - and Zemmour says this push is an attempt to install a new aristocracy of immigrants, Arab, African, Maghrebi, over the native Gauls, like the Franks did after Rome.

"Augustin Thierry called this a 'race war.' Two centuries later, rappers also sing themselves about a new race war," writes Zemmour.

"I've never been able to get rid of certain affection for 'Juju,'" writes Eric Zemmour about Julien Dray, one of the co-founders of SOS Racisme, "even though his ideas make my hair stand on end."

Zemmour calls the prosecution of Maurice Papon, who deported 1,560 Jews under the Vichy government, the replacement of history by propaganda, heroes by victims. He sees the prosecution as a prosecution of Vichy France, which he defends as legitimate.

He adduces the fact that de Gaulle appointed former Vichy officials to his governments to justify Vichy France - if Vichy was criminal, Zemmour asks, wouldn't that make de Gaulle criminal too?

"The journalists who followed the Sarkozy campaign were divided into two camps: the men who mocked him and the women who sympathized. One said 'Cecilia[, Sarkozy's wife,] has a lover,' the others 'Sarko is a cuck.'"

"Sarkozy loved to put his love on display like an adolescent proud of the beauty of his conquest...he was ridiculous but touching."