Thread by @garvanwalshe

At the #presidentielles2022 debate last night Marine Le Pen showed a print-out of an old tweet.

My team at @article7news have been looking into Rassamblement National officials' tweets over the last few years...

There's a lot in there she wouldn't want us to see 🧵

2/ Let's start with ones on Ukraine. Here's Jean-Michael Cadenas, calling #Euromaidan a coup - on 24 February, as Russian paratroopers were trying to seize Hostomel airport

3/ And here is Thierry Mariani, an MEP from the RN, with the same Kremlin line

4/ They've held this position for a long time. Here's Andréa Kotarac, complaining that the Trump Administration (!) is too pro-Ukrainian and arming Ukraine too much

5/ It's not only Putin they like. Here's Jean-Paul Garraud, another MEP grateful that Marine Le Pen got Viktor Orbán's blessing.

6/ And who does Orbán not like, that's right, George Soros. Here's MEP Gilles Lebreton, cooking up a conspiracy with Soros, the UN (ONU in French) and *checks notes* Time magazine involving "American soft power agents"

8/ His colleague Catherine Griset can't get over the "globalist agenda" of the UN and NGOs. I suppose we should concede the point about the UN, whose purpose is to promote peace across the globe...

9/ Where media is controlled by "globalist billionaires, patrons of the majority of Western states", the @WHO and Council of Europe (funded by Gates and Soros of course). So says our friend Cadenas

10/ If "globalist billionaires" isn't a codeword, howe about "The metropolises are peopled by 'nomad' populations". No we haven't heard that kind of language before, certainly not from the European far right

11/11 Le Pen herself has shown a lot of campaign discipline but the true face of Rassamblement National shows through, and thanks to @article7news's semantic search technology, we've been able to unearth it extremely fast. Follow @article7news for much more.

12 We've found more, this time about RN officials' support for the banned extreme-right Géneration Identitaire (@julie_renbe's written a brilliant book about them). The organisation was banned for incitement to discrimination, hatred and violence. How did RN people react? 🧵

13 Here's a member of the RN National Bureau, saying he endorses Generation Identitaire and he'll never be part of the anti-racist "Generation Adama"

14 MEP Helen Laporte saying that if GI were banned, it would be impossible to criticise immigration. Funnily enough their proscription hasn't stopped her leader from running an anti-immigration presidential campaign.

15 Gauthier Bouchet, complaining about the sentences for GI members convicted of impersonating police officers on the Franco-Italian border in order to scare off immigrants

16 If we were in revolutionary times, Philippe Eymery, tells us, the government would have resorted to guillotine. Which is ironic, since it is Le Pen herself who suggested putting the death penalty to a referendum

17 Scratch the surface of the RN's campaign and you find the old extreme right, doing what it's always done. ENDS