Splendid Isolation

The Divine Sarah has just returned from her native Portugal, and reports as follows:

One of the scariest things about the trip to Portugal was talking to people and realizing they’re living in an alternate reality.

You know, all the things that the Junta has tried to sell, and push? From “We’re in a booming economy” to “Biden is a patriot who stepped down to save the nation” to “Trump is a criminal” to “The refugee crisis is the result of global warming” ALL OF IT is being bought wholesale in Europe.

Now as a caveat to this, actually two of them: My family is now very much what would be considered “laptop class”, i.e. they are all credentialed professionals of some description, who therefore pride themselves on being “well informed” a lot of which consists of following our MSM (NYT, CNN, etc) and the Portuguese translations thereof. And I was mostly associating with them, save for listening in when we were in public, as I pretty much do all the time out of habit and because I like to know what people “really” think.

However, as far as I can tell even if not uniform, Portugal — which probably means most of Europe — at least as far as its educated classes go, is taking the pap our MSM spews as the gospel truth. You literally can’t tell them the truth without their thinking you’re a complete lunatic. I.e. the reality on the ground here in the US seems to them like something out of the left field that we’re just saying for shock value.

Keep that in mind when you hear of all the European love for Kamala-rama-lama-ding-dong.

The thing is that Europeans (including Brits) have  been accustomed to people telling them what to do (and to read, and to think, and to say) for so long that now, when it really counts, there is no “counter-culture” such as we have Over Here:  no equivalent of PJMedia, RedState or Breitbart News, no conservative radio (e.g. as practiced by the much-missed Rush Limbaugh or even the still-living Sean Hannity), or fearless “alternative” bloggers with an enormous following such as Instapundit, and precious few independnet small blogs such as this one.

So in the absence of all that, all they have is state-controlled electronic media and leftwing-sponsored newspapers like Le Matin, Der Spiegel and so on.  (I was amazed at how Lefty even Austrian newspapers were, the last time I was there, and Austria is easily one of the more conservative Euro countries.)

Small wonder that they believe the bullshit thrown at them about Glueball Wormening, Ev Inevitability and untrammeled Third World immigration as a benefit.

So of course, when confronted by the New Counter-Culture (as espoused by leaders such as Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, Geert Wilders and Giorgia Meloni), they are utterly bewildered by such strange concepts because they have never been exposed to them before — and strangeness, as we all know, leads to fear, opposition and resistance, if not outright rejection for no other reason other than strangeness.

And as Sarah so correctly points out,the funny thing is that while European society is living in an alternate reality, they are convinced that it is we who are.

The prognosis for Europe is not heartening, just as it will not be happy for us if the upcoming vote is fixed to provide another four years of BidenHarrisObamaClinton policies.