America First? Just another big issue the virus has completely obscured.

Will we hear again of Big Stick isolationism from Trump before the election?

Or will he just surprise us and walk away from NATO, the WTO, the UN, and some or all of our Pacific alliances, all after the election?

And then shock us all by again urging a formal US-Israel mutual defense pact, extending our nuclear umbrella to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv?

His muddled neo-isolationist nationalism played pretty well in his 2016 campaign, and might again.

And though I haven't seen much on that point I'd expect Biden to continue to be what he has been for all his career, a standard-issue adherent of liberal globalism, firmly defending its post WW2 institutional creations and affirming, if asked, our Article 5 commitment to putting Riga under our nuclear umbrella.

On the other hand, it has been the custom of Democrats to run on peace and then give us war, once in the White House.

Wilson, FDR, and even Kennedy/Johnson all did that.

The Duce could pull a Republican reversal, running as a foreign policy tough guy and then actually going through with major pieces of his 2016 America First agenda.

The offense of Coronavirus globalism

It is the rise of Virus Nationalism.

People get upset about American producers shipping PPE, masks, ventilators, and the like to buyers overseas.

And others also get upset when products related to the struggle to deal with this virus are made in their own country for shipment to buyers in other countries.

People like Trump often argue protectionism makes sense at least for anything related to national security if not across the board.

And of course Trump has notoriously claimed without challenge than trade in anything at all is a national security matter.

Lately a kind of instinctive and worldwide Trumpism has emerged regarding medical goods related to the virus.

And it is undermining the global effort, as well as economic globalism and multinationalism in general.

Maggie T must have turned over in her grave.

In Boris Johnson's video release he says the NHS is the UK's "greatest national asset."

It is "the beating heart of this country."

He insisted on the need to "protect the NHS" from being overrun by too high a virus wave.

And that the lockdown is absolutely necessary, an absolute lifesaver that must go on.

Then he lavished thanks upon his personal caregivers and especially his ICU nurses by name.

Mr Johnson, 55, was taken to London's St Thomas' Hospital on Sunday - 10 days after testing positive for Covid-19.

He spent three nights in intensive care before returning to a ward on Thursday.

He said in a video on Twitter that he had witnessed the "personal courage" of hospital staff on the front line.

Mr Johnson said two nurses - Jenny from New Zealand and Luis from Portugal - stood by his bedside for 48 hours at the most critical time and named several other hospital workers who cared for him this past week that he wanted to thank.

He said NHS workers "kept putting themselves in harm's way, kept risking this deadly virus".

"It is thanks to that courage, that devotion, that duty and that love that our NHS has been unbeatable," he said.

. . . .

Health Secretary Matt Hancock said he was "delighted" the PM was out of hospital and continuing his recovery at Chequers.

He added that staff at St Thomas' would "have cared for him as they would have cared for anybody in this country," which was "one of the things that makes me so proud that the NHS is there for us all".

. . . .

Dr Ian Abbs, chief executive at Guy's and St Thomas' hospital, said: "It is a great credit to the exceptional professionalism of clinical teams, as well as everyone in the wider organisation, that we have been able to care for the prime minister so effectively, whilst continuing to deliver equally high standards of care to all of our patients.

"While it is right that we celebrate this good news, our thoughts turn immediately to those who still need our help at this time.

"On behalf of everyone at Guy's and St Thomas', I'd ask that people stay home to help us save lives and protect the NHS."

People forget who the Dems are running against

Chris Hayes pointed out that while the press was pearl-clutching because Bernie praised Castro's literacy program - yeah, I know, it's "Mussolini made the trains run on time", but at least Castro actually did it and it actually was a good thing - Bozo was in India lavishing love on Modi and praising him as a devoted champion of religious liberty.

Nobody turned a hair at this fantastic lie, this absurd and gross misrepresentation of the bigoted and deadly Hindu nationalist authoritarian - whom Trump praised for his nationalism - as a champion of religious pluralism and freedom, even as the Duce also covered the violence and political attacks on Muslims Modi has personally incited with equally gross mislabeling as active engagement in the struggle against Muslim - yes, Bozo made it specifically Muslim - terrorism.

Nobody even said "Boo!"

Is this what the "free media coverage" of Mini-Mussolini and his Dem opponent is going to look like all the way to November?

Every time the media feel it necessary to report some mote in the Democrat's eye they should bellow with all their lung power about the corresponding beam in Bozo's eye, to deserve to call themselves "fair and balanced".

But they won't.

They'll be oohing and aaahing about Joe squeezing some young woman's shoulder and how much it just sickened her, while ignoring that Bozo is and has always been an unrelenting pussy-grabbing sex criminal and doesn't give a shit who knows it.

And nor do his party or his voters.

Trump at the UN

From a hospital waiting room.

A national disgrace, a fool, and a drivelling ass reiterates every nationalist stupidity and lie at the heart of his "America First" agenda, about which he crows and crows as he denounces globalism and global institutions.

It's a campaign speech full of offensive nonsense and lies about defense, trade, and everything he touches on.

Not excepting Brexit and the European Union.

He even suggested China ought to be kicked out of the WTO and denied the status of a developing country.

And addressing the global phenomenon of mass, unauthorized migration, he repeatedly attacked the migrants as unfairly burdening the countries they go to.

Using Venezuela to attack socialism, for domestic consumption.

Not one moment's applause, and he's been speaking for a while.

Stoney silence through the whole thing.

Even when he lies that his administration supports things that his UN audience might support.

Democrats edging toward impeachment.

Warren now ahead of Biden.

Perhaps all to the good.

Perfunctory applause at the end, only.

Extraordinary.

Resurgent nationalism

We are told it's about racist and ethno-nationalist reaction to mass immigration from outside Europe and the lesser migrations of Europeans among the nations of the EU.

The ethno-nationalist right believe they can do a better job maintaining national identity - and that's not just about keeping out the blacks - outside the EU than in.

That's a big part of it.

And they are probably right.

We are told that, in most European countries where nationalism is resurgent, it's about the right believing they can keep economies more business-friendly out of the EU than in it.

That's part of it.

But it's all a bit dicey, since some of the left notably think exactly the opposite, that they could take their societies further left outside the EU than in.

And anyway the whole trade picture makes it all a bit foggy; broadly speaking, free trade among the states of the EU is better for business than dealing with a lot of real borders and the various forms of trade restrictions that accompany them.

Last, a really big part of it that seems under-reported is resistance to the cultural revolution taking place in all Christian and post-Christian lands, perhaps only excepting Africa.

The soft spot in the heart of the American right for Putin is all about that.

So it's about abortion, yes, but also gay marriage and other offences against the traditional European morality, which is, of course, the traditional Christian morality.

It's about lots of people believing that they can keep their laws and their culture more in tune with traditional European morality out of the EU than in it.

And how far that is true may vary considerably by country.

PS. Didn't the left media used to rage it was all about Islamophobia?

There was truth to that, too, though it's not as though there wasn't plenty of reason to fear Islam.

Haven't heard much about that in a while, at least in the US.

A natural ally for the nationalist parties of Europe

Italian PM to address claims League sought money from Russia

The Cold War is soooo over.

And in European eyes, Communism is just gone.

Russian power, much diminished in any case, is no threat at all to capitalism or representative government, and Russia is not exporting any sort of revolutionary and crazy ideology just the thing to terrify everyone.

And Putin's authoritarianism, for these folks, just doesn't much matter; if it's anybody's problem, it's the Russians'.

Fewer Europeans, every day, have any interest in NATO and its Cold War II.

More and more people, not just in America but in Europe, and anywhere on the political spectrum but notably on the right, when asked "Should you or your kids be willing to fight and die in a full-scale, pan-European and maybe even global war for the independence of Estonia?", are inclined to answer with a wholly unabashed, "No."

They are equally skeptical of NATO and wholly opposed to the EU superseding Europe's individual nations as a military power.

And just as European parties of the West were not much bothered by, and often actually colluded in, American meddling in their elections to keep power out of the hands of anybody soft on defense against the Soviet bloc back in the day, some parties now seek or tolerate Russian meddling on behalf of nationalists seeking to lead their countries away from the old Cold War alliances and even, sometimes openly and specifically, the power of the US.

How to speed the death of the EU

Europe’s patchwork of abortion laws is absurd. Rights must be made universal

That will thrill the voters in Poland.

Brexit effect forces women to go to Netherlands for abortions

Of course, the objection isn't that rules need to be all the same, but that rules need to be all equally permissive of abortions throughout Europe.

Or some women interested in killing their unborn babies might find it inconvenient, confusing, and annoying, poor things.

A stronger push for control of the laws regarding sex throughout Europe by the post-Christian, PC, feminist, liberal morality, and especially laws regarding abortion, will help drive the breakup of the EU almost as much as liberal, post-national and post-nationalist convictions regarding the morality of immigration and the rights of prospective and actual migrants have done.

That is unfortunate in many ways, for Europe and for Europeans.

But the truth is that liberals, like anybody else, are only willing to tolerate kinds of diversity that they just don't really care about.

Those they hate they want to outlaw, persecute, and abolish.

Leaving the EU is an obvious way for more conservative European countries to escape domination by the nearly universal post-Christian moral orthodoxy.

The more liberal countries, on the other hand, would be free to legalize infanticide at will, suicide and assisted suicide, and euthanasia, probably rather more often than I would.

And I am confident they would.

No deal Brexit is coming

Or anyway so it appears.

Boris Johnson 'not bluffing' about quitting EU on 31 October with no deal

A position that absolutely terrifies most Britons will make him PM.

Representative government in the land of the Mother of Parliaments

The 0.3% of U.K. Voters Who Will Pick the Next Prime Minister

Some 160,000 members of the Conservative Party will make the choice.

This sliver of the population, just 0.3 percent of registered voters, is mostly white, aging and male. And it is poised to use its new clout — the party’s grass roots have never before picked a prime minister — to catapult Boris Johnson into Downing Street, potentially cleaving the world’s oldest and most successful political party as it sends Britain on the path to what could be a tumultuous Brexit.

As the Brexit mess has unfolded, Conservatives have grown ever more impatient, ever more fixated on leaving the European Union, come what may. 

Most members said in recent polling by YouGovthat leaving the bloc was worth enduring significant damage to the economy, secession by Scotland and Northern Ireland and even a shattering of the Conservative Party itself.

. . . .

Conservative membership has plunged since the 1950s, leaving behind a small core of politically active and increasingly right-wing supporters. 

Once effectively a social club where the upper classes mingled with their representatives and perhaps met a spouse, the party has remade itself as class-based politics fragmented and voters realigned themselves by education levels and age.

. . . .

One of the great concerns among Conservatives is the rise of the Brexit Party under Nigel Farage, the former leader of the anti-immigrant U.K. Independence Party. 

The Brexit Party crushed the Conservatives in the European elections last month with its message of Brexit at any cost. 

Mr. Johnson is seen as far and away the best equipped to blunt that charge.

. . . .

A no-deal Brexit, seen as the salvation of the party by some members, looks to others like its ruin. 

Economists warn it could drive up food prices, cost jobs, choke off the supply of medicines and badly disrupt British industry.

“It scares my mum, and I don’t want anything that scares my mum,” Jo Bartley, 49, a Conservative in Canterbury, said. 

“I think as a party, we should avoid things that scare people.”

Ms. Bartley is in the minority, with two-thirds of members preferring a no-deal Brexit.

Roughly 40 percent of the party’s members are older than 65, according to research led by Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, whose coming book on the members is called “Footsoldiers.” 

And they are disproportionately wealthy.

Not exactly an open door, eh?

It has been noted before that the Brexit movement is a development of specifically English nationalism.

Boris Johnson Says Immigrants to U.K. Should Be Forced to Learn English

Boris Johnson, the front-runner to succeed Theresa May as Britain’s prime minister, has said he would require immigrants to Britain to learn English, echoing remarks made by Nigel Farage, the former leader of the populist U.K. Independence Party.

“I want everybody who comes here and makes their lives here to be and to feel British, that is the most important thing. And to learn English,” Mr. Johnson said on Friday at a gathering of Conservative association members, who are voting in a contest between Mr. Johnson and Jeremy Hunt, the foreign secretary.

“Too often there are parts of our country, parts of London still and other cities as well, where English is not spoken by some people as their first language,” Mr. Johnson said. 

“And that needs to be changed.”

BJ is a Brexiteer who has openly favored a no-deal Brexit.

Mr. Johnson’s remarks were greeted with anger by lawmakers from Scotland and Wales, who represent areas where voters speak Gaelic and Welsh.

A legislator from the Scottish National Party, Angus MacNeil, derided Mr. Johnson as “moronic and clueless,” and compared his remarks to “arrogance of centuries past” that put down “native Celtic languages for the Germanic import.”

. . . .

Mr. Johnson, also a hard-liner on Brexit, seems poised for a landslide victory when roughly 160,000 Conservative Party members vote for a new party leader, and by default, the next prime minister. 

He has the support of 74 percent of party voters, compared to the more than 26 percent backing Mr. Hunt, according to a poll by YouGov for The Times of London. 

Ballots are being sent by mail to the members, who must return them in time for the end of voting on July 22.

The voting, already heavily criticized for being open only to 0.3 percent of British voters, faced fresh attacks on Saturday when it emerged that more than 1,000 Conservative Party members had received duplicate ballots. 

. . . .

Mr. Johnson has tacked to the right during the contest, reflecting the right-wing views of the Tory grass-roots members, who are — compared to the electorate as a whole — older, more likely to be white and male, and concentrated in the prosperous south of the country.

Populists, Nationalists, and terrorists in Germany, today

A Political Murder and Far-Right Terrorism: Germany’s New Hateful Reality

I tried snipping, but ended up pasting in about two thirds of the whole article.

Read it.

The politics of HBO's "Chernobyl"

The Daily Caller, behind an absurd demand for subscription, is claiming liberals hate the series while conservatives love it.

The show damns socialism, they say, and not without reason, though the point is disputed just what it damns, and so the left hate it and the right love it.

And yet Vox has published a string of well-deserved positive reviews.

The Guardian, too, loved it by the end, as have lots of other people on the left.

Indeed, so far as I know, nobody outside the post-Soviet, post-socialist Russian state, Putin's Russian nationalist state, has published a review of the series that was negative in net.

Though some on the right have taken occasion to crow, and on the left to deflect.

The HBO series was actually very popular and highly regarded among Russians, but the Putinists are reacting out of stupid offended nationalism, much like the Japanese denying comfort women were slaves, denying the atrocity of Nanking, denying any number of war crimes, and even insisting on celebrating hanged war criminals at patriotic Shinto monuments.

Much like our Southerners and their GOP enablers, celebrating people who fought a war to destroy the Union, to kill the idea that "all men are created equal", to deepen and perpetuate racism in order to commit the South to African slavery forever.

That is to say, the only known folks to damn the series have done so out of the sort of idiot right wing nationalism that mimics the crime-family moms who aid and abet their criminal children, denying they are criminals or excusing their crimes when denial is impossible, because and only because "blood is thicker than water".

The truth is the exact opposite of what the Daily Caller has claimed.

The Russian state, btw, is retaliating with a ludicrous series blaming the CIA for the disaster.

As for the discrepancies between actual history and the events in the series, everybody knows about them because the people who made the series have been yakking about them from the first moments, again and again insisting the series is not and dramatically could not be an entirely accurate rehearsal of who did what, and pointing specifically toward the very same departures from fact to which Russians out to defend the Reds have pointed with an absurd filip of "gotcha".

Not every Russian, not even every Russian personally involved, sees it that way, however.

And this Post story should rebut the lies of surviving Soviet officials whitewashing their and their party's role.

And it is worth remembering that Putin and many others in today's Russian society were themselves officials of the Soviet state.

Even today, many of them, starting with the Big Man, are far from pleased to hear criticism of the Soviet state, feeling correctly they are all of them in varying degrees personally implicated in its crimes and disasters.

A different view of the culture wars

Warsaw to Hold Gay Pride Parade Amid Fears and Threats in Poland

The largest pride parade in central and Eastern Europe was expected to bring thousands of people to the streets of Warsaw on Saturday, at a time when the gay rights movement in Poland is under siege by hate speech and a government campaign depicting it as a threat to families and society.

Diplomats from Canada, the United States and other Western nations will continue a tradition of joining the Equality Parade to show their support for what is considered a basic human right in many places. 

Warsaw’s mayor, Rafal Trzaskowski, was expected to join the parade for the first time.

While many Poles in Warsaw and other cities have grown increasingly supportive of the rights of lesbians, gay men, and bisexual and transgender people, a backlash is underway. 

In recent months, officials from the right-wing governing party, Law and Justice, have portrayed the rights movement, particularly calls for sex education stressing tolerance, as a threat to families and children.

Poland is to have 20 pride parades this year, a record number. 

In some cases, even centrist and left-wing mayors have tried to ban them, usually citing security concerns.

The Law and Justice leader, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, recently called the gay rights movement a foreign import that threatens the nation’s identity. 

In conservative areas, town councils have been declaring their municipalities “L.G.B.T. free.”

On the eve of the parade, a far-right journalist on public television, Rafal Ziemkiewicz, sent chills down the spines of the L.G.B.T. community with a Twitter post. 

“One must shoot at L.G.B.T.” people he wrote, before adding, “Not in the literal sense of course — but these are not people of good will or defenders of anybody’s rights, (the movement is) a new mutation of Bolsheviks and Nazis.”

Five Arrested in London Bus Attack on Two Lesbians

The British police said Saturday that they had made five arrests in the case of what they called a homophobic attack on two women who were assaulted and robbed on the deserted top deck of a double-decker bus in North London last month.

Four teenagers ages 15 to 18 were arrested on Friday on suspicion of robbery and aggravated grievous bodily harm, the Metropolitan Police of London said in a statement. 

On Saturday, a fifth person was detained, the police said.

. . . .

The attack took place around 2:30 a.m. on May 30 on a bus heading toward the neighborhood of Camden, according to the statement.

The women, sitting on the upper deck, were approached by “four males who began to make lewd and homophobic comments to them,” the police said. 

The two women were “punched several times” and robbed, the police said, and were treated at a hospital for facial injuries.

One victim described the attack in a Facebook post and in an interview with BBC Radio 4, identifying herself as Melania Geymonat. 

She said that she and her girlfriend, Chris, had been heading toward Camden after a date when a group of young men harassed them.

“We must have kissed or hugged or something like that, because right away they saw that we were together, so they came after us,” she said in the radio interview. 

Walk the Moon, Toni Braxton to headline Pittsburgh Pride on the Andy Warhol Bridge

Pittsburgh pride shows in rating among 20 top U.S. cities for 2019 LGBTQ retirement

A ‘Straight Pride’ parade is planned for Boston

R.I. Bishop Tobin’s stance against Pride Month spurs criticism

The logic of this thing leads straight to ethic cleansing

Maybe not soon. Maybe it's not even really in his head, yet. But it's coming.

Final Israeli Election Results Bolster Netanyahu’s Lead

A final count of ballots on Thursday gave Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party an additional seat in Parliament, making it the largest faction and punctuating the Israeli leader’s victory.

The results released by Israel’s central election commission showed Likud capturing a total of 36 seats in the 120-seat Parliament, compared to 35 seats for its main rival, the centrist Blue and White party. 

An earlier count had the two parties deadlocked.

Altogether, Likud and its traditional Jewish ultra-Orthodox and nationalist allies command a 65-55 majority, putting Mr. Netanyahu in position to head the next coalition government. 

On Wednesday, Blue and White’s leaders conceded defeat.

A little context.

Remember this?

Israeli Law Declares the Country the ‘Nation-State of the Jewish People’

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has long demanded that the Palestinians acknowledge his country’s existence as the “nation-state of the Jewish people.” 

On Thursday, his governing coalition stopped waiting around and pushed through a law that made it a fact.

In an incendiary move hailed as historic by Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition but denounced by centrists and leftists as racist and anti-democratic, Israel’s Parliament enacted a law that enshrines the right of national self-determination as “unique to the Jewish people” — not all citizens.

The legislation, a “basic law” — giving it the weight of a constitutional amendment — omits any mention of democracy or the principle of equality, in what critics called a betrayal of Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence, which ensured “complete equality of social and political rights” for “all its inhabitants” no matter their religion, race or sex.

The new law promotes the development of Jewish communities, possibly aiding those who would seek to advance discriminatory land-allocation policies. 

And it downgrades Arabic from an official language to one with a “special status.”

How do we account for the key fact of our age?

That the worst and least qualified among us think they are entitled to rule everything?

And that so many others encourage this belief.

This is the real Revolt of the Masses.

It is what democracy as a cultural as well as political obsession corrupts into.

Populist nationalism in India

Under Modi, a Hindu Nationalist Surge Has Further Divided India

When Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, was elected in 2014, it was with broad support for his sweeping promises to modernize India’s economy, fight corruption and aggressively assert India’s role in the world. 

Five years later, he is widely seen as having made at least some progress on those issues.

That secular agenda was always entwined with Mr. Modi’s roots within a conservative Hindu political movement that strives to make India a Hindu state. 

Many of his more moderate supporters hoped he might set the sectarianism aside.

But over the past five years, his bloc, the Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., has been spreading an us-versus-them philosophy in a country already riven by dangerous divisions. 

The Hindu right has never been more enfranchised at every level of government.

Now, with national elections underway, and with most polling data indicating that Mr. Modi will return to power, the growing belief here is that a divisive Hindu-first agenda will only accelerate.

The emboldening effect became apparent within months of the 2014 election. 

Hindu lynch mobs began to pop up across the landscape, killing Muslims and lower-caste people suspected of slaughtering cows, a sacred animal under Hinduism. 

Most often, they have gotten away with it.

Hate speech began to proliferate. 

So did the use of internet trolls to shut down critics.

Government bodies began rewriting history books, lopping out sections on Muslim rulers, changing official place names to Hindu from Muslim, and more aggressively contesting holy sites. 

They also began pushing extremist Hindu priorities, including an effort to locate a mystical river that features prominently in Hindu scriptures. 

Critics called it pseudoscience and said the search was akin to using public dollars to study mermaids.

The consensus among Indian activists and liberal political analysts is that their society, under Mr. Modi, has become more toxically divided between Hindus and Muslims, between upper and lower castes, between men and women.

. . . .

Its population may be 80 percent Hindu, but the modern country’s founding fathers, including Nehru and Mohandas K. Gandhi, resisted going down the path of establishing a religiously identified state like Iran or Pakistan.

Barack Obama in Berlin

Speaking to conference of youth about immigration and nationalism.

Obama made the comments during a two-hour town hall meeting in Berlin, which hundreds of young leaders from across Europe attended. 

"Immigration issues are driving a lot of the political turmoil here in Europe and in my own country," Obama said in a shared video of the talk. 

Urging those in the crowd to view those who expressed opposition to immigration with empathy, Obama said: "We can't label everyone who is disturbed by migration as racist. 

. . . .

During the talk, Obama also called for "a humane, intelligent, thoughtful, orderly immigration policy that is grounded in our better selves and our better values. 

"And we're going to have to figure out how do we make the people who are already in a country feel comfortable with newcomers," Obama said.

"That requires education and exposure and reducing fear on the part of people who are already there," he said, adding, "It also requires some levels of adaptation from the people who are coming in."

Obama also touched on the rise of nationalism across Europe and North America, asserting that "nationalism, particularly on the far right, is re-emerging." 

"We know where that leads," he said. 

"Europe knows better than anyone where that leads.

"It leads to conflict, bloodshed and catastrophe," he said. 

O warns against the circular firing squad

While speaking at a town hall in Berlin, Germany, on Saturday, former President Barack Obama addressed divisions within the Democratic party and outlined his concerns about the fiercely partisan political climate.

“One of the things I do worry about sometimes among progressives in the United States—maybe it’s true here as well—is a certain kind of rigidity where we say, ‘Oh, I’m sorry, this is how it’s going to be,” Obama said at the town hall, organized by The Obama Foundation. 

“And then we start sometimes creating what’s called a 'circular firing squad' where you start shooting at your allies because one of them is straying from purity on the issues.

He continued: "When that happens, typically the overall effort and movement weakens, so I think...you have to recognize that the way we’ve structured democracy requires you to take into account people who don’t agree with you.”

. . . .

Organized by The Obama Foundation, the town hall brought together more than 300 young leaders from private, public and nonprofit institutions and organizations, according to a statement. 

Populist (white) nationalism on the continent

Poland’s Populists Pick a New Top Enemy: Gay People

Poland’s governing party, Law and Justice, has seized on the declaration and the issue of gay rights in its campaigning for European Union elections in May and for national elections this fall.

Where the party once attacked migrants as a threat to the soul of the country, gay people have become its public enemy No. 1 in recent weeks.

It is part of a growing trend across eastern and central Europe, where nationalist and populist parties are increasingly turning to cultural issues — and attacks on gay people — to rally their faithful.

From Romania, where the government tried and failed to change the Constitution to ban same-sex marriage, to Hungary, where homosexuals are vilified as a threat to traditional families, the letters L.G.B.T. are being scorned as part of a broader struggle against what the nationalists and populists call “European values.”

Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the leader of Law and Justice and the most powerful politician in Poland, used the party’s convention in March to declare that this was a war Poland must win to survive.

. . . .

“I think that Poland will be a region free from L.G.B.T.,” said Elzbieta Kruk, who is running on the party’s list for a seat in the European Parliament. “I hope it will be.”

Somebody dreamed that Germany would be Judenrein, a while back, and we know how that worked out.

. . . .

Leading Polish figures in the Roman Catholic Church, itself reeling from revelations about sexual abuse by priests, have also joined in.

Ah, the same Polish Church that played so signal a role during and before the Holocaust is making Catholics the world over proud, again.

The Rev. Marek Dziewiecki, a well-known Catholic priest and educator, told a local radio station in a recent interview that the plus in “L.G.B.T.Q.+” stood for “pedophiles, zoophiles, necrophiles,” and that the ultimate goal was to “make people into infertile erotomaniacs.”

When some 1,500 supporters of far-right groups came to Czestochowa, Poland’s holiest site, this month, the Rev. Henryk Grzadko warned those gathered that Poland was experiencing a “civilizational invasion.”

. . . .

Rafal Trzaskowski, the mayor of Warsaw, who issued the tolerance declaration, said that while he had expected a cynical response from the government, he worried about the sort of propaganda state outlets had produced.

It was the same kind of bile, he said, that led a man to fatally stab the mayor of Gdansk, Pawel Adamowicz, on live television this year.

Matteo Salvini Announces New European Alliance of Far-Right Populists

Matteo Salvini, the anti-immigrant politician who is the most powerful figure in Italy’s government, on Monday announced the formation of a new European alliance of populist and far-right parties ahead of critical European Parliament elections in May.

“Others will join between now and the 26th of May,” the last day of voting, Mr. Salvini, leader of the League party in Italy, said at an event in Milan with allies from Denmark, Finland and Germany. 

“Our objective is to be the force of government and change in Europe.”

. . . .

Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right National Gathering party, did not attend the announcement on Monday, though she has signaled her support for the new group.

. . . .

“We are working for a big party for the new Europe,” said Mr. Salvini, Italy’s deputy prime minister and interior minister, whose efforts overlap with those of Steve Bannon, the former strategist for President Trump.

. . . .

Jörg Meuthen, a leader of the far-right Alternative for Germany party, or AfD, said at the news conference that there were absent partners “who will join us soon.” 

Immediately after the elections in May, he said, the allied parties will form a new group in the European Parliament called the European Alliance of Peoples and Nations, the result of numerous meetings over recent months.

Olli Kotro, a member of the Finns Party who attended the event, was more cautious, saying, “It remains to be seen who will join us.”

While they share common ground when it comes to strong borders against migration and an emphasis on traditional, national identities, Europe’s far-right populists also disagree on many points of policy. 

Mr. Salvini’s German and Scandinavian partners lean toward free-market economics, while their French allies are more protectionist.

Mr. Salvini has argued repeatedly that other European Union members must take their fair share of migrants, but some countries, like Hungary, have slammed the door shut. 

And Poland does not share the warmth that Mr. Salvini and other populists have toward Russia.

The state of play in Slovakia

In Slovakia, Unlikely Presidential Candidate Signals a Backlash Against Populism

During the final debate before Saturday’s presidential election in Slovakia, the men were arguing, but the only woman onstage, Zuzana Caputova, looked on calmly.

Stefan Harabin, the former justice minister and a champion of ethnic nationalism, accused Muslim migrants of “killing and raping European women in Germany and France” and claimed his opponents wanted to destroy Slovak culture.

But Ms. Caputova did not respond to the outrage. In a political climate where stridency is often rewarded and crudeness frequently seen as a marker of authenticity, she has clung to the belief that decency is what voters want most. 

And it seems to be working.

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The latest polls show Ms. Caputova with a commanding lead over all her rivals: The field has been winnowed from about a dozen candidates to five, including an avowed neo-Nazi, Marian Kotleba. 

If Ms. Caputova becomes the first woman to lead this nation of 5.4 million people, she will have done so against all odds and conventional political wisdom.

“For Slovakia, this election will determine whether we follow the path toward some form of illiberal democracy,” said Aneta Vilagi, a political scientist at Comenius University in Bratislava. 

“Or it could be an exceptional moment both for this country and in the region, the first big victory for a candidate promoting liberal democracy in the last four years.”