In a move very familiar to the Dissident Right (survivors of Unite The Right at Charlottesville, the NPI Hungary Conference, and American Renaissance’s 2011 Charlotte, NC Conference), a Muslim mayor in Brussels, with the aid of local Antifa, is trying to shut down Yoram Hazony’s National Conservative Conference:
Emir Kir, the Socialist Party mayor of the central Brussels neighborhood where the gathering took place, issued the order to close the National Conservatism Conference on grounds of “public safety.” But critics said that Mr. Kir’s order only amplified one of the gathering’s main themes: that cancel culture targeting conservative voices has run amok.
By Andrew Higgins, New York Times, April 16, 2024
I describe Kir [Tweet him] as “a Muslim mayor” in Brussels, rather than the Muslim mayor—the actual mayor of Brussels is a white guy, but Kir, whose Wikipedia page puts his nationalities as “Belgian, Turkish,” is the “Bourgmestre” of Saint-Josse, an immigrant neighborhood where many of the immigrants now have Belgian passports, and can vote.
The New York Times report does not describe him as Muslim at all.
The mayor of the Brussels neighborhood where the venue for the @NatConTalk conference is has confirmed he issued an order to ban the event, which may have violated the law on freedom of assembly. He wrote: “I issued an order as the Mayor to ban the ‘National Conservatism… https://t.co/siJ6D9zcdv
— Andy Ngô 🏳️🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) April 16, 2024
In any case, as with the Unite The Right Charlottesville atrocity in 2017, it’s an AntiFa/police collaboration:
Breaking: Belgian police have showed up at the @NatConTalk conservative nationalism conference in Brussels. Antifa have tried to shut down the event and already forced it to change venues last minute. Featured speakers include Viktor Orban & Nigel Farage. pic.twitter.com/Vj5xw2j7cg
— Andy Ngô 🏳️🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) April 16, 2024
While EuroNews calls this a “hard right” gathering [Brussels police shut down hard-right, nationalist gathering featuring Orbán, Farage and Braverman, by Mared Gwyn Jones & Vincenzo Genovese, April 16, 2024], the participants are mostly boringly respectable. Orban is a head of state, Farage a prominent British politician and former Member of the European Parliament, Braverman ,is an MP for Fareham in the UK. and former Home Secretary. Further down in the EuroNews article we discover that attendees include journalist and former French presidential candidate Eric Zemmour and former Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki.
They are, as I say, very respectable. But it hasn’t helped them.
The Z-Man tweets:
It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at a tone policing conference getting tone policed by the ultimate tone policers. https://t.co/wCWQK8pKXr
— The Z Blog (@TheRealZBlog) April 16, 2024
There’s some history there. Yoram Hazony [Tweet him], the organizer of the National Conservative Conference in Brussels, is trying to promote a National Conservatism that isn’t seen as Hard Right.
See our review of Hazony’s 2018 book The Virtue Of Nationalism by the Z-Man: THE VIRTUE OF NATIONALISM: A Book Of Contradictions, July 14, 2019; and also the Z-Man’s review of Hazony’s 2019 conference here: Report From The Gatekeeper’s Ball: Yoram Hazony Really Hates The Right; Zionist Attempt To Co-opt National Conservatism Will Fail [July 16, 2019]. See more at the Z-Blog here, here, and here.
The reason the Z-Man got to report on this conference was that VDARE.com editor Peter Brimelow and his wife, VDARE.com publisher Lydia Brimelow, were specifically not allowed to attend, in spite of the fact that they had (a) been invited and (b) paid $285 dollars… each—see “East is East And West is West”: What The Hazony/Brog Heresy Hunt Says About July’s “National Conservative Conference,” by Peter Brimelow, June 21, 2019.
The U.K. Guardian notes that both the Prime Minister of England, Rishi Sunak, and Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo are criticizing the mayor for harassing the National Conservative. But the Guardian can’t resist calling it a “radical rightwing conference” and throwing in SPLC-level smears at even attendees like cuckservative wimp Rod Dreher, below: Rishi Sunak and Belgian PM criticise mayor’s halting of NatCon conference, by Lisa O’Carroll in Brussels, Aletha Adu and Ben Quinn, April 16, 2024.
Despite my filing a formal complaint with The Guardian over its gross mischaracterization of my position on the Christchurch massacre, and providing documentation, the paper repeated again Antifa press release talking points. Dirtbags, the lot. https://t.co/iVPgis4854
— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) April 16, 2024
What this means is that if you’re a National Conservative and you want to have a conference, it doesn’t matter if you are “respectable,” you still need a secure meeting place, if possible a castle, in a place that hasn’t filled up with Third World immigration.
VDARE.com may not still seem respectable to Yoram Hazony.
But we’re having a meeting on April 26-28. In-person attendance is full up, but there are still livestream tickets available—see here for details!
James Fulford [Email him] is writer and editor for VDARE.com.
