2024 was a really great year. This year will go down in history as the year Donald J. Trump won the grand slam of the presidency, the popular vote, the Senate, and the House of Representatives. And now we can think big again.
This past year, all over the West, we have witnessed the awakening of hordes of the unwashed, the so-called “deplorables,” the “trash,” the middle and working classes who do not have their own way of thinking. That's what smart people do.
In the Netherlands, my party, the Freedom Party (PVV), has come to power. We have also seen patriots win elections in Austria, France, Flanders, and Germany. In countries like Spain, Portugal, Italy and the Czech Republic, patriotic parties are attracting more voters than ever before. We won the European Parliament elections in June and the Patriots are now in third place. And we look forward to working with the Trump administration and our Republican colleagues in Congress.
Like Trump, we were rewarded by downtrodden voters because we took their concerns seriously, not the concerns of sobbing people, but the tsunami of illegal immigration, inflation, economic stagnation, and children. Their real concern was woke indoctrination being shoved down their throats. Sisters in the media and academia constantly lament rising temperatures, refugee rights, children who imagine they were born the wrong gender, and America's so-called “genocide.” Gaza, where Israel is fighting terrorists.
2024 will also be remembered as the year Israel eliminated Hamas, blew up pagers in the presence of Hezbollah leaders, and promised protection to Druze villages in Syria seeking to be annexed into the Jewish state.
Unfortunately, in addition to the good news, this past year has also brought with it some bad news. The atrocities committed by Hamas on October 7 last year saw hundreds of innocent people, including women and children, slaughtered, raped and kidnapped for no other reason than that they were Jewish. Everyone would have expected that it would have caused massive damage. Growing solidarity with Israel. Instead, we witnessed an orgy of anti-Semitism in Western Europe.
Over the past few decades, Western Europe has allowed millions of non-Western immigrants into its country, many of them from Muslim countries. of wall street journal It recently pointed out that Britain, France, the Netherlands and Germany have large Muslim communities that identify with the Palestinian cause, while Hungary and the Czech Republic have largely closed their borders to Muslim immigrants. This explains why cities like Budapest and all of Eastern Europe are safer for Jews today than cities like Amsterdam and all of Western Europe.
We are sitting on an explosive barrel and must defuse it before it is too late. There's no time to waste. For me and the PVV members of the Dutch government, this is a top priority. As Elon Musk said about past elections, one more election would have been a disaster. Our country was saved in the nick of time by the voters. If we fail to correct the situation, our children will be held captive in the chains of tyranny.
I visited Israel earlier this month. I met and addressed the president, prime minister, and other ministers in parliament, the only stronghold of democracy in the Middle East. Every time I visit Israel, I think: Israel is a miracle. The Jews transformed the desert into fertile land from nothing. Jews built the only democracy in the Middle East from nothing. Jews built a haven of prosperity out of thin air in a sea of corruption, oppression, and fatalism. There are even growing voices in Syrian villages calling for Israeli annexation.
In fact, the truth is that the richest and freest of all Arabs in the Middle East are the more than 2 million Arabs with Israeli passports. Biased Western media never mentions that these Arabs democratically elected their representatives to the Knesset. Mentioning this undermines the argument that Israel is oppressing Arabs.
The real obstacles to peace in the Middle East are not Israel, but terrorist organizations that use Arab civilians in Gaza and Lebanon as human shields, and authoritarian states like Iran that dream of a global caliphate based on Sharia law.
When I met my friend Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, I told him I was shocked by the arrest warrant issued against him by the International Criminal Court and reiterated what I had previously told the Dutch press. Netanyahu deserves a Nobel Prize more than this insult and humiliation.
Sadly, it must be acknowledged that while immigrants are responsible for many anti-Semitic incidents, they are supported by large numbers of indigenous Westerners. And these are not so-called unwashed and deplorable students, but aggressive students egged on by left-wing professors, intellectuals, journalists, and politicians.
Perhaps many of these people suffer from Stockholm Syndrome, a psychological reaction in which we sympathize with those we fear in the hope that they will help us. But I think there's a more fundamental explanation. What Alexander Solzhenitsyn warned us 46 years ago. In a lecture he gave at Harvard University in June 1978, Solzhenitsyn warned not only against foreign powers but also against domestic critics who are determined to destroy everything we hold dear. He criticized Western countries for having lost the will to protect themselves.
Solzhenitsyn did not mince words. “The decline in courage may be the most striking feature that outside observers notice in the West today,” he says. Solzhenitsyn lamented this “decreased courage, sometimes even a lack of masculinity.” He added a stern warning: “Should I point out that since ancient times a decline in courage has been considered the beginning of the end?”
We need a culture of heroism, a culture of heroes who stand for something. But we can no longer be heroes because our current woke culture denies the existence of objective truths and transcendent values worth defending and dying for. Why do the privileged American and European leftists despise “deplorables,” sympathize with terrorists who seek to drive the Jewish state into the sea, and ridicule and ridicule Donald Trump?
Because they hate nations, peoples, and individuals who bravely stand up for something. They themselves do not stand for anything. To use their own words, they are “fluid”. Gender, values, and beliefs are fluid. These people are good at only one thing. It's about hating people who aren't fluid. Because these people remind us of what they themselves have lost: living in truth.
Donald Trump hasn't even taken office yet, but Hamas's sudden willingness to reach an agreement with Israel for the release of the remaining Israeli hostages before Trump takes office, as well as the equally sudden Western European leaders' His influence is evident in the similar sudden aggressive promotion of Peace talks in Ukraine before President Trump signed a peace deal.
My friend and author Diana West recently said, “Donald Trump's courage is the untold epic of our time.” There is a Latin proverb that goes, “Fortes creantur fortibus: Heroes beget heroes.” In other words, courage is contagious. Pastor Billy Graham said this. “When one person stands up, the spines of others stiffen.”
The greatest threat to the survival of our civilization is the current pandemic of the awakened mind virus. It flourishes in universities and schools, and it flourishes in the media and entertainment industry. These are the rotten remnants of the radical left, the engines of awakening, and must be defeated and rebuilt.
Solzhenitsyn fought against the Soviet Empire. The modern empire that destroys humanity, the one we must defeat is the Woke Empire. Politicians can't do it alone. Winning elections is not enough because politics does not determine the success of a country. Culture does. This is where you come in. This is where your example needs to set the spines of others. This is why having the courage to speak out and stand up for what is true and good is so important.
The West needs heroes, men and women, for our times. It is an era of rebirth, an era of restoration of political sanity, an era of a new culture of civic courage and heroism, an era of ending awakening and living in truth. So 2025 wants you.
Geert Wilders is the leader of the Dutch Freedom Party (PVV), the largest party in the Dutch parliament and government.
