As GD posted recently (Any Challenge From Le Pen Ruled Out For Five Years) the French ruling class have decided that they’re going to defend democracy by removing one of the possible choices that French people might have voted for in sufficient numbers that could win the presidency:

She has been sentenced to prison (although she will apparently not serve her sentence behind bars but by the practically equal humiliation of wearing an ankle bracelet, as if she were a career criminal whose whereabouts needed to be constantly monitored), a substantial fine, and most significantly of all, a ban on political activity for five years. That means that she can’t run for president in 2027. Not coincidentally, Le Pen is also the chief critic of France’s leftist political elites and their open borders policies. 

Similarly for Romania (More Of The EU Defending Democracy) where Romanian presidential candidate Calin Georgescu won an election that was then overturned by the nation’s Supreme Court on claims that he won thanks to the Russians, and was then removed entirely from even running in the re-scheduled election.

This should remind you of the attempts made to stuff Trump’s chances of winning the 2024 election, via multiple court actions – ranging from attempts to paint him as a business fraud to a rapist to an election cheat. Even though unsuccessful those efforts by the Democrat Party have left scars:

The price of serving in a Republican administration has gone up, with incoming staffers urged to buy legal insurance to cover the costs of defending against lawfare.

“It’s edging into absolute requirement territory,” an official who served in Trump’s first administration told NBC News in January. “It would be reckless” to do without the insurance, he continued, “if you have any assets to protect — the house, college funds, whatever.”

The legal bills from complying with — never mind fighting — federal investigations or congressional inquiries can be ruinous, as first-term Trump personnel discovered. Lawfare isn’t just a legal weapon, it’s economic warfare, and the threat of it is a deterrent to anyone considering working for Trump.

Lawfare which was applied even to non-members of the first Trump administration, meaning lawyers who simply did their jobs in advising him:

[The Democrats] have tried to disbar more than 100 attorneys who agreed to work on election integrity cases following the 2020 presidential election. They’ve expanded that lawfare to attorneys across the nation who defend conservatives, including half of Republican attorneys general.

Why is this suddenly happening in so many “democracies”?

[T]he political and cultural currents all over the West are moving away from the left. The march of the “progressives” (that is, those who want a massive federal state controlling every aspect of life) toward final victory and the imposition of authoritarian socialist rule seemed drearily inevitable just a few years ago, but now it is very much in doubt. Those who are unshakably convinced that they are right and righteous, however, are not inclined to give up power freely and willingly to those who will set about to dismantle the socialist edifices they have been assiduously building in Western Europe and North America for all these years. 

It may astonish readers (but it shouldn’t) to find out that the same shit is happening in Israel and being pulled by the same sort of people for the same reasons, as PM Bibi Netanyahu’s cabinet unanimously voted to dismiss Ronen Bar, the head of the Shin Bet—the country’s domestic security service.

This was always going to happen. It happened after the Yom Kippur War of 1973, with various military and intelligence people being fired, or retiring or being demoted. It eventually harvested even the heroic PM, Golda Mier, as it may this time get Netanyahu simply on the basis of “the buck stops here”. But given the massive failure of Shin Bet on October 7, 2023 they were always going to be the first in line for the firing squad. As the details of that failure have slowly emerged it looks even worse, especially for Bar:

[T]he late-night meetings Bar convened at Shin Bet headquarters concluded that Hamas was raising its own level of readiness out of fear of an impending Israeli attack….Astoundingly Bar’s message to the IDF was a recommendation to leave the theater quiet, lest raising the level of alert would reinforce Hamas’ fear of an imminent attack and lead to accidental escalation. They kept the raw intelligence from the IDF units around the fence for the same reason they kept it away from the cabinet: to prevent escalation.

The IDF, trusting Shin Bet, slept peacefully into the wee small hours (so quiet were they that Hamas paused for a few hours, thinking it was a trap). It’s for that reason that Bar is gone; the Cabinet actually did not specifically cite that failure but the reality that the PM had lost confidence in the man. Who wouldn’t? Apparently this was what Bar was like in general:

This was not an isolated event. This was and still is Bar’s MO. He acts as if Israel’s internal secret service is not accountable to anyone but himself, as if it were free to operate in the shadows outside the control and oversight of Israel’s elected government. He displayed the same contemptuous spirit of insubordination when he ignored a summons by the cabinet to answer questions at the March 20 meeting that decided the future of his career. Instead, he sent a letter in which he point-blank refused to recognize the cabinet’s authority to dismiss him.

When you have the head of your nation’s secret service thinking he’s bigger than the civil, democratic government, you have real problems, and the news has since grown even wilder as it becomes apparent that Bar, rather than following the long tradition of such people quitting once they’re told the PM has no confidence in them, has no intention of leaving and is doing everything he can to fight back, including investigating the PM:

Bar has taken a page from James Comey’s Russian collusion playbook: He is trying to protect himself by tying his chief’s hand with a contrived investigation. For now the investigation is formally directed only against the prime minister’s staff—much like the early days of the Russia hoax. But after Netanyahu interviewed and announced his candidate to head the Shin Bet, Bar pushed back by escalating his Qatar investigation…Jonathan Urich, Netanyahu’s close aide, was arrested on March 31, and Netanyahu himself was whisked out of the court room where he was testifying in his own trial, for questioning. 

Except this is more like the head of the CIA or NSA trying that stunt against a US President, a gambit far more dangerous than what the FBI’s Comey attempted, and it gets worse:

Journalist Amit Segal recently exposed a directive from Bar to spy on the Israeli police force in order to track “the spread of Kahanism into law enforcement institutions.” The late Meir Kahane’s Kach party is banned in Israel and is designated as a foreign terrorist organization in the U.S. Since the minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who is in charge of the police, is routinely labeled a Kahanist, what the directive means in practice is that Bar is spying, with no probable cause, on a member of the cabinet to which he is supposed to answer, and intimidating police personnel into insubordination, by insinuating that adherence to the minister’s directives could be considered possible “Kahanism.” 

Just to make things extra juicy, Netanyahu’s personal bodyguard is also under Bar’s command!

In all this Bar is being helped by none other than Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara. who naturally is also on the Cabinet chopping block, and both have made discreet appeals to the Supreme Court (Bar says he will only lay out his responses to cabinet in “the proper forum” according to what the “authorized judicial bodies” will decide.). Two years ago that Court survived a bruising fight with Netanyahu – over their self-selection process and their claim that they can overrule all and any action by the executive and legislature – thanks partly to Bar and Baharav-Miara, so they may be inclined to return the favour, even though the law (changed in 2002) specifically empowers the cabinet, and nobody else, to hire and fire the head of Shin Bet. The “proper forum” has already convened, and its decision was unanimous.

Aside from the specifics of the case it’s the overall atmosphere that links up with the lawfare of the Left in America and Europe, and which is perfectly represented in Bar’s “MO” mentioned above; these people are convinced that they know best, and they’re not going to be dissuaded politicians, let alone by the yokels who vote them into power:

Bar’s insubordination and the court’s boundless authority draw on the same spirit of contempt for electoral politics, and are part of the same bureaucratic power structure. There is a direct line connecting Bar’s insubordination when he helped undermine the government’s judicial reform before Oct. 7, his disregard for the chain of command in the early hours of Oct. 7 when he did not wake the prime minister, and his current defiance of the civil authority to which the Shin Bet is subordinate by law. Bar, like many of his fellow progressive government employees, and many in the press and academia, has convinced himself he is here to save us Israelis from ourselves.

It’s also why he didn’t raise the alarm, didn’t want to “escalate” with Hamas; Bar still believes in the Two State Solution and the “Peace Process”, and he wasn’t going to screw that up or allow the PM and minister of defence to do so by drawing different conclusions about the intelligence data.

About the only good news in this mess is that the system of gatekeeping groups that successfully defeated Netanyahu Supreme Court reforms are in big trouble themselves, for two very practical reasons:

Oct. 7 was not just an intelligence and operational failure of the armed forces. It was also an indictment of the antireform strategy: the scorched earth tactics that played fast and loose with our security by arranging mass walkouts of army reservists….

With Hamas and Hezbollah watching! This is like the failures on immigration in Germany, France, Britain and America; the terrible realities of that, hurting many citizens in many ways, has deligitimised the ruling classes.

[T]he flow of money to the protest movement from the Biden administration has been replaced by the new administration’s inquiry into the use of this money by the anti-Netanyahu forces; the widening of Netanyahu’s wartime coalition has made this government more stable; the need a wartime prime minister has for a head of Shin Bet he can trust is obvious to most Israelis; there’s a new IDF chief of staff, general Eyal Zamir, and a new chief of police who will not let the anti-Netanyahu permanent protest disrupt public life in the middle of a war.

Just as the Trump Administration has begun to cut off the funding of Left-Wing NGO’s via US government sources like USAID and the EPA.

There’s also one more link on the other side of this fight, and that’s the fact that Netanyahu has decided to fight, just as Trump has, and for much the same reasons:

Perhaps more important than all these changes is Netanyahu’s decision to lead the charge against the deep state. In doing so, he is now attempting to correct what was perhaps the greatest miscalculation of his long political career. For years he thought that he could make do with the defiant upper echelons of the security establishment, including insubordinate heads of security services, and with the imperial Supreme Court, with its juristocratic auxiliaries in the executive, including a politicized prosecution. That calculation proved detrimental to Israel’s democracy, to the right’s ability to govern, and to Netanyahu’s personal fate as a target of a politically weaponized criminal prosecution. He has now made the decision to tackle the problem at its roots, rather than skirmishing with the tentacles of the deep state over specific issues on an ad hoc basis.

Whether Trump and his Israeli counterpart will win is still a throw of the dice. But frankly they have to if Western nations like them are to even survive, let alone thrive.