[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]

When, since its founding in 1945, has as much truth been spoken in any UN chamber as was spoken by Donald Trump in his masterful hour-long oration on September 23? As part of “High-Level Week,” during which heads of government from around the world take their turns in the spotlight, most of them boring the General Assembly to death for fifteen minutes or so before shutting offstage, Trump was electrifying. Like J.D. Vance in Munich last February, he served up some home truths, mostly about the countries of Western Europe, which he criticized for failing to curb mass immigration, for relying on “green energy,” and for continuing to buy into the idea of climate change, which he described – wonderfully – as “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” He explained his preoccupation with Europe: “I love Europe. I love the people of Europe. And I hate to see it being devastated by energy and immigration. This double-tailed monster destroys everything in its wake…you want to be politically correct and you are destroying your heritage.”

You might expect at least some members of the Western European political establishment to appreciate Trump’s advice and recognize that he was speaking the truth. No, on second thought, you wouldn’t expect that, and neither would I. The men and women filling that auditorium on First Avenue would, with very few exceptions, be among the last people in the world to give a fair hearing to Trump’s views. They’re lockstep globalists for whom climate change (however it happens to be defined at the  moment) is an undeniable truth and mass Islamic immigration to Europe an absolute good. I’ve written before about the time, many years ago, when I tried to convince an audience of diplomats in Washington, D.C., that there was a dark side to the flood of Muslims that had been entering Western Europe for the past few decades. They dismissed everything I said out of hand, calling it “anecdotal” and implying that I was something of a hysterical fool. Even now, when the seriousness of the problem is far more obvious than it was then, members of the diplomatic corps cling to their fatuous certitudes.

Yes, some of the General Assembly delegates laughed the other day when Trump was being funny. And they applauded him at the end – a sharp departure from the utterly rude reception he got when he last addressed that body seven years ago. Yet they gasped when he dared to question the religion of climate change. And none of them, I’m sure, had their minds changed by anything he said.

As with the politicians and diplomats, so with the media. Throughout Western Europe, Trump’s speech was not just characterized as “scathing,” “blistering,” and so forth but was also roundly mocked. In Norway, where the four reporters who covered Trump’s speech for Dagbladet quoted Hilmar Mjelde, a poli-sci professor and so-called “US expert,” as calling Trump’s comments on climate change “really radical.” Eirik Løkke, another “US expert” – a category of Norwegian academics, by the way, who invariably turn out to understand almost nothing about America and Americans – called Trump an “extremely narcissistic” man whose “extremely childish” statements amounted to “babbling madness.” Løkke appears to have made the media rounds: he told NRK that Trump “has a problematic relationship with reality” and told VG that Trump had “flooded” the hall “with nonsense all the way through.”

Also quoted pretty much everywhere in the Norwegian media was Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre, who distanced himself from Trump’s “unusual” remarks – especially from his criticism of the UN, which, Støre said, “provides great opportunities to solve both conflicts and human development challenges.” (Mind you, high-ranking Scandinavian politicians always defend the UN, because after they’ve reached the top of the pole in their own countries, the only way to rise further is to secure a prestigious post at the UN. This is something that Scandinavian politicians are exceedingly good at.) Støre also criticized Trump for “going after his nearest allies.” Støre seemed not to grasp that Trump was doing something rare and remarkable: motivated by a palpable love of Europe, and especially of Britain, he was giving urgent, heartfelt, and desperately needed advice to Europe’s leaders. If only they would listen!

Anyway, on and on it went. In Spain’s El Mundo, Pablo R. Suanzes noted that Trump largely echoed J.D. Vance’s Munich speech, in which the Vice President – as Suanzes put it – “attack[ed Europe’s] values ​​and censur[ed] its positions on migration and freedom of expression.” Yes, Vance – and Trump – criticized Western European leaders for censoring speech and for failing to curb self-destructive levels of immigration. Some values! (Suanzes actually characterized Trump’s concern about mass immigration as a “fetish.”) In Le Monde, Piotr Smolar griped that Trump “makes no pretense of acting with decorum or using diplomatic language” (like whom? the useless John Kerry?) because he’s “entirely given over to the whims of his obsessions, without any regard for the liberal values ​​that the United States has claimed to defend and embody for decades.” On the contrary, needless to say, Trump has brought back liberal values to a country where they were being flagrantly violated by the previous administration, and wishes to see them return to a continent whose leaders are increasingly clamping down on free speech. Meanwhile, in the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant, you could read that Trump had delivered “one of the strangest speeches ever given at the UN,” presenting a “bizarre narrative.” Another Dutch daily, Trouw, derided Trump’s comments about green energy as “falsehoods” and seemed to scorn his reference to “colossal invasions” by “illegal aliens” – this in a tiny country that is already insanely overrun with unassimilable Muslims. The Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet, for its part, focused on Trump’s climate heresy, asserting that his description of climate change as a hoax was presented “without any evidence.”

I’ll close with the country that was the principal target of Trump’s address. The BBC’s James Lansdale was particularly irked by Trump’s concern for Christian victims of persecution. “Not for nothing,” he grumbled, “is Trump the leader of an administration that wears its religion firmly on its sleeve. ‘Let us protect religious liberty,’ he told the UN, ‘including for the most persecuted religion on the planet today – it’s called Christianity.’” Well, that’s the BBC, where if somebody yanks a headscarf off a woman in a London street, it’s given headline coverage, but if Christians in some Muslim country are being slaughtered en masse, the BBC looks away.

In the Guardian, Mohamad Bazzi slammed Trump for stepping up to the lectern in the General Assembly, “where presidents, kings and statesmen have delivered some of the most important and moving speeches in modern history,” and presenting “a long and humiliating rant.” It was, Bazzi contended, “an embarrassing performance,” “cringeworthy,” “meandering and unhinged”; he called Trump’s remarks about immigration “tirades” and dismissed his warnings that misguided immigration and energy policies would spell “the death of western Europe”.as nothing more than an attempt to gain “attention” by “unleash[ing] fear and chaos.”

Also in the Guardian, columnist Martin Kettle called Trump’s speech “a surprise attack on the UK.” Only a week after Trump, at the state dinner at Windsor Palace, called Britain and the U.S. “two notes in the same chord,” he cautioned that America’s Western European allies were “going to hell.” And, complained Kettle, Trump went after the UK most of all: “Britain got it in the neck more than China, than Russia, than Venezuela or than North Korea. Trump attacked Britain relentlessly, sometimes seemingly more in sorrow than in anger, over migration, over international law, renewable energy, North Sea oil and on the recognition of Palestine.” Kettle concluded that Trump “had looked at the world and at last found an unexpected adversary – us.”

Kettle, like the Norwegian Prime Minister, seemed not to grasp that you don’t tell enemies that they’re going to hell – you keep quiet and hope that they’ll keep going to hell. But it’s an act of real friendship to urge allies to get their act together. And there’s no ally for which Trump has more affection than the UK, where in recent years, as he well knows, thousands of critics of Islam have been arrested for social-media posts while Muslim gangs have been allowed for decades to get away with child rape on an industrial scale. Are Trump’s concerns really all that hard for Western European elites to understand? How far down the road to total Islamization do these countries have to go before their politicians, diplomats, and journalists stop turning everything upside and admit that Trump’s UN speech was a hefty dose of hard truths – every word of it delivered in the name of tough love – and that they, the continent’s spineless elites, are the one who’ve been denying reality the whole time, all in the name of globalism, multiculturalism, and international comity?