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

Finally, Western Europeans are taking to the streets for the right reasons. Well, some Western Europeans in some parts of Western Europe, anyway, and at least partly for the right reasons. In France, where street protests (often violent) are as central to the culture as wine, brie, and the cinematic genius of Jerry Lewis, they’ve been rampaging recently over proposed government budget cuts, but back in April they were kicking up a fuss over a blatantly partisan ruling that declared Marine Le Pen ineligible to run for office until 2030. In Britain, of course, Tommy Robinson’s peaceful Unite the Kingdom rally on September 13 drew – depending on whom you listen to – either 3 million protesters or just barely enough people to form a basketball team. (In the pictures, it sure looked like millions.)

And last Saturday, in The Hague, the administrative capital of the Netherlands – where the natives are arguably at least as disinclined as the Brits to get overly worked up in public – an anti-immigration rally, dubbed “Stand Up for the Netherlands,” turned violent. Thousands of people, many of whom brandished Dutch flags, took part, with some of them smashing windows, briefly blocking a highway, and vandalizing the offices of the center-left D66 party; when confronted by the police, according to Euro News, they pelted stones and bottles at them and set a patrol car ablaze, in response to which the cops “used tear gas and a water cannon to disperse the crowd” and made 30 arrests. The organizer, who goes online by some silly alias, disowned the unrest, writing on X that if she’d known the rally would turn out this way, she’d never have planned it. Freedom Party (PVV) leader Geert Wilders, the nation’s leading critic of mass Islamic immigration, was also quick to speak out, calling the rioters “idiots.”

Yes, violence is terrible. But as some of us have been warning for a very long time, if Western governments continue to look away from the existential crisis that they – or their predecessors in office – created, this is precisely what’s going to happen: a large proportion of the citizenry is going to become increasingly restive and, if not heeded, will ultimately explode.

This discord in The Hague, it should be noted, comes in advance of an October 29 election that was necessitated by the collapse of the coalition government in June. The government was formed only in July of last year, after an election the previous November in which Wilders’s party came out on top for the first time in its quarter-century in Parliament, receiving fully 20% of the vote (which is a lot in a country where there are no fewer than 15 parties in the House of Representatives). For members of the Western European political establishment, who have labored long and hard to surround parties like PVV (founded in 2006) with so-called cordons sanitaires – conspiring with one another, in other words, to keep them out of power – Wilders’s victory was an earthquake, one of many signs in the last few years that the game is changing all over Western Europe, the electorate waking up, and the policy of exclusion no longer working, at least not quite as well as it used to.

After the election, Wilders proclaimed his intention to become Prime Minister. But as it turned out, the policy of exclusion still worked well enough to keep him out of the top job, if not entirely out of the government. It took more than half a year for the four coalition parties – the PVV, the People’s Party (VVD), the Farmer-Citizen Movement (BBB), and the New Social Contract (NSC) – to hammer together a government and to find someone who was willing to serve as Prime Minister and who was also acceptable to all the parties involved. In the end, the individual selected was Dick Schoof, a politically non-aligned civil servant who had planned to retire after just serving as the nation’s Minister of Justice and Security.

In order to enable the formation of the new government, Wilders was obliged to “put on ice,” as he put it, all or most of his causes, including a total end to mass immigration, a referendum on continued EU membership, the mass closure of mosques, the deployment of the military to the border to keep out asylum seekers, an end to the so-called “family reunification” policy whereby immigrants can easily bring to the Netherlands any number of relatives from their home countries, the deportation of Syrian refugees, and the expulsion of criminals with foreign passports.

But the government collapsed less than a year later, after Wilders, unable to get his coalition partners to budge significantly on any of his issues, pulled his party out of the coalition. Left-wing media, reporting on this development, used words like “draconian” to characterize Wilders’s utterly common-sense desiderata. Soon after he walked, Schoof resigned, and the government fell. Dutch journalist Stefan de Vries, writing for the British website Monocle, depicted Wilders as an oddball whose political goals are puerile, puzzling, and thoroughly alien to the more civilized citizens of his country.

“Wilders is a toddler and now we all have to clean up his mess,” said one of de Vries’s interviewees, an Amsterdam barista. (Who knows better than a barista?) If you believed de Vries’s take on the story, the Dutch, by and large, had reacted to the government’s fall with “relief that the coalition has finally crumbled and disbelief that it lasted this long.” Even 13 years after the murder of the politician Pim Fortuyn, and 11 years after the slaughter of the columnist Theo van Gogh – both of whom had warned repeatedly about the danger of Islam – Dutch journalists (and, apparently, baristas) are acting as if all of Wilders’s – and Fortuyn’s, and van Gogh’s – concerns are sheer fantasy.

Another Dutch journalist, Koen Vossen, was also reliably snotty about Wilders, writing in the Guardian that PVV, “with its emphasis on immigration, national identity, sovereignty, more direct democracy and stricter law enforcement,” is “a fairly typical radical rightwing populist party.” Yes, take a good look at that list. For your typical member of Western Europe’s legacy media, being concerned about such things as “national identity” and “sovereignty” and “direct democracy” is what it means to be “radical” and “rightwing.” Vossen went on, charging Wilders with proffering a “highly alarmist caricature of Islam as a totalitarian ideology of conquest.” Yes, even in 2025 they’re calling such purely factual descriptions of Islamic ideology – grounded totally, needless to say, in the words of the Koran itself – as “highly alarmist.”

So the media still hate Wilders. No surprise there. But Wilders – thank goodness – hasn’t backed off an inch from his supposedly radical agenda. And as of late August – thank goodness again – PVV was leading in the polls. Let’s hope that this time the party wins big enough to push through at least some of its program. If it wins, there might be hope – maybe even a big hope. If it falls short – well, you can bet there’ll eventually be riots that will dwarf the one that just took place in The Hague. And those riots will only grow worse until the Muslims pull off a complete takeover, and make sure that the rioters will never have a chance to open their mouths again.