Vox Sentences: France’s kinder, gentler far-right-wing party

Big wins for France's far-right party; how different is Trump from the rest of the GOP really?; and Brazil's president faces impeachment.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

The Donald Trump of Europe?

Sylvain Lefevre/Getty Images

• The far-right National Front (FN, per its French initials) is on the rise in France. In the first round of elections, the FN leads in six out of France's 13 regions.

  [BBC]

• The FN is known for its anti-immigration, anti-European-integration legacy — and often fascism-sympathetic rhetoric — under founder Jean-Marie Le Pen. But his daughter Marine Le Pen, who currently heads the party, has worked hard to move the party towards the French mainstream.

  [New Republic / Charles Bremner]

• Initial reports suggest her efforts have paid off. Many French voters, seeking to reject President Francois Hollande's Socialists, were willing to vote for the FN instead.

  [Politico Europe / Pierre Briançon]

• The Paris attacks — and general anxieties about refugees from Syria — probably helped the party. 13 percent of voters said they'd changed their minds since the attacks.

  [Reuters / Michel Rose and Leigh Thomas]

• Even a supposedly kinder, gentler FN is a serious threat to the French status quo, though — especially regarding participation in European governance.

  [openDemocracy / Maximilien von Berg]

• That's why the mainstream parties of the left and right are already negotiating to throw support behind each other in the runoff elections to fight off the FN threat.

  [The Economist]

The National Front of the US?

Sean Rayford/Getty Images

• So let's talk about this Donald Trump proposal to ban Muslims from entering the US.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• It is probably, weirdly enough, constitutional. The Constitution doesn't give nearly the same protections to people outside the US that it gives to American citizens.

  [Eric Posner]

• There's an argument that the Supreme Court would strike down the precedent that makes it constitutional, since the cases establishing that date back to the Japanese internment camps, but still.

  [CNN / Steve Vladeck]

• But a Muslim ban would certainly go against the spirit of free exercise of religion. It's a very bad idea!

• Some pundits, like Slate's Jamelle Bouie, argue the rest of the Republican field isn't that different from Trump, since many of them support policies that would severely limit Muslim immigration too.

  [Slate / Jamelle Bouie]

• I (Dara) disagree. Other Republican presidential candidates' supporters don't beat up protesters at their rallies. Other presidential candidates don't then suggest that the protester had it coming.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• In an atmosphere of rising Islamophobia — and Islamophobic violence — there is a special menace to Trump saying that Muslims feel "hatred … beyond comprehension" for the US.

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• I (Dylan) disagree with Dara. Trump's mostly making his rivals' subtext text. German Lopez has a good round-up of similar anti-Muslim immigration rhetoric from other candidates.

  [Vox / German Lopez]

• The GOP can't afford to distance themselves too far. Trump is happy to point out that 68 percent of his supporters would vote for him as a third-party candidate if he left the GOP.

  [Vox / Andrew Prokop]

• Unfortunately for Trump, one of his closest foreign counterparts — the head of the right-wing UK Independence Party — thinks the Muslim-ban proposal goes too far. Which is really saying something.

  [The Independent / Jon Stone]

A shoving match in the Brazilian legislature

Buda Mendes/Getty Images

• Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff is facing impeachment hearings. Rousseff is accused of breaking budget rules last year while running for re-election.

  [New York Times / Simon Romero]

• Rousseff will face a 65-member commission — at least 39 of whose mambers strongly oppose her.

  [AFP / Damian Wroclavsky]

• Even just voting for who would sit on the commission involved a shoving match. Rousseff's supporters are suspicious that the speaker of the House — who's been leading the campaign for impeachment — manipulated the voting process.

  [Reuters]

• The speaker, for what it's worth, is suspected of taking millions of dollars of bribes from oil company Petrobras. So are many other members of the government. Rousseff hasn't been implicated in that scandal.

  [NPR / Lourdes Garcia-Navarro]

• Rousseff's also facing division within her own party — her own vice president sent her a letter in which he complains she's treated him as an "ornamental" vice president.

  [Wall Street Journal / Paulo Trevisani and Rogerio Jelmayer]

• Simon Romero of the New York Times argues that with Brazil's economy slumping badly, the government is silly to focus on Rousseff's impeachment. That may be so, but Rousseff herself is being blamed for the slump.

  [New York Times / Simon Romero]

MISCELLANEOUS

There's basically no evidence that "trigger warnings" are actually a pervasive policy on American college campuses. [NY Mag / Jesse Singal]

• Does ISIS want a huge, apocalyptic confrontation with the West? Not necessarily.

  [William McCants]

• According to science, people who end texts with periods are huge dicks. Sorry, science has spoken.

  [Washington Post / Rachel Feltman]

• The case for abolishing private housing. Yes, really.

  [The Nation / Jesse A. Myerson]

• Marin County appears to have a problem with squirrels "suddenly running up to the victims, crawling up their bodies, and biting them in various areas."

  [Marin Humane Society via San Francisco Chronicle / Kale Williams]

VERBATIM

"This, she was realizing more and more, was the role of a survivor in a mass shooting: to be okay, to get better, to exemplify resilience for a country always rushing to heal and continue on." [Washington Post / Eli Saslow]

• "For those who haven’t followed My Little Pony’s recent resurgence—and no one would blame you—DJ Pon-3 is the stage name of a DJing pony whose real name is Vinyl Scratch."

  [AV Club / Marah Eakin]

• "I believe that the progressive fervor of the humanities, while it reenergized inquiry in the 1980s and has since inspired countless valid lines of inquiry, masks a second-order complex that is all about the thrill of destruction. In the name of critique, anything except critique can be invaded or denatured."

  [The Point / Lisa Ruddick]

• "Poverty is only a 'mysterious, unknowable, negative spiral-loop' if you specifically ignore the lack of money that is its proximate cause."

  [Philip Cohen]

• "Let's choose to make this the first time we don't glorify this tragedy with talk of rock and roll and the demons that, by the way, don't have to come with it."

  [Rolling Stone / Mary Forsberg Weiland]

WATCH THIS

Why outlet stores aren’t as good a deal as you think [YouTube / Gina Barton, Joss Fong, Chavie Lieber]

Everett Collection / Shutterstock

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