PJW on Shanghai and the French elections

PJW has his own video on the craziness in Shanghai:

China is one of the few holdout nations to maintain, in the face of all contrary facts, a "zero-COVID" policy. The Communist party's face is on the line: if it fails to contain the virus through the upholding of its current insane policies, it will suffer great shame and loss of prestige (although the oppressed citizens of China are perfectly aware of the degree to which the party lies to them; the whole question of what people know and believe is like a game; cf. Orwell's notion of doublethink).

And here's PJW on what must be a very recent development: Marine Le Pen just beat out incumbent president Emmanuel Macron in a current poll:

That's pretty impressive, given that Marine Le Pen has been fighting the ugly legacy of her white-supremacist father (whose motto "France for the French" basically meant "France for "the white French"). Le Pen has far outstripped her conservative rival Eric Zemmour despite the fact that Zemmour's overall message to the French people strikes me as much clearer. But France will choose whom she chooses; it's not up to me, thank God. 

I suspect that Le Pen's current gain in the polls is only temporary, though; I think the French as a whole will instinctively put the brakes on (idiom: mettre le holà, where holà means "whoa," as in what you say to a horse to make it stop) any overly rightward slide because most French folks are, like it or not, reflexively leftist on most matters. I love the French, but their politics drives me up the wall.