‘He Missed the Fragile Part of My Bone’: Conservative Dutch Politician Speaks Out After Attack

Thierry Baudet of the Forum for Democracy party gives a speech during election night in Zeist, the Netherlands, on March 21, 2019. Bart Maat/AFP/Getty Images

Dutch politician Thierry Baudet was working a crowded room when the bottle came down.

“I just agreed to do some selfies and videos and short photographs with some members of the audience. And one of them turned out to have an empty bottle of beer in his hand and hit me on my face,” Mr. Baudet, a member of the Dutch House of Representatives, told The Epoch Times in a Nov. 21 interview from the Hague.

The leader of the Forum for Democracy party pointed to the places he was hit, “near the eye” and “on the back of the skull.”

After security subdued the assailant, Mr. Baudet headed to a hospital.

“There I learned very luckily that he had missed the fragile part of my bone,” he said, referring to a places where the skull fuses during infancy.

The NL Times has reported that the alleged perpetrator was an underage boy, citing a police statement. The Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security, which oversees policing in the country, did not respond to The Epoch Times’ request for confirmation of that claim by press time.

The Nov. 20 attack on Mr. Baudet in Groningen took place just two days ahead of the Netherlands’ general election. Mr. Baudet’s party opposes gender ideology in schools, mass immigration, and his country’s climate change policies, which he says “are ruining our economy.”

The violence against Mr. Baudet has been condemned by many Dutch politicians, including Prime Minister Mark Rutte. He described the incident as “totally unacceptable” in a post on X.

But a broader pattern has emerged: violence against right-leaning European politicians is on the rise, and little seems to be stopping it.

Other Attacks on Conservatives

The beer bottle attack came just weeks after another attack on Mr. Baudet by a different assailant.

“It was in Ghent, which is in Belgium. I was going to speak, and someone was there with an umbrella and hit me on my head, screaming, ‘No to fascism, no to fascism!’” he told The Epoch Times.

“I don’t know what kind of organization is behind this, but I do think that this is something that the security services should be looking into. They’ve been devoting an awful lot of attention to breaking up [anti-lockdown] movements. They’ve been spending an awful lot of time analyzing petty nationalist movements. But they haven’t spent a lot of time analyzing BLM [Black Lives Matter] or Antifa,” Mr. Baudet said.

Earlier this month in Spain, Alejo Vidal-Quadras of the Vox Party was shot in the face. In August, Andreas Jurca of the AfD (Alternative for Germany) Party was assaulted in what he has called an organized attack by migrants.

“The establishment sees Antifa as their stormtroopers,” Mr. Baudet said.

“Whenever some demonstration happens on the right, it’s immediately called out as a severe threat to democracy. … It’s, ‘Oh, it’s civil unrest rising,’ and blah, blah. But the actual violence is coming from the left, and indeed, it does seem like the establishment isn’t very willing to do anything about it,” he continued.

People take part in a march organized by the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) political party and carry German flags and portraits of victims of violence allegedly perpetrated by migrants. Sean Gallup/Getty Images

While Mr. Baudet is glad the alleged perpetrator of the attack has been apprehended, he’s waiting to see how broadly officials will respond to the larger phenomenon of violence against conservatives, if at all.

“The larger question is … if the authorities are going to see this as a limited case—[a] lone wolf, an individual who just got mad. Or if they’re going to see it as a societal trend, in which case they’re going to analyze the networks that he was operating in, analyze the influences that have been exercised on him, analyze what kind of societal narratives are being spread that cause violence towards people on the conservative side of the spectrum,” he said.

“That’s the big question and that’s what we’re going to be looking into very carefully in the coming months and years,” he added.

Baudet Blames Frankfurt School, Cultural Marxism

Mr. Baudet traces today’s violence against the European Right to ideas advanced by the Frankfurt School, which fused Marxism with the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud.

Works such as Theodor Adorno’s “The Authoritarian Personality,” written soon after World War II, linked certain healthy personality traits and bedrock values to the philosophies of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.

“These people, these philosophers like Adorno, [Max] Horkheimer, [Herbert] Marcuse, Wilhelm Reich, they taught the current decisionmakers in journalism, in the universities, in the State Department, in the secret services, and so on and so forth, that traditional European civilization, traditional European life, which is a thing I’m defending, that people like us are defending, inherently, inevitably leads to Auschwitz, to mass murder, to what they call fascism,” Mr. Baudet said.

He walked through the sort of thinking that leads from the redefinition of traditional values all the way to political violence from the left.

“If you defend the traditional family, if you are opposed to the demographic transition, if you are opposed to modern art, if you defend national identities, and so on, then you are almost a fascist, you’re almost far right, which is almost like Adolf Hitler,” Mr. Baudet said.

At that point, “everybody is allowed to do whatever they want to you. You’re almost a complete outlaw,” he concluded.

Despite the violence, the Forum for Democracy founder has pressed on with campaigning.

“I don’t feel that I have a right to quit. I mean, I must go on, and I must show the people that my voice and their voice, by extension, is not going to be silenced,” he said.