Lydia and Marcelo's globalist bubble

Those Portuguese who have not currently lived in the US for three years nor previously lived in England for six years like us praised the June 10 speeches by writer Lídia Jorge and President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa as “original” and “courageous.”

They were ecstatic and moved. They do not understand or pretend not to understand that these speeches are anything but original and even less courageous. They are a mere adapted and anachronistic translation of the Anglo-Saxon woke speeches that we have been witnessing for almost 10 years outside Portugal. In this article we explain that such speeches emanate not from the Portuguese, the diaspora, the PALOPs or even from immigrants living in Portugal, but from figures of the globalist American left such as Bass or Rogers, who have absolutely nothing to do with Portugal.

Just a day before June 10, we had heard the mayor of Los Angeles, the radical leftist Karen Bass, give a speech very similar to those given by Jorge and Marcelo during the protests and riots in that city. She stated that there are no real Americans and that “undocumented” (illegal) immigrants are the same as law-abiding citizens. As an “exemplary” globalist, Bass had gone to Ghana earlier in the year to celebrate Africans with American public money, instead of knowing the risk (huge winds and heat) and working to prevent the fires that destroyed much of her city.

In practice, citizens and legal immigrants are the least of the globalists' interests. They always come last in the priority list of the global woke left bubble, which is all the same and disconnected from the desires and concerns of the native populations. In his speeches, Bass has long been uttering exactly the same clichés of self-denial of one's own cultural identity constructed by one's ancestors and the atonement for the alleged sin of being Western that Marcelo and Lídia have now used in abundance (adapting slightly, for example by replacing Shakespeare or Jefferson with Camões).

Significantly , in the Boston area where we live, a globalist WOKist who uses the pseudonym Ibram X Kendi (real name Henry Rogers) who the Portuguese WOK admire (and basically translated on June 10), was fired by Boston University this year. This after an investigation into how Kendi squandered 45 million academic euros in a couple of years, years without anyone really knowing why.

Before that, when Wokism was more fashionable in the US, two years ago, the “stamped” book by this weak writer and supposed researcher who insulted the Portuguese was everywhere. He accused the Portuguese of having invented racism and slavery because of what the chronicler of the discoveries, Gomes Eanes de Zurara, wrote about 500 years ago (as if this unfortunately had not existed since the beginning of humanity). Wokists like Rogers accuse Portuguese emigrants in America of being “privileged Europeans.” This despite the fact that many in areas like Fall River or New Bedford were humble and the Portuguese emigration to here went through much suffering and pain, including whale and cod fishermen off the coast of Cape Cod. It went so crazy, at the height of Wokism, that Kendi’s book against the Portuguese was taught in elementary schools in the Boston area, including our children’s schools. These children were insulted as racists by other American children under the age of 10 simply because they were of Portuguese descent and born in Portugal. We immediately responded to the school authorities in our city to stop the denigration of Portuguese culture and the falsehoods about alleged advantages that Portuguese immigrants had that were not the result of hard work, especially in front of Portuguese-American children. They backed down and apologized.

If they had been Lídia Jorge and Marcelo, they would probably have insisted on this defamatory teaching, so that Portuguese children would be ashamed of their identity and ancestors. They would probably have applauded the now discredited simplistic Kendi as an alleged great intellectual who deserved to be taught to young children instead of mathematics and biology. They would have affirmed in unison with him that hard-working Portuguese immigrants who succeeded in the US a few generations ago, risking their lives as fishermen in the icy and wild ocean of the US East Coast, working countless hours in the mills of New England or picking fruit on the farms of the San José Valley in California, were privileged and oppressive colonists.

Unfortunately , our sad globalist elites seem to care nothing more than the delayed translation of US or UK issues. This even happened on June 10th, when Camões and the Portuguese communities were published. They absorb Saxon wokism without any critical thought. The obsessions are always the same: zero originality. It's tiring. The native population is tired of always being accused of being sinners and of everyone else being saints by the entire left in the Western world. So, we are talking about the supposed originality of the writer and the professor.

As for the alleged courage of Lídia and Marcelo, this also did not come from the same worn-out and typical globalist bubble imported from the Anglo-Saxon world. In England, we saw, while we lived there from 2016 to 2022, many politicians and writers always being called “brave” for never straying from the hard line of the beautiful speeches that Jorge and Marcelo now translated, always denying any reality that contradicted them. In England, they denied, for example, the horrible problems that were happening with certain gangs abusing hundreds of poor young English girls. This denial of reality was the easiest and most comfortable position for the entire globalist left-wing elite in London, far from poverty and the problem: they received decorations and remained popular in the press, enjoying the fruits of their “courage.” What they did not have any mercy for the defenseless victims. They did nothing for them because they looked better in the photo or in their speeches saying that their attackers were the victims of Western imperialism and colonialism. It could not be otherwise for the woke globalists .

Meanwhile, the truly brave people who dared to expose what was happening, with compassion for the victims rather than self-promotion, paid a terrible price for their boldness, being ostracized and silenced. For example, the brave Labour MP Sarah Champion, who in 2017 denounced this real and serious problem related to immigration, which has positive aspects, but like everything else, life is not always as positive as the speeches make it out to be. Instead of the easy and luxurious path of cocktails at embassies and medals like the cowards in England (similar in speeches to our lyrical Marcelo and timid Lídia), the heroic Sarah took the hard road of being forced to resign as a shadow minister of the Labour Party and never became a real minister. Life went better for another MP who at the time shared a tweet, which she removed and classified as accidental after being immediately criticized, which said “the abused girls need to shut up in the name of diversity” . It was only years after we left England that we finally saw justice being done for the people's heroes and victims.

For globalists, reality never matters: oppressors and victims are predefined at birth. They committed the unforgivable crime of being natives of the places where they were born. So they deserve hell if necessary in the name of the sins of their distant ancestors. Meanwhile, there is a woke paradise full of angels from outside, from heaven certainly, playing the trumpet and never doing anything wrong. Lídia and Marcelo sang to us on June 10, 2025, this paradise that we have heard many times and years before in the USA and England, but never seen. This is because human nature is universal and does not fit into victimization and demonization placed in very well compartmentalized woke boxes.

Humans are human. Some have good character, others don't. Character should be judged independently of skin, as explained by the late Dr. Martin Luther King, who almost certainly would not be a globalist woke if he were alive. The people are the ones who give the least orders seems to be the motto of the current globalist leftist bubble. Their strange obsessions, actions and orders seem to be in the name of some unknown global god or completely unrelated to the interests and concerns of the native populations. The resounding defeat of the left in the American legislative elections of November 2024 and even more resounding in the Portuguese elections of May 2025 is largely due to this detachment of its main figures from the local cultures that they seem to despise or want to change completely and quickly. They tolerate everything in other cultures, but they tolerate or value little or nothing in the natives. It is normal that those who despise what the local populations value do not receive their votes.

Lídia and Marcelo’s speech did not happen by chance or in a vacuum. Having exposed the lack of originality and courage of the Portuguese president and the decorated writer, we would like to conclude the article by explaining the current national reality. This is the result of the imitation of the American and English left, not only in words, but in actions. It is not beautiful speeches on June 10th copied from the Anglo-Saxon world that will solve this reality imported from the Anglo-Saxon world that does not please many Portuguese people. Perhaps the majority.

Since 2017, our globalist left-wing politicians led by Costa, with the blessing of the equally globalist Marcelo, have imitated, more than 10 years late and without learning anything from the mistakes of others, the former Prime Minister of Sweden, Reinfeldt, who mocked their culture and only realized its value when it had significantly faded. They seem unaware that the French philosopher Renan said in “What is a Nation?” that a national project with a future presupposes a common past and a present direction agreed upon by the majority. They look disgusted when the American vice-president JD Vance advises European leaders to respect rather than disregard the will of the majority of the population to maintain culture and control immigration. They never pay attention to Ana Leal’s courageous reports on TVI about the problems of mass immigration in Portugal. It’s always all alone and paradise woke until it isn’t. Until we can no longer deny the reality that nothing is ever as beautiful as said in the original Anglo-Saxon globalist speeches and their respective Portuguese copies.

In the aforementioned wealthy and large California with 40 million residents, Governor Newsom has already declared that he can no longer support the health of the approximately two million illegal immigrants living there (5% of the population). A significant influx occurred with the open borders policy of the globalist left of Joe Biden-Kamala Harris that increased the US population by 3% with illegal immigration against the will of the majority of voters of all ethnicities, including Hispanics. Something still much smaller than what happened in Portugal with Costa and Marcelo in the highest positions in the nation. Portugal arrived late to the current globalism but was immediately the “best student” internationally of globalist fashions in speeches and actions. If the globalists abroad did wrong, the woke Portuguese politicians came running to imitate and quadruple the mistake.

In our small and poor Portugal, since 2017, when we only had 421,785 immigrants, the PS and the rest of the left wing, appointed by Marcelo, at the service of that unknown globalist god, promoted the massive import, in the blink of an eye, of another 1,124,736 immigrants. They opened the border without consulting the Portuguese, deliberately and suddenly, so that today we have almost 16% of the immigrant population (1,546,521, all according to official data from the Agency for Integration, Migration and Asylum). Most of them entered without qualifications, time for acculturation or proper checks on criminal and professional records. All of this was quickly done behind the backs of the Portuguese in just 8 years of power by the PS of Costa and his allies. Ideologically inspired by the woke globalist left of the BE.

Costa's government was inefficient and lazy, from health to education, including security, housing, aviation, trains, civil protection, fires, coal-fired power plants and other energy sources, and everything else that was truly of interest to the Portuguese people. For a simple airport, there were endless studies with no quick resolution. There were eight years of socialist stagnation and inaction except for encouraging the massive import of human beings, coming from the other side of the world and with a completely different culture, which was done very quickly and without any studies or electoral referendum. It was done in a flash. The PS and its radical globalist leftist wing had no electoral legitimacy for the scale of what they did and the haste with which they did it in the name of the woke paradise. The PS was a minority government when it irresponsibly threw open the borders in 2017 because it had lost the elections to the PSD and only governed by seeking the globalist far-left to support it. There was no electoral referendum on immigration.

The Portuguese globalist elites, like their inspirations on the Anglo-Saxon woke caviar left, have what Rob Henderson calls “luxurious convictions”: they are in favor of forced, rushed and ill-considered “inclusion” of mass immigration, the consequences of which spill over into poor neighborhoods while they live in the best neighborhoods of Lisbon and make speeches or write beautiful and entertaining articles. They think they are morally better than the Portuguese who complain about what they suffer due to irresponsible globalist decisions. However, they seem hypocritical and selfish to us. They are like their powerful masters on Martha’s Vineyard in the USA who immediately expelled from their rich island the immigrants whose importation and placement they themselves promoted to place in poor areas of the rest of the state of Massachusetts. For others, they suffer the consequences of their “generosity.” The others must experience their beautiful speeches firsthand.

The world without Portuguese culture would be poorer, more homogeneous and limited. It would be like the minds of the globalist Wokists in Portugal who advocate the devaluation of our cultural identity, which is much more beautiful and unique than their common discourses, imported from California or London.