alt rt EUR

see bannon, brexit, atlantic bridge

this is newer and for younger rw parties

merri ok

see AFD

bannon manafort lacivita

flynn

MUSK EL SALVADOR, ARGENTINA peru?

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71% of world authoritarian?!

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AN 8 26

In the UK, the MAGA movement has been allying itself with the far-right/populist Reform Party — which is vehemently disdainful of Britain's Conservative Party in much the same way that MAGA disdains traditional conservatives in the United States. Former White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre examines this MAGA/Reform alliance in an article for the UK-based i Paper, arguing that it is a dire "warning" on far-right movement's ability to exploit widespread "frustration" and discontent.

Liberal Jean-Pierre, who served in the Biden administration after Jen Psaki (now an MS NOW host) left her White House press secretary position, explains, "Since leaving the White House in 2025 with Donald Trump returning to power, I have spent the past two years listening to people who feel politically unanchored.

Voters in the United States and the United Kingdom are turning to movements that promise simple answers to complicated problems because they no longer believe the major parties see what they see or feel what they feel. The appeal of Reform, Restore and fringe MAGA figures grows out of that frustration, and the links between Nigel Farage and American political voices show how these narratives travel across borders and feed the same fears."

Although Jean-Pierre, in her i Paper article, is highly critical of MAGA and Reform, she emphasizes that the "frustration" that they are trying to use to their advantage is quite real.

"After more than 15 years working in U.S. politics, including service to two presidents and most recently as White House press secretary," Jean-Pierre warns, "I have watched how quickly trust erodes when institutions fall behind the pressures people face. I sat in senior-level briefings where immigration, border security and crime were not abstractions but daily operational challenges."

Far-right MAGA Republican and "War Room" host Steve Bannon often describes himself as a "Leninist" — not because he favors communism, but because he embraces Soviet Union leader Vladimir Lenin's view that it is necessary to destroy in order to create. Jean-Pierre notes Bannon's alliance with Farage, describing "disruption rather than governance" as a key goal of MAGA and its UK counterparts.

"Movements like Reform UK and Rupert Lowe's breakaway party, Restore Britain, have stepped into that space with messages that feel direct and uncomplicated," Jean-Pierre observes. "They speak to voters who believe the country has lost control of its borders and who worry that national identity is slipping away. In the U.S., fringe MAGA voices push a similar story. They argue that institutions have failed and that only disruption can restore order. These groups do not operate in isolation. They borrow from one another, repeat one another and amplify one another…. The major parties do not need better slogans. They need to rebuild trust by addressing the underlying issues that have pushed voters away."

Jean-Pierre continues, "They need to modernize immigration systems, strengthen border management and speak honestly about crime and public safety. They need to reconnect with the realities people face and show they understand the pressures shaping daily life. If they do not, the political landscape on both sides of the Atlantic will continue to shift toward movements that thrive on fear rather than on solutions. And voters will continue to look for answers in places the major parties never expected."

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RWW 8 26

Phil Williams @ Confront The Hate: As Local News Dies, White Nationalists See Opening

At an invitation-only gathering in Italy, far-right leaders mapped out strategies to target rural America while local press coverage vanishes.

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an tc 7 26

The European populist right has been at the top of the political agenda in recent days.

On July 7, everyone in France was waiting expectantly for a Paris appeal court to decide on whether Marine Le Pen, the leader of the Rassemblement National (RN), would be allowed to run in the 2027 presidential election after her conviction for embezzlement of European funds.

But just as the European media machine was gearing up for the verdict, across the Channel, Nigel Farage – the leader of Reform UK – announced on X that he would be making a “statement about his future”. This came after multiple allegations of undeclared gifts and an ongoing investigation into possible money laundering. Farage maintains that he has done nothing wrong.

The parallels were impossible to ignore. Here were two prominent European populist rightwing politicians whose political careers were being threatened by extensive and well-documented corruption claims. How would they respond?

We did not have to wait long to find out. Only hours after the verdict, Le Pen announced that she was now officially a candidate for the 2027 presidential election. Despite the fact that her initial conviction was upheld on appeal, she intends to contest the appeal court’s decision. This means she retains her presumption of innocence and is able to proceed with her election campaign as if nothing happened.

It is a remarkable sleight-of-hand; Le Pen has found the narrowest of legal loopholes through which to pass. In her announcement, she presented her decision as a democratic one: the French people should judge her, not the courts.

In the meantime, Farage told his supporters that he is stepping down from his parliamentary seat of Clacton after being made the subject of a parliamentary inquiry into his alleged improprieties. This will trigger a byelection – but, in an equally remarkable gambling act, he plans to run himself in the hope of winning back his seat. Again, he is suggesting that this means letting the voters decide whether he is guilty or not.

Le Pen and Farage are both reading from a well-thumbed playbook. The people v the courts; voters v judges; the “transparent” legitimacy of the ballot box v the “opacity” of lengthy legal and regulatory proceedings. All of these tropes will be familiar to observers of populist politics in the United States, Hungary or Turkey.

The bigger question is: do voters care whether populist politicians break the rules? Le Pen and Farage are hoping that, like Donald Trump, they can simply swat aside legal and regulatory processes on the road to their ultimate electoral triumph.

Question of standards

There are many reasons to take Le Pen and Farage’s arguments with a pinch of salt. A closer analysis of the relationship between the populist right and corruption reveals a more complicated picture, perhaps especially in France, which is gearing up for its most important electoral cycle in 2027.

At face value, Le Pen has little to worry about since French politics is famously corrupt. Every French president of the Fifth Republic, except Charles de Gaulle and Emmanuel Macron, has a major corruption scandal to their name. Both Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy have been found guilty of corruption by French courts. They have been joined by countless MPs and mayors over the years who have been convicted of similar crimes.

Until recently, this level of corruption was widely tolerated. French voters largely accepted that politicians would embezzle money, employ their family members on the public purse, or swing large public contracts for their benefit. They were more concerned with ideological faultlines than political integrity – and they displayed little of the hand-wringing that accompanied equivalent scandals like Watergate in the US in the 1970s or the “cash-for-questions” affair in the UK in the 1990s.

Yet this tolerance has begun to dissipate in recent years. Public anger towards politicians has reached unprecedented levels, most notably in recent protest movements such as the “gilets jaunes” (yellow vests), and the deep personal hostility many French voters feel towards Macron.

Le Pen and the RN have provided a highly effective electoral outlet for this anger, and they have made much of their commitment to probity in public office. Le Pen even said herself that she would not run for election while wearing an electronic tag, and for many years the party campaigned for politicians found guilty of corruption to be banned from public office for life.

Rocky road to the Elysée Palace

But Le Pen and the RN’s role as standard-bearers of the “ordinary” French person’s rage against a “rigged” and “corrupt” political system is now under threat. By effectively stamping her dynastic authority on the party that was previously run by her father, and by blocking the rise of her young protege Jordan Bardella, Le Pen has boxed herself into a corner.

Her only way out is by the ballot box. Yet the chances of her winning the presidential election remain slim. She – and her party – lack the necessary support to win in the second round of the elections where vote transfers from eliminated parties and candidates determine the overall result, and she still suffers from a credibility deficit in comparison to more mainstream politicians.

She may well have made matters worse by giving her opponents a powerful stick with which to beat her. Even in France, accusations of corruption can be hard to shake off. And, as Le Pen and Farage know from long experience, it is just as possible to lose at the ballot box as it is to win. The Conversation

Emile Chabal, Professor of Contemporary History, University of Edinburgh

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

// ORBAN FAIL

AN 4 26

Trump has done his best to curry the favor of Europe’s far right, but after seeing Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán go down to humiliating defeat despite Trump’s support, the far right now wants to put daylight between itself and America’s leader.

“President Donald Trump’s offensive behavior toward Christians and his unnecessary and unpopular war in Iran isn’t just splitting his political base at home — it’s also alienating his allies abroad,” wrote MS NOW’s Zeeshan Aleem on Sunday. “Right-wing nationalists in Europe are becoming more and more wary of association with Trump and growing inclined to keep him at a distance to protect their own political projects. The trend marks a blow to Trump’s aspirations of creating an international bloc of right-wing nationalist states that work in concert to quash the left.”

Aleem ticked off a number of prominent Italian conservatives who are denouncing Trump including Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a number of German lawmakers from the far-right Alternative for Germany party, Romania’s European Parliament member Diana Sosoaca and French far-right leader Marine Le Pen. Their criticisms have ranged from his meddling in European domestic politics, his invasion of Iran and his attacks on Pope Leo XIV.

“Those bold criticisms speak to how incredibly damaging Trump’s war on Iran has been for his standing within his movement,” Aleem observed. “The surge in global oil prices is politically radioactive; far-right leaders and parties in Europe affiliated with Trump risk becoming associated with the energy crisis unless they take steps to create distance from him.”

Indeed, as recently as last week, the United Kingdom’s Brexit champion Nigel Farage downplayed his relationship with Trump, who he once said was ushering in “the beginning of a golden age,” by instead saying “I happen to know him, but that’s by the by.”

Overall, this pattern speaks to how Trump’s brash approach to governance has alienated America’s European allies.

“Trump, for so many people, epitomizes the ugly American — somebody who is bumptious and vulgar and ignorant about foreign cultures,” former Time Magazine editor Rick Stengel said in a recent podcast appearance on The Bulwark with former Daily Beast editor-in-chief John Avlon on Sunday. “So I think people sort of have come to the end of their patience with America.”

Ironically, Trump has aggressively courted the European far right as his natural ideological allies. Trump appointee Susan B. Rogers was selected as Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs in large part to ingratiate herself to the far right, such as by describing German migrants as “barbarian rapist hordes,” falsely claiming Sweden’s immigration policy has caused sexual violence (“If your government cared about ‘women’s safety,’ it would have a different migration policy”) and incorrectly stating that “advocates of unlimited third world immigration have long controlled a disproportionate share of official knowledge production.”

Rogers even met with members of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) Party, which espouses an ideology widely perceived as neo-Nazi.

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In Portugal, hundreds of far-right activists gathered last Saturday for the annual “Remigration Summit” advocating for the mass deportation of immigrants. Former U.S. Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino and white nationalist leader Jared Taylor were VIP guests alongside elected officials from Germany’s far-right, anti-immigrant AfD party and Spain’s Vox. In an interview ahead of the event, Bovino cited Nazi Germany’s lead general, Erwin Rommel, as an inspirational figure. At the summit, Bovino said, “If there is inspiration gained from the U.S. Border Patrol model and method, then fantastic.” Bovino was fired after immigration agents under his command killed 37-year-old VA nurse Alex Pretti in Minneapolis.

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bovino The Second Annual European Ethnic Cleansing Conference Looks to Trump for Inspiration - Global Project Against Hate and Extremism

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The Second Annual European Ethnic Cleansing Conference Looks to Trump for Inspiration

June 3, 2026

On May 30, around 500 far-right activists and their supporters traveled to Porto, Portugal, for the second annual Remigration Summit. Speakers focused on implementing policies of “remigration,” a call for ethnic cleansing which involves the forced removal of immigrants, refugees, and even citizens based on race, ethnicity, or perceived cultural belonging in their respective countries. The conference drew several American speakers and attendees, namely former Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino, who oversaw Trump’s mass deportation operation from October 2025 to January 2026. Bovino’s tenure was made infamous by the fatal shootings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good, two American citizens, by agents under his watch.

The Remigration Summit account on X advertises former Trump Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino as a speaker. From left to right: Italian Andrea Ballarati, Austrian Martin Sellner, American Gregory Bovino, Portuguese Afonso Gonçalves. (Source: X).

“Remigration,” once confined to neo-Nazi and white supremacist circles, has been repackaged as a legitimate policy framework within far-right politics in Europe and the United States. Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, AfD) leader Alice Weidel endorsed remigration as policy, the leader of Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (Freedom Party of Austria, FPÖ) called for the “remigration of uninvited strangers,” former Lega per Salvini Premier (League for Salvini Premier) MEP Roberto Vannacci founded Futuro Nazionale (National Future, FN), which calls for the remigration of immigrants “who do not integrate and assimilate,” and the U.S. State Department opened an Office of Remigration while Trump enacts his mass deportation strategy.

Remigration is rooted in the white supremacist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which purports a planned “replacement” of white people by politicians and other “elites.” Jews are often targeted as driving this “plan.” Remigration is a series of policy proposals, drafted by Austrian Identitarian and “former” neo-Nazi Martin Sellner, to end the so-called “replacement” by purging the continent of non-white people and eliminating all forms of multiculturalism. The goal is to make countries “European again.” Believers in the conspiracy theory have committed several acts of targeted mass violence against Muslims, Jews, LGBTQ+ people, Black people, and others. The Christchurch, N.Z., mosque shooter, who murdered 51 Muslims in 2019, donated €1,500 to the Austrian Identitarian movement and exchanged a series of friendly emails with Sellner.

The conference was organized by the European white nationalist Identitarian movement, namely Afonso Gonçalves, founder and president of the Portuguese Identitarian movement Reconquista (Reconquest). Among its sponsors were the American-based White Papers Policy Institute (WPPI), Identitarian media organization Filmkunstkollektiv (Film Art Collective), Reconquista, Swiss neo-Nazi group Junge Tat (Youth Action), French Identitarian organization Polémia, the Institute for Remigration (IFR), Deutschland Kurier (Germany Courier), and counter/cut. In the closing address, Belgian Identitarian Dries van Langenhove mentions an anonymous “Catholic and American” benefactor “who rightfully believes that we are all united in this struggle as Europeans.”

Remsum26_2

A list of the event’s sponsors includes several Identitarian organizations, such as the American-based White Papers Policy Institute (WPPI), neo-Nazi Swiss group Junge Tat (Youth Action), and Sellner’s newly founded Institute for Remigration (IFR). (Source: Remigration Summit).

Speakers Celebrate Trump As “Proof” Remigration Can Happen

This year’s Remigration Summit was dedicated solely to making remigration a reality transnationally, with the United States viewed as “proof” that their ethnic cleansing aspirations are possible.

Speaking on the similarities between the goals of the European far right and the Trump administration, retired Chief Patrol Agent of the U.S. Border Patrol Gregory Bovino made it clear they share the same ethnic cleansing aspirations, saying “that problem [immigration] is the same in the United States as it is in Europe.” The difference is, according to Bovino, that the United States elected a president who campaigned on remigration: “80 million people voted for remigration. As we say in the U.S., mass deportations.” As a result, remigration has been “proof tested” by the United States and can now be done in Europe. Bovino’s speech, which received a standing ovation from the conference’s attendees, demonstrated how the European far right is inspired by Trump’s mass deportation operation in pursuing their own goal of remigration across the continent. Bovino claimed to have conversations with Sellner about their ideas, which “mirror each other,” and offered himself as help to others in the audience in case they needed advice on how to conduct mass deportation operations.

Gregory Bovino speaks to the Remigration Summit attendees about the shared goals of the American and European far right. (Source: Remigration Summit).

American Cyan Quinn of the White Papers Policy Institute spoke for the second time in as many years at the Remigration Summit. While she focused on the economics of remigration in last year’s event, this year she explored how she believes remigration can help return traditional gender roles to white people in the United States and Europe. She opened her address with a quote by former U.S. Representative Steve King (R-IA), in which he said “We can’t restore our civilization with someone else’s babies.” Quinn clearly believes that white women need to have more babies to halt the “Great Replacement” (pro-natalism is a core tenet of the conspiracy theory), and this is hindered by institutions encouraging women, in Quinn’s words, “to take positions they may not even want,” such as in law enforcement and on company boards. Instead, women should stay out of the workforce, get married, and have more children. Regarding foreigners, Quinn believes “remigration creates optimism.” She cited Trump’s 2016 election victory as an optimistic sign for white people, as, according to her, the following years saw decreased Hispanic birth rates, while non-Hispanic birth rates increased (this earned an applause from the audience). As she closed out her address, Quinn said “Diversity undermines continuity,” meaning she believes having non-white people in her country undermines white people’s existence.

Stefano Forte, president of the New York Young Republican Club (NYYRC), which endorsed the Remigration Summit last year, used his allotted time to attack Muslims living in New York. He cited “feminist politicians wear[ing] a hijab on TV,” “40 percent of New Yorkers speak[ing] a language at home other than English,” and “the anti-American radical Islamic migrant mayor Zohran Mamdani” as reasons remigration is necessary. Forte frames diversity as an existential crisis, saying “this is no longer about politics…this is about survival.” The solution for Forte, aside from remigration, is to place his faith in Trump, who he believes “is responsible for the emergence of the new right throughout the world” and called Trump “our champion.” The Nouvelle Droite, French for “New Right,” describes an emerging Identitarian movement which began in the late 1960s.

Joey Mannarino, a MAGA influencer speaking on the Remigration Summit’s influencer panel, used his time to encourage the audience to “get the freaking people who don’t belong in Europe and America out of these countries” and “preserve western civilization.” He claims, “remigration is actually a very moderate solution” (“moderate solution” is a term used by the far right to denote the existence of a more extreme, and often violent, method to achieving their goals), and that migrants are “engaged in a war against us [white people].”

The Remigration Summit was hosted by Portugual’s Manuel Morgado, a local coordinator for Students For Liberty, an American youth libertarian organization.

The Next Phase of Identitarian Organizing

:{:{Martin Sellner and Dutch Identitarian Eva Vlaardingerbroek were at the forefront of new Identitarian initiatives presented at the conference. Sellner officially launched the Institute for Remigration (IFR), which he described as a pressure group inspired by the National Rifle Association (NRA), an American gun lobby group. According to Sellner, IFR will focus on three “strategic pillars,” consisting of “research on policy,” “networking,” and “campaigning and organizing.”}:

The end goal of IFR is to translate metapolitical victories (such as making remigration a mainstream term) into political action, which Sellner describes as “gather[ing] the remigration vote.” The IFR will “reward” politicians who embrace remigration, and “punish” those who do not. The Institute for Remigration is clearly an Identitarian project, with Sellner as its CEO and former IB Vienna leader Philipp Huemer as its Managing Director.}:

:{:{Similarly, Vlaardingerbroek and Sellner launched the “Save Europe Act,” a European Citizens’ Initiative described as “a legislative framework restoring sovereign borders, lawful order, and the continuity of European civilization.” The Act, if it reaches one million EU-based signatures once formally submitted, will force the consideration of several articles in EU parliament, including measures to: “declare a formal moratorium on new non-Western/non-European immigration channels,” facilitate a “total reform of the current migration framework focusing on external border protection” and “immediate return mechanisms,” “ensure the systematic and accelerated return (remigration) of illegally staying migrants,” “establish a harmonized EU-wide framework for broader remigration,” and “remove social welfare incentives and benefits that function as pull factors for migration… and encourage remigration.”}:

These articles bear a close resemblance to Sellner’s remigration policy proposal, which begins with expelling asylum seekers from Europe and finishes with eliminating “parallel societies” (i.e., non-white communities). Save Europe Act’s first signers include politicians and influencers from around Europe, with a few from the United States, such as MAGA influencers Joey Mannarino and Jack Posobiec. Other notable signatories are Restore Britain leader Rupert Lowe, Manuel Corchia of the Swiss neo-Nazi group Junge Tat, and leader of Identitäre Bewegung Deutschland (German Identitarian Movement, IBD) Maximilian Märkl. The website’s Imprint page shows the initiative is represented by Vincenzo Richter, the chairman of Identitäre Bewegung Saxony.}:

Some of the first signers of the Save Europe Act are prominent politicians, such Rupert Lowe, Bjorn Hocke, Lidewij de Vos, and Roberto Vannacci. (Source: Save Europe Act).

Louise Garnier, leader of the right-wing student organization l’Union nationale inter-universitaire (National Inter-University Union, UNI), announced the launch of a “new French national Identitarian movement,” to be made official in a few weeks. Génération Identitaire (Generation Identity, GI), the previous French national Identitarian movement, was dissolved by the French government in 2021 for “inciting hate, violence or discriminations of individuals based on origins, race or religion.”

Full List of Speakers

Austria: Martin Sellner (Institute for Remigration, Identitäre Bewegung Österreich)

Belgium: Dries van Lagenhove (Schild & Vrienden)

Canada: Daniel Tyrie (Dominion Society of Canada)

France: Louise Garnier (UNI), Jean-Yves Le Gallou (Polémia)

Germany: Björn Höcke (AfD), Lena Kotré (AfD), Maximilian Märkl (Identitäre Bewegung Deutschland)

Italy: Andrea Ballarati (Giovani Identitari), Lorenzo Caccialupi (Influencer), Roberto Vannacci (Futuro Nazionale)

Netherlands: Lidewij De Vos (FvD), Matthias Victorian (Code Victorian), Eva Vlaardingerbroek

Portugal: Afonso Gonçalves (Reconquista), Manuel Morgado (Students for Liberty)

Slovakia: Milan Mazurek (Republika)

Spain: Rocio De Meer (VOX)

Switzerland: Manuel Corchia (Junge Tat)

United Kingdom: Angloid (Influencer), Lucy White (Restore Britain), Sammy Woodhouse (Restore Britain)

United States: Stefano Forte (New York Young Republican Club), Joey Mannarino (MAGA Influencer), Cyan Quinn (White Papers Policy Institute)

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an 5 26

U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance suffered a major disappointment when, on April 12, far-right Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán was voted out of office after 16 years. Although Trump and Vance campaigned aggressively for Orbán — who they considered a valuable ally of the MAGA movement — he lost to Prime Minister-elect Péter Magyar and the Tisza party by roughly 19 percent.

In an op-ed published by The Guardian published on May 7, however, Cas Mudde — an international affairs professor at the University of Georgia and author of the 2019 book "The Far Right Today" — stresses that Orbán's humiliating defeat doesn't mean the populist far right is going away.

"There is simultaneously a consensus that Donald Trump has gone from inspiration to 'liability' for the global far right," Mudde explains. "While the fall of Orbán has great symbolic significance and important consequences for EU politics…. we should be very careful not to read too much into it for three reasons. First, as far as lessons for how to defeat so-called illiberal democrats are concerned, we must bear in mind that Orbán was in power for an exceptionally rare 16 years. This allowed him to oversee not only a political transformation of Hungary, but an economic and societal one…. Second, while the European far right has lost its unofficial leader, it is not in decline…. Third, it is true that Trump is, at the moment, 'toxic' for the far right, although this had no significant effect on the Hungarian election."

Mudde strongly disagrees with claims that the far right is "in decline."

"Sure, some other far-right parties have also recently lost elections (in Bulgaria, for example) or power (the Netherlands)," Mudde argues. "But far-right parties remain in government in a variety of EU member states (Czech Republic, Italy), and lead the polls in several others (Austria, France). The thing is, the far right is here to stay, and many of its parties are as established as the former 'mainstream' parties. And, like other parties, their electoral support fluctuates and is affected by internal and external factors, such as corruption, infighting and crises in government."

Mudde adds, "More importantly, the mainstreaming and normalization of far-right actors and ideas continue unabated. (Prime Minister) Giorgia Meloni's Italy has become a mandatory pilgrimage site for politicians who try to present themselves as tough on immigration."

Trump, according to Mudde, "helps the European far right simply by being the U.S. president."

"Even worse," the University of Georgia professor warns, "because Trump's behavior is so extreme and often seems unhinged, it is very easy for European far-right leaders to seem 'moderate' in comparison — after all, he or she is 'not as bad as Trump.' This endless comparison, and the inability to accept that there can be various shades of far right, helps savvy politicians such as Meloni. By not acting aggressively, erratically and loudly like Trump — or, in her own country, Matteo Salvini — she is mistaken for a mere 'conservative' rather than a radical-right politician."

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AN 2 26

Conservative columnist and historian Max Boot explained on Monday that President Donald Trump has “become toxic” even among right-wing movements in Europe analogous to his MAGA movement in the United States.

“I've been covering Trump's unprecedented interference in foreign elections, and what strikes me most is how brazen it's become,” Boot wrote for The Washington Post. “We're not talking about subtle diplomatic preferences here—Trump is issuing formal endorsements in other countries' elections as if they were Republican primaries back home.”

After listing the foreign politicians to receive Trump’s endorsement — including Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, the UK’s Boris Johnson, Giuseppe Conte in Italy, Javier Milei in Argentia, Karol Nawrocki in Poland, Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, Viktor Orban in Hungary and Sanae Takaichi in Japan — Boot wrote that the first problem is that it continues “Trump’s unfortunate habit of personalizing relations with other countries: He rewards leaders he likes and punishes those he dislikes.” Not only does this risk “making an enemy of the political opposition in their countries,” as happened when Trump “all but endorsed Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre” only for Poilievre to lose to Liberal Party leader Mark Carney, but it also could boomerang against Trump in areas where he is very unpopular.

“Now Trump is inviting a similar backlash in Europe, where he has become toxic with his tariffs, his attacks on European digital regulations and immigration policies, his attempt to take over Greenland, and his insults about European soldiers supposedly shirking combat in Afghanistan,” Boot wrote. “A poll released last month by the European Council on Foreign Relations found that only 16 percent of Europeans now consider the U.S. an ally. In Denmark, 84 percent have an unfavorable view of the United States.”

Boot added that “Vice President JD Vance was booed at the Winter Olympics Opening Ceremonies in Milan, even though Italy has a Trump-friendly prime minister” in Giorgia Meloni. Meloni even joined the rest of Europe in rebuking Trump last month for his Greenland threats, a fact which further demonstrates even the European far right does not necessarily want to be associated with the American president.

“A Politico poll in December found that in France and Germany, only a third of the people who support right-wing parties have a favorable view of Trump,” Boot wrote. “Little wonder that far-right leaders in Europe denounced Trump’s attempted takeover of Greenland and sought to distance themselves from the American leader.”

He concluded, “A president who zealously guards America’s sovereignty should show more respect for the sovereignty of other countries.”

Boot is not alone in raising the alarm about Trump’s meddling in other nations’ politics. Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs Susan B. Rogers has repeatedly met with far right parties in Europe and characterized efforts to marginalize extremists as anti-free speech, prompting criticisms from the British publication The Guardian. Vice President JD Vance has encouraged Germany to allow the neo-Nazi Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) Party to have a greater role in its political life, which was roundly denounced throughout Germany.

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YT 2 26

US is now funding the far-right in the UK

Richard J Murphy

337K subscribers

67,997 views Feb 8, 2026 #StateSponsoredFascism #UKPolitics #FarRightUK

New reporting shows the US State Department planning to fund MAGA-aligned think tanks, charities, and political movements in Europe. That includes organisations and figures linked to UK politics. This video follows the money: from post-war neoliberal networks, to modern think tanks, to today’s use of US state funding to legitimise extremist ideology. The far right no longer opposes the state. It has captured parts of it and is now using that power in the USA to attack democracies, including our own here in the UK. This is as organised, deliberate, and dangerous as if China and Russia were doing it - so why aren't the media saying so? Take a look at the poll below:

[ • Post](https://www.youtube.com/post/UgkxLjYbnb0jnfm6ix0Y_CQDWHk639FKAGlE State-sponsored fascism: why this matters no How the far-right moved from anti-state to state-backe The Mont Pèlerin roots of modern far-right economic Think tanks, networks, and exporting ideolog US funding of MAGA-aligned groups in Europ Why this would be called interference if Russia or China did i Reform UK, Farage, and UK political link How democracy is corroded by foreign-funded extremis Division, scapegoating, and the attack on car Why this is organised, not accidenta What must be done: exposure, transparency, accountabilit Politics of care versus politics of destruction TRANSCRIPT A transcript for this video is available at: https://www.taxresearch.org.uk

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AN 2 26

President Donald Trump's appointee Susan B. Rogers is “arguably… the public face of the Trump administration’s growing hostility to European liberal democracies,” according to a prominent British publication that accuses her of propping up far right regimes.

Rogers, who has been Trump’s Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs since October, has repeatedly characterized efforts to stop the rise of the far right as threats to free speech and met with marginalized extremist parties, according to a Wednesday report in The Guardian.

On the social media platform Twitter/X, Rogers has characterized German migrants as “barbarian rapist hordes,” linked Sweden’s immigration policy to sexual violence (“If your government cared about ‘women’s safety,’ it would have a different migration policy”) and claimed that “advocates of unlimited third world immigration have long controlled a disproportionate share of official knowledge production.”

The Guardian also highlighted Rogers’ meetings with members of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) Party, which is widely viewed as neo-Nazi in its ideology. After meeting with AfD parliamentarian Markus Frohnmaier, Rogers wrote that “unlike the Russian government (and the current German one), AfD took an anti-censorship stance in its meeting with me last week. One reason they’re gaining popularity in Germany.”

Rogers defended her meeting by telling The Guardian, “Mr Frohnmaier is the foreign policy spokesman for the most popular political party in Germany. He delivers AfD’s foreign policy positions in the Bundestag, and is the person German media call when they want a policy statement from AfD. For this reason, we talk to him in his official capacity to understand AfD’s positions.”

Yet Rogers has done more than meet with AfD. According to The Financial Times, Rogers has also scheduled meetings with far right parties throughout Europe on a mission to “fund MAGA-aligned think-tanks and charities.” According to a senior member of the UK’s far-right Reform party, Rogers has a “State Department slush fund to get MAGA-style things going in various places” and was keen to “fund European organisations to undermine government policies.”

Others in Trump’s orbit have also worked to prop up AfD. Twitter/X CEO Elon Musk, who performed a Nazi salute at Trump’s 2025 inauguration, has publicly embraced AfD as the “last spark of hope.” Meanwhile Vice President JD Vance wrote a Twitter/X post promoting Musk’s pro-AfD statements while adding, “I’m not endorsing a party in the German elections, as it’s not my country and we hope to have good relations with all Germans. But this is an interesting piece.”

Vance then added, “Also interesting; American media slanders AfD as Nazi-lite, But AfD is most popular in the same areas of Germany that were most resistant to the Nazis.”

Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio, describing the Trump administration’s opposition to the pro-democracy multinational alliances that governed the post-World War II international order, argued that “the postwar global order is not just obsolete, it is now a weapon being used against us. Eight decades later, we are once again called to create a free world out of the chaos, and this will not be easy.”

In response to Trump’s support for the far right from Germany and the United Kingdom to Marine Le Pen in Russia and Viktor Orbán in Hungary, the Munich Security Conference — widely regarded as the world’s top independent forum for analyzing foreign policy — warned that his policies could lead to global conflict.

“Transactional deals may well replace principled cooperation, private interests may increasingly trump public ones, and regions may become dominated by great powers rather than governed by international rules and norms,” the Munich Security Conference’s recent report warned.

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How US Christian nationalists are exporting their agenda to Europe

(RNS) — A new report follows the money as it moves from reactionary advocacy groups and think tanks to groups waging war on women’s equality and related causes.

Katherine Stewart

July 7, 2025

(RNS) — A report on the state of reproductive rights presented to journalists, policy wonks and activists in Brussels on June 26 begins with a quote from the 15th-century general and military theorist Raimondo Montecuccoli: “To wage war, you need first of all money; second, you need money; and third, you also need money.”

The 158-page report, “The Next Wave: How Religious Extremism Is Reclaiming Power,” follows in meticulous detail the flow of money as it moves from reactionary advocacy groups, think tanks and strategic litigators masquerading as philanthropies — the modern equivalents of the wealthy royal houses and their priestly hierarchies of Montecuccoli’s day — into groups waging war on women’s equality and related causes.

RELATED: At Turning Point USA’s AmFest, Charlie Kirk takes a victory lap for Trump election

Compiled by the researcher Neil Datta and his team of experts at the European Parliamentary Forum on Sexual and Reproductive Rights, a network of European lawmakers committed to advancing gender equality and sexual and reproductive health, the study follows similar reports published in 2018 and 2021. It shows substantial growth over a relatively short span of time in a broad-based movement opposing not only sexual and reproductive rights, but access to comprehensive health education and LGBTQ+ rights.

Between 2019 and 2023, the report finds, the equivalent of $1.18 billion flowed into 275 frontline groups on the attack. The EU countries contributing the largest amounts were Hungary ($172.7 million), France ($165.7 million), the United Kingdom ($156 million), Poland ($90.7 million) and Spain ($66.4 million). In addition, funding from Russia effectively doubled from $42.9 million in 2019 to $86.7 million in 2022; spending in Europe by U.S. Christian right groups averaged $22 million per year.

“The Next Wave: How Religious Extremism Is Reclaiming Power” report cover. (Courtesy image)

Much of the money flowing into the movement came from private sources, but some represents a transfer of public funding into sectarian groups. About half of the money went into advocacy and messaging organizations. The rest went into what the report labels “anti-gender” services — work done by grant-making groups, think tanks, legal advocacy and miscellaneous other campaigns.

As the EPF report notes, Russia’s principal strategic goal in supporting these causes is to infiltrate right-wing political parties and movements in Europe and then to steer their activism in ways favorable to Russian state interests. The Russian regime also helps right-wing European actors reinforce its own brand of Christian nationalism in their countries.

Its report cites a document, identified as a Mandate, that emerged from an influential March 2024 gathering of the XXV World Russian People’s Council (WRPC) titled “The Present and Future of the Russian World.” Overseen by Moscow’s Patriarch Kirill, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church’s leader, the gathering aims to guide Russia’s political class as well as the Russian Orthodox Church on policy issues. The new Mandate “referred to Russia’s international role as ‘the ‘Restrainer,’ protecting the world from evil and from the ‘onslaught of globalism and the victory of the West, which has fallen into Satanism,’” the EPF report said.

The Mandate also “refers to the Russian aggression against Ukraine as a ‘Holy War,’’ and states that the borders of the ‘Russian world’ are ‘much wider than the state borders of both the present-day Russian federation,’” according to the report.

According to the EPF report, the Mandate also declared that “the fight against abortion should be placed at the center of all state policy” along with the “cleans(ing) of the destructive ideological concepts and attitudes, primarily Western ones.”

By 2024, according to the EPF report, nearly all Orthodox churches, particularly those with ties to the ROC, had become active in anti-rights mobilization.

The American groups that turned up in the report due to their involvement in Europe are some of the same ones that have aggressively pushed Christian nationalist ideology on the home front. The Alliance Defending Freedom, which played a key role in overturning Roe v. Wade and defended discrimination against a gay couple in the Masterpiece Cake Shop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission case, has become a major player in European litigation, crafting “freedom of speech” cases, for instance, out of the harassment of women outside reproductive health clinics in the U.K.

Other U.S. groups active in Europe include 40 Days of Life, which stages anti-abortion harassment activities; the Heritage Foundation, which forges partnerships with conservative European think tanks; and Heartbeat International, whose “crisis pregnancy centers” offer some forms of support for pregnant women while dissuading them from seeking abortions.

RELATED: Ukraine strips Orthodox leader of citizenship, alleging links to Moscow

The funding for most U.S. activism in Europe, according to the report, can be traced to a handful of hyper-wealthy individuals and families, such as members of the DeVos and Prince families, the Walters family, the Uihlein family, the Green family, the Eldred family and the Koch brothers.

However, as Datta noted in Brussels, “We can’t just blame Americans. A lot of money is coming from European sources.”

Much of this support, the report notes, is from a cadre built from old European money and titles. “Dozens of archdukes, countesses, princes, and princesses appear as avid supporters of religious extremist causes which may at first appear exotic until one understands that this involvement demonstrates a continuity going back to a past almost forgotten in 21st century Europe,” Datta writes.

These aristocrats bring “a generalized distain for democracy and liberal values, a worldview based on religious legitimation for inherited social, political, and economic inequality; and being part of a vast, transnational and endogamous network,” which Datta describes as an “Aristo-clerical network.”

In France, private foundations controlled by Catholic families with generational wealth invest heavily in anti-abortion and other conservative political causes. Similar patterns are evident in Germany, Spain, Hungary, Austria and the U.K. Though lacking a native aristocracy, the U.S. has the next best thing in Leonard Leo and Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, both of whom have connections with far-right European aristocrats such as Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis, the widow of one of the largest landowners in Germany who has close connections with former Trump adviser Steve Bannon.

Stacks of currency. (Photo by Mufid Majnun/Unsplash/Creative Commons)

But in recent years, a nouveau riche elite has emerged in the technology sector. “Tech bros” such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, along with Fredrik Wester in Sweden and Marek Spanel in the Czech Republic, have become significant funders of conservative activism, along with other oligarchic business leaders such as Lőrinc Mészáros, who owns Hungary’s MHB bank and is a longtime associate of Viktor Orbán, and Guillaume de Thieulloy, whose organization, Fonds de dotation GT Editions, finances digital infrastructure for ultra-conservative Catholic media in France, along with far-right political parties.

Some reactionary groups have learned to siphon money from public sources as well, typically from sympathetic illiberal national and regional governments. This state money goes to favored think tanks, advocacy groups and service providers that in turn bolster their own political legitimacy. Hungary and Poland were leaders in this sector, but regional governments in Spain and elsewhere have developed the same patronage model.

Facilitating this fusion of reactionary political parties with reactionary religion has been the rise of what Datta calls “ChONGOs,”—church-based non-governmental organizations. These groups typically pretend that they are offering scientific or fact-based information and services, though in reality their aims are to promote a certain theological vision of the proper order of society.

OMB’s Russell Vought, the Christian ‘nation-ist’ driving Project 2025 and DOGE

Honed to a sharp edge in the U.S. and Russia, the illiberal ideas and methods deployed across Europe are also being exported to Africa and beyond. What is most disturbing, perhaps, is the use of massive propagandistic operations of the sort pioneered by America’s authoritarian movement.

“This isn’t a backlash or a culture war,” Datta states in the report. “It’s a strategy.”

(Katherine Stewart writes about the intersection of faith and politics. Her latest book is “Money, Lies and God.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

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In late May — four months into Donald Trump's second presidency — The Guardian reported that record numbers of Americans are applying for residency or citizenship in the U.K. Plenty of Americans are looking at countries in Continental Europe as well, and liberal American actress Rosie O'Donnell — a major critic of Trump — is now living in the Republic of Ireland and has no plans to return to the United States anytime soon.

But many observers of international politics are warning Americans who have hopes of becoming expatriates that Europe has its far-right populists as well, from Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to National Rally leader Marine Le Pen in France to Germany's Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party.

In an article published on June 1, Axios' Tal Axelrod examines the alliances between far-right MAGA Republicans in the U.S. and far-right movements in Europe.

"MAGA media heavyweights are intervening in elections around the world, increasingly obsessed with exporting President Trump's brand of right-wing populism beyond America's borders," Axelrod reports. "Why it matters: What began as a nationalist reaction to America's perceived decline has evolved into a global ideological crusade. Now at the apex of its domestic power, MAGA is rallying behind candidates who share its views on immigration, globalism and the fight for 'western civilization.'"

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The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) has held events in Hungary and Poland, and Axelrod cites examples of Trump allies promoting far-right movements in Romania and Germany.

"MAGA leaders — including Vice President Vance — excoriated Romanian authorities for annulling the results of December's election and banning the leading far-right candidate over allegations of Russian interference," Axelrod reports. "In last week's rerun, MAGA podcasters like Jack Posobiec and Steve Bannon rallied behind pro-Trump candidate George Simion, who even described himself as running 'on the MAGA ticket. Simion ultimately fell short to centrist Bucharest Mayor Nicusor Dan, a result that MAGA blamed on globalist meddling…. Vance, Elon Musk and scores of pro-Trump influencers have championed the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, which had its best-ever showing in elections earlier this year."

Axelrod adds, "Secretary of State Marco Rubio condemned German intelligence's since-retracted decision to classify AfD as a right-wing extremist organization, calling it 'tyranny in disguise.'"

Axelrod points out, however, that "MAGA's influence abroad has yielded mixed results."

According to the Axios reporter, "The AfD has been shut out of government in Germany, Simion lost in Romania, the liberal candidate is favored to win in South Korea.… A win in Poland would be a major symbolic victory — and a sign MAGA's global playbook might finally be working."

*Read Tal Axelrod's full Axios article at this link.

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Noor Bin Ladin, a right-wing influencer, stridently declares “I don’t want to eat the bugs” on a talk show hosted by a former adviser to US President Donald Trump. Laurent Duplomb, a senator from the conservative Les Républicains party in France, informs his colleagues that the French would be eating “insects without their knowledge”. Bartosz Kownacki, an MP from the nationalist Law and Justice party in Poland, suggests that opposition politicians write “instead of chicken, eat a worm” on their election materials, arguing that “this is their real election programme”.

Thierry Baudet, a leader of the far-right Forum for Democracy party in the Netherlands, shouts “No way! No way!” while holding up a bag of mealworms in front of protesting farmers. Politicians in Lega, a far-right party in Italy, warn that the European Union is planning to “impose” the eating of insects on citizens in the bloc – and a Lega electoral campaign includes a billboard-sized image of a person popping an enormous cricket into their mouth, next to the caption, “Let’s change Europe before it changes us.”

During the 2020s, commentators and politicians across the right-wing political spectrum have amplified an Internet-based conspiracy theory that elite forces are conspiring to make us all eat insects. Often rallying under the slogan “I will not eat the bugs,” right-wing and far-right figures have come out in force against human consumption of insects. Many of these people assert that the EU is planning to force bug-eating on the general public while devastating traditional agriculture and meat consumption under the guise of the European Green Deal, the bloc’s plan to eliminate greenhouse gases by 2050 and decouple economic growth from resource use. Opposing insect-eating has become a symbolic way to protest EU environmental policies, express scepticism of and hostility toward Brussels, and villainize political opponents. Closer inspection reveals that the conspiracy theory underlying such opposition has much older and more sinister resonances.

“Spreading disinformation”

Insect eating (entomophagy) remains a minor practice in Europe and North America, although alternative protein sources do play a role in the EU’s move toward a sustainable future. So far, the European Commission has approved frozen, dried and powdered forms of Tenebrio molitor (yellow mealworm larva), Locusta migratoria (migratory locust), Acheta domesticus (house cricket) and Alphitobius diaperinus (the lesser mealworm larva) for human consumption. But the market for insect powder in foods like bread, pasta and sports bars remains small. Although insects are common food in many parts of the world, consumers in the West, where insects are more commonly used to provide protein in animal feed, are reluctant to eat bugs for historical reasons based in ideas of uncleanliness and primitiveness. So, based on the facts, there seems to be little to no reason for statements such as those made by Rumen Petkov of Bulgaria’s ABV party, who said that EU approval of insect consumption is a “crime against Europe” and that the European Commission is “prepared to kill our European children”.

What led to the rapid spread of this conspiracy theory? Noor Bin Ladin’s remarks give us a clue. During her talk show appearance, Bin Ladin described her words as a message for Klaus Schwab to take to his “masters”. Schwab is the founder and executive chair of the World Economic Forum. Early in the Covid pandemic, Schwab and the WEF produced a set of proposals titled “the Great Reset”, which called for an overhaul of various world systems to produce a stakeholder-driven capitalism that would lead to a more socially and environmentally responsible future. Conspiracists seized on and branded “the Great Reset” as a new iteration of a conspiracy theory known as the New World Order – an imagined global governance system meant to control the lives of everyone. Both the Great Reset and the New World Order lead back to much older and broader antisemitic conspiracy theories that hold that elite Jewish financiers run the world with their hands on invisible levers of power. All these narratives tap into feelings of futility and hopelessness about the future.

US right-wing media personality Tucker Carlson called a 2023 episode of his show, which included a heavy focus on Schwab and the WEF, “Let Them Eat Bugs”, a title that gestures at the remark allegedly made by Marie Antoinette, the last queen of France, when she heard about people suffering from a lack of bread before the French Revolution: “Let them eat cake”. With this title, Carlson is aiming to emphasize that the elite are hopelessly out of touch and have contempt for farmers and the average man, whom they want to force to eat bugs. Like the French bedbug scare in late 2023, right-wing alarm around insect-eating has connections to the spread of anti-EU Russian propaganda. Russian news outlets have suggested that Europeans are so poor and food deprived as a result of sanctions connected to the war in Ukraine that they have been reduced to eating insects. As the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) writes, insects are “delicious treats for actors with interest in spreading disinformation against the EU”.

Symbols for dehumanization

The desire to stir up fear about the minor level of European and US insect consumption is not based on the risk of rapid growth in the insect market, but on the power to arouse disgust and fear itself. Insects have long been used as symbols to stir revulsion and paint opponents as objects of physical and moral disgust. During times of political extremism, insects have featured repeatedly in efforts to distance, devalue and dehumanize minorities. Armenians were called locusts during the Armenian genocide, and Jews were compared to lice in Nazi Germany. In the period prior to the ethnic genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda, some Hutus repeatedly called Tutsis “cockroaches” on public radio. The right wing’s current fetishization of insect-eating serves as a narrative to cast political opponents as morally repulsive, even if not labelling them as bugs themselves.

For some figures on the right, insect consumption symbolizes the worst of Eurocentric liberalism – seen as a movement so void of a positive political vision that the only possible future it offers is one of impoverishment and bug-eating. They point to an elite who they claim will go on feasting on meat while forcing mealworms and fly larvae on the rest of us. It’s a potent image. At a moment in which people on the right and the left seem unable to imagine a better political future together, it becomes easier to demonize climate policy-minded leaders as a group of disgusting hypocrites plotting to create a society of contrived scarcity where the general population is reduced to eating bugs.

Meanwhile, since 2015, scientists have been releasing papers warning that the global food system shows risks of genuine structural problems. In a future of environmental disruption, trade wars and real risks of food shortages and famine, we may need all the calories we can get – insect-based or otherwise.

Out of curiosity, I bought a bag of cricket flour last fall. The crickets resulted in a delicious, nutty-flavoured cecina, well… crickcina. So far, none of my friends will try it. They’re missing out.

D. D. Moore, Visiting Fellow, Max Weber Programme for Postdoctoral Studies, *European University Institute

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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A few days ago I had breakfast with my old friend John Shattuck, who, as president of Central European University in Budapest, saw firsthand how Viktor Orban took over Hungary’s democracy and turned it into an authoritarian state.

When Trump was elected in 2016, Trump endorsed Orban, and Orban started attacking universities — forcing the Central European University out of Hungary.

John believes Trump is emulating Orban’s playbook. (Steve Bannon once declared that “Orban was Trump before there was Trump.”)

Orban’s playbook has 10 parts, according to John:

One: Take over your party and enforce internal party discipline by using political threats and intimidation to stamp out all party dissent.

IFrame Content

Two: Build your base by appealing to fear and hate, branding immigrants and cultural minorities as dangers to society, and demonizing your opponents as enemies of the people.

Three: Use disinformation and lies to justify what you’re doing.

Four: Use your election victory to claim a sweeping mandate — especially if you don’t win a majority.

Five: Centralize your power by destroying the civil service.

Six: Redefine the rule of law as rule by executive decree. Weaponize the state against all democratic opponents. Demonize anyone who doesn’t support the leader as an “enemy of the people.”

Seven: Eliminate checks and balances and separation of powers by taking over the legislature, the courts, the media, and civil society. Target opponents with regulatory penalties like tax audits, educational penalties such as denials of accreditation, political penalties like harassment investigations, physical penalties like withdrawing police protection, and criminal penalties like prosecution.

Eight: Rely on your oligarchs — hugely wealthy business and financial leaders — to supervise the economy and reward them with special access to state resources, tax cuts, and subsidies.

Nine: Ally yourself with other authoritarians like Vladimir Putin and support his effort to undermine European democracies and attack sovereign countries like Ukraine.

Ten: Get the public to believe that all this is necessary, and that resistance is futile.

John noted that Orban’s influence now reaches across Europe.

In Austria, a political party founded by former Nazis will be part of a new coalition government this year headed by a leader who has close ties to Russia and opposes European support for Ukraine. A similar nationalist far-right government has taken over next door in Slovakia.

Europe’s three biggest countries, Italy, France and Germany, have all swung toward the far-right, but so far they remain democracies.

Italy has a nationalist government headed by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who’s followed parts of the Orban playbook but has been pushed toward the center and has softened her position on immigration and Ukraine.

In France, the far-right party of Marine Le Pen won last year’s parliamentary elections, but a coalition of opposition parties, prodded by Emmanuel Macron, united to deny her party a parliamentary majority. Their resistance will be tested by new elections in June.

In Germany, the center-left government headed by Olaf Scholz fell at the end of last year. In late February, parliamentary elections took place that determined whether the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party would become part of a new government. Viktor Orban, Elon Musk, and JD Vance all endorsed the AfD before the elections, but it came in second with just under 20 percent of the vote, and polls show that 71 percent of Germans believe that the AfD is a threat to democracy because of its overt connections to the Nazi past.

Poland, the biggest new democracy in Eastern Europe, at first adopted but is now resisting the Orban model. A far-right government elected in 2015 almost destroyed the independence of the Polish judiciary, but opposition parties united to defend the courts and defeated the government in 2023, replacing it with a centrist regime headed by Donald Tusk, with a strong commitment to restore Polish democracy.

What lessons can be drawn from all this?

John believes that the best way to respond to Orban’s right-wing populism is by building coalitions for economic populism based on health care, education, taxes, and public spending.

He points to historical examples of this, like the American Farmer-Labor coalition that brought together urban workers, white farmers, and Black sharecroppers and led to the Progressive Movement and the New Deal in the 20th century. Today there’s an urgent need for a new populist movement to attack economic inequality.

John says that defending democracy should itself be a populist cause. In the Orban playbook, the national flag was hijacked by the authoritarian leader. John believes that the flag of American democracy must be reclaimed as a symbol of the rule of law, a society built on human rights and freedoms, and international alliances and humanitarian values.

When these soft-power democratic assets are destroyed, a huge void opens up — to be filled by authoritarians like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, who are the ultimate political models for Viktor Orban and Donald Trump.

John urges that we pro-democracy anti-Trumpers move quickly with protests, lawsuits, and loud resistance. He says that those who believe Democrats should just play dead and wait for the 2026 midterm elections are profoundly wrong. Speed is essential.

I was struck by John’s optimism. He believes that the U.S. is better situated than Hungary to resist authoritarianism. We are 30 times bigger and infinitely more diverse, and our diversity is the source of our economic and cultural strength. The U.S. has an enormous and active civil society, a judiciary that remains mostly independent, a free and open if partially captured and manipulated media, and a constitution that guarantees the rights of the people to challenge and change their government.

Trump won less than 50 percent of the vote in last fall’s election, and his approval rating is well below that in recent polls.

National polls show that 70 percent of Americans today see democracy as a core American value. Resistance to the assault on democracy is not only possible, John says, but it’s essential — and it can work, as shown by the growing number of successful lawsuits that have been brought against Trump’s flood of executive decrees and the rising tide of grassroots mobilization by civil society groups across the country who are organizing demonstrations and lobbying legislators to stand up for democracy.

For two and a half centuries, Americans have fought to expand the right to vote, to achieve equal protection, to oppose intolerance and political violence, to gain freedom of speech and religion, to guarantee due process of law.

These goals may now seem to be blocked by Trump, but the U.S. is not Germany in the 1930s nor Hungary in 2025. Americans across the country are beginning to resist. John believes American democracy will emerge stronger for our efforts.

NOW READ: There’s a new dress code in Trump’s DC — and it’s straight out of a dictator’s playbook

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/."

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[How Trump’s economic policies imperil the 'far-right parties' he claims to suppor]T

How Trump’s economic policies imperil the 'far-right parties' he claims to support - Alternet.org

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CHARLOTTEVILLE [ANTI MASK LOCKDN?] organized on facebook?

anti-social network doku? habbo hotel --> scientology --> charlotteville --> jan 6? --> musk zuck digital authoritariaNISM ALT RT EUR musk 1 25

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Trump criticized on Thursday a court ruling against Marine Le Pen, the leader of France's far-right, who was found guilty of embezzling millions of euros from the European Parliament.

“The Witch Hunt against Marine Le Pen is another example of European Leftists using Lawfare to silence Free Speech, and censor their Political Opponent, this time going to so far as to put that Opponent in prison,” Trump wrote in a late-night post on his social platform Truth Social.

“It is the same ‘playbook’ that was used against me by a group of Lunatics and Losers,” the president added.

Le Pen was sentenced to four years in prison, with two years suspended, and is also facing a five-year ban on holding office, which takes effect immediately. This restriction would bar her from running in the 2027 presidential election in France, an election she was expected to win, unless she succeeds in appealing her conviction.

Trump's statement about the French politician's case came the same day global stock markets plummeted in response to his decision to impose a series of sweeping global tariffs.

“I don’t know Marine Le Pen, but do appreciate how hard she worked for so many years,” Trump further said in his post, crediting the leader for suffering losses, but continuing her politics.

"And now, just before what would be a Big Victory, they get her on a minor charge that she probably knew nothing about—Sounds like a ‘bookkeeping’ error to me," he added.

The court determined that Le Pen and around twenty other co-defendants exploited the European Parliament as a source of income, misappropriating almost $5 million in parliamentary funds. This misuse allegedly took place over an 11-year span during a time when her party’s finances were critically low.

Tech billionaire and Department of Government Efficiency head Elon Musk endorsed the president's post about Le Pen's case on his own social platform X.

"Free Le Pen!" he wrote, along with a screenshot of Trump's Truth Social post.

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Trump's far-right European allies are rebuking the president's position on Ukraine and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, NBC News reports.

Leaders across the continent are coming to Ukraine’s side and questioning Trump’s actions following the president's disastrous sit-down with Zelenskyy last week. Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s far-right National Rally party called his diplomacy “brutal,” “cruel” and reprehensible,” in an interview with Le Figaro.

Nigel Farage, a member of the United Kingdom Parliament, and long time supporter of Trump also called out Vice President JD Vance’s recent attack on Britain as “wrong, wrong, wrong”. Vance on Monday claimed a minerals deal with the United States would guarantee Ukranian security better than "20,000 troops from some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years.” The vice president denied he was talking about British of French troops with that remark.

Per NBC News:

Dutch anti-Islam populist Geert Wilders — often referred to as the “Dutch Trump” because of his flamboyant blond hair and anti-immigration politics — said Saturday that he stood by Ukraine “with conviction.” He reacted to Trump’s Oval Office clash with Zelenskyy by posting on X that it was “fascinating TV, but not necessarily the best way to end the war, gentlemen.”

While the “Make Europe Great Again” summit in Madrid attracted a swirl of support for Trump from leaders delivering accolades such as “Hurricane Trump is sweeping across the United States”, the honeymoon seems to be waning.

Neo-Nazis Linked to “Terrorist Activities” to Host Budapest Concert - bellingcat

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During the United States' 2024 presidential race, many critics of Donald Trump — from Democrats to Never Trump conservatives — warned that if he won the election, the U.S. would suffer not only from a domestic standpoint, but also, from a foreign policy standpoint. Critics argued that in Europe, a Trump victory would harm the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and encourage far-right extremists like Hungarian Prime Viktor Orbán, France's Marine Le Pen (who heads the National Rally party), and the Alternative for Germany party.

According to Politico reporter Max Griera, Europe's "far-right leaders" — including Orbán, Le Pen, Spain's Vox party, and members of the Patriots for Europe party — are feeling empowered now that Trump is back in the White House.

Their celebratory mood was evident during an event in Madrid on Saturday, February 8.

"Boasting about a new era of conservative governments in Europe under the motto 'Make Europe Great Again,'" Griera reports, "the Patriots for Europe party — the third-largest EU political family — held its first rally since its inception after last summer's EU election. On the menu? Scrapping green policy, battling Islam, taking down Brussels EU governance, migration, opposing gender and family diversity, and fighting 'population replacement.'"

Orbán, during the event in Madrid, declared, "Our friend Trump, the Trump tornado, has changed the world in just a couple of weeks. An era has ended. Today, everyone sees that we are the future."

Le Pen told attendees, "We're facing a global tipping point."

"The guests, mostly Vox's most loyal supporters and political muscle from across Spain, descended on Madrid Airport's Marriott Conference Center to fill a 2000-seat auditorium, armed with their Dior scarfs and Barbour jackets," Griera observes. "They came to listen to leaders including Orbán, Le Pen, the Netherlands' Geert Wilders, Italy's Matteo Salvini, Czechia's Andrej Babiš and Austria's Herbert Kickl, who joined via video link as he finalizes negotiations in Vienna to become Austria’s new chancellor. One after the other, the leaders vowed to 'reconquer' Europe's governments from socialist, liberal and center-right forces — building an explicit parallel to Spain's 'Reconquista,' when Christian kingdoms reconquered the Iberian Peninsula from Muslim rulers in the Middle Ages."

Wilders, sounding very Trump-like, told the crowd, "People have had enough of illegal immigration. And I ask you, do you have enough of crime in Spain? Do you have a lot of Islamic immigration in Spain? Do you have enough of woke insanity?.... You were the first who rolled back Islam and restored the rich heritage of Christianity in your country. That's why we are great admirers of Spain."

Similarly, Krzysztof Bosak, leader of the far-right Konfederacja in Poland, told attendees, "We will defend Christianity and traditional values.… We will defend traditional and normal family: mother, father and many children."

*Read Politico's full article at this link.

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US extremists are rattled by new sanctions against global terrorism group

How scammers use psychology to create some of the most convincing internet cons

Jordan Green January 15, 2025

The State Department has applied the “specially designated global terrorist” designation to the Terrorgram Collective in a groundbreaking move that for the first time sanctions a transnational white supremacist terrorist group with a significant presence in the United States.

The announcement on Monday — one week before President Biden leaves office — justified the designation based on the group “posing a significant risk of committing, or having participated in training to commit acts of terrorism, that threaten the security of United States nationals or national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States.” Terrorgram is an amalgam of the words “terror” and “Telegram,” the latter of which is a social media platform used by members to distribute propaganda.

“This is the first time you’ve seen a white supremacist group that had members or supporters in the U.S. receive the designation,” Seamus Hughes, a researcher at the National Counterterrorism Innovation, Technology and Education Center at the University of Nebraska, told Raw Story.

Two of the group’s leaders, Dallas Erin Humber of California and Matthew Robert Allison of Idaho, were indicted last year on charges that included conspiracy, solicitation of hate crimes, solicitation of the murder of federal officials, and conspiracy to provide material support for terrorists. Two other individuals, Brandon Russell — founder of the neo-Nazi terror group Atomwaffen Division — and Andrew Takhistov, who each face federal charges related to plots to attack the power grid, are also linked to Terrorgram.

The indictment against Humber and Allison describes Terrorgram as “a network of channels, group chats, and users on Telegram that promote white supremacists accelerationism: an ideology centered on the belief that the white race is superior; that society is irreparably corrupt and cannot be saved by political action; and that violence and terrorism is necessary to ignite a race war and ‘accelerate’ the collapse of the government and the rise of a white ethnostate.”

Terrorgram is not the first transnational white supremacist terrorist group to be sanctioned by the State Department. In 2020, under the first Trump administration, the State Department applied the “specially designated global terrorist” identification to the Russian Imperial Movement, which was implicated in a series of bombings in 2016 and 2017 that targeted refugee shelters in Sweden. Nordic Resistance Movement, a group founded in Sweden, was added to the list last June.

The specific bans designated groups and individuals from holding property and financial interests in the United States, while also prohibiting U.S. citizens from engaging in financial transactions with them.

Following the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., the Russian Imperial Movement invited the organizers to visit its paramilitary training camps in St. Petersburg, according to Nathan Sales, a former Trump administration State Department counterterrorism official who testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee. Sales said there is no evidence that the Charlottesville organizers accepted the invitation, but the following month, Russian Imperial Movement leaders traveled to the United States to network with white supremacists, and one posed for a photo with the group’s flag in front of the White House.

“What is most interesting for me is this represents the first time when a designation would have ramifications for U.S. prosecutors,” Hughes said. “There’s not a cadre of Russian Imperial Movement adherents in the U.S., whereas there is a good number of individuals that were drawn to Terrorgram in the U.S.”

Hughes said the designation will give prosecutors the ability to request terrorism enhancements during sentencing.

“It helps for them to tell the story to a jury that this is not just a bunch of angry people online, but an actual terrorist group,” he added.

The designation is also likely to make social media companies more reluctant to allow members and associates to organize on their platforms.

“Because tech companies can face legal risks if they provide services to designated groups or individuals, sanctions can prompt them to sever ties with those listed as terrorists,” Sales testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee back in 2022.

The announcement about the State Department sanction against Terrorgram is already causing ripples of unease across Telegram.

Reacting to the announcement on Monday, a neo-Nazi channel that advertises itself as a source of “tradecraft to evade authorities online,” posted: “We all know we are operating on borrowed time here on Telegram. It is unfortunate, as it is a hell of an app.”

The post went on to say that users should not trust Pavel Durov, the Russian founder and CEO of Telegram, to protect their data.

“We don’t want any of our admins or subscribers to wind up in federal prison over ironically being part of a ‘terror group,’” the post continued. “With no publicly available criteria to determine guilt or association, the juice is not worth the squeeze. It doesn’t make sense to maintain a presence where the enemy has the advantage.”

Prior to the arrests of two American leaders last September, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police announced charges against two unnamed Ontario men “alleged to have participated in the creation of Terrorgram Collective manifestos and Atomwaffen Division recruiting videos.”

The Canadian arrests in December 2023 followed an 18-month investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. That timeframe puts the launch of the investigation roughly in June 2021, the time of the first Terrorgram publication Militant Accelerationism, according to a Southern Poverty Law Center investigation.

Federal prosecutors allege that Humber and Allison joined Terrorgram in 2019, and became leaders of the group in the summer of 2022, “after one previous leader was arrested and charged with terrorism offenses and another became aware that he was the subject of a terrorism related investigation.”

Following Humber and Allison’s arrests, three foreign nationals appear to have taken over leadership of Terrorgram. The State Department designation identifies Ciro Daniel Amorim Ferreira of Brazil, Noah Licul of Croatia and Hendrik Walh-Muller of South Africa as “leaders of the Terrorgram Collective” and “specially designated global terrorists.”

Terrorgram is linked to two other federal prosecutions in the United States beyond Humber and Allison. Russell, the Atomwaffen founder, was arrested in February 2023 and charged alongside codefendant Sarah Beth Clendaniel in an alleged plot to carry out a coordinated attack on electrical substations designed to create a widespread power outage in Baltimore.

While Terrorgram is not directly mentioned in charging documents for the case, a review of Russell’s Telegram chats by the Southern Poverty Law Center found that he forwarded a Terrorgram document called Make It Count to another Telegram user.

Court filings by the government also allege that Russell told an FBI confidential human source that they should use Mylar balloons to short out a power transformer. That tactic is recommended in another Terrorgram publication The Hard Reset, which is described by the government as including “detailed information on how to attack a substation, including the use of Mylar balloons.”

The State Department announcement references a planned energy facility attack by Andrew Takhistov in New Jersey last summer without directly naming him.

Takhistov’s charging documents allege that he “claimed to have taken a role in the publication of” The Hard Reset and that he sent a PDF of the document to an FBI undercover employee. Takhistov allegedly praised The Hard Reset as “the only thing you need” to plan a white supremacist terror attack.

Takhistov was active in the Terrorgram group chats, and Humber posted an Audiobook promoting white supremacist murder in January 2024 in response to a request from Takhistov, according to government court filings. Later, according to the government, Takhistov thanked a Terrorgram chat administrator for posting a video “with instructions for using Mylar balloons to commit an attack on an energy facility.”

Lawyers for Takhistov and Russell could not be reached for comment for this story prior to publication.

The State Department announcement listing Terrorgram as a terrorist entity cited the Biden administration’s National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism, released in June 2021. The framework highlighted the government’s efforts to assess whether foreign entities could meet the criteria for the “specially designated global terrorist” designation.

“These designations are part of a broader U.S. government effort to address the transnational dimensions of the threat posed by [racially and ethnically motivated violent extremist] actors and reflect the Biden-Harris administration’s continued commitment to countering domestic terrorism, which includes REMVE and white identity terrorism,” the State Department said.

The emphasis on tackling white supremacist terrorism under the Biden administration has been embraced by an array of agencies in addition to State, including Homeland Security, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the FBI.

The commitment across the federal government to combating white supremacist terrorism under Biden’s leadership built on a growing consensus within the agencies that took hold during the first Trump administration. It remains unclear whether the second Trump administration will maintain the same course.

“In fact, we viewed it as such a critical threat that back in June of 2019, under my leadership, we elevated racially and ethnically motivated violent extremism to our highest threat priority, on the same level with ISIS and homegrown violent extremists, where it remains to this day,” FBI Director Christopher Wray testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in March 2021.

Wray was appointed to lead the FBI by Trump in 2017.

Kash Patel, who has been named by Trump to replace Wray in the incoming administration, has expressed skepticism towards the government’s focus on “domestic terrorism.”

“Whistleblowers have revealed in multiple ways how the Deep State is continuing to weaponize the power of the state against internal dissidents,” he wrote in his book Government Gangsters. “To pump up public support for their attacks on conservative Americans, the FBI leadership has been reportedly pushing agents to artificially inflate data on domestic terrorism to make the problem seem much worse than it is.”

Asked for clarification on Patel’s views, a Trump transition spokesperson previously pledged to Raw Story that Patel will “protect Americans from terrorism as the agency’s director.”

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During Donald Trump's first term as president, Paul Manafort was among the many Trump allies who faced criminal charges. The veteran GOP operative was sentenced to 47 months in prison in 2019 after being found guilty on multiple charges of tax fraud and bank fraud, but in 2020, Trump granted him a presidential pardon.

Manafort has a long history of lobbying for extreme far-right figures in Europe, Latin America and other parts of the world. And in 2025, according to the **Daily Beast's Sean Craig, Manafort and "his team" have been offering their "services" to the far right in Ukraine and France (including a "billionaire backer of" National Front leader Marine Le Pen).

Craig, in an article published on January 13, reports, "A memo pitching the services of Manafort's team — including Trump's 2024 co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita and his 2024 pollster Tony Fabrizio — was circulated in Kyiv recently, the (New York) Times reported, to anxious reception….. Manafort told the Times that he has been contacted 'by numerous parties in Ukraine,' though said he 'never submitted a proposal on any matter to anyone in Ukraine.'"

READ MORE:['Fascist ideology': Veteran actor slams 'orange idiot' Trump for 'nonsense' claims about LA wildfires

Craig adds, "LaCivita said he and Fabrizio “are not currently under contract” with Manafort’s team, adding 'successful political consultants on both the right and left routinely do political consulting overseas.'"

Manafort served as one of Trump's campaign managers in 2016 before Kellyanne Conway joined the campaign. Craig notes that although Manafort's "connections to people with Russian intelligence ties" worried members of the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2020, his "prospects on the global consulting circuit have been revived by Trump's election victory in November."

"A pitch memo sent to French billionaire Pierre-Édouard Stérin, who plans to invest $150 million in the next decade in far-right parties in his country — including Le Pen’s —offered to 'develop a state-of-the-art and multidimensional campaign plan' that would target voters and use opposition research to discredit opponents," Craig explains. "Stérin’s associate Arnaud Rérolle told the (New York) Times that he held a call with Manafort, whose team agreed to provide the memo."

Craig adds, "They opted not to sign a contract with his team, however. Manafort may turn to Peru, where the Times said he spoke with a representative of Lima Mayor Rafael López Aliaga last month. Aliaga leads the conservative Popular Renewal and is a likely presidential candidate in 2026."

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In a coordinated effort to undermine climate science and slow environmental progress, prominent American climate change denial organizations recently teamed up with a conservative Austrian trade union known as the Union for Sovereignty and the German climate denialist European Institute for Climate and Energy to strategize on defeating climate solutions that threaten the fossil fuel industry or are otherwise deemed too radical.

The Heartland Institute, one of the leading climate denial organizations in the U.S., and the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a longstanding libertarian group, hosted the 16th International Climate Change Conference (ICCC), which took place from June 13–15 in Vienna — a new stronghold of the far right. It was the first time the conference had been held in Europe in almost a decade. According to CFACT, their intention was “to make the case for ‘climate realism,’” a phrase used by right-wing organizations to delegitimize climate change and downplay the urgency of the crisis.

Over the past few years, Europe has become a prime target for climate denialists, with fossil fuel lobbyists effectively peddling climate disinformation to far-right parties that oppose climate mitigation policies.

James Taylor, president of the Heartland Institute, that the new political climate in Europe — where the far right has been gaining traction in recent years — presents an opportunity to strengthen a global conservative “coalition” to push back against climate-friendly policies.

Spreading Misinformation and Conspiracy Theories

At the conference, speakers shared strategies for combating both “climate alarmism” and the growth of renewable energy. Craig Rucker, president of CFACT, participating in shareholder meetings to propose anti-green initiatives, drafting model bills against renewables, and drawing more attention to whale deaths to ramp up public opposition to offshore wind farms — using what experts have called a misinformation campaign.

Many presenters, including Taylor and Marc Morano of ClimateDepot.com, framed climate change as an anti-democratic, left-wing plot to consolidate global power, echoing conspiracy theories associated with recent Covid-19 measures.

Morano further claimed that sustainable farming policies would force American farmers to sell their land to tech-world billionaires such as Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos due to rising compliance costs. He also painted net-zero policies like restrictions on gas-powered cars as “corporate government collusion” aimed at benefiting the Chinese EV industry — a claim that echoes the rise in anti-China rhetoric used by Republican politicians and other conservatives. Morano further criticized Natural Asset Companies (NACs) — a boogeyman to conservatives for valuing ecosystems and natural resources — as a Wall Street plot to “take away available land from private citizens.”

The Supporting “Science”

The scientists who presented at the conference, including a Nobel laureate in physics and a former Trump administration scientific advisor, promoted denialist rhetoric by casting doubt on scientific evidence of global warming and the impact of greenhouse gasses. Some reiterated the fringe argument that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but rather “plant food,” while others questioned mainstream climate models such as those used by the United Nations.

Many of the scientists who presented at the conference have ties to oil industry money and have been criticized for accepting but not disclosing industry funding for their research.

Willie Soon, an astrophysicist formerly associated with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, failed to disclose that he had accepted more than $1.2 million in research-related donations from corporate fossil fuel funders, including the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, ExxonMobil, the American Petroleum Institute, and DonorsTrust, according to reporting by the New York Times.

William Happer and John F. Clauser, both of whom kowtowed to the fossil fuel industry by downplaying the role of carbon emissions on climate change, are members of the Koch-funded CO2 Coalition, which also receives funding from the Bradley Foundation, the Mercer Family Foundation, The 85 Fund (run by right-wing legal firebrand Leonard Leo), the Scaife Foundation, and other far-right donors. Additionally, Happer received $8,000 from Peabody Energy in exchange for testimony at a 2015 Minnesota state hearing claiming that carbon dioxide makes a positive impact on society, a Greenpeace investigation revealed.

Host Groups’ Industry Ties

Heartland and CFACT also receive significant funding from the fossil fuel industry. In 2019, a coalition of 19 U.S. Senators accused these groups of creating a “web of denial” to mislead the public about climate change and stymie legislative action. Heartland has received funding from fossil fuel companies such as Murray Energy and the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers. Since 2014, it has also received over $15 million from Donors Capital Fund and DonorsTrust, identity-scrubbing operations that give Big Oil a way to fund climate misinformation while avoiding bad press. These donor-advised funds have increasingly supported climate denial organizations as the traceability of funding from Big Oil has decreased, a correlation documented by Greenpeace.

Donors to CFACT have included ExxonMobil as well as the Scaife and Koch family foundations, which are largely funded by fossil fuel fortunes. Despite claims by its senior policy advisor that the group stopped accepting fossil fuel money as of 2010, data collected by DeSmogshows small grants from Charles Koch’s foundation and Murray Energy between 2014 and 2018. CFACT has also received more than $8 million from DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund over the past 20 years.

While these organizations claim to be “climate realists,” they play a major role in elevating and promoting arguments against net-zero initiatives and climate mitigation strategies critical to addressing the climate crisis. By reconnecting with their counterparts in Europe, they are expanding their global reach in ways that threaten serious efforts to radically reduce carbon emissions before it’s too late.

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American right-wing media celebrate far-right European electoral success

WRITTEN BY GIDEON TAAFFE

PUBLISHED 06/11/24

After the European Union Parliament — the legislative branch of the 27-member trade bloc — held elections Sunday that resulted in large electoral gains for far-right parties, right-wing media touted the results as good news for Republicans. Conservative media figures claim the results signify “a fundamental political shift” with regard to immigration that will be echoed in the U.S. and could help the GOP win in upcoming elections.

## Far-right parties gained power in EU Parliament elections

- EU elections resulted in huge gains for far-right parties.In Germany, the far-right party Alternative for Germany won the second highest number of seats after the center-right party in the EU Parliament elections. In France, the National Rally party, led by Marine Le Pen, got more than double the percentage of the vote received by President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist Renaissance party. The Associated Press, [6/10/24]

- Despite far-right gains in the EU Parliament, centrist parties still hold a majority.The center-right party, European People's Party Group, remains the dominant party with 186 seats. The second most popular party is the center-left party, Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats, which lost four seats for a new total of 135 seats. The Associated Press, [6/10/24; European Union, European Parliament 2024-2029 Provisional Results, 6/10/24]

- Right-wing victories could reshape legislative priorities in the EU.Environmental reforms are expected to be harder to pass and there is an increased likelihood of the EU adopting stricter anti-immigration policies. CNBC, [6/9/24]
## Right-wing media suggested EU Parliament elections are good news for conservatives in America

- On War Room, former Trump adviser Steve Bannon declared, “Europe is on fire with the right.” War Room correspondent Ben Harnwell added, “There’s clearly an undercurrent that’s moving in our direction.” Real America’s Voice, *War Room*, [6/10/24]

- Right-wing news site The Daily Caller published an op-ed titled “Sleeping MAGA Giant Of Europe Finally Awakens, And The Global Left Could Not Be More Terrified.” The outlet wrote: “Americans should take these elections as a promising sign; defeat is not inevitable, and the restoration of greatness is never more than a generation away.” The Daily Caller, [6/10/24]

- Conservative outlet Washington Examiner wrote, “Survey finds right-wing surge in EU election results driven by similar concerns to US voters.”The article compared the EU election results to Brexit, writing, “The impressive showing of the Right brought back memories of 2016, when the successful Brexit vote served as a precursor to former President Donald Trump’s victory.” Washington Examiner, [6/10/24]

- OutKick host Tomi Lahren posted on X (formerly Twitter): “The EU shift towards the right is promising.”She also compared the election with the 2016 Brexit vote, “Remember that Brexit was a great precursor to Trump’s victory here in 2016. The world is sick of woke shit!” Twitter/X, [6/10/24]

- Conservative radio host Bill Mitchell: “If Europe is the canary in the coalmine, Democrats are going to be wiped out in November.”Twitter/X, [6/10/24]

- Conservative Political Action Conference chairperson Matt Schlapp reacted to the EU Parliament election results on Newsmax, saying, “This is a great day for what we believe in, with groups like CPAC, with the results in Europe.” Schlapp also seemed to use the European election results to argue that the GOP should fall in line behind Trump: “The kind of establishment center-right parties in most of these European countries, akin to the Republican Party, … [are] suffering from this idea of going along with the left but less. So it’s the same problem we have here in the Republican Party. You have Republicans that are still unsure if they want to have a full embrace of Trump.” Newsmax, *The National Report*, [6/10/24]

- During an appearance on Newsmax, conservative activist Tim Parrish praised right-wing success in EU elections and said, “We're going to see that here in the United States as well.”Parrish claimed, “More conservative policies are starting to take root as people, just like we are here in the United States, are dealing with mass immigration and crime and things that are impacting their communities. Policies that are a little more conservative are starting to take root in these areas, and we’re seeing that in not only in France and across the world, but we’re going to see that in the United States as well.” Newsmax, *The National Report*, [6/10/24]

## Right-wing media praised far-right anti-immigrant rhetoric

- Fox News host Laura Ingraham claimed the EU elections showed that “globalists, for the most part, are on the run,” and that, “people are tired of the mass migration.”She added, “But the media are still clinging to this notion of globalism. They don’t understand Americans’ feelings on this [immigration].” Fox News, *The Ingraham Angle*, [6/10/24]

- The Daily Wire host Michael Knowles called the election a “fundamental political shift” because “these elections are about migration,” saying, “I’m hopeful that this is what we’re seeing in Europe now: a sign of things to come in America.” Knowles claimed the “right is rising in Europe” and the U.S. due to “migration,” adding, “People don't like their country being flooded with foreigners.” The Daily Wire, *The Michael Knowles Show*, [6/10/24]

- Students for Trump founder Ryan Fournier posted on X that the right won in Europe because “they don’t want their countries to look like ours.” “Enough is enough!” he added. Twitter/X, [6/9/24]

- Right-wing commentator Ian Miles Cheong reacted, writing, “Save Europe, while it can still be saved from foreign invaders.”He claimed if immigration is not curbed, Europe “will see civil war.” Twitter/X, [6/9/24]

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The Conservative Political Action Conference has its eyes beyond the water’s edge in 2024, and far-right movements from around the world have flocked to National Harbor, Maryland to address the conference’s audience of conservative die-hards. The event’s 2024 motto, “where globalism goes to die,” is apparently making an exception for global movements with authoritarian and isolationist strains. Representatives and leaders from these movements have taken to the stage to prescribe how to replicate their harsh tactics in the United States. As the conference’s influence has waned domestically, CPAC has expanded its horizons in recent years, launching auxiliary events across the globe in countries like Mexico, Japan, Hungary, Brazil, South Korea, and Australia.

El Salvador President Nayib Bukele}:

El Salvador’s far-right president, Nayib Bukele, who recently won a second five-year term, received a “rock-star welcome” when he arrived at CPAC on Thursday, February 22, to give a speech.

Since his election in 2019, Bukele has declared a state of emergency in his country and promised to crack down on gangs and criminal activity. According to Amnesty International, under Bukele’s leadership, Salvadoran authorities have committed “massive human rights violations, including thousands of arbitrary detentions and violations of due process, as well as torture and ill-treatment, and at least 18 people have died in state custody.” The human rights organization has also accused Bukele’s government of using “torture” and “enforced disappearances” in its supposed gang purge.

During his speech, Bukele seemingly advised America’s next president to follow in his footsteps.

“The next president of the United States must not only win an election, he must have the vision, the will, and the courage to do whatever it takes,” Bukele said. “He must be able to identify the underlying forces that will conspire him, that will conspire against him. These dark forces are already taking over your country.”

At the end of his speech, Bukele encouraged audience members to “put up the fight because in the end it will be worth it. It has been for us, and you will have your country back."

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CitationFrom Right Side Broadcasting Network's February 22 CPAC livestream

Alternative For Germany’s Christine Anderson}:

Germany’s anti-immigrant, hard-right populist party Alternative for Germany has seen hundreds of thousands take to the streets in Germany in recent weeks to protest following a report that members of the party were present at a meeting with right-wing extremists to discuss deporting millions of immigrants. It sent Christine Anderson, a member of the European Parliament, to CPAC this year.

Anderson sat for an interview with former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon’s during a live recording of War Room: Battleground at CPAC. During the interview, Anderson told the CPAC audience to not be afraid of government noncompliance.

“Most people just complied with whatever the government asked of them because they were afraid of what the government might do to them if they didn’t comply,” Anderson said. “People should be way more afraid of what the government will do if you do comply. So, take away the weapon. Don’t be afraid anymore. Just let them threaten you with whatever they want.”

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CitationFrom the February 22, 2024, edition of LindellTV's War Room: Battleground

Hungary’s Miklos Szantho}:

Miklos Szantho, director general of the Center for Fundamental Rights, a conservative Hungarian think-tank that organizes CPAC Hungary and promotes “Judeo-Christian social traditions,” spoke about Hungary and conservatism.

In a 2023 interview with the Washington Times, Szantho described the CPAC Hungary's motto, “United We Stand!,” as representing the Hungarian right’s hopes of continuing “to broaden and deepen the network we have built from the Danube to the Potomac in recent years.” Szantho also claimed Hungary and the United States must work together to “finally defeat the liberal left” and that “Hungary has shown that the progressive mainstream can be conquered.”

He echoed those sentiments in his CPAC 2024 speech, telling the audience, “Let me be blunt: The cult of woke and its priests in the mainstream press, Hollywood, the music industry, and corporate boardrooms are a clear and present danger to our way of life and even our security.”

He went on to claim Hungary understands what the US is going through because “woke is just a new form of communism. It is a civilizational threat.”

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CitationFrom the February 23, 2024, livestream of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC)

Szantho closed his speech by announcing, “Together we will make America great again, together we will make Europe great again, together we will make this world sane again, together we will win and they will lose.”
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CitationFrom the February 23, 2024, livestream of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC)

Argentina's President Javier Milei}:

Argentinian President Javier Milei is a self-described “anarcho-capitalist” and the leader of the country’s Libertarian Party. Since taking office, Milei has purged thousands of government jobs and pushed “severe reforms” that have hurt the country’s struggling economy.

After spending most of his speech giving his thoughts on economics, Milei concluded by telling the audience to stand against socialism, regulations, and the idea of market failure.

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CitationFrom the February 24, 2024, OAN coverage of CPAC

Video also circulated on social media of Trump meeting Milei.

spain’s Santiago Abascal}:

Santiago Abascal, the leader of Spain’s ardently nationalist far-right party Vox, has positioned himself and his party as anti-feminist, and anti-LGBTQ rights.

Abascal is currently under investigation for comments he made to an Argentinian newspaper suggesting that a time would come when Spaniards would want to see the country’s current socialist prime minister “strung up by his feet."

During his CPAC speech, Abascal warned of the dangers of socialism, claiming Spain suffers “at the hands of a government of communists and socialists” who “protect and support the terrorism of Hamas” and make alliances with the “criminal regimes of Venezuela and Nicaragua.”

Abascal concluded his speech by saying, “To move forward, to make the West great again, I want to say here today that you should all be assured that the Spanish patriots are ready to fight side-by-side the American patriots.”

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CitationFrom the February 23, 2024, livestream of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC)

Japan’s Hiroaki “Jay” Aeba}:

Hiroaki “Jay” Aeba is the founder of CPAC Japan and chairman of the Japanese Conservative Union, a Japanese clone of the American group that organizes CPAC.

In addition to his conservative politics, Aeba has also earned notoriety for his involvement in a Japanese religious cult called Happy Science that sells “miracle cures” for COVID-19. Aeba also founded the cult’s political wing, the Happiness Realization Party, which pushes “ultranationalism” and measures to increase Japan’s population.

During his 2024 CPAC speech, Aeba praised CPAC chairman Matt Sclapp for bringing conservative world leaders together, telling the audience, “Now CPAC is the place for conservative world leaders, for the key men in every country, to come and share their ideas.”

Aeba also claimed that the “U.S. and the world and Japan will be better off” once Trump wins reelection and that he will “stabilize the entire world.“

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CitationFrom the February 23, 2024, livestream of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) 2024

England’s Liz Truss}:

During her CPAC appearance, former British prime minister Liz Truss, who served only 50 days as the country’s leader, pushed anti-trans and anti-woke talking points and fearmongered about immigration.

She warned that “the very basis of Western civilization is being undermined” and that our borders are “out of control, with illegal immigrants able to enter our countries freely.”

Truss also fearmongered about about how “our history is being challenged” and “our biology is being challenged” and claimed, “We've got a new kind of economics now in the West. It's called wokenomics.”

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CitationFrom the February 22, 2024, livestream of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) 2024

Truss argued that conservatives needed to arm themselves with “a bigger bazooka” than merely endorsing the “right policies,” before weighing on the 2024 U.S. elections. “Of course, we need a Republican back in the White House, we need it desperately,” she said. “It’s not just America that needs it desperately, we need it desperately right across the free world, because you are the leaders of the free world, like it or not.”

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'The fascist nightmare looms': Columnist says Trump’s election may end democracy worldwide

Carl Gibson January 20, 2024

If former President Donald Trump wins a second term in November, one columnist believes it could lead to the eventual rise of fascistic governments around the globe.

Rather than standing alone as a threat to American democracy, Guardian columnist Simon Tisdall argued that the former president is instead part of a larger trend of far-right, authoritarian leaders taking control of Western democracies in the Americas and Europe. He noted that despite a relatively prosperous economy, liberal institutions today are "weak and discredited." He compared Trump's MAGA movement to Vladimir Putin supporters in Russia, as both have a pattern of "valuing charisma over character, preferring the strongman to the right man, and turning a blind eye to corruption and lies."

Tisdall pointed to Monday's Iowa Caucuses as an example of how Trump's "anti-democratic" strategy prevailed over the face-to-face strategy practiced by other candidates like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who invested tens of millions of dollars in a ground game that spread to all 99 counties, yet failed to win a single one.

"Trump’s approach to Iowa exemplified how anti-democratic anti-politics works. He mostly avoided rallies and meet-and-greets with voters, boycotted debates with rival candidates, and travelled, aloof, in a power-tripping motorcade of black secret service limousines," Tisdall wrote. "Yet his imperial mien, lavishly funded TV advertising and harsh take-no-prisoners policy agenda produced a record win."

When looking at democracies around the world, Tisdall observed that "enclaves of freedom" are "besieged" by authoritarianism as restless voters seek strongmen who will ensure "security, uniformity, conformity and social validation for the dominant majority at the cost of civic freedoms, legal accountability, independent media, diversity and minority rights."

"India is succumbing to one-man rule, beguiled by the intolerant Hindu nationalism of Narendra Modi. Israel’s democracy is presently self-destructing. In Africa, coups abound. In Europe, Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, scrambled to shore up the national project last week against a surging far-right tide," Tisdall wrote. "In Germany, Italy and Hungary, much the same struggle against a reviving fascism is being fought (or conceded). So much so that Germany’s chancellor, Olaf Scholz, joined street protesters to urge resistance to the anti-migrant, Nazi-linked Alternative for Germany party. In the UK, alienation and an anachronistic voting system turn elections into charades."

Tisdall wrote that if Americans don't stand up for democracy in November, it could signal that "the liberal moment" has passed.

READ MORE: How the 'terror of autocracy' could make or break the 2024 election

"The fascist nightmare looms anew," he wrote. "Under darkly lowering skies, the post-democratic age dawns."

Read Tisdall's column in full by clicking here.

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an 12 23

the New York Young Republican Club recently held its annual gala in New York's financial district, and former President Donald Trump gave the keynote address with some of the global far right's most notorious political figures in attendance.

According to Talking Points Memo (TPM), the gala's attendees included not just American far-right politicians like Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado), Matt Gaetz (R-Florida) and Paul Gosar (R-Arizona), but also European right-wing extremists like Austrian politician Gerald Grosz and European Parliament member Susanna Ceccardi, who is from Italy's far-right Lega party. German politician Maximilian Krah — whose party, Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) has been criticized as a "neo-Nazi party" — was also at the event.

"Donald Trump rubbing elbows with Nazi-linked groups might be surprising if Trump’s last month wasn’t defined by him parroting Hitler and Mussolini, and promising to rule as a dictator so he can rip away Americans’ freedoms and round up millions of Americans into detention camps," said Ammar Moussa, who is the rapid response director for President Joe Biden's reelection campaign.

"The American people rejected Trump and his MAGA attacks on democracy in 2020, and it’s why he’s going to lose again next November," Moussa added.

Gerald Grosz was initially a member of Austria's far-right Freedom Party, which was founded by Anton Reinthaller — a former Nazi Party leader and SS officer. Grosz and his colleague Jorg Haider, who was the son of a Nazi stormtrooper who praised Adolf Hitler's regime, eventually joined a Freedom Party offshoot. While they all come from different countries, TPM described Grosz, Ceccardi and Krah as comrades-in-arms in movements that are "staunchly nationalist and anti-immigrant" in nature.

Prior to Trump's speech, he was introduced as the "45th, 46th and 47th presidents of the United States," which alludes to Trump's baseless conspiracy theory that he was the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election. Trump doubled down on his "dictator" comments during his speech, repeating that if elected to another term he would assume dictatorial powers on day one of his administration to build a border wall and "drill drill drill."

The New York Young Republican Club's flirting with global far-right figures is in line with how international political scholars have described the modern GOP. In 2019, Harvard University political scientist Pippa Norris surveyed roughly 2,000 political experts around the globe on the authoritarian leanings of various modern far-right parties. She found that the American Republican Party has more in common with authoritarian, fascist-adjacent parties like Turkey's AKP and Hungary's Fidesz than with their counterparts in G7 countries like the Tories in the UK and the conservatives in Canada.

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an11 23

2023's most talked-about bombshell in cable news came in April when Fox News fired its top-rated host Tucker Carlson. Since then, the former Fox News star has hosted a show on X, formerly Twitter.

Carlson, post-Fox News, hasn't been shy about promoting former President Donald Trump's 2024 campaign — not only in the United States, but in other countries as well. In a report published by Politico on November 29, journalist Sarah Wheaton stresses that Carlson is acting like "Trump's top international diplomat."

"Since his ouster from cable TV," Wheaton reports, "Carlson has been taking his new X show on a world tour — and his interviews with Argentina's Javier Milei and Hungary's Viktor Orbán have racked up hundreds of millions of views. Yet Carlson is also engaging in a sort of shadow diplomacy."

Wheaton continues, "In early November, he popped up in London to visit Julian Assange at Belmarsh prison. Eleven days later, Carlson was spotted on the streets of Madrid, alongside Santiago Abascal, leader of Spain's far-right Vox Party, amid protesters against amnesty for Catalan separatists."

On X, Carlson has not only been promoting Trump's campaign — he has also been pointing out the parallels between the MAGA movement and far-right authoritarians like Orbán.

"According to a new book by the former CNN media reporter Brian Stelter, Fox executives hadn't authorized Carlson's weeklong mission there, and the flirtation with authoritarianism might have been a contributing factor in his dismissal," Wheaton explains. "There was also Carlson's role in the defamation lawsuit that cost Fox $787 million for on-air lies that the 2020 U.S. election was stolen."

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1123an no lnx

'Completely unacceptable': Johnson gavels House out for 3-day weekend to attend far-right event in Paris

Carl Gibson

November 10, 2023

Even though a potential federal government shutdown is just eight days away, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) sent lawmakers home early for a long weekend to tend to a different priority: Catching a flight to Paris.

The New Republic reported Friday that Johnson — who still has yet to present a plan to fund the government before the November 18 deadline — gaveled the House of Representatives out of session on Thursday so he can make it to the Worldwide Freedom Initiative's (WFI) upcoming conference in Paris, France, where he's due to speak Friday night.

"We are just 8 days away from a devastating government shutdown — and instead of working in a bipartisan way to keep the government open, Speaker Johnson sent Congress home early for the weekend," tweeted Rep. Abigail Spanberger (D-Virginia). "This is completely unacceptable."

According to the New Republic, this weekend's WFI conference features an array of prominent far-right figures. In addition to Johnson, Governor Kristi Noem (R-South Dakota) will also be in attendance, along with her paramour Corey Lewandowski, who was found to have had a years-long affair with Noem earlier this year despite Noem still being legally married to her husband. A spokeswoman for far-right public education activist group Moms for Liberty — an anti-LGBTQ group whose school board candidates suffered multiple staggering losses in five different states Tuesday night — is also speaking. A promotional flyer for the event also teases appearances by Truth Social CEO (and former California Congressman) Devin Nunes, as well as former Trump campaign manager David Bossie.

Johnson will also be joined at the conference by various international far-right activists, including Brexit architect Nigel Farage, French politician Eric Zemmour — who has defended the Nazi Party's French collaborators — and Balázs Orbán, who serves as political director to extremist Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán (no relation).

This weekend isn't Johnson's first introduction to the WFI, with TNR reporting that the newly minted House speaker delivered the keynote speech at the group's launch event earlier on the 4th of July prior to his colleagues giving him the speaker's gavel. Johnson has also been making his rounds with right-wing media since becoming speaker, giving multiple interviews to Fox News, Newsmax and One America News Network.

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spain got beat 10 23?

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italy sweden 922

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afd gains 7 23

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no lnx $ ****

Worldwide fascism is being accelerated by the one thing few people want to talk about

Thom Hartmann

August 22, 2023

This article was paid for by AlterNet subscribers.

The government of the Netherlands fell this summer. The issue that tipped it over the edge was immigration driven by climate change. If Putin wanted to destroy democracy in Europe (and he does), back in 2015 he couldn’t have picked a better strategy. Odds are, though, he was just trying to protect his deepwater ports; it wasn’t until the crisis developed that he realized how he could exploit it to overthrow liberal democracies in the EU. The way it’s played out gives us a glimpse into our future — and the future of democratic republics all across the world — as the global climate emergency and the refugee crisis associated with it grows more severe over the next few years.

The current rise-of-rightwing-fascism crisis building in Europe began in 2010 and started with global climate change.

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The fall of that year sawunusually severe rainfall across the wheat-growing parts of Canada, cutting that nation’s wheat harvest, along with drought across Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and China. A La Nina caused crop failures in Argentina and Peru. Worldwide prices of staple foods, particularly wheat, exploded.

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On December 17 of that year a street vendor inTunisia, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire to protest the high cost of the wheat he needed to make the foods he and his peers sold, and the harassment of police against their protests. It sparked what we referred to then as the Arab Spring, that lasted through most of 2011.

The steady warming and drought in that area, though, never let up and the desert in North Africa relentlessly continued to eat up millions of acres of food-producing land, particularly across Syria. By 2015 it had pushed over a million Syrian subsistence farmers off their land — that had desertified — and into Syria’s cities, particularly Damascus and Aleppo.

Northern Africa became the world’s number one food importer, and the prices kept rising relentlessly.

Newly homeless, hungry, and destitute, these Syrian farmers began demonstrations in the streets demanding food, shelter, and employment or “welfare” payments from the Syrian government.

Bashar Assad, being a psychopathic dictator, ordered his troops to fire live ammunition into the crowds in 2012 and 2013, and soon a full-blown revolt was on: “rebels” seized Syria’s largest city, Aleppo, in early 2013.

Syria was also the base for Russia’s Mediterranean fleet, with multiple deep-water ports that Putin believed were critical to his nation’s military defense. By 2015 he had a dozen battleships there, along with submarines and other warships.

He had to prevent the Assad government from falling or risk an “Arab Spring democracy” emerging — as happened for a short while in Tunisia and Egypt [ALSO DROUGHT]— that might align itself with the West and kick Russia out.

Making a long story short, Putin bombed the crap out of Syria on Assad’s behalf, virtually leveling the city of Aleppo, killing hundreds of civilians.

It was one of the worst war crimes of this century, almost as deadly as George W. Bush’s brutal and criminal invasions and occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. Millions of climate and war refugees fled the country, joining Bush’s wars’ fugitives making their way into Europe by any means possible.

:{:{}:

Thus began Europe’s refugee crisis, which just helped bring down Holland’s government.In two weeks, it may well cause the rightwing fascist-aligned anti-immigrant People’s Party to come to power in the Spanish elections on July 23.

As the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) noted in a 2021 report:

“By the end of 2016, nearly5.2 million refugees and migrants reached European shores,undertaking treacherous journeys from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries torn apart by war and persecution.”

This flood of brown-skinned Muslims fleeing African and Middle Eastern climate change and wars into Europe over the past decade is why Italy and Sweden now have rightwing leaders; why Viktor Orbán was able to gain and hold power in Hungarywith his promise to “build a wall” along Hungary’s southern border (a promise he kept); and why rightwing parties are today growing so rapidly in Germany, Greece, Norway, Austria, Belgium and France.

The legacy of five centuries of racist imperialism across four continents has been that wealth and safety from the ravages of climate change are concentrated in mostly White-run nations, while vulnerability to desertification and poverty are concentrated in mostly Brown- and Black-run nations.

When Russia intervened in British politics to tear apart the EU, their trolls’ main Facebook pitch for Brexit was that “those [Brown and Black] people” the EU had let in were now making their way to the UK.

While every country in the world can accept refugees in small numbers without crisis, when “other people” begin showing up in large numbers the response by every nation in history typically tends toward rightwing nationalism and xenophobia, an obsession with borders, and demands for racial, cultural, and religious “purity.”

Here in North America we’re seeing a similar dynamic. Reagan so severely destabilized Central America and Venezuela with his sanctions, illegal Iran-Contra program, and support for rightwing death squads that those nations never recovered. In the years since, climate change has bit these weakened governments deep, forcing millions of subsistence farmers — just like in Syria but here mostly from hard-hit Guatemala — off land that once grew crops but is now, just a few years later, scrub desert.

Exploiting the climate refugee crisis on America’s southern border, Republican politicians have spent the years since Obama’s election in 2008 falsely claiming that Democrats had thrown the border “open,” producing thousands of news stories that have been used by coyotes — human traffickers — to draw even more refugees toward the United States.

Compounding that, Trump launched his 2016 campaign on keeping Brown people out of the United States, and today racism and xenophobia form the foundation of most Republican political campaigns (when they aren’t hating on queer people or women).

The result of these trends has been a worldwide shift to the right. As Freedom House noted in a 2022 report, over 60 countries experienced “declines” in democracy the previous year; only about 20 percent of people worldwide now live in “free” nations:

“Global freedom faces a dire threat. … Authoritarian regimes have become more effective at co-opting or circumventing the norms and institutions meant to support basic liberties, and at providing aid to others who wish to do the same. …

“The global order is nearing a tipping point, and if democracy’s defenders do not work together to help guarantee freedom for all people, the authoritarian model will prevail.”

So far, the western world’s refugee crisis has been mostly driven by massive policy errors and outright war crimes: Russia’s response to the Syrian farmers, the US invasion and destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan, and American meddling in Central America and Venezuela.

But all have been either triggered or exacerbated by the worldwide climate emergency. And, as we can see from this summer’s weather worldwide, that emergency is building at a rate far more rapid than even alarmist climate scientists were predicting just a decade ago.

Recent projections show that within just the next two decades as many as three billion people could be fleeing areas that will soon only marginally support human life.

As equatorial regions become uninhabitable, the mostly darker-skinned people living there will be migrating north and south into areas controlled by lighter-skinned people in numbers that will make today’s Syrian, Iraq, and Afghan refugee crisis look like a statistical blip.

It will put worldwide white supremacist and Nazi movements into hyperdrive.

In addition to acting immediately to mitigate climate change and green the world’s economy, the free nations of the world must harden our democracies against reactive rightwing violence- and hate-based racist political movements.

That will also require radically reducing the Supreme Court-gifted political power of big money here in America — particularly from the fossil fuel industry and the billionaires it has created — and returning that power and wealth to the hard-hit majority. The Democratic Party in America is increasingly committed to this, but Republicans and the dozens of billionaires in their camp are prepared to spend heretofore unimaginable sums to keep climate deniers and race-baiters in office.

We also must help those nations most hard-hit by the warming — caused largely by our carbon pollution — to deal with their own refugees internally, lest they irrecoverably destabilize first their own governments and then ours.

To paraphrase JFK, we are not helpless before this task.

But it will require western and American media and political systems to take on these three crises — climate change, the refugees it produces, and politicians who demagogue the issue while blocking forward progress — now.

We are quite literally out of time.

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"We need to understand the type of reactions and everyday denials that explain why we don’t take the greenhouse effect seriously – even when we see the consequences in front of our eyes"

“We do not dismiss climate change denial as something limited to, for example, powerful, older men with strong connections to the fossil-fuels industry – even if such organized groups do play important roles. Knowledge of climate change and its causes has been around for a long time, so firstly, we also need to understand the type of reactions and everyday denials that explain why we don’t take the greenhouse effect seriously – even when we see the consequences in front of our eyes.”

According to Martin Hultman, there are strong reasons for the prevalence of climate change denial, and why it can be so difficult to take in the implications of climate science.

“Around 80 percent of all energy bought and sold in the world is oil, coal, or gas. The world’s economy runs on this type of energy, which is destroying our habitat at the same time. This makes climate science’s findings problematic because it means that many in Sweden – and in other countries which use these resources to maintain their lifestyle – need to change their way of life, and many of the most powerful companies in the world will have to change their business models. At the same time, a more climate-friendly lifestyle involves a lot of what many of us hold dear. For example, more time socializing, more contact with nature, better health and less stress. “

FACTS: Global research network on climate change denial established

The project “Why don’t we take climate change seriously? A study of climate change denial” is a multi-year, interdisciplinary and international project, which is financed by the Swedish Energy Agency.

:{:{The project establishes the world’s first research network on climate change denial – the Centre for Studies of Climate Change Denialism (CEFORCED*)*, which includes around 40 scientific experts, including among others, professor Riley Dunlap, Oklahoma State Universit:(style="background-color:#ffff00ff"):}:y.}:

The project shall investigate right-wing nationalism, Conservative thinktanks, and extractive industries as key focus.

Right-wing nationalism: The project will map right-wing nationalist parties in Europe and their arguments around climate change denialism. Among other things, Twitter and other internet discussion groups will be analysed.
Extractive industries: The project will undertake a historical investigation into Sweden’s extractive industries –what they have learned about climate change, and how they have acted, as well as connecting knowledge to international studies into the debate.
Conservative think tanks: The project maps out how conservative thinktanks in Sweden analyze and communicate around climate, as well as their connections to lobby groups of similar character.

FACTS: Different forms of climate change denial

According to earlier research, several forms of climate change denial exist:

Organised: Groups such as Klimatsans (Climate Sense) or Stockholmsinitiativet (The Stockholm Initiative) in Sweden, as well as lobby groups like the Heartland Institute in the USA, which support and spread climate change denial.
Party Political: Political parties such as UKIP in Britain, and AfD in Germany, among others, who work against different forms of climate policy.

Response denial: For example, when people in positions of power make decisions such as the construction of Sälen airport in the Swedish mountains, running totally counter to the climate policies they claim to support.
Everyday denial: When people act as though as they unaware of climate change, and, for example, fly several times a year to foreign countries.

For more information, contact:

Martin Hultman, Associate Professor in Science, Technology and Environmental Studies, Department of Technology Management and Economics, Chalmers University of Technology. +46 709-450112, +46 31-772 63 78, martin.hultman@chalmers.se

Martin Hultman on...

The future of the climate, politics and climate change

 "I have two insights. I know how long knowledge about climate change has existed, and how many there are that have been resisting it for a long time. That can make me think: We don't stand a chance, we will ruin the planet. At the same time, the people are the ones who build and maintain our world, and in the past, there’s been a great shift in power and in values - the civil rights movement, women's right to vote, the abolition of slavery. In connection with those forms of power changes, comes legislation, technical solutions, and political changes. It gives me hope!"

  His commitment to the climate issue and the deterioration of power 

"That power-makers have known about climate change for so long without acting on it, hurts my stomach. I feel a strong sense of betrayal from former generation leaders, who have continued to build in infrastructures and legislation that worsens the situation - and left future generations in a place where time to act on it is short. It’s a generation and justice issue that concerns me strongly. "

Some scientific publications on climate denial:

Right-wing nationalism

Krange, O. Kaltenborn, B.& Hultman, M. (2018). “Cool Dudes in Norway: Climate Change denial among conservative Norwegian Men”, Environmental Sociology.

McCright, A., Dunlap, R (2011). "Cool dudes: The denial of climate change among conservative white males in the United States", Global Environmental Change.

Forchtner, B., Kroneder, A., & Wetzel, D. (2018). “Being Skeptical? Exploring Far-Right Climate-Change Communication in Germany”, Environmental Communication.

Hultman, M., Björk A. & Viinikka, T. (kommande publicering). “Far-right and climate change denial. Denouncing environmental challenges via anti-establishment rhetoric, marketing of doubts, industrial/breadwinner masculinities enactments and ethno-nationalism.”. In Contemporary Environmental Communication by the Far Right in Europe ed. Forchtner, Kølvraa & Wodak London: Routledge.

Anshelm, J., & Hultman, M. (2014). A green fatwā? Climate change as a threat to the masculinity of industrial modernity, NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies, 9(2), 84-96.

Extractive industries

Supran,G; Oreskes, N (2017). "Assessing ExxonMobil's climate change communications (1977–2014)", Environmental Research Letters.

Oreskes, N., & Conway, E. M. (2011). Merchants of Doubt: How a handful of scientists obscured the truth on issues from tobacco smoke to global warming, Bloomsbury Publishing, USA.

Young, N., Coutinho, A. (2013). "Government, Anti-Reflexivity, and the Construction of Public Ignorance about Climate Change: Australia and Canada Compared", Global Environmental Politics.

Conservative think tanks

Brulle, R (2014). "Institutionalizing delay: foundation funding and the creation of U.S. climate change counter-movement organizations", Climatic Change.

Bohr, J. (2016). "The ‘climatism’ cartel: why climate change deniers oppose market-based mitigation policy", Environmental Politics.

Dunlap, R, & Jacques (2013). “Climate Change Denial Books and Conservative Think Tanks. Exploring the Connection”, The American Behavioral Scientist.

Anshelm, J., & Hultman, M. (2014). Discourses of global climate change: apocalyptic framing and political antagonisms, Routledge, London.

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nb terms commonly used to describe trump and insurr (1st reporter that used forced to resign back in the day?)

https://www.alternet.org/2021/01/right-wing-violence-2650079928

During the past two years, U.S. counterterrorism officials held meetings with their European counterparts to discuss an emerging threat: right-wing terror groups becoming increasingly global in their reach.

American neo-Nazis were traveling to train and fight with militias in the Ukraine. There were suspected links between U.S. extremists and the Russian Imperial Movement, a white supremacist group that was training foreigners in its St. Petersburg compounds. A gunman accused of killing 23 people at an El Paso Walmart in 2019 had denounced a “Hispanic invasion" and praised a white supremacist who killed 51 people at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, and who had been inspired by violent American and Italian racists.

But the efforts to improve transatlantic cooperation against the threat ran into a recurring obstacle. During talks and communications, senior Trump administration officials steadfastly refused to use the term “right-wing terrorism," causing disputes and confusion with the Europeans, who routinely use the phrase, current and former European and U.S. officials told ProPublica. Instead, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security referred to “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremism," while the State Department chose “racially or ethnically motivated terrorism."

“We did have problems with the Europeans," one national security official said. “They call it right-wing terrorism and they were angry that we didn't. There was a real aversion to using that term on the U.S. side. The aversion came from political appointees in the Trump administration. We very quickly realized that if people talked about right-wing terrorism, it was a nonstarter with them."

The U.S. response to the globalization of the far-right threat has been slow, scattered and politicized, U.S. and European counterterrorism veterans and experts say. Whistleblowers and other critics have accused DHS leaders of downplaying the threat of white supremacy and slashing a unit dedicated to fighting domestic extremism. DHS has denied those accusations.

In 2019, a top FBI official told Congress the agency devoted only about 20% of its counterterrorism resources to the domestic threat. Nonetheless, some FBI field offices focus primarily on domestic terrorism.

Former counterterrorism officials said the president's politics made their job harder. The disagreement over what to call the extremists was part of a larger concern about whether the administration was committed to fighting the threat.

“The rhetoric at the White House, anybody watching the rhetoric of the president, this was discouraging people in government from speaking out," said Jason Blazakis, who ran a State Department counterterrorism unit from 2008 to 2018. “The president and his minions were focused on other threats."

Other former officials disagreed. Federal agencies avoided the term “right-wing terrorism" because they didn't want to give extremists legitimacy by placing them on the political spectrum, or to fuel the United States' intense polarization, said Christopher K. Harnisch, the former deputy coordinator for countering violent extremism in the State Department's counterterrorism bureau. Some causes espoused by white supremacists, such as using violence to protect the environment, are not regarded as traditionally right-wing ideology, said Harnisch, who stepped down this week.

“The most important point is that the Europeans and the U.S. were talking about the same people," he said. “It hasn't hindered our cooperation at all."

As for the wider criticism of the Trump administration, Harnisch said: “In our work at the State Department, we never faced one scintilla of opposition from the White House about taking on white supremacy. I can tell you that the White House was entirely supportive."

The State Department focused mostly on foreign extremist movements, but it examined some of their links to U.S. groups as well.

There was clearly progress on some fronts. The State Department took a historic step in April by designating the Russian Imperial Movement and three of its leaders as terrorists, saying that the group's trainees included Swedish extremists who carried out bombing attacks on refugees. It was the first such U.S. designation of a far-right terrorist group.

With Trump now out of office, Europeans and Americans expect improved cooperation against right-wing terrorists. Like the Islamist threat, it is becoming clear that the far-right threat is international. In December, a French computer programmer committed suicide after giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to U.S. extremist causes. The recipients included a neo-Nazi news website. Federal agencies are investigating, but it is not yet clear whether anything about the transaction was illegal, officials said.

“It's like a transatlantic thing now," said a European counterterror chief, describing American conspiracy theories that surface in the chatter he tracks. “Europe is taking ideology from U.S. groups and vice versa."

The Crackdown

International alliances make extremist groups more dangerous, but also create vulnerabilities that law enforcement could exploit.

Laws in Europe and Canada allow authorities to outlaw domestic extremist groups and conduct aggressive surveillance of suspected members. America's civil liberties laws, which trace to the Constitution's guarantee of free speech spelled out in the First Amendment, are far less expansive. The FBI and other agencies have considerably more authority to investigate U.S. individuals and groups if they develop ties with foreign terror organizations. So far, those legal tools have gone largely unused in relation to right-wing extremism, experts say.

To catch up to the fast-spreading threat at home and abroad, Blazakis said, the U.S. should designate more foreign organizations as terrorist entities, especially ones that allied nations have already outlawed.[long]....

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aee austria kurz grennel

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9/20

https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/new-report-shows-the-disturbing-love-for-trump-among-germanys-far-right-groups

...Bennhold points out that although Trump is “deeply unpopular among a broad majority of Germans,” the German far right is a major exception and admires his “unvarnished nationalism and tolerance of white supremacists, coupled with his skepticism of the pandemic’s dangers.” To make matters worse, the extremist QAnon cult has been gaining German converts.

“In Germany, as in the United States, Mr. Trump has become an inspiration to these fringe groups,” Bennhold observes. “Among them are not only long-established hard-right and neo-Nazi movements, but also, now followers of QAnon — the internet conspiracy theory popular among some of Mr. Trump’s supporters in the United States that hails him as a hero and liberator. Germany’s QAnon community, barely existent when the pandemic first hit in March, may now be the biggest outside the United States along with Britain, analysts who track its most popular online channels say.”

Matthias Quent, director of Germany’s Institute for Democracy and Civil Society (das Institut für Demokratie und Zivilgesellschaft in German) told the Times that Germany is seeing the “Trumpification of the German far right.”

“Trump has managed to attract different milieus, and that’s what we’re seeing here, too,” Quent observed. “We have everything from anti-vaxxers to neo-Nazis marching against corona measures. The common denominator is that it’s people who are quitting the mainstream, who are raging against the establishment.”

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/will-italys-coronavirus-epidemic-fuel-the-far-right/

[pix ferari blk stalion red hat?]

taly is staring down the barrel of the worst recession since World War II, which could bolster the far-right and damage the country’s love affair with the European Union, analysts say.Much will depend on how Rome handles the easing of the national lockdown, how quickly it manages to get liquidity to suffering businesses, and how much solidarity it is seen to get from the EU at a key meeting next week.The coronavirus emergency in Italy has fuelled not only national pride but also eurosceptic and populist narratives.That brew could play right into the hands of Matteo Salvini, whose…

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/white-extremists-are-on-the-rise-around-the-world-emboldened-by-heroes-and-hate-music/

(AFP) – They may lack centralised organisation or even a common goal, but white supremacists encouraged by the exploits of extremist “heroes” canonised on social media pose an ever-growing security threat, analysts say. After nine people in Germany were killed by a gunman with “a very deeply racist attitude,” the country’s interior minister on Friday warned that the far right still posed a “very high” security threat.The shootings on Wednesday at a shisha bar and a cafe in the city of Hanau were the latest in a growing list of attacks in the West attributed to self-appointed defenders

...

Emboldened by 'heroes' and hate music, white extremists on the rise

AFP

Didier LAURAS

,AFP•February 21, 2020

[A day after nine people were killed by a gunman with "a very deeply racist attitude," Germany's interior minister warned that the far right still posed a "very high" security threat (AFP Photo/Odd ANDERSEN)

Paris (AFP) - They may lack centralised organisation or even a common goal, but white supremacists encouraged by the exploits of extremist "heroes" canonised on social media pose an ever-growing security threat, analysts say.

After nine people in Germany were killed by a gunman with "a very deeply racist attitude," the country's interior minister on Friday warned that the far right still posed a "very high" security threat.

The shootings on Wednesday at a shisha bar and a cafe in the city of Hanau were the latest in a growing list of attacks in the West attributed to self-appointed defenders of a "white race" perceived to be under threat from migration, globalisation and Islam.

From Christchurch to Pittsburg, Halle to El Paso, militants have been emboldened by a narrative of hatred spread on the internet with an ease that observers find worrying.

"This digital ecosystem is fuelling a cumulative momentum, which serves to lower 'thresholds' to violence for those engaged in this space, both in the United States and elsewhere," Graham Macklin, assistant professor at the Center for Research on Extremism at the University of Oslo, said in a recent article.

One attack "encourages and inspires another, creating a growing 'canon' of 'saints' and 'martyrs' for others to emulate," he wrote -- noting that Norwegian neo-Nazi Anders Behring Breivik, who massacred 77 people in 2011, had become "an aspirational figure" for many.

Internet a 'facilitator' -

According to the Soufan Center, a global security think-tank, white supremacism has entered a phase of globalisation driven by niche websites popular among neo-Nazis, such as Gab and 8chan, and even the so-called "white power" music scene.

"White supremacy extremists rely on a diverse set of techniques to radicalise potential recruits," it said in a recent report, with attackers "lionised" on such platforms "as heroes, martyrs, 'saints,' 'commanders' and other honorifics."

White extremists do not share a single, common goal -- some seek self rule, others the expulsion of minorities -- but all believe their "race" to be under threat.

Many adherents to transnational white supremacy extremism hold millenarian and apocalyptic beliefs about an imminent race war, with some ardent believers in the end of time and influenced by elements of Christian identity," Soufan said.

Some believe their governments are conspiring with minority populations to bring about their demise -- the so-called Great Replacement theory, based on the title of a 2011 book by French writer Renaud Camus.

Anais Voy-Gillis, an extreme right specialist at the French Institute of Geopolitics, said: "The current context, with notably the migrant crisis of 2015, has surely contributed to the radicalisation of many people who are now ready to cross over to action."

Not only fringe sites are used to spread messages of fear, hate, and racial superiority.

The gunman who attacked two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, last March, killing 51 Muslim worshippers, live-streamed his attack live on Facebook.

A few months later, an anti-Semitic attack in the east German city of Halle, which claimed two lives, was posted on the streaming platform Twitch.

"There are many radical groups in the world and the internet is a facilitator for them to get together nationally and even internationally," Voy-Gillis told AFP.

- 'Exporter' of white supremacism -

In Europe, a well-organised coordination of far-right efforts seems unlikely, for now.

Last June, a French parliamentary committee conducted an analysis of far-right groups in the country, including attempts to make contact with like-minded organisations elsewhere in Europe, notably in Germany, Greece, Belgium, Italy, Britain, Spain and Austria.

At the time, the boss of France's DGSI domestic intelligence service Nicolas Lerner told investigators the chances were "extremely limited" that these movements would have the ability to work together at a European level.

But within a country's borders, the threat is real.

German Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said Friday that right-wing extremism was the "biggest security threat" facing his country, as he announced a more visible police presence and bolstered surveillance at mosques, train stations, airports and borders.

In the United States, an FBI report last November showed that 65 percent of "lone wolf" perpetrators of terror attacks where white.

Nearly a fifth (19 percent) of 52 such attacks committed in the United States between 1972 and 2015 were motivated by ideologies "advocating for the superiority of the white race," it found.

It was the same percentage as attackers motivated by radical Islamist doctrine.

"For almost two decades, the United States has pointed abroad at countries who are exporters of extreme Islamist ideology," Russell Travers, acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said in November.

"We are now being seen as the exporters of white supremacist ideology; that's a reality with which we are going to have to deal," he said. yahoo

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an 120

...“You’re having domestic citizens from the US coming over here and they’re bringing their crap back to your doorstep,” the former volunteer continued. “It’s not good. These guys coming out here waving guns — it’s easy. You can arrive at the airport in Kyiv, and before you know it you can be on the frontline.”

Organizations

Al-Shabaab — short for Harakat al-Shabaab al-Mujahideen, a jihadist fundamentalist group based in East Africa that’s aligned with al-Qaeda

Atomwaffen Division — neo-Nazi group founded in Florida in 2015 that promotes societal collapse through chaos and violence, inspired by Charles Manson

Azov Battalion — ultranationalist militia that is integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard

Georgian National Legion — battalion of foreign fighters integrated into the Ukrainian armed forces

Iron March — secret global neo-Nazi internet forum that was active from 2011 to 2017

Misanthropic Division — worldwide neo-Nazi network with links to Azov and Right Sector

National Corps — political wing of Azov

Patriot Front — US neo-Nazi group formerly known as Vanguard America, and before that, American Vanguard

Right Sector — ultranationalist militia that operates outside of the formal command structure of the Ukrainian military and police

Characters

Devon Arthurs — Atomwaffen Division member facing murder charges in the deaths of two fellow Atomwaffen members

Matthew Ryan Burchfield — American volunteer who has visited Ukraine

Joffre Cross — Patriot Front member, U.S. Army veteran

Joachim Furholm — Norwegian national who volunteered in Ukraine, active in the neo-Nazi scene in Norway before coming to Ukraine

Aaron Harford — Right Sector medical volunteer from Arkansas

Jason Jackson — chief of police in Arkadelphia, Ark.

Ty Wingate Jones — American volunteer who has visited Ukraine

Dalton Kennedy — American volunteer who has visited Ukraine, active with Patriot Front and other white supremacist groups

Craig Lang — U.S. Army veteran who fought with Right Sector and Georgian National legion in Ukraine, now wanted for double murder in Florida

Kent McLellan — neo-Nazi skinhead in Florida who claimed to recruit for Right Sector

Nate Morris — American who volunteered in Ukraine with Right Sector

Alexander “Slavros” Mukhitdinov — founder of Iron March, a global neo-Nazi forum

Puffing — Discord username for Patriot Front member who claimed to have combat experience in Ukraine

Thomas Rousseau — leader of Patriot Front

Brandon Russell — founder of Atomwaffen Division

Olena Semenyaka — spokesperson for National Corps

Mikael Skillt — former neo-Nazi from Sweden who fought with Azov Battalion in Ukraine and now runs a global security firm

Jarrett William Smith — U.S. Army soldier who faces federal charges for attempting to disseminate information about explosives

Brenton Tarrant — Australian terrorist who murdered 51 Muslim worshipers in Christchurch, New Zealand in March 2019

Viktor Yanukovych — former pro-Russian president of Ukraine who was ousted during the 2014 Maidan uprising

Dmytro Yarosh — Right Sector leader who left the organization in 2015

Volodymyr Zelensky — president of Ukraine, elected in April 2019

Alex Zwiefelhofer — U.S. Army soldier who went AWOL and joined Right Sector in Ukraine, now in federal custody awaiting trial for charges related to a double murder in Florida

Intercepted Podcast

Philosopher Srecko Horvat on the Yugoslav Fight Against Fascism and the Rising Right-Wing Political Forces in Europe

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German Officials Declare “Nazi Emergency” in Dresden

norway greg johnson pro brevik

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desmog uk

https://www.desmog.co.uk/2019/09/18/populism-climate-science-denial-european-union

no lnx many grafs

How the Rise of Populism is Fuelling Climate Science Denial Across Europe

Read time: 10 mins

By Mat Hope • Wednesday, September 18, 2019 - 08:01

In Europe, populism points one way, climate science the other

By Mat Hope, DeSmog, and Eduardo Robaina, La Marea/Climática. Lee en español en Climática.

This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story.

In December 2015, European Commission President Jean-Claude Junker stood at a podium to hail the world’s first comprehensive agreement to take action on climate change, and told the world, “the Paris Agreement now reflects our ambition worldwide.” While the European Union’s leaders stand by that sentiment, a lot has changed since then.

The Union is facing a credibility crisis, threatened by Brexit and the rise of populism across the continent. Its leadership is facing calls to simultaneously increase its ambition to tackle climate change and cut the very regulations that would deliver reductions in globe-warming pollution.

Climate policy — a seemingly unlikely candidate for controversy back in 2015 — is suddenly at the heart of a European power struggle.

Boris Johnson’s Cabinet of Climate Science Deniers

The EU’s struggles are mirrored, somewhat ironically, in the UK. Boris Johnson used his first address as the UK’s new Prime Minister to tell parliament that his government would “place the climate change agenda at the absolute core of what we are doing.”

This came as something of a surprise, given Johnson’s previous statements on climate change.

In December 2015, following the signing of the landmark Paris Agreement, Johnson wrote a column for one of the UK’s top broadsheet newspapers, the Daily Telegraph, in which he said that mainstream climate science was “without foundation”. In the same column, he praised the work of notorious climate science denier Piers Corbyn (who happens to be the brother of the now leader-of-the-opposition, Jeremy Corbyn).

This general disdain for the idea that climate change is a problem was in evidence during Johnson’s time as Foreign Secretary, where he presided over a 60 percent cut in the UK’s “climate attaches”. And despite early words reaffirming his commitment to climate action, Johnson’s behavior as Prime Minister has been more in keeping with this latter version of himself.

On taking office, he quickly surrounded himself with key allies from his days leading the UK’s pro-Brexit campaign, both in his cabinet and his close staff. All the appointees are part of a network of trans-Atlantic thinktanks and campaign groups pushing for environmental deregulation post-Brexit, based in and around offices at the now notorious address of 55 Tufton Street.

Matthew Elliott — formerly Chief Executive of Vote Leave, founder of theTaxpayers’ Alliance, and husband of a former Koch brothers employee and current chief of Republicans Overseas UK — is reportedly advising Johnson’s newly appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sajid Javid. One of Elliott’s former employees at the Taxpayers’ Alliance, Chloe Westley, is now working in the Prime Minister’s Office at Number 10. And several other staffers from the network are now advising cabinet members including Secretary of State for International Trade, Liz Truss.

Johnson’s prime ministerial campaign was also funded by two donors with close ties to the Global Warming Policy Foundation — the UK’s premier climate science denial campaign group, which is based in 55 Tufton Street — hedgefund manager Michael Hintze and Bristol Port owner Terence Mordaunt.

Johnson’s loyalty to this network is partly born from the necessity of keeping the electoral threat of Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party at bay. At the last European Union parliament election in May 2019, Farage’s new outfit emerged victorious, sending 29 MEPs to the European Parliament. Of those, the UK public elected 10 Brexit Party candidates who have denied or downplayed the climate crisis or who have well-publicised ties to climate science denial groups.

To counter that threat, the Prime Minister is now largely aping the populist party’s positions, including its antipathy towards climate action.

Spain’s Climate Science Denial Revival

VOX president Santiago Abascal greets supporters after voting in the April elections. Credit: Eduardo Robaina/La Marea

The Brexit Party MEPs are far from the only climate science deniers to find themselves in Brussel’s corridors of power. Spain’s far-right party, VOX, which has three MEPs in the European Parliament and a similar disdain for climate policy, will be joining forces with the Brexit Party representatives to form an anti-climate action bloc.

Like the Brexit Party (and by extension, Johnson’s Conservative Party), VOX’s representatives are quick to argue that climate policy is an expensive solution to a problem that doesn’t really exist.

“Are you aware of climate change?”, “What do you do every day to fight against climate change?”. Earlier this summer, a television journalist asked these questions to Santiago Abascal, founder and leader of VOX. His brief response was: “I don't know the scientific issues and I have to admit that I'm not in that debate. (…) The debate on climate change, if it is a natural change, if it is a change that obeys the human being, then it is something that I really don't know”.

The answer, though predictable, perfectly reflects how climate issues for the far-right Spanish party are still a debate, despite the fact that 97 percent of climate scientists, and virtually all scientific literature, confirm the idea that humans are causing climate change.

This rejection of the issue was also evident in the '100 measures for Live España’, the electoral programme that VOX presented for the elections held last April. The document made no mention of the effects of climate change or its causes, let alone mitigation and adaptation measures. However, this did not prevent the party from entering the Spanish Congress for the first time with 24 deputies and more than 10 percent of the votes.

Before the election, an internal document used to establish party positions on various issues called it “very arrogant” to believe that “man” is responsible for changes in the climate, but that “it is even more so” to believe that it can be changed through strong laws and taxes. That is why, the text states, they do not intend to “waste more money on this scam”.

To support these claims, VOX refers to former Greenpeace Canada employee Patrick Moore, known in recent years for making public statements minimizing the dangers of climate change while posing as co-founder of the environmental organization. Moore is now a director of a public relations firm. Greenpeace calls him a “paid representative for polluting corporations.”

[

Jorge Buxadé, Rocío Monasterio and Santiago Abascal during a VOX campaign event. Credit: VOX, public domain

Other VOX party personalities have also made disparaging statements about the need for climate action. Rocío Monasterio, president of the party in her branch in Madrid, described in an interview climate change as the “climate hoax”, while MEP Jorge Buxadé said in a recent debate that “the rest of the countries must fulfill the same commitments as Europeans in the fight against climate change. The current situation is an injustice”.

One of this party’s latest attempts to discredit climate science occurred at the end of August. The Spanish Senate had planned to approve a declaration showing support after three fires burned nearly 10,000 hectares (25,000 acres) on the small Spanish island of Gran Canaria. However, this initiative was frustrated after the only VOX representative there, Francisco José Alcaraz, voted against it because, he said, “its content was being used to justify progressive ideological postulates” and because of its reference to the effects of global warming, which has contributed to more intense wildfires.

An even more recent effort came this past Tuesday when the Spanish Congress approved a proposal to declare a state of climate emergency. The motion went ahead with all parties voting in favor, except for the bloc led by VOX's Santiago Abascal.*

While VOX is a political newcomer, these ideas have long been installed in Spain. VOX was born from the hand of politicians who abandoned the Partido Popular (PP), the hegemonic formation of the right wing in Spain that has governed for much of democracy. José María Aznar, former president of the PP government for eight years, founded the FAES foundation after abandoning politics. One of the many economic activities of this Spanish ultraconservative thinktank is to publish books such as those by Nigel Lawson and Vaclav Klaus, two of the most prominent European voices in denying the climate crisis.

Czech Republic president Vaclav Klaus welcomes former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar

Czech Republic's President Vaclav Klaus, left, welcomes former Spanish prime minister Jose Maria Aznar, right, in Prague October 24, 2011. Credit: REUTERS/David W Cerny

More Examples in Europe

Spain and the UK are not the only countries in Europe to see a populist revival, leading to a re-emergence of climate science denial.

Extreme right party representation in the European Parliament

graf?

Since entering Germany’s parliament two years ago on an anti-Muslim and anti-immigration manifesto, the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) has embraced climate science denial as a campaign strategy. Its election manifesto denies human-induced climate change and erroneously claims that rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has meant “world food harvests have increased significantly”.

Likewise, Belgium’s People’s Party rejects climate action as a “collective hysteria”. Netherlands’ Party for Freedom argues that there is no independent evidence that humans cause climate change and slams the work of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as unable to prove that relationship. And Austria’s far-right Freedom Party sees climate change as a globalist threat.

Power Struggle

European Parliament

Outside the European Commission. Credit: Thijs ter Haar, CC BY 2.0

While dragging national debates into an anti-scientific mire, these populist parties are expected to have a limited impact on the European Union’s climate policies, however — partly thanks to a strong showing for Europe’s green parties in May’s election.

Overall, the Greens/European Free Alliance (Greens/EFA) won a total of 69 seats, 19 more than in the last election in 2014. Germany’s alliance of environmental parties were the biggest winners, getting 22 seats. The UK elected nine Green Party MEPs, two more than in 2014. Spain elected three green party candidates. Now, after some changes, Greens/EFA have 74 MEPs, representing nearly 10 percent of the European Parliament.

The influence of this bloc of green representatives is already being felt. In July 2019, the European Commission’s new president, Ursula Von Leyden, was forced to commit to increasing the Union’s climate ambition in order to secure the support from the green bloc which she needed to win her post.

Number of seats held by the extreme right in parliaments of countries in the European Union.

The rapid growth of the green movement across Europe, both in terms of its electoral success and public support thanks to new campaigns inspired by Swedish student Greta Thunberg, has helped curb the extreme right, which aspired to become the second most powerful force in the European Parliament. And the success of greens also has been enough to seriously worry opponents of climate action.

A coalition of Europe’s fringe climate science denial groups had been planning a media blitz for mid-September, according to recently leaked documents. These plans include press conferences in multiple European capitals and a letter supposedly signed by “400 independent climate scientists and professionals” to be sent to European Union leaders, the UN’s Secretary-General, and the head of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

While that action is unlikely to have any real impact on the continent’s climate policy, it is symbolic of a new politics confronting EU leaders — one in which fringe voices increasingly have a platform, which they are using to try and deconstruct the European Union’s long-held leadership on climate change.

Updated 9/19/2019: This story has been updated to include the VOX party voting against a climate emergency declaration.

, we took a look at the rise of populism across Europe, and how climate policy suddenly found itself at the heart of a power struggle across the Union.

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desmog uk

https://www.desmog.co.uk/2019/09/18/populism-climate-science-denial-european-union

, we took a look at the rise of populism across Europe, and how climate policy suddenly found itself at the heart of a power struggle across the Union.

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https://yyy.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/16/the-myth-of-eurabia-how-a-far-right-conspiracy-theory-went-mainstream

guk no lnx

The long read

The myth of Eurabia: how a far-right conspiracy theory went mainstream

Once an obscure idea confined to the darker corners of the internet, the anti-Islam ideology is now visible in the everyday politics of the west. How did this happen? By Andrew Brown

Fri 16 Aug 2019 01.00 EDT Last modified on Fri 16 Aug 2019 07.48 EDT

In July 2011, a quiet European capital was shaken by a terrorist car bomb, followed by confused reports suggesting many deaths. When the first news of the murders came through, one small group of online commentators reacted immediately, even though the media had cautiously declined to identify the attackers. They knew at once what had happened – and who was to blame.

“This was inevitable,” explained one of the anonymous commenters. And it was just the beginning: “Only a matter of time before other European nations get a taste of their multicultural tolerance that they’ve been cooking for decades.”

“Europe has been infested with venomous parasitic vermin,” explained another. “Anything and everything is fine as long as they rape the natives and destroy the country, which they do,” said a third.

As the news grew worse, the group became more joyful and confident. The car bomb had been followed by reports of a mass shooting at a nearby camp for teenagers. One commenter was “almost crying of happiness” to be proved right about the dangers of Islam. “The massacre at the children’s camp,” another noted, “is a sickening reminder of just how evil and satanic the cult of Islam is.”

A couple of hours after the first reports of the bomb explosion in central Oslo, a few doubts emerged to cloud the picture: “Because the targets in the shooting were all good little leftists, won’t the shooter be played up as a rightwing extremist, whatever his actual motives?” one person asked.

When information emerged to suggest that the attacker might be a “tall Nordic guy”, one of the commenters, who called himself “Fjordman”, realised the true nature of the disaster: “Judging from some of the recent information, it must be treated as a serious possibility that this is actually some Timothy McVeigh, not a Muslim. It is too early to tell. If that is indeed the case … it would practically destroy my country, and make the working conditions for people like myself incredibly difficult for a long time to come, I’m afraid.”

The truth turned out to be worse than Fjordman feared. The massacre in Oslo had not been committed by Muslims. It was the work of a white supremacist, Anders Behring Breivik, who had detonated a bomb in Oslo, killing eight people, and then shot dead 69 others, many of them teenagers, at a youth camp run by Norway’s Labour party. And, according to the manifesto he published online, Breivik had been directly inspired by Gates of Vienna – the blog where all these comments appeared on the day of his massacre. Breivik called the ideology that justified his murders “The Vienna school”, after the blog.

Fjordman, whose real name is Peder Are Nøstvold Jensen, now lives in obscurity in provincial Norway. He outed himself as the man behind the pseudonym to a Norwegian tabloid in the weeks following the massacre – butmanaged to avoid testifying at Breivik’s trial, thanks to the intervention of high-powered lawyers paid for by the Middle East Forum, a rightwing American group that would later sponsor Tommy Robinson– real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon – in Britain. Nonetheless, Jensen’s influence on Breivik, however indirect, had been considerable.

Breivik borrowed part of the title of his manifesto, A European Declaration of Independence, from one of Fjordman’s blog posts, and many of the chapters in it were simply reprintings of Fjordman’s postings on various blogs, mostly Gates of Vienna, but also a far-right and passionately anti-EU site called the Brussels Journal.

Gates of Vienna was, and still is, run by Edward “Ned” May, an American computer programmer from Washington DC. It was among the first in a wave of blogs that urged the US to war after the shock of 9/11, and almost certainly the most fanatically anti-Muslim. It takes its name from the siege of Vienna in 1683, when an Ottoman Turkish army was defeated by a Polish-led one. Its essential thesis is that this was only one battle in a long war and that Europe and its civilisation are constantly threatened by a Muslim invasion.

On these varied online forums, the narrative was always the same: a liberal cabal was conspiring with hostile Muslim powers to hand over the decent working people to Islam. This was the animating myth of the bloggers, calling themselves the “counter-jihad”, who congregated at Gates of Vienna and other like-minded sites – and inspired both the violence of Breivik and the message of the racist far-right parties that have transformed European politics in the past decade.

But all of these later conspiracy theories took inspiration from a founding myth of contemporary Islamophobia: an invented plot, known as “Eurabia”, to destroy European civilisation. This is the doctrine that Jensen promoted and Breivik acted on, a hidden underpinning of a movement that has changed the world.

Once an ideology confined to the kookier corners of the internet, the idea of Eurabia is now visible in the everyday politics of the US, Australia and most of Europe: when Trump tweets about stabbings in London and falsely claims that crime in Germany is “way up”, he is invoking the Eurabian myth, taken as fact on Fox News, that European liberals have surrendered their cities to Muslim criminals.

The spread of the belief that elites conspired to push Muslim immigration on their native populations is also the story of a conspiracy theory that was nourished on some of the very first blogs and message boards, started appearing in mainstream discourse after 9/11, and thentook on a life of its own, even while the supposed facts behind it were exposed as ridiculous. It is a lesson in the danger of half-truths, which are not only more powerful than truths but often more powerful than lies.

Eurabia is a term coined in the 70s that was resurfaced byGisèle Littman, an Egyptian-born Jewish woman who fled Cairo for Britain after the Suez crisis, and then moved to Switzerland in 1960 with her English husband. She wrote under the name of Bat Ye’or (Hebrew for “Daughter of the Nile”). In a series of books, originally written in French and published from the 1990s onward, she developed a grand conspiracy theory in which the EU, led by French elites, implemented a secret plan to sell out Europe to the Muslims in exchange for oil.

The original villain of Littman’s story was General Charles de Gaulle. It is difficult for an outsider to understand how De Gaulle, who led the French resistance to the Nazis and was probably the greatest conservative statesman in French history, could be reinvented as the man who betrayed western civilisation for money. But Littman had lived many years in France, and the French far right hated De Gaulle, and indeed tried several times to assassinate him. Not only had De Gaulle fought the Vichy government, he had also admitted defeat in the long and hideously bloody war of Algerian independence – granting an Arab Muslim country its freedom at the expense of the French-Christian settler population, who had to retreat to France (and whose descendants formed the backbone of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front).

Agreeing to Algerian independence was understood by the French far right as a betrayal. De Gaulle had been brought out of retirement and restored to power in 1958 because he was believed to be on the side of the settlers in their war, which was opposed by much of the left. And so, to the far right, the Mediterranean came to seem like the frontline in a long, shifting struggle between rival colonialisms, Christian and Muslim, in which the Muslims had won a great victory in Algeria. Where would their new advance stop?

Littman’s argument, framed by her experience in Egypt (which a French force had invaded, along with the British and Israelis, in 1956), was that Islam imposed a second-class status on all non-Muslims, whom they ruled. This status of “dhimmitude” – a coinage of Littman’s, meaning subjection to Islamic rule on pain of “forced conversion, slavery or death” – was now to be extended to Europe.

According to Littman, her books describe “Europe’s evolution from a Judeo-Christian civilisation, with important post-Enlightenment secular elements, into a post-Judeo-Christian civilisation that is subservient to the ideology of jihad and the Islamic powers that propagate it.”

She saw tentacles of the great conspiracy in committees of blameless tedium and obscurity, such as the Euro-Arab Dialogue, an institution set up by the European Economic Community and the Arab League in the 70s to promote greater discussion between the regions. Her conspiracy theory was dismissed in 2006 by the Israeli historian Robert Wistrich as “the protocols of the elders of Brussels”, but what mattered more was the place he chose to challenge her ideas: a conference in Jerusalem on antisemitism to which she had been invited despite her lack of academic status. September 11 had changed everything for Littman, she told Haaretz after the conference: “In the United States, I am certain that the September 11 attacks woke people up, including the Jewish community that had previously ignored me, because it belongs more to the left.”

She explained to Haaretz the future she saw for Europe. “We are now heading towards a total change in Europe, which will be more and more Islamicised and will become a political satellite of the Arab and Muslim world.”

This was the idea that the Norwegian Jensen was enchanted by, and which, as Fjordman, he transmitted to Anders Breivik.

[Marine Le Pen, president of France’s far-right National Rally (formerly National Front) party, applauds the former US presidential adviser Steve Bannon after his speech at the party’s annual congress in March 2018.]

Jensen is unusual among Eurabia believers in that he has actually had some experience of the Muslim world and even speaks Arabic. He is the son of a socialist politician in Norway and studied Arabic in Cairo – his earlier university studies in Bergen had included English (which he writes fluently), Russian, Arabic and Middle Eastern history. In 2000, he had been interviewed by the local paper back in Norway, and spoke enthusiastically about his hosts in Egypt: “Outside the tourist areas, you meet friendly, hospitable, curious and open people who want to get to know you. I have been part of their daily lives. We’ve been invited to their homes, and talked and smoked shisha together.”

That was Jensen’s first encounter with Islam, and he was still in Cairo at the time of the 9/11 attacks. He says he saw then that there were some Muslims who celebrated the slaughter, and he also saw that this wasn’t reported in the Norwegian papers. The next year, he worked for the Norwegian Refugee Council in the disputed city of Hebron in the occupied West Bank.Unusually among Scandinavians who have worked with Palestinians in Israel, he identified with the Israelis.He narrowly escaped a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, at a bar where two of his colleagues had been killed in another attack the previous year. The experience cemented his growing fear and loathing of Islam.

The fact that the Norwegian press took a generally pro-Palestinian line while he and his friends had been the victims of Palestinian terrorism helped to convince Jensen that Islam was an existential threat to European civilisation which the politically correct establishment was wilfully ignoring. Like Littman, he seems not to acknowledge any element of nationalism in Palestinian consciousness: it is all either Arab or Muslim. In fact, the belief that Islam is hostile to national consciousness is quite widely held on the right: the philosopher Roger Scruton brought it up in a controversial speech on nationality in Hungary in 2013, in which he contrasted European Christian nations with Islamic empires.

In 2003, Jensen returned to Norway, where he attempted to make a name for himself as a public intellectual. At first, he was hostile to feminism, accusing feminists of destroying Norwegian manhood. But the focus of his concerns soon switched to Islam. He started writing under the pseudonym “Norwegian Kafir” on an American blog calledLittle Green Footballs, which loudly and fervently supported the invasion of Iraq. From then on, his writing appeared in English, on American-hosted blogs. There, he hammered into shape the narrative of elites, specially identified with the EU, who are destroying and betraying Europe by the deliberate encouragement of mass immigration.

At this point in time, the Eurabian conspiracy appealed largely to those who had long perceived a conflict between Islam and the Judeo-Christian west – with Israel as a beleaguered and persecuted outpost of western values. These people, largely on the American right, were among the earliest exponents of Eurabia – but as they never ceased to complain, theirs was not an attitude very widely shared in Europe. What would soon supply the emotional force of the fantasy was another set of ideas about global migration, less conspiratorial in their essence, but much more widely accepted among generally apolitical Europeans. These, also, originated in France, where they were known as the“great replacement”.

The idea of the great replacement had its origin in a blatantly racist French novel of the 1970s, The Camp of the Saints, in which France is overthrown by an unarmed invasion of starving, sex-crazed Indian refugees when the French army is not prepared to fire on them. Themoral of the book is that western civilisation can only be saved by a willingness to slaughter poor brown people. Steve Bannon, among the founders of the rightwing news site Breitbart and a former adviser to President Trump, has referred to it repeatedly.

Throughout the 80s and 90s, the naked racism of The Camp of the Saints kept it largely out of public debate. But the rise of Islam as a global force allowed the question to be recast. If the threatening masses were defined by religion rather than by skin colour, then hating them could be presented as an intellectual commitment rather than a racist one.

And the paranoid did have a large, shadowy half-truth to fall back on. The demographic shrinkagefacing Europe is real and undeniable, and it was obvious in the early years of this century, too. So are the much greater birth rates in sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia. In 2002, Russia and Pakistan both had populations of about 145 million; by 2017, Russia’s population was 144 million while Pakistan’s was 200 million.

The next stage in the development of a xenophobic populist worldview was for the two narratives to merge, so that Islam and Muslims became both a conspiracy and a demographic threat.

The 9/11 attacks changed attitudes to Islam in much of Europe and the US. Israel and the US now shared a sense of being under attack from Muslims. Without 9/11, Littman would have remained an obscure crank, and Jensen more obscure still. But the assault on the twin towers unleashed an immense backlash of wounded American pride and nationalism that led to the devastation of two whole countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, and countless deaths. It also fuelled a demand for explanations. Theories about the unique malevolence and danger of Islam answered a popular hunger. George W Bush declared at the time that the US had no quarrel with Islam, but many of his compatriots disagreed.

One of the many bad fruits of 9/11 was the new atheist movement, a phenomenon marked by mutual self-praise and undeviating hostility to Islam. Even if the ostensible target of much of the hostility was Christianity, the new atheists tend to consider Islam far worse and more “religious” a religion. The American writer Sam Harris’s breakthrough book The End of Faith from 2004 now reads like Bat Ye’or without the inconvenient scaffolding of easily disproved facts. “We are at war with Islam,” he writes. “It may not serve our immediate foreign policy objectives for our political leaders to openly acknowledge this fact, but it is unambiguously so. It is not merely that we are at war with an otherwise peaceful religion that has been ‘hijacked’ by extremists … Armed conflict ‘in the defence of Islam’ is a religious obligation for every Muslim man ... Islam, more than any religion humans have ever devised, has the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death.”

In the run-up to the Iraq war, and after the invasion, coverage in American newspapers and on television was, to a European eye, jingoistic in the extreme. The possibility of defeat was unthinkable. Nonetheless, a new wave of bloggers began using the term “MSM” for “mainstream media” as a disparaging reference to the large media organisations’ pretended neutrality. One of the earliest and most influential of these was Little Green Footballs, founded and run by Charles Johnson, a Los Angeles-based former session guitarist with an interest in web design. It was typical of the moment that he was an opinionated amateur with no credentials, whose real advantage was that he could build websites at a time when this required some programming skill.

Jensen, commenting on Little Green Footballs as Norwegian Kafir, made it a distribution point for Eurabian ideas. Another was Gates of Vienna itself, run by Ned May under the moniker Baron Bodissey after a sage in the sci-fi novels of Jack Vance. Then there was Jihad Watch, run by the American author Robert Spencer. Both Spencer and his frequent collaborator Pam Geller were banned from the UK in 2013 for making statements likely to foster hatred and violence between communities.

The only European blog of note in this constellation was the fanatically anti-EU site the Brussels Journal, where the Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan was a contributor. The Brussels Journal was run by Paul Beliën, a far-right Belgian journalist and author. Jensen was active on all these sites, taking part in discussions in which the Eurabian beliefs gave rise to something that called itself the counter-jihad movement.

Nowadays, when Facebook effortlessly spreads disinformation around the world, it is difficult to recapture the sense of revelation, and of belonging, that once accompanied the discovery of a new blog. The cramped but, to its adherents, strangely comforting thought world of the counter-jihad blogs turned politics into a gigantic online game. Anyone could play and everyone could find in it their inner child: “Some people think I’m weird; some think I am exceptionally intelligent,” Jensen had told a reporter when he was still a student in Cairo.

The boundaries between these blogs and the “MSM” they affected to despise were porous. Some writers aimed for a high-minded tone about the dangers of Muslim immigration: the former Financial Times columnist Christopher Caldwell published in 2009 a book, Reflections on a Revolution in Europe, that recapitulates the idea of a slow-moving Muslim barbarian invasion from a position of Olympian disdain: “Immigrants also bring a lot of disorder, penury and crime … Muslim culture is unusually full of messages laying out the practical advantages of procreation … If you walk north across the Piazza Della Repubblica in Turin, you see, mutatis mutandis, what the Romans saw. To the east, two well-preserved Roman towers remain, and so do the walls built to separate citizens from barbarians. Today, in the space of about 60 seconds on foot, you pass from chic shops and wine bars through a lively multiethnic market into one of Europe’s more menacing north African slums.”

Some were less highbrow. In 2004, the Daily Telegraph gave a column to the Canadian prophet of American greatness Mark Steyn, who had originally made his name as a witty critic of musical theatre. Doom and horror was all he saw in Europe’s future. As early as 2002, he said: “I find it easier to be optimistic about the futures of Iraq and Pakistan than, say, Holland or Denmark” – a remark he was still proudly quoting for Telegraph readers in 2005, when Iraq had become a slaughterhouse.

In terms that anticipated Jensen, Breivik and the alleged manifesto of the man charged with the Christchurch massacre, Steyn wrote (and the Telegraph published) this prophecy: “In a democratic age, you can’t buck demography – except through civil war. The Yugoslavs figured that out. In the 30 years before the meltdown, Bosnian Serbs had declined from 43% to 31% of the population, while Bosnian Muslims had increased from 26% to 44%.”

[painting naked white? woman sucks finger, others gawk; ‘Europeans, vote for AfD, so that Europe will never become ‘Eurabia’!’ reads a campaign poster in Berlin for the far-right party during this year’s European elections.

Compare Steyn in 2005 with the manifesto of Patrick Crusius, who confessed to murdering 22 people in El Paso earlier this month: “This attack is a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas. They are the instigators, not me. I am simply defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an invasion ... America is rotting from the inside out, and peaceful means to stop this seem to be nearly impossible.”

In 2007, the believers in a counter-jihad began to meet up in the real world.After a preliminary meeting of bloggers, commentators and Danish and Norwegian sympathisers in Copenhagen, attended by Jensen, a conference was arranged by May and the far-right Flemish party Vlaams Belang, in Brussels in 2007. This brought together most of the ideologues of Eurabia, as they attempted to transform it from an idea into a movement. Littman was the keynote speaker. Others present were Geller and Robert Spencer from the US, and Gerard Batten, later briefly the leader of Ukip in Britain. Ted Ekeroth, of the nationalist, rightwing Sweden Democrats, also attended.

As both Ukip and the Sweden Democrats rose to become powerful political forces, anxieties about terrorism were subsumed into much wider anxieties about demography, and about status within the old order. The American anthropologist Scott Atran has carried out extensive research into the mindset of the young men who become Islamic terrorists: the combination of wounded pride with the delight of belonging to a movement which has both global, apocalyptic significance and a living presence in a friendship group is tremendously important in recruiting jihadis. The same dynamic operates among their enemies: Breivik was remarkable chiefly in that he was so solipsistic that he could radicalise himself without the aid of any friends in real life, only those he imagined on the internet. He had at one stage approached his intellectual idol, Jensen, via email, who brushed him off as “boring as a vacuum cleaner salesman”.

You do not have to be a jihadi to feel the tug of these compulsions. The counter-jihadis, just as much as their enemies, believed they were entering an apocalyptic battle between good and evil. This is a century of wounded pride and anxieties about status for almost everyone.

Despite all this, there were some signs, even before the Breivik killings, that the original Eurabian front would break up. Those who were opposed to immigrants in general began to separate from those who hated Muslims in particular.Johnson, the founder of Little Green Footballs, excommunicated most of his followers in 2010 because of their increasing closeness to parties of western Europe that he regarded as being descended from fascists – the Vlaams Belang in Belgium and the Sweden Democrats, although he also denounced the English Defence League. Johnson was a genuine philosemite, who could not forgive the taint of antisemitism.

The anti-immigrant right had good reasons for separating itself from the anti-Muslim right. If the logic of the “Vienna school” – Jensen, Spencer and Geller, May and Littman – led inexorably to civil war and the righteous slaughter of Muslims and their leftie enablers, then most of the right shrank back from it. Commenters such as Douglas Murray and Caldwell quite genuinely believed that Breivik was insane, and that his actions had no relation to the ideas that he espoused. There may in this have been an element of self-deception, but it is also a testimony to the sort of instinctive, unthinking decency we all need sometimes to rescue us from the consequences of our ideas. It seemed that some kind of pragmatism would prevail.

:{:{}:

The hope now seems deceptive. What changed this was above all the election of the US president, Donald Trump, whose then adviser Bannon was a believer in a “brutal, bloody ... global war” against “Islamic fascism”. They showed that there was a huge constituency for racialised hatred and despair and – for them – no real negative consequences, electoral or otherwise, in pandering to it.

Since Breivik’s massacre, his own beliefs have only become more widespread.They have spread into the politics of all European countries. In the campaign for the European elections this May, the German far-right party AfD ran posters showing a naked white woman being pawed by dark-skinned men in Arab headgear. One had stuck his fingers in her unresisting mouth. “Europeans, vote for AfD, so that Europe will never become ‘Eurabia’,” said the caption. Millions of people who have never heard of Bat Ye’or, of Fjordman, or even of Breivik and Bannon, now understand that poster at a glance, and no amount of evidence will shake their certainty. They now believe all politics comes down to the words of one of Trump’s more recent tweets: “The losers all want what you have, don’t give it to them … Be strong & prosper, be weak & die!”

But who, in this situation, are the losers, and who are the strong? Last week, in an apparent attempt to emulate Breivik, a rich, disaffected young Norwegian, Philip Manshaus, shot his way through the entrance gates to a mosque in the upmarket suburb of Oslo where he lived and started firing at the congregation. He was wrestled to the ground by an unarmed 65-year-old Muslim, Mohammed Rafiq, who then held him down, with the help of another man, until the police arrived. On the Gates of Vienna blog, this episode was not deemed worthy of mention. Instead, its devoted readers were told that Muslims had been responsible for a recent outbreak of animal cruelty in Sweden.

•Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, and sign up to the long read weekly email here.

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wa mo dan block

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/free-trade-for-liberals-can-a-us-europe-alliance-protect-democracy-fight-inequality-and-save-the-environment/

...But the fracturing of Europe predates Trump, and it will likely outlast him. Extreme nationalist parties have made steady gains in EU parliamentary elections. Unchecked, they will win control of more European countries, and they will use their authority to persecute minorities, weaken civil society, and perhaps even rip the union apart. Given the continent’s history, that’s a scary prospect. The United States needs new ways to bind European states to each other, to America, and to liberal democratic values.

Here’s one: establish a large, powerful trade agreement with the European Union. Call it the Atlantic Alliance. If implemented, it would bring Europe and America closer together by making them part of the largest free trade zone in the world.

Proposing a new free trade deal in 2019 might sound backward. Recent trade agreements have been archetypes of the runaway free market-ism that produced the very inequality fueling nationalist backlash on both sides of the Atlantic. There’s a reason that Trump ran—and won—on a stridently anti-trade platform. And indeed, the deal that policymakers have already proposed, called the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), shows the flaws of the existing system. It’s designed to liberalize the flow of capital without serious respect for the consequences. Like trade agreements past, it would establish international tribunals that let corporations challenge and undermine the regulations of sovereign states.

But there’s no reason why a new deal with Europe has to follow this discredited template. Tariffs between the U.S. and Europe are already low. The Atlantic Alliance would lower them further not as an end in itself, but as a means of reinforcing strategic ties and strengthening liberal values.

...

For American liberals, a deal with Europe could advance domestic progressive policies. Unlike the Asian and Latin American partners in past trade agreements, European countries have labor and environmental standards that tend to be stronger than ours. A deal, if done right, would curb greenhouse gas emissions and raise salaries. It would create stronger antitrust rules to liberate entrepreneurs, and it would crack down on the use of tax havens by multinational corporations and the ultrarich on both sides of the Atlantic. Like any other trade deal, it would increase economic growth. But by making the U.S. and Europe more equitable and prosperous, it would protect both places from authoritarian countries and help defang the right-wing nationalism tearing the West apart.

“It makes imminent, strategic sense for the U.S. to want this,” said Wesley Clark, NATO’s former supreme allied commander. “Everything we can do to pull the United States and Europe closer together is essential. The United States cannot deal effectively with China without the strong, complete support of its European allies. And right now, the U.S. does not have that support.”

But this is more than just a way to benefit Western democracies. The United States and the European Union make up 45 percent of global GDP. Outside nations will have to raise their production standards for any goods they want traded as part of the agreement. If they want to eventually join the deal, they’ll have to adopt these terms wholesale. That could mean improved labor conditions for billions of workers and a united front on climate change.

In other words, if done right, this deal could save the world.

In the 1930s, the international system exploded. Japan invaded China. Italy seized control of Ethiopia and Albania. Germany annexed Czechoslovakia and occupied Poland. Britain and France declared war on Germany. The deadliest conflict in human history had begun.

...

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Marine Le Pen Has a Plan to Make France Great Again—and Steve Bannon Helped

no lnx

Marine Le Pen Has a Plan to Make France Great Again—and Steve Bannon Helped

By Adele M. Stan | May 31, 2019 1:45 pm

Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right Rassemblement National party, greets supporters after a rally on May 25, 2019, days before the election for the European Union parliamentary elections. (Photo by A.M. Stan for Right Wing Watch)]

Two days before the European Union parliamentary elections, an auditorium in a scruffy coal town in the north of France filled with admirers of Marine Le Pen, friend of Vladimir Putin and Steve Bannon, and leader of France’s far-right Rassemblement National (RN) party.Her fortunes appeared to be running just about even with those of President Emmanuel Macron’s La République en Marche party. At least half of the crowd of 500 or so at the rally in Hénin-Beaumont, Le Pen’s home constituency, appeared to be well over the age of 50. A very loud band playing covers of American classic-rock songs rather poorly (their version of “Purple Rain” was particularly painful, if not flat-out ironic) signaled the baby-boomer character of Le Pen’s base, as did the massive coal pile visible from nearly every point in town. Hénin-Beaumont looks a bit like those hurting Pennsylvania towns that Trumplandia is said to comprise.

A coal pile in Pas de Calais, France, visible from Marine Le Pen’s home constituency in Hénin-Beaumont. (Photo by A.M. Stan for Right Wing Watch)]

The band notwithstanding, the RN’s presentation was polished and forward-looking in terms of party-building. The two speakers who preceded Le Pen at the podium were young men; one of them, the 23-year-old Jordan Bardella, was tapped by Le Pen to top the list of candidates RN was putting forward for seats in the European Union parliament, from which she had favored France’s departure until the Brexit mess refused to end.

But now Le Pen had the opportunity to use her party’s long-standing fear-mongering tactics over the changing ethnic make-up of France to not only wound the neo-liberal Macron, but the whole of the multi-lateral European project and the reputation of regular, old liberal values themselves.

To the right of the stage, playing during the warm-up to the main event, was a large, high-definition screen displaying a seemingly endless loop of pictures of the photogenic Le Pen in various settings—with children and with local RN leaders. But then the loop stopped, along with the band, and the video panel filled with a series of animated text-and-graphics messages, accompanied by its own booming score.

As white and red text dropped onto the blue background, a graphic of the globe, turned so as to make Africa dominate and bring South America into the field of vision, appeared. The globe was marked with red arrows, meant to imply a horde of black and brown people breaching the cultural fortress of Europe.

“We believe that home for these migrants is in their home countries,” the text read.

From a slide presentation shown at Marine Le Pen’s final rally before the 2019 European Union parliamentary elections in northern France. It is part of a series that reads: “We believe that home for these migrants is in their home countries.” (Photo by A.M. Stan for Right Wing Watch)]

There was no mistaking the relentless anti-migrant messaging of RN, or of the way in which Le Pen, with some success, painted Macron as the very symbol of an impending cultural death of all things French. Several days earlier, she told the audience at a rally in Burgundy that Macron “mustn’t come in first or he will abuse it to methodically deconstruct France,” as translated and reported by the Irish Times.

Moving from wine- to coal-country, Le Pen told her fans in Hénin-Beaumont that they were part of something big—an international uprising of the little people against the global elites. There, to the cheers of those assembled, Le Pen defined the May 26 vote as an existential battle for France, Europe, and civilization as a whole, and that the way to save the nation, the continent and civilization itself was to vote for RN candidates as a way of “saying ‘no’ to Macron’s destructive vision for Europe.” There were more cheers, as rally-goers waved French flags.“ Speaking of the far-right parties of other EU member states, Le Pen invoked a catch-phrase frequently heard on the right: that of “a Europe of nations,” which is defined in opposition to the very notion of an EU with the power to issue regulations on all the member states. “With our European allies who also embody the awakening of peoples, for the first time in 60 years, we have the opportunity to initiate … the construction of a Europe of nations, and to end this European Union.” In other words, start dismantling the bureaucracy from within or, at the very least, seat enough far-right members of the European parliament to gum up the works.

That part about the “awakening of peoples”? That’s Le Pen’s reference to the rise of far-right parties in countries throughout Europe, from Italy to the U.K., and from Hungary to Spain. And if that phrase “a Europe of nations” is beginning to sound familiar to you, it’s because none other than Steve Bannon, the self-appointed guru to, and gatherer of, far-right figures across the globe, has taken it up. As the election campaign entered its last week, Bannon stories flooded the media as the banished one-time White House operative received a steady stream of reporters at a suite in the Hotel Bristol, a five-star property in Paris where Bannon was said to have paid $6,000 a night for his digs.

As election results began to come in on Sunday night, it was clear that Le Pen’s party bested Macron’s by a couple of seats—winning nearly 24 percent of France’s total vote. Although those results are not much different than what Le Pen’s party (then called the Front National) gleaned in the 2014 EU elections, the symbolic defeat of Macron was huge, cast as a clash of worldviews.

Supporters of France’s far-right Rassemblement National party wave flags at a party rally on May 24, 2019, during the campaign for European Union parliamentary seats. (Photo by A.M. Stan for Right Wing Watch)]

Nonetheless, the road to that victory was a bit bumpy. Le Pen’s ties to Putin returned to the spotlight, especially a mysterious loan her party received in 2014 from a Russian bank that then went under. Then there was that irksome selfie she posed for with Ruuben Kaalep, a member of Estonia’s parliament who has links to neo-Nazis. Kaalep photographed the two making a “white power” sign with their hands—a gesture that mimics an “OK” sign that was once used as a way to troll liberals, but after enough repetition was adopted at face value by some far-right types as a kind of not-so-secret handshake.

The selfie, posted by Kaalep to his Facebook page, caused enough of a stir that even The New York Times ran a story about the photo and the blowback the French leader received for it. Le Pen pleaded ignorance of the gesture’s meaning, saying that Kaalep asked her to make it, and she complied. However, there has been ample news coverage of Kaalep’s white supremacist leanings, and there she was, hanging out with him.

A Facebook post by Ruuben Kaalep of Estonia’s far-right Conservative People’s Party of Estonia (EKRE) showing him in a selfie with Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s far-right Rassemblement National party, making a gesture that’s come to be known as the “white power” sign. (Screenshot via Twitter from @VahurKoorits)]

It seems that a lot of far-right types in Europe are hanging out with each other these days. It was Bannon’s dream to bring them all together so that they might form a voting bloc within the EU Parliament that could gum up the works. And while Bannon’s scheme, dubbed The Movement, never really got off the ground as a Bannon-branded project, Italy’s Matteo Salvini, that country’s interior minister and leader of the far-right La Liga party, stepped in to convene a multi-national, multi-party far-right rally in Milan. That placed some of the most bigoted and reactionary political figures in all of Europe on one stage—and drew thousands of supporters to the plaza where the event took place.

Salvini, however, wasn’t able to wrangle all of Europe’s far-right authoritarians. Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, whose far-right Fidesz party ultimately won a landslide in the EU elections, apparently couldn’t see fit to hang with the small-fry whose parties have yet to rise to ruling status. Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who leads Poland’s ruling far-right Law and Justice Party, has issues with the many Russia-facing right-wing leaders in Salvini’s coalition and was not present. And Nigel Farage was too busy selling his insta-party (just add money and stir up the populace), simply called the Brexit party, to the electorate to show up. Since the elections, Salvini has so far failed to woo Orbán, who just declined the Italian leader’s invitation to join the bloc of far-right parties he is building within the European Union.

The photos from Salvini’s May 19 Milan gathering show a cheerful Le Pen, who was about to confront another problem. Her pal, Steve Bannon, air-dropped himself onto her turf just days ahead of the election to promote himself as the Man with the Plan at just the moment when it was not to a nationalist leader’s advantage to have an American materialize presenting himself in a way that suggested he’d had something to do with her success—which he very may well have had.

One thing’s for certain, Europe’s far right seems to have a lot of money to spend, and nobody seems to be able to say where it’s coming from. Le Pen herself has said she turns to Bannon for fundraising advice. When she rebranded her party a year ago under its new name (in order to distance it, at least in public view, from the anti-Semitism and Holocaust denialism that its earlier Front National was known for), Bannon was on hand for the roll-out at the party’s national convention, where he told party members to wear the term “racist” like “a badge of honor.” But when the guru of the dark forces turned up in the City of Lights as the EU election campaign was reaching its peak, Le Pen insisted Bannon had “no role” in her party’s campaign, even though two of her deputies made a pilgrimage to the Bristol to pay a call on the big guy.

The Bristol Hotel in Paris, where Steve Bannon set up shop during the 2019 campaign for the European Union parliamentary elections, receiving reporters and officials of Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National party. (Photo by A.M. Stan for Right Wing Watch)]

Pro-democracy observers of the EU’s parliamentary elections found bright spots to tout: Turnout overall is up significantly, and even as the right grabbed its biggest slice of the multinational legislative body yet, so did the Greens. But that sort of analysis ignores the fact that the right is on the rise, and that in three major EU countries—U.K., France, and Italy—far-right parties are emerging as their nation’s largest parties, at least in terms of their presence in the EU, an organization they would love to kill.

As Cas Mudde wrote at The Guardian:

Rather than a victory for democracy, the European elections, and the responses to the results, show how much populism in general, and the populist radical right in particular, has become mainstreamed and normalised. We find it normal that a neo-Nazi party is the third biggest party in a member state, that a populist radical right wins more than half of the vote in non-democratic elections, and that the populist radical right is the biggest party in several EU member states. We celebrate that “the majority has voted for pro-European parties”. We ignore that turnout in one in five member states was (well) below one-third of eligible voters.

Indeed, one of the most troubling aspects of Le Pen’s rally in Hénin-Beaumont was just how perfectly normal it all seemed. Nowhere did one feel the kind of ready-to-explode energy of a Trump rally, or a gathering of Germany’s far-right Alternatives für Deutschland party. Just nice, middle-class people expressing their contempt for people who don’t look like them—and then charmingly singing the Marseillaise in unison before calling the event to a close.

After the rally concluded, a white-haired attendee in a pink skirt-suit was seen walking to her car. Emblazoned on the back of her jacket in black letters were the words, “LOVE ROCKS.”

A fan of Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s far-right Rassemblement National party, exits a party rally for the 2019 European Union parliamentary elections. (Photo by A.M. Stan for Right Wing Watch)

Adele M. Stan explored the European Union parliamentary elections as a guest of the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, an independent foundation affiliated with Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD).

Tags: Marine Le Pen Steve Bannon Europe Immigration

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The Alarming Rise of Anti-Semitism in Europe

TAGS:

Alternative für Deutschland

National Rally

Vox

Lega Nord

Danish People's Party

https://www.desmog.co.uk/2019/05/16/right-wing-populist-parties-climate-science-denial-european-parliament-elections

With the European elections around the corner, populists and right-wing parties are gathering momentum and teaming-up into a pan-European alliance.

The alliance is being established around a common anti-immigration and eurosceptic ideology but nationalists parties have something else in common: opposition to climate action.

Research shows that dozens of candidates standing in the election are using climate science denial and anti-climate action rhetoric as a campaign strategy.

In Germany, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has embraced climate science denial to ramp-up support against environmental protection using online smear campaigns against the 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg.

In Belgium, leader of the People’s Party Mischaël Modrikamen, who believes climate change is “the biggest orchestrated bullshit in the history of humanity”, has joined ranks with former Trump chief strategist and Breitbart chief Steve Bannon and Italy’s Northern League leader Matteo Salvini to spread populist ideology across Europe.

And from Estonia and Austria to France and the Netherlands, right-wing nationalist parties continue to carry climate science denial into the political conversation. Not all parties deny the scientific evidence behind human-caused climate change, but many have become platforms for such ideas to spread.

DeSmog looks at where candidates for Europe’s key right-wing populist parties stand on climate change:

Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) - *Germany*
People’s Party - *Belgium*
Ukip and the Brexit Party - *United Kingdom*
Party for Freedom (PVV) - *Netherlands*
Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) - *Austria*
National Rally - *France*
Lega Nord - *Italy*
Danish People’s Party (DF) -*Denmark*
Swedish Democrats -*Sweden*
EKRE - *Estonia*
Law and Justice Party (PiS) - *Poland*
Fidesz - Hungary
Freedom and Direct Democracy - *Czech Republic*
Vox - *Spain*
[info graf dyn?]
alternative für Deutschland (AfD) - Germany Since entering Germany’s parliament two years ago on an anti-Muslim and anti-immigration manifesto, the AfD has embraced climate science denial as a new campaign strategy.

Its election manifesto denies human-induced climate change and claims that rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has meant “world food harvests have increased significantly”.

“We doubt that man has significantly influenced or even managed the recent climate change, in particular the current warming. Climate protection policy is therefore a mistake,” the manifesto states.

As such, the AfD rejects “all EU measures that justify the reduction of CO2 emissions with the protection of the climate”, including the Paris Agreement, which it describes as a “shift of funds from the highly industrialized countries to underdeveloped countries”.

Most recently, the AfD has conducted a targeted smear campaigns against the climate school strike movement and the 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg.

Climate change barely got a mention on the AfD’s social media channels when the party was founded in 2013. But it mentioned climate change more than 900 times in the past year alone, mainly promoting anti-Thunberg rhetoric, according to a joint investigation by the counter-extremism organisation the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) and Greenpeace’s Unearthed.

Party chairman Jörg Meuthen, the lead candidate standing in the election, has repeatedly attacked Green politics and described climate change as “a replacement religion of all left green world parties and patronisers”.

Meuthen repeatedly accused those that want climate action of “Greta hype”, labelling them “CO2 believing disciples”.

Maximilian Krah, another AfD candidate, also targeted Thunberg 10 times in tweets between December 2018 and April 2019, describing the movement she inspired as a “psychosis” and the consequences of a post-Catholic age.

He also compared climate change to homeopathy, claiming the EU could soon declare the latter a science.

Earlier this year, coal miner Guido Reil, also a candidate, defended the party’s false claim that and that it is having no impact on the climate.

The AfD’s anti-climate campaign efforts have been backed by the European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE), a German-based climate science denial which is known for co-hosting a climate conference with the Heartland Institute, a US-based think tank which has been at the forefront of denying the scientific evidence for man-made climate change.

EIKE’s advisory board include Christopher Monckton, a former British politician and advisor to Margaret Thatcher, who was later affiliated with Ukip and a notorious climate science denier.

People’s Party - Belgium

The People’s Party is a primarily Francophone, anti-Islam, right-wing party led by Mischaël Modrikamen.

The party’s lurch to the far-right over the last few years has also seen its stance on climate change radicalised, rejecting climate action as a “collective hysteria” and denying human-induced climate change.

In a statement from February 2019, the party slammed Belgium’s decarbonisation policies as “excessive”. It described “the infinitesimal increase of CO2” as “by no means a pollutant” that “allowed the globalized greening of our planet in the last thirty years as well as the yield of harvests”.

The People’s Party says it is “deeply attached to our land” but says it will instead focus “on the real problems: soil pollution by nitrates, plastics in the oceans, excessive urbanisation, permaculture, short production circuits to avoid wastage.”

A staunch admirer of Donald Trump, Modrikamen is also an ally of his former chief strategist Steve Bannon. In 2018, Modrikamen re-launched The Movement, a Brussels-based far-right organisation that aims to galvanise far-right populist ideology and anti-EU sentiment, with Bannon’s official backing. The People’s Party is officially affiliated to The Movement.

In September 2018, Modrikamen tweeted a picture with Bannon and Matteo Salvini, the leader of Italy’s populist Northern League in Italy, after Salvini joined The Movement.

Modrikamen previously shared articles from Bannon’s Breitbart website, written by climate science denier James Delingpole, which accused school climate strikers of being “ignorant and manipulated”, shared denialist theories about “global cooling”, and called Thunberg’s activism “the biggest orchestrated bullshit in the history of humanity”.

Secretary general of the People’s Party and Modrikamen’s wife,Yasmine Dehaene- Modrikamenis also standing in the election.

Dehaene-Modrikamen has cited the work of some of Europe’s most notorious climate science deniers, including Richard Tol, a former advisor to the UK’s most prominent climate science denying group the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish economist who argues it would be too expensive to tackle climate change in a meaningful way and French professor Francois Gervais, who argues that the climate emergency is “a delusion”.

Ukip and The Brexit Party - United Kingdom

Ukip has for long attracted climate science deniers into its ranks. And earlier this year, Ukip’s former leader Nigel Farage, who has a history of spreading misinformation about climate change, launched The Brexit Party to contest the European elections.

As DeSmog previously reported, the Brexit Party includes a number of opponents to measures to tackle climate change. including Ann Widdecombe, one of five MPs to oppose the Climate Change Act in the UK. Annunziata Rees-Mogg, who advocated investments in the Canadian tar sands and sister of climate science denying Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg is also a marquee candidate. She joins chairman of Turning Point UK George Farmer and Welsh MEP Nathan Gill, both of whom have questioned mainstream climate science and the need for action..

In the meantime, Ukip’s candidates are continuing the party’s climate science denial tradition.

Ukip MEPs were among a small band of right-wing members to vote against the ratification by the European Parliament of the Paris Agreement in 2016. The party’s current manifesto calls for the country’s 2008 Climate Change Act to be scrapped, and promotes measures to rejuvenate the UK’s coal industry.

Ukip leader Gerard Batten, also a candidate, has defended Ukip’s policy, suggesting there was no need for “a man-made climate change policy”. Candidate Alan Graves Senior likewise confirmed the party’s policy tweeting: “It is not a case of denying climate change it is more that we do not accept it is all man-made”.

And Ukip MEP Stuart Agnew previously described global warming as “a scam” and used a series of cold winters to justify his belief that global warming is not happening.

Other candidates in the elections, including Paul Oakley, Richard Braine, and Richard Elvin have also touted climate science denial.

Party for Freedom (PVV) - Netherlands

Party for Freedom (PVV) is best known for the aggressive anti-immigration and anti-Islam rehtoric of its leader, Geert Wilders.

But the party’s stance on climate change is no less zealous. The PVV argues that there is no independent evidence that humans cause climate change and slams the work of the IPCC as unable to prove that relationship.

It objects to climate action largely on cost grounds — a blog post on its website claims that “CO2 reduction would be at least 30 times more expensive for the Netherlands than adapting to any occurring climate change.” Its one-page manifesto for the European elections doesn’t mention climate change but promises “no more money for development, windmills, art, innovation or broadcasting”.

According to a report by the environmental think tank Adelphi, PVV MEPs have voted against all EU climate and energy policy proposals tabled in the European Parliament between 2009 and 2018, including the ratification of the Paris Agreement.

Marcel de Graaff, a PVV MEP since 2014 who is standing again, and co-chair of the right-wing eurosceptic Europe of Nations and Freedom political grouping. He has previously called to “cut the crap”, put an end to climate and decarbonisation policies and “green lies”.

In a parliamentary question, his colleague, Olaf Stuger, another candidate in the election, argued global warming data had been “grossly exaggerated” and “manipulated” and asked the European Commission to review the EU’s policy on climate change.

Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) - Austria

For the right-wing nationalists in Austria’s FPÖ, climate change is perceived as a globalist threat. The party seeks to end its dependency on imported fossil fuels and transition to domestic and locally available energy sources, including solar, wind, hydrogen and bioenergy.

However, party members continue to deny human-caused climate change.

Party chairman Heinz-Christian Strache, a hardliner who pushed the FPÖ further to the right, has repeatedly argued that it is a natural phenomenon that cannot be prevented. In an 2017 interview with Australian national radio ORF, Strache claimed that “Greenland used to be a green country with vineyards,” adding that “global warming cannot be corrected in the face of increasing solar flares and warming of the sun”.

FPÖ’s leading candidate in the elections, Harald Vilimsky, who has been an MEP since 2014, voted againstthe ratification of the Paris Agreement. And in March this year, Vilimsky submitted an amendment on proposed legislation to establish an asylum and migration fund, which deleted all mention of the “importance of tackling climate change”, the Paris Agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

National Rally - France

The National Front, now rebranded as the National Rally, has worked to relinquish its image as an anti-semitic and Holocaust-denying party founded in the 1970s by Jean-Marie Le Pen. Under Marine Le Pen’s leadership, the party has worked to green its image and make the environment an issue of national identity.

The party is keen to develop renewable energy sources to end France’s dependence on fossil fuel imports, but continues to cast doubt on the human causes of climate change.

In a 2012 interview, Le Pen declared: “I am not sure human activities are the main source behind the [climate change] phenomenon … The world has seen changes in the climate that had nothing to do with human activity.”

In 2016, National Front MEPs abstained from the vote to ratify the Paris Agreement and have repeatedly abstained or voted againstdecarbonisation and emission reduction policies in the European parliament, according to research by French newspaper Le Monde.

Breaking with that tradition, the party’s lead candidate in the election, 23-year-old Jordan Bardella, however, described environmental challenges, together with the immigration, as one of the twokey issues of the 21st century. Bardella has so far stayed clear of any direct comments on climate change.

But others have been more outspoken. Nicolas Bay, former Secretary General of the National Front and co-chair of the Europe of Nations and Freedom group said in a 2017 interview that it is “very difficult to tell whether, in the long-term, there is warming, to know the share of human activity in causing it and the capacity we [humans] have to influence these phenomena”.

Asked what he believed was the share of human activity in causing climate change, Bay said: “I think it exists but it may be more limited than sometimes said”. In the same interview, Bay rejected the idea he was a climate science denier.

in March 2019, MEP Joëlle Mellin likewise acknowledged that while climate change was “a crucial problem” for the world’s inhabitants, climate policy should take into account both human responsibility of a “savage industrialisation process” and of “proven natural climate cycles”.

Mellin also said activists had to “stop saying that humans […] are responsible for everything” and “refute the idea that the Paris Accord is an angel-like solution” to the climate crisis.

during her visit to the EU Parliament, Mellin praised the teenager for raising climate change awareness among her generation but said activists can’t only rely on shock sentences which have no other foundation besides emotion.”

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Lega Nord - Italy

Italy’s nationalist Northern League party is largely disengaged on the issue of climate change.

Although the party manifesto mentions climate change in the context of developing renewable energy and advocates climate adaptation measures, the topic is mostly absent from official communications, according to research by Adelphi. The party supports an energy transition, energy efficiency measures and a ban on polluting cars with low energy prices a key priority.

But Northern League MEPs did vote against ratifying the Paris Agreement in the European Parliament, with MEP Gianluca Pini describing the agreement as a “downward compromise in continuing to allow Chinese companies and developing countries to compete unfairly with Italian companies, who fully comply with environmentally friendly production”.

Italy’s deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini, who leads his party’s list in the elections and is not shy about his support for Donald Trump, strongly opposed the EU parliament’s recognition of the term “climate migrant”, and tweeted: “It is crazy to exploit a serious subject like climate to legitimise illegal immigration”.

Northern League candidates Mara Bizzotto and Angelo Ciocca have also consistentlyvoted against decarbonisation and climatepolicies or simply avoided and abstained on environmental and climate votes.

Danish People’s Party (DF) -Denmark

Denmark’s Dansk Folkeparti (also known as the Danish People’s Party or DF) has seen its position on climate change evolve in recent years. While many of its most high profile members were previously happy to openly tout climate science denial, the party’s MEPs have shown more willingness to engage with climate policy.

The party’s climate spokesperson said in 2018 that he was not convinced climate change was caused by human activity:

“I can’t rule out the thesis that they are man-made. But as long as there are reliable researchers who say one thing, and then some others say the other, I do not feel completely convinced that one explanation is more real than the other.”

And in August 2018, the party’s former climate lead, Per Dalgaard, told Radio24 that there is “no one in the Danish People’s Party who believes that climate change is man-made”.

But the party’s chairman, Peter Skaruup, said in March 2019 that he accepted “the climate is changing quite markedly quite quickly” and that it was “probably” due to human activity.

Nonetheless, the first and second candidates on the DF’s candidate list, Peter Kofod and Anders Primdahl Vistisen, have both criticised those that want to see faster climate action.

In a letter to Information.dk criticising its coverage of DF Youth's anti-climate action campaign in 2012, Kofod said:

“The climate debate in Denmark has created a variegated cluster of climate apostles led by Al Gore … a new religion has come: climate fanaticism, whose warm air preachers include counts Rehling on Information.”

And Vistisen was behind a 2012 proposal to suspend the EU’s climate and energy package that seeks to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent by 2020, which failed to get sufficient support to be considered by the European Commission.

Swedish Democrats - Sweden

Like France’s National Rally and Italy’s Northern League, the Swedish Democrats, a nationalist and anti-immigration party with roots in the country’s white nationalist movement, acknowledges the causal link between human activity and climate change. But it has repeatedly cast doubt on the risks linked to climate change.

The party’s manifesto states that environmental issues are often complex in nature and should be managed in the long term and calls for cooperation within Europe and globally. However, the Swedish Democrats were the only party to oppose the country’s ambitious climate target to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2045.

Party spokesman Martin Kinnunen previously tweeted that “warmer climates are positive for the opportunity to grow [food] in Sweden. That is a fact,” and that one hot summer should not lead to climate anxiety.

In the European Parliament, MEPs voting record on climate and energy issues has been mixed.

EKRE - Estonia

The Conservative People's Party of Estonia (EKRE) currently has no seats in the European Parliament but doubled its vote in the country’s national election in March, coming third with 17,8 percent of the vote. The right-wing nationalist party ran on a pledge to protect an “indeigenous Estonia” and now forms part of the country’s coalition government.

The party is fielding nine candidates in the European election — all white men.

On climate change, EKRE leader Mart Helme has been keen to emphasise that Estonia’s emissions were insignificant compared to the rest of the world. The party rejects the Paris Agreement, which Helme previously described as a “classic left-wing action”.

Like his father, Martin Helme, who is also a candidate in the election, he has argued that there is no convincing evidence for linking human activity to climate change.

“We are told that there is a pause in climate warming, and if this long pause can no longer be explained, we simply talk about climate or heat fluctuations, but no one has been able to talk convincingly about what this is and has to do with human activity,” he said in a 2016 statment.

In the same statement, Helme wrongly claimed that the Paris Agreement does not apply to coal emissions from China, India and the US.

The party’s 2018 manifesto includes no mention of climate change but says it supports renewable energy provided that it does not increase energy prices for consumers and helps to reduce Estonia’s energy imports.

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Law and Justice Party - Poland

Poland’s Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (Law and Justice Party (PiS)) is a nationalist, pro-coal party that obstructs climate policies at home. However, on the global stage the party is engaged in the UN climate negotiations and considers the Paris Agreement a success.

Under a PiS-government, Poland hosted last year’s UN climate talks in Katowice. At the time, PiS Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki hailed Poland a leader in climate protection and PiS spokeswoman and candidate Beata Mazurek warned that “climate action could not be postponed until later”.

However, Mazurek’s has significantly less climate ambition at home. In May this year, she defended the party’s pro-coal position declaring that ending the country’s reliance on coal would lead to “drastic rises in energy prices and an economic crisis”. Poland consumes the second largest amount of coal per year in the EU, with around 80 per cent of its electricity production coming from what is the most polluting fossil fuel.

PiS has also been a vocal critic of the EU’s climate policies and has repeatedly advocated for non-binding targets and deregulation. In the European Parliament, PiS MEPs voted against the majority of climate and energy proposals, according to research by Adelphi.

Some PiS politicians have also promoted climate science denial.

In an 2018 interview, Tomasz Chruszczow, Poland’s top climate negotiator refused to confirm whether he backed the scientific consensus that human activity is the key driver of climate change.

And in 2016, Education Minister Anna Zalewska proposed removing climate change and evolution theory from the biology curriculum. In 2014, she told a group of students “there [was] no global warming”.

Fidesz - Hungary

Viktor Orbán’s right-wing party Fidesz is one of the few nationalists parties in Europe to actively support the Paris Agreement, partly using it as an excuse to be less ambitious at home.

Speaking in 2017, Prime Minister Orbán said: “In Hungary, there is a consensus that climate change is real, that it is dangerous and since it is a global phenomenon, requires global action to combat.”

In 2016, Hungarian President János Adér wrote a letter to 10 heads of state from the world’s top greenhouse gas polluters demanding they set an example and tighten their emissions reduction targets. Hungary’s parliament then became the first in the EU to ratify the Paris deal.

But critics and environmental NGOs have accused the Fidesz government of using calls for action on the international stage as an excuse to do little at home.

Kövér László, speaker of the Hungarian National Assembly, has recently attributed rising public concerns over climate change overtaking concerns about immigration to “the brainwashing effect of independent and impartial media”.

Freedom and Direct Democracy - Czech Republic

The Freedom and Direct Democracy party is a staunchly Eurosceptic and anti-immigration party. It currently has no MEPs sitting in the European Parliament, but the party boasts of its links with France’s National Rally leader Marine Le Pen and Italy’s Northern League leader Matteo Salvini.

On climate change, the party-co-founders Radim Fiala and Tomio Okamura, who are overseeing a list of 21 candidates, have sent mixed messages.

In 2015, deputy leader Fiala, said that “under the pretext of combating climate change, unprecedented economic atroci-ties are taking place”. But party leader Okamura admitted that “the climate is really changing” and added it was a question of “how much a person contributes to it”.

The party’s manifesto does not mention climate change but calls for energy security and the “efficient use of renewable resources”.

Vox - Spain

Spanish nationalist party Vox is expecting to do well in the European Parliament elections, having won 24 seats in Spain’s national election in April 2019, making it the first far-right grouping to win more than a single seat in congress since Spain returned to democracy in 1975.

Vox believes that climate change is real and caused by humans, but is reluctant to commit many resources to tackling it.

The party’s first candidate for the European Parliament, Jorge Buxadé, told a recent debate, “the rest of countries must meet the same commitments as Europeans in the fight against climate change. The current situation is an injustice.”

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/the-disturbing-connections-between-trump-putin-and-austrian-neo-nazis/

Trump hadn’t even been inaugurated on December 20, 2016 when I wrote “Trump, Austrian Neo-Nazis, and Putin,” but I had already detected a troubling nexus between the three. Here is how I began that piece:

In the process of pointing out that their flirtations with John Birchers and other general “rightwing nutballish” behaviors are quickly turning the Trump administration “into the grease trap of American political history,” Charles Pierce stops to notice that incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn is still in league with the Russkies. To wit, the lunatic far-right Austrian Freedom Party leader Heinz-Christian Strache traveled to New York in November to meet with Flynn. The Freedom Party presidential nominee, Norbert Hofer, just came within a whisper of winning an revanchist Anschlussian political victory in the early December election. He had hoped to do better, saying just prior to the vote that he was drawing “encouragement from Donald Trump’s presidential victory in the United States.”

The November meeting in Trump Tower between Michael Flynn and Austrian neo-Nazis wasn’t the reason I wrote the post, though. I was responding to an article in Foreign Policy that reported:

Heinz-Christian Strache, Freedom Party leader, and Norbert Hofer, the candidate who narrowly lost Austria’s presidential election earlier this month, signed a “working agreement” on Monday with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s United Russia Party, according to a statement from the Freedom Party.]

Charles Pierce responded: “At the risk of being called a neo-McCarthyite, may I point out that this smacks an awful lot of the incoming administration’s involvement in a worldwide right-wing movement at the center of which is our good friend Vladimir Putin.”

Here was my reaction to Pierce:

Of course, this is impossible because liberals who lived through the Cold War keep telling me that all this Russia-bashing is just so much Dulles Brothers flimflam designed to distract the plebes from their rightful destiny at the head of the dictatorship of the proletariat. To bash Russia is to bash the left here at home in order to crush the left everywhere from Ho Chi Minh City to Buenos Aires.

It therefore cannot be that our president is in the thrall, if not the control, of a “worldwide right-wing movement” to restore the purity of essence to the European bloodstream and bring Christianity back to its former central and crusading glory.

Or, in other words, you need to check that “grease trap of American political history” carefully, because a few of the roles have been reversed.

I revisit this all today because Heinz-Christian Strache has just found himself in a pickle. He apparently took the “working agreement” with Vladimir Putin a few steps too far, and he did it on six-hour video tape recorded in July 2017. In truth, he was set up—by whom it is still not clear. People posing as highly-connected Russians discussed various corrupt schemes that involved trading favorable contracts for assistance in helping Strache’s political party in the upcoming elections. There was also this:

The supposed investor already had a plan: She proposed acquiring a 50-percent stake in the Kronen Zeitung, a highly influential Austrian tabloid, and to use the newspaper as a mouthpiece backing Strache and his FPÖ party in the election campaign. Strache, dressed casually in a slightly ratty T-shirt and jeans, seemed enthusiastic – mostly about the proposal, but also about the woman herself. “Are you kidding? She’s hot,” he said, with a Viennese lilt.

Strache, who is currently Austria’s vice chancellor and the head of the Freedom Party, took the bait and failed to notify the authorities that Russians were attempting to bribe him.

I don’t know who set this trap or why they waited almost two years to expose Strache, but the episode provides one more example of how neo-Nazis believe that the Russians are their allies and seek to work with them to further their political ambitions. As I pointed out in my November 2017 “A #TrumpRussia Confession in Plain Sight” piece, there’s plenty of evidence that something similar happened between the Trump campaign and Russia. That is why we need to see Robert Mueller’s counterintelligence report.

We already know that Trump used the National Enquirer to help him cover up his affairs and promote his candidacy. We know that Michael Flynn is currently awaiting sentencing after exposing attempts to bribe him into silence. Now we know that Heinz-Christian Strache is not only a nexus between Trump and Putin, but corrupt to the core. We’ve seen the white nationalist strains of Trumpism and the president’s strange affinity for Putin.

And yet somehow the president says he’s been exonerated.

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The Threat of Political Climate Change

Countering the Bannon Archipelago

By John Feffer

In the Americas, the Trump tsunami has swept across both continents and the “pink tide” of progressivism has all but disappeared from the southern half of the hemisphere. In Europe, with the recent exception of Spain, the left has been banished to the political margins. In Africa and Asia, socialism has devolved into nationalism, authoritarianism, or just plain corruption. And forget about the Middle East.

In this planet-wide rising tide of right-wing populism, the liberal left commands only a few disconnected islands -- Iceland, Mexico, New Zealand, South Korea, Spain, Uruguay. In so many other places, increasingly illiberal leaders are in charge. Add up the numbers and significantly more than half the world’s population currently lives under some form of right-wing populist or authoritarian rule, courtesy of Donald Trump in the United States, Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, Narendra Modi in India, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Vladimir Putin in Russia, and Xi Jinping in China, among others.

Optimistscling to the pendulum theory of politics: conservatives are now basking in the limelight, but the day will come when the right inevitably falls on its face and the left swings back into action; witness the results of the 2018 mid-term elections in the United States.

In addition, pragmatists point out that many of these latter-day autocrats, for all their anti-democratic tendencies, came to power through elections. Yes, they have since sought to change constitutions, pack courts, muzzle the media, and crack down on civil society, but they remain constrained by the guardrails of the more-or-less liberal political systems they still run. In the end, so goes such thinking, democracy will prevail. Look at how, over time, some right-wing populists have been dislodged at the polls (Vladimir Meciar in Slovakia), brought down by corruption scandals (Alberto Fujimori in Peru), or forced to resign in disgrace (Silvio Berlusconi in Italy).

Optimists and pragmatists alike ultimately have faith that democracies are self-regulating organisms, not unlike the Earth’s ecosystem. The planet has managed to survive countless asteroid strikes, solar flares, and extreme weather conditions. Democracy, too, will outlast Hurricane Donald and all the other examples of extreme political weather, thanks, sooner or later, to woke voters and resilient mechanisms of checks and balances.

Unfortunately, given the malign impact humans are having on the planet, this analogy is far less reassuring than it once might have been. Only the willfully ignorant expect that some natural oscillation in global temperature or the Earth’s own adjustments to its climate feedback loops will arrive in time to save us. Humankind has clearly thrown a spanner into the works and now faces a distinctly difficult, if not disastrous, future. Similarly, across the globe, the electoral pendulum appears to be stuck on the side of reaction and the new generation of right-wing populists could well be on the verge of changing the political playing field, just as humans are in the process of irrevocably transforming the planet.

Bolsonaro, Erdogan, Putin, Trump, and their ilk should indeed be understood as the political equivalent of global warming. Instead of deadly carbon, they spew hateful invective and show a remarkable determination to destroy a far-from-perfect status quo. Moreover, they are the product not of farting livestock or extraterrestrial events but of the self-interested acts of blinkered humans. In an increasingly restrictive political space, liberals and progressives are looking ever more like so many polar bears on ever fewer ice floes, with diminishing room for maneuver.

Don’t bet on politics as usual to lower the temperature and put a stop to this moment’s tidal surge of ugly intolerance. Because the nature of the game has changed, those who oppose the global New Right must engage in a strategic rethink -- or we’ll all drown in the rising waters.

The Game Changers

Today’s autocrats are, at first glance, a diverse band of brothers.

In the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte has attacked the Catholic Church for defending the sanctity of human life and challenging his campaign of extrajudicial murder. In Nicaragua, one-time revolutionary Daniel Ortega has courted the Catholic Church as a pillar of his undemocratic rule. Vladimir Putin presents himself and his country as saviors of Christianity, while Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan continues to promote his own brand of political Islam, Narendra Modi has ridden to power thanks to Hindu nationalism, and Xi Jinping eschews religion altogether. Some right-wing nationalists like Bolsonaro have ambitious plans to privatize state assets, while others, like those in Italy’s current leadership, want to nationalize major properties. Hungary’s Viktor Orban is concerned about climate change, but most right-wing populists like Donald Trump insist that the threat doesn’t exist and want to extract ever more fossil fuels.

Don’t be fooled, though. While these leaders may not rhyme, they all dance to the same rhythm.

These illiberal politicians have uniformly come to power by attacking globalization. They have criticized the neo-liberal transformations of the recent past that enriched the few at the expense of the many, while challenging the major political parties of the center left and center right that implemented the economic reforms that unleashed such forces. They have taken aim at the corruption that has metastasized in political systems already ill equipped to handle a massive uptick in cross-border financial transactions. When politically useful, they have demonized immigrants and refugees who are one side effect of, as well as victims of, that very burgeoning globalization movement. They have championed national sovereignty against the interventions of multilateral organizations, while blasting multicultural values and the human-rights groups that promote them. And they have taken advantage of social media like Facebook and Twitter that promote a version of participatory totalitarianism in which individuals can freely relinquish their privacy and abandon conventional news media for daily dispatches from their favorite celebrity autocrat.

Election results in the world’s most populous democracies suggest that liberalism -- in its free-market economic form and its more tolerant, inclusive, and statist political version – has become discredited at a popular level. A quick glance at the titles of some recent books (Why Liberalism Failed, The Retreat of Western Liberalism, *How Democracies Die,What Was Liberalism*) reveals that the chattering classes, too, have noticed this global trend.

The Trumps of this world have cannily identified a fundamental shift in the political playing field, rushing into the gap created by the declining popularity of liberal values. Viktor Orban set an early example of such opportunism when, in the 1990s, he jettisoned his liberal past and opted instead for the right side of the Hungarian political spectrum. In the aftermath of the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the left and right had alternated in power as voters became disgusted with whatever party controlled the levers of state. By successfully linking all the ills facing the country to liberals and their follies, however, Orban became the one to preside over a genuine transformation of the political landscape. The premier liberal party, the Alliance of Free Democrats, effectively disappeared when he became prime minister in 2010 -- and formally dissolved three years later. Almost a decade after he first took office, the only serious opposition to Orban is to his right.

The last time globalization transformed the world so thoroughly, in the early twentieth century, the ensuing backlash led to liberalism’s first catastrophic fail. In those years, liberals consistently failed to understand that the ground had shifted under them. In Russia, Bolsheviks took power from the weak crew of potential democratic reformers that had overthrown the tsar, inspiring a handful of movements in Europe that attempted something similar. In Germany, illiberal politicians took aim at the cosmopolitan values of the Weimar Republic. In Italy and Spain, leaders adopted virulent nationalism, challenging incipient global institutions like the League of Nations. In the wake of the Great Depression, Japanese ultra-militarists easily dispatched the weak Taisho democracy. Meanwhile, in the United States, right-wing demagogues like Father Charles Coughlin built large followings by railing on the radio against communists, Wall Street, and “the international money-changers in the temple,” though they failed to take power in the era of a charismatic liberal president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Where liberalism survived, it did so largely by absorbing some of the strategies of the illiberal communists and fascists, namely relying on the state to keep the economy afloat, as Roosevelt did with his New Deal policies. This lesson carried over into the post-World War II-era in which American liberals continued to embrace New Deal principles that would culminate in President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs and European liberals embraced the compromises that would eventually produce the European Union. At the global level, nations of various ideological dispositions came together to create a set of institutions -- the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund -- meant to ensure some degree of permanent stability. Economic globalization resumed, but this time in a regulatory environment that, initially, seemed to spread the benefits more equally.

That all changed in the 1970s when, in one country after another, a new generation of liberals and conservatives began to dismantle those very regulations in hopes that an unfettered market would jump-start growth globally. However, only after China embraced capitalism and the Soviet Union collapsed did economic globalization take a quantum leap to true globalization. With it the world returned to Gilded Age levels of concentrated wealth and inequality. No surprise, then, that the instability and intolerance of that long-gone era has returned as well.

Leaders like Putin, Erdogan, and Trump aren’t just politically savvy, nor have they simply been lucky or unusually ruthless. Instead, they sensed the changing mood of a moment and were able to capitalize on a profound discontent with the status quo that liberals had built, a discontent that won’t disappear simply because right-wing populists are exposed as frauds, incompetents, or cheats. Worse, crafty operators with even more ambitious agendas stand ready to destroy the liberal status quo once and for all.

The Bannon Archipelago

A Nationalist International should be a contradiction in terms, but that hasn’t stopped Steve Bannon from trying to create one. The erstwhile publisher and moviemaker, darling of the alt-right, and one-time Trump whisperer is on an extended world tour aimed at building a loose network of right-wing populists that he calls the Movement. It’s centered in -- of all places -- Brussels, the home of the European Union.

Bannon hopes to take advantage of post-Brexit Euroskepticism to roll his Trojan horse of a movement into the very heart of the enemy’s camp. With the encouragement of various right-wing oligarchs like financier John Thornton, he’s already met with neo-fascists associated with groups like the Belgian Vlaams Belong, France’s National Rally (the rebranded National Front), and Sweden’s Democratic Party, as well as more conventional right-wing populists in Italy and Hungary. He’s out to take the EU from the social democrats and pallid conservatives, the Vatican from the too-permissive Pope Francis, and the West from the clutches of immigrants and multiculturalists.

Elections for the European Parliament at the end of May should prove a testing ground for Bannon’s Movement. Right now, if the polling is accurate and the Euroskeptic, populist, and far-right parties combine their efforts, they could, staggeringly enough, become the largest coalition in that body. True, some prominent right-wing parties, like Poland’s Law and Justice, remain unseduced by Bannon. But it’s a mistake to underestimate him, just as it was a mistake to dismiss Trump in 2016. Success can be very persuasive, as The Donald proved in his takeover of a Republican Party whose leaders initially and almost universally despised him.

But Europe is only part of Bannon’s plan. For someone who has vented so much spleen at “globalists” like financier and philanthropist George Soros, Bannon is quite the internationalist. In Latin America, he’s already appointed Jair Bolsonaro’s youngest son as his regional representative to help build on the right’s electoral successes in Brazil, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, and Paraguay. Bannon has also partnered with a Chinese billionaire to create a Rule of Law Fund that’s meant to be the point of a spear aimed at the regime in Beijing.

In search of a stable of princes, that would-be Machiavelli has also visited Japan at the invitation of the fanatical Happiness Realization Party, a political cult that embraces Japanese militarism. Israel, too, is to be part of Bannon’s alt-right archipelago because the self-professed “Christian Zionist” sees Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a key link in a future anti-Islamic front. Also figuring prominently in his thinking is Russia, a vast, mostly white country led by a critic of Western liberalism and “radical Islam,”though Bannon acknowledges that the Mueller report has temporarily set back his efforts.

Bannon didn’t create the new right-wing populist wave, but he’s been clever enough to grab a surfboard, dive into the waters, and try to guide the swell further to the right. Toward that end, he’s creating what he calls a “war room.” He says:

“It’s what we did for Trump in the U.S.: writing op-eds, booking people on media, surrogate media -- all that. The last part of it is to do with grassroots social media and getting organized physically and getting out the vote.”

This isn’t, however, just a global version of Richard Nixon’s “Southern strategy,” an opportunistic attempt to solidify a political realignment. Bannon and his ilk have a much more ambitious project in mind. Having dismissed the current resident of the Vatican as far too liberal, Bannon has put himself forward as the pope of a new movement to fight the barbarians (as he defines them).

A lifelong Catholic and former military man, he harkens back to a much earlier papal tradition, that of Pope Urban II, who launched the First Crusade to retake Jerusalem at the end of the eleventh century. Bannon wants to recreate a pre-EU, whiter, more martial and nationalistic Europe. Like the popes and princes of the eleventh century, the right-wing populists in Europe have already been conjuring up external enemies to unify the like-minded. Islam remains a suitable adversary, whether in the form of ordinary immigrants or extraordinary terrorists. But there’s China, too, which poses the greatest challenge to the West since the Middle Kingdom last ruled the world of commerce, innovation, and culture so many centuries ago. Finally, there’s the enemy within: the globalists who have no patience for nationalism, the secularists who want to hold religion at arm’s length, and the multiculturalists who campaign against white privilege.

This crusade of Bannon’s and the far right is a last-ditch effort to maintain the United States and a large swath of Eurasia as bastions of white Christendom. For decades, those who held such views populated the extremes where they belonged. However, the economic failures of globalization, a huge uptick in refugee flows, and a general decline in faith in democratic institutions have proved fertile ground for such a new crusade to take shape.

Movement vs. Movement

In the United States, organizations like Indivisible, a progressive group created by former congressional staffers in the wake of the 2016 elections that now has 5,000 local chapters, are not waiting for the political pendulum to swing by itself. They’re already working hard to push politics back to the left -- and their organizing produced results in the 2018 midterm elections when the Democratic Party retook the House of Representatives.

The 2020 presidential election, however, is a different matter. Trump now has the incumbent’s advantage and, for the time being, the tailwind of a strong economy. In fact, some economic forecasters predict a landslide for him as long as the economy doesn’t tank. The president’s team has also made sure that areas of the country where his base is strong are experiencing greater job growth than in Democratic Party strongholds.

In addition, Trump and his minions are hard at work eroding the foundations of a democratic society -- demonizing the media, working to suppress voter turnout, chipping away at the barriers between church and state, and packing the courts with ideologues who support their agenda. The vast majority of the groups mobilizing to defeat Trump in 2020 are working with traditional tools to effect political change. Having learned from past masters of populism like Orban and Erdogan, Team Trump is instead busy changing the playing field.

That’s what makes the current political moment different. The pendulum theory of political change only applies if the major electoral actors play by the same rules. The right-wing populists have, however, been busy transforming the rules of the game so that they can stay in power as long as possible, while using the levers of the state to enrich themselves and their cronies. Putin has ruled Russia for two decades. Erdogan has held onto power for 16 years. Orban is closing in on a decade in office. Even in an undemocratic country like China, Xi Jinping has altered the collective rules of succession to ensure that he will remain leader for life.

One possible response to right-wing populism would, of course, be to ramp up left-wing populism.This was a winning strategy in 2015 for the Greek political party Syriza, which has been in charge of that country for four years now. It also worked for Evo Morales, who has captained Bolivia for more than a dozen years. And, of course, Bernie Sanders came close to being the Democratic Party’s standard bearer in the 2016 election while promoting his version of left-wing populism, which capitalizes on an essential political reality: passion often moves people more effectively than policy.

But it’s hard to see left-wing populism as a long-term answer to the New Right. It either fails electorally, as Jean-Luc Melenchon, the standard bearer for the movement France Unbowed, discovered in that country’s last presidential election; or it faces the kind of “economic realities” that forced Syriza to accommodate the austerity demands of European bureaucrats and banks; or, as Morales has demonstrated in Bolivia, it ends up presiding over the same erosion of democratic practices as its right-wing counterparts.

Yes, the nuts-and-bolts organizing of groups like Indivisible is indispensable. Yes, the passion of left-wing populists is essential. But such politicking and the mirror-image populism that sometimes goes with it are mere life preservers. They may keep us afloat, but they won’t rescue us. The New Right requires a far more original kind of response.

After all, the forces that gave rise to this tidal wave of right-wing populism remain in place: widening economic inequality, surging migrant flows, ballooning corruption scandals. Parties of the center remain discredited, and liberals have not come up with convincing alternatives to the policies and institutions of globalization they created. Trying to nudge the political pendulum out of the emergency zone is a necessary but ultimately insufficient approach. It’s the equivalent of expecting that a conventional fix like a gasoline tax will stop climate change. Environmentalists understand that unprecedented change requires an unprecedented response. To deal with the threat of political climate change, a similarly international, broad-based, and fundamentally new approach is called for.

So don’t wait for the pendulum to swing. Don’t put your faith in the guardrails. It’s not time for a manifesto or a 10-point plan. It’s time for a movement to counteract Bannon’s Movement, a global coalition that joins people and politicians in a united, international effort to respond to the true global problems -- climate change, endless war, and economic inequality -- that threaten to overwhelm us all. Absent such a movement, the rising tide of populism will sink all boats, life preservers and all.

John Feffer, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of the dystopian novel Splinterlands and the director of Foreign Policy In Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies. His latest novel is Frostlands, a Dispatch Books original and book two of his Splinterlands series.

Europe, where right-wing populist movements have begun to successfully oppose gestures toward dealing with climate change, gaining both attention and votes in the process. In Poland, for instance, just such a party led by President Andrzej Duda has come to power and the promotion of coal production has become the order of the day.

Spanish Socialist PM Pedro Sánchez Wins Election as Far-Right Vox Party Makes Gains

ActRight’s Darian Rafie

Calls for Probe Into White Supremacy and Domestic Terrorism After Arrest for Arson Attacks on Black Churches

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/04/11/calls-probe-white-supremacy-and-domestic-terrorism-after-arrest-arson-attacks-black

Civil rights advocates on Thursday called for a serious examination of racist hate crimes and domestic terrorism in the wake of arson attacks on three black churches in Louisiana.

Authorities announced that they had arrested Holden Matthews, a 21-year-old suspect accused of setting fire to three historically black churches in southern Louisiana over the course of 10 days. Matthews, who is white and the son of the deputy sheriff of St. Landry Parish, was charged with three counts of arson.

The NAACP argued that the church burnings, which are reminiscent of several similar incidents which took place throughout the South in the civil rights era, should be investigated as a racist hate crime.

"This is the same domestic terrorism that has been the hammer and chisel used to chip away at the humanity of Black Americans and the suppression of our political power," the group said in a statement.

The group noted that crimes linked to white supremacy have been on the rise since President Donald Trump took office and called on the federal government to lead in the fight against domestic terror attacks:

Since Trump has taken office, we've seen a rise in white supremacy and hate crimes—so much so that we issued letters to push both the Judiciary and Homeland Security committees of the House of Representatives to hold hearings for the resurgence of hate and raced based crimes that are overcoming the nation. Change must come from the top and we will continue to push Congress for additional hearings and concrete next steps to thwart acts of terrorism against communities of color.

Local officials in Louisiana noted publicly that Matthews had beeninterested in "black metal" music, which has beenlinked to white supremacist groups which burned churches in Norway in the 1990s. As Daily Beast reported:

A Facebook page that appeared to belong to Matthews showed he was active in pagan and black metal pages, and that he commented on two memes about far-right former neo-Nazi metal musician Varg Vikernes, who served 15 years in prison for killing a fellow metal musician and burning churches in Norway.

Some on social media cautioned the news media not to suggest that the suspect was simply influenced by an anti-religion philosophy, noting that a potential connection to racism should be investigated seriously.

...twts

twt no lx

So here’s a thing. The cop’s son who is currently under arrest for burning down black churches is into the neo-pagan Viking/Death Metal scene. People are try to angle this as “he wasn’t racist, he was demonic and anti-Christian!” DON’T LET THEM

...

white supremacist faux-Vikings don’t want, like, socialized healthcare or a 100% literacy rate, like Scandinavian countries currently have, they want to rape and pillage and do violence against “impure” people, like the Vikings of their imagination. It’s racist cosplay.

...

Those churches were not burned down because they are churches. They were burned down because they are black churches.

Megan Romer

@meganromer

Christians are not a targeted minority in the US. Black folks are. 3/3 is not a coincidence here or anywhere.

...

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https://thinkprogress.org/europe-bans-one-of-americas-most-prominent-white-supremacists-34b34726f623/

no lx twt

Europe bans one of America’s most prominent white supremacists

Jared Taylor claims he can no longer travel through the continent.

CASEY MICHEL

MAR 31, 2019, 10:06 AM

American white supremacist Jared Taylor says that he can no longer travel throughout Europe. CREDIT : YOUTUBE

AMERICAN WHITE SUPREMACIST JARED TAYLOR SAYS THAT HE CAN NO LONGER TRAVEL THROUGHOUT EUROPE. CREDIT : YOUTUBE

Jared Taylor, one of the most prominent white supremacists in the U.S., claimed on his website on Friday that he’d been “banned from Europe” until 2021.

The ban came as Taylor attempted to transfer in Switzerland for a flight to Finland. According to Taylor, Swiss police informed him that Polish authorities had barred Taylor from traveling through the Schengen Zone, a 26-country area of Europe allowing visa-free travel.

“I will spend the night at the airport, and tomorrow I will be deported,” Taylor wrote. “I am free to walk around the terminal, I can make phone calls and use the internet, and I have a meal voucher that is supposed to last me for the next 12 hours. The officer kept my passport, though, and won’t give it back to me until I board the flight home.”[twt]

Jason Wilson

@jason_a_w

Jared Taylor of American Renaissance says he has been banned from Europe until 2021, seemingly at the instigation of Poland, where he has given talks to nationalist groups (via @FFRAFAction)

7:46 AM - Mar 30, 2019

17 people are talking about this

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Taylor had been planning on speaking atwhite supremacist conferences in Scandinavia, including one on Saturday in Stockholm that featured other well-known fascists like Mark Collett and Greg Johnson.

Anti-Fascism & Far Right

@FFRAFAction

??MINI-THREAD??

Further evidence of transnational organising on extreme right.

Today in Stockholm Sweden there is an international alt-right/Identitarian conference - Scandza Forum.

This is now an annual event. It was held in Oslo in 2017 & Stockholm last year

4:01 AM - Mar 30, 2019

It’s unclear why Polish authorities issued a blanket ban against Taylor. Taylor attributed the ban to a 2018 trip to the country, where he gave multiple television interviews. During that trip, Taylor said that Polish police said he was “spreading a totalitarian ideology.”

Taylor is best-known for cloaking his white supremacy behind a facade of so-called “race realism,” which claims that intellectual differences between races are inherent. He gained prominence in 2016, when Richard Spencer — one of the most well-known faces of the so-called “alt-right” movement that backed then-candidate Donald Trump — cited Taylor as his mentor.

As it is, Taylor is the latest white supremacist prohibited from traveling to certain other countries to spread his ideology. Spencer has likewise been banned from Europe, also at the request of Polish authorities. Milo Yiannopoulos, who has worked closely with white supremacists in the past, was also recently banned from Australia, and Lauren Southern, who claims she’s not a white supremacist, has been banned from traveling to the U.K..

The move to bar Taylor — and having European countries enforce their borders against unwanted individuals — sent other white supremacists into fits. One, Hunter Wallace, said the “moral rot of Europe can’t possibly get much deeper,” a take echoed by Scott Greer, who wrote for Richard Spencer’s white supremacist journal. Nicholas Fuentes, who attended the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, described it as a “stab in the back.”

The ban also comes alongside increased scrutiny about trans-national white supremacy, much of which emanates from the U.S. Taylor has long served as one of the most well-traveled mouthpieces, having toured North America, Europe, and Russia to push his brand of hatred. The ban also comes less than a month after a white supremacist shooter killed 50 Muslims in a New Zealand mosque, the most violent act of white supremacist terror in years.

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2 new docs

https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/insightful-new-documentary-the-brink-lays-bare-the-banality-of-steve-bannons-evil/

...?

At a point early in Alison Klayman’s insightful new documentary, “The Brink,” Steve Bannon gushes over the architectural and organizational planning behind the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where 50,000 Jews were exterminated. His emphasis on the planning and details are reflective of what Hannah Arendt termed “the banality of evil,” which could easily be the subtitle of the new film hitting theaters on Friday.

It’s a fly-on-the-wall account of Bannon’s daily life and peripatetic schedule from October 2017—mere weeks after he was fired by Donald Trump—through the November midterm elections. At first glance, we get what we might expect: the shuffling, unkempt figure familiar from news footage. What we don’t expect is the sheer mediocrity of his intellect. Sometimes amusing, sometimes irascible, when unchallenged, Bannon speaks with full-throated brio and a firm grasp of anecdotes and figures (often made up). But the moment he is met with pushback, he obviously and not very credibly resorts to evasion. Still, for someone who was often called Trump’s brain, a thin base of knowledge and a loose grasp of facts might be expected.

“I’ve spent a lot of time listening to him and watching him. He is quite fast to give a combative response, but I think his tactics are often to change the conversation, to distort facts, to lie, to make a joke,” Klayman said in an interview with Truthdig. Klayman was a 2012 Sundance Jury Prize winner for “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry,” which focused on the world-famous Chinese dissident artist. For “The Brink,” she shot most of the film single-handedly, alone in the room with Bannon and his alt-right peers.

Oddly insecure in various scenes, Bannon worries about people calling him Jabba the Hutt, or about the press noting his lavish hotel stays while doing what he calls “the Lord’s work.”He is surprisingly unctuous with a journalist after a confrontational interview in Venice, where another documentary about him—Errol Morris’ “American Dharma”—was premiering at the city’s celebrated film festival. “Even after Paul Lewis at ‘The Guardian’ goes after him really hard in the interview, he’s going to try to keep everything on this keel of ‘that was fun, right?’ I think he’s fairly easy to win over.”

In “The Brink,” Bannon’s big professional push is two-pronged. First, he’s focused on establishing his 501(c)4, COAR (Citizens of the American Republic), an organization that aims to boost Republican turnout despite Bannon having no formal ties with the party. Second, he’s founding The Movement with the goal of unifying nationalist, mostly racist, organizations across Europe. At an international convention scheduled for January (that didn’t end up taking place), participants were to hammer out a plan for the EU parliamentary election in May that would tip the whole continent to the right.

One of the movie’s most memorable scenes has Bannon meeting in a hotel room with alt-right leaders from throughout the continent. Present are Flemish Parliament member Filip Dewinter, an overt admirer of the SS, along with Sweden’s Kent Ekeroth of the Swedish Democrats, a party rooted in white nationalism, and Italy’s deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, of the right-wing populist group Brothers of Italy. They do little more than express frustration, generally holding their tongues in the presence of Klayman’s camera. Then, in later encounters, Bannon denies meeting some of them, brushing questions off with a Trumpian answer: “We were at the same dinner event one time, but I don’t know him.”

“What he’s trying to say is he’s a messenger and he’s trying to shape the narrative according to his ideology,” Klayman said. “It’s part of a legitimization process to make hateful ideas into something that sound more practical and economical.”

Klayman and Bannon bicker in the movie over whether using George Soros’ name in speeches is a dog whistle to anti-Semites. But alt-right commentator (and Bannon’s former Breitbart colleague)Ben Shapiro contends that Bannon isn’t anti-Semitic, telling Slate, “I think Steve’s a very, very power-hungry dude who’s willing to use anybody and anything in order to get ahead. And that includes making common cause with the racist, anti-Semitic alt-right.”

“I don’t think there’s a distinction,” Klayman said, noting that Bannon is considered one of the main architects of Trump’s anti-Muslim travel ban. “I would include pandering to racists in my personal definition of racism. He told me, ‘I don’t believe in structural racism.’ If he’s talking about blacks and Hispanics in the inner city as so horrible and [about] black crime, if he doesn’t think there’s anything structurally that creates that experience, the logical conclusion is that there’s something not right about them. There are many things that if you take what he says and it sounds safe and logical, you really end up in anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, xenophobic places.”

Producer Marie Therese Guirgis worked as Bannon’s assistant for three years at Wellspring Media, a film distribution company. Once she got permission from him to make a movie, she turned to Klayman, with whom she had worked on the 2018 documentary, “On Her Shoulders.”

“I had never seen him as racist, as anti-Semitic, misogynist,” Guirgis said. “But the film shows what kind of a person he is. The work he is doing is promoting racism. The people he’s working with in Europe, some of them are actual neo-Nazis.”

As Klayman follows Bannon’s crusade to unite the right, a funny thing happens on the way to the revolution—the midterms. Since the crushing defeat of Republicans in the House of Representatives, many alt-right European leaders have spurned The Movement, funding for which Bannon says comes from anonymous European donors.

“I don’t even know if The Movement has a bank account and is a real entity. It seems like a bust,” Klayman said. “The question is, who is funding those projects and who is funding COAR, his (c)4?” Klayman noted that expenditures on European elections must, by law, come from European donors. “He claims he has connections to a lot of nationalists, Dubai, Qatar, [exiled Chinese billionaire] Miles Kwok, a lot of people. And my hope is that investigative reporters follow the money when they see this movie.”

In Rome last weekend to condemn a tentative economic agreement with China, Bannon told Yahoo.com that, following the findings of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, Trump would “come off the chains,” and that he is “going to go full animal” on his political opponents. He also suggested that Hillary Clinton would be the likely Democratic candidate in 2020, Brexit will end in a no-deal solution, and warned of Chinese hegemony.

“Everything he puts out into the universe has an impact,” says Klayman, who remains concerned about an empowered Bannon. “The fact is, these (alt-right) parties may still have success in the May 2019 elections that he’ll take credit for. And I think that’s a scary prospect.”

---

https://www.desmog.co.uk/2019/03/27/what-rise-right-wing-populism-europe-means-climate-science-denial

Across Europe, right-wing populist parties are picking up votes. In some countries, once-fringe parties have gained enough support to propel them into the halls of national power. But, for most, an easier target has been the European Parliament. And that could matter for climate change.

The UK Independence Party is a case in point. The group, once led by Nigel Farage, has seven MEPs, in contrast to zero MPs in the UK parliament. But it is not alone in eyeing Brussels as a potential foothold on the path to power.

In the 2014 elections, right-wing populist parties took almost 15 percent of the European parliament’s 751 seats. This is predicted to increase in the 2019 elections, scheduled for the end of May. Guy Verhofstadt, leader of the parliament’s liberal alliance, recently warned that the shake-up could usher in a five-year populist “nightmare”.

This means that parties such as France’s National Rally (known as Front National until 2018, when its leader Marine Le Pen decided on arebrand), the Netherlands’ Party For Freedom, and the Danish People’s Party are suddenly a force to be reckoned with.

“As unprecedented popular discontent obstructs governments in shaping climate policy, the question is whether the EU will be able to maintain its progressive role after the next elections,” write Stella Schaller and Alexander Carius, from the Berlin think-tank Adelphi, in a recent report on rightwing populism and its impact on climate policies.

Over the last two decades, the EU has been a fairly consistent voice in calling for climate action, even if its targets haven’t always matched the urgency of the task. Its goal of cutting emissions by 40 percent by 2030 is deemed “insufficient” by Climate Action Tracker, meaning that if all governments adopted similarly ambitious targets, the planet would warm by up to 3C.

The EU’s climate chief, Miguel Arias Cañete, has already said that the EU is in a position to raise its target and increase its ambition, a move that would have to be approved by the European Council.

But observers are worried that an uptick in populist MEPs could hinder progress, given that their parties regularly adopt positions denying the science of climate change and opposing renewable energy.

The populists

“Populism” is a somewhat difficult term to define; even harder is describing its relationship to attitudes on climate change.

Both left- and right-wing parties can be populist in nature, yet right-wing parties are more likely to adopt climate sceptic positions. And while they tend to be antagonistic towards attempts to implement climate change policies, many take a decidedly pro-environment attitude to other issues. There are even a smattering of populist parties that support climate action in some form.

“I don't think populism in itself is a bad thing, if it means you're in tune with what citizens want. In actual fact, sometimes it's just about social justice and representing ordinary individuals. [It’s right-wing populism that] is a growing concern, certainly within the EU,” says Lynn Boylan, Sinn Féin MEP for Dublin, Ireland.

Yet when parties do adopt anti-climate positions, they tend to do so based on four common reasons, according to the recent Adelphi report: Reducing emissions is seen among these populist factions as expensive, unjust, harmful to the environment, or simply not worthwhile.

Rather than forming a united front, populist parties are split between the various parliamentary groupings. Fidesz, Hungary’s governing party, is the only right-wing populist party to sit in the more centrist European People’s Party (of which Angela Merkel’s CDU party is also a member). Greece’s Golden Dawn is not affiliated to a parliamentary grouping, and the remainder of the major parties are split between the European Conservatives and Reformists, Europe of Freedom and Direct Democracy, and the Europe of Nations and Freedom Group.

The groups are also divided by their varied approaches to climate change. While the authoritarian attitude of Hungary’s Fidesz has raised concerns – Viktor Orban, the party’s leader, was famously greeted by European commision head Jean-Claude Juncker with the phrase “Hello, dictator” – it has, at least, publicly supported international climate action. Similarly, Latvia’s National Alliance has argued for multilateral climate action and for investing in clean energy.

Both Fidesz and the National Alliance have been in government for a fairly long time. According to the Adelphi report, this could be one reason for their moderate stances on climate change. Another is the fact that both countries emit less than the EU average, already relying on hydro and nuclear in their energy mixes, and therefore have less to lose by the bloc turning its back on coal.

These pro-climate positions are far from the norm, however, among Europe’s populists. The majority of the parties either outright deny the science on climate change, or else ignore the issue. TheAlternative for Germany partyand the UKIndependence Party are both openly sceptical about the proven connection between carbon dioxide emissions and rising temperatures.

Some parties have a more mixed approach, combining anti-climate sentiment with support for renewable energy. Rather than arguing for these technologies on the grounds that they’ll reduce emissions, they highlight other benefits, including the potential for job opportunities and energy independence. France’s National Rally is a prime example, rejecting the UN’s climate body as a “communist project” while also supporting the development of domestic renewables.

Despite the hostility towards climate change, many right-wing populist parties strongly support environmental policies more generally, which more easily tie into far-right narratives on nationalism, says Bernhard Forchtner, a lecturer in media and communication at the University of Leicester, who specialises in environmental communication by far-right populists.

“If it’s about the protection of the countryside, for example, or biodiversity, this is clearly something to do with the national space. Take the English countryside: we know what it has to look like, we expect it to be populated by these plants and animals, and because of globalisation, because of worldwide trade, species from the outside invade, so to speak, this space. Then there’s a problem,” he says, citing the British dislike for grey squirrels, which almost wiped out red squirrels after being introduced in the 1870s.

Climate change, however, ties in with the populist notion that there is a “global elite telling us what to do,” says Forchtner. “If you frame what’s happening around climate policies in that way, then it can be very easily connected to the populist drama where there are the good people, the evil and corrupt elite, and the far-right actors, who know what the people want.”

Impacts

Support for right-wing populist parties has been surging across Europe. In 1979, these groups had no seats in the European Parliament. After the May elections, they are predicted to make up almost 20 percent of the European Parliament. Many parties have also made headway at the level of national politics, gaining seats and, in some cases, control over government.

The Adelphi report highlights several ways in which populist parties could disrupt progress at the EU level, including hijacking the more ambitious policy proposals. “This not only due to the climate-sceptic attitude itself, but the likely shift of democratic parties’ positions in the fight for votes,” write the authors.

Right-wing populists may also push centre parties into adopting more extreme positions in the search for votes, both at the EU and at the national level, which could threaten climate policy.

Not that this is a strategy that always brings votes flooding over to the mainstream parties. According to Adelphi’s report, shifts in Germany that catered to nationalist preferences in an attempt to attract support from potentially populist voters did “not necessarily result in rising electoral support.”

For Boylan, it’s these centre parties that pose the biggest threat to climate action. “Certainly within the European Parliament, [right-wing populism is] not a big concern in terms of its impact on climate policies,” she says.

“For me, the biggest concern is that those in the centre — particularly in the EPP group or also Alde —though they're not denying climate change exists, they're the ones that are actually hampering ambition and stopping us going where we should be going. The right-wing populists are not really having any impact at all because they're smaller in numbers, though that may change in the future parliament.”

For Molly Scott Cato, a Green Party MEP in the South West, the impact of these parties is already evident in the EU today.

She gives an example on the “taxonomy file”, “which is part of the sustainable finance agenda. So essentially that’s defining what could be a sustainable investment,” Cato said. The climate-related vote brought some unusual suspects into the room, she said. “You could see clearly that people were voting – UKIP MEPs, MEPs from the Front National – that don’t normally vote. So it seems fairly clear the lobby had decided they needed them in the room, and consequently we lost some of those votes by one or two votes.”

Yet, despite the successes of right-wing populists, analysts and politicians are less concerned than one might think about the potential impact on climate action.

“Certainly if they increase their numbers, we will find it harder to take the action we need to on [the Paris Agreement]. I‘m not freaking out about the numbers they might get because, to be honest, there’s a lot of media chat about that and I don’t think we should lose our nerve over it at all,” says Cato.

“It would be a foolish thing to do, to give into fascism, wouldn’t it? Their politics is based on fear and they try to make us afraid, and our job is to be brave, and not be afraid.”

Even among those who are more alert to the potential threat of rising populist numbers, levels of concern about the impact on climate policy are low. The EU’s generally pro-climate attitude, the success of green candidates, and the fact that these parties are still primarily concerned with immigration are all seen as buffers against populist damage.

“The negative vote on climate policy still seems to be quite small in the European Parliament. So I think on this particular issue they would have to get at least above a third of the votes in the European Parliament to really make a big dent. This is not the primary concern for populist parties in Europe. Their main thing is immigration,” says Matthew Lockwood, senior lecturer in energy policy at the University of Sussex, who has examined the link between right-wing populism and climate change..

“It’s also true that, if you look at the European elections, green parties are doing very well. This is the case, for example, in Sweden and in Austria. In some cases, they’re doing better than right-wing parties. When green parties get into governing coalitions, they will tend to go for the environment, energy, climate ministry as a priority,” having a counterbalancing effect to the populists.

What can be done about it?

Despite the rising volume of populist voices in the public conversation – no one can deny the attention lavished upon them in the age of the Trump administration and in the debates leading up to the UK’s Brexit vote – very little research has been done on these parties and their impact on the climate debate.

This lack of information could be hindering efforts to stem the populist tide by politicians and campaigners who are keen to see more ambitious climate change policies implemented across the EU, says Forchtner. To successfully combat populist views, first it is necessary to understand them, he argues, particularly given the nuances and variations that exist between countries.

“What I would like to see is more research that looks at how many of these actors are still outright climate sceptics and how many just use this populist discourse strategy to position themselves with the common man against the global elites,” says Forchtner.

“There’s an ethical issue: If we write something about them, if we say something about other people, I think we should at the starting point take seriously what the other person says. There’s a strategic element to being specific. If I enter into an argument with someone who’s a climate sceptic and I start by saying, ‘You deny climate change,’ and the other person says, ‘I’m not denying it,’ then I’ve already kind of lost the argument.”

As well as further research, politicians and climate-friendly voters can also take practical actions to counter populist rhetoric, says Lockwood, including ensuring that climate policies are rolled out in a progressive manner that doesn’t play into the hands of the far right.

“One way might be to make sure everyone has access to retraining, higher education. The other is, those people have suffered from stagnant wages, falling wages, actually, in recent years and a squeeze on income. Climate policies can add to energy costs, and so what we need to do is think of other ways of funding climate policies than putting it on consumer bills, which is actually very regressive anyway.”

He points to the Gilet Jaunes protests in France as an example of what can happen when governments don’t take that into account. “The roots of this nationalist authoritarian populist backlash are in people who have been excluded from big social changes in the economy, people who used to work in manual jobs which have now been lost to technical change and globalisation. Their prospects, and their prospects for their children, are not good. They feel they’ve been shut out by the mainstream parties.”

With small numbers and a lack of unity on both policies and party issues, right-wing populists are not yet the threat that they are sometimes made out to be. But this relative powerlessness shouldn’t be counted on as their voices get louder and citizens become increasingly disaffected with mainstream politics.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/trump-linked-christian-fundamentalists-are-pouring-dark-money-into-europe-and-boosting-the-far-right/

Claire Provostand Mary Fitzgerald

According to a new analysis released by openDemocracy, Christian-right fundamentalists linked to the Trump administration and Steve Bannon are among a dozen American groups that have poured at least $50 million of dark money into Europe over the last decade.

[graf]

Between them, these groups have backed armies of ultra-conservative lawyers and political activists, as well as so-called family values campaigns against LGBTQ rights, sex education and abortion—and a number appear to have increasing links with Europe’s far right.

They are spending money on a scale “not previously imagined,” according to lawmakers and human rights advocates, who have called openDemocracy’s findings “shocking.”

Among the biggest spenders is a group whose chief counsel is also Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Jay Sekulow. Another organization has collaborated with a controversial Rome-based institute backed by Steve Bannon.

None of these American groups discloses who its donors are—though at least two have links to famous conservative billionaires, such as the Koch brothers (who helped bankroll the Tea Party movement) and the family of Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos.

‘Nobody should be in any doubt as to the insidious nature of these fundamentalist groups’

The increasing ties between some of these Christian conservative groups and the European far right will be on display this weekend at a summit of the World Congress of Families (WCF): a network of American, Russian and other ultra-conservative activists.

Right-wing politicians and their supporters from across Europe are expected to attend the event in Verona, Italy—including the Italian deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, who has described the WCF as a showcase for “the Europe that we like.”

A cross-party group of more than 40 members of the European Parliament (MEPs) has called on the EU’s transparency tsar Frans Timmermans to look into the influence of “U.S. Christian fundamentalists… with the greatest urgency” ahead of May’s European Parliament elections.

In a letter reacting to openDemocracy’s findings, and copied to the presidents of the European Council, European Commission and European Parliament, the MEPs have demanded action to protect European democracy “against nefarious outside influences.”

Scottish National Party MEP Alyn Smith, who sits on the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee and signed the letter, said on Wednesday: “This investigation by openDemocracy is extremely timely and shines a light on a major challenge facing democracy in Europe.”

OpenDemocracy’s findings “are highly alarming, and nobody should be in any doubt as to the insidious nature of these fundamentalist groups,” he continued. “No group of any kind should be able to use dark money to distort debate and to subvert democracy in Europe, least of all groups such as these whose causes are deeply regressive.”

‘The Europe we like’

OpenDemocracy has examined a decade of U.S. Christian organizations’ financial accounts and found that several of them appear to have significantly increased their spending in Europe over the past five years.

These findings come as far-right parties aim for big wins in the upcoming European Parliament elections in May, and show how large amounts of foreign money have supported the spread of their “traditional values” messages.

OpenDemocracy has reviewed hundreds of pages of financial filings for a dozen religious conservative groups that are registered as tax-exempt non-profit organizations, and thus are required to disclose some information about their foreign spending.

Some of these groups have been previously accused of supporting campaigns to criminalize homosexuality in Africa, “draconian” anti-abortion laws in Latin America and controversial projects to encourage gay people in the United States to “leave homosexuality.”

But the extent of their European activity has—until now—received little scrutiny. The new investigation reveals that some of these groups have:

Sent teams of lobbyists to Brussels to influence EU officials
Challenged laws against discrimination and hate speech in European courts
Supported campaigns against LGBTQ rights in the Czech Republic and Romania
Funded a network of seemingly grassroots anti-abortion campaigns in Italy and Spain
Deployed ambulance-chasing evangelists after tragedies such as the Grenfell Tower fire, and in the wake of terrorist attacks ???

Five of the conservative groups have previously been listed as partners of the World Congress of Families (WCF) network, which is meeting in Verona this week.

It’s not just European politicians who are concerned about them: These groups are controversial in America too. The WCF itself has been described as an “anti-LGBT hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which monitors extremist movements and tracks this network’s increasing connections with the far right.

The SPLC explains that “viewing homosexuality as unbiblical or simply opposing same-sex marriage” is not enough to be categorized as a “hate group.” Groups on this list go further—claiming that homosexuality is dangerous, linked to pedophilia, and should be criminalized, disseminating “disparaging ‘facts’ about LGBT people that are simply untrue.”

This is, says SPLC, “no different to how white supremacists and nativist extremists propagate lies about black people and immigrants to make these communities seem like a danger to society.”

Joseph Grabowski, a WCF spokesperson, told openDemocracy: “We dispute entirely the premise [of the ‘hate group’ designation]… It’s an unfortunate slight for the countless Americans and the people around the world who hold the same views as we do on marriage, the nature of family and the right to life, that are part of the fabric of Christianity and also other traditional points of view,” he said.

The WCF is a project of the International Organization for the Family and the Illinois-based Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society, whose directors include an:{ultra-conservative Spanish activist linked to the leader of the far-right Vox party.}:

Other directors include a close associate of a Russian oligarch who sponsored a 2014 “secret meeting” in Vienna with key French and Austrian far-right leaders—and an Italian politician facing corruption charges in his country.

Over the last decade, the WCF has hosted at least seven major meetings in Europe, attended by hundreds of religious right activists and a growing list of far-right politicians. Its 2017 meeting in Budapest was opened by Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán.

Among the conveners of this week’s event in Verona is an Italian anti-abortion group linked to the neo-fascist Forza Nuova party, whose leader is also expected to attend the WCF.

Trump, the far-right and the Christian ‘legal army’

Two of the Trump-linked groups examined by openDemocracy are Christian-right legal powerhouses:Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) and the American Center for Law and Justice. Together, they have spent more than $20 million in Europe since 2008.

They don’t disclose their funders, but journalists have previously traced at least $1 million in grants to ADF from a foundation controlled by the billionaire family of Betsy DeVos, Trump’s education secretary, and Erik Prince, founder of the Blackwater mercenary firm.

ADF was co-founded by Alan Sears, a Christian-right leader who co-authored a book against “the homosexual agenda.” It is increasingly active internationally, including in Latin America. It supported a 2016 law in Belize making gay sex punishable with 10 years in jail.

This group tripled its annual spending in Europe between 2012 and 2016, to more than $2.6 million a year. It now has offices in Belgium, France, Austria, Switzerland and the UK, and spends hundreds of thousands of euros lobbying EU officials, according to separate transparency data.

Among its European projects, the group supported the defense of a notorious German activist who compared abortion to the Holocaust and accused specific doctors of murder.

This year, ADF International also co-hosted an event with the French group La Manif Pour Tous, which has been previously been linked to the far-right party Front National.

Ahead of the last European Parliament elections in 2014, La Manif Pour Tous launched a “Europe for Family” campaign that got 230 French candidates to sign a pledge opposing marriage equality, trans rights and sex education.

Speaking to openDemocracy, a spokesperson for ADF International said they are “exclusively privately funded by people from all over the world, who care about human rights” and that their activities include “advocating for freedom of speech in Europe.”

Asked for more detail about whom the group gives its money to, they said: “Since our advocacy involves court cases in countries where people are harassed, stigmatized, and even killed because of their religious convictions, it is our general policy not to disclose any recipients of funding in order to protect their personal safety and livelihoods.”

The second of the two Trump-linked groups, the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ),also operates through the courts. It was founded in 1990 by American televangelist Pat Robertson to oppose the American Civil Liberties Union.

The group’s current chief counsel is Jay Sekulow, a conservative talk-show host who has been described as “the top lawyer” on Donald Trump’s legal team in the Mueller inquiry.

This group has had an office in Strasbourg, France—home of the European Court of Human Rights—for more than 20 years, from where it has intervened in numerous caseson issues including same-sex marriage, abortion rights and artificial insemination.

The director of its Strasbourg outfit has also represented the Holy See at the Council of Europe, while its Moscow center has praised Putin’s laws banning “gay propaganda.”

Trump, Franklin Graham and U.S.-sanctioned Kremlin officials

The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association is another major spender. It is led by the famous evangelical preacher’s son, Franklin Graham, who said Satan is the architect of same-sex marriage and described Islam as an “evil and very wicked religion.”

Franklin Graham, who has supported Trump as someone who “defends the faith,” was in Russia earlier this month meeting with Kremlin officials under U.S. sanctions, on a trip that he said was personally signed off on by Vice President Michael Pence.

In 2018, his group organized festivals in England and Scotland amid protests from Muslim and LGBT rights groups. It also supports “rapid response chaplains” that target crises and have been accused of “chasing ambulances” and “exploiting tragedy.”

Its filings disclose more than $23 million spent in Europe through two different U.S. entities between 2008 and 2014—making it the largest spender in this region, of the American groups analyzed by openDemocracy.

However, 2014 is the latest year for which openDemocracy was able to find public documents for this group, which has offices in the UK, Germany, France and Spain, so the true extent of its influence in the region is not yet known.

Training Europeans, on the ‘front lines of the Culture War’

A number of groups spending smaller amounts of money appear to have increased their activities in Europe in recent years.

The Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, which combines a conservative Christian worldview with free-market economics, has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Koch family foundations.

This group spent more than $1.7 million in Europe since 2008, with its spending in the region rising in recent years (from around $166,000 in 2008 to almost $240,000 in 2017).

In Italy, it has collaborated with the Dignitatis Humanae Institute—of which Steve Bannon is a trustee—that has locally controversial plans to use a monastery outside Rome as a “gladiator school for culture warriors.”

Also on the list is the U.S. branch of the Tradition, Family and Property (TFP), an ultra-conservative transnational Catholic movement that says it’s “on the front lines of the Culture War, peacefully defending the values of tradition, family and private ownership.”

This group said it spent about $100,000 in Europe since 2010. Its filings don’t detail where this money went, but the TFP has been linked to a controversial think tank in Poland that has helped develop policies for far-right Law and Justice (PiS) politicians.

A ‘wake-up call’ to prevent ‘foreign interference’

Under U.S. law, the groups analyzed by openDemocracy are required to publicly disclose some information about their foreign spending, but not the names of their overseas recipients, details of what activities they fund—or the identities of their own funders.

The $50 million figure drawn from openDemocracy’s analysis is also a likely underestimation of the resources that U.S. conservatives have channeled into Europe in recent years.

Data for 2018 is not yet available; meanwhile, there are some important loopholes. Religious organizations registered as churches, for example, don’t need to file the same disclosures.

A number of other U.S. Christian conservative groups appear to be spending money in Europe, but do not disclose this on their U.S. filings—including the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society, which has coordinated the WCF network.

Reacting to openDemocracy’s findings, German Green MEP Terry Reintke, who sits on equality-related committees at the European Parliament, said: “This extreme extent of financial support flooding the EU is shocking—especially with the European elections ahead of us.”

The SNP MEP Alyn Smith has said he and his fellow parliamentarians who signed Wednesday’s letter have called for the mobilization of “EU institutions and member states in preventing malign actors such as those identified in the investigation from interfering in the European Parliament elections in May—and beyond.”

Caroline Hickson, regional director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation’s European Network, said: “The scale of this meddling by U.S. extremists is shocking, but sadly no surprise to us. Every day European societies face concerted attacks by outside forces seeking to impose reproductive coercion… This is utterly at odds with the European values of democracy and human rights.”

“This is dark money coming into Europe to threaten human rights, and we’re not doing anything about it,” warned Neil Datta, secretary of the European Parliamentary Forum on Population and Development, describing the amounts of money involved as “staggering.”

“It took the Christian right 30 years to get to where they are now in the White House,” he said. “We knew a similar effort was happening in Europe, but this should be a wake-up call that this is happening even faster and on a grander scale than many experts could have ever imagined.”

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orban

The elections of illiberal leaders in Italy, Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe are clear danger signs. Viktor Orban’s hand has been strengthened in Hungary by the waning influence of Angela Merkel in Germany and the election of Donald Trump in the U.S.

why the left loses (eur)

https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-july-18-2018/

https://www.propublica.org/article/robert-rundo-denis-nikitin-hooligans-europe-hate-group

no lnx

Robert Rundo, a leader of the violent white supremacist group known as the Rise Above Movement, pounded the man, hitting him with a series of thudding punches — left, right, left — that sent his foe staggering backwards.

But this wasn’t a street brawl captured on video: It was a boxing match — complete with 12-ounce gloves, a referee, and scantily attired ring girls — and it was promoted by a white supremacist fight club in Ukraine. The event was held inside a bunker-like building in Kiev, with fighters competing inside a cage of the sort familiar to mixed martial arts fans in America.

With the skinhead subculture fading, neo-Nazi organizers in Europe have turned to promoting boxing and mixed martial arts bouts with the aim of pulling in new recruits.

About This Partnership

This story is part of an ongoing collaboration between ProPublica and Frontline that includes documentaries scheduled to begin on PBS in August 2018.

Rundo’s fight in Ukraine occurred this spring, as he and two other RAM members toured Europe. In Kiev, Rundo and other RAM members hung out with Denis Nikitin, a burly Russian soccer hooligan who has become one of the most successful fight promoters in ultra-nationalist circles.

On social media the group posted video and photos from the event, which was held in May. Based in Southern California, RAM’s members were involved in political violence last year in Charlottesville and other American cities. The group says it wants to revive the “warrior spirit” of the white male, and its videos of fight-training, weight-lifting and street melees have proven popular on social media.

Before traveling to Ukraine, Rundo and another RAM member, Robert Smithson, visited the German town of Ostritz to compete in a mixed martial tournament at the Shield and Sword festival, a white power convergence held on Hitler’s birthday. Attracting roughly 1,000 fascists from across the continent, the gathering was arranged by Germany’s National Democratic Party, the closest thing the country has to an openly Nazi political party. The mixed martial arts tournament held that weekend, Kampf der Nibelungen, is the largest white power combat sports event in Europe, according to researchers monitoring European extremists.

Observers of the far-right in Europe are concerned about the infiltration of neo-Nazis into the boxing and MMA scenes — and they’re particularly worried about Nikitin.

“He is seen as dangerous by those who monitor the far right” due to his “outright neo-Nazi ideology — preaching racial war and the need to ‘reconquer’ the ‘living space’ of the white man in Europe,” said Pavel Klymenko, a Ukrainian researcher with the FARE Network who tracks soccer hooligans.

According to Klymenko, Nikitin has taught knife-fighting techniques and hand-to-hand combat skills to extremist groups in Russia, Ukraine, Romania, Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom. In recent years he has launched a successful streetwear company called White Rex — one T-shirt design features an iron cross, an emblem used by the Nazis, and the words “YOU MUST MURDER,” while another depicts the logo of the Spanish fascist party, or Falange.

Nikitin has repackaged older white supremacist ideas for a new generation, rebranding them as “nationalist concepts,” said Karim Zidan, an independent journalist who writes on the intersection of sports and politics. “Nikitin is a massive figure in both MMA and football hooliganism. In a way, he’s weaponized both sports for his cause,” Zidan told ProPublica and Frontline.

At the Southern Poverty Law Center, Keegan Hankes, an analyst who follows RAM, said the group’s trip to Europe “signals that they aren’t just hobbyists. It’s gives them credibility” within the U.S. white power movement.

Social media postings show Rundo acquired several new tattoos on RAM’s European excursion, including an “8” on each shoulder (88 is the white supremacist code for “Heil Hitler”) and the White Rex logo (a Viking warrior) on his right shin with the word “fanatic” emblazoned below.

RAM has also begun importing White Rex T-shirts and selling its own garments as a means of funding the group. The Southern California organization operates an online store, Right Brand Clothing, which carries items from Nikitin’s clothing line as well as other brands like Svastone.

Nikitin refused to comment when contacted by ProPublica and Frontline, saying via email, “There will be no contact or information exchange with you. Just sit quietly and see us rise.”

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https://www.alternet.org/donald-trumps-trade-war-masks-darker-agenda-aiding-far-right-europe

djt moron but

there are others with a more sophisticated agenda, however, which may be even more concerning since they seem to see Trump as a useful tool. One of those is former Trump campaign chief and senior adviser Steve Bannon, who has been out of the limelight these last few months. The last we heard Trump was calling him "sloppy Steve," but apparently Bannon hasn't lost his affection for the big guy in spite of that. Frankly, Trump may not have lost his for Bannon either -- as long as someone is willing to kiss his ring he'll invite them back into his circle before long.

Fareed Zakaria interviewed Bannon in Rome recently where he was enthusiastically cheering on the chaos of the recent Italian elections, implying that a new day of economic populism was surging across Europe like a Panzer division on methamphetamines. He was full of the usual contradictions and muddled philosophical compost, but he essentially made the case that right-wing nationalism is the wave of the future, while trying unconvincingly to claim that race, ethnicity and religion have nothing whatsoever to do with it. He sputtered his way through an unconvincing explanation about how Trump's massive tax cuts were the basis of Trump's economic populism:

Europe is about a year ahead of the United States. . . . You see populist-nationalist movements with reform [here]. . . . You could begin to see the elements of Bernie Sanders coupled with the Trump movement that really becomes a dominant political force in American politics.

It's hard to say what's going to happen in America but it's hard to imagine a successful marriage between Sanders' left-wing populism and Trump's right-wing nativism. The xenophobia and racism is a real sticking point.

In Europe there is certainly a rising right-wing movement that Bannon and his allies are closely observing, presumably for tips on how to use Trump to make it happen in America. For instance, Trump's newly confirmed ambassador to Germany, a former right-wing hit man and odious Twitter troll named Richard Grenell, has made one of the worst first impressions of any diplomat in history with this tweet:

There was widespread indignation from across the German political spectrum but Grenell refused to back down, basically telling the German people he was only following orders:

Mind you, he was the only U.S. ambassador to do such a thing. Over the weekend Grenell went even further, giving an interview to Breitbart News in which he said he was “excited” by the rise of far-right parties in Europe and was prepared “to empower other conservatives throughout Europe, other leaders.” Breitbart reported:

Unafraid to name names, Mr Grenell expressed a deep respect and admiration for the young Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz saying, “Look, I think Sebastian Kurz is a rockstar. I’m a big fan.”

Chancellor Kurz, leader of the conservative Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP), formed a coalition with the populist Freedom Party (FPÖ) earlier this year, and has been one of the strongest advocates for securing the European Union’s external border.

Not long after the formation of the coalition, Kurz stood up to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, rejecting the controversial European Union migrant quota system. He was also been [sic] a leading conservative on the topic of counter-Islamisation while Foreign Minister in the previous coalition government, advocating and helping to pass a ban on the full-face Islamic veil.

The German government was not amused. According to Robert Mackay at The Intercept, it "demanded a formal explanation from the United States on Monday of what, exactly, the new U.S. ambassador in Berlin, Richard Grenell, meant when he promised to use his office to help far-right nationalists inspired by Donald Trump take power across Europe." Grenell tweeted that he did not plan to endorse anyone but stood by his claim that Europe, like America, is “experiencing an awakening from the silent majority — those who reject the elites and their bubble. Led by Trump.”

No doubt America's European allies were thrilled to hear that, especially with the neo-fascist rumblings coming from Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and now Slovenian right-wing nationalist Janez Janša.

The trade war is bad enough. White nationalist Trumpers stomping around Europe shooting off their mouths and giving support to far right politicians is making it worse.

In a detail nearly no one will notice, Trump just named a right-wing academic and filmmaker named Michael Pack, who is allied with Bannon, to lead the broadcasting arm of the U.S. government, a $685 million agency that oversees prominent outlets such as the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. What could possibly go wrong there?