The right-populist delusion

Plus links on Europe's deindustrialisation, the US arming Taiwan, how governments are censoring the climate debate and... are chemicals causing gender dysphoria?

I’ve written for UnHerd about the right-populist wave sweeping over Europe. Liberal politicians and pundits are understandably freaking out. Conservatives, on the other hand, can barely contain their excitement. But — “anti-wokeness” aside — what alternative do these parties offer? As it turns out, on a number of issues, they are peculiarly aligned with the mainstream. In terms of economic policy, for example, almost all of them are wedded to the neoliberal orthodoxy embedded in the EU: with few exceptions, their economic agendas revolve around pro-austerity, pro-deregulation, anti-worker and anti-welfare policies. Even more worryingly, as much as these parties love to rail against the “Brussels bureaucrats” and the “globalist elites”, they have virtually all ditched any mention of leaving the EU and/or the euro from their programmes (to the extent that they ever made that claim). Nowadays, right-populists are all euro-reformists who speak of “changing the EU” from within. Meanwhile, on perhaps the most important issue concerning Europe’s future — the war in Ukraine and the bloc’s geopolitical positioning — the parties are deeply divided. Read the rest of the article here.

I also wrote a shorter piece about the New York Times finally admitting what we’ve been saying for a very long time: that Covid deaths were massively overcounted as a result of absurd statistical methods — i.e., classifying as a Covid death any deceased, for whatever reason, who had recently tested positive. As Ngozi Ezike, the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) Director, put it in April 2020: “Technically, even if you died of a clear alternate cause, but you had Covid at the same time, it’s still listed as a Covid death. So, everyone who’s listed as a Covid death doesn’t mean that was the cause of death, but they had Covid at the time of death”. It would later emerge, in one American county, that “clear alternate causes” of death could include anything from injury and poisoning to motorcycle accidents and gunshot wounds. Read the rest of the article here.

And now, for paying subscribers only, here’s a selection of some of the best articles I’ve read this week. The topics include: Europe's deindustrialisation, the US arming Taiwan, how governments are censoring the climate debate and... are chemicals causing gender dysphoria?

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This is from last week but it’s pretty good: Michael Lind on how America has used NATO and the new Cold War to re-vassalise Europe:

It is now clear that the Russian invasion of Ukraine marked the end of one era in world politics and the beginning of a new one. As with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the collapse of détente following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, and the Korean War in 1950, it is too early to predict the outcome of what can only be called Cold War II. One consequence, however, is already clear: the acceleration of the domination of Europe by the United States. … In a prolonged Cold War, then, we shouldn’t be surprised if the European Union plays an increasingly subordinate role to NATO.

On this subject, Politico’s investigation into the deindustrialisation of Germany — and therefore of Europe — is definitely worth a read: