The Revolution of German Farmers | Eva Vlaardingerbroek & Anthony Lee | EP 416

Hello everyone! I'm pleased to announce my new tour for 2024, beginning in early February and running through June. Tammy, and I, an assortment of special guests, are going to visit 51 cities in the US. You can find out more information about this on my website jordanbpeterson.com, as well as access all relevant ticketing information. I'm going to use the tour to walk through some of the ideas I've been working on in my forthcoming book, out November 2024, We Who Wrestle With God. I'm looking forward to this; I'm thrilled to be able to do it again, and I'll be pleased to see all of you again soon. Bye-bye!

You know the deplorables, as Hillary Clinton called them? Those were the people that were out on the street, and I would say that they were everything but deplorables. I take my hat off for you. You know, I know where my food comes from, and I'm very sad that the people in power seem to have either forgotten it or—and this is obviously the stance that I have taken—know exactly where food comes from, but want to be able to control it in such a manner that they then also can exercise control over the general population.

Hello everyone! I have the opportunity today to speak with Ava Vlaaderbrook and Anthony Lee. Ava is a political commentator from the Netherlands. She was integrally involved in the Dutch farmer protest in recent years and has recently been with the German farmers, truckers, dock workers, and railway workers who've basically brought Germany to its knees in the last weeks. Even though you may not have seen much of that in the so-called legacy media circles.

Anyways, I talked to Ava today and to Anthony about just exactly what has been happening in Germany and the Netherlands, and many other European countries as well, with regards to these essentially populist uprisings, similar to say the trucker convoy in Canada. We discussed the scope of that movement, who was involved by group, the aims, the consequences, and the likely outcomes on the German and broader European political front in the upcoming years and beyond.

Join for that. So where are you, Ava, and what are you doing?

I'm in Berlin right now in Germany, and I've been on the road here in Germany all over the country for the past seven days. Because for the past seven days, the country has witnessed some of the largest farmer protests that Germany has ever seen. This protest wasn't actually just joined by farmers but was what I would call a massive uprising of blue-collar workers, ordinary citizens—people who are just fed up with the German federal government. People that are fed up feeling that they have no right to exist, being taxed into oblivion, and just wanted to make a fist and say, "We're done with you guys." That was the general sentiment that I've witnessed around here, and I've been reporting on it. I've been going out on the roads with the farmers, cheering them on.

On the first day, on Monday last week, I was on the A2, which is the busiest highway in Europe, where I met former Anthony Lee, who is sitting right beside me, and who was part of the organization. They conducted one of the largest roadblocks of the highway there that, well, I mean, I have ever seen, but I think Germany has ever seen. This was a roadblock that went on for kilometers, miles and miles on end, and I can still get emotional thinking back on it because it really reminded me of the Dutch farmer protest and even the Canadian Freedom Convoy.

At a certain point, we saw all the tractors going onto the road because the German truckers came to help them block the road, and it was just the most massive thing that I've seen in a while. I met this hero of a man who's sitting right next to me, former Anthony Lee right there. Now we are in Berlin because today was the grand finale of the protest of the past week, and he actually spoke today on stage at the brbg tour next to the federal government to tell the German government who's boss, essentially.

So, Anthony, why is it that you're involved in this? I'd like you to speak personally first—what is it that has disrupted your life to the point where you're willing to use your valuable time, energy, and machinery to engage in political activity and protest instead of doing what farmers usually do, which is like working 16 hours a day? How long have you been doing this, and exactly what's going on as far as you're concerned? Let's make it personal to begin with.

Well, yes, thank you first of all for having us on the show; it's a great pleasure. Personally, I'm just afraid of the future, a future for my kids. I have three kids, and like every other farmer in this world, I want the next generation to carry on doing the job, which has been going on for dozens of generations in some of our cases in Germany. I know friends who are in the 15th or 16th generation. Now we have a policy—not only now actually—I would say for the last 10, 15 years we have a policy in Germany and all over Europe actually, which is especially not farmer-friendly, to be polite.

We started in 2019 with around about 15,000 tractors who came to Berlin to start this protest. We've been carrying on the last four years; we spoke to politicians on all levels. For the last two years, I would say we have a green-dictated government in Germany, which is making life complicated—not only complicated for us farmers but also if I said for the ordinary workers, the blue-collar workers.

This is why we started on the 18th of December last year with a new mass protest, and this is special now because all organizations are united like they've never been, and we are standing together against this kind of policy. Like Ava said, today was one of the—I’d say—bigger protests than in 2019. I don’t have the numbers, but I came to Berlin this morning and passed probably 15, 20 kilometers long convoys of truck drivers and farmers.

This was only from one direction to Berlin, and we came from all over. Many didn’t even make it into the city because it was packed.

Okay, so there’s a bunch of mysteries there to unpack. The first thing I’d like to know, and that everybody who's watching and listening needs to know, is what exactly has—what green policies in particular—like why do you characterize the policies as green first? And then what green policies are making your life as a farmer and farmers' lives in general untenable, and why is it having the impact that it's having? Provide me with some details about what it is that you’re facing.

Well, our European government—the last years I’d say—they came up with ideas of a Green Deal. They call it a Green Deal, and everything which you pronounce green is supposed to be something good, right? Nobody really has—nobody wants to ruin the environment; everybody wants to protect it, which is good, don’t get me wrong. But I’d say it’s kind of an agenda to get rid of us, like we saw in Holland the last two years. Yes, and we have a thing in the European Union, which is a part of the Green Deal—they call it Farm to Fork strategy.

There’s four things you have to remember or know about this strategy: 10% of the whole European farmland they want to get out of use, so we’re not allowed to use it anymore. I mean, 10% of Europe, which is quite a lot. They want to cut down 50% of plant protection chemicals—I don’t know how they made up this number, but it’s a hell of a lot. It’s like if you go to a doctor, and the doctor is only allowed to use 50% of the medication.

It’s ridiculous because we need medication for our plants, which is actually totally normal. And then they want us to have 25% of the European Union farmland only be used by organic farming. I don’t really have a problem with organic farming, but you use double the space or land, or you only harvest 50%, if you’re lucky.

And I think—what was the fourth thing? Well, I mean, what I think is important to know is that just like with the Dutch farmer protests, there is a sort of a structure to the attack on farming that isn’t just on a national level. There’s definitely—as you said—there’s a European Green Deal that we’re working with, which is pushed forward by unelected bureaucrats. In this case, forgive me, but a Dutch man, Frans Timmermans, who is the mastermind—or the evil mastermind, I would say—behind the European Green Deal.

And then in every national country, there is a different set of policies that is used to target the specific farming groups. Right? So, in the Netherlands, when we last talked, Jordan, about the farmers' protest there, I told you that it was about nitrogen. The court ruled in the Netherlands that we are facing a nitrogen crisis; they are using European legislation for that to get rid of our farmers.

Here in Germany, what the mainstream will tell you was the main reason why the farmers now were particularly angry, or what sparked these protests, was the elimination of tax breaks on agricultural diesel.

The backstory to that is that the German government doesn’t have their finances in check and has a huge hole in their budget and was also trying to fill that gap. They said, “Well, let’s go after what they call climate-unfriendly subsidies.” And so they said we need to cut back on the tax break that the farmers get for agricultural diesel, which those taxes normally only involve, like for diesel for people who go out on the road—that’s what that tax is for—and farmers obviously just use it for their own land.

So the fact that they came after the farmers now and tried to, you know, fill their own gap in their budget due to their own mismanagement, and they target now the people that provide us with our daily meals, that initially sparked a lot of anger. I would say—and I think you would probably agree with me, Anthony—that there is a general sentiment within the German population that was very much reflected in these protests of just feeling like the German government—and not just the German government, also the Dutch government and the European Union—is constantly acting contrary to the interest of ordinary people who in fact pay their salaries because they are taxed already into oblivion.

The general theme that we constantly heard there was a slogan basically saying, “The government needs to go.” This wasn't just about these tax breaks; this was really a general dismay—a great dismay with the federal German government and the policies that they stand for.

So, Ava, let me ask you about that in more detail. Then Anthony, I’ll go right back to you. When the truck protest in Canada emerged, there were all sorts of idiot rumors—many of them spread by the federal government—that this was like a MAGA-style January 6th insurrection, that it was funded by MAGA Republicans, which is about the stupidest thing I can possibly imagine—or even by Russians. But underneath that, there was a fear, you might say, as well as manipulation. There was a fear that this sort of popular uprising was anti-democratic in its fundamental essence.

When you say things like the government has to go, I’m wondering how the two of you reconcile the fact—and you can help me straighten this out—reconcile the fact that Germany is led by a democratically elected government, and yet these massive protests are emerging with the proposition that the government has to go.

The question is, in a democracy, what does it mean that the government has to go? How do you see what's happening on the protest front in Germany acting in a manner that's commensurate with democratic principles? Ava, maybe you can start that.

Right. Well, I feel like it couldn't be more democratic what we are seeing right now because you are seeing people exercising their democratic rights to protest against a government that doesn't represent their interest anymore. I think the general support for the government has sunk to about 30% according to the polls here, right?

So there are people in power right now who have been in power for the past two and a half years, who were elected by the German people, of course democratically speaking, but who have, I would say, messed up so majorly that they've lost the support of the people. That's exactly the opinion that those people have now gone out to voice at their own expense because, I mean, like you said, farmers are hands-on people that absolutely do not want to spend time away from their farms, usually because they simply can't afford it.

The fact that they've now gone out in such large numbers to protest and make use of their democratic rights to me is the epitome of democracy. What you see is that instead of celebrating that, the mainstream media—exactly the way that you described well the Canadian protest—they are now saying, “Well, this is an insurrection; these are people that aren't democratic; this is extremely far-right.” You know, they constantly slap the far-right label on it.

Especially in Germany, in the historical context of this nation, that label holds a lot of power. I mean, we all understand why, right? So being called far-right is not something that you want in Germany, but it's been overused by the mainstream media and establishment so much so that clearly people feel like, “Well, whatever then I'll be labeled far-right.” But apparently, they have nothing to lose anymore, right?

So it's laughable to me that—and I understand why they're doing it—that they're trying to label these people extremists when all that I've seen are people who are just fed up with not being heard, who actually want more democratic legitimation to the government. They want to be represented by the people in power, and they feel not just unwanted and unheard—they feel like they are being threatened in their existence. They feel like they are ruled by people who essentially hate them.

So that's all I've seen. I’ve just seen ordinary hardworking people who are fed up and came to exercise their democratic rights.

Anthony, Ava makes the case that you have to have a fair bit of gall or desperation in Germany to ally yourself with a movement that's been labeled as far-right—not least because of the historical precedence of that terminology for Germany. So, I'm wondering how you regard yourself politically and maybe how you regard the majority of the people who are involved in this protest politically.

What set of descriptors do you think might reasonably be applied to them, and why is it that you decided that you would overcome the risk associated with being tarred with the far-right brush to continue the pursuit that to continue the protest that you have been engaged in?

Well, I say my personal advantage is that I'm half British. My dad was in the British military. I mean, I was born in Germany and raised in Germany, and I went to German school, but I'm not afraid of the typical right agenda they're trying to force in Germany. But many people still are. Actually, it's getting less now because the media has overdone it, and people don't really care anymore.

You asked about our government. I mean, this government has been in charge for more than two years, and Germany is one of the economic motors—I’d say the biggest in Europe—and we are the only industrial country which has negative growth in Germany. I mean, they even try to make that nice! It’s ridiculous!

I mean, how can you have negative growth? They blame it on Putin, on Russia, or on the environment—whatever, you know. But it’s all house-made because this country was one of the wealthiest in Europe and in the world, and they managed to ruin our economy in less than two years. They switched off the most efficient and safest nuclear power plants in the world, and this is all because the Green Party in Germany—that was their main goal since the early 80s.

From the day we switched off these super-efficient nuclear power plants, we became dependent on back for electricity, especially from France, which is mostly nuclear power. You can carry it on with so many things. We are reducing our best industry in the world, I’d say our car industry. They are losing contact with Japanese cars and so on, and people see that. People lose money; our inflation rate is the highest in Europe, and it’s not going down. You cannot say it’s Russia’s blame or anybody else’s—if all the countries around you are having growth.

Even the UK has growth, even though everybody said in Germany, “Okay, now after Brexit, they are going to get poor”. It’s not the case! People see that, and even, like Ava said, every worker has to pay more and earns less. So that’s why it’s turned, and there are so many people who are fed up with this government.

So, I've observed a variety of things. First of all, it's not easy to get coverage of the protests in Germany. It’s as if really nothing is going on, and it's a strange thing. Because watching you guys from the outside—I think the same is probably true of what’s happening in Spain and what’s happening in Poland—it’s so minimized and invisible that the only place that I've really been able to track it is Twitter.

So that makes it seem in some real sense that it’s conspiracy-territorial thinking even to admit to the fact that it's happening at all.

So we’ve outlined that it is happening, and we’ve outlined some of the causes. We’ve noted that it’s happening in many countries: Canada, the Netherlands, Spain, Poland, Germany. We will continue to do so. We’ve outlined the fact that there are factors at work. There’s an overarching bureaucratically imposed top-down, hypothetically green agenda that’s aiming to make a moral virtue out of the so-called degrowth that is indistinguishable from economic failure and catastrophic guidance, and that is now being touted as a moral virtue which will do nothing but impoverish poor people and make them unbelievably desperate and reliant on places like China and India, who will take the forefront in leadership in industrial development very rapidly if we don’t get our act together now.

You guys have noticed some evidence for that, I would say, for what we're laying out as the causes can be seen in the fact that, as you pointed out, it’s not just the farmers in Germany that are part and parcel of this latest protest.

Ava, can you give us some insight into how widespread the participation has been and what other groups of primarily working classes, is my understanding, what other primary working-class groups have become involved and at what scale?

Right. Yeah, well, let me paint the picture again of the moment where we met on the A2. We actually walked alongside the farmers on their tractors on a dark side road next to the highway, where it was almost, you know, like a thief in the night. They were trying to make their way onto the highway, which obviously is not easy to do, even in the early hours of the morning; and I thought to myself, how are they going to manage this? How are these tractors going to make their way onto the highway with all these cars passing by?

Then from the corner of my eye, I saw a huge, huge convoy rocking up of these truckers who all had joined the protest and made sure that the road was safe for the farmers to go onto. That really moved me. That was such a special moment to witness. I mean, in my video on Twitter, you can hear me scream in joy and excitement because it was such a true moment of solidarity from this one group in society to the other.

At the protest itself, we saw, I mean, yeah, the truckers were there, the farmers were there, all sorts of blue-collar workers, but also citizens in their cars who either were there on purpose because they wanted to support the farmers or who got stuck in traffic, but who we asked, “Hey, do you mind being stuck here?”

I kid you not, like nine out of 10 times, they were like, “Absolutely not! I don't mind. I know exactly why these people are protesting, and I agree with them.” So the support was huge.

Even going around at the protest looking at the signs that people were holding, you know, there’s a nice word in German, Mittelstand. I guess you would translate it into the middle class, you know, the working class. The class that I would say is being absolutely obliterated by the globalist agenda under the pretext of this green—you know, green, morally virtuous idea.

I mean, you could say that they’re trying to impose on us, which obviously is a dystopian world if you look at the consequence. So the Mittelstand, the middle class, the hardworking ordinary people that indeed have become increasingly poor as a result of conscious choices that were made by an elitist government, a globalist government, that do not have the best interests of the people at heart and actively work against their interests.

I would say that was the general image that I got. I felt like we are witnessing an uprising of ordinary hardworking citizens who are being branded by the mainstream media, unrightfully so, as far-right extremists when in fact, all they want is just, you know, to be able to exist, provide for their family, and do their job without being crushed by bureaucracy, without being crushed by taxes, without being crushed by derogatory labels.

You know, the deplorables, as Hillary Clinton called them, those were the people that were out on the street, and I would say that they were everything but deplorable. I take my hat off for you.

You know, I know where my food comes from, and I'm very sad that the people in power seem to have either forgotten it, or—and this is obviously the stance that I have taken—they know exactly where food comes from but want to be able to control it in such a manner that they can then also exercise control over the general population.

I think that that's ultimately the goal behind the climate agenda and using these c—yeah, I know the Green Deal—and all of these ideas as a pretext in order to gain control over people's lives. They are creating crises to do it because if you have a population that is dependent on you for their food—if they can’t eat—what is better than to gain control over them?

Have you ever heard of data brokers? They’re the middlemen collecting and selling all those digital footprints you leave online. They can stitch together detailed profiles, which include your browsing history, online searches, and location data. They then sell your profile to a company that delivers you a targeted ad. No biggie, right?

Well, you might be surprised to learn that these same data brokers are also selling your information to the Department of Homeland Security and the IRS. So, to mask my digital footprints, I protect myself with ExpressVPN.

One of the easiest ways for brokers to aggregate data and tie it back to you is through your device's unique IP address, which also reveals information about your location. When you're connected to ExpressVPN, your IP address is hidden, making it much more difficult for data brokers to identify who you are.

ExpressVPN also encrypts 100% of network traffic to keep your data safe from hackers on public Wi-Fi. That’s why I have the ExpressVPN app downloaded on all of my devices—phone, computer, and even my home Wi-Fi router. All I do is tap one button to turn it on, and I'm protected. It’s that easy.

Make sure your online activity and data are protected with the best VPN money can buy. Secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com/jordan. That’s expressvpn.com/jordan, and you can get an extra three months free.

ExpressVPN.com/jordan.

Yeah, well, it seems to me that it’s an easy move for any given bureaucrat to proclaim his or her alliance with the planet—with Blessed Mother Nature—to virtue signal in the direction of a green agenda and to thereby ratchet him or herself not only up the moral hierarchy and pat themselves on the back but also to use that as a means of advancing their career, even in micro steps.

You can imagine that the aggregate consequence of that across the entire bureaucratic class able to use this agenda as a get-out-of-jail-free card, as an excuse and explanation for every failure. We're only pursuing degrowth because of the green agenda. You can imagine that all of that collective activity going on in the background acts in a quasi-conspiratorial manner to put this agenda forward.

And just so that we don’t assume that I’m only thinking about quasi conspiracies, you know, I’ve looked very carefully at the so-called C40 Consortium agenda. This is a consortium of some of the 40 largest cities in the globe, all allied together at the level of local municipal government, who are literally pursuing an agenda that includes no more than three articles of clothing per citizen per year, a 95% reduction in private car ownership—which is why we’re all being encouraged to produce the electric cars that we won’t have enough electricity to run anyways because you don’t need electricity if you don’t get to own a car—and if the goal is a 95% reduction in private automobile ownership, then it doesn’t matter if there’s no damn grid.

One short-haul flight per person every three years, which will completely obviously decimate the entire travel industry, plus all of the tourism industry that Europe depends on absolutely in all possible manners. And then overall, although this isn’t directly from the C40, the fundamental goal of something approximating an 85% reduction in Western living standards, which is the calculation of the green virtuous globalist utopians as to what’s necessary in order for us to inhabit a green planet.

And so all of this means—it seems to me—it means not only are the bureaucrats who are using this get-out-of-jail-free card to advance their careers, there’s also a very radical leftist agenda that uses it explicitly as an agenda. It also means that the bloody radical leftists are 100% willing to sacrifice the working class and the poor to their ambition and their green agenda.

Now, that has backfired in the Netherlands, so let's concentrate on that for a moment. Eva, so the last time we talked, it was in the midst of the farmer protest in the Netherlands, and that produced a genuine political upheaval.

Maybe you could lay out for everybody what happened in the Netherlands, what the situation is now, and what you think that implies for the future of European political action in general.

Right, well, I think we can see from what happened in the Netherlands—we had the last major farmers protests in March, right? And then right in March, at the end of March, we had general elections in which the farmer citizens movement—a relatively new party—got a landslide victory. Then about a month ago, we had general elections for our parliament in which the PVV, which was originally branded as the far right—again, we can fill Bingo with this—the far-right party won a staggering number of seats for Dutch standards at least.

People have to understand we have a system in which there are multi-parties; we don’t have a two-party system; we have plenty. They always have to form a coalition. But this party, the PVV, the far-right party, won about a fourth of all votes, and now in the polls, they’re even looking at a third because they’re only rising in popularity.

I really think that this farmers protest—and that’s why I think it’s so important what you guys are doing here in Germany and why I wanted to be there—is that these farmers are in the vanguard of this political change; it’s you guys because, you know, anybody with a functioning set of eyes and brain cells—if you actually see the people that go out there, you see that those are not extremists. Those are normal people.

If you come after the people who provide you with food, that's something that I think most ordinary people can't really comprehend. It's like, why would you come after the people who provide us with food? That doesn’t make any sense, you know? And they don’t stand for that.

So, I think that the farmers' uprising in the Netherlands has had a great impact on our elections, so much so now that, yeah, the far—quote-unquote—has won, and obviously, we’re not out of the woods yet because we still have to form a coalition. But it is a major political shift where I feel like really something in the hearts and minds of the people has changed, where they’re no longer afraid of the usual intimidation tactics of the mainstream media and the establishment. They, you know, like we said, they have nothing to lose anymore.

Do you think, Ava, do you think there’s a danger? What might be the danger, if any, of normalization of the so-called far-right agenda?

I mean, there are two ways of looking at this, right? Because one way is looking at it the way you guys have been looking at it, which is that the terminology of far-right itself has been weaponized, and now that weapon is losing its potency because your claim fundamentally is that it’s been applied to the obvious, what would you say, to those at the bedrock of society, and that would be certainly the truckers and the farmers.

If truckers and farmers just going about their business have become far-right, then the terminology itself loses its meaning. But then you could also say, well, there has been danger in the past presented by the far right, and the fact that the term no longer has any validity as a weapon also means in principle that people who have a genuinely far-right agenda, such as they are, can now use this populist movement to their own advantage to put forward their hypothetically nefarious agenda.

I’m wondering, Ava, how you’ve worked through those complexities in your own mind—what you think far-right means now and if you see any dangers in this populist uprising, let’s say, and the transformation of the political scene that’s emerged in consequence?

Well, there are a few things to say to that. I think indeed one danger that I could imagine is that because this term is so overused and has become so trivialized in that sense, it’s like, okay, if there is a far-right subgroup that wants to do all sorts of evil things, then maybe we wouldn’t take it as seriously anymore because it’s so overused on ordinary people with valid, you know, totally justified opinions.

I don’t see them though; I don’t see them out on the streets; I don’t meet them. What I have personally done in my own life, you know, I’ve had my fair share of slander, and the Dutch mainstream media when I started out in my political career called me the shield maiden of the far right. Well, I was 23 when that happened to me, and I was terrified because I thought to myself, well, okay, I can forget a normal life; I can forget ever having a job—like Google never forgets. So if somebody Googles you and the first thing you see about you is shield maiden of the far right, well that’s not good.

But I’ve now come to the conclusion that there’s no point in being afraid of a label that doesn’t actually apply to you. So I just kind of run with it now; it’s in my bio on X because I think it’s funny, and I want to show to other people don’t be intimidated by people who use that label to silence you because nowadays, to me, where what I find is that they put far-right on just about anybody who is somewhat right-wing to the center who has conservative views—maybe doesn’t cut their hair short and dyed purple and scream “destroy the patriarchy” or oppose mass immigration, which clearly doesn’t have the best effect on or didn’t have the best effect on Europe.

If you have those, I would say completely legitimate, valid opinions, you earn that title nowadays with the mainstream media. So the best thing you can do is stop caring because if you stop being afraid of it, then they lose their power over you, and we can demand actual change, which nowadays would be labeled us far-right but, you know, 30 years ago would be just a Christian democratic deal.

I’ve certainly seen in Canada and elsewhere that everything right now definitely includes everything that was even 10 years ago regarded as classically liberal, and everything far-right includes everything that 10 years ago would have been regarded even as moderately conservative. So, given that the radical left actually occupies only about 7% of the population (and I think that’s probably an overestimate), that really means that 93% of the population have been thrown in by them. By the way, it has been thrown into the category either of right or far-right.

Now you would think, Anthony, that this would be a particularly significant problem in Germany, and so the fact that ordinary people have chosen to rise up nonetheless, in spite of being labeled with these epithets, indicates in all probability that something of dead seriousness is going on.

So what is it that you guys who are protesting want? What do you think your protest has accomplished, and where do you think this is going in the immediate and longer-term future in this rapidly deindustrializing and failing German state?

Well, the first thing we want is just politicians who have common sense. That’s very simple. And let me just go back one thing about this green agenda: we have, in Germany, everybody’s trying to get rid of CO2. So CO2 is the worst thing; it’ll kill us. We have young people gluing themselves onto the street, especially here in Berlin, to demonstrate that we have to cut down on CO2; otherwise, they call themselves last generation. Otherwise, we will die.

It’s so silly that—and the media is honestly cutting down a bit on it now—but it’s still onto it, and this is the main agenda, especially to us farmers, because we have to cut down on CO2, and that’s why this Green Deal—these four things I told you about—and especially the main reason, what Ava just described, to tax our diesel. And I only live about 150 km away from Holland. In Holland or in Belgium or in France, they don’t tax diesel at all.

So it’s an unfair thing for us in Europe to compare—we can’t compete, obviously not. Everybody should know that we in Germany, our farmers use one liter diesel as efficiently like nobody else can do it on this planet.

So obviously, if we don’t produce the food, we will have to get it from somewhere else. And we had some very good passage last year in an Austrian newspaper, and they said the Green Deal from the European Union is a bad deal for the planet because if we do these things that I told you a few minutes ago, we will need 8 million hectares somewhere else in the world to feed us, which will mean we need to use big ships to get the food to us to Germany, which is bad for the environment because we will pollute the air with CO2, which will kill us.

And we will take poor people’s food away, and anybody who says, especially from the Green Party, who said, "Well, it’s a good idea to do the Green Deal," he should reflect on himself and think, "No, it can’t be. It’s absolutely contrary to that sense." Or that meaning—we want to protect the planet to get rid of CO2, and you’re doing the opposite by far. People more and more realize this nonsense we’re doing, and they’re fed up with it because it’s costing us money; it’s costing our economy, like I told you.

And I mean, it’s the same. We cut down, I mean, we got a lot of gas from Russia until the Ukraine war, and it was quite cheap for us, which was good for our economy. So we cut down and said, “We don’t want it anymore.” By the way, let me explain this so anybody from outside Germany realized this: Spain, for example, which is a member of the European Union, imports double the size of gas from Russia than before the Ukraine war.

So which is silly because, I mean, we all have the same rights in the European Union, but we and our government say, “No, we don’t want it because we don’t want to give Putin money.” Even though I live in a state called Lower Saxony in the middle of Germany, we have gas; we could frack, is it fracking? We could frack gas for 30 years for the German economy. We don’t want to do it because it’s bad for the environment; we’d rather buy it from the US or from the Middle East and pay five times as much for it.

We are dependent on governments from the Middle East or from America—from the United States. Then, we have to import it. It’s so silly, which is obviously bad for the environment, but they say it’s green. It’s ridiculous!

I mean, we are doing the exact opposite of what you’re doing, and so are we in Canada. So Quebec—the province of Quebec in Canada—has enough natural gas in Quebec to supply all of Quebec for 200 years, or the EU for 50, and they refuse to frack any of it because fracking is so dangerous.

And by the way, I grew up in Northern Alberta, and they’ve had fracked there for like six decades with no problem whatsoever, and so I know all of that is absolute bloody nonsense! But the advantages of this green virtue signaling at the local bureaucratic level are so astounding that all of this idiocy can pass as green legislation, even though it flies in the face of both common sense and fact.

I know for a fact, for example, that not only is German electricity something approximating five times as expensive as it should be, which given the dependence of industry and everything else—all of commerce—on cheap energy is a bloody catastrophe. I know as well that you guys are producing more carbon dioxide and more waste per unit of energy than you were 10 years ago because you shut down the bloody nuclear plants and have substituted instead light-burning coal plants, which is utterly insane!

So just so that everybody watching and listening is clear here: not only are these green policies devastating to the working class and to the poor and to the economic stability of Europe as a whole and then to the stability of the world in general, they are counterproductive by the standards put forward by the green advocates themselves in that, as you pointed out, well, first of all, you have to import your bloody power at a tremendously high cost, and then you’re going to shut down local production of food in favor of imports.

It was only a few years ago that all the green revolutionaries were jumping up and down screaming about the fact that you should buy local, exactly to decrease the kind of transportation costs that you’re pointing to, and so it’s such a mystery because the policies that are being pursued don't even suffice to service the goals that are hypothetically trumpeted by the formulators of the policies themselves.

It's a bloody miracle of stupidity and blindness!

I've given this so much thought because so many people have asked me why—why would they do this? It doesn’t make sense. Explain it! You know, why would you come after the most hardworking sector, the most lucrative sector, the people that provide you with food? Why would you shut down your nuclear plants if you are to import electricity for I don’t know how much more in price?

Why? Why?

I think it was Carl Jung who actually said if you can’t understand someone’s actions, you have to look at the consequences and infer the motive; that’s what I’ve done with all of this. If the consequences of their policies are that we become poorer, and you know we not—they obviously—but we, if we become poorer, we become more dependent on them; we, you know, we basically could essentially starve if things go wrong.

And God forbid, if disaster happens, we’ve outsourced everything; you know we could be in real trouble.

If those are the consequences, then apparently, that’s the motive. I maybe have become too cynical, but I find it very difficult to explain it any other way.

Because this is not a one-time mistake; you know, these people—the net-zero scam—and I would really call it a scam—it is, yes, a criminal scam.

It's not just a scam; it is criminal, and I think that it is of the worst type of injustice if a government—and the people are supposed to represent us—you know, talking about democracy and liberal democracy and all—if those people turn their backs on their own population, and not just turn their backs, but actively go against their interests and allow them essentially—if things go wrong—to become poor and starve.

I can’t see—you know, I see true evil behind these acts; I don’t just see incompetence anymore; it’s worse than that, AA! It’s worse than that even because I was speaking with someone the other day, one of my podcast guests, who said that their sampling has indicated that young people now think about climate apocalypse three or four times a day, right?

They’re literally obsessed by it, and we know perfectly well that that demoralizing insistence that all human striving is planet-destroying patriarchal ambition and has to be brought to a halt—not only does it risk economic catastrophe, really right down to the fundamental level in the way that we’ve been describing—but it’s also demoralized an entire generation of people and made them afraid, terrified, like chicken that the sky is falling even when the IPCC itself, who are hypothetically the people that you know are on top of the appropriate data, have indicated nowhere in their documentation that we’re facing anything approximating a true emergency.

So, well, and so that does beg the question, as you said: just exactly what the hell is going on? And I think that your method of inferring the motivation is actually the case. I think the proximal cause is the fact that just as in Nazi Germany, let’s say that any old mid-level bureaucrat could ratchet himself up the hierarchy by identifying, at least in principle, with the overarching Nazi ideology; it’s absolutely the case with these bureaucrats who bear no immediate economic consequences for the idiocy of their actions.

If they put forward this green agenda, they’re celebrated by their radiate peers for doing so. That’s definitely good in the immediate present for their career development and their, you know, self-aggrandizing moral proclamations of virtuous self's and, in the aggregate, we get exactly this sort of thing.

Anthony, what consequences do you think that these protests are going to have? What have they had so far? Let’s start with that. What consequences have they had, and what do you think is going to unfold? Because this is a relatively new government in Germany, and it isn’t obvious to me that it’s going to fall apart in consequence.

As the government in the Netherlands did, certainly the Canadian government sailed right through the trucker protests as if it never even happened, and the probability that Justin Trudeau is going to rule with his velvet fist for the next year appears to be extremely high. So what do you think is going to happen in Germany as a consequence of these protests?

Well, it’s very hard to predict. The government didn’t learn its lesson yet; that’s obvious. We had our finance minister on stage today, and it was obvious he didn’t learn anything about our actions we did. But what we already achieved is that we are, like I said in the beginning, so United that I honestly never thought we could be.

If I said that, I mean, I would say 80%, and this is an official poll of our mainstream media—80% says they are behind our actions, behind our—it’s not a strike; it’s a protest. That’s amazing; it’s honestly amazing, especially getting in front of this agenda that we were talking about. People are realizing that now, and they’re realizing it for one reason: they believed everything—or most of them believed all this agenda we have to save CO2 to save our lives and all that nonsense. But now it’s costing them money. Everybody’s paying for this, and we are paying a big price.

We didn’t talk about—even, I mean, with the war in Ukraine—obviously Ukraine produces a hell of a lot of wheat and crops for the poorest in the world. If you look into where the wheat, if it gets out of the Black Sea region, goes to, it mainly goes to European countries, Turkey, and China, doesn’t really go to Africa where it should go.

And it comes to us; Poland and Hungary said, “We don’t want it;” they shut their borders. So it’s coming straight through to Germany, and the Danish government only recently checked if it’s contaminated with chemicals that are not allowed in the European Union, and they said yes, it is; it’s official, but nobody cares.

So we are not getting the price we should get for our crops, our grains—and we are getting overflowed by grain from the Ukraine, which is really bad. I mean, obviously, it’s bad; first of all, poor countries aren’t getting it, and we can’t get rid of ours, and the government is even paying some parts of the transport to Germany.

They are obviously paying using our tax money to make sure we get a bad price for our crop. Well, I think we were already talking about how demoralizing this agenda is, and food, of course, if you want to demoralize a people, I mean it’s done by feeding them bad food as well. I mean, Jordan, you know I don’t have to tell you about this, but the importance of good meat, of healthy animal fats, it’s huge.

If you make people feel like the only thing that they deserve is, you know, bad meat or bugs, insects, or synthetic meat, you know, feed literally food that will make you weak, I think that says something about our establishment. You know, it says something about the way that we are governed; it says something about the way that we are ruled that we are supposed to live as if we are livestock, that can only eat insects or, basically, trash, and who produce carbon dioxide simply by breathing, let’s say, and produce children, and produce children who are a net burden on the ecosphere, etc., etc.

And want to travel and want to buy things and want to have a standard of living? Absolutely!

Absolutely!

When everything you do does nothing but muck up the planet and mar the future? Yeah, it is an absolutely bloody dismal view of humanity, that’s for sure, and bordering on murderous!

Yeah, it’s Malthusian at the least, and I mean, you know, we’re joking now, but there was an actual headline not too long ago here in the UK and in Europe quoting a study that said that breathing causes climate change. Well, you know, what’s the consequence of that then? Do you want me to stop breathing? That’s the only answer to the problem then, right?

So it’s absolute content.

The human progress people have documented the fact that every baby born will produce seven times the economic resources that every baby consumes. And so the idea that’s the historical average—in the moment the idea that more people means more poverty and more environmental degradation is not only a lie; it’s an anti-truth.

And here’s another—the best data indicate quite clearly that if you can get poor people—so absolutely poor people, not relatively poor people—so people in danger of food privation, let’s say, and lacking opportunity for their children—if you can get them up to a point where they’re producing $5,000 US GDP per year, they immediately start to take a medium and long-term view of, let's say, environmental stability and sustainability because they have enough wherewithal and enough resources at their disposal so that they don’t have to be in a permanent state of crisis that incentivizes them to burn up and consume everything around them.

So the best data indicates, very, very clearly, that if we drove energy prices down or allowed them to decline—as we could, if we used intelligent nuclear technology, for example—we could raise the planetary standard of living to the point where everybody locally would start to become concerned about environmental issues and act naturally in a manner that would provide for a more sustainable world.

Instead, we’re doing the opposite to virtue signal stupidly. We're cranking energy prices up, claiming that all the industrial activity has to cease, making poor people even poorer and putting them at risk of starvation.

All that’s going to do, as it’s already started to do in Germany, is make both the economy and the environment worse, and it’s going to breed more and more uprisings of the sort that we're seeing everywhere. You couldn’t imagine a more counterproductive agenda, and to say it again, counterproductive even by the standards of the people who are hypothetically putting the agenda forward.

It’s like, why in hell would you oppose nuclear power? That’s utterly insane, especially in a place like Germany, especially when you Germans have to import nuclear power from the Scandinavians and the French. You know, it’s so blind that it’s a miracle!

But it baffles me already that we live in a time apparently where we have to justify our existence with data. You know, that’s something that deeply bothers me; it deeply bothers me.

No kidding!

Yeah, no kidding! I mean, and you know, this will of course lend me another label in secular Europe, but I think that the death of God that you so often discuss is ultimately the main reason for that.

You know, if you forget that people have intrinsic value because they are created in the image of God, and they’re just a number. If we have to work to net zero and we need to see if you add something or take too much, you have to justify your own existence by quoting scientific studies, I think we’ve gone off the road, man!

Like, in bad time! Like, this—I mean, we—are we China now? Is that what we are? These people have their mouths full constantly; they’re always talking about human rights here and there, but now we have come to a point where we have to justify our entire existence to our megalomaniac overlords, and I’m not okay with it!

Yeah, I'm not okay with it, either! And the whole Malthusian, the whole Malthusian proposition—so let’s just walk through that a second so that’s a biological metaphor. So let’s just walk through that a minute just to show exactly how wrong it is.

Okay, so now there’s lots of situations in which the use of biological metaphors can shed light on human nature and even the nature of human, what would you say, striving and thriving. So psychologists use mouse models all the time, and that’s partly because the neurochemistry of a mouse brain for example is very similar to the neurochemistry of a human brain.

There are all sorts of analogies in behavior and function that are relevant. But the Malthusian doctrine is based on a very low-level analogy. So the analogy is essentially this: if you put a microorganism in a Petri dish, so it has enough agar, enough food substrate so that can thrive, it will multiply to the point where, and rapidly geometrically or exponentially, to the point where it consumes all of its resources and then it will catastrophically collapse.

Okay? So—and you can see that same thing occurring in some natural populations. If you provide a natural population with no predation and a plethora of resources in a constrained environment, then the population will grow until it consumes all the resources and collapse.

Okay, so why aren’t people microorganisms in a Petri dish? Well, there are some constraints on what we can produce and consume. Like, there’s different, what would you say, scarcity of different fundamental elements, for example, such that some things will always be more expensive than others or almost always there’s some natural scarcity.

But here’s the fundamental difference between human beings and other creatures. So we can produce; we can innovate. We can produce variants of ourselves that can die instead of us. So on the innovation front—the innovation front, and these things are tied together because we can think, because we can transform cognitively, we don’t have to die or vary genetically.

We can transform cognitively; that’s our niche. The fact that we can transform cognitively means that we can make constant scarcity into variable plenitude, and we’ve done that constantly.

Things we regard as natural resources—hydrocarbons, for example, oil, gas—those things were of zero value in 1820—zero! They weren’t natural resources at all. It wasn’t until we figured out how to use them, how to substitute them for whale oil, for example, that they became this unbelievable source of wealth that was immediately available everywhere.

It was a cognitive transformation and revolution, and there’s no end to the degree to which we can use that cognitive revolution to increase plenitude. And that’s exactly why, for example, every baby born today will produce seven times as much as they consume.

Now, you might say at some scale there’s going to be some limit to plenitude, but it isn’t obvious at all that what that’s going to be, and it certainly isn’t obvious that we’ve reached that limit. And that’s especially true when you consider the possibility of computation because we’re in this situation now where our computing resources, which take up comparatively little resources and energy, are multiplying at a rate that’s absolutely beyond comprehension.

We have no idea how much we’re going to in 10 years. So the Malthusian notion—there isn’t anything about the Malthusian notion that’s correct, except for yeast and bacteria.

If you’re going to treat people like yeast and bacteria, then we’re going to be in the same damn situation that we’re in now, right? Where we have to justify our existence by data because the world is full of scarcity, and maybe only the elites who have our best interests in mind are going to be allowed to thrive.

Yeah, I think I can think of a far-right ideology that talked about people as being dirty, you know? And this—and bacteria. And now we are dealing with a left-wing ideology that is doing the exact same thing and making us justify our existence—and yet they call the people who opposed it far-right!

So we’re full circle.

Yeah, well, I saw recently that Trudeau's minions are now, what would you say, working behind the scenes to ensure that the public health officials at the World Health Organization, who are so concerned with the control of the next pandemic, just like they were with the last one, are also now moving to ensure that climate catastrophe will be included within the P domain of public health concern that the, you know, global overlords are going to be able to—yes, going to be able to manage.

And your comment about, you know, far-right totalitarian governments treating people as if they’re infectious agents—that’s right! Cancers on the planet, let’s say—we know perfectly well, again from the data, that that drives a totalitarian agenda.

As soon as you use language of contamination, pollution, and disgust to characterize someone, let’s say human beings, you immediately elicit the unconscious and conscious activations of the disgust systems that protect us from contamination, and those are very dangerous.

Once they're activated, they act in the destruction—right?—at the destruction of the pathogen, yes. And those people—those are the ones that the farmers, the truckers, the people that we’ve seen out on the streets today have protested against.

That’s why they were out on the street. And when I said that earlier in this conversation, we have been speaking to people who feel like they are ruled by people who hate them. And that’s maybe they can’t voice exactly why; you know, they can come up with examples, obviously; they are feeling it in their own finances.

But they can tell, and I think that people ultimately, on a human level, on a soul level, can feel when they are being despised by others, and this exactly this notion that you are just describing right now, Jordan, that I think is the motor behind this protest.

People can sense that they are being hated; people can sense that they are being despised, and they are done with it because they realize that they are the ones paying for it and that the state should be here to serve us, not the other way around.

Anthony, just out of curiosity, you know, you and Ava have just talked about the breadth and depth of this protest and its positive effects. But you closed by pointing out, for example, that the finance minister that you guys talked to—or that spoke to you—right at the close of the protests doesn’t have seem to have learned a damn thing, which doesn’t surprise me in the least.

That makes me question just how effective what you’ve done so far is. And I want your opinions about that. And then I’m also curious: why didn’t your now-united organization, given your 80% level of public support, call for something approximating a general strike and just bring the whole bloody thing to a halt?

Yeah, but that would be the obvious thing, but our—well, what—explain it. Well, actually, it’s against the law to do this general strike because we—we—obviously it is against the law. But I reckon we have to come to the stage where we have to break the law sometimes, which is not meaning violence. It's like just civil disobedience—yeah, exactly!

That’s probably the next stage, but we have to talk about that between us—between the organizations. But you’re completely right.

I mean, we gave the government two options, or there are two options: either they turn back to a policy that is for the people. Like I said, we’ve completely forgotten loads of things, which are going completely wrong in Germany. I mean, we have a farming minister who’s telling us we should only eat—and this is not a joke—10 grams of meat per day, right?

This is honestly what they’re trying to tell us: 10 grams, yeah, right! When the politicians start telling you what you can and can’t eat, we've crossed a line. It's like, you don’t get to tell me where I set my thermostat, you don’t get to tell me what I can drive and when, and you certainly bloody well don’t get to tell me what I can eat!

Like, fundamentally, and seriously, to hell with you. And what it also indicates to me—and increasingly clearly—is that once you’re waving the flag of planetary savior on the environmentalist front, once you’ve turned 100% to that kind of nature worship, there is absolutely no level of control whatsoever that you won’t stoop to and justify by your moral pretension, right, redounding to your credit and increasing your power at the same time as it does so.

All right, so this begs the question, doesn’t it? Like, I watched Claudine Gay resign from Harvard, and I’ve watched the moderate left wingers flop about now in increasing consternation, recognizing as they do the absolute danger of the diversity, equity, and inclusivity idiocy that’s part and parcel of this, what would you say, radical leftist line of anti-human thinking.

But at the same time, I see that I don’t believe that Harvard, as an institution, has learned a damn thing. I don’t believe that the moderates on the Democrat side in the United States, for example, have any idea whatsoever how deep the ideological corruption and rot has become.

So you’ve pushed forward this protest; but as you said yourself, you still have members of the government firmly in charge. You think that we should eat 10 grams of meat today, and who don’t believe that they’re going to throw you a bone or two, maybe in the near future, but the probability that they’re going to revisit the ideology upon which they’ve based their political empire strikes me to be close to zero.

So, again, you said the future is uncertain and unpredictable. What do you think’s going to happen? And what should happen?

We have three elections this year in East Germany, and East Germany—the polls show that the far-right party, the AFD in Germany, is by far in the lead in these polls, and which will be like an earthquake in our politics in Germany because we’ve never had this situation.

And if this happens—and I reckon it will because, like you said, they will not change their policy—things will change rapidly in Germany because, like you know, politicians, they want power, and to get power, you have to compromise.

Even though they now say, “We’re never going to compromise; we’ll never go together with this party,” I reckon just because they want what they want, the power, they will, and that will be a landslide. It will completely change Germany.

But saying that, that might even still—I still have hope, if hope is the right word, that our actual government will change the way they govern—not by 180 degrees (which we need) but maybe a few degrees. That might—you know, these two options are on the table, and only these two options.

Okay, well, something similar to that has happened in the Netherlands. So, Ava, what’s the status of the government in the Netherlands, and is Geert Wilders going to head up the new government? Is that how it looks, and what do you think of him, and what do you think. Again, let’s talk about this a little bit. What do you think the dangers are that present themselves as a consequence of that in the Netherlands?

The same thing applies to Germany, and we could also talk about the AFD to some degree because they’re certainly pillared as far-right in Western media—certainly, in North America, they’re viewed as to the right of Victor Orban, I would say, and he’s definitely persona non grata in the legacy media.

So let’s start with the situation again in the Netherlands, and then move to what you see, Ava, as being most likely in Germany. I’d like to hear your thoughts about the AFD as well.

So we are still in the process of forming a coalition right now. As I said, we have a very scattered political landscape, and so all of the parties that won will need to form or have negotiations and form, ultimately, a coalition to have a majority in parliament.

Without that, it’s going to be difficult to pass any legislation, obviously. So this process is very important. What is now happening is that the, let’s just say, the legacy parties—the establishment parties that have ruled the Netherlands and I would say destroyed it actively for the past 30 years—are doing everything in their power to stall that process because Geert Wilders is becoming increasingly popular.

As I said, he got one out of four votes in the elections just a month ago, and now he’s pulling at one in three votes. So the last thing that they want right now is the coalition formation process to fail and for new general elections to be called because then he’s going to become even bigger.

What I think the political strategy at home is is they’re going to stall that process for as long as possible. The parties, the moderate right-wing party, the centrist parties, they’re going to protect. They tend to be willing to work with him, and then they’re going to drag it out so long, and they’re going to say, “At a certain point, well, you know, this man is just impossible.”

They’re already saying that he has said things that go against the constitution and that are a threat to the rule of law, etc. So they’re building their case, and I think that that is something that we see everywhere, is that this, you know, this is a war of attrition, essentially.

So we have to be prepared for all of these games. However, I think something similar might happen in Germany, but what I do think is that the genie is out of the bottle with the people, and that to me is ultimately the only thing that matters. I don’t put any of my solace in the political party system anyway.

What I do care about is the willingness of people to stand up for what they believe is right and to not be intimidated by people who lie about them and about what they stand for, right? So what I think is going to happen in Germany with the AFD, the people that I have met from AFD, what I’ve seen about AFD is they are, are conservative people who essentially are saying, “Well, the ideal Merkel’s idea to let 1.2 million migrants in in one year in 2015 might have not been the greatest idea.”

You know, to me, that’s a very legitimate standpoint—extraordinarily legitimate—especially because there is no alternative, no pun intended in Germany really aside from praise from the parties that have destroyed the country very actively.

So I think that they are going to win by a much larger margin than the polls suggest right now, just like what happened for us because the PVV was also not, you know, they weren’t polled at the extent that they now have won the elections with, and I think that that will change something in the mindset of the Germans.

Because, like I said, if even in Germany, that label doesn’t hold enough power anymore to deter people from voting for change, then you really know that the government has messed up! You really know that the establishment has messed up and that the people are fed up! So, I personally think that Germans who want change have no choice really but to vote for the right-wing parties, and I would say essentially not for any party that has governed the nation in the last 10 years.

Okay, so do you see—and I’d like both of your opinions on this—it’s so difficult to get a handle on any of this, say, because, you know, I’ve been watching the political landscape for a very long time, and certainly the idea of Geert Wilders has raised my hackles in the past, and I would say that’s because I’m profoundly, at least because I’m relatively ignorant about politics in the Netherlands and still susceptible to the consensus view developed by the low-resolution pictures presented by the Legacy Media.

So I don’t know what to make of that, and exactly the same thing applies to the AFD.

And so I’d like to know from both of you what dangers, if any, you think this tilt towards this more—we’ve already taken apart the notion of the right—God only knows even what that is anymore given the overuse of the term.

But do either of you have any qualms about these political transformations? Do you think that they could—just because you’re fighting something that in and of itself is reprehensible and destructive doesn’t mean that the weapons that you use to fight it can't also pose precisely the same danger?

So, Ava, maybe you could start by commenting on that, especially with regards to the AFD, and then Anthony, you could chime in with regard to Germany.

Well, I mean, these are both the upsides and the downsides of democracy in general that we’re discussing, I think. So, of course, the instrument or the alternative can also turn bad. But then that’s inherent to democracy and the fact that we have to form coalitions in our democratic systems at least is somewhat of a safeguard in a sense that they are going to have to work together with other parties.

Anyway, so let’s say God forbid that these parties turn out to have crazy ideas that we absolutely didn’t want and didn’t vote for. We have to either trust in the fact that the system will correct it or I think you can throw away the entire concept of democracy almost all together, right?

So the, I think that a lot of people here are trying to use the possibility of maybe the AFD going too far in certain aspects or, you know, not having… I hear another argument often that they say, “Oh, well, they don’t have good people; they don’t have enough people with enough qualities to govern the country.”

I’m like, well, I don’t know if the people who are in power right now do! Like, clearly, you know, you guys have a bit of an issue on your hand! So you might as well try, and I think that that is essentially what this country needs. You know, something needs to happen, and like I said, I’m not one to put all of my solace and trust and hope in the political system anyway.

But it is very clear to me that Germany and Europe in general are on a path of national suicide, so might as well try something else for once.

And you know, because I find myself in the position so often that I’ve been called far right for what I think are perfectly valid opinions that I care a little bit less at this point, you know? I’m like, no, I think we, I think something just needs to change here, and I try to trust in the democratic system and that it will correct itself.

That terrifying specter of Meloni in Italy, who everyone and sundry was warned about in no uncertain terms forever, you know, tantamount to Mussolini and her fascist proclivities, has turned out to be a hell of a lot more moderate even than the people who voted for her might have hoped.

So these specters of fascism that keep looming turn out to have a lot less teeth than feared when they end up acquiring a certain degree of political power. Now, you know, Orban has been the most successful conservative figure in some ways on the European scene, and he’s still demonized roundly and continually in the western media.

But it’s also been my apprehension with regard to Hungary that things are nowhere near as dismal there as they might have been given all the fear that was engendered around Orban’s policies.

So what do you think about that? And then, Anthony, we’ll turn to your feelings about the AFD in Germany.

Yeah, I think you’re very right. I mean, when I go to Hungary, for example, personally, and when I speak to other people who go there, a lot of people feel like they can finally take a breather. It’s like, “Oh, that’s nice! You know, this is what Europe used to be like 50 years ago—30 years ago, in some countries even less, and I am upset as a 27-year-old that I have never experienced Europe as safe, as functioning, as sane, normal, dare I say, as I find a city like Budapest to be. You know, my parents had that experience; my grandfather sure as heck had that experience, but I never had it, and I never voted for it.

You know, I have always, growing up, had to be afraid going out after dark. You know, that’s just—that’s our reality right now, and that’s our reality not because it happened like a natural disaster, but because people in power made the wrong decisions actively.

And I think that everybody can agree to the fact that a country like Hungary is not, you know, the dictatorship that they make it out to be in the media. What I saw the time, especially the last time I was in Budapest—I was there for a symposium on promoting the family—which seemed to be, you know, relatively positive.

I mean, if you’re in the airports in Budapest, for example, what you see are a plethora of posters celebrating the family as the core bedrock social institution of the polity, and that just doesn’t strike me as particularly Nazi in its derivation, especially—and so this, and I know the president of Hungary to some degree, and she’s a woman who is quite admirable in my estimation, who spent most of her career trying to figure out how to protect the family and how to economically incentivize the role that women play in reproduction in keeping with opening up the opportunities for them on the economic front in general and is producing policies that have decreased abortion substantially without force, decreased divorce, increased the marriage rate, and also increased the rate at which women are participating in the broader general economy.

So none of that particularly screams fascism to me, and the fact too that we’ve seen—well, that the consequences of the election of Meloni and also what of the so-called far-right parties in Sweden seems to me to indicate that there’s a lot more fear there than is justified by the consequences, especially in contrast to this absolutely insane, utopian, self-serving moralizing green agenda that provides an absolute excuse for everything you can possibly conceptualize.

Anthony, in terms of the AFD, how do you think it is being perceived by the protesting class now—the people that you’ve been talking to, the truckers, the farmers, the people who work for the railways, the dock workers, because they were all involved in this protest as well.

What dangers do you, as a German citizen, see on the fascist side, so to speak, as a consequence of these populist movements?

Well, me personally, I’m in politics for the last eight years, and I was in the CDU; that was a party from Angela Merkel. I left the party about a year ago and moved to the party called Freie Wähler (Free Voters). I would say they are the old CDU as I knew it 20 years ago.

And the AFD, yes, it’s a far-right party that is gaining popularity—massively! And the main reason is, I think, is the same reason like in Italy and in Sweden: migration! We have a massive migration problem in Germany; I say right about 5 to 6 million people since 2015 who came to Germany.

At the moment, we are way over 300,000 this year. It’s not the problem with migration; the problem is who is coming, and we don’t even know who is coming. Up until 2010, I was a police officer in Berlin. We had a massive problem with migrants in those days because the migrants who come now are mainly young men from Muslim countries, and like I said, we don’t even know who is coming because they come in; they are allowed to stay here even though it’s against the law.

And we don’t obey the law; the government doesn’t obey the law like it should be. And governments like Sweden—I mean, Sweden is very liberal, as I know it. I mean, even they’ve changed. Even Denmark, you didn’t mention Denmark because Denmark isn’t governed by a right-wing party, but they are governed by a female president who is a Social Democrat.

But what she did is she uses the same methods the politics the right-wing party kind of is. And that’s why the right-wing parties in Denmark aren’t existent anymore, to be honest.

So it’s not who runs a country, which party—right or left-wing. It’s what policy do you do in your country? And talking about the AFD, it’s very, very strong in East Germany because the East Germans, I think they have—we say they are better antennas, which you know what I mean.

Because they come from a climate like they did. The elder people who lived in a climate like they did, they know if something’s not going right in your country, and that’s why they turn to the AFD more than we in the West do.

And it’s not—and many say they should be forbidden; the party should be forbidden. And I say, who are we, the people, to say it should be forbidden? Or it’s not a democratic party? For me, only one institution could say that—that’s the high court in Germany. If they say, yes, they should be forbidden, okay.

But me or the press aren’t the people or the institutions to say that. So like I said a few minutes ago, it will be very interesting to see how the AFD and the CDU will compare with each other or if they go together after the free elections we have in East Germany, and that would be very interesting!

Well, you talked about antennas, and you know I’ve traveled extensively with my wife through Eastern Europe in the last years multiple times, many, many different countries, meeting with many, many people. And certainly, one of the things I saw was that the survivors of the Soviet regime, which is what those people are, are much more sensitive to the dangers posed—and the reality of the radical leftist agenda that is sweeping over the Western world in the guise of, in the hypothetical guise of the continuance of liberalism.

And that seems to be reflected, for example, in the attitude of the East Germans that you just described toward the globalist utopian quasi-green agenda that we’ve been discussing. You know, my sense has been quite strong in recent years that the bastion of European civilization—that would be Judeo-Christian civilization—in Europe has now shifted to Eastern Europe rather than Western Europe.

And, you know, with the UK playing a rather ambivalent role in that regard because it’s a country that’s very split, with the Brexit people more aligned with the Eastern Europeans, and the, well, the Labor Party, which is most likely to be the next government, much more aligned with the globalist utopians in Brussels.

So, Ava, what’s on your slate now? The protests in Germany have come to their current conclusion, and then Anthony, maybe you can tell us what’s well—what’s the