Brussels keeps misreading public backlash as foreign influence when much of it is simply exhaustion with elite overreach and failure
Look, Queen Ursula, we need to talk, girlfriend.
Yes, I’m addressing you directly, EU Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen, because I’m not going to pretend that there’s anyone in charge in Europe who’s actually elected by the people and crafting EU policy.
And since you’ve apparently been more interested in monitoring Russian media platforms for dissident views that could potentially qualify as “Russian-aligned” than stopping online clarion calls for mass migration pushes into the EU, RT seems as good a place as any for an intervention.
Because the problem for the EU is that it’s getting so dissociated from the realities and concerns of its own people that even the pure data wonks are starting to sound the alarm. Seat projections for the EU parliament are set to swing populist to the detriment of the right-left establishment majority for the first time ever, according to recent reporting by Euronews on research data complied by the Europe Elects platform.
Now, the next EU election isn’t until 2029, which is a long way off, and you could very well decide to drop all of this in someone else’s lap by then. After all, you keep telling us that Putin is coming to Western Europe around that time, so maybe you’ll want to personally be busy window shopping in New York by then, instead of dealing with the headache of his arrival – or alternatively, his non-arrival after spending years scaring up billions from European taxpayer pockets for military hardware to mark the occasion.
I hate to break it to you, Queen, but the data from this very non-Russian research outfit (Europe Elects), published by a non-Russian media outlet (Euronews), is basically saying that right now, Europeans are looking more increasingly pro-Russian than not. To the point where the EU parliament, after the next election, could see pro-Russian gains and the anti-Russian firewall lose its majority. Or at least that’s how you guys see it when you look down on the plebes.
Because apparently there is no such thing as people who are just genuinely fed up with how you guys are running things. We either support you – or support Russia. We’re just mindless units to be fought over, like the last jars of Nutella in a supermarket blowout sale.
Look, unlike you guys, the average European is fed up with hearing about Russia and Ukraine, and with European policies revolving around that conflict and sucking the life out of everything else that actually falls within your purview.
Perhaps it would be different if you had everything else under control, and had the luxury of jacking around outside of the Eurozone that you’re actually responsible for – but that’s clearly not the case. The usual way that politics is supposed to work is that the establishment takes action A, and its impact is direct, positive, and visible on issue A. Instead, what we’re getting is action A being taken on issue A, and causing not only aggravation and worsening of issue A, but also of issues B, C, D, E… which happened to be more or less fine before. This is what has happened with the EU’s Ukraine obsession, and now it seems like it’s becoming par for the course for other issues, too. It’s like we’re spending money to see pure ideology in action rather than success as defined in the dictionary and not through some kind of Orwellian rhetoric that flips everything on its head.
In just the latest example, even one of the most stalwart establishment entities of an EU state has explicitly asked what the heck you think you’re doing. The EU has fallen into line in pushing this authoritarian control of internet use, promoting a “harmonized” bloc-wide control of internet use under the pretext of protecting kids – which apparently requires ID collection from every single adult user, as well. Turns out that even the French Constitutional Court told French lawmakers to take their law and shove it somewhere else other than up the rears of the French populace.
“By prohibiting minors under the age of 15 from accessing certain online services, the law inherently requires every person, even an adult, to prove their age before accessing them,” the court ruled. “By failing to specify the conditions and limits under which such proof must be provided, the legislature has not established the legal safeguards necessary to ensure compliance with these requirements.”
The court obviously doesn’t understand that the whole idea is to use kids to push a mass surveillance scheme. Or else it does understand – and isn’t going for it. Is the judge populist? Does he have a photo of Putin hidden in his desk? Or maybe the judge – like so many others – is just genuinely fed up with establishment hacks on all sides colluding with some opaque agenda whose advancement routinely seems to leave the average person worse off.
Consider, for instance, that this mass data initiative just happens to coincide with the recent revelation that the French public finance department – in other words, the tax collection folks – was massively hacked back in June. The hackers made off with almost all conceivable personal, tax, and income data of an estimated 700,000 taxpayers, according to a French European lawmaker. How do we know all this? Because the hackers said so. It was only then that the establishment felt compelled to inform people.
Hey, Queen Ursula, why don’t you guys just get in touch with the hackers and mainline all our “save the kids” internet data right to them? Just make sure they have to double-authenticate and click on all the cookies to access it first, though.
Again, the action taken on problem A (the kids running into perverts online), risks causing other problems of B (authoritarianism), C (data leaks), D (constitutional issues), and E (hacker-facilitated scams), even before there’s the most remote opportunity to credibly ascertain whether it does anything at all to actually fix issue A.
Look, I’m personally one of the center-right cohorts that you lost with this kind of nonsense. And things like this perfectly illustrate why populism is on the verge of exploding in Europe. Because who’s even left? We’re looking for people to lead with basic common sense. Folks who can read the room, and who are as far away as possible from your blast radius. If Russia is cheering that on, then you only have yourselves to blame. Perhaps that wouldn’t be the case if your repeated insistence on lockstep groupthink hadn’t pushed any real, legitimate dissent outside the tent and left only idiocy to bounce around off the walls unabated.
Admittedly, you guys do a great job with the food quality regulations that the average person doesn’t have the knowledge or time to police themselves. And the tethered bottle caps have grown on me. I actually miss the feeling of the plastic on my face when I take a swig of a Pepsi outside of the EU, and the cap risks rolling under the car seat. I’m not bringing my own durable container to fast food takeout, though. You can forget that. I am the durable container. Fill me up!
All I’m saying is that Euronews is warning you that you’re turning even more Europeans into “Russians” (by your own definition), and that your iron-fisted smashing of the alarm on the results of your own idiocy is counterproductive. The data shows that it’s only giving a growing number of Europeans even more incentive to just unplug the entire European establishment at the ballot box.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
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