Jan 15 (Reuters) – The combined fortunes of the world’s five richest men have more than doubled to $869 billion since 2020 while five billion people have been made poorer, anti-poverty group Oxfam said.
An Oxfam report, which comes as business elites gather this week for the annual World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, found that a billionaire is now either running, or is the main shareholder of, 7 out of 10 of the world’s biggest companies.
Far-right groups have discussed toppling the German government as they seek to harness the anger of ongoing farmer protests over subsidy cuts.
A protest took place in Berlin on Monday amid fears extremists are infiltrating the agricultural movement.
Our team Germany has been working with BBC Verify to build up a picture both online and on the ground.
While the far right is piggybacking on the row, a “Germany first” narrative appears to be gaining wider traction.
This is the same MSM technique we witnessed in Canada, one guy tries to make a poorly thought out point by waving a Nazi flag and the MSM pounces declaring all Truckers to be NAZIS.
The goal isn’t to discredit the “far right” but to discredit the farmer’s protest.
How many Swastikas have the Hamas supporters waved about? Why aren’t they called NAZIS? Why is the media for the most part treating them with Kid Gloves.
The Year of Elections has already terrified the establishment. Good.
‘2024 is the Year of Elections and that’s a threat to democracy.’ If you had to sum up the ideology of Western elites in one headline, you’d struggle to beat that one – from a recent Bloomberg piece about the apparent horrors that await us in the next 12 months.
Progressives have abandoned the working class and embraced the oligarchs.
The Western world is experiencing the most dramatic political realignment since the rise of socialism over a century ago. The driving force then was the rise of the working class, created by the Industrial Revolution. Today, it is the shift to an economy dominated by information industries, technology, finance and media. This new economic order, just like that which arose a century ago, is creating a highly disruptive political dynamic and a shift in historic class allegiances.
The political class wants to demoralize opponents, disenfranchise citizens, and demonstrate power.
Elon Musk said the following on a recent episode of the Joe Rogan podcast:
[George Soros] had a very difficult upbringing, and, in my opinion, he fundamentally hates humanity … He’s doing things that erode the fabric of civilization … Soros realized that you don’t actually need to change the laws; you just need to change how they’re enforced. If nobody chooses to enforce the law or the laws are differentially enforced, it’s like changing the laws.
This is crucial and explains why much of what the political class does appears so gratuitously provocative.
Over the last year, we and others have documented the leadership and participation of United States military, intelligence and law enforcement agencies in demanding greater censorship of legal speech online by social media platforms. Over the last two weeks, we have traced the creation of a mass, public-private censorship effort called Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL) to two separate U.S. Department of Defense organizations .
Adding to this large and growing body of evidence is the fact that there appears to be a limited number of interpretive frameworks used by the U.S. government, NATO and their allies for characterizing their populist enemies. From the Russia hoax to the COVID lab leak to the recent riots in Ireland, the news media, governments and leading NGOs have framed populists as foreign, crazy, harmful and undemocratic .
Why should belonging to the majority ethnic group of a given place be a disadvantage?
Autumn 2023 may be remembered as a benchmark for a more explicit split between the political class and popular feeling in Western Europe than had previously been the case, bringing with it, at least in the short term, the normalisation of repression and violence.
With the rise of ‘populist’ right-wing parties, we are also seeing a rise in political violence and threats. On October 8th,
According to AfD officials, [Alice] Weidel was forced to flee her apartment due to what appears to have been advanced intelligence about an imminent attack against the politician and her family as the AfD prepares to contest regional Bavarian elections on October 8th.
On November 9th, Alejo Vidal-Quadras, co-founder of VOX, was shot in the face in Madrid, Spain. And a week later, on November 20th, Thierry Baudet was taken to hospital after being attacked with a bottle in Groningen—the second case of physical violence against him in a month.
The termites have been feasting on rot of the American establishment for a long time.
Some years ago, I was in Boston on business, and invited a European friend to lunch. The man was finishing a year-long fellowship at Harvard University, and was about to head back to Europe. Over a spread of delicious New England raw oysters, I asked my friend what the most important lesson he learned from his year at America’s most prestigious university.
He thought for a moment, then said, “How fragile the American elites are.”
Supporters of such campaigns around the globe are more diverse than academics and the media acknowledge.
The world watched as a political earthquake hit the Dutch parliament on November 22. The party of populist radical-right politician Geert Wilders, whom many caricature as the Dutch Donald Trump, won 37 seats in the Netherlands’s 150-seat Second Chamber, potentially positioning him to become the country’s next prime minister. Hundreds of left-wing voters immediately took to the streets of Utrecht and Amsterdam and protested his victory.
Twitter Files journalist Michael Shellenberger rebuked leftist billionaires who oppose both popular sources of energy and their most effective replacements during a conversation with independent journalist Tucker Carlson.
They are surprised their failures have stirred a populist mass movement.
American populism’s rise is directly connected to the failures of our self-styled elites. American elites have in numerous instances missed the coming of important crises, some of which they have caused. Average Americans have borne the brunt of these crises. Today’s populist rise is simply the people’s recognition of the elites’ hypocrisy and culpability in what they have had to endure.
In less than a generation, America has undergone a series of important crises across virtually every aspect of life.
Globalism, climate-change alarmism and cultural self-annihilation have all come under serious challenge.
The new moral order our secularist elites have been busy constructing since the end of the Cold War is collapsing around them.
Over the past 30 years, the values of Judeo-Christian belief that had inspired and sustained Western civilization and culture for centuries have been steadily replaced in a moral, cultural and political revolution of the postmodern ascendancy. But the contradictions and implausibilities inherent in this successor creed have been increasingly exposed, and its failure to supply the needs of the people is discrediting it in the popular mind.
Almost one-third of Europeans now vote for populist, far-right or far-left parties, research shows, with wide support for anti-establishment politics surging across the continent in an increasingly problematic challenge to the mainstream.
Analysis by more than 100 political scientists across 31 countries found that in national elections last year a record 32% of European voters cast their ballots for anti-establishment parties, compared with 20% in the early 2000s and 12% in the early 1990s.
The research, led by Matthijs Rooduijn, a political scientist at the University of Amsterdam, and shared exclusively with the Guardian, also found that about half of anti-establishment voters support far-right parties – and this is the vote share that is increasing most rapidly.
Its radical self-sufficiency is a rich man’s pose
Marie Antoinette probably never said “Let them eat cake”. But she did provoke popular fury by building a model peasant village at Versailles, where she would retire to escape the pressures and opulence of court life, and even sometimes dress up as a milkmaid for picnics or parties.
How did a handful of rain-soaked hipsters command so much more attention than genuine disaster victims?
Finally, US president Joe Biden has found a crisis that actually interests him. A mass-emergency event has, perhaps for the first time in his presidency, managed to elicit a speedy response from the leader of the free world.
Was it a toxic train derailment that poisoned the water of a small blue-collar community? Er, no. Was it a raging fire that killed a still-unknown number of residents in a historical indigenous island community? Also no.
