Saturday Commentary and Review #87
Italy's Giorgia Meloni Ascendant, Stanford U's Social Life Snuffed Out, Russian Anti-Putin Intellectuals Rally Around Regime, 1990s Internet, Go Vegan/Fall Apart
A crisis of confidence continues to grip centrists (spanning from the centre-right to the centre-left) in western liberal democracies. Humiliated by #Brexit, it took all the power of the US Deep State and media to sabotage the populist Trump Presidency. They were helped in these efforts by the stroke of luck that was COVID-19, giving both North American and European centrists breathing room to regroup and attack, despite being all out of ideas and losing legitimacy in the eyes of a growing number of their own citizens.
Poland Hungary are ruled by populists. France’s Parliamentary elections last week saw Macron’s party lose its majority as populists from both the left and the right made historical gains (Le Pen’s RN increased its total from 8 in 2017 to 89, for example). Spain’s VOX is polling strong, finishing an impressive 3rd in the traditionally left-wing region of Andalusia last weekend as well. These are significant gains, but to be honest, neither VOX nor RN are poised to lead a national government in their respective countries any time soon.
Italy is a different story. The economic “sick man of Europe”, its debt is 150% of its overall GDP. With a population just slightly under 60 million, another economic crisis in that country could threaten the whole of the European Union with extinction. Run by Mario Draghi, a man effectively selected by Eurocrats in Brussels (and the European Central Bank, specifically), anti-mainstream and anti-systemic politics have found a growing chorus of support.
Many of you are familiar with Matteo Salvini, the leader of LEGA, a right wing populist party with its base of support in the industrial and very wealthy north of Italy. His party managed to climb above 30% in polling just as COVID-19 barged its way into the news. His future coronation as Prime Minister of Italy seemed inevitable, so much so that I wrote two long-form pieces on its certainty (here and here). Turns out that I was wrong. The impact of COVID-19 and Salvini’s participation in the Draghi-led government were a one-two punch to LEGA’s popularity, as he was seen as a creature of the system. The protest vote deserted LEGA, defecting to FdI (Brothers of Italy), led by firebrand Giorgia Meloni. Rachel Sanderson profiled her last month in this Bloomberg opinion piece:
Mario Draghi’s technocratic government has less than a year until the end of its mandate — and “Super Mario” has said he won’t seek another term. Giorgia Meloni, the first woman to lead a political party in macho Italy, is now seen as the force to beat in the post-Draghi era. And if she emerges as Draghi’s successor, it will be a political earthquake for Italy and for Europe.
That’s because Meloni’s Brothers of Italy was founded out of the ashes of the fascist National Alliance in 2012. On May 17, polls put her party’s support at 23% of prospective voters, two points ahead of the center-left coalition led by Enrico Letta. The erstwhile right-wing powerhouse, Matteo Salvini’s League, is polling at 16%, a collapse from a height of 30% in 2019. If national elections took place right now, a potential alliance — led by Meloni and including Salvini’s League and followers of disgraced tycoon Silvio Berlusconi — would capture the most seats in the legislature and form a government.
The LEGA-FdI tandem has been collectively polling at around 40% now (the threshold needed to form a government) for three years now, but Italy has this odd system where technocratic governments continue to get installed due to foreign meddling, particularly from the aforementioned European Central Bank (ECB). If you’re interested in learning more about this end run around democracy, check out the Thomas Fazi (he’s excellent, btw) piece that I profiled in June of last year here.
Meloni is already seeking to broaden her appeal — by softening her rhetoric. On talk shows and in print, she’s started describing herself as center-right. Few — if any — of her interviewers have challenged her on this revisionary self-portrait. She’s scouting for academics and business leaders who will make her appear more politically mainstream, according to people who have been contacted by her team. But drill down into her ideas and she has more in common with the illiberal democracies of Poland’s Law and Justice party and Hungary’s Viktor Orban.
Meloni’s success stems in part from being excluded. Her Brothers of Italy party was the only major political organization not included in Draghi’s right-to-left pandemic era “government of unity.” That’s given her a freedom to soak up protest votes among those affected by Italy's growing economic inequality, and disillusioned by Brussels elites. Draghi, the former European Central Bank president, was also appointed not elected prime minister. That makes him a perfect foil for Meloni's anti-establishment rhetoric.
The continuing collapse of Italy’s Five Star Movement has seen even more protest votes swing Meloni’s way.
The following is key:
Meloni, 45, accumulated political capital from the political kabuki that sought to shift Draghi to a more secure and permanent position of power — the presidency — in February. A farcical and inconclusive vote ended with Sergio Mattarella, the sitting president, putting off his retirement for want of enough parliamentary support for the move. None of the ruling coalition — including Salvini — came out looking good. But the chaotic process also humbled “Super Mario.” The prime minister is no longer the savior demigod he once was.
Meloni is now the only real political star untainted by the machinations of the sistema. She’s learned lessons from the failure of the hardcore euroskepticism of Le Pen and Salvini — indeed, she’d distanced herself from Le Pen, well before the French elections. Meloni’s positioned herself as a new type of conservative, calling herself “a right wing” Tony Blair. If that's confusing, it's probably intended to be. Many of Meloni's positions are contradictory. She knows Italy needs European Union funds, hence the softer anti-EU stance. But she remains openly opposed to immigration and against European federalism. An unmarried mother, she presents herself as a defender of Christian, traditional family values.
Italians haven’t been this far from actual democracy since the fall of Mussolini. Elites, both foreign and domestic, install their favourites into power, without even allowing for the veneer of popular assent to hide it. Little wonder that she has become so popular.
She’s a striking persona in Italy’s culture of toxic machismo — and, if she emerges victorious in an election, she would be the country’s first woman prime minister. She’s winning support from unlikely quarters on that basis alone. I met with an Italian female business leader last week who naturally leans left but still thinks Meloni is worth considering because she’d make history for her gender.
But don’t be fooled by the feminist gloss. Meloni has argued “abortion is a defeat for society” and led opposition in Italy's parliament to a law enshrining LGBTQ+ rights.
There's plenty that can change between now and the end of Draghi’s mandate in spring 2023. A rewriting of Italy's electoral law to favor more proportional representation could greatly reduce Meloni’s chances. She also needs the backing of Italy's northern industrial elite and the entrepreneurial class. That's a tough task for a woman who grew up in a working-class district in Rome. Salvini would also not appreciate her impinging on his turf.
Italians tell me that her rough, southern working class accent puts off a lot of northerners. I don’t know how much of an impact that would have on voting, tbh. Maybe our Italians here at this Substack can fill us in a bit on that.
Italy is where a populist revolt most threatens Brussels, which is why we should monitor events there closely.
Last week, we took a look at that piece in The Intercept that detailed how liberal NGOs in the USA are tearing themselves apart due to infighting, negatively impacting their ability to do what their organizations set out to do in the first place. We all had a good and hearty laugh at their expense. In response to that, I received many emails from you guys asking me to share this piece from Palladium that details how academic bureaucracy is destroying social life at Stanford University, one of the most important academic institutions in the USA. I had it lined up to go already, but that Intercept piece was just too tempting not to share right away, and I didn’t want to include two similar articles about humourless administrations in the same weekend review.
The piece opens up with a story from 1993, one common to US colleges at the time, illustrating the micro-cultures that populated that world:
JP’s favorite college story is the night he built an island. In the fall of 1993, JP was a junior in Stanford’s chapter of Kappa Alpha. The brothers were winding down from Kappa Alpha’s annual Cabo-themed party on the house lawn. “KAbo” was a Stanford institution, a day-to-night extravaganza that would start sometime in the morning and continue long after midnight. The girls wore bikini tops and plastic flower leis, and the boys wore their best Hawaiian shirts.
That year, the brothers had filled the entire main level of Kappa Alpha’s house with a layer of sand six inches deep. The night was almost over; the guests were leaving and the local surf rock band had been paid their customary hundred dollars in beer. The only question was what to do with all the sand.
No one remembers who had the idea to build the island. A group of five or six brothers managed the project. One rented a bulldozer; another shoveled the sand off the floor. Their house was not far from Lake Lagunita, the mile-wide lake on Stanford’s campus. The only holdup was the strip of university-owned land between the house and the lake.
It was JP who talked to Stanford’s head groundskeeper and convinced him to let the bulldozer pass. In the end, the groundskeeper admired their spirit. “If anybody asks you about it,” he said, “just send them to me.”
Later that year, the brothers installed a zipline from the roof of their house to the center of the island. They also built a barge, which they would paddle around the lake on weekends and between classes.
A bit of imagination, initiative, improvisation, and derring-do. What’s not to like?
It is hard to imagine someone at Stanford building an island anymore. In fact, it is hard to imagine them building anything. The campus culture has changed.
Today, most of the organizations JP remembers from Stanford are gone. The Kappa Alpha boys have been kicked out of their old house. Lake Lagunita was closed to student activities in 2001, ostensibly to protect an endangered salamander that had taken up residence in the artificial waters. Eventually, Stanford let the lake go dry. JP claims you can still see his island though, now a patch of elevated ground in a dry, dusty basin.
Stanford’s new social order offers a peek into the bureaucrat’s vision for America. It is a world without risk, genuine difference, or the kind of group connection that makes teenage boys want to rent bulldozers and build islands. It is a world largely without unencumbered joy; without the kind of cultural specificity that makes college, or the rest of life, particularly interesting.
Bureaucratic-driven cultural shift:
Since 2013, Stanford’s administration has executed a top-to-bottom destruction of student social life. Driven by a fear of uncontrollable student spontaneity and a desire to enforce equity on campus, a growing administrative bureaucracy has destroyed almost all of Stanford’s distinctive student culture.
What happened at Stanford is a cultural revolution on the scale of a two-mile college campus. In less than a decade, Stanford’s administration eviscerated a hundred years of undergraduate culture and social groups. They ended decades-old traditions. They drove student groups out of their houses. They scraped names off buildings. They went after long-established hubs of student life, like fraternities and cultural theme houses. In place of it all, Stanford erected a homogenous housing system that sorts new students into perfectly equitable groups named with letters and numbers. All social distinction is gone.
Whenever Stanford empties out a fraternity or theme house, the administration renames the organization’s former house after its street number. Now, Stanford’s iconic campus Row, once home to dozens of vibrant student organizations, is lined with generic, unmarked houses with names like “550,” “680,” and “675” in arbitrary groupings with names like “S” and “D”.
“All social distinction is gone”.
I’m not going to play dumb and pretend that Greek Life (fraternities/sororities on campuses) is innocent and sweet; there has long been a culture of sexual exploitation and dangerous alcohol/drug usage on many campuses across the country. This is not a secret, and I’m certain that it has played a role in helping shut it down at places like Stanford. I have no interest in defending Greek culture. What interests me is the ideological capture and the changes that stem from it.
This only tells part of the story, though. There is also a psychological element: resentment of these types of people from those either not accepted by them (and upset by that fact), or simple ideological hatred towards them.
Stanford as elite:
Zach, a Stanford ‘81 graduate, recalls Stanford as weird and wonderful, a four-year fever dream. When I asked Zach to describe the campus social life in the eighties, he laughed. “What kind of drugs do you want to hear about?” One boy in Zach’s class built his own generator on the lawn outside his dorm. Later, he claims, that same boy went on to become “a very important computer person.”
Stanford’s support for the unconventional pioneered a new breed of elite student: the charismatic builder who excelled at “breaking things” in nearby Silicon Valley. Stanford students were aspirational and well-rounded, confident enough to perform in a bucket hat and floaties and make out with strangers during Full Moon on the Quad. For a time, Stanford experienced a brief golden age when a spontaneous, socially permissive culture combined with a class of 5%-acceptance rate baby geniuses.
Stanford’s already formidable reputation grew, in large part, because of the way these lessons translated into the work and lives of its graduates. Between 1998 and 2013, Stanford students founded Google, Pinterest, Instagram, and Snapchat. New grads were turning down $350,000 starting salaries to try their hand at changing the world, or at least beating their classmates at making their first million. Soon, breathless articles described the mythical school where money grew on trees, where America’s academic wonderkids went to make their fortune under the California sun.
Starting in 2013, Stanford was consistently ranked first by students and parents as “America’s Dream School.” Stanford was elite, but unlike most elite schools, what made Stanford the object of such national obsession was that it was also fun. Stanford had created a global talent hub combined with explicit permission for rule-breaking. As a result, students learned a valuable lesson: they had agency; they could create their own norms and culture instead of relying on higher authorities.
Stanford had become a global brand, and this type of behaviour was seen as threatening that brand. It had to be shut down, and the Fraternities were the first to go.
Unlike Harvard, which abruptly tried to ban “single-gender social organizations” and was immediately sued by alumni, Stanford picked off the Greek life organizations one by one to avoid student or alumni pushback. The playbook was always the same. Some incident would spark an investigation, and the administration would insist that the offending organization had lost its right to remain on campus. The group would be promptly removed.
Over time, it became clear that their decisions only ever went one way—fewer gatherings, fewer social groups. The campus spirit waned year by year.
And yes, there is a “woke” element to this story:
When Stanford could not remove a student organization for bad behavior, they found other justifications. One such case was the end of Outdoor House, an innocuous haven on the far side of campus for students who liked hiking. The official explanation from Stanford for eliminating the house was that the Outdoor theme “fell short of diversity, equity and inclusion expectations.” The building formerly known as Outdoor House was added to Neighborhood T.
Next year, Outdoor House will be reinstated, but only because house members promised to refocus their theme on “racial and environmental justice in the outdoors.” Upholding diversity, equity, and inclusion is the first of four “ResX principles” that now govern undergraduate housing. Stanford reserves the right to unhouse any organization that does not, in their opinion, uphold these principles.
Stanford has fallen to DEI.
At the beginning of the war in Ukraine, the USA announced that its goal would be to arm Ukrainians in order to erode Russia’s fighting capability, while introducing a sanctions regime to cripple its economy. This then quickly shifted to the neo-conservative dream of regime change in Moscow, an enormous escalation. To make matters even worse, this past week the USGov’s CSCE held a panel on the “moral and strategic need” to dismember Russia.
There were hopes in the West that an economic collapse in Russia would see the oligarchs turn against Putin. Mikhail Fridman of Alfa Group, one of the original seven oligarchs, laughed this notion off in a Bloomberg interview in March of this year, explaining how they as a group had no power since Putin tamed them 20 years ago.
There were also hopes in the West that Putin could be moved aside by people in the Kremlin with pro-western sentiments. This has failed to materialize as well. Even worse for the regime change artists and their allies fantasizing about partitioning Russia, anti-Putin intellectuals are now circling the wagons around the government, one that they had for years wished to see replaced. Anatol Lieven explains:
Dr. Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center until the Russian government closed it in April, was for many years one of the most important pragmatic Russian voices in support of cooperation with the West and the “westernization” of Russia. He was one of the few Russian figures still to retain some of Gorbachev’s hopes for a “common European home.” (I should say that I have known Dr Trenin since I was a British journalist in Moscow in the 1990s, and I was his colleague at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace between 2000 and 2004).
The significance of Trenin’s article lies in the evidence it gives of a consolidation of the Russian intellectual elites in support of the war effort in Ukraine. It is not in many cases out of a desire to conquer Ukraine (many of the figures joining this new consensus were strongly opposed to the invasion and loathe Putin), but out of an increasingly strong feeling that the United States is trying to use the war in Ukraine to cripple or even destroy the Russian state, and that it is now the duty of every patriotic Russian citizen to support the Russian government.
Trenin writes:
“[T]he US and its allies have set much more radical goals than the relatively conservative containment and deterrence strategies used toward the Soviet Union. They are in fact striving to exclude Russia from world politics as an independent factor, and to completely destroy the Russian economy. The success of this strategy would allow the US-led West to finally resolve the “Russia question” and create favorable prospects for victory in the confrontation with China. Such an attitude on the part of the adversary does not imply room for any serious dialogue, since there is practically no prospect of a compromise, primarily between the United States and Russia, based on a balance of interests. The new dynamic of Russian-Western relations involves a dramatic severance of all ties, and increased Western pressure on Russia (the state, society, economy, science and technology, culture, and so on) on all fronts.”
He continues:
“It is Russia itself that should be at the center of Moscow’s foreign policy strategy during this period of confrontation with the West and rapprochement with non-Western states. The country will have to be increasingly on its own…”Re-establishing” the Russian Federation on a politically more sustainable, economically efficient, socially just and morally sound basis becomes urgently necessary. We have to understand that the strategic defeat that the West, led by the United States, is preparing for Russia will not bring peace and a subsequent restoration of relations. It is highly probable that the theatre of the “hybrid war” will simply move from Ukraine further to the east, into the borders of Russia, and its existence in its current form will be contested…In the field of foreign policy, the most pressing objective is clearly to strengthen the independence of Russia as a civilization…In order to achieve this objective in the current conditions – which are more complex and difficult than even recently – there is a need for an effective integrated strategy – general political, military, economic, technological, informational and so on. The immediate and most important task of this strategy is to achieve strategic success in Ukraine within the parameters that have been set and explained to the public.”
This is a call for reforms, including anti-corruption measures; but explicitly part of a strategy of strengthening Russia and Russian society in order to resist the West and succeed in limited Russian strategic goals in Ukraine. Particularly striking is Trenin’s call for Russia to be strengthened as a separate “civilization” — an idea that he would never have supported in previous years.
Westernizers in Russia have finally realized that the goal is to destroy the Russian state, not to bring it “freedom and democracy”. The objective is to pilfer Russia like they did in the 1990s, with local collaborators, many of whom have found sinecures in the West since then.
False hopes shattered:
However, Russian hopes for some form of limited compromise either with America or Europe lingered on for many years. Realists to the core themselves, members of the Russian establishment found it hard to understand why America, faced with intractable problems in the Middle East and the rise of a powerful China, did not seek to reduce tensions with the far less dangerous Russia. Similarly, they were bewildered by what they have seen as a European failure to understand that with Russia as a friend, they would face no military threat on their own continent.
Lieven is a westerner, so keep that in mind when reading the following paragraph:
There seems to be a growing belief in the Russian elites — including many who were horrified by the invasion itself — that the vital interests, and even perhaps the survival, of the Russian state are now at stake in Ukraine. Unlike the Russian masses, these well-informed figures have not been brainwashed by Putin’s propaganda. Most of them see quite clearly the appalling mess in which Russia has landed itself in Ukraine and the terrible suffering inflicted on ordinary Ukrainians. But the only way they seem to see out of it is through something that can at least be presented as a victory.
The bolded part is key: America’s actions, and not Putin’s words, have convinced them that this is an existential matter. They now agree with Vladimir Putin where once the thought of doing so disgusted them.
There are an incredible number of cliches that we can trot out to describe the Internet (known as the “World Wide Web” back then) of the 1990s. “The Wild, Wild West” and “The Electronic Frontier” were two of the most common that I can remember, and both were absolutely true.
That first Internet Decade rode on a wave of idealism, promising increasing freedom and liberty from the constraints placed on us by media and government. Everything seemed possible back then. Limitless information was only a click of a hyperlink away.
Utopias never last (nor do they exist in the first place), and the Internet was quickly co-opted, re-purposed and monetized for the benefit of Big Business. Things took an even worse turn with the rise of data mining, effectively ending privacy and allowing corporations and governments to routinely spy on us and our electronic communications. The Internet has also changed us as humans; we have shifted away from in-person communication to digital, and from the meatspace to virtual reality represented by self-selected avatars.
Jeremy Carl has written a very interesting essay about the promise of those early days in the 90s (and where it has gone all wrong) for the new publication “Return”:
A couple of my Yale roommates genuinely loved computers and they went along with me on this journey into the early days of the web. One of them is now a senior developer at Apple, the other a multi-millionaire tech entrepreneur in Seattle. We’d sit there on our ancient Macs and get them to do cool things, including a primitive form of computer-to-computer instant messaging that could only be done with other students on the Yale network. These sorts of technologies, including email, were widely used by students – but few at the time realized their revolutionary potential.
When I first started using the web in 1993, on the first graphical web browser Mosaic, developed by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), there were about 130 websites in existence. I could surf essentially the entire web, and basically did. Thereafter the number of websites multiplied rapidly. I soon designed my first personal website, an exercise in enthusiastic collegiate cringe. It was one of the first few thousand sites in the world. There were no automated ways to build web pages at the time. I learned to code by hand from NCSA’s “Beginners Guide to HTML 1.0.”
Innocent times.
Promise:
I wasn’t just interested in the technology itself, but the culture around the technology. I remember the first few issues of Wired magazine, a breath of fresh air compared to stodgy academic courses and mainstream magazines out there. I thrilled about the new information economy and the patron saint of media technologies, Marshall McLuhan. I thrilled to the mantras from the Whole Earth Catalog’s Stewart Brand: “information wants to be free” or the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s John Gilmore: “The internet interprets censorship as damage, and routes around it” (an adage that subsequent events would prove to be rather oversold). What I lacked in sophistication about the world, I made up for with enthusiasm about the subject.
I remember reading Vannevar Bush’s article, “As We May Think,” which postulated a proto-form of hypertext years before the web existed. I was blown away by Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, a novel that seemed to have foretold much of our virtual future.
Techno-Libertarianism:
I don’t generally enjoy things: Or rather, I enjoy many things, but not often while I am doing them. Like many others with a more reflective character, my pleasure tends primarily to be retrospective: More “that was cool” than “this is cool.” But this was not true with my involvement in the earliest days of the web. Even at the time, I knew what we were doing was exciting and revolutionary even if most people didn’t understand it.
In general, techno-libertarian optimism ran amok in those early days of the web. Anything seemed possible, and we were too naive to realize that the suits and the bean counters always get their piece of the action.
Click here to read the rest of this interesting essay, one that will sound very familiar to the Gen Xers here.
This entry is already rather long, so I’ll cut to the chase and end this week with a story about how a world famous and universally-celebrated Manhattan restaurant decided to go vegan and destroy itself in the process:
Chandler Yerves had wanted to work at Eleven Madison Park since he was 14 years old. After all, it had been named the best restaurant in the world, counted Leonardo DiCaprio and Martha Stewart as fans, and had pioneered decadent culinary techniques like its celery root braised in pig's bladder and honey lavender roast duck.
So when Yerves was hired in May 2021 after showing up on a broken ankle to beg for a job, he was elated. Eleven Madison Park had been closed for 15 months during the coronavirus pandemic. Not only did Yerves have the opportunity to finally work there, but he had the rare chance to launch its brand-new vegan tasting menu. It was a chef's dream.
Or it was until the day he found himself running around the streets of New York holding a ruler.
A sous-chef sent Yerves out, instructing him not to return until he had enough 5-inch red peppers for that evening's dish of fried peppers wrapped in Swiss chard. Yerves' bosses didn't care where the peppers came from. All that mattered was that they were exactly 5 inches and looked like the photos the restaurant posted on Instagram of its tasting menu.
Eataly's peppers were too big; two different Whole Foods didn't have them. It took him two hours to finally find the precise peppers at the third or fourth Whole Foods he visited. Half of the peppers he purchased ended up in the garbage, in line with what another former employee called Eleven Madison Park's "farm to trash" pipeline.
Yerves knew he needed to quit. He was exhausted from waking up at 4 a.m. and going to sleep at midnight, standing for six days a week on a broken ankle. (His walking boot was banned from the kitchen because of its open toe.) While the vegan tasting menu cost $335, he was paid $15 an hour as a commis chef, or junior prep cook. He was tired of being yelled at for things like scooping ice "too loudly" in the infamously silent kitchen. He bristled at the bins upon bins of wasted produce as Eleven Madison Park's owner and chef, Daniel Humm, trumpeted the restaurant's "higher purpose" and commitment to sustainability.
This is a fun read. Check out the rest here.
Thank you once again for checking out my Substack. Hit the like button and use the share button to share this across social media. Leave a comment below if the mood strikes you. And don’t forget to subscribe if you haven’t already done so.
Hit the like button and use the share button to share this across social media. Leave a comment if the mood strikes you (be nice!), and don't forget to subscribe if you haven't already.
My recent piece "Delusion" (https://niccolo.substack.com/p/delusion) has gotten a lot of interest and attention, and people like Rod Dreher of The American Conservative have said some really positive things about it and this Substack in general - https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/lying-liars-of-the-ruling-class-wokeness/.
That was very nice of him and I appreciate it.
Two things on Meloni.
Most likely she's a fraud. She's politically smart enough to copy popular political positions that 5 Stars and Salvini had in the past and had to become quiet about, to get a seat in the power room of Italy. She's also politically smart enough to never support policies that would radically alter the direction for Italy. Namely the vassallage status via NATO and the EU.
I say smart, because the liberals who run Italian institutions see her as much less of a threat than Salvini. This is a fact and liberal media in Italy regularly mentioned they'd prefer her over him. At the same time, it's hard to know what she really believes in and whether she'll be able to achieve anything of value if she ever manages to become Prime Minister. I don't have my hopes up tbh. The most likely scenario isn't that she's smart enough not to to show red flags for liberals, but simply that she's just innocuous enough.
Very interesting the part on Russia and good to see over there intellectuals aren't just whoring themselves to the woke empire like the rest of Europe is doing.