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Wearing a blond wig and walking through the streets of central Vienna in October 2017, Julia Ebner reminded herself of her new identity: Jennifer Mayer, an Austrian philosophy student currently studying abroad in London. It was one of five different identities that Ebner, an Austrian researcher specialized in online radicalization and cumulative extremism, adopted in order to infiltrate far-right/Islamist extremist networks. That day in October, she met a local recruiter for Generation Identity (GI), the European equivalent of the American alt right, which is mostly an online political group that rejects mainstream politics and espouses ideas of white nationalism. GI is the main proponent of the Great Replacement Theory, the baseless idea that white populations are being deliberately replaced through migration and the growth of minority communities. The theory has inspired several recent extremist attacks, including the murder of 51 people in Christchurch, New Zealand last March, and the mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas last August, which left 22 people dead.

The meeting with GIs local leader proved to be significant. Ebner learned about how important the group considered social media for their strategy to expand and recruit members in schools, public baths and other public venues that young people visit. She found out that GI were planning to launch an App, Patriotic Peer, that would connect a silent majority (in the words of the leader), which was funded by donations from around the world.

Securing the meeting wasnt easy. It took several months of setting up credible accounts within the various GI networks online and a couple of weeks of messaging with GI members. But it was necessary for Ebners research: the 28-year-old is a resident research fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based think-tank that develops responses to all forms of hate and extremism. She has advised the U.N., parliamentary working groups, frontline workers and tech firms on issues around radicalization, and her first book, The Rage: The Vicious Circle of Islamist and Far-Right Extremism, was published in 2017.

Two years ago, Ebner started to feel like she had reached the limits of her insights into the world of extremism. She wanted to find out how extremists recruit members, how they mobilize them to commit violence, and why people join and stay in the movements. Ebner believed she could only get her answers by being a part of these groups. Over the past two years, she has spent much of her spare time talking to people on online forums. They include the Discord group, used by the alt-right to coordinate the violent Charlottesville rally in August 2017, the Tradwives (short for Traditional Wives), which is a network of some 30,000 far-right women, who perceive gender roles in terms of a market place where women are sellers and men buyers of sex, and an online trolling army, Reconquista Germanica, which were active in the 2017 German federal election.

Ebner, whose new book Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists is published Feb. 20, spoke with TIME about what she discovered. The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.

Ebner: My first attempt of creating and maintaining a credible profile didnt work. I was kicked out of a group and had to start all over again.

I found switching between different identities stressful and confusing. Remembering exactly what I had said in my online profiles, previous chats and real-life conversations in these various roles could get challenging. Sometimes staying in my role and not being able to talk back as my real self was also difficult. There were many moments when I wanted to debunk a crazy conspiracy theory, or say youre not funny! instead of laughing at a racist joke, or convince younger members to cease their involvement with a group.

As youd imagine, I made made plenty of stupid mistakes. Dropping my real credit card was only one of them. Once I even signed an email with Julia instead of Jenni. Im not a professional MI5 agent, I did acting in high school but going undercover didnt come naturally to me.

I received some tips from a friend who has done undercover investigations himself and also trained people to infiltrate dangerous groups. I probably did appear nervous but I imagine most people who go to a first recruitment meeting with a white nationalist group leader probably would be, so I didnt think that it would be too suspicious.

In many cases, they offer an escape from loneliness and a solution to grievances or fears. A lot of the time it was a fear of a relative loss of status, which the networks blamed on migration and changing demographics. They offered easy explanations oversimplified rationalizations to complex social and political issues.

The networks also offered support, consolation and counselling. They can turn into a kind of family. Some people spend so much time online that I doubt they socialize in the real world.

On the surface, there was no clear profile. Users were from different age groups, social classes, educational backgrounds and depending on the group different ethnic backgrounds. The lowest common denominator was people who were in a moment of crisis. The recruiters did a good job of tailoring their propaganda to pick up vulnerable individuals. The Tradwives reached women who had relationship grievances, Islamist extremists recruited alienated Muslims whod experienced discrimination, and white supremacists exploited people who had security concerns.

It was a major part of the recruiters strategy. White supremacist networks, like the European far right, have a clear step-by-step radicalization manual, which they call recruiting strategies. The Tradwives, for example, made themselves seem like a self help group and I think thats what attracted even women from different ideological backgrounds, and even those who dont subscribe to traditional gender roles.

Some groups, the European Trolling Army for instance, had tightly-organized hierarchical structures. Neo-Nazi groups often have military-like structures, positions in the groups are even named after military ranks, and a person could rise to the top by running hate campaigns against political opponents.

Other networks, like the ones used by the perpetrator of Christchurch and the attack in Halle, Germany last October, had looser structures. They would get together on an opportunistic basis when they saw that something could be gained by cross-border cooperation. They use their own vocabulary and insider references when they decide to collaborate on a campaign or a media stunt. The Matrix is one of many internet culture references from Japanese anime to Taylor Swift. And they would be very effective at advancing these operations.

Far right groups have undergone a rebranding and have reframed the ideas held by traditional neo-Nazis. Generation Identity use euphemisms like ethno pluralism instead of racial segregation or apartheid, and combine video game language with racial slurs, creating their own satirical language.

Not only are extremist groups better at spreading their real ideologies behind satirical memes, theyre also being given a platform by politicians. Language which mirrors that used by proponents of conspiracy theories like the Great Replacement are retweeted by politicians and repeated in their campaigns. This is likely to become more prevalent in the next few months in the run up to the U.S. presidential election. The 2016 U.S. election proved to be one of the key turning points in uniting far right groups globally.

Trans-Atlantic cooperation between the far right in Europe and the alt right in the U.S. has been growing. Some of the ideologies that inspired the GI and other far right groups have been propagated by leading far right figures in the U.S. And the European far right have adopted some of the strategies of gamification and propaganda used by the Americans alt right. They both see themselves as fighters in a war against white genocide or the Great Replacement and there is loyalty between them that makes the idea of ultra nationalism obsolete.

One of the biggest problems is in the infrastructure of social media and tech companies. Algorithms give priority to content that maximises our attention and to content that causes anger and indignation. Its like handing a megaphone to extremists. Its allowed fringe views to get a much bigger audience. Developments in deepfakes, cyber warfare and hacking campaigns are likely to help extremists to refine their strategies.

Firstly, we need a global legal framework that forces all the tech companies not just the big ones but also the fringe networks, like 8chan and 4chan to remove content that could inspire terrorism. After the shootings in Christchurch and Halle, the documents the manifestos left behind by perpetrators were translated into several languages and shared on the fringe corners of the internet. We need a global approach because people can always find a way to circumvent national laws.

But content removal alone wont work. In my book I suggest 10 solutions for 2020; this includes more digital literacy programs in education settings, which can enhance critical thinking skills, help Internet users to spot manipulation and ultimately weaken extremists. We also need more deradicalization projects that use social media analyses to identify and engage with radicalized individuals. Counter-disinformation initiatives with the help of fact checkers and social media campaigners could be formed, as they have done in the Baltics, to debunk online manipulation.

Technology and society are intertwined. So, our response has to be integrated. We need an alliance across not only politicians and tech firms, but civil society and social workers.

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This Researcher Juggled Five Different Identities to Go Undercover With Far-Right and Islamist Extremists. Here's What She Found - TIME

A counterprotester confronts members of the Proud Boys and other right-wing demonstrators during an End Domestic Terrorism rally in Portland, Oregon. (Noah Berger / AP Photo)

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Several hundred anti-fascist activists gathered in Lownsdale Square, a small park in downtown Portland, Oregon, on February 8 to oppose a Ku Klux Klan rally organized by Steven Shane Howard, a former imperial wizard of the North Mississippi White Knights. But after local anti-fascist groups mobilized to counterprotest, Howard contacted the Portland Police Bureau to cancel his event. When the KKK didnt show up, we held a victory party instead.Ad Policy

Unfortunately, while we anti-fascists in Portland danced to a brass band dressed in banana costumes (the beloved Banana Bloc), more than a hundred members of the white nationalist group Patriot Front marched through the National Mall in Washington, DC, wearing white masks and chanting Reclaim America! and Life, liberty, victory!

In the aftermath, #AntifaTerrorists trended on Twitter. The hashtag tends to emerge when the right has an optics problem and needs to spin the narrative. An optics problem like, for example, white nationalists marching through the nations capital.

For all of the right-wing hand-wringing over people dressed in black wielding silly string and oranges, nearly all the domestic terrorists in the United States emerge from the extreme right. A 2019 report from the Anti-Defamation Leagues Center on Extremism showed that all 50 of the extremist killings in the United States in 2018 had links to right-wing extremists. Since 2001, the extreme right has killed 109 people. Over that same time period, anti-fascists are responsible for zero deaths.

The goals of anti-fascism are simple: oppose hate and prevent its spread. The goal of white nationalism, as established in core texts such as Siege: The Collected Writings of James Mason and the white nationalist utopian novel The Turner Diaries, is to destabilize American society and initiate a civil war. Amid the chaos of a fragmenting country, the white nationalists plan to seize control and establish a white homeland. (That nationalist doesnt refer to the United States. It refers to the white nation theyll form from Americas ashes.) Its far-fetched, but the improbability doesnt keep us safe from domestic terrorists working toward it.Related Article

Domestic terrorists are like mushrooms. Mushrooms are the surface expression of a complex network that lives beneath the soil and can span thousands of acres. Above the surface: A hate-filled personalmost always a white mancommits an act of terror, like the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting or the El Paso massacre. The popular narrative may describe him as a lone wolf, lashing out at society because of a personal grievance. We want to believe that; it renders each horrific attack an isolated event. But white nationalists are deliberately encouraging vulnerable individuals to carry out terrorist acts. In addition to message boards like IronMarch, 4chan, and StormFront, white nationalists rely on rallieslike the one planned by Howard in Portland and the one carried out in Washington, DCfor recruitment and radicalization. Rallies give them an opportunity to identify and connect with individuals who they deem open to indoctrination, as well as generating a trove of often sensationalized media coverage that they can mine for online propaganda.

In the spring of 2017, a Vancouver, Washingtonbased group called Patriot Prayer began crossing the Columbia River into Portland to hold right-wing extremist rallies. Emboldened by the Trump administration, they came to challenge Portlands reputation for progressive politics and values. Their intention was not to protest but to instigate conflict. Theyre frequently accompanied by members of the Proud Boys and known white supremacist groups, including the American Guard, the Three Percenters, and the Oath Keepers. They come dressed for battle, with helmets and body armor, sticks and bear spray, knives and guns. Oregon is an open-carry state, and the alt-right takes full advantage.Current Issue

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Theyve been confronted by anti-fascist protesters marching in black bloc as well as those rallying in solidarity. But theyve also been helped by the Portland Police Bureauan organization that includes among its ranks an officer who built a shrine to Nazi soldiers in a public park. In a series of hundreds of friendly text messages between Portland Police Lieutenant Jeff Niiya and Patriot Prayer leader Joey Gibson from 2017 to 2018, the lieutenant shared information about anti-fascist activist movements, including the locations of unrelated leftist events.

On the morning of a Patriot Prayer rally on August 4, 2018, police found members of Patriot Prayer with a cache of loaded weapons on a rooftop overlooking the location where the rally and anti-fascist counterprotest would take place. The weapons were taken and the Patriot Prayer members redirected. There were no arrests, and police returned the weapons after the event. The Portland Police Bureau informed neither the public nor the mayors office of this potential sniper threat until months later.

When the police form a line to separate one side from the other at these events, they always stand with their backs to the alt-right and their weapons facing the anti-fascist counterprotesters. Dispersal orders and crowd-control weapons like tear gas and stun grenades (flashbangs) go only one way, often deployed against the anti-fascists to allow Patriot Prayer to leave the area. Nonviolent protesters have been struck and seriously injured by flashbangs fired directly into the crowd by the police.

So why do we keep showing up to protest Patriot Prayer and their white supremacist friends? Why did we come together last Saturday to protest the KKK? Critics often tell us, Stop giving them the attention theyre looking for!

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We keep showing up, because ignoring hate doesnt make it go away; it only allows it to spread further. If we permit white supremacists to march through our city, theyll grow bolder. If we dont show up each time and prove that we outnumber them, their numbers will swell. Imagine the recruiting power of an artfully edited video of white supremacists marching unchallenged through the streets of a major US city like Washington.

On August 17, 2019, Patriot Prayer, the Proud Boys, and other extremists came back to Portland. Anti-fascist protesters recognized that videos of clashes have been used as right-wing propaganda, and so the anti-fascist group PopMob organized the Spectacle, an event designed to shut that down. PopMob encouraged Portlanders to wear whimsical costumes to an anti-fascist outdoor dance party adjacent to the far-right rally. That resulted in the confrontation of about 300 far-right demonstrators with roughly 1,500 unicorns, cats, witches, and bananas (the Banana Bloc, of course), joined by a contingent of protesters in a black bloc forming a front line to protect us. It was a very Portland protest, and it was also very effective. The far right called it quits after 30 minutes, retreated to their rental buses, and went home.

This past Saturday, the KKK wanted to test Portland, and once again we organized and claimed victory. Portland leftist organizations including PopMob, Rose City Antifa, Portland DSA, Jobs with Justice, Banana Bloc, the Direct Action Alliance, and others have formed a community to face down right-wing extremists.

When we counterprotest white supremacists in Portland, were working to cut off white nationalists recruitment and radicalization tools as early as possible. If you are opposed to fascism, you are an anti-fascist, and our fight is your fight. As a favorite chant at these anti-fascist rallies goes, We are many! They are few! We need to prove that nationwide.

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The Importance of Being Anti-Fascist - The Nation

Conservative commentator Candace Owens told Fox News hostLaura Ingraham on her Monday broadcastthat Bernie Sanders is the best racist on the left as she compared the Democratic candidate to Lyndon Johnson, a president who signed landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960s.

The good racist the best racist on the left, by the way is Bernie Sanders, because he pretends to be their friend. He lies to black Americas face, Owens said of the frontrunnerin national polls among the candidates vying for the Democratic nomination. He knows he is going to be the one like Lyndon Baines Johnson. Hes Lyndon Baines Johnson 2.0, who is going to enact policies that are going to harm black America for the next 100 years when he smiles in their faces.

Sanders famously marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1963. In contrast, President Donald Trump was sued by Richard Nixons administration in 1973 for violating the Fair Housing Act. Trump has a long history of making racist comments, includingpromotingthe racist birther conspiracy theory in 2011, defending alt-right protesters in Charlottesville in 2017 by claiming that there were good people on both sides and referringto several African countries as s**tholes.

Leo Terrell, a civil rights attorney who appeared on Ingrahams program with Owens, responded by asking:Did she talk about Lyndon Baines Johnson . . . and the Civil Rights Act? The Voting Rights Act?

He added, OK, she lost me.

Owens later defended herself on Twitter, writing that Johnson only signed the Civil Rights Act because he was forced to, as President. She also quoted the former president as saying, Ill have those n***ers voting Democrat for the next 200 years.

As historian Robert Caro explains in his four-volume, prize-winning biography The Years of Lyndon Johnson, the future president took a lead role in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and Civil Rights Act of 1960 while he was still Senate majority leader. After former President John Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Johnson took the reins on passing civil rights legislation and used his parliamentary skills to successfully push through both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Near the end of his presidency, Johnson also successfully pushed for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968.

This is not to suggest that Johnson had a spotless record on race. Like nearly all southern legislators in the 1930s, 1940s and early 1950s, Johnson opposed most of the major civil rights bills which came before the House of Representatives (where he served from 1937 to 1949) and the Senate (where he served from 1949 to 1961). He also frequently made racist comments to colleagues andfriends, as well as toblack Americans.

At the same time, there is no evidence that Johnson ever claimed that he was only passing civil rights using the slur cited by Owens. That quote originated from a former Air Force One steward named Robert MacMillan, who told journalist Robert Kessler about it in the 1990s. Though MacMillan supposedly heard Johnson say those words to two Democratic governors, it has not been corroborated. MacMillan made it clear in interviews that he intensely disliked Johnson on a personal level.

Despite his racist comments, Johnson was one of the most successful American presidents in terms of pushing for and achieving civil rights for black Americans themselves. There was a difference between Lyndon Johnson and all the other Americans who held racial stereotypes and between Lyndon Johnson and all the presidents, save only Abraham Lincoln, who came before him and who came after him, Caro wrote in his Pulitzer Prize-winning 2002 book The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate. Though Lincoln abolished slavery, Johnson gave black Americans the right to vote and made great strides toward ending discrimination in public accommodations, in education, in employment, even in private housing.

Ironically, Johnsons achievements in civil rights contributed to the Republican Party becoming a the staunchly conservative organization it is today. Johnsons Republican opponent in the 1964 election, Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona, rose to prominence in large part due to his opposition to those civil rights measures. His candidacy played a significant role in turning the overwhelming majority of black voters away from the Republican Party. Goldwaters candidacy also helped bring Ronald Reagan into national prominence as a political figure, paving the way for his election to the presidency in 1980 and the so-called Reagan Revolution, which transformed the GOP into a vehicle for modern conservatism.

Owens has aroused considerable controversy since she first began posting conservative videos in 2017 on her YouTube channel, Red Pill Black. The former Turning Points USA employee incorrectly claimed that the so-called Southern strategy of Republicans pandering to racism was a myth, and she had never seen evidence of racism in conservative circles. However, the former field director of Turning Points USA had to resign after saying, I hate black people. Like f*ck them all . . . I hate blacks. End of story.

She also falsely accused Democrats of sending explosive devices to prominent liberals, including George Soros, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in 2018, appeared to defend Adolf Hitler last year in comments meant to explain why she is a nationalist and was accused of politicizing the death of a college student allegedly killed by an undocumented immigrant.

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Right-wing Candace Owens claims on Fox News that Bernie Sanders is the best racist on the left - Raw Story

Some people plan to sit out the primary election and just vote in the general election in November.

In the primary election, you will be voting for delegates to the national convention. These delegates will select the candidate who will be on the ballot in November. In the general election you will be voting for electors to the Electoral College. These will actually elect the president.

Tennessee has 11 electors to the Electoral College. It is winner take all. The last time that Tennessee voted for a Democrat in the presidential election was in 1996, and the state has become redder every year since.

My point is that if you are a Democrat in Tennessee, your vote in November is less important than the vote in March. The presidential election will be decided in the swing states Arizona, Florida, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska's second congressional district, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

The decision for Democrats is who has the best chance to win in those areas of the country. This decision will be made in the primaries.

Please consider carefully and show up to vote on Super Tuesday, March 3 (early voting ends Feb. 25).

Jim Milburn, Lookout Mountain, Tennessee

***

Limbaugh, Trump are two peas in a pod

It's a good thing I didn't have a brick handy as I watched the latest State of the Union speech. If I had, I'm pretty sure I would have given in to the urge to hurl it at my TV the moment I saw Trump present the Presidential Medal of Freedom to one of the most racist, misogynist, hate-spewing purveyors of half-truths and ultra-conservative nonsense alive today besides the announcer of the award himself, that is.

Rush Limbaugh is to freedom what Lester Maddox was to the Civil Rights movement, or what Andrew Jackson was to Native American goodwill. It's disconcerting to know that he has a following of 15 million fans who hang on his every word.

The TFP's conservative editorial page editor, Clint Cooper, wrote glowingly of Limbaugh as a "pioneer." I suppose there is some truth to that, if the criterion for a talk-radio pioneer is being one of the longest-running and most prolific bloviators of hate, bigotry, and alt-right white male privilege of all time.

Rick Armstrong, Monteagle

***

Remember, politics, religion not same

Hate and outrage were quite obvious between Democrats and Republicans during the impeachment trial of President Trump. It continued throughout the State of the Union address.

Two days later at the National Prayer Breakfast, lacking was the assurance of restored unity and nonpartisanship. The president was acquitted, but the American people will never forget the dangerous partisan politics that played out by the opposing party.

Politicians think it's their duty to apply their best reasoning, including conscience and judgment, to their work rather than some perception of universal truth. Politics is not religion. It is not the battleground of good and evil. Religious people worship God. They do not worship political parties or ideologies.

Political opponents are not enemies. They all are advocates for the common good. They are to be a unifying force working to bind the nation together. They should advocate political compromise and make the case that the spirit of compromise is consistent with their faith.

Discussing religion and politics, I mean Judeo-Christian faith. I don't doubt the sincerity of our politicians' faith; however, the prayer breakfast promotes humility in the face of God's judgment and calls each other to fellowship across political differences.

Amos Taj, Ooltewah

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Primary election crucial for Democrats and more letters to the editors - Chattanooga Times Free Press

Welcome to the Voodoo West, a place where everybody wants the impossible and hopes for the unrealistic.

The West used to be the global middle class of politics. The ideals were great, the goals were moderate, and everyone was hard at work. Now the ideals are forgotten, the goals are grandiose, and laziness, especially lazy thinking, prevails.

This is the impression you can get of Western politics if you take one or two steps back, extract yourself from the daily fear and loathing of headline politics, and try to get a proper reading of the bigger picture.

The West consists of those parts of the world in which the ideas of the French and American revolutions of the late 18th centuries are embraced as the standard for public affairs.

The standards established by these revolutions rational self-government, regulated power distribution, proper legal procedure, freedom of speech, property rights form a great ideal that is not easy to live up to.

The yardstick of Westernness was therefore not whether a society would adhere to these standards flawlessly, but how seriously it would deal with violations against them.

Knowing full well that in a world run by humans perfection is impossible to get, the basis of western politics is not spotlessness but self-correction.

The basis for such permanent self-adjustment is a realistic view on where things stand. What is required is soberness about one's own goals and their achievability, and about the power, resources, limitations and weaknesses one brings to the game.

None of the West's major protagonists seems to have a very balanced assessment of these factors these days. Most of them run on delusion, self-deceit, dreams, misinterpretations of reality and what Marx would have called "false consciousness".

Take the United States. This president's foreign policies are fundamentally based on the idea that the US is endowed with an endless supply of strength and power that will forever make it the most powerful country in the world which will forever be able to prevail in any conflict it chooses or is forced to enter.

Such a country needs no rules, no treaties, no international organisations or multilateral institutions. Most importantly, it needs no allies, just tributaries.

Absolute sovereignty reigns supreme for such a country, and it is allowed to behave accordingly.

Or at least its president is. The flawed assumptions of limitless strength creates its own fatal political logic. If power is endless, values are negotiable.

If values are negotiable, power becomes absolute. And if power becomes absolute, corruption becomes absolute as well.

If allies are dispensable, treating them with disdain is not just possible, it is excusable. Sooner or later they will then no longer be allies. Within the paradigm of big power competition, the faith in one's own endless strength becomes a self-defeating proposition.

But this is not just about the United States, even though as the West's key power it deserves special scrutiny. Other parts of the West have their own extreme bouts of self-betrayal.

Germany believes that it can benefit from a shared European currency without paying for it. It also believes that it can have a strong, free and rich Europe in the world without arming and going to war for it.

It also believes that the UN is guaranteeing world peace. And it believes that if only the rest of the bunch was as virtuous as Germany, the world would be a better place.

The UK believes its special relationship with the US is still intact.

It truly seems to believe that it was EU regulations that prevented it from becoming a Singapore in the North Sea.

Perhaps it even believes it is desirable to be Singapore at all. It believes it can strike better trade deals outside of the EU than inside of the EU. And it really believes rather strongly that exiting the EU has anything to do with regaining control over its own affairs.

President Emmanuel Macron, on behalf of France, seems to believe that he can lead Europe on the euro, on defence, on China and on agricultural policy without too many of the quarrels of Brussels compromise-making and alliance-building.

He believes he can somehow make his country's nuclear deterrent meaningful for all of Europe without sharing it. He is also the crown witness for all of those who believe that European strategic autonomy is somehow in the books, despite zero evidence in its favour.

The Fridays for Future movement seems to believe that you can rebuild the economy of 500 million people in Europe without any politics involved, just by decree based on good intentions and a culture of generational victimhood.

Europe's alt-right hardliners believe they can build better lives for anyone based on a permanent battle against 'the other'.

Europe's illiberals and nationalists believe that the culture they want to preserve can be protected by building fences or stifling domestic dissent.

Hyper-integrationist activists believe that a European republic is about to emerge any moment now, leaving all national bickering and narrow identities behind.

The European Commission seems to believe that it can be a relevant geopolitical force by leveraging its trade and regulatory powers, but it is still unable to convince any EU member state that the commission should actually be geopolitical at all.

The principal driver of European politics at both the country and the EU level seems to be delusion and self-deceit.

The continent that gave the world the liberating force of enlightenment has collectively reverted to believing in fairy tales and the soothing power of cozy narrowness.

The leaders in Moscow and Beijing like what they see, and they are doing everything to strengthen the trend.

In this age of political endarkenment, pragmatists, non-zealous idealists, un-cynical realists and level-headed leaders without an unduly elevated sense of self-importance are needed more than ever. Irrationality often makes for the most beautiful moments in life.

But it makes for very bad politics.

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Western 'endarkenment' and the voodoo politics of Europe - EUobserver