[ Editorial ] Change Is Soon? Not Quite

In Europe, conservative, nationalist, and populist parties are unlikely to change a damn thing.

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Republican Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky delivers a damning verdict.

What the hell happened? Hypernormalisation, as Adam Curtis lays bare in his seminal documentary?

The term was borrowed from Soviet scholar Alexei Yurchak, who used it to describe late Soviet society: everyone — citizens and officials alike — knew the system was broken, dysfunctional, and built on lies, yet everyone kept performing as though it worked. Not out of genuine belief, but because no alternative was imaginable - which did not mean that one did not exist. The collective pretence became the social glue.

It is striking how those who claim to offer an alternative to globalism, Europeanism, and progressivism operate with the same mindset, the same intellectual framework, the same reflexes, and exhibit the same behaviours as those they purport to fight. Pure mirror play: oppositions only oppose each other symmetrically. No one has an angle. The reflection plane - the script - never changes.

Hypernormalisation.

Take the victimhood reflex — that insufferable posture. While progressives cry discrimination on grounds of gender, colour, or sexual orientation to demonise their opponents, “conservatives” — let us call them that, for want of a better generic term — have simply swapped it out for the censorship they claim to suffer on account of their ideas.

We are not saying this is entirely without ground. Discrimination exists. So does censorship. But not in the structural, all-pervasive way we are meant to believe — a convenient fiction that allows each camp to monopolise suffering, dodge accountability, and blame for their failures external forces they claim are beyond their control.

Progressive climate alarmism failing to land with the public? Blame social media for platforming sceptics. Eighty percent of French people opposing uncontrolled immigration? Blame social media for reflecting that majority view. Conservatives losing elections? Social media censorship, obviously.

Nobody stops to ask whether their message actually resonates with public opinion — shaped by lived reality, not by media — and subsequently whether their actions match their words.

Take La France Insoumise, the French radical left-wing party that has loudly demanded Macron’s departure since 2017, yet helped elect him twice (2017 and 2022), then squandered the 2024 legislative opening to give him the boot by engineering the election of 159 Macronist MPs in the second round — all to fend off a thouroughly fictitious fascism. The National Rally did no better, twice abstaining on no-confidence motions that would have cornered Macron into either a new parliamentary recall or resignation. That is the reality of what these two parties actually do. The script never changes.

But back to censorship. The grievance has become so lucrative it now functions as a fully-fledged business model for certain French alternative media outlets — outlets with no qualms about burning the bulk of their audience’s donations on washed-up, irrelevant boomer commentators who’ve been around for fifty years, bellowing into microphones and contributing close to nothing to public debate.

Indeed, at the height of woke capture, employees at certain platforms — Twitter and Meta in particular — did exercise censorship, because they were allowed to. Yes, during Covid, any criticism of government policy was systematically suppressed, and those same governments seized the moment to try to silence political opponents.

The platforms, however, quickly grasped the commercial damage. A social network only works when all opinions present in society are fairly represented. Anything less means haemorrhaging users, advertising revenue, and data.

Today in Europe, extra-judicial censorship is virtually non-existent. Contrary to what both progressives and conservatives insist, the Digital Services Act is a comprehensive failure as a speech-control instrument — because it is simply unenforceable. Not our claim, but the assessment of sources inside the regulatory apparatus itself: Digital Services Coordinators, the European Commission, and judicial institutions.

Take X. The €140 million fine handed down by the Commission is being challenged in court — the CJEU will decide, not the Commission. Don’t hold your breath: It’ll take years before the first ruling. The DSA is so toothless that the French government has resorted to weaponising criminal justice through asymmetric prosecutions - possibly unlawful ones, since the charges brought against X could equally apply to every other platform, none of which are being prosecuted.

[ Flash ] X Indicted

Not everything in the DSA is without merit, it should be said. For instance, it explicitly stipulates that providing a digital intermediation service guaranteeing encrypted communications and user anonymity cannot be deemed illegal or criminal, unless the service was designed specifically to support criminal activities.

As for state-approved trusted flaggers, a senior executive at a major platform was refreshingly blunt when we spoke with him: “Trusted flaggers get priority processing. We respond to them first — and in the majority of cases, we flip them the bird. Meanwhile, these NGOs can no longer sue us the way they used to. We couldn’t be happier.”

It is also worth recalling that last year in July, within sixteen days, the Paris judiciary tribunal handed down three landmark rulings with regards to DSA implementation, stating: that freedom of expression is the rule, not the exception; that it can only be restricted in cases of manifestly unlawful speech supported by concrete evidence; that a lawful subjective opinion cannot be censored; that freedom of expression and the right to information take precedence over the right to oblivion; and that anonymous speech is not in itself unlawful.

Anyone familiar with the chronic backlog of French courts knows this was no coincidence. It was a message from the judiciary: it will not tolerate having its monopoly over the control of the exercice of freedoms encroached upon.

We are not arguing that the censorship impulse should not be fought tooth and nail — freedom of expression is the bedrock of any democracy. What we are claiming is that every party that reaches power will, all things being equal, behave exactly like those already there, in order to stay there. One would have to be profoundly naive to believe that La France Insoumise or the National Rally, once in office, would not reach for state power to silence critics and opponents. They will be no better on freedom of expression than the centrist bloc.

Donald Trump was elected twice because his message was in tune with public opinion, against the establishment. During his first term, he proved incapable of delivery, unable to overcome the machinations of the deep state and the mainstream media. Elected a second time on the back of the Biden disaster, he promptly did the opposite of what he was elected for.

Hypernormalisation.

Today’s politicians are professional talking heads congenitally incapable of action — and it is on this basis that political personnel are selected, across all parties. Because they have nothing but words, because they are genuinely convinced that speaking is acting — which speaks volumes about their magical, infantile thinking — they will never stop trying to control speech by every means available, including censorship.

Let us close with elections — which in European countries, unlike the United States, are extremely difficult to rig, since voting requires ID and is conducted overwhelmingly on paper ballots, one race at a time.

It took intervention by the French senior judiciary in 2017 to sideline François Fillon so that Macron could clear the first round and ultimately win. In Romania, foreign pressure strong-armed the Constitutional Court into annulling the entire 2024 presidential process — just one week after it had validated first-round results in which Călin Georgescu had come first. In Hungary, Peter Magyar’s victory is explained primarily by Orbán’s fatigue after sixteen uninterrupted years in power, compounded by Brussels’ structural funds blackmail — without which virtually every country in Central and Eastern Europe would be in default.

Spending billions funding NGOs and media outlets to control political discourse has proven ineffective. So has platform regulation.

Which means that in France or Germany next year, attempting to cancel an election on grounds of foreign interference will not fly — neither legally nor in public opinion — given that we now have concrete proof that media and social networks lack sufficient influence to meaningfully compromise the integrity of a vote. And it does not look like the French judiciary will intervene, with a view to remain unscathed and preserve its prerogatives in case of an alternation.

Those in power have run out of solutions. The problem is that those hoping to replace them have none either.

Hypernormalisation.