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On Europe day, Romanians showed their support in the street for EU, for democracy and against fascism (mstdn.ro)

submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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On Europe day, Romanians showed their support in the street for EU, for democracy and against fascism

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

I think our democracies have trouble adapting to new times. They're like an old OS where all the exploits have been figured out and are freely shared among attackers, yet we refuse to slap on an antivirus.

Case in point: anti-democracy candidates should be banned from the democratic process. They're using democracy against itself. Călin Georgescu was banned for this reason as well as the 0 funds thing, because really his biggest issue was that he had direct ties to the modern day legionary movement (the Legion were the Romanian nazis back in the day, even collaborated with Hitler and did a bunch of pogroms under the military dictatorship of Ion Antonescu). So now this new guy George Simion, leader of our far right party (of which CG was a member a few years ago but then kicked out for being too on the nose about his sympathies for the Legion and Ion Antonescu), he's literally running as his proxy and said he'll install him as PM. So, I ask you: why is this possible? Why ban CG from running but not ban his BFF who literally everyone agrees is only running as a proxy for CG? It's just bad law enforcement. Democracy OS needs an antivirus update.

EDIT: Forgot to tie the idea to what you said.

So, in this context, the exploits are basically the same. Information is also global, so all you need is some guys in a central place (like, say, USA) being heavily financed, and foreign influence can spread easily to local influencers looking to make a quick buck by just copying the talking points. A foreign government which wants the EU dismantled, such as Russia or USA (yes, USA: the authors of Project 2025 are gearing up for this next, and all the Trump-like leaders that popped up in Europe in the last decades were part of Steve Bannon's efforts to create a fascist internationale), can additionally just directly fund local influencers throughout Europe as they did during CG's campaign in Romania, or as they did with USA influencers at TENET Media who they gave $10m (which in the context of a foreign government's budget is peanuts — it's obvious there's a lot more money being spent on such operations, and they admit it).

To get an idea for the kind of money conservative influencers are paid, we can look at an example of USA money funding USA influencers: Steven Crowder was offered a contract by The Daily Wire which he performatively turned down in public, calling it a "slave contract", because really he wanted to make his own media conglomerate to complete with them. TDW in response revealed that they did this because Crowder (who pretends he's independent, like all conservative pundits do) had a previous contract with The Blaze that was just expiring, and then showed the unredacted contract they offered him: it was for $50m.

Put together all the dark money with the opportunists who think that by emulating these influencers/politicians they can get rich or powerful quickly, not to mention the real extremists who seize this opportunity to revive their sick ideologies, and you have a thriving ecosystem all pulled in the same direction by greed and lack of morals. It's really just scams all the way down.