Trust me, a conspiracy theorist I’m not.

I believe that sort of blockheaded nonsense is for people who think with their primitive, compulsive brain stem, not their far-more-advanced pre-frontal cortex. It’s the difference between the reasoning of hysterical mass murderers (and Justin Bieber fans) and uber-calm chess grand masters.

But still …

A surge of right-wingism

Before, during and after the 2016 U.S. presidential election, I began to notice what seemed to be an unprecedented surge in right-wing nationalism in Europe, and not just the perpetually goose-stepping, stiff-arm-saluting Austrians, or the ever-fascistic Le Pen family in France.

What’s up with that, I wondered? It seemed odd, even immoral, in a continent that went to war — twice — against that sort of thing. Keep in mind that sixty million people died as a direct result of World War II alone.

Yet, by 2016, although Austria’s far-right Freedom Party was still somewhat of an outlier, it was “not an anomaly,” a September 22, 2016 Time magazine article warned:

“Across the once placid political landscape of Western Europe, right-wing upstarts have created what Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, recently termed ‘galloping populism.’ He was referring to movements like the Sweden Democrats, the National Front in France, the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands and other voices on the far right calling for their once open countries to close up and turn inward. But the insurgency is not limited to Europe. All the rising rightist parties are aligned with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in what they encourage voters to fear: migrants taking your jobs, Muslims threatening your culture and security, political correctness threatening your ability to speak your mind and, above all, entrenched elites selling you out in the service of the wealthy and well-connected.”

Democratic values attacked

As traditional American values and tendencies have been shred by President Trump since his 2016 election, those in Austria were turned on their head as well that year. Time reported that for the Freedom Party:

“Support for the state of Israel became part of its platform, and its new leaders renounced the aversion that their predecessors had expressed toward Jews. Instead [Freedom Party leader Heinz-Christian Strache] focused his party’s hostility on a different minority group: Muslims.”

Suddenly, fascism — which plunged the world into war in 1939 — was rebranded and, for some, made cool again. It got a gust of foul wind in its sails.

“Political Islam,” Strache told Time, “is the fascism of today, and that is what we have to fight.” Which is to say today’s fascists insist their flavor of fascism in and of itself is OK, not what most people reasonably see all fascism as: the root problem, whatever its political iteration. Fake news, in other words; an alternative fact.

Sound familiar?

Demonizing of Muslims

In 2016 France, some cities began prohibiting Muslim women from wearing full-cover “burkini” swimwear at beaches, and even in tolerant Denmark, of all places, the government passed a law allowing confiscation of valuables from immigrant asylum seekers to help pay for their cost to society. The United Kingdom stunned the world in June of that year by voting to exit the European Union (a move known as “Brexit”), driven largely by anti-immigrant anger of the U.K.’s closed-border Independence Party.

Then, pressed by the E.U. to accept a share of that year’s burgeoning population of refugees, Slovakia, Estonia, Bulgaria and Poland balked, agreeing only to take Christian asylum seekers. Hungary called for a referendum on the issue. Even ever-popular German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative party struggled against the far-right Alternative for Germany party (AfD), which got more votes than hers in an election in Merkel’s own district.

A conservative-made crisis

Ironically, the global recession of 2008, which was caused largely by the conservative financial tactic of obscurizing sub-prime home loans in the U.S., was seen as a catalyst of the hard-right turn in Europe and also America. What remains today is an abiding mistrust of the elite establishment that is blamed for causing the predicament in the first place.

Günter Haunlieb, a senior director at Gallup International, a leading pollster in Vienna, said in 2016:

“A steady job previously guaranteed a comfortable life here. But that’s finished. People have stopped believing they can move up the social ladder.”

In its 2016 article, Time concluded:

“Trump and his doppelgängers along the Danube have been able to capitalize not only on fears of migration but also on angst over economic inequality, often with what seem like the same slogans in different languages. On immigration: Send them back! On Muslims: Keep them out! On the media: Full of lies! On the Establishment: Crooked! On the elections: Rigged! Even their tactics seem to run in parallel, especially when it comes to the politics of fear.”

Welcome to 2018 in America. Read about this sea change here , and in this stark Washington Post op-ed, here, by Jennifer Rubin

A coincidence?

If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would say all this momentary right-wing ideology over multiple continents is way too homogenous to be just coincidental. Yes, tides of immigration from the atrocities of sectarian warfare in the Middle East have certainly put social pressures on adjacent nations, even America, but there’s something else going on that I just can’t put my finger on.

If I were a conspiracy theorist and a news-media owner, I would dispatch my best reporters to a host of right-leaning countries and try to find out if since before the 2016 U.S. election there has been any purposeful cross-fertilization of these impulses among covert agents.

Later in 2016, we suddenly had the Russians to worry about even more than we had before. The complete U.S. intelligence apparatus unanimously concurred that Russia, on the orders of President Vladimir Putin, had directly attacked our electoral process — some called it an “act of war” — to engineer a Trump victory over Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. The unsentimental Russian’s were also just trying to undermine the whole democratic experiment by exacerbating already roiling discord in our very open society that is exceedingly vulnerable to such subterfuge.

So, seemingly out of nowhere, we have an authoritarian U.S. president, bullying more than half the electorate against their wishes and kow-towing to an even more authoritarian Russian leader who is brown-nosing a growing slew of already or would-be authoritarian despots all over the world.

All conveniently at the same time.

No collusion, right?

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