Reptiles, clowns and dinosaurs roam around in Thierry Baudet’s world of thinking. Sometimes they appear in his tweets, speeches and interviews as a joke, then again as a metaphor, then again to articulate a deadly cynical message. And sometimes all at once.
That ambiguity is no accident. It is the core of the way in which Baudet conducts politics. Winning elections, as Forum for Democracy did in 2019 in the Provincial Council, and changing the system is hardly an issue anymore. Instead, Baudet wages his culture battle from the sidelines, increasingly using a cocktail of conspiracies and nihilism as a weapon.
The statement “we are ruled by a worldwide conspiracy of evil reptiles”, which Baudet made in a podcast early this week, fitted seamlessly with this style. The media dynamic, and his response to it, that followed did that even more.
With his statements, almost casually, Baudet appealed to a theory that pops up as well as genuine belief in powerful reptiles in the anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist David Icke and his followers, as in humorous photoshops on internet forums. As soon as he was criticized, Baudet insisted that it had been “natural” a metaphor for the “unfeeling” nature of world leaders and taunted his critics. The message: I may not be taken seriously, but certainly not the media.
Far-right ideologue Steve Bannon, who played a major role in Donald Trump’s rise, once described his own communication strategy as “flooding the zone with shit”: flood everything with dung. Bannon sees it this way: raising doubts and stirring up controversy is the perfect way to grab attention and shift the debate your way. Negative attention is also attention. Baudet is an admirer of Bannon, at the beginning of this month he called in as a guest on Bannon’s talk show.
Civilization can still be saved
Like Bannon, Baudet is a doomsday thinker, but he has moved on in that regard in recent years. For a long time he admired the ideas of Oswald Spengler, author of The Fall of the Occident, but without its pessimism about the inevitability of such demise. According to Baudet, the problem was in the current elite, from politics to the press to science, but in his view this was not irreplaceable. Civilization could still be saved with FVD’ers in the right places.
Baudet has all but given up that hope. He is still building his own world, with his own schools, his own currency (the Forumcoin) and an app (Forumland) for FVD followers to get to know other FVD members. But that is no longer a new society to replace the current one, but to escape it. A safe home for like-minded people.
The corona pandemic has been a crucial link in that process. That turned out to be a turning point in his thinking not only for Baudet. Conspiracy theorists around the world have seen the characteristics of virus control — far-reaching interventions in civilian lives, vaccinations, an important role for international organizations such as the World Health Organization — as evidence that the pandemic was in reality abused or staged to curtail freedoms and control power. of governments to increase. Baudet regularly emphasizes that the influence of corona on his thinking was enormous.
Hunger for power
The pandemic, he said, has made him realize that all of these problems stemmed from the same “globalist elite” and its hunger for power. The Russian invasion of Ukraine has further strengthened his thinking: he can only declare war because Russia uses different values.
Many of his old views no longer matter since then. “I have been in a wrong frame for the past twenty years,” he said in the summer of 2021 in an interview for his own digital news show with Sietske Bergsma, also a corona skeptic. The attacks on September 11, 2001, he said, were staged so that the population would direct its anger at migrants and Muslims as a diversionary manoeuvre. He repeated that claim in the podcast that appeared this week, followed by the comment that “most terrorist attacks” are fake.
Although Baudet’s stories are bulging with references to internet culture, he continues to draw on classical philosophical books, as in the past, with which he subsequently supports other, much more radical ideas. This week, for example, he mentioned the work of James Burnham as one of his sources of inspiration. For the conservative Burnham, politics is nothing more than a cynical struggle for power, waged by elites who, in the absence of countervailing power, will increase their own power, with lies and deceit, at the expense of the population.
It is this new focus on one ruler who perpetuates and increases his own power that enables Baudet to tie all his theories together – many of his ideas were already radical in 2019. It explains why he describes Vladimir Putin as a “hero”. , and as “The Dark Knight”, Batman’s nemesis: someone who advocates completely different values from the system, but who seems to be the only adversary to that system.
“I can be wrong about Putin,” Baudet also said. But even if the Russian president acts out of opportunism, Baudet is grateful to him, because he makes the order he hates more vulnerable.
Pointing to one invisible enemy also explains why Baudet is even more likely than before to shy away from ideas that are far from the mainstream. Anyone who believes that there is ultimately one elite that pulls all the strings worldwide will quickly end up with anti-Semitic conspiracies.
And finally, this view of power explains Baudet’s cynicism and nihilism. Why participate constructively if you instinctively take on the system on your own? Within the alt-right movement it is often about ‘clown world’: the current world has gone so crazy that your best option is to opt for nihilism and irony.
Words have consequences
Everything could be a joke, but maybe not. The world is not to be taken seriously. For example, Baudet tweeted in 2021: “Yes, some believe that *dinosaurs* actually existed. Ever. Anyway. Who knows…”
Baudet’s words have consequences. Anyone who believes in almighty globalists and reptiles will never be dissuaded from this after a visit to the meetings organized by the Forum for Democracy. On the contrary: people feel more empowered by what they hear from Baudet, joke or not. Threats to politicians return the names and organizations that Baudet and his party members keep calling as culprits: people like Klaus Schwab, chairman of the World Economic Forum, the summit for politicians and businessmen.
Baudet doesn’t care much about that. Ask him not to do something, people who know him say, and then he will do it. If he is discredited because of this, it does little for him. In fact, in his eyes it is the only way to dominate the debate. “FVD will be a fuss – or will not be,” Baudet once wrote in an essay for the party website in 2021.Enjoy the ride.”
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper of October 22, 2022