“Far-right”? More like “Normal”. By Melissa Chen:
I think the spell has completely broken. The word “far-right” has lost its sting as a moral tripwire and everyone is seeing through the ruse.
Scroll the comments under any piece about AfD’s result in Saxony-Anhalt and you can see it immediately.
In 2016, the label “far-right” still worked. People panicked and acted accordingly.
In 2026 they either no longer believe it or laugh in its face. The replies are blunt:
“not far-right, just right”
“this is what a 90s liberal believed”
“wanting a border isn’t far-right”This is the inevitable result of the mainstream media stretching the label “far-right” until it covered any opinion to the right of Lenin. Once a term is used on sensible opinions on border control, energy policy, crime statistics and school admissions, it just becomes noise and people start resenting the attempts at manipulation. Gay race communism became the only position that was ok to hold.
Well … the people hate what their countries have become. They don’t believe the media anymore and the term “far-right” has completely lost its moral weight.
Which will be a problem the day that a true need to deploy it arises… but until then.
Greg Sheridan in The Australian:
One Nation [are…] not Nazis. There’s nothing at all in Pauline Hanson or Barnaby Joyce that justifies the tag “extreme right wing”. …
In Germany:
AfD has been allowed to maintain the purity of the impotent, as Gough Whitlam once described it. That means their support has steadily grown. Their signature issue is immigration. They hate the size and scale of the immigration Germany has experienced, especially from North Africa and the Middle East.
That’s not a Nazi position. The failure of mainstream German parties to deal with immigration has fed directly into AfD’s rise. AfD wants to deport people who are in Germany illegally and force other asylum-seekers who are in Germany legally to work for welfare benefits. These too are not Nazi positions and it’s mad to demonise them.
AfD wants to do a lot of culture wars stuff … It wants to remove gay pride flags from public schools. It’s a good thing that democracies are tolerant of everybody’s sexuality. But it is not a necessary condition of democracy that gay pride flags must fly from all public schools.
In Australia:
The obscene Bondi massacre led to a huge rise in One Nation’s support. At first this seems strange. What’s the connection?
The Bondi massacre convinced many voters that the two major parties had both made a mess of the nation. Look what you’ve done to my country, was voters’ agonised cry. And the one figure in Australian politics who has stood most strongly against unregulated immigration from the Middle East, and from South Asian nations with strong Islamist traditions, is Hanson. …
Immigration populists are reshaping Western politics. That represents historic failure by mainstream parties. Shooting the messenger is no solution.
Normal people in white countries don’t want mass immigration from the third world,and we don’t want Sharia law and the culture that comes with it. So who are the extremists here, really? The far left are the 20% who have captured the institutions and hand out the taxpayer money, and are our new ruling class. They are the extremists.