The great reset: the far rights detailed plan to dismantle the EU
Trump hardliners want a power shift in the EU with the help of European allies. Translation:
There are increasing indications that the Trump movement is actively interfering with the political future of the European Union. In March, the most influential conservative think tank in Washington, the Heritage Foundation, invited conservative thinkers from Vienna and Budapest to present their plans for the EU during a workshop.
“It is right for the United States to be involved in the future of Europe,” Nile Gardiner of the Heritage Foundation told Nieuwsuur. According to the prominent conservative thinker, Donald Trump is America’s first eurosceptic president. “The United States has protected Europe for so long that European governments should respect America’s views.”
Polish and Hungarian think tanks published an ambitious plan in March to fundamentally reform and dismantle the EU from within. A Hungarian investigative journalist uncovered the project, titled The Great Reset. The proposal was quickly adopted by the Heritage Foundation, the intellectual force behind Project 2025, the ideological blueprint for Trump’s agenda.
Power Back to Nation States
The now-public roadmap includes proposals to strip power from the European Commission and the European Court of Justice. It also calls for renaming the EU to the “European Community of Nations.” Power, according to the document, should return to the individual nation states of Europe.
“These proposals essentially amount to the complete dismantling of the European Commission, which would be reduced to handling only trivial matters,” explains Szabolcs Panyi, the journalist who obtained the document.
Nieuwsuur also spoke with one of the Polish authors of the plan, Zbigniew Przybyłowski of the conservative Ordo Iuris Institute: “We are calling for the restoration of democracy, freedom, and the sovereignty of nations. You could call that a power shift.”
“It’s quite unusual for such an article to appear on the U.S. State Department’s website.”
– Lobbying expert Kenneth Haar
U.S. Government Statement on Europe
In May of this year, a policy document appeared on the website of the U.S. State Department. In it, the American government raised alarm about the current state of Europe. The policy piece described Europe as having “degenerated into a hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, and restrictions on religious freedom.” It criticized efforts to limit election participation, for example by labeling Germany’s Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) as “extremist.”
The document, titled The Need for Civilizational Allies in Europe, called for strengthening ties with far-right and ultraconservative allies in Europe, such as French politician Marine Le Pen, AfD leader Alice Weidel, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and Dutch PVV leader Geert Wilders. It is unclear whether the U.S. policy statement was influenced by the Polish-Hungarian Great Reset project.
“There has already been collaboration between the MAGA movement (Trump’s Make America Great Again campaign) and the European far-right,” says Danish lobby researcher Kenneth Haar. “But seeing such a document appear on the U.S. government’s official website is remarkable.”
“The Pro-European Candidate is a Disaster”
Haar points to the Conservative Political Action Conferences (CPAC) from the U.S., which have been held in Europe for the past three years. “These are very large conferences with hundreds of participants and prominent speakers, involving all major far-right parties in Europe.”
This also occurred recently during a tight race between two Polish presidential candidates. At a special CPAC conference in Poland, Trump’s former Homeland Security Secretary publicly called for a vote in favor of the eurosceptic candidate Karol Nawrocki. She labeled his pro-European opponent “a disaster.” Members of the Trump camp also expressed explicit support this year for Germany’s far-right AfD.
“The Heritage Foundation and the entire MAGA alliance appear to be succeeding in uniting Europe’s far-right parties in a way those parties haven’t been able to achieve on their own,” Haar adds.
Nile Gardiner, Director of European Policy at the Heritage Foundation, sees signs of a shift already: “A wind of change is blowing through Europe, including the Netherlands. There’s growing distrust of the concentration of power among unelected bureaucrats in Brussels.”
Brussels Silent
The European Commission has yet to respond to the ambitions coming from Washington. But according to Hungarian journalist Panyi, Brussels should be paying close attention to the far-reaching American involvement in European politics.
“We see that two EU member states—Hungary and Poland—are trying to shape the future of the EU outside of official decision-making procedures. They are enlisting the help of the U.S. in the hope that Trump will put pressure on the European Commission. That’s a threat.”
Gardiner, on the other hand, sees it as an opportunity. “Europe works best when it is a collaboration between sovereign nation states. The EU, by contrast, is about concentrating political power in Brussels. In 20 to 30 years, the EU will look very different than it does today.”
Disclosure
For this report, Nieuwsuur investigated the plans of European and American think tanks regarding the political future of Europe. Nieuwsuur spoke with experts, MEPs, and journalists from France, the Netherlands, Czechia, Hungary, the UK, Germany, and Poland. We interviewed the following sources:
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Szabolcs Panyi, Hungarian investigative journalist, who uncovered The Great Reset project.
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Kenneth Haar, Danish researcher with the Corporate Europe Observatory, an independent organization tracking U.S. lobbying efforts in the EU.
The U.S. State Department declined to comment on Nieuwsuur’s questions. The European Commission has not yet responded. Any future statements will be added here.
They should focus on their own political system… We like democracy, F*** off
Is this a warning? I hope most of you have spotted this sooner than this article seems to have, because this has been going on for quite a while.
There’s even been articles uncovering far right groups financing influencers and youtubers as a way to sever through culture.
And I keep saying that “Gamergate” was the true opening of that avenue into the mainstream almost a decade and a half ago. That was the time to spot it. By the time that “kermit the frog impersonator” and the “no chin alpha” showed up on the public radar, the problem was already unfolding wide and around for a while.
And I have a suspicion that what started Gamergate was just some good old sport trolling that then turned into… well… the opening of the gates of hell.
Obviously that I have no way to confirm this.
But I still have some fun imagining those who were indeed just trolling for some dumb fun back then, now aged with their scruffy beard and hair greying, holding their knees in a fetal position muttering to themselves “What did I do?”- and yes, it’s kind of fucked that I find that funny.
But I also keep saying the same thing over and over…
This is not just an American problem. This is everywhere.
If you disagree, I suggest you take a stroll through Europe…
You can start with Portugal, and the ridiculousness with the party Chega and its circus of followers, moving next to Spain with Vox and their own clown show, then France and don’t tell me you haven’t even heard of Marine Le Pen. Just take a look up from there to Britain with good old Brexit and the tumour Nigel Farage with the cancer that is Reform. What about Italy? Anyone thinking that Georgia Meloni snuck up on Europe must’ve been in a coma during the Berlusconi years, because the orange blob as president is just a terrible American remake of that Italian classic. And Germany, did it elude anyone the fact that AFD scored the second place in the elections and is even polling in first now, apparently? I could keep going, but we should stop before we get to the Balkans, right?
“Well, that’s just Europe and the U.S. then.”
What about Australia, with Peter Dutton and the crazy brand of fascism they have going down under? Or Canada and what the hell is even Pierre Polievre who was all set to win? Yes, these two did lose but not by much and the type of fuel they ran on is still there to burn.
This is a problem that is everywhere. And what creates this madness is that there are grifters who are willing to say whatever it takes, that take problems that affect almost everyone except the elite class, but then single their message across to a particular subset of the public which is too uneducated to understand the rest of the conversation that everyone is trying to have. And because the indignation is something that so many others can join in on when there’s so much to feel angry towards, the menace spreads wider as a result of a compromise to meet the end they desire.
But this second wave of rage that joins in has the logic that if there’s things that need fixing in one’s household, the best is to burn the house down, apparently.
And the really sad part is none of this is new.
Socrates thought that elections were too important to be handed to a general public which was too ignorant to understand its functioning or its true value. And who was it that believed that there was a need for a lie to “deceive” the population into doing the decent thing? I can’t remember which of them said that. (If you do, please do tell) But that was what many found religion to be the method to accomplish it. As ludicrous as that might sound.
It’s just the same loop of the revolt of the idiots. “My pain is truer than yours” type of nonsense.
On and on.
But if anyone knows how to make the arrogant humble and the idiot know their idiocy, please do tell.
Because you would’ve made the greatest discovery in human history that would break this seemingly never-ending loop.
I might be wrong on this one, but didn’t Labor in Australia secure the biggest margin in recent times during last elections? Dutton lost there by A LOT.
But yeah, can’t deny that otherwise, you’re making good points. Right-wing is on the rise throughout the world, with populists leading the charge, selling simple solutions for complex problems
No, you’re not wrong. Someone else has also corrected me.
Apparently Dutton even lost his sit.
So, good news on that front at least.
This doesn’t discount the rest of your points but in Australia Dutton lost by a landslide, and also lost his own seat, so he’s out of parliament entirely.
We still have a lot of the racism and xenophobia issues fed by inequality and corporate interests, but Trump and his style is deeply unpopular here, which is partially why Dutton lost so badly.
Thank you for the correction and the very good news in just one go.
And I apologise if I misrepresented the Australian national identity in the process. That wasn’t my intention. And it’s always good to know that this brand of populism is unpopular in some countries.
Thank you.
Yes, even before Trump 1.0.
The advent of smartphones & social media made everyone a journalist and camera person with instant global audience. On one hand that’s a good thing, on the other the companies running the platforms have way too much authority over which content gets boosted, and factuality, truth, or peaceful + reasonable argument does not come into it. And they have been applying these algorithms and lack of moderation for so long, we now feel that it’s normal, it’s “just the way it is”.
Not saying fascist crazies haven’t always been a thing, but printed press and TV had rules and a buffer that filters out the worst stuff.
Not so social media… Let that machinery run for a decade, the savvy grifters rise through the ranks all the way into politics (that sweet lobby mulah) cheered on by way too many people drowning out any sort of reasonable discourse. Hell, reasonable discourse itself seems to be “socialist” nowadays.
As you hinted religion is a potential way to control a population into doing what you want as it is a way of controlling what is talked about (and how it is talked about) to manipulate people.
I think what has changed is that now the owners of the media and information landscape can use new technology and psychology to control the narrative better mostly to extract a bit more profit. It is more profitable to keep people scrolling or listening to ragebait on your platform or show than to do proper investigative journalism.
The problem is the vast majority of media sources are controlled by elites who skew their messaging to the perceived whims of their owners which happen to predominately be far right. The population is forced to follow their lead as they have no easy way of influencing public opinion at scale.
I was going to say it sounds like Vance when he was spreading lies about Haitians migrants eating dogs, but then I saw the decent bit of it.