“We are not being governed by national parliaments”

Interview with Forum for Democracy (FvD) leader Thierry Baudet, published originally by Voice of Europe, on 29 August.

Thierry Baudet is a father, a Dutch politician, a bestselling author, and the founder and leader of the anti-globalist party Forum for Democracy (FvD). Before making his foray into politics and becoming a member of the Dutch parliament, Baudet completed a Ph.D. under the supervision of the British philosopher Roger Scruton. Baudet, in his dissertation, which was later published as a book titled: The Significance of Borders, explored ideas like national identity, European identity, and multiculturalism.

In this exclusive interview with the editorial team at Voice of Europe, we discuss, among other things, Mr. Baudet’s newly published book, The Covid Conspiracy: The Globalist Takeover and the Great Reset, his political party, its mission and positions, the war in Ukraine, the emergence of a multipolar war, the future of the United States, globalism, the Great Replacement, the upcoming elections in the Netherlands, and more.

Good morning and thanks for taking the time to do this interview, Mr. Baudet. For our audience who may not be aware, can you describe what the Forum for Democracy (FvD) is?

 — The Forum for Democracy (FvD) is a political party in the Netherlands and it’s actually a special party. It’s different from other parties because it’s focused so much on the community behind it. We used to be a think tank. We started off as a think tank having regular debate meetings and so on. Then we became an activist group campaigning in a referendum concerning the Dutch ratification of the EU-Ukraine Association Agreement. Two-thirds of the Dutch population voted no in the referendum, which was our position. So we won the referendum and the government brushed it aside and decided to sign the association agreement anyway. That is when we said, okay, now we have to become a political party, we have to cross the Rubicon, as it were, and get into politics to fix this. And that’s how it started. I got elected in 2017 and I’ve been a member of parliament (MP) ever since. And we’ve done some pretty, pretty cool stuff. We are the largest party in the Netherlands in terms of members. And I was the only elected politician in Europe to have opposed all of the draconian measures during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Your party had a meteoric rise and at one point, during the spring of 2019, the FvD was the most popular party in the Netherlands. Then, following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the party lost a considerable amount of support after mainstream politicians along with the globalist-controlled press carried out a targeted campaign against you and your party. For our readers, can you recount the series of events?

— During COVID, I experienced something that was really, really remarkable, which was that there was so much pressure on me and on others to follow the mainstream. And when I didn’t, and I opposed the lockdowns, the forced vaccinations, and the fear campaign that was happening everywhere, I was essentially expelled from decent society. I’ve not been interviewed for three years in the Netherlands. There are no mainstream media that would ever have me on anymore because I opposed the COVID restrictions. I take different views and they don’t accept that. So, I was ostracized from the political establishment essentially.

Despite all of that, I’m still very proud that I stood firm for my beliefs and didn’t bend. But it also meant that my party, the Forum for Democracy, lost some visibility and as a consequence of that some support. And obviously, when you oppose the globalist establishment, you are vilified. They call you all these names that we’re all familiar with. They call you a racist, you’re a fascist, you’re this, you’re that—and the sad part is it works. There are still people who do take these people seriously, even though it’s so clear—it’s clear as the light of day—that this name-calling, this vilification, is only used to manipulate the debate and give the impression that every sensible person agrees. They employ the same tactic with climate change, COVID-19, immigration, and other issues. Essentially, in any majority policy area, no real diversity of opinion is allowed to exist.

You recently published a book called The Covid Conspiracy: The Globalist Takeover and the Great Reset. It’s already been published in several different languages. For those who may not have heard about it yet, can you provide a synopsis of the book?

— I wrote a book about my experiences during COVID-19—being the only elected politician in the Western world to have opposed every element of these ridiculous restrictions, the lockdowns, the vaccinations, everything. As a result, I experienced massive backlash from the establishment. The mainstream politicians, the media, and everyone in the so-called ‘polite society’ ostracized me. So, in the book, I take all the all the arguments that they presented. I essentially debunk the globalist establishment’s dishonest and phony messaging, including the idea that the vaccine was safe and effective.

I show that it’s inconceivable that any sensible person would still believe that we were dealing with an extremely dangerous virus. This was not just a conspiracy at the political level, but it was also a conspiracy at the level of Big Pharma, the mainstream media, and social media corporations like Facebook. We saw that all of these societal institutions came together and were pushing the exact same false messaging that ultimately deceived the public. We’ve been deceived at a level that is still shocking for me to realize and the cruelty of the measures that they were willing to implement was just breathtaking. Elderly people were left to die alone, and children and teenagers were not allowed to go out to play, to see their friends. Small and medium-sized businesses have all collapsed or semi-collapsed. They forced injections with incredible rates of adverse effects. I mean we haven’t seen this with any vaccine in the entire history of medicine and still nobody’s talking about it. And everyone is pretending this is over—like it was a bad dream, like something far away. Lastly, I’m very proud that Steve Bannon wrote the preface of the book. He’s a man I’ve admired for many years and it’s just come out now in America, so it’s very exciting.

You come to some depressing conclusions in your book, namely that the institutions that are supposed to protect us—the media, doctors, courts, national governments—have betrayed us. What are we to do if we can trust what historically have been regarded as our society’s most powerful institutions?

— For about two years during COVID and a little bit after, I was sincerely depressed about the state of the world, and I felt that there was no institution that we could rely on anymore—not the medical profession, the journalists, politicians, the courts, or the judges. I felt we’d been betrayed by this junta of white gowns, white jackets, the doctors, and the medical profession that was forbidding hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin and pushing these fake vaccines on us. I felt the media had completely let us down by not asking any critical questions for two years. I was like, okay, so we can’t trust the media anymore, we can’t trust the medical profession, the courts, the judges that were just going along with this brushing aside of constitutional rights or the rule of law—it didn’t mean anything anymore.

My fellow citizens prevented me from entering restaurants and so on because I didn’t have the vaccine code—the QR code .I really felt that it was the end of society as we knew it, as I understood it. Also, the sheer lack of critical questions, not just from a journalistic profession, but also just simply from academia and science. The way peer-reviewed magazines like The Lancet were manipulated—and this has been discussed extensively afterward—but they willingly manipulated studies, retracted papers, they kept things out of the public view. They’re all complicit in this massive conspiracy to bring about unprecedented lockdowns, to push us through these vaccines, and so on. I felt depressed because I felt as if I was falling down and I didn’t have anything to hold on to. I really felt terribly alone and sad.

But then something new started to build amongst many of us. I think there’s a new international network taking the shape of people that see through all these lies that were being fed and all the fake institutions and fake authorities that push us to behave in a certain way. I feel that we’re really on track now to build something new—and that is a very hopeful thing. So in the midst of all this darkness, I feel there’s a lot of light shining from so many individuals and also institutions that do want to safeguard their humanity, that do want to live in truth, that do see through this web of news stories and fake narratives that were meant to believe—and that is a wonderful thing.

So, the COVID period was terrible, but it has also given me and many of us a new sense of reality. That is, we’re living closer to our hearts. And I think that path may lead at some point to some kind of parallel society. I don’t love that word because it suggests that we’re excluding people, but that’s not the case. Everybody’s welcome to join this club, this club of people that have woken up and who’ve come to the conclusion that all this is fake, let’s do something new. And in the Netherlands, that is working very well.

What are some of the main conclusions you’ve come to as a result of what happened during the COVID-19 period?

— One of the conclusions that I think anyone must draw from the COVID period is that we are not being governed, as it were, by national parliaments that function as the brain of the nation. Why? Simply because all these measures that were completely and utterly and provably inefficient, ridiculous, unprecedented, and bizarre, were implemented at almost exactly the same period, the same moment across the board, across the world.

This is a very clear indication that decisions are being made at a different level. And I think it’s super important to realize this because I think it’s the same thing with the open borders. Every Western nation is experiencing a massive influx of immigrants. There’s not a single exception. It’s an irrational policy and it’s a very destructive policy. And it’s being presented as if the decisions regarding immigration policy are being taken at the national level. But they’re not.

Secondly, take climate change. All Western nations are signing up for massive, massive climate change policies that are transforming the entire society which are costing us tons of money and are very illogical and irrational. So again, this is something that is clearly not being decided upon at the national level. The national level functions as a way to help people digest what is happening and to give them a sense of theatre about the process— that you have some groups in favor and some groups against. The national news plays its role as well. But the real decisions are taken elsewhere, the big issues are being set out at a different level. And that should give us pause. We really should think about that in depth because it means that our entire understanding of democracy, the nation-state, and sovereignty, is flawed and we need new concepts to understand the world.

Are there any other observations you make in your book that you would like people to know about?

 — Firstly, I show that not only have the major decisions during this period not been taken at a national level but at a global level. That’s clear from the way these lockdowns were implemented on the same day and in the same way. Secondly, I show, very worryingly, that all the institutions of society that in theory should help us reach rational conclusions, completely failed us. There was no rational debate in journalistic magazines or outlets. There was no debate possible on social media because of censorship. The doctors and the experts were not thinking about the consequences of the policies. They stopped prescribing medicines like hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin that had been prescribed to billions of people for decades. And all of a sudden they were deemed dangerous and all the doctors just went along with it. So you saw that all these institutions of society didn’t function anymore.

And thirdly, I highlight how those in power were willing to impose incredibly cruel measures—letting elderly people die alone, etc. As a result of the unneeded lockdowns we saw addiction and depression problems skyrocket, domestic violence soared, and businesses were destroyed.Then you have the vaccinations with all the adverse side effects. It’s just heartbreaking to think about how many lives have been destroyed and nobody seems to feel guilty for it. They don’t even feel anything about it.

So these three observations are central to the book. We’re not being governed at the national level, there’s no rational policymaking involved, and thirdly there’s an immense amount of cruelty amongst those in power—an ability for cruelty and a disturbing lack of empathy.

I think those three observations should give us pause and should reshape our understanding of the world. Because if the globalist elite can implement policies like this during COVID-19 they may enact similar policies in the name of climate change. The actions taken so far due to so-called climate change haven’t been rational and there’s been no discussion about them. Nobody’s making cost-benefit analysis and so on and so forth. And it’s extremely destructive. It’s extremely cruel. It robs the middle classes of their ability to build a life, to have affordable energy, to have affordable food, and to have affordable housing.

Do you think there will be another global pandemic that’s used by the globalist elite to further cement its grip on power and to take more freedoms away from the people?

 — One of the great questions that are puzzling me and many others is, is it really over?  Is Covid really behind us or is it going to come back? Some people say, in what is perhaps a tongue-in-cheek sort of way, that Putin cured COVID-19 by starting a war, right? The pandemic seemed to end from the day the war in Ukraine started. That said, we’ve never had a proper process of looking back and saying, hey, what happened there? What the hell did we do? We didn’t even evaluate the policies. It was like oh it’s over and nobody talked about it anymore.

And that means that we haven’t gone through a process of realizing what mistakes were made and what we should do differently should something like that happen again. Consequently, this means that it can happen again. Because if you don’t learn from your mistakes, you’re bound to repeat them, right? Nobody is saying that mistakes were made during COVID-19 and that the response ought to be different next time. So I’m very worried that we might—next winter, or maybe even sooner—see pandemic measures reinstated.

During the two years of COVID, we saw a massive transfer of wealth from working and middle-class people to the billionaire globalist class. Do you see this as a type of class war that’s being waged by the globalists against everyday people?

— We used to understand a free society as a society with a massive middle class. The middle class is the backbone and is the core of a classically liberal society. When we talk about middle-class people, these are people who participate in the schools of their children, those who own a home and therefore have built up some capital, those would be the people with small and medium-sized businesses, and so on and so forth, the people that would participate in society in a broader sense.

And now what we’re seeing is that these middle classes are vanishing and we’re getting, most people are simply going to members of the working poor or underclass. They’re going to be paid their wages every month or whenever with their rental house, with no basic structures, no sense of community. So you see an alienation, an atomization amongst these working classes who own less and less, who have less and less wealth, and the coming about of a billionaire class, super rich people that essentially own nearly everything. So there’s a shift and the middle classes of Western societies are being cut out, and that’s an extremely sad thing to watch. It’s extremely worrying because we will lose precisely the class that holds society together.

COVID, obviously, has accelerated this because small and medium-sized businesses couldn’t survive. You had the big investors, the massive hedge funds, and venture capitalists that jumped in and bought up all these shops and restaurants and so on. And you had the original owners and also the farmers, which often have their own family companies, agricultural companies, many of them are selling their stuff and like, okay, well, whatever, I’m not doing this anymore.

Is it a plan? Was this the ultimate intention behind all the lockdowns? In my book and elsewhere, I don’t profess to know what exactly is the reason or what actually happened behind the scenes and in the places we cannot venture.  I do see what’s happening and I’m confident that these things were not decided at the national level. So something is happening at the global level, but what exactly, I’m very honest about this, I simply do not know.

However, I think it’s obvious that the people on the international stage—the World Economic Forum, World Health Organization, UN, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Bilderberg, etc.—have a certain worldview. They think in terms of, well, obviously, climate change, and mass migration, but also they think in managerial terms. They would like to govern us down to the tiniest detail because they feel that if we don’t control society more, people are going to make the wrong decisions, right? That’s why we have to make sure they stop smoking, they don’t eat sugar anymore, they do this, they do that. And that managerial mindset may very well lead to policies that squeeze out the middle classes rather than the state squeezing out the middle classes intentionally. It may be a corollary, it may be a consequence that is not necessarily intended, but it’s just a logical consequence.

Tell us about some of the initiatives the Forum for Democracy (FvD) is spearheading outside of the parliament.

— We have set up our own school, an elementary school. We have our own publishing house, which is now growing into a media house. We might start making documentaries and so on. We have a small company that takes food directly from the Dutch farmers—to support the farmers—puts it in boxes and sends them directly to people’s homes as a part of a subscription service. That’s very nice. That’s a lot of fun. So there are lots of things and other initiatives as well. Other people are doing great things too. So, COVID, I think it was really, a mark in time. There was an age before COVID and an age after, and we’re in the beginning of something genuinely new.

You’ve made some controversial comments about the Russo-Ukrainian war in the past. Can you reiterate your position for our audience?

— So the first thing that I think is important to realize when we’re talking about the current situation in Ukraine, is that it’s not, in my view, a Russo-Ukrainian war. It is a war of NATO against Russia. I think it was a provoked war. I think Russia is the defensive party here, even though they decided to attack first. That is clear beyond doubt, but it was a defensive move because if they hadn’t done it, there would have been a massive NATO offensive to reclaim Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, which was something that Russia is never going to accept—which from a strategic perspective very understandable.

The United States would not accept it if Russia would build up a massive army in Mexico. These are things that you might contest in the area of international law, but in international relations, which is another academic subject, of course, it’s completely clear that this is the way the world works. And by willingly ignoring that and pretending it’s entirely normal for the United States to build up a massive army in a neighboring country that has very unfriendly policies towards Russia and for Russia to just accept that is either very, very stupid or it’s simply provoking a war because you have reasons to desire that.

I still think that the moment the West or the American deep state or whatever you want to call it stops escalating this conflict, peace can return very, very quickly on our continent and I think Russia wants peace, Russia wants to make a deal. The Ukrainians, obviously, are being slaughtered by the tens if not hundreds of thousands, which is horrible. I feel very, very much empathy for them. I feel very sorry for them. They are really the victims of American imperial ambitions.

Ironically, these imperial ambitions of the American deep state are also working against America, and its people, because the decline of America is quickening, making a process that’s already happening, namely the emergence of a multipolar world, come about more quickly. Through this war that America is waging in Ukraine against Russia, it is accelerating that process. America is actually uniting the entire world against itself right now, which is not a smart thing to do. And as for Europe, I think it’s super important to wake up and realize that continuing this war is not in its interest. Europe should have normal relations with Russia, should have normal relations with Ukraine, with the United States, with Turkey, and so forth and so on. Why should we be waging this war against Russia? There’s absolutely no point.

You mentioned the emergence of a multipolar world. What do you think that looks like a decade from now?

— My hope is that the multipolar world will create competing power blocks, which as a consequence might lead to more freedom for individuals in the world, Competing power blocs will inevitably be supportive of opposition groups within each other’s sphere of influence. There’s a great analogy, I think the French philosopher Tocqueville makes it, where he says if  Germany had been united in the 16th century Martin Luther would never have been able to be the founder of Protestantism. Internal conflicts in Germany with different princes as well as with the Pope and the Emperor made that possible. Medieval Europe was like a hodgepodge of different estates and different regions and everybody was competing with one another. As a consequence, there was a lot of liberty. So Martin Luther could simply go to a different principality, he could go to a different area and there he would be protected because this particular duke or that particular prince wanted to support the enemy of his enemy, right? So my hope for a multipolar world would be that you’ll get more freedom.

You talked about mass immigration. I’m sure you are aware of Renaud Camus’ concept of The Great Replacement. Do you have any thoughts about it? Is it a conspiracy theory as some say it is?

— The great French author, Renaud Camus, wrote about the Grand Remplacement or Great Replacement in English. He coined that term. And what he meant by it, I think, is something we are witnessing every day which is that the indigenous populations of Europe are not reproducing in sufficient numbers to sustain their own numbers—they are migrating away from their native nations. For example, the Netherlands, my country is not just an immigration country but it’s also an emigration country—lots of people are fleeing the Netherlands because they don’t feel at home anymore, they don’t feel safe anymore, they don’t feel that their businesses can thrive, they don’t feel the government is protecting them or taking care of them.

So, you see that the indigenous populations in Europe are in steep decline and at the same time obviously we see a massive influx of people from different parts of the world, Africa, the Arabic nations obviously as well, the Maghreb, North Africa, the Middle East, and this simply means it’s a mathematical inevitability that the population composition of Europe will be very different in the future. Mass migration brings different ethnoreligious groups, different cultures, and different ways of life. And of course, I think that’s a very sad thing because I love the European way of life, love European culture, I love the people who are my fellow Europeans, and I think it’s a great tragedy for the world if that particular way of life, that European way of life, would disappear.

Furthermore, I find it very odd that this Great Replacement, which is an observable fact, it’s something that can be seen very clearly in statistics—it’s not difficult to see—is denounced as a conspiracy theory, while the United Nations has official reports that talk specifically about Replacement Migration. This is a formal policy of the UN—something that panels at the World Economic Forum discuss. It’s happening before our very eyes.

The Biden family has been implicated in corruption schemes in Ukraine. How come this is not widely discussed in European politics? What needs to be done for Europeans to see the vested interests the Democratic Party elites have in Ukraine?

— Yes, the greatest corruption scandal in the history of the American Republic has been kept out of the European press entirely. It’s very, very remarkable, indeed. The President of the United States has been proven to have had links, through his son, to companies in Ukraine, like Burisma, links to schemes in China, and yes, nobody’s writing about it.

It means that the so-called leader of the Western world, the Atlantic Coalition, is completely compromised. It means he’s not able to make free and independent decisions based on the interest of the nation, but he has private interests that interfere with that, and nobody’s writing about it. It’s astonishing.

And again, it shows that—just as we saw during COVID-19—the legacy media, the mainstream media, consider themselves as the defenders of the current corrupt political order. I’m not sure when this shift occurred exactly, but I like to believe that there was a time when journalists defined their job as being critical toward power, asking uncomfortable questions, looking where the sun doesn’t shine, seeing how the mechanisms of power actually work and seeing what ways governments might attempt to fool us and act in their own self-interests rather than the interests of the people. It’s completely gone from the journalistic profession. They express the official line of the deep state, and that’s it. They repeat it ad nauseam and I find it astonishing to watch.

The Netherlands has national parliamentary elections coming up in November. How do you see things panning out?

— The upcoming elections in the Netherlands on the 22nd of November will be very interesting because almost all the major players that we used to be acquainted with in Dutch politics have left the scene. So our former prime minister, Mark Rutte, who had been the prime minister for the last 13 years, is gone. Sigrid Kahr, currently the minister of Finance, who had previously served as our foreign minister, is also gone. The leaders of so many parties are leaving the stage and therefore there’s a lot of room for innovation. And I think if we, the Right, play it correctly, it may just be possible that there’s going to be a sort of center-right coalition with support from Geert Wilders’ party and my party in parliament, supporting a minority coalition perhaps of the New Farmers Party (BBB) and the VVD, Mark Rutte’s liberal-conservative party. The BBB and the VVD might become the central coalition around which maybe my party and Geert Willis’ party might be a supporting bloc—and that could be a very good thing for the country.

Presently in the United States, you see a population that’s more divided than ever. There is more ethnocultural tension than perhaps has ever been seen before in the country’s history.  What do you see happening in the near future in the U.S.? Do you think a civil war is a real possibility?

— I’m extremely worried about the future of the United States. I’ve been a fan of the American Republic for a long time, although I’m not a fan of the American Empire.  The American Republic, however, is a very interesting and beautiful creation. However, now I think it’s really at breaking point.

As far as I can see, I’m obviously a European, not an American, but what I read from it, and what I see from it is extremely worrying. I think the possible indictment of President Trump is a possible spark that may lead to an actual civil war, civil conflict, or even secession of certain states. It’s possible. I think the ethnic issue remains unresolved, the massive immigration is continuing. So again, the squeezing out of the middle classes here, the backbone of society, is leaving society without something people that have essentially nothing, no possessions, therefore nothing to lose atomized without a community. And then on the other hand, you have billionaires that are very, very intertwined with politics, with big corporations, that live in a reality of their own. I’m deeply worried about the future of America.