by Tim Hains
July 22, 2022

from RealClearPolitics Website

Farmers gather with their vehicles

next to a Germany/Netherlands border sign

during a protest on the A1 highway, near Rijssen, on June 29, 2022,

against the Dutch Government's nitrogen plans.

VINCENT JANNINK/ANP/AFP via Getty Images

Source

Schoellhammer:

People Accepted the Eccentricities

of their Elite Minority

until they Felt the Negative Effects...

There is a "deafening" media silence about massive anti-government protests happening around the world, including a farmers' strike in one of the world's most productive agricultural countries, the Netherlands, and an overthrow of the government in Sri Lanka, Webster University assistant professor Ralph Schoellhammer tells Sky News.

Tractors drive by Dutch police officers standing guard

as dutch police close access to Apeldoorn on the A1 highway

to stop potential farmers demonstrating against the Dutch government's plans

to cut nitrogen greenhouse gas emissions, on 29 June 2022.

 (Jeroen Jumelet/ANP/AFP via Getty Images)

Source

Schoellhammer wrote in Newsweek:

 

A Popular Uprising Against the Elites Has Gone Global - Opinion

July 07, 2022

NEWSWEEK

 

"This is a larger trend, we already mentioned Brexit and the election of Donald Trump were symptoms of the pushback. But the situation we find ourselves in consists of four different groups," he explained.

 

"First are the activists, who really believe the end of the world is around the corner. And they are overrepresented in media, in academia, and in the cultural sphere."

"Next you have governments and politicians who like to virtue-signal to those people mostly because they are very active on Twitter. They believe they represent a huge chunk of the population."

"And then you have companies who want to make a profit off of it," he added.

 

"I don't believe that Unilever cares about the environment but it is something they have to say to pander to clients."

"The working class and middle class, or people who want to just pay their taxes and live life, who don't spend a lot of time on social media are trapped in this, it is more and more encroaching on their daily lives."

"For example, for Germany to leave nuclear energy behind was a purely political and ideological position... it turns out they will get poorer.

 

They accepted the eccentric ideas of their elites to the extent that they did not think it would have a negative impact on their lives. But now they see the negative impact."

"It's school policy in Virginia, it is the agricultural policy in the Netherlands, it is gas prices in France, nuclear energy in Germany...

 

I'm very curious how this is going to work, the future would be something like you just mentioned, a social-conservative working-class party... you see this with Hispanics and working-class blacks in the United States who shift to the GOP because the progressives in some areas are insane.

 

They just want to switch to a common-sense party, I think that is what we see at the moment."

"There is a deafening media silence on these protests," he continued.

 

"If you observe in the U.S. and Europe where all of sudden there is this worry among the political and media class about 'disinformation' and saying... they need to be careful about what information gets out there.

 

This is part of this, the best way to prevent pushback from large numbers of people is if they don't know that anything is going on."

"Think about the situation with the truckers in Canada (below video), when they pulled their bank accounts, made sure GoFundMe pulled their funding efforts.

 

This is undermining the possibility of these people to organize. It is not a conspiracy, it is what interest groups and these players do.

 

They see a potential threat to their power and they try to undermine it."