Excerpt:

Political movements derive cohesion from the momentum and energy they command. With the wind at their backs, adherents are willing to overlook their divergent interests and fight for a common cause. As these movements lose momentum and face hardening opposition, they suddenly find themselves rent by infighting and factionalism... In such situations, it is everyone for himself; there is a great scramble to leave the sinking ship, and it becomes convenient to blame erstwhile allies for failures.

This is happening in Germany right now. Signs of disarray are pervasive in the ranks of their street-level shock troops, the climate activists. For months now, Letzte Generation have had a particularly bad time. Extinction Rebellion, an important source of early inspiration and advice, has been distancing itself from the group...

All this is happening as that other great climate organisation in the Federal Republic, Luisa Neubauer’s Fridays for Future chapter, fights to distance itself from its child prophet, Greta Thunberg, and the pro-Palestinian stance she has taken since the start of the Gaza conflict on 7 October...nobody has fought so hard to make Thunberg the living saint of climate change as Neubauer and her gaggle of carbon dioxide hysterics.

The catastrophic overreach of the pandemic response, the energy crisis of 2021, the ensuing economic chaos and the decline of unipolar American hegemony have brought about an enduring sea change. The water now flows with growing momentum to the right, and not just in Germany.