Bias Test

Born in 1996 in Amsterdam, Vlaardingerbroek enjoyed a culturally and intellectually stimulating upbringing. Her parents both worked in classical music, her father as a musicologist and artistic director of orchestral performances for the Dutch public broadcaster and her mother as a radio editor. They were also religious — a quality that, Vlaardingerbroek explains, inspired her respect for hierarchy.

At university, she discovered that many of her peers did not share that respect. Studying law in the honors program at Utrecht University, followed by a semester abroad at Munich’s Ludwig Maximilian University and then a master’s degree at Leiden University (she wrote her honors thesis on “The Contractualization of Sex in the #MeToo Era”), she recounts getting into an argument with a professor. The dispute concerned a story about a Muslim janitor who says he was rejected by a school because his faith forbade him from shaking hands with women. Her teacher thought this was a clear case of religious discrimination, but Vlaardingerbroek disagreed: if shaking hands was a job requirement, then the school hadn’t done anything wrong. Vlaardingerbroek says the professor made her do a bias test — one of presumably several such experiences that led her to the conclusion that academia was ruled by leftist faculty whose political correctness bordered on Bolshevism.

Discouraged from voicing her real opinions in public, she says she felt a “growing feeling of not being free anymore.”

During her studies, Vlaardingerbroek became involved with Forum for Democracy (FvD), a far-right party that began as a conservative think tank and that argues the Netherlands should withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement and the European Union. Founded in 2016, FvD was quite successful at the polls before quickly losing influence around 2020. At its 2019 party congress, Vlaardingerbroek delivered a speech in which she attacked modern feminism, calling the movement a “form of hardcore cognitive dissonance.” In 2020, party leader Thierry Baudet —  author of a book titled The Covid Conspiracy: The Globalist Takeover and the Great Reset — tapped her as a possible candidate. But not long after, Vlaardingerbroek and three of her colleagues resigned. The reason, they said in a shared statement, was Baudet’s failure to isolate himself from the extremist wing of his already considerably extremist party, as well as his allegedly sharing antisemitic and conspiratorial views at a private dinner.

Turning her back on a traditional political career, Vlaardingerbroek developed into an online political commentator, writing for magazines and appearing on podcasts and TV shows. She did this not just in the Netherlands but also in countries like Sweden, where she made regular appearances on right-wing media company Riks’s YouTube channel.

Her online following ballooned when she began commenting on the Dutch farmers’ protests. For several years, farmers had been organizing demonstrations against the national government’s plans to significantly reduce emissions. Prominent Dutch journalists like Karel Smouter — author of Blue, White, Red, so named after the colors of the farmers’ inverted national flags — partly attributed the protests to a cultural disconnect between urban and rural, and urged reconciliation. But Vlaardingerbroek’s language was combative and polarizing, going so far as to declare that the Dutch government is using climate change as an excuse to take people’s farms away from them.

“What this is about is the Dutch government stealing our farmers’ land, and they’re doing this under the guise of a made-up nitrogen crisis,” she told Tucker Carlson on his show in 2022. It wasn’t the first time she had appeared on an American platform, telling audiences that the exact same (imaginary) threats they faced at home existed in Europe. And with each new platform she appeared on, her views and comments shifted further right.

Moral Duty

During Vlaardingerbroek’s appearance on Tammy Peterson’s podcast, aired in 2023, she elaborated her position on feminism, a movement from which her own, hierarchy-respecting upbringing kept her well away. “The gender ideology and feminism are probably the most damaging ideologies that there are for women … because it stops people from getting married, starting families and becoming truly happy and fulfilling their (moral) duty,” she told the National Catholic Register the same year. She also touched on COVID-19 vaccine mandates by way of Thomas Jefferson: “My rights were not given to me by the government, who could — and would, clearly — take them away from me anytime, but they were given to me by my Creator, by God.”

While her religious parents had, as mentioned, imparted her with basic conservative values, Vlaardingerbroek says she did not start to engage seriously with Christianity until she was in college. Living an ordinary student life outside of parental oversight apparently made her believe that she was sinning. Torn between her Protestant father and Catholic mother, she converted to Roman Catholicism in part because she did not like the former’s symbolic interpretation of the Bible.

“It’s not symbolic at all,” she told the National Catholic Register. “Even though I can’t rationalize it, I believe it; because if Christ said it is so, it is so.”

With Vlaardingerbroek making a point to “openly” involve faith in her political commentary, it didn’t take long for the two to mingle. Christianity was the cure that could turn this deteriorating society back to normal, but it was at risk of being destroyed by wokeness. In this age of cancellation and political correctness, Christianity — and specifically Catholicism — represented “redemption” and “[individual] responsibility,” a plea to regain control of your life and your destiny.

Before long, Vlaardingerbroek was saying that we — meaning the transnational right — weren’t just fighting a “political fight,” but a “spiritual” one, and that she was “fighting against forces [she] would definitely describe as evil.” Her current worldview appears to leave no room for compromise, reconciliation, or moral relativism: “I have my truth, and you have yours — that’s dangerous.”

Young Vote

At first glance, it may seem that Vlaardingerbroek only began amping up her religious rhetoric in order to break into the lucrative world of conservative US media. While surveys show that over 47 percent of Americans identify as religious, only 35 percent of Dutch people are Christian, and only a fraction are even occasional churchgoers.

“Eva converted to Catholicism in 2023,” Eviane Leidig, author of The Women of the Far Right, tells Jacobin, “and prior to that identified as Christian, but she would only reference Christianity when describing the West as a Christian civilization under threat from Islam. Eva’s religious identity has more salience in the United States than in the Netherlands, although it does resonate with other European far-right movements in Hungary and Spain.” Still, Vlaardingerbroek’s rise also corresponds with changes in Dutch Christians’ voting behavior. Where only a few years ago most sided with centrist parties, polls from the 2023 election suggest that their support instead went to Geert Wilders’s far-right Party for Freedom (PVV). It seems that the party has finally gotten a hold on the country’s own Bible Belt, which wraps around the urban centers of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and the Hague. The same polls suggest Wilders is gaining ground with young people, turning the party’s anti-immigration policy from an old people’s concern into an intergenerational identity crisis.

Vlaardingerbroek is often compared to American far-right figures. Indeed, her views and the way she communicates them are almost identical. If we imagine that the Netherlands has yet to produce a Trump, a Jordan Peterson, or an Alex Jones of its own, Vlaardingerbroek comes close. Her talk at last May’s Conservative Political Action Conference in Hungary, where she received a warm welcome from Prime Minister Viktor Orbán before declaring that the Great Replacement theory is a “fact,” has been removed from YouTube for violating its rules on hate speech. But it can still be viewed in full on Twitter/X, where she shared it with her almost one million followers.

The truth, as several journalists and political scientists have already pointed out, is that the Netherlands, like much of Western Europe, has been dealing with Trumpian characters for decades. Wilders’s predecessor Pim Fortuyn, before being assassinated in 2002, made headlines for calling Islamic culture “retarded” and telling a female reporter to “go back to the kitchen.” Wilders himself might look a little less extreme standing next to Vlaardingerbroek, but that does not mean he isn’t a severe threat too. If anything, Vlaardingerbroek’s success should serve as a reminder that the Dutch right hasn’t experienced some radical shift. What’s happening today is a logical continuation of what was happening long before phrases like “woke” and “political correctness” entered the vernacular.