Listen to more stories on hark. This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. Frosty pine trees rim the edge of an icy lake. Snow is falling; spa music plays in the background. A gray-haired man with a pleasant face stands beside the lake. He begins to undress. He is going swimming, he explains, to demonstrate his faith, and his opposition to science, to technology, to modernity. My immunity is part of the sovereignty of my being.
Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. On the contrary, he used the tactics that many social-media influencers deploy to appeal to the TikTok algorithm. In the months leading up to the election, these videos amassed more than 1 million views. Elsewhere, this gentle-seeming New Age mystic has praised Ion Antonescu, the Romanian wartime dictator who conspired with Hitler and was sentenced to death for war crimes, including his role in the Romanian Holocaust.
He has called both Antonescu and the prewar leader of the Iron Guard, a violent anti-Semitic movement, national heroes.
Hackers, suspected to be Russian, carried out more than 85, cyberattacks on Romanian election infrastructure as well. Given this strange combinationβIron Guard nostalgia and Russian trolls plus the sort of wellness gibberish more commonly associated with Gwyneth Paltrowβwho exactly are the Georgescus? How to classify them?
The terms right-wing and left-wing come from the French Revolution, when the nobility, who sought to preserve the status quo, sat on the right side of the National Assembly, and the revolutionaries, who wanted democratic change, sat on the left. Those definitions began to fail us a decade ago, when a part of the right, in both Europe and North America, began advocating not caution and conservatism but the destruction of existing democratic institutions.
