This week, Progressive's Jeremy McKeown talks to The Brawl Street Journal, a source that posts on “second-order thinking on Europe’s markets, energy, and the collision between regulation and reality.”

The man behind this blog holds a PhD in international economic law, with a background in World Trade Organisation (remember them?) dispute settlements, and has worked with an international law firm. 

He also advised banking clients on sanctions law following Russia’s invasion of Crimea. 

He then worked in various economic and regulatory roles within Germany’s civil service, giving him a front-row seat on how subsidies, regulations, and political priorities work in practice. 

The Brawl Street Journal was launched last year to help investors question the consensus, which its creator believes has been infiltrated by propaganda, as defined by the French sociologist Jacques Ellul, who wrote a book of that name in the 1960s. 

The pair discuss how propaganda is often an emergent phenomenon of well-intentioned people, rather than the simplistic, malign, authoritarian means of control we usually envision. 

They also discuss how net zero has become one of several propaganda myths of the established European consensus that have weakened the EU and wider European economies. 

They also talk about the potential for a net-zero-induced crisis, similar to the global financial crisis and what the prospects might be for Europe to avoid this outcome. 

With that, please enjoy Jeremy's conversation with the maverick behind The Brawl Street Journal.