MCC Brussels Podcast

In this week’s episode, MCC Brussels tears into Brussels’ trade-deal frenzy from Mercosur to India, the capital’s 600-day political paralysis, and Trump’s Peace Board challenge to the tired old international order.

Jacob Reynolds, Head of Policy at MCC Brussels, is joined by Barbara Bonte, Vlaams Belang MEP in the Patriots for Europe group, and Agnieszka Kolek, Head of Cultural Engagement at MCC Brussels.

India is the deal dressed up as a geopolitical triumph, the “mother of all trade deals,” featuring export wins for big sectors and a momentous agreement on mobility (read: migration) tucked inside. The reality is that India’s most reliable export is people rather than steel or software. These mobility clauses aren't just a footnote to the document. They are the entire point.

Brussels 600 days no government decay: Brussels without a government for 600 days is not a charming constitutional oddity.. It is the natural byproduct of a system designed to obstruct, run by parties that would rather exclude rivals than actually govern. No budget means no planning, no investment, no serious repair. Everyday life is left to fray by politicians who have no answers.

The Peace Board is Trumpian in style, but not necessarily empty in substance. Post-war institutions are visibly exhausted: The UN moralises and achieves little. Europe spends and postures, but cannot decide what it wants beyond “more of the same”. Trump, for all his theatricality, forces a question the polite world avoids: what if the institutions built in a previous era are no longer fit for purpose.

Follow MCC Brussels on social media:
https://twitter.com/MCC_Brussels
https://facebook.com/MCCBrussels
https://linkedin.com/company/mcc-brussels/

website:
https://brussels.mcc.hu

In this week’s episode Jacob Reynolds, with Richard Schenk and Carl Deconinck, cuts through the Davos charade, the EU’s flailing response to Trump and Greenland, and Brussels’ latest attempt to muzzle free speech via its crusade against X.

1) Davos / WEF: Davos used to be the annual summit of vague virtue-signalling and lavish self-regard. This year, it looks less like cosplay and more like crisis management. With the UN toothless and the old “dialogue forums” dead, Davos has become one of the few places rival blocs still talk . All the  while Europe’s leaders flail, delivering the same stale sermons about bureaucracy “reform” and Net Zero righteousness, as if it’s still 2019.

2) Greenland / tariffs / EU–US tension: Greenland is a bargaining chip in a colder, harder world. Trump’s tariff sabre-rattling exposes a deeper truth: the post–Cold War fantasy is over, and national interest is back.Brussels, trained to govern by press release and “values”, now looks like a sleepwalker. The result is diplomatic cringe instead of strategy.

3) X / Grok / illicit images / EU clampdowns: Yes, AI can be abused, including for non-consensual image manipulation. But the EU’s instinct is always the same: treat every new tool as an excuse to expand censorship and bureaucratic control. The EU’s long campaign against X suddenly has a convenient moral fig-leaf, while the EU AI Act and its wider regulatory reflex keep pushing innovation out of Europe. 

Follow MCC Brussels on social media:
https://twitter.com/MCC_Brussels
https://facebook.com/MCCBrussels
https://linkedin.com/company/mcc-brussels/

website:
https://brussels.mcc.hu

When the world gets serious, the Berlaymont gets nervous.
Greenland gets leaned on, farmers get sold out, and Hungary gets “managed” like a hostile province.
John O’Brien sits down with Richard Schenk and Agnieszka Kolek to say what Brussels will only ever imply.
Greenland and the Comfort Blanket of NATO
Greenland isn’t some far-off abstraction. It’s tied to an EU member state, plugged into NATO, and still had to announce—out loud—that it isn’t for sale. The moment pressure comes from inside the club, the Western security story starts wobbling. Europe outsourced its seriousness decades ago, then convinced itself conferences and communiqués were a substitute for capability. The Arctic doesn’t care about talking points.
Mercosur
Then Brussels turns to the budget and does what it always does when it wants money: it raids the countryside. The Mercosur deal lands like a boot on the neck of European farming, while the Commission tries to repackage the damage as “competitiveness”. 
The Hungary “Pause”
And in Hungary, the mask slips entirely—files “frozen” before an election so the Commission doesn’t accidentally look neutral. It’s not rule-of-law enforcement. It’s political choreography. And it’s exactly why more Europeans are starting to see the EU not as a guardian of democracy, but as a manager of outcomes.

Brussels insists it only acts where member states allow it. 

MCC Brussel's Deputy Research Director Philip Siegert shows that is simply untrue. h exists down with John O'Brien to talk about his latest report: Empire of Law: Pushing supranationalism beyond democratic legitimacy.

For decades, EU institutions have quietly rewritten their own powers; through courts, crises, delegated acts and clever legal gymnastics,  creating a system where the centre expands and national democracy shrinks.

This Deep Dive cuts through the mythology:
• Competence creep is not an accident — it’s a method
Courts reinterpret treaties, the Commission legislates without legislators, and the Council ducks responsibility by outsourcing real decisions to the technocracy. The result is a Brussels that governs far beyond its mandate.

• Crisis governance as a power machine
From the Eurozone meltdown to COVID and now “values enforcement,” every emergency becomes an excuse for more centralisation. Whether the policy fits the crisis is irrelevant - the answer is always “more EU.”

• Rule-of-law conditionality as political weaponry
Funds can now be withheld from governments Brussels dislikes, on the basis of vague “country recommendations” and administrative judgments that never face democratic scrutiny.

• And the warning that matters most:
If this continues, Brexit will not remain an outlier. A Union that overrides sovereignty and ignores subsidiarity is a Union that erodes its own legitimacy.

If Europe is to remain democratic, it must return to clear limits, respect for national self-government, and the principle that powers come from the member states, not despite them.

Read the report here: https://brussels.mcc.hu/uploads/default/0001/02/406b613a4df11a5e76c55230e18034bbaa0a39bf.pdf

This week, MCC Brussels’ John O’Brien sits down with Leonardo Orlando. He is an  evolutionary psychologist, co-author of Sex, Science and Censure, and one of the harshest critics of gender ideology in Europe.

Orlando makes a simple but devastating point: you can’t understand society if you pretend biology stops at the neck. Yet universities have built entire “gender” departments on the denial of basic human nature. The result? A flat-earth worldview masquerading as scholarship, and an academic culture terrified of the truth.

In this Deep Dive, we explore:

Why evolutionary science is now taboo in universities.
Researchers are punished for stating biological facts, while ideologues with tenure churn out theories that collapse on contact with reality.

How the censorship works.
Orlando explains how hundreds of cancelled events and silenced researchers point to a global pattern, not isolated incidents, where dissenters are pushed out of academia altogether.

What the science actually shows.
Across cultures and across time, behavioural sex differences are robust, measurable, and rooted in evolution. The evidence is overwhelming, which is precisely why activists work so hard to suppress it.

Why ignoring biology leads to bad policy.
From domestic violence to fertility decline to the gender-neutral toy obsession, policymakers burn public money because they refuse to accept basic human nature.

And the heart of the argument:
Biology isn’t destiny — unless you ignore it.
For anyone tired of ideological propaganda dressed up as scholarship, this conversation is a breath of fresh air.

Follow MCC Brussels on social media:
https://twitter.com/MCC_Brussels
https://facebook.com/MCCBrussels
https://linkedin.com/company/mcc-brussels/

website:
https://brussels.mcc.hu