The cover sets the tone. A brown teenage boy looming menacingly over a girl in a headscarf. It has all the subtlety of a brick thrown through a mosque window.

The paper contains several outlandish proposals, inching closer to a set of Nuremberg laws for Danish Muslims. The pretext for these vile and idiotic proposals is a series of media scare campaigns where a few high schools have reported problems with conservative Muslim students bullying students who are less strict in their religious beliefs. The only specific example mentioned in the proposal is the conservative organization Hizb-ut-Tahrir handing out flyers at a single Copenhagen high school. That this — a legal political organisation handing out flyers — is even allowed to happen shows that “dark foreign forces” are trying to “influence our young people and draw them away from the Danish community and the values our secondary education builds on”.

Now, this proposal has no chance of passing at the moment but it is a good example of what is considered acceptable political speech in the Nordic hermit kingdom. Støjberg isn’t treated like a crank; she’s treated like a serious politician with serious ideas. Although the proposal is not going to pass right now in its current form one ought not to dismiss it as obviously ridiculous. For decades, the far right has been the ideological laboratory of the Danish political mainstream; the lunacy Støjberg spouts today becomes tomorrow’s boring centrist consensus.

So how would high school look like if Støjberg and her merry band of fascists had their way?

Students would have to prove themselves sufficiently ideologically pure before even starting school. Støjberg intends to do this through a creepy proposal to force minors to touch adults physically. To be allowed to start school, students will have to shake the hands of both the principal and a school leadership representative “of the opposite sex as the principal”. This, we are told, will “test if students have adopted the Danish values of liberty, including gender equality”, nothing says “gender equality” like forcing teenagers to touch strangers in a ritualized power display. The suffragettes, one imagines, would have wept with joy.

Støjberg defends the moronic handshake requirement by likening it to a similarly harebrained requirement to shake the mayor’s hand if you want to become a citizen, a requirement that Støjberg herself got pushed through some years ago. “When I introduced the handshake ceremony for citizenship, there was an uproar. I was told that it was both symbolic politics and discriminatory,” the fascist leader says. “But it has been implemented today, and it turns out to work really well.” She does not elaborate on what “working really well” means, what she has established is only that the policy exists, which she offers as its own justification.

The forced physical contact is not the only requirement to start school though. Parents will be required to attend a mandatory meeting about “Danish culture, equality and education”.

But wait, there are more hoops to jump through. Students will be required to sign a declaration to follow “Danish values” - apparently self-evident to the pure of heart, though never actually defined for the rest of us - including an explicit affirmation that “the Constitution is above the Qur’an”, a bizarre humiliation ritual that reveals the fascists’ expansive ignorance on the contents of both the Danish constitution and the Qur’an.

But ideology is not enough. Even if you shake every hand, even if your parents sit through the re-education seminar, even if you swear on whatever vague values the average Danish red-faced Facebook uncle is pretending to have, you can still get rejected for racial impurity. A proposed “ethnic admission cap” would allow schools to reject students with “non-western background” if the school already has more than 25% non-Aryan students. Danish students shouldn’t have to suffer just because they live near brown people. “It shouldn’t be Danish students who for generations have had a tradition to for instance attend a specific high school who have to be transported away,” the proposal wheezes.

Once inside, the fun doesn’t stop. Anyone practicing “negative social control and culture of dominance” gets expelled. In addition, dress codes will also be introduced “where necessary”. Proposed banned items of clothing are headscarves, caps and puffer jackets. The fascists want to “remove the attitude” of the presumably Muslim “young boys who run around in packs in the hallways, showing dominance behaviour”. During her own election campaign earlier this year, Støjberg posted several videos where she was wearing a puffer jacket herself, but she has helpfully clarified that hers was a “mom pillow,” a wholesome garment worn by many women and entirely distinct from the terrifying “dominance puffer jacket” worn by non-Aryan teenagers.

Looking the part is not enough; students will also have to be sufficiently well-fed. Under Støjberg’s proposals, fasting would be banned for high schoolers. She openly admits that she wants to ban religiously motivated fasting but that the ban would cover all types of fasting.

Under the proposal students would get suspended, or expelled in repeat or “aggravated” cases, for speaking any other language than Danish in school, including during recess. What makes a case aggravated is not specified but one can imagine t depends on the language being spoken. How this squares with the far right’s performative devotion to free speech goes unexplained. Nor is it explained how foreign-language classes would function under a ban on speaking foreign languages. The fate of the many English loanwords in constant use by every Danish teenager also remains an open question.

All of this is transparently designed to expel as many non-white students as possible. This creates a funding problem, since schools are paid per student. Støjberg has a fix: schools keep the funding for any student expelled under the “negative social control and culture of dominance” clause. Cruelty, it turns out, should never be impeded by finances.

Støjberg begrudingly acknowledges that Danish administrative law requires you to at least pretend to consult the people you are making decisions for. But due process is for cucks and communists so the fascists want to fast-track the administrative process and reduce hearing times to seven days in order to fast-track expulsions. After expulsion, schools and municipalities would be under no obligation to help students enroll elsewhere. The best way to combat regressive social norms, apparently, is to ensure the affected kids remains unemployable, angry and uneducated.

Students are not the only ones getting punished under these proposals. High school managers sometimes, in their weakness, commit the sin of making Muslim students feel welcome. This must be stopped. To prevent such disgusting outbreaks of human kindness from happening, the fascists want to make it illegal for schools to make “special Islamic accommodations”, for instance by adjusting dinner times at parties to allow Muslim students observing the Ramadan to take part. Offending schools will be fined or punished “in another way” until they stop being so disgustingly inclusive.

Non-denominational prayer or reflection spaces, known as “Islamic Prayer Rooms” in the far-right lexicon, are a particular bugbear of Danish fascists and have been so for ages. You might assume these would be covered by the general ban on accommodations, but Støjberg wants them banned specifically. Just to be sure. Offending schools will be fined.

To guarantee sufficient racist paranoia among staff, new teachers will receive mandatory training in spotting “negative social control and culture of dominance.” And to ensure no school slips through the net, the government will conduct systematic inspections. Schools that fail to meet the Islamophobia quota will be fined.

The Danish far right has long been successful in racialising the political discourse on crime. It has now set its sights on doing the same for bullying, transforming a universal social problem into a racial pathology, a contagion carried exclusively by brown bodies. Støjberg is not shouting into the void. She is speaking to an audience that has been carefully cultivated over decades, an electorate that has been taught to see its Muslim neighbours as an existential threat to be managed, marginalised, and ultimately removed.

The proposal will not pass today. But the ideas will linger, floating in the political ether like spores, waiting for the moment when the center decides that the time has come to move another notch to the right. And move it will. It always does.

The battle for control of the Strait of Hormuz has become the focal point of the Iran war. Over the past several months, both Iran and the United States have claimed the upper hand – and the competing rhetoric has caused considerable confusion and doubt.

At the moment, however, the evidence is clear: The United States, patrolling the strait with its navy, is gaining ground – and Iran is losing much of its control of the critical waterway.

More than 80% of vessel transits through the Strait of Hormuz over the past two weeks have taken the Omani route – a UN-authorized shipping channel that Iran vehemently opposes – according to Kpler, which tracks ships using transponders and satellite data.

Iran, declaring the strait under its control, has attacked dozens of ships that tried to to travel the waterway via the north coast of Oman. Despite the risk, most ships have recently chosen to ignore Iran’s demands and cross the strait with the promise of protection from US naval forces.

“It increasingly looks like Iran has at least partially lost control of the strait,” said Homayoun Falakshahi, head of crude oil analysis at Kpler.

Shifting control

That stands in stark contrast to a month ago, when Kpler observed virtually no shipping traffic via the Omani route. The sharp reduction in traffic around Iran’s preferred route has prevented Iran from charging tolls on ship traffic through the strait – as it did in the spring.

The expiration of the Memorandum of Understanding between the United States and Iran this week in theory allows Iran to begin charging tolls again. But it doesn’t appear the country has been able to, according to Kpler.

“Iran’s request to collect tolls is something that most Middle East folks don’t want to do and haven’t been doing,” said Dan Pickering, founder and chief investment officer at Pickering Energy Partners. “So the Oman route absolutely makes the most sense.”

Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have chartered Very Large Crude oil Carriers (VLCCs) – the biggest oil tankers – to transit out of the Persian Gulf via the Strait of Hormuz, then transfering the oil to customers’ tankers outside the danger zone in the Gulf of Oman, according to Andy Lipow, president of Lipow Oil Associates.

To evade Iran’s attacks, they’ve turned their transponders off, often for weeks on end. That so-called dark traffic appears to have eluded some data-tracking services like Kpler as well. Although some can be picked up on satellite, it’s harder to track via traditional means.

But the United States, with significant military force on the water, has eyes on all ships passing through the strait and has reported significantly higher oil shipping numbers than most traditional estimates had previously suggested.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright last week said that combined oil transits through the strait and rerouted around the waterway totaled around 15 million barrels per day over the course of a week – much closer to the 20-million-barrel average from before the war.

Lack of clarity

That led President Donald Trump to declare Monday that the United States has “total control over the strait,” a questionable claim he has reiterated often throughout the conflict. Iran’s continued attacks and oil flows still well below pre-war levels suggest the United States does not fully control the Strait of Hormuz.

But neither does Iran.

“If their goal is to be ‘in charge,’ then I’d say they were never completely in control to start with,” said Pickering. “It feels like their goal is deterrence, in order to be validated as in-control. I think they are still deterring.”

But if tankers are really getting as much oil through the strait as the United States claims, then Iran’s deterrence and control of the Strait of Hormuz is diminished compared to what it was a month or two ago.

Complicating matters: Oman and Iran are engaging in talks to restore freedom of navigation through the strait – absent the United States – much to Trump’s dismay. It’s not clear how those discussions will affect oil traffic or control of the waterway.

“I would take all the information and headlines ‘under advisement,’” said Lipow. “But it is fair to say that Iran has partially lost control of the strait.”