The Brother and the Mass Murderer

A response to VisualPolitik’s “Spain, the Country Standing Up to Trump.” Pedro Sánchez is not a principled hero defying an unhinged America. He is a cornered politician flying into the arms of tyrants to escape his own collapsing government. Here is what the video left on the cutting-room floor and who, exactly, left it there.

VisualPolitik has released a slick, confident video asking us to believe that Pedro Sánchez is Europe’s moral compass, that 5% of GDP on defense is exorbitant, that China and Spain are “principled countries” on the right side of history, and that the real problem with the Atlantic Alliance is an American president too crass to keep. The video is well-produced. It is also, in almost every significant respect, wrong.

Before we engage the substance, the audience deserves to know something that the video itself never bothers to disclose something which, once you know it, changes the complexion of every other argument in the film.

▪Wij van WC-Eend Raden WC-Eend Aan

There is a Dutch saying that fits this video more precisely than any English expression I know. “Wij van WC-Eend raden WC-Eend aan.” It comes from an old Dutch television commercial for a toilet cleaner, in which the supposedly neutral expert endorsing the product turned out to work for the company that made it. The phrase has since become shorthand in the Netherlands for exactly this kind of sleight of hand someone presenting themselves as an impartial authority while quietly having a dog in the fight.

VisualPolitik is Spanish.

It was founded by three Spaniards Enrique Fonseca, Alberto Rodríguez Fernández-Castaño, and Enrique Couto Bueno. The original flagship Spanish-language channel is hosted by Alejandro Legarda Carreño and operated out of Spain. YouTube’s own country-of-origin field for the channel lists it, plainly, as Spain. The English-language spinoff the one you just watched uses a British-accented presenter (first Simon Whistler, now Grant Gallacher), but the scripts, the framing, the choice of heroes and villains, and the editorial direction are all produced in Spain by Spaniards.

So when you are sat in front of a video that tells you in polished English, with a British voice, with the cosmopolitan production values of a supposedly neutral geopolitical channel that the Spanish prime minister is the moral conscience of Europe, that he is courageously standing up to a deranged American president, that his refusal to pay NATO’s defense bill is principled rather than freeloading, that the Spanish pivot to Beijing is a heroic stand for multilateralism rather than a cornered politician running to a tyrant, you are not watching international political analysis.

You are watching a Spanish media operation defending the Spanish government, dressed in English for global export to audiences who would never swallow the message quite so readily if it came directly from Madrid’s official press office.

This does not mean every factual claim in the video is false. It does mean the framing, the omissions, the casting of heroes and villains, and the things the camera refuses to point at are all coming from a team with a very particular dog in a very particular fight a Spanish dog, in a Spanish fight, pretending to narrate from nowhere.

Always check who is holding the camera before you trust what the camera shows you. With that established, let us look at what the camera refuses to point at.

▪The Brother and the Mass Murderer

Your brother is eccentric. He posts tacky memes. He says rude things on social media. He embarrasses you at family dinners. He once posted a picture of himself as Jesus Christ, which let me say this clearly, as a Christian is tasteless, self-aggrandizing, and for an orthodox believer comes perilously close to blasphemy. Fine. He is your eccentric brother.

So you decide to hire a mass murderer to protect you from him.

That is the moral logic of this video. Because Trump posts crass content and threatens tariffs, Spain is to be celebrated for running into the arms of Xi Jinping the man running the largest mass-detention apparatus on the planet, the leader of the state that the independent China Tribunal in London, chaired by the prosecutor who tried Milošević, concluded beyond reasonable doubt is forcibly harvesting organs from living prisoners of conscience. As you read this paragraph.

Eccentric is not evil. Rude is not murderous. A crass meme is not a Uyghur camp. A trade threat is not a million Tibetan children ripped from their families into state boarding schools to be Sinicized out of their own language and faith right now, today, while you watch YouTube.

And let us be very clear about the other thing the video wants you to forget: whose protection put Europe into existence in the first place. The continent the video is filmed on, the NATO umbrella Sánchez says is too expensive, the freedom VisualPolitik enjoys to make videos at all; all of it exists because America bled for it at Normandy, paid for it with the Marshall Plan, and carried the Cold War on its back for forty years at four to nine percent of GDP. Europe did not build post-war Europe. America did. That is a historical fact, not an opinion.

▪Who Is This “Principled” Sánchez, Actually?

The video calls him a cat that always lands on his feet. That is accurate. It is not, however, a compliment. Cats land on their feet because they are slippery and self-preserving, not because they are righteous.

Here is what the Spanish production team declined to show you about the Spanish prime minister they are holding up as Europe’s moral standard-bearer.

On April 14, 2026 the same day he was in Beijing being praised by Xi Jinping as standing on the right side of history a Spanish judge formally charged his wife, Begoña Gómez, with four crimes: embezzlement, influence peddling, business corruption, and misappropriation of public funds. A two-year investigation. Jury trial pending. The judge presiding over the case wrote that behavior at the Moncloa palace, the Spanish prime minister’s official residence, “seems more in keeping with that of absolutist regimes.” That is a Spanish judge describing Sánchez’s government. Not Trump. Not Vox. A Spanish judge.

His brother, David Sánchez, is under indictment for influence peddling and heads to trial this year accused of receiving a bespoke government job created for him when his older brother led the Socialist party.

His hand-picked Attorney General, Álvaro García Ortiz, was criminally convicted by Spain’s Supreme Court in November 2025 the first sitting Attorney General convicted in Spanish democratic history for leaking confidential material to smear the partner of an opposition leader. Sánchez publicly defended him to the final day, attacked the judges investigating him, and declared him “innocent” just twelve days before the verdict.

His former Transport Minister and Socialist Party number three, José Luis Ábalos the man widely credited with helping propel Sánchez to power in 2018 is on trial right now, accused of pocketing roughly four hundred thousand euros in bribes from COVID-era mask contracts. Investigators recovered audio recordings in which the men used codewords for cash: five-hundred-euro notes were called “txistorras,” two-hundreds were “suns,” hundreds were “lettuces.” His adviser Koldo García is in jail, accused of collecting up to 1.5 million euros in kickbacks. Public money was also allegedly used to pay for Ábalos’s mistress’s house.

His party’s organization secretary, Santos Cerdán effectively the Socialist Party’s number three after Ábalos fell was forced to resign in June 2025 when investigators linked him to more than six hundred thousand euros in bribes from the Spanish construction giant Acciona in exchange for rigged infrastructure contracts.

And the “Delcygate” scandal, in which Sánchez’s government secretly hosted sanctioned Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez in Madrid in 2020 despite an EU travel ban Sánchez denied knowing about it at the time, but the Civil Guard’s investigation has since established that he did.

This is not a short list. It is not a cherry-picked list. It is the actual state of the Spanish government the Spanish production team holds up as Europe’s moral conscience. A government whose wife, brother, attorney general, former transport minister, and party organization secretary are all either under investigation, on trial, or criminally convicted while the prime minister himself flies to Beijing to be applauded by a dictator for being principled.

A cat always lands on his feet. So does a man running away from his own prosecutor.

▪About That “Right Side of History”

Xi Jinping told Sánchez that Spain and China are “principled countries” standing on the right side of history. The video presents this without audit, as if the speaker’s credentials do not bear examination. They do. Let us examine them.

Over one million Uyghurs are held in camps in Xinjiang. More than a thousand mosques have been demolished. Forced sterilization of Uyghur women has been documented in the state’s own leaked internal files. This alone would be the largest mass internment of an ethno-religious group since the Third Reich. It is the tip of the pyramid.

Roughly one million Tibetan children have been removed from their families and placed in state-run boarding schools to be Sinicized out of their own language and Buddhist faith. This is happening in real time, right now, on the continent of Asia, while VisualPolitik films in the Netherlands.

The China Tribunal, an independent body convened in London and chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice KC the prosecutor who tried Slobodan Milošević at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia concluded in 2019, beyond reasonable doubt, that the Chinese state is forcibly harvesting organs from living prisoners of conscience, primarily Falun Gong practitioners. Not alleged. Concluded by a real tribunal on the evidence.

In the domain of the faith the video claims to defend, Chinese Christians have seen crosses torn from church roofs across Zhejiang province, house churches raided monthly, and Pastor Wang Yi of Chengdu’s Early Rain Covenant Church sentenced to nine years in prison for preaching the Gospel. In Hong Kong, Cardinal Joseph Zen was arrested at ninety years of age. The Vatican signed a secret agreement with Beijing that grants the Communist Party a veto over the appointment of Catholic bishops. Underground Catholics worship at risk of disappearance.

In Hong Kong, Jimmy Lai is on trial for the crime of journalism. Apple Daily has been shut down. The 2020 National Security Law criminalizes speech retroactively and extraterritorially Beijing claims jurisdiction over your words, spoken anywhere on earth.

The political body count is staggering. The Great Leap Forward (1958–62) killed thirty to forty-five million Chinese by engineered famine documented exhaustively by Frank Dikötter from the Chinese Communist Party’s own archives. The Cultural Revolution (1966–76) killed another one to two million and destroyed four thousand years of cultural inheritance. Tiananmen Square 1989 the date itself cannot legally be typed into a Chinese search engine thirty-seven years later.

Now try this simple test. Name one living Chinese dissident. Any one. Now name ten American dissidents. You cannot do the first because they are dead or in cells. You can do the second in twenty seconds. Free countries produce critics by the million. Unfree countries produce silence. That is the only tell that matters, and it is decisive.

▪The 5% Math Does Not Add Up

The video calls the NATO 5% defense spending target “exorbitant.” It also warns, in the same breath, that America’s pullback is emboldening Putin. These two claims cannot both be true. One of them has to give.

If Russia is a serious threat, the coherent response is to spend more on defense, not less. If 5% is exorbitant, then Russia must not be the threat the video claims it is. Pick one. The video picks both, because the real position dare not be stated plainly: America should pay for everything, Europe should pay for nothing, and anyone who objects is abandoning the alliance.

Here is the historical accounting. The United States sustained four to nine percent of GDP on defense spending for forty years of the Cold War precisely in order to protect Europe from the same Russia that the video now says is urgent. Today the United States sits at roughly 3.4% and that is somehow described as abandonment. This is not analysis. It is gaslighting.

In 2024, Spain ranked dead last in NATO at 1.3% of GDP below even the 2% target that the Wales summit set in 2014 and that Spain had missed for a decade. At The Hague summit in June 2025, thirty-one allies committed to 5% of GDP by 2035. Germany signed. Britain signed. Italy signed. France signed. Poland was already at 4.7%. The Baltics pledged 3.5% by 2029. Sánchez was the only leader who refused.

This is what the Spanish production team calls principled. It is not principled. It is freeloading dressed in the vocabulary of resistance.

▪The Men Sánchez Actually Needs to Stay in Power

Here is what the video does not mention about how Pedro Sánchez occupies his office at all.

He lost the July 2023 election. The conservative Popular Party received more votes. He stayed in the prime minister’s office by assembling a coalition whose decisive votes came from Carles Puigdemont, the fugitive Catalan separatist leader who staged an illegal secession in 2017 and then fled to Belgium one step ahead of Spanish police.

The price of those seven votes was an amnesty law wiping the slate clean for Puigdemont and hundreds of other separatists. A law Spain’s own judiciary condemned as a violation of the separation of powers. A law the Popular Party leader Feijóo described as “an exchange of power for privileges and impunity.” A law that Vox called a coup. A law Sánchez had spent the entire 2023 campaign promising he would never pass, and which he passed within weeks of losing.

His current government depends on a coalition that includes the hard-left Sumar, Communist parties, Catalan separatists who openly want to break Spain apart, and Basque nationalists with the same aim. That is the governing majority. Those are the people he must please every single day to keep his office. That is why he rules by royal decree the migrant regularization of up to 1.6 million people was pushed through by decree precisely because parliament would not pass it.

This is the man VisualPolitik calls Europe’s anti-Trump leader. He is not standing on principle. He is standing on a trapdoor, kept aloft only by the votes of separatists and communists, distracting the Spanish public from his collapsing government by picking fights with the country that underwrites European security.

▪On the Pope, Honestly

Let me be plain about one thing the video is, on its own narrow terms, correct about.

The image of Donald Trump posted as Jesus Christ healing the sick is tasteless. It is self-aggrandizing. For any serious orthodox Christian, it comes close to blasphemy and as a believer, I do not defend it. His attacks on Pope Leo XIV for calling for peace in Iran were uncharitable and beneath the office he holds. He should have known better.

But the video commits a category error of breathtaking proportions. It places a crass meme on the same moral scale as running concentration camps, harvesting the organs of dissidents, and jailing Christian pastors for preaching the Gospel. It argues, in effect: Trump is rude to the Pope, therefore Europe is justified in pivoting toward Beijing.

No serious moral reasoning works this way. You do not respond to a man’s bad manners by allying with a regime that has killed more Christians than any state in human history. The same Chinese Communist Party that Xi Jinping leads has torn down crosses across Zhejiang, imprisoned Pastor Wang Yi for preaching, arrested a ninety-year-old Cardinal, and demanded the right to veto the appointments of Catholic bishops through a secret agreement with the Vatican.

If you care about the Church enough to be furious about Trump’s blasphemy, you should be incandescent about the regime Sánchez just flew to embrace. If you are not, then the outrage is not about the Church at all. It is about politics, wearing the Church as a costume.

▪The Only Test That Matters

All the sophistication of European commentary on multilateralism, multipolarity, principled opposition and the crumbling rules-based order dissolves against one simple observation.

The whole migrating world is running toward America. Not one person on earth is running toward Beijing.

Millions of Africans, Latin Americans, Middle Easterners, Asians, and yes, even Spaniards risk their lives every year to reach the United States. Zero of them are risking their lives to reach Shenzhen or Shanghai for the glories of the multipolar order. The feet vote. The feet have been voting for two centuries. They are not walking to Beijing.

When Spanish judges close in on his family, Pedro Sánchez flies straight to Beijing. Why? Because Xi will not ask uncomfortable questions about his wife’s four criminal charges, his brother’s indictment, or the first Attorney General in Spanish democratic history to be criminally convicted. Cornered autocrats protect each other. That is what this week was. The Spanish camera crew called it statesmanship.

America warts, sins, tacky memes, and all is still the country the migrating world runs toward, never from. The eccentric brother who built the house is still the brother. The mass murderer being invited over to spite him is still a mass murderer. No amount of slick production and multilateralism vocabulary changes that arithmetic.

Pedro Sánchez is not on the right side of history. He is on the side of history that history eventually buries the side of the cornered elite flying to a tyrant because the judges at home are finally arriving at the door. The flag the video insults is the only reason anyone is free to insult it. Try that speech in Shanghai and see how principled the right side of history treats you.

The fact that you are safe to be this wrong is the argument.

And the fact that the argument had to be made by someone outside the Madrid media ecosystem, because the Madrid media ecosystem is busy telling you the emperor has a beautiful new wardrobe, is the whole reason this piece had to be written.

God bless America. Warts, sins, and all. Still the last best hope of earth.