Merz has always been just some loser. He’s a third-rate talentless politician and in this much like his predecessor, Olaf Scholz. Both are mere caricatures, what happens when you mimeograph overmuch the last century’s tired political styles. These kinds of chancellors will continue to exist only so long as they can be sold to the geezers of the Federal Republic’s care homes by the amateurish marketing campaigns of a complicit state media as the incarnation of far-sighted competence and (more importantly) bourgeois respectability.

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Early in 2025, Merz had the chance to seize a measure of power for himself and make facts. He could have forged a deal with Alternative für Deutschland on the most important questions, established a minority government and set about force-marching the obese German state through necessary reforms. It might’ve torn his party apart, he might’ve failed, there would’ve been a huge fight, but whatever happened nobody would ever forget Chancellor Merz. Instead, the Pigeon Chancellor let a lot of deranged Antifa street protesters and screeching women with parareligious concerns about atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations dissuade him from the only reasonable path. Instead of making history, he chose to spend the first year of his chancellorship making the Social Democrats fat and happy at the expense of the nation. Most don’t even hate Merz, because hate like love has to be be earned. He inspires nothing more than mildly scornful indifference.

Everyone who was not a complete idiot knew that Merz’s mad coalition with the Social Democrats could never work. Yet the man has been lionised in the international press and even in centre-right domestic papers like the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as a serious reformer. These people told us Merz would rebuild the Bundeswehr, reduce insane social spending, impose fiscal discipline, solve the migroid problem and restore economic growth. Even if the leftoid half of the German establishment press didn’t embrace all these myths, they nevertheless worked hard to make Merz seem presentable, serious and viable. He was worth a shot, he would do his best, and after the crazy Scholz years Germany was back on solid footing.

Now, in the the space of about two weeks, the entire myth of Chancellor Merz has collapsed. Major papers that used to defend his government and praise his prospects are suddenly saying it’s over. They’re writing front-page editorials in the spirit of stuff I was posting here over a year ago. Merz appears at town-hall meetings where he gets asked how he’s made life better in Germany and before he can answer the audience just laughs at his stupid ass. His coalition partners say he’s doing a terrible job. Back-benchers from his own party are calling his political strategy a failure to his face and leaking it afterwards to the press so everyone knows what they said.

Still worse, people from the Chancellery are talking to the tabloids. They’re explaining that Merz’s government has been hanging by a thread since at least last December; that his party thinks he’s a pushover whom the SPD constantly manipulates; that often Merz just absorbs the opinions of whatever person he last talked to and so his handlers have to limit his contacts to keep him from going off-message in insane ways; that Merz is now almost totally isolated, having burned through most of his close confidants; and that nobody has any solutions or ideas and increasingly everybody doubts that the Chancellor has the talents to save himself.

We have here before us the final stages of an inexorable, terminal process. In this story Merz’s role is but a late and a small one; Merkel wrote the early chapters, and regular installments will continue until the Federal Republic is destroyed or politically reconstituted. Every Chancellor is going to be a bigger joke, even weaker and more ineffectual and more retarded than the last one. Every government is going to be even more paralysed and ridiculous than the heretofore most paralysed and ridiculous government that preceded it. Our industry will waste away while new taxes sprout like weeds, rail will grow less reliable and tickets more expensive, health insurance premiums will increase and medical care will get worse, schools will just get shittier and shittier. There will be no answers, no fixes and no succour, until the devolution is complete.

The problem is not merely the demise of a single chancellorship or a solitary party, but of an entire political world. Thus even longstanding Merkelian éminences grises like Peter Altmaier have begun to refer to our situation as a “crisis of the state.” Since its founding in 1949, the Federal Republic has been so closely identified with the two great people’s parties – the CDU and the SPD – as to be effectively inseparable from them. Other nations like France have extremely fluid political systems, but in Germany a combination of prior conservative cultural tendencies and a burdensome, deliberately enfeebling constitution has yielded one of the most inflexible political cartels Western parliamentary democracy has ever seen. The Social Democrats are already in a state of advanced decay, and now the Union parties are following them to a similar fate.

What awaits us at the bottom of our freefall is either a total reconstitution of the uniparty around Alternative für Deutschland and the Union in some dwarfed, reduced form; or an AfD ban and an institutionalisation of leftist rule in a less dogmatic reincarnation of the German Democratic Republic. The former seems vastly more likely right now, but of course that could easily change. Because we don’t know what will happen when we try to run different political software on our slow, overburdened constitutional hardware, it’s impossible to say whether the Federal Republic can even survive this resolution, and in no scenario will more than a portion of the present political elite make the squeeze.

Other countries would’ve adopted half-measure reforms to head off the cataclysms that are coming for us years ago, but not Germany. It is in our ethnic character to do everything longer, harder and in more determined suicidal fashion than everybody else. We must take everything to the absolute extreme to demonstrate our moral commitment, in the process proving to everyone else how stupid our ideological persuasions actually are. In this way our worst politics will sooner or later become their own refutation and their own undoing. Unfortunately the whole process takes a long time and is both extremely destructive and eye-wateringly expensive.

Yesterday saw a new phase in this dubious epic, as Timmy’s team of crack whale-whisperers finally realised the latest of their harebrained rescue schemes. They parked a massive, flooded barge near our confused or possibly suicidal marine mammal and enticed him to swim into it:

It really is hard to exaggerate what an unimitigated clownshow this whole thing has become – a circus funded by a few wealthy philanthropists that BILD has secured exclusive rights to cover. As Timmy lumbered into his new quarters he exhaled, which one of our execrable expertoids interpreted as an expression of his thanks.

BILD posted the video seconds later under the headline WALELUJA.

Timmy’s rescuers drew a net over the exit and sailed off with their mentally challenged charge. At present the whaletard is floating in his improbable whaletub which is in turn floating in the Baltic, headed for the North Atlantic. The plan is to release Timmy back into his native waters, just so that he can return to make an even greater problem of himself.

Humpbacks are pretty hardy creatures, but they are not immortal, and if any whale is likely to die in the coming weeks it is Timmy. The selfsame state authorities who had earlier urged all involved to leave our unfortunate whaletard to expire on his sandbank in peace had a change of heart some weeks ago. The reason is not hard to fathom, if we are honest with ourselves. The last thing they want to deal with is a rotting whale corpse off the coast of Wismar. Tourist season is looming, twelve metric tonnes of putrid whale flesh is bad for business and I’m pretty sure that disposing of a dead Timmy on any reasonable timescale is beyond the capabilities of the Federal Republic in its presently crippled state.

These are dark days for Friedrich Merz the Pigeon Chancellor. They might, in fact, be the beginning of the end for him.

Merz has become the least liked politician in all of Germany, with toilet-tier approval ratings hovering around 15%. It’s so bad the man can hardly bear to open his social media accounts any longer. This morning he went crying to Der Spiegel that “No Chancellor before me has ever had to endure anything like this” – the “this” in question being people calling him a loser and a failure on Facebook.

Even Merz’s erstwhile BFF Donald Trump has abandoned him. The Chancellor has been critical of the Iran war and that’s fine as far as it goes, but he broke new ground when speaking to a bunch of schoolchildren in Marsberg earlier this week. “The Americans went in to this war … quite obviously without any strategy at all,” he said, while praising the Iranians as “very skilful at negotiating – or anyway very skilful at not negotiating” and claiming that “the Iranian leadership are humiliating an entire nation.”

Trump responded with a rare direct rebuke on Truth Social:

As late as February Merz was wont to market himself as Europe’s foremost Trump whisperer. It was basically an implicit admission that although he was totally useless domestically, at least we could count on him to keep things smooth with our big American brothers. Now he’s not even good for that much.

German politics, I keep typing, have been mired in gridlock for a long time. The last time anything important happened was last January, and the problem with long periods of enforced stagnation driven by dysfunctional government is that the pressure for change is never properly diffused and only grows and grows. Suddenly we will pass from a world where absolutely nothing happens into a new world where a lot of really chaotic and on balance bad things happen all at once. Nobody can say precisely when the dam will break, but also too nobody can deny that it will happen.

Especially the fiscal picture looks increasingly dark: The German government avoided taking on any debt over the many years that the economy boomed and money was effectively free. Now interest rates are very far from zero indeed and the state cannot stop borrowing. Merz’s government have finally released their Federal Financial Plan, “which reads … like a declaration of insolvency” and predicts nothing but hundreds of billions in ballooning debts through 2030 to finance the social welfare system, to repair our rotting infrastructure and to rearm the Bundeswehr. The interest payments now threaten to swallow up every last free Euro of tax revenue. Practically speaking we probably only have two or three years of breathing room until the Federal Republic – one of the highest-tax countries in all of Europe – becomes effectively paralysed in its own morass of ballooning liabilities. That’s another big reason – and perhaps the most important reason – that nobody likes Merz anymore. His failed political triangulations and his total capitulation to the SPD are killing the country and ruining our future.

For about six months, the polls had Alternative für Deutschland and the Union parties more or less dead even with each other. Now the numbers have started to move again, quickly and dramatically. The CDU is in freefall, headed for 20% if not lower, while the AfD is climbing steadily, peeling voters away from the Union in a race for the 30% mark. Multiple surveys confirm the AfD has opened up a 4–5 point lead over the CDU and CSU, the biggest we have ever seen:

A lot of people have argued that there is a tipping point in AfD support – a point at which voter sentiment will shift irreversibly and in ever greater numbers in favour of the Evil Fascist Nazi Hitler Party. Ours is a state dominated by a vast regime media system that spends untold resources demonising the AfD and running interference for the government however badly they fail. This strategy can work only as long as AfD support remains relatively low; beyond some threshold, the party will become increasingly normalised socially regardless of whatever the TV says, because AfD supporters will become so common in real life. Something like that already happened in East Germany in the aftermath of Covid; there, the the tipping point seemed to lie just north of 20%. The AfD has now reached that level of support in the West as well.

At this point Merz has squandered almost all support within his own party. The CDU is full of careerist people who see nothing but a grim future of shrinking voter share and ever fewer seats in the Bundestag and the state parliaments:

Following the heavy losses in the local elections in Bavaria and the latest poll in North Rhine-Westphalia (CDU: down six percentage points), it is rumoured that plots to replace Merz have been underway behind the scenes for some time. “It’s always the same,” an experienced CDU figure … says. “Either the bloke at the top delivers or they saw him off.” Merkel … delivered a long series of election victories and with them posts and power. Merz delivers nothing politically and the Union cannot win with him.

There’s only two ways for the CDU to get rid of their doomed Pigeon Chancellor: Unioners must either recruit the Social Democrats for their plot and arrange a vote to replace him with somebody else, or they must do the unthinkable, break down the firewall and form a new minority government with the help of the AfD. The only way Merz can save himself is by giving the SPD even more of what they want and ruining Germany’s future prospects still further, in the hopes of convincing his poisonous partners them that they’re better off with him than with any notional successor. In pursuing this strategy, of course, Merz further alienates his own party and increases pressure on the firewall. And all the time those autumn elections in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Sachsen-Anhalt are looming.

Today a reporter asked Merz if he could guarantee his government would last until the end of the present legislative period in 2028. He responded that “nobody can guarantee anything.”

His name is Cole Allen, and he is a 2017 Caltech grad most recently employed as a standardised test tutor. He booked a room at the Washington Hilton late last week, anticipating the 2026 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner scheduled for Saturday evening. This was the very hotel where John Hinkley shot U.S. President Ronald Reagan in 1981.

At 8:24pm on Saturday, Allen sent a typically verbose and retarded 1,000-word manifesto to his family. Then, using his status as a hotel guest to bypass the outermost security perimeter, he made his way to the concourse ballroom where Trump and many other high administration officials were seated. Allen had armed himself with a shotgun, a handgun and various knives. At 8:34pm, he opened fire and rushed a security checkpoint near the ballroom stairs.

Allen did not get very far. Security officials rapidly disarmed and tackled the would-be assassin; he ended up stripped and handcuffed on the carpet with a foil blanket around his waist. One Secret Service member was shot during the struggle, but his ballistic vest spared him serious injury.

Secret Service and other security personnel evacuated the ballroom and there were no other injuries. Afterwards Trump held a press conference at the White House, still wearing his dinner jacket. He answered a reporter’s question with signature bravado, insisting that “the most impactful people, the people that do the most … the people that make the biggest impact, they’re the ones that they go after … I hate to say I’m honoured by that.” He also used the security lapse to press the case for his White House ballroom project.

Allen’s motives were everything you were already thinking. In his manifesto, he wrote somewhat incoherently (and in reference to the Epstein scandal) that he was “no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.” He proceeded to outline the various “rules of engagement” that he had set for himself, claiming that he intended above all to target “administration officials (not including Mr. Patel1) … prioritized from highest-ranking to lowest.” He also commented on the lax security at the event:

Like, I expected security cameras at every bend, bugged hotel rooms, armed agents every 10 feet, metal detectors out the wazoo. What I got (who knows, maybe they’re pranking me!) is nothing.

Allen signed his manifesto with the cringe name “coldForce,” which turns out to be his Bluesky nom de guerre. He spent his time on that platform angrily venting a lot of standard-issue anti-Trump bile that it is not worth my time or yours to rehearse here, and that is only useful because disingenuous idiots from former U.S. President Barack Obama down to every last establishment German journalist were still pretending as of yesterday that Allen’s motives were some kind of deep mystery.

Three points:

1) This is third assassination attempt Trump has endured since his political comeback. On 13 July 2024, Thomas Matthew Crooks notoriously grazed Trump’s ear and murdered an innocent bystander in his attempt to kill the forty-seventh president-to-be at a rally near Butler, Pennsylvania; and two months later on 15 September, the Secret Service caught a deranged Russo-Ukrainian war activist named Ryan Wesley Routh lying in wait for Trump outside his golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida. The Butler shooting was only possible because of astonishing lapses in event security, and as of now it seems that similar lapses at the Washington Hilton are why Cole could make it as far as he did on Saturday. We’ll very likely see more assassination attempts before Trump’s presidency is over.

2) Before Allen Cole, there was Austin Tucker Martin – a 21 year-old who was shot dead on 22 February 2026 by Secret Service while attempting to enter Mar-a-Lago. Trump was away in Washington at the time. This makes Cole not only the third would-be assassin, but also the second armed anti-Trump lunatic with Epstein obsessions to try something violent. I have many disagreements with the irascible Michael Tracey, but he is completely right that media promotion of the various overblown and often flatly untrue Epstein conspiracy theories is dangerous and also deeply irresponsible. This kind of mythmaking has far more emotional potency than the Russiagate nonsense that it has replaced.

3) The establishment German press have treated these events with typical maturity and even-handedness. Severely pinched US Spiegel correspondent Nicola Abé has shat out a piece declaring that “the dramatic incident at the Washington Hilton comes at a rather opportune time for Trump,” because it has allowed the forty-seventh president to “cast himself as a combative hero.” ZDF Washington correspondent Elmar Theveßen, who spent the days after Charlie Kirk’s assassination peddling malicious and transparent slander, quickly got to work Amerisplaining to Germans why Trump is the real villain and the progressive left establishment the real victim of Allen’s failed shooting:

Donald Trump’s critics fear that he could exploit this for political purposes to strengthen the security apparatus, potentially deploying the National Guard and regular armed forces within the country, including during the autumn elections. And in fact, a new task force has recently been established here to proactively track down terrorism within the country, and Donald Trump has now defined terrorism so broadly that dissidents, civil rights groups, and even the Democratic Party could come under scrutiny. And in that respect, there is a climate of uncertainty here, to which incidents like the one last night naturally contribute.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is a sleazy American political advocacy organisation that exists primarily to collect donations from morally overexcited gullible people. They solicit these donations by claiming to combat an array of political evils associated with “white supremacism.” Mainly the SPLC are known for filing lawsuits, publishing otiose classifications of alleged hate groups and promoting things like “anti-bias education.”

In its stated aims, the SPLC is not alone. A whole world of political activists and non-governmental organisations – to say nothing of entire governments and intelligence agencies – devote astounding resources to ends like these. The postwar progressive consensus derives political legitimacy from seeming always and everywhere to oppose nefarious, illiberal and anti-egalitarian forces. The problem is that malign hate groups are in extremely short supply. Never has there been such a dearth of them as today.

Facing a shrinking pool of credible demons to expel, our political priesthood has resorted to various underhanded tactics. By far their favourite is to target some random political party or otherwise harmless group and insist that they are neo-Nazi hard-right racial supremacists even though they’re not. They’ve been doing this to Alternative für Deutschland for years.

They have other approaches too. Sometimes, in very rare but extremely telling moments, we catch our progressive liberal guardians of all that is right and good actually funding and coordinating the very hate groups they claim to oppose. The U.S. Department of Justice has just charged the SPLC with money laundering and fraud, alleging that they have spent at least three million dollars doing exactly this.

The details of the indictment are amazing. Maybe you want to subscribe and we can read them together. Without your support nothing I do here would be possible.

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Timmy is the name the German press have given to a confused humpback whale who got himself caught in a fishing net off the coast of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in early March.

Authorities cut Timmy free in the hopes that he would swim back to the Atlantic like a good whale, but instead he continued to poop around off the German Baltic coast where he does not belong, finally stranding himself on a sandbar near Niendorf like a complete fucking retard.1 An intensive rescue ensued – breathlessly livestreamed by the German press and regrettably also live-tweeted by myself. Ultimately the effort succeeded and Timmy swam free, only to strand himself again, and again, and again, and still again.

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Finally authorities gave up and decided to let Timmy the Whaletard die in peace, but soon a whole raft of philanthropists and “whale whisperers” (this is literally what the press called one of them) descended on the problem and the drama of Timmy continues to this moment. The latest subplot unfolded yesterday, as our whale saviours prepared a complex scheme to lift Timmy via air cushions onto a tarp, tie him to pontoons and tug him around Denmark back into the North Atlantic. Alas, a rising tide loosened the hapless Timmy from his sandbar and he swam free, escaping this indignity at least and leaving all the whale-whispering shitheads with nothing to do but give more pointless media interviews. For two hours children across the Federal Republic jubilated as Timmy lurked aimlessly in shallow coastal waters, until of course he beached himself again, provoking a whole new narrative epicycle.

The case of Timmy the Retard Whale is oddly captivating. Most obviously it illustrates the naiveté and neotenous emotional incontinence of Germans today, many of whom have countered the pervasive secularisation of society with an exaggerated and childish faith in the overarching sacrality of the natural world and its creatures. The media have constructed a perverse Disney plot out of the endless ups and downs of Timmy’s plight: Now the whale is free! Now he is dying! Now he must be rescued! Now he is free again! Now he is stranded! Now there is hope! Now he is dying! Not only children but plenty of adults have lost themselves in this transparently repetitive drama. At one point a gaggle of dumb women even protested to demand that authorities do more to save our unsaveable humpback – who is of course merely one of perhaps 100,000 humpbacks across the world, the vast majority of whom will die in complete obscurity with nary a news article.

In my more delirious moments I wonder if Timmy is not also an omen from on high, a metaphor from the heavens to illustrate for us the ridiculous, circular farce that Germany has become.

The Federal Republic concludes the first quarter of the twenty-first century as a bloated, increasingly unaffordable welfare state, governed by a sclerotic political elite who have lost all will for reform. Annual government expenditures now officially exceed 50% of the entire German gross domestic product – a line in the sand where Helmut Kohl once said (however allegedly) that socialism begins.2

Friedrich Merz’s coalition government of centre-right Christian Democrats and hard-left Social Democrats faces an increasingly insolvent pension system, a dysfunctional and increasingly unaffordable public health insurance system, a bloated social welfare system subsidising an ever-growing population of layabouts and bums, a continued stream of illegal migrants, decaying infrastructure, a cancerous bureaucratic apparatus, an insane tax system that appropriates half of everyone’s earnings with ever less to show for it and a vampiric public media behemoth supported by a warren of malicious taxpayer-funded NGOs that run around branding everybody who has a problem with any of the foregoing as an Evil Nazi Hitler Fascist.

The pension crisis is the greatest problem of all. In the best of worlds and with even the most capable political leadership, it would still represent an existential challenge to the Federal Republic. Yet as this crisis approached from afar, the state responded not with advance measures to lessen the pain, but with an insane plan to phase out all nuclear power and transition electricity generation to renewables. It is hard to see this in retrospect as anything but a kind of weird displacement reaction. We have spent the last twenty years solving exactly the wrong problem and along the way we have made the real crisis that much worse. The energy transition means expensive energy much more than it means reduced carbon emissions, and expensive energy means deindustrialisation, means a shrinking tax base, means fewer fiscal resources to address the pension crisis, means probably higher taxes, means more productive people leave, means everything gets worse.

Before his swearing in, Merz the Pigeon Chancellor vowed an immediate blitz of reforms to address all of these problems. The Social Democrats would not cooperate, so the reform blitz was rebranded into something called the Autumn of Reforms, and nothing happened in the autumn either so Merz felt compelled to christen 2026 the “Year of New Beginnings.” We are now a third of the way through the year and nothing has really begun yet, beyond unsatisfactory half-measures on the pension front, ongoing fruitless debates on welfare reform and new conscription legislation passed with such little care and in such great haste that the government was forced to defang an unnoticed if disturbing provision requiring young men to obtain permission from the Bundeswehr before leaving the country. Meanwhile high energy prices continue to deindustrialise Germany and economic growth remains a hopeless fantasy. The political gridlock will continue into yet a second autumn, as the Christian Democrats await with terror the results of elections in Sachsen-Anhalt and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where Alternative für Deutschland stands on the edge of achieving outright parliamentary majorities.3

It is an interesting question, to ask when is the last time anything big happened on the domestic political front in Germany. The answer is pretty clearly January 2025, when the Christian Democrats in the middle of a desperate federal election campaign flirted with tearing down the firewall and conducted two mostly symbolic votes alongside the AfD. There ensued a fierce backlash from the left and their civil society goons, and since then Merz has clung to the firewall like grim death. The result is a curious paradox that may be very nearly unique in history: The more the electorate shifts to the right, the more federal politics counterbalance towards the left. The voters see the answer, and the politicians respond by giving them everywhere and always exactly the opposite of what they want.

There are three reasons for this. The first is the asymmetrical nature of left and centre-right parties in general. As left parties lose supporters to the right, they shrink to an ever more concentrated base of the truly radicalised and committed. They become more leftist and less centrist. Centre-right parties, as they lose supporters to the right, merely shrink to their directionless triangulating core. They become more centre-left and less rightist. Thus you end up with the present government, which consists of leftist true believers harnessed to a bunch of milquetoast centre-right careerists who stand for nothing discernible.

Then there are the paradoxical effects of the firewall itself, which divides the Bundestag and all state parliaments in two. The more seats and voters that vanish to the AfD behind the firewall, the greater the share of seats and voters the left enjoys in the socially acceptable portion of parliamentary politics. Left parties together have 56% of the non-AfD Bundestag presently, for example – exactly same share they had at the height of leftist power in Germany after the 2021 elections, when the AfD was much weaker. The parliamentary math thus does not discourage the left from their growing radicalisation; if anything it teaches them an opposite lesson.

The final dynamic, and the most insidious, stems from the craven incentives of the Union parties and Merz himself. To make the coalition work, they have transformed themselves into something like a subdivision of the Social Democrats. They are eager to give the crazy SPD every possible win, they miss no opportunity to debase themselves before the SPD and they give in to every last SPD demand. The logic here is incredibly simple and also very stupid: The Union fears that if the Social Democrats believe their presence in the coalition is harming them politically, they might just leave the government. Thus they want the SPD to do as well as possible, and the Union on this front has been very successful. While Union polling numbers have only decayed since the last elections, the Social Democrats until recently remained roughly intact around the 15 percent mark.

That is of course only the federal picture, and it is rapidly changing. Since the end of February, the SPD has lost ground to the Greens, because some German voters are stupid enough to react to high energy prices by shifting their support to the one singular party most devoted to making energy even more expensive. We are talking about people so mind-numbingly retarded they make Timmy look like an all-time genius ocean navigator. There is also the state picture, which is very grim and betokens nothing good for the coalition. The 22 March elections in Rheinland-Pfalz ended 35 years of Social Democratic rule in that state, with the SPD winning a mere 26% of the vote. When Sachsen-Anhalt goes to the ballot box in September, the SPD stands a good chance of being voted out of the state parliament entirely. Who knows what conclusions the Social Democrats might draw from that kind of defeat, or if the federal government can survive it.

Much of what happens in politics is down to boring systemic forces, but sometimes – and particularly in the realm of failures – responsibility can be traced instead to very specific actors. In this case, the paradoxical leftward shift of German politics can be laid almost entirely at the feet of the cowardly Union leadership. They are destroying their own party and doing untold damage to Germany via their refusal to take obvious steps: Merz must get rid of the Social Democrats, form a minority government and pass legislation with opportunistic Bundestag majorities formed from AfD votes as necessary. Something like this will happen sooner or later whatever anybody does. The more time we waste in this pointless nothing government, the worse things will get and the harder it will be to send the left packing. Their civil society minions are every moment preparing the trenches and sharpening knives for just this eventuality.

Day-to-day existence in Germany is far from unbearable, but everything is worse than it was. Particularly Covid has defined a serious break in the general quality of life. Everything suddenly became more expensive, infrastructural problems (particularly rail) have reached absolutely farcical levels, the state has acquired a disquieting repressive edge that I’ve written about many times and the bureaucracy has become even more unbearable. A lot of people, particularly smart young people, are leaving the country to seek their fortunes in places with less taxation, more functional public services and better prospects. The pain however has yet to become bad enough to break the impasse, and so we are still stuck, and it is just immensely frustrating and also really, really stupid.

As I write this, rescuers have brought in an excavator to dig Timmy free of his sandbar in Wismar Bay. A few hours ago they tried to feed him a lunch of shrimp and herring. One of Timmy’s veterinarian attendants has abandoned the mission in outrage and is screeching on Facebook that a lot of the people involved in the rescue effort are mere poseurs, which is something nobody would’ve ever guessed. In an “IMPORTANT UPDATE”, ZDF reports on the opinion of a “whale researcher” who believes present efforts “are against the whale’s best interests.” You can watch the livestream here, along with millions of other Germans.

This is going to be a rant. Some won’t like what follows but the problem is I can’t write anything that I want to write until I get this off my chest.

The coming months (and perhaps years) of blogging are shaping up to be hard. This is because many of you have decided you need to be outraged when presented with honest assessments of what I think is happening in American politics under President Donald J. Trump. You’re fine if I write honest posts about what I think is happening in Germany under the rule of anybody at all, and you were fine when I wrote honest pieces about what I thought was happening in American politics under President Joseph R. Biden. When I write about my honest impressions of U.S. events under Trump, however, I get waves of enraged responses. Idiots who don’t even subscribe come out of the silicone shouting at me to watch their favourite MAGA YouTube account and iNfOrm mYseLf.1 Other people who do subscribe rapidly unsubscribe in high dudgeon. I am told to stick to Germany or that I was only interesting when I wrote about Covid or that I don’t know what I’m talking about for any of a myriad other reasons.

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I find these reactions both unbalanced and unreasonable. Anything I post that is longer than about 1,000 words is always something I’ve thought about and researched for a while. These aren’t one-off shitposts that I throw up to troll my valued readers. I’ve tried to be diplomatic, but that doesn’t work. On the one hand people still get mad so it hardly matters, and then on the other hand still other people who claim to agree with me get mad too because they deem my diplomacy to be evidence of deeply feared “audience capture.”2 Never has the narcissism of small differences weighed more heavily upon me. Most of the angriest readers seem to agree with me on all the most important things; the stuff that gets them hopping is trivial in comparison. What does it matter, if the Iran war is actually going fantastically and I’m mistaken in my pessimism? If tariffs really work out or if Denmark decides to give Greenland away after all, what’s the big deal? Why are my reservations about these things such a problem? It’s baffling to me.

As an interim solution to this friction I’ve tried not writing at all, but we all know that isn’t the way. So I’m going to write about these problems, and I’m going to be as brutally honest as I can be about them because I’m irritated and I’ve had enough and I want to clear the air now and forever.

What follows will only be for subscribers, because I’ve long learned that it’s pointless to argue with the entire internet and some of this blog’s more casual readers turn out to be very careless angry dyspeptic types who are just going to have to wonder for all of eternity about all the enraging insane stuff I have stashed beneath the fold.

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From Apollo News:

The Hamburg Public Prosecutor’s Office is investigating two Christian YouTubers for criticizing Muslim anti-semitism and Islam in a video …

Together, Niko and Tino run the Christian YouTube channel “Eternal Life,” where they post videos in which they talk with people about Jesus and his message. …

In February 2025, the public prosecutor’s office launched an ex officio investigation into Niko over statements in a video from 2024 … The Protestant newspaper Idea was the first to report on the investigation against Niko. Apollo News has now learned that the second YouTuber, Tino, is also under investigation for the same video …

Tino and Niko have taken down the offending video, entitled “Islam is not peace” (“Der Islam ist kein Frieden”), but reporters have seen it. Apparently it was posted in the context of the pro-Palestine protests that were unfolding in Hamburg at the time and features Niko editorialising on what he sees as the dangers of Islam. The video claims that “Palestinians are working toward the extermination of the Jews, according to the dictates of the Hadiths,” among them the Hadith proclaiming that “The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews and kill them” – a text which indeed is cited in Article 7 of the Hamas Charter. In the video Niko further claims that “Hatred of Jews … is a demonic spirit and does not come from God” and that “Islam and the message behind it bring only hatred, power, and murder,” concluding that “This religion is not peace, not joy and not life.”

Prosecutors believe these statements may violate Section 166 of the German Criminal Code, which prohibits the “Revilement of religious faiths and religious and ideological communities.” Specifically, StGB §166 makes it illegal to publish content that disparages “the religion or ideology of others” or “a church or other religious or ideological community in Germany … in a manner suited to causing a disturbance of the public peace.” That last clause is the most important. While confessional content like this hardly rises to the level of other speech crimes like incitement, the blasphemy statute imposes a more dangerous standard premissed on the attitudes of the targeted group. If it is likely to inspire unrest among Muslims, in other words, it may well be illegal under StGB §166.

This is another in a long series of cases where we find the German state pursuing small-time content creators for posting the most benign things that would have attracted no attention had there been no criminal investigation. The YouTube channel “Eternal Life” as of today has only about 1,400 subscribers and 17 videos featuring nothing but bog-standard evangelical Christian content. What is more, the offending video had less than 1,000 views before it was removed. Apparently YouTube classified the video as “dangerous” before the prosecutor’s office came knocking, which probably means some internet censorship NGO was responsible for tipping off both prosecutors and the platform.

Last night did not quite usher in the feared Energy Apocalypse.

At the eleventh hour, the United States and Iran agreed to a Pakistan-mediated ceasefire. This ceasefire was said to comprise an immediate two-week pause in hostilities and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz pending peace negotiations between Iran and the United States. Unfortunately it is nearly impossible to write anything about this ceasefire because most of what one might say about it is disputed and it appears to be crumbling as I type.

On Truth Social, Trump announced that a ten-point proposal from Iran had become “a workable basis” for negotiations during the ceasefire. Iranian media rapidly published the maximalist demands of this proposal, which include war reparations, an acceptance of the Iranian uranium enrichment programme and the withdrawal of U.S. soldiers from the Middle East. Soon, however, a “U.S. official” told the press that “The document being reported by media outlets is not the working framework.” Thus we do not know what is being negotiated at all, at least not right now; and what is more, CNN is now reporting that no formal written terms underpin the present ceasefire.

According to Pakistan, the ceasefire originally applied to Israeli hostilities against Lebanon, but Israel swiftly denied this and U.S. President Donald Trump has since confirmed that “Because of Hezbollah they [Lebanon] were not included in the deal.” This appears to be an effort to smooth things over with Israel, who were surprised and unhappy at the ceasefire announcement by the United States. Today has been the bloodiest day of the present Lebanon campaign, with Israel conducting airstrikes across the country.

The Strait of Hormuz remains largely impeded by Iranian forces. Ten ships passed through earlier today, and there is no hope normal Strait traffic will be restored immediately. Iran has also warned that “Any vessel trying to travel into the sea” without prior arrangement “will be targeted and destroyed.” Trump has allowed that Iran may continue to charge tolls for passage through the Strait “as a joint venture” with the United States.

Iran also continues to attack its Gulf neighbours and Israel, including a serious and successful drone assault on Kuwaiti energy facilities and desalination plants – the second such ominous attack since Monday. At least some of these strikes are retaliation for airstrikes by an unknown actor (perhaps the UAE) against Iranian oil facilities on Lavan Island. Iran has complained about ceasefire violations to Pakistan.

Right now, it looks a lot like the Americans have put down their weapons and joined the Iranians in declaring victory, while the Israelis redouble their efforts against Lebanon and Iran launches some of its most serious retaliatory missile and drone attacks since the war began. Maybe things will change soon.

UPDATE: Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi is threatening to scrap the ceasefire deal if Israel continues its attacks on Lebanon.

This may be a big deal.

Any escalation against energy infrastructure in Iran is highly dangerous, because it will invite Iran to retaliate against energy infrastructure in the Gulf states, which produce a great part of the world’s oil and gas. The worst result could be a years-long energy crisis that changes all of our lives even more profoundly than Covid. I’m not saying that’s going to happen or that it’s even likely to happen, but I want to be clear-eyed about the eventualities before us.

On 25 March, the United States sent via Pakistan a 15-point peace plan, demanding that the Iranians make substantial concessions with respect to their ballistic missile and nuclear programmes, and also that they reopen the Strait of Hormuz. Yesterday, the Iranians responded (also via Pakistan) with their own 10-point plan, which addresses “a protocol for safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz, the lifting of sanctions and reconstruction.” Trump has called the Iranian plan a “significant proposal” and a “very significant step,” but also “not good enough.”

I see a few possibilities:

The first is that the Americans are simply bluffing in an effort to intimidate the Iranians into making concessions. This might also explain some of Trump’s more erratic social media posts, which may be read as part of a madman strategy.

The second possibility is that Trump is totally serious, and that in a final effort to bring about a change in Iranian leadership he and the Israelis will go all out against energy targets in the Islamic Republic. I can also envision a third and middle path, in which the Americans and Israelis try a partial escalation by way of threatening more. Earlier I thought a bluff was most likely, as this kind of all-out escalation is something that was already trialled in the form of the South Pars gas field attack and swiftly walked back. Trump knows very well the potential consequences here. Now I’m not so sure, but as I said, I’m eager to hear your thoughts.

Otherwise, I want to offer this brief explanation to the many critics I provoked with my last piece: Many of you seem to have gotten the idea that I’m rooting for the Iranians or that I hope Trump suffers political catastrophe. You could not be more wrong about this. I’m fundamentally on your side here; I want the United States and Israel to realise their goals. Some are irritated that I seem to be validating what they see as anti-Trump media narratives, but that is not at all my purpose. I’m just pessimistic that the war is going well, and I’m far from the only one. A lot of people, including many sympathetic to the basic project of the war, have reached similar conclusions.

Not all gambles pay off, and we must employ a little sophistication in analysing Trump’s presidency. It’s plain that whatever Trump does, large portions of the establishment press will denounce him as a lunatic and his policies as a failure. They will do this whether or not Trump is right or his approach is successful, and we cannot just robotically invert press narratives about Trump and hope to be correct about the way of things. Trump is human, he’s a politician and not everything he touches will become gold. That’s okay, and he might still be able to turn the Iran war around. I think the chances are not great right now and while it could happen and I want it to happen, I also want to be honest with my readers and write pieces that will hold up well in the months and years to come.

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The Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz famously wrote that “War is the mere continuation of politics via other means.” I know it is annoying to rehearse clichéd dicta like these, but von Clausewitz’s observation has a tedious importance for assessing the war in Iran.

This is because, while the administration of U.S. President Donald J. Trump and many of the war’s most ardent supporters are fond of remarking on the impressive tactical success of the joint U.S.-Israel air campaign, they have been less consistent in articulating their precise political or strategic goals.

Trump and those close to him have at points hoped for a popular revolution in Iran, for the “unconditional surrender” of the Iranians, and for a “change” to the “threat” posed by Iran’s ballistic missile programme and its proxy network. In the early days of the war, when the administration was still struggling to refine its war messaging, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth developed a more minimal catalogue of goals that they are wont to emphasise whenever the question of war aims arises. This catalogue is subject to minor variation but generally contains four or five points; the latest iteration, drafted after Trump’s Wednesday speech, looks like this:

Now the Iranian air force and the Iranian navy never mattered much at all, and I imagine they are mentioned merely to fill out the list with eminently achievable things that the Americans and Israelis indeed went on to achieve beyond all cavil. Destroying Iranian nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities is nearer the mark, because it touches on the clear political goal of eliminating Iran’s ability to threaten its neighbours. Alas, these aims remain unrealised and will probably prove unrealisable via the simple tactic of blowing things up from the air. Iran will simply rebuild when the bombing stops, newly incentivised to develop a nuclear arsenal for real this time.

All of this raises the question of what was supposed to happen.

The purpose was plainly not to inaugurate a new era of semi-annual air strikes to kill Iran’s leaders and dampen their capacity to project force. Mowing the grass in this fashion would entail accepting as the new normal indefinite restrictions to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and an unceasing drumbeat of ballistic missile attacks on Israel and the Gulf states.

Something has clearly gone wrong, and we now have very good reporting on what that something was. Operation Epic Fury was a serious high-stakes gamble that failed to pay off. Since this failure, the goals of the Iran war have shifted, becoming less ambitious and more diffuse.

Maybe you want to subscribe to my blog and read how I have come to these conclusions. Without your support, nothing I do here would be possible.

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We’re in the middle of another NATO spat. The Americans are accusing the Europeans of disloyalty and ungratefulness, while the Europeans are quietly (or, in the case of Spain, not-so-quietly) criticising the Iran war and preparing for the looming energy crisis.

Spain was the first NATO ally to deny the United States access to the jointly operated Rota and Morón air bases for Operation Epic Fury. Yesterday, the Spanish went further and closed their entire airspace to American planes involved in the war; Spanish Defence Minister Margarita Robles glossed the move by declaring the Iran war to be “profoundly illegal and unjust.”

Last week, Italy denied use of its Sigonella air base in Sicily to American bombers involved in the Iran war, “because the U.S. had not requested clearance and Italy’s military leadership had not been consulted.”

Over the weekend, France denied Israel the use of its airspace “to transport American weapons to be used in the war against Iran,” apparently for the first time.

And finally today, Polish are reporting that Poland has turned down an American request to send its Patriot air defence batteries to the Middle East. Polish Defence Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz explained that “Our Patriot batteries and their armaments are used to protect Polish airspace and NATO’s eastern flank. Nothing is changing in this regard, and we have no plans to move them anywhere!”

The Americans have thus continued to sour on the alliance. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Al Jazeera that “If NATO is just about us defending Europe if they’re attacked but then denying us basing rights when we need them, that’s not a very good arrangement.” Such an alliance, he added, is “a hard one to stay engaged in and say this is good for the United States, so all that’s going to have to be reexamined.”

And on Truth Social just a few hours ago, U.S. President Donald J. Trump made the following posts:

A lot of commentators in the coming days are going to proclaim the death of NATO, so allow me to offer a counterpoint: It is the province of internet crazies like me to call for the phase-out of NATO. The Americans are not going to do it and the Europeans aren’t either. These squabbles over airspace and basing privileges have happened before, they’re not a big deal and technically speaking they’re also not really about NATO anyway.

The alliance provides too many advantages for both sides and nobody has any serious interest in letting it go. These conflicts have other purposes. They are one way for Trump and aligned Republicans to score points with their nativist base at the expense of ostensible European allies who will not do very much about it, and they are probably also regarded within the Trump administration as a means of pressuring some allies to contribute to future efforts to open the Strait of Hormuz. For the Europeans, on the other hand, NATO spats in the Trump era provide an opportunity to distance themselves from a president who is pretty unpopular on the Continent and in this case from an even more unpopular war.

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This unpleasant thin-lipped woman is Stefanie Hubig. She is a Social Democrat and our current Justice Minister, and she has drafted an insane law that will make it illegal – and punishable by up to two years in prison – to create or circulate unauthorised “sexually suggestive” photos depicting the clothed posterior region, the clothed genital region or the clothed female breast area of anyone. The proposed legislation specifies that prosecutions would normally be initiated by criminal complaints from purportedly “victimised” parties, but also provides that authorities can proceed with charges on their own in cases “of particular public interest.”

What counts as “sexually suggestive” is of course in the eye of the beholder, and every photo where the subject’s consent is disputed (or simply undocumented) could conceivably count as unauthorised. The draft law is therefore set to extend a cloud of criminal suspicion over much ordinary photography, over the sharing of images (including potentially even historical pictures) online, and much else that I haven’t even thought of.

These wild prescriptions reflect the desiderata of feminist activists at the notorious internet censorship operation known as HateAid, with whom Justice Minister Hubig enjoys close connections.

To create support for this new law, German establishment media have collaborated with HateAid, a Correctiv journalist and a former Zero Covid advocate to incite public hysteria over “digital sexual violence.”

The campaign began last Saturday, with a bizarre exposé in Der Spiegel on the trials and tribulations of a German media personality named Collien Fernandes. Fernandes claims that for a period of ten years, her (now ex-) husband Christian Ulmen operated various fake online profiles in her name. Ulmen allegedly used these profiles to contact all manner of random men pretending to be his wife. In this role he engaged in phone sex using his wife’s persona and shopped around various pornographic films or pictures depicting women who may have resembled his wife engaging in sexual acts. Separately, Fernandes also complains that she has been plagued for years by a wide array of online pornographic deepfake content in her likeness. Ulmen has issued a blanket denial of all accusations through his lawyers.

Now, as NiUS have reported, there are many odd things about this story. Among them: 1) Fernandes has been teaming up with HateAid to complain about AI-enhanced pornography since at least 2023, well before the present story broke. 2) Nobody can find this allegedly abundant deepfake Fernandes pornography anywhere. 3) Neither Der Spiegel nor Fernandes nor anybody else will clearly characterise what materials Ulmen is alleged to have sent using his fake profiles. I leave it to my readers to imagine what has really happened in this case; I have my own theories, but the truth hardly matters.

The point is that in Fernandes, Justice Minister Hubig, the HateAid harpies and every other last desiccated sexual hysteric occluding the Federal Republic suddenly has a deeply emotional narrative to support their new and quite deranged innovations to the German criminal code. The NGO machinery has kicked into high gear; thousands have taken to the streets to protest against “digital sexual violence,” the press have maintained a closely coordinated drumbeat of sexual hysteria, and feminist influencers are losing their minds on Instagram.

Now that everybody is properly freaked out, Hubig can ride to their rescue with wide-ranging enhancements to our criminal code, which as noted above target not only the dreaded deepfakes, but also much ordinary public photography.

This is how legislation works in the the brave new Federal Republic of Germany: Every major progressive initiative is now attended by great pageantries, by much histrionic protesting and shouting, by strange media fables that parade before our imaginations an unceasing line of villains and victims, of heroes and martyrs, of upstanding defenders of our democracy and of evil Hitler antidemocratic fascists who hate our democracy. This will keep happening and it will probably get even more bizarre and crazy until somebody realises that the NGO machine is a huge public menace and sets about defunding all these frightening unbalanced people.

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I’ve been sick with the world’s most obnoxious virus, and amid relentless coughing and sneezing and sinus headaches, I’ve overdosed on Iran takes. So many of them. I have a lot to say, and it won’t all fit into one post. One thing is sure, though: I have recovered enough to think again and the lights at the plague chronicle are back on.

The war is not going well, at least not from the American perspective. Yesterday the Israelis hit the South Pars gas field, and the Iranians retaliated with multiple attacks on Gulf oil and gas infrastructure – the most significant of them, a devastating strike on the Ras Laffan hub in Qatar, which produces 20% of the world’s liquid natural gas. Previously both sides had avoided energy targets, with the United States refusing even to blockade Iranian oil tankers, accepting a bizarre scenario whereby Iranians were the only ones able to maintain regular shipping through the Strait of Hormuz. Everyone knows if energy becomes fair game, we’re in for a serious energy crisis, which in the worst case scenario could end with much of the oil and gas infrastructure of the Gulf states in flames, the Strait of Hormuz hopelessly mined and the world facing serious energy shortfalls. I don’t like panic and hyperbole, and there is probably some chance we still avoid much of this fate, but we should also be honest and admit that things are not looking up.

What follows is sure to annoy some people. There’s not much I can do about that; I think the best war commentary is the objective kind. I’m not a propaganda account here to tell you why the evil Americans are always on the brink of losing their empire or why the genius art-of-the-deal negotiator Trump is always twelve steps ahead of everyone. War is a complex, high-risk endeavour; unjust or poorly planned campaigns can go well and reward their wagers; the best-laid plans and most necessary attacks can nevertheless turn sour and impose such costs that in retrospect they appear regrettable.

In this first part, I want to discuss the three competing narratives of the Iran war that have emerged in the western press, and review the spat between Trump and his NATO allies over the latter’s refusal to assist in reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Maybe you would like to subscribe and support my work. Without my subscribers, nothing I do here would be possible.

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In 2011, when Angela Merkel decided that Germany had to phase out nuclear power because things like earthquakes and tsunamis happen in Japan, Ursula von der Leyen was Labour Minister and also vice-chair of the CDU. In an interview with the Süddeutsche Zeitung, von der Leyen defended Merkel’s decision, insisting that her government had “to respond to the new developments”; the Fukushima disaster, she said, had shown everyone “that the unthinkable has now become possible – a worst-case accident in a high-technology country.”

Germany has spent the years since 2011 systematically shutting down its own nuclear reactors and also lobbying other European nations to do the same. Thanks to this very dumb policy which von der Leyen openly supported, our power has gotten a lot more expensive, and our industry a lot less competitive.

Today, von der Leyen is President of the European Commission, and she has decided that maybe the phase-out wasn’t such a great idea after all. Far from abandoning nuclear energy, she now wants the EU to be become a world-leading “pioneer in nuclear technology”:

While in 1990 one-third of Europe’s energy came from nuclear, today it’s only close to fifteen percent. This reduction in the share of nuclear was a choice. And in hindsight, it was as strategic mistake for Europe to turn its back on a reliable, affordable source of low-emission power. This should change … Nuclear energy is reliable, providing electricity all year around the clock … Europe has been a pioneer in nuclear technology and could once against lead the world in it . …

This of course doesn’t mean Germany will re-embrace nuclear power. That will never happen; the damage von der Leyen helped work is wrought. Chancellor Friedrich Merz has said that while he agrees with von der Leyen’s views, “This has no implications for Germany, because the German federal government has already decided to phase out nuclear energy” and “that decision is irreversible.”

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In 2011, Angela Merkel idiotically accelerated the German nuclear phase-out just a few months after her coalition passed legislation that would’ve slowed it down by twelve years. Because of an earthquake and a tsunami that happened 13,000 kilometers away in Japan, Merkel suddenly decided that Germany needed to abandon nuclear power as soon as possible, although the Federal Republic knows neither tsunamis nor earthquakes and not even the Japanese drew this drastic conclusion from the Fukushima disaster.

Merkel’s real motivations were, as always, tactical: She hoped to deny the surging Green Party a winning electoral issue in the Baden-Württemberg elections that year, and so we can call her move a twofold failure: The Greens won over 24% of the vote anyway, which was just enough to form a coalition with the Social Democrats and force the CDU into opposition. And today, citizens of a denuclearised Federal Republic must live with a declining economy and ongoing deindustrialisation, thanks in large part to having some of the highest electricity prices in continental Europe. It was a multi-dimensional fractal fuckup, what Merkel did in 2011. We’re still paying for it.

Even many in Merkel’s own party claim to recognise these past errors, which makes it all the more maddening that the CDU keeps making them. Yesterday, Baden-Württemberg elected a new state parliament, following a long and dismal campaign in which the CDU under their genuinely stupid lead candidate Manuel Hagel …

… did everything in their power to make themselves impossible to differentiate from the Greens under a vastly more intelligent and capable Cem Özdemir.

Hagel and his CDU sought for months to banish politics from this election entirely, fearful of alienating clueless Baden-Württembergians who might just cast their vote for the deindustrialisers if the Union didn’t let them scratch their conscience sufficiently. In the end, however, Greens outmanouvered the hapless Hagel, capitalising on a seven year-old video in which the CDU man spoke with slightly lascivious undertones of a “doe-eyed” girl he met on some high-school visit ages ago. A far more significant slip-up – one that hardly won any notice outside of alternative media – showed Hagel on another school visit attempting to explain the greenhouse effect to a bunch of bored seventh-year students. Hagel, a hopeless climatoid who supports the energy transition in a German state where Mercedes-Benz and Porsche are fighting for survival, explained why we need to stop all meaningful competitive industrial activity this way:

Between the earth and the sun is the atmosphere, and when it gets thinner and thinner, the sun gets hotter and hotter. And the reason for this is emissions, CO2, and so on. And that is the greenhouse gas effect. All right?

Yesterday evening, the bill for all of this humdrum imbecility came due. The Greens emerged as the winners, if barely, with 30.2% of the vote – just a few points down from their historic high of 32.6% in 2021. The CDU improved over their last showing but managed to underperform even the most pessimistic forecasts, with a mere 29.7%.

Thanks to a slight edge in direct mandates, the CDU and the Greens will enter the state parliament with 56 seats each, but that may not matter too much. The CDU have asked the Greens if they might split the Minister Presidency between them, with Hagel and the “realo” Green Özdemir each serving two and a half years, like two little boys taking their turn on the bicycle. Özdemir has said no, because “we are adults.” In truth Özdemir is poised to become the next Minister President of Baden-Württemberg in yet another cursed Kiwi coalition.

This was a predictable outcome, and nevertheless it is astounding. The Greens and the CDU are the undisputed architects of German decline, and yet the prosperous voters of this beautiful southern state have sent both of these terrible parties back into the Landtag with an enormous mandate to do more of the same. This is proof number 5,234,345 that deep and lasting prosperity has the power to do what few other forces can, namely turn millions of otherwise sensible intelligent people into walking retards. Alas, there seems to be no way to de-zombify the voters without making them massively poorer.

Hagel and all twelve of his braincells are bitter about his failure to best the Greens, although his chances of achieving the Minister Presidency have only been dashed because the Union refuses even to contemplate any coalition with the no-longer-right-wing-extreme Alternative für Deutschland. A clear if purely theoretical majority exists for a Union coalition with the Evil Fascist Nazi Hitler Party, as the latter have nearly doubled their share of the vote since 2021. This is largely down to the rapidly shifting political preferences of actual workers and net taxpayers:

Even contemplating such a coalition is forbidden of course, and nowhere so much as in Baden-Württemberg. It is also forbidden to point out that the mere possibility of a CDU/AfD coalition would give the CDU enormous leverage over the Greens in coalition negotiations, because in a world without firewalls the CDU would have two potential coalitions partners, whereas the Greens would have no options beyond the Union. In coming decades everyone will look back upon the firewall as one of the most ridiculous and self-destructive tactics ever pursued by any Western political party anywhere, for any reason.

There are silver linings here, of course. Note what a drubbing the Social Democrats have taken. They almost didn’t make it over the 5% hurdle for parliamentary representation at all, and they are left calling themselves the “only democratic opposition” in the Stuttgart Landtag.1 This is a party full of crazy people on an express train to the land of total political irrelevance. They’re going to do a lot more damage before they get there of course, but there can be little doubt that that’s where they’re headed.

When they finally arrive in this grey pointless liminal space, they’ll get to meet the market-liberal FDP, the junior partners of Olaf Scholz’s failed traffic light coalition. These are the guys who signed off on every last catastrophic thing the Scholz clown car did, from extended mask mandates to extreme vaccine mania to destructive home heating ordinances. Happily, in doing so, they also signed their political death warrant. The FDP were once uniquely strong among the wealthy voters of Baden-Württemberg, but they have been chased out of the state parliament after bleeding more than half of their support since 2021. The FDP are slated to be voted out of Rheinland-Pfalz next, on 21 March; then out of Sachsen-Anhalt on 6 September; and finally out of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, on 20 September. After the next round of state elections in 2027, only Hessen will still have any FDP members in the Landtag at all, and that is simply because the next election Hessen will not happen until 2028.

You think the problem with spy agencies is that they are clandestine organisations that get up to nefarious things in secret with little oversight, and that’s true. It’s one reason literally every other liberal democracy on earth, aside from Germany, keeps their spies away from their own citizens. It’s no good to have goons running around inventing novel political offences aGainST OuR DeMoCraCY and tapping the phones of random people who just don’t like mask mandates or are a little too fond of Chairman Mao or whatever.

Another even greater problem with spy agencies, however, is the fact that they very often turn out to be full of totally incompetent idiots who have no idea what they’re doing or to whom they’re doing it. This is particularly the case in Germany, where as I said above, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and its sixteen state chapters spend a lot of time snooping on ordinary Germans, and to the extent this is not the kind of thing normal upstanding well-adjusted employees are likely to find remotely tasteful, German domestic spies are a cut below the rest.

One of the ways you can tell this is true, is the oceans of time and paperwork our constitutional protectors spend investigating totally irrelevant micromovements and Nazi-obsessed randos with internet followings in the low triple digits. From 2019, the constitutional protectors developed an interest in WhiteDate.net, a cartoonish white nationalist dating platform run out of Germany with around 8,000 overwhelmingly male users (never good for a dating platform). Last year, somebody hacked the poorly secured website and released all its user data, which Antifa eagerly placed online in easily searchable format.

Now, when I first read about all this last year, I was mildly surprised, if only because I generally assume that the people most likely to be running sites like WhiteDate.net are none other than the constitutional protectors themselves. That’s one of many reasons you should stay the hell away from all platforms like this. The hack revealed, however, that domestic spies probably have little to do with this particular internet trap, although some oddities remain to be explained.

The true founder and animating personality of this online curio turns out to be a 57 year-old German woman named Christiane Horn. She operated WhiteDate.net together with two other white nationalist-themed networking websites, WhiteChild.net (no idea what that was) and WhiteDeal.net (for prospective employers to find “European staff”). While Horn put her own name on the company behind all of these websites, she presented herself to her users and on the samizdat internet pseudonymously, as “Liv Heide.”

The weird thing, as we read in this amazing investigative report from Die Zeit, is that Liv Heide is also a real person, just not the same person as Christiane Horn. The still weirder thing is that Heide and Horn have very similar biographies. Both women were born within two years of each other, and both grew up near Kiel in Schleswig-Holstein. Both moved to Berlin to pursue artistic careers in their youth, and they even seem to have met briefly sometime in the mid-1990s, which is probably where Horn picked up her “Liv Heide” alter-ego.

Whereas the real Heide stayed in Berlin, Horn soon moved to Paris where she became interested in the “pro-white movement” after the Islamist attacks on the Bataclan music club and the editorial offices of Charlie Hebdo. In 2017, Horn divorced her French-Jewish husband and moved back to her hometown in Schleswig-Holstein. There she opened her white nationalist websites and constructed her new online identity as Pseudo-Heide, while the real Heide worked as an assistant hundreds of kilometers to the south at the Hochschule für Wirtschaft und Recht (HWR) in Berlin. Before long, the real Heide got wind of Pseudo-Heide’s internet presence, primarily because people started asking her about it. To distance herself from Pseudo-Heide’s dangerous internet activities, the real Heide desperately included in her professional biography paeans to “people of different origins, cultures and religions” and her belief in the “power of diversity and respect.”

One of the most remarkable things about the constitutional protectors, is that while they are supposedly a real intelligence agency with all kinds of supersecret spy methods and supersecret spy machines at their disposal, they seem to do most of their spying by simply sitting on their asses and searching the internet all the time. In 2022, the HWR uploaded a staff profile of the real Liv Heide to their website, which the “Internet Procurement Department” of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution stumbled upon while running google searches for the “Liv Heide” of white nationalist fame. They forwarded their internet discovery to something called “Department 2D” in Cologne, “which” (according to Die Zeit) “is responsible for monitoring non-violent right-wing extremists in the digital space.” An employee in Department 2D then ran cursory checks and concluded baselessly that the “Liv Heide” behind WhiteDate.net and the Liv Heide who worked in Berlin were the same person, and that there were “actual indications” that this person was “pursuing anti-constitutional activities.”

The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution forwarded this urgent high-level intelligence that they got from Google to the Berlin Office for the Protection of the Constitution in January 2024, in a “Findings report” bearing the baffling file number II B – 042-S-590005-0121/2024. This report proclaimed that the operator of WhiteDate.net had been “clearly identified” as Liv Heide, and so the constitutional protectors in Berlin passed this information on to Heide’s employers, a frequent practice when these goons discover “right-wing extremists” in the civil service. Heide’s supervisors at HWR summoned the poor woman to a conference room at the end of the workday in June and promptly fired her. When Heide asked why she was being terminated, they asked her in turn what she knew about WhiteDate.net.

After her firing, Heide protested to the constitutional protectors, gave a sworn statement that she had nothing to do with WhiteDate.net and filed a complaint with the police for defamation. Eventually she got a lawyer, and four months after she lost her job the constitutional protectors finally agreed to review her case, at which point they realised their mistake. They finally informed the real Heide that their “suspicion had been confirmed that another person with the name Liv Heide had appeared in this context.” Nobody apologised, Heide never got her job back and to this day nobody involved wants to talk about this unfortunate case.

While the constitutional protectors subjected the real Liv Heide to pointless surveillance for the better part of two years, Christiane Horn continued to run WhiteDate.net wholly unmolested by domestic intelligence agents and the police until hackers took down her platform last year – although here at the plague chronicle we’ve seen that many people have been investigated and charged with political offences for far less than the content Horn has put about. That indeed is very strange. Another curiosity, is the fact that there never seems to have been much mystery as to Pseudo-Heide’s real identity; public records have listed “Christiane Horn” as the managing director of the company behind the related WhiteDeal.net website since 2017.

This story is very similar to a case I wrote about last November, involving an economist whom the constitutional protectors misclassified as a “potential right-wing extremist” because he spent the night at the wrong person’s house. While Heide was fired outright, our economist was merely suspended and subjected to a pointless Kafkaesque months-long investigation into his nonexistent political extremism. That case also unfolded in 2024, which was the height right-wing extremism hysteria in Germany.

I owe you my thoughts on this, and I know I’ve been slow in providing them. Partly this is down to personal relocation chaos, but partly it’s because I don’t always have strong, strident opinions on every last thing that happens and I’ve learned to be cautious in throwing my ambient thoughts onto the internet. I want to write pieces that will age well and that I won’t regret having written next week, next month or next year. That can be a hard thing to do.

As always, there’s a few enduring commentariat industries active in this sphere, with positions you can predict in advance. There are for example the MAGA loyalists, who will defend every last action of the Trump administration, whatever that happens to be and whatever contradictions these defences force them into. There are the antiwar America critics, who will deploy the same blind pessimism about U.S. military power and who are always predicting imminent disaster, whatever is actually happening or likely to happen. Over both extremes and others besides there looms pitfalls like the just world fallacy – an unthinking assumption that to the extent the Iran campaign is held to be wrong it is bound to devolve into an enormous self-defeating catastrophe just short of a third world war, or conversely that if the strikes can be defended as necessary or geopolitically sophisticated it will all turn out fine.

I don’t think that kind of reasoning makes much sense, and I also think a few different things can be true at the same time:

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On Saturday, after the third round of talks between American and Iranian negotiators, the United States and Israel began conducting airstrikes on targets throughout Iran. A sensational hit on an Iranian Defence Council meeting early Saturday killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei alongside other high officials including Commander-in-Chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Mohammad Pakpour, Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces Lt. Gen. Abdolrahim Mousavi and Defence Minister Gen. Aziz Nasirzadeh. Iran has retaliated with ballistic missile and drone strikes against Israel, American military bases and U.S.-allied Gulf states like Kuwait, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

These are events of enormous geopolitical importance, and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wants you to know that she and her fellow commissioners are monitoring the situation very intensely – or at least that they will begin monitoring the situation very intensely as soon as the weekend is over:

In the meantime, Von der Leyen is eagerly tweeting about all the people she has been in touch with. She has called the President of the UAE. She has called the King of Jordan. She has called the Emir of Qatar. She has called the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. She has called the Crown Prince and Prime Minister of Bahrain. Von der Leyen’s opinion on these strikes doesn’t matter, her organisation has basically zero geopolitical relevance and her office grants her little concrete diplomatic standing, which means she’s just wasting everyone’s time here.

One thing the Eurotards could do that would really help a lot, is try shutting up more. They are not big actors on the world stage, in part because they have chosen not to be; and they rarely have anything to say that an LLM trained on the most vacuous liberal democratic nostrums could not articulate better. They are a pantsuit plague on the land and a profound embarrassment to Europeans. There is no reason to comment on everything that happens and they should learn to talk less.

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I’ll write more about Iran soon – I am still forming my opinions – but I had to get this off my chest first. Please let me know in the comments what you make of recent events.

Old friends may remember the farce we experienced last May, when outgoing Marshmallow Interior Minister Nancy Faeser pushed her gaggle of goons in the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) to upgrade their political classification of Alternative für Deutschland.

No longer did the BfV consider the national political party to lurk under mere “suspicion of right-wing extremism,” oh no. They announced suddenly and with much establishment fanfare that they had determined the AfD to be “confirmed right-wing extremists.”

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Faeser and her goons hoped this new designation would edge the AfD more firmly into Evil Nazi Fascist Hitler territory in the popular mind, thereby preparing the way for banning the party. According to the dumb Gender Studies-tier retards unassailable and unbiased experts of the BfV, the AfD were more definitely Evil, more definitely Nazi, more definitely Fascist and more definitely Hitler than ever before. They had such clear proofs of all the Evil Nazi Fascist Hitlerism lurking within the AfD that they could not even reveal them. Doing so, Faeser said, would compromise the mysterious sources and methods of her highly sophisticated political spy agency. Instead, the Interior Ministry leaked a classified dossier supporting the upgrade to sympathetic media like Der Spiegel, and these media promptly published earnest articles telling us all how absolutely Fascist and Evil and Nazi and Hitler all the secret evidence showed the AfD to be, because trust us bro.

What happened next is that somebody leaked the full 1,000-page dossier to the alternative news outlets Cicero and NiUS, both of which promptly published the full .pdf. It turned out to be one of the stupidest and most trivial documents I’ve ever read. The supersecret hyperspy sources tapped by the BfV? Google and social media posts. The supersecret hyperspy methods used by the BfV? Compiling interminable lists of potentially untoward or possibly impolite things AfD politicians uttered in googlable documents or on social media. It was so bad that almost overnight the dossier destroyed much of the momentum for an AfD ban – exactly the opposite of what its architects had intended. Even many establishment figures quietly admitted what a travesty the whole thing had turned out to be.

NEVERTHELESS: The establishment moved quickly to capitalise on the new extremist designation. Various state governments began plotting to cleanse the civil service of AfD members on the grounds that they were affiliates of an officially “extremist” organisation. In Rheinland-Pfalz they even toyed with the idea of illegally excluding AfD candidates from running in local elections also on the basis of this bureaucratic designation. The Social Democrats began pushing to initiate ban proceedings against the AfD, a move that – if successful – would grant the left parties indefinite parliamentary majorities both nationally and across many state parliaments, amounting to a kind of legal coup and casting us into a new DDR-light regime.

Meanwhile, the AfD filed suit with the Administrative Court in Cologne to overturn their upgraded designation because it was so obviously dumb and unfounded. They also asked the court to prohibit the designation temporarily, while their primary lawsuit is pending – a long involved process that will take years. The Cologne judges released their unusually extensive 55-page decision on the temporary injunction yesterday. For the party-banning speech-repressing opinion-monitoring enthusiasts of Our Democracy, it is a disaster.

From the Cologne court’s press release:

The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) may not classify and treat the Alternative for Germany (AfD) as a confirmed right-wing extremist organisation until the conclusion of the main proceedings … The BfV must also refrain from publicly announcing such a classification …

In its decision today, the court has rejected the BfV’s assessment. We give the following reasons: According to the findings of the summary proceedings, there is sufficient certainty that the AfD houses some efforts directed against the free democratic basic order … These efforts, however, do not characterise the AfD such that its overall essence may be described as anti-constitutional.

That is very important. Not only the AfD, but all political parties, have randos saying potentially or probably or even certainly anti-constitutional things. To justify a ban, you need more than random people saying random things. You need to show a) that the party is fundamentally opposed to the “free democratic basic order” (an ideological trinity consisting of human dignity, democracy and the rule of law), and b) that it exercises this opposition in an “aggressive” or “combative” manner. The BfV have hardly addressed b) at all, and their evidence has not convinced the court that a) applies. To argue their case, the BfV seem to have positively emptied their archives, submitting not only the leaked 1,000-page dossier to the court, but also an additional raft of supporting materials running to 7,000 pages across 20 different binders and electronic files extending to 1.5 terabytes.

The court finds that some “anti-Muslim” demands formulated by the AfD in the course of the 2025 election campaign are contrary to the German Basic Law, because these would tend to vitiate “the equal practice of religion,” but the judges also find that these are insufficient to “establish the anti-constitutional character of the party as a whole.” The court further noted that the BfV “has not disclosed any intelligence information … even in court proceedings” relating to allegedly secret anti-constitutional plots within the AfD, which means that “we cannot assume to the detriment of [the AfD] that [the party] is pursuing such further plans internally.”

A significant prong of the constitutional protectors’ argument held that the AfD’s advocacy of “remigration” was itself openly unconstitutional. Importantly, the court completely disagreed:

… [N]o sufficient conclusions can be drawn from any plans pursued by [the AfD] … with regard to so-called remigration. The vague term “remigration” does not imply a concrete political goal in the sense of undifferentiated deportations … In the absence of a more concrete explanation of specific anti-constitutional intentions with respect to implementing a … remigration policy, such intentions are not apparent.

As I said, this is only a temporary ruling, but given the devastating wording of the court’s judgment, it seems unlikely that the judges in Cologne will ultimately uphold the “extremist” designation when to comes time to decide the main case some years from now. The constitutional protectors may also appeal this injunction, but they would be unlikely to win, and also too I think there is a substantial chance that their ultimate boss, Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt (CSU), directs them to let this go.1 Whatever happens, the case for banning the AfD has taken a major, perhaps a fatal, blow. The fundamental problem this whole time has been that the AfD programme is pretty much constitutionally unassailable. Those who want to ban the party have had to hope against hope that the constitutional protectors could unearth secret AfD Nazi plans via their super advanced espionage methods. Instead they’ve spent years copying and pasting Facebook posts and they have basically nothing.

This case converges with other evidence suggesting that the German state – while it may presently wish to ban the opposition and repress its critics – increasingly lacks the internal resolve and coherence for this project. I’ll write more about that tomorrow; today’s adventures (see below) interrupted my routine, but I wanted to get this news out there as soon as possible.

In the latest retarded case of political repression to afflict the Federal Republic of Germany, police are investigating a pensioner for the crime of associating the German Chancellor with an iconic children’s book character.

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From the Heilbronner Stimme:

When … Friedrich Merz and Baden-Württemberg Minister President Winfried Kretschmann came to Heilbronn last October for the opening ceremony of the Innovation Park Artificial Intelligence (IPAI), the celebrity visit occasioned discussion discussion on social media.

A post appeared on the Heilbronn Police Facebook page informing locals about a temporary flight ban enacted for security during the visit. A resident of Heilbronn responded by writing that “Pinocchio is coming to [Heilbronn].” He included a long-nosed emoji.

Three months later, at the end of January, the man could hardly believe his eyes as he received a letter from the criminal police informing him that he is now under investigation for his comment. He is suspected of committing the crime of insult as prohibited by Section 188 of the Criminal Code.

StGB §188 is the notorious “lèse-majesté” statute, which the Bundestag expanded substantially in 2021 when politicians grew tired of being criticised for suspending most of our democratic freedoms in a mad drive to exterminate a respiratory virus. As currently formulated, StGB §188 enhances penalties for “insult, malicious gossip and defamation” when the rabble direct these at “persons in political life,” and also makes these transgressions easier to prosecute. In this case, the pinched schoolmarms on the “social media team” who run the Heilbronn Police Facebook page filed a complaint with prosecutors as soon as they noticed our pensioner’s comment. Apparently it is their policy to monitor comments and cry to teacher whenever they see anything they don’t like.

What makes this investigation particularly egregious – as the Heilbronner Stimme notes – is the fact that comparing Merz to “Pinocchio” is widespread in German political discourse, for the simple reason that Merz has reversed himself more than any other national politician in recent memory. Last year, Green Party Chair Franziska Brantner warned Merz against “becoming the Pinocchio Chancellor” after he reversed his promise to reduce electricity taxes on private households, and AfD Bundestag member Stephan Brandner called Merz “Pinocchio Fritze” when the latter violated his campaign pledge not to raise the debt brake. Brandner made his comments under the veil of immunity on the floor of the Bundestag, but he also posted an Instagram photomontage “depicting Merz with a Pinocchio hat and a long nose.” Google searches reveal dozens of further examples from commentators, satirists and ordinary people all across the internet.

Likening Merz to Pinocchio hardly constitutes an insult even under the extremely vague and broad wording of the German criminal code. The investigation in this case is a simple effort to intimidate an ordinary German citizen for political speech that even our weak Article 5 speech protections clearly shield. What is more, the original Facebook post to which our pensioner replied mentioned Winfried Kretschmann alongside Chancellor Merz. Strictly speaking, the Pinocchio comment could apply to either person, and the only reason our social media hall monitors associated Merz with the allusion is because they too recognise that the man is a liar.

German speech repression has eased in the past months, probably due to political pressure from the United States and a growing realisation that these cases make our authorities look immensely stupid. In the case, the numpties in Heilbronn appear not to have gotten the memo.

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