Yesterday evening at around 10pm, a man directed a white Citröen Space Tourer delivery van from Lennéstraße into the Tiergarten in Berlin – accelerating through a crowd that had gathered for the closing rally of Christopher Street Day. One woman died at the scene and 29 were injured, three of them critically. The van ultimately struck a tree, at which point its occupant fled, attacking bystanders with a machete. The CSD rally at the Brandenburger Tor was dispersed minutes later at around 10:15.

Subscribe now

German police spent most of today conducting an ever-widening manhunt for their prime suspect in this attack, a 21 year-old German citizen and Berlin resident of Lebanese descent named Abdul Ballout.

Ballout had rented the van from its private owner and his mobile telephone was found inside it. Masked SEK officers raided Ballout’s apartment in Tiergarten/Schöneberg today, but he was not present. Officers also searched his sister’s apartment in Neukölln/Treptow, this too in vain. Then at around 6pm this evening, another SEK unit found Ballout’s hideout in a garden allotment in Berlin-Spandau. Officers shot Ballout dead after he lunged at them with a bladed weapon.

Ballout was born in Germany to a naturalised Lebanese mother, and he has been known to security services since he was a teenager. They had classified him as an Islamist Gefährder, or a clear threat. His previous criminal convictions include assault and robbery. Most recently, he attempted to travel to Syria to join the Islamic State, but he was detained after a tip-off from German authorities in Lebanon, where he spent three months in custody. Finally the Lebanese shipped Ballout back to the Federal Republic, and he was held pending trial for “preparing a serious violent offence endangering the state.” The Tiergarten Magistrates’ Court found Ballout guilty and sentenced him in May 2026 to a year and ten months imprisonment. Yet they reportedly granted him “conditional release” on the condition that he attend a deradicalisation programme operated by the “Violence Prevention Network.” Ballout met with the deradicalisers twice in June and July; they found him evasive and insincere. His third meeting was set for this coming Monday – two days after the terror attack he perpetrated.

Police apparently had Ballout under intermittent surveillance in the months since his conviction. Some weeks ago he posted a picture to social media featuring a gun. Officials raided his apartment but found only a toy weapon.

Some early reports and witness statements suggested there may have been two perpetrators, but thus far police do not appear to be searching for any other suspects. By all accounts Ballout seems to have acted alone.

This afternoon, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz addressed the attack in a eulogy at the St.-Marien-Kirche on Alexanderplatz. He mentioned neither Islam nor mass migration, insisting instead that “intolerance, exclusion, discrimination, rude language and offensive jokes” had a part in Ballout’s violence.

Substack has partnered with Pangram to enable readers to scan posts, notes and comments for machine-generated text. No AI detector is flawless, but Pangram is pretty much the gold standard. Their algorithms detect AI-generated text more than 95% of the time, with a false positive rate approaching zero. I was very happy to read about this feature, and I think more social media platforms should do something like this before their content descends into a morass of platitudinous computer-generated nonsense.

Subscribe now

1. A lot of things are true of AI chatbots at the same time: They are enormously useful and powerful tools. They can melt your brain if you’re not careful with them. They have changed fundamentally, and forever, how people work in a wide variety of professions, from journalism to medicine to law. They have filled social media with low-effort engagement bait, spam and reprehensible slop of all kinds. I don’t think anybody has a problem with the background use of AI, for research purposes, for error-checking, and the like. AI as a content production tool – in this case for prose composition – is where the problems begin.

2. Some argue that the transparent use of AI can serve essentially salutary purposes, perhaps by increasing the volume and quality of the very content that our best writers already produce. This is a naive view and it is totally at odds with how AI works in practice. Firstly, people overwhelmingly want to read real human content on platforms like Substack; they do not come here to converse with human-ventriloquised robots because that is not what social media is for. And secondly, it’s just obvious that the vast majority of those who use AI to write give off the strong odour of the disreputable and the insincere.

3. Despite its considerable powers, AI will probably never be a great prose stylist, and this for much the same reason that those annoying Gmail assistive writing functions will never steer your correspondence into any kind of profundity. AI chatbots produce expected, average prose with some additional tics that they owe to their preference training. In short, their style is bland and ordinary at the level of content, while being punchier and more direct than the human average at the level of style. Much AI content thus reads kind of like ad copy, which is mostly fine if you want to write ads but which becomes pretty bizarre if not obnoxious in other contexts.

4. At a deeper level, LLMs do not have a fixed perspective or any kind of self-identity. They are always trying to play a certain role, to lend whatever impression the user demands of them, and in this way whatever meaning they produce is subordinated to the project of seeming. The more tightly you constrain the AI with specific demands, the more useful it becomes, but the open-ended prompts necessary to get LLMs to compose whole essays often produce very strange content. Superficially these pieces may seem perfectly fine – exactly the analytic or the scientific or the philosophical content you wanted – but upon closer examination you begin to notice that they are crafted merely to reproduce the aesthetic of those things.

5. With careful prompting and even more careful editing you can reduce or eliminate many of these problems, but this is harder than you’d think and capable authors will find it much easier simply to write their own goddamn blogposts. Thus AI has become the preferred composition tool not of talented essaysists, but of lazy writers, subliterate people and scammers of all kinds. It proliferates in a variety of social media subgenres that have long been suspect for other reasons, among them the cryptosphere, self-help posters, life philosophers, deepity aphorists and ragebait political hacks. Wherever the naive or inexperienced flourish and the game is to appeal to the lowest common denominator, AI dominates.

6. AI makes up for its stylistic and communicative shortcomings by excelling in the production of mindcrack – shallow content that attracts eyeballs primarily by being gratuitously loud, outrageous, superficially profound, controversial, enraging or disturbing. Above all, AI chatbots are good at telling people what they want to hear, and if you know something about what people want to hear and you’re willing to spend a few hours optimising your prompts, you too can produce mass quantities of mindcrack for your 30 Euro/month Claude subscription. The ensuing enshittification becomes self-reinforcing as discerning writers and readers take their attention to other platforms. This phenomenon is presently strangling X.

7. For all these reasons, social media platforms should discourage AI text algorithmically and clearly label obvious AI content. Ideally, Substack would slap neon LLM tags on comments, notes and posts flagged as having been written with AI assistance. For now they’ve chosen the gentler path, of reader-initiated AI scanning.

8. Now finally, here at the bottom, my own transparency statement: I have never posted, and I will never post, AI content as my own, but that does not mean I don’t use AI. I use it quite a lot and for a range of tasks. From the very beginning, I have used the AI translation tool Deepl to translate German and other European languages for my Anglophone audience. This is standard practice, and I always review and edit these machine translations to avoid infelicities and errors. Like most other people, I also use AI (primarily Claude and Grok) as elaborate, sophisticated search engines. They can pull together articles and other sources going back many years; things that once took me multiple hours or days to find, I can now unearth in a matter of minutes. More rarely, I use AI to summarise books and scientific papers, particularly when I’m not sure of their relevance to whatever it is I’m working on. (Thus far I’ve never published anything based on AI summaries.) A while ago I experimented with using AI to identify weaknesses in my own argumentation, but I gave up on that when I realised the practice was pushing me towards bloodless content that felt workshopped and boring. Instead, I will occasionally use the most sophisticated AI models to stress-test my own theses before I begin to write. Now and again I’ve tried to get Grok to produce punchy post titles for me, but I’ve never used the results because they’ve been terrible.

Contrary to its name, Christopher Street Day (or CSD) is never really a single day, but rather a series of publicly-financed LGBTQ festivities and debaucheries strung out over a week more, finally culminating in a pride march wherein participants demand very shrilly all the liberalised sexual freedoms that the state already ceded them a long time ago.

Subscribe now

Longtime readers will be surprised to learn that CSD is not actually my favourite thing. Thus I spent the past weeks in blissful ignorance of the “HanseQueer Culture Weeks” unfolding beneath my nose as a prelude to the CSD march on 18 July. I missed such scintillating political hors d’oeuvres as a wreath-lying ceremony to commemorate the queer victims of National Socialism, an “art workshop for LGBTQ* people with migrant background,” a somewhat ominous “latex workshop” and “queer-feminist karaoke.” Happily I did not miss the “Acro Yoga workshop,” but only because it was cancelled due to illness.

I would’ve cheerfully missed Saturday’s festivities too, had a friend at the University of Rostock not drawn my attention to their incredibly cringe marketing. Their motto this year was “SLAY IT LOUD: Last chance for your voice.”

Now, I’ve been suffering some of the worst hayfever in recent memory, so I’m a little slow on the uptake. I didn’t realise until my tiresome Saturday that “Slay” is intended as a pun for “say,” and that the submotto after the colon alludes to the ominous strength of Alternative für Deutschland in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and the upcoming September elections. We’re on the verge of being timewarped back to 1933, at which point our sex and gender activists will face an indefinite period of queer invisibility. This CSD may in fact constitute their last chance ever to pontificate before an audience about the intricacies of their gender identity, that’s how serious is the situation.

Anyway, I woke up early on Saturday and on a whim I caught the train from my seaside village to Rostock to slay it loud for genital mutilation, prolific anal sex and latex fetishism. I arrived at the Neuer Markt where the rally was set to start about 45 minutes early, and saw that the pridelings had already started to gather. A chubby girl with bright red hair stood on a bench holding a sign earnestly promising “FREE HUGS.” I avoided eye contact and after a while she climbed down, studiously unembraced. Then a gaggle of “pup play” fetishists wearing dog masks and tails streamed in; as they unpacked their signs and set up camp on the south edge of the square I learned that they were from some gay fetish organisation calling themselves the “Ostfriesen Puppies” – all the way from Niedersachsen.

More people arrived, and minute by minute the full Pride bestiary completed itself.

Best represented by far were the mousey teen girls, with an occasional mousey teen boy in tow. They seemed alternately timid, bored, and slightly scared in their poorly washed clothes. Some wore their pride flags like capes; others spread them out on the pavement and sat cross-legged on their nylon rainbows as if they were beach towels. A few had cutting scars on their legs and in general they lent the impression of juvenile refugees from some bizarre war-ravaged land. Three of these types ended up standing near me – two girls no more than thirteen, one of them with “Free Hugs” scrawled on her forehead in black sharpie. They were dragging behind them a rail-thin companion of indeterminate gender. He or she was wearing a white mask that impaired his or her vision so severely that the girls had to lead their charge around by the hand lest he or she trip over anything.

Another prominent constituency at these events are the plump young women with dyed Reddit hair. These are generally older than the mousey teens and seem mostly committed to implying a kind of pride-appropriate if opportunistic and not altogether convincing lesbianism. They’re the kinds of girls who tell everyone they’re bisexual yet somehow end up dating a long string of men. Their earnestness is unbearable, the bubble handwriting on their cardboard demo signs the greatest clue as to their interior disposition.

Then of course there are the creeps – unaccompanied men, no few of them presenting as trans women and waving trans flags despite abundant stubble and leg hair and little interest in passing otherwise.

As the square filled, I also noticed the kinds of people who weren’t there, at least not in very great numbers: Gay men were rare indeed; those in attendance were all older, well-dressed couples. Beyond some students sent to represent the University of Rostock and those in the meagre labour union delegations, there was also just a terrible dearth of ordinary people. The mood was some improbable mixture of tired, try-hard, seedy, naive and if anything faintly anti-sexual. Various unattractive people raised their black, grey, white and purple asexual flags, while a few others wrapped themselves in yellow flags with great purple circles, the banner of the intersexed. “We hate sex and we have defective genitals” at first seems an odd message, but when you remember the leering creep contingent I guess this too makes its own kind of sense.1

Before long some orange utility vehicle retrofitted for service as a mobile dance stage began to belch pyrotechnic smoke into the air and blare electronic dance music. Then two overweight faintly demonic drag queens lumbered onto the sound stage.

Our hype trannies introduced themselves as “Fatty Acid” and “Bitchnu,” which through the distorted overloud speakers sounded more like “Fat Ass” and “Bix Nood.” Despite their upbeat catty affectations, the general lethargy of Rostock CSD infected them too. Their delivery was flat, their jokes obviously rehearsed, their notecards always at the ready. They professed themselves impressed by the enormous turnout but the square seemed half empty and before long they were asking all of us to crowd closer. “It’s for the cameras,” some guy behind me said, and indeed I noticed an NDR film crew milling about. The press wanted footage of thickly packed crowd at the Rostock CSD.

I went into this event firmly determined to report on the speeches, but I found it almost impossible to pay attention to them. First up was a spindly redhaired woman named Sophie Koch, Queer Commissioner for the Federal Government. I guess Queer Commissioners mainly spend all summer jetting frenetically around Germany to give canned speeches at one CSD rally after the other. Koch said something about hate crimes against the queer community and the importance of solidarity and everybody clapped, but the boredom was already setting in. Ever greater numbers of the disaffected teenage girl contingent began chatting among themselves or adding more sharpie art to their cardboard placards.

The worst speech was delivered by Birgit Hesse, the Social Democrat president of the state parliament. At least I assume it was the worst speech, I sit here and type today I with literally zero idea of anything she said at all. I only remember she’d built a lot of pauses for applause into her remarks during which nobody ever applauded, so it must’ve been bad. At some point the Head Mayor of Rostock, Eva-Maria Kröger, took the mic to shout about how many of us were there and how we were all raising our voices together, and that woke the emo girls up a little. Then the Rector of Rostock University took the mic to babble about the importance of diversity for research and teaching and this put the emo girls back to sleep again. By this time the crowd had lost basically all interest in the familiar platitudes of their own movement; the only thing that could draw shouts of applause and support any longer were speakers’ periodic calls to ban Alternative für Deutschland.

Finally Bitchnu and Fatty Acid welcomed the concluding speaker, a 16 year-old transmale reading remarks off her mobile who called herself Jace. In the typical kazoo voice of the testosterone supplemented-female, Jace rambled for a while about diversity and inclusivity and about the dangers faced by queer people and the need for more state resources for transgender people. Finally she abandoned these themes and embarked instead upon a sustained rant against the evils of capitalism, the relevance of which Jace explained by insisting that capitalism is also bad because it both scapegoats and exploits transgender people like Jace.

Eventually Bitchnu and Fatty Acid ushered their overexcited squeaky communist offstage. The time had come to make our demands, which were read out in a great litany. After each demand – whether for more funding or more recognition or more free mutilation surgeries or more whatever – we were asked to snap our fingers and shout “SLAY IT LOUD.” Only about half of everyone bothered with this nonsense; the aforementioned thirteen year-old girls next to me plainly thought it was an enormous drag.

As I stood there amid the creepy autogynephiles taking selfies and the earnest Uni girls snapping their fingers and SLAYING IT LOUD, I noticed the woman in front of me was wearing a shirt depicting a vibrating personal massage device above the caption “What a feminist sounds like.”

So much of the stuff you see at pride events is like this, just baffling impenetrable nonsense:

Finally the demands were over. Bitchnu and Fatty Acid spent the rest of the hour thanking everybody under the sun and reading out various rules for the pride march through the city to the harbour. I considered tagging along but decided I’d had enough. The emo girls, the Uni girls, and the rest of the girls lined up behind the big orange pyrotechnic EDM dance truck – one big listless teenage girl parade with some weird guys wearing puppy masks bringing up the rear. I tried to note the slogans on their cardboard signs: “NO HATE. Fascism. Speciesism.” “I’M A DESASTER BUT AT LEAST I’M NOT HOMO-/TRANSPHOBIC AGAINST HUMAN RIGHTS. STRAIGHT.” “I don’t mind straight people as long as they act gay (!) in public.” “Homophobia has many faces and they’re all UGLY.” “Make love not war.”

I walked back the way I came. First I stopped at a kitchen store to shop for drinking glasses, then I bought an espresso at a coffee shop that I enjoyed on a park bench. It took me more than 20 minutes to cover the 600 meters from the square back to Kröpeliner Tor, and still I arrived ahead of the pride marchers on the parallel street, whose progress was so slow it seemed to defy human biology.

I get that nobody cares but I WILL make off-topic Tuesday posts a regular thing.

I used to run a lot, and by a lot I mean as much as 90 miles a week. Depending on pace, that averages to 90 minutes or more of running every day. Running turns out to be an addictive but also a rewarding thing, and for years it was a huge part of my life – particularly as I became disillusioned with professoring and found myself with a lot of time to spend on other things. Then Covid happened and some combination of prolonged disruptions to routine, social isolation and increasing intellectual engagement with the vaccinator dictatorship dismantled my running addiction bit by bit. When Germany finally lifted the last pandemic restrictions in 2023, I was lucky to be running a third of the volume that I used to.

Subscribe now

As I lost discipline and fitness, running got still harder and I ran still less. Whenever I tried to get back into it, I would always remember how fast and how long I used to run, I would find my present degraded fitness and smaller goals laughable, and sooner or later I would push too hard. I pulled muscles and tendons, sidelining my training and feeding my downward spiral still more. Woe is me, I know.

To all of that came the Food Problem. Some assume that if you run a lot you can eat whatever you want, but that was never my experience. Skinnier is faster, for one thing. And at high training volumes you can benefit enormously from tracking your macros like an obsessive-compulsive lunatic, for another thing. The average Western diet is not optimised for endurance sport, it’s basically too carbohydrate-poor and too fat-rich, so eating normally means that your tougher runs always feel like some varying shade of shit. What I’m trying to say is that in my obsessive running years I spent a lot of time plotting about food and micro-managing my intake of food and this was easily the worst thing about distance running for me personally, because thinking about food beyond a certain point is just really retarded.

Still worse, when I stopped running and stopped thinking about food, I inevitably gained some weight, which additional weight is inimical to distance running for a long list of obvious reasons. I’ve spent the last months questioning whether I really want to be anything more than a recreational runner at all, particularly because I know any return to serious training would require a simultaneous return to strict dietary discipline and obsessing once again about food all the time.

Some weeks ago I explained these trials and tribulations to a body-builder friend of mine, who like other body builders has spent a great part of his life not only lifting heavy things but also alternately eating a great deal and then not eating very much at all. He suggested I try an experimental drug from Eli Lilly called retatrutide, a third-generation GLP-1 agonist that is kind of like Ozempic but even more effective. Although no doctor can prescribe retatrutide and no pharmacy will distribute it, there are middlemen who source this peptide from Chinese labs and who will sell you vials of dehydrated powder ominously labelled NOT FOR USE IN HUMANS and FOR RESEARCH PURPOSES ONLY. They take crypto and their packages arrive overnight bearing return addresses from countries like Bulgaria. Untold thousands of people all across the world are injecting this stuff as I type this; a whole social media subculture has emerged around these and other grey-market peptides. My friend recommended a supplier in Poland and because I am a crazy and heedless internet person I followed his advice and I’ve been injecting retatrutide for about a month now.

It’s been a curious experience, mostly because the food thing is not the half of it. The drug has subtly realigned aspects of my personality (generally for the better), and given me new perspective on some basic human struggles. I hope that doesn’t sound too dramatic but I’m serious.

Read more

On 6 September – in less than two months – the citizens of Sachsen-Anhalt will elect a new state parliament. This is a problem for Our Democracy Enjoyers, because Sachsen-Anhalt is in East Germany, and Alternative für Deutschland are especially strong there. According to polls, the AfD are on the verge of winning an outright majority of Landtag seats. In this case the firewall would not matter at all; the AfD could govern alone without any partners. Should the AfD fall short, they will nevertheless fall very slightly short, perhaps just one or two seats short of a majority. Right now both outcomes look equally probable.

Subscribe now

The powers that be don’t want to see the AfD in charge of Sachsen-Anhalt. One reason is that an AfD government would have the full run of the Interior Ministry and of the State Office for the Protection of the Constitution. Suddenly the political opposition would learn about all the dirty hyperdemocratic tricks the cartel parties have gotten up to these past years to defend Our Democracy. Another reason is that an AfD government could theoretically terminate the state broadcasting agreements behind German public media, which would be really ungood because Our Democracy requires a constant stream of propaganda funded by mandatory licensing fees even to work. Still another reason is that an AfD majority government would be disinclined to treat the newly minoritised parties with all that much fairness or consideration, given how little fairness and consideration the AfD itself has received the past ten years; and a final reason is that when people realise an AfD government does not warp time and return us immediately to 1933, the party will experience some degree of normalisation in public perception.

Naturally, all these reasons (except for perhaps the first) reflect the variously exaggerated fears of a political cartel slowly losing its hold on power. German public media is too entrenched for a single hostile state government to uproot, the chances the AfD even tries to use the judiciary to hunt down its political opponents are less than zero, and it is far from clear the AfD would benefit electorally or in terms of popularity from presence in government. Normalisation is a knife that cuts both ways.

The other possibility – an AfD win that lands the Evil Nazi Hitler Fascists a few seats short of a majority – might actually be worse for the establishment, or at least for the CDU. The only way the Union could form a government in this scenario, would be with support from the lapsed communists of Die Linke – a toxic prospect particularly for older, conservative CDU voters in East Germany. Either the AfD wins everything, or the CDU gets a chance to lose even more catastrophically and in greater detail than heretofore contemplated. That’s what at stake in Sachsen-Anhalt.

Today, Focus reports the fears of two anonymous sources (“one of them in the CDU parliamentary group”) that the resulting pressure could split the Union. Specifically, they contemplate a post-election scenario in which a minority faction aims to forestall any arrangement with Die Linke by defecting from the CDU to help the AfD into government. Apparently, the Sachsen-Anhalt CDU is working actively to forestall just such a catastrophe, above all by purging party lists of internal critics and mavericks. Fully 14 right-leaning CDU MPs currently in the Sachsen-Anhalt parliament will not be returning as list candidates.1 To maintain discipline in the face of the AfD threat, in other words, the Sachsen-Anhalt CDU has taken steps to move its parliamentary group substantially to the left and increase its compatibility with the ex-Communists of the Die Linke/ the Left Party.

Die Linke, for their part, are just as eager to make common cause with the CDU. On Sunday, somebody leaked an internal strategy paper from Die Linke in Sachsen-Anhalt to BILD. In this document, our once-and-future Socialist Unity Party lays out their plans to help the CDU into government should the AfD fails to win outright. They fear that withholding support from the Union would trigger special parliamentary procedures that would in turn make the election of an AfD Minister President much more likely. Intriguingly, Die Linke’s strategists also speculate about what would happen if the CDU attempted any rapprochement with the AfD. They imagine that this would split the CDU into a “middle-right” and a “right-conservative” party, the latter of which would cooperate with the AfD and make all parties to the left of them irrelevant. It might also bring down the federal government, but, details.

It turns out that a firewall against a powerful populist party works like a perverse machine to drive everyone else away from the politics voters actually want, in this way reinforcing the firewall and the strength of the populist party on the other side of it. In these moments of fear and loathing, discontents within the CDU fear that any deals with Die Linke will split their party, while Die Linke suggests that any attempt by the CDU to work with the AfD will do the same. The CDU themselves, meanwhile, deploy only short-term tactics against the immediate crisis, at the cost of ever greater crises the next time somebody goes to the ballot box. The best outcome for the Union is total AfD victory, while the AfD would arguably benefit (electorally at least) from another legislative term out of government.

Our Democracy has to be the most retarded political system anybody has ever devised.

Subscribe now

If anybody cares, what actually happened is that an extension of the European Union’s mass surveillance regulation known as Chat Control 1.0 failed to make it out of the European Parliament twice in March. Unable to summon a clear parliamentary majority, advocates (mostly in the centre-right European People’s Party [EPP]) turned to the European Council, which adopted the failed Chat Control 1.0 renewal on 2 July. The Council’s position hardens automatically into law unless the European Parliament can summon an absolute majority to stop it. To forestall any such majority from forming, the EPP on Tuesday moved with member state backing for urgent procedure, angling to force their scheme through in the last days before the summer holiday, after many MEP’s had already left. The parliament narrowly approved the urgent procedure, and in consequence there were not enough votes to stop Chat Control 1.0 when it came for a vote today. Hours ago, a majority of 314 MEPs voted to stop Chat Control against the wishes of the Council, while a minority of 276 voted to let it happen. Because 314 is less than the absolute majority of 361, Chat Control 1.0 passed even though most MEPs present didn’t want it to.

It was a sleazy vote, not least because it’s far from clear this procedural manoeuvre was even appropriate in this case. Also, electronic surveillance is bad, but if we are honest with ourselves this battle was already lost.

Chat Control 1.0 was first instated in 2021 as a temporary exemption to the ePrivacy Directive of the EU, allowing messaging services and online platforms to scan chats and other electronic communications for child sexual abuse material. The exemption expired in April, but various platforms have continued their surveillance with no legal basis in the intervening months. Now their formal permission to scan our private communications has been restored and extended through April 2028. We are, in other words, merely returning to the prior regime.

Chat Control 1.0 is a temporary stopgap while the European Parliament, the Commission and the Council try to negotiate their Child Sexual Abuse Regulation, or Chat Control 2.0. As envisioned by the Commission, this permanent law would not merely allow platforms to scan private communications for child sex abuse material, but require them to do so; require additional AI-assisted automated scanning not only for known child pornography but also for such vaguely defined activities as “grooming”; and extend scanning to end-to-end encrypted services like Signal via mandatory monitoring on the client side. This insane proposal has been watered down over the years, in large part because of parliamentary opposition, but it’s coming in some form. We’re getting Chat Control 2.0 before Chat Control 1.0 expires, and Chat Control 2.0 will be at least somewhat worse.

What’s amazing to me about all of this is this man:

His name is Manfred Weber, and he’s a Bavarian politician (CSU) who also happens to be president of the pro-surveillance EPP and leader of the EPP faction in the European Parliament. Weber loves electronic surveillance and he has been the driving force behind Chat Control from the beginning. Naturally, Chat Control is something that Weber would have a lot of trouble imposing in Germany, where surveillance is widely deplored and where our Basic Law guarantees as “inviolable” the so-called Briefgeheimnis – “the privacy of correspondence, posts and telecommunications.” From his perch in the European Parliament, however, he has been able to hollow out this core constitutional principle of the Federal Republic from a procedurally rigged vote in Strasbourg, without any domestic debate or anybody in the Bundestag having a single thing to say about it.

This is a very advanced novel form of democracy that we have achieved here in the European Union.

On Saturday, the United States turned 250, and Alternative für Deutschland held their national party congress in Erfurt. It was a scene of a now-familiar carnival: The Antifa alliance Widersetzen and other leftist groups summoned protestors from across the Federal Republic to obstruct the congress via road blockades; police responded with the largest security operation that the state of Thüringen has ever seen.

Subscribe now

As at Essen in 2024 and Riesa in 2025 and Gießen also in 2025, nothing substantial happened. The protestors ended up blocking roads and tramlines that were already closed, long after the AfD delegates had assembled at their venue. The press ran footage of protestors marching up and down streets chanting the familiar slogans while Antifa beat up a few journalists from Junge Freiheit and Apollo News and threw some bottles at police officers. Ultimately authorities tallied eleven injured officers and 65 criminal offences, mostly property damage and assault. As always, we read that the protesters were “mostly peaceful.”

Spectacles like this become intriguing when you remember that both sides – the protestors making a futile fuss over AfD party business and the police fighting to contain them – are funded by the German state. According to the Ostdeutsche Allgemeine, 10,000 officers from across the country convened to keep the rabble rousers at bay on Saturday. If that figure is accurate, then German taxpayers will have spent around 20 million Euros to secure this one singular party congress against the activist organisations that German taxpayers also fund with millions more Euros.

Why is this happening?

A much-cited proverb of British cybernetician Stafford Beer holds that “The purpose of a system is what it does.” Beer later called this “a basic dictum” that “makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than the familiar attributions of good intention, prejudices about expectations, moral judgement, or sheer ignorance of circumstances.” As an analytical principle, POSIWID is useful because it allows us to move beyond the claimed purpose of the anti-AfD apparatus. Protesters have never once succeeded in obstructing an AfD party congress, while the highly ritualistic and repetitive nature of their demonstrations has steadily immunised the public against their message. In early 2024, widespread protest actions could still suppress AfD support at least somewhat, but now they seem to have lost all discernible effect. Highly vocal, overexposed opposition instead cements the status of the AfD as a true political alternative among sympathisers and enemies alike, redounding only to the party’s benefit.

That is one rather bizarre objective purpose of the anti-AfD system, but actually it’s in keeping with how the establishment has opposed the AfD more generally. The people in charge have discredited their own parties and institutions with a wide range of self-defeating tactics. Together, these failures have conspired to make our Evil Fascist Nazi Hitlerites the most popular political party in Germany by a mile. The AfD have not had to do very much to achieve this outcome at all.

The anti-AfD system has a few other objective purposes I can think of as well. At the most banal level, it just mobilises a lot of people in service of a vast media spectacle. Activists, Antifa rabble-rousers, political celebrities, freaked out Uni girls and their forbearing boyfriends – the system assembles these types from across the country and gets them to rehearse canned phrases about how much they loathe fascism over and over. It likewise assembles a great many police to contain the more violently inclined among the protesters while thousands of journalists provide hours of breathless reporting on the circus. Everybody gets to participate in the media hullabaloo surrounding Alternative für Deutschland, but beyond the confines of the AfD party congress the hullabaloo itself has as much to do with the nuts and bolts of real politics as professional sporting events have to do with warfare. The anti-AfD system allows demonstrators to engage in cheap antifascism signaling and it permits the increasingly repressive German state to mount a theatrical defence of the democratic rights purportedly still enjoyed by opposition parties.

Particularly since 2015, the Federal Republic has poured increasing financial resources into the civil society morass, effectively domesticating the activist left. Truly anti-establishment protests, like the destructive 2017 riots agains the G20 summit in Hamburg, don’t really happen anymore. Instead we have a new activist scene arrayed against establishment enemies. Along the way this novel, complex system has developed its own dynamics and started to behave in ways its architects never anticipated. What has made the problem worse, is the general ideological scattering that has afflicted the German left as climatism (their prior unifying focus) enters a state of advanced ideological decay. To maintain unity in their ranks, the activists have come to lean heavily on the AfD as a common cause. They now exist in an uneasy symbiosis with the “fascists” they spend all their time so eagerly imagining and denouncing.

As I keep saying, they’re losing but we’re not really winning.

Subscribe now

Some stories are so insane you hardly know where to start with them.

Subscribe now

On Monday a man shot up a youth welfare centre in Stade, near Hamburg, ultimately leaving six social workers dead. Before police could arrive, the shooter left the building and got into a Mercedes GLE Coupé, where his getaway driver was waiting. Police pursued the car, shot out its tyres and arrested driver and shooter while bystanders filmed:

Authorities initially refused to release any information about their suspect, claiming that his ethnic background had no relevance to the crime. Since late Monday evening, however, the steady intravenous drip of information has revealed this to be one of the most bizarre and insane crimes in recent memory.

1) The suspect, Fatih Khan G., is a Turkish citizen, born in Hannover. Early unconfirmed reports – since called into question – held that he was a member of the Miri Clan, an organised crime cartel active around Bremen. As always, he was known to German police for prior threatening behaviour.

2) Fatih Khan G.’s weapon was a Beretta 70 semi-automatic pistol, which he purchased on the black market for the amazing price of €4,000 in Berlin Kürfurstendamm – exactly one week before the attack.

3) At the time of the shooting, Fatih Khan G. was under investigation for child abuse. His infant daughter had suffered a serious brain injury and authorities suspected shaken baby syndrome and withdrew her from his custody. He travelled to the youth welfare centre in Stade on Monday to meet his daughter and her mother and attend some kind of counselling or planning session with social workers. He sent mother and daughter out of the room, then pulled out his gun and started shooting.

4) Fatih Khan G. is wanted for serious sex crimes in Turkey, including the suspected sexual abuse of his own daughter. He escaped pretrial detention in Turkey in 2021 and made his way back to Germany, totally safe from the Turkish authorities because naturally our own police never have the slightest idea about the criminal records of the foreigners we allow to live here.

5) Fatih Khan G.’s getaway driver turns out to be a 65 year-old German woman named Sylvia S. She works for the Verband binationaler Familien und Partnerscahften, a well-funded migration advocacy NGO. Sylvia S. was the godmother of Fatih Khan G.’s poor brain-injured daughter. Three days before the shooting, Sylvia S. circulated to various media outlets a 20-page memo defending Fatih Khan G. and arguing that his daughter should be returned to his custody.

6) Our unlikely getaway driver Sylvia S. is also the mother-in-law of an SPD politician named Deniz Kurku. Kurku serves in the state parliament of Lower Saxony, where he is State Commissioner for Migration and Inclusion. Kurku has been in the news most recently for his connection to a corruption scandal surrounding another Turkish SPD politician named Hülya Iri. Basically, Kurku recommended public funding for an asylum NGO run by Iri, which NGO existed solely to transfer money to Iri’s bank account.

7) The getaway car driven by Sylvia S. had been re-registered under her name five weeks before the shooting. It is a flashy Mercedes of the kind preferred by many Turkish and Arab migrants, and the last thing you’d expect lefty boomer NGO-affiliated women to be driving. It is registered in Hannover and the number plate, which includes the letters “KD,” may suggest it is in fact Deniz Kurku’s automobile.

8) Sylvia S. was released hours after her arrest on Monday, and as of now she faces no criminal charges.

This toaster-themed building is the Berlaymont, and as the enormous gaudy banner on the front suggests, it is the headquarters of the European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union. The Berlaymont is in Brussels, and Brussels is in Europe, where the weather has been unseasonably warm, with daytime temperatures rising well above 30C (or 90F).

Subscribe now

Happily, the Berlaymont has air conditioning, unlike many hospitals and care homes in Europe. Unhappily, the Berlaymont air conditioning system seems not to work so well in the heat, and so the European Commission felt compelled to turn it off – but only for lowly employees of the Commission. Commissioners, including Ursula van der Leyen, continue to enjoy cool air in their own offices.

From Politico:

The European Commission’s headquarters was forced to shut down its air-conditioning system on Friday due to the heat wave.

Staff working at the Berlaymont building received a text at midday, reading: “BERL — URGENT — Due to extreme weather conditions, forced shut down of air cooling system from floor 1 to 7 for the rest of the day.”

The 13-story building is home to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, her 26 commissioners and about 3,000 staff. Von der Leyen works on the 13th floor, and most of her commissioners’ offices are housed on floors eight or above.

Belgium and much of Europe have been sweltering for the past week, with record-breaking temperatures.

As temperatures climbed earlier in the week, the Commission provided “guidance” from their cool air-conditioned offices to sweltering employees who do not deserve to be as comfortable as them, suggesting that these lesser people should try “avoiding going outside at the hottest times of day, drinking water regularly and starting work earlier.”

[T]he advice angered some Commission staff who work in buildings without air-conditioning …

“It’s like feudalism,” a Commission official working on a lower level of the Berlaymont … told POLITICO on Friday, referring to the fact that upper floors housing commissioners got to keep their AC on. A second official agreed it was a “disgrace.”

A third staffer working on the 8th floor told POLITICO on Friday that even with working AC, the temperature inside was still 25.7 degrees.

Subscribe now

It is literally 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit) as I type this, and if you were an alien from Pluto listening to central German radio you’d have to conclude that these temperatures are at the very limits of human survivability. (It’s substantially warmer further west, but the hysteria is the same everywhere.) Meteorologists are running short of death doom colours to depict the dire state of our temperature emergency …

… and former Covid Minister Karl Lauterbach has declared that “many people will die” and denounced “right-wing conspiracy theorists” for not taking sunny summer weather seriously enough.

Meanwhile, in what has become a fixed seasonal ritual, German public health authorities and state media have begun circulating lunatic emergency advice for how to stay cool in this life-threatening heat situation.

Their pointers:

• Open windows only at night, early in the morning, and late in the evening.

• Otherwise close all windows and draw all curtains so you can be both uncomfortably warm and profoundly depressed.

• Safely ensconced in your stuffy dark apartment, unplug all electrical devices, including your internet router, because these can emit heat even in “standby mode.”

• Also roll up all of your carpets to stop them from storing heat.

• Hang up wet laundry in your dark apartment to cool the air via evaporation, but do not hang up too much wet laundry or the air will become excessively humid which is even worse.

• The one electronic device you might possibly consider plugging in, is a fan, to cool your skin. To enhance the cooling effect, put a bucket of all the ice that you have emptied from your unplugged freezer in front of the fan.

• What you should not plug in, is any kind of portable air conditioning unit, because the Federal Environmental Agency believes that they will actually make your room warmer when the exhaust air finds its way back into your apartment.

This is the modern German government in a nutshell: “The heat is going to kill you, stay inside with the windows closed and the curtains drawn and do all this other weird, crazy and unheard-of stuff to escape the murderous heat, but whatever you do, don’t do the one thing that will actually substantially reduce interior temperatures, because reasons.”

I guess there’s nothing to do about my reluctance to write this post, than to write my way through it.

Subscribe now

Across the West, the political elite have become estranged from their native populations. This process began in the years after the demise of Communism and it accelerated in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The causes are manifold: Cheap money during a long period of low interest rates, ideological radicalisation, the lack of clear political alternatives, the cancerous growth of state bureaucratic systems and the social consequences of globalisation within the political classes all played a role. Probably we have yet to understand the causes fully, but the upshot is that our elites have been pursuing crazy policies that are obviously detrimental to their own populations for decades now. They had a head-start in wreaking their destruction because the West had accumulated a lot of prosperity they could burn through before anyone began to feel the pain of their idiocy, and also because of various structural advantages, including their control of broadcast media.

As Postwar Television Democracy succumbs to the internet and as it is increasingly clear that the fat years are behind us and the future portends nothing but ever leaner years as far as the eye can see, an organic opposition has taken shape. This is the populist backlash, and in each national context it has had different political consequences, although the movement itself is broadly similar everywhere. In Hungary, Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz spent 16 years attempting to establish “illiberal democracy” before they were voted out in May. In the United States, where Trump has succeeded in loosely aligning all three branches of government behind his agenda, the MAGA movement is at the height of its influence. In the United Kingdom, Nigel Farage’s Reform and more recently Rupert Lowe’s Restore have all but eclipsed the Tories. In Germany, Alternative für Deutschland continues to accumulate support despite withering opposition from the cartel parties and the state itself.

The establishment has reacted to the backlash very strangely. We would expect elites to adjust their politics and adopt elements of the populist programme to defang their opponents. Instead, they have ceded incredible ground by doubling down on the very policies that caused the backlash in the first place. Part of this is because we are governed by stupid and parochial elites who don’t understand what is happening to them and why. Another part, however, is probably that elites have assessed the new opposition and decided that this is a passing moment which they can either manage or outlast.

I’m not sure they’re right, but more and more I’m also not sure they’re wrong. Since sometime last year, I’ve been thinking a lot about the limitations that beset populist political movements everywhere they have arisen. These limitations aren’t anyone’s fault; for the most part, they’re expressions of where these new politics come from and what they are. This doesn’t mean that they aren’t real and potentially also very bad for those who want to live in reasonable sensible countries with reasonable sensible politics.

If you want to read more, maybe you’d consider subscribing to my blog. Without your support nothing I do here would be possible.

Read more

In December 2024, Mario Voigt became Minister President of Thüringen, sworn in at the head of a political monstrosity known as the blackberry coalition. This is a minority government tolerated by the former communists of Die Linke and cobbled together from Voigt’s own CDU (black), the old-left Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (purple) and the Social Democrats (red). The parties of the blackberry coalition have nothing in common and nobody in Thüringen really wants this misbegotten government. Its entire purpose is to keep the largest party in the Thüringen state parliament, Alternative für Deutschland, out of power.

Subscribe now

Voigt is a strange rodentine man; we’ve met him before. He’s the guy who demanded the state issue “revocable social media licenses” for the privilege of commenting online. He enjoys the dubious distinction of being the first head of government in the history of the Federal Republic to promote an ex-Stasi officer to a cabinet post. Such are the measures necessary to defend democracy in this, the best and most democratic Germany of all time.

More relevant here is the fact that Voigt plagiarised substantial portions of his doctoral dissertation. In January, following an internal investigation drawn out long enough to ensure that Voigt faced no awkward questions while he was forming his obstructive government, the Technische Universität Chemnitz officially stripped him of his Ph.D. Voigt has appealed the decision, but according to me he has no prospects of vindication, particularly as much more evidence of his plagiarism has since come to light. Once upon a time, plagiarism was enough to end political careers in the Federal Republic, but too many establishment politicians have been caught doing it and nobody cares anymore. Were Voigt to resign over such a minor matter as blatant intellectual dishonesty, that would benefit the AfD, and anything that benefits the AfD must be bad, so keeping plagiarists in high office must be good.

In the past weeks, Voigt has stumbled into a new and much more hilarious scandal. It all began when he co-authored a puff op-ed for Welt demanding more German-language radio music. The text was so vacuous and riddled with so many repetitive antitheses that everyone immediately recognised it as an AI screed: “Music is more than just entertainment. It is a language, an identity, a cultural self-image”; “This decline [in German radio music] is no coincidence. It is the result of structures that favour the global and cause the local to fade into the background”; “This continuity [in the German music tradition] is not nostalgia. It is an argument.” Lest you think I’m cherry-picking, have a longer taste – purely machine-translated via DeepL, so you know I’m not adjusting the style to make it any more robotic than it actually is:

More German-language music does not crowd out international quality. An additional voice broadens the sound – it does not restrict it. Especially at a time when so much is becoming more global, faster and more interchangeable, the need for a sense of direction is growing. For something that endures. Our language is such an anchor. Our culture is such an anchor.

It creates a sense of belonging without excluding anyone. It fosters identity without isolating us. This debate is no trivial matter. It is a question of cultural self-assertion. Not loud. Not shrill. But clear. For only those who have a voice of their own can be heard in the concert of the world. It is up to us – not through coercion, but through conviction – to give it the space it deserves.

Voigt responded to the ensuing uproar very strangely, telling a reporter that “I can’t understand all the fuss,” adding that “I can only encourage everyone to use AI” and insisting that his office’s reliance on large language models to churn out low-effort political slop is “a testament to the quality of modern Thuringian politics.” Notably, Voigt made no effort to downplay his ridiculous op-ed as an error originating with some subordinate and he made no promise to actually write his own op-eds in future. If you’re thinking that’s likely because our strange little man has been using AI in all manner of shameless ways to write all kinds of things for years now and he knew his shenanigans were about to be discovered, you’d be right.

Last Tuesday, investigative journalists at Frag den Staat published an extensive exposé. They ran eleven of Voigt’s speeches through the AI detection tools Pangram and GPTZero and discovered that only one appears to have been written entirely by a human. Three, meanwhile, are entirely LLM products. Voigt turns out to have used chatbots to compose very sensitive speeches, among them a funeral oration for the former Thuringian Minister President Bernhard Vogel. Sample quote the first: “What remains of such a life? Not the chronology. Not the offices held. Only the attitude with which they were carried out.” Sample quote the second: “We spoke on the phone as recently as January this year. He gave me some ideas for Thüringen. I am well aware that I am not merely stepping into the office of a predecessor, but also into the legacy of a high standard.”

Also composed entirely with the assistance of some AI tool was a speech Voigt delivered at a memorial service for the victims of National Socialism on 29 January 2025. Of these victims, he strangely intoned that “Their eyes were empty and yet infinitely deep.” Achieving heights of banality that would prove difficult even for the stupidest of humans, he declared that “Auschwitz was not the work of some imaginary monster. It was the work of people who believed their actions were in line with a higher purpose.” In words devoid of humanity (because they were written by a computer), he deplored the Holocaust as “the result of a mindset that abandoned humanity bit by bit – in words, in decisions, in indifference.” Voigt reused substantial portions of this speech several months later at an event to commemorate the liberation of Buchenwald, an occasion for which he did not even deem it necessary to get Gemini to spit out a new speech.

Voigt has also used AI to write various newspaper pieces in addition to the Welt trainwreck that set off this controversy. His most spectacular offence is a 2025 op-ed for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung demanding minimum age requirements for social media. The piece attributed quotations to Jonathan Haidt and two other self-appointed social media experts that were entirely hallucinated by his chatbot. When FAZ asked Voigt’s office for comment, they issued a bizarre statement insisting that their use of LLMs to write articles and fabricate quotations is part of an “AI strategy” intended to make the state government of Thüringen “fit for the future.” FAZ promply denounced Voigt’s op-ed as contrary to their editorial guidelines and unpublished it.

There are so many things to say about this delicious scandal. Nobody expects a head of government to personally author all of his speeches, but the serial reliance on AI suggests that neither Voigt nor his staff have anything to say at all, or (what is worse) any idea of what they should be saying. That they’re willing to take such obviously defective and vacuous AI compositions to the public without a second thought speaks volumes about what unselfaware idiots all these people must be. Imagine showing up at some Holocaust event and declaring with a straight face that the victims of National Socialism had “empty” yet “infinitely deep” eyes, without once asking yourself what the fuck you’re even talking about. Most damning of all, however, is the fact that Voigt has been letting AI speak for him for at least 18 months now and nobody noticed until a few weeks ago. Voigt finds himself in a wonderfully symmetrical position: He has no ideas or thoughts on the one hand, but nobody gives a shit about his ideas or thoughts on the other hand. Voigt isn’t in office to do any particular thing or to have any particular vision or to pursue any particular goals. He is in office purely and entirely to keep the AfD out of office, which is also why Voigt could not care less that he’s been outed as a fraud before the entire nation. He can never be forced to resign, because that would benefit the Evil Hitler Nazi Fascist party. Enshittified robot politics to stop fascism is what Germany is all about these days.

I write this from the Baltic coast of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, just north of Rostock. In three months we’ll have state elections here, and Alternative für Deutschland are far and away the strongest party. The last poll pegged their numbers at 36%. The centre-right Christian Democrats, meanwhile, are weaker here than in any other German state; they’ll be lucky if they scrape by in September with 10% of the vote.

Subscribe now

Now, the CDU have never been that strong in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, but they owe their particular and present weakness largely to German Chancellor Friedrich Merz. Since the 2024 election campaign, Merz has taken the Union in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern on a steady march down from a high of nearly 20% into the depths of their present misery. Along the way, Merz completed a process begun by his predecessors, Merkel and Scholz, namely the full and total social normalisation of the AfD across East Germany.

This past weekend – as they stare down an impending electoral embarrassment unprecedented in their history – the Meck-Pomm division of the CDU held their state party congress. Things are already bad enough for the poor Union blighters, but to make them worse Merz swooped in to deliver yet another of his bizarre gaffe-ridden speeches. He let slip various strange statements over the course of forty minutes, but one passage of his speech in particular has me thinking that maybe I have had Merz wrong this whole time, and that maybe the man is actually not the most bumbling clown chancellor the Federal Republic has ever had, but rather a deep-cover operative on a secret mission from the AfD to crash and burn the Union with no survivors.

In the middle of a standard lament about the demise of the “political middle,” Merz spent a few words deploring the ex-communists in Die Linke (presently polling at 13% in Meck-Pomm), before turning his ire to the Evil Nazi Hitler Fascists in the AfD:

And there is … a party … that stands in the tradition of the worst injustice our country has ever known in its history. A party that not only wants to return to the days before Helmut Kohl and Konrad Adenauer, but a party questions everything that has made our country great and successful. We must engage more forcefully with this party. This phenomenon did not appear overnight and will not vanish by day’s end; rather, it poses the fundamental question of where the Federal Republic of Germany should move in the coming years and decades. And not everyone will be pleased when I quote a former prominent Green politician. But not everything has to be wrong simply because it comes from a Green. A few days ago, Joschka Fischer said on a talk show that this AfD wants to take Germany back to the time before Adenauer. Ladies and gentlemen, the time before Adenauer was a time of nationalism, a time of the worst excesses of that nationalism. With Konrad Adenauer, we left nationalism behind in Germany and we never want to go back there, which is why we will not leave our country to the extremists.

So, in order of ascending craziness: 1) Merz claims that the AfD want to take us back to a pre-Adenauer nationalism, which is a roundabout allusion to National Socialism. Then, 2) as support for this claim, Merz cites a leading politician from the Greens, apparently forgetting that the Greens are among the most absolutely loathed parties in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (presently polling at around 4%). And because that is not enough, he additionally 3) claims that the AfD “stands in the tradition of the worst injustice our country has ever known in its history,” which is a veiled way of saying that the AfD “stands in the tradition of” the Holocaust.

Set aside the fact that careless comparisons like this are a terrible idea, because they always entail the risk of legal consequences: Many AfD supporters in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern are former CDU voters. It is a very bold strategy to set about winning these people back by calling them a bunch of genocidal Nazis. Then we must remember, as I said above, that the AfD has become a totally normal party in the East, and that talking in this way about the AfD here just makes you look out of touch or crazy (or both). And finally, I would just like to know practically what Merz thinks is supposed to happen after the September vote. He spent his party congress speech railing against Die Linke and the AfD, two parties which between them are almost certain to win over half the seats in the state parliament. The Union with its morally ambitious firewalls is on the verge of walling itself off from most of the Eastern electorate, railing against phantom Nazis the whole time.

Merz is a secret AfD agent, that’s the only way to explain this. He’s working hard to get the Evil Fascist Nazi Hitler party an outright majority by September. It’s not an easy task, but if anyone can do it he can.

In 2024, the Austrian Identitarian activist Martin Sellner began serious efforts to push his concept of Remigration into the political mainstream, and since then the German state and its civil society collaborators have extended him every assistance.

Domestic intelligence agents and activist journalists at Correctiv collaborated to convict Sellner and Alternative für Deutschland of planning the mass deportation of naturalised Germans in a late 2023 meeting in Potsdam. They called this small private meeting a “Secret Plan against Germany” and drew not-so-subtle comparisons to the notorious Wannsee Conference. Ensuing anti-AfD protests lasted months, even as litigation succeeded in deconstructing much of the slander Correctiv had propagated. The hysteria cost AfD some support ahead of the European elections, but it also succeeded in making “remigration” a household word throughout the Federal Republic – something that Sellner and his Identitarians could never have achieved on their own. Unbelievably, the Correctiv reporting was turned into a theatre piece and the actual Wannsee Villa where Nazi government officials and SS leaders met to plan the Final Solution in 1942 received a sign advising visitors of Sellner’s Postdam meeting and “the … obvious… link between today’s ethno-nationalist fantasies of deportation and the historic Wannsee Conference.”

For their next act, authorities toyed with legally doubtful schemes to ban Sellner from Germany, while police devised pretenses to disrupt the speaking events Sellner had scheduled in the Federal Republic to present his book on Remigration. All this meant more press and more eyeballs for Sellner’s cause. When Sellner co-organised the inaugural “Remigration Summit” last Spring in Italy, authorities tried to prevent the attendance of several German Identitarian activists by temporarily banning them from leaving the country, and they did the same again when the second “Remigration Summit” convened in Portugal last week. In each case their restrictions ensured that small conferences held in other countries and attended by no more than a few hundred people could remain the subject of reporting and controversy here at home.

I don’t know to what degree the German approach to Sellner’s remigration programme reflects a calculated strategy, and to what degree it’s just all the pinched head girls in the state bureaucratic apparatus having a collective aneurysm over the latest politically naughty thing to come across their desks. Either way, the unique German system of ‘defensive democracy’ requires an enemy against which to array its defenses, and in the decades since the Berlin Wall fell this enemy has become “the extreme right” – concentrated like the old Communist foe in the eastern states of the former DDR, embodied by Alternative für Deutschland rather than the SED, and constructed as an equal if not greater threat to Our Democracy. Because unlike the Communists this enemy does not really exist, it requires regime propagandists to engage in heavy revisionism, for example by casting as an NSDAP successor a populist-right party with politics broadly equivalent to the 1980s-era CDU, and by building up and deploring particular villains like Sellner.

Now, political dissidents and activists of all stripes have a curious relationship with establishment discourse. The one is like oil and the other is like water; they cannot occupy the same space. In the past years, the myth that Diversity is our Strength and that mass migration might fix our pension plans, alleviate our cultural ennui and improve our culinary offerings has collapsed. Anti-migrationism has gone mainstream in many circles, driving right-populists to seize upon remigration as the new cause. I would imagine that a similar process unfolded from the establishment perspective; as major politicians and journalists decided the time had come to put the brakes on the steady stream of younger males streaming into our country from the global south, they needed to draw a new line in the sand to differentiate themselves from the populist rabble-rousers.

Thus, with the help of literally everybody from Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s benighted traffic light government to the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution to Alternative für Deutschland to Martin Sellner and his Identitarians, remigration became the new anti-migration. Which is fine, as far as it goes; people should support the causes they want, and nobody would dispute that particularly in the last ten years a great many people have forced their way into Europe, where they have proceeded to abuse our social welfare systems, violate the law at disproportionate rates and substantially degrade the quality of life. If I could push a button and make these people leave I would.

Unfortunately, this problem does not come packaged with any easy solutions, and I am less and less certain a) how remigration is supposed to work, and b) that the newly ascendant and highly dogmatic remigrationists on the right have any path towards realising their vision. While remigrationists preach the manifold benefits of putting migrants on airplanes back to the global south, the migrants’ native countries in many cases refuse to accept them, mass migration continues if at a somewhat slower pace, the AfD remains firewalled out of German politics, our elaborate NGO machinery continues to push migrationist humanitarianism, a broad elite consensus resists even efforts to deport many of those who are here illegally and primary EU law confounds remigrationist proposals at numerous points. Remigration would prove a tall order if 85% of Germans reversed their stance on the idea tomorrow. Sellner’s full, heavily technocratic vision, meanwhile, would require broad institutional buy-in and support from all major parties, including large parts of the left, over a period of decades. We are talking about a new social consensus to compel or encourage the mass resettlement of entire populations, as deep and broad as the consensus that until recently existed behind climatism. That probably can’t happen without serious generational turnover or some kind of serious political upheaval.

I do not write this as an condemnatory political ninny or an incurable contrarian. I consider Sellner a friend and I am even his translator. Yet personal considerations like these aren’t enough to blunt my scpeticism.

The most recent initiative in remigrationland is something called the Save Europe Act, rolled out by Sellner and Dutch political activist Eva Vlaardingerbroek at the Remigration Summit 2026 in Portugal. Basically, there’s an EU procedural mechanism known as the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI), whereby ordinary people can bring a legal proposal for consideration directly before the European Commission. To do this, they need only gather a million signatures in support and meet a few other requirements. Among other things, the Save Europe Act demands “legislative and policy measures” to impose a “moratorium” on non-European migration, to deport “illegally staying migrants, rejected asylum seekers” and criminals, to “establish a harmonized EU-wide framework for broader remigration” and to “remove social welfare incentives and benefits that function as pull factors for migration.”

All of that sounds great, as does the fact that Sellner and Vlaardingerbroek claim to have gathered well over 200,000 “signatures” so far. Unfortunately, reality tends generally to be less great. To begin with, Sellner and Vlaardingerbroek have yet to register the Save Europe Act with the European Commission at all. The signatures they are collecting – really, just email addresses – are part of an internet publicity campaign and have no wider significance. According to me, chances that the Commission agrees to register the Save Europe Act as a formal ECI are quite low, for the Commission may reject any proposal that “is … manifestly contrary to the values of the Union.” If Sellner and Vlarrdingerbroek do manage to squeeze their initiative through registration and the Save Europe Act becomes more than a buggy website, then they’ll still need to collect a million signatures – not from random internet people, but from verified citizens of EU member states. And if they meet that hurdle, they’ll compel a response from the Commission and a hearing in the European Parliament. Even in this best case scenario, there is no chance that the Save Europe Acts becomes law, inspires any laws or changes anything at the EU level at all.

Defenders of the Save Europe Act who have bothered to read the fine print accept that they are not on the path to making Remigration official EU policy. They argue instead that publicity surrounding the Save Europe Act will “move the Overton Window” and normalise remigration as a concept. These arguments neglect the fact that remigration has already been normalised; as I wrote above, since 2024 it has become almost a household word in Germany, if one denoting a very bad and fascistic concept approximately on par with outright genocidal fascism. Otherwise I have learned to be wary of intangible, immeasurable ends in the world of political activism. Western politics abounds with activists who are changing perceptions, challenging conventions, deconstructing myths, complicating assumptions, correcting prejudices, deepening understandings and now moving Overton Windows, and the only thing these projects and their goals have in common is that nobody can work out what any of them mean in concrete terms.

Mass migration has been an absolute curse. People want the migrants to stop coming and they want the ones who are already here to go back home. They feel impotent to change the situation and it’s natural that they should support social media campaigns promising at the very least to give them a voice. That’s fine and most of this is probably harmless, but the truth is that we’re not going to petition the migrants away. I’ve read so many appeals to the Overton Window at this point that the concept has become quite threadbare for me, but if anything has shifted mass media discourse these past years, it is not activist campaigns but the manifold and quite serious problems caused by mass migration itself. As in so many other areas from Covid to climatism, retarded elite policies are failing and unwinding themselves, but we’re not yet winning.

I’ve been quiet for five days, but I have not been on holiday and I have not had a restful break. At first I was researching this post, and then I was trying to write it. My efforts on the latter front have not gone well, so I’m throwing caution to the wind and pounding this out blind from a stack of notes, without a plan and with no idea where it’s going or where it will end up.

There’s a backstory here: For over a year I’ve thought it might prove worthwhile to review tabu books. I don’t mean those overexposed high-school tomes that find themselves for unaccountable reasons on the Forbidden Books shelves of major bookstore chains, but rather books that are genuinely tabu in our society. These are books you can’t get caught reading on the train, or books that got their authors in a lot of trouble, or books that are otherwise considered fundamentally indecent and evil and beyond all bounds of acceptable discourse. They are books that many of the most open-minded people would say deserve their tabu, but they are also books we are all undeniably curious about. In Germany, one book tops this list and outstrips all the others so completely that it’s hardly credible to begin any blog series on tabu books without an inaugural post on this singular and most tabu book of all.

I speak of a book that has been translated into at least 17 different languages and that in its time sold an astounding 12,450,000 copies across an even more astounding 1,122 print runs. At one point a copy of this book could be found in basically every German household. It is a long and dense book, comprising over 230,000 words split across two volumes, and despite its wide distribution we may doubt that very many people actually read it. It’s a book that Joseph Goebbels in the confines of his private diary called “honest and courageous,” but also “stylistically unbearable” and “unpolished,” concluding that “you have to be very open-minded to appreciate it.”

I’m talking, of course, about Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. And if ever there were a time to draw the paywall curtain, God knows that time is now. In what follows I’m going to pour out my thoughts on Mein Kampf as they’ve grown over the past weeks, and if you want to read more I invite you to subscribe. Without your support nothing I do here would be possible.

Read more

Look at you, you fucking dumbass.

Dead and bloated like a balloon off the coast of some Danish island. You made me care about you, I’ll never forgive it.

I’m not even sure you’re one and the same whale. They said in March when you first turned up off the Baltic coast that you were a young male, a boy. Then you were an adult if small male humpback as you continued to beach yourself. Now they say you’re a female whale, and I harbour dark suspicions that there may have been more than one of you and that the others just swam away. Late in the game the German press melded all of you with your last doomed self into a singular personality, into a Timmy the Disney Whale, a stupid media drama for a generally confused, rudderless and deeply naive public drunk on nature cartoons.

Livestreams of your beached ass off the Meck-Pomm coast racked up countless viewers. At some points ten percent of everyone in Germany was watching you try to die with quiet dignity in the shallow waters of Wismar Bay. Eight million people tuned in from the office to see you snort and scuffle while live Bundestag streams where laws are made and our fate is decided are lucky to get eight thousand eyeballs.

I called you a retard and named you Horst, which is a German name for idiots. You were a Vollhorst who couldn’t find his way back into the Atlantic where you belonged; I couldn’t deal with your excruciating fate and the failure of authorities to just leave you alone otherwise. Now that you’ve been properly gendered you must be neither Timmy nor Horst, but Horstine.

The People In Charge had the right idea at first. They wanted to leave you to your dignified death. Then something changed. I suspect the PIC began to think about what your corpse would do to the tourism industry and to ponder the predicament they would find themselves in if tasked to remove twelve metric tonnes of rotting whale flesh from the Wismar coast. We are talking about hapless bureaucrats who cannot even replace simple bridges or repair basic infrastructure without endless consultations and committees and budgetary debates lasting months and years.

Philanthromorons several orders of magnitude stupider than you swept in to fund a renewed rescue effort, and the PIC decided to greenlight this arrant idiocy. Tabloid reporters at BILD secured exclusive rights to film the circus. Better to tow your sorry ass into the Atlantic and let you die out of sight; better to let imbecile Germans think you had been shipped off to uncle’s farm to swim in eternal peace alongside that beloved Bernese who bit the postman when you were seven than to confront the harsh realities of nature and also of our own mortality. The Whale Whisperers, the Experts, descended on you. They told us everything would be okay, because the myth of nature is that it is proximity to human civilisation which is debilitating for wild creatures, and that a withdrawal from our milieu is in itself healing and all you need to survive. I know better, I understood from the beginning that you would die; it was only a question of where and when.

In truth, you insisted on the shallows because you were too weak to swim in deep waters. You knew you would drown in them. They enticed you into a semi-flooded barge and you swam into it thinking that here might be another sandy place to rest. Maybe the infernal landapes would stop harassing you there. Because you were such a loveable dumbass you got it wrong of course, it was just a corpse removal operation avant la lettre. They tied you down with cables and towed you around the Jutland peninsula; when the seas got rough and you were battered against the sides of your sad bathtub, they tried to dump you out. You refused to swim away, clinging to your barge for dear life. Eventually the sailors dragged you to your death, and the wounds from the cables are still visible on your corpse.

They affixed a GPS tracking device to your body, but refused to publicise the data because obviously there was no data. You sunk almost immediately to the bottom, you drowned. In the end, however, you put the knife into all of their fantasies. You took revenge on your tormenters in a last poetic act. You managed not to decompose in obscurity but to wash up dead, your body betraying your mistreatment. Now your bloated corpse threatens at any moment to explode. They have tried to remove you, but the waves push you ever closer to shore: an indictment of human folly and human idiocy.

I’m so sorry we did this to you. I’m so sorry that the Federal Republic, a land awash in bureaucratically undeportable migrant criminals and scammers, decided to pour millions into deporting your innocent whaleness out of all the creatures we might’ve tried to kick out otherwise. Incontinent empathy can be its own kind of cruelty, but at least now you are beyond all pain and suffering.

What a farce this has been.

Bärbel Bas is a particularly abrasive Social Democrat and one of the most disturbing personalities in German politics. Her every public appearance provokes in me a visceral, almost ancestral disgust. Bas is also Labour Minister in Merz’s horrible cabinet, which is probably a good thing because I can’t be the only person who finds her a reprehensible hag. Without Bas the government would surely have substantially higher approval ratings.

Subscribe now

Bas is additionally useful because she suffers from occasional but quite serious outbreaks of frankness and honesty. Yesterday, she had a particularly bad episode during a speech she gave at the German Cultural Council’s inaugural “Action Day for Cohesion in Diversity.” Among other things, Bas said she wanted to “speak plainly” and clarify that it is time to take a stand against the “grey uniformity” of the German people – or, she added, perhaps even their “brown uniformity,” the latter being of course a reference to our alleged innate fascism. Bas said that some people might long for the old days of this past homogeneity, “but that’s just not how things are anymore, and that’s a good thing.” She continued to explain that Germany may require migration to provide “skilled workers,” but that above all we need migration “for the diversity of our society” and for “cultural enrichment.”

You don’t even have to read between the lines here. Bas and also her approving leftist audience of cultural elites regard Germanness itself and German society as something requiring correction via population replacement. Among other things, they hope that new arrivals from the developing world may offset the wayward, right-trending political tendencies of the electorate, and they also hope that newcomers will improve what they see as our boring, nothing, monotonous culture.

For a long time, the mere suggestion that mass migration might represent at least in part a social engineering programme has been dismissed as a conspiracy theory, but when these people speak among themselves, they openly admit what they are trying to do. Diversity has become an end in itself, a self-evident virtue that is beyond question; the opposite of diversity is our own culture, which is right-wing, blank and bad, and requires supplementation from the outside. We are ruled by people who hold their own nations and their own societies in contempt, if not outright hatred.

Suddenly 1933 was that much closer, and this made the Defenders of Our Democracy uncomfortable. Thus there ensued a lot of hand-wringing and panic and motivated reasoning about how this poll might just be an outlier and also too leftoid conspiracy theories that INSA because reasons and as part of a nefarious plot might be cooking the numbers to make AfD look stronger than they actually are.

Subscribe now

People stopped saying things like that when Forsa, another polling operation, published their own nationwide survey three days later, which had the AfD at 28% with a six-point lead over the CDU …

… and they really shut up later that very same day when INSA published a second poll precisely confirming the death doom fascism hell numbers from their first panic poll on Saturday:

The establishment received their latest shit sandwich this morning, in the form of yet another INSA survey – this time a state poll – showing that the AfD in the Free State of Saxony with 42% support, against a badly weakened CDU at 21%:

These numbers are very close to a recent poll of Sachsen-Anhalt. Together, these polls show that the AfD is on track to achieve outright parliamentary majorities across multiple East German states in the coming years. Basically, we’re looking at a preference cascade, as the press turns on a badly weakened Pigeon Chancellor Friedrich Merz, voters move their support to the only CDU alternative in view, and AfD support thereby becomes socially normalised – which draws still more voters towards the party in turn. Who knows when it will end, or if any of these alienated voters can ever be won back from Evil Nazi Hitler Fascism to Our Democracy, or how the Union can hope to survive the tectonic shifts that are already moving the ground beneath them.

These and other imponderables have driven our political establishment to the brink of psychosis. The CDU have responded to their impending doom by publishing a defamatory 36-page pamphlet screeching that the AfD are “Detrimental to democracy,” “Anti-Semitic” and “Nationalist.” The screed reads like it was written by a pinched schoolmarm and portions of it are very likely legally actionable, mainly because they contain straight-up unadulterated lies. The document raised eyebrows across Germany because its hysterical, desperate tone is so out of character for the staid, unimaginative propagandists of the Union. They must really be losing their minds over there in the CDU.

Meanwhile police unions, of all people, have come out of the woodwork to inform us of all the ways that an AfD government in Sachsen-Anahlt will constitute a grave security risk:

“This debate hasn’t come out of nowhere,” Dirk Peglow, chairman of the Federation of German Criminal Investigators said … Many organisations, associations, government bodies and civil society actors have long been grappling with the question of what an AfD government would entail.

“This is not about party-political jitters, but about the functioning of the democratic constitutional state,” Peglow said. The interior and justice ministries would be particularly affected. The issue there is “who gains access to security-relevant information, intelligence from the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, police situation reports, threat assessments and international information channels.”

Peglow would have you believe that in Our Democracy you can’t just vote the opposition into office because that means they’ll gain control of the law enforcement agencies and the supersecret intelligence files and we can’t have that.

There’s more, there’s always more:

The national chairman of the German Police Union, Heiko Teggatz, pointed to the potential replacement of political officials, such as state secretaries, department heads and presidents of higher authorities. “This naturally carries the risk that parties such as the AfD … could install their party loyalists in key positions,” he said … As a protective measure, Teggatz suggested limiting the appointment of political appointees …

All the parties of Our Democracy have spent literal decades stuffing the bureaucracy with their men, but now that the opposition may be in a position to do the same thing it’s suddenly Nazism:

The possibility of an absolute majority for the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt is also causing concern within the SPD. The SPD’s First Parliamentary Secretary in the Bundestag, Dirk Wiese, has warned against such a scenario …

“There has not been such a blatant interference with the state apparatus in this country since the end of Nazi rule,” Wiese said. “The far-right AfD [in Sachsen-Anhalt] wants to arbitrarily restructure public authorities in the interests of their own cronyism.”

Thuringian Interior Minister Georg Maier (a Social Democrat) has even complained that AfD plans in Sachsen-Anhalt to restaff between 150 and 200 posts in the state administration would amount to a “coup d’état.” This is a very revealing claim when you think about it, as it amounts to an admission that the actual people running Sachsen-Anhalt are unelected bureaucrats and that the Defenders of Our Democracy consider it illegitimate to use democratically acquired political authority to remove unelected bureaucrats like these from office. Elections have suddenly become such a security and political risk for Our Democracy that the only people who can be trusted with any authority at all are civil servants who wield their power beyond the grasping fingers of filthy voters.

To save all that is Right and Good about Our Democracy, the cartel parties of the Federal Republic have erected a massive firewall round the Evil Fascist Nazi Hitlerites of Alternative für Deutschland.

According to this highly democratic arrangement, which effectively disenfranchises one-fifth of the German electorate, none of the cartel parties may achieve any parliamentary outcomes with AfD votes. Nobody may so much as approve the purchase of single-ply toilet paper if doing so requires AfD votes. This is because Evil Fascist Nazi Hitlerism is a contagion, and anything Evil Fascist Nazi Hitlerites might vote for – even if it is just toilet paper – immediately becomes Evil and Fascist and Nazi and Hitler by association.

Some valued readers have noticed that the firewall would seem to grant AfD unusual powers. If everything the AfD touch is fascism, then they should be able to drive the Defenders of Our Democracy before them merely by threatening to taint the perfectly reasonable and democratic and upstanding things these Defenders already want to do with their fascistic support. The risk has become so grave that the virtuous antifascist politicians of the Federal Republic are forced to exert untold effort behind the scenes, coordinating every last vote to avoid achieving some outcome with AfD support purely by accident. The stronger the AfD becomes, the greater the risk grows.

Alas, the AfD has become so strong, especially in East Germany, that it is not always possible to avoid committing the odd accidental fascism. It can happen to the best of people, even the very best of people, as it did to the Greens in the state parliament of Saxony on Wednesday.

Now, you must remember that there are not very many Greens in the Saxon parliament. In fact there are only seven of them. So when they drew up a bill intended to spare small, regional slaughterhouses various fees and bureaucratic red tape, they had little hope that it would go anywhere, particularly because the centre-right CDU was opposed. When debate concluded, however, both the AfD and the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht (BSW) factions raised their hands in favour, to general shock and consternation. This is how fascism happens – unexpectedly and all at once, when nobody is paying attention, and in this case also on video:

The chairman of the session nervously noted that “I’ve seen a majority of votes in favour here.” He consulted briefly with his nonplussed colleagues, and then declared baselessly that “We in the Presidium can’t agree on the result.” He requested that the MPs repeat the vote, this time by standing instead of raising their hands. The purpose was obviously to give the Greens a chance to vote against their own proposal, deny their bill a majority, and thereby strangle this particular incipient fascism in the crib, as if it were Baby Hitler.

Unfortunately, our seven hapless Greens had no time to coordinate their response and so everybody voted exactly the same way the second time, with the result that the bill passed and local slaughterhouses will be spared some paperwork and expenses, which is precisely the outcome Hitler would’ve hoped for or the AfD wouldn’t have supported it.

Afterwards, Green faction-leader-turned-fascist-enabler Franziska Schubert released this amazing statement regretting the success of her own party’s bill:

This majority pains us deeply as a democratic parliamentary group. Since the start of this legislative term, we have consistently done everything in our power to ensure that the AfD secures no majorities in this state parliament. We have succeeded in this with regard to hundreds of motions and amendments. Today, however, we were unable to prevent exactly this from happening … We are deeply dismayed by this.

At no point did we seek a majority with the AfD and the BSW for this motion. We will not do so in future either, and will do everything in our power to optimise the arrangements in the state parliament so that the AfD cannot provide majorities. Until the end of the debate, the AfD had expressed opposition to the bill and hurled abuse at the Green Party … In the end, the AfD and the BSW only voted in favour … to make a mockery of the democratic parliamentary groups …

If any of your friends doubt that German politics have become absolutely retarded, please send them this story.

So, as many of you know, I did a crazy thing two years ago.

I put my house in upper Bavaria on the market and bought an old Gründerzeit villa in the Thuringian Vogtland. Some readers (and also some family members) have asked why in the hell I did this and what I was thinking. Others have wondered how this eccentric project is going; they’ve wanted to know if I’m happy with all the complications and expenses I’ve welcomed into my life, how it is to live in a minimally modernised historically protected manse built to flatter the tastes of industrialists from 150 years ago, and other similar things.

I promised a report last year, but I put it off, mainly because I doubted very many readers would find an account of my adventures in obsolete German housing all that interesting. This was a mistake, and I am going to rectify it now. I desperately need to get out of the rut of German politics, I need to write more, and that is only going to happen if I diversify topics and dedicate New Posts to New Things.

From here on out, I’ll aim to write on some totally different topic every Tuesday. I’ll bring up crazy interests of mine, like famous German true crime cases that have always fascinated me; I’ll address various historical topics, from early modern witch trials to the Second World War; I’ll review strange books; I’ll throw caution to the wind and perhaps even experiment with new media, like audio. If you have specific topics or ideas you’d like to see, let me know in comments. All of this is going to be in addition to, and not in substitution of, the standard fare I’ve been churning out for years now. As I said, I need to write more, and that can only happen if I start to write about more things.

For now – and for this inaugural totally different Tuesdays post – I’m going to fill you in on my crazy villa idea. This will be the first of the New Things, and it must be paywalled, because I don’t want to put photos of my house all over the open internet.

Read more