From Apollo News:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This may be a big deal.

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

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

I see a few possibilities:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the Cologne court’s press release:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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From the Heilbronner Stimme:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I first aired my general scepticism of the Epstein mythology last July, and I think that piece has held up well. As I suggested back then, members of the Trump administration unwisely promised major Epstein revelations before realising they had nothing much to reveal about the workings of the feverishly postulated Blackmail Paedo Cult steering our politics. This has placed them in an impossible position with respect to Epstein. No revelations can ever satisfy their critics, because the Blackmail Paedo Cult is not real.

At the end of January, the U.S. Department of Justice released 3.5 million pages of investigative materials in response to the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Despite occasional indications of unsavoury influence peddling and the odd trading of insider tips, evidence of the Blackmail Paedo Cult remains outstanding as I thought it would and as many predicted. The internet brainrot industry has responded by advancing two incompatible theses simultaneously: On the one hand, the paucity of additional revelations can only mean that Trump and his Justice Department are complicit in an ongoing cover-up. On the other hand, the document release is nevertheless held to contain sweeping revelations of the very Blackmail Paedo Cult that the Trump administration is so successfully shielding from public scrutiny.

The latter thesis rests, broadly speaking, on two tranches of “evidence.” I discussed the first in my rant about the metric tonnes of Epstein bullshit presently polluting the internet: A lot of the Epstein files turn out to be protocols of baseless tips called in by crazy federal informants or random freaked out retards. In this way, the ambient Epstein mythology stirred up by the MeToo-era alarmism of 2018 has worked its way back into the investigative record, providing confirmation of itself in perfect if profoundly frustrating circularity.

The second tranche of purported “evidence” – and here my scare quotes must do heavy lifting indeed – emerges from a growing discourse about alleged code words in Epstein’s emails. The People’s Voice, an insane online compendium of manipulative raving to which I will not link, is as good a source as any for this kind of analysis:

Investigators have ripped open the latest Epstein file drops and exposed horrifying coded language straight from the elite’s own mouths: repeated references to “jerky”, “cream cheese baby” and other grotesque code words for child meat, and explicit discussions of eating newborn babies—complete with umbilical cords still attached.

These aren’t fringe fantasies—they’re documented in Epstein’s communications, where Leonardo DiCaprio‘s name repeatedly surfaces in the same depraved orbit as Epstein and figures like Woody Allen, amid talks of black-market babies, “menu items,” and a full-scale cannibal operation run through a chef specializing in human cuisine for the global elite.

The files prove beyond doubt that the long-rumored satanic cannibal network among Hollywood and power players is no theory—it’s spelled out in black-and-white emails and logs, with DiCaprio exposed swapping emails with Woody Allen about being on a cannibal diet.

Because claims like these are legally actionable, I want to make it clear that I am reproducing this garbage purely for illustrative purposes, and that there is no evidence in the Epstein document dump even remotely suggesting that Leonardo DiCaprio, Woody Allen or anybody else engaged in cannibalism. These are disturbing peasant fantasies worthy of comment only because the people peddling them have hundreds of thousands of followers and routinely win millions of views for their libel.

As it happens, I used to be a philologist, and so I can claim some minimal expertise in the humble intellectual project of deriving the meaning of words in context. Below the fold I’m going to sample some of the evidence for code words in Epstein’s emails. I can’t investigate every last allegedly suspicious vocabulary item, but I’m going to look in depth at three prominent candidates. I’m not cherry picking here; I’ve chosen some of the leading vectors for media speculation of varying grades of respectability. I’ll show you how some of these alleged codes are made into dark, impenetrable mysteries primarily by the arbitrary denial of context and secondarily by prior assumptions about what Epstein and his contacts ought to be talking about or taking an interest in. It’s not always possible to divine the precise meaning of every exchange, and in some cases it’s at least possible that Epstein’s emails do contain veiled references about unsavoury activities. In none of the most celebrated exchanges does this seem very probable, however.

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Almost exactly a year ago, the newly minted U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance gave a devastating speech at the Munich Security Conference. He denounced Eurocrat political authoritarianism, called for scrapping the firewall against Alternative für Deutschland and in general accused the Europeans of “retreat[ing] … from some of [their] most fundamental values – values shared with the United States of America.” And he went further:

I’ve heard a lot about what you need to defend yourselves from … But what has seemed a little bit less clear to me … is what exactly it is that you’re defending yourselves for. What is the positive vision that animates this shared security compact that we all believe is so important? I believe deeply that there is no security if you are afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people. Europe faces many challenges, but the crisis this continent faces right now, the crisis I believe we all face together, is one of our own making. If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you. Nor, for that matter, is there anything that you can do for the American people who elected me and elected President Trump.

His words suggested that the European political elite faced a stark choice – they could either risk their alliance with the United States or abandon the repressive measures they have used to hedge against the populist resistance rising beneath them. For people who know all too well that the end of NATO would strike a devastating blow to their hold on power, and who fear that right-populists in government would also be the end of them, this must’ve sounded like the worst of all ultimata: “Hang yourself or we’ll strangle you.” The stunned audience hardly clapped. Afterwards quivering German diplomatics scurried to the press to say how much they were shitting their pants.

Yesterday, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio gave a very different speech before a very different Munich Security Conference. He delivered another Trumpist message, but this time to general approval and even a standing ovation:

Maybe you want to subscribe and support my work here, so we can explore all the stuff Rubio got these people to clap for. Personally I find it pretty amazing.

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Yesterday Lufthansa pilots and cabin crews went on strike, forcing Hillary Clinton to slum her way on the train to the Munich Security Conference.

In this video, you can see the former First Lady and U.S. Secretary of State disembarking from her filthy Deutsche Bahn Intercity Express from Berlin, which had naturally suffered an electrical fault that disabled the restaurant car and with that, all possibility of coffee. Munich Central Station is one of the worst train stations in all of Germany; the place is awash in trash and smells always of urine and french fries. It is a very minor pleasure, watching political elites being forced to navigate the very same dysfunctional landscape all of us have to deal with every day.

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“eugyppius,” said absolutely nobody ever, “why has it been so long since you last updated us on Germany? Is nothing going on? Tell us something please.”

The problem is that German politics have degenerated so much in the past year that it is becoming very hard to write about them.

In the post-Merkel era under Olaf Scholz, insane new crazy bad inadvisable unbelievable stuff would happen almost every day; in the post-post-Merkel years under Friedrich Merz, absolutely nothing can happen no matter how bad things get. After an unstable period comprising the second half of Covid and the pious afterglow of St. Greta (before the latter took up her charitable sailing initiatives), we have settled into a new order. Imagine an airplane piloted by heedless methed-out lunatics. For a brief time they enjoyed aerobatics well exceeding the engineering specifications of their craft, until they snapped a few flight control cables, and now they have become the prisoners of their own recreations as the altimeter ticks down and the ground rushes up at them.

Metaphors are fun but specifics are healthier. As everybody knows, the centre-right Christian Democrats are in a coalition with the newly hard-left Social Democrats, and the latter are determined to block every last initiative, reform and legislative proposal, however mundane or plainly necessary or routine. A little over a year ago, I wrote that German politics had become stuck, and that was true enough back then. What is true right now, is that they have achieved a stage well beyond stuck. The federal government is in a coma, an indefinite vegetative state, on life support – totally paralysed and neither dead nor alive.

We’ve gone over the reasons so much, I hesitate to recite them again, but I will. At the root of our present crisis is a shift within the German left that has had cascading consequences for the party system as a whole. Basically, the left has become both more scattered and more extreme in the last five years. They have become more scattered, because climatism is decaying and this process of ideological unravelling means that leftists have lost a crucial focal point used to rally activists and moderates alike. They have become more extreme, because the general rightward shift in politics is depriving the Social Democrats of their traditional moderating, working-class constituents. These are migrating steadily to the Christian Democrats and ultimately to Alternative für Deutschland.

As the left slowly boils down to their activist base, they become more radicalised. The Social Democrats are no longer the family-friendly centre-left party of Gerhard Schröder. They want to fight, they want to burn things down, they want hell. The very same rightward shift, meanwhile, has had a nearly opposite effect on the CDU. They have lost many of their most engaged constituents and no few members to the AfD. What remains is a husk of dull, uninspired careerists, eager to maintain their good regard with polite society and their regular schedule of polite evening talkshow appearances. To break the present impasse, Merz or those around him must act decisively and make facts. He needs to fire all his SPD ministers, form a minority government and achieve some kind of rapprochement with the AfD. Alas, neither Merz nor anybody else in CDU leadership has the mettle for that kind of fight, which would also set off a series of catastrophic revolts within the CDU itself. Thus everything must remain frozen and broken indefinitely, while things get worse and worse and our ability ever to fix them decays.

These are the basic dynamics that would apply regardless, but 2026 is an election year. In a few weeks Baden-Württemberg and Rheinland-Pfalz will vote in new state parliaments; in September, Sachsen-Anhalt, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin will follow. The SPD are desperate to deny the CDU any victories, however superficial or merely apparent, in advance of these elections. They will obstruct even harder than they did before, they will reduce all of federal politics to a state-level campaign tactic, and the CDU have no tools to stop them. During last year’s election campaign, Merz promised a Trump-inspired blitz of reforms from the moment he took office. This became a vaguer promise that we would have to wait a little longer for an “Autumn of Reforms” later in 2025, and now it is quietly admitted that nothing much will happen this year either.

The lesson here is simple and sobering: The cartel parties can indeed keep the Evil Fascist Nazi Hitler Party out of power with ever grander coalitions, but beyond a certain threshold of AfD strength this tactic begins to cripple all of government.

This is obviously a big problem for my blog, because there are only so many posts you can write about how nothing is happening and how necessary reforms are impossible and how Merz the Pigeon Chancellor has gone back on his word yet again. The news cycle has filled with a lot of nothing stories that I am not even going to link to. Some weeks ago, for example, the governor of Schleswig-Holstein absurdly demanded that alternative media be censored on an evening talkshow, and then he denied he ever said any such thing, and there ensued a ridiculous weeks-long debate about what this clown who has precious little power to censor anybody actually said and why he said it or didn’t say it and what it all meant. In the total political vacuum we find ourselves in, the ghosts of past chapters in Bundesrepublikan politics begin to steam forth from their squalid graves. Rumours are swirling about a Green Party plot to nominate Angela Merkel for the Presidency of the Federal Republic. Former Covid Minister and noted saltphobic drunk Karl Lauterbach has made the shortlist to replace Tedros Ghebreyesus as President of the WHO.

Anyway, that is the state of things in Germany: Nothing is happening, nothing can happen, and for the foreseeable future nothing will happen. All the while the potential energy will build until finally, at some point and in a way as yet unforeseeable to us, a great many things happen all at once.

In the meantime, as I said, I am going to bring this blog out of its lowkey hibernation. There will be more posts! We will explore new topics! I will perhaps even experiment with new media!

An unstudied impression: Donald Trump is like a shark, in that he must always swim forward or risk suffocation. He, his administration and the media ecosystem that has grown up around Trump’s political persona depends upon action and controversy. In fallow news cycles, Trump steadily loses the initiative and two things happen: First, the media establishment and the leftist activist machine begin gathering their own critical momentum. Second, the vast MAGA-adjacent social media sphere must turn to other controversies to keep the clicks and the ad revenue flowing. Both of these work against the forty-seventh president and his purposes.

Since Trump’s initial barrage of executive orders has subsided, the media cycle has therefore lurched from one moment of hysteria and excitement to the next. Each new controversy totally eclipses the last. Hardly anybody remembers or talks about Nicolás Maduro any longer; the twin Minneapolis ICE shootings and associated protests, too, have faded. What were hailed as pivotal events which would finally discredit Trump’s programme this time look, in retrospect, like passing trivialities – not necessarily because they didn’t matter, but because sustained attention in this crazy messaging environment is impossible.

The Greenland uproar that preceded the 2026 World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, too, has passed. Unlike most of these other controversies, though, it cost me no few readers and also several friends, which I regret. I can’t speak in favour of American efforts to annex the territory of a neighbouring European country, and while I wouldn’t expect any of you to respect me at all were I to take the opposite position, not everybody sees things that way. Now that emotions are lower, I want to talk about Denmark and Greenland and NATO and defenceless leeching Europe and all those other issues. My thoughts on these matters are still scattered, so I’ll going to proceed by topic with obnoxious subheadings.

First, to summarise the half-remembered happenings of just a few weeks ago:

In mid-January, Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen met with U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. They discussed Trump’s demands that Denmark allow the United States to assume sovereign control of Greenland, perhaps via some kind of sale. The meeting went poorly, with Rasmussen telling the press: “It’s clear that the president has this wish of conquering over Greenland.” Various European countries then sent a handful of soldiers to Greenland, whether to demonstrate “military solidarity” with Denmark, to show the Americans that indeed they take Greenland’s security seriously or because the exercise was already scheduled anyway. Passive-aggressive ambiguity is an important Eurocrat tactic. Trump responded by threatening to levy punitive tariffs against those countries that had taken part in this pointless weekend mission and again demanding that Denmark sell Greenland to the United States. The controversy came to a head at the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, where Trump gave a characteristically memorable speech in which he ruled out military force to annex Greenland but again insisted that the island be ceded to the United States, for strictly strategic reasons:

What I’m asking for is a piece of ice, cold and poorly located, that can play a vital role in world peace and world protection. It’s a very small ask compared to what we have given them for many many decades. But the problem with NATO is that, we’ll be there for them 100%, but I’m not sure they’d be there for us.

There ensued an emergency meeting between Trump and NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, which according to the US President established the “framework of a future deal.” Rutte has suggested this as-yet unspecified deal might involve the United States gaining sovereignty over the existing Pituffik Space Base, but officially anyway neither Denmark nor semi-autonomous Greenland have assented to these or other terms. The whole matter is in hibernation now, de-escalated for the moment anyway.

Nevertheless, the episode has filled my mind with words, which I must now disgorge – words on Greenland Itself; on Encumbered Denmark; on Trump and NATO; on Trump and Europe; and on Leeching Europeans and the American Empire.

Greenland Itself: Trump has expressed an interest in buying Greenland since late in his first term. The island has strategic importance for the United States and it falls within the Western hemisphere, which explains why Trump is not the first American president who has had this idea. The U.S. effectively occupied Greenland during World War II to keep us Germans out of it, and they did not give it back to Denmark until they had established NATO and gotten the Danes to sign a treaty granting the Americans broad rights to establish bases and other defensive facilities there – provided only that the Danes agree. In practice, Denmark has always approved American requests within the framework of this treaty.

The strategic importance of Greenland faded after the Cold War, and both the Danes and the Americans drastically reduced their military presence on the island. Now that the era of unchallenged liberal hegemony is over, Greenland has reacquired its old strategic importance and its future depends a lot on American attitudes towards NATO. As long as the the United States maintains confidence in this 76 year-old alliance, the existing security framework will satisfy American strategic anxieties there. Should the Americans lose confidence in NATO or were the alliance to fall apart, the United States would surely annex Greenland. This is why Trump’s moments of NATO pessimism and his demands for Greenland seem to coincide, and it is why when Trump feels reassured about NATO (as after his emergency meeting with Rutte) he expresses his satisfaction with the status quo.

Denmark and Encumbered Europe: Denmark is among the best-governed countries in the European Union, but that does not mean the Danes can just do things. They are caught in the same general ideological and constitutional trap as the rest of us, and there is literally no way for them ever to sell Greenland to the United States. The political and constitutional hurdles are insurmountable, and their ideologically demanded post-colonial commitment to Greenland’s independence forbids it. Denmark would risk outright annexation before they could find a means of signing away Greenland. As a rule, all European states are profoundly encumbered like this. Were Denmark able to sell Greenland to the United States, and if they wished to, that would be fine, but they can’t because they’ve tied their own hands and this is the nature of the world we live in.

Trump and NATO: Much of Trump’s MAGA base remains firmly isolationist and demands that the United States abandon the NATO alliance. Trump himself knows this and he has periodically questioned the utility of NATO. Formally, however, Trump’s administration stands behind the alliance, as anyone can see from reading the 2026 National Defense Strategy and the 2025 National Security Strategy. Yes, Trump wants European countries to increase defence spending. Yes, he still hopes to complete a strategic pivot away from Europe towards China. And yes, in the longer term, he probably nurtures ambitions of reducing the importance of NATO in favour of separate bilateral agreements with various European states. Such arrangements would also provide a lever for present and future administrations to disrupt the various policies and initiatives of the European Union, which Trump clearly despises and which at least as presently constructed amounts to a suicide pact for all of us on the Continent. These populist pressures and future ambitions, together with a general distrust and legitimate scorn for Eurocrat elites, seem to be why NATO periodically fades from Trump’s favour, although never for very long. All of this is to say that I really don’t think Trump’s January bluster was a mere Art-of-the-Deal negotiating tactic, but a reflection of real tensions and contradictions within Trumpism.

Trump and Europe: Here again, we see two competing tendencies. Generally, the Trump administration has followed a sly strategy of pursuing ties with the more or less aligned and presently ascendant populist-right movements of Europe. The Trump administration has also defended our rights to free speech, particularly on social media; relentlessly attacked our insane energy transition; and criticised our elites for their failure (or refusal) to stop mass migration. The purpose of these efforts is to isolate the Eurotards by fertilising the hostile populism that is growing ominously just beneath their double chins. If you are wondering why Trump bothers with this, I refer you to my previous paragraph: Sympathetic governments in key European states, joined to the United States, would be a means of sidelining the European Union and remaking Atlanticism in Trump’s image.

Exactly how to help the populist right into power is a much harder nut to crack. Expressing overt support for parties like Alternative für Deutschland can hurt more than it helps, and the Americans don’t have more direct means of influencing domestic politics over here. At the very least, this a long-term project requiring tactics and strategies we have yet to explore, and probably some institutions we have yet to create.

What we saw during the Greenland fracas, was an abandonment of this tailored approach and a rhetorical turn against Europe in general. Trump, his administration and his social media allies at times hinted darkly about annexing Greenland outright and even accused Denmark of anticolonialist sins against the native Greenlanders.1 All of these spats have been smoothed over now, and I don’t want to be hyperbolic about the consequences, but this shift basically allowed all the worst Eurotards to posture as patriotic defenders of the European order while compelling the MAGA-aligned AfD to distance themselves from the Trumpist forcefield behind which they had sheltered.

In the end, the AfD slipped a few points in national polls and the CDU took the lead again. By way of consolation, the Pigeon Chancellor Friedrich Merz drew no direct benefit from the hullabaloo and finds himself now more unpopular than ever. Thus, while this brief hostile posturing from the American president benefited the fully Eurocratic CDU marginally, CDU politicians did not gain much of anything. A protracted episode, however, would work surely against the populist right more seriously. The AfD would be cast as a fifth-columnist pariah and energy for banning them would build. Also too, we’d have to deal with an unending deluge of Eurofed propagandists and AI abominations like this:

Whether Trump cares about this kind of thing is another question, but obviously I have to care about it.

Leeching Europeans and the American Empire: The standard MAGA-influencer line, elaborated partly from things Trump himself now and again says, holds that European countries have exploited the United States and the defensive umbrella it provides to shirk on defence spending and take six-week holidays in Mallorca every year – all while Americans work hard to fund this entire edifice that gives them nothing and does them no good.

This is not only uncharitable and overstated, it is also unflattering to the United States. The Americans fought in two European wars for the express purpose of winning an empire for themselves. Theirs is an informal empire, but it is an empire nonetheless, and it is anything but a charity operation. The deal is that the United States gets to run European foreign policy – generally for its own interests – while Euro rulers retain sovereignty in domestic affairs. The U.S. maintains influence in Europe in part by extending security guarantees to the Continent and stationing many soldiers here.

European states like Germany could fund their own defence entirely. It would hurt a little but we really could; despite all the catastrophic policies of the last 20 years we still have a large and highly advanced economy. The reason we don’t do that, is because nobody wants us to. The Federal Republic is forbidden by treaty from building its own nuclear arsenal, for example. Otherwise, were we to develop a totally independent military, our rulers would begin pursuing their own autonomous geopolitical strategy, which is something neither our neighbours nor the Americans want.

The primary benefit we draw from the American subordination and pacification of Europe is not so much savings on defence, but rather the geopolitical coordination that the NATO alliances provides to member states. Europe, being a continent rather than a country, mostly does not have coherent geopolitical interests and so it is very helpful when the Americans provide the playbook in this area. Over time, these arrangements have had unfortunate degenerative effects on European elite culture, causing our leaders to descend ever further into the depths of Eurotardation and to lose all sight of the fact that other countries also want things or that geopolitics are based on more than human rights and do-gooder humanitarianism.

Another point to note about the American empire is this: My American friends are subject to it every bit as much as we Europeans are. This is a massive geopolitical system steered by elites for their own purposes, and European leaders also collaborate in and benefit from this system. The American empire is governed by what Ben Rhodes once called the “foreign policy blob” – an agglomeration of permanent bureaucrats, key journalists and academics, politicians and others. The American president has a substantial role in influencing blob thought and policy, but he is not solely in charge and the blob also influences him. The blob remains adjacent to the Democratic Party and broadly hostile to Trump; and it is the blob, rather than the American president, that commands the loyalty of European politicians. Thus when Nord Stream was bombed at the very least with blob approval, the German Chancellor spent many weeks looking at his shoes and trying not to say anything, but when Trump made overtures to Greenland, the German Chancellor felt a little freer to speak his mind. If Trumpism persists much beyond 2028, the blob will gradually assume more Trumpist characteristics and European leaders will fall into line more completely with Trump’s prescriptions than they have until this point.

General MAGA hostility to the American empire is not unfounded or ridiculous, although it is important to recognise that even ordinary Americans derive direct benefits from empire, particularly in the form of enhanced purchasing power that comes from holding the world’s reserve currency. Because the American presence in Europe for structural reasons has caused a degeneration and artificially boosted the global system of political vandalism known as the international left, I think it would be good for the Americans to leave and for the Europeans to have their own history, but as of now neither American nor European elites want that. Not even the Trump administration wants that.

As it turns out, it is very cold in Rostock – probably not cold enough to impress my midwestern American readers, but far too cold for my tender sensibilities. This is because a “sudden stratospheric warming event” has disrupted the polar vortex, pouring a lot of very rude Arctic air into the Baltic region where nobody wants it. This air appears primarily in the form of an unrelenting, soul-freezing wind from hell. Naturally, to enrich these Soviet meteorological conditions, transit workers had to go on a nationwide strike yesterday, so I spent hours penguin-walking from appointment to appointment across the insidious ice covering half of all city surfaces.

I did, however, manage to get this cheerful photo of the old lighthouse at Warnemünde:

Now I sit on the return train to Dresden, and the frozen fields again flash past my window, this time in the opposite direction.

The internet is intermittent, the overeager conductor will not stop making inane announcements and the cabin temperature is too low.

All of which is to say that I am grumpy and in the mood to rant. And given my limited resources at the moment, I will rant about the latest cultural virus to afflict social media, occasioned by last Friday’s three-million-page Epstein document dump.

What the last 48 hours have taught me is this: To win a lot of X impressions and therefore earn a lot of X money, all you have to do is wade into this vast documentary ocean, screenshot three or four emails that may or may not contain anything notable, and attach these images to a post making literally any hysterical claim you want. Don’t worry – the sources you’re providing and the claims you’re making need not be all that closely related. With a little luck, you’ll soon get millions of views and your only naysayers will be a handful of commenters who for some reason feel compelled to spend hours unwinding the arrant bullshit you’re putting about, only to have dozens of hysterical lunatics accuse them of defending paedophiles and advocating genocide in Gaza for their troubles. That’s the state of the discourse right now.

As I said, my internet is terrible so we’re going to have to proceed by example here. Epstein enthusiasts love to provide variously highlighted screenshots of email exchanges like this one:

Probably a dozen people have posted this exact exchange in my mentions and DMs over the past days. They believe it totally vindicates all the wildest Epstein theories, they believe it sheds new light on the Blackmail Paedo Cult at the centre of world politics, they think they have really stumbled upon some amazing shit, here. (For some reason a few of these people also have profile pictures of pretty young women posing in front of American flags that seem likely to have been generated by AI and they’re posting from accounts created in India, but I’m sure that’s just an odd coincidence.)

Anyway, I invite you to read this correspondence for yourself, and then maybe consider subscribing if you haven’t already, just so I can explain to you why all of this is driving me crazy.

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On Thursday evening at 10:07 pm, a possibly drunk or high South Sudanese refugee known only as Ariop P. staggered across the platform at the Hamburg underground station Wandsbek Markt. As the train approached, the 25 year-old man shouted something – according to one witness, “I’m taking you with me” – before grabbing an 18 year-old Iranian girl, Fatemeh D., and pulling her onto the platform with him. The train struck and killed both of them. The girl was apparently a random victim, unknown to her attacker.

As is almost always the case in events like these, Ariop P. was already known to authorities for “aggression and violence.” As recently as Tuesday, he was arrested for attacking police officers. Naturally Ariop was quickly and efficiently released back to his refugee centre just in time to commit this far graver offence.

Our perpetrator was not just any asylum seeker and he did not just wash ashore in some raft. He was brought to Hamburg from a Kenyan refugee camp in 2024 – almost surely aboard an airliner chartered by the Federal Republic itself. Die Zeit reports that he was one of the so-called “resettlement refugees” identified by the United Nations, who are willingly accepted by pathologically empathic host countries like Germany for no reason that anyone can explain. In a rare act of sanity, the Federal Republic has since stopped the flow of resettlement refugees from South Sudan.

Establishment German media have reported on this case with their customary far-sightedness. Lest the filthy right-wingers get any ideas, papers like the Hamburger Abendblatt have run headlines screaming that the killer “had a valid residence permit,” which naturally makes it all okay. Die Zeit remarks that “the Hamburg branch of the AfD immediately commented on the case as another example of what it claims is a disastrous asylum policy” although “Police sources say it is too early to speculate on the background to the crime.” Der Spiegel, whose reporters apparently live on Pluto or something, informs us that “Such incidents usually spark debates about train platform safety.”

There is little to say about this latest tragedy that isn’t screamingly obvious. Our political establishment steadfastly refuses to draw any connection between the world’s poorest and least secure regions and the people who live in these places and make them what they are. In consequence, we run insane refugee programmes to import precisely the least desirable people from the worst places in the world, and when they do terrible things in our countries we have to talk about how subway platforms aren’t safe enough, how knives are really dangerous and how also German men really need to stop raping and killing women.