After some Germans reject Pride Month by displaying the national colours instead of the rainbow flag, domestic intelligence release a PSA declaring their action anti-constitutional and anti-democratic

Many readers may not know about the German Stolzmonat, but I promise the backstory is worth it, so please bear with me.

As all of you do know, via some opaque imperial decree, every June across the Western world has become the monstrosity known as ‘Pride Month.’ It is an occasion for the raucous celebration of every sexual minority and deviant proclivity imaginable. There are rainbow flags, lewd street parades, bizarre political speeches and all manner of astroturfed queer activism. I’m told that the festivities were massively scaled back this year in the Anglosphere, perhaps because they are awkward for elections, but on the Continent all such trends arrive very late and we had nothing but the usual excesses.

The eager flying of the rainbow colours is especially obnoxious in Germany, where the display of one’s national flag – except perhaps in a sports context – is discouraged and politically suspect. Some Germans have therefore responded to the perennial irritation of Pride Month by declaring June to be ‘Stolzmonat’ instead. ‘Stolzmonat’ is merely the German translation of ‘Pride Month,’ but our clever cultural hackers have appropriated the term to indicate not gay but national pride. Those who celebrate Stolzmonat do not conduct any lavish public events and they give no speeches. Most of them simply change their social media profile pictures to present the colours black, red and gold. Now and again they also tweet the hashtag #Stolzmonat.

It’s primarily a German act of social media protest, but anybody can participate:

Enough people observe Stolzmonat to cause the corresponding hashtag to rise to the top of Twitter trends now and again. This has given the Rainbow Brigade indigestion, and as there is precious little division between the Rainbow Brigade and the German state, the domestic intelligence services of Lower Saxony have decided it is time to issue an ex cathedra condemnation of Stolzmonat – eight days after it ended. Better late than never:

Below I translate this ridiculous woman’s statement. As you read, please remember that this is not just some random trans activist, but a functionary of the Lower Saxony Office for the Protection of the Constitution – an agency endowed with considerable powers to surveil and harass ordinary Germans for their alleged intellectual offences against “democracy” and the constitution:

Stop scrolling! We’re here to tell you all you need to know about the new right-wing campaign ‘Stolzmonat.’ ‘Stolzmonat’ is actually just the German translation of ‘Pride Month.’ That’s what members of our queer community [1] say; they want to make the term ‘Stolzmonat’ into what it should actually be – an expression of diversity, tolerance and strengthening of the rights of queer people.

Last year, the hashtag Stolzmonat temporarily landed at number one in the X-Trends – albeit as a polemical term of the extreme right wing. This year, the New Right in particular called for participation in Stolzmonat. The LGBTQIA+ community [2] is among the archetypal enemies of the right-wing extremist scene. In addition to discrimination against queer people, nationalism – that is to say, exaggerated national pride with simultaneous devaluation of other nations and the rejection of the values of liberal democracy – are core elements of Stolzmonat. They appropriate the German flag as a symbol for this campaign and associate it with the aforementioned elements. The new right use Queer hostility to associate themselves with existing prejudices in society and to activate ideologically like-minded people to participate in Stolzmonat. This is intended to create the impression of a large counter-movement to Pride Month. They use the hashtag and the German flag instead of the rainbow flag in their profile pictures. One of their messages: queer people are not a part of Germany. Right-wing extremists are thus pursuing a metapolitical approach [3] to exert influence on the pre-political sphere [4] and thus lay the foundation for anti-democratic positions.

There are so many dumb statements floating in this verbal morass that I don’t know where to begin. So just briefly: 1) The alphabet soup community is not “among the archetypal enemies of the right-wing extremist scene.” Pride Month has, however, became a deeply ridiculous and shallow cultural celebration of a great many things that are wrong with our society and a lot of people are extremely tired of it. 2) “Nationalism” in no way entails the “devaluation of other nations,” nor does it require the “rejection of the values of liberal democracy.” Liberal democracy grew up alongside nationalism, after all, and the Stolzmonat organisers explicitly encourage non-Germans to display their own national colours during Stolzomant. 3) It is obviously not the point of Stolzmonat to argue that “queer people are not a part of Germany.”

Amusingly, this dumb video actually has footnotes. That’s what the numbers in my translation indicate. Our domestic intelligence agents provide these notes in their Twitter thread:

1: Queer is now a collective term for sexual orientations that are not heterosexual and also for non-binary gender identities.¹

2: LGBTQIA+ stands for the English words: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender/transsexual, queer/questioning, intersex, asexual. … The + (sometimes also *) serves as a placeholder for other gender identities. ²

3: Metapolitics in the context of the New Right is a strategy that aims to achieve long-term change in the cultural and intellectual foundations of society in order to gain political power and influence. It is an indirect way of gaining power that relies on influencing values, norms and discourses.³

4: The pre-political sphere refers to areas of society where politics is not at the centre of attention, but where political issues are occasionally discussed or political values are communicated. This happens, for example, when people go to restaurants or pubs, concerts, football stadiums, festivals or other public events.

One Twitter user ventured to ask the Constitutional Protectors of Lower Saxony how Stolzmonat offends against the German constitution. They responded that it violates Article 1, which prohibits defamation, discrimination or dehumanisation directed against specific groups. That’s right: Flying one’s national flag instead of the queer flag in the month of June, in the minds of our domestic intelligence agents, amounts to grave offences against the human dignity of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgenders, transexuals, queers, questioners, the intersexed, the asexuals and that great mysterious tribe hiding behind the ominous plus symbol.

It is very curious how our rulers derive from the ostensibly liberal insistence on sexual freedom a mandate to engage in ever-escalating repression against ordinary people for expressing their opinions. I wrote about this phenomenon almost exactly a year ago, during the last Pride Month:

The problem with liberal checks on power, is that they forced the state to develop novel legal and cultural solutions to overcome them. State politics in liberal systems thus come to resemble antibiotic-resistent bacteria in hospitals – they have evolved a general resistance to constitutional limitations, in the process becoming an altogether worse and more dangerous animal …

Rights and individual sovereignty have required [an] … insidious solution… Rights in the liberal conception are fundamentally pre-political; men are endowed with them by their creator and they are inalienable. The concept thus promises many avenues for subverting the popular, democratically expressed will, and the state has worked vigorously to expand the concept of rights, investing ever more regime clients with a vast palette of novel rights. This growing field of unquestionable, sacred entitlements circumscribes popular political expression and undermines those less convenient rights that liberalism started out with. Via recognising – even implicitly – a right to health, for example, the state supersedes the older, far less convenient rights to freedom of assembly and expression. These novel second- and third-generation rights generally expand the power of the state by being positive, rather than negative, in nature; and they are typically framed to encourage the passivity of the individual who possesses them …

Nowhere do novel liberal rights metastasise so rabidly as in the discourse surrounding sexual and gender minorities. The ever-growing rainbow coalition … is a cutting edge of state power. Each of the identities subsumed into this juggernaut abounds with utility for the administrative state, and opens all manner of avenues for government bureaucrats to define and regulate the most intimate aspects of human culture, behaviour and sexual expression. It is no accident that the pride flag has become the most pervasive and probably the most sacred political symbol in the Western world. It will increasingly displace national symbols in prominence and moral significance.

1. Everybody already knew this you dumbasses.

2. This explanation is necessary because, while the LGBTQIA+ initialism is current in Germany, all of the various terms it contains are in English and a lot of the people shopping it about have even less of an idea of the various eccentricities hiding behind these letters than native English speakers. Also somebody needs to tell the constitutional protectors that they’re behind the times. The preferred initialism every years grows longer, and LGBTQQIP2SAA appears to be the latest most inclusive iteration.

3. “Metapolitics” is in no way a strategy exclusive to the New Right, although people on the right draw attention to soft cultural power more than others – above all because every time they go outside they face some newly offensive cultural absurdity. Pride Month is itself a metapolitical exercise in soft power.