How German taxpayer-funded fact-checkers conducted covert surveillance of a private meeting for the purpose of smearing Alternative für Deutschland and justifying calls to ban the party

The dirty tricks to make the AfD go away have now begun.

Alternative für Deutschland are now polling at an all-time high of 24% across Germany, making them the second-strongest party behind the CDU/CSU. It might sound good to be in first place, but the Union are polling at a mere 29%, historically dismal levels for them. New polls in the crucial states of Brandenburg, Saxony and Thüringen, which are set to hold elections in September, confirm that the AfD has established such ascendancy there as to make the arithmetic very awkward for establishment parties. There is now a serious possibility that the CDU will be forced to contemplate a coalition with the Left if they wish to keep the AfD out of government in Thüringen and Saxony. Because CDU rules forbid cooperation with both the Left and the AfD, this would cast the Union into serious internal crisis.

Many people, including some readers, have predicted that our rulers will resort to dirty tricks to solve their growing AfD problem. At least some of them seem to be desperately hungry for some pretence to ban the party. I regret to announce that the first such dirty trick has just happened. It was orchestrated by Correctiv, a non-profit “research centre” and journalism operation financed variously by the German taxpayer and a vast tangle of Silicon Valley firms, NGOs and philanthropic funds, among them George Soros’s Open Society Foundations. Correctiv engage in tedious fact-checking to combat “fake news” (their efforts to defend the reputation of the Covid vaccines were truly prodigious) and otherwise produce long establishment-friendly articles under the guise of contrarian investigative reporting. Typical items – I have selected these entirely at random – include this piece on “how much air pollution costs Germany,” this one on an alleged “anti-Green smear campaign” funded by “wealthy backers” and involving “anonymously financed placards”, and this piece on “hacker groups, state actors and Telegram users” working to spread Russian “disinformation.” It is a clear Green, leftist and Atlanticist operation.

On 10 January, Correctiv published a long investigative piece on the “Secret Plan against Germany,” plainly crafted to reinvigorate demands for banning the AfD. The supposed revelations in the article have been the subject of breathless wall-to-wall media coverage for more than 48 hours now. In addition to this reception, the timing is highly suspicious, for it comes directly in the middle of the farmers’ protest, a moment of heightened crisis for the traffic light coalition. We have before us here an open and highly dishonest attack on Germany’s second most popular party, most likely coordinated with the highest reaches of the political establishment.

I will go over all of this in painful detail.