Smurf Scandal Update, and Open Thread

I am still somewhat ill, but I will do everything to return to ordinary posting tomorrow. In the meantime, I offer a brief Sunday evening post with updates on The Great Smurf Scandal from last week, wherein a 17 year-old school girl was scolded by three police officers for posting content to TikTok that appeared to support Alternative für Deutschland.

1) The offending video has since emerged. I recommend viewing it with your audio muted. It consists of nothing but three looped slides. The first announces that “The Smurfs and Germany have something in common.” The second is a picture of the Smurfs with the words “The Smurfs are blue …” The third says “Germany is too!” and shows a map of AfD poll results, colour-coded in varying shades of blue.

2) State security services are investigating the Stralsund police for intimidation and violating the girl’s freedom of expression! Oh no, that’s wrong, I read too quickly. What they’re actually investigating, is the “right-wing hate campaign” against the school and the local police. Important people have received “threatening phone calls and abusive emails” because of sensationalising reporting in the “populist right-wing media,” and that just can’t stand. Thank heavens we have such an overblown overfunded state media system to report on these urgent threats to our democratic society.

3) The girl, who is named Loretta, has now given an interview to Junge Freiheit. She says that the police first assured her that her TikTok post had broken no laws, before proceeding to lecture her on “incitement” and “opposition to the constitution.” They also objected that she had expressed “too much national pride” online, and they made her promise to stop posting content for her own good.

So, that’s it. Despite writing about Germany for over three years and reading about the sorry state of my country’s politics every day, I still routinely underestimate how extreme things have gotten. I very much doubt Loretta’s is a unique case.