Thousands of leftist protesters clash with thousands of police in a massive action to defend "Our Democracy" against a few hundred AfD members

The founding congress of the new AfD youth division, Generation Deutschland, drew thousands of Antifa rioters and other leftist protesters to Gießen.

Leftists flood the streets of Gießen Saturday in yet another anti-AfD protest.

Saturday saw one of the larger police actions in the history of the Federal Republic, as 5,000 officers deployed against a leftist mob numbering 25,000 or more. The Antifa network Aktionsbündnis Widersetzen (“Action Alliance Resist”), Social Democrat-aligned labour unions like DGB and Verdi and an array of “civil society organisations” took to the streets of Gießen to protest the founding congress of the new Alternative für Deutschland youth wing, “Generation Deutschland” (GD).

The GD congress itself counted only 840 attendees. Without the protesters and the media coverage, it might’ve escaped mainstream notice entirely. Aside from aspiring GD members, some AfD leadership also attended, including party co-chairs Alice Weidel and Tino Chrupalla. To defend Our Democracy against this dangerous assault, the well-funded Aktionsbündnis Widersetzen directed 200 buses full of protesters from across Germany to Hessen. Many rioters on these buses immediately established illegal street blockades at the major entry points to Gießen in the hopes of stopping attendees on their way to the venue.

These blockades were in force well before sunrise:¹

In addition to obstructing major roads and highways, the protesters also blocked all three Gießen bridges across the Lahn River to the venue:

At impromptu checkpoints, rioters demanded credentials of all who approached them, allowing only fellow travellers to pass.

At several points, Antifa protesters tried to break through the police lines defending the congress venue, leading to scenes like this one …

… and this one:

The earliest AfD arrivals trickled in under a hail of stones and heavy police guard. Soon, however, police cancelled their protective convoys and left AfD attendees to find their own way to the besieged congress. It was around this time that a small Antifa mob surrounded and assaulted AfD Bundestag representative Julian Schmidt as he tried to make his way from his car to the congress:

Three young AfD members tried to squeeze through one of the Antifa street blockades behind an ambulance, but the rioters caught them and smashed their rear window:

For reporters at Frankfurter Rundschau, this video depicts AfD attendees “driving through an AfD blockade without regard for demonstrators.” You just can’t despise journalists enough. As the day dragged on, Antifa and labour union thugs also assaulted numerous reporters, including Paul Ronzheimer of BILD and the camera team of Maximilian Tichy:

The congress had to be delayed by several hours. As noon approached, police resumed their escorts for the buses of AfD attendees, and finally our congress achieved a quorum. Amid opening remarks and speeches, leftists made repeated attempts to reach the venue – all of them fruitless:

By 7pm, it was over. Despite all the Antifa disruption, Generation Deutschland had named itself and elected the dangerous Nazi Hitler Fascist Jean-Pascal Hohm as its chair. Unaccountably, German democracy and the Federal Republic are still in place, unscathed. The protests shrivelled, the rioters went home.

In total, around 75 people were injured, most of them police officers. That is hardly surprising; for all that they complain about Nazis, Antifa and their allies mostly go after the police and unsympathetic journalists. According to leading German media, the leftist riots in Gießen were “overwhelmingly peaceful,” “predominantly peaceful,” featured “many” who “demonstrated peacefully” and “for a long time remained quite peaceful.” Frank-Tilo Becher, mayor of Gießen, said he was happy that his city had not allowed itself to be intimidated either by “left-wing violence or by right-wing displays of power in black limousines” – the latter apparently a reference to those few prominent AfD members who arrived under guard in dark automobiles for their own protection. Chancellor Friedrich Merz charaterised the events in Gießen as “a clash between the far left and the far right,” and called for “the political middle” to stand strong against “left-wing populism and, above all, right-wing populism in our country.”

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Protests like these are largely financed by the German state itself, and thus by the German taxpayer. Our money is dispensed by the billions towards a vast, state-adjacent NGO network, tasked with defending Our Democracy. It flows from there into a variety of murky Antifa-adjacent organisations and other activist groups, none of whom have any kind of coherent message or decipherable political philosophy beyond sophomoric slogans like “Nazis raus” and “Fuck the AfD.” And while we pay violent thugs to riot against an imaginary fascism, we also pay thousands of police to manage the worst of their violence and also to serve as the proximate targets of their political rage. We literally fund all aspects of this whole insane spectacle. None of this would happen otherwise.

We have here an elaborate defensive illusion, intended to disguise a disturbing reality. Whatever it once was, leftism has become the official political ideology of the German welfare state and its dependants. As a belief system, this establishment leftism manages and justifies the relationships that take the money of productive working people and dispense it to millions of civil servants, welfare bums, public media journalists and state-funded political activists. If the AfD are ever in government, many of these people will have to worry about not getting paid, or at least about not getting paid as much as they getting being paid now. That – not any notional fascism – is the real problem with the “populist right” and their youth organisations.

Suggesting that the state should have fewer dependants is now the only requirement for being a fascist or a Nazi; it is beyond the pale and it makes you a legitimate target of violence. Protests on behalf of the official state ideology will always be “mostly peaceful” in the eyes of regime journalists, whatever those protesters do, because so many people make their living from the state now and benefit directly from the establishment leftist system.

The problem is that these same leftists screwed the economy, and there is every day less and less money to go around. The private-sector taxpayers who keep this whole system afloat are emigrating or retiring, while hundreds of thousands of new welfare dependants arrive every year. As the pressure for reform builds, the leftist establishment ideologues can only respond with ever louder denunciations of a mythological Nazism. It’s depressing and it is also profoundly dumb.

1. For this and the following media clips from Gießen, I have used the helpful blow-by-blow compilation of Junge Freiheit.