Tweeting the poop emoji at a cabinet minister, quoting politicians inexactly, calling a Green fat & stupid – all of this is criminal speech in the freest and most democratic Germany of all time

Activists, police and Green politicians have been conducting a years-long stealth campaign to prosecute Germans for their political speech on the internet

The massive furore around Schwachkopf-Gate – in which a German pensioner had his house raided by police for the crime of calling the Green Minister of Economic Affairs a moron – has brought a wealth of further incidents to light.

Ordinary Germans have been criminally charged for inaccurately quoting leading politicians, for tweeting the poop emoji at a cabinet minister, for calling their rulers shitheads and fat and ugly. Any online triviality you might imagine, including merely repeating jokes made by other politicians, might well lead to criminal charges. In almost every case, these charges turn out to have been filed by Green politicians as part of a clear, coordinated campaign to silence internet critics. The accused have been lectured by judges for hindering their rulers in their official duties; they have had their homes searched and their devices seized for statements that in any other Western nation would constitute protected speech.

Most disturbing is the case of a German-Romanian women from Partenstein (Bavaria), who had her house searched and her devices seized by police in 2023 after our Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock and our Economics Minister Robert Habeck filed charges against her.

Her crime? Sharing this meme on Twitter:

It depicts (from the top) Chancellor Olaf Scholz (SPD), Finance Minister Christian Lindner (FDP), Baerbock and Habeck, each of them next to an alleged citation. The Scholz citation reads: “I don’t remember having embezzled several million Euros.” Lindner’s citation reads: “No tax on excess profits, the rich shouldn’t pay more.” Baerbock’s citation reads: “No matter what the voters want, even if they take to the streets and have no more money, we stand by Ukraine.” And Habeck’s citation reads: “A shop that stops selling isn’t insolvent, it just doesn’t make any more money.”

The Würzburg public prosector’s office claimed that “none of the politicians mentioned ever made the statements attributed to them” and insisted that “a simple online search would have revealed the … misquotations.” They further argued that the image had been “widely shared on social media,” which meant it was “likely to impede significantly the political activities of the injured parties and to disparage them in the public eye.” The specific charges were “malicious gossip” (StGB 186) “directed against persons in political life” (StGB 188). On the advice of her lawyer, the woman chose not to fight the charges and accepted a €900 fine for lèse-majesté.

That is all bad enough, but as Apollo News points out, it gets even worse, because none of the quotations are materially false. Scholz is infamous for claiming memory lapses when called upon to explain his alleged involvement in the Cum-Ex scandal, and Lindner has on many occasions rejected an excess profits tax, although not in those specific words. The actual complainants, meanwhile – Habeck and Baerbock – are cited even more accurately. In widely lampooned remarks delivered in the middle of the energy crisis on 6 September 2022, Habeck said that he didn’t expect a wave of insolvencies due to high energy prices. Rather, he said, “I can imagine that certain sectors will simply stop producing for the time being … That doesn’t mean they’re automatically insolvent, but they may stop producing.” Baerbock, meanwhile, at a conference in Prague on 31 August 2022, said that “If I give the promise to people in Ukraine, ‘We stand with you as long as you need us,’ then I want to deliver no matter what my German voters think.” Far from malicious gossip, the meme is plainly political satire, providing pointed, deliberately exaggerated representations of real statements and positions. Under the Greens, that has become a crime.

Other cases are even more ridiculous. In April 2023, a man from Sachsen-Anhalt was fined €600 for tweeting the poop emoji (💩) at His Majesty the Sun Minister Robert Habeck. Specifically, he tweeted, “Herr Habeck, you are such a lying piece of 💩.” Habeck filed charges, and our offender received the following penalty order from the district court of Bitterfeld-Wolfen:

I particularly enjoy the awkwardly rendered pile of poop. Even better is this passage:

Witness Habeck feels that his honour has been violated by your statement, and in particular by your use of the emoji, and is filing a criminal complaint against you for insult. You were furthermore aware that the witness Habeck is a federal minister and that your comment is likely to make it more difficult for him to perform his duties as federal minister in public.

You read that right: A sitting cabinet minister and one of the most powerful politicians in all of Germany felt himself hindered in the exercise of his political office by a literal poop emoji on Twitter. Perhaps if ministers are so easily obstructed, they should seek different work.

Other cases we have just learned about include that of a man who called the Sun Minister “corrupt, incompetent, completely blinded by ideology … just a butthead” on Facebook. Habeck again filed charges personally, and the Euskirchen District Court (Nordrhein-Westfalen) issued a judgement for insult under our lése-majesté statute. They reasoned that “The content of your entire statement is generally liable to cause negative effects and to significantly impede the public work of the person concerned.” The accused received a suspended fine of €1000, which is to be withdrawn in June 2026 provided he does not re-offend.

Habeck is not the only Green running around the internet denouncing his critics to prosecutors. The obese former co-chair of the Green Party, Ricarda Lang, filed lèse-majesté charges against a man from Hessen for sharing a picture of her with the caption “earlier fat and stupid were two separate people.”

This reference to the comedy duo Laurel and Hardy (who are known as “Fat and Stupid” – “Dick & Doof” – in German) in fact merely repeats a joke that Till Backhaus, an SPD politician, made at Lang’s expense back in 2022. Backhaus apologised after his words occasioned a minor scandal, but of course he was never charged. For the crime of repeating Backhaus’s words while not being a politician, our Hessen resident was initially fined €300 for lèse-majesté, though judges have generously offered to drop proceedings if he donates that same amount to charity.

On and on it goes: The obnoxious Fridays for Future activist and general Green lunatic Luisa Neubauer brought insult charges against a Bavarian man for calling her unceasing climate whinery “stupid drivel from a spoilt brat.” The Miesbach District Court imposed a €1500 fine. The long-haired Green Bundestag representative Anton Hofreiter has brought insult charges against a Dresden man for calling him an “ugly woman.” The courts have imposed a fine of €1250 for insult. A man from Allgäu has had his apartment searched, his electronic devices seized and is now facing a fine of €5400 for posting a modified football caricature showing the German “Stolzmonat” beating up “Pride month.” This amounts to incitement, in this, the most best and most democratic Germany of all time.

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These are only some of the cases that we know about, and all of the cases we know about are but a vanishing sliver of the total. The vast majority of these prosecutions never come to anybody’s notice. There are untold thousands of them out there, and it is important to understand where they come from.

It is not just the Sun Minister Habeck scrolling through Instagram and calling the police whenever he finds someone calling him a shithead. Making formal complaints requires time, effort and paperwork, and so ideological activists and mysteriously funded agencies very often do the work for him – scouring the internet, assuming the costs, the risks and the bureaucratic hassle, so that all Habeck has to do at the end is sign a piece of paper. Many, but not all, of these prosecutions originate with activist operations like this.

Schwachkopf-Gate, however, was different, and more ominous. In an interview, Habeck said that this complaint “came from the Bavarian police.” The significance of his words at first escaped me, because prosecutions for insult must typically originate with the victim. Authorities generally don’t (and most often can’t) pursue these cases without a formal complaint.¹ As a few German politicians have explained, though, our police proactively patrol the internet and forward potentially criminal cases of lèse-majesté to concerned politicians like Habeck, in the hopes that they’ll sign off on the prosecution. Kristina Schröder (a former CDU representative) and Wolfgang Kubicki (of the FDP) both report the police have approached them with such requests, and Kubicki says they do this regularly.

Most politicians decline to prosecute, but the Greens are different. Politicians like Habeck sign whatever the activists and the police put in front of them. As I’ve said, the Greens reflect the attitudes and the disposition of the German political elite in general; and this means that they identify with its bureaucratic structures and its enforcement mechanisms most closely of all. They love speech prosecutions. They want more of them.

Like most products of the bureaucratic machine, the stealth campaign against lèse-majesté on the German internet is equal parts repressive and idiotic. It is repressive because people really, really should be allowed to call their moronic shithead ministers morons and shitheads if they want to. They should especially be allowed to do that when they live in nominal liberal democracies and these selfsame ministers are always praising their enormous and unprecedented if somehow always receding democratic freedoms. Criticism like this may strike you as juvenile, but in fact it’s part of an important political process, via which reviled figures are ridiculed and the social cost of supporting them is increased. I have always insisted on the importance of ridicule as a political tool, even though this has cost me no few readers who complain about my incivility. I have to say, I feel vindicated by recent events.

We should not, however, exaggerate the menace of the speech police. We must ridicule them as well, because their project is profoundly idiotic, self-discrediting and woefully unequal to the task of taming the vastness of the internet. The activists, the Habecks and the police hope to intimidate average Germans into silence, but by their very nature almost all of these prosecutions fly under the radar. Nobody hears about them and Twitter, Facebook and Instagram are as full of actionable insults as they ever were. When these cases do come to notice, they invariably make the complaining “victims” look totally retarded.

A recurring symptom of bureaucratic processes, is their literal-mindedness and total lack of strategy, and all of that is on full display in the repressions I’ve listed here. Any minimally sentient person would have second thoughts (at least) about filing charges over a poop emoji; it takes an office full of law enforcement officials eager to optimise their hate crime statistics to decide that this is good idea. The past week has done enormous damage to Habeck in particular, paradoxically making his name synonymous with the selfsame insult he tried via his own signature to suppress. It has also undermined the entire eccentric campaign against online “hate speech” generally. Our betters have been complaining for years about evil social media algorithms and Russian trolls and neo-Nazis saying terrible, awful, racist, genocidal things on the lawless internet, while also using all of the hysteria they’ve generated to hunt down random Facebook users guilty of calling Luisa Neubauer a spoilt brat. They’ve done vastly more damage to their cause than I ever could.

1. Generally, the crimes of insult, defamation or malicious gossip require a formal complaint from the injured party. Prosecutors can’t just go after these offences ex officio, and if the victim objects the case is closed. Prosecutors can, however, proceed without a complaint if this “victim” is a political figure, the vile lèse-majesté statute is in play and they determine there is “particular public interest” in the prosecution. As far as I can tell, though, such ex officio prosecutions are exceedingly rare if they happen at all.