119: The Reichsbürger Coup, with Annika Brockschmidt
Jack welcomes special guest Annika Brockschmidt to the show. Annika specialises in covering the far-right and tells Jack all about the recent German government swoop on those in the Reichsbürger movement who were planning 'Day X', a storming of the Bundestag and a takeover of the state. We go over the context of the far-right in Germany, the composition and ideology of the Reichsbürgers, the coup plans, the structure of the conspiracy, the reaction in Germany, the connections with QAnon and the Sovereign Citizens, the context of 'Nuremberg 2.0' and the various strands of paranoid pandemic politics, etc. A really fascinating episode, thanks to Annika's deep knowledge. Show Notes: Please consider donating to help us make the show and stay ad-free and independent. Patrons get exclusive access to at least one full extra episode a month plus all backer-only back-episodes. Annika on Twitter: @ardenthistorian Daniel's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/danielharper Jack's Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?u=4196618 IDSG Twitter: https://twitter.com/idsgpod Daniel's Twitter: @danieleharper Jack's Twitter: @_Jack_Graham_ IDSG on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/i-dont-speak-german/id1449848509?ls=1
I'm Jack Graham, he/him, and in this podcast I talk to my friend Daniel Harper, also he/him, who spent years tracking the far right in their safe spaces.
In this show we talk about them, and about the wider reactionary forces feeding them and feeding off them.
Be warned, this is difficult subject matter.
Content warnings always apply.
Hello, and you're listening and you're listening to a podcast called I Don't Speak German, which is I've never been I'm even more embarrassed about that title than I am on this episode, and you'll find out why.
It's just me, I'm afraid.
Daniel couldn't make it, which is a real shame because Daniel has been hoping to get my guests today onto the show for ages, and he's sorry to have missed her.
And so on that subject, I'll just get straight into it and introduce you to my very special guest for this episode, Annika Brockschmidt.
Hi, Annika.
Hi, thank you so much for having me on.
It's entirely our pleasure.
And perhaps you can just introduce yourself.
Yeah, so I'm a journalist and author.
I'm a trained historian with a background in history of violence, military history, and genocide studies, and I've been writing about and reporting on the various right-wing movements in Europe, but also in the US for quite a while, normally with a focus on the American religious right.
But I've also been doing a lot of research into the sort of group that we're going to talk about today on this podcast.
So, I'm happy to be here, albeit out of a more of an unhappy sort of... There's an unhappy reason for me being here, as tends to be the case with these things, but I'm happy to be talking to you.
I'm very happy to be talking to you, again, within the context of this whole thing being just sad that it's necessary at all.
But yes, as you can hear, Annika is a serious person, so I'd better be on my best behaviour for this episode.
Oh, God, no.
I mean, no need for that at all, I think.
All of the people who are sort of in the kind of line of work that we do, who are doing research on this.
We tend to have, you know, various events and appointments where we have to, you know, appear as serious people.
But I think, you know, lots of us deal with this with a lot of cynicism and dark humour.
So, you know, I get it.
I get it.
Same here.
You have to have your coping mechanisms.
Yeah, so on to the main topic of the episode, which is going to be the recent attempted right-wing coup in Germany, which was averted by police action right away across the Federal Republic.
Our listeners are probably aware of that in outline, if not in detail.
Annika, I mean, I'd like you to get onto the Reichsburgers in specific.
But first, I think, because this is very much your beat, perhaps you could give us an overview of Germany in terms of its situation with right-wing and far-right-wing movements.
Yeah, so we basically have a situation where what we could generally refer to as the German right-wing is a very broad spectrum, as I think is the case in most countries.
So, it's a very heterogeneous group.
This is not This is not one big, ideologically logical spectrum, but they're warring factions, so I thought maybe it's best if I outline a couple of the big players, just to situate the Reichsbürger within those structures.
So basically, what we have is we have the Reichsbürger, which is, and I'm sure we're going to go into this in more detail later, which is kind of the German version of the sovereign citizens movement.
And there are similarities between the two when it comes to, you know, the refusal to pay taxes or accept government authority.
But also the willingness to use violent force and the conspiracist thinking.
The Reichsbürger in a specific form have existed here since the 1980s, but they've gained more prominence since about the 2010s, and I'm happy to give some more details on why that was later.
But again, there are warring factions even within the Reichsbürger movement, which itself is only a of the German far right, because we also have sort of other groups who are called Selbstverwalter, which is essentially called self-governing.
So, for example, those don't believe in a continuation in a continuation of the Reich itself, but they are sort of seen as adjacent to the Reichsbürgermilieu.
So, maybe just to give you an idea of how many of them there are.
There are currently, I think, in the last report of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, From 2021, there was an estimate that 21,000 people belonged to the Reisburger movement.
And then it breaks that down into 1,500 of them as right-wing extremists and 2,100 of them as ready to potentially commit violence.
And crimes and connections with the Reisburger have risen in the past, However, there's also been sort of overlap with sort of loose QAnon groups which have sprung up
During the time of the pandemic, and this is kind of due to the fact that there are similarities in the conspiracist thinking between the Reichsbürger and between sort of the various types of QAnon adherents, because at the core is basically the idea that Germany is not a sovereign country, that Germany is governed by some type of
a special financial interest, and you can already hear the anti-Semitic dog whistles blowing quite hard in the background.
And so, you have sort of anti-Semitic roots in the thinking in the QAnon groups, but also in the Reichsbürger groups.
So, this kind of natural overlap had already been there.
And then, during the pandemic, we kind of had a a phenomenon that a group was formed, a sort of loose group out of Already existing right-wing extremists, but also a group that kind of brought people into the sort of right-wing extremism fold who hadn't been active in it before.
And they call themselves Querdenker or Querdenken, which basically means people who think outside the box, you know, independent thinkers.
Again, like you already know where this is going.
They do their own research, all of that stuff, and it's a pretty wild coalition made up out of, again, right-wingers who want the empire back, they want the Kaiser back, but also you've got the crunchy eco-types, you've got founding members of the peace movement, you've got some types even who are technically or who would say they are on the far left, but you also have sort of hardcore neo-Nazis.
So maybe some of you or some of your listeners saw pictures of these protests by these Querdenken guys.
You could see the old Reichsflagge, so the black, white and red flag.
You could see that quite often.
And this is already, again, because it is the old Reichsflag, you can already see how there is also a potential overlap with the Reichsbürger.
Then you've got the AFD, which is our sort of far-right, official far-right party, which is short for the Alternative für Deutschland, the Alternative for Germany.
And this is a far-right party that kind of started out as an anti-euro, as in the currency party, and then quickly turned into an openly anti-immigrant, hardcore right-wing party, kind of, you know, in step with all of the other European right-wing parties.
They're Christian nationalists, although it's not that easy, you know, to tell a Christian nationalist origin story here.
But they try and mostly fail, but they do try.
And they also tend to have close ties to the German religious right.
Although, funnily enough, Well, not funny, but you know, they're not the only party who has ties to the German religious right, and they're also not the party who has Christian in its name.
That's a different party.
But the AFD is also openly pro-Russia.
Most of them, you know, were big Trump fans.
And this is sort of the broad overview.
Then you've got sort of other splinter groups.
You've got sort of the white nationalist, esoteric settler types, the Anastasia movements, but those are sort of more on the fringes of the far right movement.
I would say these are probably the most important groups, although it's not an extensive list because otherwise I think we'd be sitting here in two hours still.
Yes, indeed.
It's incredibly tempting to ask you to elaborate on some of the references that just tumbled by me, but let's try to streamline things.
So, yeah, the Reichsburgers are the people who are behind this recent... Day X, I think they were calling it.
Is that right?
So, maybe I'll just shortly outline what we know so far, what they were planning, just in case some of your listeners have not been, understandably, have not been glued to this, because It is a pretty wild case.
So this was basically an extensive plot to overthrow the government.
It was one of the biggest anti-terror raids in Germany's recent history.
We had, I think, at least 3,000 police men and women who were searching the homes of suspects nationwide and also abroad.
There were 25 arrests in total.
23 of those arrested were German citizens and the police searched in total 130 Sites in this group had planned not only sort of a general coup, but this coup apparently, according to information that media received by investigators, included an attack on the Reichstag building, which is now called the Bundestag, which is where German parliament holds its sessions.
So, apparently this group, this terror group that had previously not been known, so we didn't know it existed, they had sort of conspired, plotted, planned this for about a year.
They had been holding, you know, they did shooting trainings, they conducted shooting drills, they We're working to establish sort of separate IT structures and safe communication channels.
And they had also planned attacks on critical infrastructure like the power grid, like the power grid in order to sort of create civil war-like scenes.
And they wanted to overthrow the current government, which they do not see as legitimate, and establish a new Reich.
So basically, Back to the old empire, or a Vothreich, as some have been calling it.
Not people from outside of the group, but the Vothreich is a term that is being used in right-wing extremist spaces.
So that means that there's also some truly wacky stuff in there.
Am I allowed to swear on this?
Oh yeah, please!
Okay, so there's some truly wacky shit in there.
So that means that they, for example, also wanted to renegotiate Germany's post-Second World War settlement.
And this is quite typical for certain factions of the Reichsbürger movement.
Again, there's not really one monolithic ideology behind this because different factions get into arguments about what kind of Reich there should be and if it should be in the tradition of the Nazi Reich or of the old Kaiserreich, the old empire.
But just generally speaking, from what we know about this specific group so far, this is what they were trying to do.
And again, there were also two international arrests.
Two suspects were arrested, one in Italy and one in Austria.
So, this is kind of the outline of what they had planned.
And when we now look at where do the Reichsbürger, where are they situated and what types of Reichsbürger exist in Germany, it's quite a woolly sort of
It's quite a woolly milieu, so it's very sort of hard again to see one consistent ideology, but there are similarities, and I think it's important to sort of point out the sort of main types of Reichsbürger or Reichsbürger-aligned sort of ideologies.
And there is a great article by a colleague of mine who's called Jan Rathje that I'm happy to send you, And he basically breaks it down very neatly in four categories.
So, he says, if we look at German history, we see that the first group is kind of these sort of traditionally organized right-wing extremists.
So, these are the people that have been on this since 1945, essentially.
They're the ones who want to, in quote-unquote, restore the sort of German Reich in the National Socialist tradition and restore this Reich and its, quote-unquote, Volksgemeinschaft.
And, you know, There were different political parties, splinter groups that were active.
I don't think we have to go into the details of those, but so these people have been establishing sort of structures and organizations since 1945 and some of those, as Jan Rathje explains, refer to themselves as Reichsbürger.
Then you have this sort of mixture of individuals and sort of Secessionist sovereigntists that don't necessarily, or at least not in the beginning, want to restore sort of a German Reich through a coup, but who sort of declare themselves sovereign citizens.
And I think this is probably the group that's most closely aligned to the American sovereign citizens movement.
And these are basically people who then call They basically start their own states, again, all in big air quotes, because, of course, this has no legal basis whatsoever.
But they're the ones who then found so-called state territories and declared themselves independent from the Federal Republic of Germany.
And these are also some of the instances where we've seen violence in the past, when, for example, because these people tend to hoard is quite a big deal here.
I know this, depending on where you are in the US, this might not be noteworthy, but it's quite hard to get weapons here.
And once an individual starts stockpiling weapons, the sort of the State institutions tend to become interested in why you are doing that and so some of these sort of secessionist individuals have gotten a visit from law enforcement in the past and that then has often resulted in a shootout and sometimes even in death of policemen and women.
who were trying to search the property with a warrant, which is also why this case that we're talking about today was such a big deal and which is why there were 3,000 policemen and women sort of needed in order to conduct it because this is a milieu that's known for being armed to the teeth, which again is kind of
A bigger deal here than it is, I think, in the US, because guns are not a sort of normalized part of German culture, for good reason.
And then we have these sort of Third group, and those are the Reichsbürger who see themselves into the sort of tradition of a guy called Wolfgang Ebel, who has been on this sort of since the 1980s.
They're not necessarily linked to the sort of outright neo-Nazis, they kind of do their own thing.
It's those are sort of, they have been on the scene for a while, but they've not necessarily been in the focus.
And then you've got the fourth group, and I'm coming to an end in this, don't worry.
And there's the fourth group where that you could call, I think, sort of the new right.
And they kind of provide a bridge sort of between these sort of The hardcore sort of neo-Nazi white nationalists, sovereigntists, and sort of other milieus.
So they kind of, they form as a sort of pipeline into further radicalization.
So they, for example, they are kind of like a, in quote unquote, softer version of the sort of hardcore and the tradition of 1945 neo-Nazis because they don't say that they want a continuation of the Nazi German Reich, you know?
But they claim that German sovereignty has been lost, so it's more coaxed in dog whistles.
It's not formulated as extremely, so it's less sort of If you're already in the pipeline of conspiracist thinking, this is easier to sort of get used to than somebody who says, we want the National Socialist German Reich back, because that might make you think a bit, hopefully.
But yeah, so these are the sort of four types of Reichsbürger and Reichsbürger adjacent sort of groups that we've seen in the past and the people and I think this might be an interesting parallel to sort of January 6th for example and developments in the US when it comes to sort of a newfound extremism
is that when we look at what we know so far about the people who were behind this coup, they are not the ones that you typically see who are behind sort of right-wing extremist terror attacks, because usually the perpetrators in right-wing terror attacks tend to be, well, they tend to be male, they tend to be Quite young.
They tend to sort of, at least in public understanding, you expect them to be on the fringes of society.
You know, you think maybe they have a swastika tattoo on their neck, and that is not the case here.
We had an illustrious group made up out of former German aristocracy, a former sitting MP, out of policemen, out of members of the Special Operations Unit of the German military.
So, this is not This is an extremism that is not born only from the fringes of society, but apparently right from its middle.
And I think that's an aspect that often gets overlooked when societies sort of try to grapple with right-wing extremism or fascism or neo-fascism, whatever you want to call it, is to say, oh, this has nothing to do with us, you know?
This has nothing to do with the centre of society.
This is people on the fringes.
We don't have to grapple with why this is happening because it's other people, and that's just not true, and it's quite a dangerous assumption, I believe.
Yes, that's fascinating.
There's so much there to go into.
Yeah, I mean, it's definitely a movement as opposed to the trend, certainly the trend in America towards stochastic terrorism, generating all these lone wolves, which of course are not anything of the kind, actually.
They're generated by a single right-wing I mean, January the 6th wasn't that either.
January 6th was, as we now know, very well coordinated and planned in certain sectors of it anyway.
And this sounds very much the same sort of thing.
This is clearly a coherent movement that is quite good at communicating internally and planning and And stuff like that.
They had quite serious plans in play, didn't they?
Oh yeah, definitely.
So, I read an article, I think yesterday, I can't remember, I think it was in one of the big sort of German media outlets, where an investigator was quoted anonymously, of course, who said that in his apparently quite long career, he had never seen plans as extensive as this.
And that it was quite shocking even for them to see this.
And I think it's important at this point to point out the favourite strawman argument that now gets brought on by the classic German conservative punditry class, but also some
Of some pundits who I would call reactionary centrists, which I think echoes some of the narratives that you guys have seen in the aftermath of the storming of the Capitol, where people are saying, well, these were just some lunatics.
They were kind of wacky.
Nothing honestly was going to happen.
Did you see the funny hats they wore?
And basically, Is this what will get you scared?
Just calm down.
You're being hysterical.
And this is very much a strawman argument because I have not seen a single German expert honestly argue that this coup had a chance of being successful.
I think a similar thing with slight aberrations goes for January 6th.
January 6th was planned, yes, but as far as planning a coup goes, it was pretty Poorly executed.
But a coup attempt does not have to be well planned in order to be a coup attempt.
And if the only thing that counts as a coup is the one that succeeds, then That's not even a coherent argument.
Like, if you try to kill somebody, you will be charged with attempted murder, even if you didn't manage it.
So this is just like a nonsensical argument, but it has been popping up again and again and again.
It drives me absolutely nuts.
But yeah, so It's quite hard, and I think maybe harder than in the US, again, for historical reasons, because there was a serious restructuring after 1945 by the Allies that makes it very hard to just usurp government control here.
It's very hard to do that.
That has to do with the federal structure of the country.
So, it is unlikely that this would have succeeded and that a fourth Reich would have been founded.
However, it is very, very likely that had they actually gotten to their day X and had they actually started what they planned, had they actually started their coup attempt, then there would have almost certainly been a bloodbath, at the very least.
Investigators have been very clear in saying that these people were ready to kill, they were willing to kill, and as one of the first steps to sort of implement their plan, they had planned the storming of the German parliament, including kidnapping MPs.
And if you now remember that one of the Conspirators was an MP until 2021 for the AFP, who was also apparently an avid Marx woman, who was also a sitting judge still when she was arrested.
She was still a sitting judge then.
Her background would have given her vital information to potentially ramp up a very high body count in Parliament alone.
I'm not even talking about attacks on the power grid and all of that, which would have brought chaos in itself.
But There is, even if this would not have succeeded, even, and it's very unlikely that it would have, even if the coup doesn't succeed, you can still wreak a massive amount of havoc if you have, and again, this is not a group of sort of doddering grandpas, even though German conservative pundits try, at least some of them, try to paint them as such.
These were people who had an organizational wing in their structure, apparently, And a military wing.
And they had not just policemen or former soldiers, they had people from the special operations unit of the German military, which, by the way, led to the absurd situation of the anti-terror special ops unit of the police searching the grounds of the special ops unit of the military during the raid, which I don't think has happened before.
No, probably not.
I think so far there have been reports of two to three people who were either formerly in the KSK, in the Kommando Spezialkräfte, which is the military unit.
German newspapers tend to not publish the names, I think because German data protection laws are very, very strict when it comes to that.
The head of the military wing, supposedly, was a former colonel who was in a fairly high up position in the KSK.
That unit was founded in 1996 and has been, by the way, has been in the news for cases of suspected right-wing extremism for years.
So it is no surprise at all that the KSK is involved in this, or at least some people of The Cars Car are involved in this.
There's one current, still-serving member of The Cars Car so far that I've read about who was involved in this, although he apparently was in their logistics unit and not what they call a Commando Soldat, which is the actual people who crawl through the sand, but who, you know, would be in that same environment, would have gone through similar training.
Let me just pull this up.
We have a military counterintelligence service that is called the Militärische Abschirmdienst, short MAD.
This MAD's job is basically to see to it that no extremists try to infiltrate the German military.
Not going that well.
Apparently.
It's a good idea.
Yeah, great idea.
Would love it if they actually, you know, did this.
However, again, that's also not news that this is not going well because the MAD of the Bundeswehr, of the German military, already warned in 2020 that the military had been infiltrated by right-wing extremists.
And in 2020, so two years ago, they named 600 pending cases in the whole military.
where they found suspicion of right-wing sentiments that were being investigated at the time.
And just in the Kommando Spezialkräfte, so in this special ops unit in the KSK, back then 20 soldiers were under investigation.
And the total suspected cases within the KSK over time amounts to 50.
And again, The Karskar is not made up of a lot of people.
This is the one special ops unit the German military has.
Again, this is a tiny unit because, of course, nobody wants to do this job.
I think they might be comparable to the Marines, but again, I think the number is a lot lower than the number of Marines is.
So again, the Qais Kha's involvement in this is not surprising, but also, let's be honest, the police involvement in this is not surprising either.
There have been reports that this terror group actively tried to recruit policemen and currently serving members of the military, and some said yes, some said no, but nobody reported this to their superiors.
No one!
There's also a historical reason for this in Germany, you know, and I think this is one of the things that we probably should point out here, because I think for many people who might not be as familiar with sort of the current situation of right-wing extremism in Germany, this might have come as a bit of a shock, sort of, if you don't live here or if you're not that familiar with it, because I think
Internationally, a lot of people have sort of lauded Germany's reckoning with its own past, and I think that then often gets equated with, oh, I'm sure that must mean that you're sort of done with that sort of thing, that there's no right-wing extremism anymore.
And that's very much not the case, and one of the reasons for that is basically Again, like German law enforcement and the military, they've had a long problem with right-wing extremism.
This is not new, and that is because, or one of the reasons why that is, is that the denazification after the war by the Allies effectively failed.
I think most historians today would say that.
in so far as the idea was a great one, sort of let's try to make this large number of people who were fully on board with the Nazis, let's try to sort of make them into democratic citizens and also let's denazify the state institutions, let's let's try to sort of make them into democratic citizens and also let's denazify the state institutions, let's
However, the Allies kind of had to sort of, or decided to strike a sort of practical bargain in that they noticed, oh, Oh, shit, if you actually fire all the Nazis, then there's no one left.
So, because they wanted, essentially, to prevent the collapse of the administrative state, they decided to let most of the lower-ranking Nazis get away with, essentially, a slap on the wrist.
So, they were denazified, for example, as mitläufer, so somebody who was just on on for the ride, but wasn't ideologically deep within Nazism.
Or some of them were a bit more higher up, were suspended, but were able to return within a couple of years.
And this, of course, has consequences.
So, that means that old Nazis were often Allowed to remain in their posts if they weren't as prominent a figure.
And again, there was a reason why they did this, because the situation was already pretty volatile.
So, they wanted to stabilize this very volatile situation.
this very sort of volatile situation.
However, this trade-off cost them because that basically meant that there was a continuation in ideology and personnel when it came to right-wing extremism. this trade-off cost them because that basically meant that there And And then I think there's another aspect that might be interesting, especially for American listeners, and that is Germans are very uncomfortable with their military.
So that means you very rarely see soldiers in uniform.
Our military is a lot smaller than yours, of course.
That also means that most people don't know anybody who's in the military.
And that also means, basically, that our military is even more insular than a military is just by being a military, essentially.
Because there is a sense of We are not wanted.
We are basically getting the coals out of the fire for you guys, but you don't appreciate us.
And that, of course, is fuelled by right-wing actors who then exploit that sentiment, who see this
as a fertile recruiting ground, which it is, let's be honest, which it is, because the people, or at least some of the people who are willing to join the German military, tend to be people who might have a specific form of masculinity that they subscribe to, might have certain certain prejudices when it comes to multicultural society.
Again, this is not a blanket statement, but I think the history of right-wing extremism within the German military has shown us that.
And you also have, and there's the third point and the last point that I'm going to make on this, you also have the problem with creating a narrative.
So, every military, in order to get people to be willing to put their life on the line.
You basically have to tell them a story that justifies that.
So, that means you have to kind of craft a sort of mythology around the army that you're a part of.
Now, that's a problem when it comes to the German military because you can't go, Further back.
You can't go back that far.
You can only go back a couple of decades and then you have to put a stop to it.
However, that might be the official line, but that tends to not be the case within certain units.
There have been many cases over the past couple of decades where sort of right-wing paraphernalia or Nazi symbols were confiscated within barracks, within certain units that have been known for this sort of stuff.
And that is because it is a struggle to present the case for a German army and a German army tradition When you have to deal with this kind of history, and when you have at least part of your army that represents a certain clientele, and all of these things that I've named now have
So, German politicians have been very unwilling in most cases to deal with this.
So, you mentioned the impression of lone wolves in the beginning.
And so, all of these cases that I've mentioned, they tend to get played off, especially by conservative and sort of centrist German politicians, as the famously called Einzelfälle, so singular incidents, which is basically So this is no structural problem, no problem.
This is just a couple of whack jobs who sort of, you know, got down the wrong rabbit hole.
And again, within the last three years alone, our security agencies have counted at least, this is again, this is like the minimum number, Of 327 instances of right-wing extremism within the German police, the military and the Verfassungsschutz and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
So that means that's a number three times higher than under the last administration's report.
We've had a Minister of the Interior under the previous administration who for years refused to, even though plenty of prominent sociologists have begged him to, who refused to conduct a representative survey amongst the police when it comes to racism and far-right sentiments because, my interpretation, he would not like what the results would say.
So, you know, there's a structural and historical sort of dimension to this.
That's fascinating.
So what you're describing seems like there is, at least in certain places in German culture, there is a kind of a determination to look away from what, you know, certainly there are indications of quite a broad and maybe broadening certainly there are indications of quite a broad and maybe broadening
Do you think, I mean, do you think, because this is actually one of the things I found when I was looking into this recent event was that there was something just earlier this year with quite a big raid on, I think it was a group called the United Patriots, who are, according to one thing I read, associated with the Reichsburgers. I think it was a group called the United Patriots, There was a plan to attack the power system and cause a blackout and kidnap government figures.
It was like a dress rehearsal for this thing that's just happened.
And it does seem like this is a problem that is in the process of growing.
Do you think this recent series of events shows that there is a That there is or there's going to be a reckoning coming with some of these problems?
Oh, I wish it meant that.
I think, as probably a lot of people who've been sort of covering right-wing extremism in Germany, I'm somewhat sort of cautious to be too optimistic when it comes to that.
So I think the sort of direct reactions of Most mainstream German politicians have been anything from promising to troubling, depending on who you're looking at.
So, for example, we had members of the CDU, which is the party of the Christian Democrats, So, this is the party with a Christian in the name, which is kind of our sort of conservative party.
So, not openly right-wing, but parts of the party regularly flirt with right-wing extremism in order to try to win back some voters from the AFD, which
Again, election after election after election shows it doesn't work, and yet they still try, meaning that they mainstream right-wing narratives because it doesn't actually help them, because people who want right-wing figures are still going to vote for the original, so to speak.
Wow.
Well, just to interrupt you briefly, speaking as a British person, that is so familiar I could be sick, but Yeah, it's the same mechanism.
It's the same mechanism and it's kind of maddening and it's been going on for years and even if you just look at it from like a pure, if you imagine, okay, I am now, again would never be, but if I try to think myself into the brain of a political strategist for one of their parties, be it Tories, be it CDU.
This is one of the most secure-to-fail strategies that you can employ.
And yet!
And yet!
Because, you know, it's the kind of culture wars bandwagon.
Again, I'm not a big fan of the term culture wars because I think it leads people to think that it's just rhetoric, you know.
And we have sort of specific German versions of the Various sort of right wing narratives that have been going around in the UK and in the US, but
I think it's kind of, it's worrying to see that on the one hand you do have politicians from the CDU sort of doing something that I would say is a good idea, which is for example advocating in the Bundestag during the last debate after these raids happened, advocating for a closer sort of surveillance of the AfD and of their ties into this
And there has been one CDU politician who, I think this was, I can't remember if it was yesterday or the day before, who went on one of the German morning shows and hinted at the fact that there might be sort of some things that hint at the Reichsbürger having been warned and a possible AfD connection to that.
So, that's also an aspect.
So, you do have some parts of the sort of German political ecosystem who seem to have understood this.
You have other politicians advocating for, you know, more research into right-wing sentiments in law enforcement and the military.
On the other hand, yesterday was the last time I checked his account, and again you can say this, oh this is an anecdotal thing, which it sure is, but the head of the German CDU, which again is the biggest opposition party, in parliament that we have.
This is Merkel's party.
The head of the CDU is called Friedrich Merz, and until yesterday, again I didn't check his feed today because I do like a day off from time to time from his feed, he had not put out a statement Regarding this thwarted coup, he had posted pictures of his advent wreath from him, like putting on candles.
So he had been posting.
And yes, this is just his Twitter account.
And yes, Do politicians need Twitter?
No.
But if you are the head of the biggest opposition party and you post cutesy pictures of Christmassy shit after one of the biggest anti-terror raids in the country's history, after you have for weeks
yelled about alleged left-wing extremists who are in danger of creating a new climate, RAF, which is of course a nod to the Red Army Faction.
So this is the Meinhof-Bader kind of, the Meinhof-Bader terror group who killed and bombed
in the 1970s, and he was referring to teenagers and young adults from the group Last Generation, who have been, as an act of protest, that you don't have to agree with them, but they have, for example, been gluing themselves to streets in a peaceful sit-in protest to advocate for climate actions.
They're the ones who've been throwing soup against portraits that are protected by glass as an act of protest.
Again, we don't have to argue whether or not that is a useful act of protest, but it is a legal act of protest.
The state can't forbid you from gluing yourself to the street, even though you might be an inconvenience to citizens.
There's an argument to be made that protests should be inconvenient anyway.
So he has been equating these young people who are advocating for climate justice with leftist terrorists who have killed in the 70s.
And now that we've had one of the biggest anti-terror raids after a thwarted right-wing coup attempt.
He's saying nothing.
That, in my opinion, is not an accidental decision.
That is even more mind-boggling and kind of veers into Mike Pence territory when you then realize that his name was on one of the death lists that were captured So it's bizarre.
It's just bizarre.
So I am somewhat doubtful that this is going to lead to a reckoning, because I think after the first initial shock of the news, you saw two things emerge.
And one was the sort of narrative that you of course saw on Telegram and all of the other sort of right-wing cesspools that this was a false flag attack because, and this is the reasoning behind it which again is just nuts, but it's very effective because apparently a lot of German journalists knew that this was going to happen.
So it's now not clear whether that is because they had informants.
It's possible.
Of course, they don't have to disclose those.
The German law protects freedom of the press, and that includes you not giving up your sources.
However, various newsrooms have put out a statement saying that they had found out about the raids by doing independent research, essentially, which also then makes you think, okay,
That, of course, means you're doing your work well if journalists whose beat is right-wing extremism speak to their sources, they speak to people in the milieu, and they notice something might be happening.
But That then also means that they're probably not the only ones who are realising this is going to happen.
A colleague of mine called Julius Geiler, who's doing excellent reporting, he's with the German Tagesspieger, he was able to speak to the neighbour of one of the guys whose apartment in Italy Perugia was searched, and he had apparently told his neighbour two weeks before the raid, oh, by the way, something is probably going to happen.
There might be police presence.
Don't worry about it.
So he knew what was going to happen.
So now this has obviously been spun by the right wing into this is just a PR thing.
This is being used to frame Quote-unquote, the opposition, which is, by the way, what Richard Grunell, former US ambassador, to Germany has claimed on Newsmax, drawing a parallel to January 6th, where, you know, as we all know, it was just a calm tourist visit and just people voicing their unhappiness with the democratically elected government.
So this has been going on.
And then you have the second thing that's been happening, which is what I've already talked about, which is the sort of established media outlets in a sort of misunderstood sense of neutrality, as in we have to remain the equidistance between two positions.
So we now also give voice to people who are like, just calm down.
This was just a group of doddery grandpas, which of course is absurd.
This was people who had training in special ops units of the military.
This was not doddering grandpas.
It's insane to claim that it was.
But who use this and who have made their niche in owning the Libs kind of punditry, commentary.
And this is, of course, very dangerous because if you're, I don't know, if you're just a regular person whose job isn't to burrow through this sewage, then if you just keep reading headlines like, oh, this is overblown, oh, this is overblown, you don't have maybe time to read the article.
Then even if you don't think, oh, that's true, it at least stays in your head, the more times you read it, like repetition is such a powerful thing.
If I read about wokeness 10 times in a headline, I might not know what that is, but it sticks in my head as, that is a thing.
So, if I'm then confronted with what might sound like a persuasive argument by a right-wing extremist, it's much easier for that person to cling on to the already existing connotations that I have in my head just from reading basic headlines.
Yes.
Well, I don't know if it's comforting, exactly, to know that Germany has all the same problems that we in Britain have and they have in America.
I would say, historically, right-wing extremism and its existence in Germany does not tend to have a comforting effect.
But I know what you mean.
I think it is, in an extent, Comforting to know.
Again, for me, for example, it's somewhat therapeutic to be talking to somebody who's doing work in the same field, even though you specialize in different countries, because it at least shows us, and I think this is very important, it shows us that there is a
a sort of global aspect of far-right radicalization and that our own country is not the only one that's grappling with this, which again is very troubling, but at the same time it gives you the idea you're not the only ones dealing with this.
Yes, indeed.
I was thinking more of how awful your mainstream media and mainstream politicians sound, really, and how it's very familiar.
I mean, I might go on a two-minute rant on this, if it's OK, because I think This actually might not be well-known both in UK and US circles.
Just to give you an example, the head of the very reputable and I think even internationally well-known German political magazine called Der Spiegel The Washington Bureau Chief of Der Spiegel just came out with a book and is on a book tour in the U.S.
now with a book that explains how U.S.
democracy is under threat from the left, you know, because of all of the trans people and all of the Black Lives Matter stuff.
And it's basically it's a generic Wall Street Journal op-ed made into a book.
That's in the wokeness.
You have German politicians, conservative German politicians, who first of all do not know where woke emanated from and what that term has originally meant, and that it was born from the civil rights movement and black liberation movements, but who are claiming Hamburg is now too woke.
They're all drinking cappuccino.
It's bizarre.
I was going to ask you, actually, how much the narratives are shared in your country, because the big narratives elsewhere... I mean, obviously, on the right, you have the anti-Semitic conspiratorial narratives, because that's just a given.
Conspiracy theorizing tends towards anti-Semitism and vice versa.
You always end up there.
And in the current form, it takes the form of globalists and the Great Reset and stuff like that, which of course goes into COVID paranoia about vaccines and lockdowns and masks and stuff like that.
And then you have one of the big touchstones at the moment is trans issues, wokeism, you've just been talking about, cancel culture, freedom of speech, that whole narrative.
And then that bleeds into the Great Replacement, and the viewpoint that almost all the people that stormed the Capitol on January 6th shared was Great Replacement Theory.
And as you get further into the right-wing ecosystem, you end up going from there to White Replacement Theory.
I mean, is it essentially the same network of opinions in Germany?
I would say there are definite similarities.
So what you can basically observe is that as narratives shift in the US and in the UK, as right-wing narratives shift, because, you know, they try out new things, They kind of sometimes shift, they use different terms, but it's essentially always the same narrative.
So, group X, marginalized group X is trying to replace you, the true Europeans, the true Americans, the true hmm, and they're using this supposed just cause to shoehorn in their Bolshevism, Marxism, whatever.
It's the same old anti-Semitic stuff that you essentially read in the Prodigal of the Elders of Zion.
It's been interesting to see because we see sort of conservative pundits, conservative German politicians trying out certain narratives around usually a couple of months after they've sort of gained real traction in the US or in the UK.
However, it doesn't always work.
For example, we had the political correctness moral panic, which has now been succeeded by the wokeness moral panic, but still the same narrative, still the same anti-Semitic connotations.
You have Paul Weyrich in the US in the 1990s already claiming that political correctness is the product of cultural Marxism.
So there you have the anti-Semitism connection right there.
Political correctness has been used widely here.
Wokeness is now the latest thing.
What did not work, what they tried, was critical race theory.
That did not work, because Germany has done such a shit job of grappling with racism in itself, that I would say, I would wage a guess, that most Germans have no clue what whiteness even is.
So, if you try to make critical race theory a moral panic, there has to be some sort of base level of understanding of at least racism existing, and you not wanting to acknowledge that it does.
If you then try to explain what a critical race theory is, and the majority of the people in your country have no clue what the definition of white even is, That does not work.
So, they tried a couple of think pieces.
The guy I just mentioned, who's now touring the US, the head of the Washington office of Der Spiegel, he wrote a piece with a headline, How critical race theory is an attack on the values of the West, which was essentially just Fox News talking points just put together.
And when I read the headline, I was like, okay, I probably know what this is going to be.
And yet I was like, oh, attack on the values of the West.
He could mean imperialism, colonialism and racism, in which case that would be true.
And yet, surprisingly enough, he didn't.
But so this is one example of this not really catching on.
And they moved on rather quickly.
What we've seen gain massive traction within the last, I would say, year to six months is the anti-trans stuff.
That was very much on the fringes, or not even really.
Of course, anti-trans discrimination and anti-trans hate was present here, but it wasn't a focal point of public debate.
And I think while the UK had sort of become one of the European hubs of anti-trans hate for rhetoric for a while, the German right was kind of slow to catch on, but the anti-trans stuff has gotten especially a lot of traction through the German tough movement.
So there's been a lot of so-called radical Feminists who call themselves feminists, who have openly walked hand in hand with right-wing extremists here in Germany in peddling their anti-trans hate and their Yeah, even genocidal inklings towards trans people.
So that's something that I've noticed.
And I think for a lot of people, the connection with the whole white replacement theory, how that is connected to the anti-trans stuff, A lot of people are not aware of that.
And so I think there's still a lot of sort of puzzlement over, well, how has this feminist who's, yes, she's been saying weird stuff about trans people, but now she's also saying weird stuff about immigrants.
How could this be?
Whereas it is a very, very short pipeline.
Yeah.
Well, of course, speaking from Turf Island, you know, again, that sounds very familiar.
One of the things that I noticed in your article about this that you published on your sub-stack, Threats to Democracy, was a reference to one of the conspirators posting on Telegram about Nuremberg 2.0.
That was interesting because I think the way you've described it, Reichsburger, it sounds like an umbrella conspiracy theory, very much like QAnon.
I mean, the narrative in in the Anglophone media has been very much to play up the QAnon connection.
But it sounds kind of like it works like QAnon in and of itself.
So there's that aspect to it where it can include all these other conspiracy theories and all these other political trends within itself.
And one of them clearly is this anti-lockdown, anti-vaccine, anti-mask COVID paranoia thing.
I was wondering if you could speak to that at all?
Yeah, sure.
So that's exactly correct.
So one of the suspects apparently turned out, according to a report by German newspaper Die Zeit, he posted on the morning before the arrests were made on one of the sort of
on a telegram channel, he posted, and let me just pull this quote up, quote, everything will be turned upside down, the current public prosecutors and judges, as well as the heads of the health departments and their superiors will find themselves in the dock at Nuremberg 2.0.
And the Nuremberg 2.0 thing, which of course refers to a sort of second version of the Nuremberg trials, Which Nuremberg trials were the trials where sort of the most prominent Nazi war criminals were sentenced and some of them were executed.
And so this has become a very popular A popular sort of, it's become a meme, it's become a sort of cypher or code, especially amongst the sort of COVID-denying crowd, amongst the anti-COVID measure crowd.
And it is especially insidious because it does two things at once.
It trivializes the Holocaust, Yes.
And threatens the perceived enemies of the group, which includes everything from journalists to public health officials to doctors to hospital staff to politicians and everything, while also spreading this victimization narrative which puts COVID deniers and anti-vaxxers and that whole crowd
into the same category as Jews during Nazi Germany, which again trivializes the suffering of Jews in Nazi Germany and the persecution that they endured.
And at the same time, it's very effective sort of In an in-group way, because it reinforces the victimization narrative.
And I think both in Germany, but also in other countries, you saw a lot of people during the anti-lockdown protests were Stars of David, which was kind of clamped down in Germany because that is illegal, because that, again, is a trivialization of the Holocaust, which is against the law here, for good reason.
However, it's been very Pervasive in these circles.
And Nuremberg 2.0 is something that one of the former military members has talked about openly.
I found a video of him because I read the name and I was like, ah, you sound familiar.
Looked it up and found a video of him, I think from July or June of this year, where he talks at a protest, at an anti-COVID measure protest.
about how there will be a need for Nuremberg 2.0.
So, the lust for the blood of your enemies, so to speak, the desire to see your enemies hang, the conviction that you are the good guys and that this country, in whatever way, is run by a gang of
war criminals, of genocidal maniacs, is very pervasive in the Reichsbürger movement, in the sort of general Covid-denying anti-vax movement, which has kind of become a circle, let's be honest.
The Venn diagram has become a circle.
And that is especially dangerous because I think especially the anti-vax pipeline, and now we could go into homeopathy and why that's a massive problem here.
But the crunchy anti-vax homeopathy kind of just asking questions about the vaccine, do your own research thing, and then you get to the Andrew Wakefield documentaries, quote unquote.
That's quite a short pipeline because It's an introduction in the kind of conspiratorial thinking that very, very quickly leads to very sort of bloody fantasies of quote-unquote justice being served and the sort of vindication that you see.
Because in the end, QAnon, as a narrative, as a story, ends with the quote-unquote good guys winning.
You're going to be waiting and you're going to be wading through the rivers of blood of your enemies who are going to be justly sentenced by, you know, special trial panels where, you know, the rechtschaffende Bürger, the honest citizens, will sit in and will witness justice being served.
So this is very Very pervasive in both milieus, and a colleague of mine who's done excellent work, she's called Pia Lamberti, she's a trained psychologist, she's done a lot of studies on how conspiracist thinking works, and her think tank on right-wing extremism called CEMAS, they've sort of
They do quantitative analysis of various telegram channels that they follow and monitor, and you see a massive peak of mentions of tribunals or Nuremberg, and see that go up massively in 2020 and peak, I think, in April 2021.
sort of in I think in April 2021 and so this is another another point that I think illustrates quite vividly that yes
even though the Reisberger movement is only a sort of a part of the German right-wing landscape the pervasiveness of these narratives of this Nuremberg 2.0 thing the the the fact that
People who were involved in this attempted coup were feeling secure enough to say this publicly, to say this months ago, because nothing happened to them, because nobody followed up, because no law enforcement knocked on their door.
This shows that these narratives, yes, they are connected to the Reichsbürgermilieu, but they are also, through the sort of anti-vax, sort of homeopathy entrance level into, potentially entrance level into conspiracist thinking, shows how easy it is for these very, very extreme and sort of bloody, gory fantasies
To make their way into what's generally considered the bourgeois mainstream centrist, whatever you want to call it, and how quickly these narratives can drip into the mainstream and that they're not as far removed as I think a large part of society would like to think.
Yes, absolutely.
Whether you call it the Day of the Rope, or the Storm, or the Great Awakening, or Nuremberg 2.0, it's the same thing, isn't it?
One of the fascinating things, I think, about 21st century fascism is that it's arising in a world where the Nazis, the fascists, have become the quintessential Villains of culture, the quintessential bad guys of the popular culture that informs all our brains.
So 21st century fascism is demonizing its enemies by calling them fascists and calling them Nazis in the same way that 20th century fascism called its enemies vampires and things like that.
And it's fascinating, if you, for example, this is just a short aside, if you see, I don't know if you've seen this, I wouldn't wish this speech on anybody, both for the accent and the content, but the head of this terror group, the guy called Heinrich the 13th Prinz Reuss zu Kesslitz in a just... Yes.
Abomination of consonants.
He gave a speech, I think, in 2019 at a very strange place to give that speech.
Well, not that strange, maybe.
At the World Web Forum, which is a Swiss IT conference, which kind of invites Bigwigs from the IT, crypto, whatever world, but also what they call mavericks and outliers and, you know, wacky guys.
And one of the wacky guys apparently they invited was this voice guy.
He was the guy who was going to become the emperor, the head of state, whatever you want to call it, if this coup had succeeded.
And in this speech that he gave in 2019, he basically ...claimed that the quote-unquote international financial interest, read the Jews, had in fact sort of instigated World War I in order to end the monarchy because monarchy is held up by people who have money, who don't want to go, who don't need to lend money and therefore
The evil international financial Jewish interest ended the monarchy and he sort of points out in his extremely anti-Semitic right-wing speech with which he sort of firmly placed himself into the Reichsbürger camp and why he was kind of sort of then shunned within Germany.
So, this was known.
It was not news that Reuss was on the Reichsbürger beat, but in the speech he then talks about the evils of Hitler.
So, using a conspiracy narrative that the Nazis used to justify the slaughter of Jews and the eradication of the Jewish people, while at the same time claiming that the Nazis are the bad guys.
And that there's a special cognitive dissonance to that that I find fascinating and that I found specifically fascinating.
I can't remember which episode this was, but you guys did an episode on, I think, was it Holocaust denial in specific?
Where they kind of, where you, I think you listened to The Daily Shower and you sort of showed how the narrative of sort of open neo-Nazis tends to switch from the Holocaust never happened to it should have and it was good.
Yes.
In its own warped, cognitive dissonance, sewagey place.
And I find that very fascinating.
I know.
One of their big narratives, particularly on The Daily Shower, is this thing about the Holocaust is a lie, and all these things are a lie, you know, white privilege is a lie, etc., etc.
All these things are a lie to make white people feel bad and to make Gentiles feel bad, and to put And to sort of blacken the name of genocide, and to make people think that genocide is wrong, and genocide is an inadmissible tactic, because it should be on the table as a possibility.
We should be able to talk about it, but they've made people think it's bad.
The cognitive dissonance there is just staggering.
I think you gave the example of the Himmler speech, which they deny happened, while at the same time voicing the exact sentiment and argumentative structure of the Himmler speech.
It's quite stunning.
You are my favourite kind of guest because you answer my questions before I ask them.
Oh, sorry!
No, no, no.
No, it's fine.
Honestly, I can just sit back and relax.
I was going to round off with a question about Heinrich XIII because he's kind of been the face of this news story, certainly in the more mainstream Anglophone media reports that I've seen.
They've always got a picture of him being led out of his house in handcuffs.
And they tend to lead with the story about this eccentric-looking gentleman and about how he thought he was going to be the new German emperor and stuff.
Perhaps you could talk a little bit about the aristocracy as an inflection within German right-wing politics, because that's not really something that's active in America or in Britain, actually.
Oh yeah.
Yeah, so they play a really big part in sort of the, let's call it the quote-unquote respectable looking, not respectable, actually respectable, but respectable looking part of German right-wing extremism, the sort of tweed jacket wearing kind.
that still spew the same hatred, but that have family wealth, family connections, that gives them access to parts of society that are otherwise not there for other right-wing extremists.
So, for example, the German religious right is, let me start this way.
The German religious rite consists, again, of varying factions, but sort of old aristocracy, because technically we don't have aristocracy anymore.
That doesn't mean anything.
He can still call himself a prince.
Legally, again, doesn't make him any special, but he just has a very long name.
But we sort of form an aristocracy.
are interestingly, when you look at the religious right, mainly Catholic, mainly sort of in the camp of the former Pope, you know, the German one, Ratzinger.
And they're not big fans of the current Pope because he is, of course, a left-wing radical.
And so when we look at the AfD, the Alternative für Deutschland as well, one of the most prominent figures is a very, very deeply unpleasant woman called Beatrix von Storch.
And Beatrix von Storch has really, really interesting and troubling ties to the sort of international religious right, who has sort of been a part of a
Of a sort of movement within right-wing extremism to establish structures of varying foundations with harmless sounding names.
Like, I don't know, foundation for family values, you know, the classic sort of vocabulary employed by the religious right.
But again, that's not really a well-known thing here, so people tend to be duped by it quite easily.
Or, for example, she also has connections, as do many AFD people, who are sort of from this sort of
pseudo-aristocratic milieu to an organization called the Demo für Alle, the protest for everybody, which sort of framed itself as an anti-lockdown thing, but also there for traditional marriage and against LGBTQ people existing and all of those things.
So, German aristocracy plays I think an underestimated role.
I think there was a report from the European Parliament a couple of years ago on the international network of anti-gender and anti-LGBTQ funding internationally, and it has a pretty detailed chapter on European aristocratic ties to anti-
gender anti-LGBTQ campaigns, and von Storch is now actively sort of suing against claims that she has any ties to Russian interests.
So, you know, German libel laws are pretty strict, so I will put a big allegedly in here, but there is evidence that parts of the German aristocracy or former aristocracy have been quite involved in various differing right-wing movements, and I think that is due to a sort of feeling of
of entitlement, of lost grandeur, and of a feudal sort of understanding of society where they think people like them should be on top.
People like them, usually meaning white conservative Christian people, should be on top of society.
And this is basically what Reuss says in the speech.
I don't know if it's still up.
When we were messaging about this and I said, oh, I just found another link where it's still up.
And he was like, we should write this down.
I was like, yeah, probably right.
And a day later it wasn't available anymore.
But the cool prince, the wannabe emperor says in this speech, My family has shaped German history for more than a thousand years.
First big red flag.
Thousand years.
And, well, everything was fine till the First World War started.
Everything was good.
And if you had a problem, you went to the prince.
Where can you go today?
Can you go to Brussels?
Can you go to your MP?
Good luck.
But the prince, the prince, so me, I would be the one who would set all of your stuff in order.
Again, I tried to listen in on sort of audience reactions because it's this sort of very strange conference that when you look at the advertising for this conference, it was under the name of Master or Slave, so already great framing.
And it's got quite Well, I think if you were going to be benevolent, you would say futurist-looking.
And if you were going to be a bit more realistic, you would say quite fashy-looking imagery.
But again, it is an IT conference and it had a A lot of people who you would see in the more progressive spectrum, but also a lot of people who you would see in the right-wing libertarian sort of Peter Thiel kind of, one of Peter Thiel's buddies and frequent guests.
So again, makes sense.
But there was basically no, I didn't hear any audience reaction.
And there was one of the sort of most well-known German conservative Well, I don't want to call him a journalist because technically he writes for a newspaper, but what he does is he whips up right-wing mobs and sets them onto progressive journalists and activists and people he doesn't like, which is what happened, I think, yesterday or the day before to me.
He writes for the conservative German newspaper Die Welt.
In Britain, we just call people like that pundits.
Every paper has several of them.
But he is a specific kind of... So, if he writes about you, you get flooded with, at best, calls to kill yourself, and at worst, violent fantasies of what should happen to you.
So, there's a very sort of... And this has been known for a while.
So, he wrote about... I think I wrote a thread on this conference, and he wasn't very happy about it.
And he wrote, oh, you know, she claims That you spoke at this conference, which he did.
That it was thunderous applause.
Never claimed that.
But he said, oh no, the Reuss guy, he was booed.
Well, I've seen several recordings of the speech now.
Which I would never wish upon my worst enemy, but I couldn't hear any booing.
You can hear people giggle at a very bad joke once, but there's mostly no reaction at all.
But the sentiment, and this is back to your question, The sentiment that Reuss expresses in this speech is a sort of resentment towards democratic societies, a desire to go back to some sort of feudalistic model of statehood, where people like him should be in charge.
And then you mix the anti-Semitism in with that, and you've got a pretty nasty mix that I think is prevalent in some parts of the former German aristocracy.
Yeah, if it's an IT tech crypto conference, then there's probably more than a smattering of Neo-Reaction and Dark Enlightenment types in there.
Probably quite a few absolute monarchists in the audience, so he's probably going to do quite well in terms of sympathy, which is fascinating, isn't it?
There's this guy who's speaking explicitly in terms of, we should go back to literally a thousand-year-old model of feudal princely rule.
Quite possibly going to get a sympathetic reception in a place full of people whose job is in the new information technology.
Even what people like Bannon say, but also who the thinkers are, the Bannons and the Dugans, but also the kind of Peter Thiel's echo.
There's very much in these sort of neo-reactionary, I.T., Curtis Yavin, Peter Thiel kind of sewage, you see a lot of monarchist or pseudo-monarchist ideas expressed via a sort of echo of Julius Evola's version of a fascist What do you call that?
Sort of an intellectual aristocracy.
And in IT spaces, you then see this sort of spiritual version of aristocracy that Ebola wanted.
You see that then getting translated into an aristocratic CEO class, basically.
And I've always found that very interesting.
Okay, well, that'll do for an episode.
Thank you so much for coming on and giving us this incredible tour through this subject.
Annika, I hope you can come back sometime, hopefully when Daniel's on.
And before you go, tell the listeners where they can find you, please.
Yeah, so you can find me, as long as it still exists, on Twitter at Ardent Historian, or just under my name, Annika Brockschmidt, but, you know, I get it with a consonant, so Ardent Historian.
You can find my English-language newspaper on Substack.
It's called Threats to Democracy, and for the German speakers, there's a whole There's a whole other batch of stuff there that you can quite easily find amongst my book, but I think this might be the most interesting bits where you can find me for your English-speaking audience.
So, as I say, I'm never more ashamed to not speak German, but again, thanks for coming on so much.
I would never wish this language upon anybody, so no offence caused at all.
Sincerely.
I love the German language.
I just wish I understood a word of it.
So yeah, thanks for listening, everybody, and we will see you next episode.
Goodbye.
That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
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