(Montage: Fragen zur Zeit; Christian Illner: © Christian Illner, Niagara Falls: Frederic Edwin Church, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

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Christian Illner has thereby earned praise and admiration just as honestly as he has earned scorn and hatred. That is very rare. I have never encountered this absurd contrast in any other book. It often happens that an author overreaches himself, going beyond the limits of his knowledge after a work that is only half successful, or attempts to milk conclusions from his material that the material simply does not support. Neither of these would be anything special, but Illner can’t be accused of either. The reason for this juxtaposition of clarity and obscurantism, goodness and poison, lies in Hegel’s dictum that the owl of Minerva begins its flight only at dusk, a dictum that became a curse to more than one thinker. Next week we will discuss another thinker here, for whom this became his fate in a completely different way and on entirely different historical dimensions: Robert Filmer. Filmer’s tragedy lies in the fact that he wrote at the end of 5,000 years of agrarian high culture, shortly before the Industrial Revolution rendered obsolete his historical derivation of royal authority from paternal authority, a theory against which John Locke’s polemic remained merely a battle against a straw man.

Illner, like all of us at present, stands at the temporal dividing line of a political movement. Future intellectual historians will presumably be left standing rather confused before this book and the reactions to it if they are not familiar with the details of every single year, perhaps even individual months. In this respect, at least, Die Tiefe Rechte has something in common with quite a few books of the 1920s.

So what is the bone of contention?

It is that Illner presents as a demand for the future what ought to have been an ordering retrospective. An imperious, commanding tone jars at a place that should have been reserved for remembrance, understanding, and also forgiveness. What Illner has now, as it has reached the end of its natural development, called the fellowship, we have lived.

But let us begin at the beginning:

Illner wants to show ways of living together within the Right.

To this end, he asks what the Right actually is, rejects this question, and replaces it with the question of who the Right is. The answer: We. We are the Right. That is, those who were “put into the right-wing corner” and then step into this existence as Rightists. That seems insane. Illner refuses to give the Right any content, and yet we are supposed to be the Right? If he does not say what, precisely, is right-wing, how are we then supposed to say who is right-wing?

The riddle resolves itself once one understands that throughout the book Illner consistently projects a contemplation of the past into the future as a demand. Illner’s right-wing “we” already exists. It is a group of people who have traveled a common path over the past ten to twenty years as a right-wing fellowship. In retrospect, we can say who belongs here and who does not. Whoever was there, was there. It is that simple.

The number of fellows in question is also quite manageable. There are a little more than nine, but the fact that this fellowship could exist in this form was due in large part to the fact that the number of all the reasonably relevant people fell within Dunbar’s number. It would be very difficult to find two people who were ever involved and who are separated by more than a single mutual acquaintance.

This fellowship is defined by its shared past. It requires neither a shared worldview nor, least of all, a common programme. It arises through a shared history even if, since then, people have become divided over matters of substance or even personally hate one another. Both of these things have happened often enough within this fellowship. This determination by a shared past, however, naturally works only in retrospect, never when looking toward the future. It is a question of perspective. And the temporal perspectives are both views from the present: one forward, the other backward.

It is actually very simple: There are two non-biological forms of determining a “we.” One looks to the future and rests upon common goals. The other looks to the past and rests upon a shared history. The biological “we” is a separate matter; it is more than a mere reproductive community, but that would take us too far afield here.

Illner pits the “we” of the shared past, in his words the “actually existing right-wing fellowship”1, against the “we” of the shared future. Illner does not accept the latter as a “we” at all. On the contrary: To him it is a trick by which the individual attempts to emancipate himself from the “we.”

“Through this maneuver, the individual Rightist emancipates himself from the claims of a right-wing ‘we’ and gains the freedom to choose a ‘we’ according to his own interests. Identity, however, is unchosen at its innermost core: one must already be someone, possess qualities and a will, in order to be able to choose at all. Identity therefore precedes the choice of identity, guides it, and binds it back to itself.”2

That is indeed true. Illner describes here, entirely correctly, the “we” in the present between past and future. Every “we” has an origin, and if it is to remain a “we,” then it needs a future. Anyone who has ever been part of a fellowship in the literal sense knows this: a group that sets out on a journey together. The fellowship exists, on the one hand, through the path traveled together thus far. From this perspective, goals are irrelevant. One may even have become lost together. At the same time, the fellowship exists through the common goal. What bothers Illner is that the future of the fellowship is not fixed as irrevocably as its past. That is simply the nature of past and future. Someone who suddenly decides, while standing on a cold road in the rain, that he would rather be at home is nevertheless still standing on a cold road in the rain. But he can decide not to continue with the others. Or he can decide to go somewhere else. Not to this summit, but to that one. Whether it is justifiable simply to leave in a particular situation is another matter. But even the question of who leaves whom behind, or indeed abandons whom, is, beyond the metaphors, not quite so simple.

But Illner does not want the fellowship to be capable of breaking apart. “Whoever wants to participate must now begin to internalize the fellowship and regard himself as part of it. There is no place here for a denial of the right-wing ‘we.’ It must become unassailable.”3 That is his demand. Yet only the past is unassailable. Whoever wants an unassailable fellowship gets a fossil.

The fellowship cannot be unassailable if it is to fulfill the other demand Illner makes of it: that of openness. Illner sees that the Right does have goals, above all negative goals, such as stopping the Great Replacement. But it could not agree upon a common final goal. He does not see this emptiness as a space into which he himself would now have to insert a blueprint, which would then have to be imposed upon everyone else, but as an openness toward the future that is yet to come. This is one of the two great strengths of Illner’s thinking: that here, more a disciple of Hegel than of Heidegger, he understands that the true is the whole, and indeed the whole in time:

“The fellowship is its own beginning, its own path, and its own goal all at once. Yet instead of conflating these three states into a single indistinguishable whole, this trinity directs the fellowship by unfolding its temporal moments and bringing each into its own proper right. This can be compared to the growth of a tree, which extends from the stage of the seed to that of the fully formed tree. In a certain sense, the seed already contains growth and tree. Each of the three elements contains the other two, yet they can contain one another only by stepping back for one another. The seed must allow itself to be sublated into growth, and growth fits itself into the mature tree.”4

This quotation is pure Hegelianism, and even the example is modeled on that of bud, blossom, and fruit from the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit.5

But beyond intellectual-historical genealogies: this is the only way a movement can be understood at all if it has to live and fight through historical upheavals. Hegel’s thought would never have become what it was if Hegel had not lived through the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, and the young Hegel, who planted a tree of liberty in Tübingen, would probably have been surprised by the state thinker of the Prussian monarchy. Nevertheless, it is one life and one intellectual path.

We are living in the midst of a period of upheaval, and that means that our own role in this period cannot yet be entirely clear even to ourselves. Within this movement in the process of becoming, which Illner conceives the Right to be, stands his paired opposition of the deep and the shallow Right. If the Right lay before us as something already formed, as a dead result, in Hegelian terms, then this distinction would be pointless; or rather, it would then be very shallow. There would only be different degrees of understanding of the phenomenon of the Right, just as there are popular science and academic science.

But because the Right is in the process of becoming, the situation is that on the one hand it has to deal with the business of the day, while on the other it has to deal with goals and reasons. Illner even speaks of ultimate things. These ultimate things must now be protected from the noise of the day, while conversely the work of the day must not be suffocated by brooding over ultimate things. At the same time, deep thought should not become detached from reality, and the view of the superficial should not become banal. A classic problem of the unity of identity and difference.

And Illner is right: it can only be sublated through a fellowship, community, scene, camp, let us use, if we must, the sterile sociological term “milieu.” Within such a common framework, things that originate in the depths can become prerequisites, self-evident assumptions, or simply habits. Conversely, attachment to something shared prevents the thinker from drifting into navel-gazing within his own world of ideas.

The good news is that the right-wing scene, community, fellowship, whatever one wishes to call it, of the last ten to twenty years has, by and large, accomplished this sublation between shallow and deep. But this is precisely the moment to engage once more with the words “shallow” and “deep.”

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(Jason Arday 2024: ConiferousForest19, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons)

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Let me say it straight to the tearful hypocrites: Jason Arday lied so brazenly about his life story and his achievements that he would not even have been admitted to the North Rhine-Westphalia branch of the AfD. The copy-and-paste dissertation of this Dr. Summa Cum Fraude is merely the cherry on top. The lies range from alleged sporting achievements (30 marathons in 35 days) to the banalities of his CV. Nathan Cofnas1 and Edward Dutton2 have said everything there is to say on this subject.

This leaves only two possible interpretations of Arday’s life story: either he was a ruthless fraud. In that case, we must feel sorry for his relatives, above all the two children he leaves behind. He himself can then expect very little sympathy indeed. Or he was so psychologically unstable that he should have been regarded as legally incapable of being held responsible for his fraud. Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, Arday’s Cambridge colleague, was already pointing towards the latter interpretation two weeks ago: “We should of course always investigate plagiarism to protect academic standards. However, I cannot stand by and watch when an autistic man is on the ground and the kicking continues.”3

Now, if that is the case, then the moral responsibility lies solely with the people at Cambridge, Simon Baron-Cohen and his colleagues, who in that case would have kept a mentally ill person as a diversity hire. But they are responsible either way. The only question is whether Jason Arday himself is culpable of the fraud committed and this question is no longer under the jurisdiction of any earthly judge. There was not the slightest doubt that he was a diversity hire. The first sentence of the University of Cambridge’s announcement of Arday’s appointment as a professor reads: “Arday is a highly respected scholar of race, inequality and education, with a particular interest in improving the representation of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people in higher education.”4

Just to make one thing clear from the outset: “improving the representation of Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic people” means nothing other than that these people receive places at universities and eventually professorships despite lower levels of performance, positions that would otherwise have gone to white people. Like insurance fraud or tax evasion, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is not a victimless crime simply because the victims are not visible. These are real lives of real people that have been shattered and continue to be shattered as a result. Jacob Savage has listed the damage in sufficient detail.5 For many white men of the Millennial generation, this damage can never be repaired. Life has moved on, and the period in which they would have had to make their breakthrough has passed. And we have not even got to those like Nathan Cofnas who nevertheless made it and were then cancelled.

The fact that precisely those who celebrated the mob at the university as political engagement are now complaining about a smear campaign is one thing. Had Arday been a cunning fraudster, a modern-day Comte de Saint Germain leading the cleverest minds of his time by the nose, then the whining of his supporters would simply be embarrassing. But once one understands that all these people must have known what was really behind Arday’s alleged achievements, and after Nathan Cofnas’s publications, there can no longer be any doubt about that, it suddenly takes on a very sinister character.

Here, one has to distinguish between Arday’s family and his colleagues. Even though both make the same claim, namely that Arday was driven to his death by a campaign of lies, the two cases are not the same. As far as his family is concerned, one has to grant them the right to maintain a comforting lie about his life. Particularly since Arday leaves behind two children. Should one now tell them: “Your father was a fraud and a narcissist, and when his fraud was exposed, he killed himself?” I think that question answers itself.

It is an entirely different matter when it comes to Arday’s academic colleagues. The BBC has published a video featuring one such man, that is nauseating. Strangely enough, his face is shown, but his name is not given. This man presents himself as a personal friend who was in contact with Arday until shortly before his death, and tells us how the campaign against him affected Arday and how terrible the media frenzy was. He also tells us that he himself received around a hundred press inquiries asking whether he could comment on Arday’s CV.

How about the gentleman starts with precisely that? We must not allow these people to hide behind the pose of grieving friends and colleagues. At Cambridge, people knew about Arday’s fraud, and they covered it up. The people who are grieving now are also the great beneficiaries of Arday’s death. Because you do not put a corpse on trial. And where there is no trial, the other corpses remain in their closets as well.

(Picture: © William Crochot, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International, Wikimedia Commons)

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The right question is: How broad is the spectrum of other differences that can be bridged by the danger of mass immigration? Why is this the right question, and why is the question of the primacy of domestic or foreign policy the wrong one here (!) ? The latter is by no means wrong in itself, and yes, in principle the primacy of foreign policy applies. But it is wrong here because there is currently no sharp opposition between foreign and domestic policy.

To illustrate this, let us look back at the old Federal Republic, where such an opposition did indeed exist. The oppositional Right rejected Americanization for domestic reasons, ultimately cultural and metapolitical ones. Through its alliance with America, Germany was also drawn into the cultural leftward drift of America in the second half of the twentieth century. The long road to the West did not lead into an imagined republican-democratic Western normativity, in which the Revolution of 1848 had, after all, retrospectively succeeded, but to Woodstock. Yet in foreign policy the United States was the only power that had something to hope for, rather than fear, from a resurgent Germany. From rearmament to reunification—both of them pushed through by the Americans against our dear European cousins—Westbindung was therefore indispensable. This contradiction reliably kept the oppositional Right in political irrelevance. At the time, it was left with nothing but fantasies about Central Europe, about de Gaulle’s France, and about even more absurd alliance constellations—with the Non-Aligned Movement, even with the impoverished Third World country that was then still called Red China—anything, somehow, against Washington and Moscow. Added to this was the complaint that Adenauer had sacrificed reunification for the sake of Westbindung. When reunification came in 1990 through Westbindung, which the elder Bush forced through against Thatcher and Mitterrand—who openly threatened Genscher with war—the West German Right to the right of the CDU was historically refuted. Irrespective of the fact, that Kohl never delivered his promised “spiritual and moral renewal” and allowed the last window of opportunity to pass in which the escalation of mass immigration could still have been prevented without a constitutional and state crisis.

That is a contradiction between domestic and foreign policy!

We do not have such a contradiction today. There are very different foreign-policy positions within the Right. Broadly speaking, one can distinguish Atlanticists, Europeanists, nation-statists, Central Europeanists, and Eurasians. The fact that there are five completely different and, for the most part, mutually incompatible schools of foreign policy within one and the same political camp is a consequence of the opening of the foreign-policy space of possibilities after the end of the Cold War and the subsequent unipolar hegemony of the United States. That does not mean that we are standing before a buffet of equally good options from which we can simply choose according to taste. Here too there are clearly better, worse, and catastrophic options. But the unmistakable clarity of the Cold War has disappeared—the clarity in which Westbindung was so obviously without alternative that anyone who failed to recognize this was kept away from power by a broad consensus of everyone who was not completely insane. Today one can reasonably hold different opinions about the foreign-policy orientation of the Federal Republic of Germany, even on fundamental questions.

This does not prevent the advocates of these different schools from accusing one another that the other’s position would inevitably lead to the continuation of demographic replacement. These accusations are so persuasive because, at this stage, demographic replacement can only be averted through a radical reform of constitutional law, public law, and the relevant jurisprudence. In other words: at the cost of considerable upheaval. As a result, the remigration movement has arrayed against itself all those people in every political camp who prefer the status quo—including its dynamic of demographic replacement—to the uncertainties and dangers involved in ending or even reversing it. That, however, does not make these mutual accusations any more meaningful.

Instead of a conflict between foreign and domestic policy, we are dealing with different foreign-policy objectives held by people who nevertheless share the same goals in demographic policy. Just as there are very different objectives in economic or social policy. For this the real question is: How large is the remigration tent? Or, put differently: Which differences can be bridged by the shared objective of preventing demographic replacement?

There are a number of attempts to answer this question.

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(Picture: Patriot Front)

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Sometimes activists need not only courage but also luck, and on Independence Day 2026, Fortune smiled on the group led by the 27-year-old Thomas Rousseau. According to the organization itself, 400 members, uniformly dressed and carrying flags, marched through Washington, D.C. The official parade had been canceled because of the heat, leaving the stage entirely to Rousseau and his men. The march and Rousseau’s speech genuinely made headlines around the world, not merely on the right-wing internet. Even mainstream media in Germany covered the event. Not only the white neck gaiters—worn by everyone except Rousseau to protect themselves from doxxing—but virtually everything about Patriot Front recalls the Identitarian Movement, or rather, the Identitarian Movement as it existed three to five years ago. Why is something like this only now emerging in the United States?

Geography and demographics shape not only world politics but also domestic political struggle and the forms it takes. Eight years ago, I wrote for an American audience about a question that was frequently asked at the time: “Why can’t we simply do the same thing they’re doing over there in that other country?” The question itself was entirely legitimate, but it was usually interpreted polemically and answered by claiming that someone was too stupid, too lazy, insufficiently communal, or even actively sabotaging the effort.

In reality, it is a perfectly valid question, and if one approaches it seriously, it leads to a perfectly reasonable answer. At the time, Americans wondered why street activism had reached such a high point in Europe, especially in the German-speaking world, while it was almost entirely absent in the United States. Why was there no American Identitarian Movement? Conversely, many Europeans looked with envy at the viral online activism of the then-young MAGA movement. I explained this by pointing to demographic structure. Europe has roughly twice the population density of the United States; Germany’s is about seven times greater. That makes real-world organization considerably easier. By contrast, the English-language internet naturally provides a far larger market than that of any other language except Chinese. I predicted at the time that these differences would gradually diminish. Quite simply, as a movement grows, it can sustain forms of activism for which the underlying conditions are less than ideal.

By now, much has indeed converged online, and we are now witnessing Identitarian-style activism in the United States. At this point, I am prepared to make another prediction: Patriot Front will likely undergo many of the same experiences as the Identitarian Movement, above all the realization that this kind of activism quickly loses its impact. The period during which a demonstration or an occupation is enough to make national—or even international—headlines does not last long.

Even so, Patriot Front, which was founded in 2017 after the disastrous Charlottesville demonstration, is breaking through under very different circumstances from those facing the Identitarian Movement, founded in 2013, whose peak coincided with Patriot Front’s founding. It will be interesting to observe how these changed conditions, as well as the generational difference, shape its development. Rousseau’s speech would have been unimaginable in any broadly influential right-wing organization in 2017.

My essay from back then, written by an unknown European for an American audience, was never accepted for publication, so I am publishing it here for the first time, unchanged, in German translation. Since Substack does not allow for a sensible separation by language, I have since stopped publishing in English; for this text, however, I will make an exception. Otherwise, permit an intellectual the vanity of pointing out that he turned out to be right. More recently, I have once again been thinking about the impact of such structural factors on political work and organization, most recently in a lecture I gave last Saturday at Castel Aurora in Steyregg. It is a subject that will continue to occupy us.

To answer one final question: no, Thomas Rousseau is neither my long-lost twin nor my secret alter ego. Even so, I am flattered that people apparently cannot visually distinguish me from a 27-year-old.

Now, the 2018 essay:

Demography and Political Activism: Differences Between America and Europe

As a German identitarian who has followed the political development in the United States very closely for the last several years, the fractures within the American right-wing opposition have worried me for quite some time. The United States is, for reasons too numerous to list in this text, the most important battleground for the survival of the white race in general.

Nevertheless, I would never have thought of meddling in the internal politics of the American right, if not for an argument, voiced from time to time, mostly to insult the perceived incompetence of whomever the person in question disagrees with: “Look how these successful right-wing groups and political parties in Europe did it. You are doing the exact opposite!”

This dangerously misleading argument, I think, merits a reply by someone who knows the European situation firsthand. Albeit faced with similar political and demographic problems, there are vast structural differences between the strategic situations of right-wing activists in America and in Europe. Americans trying to copy successful European movements are therefore destined for failure.

In the following text, I’m going to analyze one of these differences, which is usually overlooked: the differences in both population size and density between Europe and the United States.

All of the facts my analysis is based upon are well known, but their consequences are hardly ever thought about. I will try to avoid doling out too much unwanted advice, since the whole point of this analysis is to convince those Americans looking to Europe for a solution to their problems to instead spend their time making the best of their quite unique situation.

Population Density and Real-Life Activism

While both are nearly equal in size (Europe: 3,930,000 sq mi; United States: 3,796,742 sq mi), Europe has more than twice the population density of the United States (Europe: 188 inhabitants per sq mi; United States: 85 inhabitants per sq mi). This is probably the fact most overlooked by those who want to copy European-style right-wing methods.

The implications of population density for political activism are huge, especially for right-wing activism, whose main target population lives disproportionately in rural areas. Because right-wing activists are a small minority among their peoples, high population density is of paramount importance to the success of their real-life activism. Be it for some PR stunt or for large demonstrations, you have to get enough people in one spot. You may think that you only need relatively few people, but in order to get those few people who are not just sharing our opinions but are willing to show their faces in front of cameras, you need areas with lots of people.

The protests in Chemnitz, which have drawn some attention in American right-wing circles, only got thousands of people onto the streets, thereby outnumbering the leftist counter-protesters, who were bussed in by the establishment, because lots of people from outside Chemnitz went there to join the protests. Some came for a weekend trip; most came just for the demonstration and drove home the same evening. It takes only three hours by car from Berlin to Chemnitz and one and a half hours from Dresden.

Another example: A week before the Chemnitz protests, the Identitarian Movement of Germany held a festival in Dresden. I and my identitarian group from Trier went by car to Dresden on Saturday morning, took part in the festival, and returned to Trier on Sunday evening. Trier is in the west of Germany, near the borders of Belgium, Luxembourg, and France. Dresden is in the east, near the Czech Republic. The lease for the car and the price of the gas added up to about €300—€60 (or $69) for each person. This is affordable for college students. To make it from Los Angeles to New York and back in one weekend, you’d have to fly, the traveling costs being about $500. Some well-earning folks in their forties might spend this much money to attend a conference, but young people simply lack the means to spend this much on political activism.

Leftist protesters against real-life right-wing events may be gutter punks, but oftentimes they don’t have to worry about traveling costs, for either the state (mostly through misused university funds) or some NGO will gladly pay the bill. On top of that, leftists are more concentrated in urban areas than rightists. Most readers will be familiar with the

map linked here. It shows the 2016 presidential election by county. The height of the columns represents the absolute number of votes cast in each county. It’s a few blue towers in a large red field. But the blue towers represent the metropolitan areas, where real-life activism has to take place to even get noticed by the larger public (without generating media attention by killing an obese Antifa woman).

It is well known in media theory that locations themselves have different degrees of newsworthiness, with large cities being more interesting than small hamlets. On top of that, the buildings and monuments with high symbolic value are almost all located in metropolitan areas.

Organization

Of course, core activists have to travel a lot more often than once or twice a year. Connecting groups from different cities and regions, building the all-essential face-to-face trust necessary for any real-life movement—all this necessitates a great deal of traveling.

Germany has a population density of 600.9 inhabitants per sq mi. This is more than three times the European average and seven times the population density of the United States. As a local identitarian leader, I can build a new identitarian chapter in a neighboring city. For every new prospective member, I go there to meet the person face to face. It is a one-and-a-half-hour trip in each direction. With the exception of beer and cigarettes, this recruitment procedure doesn’t cost me a cent. The train ride is still within the parameters under which a student from Trier can use his student ID as a ticket for public transportation.

Copying German or other European models of organizing political dissidence in the United States won’t be possible. It is worth mentioning that not just demographics, but also the party systems in most European countries are better suited to support real-life activism. Large party organizations and proportional representation make it easier to get infrastructure and jobs for the boys. European politics is also financed less through bribes from big donors and more through the legalized embezzlement of public money (aka “public funding of political parties and of organizations connected to political parties”), in which you are entitled to participate in proportion to your share of the vote.

The Economics of Online Activism

On the other hand, if we are speaking of Europe in a political sense, there is no such thing as a polity encompassing the continent’s 741 million inhabitants. There are, as of now, 50 sovereign states on the European continent, even if six of them aren’t universally recognized. This is the reason why online activism is far more advanced in the United States (and Canada) than anywhere in Europe, except perhaps the United Kingdom. I won’t go into social media here, but will instead look at the more traditional kinds of online media.

From an economic standpoint, writing is the easiest form of online activism. You can have a normal job and write (if necessary under a pseudonym) on your own schedule for some online outlet. Writing articles can be done to a surprisingly large extent by amateurs. Producing high-quality videos is an entirely different matter. The fact that video production takes a lot of time, expertise, and expensive equipment to do it properly is the least of the problems.

The market for videos is completely different from the one for texts. To publish texts professionally—meaning not on your personal blog—requires a publisher running an online magazine. These online magazines are, in many cases, the blogs of normal newspapers, journals, or publishing houses, functioning as continuous marketing operations for subscriptions or book sales.

Videos, on the other hand, have to finance themselves. There are hardly any equivalents of online magazines for this kind of media, either. If you are an aspiring author, you send your text to a renowned publisher, and if they consider you good enough, they will publish your work. Thereby you get access to their readership. This makes it possible for a talented amateur writer to write one or two articles per month and still get more than a handful of readers.

If you want to reach people via YouTube, you have to start from scratch, building your own base of viewers. The same goes, for the most part, for podcasts (in this case, the TRS Network is a notable exception). To build a fan base of your own, you have to publish very frequently. Becoming an e-celebrity and maintaining this status is difficult for somebody with a normal job. Of course, lots and lots of normal working people upload their material on YouTube, but good quality and a wide audience require the ability to make a living from this.

The English language provides online activists with a huge market of potential viewers, listeners, and readers. In addition to 360–400 million native speakers, there are 400 million second-language speakers and 600–700 million people who learned it as a foreign language. Lots of those in the second and third categories happen to be non-white, so it is not that easy to estimate the size of the potential market for English right-wing content. But it is safe to assume that it is at least half a billion people. Compare that to 95 million native German speakers worldwide and 80 million who learned it as a foreign language. Danish is the native language of 5.3 million people, and only 0.3 million people have learned it as a foreign language.

As is the case with real-life activism, you need the many to get the few: the viewers, readers, and listeners. From those few, you get the even fewer: those people who keep the whole online activism afloat—the donors and paywall subscribers.

German is the most spoken language in the European Union, but for a right-wing YouTube channel in Germany, it is quite impressive to get 50,000 subscribers. They are nowhere near the 800,000+ of people like Stefan Molyneux. Therefore, it is much more difficult to become a full-time right-wing advocate on YouTube. Consider this: 50,000 subscribers may be enough, depending on the average wealth and generosity of your viewers. But if the top YouTubers have 50,000 subscribers instead of 800,000, that means that the lesser ones have 5,000–15,000 instead of 50,000–100,000.

More abstractly formulated: With a smaller population, the effort-/talent-to-viewers curve flattens. This affects not just every online activist’s economies of scale; it affects the whole online community, reducing the effects of synergy. For example, the very successful format of rightist YouTube live talk shows, spearheaded by Andy Warski and Jean-François Gariépy, is practically non-existent in Germany. There are live streams, but no regular shows like this.

The reason is simple. Each week you would have to get three to five debaters of some internet fame on your show. You would need different debaters each week, and all of them would have to be available at the same time for at least one and a half hours. There are simply not enough YouTube celebrities on the German right to sustain such a format.

For the reasons outlined above, online activism is much more successful in the English-speaking parts of the world.

Conclusions

Demographics matter. This lesson is taught to us not just by the realities of a multicultural society. Demographic differences are an important reason why the dissident right in the United States looks so much different from its European counterparts. Of course, you can do real-life activism in the US, just as you can do online activism in Europe, but the relative importance of the two is different on both sides of the Atlantic. Internal dynamics necessarily reflect the relative importance of online versus real-life activism. People behave differently, whether they interact face-to-face or via the internet. This is just human nature, and there is nothing you can change about that.

These differences between the American and the European right might diminish over time, when our movements grow, thereby gaining the capacity to better sustain kinds of activism for which the respective countries are less than ideally suited. But in the meantime, “Look how the Europeans did it, you moron!” is to be taken with more than a grain of salt.

So much for my text from 2018. The longer I do this, the more interesting it becomes to look back and see which claims that one cast into the abyss of time have actually stood the test of time. By nature, I am not inclined toward excessive optimism, so a time capsule like this does not only show us which problems have remained with us, but also how far we have come since then.

50,000 subscribers on YouTube—that was once considered the pinnacle of success. This platform here, which makes it possible to publish independently, did not even exist back then. A great deal has happened in these interesting times of ours, in which we are either blessed or cursed to live.

(Lady Justice on Old Bailey, London: Lonpicman, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

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The occasion for this is a series of objections that lawyers have raised against the view that a European country could solve its immigration problems on its own at the national level. These objections are purely legal in nature. They have nothing to do with the logistical question of border protection. They are not aimed at the fact that a common European border protection would be more efficient than control at each individual national border. Nor do these objections arise because of international power politics, i.e., that a single European state that deviates from the liberal-Western line in immigration policy would be put under pressure from outside and therefore a European self-assertion through unification would be the basis for combating the migration problem.

Both arguments are raised elsewhere, and both deserve to be examined on their own merits. But that is for another time. The legal objection is in any case a different one. It states that immigration policy has already been Europeanized and therefore a different immigration policy can only be achieved at the European level. Anyone who claims to be able to pursue a national immigration policy is selling populist snake oil, making promises that he can never keep.

There is a superficial criticism of this objection that is wrong, but nevertheless immediately suggests itself and therefore deserves to be addressed: It says that the problem is only legally constructed in the first place. If immigration policy had been Europeanized as a field of jurisdiction, then it could just as easily be brought back to the national level. This would just be a question of the distribution of jurisdictions in the treaties of the European Union. If necessary, one could reclaim it as a sovereign state anyway.

Why this is shortsighted has been shown above all by Gerhard Vierfuß1, the lawyer who advised Martin Sellner on his remigration concept. The Europeanization of immigration policy should not be imagined as if somewhere in the Treaty of Maastricht or Lisbon it says: “Immigration policy is regulated by the European Union.” On the contrary: What we call the Europeanization of immigration policy is a whole mycelium of different treaty provisions, some of which, like the European Convention on Human Rights or the Geneva Refugee Convention, are outside the actual EU treaties. Then there are the human rights guarantees in the national constitutions themselves. In addition, there is the interlocking of many European migration regulations with intra-European freedom of movement and the common market.

But there is not only this web of substantive law that prevents an end to asylum immigration, but also in procedural law a web of jurisdictions. The most important ones are the European Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights. For members of the European Union, European law and decisions of the European Court of Justice are on principle superior to any national law.

There is therefore no simple, precise exit way, no abolition of a specific law, not even a constitutional amendment, which would allow the deportation of asylum seekers. As long as this mycelium of laws, treaties and jurisdictions remains intact, every member state of the EU and even some non-EU countries like Britain will remain obligated to grant every asylum seeker a procedure that in legal practice allows them to stay in the country for an indefinite period. In Germany we would have to withdraw not only from the European Convention on Human Rights, but also from the European Union, and even if some play with this Dexit idea, it would be politically unfeasible solely due to our economic entanglement with other European markets, not to mention the subsequent geopolitical isolation.

As a result, Vierfuß and a whole series of other right-wing lawyers argue for a European solution. For example, they support the Danish-Italian initiative to reform the European Convention on Human Rights. Well, there is nothing to object to the latter proposal. One could at most speak against it if it were to result in a further shift of national jurisdictions to the European level. But at present, it looks in no way like that.

But it is no coincidence that it is the lawyers who think and argue this way. That it is the lawyers who can only imagine a solution to the immigration question at the European level. In the legal debate on mass immigration, the direction of legal thinking becomes apparent. This direction runs from the smaller association to the larger one. Or more precisely: it shifts competencies to the respectively more comprehensive level. One could also say that legal thinking is by its nature against subsidiarity. Most people are probably familiar with the primacy of European law over the national law of the individual states in the European Union. Some criticize this precisely because this primacy was not laid down in any treaty, but was simply declared by the European Court of Justice. However, this is not a coup by the court against the sovereignty of the European nation-states. If it were, then we would not have this fundamental conflict with always the same solution in every kind of federal system. In the Federal Republic of Germany, federal law notoriously breaks state law. The history of the United States is a single textbook example of how, contrary to the best federal intentions, competencies are increasingly centralized. Fundamentally, a common legal space centralizes. Why?

This is because Hans Kelsen’s doctrine, according to which law is to be understood as a system of norms that refer to each other without contradiction2, is factually obvious nonsense, but as a fiction it is the basis of the everyday work of every lawyer. The lawyer must pretend as if it where like that. Because if he did not, then two equally justified claims could collide, and thus no judgment would be possible. Of course, even in a Kelsenian system, mutually exclusive claims can exist. This happens in every bankruptcy, since here the sum of the claims of all creditors simply cannot be paid from the bankruptcy estate, otherwise there would be no bankruptcy. But the judge must at least pretend that the law prescribes which claim has priority over which other claim. Otherwise, he would have to award the same good to several parties and thus render a judgment that contradicts itself.

For this reason, a common legal system like that of the European Union leads to lawyers resolving emerging contradictions between norms through the primacy of the law of the more comprehensive unit. This also follows Kelsenian logic. Kelsen was well aware that two norms can be in circulation at the same time that contradict each other. He tried to solve this problem through a hierarchization of norms, in which the higher norm annuls the lower norm in case of conflict. If in an intra-European legal dispute German law says one thing and Italian law says something else, then the only option left is to appeal to European law if one does not want to terminate the common legal system altogether.

So far, the legal logic. And this caveat is crucial. This is the purely legal logic of a “pure theory of law.” From here, one could ask the question why we have not yet arrived at a world state. This is not a rhetorical question. The lawyers who devised the Charter of the United Nations wanted exactly that to a good part, and to this day there is a not insignificant number of doctrinaires of UN international law who demand exactly that.

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The reasons for this are intuitively clear to everyone. Capturing them cleanly is much more difficult. Because it is not one reason, but a thousand reasons. It is not the case that the will for freedom of the peoples alone prevents the world state, otherwise there would never have been a multi-ethnic state. It is also not solely due to the special interests of the elite structures in the individual states, otherwise several states would never have united, as in 1776 or 1871. If one wants to summarize these thousand reasons, then only the word frictions remains, in the plural, and in the same meaning in which Carl von Clausewitz uses this word in his theory of war: As the set of all reasons that prevent things from proceeding in reality as they do in theory. Such frictions cause a reduction in efficiency compared to the theoretical value.

That is at least the case in most instances. It should be said that in social systems, there can in principle also be something that we could call anti-friction: that is, efficiency-enhancing factors not considered in the theoretical planning. This is because social systems consist of independently acting agents. To stick with a military example: During the Afghanistan war, the Bundeswehr procurement office had not provided a sufficient number of targeting scopes. In a then-famous case, a soldier ordered a corresponding scope for €89.90 from online retailer Tchibo. That was anti-friction against the frictions in the Bundeswehr procurement office.

But what we see in this example is that anti-friction is much more likely on a small scale than on a large one. It is more likely that an individual soldier will privately buy missing equipment than, for example, the non-commissioned officers at the location organizing a collective order.

With that, we are already close to the reason why societal frictions counteract the legal tendency toward the universal state. Since I am not free from vanity, I would like to henceforth refer to this reason as Poensgen’s Law of Societal Friction:

Theorem: If two organizations differ only in the number of their members, then there are more frictions per member in the larger organization3 than in the smaller one.

Proof:

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(Lady Justice on Old Bailey, London: Lonpicman, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

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(Table for lethal injections: Ken Piorkowski, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

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What we see on the video of Iryna Zarutska’s murder is hard to bear. And I consider myself one of the more callous contemporaries in that regard. Why this particular murder had an effect that tens of thousands before it did not? Only the gods of the algorithm know. Yet we do know why this murder could have such an impact: because it stands for tens of thousands of others.

Taking a life for a life seems, in the face of such senseless brutality, the only right thing to do. When one then learns that the perpetrator had been arrested 14 times, spent five years in prison for armed robbery, the question inevitably arises whether this could not have been resolved earlier.

The very thought of a bureaucracy decreeing a person’s death makes my stomach turn. And even if lawyers are eager to see it differently: a court is bureaucratic institution. One of the basic features of bureaucratic institutions is that officials have little to no personal stake in the consequences of their decisions—no “skin in the game.” Courts are designed this way quite deliberately; it is no design flaw, no unintended side effect. No civil servant is more shielded from the consequences of his actions than the judge. This is called judicial independence and is a technical necessity of the office. Without it, impartiality is simply impossible. But at the same time, it means that the judge—especially the criminal judge—decides over human fate without being personally invested. This, as said, is necessary.

Concerning capital punishment, however, this detachment of the judge gives the act its special character, setting it apart from all other killings. There are many reasons to kill a person: revenge, anger, necessity, hatred, greed, error, enmity. Good or bad, heroic or cowardly—each of these reasons is in some way an expression of the struggle, which is life itself. The judge, by contrast, orders a killing through the application of a paragraph. He stays outside of the story of that killing. Death sentence and execution are administrative acts of the state—the Leviathan, which, whatever its advantages, by its very nature degrades the humans living within it to units of administration, even if it elevates “human dignity” to the rank of a fundamental constitutional right.

The act of execution, the bureaucratic killing of a human being by official decree, has always aroused far greater unease than killing itself. The soldier is a hero. The hangman an outcast. So it has always been, especially in the early modern period, when the death penalty reached its peak in European criminal law. The profession of executioner formally belonged to the dishonorable trades. In many towns, it was held in personal union with that of the knacker, the disposer of animal carcasses. Socially, most executioners stood closer to the condemned they executed than to the bourgeois society that offloaded this task onto them. This is one of the most disturbing aspects of the death penalty. The principle that the one who pronounces the sentence must also swing the sword exists only in fantasy novels. All real societies in history have shifted executions onto social outcasts and people whose lives had already been destroyed by some tragedy or another.

That has not changed to this day. In the United States, the identities of execution team members are secret. In 2006, however, Missouri’s staff list was leaked. The doctor responsible for administering the lethal injection was dyslexic and had more than 20 malpractice suits against him. Other members had similar backgrounds. In 2009, the state reacted to the scandal by criminalizing the publication of such information.

The bourgeois citizen demands that “justice be served,” but carrying out what he declares to be justice he cannot stomach doing that. Hence all those contraptions, from the gallows to the guillotine to the lethal injection, designed to automate execution. This has nothing to do with efficiency. Crushing a skull doesn’t take any longer. It serves only psychological distancing. And while in the past religion and concern for the condemned’s soul offered a cope, modern states have instead fixated on keeping the entire process as hidden as possible1.

Bureaucratic procedure and flight from responsibility are essential features of the death penalty. In a modern administrative state, which is and must be a managerial state, these features are even more pronounced than in times past. Yet as much as this bureaucratic killing repels us, one cannot deny this much: as the thing it is—as an administrative measure—it is very effective. What we call crime-fighting is, in reality, crime management, albeit with the goal of reducing that which is managed. Policing is applied statistics. It is about lowering crime rates, and it is a truism that the best way to do so is by eliminating criminals.

A long-term Swedish study in 20132 found that 1% of the population accounted for 63% of all violent crimes. The study concluded:

“The vast majority of violent crimes are perpetrated by a small number of persistent violent offenders, almost all males, who have an early onset of violent criminality and display substance use problems, personality disorders, and nonviolent criminality. These findings support the provision of far-reaching interventions among young individuals who have committed one or two violent crimes and are at risk of developing persistent violent criminal behavior. ”

The latter is precisely what early modern criminal law did, where “far-reaching interventions” after one or two violent crimes—or even other offenses—consisted of execution, often at a young age. That not only eliminated an offender who, with high probability, would have committed another crime at some point. Unlike the alternative solution of mass incarceration, it also avoided the problem of prison gangs, which in every modern state form a separate criminal ecosystem—especially in the United States, where, despite capital punishment still being on the books in most states, mass incarceration has largely replaced the death penalty as a method of crime prevention. One in 200 Americans lives behind bars. That prevents the worst, but you cannot deny that the death penalty is a more efficient method of crime control.

Schattenmacher3 recently even made the return to high execution figures the benchmark of a “happening” real change, as opposed to the endless outrage over senseless brutality. His unsurprising conclusion: This is unlikely. In the short term, yes, but in the long run? The greater the crime problem grows through an imported underclass, the more likely it is that administrative pragmatism will prevail over human revulsion and the will to deny the Leviathan direct authority over the life and death of its administered masses. Some may see this as a return to the historical norm. But it will cost us yet another piece of what it means to be human.

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(Table for lethal injections: Ken Piorkowski, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

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(Picture: Midjourney)

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The dispute over what is actually right-wing is not (!) as old as the Right itself. Instead it is one that has increased in intensity and decreased in clarity over time. In the beginning, it was quite clear. The Right stood for the social order from the time before the French Revolution. The Right was for throne and altar. In fact, one would hardly have used this term independently back then. One was a conservative, or in the language of the opponent: a reactionary.

Today, people call themselves right-wing, and they write philosophical treatises about what this right-wing is, without arriving at a reasonable result. The reason for this is very simple: The Right is nothing in itself. The Right is not the Left. The Right is negatively defined, and the Left was already there long before the Right. But both are the product of a transitional period.

When we draw the broad lines of our era, we tend to forget that we are living in a historical transitional period, the likes of which last occurred five millennia ago. Back then, the first high cultures of the agrarian age emerged. In a relatively short time, not agriculture itself developed—that is older—but something less tangible yet equally significant: organization beyond local settlements in the first empires on the Nile and Euphrates. Enabled by writing and, through writing, by administration. When cuneiform was deciphered, romantics expected to read the oldest poetry in the world, religious seekers hoped for secrets from the time of the creation of the Bible. Instead, museums' storage halls house several hundred tons of baked clay inventory lists, invoices, and complaint letters. The poetic and religious romantics were disappointed, but these prosaic relics testify to much more than a poem about Moses' exodus from Egypt.

These invoices and inventory lists are the material remnants of a way of organizing human coexistence that, in its basic features, did not change from the days of King Narmer to those of Frederick the Great: A broad base of rural population, at least 80 percent of the total population, works in food production. This makes large landowners the dominant social class. As an estate with its own customs and culture, these landowners develop into the nobility. The rural population generates a modest agricultural surplus that feeds the cities with their artisans. These cities are also home to the comparatively tiny number of magistrates, merchants, and priests, who are indispensable for materially and spiritually organizing this society—many times more complex than the preceding village and tribal communities. And they do this with the help of writing, without which none of it would have been possible. Even the more abstract institutions of this agrarian age, such as theology or credit, are all demonstrable in antiquity. How quickly this change occurred back then exactly can no longer be said with certainty today due to sources almost not existing, but it must have been a matter of a few generations, not a slow development over many centuries or even millennia. Even if we are wont to throw around such numbers when talking about in the furthest past. I consider it not unlikely that there were people who were born as inhabitants of a village by the river and died as subjects of the god-king Horus of Upper and Lower Egypt.

What triggered our change of an era? Was it, as Rolf Peter Sieferle wrote, the use of energy sources not dependent on the current photosynthesis on this planet, or something else? This is a question we do not need to answer here. What is certain is that we are living through this monumental change or, if the technical change is now slowing down again, as some believe it does, we have just left it behind.

The political directions of the Left and the Right are fundamentally tied to this turn of an era. They only arose when the old, organically grown social orders were no longer sustainable. This raised the question: "How shall we shape our society?"

To anyone for whom this question seems very left-wing, reminding them of the babble from university politics, they are correct. This question was only raised because, with the end of agrarian society, a space suddenly opened up that was not filled by orders that had arisen through long social evolution. The Enlightenment thinkers believed that an age of obscurantism was finally coming to an end and that people, now finally making use of their own reason, would suddenly recognize that there was no rational justification for the rule of monarchs or the privileges of the nobility. This image has persisted even among reactionary opponents, who then saw in this use of one's own reason human hubris against an eternal order ordained by God. Even in conservative lamentations about the disenchantment of the world, this reactionary error has persisted. Ironically, this granted the revolutionary order, which soon settled down in moderation as the liberal order, an equal standing with the traditional order that the former does not deserve. For the traditional order was not the result of a rationalistic social experiment, but the result of social evolution, of trial and error over centuries and millennia. As long as the basic conditions of its existence in the agrarian age persisted, these organically arisen societies were vastly superior to any artificial construction. But to the extent that humanity left the agrarian age behind, they became obsolete and untenable.

This created space for rationally devised social concepts. Of these, the Left one, based on the legal equality of all people, is the most easy to intellectually convey. This concept leads to the idea of the social contract. The social contract starts from a set of equal people who conclude a contract with each other that founds society. That this contract conclusion never actually took place was, of course, already clear to Hobbes and Locke, but the social contract was not meant to describe the practical founding of a state, as was the goal of Machiavelli's writings, but to provide its ethical justification, actually its justification in natural law. According to this idea, people have certain rights by nature, and based on these natural rights, society is legally constructed. Anyone who has read the contract theorists of the Baroque will notice that they argue in a formal, legalistic way. The social contract and thus the powers of the state are founded through transfers of rights, whose legality is examined, as every law student still learns today. For example, no one can transfer a right that he did not have in the first place. This leads to difficulties, for instance, in justifying the death penalty if one—like Locke—rejects the right to suicide.

In some form or another, the ethical justifications of all left-wing theories are variations of the social contract. There are leftist social theories that dispense with a fundamental justification of their goals and simply presuppose the value of their slogans. And because in intellectual history there is nothing that does not exist, there are even leftist theories that explicitly reject natural law, but then suddenly make a fuss about human rights. But all left social theory that attempts to cleanly justify its goals is based on the social contract. Even the "veil of ignorance" of the American ethicist John Rawls is a conceptual aid with which the question is to be answered as to which social contract is the just one, by placing us in the hypothetical situation where we do not know what position we will occupy in society. From Hobbes to Rawls, however, the core assumption of all these intellectual edifices is the legal equality of humans.

This idea of the legal equality of all human beeings is not ín itself new. From antiquity through Mazdak, who preached the community of goods and women in 6th-century Persia, to the Peasants' Wars, it has repeatedly arisen throughout history. Christianity alone has produced countless sects that preached the equality of people. Contrary to the progressive view of history, no special progress, no enlightenment, was needed for people to ask the question: "When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?" And back then as today, no, back then far more than today, hardly anyone could give a rational answer to it.

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(Picture: Midjourney)

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(Photo montage: Fragen zur Zeit; Map: Виктор В, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons; Nuclear Hazard: MaxxL, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

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Who you consider the "good" or "bad" actor in the Middle East is largely irrelevant for assessing the strategic situation. The reality is this: Israel possesses nuclear weapons and reserves the right to attack its neighboring states, far beyond just Iran. These attacks extend to outright state terrorism, such as the airstrike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus on April 1, 2024, the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh during a diplomatic visit in Tehran on July 31, 2024, or the recent strikes on Iranian leadership.

In terms of global politics, this state terrorism is far more dangerous than the genocide in Gaza. One may be morally outraged about the latter, but the harsh reality is that Israel can eradicate the Palestinians without them having any meaningful means to resist. There’s a reason state terrorism is relatively rare, despite the considerable damage it can inflict, as Israel has demonstrated. That reason isn’t moral restraint. It’s the fact that the other side can retaliate, and defending against terrorism executed by professional intelligence services is extraordinarily difficult. Especially when it comes to assassinations of leadership, defense against a modern adversary becomes a nightmare. Just ask those who’ve gone up against the mafia and live under police protection, a life barely less restrictetd than in jail. A state intelligence service has even far greater logistical and technological capabilities. Nowadays, a sniper isn’t even necessary. A drone can be positioned near a target’s home, activated remotely after the assassin is long gone, with the target’s location confirmed electronically or via satellite. To be safe from such threats, one would have to live in a bunker. This is likely why Iranian personnel were unprotected: even generals and nuclear program engineers want to spend time with their families. This is why mutual assassinations are rare, even among bitterly hostile states. They haven’t occurred in the Russia-Ukraine war, for instance. Just because some people asked about the difference between Israeli an Russian actions, as of late.

Israel is the only country in its region with a nuclear deterrent. Its enemies must therefore factor in the possibility that Israel could escalate to nuclear annihilation in response to their actions. Israel wouldn’t do so lightly, but what if it lost a missile and drone exchange? For Iran, the problem is that any retaliation to an Israeli attack carries the risk of total annihilation.

Iran is in a difficult position. Diplomatically, it relies on Russian and Chinese goodwill almost as much as Israel depends on American support. Neither Russia nor China wants to expand the nuclear club. An Iranian nuclear bomb would trigger a nuclear arms race, at least in Saudi Arabia and Turkey, if not across the entire region. Iran’s solution has been to forgo building a nuclear weapon while maintaining the capacity to quickly develop one if necessary. This isn’t unusual.

Building a nuclear warhead is no longer difficult. The technology is 80 years old. Most developed countries could do so relatively quickly, and the NPT guarantees every member state the right to a civilian nuclear program, which can always provide the material for nuclear armament. The real challenge lies in delivery systems. But any well-equipped military today possesses these, at least for medium-range capabilities, due to the increased precision of modern ballistic missiles. Ballistic missiles, with their high terminal velocity and altitude, are by far the most reliable delivery system for nuclear warheads and the backbone of any nuclear deterrent. During the Cold War, they were so imprecise that only nuclear warheads made sense as payloads. With a nuclear weapon, missing the target by a few hundred meters is not a big deal. Non-nuclear states therefor often lacked such systems. Germany’s Bundeswehr, for example, still doesn’t have them. But the Ukraine war has shown that modern medium-range ballistic missiles are precise enough for conventional use. A modern army without them has a significant capability gap. In Iran, such missiles have long been a key part of military doctrine and bore the brunt of all strikes against Israel. Even without considering Iran, these technological advancements have made nuclear non-proliferation harder to maintain.

Iran’s status as a near-nuclear power has created a certain balance, as evidenced by the fact that this solution to the Iranian-Israeli conflict has held for two decades. It’s always shaky to retroactively apply theories to past events, but I’d wager that Israel and the U.S. also had strong incentives to exercise restraint toward Iran. A series of conventional attacks failing to destroy Iran’s nuclear program would push Iran to build a bomb, giving it justification before its Russian and Chinese patrons. Israel would then face the choice of launching a nuclear strike, becoming a global pariah, or tolerating a rival with its own nuclear deterrent. From this perspective, the status quo was a tolerable situation for Israel.

Much has changed in both Israel and the U.S. I don’t have to say much about America ant this point, just yesterday, the Democratic House Speaker from Minnesota was assassinated after voting with Republicans against healthcare for illegal immigrants. In Israel, Netanyahu, after multiple government crises, elections, and an ongoing corruption trial, leads a coalition of seven parties, relying on religious extremists and ultra-Zionists to stay in power and out of jail. In his war, he’s not only starving Gaza but has occupied parts of Syria beyond the Golan Heights, up to 20 km from Damascus.

In recent negotiations, American officials have either fully aligned with Netanyahu’s demand for the complete dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program like special envoy Steve Witkoff and Secretary of State Marco Rubio or, as shown in documents available to Axios1, at least insisted on severe restrictions. This is unacceptable to Iran and upends the previous balance, especially since the U.S., during Trump’s first term, already tore up its predecessor’s nuclear deal with Iran, shredding its credibility.

This has brought the balance—Israel’s sole nuclear deterrence alongside Iran’s nuclear program—to a knife’s edge. If Iran builds a bomb, Turkey and Saudi Arabia will follow, collapsing the non-proliferation regime in the Middle East and perhaps beyond. Ironically, Israel, which never signed the NPT, is leveraging the potential collapse of the non-proliferation regime it’s causing. Netanyahu can tell Western leaders that either Iran must be swiftly subdued or the non-proliferation regime is at risk. European countries could conceivably withdraw conventional support from Israel, but they are secondary at best. In the U.S., Trump needs at least 50 Republican senators to pass his reconciliation bill and keep the government afloat. With 53 Republicans in the Senate, the Israel lobby has more than enough power to derail his presidency. No U.S. president could withdraw support from Israel.

As long as Israel is supported with the conventional capacity to attack Iran, it can continue its current policy, where an Iran without a nuclear deterrent faces the prospect of nuclear annihilation in every escalation. One needn’t sympathize with the Islamic Republic to see that this is not a stable situation.

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(Photo montage: Fragen zur Zeit; Map: Виктор В, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons; Nuclear Hazard: MaxxL, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

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(Photo composition: Fragen zur Zeit; Elon Musk: Prime Minister's Office (GODL-India), GODL-India <https://data.gov.in/sites/default/files/Gazette_Notification_OGDL.pdf>, via Wikimedia Commons; Jewgeni Prigoschin: Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation (passport)PLATEL (restoration), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; Hintergrund: ADARSHluck, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons)

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Elon Musk has reached the next station of his Prigozhin arc. He has apologized to Trump. The contradiction remains unresolved. How it will end is uncertain.

There are more similarities between Elon Musk and Yevgeny Prigozhin than just the fact that both, at some point, turned against their masters with loud accusations of malice and incompetence. Indeed, the parallels, despite all superficial differences, are striking. Both were brought in as outsiders by a chief of state during a crisis of government institutions. Only the scale with Musk is vastly larger. What Wagner did for the Russian army, DOGE was supposed to do for the entire American government: accomplish a task that government institutions, due to their internal structure, were incapable of handling. However, while the regular Russian army soon adapted to the demands of the Ukrainian battlefield, there is not the slightest indication that the Washington swamp is making even the smallest effort to get its spending problem under control.

Thus, there is a significant difference between Musk and Prigozhin. Both Putin and Trump got rid of their man at the behest of the apparatus to avoid making enemies of the officials in state institutions for the sake of a favorite. But Putin cut Prigozhin loose after he had accomplished his given task. Trump, because he abandoned the goal of somehow curbing the rampant national debt. Trump is lucky that, just now in Los Angeles, some illegal immigrants threatened with deportation—along with, above all, left-wing professional protesters—are causing a ruckus. This allows him to distract from the fact that the second Trump administration has just thrown in the towel on one of its two most important goals. On the immigration issue, despite all the tough talk, they’ve also hit a dead end. Trump is arguing with provincial judges over the deportation of illegals. White Americans will inevitably become a minority under Donald Trump’s course. Behind this looms the big question:

Whoever comes to power must govern. But how? In the rift between Elon Musk and Donald Trump, the threads of two crises intertwine into a Gordian knot of impossibilities. On one hand, mass immigration. Its core lies in the fact that immigrants acquire personal rights to stay, and under conditions of political normality, it is always far more difficult to get them out of the country than it is for the migration lobby to bring new immigrants in1. The other great crisis, addressed here, is public finances. The problem, as Musk noted on his way out and as anyone has known for decades, is only secondarily the nominal national debt, which in the U.S. currently stands at $36.2 trillion, but rather the obligations from pensions, healthcare, and social security. According to a calculation by Jagadeesh Gokhale and Kent Smetters from the University of Pennsylvania, this implicit national debt amounts to a staggering $65.7 trillion2. Combined with the $36.2 trillion in explicit national debt, we arrive at $101.9 trillion3. Musk was supposed to save $2 trillion per year through DOGE. That’s the scale that would be necessary. DOGE has so far achieved $180 billion. Not only is that far too little, but it’s also being more than offset by spending elsewhere. In fact, new borrowing under Trump in 2025, as of April 2025, is $1,051 billion, about 22 percent higher than under Biden in the same month the previous year4.

Implicit national debt, by the way, has a peculiarity compared to explicit national debt: since many of these benefit obligations are tied to inflation in one way or another, implicit national debt can only be inflated away to a limited extent. All claims to certain material benefits, like medical care or nursing, are based on the price of those services anyway, without needing to calculate any inflation rates. While inflation doesn’t improve anyone’s standard of living except for a few profiteers and parasites, it has a crucial advantage for politicians: it just happens. No one has to stand up and make the decision to take something away from someone. This also means: more than any other type of debt, implicit debt endangers political stability. Not all debts are equal. Inflation, as long as it’s not galloping inflation, has the political advantage of avoiding a clear conflict point that could destabilize the system. If, instead, it becomes necessary to publicly negotiate at a specific point in time who will lose what, that’s the occasion for revolutions.

With a shrinking demography, government cannot pay what it has promised. Even less can it deliver the actual goods services expected. $36.2 trillion, or $65.7 trillion, or $101.9 trillion are numbers that no one can truly comprehend. Gokhale and Smetters have kindly converted this into the additional net tax burden over the lifetime of an average 20-year-old American. The net tax burden is the tax burden minus the benefits received from the state. On average, for a 20-year-old American today, this amounts to $132,000. That’s how much they’ll have to pay over their lifetime. If you include the implicit national debt and assume it will be financed solely through higher taxes, this net tax burden for today’s 20-year-old would have to rise to $426,000! That’s an increase of 223%!

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(Photo composition: Fragen zur Zeit; Elon Musk: Prime Minister's Office (GODL-India), GODL-India <https://data.gov.in/sites/default/files/Gazette_Notification_OGDL.pdf>, via Wikimedia Commons; Jewgeni Pr…

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(Flagge Oranias: Vectorebus, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons)

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Since the left has saturated the public sphere with their sanctimonious phrases, the bad habit of adopting this language out of convenience has taken hold. So, when talking about the plight of South African Boers, a plight for which the Western countries are indeed partly responsible, as they dismantled the white republic, people speaks of genocide.

What is happening in South Africa is not a genocide, even though the grotesque scale of everyday violence might have the effect of driving the Boers out of their country.

What is happening in South Africa is simultaneously milder and far worse than genocide. It is not as if the government under Cyril Ramaphosa is systematically murdering or planning to murder the white population. This restraint may be due to the fact that Nelson Mandela’s successors are incapable of systematically planing or doing anything. Nevertheless, a genocide in the way Western observers usually understand this term, is not taking place in South Africa. Over the past decade, an average of about 50–100 out of every hundred thousand white farmers have been murdered each year. For comparison, in Germany during the same period, the general murder rate was less than one per hundred thousand.

It is difficult to find an appropriate term for whatever is happening in South Africa. I have called it racial-communist anarcho-tyranny; Carl Benjamin has tried the term stochastic terrorism. Perhaps someone will come up with something better. On one hand, there are the Economic Freedom Fighters, a black party with round about 10 percent support, openly calling for mass murder. This allows the ruling ANC, the African National Congress, Mandela’s old party, to present itself as the moderates, even as it expropriates white farmers without compensation.

The expropriations, however, are only the tip of the iceberg. The country has a multitude of racial laws targeting whites. Most of them are economic laws. The country openly practices something called Black Economic Empowerment. This is a points system where a company earns more points the more black employees it has and the higher the proportion of black ownership. For many business dealings, especially those involving the government, a certain number of points is required. In practice, this means a white person needs a black business partner who, in the best case, does nothing except being black to meet the quota but still he needs to be paid. The ANC uses this system to place its cronies in positions and sinecures at the expense of whites. It is understandable that under these circumstances, more and more Boers are leaving the country where their ancestors have lived for a longer time than the current Bantu majority. As a result, racial-communist anarcho-tyranny does indeed lead to violent ethnic displacement.

If a conventional genocide were taking place in South Africa, it would be relatively easy to address. Think whatever you will of the United Nations, but you could bring the issue before the Security Council, impose sanctions, send blue helmets, and, if all else fails, overthrow the government with a so-called humanitarian intervention. Unfortunately, it is not that simple.

Currently, a very telling defense of the South African government is making the rounds: After Donald Trump put the issue on the international agenda, the usual suspects are now fact-checking the claim that a genocide of whites is taking place there. Of course, they say, there is no genocide; South Africa simply has high crime rates, and besides, one must understand that whites are so much wealthier than blacks. Inadvertently, these people hit the nail on the head. South Africa has one of the highest murder rates in the world. These murder rates are at least as much due to the incompetence of the black government as to its malice. The economic strangulation of whites stems from the government’s corruption. And that does indeed have something to do with wealth distribution, only the wealth wasn’t distributed by Santa Claus.

Whites in South Africa are many times more productive than blacks. As a result, they act on South Africa’s political system like foreign aid or an oil discovery in other Third World countries. They function as an external source of wealth. As long as a country generates its own wealth, however well or poorly, the status of elites depends on their role in the country’s economic activities. But when great wealth comes from outside, you become rich by appropriating this unearned wealth. Wealth that a country does not generate itself makes the fight for its distribution the main focus of politics. Total corruption is the only possible outcome.

For Palladium, Lawrence Thomas has described how South African politics since the end of apartheid has become a struggle for such sinecures. However, he places too much emphasis on the ANC having been influenced in the past by communism from the Eastern Bloc. The bigger problem lies in the current incentive structures. For a black government in South Africa, there is nothing more lucrative than plundering the whites. Thomas calls for the overthrow of the ANC. But any black government would become like the ANC.

There are essentially two options. A return to white rule is unacceptable to blacks for reasons of pride, even if they would be materially better off under it. The other solution is a Boer state.

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(Flagge Oranias: Vectorebus, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons)

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(Montage: Fragen zur Zeit; Revolution 1848: See page for author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; Reichsgründung 1871: Anton von Werner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

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Politically, our people is organized in the state, not in families, clans, or religious communities. This simple fact means that all attempts to separate the civic nation (Staatsvolk) from the ethnic nation (ethnisches Volk) and to reabsorb the latter into society are doomed to fail. Why would anyone even try to do this? The reason for such considerations is that the alignment of the ethnic nation with the civic nation has been identified by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the courts as a pivotal point for a potential ban procedure against the AfD. The core of this argumentation can be found on page 114 of the version of the secret report published by Junge Freiheit regarding the classification of the AfD as confirmed right-wing extremist1:

“The concept of the ethnic nation is based on the distinction between a civic nation composed of German nationals and an ethnically defined nation, which leads to not all German nationals being regarded as members of the German nation.”

Paul Strieder has described the “logic”2 outlined in this passage as the core of what he sees as the problematic identification of the ethnic nation with the civic nation in the nation-state. His solution lies in separating the state from the nation, as he believes was the case before modernity. According to him and Maximilian Krah, the ethnic German nation could then exist as a mere societal phenomenon without coming into conflict with the rights of non-German citizens of the Federal Republic.

As always, when the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution targets the AfD with the concept of the ethnic nation in mind, discussions flare up about whether one could somehow circumvent this central issue of our time. I have outlined the fundamental problem sufficiently3: the moment a democratic constitutional state allows mass immigration, liberal immigration policy is transformed into the personal rights of individuals. The individual immigrant gains a right to residency. If, at some point, someone naturalizes him under any circumstances, it becomes nearly impossible to get rid of him within the legal system.

Now, two things are true at the same time:

First: Whoever accepts this hands to the operators of population replacement a ratchet that they will keep tightening, which can only be stalled for a limited time but never loosened. In the process, the national foundation of the democratic nation-state, without which it cannot exist, erodes. At best, what would emerge is a state as a ruling construct based on the inertia of mere legality, which would eventually fall apart in bloody pieces.

Second: According to prevailing jurisprudence, the concept of the ethnic nation is grounds for a ban if it leads in any way to the preferential legal treatment of ethnic Germans over citizens of non-German ethnicities. In this, Maximilian Krah is simply correct.

However, it is crucial to note that this prevailing legal opinion stems from the political realities of the existing multiethnic society, not from constitutional paragraph-juggling. “The prophecies of what the courts will do in fact, and nothing more pretentious, are what I mean by the law,” said the American constitutional judge Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. In the sense of legal realism, Jakob Maria Mierscheid4 has analyzed the prospects of a ban procedure against the AfD better than I could. My aim in the following section is solely to highlight how little the demand for a party ban is based on legal logic and how much it stems from the political situation of the current powerholders. In fact, it would be difficult, based solely on the constitution, to derive grounds for a ban even from a demand for denaturalization based on ethnic criteria or the retroactive revocation of naturalizations. However, I would advise against taking the following argument before a current German court:

The party ban is regulated in Article 21 of the German Constitution, the Basic Law or Grundgesetz, a designation originally invented to highlight the provisional nature of the order created in West Germany after the Second World War, which nevertheless, as most provisional arrangements has proven to be quite permanent and is at least since the reunification of Germany in 1990 de facto the constitution of the Federal Republic. The decisive section is Section 2, which reads:

“Parties that, by their aims or the behavior of their supporters, seek to impair or abolish the free democratic basic order or endanger the existence of the Federal Republic of Germany are unconstitutional.”

The free democratic basic order (freiheitliche demokratische Grundordnung) refers here to the preceding Article 20. To “this order” in paragraph 4 for which, in case someone should try to abolish it, the Basic Law provides a right of resistance to every German. Such a right of resistance can hardly be arbitrarily applied to any sections of the Basic Law. Neither discrimination, nor the position on citizenship law, nor even the guarantee of human dignity from Article 1 is listed as grounds for a party ban. There are other articles of the Basic Law that prohibit ethnic discrimination and denaturalization, but these are neither mentioned in Article 21, Section 2, nor do they fall under the eternity clause, which protects Articles 1 and 20 under Article 79, Section 3.

By constantly referring to human dignity, our opponents, by the way, show how shaky the demand for an AfD ban would be, even if they were factually correct in all their claims about what the AfD stands for. I am honestly surprised that this is so rarely noted in analyses on our side. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the compliant judiciary argue as follows: the concept of the ethnic nation demands the discrimination or denaturalization of non-German citizens of the Federal Republic, and this discrimination or denaturalization violates their human dignity, which in turn justifies a ban.

This argumentation has three awkward leaps: The first, and by far the simplest to overcome, is that someone who politically refers to the concept of the ethnic nation thereby intends to discriminate against members of other ethnic groups. This is understandable insofar as any political organization representing the interests of its members tries to secure rights and privileges for them. These rights and privileges come at the expense of others, who are then discriminated against. The current preferential treatment of all sorts of minorities follows exactly the same pattern. The second leap, that discrimination—i.e., legal differentiation between people—constitutes a violation of human dignity, is absurd because every legal system, at all times, discriminates between people in some way. The question is only on what criteria and with what consequences. And no one would seriously claim that people without German citizenship lack human dignity. If they did, it would imply a right to German citizenship for the entire world.

However, even if one were to accept this premise, the goal of violating human dignity is still not listed as a ground for prohibition in Article 21, Section 2. This was not simply forgotten but has a good reason: human dignity is a very vague term. Courts have considerable leeway in interpreting it. This vagueness can be quite useful when understanding the right to human dignity, as provided in the Basic Law Articel 1, as an individual’s defensive right against the state. In that case, Article 1 enables courts to issue rulings against severe forms of state abuse of power when such abuse does not literally violate the specifically defined fundamental rights in Articles 2–19. Article 1 serves as a catch-all for anything either overlooked in the other fundamental rights or not regulated in detail. Therefore, its classic fields of application are, on the one hand, issues related to the detention of prisoners or inmates of psychiatric institutions. If these were to be written into the Basic Law, it would consist of two-thirds administrative instructions for prison guards and psychiatrists. On the other hand, it applies to issues like gene therapy, which arise due to new technologies that could not have been anticipated when the Basic Law was drafted in 1949. Thus, it is left to the discretion of judges to determine on a case-by-case basis what is considered consistent with human dignity and what is not. However, if Article 1 is used as the basis for banning a political organization, its nature changes from an individual’s defensive right against the state to a legal basis for state repression, opening the door to arbitrariness. This is especially true if one follows the bastardized Kantian interpretation of human dignity, which current jurisprudence and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution rely on. They see human dignity as being violated by using a person as a means or by subordinating the individual to a collective.5 The latter is the basis of all politics, and the former is constantly done by every administration. By these standards, every real existing system violates human dignity. The accusation of unconstitutionality here takes on the logic of a puritanical morality trial, where the only thing that matters is who is the accuser and who is the accused, because by the standards applied, everyone is guilty. If one accepted the violation of human dignity as a legitimate ground for banning a party, the AfD, once in power, could have all its current competitors banned based solely on their stance on abortion or their attempts to bully people into accepting prophylactic gene therapy not so long ago. Both could be construed as violating human dignity with at least the same plausibility as ethnic discrimination.

The reason our opponents constantly refer to human dignity is that Article 1, the article in the Basic Law that guarantees human dignity, like Article 20, is subject to the eternity clause, allowing it to be rhetorically linked to Article 20, which is referenced in Article 21, Section 2, when talking about the free democratic basic order. The entire prohibition rhetoric works with such three-cornered chains of association. A rather comical example of this shoddy argumentation can be found on page 111 of the secret report:

“Article 1, Paragraph 1 of the Basic Law postulates human dignity as the highest value of the constitution. Central to the concept of human dignity are the chara of each individual as a subject with a corresponding claim to respect, as well as equality, which is reflected in legal equality.

Incompatible with human dignity are, for example, ethno-nationalist, xenophobic, anti-minority, anti-Muslim, anti-Islamic, and anti-Semitic positions.”

An undigested chunk of Kantian ethics (the quality of each individual as a subject) is regurgitated with a vague demand for equality, which is supposed to establish legal equality, though it is unclear what kind of legal equality is meant here, legal equality in everything we have to assume, considering the obviously limited cognitive capacity of the author of this passage. This elaborate gibberish, whose logical consequence would be the anarcho-syndicalist commune from the famous Monty Python sketch, then culminates in a list of groups particularly protected by the regime, thus not equal but privileged.

Nevertheless, as I said, I would advise no one to use this argumentation in court. What I aim to demonstrate is that the significance of the ethnic concept of the people in the debate about a possible AfD ban does not stem from a narrow reading of the Basic Law. Anyone who creates a dichotomy between legality and political objectives misses the point. Equally futile are all attempts to find a legal loophole to save the German people. The criminalization of the concept of the people does not arise from legal logic. Nor is it the result of mere ideological arbitrariness. The latter mistake is made by those who explain the population replacement solely as a product of left-wing cultural hegemony. This thesis seems plausible at first glance, as even the most superficial look at the media, universities, and the arts reveals this left-wing cultural hegemony. And there are indeed more than enough leftists who want Germans to become a minority in their own country. But any unbiased look at the history of migration shows that population replacement was never at the center of the Overton window. The fact that the great replacement is taking place is regularly denied. In reality, it is the product of the ratchet effect mentioned above: it is simply easier to let people in than to deport them, because every individual immigrant receives subjective legal entitlements to stay, which would have to be revoked before deportation. Given the massive prosperity gap between Germany and most of the rest of the world, population replacement could only have been prevented with an extremely restrictive immigration policy, as Japan long practiced. Instead, we had five decades of muddling through. Sometimes immigration was restricted, as in the 1993 asylum compromise, and sometimes borders were opened wide, as in 2015. But the development moved in only one direction, albeit at different speeds. This muddling through has created the current realities of a multi-ethnic society. Since the multi-ethnic society is now a reality, every government in Germany must somehow manage it.

Remigration would be complex and fraught with conflicts. Therefore, the governments of the current party cartel have opted for an approach that is by no means new in the history of multi-ethnic states. When a multi-ethnic state becomes a burden for the core population that sustains it, the nationalism of that core population becomes the greatest threat to its continued existencen and with it, to all the positions and privileges tied to that state. This is why the late Habsburg Empire pursued no nationalism as relentlessly as German nationalism. Vienna could negotiate with the nationalisms of other ethnic groups, but if German-Austrians lost their willingness to uphold the system, collapse loomed. Similarly, Putin can accommodate Chechens but jails Russian nationalists who protest the settlement of Caucasian peoples in Moscow and St. Petersburg. This logic applies even more strongly to today’s Federal Republic of Germany. Despite alarmist claims from liberal critics of Islam, we are not on the verge of a getting subjected to a caliphate. In fact, none of the ethnic groups that have migrated to Germany are anywhere near the numbers needed to overthrow or take over the state. However, they are often capable of locally overwhelming the state’s policing capacity.

Recently, a Dortmund resident told me how a friend’s stolen bicycle was located in Dortmund’s north end quarter via a tracker. The police responded, “We don’t go there.” This erosion of policing capability can stem from political influence when local politicians rely on the support of ethnic group leaders. The most drastic example in Europe is likely the integration of the specifically Pakistani form of patronage politics, the Baraderi or Biradari system, into English local politics, particularly within the Labour Party. It is no coincidence that grooming gangs have emerged from Pakistani communities in England for decades, often with tacit tolerance from local British politicians who depend on the block votes of clan leaders.

But in most cases, policing does not fail due to political influence from new citizens but rather due to the frictions brought about by populations with short time horizons and high impulsivity. Even a police officer does not come back to life if the person who stabbed him in the stomach is convicted. So, he avoids going to places where the likelihood of being stabbed for a trivial reason is high. While IQ 70 knife-wielders may pose a threat to citizens and police officers, they certainly do not threaten the state-supporting elites. The local loss of control is far too geographically dispersed to lead to separatist movements. Every major city has its neighbourhoods. However, the Turks or Arabs in Germany are not Chechens or Kurds, who have a cohesive settlement area they could declare an independent state. Political organization of individual migrant groups is also something that, from the system’s perspective, is manageable. Where such organization extends beyond the local level, individual migrant groups, due to their limited numbers, have no choice but to become client groups of established parties. And we are always talking about individual migrant groups. While all migrants combined already have the numerical strength to overthrow the state, they are far too different from one another for political, let alone revolutionary, organization. It is, of course, foreseeable that this will change in the coming decades, just as the current situation was foreseeable in Enoch Powell’s time. But just as the great replacement was not a tangible part of daily life outside a few underclass neighbourhoods until well into the 1990s, the system destabilization caused by immigrants and their descendants still plays no role today. Today’s decision-makers do not base their policies on the demographics ten years from now. Otherwise, the debate about the pension system would be entirely different. They certainly do not base their policies on the demographics forty years from now. They operate on a short-term basis, lurching from crisis to crisis for two decades at this point. Objectively, the systemic danger—the danger to what they call “our democracy” but actually mean “their democracy”—lies in the Germans becoming aware of their ethnic interests, refusing to tolerate these conditions any longer, and organizing as ethnic Germans toward this goal. Thus, there is an objective and irreconcilable conflict of interest between the interests of the German ethnic group and the ruling interests of the Federal Republic’s elites.

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This is a double-edged sword for the Federal Republic’s elites themselves. On one hand, the functional interest of the existing system, combined with the existing demographic situation, gives them a legitimization to criminalize their political opponents. On the other hand, it forces them into the absurd position of having to criminalize the core nation of the state they govern as such. The Constitutional Protection Report is the culmination so far of the internal contradiction into which the system has maneuvered itself through immigration: after its publication, it was widely considered a laughingstock. Since the report relies on publicly accessible sources, the claim of source protection as a reason for secrecy was obviously a pretext—apparently to prevent the public from knowing what it is actually based on. However, the problem for the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and its political clients is not that the report is ridiculous, but that its ridiculousness is a consistent consequence of their position. To manage the multiethnic society, the German nation must be abolished, and the mere mention of its existence criminalized, because the German nation’s claim to its homeland collides with the multiethnic society. This puts them in an even more difficult situation than the one of those who want to preserve Germany as a country of the Germans. The latter is, in principle, possible. But no state can abolish its core nation, at least not by decree. Moreover, the Federal Republic is not just any state but a democratic nation-state. It is designed as such, with “democratic” being the adjective and “nation-state” the noun. The multiethnic society, with its legal and ideological superstructure, is not only on a collision course with the ethnic reality of the German nation—which, according to this ideology, should not exist and stands in the way of the multiethnic administrative logic of the Federal Republic’s elites—but also with the structure of the state as laid out in the Basic Law, whose institutions are not designed for a multiethnic society. Of course, in such a conflict, those who, as political dissidents, are exposed to the arbitrary application of governmental force are in the greatest danger.

Maximilian Krah and Paul Strieder seek to avoid this direct political and legal confrontation by openly recognizing the Federal Republic of Germany as a multiethnic state while simultaneously demanding a separation of the civic nation (Staatsvolk) and the ethnic nation (ethnisches Volk). This way, in an ethnically neutral state, a German nation could exist alongside other nations with members holding German citizenship. Even those who are fundamentally unwilling to relinquish the right of our nation to our fatherland in this manner would be ill-advised to simply ignore such considerations. As mentioned, every government faces the necessity of managing the existing multiethnic society. This has so far applied to all governments elected in protest against mass immigration. None of them have yet been able to make a clean break that would relieve them of this necessity. Therefore, it is quite possible that a future right-wing government might try the approach of Krah and Strieder, whether it can succeed or not.

A good rule of thumb for dealing with political ideas is to first ask who they are directed against. In this case, Krah and Strieder specifically target Martin Sellner’s remigration concept6, succinctly summarized as a step-by-step reversal of the population replacement. Krah has summarized his criticism as follows:

“Sellner’s concept is unfortunately underdeveloped, internally contradictory, based on unmet assumptions, ignores obstacles, and provides a pretext for massive repression. It is therefore doomed to fail but ties up valuable forces that are temporarily misled. Paul Strieder has explained how the German ethnicity can actually be preserved: as an Ethnos, not as a Demos. This also takes the legal situation into account and, as Kisoudis pointed out, keeps the potential of the emerging new great power order open for the German state.”7

I have myself pointed out8 that Sellner significantly overestimates the effectiveness of metapolitical means. But the practical core of this criticism is different. It lies in the accusation that the demand for remigration legitimizes state repression because it distinguishes between citizens who are Germans and citizens who are not and seeks to encourage the latter to leave. This is, of course, true insofar as the state criminalizes the concept of the ethnic nation. The question would be with what trick or maneuver this could be circumvented, with what prospects of success, and at what cost.

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(Montage: Fragen zur Zeit; Revolution 1848: See page for author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons; Reichsgründung 1871: Anton von Werner, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

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(Nancy Faeser: Sandro Halank, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

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I had originally planned to publish a substantive analysis today of the classification of the AfD as a “confirmed right-wing extremist” party. The reasoning based on the ethnic concept of the nation has already sparked one or two fundamental debates within the right. Above all, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Verfassungsschutz) has inadvertently exposed the wound that its political masters have inflicted on constitutional reality. But now Friedrich Merz has failed to be elected Chancellor in the Bundestag in the first round, and albeit he won the second round, no candidate for the chancellorship has ever failed to win this formality in the first round, so that will have to wait.

What just happened? There’s speculation about whether it was Union or SPD deputies who let Merz fail. The most likely answer: both. There’s been noticeable unrest in both parties since the election. But the question is wrong. The right question is: How many deputies could the black-red coalition afford to lose? Or conversely: How many of the potentially dissatisfied deputies did the leaderships of both coalition partners need to persuade to vote for Merz anyway? The Union and SPD together have 328 deputies. 310 voted for Merz in the first round. The absolute majority in the current Bundestag is 316. The headline that “6 votes were missing” is factually correct but somewhat misleading. In total, 18 deputies from the would-be coalition parties did not vote for Merz.

From the perspective of the party leaderships before the chancellor election the situation was this: It was known that not everyone in the Union or the SPD was on board with the new coalition. The reasons are opposing, Union dissenters come from the right wing, SPD dissenters from the left wing of their respective parties. But the coalition parties have 12 more deputies than needed. So, they could afford to lose 12 for the chancellor election. This means that if no more than 12 of the SPD’s 120 deputies break party discipline, Merz and the coalition will get through, provided the Union votes for him unanimously. The smaller the proportion of SPD dissenters, the more dissenters the Union can tolerate. So far, so trivial. The key point is: From the perspective of the party leaderships before the election, the situation wasn’t “We’re missing 6 votes.” It was: “We need to get 316 out of 328 deputies to vote for Merz.” All of this gets lost in the headline “6 votes missing!” which is why I’m elaborating here.

Now, let’s put ourselves in the shoes of the SPD leadership. The leadership knows there are some intransigent members in their ranks. An I mean intransigent. The coalition negotiations amounted to the unconditional surrender of the Union. The chancellor election should really have been scheduled for May 8 or 9, not May 6.

But any SPD deputy refusing to vote for Merz, claiming he’s a neoliberal fascist or some such nonsense, is out of his mind. The SPD turned a crushing election defeat into a total victory at the negotiating table. Until a few hours ago, people forgot how high SPD chairman Klingbeil had gambled. The only reason the SPD could demand anything, the only reason it was even considered, let alone indispensable, as a coalition partner for the Union, is the firewall, the refusal of all other parties in Germany to forma coalition with the AfD. But the Union can abandon this firewall doctrine at any time. In fact, it’s not only pointless for the Union but has become highly damaging. The firewall against the right made sense for the Union as long as it could prevent the rise of parties to its right. The basic agreement of the Federal Republic’s party cartel was that the left-wing parties set the societal agenda, while the Union, as a conservative brake, could capture the votes of the majority who didn’t lean left but had no alternative to the Union. The AfD changed that, and it’s unclear how the party cartel could reverse this democratically. There’s a reason why people like Wanderwitz, who want to return to the old party cartel, demand the AfD’s ban: It’s their only chance to achieve their goal.

This has turned the situation on it’s head for the Union. Previously, the firewall reliably made the Union the strongest party. While the SPD had to share the left-wing voter spectrum first with the Greens and then with the Left Party, the Union could capture the entire right-wing spectrum and compete for the center without losing right-wing voters to a competitor. Angela Merkel perfected this, embodying the unwritten cartel agreement between the established parties like no one else: 16 years of Union dominance while jettisoning even the last conservative remnants.

That era is now irrevocably gone. Before the Bundestag election, I had bet on a black-blue (Union-AfD) government (here and here). Though I must admit I misjudged Friedrich Merz. After the Bundestag’s vote on refugee caps, he looked stronger than he does now. But my prediction wasn’t based on the Union suddenly embracing its patriotic duty, but on the assumption that the Union has enough self-preservation instinct and political savvy to see that times have changed. If the Union clings to the firewall, it will be ground to powder at the firewall. If nothing else, the last two months have shown that. It will be programmatically blackmailed from the left and lose its voters to the AfD.

It’s sheer inertia that keeps the Union tied to the firewall, solely the fear of every top Union official of being the first to state the obvious. You need to keep this in mind to grasp how high the stakes are for the SPD. For Merz, this chancellor election was about his lifelong dream, but the vast majority of the Union could do without it. For the SPD, Merz’s chancellorship is about the party’s future. If the firewall breaks, the SPD becomes a mid-sized party on a downward trajectory.

Let’s consider the alternative available to the Union: a coalition with the Alternative. The Union and AfD together have 359 seats. Before Sieghard Knodel’s exit from the AfD due to its “confirmed right-wing extremist” classification, it was even one more. Instead of just 12, a black-blue coalition could tolerate 43 dissenters. In percentages: 12 out of 328 is 3.7% dissenter tolerance for black-red. 43 out of 359 is a full 11.9% dissenter tolerance for black-blue. If it’s said that black-blue is impossible because some deputies would rebel, well, the same problem proved to be the case with black-red. But black-blue could afford a more than three times higher share of rebels.

The vote in the German Bundestag on the influx restriction law1 on January 31, 2025, was essentially a vote within the Union faction on how many deputies were willing to follow the party leadership if it tore down the firewall. The result2: 184 out of 196 in favor. The twelve remaining Merkelians didn’t even abstain—they didn’t show up at all and were recorded as “not cast.” It was this vote, and the one on January 29, that led me to my black-blue prediction. After the Bundestag election Merz lacked the courage to follow through on what he started with these votes. But Jens Spahn has since subtly positioned himself by demanding that the AfD be treated like other parties. The firewall is grinding down the Union, and deep cracks are appearing in the Federal Republic’s political elite.

None of this is a secret at Willy-Brandt-Haus3. For the SPD, everything is at stake. That’s why the AfD was classified as “confirmed right-wing extremist.” The SPD tried, through the internal security agency, to whip Union deputies into voting for their own candidate! Welcome to the Federal Republic of 2025!

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(Nancy Faeser: Sandro Halank, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

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