We in the United States, especially those of us on the right, know that the left is threatening our freedom and inherited moral standards. We also understand that these assaults have been facilitated by what Donald Trump broadly describes as the fake news, which are the powerful, misnamed “news sources” that shape our political culture. These vehicles of state propaganda have worked to white out or distort whatever does not fit their ideologically driven narratives. 

Although such distortions or concealments from our indigenous media may bother us, they are not as egregious as the fabrications of news sources in other so-called liberal democracies, that is, in other parts of what Nikki Haley and Fox News still refer to anachronistically as the free world. That world has become exponentially less free since I was growing up in the 1950s. One of the most unappetizing parts of this free world is the present German Federal Republic.

To understand present-day Germany, American conservatives should imagine a place where people like Joe Biden’s handlers have been building their progressive version of “democracy” for generations. There, any state employee or academic in a public university who expresses disagreement with the anti-fascist, woke state religion will almost inescapably lose his job and perhaps be attacked by an anti-fascist mob galvanized into action by the media. 

Those Germans who dare complain about the Biden-like immigration policy in their country, most explicitly the supporters of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) Party, will see the ruling leftist party bloc pull out all stops to ban them from expressing their views in public. Meanwhile, the German media attack dogs stigmatize the offenders as “Nazis,” and even incite riots against them. All of these measures are designed to intimidate the bearers of heterodox opinions. Knowing about the German situation, I keep reminding my conservative colleagues that they should thank their lucky stars not to be living under the good graces of German “democracy.”

Although the mindset at work in Germany is partly the result of the “reeducation” forced on the defeated Germans after World War II courtesy of their Western conquerors, much of it may be the result of typical German character (yes, I am engaging here in ethnic stereotypes). One should keep in mind that the vast majority of Germans (outside of the territories of the former Communist German Democratic Republic) have voted for an increasingly controlling government, which in some ways manages to be even more ghastly than the former German Communist dictatorship. 

Although some former Communist functionaries and even Stasi-informers have advanced politically in Germany (former Chancellor Angela Merkel is not the only one), today’s woke German leaders are preaching even more pernicious leftist doctrines than their former Soviet-installed commissars. These doctrines combine calls for a government-controlled economy in the name of fighting climate change with post-Christian wokeness and anti-nationalism. Strangely enough, Germans, even in the secrecy of the voting booth, keep endorsing the destruction of their constitutional freedoms and only sporadically complain about having their country occupied by millions of Third-World Muslim Neusiedler (“new settlers”). 

Since late November, Germans have been belabored with calls from government leaders and German media to ban the AfD. It happens to be the only non-politically correct national party that is still permitted to operate in the country. The AfD calls for a moratorium on immigration, a more-or-less free market economy, free speech, and open debate. Party leaders also occasionally criticize the ostentatious national masochism in their land, a tiresome fixation encouraged by the country’s political leaders. AfD members even describe themselves to the consternation of the media as “German patriots.” Although it is hard to find anything in the AfD that would place it even a smidgeon to the right of Trump Republicans, that doesn’t keep the ruling coalition from trying to ban this party as a pack of “right-wing extremists.” Not even the fact that the co-chairwoman of the AfD, Alice Weidel, is a proud self-proclaimed lesbian seems to matter to those who are trying to free Germany from imaginary fascists.

Right now, the German media are inveighing against an “attack on human rights,” which they have predictably alleged against the AfD. This controversy goes back to a book discussion held in a small hotel on the Lehnitzsee, a body of water connected to the Havel inlet adjoining Potsdam, a city southwest of Berlin. This discussion was organized by a dentist from the Northwestern German city of Düsseldorf, and it focused on a book, Regime Change von Rechts: Eine Strategische Skizze (“Changing the Regime from the Right: A Strategic Sketch”), authored by the Austrian conservative publicist Martin Sellner. The book, which is now in its fourth edition, addresses the question of whether Germany can still culturally and economically absorb the huge Third World population that its ruling party block has quite deliberately helped bring into the country.

Sellner carefully explains what can be done in this matter and he wisely warns against continuing a disastrously costly and socially divisive immigration policy. Having read Sellner’s book, I find the concerted German media attack against it, which characterizes it as a Nazi primer, to be truly outrageous. Sellner’s book is instead an attempt to deal with an intentionally caused political problem, and he addresses it in a noticeably moderate fashion. He even stresses that the German political system, whatever its defects, can no longer be fundamentally changed and that the German right must work within the constitutional framework to reinvigorate the now-demoralized German people. The fact that Amazon won’t market the book within Germany proves how tight the German left’s totalitarian grip has become.

Never missing a chance to stir up even more anti-fascist hysteria, the German “nonprofit, investigative news service” Correctiv, placed on its platform a fanciful account of a far-right cabal, made up of mostly AfD brass, which gathered in a suspicious location to plan the deportation of all foreign-born German residents. This fake news service even tried to identify the AfD meeting place in Lehnitzsee with the Wannsee about 10 miles away, the infamous place at which prominent Nazis met in 1942 to plan the extermination of European Jewry. How the two events are connected may be a mystery for the rest of us, but for German anti-fascists it’s all part of the same menace. What difference should 10 miles, 80 years, and an entirely different context make in a righteous war against the enemies of a globalist, multicultural dictatorship?

Although one doesn’t normally expect accurate reporting from anti-fascist zealots, this time the story they circulated about the AfD bordered on sheer lunacy. In reality, the book discussion was sparsely attended, with invited guests only. The AfD did not sponsor the gathering, although at least one AfD official was present, as was at least one member of the center-left CDU. There was no call to deport all foreign-born Germans, although there were comments made about the odious return of previously deported illegal aliens, particularly those with criminal records. Remarks made to this effect were hardly different from those that had been openly stated by Germany’s leftist Chancellor Olaf Scholz and by various members of his cabinet. 

Significantly, the leftist so-called investigative news service that whipped up hysteria about the discussion could find only one room in the hotel where the gathering took place. In retrospect, one has to wonder whether what they claim was said at the meeting was actually spoken there. Although the “news service” supposedly recorded the conversation, their tape has not yet been released, and would in any case have been illegally acquired.

Equally relevant, the German Agency for the Protection of the Constitution (a laughable misnomer for these mercenary spies of the ruling class) is now investigating the “right-wing extremism” of the staff at the Landhaus Adlon, the modest hotel in which the now-notorious book discussion took place. There is no evidence that the hotel staff was linked to the AfD, a charge that has been brought up by governmental and journalistic investigators. 

If there was such a connection, then this hapless staff, like the harassed AfD, would represent what German establishment leaders recklessly decry as Menschenfeinde (“enemies of the human race”). For those who may care to notice, this term bandied about by Germany’s woke-intoxicated president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, (Germany’s decrepit equivalent of Justin Trudeau) carries the same poisonous dehumanizing meaning as Hitler’s term Untermenschen (“subhumans”).

The material on Correctiv’s website about the “secret meeting” at the Lehnitzsee was recycled by the German mass-circulation weekly Der Spiegel and from there went to the German mainstream media, including the international Deutsche Welle broadcast, and all major German newspapers. By this point, it had been given an extra anti-AfD twist, although the connection between the real gathering and the party that the German media and party block decided to ban as “antidemocratic” was entirely nonexistent. The German mobs, which, as in the U.S., are manipulated by leftist ruling parties and often state-subsidized, swung into action. Thanks to Fox News, I could observe a demonstration in Cologne, which just happened to attract more than 30,000 protesters expressing their disapproval of the mass deportation of persecuted immigrants demanded by the Nazi-like AfD. 

Although I would expect nothing more honest from Germany’s present leftist leadership and media, what is even more unsettling is how American “conservative” news sources take up their defamations. Both Fox News and The Wall Street Journal repeated almost verbatim (allowing for translation) what the German media reported. Although one can blame this inattention to the real facts on lazy reporting, more may be at stake here. The American conservative establishment is filled with distaste for European nationalism, particularly for any form of German national pride. This sentiment is very much present among neoconservatives and American globalists and is not likely to vanish in the near future.

Because of this blindness, America’s establishment conservatives seem systemically unable to grasp that patriotic Germans, French, Poles, Hungarians, Italians, and other Europeans are battling the same leftist liars and totalitarians as the ones who are afflicting our country. There is therefore no reason to take at face value the name-calling of the Western European media any more than that of our own biased news commentators. 

Why would I think that the even more radically leftist German media are telling us the truth when they pull out their fascist branding iron? At the very least, we should remain skeptical when we hear their diatribes. I am therefore exasperated when our supposedly conservative Wall Street Journal tells me that the “far right” AfD was “threatening to unsettle German politics.” Given where Germany’s government and media have gone, an “unsettling” shake-up from the right would be the best thing that could happen in a country that is falling ominously under the sway of the totalitarian left.