I’m writing a much longer piece about the elite schism happening in the United States. A considerable share of college-educated professionals have broken with their fellows over the leftward drift of the educated managerial cohort of society (
calls them ‘symbolic capitalists’). In the past 20 years this class has become MUCH more radical on a huge range of issues (all while pretending they haven’t): gender ideology, immigration, criminal justice reform, homelessness and mental health interventions. Not just have the elite moved Leftward on these subjects, they’ve moved ALL the way left. Any compromise or appeal to reality (nations need borders, homelessness isn’t just a funding issue, biological males shouldn’t be housed in women’s prisons) is now completely suppressed. Even debating these issues-even acknowledging there is disagreement-is considered socially unacceptable.
What would it look like if this class was more cohesive and self-satisfied? How might they operate if they had a firmer grasp of the political apparatus (more parties, but less competition) and a more robust and activist set of intelligence agencies and a more compliant and hypocritical legacy media complex? To answer these questions, we can refer to Germany.
The German ‘traffic light coalition’ (red-yellow-green, named for the Social Democrats, the Free Democrats, and the Green Party) fell apart in early November. The system has come under increasing strain as the budget is caught between the mammoth cost of supporting millions of recent immigrants, financing the war in Ukraine, and paying for energy at rates 3-5x their 2019 levels.
When I list the debacles below (less than a dozen chosen, out of thousands of possibilities) remember: The German economy has been throttled by green legislation and regulations. The country’s energy grid is both dirtier and less efficient than it was a decade ago (since the country’s once-celebrated nuclear power stations have been taken offline… to be mostly replaced by coal-powered power plants, in a stunningly shortsighted and irrational change). The country has given billions of euros and tons of military equipment to Ukraine… all while keeping their domestic military development and armament barely at the NATO minimum of 2%. Their foreign policy consists of being enthusiastic, captive suppliers of the Atlanticist agenda, and chiding Israel for fighting its war. These cultural issues (below) are simply accoutrements sitting atop the vast pile of military and economic foolishness which the German regime has amassed over the past half-decade.
If elites deliver a functioning economy and a working border and a mostly fair and effective police force they can point to these blessings as validations of their rule. Instead, Germans have gotten lectures and anarchist-tinged immigration policies without any honest accounting of the challenges and costs and harms. They’ve gotten utopian confabulations in place of energy production and rational re-investment. They’ve gotten a government apparatus that sometimes seems more concerned with critical tweets and silly songs than terrorism or deadly crime. To stymie the bleeding of their credibility they leverage their mediocre cast of politicians and a lackey media complex to demonize critics, rather than listening to and addressing the complaints of the citizenry.
It’s a mess.
Immigration has been a huge and inflammatory issue. The German government admitted the largest legal surge of immigrants perhaps in human history, relative to the native population, starting in 2017 and continuing through this year. These new arrivals are expensive and generally unproductive additions to the society, and have inflamed legitimate concerns about crime and cultural conflict. These concerns have been widely stigmatized and suppressed by the country’s mainstream media and its ruling coalitions.
Billions of euros have been siphoned off to the modern client class of the managerial elite. They’re not immigrants or gay people or women; they’re non-profit employees and government contractors and employees… and journalists and politicians.
The Digital Services Act (DSA) empowers ‘Trusted Flaggers’ (elitist progressives, many of whom have ties to non-profits and the media) to report to a ‘Digital Services Coordinator’… so that content can be instantly deleted, without oversight or recourse.
In places like the United States, censorship is a thing that the three-letter agencies and the major social media platforms have to hash out among themselves behind closed doors. Things are different here in Europe, where the DSA has imposed upon all of us a totally legal censorship regime for the purposes of cracking down on notionally “illegal” internet content. Any censorship regime of course requires censors, and that’s where you, the aspiring Trusted Flagger, come in. This is your golden opportunity.
Have you ever been annoyed, surprised or possibly horrified when you saw images, videos or texts on social platforms where people were defamed or discriminated against, possibly in violent confrontations, and you thought, you shouldn’t have to read or see that? Or where products were offered that couldn’t possibly be real? Many people encounter these kinds of things every day. The European Union has said that what is forbidden in the normal analog world must also in future be forbidden in the digital world. And thanks to the Digital Services Act, the Bundesnetzagentur now bears responsibility for this.
What can we do for you? Well, you can give us your complaints, you can give us information, you can help us to take action against platforms that do not react to your reports … You can help us identify systematic risks that we will address either together with the European Commission in Brussels or here in Germany, so that platforms are a safe place. What we will not do is censor content. That is not our job. It is, however, our job to ensure that people are safe and perhaps a little happier when using social networks and e-commerce platforms. That is our job, as the Federal Network Agency, as the new Digital Service Coordinator.
…
And who is this first Trusted Flagger, you ask? Well, it is an internet tattle-tale operation run by the Baden-Württemberg Youth Foundation and funded by the Green-controlled Family Ministry.
They call themselves REspect! In this video, two women pad around a trendy loft apartment explaining what exactly it is that they’ve been up to at REspect!
Basically, REspect! accept complaints about potentially illegal speech via a form on their website and report as much of this content as possible to the police. In seven years, they’ve received almost 72,828 separate reports and filed 20,532 criminal complaints. What makes REspect! particularly qualified to Trustedly Flag, is their eagerness to reach beyond the bounds of the law. In their promotional video, they emphasise that it is important to report even perfectly legal content, because this helps with their “statistics” and assists them in advocating for “changes to the law.” Now, as Trusted Flaggers, they can use their legal leverage over social media platforms to get a lot of this perfectly legal content deleted.
The media instigated a moral panic… about the fact that party-goers and clubbers keep singing the words “Ausländer raus” (“foreigners out”) to a popular club hit. Seriously.
’…Soon the press were picking up the story. Jörg Lau, who writes for Die Zeit – that beacon of all that is good and virtuous – was among the first to denounce this most recent and regrettable resurgence of fascism. “I want dancing to hate-inciting slogans to be punished with severe repression,” Lau tweeted from the depths of his democratic convictions. “Why aren’t the police taking down these people’s identities? This is just as threatening to our state as those pro-Caliphate demonstrations.”
Lars Keitel, the mayor of Burgholzhausen… assur[es] us that he has “been in contact with the police since yesterday,” and that authorities are “already investigating and looking for further witnesses.” There follows his heartfelt and sensitive endorsement of “respect, tolerance and mutual cooperation” – indeed, of “humanity” itself – and his rejection of “xenophobia,” “hatred,” “exclusion” and “intolerance”:
To get a sense of the intellectual tenor of their media, I highly recommend you browse their coverage of the Trump campaign (hint: not favorable).
While songs and tweets are whipping certain folks into frothy uproars, sexual assault and mass knife attacks are being quietly and abashedly hushed up.
A mass stabbing several months ago led to much-publicized “knife prohibitions” (rather than, say, real policies to limit immigration or screen for criminality or detect planners of what are, in effect, terrorist attacks). How does one prohibit knives, which have been useful tools since the Neolithic period, and are still regularly carried by carpenters and plumbers and postal workers and… ?
They don’t. This is a gesture of doing something in place of actually acknowledging and working on the real issues. That’s a preferred tactic of the managerial elite, you’ll find.
The media colludes with the intelligence agencies and corporate leadership and police and politicians to repress and conceal a (growing) chorus of strident criticism. Interestingly, it is the former communist East German states (with their own recent history of censorship and repression) which have proven to be the most immune to the scolding and guilting and coordinated distortions.
‘‘Ordinary Germans have been criminally charged for inaccurately quoting politicians, for tweeting the poop emoji at a cabinet minister, for calling their rulers shitheads and fat and ugly. Any online triviality you might imagine, including merely repeating jokes made by other politicians at their colleague’s expense, might well lead to criminal charges. In almost every case, these prosecutions turn out to have been initiated by Green politicians, as part of a clear, coordinated campaign to silence their internet critics. The accused have been lectured by judges for hindering their rulers in their official duties; they have had their homes searched and their devices seized for statements that in any other Western nation would constitute protected speech. I knew things were bad, but even I find many of these cases shocking.
Recently it emerged that a number of Green politicians have been secretly colluding with judges and intelligence agencies to secretly fine and punish satirical, critical, and even lightly mocking social media posts online:
That world exists no more, but its vanishing has long escaped popular notice. We here on the dark and nefarious internet might write about the authoritarian turn in German politics, but as everyone knows we’re mere Russian trolls and what we say doesn’t matter. Something about the police raiding the home of 64 year-old Franconian pensioner Stefan Niehoff for retweeting a meme calling Habeck a moron, however, has caused the scales to fall from millions of eyes.
Takeaways
The managerial elite use ‘democracy’ as cover to maintain and advance their individual and collective privileges and power. ‘Democracy’, to them, means a system of interacting institutions and funding streams under the control of political parties and agencies, protected by the media and the police. If you benefit from the operation of this system (if you’re a trans activist or a human rights lawyer or a Bild journalist or a Green politician or an intelligence bureaucrat) you will be invested in the fate of this power structure, as Stasi agents were in the fortune of the German Democratic Republic.
If you’re a credulous and educated and somewhat soft collaborator with this system (a teacher or a therapist or a doctor or an intern or a government office manager or a non-profit employee) you will probably cast your lot in with the rulers as well. If you’re a builder or a shopkeeper or a parent or a police officer there’s a good chance you will be skeptical-and increasingly hostile. The government has been considering (somewhat openly, far more in secret) the banning of the one popular opposition party, Alternative for Germany, or AfD.
It’s important that the views of > 40% of the country be righteously suppressed, you see. It’s democratic.
Germany is an older and more feminine and more uncertain country than it used to be. It’s more progressive and more moribund… and more frightened. Inasmuch as the rulers consider history at all they probably see themselves on the cutting edge of its moral arc. I suspect that, one way or another, that illusion will be shattered before the decade’s out.
The problem Europeans and Brits refuse to acknowledge is what happens when below-replacement fertility meets illiterate immigrants.
Within two generations, the vanishingly-small cohort of trad-Europeans will be almost entirely absent in new hires across the economy, “replaced” by the kids of illiterate and ideologically anti-Western immigrants. These immigrants will not be able to understand, build or maintain the complex systems of the European economy, from tech to manufacturing to farming at the scale and with the agricultural technology required to feed Europe; simply, their utter lack of modernity and the abstract thinking required will no longer exist in Europe. Famine and war are the ONLY possible outcomes.
Germany is well on its way to becoming a country that suppresses free speech much like Russia, Iran and China. The question we in the US must ask ourselves is how long before we acknowledge this fact and realize that we can no longer be allies with a country that doesn’t share our love of freedom.
The problem Europeans and Brits refuse to acknowledge is what happens when below-replacement fertility meets illiterate immigrants.
Within two generations, the vanishingly-small cohort of trad-Europeans will be almost entirely absent in new hires across the economy, “replaced” by the kids of illiterate and ideologically anti-Western immigrants. These immigrants will not be able to understand, build or maintain the complex systems of the European economy, from tech to manufacturing to farming at the scale and with the agricultural technology required to feed Europe; simply, their utter lack of modernity and the abstract thinking required will no longer exist in Europe. Famine and war are the ONLY possible outcomes.
Germany is well on its way to becoming a country that suppresses free speech much like Russia, Iran and China. The question we in the US must ask ourselves is how long before we acknowledge this fact and realize that we can no longer be allies with a country that doesn’t share our love of freedom.