Scores of universities and research institutions in Germany and Austria on Friday announced their intention to drop their presence on the online messaging platform X (formerly Twitter), saying its algorithms were opposed to a discourse based on scientific and democratic integrity.
The planned withdrawal in the academic sphere comes as the German government says it is also considering leaving the platform because it was having an “agitated and polarizing” effect on public political discussion.
Elon Musk took his endorsement of Germany’s far-right party to the next level on Thursday, hosting a live chat with its frontwoman, Alice Weidel.
The 74-minute conversation ranged across energy policy, German bureaucracy, Adolf Hitler, Mars and the meaning of life.
The world’s richest man unequivocally urged Germans to back Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in forthcoming elections.
This is the BBC’s headline – “Musk interviews German far-right frontwoman” – The “frontwoman” is gay, a fact that would be trumpeted in most stories but the Beeb will sink to any hypocrisy to protect their ideology.
More than half a million people in Germany are homeless, according to federal government statistics released on Wednesday.
Germany’s second publication of its Homelessness Report revealed around 531,600 people are without a permanent shelter.
According to the statistics and the empirical survey, around 439,500 people were housed in the emergency housing assistance system as of the end of January, beginning of February 2024, while a further 60,400 people were staying with relatives, friends or acquaintances.
Critics call the populist party a threat to democracy, but many Germans aren’t buying it.
Elon Musk calls it the “last spark of hope” for Germany. European elites call it the heir to National Socialism. The debate over Germany’s reviled populist party, the Alternative for Germany (Alternativ für Deutschland, or AfD), is worth paying attention to, since it reveals modern Western society’s most fundamental belief structure. That debate is about to heat up further, when Musk holds a live conversation on X with the AfD’s leader. The elites, Musk says, “will lose their minds.”
Elon Musk has endorsed the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in a guest opinion piece for the Welt am Sonntag newspaper, prompting its opinion editor to resign in protest.
In the article the tech billionaire explained why he had posted on the social media platform X last week that “only the AfD can save Germany”.
He wrote: “The portrayal of the AfD as right-wing extremist is clearly false, considering that Alice Weidel, the party’s leader, has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka. Does that sound like Hitler to you? Come on!”
Germany’s head of state started the countdown to a general election on Friday by dissolving the country’s lower house of parliament, the Bundestag.
“I have decided to dissolve the 20th German Bundestag to fix the date for an early election for February 23,” said President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, adding that “political stability in Germany is a precious asset.”
Steinmeier’s decision follows a request to do so after Chancellor Olaf Scholz lost a vote of confidence in the legislature on December 16.
Former German chancellor Angela Merkel just released her autobiography with the absurd title Freedom. Right — as if she had anything to do with freeing Eastern Europe. Frau Dummkopf, as I like to call her, barely ever heard of Ronald Reagan or Konrad Adenauer or any of the real heroes of the late 20th century.
In a lot of ways, Merkel is the Joe Biden of Europe — a corrupt and incredibly stupid person who somehow managed to attain the highest post in the land. She doesn’t even have dementia for an excuse.
What the establishment media wants us to believe about any given event is usually more indicative of the media’s own world view than it is of the actual facts on the ground, and the vehicular attack on a Christmas market in Magdeburg, Germany on Friday is no exception. In fact, the media spin is even more pernicious than usual on this one.
Read this thread. The Magdeburg attacker was a fugitive from Saudi Arabia who was wanted for rape, who reinvented himself as an atheist activist in order to secure full asylum from Germany. https://t.co/qWzXjqdbhM
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) December 21, 2024
The Islamic terrorist who kiIIed Germans is a supporter of Hamas and IsIamic Jihad. https://t.co/WiSNsdShes pic.twitter.com/6dZwQEWYQA
— RadioGenoa (@RadioGenoa) December 21, 2024
Despite claims made by the German press, Taleb Al Abdulmohsen is not an ex-Muslim atheist, nor is he a fan of the AfD or Elon Musk. While he may have spread this misinformation himself, it aligns with the practice of Taqqiye, an Islamic doctrine that permits lying and deception… pic.twitter.com/tU2tRS51Lr
— Maral Salmassi (@MaralSalmassi) December 21, 2024
By all appearances the perp was a fraud, a Muslim pretending to be an “Islamophobic” atheist to avoid deportation to Saudi Arabia where he faced prosecution for a criminal act.
Also note that the German establishment is so afraid of the AfD that they will go to great lengths to smear them and that will include massaging the narrative presented by a regime friendly press.
h/t SweetPea,AndyCanuck,Mauser,testsubjectx1,CurtisH
Elon Musk has stirred up the German election campaign by endorsing the radical right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD), saying that it is the only party that could “save” the country.
The world’s richest man, a sponsor and ally of Donald Trump, has already flirted with the populist right in a number of other countries, including Britain, Italy and the Netherlands.
Elon #Musk würde #AfD wählen! Und Du? #AliceFuerDeutschland #DeshalbAfD pic.twitter.com/LXYxMYPiPp
— AfD (@AfD) December 20, 2024
After Elon Musk posted his support for Germany’s far-right AfD, the party’s leader Alice Weidel expressed her gratitude. Other German lawmakers have criticized “interference” in the country’s upcoming federal elections.
Nationalism will rise from the ashes
“Today’s Germany is the best Germany the world has seen.” So effused the Washington Post columnist George F. Will five long years ago. It’s hard to imagine anyone — even a German — writing those words today. The country is in crisis. On Monday, Chancellor Olaf Scholz lost a humiliating no-confidence vote, and now Germany is hurtling towards a divisive snap election in February. The nation’s economy has barely grown since 2018, and it is de-industrialising at an alarming rate. The unfolding calamity represents a strategic opening for China and Russia which the West cannot afford to ignore.
At the root of Germany’s industrial woes is electricity, which is now nearly twice as expensive as it is for their American counterparts, and three times more expensive than in China. Prices have been rising since the early 2000s, but a policy embraced by the German government in 2011, following the nuclear meltdown at Fukushima, sealed the nation’s fate. The proponents of the Energiewende (“energy revolution”) policy made the astonishing argument that Germany could rapidly abandon both fossil fuels and nuclear energy without losing its industrial edge. This was, as one Oxford study put it, a “gamble”. Or a game of Russian roulette, a cynic might have added.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has lost a vote of confidence in parliament, paving the way for early elections on 23 February.
Scholz called Monday’s vote and had expected to lose it, but calculated that triggering an early election was his best chance of reviving his party’s political fortunes.
It comes around two months after the collapse of Scholz’s three-party coalition government, which left the embattled chancellor leading a minority administration.
h/t DS
Conservative and liberal politicians in the eastern German state of Thuringia are calling for the resignation of the head of the state’s domestic intelligence agency, Stephan Kramer, who —according to a report—is abusing his public office to pursue a political rival, the anti-immigration Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party.
An explosive article by the media outlet Apollo News revealed that Kramer has chosen to disregard legal and factual arguments while pursuing a campaign against the AfD, effectively weaponising his office for party political purposes. He has also been described as a “serious security risk” and threatened at least one of his employees with physical violence.
Two foreigners are sipping cappuccinos on a Saturday morning in a bustling restaurant in Asuncion, sharing notes on what made them decide to come to Paraguay. “You can really forget about the rest of the world here,” says one, Paul Kittson, an Australian entrepreneur. He is not the first to have come to that conclusion.
For much of the past two centuries this sweltering, landlocked country in the heart of South America has been the destination of choice for those who wanted to get away from it all. Some were utopians: such as the group of socialists from Sydney who set up a colony they called “New Australia” in the 1890s.
Others were escapees, including the Nazis who hid in southern Paraguay in the late 1940s. Still more were isolationists, like the Mennonites from Russia and Germany who came in the 1920s to preserve their traditional way of life, far from modern threats.
What was Berlin’s chief of police thinking, when she warned Jews and gay people to hide their identities in certain parts of the city?
In an interview last month in the Berliner Zeitung, Barbara Slowik said: ‘There are areas of the city, we need to be perfectly honest here, where I would advise people who wear a kippah or are openly gay or lesbian to be more careful.’ She also said that while she didn’t want to blame any one group for this, ‘there are certain neighbourhoods where the majority of people of Arab origin live, who also have sympathies for terrorist groups… and are openly hostile towards Jews’.
