about 30 minutes in length so skim and skip accordingly
Heather Mac Donald explains the rise of Alternative for Deutschland
Germany’s elites are edgy and irritable. On Saturday, December 28, Elon Musk published an opinion piece in Die Welt am Sonntag, reinforcing his earlier claim that “only the AfD can save Germany.” The AfD is “the last spark of hope for Germany,” Musk wrote. This exercise of free speech on Musk’s and the newspaper’s part was, according to the political and media establishment, another dagger aimed at democracy. The CDU’s Merz announced that he could not “remember a comparable case of interference in the election campaign of a friendly country in the history of the western democracies.” An editor at Die Welt resigned in protest. The ever-alert German Journalists Association blasted “election advertising for a right-wing extremist party packaged as journalism.” The German media’s alarms about a second Donald Trump presidency were apparently simple fact-based reporting.
The consternation will only grow. Musk declared German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier an “anti-democratic tyrant” after Steinmeier denounced what he called the “external influence” on German democracy being practiced “particularly intensively on (social media) platform X.” And now the Tesla founder is arranging a live conversation with Alice Weidel, possibly on January 10. It is an understatement to say that the establishment opponents of the AfD and of Musk will “lose their minds,” as the tech entrepreneur posted on December 30.
In a September ARD-DeutschlandTREND poll, 71 percent of respondents nationally agreed that Germany could not cope with more asylum seekers from crisis areas. Even if European and American elites continue to label the majority of their fellow citizens fascists—and they might—the revolt against cultural replacement will continue.
Mass immigration into the West is the defining issue of the twenty-first century. The AfD and its continental counterparts realize how precious is the Western inheritance and how urgently it deserves defense. Their warnings should be heeded before it is too late.
cc: @TomK