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Donald Trump 2020

Francisco 2.0

By Francisco 2.0
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Thatguy
Thatguy

Let me be candid and honest here my man. I cannot be sympathetic to your comments because this is how adult life has always been. From the moment I stepped out of my home and headed off to college I h

Francisco 2.0
Francisco 2.0
henrygandorf
henrygandorf

it won't matter if his taxes ever come out.  it won't matter if his taxes don't ever come out.  you wanna know why?  because we already know what's in them. since early 2017 when people starting

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yoladu

yoladu 4094

Posted
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15 hours ago, Mrs Whiggins said:


 

Hmmm. 
 

Russia? HOAX!
Ukraine telephone call? HOAX!
Global Pandemic? HOAX!

Stock market and economy in the toilet? HOAX!

Millions of lost jobs? HOAX!

Person, Man, Woman, Camera, TV? HOAX!

Deutsche Bank and Mazurs? Don’t know them, never heard of them. 

how many HOAXES can be perpetrated against one man? Unbelievable.

.. because it is.

 

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henrygandorf

henrygandorf 29190

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trump - i don't know, we may have a vaccine, a very good one, and it might arrive in time, later this year, for a very special day, you know what i'm talking about, this fall, and it might be here right in time for that special day.

media - some say you're politicizing the vaccine and its timing, what would you say to-

trump - whoever said that is making it up, i've never done that, and i would never politicize the vaccine, this is about helping people, but ku-mall-uh said that because she had 15 points in the primary and went down to close to zero so people don't really like her, but if obama was in charge now, the vaccine would take 3 years, or maybe there would never be one at all.  but no, we're not politicizing anything.

 

if you didn't see the press conference campaign rally, here's what you missed.  i'm paraphrasing, but not really.

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Cairn Horn88

Cairn Horn88 8262

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President Donald Trump helped himself to art treasures he fancied in the U.S. ambassador’s historic 1842 mansion in Paris when he visited two years ago —and had them shipped to the White House with him on Air Force One, Bloomberg reported Sunday.

Trump had extra time on his hands during his visit to Paris to commemorate the centennial of the end of World War I when he controversially skipped a trip to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery outside the city. The cancellation is now causing a world of trouble for Trump since The Atlantic reported that he blew it off after calling the fallen heroes “losers,” according to their sources.

The White House has confirmed — but downplayed — Trump’s highly unusual art “caper,” Bloomberg noted.

Trump spent some of the six hours of his newly found free time after skipping out on the cemetery visit by “shopping” for art in the ambassador’s mansion where he was staying, Bloomberg reported.

The following day Trump pointed out a Benjamin Franklin bust, a Franklin portrait and figurines of Greek gods, which he ordered to be returned to Washington with him. They were valued at $750,000, according to Bloomberg. He reportedly quipped that the mansion would get the art back in six years.

Ambassador Jamie McCourt was “startled,” while others were amused and astonished, according to Bloomberg.

Nothing to see here, a White House spokesperson told Bloomberg in a statement.

“The President brought these beautiful, historical pieces, which belong to the American people, back to the United States to be prominently displayed in the People’s House,” Judd Deere said.

The Greek figurines are currently on the fireplace mantel in the Oval Office, according to Bloomberg.

The Benjamin Franklin portrait and bust turned out to be copies of the originals.

Also on HuffPost

I bet he took that little bar of soap and shampoo too!

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pyrohornIII

pyrohornIII 4814

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34 minutes ago, Jive Turkey said:

Such a terrible liar. 

 

I would think blameshifting to the secret service would not serve him well.  You have to wonder if some of these leaks are from those people.   I know they take an oath to protect the president, but don't they also swear an oath to protect the country/constitution?

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Jack Straw

Jack Straw 2954

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1 hour ago, Red Five said:

Quite a doozy of a PC he's giving right now.

He just said that Obama and Biden should have been sent to prison for 50 years for treason. 

say, can someone post some clips or other examples of Republicans speaking up and saying it’s not OK for the sitting President of the United States to threaten his self-declared political enemies with imprisonment without any basis?   Not just Senators and members of Congress members, or other elected officials; I mean, any Republican, anywhere? 
 

oh. 

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Dnaguy

Dnaguy 11955

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7 minutes ago, 4th&Five said:

It’s amazing that 4 years into this nobody asks him for specifics on basically anything. He spews shit like that and how is the next question not asking him “For what, exactly?”

4?

He’s lived his entire live never having to give specifics or getting any follow up.

The guy has gone his whole life without consequences. 

If there was a god, he would spend his remaining days on earth in a jail cell while having to watch his ‘empire’ fall apart, and get picked clean by the US government / IRS. Melania and Baron turn states evidence, M marries a black dude, and his 4 other kids all go to jail but for a reduced sentence when they also turn. Once in jail, Deutche bank and the Russians abandon him and all his tax returns, tratorous acts with foreign governments, and shit he really did during his time in the WH come to light. Anyone who was in the administration is effectively exiled from public service and some are tried with him for treason. He is convicted and Barrack Obama is the deciding vote on the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision to allow for his execution. His execution is held in makeshift stadium on the Mexican-American border in which the bleachers are made from pieces of his shittily build wall that have since fallen down. The only people allowed to attend are the Central American or Mexican teenagers / young adults who were taken away from their parents back when they were toddlers. 

But there is no god. And that’ll never happen.

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bolverk

bolverk 29671

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The president of the United States has become an inspiration for Nazis, German ones, not those Illinois pansies. Oh, and German QAnon freaks, German Covidiots, and German anti-vaxxers. My gawd, he and Putin are not only trying to destabilize the US but our Western allies too. Just look at the UK with Brexit, Orban in Hungary, Poland's lurch to the right, and the close call with Le Pen in France.

Trump Emerges as Inspiration for Germany’s Far Right
Among German conspiracy theorists, ultranationalists and neo-Nazis, the American president is surfacing as a rallying cry, or even as a potential “liberator.”

BERLIN — Just before hundreds of far-right activists recently tried to storm the German Parliament, one of their leaders revved up the crowd by conjuring President Trump.

“Trump is in Berlin!” the woman shouted from a small stage, as if to dedicate the imminent charge to him.

She was so convincing that several groups of far-right activists later showed up at the American Embassy and demanded an audience with Mr. Trump. “We know he’s in there!” they insisted.

Mr. Trump was neither in the embassy nor in Germany that day — and yet there he was. His face was emblazoned on banners, T-shirts and even on Germany’s pre-1918 imperial flag, popular with neo-Nazis in the crowd of 50,000 who had come to protest Germany’s pandemic restrictions. His name was invoked by many with messianic zeal.

It was only the latest evidence that Trump is emerging as a kind of cult figure in Germany’s increasingly varied far-right scene.

“Trump has become a savior figure, a sort of great redeemer for the German far right,” said Miro Dittrich, an expert on far-right extremism at the Berlin-based Amadeu-Antonio-Foundation.

Germany — a nation generally supportive of a government that has handled the pandemic better than most — may seem an unlikely place for Mr. Trump to gain such a status. Few Western nations have had a more contentious relationship with Mr. Trump than Germany, whose leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel, a pastor’s daughter and scientist, is his opposite in terms of values and temperament. Opinion polls show that Mr. Trump is deeply unpopular among a broad majority of Germans.

But his message of disruption — his unvarnished nationalism and tolerance of white supremacists coupled with his skepticism of the pandemic’s dangers — is spilling well beyond American shores, extremism watchers say.

In a fast-expanding universe of disinformation, that message holds real risks for Western democracies, they say, blurring the lines between real and fake news, allowing far-right groups to extend their reach beyond traditional constituencies and seeding the potential for violent radicalization.

Mr. Trump’s appeal to the political fringe has now added a new and unpredictable element to German politics at a time when the domestic intelligence agency has identified far-right extremism and far-right terrorism as the biggest risks to German democracy.

The authorities have only recently woken up to a problem of far-right infiltration in the police and military. Over the past 15 months, far-right terrorists killed a regional politician on his front porch near the central city of Kassel, attacked a synagogue in the eastern city of Halle and shot dead nine people of immigrant descent in the western city of Hanau. Mr. Trump featured in the manifesto of the Hanau killer, who praised his “America First” policy.

In Germany, as in the United States, Mr. Trump has become an inspiration to these fringe groups. Among them are not only long-established hard-right and neo-Nazi movements, but also now followers of QAnon, the internet conspiracy theory popular among some of Mr. Trump’s supporters in the United States that hails him as a hero and liberator.

Spoiler

 

Germany’s QAnon community, barely existent when the pandemic first hit in March, may now be the biggest outside the United States along with Britain, analysts who track its most popular online channels say.

Matthias Quent, an expert on Germany’s far right and the director of an institute that studies democracy and civil society, calls it the “Trumpification of the German far right.”

“Trump has managed to attract different milieus, and that’s what we’re seeing here, too,” Mr. Quent said. “We have everything from anti-vaxxers to neo-Nazis marching against corona measures. The common denominator is that it’s people who are quitting the mainstream, who are raging against the establishment.”

Trump, he added, “is the guy fighting the liberal-democratic establishment.”

For some on the far-right fringes, Mr. Trump’s message has been especially welcome at a time when Germany’s homegrown nativist party, the Alternative for Germany, of AfD, is struggling to exploit the pandemic and has seen its support dip to around 10 percent, experts say.

Nationalist populists in Germany have long welcomed the presence of one of their own, as they see it, in the White House. Mr. Trump’s language and ideology have helped legitimize theirs.

The AfD has repeatedly paraphrased Mr. Trump by calling for a “Germany first” approach. But the president is popular in more extremist circles, too. Caroline Sommerfeld, a prominent ideologue of a contingent known as the “new right” with close links to the extremist Generation Identity movement, said she had popped open a bottle of champagne when Mr. Trump won the 2016 election.

The QAnon phenomenon has added a new kind of fuel to that fire.

QAnon followers argue that Mr. Trump is fighting a “deep state” that not only controls finance and power, but also abuses and murders children in underground prisons to extract a substance that keeps its members young. German followers contend that the “deep state” is global, and that Ms. Merkel is part of it. Mr. Trump, they say, will liberate Germany from the Merkel “dictatorship.”

The far-right magazine Compact, which has printed Mr. Trump’s speeches for its readers, had a giant Q on its latest cover and held a “Q-week” on its video channel, interviewing far-right extremists like Björn Höcke. On the streets of Berlin last weekend there were Q flags and T-shirts and several banners inscribed with “WWG1WGA,” a coded acronym for Q’s hallmark motto, “Where we go one, we go all.”

Hard numbers are difficult to discern, with followers often subscribing to accounts on different platforms, analysts say. NewsGuard, a U.S.-based disinformation watchdog, found that across Europe, accounts on YouTube, Facebook and Telegram promoting the QAnon conspiracy counted 448,000 followers.

In Germany alone, the number of followers of QAnon-related accounts has risen to more than 200,000, Mr. Dittrich said. The largest German-language QAnon channel on YouTube, Qlobal-Change, has over 17 million views and has quadrupled its following on Telegram to over 124,000 since the coronavirus lockdown in March, he said.

“There is a huge Q community in Germany,” Mr. Dittrich said, with new posts and memes that dominate the message boards in the United States immediately translated and interpreted into German.

The fusion of the traditional far right with the QAnon crowd was something new, Mr. Quent said. “It’s a new and diffuse kind of populist rebellion that feeds on conspiracy theories and is being supplied with ideology from different corners of the far-right ecosystem,” he said.

One reason the QAnon conspiracy has taken off in Germany, Mr. Dittrich said, is that it is a good fit with local conspiracy theories and fantasies popular on the far right.

One of them is the “great replacement,” which claims that Ms. Merkel and other governments have been deliberately bringing in immigrants to subvert Germany’s ethnic and cultural identity. Another is a purported national crisis called “Day X,” when Germany’s current order will supposedly collapse and neo-Nazis take over.

A third theory is the belief that Germany is not a sovereign country but an incorporated company and occupied territory controlled by globalists.

This belief is held among a faction known as “Reichsbürger,” or citizens of the Reich, who orchestrated the brief storming on Parliament on Aug. 29. They do not recognize Germany’s post-World War II Federal Republic and are counting on Mr. Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to sign a “peace treaty” to liberate Germans from their own government.

Another reason for QAnon’s spread is that several German celebrities have become multipliers of the conspiracy, among them a former news presenter and a rapper and former judge on Germany’s equivalent of “American Idol.”

One of the biggest figures spreading the QAnon conspiracy is Attila Hildmann, a vegan-celebrity-chef-turned-far-right-influencer with more than 80,000 followers on the Telegram messaging app. He has appeared at all major coronavirus marches in Berlin, venting against face masks, Bill Gates and the Rothschild family — and appealing to Mr. Trump to liberate Germany.

“Trump is someone who has been fighting the global ‘deep state’ for years,” Mr. Hildmann said in an interview this past week. “Trump has become a figure of light in this movement, especially for QAnon, precisely because he fights against these global forces.”

“That’s why the hope for the German national movement, or the liberation movement, lies basically with Q and Trump, because Trump is a figure of light because he shows that you can fight these global powers and that he is victorious,” Mr. Hildmann said.

“The Germans hope that Trump will liberate Germany from the Merkel corona regime,” he said, so that “the German Reich is reactivated.”

Mr. Hildmann’s influence became plain in June, when he mobilized thousands of people to send messages to the U.S. and Russian embassies in Berlin to appeal for help. In the space of a few days, 24,000 tweets had been received by the embassies calling on Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin to “liberate” Germany from Ms. Merkel’s “criminal regime” and prevent “forced vaccination” and “genocide.”

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has warned of the risk of far-right extremists using the pandemic for their own purposes. This past week the agency’s chief, Thomas Haldenwang, said that “aggressive and disruptive far-right elements” were the driving force behind the protests over coronavirus restrictions.

But extremism experts and lawmakers worry that the security services are not paying close enough attention to the violent potential in the mix of QAnon disinformation campaigns and homegrown far-right ideology.

In the United States, some QAnon believers have been charged with violent crimes, including one accused of murdering a mafia boss in New York last year and another arrested in April after reportedly threatening to kill Joseph R. Biden Jr., who has since become the Democratic presidential candidate. The F.B.I. has warned that QAnon poses a potential domestic terrorism threat.

In Germany, language reminiscent of QAnon was used in the manifesto of the gunman who killed nine people with immigrant roots in the western city of Hanau in February.

“We have already seen that this conspiracy has the potential to radicalize people,” Mr. Dittrich said.

There are an estimated 19,000 Reichsbürger in Germany, about 1,000 of them classified as far-right extremists by the domestic intelligence service. Many of them are armed.

“At a time when some people are determined to destroy democratic discourse with all means possible,” said Konstantin von Notz, a lawmaker and deputy president of the intelligence oversight committee, “we have to take such a phenomenon very seriously.”

 

 

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henrygandorf

henrygandorf 29190

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1 hour ago, 4th&Five said:

It’s amazing that 4 years into this nobody asks him for specifics on basically anything. He spews shit like that and how is the next question not asking him “For what, exactly?”

next question?  he doesn't even answer the original question a reporter asks him.  lulz at a follow-up.

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WhatTheBuck

WhatTheBuck 28779

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25 minutes ago, bolverk said:

The president of the United States has become an inspiration for Nazis, German ones, not those Illinois pansies. Oh, and German QAnon freaks, German Covidiots, and German anti-vaxxers. My gawd, he and Putin are not only trying to destabilize the US but our Western allies too. Just look at the UK with Brexit, Orban in Hungary, Poland's lurch to the right, and the close call with Le Pen in France.

Trump Emerges as Inspiration for Germany’s Far Right
Among German conspiracy theorists, ultranationalists and neo-Nazis, the American president is surfacing as a rallying cry, or even as a potential “liberator.”

BERLIN — Just before hundreds of far-right activists recently tried to storm the German Parliament, one of their leaders revved up the crowd by conjuring President Trump.

“Trump is in Berlin!” the woman shouted from a small stage, as if to dedicate the imminent charge to him.

She was so convincing that several groups of far-right activists later showed up at the American Embassy and demanded an audience with Mr. Trump. “We know he’s in there!” they insisted.

Mr. Trump was neither in the embassy nor in Germany that day — and yet there he was. His face was emblazoned on banners, T-shirts and even on Germany’s pre-1918 imperial flag, popular with neo-Nazis in the crowd of 50,000 who had come to protest Germany’s pandemic restrictions. His name was invoked by many with messianic zeal.

It was only the latest evidence that Trump is emerging as a kind of cult figure in Germany’s increasingly varied far-right scene.

“Trump has become a savior figure, a sort of great redeemer for the German far right,” said Miro Dittrich, an expert on far-right extremism at the Berlin-based Amadeu-Antonio-Foundation.

Germany — a nation generally supportive of a government that has handled the pandemic better than most — may seem an unlikely place for Mr. Trump to gain such a status. Few Western nations have had a more contentious relationship with Mr. Trump than Germany, whose leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel, a pastor’s daughter and scientist, is his opposite in terms of values and temperament. Opinion polls show that Mr. Trump is deeply unpopular among a broad majority of Germans.

But his message of disruption — his unvarnished nationalism and tolerance of white supremacists coupled with his skepticism of the pandemic’s dangers — is spilling well beyond American shores, extremism watchers say.

In a fast-expanding universe of disinformation, that message holds real risks for Western democracies, they say, blurring the lines between real and fake news, allowing far-right groups to extend their reach beyond traditional constituencies and seeding the potential for violent radicalization.

Mr. Trump’s appeal to the political fringe has now added a new and unpredictable element to German politics at a time when the domestic intelligence agency has identified far-right extremism and far-right terrorism as the biggest risks to German democracy.

The authorities have only recently woken up to a problem of far-right infiltration in the police and military. Over the past 15 months, far-right terrorists killed a regional politician on his front porch near the central city of Kassel, attacked a synagogue in the eastern city of Halle and shot dead nine people of immigrant descent in the western city of Hanau. Mr. Trump featured in the manifesto of the Hanau killer, who praised his “America First” policy.

In Germany, as in the United States, Mr. Trump has become an inspiration to these fringe groups. Among them are not only long-established hard-right and neo-Nazi movements, but also now followers of QAnon, the internet conspiracy theory popular among some of Mr. Trump’s supporters in the United States that hails him as a hero and liberator.

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Germany’s QAnon community, barely existent when the pandemic first hit in March, may now be the biggest outside the United States along with Britain, analysts who track its most popular online channels say.

Matthias Quent, an expert on Germany’s far right and the director of an institute that studies democracy and civil society, calls it the “Trumpification of the German far right.”

“Trump has managed to attract different milieus, and that’s what we’re seeing here, too,” Mr. Quent said. “We have everything from anti-vaxxers to neo-Nazis marching against corona measures. The common denominator is that it’s people who are quitting the mainstream, who are raging against the establishment.”

Trump, he added, “is the guy fighting the liberal-democratic establishment.”

For some on the far-right fringes, Mr. Trump’s message has been especially welcome at a time when Germany’s homegrown nativist party, the Alternative for Germany, of AfD, is struggling to exploit the pandemic and has seen its support dip to around 10 percent, experts say.

Nationalist populists in Germany have long welcomed the presence of one of their own, as they see it, in the White House. Mr. Trump’s language and ideology have helped legitimize theirs.

The AfD has repeatedly paraphrased Mr. Trump by calling for a “Germany first” approach. But the president is popular in more extremist circles, too. Caroline Sommerfeld, a prominent ideologue of a contingent known as the “new right” with close links to the extremist Generation Identity movement, said she had popped open a bottle of champagne when Mr. Trump won the 2016 election.

The QAnon phenomenon has added a new kind of fuel to that fire.

QAnon followers argue that Mr. Trump is fighting a “deep state” that not only controls finance and power, but also abuses and murders children in underground prisons to extract a substance that keeps its members young. German followers contend that the “deep state” is global, and that Ms. Merkel is part of it. Mr. Trump, they say, will liberate Germany from the Merkel “dictatorship.”

The far-right magazine Compact, which has printed Mr. Trump’s speeches for its readers, had a giant Q on its latest cover and held a “Q-week” on its video channel, interviewing far-right extremists like Björn Höcke. On the streets of Berlin last weekend there were Q flags and T-shirts and several banners inscribed with “WWG1WGA,” a coded acronym for Q’s hallmark motto, “Where we go one, we go all.”

Hard numbers are difficult to discern, with followers often subscribing to accounts on different platforms, analysts say. NewsGuard, a U.S.-based disinformation watchdog, found that across Europe, accounts on YouTube, Facebook and Telegram promoting the QAnon conspiracy counted 448,000 followers.

In Germany alone, the number of followers of QAnon-related accounts has risen to more than 200,000, Mr. Dittrich said. The largest German-language QAnon channel on YouTube, Qlobal-Change, has over 17 million views and has quadrupled its following on Telegram to over 124,000 since the coronavirus lockdown in March, he said.

“There is a huge Q community in Germany,” Mr. Dittrich said, with new posts and memes that dominate the message boards in the United States immediately translated and interpreted into German.

The fusion of the traditional far right with the QAnon crowd was something new, Mr. Quent said. “It’s a new and diffuse kind of populist rebellion that feeds on conspiracy theories and is being supplied with ideology from different corners of the far-right ecosystem,” he said.

One reason the QAnon conspiracy has taken off in Germany, Mr. Dittrich said, is that it is a good fit with local conspiracy theories and fantasies popular on the far right.

One of them is the “great replacement,” which claims that Ms. Merkel and other governments have been deliberately bringing in immigrants to subvert Germany’s ethnic and cultural identity. Another is a purported national crisis called “Day X,” when Germany’s current order will supposedly collapse and neo-Nazis take over.

A third theory is the belief that Germany is not a sovereign country but an incorporated company and occupied territory controlled by globalists.

This belief is held among a faction known as “Reichsbürger,” or citizens of the Reich, who orchestrated the brief storming on Parliament on Aug. 29. They do not recognize Germany’s post-World War II Federal Republic and are counting on Mr. Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to sign a “peace treaty” to liberate Germans from their own government.

Another reason for QAnon’s spread is that several German celebrities have become multipliers of the conspiracy, among them a former news presenter and a rapper and former judge on Germany’s equivalent of “American Idol.”

One of the biggest figures spreading the QAnon conspiracy is Attila Hildmann, a vegan-celebrity-chef-turned-far-right-influencer with more than 80,000 followers on the Telegram messaging app. He has appeared at all major coronavirus marches in Berlin, venting against face masks, Bill Gates and the Rothschild family — and appealing to Mr. Trump to liberate Germany.

“Trump is someone who has been fighting the global ‘deep state’ for years,” Mr. Hildmann said in an interview this past week. “Trump has become a figure of light in this movement, especially for QAnon, precisely because he fights against these global forces.”

“That’s why the hope for the German national movement, or the liberation movement, lies basically with Q and Trump, because Trump is a figure of light because he shows that you can fight these global powers and that he is victorious,” Mr. Hildmann said.

“The Germans hope that Trump will liberate Germany from the Merkel corona regime,” he said, so that “the German Reich is reactivated.”

Mr. Hildmann’s influence became plain in June, when he mobilized thousands of people to send messages to the U.S. and Russian embassies in Berlin to appeal for help. In the space of a few days, 24,000 tweets had been received by the embassies calling on Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin to “liberate” Germany from Ms. Merkel’s “criminal regime” and prevent “forced vaccination” and “genocide.”

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has warned of the risk of far-right extremists using the pandemic for their own purposes. This past week the agency’s chief, Thomas Haldenwang, said that “aggressive and disruptive far-right elements” were the driving force behind the protests over coronavirus restrictions.

But extremism experts and lawmakers worry that the security services are not paying close enough attention to the violent potential in the mix of QAnon disinformation campaigns and homegrown far-right ideology.

In the United States, some QAnon believers have been charged with violent crimes, including one accused of murdering a mafia boss in New York last year and another arrested in April after reportedly threatening to kill Joseph R. Biden Jr., who has since become the Democratic presidential candidate. The F.B.I. has warned that QAnon poses a potential domestic terrorism threat.

In Germany, language reminiscent of QAnon was used in the manifesto of the gunman who killed nine people with immigrant roots in the western city of Hanau in February.

“We have already seen that this conspiracy has the potential to radicalize people,” Mr. Dittrich said.

There are an estimated 19,000 Reichsbürger in Germany, about 1,000 of them classified as far-right extremists by the domestic intelligence service. Many of them are armed.

“At a time when some people are determined to destroy democratic discourse with all means possible,” said Konstantin von Notz, a lawmaker and deputy president of the intelligence oversight committee, “we have to take such a phenomenon very seriously.”

 

 

From a year ago:

 

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Biff Tannen

Biff Tannen 45682

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Posted
1 hour ago, bolverk said:

The president of the United States has become an inspiration for Nazis, German ones, not those Illinois pansies. Oh, and German QAnon freaks, German Covidiots, and German anti-vaxxers. My gawd, he and Putin are not only trying to destabilize the US but our Western allies too. Just look at the UK with Brexit, Orban in Hungary, Poland's lurch to the right, and the close call with Le Pen in France.

Trump Emerges as Inspiration for Germany’s Far Right
Among German conspiracy theorists, ultranationalists and neo-Nazis, the American president is surfacing as a rallying cry, or even as a potential “liberator.”

BERLIN — Just before hundreds of far-right activists recently tried to storm the German Parliament, one of their leaders revved up the crowd by conjuring President Trump.

“Trump is in Berlin!” the woman shouted from a small stage, as if to dedicate the imminent charge to him.

She was so convincing that several groups of far-right activists later showed up at the American Embassy and demanded an audience with Mr. Trump. “We know he’s in there!” they insisted.

Mr. Trump was neither in the embassy nor in Germany that day — and yet there he was. His face was emblazoned on banners, T-shirts and even on Germany’s pre-1918 imperial flag, popular with neo-Nazis in the crowd of 50,000 who had come to protest Germany’s pandemic restrictions. His name was invoked by many with messianic zeal.

It was only the latest evidence that Trump is emerging as a kind of cult figure in Germany’s increasingly varied far-right scene.

“Trump has become a savior figure, a sort of great redeemer for the German far right,” said Miro Dittrich, an expert on far-right extremism at the Berlin-based Amadeu-Antonio-Foundation.

Germany — a nation generally supportive of a government that has handled the pandemic better than most — may seem an unlikely place for Mr. Trump to gain such a status. Few Western nations have had a more contentious relationship with Mr. Trump than Germany, whose leader, Chancellor Angela Merkel, a pastor’s daughter and scientist, is his opposite in terms of values and temperament. Opinion polls show that Mr. Trump is deeply unpopular among a broad majority of Germans.

But his message of disruption — his unvarnished nationalism and tolerance of white supremacists coupled with his skepticism of the pandemic’s dangers — is spilling well beyond American shores, extremism watchers say.

In a fast-expanding universe of disinformation, that message holds real risks for Western democracies, they say, blurring the lines between real and fake news, allowing far-right groups to extend their reach beyond traditional constituencies and seeding the potential for violent radicalization.

Mr. Trump’s appeal to the political fringe has now added a new and unpredictable element to German politics at a time when the domestic intelligence agency has identified far-right extremism and far-right terrorism as the biggest risks to German democracy.

The authorities have only recently woken up to a problem of far-right infiltration in the police and military. Over the past 15 months, far-right terrorists killed a regional politician on his front porch near the central city of Kassel, attacked a synagogue in the eastern city of Halle and shot dead nine people of immigrant descent in the western city of Hanau. Mr. Trump featured in the manifesto of the Hanau killer, who praised his “America First” policy.

In Germany, as in the United States, Mr. Trump has become an inspiration to these fringe groups. Among them are not only long-established hard-right and neo-Nazi movements, but also now followers of QAnon, the internet conspiracy theory popular among some of Mr. Trump’s supporters in the United States that hails him as a hero and liberator.

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Germany’s QAnon community, barely existent when the pandemic first hit in March, may now be the biggest outside the United States along with Britain, analysts who track its most popular online channels say.

Matthias Quent, an expert on Germany’s far right and the director of an institute that studies democracy and civil society, calls it the “Trumpification of the German far right.”

“Trump has managed to attract different milieus, and that’s what we’re seeing here, too,” Mr. Quent said. “We have everything from anti-vaxxers to neo-Nazis marching against corona measures. The common denominator is that it’s people who are quitting the mainstream, who are raging against the establishment.”

Trump, he added, “is the guy fighting the liberal-democratic establishment.”

For some on the far-right fringes, Mr. Trump’s message has been especially welcome at a time when Germany’s homegrown nativist party, the Alternative for Germany, of AfD, is struggling to exploit the pandemic and has seen its support dip to around 10 percent, experts say.

Nationalist populists in Germany have long welcomed the presence of one of their own, as they see it, in the White House. Mr. Trump’s language and ideology have helped legitimize theirs.

The AfD has repeatedly paraphrased Mr. Trump by calling for a “Germany first” approach. But the president is popular in more extremist circles, too. Caroline Sommerfeld, a prominent ideologue of a contingent known as the “new right” with close links to the extremist Generation Identity movement, said she had popped open a bottle of champagne when Mr. Trump won the 2016 election.

The QAnon phenomenon has added a new kind of fuel to that fire.

QAnon followers argue that Mr. Trump is fighting a “deep state” that not only controls finance and power, but also abuses and murders children in underground prisons to extract a substance that keeps its members young. German followers contend that the “deep state” is global, and that Ms. Merkel is part of it. Mr. Trump, they say, will liberate Germany from the Merkel “dictatorship.”

The far-right magazine Compact, which has printed Mr. Trump’s speeches for its readers, had a giant Q on its latest cover and held a “Q-week” on its video channel, interviewing far-right extremists like Björn Höcke. On the streets of Berlin last weekend there were Q flags and T-shirts and several banners inscribed with “WWG1WGA,” a coded acronym for Q’s hallmark motto, “Where we go one, we go all.”

Hard numbers are difficult to discern, with followers often subscribing to accounts on different platforms, analysts say. NewsGuard, a U.S.-based disinformation watchdog, found that across Europe, accounts on YouTube, Facebook and Telegram promoting the QAnon conspiracy counted 448,000 followers.

In Germany alone, the number of followers of QAnon-related accounts has risen to more than 200,000, Mr. Dittrich said. The largest German-language QAnon channel on YouTube, Qlobal-Change, has over 17 million views and has quadrupled its following on Telegram to over 124,000 since the coronavirus lockdown in March, he said.

“There is a huge Q community in Germany,” Mr. Dittrich said, with new posts and memes that dominate the message boards in the United States immediately translated and interpreted into German.

The fusion of the traditional far right with the QAnon crowd was something new, Mr. Quent said. “It’s a new and diffuse kind of populist rebellion that feeds on conspiracy theories and is being supplied with ideology from different corners of the far-right ecosystem,” he said.

One reason the QAnon conspiracy has taken off in Germany, Mr. Dittrich said, is that it is a good fit with local conspiracy theories and fantasies popular on the far right.

One of them is the “great replacement,” which claims that Ms. Merkel and other governments have been deliberately bringing in immigrants to subvert Germany’s ethnic and cultural identity. Another is a purported national crisis called “Day X,” when Germany’s current order will supposedly collapse and neo-Nazis take over.

A third theory is the belief that Germany is not a sovereign country but an incorporated company and occupied territory controlled by globalists.

This belief is held among a faction known as “Reichsbürger,” or citizens of the Reich, who orchestrated the brief storming on Parliament on Aug. 29. They do not recognize Germany’s post-World War II Federal Republic and are counting on Mr. Trump and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia to sign a “peace treaty” to liberate Germans from their own government.

Another reason for QAnon’s spread is that several German celebrities have become multipliers of the conspiracy, among them a former news presenter and a rapper and former judge on Germany’s equivalent of “American Idol.”

One of the biggest figures spreading the QAnon conspiracy is Attila Hildmann, a vegan-celebrity-chef-turned-far-right-influencer with more than 80,000 followers on the Telegram messaging app. He has appeared at all major coronavirus marches in Berlin, venting against face masks, Bill Gates and the Rothschild family — and appealing to Mr. Trump to liberate Germany.

“Trump is someone who has been fighting the global ‘deep state’ for years,” Mr. Hildmann said in an interview this past week. “Trump has become a figure of light in this movement, especially for QAnon, precisely because he fights against these global forces.”

“That’s why the hope for the German national movement, or the liberation movement, lies basically with Q and Trump, because Trump is a figure of light because he shows that you can fight these global powers and that he is victorious,” Mr. Hildmann said.

“The Germans hope that Trump will liberate Germany from the Merkel corona regime,” he said, so that “the German Reich is reactivated.”

Mr. Hildmann’s influence became plain in June, when he mobilized thousands of people to send messages to the U.S. and Russian embassies in Berlin to appeal for help. In the space of a few days, 24,000 tweets had been received by the embassies calling on Mr. Trump and Mr. Putin to “liberate” Germany from Ms. Merkel’s “criminal regime” and prevent “forced vaccination” and “genocide.”

Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has warned of the risk of far-right extremists using the pandemic for their own purposes. This past week the agency’s chief, Thomas Haldenwang, said that “aggressive and disruptive far-right elements” were the driving force behind the protests over coronavirus restrictions.

But extremism experts and lawmakers worry that the security services are not paying close enough attention to the violent potential in the mix of QAnon disinformation campaigns and homegrown far-right ideology.

In the United States, some QAnon believers have been charged with violent crimes, including one accused of murdering a mafia boss in New York last year and another arrested in April after reportedly threatening to kill Joseph R. Biden Jr., who has since become the Democratic presidential candidate. The F.B.I. has warned that QAnon poses a potential domestic terrorism threat.

In Germany, language reminiscent of QAnon was used in the manifesto of the gunman who killed nine people with immigrant roots in the western city of Hanau in February.

“We have already seen that this conspiracy has the potential to radicalize people,” Mr. Dittrich said.

There are an estimated 19,000 Reichsbürger in Germany, about 1,000 of them classified as far-right extremists by the domestic intelligence service. Many of them are armed.

“At a time when some people are determined to destroy democratic discourse with all means possible,” said Konstantin von Notz, a lawmaker and deputy president of the intelligence oversight committee, “we have to take such a phenomenon very seriously.”

 

 

All a reporter has to do is ask him if he denounces this.  He won't and Rs won't give two fucks.  I fucking hate these people.

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WhatTheBuck

WhatTheBuck 28779

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3 minutes ago, Biff Tannen said:

All a reporter has to do is ask him if he denounces this.  He won't and Rs won't give two fucks.  I fucking hate these people.

Ask him if he is in favor of fascism. See what he says. I'd bet he doesn't know what fascism is. Maybe prompt him by telling him Antifa stands for anti-fascists. Ask him if he's pro-fascist. He'd botch that answer worse than the time someone asked him something about Western liberalism and he responded by talking about California Democrats. 

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