In Edgar Allan Poe’s story The Purloined Letter master detective Auguste Dupin is faced with the task of retrieving the eponymous letter and thus preventing a blackmailer – a minister who helped himself to it in the palace – from using the document against the Queen.

Paris police search the minister’s apartment with utmost thoroughness, using a microscope in hopes of revealing concealed compartments, searching beneath the floors – all in vain. Eventually, Dupin pockets the substantial reward by finding the document where the officers didn’t even bother to look: it is openly sitting in the letter tray. Today, this principle applies to the entire sociopolitical sphere: vital processes do not openly play out in public, yet neither are they deeply hidden. The most vital documents are not tucked away in well-guarded hiding places. In fact, finding them requires little effort – provided that whoever does the searching has this special knack for seeking out those inconspicuous yet easily accessible places. Unlike Dupin, today’s private investigator merely has to look in several places, then connect the dots.

Those in charge in Germany and the EU particularly like to apply this “hidden in plain sight” approach in their crusade against freedom of speech – which continues unbroken even after J. D. Vance’s Munich speech. In fact, the situation seems to aggravate, apparently following the logic that if the Americans are no longer on board, we must double down on our efforts. The deception starts with the wording. Of course, the not-yet-resigned federal government and all the executive and judiciary bodies involved reject the notion of a war against freedom of speech with indignation. They’d love nothing more than to subject to penalty whoever dares speak such heresy. In his reply to Vance, German Minister of Defense Pistorius declared the notion of limitations to freedom of speech preposterous. If anything, according to Pistorius, fake news and misinformation are being countered – which he, naturally, considers fully legitimate. Pistorius’ reply provides ample cause for a closer look into the government’s campaign against misinformation. To cut right to the chase: of late, not only broad, general statements fall into this category but even mere descriptions of the readily observable.

A crucial role in these public happenings (that oddly elude the German public’s majority) falls to the State Media Agencies. Hardly anyone knows about these 14 agencies which is largely due to their original purpose: licensing private TV and radio stations, supervising youth protection in private media, assigning cable network frequencies in Germany’s 16 federal states. The agencies receive 1.8989 % of the mandatory broadcast fee, an amount which has been reliably increasing over the years.

The 2020 Media State Treaty inconspicuously introduced a new area of responsibility: now, according to §19 the SMAs also supervise private creators’ “journalistic diligence obligation”. This not only affects private radio stations (which have been around in Germany since the 1980s) but also newly-founded online magazines and even the online presence of influential individuals. Interestingly, the SMAs explicitly do not concern themselves with the diligence of public broadcasting stations. For instance, the involvement of public radio station Rundfunk Berlin Brandenburg (which, in turn, belongs to the ARD network) in the smear campaign against Green politician Stefan Gelbhaar was of no interest to the responsible SMA, the Medienanstalt Berlin-Brandenburg. Accusations of sexual harassment in several cases against Gelbhaar gained momentum only after the testimony of an alleged victim named “Anne K.” had reached an audience in the millions. The station hired an actress who spoke the would-be- victim’s accusations into the camera. However, as it turned out there had never been an “Anne K.”, her affirmation in lieu of oath turned out to be forged, the woman editor in charge had never met with the alleged accuser. Nonetheless, the Green party dropped Gelbhaar. His safe second place in the Berlin election list (guaranteeing a seat in the narrow race to Germany’s national Parliament, the Bundestag, in February 2025) was given to the party’s chief campaigner, Andreas Audretsch, instead. This affair ticks all the boxes of a regular hit piece.

Instead of bothering with this political-medial machination the MABB finds interesting ways of busying itself with the new-ish publishing firm Nius. The MABB let Nius know that they had violated “accepted journalistic standards”. In 2023, Nius published a video report about asylum seekers in Germany receiving extensive dental care. Nius interviewed several migrants who readily provided information, proudly showing their new teeth. The agency claims that Nius had “insufficiently” informed the interviewed about the report’s alleged connection with statements made by CDU leader Friedrich Merz who had topicalized dental care for asylum seekers. As is known, Merz’ political adversaries had denied said dental care for migrants to exist in the first place – and then Nius inconveniently provided irrefutable evidence to the contrary.

Sadly, the MABB has not yet deigned to elucidate how exactly Nius was supposed to explain the entire controversy to newly-arrived asylum seekers with little to no insight in German politics’ finer details.

Another written warning comes across as right-out bizarre: in December 2024 Nius journalist Alexander Purrucker commented on Olaf Scholz using the German word “Heimaten” (approximately “homelands”) – a plural form that doesn’t exist in spoken German language: “Objection! Objection your Honour! Peruse the Duden [the German dictionary considered the gold standard by most Germans], there is no plural for ‘Heimat’!” As of late, however, according to the MABB, the word can be found in the Duden after all. Again: violation of “journalistic diligence obligation”. Older Duden editions (which Purrucker probably had in mind) don’t recognize a plural form of “Heimat”. What’s more, he was obviously using the phrase “Peruse the Duden!” metaphorically to imply that no native speaker of German would dream of using a plural of “Heimat” in everyday life.

While media agencies cannot issue fines they can claim a “service fee” for their chicanery. In the case of Nius: €5,000 plus €455,18 expenses. Law firm Steinhöfel has filed lawsuits in both cases. Lawyer Reinhard Höbelt states that, firstly, the contents in question do not justify the MABBs warnings and, secondly, the agency is exceeding its competence to begin with. If the MABB were to scrutinize public stations or the government’s speeches to such petty standards they could issue notes on a daily basis.

To the same pattern, the SMA of Lower Saxony took action against publicist Alexander Wallasch whose online presence has an audience of roughly a million readers per month. For instance, in an essay about the website messerinzidenz.de, a private initiative collecting reports of knife attacks in Germany, Wallasch writes: “A young student, not affiliated with Bertelsmann or the government, simply does what foundations, ministries, and the government’s forefront organizations have been refusing to do for almost ten years: with the aid of AI he makes the daily knife attacks mainly committed by Syrians and Afghans visible. Very often, the so-called Syrian and Afghan ‘skilled workers’ only put one single tool to use: the knife drawn against their hosts.”

In the SMA’s opinion this “[…] displays several potential violations of accepted journalist standards. Firstly, an unproven, generalized statement about Syrian and Afghan migrants is made who, according to your [Wallasch’s] claims, are prone to violence without providing valid sources or evidence […] Also, the text negatively stereotypes migrants and could thus be considered discriminating.”

Undoubtedly, Wallasch makes some pointed statements, and indeed the knife-crime map does not specify perpetrators’ demographics – if only because, in many cases, the police are unable to apprehend the knife-wielder in the first place. However, 2023 police statistics do show Afghans and Syrians as the main demographic among migrants. Migrants, in turn, accounted for 11.2% of capital crime and 9.1% of brutality offenses while making up only 3% of the population, including actual war refugees. Among migrant suspects, again, Syrians and Afghans account for the majority at 19.2% and 11.2%, respectively.

The obvious conclusion is that, while using pointed wording, Wallasch is not factually wrong in his assessment. Neither does the SMA provide anything to back its accusations, simply because there are no nationwide official statistics about knife attacks and the suspects’ provenance. Moreover, Wallasch does not even broadly accuse all (or even the majority of) Syrian and Afghan migrants currently living in Germany of being knifers. Clearly, the one thing we are not dealing with here is misinformation aka willfully false claims intended to gain political influence – which is precisely what the RBB pulled in the Gelbhaar affair.

Additionally, the Lower Saxony’s SMA orders Wallasch to “check” all of the 3,000 articles in his platform’s archive. “Impossible for such a small medium”, Wallasch states, “especially when they don’t even specify what to check for”.

While written warnings issued by fee-funded agencies do not, per se, pose an existential threat to newly-founded media outlets they make life difficult and potentially create financial hardship. But the main effect of such officious criticism is stigmatization, especially since nothing even remotely comparable exists in the realm of public media. Its main purpose is to serve as a staging area for further escalating official infringement on freedom of speech. For instance, the EU might soon order platforms like Facebook or X to remove or severely limit such stigmatized sources under threat of penalty.

Glancing at the SMAs’ personnel and orientation reveals their constant asseveration of independence and neutrality to be, mildly put, misleading. Anja Zimmer, head of MABB from 2016 through 2021, graduated on “Hate Speech In International Law” – a concept that exists neither in international nor German criminal law and can therefore be interpreted ad libitum. After her time with the MABB she sat on the advisory council of Google-founded NGO “weitklick”, an organization supposedly dedicated to fighting “misinformation” until Google ended funding in 2024. Further partners of “weitklick” include the notorious, mainly tax-funded “Amadeu Antonio Foundation” or the “Neue Deutsche Medienmacher” (“New German Media Creators”, incidentally co-founded by today’s anti-discrimination commissary Ferda Ataman) – two agenda clubs that emerge whenever certain opinions or statements are to be labelled as “hate speech” or “misinformation”.

Eva Flecken, Zimmer’s successor as head of MABB, owned the SPD’s membership book (though on inquiry she claims to no longer be a member). During her doctorate she worked for SPD member of the Bundestag Siegmund Ehrmann, then-president of the culture and media board as well as speaker of the “Netzwerk Berlin” affiliated with the SPD’s left wing. In an interview with the video outlet “Discover Neuland”, Flecken outlines her ideas about her agency’s key activities using the nebulous lingo characteristic of the network of official bodies, political parties and tax-funded organizations. For instance, she declares freedom of speech on social media to be “a vital asset”, of course, but “this must not entail putting up with things that have a destabilizing effect on society without contradiction”.

When Facebook was still censoring: A post by german user Henning Rosenbusch, which merely quoted Joseph Biden’s statement “The pandemic is over” in 2022, was deleted by the German Facebook offshoot. Rosenbusch was also banned for 30 days – simply because Biden’s statement did not correspond to the prevailing German government opinion at the time. A number of politicians in Germany regret that Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg recently declared an end to this practice.

 

 

So this is no longer about false information, alleged or otherwise, but “destabilization of society” – needless to say that Flecken does not elaborate on what she means by that. During the same interview, she murmurs about “dangers to freedom of speech from within the net”. Those did indeed exist when Facebook and Twitter were hampering the reach of certain users, going as far as even deleting completely legal posts. It seems, however, that these practices do not constitute the kind of danger Flecken has in mind.

She elucidates that “certain online media must adhere to journalistic diligence”. Why only „certain“ ones? Flecken also mentions that her agency now employs “machine-based selection mechanisms” to sniff out passages in those “certain online media” she considers problematic. This means that her organization does not react to external complaints but presumes to sift through journalists’ online content on its own.

Her colleague Christian Krebs of the SMA Lower Saxony (the agency that issued the warning against Wallasch) sealed a cooperation agreement with Lower Saxony’s ministries of justice and internal affairs (the latter then headed by Boris Pistorius, now Germany’s defense minister) as early as 2021 to counter “hate crime” online – another concept unknown to criminal law. So much for the SMAs’ purported distance from the state. Upon his re-election in 2024 Krebs declared: “The Media Agencies contribute to countering hate and agitation, especially by regulating the internet.”

The Media State Treaty makes no mention of any of this. It is pure self-empowerment, benevolently promoted and conducted by official politics. In a Facebook video, Krebs has a talk with Dirk Pejril, head of Lower Saxony’s Constitution Protection Agency. i. e. the Secret Service (Germany is blessed with a total of 17 internal secret services: one on the federal level and one for each of the 16 states that the Federal Republic of Germany is comprised of.

It bears repetition: these are purely internal secret services, tasked exclusively with monitoring and countering whatever is labelled as internal threats to Germany’s constitutional integrity). The Media Agency head asks: “Where does misinformation spread the fastest?” And the Secret Service employee replies: “Information spreads fastest in the digital world, like stagnant water is a breeding ground for gnats. Digital media are breeding grounds for misinformation, for fake information. This is a new challenge.”

The terminology used by these people, who are operating in different roles but obviously towards a common goal, paints a picture: “hate and agitation”, “destabilizing society”, “certain online media”, “breeding grounds”. Add to that the likening of information and opinion to harmful insects. What do you do with breeding grounds? You clean them out by any means necessary. At the very least you tell the public to avoid them. One topic that constantly keeps re-occurring in almost all the official brochures, online media and public statements is the narrative of the “perilous internet” and its detrimental effects on society, invariably followed by demands for its regulation.

Regulation by civil and criminal law has been around for a long time, the relevant jurisdiction being more than sufficient for handling matters of the digital world just as well as those of the material one, rendering additional legislation unnecessary. Talk of the digital world’s threats therefore regularly serves as a straw-man pretext to further restriction of the flow of information and the expression of opinions in a field where no gatekeepers have so far been monitoring what is allowed into the public domain.

The narrative of the internet as a breeding ground and the alleged need to restrict “certain online media” has an unspoken counterpart: the admonishers and warners see no problem in public broadcasting, an apparatus that has recently destroyed two careers with false claims and manipulated material, namely that of RBB’s Stefan Gelbhaar, see above, and that of the former Federal Office for Information Security’s head, Arne Schönbohm by public network ZDF’s Jan Böhmermann.

ZDF also spread genuine disinformation during the recent election campaign’s hot phase by claiming that CDU Secretary General Carsten Linnemann had called for registering people who suffer from mental illness after the Magdeburg attack in December 2024. In fact, the politician had proposed a register for mentally ill violent offenders and people who threaten violence – in other words, something completely different. Clearly, this counts as influencing elections through disinformation, in other words: what the perpetuously concerned keep decrying Russia and the USA for but generously overlook when their own do it and when “certain” parties are affected. They do not consider disinformation and distortion of reality to be fundamental dangers per se but solely depending on who does it and to which end. “Rules for thee but not for me”.

The fact that the domestic Secret Service is increasingly interfering in the formation of public opinion and, like the state media authorities, constantly assuming unintended competences, is not limited to individual statements such as those made by Lower Saxony’s highest constitutional protector. In the secret report by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution on the AfD, which was leaked to the platform netzpolitik.org shortly before the Bundestag elections, the authority characterizes formulations that clearly fall under freedom of opinion and in some cases merely contain descriptions of the current situation as “nationalist”, “right-wing extremist” and therefore subject to countermeasures. For example, it states: “Anyone who defines an ethnic group primarily in terms of a ‘common culture and history’ in the sense of a people as defined by descendence within the people, which can only be thought of and thus experienced or experienced in a ‘long temporal line of continuity’, commits an offense against the human dignity guaranteed in the constitution because ‘newcomers are excluded across the board from the outset’, ‘since they cannot catch up on a ‘common history’ and thus cannot become an authentic part of the people’.”

Aside from the fact that Article 1 of the German Basic Law defines the citizen’s defense rights against an intrusive state and, therefore, cannot be violated by individuals or party members: how else is an ethnic group to be defined other than by a common culture and history with long lines of continuity? This does not ‘summarily exclude’ newcomers who have just arrived and can profess a culture, but still experience the country differently than a native German with German parents and grandparents. After all, the same applies to every German who moves to China: He can adopt the culture there, but he just comes to it from the outside.

The Federal Office also considers the following passage from the 2018 state election program of the Thuringian AfD to be extremist: “On one hand, the guarantee of security depends on a community- oriented set of values, customs and norms that has developed over centuries. On the other hand, it is dependent on the enforcement of law and order by the state. An intact legal system is based on unquestioned self-evident truths, which cannot exist in the multicultural society sought by all the old parties.” This resembles the generally recognised dictum by German legal philosopher and constitutional judge Ernst-Wolfgang Böckenförde stating that the modern secular state depends on preconditions it cannot create itself. In other words, it depends on a sufficiently large number of citizens agreeing on a certain understanding of society that precedes the constitution. As is well known, a certain politician named Angela Merkel went on record stating that multiculturalism had failed completely. According to today’s constitutional protection logic, even the former Chancellor was a right-wing extremist in her early days. Just as the media watchdog institutions did with Nius and Wallasch, Germany’s internal secret service is attempting to frame completely legal and actually banal statements as dangers to society.

The third element completing the big picture is the judiciary’s persecution of simple and harmless opinions. In August 2022 Braunschweig lawyer Markus Roscher wrote on X: “Habeck, Baerbock, Scholz: We are governed by malicious, arrogant failures. They let their citizens perish for a green- black-red sham morality, line their own pockets and are overall far too stupid to initiate well thought- out laws.” He was referring to specific occasions, namely Habeck’s largely failed attempts at persuading Qatar and Canada to supply large quantities of liquid gas and, secondly, the “heating law”. During that period, politicians advised citizens to only take short, cold showers, all the while demolishing Germany’s last remaining nuclear power plants. Here, too, someone expresses their opinion in an exaggerated manner by describing the subjective impression that certain politicians leave on them, but in doing so they are completely within their right as defined by numerous rulings of the Federal Constitutional Court. As early as 1958, in the so-called Lüth Ruling the judges in Karlsruhe established that, under the German constitution, freedom of opinion explicitly extends to protect pointed and even polemical statements.

Regardless, the Kassel district court sentenced Roscher to a fine of 60 daily rates, totaling €3,000. Roscher states to have been signaled by judicial circles that the next instance might well impose an even higher sentence. He therefore accepted the court’s decision, as the Bar Council might revoke his license to practice if he was fined 91 daily rates or more – amounting to a criminal record.

Even so, the lawyer is troubled by the possibility that the Bar Council might still revoke his license after all: “This Sword Of Damocles remains hanging over me.” While there is a distinct possibility for him to be proven right by the Federal Court of Justice or the Federal Constitutional Court at Karlsruhe, this would be of little use to the 61-year-old were he no longer allowed to practice law. He realized that the authorities intended to make an example of him when, after the ruling, the Pforzheim city council announced that it would revoke his firearms license due to “lack of reliability”. In his case, it was only a “small” firearms license, that is permission to carry a gas pistol. According to Roscher, he obtained the license when he started receiving death threats after testifying in a murder trial.

The pattern of additional punishment solely intended to intimidate citizens can now be seen in a whole series of other cases. In the CBS documentary about German state lawyers’ fight against freedom of expression, the journalist asks how people react when the police take away their mobile phones or tablets for alleged opinion offences. “They are shocked,” one of the prosecutors replies, visibly amused: “It is worse for them than the punishment itself.” A sworn public servant openly admits that the notorious house searches and confiscations are not at all intended to secure evidence (after all, what evidence needs to be secured from people posting with their real names?) but humiliation. Just like the state media authorities and the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, law enforcement officers are also ignoring the boundaries set by law and the clear-cut allocation of competences. They get away with their increasing brazenness due to governmental, administrative, and judicial bodies benevolently turning a blind eye.

Examples of informal sanctioning of opinions – lawfare – are legion. The Berlin public prosecutor’s office later initiated proceedings against blogger Hadmut Danisch who helped uncover the Baerbock vita hoax in 2021 because of comments about the weight of the Green Party’s then-chairwoman Ricarda Lang. During the investigation, the police initiated a search of Danisch’s bank account without any legal grounds in order to find out how much money Danisch received from readers of his blog. Deutsche Bank then canceled his account. Despite the investigation against him being dropped due to lack of evidence, his account was not restored.

When Martin Wagener, Professor of Political Science at the Federal University of Applied Sciences, wrote in his book “Kulturkampf um das Volk” (“The Cultural Battle Over The People”) about the historical-cultural line of tradition that, in his view, defines the concept of the people – which, see above, is considered ‘right-wing extremist’ according to the Office for the Protection of the Constitution – the academic did not lose his chair. Due to a report by the Office, however, he lost his security clearance and, consequentially, his permission to enter the university campus which happens to double as a training facility for the next generation of intelligence service operators. At the instigation of Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth, the German association of publishers and booksellers demanded Wagener’s publisher to refund the printing subsidy that many publishers received during the Corona pandemic.¹ The reason given, again without any concrete evidence: Wagener’s book was “not constitutional”. Publico could not find another case of Corona aid being reclaimed from a publisher in Germany.

The Bamberg judiciary is continuing its proceedings against artist Simon Rosenthal who critically reworked a CSU (the CDU’s Bavarian sister party) MP’s statement “Vaccination frees you” in a collage – although the first instance acquitted Rosenthal. In view of the abstruse construction, the next trial is also likely to end with the same result. But the prosecutor’s zeal in pursuing the case is tying up huge chunks of the freelancer’s time and money who now has to employ a lawyer. “Obviously, the idea is to finish me financially,” states Rosenthal.

All of this paints a remarkable contrast to the shrill political-media outrage over an inquiry comprised of 551 questions by the CDU/CSU parliamentary group about the taxpayers’ money paid to “Omas Gegen Rechts” (“Grannies Against The Right”), “Correctiv”, the Amadeu Antonio Foundation and other pro-government activist “NGOs”. The argument put forward by the SPD, Greens and Tagesschau (“Union outraged with enquiry”) is that the very notion of inquiring about what taxes are being spent on constitutes an “intimidation of civil society”. The real-life intimidation of citizens, i. e. members of the actual civil society, is regarded by the same elected representatives and media operatives as “democracy capable of defending itself”. This milieu declares a matter of course, a parliamentary enquiry, a scandal – all the while normalising something as scandalous as the persecution of “certain opinions”.

The authoritarian alliance is waging its battle at all levels. As has recently become known, EU officials are preparing a programme to “prebunk” certain expressions of opinion – under the usual fig leaf pretext of “protecting citizens from disinformation”. According to Ursula von der Leyen, “prebunking” is intended to act as an “immunisation” against “false opinions”. This euphemism entails nothing less than the state or state-affiliated bodies determining which opinions on certain topics deserve the seal of official approval. One cannot help but be reminded of the “truth” unisono proclaimed by all official channels at the time that the Corona vaccination was “guaranteed” not to cause any long-term damage. This was genuine disinformation, hammered into the public’s minds by government agencies and hundreds of journalists.

Despite the risk of such meticulous detail putting off some readers there is sufficient reason for listing all these cases: firstly, the notorious notion of merely anecdotal evidence is debunked. Secondly, only the whole picture shows the extent of the war against freedom of expression unidirectionally waged by the state and its supporting forces. There is not the one big, crfushing blow against free speech. Rather, the great illiberal alliance is working to tie it up in a thousand threads, just like Jonathan Swift’s Lilliputians did with Gulliver.

The difference is that freedom of speech is not a giant and the shacklers are not dwarves. It is all happening in broad daylight. Anyone willing can acquire all the relevant information as easily as Dupin gets the letter from the tray. Also, anyone can ask themselves just as easily why the US broadcaster CBS is showing a documentary about the persecution of opinions by the German judiciary that ARD and ZDF would never commission. And why this dossier on the state of freedom of opinion appears on Publico and the Daily Sceptic, while Der Spiegel or the Süddeutsche Zeitung go to great lengths to minimise or completely deny the existential threat to freedom of opinion. To this end, they keep repeating an all-too-familiar defamatory term: “conspiracy theory.”²

 

 

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¹ Disclosure: The same publisher also published the author’s book “Verachtung nach unten”.

² The screenshot shows an appeal from the German Federal Ministry of the Interior: people who believe that someone in their neighbourhood is spreading ‘conspiracy theories’ are asked to contact a special government agency.