Three days ago Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor published a piece in the Financial Times on “end times fascism,” focused on the far-right movements around Europe that have been gaining ground lately, how they’re just like the Nazi and fascist movements of the past, and how they diverge.
They refer to the moment when US Vice President JD Vance showed up at the Munich Security Conference in 2025 and explicitly beat up on Germans for stifling the free speech of their poor put-upon Nazis. On that trip, he visited the Dachau concentration camp (taking notes/Polaroid porn for Stephen Miller?) and then met with Alice Weidel, the head of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party, the far-right party that is, you know, Nazis by literally any other name. (They hate it when you call them that, or note that they are full of Nazis. Some of them probably don’t mind it if you mean it in a nice way, though, or if you purr the word at them, sexily.)
Of course, the world’s most antisemitic Nazi-saluting trillionaire (don’t call it a Nazi salute!) is a huge supporter, and he got a big thank you from AfD’s lead candidate Ulrich Siegmund for his all his help in the big regional election that shook Germany and much of the western world this weekend.
The (basically) Nazi AfD party won 43.8 percent of the vote in elections in the state of Saxony-Anhalt, west of Berlin but solidly in the former East Germany. Not an outright majority, but far more than any other party, a number that in these sorts of elections is considered a landslide.
Weidel also thanked Musk afterward, and in turn he gave her a “Gut gemacht!” Also congratulating AfD: Vladimir Putin’s government, and of course the Trump regime. In other words, the axis of evil.
The AfD just wants to Make Germany Great Again:
[T]he AfD sought to capitalise on a mood of nostalgia for the communist East Germany and discontent among east Germans. The party has promised a remigration and deportation offensive, to ban rainbow flags in schools and halt the building of new windfarms. It wants to change the slogan of the state from “Think Modern” to “Think German”, and reintroduce the singing of the country’s national anthem in schools.
Let’s see, viciously bigoted against racial minorities, against LGBTQ+ people, against modernity, against the outside world, replacing it all with mindless nationalistic pablum to give the people scapegoats instead of teaching themselves how to take responsibility for their problems or how to identify the real villains? Yep, sounds like MAGA, sounds like the Third Reich, sounds like every other total loser fascist movement ever!
Now, some perspective.
Saxony-Anhalt is one state in Germany, and it’s not a state that has any of Germany’s big, prosperous cities. (Which matters for context!) Again, it’s the former East Germany, downtrodden, an area we’ve seen described as sort of living in the past (we’ll include some news reports at the end for context), the type of forgotten region that’s so often a breeding ground for the kind of xenophobic scapegoating that’s necessary for fascism.
AfD also didn’t win an outright majority, and nobody wants to coalition with the creeps, which in a parliamentary system translates roughly as “Ach, Du bist immer noch probably still fucked.”
But it’s still bad. Because, for one thing, they could cobble together some kind of governing coalition, despite all the other parties’ historical desire to shun Nazis. Also, it’s just bad that for the first time literally since Hitler, such a Hitler-esque party won a landslide in a state election in Germany. Chancellor Friedrich Merz said he was “deeply shocked.”
Klein and Taylor list off Nazi-adjacent parties all through the region gaining steam, shouting “don’t call us Nazis!” as they frantically hide their stuffed swastikas under their beds and pretend to be asleep every time they think they hear Mom coming down the hall, lest she catch them masturbating. They specifically note the Freedom Party (FPÖ) in Austria, which now has a senior member serving as the President of the National Council, which Klein and Taylor explain is the second-highest office in the country.
It’s all across the continent, though, having varying levels of success. We of course know about Marine Le Pen’s movement in France, and Giorgia Meloni in Italy. In Spain there is the ultraderecha (extremist far-right) Vox party, which is winning more support to the point that it is now coalitioning in some autonomous regions with more mainstream center-right parties, which used to be unthinkable. Vox capitalizes on similar sentiments, exploiting the frustrations of an ever-present housing crisis to scapegoat immigrants and turn young people toward far-right nationalism.
“Migrant invasion!” all these people and parties scream, using the exact same playbooks and reading from the same scripts. (Oh boy, don’t you know how much Vox creamed itself when that migrant crisis in Ceuta magically started, seemingly timed to inflict maximal pain on the socialist government of Pedro Sánchez.)
Klein and Taylor are careful to note, though, that while there are similarities, there are also important differences in these newfangled Kids These Days European fascists, who are being elevated to power in response to very different, more global crises than those that created those old-timey fascist leaders.
Let’s get to know one of those Kids These Days better!
Meet AfD leader Alice Weidel, here doing a video message to Elon Musk:
Weidel is a clownass Aryan lesbian (AfD hates gays and gay marriage) who’s married to a Sri Lankan woman (AfD really hates dark-skinned immigrants) with two adopted kids (AfD is opposed to that), but whatever, it’s not like any of these policy positions would ever affect her if they became law, because she lives in Switzerland.
Amazing how these pick-me tokens show up as useful idiots in every fascist movement, strutting around like Scott Bessent volunteering to be a horse’s understudy at the Kentucky Derby. They all think they’re the “good kind” of whatever minority groups they’re members of or adjacent to in any way.
You know, not like those other people, the ones who are scared of the rise of the new Nazi party that promises to protect people from “the trans cult, early sexualisation and gender ideology.”
So that’s who that scumbag is. She really sucks, and people across the world should know her name, so they can make fun of her and write cruel fan fiction about her going on double dates with Mrs. and Mrs. Bari Weiss.
We really do need to be mocking these fucking weirdos on a global scale, because they are colossally easy to make fun of, but also colossally dangerous, and they hate being mocked. (If you have an hour, watching Mehdi Hasan and his audience humiliate AfD politician Maxmilian Krah repeatedly is immensely satisfying.)
But it also really helps to understand how similar all these fascist goofballs, charlatans, and freaks are, and how dangerous when they’re allowed in power. Toward the end of their article, Klein and Taylor note how these “end times fascists” are different in one big way, in that they’re kind of an evil alliance of the “religious fundamentalists, the tech accelerationists and the militant ethno-nationalists,” which is sort of only possible because we live in a world now — unlike that of Hitler or his contemporaries — where the Apocalypse really is possible.
And these are the people who are hell-bent on bringing it about, whether that means something supernatural — hello JD Vance and the Antichrist! — or whether that’s Peter Thiel and the rest of the billionaires trying to hop into their bunkers in Argentina or onto spaceships to Mars before the whole fucking place explodes or wildfires itself to death as a result of completely preventable climate disaster.
But sure, white morons in Germany and Spain and France and Austria and the UK and Argentina and the US, listen to these billionaires and oligarchs telling you to blame brown-skinned immigrants and gays for your shitty lives. Those people totally care about all y’all regular volk, sure as shit.
Meanwhile, Alice Weidel and her brown-skinned wife will be in their lesbian bunk in Switzerland. Or maybe Elon will let them ride on the spaceship. Whatever.
Here are a couple news reports to watch about Saxony-Anhalt and the German far-Right in general:
[Guardian]
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This is AMAZING work.
But hey this is for the "Democrats would be rightwing in Europe" crowd:
Each and every one of these sainted Western European democracies will destroy themselves by voting for conservatives and/or racists if they get the feeling that there's too many Africans, Roma or Arabs in their nation. They will destroy all the good things of their nations just so that those people with browner-hued skin won't have it. Because every country is capable of self-owning for bigotry. The USA is one of the leaders of this yes, but plenty of Eurozone nations can do it.
Don't want to be called a Nazi?
Stop acting like a Nazi.