History has a way of repeating, such that historians are obliged to explain when and how. In the early 1930s, the organization called the Union of Nationalist German Jews (Verband nationaldeutscher Juden), led by Max Naumann, emerged as one of history’s most tragic examples of misplaced political allegiance.

Naumann, who had fought in WWI as a captain for the Bavarian Army and was awarded the Iron Cross for his bravery, told Jewish Germans to support the anti-Semitic Hitler and even endorsed the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses. His self-loathing platform assumed violent hate would simply melt away given a patriotic German identity, as if race-based targets wouldn’t be targets of racism. He berated Einstein as a traitor, and demanded assets of Jews be confiscated to help Hitler amass power. This idiotic miscalculation, of course, proved suicidal — in 1935 Hitler’s secret police threw him in jail, and his members murdered in concentration camps.

[Despite the fact that to Hermann Göring he] declared [1933] in an interview that Nazi action against Jews was in many ways justified […] Dr. Max Naumann, president of the Union of Nationalist Jewish Germans, was yesterday [in 1935] arrested by the Gestapo, Nazi secret police. The Union, comprising the so-called “Jewish Nazis,” was officially ordered disbanded yesterday.

Nearly a century later, in a return to the sad theater of European right-wing politics, few puppets embody this same pattern of contradictory allegiance more strikingly than Alice “Alles” Weidel.

As one of the lead candidates of Germany’s Anti-Gay for Deutschland (AfD), Weidel presents a fascinating case study in political incongruity: a lesbian woman in a registered partnership, propped up for a leadership position in a party that vocally opposes her gay marriage, opposes her adoption rights for same-sex couples, and that published a highly symbolic “death notice” for “the German family” when her same-sex marriage was legalized.

AfD’s internet site features on its front page a death notice, saying “In deep sorrow, we say good-bye to the German family, whose constitutional protection was buried by the ‘representatives of the people’ at the German parliament.” Instead of condolence notices, the AfD advises Germans to throw out the parliamentarians who voted for equal marriage rights in the upcoming elections.

The Anti-Gay for Deutschland platform literally campaigns on death for those supporting gay marriage, and Alice says “Hey, should I go lead a hate group that wants to kill the German family, I mean kill mine? Honey, fetch my Nazi “Alles” dagger and torch, I’m off to join the campaign that hates us.”

This reminds me of the Chappelle Show skit called “Clayton Bigsby Doesn’t See Color” about a Black man so blind he becomes a popular KKK leader.

Civilian Used as Shield is a War Crime

Weidel’s position in the AfD serves a cynical strategic function as a shield by assailants too scared to stand up without a disposable body to hide behind. Her very existence within the party leadership provides convenient insulation against accusations of homophobia, while being homophobic. When critics point to the AfD’s explicit anti-LGBTQ+ policies—opposing gay marriage, curtailing adoption rights, and proposing education reforms that would minimize information about homosexuality—party members can simply point to Weidel and ask, “How can we be anti-gay when we use this token lesbian shield to make us look like we care?”

This form of tokenism creates a powerful damaging effect on political dialogue. It allows hardline positions against LGBTQ+ rights to simultaneously claim inclusivity, without any actual basis other than short-term exploitation. Alexander Tassis, another gay AfD politician and head of the “Alternative Homosexuals” group, exemplifies this dynamic when he states that gay members are “fully integrated” in the AfD—while in the same breath declaring, “We’re not seeking equality.”

Oh, wait, it gets worse. Tassis is an immigrant too. He says the AfD really represents his desire to stop immigrants. Do you know who else was an immigrant who hated immigrants? Max Neumann. The Union of Nationalist German Jews knows exactly how this story ends for immigrants like Tassis, in jail and maybe even death camps. Tassis is preaching self-hate and destruction of his own community, just like Neumann. And Weidel? Her partner is also an immigrant.

Hierarchy Driven by Fear and Loathing

What drives someone to align herself with a political movement that works against her own community’s interests, and that refers to her in terms of a quick death? The answer likely lies in a hierarchy of political priorities and fears.

For Weidel and others like Tassis, anti-immigration hate appears to cloud their concerns about own survival, let alone LGBTQ+ equality. This echoes the Nazi propaganda forcing such fear as to convince millions to kill themselves and their own families. As the impatient, hot-headed General Rommel famously said after being continuously defeated on the battle-field by Montgomery, he would much rather take a suicide pill than finally be set free from Hitler by rapidly approaching Allied forces. The “Alternative Homosexuals” group explicitly frames opposition to religion and immigration as necessary for their “survival,” while supporting a group opposed to their survival. This suicidal positioning mirrors tactics used by other European right-wing populists like Geert Wilders, who have attempted to frame outsized campaigns of hate for others as a protective measure against the official hate for LGBTQ+ communities.

The prioritization reveals a toxic political reversal and bad gamble: sacrificing full equality and rights for one’s own community (“genetic unity“) in exchange for policies that target other marginalized groups first. Throwing away the lives of others comes wrapped inside deeply insecure competitive aspirations to be allocated a big fancy house with a lush garden, a ruthless plot just on the other side of a walled concentration camp filled with people it all was stolen from.

Selfish Short-sighted Exceptionalism

Alice Weidel stands with her “Alles” dagger and torch in hand, deliberately setting fires throughout a village, winds blowing unfavorably, that she somehow believes will spare her own straw house. As one of the few high-profile LGBTQ+ figures in a homophobic right-wing movement, her attraction to the AfD seems rooted not in spite of its destructive potential, but because it feeds into Naumann-like self-erasure. This paradoxical longing for the very flames that will destroy her community defines her whole identity—she doesn’t merely tolerate hateful contradictions; she embodies them. While the AfD presents her as evidence that their human shield means supposed inclusivity, Weidel stands like a barking dog left at the perimeter outside the AfD tent, mistaking limited guard duty for genuine power. She appears to even believe she’s the tail wagging that dog, rather than recognizing herself as something the dog could rid itself of at any moment. The fundamental nature of the movement is they let her ride along, all the while saying those who believe themselves exceptional will help feed an appetite for destruction.

The false hope of self-loathing Naumann-exceptionalism operates on the implicit understanding that while the party opposes rights for the LGBTQ+ community, certain individuals who demonstrate sufficient alignment with the party’s primary goals will be useful. And once they are discarded for being willful idiots, then what Alice? There’s likely a meeting in the future where she’s told “We don’t want you, you abandoned your own gay family and gay community, and such traitors are unwelcome.” It’s a political tragedy: transferring all credibility away to policies that ultimately harm the very community one belongs to, just for affirmation inherently designed not to last.

While the phrase “useful idiot” may capture the functional role that figures like Weidel play in foolishly legitimizing hate groups they should be fighting against, it perhaps understates the agency and calculation involved. Weidel and others have made very conscious decisions to align themselves with movements that oppose them and their own community’s interests, as they believe some other shared goals have precedence.

This represents a form of dangerous compartmentalization of ignorance, a “zone” where identity is subordinated to hatred of others—where being anti-immigration becomes more central to one’s political self-conception than being pro-gay. It’s not mere idiocy but rather a complex negotiation of competing identities and priorities, albeit one that ultimately serves to enable the worst crimes against humanity.

The most insidious aspect of this arrangement is how effectively it destroys political discourse and replaces it with hatred accelerants. The presence of contradictions—like an anti-gay party with gay leaders—creates confusion that benefits the party’s broader agenda to destroy law and order. Constant contradictions to destroy any semblance of stability make it harder for critics to form clear, coherent engagement with thoughtful people and easier to foment support around irrational emotional responses.

When the AfD threatened to sue over the legalization of gay marriage in 2017, Weidel’s presence in leadership created cognitive dissonance that served as a powerful rhetorical tool. It allowed supporters to dismiss critics as simplistic or reductive in their understanding of the party’s positions. Of course, looking like the Verband nationaldeutscher Juden of 2025 makes her an even more compelling story. Hitler was a huge proponent of irrational and abrupt self-sacrifice, frequently pushing his closest and most loyal staff to murder themselves or be murdered.

The case of Alice “Alles” Weidel demonstrates how right-wing populist movements exploit contradictions to generate destabilization, tactical information warfare steps rather than liabilities. Holding up members of marginalized groups as tokens in visible positions, while simultaneously opposing their rights, creates powerful shields for maintaining and ironically expanding hate-filled exclusion platforms.

This scenario mirrors armed terrorists who snatch children from their beds to use as human shields, with Weidel functioning as that captive child who inexplicably aids her captors rather than those attempting rescue. Her alliance with the AfD reflects not just Stockholm syndrome but a deeper delusion—she believes herself a strategist among hostage-takers rather than merely a useful shield. The tragedy lies not only in her failure to recognize her expendability, but in her active contribution to a movement that would ultimately mark her as different. Her apparent qualification to assess risk may be nothing more than the psychological adaptation of a hostage who has convinced herself she shares the terrorists’ interests, when in fact her utility exists only until the moment it doesn’t.

Far from moderating the Anti-Gay part of the Anti-Gay for Deutschland party, figures like Weidel enable them to maintain or even intensify exclusionary policies even more. They are not the evidence that a hate party is changing, rather they are the disposable asset that proves the rule — a life to be disposed of in a political gambit, absorbing the worst consequences of the AfD instead of the AfD itself.

Horace wrote in Satires 1.2.47–63:

But business with the second class is so much safer – I’m talking about freedwomen … What does it matter whether you sin with a matron or a toga-wearing maid?

Two millennia later, we see the same institutional logic at work: corporate employees treated as modern freedwomen, seduce them into contracts, relocate them, secure them, isolate them. Elon Musk’s team handles paperwork, pre-arranged housing, security teams on standby – a systematic operation – like Roman oppression networks of two millennia ago.

“…this is a list that appeals to those who think about Rome every day.” True to form, his recommendations include Julius Caesar’s own account of his Gallic campaigns, “The Gallic Wars.” This passion for history aligns with Musk’s vocal concerns about declining birth rates….

What? Passion for history aligns with concern about birth rates? What? WHAT?

“The Gallic Wars” is fundamentally a text about systematic conquest and subjugation – Caesar’s account of methodically bringing various populations under Roman control. This isn’t just a casual historical curiosity, but illustrates a dangerous mindset of human exploitation through operations designed around reproductive control.

With that in mind, consider what happened after the Babylon Bee was banned from Twitter. An exchange revealed how Elon Musk treats corporate entities as his gateway into reproductive transactions:

…at one point he said, ‘Are you ever in San Francisco or Austin?’ And I said, ‘I am in Austin and Texas a good amount for work.’” St. Clair continued, adding that she worked for the Babylon Bee, a conservative satirical website, at the time. After Musk restored the Babylon Bee to Twitter from an eight-month suspension for a joke about a transgender Biden administration official, Bee CEO Seth Dillon asked St. Clair to fly to San Francisco to interview the billionaire at his new company’s headquarters. “After the interview, I got a text from him saying, ‘Feel like going to Providence [Rhode Island] tonight?’” St. Clair continued. The alleged romance blossomed from there, she claimed, until she became pregnant.

The pattern here mirrors ancient systems of concubinage – where powerful men used institutional structures to facilitate and legitimize reproductive control. This isn’t a random romance, it’s an orchestrated operation using modern corporate infrastructure. We need to know whether Musk said he’d restore the account if, and only if, a woman he had already identified as staff was converted into his concubine.

She claimed she was restricted from telling more than a close-knit circle of people that she was even carrying a child. “I was told to keep it secret. I was being asked to keep it a secret forever,” claimed St. Clair, declining to provide a reason for the confidentiality or any material proof that Musk is the biological father. Musk allegedly provided her with a lavish apartment in the Financial District — where rent for a two-bedroom can soar to nearly $40,000, according to StreetEasy — and a hefty security detail, but no romance, St. Clair claimed. The young mother was allegedly forced to spend her pregnancy alone.

Of course she was told to be alone. That’s what the security detail and lavish relocation mean. The relationship is a job to produce offspring to report for duty later. The contradiction between public visibility and mandated secrecy reveals the true nature of these arrangements – not personal relationships but institutional mechanisms for reproductive control, complete with standardized operational requirements of permanent secrecy.

The irony reaches new heights when a self-proclaimed champion of ‘free speech’ implements institutional mechanisms of forced silence. The contradiction reveals how corporate power structures enable reproductive control while maintaining public deniability. He always meant free speech for me, not for thee.

To recap, a Babylon Bee employee was magically whisked to San Francisco in May 2023, because there could only be a meeting in person there or Austin – then suddenly whisked to Providence, revealing how geographic control serves as another tool of institutional power – impregnated, and then gloatingly paraded around in public yet also angrily completely hidden. Unlike personal relationships, institutional systems of control have recognizable patterns:

• December 2023: Poses for “Real Women of America Calendar”
• February 2025: Can’t “take baby for walks” due to secrecy

What kind of security detail can’t handle setting up a baby walk? I mean, come on. Private jets to anywhere with private security detail and yet… can’t take a baby for a walk. Give me a break. The whole thing doesn’t add up at all. This isn’t about security – it’s about control. A security detail that can manage private jets but prevents baby walks reveals its true purpose: isolation and movement restriction, hallmarks of systematic control rather than protection of even a baby’s basic needs.

The casual mention of Musk’s money manager Jared Birchall handling paperwork, the standardized control of movement detail, the luxury apartment arrangement – all suggest an industrial-scale operation that’s been replicated.

A lot.

Just as Roman systems had markers, this operation displays classic symptoms of modern systematic control for human trafficking:

• Coercion
• Financial control
• Movement restriction
• Multiple similar cases

The sprawling infrastructure of arrangements visible through documented involvement of money managers, publicists, security teams, and luxury real estate suggests a systematic approach to creating concubines rather than isolated incidents.

When examined together, the standardized procedures (from initial corporate facilitation through Babylon Bee, to Birchall’s paperwork handling, to pre-arranged housing and security protocols) point to concerning patterns. The contradictions between public appearances and mandated secrecy, alongside formal “private agreements” and professional PR management, reveal an established system of control operating through legitimate business channels, one that appears designed with replication rather than some kind of personal romance and exception.

The parallels to Roman systems of population control become even more disturbing when viewed alongside Musk’s public statements about space colonization casualties and racial reproduction – suggesting an institutional approach to human reproduction intended to treat children as disposable fodder for empire building.

While standard historiography has long treated the 1898 Maine incident and 1933 Reichstag fire as separate case studies, a careful review of the evidence reveals them as sequential developments in crisis acceleration techniques. Hearst’s media empire served not merely as a prototype but as an active transmission vector, deliberately passing proven propaganda methods to Nazi Germany through direct financial and institutional relationships.

This direct lineage forces a fundamental revision of fascist propaganda’s origins. These techniques weren’t invented in Europe but were industrialized and systematized in America’s emerging media empires, with Hearst’s operations serving as both proving ground and export platform. The progression from penny press sensationalism through Civil War propaganda reached its industrial apex in Hearst’s carefully constructed system of mass manipulation.

The Spanish-American War of 1898 represents the first hugely successful political deployment of industrialized crisis manufacturing that outstripped earlier attempts.

• The “penny press” wars of the 1830s had elements of manufactured media crises and sensationalism
• The “most evil” Mexican-American War (1846-1848) had been built on press manipulation and manufactured outrage
• Civil War developed centralized machinery for media crisis manufacturing to shift mass perceptions

What stood out by the end of the 1800s was how one particular man in American media was poised to push telegraph and printing innovations to speed wider distribution, with deliberate use of photographs as a new visual hook, coordinated through multiple newspapers as if one.

William Randolph Hearst’s treatment of the USS Maine incident established what we might call the “crisis acceleration template.” When the Maine exploded in Havana harbor, Hearst’s papers didn’t merely report the event – they orchestrated a carefully constructed narrative. Through fabricated interviews, manufactured “scoops,” and the deliberate personification of evil in General Weyler, Hearst demonstrated how a modern media apparatus could transform a murky incident into an irresistible yet fraudulent casus belli.

The moment Hearst heard about the sinking of the Maine, he recognized it as a great opportunity. For weeks after the explosion, he filled page after page with mendacious “scoops,” fabricated interviews with unnamed government officials, and declarations that the battleship had been “destroyed by treachery” and “split in two by an enemy’s secret infernal machine.” The Journal’s daily circulation doubled in four weeks. Other newspapers joined the frenzy, and their campaign brought Americans to near-hysteria.

This wasn’t just “yellow journalism” – it was the beta test of manufactured consent at industrial scale. Hearst had discovered that crisis acceleration could reliably convert media reach into political power. What emerged as vilification of Cuba was consciously developed into a replicable system, with Hearst later directly funding the Nazis’ refinement of his techniques through paid opinion pieces in the lead-up to the Reichstag fire are impossible to ignore.

Both events were deliberately engineered as catalysts for predetermined political objectives, both relied on immediate attribution of blame without evidence, and both demonstrated the power of coordinated media control in shaping public response. The Nazi propagandists weren’t innovating – they were refining a proven methodology.

The archival evidence exposes direct institutional knowledge transfer. Beyond mere ideological sympathy, Hearst’s empire provided paid platforms for Nazi leaders, with documentation showing payments of approximately $1,500 per article (roughly $20,000 in contemporary terms) to Hitler and other Nazi officials. This was a deliberate transfer of tested propaganda methodology from one empire to another, with Hearst effectively licensing his crisis acceleration template to the Nazis for refinement.

National security professionals today face a persistent challenge: identifying manufactured crisis narratives before they can be exploited. The pattern is increasingly visible across multiple channels, where historical messaging techniques are being actively deployed. Studying the historical template is crucial to achieve real-time threat assessment today. The key question when examining the emerging crisis of American government becomes: Are we witnessing organic events, or the deliberate acceleration of manufactured outrage such the fraudulent “efficiency” driving DOGE breaches?

Hearst’s crisis acceleration, as adopted by Goebbels, hinged on a core methodology that persists today: a sudden dramatic event, immediate attribution of blame, coordinated media narrative, and the rapid mobilization of public opinion toward predetermined objectives.

Thus a direct lineage from the Maine to the Reichstag fundamentally changes how we must understand both events – not as isolated case studies but as developmental stages in the industrialization of manufactured consent that still manifests in the news today. As we navigate an era of media transformation into social media platforms, the ability to trace this deliberate evolution of mass manipulation techniques becomes increasingly pressing. Our present crisis doesn’t look exactly like its predecessors, but it follows the same fundamental template of construction and acceleration for oppressive aims.

Beyond DOGE as false hype about efficiency, the persistence of the “America First” slogan from 1898 through 2025 demonstrates the template in action. Its transition from explicit white supremacist messaging to contemporary military policy discourse reveals how crisis acceleration techniques preserve their core meaning while adapting their surface presentation. This is evident in Hegseth’s recent statements about rejecting international military law against crimes:

In his book, [Hegseth] expresses repeated frustration with the international laws put in place after World War II [critical of Nazism and to prosecute war crimes]. “An America First national security policy is not going to hand its prerogatives over to international bodies that make decisions about how our men and women make decisions on the battlefield,” Mr. Hegseth replied [to those questioning if his loyalty was to America or its domestic enemies].

History provides clear warnings about how quickly crisis narratives can be weaponized when media control concentrates power unchecked. The USS Maine incident and the Reichstag fire serve to also show how dangers rapidly escalate when proper checks and balances are removed or absent.

The divergent paths taken by the U.S. and Germany in 1933 illustrate completely opposed approaches to speech regulation. America established the Federal Communications Commission to counter monopolistic control of information channels, particularly targeting the kind of toxic speech propaganda driven by Hearst’s media empire. In stark contrast, Nazi Germany enacted the “public enlightenment” decree, which required journalists to operate under a racist centralizing media control under state authority.

From that moment on, journalists had register in a professional roster to be able to exercise their profession – only people with an “Aryan certificate” (proof of Aryan descent) were accepted.

This historical throughline reveals a critical pattern: crisis incidents don’t simply emerge – they are deliberately accelerated through coordinated media campaigns toward predetermined objectives. The challenge lies in listening to early warning systems that detect acceleration patterns before they achieve critical mass, particularly given today’s highly concentrated media landscape.

The operational pattern remains consistent: a catalyzing incident provides pretext, immediate attribution of blame shapes narrative control, and concentrated media amplification drives public response toward predetermined political objectives. This methodology, pioneered by Hearst and refined by his Nazi collaborators, continues to evolve in sophistication while maintaining its fundamental structure.