Twice in August 2022 the American playwright, satirist and longtime Berlin resident C.J. Hopkins tweeted cover art from his book on The Rise of the New Normal Reich. This art featured an image of a Covid-era medical mask with a barely-visible white swastika superimposed upon it. In his first tweet, Hopkins wrote that “Masks are symbols of ideological conformity. That’s all that they are, and that’s all they ever were. Stop pretending that they were ever anything else or get used to wearing them.” In his second tweet, Hopkins simply quoted Health Minister Karl Lauterbach’s notorious statement that “Masks always send a signal”.
For those tweets, Amazon Germany promptly banned Hopkins’s book, and eight months later the Berlin state prosecutor’s office informed Hopkins that he was under investigation, because it believed his tweets violated German criminal statutes against “the use of symbols of unconstitutional and terrorist organisations”. In January of this year, Hopkins was tried before the Tiergarten Berlin District Court and acquitted. In many countries that would be the end of it, but in Germany double jeopardy is not a thing. The prosecutor appealed, and Hopkins found himself on trial once again, this time before the Berlin Court of Appeals. Yesterday, the appellate court overturned his acquittal and found him guilty. He has been referred back to the Berlin District Court for sentencing.
I never tire of saying that there is no free speech in Germany, however much our Basic Law claims to guarantee freedom of expression. Yet Hopkins’s conviction is farcical even in the context of German criminal statutes and jurisprudence. To understand why, we must wade through some technicalities, but it’s worth it, I promise.
A variety of legal mechanisms have been used to forbid the reproduction of Nazi symbols and slogans since Germany’s defeat in World War II. The purpose is to impose a general taboo on the discursive accoutrements of National Socialism. Since 1968, these prohibitions occur in sections 86 and 86a of the German Criminal Code. These statutes forbid the “dissemination” of propaganda material or symbols that are “intended to further the activities of a former National Socialist organisation”.
The words “intended to further” are very important here. Using National Socialist symbols and phrases critically or with hostility is generally not forbidden. And there is a further exemption as well. Later on in the statute we read that no criminal offence occurs “if the act [of reproduction or dissemination] serves to further civic information”, if it is intended “to prevent unconstitutional activities, to promote the arts or science, research or teaching, reporting about current or historical events, or similar purposes”. This is the so-called “social appropriateness clause”, and courts have interpreted it widely, applying it even to the ironic or sarcastic use of Nazi symbols.
This is not just crazy legal exegesis from Eugyppius. Clivia von Dewitz, a sitting judge who wrote her doctoral thesis precisely on this area of German law, said much the same two weeks ago in an editorial for the Berliner Zeitung. In that piece, she explained why “the Tiergarten District Court was fully justified in acquitting C.J. Hopkins”:
In its judgment, the court concluded that the defendant had not committed a criminal offence under the symbol-prohibition statute… with his two posts on X. According to the judgment, both posts… “made it readily apparent, when the associated text… was taken into account, that the allusion to National Socialism was expressed in an overtly negative sense”.
Furthermore, the posts were not at all intended to promote the revival of National Socialist ideas or even former National Socialist organisations. This is because people with neo-Nazi aims would never use the symbols of National Socialist organisations in a visual context expressing their rejection of them… In short, the court found that an American citizen had used Nazi symbolism without intending to glorify the Nazi regime in any way.
Indeed, the prosecutor’s argument – that Hopkins had made himself criminally liable because his anti-Nazi sentiments were not immediately clear “upon reading or considering his caption” – is totally idiotic. To be confused about this at all, you’d have to also think Hopkins was promoting Covid masks with his tweets and even celebrating them because they are medically useless symbols of ideological conformity. Could any minimally sentient person believe this was his message? Anything, up to and including “I disavow this swastika and I hate Nazis” can become ambiguous with sufficient stupidity.
In short, Hopkins’s case was not even close, because it was a) basically impossible to read his tweets as promoting National Socialism in any way, and b) even if some ambiguity attached to a) (which it does not), the “social appropriateness” clause exempts him. Thus, in order to overturn Hopkins’s acquittal and convict him, the Berlin Appellate Court had to devise a remarkably unconvincing masterpiece in special pleading:
Presiding [Appellate] Judge Delia Naumann emphasised that the law… is about banishing Nazi symbolism from the public sphere. The threat of punishment is intended to prevent its revival and normalisation. Therefore, it is not enough to invoke the use of the symbol in the context of criticising state action, according to Naumann. Hopkins had only criticised the Covid restrictions, in particular the compulsory wearing of masks, but had not openly and unequivocally expressed his rejection of National Socialism.
In the opinion of the appellate court, it is not enough that the comparison of arbitrary Nazi rule with the criticised state actions also entails a critical view of National Socialism. Instead, a clear criticism of National Socialism must also be expressed, otherwise National Socialism would be trivialised. Naumann pointed out that using swastika relativised the National Socialist genocide of six million Jews.
The Appellate Court here invents a special category of discourse – “criticising state action” – where more stringent rules apply. As Hopkins and his defence attorney point out, it is totally fine to use the swastika to accuse one’s political opponents of totalitarianism or fascism, as Der Spiegel did in May 2024:

That image “criticise[s]” whatever it is that Spiegel editors imagine “Right-wing extremism” to be, but it also nowhere “openly and unequivocally express[es]” any “rejection of National Socialism.” (Amusingly, the Spiegel cover is far easier to misread in a pro-Nazi sense than Hopkins’s mask tweets. Anyone totally ignorant of what Der Spiegel is and what it stands for could easily assume it was some kind of neo-Nazi message, while you have to be a total moron to read Hopkins’s tweets as affirming National Socialism.)
Der Spiegel doesn’t have to do that because it is not criticising the state. Hopkins, however, used a swastika to attack Government Covid policies, and so he faces much greater scrutiny. The hostile journalists of the Legal Tribune Online (linked above), desperate to make the appellate court’s arguments coherent, speculate that the Spiegel cover is exempt because it falls under the “social appropriateness” exception, but the problem is that there is no way Hopkins should not receive the same protection. Only the judge’s plain distinction can make sense of the ruling: “Criticising state action” is another category of criticism, separate from all other categories of criticism, and it is subject to harsher limitations. Ironically, if actual card-carrying neo-Nazis ever were to take control of our political system, this legal standard would make it much harder for dissidents to point that out.
None of this matters, of course. Appeals courts get to be wrong and it doesn’t matter, you’re just fucked. Hopkins’s conviction is now legally binding; to have it overturned, he’ll have to appeal to the Federal Constitutional Court.
This whole sorry story is about two things:
It is, most directly and in the first place, one in a series of prosecutions intended to harass critics of the Covidian hygiene dictatorship. German authorities are specifically eager to target those guilty of “delegitimising the state”, a new category of pre-criminal political offence dreamed up by the bureaucrats in the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution during the Covid pandemic. Being house arrested and coerced into accepting doubtful and experimental medical injections caused many to notice that the Federal Republic was engaging in authoritarian tactics remarkably reminiscent of illiberal regimes, so our constitutional protectors decided they needed to put a stop to this via all the authoritarian and illiberal methods at their disposal.
But that’s only the immediate the context. Hopkins’s conviction, more broadly and in the second place, is about who may wield the weapons of history. The decades-long tabu that the German state has laid upon National Socialism now endows the Hitler era with remarkable polemical force. The state and its supporters would like to secure for themselves the exclusive use of the Nazi cudgel, and to define the political opposition as the only appropriate target of Nazi comparisons. Yesterday, the Berlin Appellate Court outlined a novel legal theory that should make enforcing its monopoly ever so slightly easier. It comes just in time, because the years ahead will be hard. The Federal Republic is growing every day more illiberal, as our elites become ever further detached from popular sentiment and the interests of their own people. If they are to stay in power, they will need to crack down on the ambient discontent of the rabble. They will do this by banning political parties, by intimidating ordinary people who dare to express their opinions and by prosecuting the odd satirist who says inconvenient things at inconvenient times by turning their own ideological shibboleths against them.
Although I suspect we disagree on many things, I consider Hopkins a friend, and I admire him for his courage and his stubbornness. His conviction comes at considerable personal cost, but I hope he recognises that it also hurts the malign forces who presently rule the Federal Republic, and damages the credibility of their efforts to instrumentalise the law for shallow, transparent political ends. That has been his service to Germany, and I will never forget it.
This article originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.
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Let’s retry Galileo in absentia and find him guilty for claiming that the sun is the centre of the solar system? It doesn’t matter what the data and several hundred years of experience tells us. Galileo broke the rules and embarrassed to Scientific consensus.
An embarrassing comment, the Galileo myth. He proved nothing except his love of his own ego. As assinine as Darwinian theology. The article is about the Rona fascists convicting someone who called them what they were namely Medical Nazis. Maybe comment on the actual material.
Your horse seems rather tall. Perhaps dismount?
I’ll comment as I see fit. Anyway, as James Rodney Schlesinger stated:
“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts” –
You must be a fan of Trofim Lysenko as he hated Darwin too?
“Darwin himself, in his day, was unable to fight free of the theoretical errors of which he was guilty. It was the classics of Marxism that revealed those errors and pointed them out.”
Trofim Lysenko
Galileo could have had his discussions in Latin, like everyone else at the time, from Copernicus onwards, but he wrote pamphlets in Italian which was likely to cause political disruption: after all, the Pope was effectively the king of the Papal States, which was going through a sensitive period.
Galileo was the 17th century Al Gore, promoting an incorrect theory (planets don’t have a circular orbits) with NO DATA to back it up. That’s what Kepler had; he had Tycho Brahe’s observations that showed elliptical orbits.
In addition, at the request of the Pope, Galileo wrote a Socratic pamphlet explaining his heliocentric theory (as was the Copernican theory), with a rather stupid questioner that was recognisable as the Pope. Not even Al Gore did that! With the Pope worried that Galileo was disturbing international negotiations, Galileo needed to be removed from the scene. If only that could have been done with the film The Inconvenient Truth.
What Galileo did do was to time objects rolling down a slope so the acceleration due to gravity could be calculated. It was these terrestrial experiments that were the incredible step forward, not his astronomical observations that he tried to bully people into believing. That isn’t Science.
It’s easy to see how a corrupt narrative, this myth about the poor, meek Galileo, could have been developed, much later on, for political purposes. Clarification of what happened, using evidence, is needed as this tale casts a shadow over an important part of the History of Science as well as the Church. We need both, however frail they may be.
1543 – Copernicus publishes De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, which presents his theory that the Earth orbits the Sun.
On April 12, 1633, chief inquisitor Father Vincenzo Maculani da Firenzuola, appointed by Pope Urban VIII, begins the inquisition of physicist and astronomer Galileo Galilei. Galileo was ordered to turn himself in to the Holy Office to begin trial for holding the belief that the Earth revolves around the sun, which was deemed heretical by the Catholic Church. Standard practice demanded that the accused be imprisoned and secluded during the trial.
This was the second time that Galileo was in the hot seat for refusing to accept Church orthodoxy that the Earth was the immovable center of the universe: In 1616, he had been forbidden from holding or defending his beliefs. In the 1633 interrogation, Galileo denied that he “held” belief in the Copernican view but continued to write about the issue and evidence as a means of “discussion” rather than belief. The Church had decided the idea that the sun moved around the Earth was an absolute fact of scripture that could not be disputed, despite the fact that scientists had known for centuries that the Earth was not the centre of the universe.
[https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/galileo-is-accused-of-heresy]
Whatever the reality of Galileo in 1633 is, my point was that C J Hoplins continues to be persecuted for his position during the Lockdowns even though we can see quite clearly that the hysteria around Covid was manufactured and monstrously false.
Speaking of the modern day ‘Nazi Germany’, injustices and the whole scamdemic, what in the world happened to Reiner Fuellmich? This article explains;
”This is one of the very few websites where you will read this story. Dr. Reiner Fuellmich, a leading attorney, has been under arrest in Germany for almost a year now. From the silence in the mainstream media, it would seem he is a dangerous spy whose arrest cannot be made public.
What has brought the authorities’ wrath upon him is his spearheading “Nurenberg 2.0,” a movement to sue the elite who orchestrated the Covid-19 pandemic as part of the Great Reset. Fuellmich was a co-founder of the German Corona Investigative Committee (GCIC). This non-government committee probed the virus’s spread, its actual danger, the PCR test’s reliability, and how much damage the anti-pandemic measures (including the vaccine) caused.
The committee also investigated if measures such as lockdowns, masking, social distancing, and quarantine protected people from Covid-19 or just caused panic so that Big Pharma could generate huge profits on the sale of PCR tests, antigen and antibody tests, and vaccines. As is well-known, independent scientists have cast doubt on the efficacy of the PCR test, saying it has at least ten major flaws.
The committee had received donations from many sources. Since members were afraid that governments might freeze the funds, it was decided to buy and hold gold worth a million euros. As another safekeeping measure, Fuellmich and another committee member, Viviane Fischer, withdrew funds as private, secured loans from the committee. Fuellmich, who borrowed €700,000 (about $782,000), was to pay it back by selling his house. Both, the gold purchase and the loans were clearly documented.
Some committee associates have charged Fuellmich with embezzling the amount he took on loan—even though (or perhaps because) the sale proceeds from his house (€1.158 million) ended up in the account of one of his accusers, Marcel Templin. Another charge is that the gold purchase was without the committee shareholders’ knowledge. Again, the purchase is documented, and the gold cannot be sold without both Fuellmich’s and Fischer’s signatures.
Fischer has now turned against him. An additional charge, which the prosecutor later added, is that his law firm obtained €15,000 in emergency aid during the pandemic by submitting false information.
Fuellmich was unceremoniously arrested last year in Mexico, where he was with his wife, Inka. They had lost their passports, so the embassy asked them to collect fresh ones on October 12 last year. When they arrived, Inka was given her passport and allowed to go, but Fuellmich was picked up by six men and brought to Germany via the U.S.”
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/10/free_fuellmich_the_unsung_hero_who_called_out_the_plandemic.html
Thanks for drawing attention to this. Shocking.
There is a pattern here. Trump is charged with multiple ‘crimes’ which will bar him from office. Marie Le Pen is charged with a serious offence which will bar her from office. Dr. Reiner Fuellmich is not so well known but this looks like a serious attempt to stop him,
I came across this YouTube during 2021 an here Dr Fuellmich interviews Dr. Astrid Stuckelberge and among other things she highlighted that the WHO had recently changed the definition of a pandemic and forbid the use of existing and long standing pandemic protocols. In edition she pointed out that Gates was given a seat on the WHO with the same standing as a country.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eOijcpZlfM&t=830s&pp=ygUpRHIuU3TDvGNrZWxiZXJnZXIgV0hPIC0gR0FWSSAtIEJpbGwgR2F0ZXM%3D
(32) The Persecution of Dr. Reiner Fuellmich (malone.news) Here is another article about him and an address at the end to send letters of support to.
Hopkins is an American. Are there no German dissidents left to stand up for him and say “Ich bin C.J. Hopkins”? Has the totalitarian might of Germany’s liberal-neo-Nazi State succeeded in getting the intellectuals to silently submit if not actually assent?
So let’s be clear – this court felt that it would underline the German state’s revulsion against the tyrannical and free-speech denying Nazi ideology and regime by…
Stamping down on and criminalising an individual’s unambiguous condemnation of Nazism, coupled with a freedom of thought and expression based desire to make a visual analogy with contemporary state policies (which I personally think goes too far, but at the same time of course believe that he has a complete right to put forward unmolested).
Interesting.
Another example of Germany trying not to be Nazi.
“Angela Merkal’s astounding open border policy granting close to a million Muslim immigrants entry into Germany could be seen as self-flagellation for Germany’s historical transgressions. Laced with typical progressive lunacy. What better way to make up for the Holocaust than by admitting “refugees” who frequently exhibit genocidal hatred of Jews.”
Gad Saad
And I suggest we all remember that Haj Amin Al Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and still a great hero of the “Palestinian” Authority, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Mad Mullahs of Iran, visited Berlin during WWII and on 28 November 1941, met with the little Austrian Corporal and personally promised him to exterminate every Jew in the Middle East.
His fans today march through London, Birmingham, Leicester and many other British cities with their mass produced anti- semitic placards. The police will nab you if you object!
Where are Antifa? This is their speciality.
The law is a perversion itself.
German Leaders have quite a record of anti-democratic State control and suppressing free speech: The Kaiser; the Nazi era; post-war East Germany/Honecker.
Their modern Leaders are simply reverting to type. They will allow no dissent from the current manifestation of state control and use legal means to achieve it …. using a previous example of state control to justify it.
They obviously don’t understand the bit in the Bible about removing the beam from their own eye 🙂
Long before tte Kaiser too.
The same people – bureaucrats, judiciary, minor politicians, media, police, etc – running Germany before 1940 were running it after 1945 and their selected heirs and successors are running it now.
Germany has always been an authoritarian State. Look at its history.
It is interesting that these days it is perfectly acceptable to burn and ban books in Germany, and forbid free speech. This is OK because we are not Nazis. It is perfectly acceptable to ban opposition political parties. It is justified after all, because we are not Nazis. It is perfectly fine to call for the death of Jews and tolerate attacks on Jewish individuals, synagogues and monuments. After all, we are not Nazis. It is OK for the state to sponsor gangs of thugs who go out and intimidate people who do not tow the party line. After all, we are not Nazis. It is even find for politicians to fantasize about sending the cavalry to Poland to teach those nasty Poles a lesson or two. After all, we are not Nazis.
But it is definitely evil to display and symbol associated with Nazism. For example when shaving the area above the lips it is always wise to start in the middle, not that there is a sudden power outage (thanks to that super reliable renewable energy) and I would have to go to work with a bristly bit standing out under my nose, making me look like a famous vegetarian artist. That would be just as bad as invading Poland. The real Nazis are not those who do things the Nazis did, but those who use symbols the Nazis used. Of course only within Germany. In The Ukraine we support those using Nazi symbols because they are not Nazis because they wouldn’t be our friends if they really were Nazis.
Recently a bit of a stir was caused when some people were recorded discussing “remigration”, expelling people from the country. Suddenly the German media went into overdrive telling us that this was something the Nazis did. Not only that, it was the most terrible thing they did. Suddenly trivializing the Holocaust and the gas chambers is no longer a problem (because we are not Nazis). The system conveniently forgot that only a few years previously there were politicians talking about expelling from the country people who would not take an experimental injection. Expelling such people would have been perfectly fine (because we are not Nazis).
Now if we roll all this back in history and look at the original meaning of the word Nazi, it is not actually short for National Socialist (that would be Naso), but a contraction of Ignaz, a name supposedly common in Austria and Bavaria and used as a racist slur against people from that part of the world. In the 1920s in Berlin stand up comedians would tell jokes about a Prussian and a Nazi, in which inevitably the country bumpkin Nazi would meet some misfortune. When Hitler became a thing, his jarring Austrian vowels made him an easy target for the Nazi epithet and it stuck. So next time somebody says Nazi, remember it is a racist term.