The story that follows might be described as labrynthine, perhaps even Byzantine, such are the twists and turns. It all stems from the plans by Equinor (the Norwegian state-owned oil and gas company now specialising in blighting the UK with wind farms) to develop extensions to both the Dudgeon Offshore Wind Farm and the Sheringham Shoal Offshore Wind Farm, both of which are described as being in the waters of the Greater Wash off Norfolk. A Development Consent Order to this end was granted in April last year, but the plans have been afoot for some time, and our story begins (for our purposes) in the summer of 2022.

As a brief digression, the reader might better understand the scale of the project by visiting the self-congratulatory section of Equinor’s website which trumpets its success under the heading “Innovative approach enables Sheringham Shoal and Dudgeon Extension Projects to progress as a joint development”:

Partners have agreed to bring the two projects under a joint ownership structure in one legal entity, subject to regulatory approvals being obtained before closing. The projects are extensions to the operational Sheringham Shoal and Dudgeon Offshore Wind Farms, which currently power around 710,000 UK homes… [somewhat intermittently].

…Development consent approval for both projects was obtained in April 2024 which was the first time in the UK that two offshore wind projects under separate ownership were awarded consent under a shared application. The consent allowed for single, joint or sequential development options. The new ownership structure enables a cost-effective joint development of the two projects whilst minimising environmental and local impact in Norfolk, contributing positively to the UK’s ambition of delivering clean [sic] power by 2030…[sic].

…The Dudgeon Extension Project is owned 35% by Equinor, 35% by Masdar and 30% by China Resources Power, whilst Sheringham Shoal Extension Project is currently 100% owned by Equinor, with Equitix Offshore 3 Limited (co-owned by funds managed by Equitix and The Renewables Infrastructure Group (TRIG)) and Macquarie Asset Management (via Macquarie GIG Renewable Energy Fund 1) having options to acquire a total of 60% interests at Final Investment Decision (FID)…

Yet more UK energy infrastructure completely in the hands of foreign companies (including the Chinese), in other words.

As Jit has discussed in Hornsea 3 and the Kittiwake Hotels and as I have discussed more recently in Displacement Activity, offshore wind farm developers can be required to make some (albeit inadequate) gesture with regard to the harms their development will cause to wildlife. In the case of Equinor and its planned extensions to Dudgeon and Sheringham Shoal, the affected wildlife forming the focus of our tale is the sandwich tern (though of course other birds are adversely affected too).

Which brings us back to the summer of 2022, and the west side of Loch Ryan, in the west of Galloway. A land agent appeared, seeking to ascertain land ownership in the area. Local landowners received letters and telephone calls from Equinor and its land agent wanting to find out who owned the land at Kirkcolm shore. The reason for their interest was that they “needed a site for compensation for Sandwich terns”. Which is rather odd, given that the “compensation” was in respect of a proposed development several hundred miles away off the east coast of England. They said that they had ‘looked elsewhere’ but no other sites were available. The site at Scar Point was considered suitable as it previously hosted Sandwich terns until approximately 2008. However, when they nested at Scar Point in the past, they nested on an island slightly offshore. It was a low-lying sand island that was gradually eroded by the wash generated by fast ferries plying the loch at the time. (The ferries are slower now, the wash is reduced, and perhaps the island could be reinstated). The “All About Birds” website tells us that sandwich terns “nest on sandy barrier beaches and barrier islands close to the ocean”. A mere technicality – why let that be a problem when you’ve a massive windfarm extension in the wings and a bit of greenwashing is required?

Recreating the low-lying offshore island would obviously be a major undertaking, so instead they were looking at a field next to the shore, where they hoped to dig a pond habitat for the terns. This field, and every other field they ‘considered’ has never hosted a colony of Sandwich terns. It seems that their plans were largely based on a ‘similar pool’ which was built in the past – St John’s Pool in Caithness, which is a wildlife habitat, and, in fairness, Sandwich terns do now nest there.

I have, in confidence, been made privy to terms offered for a lease of one of the fields that Equinor had their eyes on. Of course, I respect the confidence, and will say no more about that, other than to note that the solicitors Equinor would routinely use were Burges Salmon, a firm whose representatives regularly feature as speakers at the Westminster Energy, Environment and Transport Forum conferences about which I have written a few times. It’s a cosy and lucrative world, this world of renewable energy.

But I digress. There’s a lot of money to be made from wind farm extensions, especially if there’s state-guaranteed funding available in the form of a Contract for Difference (currently guaranteed for fifteen years, but with talk of extending that guarantee to twenty years), and so huge amounts of paperwork are generated, including something called “Sheringham Shoal and Dudgeon Offshore Wind Farm Extension Projects Appendix 5 – Derogation Funding Statement (Habitats Regulations and Marine and Coastal Access Act) (Revision B)” dated July 2023. This tells us that:

Natural England and Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) have both indicated through the ETG meetings (see Annex 1D Record of HRA Derogation Consultation, document reference 5.5.1.4) a preference for developing an inland pool for Sandwich tern at Loch Ryan, Scotland and so the Applicant intends to progress this as the preferred project-led measure. This option (rather than the floating pontoon option) has therefore been included in the cost estimate given in this document.

Compensation is to be provided not only for sandwich terns, but also for kittiwakes and guillemot and razorbill, at a total cost of £16.9 million, of which £615,625 is development expenditure (professional fees?) related to the Loch Ryan project, with a further £95,000 for artificial nesting boxes/shelters. Capital expenditure of £1,607,500 includes the construction costs for the pool, with £180,000 for predator management and artificial nesting boxes/shelters. Operating expenditure of £1,462,500 is provided for habitat restoration and another £301,400 for predator management and artificial nesting boxes/shelters (although that latter figure presumably includes nesting boxes at Blakeney Point, as none are proposed for Loch Ryan). Decommissioning expenditure (“ABEX”) amounts to a further £50,000 and £15,000 for the same two categories respectively.

That Equinor and its business partners are prepared to spend such sums of money indicates the lucrative nature of the wind farm business to them in the UK. It also means that when they have settled on a habitat compensation plan that will ease the way for them to receive the necessary consents to go ahead with their planned wind farm extension, they are not inclined to take no for an answer. Thus, when one of the landowners who was approached to make land available was not prepared to play ball, compulsory purchase powers reared their ugly head. In this connection, a Freedom of Information request has revealed a rather remarkable email sent on 4^th January 2023 to the Scottish Energy Consents Unit. It claimed that the matter was “becoming somewhat urgent”, due to the fact that a “Development Consent Order application was submitted to the Planning Inspectorate for the projects in September 2022 and has since been accepted for examination. The examination process is due to start this month.”

Attempts to negotiate terms for land to be used for sandwich tern compensation measures had not come to fruition, and so “we would like to explore CPO powers as an alternative route to assure the Planning Inspectorate that another option for securing the necessary compensation land is, in principle, available to the projects should this be required.”

Somewhat cheekily, the email said “we would welcome the opportunity to discuss this with the ECU and whether a CPO could be promoted jointly…”

Happily, the ECU declined to get involved with such shenanigans, and so a KC’s opinion was sought. This produced the desired result, namely advice to the effect that they had powers under section 10 of and Schedule 3 to the Electricity Act 1989 compulsorily to purchase land for the purposes of wildlife compensation for an offshore wind farm 400 miles away. Specifically, the advice regarding the distance from the development was:

That the land which is being contemplated is remote from the projects does not affect the principle of application of the provision. The answer would be no different if it were immediately adjacent. The required connection is not physical but functional.

We lawyers like to express our wisdom by trotting out bits of Latin, and in this context I note that reductio ad absurdam may be relevant. I won’t explain it, since I think the thing speaks for itself (or should I say res ipsa loquitur?). In essence, if the KC’s opinion is correct, then a developer building a wind farm off the Kent coast could exercise compulsory purchase powers to acquire land on Unst or Yell in Shetland, or perhaps on St Kilda. That does seem absurd, especially as in this case they could have used powers normally reserved to the state, to force the acquisition of a piece of land that is an integral part of a small farm, the loss of which might render the farm unviable. This despite the fact that there is no guarantee that the mitigation measures will succeed. The KC did acknowledge that he has not been able to find any case law directly on point, the issue has not previously been litigated, and there is an argument against his interpretation. Still, his opinion was to the effect that his clients had the necessary compulsory purchase powers, and armed with that, they can now feel free to throw their weight around. Thus, in one of many lengthy documents associated with this story (the “Applicant’s Responses to the Examining Authority’s Second Written Questions” in May 2023, which runs to 203 pages) they make it clear that although they prefer to acquire by compensation the land to be used for compensation measures, they will use CPO powers if necessary.

Happily (or not for the sandwich terns, depending on the outcome), an adjacent landowner appears to have come to terms with Equinor, so the threat of a foreign company compulsorily purchasing farm-critical land for a speculative compensation venture appears to have receded.

Meanwhile, things seem to be (temporarily, one assumes) in abeyance. Equinor produced a glossy “community newsletter” in which it claimed that it “strives to be a good neighbour and has aimed to reach as many people as possible with details of these proposals, including two rounds of maildrops to over 7,000 homes locally advertising the consultation events held earlier this year prior to our proposals being finalised.” Consequently, the strength of feeling at a public meeting held on 27^th January 2025 seems to have come as something of a shock. I don’t imagine they were expecting a well-researched powerpoint presentation, which included the information that the RSPB input into the exercise had been as follows:

We are concerned about the site being constrained by rising land and woodland. This is likely to make the site feel too enclosed for Sandwich terns, as they prefer an open aspect. Disturbance in the surrounding area will need to be carefully managed to ensure birds are not put off from using the site

Nor, I suspect, did they expect Freedom of Information requests to yield this gem:

The Applicant acknowledges there is uncertainty about whether or not Sandwich terns would recolonise Loch Ryan if suitable breeding habitat was created, and how quickly this may occur…

They were probably also shocked to be confronted with a firm suggestion that meaningful community benefit should be on offer. It was pointed out that the existing windfarms:

have established community funds which have, in total, awarded well over £1.4 million to projects in Norfolk. The funds were set up to provide grants to Norfolk community groups, including schools and charities, for projects that focus on renewable energy, marine environment, safety, sustainability, or education within the project areas.

Yet for us the intention is to permanently damage our landscape with a nil intention to provide community benefit funds.

Following the meeting, Equinor started discussing what community benefit measures might be considered by the local community, but things have ground to a halt pending the outcome of their planning application in respect of the proposed sandwich tern works at Kirkcolm by Loch Ryan. One distinct possibility is that Equinor has concluded that it would be simpler to scrap the proposed badly thought-out sandwich tern mitigation plan, save itself both the cost of the works and some more community benefit payments, and fall back on a payment into any forthcoming Marine Recovery Fund (MRF) of the type which I discussed here. After all, as the UK government becomes increasingly desperate, following the withdrawal of Orsted from Hornsea 4, it is likely to throw the kitchen sink at making offshore windfarm developments as easy and as attractive as possible for the developers. If Equinor could make a payment to a MRF and walk away from Loch Ryan, I strongly suspect it would regard that as a good result. The understandably disgruntled locals would be happy too, and the sandwich terns would probably be no worse off than if the mitigation project went ahead.

But is anyone thinking about the birds? Best of all would be if Equinor “did an Orsted” and pulled the plug. Let’s give nature a chance.

From THE DAILY CALLER

Audrey Streb
DCNF Energy Reporter

Federal reviewers internally raised red flags about a Biden-era Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) program that awarded billions with minimal oversight to politically-connected green groups, according to a Tuesday report published by Protect the Public’s Trust (PPT), a watchdog organization. 

Reviewers scrutinized several of the grant applications for the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF), the EPA program that awarded $20 billion to green groups connected to Democrat donors and insiders, identifying concerns such as “excessive” executive pay, curious financial statements and limited oversight, according to documents first obtained by The Free Press and additional findings uncovered and compiled in PPT’s new report. The GGRF budget far exceeded any budget in all of EPA’s history, and the PPT report argues that the program was not administered with appropriate levels of oversight.

“For a program that was given more money to hand out than the EPA has ever had in its entire budget, it would be reasonable for the American public to expect that it would have been operated without the slightest hint of conflict or questions about the recipients,” Michael Chamberlain, director of PPT, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Knowing what EPA leadership did following receipt of these critical assessments, one is left to wonder whether they decided wasteful spending while lacking the resources and any genuine plans to prevent abuse and fraud was merely the cost of doing business to avoid leaving it to a potential Trump administration.” (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Watchdog Slaps Ex-Biden Official With Complaint Over EPA ‘Gold Bars’ Scandal)

The Shocking Weakness of EPA’s GGRF Award Process. by audreystreb

‘Gold Bars’

The GGRF is being investigated by the EPA’s inspector general, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI for potential fraud and abuse of taxpayer dollars, and EPA administrator Lee Zeldin has pointed to the program as an example of waste on the Biden administration’s watch on numerous occasions. Zeldin has often referenced a video covertly recorded by conservative activist group Project Veritas, in which a Biden EPA official likened the agency’s rush to get program funding out the door before the arrival of a new administration to tossing “gold bars off the Titanic.”

“We owe it to the American people to be good stewards of taxpayer money and they deserve better than the reckless spending of our predecessors,” Zeldin said in a statement to the DCNF. “The latest batch of internal EPA documents directly reflects the infamous words of the Biden EPA, this money was tossed ‘off the Titanic.’ In addition to the obvious self-dealing and conflicts of interest, reviewers outlined concerns about unqualified recipients and reduced oversight. … Rest assured, the Trump EPA is working to ensure these tax dollars are properly accounted for. ”

The EPA froze the 129 Citibank accounts where the funds are being held, and in response, several organizations filed lawsuits against the EPA and Citibank, claiming there is no legal justification for withholding the funds and that the EPA acted appropriately in distributing them. An appeals court intervened to stay a previous court ruling that would have forced the EPA to unfreeze the funds. (RELATED: Turns Out Top Execs Of Org Picked For Billions By Biden EPA Are Big Time Democrat Donors)

🚨FOIA’d docs expose, as we’ve been saying, the Biden EPA “gold bars” scheme was riddled with self-dealing and conflicts of interest, unqualified recipients, and reduced oversight.

An honest person might even call this sourced documentation “evidence”. https://t.co/H2kufgYg38

— Lee Zeldin (@epaleezeldin) May 12, 2025

Power Forward Communities

Power Forward Communities (PFC), a nonprofit coalition linked to Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams, was specifically formed to secure taxpayer funding from the GGRF, from which it was awarded $2 billion, the PPT report notes.

Other Democrats linked to the nonprofit coalition include Phyllis Caldwell, the vice chair of Enterprise Community Partners (ECP), an arm of the PFC, as well as the founder and co-chair of PFC Ari Matusiak, both of whom worked in the Obama administration, the PPT report notes. Shaun Donovan, CEO and president of ECP, also served in the Obama administration as the director of the Office of Management and Budget.

A review panel examining the application of PFC graded it just above 80% and raised concerns about proposed salaries for executives and incomplete financial statements, according to the PPT report. Candidates were evaluated “on a steep curve,” and winning applicants achieved no higher than an A-minus score, the PPT report states.

“The salary structure for top officers seems high for a nonprofit – or rather high enough that it merits some explanation,” one reviewer wrote. “[I’m] wondering if this could be a problem with public perception. … Many of the costs are just presented, but [with] little or no explanation as to why they are reasonable,” they continued.

Another reviewer wrote that “executive salaries appear excessive,” adding that the amount did “not seem appropriate for federal funds.” Another added that “senior management salaries are seemingly high without justification.”

Reviewers repeatedly listed PFC’s partnership with United Way and Habitat For Humanity as a strength of its application, though both of the organizations later pulled out of the coalition, as the report notes.

After the PFC notified the courts that it was struggling to pay employees or cover operating expenses, United Way withdrew from the coalition, a spokesperson for the organization confirmed to the DCNF. Habitat For Humanity also jumped ship, citing the need to preserve its financial resources due to a potentially prolonged legal battle with the EPA, according to Politico.

“The applicant’s historical financial statements are not available since Power Forward Communities, Inc. has been recently established as a nonprofit corporation,” one reviewer wrote. “This risk is mitigated by the track record and strength of its coalition partners, including United Way and Habitat for Humanity,” they continued. 

PFC, ECP, Abram’s office, Habitat for Humanity, Caldwell, Donovan and Matusiak did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment. (RELATED: Biden-Harris Admin Handed Billions To Coalition Partnering With Stacey Abrams’ Org Dedicated To Turning Out Voters)

Climate United Fund

Climate United Fund (CUF) was awarded $6.97 billion and received the highest rating of the mentioned nonprofits at 90.1%, yet reviewers noted that the nonprofit had seemingly unjustified high employee compensation and vague plan descriptions, the PPT report noted.

Two separate reviewers also noted that “exec comp seems high,” and that the large budget could “add risk to a federal award.”

Other aspects of the grant application confused reviewers, as the nonprofit dedicated 2.2% of its budget to “market predevelopment,” which an employee needed “additional clarity.” When it came to CUF’s plan to decarbonize homes, one federal employee wrote that “these numbers don’t make sense.”

CUF says the application process was robust, and that reviewers flagging concerns is a natural part of evaluations like the one the group underwent for the GGRF.

“We went through a robust, 9-month application and review process with nearly 50 federal employee reviewers who evaluated and scored numerous applications. As with any review process, there were many viewpoints taken into account and reviewers were required to note strengths and weaknesses with each score,” a spokesperson for CUF said in a statement to the DCNF. “We received a high score and ultimately an award based on our decades of experience investing in communities across the U.S.”

At the time of approval for GGRF funding, the nonprofit’s board boasted multiple Democratic figures, including Phil Angelides, former California State Treasurer and Harold Pettigrew, who was appointed to the Treasury Department’s community development advisory board by Biden, the PPT report notes. Additionally, Anthony Foxx, head of the Department of Transportation under Obama, held a seat during the GGRF application process but has since left the CU board, according to the PPT report.

The nonprofit announced in March that it may not be able to cover operating expenses if it cannot access the Biden-era grant funding. 

 Angelides, Pettigrew and Foxxdid not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment. (RELATED: ‘The Swamp Is Getting Deeper’: EPA Awards Billions From Biden’s Landmark Climate Bill To Orgs Loaded With Dem Insiders)

Coalition For Green Capital

Coalition For Green Capital (CGC) had the strongest financial statements of the grantees, though reviewers flagged that its “FY2022 and 2021 financials show a net loss with declining fees for service income,” according to the PPT report.

The nonprofit received $5 billion in taxpayer funds through the GGRF, and — like its fellow GGRF grantees — the organization has considerable connections to the Democratic Party, according to the PPT report. Notable board members include former Biden official Cecilia Martinez and David Hayes, the former White House special assistant for climate policy.

Hayes was a member of CGC’s board during the first Trump administration before departing to join the Biden White House, then later rejoined the CGC’s board soon after leaving government, according to the PPT report. Hayes and CGC referred the DCNF to the nonprofit’s lawsuit, which states that Hayes did not work on the GGRF provisions later included in the IRA and that his work in the administration presented “no conflict of interest.”

Rated at an 88.9% score, reviewers flagged the nonprofit’s high employee salaries, questionable financial modeling and oversight concerns regarding the deployment of billions in taxpayer dollars in a limited timeframe, according to the PPT report.

One reviewer noted that employee salaries would be exorbitant, the PPT report states. “Of the 71 expected hires, more than 20% would be making salaries more than ~$450,000” the reviewer wrote.

Other reviewers expressed oversight concerns regarding the rapid distribution of billions in taxpayer dollars.

CGC’s “assumption of deploying $10B in the first fiscal year of performance seems unattainable,” another federal employee noted.

“Ambitious assumptions around deployment call into question the risks being modeled by the lead applicant. It stands to reason that the accelerated deployment of capital well beyond what has been seen historically would result in losses well beyond what has been recorded historically,” the reviewer continued, noting that CGC did not address this issue in its application materials. 

Martinez did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.

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From THE DAILY SCEPTIC

by Eugyppius

I’ve covered a lot of speech crime indictments here at the plague chronicle. Before Covid, these things hardly ever happened. Occasionally you’d find the odd article about a dumb tourist who was cited for throwing a Nazi salute in public or something, but that was it. The whole area just didn’t matter.

The German state acquired a kind of political Long Covid from the pandemic. Its agents learned from their virus repressions that they could get away with a lot more than they ever thought, and they also learned to view ordinary people as their adversaries. A third thing happened too, in that lockdowns moved a lot of discourse to the internet, and the German elite discovered for the first time that they and their policies suffer a popularity deficit there. To explain this, our baffled and offended if powerful social media naïfs borrowed the malevolent concept of ‘disinformation’ from the Anglosphere. They began whining and crying and beating their breasts and clutching their pearls about disinformation. None of them did this so hard and so insistently as the Greens, because the Greens represent the views of the German political elite, and as an elite they feel entitled to scold, control discourse and tell other people what to do.

That’s my potted history of how we got to this world, with pensioners being sent to jail for typing the wrong three-word phrase on the internet and YouTubers being fined thousands of Euros because some computer programme hallucinated into their banal complaints about poor internet reception a contextually incoherent Nazism. If you’re unlucky enough, you can get nailed for literally anything, and we only hear about a tiny minority of these cases. For a lot of people, the summary judgments they receive from the court are embarrassing, baffling and not worth the trouble. Those who can will just quietly eat the fine and try to get on with their lives.

In past pieces, I’ve drawn comparisons to the old East German DDR, and I’ve also tried to characterise political repression as something that all states get up to when their ruling classes become threatened. I stand by all of that, but I’ve neglected to explain why our present situation is unique.

Europe and particularly Germany have entered a totally new era when it comes to government interference with personal expression. We’ve never seen anything like this before, it is going to get a lot worse, and nobody anywhere has the slightest interest in dialling this back. The prosecutions are escalating and they will only become more pervasive and ridiculous.

What is happening resembles classic ‘totalitarian’ political tactics only superficially. The DDR employed literal bureaucrats and secret policemen whose job it was to censor speech according to defined standards and to punish or intimidate those who said inconvenient things. An analogy would be the farmer who decides there are too many rabbits eating his cabbages, and so he goes out and shoots them.

Modern Germany just can’t go out and shoot rabbits, and the reason has nothing to do with liberal democratic freedoms. We can’t even build bridges. Over a century ago, the Kingdom of Saxony required only two or three years to build the first Carola Bridge over the Elbe in Dresden. The SS destroyed that monument in 1945 to slow the Soviet advance, but the DDR needed only four years to build a replacement – the one that finally collapsed in September of last year. Today, in the best Germany of all time, we will require at least 10 years and almost certainly more to build our third Carola Bridge. That is a very rough scale of how much ability the state has lost in the space of just a few generations.

The sclerotic, hyper-managerialised state that cannot build an uncomplicated 500-metre bridge across a river also finds censorship really, really hard. And so it has signed over this project to a whole world of NGOs, many of which now devote incredible resources to policing the internet all day. We once had a farmer shooting rabbits, and that was bad enough if you happened to be a rabbit. Now we have an obese, bed-ridden, day-drinking farmer who can no longer fit through his front door. To solve his rabbit problem he has deputised a lot of autonomous agents, like the myxoma virus, to get rid of the hated rabbits instead. This means he’s no longer in control of the process at all. The censorship happens all on its own, and for reasons of its own too. It’s just something that a growing number of state-adjacent organisations do now, because there are institutional interests (jobs, funding) behind it.

How this happened is insidious. To take but one example: during Covid, German politicians didn’t like the fact that people were calling them names on the internet. They therefore voted to enhance penalties for insults directed against those ‘in political life’. Then, some of them ran off and founded an internet censorship NGO-cum-startup called So Done, the entire business model of which involves using AI tools to find people insulting politicians and referring these politician-insulters for prosecution. When these malefactors are ordered to pay compensation to their ‘victims’, the insulted politicians split the money with So Done, and everybody is happy.

That case is especially egregious, but it is much the same story with the ‘trusted flaggers’ deputised by the Digital Services Act and the swarm of other speech-suppressing NGOs who have descended upon German discourse like a bunch of fleas. We are looking here at a whole niche profession premised upon censoring and punishing people for saying naughty things. The not-so-subtle problem is that anyone employed under these auspices, being a professional, can never stop finding people saying naughty things, regardless of what people are actually saying. In this the new censors are much different than their DDR-era predecessors. They work not to influence discourse, not to protect the delicate feelings of wealthy invulnerable politicians, not to enforce a new online civility, not to defend the legitimacy of state institutions and not even because it is fun to see AfD voters shamed in court and deprived of their savings. No, they do it because it is their job, and that is the most terrifying thing of all.

Consider REspect!, just one of these garbage organisations. We’ve met it before – it’s the hate speech NGO run by a weird Egyptian man named Ahmed Haykel Gaafar. As of last year anyway, 10 people worked at REspect!, their salaries paid in part by the government. From their quarterly reports, we learn that in 2024 REspect! processed an average of 89 speech reports a day, 31 of which they referred to prosecutors. (As always, we’re asked to believe that people just come to REspect! with all the hate speech they’ve found online, and that REspect! then uses its prerogative as a trusted flagger to get naughty speakers banned and censored. The problem with this story, is that it requires us to believe that thousands of Germans are actually going to the dumb REspect! website and using its retarded speech report form, which I find highly unlikely. Maybe the odd offended Greenling actually does all of that, but what is actually happening here, almost certainly, is that REspect! is itself trawling the internet every day for hate speech. This would be why it needs to have a staff of at least 10 people, which you would not need if the offended and terrorised masses were doing all the reporting for you via web form.) These guys are by far most active on X and Facebook, and their all-time favourite speech offence is violations of section 86a of the German criminal code, the statute that forbids the use of NSDAP-associated slogans and symbols. This one law accounted for 64% of its entire haul last year. The reason for this is obvious: Nazi slogans are easily searchable and therefore offer the greatest payoff for the least effort. For everything else, somebody might actually have to read something, and that’s no good if you need to maintain your quota of 90 daily speech naughties.

The final step is the most frustrating: media naturally report on a subset of the prosecutions that REspect! helps generate, which causes the forbidden and highly dangerous Nazi phrases to recur all across the internet, where our word-searchers find them and initiate new prosecutions. It is like sowing the seeds of one’s future harvest.

I am not exaggerating or making this up. Consider the fate of that most deplorable of National Socialist slogans (from which I distance myself utterly), ‘Alles für Deutschland‘ (‘Everything for Germany’). Nobody except Nazi memorabilia enthusiasts knew this was a Sturmabteilung phrase until somebody caught the AfD politician Björn Höcke saying it in 2021. Since then, we have had a poor pensioner from Traunstein facing jail time for repeating ‘Alles für D–‘ in two separate tweets, in ironic commentary related to Höcke’s case. We have this guy from my old district in Bavaria who got his house searched and a €7,000 fine for merely repeating an ‘Alles für D–‘ hashtag on X, also in relation to Höcke’s prosecution. We have this pensioner from Münster hit with a €4,000 fine merely for citing the evil magical phrase, with quotation marks and everything, also in the course of discussing Höcke’s prosecution. And then finally we have the prominent social media personality Stefan Homburg convicted and fined €10,400, also for merely citing the forbidden phrase in the course of a broader discussion about the absurdity of it all. And again, these are the only the cases we know about. That can’t be emphasised enough.

Plainly, none of this is reducing the amount of ambient Nazi phraseology on the internet. If anything, the tactics before us have only served to increase the circulation of these darkly magical incantations. These morons have raised ‘Alles für D–‘ from near total obscurity to a household proverb in the space of just a few years, and they’ll keep going.

Except for the AfD, all the major German parties just love this stuff, or at least they have no idea what is going on and no conception that it might be a good idea to stop this. Our new CDU-led Government has just promoted the extremely noxious NGO HateAid to trusted flagger status alongside REspect!, and as artificial intelligence offers these people ever-improving tools, the prosecutions will just get crazier and wider-reaching.

We have established an autonomous, self-reinforcing censorship regime that serves no real purpose other than its own propagation, and for the foreseeable future we just have to live with that. It sucks.

This article originally appeared on Eugyppius’s Substack newsletter. You can subscribe here.