"Very difficult to stop social media self-manipulation"

At first glance, Tamara K. seems rather harmless. As an alternative practitioner in an Eifel village in North Rhine-Westphalia, she tries to help people through "holistic naturopathy". She wears blonde dreadlocks and lots of colorful bangles. She usually smiles in a friendly way in photos. But when Corona deniers tried to storm the Reichstag in Berlin in August 2020, she was one of the driving forces. She cheered them on via microphone: "We're going to get there and get our house rights back today, here and now!" The day before, she appeared in front of the Russian embassy. There she announced that she wanted to "make sure that this FRG fake government is wound up!" Then she asked Putin's ambassador to "take care of us, we will fight for our freedom tomorrow".

During the protests by corona deniers and radical opponents of vaccination, the republic became acquainted with the explosive connection between two milieus that were previously unknown to the general public: esotericists and anti-constitutional, often right-wing radical conspiracy believers - as in the case of the said naturopath, who was close to the right-wing extremist Reich citizens. Now that the pandemic has peaked, what has remained of this crossroads in NRW? From their networks? And what danger do they currently pose?

Experts addressed these questions in Düsseldorf at a discussion event organized by the Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation on “Belief in conspiracies in the esoteric and in the middle of society”. In addition, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution pays attention to this mixed scene. Both painted a bleak picture to WELT: The scene had by no means shrunk. In some ways, she is currently more dangerous than ever. According to the NRW Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the great danger of such conspiracy ideologues remains that they favor politically motivated crime, or at least create tolerance for it.

Because: According to a spokeswoman for the protection of the constitution, they derived a right of resistance from “their conviction that they had uncovered a hidden reality”, from their belief that the pandemic was “only a pretext for the abolition of fundamental rights”. There is also ample evidence that Corona deniers have said on social media and at demonstrations that democracy with free elections and the rule of law with independent courts are fiction. In reality, there is a dictatorship controlled by secret powers with the aim of destroying vaccine skeptics and corona critics. From this misjudgment of reality, individual corona deniers concluded that it was therefore inevitable to murder the political elite.

But these milieus survived the end of the pandemic unscathed, observes Elisabeth Müller-Witt. The vice chair of the SPD parliamentary group has been dealing with these scenes for years. Even after the peak of the pandemic, the networks of esoteric, anti-state conspiracy believers continued to exist, she says. It is "very difficult to end the social media self-manipulation that many conspiracy believers have engaged in." Those who belong to these networks are constantly being confirmed in their delusions - because media driven by algorithms constantly provide their users with comments and (supposed) news that underpin the believer's worldview.

The advice center Sekten-Info NRW also says that the number of relatives of conspiracy believers asking for help has by no means decreased (therefore there were 249 requests in 2021). And according to the Leipzig authoritarianism study from 2020, a good five percent of Germans have “a strong tendency to conspirituality”, i.e. to belief systems in which conspiratorial conspiracy theory and esoteric spirituality coincide, regardless of the pandemic. That's not surprising either, says Katharina Nocun, author of the book Dangerous Faith. The radical world of ideas of esotericism”. Belief in conspiracies and esotericism showed an inner affinity, "they dock psychologically on the same needs" - with their belief that they could see through a deceptive world of appearances and recognize the true connections.

There is nothing to suggest that the scene of conspiracy-believing corona deniers in NRW has shrunk since May 2021, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution also reports on request. At that time, based primarily on activities in social networks, he estimated that the size of the scene was “in the low five-digit range” – although not all active people were strictly anti-constitutional. According to the authority, however, the hard core of the so-called delegitimizing scene, which is all about delegitimizing the democratic state, has declined somewhat. At the moment there were only "50 to 70 people" in NRW, including a number of esoterics. It is noticeable that “right-wing extremists and the delegitimization scene are currently networking even more closely than during the Corona protests”: At that time there were sometimes clear demarcations. That's the end of it now. In September, for example, esoteric circles and the right-wing extremist group Aufbruch Leverkusen supported a pro-Russian demonstration in Cologne. At the gathering of around 1,000 people, the slogans were merrily mixed: against the corona dictatorship and compulsory vaccination, for Putin, against NATO. Russian and German flags, but also the rainbow flag, were waved.

This shows a trend: After the great anger at the corona protection measures had subsided, the scene has currently turned to the Ukraine war and its consequences. Author Nocun also reports that they mobilized on the side of Putin supporters and in protests against refugees from Ukraine. The connection to Corona is not lost. According to a survey, half of the unvaccinated people in Germany believe that the Ukraine war is primarily "a maneuver to distract from the pandemic policy," reports Nocun. The Office for the Protection of the Constitution also warns that “up-to-the-minute political content is being increasingly taken up and covered with conspiracy myths”. In addition to the attack on Ukraine, these included “increased gas and oil prices and the cost of living, climate change and anti-Americanism”.

After all: At the moment, unlike in the Corona peak phase, the scene is no longer bringing 5,000 demonstrators to the streets nationwide and no longer 30,000. But that calms the experts Müller-Witt and Nocun just as little as the protection of the constitution. After all, your networks are still intact and large. And as late as May 2022, a good 60,000 eligible voters in North Rhine-Westphalia cast their votes for the party “Die Basis”. It is considered by many observers to be the political arm of the pandemic deniers. Her top candidate in the 2021 federal election said the federal government was planning a concentration camp for the unvaccinated and was working on crimes worse than the Holocaust.

Nevertheless, the advice center Sekten-Info NRW warns against treating politicized esoteric conspiracy believers disrespectfully, undifferentiated or arrogantly. As a result, they would usually only be strengthened in their worldview. In addition, an extremely complex movement gathers under the term esoteric nowadays. And in the one encounters crude occultism and ancient Germanic runic magic as well as healthy tea recipes and widely recognized practices such as meditation. And that comes from the two world religions of Hinduism and Buddhism - not the overheated imagination of some conspiracy believers.

10,000 followers at least

In May 2021, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution examined the number of conspiracy-believing corona deniers in NRW. He recorded the reach of the groups "lateral thinking" and "corona rebels" in social networks. Their NRW groups had a total of 17,500 members on Telegram and around 16,500 subscribers on Facebook. Adjusted, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution assumes more than 10,000 followers.