So is the AfD lawmaker.

That trust is lost in big parts.

…due to a barrage of malicious propaganda.

If people suffer

The standard of living in Germany is close to the highest it’s ever been.

Truthful education would have prevented the current situation.

How? An extremely tiny minority of the population has any semblance of education, it’s not realistic to expect to be able to educate the masses up to the standard required to steel oneself against an endless barrage of malicious propaganda.

Balanced is already giving an equal share to lies.

No, “balanced” means calling out lies for being lies - but the truth is still nuanced. You can’t hope to compete with simple propaganda slogans and oneliners through nuance and thoughtfulness.

You’re missing the point, and not comparing apples to apples (influencers are only a small segment of the ad market; public broadcasters do much more than report news).

Yes, those €8 billion could be spent more effectively from the perspective of tackling fascism by stooping down to their level and flooding the waves with propaganda against fascism. This is not the situation we should want.

As long as public media remain committed to (trying to) reporting in a balanced way - as they should! - it can never compete with fascist propaganda that is not afraid to willfully lie. It is the fascist propaganda that must be tackled at its root.

The “funding” comes from advertisement on social media, which is the dominant way people, especially those most likely to fall victim to propaganda, consume news. Sure, public media still exist, but they are far less relevant.

This isn’t about “alternatives,” it’s about a failure to adequately regulate. Imagine if Der Spiegel posts an anonymous article - without verifying the identity of the author - alleging that Jews are coming to enslave your children. Yet this situation is exactly what social media are currently like, and the kind of content that spreads on there like a cancer.

It’s tempting to find the good in other people, and if they vote for obvious racists, there must be something to it other than racism. And while people are not innately evil, the vast majority can be easily manipulated by the forces of evil weaponizing people’s lowest instincts. It is those forces that should be tackled at the root, instead of letting them run rampant and ineffectively trying to quench the fires they start.

Surely you can’t believe the current economic situation in Germany is worse than in the 1990s - especially in East Germany?

The reasons people vote for racist parties is well-understood, and it has nothing to do with “economic” issues. The big difference between the 1990s and today is that the media are nowadays flooded with racist propaganda, whereas back then the media landscape was still dominated by public media and intellectuals. People are not any more racist than they were back then, but people didn’t usually vote according to racist beliefs (aside from a handful of NPD voters) since public debate was dominated by non-racist issues. So it is precisely the opposite - economic issues have become less important to voters.

The way to defeat this surge of fascism is to start adequately regulating (social) media, for example by banning astroturfing and medical misinformation and holding those who host such content accountable.

In my experience, they work as engineers, engineers or engineers.

There is a strong correlation between shitty health care and low life expectancy.

Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Not a “nice” or “beautiful” tourist experience, obviously, but an extremely impressive one. I’m not a very emotional person, and have no personal link to the Holocaust, but one of the few times of my adult life I cried was when I visited the memorial site.

Sending it to “poor countries” (outside the EU) is more expensive than sending it to a local charity or just putting it on sale.

Productivity in any case craters after about 30 hours per week, but people like Merz don’t realize that since they haven’t actually worked in their lives.