Don't Look to China for Censorship — Look to GERMANY (Kim Iversen)

If you want to know how far a government will go to police speech, don't look to China — look to Germany. Satirist and playwright C.J. Hopkins, an American who's lived in Berlin for years, is back on the show with news that Germany has indicted him again — this time not for two tweets, but for writing, publishing, and advertising his book at all. He walks Kim through the whole saga: three armed police at his door, his computer seized, his wife and cats terrorized — over the cover art of a book that used a Covid mask stretched across the swastika of William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, meant as a warning about authoritarianism, not an endorsement of it. He covers the two tweets that first got him charged with "spreading Nazi propaganda," his acquittal, the prosecutor's appeal, the appellate trial held under terrorist-level security by three judges who'd clearly already decided, and the Constitutional Court refusing to even review his case — no explanation given. The court's own reasoning is the stunning part: they conceded he's not a Nazi and spent his life writing anti-authoritarian work — the "problem" was that his art criticized the Covid measures and the government. Meanwhile Der Spiegel covers and other books with swastikas sell freely in German bookstores. As Hopkins puts it, this isn't a legal story, it's a power story — "we'll crush you" is the message, and it's the same one being sent to Covid dissidents, pro-Palestinian protesters, and the Ottawa truckers alike. He and Kim get into the partisan blindness on both sides ("you're not going to be in power forever — and when you're not, you're the target"), the 30–40,000 euros in legal fees his readers have covered, his sentencing this October, and why he keeps sticking his finger in their eye anyway: because rights you stop insisting on are rights you never get back.
C.J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist, and political satirist based in Berlin, and author of The Rise of the New Normal Reich — banned in Germany.



[Posted at the SpookyWeather2 blog, July 19, 2026.]