LAST MONTH, upwards of 1 million people flooded the streets of Germany to express their opposition to the right-wing political party Alternative für Deutschland, or Alternative for Germany. In Berlin, more than 100,000 people gathered on the Bundestag lawn under a banner reading Defend democracy: Together against the right.

The message Germans were sending was clear, Paul Hockenos, a Berlin-based journalist, wrote in Foreign Policy: “The AfD’s stripe of right-wing radicalism is out of place in democratic Germany.” But not, apparently, in democratic America.

In January, Elon Musk, one of President Donald Trump’s closest advisers, appeared via video at a campaign event in Halle on behalf of the AfD, urging those in attendance not to be ashamed of its nation’s history.

[Graeme Wood: Germany’s anti-extremist firewall is collapsing]

“It’s good to be proud of German culture and German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything,” Musk said. Then, in an obvious reference to the Nazi era, Musk said there is “frankly too much of a focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.”

“I think you really are the best hope for Germany,” Musk told the 4,000 AfD supporters. Musk also published an op-ed in Welt am Sonntag, urging Germans to vote for the AfD. The paper’s Opinion editor resigned in protest.

But that was just the start of the Trump administration’s embrace of the AfD. Last week, Vice President J. D. Vance gave a speech at the Munich Security Conference that the German media called a “campaign gift” to the AfD prior to the German elections tomorrow.

In an extraordinary act of intervention into the internal affairs of an ally, Vance essentially urged the next German government to include the AfD, which has so far been treated as a pariah party, in the governing coalition. The Trump administration wants to destroy the firewall that has been built around the AfD. It’s worth understanding why it was erected in the first place.

GERMANY’S DOMESTIC INTELLIGENCE AGENCY has classified part of the AfD, founded in 2013, as extremist, warning that it is a “danger to democracy.” (In 2017, the AfD became the first far-right party to enter the German Parliament since World War II.)

Much of the attention has focused on Björn Höcke, a history teacher who heads a faction of the AfD, known as “The Wing” (Der Flügel ), in the state of Thuringia. Höcke has “used metaphors reminiscent of Goebbels, Hitler’s chief propagandist,” The New York Times reported, “saying that Germans need to be wolves rather than sheep.” He has talked about racial suicide and “cultural Bolshevism.” At a 2017 rally in Dresden, Höcke called on Germans to make a “180 degree” turn in the way they viewed their history. He has said that Germans were “the only people in the world to plant a monument of shame in the heart of their capital,” referring to the Holocaust memorial in Berlin. Höcke wants to revive the word Lebensraum—a term used by the Nazis that means “living space.” And he seems offended that Adolf Hitler has been described as “absolutely evil.” (“The world has—man has—shades of gray,” Höcke said when asked about Hitler. “Even the worst severe criminal perhaps has something good, something worth loving, but he is still a severe criminal.”)

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Matthias Quent, a sociologist and the founding director of the Institute for Democracy and Civil Society in Jena, whose work focuses on the analysis of the far right and radicalization, has called Höcke’s ideology “pre-fascist.” “His book reads like a 21st-century Mein Kampf,” Quent told the Times. And Höcke is hardly alone. Alexander Gauland, an AfD leader in Parliament, described the Nazi era as “a speck of bird poop in more than 1,000 years of successful German history.”

The AfD, which has most of its support in the formerly Communist eastern part of Germany, was defined at its outset by opposition to the common European currency; within a couple of years, it has become pro-Russian and embraced xenophobia, and it now defines itself as committed to preserving German identity and nationalism. It has ties to neo-Nazi activists and the extremist Identitarian Movement, including discussing a “re-migration” plan which, according to Hockenos, would “forcibly repatriate millions of people.”

The AfD is headed by Alice Weidel, whom Vance met with last week and who is ideologically close to Höcke (Weidel has said she would put Höcke in her cabinet if she were to become chancellor). Many people judge the AfD to be the most right-wing party in Europe. And now, in advance of tomorrow’s parliamentary elections, the AfD is polling second, with one in five voters still undecided.

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION’S embrace of the AfD is the latest example of it casting its lot with right-wing European movements. It not only wants to destroy the transatlantic alliance; it is supporting parties that are extreme and enemies of classical liberalism. But there’s an additional twist in what we’re witnessing.

[Read: The end of the postwar world]

For Vance and Musk to go so far out of their way to support not just any rising radical movement, but this particular party, in this particular country, with its deep historical experiences with fascism, is quite telling. They are not just “trolling the libs”; they are giving their public backing to a movement that represents the core convictions of MAGA world. They see in the AfD an undiluted version of MAGA. What we’re witnessing from Trump & Company, as alarming as it is now, is only a way station.

And before you know it, virtually everyone in the Republican Party will be on board. Trump always changes them; they never change him. The AfD’s approach to politics—nihilism with a touch of Nazi sympathizing—is the model.

However the AfD does in the German elections tomorrow, it has already won the hearts and minds of the most powerful men in America.

A man has been seriously injured after being stabbed at Berlin's Holocaust memorial, while an 18-year-old Russian citizen was arrested in Brandenburg for planning an attack on the Israeli embassy.

Last week in Munich, Vice President J. D. Vance scolded European dignitaries for their failure to address popular discontent. They had ignored what Vance called the most “urgent” issue of our time: the relentless flow of non-Europeans into Europe. Without naming it, Vance was defending a far-right political party called Alternative for Germany (AfD), best-known for its commitment to deporting as many immigrants as the country’s airports can process. Vance said he “happen[s] to agree” with voters worried about “out-of-control migration.” But he was aghast at the idea that governments would try to silence their citizens, whatever their views. “There is no room for firewalls,” he said. “You either uphold the principle of democracy or you do not.”

Germany’s establishment leaders have long accepted a different binary: Either you put up a “firewall” (Brandmauer) against far-right extremists, or you risk losing your democracy to literal Nazis. Accordingly, when the AfD won a plurality in last year’s state-level elections in Thuringia, the other parties cried “Nazi” and stitched together a coalition to keep the AfD out of the government. But this arrangement—even when you win, you lose—has infuriated AfD supporters, and at the party meetings I attended recently, they were in a storm-the-Bastille mood, eager to take down an old regime that they, like Vance, believe is stealing democracy from them in the guise of saving it.  

This may be the year the firewall collapses. The AfD is now polling at about 22 percent nationally and seems destined for a strong showing in Sunday’s federal parliamentary election. No other party will deign to form a coalition with it. But if the AfD performs well enough, it will be impossible to exclude altogether from decision making.

Earlier this year, I donned a flame-retardant suit and pole-vaulted over the Brandmauer into Thuringia. Like other AfD strongholds, Thuringia was part of the old East Germany, and like much of the East, it remains economically depressed. It has lost more than a fifth of its population since unification. Historically, it is a German cultural center, the home of Goethe and Schiller and Bach—Land of poets and thinkers, the banner at the state’s largest railway station announced—and, in 1929, it was the first part of Germany to vote for the Nazis.

On January 28, I attended an AfD rally in Ichstedt, a town of about 600. I would describe the place for you, but the event began at 7 p.m., which, on a moonless German winter night, in an empty countryside, meant that I may as well have traveled from the train station blindfolded. No businesses were open, and the roads were almost without streetlights. My taxi driver told me that since car factories and copper and potash mines had closed in the area, jobs were few. He asked me whether anyone had ever told me I looked like Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and the most enthusiastic AfD supporter outside Germany. (I said I was not Musk and hoped to convince him by leaving a miserly tip.)

I was the last to arrive. The rally took place in a humble, rectangular community center, of the sort one might find in a small and dwindling American town. The men and women in the hall also matched the Middle American phenotypes familiar to me from my childhood in Minnesota—the heavyset men in late middle age; the younger men in caps and grimy hoodies; the women with frizzy hair, matching the men beer for beer. I bought a lager, and they invited me to sit at one of the long tables. My coaster was AfD-branded, with a play on a German adage: “Whoever dishonors the farmer, doesn’t deserve the beer.” I searched the room for anyone who looked likely to have non-German ancestry, and only when I caught my own reflection in the bottom of my glass did I see one.

[Read: How Hitler dismantled a democracy in 53 days]

A theme of the evening, rather than the need to vote for the AfD—the votes of all present were assured—was the need to proclaim one’s support proudly, so Germany knew that this movement could not be ignored or outlawed. “I became a member of the AfD in 2016,” Daniel Haseloff, a party candidate, told the crowd. “Then it was normal to vote for the AfD in secret—to come to the party meetings in the dark and say, I hope no one sees me.” Now, he said, it was time to “declare support at work, among family members, and say, Yes, I stand for the AfD; I stand for deportation, for Fortress Europe, for our great homeland, for our great culture, and for Björn Höcke.”

Höcke, the leader of the Thuringian branch, is a major figure in the AfD’s far-right wing, and one of the main reasons the party’s opponents suspect they’re dealing with real Nazis. In a 2017 speech, Höcke wondered aloud if Germany’s self-flagellation over the Holocaust might not have reached a point of negative returns. Germany, he said, “needed to make a 180-degree change in its commemoration policy.” Before entering politics, Höcke was a teacher of history, not of geometry, so the “180 degree” line left unclear whether he meant that Germany should stop agonizing over its fascist past, or come around to celebrating it. Members of the current government are already discussing banning the AfD, and the group’s supporters at the rally told me they view a strong showing in the election as the only means of survival, because the greater the following, the more awkward a ban will be to implement.

The AfD started in 2013 as an anti–European Union party, full of Germans cranky about having their hard-earned taxes go to bail out lazy Mediterranean countries. A decade on, at the Ichstedt meeting, AfD supporters were still furious that EU membership had added another encrustation of bureaucracy and taxation to an already massive state. But the issue that dominates the party’s platform is immigration, and the chant that animated the Ichstedt crowd most was “Abschieben, abschieben, abschieben”: “Deport, deport, deport!” Germany has seen net migration of more than 5 million people since 2014. More than 1 million of the new arrivals are Syrian and Afghan, and in 2023, the number of people seeking asylum jumped by 50 percent. The AfD has pledged “remigration”—deporting or encouraging the departure of as many of these newcomers as possible, as well as encouraging Germans who have left to come home.  

Party leaders say they wish to make Germany safe again; to end “climate madness” and attempts to rely on solar and wind energy, in their dark and not-always-windy country; and to keep welfare benefits out of the grabbing hands of foreigners and in the hands of Germans. They have also learned to be indignant, along with Vance, about the state of German free expression and democracy, and say that “direct democracy,” rather than democracy filtered through the establishment-party system, will remedy the AfD’s exclusion from power.

Supporters during the AfD general-election-campaign launch, in Halle,. Germany is holding a national election on Sunday. (Krisztian Bocsi / Bloomberg / Getty)​

Sometimes these concerns cross-pollinate with the old hostility toward the EU and its bureaucracy. A speaker at the rally compared the onerous paperwork that the German state demands from its citizens with the light burden it places on asylum seekers. Citizens are denied state services for checking the wrong box, he said, but asylum seekers can show up with no documents, and the state will provide someone to fill out the forms for them and cut them every break. If Germany had to be paperwork hell, then newcomers should be subjected to the same tortures.

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Ichstedt is so sedate that I had trouble imagining any crime there at all. The urban disorder of nearby cities, however, was vivid in the speakers’ and attendees’ minds. It seemed to have inspired equally vivid reverie of how migrants might be rounded up and sent home. Haseloff pledged that the airport in Thuringia’s main city of Erfurt, which has steadily lost passenger business over the past 20 years, would be revitalized through the construction of “deportation prisons” in the surrounding industrial zone. “Under an AfD government in Thuringia, several planes a day will take off to the home of immigrants. By doing so, we will set an example for the whole of Germany. We will make Thuringia an undesirable destination for social migrants.”

Once the Ichstedt rally ended, everyone got up to go home, and a few were already at the door when someone onstage suggested that they close with a few verses of the German national anthem. Everyone stood and sang, solemnly. Germany has had the same anthem since the Weimar Republic, and many decades ago, it was shorn of Nazi-redolent verses such as “Deutschland über alles.” But after two hours’ worth of talk of “the great German homeland” and Kultur, how could one not hear those ominous excised lines echoing distantly?

That echo was unfair to those present. Although the rally attendees definitely wanted to get rid of foreigners, they used no slurs; they did not vilify Islam; they did not use overtly racist language or tropes of extermination; and they seemed sincerely wounded by the accusations that they were fascists. Nevertheless, some rhetoric, when uttered in German, unavoidably sounds odious. The German language is a prison, and anyone who speaks it is trapped by associations that other languages have escaped. “God bless America and the American people” is boilerplate, but “Gott mit uns” (“God is with us”) is a Nazi slogan, and when I hear a German talking about “das Deutsche Volk” (“the German people”), I wonder if he is reaching for his Luger.

One has to ask: If I were running a far-right party plagued with accusations of sympathy for the Third Reich, would I adopt slogans that encouraged that impression, or that discouraged it? The AfD does the former. Its leader is Alice Weidel, and at rallies one often hears chants of “Alice für Deutschland”—which literally means “Alice for Germany” but sounds just like “Alles für Deutschland,” a Nazi-storm-trooper motto. Some of the party’s other leaders, such as Höcke, keep stumbling into statements that sound at best neutral about the legacy of Nazism. Höcke has warned that if Germans are not appeased, their native “Teutonic fervor” will erupt violently; he once wrote that his country will have to “lose” the part of its population that is “too weak or unwilling to resist the advancing Africanization, Orientalization and Islamization” of German society. (He later said that he meant only that those who denigrate Germany, call it a “shit” or “mongrel” country, or wish for it to be firebombed would have to go.) In the state Parliament in Erfurt last month, Mario Voigt, the leader of the current government in Thuringia, which has shut out the AfD, stared down Höcke and called his party a “Führer cult.” Höcke reacted to this speech by raising his hands in mock alarm.

On numerous occasions, the party has embraced vicious and personal campaign tactics. This year, the AfD leafleted immigrant-heavy communities in Karlsruhe with fake one-way economy-class tickets dated for election day. The passenger name was “illegal immigrant”; the destination: “safe country of origin.” “It’s nice at home too,” the tickets said, with assurances that “citizens will not be deported,” though the wording implied that all who could be legally deported should be. One after another, individuals welcomed by the party have been found to have nasty episodes in their past—harassment of Jews, minimizing statements about Hitler.

[Read: What Germany says about far-right politics]

Complicating matters is the fact that Weidel, the actual Führer (or Führerin) of the AfD, is hardly Third Reich–compliant. She can speak in fiery tones about immigration: “On the first day in government, we will seal off the German borders,” she promised a crowd earlier this month, adding, “No one will be able to come in.” But she is also curious about the world outside Germany for reasons unrelated to conquering it; she speaks Chinese and lived in China for six years. And although she has Aryan skin and hair, she is married to a woman of Sri Lankan origin, with whom she is raising two sons. In her speeches, she stresses that Germany must comply fully with refugee law—but she adds that “asylum is temporary and ends when the reason for fleeing no longer applies.” Her opponents accuse her party of an unseemly interest in concepts like “the German people” (with all that phrase’s Nazi baggage). But Weidel herself seems most passionate when defending the elimination of carbon taxes and the return of the internal combustion engine.

Even the party’s detractors acknowledge that most AfD supporters are not personally racist, and that many have been drawn to the AfD because of their displeasure with botched or bizarre economic policies. Weidel is adept at drawing conversations toward policies that many Germans, whatever they think about immigration, can agree were foolish, and should have been recognized as such at the time. The establishment parties, after all, were in charge when Germany shifted away from nuclear power, toward wind energy and natural gas piped in from Russia—essentially volunteering itself as a hostage in case Russia ever became an enemy of Europe. (The AfD, like the Trump administration, is very friendly toward Russia, and wishes to reopen pipelines from there to diversify energy supply and lower prices.)

Weidel can dwell on these boneheaded policies in part because almost every German keen on mass deportation is already planning to vote for her, and those in the center are up for grabs. That said, the AfD knows that crime and immigration are winning issues. When I interviewed Stefan Möller, an AfD politician and a deputy to Höcke, he was filled with sensible commentary about the failed economic policies of previous governments. But his eyes really lit up when I turned to immigration, because the AfD has simply dominated all public discussion of its downsides. “Almost every day, we’re seeing reports of knife attacks, of children being hunted down in schools,” Möller told me. “We are expected to prevent things like the knife attack in Aschaffenburg, or the attack in Magdeburg, or the rampant crime. These are not acceptable. And the answer, for society and for our voters, is a consistent policy.”

By now it is impossible to ignore the crime rates of recent immigrants to Germany. In 2023, about 41 percent of crimes were thought to have been committed by foreigners. The anecdotes match the data: Several high-profile cases of bizarre public violence, such as the stabbing of random children, have involved foreigners. At a rally I attended in the town of Sonneberg, a politician named Oliver Kirchner referred to Germany as “the world’s mental hospital,” for its willingness to accept criminally insane foreigners.

Möller told me he lives on the outskirts of Erfurt, and is therefore spared having to deal daily with the crime-ridden area around the train station and main square. He told me a story about children from his suburb who went downtown for ice cream. “They made a mistake on the way home,” he said. “Instead of walking along the tramway, where it’s busy, they went on Tromsdorf Street.” There, he said, they were beset and mugged by a gang of teenage immigrants. Then he invited me to become prey myself. “Go there, and you will see what I mean,” he said. “That is where they find their victims.”

Möller must have underestimated how cheaply The Atlantic houses its reporters when on assignment, because I needed no invitation: I had already booked a hotel near the train station, at the end of Tromsdorf Street. Like almost all railway hubs in Germany nowadays, this one had Syrians and other immigrants standing idly at all hours, talking in Arabic and Afghan languages. Because I was jet-lagged, I would walk Tromsdorf Street late at night, always returning to my room unstabbed. The area seemed not so much crime-ridden as eerily vacant, my footsteps echoing in the shadows like Joseph Cotten’s in Vienna in The Third Man. The shops—many of them Middle Eastern markets—closed after dark. Once or twice I fell into step with a few young guys and wondered if I had hit the jackpot and found a gang. But I am a grown man, not a woman or a tween with an ice-cream cone, so even if they were evaluating me for a mugging, they probably thought better of it. Once, two of them got closer, and I heard them talking in Arabic about going into a pool hall.

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Standing idly is not a crime; neither is speaking a foreign language. By American urban standards, the street was extremely safe. But Möller’s anxiety stems from a predictable form of culture shock, when a very old country changes very fast. Anyone who thought ordinary Germans could cope with this shock, and even welcome it, was deluded. Those streets had been emptying out for some time as the region’s economy flagged and its population declined, and for years they had been even more silent than they are today. No one predicted that when the silence was broken, the voices to break it would be Syrian.

This surprise, unthinkable just a decade ago, has led to grotesque calumnies against vulnerable people, as well as policy proposals that are both clumsy and inhumane. But even Möller, who works directly with one of the AfD’s most incendiary politicians, would when pressed acknowledge that the ideal German future would not look like the distant, romanticized German past, of lederhosen and beer and Wagner.

I asked Möller when he thought Germany went wrong—what year he would go back to, in his Flux Capacitor–equipped Audi, to reboot his country and avert the problems he wanted to solve. He said that he disapproved of Germany’s immigration policy going back as far as he could remember—but 2000, roughly, when Germany’s borders disintegrated and its currency vanished, was when everything started falling apart. I told him that I had started coming to Germany around that time, and even then it had seemed that immigrants were integrating into German society. And it hadn’t seemed so bad to have foreigners there, doing jobs that Germans were losing interest in.

Möller mostly agreed, and noted that the AfD itself had changed its maximalist position on immigration—deport them all—to a more targeted agenda of removing welfare-claiming layabouts, unskilled laborers, and criminals. “Today even our own voters expect us to differentiate,” Möller told me, between violent criminals and “migrants who integrated very well, who are now German citizens, who do not cause any problems.” He said that “no AfD voter expects the AfD—not even in Thuringia—to deport doctors, engineers, or some mailman from Ghana.”

Bjӧrn Hӧcke, the leader of the Thuringian AfD branch, raises his hands at a campaign event in Thuringia. (Michael Reichel / picture-alliance / dpa / AP)

The true collapse happened in 2015, Möller believes, when Syrian and Afghan refugees began arriving in huge numbers. He said any cardiologists or engineers among the legal newcomers should be welcome to stay. But the suggestion that such migrants might come, he told me, is for now “awfully theoretical.” The 2015 wave of migration, he said, had flooded the country with “social migrants,” those who came to enjoy free money from a welfare state, including Syrians and Afghans poorly equipped to integrate into an economy no longer dependent on labor performed by illiterate peasants. “The people we need for [skilled] jobs are not coming,” he told me. “The Indian engineer is not coming, because the Indian engineer will go to a place where he earns more money, where he pays less taxes, where his children are taught in decent schools, and where it is safe to go into town in the evening. He won’t stay in Erfurt.”

This was a persistent theme among AfD supporters and politicians: that Germany had become a shithole country, not fit for an engineer from Delhi, and it needed to become worse for newcomers to be livable for anyone. Donald Trump’s first inaugural speech was about “American carnage,” and now the AfD described an equally awful Germany. It is a weird sensation to go to Germany—the center of what Donald Rumsfeld called “Old Europe,” where I once stayed near a corner bakery old enough to have served Martin Luther—and find that it feels like America’s political younger sibling.

[From the March 1932 issue: Hitler and Hitlerism: a man of destiny]

But the longer history of the AfD is distinctively German, and the result of 50 years of politics perhaps too sedate for its own good. Germany, having been responsible for an eventful half century, decided to forswear eventfulness for the next half century. It was instead governed by a familiar species of cautious, credentialed bureaucrat: never younger than late middle age; usually addressed as Herr Doktor or Frau Doktor; always white, of course. Except for Angela Merkel, one would be forgiven for failing to match faces to names—and to some extent that interchangeability was a relief, considering the last time a German leader was immediately identifiable by face and mustache. The watchful conservatism was exemplified by the campaign slogan of Konrad Adenauer, leader of Germany’s center-right party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU): “Keine Experimente!” The center-left party, the Social Democratic Party, was similarly conservative: no experiments, no funny business.

This status quo, bland as a Bavarian dumpling, faced challengers from the extreme left and right. The radical left produced violent factions—Baader Meinhof, Red Army—whose members ended up hunted and imprisoned. The radical right in Germany posed a more complicated problem. West Germany was plagued with accusations of having incompletely de-Nazified. Many politicians and business leaders had fought in the war, and a don’t-mention-the-war attitude prevailed among those of social grace—if the war was mentioned, the mention should sound disgusted, and anyone who spoke of it in any other way, including in neutral terms, faced shunning and worse. Neo-Nazi parties in Germany felt the full force of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (the Verfassungsschutz, the German equivalent of the FBI), and were shut down.

Those on the far right who wriggled out of being banned confronted instead a disciplined, broad, organized political punishment: the “firewall” that Vance finds so objectionable. Their parties, up to now, have been treated as unhygienic, so that even if the far right and the center agree on something, the center refuses to court the far right’s vote and instead treats it as untouchable. The task of tending the firewall’s flame was judged so important that the parties of the center increased their cooperation with the Green Party and the old East German Left. On immigration, the CDU quietly adopted the view of the left, that Germany’s future would be as a land of immigrants and that anyone who suggested that this vision was undesirable was probably a racist. During Merkel’s long tenure as chancellor, from 2005 to 2021, her party—while nominally center-right—came to embrace certain elements of the far left. This included, fatefully, the welcoming of millions of undocumented immigrants from Syria, Afghanistan, and other countries beset by war or poverty. Merkel’s line, in the face of this extraordinary situation, was “Wir schaffen das”: “We’ll manage it.”

AfD supporters gather for an election-campaign meeting in eastern Germany on August 14, 2024. (Michaela Stache / AFP / Getty)

Hans-Georg Maassen, who was Merkel’s head of domestic intelligence during this period and who was responsible for immigration law before that, has since been ejected from the CDU and started his own party, the Values Union, in part over his criticism of Merkel’s de facto open-borders policy. “For her, immigration policy was ideological,” he told me. “To let in millions of new people, without discussion: This is against the law.” The CDU, by taking this step, had become indistinguishable from the parties to its left, such as the Greens, who openly favored transforming Germany into an internationalist-left society. “People noticed,” Maassen told me. “If you vote for the Greens, you get a Green immigration policy. If you vote for the [Social Democratic Party], you get a Green immigration policy. And for the CDU, that gets you a Green immigration policy too.” That left an opening for the AfD. And as soon as Germans decided that immigration was the issue, the AfD was ready to win big for having consistently opposed it.

This history explains why the AfD directs its most bitter invective not at the immigrants, not at the leftists, but at the center-right. AfD leaders say the CDU caved to the left instead of turning back as many “social migrants” as the law allows. The process of telling refugees apart from non-refugees is extremely difficult, with dire consequences for those refugees wrongly flagged as non-refugees. Faced with that problem, Germany tried—I wrote about it for this magazine in 2018—but not, according to the AfD, hard enough.

In Ichstedt, Daniel Haseloff cautioned against being satisfied with anything but dismantling the CDU. “The CDU is our main opponent—not just here but in all of Germany,” he said. He did not even bother mentioning the left. “We will only be fully successful when the CDU in its current form no longer exists,” he told the crowd. “Trump has shown us how it’s done.” Only after the establishment Republicans were demolished, he said, was there “room for Trump, for Elon Musk.” (Some people looked my way.)

The man most likely to win this week’s election and become the new chancellor is Friedrich Merz, of the CDU. He has tried to court AfD voters and push through immigration legislation that the left viewed as too friendly to the AfD. This, Haseloff said, was a trick. The CDU just wants to peel off AfD votes—and when it does, it will do what governments have done before, and shut the party down. “Merz wants to see the party banned after the federal election,” Haseloff said. “That means he doesn’t see us as partners tomorrow; he sees us as opponents.”

It’s funny, then, that the biggest demonstrations in Germany that week were against the CDU—not by AfD supporters, but by their enemies on the left, who thought Merz had extinguished the firewall and given in to Nazis. I attended a protest outside CDU headquarters in Berlin the day after I left Thuringia, and felt as if I had traveled through time, from a small town decades ago, with its farmers and factory workers, to a gathering of modern university students in a cosmopolitan city. Demonstrators had spiky hair and sustained themselves with takeaway containers of kebabs, rather than beer and sausage. The youth of the protesters was salted and peppered with middle-aged and older people, the sorts of folks one sees at cultural events in the Bay Area or Vermont.

[Read: How Hitler’s enablers undid democracy in Germany]

They told me that by treating AfD voters and politicians as potential friends, rather than as pariahs, the CDU had welcomed racists back into the Reichstag. “We stand together against all right-wing extremism, regardless of whether it comes from the AfD or from the CDU,” a young woman with a bullhorn told the crowd. She said the CDU had never been a friend of immigrants, and now, by reaching out to the AfD, it had shown how false its friendship had always been. No one should trust them again, and demonstrators—the people—were the only ones standing between Germany and a return to racism. She led a chant: “Wir sind die Brandmauer”: “We are the firewall.”

Most noteworthy, at this protest outside the CDU, was that none of these people were members of the center-right, objecting to their party’s change in policy. They were all members of the left fringe of a broad coalition, hectoring members of the coalition’s center-right into maintaining an immigrant-friendly policy that the left flank had insisted on, and that the rest of the coalition had accepted with reservations. At the AfD meeting I had attended the night before, the message was: Don’t trust the CDU, even when it does what you want. Tonight the message was, Don’t trust the CDU, even though it did what you wanted for almost 10 years.

To some extent, this bind is just what happens in coalition politics: Being in the center means getting pinched by parties from both sides, but also having the chance to work with those parties and steal their voters with both hands. For much of Germany’s postwar history, however, coalition politics have not played out in the manner of most parliamentary democracies, because the center and left parties have conspired to treat the far right as radioactive. Here again one would expect Germans, of all people, to understand the dynamics of walls: that if you build them up, the pressure mounts on one side, and when the wall crashes down, the equilibration can be dramatic. Even as sensible a rule as Don’t be nice to Nazis cannot repeal this dynamic of hydrostatic pressure. The far right can be suppressed only so long, but that just means a reckoning postponed rather than avoided.

By sequestering the AfD on the right, the CDU kept itself free from the contagion of the party’s most odious members. It also lost its only chance to lure the non-odious AfD members to its side, and to explain how a Germany with a generous—but not infinitely generous—policy toward beleaguered foreigners could remain prosperous, safe, and German. I found Stefan Möller much more reasonable when I could press him, and get him to exempt his Ghanaian postman from deportation. In this way he is like most people: pricklier when left alone, and more reasonable when reasoned with.

Maassen, the former Merkel colleague, had been a CDU candidate in Thuringia before he started his own party. He told me how his attempts to stand for election on the CDU line eventually became untenable, because voters came to think of the CDU as a party of scolds, and of thought-police in a new guise. He noted that people there knew, because they had lived through one-party rule in the East, what a stifled politics felt like. “In East Germany, if they were an opponent of the regime, they had to look to the left, to the right, if they were in a restaurant and talking politics, in case somebody had big ears. Nowadays they have the same feeling if they are members of the AfD.” But if you complained about this stiflement in East Germany, your punishment could be severe. Now the problems are lesser, although still real: losing your job, your freedom to associate with other far rightists. The deeper issue, he said, was the AfD members’ sense of betrayal by a system that they had been told was open. “The AfD supporters say, This is not democratic.”

Holocaust survivor: “What Israel is doing is horrible”

Photographs by John Francis Peters

Amid the madness and tension of the most recent presidential-election campaign, a wild form of clickbait video started flying around the political internet. The titles described debates with preposterous numerical twists, such as “Can 1 Woke Teen Survive 20 Trump Supporters?” and “60 Republicans vs Democrats Debate the 2024 Election.” Fiery tidbits went viral: a trans man yelling at the conservative pundit Ben Shapiro for a full four minutes; Pete Buttigieg trying to calm an undecided voter seething with rage at the Democrats. These weren’t typical TV-news shouting matches, with commentators in suits mugging to cameras. People were staring into each other’s eyes, speaking spontaneously, litigating national divisions in a manner that looked like a support group and felt like The Jerry Springer Show.

The clips were created by Jubilee Media, a booming entertainment company that has built a huge young following by turning difficult discussions into shareable content. Launched in 2017, it has produced videos with titles including “Flat Earthers vs Scientists: Can We Trust Science?” (29 million views), “6 Vegans vs 1 Secret Meat Eater” (17 million views), along with hundreds of others in which delicate subjects—Middle East politics, parenting strategies, penis size—are explored by strangers in gamelike scenarios. During an era of ideological chaos, when all consensus seems in flux, Jubilee has become a phenomenon by insisting that it’s okay, even fun, to clash. In doing so, it represents a challenge to traditional media: Jubilee’s founder, Jason Y. Lee, told me he’s hopeful that the company can host one of the presidential debates in 2028.

Jason Y. Lee (left) watches a taping of Surrounded. He relaunched Jubilee in 2017 as an effort to bridge national divisions revealed by Donald Trump’s election. (Photographs by John Francis Peters)

That idea shouldn’t sound far-fetched. The 2024 election demonstrated the influence of YouTube, TikTok, podcasts, and other online forums in fostering discussion that’s less regulated than what journalistic norms allow. Gen Z’s rightward swing since 2020, combined with its high rate of independent party identification, suggests a remarkable openness to persuasion from across the political spectrum. Basic policy shibboleths, such as the efficacy of vaccines, are being questioned by all sorts of constituencies; once-predictable public-opinion trend lines—regarding feminism, LGBTQ rights, democracy itself—are going wobbly. As Jubilee’s former creative director John Regalado told me, the internet is “updating our tolerance for disagreement—and disagreement on a lot of things that we thought were in the can.”

Jubilee has proved adept at mining this new paradigm for views. Its video with Shapiro was the fifth-most-watched bit of election-related content on YouTube, just a few spots down from Joe Rogan’s interview with Donald Trump; that “1 Woke Teen,” the fledgling TikTok commentator Dean Withers, was invited to the White House after his performance. The company’s offerings also include dating shows, a forthcoming dating app, and a card game to provoke interesting interactions with friends. Students at high schools and colleges have held Jubilee-inspired events to mimic the debates they see on-screen. Lee said he’s trying to build “the Disney of empathy”: a media empire that teaches people how to connect, listen, and healthily disagree—an ambitious, even fanciful-sounding notion in a time of cultural fracturing and political polarization.

Pursuing that goal has meant emphasizing seemingly old-fashioned media ideals—neutrality, fidelity, hearing from all sides—in ways that can seem extreme. Moderators, when they’re involved at all, take only the lightest touch in steering conversations, which can mean letting misinformation and misdirection fly. (Fact-checks happen after filming and are provided by another start-up, Straight Arrow News, which pitches itself as “Unbiased. Straight Facts.”) Cast members tend to seem like regular, if colorful, folks who speak off-the-cuff. The point isn’t to change participants’ minds—full-on ideological conversions almost never happen in the videos. Rather, Regalado said, Jubilee thinks of its efforts as a “practice” or a “ritual.” The awkward or upsetting moments that inevitably arise are part of the product. “That rawness and that authenticity is what young people desperately are seeking,” Lee told me.

Jubilee’s critics, however, contend that the company is simply manufacturing ragebait and platforming dangerous ideas in order to pull eyeballs. Regalado noted that angry viewers often leave comments joking that Jubilee might do “Holocaust Survivors vs. Holocaust Deniers” next—but in the company’s logic, that’s really not an outrageous idea. “Internally, Jubilee has argued about whether or not we would do that episode,” Regalado said, adding that he himself would “want to see that dialogue happen” so long as the Holocaust survivors understood what they were getting into. “I don't think it’s good for society to deny an opportunity for discourse.”

Jubilee’s headquarters have the rumpled, run-and-gun energy of a newspaper office. The ceiling panels are scuffed, the walls are decorated with movie posters, and the desks are dotted with equipment, knickknacks, and struggling houseplants. I visited on a Friday, when most of the staff was working from home, save for a casting director making calls from a private booth. Lee explained that, because Jubilee makes around 200 videos a year, finding participants is a constant chore. “One day we’ll be like, ‘Hey, we need to get nuns,’” he said. “The next day we’ll be like, ‘We need 50 gang members.’”

Lee took me into a corner office with a sweeping view of the Los Angeles International Airport’s tarmac. Using a dry-erase marker to write on the glass tabletop we were sitting at, he drew a graph. One axis was labeled “value” (as in social value) and the other “savvy” (as in business savvy). He wants most of Jubilee’s content to fall in the top-right quadrant, meaning it’s highly benevolent—informative, uplifting, helpful—but also highly entertaining and, therefore, profitable. He pointed to a sign on one wall that said Provoke Understanding and Create Human Connection. That’s Jubilee’s mission statement, whose acronym, PUCHC, is pronounced puke, so people “actually remember it,” he said.

Participants crash into one another while rushing to the debate chair. (Photograph by John Francis Peters)

Sporting a tastefully mussed mullet and canvas pants, Lee sounded like a start-up founder who has delivered countless pitches about his company’s significance. Clearly, however, his desire for impact is deeply rooted. Raised in Kansas by Korean-immigrant parents, Lee is a devout Christian. His résumé bears the hallmarks of can-do Millennial idealism: an internship on Barack Obama’s 2007 primary campaign; five months in Zambia working for the Clinton Health Access Initiative. In a 2017 TEDx Talk, Lee said that he grew up wanting to be a police officer in order to help people.

On Lee’s 22nd birthday, in 2010, he saw news reports about an earthquake devastating Haiti and felt a need to contribute in some way. He went to a New York City subway station and started busking for donations to relief efforts while filming himself. He came up short of his $100 goal for the day. But when he posted the video of his busking online with a pledge to donate a penny each time the video was viewed, something strange happened: He went viral, or at least more viral than any random guy warbling Coldplay on shaky footage could have expected. He then founded the Jubilee Project, a nonprofit to create socially conscious videos; two years later, he quit his six-figure consulting job at Bain & Company to run the project full-time.

The early version of Jubilee was very much a product of its time—a moment when the internet was widely assumed to be a force for progress. The Arab Spring, Kony 2012, the Ice Bucket Challenge: All were early-2010s mass mobilization efforts for a better world, fostered by Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter. Peppy infotainment start-ups—BuzzFeed, Upworthy, Vox—were proliferating, and legacy brands were “pivoting to video,” believing that traditional journalistic values could persist in new shapes.

Really, though, those values were being tested. The dynamics of the internet in those days encouraged newsgatherers to communicate with a clear point of view; the ability to drive traffic by targeting specific audiences, who could in turn orchestrate social-media backlash to coverage, helped make so-called both-sidesism distinctly unfashionable. The rise of Donald Trump, campaigning on what would be later called “alternative facts,” added to the widespread sense that media organizations would play a more active role in refereeing democracy. Traffic boomed, but cultural fracturing worsened as MAGA created its own information ecosystem via independent outlets and forums like Facebook.

After the 2016 election, Lee was disturbed by the divisions he noticed among his acquaintances. Back home in Kansas, people couldn’t fathom why anyone voted for Hillary Clinton; in L.A., they couldn’t do so for Trump. He felt pained to realize that the Jubilee Project’s PSA-like content—about topics including school bullying and global poverty—mostly seemed to be preaching to people who already thought as he did. He relaunched Jubilee as a for-profit company, pitching it as an effort to bridge ideological silos.

Lee and his team devised a set of “shows”: repeatable formats that could liven up discussions about any topic. Middle Ground asks two seemingly opposed factions—minimum-wage workers and millionaires, sex workers and clergy—to try to come to some sense of agreement through discussion. In Odd One Out, a group of similar people tries to root out a mole, thereby examining individual stereotypes (for example, a group of straight guys tries to identify the secretly gay one). Jubilee’s dating videos force people to “swipe” through potential mates in real life, which highlights biases, preferences, and the general inhumanity of apps such as Tinder. Surrounded, which encircles one expert debater with 20 to 25 rivals, is intended to showcase “the many versus a mighty,” Regalado said.

At best, the videos are eyeball-scorching documents of human behavior. The 2024-election hit “Can 25 Liberal College Students Outsmart 1 Conservative? (Feat. Charlie Kirk)” had a carnivalesque feel, showcasing all sorts of people trying out all sorts of rhetorical strategies—nitpicking; filibustering; even, from time to time, building logically sound arguments. Conversations got cut maddeningly short and insults flew to and fro, but that made it all the more satisfying when, for example, a nose-ringed student named Naima incisively landed a complex point about structural racism. Over 90 minutes, an odd kinship seemed to develop between Kirk—a slick and buttoned-up pundit who’s made a career out of “owning” liberals—and his opponents, almost like they were all in on a joke.

Sometimes the chemistry among Jubilee participants becomes poisonous. Last year, the company posted one of its most controversial installments, “Is Being Fat a Choice? Fit Men vs Fat Men.” It featured Myron Gaines, a manosphere podcaster, who repeatedly referred to overweight people—four of whom were in the room with him—as “fat asses” who should be put in a fitness “concentration camp.” Social media lit up with outrage directed toward Jubilee for giving voice to a vicious troll. Lee told me he felt that criticism was fair: Strong voices are good, but voices that hijack the conversation with an agenda and dehumanize other participants are not. “Every year, we put over 2,000 people in our videos,” he said. “I’m not gonna lie; there have been certain videos [where] I’m like, Oh, we might have gotten this balance off.”

Participants in Surrounded can raise red flags, signaling a vote to replace the current debater with someone else from their side. (Photographs by John Francis Peters)

Balance is a word that comes up often in the many, many takedowns that have been aimed at Jubilee over the years. Every issue may have two sides, but not all sides are equally valid, and some are even dangerous. Lee told me that Jubilee has a “harm clause” against featuring groups that openly want to hurt other groups. Harm, of course, is a relative—and ever-expanding—term. Jubilee’s team mostly resolves contentious programming decisions through internal discussion and debate, which seems fitting. For example: Lee told me he disagrees with Regalado about potentially doing a “Holocaust Survivors vs. Deniers” video. Certain topics are just “beyond the realm where people will give us any benefit of the doubt.”

Yet Jubilee’s success suggests why deplatforming—the strategy of blocking bigots and liars from public stages—has proved ineffective. Audiences can always follow provocateurs to alternative platforms; a billionaire can buy the old platform and raise up once-canceled voices. “An anti-vaxxer is about to be part of the Trump administration, and that’s not because of a Jubilee video,” Regalado said. “That’s because information is accessible to people in a new way, and ideas are being resurrected because of our relationship to the internet.” (He was referring to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom Trump selected to lead the Department of Health and Human Services.)

Lee declined to comment on his own political beliefs, but he said that his staff generally leans left; Regalado, who exited his full-time role at the company in 2023 but still contributes as a consultant and podcaster, told me he’s “a little bit more liberal than conservative.” Both men suggested to me that progressive critics of Jubilee, who believe that political debates on the platform tend to end up favoring the conservative side, may be reacting to an imbalance in the wider political culture. In the pugilistic, digressive arena of a YouTube debate, advocates for the right are just more experienced at getting their point across.

“Something that people will ask us quite a bit is like: You featured Ben Shapiro and you featured Charlie Kirk. Why aren’t you featuring those people on the left?” Lee said. “And usually the question I ask is, Who are you talking about?” The only establishment Democrat to sit down for a Jubilee video this past cycle was Buttigieg; other liberal Surrounded anchors were a TikToker (Withers) and a video-game streamer (Destiny). Of course plenty of other camera-tested Democrats exist, but they tend to be native to mainstream TV news, which hasn’t been a forum for robust, sustained argument since Jon Stewart shamed Crossfire off the air 20 years ago. Regalado characterized liberals as suffering from “a reluctance to meet the moment that we have.” He added, “Their ideas have suffered for it.”

The day after I visited Jubilee’s offices, I arrived at an industrial building in South L.A. for a taping of Surrounded that would pit 25 Christians against one atheist. In a circle of folding chairs sat youthful theologians with tattoos, a midwestern pastor in a fleece vest, and one blond-bearded Mormon in a suit. At the center was a blue-blazered 25-year-old named Alex O’Connor, who had come to argue that God probably wasn’t real and that Jesus probably didn’t rise from the dead.

At first, the mood was tense. O’Connor would state an assertion, and Christians would sprint up to debate him, sometimes crashing into one another on the way. A large countdown clock enforced 20-minute time limits on each round; as the conversations went on, the other participants started to raise red flags, signaling a vote to kick out the current champion of their faith and install a new one.

And yet, despite the gladiatorial trappings, the discussions turned out to be heady and technical—largely focused on disputes over interpreting specific biblical passages. At one point, the shoot’s director, Suncè Franičević, tried to create some sparks by urging participants to not be afraid to share personal experiences. Lee, watching the shoot alongside me, referenced the graph he’d drawn at Jubilee’s headquarters. This episode was shaping up to land high on the do-good side of the spectrum but possibly lower on entertainment value. “The question is,” he asked, “do you think people will watch it?”

Surrounded, which encircles one expert debater with 20 to 25 rivals, is intended to showcase “the many versus a mighty,” Regalado says. (Photograph by John Francis Peters)

As civil as the debate was, I felt the same thing I always feel while watching Jubilee content: squirming discomfort with confrontation but also amazement at the eagerness of the young participants to dive into thorny subjects. I’ve long thought that what Stewart said on Crossfire was correct—that bickering on camera just feeds division and sows confusion. But I’m also of a generation whose worldviews about religion and politics and so much else were, for many of us, set long ago, in the TV-news era. We then gorged on the internet’s wealth of sharp and smart commentary designed to tell us what we already thought. Jubilee, however, is largely being consumed by people who came up in the fractured aftermath, scanning comment-section flame wars and social-media controversies, trying to figure out where they fit.

I spoke with O’Connor afterward. He’s a rising YouTube star and podcaster who has participated in rollicking discussions with the likes of Piers Morgan, Jordan Peterson, and Richard Dawkins. Many of the Christians at the shoot recognized him from the internet and said they were, in spite of his atheism, big fans. He started his influencer career as a teenager ranting at the camera, but over the years, he told me, he’s learned to tone down the vitriol and show more humility. Commenters on his channel sometimes grouse that he’s gone soft, but his viewership numbers keep going up: He just hit 1 million subscribers on YouTube.

O’Connor’s trajectory made me think of something Lee had told me. In the time since the company was founded, online discourse has hardly become more empathetic, and America’s divisions haven’t healed. But Lee has faith that Jubilee’s influence will be felt in years to come, in the words and deeds of people who grew up watching the company’s videos, honing their sense for what productive—and not-so-productive—conversation looks like. “I am confident that we are nudging us towards better,” he said.

I asked O’Connor whether he bought into the idea that Jubilee really was teaching people how to become better thinkers and speakers. “I don’t know,” he said, choosing his words with the same care and precision that he had during the taping. “I think that kind of is an empirical question.”

The only evidence that he could offer was this: He’d been an atheist arguing with a room full of Christians, “and afterwards, we all went out to the pub—and we had a wonderful conversation.”

Did Elon Musk actually toss off a Sieg heil! at Donald Trump’s inauguration rally today?

A lot of people online seem to think he did, based on data from their eyeballs. Freeze-frame images of Musk on social media show the world’s richest man at a podium in Washington, D.C.’s Capital One Arena engaging in what could definitely be construed as a Nazi salute. Video clips of Musk’s speech support this conclusion. Musk stands at the podium, graced with the presidential seal, and thanks the crowd. Then he forcefully slaps his right hand to his chest and rather violently extends his arm outward diagonally to the audience. Multiple historians have backed the idea that Musk’s gesture was indeed a Nazi salute. “Thank you,” Musk says. He makes the gesture to the crowd, turns 180 degrees, and repeats it to the rest of the crowd behind him. “My heart goes out to you,” he adds, placing his hand back on his chest.

What’s left out of much of the discussion is that Musk is supremely, almost cosmically, awkward and stilted. All close observers of Musk—and I am one—know this.

So which one is it? A mask-off full-Nazi moment or just a graceless tech baron not in full control of both his arms and his feelings? (It wouldn’t be the first time he’s embarrassed himself onstage using his limbs.) I would urge you to watch the video for yourself.

Musk has not yet commented publicly on what he did, and he did not respond to my inquiry about what, exactly, he thought he was doing up there. (It’s worth noting that the video Musk posted of his speech did not show Musk performing the gesture head-on—it cut away to the crowd; a C-SPAN clip shows it in full, though.) Eventually, he will almost certainly deny that he Sieg heiled. If history is a guide, he will post on X, scoffing at the accusations. He could make a self-deprecating joke about being so excited that he wasn’t aware of his body. He could act like a troll, like he did when a German magazine likened him to a member of Hitler’s cabinet, and he responded, “I did Nazi that coming.” The most disturbing response might be if he says nothing at all. So far, he has posted several times on X today without addressing the matter.

Musk’s X has given a megaphone to bigots and restored the accounts of banned racists. I’ve argued that Musk has turned X into a white-supremacist website. Musk himself has spent recent weeks enthusiastically endorsing Germany’s far-right political party, Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD. Members of the party have had documented ties to neo-Nazis; in 2018, the co-leader of the AfD downplayed the significance of the Holocaust and the crimes of the Nazi regime. Musk has endorsed posts about the racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory. Even those inside the MAGA movement have voiced concerns about Musk. This month, the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon called Musk “a truly evil guy, a very bad guy.” He used the word racist to describe Musk and others in Trump’s Silicon Valley inner circle who have South African heritage: “Why do we have South Africans, the most racist people on earth, white South Africans, we have them making any comments at all on what goes on in the United States?”

All of this informs how one might interpret Musk on the stage today. Above all else, Musk is a troll, an edgelord. He delights in “triggering” his ideological enemies, which includes the media. And his gesture—whatever the intent—has done just that. In a way, the uproar online over Musk is reminiscent of an incident in the first months of the first Trump administration, when two pro-Trump influencers were photographed in the White House press room making the “OK” hand gesture. The photo was interpreted by some media members as a white-power symbol. Reporters and organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League traced it back to racist message boards like 4chan’s /pol/ board. Eventually, however, the gestures appeared to be part of an attempt, by 4chan, to trick the mainstream media into overreacting and turning the handiwork of a few trolls into national news. The whole affair was exhausting and difficult to follow. A message board that trafficked in hate speech created a fake hate-speech symbol to try to trick the media into calling something racist. (The ADL, it is worth noting, has extended Musk the benefit of the doubt, issuing a statement that Musk made an “awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute,” and encouraged everyone to “give one another a bit of grace.”)

None of that is to suggest that Musk’s salute wasn’t genuine. A practiced troll consistently crosses redlines because they want to offend and trigger. They also swaddle their actions in enough detached irony and cynicism that allow them to relentlessly mock or harass anyone who dares take them seriously. There is every reason to take a right-wing troll at face value, and yet doing so often means giving them what they want: an intense reaction they can use against you.

For now, all anyone has to understand Musk’s motives is a damning video, his past words and actions, and plenty of circumstantial evidence about his beliefs. What is undeniable is that watching Musk do that onstage while thousands stood on their feet cheering was more than ominous. Across the internet, Wired reports, neo-Nazis are thrilled at what they believe is a direct signal from the centibillionaire. In many ways, it is a fitting spectacle to begin the second Trump administration: a bunch of people arguing endlessly over something everyone can see with their own eyes.