Tag: germany

Sex-Ed: Eighth Graders Given Class Project to Design a Brothel

A German school was forced to withdraw a sex-ed lesson after children aged 13 and 14 years old were given the classroom task of designing a “new brothel for all”.

Children in an eighth-grade class at a Catholic high school in Kevelaer, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, were assigned the classwork of designing an inclusive brothel, including floor plans. The local Rheinische Post reported on the remarkable lesson plan on Wednesday, and news quickly spread nationwide, leading to the headmistress and mayor facing demands for explanations.

The worksheet, entitled ‘The New Brothel For All!’, asked students to consider key areas of modern “house of sexual pleasure” design, including “What sexual preferences need to be addressed and catered to?” “How should a brothel be designed from the outside so that it can be visited and desired by all kinds of people?” and “What should an advertisement for such a brothel look like?”

After considering these factors, including who would work there, what it would offer, and drawing a floor plan, the class would be brought in at the end for a group discussion.

The school, Kardinal von Galen Gymnasium, was invited to offer an explanation for this extraordinary sex education lesson, and while it didn’t exactly double down, it also insisted it had been delivered for all the right reasons.

The headmistress said, reports WDR: “The material under the heading: ‘Sexual Education of Diversity: Practical Methods on Identities, Relationships, Bodies, and Prevention for Schools and Youth Work’ is deliberately designed to be provocative in order to stimulate discussion.

“It responds to developments in our society with a diversity of lifestyles and gender roles. It also addresses the heavy use of social media channels by children and young people and the associated flood of information about various forms of sexuality.”

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Germany Becomes A Ukraine War Lab, and a Staging Ground For a Forever War On Russia

In February, under the white light of a Bavarian assembly hall, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and German Defense Minister, Boris Pistorius, walked past rows of unfinished drones. The joint venture hosting them, linking Germany’s Quantum Systems with Ukraine’s Frontline Robotics, is already producing aircraft for Ukraine, plans to scale toward 10,000 units a year, and has already sent its first batch east. This is what Berlin now calls support for Ukraine, not crates on a runway, not old equipment hauled out of Bundeswehr depots, but German soil giving Ukrainian war design an industrial home.

For years, German officials sold their Ukraine policy in the language of restraint, solidarity and defensive necessity, but today, that language is buckling under what Berlin is now doing in plain sight. Germany has signed onto Ukraine’s defence innovation platform, opened itself to battlefield-data sharing, backed joint ventures that turn Ukrainian combat know-how into German-produced drones and robots, and committed itself to work on long-range strike systems with a reach of up to 1,500 kilometres. The result is no longer the picture of a cautious donor helping from a distance. It is a state folding Ukraine’s war labs into its own industrial base and building the rear area of a long war against Russia on German territory.

Germany Becomes the Factory Floor

The Munich drone line strips away the euphemism. Ukraine is not simply receiving German kit from stockpiles. Ukrainian battlefield-proven designs, software and operational lessons are being fused with German capital, German factory capacity and German political cover inside ventures built to scale weapons production for a war Berlin still insists it is not fighting. The Auterion-Airlogix Joint Venture GmbH makes the point even more bluntly. Registered in Germany and launched in February, it combines Airlogix’s battle-tested Ukrainian UAV platforms with Auterion’s autonomy software and is meant to produce thousands of autonomous, combat-ready systems in Germany for the Ukrainian armed forces. Every time Ukrainian engineers find a way through Russian jamming or air defences, German industry is there to absorb the lesson and turn it into volume.

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German Intelligence Deems Watermelon Emoji Hate Speech

Germany has reached the point where even a watermelon can now be treated as a political threat. That is how absurd Europe has become. According to reports surrounding the latest antisemitism controversy in Germany, authorities and institutions are increasingly targeting symbols tied to pro-Palestinian activism, including the watermelon symbol that protesters began using after Palestinian flags and imagery started facing restrictions in some settings.

Think about how insane this has become. A watermelon is now being politically analyzed for “hate speech” implications while Europe is collapsing economically, energy prices remain elevated, migration tensions are exploding, and Germany itself is entering one of the worst industrial downturns since World War II. Instead of fixing the economy, Berlin is policing fruit symbolism and online speech.

I have warned that Germany has been moving steadily toward censorship for years. They raid homes over social media posts, prosecute citizens for insults online, and constantly expand speech laws under the excuse of fighting extremism. The problem is governments never stop at genuine extremism. Once censorship machinery exists, everything eventually becomes “dangerous.” Today it is a watermelon emoji. Tomorrow it becomes criticism of migration policy, opposition to war, or questioning government spending.

The Germans of all people should understand where this road leads. Europe has convinced itself that suppressing speech somehow eliminates social anger. It does not. It only drives resentment underground where it becomes more radicalized. History has shown repeatedly that governments trying to regulate political thought always end up creating even greater instability.

The frightening part is the sheer hypocrisy. Europe claims to defend democracy while simultaneously deciding which symbols, opinions, protests, or political expressions are acceptable. A watermelon itself is obviously not hateful. It is a piece of fruit. What governments fear is not the symbol itself. They fear losing control over public opinion as anger grows across Europe over war, migration, inflation, and collapsing living standards.

This is the real crisis developing in Germany. Not merely antisemitism, which absolutely exists and should be condemned, but the broader destruction of open discourse itself. Once governments begin defining ordinary political symbolism as dangerous, free society is already in serious trouble.

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German Chancellor: US No Longer ‘Land of Opportunity’; Wouldn’t Recommend His Kids Move There, Cites ‘Deteriorating Social Conditions’

A deepening rift between Europe and the United States is becoming increasingly clear, as German Chancellor Friedrich Merz delivered a striking and unusually blunt critique of America’s current trajectory—raising serious questions about the future of the transatlantic alliance.

According to reports from German media, peaking at a Catholic youth gathering in Würzburg, Merz made headlines by stating he would no longer recommend the United States as a destination for his own children. The remark, coming from a politician long associated with pro-American positions, has sent shockwaves through diplomatic and political circles.

“I would not recommend to my children today that they go to the U.S. to get an education and to work,” Merz said, pointing to what he described as a deteriorating “social climate.”

The statement reflects more than personal concern. It signals a seemingly ever-widening fracture between Europe and America, one that is no longer confined to policy disagreements but increasingly extends to values, economics, and societal stability.

Merz, once a staunch advocate of close transatlantic ties, emphasized that his admiration for the United States has waned significantly. “I am a great admirer of America… but at the moment my admiration is not growing,” he said.

His concerns extend beyond culture and into the economic reality facing young Americans. According to Merz, even highly educated graduates are struggling to find meaningful employment—a reality that undermines America’s long-standing image as a land of opportunity.

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Germans Are Feeling the Economy Collapse in Real-Time

Germany was once considered the industrial engine of Europe. Today, ordinary Germans are increasingly feeling their economic model breaking down in real time as living costs rise, industry weakens, and confidence in the future deteriorates rapidly. The political establishment still talks about “green transitions” and economic resilience, but households across Germany are experiencing something entirely different underneath the surface.

Recent polling from INSA found that nearly 70% of Germans believe the country is heading in the wrong economic direction, while consumer confidence remains near recessionary territory despite years of government stimulus and intervention. Another survey found that over 40% of Germans now say they cannot maintain their previous standard of living because of rising costs tied to food, housing, electricity, transportation, and heating. The middle class is being steadily eroded.

This is precisely what I warned would happen once Europe embraced energy self-destruction under the climate agenda. Germany built its industrial dominance around cheap and reliable energy combined with export manufacturing. Once Berlin shut nuclear plants, restricted domestic energy production, and sanctioned Russian energy flows simultaneously, the entire economic structure became vulnerable. Energy-intensive industries like chemicals, steel, manufacturing, and automotive production immediately faced soaring costs that competitors in Asia and the United States simply do not carry to the same degree.

German manufacturing activity has contracted repeatedly over the past two years while industrial production remains well below pre-crisis levels. Major firms including BASF have openly reduced European operations because operating costs inside Germany no longer make economic sense long term. Volkswagen, Siemens, and countless mid-sized industrial firms are all confronting weakening competitiveness as energy prices remain structurally elevated.

Meanwhile ordinary Germans are absorbing the impact through declining purchasing power. Food prices surged dramatically following the Ukraine war and broader inflation crisis. Housing costs continue rising in major cities. Electricity prices became some of the highest in the industrialized world. Insurance costs, transportation expenses, and debt servicing all moved sharply higher after interest rates normalized from the artificial zero-rate era.

The political class still pretends these are temporary disruptions. They are not temporary. Germany is facing structural decline because policymakers dismantled the foundations supporting industrial prosperity itself. You cannot run a major export economy while intentionally making energy scarce and expensive. The mathematics simply do not work.

This is why the ECM projected Europe entering a depressionary phase into 2028. The sovereign debt crisis was never truly solved after the euro crisis years. Europe merely delayed the reckoning through ECB intervention, money printing, and artificial liquidity. Now the continent faces a second wave of pressure simultaneously involving war spending, migration costs, demographic decline, energy instability, and collapsing competitiveness.

Germany sits at the center of that crisis.

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Germany’s Nuclear Confession Is a Crack in Net‑Zero Pretense

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz has called the nuclear phaseout a “serious strategic mistake” that left Germany short of firm power that turned the Energiewende into the most expensive energy transition on the planet. This is an early marker for a developing worldwide retreat from policies that sidelined nuclear power and demonized coal, oil, and natural gas.

German and Japanese Nuclear Embarrassment

Germany stubbornly closed its last three functioning nuclear reactors in April 2023 right in the middle of a crippling energy crisis triggered by the war in Ukraine. As pragmatists predicted, German citizens now suffer under punishingly high electricity prices and remain heavily dependent on imported energy.

The green dream was sold as a route to “cheap” renewables, yet the reality for German households and factories has been record‑high electricity prices, complex subsidies for favored businesses and individuals who conform to the climate narrative, and a grid that struggles on windless days or under gray skies. 

Japan made a remarkably similar error but is finally correcting course. After the Fukushima disaster, the government panicked and shut down all 54 of its nuclear reactors. Today, Japan is slowly restarting those idle units.

The pattern is plain to see. Countries abandon dependable power sources under political pressure, then spend years rebuilding what they had demonized and dismantled.

Regret Over Abandoning Fossil Fuels

This is why I anticipate a cascade of similar reversals by national leaders who participated in a destructive campaign that stripped grids of dependable, affordable, and abundant coal, oil, and natural gas.

Politicians are already quietly hitting the brakes on their aggressive fossil fuel phaseouts when reality bites. The massive Groningen gas field was scheduled for permanent closure due to localized earthquake risks. Yet in 2024, the Dutch Senate delayed the final shutdown vote when lawmakers demanded guarantees that abandoning the domestic resource would not jeopardize energy security.

Within a week of the German chancellor’s admission of a nuclear energy fiasco, the country’s energy minister lamented at an oil and gas conference the push of net zero policies, indirectly referencing the abandonment of fossil fuels.

In the United States, President Donald Trump took executive actions aimed at preventing some coal plants from closing, including orders that kept aging facilities like the J.H. Campbell plant in Michigan running to “avoid summer blackouts.”

South Africa’s Mineral Resources and Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe consistently fights international pressure to quickly abandon coal. “You don’t destroy what you have on the basis of hope that something better is coming,” he says. Mantashe rightly insists that protecting the ability of the state to supply energy must remain a priority.

India offers the most powerful example of this energy pragmatism. The country has signaled that coal will remain the backbone of the economy for decades, even as its diplomats make empty promises about reaching net-zero by 2070. Deputy Power Minister Shripad Naik recently revealed that India had added a massive 7.2 gigawatts of new coal capacity in the 2025–26 fiscal year alone and would add 307 gigawatts of total coal capacity by 2035.

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Trump Considering Moving the Troops Withdrawn From Germany to Poland

Goodbye Germany, hello Poland?

We have been reporting here on TGP about the repercussions of German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s offensive comment about the US operations in the Middle East, and the fierce response by Donald J. Trump, as you can read in Trump Hits Back at Germany’s Merz for Suggesting that Iran ‘Is Humiliating the US’, as Foreign Minister Wadephul Tries To Walk Back the Absurd Comments by failing Chancellor.

This is an unforced error by Merz that showed his true colors and his lack of appreciation for his US allies.

In fact, Merz is failing badly as head of government, as we reported in a post on Merz’s first year as Chancellor:

“Merz’s numbers are a record low: a mid-April poll shows only 18% of voters are satisfied with his work, while as much as 80% are dissatisfied. Even the majority of Merz voters are reportedly unhappy.”

Now that the withdrawal of US troops from Germany is considered a done deal, Trump is constantly asked whether the US troops withdrawn from Germany will be moved to Poland.

Now, Trump said that Warsaw favors the idea, and he considers it to be feasible.

Euronews reported:

“US President Donald Trump has admitted he is considering moving some of the American troops being withdrawn from Germany to Poland.”

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Germany’s Silent Shift: From Entrepreneurs To State Dependence

Germany affords itself a state bureaucracy that functions like an artificial labor market placed upstream of the private sector. The flight of hundreds of thousands into the arms of the state corresponds with the shrinking number of self-employed in the country. And policymakers are actively promoting this trend.

Let us begin with a piece of good news: according to a Bertelsmann survey, around 40 percent of Germans aged 15 to 25 can imagine starting a business as their personal life path. That is a surprisingly high figure in a country where young people not infrequently cite, half-jokingly and half-seriously, Hartz IV or the public sector as career goals.

Let us note: the embers of entrepreneurship in Germany are still glowing; economic autonomy and sovereignty still rank highly among the younger generation. However, it is questionable whether this will suffice to ignite, one day, a true founding boom in a country of climate transformation, deeply rooted faith in the state, and an expansive public sector—a boom that could force a turnaround and help erase the long-accumulated sins of climate socialists.

But we digress. Romantic youthful ideals carry little weight in the leadership circles of the Berlin Republic. There, the ideal of free enterprise collides with the cultural-political malaise of statism—one of many politically induced fault lines of our time. Entrepreneurial action, the free decision over the allocation of capital, inevitably carries conflict potential in a climate of manically enforced eco-transformation.

In attempting to transform the existing economic order into a system of state-directed energy production and centrally steered industrial output, policymakers are pushing a growing number of mid-sized enterprises either into insolvency or straight abroad. No one should be surprised by the country’s economic depression: there is a price to be paid for handing over the economic crown jewels—such as nuclear power or automobile manufacturing—to ideological zealots.

It is hardly surprising that the fury of the socialist “firewall cartel” is also directed at entrepreneurs, who serve as one of the silent barriers against the barbarism of socialism. In Germany, it is all too easy for politicians to distract from their own failures with envy debates, resentment, and instruments such as inheritance or wealth taxes. If you want to understand how this script works, recall the embarrassing entrepreneur-bashing by the labor minister and her finance minister just a few weeks ago. This is not an entrepreneur-friendly climate—neither fiscally nor socially.

One should therefore not be surprised: economic decline is inevitable, and it is increasingly visible in the compressed real incomes of citizens. They are grappling with a distorted labor market, rising inflation, and ongoing poverty migration—a toxic brew for a society that has, in large part, lapsed into an apathetic and strangely muted “degrowth mode.”

As mentioned: why still have entrepreneurs if, in the end, the state—with unlimited credit and the iron hand of the supreme regulator—directs economic activity? Economist Lars Feld estimated total subsidies last year at €321 billion, corresponding to seven percent of the country’s entire economic output. Put more bluntly: a Mount Everest of corruption money, actively tracked down by dubious subsidy entrepreneurs who, in doing so, help construct the redistribution machinery of the green transformation. A devilish system that casts anyone enriching themselves from taxpayers’ money in an extremely unfavorable ethical light.

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Trump Pulling 5,000 US Troops From Germany In Punitive Move Amid Merz Spat

In a huge late in the day Friday development, the Trump administration plans to pull some 5,000 troops from NATO member Germany, CBS is reporting. Citing senior defense officials, the Pentagon expects the troop draw down will happen over a six to twelve month period, Reuters has also separately reported, in what clearly appears a punitive measure aimed at Berlin by the Trump White House.

Over several years, and stretching back decades, the US has maintained the most number of troops on the European continent in Germany – currently estimated at over 36,000 active duty personnel. So the 5,000 – while significant – is still somewhat of a symbolic move and number.

The large US presence hearkens back to the post WWII division of Germany and post-war order, and is also a legacy of the Cold War. Ironically at this very moment European leaders have hyped a ‘new Cold War’ with Russia, as the Ukraine war continues raging.

“The officials characterized the move as a signal of President Trump’s discontent with the level of assistance that European allies have offered in the U.S.-Iran war,” CBS writes.

The significance of the planned move also lies in the fact that America’s German bases serve as headquarters of US European Command and Africa Command – with the historic Ramstein Air Base being the key hub.

The announcement via US reporting comes just a day after Trump again lambasted German Chancellor Friedrich Merz:

“The Chancellor of Germany should spend more time on ending the war with Russia/Ukraine (Where he has been totally ineffective!), and fixing his broken Country, especially Immigration and Energy, and less time on interfering with those that are getting rid of the Iran Nuclear threat, thereby making the World, including Germany, a safer place!” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

Merz had in a rare moment torched US foreign policy and the Trump administration’s Iran war gambit in Monday remarks given at a local event in Germany.

Included in that very head-on critique of Operation Epic Fury came in the following: “An entire nation is being humiliated by the Iranian leadership, especially by these so-called Revolutionary Guards. And so I hope that this ends as quickly as possible.”

Merz had also claimed, “If I had known that it would continue like this for five or six weeks and get progressively worse, I would have told ​him even more emphatically.” ​

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Germany Aims to Become EU’s Strongest Military Force by 2039

Germany has now openly declared its intention to become the dominant conventional military power in Europe by 2039. What Berlin is doing is a structural shift that has been building quietly for years, and now it is being formalized in plain sight. The plan calls for expanding the Bundeswehr to roughly 460,000 personnel, including reserves, with about 260,000 active troops, effectively doubling the scale of its usable force compared to today.

What stands out is that this is taking place at the same time Germany’s economy is stagnating, with growth forecasts collapsing toward just 0.5% while inflation rises due to energy pressures and geopolitical tensions. You are witnessing the classic historical pattern where governments shift resources toward military buildup as economic conditions weaken. This is precisely how capital is redirected during periods of rising geopolitical risk.

Germany’s military budget tells the real story. The Bundeswehr is now operating with roughly €108.2 billion in 2026, making it one of the largest defense budgets in the world, and a dramatic departure from the decades when Germany refused to even meet NATO’s 2% threshold. Just a few years ago, Germany was spending closer to €80–90 billion annually, and now projections show spending rising toward €150–160 billion by 2029, or roughly 3.5% of GDP.

This is a staggering transformation. For decades, Germany deliberately maintained a weak military posture as part of the post–World War II settlement. Now they are not only rearming, but they are also explicitly stating they intend to be the strongest conventional force in Europe. That would have been unthinkable twenty years ago.

From the perspective of the Economic Confidence Model and the war cycle, this fits perfectly into the timing window we have been warning about. The arrays have been showing a convergence of civil unrest and international war cycles into 2026–2027. What we are seeing in Germany is not isolated. It is part of a broader shift across Europe, where governments are preparing for sustained conflict risk, not a temporary crisis.

Germany has also moved beyond simply increasing spending. They are restructuring the entire military system, including technology integration, AI-driven warfare, and logistics infrastructure that can support rapid deployment across Europe. This is preparation for long-term engagement capability, not defensive posturing. Once governments begin investing at this scale, they are not planning for peace. They are preparing for confrontation.

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