The German Establishment is so Desperate to Crush the AfD it has Developed an AI ‘Racist Uncle’ and Sent it into Schools for Children to Debate

Täteropferumkehr is the German term for “victim blaming” – often hyphenated as Täter-Opfer-Umkehr to make it look slightly less clunky. In recent times, our political and media establishment have turned it into a sharp tool, employed with reference to both foreign and domestic politics.

Unsurprisingly, Germany’s woke lLeft – always eager to champion the alleged plight of the “oppressed” – views Israel, the only functioning democracy in the Middle East, as the ultimate perpetrator, while framing bloodthirsty Arab aggressors as the true victims. In 2025, five Berlin-based “activists” (four of whom openly identify as “they/them”) ransacked an Elbit Systems facility in Ulm, causing over a million euros in damage. Now standing trial in Stuttgart, they naturally view themselves as the victims.

One wonders what would happen if “roller-skating” Daniel, “music-making” Crow, “poetry-writing” Leandra, “community-organising” Vi, and “nature-loving” Zo were dropped onto the shores of Gaza. Would “they/them” receive a warm welcome from Hamas? The non-binary inmates might have gleaned an inkling of what radical Islamists have in store for them following the Islamist attack on the Berlin Pride parade last Saturday.

On the domestic front, we see an equally Orwellian exercise in doublethink. The one political party that has been systematically cut off from public funding, denied committee chairs, pilloried behind a political Brandmauer (“firewall”), and whose members suffer the lion’s share of physical assaults is routinely portrayed as the sole perpetrator. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) is ceaselessly accused of peddling racism, revisionism and Russophilia – to name just a few of the slurs slung its way by the goody-two-shoes gatekeepers of the moral high ground.

The siren song of establishment polity, legacy media and state-funded NGOs has increasingly been amplified in secondary schools. In North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state, one in five schools belongs to the taxpayer-funded “School Without Racism” network, backed by a leftist teachers’ union. Where these funds actually go is often opaque, but the encouraged “activism” almost always targets “Right-wing extremism” – which, in modern German parlance, simply means campaigning against the AfD.

Currently, state and federal authorities are in a panic over the prospect of the AfD winning an outright majority in upcoming state elections. Polls show support for the maligned party hovering above 40% in Saxony-Anhalt, which could easily translate into a parliamentary majority. Reiner Haseloff, a former Minister-President of the state, even resorted to scaremongering, hinting that secondary school diplomas from Saxony-Anhalt might no longer be recognised in other parts of Germany if the “wrong” party wins.

Often, the anti-AfD machinery operates more subtly. Before the last local elections, municipal authorities displayed posters and information for all mayoral candidates in my school’s foyer – well, almost all. The AfD candidate was conspicuously missing. When I asked the election official about this glaring omission, I was told the local AfD had failed to respond to the municipality’s request for information. When a colleague followed up with the local AfD branch, they confirmed they had never been contacted in the first place.

But the most ludicrous example of state-sponsored indoctrination in my area is an AI robot named “Navel”. Developed by a PhD student at the local university in cahoots with the largely taxpayer-funded “Active Museum South-Westphalia”, the robot was programmed to impersonate a “racist uncle” at a family reunion, spouting anti-immigrant talking points. Secondary school students were encouraged to “spar” with the divisive Dalek to hone their skills in rebutting Right-wing thought. To make the exercise even more absurd, the robot is built to look like a toddler and wears a woolly cap to “humanise” it.

Yet, despite the vast sums of money, resources and personnel poured into this apparatus by governments and their ‘civil society’ allies, the desired outcome remains elusive. Marcel Fratzscher, a favourite economist of the establishment Left, recently lamented in Die Zeit that young men in particular are turning to the populist right because they “feel like losers of modernisation”. His grim conclusion: “There is little remedy.”

So what does it mean when the concerted effort of the righteous left cannot turn the tide of sustained AfD support? Perhaps the commentariat, the wokerati and the creator of the unwittingly ironically named AI uncle “Navel” should engage less in navel-gazing and doublethink and more in recognising reality. Israel – not Hamas – is our ally; the AfD is a party like all others, entitled to the same privileges; and children in school must not be indoctrinated.

Perhaps we should send “Navel” to the “they/them” lot in jail for some instructive lessons. But they might refuse to engage with him so long as he declines to share his pronouns.

The author is a teacher at a German secondary school.