Off-price department store retailer Burlington, formerly known as Burlington Coat Factory, fell in premarket trading after reporting weak third-quarter comparable sales and issuing soft fourth-quarter and full-year comp guidance that missed Bloomberg Consensus expectations.

Snapshot: Q3 Results (Slight Miss on Revenue/Comps)

• Adjusted EPS: $1.68 (beat) vs. $1.55 y/y

• Revenue: $2.71B (+7.1% y/y), just below Bloomberg Consensus ($2.72B)

• Comp sales: +1% (Estimate: +2.5%)

• Gross margin: 44.2% (up from 43.9%)

• SG&A: 35% of revenue (improvement vs. 35.4%)

• Merchandise inventories: $1.66B, up 15% y/y (well above BBG estimate of $1.51B)

“Total sales increased 7% in the third quarter, while comparable store sales increased 1%. Traffic to our stores fell off significantly after the back-to-school period driven by unseasonably warm temperatures in our major markets. Our comp trend then picked up to mid-single-digits in mid-October once the weather cooled, and that strong trend has continued through the first three weeks of November,” CEO Michael O’Sullivan wrote in a statement. 

Burlington’s fourth-quarter and full-year forecasts were also underwhelming compared with Bloomberg Consensus expectations. Shares are down 5% in premarket trading.

Snapshot: Q4 Outlook (Soft vs. Street)

• Comp sales: 0% to +2% (Estimate: +2.1%) Adjusted

• EPS: $4.50–$4.70 (Estimate: $4.62) Sales growth: +7% to +9%

Snapshot: 2026 Outlook (Mixed – EPS Raised, Comps Still Light)

• Adjusted EPS: $9.69–$9.89, raised (Estimate: $9.56) Sales: +8% (prior +7–8%)

• Comps: +1% to +2% (Estimate +2.46%) Net capex: ≈$950M

According to company filings, Burlington’s core customer has an annual household income of $25,000 to $100,000 and is typically between 25 and 49 years old.

It’s important to note that consumers more broadly, especially in the low- to mid-income tiers, are under financial pressure and increasingly value-oriented. This has been confirmed in recent earnings from Target, Home Depot, Walmart, and TJ Maxx.

The question becomes whether Burlington’s customers are dialing back on spending on apparel, footwear, and coats, not because of seasonal trends, but because their pocketbooks are being squeezed.

After two months of nothing, the avalanche of actual government-supplied macro data begins in earnest with Retail Sales (for September). BofA’s omniscient analysts expected a small beat…

Retail sales should be a slight beat based on BofA real-time card spending dataa pic.twitter.com/amrOxXgiqU

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) November 25, 2025

But, for once, they were off with headline sales rising just 0.2% MoM (+0.4% MoM exp) but still rising for the 4th straight month…

Source: Bloomberg

On an unadjusted basis, Retail Sales fell significantly MoM (but that appears to be a very seasonal factor)…

Excluding Autos, sales were up 0.3% MoM (in line with expectations) but Ex Autos and Gas it was a disappointment, rising just 0.1% MoM (+0.3% exp).

Motor Vehicles and Nonstore Retailers saw sales drop the most while Gasoline Stations and Food Services & Drinking sales rose the most…

Perhaps worst of all is the 0.1% MoM decline in the Control Group – which is used in the GDP calculation – considerably worse than the +0.3% MoM expectation…

Source: Bloomberg

Control Group Sales are still up 4.1% YoY however.

Finally, we note that ‘real’ retail sales are higher YoY for the 12th straight month…

More bad news to support Fed rate-cuts?

For the four weeks ending Nov. 8, 2025, ADP reports that private employers shed an average of 13,500 jobs a week, considerably worse than than the last couple of weeks.

That is the worst ‘monthly’ average since August

“Consumer strength remains in question as we enter the holiday hiring season,” says Nela Richardson of ADP, adding that “might be playing into delayed or curtailed job creation.”

This is certainly not good news, but it does shift the dove/hawk argument at The Fed to pro-cut side and we see odds rise for December…

Is this bad news good enough to support the Santa Claus Rally?

A US official privy to negotiations is claiming major progress Tuesday, telling ABC News the Ukrainian delegation has agreed to the United States’ potential peace plan, at a moment it’s still being hotly debated, especially among the Europeans.

“The Ukrainians have agreed to the peace deal,” the US official said, but without specifying much in the way of details. “There are some minor details to be sorted out but they have agreed to a peace deal.”

Of course, the proverbial devil is in the details, along with each side’s ‘red lines’ – and so this claim should be taken with caution at this still very early point.

The Trump White House has set a deadline of Thursday, or Thanksgiving Day in America, for the warring sides to reach a deal. This suggests these talks are moving along with intensity and a sense of urgency.

“United States Army Secretary Dan Driscoll held secret talks on Monday with a Russian delegation in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates to follow up on this weekend’s talks with Ukraine in Geneva that were intended to move the Ukraine peace process forward,” ABC cites a US official further as describing.

Oil slides on the optimistic headline that Ukraine has tentatively agreed to the Trump-backed deal…

As we described Monday evening, the Zelensky government has still appeared publicly resistant to any deal which cedes territory to Russian forces. Also most importantly is that the Ukrainian government has said it will reject outside attempts to control its future alliances, which is a reference to the US plan’s call for a commitment that Ukraine never join NATO.

Also injecting some realism in these front-running headlines is The Washington Post Tuesday morning, which writes:

Russia is unlikely to accept changes in the new peace plan to end the war that the U.S. and Ukraine are negotiating over, say analysts, even as U.S. Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll is in the United Arab Emirates meeting with a Russian delegation and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is expected in the United States.

From Moscow’s point of view the most objectionable term is to accept that Ukraine would be given ‘Article 5-style’ security guarantees by the Western alliance. This could be recipe for future major war, if NATO-like guarantees are given.

But Zelensky in his latest statement on X pledged that Ukraine would “never be an obstacle to peace” – but also emphasized the importance of his country remaining independent and sovereign. What that means by the end of this process is still very up in the air at this point.

Religion plays a defining role in American culture and politics, but the degree of religiosity varies dramatically by state.

This visualization, via Visual Capitalist’s Niccolo Conte, maps out the share of adults who are highly religious based on survey data from the Pew Research Center.

The survey was of 36,908 adults, conducted July 2023 to March 2024, with religiousness based on prayer frequency, attendance at religious services, belief in God, and the importance of religion in life.

Which U.S. States are the Most Religious?

Mississippi leads as America’s most religious state, with 50% of adults surveyed categorized as highly religious.

The table below shows the share of residents in each U.S. state who are considered highly religious:

South Carolina follows Mississippi with 46% of adults highly religious, with South Dakota and Louisiana tied next at 45%.

The data highlights a strong concentration of religious adherence in the American South. States like Tennessee (44%), North Carolina (41%), and Arkansas (40%) demonstrate the cultural legacy of the “Bible Belt,” where Christianity remains woven into America’s religiosity.

The Least-Religious States in America

In contrast, the Northeast and much of the West Coast are markedly less religious.

New England stands out for its secularism with the three least-religious states in America: Vermont (13%), New Hampshire (15%) and Maine (17%).

Alongside New England, western states like Nevada (20%) and Oregon (21%) show lower levels of religious engagement, with California only slightly higher at 24%.

Overall, the national average of highly religious adults sits at 31%, with the difference between the top and bottom states—Mississippi’s 50% versus Vermont’s 13%—illustrating just how much religiosity varies across the United States.

To learn more about religion around the world, check out this graphic which shows the world’s most popular religions.

Authored by Roger Bate via The Brownstone Institute,

The UK Covid-19 Inquiry has finally released the core political chapters of its long-awaited report. After nearly three years of hearings, millions of documents, and tens of millions of pounds spent on legal fees, the conclusion is now unmistakably clear.

They’ve learned nothing, as I detail in my latest research. 

Worse, they may not want to learn.

The Inquiry’s structure, its analytical frame, even its carefully curated narrative all point in the same direction: away from the possibility that Britain’s pandemic response was fundamentally misguided, and toward the politically safer claim that ministers simply “acted too late.”

On November 20, 2025, Jay Bhattacharya captured this perfectly in a single sentence on X: “Fact check; not locking down at all (like Sweden) would have saved lives in UK. Hard to believe how much money the UK spent on its sham covid inquiry.” That tweet was provocative—but it was also accurate in its diagnosis of the Inquiry’s deeper pathologies.

The Inquiry’s Central Mistake: Asking the Wrong Question

From the outset, the Inquiry has framed Britain’s pandemic response as a timing problem. Lockdowns were assumed to be necessary and effective; the only question was whether politicians implemented them quickly enough. The result is a dry recitation of process failures and personality clashes inside Downing Street, all of which are said to have delayed the inevitable “stay-at-home” order.

But that framing was never neutral. It was baked into the Inquiry’s analytical choices—especially its uncritical reliance on the same family of models that drove the UK into lockdown in March 2020.

The centerpiece of that modeling tradition is Imperial College London’s Report 9, the document that forecast hundreds of thousands of UK deaths absent stringent lockdowns. That report assumed near-homogeneous mixing, limited voluntary behavior change, and high fatality rates across the population. Under those assumptions, lockdown becomes not a political choice but a mathematical necessity.

The Inquiry has now rerun the same machinery and, unsurprisingly, produced the same conclusion.

Its headline claim—that delaying lockdown by a week caused roughly 23,000 additional deaths—is not a historical finding. It is not based on observational data. It is simply the output of an Imperial-style model with a different start date.

The Inquiry has restated the model, not tested it.

The Evidence They Chose Not to See

The Inquiry’s blindness becomes fully apparent when we ask the obvious comparative question: if the lockdown paradigm were correct, what would we expect to see among countries that refused to lock down?

We would expect chaos. We would expect mass hospital collapse. We would expect mortality catastrophes to dwarf the UK.

We would expect, in short, to see Sweden in ruins.

Instead, we see the opposite.

Sweden kept primary schools open, avoided stay-at-home orders, relied heavily on voluntary behavior, and preserved civil liberties throughout the pandemic. After correcting early care-home errors, Sweden recorded one of the lowest age-adjusted excess mortality rates in Europe.

The Swedish experience is not a footnote. It is not an “exception.” It is the control case—the real-world test of the lockdown paradigm.

And it falsifies it.

A serious Inquiry would have begun with Sweden. It would have asked why a country that rejected lockdowns achieved better mortality outcomes than Britain while preserving education, normal life, and basic freedoms. It would have integrated that evidence into every chapter. It would have examined whether voluntary behavior changes, targeted protection, and risk-based messaging can substitute for mass coercion.

Instead, Sweden is barely mentioned. When it appears at all, it is described as an anomaly. The Inquiry behaves as though Sweden is politically inconvenient—not analytically essential.

Because it is.

The Modeling Was Wrong. The Inquiry Can’t Admit It.

If the Inquiry were genuinely interested in learning, it would examine whether the models that drove the UK’s response were flawed. It would review the assumptions underpinning Report 9. It would test them against real-world data from multiple countries. It would commission adversarial modeling groups. It would bring in critics. It would examine alternative frameworks.

It did none of these things.

The behavior of the public is a perfect example. Imperial-style models assume that people remain near-normal in their social contacts without legal mandates. But mobility data, workplace activity, and school attendance show that Britons began adjusting their behavior weeks before Boris Johnson held the lockdown press conference. High-risk individuals adapted earliest. Businesses reacted to perceived risks earlier than the state. Families responded faster than the Cabinet Office.

The models were wrong about behavior.

Yet the Inquiry’s analysis still treats people as if they only respond to orders, not information.

The result is a fantasy counterfactual: a Britain that would have carried on as normal in March 2020 had the government not intervened. That Britain never existed.

Where Is the Cost–Benefit Analysis?

The Inquiry promised to evaluate the “relative benefits and disbenefits” of non-pharmaceutical interventions. It has not done so. There is no integrated accounting of:

• the millions of missed cancer screenings

• the explosion in mental-health morbidity

• the delayed cardiovascular care

• the long-term educational loss from school closures

• the widening inequality gaps

• the years-long damage to the NHS backlog

• the economic scarring that will shorten future lives

Lockdowns always look good when you only count Covid deaths. But public health is cumulative. It is intertemporal. Saving a life today by destroying ten years of someone’s earning power is not a victory.

The Inquiry refuses to engage with these trade-offs. It is easier to condemn “late lockdowns” than to ask whether lockdowns were the wrong tool altogether.

The Real Reason the Inquiry Learned Nothing

The central failure of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry is not analytical. It is institutional.

A real investigation would expose catastrophic judgment errors across the political and scientific establishment. It would show that ministers outsourced strategy to a narrow modeling group. It would reveal that the harms of lockdowns were not only foreseeable but foreseen. It would vindicate critics who were ridiculed or censored. It would anger parents whose children suffered educational harm. It would enrage families whose loved ones died because routine care was suspended. It would shatter public trust in Whitehall and SAGE.

That is precisely what the Inquiry cannot do.

Instead, it offers a politically safe narrative. The strategy was sound. The problem was timing. Ministers were slow. Advisors were frustrated. Downing Street was chaotic. But the solution next time is simple: lock down earlier, lock down harder, lock down smarter.

It is a comforting fairy tale for the people who caused the damage.

The Truth Is Already Clear

Bhattacharya’s November 2025 tweet may have been blunt, but it crystallized what the Inquiry is unwilling to say. Sweden shows that not locking down at all could have saved British lives—not merely reduced collateral damage, but saved lives.

That is the final heresy. And that is why the Inquiry cannot confront it.

Learning would expose too much.

The UK did not simply lock down too late. It locked down unnecessarily. The Inquiry should have been a reckoning. Instead, it became a shield—protecting institutions rather than illuminating truth.

Britain deserved better. The world deserved better.

Until we admit what went wrong, we remain doomed to repeat it.

A dormant volcano in Ethiopia’s Afar region, Hayli Gubbi, erupted on Sunday for the first time in thousands of years, blasting ash and smoke up to 9 miles into the atmosphere, disrupting air travel across the Red Sea toward Yemen and Oman.

Here we observe the ash plume from the first recorded volcanic eruption from Hayli Gubbi Volcano in Ethiopia in 10,000+ years! This is the northern end of the East African Rift Valley, a geologic spreading center driven by the Great African Superplume. pic.twitter.com/wksMnbfEI4

— Stefan Burns (@StefanBurnsGeo) November 23, 2025

Hayli Gubbi’s sudden awakening after roughly 10,000 to 12,000 years may suggest the Afar region and the broader tectonic system beneath East Africa are becoming more geologically active, with new magma moving beneath the crust.

🇪🇹 For the first time in recorded history, Ethiopia’s Hayli-Gubbi volcano has erupted

A plume of ash rose 10–15 km into the sky and is moving toward the southwestern Arabian Peninsula, according to VolcanoDiscovery.

The awakening of Hayli-Gubbi is the first in observational… pic.twitter.com/GWrd8ljcec

— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) November 24, 2025

On X, the American Geographical Society posted satellite imagery showing a massive ash and sulfur dioxide plume drifting across the Red Sea toward Yemen.

Hayli Gubbi Erupts
A long-dormant volcano in Ethiopia’s Afar region, Hayli Gubbi, erupted on Sunday for the first time in thousands of years, sending a massive ash and sulfur dioxide plume across the Red Sea toward Yemen…

Read more: https://t.co/dcYqGK3x9b#Hayli #volcano pic.twitter.com/6tMh2yQ1wF

— The American Geographical Society (@AmericanGeo) November 24, 2025

Flight-tracking website Flightradar24 showed that commercial aircraft in the region are avoiding the toxic plume.

Current (black) and forecasted (green +6hr , yellow +12, red +18) ash cloud observations from today’s eruption of Hayli Gubbi volcano in northern Ethiopia. pic.twitter.com/96vtwvLD20

— Flightradar24 (@flightradar24) November 23, 2025

Questions remain over whether nearby dormant volcanoes could also awaken and enter an active cycle.

Authored by Andrew Korybko via Substack,

AfD co-leader Tino Chrupalla said during a recent appearance on public media that “Poland could also become a threat to us…We see that Poland’s interests differ from Germany’s…We are seeing double standards on the Nord Stream issue. Poland did not extradite a wanted criminal, a terrorist, to Germany.”

He’s not wrong, but he’s also not right for the reasons that people might think, namely the assumption that Poland might one day pose a military threat to Germany.

The present piece will clarify the matter.

It’s true that “Poland’s interests differ from Germany’s”, though not necessarily in the economic sense since Poland became a larger export market for Germany earlier this year than China, and Poland has benefited from the German-led EU’s subsidies (that benefit Germany even more though). Their different interests largely pertain to the future of the EU, which Germany envisages becoming a federation under its leadership while Poland wants it to be a loose union of states that retain more of their sovereignty.

Nord Stream embodied these differences since Germany could have leveraged what would have been its leading energy role in the EU had the second pipeline come online to coerce the Central & Eastern European (CEE) countries into making more concessions on their sovereignty to Berlin-backed Brussels. Poland feared this scenario for self-evident reasons, while the US didn’t want the rise of a de facto German-led “Federation of Europe”, so they plotted together to prevent this from happening.

Poland’s Swinoujscie LNG terminal opened in 2015, and it’s now poised to serve as the entryway for US LNG into CEE as explained here, which will erode German influence there. In parallel, the US supports the Polish-led “Three Seas Initiative” of more robust integration among the CEE states, which is one of the means through which Poland plans to revive its long-lost Great Power status. These aforesaid policies were then given an unprecedent boost after the Nord Stream attack that the US arguably orchestrated.

Had the Ukrainian Conflict ended as a result of spring 2022’s peace talks, then the opportunity for blowing up that pipeline would have closed, hence the importance of Poland aiding the UK in its efforts to convince Zelensky to keep fighting by allowing the unlimited transit of military aid to that end.

In the three years since that attack, the German economy greatly weakened, which Poland and the US expect to accelerate the erosion of German influence in CEE and facilitate its replacement with their influence.

Poland can’t replace Germany’s economic influence there even though it just became a $1 trillion economy, but the lopsided trade deal that the EU agreed to with the US could eventually see the latter doing so instead.

Polish influence can instead take the form of leading CEE’s containment of Russia now that it commands NATO’s third-largest army, thus creating a wedge between Germany and Russia like the US also wants, and rallying the region behind its vision of the EU’s vision in opposition to Germany’s.

Chrupalla was therefore correct in claiming that “Poland could also become a threat to [Germany]” since the successful implementation of the abovementioned grand strategy would shatter German hegemony over CEE. What he didn’t mention, and perhaps he hasn’t (yet?) realized it, is that the aforesaid is a joint Polish-US plan that’s been operational for years already. If it wasn’t for US support, Poland could never pose any strategic threat to Germany, so it’s really the US that already poses the greatest one of all to it.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

The UK military continues monitoring and shadowing Russian ‘research vessels’ as well as naval ships off Britain’s waters which are widely understood to be Russian Navy intelligence collection ships.

In the latest development, British media reported Sunday that the Royal Navy recently intercepted two Russian naval vessels as they passed through the English Channel, according to a statement by the UK Defense Ministry.

The ships have been identified as the corvette Stoikiy and the tanker Yelnya, the former which is part of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. The Royal Navy’s patrol vessel HMS Severn was dispatched to shadow the Russian vessels as they moved west through the Dover Strait – which is the northwest part of the channel just before entering the North Sea.

BBC and CNN have indicated that for part of the shadow mission, monitoring of the Russian ships was handed off to NATO partner assets.

“In addition to the ships stationed around the UK coast, Britain has deployed three Poseidon surveillance aircraft to Iceland as part of a NATO mission patrolling for Russian ships and submarines in the North Atlantic and Arctic, the ministry said,” CNN writes.

Britain’s military has indicated that its HMS Severn continued tracking the corvette Stoikiy “from a distance” and at all times remained prepared to react to “any unexpected activity”.

Russia’s embassy in London has meanwhile emphasized that Russian vessels international waters in reality “pose no threat to Britain’s security.” This comes after alleged incidents where Russian vessels aimed lasers as British warplanes operating above to monitor the ships’ activities.

And last week the embassy firmly stated, “London, with its Russophobic path and increasing militaristic hysteria leads to further degradation European security, providing the premise for new dangerous situations.”

Western allies believe Russian naval ‘research vessels’ like the Yantar are assisting with Moscow-backed ‘sabotage campaigns’ in northern European waters. For example the last couple years have seen allegations of Russian vessels cutting telecoms cables under the North Sea and elsewhere.

“We call on the British side to hold off taking any destructive steps which might aggravate the crisis situation on the European continent,” the embassy added.

A view from HMS Severn as it tracks Russia’s RFN Stoikiy in the English Channel.
📸MoD 🇬🇧 pic.twitter.com/wGsLO006Nc

— Massimo Frantarelli (@MrFrantarelli) November 24, 2025

Russian officials and institutions have been under intense scrutiny in the UK ever since the Ukraine war began, and relations are steadily worsening. London officials believe that Russian government-linked entities in Britain could be involved in ‘sabotage operations’ targeting NATO and Europe’s defense sector.

Authored by Greg Collard via Racket.news,

New liber-net report maps an expansive network of government and private censors across Germany…

Many organizations and federal agencies involved in censoring Americans under the guise of mis/disinformation have shut down in the last couple years. Racket’s Twitter Files exposed the level of censorship slime oozing from organizations such as the Stanford Internet Observatory, the Election Integrity Project, and the Virality Project. On the government side of things, there was the Global Engagement Center, the Foreign Influence Task Force, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), which still exists but is no longer involved in mis/disnfo work.

That’s not to say America is perfect when it comes to free speech, but as Sen. Rand Paul said in September, “throughout government, the censorship apparatus that Biden had put in place is gone.”

However, if you look to Germany, the strongest economic power in the European Union, it’s easy to see where America was going. It has about 330 organizations working with federal and state levels of government to suppress speech and about 425 grants — mostly from the government — that fund this work, according to research from liber-net, a free speech group that tracks censorship.

The most high-profile cases of German censorship, at least in America, have been raids of people who authorities determined had engaged in “digital violence” for offenses that include insulting someone. These raids were the subject of a high-Zprofile “60 Minutes” segment last February. Prosecutors and police largely depend on a system of government-certified and government-funded “flaggers.”

While these incidents understandably get the most attention, the censorship apparatus is much more deeply ingrained in German society, says Andrew Lowenthal, the CEO of liber-net.

“Germany is the most important country doing this type of content controls work in the entirety of the EU and I would argue has a significant influence on the EU. There’s not really any light between civil society and the government.”

As a result, there’s a constant “atmosphere of intimidation,” says Thomas Geisel, a former mayor of Dusseldorf and now a member of the European Parliament.

“People are afraid to speak their mind. That people always have to find some sort of way of expressing their mind in a politically correct way has created a narrower space for discourse, and I think that is really threatening our democracy.”

Liber-net’s report includes a searchable database of organizations involved in content control and the grants that fund their work, categorized from 1-5 flags, with five being the worst for its censorship advocacy.

The report indicates that government funding for content controls peaked in 2023 at about $36 million (converted from euros, as all dollar amounts in this article are) among the German federal and state governments as well as the EU. While the combined funding among the three has decreased to around $23 million, the amount from the German federal government remains roughly the same and has increased since last year.

Source: liber-net. Amounts in euros.

The “subtle instruments”

In some cases, government money goes to private organizations that act as a middleman for the government. For example, all of the money the private German Research Foundation distributes is provided by the German federal and state governments, and the EU (1%). The foundation awards money to various mis/disinfo causes. In June, it even requested proposals to expand “the term ‘disinformation’ to include claims that may be factually true,” according to liber-net.

The report says the German government has certified four organizations as flaggers, or in the government’s framing, organizations with “specialized expertise and experience in identifying and reporting illegal content.” The Federal Network Agency (Bundesnetzagentur), which enforces the EU’s controversial Digital Services Act, awards grants to these flaggers.

Among them is a group called REspect!. It’s been a government-certified “trusted flagger” since October 2024, which means “deletion requests submitted by REspect! to the platforms must be given priority and processed within a shorter time,” according to a REspect! report. The group received funding directly from a government grant program called “Demokratie leben!,” which translates to Live Democracy!

REspect! has an online portal for people to submit their complaints, which are then forwarded to the proper authorities such as the Bavarian Police. That was the case for one person who had the audacity to call a German politician a “Dummschwätzer” on Facebook — which roughly translates to “blowhard” — as documented by the Bundestag in a list of attacks against politicians and political parties.

Translation via ChatGPT: “Report of an offense via the online portal of the Bavarian Police through the reporting office REspect! Reporting an online insult. The GS (Green Party member of the state parliament) was called a ‘Dummschwätzer’ (‘blabbermouth’ / ‘loud-mouthed idiot’) on Facebook.”

Another “trusted flagger” is HateAid, which received its certification in June after proving its bona fides in other aspects of Germany’s censorship apparatus since its founding in 2018, garnering at least $5.2 million in government funding, according to liber-net.

HateAid purports to be a defender of free speech. From its homepage:

However, HateAid, armed with public funding, will go after people who express the wrong opinion. Take the Russia-Ukraine war, according to liber-net:

HateAid has also notably pursued the censorship of those protesting Berlin’s backing of Kiev; it has classified the hashtag “Kriegstreiber” (or “Warmonger”) as “pro-Kremlin propaganda” whose effect is to “undermine the credibility of politicians” supporting Berlin’s war efforts.

HateAid even warns that the “warmonger” hashtag from “small pro-Kremlin accounts” can shape public debate because they respond to channels with large audiences, such as those of politicians and journalists (bold emphasis is HateAid):

These are retweeted or commented on preferentially in order to spread the narrative of the “warmonger”. In this way, even small accounts can share propaganda with enormous reach. As a result, they enter the centre of society, where they are also perceived and taken up by citizens who are reading along. In effect, they are free riders on the reach of these accounts and can thus shape the public debate.

The CEO of HateAid, Josephine Ballon, was part of the 60 Minutes piece mentioned above. She declared that “free speech needs boundaries.”

“Free speech needs boundaries… Without boundaries, a very small group of people can rely on endless freedom to say anything that they want, while everyone else is scared and intimidated,” says Josephine Ballon, CEO of HateAid. https://t.co/YjlBa7YJ3s pic.twitter.com/xqI88oiiO2

— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) February 17, 2025

Without speech boundaries, Ballon argued that people will be afraid to participate in political discussions.

“This is not only a fear, it’s already taking place. Already half of the Internet users in Germany are afraid to express their political opinion, and they rarely participate in public debates online anymore.”

There lies the rub: is that because people are afraid of being criticized or attacked online, or because people are afraid of being turned over to authorities by the government’s “trusted flaggers” such as HateAid and REspect!?

Geisel says Germany’s censorship apparatus is having a similar effect as anti-speech laws in Russia, which, after invading Ukraine, made “discrediting the armed forces” a crime.

“It’s a lot more subtle [in Germany], but the result is very similar in that you simply don’t speak your mind anymore because there are more subtle instruments preventing you from speaking your mind.”

He points to the highly publicized case of political scientist Ulrike Guerot as an example. Guerot was a political science professor at the University of Bonn until she was fired in 2023 after outrage over a book she co-authored, “Endspiel Europa,” which translates to “Endgame Europe.” Guerot argued that “Ukraine had the role of starting a war with Russia on behalf of the West, which was then to be backed militarily and logistically by NATO member states…”

Officially, Guerot was fired for plagiarism, although she maintains there were only minor problems and that the accusations were a pretext for firing her over her views.

Guerot said liber-net’s report is eye-opening because it maps out a censorship network that makes clear to her the problem is worse than she realized.

“It draws the line between the dots and you say, ‘Ah, this is connected to this and they got the money from there.’ And that’s why it’s called a censorship network. It’s like a spider net, and there are the dots and it’s all connected. And in this respect, I must admit it was absolutely breathtaking.”