- The Berlin state prosecutor’s office is pursuing criminal charges against Hopkins for “disseminating propaganda, the content of which is intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organization”
- The propaganda referenced is two tweets from 2022, which include an image with a mask carrying a faint image of a swastika
- In Germany, national laws prohibit Nazi insignia but expression aimed at “countering anti-constitutional activities,” as was Hopkins’ intent, is supposed to be protected
- Hopkins speaks openly about the pathologized totalitarianism that is subtly taking over society; during the COVID-19 pandemic, he criticized lockdowns and COVID-19 shot mandates, as well as the censorship of dissenters
- When citizens are punished for criticizing government policies, we should all worry that those in control are moving toward taking away something that’s essential in a free society — dissent
(Mercola)—C.J. Hopkins, an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin, speaks openly about the pathologized totalitarianism that is subtly taking over society. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he criticized lockdowns and COVID-19 shot mandates, as well as the censorship of dissenters.
During the early phases of the pandemic, Hopkins’ work was heavily censored by YouTube and Facebook, which went so far as to even suspend or restrict the accounts of people who tried to share Hopkins’ posts.1 Now, he’s facing another challenge to freedom and autonomy, as he’s facing criminal charges for a satirical tweet.
German Government Prosecutes Hopkins Over Tweets
The Berlin State Prosecutor’s office is pursuing criminal charges against Hopkins for “disseminating propaganda, the content of which is intended to further the aims of a former National Socialist organization.”2 The propaganda referenced is two tweets from 2022, which include an image with a mask carrying a faint image of a swastika. Writing in The Atlantic, journalist James Kirchick notes:3
“To argue that Hopkins was advancing National Socialism by imposing a swastika over a face mask is absurd. He was clearly doing the opposite: invoking a symbol of what is widely regarded as the most evil and destructive ideology in human history to express his feelings — however histrionic — for state-promulgated public-health policies he dislikes.
Hopkins was ‘comparing the evolution of one system which I think is totalitarian in nature to the evolution of another totalitarian system that we all know,’ he told me, not glorifying fascism.”
But in Germany, national laws prohibit Nazi insignia, which is why Amazon banned the sale of Hopkins’ book, “The Rise of the New Normal Reich,” which also features the swastika-emblazoned mask, in Germany, the Netherlands and Austria. If Hopkins is found guilty, he could be fined about $4,000 or sent to jail for 60 days. Kirchick writes:4
“Hopkins sees his ordeal as part of a broader ‘criminalization of dissent’ sweeping the Western world. ‘Basically anyone prominent, halfway prominent, and even little fish like me, if you get on the radar of challenging the official ideology, the program of the day, they’re making examples of people is basically what it is,’ he told me.
Against his lawyer’s advice, Hopkins republished the tweets in his Substack newsletter — sparking, as he reported, a second criminal investigation, this time for minimizing Nazi crimes.”
Are Authoritarian Measures Accelerating in Germany?
In “The Rise of the New Normal Reich,” Hopkins details how measures of totalitarian control are being normalized around the world. Depending on where you live, you may or may not be experiencing these things firsthand.
“If you’re aware of how people are behaving in different countries or in different states in the U.S., what have you, there are many places where it is becoming just completely normal to walk around with a medical-looking mask on, and people don’t think twice about segregating and banning people and imposing vaccine mandates and what have you.
All of these measures that were rolled out during the shock and awe phase are just subtly becoming a part of daily life,” he explained during our 2022 interview.5
“We’re being conditioned to walk around in our lives, terrified of some pathogen that is going to come and attack us, or some health threat. It’s really, it’s a wholesale revision of reality, and it’s frightening.”6 At the heart of his argument is that the global-capitalist ruling establishment, which Hopkins refers to as GloboCap, is using fear as a strategy for control over the population.
In Germany, Hopkins says fascist measures have been quickly accelerating. “Seriously, assuming you don’t live here, you likely have no idea how fascistic German society and culture has become,” he wrote in November 2023, “and how quickly the transformation has occurred. It began in the Spring of 2020 with the introduction of the ‘Corona measures,’ and has been intensifying ever since.”7
“The shock and awe phase that we went through in ’20 and ’21 is over,” Hopkins said in our interview. “You can’t sustain shock and awe like that forever. What we’re experiencing now is really the normalization of the pathologization of society.”8 Even the charges against Hopkins seem baseless, as, even in Germany, Nazi imagery is allowed for certain purposes, including countering anti-constitutional activities. Kirchick continues:9
“So far, although he retains U.S. citizenship, Hopkins’s case has attracted little attention in the American media. But his predicament offers an important opportunity to examine how we think about the most loaded political symbols — and to cherish the exceptional free-speech culture ensured by America’s First Amendment.
On its face, the charge against Hopkins seems specious. Although the display of Nazi imagery is generally prohibited in Germany, the country’s criminal code allows the display of such symbols for ‘civic education, countering anti-constitutional activities, art and science, research and education, the coverage of historic and current events, or similar purposes.'”
The Goal Is to Silence Dissenters and Control Society
In the past, totalitarian regimes used drastic and obvious shows of control, putting people into concentration camps. Today’s ruling establishment is far more subtle in its tactics, but possibly even more dangerous. Hopkins says:10
“I don’t think they can put us in camps … they don’t have to. If you look at what’s happening to the economy, if you look at what’s happening to our ability to travel, to our ability to communicate, I mean, the censorship that is going on, I think the technologies that are being deployed in the service of this new form of totalitarianism are much more subtle and, in many ways, much more effective.
I’ve made the point, online, I made the point in the book again, I don’t think global capitalism can go openly totalitarianism in the same way that systems in the 20th century did. I think it’s suicidal for global capitalism. It needs to maintain the simulation of freedom, the simulation of democracy, and so the technologies that are being deployed are much more subtle.”
While people may not end up in prison-like camps, the end-game may be no less restrictive. Technologies like the upcoming central bank digital currency (CBDC), for instance, could easily lead to tight control over your finances, limiting your ability to purchase food or pay rent if your access to your funds is turned off. In the case of Germany prosecuting Hopkins, he says:11
“Basically, the government no longer needs to justify its crackdown on dissidents with plausible legal (or even just rational) arguments.
They know that the majority of the German public supports the ‘New Normal’ Gleichschaltung campaign, or at least will look the other way as they carry out police raids on the homes and offices of ‘Islamic influencers,’ ban demonstrations (exactly as they did in 2020), censor and criminalize dissent, imprison political dissidents based on blatantly false criminal charges, and otherwise make a mockery of the German constitution.”
In explaining why he republished the swastika-mask images again, knowing it would likely lead to additional charges against him, Hopkins wrote:12
“No, I am not a glutton for punishment. I’m not at all enjoying my introduction to the so-called ‘German legal system.’ … The goal of … prosecutions like mine (and those of many other dissidents currently) is (a) to punish us for speaking out against ‘New Normal’ totalitarianism by making our lives as miserable as possible, (b) to make examples of us to discourage others from speaking out, and (c) to intimidate us into shutting … up.
Totalitarians, fascists, and other power freaks are essentially just glorified schoolyard bullies. They may cloak themselves in the mantle of the law, but their modus operandi is brute force … their message is simple: ‘either do what we say, or we will hurt you.’ … The point is, never give in to a bully. Never reify a bully’s ‘authority.’ If you do, you will find yourself sucked into the bully’s sadistic, nihilistic ‘reality.’
You will be playing by the bully’s rules. And that is all ‘reality’ actually is, a set of rules we agree to play by, or, in this case, do not agree to play by.
So, getting back to my criminal case, and the Berlin State Prosecutor’s latest attempt to bully me into shutting up and demonstrating my ‘respect’ for the ‘authority’ and ‘power’ of the Berlin State Prosecutor … I do not respond well to threats. I do not take orders from totalitarians and fascists, or any other type of authoritarians or bullies.
So that is why I have republished those Tweets, and why I will continue to republish those Tweets every time the German authorities threaten me with additional criminal charges for refusing to obey their ‘authority.'”
Dissent Is Essential in a Free Society
When citizens are punished for criticizing government policies, we should all worry that totalitarianism is near. Using clever tactics like censorship and attacks on people’s reputations and credibility, those in control are moving toward taking away something that’s essential in a free society — dissent. Kirchick explains why, regardless of how you feel about Hopkins’ message, his prosecution should trouble us all:13
“Some might argue that, as a permanent resident of Germany, Hopkins ought to have known what he was getting into by conjuring the country’s ultimate taboo, and that his posturing as a sort of latter-day Martin Niemöller, the anti-Nazi theologian, would not endear him to his hosts.
‘Of course; it’s Germany,’ he said, when I put this to him. ‘Of course they’re hyper about anything that is promoting the Nazis and, frankly, God bless them. That’s the way I feel about it; I’ve always supported it and understood it even though I’m a free-speech absolutist.’
One can call his method of argument likening anti-COVID policies to Nazism misguided, intellectually lazy, or tasteless — I personally find it to be all three — but endorsing ‘the aims’ of National Socialism it is not. Which strongly suggests that Hopkins is being punished not for promoting an outlawed political movement from the German past but for criticizing a government of the German present.
Such a conclusion is only reinforced by the second proceeding against Hopkins for the tweet ridiculing one particularly powerful member of that government, the country’s health minister.
That a citizen could be tried on these grounds in a Western democracy should trouble us, and Germany’s unique experience as the birthplace of Nazism offers no justification. On the contrary, precisely because that fraught history gives Germany ample reason for vigilance about support for fascism, it must be scrupulous in how it regulates expressions of said support.
According to the country’s criminal code, expression aimed at ‘countering anti-constitutional activities,’ as Hopkins’s swastika-branded mask clearly was, is protected. A government that prosecutes a writer for calling its policies fascistic unwittingly validates the criticism. Even if some find Hopkins’s views and the way he expresses them offensive, that does not lessen the danger that his prosecution represents.”
- 1 TK News by Matt Taibbi May 13, 2021
- 2 Substack, CJ Hopkins July 3, 2023
- 3, 4, 9, 13 The Atlantic January 3, 2024 (Archived)
- 5, 6, 8 Dr. Mercola interviews C.J. Hopkins, interview transcript, page 3
- 7, 11 Substack, CJ Hopkins November 25, 2023
- 10 Dr. Mercola interviews C.J. Hopkins, interview transcript, pages 11, 12
- 12 Substack, CJ Hopkins September 10, 2023
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
