On Querdenken’s ostensible “left wing” is KenFM, an Internet journalism portal founded by Ken Jebsen. Once an antiwar activist and public radio host, Jebsen was fired from his job for anti-Semitic comments. Ever since, KenFM has amassed a considerable following on YouTube, social media, and its crowdfunded website, thanks to the host’s lightning-speed interviews with an eclectic and provocative group of authors, scholars, and artists.
Given plausibility through a wave of account deletions by platforms like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook, Querdenken’s coronaskeptics have followed libertarian and far-right leaders to a growing number of alternative platforms.
With attention-grabbing
titles like “Transnational Elite-Fascism,” “Down with the Digital Dictatorship,” and “COVID 19: A Trojan Horse, European 9/11?,” KenFM’s pseudo-intellectual style stitches together anti-elite discourse with the conservative controversy of the day, be it migration policies, corruption scandals, or coronavirus measures. With close-up videos that showcase Jebsen’s authoritarian flair, the program blurs Kapitalismuskritik and anarcho-capitalism, bringing together left-leaning critics like
Rainer Mausfeld and
Ullrich Mies with right libertarians like
Markus Krall and
Max Otte.
What unites such variants of “left” and “right” thinking is less their common goals than their shared enemies. From “mega-manipulation” to “mass censorship,” they all paint a dystopian picture of the conspiracy of power. Outside of KenFM many other diagonal partnerships have formed, such as the
podcast “Multiculturalism Meets Nationalism” in which the Ghanaian-German “lifestyle entertainer” Nana Domena
dialogues with the neo-Nazi Frank Kraemer. Oddities and nuances aside, the pandemic has allowed the diagonalist “resistance” to focus its critique on the spatial containment and physical restriction imposed by the government, often embodied by Chancellor Merkel (or “Merkill”) herself. Concepts like “freedom” and “democracy”—especially the freedom of assembly—become a battle cry against the “totalitarian” and “fascist” forces “up above” (in German,
die da oben).