“Back at home in the United States, the newspapers are saying that I came here today to speak to about 5,000 Nazis,” Robert F Kennedy Jr told a large crowd in Berlin. Estimated at 38,000 people, the crowd was a mix of hippies, anti-war types, Green party voters and anti-vaxxers, rubbing shoulders with a smattering of skinheads. It was late August 2020 and a group called Querdenken had rallied this motley crew together in defiance of Covid-19 restrictions.
“Governments love pandemics,” Kennedy said. “They love pandemics for the same reason they love war – it gives them the ability to impose controls that the population would otherwise never accept.”
