Too Stupid for Democracy?

A new book by Die Zeit's deputy 'politics' desk head shows how low journos™ have fallen, and if his 'arguments™' are any indication, we're still quite far away from the intellectual bottom

Meet Mark Schieritz, an award-winning ‘journo™’ whose expertise (sic), according to his author’s profile, is as follows:

Mark Schieritz is deputy editor of the politics desk at Die Zeit in Berlin. After graduating from the London School of Economics, he began his career at the Financial Times Deutschland, where he worked for seven years—including as head of the financial markets desk. Mark Schieritz has been honoured with the Ernst Schneider Prize of the Chambers of Industry and Commerce and the Keynes Society Media Prize. His books Die Inflationslüge [The Inflation Lie, 2013] and Der Lohnklau [The Wage Heist, 2015] were published by Droemer Knaur.

You see, while this is accurate enough (and German Wikipedia doesn’t offer much more), we note the following: first, his employer, Die Zeit, is one of Germany’s most establishmentarian left-liberal (whatever that means) employers. Mr. Schieritz, second, studied at the London School of Economics whose prime function is to turn otherwise sane people into Fabian Socialists (whom George Orwell would, infamously, call ‘IngSoc’ in 1984, short-hand for ‘English Socialism’). This explains, largely, why Mr. Schieritz then worked for the pink paper otherwise known as the FT, German edition, and received the Ernst Schneider Prize for Germany’s main industrialist lobbying group.

A few words on the Keynes Society Media Prize: Mr. Keynes was one of, if not the, chief advocate for Fabianism in the middle decades of the 20th century; Wikipedia calls him ‘the father of macroeconomics’ while also noting (which several other celebratory accounts don’t) that Keynes was ‘a proponent of eugenics’ and ‘president of the British Eugenics Society from 1937 to 1944’. (yet Britain was fighting Hitler over, among other things, Germany’s inhumane treatment of ‘life unworthy of life’: oh, the irony).

Doermer Knaur Has the Same Owners as Die Zeit

Back to Mr. Schieritz: note that the publisher of his most recent book, masterfully entitled Zu dumm für die Demokratie?—which roughly translates into ‘Too Stupid for Democracy?’—is a company by the name of Doermer Knaur. In case you’ve not heard of that publisher, well, you’re in for a treat.

According to Wikipedia, it is fully owned by the Holzbrinck Media Group (or Holtzbrinck Publishing), Germany’s ‘fourth-largest media conglomerate’, as cited based on this website that ‘no longer exists’; thankfully, the Internet Archive has a copy (dated 20 Sept. 2021), which you can access here.

Holtzbrinck Publishing is the owner of, among others, Macmillan (a quite active academic imprint), publishers S. Fischer Verlag and Rowohlt Verlag. It is run by Stefan von Holtzbrinck while his half-brother Dieter von Holtzbrinck runs DvH Medien GmbH. We note, in passing, that Stefan von Holtzbrinck, according to his German Wikipedia profile (linked at the earlier mention of his name), is ‘among the 50 wealthiest individuals in Germany, with his net worth estimated at 4.8 billion euro (as per 2024)’.

Together, Holtzbrinck Publishing and DvH Medien GmbH (which is the German abbreviation of an LLC) co-own, in equal parts, Die Zeit, Mr. Schieritz’ employer. Funny that, eh?

Moreover, Dieter von Holtzbrinck, according to its above-linked German Wikipedia entry, specifically his DvH Medien GmbH,

is the sole shareholder of various German media companies, including the Düsseldorf-based Handelsblatt Media Group—with the Handelsblatt and the WirtschaftsWoche as its most important media brands—and the Berlin-based Tagesspiegel Group.

You see, German legacy media publishing is a small world, isn’t it?

Speaking of Germany’s small, ‘Truman Show’-esque media world, let’s not forget where this all fits into—the so-called ‘Atlantik-Brücke’, or the US Deep State/Intel/Wall St machinery of aggregation and control over the outlying areas of empire:

For once, I’ve kept the big link—with Die Zeit and Holtzbrinck Publishing prominently flanking both state broadcasters ARD and ZDF. Note, further, the connections between Die Zeit and both the Bilderberg Meetings and the Trilateral Commission, by the way. Funny that, eh?

With these ‘preliminaries’ set, we may summarise the ties that bind MarK Schieritz—deputy editor of the politics desk at Die Zeit—to the netherworld of Germany’s highly concentrated media cartel and, by extension, to the US Deep State/Intel/Wall St machine.

Needless to say, I consider it highly relevant, if not entirely surprising, that a ‘journo™’ of Mr. Schieritz’ persuasion, job connections, and track record writes a stunningly elitist pamphlet that is published by a company owned by the proprietors of his employer, Die Zeit. I’m 112% certain the book with the telling, if not revelatory, title ‘Too Stupid for Democracy?’ was accepted for publication because of its merits, right? Right!

While I translate the description below, note the subtitle: ‘How to protect the liberal order when the will of the people becomes dangerous’.

Too Stupid for Democracy?, by Mark Schieritz

Having provided, in the shortest manner possible, the relevant background information, we may now consider some of its contents.

What follows is drawn from the publisher’s website and a few trial chapters as Mr. Schieritz’ most recent masterpiece will be out on 3 Feb. 2025. All the below originally German-language content comes to you in my translation, with emphases and [snark] added.

Here’s the publisher’s summary:

On the Responsibility of Freedom

If politicians from different parties can agree on anything, it is the one irrefutable, basic rule: the voters are always right. However, when the Grundgesetz [Germany’s de facto constitution] states that all state power emanates from the people, this also entails a certain responsibility [which is, of course, in Mr. Schieritz’ view, subject to his—or his employers—consideration]. Anyone who votes for extremists because the trains don’t run on time or the neighbourhood bakery closes is contributing to the disruption of our society and political culture [read this sentence again: if you vote the ‘wrong™’ way, you are the problem]. There are alternatives. Even democratic ones. In his highly timely book, Mark Schieritz, deputy head of the ‘Politics’ [these scare quotes aren’t mine, but I find them hilariously appropriate] desk at Die Zeit [unmentioned here is that the publisher, Doermer Knaur, is owned by the same Holtzbrinck half-brothers as Die Zeit], shows why it is extremely dangerous to look for the reasons for the crisis of democracy solely in politics [of course, if political decisions—made by ‘politicos™’, by the way—have bad outcomes for the people/voters, it’s the latter’s fault]. His astute analysis makes it clear that we cannot rely unconditionally on the people, because the will of the voters does not always follow the laws of logic [there are no such things, hence this should be ‘laws of logic™’].

Painful, isn’t it? When I found out about this masterpiece of agit-prop and sycophancy, I first just sat there, staring at the screen in disbelief, before I wanted to bang my head against the wall.

As I ventured into the few pages offered by the publisher, I stumbled across the following half-paragraph entitled ‘About this book’:

There are alternatives. Even democratic ones.

While not spelled out who or what these ‘even democratic alternatives’ might be, the introductory section quickly reveals Mark Schieritz’ favourites. In the brief pages entitled ‘Is the Voter Always Right?’, Schieritz opens his book with Hillary Clinton’s—I kid you not—infamous ‘basket of deplorables’ comment from 2016, followed by a brief paragraph summarising the ‘storm of indignation’ that quickly ensued and, in all likelihood, contributed to Mr. Trump’s victory. It is followed by the subsequent musings:

The episode is seen as an example of the behaviour of a political elite that has distanced itself from the concerns and needs of ordinary people. They live in their bubble and look down on the people. Since then [but not before, is what Mr. Schieritz is saying here], the basic rule of political debate has been: the voter (for reasons of readability, the generic masculine is used here [lol]) is always right. Politicians must accept their decision with humility. Because they [the people] are the sovereign. They are not to be insulted. And [the voter] is not to be criticised. Just as an entrepreneur does not criticise his customers, because otherwise they might go to the competition. In Western democracies, the people have therefore moved to the centre of politics since Hillary Clinton’s defeat [read this sentence again: as if voting and voters didn’t really matter before 2016—a stunning admission of the largely stage-managed ‘democracy™’ after 1945, courtesy of the total political warfare waged by the US Deep State/Intel/Wall St cabal]. Voters cannot be expected to do anything and must be taken as they are. Otherwise they will become angry and vote for parties that reject democracy [but wouldn’t that also be democratic?]. This consideration is the basis of the philosophy of respect that Olaf Scholz developed in his first parliamentary election campaign, drawing on the work of the American philosopher Michael Sandel. The way of life of many ‘hard-working citizens’, Scholz once wrote, is often met with ‘derisive contempt’ by the cultural and economic elites [here, I should mention that Mark Schieritz’ penultimate book is—a biography of none other than Olaf Scholz that appeared in 2022 with the S. Fischer Verlag, another publisher owned by the Holtzbrinck conglomerate, if you’ve been paying attention].

Now there is nothing wrong with respect. All people deserve it. And many deserve more of it [and who’s going to determine that? I suspect it might be Mr. Schieritz and his ilk…]. But in political practice, respect for the people has long been replaced by uncritical glorification [of the voters, apparently to the detriment of out esteemed leaders who, I am speculating here, are deserving of ‘more’ respect], which raises a whole series of new questions. This one, for example: What exactly do ‘the people’ actually want? How do you determine that? And what if they are wrong? Or to put it another way: could it be that Hillary Clinton was a little bit right? That we are—to put it bluntly—too stupid for democracy? Because the political establishment is not only under pressure in the USA. In the state elections in Thuringia, Brandenburg, and Saxony in the late summer of 2024, the AfD, a party categorised by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution as a suspected far-right party, received around a third of the vote. And in France, the right-wing nationalist group Rassemblement National came third in the parliamentary elections a few months earlier.

If, at this point, you’re suspecting that the timing of the publication—a few weeks before the Bundestag election scheduled for late February 2025—will trigger glowing ‘reviews’ in legacy media outlets, I doubt you’re incorrect. To be blunt, I’d be surprised if that doesn’t happen.

Also, note the staggering absurdity of a left-liberal, Fabian-trained ‘journo™’ glorifying Hillary Clinton’s (!) gaffe about the ‘basket of deplorables’ (!!) that contributed massively (!!!) to her losing against Mr. Trump in 2016.

I suppose there’s nothing else to be said about the mental state of pro-régime media in Germany in 2024; in fact, I doubt anything else could be said about the advanced decay of German legacy media and its self-declared, as well as self-celebratory, juste milieu.

I’ll bring you a few more choice quotes from Mr. Schieritz’ masterpiece:

There may be many reasons not to blindly trust the people, especially against the backdrop of a media landscape increasingly characterised by algorithms and disinformation. The public sphere...is fragmenting into specialised arenas into which only the information that confirms one’s own stance or serves the interests of the owners of the major internet platforms can penetrate. As a result, democratic decision-making is in danger of losing its foundation. However, without a genuine exchange of arguments based on a common and empirically verifiable understanding of the truth, a meaningful debate is not possible [just re-visit legacy media’s stance vs. the modRNA poison/death juices to learn how much truth is in that statement, alas, Mr. Schieritz observes the speck in his brother’s eye here…] The earth revolves around the sun and not the other way round [Mr. Schieritz certainly has many qualities, yet modesty isn’t one of them]. There’s no need to argue about that.

With the global rise of populists, however, issues that society had already agreed on are suddenly being declared a matter of dispute [because…change is bad, right? Sounds more like ‘the people’ aren’t supposed to ever change their minds]...then even fundamental civilisational achievements such as gender equality or the independence of the courts are up for debate [as if the Covid-infested judiciary should be brought up here]. The ban on vaccines brought into play by Trump’s ally Robert F. Kennedy Jr. during the presidential election campaign shows where the journey could take us [and just like that master-journo™ and head of the ‘politics’s desk at Die Zeit Schieritz lied as Mr. Kennedy didn’t say that, as ‘even’ NBC News wrote, of all outlets].

Sigh.

One more exemplary snippet, then we’ll leave this BS in peace, I promise (the Italics in the segment below are found in the original).

What is Democracy?

The problem with the democracy debate is therefore that its central concept is not sufficiently clearly defined [as if that’s the issue here and not, say, the contempt for ordinary people dripping from every word here]. It is not primarily democracy that is in danger (which is why this accusation is comparatively easy to refute). Rather, it is a specific historical form of democracy that is in danger: liberal democracy, as it developed in the states of the West in the post-war period [I’ve been telling you, dear readers, for quite some time now that this is issue: the post-1945 order is at stake as the US Deep State/Intel/Wall St cabal appears to be transforming its ways and means of global control]. Liberal democracies are characterised firstly by the fact that majority rule is embedded in a normative framework of values: the rule of law, social equality, freedom of opinion. This also applies to the Federal Republic of Germany in its current constitution. In this sense, the Basic Law is not only a legal text regulating procedures, but also a political statement. It declares human dignity to be inviolable, and binds state action to the observance of ‘inviolable and inalienable’ human rights [do I need to mention again the serial, premeditated abuses of said human rights during the WHO-declared, so-called ‘Pandemic™’? Cheerleading the demonisation of everything not favoured by the gov’t were, among others, the media outlets owned by the Holtzbrincks]. To put it mathematically, these rights are placed in front of the parenthesis. They are not part of a political negotiation process; the corresponding articles (1 and 20) can never be changed [line break added]

Secondly, in many liberal democracies, there are always decisions that are not covered by the majority principle [backtracking on his professed article of faith, authoritarian gov’t decisions against the democratic majority are both ‘normal’ and kinda o.k., if they lead in the direction favoured by the author]. In the case of Germany, there was no majority among the population for key decisions in post-war history, such as membership of the European Monetary Union, reunification, or the Westbindung [in short, West Germany’s association with the US-led, NATO bloc in 1949; also, Mr. Schieritz admits that these policy decisions, incl. the controversial re-armament (Wiederbewaffnung) of West Germany less than a decade after the defeat of Hitler’s Third Reich, were carried out against the will of the people; the same goes for the EU and its abject monstrosity, the Euro]. If the German chancellors had always listened to the people, the country would probably still be divided and the euro would not exist [what an admission, if not celebration, of the fundamentally anti-democratic nature of our post-1945 world]. Sometimes you may have to restrict democracy in order to defend it [remember: bombing for peace is like f****** for virginity]. If constitutional principles had been enforced, then Trump might not have been allowed to stand for election at all, given his misdemeanours [this is way too stupid not to mention—a misdemeanour (orig. Verfehlungen) is not a felony, i.e., something that results in a criminal conviction that might affect one’s right to run for office or, as happens in some US states, to vote; note that ‘if constitutional principles had been enforced’, the Covid shenanigans would have resulted in the protagonists standing trial, yet these very same shady characters all received Orders of Merit, funny that].

I’ll stop here. I think we’ve seen and read enough.

Remember, don’t shoot the messenger, if you would.

Bottom Lines

I suppose the advanced state of decay of legacy media in Germany can now aptly be summed up in the following statement by Mark Schieritz:

Could it be that Hillary Clinton [when speaking about the ‘basket of deplorables] was a little bit right?

It is late January 2025. I cannot f****** believe that this BS is published.

Yet, here we are. Yesterday I concluded in the following way:

This is where we stand—it’s not just that legacy media has a thorough, left to far-left bias in general, they also have a massive pro-US/Transatlantic bias, as shown by several ‘connections’, or conflicts of interest.

To which we now add the seemingly counter-intuitive aspect of oligarchic command and control over what is published and where, exemplified here by Mark Schieritz (deputy head of the ‘politics’ desk at Die Zeit) whose employer also owns the publisher (Doemer Knaur) where the above pamphlet in stupidity-plus-condescension is coming out on 3 Feb. 2025, i.e., three weeks before the Bundestag election.

The contempt and disgust by Mark Schieritz for his fellow countrymen is palpable. What my piece here argues, moreover, is that Mr. Schieritz is doing so perhaps not at the request of the Holtzbrinck half-brothers, but it is getting increasingly hard to overlook the oligarchic ‘invisible hand’ that steers the increasingly muddied waters of our post-1945 existence.

And let’s not forget that Die Zeit also ran Goebbels quotes (ironically, written by a French-Israeli sociology professor) in support of Ukraine:

Amid their Russophobia, Die Zeit Endorses Goebbels Before it Becomes Embarrassing and Changes Headlines

All the while another Holtzbrinck-owned outlet, Handelsblatt, pushed hard for the racist scam otherwise known as ‘DEI’

Germany's Anti-Discrimination Commissioner Wants Businesses to 'take stock of how diverse their workforce is'

In the final analysis, there’s no escaping, no less possibility of getting away with these kinds of distorted, biased, and increasingly surreal discursive constructions.

So, let’s call a spade a spade—for where there’s smoke, there’s bound to be fire:

Most BS put out by legacy media—as well as by ‘politicos™’ and many ‘experts™’—resembles the shadows on the walls of Plato’s cave.

Thus the importance of being able to navigate both this largely fake world inhabited by ‘politicos™’, ‘journos™’, and ‘experts™’ AND the real world.

Hence today’s piece illuminating the ownership structures and unsavoury ties behind Mark Schieritz’ masterpiece, Too Stupid for Democracy?

I’ll leave you with one final nugget of wisdom from that pamphlet, which, at least to me, makes me marvel at the sanity of both Mr. Schieritz and his owners employers, yet the below paragraph is a very apt illustration of the above allusion to Plato’s Cave:

It is true that the central problems of the 21st century—migration, demographic change, global warming, the collapse of the post-war order—are not under control in any country. However, this is also due to the scale of the problems and their concentration in time and space. And not just because of the supposed incompetence of the politicians involved. Joe Biden [I literally fell off my chair reading this] launched the largest aid programme in industrial history to get the American economy back on track after the slump caused by the coronavirus pandemic. This has also been successful; in no other industrialised country has economic growth recently been higher than in the United States. Nevertheless, the Democrats were voted out of office. Politics is about solving problems, but some problems are not so easy to solve—and sometimes the [sic] solution is not honoured by the voters.

In the subsequent section bearing the marvellous title ‘Vox populi, Vox Rindvieh’ (cattle), the linguistic and mental incoherence comes to the fore completely:

Even the Basic Law with its extensive security precautions does not offer absolute protection against a hostile takeover of the republic by authoritarian parties. This is shown by the example of the Weimar Republic [when the Basic Law did not yet exist]: the NSDAP was banned. The party’s assets were confiscated and Adolf Hitler was sent to prison [yes, he was, following his attempted Beerhall putsch of 1923]. However, the ban was lifted in 1925, partly because conservative forces saw Hitler as an ally in the fight against the communists. There was a lack of political will to extend the ban. Just as there was a lack of political will in the United States to prosecute Trump for his misdemeanours during his first term in office [vague enough to be plausibly believed without bothering to follow-up upon this by the presumptive readers, but without any specifics offered (which undermine the argument); also, note the hilariously stupid guilt-by-association of Trump and Hitler so common among legacy media ‘journos™’]. It is not institutions that act, but people [remember, this is the opposite ‘argument™’ when a mass shooting occurs: it’s people that kill, not guns]. Thus follows: If state power emanates from the people, then this also entails a certain responsibility for one’s own actions. Otherwise, liberal democracy will be history at some point.

If these last two sentences applied, the Covid perps—including chancellors Merkel and Scholz, Health Ministers Spahn and Lauterbach, ‘experts™’ like Christian Drosten and former Ethics Committee chairwoman Alena Buyx and many, many others—would have to stand trial.

The fact that Mark Schieritz doesn’t argue this is revealing the age-old explanation for what is happening here:

Just like the princes of Renaissance Europe who like to collect artefacts and humanists alike, our modern-day oligarchs, be they the Holtzbrinck half-brothers or the likes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, like to listen to sycophantic sell-outs praising them.

Some things never change. And if you’d excuse me now, I’m off to puke now.

What a shit-show.