C.J. Hopkins, an American playwright and longtime leftist living in Berlin for 25 years, became a target of German state prosecution after criticizing COVID policies and comparing them to Nazi-era authoritarianism; his bestselling book The Rise of the New Normal Reich was banned by Amazon and German authorities, and he faces criminal charges for “disseminating Nazi propaganda” — a charge stemming from his use of a swastika covered by a mask on the book’s cover as satirical protest.
The Pivot from Leftist Playwright to COVID Dissident
Hopkins’ break with his former community began in March–April 2020 when he applied scientific scrutiny to the official COVID narrative and found it didn’t align with emerging data; he had spent four years writing political satire about the establishment’s reaction to Trump and Brexit, viewing those events as a populist rebellion against a global system.
A writing student publicly denounced him as a neo-Nazi and antisemite for questioning lockdowns, illustrating a broader pattern: from the start, the official narrative framed any dissent as far-right extremism, delegitimizing credentialed critics like Jay Bhattacharya.
Hopkins describes the experience as suddenly finding himself inside a cult — an alternate reality sustained by collective belief and ritualistic behaviors (masks, distancing) that made no sense outside that reality; he felt the “dark, authoritarian energy” of a consensus detached from material facts.
Why He Saw Through the Hysteria When Others Didn’t
No single explanation exists, but Hopkins cites personal history (growing up encouraged to question authority), a natural aversion to herd mentality, and a career spent writing anti-authoritarian literature that attuned him to fascist social formations.
He rejects the “mass formation psychosis” thesis (Matthias Desmet), arguing instead that any society can be pushed into totalitarian configuration if power has the will and technology; the message was clear: democratic rights are suspended, challenge us and we will destroy you — most people rationally chose compliance to protect families and livelihoods.
The system inculcates fear through arbitrary enforcement: you never know which “husband” is coming home, so you self-censor; this is more effective than overt repression because the boundaries are invisible and shifting.
Life in Berlin Under COVID: The “New Enabling Act”
In April 2020, the Bundestag passed the Infection Protection Act, which Hopkins calls a new Enabling Act (referencing 1933): it suspended the constitution and allowed rule by decree under a declared health emergency.
Berlin transformed overnight into a “pathologized fascistic society”: universal masking, police guarding markets, social distancing enforced robotically; Hopkins was pulled from a grocery store by armed police for wearing a paper-bag mask labeled “Befehl ist Befehl” (orders are orders — the Nuremberg defense).
By late 2021, Germany imposed a “lockdown of the unvaccinated”: the unvaccinated were barred from restaurants, museums, public buildings, and non-essential stores — allowed only grocery shopping, masked; the vaccinated wore “badges” (masks/vaccine passes), the non-compliant were segregated.
The August 2020 Berlin protest (with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.) and the staged “storming of the Reichstag” — permitted by authorities, led by an ex-NPD member, with police deliberately withdrawn — served as a dress rehearsal for January 6, framing dissenters as insurrectionists.
Legal Persecution: From Tweets to Book Ban to Dawn Raid
In August 2022, Hopkins tweeted the book cover (a masked swastika parodying Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich) and quoted Health Minister Karl Lauterbach admitting masks are “signaling”; Twitter censored the tweets in Germany, Amazon banned the book in Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands.
The German censorship network referred the case to the Federal Domestic Intelligence Agency, which passed it to the Berlin prosecutor; Hopkins was charged with disseminating pro-Nazi propaganda — despite the obvious satirical intent and statutory exceptions for art and protest.
At his first trial (January 2024), the judge acquitted him, ruling his speech was protected protest against anti-constitutional government acts; but the prosecutor appealed — double jeopardy does not apply in Germany.
The retrial was conducted under “strict anti-terrorist security procedures”: body scans, no writing instruments, press given stubby pencils, observers behind bulletproof glass; a three-judge panel summarily overturned the acquittal and convicted him — a “convicted hate criminal” for satirizing authoritarianism.
In November 2025, police conducted a dawn raid on his apartment, terrifying his wife and cats, seizing his computer — a new indictment charges him with writing, publishing, and distributing the banned book itself, and with reporting on his own trial using the cover art.
The System’s Evolution: Global Capitalism’s Totalitarian Turn
Hopkins argues the West is in the early stages of a new, global capitalist totalitarianism distinct from 20th-century models: no jackboots or banners permanently, but a veneer of consumer choice and rule-of-law pretense maintained while dissent is criminalized through vague “communications offenses” (60,000+ arrests in the UK over five years).
The system has no external adversaries post–Cold War; its only task is “clear and hold” — consolidating ideology and eliminating internal resistance pockets (traditional values, national cultures, religious communities) that impede a single global marketplace.
Red lines that trigger real repression: questioning the Ukraine war, January 6, demographic change; Israel criticism is tolerated (or encouraged) when it channels dissent into safe anti-Zionist frameworks that avoid challenging global capital’s Middle East headquarters.
Julian Assange is the paradigmatic case: an Australian citizen held for years in UK maximum-security prison without charge, punished for creating an actual problem for the system — “watch what we do to him” is the message, repeated during COVID and now.
The Left’s Collapse and the Nature of Compliance
Hopkins lost all his German friends of 16+ years; the left/liberal milieu fell in lockstep immediately, performing party-member credentials by denouncing maskless “deviants” — the same people who warned about McCarthyism and the War on Terror became its enforcers.
He does not condemn them as cowards but analyzes compliance as survival instinct plus psychological reconciliation: having chosen not to resist, people convince themselves the narrative is true (masks work while seated, the virus is apocalyptic) to resolve cognitive dissonance.
Moral outrage erupted against the non-compliant: acquaintances celebrated reporting strangers, denounced parents — the cruelty was the point, validating allegiance to the new order.
Living Under Persecution: Doom or Duty?
Hopkins rejects a sense of doom, describing a “strange joy” rooted in a theatrical view of life: we are cast in roles for a brief moment; the task is to play one’s part well today, knowing the end comes regardless.
He invokes Sophie Scholl, executed by the Nazis at 21: on her death day she noted the beautiful weather and thought, “What does my death matter if through us thousands are awakened?” — “They can kill me, but they can’t eat me.”
The book’s resurrection via Tucker Carlson Books is itself an act of resistance: banned in multiple countries, it documents the system’s evolution in real time, proving authorities only censor truth that threatens their power.
