You’d be hard-pressed to find a more fitting scenario to encapsulate the MAGA movement’s contradictory stance on antisemitism and other forms of extremism than the juxtaposition of a U.S. State Department official promoting Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland party and the department issuing a public condemnation of a deadly antisemitic attack in Australia in the same afternoon.
On Sunday, the same day of the mass shooting on Bondi Beach, top State Department official Sarah Rogers posted an endorsement of the AfD, a party founded by Nazi apologists and to which various scholars have largely attributed the disturbing normalization of antisemitism in Germany in recent years.
Rogers met on Saturday with Markus Frohnmaier, an AfD member in the German parliament. And after a journalist noted on social media the reporting on Frohnmaier’s ties to the Russian government and claims he is a Russian asset — which Frohnmaier has denied — Rogers responded by touting the group’s purported “anti-censorship” stance as “one reason they’re gaining popularity in Germany.”
Unlike the Russian government (and the current German one), AfD took an anti-censorship stance in its meeting with me last week. One reason they’re gaining popularity in Germany. https://t.co/w6jBoZhjQL
Germany’s domestic intelligence agency has deemed the AfD an “extremist” group, and while some of its members were punished by a German court last year for promoting Nazism, and the party welcomed back two party members who had previously been “excluded over Nazi-related remarks,” per the Guardian.
At the same time, AfD is aligned with Big Tech elites such as JD Vance and Elon Musk, who have accused the European Union of “censorship” for regulating social media with laws designed to curb hate speech, disinformation and sexual abuse online.
Rogers’ meeting with Frohnmaier came as the New York Young Republican Club was preparing to schmooze AfD members at a ritzy gala in New York on Saturday. As Politico reported, the gala featured AfD members commingling with American white nationalists.
Lately, the MAGA movement has been convulsing in a civil war of sorts over some members’ embrace of antisemitism. The images of Trump administration officials laying the charm on stewards of German far-right extremism seem unlikely to resolve things on that front.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.