Germany's Crazy Monarchists

 At Bloomberg, the sad and crazy story of Germany's self-proclaimed king:

Presented with a recorder, Peter talks and talks. He talks about how he healed an ex-girlfriend who was abused as a child by Satanists, using only his hands. About how a cabal of shadowy elites, including Rockefellers and Orthodox Jews, spread Covid-19 to boost drug profits and compel Germans to accept implanted biosensor chips. How a sniper once shot his car on the autobahn, but divine intervention caused the bullet to only nick the windshield. (He knows what you’re thinking, but a policeman friend told him there’s no way it was a rock.)

King Peter’s subjects are adherents of the Reichsbürger movement, whose members believe Germany doesn’t exist. The republic, they contend, is a limited liability company controlled by the Allied victors of World War II—and, according to the more anti-Semitic, the Rothschild family. Reichsbürgers print their own passports, often refuse to pay taxes, and clog courts with paperwork, along the same lines as the U.S. “sovereign citizen” movement.

And like their other American kin, QAnon, the far-right conspiracy theory alleging a “deep state” plot against Donald Trump—they’re products of the digital age of unreason. Reichsbürgers are indoctrinated by low-budget YouTube talk shows hosted by the likes of Jo Conrad, who says Freemasons, lizard people, and child-murdering cults have overrun Germany. Converts protest outside the Reichstag, which some say is guarded by a laser cannon. For fun, they stream Reichsbürger hip-hop. In 2018, Germany’s domestic intelligence agency identified about 19,000 Reichsbürgers, nearly double its estimate of two years earlier. The true number, officials say, is likely far greater.

So the weird notion that the government is actually a corporation has crossed the Atlantic; do you suppose they copied that from American crazies, or is it somehow just an obvious notion in our world?