Following an interview with news show Tagesschau Yascha Mounk’s got a bad reputation among German conservatives. People over-reacted to a single line, ‘We dare a historically unique experiment in changing a mono-ethnic, mono-cultural democracy into a multi-ethnic one.’ The interview itself is mixed. He paints Trump and the AfD – as a whole – as extremists, which is something, I suggest, he and others should eventually apologise for. He also made some salient conservative points. He rightly complains that perpetual formations of party coalition necessarily result in the erosion of alternatives on the ballots. This view alone could ignite the negative attention of our secret service Verfassungsschutz. He also figured that the all-is-well propanda did not match people’s real-life career experience.
The next time I saw him was when he gave a Ted Talk in which he also threw around vague notions of extremism. That showing was also very mixed. Leaving the European Union counts as populism, he opined. I suppose that in this vein his current home America is extremist, radical and fascist, too. They did not even join. Most countries on earth are far-right and populist by this token.
But then he suprised me.
Fed up with the everybody-is-a-Nazi hoax, he made the rounds through conservative podcasts.
But was he? I didn’t pay much attention to him because I found his insights rather lame and shallow as if he simply straddled talking points and not try to find out what was going on. I knew at the time that he is a co-publisher of my favorite news outlet ZEIT – the German equivalent of haAretz, the Guardian and the New York Times. His colleague Giovanni di Lorenzo, formally at the head of the weekly print leg of the ZEIT enterprise, is notorious for making statements which suggested that he never ever, nevernevernever ever, read his own g-d awful, nutcase newspaper (my favorite – I’m a hate reader).
So I pondered whether Yascha Mounk simply learnt it from the best, from Yassir Arafat. Make at least twice the money and profess a totally different viewpoint in each language!
But then I saw an interview of conservative novelist and screenwrite Andrew Klavan with columnist Caitlin Flanagan. She is a friend of both Andrew and Yascha and she mentioned that in private Mounk quips about the ‘short march through the institutions’ to refer to the avalanche of left-wing madness. (It’s around minute 34).
Today, journalist Celeste Marcus calls him her rapist. Mounk’s newspaper The Atlantic cut ties with him and his involvement with ZEIT is suspended. Celeste Marcus writes on her Libertis Journal, ‘Every rape survivor who has shared her story with me was also told by her rapist that what he did to her was not rape.’ Isn’t that peculiar? I bet you can ask any Hamas victim and you can search the Congo up and down and not find a single rape victim who’d been told that. In July 2023, the brutish writer besmirched Israel’s government as follows: ‘Liberal Zionists, freighted with the responsibility to cleanse and heal the country which Netanyahu and his brutish government every day besmirch, have taken to the streets of many cities and towns each Saturday evening since the seventh of January.’
Sure enough, I can’t know for sure whether the allegations that she kept for herself for two years are honest or not. Courts are to decide. I’m not saying that she had not been beaten, throttled or threatened while Yascha Mounk penetrated her only to end it all with ‘Oh, that wasn’t rape.’ I don’t know. Less dramatically she could have said, ‘Hey, what about red whine?’, prompting Mounk to push her down with a macho ‘I am already drunk enough!’ It’s all possible. Her little magazine and her Twitter feed are craving attention, too. And there is a war in Israel she douses with sanctimonous tweets whilst Mounk lambasts the American left.
Goldstein 