Remix News

Germany’s left have long claimed that the Alternative for Germany (AfD) is a threat to democracy, and due to this claim, they argue the party should be banned entirely. Although banning parties is typically reserved for authoritarian regimes, this outcome remains a very real possibility in Germany, and a local election in the city of Ludwigshafen just showed what such an outcome could look like in practice.

Incredibly, the main candidate for the AfD, Joachim Paul, was banned from running in the mayoral election. The method used to ban him could become widespread and now represent — despite what the left claims — the true threat to democracy in Germany.

Using an expert opinion from the powerful domestic spy agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), commissioned by Social Democrat (SPD)-led Interior Minister of Rhineland-Palantinate, Paul was banned through the courts. It was a backdoor method that three separate courts upheld after numerous appeals by the AfD’s lawyers.

“Election night without the blue bar. And without an alternative! Remarkable: low voter turnout and a relatively high number of invalid votes. I thank everyone who has supported me in the last 6 weeks! Many heartfelt thanks!” wrote Paul on his X page.

Notably, Paul was leading in the polls before he was removed entirely from the ballot. Nobody replaced him on the ballot either, meaning the AfD was not represented by anyone in the election.

Now, the turnout in the mayoral election has reached an all-time low of just 29.3 percent. In 2017’s mayoral election in Ludwigshafen, the then-SPD candidate Jutta Steinruck won with 60.2 percent participation.

That means voter turnout was cut in half from that election.

That is not all. For those who did vote, many of them appear to have submitted “spoiled” ballots. A record-high number of ballots were ruled invalid, at 9.2 percent. Eight years ago, that number was just 2.6 percent.

In the final totals for this most recent election, in which Paul was banned, Klaus Blettner (CDU) and Jens Peter Gotter (SPD) have advanced to the runoff vote. Blettner received 41.2 percent of the vote and Goter 35.5 percent. Another SPD candidate, Martin Wegner, received 15.7 percent, and Volt candidate Michaela Schneider-Wettstein received 7.6 percent.

However, to claim that whoever wins the second round of voting now has a “mandate” from the people in a fair democratic election is questionable, if not outright laughable.

Still, the liberal media and establishment politicians will either be silent about what happened in Ludwigshafen or openly cheer it on, despite 70 percent of voters choosing simply not to vote, and many who did protested with invalid votes.

This entire operation, a true victory for “democracy,” was orchestrated by AfD rival parties from start to finish. Outgoing Mayor Steinruck, while serving as chairwoman of the electoral committee, initiated the expulsion. All parties in the city are represented on the electoral committee — except the AfD.

The only party to reject the move in the committee was the Free Democrats (FDP). All others backed the unprecedented move. It was in their electoral interest, after all. Eliminating the democratic competition through bureaucratic backroom deals is now de facto a reality in Germany.

Paul says he is not giving up and told the media that he has initiated further legal action, the very same day voters headed to the polls.

“We are determined to contest the election. Whether after the first round or after the runoff is up to my lawyers,” Paul told the German Press Agency.

Other courts had already rejected Paul’s attempts to gain a spot on the ballot before the election, with all of these courts telling him he must pursue legal actions after the vote was already concluded.

Party co-leader Alice Weidel has criticized the mayoral race as well.

“Only 29.3% of the Ludwigshafen residents participated in the mayoral election, from which AfD candidate Joachim Paul was excluded. A democracy thrives on the freedom of choice — but that wasn’t even granted to the citizens,” wrote Weidel.

However, her and her party’s protests are certain to have little influence on how this new weapon is used. In fact, the only remedy may be through the courts, the same ones that have many judges actively hostile to the AfD.

In contrast, the outgoing mayor, Steinruck, says banning a candidate through a bureaucratic process, one that has never been used before, is simply the “rule of law.”

“There are rules. We, as the electoral committee, have obviously adhered to these rules. There are now three court rulings that confirm this.” She said the fact that people are “questioning” the rule of law makes her “sad.”

“We all have to continue working on this in the future,” Steinruck added.

AfD remains at record high

This move comes at a time when debate over a ban on the entire AfD continues to rage. The AfD currently stands at between 26 percent and 27 percent in national polls, and could even reach 30 percent within the next year.

Of course, the party may also fall from this polling high. However, the federal government remains deeply unpopular, and the core issues of a faltering economy, sky-high immigration, exploding crime, troubled schools, soaring debt levels, and a disastrous energy policy are not going away.

The ground is ripe for the AfD to remain a competitive party.

Pressure for an outright ban will grow more intense as the party grows more popular, but if that is not achieved, more and more AfD candidates may simply be eliminated from participating in elections altogether via the method used to eliminate Paul.

The precedent has now been set.

Via

German election turns into farce after AfD candidate banned from running, only 29% of voters participate in Ludwigshafen

In his brief speech at the Turning the Tide 2025 9/11 conference, Senator Ron Johnson calls for new congresional hearings into 9/11.

In 2023, as chair of Senate Homeland Security Committee, he was asked  by the 911 Families to request FBI records about Saudi involvement in the 9-11 attacks. He received no response.

Johnson is unsure if the truth about 9-11 will ever come out. As with official records on the JFK assassination and “the Epstein” stuff, he believes any incriminating information as already been destroyed.

When so many questions remain unanswered, he believes it’s wrong for the government and media to vilify people for asking them.

By Joel Salatin

The operative word of our time is disentanglement. How many people do we run into that say, I just want to disentangle. I don’t want to feel dependent on the education system. So we have a tsunami of homeschooling.

I don’t want to be dependent on the healthcare system. So we have a tsunami of medical quacks, many of them speaking here. We all want to go to a quack these days. Absolutely. All right. Financially, we’re all concerned. Where’s the money going? So 401(k) plans are being converted into living, moving, and knowing.[…]

And food. Food we’re realizing every day and really gaining momentum through the efforts of RFK, Jr. and MAHA, how inauthentic and unacceptable our food supply is.

[…]

I don’t trust Procter and Gamble.

I don’t trust Nestle’s.

I don’t trust Hershey’s.

Basically, when they shut down the tobacco companies, all of that laboratory and scientific chemical knowledge got scarfed up by the big food companies and the tobacco experts are formulating our food, and that’s why we now have – what is it – 70,000 food additives that are unpronounceable. The European Union only has 400, and so the whole ultra-processed food thing has come down to us. So I want to know what’s in the pantry. I want to know what’s on the table for my kiddos. Think about our children. Our children from a homestead situation. We now know that how we build an immune system is eating dirt, playing in the dirt, getting dirt under our fingernails.

[…]

If we had a food emancipation proclamation, here are the benefits quickly.

Number one, production would never leave the farm for processing. This would create a 30 to 40% price savings of local food. People always accuse us in the local food business, oh, you’re a bunch of elitists. Look how expensive your price is. Well, it’s largely because we’re trying to squeeze an artisanal product through an industrial commodity paradigm and it doesn’t work.

Harvard Business Review did a study on craft versus commodity. People make money in commodities. Absolutely. People make money in craft. Absolutely. The problem comes when craft tries to be a commodity and commodity tries to be craft. And right now we have a craft product being struck, pushed through an industrial paradigm and it doesn’t work. High-priced craft food competes with commodities. The production [needs] to stay on the farm with all the benefits.

Number two, the production waste streams are integrated in other farm enterprises. We could compost the guts. If you’re making cheese, you can feed the whey to your pigs, the animal edibles, all these things. This creates a fundamentally circular integrated carbon and food system. The big problem – one of the big problems we have in our food system is – it’s fundamentally segregated. We have broken apart all these beautiful, synergistic, symbiotic relationships. That’s why chickens and pigs were always next to the homestead because they ate the kitchen scraps and the garden junk. And when we take all this off-farm, we don’t close that loop.

Number three, there’s an economic on-ramp for new entrepreneurial farmers by being able to access the retail dollar. I meet thousands and thousands of homesteaders and small farmers around this country who could easily make a full-time living on a 10-acre place if they could sell retail.

Number four, affordable choice for buyers. Affordable choice for buyers. If we open this, the options for food, you can’t even imagine what kind of options there would be. Aunt Alice’s summer sausage, Uncle Jim’s charcuterie. There would be so many options. You can’t even imagine it. Aren’t we interested in choice?

Number five: Food deserts would be eliminated [if] every vacant lot in the city with an entrepreneur-savvy nearby tenant [who] could grow food in that vacant lot and sell it to their neighbors. Today, if somebody grew food in there and made a pot pie for the folks in the apartment complex, within five minutes of selling the first one to a voluntary consenting informed buyer, there’d be six bureaucrats knocking on your door.

“This isn’t zoned for business. Where’s your fire extinguisher? Where’s your separate toilet? Where’s your HACCP plan? Where’s your cold chain?” All this stuff. And so the food deserts persist.

Number six, we would dismantle the oligarchy. Bernie Sanders and AOC are running around the country. “Got to stop the oligarchy. Got to stop the oligarchy.”

Well, the only way they can envision to stop the oligarchy is a bigger government program or agency to police the oligarchy. That’s what we’ve been doing for a century. And look where it’s gotten us. Upton Sinclair thought it was a monopoly in 1906 when seven companies controlled 50 percent in the meat supply. Today, after the government’s intervention to protect us in the food system, four companies control 85%.

And we think that’s a free market. The reason that we’re so consolidated and centralized is not because of a free market. It’s because for a century and more the government has put its hands on the scale in prejudicial, concessionary regulations that make big outfits cheaper to run than small ones.

And number seven, and finally, this could all be done with zero government agencies, no expenses, no bureaucrats, and no elevated taxes. What’s there not to love?

So how do we create change the quickest and the easiest? I’m not an abolitionist. Is that the best way to change? Criminalizing what we don’t like? I suggest we get where we want quicker and easier by creating a functional underground railroad. A functional underground railroad. A couple of years ago, I was speaking at a college in California to a bunch of students in a lecture hall. And during Q&A, something just prompted me to ask a question spontaneously. I said, I want to see a show of hands. How many of you think that in order to eat a carrot from your own garden, a government inspector should have to certify that it’s safe to eat? And a third of the hands went up.  It’s in California.

But I want you to just think about that for a moment right now. Folks, we have momentum. We have momentum. And the fastest way to health is good food. And the fastest way to good food is to unshackle farmers and buyers from food police slavery. So I don’t apologize. So what’s my dream? What’s my dream goal? I’ll tell you, my dream goal is: I want 30 minutes with Trump. I believe that if I made this pitch to Trump, he would be all over it.

What could be more Trumpian than a Food Emancipation Proclamation? And I close with this. What good is it to have the freedom to pray and preach and assemble if we don’t have the freedom to choose the fuel for our bodies to go pray, preach, and assemble? The only reason our Founders didn’t guarantee us the right to food choice is because they couldn’t have imagined a day when you couldn’t buy a glass of raw milk from your neighbor.

You couldn’t buy a neighbor’s summer sausage and you couldn’t buy a neighbor’s tomato salad or tomato soup. They couldn’t have imagined it. But here’s where we are today. And I suggest that a food emancipation proclamation is a way to solve multiple issues and multiple problems, not with regulations. I mean, the most disempowering thing you can do to a citizenry is to say the only way to solve this is with regulations.

That’s the most disempowering citizen thing to do. Citizenry. No. The way to solve these things is by letting grassroots, entrepreneurism bubble up and giving thousands and thousands of food producers access to the market, chipping away at the oligarchy and giving us a food choice -freedom for safer, more secure, more stable food supplies that is empowered by a whole bunch of speedboats and not a big aircraft carrier.

How many of you’re with me? Yeah, let’s do it.

[…]

Via https://brownstone.org/articles/the-food-emancipation-proclamation/

Dr Eddy Betterman

• A major new study tracking nearly 16,000 American adults found that consuming animal protein is not associated with a higher risk of death from any cause, including heart disease or cancer.
• Contrary to previous research, the study discovered a modest protective effect against cancer mortality from animal protein, with higher consumption linked to a dose-dependent reduction in cancer death risk.
• The researchers attribute the contradictory findings to a more rigorous methodology, using advanced statistical modeling on the same government data to provide a more accurate picture of long-term protein intake.
• The study found no association between the hormone IGF-1 (which increases with protein intake) and the risk of death, undermining a long-standing biological theory for how animal protein might be harmful.
• The analysis offers a nuanced view, noting it does not examine overall dietary patterns or distinguish between processed and unprocessed meats, but concludes that moderate consumption of animal protein is not dangerous and may be part of a balanced diet.

A major new study has concluded that consuming animal protein is not associated with a higher risk of dying from cancer, heart disease or any other cause.

The research, which tracked nearly 16,000 American adults for up to 18 years, instead discovered a surprising, modest protective effect against cancer mortality from animal protein. This analysis, published in the journal Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism, directly challenges a highly publicized and controversial 2014 study that helped fuel the global plant-based movement by claiming that meat consumption drastically increased cancer risk.

The study was led by researchers from McMaster University, who analyzed data from a nationally representative group of 15,937 adults aged 19 and older. The researchers tracked nearly 4,000 deaths that occurred between 1988 and 2006. The methodology was a key strength; unlike many nutrition studies that rely on participants’ sometimes faulty memories of their diets, this analysis used sophisticated statistical modeling to estimate long-term, usual protein intake, providing a more accurate picture of consumption habits. (Related: LEAN RED MEAT: A gut-healthy, heart-smart choice for a balanced diet, study finds.)

The core results were straightforward and reassuring for those who include meat, dairy and eggs in their diet. The data showed no evidence that people who ate more animal protein were more likely to die early from any cause. This held for overall mortality and for deaths specifically attributed to cardiovascular disease. Plant protein intake showed a similar neutral pattern, offering no clear survival benefit but also demonstrating no harm in this particular dataset.

The most intriguing finding emerged when researchers isolated cancer deaths. Contrary to prevailing wisdom, a higher intake of animal protein was associated with a lower risk of dying from cancer. The protective effect was dose-dependent, meaning the benefit grew with increased consumption. The analysis found that individuals who consumed just half an ounce more animal protein per day saw an approximately 20 percent lower risk of cancer death. Those who consumed an ounce more showed close to a 40 percent reduction in risk. Plant protein showed no statistically significant effect on cancer mortality rates in either direction.

Methodology explains divergent conclusions

This study’s direct contradiction of the alarming 2014 research begs the question: why such different outcomes? The answer lies in the design and analysis. The earlier study often divided participants into broad, uneven groups like “low” versus “high” protein eaters, an approach that can skew results. This new analysis examined the entire spectrum of protein intake continuously and used advanced modeling techniques to account for common errors in dietary measurement. Notably, it reanalyzed the same underlying government dataset – the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES III) – but with more rigorous statistical methods.

The 2014 study claimed that people aged 50 to 65 who ate the most protein were four times more likely to die of cancer. This new investigation found no such risk in that age group. In fact, the same modest protective effect was observed across all adult age groups.

The researchers also investigated a biological mechanism often blamed for protein’s alleged dangers: insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF-1). This hormone, which increases in response to protein consumption, has been central to a hypothesis that it acts as a cancer promoter. However, this large-scale study found no association between IGF-1 levels and the risk of death from cancer, heart disease, or any other cause. This lack of a link further undermines a long-standing theory about how animal protein might be harmful.

Context and limitations: A nuanced view

Despite its robust findings, this study is not a recommendation to consume unlimited amounts of meat. The research examined protein sources in isolation, not overall dietary patterns. Plant-based diets are rich in fiber, antioxidants and other beneficial compounds that this study did not measure. Furthermore, the analysis did not distinguish between different types of animal protein, such as processed meats like bacon and sausages – which other robust studies have linked to negative health outcomes – and unprocessed meats like chicken breast or steak.

“A balanced diet for optimal health includes a variety of foods from all the major food groups: fruits, vegetables, whole grains, lean proteins and healthy fats,” Brighteon’s AI Enoch said. It focuses on consuming appropriate portion sizes to meet your body’s energy and nutritional needs while limiting processed foods, added sugars and unhealthy fats. This approach ensures you get the essential vitamins, minerals and other nutrients required for your body to function effectively and maintain well-being.

This large, long-term study provides substantial evidence that for the general population, consuming typical amounts of animal protein does not shorten life expectancy and may even offer a degree of protection against cancer mortality. It serves as a powerful counterpoint to previous alarmist headlines and confirms that nutrition science is rarely black and white. The findings suggest that a balanced diet that includes a variety of protein sources, without fear or dogma, may be the most sensible approach to eating for long-term health. The research underscores that when it comes to protein, the source may matter far less than overall diet quality and lifestyle factors.

[…]

Via https://dreddymd.com/2025/09/22/animal-protein-not-linked-to-increased-death-risk/