Lösch Dich

When you watch Lösch Dich, a documentary about online hate networks, you expect to learn about anger. What you get is the production schedule.

Reconquista Germanica, a right-wing troll network that ramped up before the 2017 German elections, built a machine. They recruited people—not ideologues, mostly just people sitting with loose resentments about immigrants, Islam, whoever—and fed them into structured groups. Every day, new orders: flood this hashtag, tag these accounts, push this narrative. Variations on a theme, coordinated relentlessly. The goal wasn’t to convince anyone of anything. It was to make their perspective look inevitable, inescapable, already won.

A guy called Nikolai Alexander ran it. He knew which questions worked: What does it mean to be a patriot? What’s Germany to you in your dream? And it worked. The machinery was efficient. Sort by leaning, feed into units, assign tasks, repeat.

The documentary pulls back the curtain. You see the funnels, the command structure, the mechanics laid bare. And something crystallizes, something sick: this is how some of what passes for genuine public opinion actually forms. It’s not organic. It’s someone else’s construction project.

What lingers isn’t the ideology or the targets. It’s the realization that resentment—the thing that feels most intimate and real—can be engineered. That loneliness and anger can be turned into a process, a schedule, a thing that runs itself. That the system is simple enough to work, and that most people inside it don’t even know they’re parts in it.