The evidence of a honeypot begs who or what was it for.

The NVIDIA espionage case has produced at least two answers, which I see floating around already. The spy wanted the GPU engineering secrets, or the spy wanted to steer the CEO deeper into circular financing that inflates the AI bubble that pops and takes the American economy down with it. Both answers assume the CEO is a victim, someone who is influenced from an outside agent. A little Soviet history tells us why that assumption fails.

The KGB built an entire apparatus for moving people in a predictable direction. Its internal dictionary, smuggled out by the archivist Vasili Mitrokhin and published as the KGB Lexicon, defines the agent of influence as a recruited asset who uses his official or public position, on instruction, to shift policy and opinion. The dictionary sets him apart from the confidential contact, who is cultivated without knowing it. Every term in the book assumes a target who isn’t moving on their own, and thus has to be nudged. Oleg Kalugin, who ran those operations in Washington, told CNN in a 1998 interview that subversion rather than collection was the heart and soul of Soviet intelligence.

The efforts focused on those in the West who pushed back, to breach integrity more than confidentiality (leak secrets).

The honeypot doctrine historically points away from CEOs, instead of directly at them. Markus Wolf’s HVA ran the Romeo program against Bonn for three decades, and the CIA’s own account of it says the targets were lonely government secretaries, chosen because the method was cheap and the women held the files. The chancellor had opinions. The secretary had the documents. Sexpionage went where the paper was, and a CEO who learns his own products from slide decks is the wrong end of that building.

The method also had a raw material rule. A 1983 State Department study of Soviet forgeries put it in one line: the lever lies in the prejudices of the deceived. The handler gives precise direction and a tempo to a tendency that already was present. A confidence builder with an accelerant.

Huang supplies his own direction and his own tempo. It’s all public, at max confidence and speed. Heck, I’ve even reported the NVIDIA pipeline into Russian drones bombing civilians during sanctions. This is not the kind of CEO who needs a spy in his bedroom to convince him of helping the bad guys.

He has argued for years that NVIDIA should sell China everything short of its newest line. In October 2025, three months after the administration granted export licenses on a revenue-sharing arrangement, NVIDIA committed $25 million to the White House ballroom and asked that the gift stay anonymous. In May 2026 Huang was left off the delegation to Beijing. Trump called him and picked him up in Alaska on the way to Xi, and Reuters reported that same week that Commerce had already cleared H200 sales to about ten Chinese firms.

That was the same spring Secretary of State Rubio oversaw a classified memo warning the White House that Huang was in a close relationship with Alice Huang, a Chinese citizen whom US officials had concluded was recruited by the Ministry of State Security. The warning was blaring like a bullhorn. Huang kept his seat, perhaps even because of it. A counterintelligence flag on the loudest opponent of export controls changed nothing, because his position was aligned with the administration’s position. An agent of influence recruited to produce that outcome would have been paid for nothing. And that’s not how agents roll.

The British learned all this back in 1963. John Profumo shared Christine Keeler with a Soviet naval attache, and Lord Denning’s inquiry found no breach of security from the connection. Profumo fell anyway, because he lied to the House of Commons about the affair. The spy story was the sideshow. The integrity failure ended the man without a single secret changing hands.

Washington already has a China story, too. Katrina Leung was one of the FBI’s highest paid assets and an 18-year intimate partner of her handler, Special Agent James J. Smith, while she passed material to Beijing. The Justice Department Inspector General found in 2006 that the FBI did little or nothing about the counterintelligence warnings that piled up during those years. The warnings were there. Leung was apparently more useful to the FBI as a source than as a suspect. Smith hid the affair, and the Bureau left him in charge of the one asset who could expose it. The memo circulating in spring 2026 about Huang and Megaspeed is a two-decade old rehash more than a novelty.

NVIDIA’s own words on Sunday kill some of the speculation. Huang’s message to employees admits the affair, apologizes to his wife and children, and says he will cooperate with the board. It names no woman, no company and no chip. The national security concerns get one sentence about loving his country. The board’s statement, as reported by the Times, said the company had no reason to believe that either national security or NVIDIA secrets were compromised. A collection operation looks exactly like that from the inside. Nothing is missing from a box that was never targeted for opening, and the man who owns the box has confessed to everything except what was in it.

The target was the supply chain.

Alice Huang was a senior executive at Megaspeed, a Singapore company that became NVIDIA’s largest buyer in Southeast Asia and that the Commerce Department and Singapore police were investigating in October 2025 over whether its chips moved on into China. NVIDIA says it checked and found the chips where they belonged. Either way, a CEO close to a procurement channel is worth having for allocation, for customer intelligence, and for early warning on enforcement. That is the commercial side of collection, which needs no influence at all. It’s like saying a woman working for candy stores is having an affair with the candy maker. The secrets are the delivery schedules.

The precedent is well-worn in history. Between 1982 and 1984 Toshiba Machine and Norway’s Kongsberg Vaapenfabrikk sold nine-axis propeller milling machines and their controllers to the Soviet Union on false export papers naming a civilian end user. Because what Russian civilian doesn’t need ultra-quiet submarine propellers? Reagan called it in 1987 a serious diversion that served the Soviet program of underwater warfare. The buyers worked through a KGB-linked trading organisation. The sellers worked for the contract. The same year the Toshiba deal was signed, a KGB colonel named Vetrov handed the French thousands of documents from Directorate T, the service built to acquire Western technology, exposing more than 200 Line X officers in Western capitals. Line X ran on willing sellers and front companies. Greed did the recruiting. A honeypot would have been an unnecessary expense, and the Soviets weren’t going to waste money on that.

The exhaustion lesson is the icing on this anti-American cake. Reagan’s NSDD-75 of January 1983 made sustained pressure on the Soviet economy explicit US policy, with the stated expectation of no near-term improvement in relations. The Soviet Union was running out of runway fast because of corrupted overspend. The Chinese Communist Party spent the following decades studying how that happened, and the lesson it drew is to let the other side spend itself out against a shadow. The history-savvy Chinese have no reason to push Huang into circular financing that he already loves. He couldn’t be pressed more there. China watches, it buys what it knows will be released to it, and it stays out of the way.

The circulating answers I’ve seen for the honeypot story share an important assumption, that a CEO is a victim being externally influenced. But we all see very openly how Huang already was moving on its own, and the administration was moving with him, and the only place a Chinese service had any job to do at all was minding their supply chain that his company kept insisting was clean.

One figure on the poster held gold coins in one hand and a whip in the other, with a map of the Soviet Union under his arm. The Deutsches Historisches Museum catalogues him as a Jew who embodies Western capitalism and Soviet Bolshevism at the same time. That one figure is the story from 8 November 1937. Twenty rooms beyond the poster were setup by Nazis to sell a lie.

“Der ewige Jude” opened in the library building of the Deutsches Museum in Munich as a “Große politische Schau”, with speeches by Goebbels and Streicher. It ran to 31 January 1938 and counted 412,000 visitors. The touring version reached Vienna, Berlin, Bremen, Dresden and Magdeburg before closing in June 1939. The Reichspropaganda-Amt and the Gauleitung München-Oberbayern built it with the Anti-Komintern and the party’s research institutes on the “Judenfrage”, a list recorded in Rosemarie Burgstaller’s entry in the Historisches Lexikon Bayerns. The Stadtarchiv München holds the press photographs of the rooms.

The sequence of rooms

Room one showed photographs of Rudolf Hilferding, Karl Radek and the actress Elisabeth Bergner, enlarged facial features and three wax heads. The wall text asserted typical Jewish features and explained their absence as camouflage. A Jew who looked German was a Jew in disguise.

Room two presented the Talmud and the Schulchan Aruch. The party journal “Mitteilungen über die Judenfrage” summarised the room: these law books with their thousands of paragraphs of hatred for non-Jews are for Jews what religion is for other peoples. Judaism was a hostile code wearing the costume of a faith.

A forty-metre hall followed, with a film of ritual slaughter running on a loop at the entrance and guided tours drawing the line to ritual murder.

Then the exhibition changed century. A Weimar film section with its own cinema. A mock shopping street with windows for fashion, music, literature and art, labelled as Jewish decay. A culture room under the title “Sodom und Gomorra” with Arthur Schnitzler, Franz Werfel, Max Reinhardt, Josephine Baker and Yehudi Menuhin. Seven or eight rooms of photomontage on Walther Rathenau, Georg Bernhard, Magnus Hirschfeld and Sigmund Freud, with walls built to lean inward over the visitor. A Bolshevism section of ruined cities and corpses copied from the Anti-Komintern shows. Two rooms of Freemasonry with coffins and skulls. An “Ehrenhalle” with the Nuremberg Laws in marble, and a last room presenting camps and expulsion as the solution.

The first rooms indicted the Jew as an archaic tribe with a bloody cult and a book of hatred in place of religion. The later rooms indicted the Jew as the author of modern sexuality, psychoanalysis, the theatre, the press, the department store and the Soviet state. Nazi usage called that second charge Kulturbolschewismus. The exhibition charged Jews with being too religious and with dissolving everyone else’s religion, and it placed the two charges in consecutive rooms. Room one had already supplied the rule that made both charges hold: the visible Jew was the enemy, and the invisible Jew was the enemy hiding. The same preference for the legible Jew survived the regime, which is why postwar Germany honours Chug Chaluzi for religious motives that German-Jewish society of the 1920s had treated as a mark against them.

From rooms to Xcrements

The Global Project Against Hate and Extremism has compiled the timestamped reactions of Christian nationalist figures and Project 2025 coalition partners to the midterm results, from the evening of 3 November to the morning of 5 November 2026. Read against the Munich floor plan, the compilation sorts itself by room.

Munich, 1937	X, 3 to 5 November 2026
Room 2: Talmud in place of religion. Long hall: ritual slaughter on a loop	Partridge: divine judgment for “Pandering to Anti-Christ Israel”
Culture room “Sodom und Gomorra”: Schnitzler, Reinhardt, Baker. Photomontage rooms: Hirschfeld, Freud	Webbon: Jews vote for “sexual perversion, and abortion”
Bolshevism section: ruined cities	Metaxas: “Islam and Marxism”. Driscoll: a “counterfeit trinity”
Poster: coins in one hand, whip in the other, Soviet map under the arm	Torba: the “Hinjew alliance”. Webbon: Jews caused the Iran war, Jews voted Democrat
Room 1: absence of Jewish features explained as camouflage	Webbon: Jews appointed as “captains of the team”; “They hate you”
Last room: camps and expulsion as the solution	Torba: “The time for voting is over.” Webbon: “I have a list.”

Joel Webbon, a Texas pastor, wrote at 12:41 a.m. on 4 November that Jews in the White House had talked Trump into the Iran war and that Zionists were the biggest threat to his side’s future. At 8:15 a.m. he wrote, “An entire war for Israel. Jews still voted Democrat.” Eleven minutes later he answered an exit poll showing Jewish voters at 67 percent for Democrats with “They hate you, your children, and your country.” At 11:18 p.m. he wrote that Jews vote for open borders, “demographic erasure, sexual perversion, and abortion.” One author, one day, with Jews as the war party of a foreign state and as the solvent of Christian order. Protection had been extended and loyalty assumed. A vote cast as citizens was received as treason.

Dale Partridge listed “Pandering to Anti-Christ Israel” first among the reasons for divine judgment. Andrew Torba of Gab wrote that those who bless Israel had been blessed with a landslide defeat and called the night a rejection of the “Hinjew alliance.” Eric Metaxas named Islam and Marxism as an existential enemy on the scale of the Revolution and the Civil War. Mark Driscoll named abortion, Marxism and Islam as a counterfeit trinity. The Bolshevism section in Munich showed ruined cities. The 2026 version adds a mosque.

Torba posted “The time for voting is over” at 10:32 p.m. on election night. Webbon promised the following evening that his side would win “with or without a majority vote,” and that morning had posted “I have a list. I will not forget.”

Hans von Spakovsky, a Heritage Foundation alumnus who chairs a Project 2025 coalition member, wrote the morning after the election that the closest historical analogy was the 1932 German vote that made the Nazi party the largest in the Reichstag, and he meant the Democrats.

The Munich exhibition had a fixed grammar of Nazism. The Jew is their enemy as both the visible stranger and as the invisible insider, as the keeper of an archaic law and as the destroyer of other peoples’ faith.

The grammar acquires new names but nothing else. The timestamps in the GPAHE compilation show a 2026 regurgitation of 1937 Nazism was complete within forty hours of the polls closing.

In the Roman Republic, as Polybius wrote, a sentry’s “watchword” was written on a wooden tablet, and then passed hand to hand up each street of the camp with witnesses at every handoff. Clever, no? Every tablet had to be back with the tribune before dark. A missing tablet was easily traced to the specific relay team, under a specific unit leader. A sentry who was found asleep was tried by the tribunes and punished severely. Polybius says the watches held because the penalty was certain, and the fault was accurately assigned. The severity is the part that usually sticks with people, because it shocks the senses. But accuracy and certainty is what actually made it work. And on that note, the certainty is the part that is easiest to replicate today.

When you look at GitHub today, you have to wonder if nobody in the whole organization studied any history. The user interface hands each installation admin a tablet that represents everything, and therefore nothing: the whole camp may as well be charged with whatever happens, meaning nobody reliably will be held to account.

Take for example how an “application permission” email will be sent from GitHub.

What? Who? Where?

Let’s have a look at one example: “[GitHub] Claude is requesting updated permissions” seems to be going around right now.

A GitHub App, Claude, installed on your account is requesting updated permissions.

Visit https://github.com/settings/installations/ to review and accept or ignore these permissions.

You may choose to ignore this request. If you do, Claude will retain its current permissions.

You can view pending requests by viewing your Apps settings page.
https://github.com/settings/installations

If you run into problems, please contact support by visiting: https://support.github.com/contact?tags=dotcom-integrations

Thanks,
Your friends at GitHub

With friends like these, who needs Romans?

Eight permissions are in the GitHub interface, with a vendor badge and reference and one sentence of explanation for the lot. This particular vendor, should you be bothered to look, has published research on approval fatigue, the exact failure this design produces. The request for updated permissions is nearly impossible to untangle. Five scopes are new. Three are upgrades from read to write. And the “developer note” at the bottom says: “Allow the Claude Apps to automatically create repositories when desired.” That sentence explains one scope. The other seven get… nothing.

GitHub sends this kind of email automatically whenever an app’s permission manifest is changed. GitHub’s documentation says the installer may approve or decline. A declined app keeps its old permissions and keeps doing what it did; whatever needs the new scopes fails, and the installer is told only that it “may not function as expected.” The choice is all or none, with uncertainty pressed firmly onto the none side.

The eight, as they appeared:

• Administration, read
• Merge queues, read
• Repository creation, read and write
• Webhooks, read and write
• Commit statuses, read
• Actions, upgraded from read to read and write
• Checks, upgraded from read to read and write
• Organization members, read

Anthropic publishes material on just two of them. The enterprise-server setup guide says webhook write creates a hook on a plugin marketplace repository when automatic sync is turned on, and organization member read checks a connecting user’s role when an installation is linked. The plugin support article confirms the webhook purpose.

The remaining six? Pound sand.

This is the second such email from Anthropic alone this year. In March the app asked for Checks write, with Administration and Merge queues read alongside, and a user filed an issue saying the first thing they assumed was a credential leak. Anyone who declined in March sees those same scopes again in November, stacked on top of the new ones, because GitHub shows the gap between what an installation approved and what the manifest now asks for.

Reasonable assumption, which opens Pandora’s box of operator confusion and fatigue from poor authentication prompt hygiene.

The explanation in that thread was based on text that was said to be from Claude itself. In May a GitHub organisation admin opened a community discussion after the same app sent the same kind of request, asking for per-scope approval, and documented that revoking a single scope after approval requires uninstalling the app, and reinstalling presents the same bundle again.

Just for some perspective, Cursor sent the same email to its users ahead of a review feature. AWS did too in 2024.

This is not a good look for the industry, especially as we know how to do this better.

As I already mentioned, Anthropic has itself published notes on what’s wrong with what Anthropic is doing to its users. In its engineering post on Claude Code auto mode, Anthropic reports that users approve 93% of permission prompts, and that over time this produces approval fatigue, where people stop reading what they approve.

I said as much about this topic in the book I co-wrote in 2012 about cloud security threats. I mean, nothing here is a surprise or new to anyone who has even a few years of real security experience.

Anthropic built classifiers to intercept threats inside the terminal. Meanwhile, it sent the GitHub version of a bad prompt design to every installation admin. The GitHub prompt is through email, completely outside any classifier or sandbox. And then the approval is account-wide and sticky.

If you are already thinking about phishing surface, well done. GMO Flatt Security reported to Anthropic in January that anyone can register a GitHub App, install it on a repository they control, and use its token to open issues on any public repository. Registering an app named Claude with a similar icon and sending this template is kids play. Every email Anthropic sends with a one-line note is pushing the kind of fatigue on its installers that greases them to click through a fake one.

Ok Anthropic, let’s get real. You know the risks. You know the harms. You know better.

You published all this yourself. Does the left hand know what the right is doing?

A vendor that measures approval fatigue in one of their products as a bad thing and manufactures it in another of their products… has a governance failure. Anthropic publishing the harm research and then setting it off under its own installers is evidence the company needs some serious security leadership reconfiguration.

Customers’ repositories deserve better than a sapper blown up by his own charge.

The fix is clear and cheap, which is what makes this a governance (and history education!) failure rather than an engineering one. A changelog entry per scope, published before the manifest changes, stating which feature uses it and what stops working when it is declined. The email links to it.

Done.

Beyond that, one app per capability. Code review, cloud sessions, security scanning and plugin sync carry different scopes. An installer who turned on one should approve the scopes for one. If the tablet has everything and everyone on it, it effectively has nothing and nobody to hold accountable.

English | Deutsch

Ich stecke diesen Herbst bis über beide Ohren in deutschen Politikerreden und bin erschrocken über den Antisemitismus. Die Arbeit ist langsam und meist öde. Wir ziehen die Bundestagsprotokolle, wir lesen, was gesagt wurde, wir notieren, was eine Aussage über Juden macht und was nicht.

Die AfD liefert reichlich. Das war zu erwarten. Alle anderen Parteien zusammen kommen nicht annähernd an die AfD heran. Sie produzieren es, als wäre es freigeschaltet. Aber von wem, wie, und warum?

Nicht zu erwarten war ein Mann, der aus dem Baum fiel, als wir ihn schüttelten, obwohl seine Bilanz genau auf den Begriffen sauber ist, die wir geprüft haben.

Alexander Dobrindt ist Bundesinnenminister. CSU, seit 2002 im Bundestag. Wir haben alles gelesen, was er in diesen vierundzwanzig Jahren im Parlament gesagt hat. Er hat dort nie etwas gesagt, das als antisemitisch zu kodieren wäre. Keine Chiffren, keine Reizwörter, kein Augenzwinkern. Wenn er Juden erwähnt, verurteilt er Judenhass. Er sagt, Juden gehören zu Deutschland. Nach jeder fairen Lesart seiner Worte gehört er nicht in diesen Korb.

Warum landete er trotzdem immer wieder darin? Wegen dem, was er mit dem Thema und um das Thema herum beständig tut. Eine kleine Auswahl zeigt die Methode.

Ein Tag Abstand

Am 20. Mai 2025 stellte er die Statistik der politisch motivierten Kriminalität vor. Die Bundesregierung veröffentlichte seinen Satz: „Egal, wo der Antisemitismus herkommt – er ist unter keinen Umständen zu akzeptieren.”

Egal, wo. Dieses Wort merken.

Am nächsten Tag, dem 21. Mai, stand er dem Bundestag in der Regierungsbefragung Rede und Antwort. Plenarprotokoll 21/6, Seite 405: Antisemitismus gebe es „sowohl im rechtsradikalen Bereich als auch in Bereichen des importierten Antisemitismus.”

Importiert. Nicht egal, wo.

Derselbe Minister, dieselbe Woche, zwei Publika, zwei Botschaften.

„Importiert” benutzt er seit Oktober 2023. Das Wort zeigt weg von der AfD, weg von der heimischen Rechten, hin zu Migranten. Und sobald es dorthin zeigt, wird es zum Argument für Abschiebung. Wer Antisemitismus im Netz erforscht, beschreibt diesen Zug seit Jahren: einräumen, dass es Antisemitismus gibt, und ihn dann einer Zielgruppe zuschieben, meist Muslimen. Shahak Shapira hat es im September schlichter gesagt. Deutschland hat mehr als genug Antisemitismus. Man muss nichts importieren.

Eine Gedenkstunde

Am 9. November 2023, dem Tag, an dem Deutschland an die Pogrome von 1938 erinnert, hielt der Bundestag seine Gedenkdebatte. Dobrindt sprach, festgehalten im Plenarprotokoll 20/134, Seite 16792:

Die Jüdinnen und Juden gehören unverbrüchlich zu unserem Land, ihr aber nicht.

Das Protokoll vermerkt den Zwischenruf von Saskia Esken von den SPD-Bänken: „Nicht mal in so einer Gedenkstunde können Sie das lassen!”

Er machte trotzdem weiter. In dieser Stunde forderte er eine Mindeststrafe von sechs Monaten für Israelhass, die Regelausweisung ausländischer Täter und den Passentzug für Doppelstaatler. Dann der Satz, für den die Forderungen gebaut waren:

Wer nicht mit Israel leben will, wer nicht friedlich mit Juden leben will, der kann auch nicht in Deutschland leben.

Das Protokoll vermerkt Beifall bei CDU/CSU, FDP und AfD. Die AfD klatscht einem CSU-Minister in einer Gedenkstunde sonst nicht.

Die Gesetzentwürfe, die seine Fraktion daraufhin einbrachte, wurden im April 2024 abgelehnt. Seit Mai 2025 ist er Innenminister. Er hat sie nicht wieder vorgelegt.

Zwei Tage nach einer Wahl

Am 20. September 2026 gewann Die Linke die Berliner Wahl. Am 22. September sagte Dobrindt, die Berliner Linke dulde „ganz offensichtlich” Antisemiten und Extremisten in ihrem Umfeld.

Zwei Tage. Keine Prüfung, kein Befund, ein Bundesminister, der den Parteien in Koalitionsverhandlungen eines Landes sagt, mit wem sie nicht reden sollen.

Am 24. September korrigierte die Moderatorin in der ZDF-Sendung maybrit illner ihren eigenen Versprecher über die Spitzenkandidatin der Linken, Elif Eralp:

Sie ist keine Antisemitin.

Der Präsident des Zentralrats der Juden hat gesagt, er halte ihre persönliche Haltung für glaubwürdig.

Dobrindt antwortete: „Na doch.” Worauf er das stützt, sagte er nicht.

Eralp ist nicht jüdisch. Sie hat Strafanzeige wegen übler Nachrede und Beleidigung gestellt. Die vollständige Antwort des Ministeriums:

Die Worte stehen für sich.

Sie stehen für sich, als müsse niemand für sie geradestehen.

Am 7. Oktober, beim Gedenken am Bebelplatz an das Hamas-Massaker, sagte Dobrindt es noch einmal, ohne die Partei zu nennen: Man müsse alarmiert sein, wenn in Berlin eine Partei über eine Regierungsbeteiligung spreche, die offen Antisemiten in ihrem Umfeld dulde.

Wenn das sein Maßstab ist, müsste er ununterbrochen über die AfD reden. Ihre Leitfigur Björn Höcke ist zweimal wegen einer SA-Parole verurteilt. Auf ihren Kundgebungen wird dieselbe Parole mit einem ausgetauschten Wort skandiert, „Alice für Deutschland.” Ihre interne Post, von Correctiv geprüft, liest sich, wie man es erwartet. Die Akte ist öffentlich.

Rund 150 Berliner Jüdinnen und Juden, darunter Deborah Feldman und Susan Neiman, haben in einem offenen Brief die Kampagne gegen die Linke eine zynische politische Instrumentalisierung genannt. Der Zentralrat der Juden sagte, die Berliner Linke habe ein echtes Problem, was in Berlin ungefähr so viel heißt wie: das Wetter ist schlecht, und hat „Na doch” nicht übernommen. Das trifft es. Es gibt Antisemiten in der Berliner Politik, bei der Linken auch. Der Minister arbeitet nicht gegen sie. Er benutzt sie.

Das Wort, das er aufhebt

Die AfD gibt es seit 2013. Der Verfassungsschutz stuft sie als gesichert rechtsextremistisch ein, und deutsche Gerichte lesen ihren „Remigration”-Plan als ethnische Säuberung. Dobrindt nennt sie ebenfalls „rechtsextremistisch” und ist gegen ein Verbot. In dreizehn Jahren, in nichts, was wir finden konnten, hat er die AfD je antisemitisch genannt.

Nur die Linke bekam dieses Wort, zwei Tage nach einem Wahlsieg. Die Partei, die seiner Gedenkrede applaudierte, hat es nicht ein einziges Mal bekommen.

Und in den Wochen der Warnungen vor Berlin war das Amt der Bundesregierung gegen Antisemitismus unbesetzt. Felix Klein ging Ende August. Die Nachfolge wurde am 14. Oktober beschlossen. Im Juli hatte Dobrindt eine „in Kürze” versprochen.

Der Minister, den der Antisemitismus einer Partei alarmiert, ließ also das Amt, das für Juden sprechen soll, während des Alarms leer. Wer wissen will, wie „Nie wieder” mit all dem zusammengeht, muss nicht lange suchen.

Das Muster

Seine anderen berühmten Formeln passen dazu. „Konservative Revolution” 2018, der Name der Weimarer Rechten, beibehalten, als Historiker widersprachen. „Anti-Abschiebe-Industrie” im selben Jahr, für die Anwälte von Asylsuchenden, Unwort des Jahres, gefolgt von Tausenden Hassmails an einen Anwalt in Ellwangen mit dem Begriff in der Betreffzeile. „Migrantische Chaoten” in diesem Monat, woraufhin sein eigenes Ministerium einräumte, es habe keine Zahlen.

Die Ziele wechseln. Juden sind nie das Ziel. Juden sind jedes Mal die Begründung für eines.

Es ist nicht das erste Mal, dass dieser Blog ihn nach links zeigen sieht, während rechts gearbeitet wird. Im Juni, nach dem Brand im Umspannwerk Reutlingen, sprach der Innenminister von Linksextremisten, bevor irgendjemand wusste, wer das Streichholz gehalten hatte.

Das ist der Zug, den Esra Özyürek in Subcontractors of Guilt beschreibt: Die Last des Holocaust wird nach unten weitergereicht, an die, die am wenigsten Macht haben, sie zurückzuweisen, und am Ende halten Muslime in Deutschland die Rechnung. „Importierter Antisemitismus” ist dieser Transfer in zwei Wörtern. Es ist derselbe Reflex, mit dem der Kanzler im September bei einer Berliner Kundgebung Antisemitismus unter Ausländerfeindlichkeit ablegte. Dobrindts Version geht einen Schritt weiter in den Betrieb: Die Juden gehören zu uns, als Grund, den wir in der Hand halten, damit „ihr aber nicht” folgen kann.

Was wir veröffentlichen

Dobrindt wird im Antisemitismus-Tracker mit null antisemitischen Aussagen erscheinen. Das ist die ehrliche Zahl, und eine Zählung, die schummelt, ist wertlos. Neben der Null steht eine zweite Spalte: Aussagen, die Antisemitismus gegen andere einsetzen. Dort steht er bei acht. Die Gedenkrede, denkwürdig wegen derer, die applaudierten, ist die erste.

Wir haben auch gesucht, ob er je etwas über die Rolle seiner eigenen Familie im Nationalsozialismus gesagt hat, wie wir es bei allen tun. Nichts ist veröffentlicht, und er hat nie darüber gesprochen. Auch diese Leerstelle kommt auf die Seite.

Die Lehre aus einer Saison des Lesens ist einfach. Die Wörter sind nicht das Einzige. Ein deutscher Rechtspolitiker kann vierundzwanzig Jahre ohne ein böses Wort über Juden auskommen und sie trotzdem benutzen, wann immer es sich „lohnt”.