German Youtuber assaulted after AfD’s First Free Media Conference

The popular Youtuber, with tens of thousands of fans and large reach, was attacked on his way home by a ten-member group of hooded thugs armed with sticks and clubs after the Saturday night conference. He was intentionally ambushed from all sides. The injured 49-year-old was taken to a Berlin clinic.

The deliberately planned assault on Flesch “in the aftermath” of the event showed the resolve of leftists and Antifa to disrupt the so-called “Fourth Power” or free media. After the conference, Flesch, a former Berliner, had agreed to livestream a discussion by Milo Yiannopoulos from a pub at the Brandenburg Gate.

However, this did not happen because the Youtube stream was censored. After a long video interview with Yiannopoulos, Flesch left but was attacked and beaten by a group of ten masked Antifa members.

He described the attackers as “typical children of the Antifa”. They were “hooded, had young voices and 50kg at max, 175 cm”, who did not even manage to beat him up properly.

According to a police spokesman: “After initial investigation, a passer-by noticed around 01.30 clock on Rigaer Straße several masked individuals, who struck a man with sticks and clubs.” The witness then alarmed the police, and the emergency services “conducted a scan of the area for the assailants, but without success”.

The Berliner Zeitung also reported on the assault: “Alarmed rescue workers took the 49-year-old victim to a clinic, from which dismissed himself before treatment. So his injuries to the head and an arm could not be treated there,” the police spokesman continued. State Security has taken over further investigations.”

BILD reported in a very detailed manner about their ex-employee. “One of the most famous German video bloggers from the right-wing populist scene has been beaten by several attackers on Rigaer Strasse (Berlin-Friedrichshain). Image information revealed that the victim is the former Neukölln inhabitant Oliver Flesch (49).”

In early 2018, the Frankfurter Rundschau reported that Flesch was involved in organising a demonstration against Angela Merkel in Hamburg. At the demonstration, which was also supported by Pegida founder Lutz Bachmann, mostly conservatives were present.

Leftist site Vice News described a live stream scheduled by Flesch with Johannes Thiesen and Marie-Thérèse Kaiser in February 2018 and broadcast on his Youtube channel as “two and a half hours of Holocaust denial, alternative facts, flags of Germany, and sex tips”.

In September 2018 Flesch was referred to in the New York Times as an example of a “far right figure” and criticized because after the riots in Chemnitz he published several videos on YouTube, showing how events had been manipulated by the mainstream media.

The sociologist Götz Frommholz described Flesch as a “right-wing populist” who “simplifies complex issues and […] stigmatises minorities”. He belongs to a group of about 20 prominent German bloggers “who spreads right-wing populist content on YouTube” he fumed.

In addition to political issues Flesch is committed to men’s rights. On his blog, he opposes a women’s quota and sees the reason for the lack of women in leadership positions as “simply missing the grit to get to the top”.

Flesch operates several social media channels – especially on YouTube – with tens of thousands of fans. He says he lives in Mallorca, “because there are more sun and less headscarves”. Under the heading “German hate from Cala Ratjada” a “Mallorca newspaper” had reported on him.

Just a few days ago, Flesch uploaded a video on YouTube, which shows him in a verbal confrontation in Berlin’s Riga street. “To be continued”, he noted at the end of the recordings.

Petr Bystron, an AfD MP, and initiator and co-organizer of the First Free Media Conference, denounced the violence. “It is unbearable that guests are beaten at a conference in the German Bundestag on Berlin streets. It is already the second incident within a short time that friends of the AfD or neutral journalists in Berlin are attacked on the street, evidently by left-wing extremists.

“During the Berlinale in 2019, four members of the JA [AfD Youth party] were attacked and injured by the Antifa on the way to a demonstration about the Holocaust. This time it’s the well-known Youtuber Oliver Flesch, who was beaten with sticks by cowardly assailants.

“Unbearable too, is the coverage in the mainstream national media, which concealed that these attacks usually have a left-wing extremist background.

“It is also incomprehensible why State Security is always involved but never finds a perpetrator. The extreme left-wing scene is well-known to the authorities – it seems likely that this scene will be preserved.”

Bystron continued: “This assumption is also supported by the fact that many left-wing extremists are financed with taxpayers’ money from a network of front organisations. The youth organization of the Greens, the SPD and the Left are interspersed with people who also work in the Antifa.

“It is high time that the Antifa is declared a terrorist organisation, as it has already been in the US.”

The AfD MP Udo Hemmelgarn commented on the assault: “I am appalled by the cowardly attack on Oliver Flesch and wish him a speedy recovery. I am concerned that this government does very little to address daily criminal leftist fascism.”

Meanwhile, left-wing extremists also launched an attack on the editors of the Swiss conservative weekly Weltwoche. They threw red paint bags at the entrance and sprayed the phrase “against right-wing agitation” on the door of the establishment.

“The same ones who demand media freedom in Turkey, for example, want to smash it in Switzerland,” wrote editor-in-chief Roger Köppel on Twitter.

He added: “It shows the totalitarian, criminal sentiment of left-wing hooligans.” Köppel says that he has already filed a complaint.

On May 1, Weltwoche editor Alex Baur was the target of a left-wing extremist attack. Masked thugs assaulted and injured Baur at a folk festival in Zurich and his shirt was torn to pieces. The attackers hit his daughter in the stomach. They also destroyed the Empanadas stand of his Peruvian wife.

Baur did not report the assault. On Twitter, he wrote, “We’re not going to take notice of a few cowardly anonymous Neanderthals who may not know what a family is.”