State Minister Wolfram Weimer under pressure – support from Nouripour

These are hard days for Wolfram Weimer. First, Trump friend Richard Grenell attacked the Minister of State for Culture, then Alice Weidel went on the attack. The AfD leader accuses Weimer of having published her texts without permission on a platform that he founded before he joined the federal government.

The background: Weimer opened the Frankfurt Book Fair last Tuesday with a warning about “intellectual vampirism” from American and Chinese tech companies. The State Minister criticized that companies would work to suck the creative potential out of bright minds and use the ideas. The speech attracted greater attention – but in a way that Weimer could hardly have wanted.

Shortly after his appearance, Richard Grenell publicly attacked the German on the The fact that Weimer has been campaigning against large tech companies for months and recently even suggested breaking up Google may also have played a role.

Also shortly after Weimer’s appearance at the book fair, Alice Weidel sent a lawyer to accuse the state minister of unlawfully using intellectual property – in the online magazine “The European”, of which Weimer was the publisher until he got his job in the federal government. The platform is said to have published a large number of speeches and press releases from politicians, even without their consent. There were almost 100 contributions from Alice Weidel alone on the website.

The AfD and the Trump camp – there are good connections there. Are both attacks possibly related? At least that’s what Omid Nouripour (Greens), the Bundestag Vice President, is now suggesting.

“The Trump administration protects the interests of the tech giants and is therefore very tough on their regulation in Europe. Alice Weidel is siding with Trump’s financiers and thus against German interests. That is shameful,” says Nouripour star.

Weimer still has to clarify the allegations. Because they are unpleasant for him. In recent years, the “Weimer Media Group” has explicitly advertised that more than “2,000 renowned authors from politics, business, culture and science” would write on the debate portal “The European”, including Friedrich Merz, Brad Pitt and Pope Francis. However, they may have only been publicly accessible speeches and press releases and not specially written, exclusive texts. In any case, CSU man Dobrindt let it be known at the weekend that he had never written for the portal.

So did the former Weimer portal steal texts in order to possibly increase its own importance and increase its reach? “We clearly reject this allegation,” says the publisher. “The European is a curated debate magazine. In addition to journalistic texts and original articles, the portal had numerous documentary texts – especially in the years before the pandemic.”

In particular, important speeches and press releases from top politicians from the parties represented in the Bundestag were documented with sources. “This was a good contribution to democratic culture because the decision-making process of parliament and politics was made accessible to a broad audience.” It goes on to say: “If individual contributions by Ms. Weidel were not published with proper references, these are technical errors that we regret.”