Germany’s Jan Böhmermann, well known for his far-left comedy late night show, is more or less the Stephen Colbert of Germany, except he is perhaps even more aggressively and nakedly a political activist. During his taxpayer-funded show Neo Magazin Royal on ZDF, he doxxed the right-wing YouTuber “Clownwelt” last week, who had attempted to remain anonymous.
There are a lot of reasons to believe this doxxing was not the work of research performed by Bohnermann’s staff and Zeit, as Bohnermann claims, but outright intelligence agency information fed to his team, or at least someone on his team.
The method Böhmermann claimed for unmasking the identity of “Clownwelt” is a stretch to say the least. First, he claims they obtained a photo from the Telegram channel of Clownwelt, which showcased him wearing a metal band T-shirt and a guitar pick necklace. From there, he claims the following:
“If you now search all available photos of all German metal bands in Germany for a guitarist, you will end up with this hit. A metal guitarist from NRW. There it is, the golden guitar pick on the chain around his neck. But that’s not enough, of course. So we scrutinized his former band, spoke to his friends and relatives, visited his university, checked everything with other sources, double and triple crossed. We even had his voice scientifically analyzed, and then we were very, very sure.
In real life, one of the most important right-wing extremist internet propagandists and AfD stirrup holders is a 29-year-old metal guitarist from a small town in North Rhine-Westphalia called Marc Philipp. He did his A-levels and then, because he simply has a penchant for telling people things, studied to become a teacher at a university in a small town in Lower Saxony.
He dropped out of university at some point, he never handed in his bachelor’s thesis, and from summer 2021 he really took off as a right-wing extremist on YouTube. And his private environment didn’t know anything about it. They may have been surprised. They were completely surprised when we spoke to them.”
Wenn es Böhmermann nicht gefällt, dann muss es ja gut sein.
— Jörg Baumann MdL (@BaumannMdL) May 10, 2025
Abonniert Clownie seinen Kanalhttps://t.co/HNLDmzCZob#Clownswelt #Boehmermann pic.twitter.com/tjs83gvCme
Based on this one photo, Bohnermann claims to have “searched all the metal bands” in Germany. This sounds, to put it light, highly questionable. Clownwelt was not in a popular band, in fact, most metal bands are not particularly popular, even the more well-known ones. It was more or less a local band, of which there are tens of thousands in Germany. Even if we narrow this down to only metal bands, we are still looking at thousands of people — many of whom were “underground,” including from defunct bands. There are also plenty of metal fans, some whom would sport a guitar pick necklace, who are not in any active metal bands.
If we factor in that each band has dozens, sometimes hundreds, if not thousands of photos, going through all of these photos across Germany sounds ludicrous. Furthermore, if we consider that many band photos are private or contained in social media canals that are not searchable or difficult to search, it begins to sound like Bohnermann’s team would be dedicating an incredible amount of time for what seems like such a pointless task that would fail to turn up anything.
For argument’s sake, let’s just assume this is exactly what happened. Well, even then, if they found these two matching photos with a person wearing the same guitar pick necklace, it still would not prove anything, as Bohnermann says himself.
Let’s then think about what Bohnermann claims they did next. He said they call all this guy’s family and friends. First, it is unclear how he obtained this information, including the names of all these families and friends, but even more questionable is how he obtained all of their contact numbers. It is not so easy to just obtain private phone numbers in Europe, especially in Germany, known for its strict privacy laws. Many people no longer have home phone numbers, and private cell phone numbers are not listed in the telephone book.
Bohnermann then claims that he called all of these people one by one, and all of them claim they have no idea that the person they know is involved with any right-wing activities on social media.
So, what is Bohnermann’s actual confirmation here? There is none. None of this adds up. None of these people confirm that they know Clownwelt because Bohnermann himself says that Clownwelt kept his life secret.
Instead, Bohnermann calls them and tells them who Clownwelt is, because the truth is that Bohnermann already knew who he was.
The idiot-proof explanation of all of this is that Bohnermann was fed intelligence info through someone at an intelligence agency through the backdoor. There is also the possibility that Bohnermann himself did not know anything himself, but someone on his team did.
Either way, armed with this information, they have to work backwards to concoct a believable story about the doxxing, however, these stories are never all that believable. Charles Cornish-Dale, known as Raw Egg Nationalist, who was doxxed last year, wrote about how intelligence agencies are colluding with third parties to doxx those on the right. It’s known as “parallel construction,” as he also discusses here:
And so this piece basically is about the fact that I think Hope Not Hate doxxed me with the help of the government in some way. It’s about this thing called parallel construction, which is a journalistic technique. It’s a technique used by the intelligence services, by law enforcement as well, when they get information in a dirty way, basically. You know, when they get information from sources, when they break in and steal something, when they hack a computer, they invent a credible story to explain how they got the information legally.
And that’s basically what Hope Not Hate did. So they said in this expose, oh yes, we found some old posts, we found an old text message that Raw Egg Nationalist posted, and we managed to decipher his name from it. And they said some other stuff as well. They said that I posted some pictures of my garden and somehow that contributed to their… I mean, I posted a picture of my squat rack on my patio with no sky, nothing, no identifiable features, just a squat rack on a patio. And they’re saying that that was how they found me.
So, the piece really is just about the fact that actually Western governments, intelligence services are trying to disrupt the right, they’re trying to disrupt the popular right. And I think what they’re probably doing is colluding with activist organizations like Hope Not Hate to doxx people.
In the case of Germany, the tip-off went to Bohnermann instead of an organization like Hope Not Hate, as Bohnermann has a national audience and a public doxxing on his show would, at least in their view, deliver maximum damage.
In this case, the intelligence agency or agencies, very possibly someone in the Office of the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), first discovered who Clownwelt was. This could have been organized within a group or someone simply one person going rogue in the office, but no matter which intelligence entity leaked this, the leak never “officially” happened. This information was then fed to someone they trust on Bohnermann’s team, knowing what Bohnermann is capable of doing with it.
Either Bohnermann or the intelligence leakers had to create a “parallel construction” technique based on the two photos with a guitar pick, which may have been all they had to work with, so they may have had to go with that. They know their audience does not particularly care how they got this information, but they have to maintain their distance from Germany’s increasingly authoritarian spy system, which, of course, would look quite bad if it were leaking private information to a state-funded millionaire Antifa comedian.
This is all theory, but it sounds a lot more plausible than Bohnermann’s so-called guitar pick story. In fact, this is a good case of Occam’s Razor in practice.
It is safe to say that Bohnermann’s leak has been met with outrage. Here is an excerpt from Welt editor Ulf Poschardt:
Time and again, Jan Böhmermann uses his show to intimidate and denounce dissidents as a disciplinarian of the ruling class – using an ideological sledgehammer to do so. No one provides better material for criticizing public broadcasters than he does.
The bourgeoisie, as the left-wing theorist Antonio Gramsci knew, rules not only through the police and capital, “but through cultural hegemony – that is, by possessing the sovereignty of interpretation over values, language, education, religion, and the media.”
Böhmermann uses his show to intimidate and denounce those who think differently, as a kind of disciplinarian and whip of the ruling society. He is malicious, thin-skinned, and sadistic. He did this again on Friday, when he publicly unmasked – or “doxxed” – the right-wing YouTuber Clownswelt by name, revealing his identity and place of residence.
Interestingly, the backlash on social media began immediately and was enormous. The result was that the “state artist’s” place of residence and his children’s daycare center were made public. An unfortunate development, but in the self-image of the circles attacked by Böhmermann, a form of self-defense. Another milestone in the decline of morals on all sides.
Poschardt describes how he himself has been the target of Böhmermann, such as when Böhmermann placed his face on a “wanted” poster and gave him a Hitler mustache. Böhmermann, who is lavishly funded by taxpayers, has become a focal point for those calling for reform to the state broadcasters, which take in hundreds of millions of euros per year.
“The public broadcaster must be smaller, more focused, and completely restructured. Böhmermann makes mistakes in his research; his tone of hate and incitement is celebrated by precisely those who want to defend ‘our democracy’ against ‘hate and incitement,”‘ writes Poschardt.
How Bohnermann actually obtained this information will likely never be revealed, but expect that German and other European agencies, with their enormous surveillance powers, will use them in any manner they can to ensure the increasingly discredited establishment maintains its grip on power, especially as parties like the Alternative for Germany (AfD) slide into first place in the polls.
As for Clownwelt, he has remained defiant, and his follower count on YouTube has nearly doubled, now approaching 400,000. His latest video has earned him nearly a million views in just two days.