Intelligence does not make you immune to propaganda, that’s not something I said or even brought up.

In your comment above you said “That completely downplays the intelligence of east Germans”.

What I was saying/implying is that east Germans are smart enough to understand what the policies AfD proposes mean and that the AfD proposes Nazi level policies

But as I’m arguing it doesn’t matter how smart they are if the propaganda is good enough. Even otherwise intelligent Germans aren’t immune to propaganda which cloaks AfD’s true nature. This is plenty of AfD voters. They have fallen for AfD propaganda which appeals to emotion, then suggests traditional media are lying, exagerating, or demonizing them. They have been convinced migration is the biggest issue facing the country, they think AfD is simply a right wing anti-migration party.

If you’ve been on the internet long enough, you’ll know the strategy well enough. They ‘hide their power level’ to quote Stormfront and they also cloak their nazism in humour and irony, allowing it to enter the mainstream.

For example, do non-political people even blink anymore when you mention ‘cultural Marxism’? And yet that’s a neo-Nazi term, derived from the Nazi term Kulturbolschewismus. IRC Hitler literally discusses it in Mein Kampf. But if you mention that, you’re inevitably exagerating, it means something else, you’re accused of crying wolf, or of trying to censor people.

Things decline in the hands of the moderates or conservatives until they become so bad that people become desperate.

A drowning man will grasp at a straw.

AfD propaganda has convinced otherwise normal Germans that only Afd is willing to adress the real problems the country faces. Because people are often desperate, because people are emotional, because they have been convinced to no longer trust traditional media, they are willing to take a gamble and ignore all the warnings.

“What’s the worst that could happen?”, they think. “It can’t be worse than this.” But it can always get worse. Much much worse.