Berlin: Thousands march in COVID-19 pandemic skeptic protest – DW – 08/03/2024

The history is ranging back much further. Since about the late 2000, early 2010er years Russia and other far right groups heavily coopted the "peace movement" and pumped it full with a mix of conspiracy theories. They have been brewing this crazy mix of conspiracies, esotericism, christian themed anti-abortion and other "family value" far right nonsense and straight up racism and antisemitism. It is improtant to note though, that German esotericism and fascism (and its predeccesors) have a shared history going back into the 19th century.

This movement got a huge boost with Covid and the opposition to the measures, that then got furthered into a general "the current state is illegitimate" sentiment, but for far right reasons, like claiming the third reich is still the legal entity of the state and the federal republic is a limited liabilty company (yes it is that stupid).

They are very much against "Wokeness", abortions, believe in "great replacement" and all the other ugly stuff. Covid is just the catalyst that got them known to the general public.

This is basically editorializing of DW. Those are mostly anti-vaxxers that existed before Covid-19 as well.

But the organizers seem to have mostly switched to an anti-war message, which is sad as this cooptation of that topic makes it nearly impossible to question unnecessary military build up (as opposed to necessary support for Ukraine) without looking like you belong to this group.

There weren't enough alt-right loonies to be relevant in the first place, so they took years and had to work hard to co-opt any insane fringe topic to get them all into one somewhat big movement.

So now it's a total shitshow of fairy tales now that make most hardcore conspiracy nutjobs seem sane.

...or into the sea?

Those people have not moved on since 1933.