This is the Guardian.

Today, a former soldier, a prince, and a politician walk into a hunting lodge.

But what follows is no joke.

On the 27th of November, a video was uploaded onto a video website that was popular amongst far-right conspiracy theorists.

A featured German man with a strong, very, very accent sitting by the Adriatic Sea.

Looking back, one of the big mistakes made by the group plotting a secret insurrection to topple the German government

may have been posting a video about that secret plan on the internet.

And he's just openly chatting about how there was a great, epical upheaval about to come to Germany.

There's a terrible pan-pipe, rainstick soundtrack in the background.

He told his viewers that those people who'd been bullying us, who'd been arresting us, they would finally see their comeuppance.

He said that this great revolution would come to Germany in the coming weeks, he says, hopefully before Christmas.

The man in the footage was Maximilian Ada, and this part is more serious.

He was a former Special Forces soldier, well trained with access to weapons and a powerful network.

Not many people looked at that video from what it seems, but it seems that his plan was real.

Ada is talking very openly about his great plan for a revolution, which you'd think for a serious coup plot is a pretty dumb move.

It sort of makes you wonder whether is this really a serious figure plotting in the shadows?

Or is it just an old man who spent too much time on the internet and is trapped in his little filter bubble?

And you do it all the way to the end.

The answer to those questions came last week, with the biggest anti-extremism raids in modern German history.

Prosecutors claimed the man was part of a group, inspired by a conspiracy theory that few people took seriously,

but which, online and after the pandemic, became the fuel for a violent plot.

The alleged plan failed, but its very existence tells us something about the new power of far right conspiracies to radicalize people, and not just in Germany.

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