Permabanned on almost all internet platforms, Rainer Winkler has been effectively silenced off the internet. He’s also being investigated for disseminating illegal pornography. Will he give up now? And is his situation actually a free speech issue?

The Private Citizen is back! First order of business: An update on what Rainer Winkler (aka. Drachenlord) has been up to while I was travelling through Europe.

First of all, let me thank you for sticking with me through my extended holidays! I am now back in the saddle and I’m planning to release as many extra episodes as I can over the next few months to make up for all the episodes I have missed this year.


This podcast was recorded with a live audience on my Twitch channel. Details on the time of future recordings can usually be found on my personal website. Recordings of these streams get saved to a YouTube playlist for easy watching on demand after the fact.


An Update on the Drachenlord Saga

The last time I’ve talked about Rainer “Drachenlord” Winkler, probably Germany’s most controversial YouTuber, he had just gotten off again on probation for assault charges and was in hiding, releasing controversial porn stories on his blog and sporadically streaming on YouTube. At lot has happened since then.

Illegal Pornography

Reportedly, Winkler is now being investigated for sharing illegal violent pornography and bestiality materials (§ 184a StGB ). Winkler himself has said that his house was raided by police and documents, his computers and his smartphone taken.

Should he be convicted in this case, he’s likely to face jail time (which could be up to three years). It is almost impossible for him to get off on probation once again, even if it is unlikely that his current probabation will be changed to jail time because of this investigation – that’s just not how the German legal system usually works.

It is likely that the violent pornography charge stems from his blog, which was hosted on Blogger, and where he posted a story evidently featuring himself as a medieval lord, raping a woman. In what was likely a reaction to people reporting this story on the blogging platform, Google took the blog down some time after I last talked about Drachenlord and his antics. But since the story was freely available to people in Gemany without an age check before this, he was probably committing a crime regardless of Google taking the blog down because of, what I presume, were terms of service violations.

Banned Off YouTube, Twitch, TikTok, OnlyFans & Snapchat

After his porn blog was taken down, Winkler redoubled his efforts to stream on YouTube and TikTok and he even uploaded a few YouTube videos again. He was mostly streaming video games and also had a few rant streams and videos where, as expected, all he talked about was his hater community.

It did not take long for his YouTube channel to get a community strike for a terms of service violation for an older “Lustlord” video, where Winkler talked about sex. This has happened before and usually the Drachenlord managed to get around all of these strikes one way or another. In several earlier instances, he just waited out the strike and didn’t upload anything for a week. This time however, he decided to circumvent his forced timeout by YouTube. He decided to upload a video to a secondary channel in which, and I’m not making this up because I saw it with my own eyes, he bragged about circumventing his strike with the video in question. This circumvention of a community terms of service violation strike seems to have cost Winkler his prized YouTube account. As has been confirmed by several press outlets, he is now permanently banned on the platform .

Winkler then decided to move his stream to Twitch, where he had been permabanned (although he denies this) several years ago for dropping an N-bomb during a GTA V stream. During this first stream on his new account, he was very quickly taken offline by Twitch again. Presumably permanently.

Drachenlord then streamed on TikTok and was actually starting to earn some money there, but he quickly making the mistake of promoting his OnlyFans account on TikTok in some streams. He apparently was planning to stream gaming on OnlyFans? In any case, when he linked his OnlyFans account in his TikTok bio, he was also banned off that platform, as this apparently constitutes a TOS violation on TikTok. In a matter of hours, his OnlyFans and Snapchat accounts were also deleted – presumably on the initiative by haters from his community.

Is Drachenlord Defeated Now?

An important issue for the “Drachengame”, ie. essentially Winkler’s online followership, is the question if Drachenlord has been “besiegt” (German for defeated, sometimes also spelled “besigt” in this context, referencing Winkler’s generally miserably spelling).

With Winkler’s prized YouTube channel gone, no alternative way of broadcasting to a large audience and making money off this, it seems Winkler has indeed been defeated by his haters. Which is a double edged sword, because even though most of Winkler’s community often say that they want him off the internet, in reality he’s their prime source of internet and, in some cases IRL, amusement. So these people (if they call themselves fans or haters doesn’t really matter) have a vested interest in keeping Winkler online and keeping the phenomenon Drachenlord going. Which is also why Winkler has been able to live off the money he’s generated off his haters for several years now.

It does seem like this might all come to an end now. With Winkler in hiding and nobody knowing for sure where he was streaming from, his views (and thus his income) was already heavily declining before he got banned everywhere. Which is probably where his idea to make money with porn content came from. But now, he’s essentially off the internet and needs to find a job (unlikely) or live off social aid provided by the German state.

I personally think he’s probably resigned himself to finally having to go to jail anyway. He’s probably just trying to somehow keep his head over the water until he inevitably has to go behind bars. But who knows what’s going on in that man’s head, to be honest. He might already be planning his comeback. He certainly vigorously denied having been defeated in one of his last TikTok streams. I think we can be almost one hundred percent sure that he’s planning a comeback after his jail time, if he indeed gets convicted again.

Independently of the question if Winkler will be back or not, there’s also the question if his removal off, what amounts to basically the whole internet, is a free speech issue. Is this censorship or simply the consequence of a personality that most people find reprehensible and a weird attempt to monetise provocation on a large scale?

Producer Feedback

Responding to episode 120, there was a bit of a discussion on the forum about some of the issues I had talked about.

nekr0z said:

You ask a very sound question at the end of the main part: if the elected lawmakers see those who elected them as unable to make adult decisions, how is the whole democratic process supposed to be valid?

If we were talking about Russia, the answer would be clear: the democratic process isn’t supposed to be valid at all. From the point of view of an “elected lawmaker”, common people are indeed not supposed to make any decisions for themselves, and ideally they wouldn’t even want to; decision making is what the elites are for. The “democratic process” is in place to make sure the whole thing looks legit but doesn’t affect actual decision-making in the slightest. There are ways to make sure the common people elect the necessary candidates, and there are safeguards to make sure no rogue commoner can sneak in as a candidate. The more decisions are made for the common people, the less incentive there is for the common people to even think about making the decisions, the better. Common people are there to produce wealth for elites, not to tell elites what to do.

See, from this point of view such a decision makes total sense. From the point of view of an ideally working democratic process, where by electing candidates citizens make sure their interests are represented, it makes none, as you’ve pointed out in the podcast. Which makes me wonder if EU is actually closer to Russia than to an ideally working democratic process, at least in some regards.

astralc chimed in:

I remember a discussion in the discord server (RIP) about (assistive) technologies in the car, and are they helping or not. I still think a lot of the helpers just make the driver stupider - less about laws, more about common sense.

I mean also the notify stuff (I have mobileye in my car, which just beeps in certain situations, and sometimes I see how much it is wrongly identify lanes or distance), but mainly the quasi self driving stuff - lane assist, distance keeping, speed keeping - I tried to drive on a car with it on, and it feel like you are fighting the car.

No technology will have predictable way to behave in all situations - and making drivers idiots won’t help with that.

Also smartifying cars - is it a step for including self-driving cars as the only service as part of the globalist agenda of the great reset?

And Bazzawill added, on an unrelated topic:

I had intended to ask you about Die Toten Hosen after recently learning my favorite punk band The Living End played Die Toten Hosen in Australia and Germany. You also reminded me to check out Die Toten Hosen which I will tomorrow on the way to work.

If you have any thoughts on the things discussed in this or previous episodes, please join our forum and compare notes with other producers. You can also contact me in several other, more private ways.

If you are writing in from Russia, you might want to use my whistleblower contact form.

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Thanks and Credits

I’d like to credit everyone who’s helped with any aspect of this production and thus became a part of the show. I am thankful to the following people, who have supported this episode through Patreon and PayPal and thus keep this show on the air:

Galteran, Rhodane the Insane, Steve Hoos, Butterbeans, Michael Small, 1i11g, Jonathan M. Hethey, Michael Mullan-Jensen, Dave, Jaroslav Lichtblau, Jackie Plage, Sandman616, ikn, Bennett Piater, Vlad, Rizele, avis, Joe Poser, Dirk Dede, Kai Siers, Fadi Mansour, David Potter, Mika, Cam, MrAmish, RJ Tracey, Captain Egghead, Rick Bragg, RikyM, Barry Williams, Jonathan, Robert Forster, astralc, krunkle, Superuser, D, Florian Pigorsch and Eric Le Lay.

Many thanks to my Twitch subscribers: Mike_TheDane, mtesauro, pkeymer, BaconThePork, redeemerf, l_terrestris_jim, Galteran and jonathane4747.

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Podcast Music

The show’s theme song is Acoustic Routes by Raúl Cabezalí. It is licensed via Jamendo Music. Other music and some sound effects are licensed via Epidemic Sound. This episode’s ending song is First Horizon by ELFL.