Conversations with a young 'nazi' Pt 1

story time

With his permission, I am going to make a boy famous.

He said I could use whatever name I wanted, but out of my ambient maternal instinct for all living things, I will refer to him as ‘K’.

K is 24. He is from Illinois and lives 2 hours outside Chicago. He never went to college. He works in a Walmart distribution centre. He operates a forklift in the frozen section to carry yoghurts, frozen meat and other food products. He stacks boxes 3-4 nights a week. Usually, he finishes his shifts around 1:00 am. On his way out, sometimes he bumps into a girl who can’t be much older than 19. She is short and small and reminds him of Bambi. She probably grew up in a farm and has not been spoiled by the darkness of the deep web.

She is his type. Maybe she’d like K if he bothered to talk to her, but K knows that not every flower is meant to be picked. He is worried he wouldn’t be good for her.

When he goes home, he can’t sleep for hours. Sometimes, his friends come, and they go out together. Many of them are foreign; some are Mexican.

If he is not hanging out with them, he calls me.

He never puts video on, but I did the first time we spoke. I showed him my cat. Later one night, when he is drunk or high or both, he will confess that that was when he knew he was falling for me.

We talk for hours and ask the sort of mundane questions we used to ask strangers on the internet in high school. It’s an experience I haven’t had in decades but viscerally remember as intoxicating as a teen.

There is only one problem. K is a nazi.

He told me the first time I met him at Sovereign House in Dimes Square. I was in NYC for the elections, and Milady and Polimarket were hosting an election watch party. K flew to NYC just for that. It was his first time in the Big Apple. I was there to pick up stories and soak up the atmosphere.

He came to meet other ‘Miladies’, people loosely associated with the cryptic NFT. As an online community, it’s well-known that it has a lot of people who claim to be far right. I say claim because many look like grinning teenagers looking to provoke the status quo. As

Katherine Dee

has said before, their observed politics are liberal; the way they live their life, the company they keep.

K protests when I accuse him of LARPing as a nazi. He starts sending me links to conspiracy blogs which even current, Elon-brained, twitter blocks me from clicking.

I started talking to him initially because I wanted to interview him for a piece I was writing on Milady. Compared to many other Americans I encountered in New York, he was surprisingly verbal, with very high memory recall and no filter—a journalist’s dream.

Early on, I got him to confess the real motives behind his anti-social politics. He said since 8th grade his goal was to be the least normie possible, that’s how he ended up there. He was nonchalant about it. He said he was an angsty teen, he wanted to stand out, he was chronically online, he wanted to believe whatever is ‘the most controversial yet true’. He used to think being anti-racist was controversial, but every large company now supports race mixing. So he turned to fascism to own the libs.

I am worried that by giving him attention because of his anti-social politics, and especially by baptizing him a young nazi, I am encouraging him.

More than that though, I am bored when he erupts in conspiracy talk. It reminds me of all the reply bros under my Facebook posts in university, whose obvious libidinal motives in trolling me eluded me at the time.

I am not in university anymore, though. I have challenged myself to bother when people disagree with me in earnest. So I continue chatting.

K says he likes crypto because it's the closest thing his generation has seen to the Wild West or the Gold Rush. Crypto also takes monetary power away from the government. If you are too racist, they take your bank account, but they can never take your bitcoins.

I have been obsessing over the link between crypto and extremism and want to write more about it. K asked me how much I would get paid for these articles. I tell him, he scoffs.

He says he makes more money working in a Walmart freezer than a nurse in London. He is correct. He asks me whether I own any crypto myself. I don’t; I put all my savings in a stocks and shares ISA. He asks me how much. I tell him. He mocks me.

Since spring he has lost and made and then lost again about $50K in crypto. At the party, he said many people there had become rich from crypto. We recall two boys I met, who created an AI NFT called George Droyd, which is meant to be George Floyd but from the future. He regrets not cashing in on that earlier, as it shot off.

This is how all of these memecoins, shitcoins and NFTs work. Someone comes up with a new idea, rumps it up in online chatrooms, creates a ‘lore’ out of thin air- what in the normie world we call ‘marketing’- and gets very online people to buy into it with the promise that they are invested in it for the long haul. Of course, the creator inadvertently isn’t and cashes out as soon as the coin's price gets a bump.

K says that as a woman, I would have a massive advantage in crypto. It is mostly men, and whenever a girl breaks into the scene, she effortlessly galvanises attention for her preferred shitcoin. He says this could be my saving grace, rescuing me from a life of Westminster poverty and media grift-shifts at ungodly hours.

I make a mental note to explain to him how I feed on clout when we get to know each other better but for now I don’t want to stop his flow. I am focused on extracting more information about his crypto habits.

He accuses me of being a ‘foid’ trying to manipulate him. He is a ‘truecel chud’ and I don’t get him.

I seen on your instagram you said you turn rightwing boys to the other side. How’s that going?

Ah, I see he’s scrolled all the way back to my Covid-era photos. I have a photo of me in a red bikini running carelessly on a beach in Greece. It was one of the landmarks of my life-long joke/story/brand of the left-wing woman who speaks to the right. The caption said, ‘turning your right-wing sons red since 2012’. That was the year I migrated to the UK.

It started as a joke in university. My friends were horrified when I, the campus’s socialist princess, chose the only red chino-wearing public schoolboy in the Student Union to deflower me and be my first boyfriend. Their reaction fuelled my own inner contrarian. I found it funny. In hindsight, it was a stroke of genius that I started creating my own lore early on.

Over the years, I continued to keep the far left close and the hard right closer- for research, you understand. My enemies would be forgiven for thinking posh right-wing Tories were my gateway drug to fascist Walmart working crypto chuds.

That would be astonishing performance art.

TBC.

Read part 2.

Read part 3.

Read part 4.