Infiltrating Nazis for fun and profit
In late 2017, my friend asked me if I wanted to see a nazi cult. They had found a “National Socialist” (so called, they posited, because nazi had become a pejorative word and as such a misnomer.) discord server being advertised on reddit. For the last 2 days at least, my friend had been conning them.
I assumed I’d find a bunch of different pompous assholes jacking off each other’s egos and exclaiming their superiority over everybody else.
Instead what I found seemed at first like an accepting community. Their “hey, welcome!” attitude appeared directly counter to the inherently antagonistic nature of their jokes and belief system, but nobody seemed to acknowledge the cognitive dissonance. I was not in the group that they deemed lesser, who they blamed for their misfortune, so I was accepted with open arms. I could definitely see how somebody who never felt welcome in anywhere else could be convinced to stay, and never give themselves the distance to acknowledge the monstrosity of that decision. Who’s need for someone to blame for their suffering, deflected off of corruption and war, placed their feelings of betrayal, frustration, and ire squarely in the realm of racial politics. Their beliefs, it seems, revolved not around the supremacy of whiteness, but in the blaming of black people (& as such the systems that perpetuate their prosperity) for their problems. The white supremacy seemed secondary; sometimes like a defense mechanism. A collective of loners. Comforting eachother when they were down, offered sympathy when somebody complained. All while having of the most cruel, abhorrent, and dehumanizing beliefs in history. Over and over again, I would read something empathetic from them, or some apparent moment of clarity, only for the same person to say something that made me stick to my stomach.
It was lead by a man in Missouri who stated he had been a nationalist for 13 years, since 2003. That, he said, was when he realized how society worked and he couldn’t believe that less people hadn’t yet figured it out. Maybe his first name was Max, I don’t recall, it’s been a long 4 years. Let’s say his name was Max
Max would regularly pine after his ex-girlfriend, whom he’d harassed to the point that she had to abandoned her social media presence, oscillating between morning of the lost relationship, half-hearted declarations that he’d be better, and creepy egotistic assertions that they were meant to be together. She was POC. When Max’d post another picture of her, saved off an abandoned facebook account, others would react with understanding, support, comfort. Even as they would share memes depicting black people as gorillas, and discuss their intellectual inferiority as intellectual fact. Max molested his 11 year old daughter, and bragged to us that we could not report it and try to give custody back to her mother, as he was friends with all the local cops. He said go ahead, go tell the cops. Who are they going to believe, some stranger on the internet? Or their friend. Told us cop in his town’s police union, friends with the sheriff a town over.
Likely due in addition to some jovial death threats, we went for a different tactic: Subterfuge. We made throw away accounts and entered as strangers, pretending to be people excited to finally find a community of people who knew/believed the same things they did.
One person was trans, which intrigued us, we did not expect a neonazi cult to be accepting of trans people; but. it seemed that placing the blame of societal ills so squarely on race, they had no ideological need for the persecution of trans people. They even said stuff along the lines of “see, we’re not backwards, we can’t be evil, we even support trans people.” so when places like the BBC says things like “we’re not evil for persecuting trans people, see, we accept lesbians” know that it’s the same excuse used by literal nazis. After conversations back and forth trying to understand how a trans person comes to the conclusion of nazism, the only other trans person and us ended up unmasking, and it turns out that she was a queer communist who was in the chat for the same morbid curiosity and hope of hurting nazism that we were.
Max’s right-hand man was his childhood friend. Having crawled back to him after ending up alone in his childhood town with no other friends. We talked on and off, even in DMs. He’d come to me when he was in pain, and it was obvious he was being heavily manipulated. I tried hard to get him to realize the delusion of the group and ideology he was a part of, but such turned out fruitless. It boiled down to one sentiment, “I can’t move away from this, these are the only people I have left”
We want fascist redemption arcs so bad, we want to be the one who taught a nazi how to be good again. But I don’t think we’re going to have much luck rehabilitating nazis until we rehabilitate the society that creates them.
Realizing that kindness would bear no fruit for us, as impatient we were, we took a different approach, and after becoming part of the friend group, after gaining everyone’s trust, we spammed the server with furry porn until we were banned. We then did it again. And again. Eventually, after at most a couple weeks, due to the shitposting of like 3 people, after multiple replacements of a link & attempts to hide it, they stopped trying to have a public link. After compelling the removal of avenues of recruitment, we considered the operation a success, and left them, considerably more paranoid, exhausted, and fragmented than when we started out. A few months later in February 2020, discord banned multiple nazi servers in one fellow swoop. Now, after What we’ve seen since of Law Enforcement’s approach to nazis and rapists means Max likely wasn’t lying about the uselessness of reporting it. So whenever somebody is trying to ban porn or anonymity, just remember: they’re effective against nazis”
We often think that isolation is a good punishment for nazism, but that doesn’t really work when the nazi groups are more inviting to social outcasts than anybody else.
It’s true that you can cut things off, but in order to do so, you must do so at the root,
as Angela Davis once said, “Radical simply means “grasping things at the root.”
If you do not, what kills you will become self sustaining.
And will blame you for the death.
