Your kids are watching nazislop on TikTok

During the pandemic, far-right extremists spent a lot of time trying to radicalize young internet users into exploring more esoteric forms of Nazism. They did this largely by making memes for children on sites like iFunny and Reddit and by writing long, annoying Substack posts for Dimes Square downtown scene hipsters. And, unfortunately, it worked pretty well. This stuff has been everywhere you look for years, popping up during mass shootings and crypto coin giveaways. But following Charlie Kirk’s death in September, all of this garbage has suddenly become impossible to avoid.

Know Your Meme dates the Nazi occultist wave starting around 2021-2022, which gels with what I saw, as well. I first came across it in 2022, while I was reporting out a piece for Fast Company about an extremely dumb crypto project called the Remilia Corporation, which was selling NFTs heavily influenced by fascist spiritualism, 4chan creepypasta, and, of course, the anime Serial Experiments Lain. Writing that piece was when I also first encountered the angelicism01 Substack, an outrageously racist stream of consciousness blog that, according a piece last month from The Cut, is written by an impossibly pathetic man from the UK named Jonty Tiplady. Apparently, Tiplady’s racist bloviating was influential enough among the Dimes Square set, however, that he was able to start a psuedo cult of sorts. “For the four women, 01 operated as a kind of remote guru, curating a creative young person’s life in New York from afar,” as The Cut put it. Interestingly enough, Tiplady has since deleted his 2022 piece titled, “Somebody Please Columbine The Entire The Cut Editorial Staff.” Wonder why!

All of this is to say that there was a concerted effort during lockdown to redpill users on a new kind of violent accelerationism, as well as extremely niche Nazism mysticism. Why? Why not. Yuga Labs, the startup behind the Bored Ape NFT line, had to spend years fighting off allegations that their name is a reference to Kali Yuga, a Nazi bastardization of the Hindu world age cycle. Doesn’t matter if it was or wasn’t, the neo-Nazis claimed it either way. Groypers started going viral by injecting references to Nordic mythology into racist videos, usually set to MGMT’s “Little Dark Age.” In 2022, a mass shooter in Buffalo, New York, used weapons covered in references to these ideas, including the Sonnenrad, or “Black Sun” Nazi symbol. There was a whole TikTok trend in 2023, where users were making aesthetic fan cams of Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, hoping to dupe unsuspecting TikTok users into sharing them. And that same year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had to fire an aide who inserted Sonnenrad into one of his videos.

After Kirk was gunned down this fall, this strain of Nazi imagery went into overdrive. As I argued in a recent Rolling Stone piece, young far-right extremists, who saw Kirk as a moderate and a sellout, have pounced on Kirk’s death, using it as an opening in the intra-Republican culture war, filling up platforms like X with AI-generated Kirk memes. Some are beginning to speculate they may have created so many memes that they accidentally poisoned AI video generators, causing them to spit out Kirk’s face by default. There’s some precedent for this, it’s called “AI inbreeding.”

The Kirk memes, or “the Kirkflation of 2025,” as I saw one X user call it, collided with Gen Z Nazi mysticism in late September. A user shilling the Solana cryptocoin started an X account called KIRKINATOR, using AI to animate a video series about a cyborg Kirk coming back to life to kill liberals and black people, hang out with Andrew Tate, and travel to the lost city of Agartha. The most viral video on the account depicts cyborg Kirk and Alex Jones flying to Agartha, where they’re greeted by a morbidly obese Vice President JD Vance, Hulk Hogan, the mythological figure Yakub from Nation of Islam, John McAfee, and a white version of FBI director Kash Patel. In the video, Vance, dressed as the pope, anoints Kirk as a Sonnenrad spins behind him and a supercut of Nazi occultist brainrot flashes on screen, set to a nightcore remix of t.A.T.u.’s “All The Things She Said.” Sorry to throw all of that at you in a single paragraph, but this is just how racist and insane we’ve let the internet become in the 2020s. This is honestly just the baseline background radiation for most major social platforms now.

One X user I came across recently compared the Kirk edits to #DicksOutForHarambe and the Agartha videos to Major League Gaming YouTube poops. Which feels accurate to me. “Normal” memes in 2025 — niche, bizarre, and extremely racist.

Agartha comes from a 19-century idea that the earth is hollow and at the core is a lost ancient city. It’s not explicitly a Nazi thing, but it was a popular idea among German occultists in the 20th century, who saw it as a promised land for the Aryan race. And it’s very popular with Gen Z edgelords on TikTok here in the 21st century. In one popular TikTok, an AI-generated Kirk FaceTimes a user and asks the viewer to drink a can of white Monster energy drink and defend the gates of Agartha. In another, Nazi soldiers pour white Monster on runes in Antartica to travel to Agartha. All of the videos use a trending audio of a remix of Men At Work’s “Down Under.” (Because Agartha is underground, one would assume.)

Making all of this even more confusing is that these Agarthan videos are circulating at the same time that the AI-generated “We Are Charlie Kirk” song has become a meme among leftists and apolitical shitposters, after it was already trending among mainstream MAGA boomers. Before it became an ironic meme, it was getting millions of — seemingly genuine — views on Spotify and YouTube. And, yes, there are “Agartha” remixes of “We Are Charlie Kirk” going around right now, as well.

The point being that you can’t really escape any of this now. Even making fun of it, referencing ironically, plays into its spread. Case in point: The Global Network on Extremism and Technology warned last year that Nazi mysticism and iconography was spreading across TikTok in South and Southeast Asia, largely in the form of semi-ironic anime videos. Last month, a 17-year-old attacked a school mosque in Jakarta with explosives, injuring over 50 people. The boy was arrested with a toy gun that had "14 words. For Agartha," written on it, “14 words,” being another neo-Nazi reference. And, just this week, a high schooler (I assume) at a Catholic high school in Pennsylvania made an Instagram page called @mchs_agartha, where they’ve started posting Nazi brainrot videos listing the teachers “allowed and banned from Agartha.” One of the teachers in the video, one “banned” from Agartha, has been photoshopped to have a hook nose and Jewish locks. I’ve reached out to the high school the account is targeting, but haven’t heard back. I am not totally quite sure how to explain what these posts even are if they call me back. Is it a dumb racist Instagram? A harbringer of something darker? It’s hard to tell, but, as always, everyone’s in on the joke until someone isn’t and everything’s just a dumb meme until it hurts someone.

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In an issue back in 2022, I argued that if you looked at Tumblr’s user decline following the 2018 porn ban and subsequent growth on platforms like Reddit and Twitter (pre-Musk) — and the extremely bizarre drama on those sites that followed — you could actually see a specific group of people moving from one site to another. And I posited that these people will bring all of their messy infighting to wherever they end up.

“I have wondered if the bulk of community moderation problems on major social networks is actually about managing the toxic behavior of the same 5-10 million people who move around the web being terrible to each other,” I wrote at the time. “And, for what’s it’s worth, I do know one truly horrible Tumblr user who was an active fandom bully on that site who is now doing the same stuff on Twitter.”

Boy, was that prescient! Because this weekend, X users went wild for a thread they’re now calling the “Jamaican Masterpiece thread,” posted by user @burningviolins. The user has since deleted their account, but here’s a screenshot that should give you the gist of what it was about.

As is always the case, @burningviolins started getting a little too silly with it and users called bullshit. Former Tumblr users eventually recognized @burningviolins from their time on Tumblr going by the usernames @littlegreenfag and @prksoda, where they got caught lying about being Jewish and being related to Holocaust survivors. If you want to go further down this rabbit hole, you can click here to see the original Tumblr callout post about them and you can click here to see what they were posting on Reddit a few years ago.

But here’s a real fun twist. @burningviolins was, apparently, very obsessed with the actor Adrien Brody, to the point they may have even commissioned a bodypillow of Brody. Which is why some users are wondering the whole “Jamaican Masterpiece” idea may have come from Brody’s infamous fake-rasta impression on Saturday Night Live back in 2003 🤔🤔🤔

Rosie Nguyen, better known online as @jasminericegirl, founded the creator economy startup Fanhouse, before resigning in 2023. She’s sort of been floating around as an influencer/X personality ever since. Last week, she was pilloried for announcing that she was joining generative-AI music platform Suno as the head of creators. Nguyen wrote a big ol’ post, lamenting that she wished “Suno existed 20 years ago when I was a kid in elementary school, showing strangers songs I wrote with no way to produce them. But I'm really, really happy that it exists today, for all of the other kids who might need it.”

Thousands of people have since pointed out that major chart-topping songs released in the last 15 years were produced either partially or sometimes completely on a phone, oftentimes using free software. TL;DR skill issue.

Nguyen has been posting through it all weekend, making the same argument every AI evangelist makes, that AI tools “lower the barrier to entry.” Which, look, I’m gonna be earnest on main here for a sec. The creative process, particularly with music, the act of lowering the barrier to entry yourself and seeing what happens, that’s the whole point. That’s the fun part! Arguably, the only part.

Anyways, Nguyen decided to respond to all the backlash by posting a video on X of herself playing piano. Which didn’t go down so well. One user replied, “At least we can tell you def didn’t use AI for this.”

Speaking of AI…

Some weird guy made a new AI-generated doll to play with. This one’s name is Michelle and she’s a podcaster or something. Nothing super surprising here. The guys pumping these out are only interested in generating women, obviously, and I’m sure if you’re suffering from the same kind of psychosexual dysfunction as them this must hit hard as hell.

The funny bit here is that another weird X guy got mad that they put nose rings on Michelle, writing, “hard pass.” To which the original poster replied, “I can’t evaluate the particular psychological aspects, but the female mystique is present.” I assume he used AI to reply.

When the AI crash comes, we may all lose our retirement savings, but at least these guys will also lose their girlfriends.

X user @terupancake made one of the most extensive callout posts I’ve seen in a long time. It’s a 42-page Google Doc alleging that popular anime smut artist @Asamiarts traces AI images and even makes fake timelapse videos. You can read the whole thing here.

P.S. here’s a 15-pound cabbage.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***