Everyone Loves Hitler
What’s the deal with non-white neo-Nazis?
In a way, Caleb Liam Vasquez was a very ordinary American teenager. He grew up in a big house in a masterplanned suburb called Eastlake Trails. All the houses there are big. They’ve all got lush front gardens, palm trees practically spilling out of the ground. Eastlake Trails is ringed with exciting retail centers on three sides, but to the east you can drive down to the lake and look out at the empty hills, rising up into the great Californian wilderness. It’s safe there. The weather is perfect and the people are friendly, but Caleb spent most of his life inside, watching a Dutch cartoon about three socially awkward sisters called Ongezellig, posting about Ongezellig online, getting frustrated that the online Ongezellig community was being taken over by normies who didn’t really get it, and fantasizing about death. He wanted to kill large numbers of people. Exterminate everyone he saw, turn all his happy attractive peers into heaps of inert biological pulp. He also wanted to die. That was the best part of the fantasy: after gunning down as many subhumans as possible, he would put the barrel to his head, and finally it would all be over. The indignity of being a shorter than average man. The unfairness that can only be made good in blood.
Most of his heroes were mass shooters, but another was Adolf Hitler. “He is the greatest man to ever walk this Earth,” he wrote. “I only hope that we can finish what he had once started and make him proud.” On the 18th of May, 2026, he and another teenager he’d met online attempted to finish what Hitler had started by murdering three people outside a mosque in San Diego, then getting in their car and shooting at a Samoan landscaper on the street. Finally, still livestreaming everything they were doing, they shot themselves.
What made this attack unusual is not that American boys from the sunny suburbs are turning into Hitler-worshipping mass murderers; that’s more or less expected. The strange thing is that this one was called Vasquez. A large chunk of his inevitable manifesto is devoted to “shitskin immigrants,” the “spics” who “come with complete disregard for the country they come to” and “DO. NOT. FUCKING. BELONG. HERE.” His only religion, he said, was the white race. But he was Mexican. He wasn’t unaware of this fact. “You’ll probably just see me as a larping spic,” he wrote, “but that’s honestly fine and I could care less.”
The other strange thing about the attack has to do with one of the victims. Amin Abdullah was the mosque’s security guard; when the two shooters approached the mosque, Abdullah triggered the alarm and tried to fight them off. His actions might have saved the lives of the 140 students inside the building, and he sacrificed his life in the process. Which is why only the most frenzied of right-wing commentators have felt the need to point out that he was, on Facebook, liking pictures of Adolf Hitler captioned with sentiments like “Do you now understand, why I did what I did!?” The implication is that whatever dodgy private opinions he held should invalidate his actual personal heroism, which seems desperate. Still, it’s weird. During the Cultural Revolution in China, rival Red Guards units would attack each other with clubs and guns, both sides screaming “Long live Chairman Mao!” In the West, we do things differently. Here, we have politically motivated firefights between two non-white people, both of them devoted to Adolf Hitler.
It used to be possible for progressives to claim that there was some kind of clear ethno-political line running through the world. On one side, the politics of whiteness, which are regressive, exclusionary, resentful, the cold withered hand of a dying order, based in fear of the other and the desire to chop the world into neat little parcels surrounded by white picket fences. On the other side, the politics of the global majority, which are warm and joyful, open to everyone, and based on principles like community and laughter and using lots of interesting seasonings in your food. The reality has turned out to be much weirder than that. The 2024 election really did seem to go down along racial lines: the places where Kamala Harris improved on Biden’s vote share tended to be leafy, affluent, and overwhelmingly white. Meanwhile, in immigrant communities, and Latino border towns, and multicultural metropolises, the voters shifted decisively towards Trump. Here in Britain, the most fiercely anti-migration Home Secretary in recent history is called Shabhana Mahmood. One of the leaders of our insurgent right-wing party has promised to protect Britain’s Christian heritage; one of his proposals is a law to prevent churches being converted into mosques. He’s a Muslim named Zia Yusuf. One of the party’s shadowier ideologues is called Raheem Kassam. Whatever psychological swamp is out there, producing these politics, it isn’t quite fear of the other.
Still, the rise of the non-white white supremacist is surprising. It feels wrong that the most influential rapper of the 2000s is now releasing tracks titled “Heil Hitler.” Or that you’ll have a group of what are essentially children’s entertainers, some of the most popular children’s entertainers in the world, most of them conspicuously non-white, singing along to it in the back of a limo in Miami and throwing Nazi salutes. Or that people with names like Mauricio Garcia or Sai Varshith Kandula keep decking themselves in Nazi paraphernalia and then going out to commit acts of terror. How on earth did we end up here?
Until recently, Adolf Hitler had a very particular meaning in mainstream European and American society. He stood for a kind of moral test. What would you have done, when the Nazis were on the march? Would you have hidden people? Would you have stood up against them? Or would you have lived quietly and pretended not to know what was going on? Hitler is the name for the human capacity for weakness in the face of evil. That test already existed while Adolf Hitler was still directing tank columns from the Wolfsschanze.
In her 1941 essay “Who Goes Nazi?”, Dorothy Thompson tried to imagine what kind of person would be tempted by the consolations of fascism, and which would not. Her conclusion is that happy, confident, popular people who are content with their position in the class system will never go Nazi, but any kind of disaffected striver or anyone with any kind of inward restlessness is in danger of succumbing to hate. “Mr. C is a brilliant and embittered intellectual. He was a poor white-trash Southern boy, a scholarship student at two universities where he took all the scholastic honors but was never invited to join a fraternity. His colleagues have admired his brains and exploited them, but they have seldom invited him—or his wife—to dinner. He would rise high in a Nazi regime.” This is a very cruel portrayal. She might not have been wrong.
In other places, though, he doesn’t carry the exact same moral dread. Quick: what’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think about former Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler? If you answered something other than “blue jeans, reasonably priced polo shirts, and a wide selection of international footwear brands,” it’s likely that you’re not from the city of Nagpur in India’s Maharashtra State. Nagpur is home to three outlets of a menswear store called Hitler The Brand Fashion, plus another called The Hitler Point. Or Haldwani in Uttarakhand, where you can get a wide selection of leisure and athletic clothes at Hitler Reloaded. Or Kurnool in Andhra Pradesh, where you can pick up something wavy at either Hitler & Planet or Hitler Denim. Or Ahmedabad in Gujarat, which might be India’s capital of Hitler, featuring a Hitler Men’s Wear, a Hitler Menz Wear, and a Hitler Shoes. For India’s most intriguingly-named menswear store named after Hitler, though, you need to go to Hyderabad, where you can drop into a modern mall near Kacheguda station and explore the premium brands at Hitler The Symbol of Passion.
Occasionally an Israeli tourist will run into one of these exciting emporiums of Hitler and throw a fit, and then the Anti-Defamation League or some other group will helicopter in a bunch of tactical lawyers and PR representatives, to engage in a comprehensive campaign of hectoring until every shopkeeper on every dusty back-street in Uttar Pradesh understands and acknowledges the suffering of the Jews of Europe. And maybe they’ll even pretend to, for a while, but it’s a losing battle.
Say someone who happens to not be Indian runs into… let’s say it’s an ice cream stand named after Aurangzeb. You can explain what he did to Guru Tegh Bahadur and Sambhaji and half his own family, but they won’t really get it. That’s just history; that’s just the past, which is where all the dead people are kept. For every menswear store called Hitler Delicious that gets shut down in Telangana, there’s a bookshop somewhere else that’s just started promoting Mein Kampf as a guide to getting ahead in business. In India, comparing someone to Hitler doesn’t mean that they’ve failed the great moral test of their lives. Hitler means someone who’s a bit bossy. Someone basically decent but who seems to get an inordinate kick out of telling other people what to do. The people who think differently are less and less significant every year. The more Europe recedes from the international stage, the more the great demon of Europe’s own history is loosed on the world.
This kind of cheerful ignorance is probably not why there’s now a universal global youth monoculture consisting of games, anime, sped up pop music, AI-generated videos of Charlie Kirk hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein, using the word “bro” as a pronoun (“Bro thought bro was cooking”), Adolf Hitler, murder, and dying. There’s something much more sinister at work. But hopefully it should demonstrate the deep insufficiency of the standard progressive explanation for this kind of thing, which is that when non-white people start identifying with Nazism, it’s because they’re trying to make space for themselves in a deeply racist world by establishing some kind of “proximity to whiteness.” Which is, in fact, deeply provincial—by and for white people who still think they’re the center of the moral universe. If an ugly rhetorical instrument like “whiteness” is useful at all here, it’s because it names the normative project that used to prevent large numbers of people from idolizing Adolf Hitler, and which is now faltering. Maybe you could get a better idea of what’s behind the non-white neo-Nazis by just finding out what they themselves have to say on the subject. Here’s the unofficial anthem of the movement, Kanye West’s “Heil Hitler”:
With all of the money and fame
I still can’t get my kids back
With all of the money and fame
I still don’t get to see my children
So I became a Nazi
Yеah bitch I’m the villain
Nigga Heil Hitler
Nigga Heil Hitler
All my niggas Nazis
Nigga Heil Hitler
It’s an amazing track. A hundred years of work on the psychology of fascism, and he just comes out and says it all. Why did you become a Nazi, Mr. West? “Well, you have to read all my ideological statements as a psychosexual symptom; what’s really going on when I talk about Hitler is that I feel emasculated, my narcissism’s been wounded, I’ve been rejected by women and cut off from the principle of paternity; despite my own personal strength and potency I’m powerless before a state that has the ability to reach into my private life and tear me out of the patriarchal family structure; in a sense I’ve been cucked by the state, which is something I find simultaneously infuriating and erotically compelling; and I’m dealing with this profound woundedness by identifying myself with the forces of all-powerful violence that I privately know myself to lack, reframing my personal humiliation as a willing act of subordination to the collective; if you want to know more about why I’m doing this, please consult Reich (1933), Fromm (1941), and Theweleit (1977).” In the video he arranges a crowd of half-naked animal-headed men in military formation, all barking “Heil Hitler” in unison. Here it is at last, the homoerotic masculine collective, all hard gleaming flesh, into which you can subsume your injured subjectivity. But Kanye had to pay them all to act out this particular scene. A lot of them are probably very glad the video’s been all but banned online.
People don’t get wrapped up in this psychic structure despite the fact that they personally happen to not be white; if anything, it might make you more susceptible. Not all cases of wounded subjectivity end up expressing themselves as fascism; the world is full of totally deranged people, the hollow ranting shells of human beings, whose madness has managed to take the form of a totally inoffensive politics acceptable at any dinner party. But if you’re from an ethnic minority background, then it’s much more likely that race—which is, after all, something you experience more often than other people—will start to involve itself in whatever psychosis you’re brooding.
Of course, not everyone’s fascist psychosis is as rich as Kanye’s. The new generation of multiracial white supremacists aren’t really that interested in economic corporatism or the unfairness of the Treaty of Versailles; even the herrenvolk stuff is malleable and optional. The thing that really gets them going is naming the Jew. As far as I can tell, every single child on the planet is spending twelve hours a day watching ethnically ambiguous streamers chatter away about Jews. When a group of teens encounters one of their online idols in the flesh, they all gather around him and spontaneously start chanting “Fuck the Jews!” over and over again. Youth culture is just anime and antisemitism now; it’s in the deep grammar of how these people experience the world. Cheap bad food is goyslop. People who don’t look at the exact same deranged websites as you are goyslaves. The Jews are everywhere and behind everything; they’re why your life is like this, instead of something better. If you step on a turd in the street, it’s because this is how the Jews have chosen to fuck with you today. The only thing you can say for certain isn’t part of their plan, the only point of stability in a Jew-haunted cosmos, is Adolf Hitler.
It’s very tempting to blame all this on the war in Gaza. Two years of kids in filthy tents, body parts in the rubble, medical crews executed and buried in the desert: it’s been enough to wear out whatever remained of the post-Holocaust taboo on this kind of thing. It doesn’t help that Israel really does seem to have manipulated the United States into fighting a war on Iran that’s not even slightly in the American interest. But these antisemites aren’t appalled; most of the time they’re not even angry. They’re enjoying their antisemitism. It’s fun to ferment dark theorems about the Jews until your whole brain’s fizzing; thinking this way comes with some kind of payoff.
Antisemitism is a loser ideology. The best antisemites are all bitter, thwarted, resentful losers. Louis-Ferdinand Céline, a sexual and artistic failure, was hounded by critics whenever he tried to produce a new work. “The great French critics!… The finest flower of criticism!… Those who decide upon the Grand Prizes!… Aren’t they all Jews? All a bunch of stupid bastards, those Jews! All of them are losers, suckers, oddities! each one of them is responsible for the killing of at least fifteen works… They exert their vengeance… They crush…” There’s a reason antisemites tend not to be sunny, cheerful people; it’s why someone like Nietzsche could never have been an antisemite, and why Kanye West—whose best music is all in a Nietzschean mood of total hyperbolic self-confidence, first declaring himself a genius and then a god—stopped making bangers at exactly the same time as his Hitlerite turn.
Antisemites imagine themselves as victims. But the Jews are victims too: the officially designated victims of the twentieth century. Jews are the people whose entire identity has come to revolve around victimhood; we’re the ones who will skydive into a Third World rice paddy to make sure the locals understand the horrors of Auschwitz. By hating the Jews, you get to enjoy all the consolations of victimhood, while also safely displacing your own sense of being a loser onto someone else. It’s the Jews, not me, who are always whining about their racialized suffering. They’re the annoying ones. Why are they so self-obsessed? Which is why, around the world, antisemites of every hue and creed are writing resentful screeds about all the women who’ve wronged them, following in the footsteps where Philip Roth and Saul Bellow led.
This nasty little mirror at the center of antisemitism is, more or less, the entire mechanism behind the non-white white supremacist. How do they deal with the obvious contradiction in being an immigrant nativist or a non-Aryan Nazi? They don’t; that contradiction is what keeps the whole thing running. Look at Caleb Liam Vasquez‘s manifesto. It’s hard to read the thing without noticing just how much he’s obsessed with the notion of his own biological inferiority. He is, as he puts it, a victim of “genetic cursing.” One built-in hereditary trait—being short—has determined the whole scope of his life, even though it’s not his fault, even though he had nothing to do with it. “Those who don’t make the cut from not being quite attractive enough are cursed to an existence of perpetual torture just because a couple centimeters in their face weren’t a certain way, they got the wrong chromosomes, or they got unlucky with their genetics which were passed onto them by their parents. Genetic determinism is the most cruel, unfair, brutal reality to accept and women don’t make it any easier.”
Vasquez thinks this is unfair, and that women ought to give him a chance, but they never will; the verdict of nature is so absolute that, at eighteen, Vasquez doesn’t see any point in waiting to see if things get better in adulthood. He will always be “treated like a subhuman.” The best thing to do with his worthless life is use it to destroy as many other people as possible. Because of their cruelty, the tall, happy, well-adjusted, and sexually normal all deserve to die. “Truly a righteous retribution is needed.” At the same time, though, he also insists that, for instance, the “problems of the negro race stem from their genetic inferiority.” Thousands of words of murderous rage against the subhuman hordes, the Third World invaders, life unworthy of life, genetic refuse, half-animal: the people who are infinitely beneath him, precisely because they’re exactly the same.
Sam Kriss is a writer and dilettante surviving in London.