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this post was submitted on 22 May 2026
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This is very well put. Is this your own formulation or where did you pick it up?
Thanks, that was all me.
I feel like this is essentially what these grifters do to socially engineer the opinions and beliefs of their fans/followers who already have an incoherent benign version of the ideology swirling in their heads.
Yeah. I had an experience I think about all the time. Imma try to make it as short as possible.
This was years ago, maybe ~2010, and people were not as attuned to nazi stuff, and far right views were still pretty fringe. People were a bit less polarized and def less politicized.
I went to visit my friend and meet her new boyfriend. He dressed edgy, just her type. We hung out, nice guy. I'm def the type to some weed and get in long convos about philosophy, history, religion. And that's what we did.
He asked if I liked jazz and I told him I listened to a lot of Mingus, Coleman, Sun Ra, Coletrane. He asked if I'd ever listened to Mahavishnu Orchestra, I said I hadnt, and he put on Birds of Fire, which is a very good 70s rock/jazz fusion album.
Then he started telling me about the ancient Christian gnostics. He said they believed that there was an evil creator god that made the material world that did not realize he was born from another greater, a source. Jesus was the son of the actual "source" and this other, creator god, believed that he was the real god, called the Demiurge. This story stuck with me.
About a year later, my friend broke up with him because she found out he was an actual Nazi. My friend is a queer feminist, had no idea, until one of his old friends came over to their house and started talking about liebenstraum, race science, blood and soil, 14 words type shit. The story stuck with me still.
Years later, after learning a lot more about history, ancient religions, fascism, damn near everything -- I finally stumbled on some more context to his story: the gnostics hated the Hebrews. The Demiurge and the ancient man-faced- snake-god Glycon are very closely related, and the myth of the Demiurge was a way of the Gnostics discrediting the Hebrew god YHWH. Since the gnostics rejected the material world, they of course rejected the god that had created it in myth.
So that's the story of how a Nazi tried to prime me for antisemitism by tricking me into listening to white jazz and talking to me about ancient creation myths.
Holy crap…
That’s insane… but yeah, considering how long ago this was (relatively), it makes sense how covertly he was seeding these ideas. Nowadays it’s a much dumber version of that, but still the same theme and intention. The goal is still to commandeer pre-existing ideas or interests and try to force it to be viewed through their absurd lens.
Well it doesn't help that the ideas available to commandeer often already have nationalistic, hetero/cis, white, legalist, idealist views on how things work. We also have to account for hegemony, that these views are being promoted by major media corpos, people with complaints about it are let go and replaced with Bari Weiss. It isn't just ideas in the abstract, it is material and practical. Grifters push these ideas but gradual changes in peoples lived experiences validate these new ideas. Not saying the ideas are true, but that peoples conditions are illusory as well.
Like just because it is a grift doesn't mean the conditions for it aren't ripe. Ideas can be structural, like language.
Not trying to correct a view, just elaborate a bit
Totally! I appreciate the conversation and not taking it any other way.
Also really starts to make sense why they target young people who haven't had the education, life experience, or honestly just brain development to critically analyze the world view they were conditioned to have by all those sources.
Yeah I think there's something to getting them while they're young. Its like if you can convince people of some really bad ideas for a little while, even if they change their mind there's still been some reinforcement of those ideas.
Also i think watching the same algo served content actually rewires peoples brains. Which is easier when the wiring isn't real well developed yet.
Since he was a nazi, I'm glad you and your friend dodged that bullet and he was ejected from her life. That said, nothing about what he was telling you strikes me as inherently nazi or fascist. Was he actually trying to convert you to ancient Christian gnosticism (which I think would be weird even for a nazi)? Talking about the demiurge is not a nazi dogwhistle or tactic. I mean Matt Christman is well known for expounding on the demiurge! The demiurge is fairly frequently brought up here on hexbear. As an interesting coincidence, the last TrueAnon episode discussed the demiurge.
Later revelations about this person aside, from everything you've said about the interaction itself, it just sounds like an interesting conversation you could have had just as easily with a leftist.