TikTok Brainrot Is Normalizing Alt-Right Ideologies

Yahoo

30-04-2025

Illustration by Chris Panicker
The TikTok begins with a video of YouTube music reviewer Anthony Fantano dissing underground artist Nettspend's debut album, BAD ASS F*CKING KID, saying he's 'not really a super skilled rapper.' There's a pause with a fabricated Wikipedia entry saying Fantano is of Jewish descent (the actual page says 'Sicilian descent'), and then a barrage of flashy Nettspend clips zip across the screen, woven into bursts of military gliders and colossal temples. A psychotic hardstyle remix of Zedd's 'Clarity' shudders in the background. '271k monthly listeners,' the creator writes in the description, a reference to a Nazi dogwhistle about Holocaust deaths. This is one of a slew of recent clips that cast Nettspend as the blonde-haired, blue-eyed prince of Vril and Agartha, a fictional life-force and kingdom, respectively. 'Nettspend is the white savior of the underground,' says one comment with over 1,200 likes. 'Nettspend will ring through the trumpets as god descends to earth from heaven,' proclaims another.
Clips referencing Vril and Agartha have been a fixture of online communities for years. But this new wave of edits is borderline absurd, to the point where they're like experimental collages. There are clips of giant temples and flying saucers mixed into glowing montages of the white underground rapper Joeyy with comments calling him the 'chancellor of Agartha.' Guys are exposing babies to Vril edits. Videos brim with occult iconography and calls for a new Vril society while using fakemink, Charli xcx, Sematary, and bitcrushed trance songs as the soundtrack.
For the uninitiated, these mythical concepts, Vril and Agartha, both originate in books. Agartha, which is big in the occultist canon, refers to the belief in a legendary society within the Earth's core. It was devised in the late 1800s by the French writer Louis Jacolliot, and later built on by Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, who claimed that he visited this secret land of a million inhabitants through astral projection. Shards of the idea have littered the cultural landscape, like in Call of Duty and Miles Davis' 1975 live album Agharta. Vril comes from the British author Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who's responsible for a number of famous phrases like 'a dark and stormy night.' Less known but just as influential is his 1871 novel Vril: The Power of the Coming Race, which describes a superhuman race of Vril-ya who live in a utopia powered by a special 'all-permeating' fluid. Decades later, Nazis latched onto the idea, with some even spending time hunting for Vril.
Online, these ideas have become diluted and deformed, dumbed-down to images of tradwife blondes and futuristic triangle structures. People often conflate Agartha with Hyperborea, a land of eternal sunshine in Greek mythology that's been a recurring obsession for the alt-right. Other video motifs include UFOs, idyllic green pastures, and vigorous exhortations to drink only the purest, rawest milk. In the most despicable clips, Agartha and Vril have become stand-ins for bigotry. People use #vril on clips celebrating Elon Musk's Sieg Heil stunt, spewing anti-immigrant rhetoric and racist dogwhistles. Some of the content echoes the ongoing Save Europe campaign: xenophobes begging to make Europe fully white, rewiring classic Eurodance songs like Gigi D'Agostino's 'L'Amour Toujours' into singalong hate-anthems. That trend already spiraled into real-world hostility in 2024; while the song played at a bar in Germany, a crowd reportedly yelled slurs at a Black woman and punched her in the face, with one man allegedly Nazi-saluting.
What makes this wave of videos particularly bizarre is its overlap with brainrot memes. As Vril posts have exploded in recent weeks—over 700,000 TikTok videos use the hashtag—there's been a surge of obvious parodies, like Jack Black edits and one where a cat gazes mesmerized as it contemplates the holy effulgence of Vril. The basic idea of people treating Nettspend—teen rapper drawling about downing lean—as an Aryan prince is ridiculous to anyone whose brain isn't totally zapped. But there are clearly people who believe he's some kind of prophet, declaring their fealty to the Chosen One.
It's easy to see why impressionable kids are seduced by these videos, which resemble roided-up campaign ads. A blitz of rapidfire clips and throttling hardstyle, they radiate a desire to teleport to some fictional land of Chad males and waifish e-girls. Ron DeSantis already used a frantic mashup style like this for an infamous attack ad, and it's not hard to imagine the zoomers running the GOP socials dropping Vril and Agartha memes. (FPÖ Tirol, a right-wing populist party in Austria, just became the first political party to make a Vril edit, racking up hundreds of thousands of views on a TikTok posted Monday.) QAnon was for senescent boomers; fashwave and Embrace Masculinity clips are millennial-coded. Now the aspiring fascists are into Vril, which they basically use like the concept of aura but with an added layer of white supremacy. The Nettspend fandom is so laced with irony to begin with, it makes sense that he'd turn into a figurehead for this 'scene,' if you can call it that.
As with other inane crazes like gooning, a sexual fetish that became a TikTok meme, Agartha, Vril, and Hyperborea have become buzzwords in the open-source patchwork of puerility that dominates the internet today. They're no longer the preserve of occult researchers and xenophobes. Now they're being adopted into the unhinged babble of SlimeTok, the underground rap subculture full of video editors pushing language to the brink—a glorious wasteland of 'ts pmo' and Gurt lore and Druski clips (if you don't know what any of those are, congratulations!).
Essentially, the same people whose For You page feeds them conventional underground rap clips are now getting Aryan Nettspend edits and commenting stuff like 'pshh OsamaSon better.' The result is a sinkhole of winky irony and simmering hatred, some genuinely funny gibberish tangled with mask-off racism. The algorithm collapses context into a post-post-ironic mishmash. In one scroll of TikTok's fried conspiracy-rap underworld you'll find UncleAgartha, a guy who looks like store-brand Thor, making 'ASMR You're a Femboy in Agartha' roleplays and filming videos pretending to be drinking Monster inside the hollow Earth. In the next, everyone in the comments will be spamming anti-immigrant screeds and dogwhistles while the audio is a brain-bulldozing hardstyle remix of a Bladee song. One clip is cherry-picked crime stats; the next offers a 'testerone-maxxed' Chicken Jockey phonk edit.
Some Vril and Agartha heads are despairing about the way their precious dogwhistles have leaked beyond the realm of looksmaxxing forums and 4chan to hit critical mass. It's at the point where students playing online quiz games are naming their accounts after the myths (as shown in a popular TikTok using an audio that mashes King Von with Scott Brown and calls it an 'Aryan remix.') 'bro we are becoming the new brainrot,' one commenter cries in distress. 'fascism itself is peak for frying your dopamine receptors,' another chirps back.
To a certain extent, this entire video craze feels like a psy-op—a distraction from the actual horrendous things going on in the world. Unlike Save Europe, which has hundreds of TikTok edits and YouTube mixes devoted to purifying countries and turning them into ethnostates, the Agartha-Vril zone has no coherent idea or apparatus of attack yet. It's hopelessly subsumed by nonsense; as one commenter puts it on a harebrained video that montages a Swastika-shaped video game boat with irrelevant clips from Minecraft and Angry Birds: 'the Vril has been lost in translation.' But there's a real risk in letting harmful ideologies disguise themselves as brainrot, because it makes them harder to moderate and easier to normalize. A cynic could argue that brainrot is destroying the fabric of society, infesting middle school classrooms with verbal excrement and making kids more susceptible to alt-right pipelines. And they're not totally wrong: Stupidity begets stupidity, it primes you to think less critically. One viewer might realize the irony and laugh at a satirical edit; another might fall down the rabbit hole for good.
Originally Appeared on Pitchfork