Tate’s political analysis had the tone of a 14-year-old playground bully, but Musk’s excitement at men turning out to vote spoke to something fundamentally true: that Donald Trump’s plan was working. When I first read the tweet, I began searching for evidence that men were indeed turning up in record numbers. On Musk’s platform, X, I was greeted with videos from Philadelphia and Miami of young men wearing red caps celebrating in the streets—pickup trucks tearing down street-lit highways with MAGA flags trailing from their cargo beds. After covering the Manosphere and the hyper-online ‘Bro’ Right for the past five years, I knew that in recent months they had mobilized like never before behind Trump, and that if they were motivated enough to actually go out and vote, Trump had a serious edge. 

Videos began to spread of frat boys across the US declaring their support for Donald Trump. When his victory was announced, one group filmed themselves performing Trump’s dance moves to “Y.M.C.A.” on the steps of their fraternity. 

Men aged 18-29—a group that has been politically unengaged in recent years—voted decisively for Trump. The Wall Street Journal reported a shift to the right of 28 points among this group. According to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning, 56 percent of young male voters opted for Trump in 2024—a marked increase from 41 percent in 2020. In Trump’s successful courtship of this cohort, his secret weapon appears to have been his 18-year-old son, Barron. 

In the early hours of November 6th, Trump took to the stage in West Palm Beach, Florida, to declare victory. The very first people to join Trump in front of the cheering crowds were his wife Melania, and the apple of his eye, Barron. At 6’7”, Barron towered over his father as he smiled at the MAGA loyalists in the audience, some of whom have come to see him as his father’s political heir in recent months. Reportedly his father’s favorite son, what many don’t realize is how crucial Barron may have been in helping his father secure re-election. 

When UFC boss Dana White was summoned to the podium by Trump, he thanked a cadre of podcasters and influencers, including his close friend Joe Rogan. There were three other names in that list, however, that show Barron’s hand in Trump’s media strategy—Adin Ross, the Nelk Boys, and Theo Von. The content Trump made with these creators in the run up to the election was viewed hundreds of millions of times, primarily by that key demographic of 18- to 30-year-old men. In Trump’s interview with comedian Theo Von, which has now been viewed by over 14 million people on YouTube alone, Trump tells him: “Your thing is going really great. My son’s a big fan of yours.” But Barron isn’t just a fan of alternative media stars like Theo Von—he’s a friend to some of them, too. 

Adin Ross is a 24-year-old American influencer and streamer, whose career highpoints include being the man who sniffed Andrew Tate’s chair after interviewing him, hosting a stream with white supremacist Nick Fuentes, and repeatedly being banned from streaming site Twitch for his use of “hateful slurs or symbols” and “hateful conduct.” In August of this year, Adin Ross and his team set up in the living room of Mar-a-Lago for a livestream with Trump, who began by passing on a “hi” from Barron. At the end of their interview, Trump told Ross: “Barron says, ‘Dad, he’s really big,’ he said, ‘He’s also a friend of mine.’” The pair then exited Mar-a-Lago, whereupon Adin Ross gifted Trump a Rolex and a custom wrapped Cybertruck featuring the image of the returning President raising his fist after being shot in the ear. This inadvertently sparked a debate over whether the gift constituted a campaign finance violation. The clips of Trump and Ross dancing in front of the car went viral. 

But Barron’s role in Trump’s media strategy goes beyond just introducing Trump to figures like Adin Ross. Barron and his best friend, fellow 18-year-old Bo Loudon, were tasked by the campaign with helping Trump reach a young male audience. Loudon is a pro-Trump influencer, and son of the conservative media personality Gina Loudon, former co-chair of Women for Trump. Bo and Barron reportedly set up the Adin Ross stream, and Bo has claimed he helped set up Trump’s interview with Joe Rogan, too. 

On the day of the election, figures from across the vast and frequently depressing multiverse that is the online ‘Bro right’ gave their ringing endorsements of Donald Trump, and implored their fans to go and vote for him. Upon the announcement of his victory, John Shahidi of the Nelk Boys tweeted: “Idc what anyone says, podcasts helped us win this election.” When the Wall Street Journal reported that ‘Younger Men Voted Decisively for Donald Trump,’ Shahidi reposted it alongside the message, “Shout-out to our entire team!”

A part of Trump’s message that particularly resonated with his young male audience, and the podcast hosts he made appearances with, was his seemingly favorable stance towards cryptocurrencies, and his puzzling claim that Bitcoin will be “made in the USA.” Earlier this year, in Austin, Texas, I interviewed an African-American man who told me he would vote Trump for the first time, almost entirely because of his stance towards crypto. 

Trump has hailed his son Barron for showing him the potential of crypto, claiming: “Barron knows so much about this… he knows it inside and out.” When the Trumps launched their own crypto venture World Liberty Financial (WLF) in September this year, a leaked document obtained by CoinDesk listed Barron as its “DeFi [decentralized finance] visionary.” But it appears WLF wasn’t Barron’s first involvement in a crypto project. 

Shortly after the Trump-inspired ‘DJT token’ launched in August 2024, its price began to spike when rumors emerged that Trump and his son Barron were behind the project—then the market crashed when a ‘whale’ sold roughly $2million worth of the token. A $150,000 bounty was put out online for whoever could identify the token’s creator, which set off a chain of events that led to the creator outing themselves. It was Martin Shkreli, the comic book villain known for his price gouging of essential medicines, and purchasing the only copy in existence of a rare Wu-Tang Clan album, which he then repeatedly threatened to destroy. There was, however, another twist: Shkreli claimed he was not alone in the project, and that he had indeed created the token with the help of Barron Trump. 

Given his track record—including serving a six-and-a-half-year stretch in federal prison for financial crimes—it’s not surprising that many did not believe Shkreli’s claim. But Shkreli was adamant. He claimed he had thousands of pieces of evidence that he created the token with Barron, and he shared one of them: a screenshot with the notorious influencer Andrew Tate. It appears Tate was one of the ‘celebrities’ contacted to promote DJT to his audience, in a bid to ‘pump’ the price of the token. The screenshot showed messages between Shkreli and Tate, in which the manosphere figurehead appeared to confirm Barron’s involvement. 

If Shkreli is telling the truth, then Baron Trump isn’t just ushering his father into a media sphere of which he is a fan, but one of which he is an active part. With direct links to figures like Andrew Tate and Adin Ross, Barron has the ability to rally support from them for his father like no child of a candidate before him. Tate has over 10 million (mostly young male followers) on X, and spent election day live-streaming and repeatedly tweeting, telling all his American followers to get out for Trump. His brother Tristan shared the same Wall Street Journal stat as Shahidi before him, claiming a part in the male shift towards Trump. 

“It’s men vs gays and chicks.” 

I’ve spent the last five years investigating Andrew Tate for a series of documentaries, including one for VICE, as well as a book. Tate and his team have been working towards this kind of election impact for a while. During production, we acquired a tranche of private messages sent between senior ‘War Room’ members, and for the past four years the election has been referred to as an impending “gender war,” where the modern markers of identity politics would fall away, and it would all become a case of men vs women. Young male voters across a wide range of economic and racial backgrounds did vote for Trump, including Hispanic men, who many had expected to turn against him. 

The rise of influencers like Tate and Ross aren’t just a symptom of young men shifting to the right, but an active factor that has exacerbated it. The ideology gap is widening between young men and women, not just in America, but all over the world. In the UK there is a 25-point gap between the views of young men and women; in Germany, this rises to 30. 

The factors that have led us here are wide-ranging, but in making a concerted effort to reach out to disaffected young men, Trump gained an edge in what is being described as one of the most consequential elections in US history. We saw a similar effect in the UK during the last election, as young men shared their support for Nigel Farage and his Reform Party. 

Many of the complaints coming from young men may appear to be misguided. Yet if politicians on the Left do not find a way to reach out to this group, and engage with it where it dwells online, opportunist populists like Trump and Farage most certainly will.

In this election, one of Trump’s strongest weapons appears to have been his gigantic, chronically online 18-year-old son, his best friend Bo, and the ‘Bros’ they swung for Trump.

Follow Jamie Tahsin on X.

Clown World, a book on Andrew Tate co-authored by Jamie Tahsin and Matt Shea, is available now through Quercus Books.

The post How Barron Trump and the ‘Bro Vote’ Helped Sway the US Election appeared first on VICE.

The problem? Judge Lewis Liman has ordered Giuliani to turn over the vehicle—along with many other possessions, NBC News reported. The items will go towards the $146 million Giuliani owes two election workers he defamed.

Per the outlet, Giuliani’s valuable car was once owned by Lauren Bacall. President-elect Donald Trump’s one-time lawyer was given one week to part ways with the vehicle—as well as cash accounts, jewelry, Yankees memorabilia, and other valuables—on Oct. 22.

However, Giuliani has yet to hand over assets to Ruby Freeman or Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, the defamed election workers’ lawyer, Aaron Nathan, told the outlet.

Nathan alleged Giuliani and his legal team “have refused or been unable to answer basic questions about the location of most of the property subject to the receivership.”

Nathan further claimed that Giuliani played coy about the location of the Mercedes and other items.

Ted Goodman, Giuliani’s spokesperson, claimed the car snafu was all one big misunderstanding.

“Our lawyers have requested documentation to transfer over the title of the vehicle, and haven’t heard back from opposing counsel,” Goodman claimed to the outlet.

In light of Giuliani’s public defiance of Liman’s orders—and his unwillingness to cough up his possessions—the outlet reported that the judge ordered the disgraced lawyer to appear in a New York City court on Nov. 7.

The post Rudy Giuliani Rolled Up to Vote in a Mercedes He Was Ordered to Surrender 2 Weeks Ago appeared first on VICE.

An NBC News & MSNBC National Political Correspondent, Kornacki shot to fame when he systematically broke down election results. Through it all, he captured hearts by sporting his go-to khakis and using his trusty map.

This year, as the country gears up to find out if Kamala Harris or Donald Trump will win the presidency, Kornacki is preparing for his turn in the spotlight.

Put another way, one X user aptly joked, “NBC is currently thawing Steve Kornacki like Mariah Carey every winter.”

Once his thaw was complete, a social media user reminded people, “Don’t forget to leave milk and cookies out for Steve Kornacki tonight.”

One person suggested that NBC mark Kornacki’s entrance “with smoke and pyrotechnics like he’s a Super Bowl quarterback.”

People are even stating that Kornacki’s eagerly-anticipated appearance will be the main event of the night. One person tweeted, “Anyone have set times for tonight? When is Steve Kornacki? I’m gonna skip the openers.”

Kornacki did give a tip about when he’ll pop up on air.

“I want to tune out all the racket in the afternoon hours, and then come in when it gets real,” he told USA Today.

Throughout the evening, Kornacki will be working hard. As such, one person suggested that he be allowed to take a shot each time a state is declared. Another joked that Kornacki may need to take a smoke break when he’s off-camera.

If Kornacki works too hard during the sure-to-be stressful situation, one person worried that it could affect him physically.

Basically, people just want Kornacki to know how important he is to their election night.

“I hope Steve Kornacki is prepared for how much I’m going to depend on him as my personal emotional support human,” one person tweeted.

It’s safe to say, he is not.

“I take it in good spirit,” Kornacki told the outlet of the hoopla surrounding him, “but I’m a little self-conscious about [the] attention.”

The post Everyone Is Thirsty for ‘Map Daddy’ Steve Kornacki on Election Night appeared first on VICE.

Per the New York Times, Hafner, a Democrat, was able to enter the race for Alaska’s sole congressional seat by mailing in a ballot from prison. The law allows candidates to run in states in which they don’t reside. They must, however, move to the area should they win, per the outlet.

Hafner, who’s serving time for threatening public officials and calling in false bomb threats, is using his prison mugshot as his official photo for the race.

“I’m a progressive. I’ll work with Bernie Sanders and AOC to implement a better America for working-class Americans,” Hafner told a local news outlet of his platform. “I support Medicare For All. I support free college. I support student loan debt relief.”

Hafner may also have less than altruistic reasons for running. The candidate believes that, should he win the election, he might be released from prison before his sentence expires on October 12, 2026.

“Ultimately, if I’m elected, I expect to be released immediately at that point,” he told NPR. “There’s a federal statute under compassionate release that says you could be released for extraordinarily compelling reasons. And, by golly, if I’m going to D.C. to represent the people of Alaska, I think that’s a very extraordinary and compelling reason.”

The Possible Political Ramifications of Eric Hafner’s Bid

Hafner was initially a nonentity in the race. That all changed after the primary election, though.

Alaskan law moves the top four primary finishers into the general election. While Hafner finished in sixth place in the primary, the candidates who came in fourth and fifth dropped out. That automatically put Hafner on the Nov. 5 ballot.

Most agree that Hafner is unlikely to win a seat in Congress. He could, however, lead to problems for his own party. The main contenders in the race are Mary Peltola, the incumbent Democrat, and Nick Begich, her Republican challenger.

Democrats are aiming to gain control of the House, something that can likely only be achieved if Peltola keeps her seat. The issue comes into play if Hafner detracts votes from Peltola.

With that in mind, Democrats tried to have Hafner taken off the ballot, NPR reported. They were unsuccessful in their efforts, as the Alaska Supreme Court ruled in Hafner’s favor, per the outlet.

“The chances of Eric Hafner having an impact on this election are legitimate and real,” Republican strategist Matt Shuckerow told the Times. “This is an extremely tight race and every vote will count.”

The post Candidate for Alaska House Seat Has Never Been to the State — And Is Currently in Prison appeared first on VICE.

Hensel, a software engineer who calls himself a “passionate data-driven problem solver,” opted to create an AI-version of Beyer instead. As Reuters reported, he didn’t get Beyer’s permission for his project. He plans to debate the AI-bot, nicknamed DonBot, on Oct. 17.

Using OpenAI, Hensel trained the AI chatbot by feeding it information from Beyer’s website and press releases. Hensel also used publicly available data about the congressman. It’s meant to produce accurate answers, Hensel told the outlet.

Hensel won’t be alone on the debate stage with a computer. Fellow independent candidate David Kennedy will also participate in the debate. Republican challenger Jerry Torres has not addressed the forthcoming event, the outlet reported. In the event that Torres doesn’t show, he’ll be represented via a yet-to-be-created JerryBot, Hensel told Reuters.

In a statement to the outlet, a spokesperson for Beyer hinted at the congressman’s feelings about the whole thing.

The spokesperson pointed to Beyer’s work “to improve artificial intelligence regulation, including legislation to prevent nefarious actors from utilizing AI to spread election misinformation.”

Nonetheless, lawyers told the outlet that Beyer likely has little legal recourse when it comes to stopping the AI chatbot-fueled debate.

Despite Hensel’s work to push the online debate ahead, the candidate told the outlet that he isn’t blind to Beyer’s significant lead in the polls. Instead, Hensel views his efforts as a way to ensure “greater transparency” in elections.

AI has been a hot topic as of late. The public is grappling with how to distinguish real articles, photos, and videos from artificially-generated ones. This is of particular concern given the upcoming election.

Worryingly, a study found in February that AI-generated propaganda is as effective as human-crafted media and “could blend into online information environments.”

The post Ghosted by Congressman, He Created an AI Chatbot of Him to Debate Instead appeared first on VICE.

Nearly 500 entries were whittled down to 9 finalists, which were whittled down to a single winner as voted on by the citizens of Michigan: A totally jacked werewolf ripping his shirt off and howling into the sky in front of an American flag with the words “I Voted” on top. Hell yeah.

The werewolf Hulk Hogan-ing his shirt was designed by 12-year-old Jane Hynous from Gross Pointe Farms, a city of around 10,000 in the northeastern portion of Metro Detroit. Jane doodled out of boredom while watching the movie National Treasure in her social studies class. I haven’t been in school for many years, but it’s nice to see that some things never change. Kids are still watching movies in class that have only the vaguest association with that class’s field of study.

Jane’s ripped werewolf may have won, but I have to shout out some of the other finalists. Like the illustration of a bass with the words “I voted” written in its pattern across its body. Or the one with the deer wearing a hat featuring the state of Michigan that’s also wearing those wraparound Macho Man Randy Savage sunglasses that are popular right now. Or the one that simply says, “I voted yay,” in the kind of text that was clearly written using an index finger on a phone screen. Jane’s design will be handed out to voters this coming November.

The post Michigan’s “I Voted” Sticker Will Be a Jacked Werewolf Hulk Hogan-Ing His Shirt Apart appeared first on VICE.

The 36-year-old McGregor announced on social media his plans to run for president after expressing his discontent with Ireland’s current political establishment. He called himself the “only logical choice” to lead the nation. If the only logical choice to lead your nation is a guy who made a living on getting punched in the head, your nation is in bad shape. Though, it doesn’t seem like Ireland has reached that point of desperation quite yet or even anywhere near it.

McGregor promised he would use his presidential powers to dissolve Ireland’s legislator, called the Dáil. “I would have all the answers the people of Ireland seek from these thieves of the working man,” he said. 

It doesn’t seem like McGregor has a history of working in government or public service. From my research, it appears his qualifications include punching people, getting punched, and co-starring in the remake of Road House. I’m sure he got “all of the answers” from his time on set with Jake Gyllenhaal.

McGregor had been scheduled to make his return to the octagon with a fight against Michael Chandler at UFC 303. The comeback was derailed by a toe injury he sustained during training. UFC President Dana White previously said McGregor will not be competing at any point in 2024, though he may compete in 2025. But that might conflict with his presidential run unless he finds a way to combine the two, perhaps by physically accosting his political opponents.

McGregor has hinted at such aspirations in the past, though as a general rule, voters should be wary of any candidate who views being the leader of a nation as a fallback plan for when they can’t find work beating people up.   

The post Connor McGregor Is Running for President of Ireland, Unfortunately appeared first on VICE.

Miller says he would be the chatbot’s “humble meat avatar.” Though he is technically speaking the one on the ballot, in public, he wears a portable Bluetooth speaker around his neck with a built-in microphone so that VIC can receive questions and respond. His role as mayor, in large part, would be to sign the documents it tells him to sign.

Miller insists this is not a “stunt.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, he has no prior political experience—of course, he would assume running a city is as easy as typing a query into a chatbot and just doing what it says. And despite Miller’s belief that a ChatGPT bot could perform better than human government officials because it can process vast amounts of information quickly and without error, there’s incredible evidence on the contrary. When it’s wrong, it’s often spectacularly wrong—like catastrophically, embarrassingly wrong. 

“It is hard for me to talk about the ‘risks’ of having an AI mayor,” said Arvind Narayanan, a Princeton computer science professor quoted in a great Washington Post story about the situation. “It’s like asking about the risks of replacing a car with a big cardboard cutout of a car. Sure, it looks like a car, but the ‘risk’ is that you no longer have a car.”

At one point in the Post story, Miller demonstrated Vic’s incredible powers of political leadership. VIC argued against banning books, as some schools in Cheyenne have recently done. A perfectly reasonable and wise position. The bot added, “But, let’s create a process ensuring a balanced approach.” It seems even an AI pretending to be a real politician knows how to be vague and useless. It’s kinda hard to govern when you have no political perspective and just regurgitate what you’ve aggregated from online sources. 

Rest assured, Miller and VIC’s chances of winning the Cheyenne mayoral race aren’t great. The incumbent mayor is running again and so is the runner-up in the last election. Though Miller’s experiment raises some interesting questions about what people want in a politician, this isn’t not what people want to use AI for, really—apparently, most would prefer it was writing erotic fiction.

The post An AI Chatbot’s “Meat Avatar” Is Running for Mayor in Wyoming appeared first on VICE.

Green soft power is nothing new. The idea that simply being Irish confers a certain level of cultural cachet is written into our national DNA, and is spread all over the world by the Irish diaspora. The Irish boomerang, the saying goes, is one that never comes back but never shuts up about how much it wants to. In the centuries following the Great Famine—which saw around 1.5 million people emigrate in 30 years—Irish identity molded itself like plasticine into whichever corner of the world it wound up in. There are Irish bars in Honolulu and Kathmandu, as the folk song goes. The Emigration Museum in Dublin claims basically every celebrity in modern history as being at least slightly Irish, from Morrissey to Rihanna. By the turn of the century, 80 million people worldwide claimed Irish descent, and more than 36 million Americans say Irish is their primary ethnicity. Around the same number can be found on the streets of Belfast or Dublin on any given day, wearing Aran sweaters they paid too much for in Carroll’s gift shop on their way in from the airport, or grinning their way gormlessly through marches carried out by Orange Order supremacists.

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But until recently Irishness—native or diasporic—was very much the butt of its own joke. In Georgian England, cartoonist and satirist James Gillray drew the Irish as subhuman ogres, and as late as 1943 the satirical magazines were depicting us as Frankensteins and drunks. Even as anti-Irish prejudice in the UK and US softened, we were seen as a bit of a joke: silly people who were good craic but deeply unserious. Americans—yes, them again—drank ‘Irish car bomb’ shots as the world was forced to endure the chart-mandated morality of Bono and Bob Geldof.

To be Irish, in short, was not exactly cool.

It’s difficult to pinpoint the exact moment this perception shifted. However, you could probably argue it was the 26th of April, 2020. Deep in quarantine, the BBC and Netflix adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People arrived with a gift for a bored and horned-up world: Paul Mescal. As laconic heartthrob Connell Waldron, he spread the good word of O’Neills shorts and St Christopher’s chains, and things would never be the same. People convinced themselves they liked drinking takeaway Guinness out of milk cartons while respecting social distancing. Boys from Kildare were cleaning up on Hinge like never before. Four years on, the impact has snowballed and now the tendrils of ‘Cool Eire’ extend into all areas of popular culture. 

Sally Rooney’s writing is now so popular it’s inspired its own literary style (and in turn hand-wringing takes about how it is ruining modern literature). Last year the Booker Prize had no fewer than four Irish authors on its 13-strong longlist: the most ever in a single year. Of the shortlist, half were Irish, with the award eventually going to Prophet Song by Limerick’s Paul Lynch.

This coup is taking place not just on the page, but in the pint glass too: Guinness has gone from a hardy pub perennial to the UK’s flat-out best-selling draught beer, accounting for one in every nine pints pulled in a British boozer. Being ‘fashion-forward’ in Ireland was once a crime punishable by ridicule and death. Woe betide anyone wearing sunglasses or a beret in Waterford. But today, some of the world’s best-known designers—Simone Rocha, Jonathan Anderson at Loewe, and Sean McGirr at Alexander McQueen—are Irish.

Even our politicians have undergone their own pop culture makeovers, largely led by online humor. Thirty years ago Sinn Féin’s Gerry Adams was barely allowed to use his own voice on British television—then he became a meme himself, known for alligator puns and his love of rubber ducks. The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri became an honorary Irish woman (her hometown of Boston, Massachusetts is 22.8 percent Irish heritage, which apparently is enough these days). The star of Bridgerton’s third season, Galway’s Nicola Coughlan, is now famous enough to invoke the ire of slack-brained right-wing columnists, while the west Belfast rap band Kneecap played two packed gigs at Glastonbury on the same day. Barry Keoghan, somehow, is shagging Sabrina Carpenter. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that it’s never been cooler to be Irish.

But simply being Irish has become so popular, so fast, that it’s now verging on twee again. The unfortunate collateral of Guinness’ spike in popularity are the nonentities for whom drinking it constitutes a personality in itself; one that manifests in ‘splitting the G’ and Shamrock logos in the foam. Emerald Eats, an Irish food stall in the millennial hipster-festooned Broadway Market, regularly has winding queues of people desperate to pay for the ‘viral’ Gaelic cuisine of chicken fillet rolls and spice bags. It’s rare that an Irish celebrity can set foot on a red carpet these days without being interrogated about their childhood in a blatant bid to feed the internet’s Ireland obsession.

As an Irish person living in England, it’s been an interesting experience. Five years ago, I was told by a television producer that Kneecap couldn’t feature on a show I was working on  because the executives felt uncomfortable and “still remembered the Troubles.” Now, they’re being shouted out by Noel Gallagher. Around the same time, I overheard someone at a publishing party complaining that they kept getting submissions by Irish authors, but that nobody wanted to read those stories. Today, bestseller lists are frequently populated by just these kinds of stories. When I moved here, we were still the Punch cartoon, the butt of the joke, the strange neighbors from across the water. I had my accent parodied by public school boys at more house parties than I care to remember. I spent my first years in London raging all the time about how little the English knew about us, how little interest they took in finding out. I should have known I’d eventually end up annoyed once we finally wound up on the inside of the joke. (Though for this we can thank the internet and Diageo more than the English, I think.)

There are certain dangers that tend to present themselves whenever and wherever identities are flattened like this. At the same time that Irishness was being celebrated in all its green glory online, the country itself was living through a few anni horribiles. Homelessness and a housing crisis are crippling Dublin. Far-right fascists use this reality to propagate the myth that “Ireland is full.” In the north, the housing situation isn’t much better. More people have died as a result of long hospital waiting lists as were killed in 1972, the most violent year of the Troubles. There are—and I cannot emphasise this enough—no fucking trains.

None of this is particularly well suited to a funny TikTok, admittedly. Instead, the current iteration of Irishness continues to funnel its way out through that content pipe. We’re no longer seen as hard-drinking leprechauns, ogres, or dubbed-over disturbances of the peace. We are now sad lonely heartthrobs with nice accents and the brooding authors who hog all the awards for creating them. We create the best watering holes in the world—it’s only a shame the queues are too chaotic to get anywhere near The Devonshire, or Skehans, or the Fullback to pay a tenner for a pint of “da black stuff”. It’s never been cooler to be Irish. I kind of miss the unpopularity. 

Words by @rosielanners

Collage by @m.parszeniew

The post How Being Irish Became a Meme appeared first on VICE.

The Nazi Eagle symbol was developed by Hitler’s party in the 1920s, and is also known as the Imperial Eagle or Parteiadler. As well as the tablets bearing its image, cops seized half a kilo of weed and 100 grams of coke. The arrest was only reported by an Irish tabloid newspaper, the Sunday World, but the Dutch police confirmed its accuracy to VICE.

The irony is inescapable: to see an ecstasy pill (a drug synonymous with feelings of love, euphoria, and empathy) juxtaposed with Nazi insignia (synonymous with hate, brutal intolerance, and genocide, if you hadn’t been paying attention) is jarring in the extreme.

Yet this isn’t an isolated incident. “Yesterday, a member of the French Psychedelic Society, who works in a harm reduction association in western France, sent us this,” Dr Zoë Dubus, a post-doctoral researcher specialising in psychotropic drugs, wrote on X this week. Attached to the post was a photo of two grey pills, also stamped with the Nazi Eagle.

According to Dr Dubus, the pills are “starting to circulate in France” and have “been spotted since early 2024 in Switzerland, Iceland, and Holland.” Testing in Zurich revealed this design has also been used to make 2C-B (in 2023) and MDMA (this year).

The trend exists in an interesting context. Far-right political parties have made massive gains in Brussels of late, a situation lubricated by a grim uptick in youth support. In Germany, 16 percent of under-25s voted for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the EU elections earlier this month, triple the number for the same election in 2019. The National Rally (RN) in France was the most popular party for people aged below 34, increasing ten points to 32 percent of the vote for that demographic. Meanwhile, Poland’s far-right Confederation party saw an 18.5 percent increase in support from voters under 30. Similar shit has gone down in Portugal, Spain, Austria, and the Netherlands.

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Is it possible that we’re seeing Europe’s far-right surge play out through the medium of party drug designs? The first sample spotted with a Nazi symbol was in Switzerland in 2019, followed a few years later by a swastika LSD tablet. But until now, Dr Dubus explains, it’s been a “limited phenomenon.” That’s changed this year, however.

“In early 2024, several tablets with the Nazi eagle and swastika were analysed, indicating an increase in production,” she recalls. “What’s more, the pills are all different in quality and composition: 2C-B, MDMA, and a strange mixture which seems to indicate that one of the batches was made by a very amateur chemist.” The chemical diversity with the same pill design, she argues, demonstrates that they come from several different manufacturers. She does not know which groups are making them at the moment, but notes that European MDMA production continues to be mainly focused around the Netherlands.

The far-rightification of Europe’s illicit drug supply isn’t exclusive to ecstasy and 2C-B; it appears to have extended to the coke supply, too. Last year, narcs at a port in northern Peru busted 58 kilos of coke destined for Belgium. Each individual kilo block that made up the haul was wrapped in Nazi regalia and—just in case you missed that glaring swastika-shaped clue—the bricks of gear themselves were stamped with the telltale word ‘HITLER’.

Police Colonel Luis Bolanos told reporters the Nazi coke was worth $3 million and would’ve been “distributed across Belgium, the Netherlands, France, and Spain.” Again, it’s hard to know if the special design had been ordered by neo-Nazi drugs gangs, or drugs gangs looking to sell to neo-Nazis, but if there’s one thing worse than being trapped with a neo-Nazi, it’s probably being trapped with a neo-Nazi who’s high on cocaine.

There’s an increasing stockpile of anecdotal evidence of Europe’s Nazi drug surge. Four months ago, a Redditor who self-describes as “a casual stoner” was baffled when presented with drugs branded with Nazi iconography. “A friend of mine showed me a bag of MDMA pills shaped like Nazi Eagles,” he wrote. “He found them funny as hell in an ironic way.” He added: “I kinda forgot about it, but now I’m seeing more and more people posting and having ecstasy shaped as swastikas, SS logos or Nazi Eagles, none of them are white supremacists … seeing how prevalent this has become lately, I’m kinda confused, is there any reason for it?”

I reached out to the Redditor and the subreddit requesting more information. The original poster has yet to reply, but in typical nihilistic fashion, those who did don’t link the design to genuine far-right groups. One said “people just press ‘em into whatever they want for the fun of it,” some said it was done for “marketing” purposes, and a couple believed it was a reference to the fact the original Nazis were themselves tweakers, often meth-ed up to the eyeballs for days on end while conducting their barbaric rampage across Europe.

But others were less optimistic. “I think the use of SS insignia and the Parteiadler as a pressed pill design speaks for itself,” Dr Brian Pace, an Affiliate Scholar at the Center for Psychedelic Drug Research and Education, told VICE. “Attempts to dismiss or excuse it as some kind of troll is to concede that one can troll in this way without some level of adherence to far-right ideologies. The only people who would find that funny are fascists, period.”

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I asked Dr Dubus if she thinks that the people pressing the pills are trolls or actual far-right groups. “Some could be trolls. But some could really be linked to Nazi groups that very openly discuss their use of psychedelics on forums.

“Ecstasy pills have always been used to spread ideas,” she added. “Counterexamples are the Me Too or Antifa pills. But the increase in the presence of this symbol at several French parties [raves] in recent days, just after the elections giving 30 percent to the worst far-right party in history, is particularly worrying.”

Follow Simon on Twitter @oldspeak1

The post Nazi Drugs Are Sweeping Across Europe appeared first on VICE.