What covering heavy metal taught me about spotting Nazis
A bare-chested, wild-eyed white man in bearskin furs and a horned helmet stood at the podium of the Senate chambers, his fists raised in triumph, as fellow Trump-supporting rioters laid waste to the Capitol. The man, a QAnon cultist from Phoenix named Jacob Anthony Chansley, who goes by the name Jake Angeli, has since been arrested alongside a few dozen others, but not before the far-right social mediasphere tried to paint him as an “antifa spy” planted among the insurrectionists. The efforts at misdirection were in vain, however—Angeli is a notorious pro-Trump presence at rallies in his home state, and he’s pleaded publicly for recognition as a true “patriot.” In case there remained any uncertainty, a close look at his hairy torso made Angeli’s leanings clear: when I zoomed in on his tattoos, I noticed white power symbols—Angeli was quite literally wearing his fascist sympathies on his heart. I knew what I was seeing because I recognized some of the same iconography hidden in the margins of black-metal albums.