Bitcoin Bros and the MAGA Faithful Converge in Nashville — and Embrace an Alternate Reality
It was an hour before the motorcade was set to arrive in downtown Nashville, and the lady in the “Trump Save America” T-shirt was explaining why she hates Kamala Harris. “I’m not meaning to say I’m a prejudiced person,” she began. Of the many ways to end such a sentence, none were promising. I assumed she would call the vice president a “DEI hire,” as right-wing pundits had done all week. But she veered in a different direction.
Harris, the woman went on, believes in pushing homosexuality, transgenderism, and “people acting like cats and dogs.” At her grandniece’s public school in Kentucky, students identify as animals and come to school on leashes. This, she insisted, is the future Democrats want: lawless, godless, and out of control.
It was late Saturday morning, two weeks since the near-assassination of Donald Trump. The woman from Kentucky, a nurse and preacher’s wife, had driven to Nashville earlier that day with her sisters. Outside the Music City Center, the sprawling convention center where Trump was scheduled to speak, the former president’s face appeared on a digital screen against a bright orange backdrop reading “Bitcoin 2024.”
The sisters knew little about bitcoin and, to be fair, neither did I. As for the conference, all they knew was that they couldn’t afford it. Tickets ranged from the basic festival pass for $699 to a VIP “Whale Pass” for $21,000. But it didn’t matter. They just wanted a glimpse of Trump. And if they didn’t get one, that was OK too: “We’re here for moral support.”
This was not how I typically spent my Saturdays. On weekends, the strip near the convention center known as Lower Broadway is clogged with tourists and bachelorette parties. Scores of mostly white women in cowboy boots fill honky tonks that have become dominated by bro country celebrity venues, from Kid Rock’s Big-Ass Honky Tonk Rock n’ Roll Steakhouse to a new bar by Morgan Wallen, the country star ostensibly “canceled” after dropping the N-word on video.
Nevertheless, I’d come downtown with a certain sense of civic duty. Trump had arrived as Nashville was increasingly attracting right-wing extremists, who seemed to feel too comfortable in the city I call home. Since I moved to Nashville in 2015, the Republican Party had been taken over by the MAGA movement and Tennessee’s politics have taken a hard-right turn.
Nashville has become a magnet for far-right media figures like Ben Shapiro, who moved his media company, the Daily Wire, to the city in 2020, bringing a wave of anti-trans activism that has made Tennessee increasingly cruel toward LGBTQ+ people. Meanwhile, Nashville, which is often described as a blue dot in a red sea, has seen aggressive assaults on its political power. A new congressional map recently carved the city in three, obliterating a Democratic district and distributing the pieces to a trio of Republicans. The East Nashville neighborhood where I live is now represented by a Trump loyalist from Cookeville, some 80 miles away.
In recent weeks, things in Nashville seemed to be taking an even darker turn. All throughout July, white nationalist groups had descended upon the city. The neo-fascist Patriot Front marched downtown over Independence Day weekend; a week later, neo-Nazis disrupted a Nashville City Council meeting. The weekend before the bitcoin conference, neo-Nazi provocateurs filmed themselves harassing a group of Black boys who’d been downtown playing bucket drums. The men hurled racial slurs, laughing and jeering when one child erupted in anger. As police officers escorted the kids away, one of the white supremacists gleefully faced the camera, calling them “little fucking monkeys.”
The ladies from Kentucky were unaware of Nashville’s Nazi problem. They had no idea why such people would share Trump supporters’ slogans, like “Let’s Go Brandon” or “Facts don’t care about your feelings.” They questioned whether the neo-Nazis were even real. They had probably been paid by George Soros, the nurse concluded. “I think that anything that’s going against America is paid by George Soros.”
The neo-Nazis were real, of course — certainly more real than students identifying as cats. Seven years after white nationalists marched through Charlottesville and Trump signaled his support for the “very fine people, on both sides,” his supporters were as eager as ever to either embrace or explain away his racism and authoritarianism. Now those supporters included crypto billionaires and bitcoin bros. Like the nurse from Kentucky, they were committed to an alternate version of the world. Why worry about Nazis when you’re forging your own reality?
The Bitcoin conference is a project of Nashville-based BTC Media, and, I heard again and again, not usually political. Cryptocurrency’s adherents have traditionally envisioned a utopia of free exchange unshackled by the bonds of the state. Yet the conference seemed to have gone full MAGA. On the steps outside the Music City Center, a tax lawyer in khakis handed out white bandages stamped with a red QR code while wearing one over his ear. This year marked a turning point, he said. Many within the crypto community were skeptical of politicians but “anything that pushes the price of bitcoin up, everyone here will be happy about.”
Until recently, that skepticism had gone both ways. Trump used to dismiss cryptocurrency as a “scam,” calling it fake money “based on thin air.” But he’d changed his tune after election donors opened their checkbooks. Fundraising events had been arranged around the conference; a VIP reception with Trump cost between $60,000 and $844,600 a head, while a rooftop meet-and-greet featuring Donald Trump Jr. and former Daily Wire pundit Candace Owens was more modest: $3,000 to $20,000. (Following complaints about her antisemitism, Owens was replaced at the event by Tucker Carlson.)
This year’s event boasted a who’s who of politicians — including four U.S. senators — as well as right-wing celebrities, from former GOP primary candidate Vivek Ramaswamy to British comedian and accused rapist Russell Brand. Famed whistleblower Edward Snowden spoke remotely, warning the audience, apparently in vain, “Cast your vote but don’t join a cult.”
Outside the convention center, a garishly decorated Cybertruck advertising something called THORChain parked behind Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s tour bus while I spoke to a campaign volunteer who bragged that he refused to vaccinate his children. He said he was drawn to RFK Jr. because of his anti-authoritarianism. When I mentioned the neo-Nazis who had been coming to Nashville, he scoffed. “That’s got Feds written all over it.”
Inside, the line for Trump’s speech stretched from the Nakamoto stage — the main event space, named after bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto — down the hallway and into a yawning exhibit hall, where it snaked through a maze of vendors and crypto displays. There was “mining” equipment, bitcoin-inspired art — a startling amount of which featured Pepe the Frog — and meme-inflected merch, whose tongue-in-cheek references were largely indecipherable to me. One vendor was hawking sports and entertainment memorabilia, along with a framed poster of Trump with his raised fist after the assassination attempt, stamped with the word “FIGHT!” At $500, it was his most popular item.
I found the end of the line across from a booth advertising Moonshot Mining. (Men vastly outnumbered women at the conference, both in the audience and onstage.) Behind me a group of guys discussed Harris. Picking her as their candidate was the worst decision the Democrats could have made, a white man laughed. A younger Black guy said he’d seen on TikTok that she might choose Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly as her running mate. Now that would be smart, the white guy replied. “Mark Kelly’s like an American hero, dude. He’s a fucking astronaut, bro.” In a more somber tone, he warned that if Harris wins, “one of two things is true. Either the electorate are really, really, uninformed or there’s something suspicious about the process.”
The Black man was 25 and a Nashville resident. He wore an orange and black Bitcoin-themed baseball jersey. A finance and economics student in college, he’d been “orange-pilled” years ago, he told me, but he had plenty of other interests. “A lot of bitcoin people are like, ‘If it’s not helping bitcoin, it’s not helping anything,’” he said. “And I’m like, ‘Uh, the world is much more complex than that.’” Still, he understood why some people felt so passionate about the issue. People see inflation and the doubling of grocery prices and become anxious about their future. “They can’t control what the banks do. So they think, ‘This is the only way I can escape what’s happening.’” Leaders embracing bitcoin made an alternative future feel within reach. Still, he didn’t like the energy Trump brought out in people.
By 1:45 p.m., the room was at capacity. What remained of the line dissolved as people scattered to the overflow areas in the exhibit hall. I found a spot in front of a stage sponsored by Gemini, the crypto company founded by billionaire twins Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss. They had recently thrown their support behind Trump while declaring war on Harris, who had declined an invitation to the conference.
A white man in his 50s took a seat next to me holding a rolled-up sign reading “SCAMALA.” The enthusiasm for Trump seemed to strike him as both deeply stupid and very funny. “He’s here to raise money and get votes. It’s that simple,” he said. “Do I really want him to be our president? Not really.”