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.
