Salt and Reich

The NPD—Germany’s neo-Nazi party—once decided the best use of their organizational energy was a cooking show. Two guys, a kitchen, strong ideological conviction, and apparently a salt shaker that became the production’s unintentional star: even their most committed supporters found it, by the end, genuinely stupid. There’s something almost poetic about that. You can build a whole movement on hatred, design an entire aesthetic around exclusion and racial fantasy, and still get undone by a condiment. The internet found the video, as the internet does. I watched it twice. The second time was worse, in the specific way that things are worse the second time when the problem isn’t what’s on screen but the fact that it exists at all.