They Did Nazi It Coming: Antisemites Furious as Meme Coin Scheme Unravels

An antisemitic podcaster famous for hosting Kash Patel tried his hand in crypto. It didn’t end well.

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ANTISEMITIC PODCASTER STEW PETERS spews bile on his show every night. Yet he inexplicably managed to host Kash Patel on his show eight times—a fact that became an issue during Patel’s Senate confirmation hearing to become FBI director.

Patel claimed to have no familiarity with the guy, which turns out to likely have been instructive for Peters. Because now, even his racist fans are disavowing him, accusing him of ripping them off with a cryptocurrency and costing them thousands of dollars.

What terrible news!

The controversy centers on $JPROOF, a memecoin Peters launched in April. To give you a sense of what kind of people we’re dealing with here, the name is a reference to Peters’s claim that the way the coin is set up guarantees that it will be “Jew-proofed”—that is, safeguarded from the malfeasance of Jewish bankers.

$JPROOF was initially a hit in some unsavory corners of the internet, boosted by Peters’s constant promotion into hitting $0.20—big money in memecoin world! But while $JPROOF promised that the vast majority of its coins would be permanently locked up in a “vault” and not traded, hence preserving the coin’s value, an X user in May used public transactions to show that the $JPROOF treasury was in fact transferring $JPROOF out.

Once outside of the treasury, it could presumably be converted into money for whoever controlled the treasury. In other words, someone was looting $JPROOF.

The price subsequently began to plummet.

The saga of Peters’s troubled meme coin shows the degree to which the cryptocurrency industry is ripe for manipulation, heartache, and even political discontent. For right-wing media figures, flash-in-the-pain memecoins—including those spearheaded by Donald Trump himself—can offer both an opaque way to shift around finances and an opportunity to turn online notoriety into instant wealth. But they can also explode in spectacular fashion.

Peters’s alleged crypto-grift fiasco also raises another question: Why did Kash Patel associate so much with a guy like this in the first place?

Peters’s most vocal alleged victim, neo-Nazi online personality Lucas Gage, is not a sympathetic figure himself. Gage has earned more than 300,000 followers on X by promoting his own anti-Jewish bigotry, but after losing $9,000 to Peters’s memecoin, he’s posing as a sort of innocent naif wandering about on the internet.

“None of us expected Stew to be doing anything wrong!” Gage complained in a June 9 video.

Neither Peters or Gage responded to my requests for comment.

Gage had seen the $6,000 he initially invested in the coin jump to $30,000, then slide to a still-handsome $15,000. He freaked out at the news that someone was pillaging the coin. He sold it, losing $9,000 in the process. Gage wasn’t alone—after hitting a new low at below $0.01 last week, $JPROOF now sits at just $0.02, crushing the investments of $JPROOF holders.

Peters insists he didn’t do anything wrong. But his professions of innocence are somewhat undermined by the background of another key player on $JPROOF: investment advisor Carlos Cortez. Based in Florida, Cortez styles himself as a kind of MAGA financial advisor, and offers the “America First Retirement Plan” to his clients.

While Peters has praised and promoted Cortez on his show, other people Cortez has previously dealt with found their transactions much less based.

Cortez has paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars to settle numerous complaints from former customers, who accused him of squandering their money on—you guessed it—a “fraudulent cryptocurrency scheme.”

Cortez didn’t respond to a request for comment.

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THE $JPROOF FIASCO AND GAGE’S allegations have roiled the antisemitic online community for over a week. On June 11, Gage even had to film a video with his wife to insist that, despite his losses, he wasn’t bankrupt and his wife wasn’t leaving him. The strength of his proclamation that he was still married was somewhat tempered by his wife’s refusal to appear on camera, and her insistence that she would never have let him blow their money on Peters’s coin if she had known about it.

The allegations of being scammed here are a little rich, given that $JPROOF had no legitimate reason to exist in the first place. Like other memecoins, the whole thing rests on the idea that you can make money only if you’re not the one stuck holding the bag. Peters’s only misdeed, if you follow Gage’s logic, was ripping off the early investors when he should have just held tight so they could all rip off some later investors together.

Unfortunately for $JPROOF bagholders, Peters has had honesty issues in the past. As a young man—you’ll want to sit down for this one—Peters impersonated an actor to insinuate himself into the social circle of then-Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura’s movie-crazed son.

Peters moved into the governor’s mansion, potentially for as long as a month, and lived high on the hog at taxpayers’ expense, enjoying amenities like laundry and meals all provided by the governor’s staff.

And this is a guy our current FBI director associated himself with publicly—over and over! Fortunately for Patel, he’s at least unlikely to be a $JPROOF holder himself. After Patel denied knowing Peters during his Senate hearing, a furious Peters claimed that Patel was lying.

Perhaps Gage should have known all along that he should have been more skeptical. After all, Peters is a flat-earther who thinks the world is surrounded by an impenetrable dome called the “firmament.” Yet in common crypto-parlance, $JPROOF believers insisted their coin would explode in value—or “go to the moon.”

“How are we going to the moon if you believe in the firmament?” Gage said in a June 9 video, before adding some expletives and a slur for the mentally disabled.