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 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.”