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

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.