Look, I get it. The Nazi bar cleaned up its act. A few years, maybe even just a few months ago, it was full of Nazi bullshit and propaganda, and run by a clear Nazi, and that sucked, as it was the only bar in town that showed sports.

So you left. Because fuck Nazis and who in their right mind hangs out in a Nazi bar, right?

I mean, other than Nazis.

But honestly, the other places you tried with your friends showed different sports, or no sports at all. And a lot of the conversations you had were just about how bad the Nazis are, and isn’t this a better place than the old Nazi bar, and thank goodness we’re not Nazis, and hey, fuck those Nazis right? Who needs sports anyway?

But then a couple of people mentioned the Nazi bar again, and you got curious. You went along, eventually, because you’ve got to check your assumptions every so often. And yep, still Nazi bar.

So you go back to the other bars, but they all seem to be defining themselves by how not a Nazi bar they all are. Like even when you leave the Nazi bar, it’s really all any conversation comes back around to.

And still, no sports.

So you check out the Nazi bar again. And wait a minute, what’s this? The Nazis all seem to have gone away! No Nazis anywhere you can see (and fair, you look). Sure, the owner is still very clearly a Nazi, but maybe he’s just got bored (wouldn’t be the first time). So maybe actually the old staff are running the show again, keeping it on the down-low, and it’s no longer really a Nazi bar. I mean it doesn’t look like a Nazi bar, and there really do seem to be no Nazis here any more.

And, you know: sports!

So you tell some friends, on the quiet, and they come with you and hey! No Nazis? They look pretty thoroughly too, since they’re skeptical (rightly so! It could be a fucking Nazi bar), but no. No Nazis.

And sports!

So you all settle in a bit, and start to spread the word, more confident that the Nazis have, indeed, fucked off.

And some more friends join you. Some stay, but some still get creeped out. Some even get so creeped out they accuse you of being a Nazi. They say nothing has changed, that they still get abuse when they go, that they still feel in danger, or threatened, and that the place is still full of Nazis. But that’s not what you see. You can’t figure it, so you figure instead that spending all the time in those other bars has made them paranoid. Has made them so focused on everything being about Nazis that they’ve lost their minds.

Because for real, there are no Nazis here. Just lots of folks watching sports.

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Which is of course the whole point, because the bit where you and me and everyone else noticed that the Nazi bar was a Nazi bar was a bug. People like us aren’t supposed to notice it’s a Nazi bar, since we’re the people they want to come and spend our money. It’s the others that are supposed to notice that it’s a Nazi bar. The ones the Nazis don’t want. They get the hostile bouncer, the rude bartender. They get the toilet attendant that shuffles them off to the back stalls where the Nazis have scrawled what they really think of them.

And when you ask them why they don’t want to come, they tell you, and you can’t believe them. So you assume they’re nuts.

And suddenly you’re not in a Nazi bar, not really: you’re just in one that weirdly seems full of people that all seem like you, watching sports and talking about sports and glad that nobody’s talking about Nazis any more.

Because a Nazi bar that everyone can see is a Nazi bar is just a bad Nazi bar. The successful ones convince their wealthy patrons that it’s just a regular bar. A good one even.

Just one that keeps all those crazy people out.