Meet the Fashion-Forward Firebrand Making a Svelte Splash in Washington

Gary Duncan deftly maneuvers a small pile of crinkle cut truffle fries to form a swastika on his crescent-shaped plate.

“Heh, look what I did,” he says, sunny-day blue eyes alight beneath a fetching pair of Burberry glasses. “I made a swastika. Because I’m an actual Nazi.”

The conservative wavemaker is refreshingly candid, musing about eugenics in our booth at the achingly hip Washington hot spot, Mavericks. One senses no filter; Duncan refuses to mince words, police his language, or talk directly with Jews. When discussing racial purity, he is unencumbered by the burden of political correctness, and he makes no apologies for it. Then he proceeds to eat the rest of his fries and tuck into a three-bean salad. (“No black beans — I’m ride-or-die garbanzo.”)

Duncan wears a hand-stitched heather grey jacket with an inside pattern trim of tessellated skulls. With mesmerizing Nordic good looks and a “Pogrompadour” haircut (like Macklemore, only more so), Duncan is fast becoming the clean-cut face of an exciting new voice in American politics. But he’s not without a playful sense of humor about himself. When a dollop of aioli lands on his compact mustache, which looks as though the rocket ship of his nose has left a permanent trail of exhaust immediately beneath his nostrils, he rolls his eyes and lets out an embarrassed sigh.

“More like the whoopsie party, am I right?” he says, handsomely.

If Adolf Hitler is the Michael Jordan of Nazis — a comparison the racial exclusionist would admittedly not have enjoyed — Duncan is the Kristaps Porzingis, a hot rookie sensation with angular Latvian features who favors a skinny tie. For years, the 38-year old non-traditionalist has been shouting quite literally into the void, proclaiming on Twitter that whites are the superior species, that a fourth Reich will indeed rise in America, and that Paul Smith suits are “hot fire.” In Duncan’s view, there’s just something special about the centralized power of an authoritarian government, and the clean lines of well-cut wool. He also has a lot of thoughts about depopulation.

“Is it PC to believe that whites are the ‘master race’?” he asks, making air quotes with his well-manicured fingers. “Maybe it’s un-PC to deny the possibility.” Duncan’s brash views weren’t finding much traction online beyond Twitter users with anime avatars and usernames like “ShrekPissSlave420”. Then a certain presidential candidate emboldened him and his brethren with a worldview that dovetailed nicely with their own.

Recently, he’s been organizing meetups around the DC area, under the innocuous moniker, The League of Good Pals. The so-called “Good Pals movement” gained steam throughout the election cycle, with the media latching onto it as a user-friendly term to describe Nazis.

In some ways, the Good Pals movement resembles an older generation of “aggressively racist rabble-rousers” — or “straight-up Nazis,” as Duncan prefers to put it — who have long sought to be taken seriously. Duncan enjoys rock star status among many distinct fringe groups beneath the Nazi banner because he owns at least two suits, doesn’t live with his parents, and has managed to avoid being beaten up yet, even once.

He also likes to mix it up with colorful wordplay.

“I don’t know about Chance the Rapper, but I’d like to wrap the Chancellor of Germany in a loving American embrace,” he says, a slight smile dancing on lips that are a weird amount of glossy. “But in all seriousness, I look forward to the day Chance the Rapper is detained in a re-education camp.”

After taking a moment to tie his red shoelaces, which are pristine, artisanally crafted, and meant to symbolize the blood he’s shed for “the cause,” Duncan leans back and laughs.

“Remember when I made the swastika with my fries?” the dapper Nazi says, shaking his head a little.

Duncan knows that a white ethnostate is for now just a beautiful dream, but his first goal is to make it acceptable for he and other Nazis to talk about it in public without getting beaten up mercilessly. He hopes that as his media coverage grows, America’s nonwhites will come to accept his extreme opinions as a valid point of view, and possibly even leave the country willingly. He’s earmarked several districts in each state to become designated “Little Dachaus,” though, just in case.

Duncan looks wistfully through the window in the general direction of the Lincoln Memorial. “Sieg heil,” he adds, thrusting his arm out in a salute that somehow does not wrinkle his majestically fitted jacket sleeve.

Later that evening, Duncan met with a who’s who of area Nazis for dinner at the musky cigar bar, Ashes, a classic DC watering hole. The group includes Fred Gummer, who runs the website White Genocide and has been dubbed a “coat-and-tie Nazi” by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and Garth Buckwell, the translucently pale founder of anti-immigration website, The N-Word. The dashingly dressed literal Nazis resemble Washington lobbyists more than members of an Aryan prison gang. And it’s clear from the way they discuss setting up a GoFundMe to get industrial rockers Rammstein to play Duncan’s birthday party, that these enterprising rebels are working out of a new playbook. A playbook for jaunty Nazis.

“This election has awakened everyone to our presence,” Duncan says, adjusting a satin cravat festooned with the Imperial Eagle.

Duncan nods, and does a celebratory goosestep. It is quite awkward. By now, most of the bar has filed out — or at least our section has mysteriously depleted. I gather my things and quietly leave, so as not to disturb the rogue nonconformist while he’s in his element with friends. On the way out, I can’t resist a last glimpse at Duncan. He’s a man with audacious plans, making big moves in a powerful city, his finery so deliciously impertinent you almost forget he’s a total, balls-out Nazi.

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Joe Berkowitz is a staff editor at Fast Company. His first book, You Blew It!, is in stores and you can pre-order his next one, Away with Words, out June 2017.