“Hey, do you have time for a quick interview?”

It was a question I had heard before, many times, on the streets of Boston. The people who asked usually had cameras, clipboards, or microphones. Sometimes they were journalism students;  sometimes they were content creators looking for quick sound bites. I usually said yes, but this time I was not prepared for what followed.

“Do you think you’re a good person?” the boy asked, holding his phone in front of my face.

I observed him. He seemed normal. He looked like he could have gone to Emerson. He was in his twenties, at most, and seemed level-headed on the surface. 

“Yes,” I said, unsure where the conversation was headed but trying to stay polite.

“Now, who do you think is a better person, Hitler or Obama?”

“Obama,” I answered immediately. Even if I disagreed with certain policies or actions from his presidency, he was not Adolf Hitler. It seemed like an obvious response.

The boy’s tone shifted instantly. What started as a simple question turned into a speech about Hitler’s greatness. He spoke about Nazis with admiration, attributing many major scientific inventions to them. 

With calm conviction, he claimed only “10% of people who died in the Holocaust were Jewish,” and that the gas chambers “weren’t real.” People walking by glanced at us for a moment and then continued on their way. I felt my body tighten. I wanted to walk away, but I was frozen between disbelief and disgust.

Encounters like this are becoming more common in public spaces and on social media, where extremists disguise their views as harmless interviews. They use curiosity and controversy to draw people in, then twist the conversation into a platform for hate, and the casualness of it is part of what makes it so dangerous.

As the exchange went on, the boy’s comments grew louder and more aggressive. He began talking over me, dismissing everything I said, accusing me of being brainwashed and naïve. Finally, he said it outright: he was a Nazi. He seemed proud of the word, as if it gave him power.

This encounter reminded me of “gotcha journalism”—a manipulative form of interviewing where the goal isn’t to inform or understand but to provoke, embarrass, or trap the subject into making compromising or damaging statements. These so-called “interviews” are staged performances, edited for shock value and virality, in which the interviewer’s aim isn’t to uncover the truth, but to elicit a reaction. They bait ordinary people into conflict, then twist the footage to fit an agenda. What might appear to passersby as an innocuous street question is, in reality, a setup designed to humiliate and spread hate. That was this interviewer’s goal when he approached me, and one way or another, he got what he wanted.

The interview ended on a sour note. I walked away shaken, angry, and humiliated. And then, in a moment of impulse, I did something I regret: I reached for his hat and pulled it off his head. It was symbolic to me, an instinctive reaction against everything he had just said. 

But he took it as an attack. He came after me immediately.

He sprinted through the Boston Common, chasing me all the way to the front of Little Building. He grabbed at my body, refusing to let go, clawing at my arms and shoulders while his yells cut through the noise of the busy street. He called me “bitch” and “slut.” His nails scraped my skin as I tried to pull away.

I looked around for help, but no one stepped in. People watched. Some laughed. One man, standing a few feet away, shouted, “I love Hitler,” and smiled. It was surreal. The crowd seemed to enjoy the chaos. I felt small, powerless, and alone.

Eventually, I broke free, returned the hat, and ran. My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it in my throat. When I finally stopped, I realized how shaken I was, not only by his violence but by the indifference around it. 

The people who laughed, who looked away, who cheered him on were students, part of the same community that preaches empathy and awareness. And yet, in that moment, they became part of the same scene of hate.

What struck me most afterward was how quickly cruelty can become a form of entertainment, and how easy it is for unchecked hate to slip into public spaces disguised as conversation. 

We like to think that hate lives in dark corners of the internet or faraway extremist groups, but sometimes it is standing right in front of us, holding a phone, asking, “Do you have time for a quick interview?”