Antisocial, page 14
After the 2012 election, Sailer showed, again using exit-poll data, that Romney could have won without making any overtures to Hispanic voters, or to any other minority voting blocs. All he needed, again, was more white votes—specifically, more support among working-class white men in the Rust Belt. “The hidden story of the 2012 election just might come down to Romney not appealing to blue-collar white guys in this swing region,” Sailer wrote. How could Romney have appealed to them? Sailer suggested one way: a hard-line stance on border security. In states like Michigan and Wisconsin, he wrote, “Immigration should be the perfect issue for the GOP to use to split the rank and file from their Democratic bosses.”
Sailer still considered himself a conservative, although the arbiters of palatable conservative opinion, such as the editors of National Review and The Weekly Standard, had long ago stopped commissioning his work. Many of his peers in dissident right-wing punditry—John Derbyshire, Peter Brimelow, Ann Coulter, Jared Taylor—had been cast out of the conservative establishment for similar intellectual heresies. A few of them embraced their outcast status, gaining attention through confrontational acts of televised sophistry. (Ann Coulter was especially adept at this tactic, tiptoeing just close enough to the you-can’t-say-that-on-television line to ensure that she would always be invited back on television.) The others kept blogging, biding their time.
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Sailer felt confident that no part of the Sailer Strategy was unconstitutional or illegal. In more than a decade, no one had been able to point out any serious mistakes in his arithmetic or his logic. The real problem, as far as he could tell, was that his ideas made powerful people uncomfortable.
Conservatives often referred to the Overton window, or to political correctness. Sailer went a step further. Of all the malign forces that he perceived in the world, perhaps the most pernicious was what he called “the Narrative”—a nonnegotiable vocabulary that every member of polite society was required to learn. Political correctness was just a small part of it. Americans absorbed the Narrative every day—in their schools, in the media, through mass entertainment, through thousands of tiny social cues. The brainwashing was so total as to become invisible; people internalized the axioms so deeply that, after a while, they couldn’t think without them. Simply to point out the existence of the axioms, much less to call their truth into question, was to become a dangerous brute, a pariah.*
According to the Narrative, Islam is a religion of peace; therefore, the mullahs calling for bloodshed had to be ignored or explained away. According to the Narrative, race and gender are social constructs; therefore, newspaper articles and car commercials had to avoid depicting any meaningful difference between European Americans and African Americans, or between men and women. According to the Narrative, American citizenship is a civil right that is owed to every one of the world’s seven billion inhabitants—Sailer called this the Zeroth Amendment, because “it’s not in the Constitution, but it’s treated as if it were”—so anyone seeking high office had to speak about immigration in magnanimous platitudes. This, Sailer believed, was why the Sailer Strategy was never invoked in The Economist or The Wall Street Journal, or on CNN or Fox News, or in official GOP reports. It defied the Narrative.*
On his blog, he referred to his ideas as “crimethink”—the word George Orwell used, in 1984, for any thought that Big Brother didn’t want you to have. By that analogy, of course, Sailer was Winston Smith, a vigilante hero struggling against tyranny. He understood that the analogy was melodramatic. He had no reason to assume that anyone at the NSA was even aware of his blog, much less conspiring to censor it or arrest him for its contents. The tyrannical force in the twenty-first-century United States was not a Ministry of Truth but the pervasive reach of the Narrative. “It’s naive to imagine that a government would have to pay people to do this kind of thing,” Sailer wrote. “In the current year, we now know that plenty of people would join the Volunteer Auxiliary Thought Police for free.”
It seemed obvious that the marketplace of ideas was rigged against him. He was free to write what he wanted, but a small contrarian blog was no way to spark a national movement. Many normal American voters, Sailer thought, might consider his views quite unobjectionable, even obvious. But first normal Americans would have to be exposed to his ideas, and the guardians of the Narrative—the gatekeepers who controlled the movie studios, the ad firms, and the mainstream press—would never allow that to happen.
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The system of Narrative control that Sailer had in mind was an old-fashioned one, with firm boundaries patrolled by human gatekeepers. But, whether Sailer noticed it or not, those boundaries were eroding quickly. In 2008, the marketing agency Universal McCann published a report declaring that the “age of mass media” was giving way to the “age of social media.” Anyone with web access, anywhere in the world, was now not only a receiver of news but also a transmitter. Facebook, valued at $15 billion and rising, had recently gained its hundred-millionth subscriber. Meanwhile, American newspaper circulation was declining for the sixth consecutive year. Informational power was being democratized, or at least entrepreneurialized: you could spread almost any message you wanted, as long as you could get a crowd to listen. On the cover page of the Universal McCann report were a group of stylized cartoon characters with cyberpunk outfits, asymmetrical haircuts, and featureless faces. They stood on a grassy knoll overlooking a hypermodern skyline, raising their fists and 3G-enabled devices in the air. The tagline was “How the internet turned us all into influencers.”
William F. Buckley, the last singular arbiter of conservative opinion, died in 2008, a few months before the report came out. He had no comparable successor, no conservative panjandrum who could dictate which ideas deserved to flourish and which did not. Several individuals and institutions tried to fill this role, but it seemed that this old kind of gatekeeping was becoming less feasible with every passing year. Many decisions about the spread of information were now made algorithmically. The algorithms were not designed to gauge whether an idea was true or false, prosocial or antisocial; they were designed to measure whether a meme was causing a spike of activating emotion in a large number of people. And Sailer’s citizenism—more colloquially known as intellectualized white nationalism—was just such a meme.
Sailer and other far-right heretics, many of whom Buckley had banished to the fringes of the movement years earlier, now reconvened online. They built their own publications (The American Conservative, Taki’s Magazine, VDARE), and promoted them using new tools such as WordPress and Twitter and Reddit. These were more powerful distribution mechanisms than fifty-year-old print magazines, anyway, and they had the added benefit of being content neutral. Through social media, the heretics lured visitors to their own sites, where they spoke even more freely, arguing from first principles. No thought was beyond the pale. Unsayable opinions were repeated, again and again, until they became sayable. In the comments sections, the writers and their burgeoning audience debated what they should call themselves. The New Right? The American Renaissance? The Dissident Right?
In November 2008, about sixty ex-academics, autodidacts, and freelance opinion writers gathered in a hotel ballroom outside Baltimore. They were there for the inaugural meeting of the H. L. Mencken Club, which described itself as a “society for the independent right.” Earlier that month, Barack Obama had defeated John McCain to win the presidency, but the heretics in the hotel ballroom would have been equally dismayed by either result.* “There are things that everybody knows are true but can’t be said,” Peter Brimelow, the editor of VDARE, asserted in his keynote speech. One such thing, he continued, was the Sailer Strategy—“the need for Republicans to mobilize their white base.”*
Paul Gottfried, a cantankerous former professor in his sixties, gave a speech that amounted to a generational baton-passing. The paleoconservatives, among whom he counted himself, had “spent their lives butting their heads against the American conservative movement,” with little to show for it. But now, suddenly, “we have youth and exuberance on our side.” He mentioned “a growing communion” of “websites that are willing to engage sensitive, timely subjects”; fans of these sites, Gottfried hoped, would form an energetic new cohort of dissident right-wingers, which he dubbed “the post-paleos.”
Gottfried’s remarks were later published on takimag.com, the website of Taki’s Magazine. Writers don’t pick their own headlines. Instead, the site’s managing editor, Richard Spencer, coined a phrase for the new cohort of dissidents, a phrase that he thought would be catchier than “post-paleos.” He titled Gottfried’s speech “The Decline and Rise of the Alternative Right.”*
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Sites like Taki’s and VDARE inspired more alt-right sites, animated by an even more flippant, feral energy: The Right Stuff, Danger & Play, Radix Journal, the tech section of Breitbart. These sites were often laden with gleefully racist jokes, images of Greco-Roman statuary, and high-flown encomiums to “Western civilization.” The authors implied, or sometimes stated outright, that diversity was not an asset but a Trojan horse, or that authoritarianism was preferable to democracy, or that white male dominance was what had made antiquity great. These were ideas that polite society found abhorrent, of course, but the alt-right bloggers only treated this as further evidence of their own intellectual potency. After all, true crimethink is supposed to shock the bourgeoisie.
For a certain kind of reader, discovering these alt-right sites felt like stumbling onto a countercultural intellectual vanguard. These enthusiastic readers then took to Reddit and 4chan and Twitter and Facebook, spreading the heretical gospel. On social media, from behind an anonymous avatar, you could share more or less whatever you wanted—a Holocaust joke, an absurdist meme, a thought-provoking lie. You could post something because you believed it, or because you didn’t believe it and you wanted to see who would. You could post something because you valued freedom of thought for its own sake; you could post something solely to get a reaction; you could post something without even knowing why, just because you felt like it.
Some parts of Reddit, and most of 4chan and 8chan,* were dominated by a culture of “shitposting,” or posting whatever shit happened to pop into your head. There were endless subgenres of shitposting, with new ones invented practically every day. If you were expressing nostalgia for Pearl Jam and Boy Meets World, you were ’90s posting. If you acted technologically illiterate or scandalized by raunchy humor, the way a clueless baby boomer might, you were boomer posting. Bane posting was when people treated Bane, the homicidally nihilistic villain from the Dark Knight trilogy of Batman movies, as a hero.* Trying too hard—letting yourself be swept away by earnestness or urgency, in defiance of the casual vibe of the internet—was called effort posting.*
Amid all the arcane and sarcastic memes were glimmers of sincerity: statistics, rhetorical questions, and other breadcrumbs that were supposed to lead normies down the path toward full alt-right radicalization. What kind of people followed the breadcrumbs? Some were hypercontrarians, addicted to the rush of asking forbidden questions and rejecting widely accepted answers. Some were alienated young men—restive, thwarted, full of depthless rage at women or at the world. Some had come to think of their lives as fictional simulations and were eager to experience a new timeline. And some, like a villain from the Dark Knight trilogy, just wanted to watch the world burn.
The new alt-right converts, more and more of them every month, continued to form communities on social media, where their voices continued to be amplified. The mood felt increasingly volatile, electric, like a parking lot outside a bar before a fight breaks out. In 2014, the alt-right hordes started coalescing around a more overt set of talking points: that racism was realism, that diversity was code for white genocide, that nonwhite immigration posed an imminent threat to Euro-American sovereignty. Then, in the summer of 2015, the hordes came to a sudden and unexpected consensus. They would use social media shitposting to help Donald Trump—a doddering pop-culture punch line whom they had rebranded, with web-savvy irony, as a triumphant “God-Emperor”—in his implausible quest to become the next president of the United States.
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At the H. L. Mencken Club’s annual meeting in 2010, one of the keynote speakers was Steve Sailer. “Richard Spencer has asked me to speak,” he began, “on the topic ‘Can HBD Trump PC?’”
“PC” stood for political correctness. “Trump” was a common verb, not a proper noun. “HBD” stood for human biodiversity—a phrase that had gone viral within the alt-right blogosphere, largely owing to Sailer’s repeated use of it. Human biodiversity: the hypothesis that people are different, that they differ in predictable ways, and that some groups of people—some races, for example—have drawn stronger cards in the genetic lottery. On Sailer’s blog, most discussions of human biodiversity ended up returning to one specific, enduring idea: that white people are inherently smarter than black people.
“In an intellectually healthy world, of course, the study of human biodiversity wouldn’t be imperiled by the reign of political correctness,” Sailer said. The problem, as usual, was the Narrative: “You watch your TV and learn from it what kind of thoughts raise your status and what kind lower your status.” As long as mass-media gatekeepers kept portraying citizenism as low status, Sailer believed, the commoners would fall in line. Maybe one day, someone would subvert this status game, “shatter political correctness,” and rebuild the Overton window, but he couldn’t imagine who that person might be.
On June 16, 2015, Donald Trump stood, stiff and red faced, as an escalator carried him down to the lobby of one of his eponymous skyscrapers. A group of onlookers—many of them background actors who would be paid fifty dollars, in cash, upon leaving the building—held up signs and snapped photos with their phones. In the background, a PA system blasted “Rockin’ in the Free World,” an antijingoist anthem by a Canadian pacifist. When Trump got to the lobby, he gripped a lectern with both hands, looking both cocky and profoundly uncomfortable. He lied about the size of the crowd in front of him, mocked his political opponents (“They sweated like dogs”), and claimed that Muslim terrorists had “just built a hotel in Syria,” which was so far from being true that journalists would later struggle to figure out which false rumor he might have been referring to. He said, of Mexican immigrants, “They’re rapists.” He was five minutes into his presidential campaign.
A few minutes later, he said, “We need somebody that can take the brand of the United States and make it great again. It’s not great again.” He announced that he was running for president, and the background actors cheered. The sound operator cued up “Rockin’ in the Free World” again, to serve as Trump’s exit music, but Trump didn’t exit. Instead, he gestured for the volume to be turned down, then went on talking for another thirty minutes.
The whole spectacle was so discordant with the Narrative that most mainstream pundits discounted it, albeit for conflicting reasons. Trump was a huckster; his campaign was a publicity stunt; he would soon drop out of the race; he had no ideology; his ideology was sophomoric and inconsistent; his ideology was seductive and dangerous. Besides, he had no path to electoral victory.
Steve Sailer, meanwhile, kept blogging about the Sailer Strategy.
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In 1989, David Duke, the founder of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, was elected to the Louisiana House of Representatives. The following year, he came close to winning a Republican primary for the U.S. Senate, capturing 43 percent of the vote. He was able to do all this, in part, because of his name recognition, which he maintained by constantly appearing on television. He seemed to assume that all press was good press. He was fine with being described as controversial, even dangerous, as long as he was placed somewhere within the bounds of recognized political opinion.
Blatant racists like Duke were a staple of the tabloid talk shows of the 1980s and ’90s, the ones hosted by Geraldo Rivera and Sally Jessy Raphael and Oprah Winfrey. “It is definitely not a secret that hatred and racism is alive and well in the United States,” Ricki Lake said on her daytime talk show in 1993. “But why? And where does this hatred come from? Today, we will talk to young women who are proud to be members of the Ku Klux Klan.” The next hour of television did little to illuminate where American racism came from. “I think you’re all screwed up,” one audience member shouted, pointing at the women onstage. The rest of the audience erupted in applause.
Such ritual humiliations were good for ratings (everyone loves a good fight); they were good for social cohesion (nothing brings people together like a common enemy); they were also good for catharsis, in the original sense.* What is racism? Racism is a bad humor that dwells only in bad people. Where are the bad people? They are there, on the stage, under the bright lights, wearing shoulder pads and tacky teased hair and defiant sneers. Racism does not reside among us, the audience. You can tell because they are the ones being pointed at and we are the ones doing the pointing.
I was nine years old when that Ricki Lake episode aired. When I was home sick from school, I would often watch the daytime talk shows—I was especially fond of Sally Jessy Raphael, because of her bright-red glasses—and I always had precisely the reaction I was supposed to have. I remember thinking, in words, Who could possibly hate other people because of the way they look? Racism seemed like an exotic affliction—one of nature’s cruel and inexplicable mistakes, almost like a rare birth defect. At school, I was taught to associate late November with the Pilgrims and late December with Jesus and mid-January with Martin Luther King, who preached love and tolerance and envisaged a day when Americans would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
