Antisocial, page 20
I spent one uncomfortable summer afternoon with Colin Flaherty, a sixty-year-old white guy from Delaware. He wanted to see The New Yorker’s office—“I’ve always been curious what the belly of the beast looks like”—but that seemed like a bad idea for several reasons, so instead I took him to the Condé Nast cafeteria for a quick coffee and then whisked him outside, to City Hall Park, for an interview. We sat on a bench and Flaherty grumbled about the sorry state of the world. At the time, he had some twenty-five thousand subscribers on YouTube, but his account kept getting suspended for violating YouTube’s rules. He told me that his goal was to expose the national epidemic of black-on-white crime, and the mainstream media’s mysterious refusal to report on it. I made what I thought was a solid counterargument: that there was no epidemic of black-on-white crime, which explained the lack of media coverage.
Flaherty had no particular internet strategy. He seemed like a surly racist of the old-school variety—the kind of guy who, if he weren’t ranting about black pathology on YouTube, would be ranting about black pathology on his front porch instead. In a pinned tweet, he tried to promote his most recent book, Don’t Make the Black Kids Angry, by turning the title into a hashtag. But he hadn’t noticed that hashtags could only consist of letters and numbers—that the Twitter algorithm understood any punctuation to be the end of a word—so his hashtag ended up being #Don, followed by a vestigial tail of unhighlighted letters.
Clearly, Flaherty would not be of much use to me. Next I tried Ben Goldman and Paris Wade, two twenty-six-year-olds who’d met when they were undergraduate business students at the University of Tennessee. Now they were living and working together in a studio apartment in the outer suburbs of San Francisco, sleeping on air mattresses and eating a lot of takeout burritos. Every twenty minutes or so, on a Facebook page called Liberty Writers, they would post another “news” bulletin based on little or no evidence (“IMPEACH HIM NOW! Obama’s ISIS Tape Just Leaked & It’s Even Worse Than You Can Imagine”). Each post was calibrated to incite a quick burst of activating emotion, usually fear or rage. The Facebook posts drove traffic to a site, LibertyWritersNews.com, which was laden with ads recommending herbal virility pills or one weird trick to bust belly fat.
They used pen names: Ben Goldman was Danny Gold, “America’s #1 Writer,” and Paris Wade was Paris Swade, “the best writer on the Internet.” On the phone, Goldman was more modest. “Paris and I were busboys in a Mexican restaurant in Knoxville,” he said. “Nobody else was really hiring. Then we put up a Facebook page, and suddenly we’re making forty thousand bucks a month.” He could hardly believe his good luck. I asked a few questions about yellow journalism and the fragility of the American democratic experiment, but neither topic seemed to hold his interest. “I approach what we do as a business, basically,” he said. “Having strong beliefs can get in the way of building up a business sometimes.”
He and Wade came from liberal families, and Goldman told me that each of them had “voted for Obama both times. But you can spend five minutes looking at the analytics and see what your audience wants. ‘Hillary is a corrupt witch.’ ‘Comment below if you love our flag.’” He had his own personal beliefs, “but, regardless, when you know which narratives work, you feel pressure to drive those narratives. I’m sure you guys deal with similar pressures at the New York Post.”
“The New Yorker,” I said.
“Right,” he responded. “What did I say?”
Pro-Trump clickbait was an easy way to make money, but I assumed that if that particular hustle ever became less lucrative, Goldman and Wade would be just as happy to hawk stock tips or real estate.
After the 2016 election, LibertyWritersNews.com and the Liberty Writers Facebook page both vanished. In 2018, I checked in on Goldman and Wade again. They were now living in the Las Vegas area, where Wade was running for Nevada State Assembly as a Republican.*
* * *
—
I called Mark Dice, a frequent guest on Infowars and a YouTuber with half a million subscribers. Dice’s primary beat was exposing the Illuminati cult that controlled Hollywood. He did not seem to mean this figuratively. “I’ve shown, by pointing out secret messages in Lady Gaga’s videos, that she’s a Devil-worshipper,” he told me. “I’ve called Kim Kardashian ‘the big-butted anti-Christ.’ That sort of thing. I’m not afraid to be politically incorrect.” I asked Dice if I could spend a few days with him, observing how he made and promoted his videos. He declined.*
Next I approached the founder of Infowars, Alex Jones, who seemed willing to participate in a profile. I’d listened to his show for years, on and off, out of morbid curiosity. Jones treats facts the way cats treat small rodents, batting them around for a few minutes before butchering them for sport; still, when I paid more attention to the cadence than to the words, I sometimes found his millenarian rants oddly transporting. His opinion about global warming, to take an example more or less at random, was that the coastal elites had it exactly wrong—that the atmosphere actually needed more carbon dioxide, “a planet-saving nutrient.” This wasn’t a bad metaphor for Jones’s whole broadcasting style: finding an informational environment already rich in toxins, he tried to help by disgorging as much poisonous gas as possible.
I had finalized my plans with the Infowars staff and was in the process of booking a trip to Texas when Jones changed his mind and rescinded the invitation. A few months later, he let a Vice camera crew film inside his studio. On a whiteboard in a conference room was a chart that some Infowars staffers had been working on: a two-dimensional map of the Media Matrix. A few dozen major outlets were arrayed along a Y axis, from the most “state-run” to the most “independent,” and along an X axis, from “tyranny” to “freedom.” Infowars was the freest and most independent; ABC and CNN were the most state-run and tyrannical. In the middle of the chart were Vice News, the Financial Times, and The New Yorker.
* * *
• • •
I kept scouting for internet villains, and I found plenty, but none of them fit my needs. What I was looking for, I started to realize, was a person whose undeserved influence could demonstrate the brokenness of the entire system—in other words, a reductio ad absurdum.
It’s a rhetorical move at least as old as the Socratic dialogues. Someone articulates a principle that seems to make sense on its face—Justice means obeying the law, for example—and Socrates dismantles it, showing how it can lead to paradoxes. What if your government makes an unjust law? Would justice then require that you both obey it and disobey it? Any principle that ends up producing such absurdities was surely flawed to begin with.
In the early days of social media, the new gatekeepers didn’t spend much time delineating their abstract principles. For the most part, they proceeded according to instinct, or aesthetic preference, or trial and error. (We always banned people. It wasn’t well thought out or even articulated, really.) When they did talk of freedom, democracy, and giving power to the people, their lofty rhetoric was rarely subjected to Socratic scrutiny. Which people? How much freedom?
In early 2016, William Powers, an employee at the MIT Media Lab, wrote an article about the 150 top “election influencers” of the moment, according to a quantitative analysis of Twitter data. “Thanks to the digital revolution,” he wrote, “the old behemoths of political influence, the two major parties and the traditional media, have lost their former dominance.” The most influential influencer on the list, to no one’s surprise, was Donald Trump. The next ten slots all went to individual politicians; the highest-ranked media organization, at number 12, was Fox News. At number 32 was a site called Viral Buzz News, which billed itself as “a trendy take on today’s news, entertainment, social media trends and fresh talk”—not quite Dose Politics, but not far off. Lower on the list were Politico, CNN Politics, and The New York Times. Cher was sandwiched between Bill O’Reilly and the Associated Press.
Any media system that could lead to such absurd outcomes was surely flawed. If this was how millions of Americans were getting the information that would shape their voting behavior, then something had gone terribly wrong.
I showed the list to a few people who knew the social media landscape well. More than once, their reaction was that the most surprising thing about the list was that Mike Cernovich wasn’t on it.
* * *
• • •
That August, Hillary Clinton announced that she would give a speech linking Donald Trump to the alt-right. The afternoon before her speech, Cernovich sat on a veranda in Orange County, California, opened Periscope on his iPad, and started filming a video called “How to fight back against Sick Hillary and the #ClintonNewsNetwork.” By “Clinton News Network,” he meant CNN and the corporate media as a whole. “Sick” was supposed to describe Clinton both morally and physically. By “fight back,” he meant using Twitter to gain ground in a larger informational war.
He slipped into his standard Periscope persona—part pundit, part life coach, part nativist demagogue. “Tomorrow, everybody’s going to be googling the alt-right,” he told his followers. “And you know what shows up? Jeff Bezos’s blog, The Washington Post. Hoax articles, hoax sites are gonna come up.” A torrent of heart logos, each generated by a viewer tapping the like button, surged up the right side of the screen. On the left side of the screen, also floating upward, were their comments (@beelman_matt: “PC is for PUSSIES”; @ciswhitemale: “Mike is a bosss”). Cernovich wore a plaid shirt, partially unbuttoned to display his chest hair. Behind him were a large, bright-blue swimming pool, a row of trimmed boxwoods, and a mountain glowing in the late-afternoon sun. (A comment from @CanadaUncuck: “nice pool.”)
Cernovich insisted that he was not alt-right, but he kept slipping into first-person pronouns when he mentioned the movement. “We can control the narrative on Twitter,” he said. “On Google, we’ve lost. Mainstream media we’ve lost.” Already, in anticipation of Clinton’s speech, the hashtag #AltRightMeans was trending on Twitter, with the alt-right’s supporters and its opponents competing to define the movement in real time.*
Cernovich talked for another seventy minutes as the sun set behind him, growing increasingly excited about Clinton’s speech. By the end of his livestream, more than twenty thousand people were watching. “I want a full-scale media attack on me,” he said. “I want this to become an international trending topic.”
* * *
—
The next day, Cernovich watched Clinton’s speech, livestreaming his reaction on Periscope. “Is she gonna fall?” he said, as Clinton approached the stage. “She’s grabbing the handrail!” For months, Cernovich had been insisting that Clinton suffered from a grave neurological condition, and that the media was covering it up. Speaking and typing at the same time, he tweeted, “Sick Hillary grabs handrail as walking up steps. #AltRightMeans.”
The hashtag continued to trend while Clinton spoke.
“#AltRightMeans I don’t have to be ashamed of my heritage,” Lauren Southern tweeted, with a stock photo of a blonde girl holding a Danish flag.
“#AltRightMeans tweeting about how Hitler might have been on to something from behind a Pepe the Frog avatar,” Matthew Chapman, a Democratic activist, tweeted.
“I don’t know what #AltRightMeans,” a comedian named Maura Quint tweeted. “are those the ones who hate me b/c I’m a Jew, b/c I’m a woman or b/c I believe a hot dog is a sandwich?”*
In her speech, Clinton used the term as it was then commonly understood: a loose online affiliation of conspiracists, bigots, and social media trolls, with no single ideology unifying them all. Richard Spencer tried to reassert the term’s intrinsic connection to white nationalism, telling a Guardian reporter, “Someone who is really alt-right recognizes the reality of race.” But even the inventor of a meme can’t always control how it evolves.
Clinton, behind a lectern, read out a few headlines from recent Breitbart articles by Milo Yiannopoulos. “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy,” Clinton said. “Would You Rather Your Child Had Feminism or Cancer?” She disapproved of these sentiments, and she was using her bully pulpit to express that disapproval. She was also, whether she realized it or not, amplifying Yiannopoulos’s message. The troll’s fondest wish is to trigger as many normies as possible, to hear his memes pass through the pursed lips of the powerful; yet even Yiannopoulos, a troll of unparalleled ambition, couldn’t have anticipated that Hillary Clinton herself would repeat his words in front of a global audience.
Clinton didn’t mention Cernovich, but she did denounce Alex Jones, who had suggested that the Sandy Hook shooting was staged and that its victims were child actors. When she reached this part of the speech, she went off script, her voice sinking into an unusually dire register: “I don’t know what happens in somebody’s mind, or how dark their heart must be, to say things like that.”
When Clinton’s speech was over, Yiannopoulos, writing on Breitbart, called it “a drive-by shooting with a water pistol fired from a mobility scooter.” Cernovich, on Periscope, deemed it “boring,” contending that it “contained way too many facts, didn’t have a central theme.” He was streaming from inside the living room. After a few minutes, though, Shauna asked him to go back outside. She was trying to watch the postspeech analysis on CNN, and she couldn’t hear the TV.
Alex Jones responded to the speech a few hours after it ended, uploading a YouTube video of himself in his backyard. It was dusk, and cicadas were chirping in the background. “As I stand out here in the ninety-five-degree heat, as night falls, and I sweat, I guess I am figuratively in some type of fever swamp,” he said. He scratched a mosquito bite on his forehead, then muttered about the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds. “People say, ‘Oh my God, you’ve hit the big time—Hillary Clinton talked about you,’” he went on. “Give me a break. Hillary Clinton’s average YouTubes, on her own channel, have, like, five thousand views. Our average one has hundreds of thousands.”*
Clinton’s speech “was the stupidest thing she could have done,” Cernovich said. Clinton’s social media advisers, he said, were “twenty-four-year-old basic bitches who feel triggered by us, and so they asked their boss to yell at us and make us go away. Well, we’re not going away. They just made us stronger.”
* * *
—
I emailed Cernovich and asked if I could spend a few days with him. Despite his antimedia bravado, it turned out, he talked to the media all the time. He wasn’t naïve enough to imagine that The New Yorker would run a puff piece about him, he told me later. Still, however the article turned out, he felt confident that he’d be able to spin it as a victory. It might include a few snarky observations designed to lower his social status. Fine. Beyond that, what was the worst that could happen? Some understated insults in a fancy font? Every day, on Twitter, someone called him a rapist or a human-shaped shit stain, and it only seemed to make his brand stronger.
We talked on the phone, and I asked him quotidian questions. What did he do all day? How did he make money? And what was Cernovich Media, exactly—was he renting office space, hiring reporters, filling out W-2 forms?
Cernovich laughed. “I run a lean operation,” he said. “Come out and you’ll see it for yourself.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The Media Matrix
Cernovich lived on a patch of coastline fifty miles south of Los Angeles, in a deep-red congressional district marked by temperate beaches and intemperate politics.* When he first told me his address over the phone, I asked him how I would recognize it. “You won’t,” he said. “It’s one of those suburban tract-type deals where all the houses look exactly the fucking same.”
Sure enough, every house on his cul-de-sac had a ceramic tile roof, beige stucco walls, a one-car garage, and a dash of pro-forma xeriscaping. He met me outside, barefoot, wearing a rumpled gingham shirt and jeans. I’d watched so many of his livestreams that I felt as if I knew him, but this was our first time meeting in person. He looked shorter and fleshier in person, and his eye contact was less steady than it was on camera.
A day-old Orange County Register lay at his feet, still wrapped in plastic. Cernovich Media was a lean operation indeed. Cernovich didn’t even own a car, much less a satellite truck or a video-editing suite. Next door, a sticker on a garbage bin advertised a seamy web tabloid called WorldNetDaily, known for promoting the false rumor that Barack Obama had been born in Kenya. Cernovich hadn’t met the neighbors. “They’d probably geek out if I told them my name,” he said. “Then I’d have to say hi every time I see them, and maybe they’d want to be friends—nah, not worth it.”
He led me inside. “Shauna, d’you have pants on?” he shouted. “Not trying to get lucky, just letting you know there’s a reporter here.”
Shauna was in the kitchen, wearing yoga pants and a fluorescent-pink wicking tank top. (I already knew, from Periscope, that the house dress code was athleisure.) She was twenty-nine, six months pregnant, and as personable as her husband was taciturn. “I’m so embarrassed!” she said, apologizing for an imaginary mess. “We just moved in, like, two weeks ago.”
The house was clean and compact, with still-empty picture frames and a couch covered in patterned throw pillows. There was a small, paved backyard, with a single lawn chair and a few dog toys scattered on the ground. The house I’d seen on Periscope—the one with the lush veranda and the swimming pool—belonged to Shauna’s parents, who lived a few blocks away.
