Antisocial, page 22
On May 16, 2011, Trump made an announcement on his Facebook page: “After considerable deliberation and reflection, I have decided not to pursue the office of the presidency.” However, in the future, he wrote, “I will not shy away from expressing the opinions that so many of you share yet don’t have a medium through which to articulate.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The Transplant
You guys want a snack?” Shauna said.
“Not now, babe,” Mike said, keeping his eyes on his computer screen. She put out a bowl of pita chips anyway. He ignored it. I tried to resist, applying the self-control techniques recommended in Gorilla Mindset, but after a few minutes I looked down and saw that I’d eaten every chip in the bowl except one.
“I don’t want to disrupt your schedule,” I told him. “Just try to go about your day as you normally would.”
“My days aren’t structured at all, dude,” he said. “I’m gonna be on Bill Mitchell’s show at some point and on Gavin’s show at some point. Otherwise, I mostly just go with the flow.”
Shauna put on sneakers and got ready to walk to her parents’ house. “They don’t fully understand what Michael does,” she told me. “They get that he likes Trump and that he puts stuff on the internet—they just don’t get how that’s a job.” Her parents, secular Persian Muslims, left Iran before it became a theocracy. “My dad hates when women cover their hair,” she said.
“We sometimes joke that he’s more Islamophobic than I am,” Mike said.
“My dad actually created an anonymous Twitter account so he could troll Muslims,” Shauna said. “At the same time, he hates Trump, because he’s, like, ‘If he’s saying negative things about different groups, then how do we know he’s not going to come after Persians one day?’ Even if you believe certain things, you shouldn’t necessarily say it openly.”
Mike wasn’t so sure. “I don’t think any ideas are off-limits,” he said. “Actions, yes. Words, no.” He stood up and stretched briefly, thrusting his chest forward and his arms back. “Lowers your cortisol,” he explained.
A Skype call came in: a producer at The Gavin McInnes Show. Cernovich sat and smoothed his hair, checking his reflection in his webcam.
“Thanks for joining us, bro,” the producer said.
“Nice to see you again, cutie pie,” Cernovich said. “How’s the angle looking? How’s my hair looking?”
The producer put Cernovich on air, and he and McInnes spent fifteen minutes agreeing that, if you ignored most of the available evidence, Trump seemed to be winning. McInnes mentioned a video that was making the rounds on Twitter: a Trump supporter crashing a poorly attended Clinton event, filming it on his phone. “Not to trivialize what you do,” McInnes told Cernovich, “but it shows how easy it is to be a real journalist—just fucking go there!”
“That’s what I tell people,” Cernovich said. “All you need is a smartphone and balls, and you can do real journalism.”
* * *
—
Gavin McInnes, in addition to his online talk show and his late-night appearances on Fox News, had started contributing YouTube segments to the Rebel Media, an alt-light outlet founded in Canada in 2015. At various times, Lauren Southern, Jack Posobiec, and Laura Loomer have all been employed by the Rebel; so have Sebastian Gorka, a British-Hungarian Islamophobe who served briefly in the Trump administration, and Faith Goldy, a Canadian in her twenties whose bio described her as “a fearless journalist and devout Catholic.” Her straight-to-camera commentary for the Rebel included such segments as “BOMBSHELL: Canada’s Border Invasion Intensifies!” and “Is Soy Feminizing the West?”
Goldy—like Lauren Southern, one of her closest friends—referred to her racial politics as “identitarian.” Both women were attempting a tricky Solomonic split: they publicly denied being white nationalists, yet they kept dog-whistling loudly enough to hold the alt-right’s interest. Goldy and Southern belonged to the first generation to grow up with social media, and they’d both been red-pilled by a combination of premodern philosophy books and post-postmodern message boards such as 4chan. They were well practiced at cloaking their ideological commitments beneath several layers of irony, allusions, and emojis.
Anyone who was paying attention, though, could have discerned a consistent message. On assignment for the Rebel, Goldy and McInnes had traveled to Israel and Palestine. “This place is Muslim now!” McInnes reported in one video, standing outside the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. “We had it for I don’t know how many hundreds of years.”
“The only way we’re gonna get Bethlehem back is if we launch the next crusade,” Goldy said, adding, “Deus Vult!” This was an eleventh-century battle cry that Christian holy warriors had shouted during the First Crusade while killing Muslims and pillaging their cities.
McInnes never quite crossed the line into open white nationalism, but he often came close. The alt-right had something akin to a Pledge of Allegiance, an old white-nationalist shibboleth known as the Fourteen Words: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”* Alt-right trolls liked to goad alt-light demicelebrities into uttering the words. On YouTube, it became something of a game.
“Say it, Gavin,” one of McInnes’s guests implored him on his show. “You will prove that you are really at the crux of this movement.” The guest broke the sentence into its constituent parts, like a priest leading a parishioner through a sacrament. McInnes followed along, repeating thirteen of the words but replacing “white” with “Western.”
The commenters were crestfallen:
He’s not fully committed to the cause
Gavin McCuckis
Memes over genes, or genes over memes?
Faith Goldy, by contrast, had no problem crossing the line. In a separate YouTube video, while failing to suppress an impish grin, she recited all of the Fourteen Words. “Is that controversial, though?” she said. “I think it’s controversial to say the opposite.”
* * *
—
The civic-nationalist alt-light kept trying to declare its independence from the white-nationalist alt-right, but the effort seemed futile. In casual conversation, on televised news, even in think-tank reports, the definition of “alt-right” kept warping and blurring. Most people used the term interchangeably with “fringe weirdo,” a concept that meant something different to everyone. “They’re on the wrong side of history,” a friend told me. She meant all of them. The distinctions didn’t interest her.
My colleagues and friends assumed that I was an expert on the entire phylum of far-right internet villains, but I was only one man, and the internet was teeming with villains. I had to set priorities. The unapologetic Nazis were so obviously repellent that, at the time, they seemed like a mere oddity. Instead, I focused on the alt-light, which struck me as a more instructive test case.
Our country was undergoing a painful and sudden shift. The old national vocabulary was being dismantled, and it was too early to tell what would take its place. I sometimes imagined the process as a barbaric form of surgery, an unauthorized organ transplant. The ribcage of the body politic had been pried open; the alt-light demicelebrities were trying to sneak into the operating theater, insert their thinly disguised demagoguery, and then sew up the wound before anyone noticed. They weren’t actual doctors, but you couldn’t necessarily see that at first glance; they wore convincing-looking uniforms and spoke with authority, and for some people that was enough. Nobody, not even the alt-light themselves, knew whether the transplanted organ would be assimilated or rejected. We would all have to wait to find out.
* * *
• • •
Cernovich stood up, poured himself another cup of coffee, and sat back down at his laptop. He checked his direct messages on Twitter, responding to about one in twenty. “People send tips all day long,” he said. “I can’t even look at them all, much less chase them all down.”
He read a few articles about Ahmad Rahami, who was suspected of planting bombs in New Jersey and Manhattan the previous day. Most of the articles noted that Rahami, who was born in Afghanistan, was a naturalized American citizen. Nonetheless, Cernovich said, “It’s important to keep building an association. Hillary wants open borders? OK, this is what happens.”
Developments in the Rahami case were big news in the New York area, but not everywhere on the internet. “If there’s a story that can hurt Hillary, I want it in the news cycle,” Cernovich said. “When I first started, that meant figuring out how news cycles work. If it’s on Drudge, then it’s on Hannity. If it’s on Hannity, then Brian Stelter’s talking about it on CNN. No one teaches you this stuff. You just study it and figure it out.”
When he couldn’t get the Drudge Report to pick up a story, Cernovich simply promoted it himself on Twitter. “The amazing thing is, you can just do it whenever,” he said. “Here, I’ll show you.” He propped his iPad upright on the kitchen table, with the camera lens facing a mirror in front of him. He emitted a few hacking outbreaths—“Gotta breathe into my stomach first, to get oxygenated,” he said—and then started filming. “And we’re back,” he began. “Mike Cernovich, Danger & Play, Gorilla Mindset.”
Within minutes, thousands of viewers had joined the stream. “We’ve gotta get a hashtag trending,” he said. “We definitely need to remind the world that Hillary Clinton is bringing in the terrorists.” Viewers made suggestions in the comments, and Cernovich read them aloud. “HillarysMigrants is good,” he said. “Hillarys Terrorists is good. Yeah, just keep throwing them out.”
Someone suggested #TerroristsForHillary. “Eh, a little too cutesie,” Cernovich said. “You wanna be catchy, but if you overstate it too much then it loses its persuasive power, like ‘basket of deplorables.’” He overlooked #SkunkKillary, #hillarys hitmen, and #hillarysmigrantcuntlickers, as well as a commenter who wrote, “Nice tea kettle of flowers, cuck.”
“HillarysMigrants seems to be a popular one,” Cernovich said. It was settled. He clarified the spelling: one word, no apostrophe. “Remind people that Angela Merkel, George Soros, Hillary Clinton—they’re all together,” Cernovich said. “Post pictures of them together.” A commenter wrote “Evil Jew Soros”; Cernovich either ignored it or didn’t see it. He kept talking for twenty more minutes, reading passages from George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, plugging his book, and referring to George Soros’s son six times as a “basic bitch.”
When the video was over, he searched for #HillarysMigrants on Twitter. There were hundreds of tweets, many of which included images, as he’d requested: Clinton and Merkel laughing conspiratorially; a macabre illustration of Clinton as a ventriloquist’s dummy, sitting on George Soros’s lap. Cernovich added a few tweets of his own, saying the words aloud as he typed them: “‘The media won’t tell you the truth about #HillarysMigrants.’” He tried another variation a few seconds later; it got fewer retweets, so he deleted it. “This is my one-man version of A/B testing,” he said.
He searched for the hashtag every few seconds, yielding about a dozen new tweets each time. “It’s hard to tell yet whether this is a killer hashtag or just an OK one,” he said. “It’s picking up some steam, but maybe not enough.” After a few minutes, he gave up. “Doesn’t look like they’re going to let this one trend, for whatever reason,” he said. “Should we grab lunch?”
* * *
—
Shauna unlocked a BMW X-class using a clicker in her purse, and we headed to a nearby strip mall. “I make her do the driving,” Mike told me, from the passenger seat. “The deal is, ‘I pay the bills. Driving is your job.’” Shauna just smiled and turned up the radio.
We ordered at a counter-service kabob place.* The food arrived on a plastic tray, and Cernovich set it down on a table inside, where there was air-conditioning. He was explaining something about his salmon kabob—why fish fat is the good kind of fat, I think, although I was only half listening—when he got a news tip by text. “We gotta get home,” he said, wrapping up his leftovers.
“Should I stop at the Starbucks drive-through?” Shauna said.
“No time, babe,” he said.
At an elementary school in Eagle Valley, Utah, a bomb scare was in progress. No reporters were on the scene; the only public source of information was a woman who lived across the street from the school, peering out her window and posting footage to Facebook Live. Mike opened Twitter on his phone, then commandeered Shauna’s phone and opened Facebook on hers.
A man in a green robe and a turban was pacing near the entrance to the school, which had apparently been evacuated. “Could be a hoax, could be a drill, could be the real thing,” Cernovich said. He tweeted a link to the Utah woman’s live video. At the time, only seventy-seven people were watching; after Cernovich and others passed it around, the number climbed into the hundreds, then into the thousands.
I opened the video on my phone so that I could follow along from the backseat. A few seconds later, a tank rolled into the frame. “Fuuuuck,” Cernovich said. “Anyone else getting goosebumps?”
At home, he rushed into the living room, stood his iPad on end, and started another Periscope. “You’re watching this as it happens, folks,” he said. “If this is a drill, it’s one hell of a drill.”
“Islam is cancer,” one Periscope commenter wrote.
“Robot Lives Matter,” wrote another.
After a few minutes, the police in Utah ordered the woman to step away from her window, and her Facebook feed went dead. The man in the turban turned out to be a local white man who was suffering from delusions; he was arrested, and no bomb was found. “I’m gonna call this mental illness rather than Islam,” Cernovich told his audience. “You make up your own mind.”
He ended the video and shrugged. “A lot of these things end up being dead ends,” he said. “I don’t get as blue balled by that as I used to.”
* * *
—
It was 3:30 in the afternoon. I was exhausted. Cernovich went upstairs and changed into track pants. “I think I’ll power down for the day,” he said. “Go to the gym, relax a bit—maybe keep an eye on Twitter, but not closely.”
Before closing Twitter, he took one last look at his direct messages. One was from a fan who claimed to have found a Reddit thread started by one of Hillary Clinton’s IT staffers. Apparently, the staffer had been asking for help as he tried to delete Clinton’s name, illicitly, from a cache of old emails. “My confirmation bias would love for this to be real,” Cernovich said. “But honestly it seems too good to be true.” When he clicked the link, though, he saw that the Reddit thread had just been deleted. “That’s fucking interesting,” he said. After five minutes of digging, he found an archived version of the thread; it looked legitimate, and legitimately incriminating. “Son of a bitch,” he said. “This might actually be true.” He tweeted, “Did sick Hillary’s IT guy really ask for help on Reddit? Investigating.”
He started to breathe heavily, drifting back into his muckraking flow state. “We’re going to make a whole new news cycle about her fucking emails again!” he said. “This poor fucking woman.” He started a new Periscope, and commenters suggested possible hashtags. “I don’t think RedditHillary is a good hashtag,” Cernovich said. “What else? HillarysITGuy? We’re having a hard time.”
After a few minutes, he grew impatient and made an executive decision: the hashtag would be #HillarysHacker. “How big this is cannot be overstated,” Cernovich said. “I say this not just as one of the ten most recognized journalists in the world, but I say this also as a lawyer.” While he was livestreaming, I opened Twitter and saw that—on my feed, anyway—#HillarysHacker was the number 2 trending topic.
* * *
—
I left Cernovich’s house and took a quick walk on the beach, trying to clear my head. Then I checked into my hotel, switched my phone to silent mode, and slept for a long time. Overnight, the #HillarysHacker meme leaped into the mainstream. A conservative site called Red State picked up the story; Wikileaks tweeted about it; Fox News started covering it early in the morning. By the time I woke up, the story had appeared in Vice and New York magazine, and the House Oversight Committee had promised to investigate it. I checked Cernovich’s Twitter feed: since I’d left him, he had tweeted dozens of times, as late as 1:30 A.M.
When I returned to his house, he was wearing the gingham shirt he’d worn the day before. “I didn’t go to the gym last night,” he said sheepishly. “I didn’t get much sleep. I’ve gained twenty pounds during this fucking election.” He mentioned that he’d been reading Andrew Breitbart’s 2011 autobiography, Righteous Indignation. “There’s a part where he’s on a plane for five hours, without wi-fi, and he has withdrawal symptoms,” Cernovich said. “I relate to that. And, you know, Breitbart had a huge cultural impact, but he died of heart failure at forty-three.”
Cernovich was almost forty, and he wanted his hero’s journey to last far longer than Breitbart’s. He had big plans: writing more books, directing feature films, maybe even running for Congress. “If I sense that that’s what the people want, then I do think I would feel a duty to serve,” he said. “It sounds crazy to you, I’m sure, but I’ve learned not to count anything out.” He said that he had a “postmodern theory” of reputational impermanence—which seemed to be, essentially, that almost every moral boundary was permeable and almost every fact was negotiable. “Nazi stuff and pedophile stuff—those are permanently disqualifying,” he said. “Anything else, you can probably spin your way out of it.” He was betting that his misogyny, his xenophobia, and his long record of lies would all be forgiven eventually—that in the America of the near future, Cernovichian ultranationalism would become the new normal. “Once that Overton window starts moving,” he said, “it can move pretty fast.”
