Antisocial, page 3
Of all the VIPs on the list, Sheriff David Clarke of Milwaukee was the only African American and the only elected official. He had spoken at dozens of Trump’s campaign rallies, warming up the crowds before the main act. Roger Stone was one of Trump’s longest-serving political advisers; Alex Jones claimed to talk to Trump on a regular basis, but then again Jones was an inveterate liar. The other VIPs, having emerged recently from apolitical obscurity, had no formal ties to Trump, or to any known political entity. Any one of them, taken alone, might have seemed negligible, a curious by-product of the variegated energies made newly visible by the internet. But together they’d had a decisive impact on the 2016 campaign, and on public opinion more broadly. It was hard to imagine Trump winning without them.
The VIPs shared a common set of enemies—the Clintons, the Bushes, the globalists, the mainstream media—but they didn’t agree on everything. Some were more anti-Semitic than others. Some were more openly racist than others. Some emphasized misogyny, whereas others were more passionate about Islamophobia. Still others, rather than committing to any consistent ideology, rotated through evocative tropes about Davos or the Deep State. Each of them espoused opinions that were so politically retrograde, so morally repugnant, or so self-evidently deceitful that no reputable news organization would ever hire them. And yet, in the twenty-first century, they didn’t need traditional jobs. Instead, they could mobilize and monetize a following on social media.
They made their names, and in most cases made a good living, by generating what they called content—podcasts, publicity stunts, viral memes—which they peddled across a variety of platforms: a Twitter feed driving traffic to Patreon, a Gab feed soliciting donations through Coinbase, a personal site racking up ad revenue. This insured that, if they got banned from one platform or another, they wouldn’t starve, and their message wouldn’t be starved of attention. Some of them knew a lot about politics; some knew next to nothing about politics. In every case, their main skill was the same: a knack for identifying resonant images and talking points, and for propelling them from the fringes of the internet into the mainstream. If the old media gatekeepers in New York and D.C. still doubted whether this was a meaningful skill, then this skepticism only worked to the online propagandists’ advantage, because it allowed them to be underestimated. They knew that a series of small memetic victories would help them gain ground in a larger informational war.
At bottom, they were metamedia insurgents. They spoke the language of politics, in part, because politics was the reality show that got the highest ratings; and yet their chief goal was not to help the United States become a more perfect union but to catalyze cultural conflict. They took for granted that the old institutions ought to be burned to the ground, and they used the tools at their disposal—new media, especially social media—to light as many matches as possible. As for what kind of society might emerge from the ashes, they had no coherent vision and showed little interest in developing one. They were not, like William F. Buckley Jr., standing athwart history, yelling “Stop”; they were holding liberal democracy in a headlock, yelling “Stop or I’ll shoot!”
When a reporter from CNN requested credentials to the DeploraBall, the organizers posted their response on Twitter: “We question your integrity as an institution of journalism. Therefore, we will not be issuing you press passes.” This was retweeted thousands of times. One anonymous Twitter user, whose avatar was a cartoon of a scowling bald eagle, replied with a celebratory meme—a photo of Anderson Cooper, sitting behind a desk in a CNN studio, captioned with the words “Breaking News: The People Don’t Believe Our Bullshit Anymore.”
“We’re the new media,” Cernovich told me. “The dinosaur fake-news media—their days are numbered.” This may have been Trumpian bluster, but it contained a degree of truth. “It offends their paternalistic, basic-bitch egos to hear it, but, sorry, this is what a truly democratic media looks like. They used to be able to control the narrative. Well, fuck you, motherfuckers. The barbarians are at the gate. Everyone has a voice now.”
CHAPTER TWO
Pride
At the Press Club, Cassandra Fairbanks assembled gift baskets for the DeploraBall’s VIPs and top donors. She laid out a dozen identical piles of tchotchkes (MAGA hat, inauguration-themed chocolate, tiny American flag manufactured in China), arranged every pile inside a wicker basket, and then tied a ribbon around each one. Luke Rudkowski sat nearby, reading Twitter. If any of the event’s male organizers were around, I didn’t see them offering to help.
“Baskets,” Fairbanks said, elbowing me in the ribs. “Get it?”
In September 2016, Hillary Clinton spoke at a campaign fund-raiser in New York City. “To just be grossly generalistic,” she said, “you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.” Her audience chuckled. She defined the deplorables as “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it,” and lamented the fact that her opponent “tweets and retweets their offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric.” The political press immediately characterized Clinton’s statement as a gaffe, not because it was untrue—apart from the word “half,” it wasn’t even disputable—but because it could hurt her politically.
“I regret saying ‘half,’” Clinton half apologized the next day. But her infelicitous phrasing (who uses “deplorable” as a noun? who puts people in baskets?) refused to fade from the electorate’s memory. A headline in The Boston Globe: “With ‘Basket of Deplorables’ Quip, Clinton Just Made a Meme.” Sure enough, the social media ultranationalists immediately flooded Reddit and Twitter with parody images, reclaiming the moniker for themselves.*
Fairbanks tied a bow around the last gift basket. With Rudkowski, she walked outside and hailed a cab. The party wouldn’t start for another few hours, so she was going to meet her friend Gavin McInnes, another DeploraBall VIP, who was pregaming with a few friends at a luxury condo on K Street, about a mile away. He had offered to escort her later that night, when they made their grand entrance into the Press Club. The idea was to shield her from protesters, and she was eager to take him up on it.
In the cab, Fairbanks opened Instagram, where she’d just posted a photo of herself in her gown. She read a few of the comments aloud:
Looking good
Be careful of those Commies
Don’t give Gavin a heart attack
Helicopters thumped overhead. Police officers directed traffic, using wooden barricades to block access to the National Mall. On the wide facade of a convention center, artists were projecting the words of a few of the women who had accused Donald Trump of sexual assault.
“El Chapo just got extradited,” Rudkowski said, referring to a push notification.
“Dude, let’s focus on one country at a time,” Fairbanks said.
* * *
—
At the condo building, we took an elevator to the top floor and knocked on a door. A man in his late forties answered. He wore a black bow tie, slicked-back hair, and a full, sculpted beard. He greeted Fairbanks with a kiss on the cheek, then stepped back and gave her a vaudevillian once-over. She giggled and batted her eyes, playing along. “Cleavage looks fantastic, as always,” he said.
This was Gavin McInnes. Like the other DeploraBall VIPs, he was a content creator; before becoming an out-and-out Deplorable, he’d come closer than any of the others to a mainstream show-business career. In the 1980s and ’90s, he was in a punk band called Anal Chinook, and he later had a bit of success as an actor and a stand-up comic. In 1994, using grant money from the Canadian government and a Haitian nonprofit, he and two friends cofounded Vice magazine. The mainstream press dubbed McInnes “the godfather of hipsterdom.” After 9/11 he became an outspoken right-winger and a budding Islamophobe; he resigned from Vice Media, signing a lucrative parting settlement that included a nondisparagement clause. He published a salacious memoir, cofounded a boutique advertising firm, and appeared intermittently on Fox News, usually at three in the morning.
In addition to these appearances, McInnes wrote columns for extremist-friendly web publications such as The American Conservative, cofounded by Pat Buchanan, and Taki’s Magazine, founded by Taki Theodoracopulos, a Greek aesthete who seemed to have a soft spot for European fascism.* (McInnes was recruited to write for Taki’s by its managing editor at the time, a pompous white nationalist named Richard Spencer.) Primarily, though, McInnes presented himself as an internet shock jock. On The Gavin McInnes Show, which streamed for an hour and a half every weekday, he told lewd stories, got a butt tattoo live on air, and interviewed comedians, sex workers, and overt white supremacists—not because he endorsed white nationalism, he insisted, but because he wanted to give a fair hearing to all points of view. (He did maintain, however, that women would be happier as housewives, that gender-confirmation surgery was genital mutilation, and that “Muslims are stupid, and the only thing they really respect is violence.”) When Donald Trump ran for president, McInnes praised him for being “anti-jihad,” “anti-immigration,” and “anti-establishment.” “Trump is crass and rude and irrational, but that’s what we need right now,” McInnes said, on Fox Business. “We need hate. We need fearmongering.”
In 2016, McInnes announced that he was founding the Proud Boys, an all-male fraternal organization composed of “Western chauvinists who refuse to apologize for creating the modern world.” Every few weeks, he gathered dozens of restive young men at a dive bar in Manhattan, gave a vigorous toast about how “the West is the best,” and encouraged them to drink heavily; by the time the young men started getting into fistfights with the normies, McInnes had usually slipped away to his wife and sleeping children in Westchester County. Whenever a journalist implied that the Proud Boys were a white-pride organization, McInnes claimed to be shocked and offended: “‘Western chauvinist’ includes all races, religions, and sexual preferences.”
Fairbanks walked through the door and toward the preparty. I started to follow her, but McInnes placed a hand against my chest. “Who’s this guy?” he asked, turning over his shoulder to address Fairbanks.
“He’s a journalist, but he’s cool,” she said. “He’s with me.”
McInnes, glowering, kept his hand where it was. For the first time, he looked me in the eye. “If you call us Nazis in anything you write,” he said, enunciating very clearly, “I’ll kick your fucking ass.” Then he removed his hand from my chest and stepped aside to let me in, his facial expression changing abruptly to a rictus. “I’m just messing with you!” he said. “Probably. Almost definitely.”
He led us through an indoor lounge area and out onto a roof deck, where about a dozen Proud Boys stood in a loose circle, wearing navy blazers and red MAGA hats, drinking bottles of Budweiser. Most of them were younger than McInnes by two decades or more. “Gentlemen, try not to jizz in your pants,” he said, introducing Fairbanks. Then, making his way to the center of the circle, he picked up where he’d left off, recounting an interview he’d just given to a Japanese news crew.
“They go, ‘How do you feel—Mr. Trump?’” McInnes said, in a cartoonish Japanese accent. “I go, ‘Yep, Trump, love him, great.’ They go, ‘And how do you feel—white power?’ I go, ‘White power? What the fuck? Fuck off!’ And I kicked them out. Seriously, where do people even get this shit from? There’s, like, five guys in the country who are actual white supremacists, and you can tell who they are ’cause they wear robes and clip-clop around on horseback!” The young men chuckled. It wasn’t clear what they were supposed to say in response, if anything.
“It’s too cold out here,” McInnes said. “My dick is shriveling up.” In case his meaning wasn’t plain enough, he put his hand down his pants and stuck one finger through the fly. “I’m leaving before I get AIDS,” he declared, and went inside.
I turned to chat with the Proud Boy standing next to me. A contractor from North Carolina, he was barrel chested and at least a head taller than everyone else. Beneath his blazer, he wore a black T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Proud Boys,” in the style of the Jack Daniels logo. I asked him why he’d joined the group. “’Cause I’m proud to be white!” he said. “These days, suddenly, everyone is so divided, you can’t say anything. Being a white cis male is the worst thing you can be. Like Gavin always says, why should I apologize for being who I am?”
He tried to swig from his beer and realized it was empty. “It’s OK to be a nationalist, and it’s OK to have pride in yourself,” he went on. “But you put either of those concepts together with being white, and suddenly you’re an insane Nazi bigot. No. Fuck that.” He shook my hand firmly, looked me in the eye, and grinned politely. “Pleasure meeting you,” he said, and went inside to get another beer.
* * *
—
Zach, a skinny Proud Boy wearing a baggy blazer, was twenty-three and looked even younger. He had dimples, and a few seraphic curls protruded from beneath his red MAGA hat. When someone else on the roof deck made a particularly derogatory joke, Zach would smile, pull his cap low, and cast his eyes downward, looking both embarrassed and invigorated. Some of the Proud Boys had tickets to the DeploraBall; others, including Zach, were hoping to bluff their way past security. “I’ll walk over and see what happens,” he said. “I’m just happy to be here, honestly.”
He lived a few miles away, in the middle-class Maryland suburb where he’d grown up. “Everyone I know has exactly the same opinions,” he said. “‘Trump’ is synonymous with ‘deranged moron.’ It’s an article of faith, and I guess I’m just not a follow-the-leader kind of guy.” This was what had piqued his interest in The Gavin McInnes Show: a desire to see sacred cows led to the slaughter.
I understood where he was coming from, almost literally. I, too, grew up in anodyne liberal suburbia. When I was a teenager, I longed, like teenagers everywhere, for something that might help me stand out, or at least help my personality cohere. The best I could come up with was a safe simulacrum of punk-rock rebellion. I tried to grow my hair out like Kurt Cobain, but instead I ended up with a lamentably bouffant ginger butt cut. I chain-smoked, which gave me heartburn. No one was particularly impressed with my insufferable shtick; girls certainly weren’t. But I convinced myself that I was on the side of righteousness. I was standing up to the Man.
The worst kind of person, I decided, was a conformist, an institutionalist, an establishment shill. I invented principles, retroactively, to justify my convictions, but my only truly consistent principle was contrarianism. Fatuous bourgeois bullshit was all around me, and I was the only one with enough integrity to see through it. If everyone else trusted the line they were being fed in the history textbooks, or in The New York Times, then I would be an iconoclast, questioning the dominant narrative.
It seemed at the time like a matter of ethics, but ultimately it was reducible to aesthetics. All things being equal, it’s always cooler to be a rebel than an institutionalist. Defy convention. Blow up the system. Question everything. I never saw a Kurt Cobain poster that said “Some Norms Might Actually Be Worth Preserving” or “Question Some Things, But Don’t Go Crazy.”
Politics didn’t come up much, because no one around me was all that political. When I did take an interest in politics, it was in college, through books. By then, questioning the dominant narrative no longer made me special; questioning the dominant narrative was homework. I wonder now what might have happened to the eighth-grade version of myself if I’d felt coerced into accepting some mandatory political orthodoxy, and if I’d been able to dig up succinct and seductive counterpoints to that orthodoxy, whenever I wanted, simply by glancing at the internet on a computer I kept in my pocket.
Much later, when I found myself working in the inner sanctum of contemporary journalism, I started to let go of my knee-jerk contrarianism. Gradually, reluctantly, I admitted to myself that institutions can also have significant upsides. I never deluded myself into believing that the norms of traditional journalism were infallible, or worthy of exaltation, or intrinsically cool. (Nobody thinks gatekeeping is cool, not even the gatekeepers.) And yet, as it turns out, it’s possible for a thing to be uncool and also necessary. Let’s say you’re hosting a dance party in a dark warehouse. You decide not to put up any illuminated exit signs—they don’t fit with your aesthetic. You’re above maximum capacity, but you don’t want to be a buzzkill and start kicking people out. Someone pulls a fire alarm; it’s a prank, and everyone ignores it. In the unlikely (but not impossible) event that you smell a gas leak or see billowing smoke, you’re going to need a contingency plan, and a functional PA system.
“Gavin is so free, so no-fucks-given, the way he talks,” Zach said. “It’s a dopamine rush, listening to him—like, how can he get away with saying this shit? It could be some insane drinking story, or sex story, or whatever, and then the next minute he’s actually making an evidence-based argument about how traditional gender roles make women happier, or about how cultural Marxism infected the media. You start listening with an open mind, and you go, Actually, I’ve never heard anyone make that case before.”
McInnes often asserted that conservatism was “the new punk rock,” and there was something to this, at least on the level of pure energy. He had made himself into a kind of renegade. His style was certainly edgier and more bracing than that of any CNN pundit. And his Janus-faced jester routine afforded him a lot of flexibility: when he made a cogent argument, he was a political commentator; as soon as he crossed a line, he was only joking.
