Antisocial, page 35
For a while, he hoped that his podcast and his marriage could coexist. “I wanted to have it both ways,” he said. “But then we got popular.” In 2015, when his identity was still secret, he attended a conference hosted by Richard Spencer’s think tank. Most people in the room recognized his voice, and several told him that they’d bought tickets to the event specifically in order to meet him. “At that point, it was, like, OK, this is getting out of control,” he told me. “I kept saying, ‘It’ll be fine, it’ll be fine,’ but I knew I was just delaying the inevitable.”
We talked about The Culture of Critique, the anti-Semitic book that he’d found so formative, and I mentioned that I’d just ordered a copy on Amazon. “Well, don’t red-pill yourself too hard,” he said. Then he paused: “You’re not Jewish, are you?” he asked.
I am. I don’t put triple parentheses around my name on Twitter, as some Jews do, in defiance of TRS’s Echo. But I have never made a secret of my identity. I have written for Jewish magazines. My face looks Jewish. My name sounds Jewish. All of this information was readily available on the internet.
“Yep,” I said.
“Interesting,” he said, sounding a bit flustered. “Fully Jewish, or half Jewish?”
“Fully,” I said. “Your Jewdar must be broken.”
“Yeah, well, you’ve got red hair,” he said. “That threw me.” He encouraged me to read MacDonald’s book nonetheless. “I would hope that you would be able to look past any dissonance and at least examine the argument,” he said. “Maybe do some internal—not that I expect you to hate yourself . . .” He trailed off.
At one point, without prompting, he said, “You wanna know the first thing my dad asked me after Charlottesville? He didn’t say, ‘Are you OK?’ or ‘How are you?’ He said, ‘Change your name.’” His mother had asked about his safety—“Mothers are mothers,” he explained—but not his stepmother, and not his father. “He didn’t care about that,” he said. “All he cared about was his good name.” I couldn’t be sure, over the phone, but it sounded like he was crying.
* * *
• • •
For a few days after he was doxed, Mike Enoch tried to insist that he wasn’t Mike Peinovich, but he soon posted a confession on The Right Stuff. “Yes my wife is who they say she is,” he wrote. “I could try to explain my whole life for the last ten years to you but what difference at this point would it make. Life isn’t perfect.” In his absence, Dunstan and McNabb convened an emergency recording of The Daily Shoah, in which they attempted to address the controversy without fully explaining it. “I don’t know what kind of cognitive dissonance Mike had to live with to be in that situation,” McNabb said. It wasn’t clear that there would ever be another episode of the show.
On white-supremacist forums across the internet, including on The Right Stuff itself, opinions were divided. Some commenters vowed to boycott the site until Enoch divorced his wife (“I can’t believe all you fags still support this jew fucker!”), or accused him of being “controlled opposition.” Some held out for more information (“how Jewish? Because if 1/4 or less, I don’t give a shit”). Others made non-sequitur observations (“I’m more disappointed by how fat he is than anything”).
“Wow just wow,” Andrew Anglin wrote on the Daily Stormer. “This may be the first time I’ve ever said ‘wow just wow’ with 100% deadly seriousness. This was definitely not expected.” Although Anglin understood why many in the movement felt betrayed by the news—“Really, he should have gotten a divorce. I think that’s reasonable”—he argued that Enoch deserved a second chance. “I don’t think that Mike is a shill,” he wrote. “Tens of thousands—maybe even hundreds of thousands—of men have been brought into the movement through TRS and Mike’s work, and nothing can or will change that.”*
Immediately after the dox, Enoch told people, in private, that he was done with white nationalism. Dunstan and McNabb could continue the show without him, or they could end it; either way, his plan was to leave the alt-right, disappear from the internet for a while, and try to mend his relationship with his wife. But it soon became clear that, no matter what Mike did, it wouldn’t be enough to save his marriage. His wife was leaving. She moved out of New York and went to stay with her parents. Mike stayed behind in the apartment on the Upper East Side, unsure what to do next.
Six days after the dox, he started telling people that he’d changed his mind. The movement was all he had left. He and his cohosts recorded an episode of The Daily Shoah announcing Enoch’s triumphant return. “We’re not letting this thing beat us,” Dunstan said. “We’re not going anywhere.”
A propagandist with enough time and talent can explain away even the most glaring contradiction, and Enoch had spent years developing an intimate bond with his fans. “I appreciate everyone’s support,” he said. On the air, Dunstan read dozens of notes from listeners who, despite the news about Enoch’s wife, were remaining loyal to the show. Some had donated hundreds or thousands of dollars to Enoch in his time of need. “My heart goes out to his wife,” wrote one fan, a long-distance trucker who listened to The Daily Shoah on cross-country drives. “I imagine she is getting a huge amount of shit from her family and the larger community. If she is married to Mike, she must be a good individual.”
“That is a really nice thing to say,” Enoch responded on the air. “I’m sure she’ll appreciate that.” He didn’t mention that she was living in the Midwest, trying to lie low, doing her best to stay off the internet.
* * *
• • •
I visited Mike Enoch’s mother, a retired president of a small college, in her tidy, sun-filled apartment in New York City. She sat in one upholstered armchair and I sat in another; nearby, on a love seat, was a throw pillow embroidered with a few flying angels and the words of the Serenity Prayer. “Mike E. knows what I think about his politics,” she said. “I was very active in Hillary’s campaign, and I do a lot of pro-immigrant volunteering at my church—I’m being trained to accompany people to their ICE hearings—so I’d say we disagree very strongly.”
“And you consider it a political disagreement?” I said. “Or does it go beyond politics?”
“He’s my son,” she responded. “It doesn’t matter what it is. I’m not going to stop loving him, or talking to him.”
She told me about a time a few months earlier, when he’d asked to bring some friends over for dinner. “I was annoyed. I said, ‘Mike E., dinner’s in three hours—I don’t know if I have enough chicken!’ But he said, ‘I would think that you’d at least want to meet my friends,’ and I went, ‘You know what, that’s a good point. Why shouldn’t I want to meet your friends?’”
He’d brought over two burly men, one of whom was a member of the Alabama National Guard. “They introduced themselves as Richard Spencer’s personal bodyguards,” she told me. “I thought, Well, I certainly wasn’t bargaining for this. But they turned out to be polite young men, I have to say. At one point they started getting into it, about diversity this and Judaism that, and I said, ‘Look, I don’t think we should argue.’ So I changed the subject: ‘Is it your first time in New York City? How are you enjoying it?’ And after that the evening went smoothly.”
She’d always liked Mike Enoch’s wife—“ex-wife, I guess I should say”—and had recently sent her a birthday card. The ex-wife, in her response, wrote, “I wish I could push a reset button on my life.”
“The last time Mike E. was here, I told him about that note,” his mother said. “He was sitting at the dining-room table, right over there, and when I told him those words he just burst into tears.”
On her phone, she showed me text messages that she and her son had exchanged while he was at the Charlottesville rally.
Her: “I just want to remind you that you do not have health insurance.”
Him: “We’re safe. We just want to express ideas. The ACLU is supporting our right to speak.”
Reading this, she glanced up at me. “He knows I’m a big supporter of the ACLU,” she said. “So I’m sure he thought that would soften me up.”
“And did it?” I asked.
“Oh, probably,” she said.
She showed me another text exchange, also from when he was in Charlottesville, in which she asked if he’d received the package she’d sent in the mail. She explained to me that the package was full of new shirts. “The ones he had at the time were too big and billowy,” she said. “I figured, if he was going to be on TV, I wanted him to have something that fit better.” I didn’t know what to say to that. My first thought was, If my son ever tells me that he’s planning to speak at a white-supremacist rally, I hope my reaction is not to go shopping. But my second thought was, Honestly, I have no idea what I would do in that situation.*
Near the end of our conversation, I asked Mike Enoch’s mother if she could think of anything unusual about his childhood, anything that might have steered him toward the path he was on. She answered by talking about his “heritage.” “I believe that Serbs and Croatians are a hateful, vengeful people,” she said. “He has that vengeful blood running through his veins. He doesn’t just have that Scandinavian blood, that pure Norwegian blood.”
Once again, I didn’t know what to say. A comment about pure blood would have been off-putting in any context; in this context, I found it stupefying. In the twenty-first-century United States, we sometimes tell ourselves that racial essentialism is a rare and inexplicable defect, but in fact it doesn’t come from nowhere. When I was a child, my grandmother told me, sternly and repeatedly, that every person on Earth was a unique miracle, equally worthy of dignity and opportunity and respect. “You don’t need to believe in God to know that,” she said. “You know it because that’s what it means to be human—seeing the humanity in everyone else.” She also told me, when I was seven years old, that I’d done well on a math test because of my “Yiddishe kop”—my Jewish brain. Even now, I can’t imagine how my younger self reconciled those two apparently contradictory ideas.
* * *
• • •
On my last visit to the Peinoviches’ house in New Jersey, Mike Sr. flipped through a photo album that Billie had brought up from the basement. One photo sparked a pleasant memory: a twenty-fifth-anniversary trip to Hawaii, in 2008, with the three children. “We were all in good spirits that week, even Mike E.,” he said. “We went out to these long dinners and ordered a bunch of cocktails, which probably helped. Mike E. had brought along this computer program he’d made—”
“The Bergman Plot Generator,” Billie said.
“He somehow figured out how to randomly generate plots of Ingmar Bergman films—”
“‘A dark knight encounters death on a lonely road,’ that kind of thing—”
“And he left it running, in the condo we were renting, and all day it would be spitting out plots,” Mike Sr. said, chuckling. “We’d come back inside and read them out to one another, and we’d fall down laughing.”
His smile faded. “I still love him, in spite of everything,” he said, his voice catching. The sun started to set, casting shadows across the living room, and he went into the kitchen to open a bottle of wine. Billie said, “All I keep thinking is that, if we were Jewish, we’d be sitting shiva right now.”
Earlier in our conversation, Mike and Billie had asked me a series of questions about the alt-right. They seemed like attempts to understand Mike Enoch’s personal motives, although they were phrased as broader questions about the movement. Was the extreme rhetoric just a sick joke, or did they actually mean it? How did they decide when to be outrageously provocative and when to hold back? Instead of answering categorically, I mentioned a specific example: the response to the killing of Heather Heyer, which had caused a rhetorical schism within the movement. A few alt-right leaders, hoping to give their movement a sheen of respectability, had been relatively restrained.* Others reacted with vicious cruelty. “Heather Heyer was a fat, disgusting Communist,” Jason Kessler, the organizer of the Charlottesville rally, tweeted. “Looks like it was payback time.”
When I first mentioned this rhetorical schism, Mike Sr. started to ask me which side his son had fallen on. But then he caught himself: “You know what, forget it. I don’t need to know.”
Now, reentering the room with the wine in his hand, he changed his mind. “I think I actually do want to know,” he said. “About how Mike E.—whether he said anything about that poor girl.”
I didn’t give him any of his son’s direct quotes. I didn’t have to. As soon as I hesitated, he knew enough.
“Oh,” he said, his face twisted in sharp, silent agony. “Oh, no.”
* * *
• • •
I handed in a piece about Enoch. I had made mistakes, as always, and the fact-checker corrected them. The pottery in the Peinoviches’ house came from Mexico, not New Mexico; Kevin MacDonald spelled his name with a capital D. When the fact-checker called Enoch, he said that he considered himself a white nationalist, not a white supremacist, but that we could print whatever we wanted. He denied having stomped on a glass at his wedding; but I’d seen the wedding album with my own eyes, so the fact stayed in. Enoch also used the fact-checking process to take a few more vicarious swipes at his parents. “If my dad told you some shit about how my grandpa fought the Nazis during World War Two, I’m gonna have to preemptively correct that,” he said. “I understand why that has nice rhetorical resonance and all, but my grandfather fought in the Pacific Theater.” I considered running this by Mike Sr., but concluded that I’d already put him through enough.
Several of Mike Enoch’s relatives had told me, independently, that they’d always considered him “the smartest one in the family.” The fact-checker disputed this. He didn’t doubt that they’d said it, but he was also responsible for verifying the content and context of each quote, and this one seemed like it risked conveying a false impression. “He has certain intelligent instincts related to aesthetics and communication,” the checker said, “but beyond that—well, I worry that his family, and now us, are trying to see a silver lining where there is none.” Understandably, the checker was wary of overemphasizing the intelligence of a person who had reached such colossally stupid conclusions. We had a long discussion about it, in which I countered that intelligence and morality were independent variables—that a lot of bright people held reprehensible beliefs, and that the fact that an otherwise smart person could succumb to internet neofascism was part of what made internet neofascism so terrifying. After a while, the checker and I agreed that we wouldn’t be able to settle on a mutually satisfactory definition of intelligence by press time, and we left it to the editor of the piece to cast the tie-breaking vote. She decided that we should describe Enoch not as “smart” but as “clever.”
Next, we had to pick a rubric. Annals of Activism? The Political Scene? Enoch wasn’t exactly a political theorist, and The Right Stuff wasn’t a political-action committee or a think tank. It was a content farm producing an endless supply of blog posts and podcasts and memes. Its goal was not to organize congressional campaigns or to write draft legislation but to nudge the Overton window.
We went with Annals of Media.
* * *
—
Enoch called me several more times. I knew that he was recording our conversations, probably hoping to generate material for his podcast; but the calls were useful for my purposes, too, so I kept taking them.
I assumed that his minions would descend on me after the piece came out. It occurred to me that, if Enoch had met me in person, he might be more likely to order his troll army to stand down, should the need arise. Shortly before the piece was published, I texted him to ask if we could meet for a drink.
“Sure why not,” he texted. “Let’s go to Heidelberg. Good beer and brats.”
It was a German beer hall on the Upper East Side. “You know, this whole part of Manhattan used to be a German neighborhood,” Enoch said, as we were led to a table by a hostess wearing a dirndl. We sat across from one another, and he stared at me for a long moment.
Having familiarized myself with the TRS Troll Guide, I knew that my only job was to remain unruffled. “This place is pretty LARP-y, don’t you think?” I said, ordering a Lowenbrau and a platter of bauernwurst.
“You eat pork?” he said.
“We’re sneaky like that,” I said.
He asked me what I thought of The Culture of Critique now that I’d read it. I answered as forthrightly as possible. “Whatever I say, you’ll argue that I can’t be objective,” I began. “Which, fine, maybe no one can be objective about anything.” But my honest opinion, leaving aside whether I found the book offensive, was that MacDonald’s argument made no sense. There were a hundred things wrong with it. I picked one. “He says that Jews are overrepresented in leftist movements,” I said. “Fine. Jews are also overrepresented in right-wing movements. Jews are overrepresented in centrist movements. Jews are overrepresented in physics departments. Jews are overrepresented in circuses.” Steve Bannon had recently been fired, due in part to post-Charlottesville blowback, leaving Stephen Miller as the chief architect of Trump’s most draconian anti-immigrant policies. Jews were even overrepresented in Trumpist nativism! The phenomenon of Jewish overrepresentation was a curious one, I conceded, but MacDonald’s gloss did nothing to explain it.
“I can dispute some of your points,” Enoch said. “The Stephen Miller thing—I will admit, I actually can’t figure that one out. I’m thrilled about it, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t know what to make of it.”
