Antisocial, page 38
They gave her the passwords to IE’s private servers on Discord. There were about two hundred people in IE at the time, and only a handful of them were women. Samantha gave out her phone number and told people in the movement, especially women, to text her if they ever needed anything. If a woman was having relationship problems, Samantha would give advice; if a woman got doxed and needed to lie low for a while, Samantha would offer her a couch to crash on. When people were preparing to break the news to their normie relatives that they were alt-right, Samantha would coach them through it: Make sure they know that you don’t hate anyone else, you’re just pro-yourself. One minute, she’d be at work, mixing a drink, listening to the locals talk about the latest boneheaded Trump tweet; the next minute she’d be outside, on her break, scrolling through a hundred notifications on her phone, typing in ten Discord chats at once, helping to build the underground movement that would restore her people to honor and dignity. If she went an hour without checking her phone, hundreds of people noticed. Before, what was the most important decision she’d made in a given day? What to wear? What music to play? Now she typed things and it actually changed what people did in the world.
It took only about two months for Samantha to become the women’s coordinator of IE. Her new friends told her how impressive it was that she’d reached the upper echelons so quickly, but it seemed as if all you had to do to distinguish yourself was have a modicum of competence and actually do what you said you were going to do. The organization was full of guys who would make ambitious plans and then drop the ball. Samantha underpromised and overdelivered. The guys still took most of the credit, but she tried not to worry about that.
She used a pseudonym—everyone in the movement did, except for those who’d already been doxed and had no choice but to use their real names. If the normie world ever figured out how to match her online persona to her real-life identity, she’d surely get fired; her family might disown her; angry mobs could even show up at her house. Everyone in the movement lived with the constant threat of doxing. This was why, even though the movement was full of fleeting alliances and fake signs of intimacy, the best way to tell if someone really trusted you was to see whether they were willing to tell you their real name. Once you knew that, you held their life in your hands.
Richie had joined IE, too, on her recommendation, but he wasn’t advancing as quickly as she was. He would never admit it, of course, but he seemed resentful. The alt-right had been his thing, and now she was taking it over. They started to grow apart. Eventually, he moved out. She still felt that cliché fluttery-stomach feeling whenever she thought about the guy who used to play the guitar at house parties; but, for better or worse, that guy didn’t exist anymore.
She still kept in touch with her brother. They talked on the phone several times a week. She didn’t tell him everything, but she revealed enough—allusions to memes, or to her new “political” friends—that he started to piece it together. Whenever she dropped similar hints around her coworkers, they tended to ignore them or treat them as jokes. But her brother spent a lot of time on the internet; he knew how deep the rabbit hole could go. He started calling her by a new nickname, which he meant both ironically and unironically: Vanilla ISIS. “I know you have a good heart,” he told her. “Just don’t forget who you are.”
* * *
—
She moved to another Southern city, near where several other alt-right leaders lived. She got another bartending job, and she also spent hours every week, sometimes hours a day, doing volunteer work for IE. She used Google Maps to scout locations for future marches and protests. She moderated various Discord and Slack channels, trying to keep the conversation within bounds. One time, in a Discord chat, a guy posted a meme of a fried chicken leg hanging from a noose. Samantha, the moderator, put the guy in Discord “jail,” meaning that he could read posts but couldn’t like or comment on them. He went over her head, complaining to the top leadership that she had stifled his free speech. But the leaders backed Samantha: even though she was a girl, she was still above him in the hierarchy, and in this case she was right. You might think you were just posting an edgy meme, but you never knew when Antifa or the feds might be watching.
Her favorite task was interviewing new applicants to IE, sometimes two or three dozen of them a week. A few times, in the background of a Skype call, she’d see a Gestapo helmet on a bedroom shelf, or the person would mention wanting to fight in the imminent Racial Holy War. Those were automatic rejections. But most people seemed pretty down to earth. She would start by asking them about how they first got red-pilled, or about their favorite movies—anything to put them at ease. “What do you like to cook?” she asked one woman. The answer was pad thai, but the woman was hesitant to say so because she thought it wouldn’t sound European enough. “Oh, please, you do not have to worry about that,” Samantha said.
In truth, though, sometimes a face would pop up on Skype, and within seconds Samantha would know that the person was too dark to qualify. One woman was half Indian, half white, but she swore that she only felt a connection to her European side. Another guy was Latino, but he said, “I’m American. My kids are American. I want to fight for the survival of this country.” In those moments, Samantha felt a mix of pity and distress. Couldn’t the guy just join La Raza or something? Why was he applying to IE, anyway?
She sent him a form rejection email.
“Is it because I’m not white enough?” he wrote back. “Do you think I should join the Proud Boys instead?”
She didn’t respond.
* * *
—
In the spring of 2017, a leader within IE started a new invite-only Discord channel. He was organizing a rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in mid-May, to protest the removal of a Robert E. Lee statue. Samantha decided that this would be a good time to meet her new community in real life. She rented an Airbnb, bought a new white swing dress, and drove for most of a day to get there.
Before the march, everyone gathered in a nearby park to go over the route. The guest list was small—about a hundred people, mostly IE members, all fully vetted. She was prepared to stand inconspicuously on the sidelines, but people kept approaching her and treating her like a celebrity: “Oh, my gosh, you were my interviewer!” “Thank you so much for bringing me into this thing.” Some asked for selfies. A lot of the younger guys tried to hit on her—incompetently, but still, it was kind of sweet. The movement felt real and robust, and she was at the center of it.
After the rally, there was a big banquet under a frame tent. The leaders stood at the front, where there was a PA system, giving speeches—Nathan Damigo; Mike Enoch from The Right Stuff; Jason Kessler, who’d helped organize the event; even the Based Emperor himself, Richard Spencer. All the people she’d spent hours watching on screens or listening to through earbuds, suddenly come to life. Sam Dickson, a seventy-year-old “racial communitarian activist” and the man Richard Spencer called “my greatest influence,” recalled his childhood in Jim Crow South Carolina, and his ancestors’ experience in post-Reconstruction South Carolina. “I asked my grandmother, ‘How were the whites able to take the state back when the blacks were the majority of the population?’” Dickson recalled. “She said, ‘We had to get all the white people in line.’” Since then, Dickson said, getting white people in line had been his life’s work. In an avuncular tone—acknowledging that it was cheesy to do the back-in-my-day shtick, but doing it anyway—he said, “I urge you to be happy and joyous warriors, because the setup today is so much better than it was back then. It’s a hackneyed cliché that the internet has opened up sources of information that weren’t available, but I don’t think those of you who are young have any idea how difficult it was . . . to make contact with other people. Now you have all these social networks.”
When Spencer took the microphone, he said, “I was going to talk about mind-set.” The crowd giggled—everyone associated that word with Mike Cernovich, whom they considered a preposterous alt-light huckster. Lisping, Spencer pretended to hawk “my ebooks and nutritional supplements.” Then, in his real voice, he gave an expansive speech about the thing that made him feel most hopeful about the future: the indomitable red-pilled fervor of Generation Z. “I feel like a cynic among fanatics when I meet young people,” he said.
That night, there was a big house party at a local Airbnb where some of the rally’s organizers were staying. The basement, the kitchen, the hallways, the living room—every space was crammed with guys in white polos, jacked up on adrenaline. They had showed up in force and exercised their First Amendment right to protest. Nobody had dared stand in their way. They had nothing to apologize for. Who knew what else this movement could achieve?
In the backyard, Samantha struck up a conversation with Richard Spencer, the man of the hour. He touched her arm and offered her a drag of his cigarette. Everyone else was focused intently on him—the young guys were practically forming rope lines to ask him about Žižek, or memetics, or the categorical imperative—but he kept ignoring them and talking to Samantha instead. She willed her facial muscles to stay neutral, trying not to seem like a fangirl.
“Do you get off on the fact that these kids treat you like a god?” she asked.
“I gave a speech today, and it changed the way you view the world,” he responded. “Isn’t that a bit godlike?”
She went inside to get another drink. A few minutes later, Spencer walked into the room. As soon as he entered, a skinny kid—couldn’t have been much older than eighteen—raised a glass in Richard’s direction. “Sieg!” the kid shouted.
A few other boys snapped to attention and shouted, “Heil!”
They did the call-and-response a few times, more and more energetically, until everyone in the room was either watching or joining in with stiff-armed salutes. She’d heard stories about this, she knew about the memes, but it was different to see it all around her—to feel the hot breath of the boys, to see their eyes go wide with a kind of ferocious ecstasy.
Richard drank it in. He smiled as wide as she’d ever seen a person smile. The saluting went on and on; the kids were high on the pure energy of it, sloshing their beer onto the floor, rocking onto the balls of their feet. Richard, from across the room, looked straight at Samantha and raised one eyebrow. He didn’t have to do more than that. His meaning was unambiguous: So? You’re too good to do it, too?
She had already told everyone that the Nazi stuff was not for her. She knew in her heart that it was wrong. This whole thing was supposed to be about pride and self-love, not about hate, not about violence. He kept looking her dead in the eye, unflinching, the internationally famous super-Nazi, calling her bluff. Her arm went up. She did it. God help her, she did it.
* * *
—
Another guy she’d met in Charlottesville was an emerging leader in the movement—not one of the speakers at the banquet, but someone who was starting to ascend to that top tier. There were rumors that he might be the next leader of IE. Not long after the rally, he got doxed. The dox included his home address, and he announced on Discord that he needed to get out of town for a while. He and Samantha talked over Skype, and although she’d only intended to comfort him, she found herself offering him a place to crash for a little while. This was what you were expected to do within the movement: when one of your people was in need, you offered help.
He showed up at her apartment a few days later and came on strong. He was very convinced that they should be together. She wasn’t, but he wore her down, and she decided to give it a shot. The guy was obviously in a fragile state. She tried to have compassion. But it was never a good fit, and, after a few weeks, she asked him to start sleeping on the couch.
Things went downhill quickly after that. He agreed to move out of her bedroom, but he wouldn’t look for a new place or help with the rent. He didn’t cook or do dishes. He barely even went outside. If she tried to ask when he was planning to move out, he would get angry, the conversation would escalate, and he’d end up calling her a whore, or warning her that, when he was in charge of the ethnostate, she would be sent to a breeding camp. Later he would apologize and say that it was just a joke. But he would also mention that he knew her real name and where she lived, and that he could release that information whenever he wanted.
He didn’t hit her, and he didn’t rape her. But she didn’t feel like she was in control of the situation, either. What was she supposed to do, call the cops on one of the leaders of her own underground movement? When the cops came, what would she tell them—“This creep won’t leave my apartment”? Was that even a crime? Besides, as soon as he found out that she’d betrayed him, he would dox her and ruin her life—or, at the very least, no one in the movement would ever trust her again, and the movement was all she had. No, it was impossible. She’d always prided herself on being an easygoing person, socially astute enough to adapt to any situation. So she adapted.
They could be platonic roommates in private, he told her, but in public she was to keep up the ruse that they were a couple. He was going to be a power player in the alt-right, and as far as “movement optics” were concerned, Samantha was going to be his First Lady. He introduced her to everyone as his girlfriend—the new IE power couple. He kept climbing through the ranks of the organization, taking on more projects and then blowing his deadlines. Sometimes he would guilt Samantha into doing his work for him; then she’d hear him on a conference call in the other room, accepting praise for a spreadsheet he’d barely glanced at.
At one point, they spent a weekend in New York City hanging out with a bunch of inner-circle movement leaders, drinking bourbon and joking about the impending race war. They took a train upstate, to Sven’s house, for one of TRS’s famous book burnings. She stayed quiet most of the time; she was a girl, so it was easy to disguise sulking as submissiveness. Then Monday came, and they went home and took a break from the ruse. She went back to work, and he went back to calling in to alt-right podcasts over Skype, or playing video games on the couch.
Along with Jason Kessler and a few other people, he started planning another Charlottesville rally, in August. It would be a bigger one this time, a triumphant return—Charlottesville 2.0, they called it. She could hear him through the walls, screaming over his headset about supply routes into town and escape plans in case things turned ugly. The demonstrators would march through the University of Virginia with torches and then gather in Robert E. Lee Park, demanding that their European American heritage be treated with respect. White people around the country, seeing this valiant display, would be roused from their apathy and join the movement. Samantha helped with the logistics here and there—when David Duke had trouble getting a hotel room under his name, she booked one for him, posing as his granddaughter—but mostly she tried to stay out of it.
She didn’t dare tell anyone, not even her brother, but she was starting to wonder whether joining the alt-right had been a terrible mistake all along. The more helpless and angry she felt about her domestic situation, the less she felt like making excuses for the rest of the movement. If this was how one of the alt-right’s most exalted leaders behaved behind closed doors, then what other blatant hypocrisies were being overlooked? She’d spent months convincing her friends, and herself, that the movement was more innocuous than it seemed, that their fears were misplaced. But what if the ironic racism really was just racism? What if white separatism and white nationalism and racial realism were all epithets for the same old-fashioned violent impulse? What if the alt-right was basically what the normies said it was?
Once she saw this possibility, she couldn’t unsee it. On the Discord channels, the grisly memes kept coming: helicopter rides, gas chambers, “John Deere’s new multi-lane protester digestor.” When she was first starting to get red-pilled, she’d told herself that she was waiting for the mask to slip and reveal actual hatred; by the time the hatred was there in plain sight, she’d been so turned around by movement propaganda that she somehow made herself look past it, or convinced herself that it was all just harmless shitposting. Now, as quickly as she’d tumbled down the rabbit hole, she could feel herself drifting back up toward the surface. It felt a little bit ridiculous that, after coming this far, all it took to make her reconsider everything was a world-class nightmare of a roommate. Then again, maybe it was no more ridiculous than all the other circumstances that had led her into this mess.
She had requested a day off from work to attend the second Charlottesville rally, but she canceled the request at the last minute and went to work instead. All day, she tried to avoid looking at the TVs hanging above the bar. When she heard that someone had been killed in a car crash, her reaction was a mixture of panic and a kind of immediate, disembodied clarity. There’s no way to justify any of this, she thought. I need to find a way out.
It wasn’t easy to quit the alt-right, but it was possible. She remembered a few people who had seemed totally ensconced in the movement until one day they went dark and you never heard from them again. Instead, you heard rumors: This guy moved to a new state. That guy got a new phone number, met a new woman, started a new life as a normie. Samantha was still in her twenties. It wasn’t too late to get a college degree. Maybe she could even have a family one day, after she figured out how to deal with her own issues.
